Colin Marshall

Artistico

Justin Wehr writes in:

This may be one of the strangest post requests ever requested, but shoot: I’d like to see you write about your proclivity to close your eyes while talking. For some reason, that stood out to me while watching the video.

There are a number of subquestions that interest me:

Why do you do it?
What causes you to do it and what does it do for you?
How aware are you of doing it?
What do you think others think of it?

I don’t mean to imply that this is in any way a strange behavior, and I hope you are not insecure about it. If anything is strange, it is my interest in these questions.

This didn’t seem at first like it would open a can of worms, but hoo boy does it. Years of practice have geared me to explain this in terms of the sheer degree of focus and reflection I feel everything anyone says to me deserves — and even the interviewer who conducted the interview to which Justin refers asked directly about this habit of mine and framed it in just those terms — but I can equally and oppositely explain it by admitting that my social skills are teh suck.

Okay, maybe I just fear that my social skills are teh suck, but flip open a textbook on autism-spectrum disorders and see if it doesn’t call out a habitual failure to make and maintain eye contact as one of the redder, wavier flags. I hold up a little better at age 26, but as a kid I couldn’t talk or listen to somebody while looking straight at them without chanting the internal equivalent of “oh shit, oh shit, oh shit” and thereby losing my train of thought and ability to respond coherently. I do genuinely want to give peoples’ questions due attention and consideration, but figuring out I could exaggerate the physical element of that and not have to look at people made for a useful trick indeed. For a while.

But that only covers one artifact of the childhood I inexplicably spent hammering “IF OTHER PERSON, THEN AVOID” into my personality’s source code. If I burnt vast swathes of my sixth year of life hiding in my bedroom with Parsec, I burnt vast swathes of my first year of college hiding in my dorm room with DVDs of Paul Thomas Anderson movies. Because that, my friends, is what you move 1200 miles to UC Santa Barbara to do: close the door and hope desperately that nobody invites you to something that might interrupt your Boogie Nights commentary track, while at the same time hoping desperately that somebody invites you to something that might interrupt your Boogie Nights commentary track.

I don’t know who to blame for this, but oh man, am I pointing my finger wildly. The habit of swerving wildly around possible human contact has a way of persisting on a deep, reptilian neurological level, even though I haven’t actually wanted to avoid people for a long time, where “wanted” refers to a function somewhere in the part of my higher consciousness that, I don’t know, reads a lot of László Krasznahorkai. Or seriously intends to. By myself. Alone. In a room. O LORD MAKE IT STOP

Bizarrely, and unlike a great many young people with hundreds of read books logged to my name, I didn’t endure a childhood filled with savage mockery. I can’t even recall a single instance of mild, garden-variety, they’re-just-doing-it-because-they-want-a-rise-out-of-you taunting, despite my habit of — shockingly — carrying both tabletop role-playing game rulebooks and photobooks of the world’s various domestic cat breeds. To school. There I sat in the dining commons, practically demanding an atomic wedgie, and nothing — although this policy of voluntary autism might’ve prevented me from noticing if day ever came.

“I’m afraid your child is deeply autistic,” says a grown-up’s voice bubble from off the panel in one of Matt Groening’s Life is Hell comics, compendia of which I liked to shove in my backpack alongside Ninjas & Superspies and The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Cats. “Me,” thinks the surreptitiously listening youngster in the panel’s center, “artistic?” This has since become my go-to term for those who display the same residual behaviors I so despise and futilely seek to eradicate in myself. “Man, was that artistic,” I’ll think to myself after spending half an hour instinctively spending forty minutes looking for an answer to a question on blessedly unjudging Google that I could’ve settled in a simple thirty-second phone call to a living being. Madelaine favors a certain kind of paper called Artistico, long logo-emblazoned boxes of which stand in the corner of our apartment. “Ugh, what an artistico,” I’ll hatefully mutter to myself after my more flamboyant acts of social self-sabotage.

Anyway, to answer Justin’s questions, I’ll clamp my peepers tight (just kidding! This is the internet, where it’s safe) and say:

Why do you do it? Impulse
What causes you to do it and what does it do for you? The atavistic impulse to hide, and it delays an immediate freakout now while bolstering the greater, more existential freakout going on even now
How aware are you of doing it? I know it’s an impulse, but I do feel myself doing it every time, which adds another tricky loop of meta-ness to deal with while I’m trying to talk
What do you think others think of it? “I definitely shouldn’t give this guy any money”

Instead of writing about my personal history, I should have just posted Socially Awkward Penguins:

(Maybe I’ve written about this before.)

Anthony asks about all this 10,000-subscriber fuss

Anthony comments on my push for 10,000 Marketplace of Ideas subscribers or bust:

Why do you need 10,000 subscribers to continue it? I realize you want to spread ideas, and that's not a bad thing, but you seem so intent on ending it without reaching a larger subscriber base.

Do you need that many people to justify its existence? Is this a self-imposed decision or was it forced upon you? I understand you're probably a freelance journalist and are busy and broke, but if you enjoy it, and your listeners enjoy it, there's no reason to push the boundaries of that relationship. If it becomes a burden then you can scale it back or pander for donations, or even end it. But begging for subscribers has always gotten on my nerves, regardless of the cause.

The only justification I can see for this is that in order to get more high-profile guests, you need an established reputation, and for a podcast, subscriber statistics are the best way to show that.

Strongly encouraging listeners to "recommend" and "share" turns me away. Nevertheless, I wish you success. I just hope you can attain it without succumbing to tired tactics that I've seen too often.

The long and short of it: because I expected to reach 10,000 subscribers years ago. At the current rate of growth, I'll die of liver spots before I can make a sustainable career out of this.

Interestingly, I haven’t had trouble getting guests of any profile; nobody’s even come close to asking for listenership figures. But while I seem able to invite any guest I want, there remain a few things I can’t do, the most urgent priority of which is to make the show without having to burn a huge chunk of my day on a job that has nothing to do with anything. To achieve that state, I reckon I’ll need at least the following:

• A five-figure podcast audience (because I keep hearing the refrain, “Don’t even try professionalizing any podcast with an audience smaller than five figures”)
• Some sort of major-city terrestrial broadcast presence (because, at its heart, I don’t see The Marketplace of Ideas as a fully “pull” medium type of show)
• Not necessarily a rapid rate of audience growth, but at least a constant rate of audience growth (as opposed to an oscillation between audience growth and decay)
• Listening enforced by law in at least 51 percent of Anglophone territories

Much soul-searching tells me that, content-wise, I have already done enough to achieve this, so the sticking point must lay elsewhere. (As Principal Skinner once said, “No, it’s the children who are wrong.”) I choose to heed the golden words of wisdom Conan O’Brien uttered during his interview on WTF (a podcast that, coincidentally, recently hit it big on public radio): “Get into situations where you don't have a choice. I believe that's the definition of accomplishing things in this life.” Hence the decision to rip myself off of whatever teat now holds me back and move to L.A., with nothing lined up, in exactly two months.

I’ve heard the question before, in various forms: “Why can’t The Marketplace of Ideas continue as a hobby?” Because nothing can. Maybe my own personal psychological weirdness causes this, but, broadcasting, filmmaking, or writing, I can’t keep any pursuit rolling viably as a hobby. But nor can I convert them into “jobs,” traditionally defined and separate from “life.” There comes a point when they must integrate with my existence itself or begone — and the clock’s ticking.

Colin Marshall responds to Colin Marshall about the lifestyle of Colin Marshall

Don’t worry; I’m not doing some kind of meta thing. I sometimes e-mail with this one guy, also named Colin Marshall, about Korea (he lives there), cinema, Korean cinema, and the Korean cinema of Sangsoo Hong. He wrote this in response to my post “Two Flavors of Adulthood”, if you remember it, but my blogging platform wouldn’t let him leave it as a compliment. Because I can’t let technological snafus silence the voice of my namesake, here it is:

I don't understand why you insist on forswearing the familial side of "grown-upitude" in so vehement and public a way. Of course, there's nothing wrong with not having a wife and kids, and if you wish to renounce them, that's your choice. But to announce that you are doing so on the back of "cultural responsibilities" seems a bit presumptuous and insulting.

There's also a major paradox at play here: you are frequently ebullient and effusive in your appreciation of art, and perhaps crave to find fellows "for whom any given work of Andrei Tarkovsky trumps even the most deluxe package of holy matrimony and reproduction". But what, about your favourite works of art, do you find moving? I'd hazard a guess that you aren't merely on some death-and-erasure trip, that your favourite works also push some of the buttons that reflect your metaphysical entanglement with love, yearning, fear, community etc., in short, the things that relate to your being a human being LIVING in the world, and the things (along with death) that give art its power.

And yet, you seem to imply that your ideal peer group would comprise people who renounce the same things that you do on the back of a "cultural responsibility". But to what culture, can I ask, would you all duty-bound? Would it be the a culture bound up with the world, or merely one bound up with art? Would you recommend that all serious artists be as martyrs - make these sacrifices so that others could enjoy their efforts? It seems that if all artists thought the same as you do then the only ones fully equipped to enjoy art would be those who had made similar sacrifices. And unless you're thinking in terms of posterity, even this would surely be untenable after a while, because all these serious artists and art appreciators would eventually die out.

I really think it's unhealthy to decide, as a twenty-something, that "cultural responsibility" betokens the renunciation of all the things you mentioned, as it is to wonder where you might find a group of Tarkovsky acolytes who would place even his most minor work above their wife and kids (whom, according to you, they probably shouldn't have anyway). It's not either/or; just look at James Joyce. Not everything is black and white, not all thirty-something dads are semi-bearded Spiderman fans, not all abnegators are artists.

That seems all in order. I don’t know if I find anything particularly “moving” in art, Tarkovskian or otherwise, but certain creators definitely impress the hell out of me on the regular. I shy away from making anything resembling a recommendation to “all serious artists,” or even a recommendation to “artists,” or even a recommendation to “people other than me.” (None of this applies to non-Colin Marshalls — er, non-this-Colin Marshalls.)

Colin’s observation that “it’s not either/or” checks out, though that he makes it tells me that I failed to get across in the original post that I meant to talk about two ends of a spectrum. On the one end, you’ve got the beardo dads (i.e., who take familial responsibilities seriously) who limit the bulk of their cultural experience to those directly descended from Marvel comics (i.e., who cast off cultural responsibilities). But why, in my generation, have I seen so little of the other end?

Mark Larson and Justin Wehr on cat and dog media

Comments on cat and dog media from Mark Larson:

This reminds me of an aside in Barbery's "The Elegance of the Hedgehog": "The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects". I agree 100% about being turned off by perpetually needy hard-sell dog media, but the downside of cat media: it's more difficult to socialize around. I have yet to have a water-cooler conversation turn to last night's Charlie Rose. Alas! My cultural cross to bear.

And Justin Wehr:

Can one be both a cat media person and have a 10,000 subscribership goal? I suppose so if the purpose of the goal is not “hey, look at me” but rather more like “I want to do this, but if it doesn’t feed me by this point, time to move on”.

Justin refers, of course, to my 10,000-or-bust drive for The Marketplace of Ideas. I consider his a valid question, though one basic objection rises quickly: would you really call 10,000 subscribers such a big number? To my mind, 10,000 remains safely on the segment of the media spectrum between “niche” and “very niche.” If I can’t even reach that, then I deem the world itself officially wrong: I’ll move to a fortified compound in Wyoming and start cranking out webisodes about jeggings or something.

The next logical question: do I mean The Marketplace of Ideas to be “cat media”? Readers and listeners seem to suppose so, but I can’t see my own intentions quite so clearly. My main drive tells me to make the best, most interesting conversations I probably can, but, like Peter Greenaway, I want to be MAINNNNNSTREAMMMMM. (Note for Peter Greenaway, if this ever gets back to him: my link to that Exiled piece by no means implies endorsement of that Exiled piece. And while I’m at it, note for Elvis Mitchell: my link to that New York piece by no means implies endorsement of that New York piece. Let’s straighten this out.)

Justin addressed this issue in his own post:

That is probably generally true, but it is not necessarily true, as Colin himself writes in a previous post:

I've recently come to find that making something interesting and popular is the only creative goal worth pursuing. Sure, you can gun for popularity alone, but the easiest way to that is to crank out something bland that zero love but millions find acceptable. On the coin's other side, you can make maximize only interestingness, but then you risk making something obscure that your potential audience, the pool of people with pre-existing proximity to the work — dwindles to zero.

A quote from Anne Sexton comes to mind: "I am in love with money, so don't be mistaken. But first I want to write good poems."

Posts within posts within posts: things just got vertiginous.

Matt responds to Revolutionary Road

An interesting comment by a certain Matt on my consideration of Revolutionary Road:

You almost can’t blame him; surely this is the first instinct of anyone outwardly gearing up to make a big change. Anyone preparing to do that — myself included — needs to raise a formidable amount of inward-looking vigilance to avoid falling into the same pattern.

I don't know. My main reaction to the novel is that I would like to punch Frank Wheeler in the face, and possibly Richard Yates as well.

The glossy numbing rot of tightly circumscribed suburban striving is something that usually interests me, but Yates's relentless contempt for his characters overrode any sympathy I might have had for his themes. It is fine to write about vacuous jerks, but it is overbearing to annotate every encounter, every inner monologue, every f***ing page practically, with authorial contempt for said vacuous jerks (to make double extra certain I know how to feel). Just give them to me bare, and let me figure out for myself whether or not I hate them.

All the novel's action flows from Frank's inner narcissist: it kills his wife, wrecks his kids, scorns his friends, and (constantly, neverendingly) fishes for validation from precisely the cozy vacuity he affects to disdain. Frank is interested in cultivating a praise-garnering personal narrative, not actually extricating himself from the eudemonic atrophy he spends so much time critiquing/ironically dismissing. He doesn't want to be different, because that would involve risk and actual physical separation from the people he condescends to, in which case who would be there to listen to him expound about how different he is? Rather, he wants to gesture at being different while staying right where he is. Best of both worlds there: he gets the safety and predictability of structured banality, and he gets to scoff at the rubes who don't "get it" while those same rubes tell him he's awesome and a rebel.

Navel-gazing men barely notice anyone else, and this indifference is not benign (even moreso in 1955, I suppose). Frank wants credit for empathy, for responsibility, for sophisticated adulthood, but he undertakes not a single action that does not redound to his own ego-fulfillment. Basically, he just takes. His marriage to April becomes an unintentional fait accompli, based on her not wanting him to feel bad, and him having no clue this is going on:

What a subtle, treacherous thing it was to let yourself go that way! Because once you'd started it was terribly difficult to stop; soon you were saying "I'm sorry, of course you're right," and "Whatever you think is best," and "You're the most wonderful and valuable thing in the world," and the next thing you knew all honesty, all truth, was as far away and glimmering, as hopelessly unattainable as the world of the golden people. Then you discovered you were working at life the way the Laurel Players worked at The Petrified Forest, or the way Steve Kovick worked at his drums - earnest and sloppy and full of pretension and all wrong; you found you were saying yes when you meant no, and "We've got to be together in this thing" when you meant the very opposite [...]

This edifice of innocuous little lies becomes impregnable over time; eventually you are trapped in this thing you loathe, and you barely know how it happened. The difference is that April genuinely loathes it and understands its implications, is in many ways a genuine victim, whereas Frank is just posing.
As to those implications, here is an "ancient man" telling us the novel's Big Important Theme:

He may have forgotten the shape of his first wife's smile and the sound of her voice in tears, but by imposing a set of numerals on her death he has imposed coherence on his own life, and on life itself. Now all the other years can fall obediently into place, each with its orderly contribution to the whole. [...]
He has brought order out of chaos.

So: we choose Structure (tidy communities comprised of tidy houses on tidy streets) over the sloppy churnings of life, and in so doing obliterate the interesting parts of ourselves. We submit to pointless nothing work, anonymity, serial pettiness. Ultimately we begin to mistake this coping mechanism for virtue, i.e. this is a thing we do because it is right and true, not because it eases our angst. We gloss the sacrifices, re-categorize them as choices borne of integrity.

I'm not sure the novel is successful at illuminating the particular ways in which this dynamic manifests, however. Not that they're not there: for Frank, a succession of pats on the head (from his job, his boss, his mistress) stand in for accomplishment. Mrs. Givings confuses activity with purpose. Yates indulges a reverie for nearly every character wherein he or she wrestles with the vague but persistent idea that they've missed something (ugh). And so on. But he seems to want to attribute this state of affairs to the weakness/wickedness of individuals rather than the infrastructure of anodyne self-congratulation that coaxes them into acquiescence.

I'm all about promoting interesting comments. Matt, if you have an internet thing, I'll link to it.