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"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun" |
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While professional jealousy has long been the scrip in which Suck pays its staff, even we were taken aback by the mother lode of spite, bile, and gall unearthed by the sudden success of Jedediah Purdy, the home schooled Harvard man whose book For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today has cashed in so handsomely on the pundit-invented trend away from sarcasm and toward deep sincerity. Frankly, having gotten behind the irony
backlash in the new earnestness back when it wasn't cool, we expected to get at least an appearance on public access out of the deal. We also recognized a rare opportunity to beat up on a seemingly defenseless punching bag. Sadly, while we can't recommend the book, the open secret is that there's hardly anything about irony in it. We suspect a put-up job, in which the young snake charmer has managed to tie himself to the media's hot air balloon. We were determined to get the story straight from the young bard himself. The New York Times Magazine story on you contains an anecdote in which you were outraged at students who made wisecracks during a screening of Love Story. Is that true? Of course it's true. What do you mean, "Of course?" Because it's in the Times it must be true? No, no, no, but it's basically accurate. I did that. That's totally admirable. Seriously, you should be applauded for that. It was funny. Talk about how these things don't change: After that piece was out, Todd Gitlin sent me a note saying, "Freshman week, Harvard, 1960." They were doing exactly the same thing with old Bogart movies. Same routine, same folks. And he got up and started shouting at them to sit the fuck down and stop their show of insouciance. I'm not totally enamored of the argument that "The more things change ..." but it's interesting about the subculture at that kind of institution. Well, since you've dropped the H-bomb, I might as well ask: Your editor calls you "the kid from nowhere." Walter Kirn calls you the "brainy nature boy" who "has stormed the capital." How do you get to be an outsider after graduating from Exeter and Harvard? It depends on what you mean. The sense in which I think it's not wrong to describe me as an outsider is that you get a certain anthropological perspective on your own setting when a couple of things happen. One is in some degree when you come out of West Virginia to a place like Exeter or a place like Harvard. Another is when you come out of a very particular kind of cultural setting at almost 14 and go into the public high school. I'm sure you can imagine the complexity and sometime cruelty of that culture — what it is to go into it with no sense of its rules and no sense of the kinds of distinctions that people make all the time. The point is not that I had trouble making friends because I was an outsider. The point is that you develop a kind of self-conscious acuity when you're trying to figure out what the hell's going on around you. I still say I'm a bigger outsider than you. At least in Appalachia you had Wendell Berry. The only writer we had in Atlantic City was Christopher Cook Gilmore. I missed him. You were lucky. If you ask where my gut loyalties are, they have a lot more to do with West Virginia than with Harvard. But there is another sense, in which to say that I'm an outsider is sort of fatuous, and I'm not going to try to say otherwise. In his review of your book in Salon, Caleb Crain catches you mixing up Emerson and Thoreau. That is incredibly embarrassing. I can tell you the narrative, and it's not exculpatory, and I don't pretend it's exculpatory. I was rereading Walden and Emerson at the same time; and I came across "original relation to the universe," thought it was a great line, and wrote it down; and I just never reread that section again. But it's incredibly stupid and embarrassing, and I really wish I hadn't trusted my own memory. You should try Ruth Shalit's download defense: Just say you downloaded stuff and then it got broke. That doesn't get you off the hook. All right, take it like a man. In your book you describe the suspicion that "we are just quantum selves — all spin, all the way down." In your profile in the Times Magazine you say, "With [Harper's editor Roger] Hodge, it's no all the way down." Do you know the story of the old lady who told Stephen Hawking that the universe is constructed of "turtles all the way down"? Sure. I'm sure that's where it's coming from. I've always loved that phrase. Everything I had heard led me to believe your book would be some kind of impassioned anti-irony lamentation. But the reality, which few people have admitted, is that it includes a lot more information about strip mining and Eastern Europe than condemnations of Jerry Seinfeld. I say you just threw in a little anti-irony patina because you know it's hip to be down on irony these days. I certainly had a sense that when I talked about irony people were a lot more interested than when I talked about skepticism toward politics. I did not have a sense that the discussion of irony in the first chapter was not the freshest thing in the book. Was not? That's a double negative. I thought it was the freshest thing in the book. It's probably true that to the cognoscenti the theme is not novel. I do think it's an oft-thought, never-clearly-said matter, and the one reason people are interested in the book is that it does try to describe the ironic manner in a fairly textured way. Does it add anything to our understanding of the ironic manner? If you say no, then no. I mean, if you knew all that, then it does not. But your point is really about tactics and marketing of the book. On that point, I'm literally trying to remember the process by which the subtitle got selected. The back and forth basically was that I came up with the title and was told that there had to be a subtitle and that it had to be "x and x and x in America Today." And no question; I'm sure that it came up — not explicitly, but I'm sure it was in people's minds — that folks are paying attention to irony. It seems implausible that it was not. On the other hand, there was never a conversation where someone at Knopf said, "You know, you're going to get a lot of press if you put 'Irony' in the subtitle." The way the book is being received, as an anti-ironic screed, is not something I'm happy about. I didn't write this book to achieve a fleeting notoriety or even a slightly more lasting notoriety. The last thing I want in the world is to become the anti-irony guy, the pundit in square E7 of the pundit grid, who gets called up when they want someone to say something snide or sanctimonious about irony. And you're right, it's not a book basically about irony. It's a book written against indifference. I don't say, "All right, score!" when The New York Times Magazine titles its piece "Against Irony." The rest of us should be so lucky. There are plenty of worse things that can happen to you than to become America's talking head of choice. I think it would be pretty horrible. I think that would be a pretty nasty position, and I have no intention of taking it up. So what are you doing to prevent all this from happening? What do you do? Well, the first thing you do is you turn down an offer from TV Guide to review five new pilot programs from the fall lineup in terms of their ironic and nonironic content. The idea of an offer like that was basically a parody of the situation I was entering two weeks ago. That offer came in today, and I just about fell down laughing, but it's also very unsettling. The project I've been doing for the second half of the summer is on the political economy of agriculture, looking at vertical and horizontal integration and consolidation in the agriculture industry and their effects on mid-scale farming. That's not anti-irony, and it's not sexy. I'm not here to nail down a job on Wall Street or somewhere else. But right now you're doing a Slate Dialogue with Michael Hirschorn in which you're in character as Anti-Irony Man. How is that any less self-parodic? Because Slate has intellectual credibility and TV Guide doesn't? That's interesting. It's sort of unsettling, because I've never read Slate. You and everybody else. It seemed like a good chance to discuss some of the cognoscenti response to the book. Do you think scientists will ever quantify the sheer inanity of Hirschorn's comments? I'm not sure what you mean. He spent a lot of time on the branding issue, but that's sort of an interesting paradox in my situation. If you're going to go for the paradoxical jugular, that's probably the one, and it's an issue that's worried me enough that I thought it was worth responding to. His other stuff ... His wrap-up question was some flapdoodle about, "How can we avoid irony without moving to West Virginia?" My grandmother could come up with a more intelligent question than that. [Very polite and charming deferral, which did Hirschorn more credit than he deserves] In the book, when it comes time to give an example of public-minded action, you cite your mother's service on the local school board. Pretty thin stuff, don't you think? Why? Because plenty of people already serve on school boards all over this great nation. You're being a little ironic right there. How? The "great nation" thing. I believe this is a great nation, pal. You can take that any way you want. Fair enough. In any event, why do we need somebody lecturing about the importance of serving on school boards when, in fact, school boards already have to hold elections and turn people down who want to serve? Do you not understand why people with kids and mortgages want to kick your ass when you go on about the need to take responsibility? I swear that I'm not out of sympathy with that. I have a discomfort with the fact that this book runs a constant risk — and it's a risk that it has evidently fallen on the wrong side of with you — of coming off self-righteous, sanctimonious, and preachy. It's one of the virtues of a disciplined irony that it really cuts off your self-congratulations. It's a risky book in terms of self-regard as well as other people's perception of it. I don't think it's cool to be sanctimonious; I don't think it's attractive to be self-righteous. The book is really an attempt to talk seriously about public purposes and to not be those things. And some people who have read it carefully think that it succeeds in doing those things, and some people who have read it carefully, like you, think that it fails. And to the extent that it fails, writing a book like this is a really humiliating experience. Well, jeez, I don't want to be tormenting you over here. I'm serious; that's just the way it is. The Times Magazine story has one scene where you're riding your motorcycle at 60 mph in a 25-mph zone. That is, in fact, fair. Well, for a guy who just wrote a book about the importance of acting in a civic spirt, isn't that a pretty poor example of public-minded action? There was no one within two miles. It was a desolate country road.... Um, that's a totally fair question. I'm trying not to sound like an ass in responding to it.... No, it's not a good example. It is true that that was a road where the reporter and I were the only people who would have been in danger. No one lives there. No kids were playing on it.... Didn't you ever see the opening scene of Lawrence of Arabia? Yup, sure did. Well, that's what he thought: "I'm the only one on the road." Yes, it wasn't smart, and I have nothing to say in defense of that, except that I don't drive my car that way, and I don't drive that way when there are people around. In the Salon review, Crain also implies you would have been better off if you'd been beaten up by your classmates in grade school. That's truly obnoxious. I can't make anything of that. But it does speak to some general hostility toward you and your celebrity, doesn't it? Apparently. Do you think Jesus was smart to put off preaching until he turned 30? Those were different times, and the ways that they were different are obscure to me. He made a good call by preaching in Aramaic. All right, Harvard boy, let's see how smart you ain't. If I write under the alias BarTel d'Arcy, to whom does my alias allude? Sorry, you got me. Nyah! He's the tenor in Ulysses. Oh! Excellent. How about if I write as Cunegonde? Got me again. She's the princess in Candide. How about Satchel Paige? Well, sure. Played with the Kansas City [Monarchs]. Said to be pitching until he was 60, after he broke into the majors. Good. How about Benedict Bogus? Sorry. He's the evil millionaire in the Young Three Stooges comic books. The Ulysses one is embarrassing, because I actually did read it. In class, of course, not on my own. Read it and loved it. OK. Thumbnail impressions: Bill Clinton. Ahem. Gives political cynicism a good name. Andy Warhol Huh. Continues to confuse Pittsburgh. Chris Rock Saw him quoted recently as saying that the best thing in the world, better than love letters, is to sit at home with his girlfriend — or maybe it's his wife — and watch a dumb video and laugh at it. And it made me feel a little more warm and fuzzy about Beavis and Butt-head irony. Susan Faludi Didn't read any of her earlier stuff. I'm curious to read this new book that's getting so much attention. Sting Pretty saccharine. John Updike Haven't read a whole lot.... Eventful nose. Koko the gorilla. Still not sure whether she was saying anything. OK, that's about it. Have you ever read Suck.com? I've heard about it but I've never actually read it. You and everybody else. When the Purdy brand started to break wide a couple of weeks ago, we saw you as an opportunity to build our own brand as the Antipurdy. But to do that, we would have had to misrepresent the content of your book — which a lot of other publications apparently don't mind doing. Unfortunately, at Suck, we're scrupulous to a fault. Well, I take it you put people in Suck to make fun of them? Yeah, don't worry about it. You acquitted yourself well.
It's more than just our instinctual need to defend le Jerk against all attackers that has worn out our patience with the long and pointless campaign against Jerry Lewis' lost masterpiece, The Day the Clown Cried. Having recently scored our own (no longer rare) copy of the script, we can say that Harry Shearer's long march of laughter at the unreleased film's expense now seems less than credible. Admittedly, the script teems with jawbreaking dialog like "... all rations are canceled for the next 48 hours," "You make us scream — scream with laughter," and "Why do they hate me?" But all the mockery of Clown has long ago reached a level of sub-MST3K-level wiseacreage, and as Shearer acknowledged for the umpteenth time in an appearance this week on The Howard Stern Show, the film's Achilles' heel is that it ends on a really down note — which we would think was a mark of quality in a movie about the Holocaust. But then, maybe not. As Jakob the Liar hits screens tomorrow, it's becoming clear that the key to success in Shoah business is to be heartwarming, and in that respect, the joke seems to be on all of us.
It's become a de facto part of the post-disaster coping process that some mope has to tell a TV reporter that the experience was "like something from a movie." The rest of us have come to expect this part of the news cycle, but for a criminal bent on going out in a blaze of glory, it can be a real bitch. So it was for Larry Ashbrook, who last week became the latest poster boy for crazed loners with assault rifles when he let loose with a semi-automatic in a Baptist church in Fort Worth, Texas, killing seven. While it was no surprise that several in attendance fed reporters the de rigueur "like Hollywood" line, what was striking was the number of people who actually believed it was a movie or some other entertainment, even as their fellow churchgoers were spurting real blood out of bona fide gunshot wounds. "We all thought it was part of a skit," said teen witness Rachel Millar. Fort Worth Police Chief Ralph Mendoza acknowledged that the injuries were worse than they might have been, since people failed to run away in the apparent belief that they were witnessing some kind of act. Even actual bullet wounds weren't enough to shake some of the kids from the notion that they were being subjected to some kind of extra-wacky Candid Camera stunt. After he got blasted, 14-year-old Nicholas Skinner looked down and saw red all over the seat and came to the inescapable conclusion that he had been hit — with a paint gun. (No doubt he spent his hours in the emergency room keeping his eyes peeled for George Clooney.) The upshot was that Ashbrook, in his final bid to make a splash after leading a life of quiet desperation, found himself fighting an uphill battle. "This is real!" he yelled at the congregation, understandably nonplussed during his final moments as kids stood up and shouted, "Shoot me!" rather than cowering in terror. It wasn't all for naught, though: Two people present managed to catch part of his performance on videotape. courtesy of theSucksters |
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