Colin Marshall

Reading my way into L.A.

My inquest on alternative Los Angeles novels just hit The Millions. Excerpt:

You Millions habitués presumably prepare for life’s big events the same way I do: by gorging yourselves on novels to do with those events, tenuously to do those events, and, well… beyond. Readying myself for a move to Los Angeles, I naturally turned to literature, but I decided to avoid the region’s richest, oldest, most beloved literary currents: its unflinching examinations of Old Hollywood, its hardscrabble outsider odysseys toward the kingdom of celebrity, its hard-boiled tales of murderous intrigue and complex deceit beneath the palm trees. Those novels became iconic for a reason, but I had to ask: given Los Angeles’ practically unfathomable size and diversity, what other kinds of literature does it offer?

So I asked all the readers I could for their recommendations of “alternative,” “adventurous,” “unusual,” “non-canonical,” or just “weird” Los Angeles novels, keeping the question purposefully vague enough to ensure a wide variety of responses. These five books, mentioned by readers based in the city and elsewhere as well as by readers for the city and against it, “clicked” together in my mind to form the beginnings of a new, personal, Los Angeles canon.

And now, please excuse me while I return to panhandling.

Sharon Waxman: Rebels on the Backlot

I continue my reading on the nineties U.S. independent film boom with a recommendation from Rob Montz. Sharon Waxman’s Rebels on the Backlot came out right around the same time as Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures, but instead of telling a complete-as-possible history of the movement, it focuses instead on six potentially representative auteurs: Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbegh, David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, David O. Russell, and Spike Jonze.

Sometimes authors bear responsibility for this and sometimes publishers do, but the book occasionally reads like a sleazy tell-all, as in the Tarantino chapters hell-bent on exposing the filmmaker’s poor personal hygiene and embarrassingly higher-than-lower-middle-class background. The sections on Soderbergh fare better, despite compulsively returning to and speculating about his issues with “intimacy.” Still, the more I read about the man, the sadder I get about his limiting “one for them, one for me” mindset, where every actually interesting project — the kind that prompts Waxman and Biskind to whip out their licenses to dismiss — means one more Erin Brockovich or Ocean’s Fifteen.

Spike Jonze I’d never known much about, but I found Being John Malkovich’s story of slipping through the bureaucratic cracks and coming to fruition pretty much undicked-with inspiring. It got me thinking about the year 1999, when we had not only Malkovich, but Magnolia, Fight Club, Three Kings, The Limey, and several more I’m surely forgetting besides. Say what you will about any of these films, but has the spotlight of U.S. cinema fallen across any lineup as interesting since? No wonder I got seriously into movies right then.

I get the feeling that a lot of readers will come away from the Paul Thomas Anderson chapters thinking of him as the ultimate obnoxious, demanding wunderkind, a paragon of arrogance demanding ever-higher budgets, ever-longer runtimes, and ever-finaler cut authority. But if the guy uses his high budgets, long runtimes, and final cuts to pump out pictures like Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood, does asking for them, no matter how forcefully, really count as arrogance? Waxman writes much about Anderson’s ongoing struggles with one particular executive, a symbol of the whole theme of “imperatives of art v. imperatives of commerce” that keeps coming up in my reading about this period — although nothing has ever totally convinced me of their direct opposition.

But don’t believe me! Listen to Soderbergh, who gives the book’s closing quote: “This is a story that goes back all the way to the beginning of cinema in this country, with the struggle for auteur filmmaking with the American cine-culture. That’s always been the battle. Between the belief that a director should be in creative control of a movie, as opposed to the person financing the film.” Hmm.

The book’s David Fincher seems both as contemptuous of everything that goes on in Hollywood except filmmaking as Anderson and as open about discussing it as Soderbergh. I found within myself a wellspring of respect for him while reading Waxman’s account of the production of Fight Club, of all movies. (Note, however, that I’ve always held a pro-Fight Club position, and not because I think it has serious things to say about “consumerism.” If anything, it makes fun of the unfocused, intellectually bankrupt rage it depicts, and which its dimmer fans declare awesome, necessary, and even awesomely necessary.) Fincher’s quotes indicate one goal on his part and one goal only: to spend as much Hollywood money as possible making as un-Hollywood a picture as possible. In his own words, as he arranged them when he got the studio’s go-ahead, “Those idiots just green-lit a $75 million experimental movie.”

But David O. Russell, as Waxman portrays him, fascinates me more than anyone else. Maybe that happened because of all the stories about him getting into fistfights with producers or forcing George Clooney to do yoga breathing or looking up dresses or getting written off as a “weirdo” or taking his own photos from awards-ceremony stages. I certainly couldn’t drop the book when it got into the famously tormented Three Kings shoot, not just because I quite like that movie — and its DVD, which I need to watch again soonish and which provided an important unit in my self-made film school when back, at age fifteen, I decided I want to make films myself — but because of the obvious all-consuming dedication it required of him. Man had to get in the game, and it shows in the final product.

Alas, the Three Kings stuff also turns out to be the closest Waxman gets to discussing the actual process of making a film. Most of the book treats it as a black box surrounded by a web of time-sensitive financial dealings (both under- and over-handed) and endless personal strife for the artist. It can tell you about Harrison Ford’s waffling about joining the cast of Traffic or Anderson’s locking himself in the editing room and denying studio stooges access or Jonze’s fashioning a half-floor out of an existing office building or Russell’s insistence on shooting on Ektachrome or Fight Club’s apocalyptic test screenings, but the real substance of cinematic creation — the stuff that doesn’t necessarily make for juicy anecdotes — goes missing.

This surprises me in an otherwise crazy-enjoyable book about these particular directors, but certain moments give the game way. Though I do sense sense a genuine admiration for the work of Tarantino, Soderbergh, Anderson, Russell, Jonze, and Fincher, I can’t quite forget the times Waxman lets slip with sentences like, “The glacially paced and icily shot Solaris was a remake of an Andre [sic] Tarkovsky film that made all but the most dedicated art-house movie lovers fall asleep” — sentences which exhibit about five different levels of philistinism at once.

David Sterritt: Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews

Although I’ve seen pathetically few Jean-Luc Godard films, my meager Godard watchedography ironically includes some pictures even his fans haven’t gotten around to, like his 1980 “second first film” Sauve qui peut (la vie)/Every Man for Himself/Save Your Ass. Though you wouldn’t know if from my failure to write anything about that movie — I did talk about it with Dave Kehr on this week’s Marketplace of Ideas, though — I did find enough cinematic inventiveness in it, even thirty years after its release, that I felt a renewed sense of responsibility to learn about the man behind it.

If you’ve never checked out the University of Mississippi’s Conversations with Filmmakers series, do it now. Vernon and Marguerite Gras’ Peter Greenaway: Interviews delivers, for me, the most articulate indictments of cinema’s failure to achieve its artistic potential. Livia Bloom talked with me on MOI about editing Errol Morris: Interviews. I just read, and felt invigorated by, Ludvig Hertzberg’s Jim Jarmusch: Interviews. The books all deliver exactly what they promise: interviews, interviews, interviews, over several eras, with several interviewers, and displaying just enough restatement and idea overlap to highlight each subject’s tics and preoccupations.

Had I interviewed Godard myself — a job for which, as you know, I lack nearly all qualifications — Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews would constitute a full MOI hat trick: Past guest David Sterritt edited the volume, and past guest Peter Brunette then edited the series. But since past guest Jonathan Rosenbaum conducted one of the conversations within, I’ll settle for a pseudo-triple. Everyone involved gets good stuff out of Godard, a task which seems alternately effortless and impossible. Sometimes I think of the man as a classically aloof stonewaller, and sometimes I imagine him scattering seeds of cinematic provocation like a camera-wielding Swiss Johnny Appleseed.

Given my total disinterest in Marxism and my failure to see the death of cinema on the horizon, I’ve never set much store by Godard’s most notorious proclamations, but his ideas about how to work resonate more and more with me these days. He brings up his opinions about rapport with the gear a few times in this book: no man could call himself a great lover if he only touched a woman every few years, so can a man call himself a filmmaker if he only touches a camera every few years? In one extended dialogue, Godard goes back and forth with an engineer at Aaton about their attempt to invent a 35-millimeter camera small enough for the director to carry at all times and grab shots whenever and wherever they present themselves. The project fell apart, but I love that Godard lives close enough to the filmmaking metal that he would even want to push the technology forward like that.

I get the impression that Godard — “loves” to work doesn’t feel quite right, but — must work. He doesn’t do filmmaking; he is filmmaking. That sounds too grand, but I don’t want you to have to endure eight paragraphs of clarification. Even when Godard has fallen into moralistic periods (I don’t look too heartily forward to watching his seventies work) or had critics declare his irrelevance, he’s still worked, still found ways to make cinema thrill him. I don’t think he’s given himself a choice, and that I greatly admire. This excitement comes through in a Breathless or a Sauve qui peut (la vie) — and even in the less leaden passages of a picture like Contempt — but I look forward to feeling a lot more of it in the rest of his oeuvre.

(And let’s face it — anybody who collaborates so closely with ECM, I’m gonna get into.)

Peter Biskind: Down and Dirty Pictures

I “came of age” as a cinephile during the nineties U.S. independent film boom. I thus took a while to realize that guys like Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez, David O. Russell, Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Steven Soderbergh — high profiles who came from low budgets — had not always ruled and would not always rule American cinema. Other than Russell, both Andersons, and the occasional Soderbergh, I haven’t looked back to these guys for much inspiration in my own filmmaking, though they all share the credit for firing me up in the first place. Weirdly, I’d never researched the historically distinctive era that brought them all to such prominence so quickly. How had it happened?

To remedy my ignorance, I first went to Peter Biskind, a well-known chronicler of the American movie business. You might know Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, his account of “the New Hollywood,” the nineties indie movement’s direct formal predecessor in the seventies. (I always felt all that burnt-orange revivalism ran deeper than That 70s Show.) The folktale about the New Hollywood goes something like this: Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper made Easy Rider for cheap, Easy Rider made pantloads of money, and so the studios started casting around for other artistic young filmmakers in a cargo-cultish attempt to replicate the Easy Rider trick until they realized they couldn’t sustain it. The folktale about the indie boom goes like this: Soderbergh/Tarantino/Smith/Rodriguez made sex, lies, and videotape/Reservoir Dogs/Clerks/El Mariachi for dirt-cheap, sex, lies/Dogs/Clerks/Mariachi made balloon-seat-pantloads of money, studios cast around for other rough-and-ready young filmmakers, etc., etc.

Down and Dirty Pictures tells this folktale in welcome (if near-oppressive) detail. Simon and Schuster gave the book the subtitle “Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film,” which, despite coming in the terribly unpromising “a, b, and the x of y” form, points out a couple entities I’ve never really understood but who, by Biskind’s reasoning, made indie film into Indie Film. Biskind spends more time on the legendarily brutish Miramax co-founder Harvey Weinstein than any of the scores of other suits he mentions; I quickly lost count of the many “Harvey, the veins in his purple face throbbing with rage, sprayed an arc of spittle across the conference room” and “For reasons known only to himself, Harvey began throttling the intern” moments described.

I actually feel a 280-page Harvey Weinstein biography somewhere in these 484 pages, the rest of which do indeed discuss Sundance, the careers of involved directors, and the ill fates of would-be Miramaxes. Biskind’s Harvey reads like a tragic figure of antiquity, driven by sheer love of film to found Miramax, a company that would acquire and promote the living hell out of adventurous passion projects, to get them on the same turf with and ultimately beat out the prevailing Hollywood pablum. He stuck to the plan up through about Pulp Fiction and the sale of the company to Disney; each taste of money just made him thirstier for more, which forced Miramax to play it safer and safer. The company that once distributed The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover worked its way down to The English Patient, then Shakespeare in Love, then She’s All That.

Sadder still, Harvey appears never to have had the taste he thought he did. Though, in his own mythology, he experienced his awakening during a screening of The 400 Blows, he grew up to become the man who would loose Life is Beautiful on the American public. In apology to one young director he kept browbeating and browbeating to cut down her film — Biskind describes Harvey demanding cuts even more often than he describes him exploding — he sends flowers, a book of Truffaut essays, and a card explaining that, see, I love art films too, y’know? But if he truly considers Truffaut the far “art” end of the spectrum, well, that says everything you need to know.

Biskind has the indie bubble burst around 2000, though Sundance, Miramax, Weinstein, and most of those auteurs soldier separately on. I don’t know how much things have changed. Reporting from Sundance a year or two, The Sound of Young America host (and past Marketplace of Ideas guest) Jesse Thorn asked, “How can these great artists work for such UGG-booted dunderheads?”

Marc Norman: Bike Riding in Los Angeles

My search for “alternative” Los Angeles novels, which began with Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, continues. Though I only saw Marc Norman’s Bike Riding in Los Angeles pop up twice or thrice in my preparatory reading of books about L.A. books, it always stood out to me. One obvious explanation: when I move to L.A. myself in August, bike riding’s what I’m gonna be doin’. Lacking anything like the money to buy a car — or even to operate and maintain a free car — I shall remain two-wheeled for the foreseeable future.

Luckily, my limited experience has revealed a sound bikeability in L.A., which runs counter to just about every casually held opinion. I suspect most of the sentiment that “you can’t bike in L.A.” comes from the many, many people who use the city’s geography inefficiently, living in Manhattan Beach but working in Pasadena or whatever. Andy Bowers has my back on this:

It's very easy for an L.A. driver to think that our city is as choked with humanity as Manhattan. From the driver's point of view, that's increasingly true—there are more and more evenings when every major street is stopped dead, and going a few miles can take hours. At work the next day, people grimly shake their heads and lament what's becoming of the city.

Not only has riding my bike enabled me to glide past all this gridlock (in fact, I'm often not even aware it's happening), but it has made me realize that it's an illusion. The city itself is not gridlocked—merely the narrow asphalt ribbons onto which we squeeze all our single-occupant cars. On the back streets I now take, everything is quiet and serene. The main roads may mimic Times Square on New Year's Eve, but the areas between L.A.'s clogged arteries comprise mile after square mile of low-density, low-stress residential bliss (the same is true, I suspect, of most American cities).

I plan to live somewhere in the Koreatown-downtown range, which should place me close to Metro stations. My secret weapon of rolling my bike onto trains (which Metro’s cool with) leaves very few worthwhile parts of the city inaccessible. Seeing as Metro Rail didn’t open until 1990, Norman, writing this novel in the early seventies, wouldn’t have enjoyed that option; for him, bike riding in Los Angeles meant bike riding in Los Angeles.

Rather, I should say that the Bike Rider wouldn’t have enjoyed that option. This guy, a protagonist who’s only sometimes around, seems to hold Norman’s place in the story. His supporting cast includes the Drag Cop, Derby, Flon, Marshal T — — — —, Sunny, and the Phantom Bike Rider. They live out their dramas, such as their dramas are, in a rapid succession of short chapters with titles like “Street of Worries,” “Famous Bicycle Mechanics,” “Corn in the City,” “In Ventura County,” and “In Ventura County (Again).” These blow by in 122 pages — though they feel like less — behind a now-oh-so-retro orange-and-brown cover.

Needless to say, Bike Riding in Los Angeles would look, to most eyes, like a supremely strange little book, and I haven’t even mentioned its being set entirely in a rounded, Helvetica-ish font. It doesn’t cross my own threshold of true weirdness; I recognize it more as a Silent Generation fever dream, though one built out of unusual components. Yet I feel something in its ghostly set of characters who pass laconically in and out of the bits-and-pieces narrative run through with L.A. history (an ill-fated 1890 Pasadena Bicycle Club excursion has an especially continuous presence) drawing me back for a re-read. No objection, since that’ll maybe take 45 minutes, and I’ve gotten into short novels lately.

(Coincidentally, I also just read about how how Norman got bullied by Harvey Weinstein over his writing credit, alongside Tom Stoppard, for Shakespeare in Love. Peter Biskind talks to him about it in Down and Dirty Pictures, his book on the U.S.’ nineties indie film movement, about which more later.)

Christopher Isherwood: A Single Man

Searching for books to include in an article about alternative Los Angeles novels, I sent out a call for suggestions of “adventurous,” “lesser-known,” “experimental” and or “weird” pieces of literature set in or somehow shaped by the city. Not until I’d piled up a few of those did a relatively well-known title occur to me which could head up and offer a “way in” to the list: Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man. Despite having drawn currency from Tom Ford’s film adaptation last year, it rarely makes lists of L.A. or even Southern California novels. I suspect Isherwood’s English origins and the book’s status as a work of gay literature (because it couldn’t fall under two headings) have something to do with this, but to my mind, these make it exactly the novel-of-place to read. Seeing that place through a foreign cultural sensibility while flying under a separate literary radar altogether allow it to approach the place more obliquely — more interestingly, in other words.

Isherwood sets the novel in the Los Angeles of the early sixties, a Los Angeles he experienced and one I wish I could’ve. (At least I have internet videos.) Just as Isherwood taught at Los Angeles State College, his protagonist George teaches at the fictional San Tomas State College. Just as Isherwood drove almost all the way across town — if you, like me, use a semi-purist 25-mile-by-25-mile definition of town — from his coastal Santa Monica home to his fairly deep-inland school, George commutes with the Utopian of someone raised on European roads. (“It is one of the marvels and blessings of the Los Angeles freeway system that you can now get from the beach to San Tomas State College in fifty minutes, give or take.”) Isherwood preferred and George prefers the company of men, although, unlike Isherwood, George has lost Jim, the one man he especially prefers, to an auto wreck in distant Ohio.

Breakfast with Jim used to be one of the best times of their day. It was then, while they were drinking their second and third cups of coffee, that they had their best talks. They talked about everything that came into their heads — including death, of course, and is there survival, and if so, what exactly is it that survives. They even discussed the relative advantages and disadvantages of getting killed instantly and of knowing you’re about to die. But now George can’t for the life of him remember what Jim’s views were on this. Such questions a hard to take seriously. They seem so academic.

The novel covers just one day of George’s post-Jim existence. (Perhaps it covers the final day of his existence, period; Isherwood writes an ambiguous ending in which most readers seem to see an absolute, necessary finality that I don’t, quite.) I understand Southern California offered more permissiveness than did most of the United States and much of Europe back then, but stern whispers still float thick enough in the air to keep George — a white, 58-year-old, homeowning college professor, but nonetheless gay! — laboring under a burden of secrecy. He only tells his closest friends about Jim’s death, letting everyone else think he moved back to live with his parents. To most of the bits of society that immediately surround him, George just looks like a culturally refined unmarried man who may or may not contemplate death a lot.

I actually feel more resonance with George than I have with most other literary characters, especially the ones crafted to share my age, nationality, professional interests, time period, or sexual orientation. I can’t quite tell you why, though we may have to chalk at least part of it up to the way Isherwood opens up George’s consciousness on the page and thus universalizes him, or makes him universally connectable. Bear in mind, we’re talking about a character who zones out while driving and fantasizes himself as a Big Brother-like dictatorial figure, clutching the world in his iron fist, brutalizing with extreme prejudice those who would persecute him. Or do we all wallow in own versions of this fantasy?

The population will slowly begin to learn that Uncle George’s will must be obeyed instantly and without question.

But does Uncle George want to be obeyed? Doesn’t he prefer to be defied so he can go on killing and killing and killing — since all these people are just vermin and the more of them that die the better? All are, in the last analysis, responsible for Jim’s death; their words, their thoughts, their whole way of life willed it, even though they never knew he existed. But, when George gets in as deep as this, Jim hardly matters any more. Jim is nothing now but an excuse for hating three quarters of the population of America...

In this particular day, George wakes up; drives to school; lectures on Aldous Huxley; argues with colleagues in the faculty dining room (“My God, you sound like some dreary French intellectual who’s just set food in New York for the first time! That’s exactly the way they talk! Unreal! American motels are unreal!”); visits Doris, a dying woman who once attempted to steal Jim from him; makes an extra, off-regimen visit to the gym; abandons grocery shopping for a dinner at the home of his other ex-pat friend, a divorced middle-aged woman named Charley; rebuffs Charley’s drunken advances; darts off to a favorite bar in the middle of night; goes skinny-dipping with one of his particularly enigmatic students; and does or does not die.

I don’t want to get too thematic about this, but Isherwood repeatedly alludes, throughout the course of George’s day, to the question of what it is to be among the living. George defines himself as one of the living against, obviously, Jim, but also against the fast-on-her-way out Doris. Certain things blow gusts of living-ness right in his face: crossing the entire city on a freeway; throwing himself into an impromptu sit-up contest; plunging into the ocean, drunk, in the wee hours; ogling a couple of tennis players; running laughingly to a bar instead of dutifully returning home. George rides these sudden waves of vivid sense experience into bouts of spontaneity. You don’t see many corpses doing that.

George’s perspective dominates the novel, understandably so, but I think as often about his students now as I think about him. Not any particular student, though Isherwood gives the skinny-dipping Kenny Potter and his mildly sour Japanese girlfriend outsize positions in George’s thoughts. I think about his students as a vast generational mass, albeit not quite so vast a generational mass as the one that immediately followed them. A Single Man takes place in 1962, meaning most of the college students in it were born between 1940 and 1944. I’ve often read that, in terms of economic opportunity and not getting into wars, the best 20th-century year to be born is around 1938. Some part of me desperately wants to have been a part of the Silent Generation. They seem to have pioneered a lot of the types of lives that attract me, and they got to do it without falling into the black hole of 1968-y agitation. I’ll have to make do with the age cohort I’ve got, but something about the way George looks at their cars always gets me wishing I didn’t:

There’s the beat-up, not-so-white Ford coupe belonging to Tom Kugelman, on the back of which he has printed SLOW WHITE. There’s the Chinese-Hawaiian boy’s grime-gray Pontiac, with one of those joke-stickers in the rear window: THE ONLY ISM I BELIEVE IN IS ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM. The joke isn’t a joke in this particular case, because he really is an abstract painter. [ … ] And there’s the well-waxed, spotless scarlet MG driven by Buddy Sorensen, the wild watery-eyed albino who is a basketball star and wears a “Ban the Bomb” button. George has caught glimpses of Buddy streaking past on the freeway, laughing to himself as if the absurd little sitzbath of a thing had run away with him and he didn’t care.

These "friends" you speak of

Of course I would want to read Geoff Dyer’s writing: operating free of career shackles to any particular subject (+1), he fills his books with formally distinctive (+1) essays (+1) about geographical self-displacement (+1); about culturally synesthetic experiences of visual, cinematic, and musical art (+1); and about avoiding real jobs (+1). He came up an only child (+1) and now enjoys ECM records (+1), cappuccinos (+1), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (+1), and not having children of his own (+1). So of course I would also want to interview him.

We met up to record a conversation on the balcony of a Sunset Boulevard café. As serious Marketplace of Ideas-philes know — boldly assuming such -philes exist — I refuse to summon the will to write questions in advance. Instead, I lazily spend weeks cramming my unconscious mind with material by my guest and, even more importantly, material around my guest. Then, come conversation time, que será será. But, sitting down with Geoff Dyer, I broke my own habit-as-rule, compelled to know one thing above all: how do you make friends?

However you interpret that question, you interpret it correctly. How does Geoff Dyer, specifically, make friends? I want to know that. How, generally, does one make friends? Yeah — that too. If you haven’t read his more personal or travel-oriented essays, I assure you they offer the impression of a man who collects pals like some collect those flattened pennies stamped with images of national monuments. In certain moments, he acknowledges the slight oddity in this: "I've got used to making new friends at an age when many people are living off the diminishing stockpile amassed at university," he writes.

But I stumble over the age less than that other cluster of attributes, the ones I share. I’ve met other only children who like their Tarkovsky films, their albums from ECM, their Thomas Bernhard novels, and their artisanal beverages. As a rule, we don’t make friends easily. In less sober moments, I sing the praises of my favorite elements of culture as tools to bring humanity together, to warm the pockets of frost between us all, but in more sober moments I wonder if these works of art don’t disconnect me from my fellow man even more often than they connect me to him. We endure the worst of this in middle and high school, a barren time that forces us to fashion identities out of our fleeting yet tribal likes and dislikes, but I don’t feel I’ve completely shaken that taint (to inadvertently evoke a disgusting mental image).

Another essayist, centuries older but still a friend-maker in his way, may point to the escape route. A couple weeks ago, I interviewed Sarah Bakewell, Michel de Montaigne’s latest biographer. I admire many things about Montaigne, not least having invented the modern essay form, but his lack of strong opinions really wins me over. In his work — point out the staggering oversimplification in this if you must — I see a man struggling so hard to be honest about himself that, in the process, he strips himself of his opinions. I’ve come to think of honesty as a solution that, poured on one’s own opinions, dissolves them. When we dig down to bedrock, claims like “I love Andrei Tarkovsky’s movies” and “I hate Andrei Tarkovsky’s movies” amount to little more than — well, grunts, right? We can’t credibly call them honest or dishonest, since their vagueness and rootedness in impulse takes them out of territory where that sort of truth and falsity applies.

Which isn’t to say that we should stop talking about the cultural products that attract or repel us. I just wonder if we should talk about them from richer angles than liking and disliking. In the best critics’ vocabularies, do words like good, bad, and any synonyms thereof have any place at all? In our interview, Geoff Dyer mentioned his current work on a book entirely about Stalker, in which — and only my own conjecture follows — he will not say “Stalker is good,” or even “Stalker is great.” I wager he’ll say something more interesting like, oh, “It's not enough to say that Stalker is a great film — it is the reason cinema was invented.” Hence, I suppose, the fact that I showed up to interview him, not the other way around.

 

Henepola Gunaratana: Mindfulness in Plain English

My poor life choices have lead me to prize two things: infinite patience and full books available free on the internet. Henepola Gunaratana’s Mindfulness in Plain English, available in the tubes as a PDF, hits both birds with one stone. Ask Metafilter’s hive mind recommended it again and again in old threads I’d read with titles like “How do I clear my mind?”, “Help me learn how to think straight”, “I fear my brain is trying to destroy me”, and “OH JESUS GOD MAKE THIS MENTAL YAMMERING STOP.” I felt the universe somehow “guiding” me toward the book, and hey, price’s right.

My very search through those threads would suggest that I suffer from concentration issues. I do, but only as an effect of the much larger problem of living locked in a struggle with my own mind. Intellectually, I believe that my mind = my brain = my personality = me, but in day-to-day reality, I feel forced to constantly suppress something internal that generates wave after wave of impulses to hide, turn solipsistic, and generally puss out, translating everything into its own conceptual language of fear, despair, and laziness. It makes its presence known at all times, whatever it is, but it never feels like me.

Recent months have seen my desperation to silence this... this thing rise to terrible heights, so I’ve cast around for solutions in places I wouldn’t normally. Living in and — let’s face it, being of — California, the epicenter of North American flakiness, I hesitate to approach anything with “mindfulness” in its title or meditation in its subject, but the passages I’d read quoted made too much sense to write off. For example:

We usually do not look into what is really there in front of us. We see life through a screen of thoughts and concepts, and we mistake those mental objects for the reality.

[ … ]

Early on in our practice of meditation, we need to rethink our underlying assumptions regarding conceptualization. For most of us, we have earned high marks in school and in life for our ability to manipulate mental phenomena — concepts — logically. Our careers, much of our success in everyday life, our happy relationships, we view as largely the result of our successful manipulation of concepts. In developing mindfulness, however, we temporarily suspend the conceptualization process and focus on the pure nature of mental phenomena. During meditation we are seeking to experience the mind at the pre-concept level.

Actually, now that I pull this stuff out of context, it sounds a little more granola than I’d like. The clunky prose may have something to do with it; clunk tends to bring with it a certain veneer of over-earnestness. But clearly I walk a dangerous line here. I do find that my dependence on throwing around words and concepts messes me up, but when I acknowledge that, how safe a distance can I possibly keep from the whole “everything is everything” and “the limits of language mean nothing is true or false” trips so beloved of sky-high undergrads? I consider it one thing to acknowledge communicative limitations; I consider it quite another to use them to absolve yourself of all intellectual responsibility.

Gunaratana doesn’t help his credibility when he makes claims that the sufficiently advanced meditator “achieves perfect mental health, a pure love for all that lives and complete cessation of suffering,” or when he makes groan-inducing reference “Western science and physics.” I highlight these particularly sketchy bits not to make the book as a whole seem sketchy, but to crank up my nonsense threat alert level. So much in this book strikes me as correct that I feel a heavier burden of responsibility to give the stink eye to the parts that don’t.

I mean, jeez, I don’t want to belabor this, but the word “mindfulness” alone — it just calls up so many horrific images of 36-year-old women driving hybrid vehicles brimming with extra pairs of yoga pants. But Gunaratana comes at a working definition of the term from a few different angles, none of which have to do with wind chimes. He calls it “non-judgmental observation,” “that ability of the mind to observe without criticism,” to see things “without condemnation or judgment” but only “a balanced interest in things exactly as they are in their natural states.” This includes yourself: “You see your own selfish behavior. You see your own suffering. And you see how you create that suffering. You see how you hurt others. You pierce right through the layer of lies that you normally tell yourself and you see what is really there.”

Again, grand. Probably too grand. But I’ve arrived independently at similar conclusions, or at least suspicions, in recent years. I certainly have the experience of neurotically building and protecting a fragile structure of self-mythologizing B.S. around myself. I’ve experienced the useless divisiveness of opinions, especially in settings where, as Tao Lin once blogged, “it distracts from existential despair and loneliness when people type a lot of abstractions to try to defeat someone else's likes and dislikes.” Speaking of abstractions, I’ve slowly leaned away from them and toward — how to put it? — concretions, an idea that sort of provides the core for this whole book, visible when Gunaratana writes something like, “Your body is a tool for creating desired mental states.” And you know I’ve tried to grasp all this with a mind he describes as “a shrieking, gibbering madhouse on wheels barreling pell-mell down the hill, utterly out of control and hopeless.” But apparently everyone’s does that.

The protagonist

Maria Bustillos’ excursion into David Foster Wallace’s private self-help library reminds me of my own past fascination with self-help. Wallace’s introduction to the stuff came, as we fans all now realize, through addiction and recovery. Mine came through — I don’t know, grim awe? I could never quite believe that an entire industry grew from such thin, unpromising soil. Leaving aside all those rich questions about their effectiveness, the very existence of motivational speakers became a particular interest. Part of me demanded to know how they could possibly do that job. Another part of me demanded to know how I could get that job.

Errol Morris once researched a project about self-help in America (I wonder: should we consider self-help a distinctly American phenomenon? Nick Hornby’s publisher told him his novel How to Be Good would sell a lot of copies specifically here to buyers mistaking it for a book about literally that) but scrapped it, leaving it, to my mind, one of the most intriguing studies I’ll never see. Errol Morris and self-help: can you envision a starker clash of sensibilities? Then again, a decade ago I’d have said the same about David Foster Wallace and self-help. Morris and Wallace: smart! Artful! Intellectually satisfying! Tasteful! Seemingly cynical yet really empowering! Self-help: dumb! Artless! Intellectually impoverished! Tasteless! Seemingly hopeful yet really enervating!

In viewing it as a grotesque spectacle, I don’t know how much my enthusiasm for things self-help differed from, say, a Gen-Xer’s enthusiasm for late-night public-access television. But as with anything ostensibly pitched so far away from me, I worked up a curiosity about the nature of the minds to which it did appeal. This turns out to lay close to one of the coriest of Wallace’s core concerns: can we possibly act, always and everywhere, on the assumption that all the other people around us possess fully realized inner lives too? Can we ever consistently see them, in all their consciousness, as more than bit players in the grand drama starring us?

As at least a B- Wallace reader, I’ve recently come to think of this as the question of the man’s fiction, and perhaps most of his nonfiction. John Jeremiah Sullivan’s GQ review of Wallace’s posthumous The Pale King mentions “his frequent and uncharacteristically Pollyanna statements about the supposed power of fiction against solipsism, i.e., that only in literature do we know for sure we're having "a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness." Later, Sullivan gets Wallace’s abilities in this arena across with an imaginary scenario:

Imagine walking into a place, say a mega-chain copy shop in a strip mall. It's early morning, and you're the first customer. You stop under the bright fluorescents and let the doors glide closed behind you, look at the employees in their corporate-blue shirts, mouths open, shuffling around sleepily. You take them in as a unified image, with an impenetrable surface of vague boredom and dissatisfaction that you're content to be on the outside of, and you set to your task, to your copying or whatever. That's precisely the moment when Wallace hits pause, that first little turn into inattention, into self-absorption. He reverses back through it, presses play again. Now it's different. You're in a room with a bunch of human beings. Each of them, like you, is broken and has healed in some funny way. Each of them, even the shallowest, has a novel inside. Each is loved by God or deserves to be. They all have something to do with you: When you let the membrane of your consciousness become porous, permit osmosis, you know it to be true, we have something to do with one another, are part of a narrative — but what? Wallace needed very badly to know.

I, too, have started feeling the need to know, which makes me think that, to the extent Wallace developed the ability “to prove to us that everyone's complicated, that when people seem simple and dull, it's we who aren't paying attention enough, it's our stubborn inborn tendency to see other people as major or minor characters in our story,” or, as Bustillos writes, “to erase the distance between himself and others in order to understand them better, and trying visibly to make himself understood — always asking questions, demanding to know more details,” he had some kind of superpower, the one that busts apart what Paul Graham calls “the most difficult problem in human experience: how to see things from other people's point of view, instead of thinking only of yourself.” Bustillos quotes Wallace as saying, “I just think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer. Because that means I'm going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to have a conversation with a person.”

Wallace laid a good deal of this out with the utmost explicitness in his famous 2005 Kenyon commencement speech:

My natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

[ … ]

If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

I’ve got to tell you, part of me has come to long for this anti-solipsistic power to experience everyone’s complexity, to erase the distance between myself and others, to automatically pay serious attention and have a meaningful conversation. Hence, I think, my recent years’ mass jettison of opinions — I have, like, four left — and preference for the concrete over the abstract. But another part of me does not long for this, does in fact suspect that, when you absorb everyone else’s perspective into your own, you lose your direction. I think of the Sunday Calvin & Hobbes where Calvin, bombarded with information by neo-Cubistly seeing all perspectives at once, finds himself totally immobilized.

Perhaps I really shouldn’t think of myself as the protagonist. But aren’t I the protagonist? I understand that I could surely derive great happiness — probably some emotion transcending happiness — by cutting myself down to size and refusing to privilege my story over others’, but how can I ever do the kind of work I can respect — the kind, uh, David Foster Wallace did — if I burn all my energy empathizing with the rest of humanity? While I loathe the notion that I’ve ever considered another human being simply an obstacle to my ambitions, I can’t deny having those ambitions. But speaking of protagonists, see also Wallace’s assessment of the protagonist of John Updike’s Toward the End of Time: “It never once occurs to him that the reason he's so unhappy is that he's an asshole.”

Richard Yates: The Easter Parade

“[The Easter Parade’s] the characters are all 'fucked',” wrote novelist and Richard Yates admirer/own-novel-titler-afterer Tao Lin. “The main character is the least 'fucked,' but the least 'fucked' person is always in a different way the most 'fucked' person, because of being most aware that everyone around him or her is 'fucked.’” Yates would seem to validate Lin’s assessment with the novel’s very first line: “Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce.”

A bold opening move, since it makes you envision a slog ahead: okay, so having established his characters’ ultimate unhappiness, he’ll just deterministically trace it from one probable cause all the way through the next fifty years. But that thing about the parental divorce now seems to me like a red herring: Emily and Sarah Grimes come from divorced parents, sure, but so many other hard-to-identify factors weight down on them that the search for one or even a few “main ones” can produce nothing. They “fuck” themselves, but their circumstances also do it, their parents also do it, their men also do it, humanity as a whole also does it, you and I probably also do it — but none do it intentionally, let alone maliciously.

Sarah, the older and more immediately pretty sister, rapidly settles down with a lowbrow semi-Englishman who beats her and produces three sons. Emily, the younger, relatively bookish sister to whom the narrative sticks closely, goes to college, signs on with an advertising agency, and bounces without prolonged satisfaction from man to man to man. Almost everyone around her eventually slips up and reveals themselves as a pathetic figure, then dies. Her father, a beaten-down copy desk drone working at a newspaper he hates, goes first. Her mother, a flighty alcoholic with rotting teeth and complex delusions of bon viveur-ism, takes much longer. Sarah, whom Yates paints as maybe too dumb to realize the grim, stunted banality of her family life, goes last.

This leaves Emily alone at the novel’s end, unemployed and flipping through her address book in desperation for human contact. Her former lovers, many of them cultural and financial medium- to medium-high rollers, have married or died. Only her favorite nephew Peter remains, and ringing him up strikes her as a near-ludicrous stretch. She does it anyway, which prompts him to invites her to stay with his new family in New Hampshire. But the moment she arrives, Emily drops into an obscure emotional turmoil, totally freaking out by the time she spots bicycles in Peter’s garage:

“So you bicycle!” she called to him across the top of the car. She had gotten out quickly, still trembling, and snatched her suitcase from the back seat; then, because a good loud sound was needed to punctuate her rage, she slammed the car door with all her strength. “That’s what you do. Oh, and what a lovely sight it must be, the two of you out bicycling with little what’s-her-name on a Sunday afternoon, all tanned and leggy in your sexy little cut-off jeans—you must be the envy of all New Hampshire...”

I have a sense that this scene, the novel’s last, exists to deliver the culmination of Emily’s rage at neither her nor anyone in her immediate family’s life having “panned out,” especially as compared to what she extrapolates from her scant data on Peter’s. But what would their panned-out lives have looked like? At no point do Emily, Sarah, nor their mother “Pookie” develop a clear idea of what they mean to achieve; they just sort of swim along like blind cave fishes. Yates writes that Pookie’s life “seemed pledged to achieving and sustaining an elusive quality she called ‘flair.’” Even with some idea of what she wanted, Yates seems to doubt that even the reasonably intelligent Emily could’ve gotten there: “Do you know a funny thing?” she says to Peter after she tires herself out with the hopeless j’accuse. “I’m almost fifty years old and I’ve never understood anything in my whole life.”

Does Yates use The Easter Parade to make some kind of feminist statement? You could easily close the book and think, “Women: damned if they do, damned if they don’t.” Sarah reaches deep dissatisfaction by way of marriage, family, and alcohol; Emily reaches deep dissatisfaction by way of a education, a career, and “liberated” serial monogamy. Yet Yates rolls out red carpet over which they still somehow walk the plank: Sarah’s looks let her write her own ticket with the menfolk, and Emily scores a plum job at an ad agency not only free of Mad Men-type discrimination but run by a woman. Not only does their femaleness not hold them back, but I have a hard time finding a way in which Yates doesn’t make it a great advantage.

All the way through, I kept thinking of Joseph Heller’s Something Happened. To the extent that Yates’ Grimes sisters “fuck” themselves (in Tao Lin’s parlance), they do it by not doing anything in particular, by not acting with anything resembling decisiveness, just like Heller’s equally mid-century malaise-y Robert Slocum. Yet despite this, all three characters labor under strong, amorphous desires: Sarah Grimes for something maybe like marriage and family, Emily Grimes for something maybe like intellectuality and independence, and Robert Slocum for something maybe like comfort routine. In this way, Slocum mirrors Frank Wheeler of Yates’ own Revolutionary Road, whose wife April wants him to attain something maybe like a “creative” life in Paris. (Emily and one of her many men actually try this, but it works out as well as anything does for Richard Yates characters.)

I feel like Yates might have a certain formula in mind here: strong desire + lack of intention = a whole lot of not fun. This seems inherently wrong to say about a bearded, leathery, embittered, chain-smoking, non-college-educated World War II veteran bent on chronicling a certain strain of decadent American mediocrity, but I’ve come to think of him as a kind of Buddhist novelist. Maybe lower-case-b buddhist novelist, but still, his worldview attributes very few of humanity’s problems to outright malice, and I doubt his characters would have fared worse on the Eightfold Path.