I woke up at 1:37am convinced that it was 7:37am and felt very satisfied with myself for having slept through the whole night. I was rested, content, and full of ideas. I’d just had a series of dreams and I was eager to write them down—at least one of them was a mind-blowing revelation. I put the screen brightness on my phone all the way down and, with my eyes closed, did my best to transcribe:
First, I dreamt I was an apparatchik, and, along with another comrade, I was trying to convince Mao to let us run the economy and the military, respectively. This perhaps because I’ve been reading Mating by Norman Rush, which I highly recommended, and which takes place in a vaguely Socialist development project in the Kalahari desert.
Second, I dreamt I was on a mission for vigilante justice, pursuing a violent criminal in the face of police inaction. This because I watched John Woo’s dialogue-free shoot ‘em up Silent Night. (Great conceit, medium execution.)
But the important dream, the genius breakthrough worth waking up to write down, was the one in which I passionately, tearfully attempted to explain the difference between good art and great art to a small gathering of dear friends. I told them that I had come up with a sorting mechanism for human action and expression.
To transcend, to be great, to become memorable and worthwhile, a piece of art had somehow to find a way to be for the reader/viewer/listener. This was why, I explained, most books were dedicated to someone. The author was trying to summon that energy.
Only that wasn’t quite it… and now the dream was fading… I hammered away at my phone with my thumbs, struggling to nail down what had seemed so clear just a moment ago.
I spent a while like that, laying in bed, half asleep, pleasantly anticipating the proximity of coffee and breakfast. I put my noise-canceling headphones on because my brother was snoring like a troll in the bed next to mine. There was no way to tell what time it was by the light coming around the curtains because we were at a hotel in Tromsø, Norway, which is above the Arctic Circle. In mid-summer the sun doesn’t set.
After a while I glanced at the time and began to understand that it was actually still the middle of the night. In fact, it was 2:30am, quite clearly. I became mildly alarmed. I had been operating within an illusion, a misreading of reality, for almost an hour. It might have been more disorienting if my internal clock wasn’t already cuckoo from the red-eye. I took some melatonin and went back to sleep.
Unfortunately, when I woke up at a reasonable hour and read through my notes, I realized that my genius breakthrough dream was clearly plagiarized from an article in The New Yorker about David Foster Wallace that I’d been reading at lunch the day before.
“It seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies . . . in be[ing] willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I’m scared about how sappy this’ll look in print, saying this. And the effort to actually to do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don’t seem to have yet… All the attention and engagement and work you need to get from the reader can’t be for your benefit; it’s got to be for hers.”
What does he mean by “benefit”?
With a novel, it’s not that you’re teaching the reader something she doesn’t know, although teaching is allowed. You’re not imparting wisdom, although wisdom can be imparted. And it’s not just entertaining, although entertaining is necessary.
George Saunders has a riff on this in his terrific master class on the Russian short story, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. “Many young writers start out with the idea that a story is a place to express their views—to tell the world what they believe. That is, they understand the story as a delivery system for their ideas. I know I felt that way. A story was where I got to set the world straight and achieve glory via the sheer originality of my advanced moral positions. But, as a technical matter, fiction doesn’t support polemic very well. Because the writer invents all the elements, a story isn’t really in a position to ‘prove’ anything.”
OK, so if you’re not downloading your genius breakthrough, which you might have borrowed from someone else anyway, what are you offering?
Maybe a useful analogy here is food. There’s no moral to an apple, no philosophical message, just freshness, calories, crunch, flavor, vitamins, carbs, sugar, fiber.
The best food, made by a proverbial grandmother, is pure nourishment. Given in love with no expectation of repayment. Maybe art should be like that.
Except that books, like great restaurants, must nourish while also existing within the demands of material reality, meaning that they straddle, as Lewis Hyde pointed out, the gift economy and the market economy.
I’m worried now that this analogy is arriving at Chicken Soup for the Soul—the best-selling inspirational series from the 90s which formed an LLC to maximize profits, started selling pet food, went public (CSSE), bought RedBox for $357 million (most of it debt) in 2022, and then got delisted from NASDAQ, and filed for bankruptcy yesterday. Now Chicken Soup for the Soul has nearly $1 billion in debt. Oops!
Nelson Denoon, the semi-messianic love interest in Mating, believed that the “limited liability corporation was a virus devouring the world.”
So how about a cheeseburger with fries for the soul instead? That would be Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter. If your taste is a little more high-flown, reading DFW’s Infinite Jest is like sitting for a preposterously long tasting menu prepared by guys with tattoos in a room playing 90s rap. Having lunch in the bar room at Gramercy Tavern, that’s Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. If you want fresh-killed rabbit stew cooked over a fire out on the prairie, that would be Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. (It’s gonna be a little gamey!) Commercial fiction tastes like fast food. Reading Vladimir Nabokov is like eating ortolan with a napkin over your head.
My hope is that my novel, Cake Eater, will be something like digging into the dry pepper style chicken at Han Dynasty—sweaty and spicy but with a strange numbing sensation on your tongue from the Szechuan peppercorns—followed by a pint of chocolate chip cookie dough from a bodega, eaten on the walk home, to soothe the fiery belly.
Great art, I think Wallace was saying, contains a gift from the creator to the reader, even if the experience was paid for.
Apparently he was a big fan of The Gift by Lewis Hyde, which explains this better than I can:
“A gift is a thing we do not get by our own efforts. We cannot buy it; we cannot acquire it through an act of will. It is bestowed upon us. Thus we rightly speak of ‘talent’ as a ‘gift,’ for although a talent can be perfected through an effort of the will, no effort in the world can cause its initial appearance.
“We also rightly speak of intuition or inspiration as a gift. As the artist works, some portion of his creation is bestowed upon him. An idea pops into his head, a tune begins to play, a phrase comes to mind, a color falls in place on the canvas. Usually, in fact, the artist does not find himself engaged or exhilarated by the work, nor does it seem authentic, until this gratuitous element has appeared, so that along with any true creation comes the uncanny sense that ‘I,’ the artist, did not make the work. ‘Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me,’ says D. H. Lawrence.
“That art that matters to us—which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience—that work is received by us as a gift is received. Even if we have paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us which has nothing to do with the price.”
Tickets to Burning Man are expensive but once you’re inside everything is gifted. That includes food and drinks and anything else anyone wants to offer, like, say, screen-printing an evil clown face on your shorts while you stand and watch in your underwear. It also applies to the massive art installations and pyrotechnics and laser shows and the endless tech house sets. All are free and open to whoever is interested.
When I stumbled on Michael Garlington’s Chapel of Babel, a five-story baroque art installation complete with secret passage ways and narrow corridors and a vaulted ceiling, every inch of which, front and back, was covered in minutely detailed, haunting photographs, I was moved. I spent a lot of time in there. Eventually someone explained to me that at the end of the week the chapel was going to burn, just like everything else on the Playa.
In the market economy, once you have a customer base, you find ways to maximize profit, often by reducing the quality of the product. That explains in part why so much of what we buy is so shitty and often doesn’t last more than a few years. (Entropy is also a factor there!) In the market economy you can get away with 8 out of 10 quality, maybe even less.
But if you’re giving a gift, like the Chapel of Babel, you can’t really go 80%. You have to go 100%. Because it’s an extension of you, given to others as nourishment.
Once delivered, a gift cannot be kept. It must be either recirculated or consumed. Burned, even. Anthropologists find this consistently in gift cultures.
Hyde again:
“In folk tales, the person who tries to hold on to a gift usually dies… The effect is clear: by keeping the gift they get no more. They are no longer channels for the stream and they no longer enjoy its fruits, one of which seems to be their own lives… a gift must always be used up, consumed, eaten. The gift is property that perishes…
“The opposite of ‘Indian giver’ would be something like ‘white man keeper’ (or maybe ‘capitalist’), that is, a person whose instinct is to remove property from circulation, to put it in a warehouse or museum (or, more to the point for capitalism, to lay it aside to be used for production)…
“In the world of gift… you not only can have your cake and eat it too,” Hyde writes. “You can't have your cake unless you eat it.”
More cake
The daily routines of famous creative people, divided between sleep, creative work, day job, food/leisure, and exercise. Interesting that masturbation didn’t get its own category. I would be curious to know…
John Berger’s 1972 four-part BBC doc, Ways of Seeing, which challenged traditional ways of looking at art in the West. Berger is a delightful on-screen presence. His shirts alone make the thing worth watching.
Jordan Jensen is my favorite comedian working right now.