I Think You're Totally Wrong

by David Shields

  DAVID: You want to share?

  CALEB: I’ll have a bite.

  DAVID: Ian Hamilton was a British biographer and editor. A friend came up to him and said, “You know, all this drinking we always do—I’m not sure I really even enjoy it anymore.” Hamilton said, “Enjoy it? Whoever said you were supposed to enjoy it?” I love that line. It’s a very British way of saying no matter what you do you’re fucked.

  CALEB: You love to say that, that we’re fucked. “We die and so therefore we’re fucked.” That’s your thing. You and I aren’t that fucked.

  DAVID: We’re back now to the Khmer Rouge?

  Silence.

  DAVID: But the drinking, I mean. Do you get pretty lit at these social—

  CALEB: Like tonight, you mean?… Remember when some politician said corporations are people?

  DAVID: Romney.

  CALEB: Corporations are people. Microsoft employs ninety thousand.

  DAVID: Corporations are populated by millionaires.

  CALEB: Would you rather live in a country with corporations and millionaires? I’ve been to places without either. They suck.

  DAVID: I see your point, but corporations have been given—

  CALEB: Capitalism is two restaurants in a place that can support only one. The restaurant that provides the freshest, tastiest food for the best price and with the best service will survive, and the restaurant that serves crap will die. And that’s how it should be.

  DAVID: No one’s arguing for the end of capitalism. Even Norman Goldman.

  CALEB: Yeah, well, Goldman and Limbaugh cancel one another out.

  DAVID: Hardly.

  CALEB: Both are wrong.

  DAVID: You actually go out of your way to listen to talk radio?

  CALEB: I’m in the car at least an hour a day, taking the girls to school, to day care, going to the health club, running errands, and that’s all I listen to.

  DAVID: What do the kids want?

  CALEB: Music. I’m a dictator when I drive. As they get older, they’ll make more noise.

  DAVID: I promise you, you won’t be listening to talk radio anymore.

  CALEB: They already have “princess” disease.

  DAVID: In the sense of wanting to dress up as princesses?

  CALEB: In the form of wanting to be treated like princesses.

  DAVID: Those three girls are pretty cute.

  CALEB: We went to Disneyland. I call the experience the closest I’ve ever been face-to-face with evil. They could get rid of Guantánamo and make terrorists spend a day in Disneyland—they’d talk.

  DAVID: It was pretty painful? The one in LA?

  CALEB: Doors open at ten a.m. We get there a little before, and I’m surprised: the line’s not so bad. Terry’s pregnant with Kaya. Ava’s almost four and Gia’s two. Two and under are free, but we still pay two hundred bucks for two adults and a kid. That’s a living monthly wage in Thailand. We go in to Disney Village: mountains and oceans of people. The gates to Disneyland won’t open until eleven. We have two kids dying for Disneyland, and they want every toy they see in every store. Mickey Mouse puzzle: eighteen bucks. Lion King figure: six bucks. We die a slow death for one hour. Eleven a.m. approaches, people line up, the girls are going nuts, we finally get in at maybe quarter after eleven, and every ride is jammed. We start at the Snow White adventure, wait fifteen minutes, sit down for the ride, and then we come out and keep doing it for another eight hours. Line, ride, line, ride, line, ride, we get done, and Terry turns to me and says, “That was fun. Let’s come back tomorrow!”

  DAVID: Ouch.

  CALEB: You never went? You didn’t take Natalie to Disneyland?

  DAVID: Almost, once.

  CALEB: Did Natalie want to go?

  DAVID: I was up for it. I’d put on my anthropological pith helmet and try to—wasn’t it fascinating?

  CALEB: It’s an odd study of the human animal. We had lunch at the Rain Forest Café (cruddy food at high prices), but they had beer. Terry says, “You get a beer. The kids are having a great time. It’s not so bad, is it?”

  Back at Khamta’s house.

  CALEB: The opening of Still Life with Woodpecker: “Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not.” Tom Robbins then says, “There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself.”

  DAVID: “Who knows how to make love stay?”

  CALEB: That gets to something.

  DAVID: No, it doesn’t. That takes Camus and turns him into Rod McKuen. That’s terrible.

  CALEB: The Robbins line reminds me of William Gass’s “Politics … for all those not in love.” Both are getting to the same place.

  DAVID: The only reason Robbins is a romantic is he’s bedded more women than Sinatra.

  CALEB: I partly agree with you about Robbins. Too many talking spoons.

  DAVID: (strumming the guitar) I’d now like to sing some songs I’ve written.

  CALEB: You’re a musician?

  DAVID: No. I wish.

  CALEB: There’s a comedian inside you dying to escape.

  DAVID: Oh, he’s escaped.

  CALEB: You know, when you read my first novel, for class, you compared it to The Stranger. My narrator describes childhood, going to Sunday school, and a teacher tells him, “In heaven, when you fall, an angel will catch you.” I close the paragraph by saying, “My childhood must have been wonderful.” And you compared this detachment, I had thought positively, to Camus: “Mother died today, or maybe it was yesterday.”

  DAVID: I did mean it as praise, but compared to The Fall, The Stranger is a slog.

  CALEB: I love when the warden shows Meursault the cross and tells him that every prisoner, before execution, breaks down and weeps. Meursault calls bullshit, sending the warden into a rage. Meursault’s a sociopath, incapable of feeling guilt or joy in the lives of others, indifferent and malleable, willing to go along with his surroundings. The novel satisfies my X factor.

  DAVID: To me, it’s all so obvious what Camus is doing and saying in The Stranger. You get it on about page twelve. I’ve tried to teach The Fall many times, and most students hate it. They literally throw the book across the room. Maybe it’s a limitation of my aesthetic: basically, the only thing I really love is listening to people think really well about existence for 120 pages. What else is worth my time?

  It’s the same argument we had about your Polynesian transvestite story. You thought that by laying in all these images and motifs you’re building all this power, but you’re not, at least to me. You need to get in there and wrestle with the material much more overtly, have the narrator think aloud about everything, not just move from scene to scene.

  CALEB: The Stranger ends: “… they shall greet me with howls of execration.” In another translation the title is The Outsider, and it ends with “cries of hatred.”

  DAVID: That’s terrible.

  CALEB: It’s a more literal translation of “cris de haine.”

  DAVID: “Howls of execration” is so beautiful.

  CALEB: For the Nervous Breakdown, I wrote a comparison: “Tao Lin’s Richard Yates vs. the 2006 Dodge Caravan Owner’s Manual.”

  DAVID: Do you own one?

  CALEB: Terry does. The manual kicks Tao Lin’s ass.

  DAVID: Maybe envy is a young man’s disease. Of course I want my work to be admired—be as famous to the world as I am to myself, as a teacher of mine (the same woman who told me the Toni Morrison anecdote) once said—but I’m so busy I literally don’t have time for it. The title essay of a book Stanley Crouch wrote was a lengthy critique of Black Planet: he thought I needed to write more about being a Jew in America, or something like that. He got [David’s former UW colleague] Charles Johnson to keep faxing me things to try to get my dander up, but I didn’t have any interest. That book was years in the past by then.

  This may be self-glorifying on my part, but do you feel any e
nvy toward me or my work?

  CALEB: I’m a nobody. I’ve got nothing. I’d like to take the high road, though, and say that I don’t. How am I diminished by the success of others? When I was single, did it bother me that other men dated fantastic women? When I played basketball with Nate Robinson or Jamal Crawford [NBA players who grew up in Seattle] or played music with fantastic musicians, I was aware of my inferiority. I want to be better, but I like the challenge. Being on the same court or stage improved my skills. I’d rather be the worst player on the court; my own game will rise. Reading high-intellect writing has the same effect. I did get a kick out of Eric Lundgren’s two-star review of Reality Hunger on Amazon.

  DAVID: Let’s pull back and look at the thing from afar: What are we doing here over this long weekend? Are you in some sense seeking validation, approval, manuscript appraisal, career counseling? I’m seeking in a way the opposite. I’m seeing if you can undermine me, so I can restart my engine. Feel free to offer devastating or semi-devastating critiques of me and/or my work.

  CALEB: If you’re looking for a critique, Remote is probably my least favorite.

  DAVID: Ooh, really? I still like that book a lot.

  CALEB: What else? The Spider-Man thing in How Literature Saved My Life and the chapter in Reality Hunger when you do little responses to other people’s books. Your collage books read like Esquire’s “Dubious Achievements.”

  DAVID: I gotta stop you. That is so ridiculous.

  CALEB: Good bathroom reading, doctor’s office reading.

  DAVID: Ha ha.

  CALEB: What you consider velocity means quickly skip one paragraph for the next; it lacks the feeling of being in a book. A good novel gets progressively more interesting. Your books lack this momentum and acceleration; the first ten pages are as good as the last ten. To you, there may be structure, but you could almost read Reality Hunger backward and get the same impression.

  DAVID: I don’t know what to say. You don’t have a clue how to read my work.

  CALEB: Here’s your letter, dated January 4, 1993, complete with a six-digit number so I can’t call you back.

  DAVID: What an idiot!

  Dear Caleb,

  Happy New Year’s greetings from your former creative writing teacher. How are you doing? I hope you’re still writing. The novel you were working on in class a couple years ago showed a lot of potential. To me, the strongest section of the novel dealt with your protagonist on Capitol Hill; by emphasizing that material, you could produce a very effective coming-of-age novel.

  “I walked out of the kitchen and went outside. There they were—the stars, the moon, the gentle hum of the sea, and the black paper cut-outs of the trees against the night; there they were.” Are these lines from your book? Do I have the lines right? Is there any chance I could use (beg, borrow, or steal) these lines in my own work-in-progress, a strange mix of fiction, nonfiction, and autobiography about mass media?

  All best,

  David Shields

  Phone: 548-363

  CALEB: In many ways, my asking you for help opened up our relationship.

  DAVID: Probably so.

  CALEB: If I hadn’t asked for a blurb, and then hadn’t called you a dork, who knows?

  DAVID: Yeah—who knows?

  CALEB: I’d rather be insulted and dismissed by a genius than flattered by an idiot. I’m by no means saying you’re a genius, but you’re very critical of my work.

  DAVID: Not particularly.

  CALEB: You’ve never been blown away by anything I’ve written. It’s not as if my goal in life is to blow David Shields away, but any writer wants to impress the reader. I’ve sent you various things, unpublished, published, and you’ve never been knocked out. Even my collage of eighteen genocidal deaths, you said, “Ehh.”

  CALEB: A lot of today’s artists lack experience. They’re not in a prison, but they’re sheltered. They’re David Markson holed up in his New York City apartment, Tao Lin and Blake Butler at their computers, David Shields in academia. Do you know Chekhov’s “The Bet”?

  David shakes his head.

  CALEB: Two men argue over what’s harder to endure, life in prison or the death penalty. The banker believes life in prison to be a slow, cruel death, while the young lawyer thinks prison isn’t so bad, and thus death would be worse. The banker challenges the lawyer, and they bet whether the lawyer can survive solitary confinement for fifteen years. There are conditions: the lawyer can have a piano, books, wine, and so forth. The lawyer lives fifteen years in solitary confinement, but by this time the banker is no longer wealthy and can’t pay. The lawyer, though, has tasted the fragrance of life through literature. He writes a note saying he doesn’t want the money, and disappears to roam the earth. The banker locks the note away.

  DAVID: Either you told it badly or once again Chekhov does precious little for me. I don’t get it.

  CALEB: The point seems to be that life experienced through the prism of art trumps the experience of life.

  DAVID: Sign me up for that.

  CALEB: Who said you could journey around the world in the comfort of your library?

  DAVID: Let me intercede. I do think it’s a continuum. Somehow we wind up portraying you as a man of vast experience and me as someone locked away in a nunnery, but—and this is really sad to have to say—but I’ve lived a full life. I’ve married, raised a child, traveled, taught, stuttered.

  CALEB: (laughing) I agree. I think it’s possible to live life at ground level and never leave a five-mile radius.

  DAVID: You do? Good, because that’s pretty much what Kierkegaard—

  CALEB: Not really. No.

  DAVID: Don’t you think, contrariwise, that you’ve erred, that you’ve indulged in life too much, that you’ve devoted yourself insufficiently to art? You’ve been too eager to accumulate experience for experience’s sake.

  CALEB: I’ve procrastinated. I’ve failed. I’ve overestimated my abilities and underestimated the difficulties.

  DAVID: You probably thought, Hey, I’m going to have fun and then I’ll be able to turn it on. It probably wasn’t crucial to you, whereas it was everything to me to become a writer. I had to become a writer.

  CALEB: In high school I wanted to be a jock. In college I became a dedicated writer, temporarily. Afterward, I wanted to be a musician. Then it was travel and language. I figured all this would help my writing.

  DAVID: It has. You have a range of reference I couldn’t pretend to match.

  CALEB: I regressed. My form got all messed up. After studying Korean and Chinese, you learn to think without articles, so I tried writing without articles: “He went inside room, saw woman cry, sat, picked up bottle, drank beer.” I wrote my rape novel like this; I thought I was being revolutionary to say everything in literally as few words as possible. Minimalist, different. I gave early chapters to a few friends, and they couldn’t stand it. Still, experience hasn’t been a waste, and I never stopped reading. If anything, I read more overseas. I’m drafting and setting stories in Taiwan, Brazil, Thailand, Korea, Hong Kong, the UAE.

  DAVID: Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog and the fox. You’re the fox: you know many things. I’m the hedgehog: I know one thing.

  CALEB: When I lived in Al Ain, a small city in the emirate of Abu Dhabi, two Pakistani cabdrivers were publicly executed.

  DAVID: Did you see it?

  CALEB: I didn’t know about it until after. Some of my high school students had. They told me about it.

  DAVID: Why’d they execute the cabdrivers—took the long way to the airport?

  CALEB: They murdered fares and dumped the corpses in the desert. Over 20,000 people attended. The two were tied to these posts and publicly humiliated for their last twenty-four hours. They were cordoned off. People would walk up to them, two feet away, and spit or curse or whatever. It was September and over a hundred degrees; they gave them just enough water to keep them alive, maximize suffering for twenty-four hours. Then they were shot.

  DAVID: Ford Madox
Ford says if you have any imagination at all, the death of a mouse by cancer is the whole sack of Rome by the Goths. Flannery O’Connor said any good writer has plenty of material for the rest of her life if she survived childhood.

  CALEB: You think too much about literature.

  CALEB: In your writing you seem very conscious of Jewish identity. I never considered myself Jewish. My parents only reminded me that it was in my blood.

  DAVID: I’d had no idea you were a quarter Jewish, but I can see you now as a Talmudic scholar.

  CALEB: My dad’s cousin lives in Los Angeles: Jerry Benezra, a union lawyer.

  DAVID: He’s probably best friends with my half brother, who lives in LA.

  CALEB: I grew up, basically, Christian. My parents aren’t very religious, but they thought church was the right thing to do, so we went. They stopped when I was about twelve.

  DAVID: Does your dad view himself as Jewish?

  CALEB: No. And he went to Jewish school until he was nine.

  DAVID: Is he anti-Semitic?

  CALEB: Not at all. I’d even say he’s hard-line pro-Israeli.

  DAVID: What about your mom?

  CALEB: Same. Pro-Israeli. Her dad was anti-Semitic, though. His name was James Edmond Wilson. Initials: J.E.W. He didn’t like that, said racist things at home. She ended up marrying a man who was half-Jewish.

  David laughs.