THE WHOLE TRUTH

self, ego, book reviewing, Updike, menacing music

THE WHOLE TRUTH

I had a phone session with my therapist yesterday and for about 20 of the 45 minutes I talked about twitter dying and what it would mean to me, what kind of void it would leave in my life. When I realized what I’d been rattling on about for such a long time, I felt a wave of revulsion at myself. That’s what therapy is for.

—-

I recently was asked to join a publication I’ve written for that I admire. This would mean being privy to the editorial decision-making behind the publication’s production cycle, what to publish, how to market the publication, and other aspects of the running of an online magazine. This essentially meant being invited to an exclusive chat room used only by the magazine’s staff where they had extensive planning meetings and discussions about what to do with the magazine. When I was invited I happily said yes and once I got access to the chat I spent hours going through the archived channels to read about the inner workings of the magazine. Along the way I came across a rich motherlode of let’s just call it information that was not meant for all eyes. I saw that, during my previous writing for the magazine, my name had come up as well as humorous observations of me were made based on my behavior on twitter.

I remember when I got separated from my wife I still had keys to the house where she and my daughter lived and on the pretext of going over there to pick up some more of my things (there weren’t many left—she had made it a condition that I was to leave the house and gather all my belongings in a week, everything) I am ashamed to admit I snooped around the house. I don’t really remember if I found anything, or exactly what I was looking for besides clues to the weighty decisions my soon-to-be ex-wife was making and how they would affect me and my daughter. Whatever I found, let’s just say, became locked away in an internal cabinet of my own guilt and shame, which I don’t now have direct conscious access to. It was over twelve years ago, and the intervening years have mercifully drawn a translucent membrane over those actions. But one thing I do remember from this sad period of time was the lesson: “Maybe you don’t want to know. Maybe it would be better for you to stop looking. Even if it’s the truth you find. You might be too weak to handle the truth.”

A similar feeling came over me when reading these threads of chats where my name kept popping up, critiquing my writing or poking good-natured fun at my online persona. I read back pretty far into the thickets of old chats but I got the icky, desperate, nauseating feeling that I was reading people’s thoughts about me that they wrote down perhaps without an inkling that I would ever read them. And that this was some kind of violation, not of me, but of them. So I broke it off. I don’t know how much there might still be left to unearth about myself on there but I decided that I don’t want to know. I would rather be on slightly shaky ground with my friends and colleagues and not know the whole truth of what they think of me, than to be on a solid ground and feeling pain and embarrassment. My overwhelming impression is that these people like and respect me, or else they would not have asked me to join them. I didn’t clear the hurdle of myself completely; my foot caught on the bar and knocked it over, but I’m still on my feet and running. No real harm done. There are other Jesse-shaped hurdles coming.

Like reviews. Like the reviewing “thing.” I’m learning the truth about that side of literary production. The vessel I’m on, from which I write reviews of other people’s books, is a creaky, ponderous craft with a fair number of leaks and a tiny storeroom of grain, only two functioning cannon, you get the picture… It’s modeled after much larger sturdier ships like the ones I’ve seen in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. My hero as a reviewer is John Updike who, among an astounding output of novels and other books, wrote a series of massive collections of essays and book reviews, roughly one every decade until he died.

The collections of literary criticism from Updike that I own and I have read some of include:

• Picked-Up Pieces (1975)

• Hugging The Shore (1983)

• Odd Jobs (1991)

• More Matter (1999)

• Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism (2007)

After that I haven’t read his work as he died in 2008. There have been other non-fiction books from him. I’ll get to those other books later, I tell myself. But it’s worth looking over Updike’s “rules for a book reviewer”:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's œuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never ... try to put the author "in his place," making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

—————

Updike’s rules for book reviewing are handy guides for how to go about the business of directing the attention of others to some perhaps under-appreciated or unknown book in the teeming locust cloud of books which moves around us with its own constant, choking, Brownian motion. In some ways—and this might be too grandiloquent a metaphor for somebody as terrified and inexperienced with guns as I am—it’s like shooting game where you have to lead the target by a certain distance to hit it. It’s all in motion and if you wait too long maybe the bird will fly away from you out of range.

My initial impulse for bringing up reviews here was to express a disillusionment I have undergone lately about the reviewing game. I have tried to as it were, purify my motives in writing reviews, or at least subject them to one or two passages through the blast furnace to bake off my self-interest, my aims to use reviews to network and schmooze, to get other writers to notice me and love me, etc. Twitter makes these Rochefoucauldian self-interested tactics very easy. Tagging the writer of a book to alert him or her to the tweet linking the review you wrote of their book is the simplest thing in the world, but I am learning that a very “un-simple” process is set in motion by doing this technologically effortless maneuver.

People are usually thrilled that you read their book, in the first place. And the fact that you’re telling everybody you read it and you have a certain response to it is an illuminating act. My experience is that people are very moved and touched by the generous gesture and sometimes perhaps even enlightened about something in their own book that they may not have been aware of while writing it. I flatter myself that I’ve written such reviews. To put it in Twitter terms—since those are the all-important elemental building blocks out of which this current literary universe is made—the author, if they don’t know you, will like your tweet with the review of their book and probably want to follow you. Maybe you just made a friend.

And that’s where the problem might lie. My own experience, and this is certainly colored by my own subjective emotions and propensities, is that the person whose book you just reviewed, more likely than not, still doesn’t want to have much to do with you. If you were looking for intimacy or chumminess or a sense of equality or comradeship by writing your review, you are likely not going to get any closer to it by this means. It sounds bitter but to expect a review of your book in return marks you as somebody who is transactionally dishonest on a very fundamental level: this is my impression. Maybe it has been gotten by feeling hurt or damaged by the unwillingness of most people I review to shine anything but the most minimally sparkling light back onto me. And this registering of damage or hurt is self-pitying and wrong. So to compensate and try to lick the wound I overlook the perceived wrong by developing a kind of jaded rule of thumb, that “nobody deserves shit from anybody else.” Expecting rewards from other people in a literary arena, expecting light, is a mistake. Or maybe you’re getting plenty of light from others but it is not enough to, like Wall•E’s weathered little solar panels facing a dying sun through the smog, recharge your ego’s onboard batteries?

I had a book reading recently in my small local city and only six people showed up. They all bought books. But somehow I was expecting more people, and the distance between the expectation and the reality caused me to do some hard thinking on the cold, dark drive home afterward. I live about forty-five minutes away from this city, Oneonta. And on the way I came to a certain realization. This realization may not be the true reality but for that drive and a while afterward, it was my epiphany, my insight. And it led me to this: expecting a mirror’s reflection, or a feedback loop, or a royalty statement, or a review from your peers from this literary game is just laughable. Looking for signs of yourself, that you were appreciated or noticed or that you fit into some kind of literary tradition, is foolish and bound to get you hurt. You wrote a book but you didn’t do much of anything special. Or, you did do something special, but it’s not for you to be able to know about it after the fact. You were moving in the dark and laying down your words, and you are in real ways cut off from any subsequent fumbler in the dark who looking for a way out of the labyrinth passes their fingers over your chiseled markings in the rock. (That’s a pretty dark and hopeless extended metaphor Jesse.) Ok. It’s not that bad. But I hope you get what I mean. This communication and union with others that my esteemed friend Derek Maine talks about literature being is really concealed from the writer. In some cases it may not happen until the writer is long dead, over decades or centuries.

I recall being caught up in discussions with a college friend decades ago over the following hypothetical scenario of art: if you were on a deserted island, with no one around, and you sculpted a statue out of rock—is that art? Is it art if no one on earth besides you will ever see it? Or is it art because it embodies the sculptor’s expression to the void, to nature, to themselves? Can you exist without an audience? Can you broadcast your transmission with no receiver…can you craft something with no way to gauge your target, make adjustments, orient yourself to the presumed viewer or listener?

My college friend (who conducted himself as something like a wise mystic Eastern guru, wore a turban he’d gotten from travels in India, sat on the floor, and physically carried himself as a sort of premonition of Osama bin Laden who was on American TV screens sitting in a cave next to his AK-47 four or five years later) said you shouldn’t need to. You should make art in a void with no thought to anybody ever seeing it, this bin Laden guy said. I want to reach back through the decades and strangle that man. They didn’t understand the artist’s ego, the thirst for recognition. It’s probably some Western infection of personality which has gotten a hold of me.

The Substack thing, which I have been pouring much of my literary energy into lately and risking widespread annoyance among my long-suffering subscribers, gestures in this direction. Sending newsletters out with little to no feedback, no data to study, no facial expressions in the reader to look at and readjust the tone of your voice, has some kinship with this art for its own sake. At my recent reading in Oneonta, before anybody showed up, the MC and facilitator told me that she’d read a Substack post of mine and told me it “flirted with being cringe” but pulled out of it and ended up being good. Flashbacks of rifling through my ex-wife’s things, or reading the old chats at the magazine I was invited to join! I don’t want to know too much… maybe it’s better not to know.

———-

I don’t know enough about music theory to explain what the following songs have in common, whether it’s a minor key or whatever, but I like the creepy feeling of menace I get with these passages.

Beginning verse of “Sentimental Lady” Bob Welch

All of “Do It Again” Steely Dan

Sax part of “Baker street” Gerry Rafferty

“Lunatic fringe” Red Rider

Alan Parsons Project “Eye In The Sky”