Twee

2001–2009

In which catastrophe and war separate the real men from the man-children in the worlds of literature and activism, and the fate of the modern age hangs in the balance. Would it be the end or the beginning of something better, kinder, and more hands-on?

The world was going to end. The giant rabbit with the gnarled teeth predicted it. Donnie Darko, the cult film directed by Richard Kelly is a long, occasionally funny bad omen. Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) is an insomniac, overmedicated, and over-psychoanalyzed troubled teen in the fall of 1988. He may also be dead. In another bit of horrible coincidence, a part of a jet airplane has fallen on his house. He exists now in a sort of netherworld, a Holden Caulfield figure in purgatory, obeying the call and parsing out the cryptic utterings of a giant, Harvey-like bunny. Donnie Darko is a great Twee film because it’s suffused with dread, darkness, and humor à la Anderson’s oeuvre, and because it reduces its adult characters to either helpless or deluded. In terms of production and setting, Darko takes Anderson’s ardor for the unremembered 1960s and places it in the 1980s; it’s set on the evening of a George Bush–Michael Dukakis presidential debate. In 2001, teens rallied around Darko, making it an almost instant cult hit, largely because it was spearheaded by a credible film rebel in Donnie—but also because by this point, thanks to technology, the unremembered ’80s could be virtually experienced. Echo and the Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon,” Duran Duran’s “Notorious,” the Church’s “Under the Milky Way,” and especially Tears for Fears’s “Head over Heels” and the haunting cover of “Mad World” by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules made going back in time seem preferable to the actual madness that had descended like falling debris.

Few other works of 9/11-informed art ring as true as Darko, probably because it was filmed before the attacks and has prescience on its side. Even pop saint Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising feels somewhat exploitative, having been recorded after the attacks. Artists had the means to respond to catastrophe faster in the twenty-first century, and perhaps this was not such a good thing. There was a good decade’s worth of simmer between J. D. Salinger conceiving of Holden Caulfield, taking him to war, processing what he saw in Hürtgen Forest and at Dachau, and ultimately writing The Catcher in the Rye.

After the 9/11 attacks, there was also the prevailing sense that the adults needed to be in charge, not an increasingly infantilized and hybrid generation of teens. The Bush-Cheney leadership treated Americans like children, instructing us to do some shopping if we felt like helping, carrying on as if nothing happened at all. But as with World War II, the world had changed forever, and answers were not coming clear or fast enough to satisfy, well, anyone.

September 11, 2001, brought with it, more than anything else, a sense of confusion and disorientation. Were we going to get hit again? Who was hitting us, anyway? They didn’t wear uniforms. Why do they hate us? It was left to our elected officials and public servants to produce concrete answers and to our artists to address the abstract. Some looked forward. Others looked backward for precedent, and a few, perhaps unwisely, looked at the still-smoldering and tension-electrified present.

“Our good fortune allowed us to feel a sadness that our parents didn’t have time for,” Ewan McGregor says in voice-over in Mike Mills’s bittersweet love story Beginners. Now the sadness was ours. We had our own World War II, our own Vietnam, and few of us had the sure-handedness or the ego of the Boss. What would we do with it? Would we handle it well, or would we clam up or blow it with self-absorption? It behooved our young artists to figure it out, even as the pit was being cleared of smoldering metal and ash and the air smelled deadly. Clarity was key.

“I don’t think 9/11 had much bearing on me writing about history,” says Sarah Vowell. “In fact, I was finished with a book of historical essays and had to scramble to write another, what came to be the title essay of Partly Cloudy Patriot, which was a tip of the hat to Thomas Paine. I will say it had a drastic impact on my music consumption. I used to have music playing around the house all waking hours, and I switched to news overnight and never really went back. It sounds silly now, but I slept with my radio tuned to my NPR affiliate for at least six weeks because I wanted to know the second they took bin Laden into custody. I did not anticipate that would take ten years. Though the first thing I did when I heard was put on Joan Baez singing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’”

Brooklyn writer Jonathan Safran Foer, today a divisive literary figure, should at least get credit for his attempt to write his literary equivalent of The Rising. Foer’s Oskar Schell, the nine-year-old hero of the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, is a precocious waif in a ski hat and backpack who has the run of the city until tragedy strikes. When he loses his father in the attacks on the World Trade Center, New York is no longer his playground but a haunted house. Oskar, like Holden Caulfield obsessing over his ducks, spends much of the book and subsequent film adaptation searching for the lock to a key the old man left behind. Here is a somewhat broadly drawn boy genius, but also one who has every right to whine and brood. There were many orphans made that terrible day.

And yet at the time of the book’s publication, four full years after the attacks, there were readers who cried again and again, “Too soon,” or “Not concrete enough.” More than a decade on, that seems unfair. An artist’s themes and topics cannot be dictated by the public, no matter how disturbed. But bin Laden was still at large. Support for the wars in both Afghanistan and later Iraq had yet to fizzle out and turn many against the president. There was no new Freedom Tower rising at Ground Zero. There was no balm at all, really. A good writer tends to ask more questions than provide answers, and this is useless in a panic.

Foer’s previous novel, 2002’s Everything Is Illuminated, was a best seller and announced the arrival of a major new voice. Extremely Loud stopped that momentum cold.

When asked whether he had second thoughts taking on 9/11, Foer responded, “I think it’s a greater risk not to write about it. If you’re in my position—a New Yorker who felt the event very deeply and a writer who wants to write about things he feels deeply about—I think it’s risky to avoid what’s right in front to you. None of the ways people were talking about 9/11 felt right to me.”

That this new, murky conflict was a religious war forced the literary thinkers of all generations, especially the new, young heroes who had all the media attention (even those who were, at their core, utterly secular), to reflect on questions of spirituality. There was a pressure to select a faith and use it as a survival tool; a sort of zealot envy pervaded. The enemy, if there was an actual enemy, certainly had a fanatical investment in faith.

“I want to talk about God in a literary way,” Foer said. “But I think I would have a very hard time praying to God.” Despite the bravery and the sincerity with which he wrestled with these serious themes, Foer’s Twee visage is what really did him in. Nobody questioned his talent. They took issue with his glasses; people confused him with Oskar. He looked like a boy, a spelling-bee champion. When an actual actor replaced Foer in the popular imagination and gave us an alternate face of Oskar, however, things just seemed to get even worse.

Images of a falling man—at the back of the book, in a kind of child’s flip book design—showed a real-life victim who committed suicide by jumping from the tower, rather than dying from heat, fire, smoke inhalation, instead floating back up into the smoky window. To some this was seen as not poetic but exploitative. After 9/11 people asked if irony was dead. They might have inquired about whimsy as well.

The film version of Extremely Loud was Oscar bait that salted the wound. Worse, it was a falling Tom Hanks. The actor is America, representative of everything we trust and are proud of, the Jimmy Stewart of his age. And here was this adaptation nobody wanted, killing him and making us relive that dreadful Tuesday all over again.

Especially in New York City, the knives came out. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times wrote: “It’s about the impulse to drain that day of its specificity and turn it into yet another wellspring of generic emotions: sadness, loneliness, happiness. This is how kitsch works. It exploits familiar images, be they puppies or babies—or, as in the case of this movie, the twin towers—and tries to make us feel good, even virtuous, simply about feeling. And, yes, you may cry, but when tears are milked as they are here, the truer response should be rage.” Lou Lumenick of the New York Post compared the film to one of “those framed 3-D photos of the Twin Towers emblazoned with ‘Never Forget’ that are still for sale in Times Square a decade after 9/11.”

Even Art Spiegelman, who took on the Holocaust and was so careful not to profit from his Maus series, lest he be criticized as exploitative, was compelled to address—carefully—the events of 9/11. In 2004 the artist issued In the Shadow of No Towers; an oversize meditation on the day, which seemed, especially when compared to his previous epics, somewhat tame. “I never liked those arrogant boxes,” he writes of the towers, “but now I miss those rascals, icons of a more innocent age.” He compares the air in the days after the attacks on New York, acrid and toxic, to his father’s description of the air at Auschwitz, but that’s as far as he’ll go. Foer, younger and perhaps braver, was willing to risk his reputation to really go there, through the eyes and heart of a scarred but plucky child, and in some ways his career has never recovered.

If there’s an invention of the 9/11 era of letters that’s critic-proof, or rather critic-oblivious, it’s McSweeney’s, which today feels more and more like both an empire and an important literary school on par with the existentialists and the beats. At a recent symposium at Laemmlein & Leah Buttenweiser Hall at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, a few hundred young men and women—slouching in their black vintage dresses, clunky shoes, nerd glasses, ski hats, and beards—filed in to hear some of the magazine’s key contributors over the years discuss the origins of the quarterly turned website turned publisher, once raggedy and prided on printing pieces that were rejected by other publications. This is where the movers and shakers of popular culture come to lecture, whether it’s Dr. Oz or Suze Orman, and in its own way, McSweeney’s has similarly imprinted its design for living on millions.

Founder Dave Eggers was himself a refugee from the standard publishing world, which was clearly too staid and catty for him. One can imagine him recoiling and devising ways to chuck all the rules. He was a student of the post-Punk British Indie scene of the early and mid-’80s, so the example was already there when it came to eliminating the middleman, staying true to an ideal, and operating with a social conscience. He was also a student of the heroic and rebellious Maurice Sendak, having read Where the Wild Things Are at age five. “I just reacted with pure terror. But then I used to hide under the couch during The Wizard of Oz. I think what frightened me the most was that I couldn’t work out if the Wild Things were nice or nasty. There was a moral ambiguity to them which really disturbed me,” he has said.

Eggers, then a new father himself, wrote the script to the Spike Jonze adaptation of Sendak’s classic, as well as a full-length novelization. “I wrote it between our two children being born,” he said. “I wanted to write something that might have the same sort of effect on a kid as the books I read when I was young had on me. I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach. It’s like the cement is still wet when you’re that age; every little mark can become permanent.”

Following the success of his 2000 memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which deals with him raising his younger brother, Christopher (Toph), following the back-to-back losses of both parents to cancer, Eggers could have benefited from the established publishing-business structure and committed himself no further than the delivery of a highly lucrative follow-up. Instead he invested in McSweeney’s and printed the next book, now hugely anticipated, himself.

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, christened with Eggers’s mother’s maiden name, was founded in 1998 as a literary quarterly, a sort of new, modern version of Granta or Paris Review. By the release of 2002’s Eggers novel You Shall Know Our Velocity, it was regarded by Great Britain’s Telegraph as “the most influential literary magazine in the United States.” This was down to the talent, of course (contributors included Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, and Ann Beattie, among others), but also the presentation. McSweeney’s the publication felt like a fetish object, like an old piece of vinyl. David Foster Wallace famously wrote a short story on the spine of one issue. Some were packaged in boxes, others in letters. They were gilded and giftlike, and to read them was to carve out a small bit of identity for yourself as a McSweeney’s adherent.

Eggers, who seemed to know what to do with his new power, later founded the tutoring center 826 Valencia in San Francisco (and would establish outposts in cities across the country, as well as London and Dublin), applying his pragmatism to his social work by encouraging the creative writing and artistic skills of children ages six to eighteen. The programs were established with expediency and a kind of middleman cutting that called to mind the models established by Calvin Johnson at K Records or Ian MacKaye at Dischord. In a climate where people were growing further and further removed from each other thanks to the advent of social networking—and where even in art it was becoming increasingly common to muse, fantasize, or self-infantalize rather than tackle small problems incrementally with an eye toward a better world—Eggers, the literary child-rebel, did his networking on a person-to-person level.

“The tight-knit community we had is the foundation for what became 826,” says Sarah Vowell. “The only thing I know about the influence of McSweeney’s is that if you value your free time, do not take Dave Eggers’s calls. He’s a real roper-inner.”

“McSweeney’s as a publishing company is built on a business model that only works when we sell physical books. So we try to put a lot of effort into the design and production of the book-as-object,” Eggers has said. He found a printer in the Detroit area, Thomson-Shore, and took pride in the Made-in-the-USA-ness of it all. “The fact that they’re in Michigan makes it easier to communicate,” he has said, “to reprint, and to correct problems . . . I don’t mean to beat a made-in-America drum, but I would be lying if I said it doesn’t feel somehow right to be printing books in the U.S.”

Only Jack White rivals Eggers as a twenty-first-century Indie maverick, creator, and operator of his own idealistic microcosm. The former White Stripes leader founded Third Man Records in 2001, the year that the duo broke through with its third album, White Blood Cells. Today he owns and operates a self-contained record store, performance space, and record-company office in the same Nashville compound. It’s a throwback to the days of Sun Records in Memphis, Chess in Chicago, and even Motown in White’s own Detroit. There’s even a darkroom for developing promotional photos. Like Eggers, White hired an old-school factory crew (United Pressing) to locally press the vinyl that’s cut at the nearby studio. “We have a great relationship with them,” White told me in 2009. “We had a meeting with them before I even bought the building. I said, ‘Listen, I want to turn around records really fast. If I bring you a record, how fast can you do it? They can get us a hundred and fifty copies in twenty-four hours.”

The juxtaposition of sometimes-chauvinistic traditions of blues-rock lyrics and White’s more childlike and unaggressive tendencies was a bit trickier. As the White Stripes got bigger, they had to reckon with the Nirvana problem of drawing knuckleheads to the pit. I once saw White stop a concert midsong to lecture an overzealous fan with “This is a Marlene Dietrich song!” as if to imply that moshing to an old Weimar cabaret number was absurd.

By the time the White Stripes were winding down, White had relocated to Nashville and, like Calvin Johnson, divided up his talents and attention among several different recording and touring concerns, among them the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather. It was there that he became, like Dave Eggers, a modern, real-life Willy Wonka, with an analog-is-better aesthetic and everything made in America.

The culture’s tendency toward crafting begins in the post-9/11 era. Movie stars can be seen with knitting needles in their Birkin bags. Anything tangible, perennial, “old school,” and pure—a book, an LP record—is akin to a kind of cultural comfort food. And while the Net sped this up, even the most marvelous of modern marvels would take a turn inward toward the personal, with blogs and message boards exponentially growing and vying with more corporate retail sites for space and attention.

“I never had WiFi at home,” Eggers has said. “I’m too easily distracted, and YouTube is too tempting . . . I’ve never read a page on an e-reader.” McSweeney’s saved paper the same way Wes Anderson’s Max Fischer saved Latin in Rushmore and Jack White saved the American vinyl presses. “I would like to set the computers on fire,” White told me in 2009. “We are in an age that is the antithesis of what I am trying to do artistically. It’s a constant battle.” The success of McSweeney’s and Jack White, both wildly popular, can be seen as a triumph of the older, slower, but truer way over modernity, speed, and economy. It was fueled almost entirely by a sort of cars-with-fins-were-better sense of romance, quickly becoming not only a subculture in the twenty-first century but a new kind of cause. “I’m the poster boy for gas-lamp technology,” White joked.

“I totally admire what he did,” Jonathan Ames, a McSweeney’s contributor, says of Eggers. “He was so exuberant. Like his generation’s George Plimpton [founder of the Paris Review].”

There is a website—McSweeney’s Internet Tendency—as well as an online store, but you won’t find the founder on it. “I can say that with regard to the Web, Dave was utterly befuddled,” says John Hodgman, another early McSweeney’s contributor. “He found the idea that there was going to be a website somewhat confusing, and indeed the Web McSweeney’s became a different animal. Dave’s passion is to create these beautiful, innovative books. McSweeney’s as a journal is about tremendous writing, but it’s also about the art of making printed materials. And at the same time that Dave was creating these beautiful artifacts, sewn with golden thread, on the other side the website was pointing to a different kind of future. One where people would put up short material to be read all over the world.” Faced with loss (Eggers’s sister was, for a time, publicly unhappy with her portrayal in Staggering Genius and committed suicide in 2001) and the start of his own family, Eggers might have remained solipsistic and precious, and indeed there are elements of that in his work. McSweeney’s, along with the worst of the Foer book (and film), is dismissed by some as too cute, given the times; a sort of catchall buzz word for everything clever and Twee in publishing. With The Believer, a monthly magazine; Lucky Peach, a culinary-focused volume; and the Wholphin anthology DVDs, it’s certainly a large enough multimedia concern to take fire.

“People hate whimsy,” Hodgman says. “I think people are suspicious of it—because it seems un-serious in some way. Whimsy, in my mind, is defined as a kind of playfulness and a pleasure in playfulness—wordplay or cultural references or inside jokes. It is controversial not merely because it’s disconnected from the hard social realities around us, but also because it doesn’t care and it is not going to feel guilty about it. And a lot of people have trouble with that. I don’t know that you could ever accuse Dave himself as a writer as being unconcerned with the world.”

Eggers’s subsequent books have taken on a sort of open-eyed global consciousness that will again hopefully find him leading by example. What Is the What, his 2006 novel, examines the crisis in Darfur, and Zeitoun is a 2009 nonfiction account of the displaced, post-Katrina residents of New Orleans. McSweeney’s still exists in a kind of grace state because of this balance of whimsy and taking on the big issues of the world. “Part of his life is profoundly concerned with the world around him,” says Hodgman, “but one of the reasons people still get mad is that he’ll create the drop-in tutoring center but he’ll also put a pirate-supply store in front of it. Or a superhero-supply store in front of it. It’ll be playful and it won’t apologize for being playful, and why should it?”