2010-06-08 15:03:54

PURPLE STATE OF MIND: Five Years On, An Experiment In Conversation Continues

Filed under: Books, Craig Detweiler, Featured, John Marks, Purple State Of Mind, Village Square
Posted by: John

by JOHN MARKS

Purple State of Mind is five years old. What a weirdly improbable notion.

In any world that made sense, Purple State Of Mind shouldn’t have lasted a day. It should never really have lived beyond its first three hours of existence on a sound stage at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. It should never have been more than an abortive conversation between two old friends about stuff that their kids won’t even find interesting.

Why has it survived and even thrived? Much as I’d like to take some credit, the real reason has nothing to with me or my co-producer Craig Detweiler. Purple State of Mind, the movie, the idea, the conversation, lives on because the rancorous political and cultural atmosphere that inspired it in the first place still exists. The national dialogue continues to deteriorate, and come this fall’s mid-term elections, the second since we launched our talk, we’ll have a chance to see exactly what that means.

It’s hard to tell whether the GOP will win back the House or just how much damage will be done to the Democrat hold on Congress, but that’s beside the point. A justifiably angry population is driving out moderates in the primary elections and replacing them with politicians who will hold much less pliable positions. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as long as everyone comes to Washington D.C. to get work done. But if the upshot is that Lt. Governor Bill Halter as a Senator will be less likely to find compromise with Republican Mitch McConnell, if Kentucky Republican Rand Paul will be less likely to work with Barney Frank, we’ve got a serious problem.

We’ve got the Japanese movie monster version of gridlock, and it will stomp us. Grid-zilla!

And that’s clear even before the opponents start slinging BP oil at each other in the lead-up to the general election in November.

I never thought I’d say this, but five years ago, when Craig and I started to bloviate on camera, national politics may have been poisonous, but toxicity levels seemed manageable. By 2006, lots of people on both sides of the aisle could recognize that the Bush administration had made terrible mistakes. There was a growing consensus that change needed to occur, and by the spring of 2008, as we traveled around the country speaking to religious and secular audiences, it was common to run into lifelong Republicans who had decided at last to vote for a Democrat, none other than Barack Obama.

In the midst of that amazing election, the Great Game Change, it was clear that hope and fear, joy and rage mingled. The images of Barack Obama speaking openly and honestly about race to black and white alike were matched by those of John McCain and Sarah Palin pouring rhetorical gasoline on already angry crowds. When Obama won, a moment of relative peace turned out to be a short season of numbness. The hope and joy faded. Fear and rage remained, and now they flourish.

Weighed down by the burdens of too much debt and too little decent employment, lied to and cheated by banks and government and companies that appear to spend most of their energy dodging responsibility for past mistakes, disgusted by the spectacle of partisan bickering on television and in the halls of government, vast reaches of the American public are checking out. Recent polls shows disaffection with the Tea Party along with the establishment. That’s because the movement is trying to become a political party, and that way lies self-destruction. To a lot of people, anyone and everyone in authority looks suspect.

Nothing new in that tried and true American sentiment, but the intensity and depth of the conviction feels comprehensive now, so much so that it’s hard to imagine what Obama will be able to do once that rejection of authority is enshrined in a new Congress in which no one has the upper hand, and no one wants to give an inch.

It’s a misnomer of history that the world can be radically reshaped in the blink of an eye. The fall of the Berlin Wall happened over night, but it was years in the making. The French Revolution, which swept away the power of kings in Europe, needed a century or two of economic and political transformation, if not a millennium. Still, a casual observer could be forgiven for feeling that the last half decade in American political, cultural and economic life amounts to a revolution, one that is still unfolding.

A boom has turned to a long-lasting bust. A technological revolution long in the making has accelerated into warp speed. An era of conservative robustness has passed away, and yet no great progressive swing has taken its place. The American scene seems stuck in a deep breath before a storm.

What does that mean for Purple State Of Mind? I suppose we deserve a small pat on the back. It’s no small thing for a project as ephemeral as ours to survive one era and live into another. At the same time, under the new dispensation, I have to ask myself what purpose we now serve. In an environment where the very idea of Purple is scorned by both sides, as spineless lack of conviction, as capitulation to the Arlen-Specter-style opportunism, as collaboration with the enemy and worse, we have to have a better answer to the question than we now possess.

Over the summer, we’ll be retooling the website to reach many more people than it already does. Liz Joyner at the Village Square and Peter Blackstock will continue to offer their thoughts from the battlefields of politics and music. Come August, we’ll feature interviews with a whole new crop of stellar thinkers, artists, musicians, writers and journalists. We’ll also be bracing ourselves for the Mother of all Mid-Term Elections and looking for ways–very small and perhaps quixotic ways–to heal the wounds without looking ridiculous or naive.

Peace has so much less sex appeal than war. That’s our basic problem. Flamethrowers punk flowers every time. But we’ll stew over the future of the Purple State just the same. Call it a Five-Year-Plan. Call it the Fifth Great Awakening. Call it crazy. The conversation continues.

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2010-04-29 07:34:58

MAY DAY: Moo Doo Hits The Fan On One More National Division, And We Celebrate In Advance

Filed under: Barack Obama, Democrats, Featured, Purple State Of Mind, Republicans, Tea Party, politics
Posted by: John

by JOHN MARKS

In America, we insist on the pleasure of variety. We walk into a grocery store and appreciate the drama of massed goods. We go to the exurban multiplex and marvel at the two dozen narrative possibilities.

Variety isn’t just who we are. It’s what we do. So it only makes sense that we pride ourselves on the number and quality of our national fault lines too. We beam at having become the Whole Foods fresh produce section of internecine conflict, every shelf of our national life groaning with a harvest of embittered decades. We heart multiply orgasmic polarizations.

In that light, this May Day weekend should be seen as a sort of national holiday, a celebration of all that divides us. Already, alarm bells are ringing, and the Drudge Report is screaming as Hispanics reportedly plan demonstrations against the Arizona immigration law in 70 cities across the country. Who can doubt we’re going to be one step closer to Sam Huntington’s delicious old nightmare of Aztlan in the Southwest, the clash and flash of civilizations against a sandstone backdrop?

Raise your glasses and imagine, if you will, the rage and anxiety already emerging among conservatives (and not just conservatives), the fear of an alien brown wave that threatens to sweep all before it. Steep yourself in the chili aroma of approaching doom. Then open your eyes wide and appreciate the violent beauty of our national spectacle.

Everywhere we look this week we find the combat smoke of culture war. Yesterday, the judge in the gay marriage litigation in San Francisco set closing arguments in the case for June. The outcome of the case will set a national precedent. It will also be appealed, and the case will eventually go to the Supreme Court.

Therefore, closing arguments must be incendiary. They must light new fires along the great, jutting ridge line of our religious and sexual preference colllisions. They must sum up entire vistas of opposition, constructed over the past thirty years by churches and parachurch organizations on one side, preaching a new emphasis on sexual depravity, moving a particular sin of the flesh to the center of their theological concern; academic departments and gay rights activists on the other, establishing whole departments to study sexual preference, meanwhile launching a broad-based movement in the era of AIDS to bring the plight of dying men and women to the attention of the world.

Both of these efforts required villains: the gay agenda storm troopers, the genocidal hets, the mean homosexuals, the fascist Christians. Neither argument could ever hope to exist in cool isolation. Both required the playbook of Greek mythology, men against gods and demons.

The American landscape of victory and defeat goes on and on, like that moment in Gone With The Wind, where the camera pans across the miles of Confederate war casualties, victims scattered across the frame, nothing but victims as far as the eye can see, and in the distance someone else’s victorious army, set to burn the Atlanta of all hope and desire and happiness.

Rush Limbaugh accuses Barack Obama of playing the race card to rally his troops by omitting white people from his call for political muster, though the president did mention women and gay people, many of whom are tremendously and unmistakably white. They’re the wrong white, we may suppose, the ghostly white face of the bluecoat enemy on the far side of the river.

But why belabor the point by bringing up the class warfare explicit in the Wall Street hearings or the endless list of foes kept in loving, burning embrace by the Tea Party movement, mobilizing for its next final conflict in November, so powerful that it has driven the governor of Florida out of his party and into the independent camp? Why become redundant by mentioning the skirmish over the omission of slavery from the Virginia Confederate History month celebration or the thousand daily slights perceived by women against women no matter what the issue or the aggrieved Christians in Hollywood, muzzled by what they see as the spirit of a new leftwing McCarthyism?

Instead, let’s go to the movies, not our live, real-time, unscripted spectacles, but the fake ones, to a scene in this year’s Oscar-winning Best Picture The Hurt Locker, which helps to bring order to this sprawling and chaotic diorama. A bomb specialist, played by Jeremy Renner, back home from the wars, stands in a supermarket and stares at a wall of choices, but the effect isn’t one of multiplicity. He is staring at a blank, dead wall of materia. Choice has been reduced to a single decision: stay home or go back. He might be looking into a wall, or he might be reflecting before a mirror.

The multiplicity of choices, in other words, is an illusion. All these conflicts are versions of the same conflict, a deep-rooted and organic thing, a sort of cultural bittersweet plant, tunneling down into the ground beneath our feet, tendrils running in every direction, interlocking and intersecting with the roots of all other plants, meanwhile shooting up into the sky, too, becoming one with every tree, flower and building that it touches.

We grew this plant. We built this wall. Without quite knowing it, yet advancing its life by purpose and design in our homes, churches and schools for decades, we have essentially become the sum of our divisions. We have become a fault line nation, and we barely know ourselves without the sound of beating drums and terror cries. Our democracy has turned into a series of social civil wars. Maybe that’s the definition of all democracy, and maybe it’s why democracies are so fragile, because their natural state, over time, tends to be spiritual militarization.

Americans hate it when their own personal conflicts and allegiances get flattened by bird’s eye view into a single shot. They feel violated and diminished. They have invested everything in their singular fight, and now they’re being told that from a certain perspective, their behavior is best described by comparison to that of their ideological opponents. Their rejection of the comparison is the best guide to its power and veracity.

This isn’t to say that the combatants should give up because all sides are exactly the same in every way. Far from it. If all sides were exactly the same in the justice of their claims, in the merits of their cases, there would be no conflict at all, and each and every person would simply go on with their lives. It’s precisely because each of these conflicts has a distinct history and sharply defined personality, a set of unique players and a constantly revised script, a treasury chest of money and a martyr’s wall of victims that we can see them so clearly in the larger context. Their definition in the frame is a measure of their seriousness.

But the big picture serves a modest purpose just the same. By holding a giant mirror up to our reality, by all looking at one moment into the cosmically vast surface of this image, we may for an instant appreciate the scale of the rhetorical and social violence we’ve unleashed, the sheer magnitude of our antipathy, written on every face, painted on every door, flashed across every screen ad nauseum until we can’t help but recognize ourselves.

Know thyself, America. Is that too much to ask this coming May Day?

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2010-04-26 12:35:02

THE PURPLE INTERVIEW: Author David Shields Talks Fact, Fiction and How He Turned Into The Poster Boy For Plagiarism (Part 1)

Filed under: Books, David Shields, Featured, Purple State Of Mind, Reasons To Believe, The Purple Interview
Posted by: John

by JOHN MARKS

Plagiarism is cool. All art is theft. There’s not much difference between fact and fiction. The traditional novel is dead. If you’ve heard these lines lately, chances are you’ve been listening to someone talk about author David Shields, whose new book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto has been making waves in the literary establishment.

Actually, that’s an understatement. The waves have reached the shores of major media. Unlike most works on the subject of literature, Reality Hunger has become part of a much wider discussion about the future of reading and writing. That’s partly because it’s a stirring and thought-provoking book, deserving of its attention, but it’s also a matter of timing.

I found out about the launch of the Apple IPad and the publication of Shields’ book at roughly the same moment in early March, and the two events bonded in my mind, as if the book functioned as a manual for grasping the implications of the device. That’s not far from the truth. The IPad seems likely to scramble media as never before, bringing music, books, movies, television and the Internet into one cosy device.

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto suggests what that scramble might look like, existentially and philosophically. The book is organized into 618 items on 204 pages, not counting the appendix. Some items are miniature essays. Some are declarations. Others are aphorisms. Most entries are quite short. Roughly half of them were written by other people, half by the author.

Item 1, an essay, starts, “Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art.” The last, item 618 ends with the line, “Let’s see who controls the danger.”

The philosophical heart of Reality Hunger might be item 503. “When I was seventeen,” Shields writes, “I wanted a life consecrated to art. I imagined a wholly committed art-life: every gesture would be an aesthetic expression or response. That got old fast because, unfortunately, life is filled with allergies, credit-card bills, tedious commutes, etc. Life is, in large part, rubbish. The beauty of reality-based art –art underwritten by reality hunger–is that it’s perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) “life as art”. Everything in life, turned sideways, can look like–can be–art. Art suddenly looks and is more interesting, and life, astonishingly enough, starts to be livable.”

Most items in Reality Hunger receive a citation in the appendix at the back of the book. Item 503, we’re told, was written by Shields. Item 502, on the other hand, “Deep down, you know you’re him,” is ad copy for HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Reality Hunger makes a lot of people uneasy, even fairly powerful people like Stephen Colbert.

Several days ago, when Shields appeared on the Colbert Report, Colbert tore the book apart, literally.

The comedian compared Shields to a neighbor who enters a friend’s house and decides to take the furniture and call it his own. On the one hand, it was a comedy bit; on the other, you got the feeling Colbert meant every word. Meanwhile, in a New York Times review, Michiko Kakutani called the book “deeply nihilistic”. Laura Miller, over at Salon, was more sympathetic, but ultimately questioned why the book had to be written in the first place. Who was stopping the author from exercising his predilections?

I have my own reservations, which you can find here, but I would still argue that David Shields’ book is a must-read for anyone who cares about the state of literary creation. It’s not so much about the arguments themselves. It’s about the cultural moment embodied by the book, the appearance of the Apple IPad and the collapse of mainstream journalism, the rise of the e-book and the decline of print. Shields may or may not be right on any given score, but he’s unimpeachable in his sense of the zeitgeist.

Everything is changing for people who write and read books.

So if you want a launching point for teasing out the implications of that change, or if you merely want to orient yourself on a wildly chaotic taste grid, this is the book for you. Despite my caveats, which I made known to him before we spoke, Shields was kind enough to join the conversation.

We spoke for more than an hour, covering everything from his reasons for writing the book to his hopes for its reception, from his thoughts on god to his lack of sympathy for HBO’s The Wire. In the interest of a better read, I’ve broken the interview into two parts.

Part Two will appear next Monday.

Q:My first question is whether you’ve been surprised at the response to the book. It’s such a hard publishing environment in which to get any book noticed, but especially a literary manifesto, to break through the screen of white noise and get people talking about your work. Did you know as you were putting it together that you had something like that or was it more of a wing and a prayer?

A:More the latter. It was just a funny book that I put together that seemed to me possible to get published by a small press or an academic press, so I was delighted that Knopf decided to publish it. I worked hard to get the book out there, as did the publisher, but yeah, I was surprised as anyone.

What happened, for better or worse, is that the book got cartoonized into two positions. One, that the novel is dead, and two, plagiarism is A-OK, and somehow those became the talking points of the book. It’s fine by me, I guess, but it definitely cartoonizes the argument of the book, which to me is much more about the literary and existential and artistic refinements of non-fiction, but that’s a harder argument to parse. Basically, what happened is that the book got talked about far more than I could possibly have imagined, I think primarily because of those two talking points that the book got cartoonized into imbibing.

Those ideas are in there, but there’s been a bald simplification of them, I think.

Q:Right, because they’re both embedded in everything else.

A: Right. Does that ring true to you?

Q:It absolutely does. I can see why it happened. Just watching the Colbert episode the other night, that’s obviously what he went for, the whole idea of plagiarism, and that’s a neat bit for a comedy routine.

A: Yeah.

Q: But it doesn’t really talk about how you reach that conclusion or all the many ways that you tease out the ramifications or how you surround it with your own sense of conflict. You’re thinking aloud to me a lot in the book, and since it reads me like you’re including thoughts that have provoked your own thoughts, and to separate the argument about plagiarism from those other pieces does seem to turn it into a gag.

A: I saw some blog post that called me a con artist. Michiko Kakutani called me “deeply nihilistic”. That’s the farthest thing from the book. The book is deadly serious. It’s not a con game. It’s trying to rescue non-fiction as art. It’s trying to resurrect the nature of literary discourse. It’s an utterly serious, utterly committed, completely passionate book, and I completely stumbled into this other posture.

I’ve told this story a few times on the web, so stop me if you’ve heard it, but for many years I taught creative writing at UW. I was hired as a fiction writer, and then my interest in fiction started to evaporate, and I felt like I had to justify my existence to myself and my students, because I was no longer reading or writing or teaching fiction. I was much more interested in the philosophical excitements of literary non-fiction, and so I developed a course, and the course packet became this big blue unwieldy binder that year by year I was able to edit down with greater and greater precision, so that basically became Reality Hunger.

But I didn’t begin with some clever idea, oh, I’ll have the whole book be plagiarized. Basically the whole book is a mixture. About half of it is “mine” and about half of it is other people, and I didn’t especially care who was making the argument. But I did come to realize how beautifully the confusion of who the speaker is embodies the argument that the book is trying to make, namely that all great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.

I love that the reader is not to be able to tell who is speaking. Is it Shields? Is it Emerson? Is it Nietzsche? Sonny Rollins? Is it some weird admixture of all those. I came to realize that the quote that you can’t tell the provenance of beautifully embodies the argument I’m trying to make about genre. Does that make sense to you?

Q:Yes.

A: I didn’t begin with the appropriation, in other words. I stumbled into it, but then came to realize it was a gorgeous trope of the argument I was trying to make, and I’m fine with being the poster boy for appropriation. I stand in an ancient and noble tradition from, you know, the beginning of artistic creation until now. Artists have always plundered, but that’s hardly the only argument I’m making, and it’s not even the entire argument I’m making. I’m not even an absolutist against copyright.

Q:How did you decide what went into the book and what didn’t? Obviously if the book arose through years, there were things that came in at one point and other things that maybe slipped out. How did you winnow to the point where you thought, okay, this is roughly the book? Or did it kind of happen organically over time?

A: That’s a great question, and it drove me completely crazy, and it drove a couple of my friends completely crazy because I basically finished the book, my goodness, three or four years ago. I had a rough, rough draft of it pretty much done, essentially the book, and then Knopf bought The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead[[an earlier Shields book]] and Reality Hunger together as a two-book deal. They wanted to publish The Thing About Life first, and they did, and they wanted that book to have a long life before Reality Hunger came in and moved the conversation in a different direction, so basically Reality Hunger was sitting there for a couple of years, and what happened is that I would have to update stuff as the world changed.

James Frey entered the picture, for instance. The hip hop chapter got built up. I forget if the balloon boy made it into anything other than the flap copy.

I was constantly moving stuff around. It was basically a case of reading as writing. There would be certain passages, and I was never looking to find stuff per se for the book, but I’m a voracious reader, an obsessive reader, and so basically any time a passage would just completely seize me and demand entry, I would consider it, and I would rewrite the book and rewrite it and rewrite it, until I could find a place for the new passage. I’d bounce it off a couple of friends, and the book was just constantly changing.

In a way, the book is a kind of record of the favorite passages I’ve ever read, 618 passages, and as I’ve said, about half of them are mine, and of the ones I’ve added, they were passages that knocked so loudly on my door that they demanded entry. They were just passages where I just said, ‘my god, that has not been said yet, and it’s said beautifully. I’ll tweak it a bit.’

To me, it was a case of what passages lived on my nerve endings with such ferocity that they demanded inclusion. That was the criterion.

Q: Beautifully put. And it absolutely feels that way in the reading. Let me ask you about something that really struck me and was an intense part of my pleasure in the book and really reminded me of this old Julio Cortazar novel Hopscotch. I actually really enjoyed flipping to the back of the book and finding out who said what, and actually when I then went back to the passage, I found myself lingering over things maybe longer than I would have.

It was interesting, and this may have just been my lack of observational skill, but I read about half of the book without realizing that the citations were at the back, so when I went back there and saw it, I had two separate readings of the book, one in which I didn’t know who said what, and one in which I did. Now, in the book, you talk about the fact that you wrestled with the lawyers about whether to include the appendix, and they insisted that you must, and then you advised the reader to cut those pages out, but as a reader, I actually found the appendix with the citations to be a source of delight. I wonder if you saw at all the aesthetic possibilities of the inclusion of the appendix?

A:Definitely. I must admit, I’ve come to love the appendix. It’s one of my favorite parts of the book. However, given what the book’s about, it’s a complicated thing. Someone sent me an email that said, ‘I don’t believe you ever intended not to have citations,’ but I really did. It was a quite serious legal battle between me and the publishers and copyright lawyers. I was adamant that, given what the book is arguing for, it would be completely hypocritical and completely an act of bad faith if I were to then willy-nilly put the citations in the back without a whiff of protest. It was crucial to me to register a protest.

I have come to see the literary and dare I say the commercial value of the appendix, and I feel that if we didn’t have the appendix in the back, and if I didn’t have a disclaimer, it seems to me quite possible this book would have fallen considerably lower on the radar than it did. I think that one of the ironies of the book is, by having the appendix and talking about my reluctance to include the appendix, that I think I forced the issue of appropriation out into the open, saying outright that I’m not doing anything that Shakespeare and James Joyce and Tchaikovsky and Monet and William Burroughs and Kathy Acker and every artist from the beginning of time has done, but making that armature an actual part of the book.

I got a wonderful email from my colleague Heather McHugh, talking about four different ways in which the appendix sort of forces one’s reading. One, she said, you read the book blind, without checking the citations. Two, that you read from the book to the appendix, constantly flipping back and forth. Third, that you read the appendix almost as a separate text, and fourth, that you read the appendix scouring for your own name, hoping that you got quoted.

So many people have said the same thing, which is that there is a kind of giddy, funny, limbo joy in going back and forth between text and citations, and I get the appeal.

But at the same time, it’s crucial to me to democratize culture, to flatten out those voices. I don’t want people saying, “Okay, Nietzsche said this, so therefore it must be profound, whereas Joe Biden says this, so it must be silly.” To me, it’s extremely important that the book is not an anthology of other people’s voices, but in some crucial sense it’s my book, that I’ve chosen these passages, I’ve remixed them, I’ve positioned them in such a way that the quotes are decontextualized. It’s crucial to me that the passages get read as weirdly inside my megaphone.

It’s vital that on some level the book not become a game of spot the quotation, and that you enter the argument that the book is making, and as a friend of mine says, that you experience the dubiety of the first person pronoun, that you not be sure who’s speaking. Otherwise, to me, it can become this endless came of tic tac toe or jeopardy, and that’s considerably less interesting me.

But tell me how it’s a pleasure for you. In what way is it interesting to go back and forth?

Q: I think if the book had been only other people’s quotations, that would have been different. But because of the mix of your own very strong authorial voice and the other voices, which feels very organic, the appendix becomes a way of investigating, I guess, which pieces of the argument come from where, how they might reinforce each other, how they might be differently read.

A: One thing I was hoping is that people would recognize how much of it was quotations without any help. There are a few hints I give early, and then in the middle of the book, I essentially cop to it, at section 296 or so, in which I basically say that half the book is taken from other sources. But even without the citations, I would hope that people would start to hear quotations. There are well-known lines from Eliot and Emily Dickinson, so at a certain point. I was just hoping that people would start to recognize how much of the book is quotation, and they’d sort of do the investigation themselves through Google. There’d be kind of a pleasurable feeling of investigation, whereas part of me still resists the idea that I hand to the reader on a silver platter what the quotes are.

A lot of friends of mine read an early galley of the book that didn’t have any quotations, and you know, they’d have one hand on the Google search button and the other hand reading the book, and there was kind of a fun investigation going on, and I was sort of hoping there would be a funny carnival ride in which readers would start to realize how much of the stuff is from other sources, and almost all these passages, the moment you type them in, they essentially come up on the web.

I just wanted that extra step to be part of the readers experience.

Q: One of the things that makes the book work is that the voice is consistent throughout. No matter how much you borrow, there is a sense that it’s all of a piece. How did you manage to balance those two forces?

A: Let’s see. The two forces being…

Q:A singular voice of your own mixed with a huge amount of material from other people.

A: To me, it was always about the former. It was always about violating everyone else’s voice as needed in order to put it into my own register. Some friends of mine think, and in many ways I agree with them, that it’s the most personal book I’ve ever written. Or if you don’t like the word written, perhaps composed.

It’s a deeply personal book, which is one of the ironies here. It’s in some ways a very naked, very personal, very revealing and oddly passionate book, the irony being, of course, that it’s composed of a lot of the work of others. It’s a short book. It’s about 60,000 words, and maybe 25,000 words come from other people.

So for me, the loyalty was always to making it a consistent voice. As I worked on this manuscript over many years, as a course package became a quasi-manuscript, became a book, I often forgot, did I write that? Did I write this anew? Is it something I wrote in an earlier book? Did it begin as a passage from Frank Rich and have I rewritten it so much that I can’t even find it? That happened many times, when I would begin with a passage from who knows where, and I’d rewrite it so thoroughly that I could no longer find the actual source. There was almost not a single word left in the original passage.

There’s a crucial moment in the book where I say, “Most passages in this book are taken from other sources. Nearly every passage I’ve clipped I’ve also revised, at least a little—for the sake of compression, consistency, or whim. You mix and scratch the shit up to the level your own head is at…”

To me, that’s the loyalty. To me, it’s to making the argument cohere, and to making the voice weirdly my own, so that a lot of people, even my editor, thought it was all me. It all sounded like me, which to me is a high compliment. I hope the book is weirdly seamless, and that was the whole point for me. Virtually everyone agreed with my project. There were a couple of people who said, no, I’m not cool with that, so please take me out, but everyone else was excited, because they understand, as I say ad nauseum, this is the history of art. Art Is Theft. Plagiarism and creativity are, in my view, and in the view of many people virtually synonymous, so in a way I’m just making manifest what creative artists have done from the beginning of time.

Anyway, a long-winded answer to your question, which is all of my loyalty was to consistency of voice.

Q:When it comes to writing a manifesto, one of the questions, maybe the first question, the obvious question, that always arises, is who is this for? If I hear you correctly, at least the first audience for this stuff was your students.

A: It really was, and also my colleagues who did not want to have a non-fiction track in the creative writing program. There’s kind of a pedestrian origin of the book, where I was trying to convince myself, convince my students, convince my colleagues who only wanted a poetry and fiction track, that somehow non-fiction wasn’t art. And my feeling was You’ve got to be kidding. Really? Non-fiction to me is thrillingly art.

I’m less interested in plagiarism per se, which is only a subset of my argument. I’m less interested in the sort of boring take-down of the novel, which is only a subset of my argument. To me, the core of my argument is to try and rescue non-fiction as an art, to argue for a certain kind of essayistic non-fiction.

I’m doing defining non-fiction upward, in other words, when so much of the contemporary discussion of non-fiction is defining it downward, as a subset of journalim.

So we get what I call trials by Google, where every work of non-fiction gets vetted as if it were an article in the New York Times, and we find out that a person stole three words from another source or he didn’t really go to the dentist on Thursday, and all this discussion is defining non-fiction downward. To me, the core manifesto is to bring along fellow travelers, fellow writers of literary non-fiction, personal essay, lyric essay, whatever you want to call it, and try to make extraordinarily high claims for the most ambitious non-fiction to stand absolutely shoulder to shoulder with poetry and fiction.

It’s complicated because on the one hand I’m saying genre doesn’t exist, and at the same time I’m saying something like non-fiction is terribly interesting within the terms of genre, so it’s complicated, and the argument in my view is not completely worked out, but the core manifesto, for me, is that I’m trying to issue a call to arms to writers of non-fiction and readers of non-fiction to stop defining non-fiction downward, stop genuflecting at the altar of the novel, and see that non-fiction, when turned sideways, can be unbelievably interesting.

To me, the key move is one where, instead of taking non-fiction premises for granted, like fact and reality and truth and verifiability, that if you turn those counter-clockwise, you can take of non-fiction and make a kind of trampoline off which to bounce into the most serious questions. What is truth? What is reality? What is memory? What is knowledge?

The most interesting questions in existence can get incredibly, richly investigated by non-fiction because of the very fact that it’s purporting to be true, and works of non-fiction that worry that truth value strike me as having the potential to be extraordinary works of art.

On my Facebook page, I have this thing called a very partial reading list, 120 books that, to me, embody that really beautifully.

Q: What’s the top of the list? What’s something that’s grabbed you lately?

A: But what’s something that I really love of late? A few that come to mind. I’m a huge fan of Simon Gray’s The Smoking Diaries, a four-volume book in which he meditates for a thousand pages on the relationship between mortality and art. Another book I really love is Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, an incredibly wonderful book. I love Leonard Michaels Shuffle.

I love Sebald, of course. I love some V.S. Naipaul. I love Sarah Mancuso’s The Two Kinds Of Decay. I love J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello.

Q:That’s a fantastic novel.

A: I love that book so much. That book hovers so beautifully between forms. What do you like about it?

Q: I think I like it so much because that character feels like Coetzee thinking aloud about everything that’s ever mattered to him but also about what it’s been like to be the figure who thinks aloud publicly about those thing, and yet also, I think she’s a fully realized character, but realized through the ideas, realized through her tastes. I’ve never read anything quite like it, and it’s also my favorite of his books.

A: You’ve said it really beautifully. I once wrote a long fan letter to Coetzee about the book, just how much I loved it, and I told him how badly undervalued I thought the book was. Each chapter, in my view, is an attempt by Coetzee to revisit a stance he had taken in an earlier book. In each chapter, virtually without exception, the character undermines an affirmation that Coetzee earlier made, whether affirmation of animal rights or anti-apartheid political activism or friendship or love or sex or art. Each chapter, almost point by point, eviscerates an affirmation of human existence, so the whole book could not be more thrilling, as Coetzee-Costello is trying to find something in existence that he/she can actually affirm, and by the end of the book the only thing she can affirm is the belling of the sound of frogs in mud, just sheer animal existence, and that to me is essentially Coetzee’s stance. He’s not a nihilist exactly, but a starkly godless realist.

It’s a point by point attempt to meditate on the most serious aspects of existence. I think of this great line by Samuel Johnson, who said “a book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure existence”, and I love, love, love books that put as the latter their primary reason for existence, that are investigating the question of how the writer felt being alive. That I find utterly thrilling, and everything else I find utterly trivial. The books I want to affirm, the books Reality Hunger is trying to argue for, are the books that put absolutely front and center how we solve being alive and don’t settle for entertaining the reader with a kind of narrative legerdemain which often bores me to tears.

Q: Let’s talk for a second about that word “reality”. That’s a really interesting, really riveting part of reading this book for me, because my last book is a look at evangelical Christianity through the lens of my own experience in that world, my getting into it, and my leaving of it, and reality means something very different for devout evangelical people, as it does for a lot of people, than it would for me now. It’s a hugely loaded term that can mean anything from the aesthetic of a particular kind of television to the essence of a major truth claim. And then there’s the whole question of literary realism. So I’m just wondering how you bat that word around and how far you wanted it to stretch in this book?

A: That’s a fair point, and I think people have questioned me, and I didn’t read your whole review, but I looked at it, and I got the sense that you struggle with my use of the term “reality”, and I’m not totally satisfied with how much I’ve defined reality. The way I’d say it is this. Obviously, I’m not pretending to have unique access to reality, that I’m the first person on the planet who’s determined what reality is, and it’s sort of like that famous line by Justice Stewart about pornography, you know I can’t define it in concrete terms, but I know it when I see it.

For me, I’m obviously not defining reality in Christian terms or in religious terms. I’m not defining it according to the terms of reality TV. I don’t think reality is constituted by reality television or by the canons of realistic fiction. Those are not useful guideposts for me. For me, what I keep on coming back to is this.

In my view, we can never quite get to “reality”. Reality is always within quadruple quotation marks. The perceiver by his very presence alters what is perceived, but I always come back to the idea that I want the thinnest possible membrane between writer and reader. That is what I seem to want, and whether that’s in film, in a movie like Humpday, which has no script, but tried to allow as much rawness, a lack of filter…

Q:Great movie, by the way.

A: Oh good. I’m glad you’ve seen it That’s just of one among many examples. I have the long list at the beginning of the book. Humpday or Curb Your Enthusiasm or Billy Collins or Dave Eggers or Todd Haynes first film, Eminem’s first album—there’s a kind of rawness, nakedness, unfilteredness, that strikes me as real. I can talk probably best about writing. I saw a New Yorker review by James Wood that said I was trying to define reality, but I’m not a scholar, I’m not a literary critic really. I’m just a working, practicing writer who is bored to death by the novel, bored to death by the conventional memoir, and I want to argue for the work.

I don’t know, I know it when I see it, this idea…I’ve just been re-reading this extraordinary work by Maggie Nelson called Bluets, and it’s so raw, so unfiltered, that I guess that’s the best I can do, this idea that there is as thin as possible a membrane between writer and reader.

I’m trying to find a passage in the book where I quote Adam Gopnik. He’s talking about some work by Francis Bacon, and he says, only work of authentic disorder can break through our contemporary existence, basically that we live in a completely simulated, completely mediated, completely artificial society, and only works of authentic disorder can somehow break through. I always go to that Kafka line, “a book should be the axe to break the frozen sea within us.” To me, I really love work that has this authentic disorder.

That’s the best I can do. I have that long list on page two. And I have a relatively useful description on page three, in which I say, “An artistic movement, albeit an organic and as-yet-unstated one, is forming. What are its key components? A deliberate unartiness: “raw” material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional. (What, in the last half century, has been more influential than Abraham Zapruder’s Super-8 Film of the Kennedy assassination?) Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture; plasticity of form, pointillism; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity, self-ethnography, anthropological autobiography; a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and non-fiction; the lure and blur of the real.”

I feel like, gee, that’s as good as I can do. If someone has a better distinction, go for it. That’s a relatively useful description.

[[IN PART 2, ON MONDAY, WE'LL TALK ABOUT GOD, CREATIONISM AND THE WIRE. BE THERE]]

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