How it didn’t.
VONNEGUT: Contemporary writers who leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorian writers misrepresented life by leaving out sex.
“Seattle’s downtown has the smoothness of a microchip,” Charles Mudede says. “All of its defining buildings—the Central Library, Columbia Tower, Union Square towers, its stadiums—are new and evoke the spirit of twenty-first century technology and market utopianism. If there’s any history here, it’s a history of the future. The city’s landmark, the Space Needle, doesn’t point to the past but always to tomorrow.”
Most new technologies appear to undergo three distinct phases. At first, the computer was so big and expensive that only national governments had the resources to build and operate one. Only the Army and a handful of universities had multi-room-sized computers. A little later, large corporations with substantial research budgets, such as IBM, developed computers. The computer made its way into midsized businesses and schools. Not until the late ’70s and early ’80s did the computer shrink enough in size and price to be widely available to individuals. Exactly the same pattern has played out with nylon, access to mass communication, access to high-quality printing, Humvees, GPS, the web, handheld wireless communications, etc., etc. (Over a longer timeline, something quite similar happened with international trade: at first, global interaction was possible only between nations, then between large companies, and only now can a private citizen get anything he wants manufactured by a Chinese factory and FedExed to his shop.)
The individual has now risen to the level of a minigovernment or minicorporation. Via YouTube and Twitter, each of us is our own mininetwork. The trajectory of nearly all technology follows this downward and widening path: by the time a regular person is able to create his own TV network, it doesn’t matter anymore that I have or am on a network. The power of the technology cancels itself out via its own ubiquity. Nothing really changes: the individual’s ability to project his message or throw his weight around remains minuscule. In the case of the web, each of us has slightly more access to a mass audience—a few more people slide through the door—but Facebook is finally a crude personal multimedia conglomerate machine, personal nation-state machine, reality-show machine. New gadgets alter social patterns, new media eclipse old ones, but the pyramid never goes away.
Moore’s Law: the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit—essentially, computational speed—doubles every two years. Most of humanity can continuously download porn (by far the largest revenue generator on the web) ever faster and at ever higher resolution. The next Shakespeare will be a hacker possessing programming gifts and ADD-like velocity, which is more or less how the original Shakespeare emerged—using/stealing the technology of his time (folios, books, other plays, oral history) and filling the Globe with its input. Only now the globe is a billion seats and expanding. New artists, it seems to me, have to learn the mechanics of computing/programming and—possessing a vision unhumbled by technology—use them to disassemble/recreate the web.
I am not that computer programmer. How, then, do I continue to write? And why do I want to?
MAYBE ANDER MONSON is that programmer. He is an entire generation younger than I am—the same age, approximately, as Ben Lerner. In the first chapter of Monson’s most recent book, Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir, his jury duty becomes the occasion for a pointillistic meditation on his own arrest for hacking/felony credit fraud, his confusion as to whether his mother died of colon cancer or ovarian cancer, the pros and cons of fact checking, the mediation of life by TV and film, the inability of the defendant to narrate his own story and (thus?) his guilt, the lure and blur of story, his—Monson’s—weariness with the hundred manuscripts he has to read as judge for a nonfiction prize (“I don’t object to the use of I [how could I?], but to its simple, unexamined use, particularly in nonfiction, where we don’t assume the I is a character, inherently unstable, self-serving, possibly unreliable”), the difference between we and I (one of the book’s main subjects), memory as a dream machine, composition as a fiction-making operation—in short, “What do we know, and how can we know we know it?”
Throughout the book, “daggers”—glyphs—adorn various words, redirecting me to images, video, and evolving text on the book’s website. Interstitial minichapters appear within and among chapters, providing the work’s theoretical framework (“In others we ourselves are summed up”).
He visits the World’s Biggest Ball of Paint, which “continues to expand. Because of you. And you. Because of all of us.” This is as close as he is (I am) going to get to a direct articulation of his (my) aesthetic and metaphysic: he wants work to be equal to the chaos and contradiction of the cultural wiki to which we all have been assigned and the nothingness of death to which we are all destined. The deaths of Monson’s mother and D. F. Wallace haunt the text.
Monson posits and furnishes a “post-postmodern world” that is “starting to secede away from memoir, from the illusion of representation. Let’s make rules so we can follow them and then so we can break through them. By breaking through them we may start to feel alive again.” For Monson, for me, that’s the crux: he’s trying to make himself/make me feel something, feel anything, do whatever he can to vanquish the numbness that is a result of enforcing “order, decorum,” ceremony, formula, expectation.
IT’S HARDLY a coincidence that “Shipping Out,” Wallace’s most well-known essay, appeared only a month before Infinite Jest, his most well-known novel, was published. Both are about the same thing (amusing ourselves to death), with different governing données (lethally entertaining movie, lethally pampering leisure cruise). In an interview after the novel came out, Wallace, asked what’s so great about writing, said that we’re existentially alone on the planet—I can’t know what you’re thinking and feeling, and you can’t know what I’m thinking and feeling—so writing, at its best, is a bridge constructed across the abyss of human loneliness. That answer seemed to me at the time, and still seems to me, beautiful, true, and sufficient. A book should be an ax to break the frozen sea within us. He then went on to add that oh, by the way, in fiction there’s all this contrivance of character, dialogue, and plot, but don’t worry: we can get past these devices. In the overwhelming majority of novels, though, including Wallace’s own, I find the game is simply not worth the candle. All the supposed legerdemain takes me away from the writer’s actual project. In their verbal energy, comic timing, emotional power, empathy, and intellectual precision, Wallace’s essays dwarf his stories and novels.
In “Shipping Out,” Wallace phrases himself as a big American baby with insatiable appetites and needs. This may, of course, have been a part, even a large part, of Wallace’s actual personality (I was on a panel with him once and loved how rigorously he scrutinized everything I said, even if I was a little alarmed at the volume of tobacco juice he spat into a coffee can at his feet), but Wallace’s strategy is an example of what Adorno calls immanence: a particular artistic or philosophic relation to society. Immanence, or complicity, allows the writer to be a kind of shock absorber of the culture, to reflect back its “whatness,” refracted through the sensibility of his consciousness. Inevitably, this leads our narrator to sound somewhat abject or debased, given how abject or debased the culture is likely to be at any given point. On the cruise ship Zenith, which Wallace rechristens the Nadir, he catches himself thinking he can tell which passengers are Jewish. A very young girl beats him badly at chess. He’s a terrible skeet shooter. Mr. Tennis, he gets thumped in Ping-Pong. Walking upstairs, he studies the mirror above so he can check out the ass of a woman walking downstairs. He allows himself to be the sinkhole of bottomless American lack. In order to lash us to his own sickness-induced metaphors, he writes in as demotic an American idiom as possible: “like” as a filler, “w/r/t.” He’s unable to find out the name of the corporation that many of his fellow passengers work for. He keeps forgetting what floor the dance party is on. He can’t figure out what a nautical knot is. He’s unable to tolerate that the ship’s canteen carries Dr. Pepper but not Mr. Pibb.
Drafting off Frank Conroy’s “essaymercial” for the cruise line—“the lapis lazuli dome of the sky”—in much the same way Spalding Gray in Swimming to Cambodia uses the pietistic The Killing Fields and James Agee in Let Us Now Praise continually works against the contours of his original assignment for Forbes, Wallace is nobody’s idea of a reliable reporter: never not epistemologically lost, psychologically needy, humanly flawed. (When a client complained that the roof was leaking, Frank Lloyd Wright replied, “That’s how you know it’s a roof.”) The Nadir promises to satiate insatiable hungers and thereby erase dread by removing passengers’ consciousness that they’re mortal. Ain’t gonna happen: Wallace can hardly say a thing without qualifying it, without quibbling about it, without contradicting it, without wondering if it’s actually wrong, without feeling guilty about it. “Shipping Out” is about Wallace’s flirtation with the consciousness obliteration plan; the footnotes, finally, are the essence of the essay, making as they do an unassailable case for the redemptive grace of consciousness itself.
ONE OF MY clearest, happiest memories is of myself at fourteen, sitting up in bed, being handed a large glass of warm buttermilk by my mother because I had a sore throat, and she saying how envious she was that I was reading The Catcher in the Rye for the first time. As have so many other unpopular, oversensitive American teenagers over the last sixty years, I memorized the crucial passages of the novel and carried it around with me wherever I went. The following year, my sister said that Catcher was good, very good in its own way, but that it was really time to move on now to Nine Stories, so I did. My identification with Seymour in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” was extreme enough that my mother scheduled a few sessions for me with a psychologist friend of hers, and “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” remains one of my favorite stories. In college, I judged every potential girlfriend according to how well she measured up to Franny in Franny and Zooey. In graduate school, under the influence of Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, I got so comma-, italics-, and parenthesis-happy one semester that my pages bore less resemblance to prose fiction than to a sort of newfangled Morse code.
When I can’t sleep, I get up and pull a book off the shelves. There are no more than thirty writers I can reliably turn to in this situation, and Salinger is still one of them. I’ve read each of his books at least a dozen times. What is it in his work that offers such solace at 3:00 A.M. of the soul? For me, it’s how his voice, to a different degree and in a different way in every book, talks back to itself, how it listens to itself talking, comments upon what it hears, and keeps talking. This self-awareness, this self-reflexivity, is the pleasure and burden of being conscious, and the gift of his work—what makes me less lonely and makes life more livable—lies in its revelation that this isn’t a deformation in how I think; this is how human beings think.
WE LIVE IN a culture that is completely mediated and artificial, rendering us (me, anyway; you, too?) exceedingly distracted, bored, and numb. Straightforward fiction functions only as more Bubble Wrap, nostalgia, retreat. Why is the traditional novel c. 2013 no longer germane (and the postmodern novel shroud upon shroud)? Most novels’ glacial pace isn’t remotely congruent with the speed of our lives and our consciousness of these lives. Most novels’ explorations of human behavior still owe far more to Freudian psychology than they do to cognitive science and DNA. Most novels treat setting as if where people now live matters as much to us as it did to Balzac. Most novels frame their key moments as a series of filmable moments straight out of Hitchcock. And above all, the tidy coherence of most novels—highly praised ones in particular—implies a belief in an orchestrating deity, or at least a purposeful meaning to existence that the author is unlikely to possess, and belies the chaos and entropy that surround and inhabit and overwhelm us. I want work that, possessing as thin a membrane as possible between life and art, foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive. Samuel Johnson: A book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it. Acutely aware of our mortal condition, I find books that simply allow us to escape existence a staggering waste of time (literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it).
THE SADNESS OF the Yankee fan lies in his knowledge that his gorgeous dream is made of money.
This is America, though: capital of capitalism.
I was once wildly in lust with a girl who was fond of saying it’s not the bulge in front, it’s the bulge in back.
So, too, I’ve lived my life for art, which I know is not immemorial.
Illusion, baby, illusion—whatever the cost.
IN THE EXTREMELY bureaucratized culture in which I now live, I’m inundated by documents: itineraries, instruction manuals, lectures, permit forms, advertisements, primers, catalogues, comment cards, letters of complaint, end-of-year reports, accidentally forwarded email, traffic updates, alumni magazine class notes. What I call “fraudulent artifacts”—pseudo-interviews, faux lectures, quasi-letters, “found” texts, etc.—exact/enact giddy, witty, imaginative revenge on the received forms that dominate and define our lives. These counterfeits capture the barely suppressed frustration and feeling and yearning that percolate about 1/16th of an inch below most official documents. Such forgeries appeal to me—utterly disconnected as I am from the conventions of traditional fiction and having turned to genre-emptying work to reanimate my literary passion.
E.g., Gregory Burnham’s “Subtotals,” seemingly a pointless data sheet of the number of times the narrator has climbed stairs, sent a postcard, received a kiss, etc. It isn’t that at all. It’s a beautiful ode to—if we’re lucky—not finding God or winning a Purple Heart but averting calamity and muddling through in the middle. This is what I do, in any case, so I want to say we all are.
Lucas Cooper, “Class Notes,” on one level a McSweeney’s-style parody of alumni magazine class notes, on another level an anthropology of Reagan-era unfettered capitalism, and on still a deeper level a chart of the transition over the course of a man’s life from hyperaggression to inevitable loss to the bliss of some big quiet thing falling down and locking into place, like a whisper of some weight.
Paul Theroux, “Acknowledgments,” a parody of the acknowledgments in the front of a scholarly book and a brutal commentary on the vampiric nature of the well-funded critic (getting fat on the bones of the obscure poet).
Rick Moody, “Primary Sources,” ostensibly a list of Moody’s favorite works of art while growing up but really a devastating meditation on how, in the absence of his father, he was “looking elsewhere for the secrets of ethics and home.” Join the fucking club, my friend.
CHRISTIAN MARCLAY’S The Clock is a twenty-four-hour-long video constructed of thousands of film fragments in which a character interacts in some way with a clock or watch. As each new clip appears, a new narrative is suggested, only to be swiftly overtaken by another one. The video is synchronized to the local time. At any moment, I can look at the work and use it as a clock. There are amazingly few kinds of gestures available in the repertory of human behavior, and yet there’s a comfort that at, say, 5:00 P.M., for most people it’s quitting time. Film (life itself?) is an irreducibly melodramatic medium. Very, very few clips from comedies—would wreck the mood, which is Our birth is our death begun. Many of the actors are now dead. Soon enough I’ll join them (you, too, dear reader …). The seconds are ticking away as I’m watching. I want to ID the clip—I exist—but the fragment and my identification are almost immediately overwhelmed by time, which always wins.
Yeats: “The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life, or of the work, / And if it take the second must refuse/A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark./ When all that story’s finished, what’s the news? / In luck or out the toil has left its mark: / That old perplexity an empty purse, / Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.”
Death is my copilot, my topos. Who scratched in ancient clay those first words Love equals death, art equals death, life equals death? Or perhaps it was a single word. If so, all literature and all philosophy have come from this single word. Plato believes this scratch leads to truth (his belief in the “really real”). Nietzsche believes this scratch leads to impotence (“Without music, life would be a mistake”). Yet both made millions singing the same song. Where did the formula (love equals death equals art equals life) come from?
A STUDENT IN MY CLASS, feeling self-conscious about being much older than the other students, told me he’d been in prison. I asked him what crime he’d committed, and he said, “Shot a dude.” He wrote a series of very good but very stoic stories about prison life, and when I asked him why the stories were so tight-lipped, he explained to me the jailhouse concept of “doing your own time,” which means that when you’re a prisoner you’re not supposed to burden the other prisoners by complaining about your incarceration or regretting what you’d done or, especially, claiming you hadn’t done it. Do your own time: it’s a seductive slogan. I find that I quote it to myself occasionally, but really I don’t subscribe to the sentiment. I’m not, after all, in prison. Stoicism is of no use to me whatsoever. What I’m a big believer in is talking about everything until you’re blue in the face.
TWENTY YEARS AGO, another undergraduate, Caleb Powell, was in my novel-writing course; we’ve stayed in touch. I’ve read and critiqued his stories and essays. A stay-at-home dad and freelance journalist, he interviews me occasionally when a new book comes out. We disagree about nearly everything. Caleb wanted to become an artist and has overcommitted to life; I wanted to become a person and have overcommitted to art. He’s one of the most contrary people I’ve ever met. I like how he questions nearly everything I say. Last fall, we spent a week together in a mountain cabin, recording all of our conversations. We played chess, shot hoops, hiked to lakes and an abandoned mine, ate at the Cascadia Inn, relaxed in a hot tub, watched My Dinner with André, Sideways, and The Trip, and argued about a multitude of topics: Michael Moore, moral placebos, my high-pitched voice, Jewish identity, transsexual blow jobs, artistic jealousy/envy, DFW, the semicolon, Camus, DJ Spooky, our respective families, Cambodia, racism, capital punishment, et al., inevitably circling back to our central theme of life and art. We went at it hammer and tongs.
In our self-consciousness, we couldn’t help but act naturally. Two egos tried to undermine each other. Our personalities overlapped and collapsed. There was no teacher, no student, no interviewer, no interviewee, only a chasm of uncertainty.
We’re now trying to turn that uncertainty into art, taking our initial 300,000-word transcript and constructing an argument out of it, a through-line. I love the collage nature of this project, which is a perfect expression of my aesthetic, and I’d even go so far as to say it’s an apt metaphor for any writer’s artistic process. When you’re dealing with such a massive amount of material, you perforce ask yourself, Isn’t this what all writing is, more or less—taking the raw data of the world and editing it, framing it, thematizing it, running your voice and vision over it? What you’re doing is just as much an act of writing, in a way, as it is an act of editing. Multiply 300,000 by a very large number—a trillion, say—and you have the whole of a person’s experience (thoughts, anecdotes, misremembered song lyrics, etc.), which he or she then “edits” into art.
I NO LONGER BELIEVE in Great Man Speaks.
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.
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.
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.
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.