On Meeting Writers We Admire

"This passion for wanting to meet the latest poet, wanting to shake hands with the latest novelist, get hold of the latest painter, devour...what is it? What is it they want from a man they didn't get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he's done his work? What's an artist, but the dregs of his work? The human shambles that follows it around. What's left of a man when the work's done but a shambles of apology?" - from William Gaddis's novel The Recognitions (1)

This take interests me, mainly the part about the artist as a "shamble" after the work's been done. It reminds me of ideas about memes using us to spread themselves around. Genes have told me they do the same. (But did I tell Them I was buying their line?) In Michael Pollan's terrific book, The Botany of Desire, tulips, apples, potatoes, and cannabis have all manipulated us to get what They want. Like the devil whose greatest trick was convincing us He doesn't exist, these things - including the works of Art in this Gaddis case - use us, making us think we're the ones in charge. It's a deeply amusing turn for me: the Artist as Host for the Art itself, leaving us as "dregs" and in "a shambles."

And still, I want to shake the hand of Cannabis.

I saw Douglas Rushkoff give a talk in LA on his tour for Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, and bought a copy and lined up to have him sign it afterward. When I got up to him I spewed that I'd just talked to Robert Anton Wilson, who was mildly disappointed that Rushkoff seemed to have problems with his friend RAW's disbelief in anything, as captured in an interview Rushkoff did for the Maybe Logic documentary. I told Rushkoff - a long line behind me - that RAW said one can feel strongly about something but still be agnostic, and that he wished Doug would read his book The New Inquisition. I could tell Rushkoff thought I was a weirdo, talking too fast and too intensely about something sort of personal along a quasi-arcane minor tiff between me and him and RAW, and this had nothing to do with his energetic talk about Judaism, and he didn't really respond to what I said, but smiled and signed his name, writing on the title page, "To Michael: Enter Chapel Perilous..." just above the subtitle "The Truth About Judaism." Was this his little joke? I think so. Maybe. By his body language I think he was glad to be rid of me. To this day, it's the only Rushkoff book I own that I still haven't read. I've thumbed through it, yea, but read? Well then, why did I buy the new hardcover for $22 (or whatever it was)? I guess I just wanted to be in Rushkoff's presence, give him my insider info about what RAW said to me about him. I felt foolish. Meeting admired writers can do this to us.

                                  George Saunders, photo by Tim Knox

This topic turns out to be more popular (as I infer from googling) than I'd thought. An idea I see over and over in articles about this: we readers have spent a lot of time in our solitary inwardness "with" the writer and created a detailed image of what the writer "is really like," but this is usually revealed as an illusion. I like what George Saunders told Margo Rabb:

A work of art is something produced by a person, but is not that person - it is of her, but is not her. It's a reach, really - the artist is trying to inhabit, temporarily, a more compact, distilled, efficient, wittier, more true-seeing, precise version of herself - one that can't replicate in so-called "real" life, no matter how hard she tries. That's why she writes: to try and briefly be more than she truly is. (2)

I've been on the other end, in a way: as a rock guitarist. When I'm playing it's sort of another version of "me" that I've spent a lot of time cultivating through long hours of practice. Admirers seem to approach that other "me" when I'm back to my "ordinary reality" and what they say often seems to apply to someone else: someone better than I feel I "really" am. But they have sweet intentions, so I try to sort of smile and play along, "Thanks, man. That makes me feel really good. Rawk on!" All the while I know Steve Vai and a thousand other guys can play circles around me...

Concomitant with this, I've been trying to get used to the idea that our default mode is as essentialists, much as it pains Korzybski. Cognitive psychologist Bruce Hood's experiments show that we want and need "Distributive existence over time and with others." (3) By being in the presence of an admired figure we hope, on some odd level, to share in the artist's essence. What a thrill to put on a sweater once owned by George Clooney! Or to hold Einstein's writing pen. Or to decline when asked if we want to try on a hat once worn by Hitler. Perhaps this best explains getting the book signed and a brief exchange of pleasantries with some admired writer: we want to distribute ourselves into the admired writer's psychological domain, at least for a few seconds. (Others want to increase the value of the book for eBay sales, I know...)

In our celebrity kulch, this desire to make contact with quasi-mythic figures seems loudly and abundantly clear; I'm perhaps no different than any other fan who goes nuts over spotting a Kardashian in Beverly Hills. But there aren't many celebrities I'd bother if I were in the room with them. I just don't care all that much about the people who entertain me on screens. It's some of the musical and authorial Beings that have the potential to get me going and make an ass of myself. I was working in a library in ritzy Palos Verdes Estates and there was a summer live music concert in the park outside: families bring picnic baskets and blankets, that sort of thing. And I turn around and Joe Montana is at the counter, asking, "Is there a back way out of here?" He had been trying to enjoy the concert, but people were pestering him for autographs and photos. I never said, "Wow! You're the greatest quarterback ever!" I thought it. Then I dutifully walked him through the library and out the back door into a quiet dark evening and he said thanks. It was weird.

                               Douglas Rushkoff, photographer unknown

It's cheery to read about a fan having a good experience meeting their favorite writer, as for example Jean-Luc Bouchard when meeting Kazuo Ishiguro. (4) The takeaway for me, here: say you loved the one book that got panned the most, or neglected. I told Robert Anton Wilson I loved Right Where You Are Sitting Now (which I do, but it's not my favorite), and he seemed delighted, saying similar things to me about that that Ishiguro said to Bouchard. RAW once quoted Confucius in another interview about bad reviews: it's as if the critic is saying something nasty about one's children, and Confucius said that we naturally love what grows up in our own homes.

I went to a talk and book signing by Erik Davis, in Berkeley, after his book Visionary State came out. I thought he was my age, so I said something to the effect about him being more accomplished and I was slacking. With what I took to be a slight annoyance, he told me he was seven years younger than I thought, then resumed his banter with photographer Michael Rauner. Not exactly the stellar level of repartee I was hoping for. Later I realized I'd had my own version of that bit where comedian Chris Farley gets to interview Paul McCartney and all he can think to say is, "Remember...when you were in the Beatles?" (Okay, I wasn't that bad.)

Now that I've thought about it, the next time I meet a favorite author I'm going to psych myself up by assuming they'll be unpleasant no matter what I say, and if/when they are not a drag, it's a win-win. Or probably: just a win for me. He's still that great Erik Davis when I read his books, the one I invented without knowing it, and damn that "real-world" exchange I had with him. It...was a mere anomaly. Dude's the coolest! Yes...

Speaking of Robert Anton Wilson, I spent the better part of an afternoon with him at his condo in Capitola/Live Oak/Santa Cruz and he was far beyond sweet and brilliant and kind and hilarious and understanding; I got lucky. My favorite living author (along with Pynchon, but good luck with him!) talked to me like a longtime friend. It was beyond my wildest imagination.

David Foster Wallace had an interesting take on all this. I don't subscribe to his ideas here, but I think they're very interesting:

DFW was disappointed to hear how his favorite writers sound: their actual voices interfere with his reading of them. I wonder how this relates to seeing a picture of the author on the book jacket? Anyway, in a 2005 interview with Didier Jacob: 

Q: Which writer, living or dead, interests you most, and which one would you most like to talk to? Pynchon? Hemingway? Salinger? (Or Shakespeare, or somebody else...)

DFW: I am not very curious about the lives or personalities of other writers. The more I like someone's work, the less I want personal acquaintance to pollute my experience of reading her. I have briefly met some of the US writers I admire - Cormac McCarthy, for example, and Don DeLillo, and Annie Dillard - and they all seemed like fine, pleasant people. But I found that I did not want to "chat" with them. In fact, I did not even like hearing them speak. In their books, each of these writers has to me a very distinctive "voice," a kind of sound on the page, and it has nothing to do with their actual larynx or nasality or timbre. I do not want to be hearing their "real" voice in my head when I'm reading. I'm not sure whether this makes sense, but it's the truth. There are, on the other hand, some writers I exchange letters with, and this I enjoy very much. Because the consciousness in the letters feels to me like much more like the consciousness I admire in the work." (6)

When I read Woody Allen's comic essays (which I love and greatly admire), I can't help but hear him in my head, but I think it adds to my experience. And maybe because he's always trying to get laffs. If I read something by him that was sad, it would be jarring. When I listen to Pound and Joyce read their work, it's like some alien broadcast: I didn't think they would sound so static-y. No, but seriously: their voices sound so overly "for" that newfangled microphone thing, knowing it's going out to the masses...I still don't hear their voices when I read them. DFW's ideas seem almost Asperger-ish to me. Take it further into, say, Roland Barthes's idea of ecriture blanche, or "white writing," in which any text requires nothing from the Reader: all terms are transparent and obvious. (Okay, now DFW's ideas seem far more sane than that.) Still...I mean, reading Burroughs and Philip K. Dick is weird and thrilling, but knowing about their lives (and especially hearing Burroughs's voice!) makes their texts even better. To me, that is...

Recently I read an amusing article by a critic who was assigned to review a book by an academic: Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender, by David J. Getsy. Critic Jarrett Earnest is so appalled by the academicese and preciousness of the writing he wants to write a hatchet job review; he can't stand this asshole academic. But before he does his hatchet job, he feels compelled to find Getsy and see what sort of person this writer is face-to-face. He tracks down Getsy. He finds he likes Getsy and in talking to him he understands where he's coming from. Earnest ends up writing a good review of Getsy's book. I'm sure this sort of thing has happened before, but this is the first instance I can think of. (5)

                                   
Furthermore on Robert Anton Wilson, when I talked with him he told me he was in a German film called 23, in which he plays himself, because the famous German hacker Karl Koch admired Illuminatus! so much, and as a hacker he was named "Hagbard." RAW said he'd love to see the film, but it wasn't playing in Unistat. I told him I'd seen it a couple months earlier in Hollywood. He seemed a tad miffed. I don't know if he ever got a chance to see it. In the film, Koch/Hagbard attends a lecture by RAW near Hannover and then gets his autograph before RAW is whisked away in a car. Koch said he read the 805 page Illuminatus! "Eighty times." Who knows who really burned Karl Koch to death with gasoline in an isolated wooded spot? The KGB and CIA had their reasons. It was ruled a suicide, but not many of Koch's friends buy it. I will link to a YouTube copy of the film 23 below and hope the reader who clicks on it doesn't get a busted link. (7)


1.) hat tip to Roman Tviskin for this quote, found on his dormant blog, Zuihitsu Bits
2.) Fallen Idols, Margo Rabb, NYT, July 2013
3.) see about 3/4 down in my blog about hoarding HERE
4.) What It's Like To Meet Your Favorite Author, Bouchard, Buzzfeed Books, March, 2015
5.) Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender, reviewed by Jarrett Earnest, Brooklyn Rail, Feb, 2016
6.) found in Conversations With David Foster Wallace, p.166
7.) YouTube copy of 23, accessed 31 March, 2016. RAW is seen around 13:42 to 14:15. I saw a print with English subtitles at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood soon after it came out. See the actor August Diehl playing hacker Karl Koch/Hagbard pick up a girl at a party and bring her back to his room and tell her his own computer is called "FUCKUP" (from the novel) and how important Illuminatus! is, starting around 9:42

                                           graphic art by Bob Campbell

Hoarders: Glad It Ain't Me! (or...is it?)

Ever see the TV show Hoarders? I've seen a couple episodes, which were enough for me. I'm told there is at least one copycat show on cable TV on roughly the same subject. What made me wonder: is this a serotonin imbalance? Is it related to OCD? What? Some researchers at the National Institute for Mental Health are making some inroads using fMRI machines and things like junk mail, but I'll get to that later.

I previously wrote about my baseball card collecting as a youth, and tried to link it to Walter Benjamin's idea about the essence of the Original, which, in my research on Benjamin, I linked to a hashish-inspired idea that has influenced the postmodernists.

Lately - in addition to Hoarders - I've gotten into conversations with friends over their collections, their prized possessions that seemingly would have no value to anyone but themselves, and experiences being in others' dwellings that were...how do I put this delicately? Cluttered badly.

                            I've never been in a house that was this hoarded-up. Click on
                            the pic for a more in-your-face view. You thought You had 
                            problems? 

Robert Sapolsky and Rice Krispie Treats
And I've been thinking of one of my intellectual gurus, Robert Sapolsky, who emphasizes the metaphor of the Continuum when we think of diseases, and it's really easy to see it when we think of things like, say, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Sapolsky would hold a little end-of-the-semester party for students at Stanford, and make sure Rice Krispie Treats would be part of the celebration. The picture I linked to there, notice, has all the little treats cut from the pan in idealized rectangles or squares. At some point, during every party, Sapolsky would sneak back into the room where the cookies and cakes were, and notice that people who had used a knife to cut their own treats would always cut at nice 90 degree angles. Sapolsky would quickly and surreptitiously make some odd, uneven, symmetry-ruining cut in the Treats, eat his confection, then rejoin the party. After a short period when others had gone into the food room for Treats and other goodies, he'd go back in, and sure enough: someone had "fixed" the irregular angle he'd cut and recouped the 90 degree angle. His point? We all have a bit of this OCD-ishness in us, even the best and brightest Neuroscience students at Stanford.

When you drop mail in a public post office box on a street corner, do you ever check again to make sure your mail actually fell into the box and didn't get "stuck" inside the lid? If you do, don't feel bad: more people than you'd think also do this.

If you want to read a really mindblowing essay on how this might relate evolutionarily to the rise of religious ritual and dogma, read "Circling The Blankets For God," from Sapolsky's book The Trouble With Testosterone. Or: HERE 'tis from Scribd.

Ahh...but what does this have to do with hoarding? I'm not sure. Let's delve a bit deeper.

My Own Magical Thinking
When I met my future wife's parents I quickly took a strong liking to her father, who had been born in North Carolina in 1919, with four brothers, and they did subsistence farming near Chapel Hill. During the Great Depression they had nothing except what they grew for themselves. When what we call "World War Two" came around, he enlisted, but his eyes had been crossed since he was born, so the Army fixed his eyesight and he learned radio repair instead of having to fight Germans or Japanese. He caught tuberculosis during the war, and was in a TB ward for five years, until they were sure they had one of a new class of miracle drugs called "antibiotics" that could fix him up without harm. While in the ward he taught himself advanced mathematics, relativity, and the basics of quantum mechanics from books brought around in a bookmobile. After the war he owned the first TV repair shop in Los Angeles - he had no formal college! - and then spent the rest of his life working in aviation and on NASA-related projects as an engineer. This guy was amazing. He was wry, very funny, relentlessly logical, and had a thick North Carolina accent until death. What's my point?

One day my wife, after visiting him, brought me a bunch of his old cardigan sweaters and asked me if I wanted any of them. I said Hell Yes! I had never been a cardigan-wearer, but just wearing her Old Man's old sweaters would be cool. They had something to do with Him.

I wore those sweaters until they were totally unwearable: holes in the elbows, the seams ripped at the shoulder, etc. I guess part of it was I thought my cardigan-wearing fit my "weirdo intellectual" image of myself, but maybe just as much: I thought possibly a bit of my beloved father-in-law's Cool Guy essence was seeping into me, and it's making me a smarter and funnier dude. I dunno. Maybe? I "know" this is crass mysticism on the Main Level. But I didn't throw those cardigans away; I kept them in my closet. After he died, every time I saw those things piled in my closet I thought of him. A few of 'em are still around.

What is this all about? Respect? Yes, but respect doesn't totally explain it.

Dr. Bruce Hood and the Essence Behind Sacred Objects
Cognitive psychologist Bruce Hood sheds some light on all this, I think. In his book Supersense: Why We Believe In The Unbelievable, he relates his delight in a jam-packed memorabilia shop, and how he liked to talk to the owner about why people felt sentimental over Olde Things. Things that were, seemingly, ephemeral. Like trinkets and old postcards. The owner told Hood he thought people collected things in order to remind themselves of when they were younger and happier. Here's Hood:

"Why do people do it? Collecting seems such an odd behavior in a world of instant upgrades, duplication, and modern innovation. Why look backward? When I entered the collector's domain, I discovered a mirror world populated by legions of people who traipse around car trunk sales and flea markets every weekend seeking authenticity. Come rain or shine, these people were out in droves, looking for the original." (198)

                                          A curio shop, somewhere in the East.

The original. We're back to Walter Benjamin again, in his ingenious "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Or are we? Is there another, somewhat less romantic way to model the search for the value of the Original? Hood cites superstar neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen (cousin of "Borat" Sacha Baron-Cohen, btw), who has shown that men seem more naturally inclined than women to order and systems, and Hood thinks "completing the set" seems more a male thing than female.

Hood has some neuroscientifically fine riffs about art and forgeries. There have been forgeries of famous paintings that sold for a lot of money, because "experts" vouched for the painting's authenticity. When it is found that the paintings are forgeries, the shit hits the fan, people are outraged, and the value of the now-realized-fake sinks into the abyss. But if everyone was fooled until some sleuth figured out there was something amiss with the provenance, why does it matter to people if it was real or a fake?

All of us think we know the answer, and perhaps many of us do know, but what Hood says about Why we care so much seems very interesting to me.

"I think that an art forgery is unacceptable because it does not generate the psychological essentialist view that something of the artist is literally in the work," says Hood on page 203, op. cit.

Psychological essentialism? Well, I get it, if only because of my father-in-law's cardigans. But let's dig a  tad deeper with Hood before I get to the whole hoarding thing...

Plutarch told the story of the preservation of legendary Athenian king Theseus's ship. As years passed, some of the wood rotted and was replaced by new planks. After awhile it became unclear if the ship was still Theseus's. Was it "really" the "same" ship? What if the old rotted planks had been kept and reassembled into some battered old ship...would that be the "real" one?

(No matter how old you are right now, sitting there reading this, most of the cells in your body that make "you" are only ten years old at the oldest. That "you" from 12 years ago? All of the cells have been replaced!)

Hood and colleagues built an impressive-looking Big Machine with lights and dials on it: a Copy Box Machine. Here's what it could do: you asked kids to put their beloved blankie or teddy bear into it, and  one exactly the same but "different" would come out the other side. Every kid wanted the Original back.
(see Supersense, pp.203-213)

"So I would argue that the behavior of the toddler toward his grubby blanket and the obsession of a fanatical collector to own original memorabilia reflect the same human tendency to see objects as possessing invisible properties that originate from significant individuals. By owning objects and touching them, we can connect with others, and that gives us the sense of distributed existence over time and with others. The net effect is that we become increasingly linked together by a sense of deeper hidden structures." (221)

"Distributed existence over time and with others." Is that too much for our egos to ask in an indifferent universe? Apparently not! (More than one blogger has cited their blog as Internet immortality, so I guess you can count me in as one desirous of my existence distributed over time, with others.)

Mutt: You want your existence distributed to others over time?
Jute: Aye! Hey why not?

Hoarding
Then what's with all the hoarding? Dr. David Tolin, working under the auspices of the National Institute of Mental Health, had a control group, a hoarding group, and people with OCD collect their junk mail for a long time, and bring it in to the lab, where they were asked to climb into an fMRI machine. When a picture of their mail came up, the areas of the brain in the hoarders that have to do with weighing the value of things, emotional decisions and assessment of risk, unpleasant feelings, and making a decision about personal possessions showed an unusual lighting pattern: hoarders's brains were not the same as the OCD people's, and the control group was, of course, more "normal." If they saw a picture of someone else's junk mail, the hoarders had an easier time thinking about what they would do with it. Two basic reports on Tolin and his team's findings are HERE and HERE. A CNN video on these findings is HERE.

Bruce Hood, like Sapolsky, emphasizes the Continuum when analyzing his data. Some of us seem to have much less of a magical/religious-like impulse with regard to special objects. Some people may watch Hoarders for lurid reasons, for many reasons, but I think it's well-established that hoarders just have a bit more trouble making sense of what objects are truly valuable than the rest of us do. And as for objects that we're attached to, for sentimental reasons, this seems roaringly on a continuum, and at odds with publicly-stated norms. For example, as Hood writes, "Most people are too embarrassed to admit they still have their sentimental childhood objects. However, a recent survey of two thousand solitary travelers by a U.K. hotel chain revealed that one in five men slept with a teddy bear - more than the female travelers." (210)

Whew! Now I don't feel so weird about hoarding my 2000 some-odd books, many of which I probably won't read again. (But what a pain in the ass when you need to move!)