Mar
14
Viegener’s 2500 Random Things and Koestenbaum -Pat Wadsley
March 14, 2015 | Comments Off on Viegener’s 2500 Random Things and Koestenbaum -Pat Wadsley
In Wayne Koestenbaum’s essay “Memoir in the Age of Buzzfeed” reviewing Matias Viegener’s 2500 Random Things about Me Too, Koestenbaum opens by saying his favorite books “teach me how to think, or how to stop thinking,” and Viegener’s book did both and was thoroughly provocative: On page 188, Viegener says that he wants to create a memoir with no identity and no emotion. However, although written dispassionately, there is a strong undercurrent of emotion running through it. Is this emotion something I, as the reader brought to it? Or was it Viegener’s plan? Who would want to write a book which did not elicit emotion from a reader?
The “paratactic structure” of the book, as Koestenbaum calls the assemblage, allowed a wide array of concepts: from Zen to allegory to what makes a great narrative, piled on thick and fast, juxtaposed with steps in a death march and the merely banal.
It was absent of time frame which was disconcerting, but it was far from random, had a strong narrative arc, both in the churning of his mind and the circumstances around him.
One of his statements is that of “Remarks are not literature.” I wonder if we might be able to define the different effects a memoir composed through lists and a memoir in traditional narrative structure has on the reader, especially in its after effects.
Do we remember “bon mots” in the same way as we remember a message that the reader has implanted in a narrative, or has Viegener implanted that message as well?.
Additionally, I find it interesting that the writing collective he formed in California is called Fallen Fruit. This book carries a strong sense of life ripening and dying around him. As a gay male, he could have chosen the name Fallen Fruit as a way of claiming both identity and mortality. In both his book and his writing group, Viegener is stating that there is no identity without death.
