Staying Alive
Interesting dinner party conversation last night that the only interesting thing about literary prizes would be the author refusing them. Of course we’re all vegetarians but even the cat meowed.
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Reading Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or I learned that “interesting” is a modern concept. I thought that was really interesting. I watched café patrons look at their phone instead of the book in front of them, which was always Elif Batuman’s Either/Or, and I too participated in their uninteresting failures.
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I did not take off from work for Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. I did not repent. I did not pray. I lied to my father a few co-workers and some friends about all of those things. I did read the first three pages of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. I did see and read a tweet about Tao Lin’s poop, which meant I had to read even more about his poop than I had to read while reading Jordan Castro’s The Novelist. God will never forgive me.
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There’s always so much talk about how literary criticism has gotten shallow, but what if the books themselves are shallow. What if authors are more interesting than the books they write, and even the authors themselves aren’t really that interesting at all. You know what’s missing from good books? Joy. And sensibility.
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This week I read another long story blaming “White Women in Brooklyn” for the decline of western art. I’m reminded of Blake Butler’s old line, something like, stop using my pussy as an ambulance for the world. My solution? Every time you read “White Women in Brooklyn” say it to yourself in Extreme John Travolta Voice.
A new and precise line in Butler’s substack about “the slowly dying Lishian school of the sentence” has gotten stuck in my head, this playoff season, like Cubs in Five. The Phillips Corporation will admit they made an awful mistake before young men give up writing their Lishian sentences, but there does seem to be a new wildness in American fiction, and it’s mostly coming from those who promote their work as anti-woke, not from proper books birthed into a perfect world.
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I play the music I own on vinyl. I play the music I own on CD. I give the music I learn about in Recommendation Corner the old college try, I’m more an Ian guy than a Steve. I defend the playlists. I delete the songs. I move the box sets to the basement and lug the American Record Guides back up. I don’t own E.S.P. on CD but the title track is on the CD of Miles Davis’ Greatest Hits which we listen to during the dinner party and then during the pot party I play E.S.P. on vinyl and Mattie asks do you like jazz and I say no I don’t like jazz, I like Miles Davis. I write out Don Giovanni arias in languages I can’t read. I listen to Good Morning’s Country and I think about you, during the Modafinil line, because that’s the line that would make you think of me. I like the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs song “Different Today” even though every day feels more or less the same, and the 1975’s “Part of the Band” is the first Dylanesque song since Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature. “The worst inside of us begets / that feeling of the internet / it’s like someone intended it.” I remember how tears of joy streamed down my face the day Dylan won the Nobel Prize, thinking there was hope for the written word and how all you phonies who think there’s some august tradition of literature got what was coming to you. Just for a sec. I hope it still hurts.
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Why does the writer of the lamestream media piece that dissects some “dangerous moment on the Right” always editorialize themselves as “studying the right wing for a long time.” Imagine the writer of stock buybacks who has been “studying the habits of tycoons for a long time.” Or the cultural critic on the Dimes Square beat who has “studied Dimes Square for many decades now” and looks forward to getting a little skirt in the backseat of the taxi.
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That’s the tweet. But Thomas Pynchon won.
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Absurdist Jesse Ball published a book called Autoportrait and it’s fine, but it’s nothing like Édouard Levé Autoportrait, one of the most charming books of all time, which Ball, on page XIII of his hardcover, calls a fruitless clump! On the last page, Ball claims he wrote his pages in one day, on John Grisham’s Mississippi estate — another prolific writer he then insults. This is Harold Bloom claiming he read Ulysses over Indigenous Peoples v. Columbus weekend, a case still held up in the court of jester appeals.
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Eve Sedgwick’s distinction between reparative and paranoid reading. The reparative cleans you up, the paranoid leaves you in a Christian frenzy. I find this instance of writing reparative. Even when I am being dirty with someone I feel spotless. Filth is pure. I just love it.
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After what feels like forever, a dozen college students get off the train. The guy across from me says my god, were we that bad? I say to him we were much, much, worse. Those guys were drinking Bud Freedom.
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The purpose of a story, Sontag wrote, is reclaiming the rights of intensity. If I am going to distinguish myself as a writer I must make a break. I cannot live “in the break” as the other writer must, they have no choice, I do. I must reclaim the rights of Shel Silverstein’s forgotten language. I must smile in secret at the gossip of starlings.
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I discovered Avital Ronell a few weeks ago, through Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom, which was an education in itself and refreshed my memory about Sedgwick’s reparative. On Saturday morning I sat in Oz Park while my child played and I read Ronnell’s Crack Wars. I may as well have been reading Reading Lolita in Tehran on the playground. A page of Ronell being bored is the greatest page from any boring writer, although I fear she is too smart for me and I’ll never keep up, I only have a Master’s Degree and I only speak two languages and one of them is music. On the internet I discovered Ronell was cancelled for giving one of her students a real hard time. Andrea Long Chu popped up again, with a convincing essay about how white-collar work sucks, which I agree with. Ronell wrote a biggish book called Stupidity. Not On Stupidity, just Stupidity. The amount I miss is interesting.
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On Monday I told my wife I was depressed because it was Monday and she said, “if it’s not Monday with you, it’s something else.” We fucked every night this week. I am losing my summer tan and the beaches closed so I started viewing pornography again. Logging on, I felt like Li from Tao Lin’s Leave Society, the afternoon he relapses and views pornography with anger and glee. I said to the girls, pregnant in their Hollywood Squares, how could I give myself over to only one of you, when all of you missed me this much?
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I was in a hurry and said excuse me, miss! to a woman blocking my path off Broadway. Only after I boarded the train did I realize it was Katia. The last time I saw her she was screaming at her then husband about “growing the fuck up,” which made my child, and her child, cry. It wasn’t just Monday with that guy, it was Tuesday and Wednesday and Friday too. The thing about raising children is that, unlike your then husband, they rarely become your then children unless your goal in life is true crime. It’s one reason you can never trust the childless on the future, and you can never trust the childless on the past. It’s only the present the childless commandeer. They can’t throw their arms around stupidity like daddy can, they can’t swing it from a star.
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After finishing Jordan Castro’s The Novelist I re-read the first 100 pages of Don DeLillo’s Mao II and then became bored with its profundity. Bill Gray also suffers from writer’s block, like Castro’s unnamed novelist, although unlike him Gray has published books and the reader believes Gray’s novels have changed people’s lives, and also changed the way writers think about composing the sentence, the sentence being “the writer’s will to live.” It is no surprise that Mao II is dedicated to Gordon Lish. Bill Gray, a “thick-bodied man,” like Castro’s Facebook friends, doesn’t have Twitter, he has cigarettes, but if he had Twitter he would smoke that, too, because he knows it’s the “self-important fool that keeps the writer going,” what Castro, writing about Twitter, identifies as pride. Gray’s in a rut because he knows writers no longer make “raids on human consciousness,” because they have all been “incorporated” and the only thing publishing — indie or mainsteam, anti-woke or do-the-work — really wants is a dead writer, because “the secret force that drives the publishing industry is the compulsion to make writers harmless” and pretend they’re part of some “august tradition.” Très pleased that Don DeLillo won, she’s great, she’s an august tradition. Published in 1991, Bill Gray’s problem isn’t that ornamental despair of kings like Jonathan Franzen or Joshua Cohen — prestige television and/or Twitter has ruined the Novel, if not necessarily Their Novels — it’s that writers aren’t as important as terrorist attacks. In 2022, that complaint sounds racist. DeLillo is a führer not a prophet. Remember Karlheinz Stockhausen, the composer of a piano piece that begins by repeating the same chord 140 times, who wrote, 10 years after Mao II, that 9/11 was the greatest work of art he had ever seen?
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The ubiquity of the autumn trench. Elisabeth Shue’s in Adventures in Babysitting but less wintry. Are wicked city women wearing these in Zuck’s metaverse? Can you lease an autumn trench from Plato’s Closet in Yarvin’s Urbit? Sometimes they feel cream, sometimes tan. The other night at Siena Tavern I counted no fewer than five cosmopolitans in their “absurdly early thirties,” as DeLillo writes of Brita Nelson in Mao II, wearing some version of the autumn trench. They leave me in the brooch.
After the show I walk outside and scream, who here owns The Garbage & The Flowers on vinyl? I see a punk and think about how much I hate punks but the boy in the cowhide vest has a Camel Blue and the conversation doesn’t need to progress from there. The only thing I can tell you is that the saints are marching in and the photographers are sticking out and the horses are pulling up with Bluetooth speakers tickling their manes and there’s no vacancy at Trump International and the bar at the Langham has a private equity party and pandemic racism won because even I’m scared to ride unstrapped the Red Line after 11pm. I check my Lyft app, startled to see the picture I added the night of Danny’s wedding, and then compare it to the Curbed price, also the cost of a Club Monaco t-shirt. I kick up my leg. A yellow cab flashes their brights. In the cab, which will cost $10 less than the Lyft or the Curbed, the news segment on the backseat TV features a young Black man being arrested for assaulting an elderly Black woman on the Red Line. I can’t turn it off. I ask the driver to pass me the aux and soon we’re singing Kevin Johansen’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” with fake drifter blues. By the time we commit to Michigan Avenue I’m too drunk to see anything but the champagne brown mannequins in the Max Mara windows. They wear flesh-colored trenches. But what color is flesh-colored, anyway? Count me out.
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I write because Gordon Lish used to brush my girlfriend’s Egyptian ass at the old NYU bookstore. Another thing I do is keep Lish’s Collected Fictions on eBay at a hideous price and sometimes people offer to buy it at that price, and then I raise the price. It costs me nothing.
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Nobody asked me, but I do not believe art has the ability to change the world. I believe the redistribution of wealth from the 1% has the ability to change the world.
