Fan’s Notes: A Podcast about Books and Basketball — Episode 20: My Struggle Book 1 / Playoff Preview
is it artful or artless? (circa 9:30-17:00)
Semi-fictionalised memoir, middle-aged man trying to come to terms with the relationship to his father
Aesthetic project employing a “painterly naturalism” > it’s a “smooth wall of prose where, calm and undisturbed and weighted the same as everything else”
Philosophising project, in which the structural mundanity allows moments of transcendental enlightenment
novel or memoir? (20:11)
probably closer to memoir than novel
lots of novelistic structure (buried beneath ten-page descriptions of trying to learn Paranoid by Black Sabbath (21:45)
themed through seeing a face in the water and his weird father, flash forward to him describing his discomfort at being a father, then ultimately burying his father // extraneity and seeming irrelevancy piled upon this
meta-concern with writing (31:20)
Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station; Tusk, Transit; Geoff Dyer
anxiety about being a novelist, so engaging with semi-fiction (roman a clef-ish)
anxiety about the state of the novel as similar to painting? this is nearly a feature of the novel (33:10)