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Just in time for Valentine's Day,
the Guardian in London has
reviewed and raved about
The Secret Language of Sleep.
And, for the rest of the week,
you can buy it for $5!
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Before you read this, perhaps you would like to read Section One. - - - - JL: DE: 1. I've been in LA this week, and as horrible as it was staying on Sunset, I do really like the city's enthusiasm for just about everything, every stupid ugly cheap thing. I like that they get excited about making TV shows. That they want to make things, and make them quickly, and then make more things, and reach people, and make them laugh or cry or whatever. It's nice — it's jumpy and desperate in a healthy and wide-eyed sort of way. They obviously fear death, and this is good. 2. I'm reading Michael Cunningham's The Hours, which is absolutely magnificent and which I should have read a while ago, I know. I was prompted to read it after seeing him speak a few weeks ago at a weekly forum sponsored by a club kind of thing somehow affiliated with NYU. I'm going to offend all the members of this by saying that many of them embody precisely what makes me queasy about what you might call (or they might prefer themselves to be called, or would have been called in another era) the New York Intellectual. I spend a lot of time during these lunches just watching the audience, because there seems to be a concerted effort, on the part of a good portion of them, not to have a good time. And Michael Cunningham's speech was so instructive and great because he just didn't care, for a second, about what these people thought. He got up and told these people that he didn't read books as a kid, that he thought books were uncool, that he preferred to spend his time chasing girls and smoking cigarettes. And of course Cunningham is one of the most celebrated writers we have. His talent is beyond debate, and of course someone like him, who did not come up through academia — at one point he cited WWII when he should have said WWI and was quickly corrected — very much upsets a certain brand of people. But Cunningham just got up and did his thing, in a loose and almost gee-whiz sort of way, and it was perfect. And all the while, there was this man, across the room from me, who I could watch while watching Cunningham, and he had on his face a look of perfect, unimproveable sourness. Pursed lips, eyelids at half-mast, legs crossed, dressed like a dandy. He was the absolute picture of what I call the The Unimpressed. These are men uncomfortable in their own skin. They cannot be entertained. They do not laugh. They do not do; they watch. And speaking a few feet away from this particular Unimpressed Person was Cunningham, who is completely at ease in his body, is completely fluid, is wearing a T-shirt that shows his belly button. And he's talking about how much he loves Virginia Wolff, and is relating her work, in a very clever way, to chaos theory. And he's talking about how he discovered Wolff — as a teenager, he read her to impress a girl he wanted to impress — and how her work has affected his, and also, in essence, how much he loves being alive, and among people, and the ability to create and to have his stuff reach and move people. And surely a man like this Unimpressed Person, without Cunningham's looks (Cunningham's in his mid-forties, though he looks about 33), without Cunningham's fit physique, without his charm, his easy grace, his having *lived*, without his book's tremendous popularity, his broad worldwide audience, his Pulitzer, this Unimpressed Person just sat there, in his nice suit and glasses and pursed lips, and looked sour. It was not even a sometime-sourness. He sat, for one hour solid, with this same sour look, unchanging. It was startling. Because he was in my line of sight, I had to consciously not look his way, so disturbing was his look of barely hidden contempt. And the thing I always wonder about these people is why they ever leave the house. Why attend a lecture if you're not trying to learn, to, at the very least, have a good time? There is another such person, who very well might have been in the room but whose name I will not divulge, who, in his twilight years, is still spending his time poo-pooing, with carefully manufactured condescension, new writers. (Can you imagine being 80 years old and thinking that a constructive use of your time is to pick apart the work of a beginning writer a third your age?) This man, who I think lives primarily as a critic and 'academic' — oh what a life! — once told a class of graduate students, among whom was a friend of mine, that over the years his tastes had become so refined that there were now "only two or three" works of art that he could even stomach. And this man still finds the energy to wake up in the morning. How? What can the world offer him? What can be seen by the Unimpressed Person that would please him? These are people who see the world through a very tiny aperture. And for that we should feel bad. I want to take these people out of the city, for just a few hours, and bring them to see some mountains. Or a waterfall. They wouldn't even have to see the waterfall — just hearing the water rush and fall and crash would, I think, change them, would awaken them. I honestly think it's a result of too much time spent indoors, in dark rooms, reading critiques of criticism of opinions about trends. One needs, I think, very often, some exposure to the source material — that is, the world. JL: First, I have a superfically amused response to your pitting California-naive-liveliness-creativity against New York-sterile-academic-death urge — after my ten years in California, and my return to New York (from whence I came) I've consoled myself and ordered my self-understanding around a rejection of California's ahistorical, goofy, new-age, banality-of-evil olestra (nothing sticks, I get drunk, I fall down, what's the problem) atmosphere in favor of New York's intense, achievement-ratifying and knowledge-based substantiality. But those are my silly biases. Needless to say, safe to say, cultural 'life-urges' and 'death-urges' thrive in their many (remarkably) different urban biospheres equally, in close coexistence, and so often, so confusingly, wearing one another's clothes at unexpected moments. I mean, I'm constantly turned on by the fact of a thriving cultural life in New York. Which for me is marked precisely by the regular and abundant attendance of an "intelligensia" to readings, old films, performance art, etc. And I find this confirmed in a few basic places (because like all New Yorkers I'm a creature of habit, with an undeniably tiny circuit in which I actually operate — my "giant metropolis" consists of six subway stops, probably about 20,000 faces): a few key reading series' at a few key bookstores and other venues, the Film Forum, and few things like The Fez, The Moth, Joe's Pub, KGB. Each of which venues contextualize ostensibly disparate cultural presentations very narrowly by the assertion of an audience demographic which finds them all appropriate and hip. And, while I'm often in a bliss of self-forgetting, of genuine participation in 'audience' at these places and times — I can go there and be 'at my waterfall' — I'm also capable of flipping a switch, and suddenly seeing the posturing, sneering, insider-ish resentfulness and small-mindedness which can lurch into view, which is all too often lurking there to be seen, and felt. The self-congratulation and implicit elitist exclusiveness. The cultivating of tiny slights. The grooming of complaint, the morbid watchfulness for a vulnerable opening, an Achilles' heel. How do these things live in such close quarter? It's Freud's Narcissism of Minor Difference again, perhaps: my own resentment and disappointment are so close to the surface, so ready to come out the moment I detect the foul air, precisely because I'd come to this place in order to be at a waterfall, precisely because a gathering of people in a room to talk about books is so painfully, threateningly close to my fantasy of an ideal world! As though everyone in that room is on best behavior — reining in The Sneer. And when I notice someone failing to rein it in, I'm furious with disappointment at that person. The engine of the fury being the fact that The Sneer is in me, too, but I'm keeping it from coming out. A game of Prisoner's Dilemma, where if one of us breaks we all go down. I'm writing while listening to a cd I bought yesterday, at a great record shop in Toronto called Soundscapes. The store is such a labor of love — every section highly selected by the store's owners, like a brilliantly-edited magazine, so that, though I spend hours making my own "selection", I'd probably be just as satisfied if I grabbed cds off their shelves at random. I'm listening to a reissue of the African musican Fela, called "Expensive Shit/He Miss Road" — two lps from the early 70's on one compact disc. Beautiful, cascading music, most particularly waterfallish. I don't know why, but I'm compelled to turn this exchange partly into a swapping of enthusiasms, like yours about Cunningham. There's so much out there, so much that's wonderful, the government ought to pay people to stay home and read books and listen to music. Subject for further research: George Steiner's Real Presences, in which he asks us to "imagine a society in which all talk about the arts, music and literature is prohibited". The banishment of secondary material would mean that the only criticism or response to existing art would be to create other art. (I lifted this quote from Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz, where Dyer then extends this fantasy into an assertion that Jazz functions largely like Steiner's proposed society — the music is critiqued and understood by more music.) That guy you mention who only finds two or three works of art tolerable to his rarefied sensibility — that's so easy, isn't it? So much easier than confronting the generosity of the world. Though he's probably got tens of thousands of reading hours under his belt, he's quite comically ended up in just the same place as the people I used see at the bookstore I worked at, who'd allowed their laziness about reading to be shored up by a classic mistaken received impression that went like this: More-or-less, there is One Book Worth Reading every year or so, a Great Book. They'd brush aside the magnificent chaotic abundance of our bookstore's whole literature section, the chance to browse, marvel, lose themselves in art, in favor of plucking up that single title that they'd heard was on people's lips, the Official Novel of Now — this year "The Name of the Rose", that year "Smilla's Sense of Snow" or "Infinite Jest" or "Perfume", whatever. Good books often filled that spot, I should say — usually it was filled by a good book. But that isn't the problem. These one-novel-a-year customers would read it, or at least read the first fifty pages, and then give up. Puzzled, irritated, distressed, because it didn't actually stand in for understanding what it was to care about novels, for seeing novels' relation to and interpenetration of life — because no single novel can stand in for and replace the context of a real and full reading life, no single novel could repair the damage they'd done to themselves — and they'd put it aside and declare it overrated because it didn't remind them of Catch 22 or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, whatever the last buzz they'd had, fifteen or twenty years earlier, fifteen or twenty before they'd killed their reading self through neglect without even noticing. But — back to California and New York, to the innocent sweetness of LA's enthusiasm, as you saw it, versus New York's withering intellectualism. I'm reminded of a personal conundrum I've never solved (lazily, never pursued hard enough — and that's going to come back to haunt us in this, as I've hinted before: real thinkers have covered some of this ground, or all of it, and we're in their footsteps). I've always valorized "remembering". In my first attempts at fiction I was particularly obsessed with the crime of consensual amnesia, and the losses associated with forgetting. It seemed to me that people of value and taste and awareness did and should live in fear of forgetfullness, in themselves and others. Then I read some Nietzsche. He's particularly focused on resentment — on that small-mindedness which cuts down the potentially great. (You and F. have got some temperament similarities, I think). In his thinking, resentment fosters directly in memory — the people who shred others are the rememberers, the ones who won't let go of this or that. Forgetting opens up clear space for life to flourish, creativity to happen. I think you see where I'm going. Your admiration is for the L.A. people (and Michael Cunningham) as blissful and free forgetters. And your description of the Unimpressed Person is clearly akin to Nietzsche's excessive and resentful rememberer.
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