Lethem has a story in the new Harper’s, “The Dreaming Jaw, The Salivating Ear,” about a blogger. ‘The Salivating Ear’ is itself an in-joke, the name of a blog I set up a few years ago, entirely so a few friends of mine could amuse one another. It’s out there, vibrating silently in cyberspace, with a handful of dead links and gnomic utterances. The blog’s theoretic proprietor, one ‘C. Tietjens,’ is yet another in-joke, named after the galumphing antihero of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End. But it does make me wonder about this impulse, in writing, to mine the text with easter eggs; to load a story or novel with references that might finally be intelligible to one person only. That Summertime Sound, of course, is loaded with such things: so many nods and winks you (or at least, I) might be forgiven for thinking the book’s narrator had–ahem–Tourette’s. Except maybe you won’t notice. These things usually are (almost) invisible to everyone else. Unless it’s Pynchon, say, where the text is so encrusted with them you can’t help but–not just ‘notice,’ but feel like you’re the sober one in a car filled with recklessly stoned and intelligent people. Here, I’m just wondering what those easter eggs do, and how it is that when I’m writing ‘well,’ work that seems intended for an audience of some kind, this creeps into it almost by definition. Perhaps it’s a way of holding on to privacy, of keeping the work encoded in some fashion. It might even be how writing develops personality, manages to be intimate with its reader even if it’s not fully revealing the terms of the joke. Hopefully it’s more than just indulgence. Which is probably what you get when this impulse fails.
I’m reading at Book Soup this upcoming Friday, September 18th*, at 7 PM. Please come and hear me read, at very considerate & non-ass-numbing length, from That Summertime Sound. According to my publicist, I “will dazzle” at this event.
“Matthew Specktor will dazzle with passages from That Summertime Sound”
says the release. Let’s take her word for it. Bring sunglasses.
I’ll hope to see you there.
- M
EX LIBRIS
“Matthew Specktor’s beautiful and arresting first book, That Summertime Sound (MTV Press, $24), chronicles a different sort of ’tween experience—the obsessive desires and frustrations of a young man caught in the time warp between adolescence and adulthood in the ’80s. Specktor, an L.A. native who has worked for years in film development, has a crisp, evocative style that captures both the nuances of a particular time and the universal themes of any insightful coming-of-age story. We’ve all been there. “
An excerpt from That Summertime Sound by Matthew Specktor:
“Invisible Dan drove the car, a green Volkswagen Jetta that hurtled along I-80 in the middle of the night. We’d just coaxed him into fifth gear—he’d never driven a stick before—and now allowed ourselves to drowse, drifting on the edge of sleep as we whisked through central Pennsylvania. The Promised Land was still two hundred miles away. Columbus, Columbus, Columbus. Was there a word more beautiful in all the language than this one, which bespoke whole worlds of firstness, freshness, discovery? Westward we flew, as the word made a rosary under my breath, the engine’s hum and the seat’s vibration lulling me deeper. Then a truck slid past on the left and Dan panicked. He ground the gearbox and stomped on the brake.
“Shit!”
The car spun a full 360 degrees. Dust kicked into the air and Dan screamed as we fishtailed over to the shoulder and stalled. We sat there a stunned second. Then Marcus, dear old Marcus, leaned forward and took charge.
“Easy there, hoss.” He bent across from the backseat to show Mr. Invisible once more how it worked, the H-shaped pattern of the gears. “Like this.”
The gearbox ground again, the car sputtered. We were at forty-five degrees in the middle of the interstate, angling across the yellow line.
“Try again.” Marcus’s nicotine-streaked fingers pointed towards the stick. “One more time.”
“Um—we’re in the middle of the highway.”
“So what?” This was Marcus in a nutshell. No matter that he’d eaten six hits of acid since sundown, was staring out at a world that might’ve been teeming with green insects as he saw it. Nothing bothered him, everything was cool. You’d buy anything he wanted to sell you. “We’re fine.”
You’d buy anything. In a sense I’d already bought. I should’ve been lounging by my parents’ pool in California, instead of trapped in a car full of tripping lunatics hurtling towards the Corn Belt. We were headed towards Ohio for an entire summer. Who else could’ve convinced me the Buckeye State was Paradise, that its people were as Gods in their colorful extremity.”
READ THE REST of the excerpt at Forth Magazine.
