A rubber band graphic from "Friends and Relatives of Rubber" at Metazen.

After reading a lot of online fiction last month, I’m noticing something: people like people. People like reading about people, anyway.But this isn’t carefully said. “People” is too general a term for what I mean. Having studied some philosophy, I know that when we talk this way we use the universal quantifier. But if we’re talking specifically we use the existential quantifier. To explain: Imagine a corral of horses and two cowboys conversing. One has his back to the corral and the other faces it. The first cowboy says, “Yup, all them horses is brown.” The second one says, “But look, that one there’s black.” The first cowboy uses the universal quantifier. He refers to the whole group without looking directly at any specific one. The second cowboy looks at one particular horse, naming it “that one.” He uses the existential quantifier. This kind of talk, existential quantification, is talk about specific qualities. Individuals. Not theorizing or generalizing like the first kind of talk.

So when I say that people like reading about people I mean that people like reading about individuals. They like details. They like blood and grit and personality. They don’t like back-turned abstraction and theory. They like lives. Individuals. Existences. They like to read about “that one,” not “those.”

Let’s have some examples.

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The most striking piece of writing I read in February was written by Bobbi Lurie and published in Diode Magazine. It’s called “Grief Suite.” Diode is a poetry journal, but when I read this I couldn’t help falling inside of it like it was fiction. So I treat it like fiction. Observe the quantifiers working here:

The approximate location of the daughter’s grief is not the body but the space around it, the smothering humidity, the day breaking into time repetition, memory and the blunted colors of. Not people causes bodies streaming past.

Hospitals and doctor visits and the giving up of it. The daughter takes the mother to healers, New Age Santa Fe redemptives gluttonous for, Hasidic rabbi wreaking miracles turning away unable, the Dalai Lama’s personal physician saying, o.k. but let go.

The mother’s purple blouse and pants are wadded in a ball beneath the gurney. The mother squirms, kicks her legs as she always has. The daughter says no heroic measures. She remembers how the mother says dying is like sleep. The daughter cries and phones the younger son, tells him to tell the older son too. The male nurse says your mother will not die. She is fine. The mother’s white skin, white hair like silk, her luminous body sick and shaking, arms tied down in restraints, her heart beats green on the black screen above her head, blood pressure in red, oxygen in blue. They say she is doing well.

This is about the exact existence of the daughter losing her mother. The words give way immediately to the viscera they reveal. You read them and they dissolve into the daughter’s being. Similarly, Amber Sparks’ recent piece in decomP brings the direct experience of homelessness to the front door of her main characters. V. Ulea’s short piece “Fatal Attraction” in The Battered Suitcase about the physical and metaphysical discovery of a black hole speaks this language of specific existence. The same goes for Len Kuntz’s piece in Metazen “Friends and Relatives of Rubber” where he writes a neo-fable from the perspective of a rubber band being flicked and snapped around.  Anonymous 9′s exploration of naive evil in “The Master Bedroom” published in Beat to a Pulp is freakish for it’s injection of emotion, psychotic though it may be. I feel that story behind my eyeballs. The same thing happened when I read Lydia Ship’s story in Night Train about what it’s like for a woman when her tattoos come alive at the office, or when Kim Goldberg writes of love and fixing spaceships in Zahir, or Matt Bell writes about the neo-industrial visions of a New England preacher in Conjunctions.

All these writers talk like the second cowboy. They’re all painting the lives of people. They don’t bother themselves with generalities or theories, agendas or concepts or universals. This doesn’t concern them. They aim instead for the immediacy of the specific.

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I recently had a conversation with a good friend who has a discerning taste for literature. I’d implored her to read Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, as it’s my favorite articulation of postmodern, pluralistic, techno-society paranoia. The concept of it blows me away. Take my favorite passage, for example:

…It was like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeros and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning or only the earth…In the songs Miles, Dean, Serge, and Leonard sang was either some fraction of the truth’s luminous beauty or only a power spectrum. Tremane the swastika salesman’s reprieve from holocaust was either an injustice or the absence of a wind; the bones of the GI’s at the bottom of lake Inverarity were there either for a reason that mattered to the world, or for skin divers and cigarette smokers. Ones and zeros. (p.136)

Here, if characters are mentioned, they’re mere thin-swaths of color in a grand theoretical statement about the terrible-mechanical uncertainty of our age. I told all this to my friend before she read it. But when she finished the book and we got dinner and I asked her about it, she scrunched up her face. She said (I’m paraphrasing here) “Yeah, okay, but so what? There aren’t any human beings in this book. Who cares about all these crazy names and alternative postal services?” I explained to her again that this was about the idea of paranoia, trying with my inflection to demonstrate the importance of the concept. But she just shrugged again and said, “I want something fleshy.” We started talking about something else.

The tension here is between the quantifiers. I look for secular theology in my literature, the universal quantifier. In contrast, my friend looks for the flesh of the people. She wants the existential quantifier. What I’m realizing as I read internet fiction this month is that she’s in the majority.