Siddhartha Deb: A Teacher of a Different Kind

In the ninth installment of the LARB’s Writers on Teachers series, Morten Høi Jensen discusses Siddhartha Deb, a rising star of the New York literary scene whose new nonfiction book on contemporary India, The Beautiful and the Damned, has met with some controversy (its first chapter was expurgated in the country to which the book is devoted, thanks to a court injunction).

Edmund Wilson once described his Princeton teacher, Christian Gauss, as “a teacher of a different kind — the kind who starts trains of thought that he does not himself guide to conclusions but leaves in the hands of his students to be carried on by themselves.”

Siddhartha Deb, too, is a teacher of a different kind. He is young, for starters, and seems often to stand apart from the academic milieu; though he keeps a formal, professional distance to his students he is really more like an older sibling than one of the customary mid-life antiques one always half-expects. He is well-versed in the latest contemporary writing; he listens to MC Solaar and wears hoodies when not in the classroom; he writes lucid, intelligent criticism for hip New York journals like n+1 and Bookforum.

In other words, when it comes to Deb the generational gap that unavoidably exists between students and professors is pretty narrow. This gap shrinks even further once you factor in the genuine sympathy and interest Siddhartha always displays. My stock-image of him in a classroom has him hunched over the desk with his arms in front of him, listening and nodding his head intently, muttering, ‘Right, right, right, right.’ And yet he manages to command respect. While a student of his at Eugene Lang College of The New School I often felt the tectonic plates of my own opinions and tightly-held ideas loosen or shift.

I took Deb’s class “Reading for Writers: Roberto Bolaño.” He had already written at some length about Bolaño for Harper’s and the Times Literary Supplement, and in a 2007 panel organized by n+1 — later published in their pamphlet series as What we Should Have Known: Two Discussions — he added Bolaño’s name alongside W.G. Sebald’s as one of the two of the most important contemporary fiction writers. In that same panel discussion Siddhartha said of his students that they often seemed to lack historical awareness: “They’re very bright, they go to a liberal arts college; they’re very smart. But whatever kind of historical context it is — world-historical context certainly, but even an American historical context — is missing.” The Bolaño class wasn’t narrowly designed to explicate the Chilean novelist’s work, but to consider it in as large and amiable a way as possible. Imparting on us the weight and scope of historical context was paramount.

In his long Harper’s essay, Siddhartha argues that “Bolaño is in some sense working over the unsolved case of Latin American violence,” and part of the thrill of the class was the sense that we, too, were contributing to a case of strong literary and political importance, and that this case (because Bolaño’s fiction and essays were still being translated) was an ongoing one. We were — all of us — discovering and digesting his work in tandem with its appearance in English; with Siddhartha’s guidance we navigated everything from the politics of literary translation to the history of the book review; we considered the decline of manifesto-writing and the rise of the MFA short story; we even looked into odd modern cultural phenomena like Stuff White People Like. This was the thrill of discovery, not just of an individual writer but of the reverberations of storytelling in historical and cultural terms. Bolaño presented a world for us, but it was Deb who helped us explore it.

On the day of our final class I was walking down Sixth Avenue with my friend (and fellow classmate) Alyssa, lamenting the fact that we wouldn’t be spending two days a week in a classroom with Siddhartha anymore. When I casually mentioned the possibility of starting a review or discussion group, she broke into a spasm of excitement and passion. We immediately set about enlisting other students and, privately referring to ourselves as “The Siddhartha Debs,” agreed to meet once a week at Café Loup (eventually we downgraded, for financial reasons, to City Tavern on Thirteenth Street). Over gin or Jameson we revisited class discussions and vowed to uphold the literary flame Bolaño and Siddhartha had kindled. When eventually we put together our modest little zine, Siddhartha emerged as our most vocal and enthusiastic supporter; he invited us to come present our journal to one of his classes, and got us a spot in an impressive faculty reading series at The New School.

This was a gift. For months we had been reading and writing with Siddhartha in mind. His dual role both as an accomplished fiction writer and engagé literary critic was, we felt, something to aspire to.

I realize now that the thrill of discovery was not limited to Bolaño only, but applied in equal measure to Siddhartha’s own writing. In The Point of Return (2002), his debut novel, there is a description of the narrator’s father that invokes Siddhartha’s gifts as a writer and critic:

“It was as if, with retirement, the layers of life as a veterinary doctor, as an officer, had fallen away to reveal the peasant who had always lived beneath the suits and ties.”

Cutting through many a congealed convention to reveal undercurrents of a political, social, and cultural nature, with a critical eye that is — to use one of David Foster Wallace’s memorable neologisms — "incisionish": this is the Siddhartha way. The Beautiful and the Damned, his brilliant new book of narrative non-fiction, embodies this method. At a reading at KGB Bar earlier this fall, I was happy and proud to see him greeted with excitement and interest. He deserves it; his writing, like his teaching, is of an altogether different kind.

Morten Høi Jensen is a freelance book critic. His writing has appeared in Bookforum, Open Letters Monthly and The Quarterly Conversation. He is books editor for IDIOM Magazine.

Radar LARB

The Boxing Day Swim (courtesy fimb and flickr creative commons)

Football and foxhunts, department store sales and epic sessions in the pub: as this article points out it's a wonder Americans haven't adopted Boxing Day for themselves (never mind it's that other kind of football). O well. You still have the blips at Radar LARB (most Mondays):

The Full-Stop editors: The Situation on American Writing: Dana Spiotta: "I truly don’t think about audience at all until a book comes out. Then I wonder who will respond to it and why. I have no idea if the audience for serious fiction has grown or contracted. I don’t feel as pessimistic about it as I ought to. I just think humans want and need to read good fiction. Maybe they forget it sometimes, but I can’t imagine people will give up reading stories."

Michelle Dean: The Struggle for the Occupy Wall Street Archives: "An example of how Jez talks: The first time I asked him to explain his motives for starting the archives, he grinned and said, 'The idea came from a number of places, and I’ll try to make it as simple as possible, as succinct as possible.' He paused and then took a deep breath. 'There is an essay, or an interview with Jacques Derrida, which occurs in a book called Philosophy in a Time of Terror.'"

Alan P. Lightman: The Accidental Universe: Science's Crisis of Faith: "Dramatic developments in cosmological findings and thought have led some of the world’s premier physicists to propose that our universe is only one of an enormous number of universes with wildly varying properties, and that some of the most basic features of our particular universe are indeed mere accidents—a random throw of the cosmic dice. In which case, there is no hope of ever explaining our universe’s features in terms of fundamental causes and principles."

Maria Russo: Is 2011 Really Just 1991?: "Kurt Andersen has really done it now. His more than three decades spent monitoring the tremolo fluctuations in urban American style, power and class distinctions appear to have ended in defeat, with a single, glum Vanity Fair essay."

Kee Hinckley: "On Pseudonymity, Privacy and Responsibility on Google+."

Passionate Utterances: Learning from Stanley Cavell

The seventh installment of LARB's Writers On Teachers series: Sianne Ngai describes her time studying with Stanley Cavell. Find the whole series in one convenient sidebar near the top of the blog.

I was a grad student in English at Harvard in the mid-90s, but physically there for just three years, anxious to move to Brooklyn for a relationship as soon as I became ABD. In that brief but intense period of time, I tried to take as many courses offered by Stanley Cavell as possible. In my last year, I asked him to be a member of my dissertation committee. Looking back I’m still flooded with gratitude (and astonishment) by the fact that he said yes.

At the time I couldn’t have said why I felt so attuned to Cavell’s writing. I just knew, after reading his essay on moods in Emerson and Nietzsche (“Aversive Thinking”) and then his books on Thoreau and remarriage comedy (The Senses of Walden, Pursuits of Happiness), that I wanted to read more, and to think and talk with him as much as possible about the things he thought were interesting. All the more so when I realized that, in person, Stanley Cavell was exactly like the voice his writing projected. That voice, no matter what it happened to be speaking about — Shakespeare and the avoidance of love, Jacques Derrida and J. L. Austin, the Hollywood women’s film of the 1930s and 40s — was unfailingly generous and infectiously interesting. It was a meta-philosophical voice, preoccupied less with the wrongness of skepticism (that is, with skepticism understood as intellectual error, thereby capable of intellectual correction) than with its status as a basic condition of human life and also as a kind of madness, a denial of our shared reality with other minds. Cavell’s voice was a kind of therapy against that madness. It was also an utterly and profoundly non-snobby voice: the voice of a philosopher concerned with philosophy’s aversion to the ordinary, and with the nondiscursive aspects of ordinary language — its affect and force, its ontology as action — that seemed to interest so few other philosophers of language at the time. It was, finally and significantly, the voice of someone deeply interested in how gender inflects both of these problems.

I took four courses in a row with Cavell, all in the philosophy department: two graduate seminars on Lacan, an undergraduate lecture called “Aesthetics: Opera and Film,” and a graduate seminar on King Lear. I loved these courses, even when I wasn’t sure I understood what they were truly about. (It’s called “Opera and Film,” but what’s it about really? I kept asking myself.) This was mostly due to my ignorance; I was still playing catch-up, in part by reading as much of Cavell’s work as possible. But I think it was also due to the genuinely open and experimental nature of the courses Cavell taught. He was trying to work out certain questions in them, with us. This felt really thrilling.

“Opera and Film” was one of my favorites. The syllabus, as was always the case in Cavell’s courses, was not so much eclectic as complex. We listened to and/or watched Carmen, Don Giovanni, Tannhäuser, The Lady Eve, Now Voyager, Moonstruck, Smiles of a Summer Night. We read J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things With Words with Shoshana Felman’s The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, Catherine Clément and Susan McClary on women in opera, Baudelaire on Wagner, and selections from Cavell’s own The World Viewed and A Pitch of Philosophy. Sometimes, delightfully, he would pause during a lecture, walk to the piano on stage, and play a passage or two from the score discussed in the reading. And as the semester progressed it became clear that what the course was “really about” was the peculiar ontology of what Cavell (adapting J.L. Austin) called passionate utterances: how they demand a response in kind, how words can be “owed,” or thought of as a form of indebtedness to others.All of this was linked to the question of whether the split between words and music in opera was gendered, and to what became of the female voice in Hollywood melodrama.

Similarly, the grad seminar on King Lear was really about what Cavell called problematic praise, which was, in turn, another way to think about the complexities of aesthetic judgment and criticism. In addition to Shakespeare’s tragedy, which foregrounds the consequences of false praise and ingratitude, we read Heidegger on thinking and thanking (What is Called Thinking?) and Henry James’s remarkable story about mass-cultural author worship (“The Birthplace”). One day Cavell showed us a scene from The Band Wagon (1953) in which Fred Astaire, as Cavell read it, tries to find a way to express his indebtedness to African-American dance. Cavell noted the way in which Astaire, a song and dance man, is shown, strangely, in ¾ shot (cut off at the thighs) for the beginning of the film. It’s not until after a routine in a penny arcade, in which Astaire does an extended duet with a black male dancer, that, as Cavell put it, pointing to his image on the screen, Astaire manages to “find his legs.” Cavell read this performance as an act of praise, or as an expression of aesthetic indebtedness and gratitude; thinking also, as Cavell often did, about issues of race and appropriation, I wondered if it wasn’t also readable as a kind of reparation or apology (which we often refer to as something “owed”). Both praise and apology belong to the class of what Austin called “perlocutionary” utterances, in which, as Cavell notes, the felicity of the action is dependent less on the “I” than the “you.” In other words, if you do not accept my compliment or apology, then I haven’t successfully complimented you or apologized.

Cavell’s Lacan courses were more straightforward, organized around the French psychoanalyst’s own famous seminars. The first, “Freud After Lacan,” was on Book III: The Psychoses (Freud’s reading of Daniel Schreber). The second, whose name I can’t remember, was devoted to Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Kant, Sade, Antigone).

I was the only first-year English grad student in “Freud After Lacan.” This made taking the course feel a bit lonely (so much of grad school is about learning alongside the people in your cohort) and that much more intimidating. It was Lacan, after all, and I didn’t have a buddy to confide in, to talk with about my confusions. I was too much in awe of the philosophy Ph.D. students in the class, especially the many advanced ones in their fourth and fifth years, to make friends with them. Above all there was the difficulty of Lacan himself: those daunting quasi-mathematical algorithms, that sublime, inaccessible Real. But offsetting all of this was the fascinating question: What was it about Lacan (and Lacan’s interpretation of Freud, in particular) that Cavell felt he had to grapple with philosophically? The fact that it was Stanley Cavell — someone who constantly wrote about language and gender, but who nonetheless was not on the chart of poststructuralists I’d been supplied with as an undergrad (a chart that included Lacan but not Cavell) — suddenly made Lacan all the more interesting.

In the classroom, Cavell was intense and serious, though often smiling. He had an amazing flash of a smile. While his syllabi were intricately structured, his pedagogy was open to the point that if he were struck by an issue in a text mentioned in someone’s presentation, he would immediately revise the syllabus to assign that text in order to bring everyone else into the conversation. His way of thinking was explorative as opposed to combative, which is not to say that he never took issue with other thinkers. And though he was generous with his students, he didn’t pretend to like everything they said. I once mentioned Theodor Adorno during a seminar, and Cavell, irritated but also showing a sense of humor about that irritation, said that Adorno always felt like a “flea in his ear.”

In seminar I always tried to snag the seat right next to Stanley, on his left. (Mostly so I could hear him clearly; at the time I had a note-taking obsession, which involved transcribing every single word the professor said.) There was always a ring of auditors sitting around those of us at the table, and often these auditors were visiting from other countries. There were also professors and graduate students from various departments at BU and MIT. Once the philosopher Hilary Putnam was there; another time it was Stanley’s wife. Cavell would talk first, in a directed but relaxed way, and student presentations on the reading followed. People worked really hard on the presentations, and they were almost always good. Somewhere in a file cabinet I still have all of their handouts about Freud and Lacan, including ones by Nancy Bauer (author of Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism) and William Bracken (now in the philosophy department at UC Riverside).

I was inchoate and jelly-like in graduate school (kind of like a slime mold), but Cavell was kind to me anyway. He seemed to take me seriously. He gave me a lot of his time. Once, after having lunch together, he said to me, “You’re very dutiful.” The gentlest of criticisms. Of course, I — dutifully — tried to be less so.

We have stayed in touch, albeit loosely and intermittently, over the last 17 years. Here’s the last email I sent him:

Dear Stanley,

Just a note to say hello and also how much I wish I could be at the
conference on your work this October! (I committed myself
to something else in Montreal on the same date, otherwise I **would** be
there).

I actually had a dream last night in which I ran into you at a dog park. (Do
you have a dog?) The dogs were happily playing somewhere off on the field,
and you asked, Did you put your name on the list to get my family
newsletter? I hadn't. First thing I did when I woke up was to
refind your email address on the internet, and that's when I found out about
the conference. Which kind of **is** a family.

Best wishes to you,
Sianne

Stanley wrote back and said he did indeed have a dog, Kaya, who always stays by his side during his days of writing. He said he didn’t have a family newsletter, but he did have an autobiography he was expecting to appear soon; if I sent him my address he’d send me a copy.

¤

Sianne Ngai is Professor of English at Stanford University. She is the author of Ugly Feelings (Harvard, 2005) and Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, forthcoming also from Harvard in fall 2012.

The Long and the Short of It: Writings on Contemporary China (A Top Ten List for 2011)

The Fat Years, by Chan Koonchung
Cover image for the English-language translation, from Nan A. Talese.

LARB contributor and China matters specialist Jeffrey Wasserstrom offers multiple tiers of recommendation for year-end reading.

'Tis the season for best books lists, which—to invoke a Chinese saying—sprout up like bamboo shoots after a spring rain. Just in case somebody asked, I was prepared to offer my own: 2011's best books on recent Chinese political and cultural developments. No one asked. And while I could go ahead and simply post my list anyway, it feels a bit late for holiday book buying. What might be more useful—especially for readers without a lot of time during the holidays—is to highlight some of the notable short form and long form news reports, reviews, and commentary pieces from the last year. The result is a Top 10 list that I hope will give readers an enlightening overview of how a variety of writers have been addressing the major events, trends and phenomena in the world’s most populous country. And if you have the time to plunge into a book just now, or are looking for that last-minute gift, I’ll mention one published in the last couple of years to pair with the article in question. (I’ve reviewed many of these myself, for venues such as TIME and the Asian Review of Books, but in each case, I’ll point readers to a review by someone else, so that they get a perspective different from mine about the work’s value.)

Though the list is eclectic, a fair number of the titles address collective struggles for change or profile individuals known for speaking out against abuses of power. This perspective is not coincidental (see my own China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know). Though TIME’s decision to name “The Protester” its 2011 person of the year was likely not driven by events in China—this was, after all, the year of Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street—dissent is always a crucial theme when discussing China and its future.

Granted, Chinese protests, though sometimes in the headlines, have not been generating the same kind of intense global scrutiny that they did back in, say, 1989 (when, incidentally, Gorbachev got the “Person of the Year” nod from TIME, just as he had in 1987). Still as Megan Shank and I argue in a commentary coming out in the next issue of Dissent, 2011 saw plenty of expressions of discontent in China. And some of the biggest Chinese news stories that broke after we completed our piece, such as the self-immolation of Tibetan monks and the drama in the village of Wukan, have underscored the significance of the issue.

A Long Form Top 5

1. “The Han Dynasty”: New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos’s profile of one of China’s most interesting and hard to categorize intellectuals: Han Han. (Abstract only; full article behind a paywall.)

The subject of this piece, Han Han, made his name as a novelist and racecar driver, but he is now probably most influential as a blogger with a massive following who has become increasingly political in recent years, writing posts that are often scrubbed away by censors soon after they appear—but not before being shared and reposted. Pair it with New Yorker contributor Zha Jianying’s book, Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China, which limns the varied political choices being made by entrepreneurs and intellectuals, some of whom, like Han Han, are neither dissidents in the classic sense nor unquestioning supporters of the status quo (for more on the book, see David Pilling’s review).

2. “A View on Ai Weiwei’s Exit”: Australian Sinologist Geremie Barmé’s essay, inspired by the famous gadfly figure’s detention last spring.

The piece, accompanied by photographs of the artist’s work, offers a deeply informed look at how exactly Ai Weiwei’s art and political stances have developed in recent years. Pair it with the artist’s own commentaries and online posts, published in book form earlier this year (for more about that volume, see Los Angeles Review of Books contributor Alec Ash’s “The Last Rant," a review of the compendium).

3. “In Fast-Growing China, A Warning about When Prosperity Isn’t Enough”: Foreign Policy contributing editor Christina Larson’s article following protests over a toxic chemical plant in China’s northeastern city of Dalian.

In August, Larson, who has a long-term interest in environmental issues, quickly headed to the metropolis and began interviewing participants. In addition to a valuable early dispatch on the event that went up quickly at Foreign Policy.com, she wrote this longer analytical piece for the Atlantic. Pair it with Chan Koonchang’s The Fat Years, a dystopian novel set in a booming yet tightly controlled China of 2013. The Fat Years has been dubbed a Chinese 1984, but is often concerned with the Brave New World question of how far material satisfactions alone can take a society (for more details, see Jonathan Fenby’s review of the English language edition, which was published earlier this year).

4. “Little Girl Found”: Financial Times Shanghai correspondent Patti Weldmeir’s poignant reportage tracking the fate of an abandoned baby girl.

Wedlmeir combines reminiscences from her own life (she adopted her two daughters in China) with the story of her efforts to discover what became of the infant she discovered outside of a Dunkin’ Donuts. Memoir and investigative journalism are enmeshed in this unusual piece. A good companion for this story is Mara Hvistendahl’s Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men (for more about that book, see Megan Shank’s review).

5. “China Gets Religion!”: Ian Johnson expels any lingering doubts a reader might have about the importance of the religious revival underway in China and the government’s struggle to come to terms with it. (Abstract only; full article behind a paywall.)

Ostensibly a review of four recent publications, this piece by Johnson—a Pulitzer Prize winner and author of two powerful books (one on China, the other on Islam in Europe)—is actually, like many of the best New York Review of Books pieces, an essay that uses the works under review as a starting point for a comprehensive look at a major issue. This article could be paired with any of the four books Johnson reviews, but a particularly engaged companion might just be James Carter’s Heart of Buddha, Heart of China, , which looks back at the interplay between political and religious engagements over a long swath of the 20th century (see Justin Ritzinger’s review for details).

A Short Form Top 5 (fittingly, with shorter summaries)

1. Tania Branigan’s “Mao Lives: How China Keeps the New in Touch with the Old”: A lively examination of the “Red Song” craze and related cultural trends. Pair it with: Timothy Cheek’s edited volume A Critical Introduction to Mao (see the discussion of that work in Pankaj Mishra’s “Staying Power: Mao and the Maoists”).

2. Barbara Demick’s “In China, What You Eat Tells Who You Are”: A well-argued look at the politics of eating in a country that has been rocked by tainted food scandal in recent years. Pair it with Chinese Whiskers, an allegorical tale of corruption and food scandals by Pallavi Aiyar, former Beijing correspondent for the Hindu (for more on the book, see Los Angeles Review of Books contributor Maura Cunningham’s review).

3. Josh Chin’s “Train Crash Stirs Chinese Net Furor”: A trenchant analysis of the popular anger triggered by a high-speed train crash (and by government efforts to block an investigation of its causes and limit reporting on the event by the Chinese press); particularly good at quoting from and explaining the importance of microblog posts on the incident. Pair it with Susan Shirk’s edited volume Changing Media, Changing China (reviewed by Andrew Nathan here).

4. Edward Wong’s “Pushing China’s Limits on Web, If Not on Paper”: A clear-eyed analysis of censorship mechanisms and the varied efforts that freethinkers have been making to circumvent them, organized around writer Murong Xuecong’s comments upon receiving a prize. Pair it with Perry Link’s Liu Xiaobo’s Empty Chair, which takes its title from the result of the Chinese government blocking Liu from attending the ceremony in which he was awarded the Nobel Prize (for more on that e-book, see Paulo de Almeida’s blog post).

5. Malcolm Moore’s “Inside Wukan: The Chinese Village that Fought Back”: An extraordinary piece of on-the-scene reporting about rural China, in which villagers angered at unscrupulous developers and government corruption managed to evict all representatives of the Chinese Communist Party from their community. Pair it with Yu Hua’s China in Ten Words; particularly, the “Disparity” chapter in which the context for this sort of militancy is well described (for more, see Pico Iyer’s review).

Ending with a nod to Yu Hua brings this post full circle. I began by reflecting on the list of top 2011 books on contemporary Chinese politics and culture that I created but never shared. Well, now I’ll happily share one thing. The list was going to begin by describing China in Ten Words as the best book on the topic I read all year. I was going to mention as well that Yu Hua also gave the best talk on China I heard in 2011—the presentation at Pomona I mentioned looking forward to in my last post to this blog. If you missed that event, you can get a good sense of its flavor from an op-ed he wrote afterword, inspired in part by the questions he got from the audience that night. Called “Chinese Autumn is No Arab Spring,” it is the perfect essay to reflect on as we wait to see how the drama at Wukan ends and prepare for what 2012 has in store for the people of China and the writers, Chinese and foreign alike, who try to understand the meaning of the latest developments in a country that so often moves in surprising directions.

Radar LARB

Slavoj Žižek's praise for Ralph Fiennes's adaptation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus: "For his forthcoming film adaptation, Ralph Fiennes (with the writer John Logan) has done the impossible, confirming in the process T S Eliot's claim that Coriolanus is superior to Hamlet. He has fully broken out of the closed circle of interpretative options and presented Coriolanus not as a fanatical anti-democrat but as a figure of the radical left."

"On Becoming an Editor" by Sven Birkerts: "It took only a few days on site... to see that a magazine is, figuratively speaking, a receiving dock for the products of our collective dream-life—those “pure products” that Williams invoked—and that editing is, before readying manuscripts for publication, very much a business of cutting away the less essential in order to expose the more essential. I mean this both in practical and philosophical terms. Editing, I have found, is the search for signal in a sea of noise."

James Greer's review of Green Girl by Kate Zambreno: "The book is by turns bildungsroman, sociological study, deconstruction, polemic, and live-streamed dialogue with Jean Rhys, Clarice Lispector, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, the Bible, Roland Barthes, and most of Western European modernism by way of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project."

Sasha Stone on Fincher's re-envisioning of Stieg Larsson's famous heroine, Lisbeth Salander: "When Fincher announced he’d next be doing The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo some grumbled that it was going to be a “paycheck movie” for “fuck you money” — a crowd-pleaser, not a “Fincher film.” Not a Fight Club. Not a Zodiac. And no, not a Social Network. It’s funny how quickly most of us are ready to classify something because it’s too weird to have it just dangling out there as an unknown, which makes it all the more strange that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is one of the best films of 2011." 

Lucy Ferriss on the resuscitation of interest in longer novels: "We think of ourselves as living in the age of the excerpt. When pressed, most professors I know admit that they assign fewer pages of reading now than they did, say, 20 years ago. We share these statistics and sigh. Pressed further, we admit to skimming more ourselves, to reading short online articles rather than the lengthier printed versions, to choosing our leisure reading based in part on the lean word count of the book... The odd paradox of this impression of the dumbed-down reading world is that young people seem to be gravitating toward doorstoppers. And reading them."

A Spectacle and Nothing Strange

By Eve Fowler

This summer I made 20 silkscreen posters, like the ones that are posted around LA advertising concerts, boxing matches and other events. The text on my posters came from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. I placed these posters in public spaces around Los Angeles.

I have been working with this particular text in various ways for about a year. Some of the posters read: "A spectacle and nothing strange," "A difference of very little difference," "Very like the last time," "There are the ones who do see me," "A narrative of like and like it," "Very different but much more" and so on. I'm interested in the multiple interpretations a viewer can have seeing this text in public. I'm also interested in making something that is accessible to everyone, or at least a very broad audience. I see Stein’s language as queer, in both senses of the word, but I think it is open-ended and can be understood in various ways.

I made one poster as a test and attached it to a fence on Beverly Blvd. where other signs like it were hung. I was curious about how long it would stay up and how it would survive the rain. While I was hanging the sign two boys, probably around 14, came over and looked at it. They walked away and then came back and asked me, "What is that?"

In other words, they were asking, "What does that phrase mean?" The text on the poster read, "This is it with it as it is". I told them it was a sentence from a book by Gertrude Stein, a writer I like. They said, "Oh, it's cool! It's like a tongue twister." I am interested in the idea that people will enjoy this language in some way.

At the end of this project, I’m going to place a sign in each of the locations where the other signs were hung. This one is color with no text with the exception of very small "Gertrude Stein" on the border of the poster where the name of the printer normally appears.

My previous work—photographs of the queer community, my wrapped lesbian library, and the collages I have been making for the last few years—has led me to this project that serves as homage to Gertrude Stein and queer writers in general. I've also been interested in modes of distributing art that are different from those that are institutional. In terms of this project I'm interested in direct public access in a vernacular way.

Eve Fowler is an artist living in Los Angeles.

http://www.evefowler.com/iWeb/www.evefowler.com/home.html

LARB Recommends

Los Angeles International Airport by Garry Winogrand featured at In Focus event on 12/20.

Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.

Thursday, December 15^th: Carson Mell will be reading from his new novel The Blue Bourbon Orchestra and signing copies at Family beginning at 7:30 pm.

Slake at Chevalier’s Books featuring poet Luke Davies, Sam Slovick, Melissa Chadburn, and Brendan Schallert beginning at 7:00 pm.

Saturday, December 17^th: Insert Blanc Press Benefit and Holiday Party featuring performances by Harold Abramowitz, Amanda Ackerman, Brain Ang, Allison Carter, and many more at Weekend Gallery beginning at 6:00 pm.

Cinefamily’s Fantastic, Elastic 24-Hour Fundraiser Telethon with 24 hours of awesome events. LARB contributing editor Jonathan Gold gives a lecture on “Food and Film” beginning at 4:15 pm.

Neil Hamburger presents a book release party/screening/variety show for Flying Saucers Rock n Roll by Jake Austen at Cinefamily beginning at 2:30.

Sunday, December 18^th: Tongue and Groove: a monthly offering of short fiction, personal essays, poetry , spoken word, and music featuring LARB Senior Editor Matthew Specktor, LARB Editor-at-Large Lisa Jane Persky, Anna David, and Jillian Lauren at The Hotel Café beginning at 6:00 pm.

Boundary Pageant #1 presents designer, developer, and professor Liz Falletta performing “How I Spent Two-and-a-half Years Drawing Three Lines” at Machine Project beginning at 2:00 pm.

Tuesday, December 20^th: In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945-1980 exhibit opens today at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Center for Photographs

Pulp Nonfiction: An Interview with John Jeremiah Sullivan

by Michael Goetzman

J. J. Sullivan, Skylight Books. November 15th, 2011

Image by Michael Goetzman

John Jeremiah Sullivan seems disconcerted when asked who’s most influenced his writing. There’s a long, pained pause. It’s an impressive silence — followed by a sigh, followed by an “I don’t know,” which, I realize, is probably an accurate answer. How could anyone know? Identifying one’s influences is speculative at best — more often an exercise in wishful thinking than careful self-assessment. Then again, that doesn’t keep most who are asked from tossing an interviewer the bone of a few well-worn names. Ultimately Sullivan withholds any decisive answer, neither fully accepting nor eschewing the exalted bunch critics have chosen for him: David Foster Wallace, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe among others.

The comparisons to Wallace are unavoidable. We likely haven’t seen an bricolage of reportorial essays like Pulphead since A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and there’s no doubt Sullivan, like most journalists of his generation, has borrowed a few stylistic flourishes from Wallace, tapping that dynamic space between high and low, between rambling cerebral voice and pithy, clarifying magazine sentence. Sullivan just seems to be doing it better than everyone else. The essays engage such disparate subjects as Christian rock, Axl Rose, Tennessean cave art, and 19^th century botanist Constantine Rafinesque. They’re outlandish, enlivening, and adroit; even so, they’d feel haphazard and disconnected if Sullivan weren’t able to meet each subject with the same essential curiosity and bemused non-judgment.

In the interview below, conducted last month before his reading at Skylight Books, Sullivan discusses much of his personal and professional history at times alluded to in Pulphead. He talks about growing up in the South and cultivating a passion for pop music, about living in New York before and after 9/11, and about his uncanny kinship with fellow Southern writer Wells Tower; he touches on the time he rocked out with James Wood in Bryant Park and about taming the “I” — and, at one point, he just sits gravely, racked by the trouble of pinning down his influences.

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Many critics have commented on the surprising interconnectedness between pieces that, on the outset, seem completely unrelated. What do you think unites these pieces?

I’m glad that the interconnectedness of the pieces comes across. I worked really hard on that, not just when it came to choosing the pieces for the book but while writing the pieces, I was working out an interconnected set of concerns; they all felt like part of some project. I didn’t know what the project was. Now I see that it was the book. And to help make a united whole, I chose pieces that spoke to each other and spoke out of what I saw as my deepest fixations.

Like what? Your own obsession with each subject does seem to be a uniting theme.

Well, the South is all over the place. Pop music is all over the place. History. It’s all the shit I’m into, but when I try to go deeper than that, it becomes muddy and that feels important somehow. I’m still writing about those things; I’m still tapping those things so I’m not ready to codify them yet. That’s what the writing is. It’s an attempt to put those obsessions in some sort of order.

How do you approach the research on a subject? One article described you as "magnetized": crazy stuff seems to come to you instead of you going to it. Do you attribute that to luck or your approach?

There’s definitely some luck involved. But it’s also true that if you keep hurling yourself at the wall, eventually a crack will open and it’s also true that there are fourteen pieces in the book, but in the period covered by the book I probably wrote 45 pieces and I was naturally picking out the ones where more interesting things were happening to me, so that skews the specimen sample a little bit.

How did you revise the essays for the book?

Well, during the time I was writing the pieces, I was often trying to have fun with pop culture references that were only of real meaning at the moment. That’s one of the fun things you can do with magazine writing: talk back to the machine a little bit. So, I cut some of those references out. And, you know, certain sentences that had sounded right in the magazines didn’t sound right in the book; different formal pressures condition your reading of sentences in different ways. I couldn’t plan for that, but now I see that there are some sentences that I fucked up because I was trying to smooth them out a little too much.

Do you have a sentence in mind?

There was a sentence in the Christian rock piece that was, “It wasn’t long at all before the little fuckers rounded on me.” That was from GQ. That was a good English sentence but something about it — the cussing in that piece always sounded a little forced, so I changed “little fuckers” to “children,” and I think I weakened the sentence. It’s weird — even in editing yourself, you’re still not seeing it all. You’re still falling into little traps.

You were an editor for about ten years before you started writing professionally. Do you feel being an editor has generally helped or hindered your writing process?

It helps up to a certain point. As an editor, you’re learning the whole time — learning tricks, acquiring tools. You’re getting to watch writers that are much better than you work on their pieces at the workshop level. So you could ask, “Why did you take out that comma?” “Why did you cut that page?” “I don’t just want to know that you did it; I want to know why you did it. What was influencing the mechanism at the moment that caused you to think that this thing wasn’t working or that it needed to be better?” That was my education.

But there does come a point where you have to make this mental decision to shut off the editing instinct; otherwise, you can’t exist as a writer; the writer is a little antagonistic with that voice. You go to write one sentence and can instantly think of five good reasons why it shouldn’t be like that, but that’s not the way writing works; you’re saying something because you have to say it. A good writer is not necessarily best buddies with the editor — that’s your playing partner, you’re trying to beat that person. It took me a while to figure that out. I’m still not sure I’ve totally figured it out.

To get a bit of your pre-professional history: You grew up in Louisville, Kentucky?

I was born there, but I grew up mostly across the river in Southern Indiana.

And your first book Blood Horses is part memoir about your father who was also a writer. Are there a fair amount of writers in the family pedigree?

Oh, yeah. My father was a sports writer, and my mother was an English teacher, so there was never any hope for me. I mean, in our house, if you could use language well then you had some power. I can’t remember who it is, but there’s a writer who pointed out that it’s often the case with writers: they grew up in houses like that, which makes so much sense.

You moved to New York in the late nineties only to move back South several years later. What was your experience as a writer in New York like?

In some sense I don’t feel like I have a right to have an opinion about it because some of my friends are still there. They've become New Yorkers and I know much less about it than they do, but I will say that it was an interesting time, if you were to pick seven years to spend there, to have them straddle 9/11 very neatly like that, was something else. I was just coming to know and love the city as it was before and felt that I belonged there for the first time. Then there was that day, and everything after that was totally different. It’s just hard to overstate the extent to which it changed the city at every level.

Did you feel it was harder to write and live there after that? Was that part of the impetus to move back to the South?

I don’t think so. That was a different thing. That was just personal shit that goes with being in the city. No, if anything, 9/11 made me want to stay, because you wanted to see how it played out. But I didn’t feel like I could survive there as a writer anymore. If you can’t breathe, you’ll punch out a window. I wasn’t even really there yet as a writer; I hadn’t figured much out. That was the problem: I needed to figure that shit out. I couldn’t get in touch with my own voice at its quietest in order to find whatever it was I needed to say. I didn’t feel like I was getting there. I needed time, I needed… solitude, I guess.

Much of your writing focuses on music. In one interview, you pointed to an early interest in music writing as the locus of your desire to “figure out” good writing.

Yeah. Actually, my brother was a big influence here. He was the first person I ever heard talk about a piece of art in a deeply critical way — critical not in the negative, but in the analytical sense. He was just a student of pop music from an early age. I don’t know what tripped that in him, but it was his thing. We would sit down and go through Beatles chord books together. It wasn’t just a case of rocking back and forth in front of the speaker and saying, “Isn’t this brilliant.” It was saying, “Look at this fucking bridge, look at what they did here. That’s why this is so much better”: the mechanics of it. And he and I would argue a lot. He was an early opponent. So, yes, I definitely think I was delving into and parsing music before writing, at least on a conscious level.

Were you in any bands yourself?

Yes. Many a high school band [laughs]. I’m sort of in this band called Fayaway now, in Rollington, North Carolina. But it’s more of a concept thing.

I heard about this gig that you and Fayaway played at Bryant Park with James Wood.

Yeah, that was fun and weird. James Wood is a great drummer. The guy is a monster drummer. I mean, with us he was just doing a sort of skittery bongos thing, but he’s actually a studio-level drummer. I think that was his thing for years. When he was younger, he was really serious about it. As you can imagine, he’s really serious about everything he does.

How familiar are you with Wells Tower and his debut Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned?

You know, it’s funny. I’ve never met him, but I’ve been into his work ever since he first started getting published, and I remember hearing his name from Roger Hodge at Harper’s before he got known and see him as sort of a comrade. I’m going to meet him in New York in a few weeks for the first time, which I’m looking forward to.

There are definite similarities between his and your writing. Despite him writing in fiction and you in non-fiction, it seems like you guys are kindred spirits in a way.

Yes, and he and I have confirmed that since — that we had been reading each other all that time. I don’t know why we never met, because we have lots of mutual friends, but maybe exactly for that reason, maybe it was a healthy distance. I’m anxious to see what he has to say at this thing in New York. It’s rare to have a conversation in front of an audience where it’s actually a real conversation. I have all these things I want to talk about with him. It’ll be neat.

So your first conversation in person will be in front of an audience?

Yeah [laughs]. 2011, man.

So Jonathan Franzen and several other authors made a list of the ten things they’ve learned in writing fiction for The Guardian a year or so ago, and he suggested reserving use of the first person only for an “irresistible” or “distinctive” voice. You’ve made ample use of the first person pronoun in your pieces, and have been praised for your skillful use of it. How do you manage it?

Well, it’s something that has taken me a long time to get to. It certainly wasn’t like that in the beginning. I sort of had to tame the first person I guess. It’s a process of training your ear. You know when you listen to your own voice on a tape it sounds strange? You can’t really hear it the way other people hear it. You’re trying to do the exact same thing with the first person. You want to hear it the way a disembodied third person observer would hear it. What does it sound like in the larger scrum of human communication? You’re trying to tune in to that and it takes time.

Also, I think Franzen there is registering the power of the first person to sink a piece, and I share that; I’m hyper-sensitive to that. Sometimes it’s one of those things where you think you’re vigilante about it, but you can have a deafness to your own first person, even though the first person of another person shrieks at you. I try to stay on guard toward the first person wanting to be there for it’s own sake. It’s one of those things. It’s good for your writing to have a healthy skepticism of the first person and to want to make it work for its pay. It’s like, okay, if you’re going to come in here and start talking in the middle of my piece, saying “I” and pretending to be me, then you better be working, you better be taking me somewhere the piece couldn’t go. So when I use it in my pieces, it’s usually when I feel something in my experience is going to give the reader access to the subject. For example, in the Christian Rock piece, I get into my high school evangelical phase because I feel like this is an experience I shared with these kids. I don’t have to pretend sympathy with them. I was there. And, for instance, in the Axl piece, writing about growing up in rural, white-trash, Southern Indiana suddenly became quite relevant to understanding Axl Rose.

How important has reading been to your development as a writer?

Indispensible. By using other books, mining other books, you’re adding to your palette. If you look at my first book Blood Horses, it used pastiche to a certain extent — incorporating whole swatches of other text without dicing them up, and I’ve buried that a little bit in my work ever since, but it’s still the way my brain works. My pieces almost always begin with my in dialogue with something. They don’t begin ad ovo, you know, sitting at the blank white page and trying to think of a sentence. Something is already happening by the time I start writing; something I’ve read has set me off, an image I’ve seen has set me off. So, the more of that you can expose yourself to, the more pistons are going to be firing. That’s how I’m wired anyway. I know there are other writers who claim never to read anything, where they’re just transcribing something running in their heads but it’s not like that for me.

What authors have had the biggest influence on you?

[Pause] I don’t know [pause]. I feel like I’ve stolen from and reacted against almost every book I’ve ever read. The people I read with greatest pleasure would be… again it makes sense to be almost random. A book will come into my life and my experience of it will totally obliterate any sense I have of a personal canon.

Do you know the philosopher Zizek?

Yes, Slavoj.

Right. He’s funny, and you know he has this thing about love, the evil of love, and he says, I really don’t like love, because what love says is: I pick you out from everything, and I’m going to give you special attention, meaning that everything else is denigrated, and he says there’s something a little evil in that, and in the same way I think that there something a little philistine about lists.

How do you feel about the comparisons to David Foster Wallace?

David Foster Wallace died, and in the conversation about his death a certain sort of book got elevated, got enshrined. That book was the literary essay collection that has a reportorial narrative flow to it, and my book was the first one that came along and sort of fit that neatly and so people go to that. It’s natural. And it’s also true that I stole a lot of shit from him, as well as from all the other people I read, and I will continue to do so. But it doesn’t penetrate too far when I hear that stuff.

[Pause] Man, your influences are weird; I always wonder how authors are so confident when they talk about their influences, like how are you so conscious of that? Because when I look at my own case, at my own past and memories of writing certain things, it’s never very conscious; your influences often get at you by tangent and subterfuge. It’s not always the books that you would like to have influenced you that do.

And I’ll tell you something that I just realized in the street outside that I might mention. When I was in college, Mark Richard wrote this piece about Tom Waits, this unbelievable profile for Esquire — best thing ever written about Tom Waits if you can ever find it, and I read that when I was 19 or 20, when I was in a hero-worshipped thrall, and I’m sure that had a massive influence on me and, I mean, look at what I ended up doing. But, bottom line, I’ve never thought about it because I don’t want to; your influences are a problem.

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading Tolstoy’s stories translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky, this husband and wife team who are retranslating all of Russian literature. They’re sort of the next great translators after Constance Garnett, and these stories are just fucking revelatory, my god. This story Hadji Murat you have to read. I bet they have the book here.

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John Jeremiah Sullivan's Pulphead was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux last month. You can find it here, at Skylight Books.

Michael Goetzman is the Assistant Managing Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives in Los Angeles.

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