  We're a day late,  but there's an illuminating urlLink conversation being carried on in honor of Bloomsday this week by novelist Jeffrey Eugenides and some hack named Jim Lewis about Joyce and contemporary fiction.  I'll discuss Eugenides,  who is a lot smarter than Lewis and a little embarassed by the conversation,  I think,  after the conversation ends;
 here I'll stick to the narrow- minded but somewhat representative arguments of Lewis.  Lewis,  in short,  brags that he is " not much moved"
 by Joyce or Modernism.  He confesses he admires Joyce's plainly written short story,  The Dead,  much more than Ulysses,  and thinks Joyce need not have written anything else after he completed it.  He then advances an embrassingly shallow theory about our society's transcendence of the need for an avant-
garde in art which includes the ( unbelievably embarassing,  even if casually stated)  comment:  " Round about '77,
 something ended.  Inevitably,  Miller ( whoever he is)  sees fit to include his own cranky denunciation of all things influenced by the modernist experiment ( i.
e.  Joyce)  " 'Make it new, ' Pound insisted.  How much pale ink continues to be spilled in the service of that demand.
 I,  for one,  would like to see an unofficial ban on the following things:  stories in which the author shows up as one of the characters,  stories built around lists,  or with the marginalia of writing moved to the center (
dedications,  errata,  footnotes,  etc.  I would like to see mere cleverness and innovation removed from the practice,  along with all cheap ironies,
 second- guessing,  meretricious tricks with time ( stories written in the present tense,  narrative running backwards,  games with simultaneity,
 and so on)  the substitution of swaths of facts and factoids for inspiration and invention …  and so on. Above all,  I would insist that novelists who think they're smarter than their characters,  and more sophisticated than the idea of the novel itself,
 and who cannot resist the temptation to demonstrate as much,  ought instead to find deeper characters and better stories to write.  I want a book to break my heart;  everything else is television.  Let me make a quick statement of rubuttal :  I,
 for one,  whould like to see an unofficial ban on critics and writers of middling talent who think they're smarter than the novelists they critique and like to show it by demonstrating to their readers how totally exhausted and " spent"  they are by literary experimentation,  tricks,  irony,
 narrative confusion,  language tricks,  footnotes,  marginalia,  etc.  Hereby,
 I especially would like to see such critics keep their grubby pens away from James Joyce and other geniuses who comprise the most important cultural contribution the west has made since Shakespeare.  If a few young Joyce or Pynchon followers go over the top in their attempt to follow said authors,  this does not represent a threat to literature as said critics think they know it,  nor is it any more contemptible than renouncing literary expermimentation of all kinds just because some people don't do it well.  In fact,  contrary to the dominant belief among said critics,
 the trend in contemporary fiction is toward cautious naturalism ( see New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue,  Alice Munro)  not formal invention ( see urlLink cool reception for Wallace's Oblivion )  It's interesting Lewis names Hawkes and Coover and Barth and Gaddis and Gass as some of the authors who betrayed him in his youth because of their obsession with formal invention-
I get the feeling they betrayed a lot of people who grew up in the 70s and 80s,  and turned them against narrative " tricks"  for all time.  But that makes sense:  besides Gaddis,
 those were not the best writers of their era,  just the most trendy in the academy and probably with young people ( maybe like many multicultural writers today,  of whom people growing up now will tire shortly)  And many of them were overly obsessed with formal inventions- which is not the same as experimentalism;
 I think Barth is the most didactic author I've ever read.  The best writers of that period were Roth,  Brodkey,  DeLillo,  Nabokov,  Pynchon and (
maybe)  Updike- they were all experimental in their own ways ( every great writer is)  but more importantly they were all great thinkers and great writers,  which is always the only real important ingredient for.
well,  great writing.  It's obviously as dumb to be against experimental writing as it is to be for it,  in all cases.  Unfortunately,  those that take Lewis's line (
and there are a lot of them,  judging from urlLink responses to Bloomsday ,  as well as the lack of response to urlLink Wallace's new book )  first of all excuse themselves from having to take seriously authors they consider experimental ( Wallace,  Moody,
 Saunders,  etc)  some of whom are among the best people writing today.  Secondly,  their stance discourages new writers from trying new things,  which I think is a shame.
 Did you see the conversation Adam?  What did you think?  And also,  remember what a nerd William Gass was and how we had to leave the room because we were laughing so hard at him when he spoke at Brown?  That was funny.
