Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five. The expository first chapter, for all intents and purposes a prologue, renders moot the rest of the book and everything else he ever wrote. I live and die for the overt meditation.
7
LIFE V. ART
Do I still love literature?
Life/art
CLAUDIUS MURDERS KING HAMLET. The piano falls on the cartoon duck. Your life won’t turn out the way you expect it to. This is where art comes in …
My two proudest literary accomplishments of middle age are that “good” and “bad” reviews no longer affect me much (I used to retire to bed with a quart of ice cream if, say, The Kansas City Star had even the slightest quibble) and I now give readings without the benefit of pharmaceuticals (which I used to use to mitigate stuttering).
If Geoff Dyer weren’t so handsome, he would never have become such a traveler. I wonder if travelers, in general, are more good-looking than other people; I think they might be. At the very least, travel writers, e.g., Chatwin, Theroux, Junger, are generally better-looking than other writers. So, too, the essays/diaries/notebooks of handsome male writers are so different from those of ugly male writers that there should be separate shelves in the bookstore: “Essays: male (h), essays: male (u).” Compare Michaels, Brodkey, Isherwood, Camus, Theroux, Amis (père et fils) to Canetti, Sartre, Genet, Larkin, Cioran, Naipaul. The former veer toward wise-depressive; the latter, toward brilliant-bitter. Fence straddlers like Henry Miller—great body, but jug-eared and cueball-bald—typically report with self-mocking bonhomie. Out of Sheer Rage is a serious and urgent book, though it wears its seriousness under a mask of Chaplinesque comedy. When I said this to Dyer, he seemed taken aback, as if its real subject should never be spoken of in public. So, too, he likes to pretend that The Ongoing Moment is “about photography” (it’s about trying to learn how to live life inside time).
In German bookstores, there are pretty much only two categories: literature—work aspiring toward artistic merit—and then just pure information, train schedules and the like. Unfortunate example.
Sarah Manguso and I became friends when I wrote her a fan letter about her book The Two Kinds of Decay, which is an account of living for ten years with a life-threatening blood disorder and is devoid of anything even remotely resembling self-pity or self-aggrandizement. She recently wrote to me, “I’ll watch a genius do anything. I’ll watch my friend Andy use Photoshop to erase color impurities on the same image for an hour because he sees things I don’t see. I’ll watch him until I see that he sees them. It’s like opening a gift. Or the original meaning of ‘apocalypse’: the lifting of the veil.”
In Fahrenheit 451, people experience almost nothing in their own lives, but they experience a lot by watching television shows that are more like life than life itself. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, Baudrillard declared that Western culture had become a simulacrum and that there was no longer an original to base our perceptions on: the replication, the program had become reality. In the visual arts, a replication of a replication became media within media (the original no longer exists). Visual artists continued to appropriate, but now, in order to avoid legal skirmishes, they tend to re-present the representation, moving the material into another form, customizing it, enlarging it or shrinking it, using new color or materials, moving from one medium to another, e.g., a Harley made of salt.
Tom McCarthy and Simon Critchley, the cofounders of the International Necronautical Society and coauthors of the “Joint Declaration on Inauthenticity,” when asked to present their declaration at the Tate Britain, found and trained two actors to pretend to be them. Many people in the audience were angry when they discovered that the actors were not in fact the authors … of a declaration on inauthenticity … presented in a museum.
Nicholson Baker’s A Box of Matches has the thinnest of fictional apparati: there is no plot or setting; there are no characters; it’s just Baker sitting down with a box of matches—he really did this, of course, just as for The Anthologist he videotaped himself giving lectures about poetry—and thinking, thrillingly, about the ephemeral nature of existence. Baker estimates that 93 percent of each of his “novels” is autobiographical, but that if he alters a single detail from “reality,” this necessitates calling the work a novel, which is absurd. The personal essay isn’t “true”; it’s a framing device to foreground contemplation. There are passages from The Anthologist that are as eloquent and tender as anything Baker has ever written, but what he wants to do is dilate on the emotional triggers, formal properties, and soul-rearranging rewards of poetry. He doesn’t care a whit about the book’s twinned narratives: the narrator getting back together with his ex-girlfriend and giving a speech at a poetry conference—utterly pro forma. What could have been a great book is thrown off track by Baker’s pretense that he’s writing a novel. The novelistic gestures, especially in the last half, seem to me extremely left-handed (no offense to all those superb left-handed readers out there).
Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho slows down Hitchcock’s Psycho to two, rather than twenty-four, frames per second. Don DeLillo watched 24 Hour Psycho and wanted to write a meditation on that film. Duty called, though, and he trapped his beautiful film criticism inside an uninspired novel called Omega Point.
Thoreau: “The next time the novelist rings the bell, I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down.”
I like art with a visible string to the world.
Lucian Freud: “I’ve got a strong autobiographical bias. My work is entirely about myself and my surroundings. I could never put anything into a picture that wasn’t actually there in front of me. That would be a pointless lie, a mere bit of artfulness.” My aesthetic exactly, for better and worse.
Mairéad Byrne’s The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven is everywhere a seizure and transfiguration of the everyday into insight. She “reclaims” life by showing that a poem can be made of anything, e.g., the awkward “hi” between a white woman and black man passing each other on a dark street. The poems pretend to be light, but they aren’t, careening as they do between fury and joy.
My entire twenties, I lived on practically nothing, slept on my father’s couch for ten months. At thirty-one, I was a proofreader for Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro (PMS), a San Francisco law firm that represented the wrong side of every case. The lawyers hated their jobs. I loved mine, though, since I spent my entire time there finishing my second novel. All the other subalterns were as bored as I was, and they were happy to print out copies of drafts for me, retype pages for me. It was Team Shields. We also discovered something new called a fax machine. Very exciting. I’d arrive before anyone else, and the lawyers would thank me for being such an eager beaver.
In fiction, the war is between two characters, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, say, whereas in ambitious personal essay, there’s just as much war, just as much “conflict,” but it’s within the breast, as it were, of the narrator/speaker/author. The essayist tries to get to everything that Macbeth does; he just locates it all within his own psyche. Every man contains within himself the entire human condition.
When Natalie was seven, she read the Lemony Snicket series, which is about three orphaned kids who undergo various and terrible adventures as they try to find a home. They get handed off to Count Olaf, a distant cousin who is an utter ogre. A middle-class kid can read it from the vantage of her secure home and love the characters’ horrific lives. What’s alluring to children about something cute is that they can love it back to health and thereby feel powerful themselves. In their ordinary lives, children are constantly condescended to; it’s important that they can condescend to something else.
One of my former students, who appeared on The Weakest Link, mailed me a videotape of her appearance on the show and then sent me the essay she wrote about it; I showed the video and read the essay to Natalie. I wanted to emphasize to her that you can write about anything that happens to you, that it’s a natural response to experience.
&nbs
p; N. is so preternaturally creative that she’s made me a more productive and better writer, not to mention a more human human.
Lester Bangs: “Once you’ve made your mark on history, those who can’t will be so grateful they’ll turn it into a cage for you.” Manguso: “Once your first book appears and is read, it provokes a set of expectations of what you should produce, or are capable of producing, next. Sudden fame tends to demolish the lives of adolescent film stars. Writers, with their much tinier fame, don’t escape the effects of the infinitely reflecting mirror of a readership. A Hegelian synthesis between writers’ first books and their first criticisms occurs not once, not twice, but forever. A mature writer’s facility with his craft can threaten the genuineness of his product—one that turns into a celebration of skill rather than a necessary foray into a mysterious world. This is not to say that all emerging writers are afire and that all mature writers are shallow, only that public validation and expectation increase as a writer’s career continues, and that the threat of writing to an audience becomes only more present a danger as time passes and renown increases. I value most those writers who, while already setting their new stars into the poetical firmament, are not mired in the stability-enforcing, niche-assigning public consciousness.”
Dyer calls this self-karaoke. It happens to virtually everyone. Hemingway, Carver, Brodkey, DeLillo come quickly to mind. Only men? Do women in their maturity avoid this? Not at all sure that’s true (see Kael, Adler, Hardwick, Malcolm, Didion, Carson, Hempel). This whole idea of self-karaoke, for Dyer, is predicated on the idea that at a certain age—mid-fifties? late fifties? early sixties?—new stimuli tend not to penetrate and so one is mining oneself endlessly in a not especially productive feedback loop. Dyer says that people ask him who his main influences are, and at this point, it’s himself. He’s his main influence. After a certain age, you’re building only on yourself, for ill or good.
I turn fifty-seven later this year. Is it true for me now? Would seem so. I fear so.
Real life
THERE WAS A BLOG, then a Twitter feed, then a mega-selling book, and then a TV show, which I didn’t see before it was canceled. It sounds too easy—someone just collecting the one-off wisdom of his father—but Justin Halpern’s Shit My Dad Says is, to me, hugely about Vietnam (Samuel Halpern was a medic during the war), and on the basis of a single crucial scene, it’s not inconsiderably about him still processing that violence, that anger. The book is also very much about being Jewish in America, about the father teaching the son how to be Jewish and male in America, which is a contradictory, complicated thing.
Each entry is 140 characters or fewer—the length of a tweet—and all of the subsections and minichapters are extremely short. The book is a tape recording of Sam’s best lines, overdubbed with relatively brief monologues by Justin. It’s not great or even good, probably, really, finally, but above all it’s not boring. Which is everything to me. I don’t want to read out of duty. There are hundreds of books in the history of the world that I love to death. I’m trying to stay awake and not bored and not rote. I’m trying to save my life.
In Shit My Dad Says the father, Samuel, is trying to convey to his son that life is only blood and bones. The son is trying to express to his father his bottomless love and complex admiration. Nothing more. Nothing less. There are vast reservoirs of feeling beneath Justin’s voice and beneath his father’s aphorisms.
The only mistake (a major one) occurs in the final chapter: the mask comes off and everything goes badly sentimental. It’s a terrible move—almost certainly the result of editorial ham-fistedness. In many ways it ruins the book.
Halpern’s instinct was to make a blog first. The book seems to be a secondary recasting of the blog. It was the blog that people kept telling me about. I like that you can be an unemployed screenwriter in San Diego (originally, Halpern was just collecting notes for a screenplay about his dad) and six months later a bestselling writer.
Can social networking/blogging generate good books? On very rare occasions, such as this, yes.
Books, if they want to survive, need to figure out how to coexist with contemporary culture and catalyze the same energies for literary purposes. That cut-to-the-quick quality: this is how to write and read now, or at least this is the only way I can write and read now.
The undergraduates I teach are much more open to a new reading experience when it’s a blog. I know there have to be a hundred complex reasons as to why that is, but none of them change the fact that un- or even anti-literary types haven’t stopped reading. They just don’t get as excited about the book form. The blog form: immediacy, relative lack of scrim between writer and reader, promised delivery of unmediated reality, pseudo-artlessness, comedy, naked feeling.
Another example: seventeen years ago, David Lipsky spent a week with David Foster Wallace, then fourteen years later Lipsky went back and resurrected the notes. The resultant book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, pretends to be just a compilation of notes, and maybe that’s all it is, but to me it’s a debate between two sensibilities: desperate art and pure commerce. Lipsky, I hope, knows what he’s doing: evoking himself as the quintessence of everything Wallace despised.
The book as such isn’t obsolete. Inherently, it’s less immediate and raw, going as it does through the quaint labyrinth of the publishing industry, and even when the book is printed and ready to go, you have to either get it at a store or have it shipped or downloaded to you. Print is, of course, on the verge of becoming an artifact. Simply the physical act of holding a magazine or a book doesn’t have anything like the same psychic pull it had in the past. It has the feel of a self-conscious reenactment, as if I’m trying to imagine myself in the old West in ersatz Tombstone. For now, this is a constraint I can work around. I take it as a challenge: to give a book a “live,” up-to-date, aware, instant feel. There will always be a place for, say, the traditional novel that people read on the beach or chapter by chapter at bedtime for a month as a means of entertainment and escape. There is, though, this other, new form of reading that most books being published today don’t have an answer for. Even achieving a happy medium between the new and old reading experiences is an advance.
Efficiency in the natural world: the brutal cunning of natural selection as it sculpts DNA within living organisms. DNA is always pushing toward the most efficient path to reproduction. Water always finds the briefest, easiest path downhill. Concision is crucial to contemporary art—boiling down to the bare elements, reducing to just the basic notes (in both senses of the word). The paragraph-by-paragraph sizzle is everything.
Elif Batuman: “A lot of the writers I know are incredibly good email writers. I often find their emails more compelling than the things they’re writing at the time. Everyone has two lives: one is open and is known to everyone, and one is unknown, running its course in secret. Email is the unknown life, and the published work is the known life.”
A former student wrote me, “For years I’ve been taking notes for a book that I hope will materialize at some point, but every time I attempt to turn the notes into the book, I hate the results. Really, what I’ve built is a database of quotations, riffs, metaphors. I find even my notes on how the book should be structured to be full of energy, because they’re an outline of my massive aspirations, most of which I have no hope of actually pulling off. It feels almost as if my book wants to be about the planning of a book: a hypothetical literature that can’t exist under earth’s current gravity.”
“The notes are the book,” I wrote back, “I promise you.”
I promise myself.
Life/art
THE MOVIE DIRECTOR Bryan Singer, the friend of an acquaintance, sat in first class next to George Bush on a flight home from Korea. Asked by my acquaintance what they talked about, Singer said, “I began to understand why everybody liked him, and I liked him, too.”
“Really?” my acquaintance asked.
“Yeah, I did.”
“Did
you challenge him on anything?”
“No, ’cause everyone was really nice. Bush got up and talked to everyone in first class for a long time—‘Whaddayou do?’ ‘What are you up to?’ That sort of thing. He was a great guy, very gregarious.”
A Korean dentist pulled out his camcorder and panned from King Kong on a large screen over to Bush reading on his Kindle, then over to Singer’s assistant, who pointed and said, “It’s George Bush!” Then back to Bush. Back to King Kong. The Korean dentist was more interested in the director of X-Men than in Bush, who sensed that Singer was gay and made what Singer perceived to be a friendly joke: “Let’s introduce our assistants and maybe they can have sex!” Bush said he was going to take a nap and asked Singer if he wanted an Ambien. When Singer said he was off Ambien now, Bush replied, “Well, I’ve been using it for years. It keeps me on schedule.” My acquaintance said Singer said Bush simply understands how the world now works; with his friendly manner he gets what he wants, and he’s at peace with everything. Singer said the camcorder video was the best film he saw all year.
How Literature Saved My Life Page 11