Living to Live

I have Seth Cohen (The O.C.) to thank for introducing me to Chuck Klosterman. I spotted him reading Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs during an episode of The O.C., and the title of the book intrigued me so much that I had to hunt it down.

—Review by deargreenplace of Killing Yourself to Live, 

by Chuck Klosterman, on the revish.com

I have been on a trip for over ten days and have done little writing beyond that done on postcards, and I have been reading personal essays/autobiographical novellas with near exclusivity.  For example, I began Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace on the train stretch between Reno, Nevada and Salt Lake City, Utah, read 200 pages on flights from St. Louis to Chicago and from Chicago to Helsinki and from Helsinki to Berlin, and I have one essay remaining as I sit backward facing in a train en route—from Berlin—to Amsterdam, in a seat that may belong to a disgruntled Dutchman across the aisle.   My girlfriend/traveling companion is not sure of the meaning of an encounter that transpired while I was asleep involving the Dutchman's arrival, glance at his ticket and then my seat, and subsequent perpetual scowl.

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I began this trip with a personalized variety of self-psychoanalysis by which I aimed to make it a journey of emotional healing and self-understanding, which, I suppose, with the rare intentionally self-destructive benders (Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas comes to mind), is how most people, if pressed, would describe a trip of their own making—I read William Styron's Darkness Visible, subtitled "A Memoir of Madness," from the origin of the California Zephyr in Emeryville on the San Francisco Bay east through Sacramento, finishing in Gold Country.  It was reassuring to have the symptoms of a long-developing depression—much due to the logistical anxieties of this trip—validated, and therefore to be cognizant of them through this validation, and to know what I experienced, was experiencing, and habitually experience is a minute shade of the debilitating effects of Styron's illness, and the depression afflicting so many others, and that whatever was pre-trip nerves was, so to speak, left behind.  Awareness with movement with anticipation with honest eloquent writing shuttled me like a train to a healthier place.  

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A month before I left, my father and I caught up on what we respectively had read while he was on a road trip with my mom for over a month.  In the months before that trip I had shared with him two collections of pop culture essays by Chuck Klosterman that I had enjoyed, inspiring my father to raid amazon of another book of essays, two Klosterman novels—which didn't particularly interest me—and a road trip memoir that he insisted I read, to "let [him] know what [I] think," but that I should wait to read it on the train, in transit as he had done, for reasons that one may consider appropriate, dismiss as "cute," or may ascribe to the stoner synchronicity of playing Dark Side of the Moon while watching the Wizard of Oz muted, or throwing the radio in the bath when "White Rabbit" peaks, for examples.  He was also going to postpone lending me Consider the Lobster, in this case just to spend more time with it—he seemed particularly taken by DFW's ingenious explication of the famously impossible to understand Wittgenstein in a footnote to an essay about a new dictionary of English usage. I believe in synchronicity—as you can tell my father does as well—and I will constantly plan and interpret the media I consume in relation to its consumption, and the contexts that circle that consumption.   The process is constantly edifying and—at my most idealistic—the key to accidental insight, the sort of left-field logic or unexpected parallel that creates new and constructive ideas.  At my most cynical such "insight" is the deluded justification of a constant no-attention-span need to be doing at least two things at once, the consequence of too much self-indulgent art and too much cannabis sativa taken in—sometimes—at once.  Needless to say the project of this reading appealed to me greatly: CK drives around the country visiting memorials to rock and roll deaths as I take the train across these great states.  He mentions, as a detail that my dad thought I would enjoy, that he narrows down his CD collection to 600 essentials he would need for the drive.  I brought my walkman and emptied out my 16-cassette book of Oral Roberts reading The Old Testament and filled it with 16 essential tapes.   Surely this was to be a positive experience for everything involved, textual, human, and otherwise.  

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About a month has passed since I first began this essay on that train in my notebook, and I have yet to break my streak in autobiography consumption.  I have visited a friend in Spain and read Hemingway's great non-fiction tome on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, and re-connected with my father's side of the family in England, and borrowed from my youngest cousin and read Orwell's memoir of an over-educated jobless tramp, Down and Out in Paris and London.  I have just returned from visiting the middle cousin in London (though Orwell was still in Paris in the book) and am at my aunt's country house outside of Droitwich as I write this.  It is actually being shown to a prospective buyer presently and I am forced to conclude that I have not contributed to the property value as I type away in the dining room, and try to finish the story begun a month ago, lived a week before that.

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The first parallel between these three books—just to clarify Darkness Visible by William Styron, Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace, and the Klosterman book—is, well, I guess I should start with the presence of the narrator/author as character in the story, but also, stand-in for the reader.  We are to trust our author as we would our own selves in a given situation.  This is perhaps the difficulty in switching from the radically empathetic authors Styron and Wallace to the unflinchingly unfeeling narrative persona of Klosterman, which brings me to the parallel I initially intended to address at the start of this paragraph (a paragraph which saw the return of my aunt, the realtor, the prospective buyer and her son back into the room, a moment of eye contact with the 4-year old little English boy who proceeded to sprint out of the room): the treatment of the superficiality of Los Angeles.  David Foster Wallace begins the book (or the editor of the book opted to begin) with a 50-page, exhaustive account of—simultaneously—the Adult Video News Awards for achievement in pornography, the pornography industry, the media surrounding the pornography industry, and what it entails to be a member of the media covering the AVN awards.   The depth of Wallace's humanity is not explicit, but rather a visceral flip-side to the frank objectification and commodification of the greatest expression of love and intimacy humans have.   DFW treats his subjects fairly, quotes them accurately, backs up any detail with facts and context, with such rigor that what is initially just superficial (porn and its stars) becomes hideous in the extent to which the culture surrounding it has become autonomous with its own bureaucracy, media and logic.   Nowhere is judgment ever cast; nowhere does DFW take an implied position of superiority (I am composing this in the blogger platform which does not seem to have a means to footnote certain phrasings that need clarification, unfortunately, which I have let slide until the present moment when I feel the need to note that I do not have a copy of the essay in front of me [I left it in Berlin to collect at the end of my trip], I did not take notes on it as I read it, and I generally concede it is poor practice to use words like "nowhere" in serious literary discussion— I am thus admitting to and partaking in a particular brand of writing that values feelings and memories over the scholastic church of close reading and citation).

I read this essay in the hours before arriving in Salt Lake City in the middle of the night, anticipating a quick visit with two friends who agreed to stop at the train station, and the morning after, when it turned out the train was 3 hours late.  At a certain point I read Klosterman's discussion of why he did not want to go to LA in his trip (he is visiting the sites of famous deaths in the history of American rock and roll, or, as he puts it in perhaps the most cringe-inducing line I have read in a book, "going to get his death on"), although it has some notable rock and roll deaths, which I can't presently share because he did not end up going there and you can google them just as well as I can.  Instead he presents a scene out of an imaginary screenplay that typifies his feelings about the failings of Los Angeles, its culture, and its people (again, I do not have my father's copy in front of me [this time it is in St. Louis to be collected further along the return stage of the hero's journey] and I am more or less describing the memories of my feelings about the work in question.  Abysmal scholarship, I know).  

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Klosterman and DFW essentially get to the same point: LA is superficial and the people who live there and buy into it suffer from a certain lack of humanity as a consequence; both pieces of writing (the bit of screenplay dialogue and the DFW essay, which is titled, by the way, in the book, "Big Red Son," and, in Premier magazine in 1998, "Neither Adult Nor Entertainment") have a slightly detached outsider view on the situation and present it as ridiculous.  The difference is Klosterman has invented this unbelievable and absurd situation as an exaggeration of stereotypes, whereas DFW is documenting an unbelievable and absurd situation that is a greater exaggeration of stereotypes than one can imagine who is not privy to the San Fernando world of pornography.  The waiter trying to get into the media world of LA is a flat invention of Klosterman, and we believe in the authenticity of Klosterman because he finds conversing with the stereotype trying, so trying that the scene ends as he "jams a steak knife into his own heart...twice...not unlike singer-songwriter Elliott Smith."

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Despite depression’s eclectic reach, it has demonstrated with fair convincingness that artistic types (especially poets) are particularly vulnerable to the disorder—which in its graver, clinical manifestation takes upward of 20 percent of its victims by way of suicide. Just a few of these fallen artists, all modern, make up a sad but scintillant roll call: Hart Crane, Vincent Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Arshile Gorky, Cesare Pavese, Romain Gary, Sylvia Plath, Mark Rothko, John Berryman, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Diane Arbus, Tadeusz Borowski, Paul Celan, Anne Sexton, Sergei Esenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky—the list goes on. 

—William Styron, Darkness Visible

The sets of circumstances that make me feel the way I do about the conclusion of Klosterman's self-satisfied SoCal commentary are very particular to me, so I shouldn't suppose everybody should shudder as deeply as I did upon first reading it (which is different from the cringing at the tackiness of "going to get my death on" or the treatise that follows in the next chapter on why Radiohead's Kid A predicted September 11th).   I found myself on the train restraining myself from querying aloud if he really thought his character, sitting beside a pool sipping on a coke, having lost patience with the waiter was really equatable with the pain that Elliott Smith was confronting in the moments before he killed himself.  I was getting over-excited obviously.  This disjoint is the source of the humor of the passage, the same disjoint that runs through the entire book: Klosterman voyages to and stands on the graves of people who felt and expressed feeling in art and he proceeds to fail to feel and express feeling about it in the book; and that's what passes for clever; and if I complain about it I don't get it?   He generally doesn't take the thing very seriously.  He prefers to put his thought and feeling into diatribes, for example, comparing the great loves of his life to members of KISS.  The eye-rolling you may be able sense in my words is anticipated by Klosterman and he seems to prefer to relish in his superficiality and his chauvinism as opposed to rationalize it, or take a critical, self-aware approach to it, and he even references someone like myself, a member of the blog community, buying his book and taking the piss out of it, again a paraphrase: the book and I remain an ocean a part.

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I heard the news that Elliott Smith died at recess, between 2nd and 3rd periods, toward the end of my last year of high school when my friend Amy asked if I had heard.  I said I had not and she informed me "he stabbed himself in the fucking chest."  It was an intense image, to say the least, to carry with you for the rest of the school day, but I happened also to have an intense affinity for the man.  Either/Or was one of my favorite albums; and I came of age to a mix tape that had "Miss Misery" as an emotional highlight—I brought this mix tape on the train, as it turned out. I first understood Existentialism, roughly, through his line "You can do what you want to whenever you want to / you know it doesn't mean a thing: big nothing."  

Celebrities die.  It is always sad, but not always unexpected.  It was amazing that Johnny Cash lived as long as he did.  I hadn't studied Derrida before he died, so I wasn't as deeply affected.  It was, of course, very sad when George died.  However, suicide is an unfathomable atrocity and the pain that leads to it and the pain it causes, while incomparable to each other, are each indescribable.  

When David Foster Wallace killed himself I was finishing my last semester of college.  I heard the news while listening to Fresh Air and heard his voice for the first time in a replayed interview.  I didn't really know who he was. I checked out Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and read it in my free time.  I graduated in December and the ceremony was cancelled due to a sudden snow storm which, in Portland, Oregon, has a tendency to halt things like graduation ceremonies.  What became known as "This is Water," DFW's commencement speech in 2005 at Kenyon College became my own de facto commencement speech, and he has since been a focal point of my post-academic life, and a source of a great melancholy in that every profound identification I make with his work and with the author behind it makes me feel the loss more.  

After high school I lived at my parents' house and saved money for an extensive trip: I was to drive my grandmother's car to Whidbey Island, Washington from Salinas, California, visiting my brother and a dozen friends along the way, leave it there for her, return to Oregon, somehow, fly to visit a friend in Massachusetts, fly to London to spend Christmas with my family, and then travel with my brother to Madrid and back.  On October 19, 2004 Elliott Smith's unfinished album about all of the deep dark places his soul was when he died was posthumously released, and I bought it that day while visiting my brother in Arcata and listened to it over and over.  I made a tape of the CD to play in the tape deck I had velcroed to the dashboard.  I made a great friend based in part on the shared enthusiasm we had for the album.  Interestingly, bear with me, Joanna Bolme helped finish the album after Smith's death, and she was on tour with Stephen Malkmus in 2005 when DFW spoke to Kenyon college, when I saw her in person (with my new friend and my brother) at the Fillmore and my brother shouted and got her attention.  And, on the off chance you find that interesting, it might interest you to know that the friend I was visiting in Massachusetts went to Hampshire College, Elliott Smith's alma mater.  By the way, I have never seen Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I have just had the scene paraphrased for me about throwing the radio into the bathtub when "White Rabbit" peaks.

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"Consider the Lobster," the essay from which the book gets its name, is, in essence, about tourism.  I am, in essence, a tourist.  While I am staying with friends and family, travelling at a leisurely pace, and trying to participate in real things, the label is not easy to escape, however much I would like to.  The essay describes a lobster festival in Maine, though, as is his wont, DFW comes from a compassionate perspective.  It becomes fairly disgusting to center a massive celebration around the act of boiling hundreds of creatures alive.  I am easier to persuade of the morals or this, as I am a vegetarian; but it is undeniable to deny the fact of it.  The biggest grain of truth comes, in true DFW fashion, in a footnote, really, in a metaphor at the end of a footnote.  What is said is that attending such phenomena, which the locals leave to the tourists to do, is like pouncing on something that is already dead, killing it further.  I am from Monterey, California, and around the time of my birth Monterey declared itself dead, put the bell jar on, and invited the world to witness what it was.  I can empathize with DFW's point, and the metaphor is that we flock as tourists to prey on the dead thing at the shore as a lobster bottomfeeds (the book is still in Berlin!) on the dead protein scattered on the beach, though of course on the water side of the beach.  

I believe everything I have endeavored to say has been said, apart from the conclusion about why I find Chuck Klosterman's work so offensive, which I still don't care to do because, like I said, it is so tautological, he describes it himself in his book, but, in his mind, transcends it by doing so.  The question for me is how do I tell my own story, taking a trip 8 years later, on the other side of my twenties, which has such similar contours, with not just Elliott Smith's unfinished, haunting swan song as its soundtrack, but the entirety of my past, and how do I continue to take this trip as both an empathetic human and a consuming tourist, and where do I end up at the end of it?  What has changed, if anything, in eight years, besides receiving a bachelor's degree, and what solace can I find in the credo that This Is Water, when it wasn't enough for David Foster Wallace?   And why should I have spent five hours typing up this essay on my vacation between lunch and teatime instead of, what, drinking cocoa and watching the rain come down?  There are, of course, many positive answers to this, deeply personal to me, but it is teatime and I have typed enough for a day of vacation.