Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, Found Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts

by David Shields

  3 Lester’s last published piece, in the Voice, appeared in my senior year of college. I moved back to N.Y.C. a little later, after six months in California, where it was too relaxed. By the time I got to New York, the East Village galleries were already disappearing. Lester was dead. The Gap had moved in on the northwest corner of St. Mark’s and Second Avenue.

  4 In 1978, back at S.P.S., I took six hits of “blotter” acid and had a pretty wrenching bad trip. Eternal damnation, shame, humiliation, and an endless line of men in clown costumes chanting my name and laughing. That kind of thing. I turned myself in, confessed to a master I liked, the Reverend Alden B. Flanders. Somewhere in the middle of the five or six hours it took to talk me down, I asked him if he thought I would remember this moment for the rest of my life.

  5 “The necessity for this book is to be found in the following consideration: that the lover’s discourse is today of an extreme solitude. . . . Once a discourse is thus . . . exiled from all gregarity, it has no recourse but to become the site, however exiguous, of an affirmation.”

  6 I didn’t get baptized until I was fifteen. The minister, who had buried my grandparents and my uncle and performed my mother’s remarriage, couldn’t remember my name. Right then, the church seemed like the only thing that would get me through adolescence. I was going to get confirmed later, too, but instead I started drinking.

  7 Cf. “Eco, Umberto,” and also n. 9, below.

  8 The band I played in, in college, was called Forty-five Houses. We got our name from the first Surrealist manifesto: “Q; ‘What is your name?’ A. ‘Forty-five houses.’ (Ganser syndrome, or beside-the-point replies.)” Our drummer preferred women to men, but I sort of fell in love with her anyway. After we graduated, she gave me a ride on her motorcycle. It was the first time I ever rode one. I held tight around her waist.

  9 See n. 20, below.

  10 The first day of Angela’s workshop in college, a guy asked her what her work was like. She said, “My work cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man’s penis.” Second semester, there was a science-fiction writer in our class who sometimes slept through the proceedings—and there were only eight or nine of us there. One day I brought a copy of Light in August to Angela’s office hours and she said, “I wish I were reading that”—Faulkner—“instead of this” (pointing to a stack of student work).

  11 As a gift for graduating from boarding school, my dad gave me a short trip to Europe. Two weeks. I was a little bit afraid of travel, though, as I still am, and in London I spent much of the time in Hyde Park, in a chair I rented for 15p a day. The sticker that served as my lease still adorns my copy of The Stories of John Cheever, also given to me by my dad. I haven’t been back to the U.K. since.

  12 We moved a lot when I was a kid. In eighth grade I had a calendar on which I marked off the days until I’d be leaving Connecticut forever. My attachments weren’t too deep. I spent a lot of time with Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, and the Avengers. I also liked self-help books and Elton John records.

  13 Picard and the crew of the Enterprise attempt to make contact with a race of aliens, the Children of Tama, who speak entirely in an allegorical language. Picard doesn’t figure out the language until the captain of the Tamarians is already dead. A big episode for those who realize how hard communicating really is.

  14 One guy I knew in college actually threw this book out a window. Here are some excerpts from my own marginalia: “Function of art is supplementalism though devalorization of weighted side of oppositions”; “Attendance as performance: more absence creates more real presence.” I’m not sure what I meant, but I loved Derrida’s overheated analogies: “Writing in the common sense is the dead letter, it is the carrier of death. It exhausts life. On the other hand, on the other face of the same proposition, writing in the metaphoric sense, natural, divine, and living writing, is venerated” (page 17).

  15 The WELL—as it is abbreviated—has a really good “Star Trek” conference, too. This private conference is about sex. I started messing with computers in junior high, when my grades got me out of study hall. Which was good because people used to threaten me if I didn’t let them copy my homework. It was on the WELL that I learned both the address for a mail-order catalogue called Leather Toys and how to affix clothespins.

  16 My drinking got really bad in graduate school. In the mid-eighties, I was in love with a woman who was living in Paris, and I took the opportunity to get mixed up at the same time with a friend in New York. Kate, the second of these women, first played this record for me. The snap of the snare drum that begins The Good Earth has a real tenderness to it, for me. I was playing this record when I was really ashamed of myself and also afterward, when I was hoping for forgiveness.

  17 At the end of my drinking, when I was first living in Hoboken, I started writing my first novel, Garden State. Later, through a chain of kindnesses, someone managed to slip a copy of it to William Gaddis, the writer I most admired, then and now. Much later, long after all this, I came to know Gaddis’s son Matthew a little bit, and he said that the book had probably got covered up with papers, because that’s the way his dad’s desk is. But maybe there was one afternoon when it was on top of a stack.

  18 The last day of class with Jack Hawkes, we were standing out on one of those Victorian porches in Providence—a bunch of us, because there was always a crowd of people trying to get into Jack’s classes (and they were usually really talented)—firing corks from champagne bottles out into the street. A couple made it halfway across. Hawkes was mumbling something about how sad it was that so many writers were so afflicted by drink. In less than a week, I was going to graduate.

  19 Another clergyman in New England, Mr. Joseph Moody, of York, Maine, who died about eighty years since, made himself remarkable by the same eccentricity that is here related of the Reverend Mr. Hooper. In his case, however, the symbol had a different import. In early life he had accidentally killed a beloved friend; and from that day till the hour of his own death, he hid his face from men.

  20 See n. 7, above.

  21 During the period when I was finishing my first novel, I had an office job in publishing, from which I was later fired. I judged everything against the books I loved when I was a teen-ager: The Crying of Lot 49, Beckett’s Murphy, One Hundred Years of Solitude, etc. Besides Lester Bangs (see above), Marcus’s Lipstick Traces was one of the few recently published books I liked. Another was Responses: On Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism (University of Nebraska Press).

  22 In 1987, I institutionalized myself. At that moment, Thurber and Groucho Marx and anthologies of low comedy seemed like the best that literature had to offer. I thought I was going to abandon writing—something had to give—but I didn’t. I felt better later.

  23 “The accusation that the gnostics invented what they wrote contains some truth: certain gnostics openly acknowledged that they derived their piosis from their own experience . . . The gnostic Christians . . . assumed that they had gone far beyond the apostles’ original teaching.”

  24 And Cage’s book Silence; and Music for Airports; and La Monte Young’s “The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from the Four Dreams of China”; and Ezra Pound after St. Elizabeth’s; and Be Here Now; and Mark Rothko.

  25 The back cover of this issue consists of a newspaper photo of a man in a wedding gown slumped over on a toilet, his skin ribbed with gigantic blisters. He’s really destroyed, this guy. I’d been given to believe the photo was from the Daily News. And since my grandfather worked for the News the luridness of this horror struck close. This, I learned, was an act of pleasure.

  26 Angela Carter assigned this book to us in sophomore year. I was taking a lot of quaaludes that spring. One night, I stayed up all night on quaaludes and wrote a story, cribbed from Bruno Schulz, about a guy who lives in a house that is actually his grandmother. Later, when I told Angela that I’d written the story high, she said, cryptically, “Quaaludes, the aardvark of the drug world.” />
  27 “All these empty urges must be satisfied.”

  28 “Sick as I am/confused in the head/I mean I have/endured this April/so far/visiting friends” (pages 427–8). Garden State was published in the spring of 1992. I was already pretty far into my second book, The Ice Storm. I left Hoboken for good.

  29 There was a time, when I was an adolescent, when I didn’t feel like I had a dad, even though he didn’t live that far away, and I saw him on Sundays. This is an admission that won’t please him or the rest of my family. The way I see it, though, there has never been a problem between me and my actual dad. But dads make the same tentative decisions we sons make. Once, my father said to me, “I wonder if you kids would have turned out differently if I had been around to kick some ass.” This was during one of those long car rides full of silences. The question didn’t even apply to me, I didn’t think. He might have been there, he might not have. Didn’t matter. I was looking elsewhere for the secrets of ethics and home.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Also by

  Title Page

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. “Disclaimer” David Means

  2. “I CAN SPEAK!™” George Saunders

  3. Some Instructions to My Wife Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage, and to My Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood (excerpt) Stanley Crawford

  4. “One Thousand Words on Why You Should Not Talk During a Fire Drill” Mark Halliday

  5. “Problems for Self-Study” Charles Yu

  6. “Permission Slip” Caron A. Levis

  7. “How to Become a Writer” Lorrie Moore

  8. “The Dead Sister Handbook: A Guide for Sensitive Boys (Laconic Method to Near Misses)” Kevin Wilson

  9. “Interview with a Moron” Elizabeth Stuckey-French

  10. “Reference #388475848-5” Amy Hempel

  11. “The Explanation” Donald Barthelme

  12. Letters to Wendy’s (excerpt) Joe Wenderoth

  13. “This Is Just to Say That I’m Tired of Sharing an Apartment with William Carlos Williams” Laura Jayne Martin

  14. “Single Woman for Long Walks on the Beach” Ron Carlson

  15. “My Beard, Reviewed” Chris Bachelder

  16. “The Varieties of Romantic Experience: An Introduction”

  17. “Vis à Vis Love” Mieke Eerkens

  18. “Practice Problem” Joseph Salvatore

  19. “Officers Weep” Daniel Orozco

  20. “Subtotals” Greg Burnham

  21. “Our Spring Catalog” Jack Pendarvis

  22. “Reply All” Robin Hemley

  23. “Chaucer Tweets the South by Southwest Festival” Kari Anne Roy

  24. “Iconographic Conventions of Pre- and Early Renaissance: Italian Representations of the Flagellation of Christ” Rachel B. Glaser

  25. “The Human Side of Instrumental Transcommunication” Wendy Brenner

  26. “Class Notes” Lucas Cooper

  27. “Dear Stephen Hawking” Samantha Hunt

  28. “National Treasures” Charles McLeod

  29. “Discarded Notions” Matthew Williamson

  30. “Star Lake Letters” Arda Collins

  31. “Life Story” David Shields

  32. “Instructions for Extinction” Melanie Rae Thon

  33. “Will & Testament” Matthew Vollmer

  34. “Letter to a Funeral Parlor” Lydia Davis

  35. “Acknowledgments” Paul Theroux

  36. “Primary Sources” Rick Moody

  37. “Contributor’s Note” Michael Martone

  38. “The Year’s Best Fiction 2008: The Authors Speak” J. Robert Lennon

  39. “About the Typefaces Not Used in This Edition” Jonathan Safran Foer

  40. “The Index” J. G. Ballard

  Further Reading

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Copyright