Kenneth Burke had an idea of the "parlor" in Philosophy of Literary Form. Maybe you found your inspiration there?
"Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress."
Awesome. Burke is annoying but worthwhile in long-form works like PLF, Rhetoric of Motives, etc.. Some people prefer his essays, so here is some brilliance about "Hamlet."
I have a theory that a big-- not absolute, but at least very substantial-- cause of the split between Millennial Nerds Who Only Read Slop and Millennial Nerds Who Might Read Some Other Books Sometimes is the latter being exposed to Calving and Hobbes in childhood.
I love this idea of great art as one that renounces the egotistical tendencies that plague so many artists and embraces its conversation with voices from the past.
Ordered my copy of Metallic Realms. Should be arriving tomorrow!
This part is something I've been thinking about and so it hit me with a big 'hell yeah' to read this: "I also used to feel shy about putting my fiction in conversation with my idols. How could my work live up to these great authors from history? These days I think, fuck it. Why hide?"
You're probably familiar with the Bluesky account The Midnight Society (I used to follow it on that other platform before it became toxic). It riffs on your concept through imaginary conversations between horror writers past and present. It's edgy and, IMHO, very funny.
I write the YA time travel series, Edge of Yesterday in which modern GenZ teens dance the fugue at Lorenzo de' Medici's Carnival Ball and find postcards from the future in Keen's Chophouse in New York while dodging bootleggers. And miss timelines by traveling to their own future. So much fun mixing Steampunk and AI, Insta and newsboys, Newton, quantum physics and resurectionism across time!
This is a wonderful post. I love the idea of a ballroom for writers across eras and genres, all conversing with each other - and even better, slipping in and out of parallel ballrooms where artists, musicians etc are having their own ballroom parties. I have been reading your posts with a lot of interest. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
I'm looking forward to reading "The Asshole Theory of Autofiction."
The number of times a Calvin & Hobbes strip comes to mind in my own daily life is actually astounding! (Garfield, too.) Comic books have an outsized influence on young readers, for sure. If more could be like Calvin & Hobbes, maybe we'd have more readers today.
That Tracer Bullet strip is from the series where Hobbes shaved Calvin's head, a high point in a comic full of high points, and oh my God that second panel is funny.
Also, “The Mirror in the Panopticon Method of Satire"?! I vote for that one to be moved to the top of the list if you're wondering what to write about next.
What a party! I want a dance with James Joyce. Oh, maybe I am dancing with him now.
I like what you say about finding voice in what’s missing. Yes, that’s in a good conversation each brings value to it with their unique perspective. The whole conversation becomes richer.
This post is a lovely image to dream about. Thank you.
It annoys me that the genre/style delineation is more about external influence than the books themselves. In my opinion, Gene Wolfe SHOULD be discussed in literary circles, magical realism SHOULD be discussed with fantasy, etc. It aids discovery and variety. You can move around different conversations yourself, but in practice many don’t. Obviously marketing and modern platforms like Goodreads only make things worse. Sorry, just a personal gripe of mine when it comes to consumption, not just creation, that I’ve never seen anybody talk about.
I hear you--and just wrote about Gene Wolfe in my last article!--although I do think that the surrealist/magical realist/absurdist vein of literature is distinct in many ways from more traditional SFF type fantasy internally, not just because of external influences. Most fantasy in the Tolkien/Martin/Etc. vein attempts for a type of verisimilitude and fleshed-out worldbuilding while surrealist literature employs dream logic and does not work on the level of logical worldbuilding. That type of worldbuilding would kill the whole vibe of surrealism.
That said, I agree the more cross pollination the better in all directions. I think you can learn a lot comparing traditional fantasy to surrealist/magical realist work but you also could learn a lot comparing A Song of Ice and Fire to Wolf Hall and vice versa. Historical fiction has to use similar worldbuilding techniques aimed at modern readers, you know?
The Burke parlor is the exact antecedent and it's worth quoting in full because it does something your Grand Ballroom theory extends beautifully: "You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about."
What you've added to Burke is the spatial metaphor of simultaneous presence — the ballroom rather than the sequential parlor. Burke's image is temporal: you arrive after others, you catch up, you eventually leave and others continue. Your image is something more like jazz: everyone is playing at once, across time, and the work is finding your note in the chord rather than waiting for your turn to speak.
The Tracer Bullet strip crystallizes it for sure. Watterson in conversation with Chandler, Chandler in conversation with Hammett, all of them in conversation with the dime novel tradition they were both parodying and perfecting. The strip is funny partly because you can hear all those conversations happening simultaneously in a single panel.
The shyness you describe — how could my work live up to these great authors — is what gets resolved when you understand the ballroom as a place you've already been invited to, not a room you need to earn entry to. The invitation is reading them. The entry is writing back. In my opinion that is.
Tracer Bullet: Every panel is so damn good.
1. The cigarette smoke looking as though it came from the gun.
2. So sick that this kid is drinking and smoking and this appeared in the funny pages above Family Circus!
3. "In walked trouble. Brunette as usual." Chandler is so fun to parody because the wordplay is a rich/funny match for the cynicism.
4. He was riding high and now his head barely pokes above the table. Perfect.
Kenneth Burke had an idea of the "parlor" in Philosophy of Literary Form. Maybe you found your inspiration there?
"Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress."
I haven't read, but love the quote. Will have to put in the to-read list.
Awesome. Burke is annoying but worthwhile in long-form works like PLF, Rhetoric of Motives, etc.. Some people prefer his essays, so here is some brilliance about "Hamlet."
http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/courses/COGSCI600.2009/Burke(1925).pdf
Keep up the great writing!
I have a theory that a big-- not absolute, but at least very substantial-- cause of the split between Millennial Nerds Who Only Read Slop and Millennial Nerds Who Might Read Some Other Books Sometimes is the latter being exposed to Calving and Hobbes in childhood.
I love this idea of great art as one that renounces the egotistical tendencies that plague so many artists and embraces its conversation with voices from the past.
Ordered my copy of Metallic Realms. Should be arriving tomorrow!
Thank you, and hope you enjoy!
This part is something I've been thinking about and so it hit me with a big 'hell yeah' to read this: "I also used to feel shy about putting my fiction in conversation with my idols. How could my work live up to these great authors from history? These days I think, fuck it. Why hide?"
You're probably familiar with the Bluesky account The Midnight Society (I used to follow it on that other platform before it became toxic). It riffs on your concept through imaginary conversations between horror writers past and present. It's edgy and, IMHO, very funny.
I write the YA time travel series, Edge of Yesterday in which modern GenZ teens dance the fugue at Lorenzo de' Medici's Carnival Ball and find postcards from the future in Keen's Chophouse in New York while dodging bootleggers. And miss timelines by traveling to their own future. So much fun mixing Steampunk and AI, Insta and newsboys, Newton, quantum physics and resurectionism across time!
Bernie(hard) Bros, lol.
This is a wonderful post. I love the idea of a ballroom for writers across eras and genres, all conversing with each other - and even better, slipping in and out of parallel ballrooms where artists, musicians etc are having their own ballroom parties. I have been reading your posts with a lot of interest. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
I'm looking forward to reading "The Asshole Theory of Autofiction."
The number of times a Calvin & Hobbes strip comes to mind in my own daily life is actually astounding! (Garfield, too.) Comic books have an outsized influence on young readers, for sure. If more could be like Calvin & Hobbes, maybe we'd have more readers today.
I didn’t have the metaphor, but this idea is basically how I used to describe literature to my students.
That Tracer Bullet strip is from the series where Hobbes shaved Calvin's head, a high point in a comic full of high points, and oh my God that second panel is funny.
Also, “The Mirror in the Panopticon Method of Satire"?! I vote for that one to be moved to the top of the list if you're wondering what to write about next.
This is a great essay. Thank you.
Thank you!
What a party! I want a dance with James Joyce. Oh, maybe I am dancing with him now.
I like what you say about finding voice in what’s missing. Yes, that’s in a good conversation each brings value to it with their unique perspective. The whole conversation becomes richer.
This post is a lovely image to dream about. Thank you.
It annoys me that the genre/style delineation is more about external influence than the books themselves. In my opinion, Gene Wolfe SHOULD be discussed in literary circles, magical realism SHOULD be discussed with fantasy, etc. It aids discovery and variety. You can move around different conversations yourself, but in practice many don’t. Obviously marketing and modern platforms like Goodreads only make things worse. Sorry, just a personal gripe of mine when it comes to consumption, not just creation, that I’ve never seen anybody talk about.
I hear you--and just wrote about Gene Wolfe in my last article!--although I do think that the surrealist/magical realist/absurdist vein of literature is distinct in many ways from more traditional SFF type fantasy internally, not just because of external influences. Most fantasy in the Tolkien/Martin/Etc. vein attempts for a type of verisimilitude and fleshed-out worldbuilding while surrealist literature employs dream logic and does not work on the level of logical worldbuilding. That type of worldbuilding would kill the whole vibe of surrealism.
That said, I agree the more cross pollination the better in all directions. I think you can learn a lot comparing traditional fantasy to surrealist/magical realist work but you also could learn a lot comparing A Song of Ice and Fire to Wolf Hall and vice versa. Historical fiction has to use similar worldbuilding techniques aimed at modern readers, you know?
The Burke parlor is the exact antecedent and it's worth quoting in full because it does something your Grand Ballroom theory extends beautifully: "You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about."
What you've added to Burke is the spatial metaphor of simultaneous presence — the ballroom rather than the sequential parlor. Burke's image is temporal: you arrive after others, you catch up, you eventually leave and others continue. Your image is something more like jazz: everyone is playing at once, across time, and the work is finding your note in the chord rather than waiting for your turn to speak.
The Tracer Bullet strip crystallizes it for sure. Watterson in conversation with Chandler, Chandler in conversation with Hammett, all of them in conversation with the dime novel tradition they were both parodying and perfecting. The strip is funny partly because you can hear all those conversations happening simultaneously in a single panel.
The shyness you describe — how could my work live up to these great authors — is what gets resolved when you understand the ballroom as a place you've already been invited to, not a room you need to earn entry to. The invitation is reading them. The entry is writing back. In my opinion that is.