I’ve been writing something about Nathanael West, and I had occasion to go back and look at a conference paper I presented on The Day of the Locust from about six years ago. It’s not very good! But I did find some paragraphs I kind of like.

“It was another joke. Calvin and Hink slapped their thighs and laughed, but Tod could see that they were waiting for something else. Earle, suddenly, without even shifting his weight, shot his foot out and kicked Calvin solidly in the rump. This was the real point of the joke. They were delighted by Earle’s fury. Tod also laughed. The way Earle had gone from apathy to action without the usual transition was funny. The seriousness of his violence was even funnier” (111).

Tod, and therefore the reader, has no access to the motivations behind Calvin and Hink’s provocation of Earle. But “the real point of the joke” is not the joke itself – it’s the violence the joke induces. The violence and the transition-less passage from joke to violence is the source of the laughter. Moreover, because “the seriousness of the violence” paradoxically amplifies its humor, the line between humor and violence is, for all intents and purposes, erased. Violence is only funny when it is real violence, as opposed to slapstick or comedic violence. For Calvin and Hink, the humor is funny and meant to be funny. But as readers, we’re left with a comedic moment that isn’t meant to be funny. The staging of comedy is pretty grim in itself.

This performative contradiction is the engine of West’s book, both in its status as a black comedy and as a critique of what West sees as a particularly American mode of violence. In an oft-quoted letter to Malcolm Cowley, West notes that humor is bound inextricably to every facet of his writing. “I’m a comic writer,” writes West, “and it seems impossible for me to handle any of the ‘big things’ without seeming to laugh or at least smile … I tried to describe a meeting of the Anti-Nazi League, but it didn’t fit and I had to substitute a whorehouse and a dirty film. The terrible sincere struggle of the league came out comic when I touched it and even libelous” (Veitch ii). In the Shoop episode, then, the collapse of the violent and the comic represents a serious issue for West’s practice as a writer. For him, this issue is cultural.

I guess I’ve been thinking about The Day of the Locust and laughter not just because I’m writing about it again, but because, in the time between when I originally wrote the conference paper (early 2009) and now, comedy’s become, I don’t know, more “important feeling.” West’s sense of the comic and the violent are nearly indistinguishable from each other — he thought that Americans required ever-more extreme forms of entertainment in order to satisfy the desires that mass culture imbued in us. And eventually, the only thing that satisfies the need is not just comic representations of violence, but actual violence.

You could make the argument that he was right, and that the real and figurative violence on reality shows just fulfills his fictional vision. But we’re also in the middle, I think, of a kind of comic elevation. I’m hardly the first person to say this. Certain stand-up comics (Louis C.K., Hannibal Buress, Maria Bamford, Marc Maron I guess) are looked at more as artists than entertainers, things like “Too Many Cooks” exist and rack up millions of YouTube views, people seem more generally willing to extend aesthetic leeway to comedians, comedies, comics, etc. So if West was right about the way that, under the conditions of mass culture, violence and comedy have become indistinguishable from each other, he didn’t predict (couldn’t have been expected to predict) the way that the comic has, in some ways, elevated itself above the expectations people have of mass culture.

My piece about D.T. Max’s DFW bio Every Love Story is a Ghost Story is up over at Capital New York. I had a chance to interview Max before his first New York reading, and there was a lot of stuff I couldn’t fit into the Capital piece. Below are some lightly edited chunks of the interview. Enjoy.

—

Mark Sussman: One of the things to me that was one of the great pleasures of reading it, were your readings of Wallace — I found them really admirable. There was a sentence in which you’re describing his transition to the style of his later fiction: “a passionate need for encounter telegraphed by sentences that seem ostentatiously to prohibit it, as if only by passing through all the stages of bureaucratic deformation can we touch each other as human beings.” It’s interesting to me, in that it sets out the problem of the biographer as much as that of being human.

D.T. Max: I hadn’t thought about that. What’s the problem that you see for the biographer?

MS: I’m wondering if you had to go through these stages of bureaucratic deformation.

DM: In my own writing?

MS: Yeah, or in putting yourself through the paces of his thought.

DM: The way I understand what I wrote is more … it’s interesting, I hadn’t really thought about that sentence in a long time. There’s almost a question in that statement. Why would he think that was the way to get at true encounters? Why would he feel that you need to clear out the morass of insincere speech? I don’t know if that would have applied. It’s a first biography. What’s really, really intriguing and exciting and difficult is simply to create a portrait where no portrait has existed before. You do a second biography and your challenges are I think almost entirely different. You have to make room between yourself and the first biography. Interpretation becomes terribly, terribly important. Or finding a new cache of letters. But I had like 700 pages of letters that people gave me, and I had a couple hundred interactions with friends. For me it was which David do you choose? It’s which David do you trust? Which David do you think is real? Because every David was presented to me, from this monastic Thomas Merton figure to the wastrel, the manipulator. He thought of all of this. It’s all in there, all in his stories, all in his self-image. One of the things you realize as a biographer of David is you can never out-David David. As many times as I indicate in the biography that there’s a quality of recursion in David’s mind, to really live that quality, it would be impossible to really write a biography that replicated just how uncomfortable and active David’s mind was. In some ways my goal in this book was to write a memoir written not by the person who experienced the events. That’s one reason why the book is shorn of the rigamarole and regalia of biography. I don’t know if you noticed that. There’s no introduction, there’s no afterword. The moment of David’s death is the end of the biography. Saul Bellow said death is where the picture stops. Where the picture stopped for David, the book stops. The thing I was trying to do there … well, a bunch of things. But one thing is, without imitating him … he died so recently that it would be a false step to make it as if he had lived in the 1920s. He was alive in 2008, almost exactly 4 years ago. So in some ways I was trying to get you close. I was a little bit imitating the technique in TV where one show ends and they throw you right to the next show without advertisement or pause. You can’t physically read it in a sitting but it’s written like a book that’s meant to be read in a sitting. It’s different from the quasi-reference biography. It has an index but I do not intend it particularly as a reference work. It’s a story. The whole emphasis is on story.

MS: There is almost this pellucid quality to it that, as I was reading, and thinking back on my own experience of reading Infinite Jest and David’s other work, I was thinking wow, I could not imagine a less Infinite Jesty approach to this writer’s life.

DM: You’re a Wallace reader? Which works?

MS: When I was in high school I read A Supposedly Fun ThingI’ll Never Do Again and also The Girl with Curious Hair and I had read around in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. And then at a party in college, a friend and I sort of drunkenly challenged each other to an Infinite Jest reading contest. Which I won.

DM: Where’d you go to college?

MS: I went to the University of Arizona, actually.

DM: Oh, you were in the footsteps.

MS: I was. And I had classes with Charles Sherry as well.

DM: Oh you did?

MS: I did. And when I was reading the book and saw the thing about [philosopher Hans-Georg] Gadamer, I was like, oh, that’s Sherry.

DM: Did you take that class?

MS: I didn’t take that one. I took a version of the theory class he taught, which was much more about phenomenology. But before I realized that [he had taught David], I was waiting outside his office reading Infinite Jest because I was trying to cram in as much as I could whenever I could. And he was like “David …”

DM: I didn’t realize he had consciousness of David. I knew when I interviewed him that he knew who David was, but I wasn’t aware that he knew who David was in a bigger …

MS: No, he did. Because when he saw it, he said how do you like that? I said I really like it. And he said, that’s his best one.

DM: I didn’t realize that. This is one of the frustrations of biography. Someone told me a story about David dropping out of a class because a professor said he hadn’t had enough footnotes in his paper. I just thought that was the most delicious small-i irony ever in the history of scholastics. But I could never run down the anecdote. I knew it was true but I couldn’t find the class. He audited a lot of classes in Arizona. When you audit you don’t really leave much of a trail.

–

MS: What’s a good story about David that you wish you had been able to fit into the book?

DM: There’s a great story that’s somewhat come out. It was in the book and somehow fell out. I don’t even remember cutting it. It was that Antonin Scalia had lunch with him. And the thing that hasn’t come out, I mean, the whole thing has come out from Brian Garner’s point of view, so I don’t know. But according to the guy who invited Scalia, who’s an academic at Pomona, Scalia was a huge fan of Infinite Jest. I find that interesting. And I find it possible too. You know what I mean?

MS: What do you mean?

DM: I could see Scalia loving Infinite Jest. Politically, David, as you probably know, the fact that he voted for Reagan has gotten a lot of web attention. But frankly, his whole stance in the world, once you get past the Jerry Garcia look, in his later life he was pretty conservative. It was culturally conservative. It was Burkean, in a way. He was conservative in the lowercase sense: let’s be careful before we take a step forward. Politically he was liberal. He didn’t like Bush, he liked Bill Bradley, he was fairly conventional. Anyway, I thought that was a great story. I don’t know why it isn’t in the book, but it’s not there. I must have cut it at some point in the interest in the ending having more of a focus than it would have had otherwise. He was also a member of some sort of secret society at Pomona that used to pull pranks. He financed this group of girls who pulled Harvard Lampoon-style pranks. That was fun too. I wish that was in the book to capture that side of him. There are plenty of stories if you want to turn off the tape recorder. Those didn’t all get into the book. Most of them didn’t. Look, I’m a journalist. I’m on the side of information. Acknowledging that these aren’t ordinary circumstances, the book has an enormous amount of information that I think you don’t usually get in a first biography, from letters to trying to kill Mary Karr’s husband.

MS: That to me was one of the genuinely shocking moments in the book.

DM: Shocking. Because you don’t really think of intellectuals as being in the sphere of action. You just don’t think we do that. We know that we write well about it. We know that we cogitate it. We know that we can imagine it and write about it in our diaries and our fiction. But we don’t think we’d do it. We’re not doers like that. It would be equally surprising in a way if he could rewire his own stove. It wouldn’t be as morally surprising but it would be as practically surprising. I think living at Grenada House put him in touch with a whole world of people he never would have met otherwise. The other thing: buying pot will put you in touch with a whole world of people. Buying pot was his passport. There’s a wonderful line in Casablanca where Major Strasser asks Humphrey Bogart what his politics are, and Bogart says I’m a drunkard. And then Captain Renault pipes up and says, That makes you a citizen of the world! So I think by the same token David was a citizen of the world. There are a lot of people he never would have met. All these figures in the book like Charlie McLagan can be in part explained by substance abuse. Not totally explained, but partially explained. They were friends as well, but that was the connection.

–

MS: It’s interesting, especially after reading The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, I wonder if you had the temptation to get into the science of David’s addiction, his depression, whatever it was.

DM: I know, I know. Someone said they wished the book had more psychoneurology and less biology. Less hormones and more deep structures. I wasn’t overwhelmed by what there was to learn from the hardcore scientific approach to depression. I found that the terms got very murky very quickly. I don’t think he was ever correctly diagnosed, so that was the other part of the problem. It was pretty clear to me that he had manic depression, or some sort of bipolar depression. And I don’t know, I did ask a number of psychiatrists what they would think about this and the Nardil he was treated with. John Franzen at one of the memorials said most people who believe David died of a neurochemical imbalance don’t read the stories David wrote. And I sort of felt that way. I felt like that’s a simplification. One difference I found between the magazine piece in the New Yorker and the book is that I’ve come to believe more and more that the reason he came off the Nardil wasn’t anything physical, but that he was just so frustrated with his life and his inability to write. I would have thought when I started out the book that I’d be going the other direction, that I’d find a long train of physical ailments that the Nardil was causing, but I didn’t find them. In fact, I think that he maybe had a panic attack in the restaurant in Claremont when he was hospitalized, an anxiety attack. His wife points out that they had eaten many times there. That was interesting. I was surprised and interested to find that the so-called “softer” interpretation was gaining more force. I’m glad because  we need stories like David’s story. I would have been a little disappointed if it turned out he had a duodenal cyst that the Nardil was causing.

MS: Right. I was talking to a friend about it, and I told her that it didn’t seem like there was anything really conclusive about it. And she was quiet for a second, and she said well it would be a lot more comforting if it were that.

DM: I understand that sentiment, and I understand why people would reach for that. No one wants David to have made that mistake. I don’t want David to have made that mistake. Every time I reread the drafts, I would cry at the end. I would cry during the copy edit. You don’t want this ending to be the ending of the book. I don’t want this to be the ending of the book. He’d only be 50 today. We all feel there was work ahead of him to do, and we all liked having him on the planet. People notice that most of all now that he’s gone. But even then people liked having him on this planet. The powers of the biographer are limited. You can’t change the ending.

So an essay-review I wrote about Kenneth Goldsmith’s newish essay collection Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age just went up over at Souciant Magazine. Initially I took a much different approach with the piece, and then stopped because it was kind of insane. But I do have some of that original draft, and you can probably see why I didn’t end up going in this direction. Anyway:

“In regard to the many sophisticated ideas concerning media, identity, and sampling developed over the last century,” writes Kenneth Goldsmith in the introduction to his new collection of essays, Uncreative Writing, “books about how to be a creative writer have completely missed the boat, relying on cliched notions of what it means to be ‘creative’.” I can imagine a 22-year-old version of myself nodding along sympathetically. Disgruntled and arrogant, having run through the course of workshops and lectures required for a BA in creative writing, “creative” seemed a laughable term to apply to the diarrhetic flood of forced epiphanies, leaky metaphors, execrable prose, and shitty advice washing over the seminar tables in the Modern Languages building in the spring of 2005. Genteel “literary fiction” was the house style — a cohort of dreamy MFA students and downtrodden adjuncts policed our sentence boundaries: simple, precise phrases must be mobilized in the service of conjuring a vague aura of meaningfulness from the most commonplace events. A strict attention to the wonderousness of the everyday was rigorously enforced. Had any of us any talent, it surely would have been crushed under the boot heel of the institution. Some of us carved away, carefully blowing the dust off the most exquisitely idea-less sentences, while the rest took refuge in a half-baked version of postmodern involution, barricading our lack of creativity from scrutiny with wall after wall of ham-fisted irony and self-reference.

I was one of the worst offenders, a pomo dunce of the first order. My cleverness knew no bounds. To be “creative” was to turn the tenets of the workshop on their head, to be “creative” was to lay bare the device, to be “creative” was to reckon with the infinitely regressive nature of signification, to be “creative” was, finally, to sneer at all of those unreflective trogs who thought they were so “creative.” Workshops were ideological warfare, though only I seemed to be aware of it, if one can be “aware” of something that simply isn’t the case. I harangued the insufficiently self-conscious, derided the epistemologically naive, lambasted the formally normal. An adjunct instructor told one of my classmates that I gave her nightmares, and when that classmate relayed the information, I felt a buzz of perverted pride that now registers as a correspondingly powerful shame.

If you haven’t been reading the Los Angeles Review of Books, you’re missing out, buddy. See, for instance, David Shields’s “Life is Short; Art is Shorter,” which went up today. Shields is, if nothing else, one of the few writers with the sack to include a semi-colon in a title. The essay reads more or less like an abstract from last year’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. Like that book, it’s both a polemic and a meditation, composed of numbered paragraphs but without the sense that each enumerates a command to be obeyed, an order to carry out. Here are the last few paragraphs of the piece, which appear under the heading “Collage is Not a Refuge for the Compositionally Disabled”*:

I often stop reading front to back and read the book backwards. I can’t predict which books it will happen to me on, but this reverse-reading will tug on me like a magnet about halfway or two thirds through. It often occurs on books that I love the most.

Use a tree as a fence post and string barbed wire across it; allow ten years to pass; the tree will have grown around the barbed wire, and the barbed wire will now go through the tree rather than around it.

Am I missing the narrative gene? I frequently come out of the movie theatre having no idea what the plot was: “Wait—he killed his brother-in-law? I didn’t know he even had a brother-in-law.”

The way he hopscotches from reading journal to enigmatic factoid to anecdote keeps you suspended, dangling from the edge of one paragraph until you release, free fall, and land on top of the next. What happens in midair is really the substance of the essay — Shields carves out little spaces to think in.

Which makes sense, as his chosen project lately has consisted of an attack on narrative in favor of what he refers to as the “lyric essay.” Reality Hunger is focused in large measure on taking apart cherished traditions like narrative, story, authenticity, and authorship, and this essay is involved in the same sort of thing (plus some rather pointed criticisms of Jonathan Franzen’s “Farther Away,” the New Yorker essay on David Foster Wallace). In that sense, it’s more of the same — I’m still waiting for a new form, rather than the continual unspooling of these numbered, and admittedly extremely pleasurable, fragments. I’m not sure I agree with all of Shields’s critiques; I’ve never understood why authors of aesthetic manifestos insist on the abandonment of one form in favor of another. Isn’t there room and desire for pretty much everything?

After all, when you do a Google image search on “collage,” you come up with a bunch of those collages that are thousands of smaller images arranged to form a large portrait. The avant-garde connotations Shields seems to attribute to collage got subsumed beneath more accessible, mimetic forms. This is the way of things, probably, and it speaks to the malleability of forms, both strange and familiar, the way in which forms that were strange have a tendency to become familiar. So it’s not, like Johnson said of Tristram Shandy, that “nothing odd will last” (or whatever), but that nothing odd stays odd for long.

* Also, here’s something Shields wrote called “Collage” which I’m pretty sure is an excerpt from Reality Hunger.

I’ve been doing a bit of background reading on the Greek Cynics, and it’s pretty much the best ever. Here’s a passage from A.A. Long’s chapter “The Socratic Tradition: Diogenes, Crates, and Hellenistic Ethics” from Branham and Goulet-Caze’s The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy (University of California, 1996):

Antisthenes defends the claim that, although he is penniless, he prides himself on his wealth. True wealth and poverty, he argues, are possessed in people’s souls. He observes persons who are conventionally wealthy yet pathologically unsatisfied by their possessions. As for himself, he has sufficient to satisfy all his basic bodily needs, and, since he is not choosy, he can always find some willing woman if he wants sex. For enjoyment, instead of buying expensive things, he draws on his soul’s resources. Anticipating Epicurus, he says that it is more pleasurable to satisfy his appetite when genuinely hungry or thirsty than when not in need. Such frugality promotes honesty and contentment (32).

One of the most interesting things about ancient Cynicism (radically different from modern cynicism — on this, see Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason) is its emphasis on the pleasure of self-denial. That is, denying oneself immediate and excessive gratification actually enhances pleasure eventually. Discipline, denial, self-mastery are all different paths to pleasure rather than virtuous acts in themselves. Nice.

Diogenes of Sinope, who Plato called “a Socrates gone mad,” is probably the most famous Cynic. From Diogenes Laertius’s (different guy) Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, written in the first half of the third century, A.D.:

Once, when a man had conducted him into a magnificent house, and had told him that he must not spit, after hawking a little, he spit in his face, saying that he could not find a worse place.

Burn!

A profligate eunuch had written on his house, “Let no evil thing enter in.””Where,” said Diogenes, “is the master of the house going?”

Ay-oh!

Once at a banquet, some of the guests threw him bones, as if he had been a dog; so he, as he went away, put up his leg against them as if he had been a dog in reality.

Huh. Okay. Diogenes: never afraid to let shit get real.