The Michigan Daily - Tuesday, April 21, 1998 -1' Crowd captures NOFX essence By Gabe Fajuri Daily Arts Witer Full of an audience that consisted mainly of 12-year-olds and their par- ents, Clutch Cargo's was bursting with action on Saturday evening. Despite an extremely early door time at 5 p.m. the former church was filled to capacity for NOFX's first appearance in the Detroit area in almost two years. Hi-Standard, a Japanese punk rock trio, warmed up the crowd first. Better on stage than record, the three foreigners put together an impressive showing, drawing from their two releases on Fat Wreck Chords, and closing their set with "Angry Fist," the title track from their latest release. A quick break in the action brought the Bouncing Souls to the stage around 6:15 p.m. The East Coast's self-proclaimed "most tour- ing band in punk rock" hurtled through their half-hour set with the voracity of a tiger. Cheers were Author Barth to discuss fine writing at ceremony By David Erik Nelson For the Daily Today, the University will dole out its most presti- gious awards for literary achievement: the Hopwoods. Big-money, big-recognition and prizes will reward stellar work, and to add to the occasion, John Barth will speak at the ceremony. It's not easy to talk about John Barth because he is a pioneering postmodern author who is virtually unknown outside of literary circles. In a recent telephone interview, Barth aptly sum- marized his literary contribution, observing that "great fiction is seldom solely about itself, but it is almost always also about itself." This final clause is the watchword of postmodernists like Mark Leyner and Donald Barthelme, writers of metafiction. Metafiction is the school of writing that takes fic- tion itself as its subject. This can be a hard to grasp concept; here's Hopwood Awards Ceremony Rackham Auditorium Today at 3:30 p.m. an example (taken from DF Wallace's novella "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way": "Nouns verbed by, adver- bially adjectival." In this very metafictional sentence the subject (the thing being talked about) is the form (the manner in which the thing is discussed.) Wallace's sentence isn't about Dick and Jane going to the park, or Spot eating his dinner; it's a sentence about sentences, about the nature of sentence-ness. This approach is akin to taking a photo of a mirror. what Barth dislikes in "metafiction;" prose that is solely about itself. A better example is Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five," which, en route to telling us Billy Pilgrim's story, also tells us a great deal about the nature of storytelling and chronology. With or without his approval, Barth was instru- mental in metafiction's inception; his work is the unwilling mother of Leyner's "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist," Wallace's "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," Donald Barthelme's "Sentence," etc. What is most admirable about Barth isn't his inno- vation (for, when push comes to shove, admiring creativity is like admiring how tall someone is), but his unwillingness to sit on his laurels. Despite great critical and at least moderate com- mercial success, Barth has never chosen to stick with what's safe or has worked before; in his work Barth is constantly moving forward and further. "The Floating Opera," (Barth's first novel, pub- lished in 1956) is Todd Andrews' life's story com- pressed to the day he decides to kill himself. It's standard in the sense that it is clearly charac- ter and plot driven, yet nonetheless we already see shades of the metafictional super-voice (the voice that eradicates everything outside of itself) and par- alyzingly apathetic protagonist that will become the backbone of the works of Vonnegut, Leyner, Wallace et al. The real high-water mark for Barth's metafiction comes in his short story collection "Lost in the Funhouse" (1968), wherein we find stories such as "Title," a story with no point or content apart from the story being constructed. But that summation is too simple: Vibrating with- in the story struggling to be told is, of course, the author trying to tell the story: "As you see, I'm try- ing to do something about the present mess; hence this story. Adjective in the noun! Don't lose your composure." Although we never know this author's hair color or gender, we can make a legitimate connection with his/her struggle. At the core of the formal experi- mentation is a cathartic heart. If there is one quality that characterizes Barth's work across the board it is this sort of virtuoso litheness. Barth's significance cannot conceivably be over- emphasized. If you have ever, in your life, read a book you enjoyed or written a sentence that's made you proud, then you will never, ever forgive yourself if you miss Barth's lecture at the Hopwood Awards Ceremony, today at 3:30 p.m. at Rackham Auditorium. Courtesy of Epitaph Records The men of NOFX delivered a stellar show this past Saturday at Clutch Cargo's in Pontiac. NOFX Clutch Cargo's April 18, 1998 heard for older songs including "I Like Your Mom," "Quick Check Girl" and "Lamar Vannoy," as well as items from last year's Epitaph records release "The Bouncing Souls." By the time the Souls were done with their r rin of th" portion o t1e evening's entertainment, the crowd had worked up a good sweat. The real party, however, had yet to begin. The members of NOFX walked on stage nonchalantly about an hour after the Bouncing Souls had started their set. A single glance at the four of them would never have suggested that these were men who would incite one of the single most insane evenings at Clutch Cargo's. -Fat Mike, the band's lead singer didn't start things off with a song, but rather a five-minute chat with the crwd. As soon as his sarcastic ban- ter began, everyone seemed to know th t something was going on. The first chord finally struck, the rabid masses in the mosh pit let go of any inhibitions they might have had and let loose on the stage. From the first song to the last, not a moment passed without someone being on, or trying to be on, the stage. There must have been more than 200 crowd surfers during NOFX's set. At one point, the tiny platform was literally full of fans. The crowd surfers really made the show outstanding. The general crowd (those actually watching the show and not actively participating) was treated to a total of three moonings and dozens of extended middle fin- gers. One surfer attempted to drop his boxer shorts while on stage, but was stopped (and just soon enough) by the stage manager before performing the dirty deed. The band seemed to take all the madness in stride. The members of the band seemed happy with the frenzy unfolding around them, and took every opportunity they had to make fun of crowd surfers and some- times prevent them from jumping from the stage. As for NOFX's musical menu, it cranked out both new and old tunes, to the extreme pleasure of everyone in attendance, even those that stood in the balcony throughout the entire performance. Classics like "Linoleum," "Leave it Alone," "Stickin' In My Eye," "Liza And Louise" and an innumer- able list of others seemed to flow out of the band in a never-ending stream. In true punk rock style, the band attempted to squash together eight songs in three minutes, but only suc- ceeded in cramming six into four minutes. Some of these "quickies" included "Murder the Government," "Reagan" and "I Wanna Be An Alcoholic," There was no encore Saturday night. Instead of taking the tradi- tional break before a three or four song final hurrah, NOFX just cranked out four more tunes, finish- ing off the evening with their salute to Judaism in the song "The Brews," which was quickly followed by their traditional recessional hymn, "Buggley Eyes." The classic example of digestible metafiction is Barth's own short story "Lost in the Funhouse" (from the collection of the same name). In this story, the tale of adolescent Ambrose, des- perately infatuated with his cousin and lost in an amusement park funhouse, is interrupted and modu- lated by observations about the facts and methods of writing. Suffice it to say that metafictionists are "writers' writers," although I'm not sure if that's meant to be a compliment or an insult. Barth himself isn't comfortable with the term "metafiction" because "what it seems to imply is a kind of fiction that really is mainly about its own process." "What I'd much prefer is fiction that does not naively approach form but, that being said, goes on to make an appeal to the emotions," he said. Thus, Wallace's sentence would also be an example of Read the Daily Online at www. pub. umich. edu/daily The Right Direction Can Make All The Difference. (f xil CDo '11 mw l f S - rth rl~I~tl f a: * resT4ei* DiE'Qtorg Mr4a Cweoo Bfifing ir 906 S. Univers Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Te(e phone: 763-2084 National Tests Show 40% Of All Children Read Below Grade Level. Kids need a lot of direction to know which way is up. Especially when they're learning to read. That's why they need people like you. 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