A Room of Everyone’s Own: The Writer as Public Fixture

Essays
April 9, 2012 | 19 4 min read

The portmanteau “coffice,” which sounds at first like a cute one-liner, turns out to be so useful for describing contemporary reality that it may, like “staycation,” soon appear in dictionaries. Originating in South Korea in 2010, it refers to a coffee shop employed as one’s office. It’s also a verb: to coffice. Bootstrapping entrepreneurs throw the term around, and though I haven’t heard writers use it yet, I suspect they will soon. Every time I stop into a café in New York City, I see them, ears tethered to computers, faces aglow with laptop light. When I speak of “writers,” of course, I am not discussing crafters of emails or grocery lists. I am thinking of aspiring novelists, creative non-fiction writers, and poets too. “There they are,” I think. “The cofficeurs.” And what I have always been tempted to say to them is: Go home.

Writing in public feels like a performance, but, when we’re dealing with literature, the performance is not what endures. To put it another way: the final outcome is the performance. I can’t help but assume when I see the coffice-bound writer as one who privileges persona over results.

However, when I asked writers I know about their own relationship with public writing (after all, some of my best friends write in coffee shops), I was surprised by the range of answers. One explained to me, on a crowded subway train, that the temptation of Internet pornography was so strong that a public environment helped him avoid autoeroticism, and kept him focused and productive. This did little to assuage my aversion, but I was interested to hear that internal distraction can be just as much an obstacle to writing as external distraction.

Another writer pointed to the brute economic necessity of the coffice. This is a salaried reporter with benefits, required to travel locally, who makes a living posting short compact creative news pieces to a blog with as many as fifteen deadlines a week. Wherever he can grab a moment to write, he does. “Sometimes I need to leave my apartment to get work done, to just change the space.” I pointed out that very few writers are writing a novel because rent is due. His response: “Novelists are exactly the same as reporters. Just take away reality, the galaxy of issues that go along with dealing with actual people and their lives, and deadlines.” Ultimately, he said, “If you’re saying that NYC supports a large number of creative types who end up working in public, yes, you’re correct. Should they shut up (their laptops) and get a job in a cooperative office space, maybe. Me, I’m thrilled Variety [Cafe] has free WiFi.”

A third more casual writer — my partner — suggested that cofficing may be less a decision about process than a conditioned behavior, the byproduct of college culture. Many educated individuals were brought up in dorms, libraries, large classrooms, campus lawns, study halls, dining halls, and community lounges. To think and create in public has become a norm. Indeed, the implied presence of an immense public when working on a computer with Internet access is almost inescapable. Yet this only seems to sustain my view that writing in public is, like many other habits of college students and Internet users, an attention-seeking performance.

cover Is that so wrong? Coffee-house culture was vital to European literature of the last century, Ernest Hemingway , perhaps the patron saint of cofficers, not only wrote in public, but wrote about how he wrote in public (maybe even as he was writing in public). Hemingway was a great talent, but also a showoff who required validation, and in his youth liked to execute his art before an audience between shots of “rum St. James” and eyeing a pretty girl “with a face fresh as a newly minted coin,” as he writes in the first chapter of A Moveable Feast (a text that no doubt helped fuel the trend of Americans writing in cafés).

But writing in seclusion was the true ritual throughout even Hemingway’s life. In his 1954 Nobel Prize Banquet Speech, Hemingway said, “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life… For [a writer] does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.” Virginia Woolf, who also knew from solitude, even went as far as to write that a marginalized individual could only contribute quality literature to the world by first having A Room of One’s Own.

These days, many of our most prominent writers seem to have gotten the memo. With the exception of Nathan Englander, who I’m told is a regular at the Hungarian Pastry Shop in Morningside Heights, there seem to be surprisingly few published writers operating in coffee shops. In my casual research I came across How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors edited by Dan Crowe, wherein famous living writers were asked to comment about their own process. Among the sixty-seven or so contributors, only two writers allude to writing in cafes or coffee shops. Nicholson Baker describes his earplugs as useful “in any loud place,” but does not reference a particular public location. Elif Shafak explains, “I am a nomad… libraries, cafes, streets, trains stations… everywhere can be my writing abode,” but like she said, she’s a nomad. Willy Vlautin writes at a racetrack. From A.M. Homes to ZZ Packer the other 64 prefer solitude from their pre-published days to the present, sometimes referencing objects they keep on their desks or pictures hung on a wall in a private room as things that serve their process.

As these writers know — as Hemingway and Woolf knew — literature is a relationship both with solitude and with the rest of the world, and I suppose what bothers me about the laptop hive of the “coffice” is that it offers neither. So when I see writers hunched over their third refills, maybe I don’t want to say, “go home,” but “stay.” Close your laptop, observe humanity, have a lengthy conversation with a fellow customer or artist, then go home and get the work done.

Image of Ernest Hemingway in London at Dorchester Hotel 1944 via Wikimedia Commons

is an associate writing consultant and adjunct lecturer at Columbia University and Baruch College. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Details, The Bellevue Literary Review, Nerve, Forklift Ohio, and Court Green. A short film he wrote, "REMAINS," was in competition at the 2012 SXSW film festival.

Essays

Sula

Essays
November 30, 2010 | 2 7 min read
Editor's note: This is essay is excerpted from Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book, published by Da Capo Press.  About a month after I finished the piece, my middle daughter, nineteen, read Sula for a college class and called me while I was on a book tour in Memphis for my latest novel; while I stood beside the blues bars on Beale Street, she told me that the rich language and metaphor in the novel changed the way she looked at the world. 1. The Virginia Quarterly Review recently devoted a special issue to the price of e-readers and technology – the endless frantic mining for the raw materials that will power up Ipads and Kindles.  I don’t live on a street where anyone has e-readers, and I’d been thinking old school for a different reason:  How could I give away or bequeath an e-reader? Looking around at my hundred-year-old house, a former farmhouse on a dead end street of tiny bungalows and stucco cottages in inland southern California, and having attended seven funerals in the past two years, I’ve already thought about my most prized possessions:  What would I want my children to have? I have so little.  There’s the handwoven piece of material shaped like a folder, with thread ties, enclosing green felt pages which hold needles.  My great-grandmother made it, in Switzerland, in the early part of the century.  My girls have seen me use it countless times, to mend their clothes. My brother has been dead eight years now – he bequeathed me, unknowingly, his Mexican fighting chicken, named Coco, who is ten years old and still lays eggs.  Also his sheepskin-lined Levi jacket, with a spatter of ragged holes from where someone threw battery acid at him, which I wear when it’s very cold or I miss him. A cast iron frying pan given to me by my mother-in-law, who had been told that a blonde girl might not be able to cook properly for her son, but who believed in me enough to give me the pan, show me how to season it, and then teach me how to fry chicken. And my books. Because I still live in the same city where I was born, and no one in my family has ever loved books, the walls of my house are lined with them, including all the volumes of my childhood. My three girls have read most of them: the ragged, much-handled copy of Little Women, illustrated with bonneted sisters; the ancient copy of Heidi which meant so much to me as I imagined my mother living that life, in the Swiss Alps (she spoke very little about her childhood except to say that when she was ten, her mother’s body lay on the dining room table until the funeral in the tiny mountain town.  (They refused to touch Alfred Hitchcock’s Daring Detectives, circa 1969, which used to scare the crap out of me and which I still love for the gory illustrations.) My most prized book is a cheap paperback.  Toni Morrison’s Sula.  I’ve lent and given away hundreds of books to hundreds of people, but I’ve never lent Sula to anyone except my oldest daughter. I waited years to hand it to her, a great reader like me, waiting for the right moment to put it on her dresser or in her palm and have her say reverently, “This is the book you read every year, the one we always tease you about.”  But not until she was twenty, a junior in college, did I succeed in having her actually pick it up.  And of course, she said with utter incredulity after she’d finished it, and handed it back unceremoniously, “Yeah, the mother lights her son on fire.  And the women all end up alone.  Thanks, Mom.” 2. Was I fourteen?  I had just met my future husband, in junior high.  It was summer.  I went to the Riverside Public Library as often as I could because it was quiet and safe.  The paperback on the revolving wire rack, with a pencil-marked A on the inside first page.  A for Adult?  It was for sale.  75 cents. I picked it up because the young woman on the cover looked so much like my high school friends.  Brown skin, a cloud of black hair, a dark-blue floral print dress that looks ’70s Qiana-fabric slinky, and a birthmark over one eye.  Above her the words say— SHE IS DIFFERENT, SHE IS MAGICAL, SHE IS SULA Until then, every adult novel I read had come checked out from this library or the bookmobile that came to the grocery store parking lot in my neighborhood.  I thought it was a book for a girl.  I didn’t know Sula would drown a child, watch her mother burn without running to help, steal her best friend’s husband, defy her town, and die alone at thirty. This slim novel—149 pages, the paperback published in 1975—became a dark and luminous icon for me.  It was like a premonition.  It made me into a writer, it colored how I became a mother, and images and words from it unfurl themselves in my mind—like dye dropped into water—nearly every day, as I stand at the sink, as I drive a car, as I look at my children.  Its cheap pages darkened to marigold, Sula remains on a shelf near my desk, except for the days that I read it again, annually.  I have read the book at least once a year for the last thirty-five years.  I married at twenty-two, and every year my husband would see the paperback, the girl’s implacable gaze on him, her hand under her chin, and he would say, “You reading that book again?”  I would say, “You watching Shaft again?” We had memorized large portions of the dialogue of each. The first time I kissed him was on the asphalt basketball court down the street from my house.  At fourteen, I had understood little of the scene where Sula is making love with Ajax, but I never forgot what she saw: …the golden eyes and the velvet helmet of hair…If I take a chamois and rub real hard on the bone, right on the ledge of your cheek bone, some of the black will disappear.  It will flake away into the chamois and underneath there will be gold leaf. Even then, on the school playground, I studied his face, trying to define it in word-images.  His skin was the color of palm-bark, brown with red underneath; his black eyebrows were narrow crow feathers; on his cheek a complicated scar like Chinese script from where someone had hit him with jagged rock. Months earlier, I’d been walking down a street with my best friend.  She blithely agreed to hitch a ride in an ancient Buick like a dirty white boat. I followed her into the backseat, and a few blocks later, the young men inside turned menacing. At fourteen, I had understood exactly what happened when Sula and her best friend Nel are confronted by four Irish boys on the way home from school, boys who have been hunting them as sport, and Sula pulls out her grandmother’s paring knife— Sula squatted down in the dirt road and put everything down on the ground; her lunchpail, her reader, her mittens, her slate.  Holding the knife in her right hand, she pulled the slate toward her and pressed her left forefinger down hard on its edge.  Her aim was determined but inaccurate.  She slashed off only the tip of her own finger.  The four boys stared open-mouthed at the wound and the scrap of flesh, like a button mushroom, curling in the cherry blood that ran into the corners of the slate. Sula raised her eyes to them.  Her voice was quiet.  “If I can do that to myself, what you suppose I’ll do to you?” The first time I’d read it the metaphor and simile went into my brain like the vapor of the PCP-soaked Kool cigarettes my compatriots were smoking that summer. I studied my fingertips.  Button mushroom.  Cherry blood. In the Buick, I told the men an elaborate story about my stepfather who was a sheriff’s deputy.  I described his shotgun, fearlessly looking into their weed-reddened eyes, and said, “Do whatever you’re going to do, but when you drop us off, he’ll find you and kill you.” My stepfather owned three Laundromats.  We cleaned them on the weekend.  He had no gun. They left us on another corner, and my friend said, “You just lied and lied.” Thirty years later. My friend Nicole and I sit at my kitchen table, and while she heats a straightening comb on the burner to tame my middle daughter’s hair before a dance, I am reminded of when Sula returns to town after being gone for ten years, visiting Nel’s kitchen— Nel lowered her head onto crossed arms while tears of laughter dripped into the warm diapers…Her rapid soprano and Sula’s dark sleepy chuckle made a duet that frightened the cat and made the children run in from the back yard, puzzled at first by the wild free sounds, then delighted to see their mother stumbling merrily toward the bathroom, holding on to her stomach, fairly singing through the laughter:  “Aw.  Aw.  Lord.  Sula.  Stop.” I am the one burying my face while Nicole says, “I looked at this brotha’s picture, the one, you understand, he thought best to put up on the dating site, and I see these rings around his face, and I look again, and he’s got his damn driver license photo on there.  That’s the best he can do and he thinks I’m about to give him a call.  Cause he’s a catch.  With his lazy broke ass.” My girls hover in the doorway and narrow their eyes, a little afraid to come in. 3. The business of loving and buying and reading books is not a zero-sum game. In my daily life, I know no one with an e-reader.  It’s not that kind of neighborhood. And you can’t give away a book on that “platform.”  Thousands of people might only read on their iPads or Kindles in the future; they may never buy another printed-on-paper novel.  Thousands more will never have books; they will tell their stories by firelight and kerosene lamp in a circle of people as they always have (or in our family’s case, standing around the oil-drum cooker in my father-in-law’s driveway, the barbecue smoke drifting over all the cousins as they talk about a shooting that happened in 1921 or a shooting that happened last weekend, as they talk about how much a nephew loves the wrong woman and she’s certain to ruin his life).  And thousands more of us will only read books we can hold in our hands and pass on. Nel and Sula.  “We were two throats and one eye and we had no price.” The book was on the couch again, while I wrote this.  My youngest daughter, fourteen, said, “What’s Sula about anyway?” She has seen it on every table, bed, and couch in the house, her entire life.  The solemn, hooded eyes of the young woman study her.  Does she recognize the guarded, evaluating stare as the one she’s seen countless times in the gaze of her aunts, my friends, and me?  At a school function surrounded by white parents, at sports events where people study us, at the store where the security guard frowns slightly? She picked it up and looked at the back cover.
Essays
| 2 7 min read
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19 comments:

  1. As a “cofficeur”–let’s play that one out as quickly as possible– my rebuttal is simple: if you’re getting work done, the rest of the world can go euphemism. It’s not performative–it’s necessary.

    I’ve always been told, and held as wise advice, to treat writing as much like a 9-5 as possible. As such, I go someplace to write. Sometimes I even put on a tie. I have a hell of a time writing at home because home is where I go to relax, to sleep, to, yeah, fart around on the internet. Just like I am now, before I head to the coffice.

  2. Eric hit this one on the nose. I spend forty hours a week at my desk at work. When I go home, I go to the place where I sleep, eat, watch tv, surf the internet, shower and read. My natural inclination is to do any one of those things before actually buckling down and working on my novel or freelance articles.

    When I put my laptop in its case, grab the bus to the nearest Panera or Starbucks (god help me, I’m not very original when it comes to my sources of caffeine and pastries), sit down and look at a blank screen, something clicks inside my brain and tells me I have to work.

    If that little light doesn’t click on and I want to do something else, I either have to walk around with my laptop or I have to take the bus back home.

    Silly? Yes. Productive? Very. I often find that when I’m the most bored and reluctant to write is when I end up forcing myself to sit there and write out of it and (every once in awhile) surprise myself.

    I see plenty of poseurs and weekend novelists at coffee shops (hey you! Stop stealing the outlet I need to plug in my laptop!). Give us a chance – some of us might come up with something good someday!

  3. Nobody uses the word coffice. This article is about the author’s feelings of contempt and superiority (perhaps discomfort, probably insecurity) when visually confronted by thousands of aspiring writers at work.

    I do 99% of my work at home, and occasionally in a coffee shop. I concentrate better at home. But with headphones to block out the noise, I’ve gotten myself into the zone at Starbucks too. I’m not sure it really matters.

  4. For me, writing in public isn’t about being seen by others as a writer as it is about being seen by others as a person who exists (and seeing others.) I simply can’t spend the majority of my waking, working life alone. I begin writing projects at home in silence and solitude, and I tend to go to a cafe to do things like editing, proofreading, research, revision, etc. It’s just something I need to do so I don’t go stir-crazy. It’s comforting and revitalizing for me to get out into the world where there are other people, and be reminded that minds besides mine do in fact exist. It’s important and humbling for me to acknowledge that.

    In terms of the idea of “facing eternity, or the lack of it, each day,” that’s what my meditation practice is for.

  5. If you can’t work alone, in solitude, then there is a pretty good chance you shouldn’t be a writer. I totally agree with the author of this piece. People who write in public are more interested in being seen as a writer than actually being a writer. I’m not saying that these people don’t write. I’m sure they do. But the scrim of self-consciousness that comes with performing in public is a detriment to the work, not a boon.

  6. Let he who is without writing sin throw the first pencil.

    There you go. Mention me on one of your blogs you hacks.

  7. I spend enough time outside–I work outside, I cycle every day, I go for long walks–and I have no desire to spend a single minute sitting in a coffee shop, working, surrounded by people and noise and (worst of all to my concentration) children. I write at home behind closed doors, usually late at night, when it is as quiet and solitary as possible. I have always felt writing an extremely private ordeal that others have no business observing. While it is by nature a silent and hidden endeavour I still feel somewhat exposed even with but one other person in the room. Of course, I do keep a great deal of coffee on hand. What I really wonder is how writers can afford to frequent Starbucks et al. considering the going price of a grande latte. The book I’m writing already costs me $10 a day in cigarettes.

  8. Except for a snarky comment by sordfite, no one here has mentioned children. I have a few kids and a fulltime job, so coffee shops and public libraries provide a necessary middle space where I can write. My office is full of distractions (aka the work I’m paid to do) and home is where the kids are. I can’t afford a second office/writers cave, so what’s a guy to do? You go where there’s a table and a chair (which you rent one cup of coffee at a time), you bring headphones, and you go to work.

  9. I believed this to be true until I got a job working at home from a computer. My computer is now Where Work Happens—where I have to think about the sports articles I write, in 2000 word bursts, seven days a week. I can’t think there anymore.

    You’ll see me at coffee shops, with a crappy netbook my parents bought and then hated, every so often, now. It’s not an act, and I don’t like coffee, either. It’s because I just got off work, and I’d like to do some actual writing out of the office.

  10. To each his or her own, of course. But I do such weird shit when I write (palilalia, play-acting and so forth), that I would be quite stunted by self-consciousness if asked to do it public.

  11. Re: Karl Kim, “People who write in public are more interested in being seen as a writer than actually being a writer.”

    Does this really ring true to anyone else? If I read in public, is it not about reading, but about projecting myself as a reader? Never has it occurred to me that when I write in public I’m projecting the image of being a “writer.”

    The person with a laptop at a coffee shop can be anyone: a student, a person who didn’t pay their Internet bill at home, etc. It’s bizarre to me that someone else would automatically assume that he who writes in a coffee shop is a “writer” or would fashion herself a writer.

  12. I recently wrote in a bookstore window for a week. The novel I was working on was projected on a screen behind me; passersby could gawk, read, sneer, or turn a blind eye.

    This was just a cheap publicity stunt, but the exercise was fascinating. One takeaway: It was easier than I thought it would be. If someone “interrupted” me by starting a conversation, I stopped writing. If nobody was interrupting me, I really had no excuse not to write.

  13. I commend those who can write in public places amidst the noise and distractions. I need silence, so I work from my home desk, but it isn’t a given that I’ll find it there, either.

  15. Starbucks is not for writing. Starbucks is for pretending you are going to buy something and then using the bathroom.

  16. I find the hum of life happening around me in a public space to be good for my poetry more times than not. I’m less likely to get caught in a loop or block than when I’m at my desk (which is where I do my work as a freelance web developer).

  17. If I drink coffee in a cafe, is it not about drinking coffee, but about projecting an image of myself as a coffee drinker? I could after all use the coffee maker on my kitchen counter.

    I do 95% of my writing at home. I do the other 5% in cafes, because writing a novel involves spending an awful lot of time shut up in a small room, and look, sometimes it’s just nice to get out of the apartment for a couple hours. I’m not posing as a novelist when I write in cafes; I’m actually writing a novel. I sometimes find that the white noise of cafes can be conducive to writing, and it’s awfully nice to have a steady source of lattes on hand. The work I do in cafes is no less serious than the work I do in my quiet home office. The three novels I’ve published were written both at home and in coffee shops.

  18. Pingback: Writing in public feels like a performance, but, when we’re dealing with literature, the performance is not what endures | RC Gale

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Essays

The Wisdom of Crowds: Reddit, Twitter, and the Hunt for the Wrong Man

Essays
April 23, 2013 | 6 6 min read
Thursday night’s abhorrent online vigilantism — in which Reddit and Twitter users seized upon police radio chatter to accuse a missing (and completely innocent) Brown University student of bombing the Boston Marathon — reminded us of one of the most under-acknowledged facts of the internet: that beyond the sleek, profitable edifices of Web 2.0 there remains the humming, virtual presence of an online crowd that is restive, unpredictable, and hungry for a cause. One need only glance at a few of the threads from Thursday night to get a sense of the zeal, numbers, and unscrupulousness of the throngs that intercepted two misidentified names and promptly set about defaming one. As with any physical crowd, what began as isolated innuendo quickly became the rallying cry of thousands. At midnight, Anonymous tweeted the full names of two possible suspects mentioned by the police — one of them the missing student, Sunil Tripathi — but omitted the all-important modifier “possible.”  By morning, the post had been retweeted over 3,000 times, and it was not until the police confirmed the identities of the actual suspects, the brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, that the crowd’s furor over Tripathi subsided. I first learned of the night’s disturbing events the following morning, when a friend called to warn me that Sunil Tripathi had been the victim of an online smear campaign. A year and a half ago I had visited this friend in Providence, and on the way there I happened to share a ride with Sunil and another Brown student. I had not met him before or since, and I did not know he was missing. My thoughts immediately went out to his family and friends, though soon I was also checking Reddit and Twitter to see the damage for myself. What I found were the digital debris of an internet lynch mob — incendiary posts, hastily produced collages of Tripathi’s face next to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s, some comments that had since been deleted, some that had been redacted to note that he was not, in fact, their man. It’s a bit unfashionable to speak darkly of "the crowd" these days. One might think that the term itself betrays a certain elitism or establishmentarianism, and yet the odd state of affairs is that it is precisely the establishment — generally business and mainstream media — that has recently embraced the power and resourcefulness of the online multitudes. In the past decade, much has been made of the untapped energy of online crowds, of their wisdom, ingenuity, and potential for productivity. Search Amazon and you will find, apart from James Surowiecki’s inaugural 2004 discussion The Wisdom of Crowds, titles like Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business and We Are Smarter than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business. To be sure, the power of crowdsourcing has given us gifts both precious (like Wikipedia) and picayune (the cover design of Elizabeth Gilbert’s next book), but it is a legitimate achievement of the digital age, one that proves that the internet is capable of transforming the way we interact collectively. Prior to vilifying Tripathi, for example, Reddit users had been helpfully sifting for leads amid the enormous amount of footage taken at the Boston Marathon. Nevertheless, the reflexivity with which we invoke the “wisdom of crowds” seems to suggest less that we think crowds are truly wise and more that we understand — if only dimly — their undeniable potency. The fact is that the digital age has yet to really countenance the cultural anxieties produced by the new invisible crowd. In this regard, the jitters of the internet era bear an almost comic resemblance to a central disquietude of the august, and apparently closed, epoch we call modernity. For just as the increasing institutionalization and regulation of the internet seem to be attended by the lurking possibility that everything could crumble from one cyber attack unleashed by a handful of anonymous malcontents, so too did the project of modernity grapple with the contradiction that even as its liberal institutions grew more powerful, its stability became more dependent on the whims of the crowd. The French Revolution and its aftershocks are the textbook examples here, providing the archetypal images of the crowd in all its revolutionary splendor and violence. Now clearly, the works of Anonymous or 4chan don’t quite match the grisly proceedings of the Jacobins, but one can detect definite recursive qualities between them — namely excessive zeal, indiscriminateness, feverishness. And if history insists on recursion, there’s no reason not to learn from its lessons. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, several cities, including London and Paris, were the crucibles in which the mass of the crowd seemed unerringly to precipitate. Writing of London, Edgar Allan Poe described with fascination “the dense and continuous tides of population” that rushed past a hotel window. Across the Channel, Paul Valéry called it savagery. Yet amid the talk of “the riffraff” and the pervasive anxiety that from this rabble the revolution might spontaneously recur, Charles Baudelaire stood apart with his famous dictum épouser la foule (literally, “marry the crowd”). Baudelaire could register as well as anyone the terror of the crowd, but what made him different was his wish to be truly at home in the dirty, swarming city, and to do that he needed to embrace the frisson of crowds. Above all, it was Baudelaire’s willingness to explore the often erotic allure of anonymity and the pleasure of suppressed individuality that allowed him to investigate the logic of crowds — a logic that bears equally on our digital throngs. In particular, Baudelaire was acutely sensitive to the fantasy of escape into otherness that crowds provide. In one of his prose poems he writes that the man who marries the crowd “adopts as his own all of the professions, all of the joys and miseries that circumstances present to him.” The person in the crowd takes up cares, pleasures, and tasks without a thought of one’s personal business or even one’s credentials. The bricklayer fights in the revolution; the butcher helps dislodge a cart from the mud; and so too the Redditor plays detective by heatedly comparing the eyebrows and jawlines of Tripathi and Tsarnaev. Writing much later in Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti theorized this tendency, noting that a crowd “needs a direction” if it is not to lose mass, and die. Today, the same pressures drive online throngs into their unfailing surety of purpose: we all want to think our feeble little tweets are worthwhile. For denizens of the digital space, the lesson of épouser la foule is not that we should all spend more time in the bowels of Reddit, but rather that we must recognize that we, like Baudelaire, wish to be at home in our new, crowded world. This entails coming to terms with not just the wisdom but also the idiocy, hyperbole, and prejudice of crowds.  It means that we need to know beforehand the feverish, speculative nature of the virtual crowd, so that when a slanderous rumor is tweeted at least established news outlets will check their sources. I can think of no sadder instantiation of the pervasive crowd mentality than Salon’s grudging admission Friday that it too tweeted Tripathi’s name as a suspect, though it pointed out that it only did it “when just about everyone else on Twitter was doing so.” So much for journalism! Baudelaire’s flirtations with la foule 150 years ago are enough to indicate that human nature isn’t about to wean itself off the thrill of the crowd, but that’s no reason to integrate the will-to-follow into the architecture of the very institutions that are supposed to uphold fact over fantasy. Tripathi needed an advocate that night, and not a single voice tried to stay the crowd. Image via The Bay Area's News Station/Flickr
Essays
| 6 6 min read
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Essays

Funny, You Don’t Look Like Angela Davis

Essays
February 22, 2013 | 5 5 min read
I’ve had a low-grade identity crisis much of my life. I used to be Angela Davis -- the real Angela Davis, as far as I knew: blond, blue-eyed, shy, only inwardly radical. Until the day in the summer of 1970, when I was working as a cub reporter for my editor mother at a weekly newspaper and with a laugh she slapped onto my desk a photograph that had just come over the wire: Wanted: Angela Davis. A fierce black woman scowled up at me beneath an enormous Afro. A known communist. 5’8”, 145 lbs. Wanted as an accessory to murder committed by the Black Panthers. My identity and my name had been stolen. As the revolutionary Angela rose in national prominence, I was subject to laughs and ironic looks when I introduced myself: “Funny, you don’t look like Angela Davis.” Confusions abounded. When I became a reporter for the Raleigh News and Observer -- whose readership includes the conservative eastern part of  North Carolina -- there were protests to the editor about “the commie” on staff. The “real” Angela came to town, and I was assigned to interview her. Given what I knew about her activities, I found her surprisingly pleasant and low-key, though completely indifferent about the bizarre coincidence of our twin names. (But, by then, she owned the name). Nevertheless, I anticipated the publication of the story with glee: Angela Davis by Angela Davis. This should make some conservative heads spin. And I thought it would set matters straight about my identity, at least in my hometown. It did not. Not long afterwards I arranged to do a feature on a left-leaning press that was gaining national prominence. When I showed up for the interview, the editor said that he couldn’t talk with me just then, because he was “waiting for Angela Davis.” This sort of thing has continued for decades. I was offered a writing job at an African- American magazine in Chicago on the strength of “my” name. (The job description was altered once I appeared in the publisher’s office). Later, when I was a professor, even though I had married and added a Gardner to my name by then, I was asked to give a lecture at a national conference on African American literature. (I was tempted to accept.) The editor of my first novel inquired if I might like to change my writing name to Angela Gardner, since Angela Y. Davis  (by then the brilliant intellectual writer with an international reputation) had a book coming out from Random House the same season. I resisted the Angela Gardner option. What if I got divorced? (A prescient thought.) I consider adopting another name. Neither of my grandparents’ surnames -- Herbin, Robicheau -- though melodious, quite fit. So I have gone on with a name that is not entirely mine, a name that I sometimes regret when people ask me (still), “Where is she now?” (I have to report though, now that I have a modest reputation as a novelist, I am thrilled when someone says to me: “Not the Angela Davis-Gardner?”) My happiest discovery, however, has been to realize that when I’m in the process of writing fiction, I have no name. Only my characters exist, and when I live with those characters during years of creation they are as alive to me as most people walking around in the “real” world and I am passionately attached to them. They are mine. Imagine my surprise then, when one Saturday a few weeks ago, friends called to tell me that my latest novel was going to be featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition. “What happened to the child of Butterfly and Lt. Pinkerton at the close of Puccini’s famous opera Madama Butterfly?” was the lead-in for the story. This  described my novel (Butterfly’s Child) and my character -- Benji, I had named the child -- to perfection. I tuned in. The reporter began talking with the writer David Rain, who had just published a debut novel, The Heat of the Sun, about the child of Butterfly and Pinkerton. I felt like the narrator in Gogol’s story “The Nose” who wakes one day to find that the nose has disappeared from his face. Later he sees the nose walking down the street dressed as a haughty bureaucrat. Part of himself has become a character in his own story and gotten away from him. In an irony that the metatfictionist Gogol would have appreciated, my character Frank Pinkerton (father of Butterfly’s child) in one scene of my novel attends a performance of the opera Madama Butterfly. Stunned to see his past transgressions -- the affair with Butterfly, his caddish behavior -- held up to him like a mirror, Pinkerton cries out, “They’ve stolen my life!” Exactly, Pinkerton. Were you getting even with me? For here was a young man with an Australian accent being interviewed about my characters -- including you -- as though he had invented them. Decades ago, when I seemed to be in serene and exclusive possession of the name Angela Davis and I was in graduate school working on an MFA, my teacher, the poet Randall Jarrell, gave me a copy of his new book, The Bat Poet. The gift was in congratulation for an essay I’d written about Nikolai Gogol in Jarrell’s Russian literature class. The bat in the story is moved to poetry as he listens to the mockingbird’s riffs on the melodies of other birds. His question -- “Which one’s the mockingbird, which one’s the world?” -- is his epiphany, an awareness of the porous boundary between art and reality. That moment is also a comment on the phenomenon of art drawing upon art. The bat is an artist reflecting the artistry of the mockingbird; the thrush and the cardinal and the jay, whose songs the mockingbird imitates, are artists too. After the initial shock of hearing about another novel featuring Butterfly’s child, I realized that of course David Rain has as much right to the character Butterfly’s child and his fictional world as I do. Our characters are quite different. But the similarities between the premises of the two novels is a striking example of what Jonathan Lethem discusses in his brilliant essay, “The Ecstasy of Influence:” all writers inevitably plagiarize from the vast world of literature and ideas. Both Rain and I borrowed our characters from Puccini’s opera. Puccini took his story from playwright David Belasco, who built on the novel of John Luther Long, who was trying to cash in on the popularity of Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthemum. My Butterfly’s child Benji and Rain’s character Trouble have the same literary DNA -- the same father and mother, the same back story. The play Miss Saigon, the film M. Butterfly, and the recent Japanese opera about Butterfly’s child (titled, in English, Butterfly Junior) also share their heritage.  All these offspring are testament to the power of the Madame Butterfly myth, which is itself a manifestation of the timeless love-triangle plot. But please remember, dear reader, that the name of my Butterfly’s child is Benji. He’s blond with a Japanese face (the very embodiment of identity conflict), he has a quite a story to tell, and he’d like to meet you. And I am the real Angela Davis-Gardner.
Essays
| 5 5 min read
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