Each year, the packet became less unwieldy, less full of repetitions and typographical errors, contained more of my own writing, and I saw how I could push the statements—by myself and by others—into rubrics or categories. All the material about hip-hop would go into its own chapter. So, too, the material about reality TV, memory, doubt, risk, genre, the reality-based community, brevity, collage, contradiction, doubt, etc. Twenty-six chapters, 618 minisections. All Reality Hunger ever was to me was that blue life raft: a manuscript in which I was articulating for myself, my students, my peers, and any fellow travelers who might want to come along for the ride the aesthetic tradition out of which I was writing. It wasn’t the novel. And it wasn’t memoir. It was something else. It was the idea that all great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one. If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms. It’s a commonplace that every book needs to find its own form, but how many really do? Coetzee on his own work: “Nowhere do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing.”
And here was the big break: I realized how perfectly the appropriated and remixed words embodied my argument. Just as I was arguing for work that occupied a bleeding edge between genres, so, too, I wanted the reader to experience in my mash-up the dubiety of the first person pronoun. I wanted the reader to not quite be able to tell who was talking—was it me or Sonny Rollins or Emerson or Nietzsche or David Salle or, weirdly, none of us or all of us at the same time?
Until that point, I hadn’t thought a great deal about the degree to which the book appropriated and remixed other people’s words. It seemed perfectly natural to me. I love the work of a lot of contemporary visual artists whose work is bound up with appropriation—Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Elaine Sturtevant, Glenn Ligon. And I’ve been listening to rap since Grandmaster Flash in the late ’70s. Why in the world would contemporary writing not be able to keep pace with the other arts?
Most readers of the book-as-intended would have spotted only a handful of the most well-known quotations, suspected that a lot of the paragraphs were quotations (even when they couldn’t quite place them), and come to regard my I as a floating umbrella-self, sheltering simultaneously one voice (“my own”) and multiple voices. The possibility that every word in the book might be quotation and not “original” to the author could have arisen. The whole argument of that version of the book was to put “reality” within quadruple quotation marks. Reality isn’t straightforward or easily accessible; it’s slippery, evasive. Just as authorship is ambiguous, knowledge is dubious, and truth is unknown or, at the very least, relative. (This entire paragraph is cribbed from an email Jonathan Raban sent me.)
My publisher, Knopf, which is a division of Random House, which is a subset of Bertelsmann, a multi-billion-dollar multinational corporation, didn’t see it the same way. I consulted numerous copyright attorneys, and I wrote many impassioned emails to my editor and the Random House legal department. At one point, I considered withdrawing the book and printing it at Kinko’s (now subsumed into FedEx office). Random House and I worked out a compromise whereby there would be no footnotes in the text, but there would be an appendix in the back with citations in very, very small type (if you’re over fifty, good luck reading it). Quite a few of the citations are of the “I can’t quite remember where this is from, though it sounds like fourth-generation Sartre; endless is the search for truth” variety.
Some people seemed to think I was the Antichrist because I didn’t genuflect at the twin altars of the novel and intellectual property (there’s an oxymoron if ever there was one). I became, briefly, the poster boy for The Death of the Novel and The End of Copyright. Fine by me. Those have become something close to my positions. The key thing for an intellectually rigorous writer to come to grips with is the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and thus more visceral forms. You can work within these forms or write about them or through them or appropriate the strategies these forms use, but it’s not a very good idea to go on writing in a vacuum. The novel was invented to access interiority. Now most people communicate through social media, and everyone I know under thirty has remarkably little notion of privacy. The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently. Art, like science, progresses. Forms evolve. Forms are there to serve the culture, and when they die, they die for a good reason—or so I have to believe, the novel having long since gone dark for me …
6
ALL GREAT BOOKS WIND UP WITH THE WRITER GETTING HIS TEETH BASHED IN
The only books I care about strip the writer naked and, in that way, have at least the chance of conveying some real knowledge of our shared predicament.
Sometimes the place I go to be alone to think turns out in the end to be the most dangerous place I can be
YEATS SAID that we can’t articulate the truth, but we can embody it. I think that’s wrong or at least beside the point. What’s of interest to me is precisely how we try to articulate the truth, and what that says about us, and about “truth.”
What separates us is not what happens to us. Pretty much the same things happen to most of us: birth, love, bad driver’s license photos, death. What separates us is how each of us thinks about what happens to us. That’s what I want to hear.
Texting: proof that we’re solitary animals who like being left alone as we go through life, commenting on it. We’re aliens.
Updike: “I loathe being interviewed; it’s a half-form, like maggots.” Gertrude Stein: “Remarks are not literature.” Um is not a word, but I like how people use it now to ironize/mock/deflate/put scare quotes around what comes next. The moment I try not to stutter, I stutter. I never stutter when singing to myself in the shower.
The perceiver, by his very presence, alters what’s perceived: Plato, Dialogues of Socrates. Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe. Boswell, Life of Johnson. Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer. Schopenhauer: “The world is my idea.” We don’t see the world. We make it up.
Ancient Sanskrit texts emphasize the ephemeral nature of truth. Sanskrit writers use fiction, nonfiction, stories within stories, stories about stories, reiteration, oral history, exegesis, remembered account, rules, history, mythological tales, aphorisms to try to get to the “truth,” often dressing it up in narrative as a way to make it appear comprehensible, palatable. Sanskrit works revolve around the question “Who is the narrator?” Subjectivity is always present in the recitation: the nature of reality is ever elusive. We spend our lives chasing it.
When playing an electric guitar, instead of plugging the cord straight into an amplifier, you first plug it into a little electronic stomp box called a pedal. A second cord takes the altered sound from the pedal to the amplifier. The sound coming from the guitar to the pedal is “clean”—as true to life as a given electric guitar can be (which is a whole other debate). There are hundreds of different guitar pedals you can buy, each one altering the “true” sound of the instrument. One “clean” note from your Telecaster can become a crescendo of sound (if sent through the right effects pedal).
In Amadeus, Salieri says re Mozart’s score, “I am staring through the cage of his meticulous ink strokes at an absolute beauty.”
In Ron Fein’s Drumming the Moon, the flute assumes a pitch and sound somewhere between the tonality of human expression and wolf howl, never quite sure of its place in the world, negotiating its own survival.
I recently reread Renata Adler’s novel Pitch Dark and felt like I finally got it. The three sections are thematic sculptures. The first section is about how love is a mystery, a sadness, an absence, a darkness. The second section takes place in Ireland, where the Adler figure gets in a car accident: the misunderstandings between her and everyone she meets are represented as utter epistemological darkness. And the third section is this darkness writ large, into society and civilization as a whole—every human inter
action is conducted in pitch dark.
Walking on Forty-fifth Street, Laurie and I witnessed a car accident. Ten seconds later, we had and held diametrically opposed views of what we’d just seen. (She was wrong.)
I find that no matter what I write, Laurie doesn’t respond to my work in the way I want her to, or more accurately, she resents that she’s an arrow in my quiver. I wouldn’t want to be an arrow in her quiver, either (though in a sense aren’t we all, etc.). I loved it when she asked, the day before my profile of Delilah was published in the Times Magazine, “Are we in it?”—i.e., do she and Natalie make cameos? When I said no, she said, “What, we’re not good enough?” I took this in the way in which I hope it was meant: as a brilliant gloss on Damned If You Do/Damned If You Don’t. Might as well go for broke.
It’s hard to write a book, it’s very hard to write a good book, and it’s impossible to write a good book if you’re concerned with how your intimates are going to judge it. I learned a long time ago that the people whom you most want to love your books … won’t (I’m nowhere near Laurie’s favorite writer; ceaseless is her apotheosis of fellow Illinoisan D. F. Wallace). The people who know you the best are always going to view your work through the screen of their own needs. They’re never going to read it on the terms in which you intend it. As do I, of course, whenever I see even the briefest or most oblique description of myself in someone else’s work.
Are we all just characters in one another’s novels? Is the drama of love indistinguishable from the engine of narrative? Is reading for the plot identical to desire? Are we all egoists, and is the best we can do to make sure that our own needs don’t get in the way of other people’s desires? We’re all sleepwalkers in the mind of, oh, I don’t know, Napoleon. The emperor’s body is a box within a box within a box, a prison within a prison within a prison.
My former student Rachel Jackson: “Sometimes the place I go to be alone to think turns out in the end to be the most dangerous place I can be.”
According to Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves, Victorian women liked to fuck, though apparently (whaddya know?) only Frank.
Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March forever altered my writing life. By being as self-reflexive as it is, a heat-seeking missile destroying whatever it touches, the film becomes a thoroughgoing exploration of the interconnections between desire, filmmaking, nuclear weaponry, and war, rather than being about only General Sherman.
I grew up in a house in which there was much talk about love, peace, justice, truth, community, but what I saw operating in my own family was a horrific regime. I often feel like an Eastern European who traveled west in the 1980s and had to hear about the glories of Communism. The Eastern European had lived his entire life under the oppressive umbrella of Mother Russia. He wouldn’t care to hear naïve paeans to the Marxist state. I realize this is trumping up badly my own experience growing up in a San Francisco suburb, but that’s how it feels to me. Don’t tell me how right-on activism is going to save the world. The split between idealistic rhetoric and ragged reality was so extreme that I’ve never quite recovered an ability to participate in the commonweal. Although I can hear how naysaying this may sound, I peeked behind the curtain and saw the Wizard of Oz making silly noises into a megaphone. I’m not going to now believe all that sound and fury is signifying something real.
I’m a product of post-hippie California of the ’70s: a culture of the unreal that had lost its optimism and found its only refuge in drugs. You had to dig around to find any sort of meaning …
The last line of Adler’s other novel, Speedboat, is “It could be that the sort of sentence one wants right here is the kind that runs, and laughs, and slides, and stops right on a dime.” (Cf. Isaac Babel: “No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.”) She’s fascinated by the arbitrariness of language, the enveloping embrace of culture. Try as she might to liberate herself from social convention, e.g., cliché, she can’t. She’s doing everything she can to make me hyper-aware of her thought processes, to develop intimacy between the speaker and listener—moments in which I feel the strange rub of language, the way it not only evokes life but creates it, prophesies it. The epigraph is from Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies: “ ‘What war?’ said the Prime Minister sharply. ‘No one has said anything to me about a war. I really think I should have been told.… ’ And presently, like a circling typhoon, the sounds of battle began to return.” Speedboat is an oblique bildungsroman, taking Adler’s alter ego, Jen Fein—whose name suggests that she’s not real, that she’s Renata Adler—from the privacy of her pastoral childhood into the irredeemably corrupt, war-torn (cliché!) world of public affairs. Adler frequently writes and then repeats an idiomatic expression—for instance, “And what’s more, and what’s more …” It’s a very strange gesture, this impulse to articulate and articulate again: highly oral, even oracular. What is the book, exactly—a novel? memoir? cultural criticism? philosophical investigation? journal? journalism? stand-up comedy? I love that feeling of being caught between floors of a difficult-to-define department store. The chapter titles don’t very accurately or fully describe their ostensible contents. The material can’t be held by its titular container. The book is constantly breaking its own bindings, as you’re going deeper into, you know, a single human consciousness. You keep turning pages and reading scenes until finally you understand what, for Adler, constitutes a scene: a toxic and intoxicating mix of velocity, violence, sex, money, power, travel, technology, miscommunication; when you get it, the book’s over.
Maggie Nelson claims that it makes her feel less alone to compose almost everything she writes as a letter. She even goes so far as to say that she doesn’t know how to compose otherwise. When I’m having trouble writing something, I often close the document and compose the passage as email to, say, my friend Michael. I imagine I can feel the tug of the recipient at the other end of the wire, and this creates in me a needed urgency. The letter always arrives at its destination.
In London, I asked my voluble cabdriver if he could locate the origin of the tendency of every British conversation to rapidly devolve into a series of quibbles, quarrels, and contradictions. “The end of empire,” he said with certainty. “We’re not going to make that same mistake again.”
Irony is the song of a bird that has come to love its cage—people always quote this truism as if it were the clinching point of an argument about the limits of irony, but name me the bird among us that is not caged and isn’t at least half in love with its cage.
All great books wind up with the writer getting his teeth bashed in
FIFTY-FIVE WORKS I swear by:
Renata Adler, Speedboat. D. H. Lawrence: it’s better to know a dozen books extraordinarily well than innumerable books passably. In a documentary on Derrida, when he shows the filmmaker his enormous private library, she asks him if he’s read all the books. He says, “No, just a few—but very closely.” I’ve read Speedboat easily two dozen times. I can’t read it anymore. It’s one book I’ve read so many times that I feel, absurdly, as if I’ve written it; at the very least, I feel that I know a little bit what it must have felt like to write it. In any case, I learned how to write by reading that book until the spine broke. I typed the entire book twice.
James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. My writing life was changed forever by Agee’s willingness to use, and ability to incorporate into his book, his rant-replies to a Partisan Review questionnaire.
St. Augustine, Confessions. Autobiography: the testimony of a being in dialogue with itself.
Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot. Overlapping essays on the inexhaustible dialectic between life and art.
John Berryman, The Dream Songs. Tony Hoagland: “Virtuosity with language is not by itself enough for poetry. A poem has to sustain a strong connection to the suffered world, and any intelligence that dares call itself poetic needs to be penetrated and informed by the life of the emotions. The ego must be breached by the fire and
flood damage of experience. At the same time, plaintive wailing will not suffice. Successful poems have grace and vivacity—sometimes even power—of language, mobility of mind, and not a straight-faced, deadpan earnestness, but a brave freedom of feeling.”
Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions. An investigation of otherness pretending to be mere miscellany.
Grégoire Bouillier, The Mystery Guest. A character in Stardust Memories says that all artists do is “document their private suffering and fob it off as art.” Said more positively: a writer finds a metaphor that ramifies and attempts to persuade the reader that the metaphor holds the world’s woe.
Joe Brainard, I Remember. Outwardly, a series of random memories; in fact, beautifully organized around themes of resistance and conformity.
Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America. Here, too, a book is thought to be a random gathering, but it has real power and momentum, derived from the pressure Brautigan puts on the relation between pleasure and commerce.
Anne Carson, “Just for the Thrill: An Essay on the Difference Between Women and Men.” Ranges everywhere from songs on the radio to ancient Chinese history in order to get very deeply at the war between men and women.
Terry Castle, “My Heroin Christmas.” Many, perhaps most, reviewers use criticism as a way to brandish what they pretend is their own more evolved morality, psyche, humanity, but this flies in the face of what is to me an essential assumption of the compact between writer and reader—namely, that we’re all bozos on this bus. No one here gets out alive. Let he who is without sin, etc. Castle conveys the mad genius of Art Pepper’s autobiography, but she doesn’t stand back from the book as if she, too, isn’t wildly confused. She implicates herself and her drives and passions. Love is good, but hate is good, too. What she hates is at least as telling as what she loves. She makes the arrow point in both directions: outward toward the work and inward toward herself. I learn at least as much about Terry Castle as I do about Art Pepper.
How Literature Saved My Life Page 9