Satire! Controversy! Argg!

I'm gonna come out and say it: Yes, I totally do want some trading cards with Aimee Bender and George Saunders and Zadie Smith and whoever else. That would be awesome.

With that said, this whole thing reminds me of a conversation I overheard standing outside the fiction building last week.

So this girl, whose name was apparently Heather was telling this story. Goes like this.

"So I walked around the corner and there was Eric sitting there with his accoustic guitar. And when he saw me he started to play "Stairway to Heaven." Then he stopped and he was like, 'Get it? "Stairway to Heather'..? And now I just pretty much hate him. Because art is like the only thing in life I take totally seriously."

What I'm saying is, come on, it's satire. Satire's job is to knock down anything when it starts getting too big for its britches (I can't believe I just wrote "too big for its britches). But that doesn't actually mean that the satirist hates everything about what he/she's writing about. I mean why would you spend all that time disecting something you completely loath?

After all, Lanhma is actually making work for him what he's poking fun at. At one point or another this piece falls into most of the categories he lays out for the "McSweeney's Tone." Academically clever, snarky clever, playfully adorably clever, self-indulgent.

Lanham is constantly subverting or undercutting most things he says. He has this whole satirical hyperbole about McSweeney's being our generation's only bona fide literary movement. Then, at the end, he pokes at those who would dismiss McSweeney's making them into the sort of people who used to dismiss rap music as a trend. And to those people that would still seem a reasonable argument. Meaning Lanham actually thinks its ridiculous to dimiss McSweeney's.

Or consider it this way...We were talking about Neal Pollack a few weeks back. Lanham does basically what Pollack used to do. They write satire. Pollack's satire was..wait for it... published by McSweeney's. Pollack fits the McSweeney's mold Lanham is talking about, therefore Lanham fits the McSweeney's mold Lanham is poking fun at. That's ironic. And I'm gonna say it's done in a totally intentional way. Real irony. Not like rain-on-your-wedding-day-ironic.

And that issue McSweeney's did on comics did rule. I doubt Lanham would actually seriously argue that.