RantWoman considers Kirn the kind of writer one would more likely browse from the bookshelf of someone else's lakeside cabin than buy oneself. Even if RantWoman's eyeballs stood up to that much reading, the new age of digital distribution kind of puts a kink in that kind of culture consumption. Then there is the accident these days of whether or not RantWoman would even encounter announcements about such. RantWoman actually intersected with a promo link on a social networking site. RantWoman's consumption of anything on that site except her friends' updates is so minimal as to be laughable, but there the promo link was!
The last thing RantWoman read of Kirn's until now was http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200501/kirn Walter Kirn has a new book out. Lost in the Meritocracy by Walter Kirn , marketed as an expansion of the essay mentioned above. In the middle of other press's fandangoes about delivering content in accessible formats, RantWoman thanks Doubleday-Knopf for the downloadable first-chapter preview.
The preview shows another in Kirn's riffs on bright literate kid who is good at those fill in the dots kinds of standardized tests goes off to Princeton, does a lot of mind-altering substances and lives his own version of outsider This Side of Paradise, except that so far RantWoman is not detecting much paradise. Full disclosure, except for the mind-altering substances and the chain-smoking, RantWoman can relate to some of what Kirn writes about as far as college life and literary excess. RantWoman remembers hearing Kirn read and also seeing him in a few places chain-smoking fiercely enough that under more intimate circumstances she might have delivered one of her standard "smoking is a filthy disgusting disagreeable politics financing habit and a waste of precious brain cells" lectures. Not that the lecture would necessarily have helped anything except RantWoman's endless rant reflex, but still.
RantWoman also occasionally admits to a reaction similar to that of a blogger she reads talking about The Lord of the Rings: life is complicated already without continually choosing the path that leads to more adventure than the hypothetical less-adventure alternative and there is a certain annoying decadence in continuing to choose things that make it more complicated. After the zillionth recounting of Kirn's banal clashes with the Princeton social structure or some besotted exploit, RantWoman keeps wanting to scream!
Couldn't you have asked your RA for help about your roommates' unreasonable furnishing practices? GOOD FOR YOU for figuring out that sex with a drunk coed was inappropriate! RantWoman can tell you that being the sober anchor for one housemate seeing bad things while she participated in some of her housemates' group acid trip just confirmed the sanity of opting out of that particular experiment and definitely did not make RantWoman yearn for even greater experimentation. By the way, wasn't there anything else going on in the world like the threat of nuclear war,the ravages of Reagan's social welfare policies, the barbarities of the guerilla wars in Central America or just the technological, social, and economic revolutions of the incipient Internet age?
Even in literary terms, RantWoman has mixed opinions. Kirn recounts how, never having written any serious poetry, he latched onto a local poetry contest to impress one of his steps upward. Kirn won the poetry contest and of course parlayed that into the next steps up his career ladder. RantWoman contrasts that with the emotionally encouraging but economically squelching rejection letter another blogger shared about a poetry book submission. It's nice when literary figures make careers, but in making careers, do they have some kind of role in nurturing the environment for other poets or at least in trying to proffer trenchant commentary about other aspects of the literary world besides their own internal monologues?
RantWoman has only read the opening chapter, so it's probably unfair to assume what she seeks is lacking. Tough. Read the book. Tell RantWoman what you think. What would make it worth her time?
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