Reality nausea. — Touched with Fire Media

I’ve been reading a lot of broken books lately. I mean this in a lot of ways, but chief among them is that I’ve been reading books with a lot of power and no effective way of spending it. If a novel were an engineering project, these books would be machines that did great work inefficiently, for one reason or another.

Also, most of these books have been willfully shattered, narratives made of collage, or a plethora of points-of-view, or interrupted by themselves. Some of them are purposefully appropriative, in ways that I’m unsure of: is it interesting, or pedantic, to structure an entire essay of quotations from other people’s work? Is a book that purposefully builds itself on a DJ Shadow album, made almost entirely of samples, thrilling or simply derivative? Am I changing my mind or not?

2. I Heart Toxic Waste

I have a t-shirt, white with big block printing, that says “I (Heart) Toxic Waste”, like those t-shirts that tourists buy in Times Square that profess their love for New York City. This shirt is doubly allusive: it’s worn by Chris Knight (Val Kilmer) in one of my favorite movies, “Real Genius”.* So on some level it pays tribute to a movie I love, and mocks tourists, which is a bit snotty, I freely admit. Also, crucially, it’s funny, absurdist, and provokes conversation in a weird sort of way. I’ve had people say, “What’s that from?”, asserting their cultural bona fides. I’ve had them say, “Why do you love toxic waste?”, proving that they’re in on the joke. I’ve had a lot — a lot — of people ask me where I got it. (The internet, natch. Do your own Googling.)

*Filmed at my alma mater, by the way.

What I’ve never had before is someone who was offended by it. That happened when I was in New York a few weeks back, after the gala Moth Ball, a bunch of us retired to the cramped offices on Broadway where I once served as intern. A middle-aged woman asked me about my shirt, which I wore to replace a beautiful orange button-down that I had ruined by dumping street food down the front. I made some sort of jest, and she decided to make a point.

I won’t try to quote her: we were both drunk. In fact I couldn’t tell you the first thing about how we got from my t-shirt to her generalized objection of my generation’s addiction to irony and lack of sincerity. I probably said something: I usually do. I probably said something about how Baby Boomers reflexively valorized authenticity in a way that suggested to me that they had a great deal of anxiety about their own. I also think she thought I was younger than I am: she wasn’t nearly old enough to be my mother, I’ll tell you what, but she was treating me like her kid.

Did I get angry? I don’t know. I did make her angry. Very, very angry, moreso than I had realized. When I tried to apologize, she told me I wasn’t sorry. Then I WAS mad. I said she should have fun being self-involved and clueless. It was a generational thing — and we’re of the same generation. How did that happen?

3. Eat the Document

One of the broken books I read lately was Dana Spiotta’s “Eat the Document”, which had a lot of really fascinating shit to say about identity, and ultimately failed as a simulacrum of many consciousnesses. The book, which engages that same generational divide that the woman at the party & I fought a proxy war over, resists both the old Romantic idea that there is an essential, immutable self, and — crucially — the lamebrained postmodernist notion that identity is entirely composed.** Her characters, who go underground and change their names, their contexts, both find themselves totally altered by their choices and their surroundings, and are incapable of escaping their old guilts and desires. Identity, Spiotta seems to be saying, is both composed and constant. Sounds about right to me.

**A natural overreaction to fascism and the failure of the internationalist left to manifest as anything other than genocidal, Stalinist dictatorships. The idea that there may be a genetically determined part of ourselves is a little scary, but it also seems to be true, at least based on economic studies of who excels in the world and who does’t.

The book, unfortunately, contains long passages that are supposed to be the journals of a 15-year-old boy, but which read exactly like the internal monologue of a 30-something product of a great deal of higher education. The kid is meant to be overweight and somewhat swotty, I assume as an excuse for his ability to write so well, but as a former overweight and extremely swotty 15-year-old, I can tell you that words like “oenological” don’t just come dripping from their tongues, even if they are voracious readers, even if their parents like wine. This kind of slip happens a lot in the book — characters don’t talk, they speak narration between quotation marks; all seem too together, too completely able to articulate what they mean. Nobody ever seems to misstate anything in this book.

So: how to evaluate “Eat the Document”? Goodreads compels a person to give star ratings to things, as does Amazon, or Barnes & Noble. Of course star ratings are silly. But I did it anyway: I gave “Document” 3 stars. And of course I wasn’t compelled. I could have just not rated it at all.

4. Reality Hunger; The Ecstasy of Influence

In college, I wrote a song, or thought I did, called “Mama Won’t.” It went something like, “Mama won’t allow no guitar playing in here / mama won’t allow no singing in here”, etc, etc. Eventually one of my friends discovered a folk song — not even an obscure one — that was … well, it was pretty much exactly the same. I was embarrassed, deeply. It was done unconsciously, but still. I had stolen something and passed it off as my own.

They made David Shields put an appendix in “Reality Hunger”, his collage-like meditation on originality, fiction, nonfiction, and life lived mediated by television, films, the internet, books, etc. This is because he freely, and without quoting, took phrases, sentences, perhaps whole paragraphs from sources as disparate as the actor Jennifer Jason Leigh to the philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin. He was making a point, of course: all that is written is written in an ink of culture, comprising the ground-up history of that culture. It was all so blatant: he wasn’t stealing, he was sampling. I’m in sympathy with this idea, to a point. I certainly was enjoying the book more before I discovered the appendix, because now I find myself weirdly compelled to flip back and figure out who said whatever it is that Shields is saying. Silly. He’s divorcing these things from their context, laying them next to one another, and next to his own thoughts, to change what they mean. That’s the point. But I’m helpless.

In the title essay of Lethem’s “Ecstasy of Influence”, a similar thing is done, except that it is perpetrated (A) as sleight-of-hand, and (B) the index is part of the point, because the essay is done so seamlessly that one might not guess it was stitched together in the way it is without looking at the back. Lethem’s point is also slightly different: high culture, low culture, television and comic books and Shakespeare, what-have-you — all the same thing. All texts to be read; all inevitably repurposed. It’s the effectiveness of the repurposing that makes a given work good, not the nature of its sources.

Broken books, though. Shields’ is literally broken, into tiny fragments, but it also strays much too far afield in its assertions about fiction and nonfiction. There is, after all, such a thing as lying. No amount of blather about how narratives to violence to facts can change that. Lethem’s is just too big, too much, containing both the fascinating and the fickle, the titanic and the tiny. It’s supposed to, by the way; it’s broken on purpose.

5. Open City

“But now we’re getting down to matters of taste, aren’t we?”

Charlie B. asked me that when I finally expressed that my main problem with Teju Cole’s “Open City” was that it was all about a guy walking around thinking about a bunch of shit I didn’t give a fuck about — Dutch art, classical music, things I won’t classify as “boring” because I know people love them, but I just don’t feel anything as a result of them. I also thought the main character was an asshole.

It was interesting, though, to have someone draw a distinction between “taste” and something other, more objective, about what one might like or not like in a work of fiction. Discussions of books (or movies, or music, or whatever) are so soaked in questions of taste that it’s become essentially de rigeur to end every argument about these things by “agreeing to disagree”. On some level, that’s the only thing it’s possible to do and get along with your fellow humans. But is there a place where a line falls? Can something be objectively good or bad?

Oh, oh, oh, I am hesitant. I was such a browbeating pedant in my adolescence, in particular on the subject of music, that I now shy away from the whole business a lot of the time. Though I often say provocative things, I almost always back down immediately. No, “Open City” didn’t suck. It just didn’t work for me.

Aw, fuck that. “Open City” is a shitty book, utterly unconvincing and purposefully showoffy, about a very young doctor who has allegedly had time to ingest a very great deal of literary, musical, and philosophical theory while serving a residency and studying medicine. Not a chance. It strokes the ego of those who valorize high culture, allows a reader to feel a little frisson of self-satisfaction for making his way through something that is so patently boring and ill-considered, but it’s not actually any good. It doesn’t achieve its goals: it doesn’t challenge or disrupt the reader’s understanding of New York or immigrancy in America; it doesn’t convincingly pose philosophical questions, or make one culpable by coming to like its despicable protagonist. It’s just a crappy catalogue of boring navel-gazing and books some guy read.

I’ve read a lot more in the last few months than I think I ever have before. I read a lot of books that weren’t broken — Julie Orringer’s “How to Breathe Underwater”, Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping”, Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” — but there’s also a level on which some of those books aren’t quite sticking with me in the way the broken ones have. I guess I’m worrying over the breaks, like one might unconsciously run his fingers over a scar. Maybe it’s better to write a broken book than a whole one. Hrm.