In defense of facts
February 4, 2017 5:30 AM   Subscribe

William Deresiewicz's review of a trilogy of books on the essay, eloquent and savage: "What we really seem to get in D’Agata’s trilogy, in other words, is a compendium of writing that the man himself just happens to like, or that he wants to appropriate as a lineage for his own work. To be sure, there does appear to be a kind of prose that he’s particularly partial to and that is mainly what he seems to have in mind when he talks about the lyric essay. We find it, especially, in many of his more modern selections, including the bulk of the first anthology, The Next American Essay, which covers the period from 1975 to 2003. We find it, that is, when he isn’t limited by the literary record of older ages and can show us what his taste is like when granted full indulgence."

..."What it’s like is abysmal... D’Agata is a professor of creative writing, and a lot of this material is indeed “creative writing” in the worst, collegiate sense: not fiction or poetry or memoir or essay, but verbiage that manages to be both all of them and none—formless, monotonous, self-indulgent, and dull."
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory (24 comments total) 25 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is one of the best, most cathartic scathing reviews I've read in a while. It's better even than a really good scathing restaurant review.
posted by Gymnopedist at 6:26 AM on February 4, 2017 [12 favorites]


Yeah, this is amazing.
posted by mothershock at 6:38 AM on February 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


I read this review a couple of weeks ago, and was inspired to read The Lifespan of a Fact, which is mentioned. It's an essay D'Agata wrote, annotated with his and the fact-checker's back-and-forth. I was astonished he allowed to it be published; he comes off as arrogant, narcissistic, and whatever the fancy word for assholish is.

This is a really scathing review, but it also includes a very nice, succinct definition of what an essay is, in the passage that ends, "And what makes a personal essay an essay and not just an autobiographical narrative is precisely that it uses personal material to develop, however speculatively or intuitively, a larger conclusion."
posted by Orlop at 6:45 AM on February 4, 2017 [9 favorites]


We haven’t gotten six lines into the first headnote of the first anthology before we read that in 1975, “we are on the moon, again, for the eighteenth time.” There were six lunar landings, the last in 1972.

And that is not the least of D'Agata's errors.

Either he is subjecting readers to an epic troll, or he is just spectacularly bad at his vocation.

Seriously: if I ever submit a piece of writing to my boss that is D'Agata-level wrong - in both mundane facts and in its conceptual underpinning - I will instantly undermine all trust and probably my career.

Also: imagine you're a student of his at the UIowa and you read this.
posted by Caxton1476 at 7:08 AM on February 4, 2017 [5 favorites]


This is delightful. It sums up so many of my irritations - against the Trump alt-fact crowd, against scholars who refuse to defend us against the alt-fact crowd because they think "provocative" is a better category than "true", against people who are rude to copyeditors - so perfectly. I'm almost grateful to D'Agata for occasioning it.
posted by Aravis76 at 8:05 AM on February 4, 2017 [5 favorites]


Damn it's cathartic to see someone who doesn't believe in "facts" get so thoroughly trashed. I wish every article about Trump were like this.
posted by xammerboy at 8:25 AM on February 4, 2017


The NY Times published a rather scathing review of D'Agatha's "Lifespan of a Fact" essay when it came out:
“I try to take control of something before it is lost entirely to chaos,” D’Agata writes, but what he creates is a mirage. He takes randomness and superimposes themes, gins up drama where it doesn’t exist, tries to convince us his embellishments are more vivid and revealing about a city, about human nature, about Truth, than reality could ever be.

In short, he plays God. (Recall: “I wanted his death to be more unique.”)
The OP is next level though.
posted by simen at 9:37 AM on February 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


"If D’Agata wants to call these pieces “lyric essays,” he is free to do so (this is America, after all), but he might want to give us some warning, in a truth-in-advertising kind of way—might want to let us know that the word essay in his titles is used in a sense that is, let us say, idiosyncratic. If I bought a bag of chickpeas and opened it to find that it contained some chickpeas, some green peas, some pebbles, and some bits of goat poop, I would take it back to the store. And if the shopkeeper said, “Well, they’re ‘lyric’ chickpeas,” I would be entitled to say, “You should’ve told me that before I bought them.”"

I really, really enjoyed this piece. Well-written, excoriating, and profoundly satisfying.
posted by Atrahasis at 10:45 AM on February 4, 2017 [8 favorites]


MetaFilter (also, perhaps, D'Agata): “Well, they’re ‘lyric’ chickpeas"
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:20 AM on February 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


D’Agata’s rationale for his “new history,” to the extent that one can piece it together from the headnotes that preface each selection, goes something like this. The conventional essay, nonfiction as it is, is nothing more than a delivery system for facts.
"History is written by the victors". There is still a lot of misinformation and disinformation embedded in the commonly-accepted narrative of History. And the Internet/Computer-enabled boom in the quantity of "facts" (I am tempted to add a couple more layers of scarequotes), has truly made this not an Information Age, but a Misinformation Age.

So, to Fix That For You, "the conventional essay is nothing more than a delivery system for whatever you want, facts, lies, fantasies or bullshit."
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:35 PM on February 4, 2017


I read this review about a week ago and thought it was quite scathing, in a good way (i.e., I agreed with the thrust of it). And "lyric chickpeas"! The next pot of chickpeas I cook will be scanned for pebbles and goat turds.
posted by Agave at 1:37 PM on February 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


Orlop, that Lifespan of a Fact piece actually turned up on Metafilter a few years back and everybody ripped the shit out of it. Enjoy.
posted by ostro at 1:48 PM on February 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


This is probably my favorite bad review since "A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity".
posted by brennen at 3:21 PM on February 4, 2017


Orlop, that Lifespan of a Fact piece actually turned up on Metafilter a few years back and everybody ripped the shit out of it. Enjoy.

Thank you!

Either he is subjecting readers to an epic troll, or he is just spectacularly bad at his vocation.

The repeated errors that mis-state things that appear on the very next page in the essay made me start wondering if this is some kind of really complicated performance piece.
posted by Orlop at 4:01 PM on February 4, 2017


Orlop, that Lifespan of a Fact piece actually turned up on Metafilter a few years back and everybody ripped the shit out of it. Enjoy.

Not as much as I was expecting, there were plenty of vigorous defenses of the "truth isn't about boring facts" position in that thread.
posted by Proofs and Refutations at 4:36 PM on February 4, 2017


Not as much as I was expecting, there were plenty of vigorous defenses of the "truth isn't about boring facts" position in that thread.

Sadly, that was my reaction to it, too.
posted by Orlop at 5:41 PM on February 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


Uh, haha, yeah, maybe I should have mentioned that when I saw D'Agata's name in this post my instant reaction was a vivid flashback of reading that thread, a full five years ago, and experiencing RAEG. (RAEG, I tell you.) I mean, the overall conclusion of the thread was that he was full of it, but still! Those fuckers were wrong on the Internet, dammit!
posted by ostro at 7:05 PM on February 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


Oh, and forget Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays, this is what there should be an anthology of: Best Deservedly Scarifying Literary Reviews. I would get it in a hot second. It would have to include that David Foster Wallace review of a late Updike novel in which he calls the book's main character "an asshole," and maybe some of George Orwell's book reviews. Anybody have any favorites of the genre?
posted by ostro at 7:29 PM on February 4, 2017 [2 favorites]


I'm fond of George Eliot's Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, mainly because it's fun to see George Eliot be so very unmeasured, for once. Her targets are a lot less deserving than D'Agata, I think - George Eliot targeting the Victorian equivalent of Harlequin paperbacks is enormous overkill - but it's a good read.
posted by Aravis76 at 12:26 AM on February 5, 2017


I remember reading about lifespan of a fact as part of a creative nonfiction course in my MFA program. it being an MFA program, you may expect there were plenty of people in the "facts can/should be bent to the benefit of the narrative" camp

that it's now fairly easy to draw a line between that arrogant, self-important, intellectually lazy position and the bald-faced lying of the Trump administration seems like a better, more thorough rebuke of the academic movement than anything I might have mustered at the time

but anyway, yeah, this piece is great! academia's savage takedowns are the best kind of savage takedowns
posted by Kybard at 7:55 AM on February 5, 2017


Anybody have any favorites of the genre?

Ostro, Matt Taibbi's takedown of Thomas Friedman, Flathead was echoing in my head as I read this piece.
posted by helpthebear at 5:09 PM on February 5, 2017 [1 favorite]


Anybody have any favorites of the genre?

The Iowa Review ran an entire issue once absolutely eviscerating Harold Bloom's Book of J back in the day. Made him look like a total amateur.
posted by Caxton1476 at 5:28 PM on February 5, 2017


I found my favorite entry in that Iowa Review takedown of Bloom: Scholar, Heal Thyself; Or How Everybody Got to Be an Expert on the Bible, by Richard Eliot Friedman. It's an incredible read, well worth the time. Typical passage:

In the face of Bloom's crude arrogance toward biblical scholarship, either of these is inexcusable. Bloom prints J separately and comments on its literary characteristics. That's been done before. He focuses especially on its view of God. That's been done before. He says it's by a single writer. That's been said before. He says the writer may have been a woman. That's been said before. He connects her with the noble class. That's been said before. He says it's from the Solomonic era. That's been said before. He relates it to the Court History of David. That's been said before. He says it's great literature. That's been said before. He compares it to Homer. That's been said before. And then Bloom denigrates biblical scholarship for having missed the insights that he claims to have given us!
posted by Caxton1476 at 7:50 AM on February 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


Bloom is just the worst.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:18 PM on February 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


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