David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

Life is short—art is shorter

AREVIEWER SAID about my third book, the novel in stories whose cover I mentioned a few pages back, that if I kept going in that direction, i.e., toward concision, I’d wind up writing books composed of one very beautiful word. He meant it as a put-down, but to me it was wild praise.

“Honestly,” Natalie said, “most people my age don’t have the attention span to sit down and watch a two-hour movie, let alone read a book.”

In J. Robert Lennon’s Pieces for the Left Hand , “A local novelist spent ten years writing a book about our region and its inhabitants which, when completed, added up to more than a thousand pages.… Exhausted by her effort, she at last sent it off to a publisher, only to be told it would have to be cut by nearly half.” The final manuscript in its entirety: “Tiny upstate town/Undergoes many changes/Nonetheless endures.”

Manguso, to me: “When I read a poetry collection, I read the book ‘in order,’ which is to say in order of length. I read the shortest poems first, then the slightly longer ones. I skip any that are more than two pages. No time. My taste for small art might be related to my apparent short-term-memory problem involved with long narrative (or length in general).”

A friend gave me a ticket to a seat in the first row at a Blazers-Mavs playoff game. I was stunned by what the game looked like up close. Given the height, width, wingspan, speed, quickness, and strength of the ten players on the court, only about five hundred people in the entire world could even dream of operating with any efficiency in the 20′ by 20′ space in which nearly the entire game was conducted. In order to get open for a shot, a player had to improvise at warp speed.

It’s nearly impossible now to tell a story that isn’t completely familiar and predictable. You have to cut to the part we haven’t heard before. See David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives , which consists of forty very brief descriptions (mostly in the second person) of afterlife scenarios. Each “tale” feels less like a “story” than a hyperextended, overly literal joke or the explanation of the rules to a complex video game or role-playing game.

The point is often lost upon me in longer works, which may be “well made,” but what I can pull from them remains obdurate. In some prose poems/lyric essays/short-shorts, I’m told a simple and clear “story,” but the writer has figured out a way to stage, with radical compression, his or her essential vision. Such works are often disarming in their pretense of being throwaways. At first glance, they may feel relatively journalistic, but they rotate toward the metaphysical. Working within such a tight space, the writer needs to establish tension quickly, so he often paints a sexual tableau. Said differently: prose poems/lyric essays/short-shorts frequently hold the universal via the ordinary.

I love infinitesimal paintings, the more abstract the better. (Not without exception, but in general, as one moves east, the orientation of art schools gets less abstract, more traditional, more commercial.)

Manguso, for the nth time: “In college I was once accused of owning only six objects. In my dating days, as soon as I anticipated going to bed with someone, I found it absurd, irrational, to further resist the inevitable. If there’s a good line in a book, I’ll happily copy out the line and sell the book to the Strand. Jettisoning content—temporal, material, or textual—makes me feel good all over. There’s no time to relax in a short text. It’s like resting during the hundred-yard dash. It’s ridiculous even to consider. One should instead close the book and just watch television or take a nap. Kafka, who was unusually susceptible to textual stimuli, read only a couple of pages of a book at a time, he read the same relatively few things over and over, his reading habits were eccentric, and he wasn’t a completist. One good thing about my impending death is that I don’t need to fake interest in anything. Look, I’m dying! In Joseph Heller’s memoir, Now and Then , there’s a scene in which Mario Puzo, after visiting Joe in the hospital, says with marked envy that Joe would be able to use the diagnosis as a social excuse for the rest of his life.”

My father’s favorite joke: Two prisoners told each other the same jokes so many times that they resorted to numbering the jokes and just mentioning numbers. One prisoner turned to his bunkmate and said, “Hey: number twenty-seven.” The other one didn’t laugh. “Why didn’t you laugh?” “I didn’t like how you told it.”

My former student Tara Ebrahimi, who has battled manic depression and suicidal longings (we bonded like bandits): “I don’t want to be bogged down by the tangential, irrelevant, or unnecessary. Stick a spear straight to my heart—stick it straight to my brain.”

The question I’ve been trying to ask all along

DO I LOVE ART ANYMORE, or only artfully arranged life?

How literature has no chance whatsoever of saving my life anymore

VONNEGUT: Contemporary writers who leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorian writers misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

“Seattle’s downtown has the smoothness of a microchip,” Charles Mudede says. “All of its defining buildings—the Central Library, Columbia Tower, Union Square towers, its stadiums—are new and evoke the spirit of twenty-first century technology and market utopianism. If there’s any history here, it’s a history of the future. The city’s landmark, the Space Needle, doesn’t point to the past but always to tomorrow.”

Most new technologies appear to undergo three distinct phases. At first, the computer was so big and expensive that only national governments had the resources to build and operate one. Only the Army and a handful of universities had multi-room-sized computers. A little later, large corporations with substantial research budgets, such as IBM, developed computers. The computer made its way into midsized businesses and schools. Not until the late ’70s and early ’80s did the computer shrink enough in size and price to be widely available to individuals. Exactly the same pattern has played out with nylon, access to mass communication, access to high-quality printing, Humvees, GPS, the web, handheld wireless communications, etc., etc. (Over a longer timeline, something quite similar happened with international trade: at first, global interaction was possible only between nations, then between large companies, and only now can a private citizen get anything he wants manufactured by a Chinese factory and FedExed to his shop.)

The individual has now risen to the level of a minigovernment or minicorporation. Via YouTube and Twitter, each of us is our own mininetwork. The trajectory of nearly all technology follows this downward and widening path: by the time a regular person is able to create his own TV network, it doesn’t matter anymore that I have or am on a network. The power of the technology cancels itself out via its own ubiquity. Nothing really changes: the individual’s ability to project his message or throw his weight around remains minuscule. In the case of the web, each of us has slightly more access to a mass audience—a few more people slide through the door—but Facebook is finally a crude personal multimedia conglomerate machine, personal nation-state machine, reality-show machine. New gadgets alter social patterns, new media eclipse old ones, but the pyramid never goes away.