Greenpoint

Arrived in Brooklyn on Friday, after a car ride encompassing 18 hours, a tire blowout in Indiana, getting pulled over in Ohio (not carrying guns), 5 and a half Red Bulls, the Worst Truck Stop Ever, getting pulled over outside of the Queens Midtown Tunnel (not carrying bombs), and heavy rain throughout.

Notable Bodily Sensation: a kind of weightlessness brought on by the green sameness of the landscape, about 3/4 of Pennsylvania. Unerring in its beauty, and also unrelenting - the landscape distorts any sense of time or progress. Pennsylvania is not a state of mind. Without seeing the signs, you somehow know that you are inside of it - the landscape grows hills almost immediately upon exiting Ohio. The beauty is breathtaking until you have no breath left. I suppose then it's suffocating. You get the feeling of being lost, even though there is no way ever to get lost along the I-80, which keeps you clear of pretty much any sign of civilization, except for the literal ones pointing out roads to Harrisburg and a couple Penn State campuses. Eventually you hit the mini-mall of Stroudsberg and it brings on a feeling of almost total exhaustion because you're thinking, "Now? This is the first city I'm hitting? We have more to go ..." But then soon after the Delaware Water Gap, and you're in Jersey, for better or worse. [Also, do NOT stop at the first truck stop after you cross into Jersey on the I-80. Harrowing.]

Road Game to Keep You Occupied: How Many Anglo Modernist Writers Can I Name? (Not nearly as many as I thought.)

Worst Choice for Packed Lunch: Starbucks Sandwiches.

About the Stuff in the Back: "I hear something shifting in the back of the truck." "Ignore it." WHUMP "Ignore it."

And now Greenpoint.

This Patch

This is it - last post from Chicago. Smell it? Yes, mustardseed and also some hot peppers, and it actually smells like a mustache. If you could be overweight and wear those 70's style tinted glasses all the time, not just in the sun, and, for a guy your size, flail around a lot, then I'd be moving away from you too. For real - nothing personal.

See You Later, Not Goodbye

We had the going away party on Saturday. Right now I'm living an inflated version of saying goodbye to someone and then exiting the same way at the same time, awkwardly having to laugh and walk out to the parking lot together. Chicago, I said my goodbyes. Now kindly eff off.

Another Superstition

A footnote in Charles Sanders Peirce's "How to Make Our Ideas Clear":

"Fate means merely that which is sure to come true, and can nohow be avoided. It is a superstition to suppose that a certain sort of events are ever fated, and it is another to suppose that the word fate can never be freed from its superstitious taint. We are all fated to die."

Emptying the Dustbin

From Greil Marcus's essay on Wim Wenders in The Dustbin of History:

"There is no real need to explicate what Wenders is saying, though one could easily say, along with him, that any film that says the Germans were embarassed, anxious, and scared, even though they didn't have a clue, is a lie - any discourse that means to have it both ways is a lie."

There's something incredibly gratifying about watching Marcus call bullshit on people - this quote concerns an essay Wenders wrote about the German film Hitler: A Biography, which, from what I can glean, Wenders seems to think has some apologist overtones. Marcus spends most of his essay on E.L. Doctrow's Ragtime and Robert Altman's Nashville calling all kinds of bullshit - on Doctrow, on Altman, on pretty much every critic who likes Doctrow and Altman. I like how Marcus can register genuine dislike for, even a form of disgust with, something, and not get bile all over the rug.

Now I've Got the Motherfucking Howling Fantods

Word to Jessica's hyper-sensitive antennae for picking up on this TV Guide interview with The Office's John Krasinski, who is apparently writing and directing the film adaptation of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (which was originally made out of paper). I have not enough W's, T's or F's.

I'm nervous - Wallace is one of my favorite writers ever. (But I'm a white, male, college graduate born after 1980, so it's pretty much required). And while Brief Interviews contains some of his least successful work (along with a lot of good stuff), I can't help but feel like somebody is turning my best friend into a lizard. CANNOT become the guy who says, "It's not as good as the book."

There's no way it's going to be as good as the book.

And the guy from The Office? Really?

Accenting Some Other Thing

I try to keep in touch with a relatively small cadre of old, close friends. In the course of conversations, I almost always find myself impressed with them, or, at the risk of sounding weirdly paternalistic, proud of them. Mostly I think it’s because I have a compulsory question that I ask of them, and without fail they manage to answer it in a way that makes me happy: “Cool. But what else are you doing?”

I say “compulsory” because I think I mean I feel compelled, and maybe the word “compulsive” gets closer to overtone I’m trying to express here. The thing you do is what pays your rent and puts food in your mouth, but the “what else” is the thing that’s interesting, that’s supposedly expressive of some striving tendency in a person to do something that puts aside he practicalities of keeping your body alive, or sometimes even works against that tendency. I think I find myself compelled to ask the “what else” question because the “what else” is the really hard thing to do. And at the same time it’s the most necessary thing, because, paradoxically it lives and breathes outside of the space of necessity, and (at least for people in my tax bracket) sometimes directly opposed to necessity.

Whenever a friend tells me they’re starting a band, or blowing all of their savings on a really long trip on another continent, or acting in a new play, I can’t help but question my own “what else” – and as of right now, there’s not much of a what else at all. Maybe that’s because of a certain tendency I have that I’m just starting to recognize. It’s scary and it has something to do with my wanting to go back to grad school, and going through the enormous pain in the ass of applying and gaining admission to one (well, two, so kudos to me). Because it seems that I have a big problem formulating the “what else” in terms outside of some vaguely nonsensical concept of, for lack of a better, smarter term, “identity.”

Here’s where we run up against the problem of pragmatism. I’m no Louis Menand, but I’ve understand pragmatism as the basic idea that what we do constitutes the whole of what we are, and that notions of belief, self, etc. are all equal to the sum of the action we take – sort of like the existentialist credo, “existence precedes essence,” but somehow less abstract. To point out a really obvious example, you can’t be a writer without actually writing something. Fair enough. But if the idea that action wholly constitutes self holds any water for you, and you, perhaps like me, find yourself hard up when it comes to motivation, you are, by definition, in a pretty serious crisis. My solution was to go back to school.

That’s not the only reason obviously – I do feel like studying literature, theory, philosophy, etc. is pretty much what I do best (not that I know all that much about those things), and I find it fulfilling and exciting … still. It’s hard to come to terms with the fact, though, that I work best within the academic structure. On the one hand, it’s good because I’ve put myself in a position where I have to work. On the other hand, it’s scary because, well, what the fuck does it mean that I need an immense and regimented system to actually make me do something? What is the status of my “what else” if I need all of academia pushing me into productivity? This is why I say I’m compulsive about asking “what else,” because I need to know that it’s possible, and it’s sort of gratifying seeing other people doing it, even if I, myself, sometimes feel stuck at the lab – if that makes any sense.

Saying "Dylar Addiction" Causes "Dylar Addiction"

On Saturday, I'm going to a performance of Don DeLillo's new play Love-Lies-Bleeding at Steppenwolf. I'm pretty excited about this, as reading White Noise and then Underworld were pretty formative experiences for 18-year-old me (props to the The Sugar Shack). I read Mao II when I was 16, but I don't think I appreciated it (partly because I don't think I knew who Mao was, and I kept waiting for him, Godot-like, to show up - okay, that was embarassing, but I feel cleaner now). Delillo's ability to measure the dizzying effects of American history and culture on the experience of living makes him, implicitly, one of the most profound, living cultural commentators we have. Delillo's fictions show us not how to live, but how we do live, and it's deadly serious and incredibly funny all at once. End of obligatory encomium.

But I'm in sort of a spot. After the performance, Delillo will be in the lobby signing books and answering shallow questions and nodding, embarassed, as sputtering jerks like me try to tell him how totally great his writing is. I've always had an aversion to talking to famous people, or even people who aren't famous, but who's work I really like. When I wrote for my college newspaper, interviews were certainly my weakest point. I could ask interesting questions, but honestly, I found that I had nothing in common with most of the people I talked to, and couldn't engage with them in any non-journalistic fashion. The only exception to this is maybe Angus Andrew of the Liars, but dude is so easy-going and friendly that it's pretty hard not to get along with him. Out-and-out trainwrecks include Fiery Furnace Matthew Friedberger and Moving Unit Blake Miller (in my defense, Friedberger was my first interview ever, while Blake Miller was [is?] a pretentious dick and his band is awful). Every other interview / social situation with a band or actor whose music or acting I like ends up being sort of awkward and uncomfortable.

Which brings me to this spot I'm in. Do I get Delillo's autograph? Do I try to tell him he's awesome? There's something that's so incredibly embarassing about asking for an autograph, which is why I find it so strange that people want to do it. There will be nothing more strange than watching Delillo sign a copy of Underworld, thus allowing that person to fetishize a novel that is, at least in part, about the fetishizing of history (Nick Shay's baseball). It's not the gleeful fetishizing that weirds me out, though - it's the willful, public supplication that people perform. The book signing has all of the hallmarks of kneeling before a king, or kissing the pope's ring. You stand as the author sits, and you lean in to give him to book as he looks at you and asks you who you would like the book signed to. Perhaps he asks you some trivial detail about your life, and he makes you feel special because now, just as you walk out of the signing with signpost of his presence, he also leaves with a tiny piece of you. But that gesture towards exchange, rather than bestowal, actually amplifies the fetishization of the signature. Because now you're not just fetishizing an object (a book signed by Delillo), you're fetishing an historical event - memory and imagined understanding palpably ingrained in a few unreadable ink swoops. Part of you has been colonized by the memory written into this thing, and part of your consciousness becomes synonymous with the object.

But what's so vexing is that I know it's absurd and sort of creepy that people give in to the ritual of the thing, want to, need to fetishize the books as a substitute for the author. I know it's creepy and absurd, but I still find myself scanning my bookshelves for the right one. Should I have him sign the same copy of Underworld that I first read, the one I sat up feverishly underlining, scribbling in the margins? That would be enacting some kind of weird meta-nostalgia, as if Delillo were actually signing my reading experience - maybe that's a bit too intimate. Should I have him sign the copy of White Noise that I stole after I lost my original copy? It would take some of the visceral punch out of the thing, that's for sure. Or maybe I should have him sign a book of his that I've yet to read - Ratner's Star, maybe. I have a copy already. It could be a prefab fetish, all ready to cordon of a part of me, or anyone, really. I could sell them in supermarkets.

Conflicted, to say the least. It seems that it's all or nothing - either give in to the reverential ecstasy, the ritual of the thing, or else don't. I probably won't do it. Seeing celebrities (or whatever Delillo is) when they can't see you is more satisfying somehow. You get to flip the power dynamic - these people who enter you through your eyes and ears, show up in your home, stare at your from the back page of strangers' newspapers and bookspines, pop into your thoughts when you don't expect them - you watch them move and talk and be nervous and say dumb things and you do it without capitulating to a commodity, or by placing a bit of yourself in some other thing. You take a little bit of celebrity's overwhelming power by taking away its body, and that, ephemeral as it may be, is more valuable than a signature.

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Postscript: That being said, if anybody else would like a book signed by Don Delillo, I would be rabidly, excruciatingly pleased to have one signed for you.

Adding Colbert to the Fire

White House correspondents correspond - they also dine and do so at dinners.

Stephen Colbert is something I've decided to call a "value" comedian. That is, his main appeal is that he is a proponent of a view point and has found some novel way to express that viewpoint. His gift is not in adding anything new to any kind of debate, but in his ability to fold two aspects of something together in order to delineate an ironic kill zone. We like him because he says stuff we like to hear (or, as the case may be, says stuff we don't like to hear in a way we like to hear it). In today's NY Times story about Colbert's "address" (perhaps a bit of a misnomer) to the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, reporter Jacques Steinberg calls John Stewart Colbert's "comedy patron," which also seems to me a strange misuse - Colbert is a beneficiary of Stewart's benevolent largesse, yeah, but moreso he comes off as Stewart's protege. Colbert's blustery, ironized rhetoric is the inverse of Stewart's fake unprofessionalism. Stewart is endearing while Colbert is kind of grotesque. One of Stewart's hugely powerful techniques is constantly reassuring the audience and his guests that he is no way a professional, that he is totally inept. In fact, if Stewart actually was any of those things, he would look a lot like Colbert's character. Stewart's repudiations of professionalism are in fact the marks of his professionalism, which makes him interesting. Colbert on the other hand, while probably wittier, more incisively satirical than Stewart, constantly looks constrained by his character, and breaks out at times to remind us, "Hey, it's me, Stephen! I'm not really a conservative blowhard!"

Which is why I can kind of sympathize with all of the non-laughers at the WHCA Dinner. Read over the transcript and see how many lines Colbert either adapts or repeats verbatim from The Colbert Report. The concept of "truthiness" - the idea that truth is based on gut feelings rather than facts - has gone from an awesome bit on the show to the entire axis on which the The Colbert Report spins. Granted, it was a really good idea, but Colbert's constant references to it come off kind of clunky. It's the secret decoder ring to his entire show, but as an idee fixe, it doesn't seem quite rich enough to sustain the program for much longer. Those at the dinner who might have been prone to laugh already have laughed, and those who were not prone to laugh didn't. Which isn't to say it wasn't funny, it's just funny in the way Colbert is funny all of the time - and also nobody likes being lambasted right to their face.

I'm sure part of the silence had to come from the fact that this was a fake journalist delivering a pretty scathing endictment to a bunch of real journalists. And that there was none of the good-natured poking-fun-at-self that tends to defuse satire-gone-tense. This, of course, is where Stewart shines brightest - even though Stewart is pretty transparently liberal, he's not partisan, and he's certainly never above directing his jabs at himself. In his address, Colbert's targets were a) Republicans and/or B) Journalists. Lord help you if you're both, and Colbert's implicit claim is that, if you're a journalist, you are. This what makes the speech so brazen: Colbert condemns a handful of communities of which he is not a part, and then engages in no self-criticism at all, or even criticism of Democrats. Hence the bad reception: comedy only goes over when the comedian can align himself with his audience, and that certainly didn't happen. Stewart's Crossfire salvo was intended as a an act of self-policing - trying to get the (shudder) Newstainment people (of which he is one) at least to acknowledge their role in the discursive mess that is public political discussion. Colbert, neither journalist nor Republican, expected people to laugh with him at themselves, while he laughed at, not with (to be fair, his bit about Scalia went over like gangbusters with the man himself).

So maybe it's brave to make fun of the president while he's twenty feet away from you - the gesture is appreciated, for sure - it may be a bit much to expect him to laugh, too.

David Lee Rothing the Dickens Out of It

We walk down to the beach, David Lee Roth and I. From the top of a dune, he springs, shooting up, body in flying-V formation as dust rings from the future puff out from under him. He lands a mile off shore and steam rises from the sea, as if the sun itself were drowning. Razor blades rain from the sky, and I know now that David Lee Roth has begun that ephermeral something's endless solo career.