Secrets, Confession, and Reconciliation

I have been a reader of PostSecret for about seven years now, I think, if not a bit longer. PostSecret, for those of you who do not know, is a website run by Frank Warren, who solicits postcards not only from people across America but also from across the world. Warren asks individuals to write down a secret on a postcard and to send it to him. He takes about twenty of these each week and posts them on the site on Sundays. The posts are moving, amusing, lovely, painful, familiar, shocking, and almost always powerful. Rarely are they banal or mundane. Many people make their perusal part of their weekly rituals, every Sunday or Monday.

The directions that Warren gives for the project are rather simple. He hands out cards that read:

SHARE A SECRET
You are invited to anonymously contribute a secret to a group art project. Your secret can be a regret, fear, betrayal, desire, confession or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything – as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before.

Warren encourages people to send a number of cards, but to always share the secrets anonymously. He began passing these cards out in the Washington, DC area about 10 years ago and soon people began sending the cards in to him and he began publishing them. He now gets tens of millions of hits on his site each year and it has become enormously popular. He has published five books of secrets and the latest went to #1 on the NY Times bestseller list. It’s been an impressive run for him.

In the last few years Warren has begun touring the country – and even overseas – talking to audiences about PostSecret and about secrets and his work. Well, when my friend and colleague Mark Rice asked me to join him in attending one of these events in our local area recently (Mark is also a longtime reader of the site), I felt compelled to agree to attend. It was a fascinating experience, but not in the way that I had expected it to be.

Warren began the event by talking about how he imagines secrets as a box full of postcards that we carry around. The question he has is what to do with that box? He wanted to encourage us to share the contents of that box, suggesting that there is something transformational in the act of sharing.

Warren was a good speaker, practiced in his anecdotes and his gestures. He clearly had done this a number of times – and by this I don’t mean to put him down in any way. He was a pro and he knew how to hit the right notes in his performance. But that’s part of what was interesting to me: it was a performance and I don’t think I expected that.

He showed us images and shared stories and personal details, including things about his relationship with his mother and even a message she left on his voicemail rejecting the offer of a free copy of one his books, a book she had called “diabolical.” He knew how to work the stage and how to alternate the pitch and tone of his voice, how to exhort us and how to quietly and intimately connect with us. He was selling books and his site, but the profits seemed to go for the good – much of what he does goes to suicide hotline and prevention centers, a cause he has taken up as central to his work on PostSecret and a cause we pretty much can all get behind.

Soon after Warren began, he told us he was going to share secrets that “the lawyers” wouldn’t allow him to put in the PostSecret books. It felt like we were being welcomed into the inner circle. Some of the “outlawed” secrets had potential copyright infringements in terms of their images, others had images or words that the lawyers deemed potentially upsetting or scandalous. The first secret had an image of a woman’s breast. It was a close-up, with a focus on the areola and a pair of tweezers plucking a hair from it. Apparently, this woman does not have perfectly hairless areolae and is admitting to plucking the hairs. Now I’m not sure how scandalous this image was, nor why it might potentially upset anyone – a bare breast? But still, the card was banned from the book. The postcard had one word on it – “Confession.”

During my drive home, as I thought back to the event, I connected that image of the breast and the word “Confession” with how Warren ended the formal part of his presentation. This ending was what Warren called his “testimony.” He spoke about the crucial importance of opening up, not only to others, but to ourselves, about what we keep as secrets. He suggested that secrets can be heavy burdens upon us and that it can be transformational to confess them. This ending had a Fundamentalist feel to it – he even ended it by asking of the audience, “Can I get an Amen?” He was both joking and not. For Warren, there is something deeply spiritual in what he sees as his project and this talks that he gave: even if he understood that this was not a formal church setting, he also recognized that there was something powerful going on in this space, something communal and shared and perhaps transcendent for those of us in the audience. This was also part of the performative aspect of the event, much as church itself is often a performative space – as is a classroom, if I’m going to be completely forthright. (Worth noting: Warren is currently working on something he calls “PostSecret: The Play,” holding auditions in New York.) Warren’s testimony was a performance of sincerity and authenticity, he returned to the story of his mother and gave us more insight into his childhood and his suffering and his path to where he is now and told us that he would not trade anything in what he had experienced. His journey is important to him, suffering and all, in helping him locate himself in this present time. And the rhetoric of suffering only reinforced the religious or at least spiritual undertones of the event and the value of the secrets revealed, confessed and spoken aloud in a moment that leads to transcendence. “Confession,” that early image had offered us as an audience, and confession was now positioned as something deeply valuable and communal for those of us in the room.

This should make some sense for longtime readers of the website. PostSecret is a deeply confessional space where people admit their fears and their weaknesses, their love of others, their shames, their hopes. In sharing these they share something that feels essential about themselves. The readers of the site recognize this and often feel part of something larger – it’s what readers of the site call the PostSecret Community. That community has only gotten larger with the lecture tours and the publication of the books. Visitors to bookstores often leave secrets in the books for others to find, continuing Warren’s project literally beyond the pages of his books.

But my response also led me to a few questions. Warren has called PostSecret “a group art project.” What about it is “art”? I’m not sure. He certainly has an archive of artifacts, though he seems less interested in them as artistic representations or as artifacts as he is about them as secrets that have been revealed. The postcards can certainly be creative, but other than his selection as to which secrets to publish on the site or in the books, we don’t really have a sense of what about their creativity Warren values. The criteria of his subjective preferences remain hidden. Will he unveil these criteria? What will he do with the artifacts that he has collected? What will come of the archive? Finally, and in a somewhat different direction, are the secrets that the public doesn’t see as fully realized as confessions as those published? This last seems important, as Warren goes out of his way to present the secrets and his own stories as “authentic.” That authenticity is part of the performance of PostSecret, and don’t get me wrong, I’m not necessarily against it. But the performance of authenticity is something that viewers and listeners and readers should be aware of. There is no way to know whether someone is lying or fabricating a secret. Warren’s acceptance of all the postcards and his publishing of them suggests not only that he takes them all at face value but that they all are somehow equivalent to him.

And this idea of equivalency is my last point. On the site, all the secrets are posted by themselves, with no commentary from Warren, though with an occasional comment from a reader that he has placed as an accompaniment. For the most part, each secret stands alone, all equal in importance and potentially in impact. I thought of this aspect of the site when Warren told us the story of how he was approached by the band, The All-American Rejects, about using postcards from PostSecret in the video for their song, “Dirty Little Secret.”

At first Warren rejected their request before eventually agreeing to share thirty of them. In the video, though, Warren told us, the band ended up adding three secrets of their own, all of them anonymous like the ones Warren had provided. He then showed us one of these three. It read, “I cheated on the SAT and got a scholarship.” Many people in the audience laughed, perhaps because they found the idea of cheating familiar, perhaps because they found it shocking or ironic or funny. I had a different response, however. I found the secret deeply upsetting. By cheating and getting a scholarship, this young man was certainly angling for something better for himself, but he didn’t seem to understand that there was a cost for someone else. Colleges and foundations do not have an endless supply of scholarship money or opportunities. When someone gets one, another person does not. That scholarship that went to him was refused to someone else, someone who may have needed it to attend college, someone who may then have had to go to a different school and may have had a painful or difficult experience. I’m not claiming to know, but I am claiming that his cheating had consequences, and consequences beyond himself. And I’m claiming that his secret is not the equivalent of others, like “I’m a virgin” and “I’m afraid that no one will ever love me as much as my dog does” that show up in the video and on the site. Those secrets reveal something powerful about the individuals who wrote them, elements of their lives that they have chosen to share. The band member’s confession of cheating is not the moral equivalent of these.

This isn’t to say that there might not be value in the confession – value for the confessor. The testimony might be healing and cleansing for him; it might make him feel better to get it out there. But I don’t feel closer to him for the confession. I don’t feel something communal or transcendent. I feel angry and frustrated at his selfishness. The confession doesn’t allay that; in fact, it seems to me to be rather a continuation of the same selfishness. He feels better. Great for him. Wonder what he’d say to the kid who he blocked from getting that scholarship, the one who didn’t cheat? Make THAT confession to THAT person and maybe I’ll start to feel something for you and not just about you.

Warren started a PostSecret app last year and it was enormously successful for a number of months, but then he had to shut it down. His insistence on anonymity for the users of the app – similar to how he advises submissions to be anonymous – actually led to abuse and bullying and other sorts of behavior on the part of users, which got so bad that he decided that he needed to stop it. I can understand the anonymity – it’s somewhat freeing, after all, and allows for some to feel comfortable sharing. At the same time, it also operates as a permission to say whatever you want knowing there will be no punishment, no consequences. Warren wants the project to be about community and about forgiveness and about transcendence and these are honorable goals. But he needs to think harder about how this operates. Not all secrets are equivalent, at least not morally or ethically, and not all experiences are either. That’s okay, actually, and really only a problem when you present them as such. And when you offer whoever confesses absolute reconciliation, which maybe isn’t your place to do.

I’ll keep reading PostSecret and I’m sure I will continue to laugh at some of the cards, and tear up, and stare in amazement, and wonder about the things that connect us. But I’d be lying if I told you it’s ever really going to be the same for me. The secret is out.

Home is Where?

A cross-posting: please go check out Invisible Culture, which is hosting a blog on Season Five of Mad Men in relation to their latest issue, which has a number of articles on the show (including one on Frank O’Hara, a topic near and dear to my heart).

The good people at Invisible Culture have asked me to contribute something on the show and I was happy to say yes.

My latest piece is entitled, “Home is Where?” and looks at the way space is operating this season on the show, especially as is related to home vs. the office and especially as connected to Pete, Peggy, and Don. Go take a look!

Power, Politics, and Negotiating Allegiances

In my last post on Mad Men, I ended with a series of questions: “Who will best be able to negotiate the liminal, the in-between? And where will allegiances lie as things become better defined? When we put this in its historical context of 1966 and 1967, which when this season seems set, big things seem to be on the horizon.” The last two episodes have taken us further into these issues.

First and foremost, we have the issue of race that were percolating in the mid- to late-1960s. The Civil Rights Movement is taking hold and we see the characters on the show trying to cope with these changes, most of which seem centered around Dawn, Don’s new secretary. She is a very sympathetic character first in her articulation of her horror at the photos of Richard Speck’s victims and rejection of them as titillation and later in her anxiety about traveling to Harlem late at night and her brother’s concern for her safety. Peggy demonstrates a willingness to put Dawn up at her home, but she has a moment of concern about leaving Dawn to sleep in a room with Peggy’s purse. This dual reaction seems a useful embodiment of the desire to adopt a liberal attitude within a context of white anxiety about African-Americans. It certainly carries the flavor of the liminal, as Peggy tries to determine not only what feels right but what feels appropriate, safe, smart.

Then there is gender. Women dominated the last episode – Peggy takes Roger Sterling for $400, Joan kicks out her creep of a husband, and Don runs into an old lover, Andrea, who he dreams about, in the throes of a fever, as a kind of succubus figure who he eventually kills. Much of the episode saw them assert their will in different contexts and often to great effect: Joan enforces her will over her home and her family, Peggy negotiates successfully with Roger, and Andrea demonstrates that Don’s old lovers and his past pose a potential threat to his marriage to Megan. Don’s murder of Andrea seemed to be a symbolic assertion of male authority over female encroachment, manifested in his dream. All of these various scenes added up to women either gaining greater agency or “engendering” greater anxiety for men. How interesting that Ginsberg’s ad pitch features Cinderella trying to escape from danger only to realize that she enjoyed it and sought it out. It’s a different spin on Don’s dream reaction to Andrea – a man representing a woman as ultimately in the thrall of male power.

Again, I think with both race and gender, it will make for interesting viewing to see how the characters negotiate the shifting ideological allegiances that the 1960s created.

Finally, I’d like to note the business shift going on in terms of the power struggle between Pete and Roger. Roger is desperately seeking to maintain his position and his authority in the office and in the company itself. Pete is asserting himself as at least Roger’s equal. How will this play out? It’s becoming overt, and Pete’s announcement to the office that he got Mohawk Airlines back and taking all the credit is a clear attempt to assert his dominance on the account side. Pete seems an up-an-comer. Many will go with him. But Don noticed Roger’s reaction to Pete’s announcement and sought to allay his fears. Peggy was also aware of it. Still, Peggy happily took advantage of Roger when he needed help of the weekend and she does have lots in common with Pete, especially as the comparative up-and-comer on the creative side. It’s not clear that she will choose Roger should she have to choose between them. Nor is it clear what Don will do. He is closer to Roger and sees himself as more of Roger’s generation than Pete’s. Roger was a mentor of his and he is friends with him. But Don is also sympathetic to Pete and recognizes what he does for the company. He has again demonstrated that this season. Negotiating the delicate balance between the two seems to be one of the central tasks he has this season.

Race and gender. Politics on the national level and in the office. Power and allegiances. Mad Men continues, following much of the same elements that it always has, allowing for differences, cultural contexts, and individual characters to move the story forward and outward.

 

Neither This nor That/Both This and That

Liminal (adj.) – on the margins or the threshold; neither this nor that or both this and that.

The first episode of Mad Men, “A Little Kiss,” this year had many elements of the liminal that I haven’t seen many people speaking about, but which I found vital to the structure of the episode. (The first two episodes were presented together in a two-hour episode, with tonight’s labeled episode 3.) Liminality is the state of being in between, on the margins. It’s often associated with a particular space, but it can also refer to characters within narratives as well.

The episode begins with Sally waking up in an apartment wandering down the hallway, soon mistaking the door to the master bedroom for the door to the bathroom. As she speaks to her father, Don, who is dressed in pajama pants but not wearing a shirt, Sally looks past him to the bed, where Megan sleeps naked, facing away from the door, her back and buttocks exposed to Sally’s eyes. Megan is the woman sleeping with Sally’s father, but not Sally’s mother. She is Don’s wife, but in Sally’s eyes not fully family. She is something in between.

At work, Megan is likewise on the margins. She is Don’s wife but also an employee. She’s dabbling in the creative side of the ad business, but doesn’t have any real experience in it. Peggy is mentoring her and overseeing her work, but because she is Don’s wife, Megan holds a certain power over Peggy that Peggy is well aware of, even if Megan knows little about the work that they do. Megan arrives with Don and leaves with him. She is not exactly autonomous there, but she does have the authority of being the wife of one of the partners of the firm.

Back to the apartment. This apartment and what transpires in it is central liminal space in “A Little Kiss.” It’s a modern, up-to-date, 1960s apartment with a showcase living room with built-in shelving, a sunken floor, and a fabulous white rug. It’s their home that they’ve made, and as such it’s the space where they entertain. And the surprise party for Don’s 40^th birthday is the centerpiece of the two-hour episode. But as a home space, during this party it is populated pretty much solely with people who work with and for Don. We might well ask, “Who are their other friends? Do they have other friends?” With this party, it’s hard to see any. So the party operates as a liminal space between work and home and the challenge of the party for the guests is how to negotiate the in-betweeness of SCDP and Don’s home. With her overt mention of the effort she is putting into a current ad campaign, Peggy struggles with this. Her boyfriend asks, “What are you doing?” and she answers, exasperated with herself but also confused as to what she was supposed to say, “I don’t know.” Harry Crane, not surprisingly, doesn’t bring his wife, allowing himself to act the creep in front of his colleagues. Lane Pryce and Ken Cosgrove are much more at ease and more readily blend in.

And while Don is able to negotiate the liminality of his home/work – and it shouldn’t surprise us that he can, since he is the master of being able to do just this sort of thing, Megan isn’t as proficient with it. Her song-and-dance routine to “Zou Bisou Bisou” is so sexualized that few if any of the men know how to handle it. There’s something about it that might be a little inappropriate, though it shouldn’t be. This sort of thing goes on at parties, and is clearly what Megan has in mind when she tells Peggy that everyone will leave the party and “go home and have sex.” The element that makes the routine risqué is that the witnesses to it are all colleagues from work.  This is what leads to the discomfort.

Of course, for Don, the discomfort is that it isn’t actually his birthday. It’s Don Draper’s birthday, but Dick Whitman’s was a few months ago. This leads back to one of the main themes of Season 4 (and the series as a whole) – “who is Don Draper?” Is he Don or Dick? Neither or both? His unhappiness at the party, he says, isn’t because he doesn’t like surprise parties but because he doesn’t like birthdays. And this is a big one – 40. He’s aging. Megan calls him old a number of times, sometimes teasingly, sometimes less so. And as a 40-year-old, he seems to identify with the older generation of Roger Sterling, Lane Price, and the other “grown-ups.” He sees the others as more akin to kids. Their interest in marijuana and new music doesn’t interest him. (Not that he isn’t familiar with them.  Do recall his first-season affair with Midge and attendance at West Village Bohemian nightclubs. But he’s done all that already.) And he is married to one of these kids. Megan is clearly of the new generation. Her version of “Zou Bisou Bisou” is evidence of her comfort with a new overt sexuality that is fully new to Don and the men of the older generation.

The other figure we should take note of at the party is Pete Campbell, dressed more formally than many of the others, with what I would call a country-club plaid sportcoat. Pete wants no part of all the things that the others of his actual generation want. He wants what the older men want – money and power. At work he is in a figurative liminal space – neither a full partner, nor a regular employee. Not treated by the big boys as equal, but actually the one bringing in the most business. Pete wants to be seen as the equal of the other partners, though he isn’t. Curiously, it’s Don who is most sympathetic to Pete. Does he recognize something of his own situation in Pete’s?

All this hints at what may be one of the main themes of the year – Who will best be able to negotiate the liminal, the in-between? And where will allegiances lie as things become better defined? When we put this in its historical context of 1966 and 1967, which when this season seems set, big things seem to be on the horizon.

A Shabby Effort

I first heard Mumford and Sons on the radio, and they were getting airplay because they had a song with the word “fuck” in it. When I heard it, I thought that this was interesting, not because they used the word – God knows I use it often enough – but because cursing had somehow become an emblem of outsider status. The song was “Little Lion Man” and the singer articulates that he had “fucked it up this time,” taking responsibility for a failure that had messed things up but good.

To me, what was interesting was not so much the word “fuck” in a popular song – hiphop has certainly had a stronghold on that for over twenty years – but that “fuck” was presented as an emblem of authenticity by a white band – a British white folk band. I could hear the banjo, I could get the emphasis on stringed instruments. I could tell that there was no Autotuner. It was clear that this was a band that played its own instruments. There was musical talent at work here. I really kind of liked this song, though it was hard to place why. Unfortunately, the more I listened to it, the worse it went. In listening to the song, I was struck by how much emphasis seemed to be on the “Fuck.” It was as if the cursing was somehow supposed to be the mark of street cred. For a British folk band, this seemed a little odd. Why were they trying so hard to be “authentic”? Why the need to try? Why not just “be” authentic without using the word “fuck” to signal your own authenticity?

Then came ”The Cave,” the follow-up song that became even more a barnstormer hit. This song is likewise propelled by the acoustic instrumentation of the band. It’s propulsive, passionate, insistent. The music moves up to a stirring crescendo that is hard to resist. Again, the acoustic instrumentation builds to a crescendo that is impossible to follow. It’s powerful musically. The problem with it? The amazing banality of the lyrics:

It’s empty in the valley of your heart
The sun, it rises slowly as you walk
Away from all the fears
And all the faults you’ve left behind

The harvest left no food for you to eat
You cannibal, you meat-eater, you see
But I have seen the same
I know the shame in your defeat

But I will hold on hope
And I won’t let you choke
On the noose around your neck

And I’ll find strength in pain
And I will change my ways
I’ll know my name as it’s called again

Cause I have other things to fill my time
You take what is yours and I’ll take mine
Now let me at the truth
Which will refresh my broken mind

So tie me to a post and block my ears
I can see widows and orphans through my tears
I know my call despite my faults
And despite my growing fears

But I will hold on hope
And I won’t let you choke
On the noose around your neck

And I’ll find strength in pain
And I will change my ways
I’ll know my name as it’s called again

So come out of your cave walking on your hands
And see the world hanging upside down
You can understand dependence
When you know the maker’s land

So make your siren’s call
And sing all you want
I will not hear what you have to say

Cause I need freedom now
And I need to know how
To live my life as it’s meant to be

And I will hold on hope
And I won’t let you choke
On the noose around your neck

And I’ll find strength in pain
And I will change my ways
I’ll know my name as it’s called again

Sigh. It’s stunning just how many cliches one writer can work into a text, isn’t it? “Refresh my broken mind”? Sheesh. When I first heard this, I was excited that a lyricist for a popular band had read Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” They allude to the “sirens”? Someone’s read the Greeks! But it’s never that simple, is it? What has driven me crazy for a while now about this song is the image (or the notion) of someone choking on a noose around his neck. I’m pretty sure that “choke” isn’t the right word here. “Strangle” would work quite well. “Choking” refers to something inside the throat, but a noose isn’t on the inside of the throat, it’s something that goes around the neck. Why’s it matter to me? Because the value in good writing, in worthwhile writing, lies in how hard you strive to make it work, how hard you work to make it make sense. This band just plain didn’t. It aspires to profundity – my God, the first couple of verses of the song are amazingly overwritten! – but ultimately the lyrics are just plain lazy.

If you take much time at all to look at the lines of the song, most of them don’t make much sense. It’s rather frustrating. Just take a look at the first two or three verses. What’s actually going on there? I’d be curious to know, and I just can’t tell. The video doesn’t help, by the way. The band – clearly more commercially successful now that “Little Lion Man” has become a hit – rides around on scooters while a second band plays their instruments. This second band is comprised of four men who are of a different nationality – which nationality isn’t made clear. They are colored, third-worldish, imagined as downtrodden. (Part of the Arab Spring? Not sure.) They wear the clothes of a marching band and play the instruments full throttle while the boys in the actual band ride around on their scooters and lipsynch the lyrics.

It’s not really a proud moment. The band looks like a bunch of dilettantes into something vaguely international while celebrating their own commercial success. And while the video as a whole has the sense of being politically engaged, it never actually goes into politics and remains only allusive, and therefore toothless.

All in all a rather shabby effort. To be authentic is to be yourself, no matter the cost. That’s not my sense of this band, nor these songs.

Early Summer Reading

The first book worth mentioning, when it comes to my early summer reading, is Keith Richards’s Life, with its oft-amusing portraits of life as a Rolling Stone and Richards’s striking common-man writing voice. In the book there are some truly great stories – especially the excellent set-piece that serves as the opening chapter and reminds me in this way of the way the opening set-piece of Don DeLillo’s Underworld works – but ultimately I would have to admit that the book became a bit of a slog for me to get through in that I found myself very much able to put it down and return to it later. That’s not much of a critique, in that there’s nothing wrong with putting a book down, but Richards at times went over the top in his self-estimation of certain things – his drug intake, his ability to drive brilliantly at night, his excitement about playing with Jamaican musicians – so that he could become hard to take after a while. I’d recommend it to others, especially for the unbelievably conflicted feelings he has toward Mick Jagger (it’s not all negative, as the press about the book seemed to emphasize). Those parts are just plain fascinating – has anyone known such a complicated love/hate relationship? Life is not a must read, but it certainly has its moments. Great for the beach.

The next book worth mentioning is a novel by Joshua Ferris, The Unnamed. You may have come across Ferris before: he’s a young writer and his previous novel – Then We Came to the End – was something of a commercial and critical success, with plenty of positive reviews and placement on lots of Top Ten Novels of the Year lists. Perhaps you recall it: Ferris used the first-person plural to situate his story of workplace ennui, set in an ad agency in Chicago as the Internet boom came to an end. I remember reading Then We Came to the End and finding it funny at first in its satire of American boom ideology, but as I kept reading I found it less funny than clever, and by the end I was kind of tired of its cleverness and hoped it would start to add up to something more. I didn’t really think it ever did, though I also thought that it was pretty good for a first novel – to be fair to Ferris.

I began The Unnamed this winter when my kids were taking ski lessons. I became enamored of it because I found the plot conceit rather engaging. Tim is a highly successful attorney, married with a daughter, who is undergoing an affliction that is unknown to mankind: a compulsion to set out walking, walking for hours and hours until he collapses from exhaustion. This compulsion has returned – which means that he has had it before, which he did, and then it passed. But it has returned now with a vengeance. At any moment – at home, at work, anywhere – Tim’s body starts to walk. No doctor knows what is going on; his case is even profiled in The New England Journal of Medicine. Irregardless of the impact on her own work and well-being, his wife Jane is loyal to Tim, driving to find him at night, collecting him from wherever he has collapsed. His daughter Becka is rather estranged from him, but not so much because of the compulsion but because Tim is so driven to succeed at work that he tends to ignore his daughter and is unable to make any emotional connection to her.

As my kids skied, I would read snippets of the novel and savor Ferris’s writing and Tim’s problems. However, because of the time constraints of the Spring semester, I decided to call a halt to my reading of the book and to wait until the summer to return to it. When I did, I became fully engrossed rather quickly and ate it up like a fresh key lime pie. The compulsion – it’s hard to call it an illness because it’s never made clear exactly what it is (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, etc.) – ruins Tim’s career and devastates his family and the novel, on one level, dramatizes that destruction and the broad pain it causes all of the individuals in the family. On another level, the novel offers a portrait of the love affair between Tim and Jane – her loyalty to him that eventually leads to her own destruction and his loyalty to her, which is of a much more complicated sort. That element of the novel is rather brutal in its portrayal. Add to this the portrayal of Becka and the damage that Tim’s dedication to work, and then the recurrence of the compulsion, have wrought on her. The novel, in short, is hard work, at least in terms of its emotional pull on the reader.

Ferris has some strong gifts as a writer and he has come up with something strikingly original in his story. There are echoes here of the type of story that focuses on cancer and what it does to individuals and families, and much of the emotional vibe of the book is one of grieving, of something lost. There were times when I turned to my wife and said, “This part must be a dream sequence because there’s no way it could have gotten this bad, there’s just no way.” But there was. It’s terribly sad. But the novel isn’t perfect, nor fully satisfying. For all the things that Ferris can do, he hasn’t yet mastered the skill of making us feel fully invested in his characters. The story is compelling more than the characters themselves are. I wanted Jane and Becka both to be more fully developed characters. But still, overall, I’d recommend the novel, in part – I suppose – because I’d love to have someone to talk about it with!

The other book I’ve been reading, slowly, lovingly, joyously, is David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. I love Wallace’s nonfiction; I’ve read some of his fiction and like it fine, but I am one of the people who believe that his true gift – his best genre – was the essay. A few years ago I read Consider the Lobster and was stunned by it. The intellectual reach, the deeply held belief in the power and beauty of language, the fellowship he felt toward other people – these were so clearly on the page, in my mind. The essays were beautifully written and they were on topics that at first blush seemed to be rather banal: an awards show for porn stars, a lobsterfest in Maine, a new edition of a dictionary. Irregardless of the topic, though, Wallace invested himself intellectually and aesthetically in the task at hand. He took it seriously and compelled us to do so as well. Those banal occasions for writing became transmuted into something beautiful, something touching, and something important. They became occasions for ideas.

That, in fact, is what I love in his essays. They so clearly serve as testaments to a mind at work, at play, engaged in the act of thinking. The word “act” is crucial, I think, when describing Wallace’s nonfiction. His writing style – discursive, with plenty of footnotes that allow us to meander into side issues for a bit and then to return to the main issue at hand, and playful, with a mixture of the vernacular and the technical that is comfortably familiar while at the same time keeping us on our toes as thinkers – actually allows us to see him thinking. It’s as if he’s working out his ideas in the moment, in the text itself as we read it. But in his best pieces, of course, he’s worked it out in advance and is instead allowing (or possibly forcing) us to join him in the act of thinking. So the reading becomes the similarly active as an intellectual process. Wallace crafts his essays – they read as fully accomplished wholes – but he structures them in such a way as to let us see his mind at play and therefore also to let us play with what he is presenting to us. It’s heady stuff, in the best way possible.

His essays are things to savor. His piece on David Lynch is such good fun that it’s almost impossible to put down. His essay on playing tennis as a teen and the combination of physical and intellectual activity in the playing is a wonderful testament to what it can mean to “get lost” in the moment of play (again, physically and intellectually). The last piece I read, just the other day, on professional tennis was especially striking. Wallace focused his attention on a rather unknown player, Michael Joyce. In doing so, Wallace was able to note how much better Joyce was than anyone Wallace had ever played or seen in person. Joyce became the embodiment of how much better professional athletes are in their sport than the rest of us. At the same time, Joyce was nowhere near the best in his sport, which demonstrated just how amazing the best players actually are. Indeed, Wallace speaks so glowingly of Joyce that I felt compelled to look him up.

It turns out Joyce’s ranking peaked soon after Wallace’s essay was originally published in Esquire. He never won any tournament of real significance and never was actually that successful as a professional athlete, at least not how success tends to be defined in our present culture. And yet. And yet Joyce won over $750,000 playing tennis. And in fact he still occasionally plays, and is certainly involved in professional tennis – as a hitting partner and occasional coach. He has made a living out of something he loves to do, something that he excels at, something that he is better than almost anyone else at doing. No one really knew who Joyce was when this essay came out, and no one really knows him now. But Wallace, in this essay, was able to make clear that Joyce was actually special and worthy of our attention and our thought. And the essay itself is as well, as again Wallace uses Joyce to think not only about Joyce and what he represents but also about tennis itself, about the place of sports in our culture, about our values. It’s funny, it’s smart, it’s one of the best pieces I’ve read in a while.

I haven’t finished the collection yet, I think because I don’t want to because then what will I read? I still have the piece on cruises and the piece on the state fair and I don’t want it to end. Great books can be that way. You finish and you feel flushed and aflame and want more, but it’s gone and there isn’t more.It’s true that I can always read This is Water again, Wallace’s great graduation speech at Kenyon in 2005. And if you haven’t read it yet, you’ve made a mistake, even if unknowingly. Do so, do it now. Here’s a link to it so that you can read it online: because it’s now copyrighted, this site had to take the piece down, but it’s cached and so available, and this reads not so much like a perfectly finished text but more like a transcript, which is part of its charm in this form. This is Water, like Wallace’s essays in his collections, is a powerful evocation of Wallace’s compassion, of his desire and his ability to think beyond himself. It’s also a powerful evocation of Wallace’s basic goodness. He must have been an interesting man to know. And as I write this, I realize that one of the reasons I don’t want to finish reading his essays is because I know there will be no more new ones. He’s dead and his writing is gone. Yes, we have The Pale King, and I recently received it from my wife as a present and I hope to read it later this summer. But there won’t be any new pieces and I suppose that’s something I want to put off dealing with.

Keith Richards lived. Wallace didn’t. It’s not ironic, but it’s a brutal reality. I like the Rolling Stones, but Wallace sets my mind aflame and makes me want to be better than I am. I guess I don’t want to stop wanting that.

Defining Horrible Songs

It’s time to define the “Songs that are Horrible” series a little better.

Back in the day one of my brothers put together a cd called “Songs You Love to Hate.” He wasn’t the first to do this, nor certainly the last. But it contained some gems – like “Brandy” and “Seasons in the Sun” and “The Pina Colada Song.” All classically bad, bad in a way that is virtually unique. At the same time, there is something catchy about these songs, something that gets into your head and you can’t get out. I’m ready to sing “Brandy” right now – “Brandy, you’re a fine girl (what a fine girl)/What a good wife you would be/But my life, my love and my lady/Is the sea.” (By the way, I’ve sung this song in karoake and it’s harder to sing than you’d think. I don’t recommend it.)

The thing about these songs, though, is that they don’t really aspire to be anything more than what they are. They’re pop songs, with nothing deep, nothing particularly interesting. They don’t speak to a larger experience, not really. They’re meant to be catchy, to be popular, to sell. And they were. But they’re not horrible, because they don’t fail at what they’re trying to be. They aim low and clear that wall.

Songs that are horrible aren’t merely pop songs, they’re songs that seem to have a higher ambition, to say something meaningful to listeners, even though they don’t. They’re catchy, sure, but writingwise they’re strikingly inept. They fold in on themselves in that they want to be profound but end up as baffling, dopey, just plain confusing. This, then, is how I’m defining horrible for this series. These are songs that fail (often spectacularly) to be what the band wants them to be. They’re popular but embarassing.

Recently, in asking for some suggestions, I received a few nominations for songs that are pretty bad, but not necessarily horrible in the way that I’m thinking about in this series. For instance, one friend nominated “Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats, a truly bad song from 1982 that has gotten stuck at least once in the head of most everyone who has ever heard it.  The lead singer of the band has claimed that the song is a protest against bouncers who were stopping people from pogo dancing to New Wave music and therefore a song proclaiming freedom of expression. Listening to it and thinking about the words, I have to tell you that this is something of a stretch. I guess it could be about freedom of expression, if I worked hard at the interpretation, but that’s giving the song a LOT of slack. The video is ridiculous, of course. The setting in medieval England makes no sense whatsoever, though it does seem to give license to the desire to include a midget in the cast, but at the same time the setting and its randomness is kind of the best thing about it. It’s not horrible, it’s kind of wonderfully bad.

Then there’s “Karma Chameleon,” by Culture Club. Another friend nominated this one and, again, understandably so. It’s bad. “Loving would be if your colors were like my dreams/Red, gold and green. Red, gold and green.” Umm, huh? Why would loving be “easy” if this was the case? Does Boy George have no blue, or brown, or orange, in his dreams? I sense a metaphor, but one that’s hard to pick out. Again, it’s a song that can get into your head, it’s got a harmonica part that gives it a Merseybeat feel, and it proved a winner commercially, going to #1 for three weeks. But that’s all it is – a very good pop song. Boy George has suggested that it’s a song about being “true” and  acting “like you feel,” but as with “Safety Dance,” this entails a bit of a stretch really. And again we have a fantabulously crazy video, with another setting that has nothing at all to do with the song! This time we’re in Mississippi in 1870, which allows the band members – who are both black and white – to interact together with a sense of brotherhood and community. Because we’re in Reconstruction? That’s not anachronistic AT ALL! I suspect that the setting was determined so that they could get everyone to dress up in costume and Boy George’s “costume” would not stand out so much. The funniest part of this? Other than some elaborate necklace around his neck, Boy George actually isn’t in period costume! He’s wearing a sweater vest over a button-down shirt. That’s just so unbelievably greatly bad that you kind of have to love it. So again, no this song isn’t horrible, because it doesn’t aspire to be actually good.

As I go forward, I will continue to look for songs that don’t work, songs that are meant to be “serious statements” but are little more than gobbledygook, songs that take themselves way too seriously. Those are the songs that are truly horrible. Pop songs can drive you crazy, but all they really want to do is to be popular. “99 Red Balloons“? Bad. Toto’s “Africa“? Horrible. Really horrible. At least Nena has a sense of humor. Toto is unbelievably insufferable. That and kind of casually racist. I’m all for bad pop songs. Ones that aim higher? That almost always leads to trouble.