I no longer believe in Great Man Alone in a Room, Writing a Masterpiece.
I believe in art as pathology lab, landfill, recycling station, death sentence, aborted suicide note, lunge at redemption.
Your art is most alive and dangerous when you use it against yourself. That’s why I pick at my scabs.
When I told my friend Michael the title of this book, he said, “Literature never saved anybody’s life.” It has saved mine—just barely, I think.
How I want language to save my life now
What thou lovest well remains, / the rest is dross.
—POUND
THE NOVELIST NANCY LEMANN and I went to college together thirty-five years ago. Major crush. The book of hers that I most admire is Sportsman’s Paradise, which explores and embodies women’s condescension to men’s risible devotion to spectator sports—in this case, the New York Mets. The last line of the book, “New York played Chicago,” is, in context, devastating, because Nancy has taught us to understand that the key to life is to find something trivial (sub specie aeternitatis, everything is trivial) and love it to death.
Which brings me to Dave Mahler, who hosts a Seattle sports talk radio show on KJR 950 weekdays from 10:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. Although he does brilliant impressions, he’s almost never insightful about the game, and even less frequently is he insightful about life in general. He’s not especially funny, he’s a painfully bad interviewer, he’s enormously overweight (his nickname is “Softy” and he’s ceaselessly mocked by the other hosts for his appetite), he says, “The bottom line is …” every five minutes, and yet I must admit I arrange my mornings to be sure to listen to at least one segment of his show. Why is this?
Because he gets what Nancy gets (two more different people are impossible to imagine). A caller recently told him to “get over it”—Seattle’s loss, due in part to some truly terrible calls by the head referee, Bill Leavy, in the 2006 Super Bowl. Softy’s response: “Don’t get over anything.” This is the extent of his philosophy. It’s the extent of my philosophy. Failure is the only subject.
Each of us is an ungodly mix of suffering individual, artist, entrepreneur. Who knows? Maybe Mahler’s shtick is an act. His persona feels to me pretty “real,” whatever that means. I want the University of Washington football team to win so that I can hear the lift in Softy’s voice, his projection into the future of kingdom come. After the team loses, though, I can hardly wait to get downstairs to my “office,” pretend to work, and listen to him take calls until one or two in the morning. He never gets over it. He never gets over anything. “I’m nervous,” he says, “because of my nature.” Informed that if the Seahawks obtain the elite quarterback Peyton Manning, it might change the entire trajectory of the franchise, he says, his voice breaking slightly, “I’m tearing up in here.” (They didn’t.) The yearning that comes through the radio, the beautiful sadness of it, the visceral hunger to be saved by complete strangers’ mesmeric performances, the conglomeration of voices in a single space …
Not a news flash: we live in a spectatorial society. We are all stargazers of one kind or another. There are far worse models than Softy for how to exist in this culture, participate in it, dig it but remake it in your own image, use it for your own purposes. He was recently talking about the 2012 Super Bowl, then suddenly broke off the monologue and focused again on the Seattle Seahawks, saying, “It always comes back to my team.” He is alert to his own nerve endings. He’s alive right now. He’s not dead yet. He still has feelings (it’s increasingly hard to have actual feelings anymore, I find). He’s capable of a kind of love.
How language doesn’t really save anyone’s life
ONE SUMMER, a friend of Laurie’s worked as a graphic artist in a T-shirt shop in Juneau, Alaska. Cruise ships would dock, unloading old passengers, who would take taxis or buses a dozen or so miles to Mendenhall Glacier, which is a hundred square kilometers—25,000 acres—and whose highest point rises a hundred feet above Mendenhall Lake. Once, a tourist said about the glacier, “It looks so dirty. Don’t they ever wash it?” On their way back to the boat, one or two ancient mariners would invariably come into the shop and ask Laurie’s friend if he would mail their postcards for them. Able to replicate people’s handwriting exactly, he would add postscripts to the postcards: “Got laid in Ketchikan,” “Gave head in Sitka,” etc.
What do I love so much about this story? I could say, as I’m supposed to say, “I don’t know—it just makes me laugh,” but really I do know. It’s an ode on my favorite idea: language is all we have to connect us, and it doesn’t, not quite.
How literature did and didn’t save my life
I WANTED LITERATURE to assuage human loneliness, but nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn’t lie about this—which is what makes it essential.
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Big Shoes Productions, Inc.: Excerpts from the Delilah show. Reprinted by permission of Big Shoes Productions, Inc., as administered by Clear Channel Communications, Inc.
Charles Mudede: Excerpt from “On Culture” by Charles Mudede from Seattle 100: Portraits of a City (New Rider Press, 2010). Reprinted by permission of the author.
Condé Nast: Excerpt from “Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity” by Ray Kurzweil, originally published in Wired (April 2008). Copyright © 2008 by Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Condé Nast.
Counterpoint: Excerpt from The Brothers by Frederick Barthelme. Copyright © 1993 by Frederick Barthelme. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint.
The David Foster Wallace Trust: Excerpt from “A Conversation with David Foster Wallace by Larry McCaffery” from the Dalkey Archive Press. Reprinted by permission of the David Foster Wallace Trust.
Georges Borchardt, Inc.: Excerpt from “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” from Shadow Train by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1980, 1981 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., for the author.
Scribner: Excerpt from “The Choice” from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume I: The Poems Revised by W. B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1933 by The Macmillan Company, renewed 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
A Note About the Author
DAVID SHIELDS is the author of thirteen previous books, including Reality Hunger (named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times best seller), Black Planet (National Book Critics Circle Award finalist), and Remote (winner of the PEN/Revson Award). He has published essays and stories in dozens of periodicals, including The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The Yale Review, Salon, Slate, McSweeney’s, and The Believer. His work has been translated into fifteen languages.
Other Titles by David Shields available in eBook
Reality Hunger 978–0–307–59323–8
Black Planet 978–0–307–76710–3
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead 978–0–307–26849–5
Visit: www.davidshields.com
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ALSO BY DAVID SHIELDS
Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts, co editor
Jeff, One Lonely Guy, coauthor
The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death, coeditor
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead
Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine
Enough About You: Notes Toward the New Autobiography
Baseball Is Just Baseball: The Understated Ichiro
Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season
Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity
Handbook for Drowning: A Novel in Stories
Dead Languages: A Novel
Heroes: A Novel
How Literature Saved My Life Page 14