DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (19)
By:
June 8, 2025
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… late-breaking obsessions, avoided discoveries, and devotions delayed! Series edited by Adam McGovern.
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Events are ephemeral, and even as they’re happening, they can feel fabricated or have elements of artifice. Once memories have been remembered aren’t they subtly altered, therefore in some way also forgotten? This contradiction is the material of autofiction, its mode of fixing unfixed memory. I remember the moment I decided to give Knausgaard’s work a chance, after years of ignoring it, certain it could never interest me, thinking it was all some kind of gimmick, apparently the idea was to climb a banal mountain of prose. The Norwegian Knausgaard’s cragged face, was he an actual troll? The young bookseller in Santa Fe who raved to me about him, trying to convince me to give him a try, finally compared him, falteringly, to Proust. I bought the first book in My Struggle from that kid and went on to read nearly everything by Knausgaard. He is not at all like Proust. He tries to get as close as possible to life itself not actually occurring, avoiding Proust’s intricate sensoria, his technique of thick description by which he deepens, multidimensionally complexifies, and heightens the real. Knausgaard instead purposefully flattens what’s already flat: life, barely occurring. Derealization, just as it is, and then somehow things come alive. Banality gains a translucence. Going about his life fictionalizing it. The generational transformation from 1970s impoverished Norway to post-oil boom Norway. Dark Atlantic Ocean. Huge, austere rocks. He becomes a father tyrannized by servitude and obligation, struggling to find time to write, describing himself the way so many feminists have described themselves, trying to write but done in by housework, caregiving, cooking, and children, coming out about familial abuse. The death of his alcoholic abusive father is abject. He writes about it and his family is offended. He is blasted internally by extreme conflict in adolescence and in the family of origin, as well as the family he creates. That is, his situation is common; generalized. It matters, then, when suddenly something in particular is felt, glimpsed, known. In those moments, his favored verb is open. This is key: opening. He looks for the eternal, the possibility of the deathless, and in his most recent intensely uneven and in moments terrible trilogy he takes as his conceit a literal resurrection of the body after death. Animals, birds, woods, forests, violence, music, children, summer cottages, wounded students, ambivalent professionals, coffee, beer, wine, prawns, and so many cigarettes. Apparently, he never revises.
DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Adam McGovern | Mandy Keifetz on FAITH | Heather Quinlan on THE GRATEFUL DEAD | Carlo Rotella on SMOOTHER GROOVES | Art Wallace on MICHIGAN | Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons on TAYLOR SWIFT | Josh Glenn on ART | James Scott Maloy on BE-BOP DELUXE | Jake Zucker on LIGHT SLEEPER | Gabriela Pedranti on THE BIG BANG THEORY | Adam McGovern on DOGS | Tana Sirois on COLLABORATIVE EVOLUTION | Rani Som on LED ZEP | Holly Interlandi on HOT SAUCE | Jeff Lewonczyk on TWIN PEAKS | Nikhil Singh on PRE-TEEN DAVID LYNCH PROBLEMS | Christopher Rashee Stevenson on O’NEILL & THE SEA | Fran Pado on SHARKS | Juan Recondo on BEN GRIMM’S INNER LIFE | Miranda Mellis on KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD | Mimi Lipson on SOBRIETY | William Nericcio on ELYSIUM | Crockett Doob on SLEATER-KINNEY | Marlon Stern Lopez on PAT THE BUNNY | Crystal Durant on SEX AND THE CITY | Wendy Chin-Tanner on MY PARENTS’ ART STORE.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!