David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

Another example: seventeen years ago, David Lipsky spent a week with David Foster Wallace, then fourteen years later Lipsky went back and resurrected the notes. The resultant book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself , pretends to be just a compilation of notes, and maybe that’s all it is, but to me it’s a debate between two sensibilities: desperate art and pure commerce. Lipsky, I hope, knows what he’s doing: evoking himself as the quintessence of everything Wallace despised.

The book as such isn’t obsolete. Inherently, it’s less immediate and raw, going as it does through the quaint labyrinth of the publishing industry, and even when the book is printed and ready to go, you have to either get it at a store or have it shipped or downloaded to you. Print is, of course, on the verge of becoming an artifact. Simply the physical act of holding a magazine or a book doesn’t have anything like the same psychic pull it had in the past. It has the feel of a self-conscious reenactment, as if I’m trying to imagine myself in the old West in ersatz Tombstone. For now, this is a constraint I can work around. I take it as a challenge: to give a book a “live,” up-to-date, aware, instant feel. There will always be a place for, say, the traditional novel that people read on the beach or chapter by chapter at bedtime for a month as a means of entertainment and escape. There is, though, this other, new form of reading that most books being published today don’t have an answer for. Even achieving a happy medium between the new and old reading experiences is an advance.

Efficiency in the natural world: the brutal cunning of natural selection as it sculpts DNA within living organisms. DNA is always pushing toward the most efficient path to reproduction. Water always finds the briefest, easiest path downhill. Concision is crucial to contemporary art—boiling down to the bare elements, reducing to just the basic notes (in both senses of the word). The paragraph-by-paragraph sizzle is everything.

Elif Batuman: “A lot of the writers I know are incredibly good email writers. I often find their emails more compelling than the things they’re writing at the time. Everyone has two lives: one is open and is known to everyone, and one is unknown, running its course in secret. Email is the unknown life, and the published work is the known life.”

A former student wrote me, “For years I’ve been taking notes for a book that I hope will materialize at some point, but every time I attempt to turn the notes into the book, I hate the results. Really, what I’ve built is a database of quotations, riffs, metaphors. I find even my notes on how the book should be structured to be full of energy, because they’re an outline of my massive aspirations, most of which I have no hope of actually pulling off. It feels almost as if my book wants to be about the planning of a book: a hypothetical literature that can’t exist under earth’s current gravity.”

“The notes are the book,” I wrote back, “I promise you.”

I promise myself.

Life/art

THE MOVIE DIRECTOR Bryan Singer, the friend of an acquaintance, sat in first class next to George Bush on a flight home from Korea. Asked by my acquaintance what they talked about, Singer said, “I began to understand why everybody liked him, and I liked him, too.”

“Really?” my acquaintance asked.

“Yeah, I did.”

“Did you challenge him on anything?”

“No, ’cause everyone was really nice. Bush got up and talked to everyone in first class for a long time—‘Whaddayou do?’ ‘What are you up to?’ That sort of thing. He was a great guy, very gregarious.”

A Korean dentist pulled out his camcorder and panned from King Kong on a large screen over to Bush reading on his Kindle, then over to Singer’s assistant, who pointed and said, “It’s George Bush!” Then back to Bush. Back to King Kong . The Korean dentist was more interested in the director of X-Men than in Bush, who sensed that Singer was gay and made what Singer perceived to be a friendly joke: “Let’s introduce our assistants and maybe they can have sex!” Bush said he was going to take a nap and asked Singer if he wanted an Ambien. When Singer said he was off Ambien now, Bush replied, “Well, I’ve been using it for years. It keeps me on schedule.” My acquaintance said Singer said Bush simply understands how the world now works; with his friendly manner he gets what he wants, and he’s at peace with everything. Singer said the camcorder video was the best film he saw all year.

What I would give to see this film.

Life/art

THE ISOLATION of the widely spaced sans serif characters on the hardback jacket of my novel-in-stories, Handbook for Drowning , is the isolation of the characters in the book. The clean lines on top contrast with the water bleeding. The T-shirted boy’s eyes are covered and thus he is Everyboy. The title is a kind of impossibility (for whom would such a manual be intended? who would bother to compose such a gloomy guide?), as is the photograph: unreadable, paradoxical. Is he sinking or ascending or, somehow, perhaps, doing both simultaneously? People in bookstores couldn’t abide the endlessly falling figure and tended to turn the book “right side up”—upside down (this edition is long out of print). Who knows how to write about happiness (which, famously, is white and doesn’t stain the page)? I took my largely happy middle-class life and pulled out all the consolations. I had no wisdom, so I faked it by sounding dire (still the case? Maybe …).

The liner notes of many grunge rock CDs contained heartbreaking photos of band members as little kids. All that hope and energy and innocence in photos of Kurt Cobain at age eight were an implicit rebuke to what had happened to the lead singer–protagonist by age twenty-seven. I was and am interested in that contrast—where did all that light in my eyes go?

Not only do so many films have a real-life basis to them, but almost every film is promoted by having the stars and director pretend that the film set reproduced the very psychodrama that the film supposedly explores, e.g., The Beaver , which in many particulars echoes Mel Gibson’s real-life meltdowns. Harrison Ford says about his Cowboys and Aliens costar, Daniel Craig, “See how he has my back?” In other words, there’s no fiction: it starts as fact and ends as fact and in between is just a little semi-imaginary construct, which is the vehicle to get us from one fact (the originating episode) to another fact (the gossip about the set). This is very different from how people responded to Gone with the Wind .

I noticed this ambivalent embrace of autobiography first, I think, when visual artists I met at artists’ colonies talked about the factual and the real in a way that was related to autobiography but clearly different, more ironic, more ontologically inquisitive. The sources of the trend seem varied and complex: Metafiction’s existential questions recontextualized in a minimalist, i.e., factual, mode. The twitterization of the culture, turning personality into a cult and gossip into the only acknowledged platform. The nonfiction novel of the ’60s, only turned sideways now, so not poetic reporting about the march on the Pentagon, but taking the traditional material of modernist fiction—the interior self—and conducting a kind of art criticism or high journalism on it. All the deconstructive questioning of the existence of the self as anything other than text. The writers I like tend to present the ambiguities of genre as an analogue to the ambiguities of existence. Two things that Spalding Gray did so well—place himself in harm’s way and reveal the process by which each work got made—are crucial to me.