This is my avenue. It's in Hollywood. Whenever I ache to see my name in print, I spend a few minutes feeling shame at the pernicious nature of my ego, and then I look at this picture, and it helps, somehow.
I went to the LA Times Festival of Books this weekend. I saw a lot of panels. Some of them were inspiring. Some of them were frustrating.
Here are Six Moments Worth Remembering:
On a panel called "Writing the Fantastic:"
1. Lev Grossman calling himself a "Recovering Realist" and saying that "we're recovering from a long and painful hangover from Modernism."
2. Aimee Bender explaining that the difference between Gregor Samsa waking up "feeling like" a cockroach and waking up as a cockroach, in other words the literalization of metaphor, is a way to get readers to engage the same questions of life, death, love through new lenses.
On a panel called "Writing the Outcast" (which I will affectionately also call "The Cock Show"):
3. Rob Roberge saying that all great fiction deals with the issue of desire, and what happens when it's met, or not met. Then, Rob's immediately reminding us that getting our desires met is actually not always that great for us.
On a panel called "Writing Sex:"
4. Stephen Elliott wondering if people become artists instead of becoming lovable.
5. Susie Bright stridently, articulately reminding the room that as a culture we are "nowhere near" the actual breaking of our taboos.
And the sixth moment: They all had coconut juice. Every single speaker on every panel had coconut juice hiding behind their name placards. This is Los Angeles, I kept thinking. This Book Fest is driven by star power (celebrity authors like Bret Easton Ellis filling a 400-seater auditorium) and coconut juice, the current health-food craze. Los Angeles can be so endearing.
Amy Tan couldn't fill a 200-seater at the Boston Public Library three years ago. Maybe she needed to get some coconut juice in there. Maybe the Boston Public Library just needs to hold all its readings during the spring and summer months, and give everyone coconut juice on the way in.
The point is: I went alone, all day, both days, and saw some wondrous and horrifying things. There's a lot of really bad books getting made. There are also some unbearably good ones--great ones, beautiful ones. I stood at the McSweeney's booth for ten minutes fingering all their wares, and when one of their hip dudes asked me if I was familiar with McSweeney's, I said, "Yes. I have a very strong love-hate relationship with you guys."
"What's the ratio of love to hate?" he asked me.
"About seven to three."
"Want to have that magazine for seven dollars, then?" he said.
The magazine, called The Believer, is usually $10, and this particular one had a DVD with a short film by Nabokov, who is one of my favorite writers, and a mention of the movie Tron on the cover, and so, I said yes.
I'd call this a moment of grace. Surprisingly, the McSweeney's guy never asked me what the 3 points of hatred might be for. I'll tell you now: one hatred point goes to McSweeney's for making exactly the kind of books I want to make, design-wise, and often concept-wise as well, and charging more money for them than I can afford. One hatred point goes to the overall sheen of hip-cool-dude-in-the-know-about-stuff that one must have to write for them. (They are more earnest than snarky, thank all goodness, but any snark at all gets at least one point from me.) And the last hatred point is irrational and rude of me: they haven't published Vanessa Carlisle. I'm like the Bloodhound Gang who once rapped the line: "I hate Spin Magazine 'cause they never, ever plug me." McSweeney's is like my older sister circa 1988.
Remember, they also deserve seven love points. It may even be more like eight or nine. Find out why here.
As I strolled the aisles eating my protein bars and wishing I had my own little coconut juice to sustain me, I met some brilliantly earnest people at the Pathfinder booth--we talked about socialism and student movements and I was heartened by their presence. Go to the site and get smarter.
Just across the road there squatted a self-published self-help author who wanted me to admit that I was desperately unhappy with my life so he could help me help myself fix it.
"But I have a great life," I said.
"Maybe you think so," he said.
"I just told you so," I said.
"Everyone has problems," he said. "That's where I come in."
"I don't think you come in, actually," I said. I wished him luck on his book.
Book Fest, oh Book Fest, you were an exhausting date. I'd really like to see you again, but, I need some time to think. I need some space. Let's get together in, like, a year.
Usually I tell people I write "everything but poetry."
To hell with my anti-genre-identity, it's National Poetry Month.
Easter, 1985
A tiny blondewearing a bonnet,
I am nearly six years old.
My lips press together
in a half-smile.
Now, I recognize it;
the half-smile my mother wore
when she lied.
She told one lie.
She told it to everyone.
She told it all the time.
Look at this child with a liar's face,
me the child
learning to announce
my contented well-being
to some abstract audience
God or family, mother only, or camera.
Always good, my mother.
Always good, her daughter.
Good then.
Thank you.
Yes, please.
Ribbon under chin.
My grandmother's gnarled hands
still make lace.
My mother and I,
we now bare our teeth.
The first lines about Werner Herzog's movie Stroszek on Wikipedia are these:
"Stroszek is a 1977 film by German director Werner Herzog. It was written in four days specifically for Bruno S. and was shot in Berlin, two towns in Wisconsin, and in North Carolina. Most of the lead roles are played by non-actors."
This is naturalist absurdity. Nothing in this film is adulterated by special effects. Half of the dialogue is improvised. The female lead exits the film 3/4 of the way through, never to return. We see her with makeup, without, beat up, dressed, and undressed. The lead character, played by Bruno S., is, actually just Bruno S. And who is Bruno S.? A half-mad former delinquent son-of-a-prostitute who plays an accordion in the street.
One of the benefits of life in LA: I got to hear Herzog himself introduce and then discuss the film at the Egyptian Theater. And this in and of itself was absurd--the theater is on Hollywood Blvd, in the heart of the High-Gloss Celluloid tourist trap, but, was stuffed with bespectacled hipsters who clearly belong down Sunset at the WGA, or the DGA, or downtown at USC film school. I wondered how many of them deigned to slum it at the Pig and Whistle, just for shits and giggles, after the Herzog event. He's clearly a god, to many of them, since the theater was packed nearly to capacity on a Sunday night and to my right, a man with a closely shaved head and light cashmere sweater was moved to tears when Herzog took the stage. Before Herzog even said anything.
The film itself, to hear Herzog tell it, is a glorious piece of luck. It's a movie he loves, built almost completely upon happenstance. He wanted to cast Bruno in a different film, changed his mind, felt guilty, and wrote Stroszek in 4 days to appease Bruno, an emotional, eccentric, factory-worker-cum-actor. One of the most brilliant moments of the film, in which Bruno sits at a woodgrain table in a soon-to-be-reclaimed-by-the-bank mobile home with his sort-of girlfriend, a prostitute named Eva (also actually named Eva), was entirely improvised. Bruno delivers a polemic against the American method of quietly, subtly, stealing your soul. At least under the Nazis, he argues, it was brutality out in the open. Here, it's hidden. You are oppressed and you don't know where from, or by whom, exactly. Everybody smiles at you.
I said, "whoah," out loud. I was sitting alone, with Herzog disciples on either side. The one to my left nodded and smiled knowingly. Los Angeles people don't like to verbalize their awe, but he at least acknowledged mine.
The movie ends in a tourist trap, with a chicken, a duck, and a bunny all performing stunts: driving a fire engine, dancing to a juke box. This is the epitome of car-crash attraction. You cannot look away from the dancing chicken. You cannot stand the dancing chicken. You are an American who cannot look away from your culture. Yet you cannot stand your culture. This paradox seems insurmountable at the end of Stroszek.
Herzog told a series of endearing stories after the film. Origin stories, we call them. Where an idea came from. How a moment in the film got captured. Who that mute mechanic was, and how difficult it was to find him months later. I wanted to hear it all, in the vain hope that the movie would start to "make sense."
But it doesn't. And it doesn't for a few reasons. The first, and most important reason, is Bruno lives in three cultural arenas that do not make sense. Prison, at the beginning of the film. 1970s Berlin, where the hustlers and pimps control the streets of his neighborhood, in the middle. And The American Midwest, at the end. Increasingly, Bruno is isolated, as his translator leaves him, his sense of order leaves him, and his last partner in crime is arrested.
In the end, he has a shotgun, a frozen turkey, and a chair lift that runs endlessly up and down a forested hill. On the back of his lift is a sign reading: "Is this really me?"
Is this culture really mine? How could it not be, if I am in it? How could it be, if I am not of it? At some point we all look around and realize all we've really got is a frozen turkey and a shotgun, don't we? This is why we build community. Why we artists create deliberate absurdity in the midst of all that claims (by its hegemony) to not be absurd. At least I think so.
But I'm wearing broken glasses in the desert, drinking cold coffee. My throat hurts and the kitchen is gurgling. My authority is seriously in question.
