Monday, January 30, 2012
Culture / Books / Comedy Joel Rice on McSweeney's Internet Tendency
Posted by Jack Silverman on Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 2:30 PM
The McSweeney's piece is the 19th installment in Rice's Flip: A Column About Skateboarding, titled "An Introduction to Literature, Part IV." If A Column About Skateboarding has you expecting lots of "dude!," "suhweet!" and "totally stoked!" ... well, think again. There are references to Dostoevsky, Rice's Shakespeare-denying great-grandfather, and the grisly murder of a college coed, and it begins thusly:
It’s common for students to conflate the “voice” in a given work of literature — be it a poem, novel or short story — with that of the author’s. Of course, even when a narrator speaks in first-person, this does not necessarily signal that this “voice” belongs to that of the real-life author. Obviously, crime fiction author Raymond Chandler is not the same person as his fictional creation, the hard-boiled private detective Philip Marlowe. It is, at best, usually misguided to assume that novelists or short story authors have direct, first-hand experience of what they choose to write about in fiction.
A brief autobiographical sketch of the author, after the jump ...
I live in Franklin, TN.
My hometown is San Francisco, but my wife is a native Franklinite and Harpeth Hall Grad. We fell in love at Kenyon College, which has a Nashville connection in John Crowe Ransome and Robert Penn Warren.
Some of my earliest memories are of skateboarding in San Francisco, and my adolescence corresponded to what was then a renaissance in street skating in San Francisco, so I got to watch some of the all-time greats — Jeremy Wray, Danny Way, Mike Carroll, Jovontae Turner, Harold Hunter and Henry Sanchez — change the history of the sport. Just the way they wore their backpacks or held cigarettes was cool in a way I have devoted much of my artistic life to trying to explain.
This experience of skateboarding in San Francisco never left me, and has consumed much of my life since then. I literally would dream about skateboarding when I was at Kenyon.
My wife Morgan Ogilvie is a very talented oil painter and has supported me without question in my quest to write prose poetry about skateboarding.
Tony Hawk once told my wife he liked her paintings. I made David Foster Wallace inscribe a book to me describing me as the best skateboarder since Tony Hawk. Wallace's only connection to skateboarding, he told me, was that he would see "the little fuckers in front of the library."
My great-grandfather was a writer, a family legend and a Shakespeare denier, and other than the skaters I admired, is one of my chief inspirations.
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