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

Modern In A Post-Modern World

Essays
November 7, 2007 | 3 5 min read
There's an old Woody Allen nightclub routine, dating back to his stand-up days in the mid-60s, that goes a little like this:"I was in Europe many years ago with Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway had just written his first novel, and Gertrude Stein and I read it, and we said that is was a good novel, but not a great one, and that it needed some work, but it could be a fine book. And we laughed over it. Hemingway punched me in the mouth.That winter Picasso lived on the Rue d'Barque, and he had just painted a picture of a naked dental hygienist in the middle of the Gobi Desert. Gertrude Stein said it was a good picture, but not a great one, and I said it could be a fine picture. We laughed over it and Hemingway punched me in the mouth.Francis Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald came home from their wild New Years Eve party. It was April. Scott had just written Great Expectations, and Gertrude Stein and I read it, and we said it was a good book, but there was no need to have written it, 'cause Charles Dickens had already written it. We laughed over it, and Hemingway punched me in the mouth.That winter we went to Spain to see Manolete fight, and he looked to be eighteen, and Gertrude Stein said no, he was nineteen, but that he only looked eighteen, and I said sometimes a boy of eighteen will look nineteen, whereas other times a nineteen year old can easily look eighteen... That's the way it is with a true Spaniard. We laughed over that... and Gertrude Stein punched me in the mouth."Alan Rudolph's 1988 film The Moderns dips into the same well. Set in Paris, in 1926, the central story is a fictional love-triangle. Weaving in and out of the story, however, are Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, being oh so iconic and giving the film much of its historical flavor, and its humor."Modern" is certainly a fluid term, and to flatly state that any one era permanently defines the term is, I suppose, arrogant. But Paris in the early part of last century, and in particular the 1920s was, indeed, a remarkable era of Modernism in which literature, visual arts, music and the theories behind all of these not only propelled themselves forward but bounced off of each other.And at the centre of it all was Gertrude Stein, mentor to such then-unknown writers as Ernest Hemingway, champion of unknown painters like Matisse and Picasso, writer and linguistic innovator who would herself be influenced by Picasso's stylistic shifts to the point where her own writing was seen as cubist. Her Saturday night salons brought together the painters and writers who are now seen as being the stars of the modern era. She introduced the world to the Moderns.The best memoir of this remarkable era is Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. Written late in his life, these twenty short, masterfully crafted vignettes depict his life in Paris from 1921 to 1926, a period of tutelage, as it were, at the feet of Gertrude Stein, whose pronouncements on what was "important" and what was "modern," were taken as gospel by the young writers and painters of Paris. Stein impressed upon Hemingway the necessity of choosing the exact words to convey the reality of the story, a lesson which informed everything he would write.A Moveable Feast is also a memoir of a place, specifically Montparnasse on Paris' left bank. We see Hemingway at home with his wife Hadley and small child, braving cold Parisian winters. We see him in the cafes and bars of the quarter, surrounded by strangers, yet blocking them out and focusing on the writing at hand. We see his blossoming friendship with the troubled Fitzgerald, and his association with Ezra Pound. It's a fascinating collection of stories, and remains my favorite Hemingway book. You feel like you're reading a fine short-story collection. These tales easily match the clean, precise prose of his best short fiction. Except, I realize, for the "fiction" part. But that's nitpicking.Another book that covers some of the same territory, and features many of the same players, is Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. This memoir, written by Stein in the 1930s, adopts the gossipy, conversational tone of her partner, Miss Toklas, recounting the story of her life, and centering on her relationship with Miss Stein, who effectively becomes the central character, the catalyst in this "autobiography." So, despite the title, it's really an autobiography of Gertrude Stein herself, who suspends her normally abstract literary style to assume the voice of Miss Toklas. Which I admit all seems very post-modern for a memoir by and of one of "the moderns." The conceit - adopting Miss Toklas's voice, spares the reader what might have been a head-scratchingly abstract memoir. On the other hand, Stein's adoption of her partner's flighty tone fills the memoir with an inordinate amount of frivolousness and gossip.Still, there's enough meat in this memoir to make it a must-read for anyone interested in this era of literature and painting. Stein, through Toklas's eyes, gives us glimpses into the formative years of the wonderful composer Erik Satie, and era-defining painters such as Picasso and Matisse, who were regulars at Stein's salons, and whose early works were on display at the Montparnasse home shared by Stein and Toklas. And, not surprisingly, young Hemingway makes several appearances in Stein's memoir. A favorite of hers (though, seemingly, less so of Alice's) we see her intellectually doting on him with great affection. And, as in Hemingway's memoir, Paris itself is a character, both Montparnasse on the left bank, and also the storied Montmartre further north.As it happens, I was in Paris in early September, having come up by train from southwestern France, and was met at the Gare d'Austerlitz by my friends Doug and Anna who had come down from London. Item one on the agenda: a lingering lunch, replete with champagne, wines, and spirits at the Closerie de Lilas, a favorite haunt of Hemingway's, and a locale that figures prominently in A Moveable Feast. This set the tone for the next few days. If Hemingway ate or drank or wrote there, who are we to walk by without symbolically paying our respects.It's all a romantic conceit, of course. Paris moved on after the "Modern" era ended, but for fans of Hemingway and the Moderns, why not let A Moveable Feast spread itself before us? Place Contrescarpe, rue Cardinal Lemoine, the Pantheon: there they are. There's something to be said for sitting on a stoop across from the Pantheon at two in the morning, Doug and Anna poring over the map, me staring at the Pantheon, mesmerized by its grandeur, my stupor enhanced doubly by the two a.m. September stillness.The adventure continued the next day. Anna having returned to London, Doug and I decided to trek up through Montparnasse, across the river, through central Paris, up to Picasso's digs. Up to Montmartre. Me hobbling, having fallen moments after stepping onto the sidewalk.I do this. I fall down a lot. A flight of recently polished stairs, I can careen down it in half a second. Stepping off my old back porch after a light snowfall? I become a gymnast, somersaulting down with expertise. And then there's the now-legendary "incident" on the stairs leading down to London's Leicester Square tube station a few years ago. I slipped on the rain-slicked top step and bounced down the remainder, with no one, NO ONE, seeming to notice.So there I was, limping my way from Montparnasse up to Montmartre, looking like a transplanted Ratzo Rizzo to my friend Doug's Joe Buck, knowing that somehow, somewhere, Ernest Hemingway was shaking his head and Gertrude Stein was rolling her eyes. But what the hell, in our post-modern world, you're only modern once.
Essays
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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

Interactive Art: What Video Games Can Learn from Freud

Essays
January 6, 2011 | 9 8 min read
1. What if the best thing art has to offer is freedom from choice? There’s a reason it’s high praise, not criticism, to say that a film or a piece of music or a good novel “sweeps you along.” There’s a selflessness in it: not just the pleasure in pausing the parts of the brain that plan and calculate and select, but in the temporary surrender of investing in someone else’s choices. Good art can be where we go for humility: when we’re encouraged to treat each of our thoughts as worthy of being made public, it can be almost counter-cultural to admit, in the act of being swept along, that someone else is simply better at arranging the keys of a song or the twists of a book and making them look like fate. Freedom from choice is a seductive way of thinking about art—and it’s at the heart of the debate over the cultural value of video games. Video games, for their cultural boosters, promise an art based on choice: an interactive art, possibly the first ever. For their detractors, “interactive art” is a contradiction in terms. Critics can point to video games’ narrative clichés or sloppy dialogue or a faith in violence as the answer to everything; but at base, they seem to be bothered by the idea of an art form that can be “played.” Choice is their bright line. Last spring, Roger Ebert nominated himself to hold that bright line on his blog. And though the 4,799 comments (to date) on his original post weighed in overwhelmingly against his claim that “Video games can never be art,” and encouraged him to back off of that blanket assertion, he summed up as eloquently as anyone the danger posed to narrative by video games’ possibility of limitless choice: If you can go through “every emotional journey available,” doesn’t that devalue each and every one of them? Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices. If next time I have Romeo and Juliet go through the story naked and standing on their hands, would that be way cool, or what? It’s possible, as Owen Good did, to write off the whole argument as empty, just a chest-thumping proxy war between generations or subcultures: “Art is fundamentally built on the subjective: inspiration, interpretation and appraisal. To me that underlines the pointlessness of the current debate for or against video games as art….Is there some validation the games community seeks but isn’t getting right now?” But then, every argument about art is about validation, about the assignment of prestige—yet those arguments are still worth having, because they can also be about something else. The argument over video games is about finding a place for choice in art, about respectability, and about empathy. And the best way into that argument may come from considering another cultural practice’s struggle for respect in its early days. I think that there’s already been a powerful interactive art, one that has some lessons for video games: psychoanalysis. 2. Too Jewish, too sex-obsessed, too much a cult of personality centered on Freud: before it was a more-or-less respected science, psychoanalysis was widely thought to be all of those things. George Makari’s Revolution in Mind begins the history of the movement that gathered around Sigmund Freud with a clique small enough to fit into a Vienna living room. Freud dreamed of creating a new scientific discipline, one legitimized by university departments, teaching hospitals, international conferences, and state funding; but he couldn’t even secure agreement among the rival scientists, doctors, artists, writers, liberal activists, and sexual libertines all drawn, all for reasons of their own, to his ideas of the unconscious. What exactly was this movement? Was it a school of medicine, a philosophical circle, a budding political party? With its objects of study so hard to pin down objectively, it was hard to say with certainty. Maybe it was art. That, at times, was the opinion of James Strachey, one of the more important figures in legitimizing this strange discipline and winning it an international reputation. James was the brother of the Bloomsbury author Lytton Strachey and a scholar of Mozart, Haydn, and Wagner; he was also one of the first English-speaking psychoanalysts and Freud’s most important translator. It’s because of Strachey that we still use Latin terms like id, ego, and superego, rather than Freud’s more down-to-earth “the It,” “the I,” and “the Over-I” (as a literal translation of his German would have had it). As an aspiring “talk therapist” in 1920, Strachey came from London to Vienna to undergo an extensive training analysis with Freud. He wrote to Lytton that he divided his time equally between the doctor’s office and the opera house—and, intriguingly, he described his sessions as a brand-new kind of aesthetic experience, a kind of private opera in which the therapist was the director and he was the star. Here is what he wrote after 34 hours on the couch: [Freud] himself is most affable and as an artistic performer dazzling…Almost every hour is made into an organic aesthetic whole. Sometimes the dramatic effect is absolutely shattering. During the early part of the hour, all is vague—a dark hint here, a mystery there—; then it gradually seems to get thicker; you feel dreadful things going on inside you, and can’t make out what they could possibly be; then he begins to give you a slight lead; you suddenly get a clear glimpse of one thing; then you see another; at last a whole series of lights break in on you; he asks you one more question; you give a last reply—and as the whole truth dawns on you the Professor rises, crosses the room to the electric bell, and shows you out the door. Why was the experience so aesthetically powerful, so unlike anything Strachey had seen before? In large part, it seems, the difference was that he was a participant in the drama, not merely a spectator—or maybe a participant and a spectator at the same time. There was a story being played out in one-hour increments; but the story was his story. His choices—how to react to each question, what to reveal and what to conceal, how to make sense of and advance the unfolding “plot”—gave the story its shape. And the scene of the real action was internal: “dreadful things going on inside you.” At the same time, though, Strachey realized that this was not a simple exercise in introspection or an outpouring of emotions—it was a guided drama. Freud shaped it as much as his patient did, not by telling a story, but by skillfully arranging a limited number of choices, on the fly, that reliably delivered his patient to the sensation of dawning truth and artistic completion. What’s remarkable is that he did it with such consistency. Strachey wrote about a series of conversations, and yet they all seemed to shape themselves into a classical dramatic arc: premonitions, a mounting pursuit, a crashing climax, and a cliffhanger ending. It’s true that James Strachey, aesthete as he was, brought his own unique preconceptions to Freud’s couch. But it’s also true that the dynamic he identified—the tension between free response and prearranged structure in each session—would, according to Makari’s history, be the cause of some of the growing movement’s greatest schisms. For instance, Freud’s Hungarian disciple Sándor Ferenczi came to advocate “active therapy”: confronting patients directly, turning their answers back on them, setting deadlines for progress, enforcing sexual abstinence, and even, in one case, regulating the patient’s posture during sessions. On the other pole, the Frankfurt analyst Karl Landauer argued for a passive technique that teased out the patient’s resistances to treatment, insisting that the therapist must not “impose actively upon [the patient] one’s own wishes, one’s own associations, one’s own self.” Long after Freud’s movement had achieved the legitimacy he always sought, this tension between hands-on and hands-off treatment would end friendships, partnerships, and careers. 3. Of course, video games are not a kind of psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis would not make much of a video game (“press ‘A’ to confess sexual feelings for Mother”). Nor has psychoanalysis shaken off its detractors, then or now, by painting itself as an art; as compelling as Strachey’s vision was, there was always more prestige in claiming the objectivity of science. Besides, if it was so pleasurable for Strachey to reflect on his treatment, how serious could his problems have been? Strachey may have idealized his treatment—but he also found the emotional potential in a practice that many of his contemporaries were writing off as a fad. And in doing so, he gave evocative evidence for the possibilities of interactive art. He also, unwittingly, described the reasons why video games seem so promising to so many. They can be an art that makes us both spectators and performers, one that can turn us from passive audience members to partners, flattening the relationship between artist and audience without erasing it altogether. In the private drama he co-created, Strachey was decidedly the junior partner; Freud was such an effective senior partner because he balanced choice with structure, keeping his patient personally invested even as the session stayed fastened to some important dramatic rules. Is it too far a stretch to see this as a type for the relationship between a skilled video game designer and a savvy player? In video games, our story can be anyone’s but our own. But their greatest promise, and greatest advantage over traditional art, is in their power to create empathy—to make someone else’s story feel like our own because we are temporarily living it. We’ve been able to lose ourselves in video game characters ever since the first player sent his Italian plumber off of a ledge and exclaimed “I died!”—not “Mario died!” Today, though, that power of empathy is being put to much more complex uses. In Slate’s annual Gaming Club discussion last month, Chris Suellentrop reflected on “the scene—it feels unfair to call it a level” in the game Heavy Rain that forced him to cut off his own character’s finger: “It felt agonizing, like I was cutting off my own finger. It was one of the most remarkable things I’ve ever experienced, in video games or any other medium.” Similarly, in Extra Lives—both a defense and a criticism of video games’ cultural potential—Tom Bissell spends pages meditating on a drive through the night city in Grand Theft Auto IV, with two bodies hidden in the trunk of his car. It was a dangerous risk undertaken to advance his character’s underworld career—and it was also an unsettling choice in which he felt criminally complicit. Interactivity, Bissell writes, “turns narrative into an active experience, which film is simply unable to do in the same way.” Film could not have left him with the same sense of guilt. It might be that empathetic power that ultimately brings the argument over video games’ cultural value to an end. Even in the midst of his criticism, Ebert concludes that the works of art that have moved him most deeply “had one thing in common: Through them I was able to learn more about the experiences, thoughts and feelings of other people. My empathy was engaged.” Perhaps there aren’t any games that engage his empathy, let alone engage it more powerfully than a film. Maybe there never will be: it’s telling that the moments identified by Bissell and Suellentrop as emblematic of video games’ potential tend to revolve around extreme violence. Even Bissell complains that game designers tend to give short shrift to narrative and characterization and line-by-line prose—and maybe we shouldn’t expect that to change. Given the amount of capital most sophisticated games demand—let alone the capital it would take to finance one complex enough to count as truly interactive—maybe we should expect them to settle permanently into the niche of the summer blockbuster. But even among the big-budget films, there are those that challenge us and move us. Video games, in principle, don’t have to be any different—and the potentially interactive art they hold out promises to move us with the intensity of Strachey’s light breaking in. When and if that happens, we shouldn’t expect art to be washed away in a flood of endless choices, with characters going through the story “naked and standing on their hands.” The most interesting argument won’t be about video games’ status as art, but about how to build an art that most effectively balances choice and structure, openness and narrative. Every increment toward freedom could mean deeper involvement and deeper empathy, at the cost of shapelessness; every increment toward structure could mean more captivating stories and characters—even as we find it harder to imagine ourselves into their shoes. The debate between the virtues of freedom and control, articulated almost a century ago by Freud’s disciples, will play out again, inconclusively, in a realm they could have barely imagined.
Essays
| 9 8 min read
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Essays

Theaters of the Mind: Radio & Literature

Essays
March 1, 2016 | 5 5 min read
In one scene from Americana, Don DeLillo's 1971 debut novel, narrator David Bell turns off a light and turns on a radio: Sound filled the room, huge noise, bass and drums booming out of the speaker, beating and scratching, then the sting of a fierce needling trumpet. In the darkness that trumpet had a deeper beauty, filling space, leaving time behind, a difficult sound departing and returning, and I did not feel I was in a room with four walls. A note hung at eye level, dim speck on the railroad horizon, then vanished into a long silence shaded by the revving bass. It is not surprising that a writer so in love with the sounds of language -- someone who titled a novel White Noise -- would embrace the power of radio as narrative. Yet, like other talented novelists, DeLillo manages to surprise us with the familiar. Elsewhere in the novel, Bell describes a “three-antenna marine-band hi-fi portable radio” belonging to another character. The radio transmitted a “never-ending squall of disc jockey babytalk, commercials for death, upstate bluegrass Jesus, and as we drove through the cloverleaf bedlams and past the morbid gray towns I perceived that all was in harmony, the stunned land feeding the convulsive radio, every acre of the night bursting with a kinetic unity, the logic beyond delirium.” It is sometimes refreshing to ditch the convenience of playlists and clarity of satellite stations and embrace the surprise of terrestrial radio. The shifting genres of FM. The droning emptiness of AM. I am reminded of “Route 7 Outside Nacogdoches, Texas” by Joe Wilkins, about a long drive down the road, and the narrator's “good pain inside distance.” There, “the night gone liquor black, / radio catching miles / of static, there was only / the ache of cicadas and wind / and leaves in the wind, / and I did not know I was driving / to you. I was driving.” Radio is elegiac. Radio is the theater of the mind: our eyes are free to look elsewhere, but the sound bounces in our brains. Two mediums that elicit imagination and subjective experience, radios and literature go well together. As another theater of the mind, literature requires more active listener participation than visual entertainment. Often the synthesis of the two makes narrative magic. Mucho Mass, the husband of Oedipa Maas, in The Crying of Lot 49 is a disc jockey for KCUF, a California radio station. The novel is suffused with sound. Mucho was previously a used car salesman, but unlike other hucksters, did not use pencil shavings “for hushing sick transmissions.” Oedipa is haunted by disembodied voices: late-night prank phone calls from her billionaire ex-boyfriend, who disguises his voice as The Shadow, a radio character from the 1930s. Lapsed Catholic he is, Thomas Pynchon makes the radio sacramental: Oedipa imagines Mucho “looking through the soundproof glass at one of his colleagues with a headset clamped on and cueing the next record with movements stylized as the handling of chrism, censer, chalice, might be for a holy man, yet really tuned in to the voice, voices, the music, its message, surrounded by it, digging it, as were all the faithful it went out to.” We want to be surrounded by sound: speakers in front, above, and behind. Literature puts the speakers inside of us. Julian Murphet has considered William Faulkner's experimentation with levels and layers of “voice” in his novels. Murphet is correct to note that “Faulkner's career as a novelist is coeval with the rise of one of the most astonishing cultural events in any nation's history: the present-tense linking up of American cities from coast to coast, thanks to syndication and electromagnetic propagation, through voices speaking into living rooms and office spaces ‘out of the air’ and directly into the resonant chambers of the soul.” Murphet quotes Theodor Adorno's Current of Music to supplement the point: “The absence of visible persons makes the ‘radio voice’ appear more objective and infallible than a live voice; and the mystery of a machine which can speak may be felt in atavistic layers of our psychical life.” In Faulkner's work, Murphet sees “how the art of the novel is adapted, in a state of emergency, to absorb these new, disembodied voices of radio and gramophone, not as alien impositions on the living speech and dialogic richness of an expanding nation but precisely as the transfiguration through mechanical mediation” of our selves and souls. As I Lay Dying -- perhaps Faulkner’s finest and most sonorous work -- ends with a chapter narrated by Cash, the apostolic carpenter son. The chapter’s first sentence: “So when we stopped there to borrow the shovels we heard the graphophone playing in the house.” As the chapter goes on, Cash notes when the music plays, and when it stops: “So we set in the wagon, but the music wasn’t playing now. I reckon it’s a good thing we aint got ere a one of them. I reckon I wouldn’t never get no work done a-tall for listening to it. I dont know if a little music aint about the nicest thing a fellow can have.” The family is about to meet the new Ms. Bundren. She is holding a graphophone. As the novel ends, Cash thinks how “everytime a new record would come from the mail order and us setting in the house in the winter, listening to it, I would think what a shame Darl couldn’t be to enjoy it too.” Faulkner chose to have Cash articulate his emotional and spiritual distance from his brother through their inability to share sound. In John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio,” Jim and Irene Westcott share sound, until “One Sunday afternoon, in the middle of a Schubert quartet, the music faded away altogether.” Broken, the radio was replaced with a “large gumwood cabinet” that occupied their apartment “like an aggressive intruder.” A clear and pure tone is later replaced with crackling and rustling, as the radio begins transmitting the surrounding world. Private and intimate conversations whisper from the radio. Also: “a monologue on salmon fishing in Canada, a bridge game, running comments on home movies of what had apparently been a fortnight at Sea Island, and a bitter family quarrel about an overdraft at the bank.” Soon the “hideous cabinet,” the ugly God of a machine tunes into the Westcott’s own sins and fears. We learn how to live through radios. Within Eduardo Corral's poem “In Colorado My Father Scoured and Stacked Dishes,” the father “learned English / by listening to the radio. The first four words / he memorized: In God We Trust.” Radio delivers us news, both public and personal. In “Easter, 1960” by Sharon Olds, a hospital uses an “ancient boarding-school radio” to announce that the speaker's boyfriend was one of two men brought to the emergency room after a car crash: “one of them / critical, one of them dead.” Back to DeLillo’s Americana, where the “radio was announcing a sale on ground round steak and then some old-time rock came on, lush and mystical, cockney voices wailing through a prayer wheel of electric sitars.” Radio is like literature, like our thoughts: moving, shifting, often clouded in static, and yet sometimes out of the maddening noise comes clarity. Image Credit: Pixabay.
Essays
| 5 5 min read
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Essays

Stuck Inside of Stockholm with the Nobel Blues Again

Essays
March 6, 2017 | 5 9 min read
Two months have passed since the 2016 Nobel Prizes were doled out in Stockholm to a worthy group of physicists, chemists, economists, and such, with Swedish royalty and other well-heeled folks dressed and jeweled up in the audience.  Bob Dylan, the celebrated no-show, missed out on the banquet’s sumptuous menu, which featured quail in black garlic and cloudberry sorbet, but Patti Smith gamely made her way through “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and the American ambassador to Sweden read Dylan’s short acceptance letter.  This wasn’t exactly the glorious party some might have imagined or hoped for.  But the chastened Nobel committee had certainly come a long way from their initial dismay and then frustration at Dylan’s extended silence following the announcement of his award. One wonders how closely they had studied his work.  All they had to do, really, was listen to how that harried farmhand drew his line in the sand on 1965’s “Maggie’s Farm” and they could have predicted Dylan’s seemingly cryptic non-response: Well, I try my best To be just like I am But everybody wants you To be just like them Dylan doesn’t like to be crowded.  Try to pin him down and he’ll suddenly remember a previous engagement that’s more important than dropping by to collect a Nobel Prize.  What could this award confer upon him anyway?  His artistic achievement stands, with or without it.  As Leonard Cohen noted, giving Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize “is like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.”  That cloudberry sorbet never had a chance. But Bob Dylan’s Excellent Nobel Adventure isn’t over quite yet.  His award doesn’t become officially official until he, as all Nobel laureates are required to do, delivers a lecture within six months of the award ceremonies.  If he doesn’t provide that lecture, would the Nobel committee actually consider stripping him of his award?  Certainly there are more than a few observers out there who would be happy to see that happen, because Dylan is one of the more controversial of recent Nobel recipients. Historically, the Nobel literature committee has always taken a lot of guff for their decisions.  In any given year, critics trot out their favorite choices for who should have won instead, and there is indeed a long, sad list of greats who have been passed over, including Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Clarice Lispector, and Eudora Welty.  I’ve always been mystified why the Portuguese writer Miguel Torga, author of the haunting Tales of the Mountains, was nominated several times and still never got the call.  I once joined a nomination letter-writing campaign for Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe that, sadly, failed.  I’ve been waiting far too many years for the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare to get his chance. Literary life, like the rest of life, is unfair. I’ve also indulged in my own share of head scratching at some recent Nobel choices. I’d never heard of the two French writers, J.M.G. Le Clézio and Patrick Modiano, who received their Nobel Prizes in 2008 and 2014, respectively. Yet neither author was obscure, not even remotely so: both had been multi-awarded and bestsellered, though their achievements occurred outside the bubble of American literature.  I now list them both among my favorite writers. The controversy over Bob Dylan has nothing to do with any supposed lack of visibility -- he’s famous the world over.  But he’s a songwriter.  Some observers have suggested that the Nobel literature committee has become a little too frisky, a little too aesthetically restless, because in recent years, there have been a number of choices made outside of the cozy fiction/poetry pendulum: the playwright and performance artist Dario Fo won in 1997, the playwright Harold Pinter in 2005, and in 2015 Svetlana Alexievich won for her nonfiction. A little historical perspective on this supposed friskiness is in order here.  Alexievich wasn’t the first nonfiction writer to win.  In 1949, Winston Churchill won for his multi-volume history of Great Britain.  Interestingly enough, that was only half of the reason for his award -- he also won for his speeches.  The Nobel committee specifically lauded his “brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.”  And despite the ruckus over the prize going to Dario Fo in 1997, he wasn’t even close to being the first playwright to win.  He was the 12th.   The first awarded dramatist was the Spanish playwright José Echegaray, in 1904 -- only three years after the Nobel prizes were launched. In all, 14 writers have won primarily or in part for their dramatic work, most notably George Bernard Shaw, Luigi Pirandello, Eugene O’Neill, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Wole Soyinka. Playwriting is a literary form that has a lot in common with songwriting.  Both are written texts that live most fully through extra-literary collaboration.  While many plays are read for pleasure (William Shakespeare, anyone?), they are written specifically not to deliver everything on the page.  “Exit, stage left,” for instance, offers nothing on the subject of how an actor might accomplish that exit.  The words of a script are surrounded by an artful deployment of negative space that waits to be filled by actors, a director, the lighting crew, costume designer, and many others to add nuance and perhaps unexpected interpretations in performance.  Even where a play is staged -- whether a proscenium stage, a theater in the round, or an open-air Greek theater -- adds further dimension.  It’s harder to imagine a greater contrast with a dimly-lit off-off-Broadway venue than ancient Athen’s theater of Dionysus: plays there were performed outside and during the day, on the southern slope of the Acropolis. In playwriting, words are, you might say, the opening gambit. In songwriting the lyrics create the possible tone of the accompanying music, and that music can then transform the words by adding emotional depth, suspense, and drama.  Just as the lines of a play are designed for the actors who will speak them, an invitation for collaboration is built into the possibilities of lyrics. The words of a song are designed to be sung, to be performed by any number of instruments and interpreters -- and Dylan’s songs have been performed by a ridiculously long list of artists, from The Byrds to Etta James, P.J. Harvey to Diana Krall, Jimi Hendrix to The Ramones,  Caetano Veloso to Adele and beyond. In his brief Nobel acceptance letter, Dylan acknowledged this connection between playwriting and songwriting.  Shakespeare’s “words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken, not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I’m sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: ‘Who’re the right actors for these roles?’  ‘How should this be staged?’  ‘Do I really want to set this in Denmark?’" Pivoting from this point, Dylan’s letter continued, “I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life’s mundane matters. ‘Who are the best musicians for these songs?’  ‘Am I recording in the right studio?’  ‘Is this song in the right key?’” If, after celebrating the collaborative art of playwriting since 1904, the Nobel committee has finally turned its gaze on the related literary genre of songwriting, then the inevitable choice for the prize is Bob Dylan.  He’s arguably the greatest, most transformative songwriter of the past century (though it’s worth noting that Rabindranath Tagore, who won in 1913 for his poetry, was also a songwriter; he wrote over 2,000 songs, many of which are still popular throughout South Asia) (read more on Tagore). Forging an amalgam of biblical verse, François Villon, Arthur Rimbaud, T.S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, Woody Guthrie, Chuck Berry, and others, Dylan pushed Tin Pan Alley off the cliff while creating one unlikely masterpiece after another.  “Masters of War,” “Gates of Eden,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Visions of Johanna,” “Desolation Row,” “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” and “Idiot Wind” are just a few examples of an evolving body of work that has challenged every other songwriter to think more deeply about a wider range of subjects that you could write about, what sort of language you could use to embody those subjects, and just how long your songs could take their time doing so.  And none of this happened by accident.  Sean Wilentz, in “Mystic Nights," his masterly essay on the making of Dylan’s album Blonde on Blonde, observes that during the recording, “Dylan constantly and carefully revised, as he always had and still does, even to the point of abandoning entire songs. Changing the line “I gave you those pearls” to “with her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls” was one example out of dozens of how Dylan, in the studio and in his Nashville hotel room, improved the timbre of the songs’ lyrics as well as their imagery. And Dylan’s voice, as ever an evolving invention, was one of the album’s touchstones, a smooth, even sweet surprise to listeners who had gotten used to him sounding harsh and raspy. By turns sibilant, sibylline, injured, cocky, sardonic, and wry, Dylan’s voice on Blonde on Blonde more than made up in tone and phrasing what it gave away in range.” Dylan always developed his lyrics and music to reflect his shifting identity as a human.  One might say the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature could be considered a group award for every Bob Dylan there has ever been. While it’s true that Nobel recipient Anatole France was born François-Anatole Thibault, the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral was born Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga, and the Guadeloupean-French poet Alexis Leger went by the pen name of Saint-John Perse, I think few would venture the opinion that “Bob Dylan” is merely a pen name.  That original, mysterious nub of the middle class and Midwestern Robert Allen Zimmerman didn’t so much rename himself as conjure a fluid mask for the expression of all his future public selves: a Woody Guthrie-like folk singer, the protest singer, a sensitive singer-songwriter, a gritty and poetic rock ‘n’ roller, the elusive figure releasing oracular songs from a basement, then the country gentleman, followed by the very public ringmaster of a traveling musical carnival, leading to the brimstone Christian and then the lapsed one.  These days he’s an increasingly grizzled troubadour of the decades-long Never Ending Tour, bringing his own vast version of the great American songbook to any state fair or refurbished theater that will have him. Dylan wears each mask until its features begin to harden, and then he sets about fashioning a new one.  Each mask is a part of him but no mask is him.  What Dylan’s oeuvre most celebrates is that busyness of being born, not dying, the life-long squawk of his successive secret selves through the public medium of popular song.  His greatness can’t be confined to a single song, or a single album, or even a collection of “best” albums.  I think a deeper reason we listen to his changing voices, musics, and personas is because his lifelong transformations reflect our own, those we struggle to suppress and those we hope to release. There’s a crucial moment in the arc of Dylan’s shape-shifting career that occurred during a concert that was, happily, recorded, bootlegged, and eventually released officially as The ‘Royal Albert Hall’ Concert.  It’s the summer of 1966, and Dylan is on tour in England, introducing to audiences his latest electric self, backed by a group called The Jayhawks (which would a couple years later morph into The Band). Throughout the tour the acoustic sets have gone well, but whenever Dylan plugs in with The Jayhawks the audience mood sours.  A month’s conflict of expectations comes to a head at a concert in Manchester.  Between songs, the audience claps loudly in unison, an ironic, anti-clapping: not applause but criticism.  What were they thinking?  Hadn’t they noticed that the figure on stage had already in his young career shed three previous musical masks?  But “everybody wants you to be just like them” and the heckling continues.  Dylan taunts them in return and performs a searing version of “Ballad of a Thin Man” not for them but at them.  Finally, some poor soul in the audience shouts “Judas!” to appreciative laughter. Dylan responds with a growling, “I don’t believe you.”  Then, after a tense pause, he shouts, “You’re a liar!”  Turning to the band, he tells them, “Play fucking loud,” and what follows is a roaring kick-ass blast of “Like a Rolling Stone” that finally silences the malcontents.  Yet Dylan wasn’t asking The Jayhawks to just play the song fucking loud, he was also asking them to blare out the necessity of his latest persona to that angry and uncomprehending audience.  He was fighting for his right to wear whatever mask fits.  He was fighting for his right to breathe. It has recently been announced that in early April, Dylan will perform two back-to-back concerts in Stockholm, which is well within that six-month Nobel lecture deadline.  There are suggestions that these concerts might serve as a substitute.  Or maybe not, and a podium is waiting.  Whatever is decided, tread lightly, Nobel literature committee.  Every Bob Dylan we have ever known and listened to bristles at requirements.  That’s the very path that led him to the Nobel. Interested readers can find the author's close look at Dylan’s song “Cold Irons Bound” at his website. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Essays
| 5 9 min read