Tag Archives: Jonathan Lethem

Non-Canonical

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The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.
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Black Metal Fandom

In the framing of the documentary “Until the Light Takes Us,” the pheonomenon of Black Metal was born and died in the same instant as the publication of sensational reports in the Norwegian media of the activities of Varg Vikerness and the supposed “inner circle” of musicians and agitators retroactively called the second wave of black metal. The aesthetic and thematic trappings of the world-wide scene to come, including, paradoxically, the adherent reverence to the supposed ideals of the original inner circle who despise and disavow all those who follow them, are cribbed almost entirely from these (mostly false) accounts of Satanism, Anarchism, and (unfortunately true) pointless grisly murder.

Punk Rock died in Los Angeles in 1986, according to some sources. It emerges, Elvis-like, on the underside of skateboards coasting across uneven gravel mall parking lots, or in communal houses in the suburbs of Rangoon, and in endlessly concurrent music documentaries about the life and death of Punk Rock, year after year.

Disco died when white people started making it and other white people got real mad. The whole scenario is pretty embarrassing in general. I’m glad I hadn’t been born at the time.

&The children’s television program My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic something something bronies blah blah siiiiiiiiiiiiigh.

Superheroes never die. They just get new writers who sometimes kill them. But later, new writers – and who knows?!

My favorite manga should have ended like, ten volumes agooooo. It just doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere.

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What bugs me about semi-autobiographical works is that an author can always ascribe the lousy parts of their stories to the fixed continuity of the supposed “autobio” part. Jonathan Lethem’s toad of a novel “Fortress of Solitude” sets its story against the backdrop of Brooklyn in the waning of the 20th century. So it makes perfect narrative sense that after the dissolution of the possibility and wonder of the childhood friendship of the book’s two heroes, Mingus gets chewed up and his talent suppressed by the intertwined terrors of drug addiction and the criminal justice system as his neighborhood is gentrified in real time. Dylan, the more privileged of the two, more or less becomes a dried-up old turd from the moment he begins to monetize his passions, to value things over people and to vaporize his yen for music and culture into the loveless prison of obsessive collection and curation. The fact that the former character is black and the latter white is no accident, it’s just fate. Too bad the semi-autobiographical author was only semi-interested in designing a universe with less banal systematic cruelty along with the addition of magical rings of power.

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Being a fan draws a lot of people into happiness and/or success as creators in comics. But as fandom becomes more visible and defined in our consumer culture, a vocal following can blur the line between fan/participant and master and enforce rules that no one can remember writing in the first place. Just like the lions eat the antelope and the lions turn to a grass lot which gets built up into a boutique for silk-screened baby onesies and the antelope get pushed out of their neighborhoods by rent hikes, whole artforms can be scuttled by the arbitrary curation of its fans when the joy of discovery becomes the rote drudgery of collection.

I didn’t mention furries in this essay-ette, so it’s not canon.

“Don’t call me a fucking BRONY, ok?”

Not Best, Mostly American, Comics Non-Criticism

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Hate fest is over, but hate is ever new. So I thought I’d reprint this review of Ben Schwartz’s Best American Comics Criticism which I posted at tcj.com a while back. The piece was part of a roundtable: you can see all the other pieces at the following links:

Opening contributions from Ng Suat Tong, Noah Berlatsky, Caroline Small, Jeet Heer, Brian Doherty and BACC editor Ben Schwartz; responses from Caroline Small, Ng Suat Tong, Jeet Heer, Noah Berlatsky and Ben Schwartz.

My review is below.
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Ben Schwartz begins his introduction to Best American Comics Criticism with an anecdote: one day at a mall he heard two young girls arguing about what to call graphic novels. For Schwartz, this was a “definitive moment.” Comics used to be for nebbishy, perpetually pubescent, socially stunted man-boys — but that’s all over. Superheroes are dead, replaced by the teeming offspring of anthropomorphic Holocaust victims. Nowadays everybody from New York Times editors to real live tweens are enamored of the sequential lit. From a niche product for mouth-breathing microcephalics, comics have become our nation’s primary containment vessel for deep meaningfulness. Open them and feel your world expand.

But while comics may have generously embraced tween mall rats, the same cannot exactly be said for The Best American Comics Criticism. Schwartz’s keyboard lauds the heterogeneous appeal of comics, but his heart is still in some back alley, cheeto-smelling direct market basement, lost in a rapturous fugue of insular clusterfuckery. You’d think that if you were editing a tome focusing on comics criticism over the last 10 years, and if you further began your tome by genuflecting towards tween girls as icons of authenticity, you might possibly feel it incumbent upon you to include some passing mention of the 1,200 pound frilly panda in the room. Not Schwartz though; if he’s ever heard the word “shojo,” he’s damned if he’s going to let on. The only manga-ka who defiles these pristine pages is alt-lit analog Yoshihiro Tatsumi — and he only makes the cut because he was interviewed by that validator of all things lit-comic, Gary Groth.

The almost complete omission of manga (and the complete omission of online comics) isn’t an accident. Schwartz deliberately set out to produce a work which would appeal only to his own tediously over-represented demographic which would focus on the triumph of lit comics over the years 2000-2008.

Now, you might think that it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to title your book Best American Comics Criticism and then, deliberately collect a sampling of essays related to one particular strand of comics that happens to interest you and your in-group. You might think that in these circumstances your title seems, not like a description of the contents, but rather like a transparent marketing ploy. You might think that craven, and I would agree with you.

It’s only once you get over the fact that the book’s cover is a lie, though, that you can really start to appreciate the purity of the work’s cloistered lameness. Yes, only one female critic (Sarah Boxer) is included. Yes, Schwartz compulsively returns to the same writers again and again — three essays by Donald Phelps, two pieces by Dan Nadel, two by Jonathan Lethem, two by Dan Clowes. And yes there are not one, not two, but three interviews by Gary Groth, the book’s erstwhile publisher. But the most audacious moment of collegial nepotism is a pedestrian essay about Harold Gray by — Ben Schwartz himself! Even better, if you read the acknowledgements you learn that Schwartz wanted to include another of his own essays, but was prevented by rights conflicts. Really, it’s kind of a wonder he didn’t just put together a book of his own writings and slap that Best American title on it. After all, he’s the editor. If he thinks Ben Schwartz writes the best criticism in explored space, who’s to gainsay him? (It’s possible that Schwartz wanted to include the other essay instead of the piece he used… which means that he printed his second best as one of the top essays of the decade. If that hadn’t worked, would he have gone to his third best? His tenth? His grocery lists?)

To be fair, I’ve actually quite liked some of Schwartz’s writing over the years. A piece by him about Paris Hilton which ran in the Chicago Reader is one of my favorite things to ever run in that publication — I still remember its concluding paragraph clearly seven years later. And while using multiple essays by a handful of writers seems like a gratuitously ingrown way to structure a best-of book, if the results were provocative and enjoyable, I wouldn’t kick.

Unfortunately, the results here are… well, they’re really boring, mainly. Part of the problem is, again, the insular air of self-satisfaction. The worst in this regard is probably the Will Eisner/Frank Miller interview excerpt, in which the participants both pat themselves on the back so vigorously that they seem to be in some sort of contest to see whose arm will fracture first. In terms of abject sycophancy, though, the David Hajdu interview with Marjane Satrapi is close behind. “Like her work, Satrapi’s apartment is a mosaic of Middle Eastern and Western, high and low — a willful testament to cultural and aesthetic heterogeneity.” What is this, Marie Claire? Compared to such celebrity puff-piece drivel, the merely grating mutual admiration on display in the Jonathan Lethem/Dan Clowes interview seems positively tolerable. Sure, Lethem actually claims that what he and Clowes are doing is somehow “dangerous” while they’re both sitting on a podium in front of a herd of maddened, man-eating elephants — or are those rapturously respectful undergrads? Either way at least he doesn’t opine that Clowes’ bow tie is a sartorial sign of nostalgic doubling. You take what you can get.

When the book isn’t oozing complacency, though, it’s giving off an even worse miasma — anxiety. As any alt comics confession will tell you, the clubby smirks of the knowledgeable hobbyist hide a desperate desire to be accepted. The book is one long grovel, as if Schwartz hopes to win fame, fortune, and mainstream acceptance through sheer power of toadying. This is most visible in the egregious reliance on “name” authors. Ephemeral book introductions by John Updike, Dan Clowes and Jonathan Lethem all read like exactly what they are — celebrity endorsements. Alan Moore’s disjointed interview transcription about Steve Ditko is interesting but slight, while Seth’s essay on John Stanley seems padded out with an overdetermined breezy musing that is, I guess, supposed to be redolent of whimsical genius. “I’m sure when [Stanley] wrote these disposable comic books he could never have dreamed that, half a century later, grown adults would still be looking at them. It’s an odd world.” Or maybe it’s a clichéd world. So hard to tell the difference.

Schwartz pulls out a host of other gimmicks too — a fascimile of the court decision giving Siegel and Schuster back their rights in Superman; an Amazon comments thread about Joe Matt; a meta-cartoon by Nate Gruenwald, comprised of annotations upon a fictitious old school cartoonists “classic” strips. The first seems needless, the second is blandly predictable; the last actually has a lovely expressionist/modernist feel, though I think it probably lost a good deal in being excerpted. All of them, though, seem to come from the same place of nervous desperation. “I know no one here really wants to read criticism,” Schwartz seems to be saying. “So, um… here! Look! Bunnies!”

Schwartz does seem to prefer bunnies to criticism — perhaps because he has only the vaguest idea of what criticism is, or of why anyone would be interested in it. Specifically, for a critic and a supposed connoisseur of criticism, he seems to have a marked aversion to anything that might be considered an idea. Most of the pieces in the book say little or less than little. John Hodgman’s essays, for example, tells us that Jack Kirby thought of his Fourth World series as a long completed work… and now folks like Brian K. Vaughn also think of their series as long completed work, and ain’t that something? Rick Moody says Epileptic shows “this relatively new form can be as graceful as its august literary forbearers.” R. C. Harvey assures us that Fun Home is “Serious literature for mature readers for whom sex is only part of adulthood;” Jeet Heer insists that “Whatever he might have drawn from his personal memories, the emotions that Frank King explored are universal;” Donald Phelps emits his usual fog of avuncular gush; Paul Gravett bounces up and down in the backseat while chattering on about how “lots of people, writers, artists, editors and readers, are in this for the long haul, for however long it takes for the graphic novel to achieve its possibilities.” This is knee-jerk boosterism, platitudinous bunk intended to sell me crap, not to make me think. For Schwartz, it seems, the best criticism is marketing copy. Maybe he should edit an anthology of beer commercials.

There are some enjoyable pieces. In his review of comics commemorating 9/11, R. Fiore sounds like the ignorant blowhard at the end of the bar (Terrorism doesn’t work, Robert? Really? The KKK will be surprised to hear that Jim Crow never happened then.) But at least he has some personality and something to say, no matter how asinine. Sarah Boxer’s essay about race in Krazy Kat has moments of interpretive élan. Ken Parille’s dissection of Dan Clowes’ David Boring is so passionate about its obsession that it’s fascinating reading even for someone who, like me, really hates David Boring. And Dan Nadel’s evisceration of the Masters of Comics art exhibit is perhaps the strongest piece in the volume, not least because it hits so painfully close to home. “So, if the curators really want comics to be examined as a serious medium, the first step is not to establish a bullshit canon, but rather to be serious — avoid silly stunt-casting, attempt to provide rudimentary information, and for heavens sake, try not to commission an exhibited artist’s wife to write about another exhibited artist. Y’know, act like real, grown-up curators! Good luck.” Schwartz, man — that had to have left a mark.

But a few pleasant oases don’t make it worthwhile to cross the wasteland. The irony is that, in the end, this book proves exactly the opposite of what Schwartz intended. Best American Comics Criticism doesn’t give us comics as an engaged, vibrant medium, connected to ideas and to the broader world. Instead, Schwartz’s comicdom is a cramped little shanty, from which, every so often, a tiny face sticks out to lick the nearest boot or shout in a quavering voice, “I am somebody!” before diving back into the hovel. If you believe this volume, comics between 2000 and 2008 went precisely nowhere. They’re still as boring, still as self-involved, and still as desperate for approval as they ever were. I don’t actually believe that Best American Comics Criticism is an accurate reflection of the best in comics or in writing about comics. But if it is, we all need to give the fuck up.
 

Your City’s a Sucker: Chronic City, Complicity, and Internet Fiction, Part 2

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In part one I discussed how the existence of the internet complicates and modifies many of the ideas laid out in David Foster Wallace’s “E Unibas Pluram and in particular how our transition from a nation where human labor is engaged in making objects to one in which it is engaged in making images is a key societal change that a recent crop of novelists are trying to address. Today, I’ll talk at length about Jonathan Lethem’s recent novel Chronic City as an example of this.
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It’s hard to summarize or even introduce the plot of Chronic City, as its gradual unfolding and the realizations that come with it is an important part of the experience of a first reading, but as Hooded Utilitarian is a pro-spoiler kind of place, let’s give it a shot.  Chronic City concerns the (mis)adventures of a washed-up former child star named Chase Insteadman who enjoys a mid-thirties second celebrity due to his engagement to a doomed astronaut named Janice Turnbull. Janice is stranded in a space station behind a line of Chinese mines, a series of letters she writes to Chase her only communication with the Earth (or the reader). Chase meets and befriends a washed-up cultural critic named Perkus Tooth, who is one of contemporary literature’s great eccentric side-kicks. Perkus, who made his reputation posting hand-scrawled broadsides on the walls of buildings all over New York, now lives in a rent-controlled Upper East Side apartment where he does lots of drugs, eats cheeseburgers and muses about the hidden connections between various pop culture ephemera.

Perkus and Chase’s crew is rounded out by two other friends: Richard Abneg and Oona Lazlow.  Abneg, a former tenant-rights radical, now works for New York’s billionaire mayor undoing rent stabilization laws. Oona, Perkus’s former protégé with whom Chase begins an affair, ghost-writes celebrity autobiographies.  Together, they discover and begin chasing after quasi-mystical objects called chaldrons, odd sparkling urn-like containers that they’ve only glimpsed images of on Ebay.

The novel moves with the episodic rhythms of a difficult friendship.  There are bursts of and gestures towards an overriding narrative involving a conspiracy that remains thoroughly in the background until the final few chapters. In its place, are many many conversations about pop cultural artifacts, soirees amongst the elites of Manhattan and ongoing searches for capital-t Truth.

Wallace talks about us being one big audience, but Chronic City is after something a little bit different. Through Chase’s eyes, what we see is an age where we are spectators and consumers, yes, but we’re also performers. We’re also the ones making the very culture we’re the audience for. Via YouTube, Facebook, Blogs, Tumblrs, Twitter, Pinterest, through Vimeo and Etsy and Soundcloud and countless other outlets, we are audience and performer at the same time. We can no longer claim—as Wallace does— that a culture is being imposed on us, one that’s simultaneously delightful and infantilizing and isolating.  We are both halves of the equation now.  Whatever happens, we are complicit in it.

Complicity is the big wrinkle that Chronic City brings to this issue. And it turns out that once you start looking for it, the word complicit appears all over the book[1].  The word first surfaces on page 13 when Chase is trying to explain his newfound friend Perkus to the reader, when, after a litany of different cultural subjects Perkus would rant about, Chase sums it up thusly:

 

In short, some human freedom had been leveraged from view at the level of consciousness itself.  Liberty had been narrowed, winnowed, amnesiacked.  Perkus Tooth used the word without explaining—by it he meant something like the Mafia itself would do, a whack, a rubout.  Everything that mattered most was a victim in this perceptual murder plot.  Further: always to blame was everyone: when rounding up the suspects, begin with yourself.  Complicity, including his own, was Perkus Tooth’s only doubtless conviction. (emphasis mine)

 

The tone here is not moralistic. Chronic City is not saying—and never says— that we are evil for our participation. If anything, it views this participation that we all do (including Perkus, including Jonathan Lethem, including me, including you) as a fact. The book may be trying to make us see this participation, but it’s not scolding us for it. Instead of judging us as Perkus does, Lethem tries to make us aware of the ways that we all make our bargains, have our scripts and have to pay a price for being in and enjoying this society we’ve made.

And we do enjoy it. Let’s not bullshit each other. Like Richard Abneg screaming that he wants to fuck a Chaldron the first time he sees one, there’s something very ecstatic about all of this.  It’s not without joy. But it’s not without its price either, particularly for us artistically-inclined folk.  The internet has both devalued creativity and enabled it.  There’s more writing—and reading—going on than at any point in human history, and much of it is for free. Facebook is able to have a small staff because its users make its content for them.

That content is worth pausing to consider. I find it striking, for example, that the first major internet meme most people I know encountered involved baby talk gibberish scrawled on pictures of kittens, and much of the writing we generate is poisoned with reflexive bad-faith and a kind of unquashable rage. And there’s a constant feedback loop of participation, anger and trollery begetting anger and trollery like the two warring factions in The Butter Battle Book.

I’m complicit right now, come to think of it. I am writing this post for free on the internet. Generating more content, some of it fueled with internet skepticism, a skepticism that is immediately defanged because you have to get onto the internet to read it in the first place. Indeed, I don’t watch DFW’s six hours of television a day, but I spent a great deal more time than that staring into my computer screen, interacting with people online, passing along memes and hashtags, doing a lot of things that feel like work but aren’t, participating in this culture I also try to critique.  What choice do I, do any of us, have?

Chronic City is examining this world built on complicity, built on active—if often unwitting—participation in the very systems that we are angry at and want to overthrow. And it examines that world through the very specific—and very odd—eyes and words of narrator and protagonist Chase Insteadman.

Chase is a retired act-or.  He no longer acts.  That’s the key aspect of his character. Within the book there are only a handful of moments when Chase consciously commits some kind of action in pursuit of an objective (or, in other words, acts the way we expect a protagonist to act). Instead of being an actor, Chase is imbued with a kind of monstrous self-awareness. He might be blind to the realities of his life, but he knows he’s blind. One of the great pleasures of the book is reading Chase talking about himself, which he does with some regularity.  Pay particular attention to the way he phrases the following on 63 and 64:

 

The only role I ever played to anyone’s complete satisfaction was Warren, on Martyr & Pesty… The show itself was avowedly “dumb” and we all (writers and actors, network, critics, audience) flogged ourselves those days for our complicity in its runaway success, but I, the exception was unaccountably “soulful.”… I no longer act, that is unless you’d call my every waking moment a kind of performance.

 

Or this on 66-67:

I’m outstanding only in my essential politeness.  Exhausting, this compulsion to oblige any detected social need. I don’t mean only to myself; it’s frequently obvious that my charm exhausts and bewilders others, even as they depend upon it to mortar crevices in the social façade…. But if beneath charm lies exhaustion, beneath exhaustion lies a certain rage. I detect a wrongness everywhere. Within and Without, to quote a lyric. It would be misleading to say I’m screaming inside, for if I was I’d soon enough find a way to scream aloud.  Rather, the politeness infests a layer between me and myself, the name of the wrongness going not only unexpressed but unknown. Intuited only. Forbidden perhaps.

 

It is a very curious thing for a protagonist to be someone who doesn’t act. Doubly curious when that person is also the narrator. We are used to our protagonists wanting things and then taking certain actions to get them. But other than sex with Oona, we know very little about what Chase wants. Chase has little inner life, and is open about this. To drive the point home, Insteadman’s apartment is basically empty, devoid of any belongings worth describing. Instead, what he wants to describe to the reader is the view outside of his window, a view being slowly eclipsed by a high rise going up in front of it.

Chase’s mix of self-awareness and blindness, politeness and rage results from his transformation prior to the book’s beginning from a subject into an object. He understands that his existence is predicated on being used by other people. His life is lived as an extra man at a series of high-society functions; his politeness, sit-com childhood and newfound fame as the fiancée of a doomed astronaut get him invited to various soirees where he sings for his supper by discussing his love of his lost Janice Trumbull, whom he cannot even remember anymore.

Via Chase, Chronic City shows how we are losing pieces of our subjectivity in all our constant performing for other people; we are instead becoming—and treating others as—objects. As our culture moves from making things to making images of things—a subject Chronic City turns to overtly in the second half of the book—we in turn objectify ourselves. Chase talks about this frequently. As he goes to a fancy dinner with the richest couple in New York, he remarks that his “presence for an evening, or at least the duration of an elegant dinner, had been auctioned off as a premium, at a benefit for one of Maud Woodrow’s charities. I couldn’t anymore recall which.”  Six pages later, he says that his face is a mask. Chase has turned himself into an object to be sold by one person to another and he can’t even remember for what cause he’s doing it. Is it any wonder that, in the midst of the dinner, he comes down with a crippling flu?

I also don’t think that it’s a coincidence or authorial oversight that both Chase and Richard Abneg treat the women in their lives as objects. We know Oona has large incisors, heavy glasses, a black bob haircut, that she’s very skinny and that she has peach sized, impertinent breasts.  We don’t know who her parents are or where she comes from. We don’t know what she desires. Chase says he loves her, but his love largely boils down to trying to investigate her, to solve the problem of who she is against her own will[2].  Abneg, meanwhile, gazes upon the sleeping form of his lover Georgina Hawkmanaji and intones to his friends, “Such an amazing shape. How can anyone ever sit in a meeting, or make a plan, or add up a column of fucking numbers, when there’s a shape like that somewhere out there, a shape like that with your name on it, coming to get you?” The Hawkman, as she is called in the book, is a shape rather than a person.

The novel situates these people, these shapes, these performers in a very particular environment, for the Manhattan of Chronic City (and I hate to spoil this, but the book is undiscussable without this knowledge) is not our New York. It’s an alternate one, a kind of Earth-2, one where instead of 9/11 a great, never-ending fog descended on lower Manhattan, one where film directors Morrison Groom and Florian Ib have directed movies starring The Gnuppets and Marlon Brando or where people listen to groundbreaking post-punk band Cthonic Youth.

There’s a heavy emphasis within the novel on spaces-within-spaces.  Chase meets Richard at a party that takes place in a Brownstone within an Apartment building. A restaurant might hide a secret room. Perkus’s apartment, like a TARDIS is “a container bigger on the inside than the outside.” An installation artist named Laird Noteless’s signature artworks involve huge chasms dug into cities.

Children’s stories often begin with a kind of familiar cadence.  Once there was the Land Of _______ and in the Land there was a forest, and in the forest there was a house and in the house there was a room and in the room there was a cabinet and in the cabinet there was a drawer and in the drawer there was a box and in the box there was a….

What’s delightful about this for children (and adults) is that you are waiting to get to this end of the chain, because at the end of the chain is what really matters. It’s the magic ring. Or the truth. But on the internet, when you follow the series of boxes within boxes, you always hit another link in the chain, another rabbit hole to go down. You are always going deeper and deeper into new boxes and the truth, if it exists, becomes destabilized.  After all, in a world in which editing a Wikipedia article can change Marlon Brando from dead to alive, who knows what’s real and what’s fake?  Chronic City takes this idea and spins a world of it.  Its central trio of men—the brain, the body and the raging erection of Perkus Tooth, Charse Insteadman and Richard Abneg—seem to be on a search for truth. But the truths they eventually discover—I’ll leave them unarticulated here— might not even be true, and might not be actionable even if they are.

This all comes to a head once chaldrons show up and Perkus, Chase and Richard begin a series of mad scrambles to get their hands on one. Their first attempt leads to one of the book’s great setpieces, a mad Ebay-and-borrowed-credit-card pursuit fueled by high grade marijuana and the improvised guitar stylings of Sandy Bull (who, it turns out, actually exists).  It takes quite awhile for the trio to figure out why they even want a chaldron so badly in the first place.  It’s a perfect locus of desire… but a desire for what?:

“For something so warm… it casts a sort of … brusque… watery…. Shadow… over so much else… that I took for granted…”

“Despite sounding like a retarded Wallace Stevens I actually get you,” said Richard.  “That thing’s the ultimate bullshit detector–“

“Sure, and what it detects is that your city’s a sucker[3], Abneg.” Perkus spoke with a startling insistence, but his tone wasn’t needling. “Your city’s a fake, a bad dream.” This was somehow the case, the chaldron interrogated Manhattan, made it seem an enactment. An object, the chaldrone testified to zones, realms, elsewhere. Likely we’d lost the auction because one couldn’t’ be imported here, to this debauched and insupportable city. The winners had been rescuing the chaldron, ferrying it back to the better place.

 

And so we return back to Perkus’s essential truth: that somehow a fast one has been pulled on the world by the world, leaching everything real out of the universe and, to coin a verb, ersatzing it. Perkus responds to this perceived conspiracy in two seemingly contradictory ways.  He both attempts to reject the world that he views as corrupt and looks for vibrational evidence for his one truth in pop cultural ephemera.  In this, Marlon Brando serves as Perkus’ Space-Coyote-Spirit-Guide, a human signpost revealing hidden truths. Or rather, the same truth, over and over again.

Whether or not the secret Perkus has uncovered is, in fact, true is an open question within the novel. Chronic City is suffused with contradictory moments, ambiguous clues, impossible moments. The reality of the novel—like the reality of Wikipedia— is too unstable to permit anything like an objective truth.  As a result, the book avoids the kind of modernist and romantic clichés about outsider artists. All of Perkus’s ideas could just be a bulwark against his sense of failure, a way for him to sabotage any chance at a recognition he claims to not want but also craves[4].

The tone of the novel, as mentioned before, eschews judgment for a satirical, wise-cracking humor that covers over—and eventually gives way to—despair. For when you are trapped in a world where all is image, and those images may not even have real-world referents anymore, when the closest to freedom you can come is to realize you are a puppet, where hidden conspiracies are ever-present yet might simply be nothing more than the tacit acceptance and perpetuation of the world as it is, it’s hard not to despair.

Chronic City isn’t the only recent work to take this state of affairs as subject matter. Jennifer Egan’s Look At Me, the recent film Shame, Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply, even Dash Shaw’s recent Bodyworld are all suffused with information-age anxieties about identity, reality, and image. Obviously, these themes are not new—they’re present in work as diverse as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and much of Philip K. Dick as well as the Image-Fictioneers that Wallace celebrates— but in this new crop of information age literature we see these themes and anxieties jumbled and replayed in new ways.  If previously we were concerned with loneliness, now we’re concerned with a kind of alienating hyper-sociality. If before we wanted to penetrate surfaces to get at the realities underneath, now we’re worried there might not be any reality to get to. If before we were victims of a system imposed upon us, now we are creators and perpetuators of that very system.

Of course, maybe it’s always been thus. Perhaps it’s just more visible now. After all, Perkus can’t point to the time when we got amnesiacked. It exists outside of consciousness, fueled by the endless money of the inescapable Manhattan, a world rendered so insular in the book that the reader is likely to wonder along with Chase if the rest of the world even exists.  Of course, it does and it doesn’t. As Fozzy says in this clip, uttering the essential truth of his Gnuppet brethren, I do understand that I am not a real bear. But I know what I am… I’m a real puppet.


[1] Not for nothing, as well, are two of the four main characters sell-outs. Abneg has sold out his political beliefs and Oona has sold out her talents. Yet, and it’s a testament to the book’s charms, they remain loveable to us.

[2] There’s another essay to be written about how Oona is in many ways a response to all of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl/ Mysterious Woman Shaman clichés of early 21st century literature and film, particularly in her refusal to indulge or take care of Chase at his most immature and vulnerable moments. That’s for someone else to write.

[3] It’s not really germane, but this is one of the book’s many references to LCD Soundsystem, which joins a whole host of things that Lethem references with pithy one-liners.

[4] Perkus, we learn, turned down a book deal once because the book was going to be marketed as rock criticism and he hates rock critics.

Your City’s a Sucker: Chronic City, Complicity, and Internet Fiction Part 1

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(Note: The following is adapted from a talk given at the University of Minnesota)

Here’s a fun trick, if you happen to be teaching a college level class: Squint out from behind that big desk or lectern or black treated-rubber-covered laboratory table on which you are banging your fists in a desperate attempt to keep your students paying attention to you instead of to Facebook and say unto them, Alright, raise your hands if you can remember the first time you ever used the internet.

Try it. Not right now, obviously, as I’d prefer you read this, and if it happens to be in the twilight hours going and getting a bunch of kids together might get you in trouble. Should you ever be amongst a large quantity of the yoots of America, try it.  It’s an edifying experience.

And then, if you want to blow their minds, tell them that in ten years, none of the eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds you ask this question of will raise their hands. You’ll get lots of those mmms you hear from the audience during TED talks when someone has said something that feels profoundish.

I remember the first time I used the internet, of course. I had been logging onto BBSes—and even running one—for years.  In fact, I considered myself (mistakenly) a fairly techno-savvy person.  But I had never used the internet before the last week of August, 1997, when Joe Dickson showed me how to plug my computer in to Vassar’s Ethernet system, load up Netscape Navigator and go to visit a then obscure online bookseller called Amazon dot com.

Don’t worry. This isn’t going to be about nostalgia, even if nostalgia is one of the dominant modes of the internet.  No. I’m far more interested in the ubiquity of the web and in the ways webbiness has begun to infect and affect the narratives we consume and create.

Twenty two years ago, David Foster Wallace was thinking about similar questions with his essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction. Noting that people spend more time consuming television than doing almost anything else, Wallace inquired into what happens to us when we spend the plurality of our hours as spectators as an audience staring, as he points out, at our furniture.  What, he wonders, does it do to us when we stop interacting with the real world and spend most of our time not interacting with but rather absorbing fictionalized narratives about the world?

My guess is that a lot of HU readers have read the essay, and it’s way too long and complicated to summarize here. But to broad-stroke it for you, what Wallace ends up at is looking at the ways that “irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive of those features of contemporary U.S. culture… that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird pretty hand has my generation by the throat.”  Along the way he notes that “irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and at the same time they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture,” while calling TV a “malevolent addiction,” because it holds itself out as the solution to a problem (loneliness) that it is abetting.

What Wallace is really after is the ways fiction could (and does) respond to all of this. To do this, he describes what he calls “Image-Fiction.” This term is a bit slippery. Wallace seeks to unite many aesthetically divergent writers (such as Don DeLillo, AM Homes, Mark Leyner and himself) under a banner that’s more defined by core values than actual noticeable artistic commonalities:

 

If the postmodern church fathers found pop images valid referents and symbols in fiction….the new Fiction of Images uses the transient received myths of popular culture as a world in which to imagine fictions about “real,” albeit pop-mediated, characters….The Fiction of Image is not just a use or mention of televisual culture but an actual response to it, an effort to impose some sort of accountability … It is a natural adaptation of the hoary techniques of literary Realism to a ‘90s world whose defining boundaries have been deformed by electric signal. For one of realistic fiction’s big jobs used to be… to help readers leap over the walls of self and locale and show us unseen or –dreamed-of people and cultures and ways to be. Realism made the strange familiar. Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a Soviet-satellite newscast of the Berlin Wall’s fall… it’s not a surprise that some of today’s most ambitious Realist fiction is going about trying to make the familiar strange. (all italics in the original)

 
One of the problems with reading E Unibus Pluram today is that it’s a bit dated.  This essay was written prior to both The Sopranos and widespread internet use, and so it’s tempting to say that everything has changed.  Which, to some extent it has; the problems he’s discussing are true, but they’ve also radically shifted.  Nevertheless, it provides a rather nice lens through which we can look at Jonathan Lethem—one of Wallace’s near-contemporaries—and how his latest novel Chronic City assays American humanity in the age of the internet[1].

Wallace is worried about what happens to a culture when it moves from being A Nation of “Do-ers and Be-ers” (his words) to a nation of spectators and consumers.  We watch television, we buy things on QVC. Wash, rinse, repeat.  This is not exactly true anymore.

Many readers of this post have likely heard someone on the radio or the teevee say something akin to “We used to make things. America doesn’t make anything anymore!” as a way of tracing our decline as a nation.  Pretty much everyone who comments on the economy or politics, regardless of political ideology, ends up saying this at some point.

That statement—America Is Broken, We Don’t Make Things Anymore—is sort of true and sort of misleading.  It’s not true in the sense that it’s actually meant.  It turns out many many things are still manufactured in America. But—and this is an important but—not that many Americans are employed making them. Many of them are made, instead, by robots. So the statement “we used to make things” becomes true, even if the statement “we used to make things” is false.

It’s also worth thinking about the other word in that sentence: Things.  We. Used. To. Make. Things.  We don’t make things anymore. We have robots for that. So what do we make? We make cultural output and in particular, we make images.  And many of us are doing this all the time.  For free. On the internet. We are making animated .gifs and publishing them on tumblr. We are making memes of Ryan Gosling going “Hey Girl.” We’re writing long blog posts doing close readings of novels. We’re making short films and posting them to YouTube.  And we love these images we create so much that we will go to a festival to see a hologram of a dead rapper perform.

This is having a profound effect on who we are, what the world is and how we perceive and navigate it. This is what, to me, Chronic City is about.  As we’ll discuss in part two (now up!), It’s about these forces, ones that affect all of us, ones we don’t think about anymore because they’re the New Normal.


[1] NB: Chronic City is a large, long, thematically dense and at times deliciously contradictory and ambiguous novel. It’s also clearly meant to be read more than once.  So please take this as A reading of the book rather than The One True reading of the book. If you haven’t read it before, I hope this provides you some sign posts for your own explorations within its streets and boulevards.

Unkafkaesque

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This piece first ran on Splice Today.
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Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” is about an artist/performer who starves himself for the amusement of the public. Alas, his artistry and dedication are unappreciated, and so he dwindles to nothing alone in a corner of a dirty cage.

The tale is the first selection in Kafkaesque, a new anthology of stories inspired by Kafka and edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly. The choice to open with “A Hunger Artist” seems a deliberate tug at the well-read reader’s heart. Kafka, after all, may have thought he would vanish, but instead, here he is, more robust than ever, inspiring anthologies full of followers. Kafka now seems less like the hunger artist who died alone and unmourned in the straw, and more like the panther who replaces him as an exhibition, a personality so magnetic that “the spectators crowded around the cage, and did not ever want to move away.”

It’s a poignant irony—and as such, it’s very un-Kafkaesque. Kafka’s stories are certainly filled with irony, but those ironies aren’t sweet or comforting or triumphant. They’re baffling and , disappearing into themselves much as the hunger artist collapses into his skin. Kafka wasn’t sentimental, not so much because he looked at the world with cold dispassion as because his creations were so intensely narrow. It’s hard to be sentimental when everyone, even yourself, is just a thing in an ever-shrinking and dreamer-less dream.

Kafkaesque is then a contradiction in itself—it implies a communal experience where there is not even any identity. The stories in the volume most consistently betray Kafka’s spirit when they insist—helplessly, inevitably—that that spirit exists. Paul Di Filippo imagines Kafka as a superhero fighting crime in New York; Jonathan Lethem and Carl Scholz imagine him as a writer for Frank Capra in Hollywood; Philip Roth has him as an aging Hebrew school instructor; Tamar Yellin has him as a cute old man with a terrier in Wales; Carter Scholz (again) puts him in a hotel with Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives. It all has a bravura pomo smugness; Gregor Samsa awaking suddenly to find himself on This American Life. The point of each of these stories is that the author knows Kafka and can send him where the author wills. The point of Kafka’s stories were always the exact opposite.

The selections that don’t feature Kafka as a character often work better, but still encounter similar problems. Eileen Gun recasts “The Metamorphosis” in a corporate office… with a more upbeat ending. T. Coraghessan Boyle recasts The Trial in a service garage… with a more upbeat ending. Indeed, “The Hunger Artist” is alone in the collection in the sordid, insignificant manner in which it offs its protagonist. If anything’s Kafkaesque, it’s having your hero shot at the end “like a dog,” but nobody here has the stomach for it. Instead, the writers prefer more congenial strategies, whether ambivalent personal epiphany (Tamar Yellin, Michael Blumlein); ambivalent apocalypse (Theodora Goss.); or ambivalent anti-climactic domestic mundanity (Jeffrey Ford.)

The best stories, though, are the ones that not only don’t feature Kafka, but don’t even seem particularly inspired by him. J. G. Ballard’s “The Drowned Giant,” Borges’ “The Lottery in Babylon,” and Damon Knight’s “The Handler” are all sideways parables, but there is nothing in any of them that seems to especially demand Kafka as a predecessor. In fact, all seem closer to each other than any of them do to K.

Specifically, Kafka is obsessed with parables of the pains of failure and diminishment. Ballard, Borges, and Knight give us, instead, parables of the pains of success, or at least expansion. Knight’s effort is about a boisterous, beloved life-of-the-party who is actually (to everyone’s embarrassment) a suit worn by a diminutive, boring, sweaty square. Ballard tells about a giant swept up onto the beach whose body parts live on as Brobdinagian mementos spread throughout the city. And Borges’ “The Lottery in Babylon” is about how a mysterious company institutes a lottery which becomes so popular that eventually everyone and everything bows to its totalitarian regime of chance.

Kafka may be the one who was adjectivized, but Borges seems like the more influential writer, both in general and in this anthology specifically. Theodora Goss’ “The Rapid Advance of Sorrow” is self-consciously “magical” and profound in a way that’s much closer to bad Borges than to bad Kafka. It’s Borges’ daemon, not Kafka’s, which is responsible for all those Kafka’s of infinite alternate earths. And the proliferating parts of Ballard’s giant insistently echo the mysterious diffusions of Borges’ “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”

Borges multiplies and insinuates and conquers, then, rather like the lottery he writes about. Not coincidentally, “The Lottery of Babylon” can be read as a metaphor for the sinister exhilaration of capitalism, Babylon’s “infinite game of chance”—with everything, even the omnipotent corporation, dissolving into a rage for randomness—seems like the perfect Libertarian wet dream.

Capitalism is totalizing and expansive; it crosses borders to turn everything into itself. Borges didn’t exactly approve, but he understood. So does Boyle, whose protagonist is trapped in the garage until he figures out that he has no choice but to buy a crappy car from the proprietor. So does Michael Blumlein, whose fashion designer finds odd inspiration in a giant wasp, a winged avatar of success that flies away at the last minute. Endings open out into irony or nothing, but they do open, in thrall to the lottery and its ominously friable possibilities.

Kafka didn’t see things that way. He wasn’t a world-builder or a world-solver, displaying his parables like coins for some secret slot machine. His stories have no possibilities, ominous or otherwise. As the Hunger Artist is dying, he explains that he only starved himself because he had no choice; he could never find what he wanted to eat. He’s a failed consumer, left out of the rat race not because he lost, but because he couldn’t figure out how to play. Nothing absurd or unexpected happened to him; his life just narrowed and narrowed until, off to the side of desire, it guttered out. No wonder everyone prefers the panther, which knows what it likes to eat and exudes the crude virility of wanting from behind its bars. It, not Kafka, paces through these pages. Kafka’s dead.

The Internet is the Return of the Repressed

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Back in 2007, after the release of You Don’t Love Me Yet, I was fortunate enough to “silently interview” Jonathan Lethem (I emailed him the questions and he responded in email).

Mr Lethem was a remarkably generous conversationalist, and his answers were lovely — well-thought and well-formed. I wasn’t sure what would interest him, so I sent very disparate prompts on everything from literacy to comics to postmodernism. The coherence of this interview is entirely due to his thoughtfulness.

Thanks to bizarre editorial preferences, however, the full interview never saw the light of day, until now. Lethem comments at one point about things you write on the Internet coming back to haunt you; I hope if he notices this he’ll be pleased with what he wrote. I think it’s more the Return of the Impressive.

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Caro: Since I’m in DC and you’re a known baseball enthusiast, got anything safe to print about the Washington Nationals?

JL: I fear not, but I’ll risk it. As a lifelong Mets fan I grew up feeling dread and fascination with the Montreal Expos, who tended to torment us, especially a now-mostly-forgotten cluster of players — Tim Raines, Floyd Youmans, Andres Gallarraga, etc. The whole Francophone thing, the obscure swirling logo on their caps, the name bound in time to some mysterious public event… all combined to make the Expos a source of wonder. The Nationals, by contrast, remind me in their flat, grey, literal existence of the “Washington Generals” (as opposed to the “Specifics”?), the basketball team destined to lose every night to the Harlem Globetrotters. I do like Dmitri Young, though.

Caro: I feel a little obligated to ask you about book festivals [Note: this interview was conducted in conjunction with Lethem’s appearance at George Mason University’s book festival]. I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on the value of putting authors and readers together in festival settings or on the state of literacy in the US in general?

JL: Ah, well, that’s a big question, literacy. I tend to worry about blowing a lot of hot air if I generalize about something like literacy, except to say that I’m in favor of it, fortunately find it everywhere I go, and therefore prefer to believe rumors of its demise are overstated.

As for festivals, all jokes aside, I really do like greeting other writers, and readers too. There’s a tension in this passion of ours, between the fundamentally solitary acts of reading and writing, the completely beautiful monastic tendencies that those activities cultivate in us, and then the countervailing urge to gather, come out of our shells, rediscover the tribal world, exchange enthusiasms, autograph one another’s first editions, brag and complain, talk about baseball, etcetera. I’ve always felt this double-urge very strongly, and I suppose my life can partly be described as a series of attempts to bridge the gap between the solitude of my private obsessions and the embrace of a larger human world — from working in bookstores, where I could meet other readers and press my favorites on them, to publishing my novels and then going out to thank personally the odd folks who liked them. Festivals are a nice opportunity to, again and briefly, resolve the public-private paradox.

Caro: You Don’t Love Me Yet is set in LA even though you are now, given your two best-known books, strongly associated with New York. Did you set this book in LA because you felt it was more appropriate, or more metaphorically significant, or just imaginative tourism?

JL: I lived in California for ten years before returning to Brooklyn — though I lived in Northern California, which in its way is as different (and as pitted-against) Los Angeles as New York is. And during that time everything I wrote was more or less set either in the Western part of the country — the Bay Area, or the desert west — or in a kind of vaguely gritty urban cartoon. You Don’t Love Me Yet actually felt like a return, to me, to the settings and modes of some earlier work, most particularly a book called As She Climbed Across The Table (as well as more recently unBrooklynish short stories like Vivian Relf). But I do understand that for a certain readership I “begin” with Motherless Brooklyn and then continue in The Fortress of Solitude, and that for those readers it may have come as a sort of shock, not just because of Los Angeles but because of the relatively blithe comic tone. I suppose I was willing to provide a u-turn experience for those members of my audience (assuming they were willing to follow me into the new territory, which is never something one should take for granted), just as I’ve felt willing — and sometimes even driven — to disappoint earlier expectations that I “stay” a hard-boiled detective writer, or a science fiction writer, or a postmodern writer, or whatever.

I landed in Los Angeles rather than the Bay Area — which would have been the more obvious home for a novel about hapless hipsters in their late twenties, seeing as how that was where I was when that was more or less who I was, but I realized that after the Brooklyn work — not just the two novels, but the constellation of essays and stories that surrounded them — I wanted to avoid the air of personal reminiscence even more completely. Rather than relying on the flavor of my memories of a place, I liked Los Angeles for being a place I was merely curious and confounded by. I felt free to write into my own perplexity about the way L.A. works because these characters are themselves perplexed (just as I felt safe writing about high-end particle physics in As She Climbed Across The Table because my characters are befuddled by physics).

Caro: LA’s media-saturated, less-than-intellectual culture is often credited with our society’s turn away from verbal literacy toward audio-visual media. It’s not uncommon for writers and teachers of writing to consider the proliferation of non-verbal media as bad for traditional verbal literacy (although there are different literacies at work). Do you think audio-visual literacy impedes verbal literacy, or is it just a matter of access and practice?

JL: Oh, big questions about literacy again! I’m terribly interested in your remarks here but fear I can’t do them justice in brief. Why don’t I just make a mysterious gesture in their direction by saying — yes, absolutely, yes: “different literacies,” even within the notion of a “visual literacy” – for instance, I’ve become hugely curious about the enormous differences in the ‘reading protocols’ that distinguish film spectatorship from comic-book reading – despite the great temptation, indulged everywhere lately, to conflate the two. One is passive and collective, the other so elaborate and private – and difficult, because of the necessity of constantly switching from verbal to visual presentation – that it may in fact be more hermetic than traditional reading. And, though I’ve never made myself familiar with it, I bet video game literacy is another thing altogether.

Anyway, I’d hardly be the first person to note that the great irony of cyberspace is that everyone’s using it to revive the epistolary tradition… e-mail (which we’re using now) was hardly the revolutionary post-literate virtual reality everybody was so hot for and frightened of fifteen years ago… but it is a revolution, isn’t it?

Caro: What prompted you to take plagiarism and originality as your subject in You Don’t Love Me Yet? And why did you choose alternative music as the place to work this out rather than, say, hip-hop, where appropriation is so much more direct and obvious?

JL: Great question. For the record, I once did, long ago, try to write a story about appropriation issues in hip-hop — this was around the time that Vanilla Ice was being compared to Elvis Presley for his usurpation of black cultural authenticity — and I failed. My attempt became a science fiction story about basketball players who appropriate one another’s skills using digital technology, so that a new player could “sample” Michael Jordan — it was a sort of disguised hip-hop story. And — continuing to feel defensive — I have no particular aversion to hip-hop. I feel the need to specify this because my semi-autobiographical character in Fortress of Solitude, Dylan Ebdus, is a sort of purist about soul music and has a great discomfort with rap. Not me, though. Yet somehow I’ve never managed to write about it very embracingly or extensively. It’s one of those things that just doesn’t seem, despite my interest, to be “mine” to write about. Like – ha! – Los Angeles.

Anyway, I had a whole bunch of other reasons to want to write about a mediocre rock band. I didn’t think of myself as having something to say about the ‘alternative scene’ (by the way, since since you mentioned scare quotes, I feel obliged to use them everywhere) in any real sense – this book simply doesn’t take place in the real world in that sense. But a rock band – two guitars, bass and drum – seems to me some kind of homely and encompassing archetype of the urge to blend artistic aspiration and hanging out with your friends – to refuse to choose between the two. And that interests me very much.

Caro: I’m not sure I have the chops to ask this question but I want to ask you about comic books as a literary influence because one of the things that I find myself as a adult not liking about comic books is how disruptive they feel in contrast with reading prose.

But highly literate people who love comics don’t seem to experience this the same way – there’s a deftness at balancing the multi-media form. Reading a comic seems to wish for a more seamless experience that takes a particular kind of literacy to really accomplish. Do you think art and words do inherently different literary work, or do they just work on the reader in different ways?

JL: Actually, I think I want to disagree with you directly here (and this is a distinction I began making in an earlier reply, above): For me, comic books are actually a very disrupted and baroque kind of reading experience, with uneasy shifts between simultaneous languages, and interesting tensions created between levels of ‘reality’ – the cartoonish and the mimetic coexisting – and it is in those kind of disruptions and discomforts that I find comic books most directly influencing my own art. (This is, again, as opposed to cinema, which seems to me a language of seamless immersion, imitative in that regard of waking reality, or dream – and, of course, interesting to and influential on me as well!)

Caro: You’re one of these literate people who love comics, but you have written several long and completely un-illustrated books in quite meaningful prose that take our cultural and personal engagement with comics and other art forms – music, film — as starting points. How do you feel about projects where someone makes a graphic novel out of a prose book, like with Auster’s New York Trilogy? Are they two ways of telling the same story or just a post-literate Cliff’s Notes?

JL: Well, yeah, much as I love that trilogy, that adaptation always seemed a bit dignified and literal to me — for the same reason I was never much of a reader of Classics Comics, and I mostly don’t like doggedly faithful middlebrow film adaptations of novels regarded as important. When one form takes from another I mostly prefer it to be a more fugitive and irreverent relationship, with stuff discarded or hidden, with slippages and rough edges showing. More energy and uncertainty. I’d love to see what would happen, for instance, if Paul collaborated with a comic book artist on something new, from the ground up.

Caro: From comics to lyrics: In your review of The Ground Beneath Her Feet for the Village Voice you say Rushdie’s lyrics “die on the page.” Lyrics play a pivotal plot point in You Don’t Love Me Yet — but not as quotes. Do you think quoting always has this death-effect on language that lives in another context? When you pull from a context that isn’t prose — lyrics or comics — what needs to happen to that language in order for it to not “die on the page?”

JL: Ah, this is the horror of the internet – ‘the return of the repressed’. I wish I hadn’t written that review. I’ll console myself by imagining that every writer has one such regret in his catalogue somewhere. The point I was snottily and overconfidently advancing is one that still concerns me: the difficulty of presenting one work of art within another, persuasively. Yet the evidence shows that I’m compelled to go up against this seeming impossibility. Rock lyrics have been, for me as a reader, a particular sticking point, even in books, like Delillo’s Great Jones Street, or Shiner’s Say Goodbye, that I find otherwise pretty beguiling. For that reason, I suppose, I chickened out and only quoted fragmentary lyrics in You Don’t Love Me Yet — and not even many of those. Mostly I just dropped the titles of my fictional songs and allowed the reader to imagine the rest. But I also believed I was safeguarding myself (perhaps wrongly) by asserting the mediocrity and marginality of my band – I didn’t claim they’d conquered the world, or even the pop charts. It’s that claim, for fictional art – that it changes the course of culture – that I usually find the most problematic and unpersuasive, like the presence of a “555” prefix in a phone number. And this is from a writer, and reader, not usually terribly concerned with verisimilitude. But we all have our sticking points.

Caro: In an interview with Robert Birnbaum in The Morning News you mention your “postmodernism” in scare quotes and emphasize your traditionalism. A sense of history and place doesn’t often provoke the adjective “postmodern,” so I’ve grabbed onto that as a traditional element in your work — you describe it as something that you had to learn by reading less-postmodern authors. Have you self-consciously tried to balance the influence of writers like Coover and Calvino an Angela Carter and those imaginative writers who created what came to be known as postmodern writing with the influences of modernism?

I’m also thinking of the way you mention elsewhere that a notion of “realism” that doesn’t take imagined reality into account isn’t really very realistic. Also in that interview with Birnbaum you say, “in Fortress of Solitude, the superhero is the metaphor that breaks out of the metaphorical and runs amok, distorting the reality.” It seems like metaphor is a much more useful and descriptive concept than “realism” for talking about the distorted way we experience the world. Questions of whether your work is realist or not seem to elide these postmodern influences and your sensitivity to metaphor and how we make our world through cultural engagement. I want to take that quote as saying that reality is itself richly metaphorical but let me prompt you to say more on how a metaphor “breaks out of the metaphorical.” Does it become something else, no longer a metaphor?

In all these dichotomies and contrasts — metaphor against reality, intellectual against inspiration, postmodern against traditional, audiovisual against verbal, LA against NY — the begged-but-not-mentioned one is fragmentation against synthesis: your essays are very synthetic and your novels do try to say something about history, something meaningful about race and class and experience and the way people make sense of the world. In that same interview with Birnbaum you say American writing “gobbles contradiction” — do you mean that it feeds on it or that it makes it evaporate?

JL: Can I say “both”? It gobbles it as it evaporates? I love all these remarks of yours, I should say first of all. Any answer I give here, in this brief form, is destined to be inadequate. But a few observations: yes, I’m quite devoted to the notion that the dreamlife is also life, and that the exclusion of reverie, daydream, hallucination, paranoid or reverent irrational belief, wishful distortions, needful projection, art projects, and other distortions of the ostensible ‘literal’ everyday surface of reality results — to the extent that my straw man actually exists — in a ‘realism’ that is not only impoverished, but by my standards quite utterly unreal. In fact it makes for a kind of kabuki notion of the real, highly mannered and communicating as mimetic only within certain very local and temporal formal traditions. In time such narrow notions of mimeticism may look as silly as, say, the huge prevalence of a bogus jiggly ‘documentary’ camera style in nearly all serious Hollywood films of the past five years, regardless of their subject.

But then again, I’m quite committed — to glance, for a moment, at the evidence — to a choice that is itself mannered, specific, and funky, and I’d be guilty of obfuscation if I seemed to be claiming that my work simply (or “simply”) represented a fuller and more “real” “realism”. That is to say, the metaphor that breaks out of the metaphorical — the magic ring or spray-can that makes lost things visible or goat man in my work — for shorthand, let’s call it my goat man. My goat man is a deliberate affront, a textual problem, an area of slippage or fissure between the use of an (generous and florid) mimeticism elsewhere and the objectionable, suspiciously genre-activating chunk of fantastic stuff — a character or object or environment that blurts out of the category of symbol or metaphor, into the story itself, and demands to be recognized. The chunk of cognitive dissonance my customers are always finding in their soup spoons. For that I can offer no explanation briefer than my collected works themselves. That pursuit is the tail I am forever chasing, and it is my own tail, and whether you find my effort ludicrous — like a puppy on the lawn — or enthralling and terrifying, like the Worm Oroborous (check the spelling on that) depends on your set and setting, I suppose. If I have anything, ultimately, to add to the great conversation of literature, it is this habit of deliberate confusion.

Caro: Paul Auster and Robert Coover have both come up in this email and both, like you, have a thing about baseball. Is there something inherently literary about baseball?

JL: Well, sure, many things. And they’ve nearly all been remarked upon here or there. But one I don’t think I’ve seen clearly identified is baseball’s tendency, with its schematic base-to-base, one-thing-at-a-time, let’s-stop-and-talk-it-over tendencies, to create a strong feeling of missed opportunity, lost chance, alternate outcome thoughts in the viewer. Whereas other sports are largely about things that actually happen, a lot of baseball ends up being about things that almost happened, that could have happened, but didn’t. It’s full of speculation and regret. Stories, in other words.

Caro: Although you have put girls at the center of your stories (Pella Marsh in particular), you have been often concerned with boyhood, with male coming-of-age as mediated by popular art. I heard someone refer to you once as the Francois Truffaut of books (which I interpreted to be because you find boys fascinating but aren’t incapable of doing justice to girls.) You do get asked a lot of those Questions-That-Are-Good-To-Ask-Smart-Men about race and class and popular culture and comics and magic realism: I would like to ask you about girls. Girls in popular culture, girls in literature, girls in your literature. The Mother Jones article on sexism in comics. Whether feminine coming of age is mediated by popular art in the same way as for boys…really just a general prompt.

JL: Let me again be defensive: before I’d written The Fortress of Solitude, I remember seeing an entry on me in some literary encyclopedia that defined my accomplishment (on the strength of As She Climbed Across The Table and Girl In Landscape, surely) as “strong female characters”. That’s a reputation I’d love to imagine I’ve burnished with You Don’t Love Me Yet. But of course the two Brooklyn books are also both books of male comraderie and female exclusion. No doubt in those books, and in some stories, I’ve explored the Hemingwayesque theme of “men without women” (and you’d be safe enough adding “men who don’t deserve women.”) And then the whole comic book and rock and roll thing may have reinforced the impression (though I don’t know the Mother Jones article you mention). But hey, wait, I didn’t write about “masculine coming of age” per se in my essays-cum-memoir — I simply wrote about my own! It wasn’t a sociological book, but a confessional one.

Caro: What would happen if Jack Kirby and Jack Kerouac showed up on your doorstep expecting…something?

JL: Jack Kerouac I’d simply want to offer soup and a sandwich, maybe a shoulder to cry on. That would be relatively simple. Kirby could get more complicated. We’d have a lot of stuff to talk over. Kirby frightens me a little.

Copyright Kills Culture: Lethem and Paley sing the blues

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In 2007, Jonathan Lethem published an extended essay in Harper’s on the nature of creative inspiration and the ways in which all creativity draws on a cultural wellspring of ideas and representations. Called “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” it contains the following passage describing the “open source” culture behind the origins of the Muddy Waters song “Country Blues”:

“I made it on about the eighth of October ’38,” Waters said, “It was fixin’ a puncture on a car. I had been mistreated by a girl. I just felt blue, and the song fell into my mind and it come to me just like that and I started singing.” Then Lomax, who knew of the Robert Johnson recording called “Walkin’ Blues,” asked Waters if there were any other songs that used the same tune. “There’s been some blues played like that,” Waters replied. “This song comes from the cotton field and a boy once put a record out – Robert Johnson. He put it out as named “Walkin’ Blues. I heard the tune before I heard it on the record. I learned it from Son House.”  In nearly one breath, Waters offers five accounts [of the song’s authorship]…

Lethem’s essay is, as the title suggests, entirely composed of plagiarized fragments of text, knitted together into a new whole. Whether due to his fame, to Harper’s influence as a literary publication, or to some resistance to commodification inherent to natural language, nobody objected too vociferously to the use of his or her words, although Lethem’s strategy did prompt some commentary (all of which is behind subscription locks.)

Around the same time that Lethem’s article was hitting the newsstands, cartoonist Nina Paley was hitting a brick wall in the production and distribution of her blues-inflected animated full-length feature film, Sita Sings the Blues. Made by Paley single-handedly in her Manhattan apartment, Sita brings together an embarrassment of source-material richness: Paley’s own humor-filled story of breakup-by-email, the ancient Indian epic Ramayana, and the blues songs of ‘20s American songstress Annette Hanshaw.

Despite the “open source” culture of indigenous blues, it’s those Hanshaw recordings that led her to the brick wall: the recordings’ are restricted by copyrights held by large corporations like Sony and EMI. The cost of licensing the music used in Sita would have cost her more than it cost to make the entire film. She explains the copyright obstacles facing the film and its soundtrack on her blog.

Paley’s imaginative solution to the problem has been to give the film away for free, and the result has been a firestorm of enthusiasm for all things Sita. Paley says that her new “free culture” lifestyle has eradicated her cynicism and made her even more creative than before. A lot of that creativity at the moment is going into promoting the idea of free culture: her Facebook page boasts a charming jingle and accompanying animation clip promoting the idea that “copying isn’t theft”:

(The “draft needs your audio” refers to Paley’s request that musicians make their own versions of the ditty she sings in this vid.)

You can watch Sita online (click through rather than watching the embedding ’cause the right side is cut off):


or download it from its homepage.

Lethem explains in his essay that the surrealists felt our experience of life is “dulled by everyday use and utility,” and understood cinema and photography as art forms that “reanimate the dormant intensity” of the “matter that made up the world.” Paley’s animated film accomplishes a similar “reanimation”, but it’s not corporeal material that’s made more relevant and compelling through her representation, it’s the “primal stories” of the source material. In her own words:

Sita’s story has been told a million times, not just in India, not just through the Ramayana, but also through American blues. Hers is a story so primal, so basic to human experience, it has been told by people who never heard of the Ramayana. The Hanshaw songs deal with exactly the same themes as the epic, but they emerged completely independent of it. Their sound is distinctly ‘20s American, and therein lies their power: the listener/viewer knows I didn’t make them up. They are authentic. They are historical evidence supporting the film’s central point: the story of the Ramayana transcends time, place, and culture.

Lethem probably wouldn’t use the language of timelessness to describe this effect – his essay observes that “serious fiction” is “liberally strewn with innately topical, commercial, and timebound references,” pretty much like everything else. But Paley’s point is really more about primacy than timelessness – things common to human experience, things not transcendent to culture but merely so common among cultures that they seem universal.

But it’s not just that juxtaposition of those common elements from several cultures that animates Sita: it’s also the mark of the artist’s hand. At the risk of tautology, the animator re-animates. But not just in the literal sense: for culture to remain alive and to become mature, to learn from accumulated experience and insight, artists have to be able to take it into their hands and renew, revitalize, and re-animate it. The more locked down it is behind copyright, the harder it is for artists to do that, and the less alive the culture is.

Listen to Paley talk about free culture to the non-profit Public Knowledge:

Or if you’re interested in the business model, here’s her presentation to the National Film Board of Canada: