Living, Loving, Partygoing with the Future Bible Heroes and Henry Green

It appears that the new Future Bible Heroes single, “Living, Loving, Partygoing,” is a tribute to the English modernist novelist Henry Green. And more specifically, to the Penguin edition that collects all three of those novels.  (Penguin is onto this.)

I’m not all that surprised that Stephin Merritt would be a Henry Green fan.  Perhaps his recent hearing problems/ tinnitus led him to the “odd, haunted, ambiguous” Green, who is famous for his Altman-esque overlapping conversations.  From a Paris Review interview with Terry Southern, “The Art of Fiction” #22, from 1958:

TERRY SOUTHERN: I’d like to ask you some questions now about the work itself. You’ve described your novels as “nonrepresentational.” I wonder if you’d mind defining that term?

GREEN: “Nonrepresentational” was meant to represent a picture which was not a photograph, nor a painting on a photograph, nor, in dialogue, a tape recording. For instance, the very deaf, as I am, hear the most astounding things all round them which have not in fact been said. This enlivens my replies until, through mishearing, a new level of communication is reached. My characters misunderstand each other more than people do in real life, yet they do so less than I. Thus, when writing, I “represent” very closely what I see (and I’m not seeing so well now) and what I hear (which is little) but I say it is “nonrepresentational” because it is not necessarily what others see and hear.

Another good moment from this interview occurs when Southern asks how Green came to the plot/story for Loving:

I got the idea of Loving from a manservant in the Fire Service during the war. He was serving with me in the ranks, and he told me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what the old boy most liked in the world. The reply was: “Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.” I saw the book in a flash.

I’ve kind of been waiting for the ripples from Downton Abbey-mania to reach Green. Henry Green Revival!

Merritt’s lyrics seem less faithful to than perhaps generally inspired by the mood of Green’s novels, e.g.: “At Mink Stole’s birthday/ in gay Provincetown/ I came to DJ/ and left with the clown.”

Amis’s The Green Man: Fawlty Towers meets The Turn of the Screw

The great New York Review of Books Classics series has a new edition out of Kingsley Amis’s 1969 The Green Man.

It is a strange book.  Imagine a cross between Fawlty Towers, a nudge-nudge swinging circa 1970 English sex farce, and James’ The Turn of the Screw interlaced with a matrix of references to English folklore and anthropology.  One in which the narrator’s quest to get to the bottom of the haunting of his hotel by a malignant 17th-century ghost is presented as not-necessarily more urgent than his well-thought-through (if ultimately not fully successful) plan to convince his wife and mistress to participate in a threesome with him. The novel’s narrator Maurice Allington is the Basil Fawlty figure, a witty alcoholic who runs a B&B-style hotel in the English countryside.  Kingsley cleverly updates James’ novella (among other classic ghost stories) by rendering his narrator’s heavy drinking and tendency to black out and, perhaps, experience hallucinations as a source of ambiguity about the strange phenomena he starts to see around his hotel: strange men and women coming up the stairs and appearing in the window, and a very creepy Wicker Man-esque primaeval forest creature comprised of branches and plants.  Or rather, we ourselves don’t really doubt that something supernatural is occurring, but Allingham’s reputation among his family and friends is such that no one takes him too seriously when he seems to be seeing things.

If you’ve read Lucky Jim you know that Amis can be hilarious; Allington is an extremely mordant, amusingly cranky and misanthropic narrator.  Here’s a favorite passage:

I missed out the artichoke, a dish I have always tended to despise on biological grounds. I used to say that a man with a weight problem should eat nothing else, since after each meal he would be left with fewer calories in him than he had burnt up in the toil of disentangling from the bloody things what shreds of nourishment they contained.  I would speculate that a really small man, one compelled by his size to eat with a frequency distantly comparable to that of the shrew or the mole, would soon die of starvation and/or exhaustion if locked up in a warehouse full of artichokes, and sooner still if compelled besides to go through the rigmarole of dunking each leaf in vinaigrette.  But I did not go into any of this now, partly because Joyce, who liked every edible thing and artichokes particularly, always came back with the accusation that I hated food.

This is true enough.  For me, food only interrupts everything while people eat it and sit around waiting for more of it to be served, but also casts a spell of vacancy before and after.  No other sensual activity must take place at a set time to be enjoyed by anybody at all, or comes up so inexorably and so often.  Some of the stuff I can stand.  Fruit slides down, bread soon goes to nothing, and all pungent swallowables have a value of their own that transcends mere food.  As for the rest of it, chewing away at the vile texture of meat, pulling bones out out of tasteless mouthfuls of fish or emcompassing the sheer nullity of vegetables is not my idea of a treat. At least sex does not demand a simultaneoius outflow of talk, and drink needs no mastication.

A truly committed alcoholic’s theory of food and eating.

The novel definitely feels somewhat dated or at least of its moment in its unapologetic sexual objectification of women.  It might be possible to explain this away as an effect of an ethically unreliable narrator whose attitudes towards women we are not invited to share — Allington does eventually get a kind of comeuppance and enlightenment — but you have to be able to deal with a lot of verbal ogling and the long-range planning of the intended threesome, etc.

What seems unique about The Green Man is the intertwining of its humor and supernatural horror.  It actually is kind of scary which seems a tough trick to pull off in the midst of all the dirty-old-man-innkeeper humor. Kingsley also offers some surprising and cool metaphysical developments late in the novel that you don’t see coming.

Oh wow — here’s an old paperback edition, from a t.v. adaptation?

Keeping it classy!  Relieved we can’t see the guy’s body. That is definitely something I’d be embarrassed to be seen reading on a bus.

And another, a cool one:

‘I Will Ruin Him’: James Lasdun’s memoir of being stalked

illustration from NYT Book review

James Lasdun’s Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked is a creepy and compelling story of a teacher-student relationship gone bad, a memoir of being stalked, and an investigation into reputation and identity within 21st-century internet culture.  It also touches on other topics including contemporary Jewishness, Israel, and anti-semitism, and a son’s reflection on his relationship with and to a famous father (Lasdun’s father was the architect Denys Lasdun who designed the Royal National Theater in London among other prominent structures).

The Chronicle of Higher Ed ran an excerpt from the book a while ago and I sometimes felt that this narrative’s proper length may have been somewhere between that short piece and this full-length book.  Still, it is gripping and smart throughout, with a canny self-awareness about this story’s resonance with a long literary history of Gothic doppelgangers and mysteriously implacable enemies (I thought of, e.g., William Godwin’s Caleb Williams and Nabokov’s Lolita among other such tales).  The title of the excerpt, “‘I Will Ruin Him’: How it Feels to be Stalked” evokes one of Lasdun’s major themes: the vulnerability of reputation and personal identity today, its susceptibility to “ruin” through online means.  I thought also of the recent story (which on reading, prompted me to go through the minor hassle of setting up two-factor authorization for my Gmail account; you should probably do it too) by journalist Mat Honan that begins, “In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID account was broken into, and my hackers used it to remotely erase all of the data on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.”

I personally do find it terrifying to reflect on how easily a determined, malicious enemy — or random hacker — can target you and wreak very serious havoc on your life.  Lasdun’s story is one of a personal encounter that goes wrong, but part of the takeaway from his story is the ease with which anyone can today do you harm through digital means.  There are a lot of Iagos out there on laptops and smartphones.

The book ends with the situation unresolved: his stalker, Nasreen, is still hounding him, posting invented accusations on online sites (she claims Lasdun raped, abused, and manipulated her in countless other ways, including plagiarizing her writing and stealing her work), emailing employers and colleagues, and so on.  It’s irresistible to look for possible signs of her activity out there now that the book has been published.  For example, there’s this recent Amazon review: “This was such a boring book. It was awful. I can’t believe this guy teaches writing…and no, this is not Nasreen writing (although your paranoid and egotistical self will probably think it is).”

And I found this one fascinating:

As a recovering stalker, this has changed my life,March 13, 2013

By Buckshot – See all my reviews

I was never as menacing or hateful as Nasreen, I never was talked to by the police or given any threats about legal action, and I never smeared my professor’s name, but in most other ways, this story is shockingly parallel to my life experience. The stalking took place in Western NY with my creative writing professor, between the years of 2007 to (well, today I had to send him a blurb about this book as a goodbye). That’s several years of unwanted emails. Which, like Nasreen’s, came in ‘fevers’ between silences. Sometimes addressing him like an ‘ever-dependable mentor’ and sometimes in a phase of hyperbolic disgust, sprinkled throughout with coherence and self-reflexive apologies, even humor. I relate to Nasreen so deeply, her existence gives me some strange relief. The author treats the subject with the respect and humanity that I always hoped I would be seen with. The increases in frequency of these unwanted emails correlates to times in my life that are more stressful and filled with doubt, as they probably did for Nasreen. The chasm between how I seem in real life (coy, near-mute, clumsy) with how I am in the emails is similarly jarring. For christsake I even used to use the phrase, “intimacy terrorist.” At times, I thought this book was written under a false identity of my professor. He kept a solid silence up, that confuses me to this day, but reading this book I think I understand what it’s like from the other side, and I don’t want to inflict that on anyone. I don’t want to be pathological. Again, I was never as extreme or punitive as Nareen, but the frequency and intensity of my emails are similar, and the origins and reasons for the attachment, nearly exact.

Jamie Quatro & George Meredith: Hiding the Skeleton

Jamie Quatro’s I Want to Show You More seems like the 2013 version of Ben Lerner’s hilarious & super-smart 2011 Leaving the Atocha Station: a first-book fiction breakout on a small press (Lerner’s was published by the really indie Coffee House press; Quarto’s is on Grove, so maybe not exactly the same thing) that gets rave reviews from James Wood in the New Yorker, the NY Times, and cascading ripples of underdog-new-author-loving accolades from that point on.

Quatro’s stories are really good.  They’re all set in the town of Lookout Mountain on the Georgia-Tennessee border, which on first blush sounds like a too-picturesque invented setting but turns out to be where Quatro actually lives.  (Her husband seems to be a business professor at the (Presbyterian) Covenant College in Lookout Mt.)

The one that seems to have received the most attention is “Decomposition: A Primer for Promiscuous Housewives.” This is a disconcertingly realist-allegorical account of a married woman’s adultery in which, following her confession to her husband and breaking off of the affair, her lover’s slowly decaying corpse manifests in the marital bed.  She zips up the body in a sleeping bag and hides it in an old playpen in the basement, disguised under piles of junk.  Finally she brings her husband down to look at the hidden corpse, which starts to scream at her and call her a whore.

My theory is that Quatro (who started but did not finish the PhD program in English at Princeton, specializing in British Romantic poetry) is drawing on George Meredith’s great 1862 sonnet sequence “Modern Love,” especially its famous section 2 in which the miserable, adulterous couple play “hiding the skeleton” in their performance of a happy marriage:

AT dinner she is hostess, I am host.

Went the feast ever cheerfuller? She keeps

The topic over intellectual deeps

In buoyancy afloat. They see no ghost.

With sparkling surface-eyes we ply the ball:

It is in truth a most contagious game;

HIDING THE SKELETON shall be its name.

Such play as this the devils might appall!

But here ’s the greater wonder; in that we,

Enamor’d of our acting and our wits,

Admire each other like true hypocrites.

Warm-lighted glances, Love’s Ephemeræ,

Shoot gayly o’er the dishes and the wine.

We waken envy of our happy lot.

Fast, sweet, and golden, shows our marriage-knot.

Dear guests, you now have seen Love’s corpse-light shine!

There’s a new Yale UP edition of the poem (and a bunch of other Meredith poetry) reviewed (somewhat nastily to its editors) by Helen Vendler in a recent New Republic.

I Want to Show You More has various enjoyable & surprising things about it, including that it is (a) immersed in matters of religion; not only are many of its characters church-goers but several stories (like “the Anointing” and “Demolition”) are centrally about faith in different ways and (b) it’s unusually filthy/pervy by prestigious-short-story standards. In “Decomposition,” for example, one manifestation of the adulterous woman’s ill ease (with her lover in the basement) is that she “grow[s] desperate, watch[es] Asian breast massage how-to videos on YouTube with links to girl-on-girl porn.”  I wonder what the folks at Covenant College think of all this.

*Any relation to Suzi Quatro a.k.a. “Pinky” Tuscadero on Happy Days?  Weirdly conceivable but probably too good to be true.

Our love is alive, and so we begin

Foolishly laying our hearts on the table

Stumblin’ in

Our love is a flame, burning within

Now and then firelight will catch us

Stumblin’ in

Stumblin’ in

Stumblin’ in

I actually always thought it was “our love is a lie”… which I thought was kind of hard-hitting for that kind of song.

Richard Hell: Cold, angry days on the houseboat

I had Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation and Destiny Street in high school and although those were never albums I listened to from start to end a whole lot, I’ve always really loved a few of Hell’s songs: e.g. “Time” (“Only time can write a song that’s really really real”), “Love Comes in Spurts,” “Kid With the Replaceable Head,” and “Blank Generation.”  He was a bit of a punk-rock Zelig: a founding member of the great Television before his high school buddy Tom Verlaine kicked him out; briefly in Johnny Thunders’ Heartbreakers after the breakup of the New York Dolls; slept with Nancy Spungeon for a while before she got involved with Sid Vicious; opened for the Clash with the Voidoids in Britain in 1977.  That year Time dubbed him “the demon-eyed New Yorker who could become the Mick Jagger of punk” (it didn’t quite work out that way). I don’t think I had really known this, but Hell’s memoir (I Dreamed I was a Very Clean Tramp) makes a convincing case that when Malcolm McLaren spent a while hanging around NYC in 1974-5, he admired Hell’s style — his good looks in torn leather jacket, the safety pins, spiky hair, aggressively graphic hand-printed text on t-shirts, a Situationist-influenced collage aesthetic — and that when he couldn’t recruit Hell to form his own band, McLaren just appropriated the look and gave it to the Sex Pistols. (Hell admits to spending some time feeling frustrated about his unacknowledged role as the originator of punk’s signature style, but seems Zen about it now.)

Robert Christgau claims that with the memoir Hell equals or exceeds Patti Smith’s achievement in the National Book Award-winning Just Kids.  I definitely disagree; overall I found I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp hit or miss. It has some great stories to tell, but eventually it devolves into a dispiriting narrative of heroin addiction, reflexive promiscuity, and missed opportunities– somewhat redeemed by the awareness that Hell eventually got clean and turned into an apparently healthy person.

Some examples:

Our record company was another source of disgust and disappointment.

Later, as the monotony and discomfort of the tour became more and more horrible, the great [Clash friend/ roadie] Roadent introduced me to his antidote for ennui — self-inflicted cigarette burns.  It worked and I still have the cherished memory on my left forearm.

Jake did a creative thing for us in London by renting a houseboat on the Thames, off Cheyne Walk, for the band to live in.  But it turned out not to be a good idea to cram us all into a tight space.  By the end of the first three days I was junk-sick and irritable… My hopelessness grew… It got labyrinthetically self-repellant… The entire… tour was just a stretched-out version of those first few cold, angry, nauseated days on the houseboat.

Some friend or editor also really should have gotten Hell to ease off on of the punk-groupie sex stories, which also get monotonous and depressing. He indulges too much in plain old objectification of the array of women who pass through his various fleabag Lower East Side bedrooms. “Although he’s self-deprecating about it of course,” Christgau writes (unfortunately), “Hell was New York punk’s great ladies’ man.”  Sabel Starr is one example of his conquests.  “Sabel was fifteen (Johnny [Thunders] was nineteen) when they met and she was already notorious as an L.A. groupie.  Word was she’d slept with Iggie Pop was she was thirteen… She always had the cheeriest healthy smile.  The smile was real — happy and friendly.  Everything about her was real.  She was heroic.  At least from the point of view of a musician she liked.  She truly lived for fun and joy, and the thing that was the most joyous of all to her was to make a meaningful rock musician happy.  That was her mission, the way someone else might join the Peace Corps.  Instead of digging wells and planting crops and offering medical care, she provided pretty and entertaining companionship, astute and sincere encouragement, favorite drugs, and magnificent blow jobs…. She was a soulful, sane, self-aware sweetheart of a committed groupie.”

Eww. As he comments at one point, while on coke his “brain and cock were one”… and he was high most of the time in the late 70s and early-mid 80s.

Hell is a pretty smart guy, one of the better-read and more intellectual of the punk generation (he always saw himself as a writer/artist who happened to decide to make music for a while), and there are some good/fun things about the book… he knew everyone in those days, and it’s fascinating to see the emergence of punk from the perspectives of one of its conceptual architects.

He observes interestingly at one point that “the British punk culture also seemed strangely asexual.  There were some classic teenage sexpectations among stray members of bands, but for the most part the relations between the boys and the girls seemed infantile, like prepubescent.  People kidded and cuddled and might even share beds, but it seemed to be in bad form to regard one another as sexual prospects.”  The book brought out the prude in me: I kept thinking, “stop doing drugs and chasing groupies, focus on your opportunities.”  Punk saw itself as an alternative to the excesses of 1970s rock and roll culture, but people like Hell got caught up in an arty downtown version of those same excesses, to the point of sleeping with the very same groupies.  Although he definitely gets the problem of drug addiction, it doesn’t seem to occur to him that there might have been something valuable in a (relative) prudishness and “asexuality” in the London scene, which may have helped to prevent punk from reverting into just a new form of rock and roll.  (Just read this Bookforum review which comments of Hell, “he’s a scumbag with an intimate, articulate understanding of scumbag psychology.”)

The “clean”/chaste vs dirty/ “tramp[y]” [vis. the book's title] dichotomy may also relate to Hell’s complicated feelings towards Tom Verlaine, who is the closest this book comes to the Robert Mapplethorpe of Smith’s Kids — e.g. the roommate/ best buddy/ co-conspirator from the early days.  Hell still seems to feel rejected by and angry at Verlaine to some degree, perhaps in part because of Verlaine’s aloof, un-rock-and-roll fastidiousness: he didn’t do drugs, didn’t hang out much, and you don’t hear a lot about his girlfriends.  I guess he just dedicated all his energy to making genius music… (Although to be fair, Verlaine does sound as if he could be a pain in the neck, a bit of a control-freak J. Mascis type, with Hell as the bewildered/rejected Lou Barlow).

But then, I was always much more of a bookish Verlaine than a bad-boy Hell type (sans any musical talent), personally.

*Amour* and *I Married You for Happiness*

Coincidentally (I think) I happened to be reading Lily Tuck’s novel I Married You For Happiness when I saw Michael Haneke’s Amour at the IU Cinema– both of which are about an elderly, long-married spouse’s response to the death of his/her partner.  You probably know about Amour.  The donnée of Tuck’s novel is a bit different; at its onset, the narrator Nina is at the bedside of her husband, who after going upstairs to take a quick nap, has died suddenly; the novel plays out in that night, as she stays by his corpse, thinking back over memories from their marriage.  As its title suggests, I Married You For Happiness is less about the death than about the marriage, and I found it to be a moving and engaging portrait of a not-untroubled long-term relationship as it spools out over decades.  They meet at a cafe in Paris where she is reading an avant-garde French novel by Natalie Saurraute (which hints at Tuck’s aesthetic program). Theirs is a C.P. Snow two-cultures kind of marriage, she a painter, he a mathematician, and one of its concerns is the way two people with different ways of thinking, kinds of mind, and perspectives can form a life together.  In this it reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s portrait of a somewhat incompatible yin/yang marriage in the Ramsays:

Whenever she "thought of his work" she always saw clearly before 
her a large kitchen table. It was Andrew's doing. She asked him 
what his father's books were about. "Subject and object and the 
nature of reality," Andrew had said. And when she said Heavens, 
she had no notion what that meant. "Think of a kitchen table then," 
he told her, "when you're not there."

So now she always saw, when she thought of Mr. Ramsay's work, 
a scrubbed kitchen table.

Nina is a bit Mrs Ramsay-like in her bemused attitude to her abstractly-thinking husband’s worldview.  Although in other ways she, as an artist, more resembles Mrs. Ramsay’s protege Lily, the painter (Lily Tuck/ Lily Briscoe?).

I am a longtime Haneke fan (I’ve seen most of his films, I think — my favorite is probably Caché; I can never bring myself to watch either version of Funny Games), and I found Amour brilliant and/but hard to watch in some respects.  I read one review that asserted that it is “not a depressing movie” and in fact that it would be a good choice for a couple to go see on Valentine’s Day.  It’s true that it’s a notably realist and unsentimental depiction of long-term commitment– one that considers what the phrase “’till death do us part” might really mean in practice.  Not sure I’d really recommend it for date night, though.  One friend saw it at a different showing at the IU Cinema during which she reports various audience members were crying, one woman doing so throughout the entire film and, at one climactic moment (you can probably guess which if you’ve seen it), shouting out loudly “no!”  My friend says she actually kind of wished she’d seen it on DVD at home, as the emotion in the audience was a bit overpowering.

George Saunders’ & Sam Lipsyte’s Disrespected Worlds of Fantasy

My spring break pleasure reading, partly on a round-trip plane ride, consisted of two new collections of stories by authors I’ve read for a while, George Saunders’ Tenth of December and Sam Lipsyte’s The Fun Parts. It was interesting to read them in succession; you could construct a Venn Diagram in which they both overlap with parts of Donald Barthelme, Mark Leyner (although I admit I only thought of him because I just read Lipsyte’s admiring interview with him in the new Paris Review), Louis C.K. and/or other standup comics, Saunders’ one-time Syracuse colleague David Foster Wallace and maybe Kurt Vonnegut. What may be most distinctive about them, at least considered together, is the fundamental role of humor in their fiction — they almost continually crack jokes even in pretty serious and/or grim narratives, in a way that feels kind of post-David Letterman and contemporary to me.

It’s a slightly unfair comparison to Lipsyte because Tenth of December is probably the best book of an artist for whom the short story is his central and basically only art form, whereas Lipsyte’s The Fun Parts is more of an occasional collection and doesn’t, IMO, show him at his strongest compared to, for example, his last full-length novel The Ask which I believe I wrote about here a few years ago… Yes, I began that posting by observing that it will “probably long remain the funniest and best novel filed under this Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data: 1.  College administrators– Fiction.  2.  College benefactors — Fiction.  3.  Education fund raising — Fiction.”

Saunders’ book is fantastic. I guess my favorite is the amazing “The Semplica-Girl Diaries” which he discusses on the New Yorker fiction blog here. Saunders in his winningly unpretentious way comments that ‘If the only thing the story did was say, ‘Hey, it’s really wrong to hang up living women in your backyards, you capitalist-pig oppressors,’ that wasn’t going to be enough. We kind of know that already. It had to be about that plus something else.” This story would work really well on a syllabus in a course focused on depictions of immigrant labor or related topics.

Lipsyte is a master of that contemporary mode of cringing-embarrassment-and-shame, with a focus on the grotesque and abject body, that’s most familiar from t.v. shows like Louie C.K., Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Girls. And Maria Bamford’s stand-up comedy and her show. He’s hilarious and brilliant, but I found the stories a bit brutal and cudgeling when read all in a row.  They contain some pretty disgusting and/or emotionally lacerating moments, e.g. the story with the dad who taunts his son to goad him to take a swing at him: “Don’t be such a damn pansy!  I’m leaving your dying hag of a mother!” Maybe my favorite was the one about early-teenage Dungeons & Dragons players, which stood out for me as having more of a Saunders-like sympathy and emotional depth than some of the others.

That story’s D&D theme also reminded me of the final story in Saunders’s collection, “Tenth of December” itself, which starts in the consciousness of an odd kid who seems to have developed his own cosmology involving creatures called Nethers that vaguely bring to mind some of the creatures in A Wrinkle in Time:

They were Netherworlders.  Or Nethers.  They had a strange bond with him.  Sometimes for whole days he would just nurse their wounds.  Occasionally, for a joke, he would shoot one in the butt as it fled.  Who henceforth would limp for the rest of its days. Which could be as long as an additional nine million years.

That’s a characteristic Saunders thought, that this weird kid spends days, in his fantasy life, nursing the wounds of aggressive invented creatures whom he also humiliatingly injures for laughs, and with whom he has a “strange bond.”

It makes sense that both Saunders and Lipsyte would be interested in eccentric, childish, disrespected realms of fantasy and role-playing. Both authors return repeatedly to self-contained invented worlds and subcultures, lacking good aesthetics or high-cultural credibility, that provide opportunities for grandiose self-dramatizing on the part of losers and marginal types of all kinds. Amusement and theme parks seem often to serve this role for Saunders. This preoccupation seems fitting for an era in which literary fiction has vastly less cultural influence than, say, console or smartphone video games. There’s a resigned albeit slightly embarrassed sense on the part of both authors that they are working in a genre that has lost status in a major way and that cannot really even compete with the cheesiest of non-literate games. And of course part of their success is that they fully recognize this in the way a lot of authors trying to plug away at realist fiction do not.  (Maybe Jennifer Egan’s work has some of this too.)

I point this out as a former somewhat-dedicated D&D player circa 6th-7th grade…

Diane Arbus, Adventurer

I read the Patricia Bosworth biography of Diane Arbus, originally published in 1984, only a little over a decade after her death, but reissued and, I believe, the basis for the 2006 film Fur: an Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, which stars a horribly mis-cast Nicole Kidman (!!) and which looks awful.

The biography is not perfect — somehow I felt the truth of who Arbus was, what she felt and thought, remained to some degree elusive or hidden from Bosworth and the reader — but I found it very gripping.

I had never known that Arbus was born Diane Nemerov and was the sister of famous poet (twice poet laureate, winner of Pulitzer, National Book Award, and Bollinger prizes) Howard Nemerov!  Quite the talented-sibling duo.  Howard is quoted late in the book saying that Diane once commented to him, “You know, I’m going to be remembered for being Howard Nemerov’s sisrer;” “how ironic and untrue,” he observed to Bosworth. (Although I think Nemerov’s own fame emerged more fully after the book was first published.)  They were cosseted children of privilege, of immigrant Jewish parents, in a rarefied Upper West Side Manhattan world, their father a wealthy founder of the Russek’s department store on Fifth Avenue (Diane grew up to hate shopping for clothes); attended the elite Fieldston prep school where they were both recognized as very talented.  Yet oddly, Diane and Howard’s parents gave them very little if any money as adults, and both of them had to scrape and scheme to support themselves in their early adulthood.

I was thinking about some other famous later 20th-c American poets whose fathers were very wealthy industrialists or financiers. James Merrill, son of Charles Merrill, co-founder of Merrill-Lynch; Louise Glück, daughter of the inventor of the X-Acto knife.  I went to a private high school in Boston founded by another son of Charles Merrill, and I always found it funny to think that the Merrill money alternately funded a school and a poetry career.  Economic capital –> Aesthetic/cultural capital.

Diane married Allan Arbus as a teenager and they became a successful fashion-photography duo in the 1940s and 1950s.  People comment that the two of them were often in a corner consulting about a shot, whispering conspiratorially.  There’s an amazing reproduction of an image from a 1947 feature article in Glamour on “case histories of seven married couples who are collaborating on joint careers in the arts, the sciences, and business” that shows a prim-looking Diane in a long dark dress feeding their young daughter Doon.  They both eventually became disenchanted by the fashion world– after their divorce, Allan eventually became a successful actor, starring as Maj. Sidney Freedman on M.A.S.H. (!- this actually does not come up in the biography).

One limitation of the book is that it does not reproduce a single Arbus photograph.  I know them pretty well, but if you didn’t, you’d definitely want to read the biography with one of her collections in hand.  I am going to try to get hold of the 2003 catalogue Diane Arbus Revelations because I really only know the famous images from the 1972 Aperture monograph.

Even after reading the biography, I can’t quite decide what I think about the question of the degree to which the ways her photography sensationalizes and (cruelly?) exoticizes its subjects.  One of her mentors, Marvin Israel, says:

A photograph for Diane was an event.  It could be argued that for Diane the most valuable thing wasn’t the photograph (the result), it was the experience, the event… Once she became an adventurer — because Diana really was an adventurer — she went places no one else [no photographer] had ever gone to.  [Those] places were scary… But once [she] became an adventurer [she was] geared to adventure and she sought out adventure and her life was based on that… the photograph was like her trophy– it was what she received as an award for her adventure.

It would be difficult to defend the work on purely aesthetic grounds.  She was “adventuring,” pushing herself to enter into forbidden, strange, exotic zones– that sense of symbolic boundary-crossing was fundamental to the images. And a critique can certainly be fairly made of the ways different kinds of social marginality (e.g. ethnic, economic, disability-based) get conflated into what can seem like one big category of the non-normative. On the other hand, she was no slumming tourist, dropping in to get the photo and then going back to her upper-middle-class world.  She returned again and again, obsessively, to many of her subjects.  The famous photo of the “Jewish giant” with his parents came out of over years of visiting and photographing him: “from 1962 to 1970 she kept returning to the Carmels’ cramped apartment until she finally captured the image she wanted.”  And she became a regular at the Coney Island sideshows and Hubert’s Freak Museum, far beyond what could have been needed to get the photos, and got to know many of the performers very well (“the living skeleton, the embalmed whale, the ventriloquist with his two-headed cat”) and considered some of them friends.

Later, in the 1960s after her divorce, this “adventuring” transitioned into sexual adventures, sometimes of a pretty seamy variety:

Sex was the quickest, most primitive way to begin connecting with another human being, and the raunchier and grosser the person or environment, the more intense the experience, and this enlarged her life… She… described in a particularly detached way how one night she’d had sex in the back of a Greyhound bus (“If you sit on the inside back seat of a Greyhound bus, it means you’re sexually available.” [ed. note: good to know!)  No introductions were made, not a word was spoken, and after this swift, mute encounter in the dark, she got off on the next stop and waited on the highway for an hour or so until another bus came along which would bring her back to New York. ... It was almost as if she was determined to explore with her body and her mind every nightmare, every fantasy, she might have repressed deep into her subconscious.... Crookson listened as she told him of picking up a Puerto Rican boy on Third Avenue "because he was so beautiful."... At this point Crookson interrupted to ask her if she hadn't ever faced actual danger as a result of such recklessness.  Yes, she answered, but she'd always been "thrilled" to take risks to "test" herself- and besides, nothing bad had ever happened to her and for some strange reasons she was positive it never would.... [W]hen her camera was with her she always felt in control….. It seemed as if merging with her subjects… was a way of giving herself to them after they revealed themselves to her camera.

Many comment that Arbus carried her often-bulky cameras and other equipment in front of her like a shield– even when she photographed at orgies (these images have apparently never surfaced).  I was surprised that there is not a single reference to her ever getting mugged or having her camera stolen, given all the stories about her wandering about Central Park in the middle of the night or the like.

To me probably the most haunting images are the late ones taken at the institution for mentally-disabled patients in Vineland, New Jersey:

Arbus’s Guggenheim proposal (she won it): “While we regret that the present is not like the past and despair of its ever becoming the future,  its innumerable inscrutable habits lie in wait for their meaning.”

You are Radiant like Sunlight: L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology

L. Ron Hubbard in 1950

I’m reading Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear: Scientology: Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief, from which I keep having to read excerpts out loud for being so bat-shit crazy even within the frame of my expectations about Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard.

The basic story so far: young man with a flair for self-dramatizing/lying joins the Navy in WW2 and is discharged; at this point a massive gap develops between Hubbard’s own accounts of his experiences in the war (filled with heroism and derring-do) and all extant navy records of his undistinguished or worse record.  He develops a promising career as a science fiction writer and becomes part of a boho sci-fi scene including the likes of Robert Heinlein, who becomes a close buddy.  Joins a cultish commune in Pasadena called the Agape Lodge, “a branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis, a secret fraternal organization dedicated to witchcraft and sexual ‘magick,’ based on the writing of… Aleister Crowley.”  Hubbard’s estranged son later comments that when Crowley died in 1947, “That’s when Dad decided that he would take over the mantle of the Beast and that is the seed and beginning of Dianetics and Scientology… It was his goal to be the most powerful being in the universe.”

Under anasthesia at the dentist, Hubbard has a vision that he believes reveals the secrets of existence to him.  He writes a self-help book based on said vision, Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health, which becomes a surprise best-seller and makes him wealthy.  When the Dianetics trend passes, however, Hubbard is broke again, and subsequently re-invents Dianetics as not simply a kind of self-help, power of positive thinking alternative to mainstream psychiatry, but instead a full-fledged religion with Hubbard at its center as a charismatic leader.  This is when things start getting really weird and dark.

A few favorite passages so far.  This is from “a list of personal goals and compliments [Hubbard] pays himself, but… also a portrait of the superman he wishes to be,” written in the late 1940s before the publication of Dianetics.

You are radiant like sunlight.

You can read music.

You are a magnificent writer who has thrilled millions.

Ability to drop into a trance state at will…

You did a fine job in the Navy.  No one there is now ‘out to get you.’

You are psychic.

You do not masturbate.  [This follows an earlier affirmation: "Masturbation does not injure or make insane.  Your parents were in error.  Everyone masturbates."  Btw, one Crowleyian ritual at the Agape Lodge involved "'invocation of wand with material basis on talisman' - in other words, masturbating on a piece of parchment.'"]

You do not know anger.  Your patience in infinite.

Snakes are not dangerous to you.  There are no snakes in the bottom of your bed.

Later, in the heady “Sea Org” era, when Scientology’s leaders had not yet found a stable home base and were located on a ship at sea:

Hubbard began recalling many of his own various existences… He claimed to have been a contemporary of Machiavelli’s, and he was still upset that the author of The Prince stole his line ‘The end justifies the means.’ He said he had been a marshal of Joan of Arc and Tamburlaine’s wife.  He told stories of driving a race car in the alien Marcab civilization millions of years before.  He came to believe that in some of his past lives on this planet, he had buried treasure in various locations, so he launched an expedition to unearth his ancient hoards.  He called it the Mission of Time.  He selected a small crew… Because he wanted to keep the mission secret, he had two long rafts fashioned, which could be rowed ashore under cover of darkness and pulled up on the beach near where he imagined his ancient treasure was buried….

The missionaries found some old bricks they thought might have been the ruins of a castle beside the watchtower.  The metal detectors found nothing.  Hubbard decided to come along the next day to inspect the site himself.  “Yes, yes, this is the place!” he said excitedly.  He explained the absence of treasure by saying that it must have been hidden in a portion of the ruined castle that had fallen into the sea.  [The expedition] next stopped in Calabria, on the toe of Italy, where Hubbard had buried gold in his days as a tax collector in the Roman Empire.  None was found, however.

It is an unbelievable story, and I have not even gotten to Tom Cruise and John Travolta yet. The book makes you realize that Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master massively underplayed the craziness– it represents Scientology as resembling in origins a deranged instantiation of an H.P. Lovecraft fiction or something along those lines.

Remember: You are radiant like sunlight. You are a magnificent writer who has thrilled millions. You are psychic. You do not masturbate.

p.s. The Amazon reviews of the book, some written by former Scientologists, are fascinating.  Also see Kim Masters’ “Why the Media is No Longer Afraid of Scientology.”

*We Killed*: Elayne Boosler driven crazy by bullshit

I read a lot of We Killed: the Rise of Women in American Comedy (by Yael Kohen) the other day; it’s an oral history and I started reading it in the 1970s or so, skipped the earlier parts of the history about Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, et al (I may go back to read that).

One figure I found fascinating in this narrative was a stand-up named Elayne Boosler, who grew up as the child of a Russian acrobat and a Rumanian ballerina in Brooklyn.  I’d never heard of her, although she was quite prominent in the 70s and into the 1980s.  She dated Andy Kaufman and achieved a fair amount of success; she even did a Dry Idea anti-perspirant commercial in what looks to me like 1982 or so:

There are three “nevers” in comedy.  Never follow a better comedian.  Never give a heckler the last word.  And no matter how badly a joke bombs — although it’s never happened to me personally — never let them see you sweat.

She is viewed as a pretty important figure by many of the commentators and she emerges as a slightly tragic or melancholy one in the sense that her career seems emblematic of female comics of this generation: she was super-talented, she did well, but she hit what seems to have been a kind of glass ceiling.  Richard Lewis comments that he always thought of her as “Jackie Robinson of stand-up in my class… There was like, a guy, a guy, a guy, a guy, and ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Elayne Boosler!’ And she would come on and rip up the joint, and I just found it astounding, because she had to overcome so many obstacles.”

As the author explains, one of the most problematic blocks to the advance of female comics in this era was The Tonight Show.  Appearing on the show was one of the crucial routes towards stardom and Johnny Carson admitted outright that he found most female comics “a little aggressive for my taste”; as Kohen comments, “the women who suited Carson’s taste were, for the most part, blond, buxom, and willing to play dumb.”

Someone else (Joanne Astrow) comments, “There are always complex stories.  There’s another side to it.  Elayne Boosler has what I would honestly call anger management problems.  And Elayne has an obsessive craziness about material being stolen from her.”  Then someone (Claudia Lonow) chimes in, “Did she have a chip on her shoulder or was she a creative person who was being driven crazy by bullshit?  That’s what I think.  She was systematically being driven crazy.”

I find this convincing partly because she was obviously so good and there seems no good reason why she would not have broken out in a bigger way (as many of her male peers did) were it not for the endemic structural sexism of the comedy scene of the era.

Check out this hilarious clip about the awkwardness of one-night stands:

And this clip of Boosler appearing on some kind of strange Andy Kaufman special, in which he sits high above her at a giant desk as they bicker about their breakup, is amazing:

Boosler now seems to have become a progressive activist of sorts (writes for the Huffington Post sometimes) and an animal rescue advocate.  I’m sure she’s doing fine but my sense is that she never got her due.

Following a victory lap about Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, the book concludes somewhat depressingly with the recent emergence of a new ideal of model-level hotness for female comedians; notwithstanding occasional exceptions that prove the rule like Melissa McCarthy, it’s pretty clear that nowadays if you don’t look like Chelsea Handler, Whitney Cummings or Natasha Leggero you are likely to get shunted away from performance towards the writers’ room.