Mae Saslaw is a contributor to and friend of The Corresponding Society.
“An aesthetic of cognitive mapping—a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system—will necessarily have to respect this now enormously complex representational dialectic and invent radically new forms in order to do it justice. This is not then, clearly, a call for a return to some older kind of machinery, some older and more transparent national space, or some more traditional and reassuring perspectival or mimetic enclave: the new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object—the world space of multinational capital—at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spacial as well as our social confusion. The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale.”
-Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism
What I love about Jameson’s writing is the way his logic carries and keeps momentum. For Jameson, every argument deserves space to match its complexity; it is not worthwhile to begin an exploration, discover that it takes you someplace mired and unpleasant, and then back out of the fight. The paragraph quoted above could not abide any part of it replaced with ellipses, and I regret not having the patience nor real estate to post a full two pages of his text. That said, this paragraph describes a compelling challenge, and it’s one that I have decided to take on. I’m currently in the very (very) early stages of my first novel after writing short fiction for several years. As I start the project, I’m taking as much time as I need to think about what I’m doing and why, less in the sense of plot and more in the sense of politics. Writing after Jameson requires at least two objectives:
1)Regarding content, of course I must produce something that answers his questions: Is the new political art possible? And, how does one achieve a “breakthrough” beyond postmodernism without resorting to futile hybridization or, worst of all, pastiche?
2)Aesthetically, it is not an option to be anything other than exhaustive. We have seen before what exhaustive fiction looks like—and it can be incredibly beautiful in the right hands—but what do I mean by “exhaustive”? The purpose of describing, to the last, every chink in the wall is a transparent one; the critical reader immediately recognizes the familiar tack and takes the cue to start reading for line work and watching out for the buried, devastating clauses. But what I am talking about is something else. The details are allowed to get exhausted, drawn out, perhaps boring at times, but what is vital is that the story itself, its characters, leave out nothing. This is a fine line. The added difficulty here is to stay clear and concise at the same time. Perhaps the breakthrough we seek has something to do with an abandonment of writerly distance.
But the goals themselves are not yet clear. It may be obvious that the duty of a certain kind of writer is to be ambitious beyond one’s influences, to attempt a dreadful and (I imagine) totally unsatisfying form of transcendence in which one kills one’s heroes and teachers. I don’t believe that is the best approach, and it is not entirely mine. My own duty, as I see it, is to answer for my particular historical moment, to bring to light its products and lay bare its every intricacy. (I’ve been thinking a lot about generational issues, how one generation unfailingly criticizes its successors for their ignorance, their lack of taste, etc. Perhaps a side effect of this age-old social phenomenon is that it fuels the art of the so-called ignorant, who, for their own self-centered psychological reasons, must prove their parents wrong. I mean, duh?) That said, Jameson’s articulations of exactly what my particular historical moment entails and implies about my country’s chronic amnesia and about our cultural future provide a compelling set of questions that can only be answered in art. Criticism has great potential, and I practice it just as much as fiction, but at a certain point, someone must make something to be criticized. Perhaps this is the breakthrough, the direction in which art must go.
It’s almost easier to think of beginning a novel in the shadow of theory, as opposed to the shadow of my favorite authors. It’s easier because I don’t have to worry as much about imitating voice, about coming off as derivative, about “paling in comparison” if that means anything. It’s harder because the framework is far boggier: I don’t know what Jameson wants in a protagonist, or a plot line, or how heavy-handed he wants his politics. I know that I don’t want to write science fiction for my own personal, admittedly snobbish reasons, though most non-writers I talk to express some confusion as to why I don’t write science fiction (to which I have been known to take vocal offense). The last question is the hardest to answer: Jameson points out, time and again, that postmodern art fails (and this is, sometimes, one if its defining characteristics) when it becomes somehow politically apolitical, meaning that the argument we see on the surface goes no further, addresses no problems beyond itself. This is the “tampon in the teacup” category of artwork, which so many people think about first when they consider art today, and which us intellectual wankers complain about because such bad art ruins our reputation. (What we deserve to acknowledge at such times is that we are, on some level, concerned for our reputation; we long for an aesthetic universality that a few artists actively work against, and perhaps we deserve to be commended for that. Of course, who would care enough to commend us? Poor us.) I recognize immediately artwork from the above category, which may be called political art for the sake of political art, as opposed to art for the sake of politics. Who among us (I’m still talking about intellectual wankers) didn’t get aroused—perhaps even physically—the first time we heard the Godard bit about “The point was not to make political films, but to make films politically”?
Writers today simply don’t get to make books politically, at least not in the sense Godard meant. For Godard, the political film was one that explicated its means of production, that worked against Hollywood glamor, that exposed Hollywood fantasy for its expensive and deceptive escapism. As for myself, I have spent the past several years considering the ways in which means of production and distribution of fiction intersect with its political goals, but I have not yet understood what it means to write politically. It is important to acknowledge the origins and presentation of a work of fiction—who brought it to the public and why—especially given the recent state of the publishing industry and the work that has been done by so many to circumvent the challenges of publishing new and challenging works to a wide audience. Ultimately, though, we are all going to sit at our keyboards and write, and the political difference between writing a novel in a public library and on one’s own expensive laptop does not quite compare to what Godard was after with political film. In other words, fiction is not capable of exposing its material means of production in the same ways. So, if I wish to be a political writer, then the fiction itself must contain its own politics. This is the problem.
If Jameson has taught me anything so far (disclosure: I have not yet finished his book), it’s that the problem must be allowed its space to breathe, to mutate and grow branches, to loom overwhelmingly. He acknowledges the potential for critical theory to drive its practitioners to dead ends, namely in his description of Adorno’s ultimate “winner loses” paradox, in which he who comprehends the problem must also comprehend the fact that it is hopelessly unsolvable. (An analogue in common adage: “If you’re worried, it’s already too late.”) But what would it look like to consider, and to attempt to overcome, such a paradox in fiction?
Showing posts with label guest post. Show all posts
Showing posts with label guest post. Show all posts
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Friday, October 9, 2009
The Epistemology of Emo
Mae Saslaw was last month's guest editor. She has just gotten to writing her second post.
Her pieces have appeared in Correspondence 1 & 2, and more of her work is available at maesaslaw.wordpress.com.
Some months ago, The Correspondence Society and friends wrote a series of essays on the nature of the hipster and what constitutes hipster culture, if there is such a thing. We overwhelmingly concluded that there is no unified hipster culture, that they produce no unique or identifiable cultural artifacts, and this is one of the primary reasons for their failure—or, since perhaps they weren’t trying in the first place—to form a distinct movement of any kind. I’ve heard arguments along the same lines applied to emo: that there is no identifiable emo music, literature, or art; that emo kids themselves disagree on what aesthetics define emo; that “real” emo was over long before the word/concept ever really took off, and so nothing after maybe 1998 (the year is highly debatable) counts as emo; etc. I have no better working definition of emo than the next emo kid, but I will argue that—unlike hipsters, though the difference between the two is not especially what I mean to emphasize—there are coherent ideas and thought processes running through the whole of the emo movement/scene/what have you, that the lifestyle or, really, epistemology, emerged in the wake of punk rock and still persists in some form. I do not pretend that the authenticity and quality of what is popularly considered emo music has maintained the high standard it once had (you can laugh here), and the degradation and hence bad reputation emo music has endured is in no small part due to the inevitable effects of commercialization. The point I mean to make is one about shared experience: whether your canonical emo band is Sunny Day Real Estate, or Brand New, or Bright Eyes, or Dashboard Confessional, etc., your general worldview has a great deal in common with that of another emo kid from a different time or place, etc. along the emo continuum.
The condition of the emo kid is easy to write off as unfettered vanity and self-indulgence, the case for this view being that emo kids are, in the main, relatively privileged and unaffected by what most people consider to be real traumas of contemporary life, ie, they are situated (usually) well above the poverty line, and have never been exposed to or threatened with extreme violence. We find it hard to sympathize with adolescents and young adults who have grown up sheltered at a time when millions of children have real problems. And, during my own stint as a self-described emo kid, the guilt I felt around feeling dissatisfied with my life (guilt from the knowledge that others had it way worse and yet I found so much about which to complain, or, more accurately, to almost deliberately make myself miserable) was a significant part of the system of malaise I wove in my head.
That said, it’s as hard to convincingly argue that emo kids do have at least a few actual problems, and that these problems are the common threads between different versions or incarnations of emo. And I’ll concede that, even in hindsight, I can’t say that they even were real problems, but it sure as fuck felt like it: the certainty and gravity of the conclusions I drew about myself and other people trumped any remaining capacity I had for objectivity. Everyone really was unendurably vapid and insensitive, and I really was going to maintain my destructive habits unto lifelong loneliness. That’s how it seemed. Part of ceasing to be emo—rather, as emo—was my growing need to apologize for how absurd I sounded in pretty much every communicative act I made, how absurdly I behaved for several solid years. The other part was discovering better art, better music, and most importantly better literature, and realizing that there were far more comprehensive and sustainable ways to deal with the world than the thought processes I mired myself in. And, as has become apparent in this essay, I still continually apologize for emo—to anyone who has been emo, and to anyone who has had any sort of relationship with an emo kid.
With the apology must come the explanation of what it is I am apologizing for. The epistemology of emo, I have decided centers around the following emotional ideology: The emo kid sees in herself some pattern of self-destructive behavior and finds herself both unable to stop and unwilling to continue, but because she is unable to stop, she must continually question whether or not she really is unwilling to continue, and if she is not, she must question what intrinsic flaw makes her weak-minded or truly self-destructive or both. The self-destructive behavior might be a desire for romantic relationships characterized by severe dependence and/or “trust issues,” a desire for meaningless sexual encounters, eating disorders, cutting, repeated alienation of friends, drug and alcohol problems of a fairly minor order, etc. Her ability to question whether or not she wants to stop in the first place leads her to conclude that she is not truly, hopelessly addicted to anything, and indeed she usually is not, but draws her conclusion from an assumption that truly, hopelessly addicted people have already lost the ability to question want vs. need vs. un- or subconscious drive. But, at the same time, the fact that she continues whatever destructive behavior she likely knows she has chosen leads her to further question why she hasn’t totally destroyed herself—ie. she is not dead, or incarcerated, or in rehab, or pregnant. She has never reached and maybe never been close to total destruction, and she sees this as evidence that she is still in control of her actions, and therefore fully capable of “fixing” herself without outside help. Her ultimate self-analysis, and this usually takes at least a year to arrive at, is that she enjoys being somewhat—but, obviously, not entirely—self-destructive, enjoys the level to which she can predict what causes her pain. There’s no real way to tally how many emo kids slowly pulled themselves out of the emo condition vs. how many did go to rehab or join a religious organization or otherwise make some drastic life change that shocked them out of their particular self-destructive behavior more or less overnight. And I am fairly certain that members of the latter category are harsher critics of emo, and those most willing to argue that the emo mentality has no redeeming qualities for anyone. I don’t blame them. I only want to describe, as clearly as possible, the strategies common in every emo kid’s approach to thought and life in general. I call the totality of my conclusions the epistemology of emo because the emo movement, for all its fragmentation, describes a condition of the individual that is all-encompassing. The reason, I think, why former emo kids are so easy to spot, and why they tend to stick together, is that the whole tempest of skewed logic leaves its etchings on the walls of the mind. It’s why someone ten years older than me uses the same word to describe incredibly different artistic periods: ever since punk rock gave us permission to question our role and agency as adolescents, and grunge gave us permission to rage inwardly at whatever we happen to hate about ourselves, emo kids have been inventing and perfecting the cultural artifacts that feed the attitude and vice versa.
Her pieces have appeared in Correspondence 1 & 2, and more of her work is available at maesaslaw.wordpress.com.
Some months ago, The Correspondence Society and friends wrote a series of essays on the nature of the hipster and what constitutes hipster culture, if there is such a thing. We overwhelmingly concluded that there is no unified hipster culture, that they produce no unique or identifiable cultural artifacts, and this is one of the primary reasons for their failure—or, since perhaps they weren’t trying in the first place—to form a distinct movement of any kind. I’ve heard arguments along the same lines applied to emo: that there is no identifiable emo music, literature, or art; that emo kids themselves disagree on what aesthetics define emo; that “real” emo was over long before the word/concept ever really took off, and so nothing after maybe 1998 (the year is highly debatable) counts as emo; etc. I have no better working definition of emo than the next emo kid, but I will argue that—unlike hipsters, though the difference between the two is not especially what I mean to emphasize—there are coherent ideas and thought processes running through the whole of the emo movement/scene/what have you, that the lifestyle or, really, epistemology, emerged in the wake of punk rock and still persists in some form. I do not pretend that the authenticity and quality of what is popularly considered emo music has maintained the high standard it once had (you can laugh here), and the degradation and hence bad reputation emo music has endured is in no small part due to the inevitable effects of commercialization. The point I mean to make is one about shared experience: whether your canonical emo band is Sunny Day Real Estate, or Brand New, or Bright Eyes, or Dashboard Confessional, etc., your general worldview has a great deal in common with that of another emo kid from a different time or place, etc. along the emo continuum.
The condition of the emo kid is easy to write off as unfettered vanity and self-indulgence, the case for this view being that emo kids are, in the main, relatively privileged and unaffected by what most people consider to be real traumas of contemporary life, ie, they are situated (usually) well above the poverty line, and have never been exposed to or threatened with extreme violence. We find it hard to sympathize with adolescents and young adults who have grown up sheltered at a time when millions of children have real problems. And, during my own stint as a self-described emo kid, the guilt I felt around feeling dissatisfied with my life (guilt from the knowledge that others had it way worse and yet I found so much about which to complain, or, more accurately, to almost deliberately make myself miserable) was a significant part of the system of malaise I wove in my head.
That said, it’s as hard to convincingly argue that emo kids do have at least a few actual problems, and that these problems are the common threads between different versions or incarnations of emo. And I’ll concede that, even in hindsight, I can’t say that they even were real problems, but it sure as fuck felt like it: the certainty and gravity of the conclusions I drew about myself and other people trumped any remaining capacity I had for objectivity. Everyone really was unendurably vapid and insensitive, and I really was going to maintain my destructive habits unto lifelong loneliness. That’s how it seemed. Part of ceasing to be emo—rather, as emo—was my growing need to apologize for how absurd I sounded in pretty much every communicative act I made, how absurdly I behaved for several solid years. The other part was discovering better art, better music, and most importantly better literature, and realizing that there were far more comprehensive and sustainable ways to deal with the world than the thought processes I mired myself in. And, as has become apparent in this essay, I still continually apologize for emo—to anyone who has been emo, and to anyone who has had any sort of relationship with an emo kid.
With the apology must come the explanation of what it is I am apologizing for. The epistemology of emo, I have decided centers around the following emotional ideology: The emo kid sees in herself some pattern of self-destructive behavior and finds herself both unable to stop and unwilling to continue, but because she is unable to stop, she must continually question whether or not she really is unwilling to continue, and if she is not, she must question what intrinsic flaw makes her weak-minded or truly self-destructive or both. The self-destructive behavior might be a desire for romantic relationships characterized by severe dependence and/or “trust issues,” a desire for meaningless sexual encounters, eating disorders, cutting, repeated alienation of friends, drug and alcohol problems of a fairly minor order, etc. Her ability to question whether or not she wants to stop in the first place leads her to conclude that she is not truly, hopelessly addicted to anything, and indeed she usually is not, but draws her conclusion from an assumption that truly, hopelessly addicted people have already lost the ability to question want vs. need vs. un- or subconscious drive. But, at the same time, the fact that she continues whatever destructive behavior she likely knows she has chosen leads her to further question why she hasn’t totally destroyed herself—ie. she is not dead, or incarcerated, or in rehab, or pregnant. She has never reached and maybe never been close to total destruction, and she sees this as evidence that she is still in control of her actions, and therefore fully capable of “fixing” herself without outside help. Her ultimate self-analysis, and this usually takes at least a year to arrive at, is that she enjoys being somewhat—but, obviously, not entirely—self-destructive, enjoys the level to which she can predict what causes her pain. There’s no real way to tally how many emo kids slowly pulled themselves out of the emo condition vs. how many did go to rehab or join a religious organization or otherwise make some drastic life change that shocked them out of their particular self-destructive behavior more or less overnight. And I am fairly certain that members of the latter category are harsher critics of emo, and those most willing to argue that the emo mentality has no redeeming qualities for anyone. I don’t blame them. I only want to describe, as clearly as possible, the strategies common in every emo kid’s approach to thought and life in general. I call the totality of my conclusions the epistemology of emo because the emo movement, for all its fragmentation, describes a condition of the individual that is all-encompassing. The reason, I think, why former emo kids are so easy to spot, and why they tend to stick together, is that the whole tempest of skewed logic leaves its etchings on the walls of the mind. It’s why someone ten years older than me uses the same word to describe incredibly different artistic periods: ever since punk rock gave us permission to question our role and agency as adolescents, and grunge gave us permission to rage inwardly at whatever we happen to hate about ourselves, emo kids have been inventing and perfecting the cultural artifacts that feed the attitude and vice versa.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
A year without David Foster Wallace, a summer with Infinite Jest
Mae Saslaw is this month's guest editor. Her pieces have appeared in Correspondence 1 & 2, and more of her work is available at maesaslaw.wordpress.com. Her next post will be considerably more organized than what follows, and may contain a cogent argument. In the mean time, she will abuse this forum for reasons unapparent.
One year ago tonight, Lonely Christopher called me up to say that David Foster Wallace had committed suicide. I did what any friend would do and started to feed Lonely Christopher alcohol. About twenty minutes after he arrived, he got a call from Greg, whose appendix was near bursting. It was a weird night. But that’s not what this post is about.
I was one of the people who hadn’t actually read any of Wallace’s work—outside of an essay or two for class—prior to his death. I’ve spent the last twelve months catching up, and to date I’ve read Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Girl with Curious Hair, and most recently, Infinite Jest. I started Infinite Jest intending to follow along with the Infinite Summer people and go to their meetings on Thursdays in the Village. That didn’t happen, but I did finish the book. What was extraordinary was the amount of attention I got just for carrying the thing around. One girl approached me on a subway platform and asked if I’d read an essay of Wallace’s that had appeared in the New Yorker at some point, because if I hadn’t, she was going to give me her copy.
Ordinarily, I have a pretty limited amount of patience for the general public and carry an admittedly larger-than-justifiable sense of superiority when it comes to my tastes in fiction. Example: I once saw a boy my age reading Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser on a subway car filled with screaming preteens. I wanted to lean over and tell him, “Don’t even try reading that book now; you won’t understand a damn thing.” I ultimately didn’t say anything, but only because I didn’t want him to think I was coming onto him. I am an asshole. To be fair, I also had the reverse happen to me: Last summer, when I was trying to read Gravity’s Rainbow, a heavily-tattooed gentleman (carrying a copy of The Confessions of St Augustine) interrupted me and asked, first of all, if I could possibly read on a sweltering train with headphones on, and second, if I was trying to read the book without a companion volume. I said something like, “I’m reading it for the sentences,” and then bitched about the heat and how I wanted a cigarette. I must have come off looking pretty fucking cool. That’s not what this post is about, either.
I have a hard time being direct about this, about what reading Infinite Jest this particular summer and finishing up last week was really like. I guess it was something like this:
So we—myself, plus the people who approached me in the subway or in stores to say that they were reading or had read or had given up reading Infinite Jest—have this passage in common, this pretty profound slap in the face. I could read this as Wallace’s argument against reading his novel, since the act of reading is this same consumption of art that pulls us into anhedonic emptiness, maybe. Or it’s the interruption, the little piece of metafiction that jars us, alerts us to the fact that we’ve been reading for these instructions, and we’re getting what we asked for, and maybe we shouldn’t have asked for it, or maybe we definitely should have because being cultured and hip is the only way out of utter loneliness, unless it isn’t. In any case, he’s called my own personal bluff. Am I cool yet? Because I’m pretty fucking jaded. The point is that I don’t get to discount my fellow readers after this—we all just had our insecurities nailed down. Hard.
And I can’t ignore the shade that Wallace’s suicide paints over the experience of reading Infinite Jest. Wallace becomes even more like J.O. Incandenza, the figure whose ghost haunts the book and all its characters. If you’ve read the book, you know about all the parallels between the novel and Incandenza’s final film, also titled Infinite Jest, so I won’t go into those except to say that everything Wallace tells us about the film is true of the novel. There’s no literary or historical evidence to suggest that Incandenza’s suicide at all prefigures Wallace’s death any more than the deaths of any other of his characters. But still. The similarities are hard to ignore, and I wonder what it might have felt like to read Infinite Jest before Wallace died. One would have had the sense, for instance, that it might be possible to ask him what he meant, if passages like the one above were meant to destroy us in quite the way they did. Or, perhaps, if the side effect of uniting the unbearably cool U.S. youth was the point all along. Or, if we were supposed to realize that anhedonia and inhumanity are too closely linked. I can’t imagine that, if I’d read the book last year, I would have taken any particular solace in knowing that Wallace was, if nothing else, still alive—Infinite Jest leaves so little room for solace. But it hurt (maybe hurt is the wrong word: stung? cut?) more to know that he killed himself, that he couldn’t think or write his way out of a place where, according to him, we all are. (“By AA’s own professed logic, everyone ought to be in AA. If you have some sort of Substance-problem, then you belong in AA. But if you say you do not have a Substance-problem, in other words if you deny that you have a Substance-problem, why then you’re by definition in Denial, and thus you apparently need the Denial-busting Fellowship of AA even more than someone who can admit his problem.”)
One last anecdote: Last week, on one of the last days I spent reading Infinite Jest, I stopped at a bodega on my way to work. It was 8am, I was hungover, and I had to wait a couple of minutes for my bagel. A woman and her young daughter were waiting for their sandwiches as well, and after glaring at me for a couple of minutes, the woman noticed I was carrying Infinite Jest. What exactly we said to each other isn’t all that important, but I got the distinct sense that she hadn’t really considered Wallace’s death and what it had done to his readers. As far as she was concerned, he might as well have been dead for decades or more—the conditions of his life had nothing to do with the work. And I guess that’s a certain school of reading, to ignore as much about the author as you can. I disagree in any case, but I don’t see how anyone can exclude an author’s suicide from complete analysis of a work, or from the experience of reading it.
I think more discussion is called for. I think I failed in making a lot of points, partly because I need to spend more time considering exactly what happens in the thousand pages I spent the summer reading. But in the spirit of the commemorative blog post, here is another of my favorite (if I may express preference for something that leaves me devastated) passages from Infinite Jest. It happens around the middle of a list of things one learns at a halfway house.
One year ago tonight, Lonely Christopher called me up to say that David Foster Wallace had committed suicide. I did what any friend would do and started to feed Lonely Christopher alcohol. About twenty minutes after he arrived, he got a call from Greg, whose appendix was near bursting. It was a weird night. But that’s not what this post is about.
I was one of the people who hadn’t actually read any of Wallace’s work—outside of an essay or two for class—prior to his death. I’ve spent the last twelve months catching up, and to date I’ve read Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Girl with Curious Hair, and most recently, Infinite Jest. I started Infinite Jest intending to follow along with the Infinite Summer people and go to their meetings on Thursdays in the Village. That didn’t happen, but I did finish the book. What was extraordinary was the amount of attention I got just for carrying the thing around. One girl approached me on a subway platform and asked if I’d read an essay of Wallace’s that had appeared in the New Yorker at some point, because if I hadn’t, she was going to give me her copy.
Ordinarily, I have a pretty limited amount of patience for the general public and carry an admittedly larger-than-justifiable sense of superiority when it comes to my tastes in fiction. Example: I once saw a boy my age reading Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser on a subway car filled with screaming preteens. I wanted to lean over and tell him, “Don’t even try reading that book now; you won’t understand a damn thing.” I ultimately didn’t say anything, but only because I didn’t want him to think I was coming onto him. I am an asshole. To be fair, I also had the reverse happen to me: Last summer, when I was trying to read Gravity’s Rainbow, a heavily-tattooed gentleman (carrying a copy of The Confessions of St Augustine) interrupted me and asked, first of all, if I could possibly read on a sweltering train with headphones on, and second, if I was trying to read the book without a companion volume. I said something like, “I’m reading it for the sentences,” and then bitched about the heat and how I wanted a cigarette. I must have come off looking pretty fucking cool. That’s not what this post is about, either.
I have a hard time being direct about this, about what reading Infinite Jest this particular summer and finishing up last week was really like. I guess it was something like this:
It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip — and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté…Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool.
So we—myself, plus the people who approached me in the subway or in stores to say that they were reading or had read or had given up reading Infinite Jest—have this passage in common, this pretty profound slap in the face. I could read this as Wallace’s argument against reading his novel, since the act of reading is this same consumption of art that pulls us into anhedonic emptiness, maybe. Or it’s the interruption, the little piece of metafiction that jars us, alerts us to the fact that we’ve been reading for these instructions, and we’re getting what we asked for, and maybe we shouldn’t have asked for it, or maybe we definitely should have because being cultured and hip is the only way out of utter loneliness, unless it isn’t. In any case, he’s called my own personal bluff. Am I cool yet? Because I’m pretty fucking jaded. The point is that I don’t get to discount my fellow readers after this—we all just had our insecurities nailed down. Hard.
And I can’t ignore the shade that Wallace’s suicide paints over the experience of reading Infinite Jest. Wallace becomes even more like J.O. Incandenza, the figure whose ghost haunts the book and all its characters. If you’ve read the book, you know about all the parallels between the novel and Incandenza’s final film, also titled Infinite Jest, so I won’t go into those except to say that everything Wallace tells us about the film is true of the novel. There’s no literary or historical evidence to suggest that Incandenza’s suicide at all prefigures Wallace’s death any more than the deaths of any other of his characters. But still. The similarities are hard to ignore, and I wonder what it might have felt like to read Infinite Jest before Wallace died. One would have had the sense, for instance, that it might be possible to ask him what he meant, if passages like the one above were meant to destroy us in quite the way they did. Or, perhaps, if the side effect of uniting the unbearably cool U.S. youth was the point all along. Or, if we were supposed to realize that anhedonia and inhumanity are too closely linked. I can’t imagine that, if I’d read the book last year, I would have taken any particular solace in knowing that Wallace was, if nothing else, still alive—Infinite Jest leaves so little room for solace. But it hurt (maybe hurt is the wrong word: stung? cut?) more to know that he killed himself, that he couldn’t think or write his way out of a place where, according to him, we all are. (“By AA’s own professed logic, everyone ought to be in AA. If you have some sort of Substance-problem, then you belong in AA. But if you say you do not have a Substance-problem, in other words if you deny that you have a Substance-problem, why then you’re by definition in Denial, and thus you apparently need the Denial-busting Fellowship of AA even more than someone who can admit his problem.”)
One last anecdote: Last week, on one of the last days I spent reading Infinite Jest, I stopped at a bodega on my way to work. It was 8am, I was hungover, and I had to wait a couple of minutes for my bagel. A woman and her young daughter were waiting for their sandwiches as well, and after glaring at me for a couple of minutes, the woman noticed I was carrying Infinite Jest. What exactly we said to each other isn’t all that important, but I got the distinct sense that she hadn’t really considered Wallace’s death and what it had done to his readers. As far as she was concerned, he might as well have been dead for decades or more—the conditions of his life had nothing to do with the work. And I guess that’s a certain school of reading, to ignore as much about the author as you can. I disagree in any case, but I don’t see how anyone can exclude an author’s suicide from complete analysis of a work, or from the experience of reading it.
I think more discussion is called for. I think I failed in making a lot of points, partly because I need to spend more time considering exactly what happens in the thousand pages I spent the summer reading. But in the spirit of the commemorative blog post, here is another of my favorite (if I may express preference for something that leaves me devastated) passages from Infinite Jest. It happens around the middle of a list of things one learns at a halfway house.
That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That loneliness is not a function of solitude. That it is possible to get so angry you really do see everything red. What a ‘Texas Catheter’ is. That some people really do steal—will steal things that are yours. That a lot of U.S. adults truly cannot read, not even a ROM hypertext phonics thing with HELP functions for every word. That cliquey alliance and exclusion and gossip can be forms of escape. That logical validity is not a guarantee of truth. That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil. That it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person. That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds. That you can all of a sudden out of nowhere want to get high with your Substance so bad that you think you will surely die if you don’t, and but can just sit there with your hands writhing in your lap and face wet with craving, can want to get high but instead just sit there, wanting to but not, if that makes sense, and if you can gut it out and not hit the Substance during the craving the craving will eventually pass, it will go away—at least for a while. That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people. That the metro Boston street term for panhandling is: stemming, and that it is regarded by some as a craft or art; and that professional stem-artists actually have like little professional colloquia sometimes, little conventions, in parks or public-transport hubs, at night, where they get together and network and exchange feedback on trends and techniques and public relations, etc. That it is possible to abuse OTC cold- and allergy remedies in an addictive manner. That Nyquil is 50 proof. That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them. That if enough people in a silent room are drinking coffee it is possible to make out the sound of steam coming off the coffee. That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
A Ladies Scarf, Billowing Goodbye
Writers On Music
This is a series of short essays about music from the perspectives of young writers. Several members of The Corresponding Society have been asked to address the subject. The participants have academic backgrounds in fields such as literature, poetics, and history; they are enthusiasts, but claim no formal musical qualifications whatever.
Placing Rhapsody in Blue
by Adrian Shirk
Once, in Albuquerque, I stopped at a record shop called Natural Sound, a squat building on the dusty corner of Central Avenue known formerly as Route 66. The shop was going out of business and everything was on sale. The shelves, not unlike those of small businesses in Brooklyn, were already thinning; the recession had been officially announced the night before during our layover in Houston. Announcing it did as much as the diagnosis of a quiet form of cancer which has already taken a scoop out of your liver. Presenting the dime-store map to the young man at the counter, I asked him which canyons were the good ones, but he only blinked at me through the morning sun, saying nothing. So my companion and I bought four CDs, including a Gershwin compilation featuring Rhapsody in Blue, and started up I-25.
I was not entirely sure why we’d come to New Mexico. There had been free airline miles to use, a limited expenditure period --- I knew this --- but the destination had been picked out over coffee two weeks before, and now we were here. I-25 is a barren stretch of road that cuts through the state vertically. The San Andreas Mountains stand erect to one side, with the sheer, bald face of southwest erosion, jutting from dirt plains that undulate like water. It is not unlike the vision Warner Bros. once painted for Merry Melodies, and when we put on Gershwin, the likeness grew: Rhapsody is commonly associated with New York, but what struck me as the first cartoonish crescendo seared from the rental car’s speakers --- the sweet shrieking rise of the clarinet, the way it flowers at the end --- was how it matched the playful, grandiose landscape of cowboy country just as well. Reflexively, I could see Roadrunner and Coyote darting from behind the yucca, mimicking the frantic, innocent pace of Gershwin’s piece. Wasn’t Bugs Bunny always on his way to Albuquerque?
My relationship to music is not a sophisticated one. My parents met at a jazz program in college during the early 70s, where my mother played flute and my father, bass trombone. Without finishing his bachelor’s, my father took a job at the American Federation of Musicians, Local 99, and climbed his way to a position that hovered around Secretary Treasurer for twenty years. And when my parents split up, he married another flutist, and all of these people raised me, and at no point coerced me into a music education of my own. They didn’t even push piano lessons, or elementary school band. We lived across the street from a large Mormon family, the children of which played five instruments each. We listened from our front steps. I still can’t read notes. Each parent took me to countless concerts, their own and others, and on our home stereos played Classical 89.9. My dad fought on the side of tinny-voiced musicians until I moved out. Music was an atmosphere more than anything, a godlike presence I couldn’t name. I remember sitting in the backseat on the ride home from seeing my stepmother play The Rite of Spring for the Oregon Symphony, and suddenly being old enough (probably fifteen) where I felt awkward realizing I had no idea what to say.
Everything flattened and browned as we moved south. I-25 converged with Route 3, and in a town called Truth and Consequences, the second movement of Rhapsody commenced and we stopped for coffee. The song slowed, becoming dramatic, breathy --- a ladies scarf, billowing goodbye from a passenger train’s window. The brass section picked up, punctuating the melody with pile-driving bars that sounded (and looked) like the gears of a steam engine. Like all the other western New Mexico towns, Truth and Consequences had once been the home of coal miners, but all the remained were closed-up civic buildings, a bank and a muddy trickle of the Rio Grande that ran along the highway. Even the name, once Hot Springs, had been coughed up for a popular 1950s television show running a national contest. On Gershwin’s album jacket was a 1913 Colin Campbell Cooper painting called “Fifth Avenue, New York,” of the intersection in front of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and almost a century old, the painting depicted the same city I live in now, whereas most of New Mexico would be unrecognizable to its citizens of yore. I assumed Rhapsody to be about an unchanging American face --- something that united the bodies of freights and subway cars, hurtling over their respective rails. But how, when all I could see was the businessman and the buggy on the corner of 81st? And where in this forsaken state did they keep it?
And what did Gershwin know of place: reared in Brooklyn by a pair of Russian-Jewish immigrants, who pushed all their children into music training, it was only expected he and Ira rise to national greatness, and who better to reflect industrial America than a culturally bastardized foreigner who could see every piece of it, whole and raw. There was nothing godlike about it. Gershwin was a man’s man, surrounded by fancy women, tripping fans, and great noise. Though a close friend of Gershwin’s, composer Kay Smith once said, “under the vibrant and gregarious exterior was a sad Russian.” Perhaps Gershwin was writing about New York, but perhaps New York contained shards of every united state, and perhaps he could isolate the smaller pieces from the mess. The myth is that he conceived of Rhapsody on a commuter train to Boston, that he finished it in a month’s time, and improvised parts at its first concert. It is this act of improvisation that suggests to me he drew his material from what was around him, responding to the energy or enthusiasm at hand; and that the nature of Rhapsody is not a representation, but rather a perfect mirror, conjured in the moment of its opus. Maybe America liked him so much because listening to his music was like watching ourselves dance. In my most earnest attempts, this is to what end I write. “I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise,” Gershwin said.
We drove through tiny towns dotting the edge of the White Sands Missile Range, past the Trinity Site. It was a warm, September afternoon. We stopped at lava beds and saw antelope and the terrain began to rise, still vast and tan, but rising now in dikes that the road snaked through, gently releasing us back into the plains. I played Rhapsody on repeat. These were the sounds I wanted to write, the movements, this dance. I did not want to write fiction or poetry or journalism or travel guides or songs or manuals or plays; these were not the right ways or words. I wanted to record, to reverberate, to sound the rhythms of everything around me; to terrify and move people with their own bare reflection; to rove the highways like the guy who drove the night soil cart in medieval Europe, picking up the national excrement flung out the windows of American homes.
We pitched a tent in the backcountry of White Sands National Park, just outside of Las Cruces. Our site roosted amongst miles of gypsum white dunes and the deepest silence was known to me --- settled, penetrated by only the sonic booms of fighter jets launched from a nearby military base. We wedged our propane stove into the sand and shared a dinner of Dinty Moore stew and dried fruit as the sky grew impossibly dark. I had dreams that night of driving through the West at the turn of the century: I, gripping my Gibson hat, and my companion crushing a cigar under his heavy mustache.
Even now I don’t know the lexicon of music, but I know that it does the work I wish to do. It has an agility I can’t summon with words; writing is the beginning of a thing, the framework and casing, and music occupies the space of what must be a pure and present form. In his 1979 film Manhattan, Woody Allen pairs the clumsy short-comings of language as his character, Issac Davis, recites the working-preamble of his new book over a montage of turn-of-the-century film clips set to Rhapsody in Blue. “‘Chapter One,’” Isaac begins. “‘He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion.’ Uh, no, make that: ‘He --- he... romanticized it all out of proportion. Now... to him... no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black-and-white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.’ Uh, now let me start this over...” The Super-8 clips continue, showing the roaring bustle of a classier era, rugged docksmen hauling nets of fish, first-rate girls and a climbing skyline, but Isaac keeps trying: “‘He was as... tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat’ --- I love this! --- ‘New York was his town. And it always would be.’” But at this point we have stopped listening to him.
This is a series of short essays about music from the perspectives of young writers. Several members of The Corresponding Society have been asked to address the subject. The participants have academic backgrounds in fields such as literature, poetics, and history; they are enthusiasts, but claim no formal musical qualifications whatever.
Placing Rhapsody in Blue
by Adrian Shirk
Once, in Albuquerque, I stopped at a record shop called Natural Sound, a squat building on the dusty corner of Central Avenue known formerly as Route 66. The shop was going out of business and everything was on sale. The shelves, not unlike those of small businesses in Brooklyn, were already thinning; the recession had been officially announced the night before during our layover in Houston. Announcing it did as much as the diagnosis of a quiet form of cancer which has already taken a scoop out of your liver. Presenting the dime-store map to the young man at the counter, I asked him which canyons were the good ones, but he only blinked at me through the morning sun, saying nothing. So my companion and I bought four CDs, including a Gershwin compilation featuring Rhapsody in Blue, and started up I-25.
I was not entirely sure why we’d come to New Mexico. There had been free airline miles to use, a limited expenditure period --- I knew this --- but the destination had been picked out over coffee two weeks before, and now we were here. I-25 is a barren stretch of road that cuts through the state vertically. The San Andreas Mountains stand erect to one side, with the sheer, bald face of southwest erosion, jutting from dirt plains that undulate like water. It is not unlike the vision Warner Bros. once painted for Merry Melodies, and when we put on Gershwin, the likeness grew: Rhapsody is commonly associated with New York, but what struck me as the first cartoonish crescendo seared from the rental car’s speakers --- the sweet shrieking rise of the clarinet, the way it flowers at the end --- was how it matched the playful, grandiose landscape of cowboy country just as well. Reflexively, I could see Roadrunner and Coyote darting from behind the yucca, mimicking the frantic, innocent pace of Gershwin’s piece. Wasn’t Bugs Bunny always on his way to Albuquerque?
My relationship to music is not a sophisticated one. My parents met at a jazz program in college during the early 70s, where my mother played flute and my father, bass trombone. Without finishing his bachelor’s, my father took a job at the American Federation of Musicians, Local 99, and climbed his way to a position that hovered around Secretary Treasurer for twenty years. And when my parents split up, he married another flutist, and all of these people raised me, and at no point coerced me into a music education of my own. They didn’t even push piano lessons, or elementary school band. We lived across the street from a large Mormon family, the children of which played five instruments each. We listened from our front steps. I still can’t read notes. Each parent took me to countless concerts, their own and others, and on our home stereos played Classical 89.9. My dad fought on the side of tinny-voiced musicians until I moved out. Music was an atmosphere more than anything, a godlike presence I couldn’t name. I remember sitting in the backseat on the ride home from seeing my stepmother play The Rite of Spring for the Oregon Symphony, and suddenly being old enough (probably fifteen) where I felt awkward realizing I had no idea what to say.
Everything flattened and browned as we moved south. I-25 converged with Route 3, and in a town called Truth and Consequences, the second movement of Rhapsody commenced and we stopped for coffee. The song slowed, becoming dramatic, breathy --- a ladies scarf, billowing goodbye from a passenger train’s window. The brass section picked up, punctuating the melody with pile-driving bars that sounded (and looked) like the gears of a steam engine. Like all the other western New Mexico towns, Truth and Consequences had once been the home of coal miners, but all the remained were closed-up civic buildings, a bank and a muddy trickle of the Rio Grande that ran along the highway. Even the name, once Hot Springs, had been coughed up for a popular 1950s television show running a national contest. On Gershwin’s album jacket was a 1913 Colin Campbell Cooper painting called “Fifth Avenue, New York,” of the intersection in front of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and almost a century old, the painting depicted the same city I live in now, whereas most of New Mexico would be unrecognizable to its citizens of yore. I assumed Rhapsody to be about an unchanging American face --- something that united the bodies of freights and subway cars, hurtling over their respective rails. But how, when all I could see was the businessman and the buggy on the corner of 81st? And where in this forsaken state did they keep it?
And what did Gershwin know of place: reared in Brooklyn by a pair of Russian-Jewish immigrants, who pushed all their children into music training, it was only expected he and Ira rise to national greatness, and who better to reflect industrial America than a culturally bastardized foreigner who could see every piece of it, whole and raw. There was nothing godlike about it. Gershwin was a man’s man, surrounded by fancy women, tripping fans, and great noise. Though a close friend of Gershwin’s, composer Kay Smith once said, “under the vibrant and gregarious exterior was a sad Russian.” Perhaps Gershwin was writing about New York, but perhaps New York contained shards of every united state, and perhaps he could isolate the smaller pieces from the mess. The myth is that he conceived of Rhapsody on a commuter train to Boston, that he finished it in a month’s time, and improvised parts at its first concert. It is this act of improvisation that suggests to me he drew his material from what was around him, responding to the energy or enthusiasm at hand; and that the nature of Rhapsody is not a representation, but rather a perfect mirror, conjured in the moment of its opus. Maybe America liked him so much because listening to his music was like watching ourselves dance. In my most earnest attempts, this is to what end I write. “I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise,” Gershwin said.
We drove through tiny towns dotting the edge of the White Sands Missile Range, past the Trinity Site. It was a warm, September afternoon. We stopped at lava beds and saw antelope and the terrain began to rise, still vast and tan, but rising now in dikes that the road snaked through, gently releasing us back into the plains. I played Rhapsody on repeat. These were the sounds I wanted to write, the movements, this dance. I did not want to write fiction or poetry or journalism or travel guides or songs or manuals or plays; these were not the right ways or words. I wanted to record, to reverberate, to sound the rhythms of everything around me; to terrify and move people with their own bare reflection; to rove the highways like the guy who drove the night soil cart in medieval Europe, picking up the national excrement flung out the windows of American homes.
We pitched a tent in the backcountry of White Sands National Park, just outside of Las Cruces. Our site roosted amongst miles of gypsum white dunes and the deepest silence was known to me --- settled, penetrated by only the sonic booms of fighter jets launched from a nearby military base. We wedged our propane stove into the sand and shared a dinner of Dinty Moore stew and dried fruit as the sky grew impossibly dark. I had dreams that night of driving through the West at the turn of the century: I, gripping my Gibson hat, and my companion crushing a cigar under his heavy mustache.
Even now I don’t know the lexicon of music, but I know that it does the work I wish to do. It has an agility I can’t summon with words; writing is the beginning of a thing, the framework and casing, and music occupies the space of what must be a pure and present form. In his 1979 film Manhattan, Woody Allen pairs the clumsy short-comings of language as his character, Issac Davis, recites the working-preamble of his new book over a montage of turn-of-the-century film clips set to Rhapsody in Blue. “‘Chapter One,’” Isaac begins. “‘He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion.’ Uh, no, make that: ‘He --- he... romanticized it all out of proportion. Now... to him... no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black-and-white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.’ Uh, now let me start this over...” The Super-8 clips continue, showing the roaring bustle of a classier era, rugged docksmen hauling nets of fish, first-rate girls and a climbing skyline, but Isaac keeps trying: “‘He was as... tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat’ --- I love this! --- ‘New York was his town. And it always would be.’” But at this point we have stopped listening to him.
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