CALEB: I guess you see the obvious. Chomsky is half wrong. And in politics or religion “half wrong” equals “all wrong.” The U.S. needs criticism, but it’s got to come from a free agent, not Chomsky. He’s become an intellectual demagogue.
DAVID: I’d say he’s pure demagogue. I just like how carefully and quietly and pseudo-respectfully he speaks, as if he’s saying very normative things.
CALEB: My problem with him is he misuses his authority. He’s still the same guy who misread Cambodia, citing Western propaganda that only 8,000 people died. Chomsky’s misreading directly influenced how leftist intellectuals approached Cambodia. Chomsky never adequately, as you like to say, “turns the arrow back upon himself.” And he’s gotten progressively worse. After they killed Osama, Chomsky said, “Bin Laden’s ‘confession’ is like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon.” Talk about a perpendicular analogy. In 1967 Chomsky wrote “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.” He has failed to answer his own call.
DAVID: I’m mainly fascinated by him as a presence.
CALEB: “A presence”? That’s it?
DAVID: Listen, Caleb. You’ve done more things out in the world than I have, but I’ve figured out how to write about it in my own voice. I know how to place a jar in Tennessee. It’s all I know how to do, but that, to me, is everything.
CALEB: A jar in Tennessee?
DAVID: Wallace Stevens.
CALEB: It’s not everything.
DAVID: To me, it is.
CALEB: If that’s all you have, it’s nothing.
DAVID: That’s because you don’t have it.
CALEB: That’s a pretty dickish thing to say, don’t you think?
DAVID: You’re right. I apologize. Let’s agree to disagree. Let’s take a break.
CALEB: At the Philoctetes Center panel, you, Rick Moody, and John Cameron Mitchell couldn’t get a word in because DJ Spooky just kept talking about nothing, saying shit like “The bizarre right-wing rescripting of reality is exactly what Hitler was doing: creating a notion of fear and terror as a narrative frame.” The moderator put a stop to it with an interjection about Freud and the vagina. Moody says, “Excellent point.” And they successfully change the topic.
DAVID: I was supposed to be the moderator of the discussion, but—
CALEB: It was a lively conversation.
DAVID: I’d never met Paul Miller—that’s DJ Spooky’s real name, as you probably know—and he was a last-minute replacement for someone else. He’s obviously smart and he talks a good game and he’s—
CALEB: He’s no dumb-dumb, but he needs someone to tell him to shut up.
DAVID: I should have just said, “Paul, thanks, but let’s let other people jump in.” It was a conscious decision on my part: the whole room would have gone cold. If Rick Moody were talking too much, I would have said, “Rick, c’mon, give it a rest. You’re talking up a storm.”
CALEB: An ice storm.
DAVID: Ha ha.
CALEB: But you wouldn’t say anything to Spooky?
DAVID: Would you have?
CALEB: I’d like to think so.
DAVID: Endless blathering and name-dropping and never really saying anything. I wish I’d called him on it. I didn’t.
CALEB: I name-drop, I life-drop, I’ve done this, I’ve done that, but there’s a time and place.
DAVID: Because he’s black, I just didn’t feel comfortable shutting him down.
CALEB: Speaking of which, what’s this about you listening to hip-hop? I just can’t see David Shields thundering down the road listening to N.W.A.—you know, Niggaz with Attitude.
DAVID: You don’t think I know who N.W.A. are!? You have a completely one-dimensional view of me. I like hip-hop as it enters my ears through my friend Michael and through Natalie. I don’t pretend to seek it out.
In the kitchen.
CALEB: Beer?
DAVID: Sure. (sound of beer bottle opening) Amazing. That’s an experienced beer drinker. I’ve never seen that.
CALEB: Terry’s not a fan of the wedding-ring bottle opener.
DAVID: Why not?
CALEB: She thinks it’ll scratch up the ring. I say it’s a symbol of devotion. Beer. Wife. Love.
CALEB: What’d I do with the black pepper? You want some?
DAVID: That’s plenty. Thanks a lot. This sauce is very good. It’s really delicious.
CALEB: Thanks.
CALEB: In Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee alludes to our treating animals similarly to the way Nazis treated Jews.
DAVID: I’m not a vegetarian, but I wish I had the willpower. Coetzee says about Eating Animals, “Anyone who, after reading Foer’s book, continues to consume factory farm products must be without a heart, or impervious to reason, or both.”
CALEB: Ugh.
DAVID: If you watch a documentary like—
CALEB: It’s a bunch—
DAVID: If you watch how chickens are slaughtered, it should make you feel guilty. Don’t you think it’s cruel how animals are slaughtered, and yet we do it for our own convenience? Do you not think there’s a legitimate case to be made for vegetarianism?
CALEB: We’re omnivores. Animals suffer. That’s what they do. They eat one another, battle the elements, starve. They’re not cognizant the way we are. In a rich, liberal, educated society it’s easy to be a “moral vegetarian,” but in Africa and Southeast Asia they don’t eat animals because they can’t afford to. Kids suffer mineral and iron and vitamin deficiency. And the brain can’t develop without nutrients that meats provide. Pregnant mothers need meat, eggs, milk to help nourish their fetus, so poor people die or grow up malnourished as relatively prosperous vegetarians eat tofu and watercress and hijiki and organic tempeh and then tsk-tsk about meat being “murder.”
DAVID: Do you try to eat from organic farms?
CALEB: Terry is nuts about it; so is my dad. We eat free-range chicken, organic everything. All the vegetables we’re eating tonight are locally produced. We avoid red meat because it’s unhealthy.
CALEB: When it comes to food, guns, abortion, I’m pro-choice. Smoking: it’s your choice. I’m anti-cigarettes but pro-choice. Nobody’s pro-abortion.
DAVID: I think the pro-abortion side believes it can’t keep compromising. The so-called pro-life movement’s ultimate goal is to ban abortion completely.
CALEB: There are those who fear if we ban assault rifles, we’re going to ban hunting.
DAVID: I tend to buy the pro-choice argument and I tend not to buy the pro-gun movement.
CALEB: Guns we agree on, but no one’s trying to ban them. The pro-choice, anti-death-penalty, moral vegetarian, though—what is such a person saying? That a fetus has less value than a convicted criminal or a chicken? Terry’s friend Jenny and her husband stopped eating meat for moral reasons. Then Jenny had an abortion while she was going to nursing school. A couple summers ago we had a barbecue, and before they could grill their vegetables, they take a wire brush and start cleaning the grill so meat by-products won’t pollute their vegetables. I tell Terry, “Chicken has more value than a human fetus?”
DAVID: You have a distant, detached perspective on human foibles. You’re good at that, I think. You’re very logical.
CALEB: Of course I didn’t say anything. Jenny felt horrible, though. It messed with her mind. When she told her mother about the abortion, rather than offer consolation, she went ballistic, accusing Jenny of “aborting my grandchild.” Now they don’t talk. And I think Jenny regrets her choice. So there’s that.
CALEB: Tell me the Coetzee blurb story. Every time I asked before, you were completely evasive.
DAVID: I love Elizabeth Costello as much as any book published in the last ten years.
CALEB: A very boring book.
DAVID: You’re joking, right?
CALEB: Not at all.
DAVID: I’d go to the mat for that book. I handwrote Coetzee a fan letter and tried to articulate what I like so much about it—basically, that every chapter is an evisceration of
the moral/aesthetic stance of one of his previous books, and the book as a whole is an attempt to try to figure out what if anything in life is worthwhile. At the end, he can affirm only the belling of frogs in mud: sheer animal survival. It’s an incredibly serious and great book. I sent him the letter; he liked what I said. This is all by snail mail.
CALEB: Snail mail? Australia?
DAVID: I didn’t have his email.
CALEB: Your penmanship is horrible.
DAVID: Just let me—
CALEB: Moo.
DAVID: After a few exchanges, I described Reality Hunger and asked him if he’d be willing to read a tape-bound manuscript. To my surprise, he said yes.
CALEB: Get to the point.
DAVID: Basically, what happened is he wrote a blurb, I conflated it with another email he’d written to me, and asked him if it was okay to merge the official blurb with his unofficial blurb. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal.
CALEB: (laughing) He did.
DAVID: I can’t count how many times people have done that with my emails, but he said, “No, it’s not okay. Please use only the official blurb.” I said, “Absolutely. Of course. No problem.”
CALEB: Only, there was a problem.
DAVID: A few weeks earlier I’d sent the blurb to my editors in the U.S. and UK and a few other people. As soon as I got Coetzee’s request, I made the correction, but then Zadie Smith wrote a review in the Guardian months before the book came out, and she quoted the fuller, wrong, unofficial blurb. The moment I saw that on the web, I’m like, What the fuck!?
CALEB: For the record, the sesquipedalian David Shields just said, “I’m like, What the fuck!?”
DAVID: First of all, I wasn’t thrilled with her take on the book, and second of all—I’m going to get an apple. Hold on.
David gets an apple, takes a bite. Caleb gets a beer, takes a drink.
Second of all, the moment I saw that Coetzee quote, my heart just fell out of my rib cage.
Caleb laughs.
DAVID: I wrote to him immediately, “One of the red-letter days of my life was when I got the statement from you that you liked my book. You’re one of the half-dozen writers I most admire in the world. It’s entirely my fault. I sincerely apologize. I promise to make sure only the correct quote gets used going forward.” And that’s the last I ever heard from him. From then on it was Coetzee’s agent, who said no publisher can use the quote. Coetzee wrote a letter to the Guardian, which had to take the review down. Zadie Smith couldn’t republish the essay.
CALEB: The quotes are public. How many galleys exist?
DAVID: Maybe four hundred.
CALEB: Really? That makes the galleys collectors’ items. If someone offered me a thousand bucks for my copy, I wouldn’t sell it.
DAVID: Did I do anything wrong, exactly?
CALEB: You kind of did.
DAVID: Here’s a writer I really admire and I—
CALEB: I should blog it.
DAVID: Don’t do that.
CALEB: Why not? Fair use.
DAVID: Well, there’s a legal stricture.
CALEB: Who would be liable—you or me?
DAVID: I doubt it’d be you.
CALEB: I won’t do it, then.
DAVID: For this relief, much thanks.
CALEB: I was disappointed when you refused to offer wholehearted praise of my rape novel.
DAVID: That was an awkward situation.
CALEB: How could it have hurt you? You wrote, more or less, “I’ve just written Reality Hunger, a manifesto partly in dispraise of traditional novels, so I probably shouldn’t blurb traditional novels.”
DAVID: What happened in the meantime was the Coetzee mess. I was thinking, Coetzee’s acting rather high-handed toward me. I’m not going to act high-handed toward Caleb.
CALEB: I was pissed. Then I got your permission.
DAVID: What’d I say?
CALEB: You said not to call your former teacher names, and that I could use any praise you’d written. My novel didn’t deserve a glowing blurb, but still—
DAVID: What did you call me, do you remember?
CALEB: I said, “You’re really a dork.”
DAVID: Third-grade stuff.
CALEB: You immediately responded with “What do you mean?” Then, a few minutes later, you wrote, “You’re wildly overreacting.”
DAVID: I think that’s true, don’t you?
CALEB: Probably.
DAVID: I forget what I said.
CALEB: You’d written about my book, “Your book is gorgeously written and the ending is quite powerful, but unfortunately I can’t blurb it because I have a book coming out that—”
DAVID: That makes sense, to me, actually; after Reality Hunger—
CALEB: Fair enough.
DAVID: Well, I liked your novel.
CALEB: Apparently not enough.
DAVID: Thanks. That was really good. I’m used to Laurie’s cooking and that was right up there. Let me do the dishes.
CALEB: We can use the dishwasher. I need to beer up. (goes to get a beer)
DAVID: I think it’s a fascinating wrestling match between you and me on Elizabeth Costello. Your take is: Here is an Afghani widow, and there is Coetzee worrying about his legacy, but the book is not “Woe is me—I’m a misunderstood Nobel Prize winner.” Coetzee is saying, “I’m trying to stay alive as a writer and not be buried under the avalanche of applause. I’m now a man in my mid-sixties. I want to ask the ultimate question.”
CALEB: What’s the ultimate question?
DAVID: What, in life, can I actually affirm? Not pseudo-affirm, but what do I actually believe in? And after all these great chapters about animal rights, civil rights, political activism, art, love, friendship, I believe in the belling of—
CALEB: What you said earlier.
DAVID: Your critique of Coetzee is, to me, the same as your critique of Wallace: “Enough whining—give me the agony of the world without all of your precious consciousness between me and the world.” But to me, that’s what art is: human consciousness.
CALEB: “Consider the Lobster,” “Shipping Out”—they’re engaging, but my problem with Wallace is I don’t think the reader should have to work that hard. He vacillates between esoteric and overwritten.
DAVID: You think he brandishes his authority too much?
CALEB: He is—he was—a cool guy.
DAVID: I would say he was probably the least cool guy in the history of the planet.
CALEB: You can tell that spending time with him probably was a kick. He needed someone, though, to pull him aside, inspire him, make him not feel so lonely. An editor. A lover.
DAVID: I think if he had had that, he wouldn’t have become anything like the much-loved writer he was. His whole project was nothing more or less than trying to convey and articulate and embody how strange it felt to be alive, especially to think, now—the pleasures and burdens of being conscious. So every footnote, every neologism, every weird mix of highfalutin diction and pop jargon, every overuse of “w/r/t” or “like” as a filler, every qualifying parenthesis—the goal was to try to talk in a new way about what it felt like to be alive at ground level right now.
CALEB: I’d be Mr. Interrupting Cow. Maybe his IQ goes over my head.
DAVID: You’re an extremely intelligent person.
CALEB: I have limits. I don’t suffer from low self-esteem, but I know I’m clueless. I just don’t make this my front-and-center.
DAVID: Who cares what his IQ was? Wallace figured out how to sound smart on the page. He said that pretty much everyone at Pomona College, where he taught, had higher SAT scores than he did. I studied Latin in high school and college and graduate school, and he constantly misuses it.
CALEB: Is he aware of that?
DAVID: No, he’s just misusing it. And that helps me understand him as a vulnerable person who tried very hard to sound incredibly smart, but here’s an area I happen to know well, and he’s often hilariously wrong. The point bei
ng that he wasn’t necessarily a “genius,” whatever that means. It’s that he found a way to sound really smart and funny on the page.
CALEB: Interesting. Maybe his IQ goes beneath my head.
DAVID: Exactly. He was stupid enough to commit suicide.
CALEB: I’ve got two suicidal friends: one was manic-depressive/bipolar, and the other had fits of depression, but now they’re on medication.
DAVID: That was Wallace.
CALEB: Some people—their synapses don’t connect.
DAVID: It’s pure biochemistry, isn’t it? As young as fourteen or fifteen, Wallace was imagining that he had an axe sticking out of his forehead. He always felt there was a glass wall between himself and the world and was on Nardil for most of his life. Then he had that great job at Pomona, was happily married, was hoping to have a child, and he said, “I want to take this happiness to the next level.” And he went off Nardil. Big mistake: he spiraled into severe depression. What happens, sometimes, with these meds, is that when you try to use them again, you can’t. They’ve lost their kick for you. When he tried to get back on it, it wasn’t the same. He tried everything, including electroshock, which my father submitted himself to every few years the last half of his life.
CALEB: Did you know him—Wallace?
DAVID: Slightly.
CALEB: I should retract some of what I said. I feel cruel.
DAVID: Not at all.
CALEB: This song is called “James Wood Is a Dinosaur.” (strums a guitar chord and sings, à la Paul Shaffer) James Wood is a dinosaur. (strums a chord progression) James Wood don’t know the score. (plays loudly, then softly) James Wood makes David Shields snore.
DAVID: Stick to learning foreign languages.
CALEB: (to DVR) It’s now 9:37 p.m., Friday, September 30th.
DAVID: What’s my problem with James Wood? He’s confused literature with religion.
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