The Rake Magazine

Author: Hans Eisenbeis

  • This Post More Interesting & To-The-Point Than The Next

    New issue is up. Print edition–the real thing–will hit the streets on Monday. This is what we’re doing most of the time.

  • The Narcissist At Work

    With the news that our publisher and son have taken the reins of the ab fab MNSpeak, I was reminded of an ongoing monologue I’ve been developing (I know, among all the other ongoing monologues) about the variety of blogs. Just within any particular medium, there are so many varieties that creating a typology is an endless task, and probably a pointless one. Consider, for example, the world of vlogs or video podcasts. This is a nascent thing–iTunes currently lists 83 vlogs. I guarantee that number will be in the thousands, if not the tens of thousands in twelve months– and already it makes very little sense to compare, say, Chasing Windmills with Rocketboom. One is a sort of daily variety show with an astonishingly annoying host, the other is an artful and funny and professionally produced soap opera. The same is true, of course, of the text-based crowd. There’s humor, memoir, political punditry, book reviews, gossip, just some guy’s random thoughts, and so on.

    But this obvious point makes me consider what the essence of a blog is, if there is an essence. If there is anything new to it (particularly in print) it is the foreshortened form– the quick hit, the editorializing link, the ribald punchline, and on to the next post. By that criteria, this here operation is no blog at all, but a frequent writing exercise with disparate, idiosyncratic subjects like magazine publishing, hockey, life in the Midwest, and so on. Anyone who writes for a living ought to write as often as they can–sort of like if you consider yourself a professional skier, you should probably ski quite a lot. Now the difference is that most professionals don’t wish to practice in public. Most writers, if they know what’s good for them, will self-edit aggressively. That’s to keep up the quality of the stuff that makes it to the point of public consumption. You could also make the argument that too much publishing, whether it’s in a blog or a newspaper, devalues the product and the producer.

    On the other hand, I think you write differently if you know there is a possibility that someone other than yourself is going to read it. It’s similar to the question of whether the artist can or should think about his audience. It changes the art, generally for the better I think, when it is intended for public viewing, because it should compell the artist to make extra sure things are looking their best. So blogging, for the writer anyway, is maybe a zero-sum game. Probably the best advice is to continue to write publicly AND privately.

    If I tried to guage how much I write that actually ends up in the public domain–including here on the web–I’d say roughly half of it never sees the light of day. And that’s not because it’s unfinished or unintended to have readers. I hardly ever start a project without finishing it, whether its a bloggy graf or a magazine article or a novel. (Tried once. It is the worst thing ever written in the English language. No, that would be a selling point. It’s the most useless thing ever written in the English language, and I may well go to hell just for the vanity of forcing it on the one or two people who did look at it. I used to think the thing was merely unfinished–at 100,000 words. Now I know it’s not that. It’s that it is relentlessly bad from beginning to end.)

    Not sure what my point was here, other than to do my own pushups today out here in view of everyone and everything, after spending a week or so writing in a closed circuit. The upside for readers, generically speaking, is that a good writer like Woolcott or TMFTML or Diablo works differently and more loosely in this medium, and often times they really shine without the interference of an editor or a publisher or, more subtly, their own censorious professional within. I like to compare the online and print writing particularly of Woolcott, because he’s always a gas to read. But on the web, he flexes all those ripped metaphorical muscles, and he regularly beats up on the deserving weaklings who dare to darken his doorstep with their muddled thinking and their mannered contempt.

  • Truth or Dare

    The “white lie”—is there such a thing?

    Good journalists, they say, have no friends. We have a few, so perhaps we’re doing something wrong. It’s true, though, that anyone who writes for a living makes enemies now and again. Writers of all types are caught on the horns of fact and fabrication. On the one hand, novelists writing under cover of fiction often get in trouble when “characters” recognize themselves in a story. Conversely, if you’re writing nonfiction, there are high expectations that everything in your account will, you know, be true and verifiable and all that. In the past four weeks, the issue has come to a boil, thanks to two memoirists who appear to have transformed their Minnesota experiences from low-voltage, real-life fluorescence into explosive, incandescent scandal. That would be Nicole Helget, the fascinating young writer of The Summer of Ordinary Ways, and James Frey, the successful but embattled writer of A Million Little Pieces. Helget’s story has been generating some static from immediate family and friends for her disturbing rural Minnesota memoir; some of the characters implicated in her tale have decided that the writer exceeded the limits of her artistic license. And Frey notoriously padded his resume as a drug addict and felon, the better to tell the story of his redemption at a Minnesota treatment center.

     

    This all raises the question of what constitutes a memoir, and what rules must be followed. And the answer, apparently, is that there are no agreed-upon rules. While we are inclined to give all writers and storytellers the benefit of the doubt, it will not do to have them begging off responsibility due to the “subjective memory” of the writer. That is a disingenuous dodge. Should memoirists make things up, outside of their own internal states? They should not. Memoir is a fashionable genre, but it is also a chronically troubled one. Thanks to professional jealousy, almost every bestselling memoir is eventually scrutinized, weak points are identified, and the authors are dutifully rebuked. Folks from Lillian Hellman to Dave Eggers have stepped over the line of veracity into verisimilitude. There are those who are hurt by libelous narratives. And then there are the rest of us who like nothing better than to pile on an artist for taking liberties with the truth. Beyond this small epidemic of mendacity, we’re frankly more worried about the clucking, sanctimonious press. In critical circles these days, there is a strong whiff of vigilantism. It’s even stronger than the fume of victimhood that seems to be the exhaust of most popular memoirs.

     

    Other forms of autobiographical art are given much more leeway. Consider, for example, the visual artist. In early December, local artist Gabriele Ellertson succumbed to cancer after living with it, documenting it, battling it, and exploring it as subject matter in her work. This she did for almost two decades in her elegant, disturbing paintings and drawings. It would take a very precise and jaded critic indeed to see (or even to care) where Ellertson might have embellished her own story within the parameters of her art. In the visual arts, we do not think in terms of truth and falsehood. We think of beauty and imperfection. And yet, one of the enduring precepts of civilization is that truth is beautiful, and beauty is truth. We’re not sure that lets an elegant stylist like Nicole Helget, or a successful twelve stepper like James Frey, off the hook. But there is some substance to Picasso’s idea that art is a lie that tells the truth.

    And then just a week ago, Bob Feldman passed away. He was the president of Red House Records, an internationally respected folk label based here in St. Paul. Feldman, who was a gracious, funny, and authentic man, will be remembered as a publisher of great stories—though only a boor would vet the Red House catalog for historical fact. Folk music would seem to be another art form that does not truck with questions of prevarication. But then it doesn’t make a lot of sense to ask whether “Honky-Tonk Blues” is a true story, does it?

     

    In the real world, outside the bounds of art, this imaginative approach to storytelling is often called “lying,” and sometimes “fraud.” The other day, Stillwater high school students unmasked one of their classmates as an imposter. You will recall that Joshua Gardner claimed to be British royalty, the seventeen-year-old “Caspian James Crichton Stuart IV, Fifth Duke of Cleveland.” In fact, he was merely an imaginative twenty-two-year-old registered sex offender from Winona. One can’t blame him for trying to reinvent himself—why should pop-culture royals like Madonna and David Bowie have a monopoly on self-reinvention? Is there anything more Anglo-American? But perhaps Gardner ought not to have aimed quite so high, nor insisted on being addressed as “your grace.”

     

    More eloquent critics than us have pointed out that there is reason to worry about a culture that tolerates so much fibbing. Times book critic Michiko Kakutani has written movingly about the ramifications that Oprah’s Book Club has selected Elie Wiesel’s Night as its next title in the wake of the James Frey affair. If Oprah’s view of the Frey controversy is that it was “much ado about nothing,” what’s to prevent readers from denying that the Holocaust, at least as witnessed and detailed by Wiesel, ever happened outside the imagination of the author? And an important larger point needs to be emphasized. As Kurt Andersen has said, the climate of relativity today is a strange one in which evolution is “just a theory,” allegedly on an equal footing with the crank religious propositions of “intelligent design,” and a just war is one that can be redeemed by any number of fungible perceptions and political prejudices that trump the “reality-based community.” When we allow facts to be displaced by subjective impressions, then spin replaces the news, the globe continues to heat up, the voices of antagonism grow shriller, and our attention is diverted from real tragedies large and small.

  • More On 24

    James Surowiecki, one of my favorite writers, really ought to be allowed out of his gilded cage at the New Yorker a bit more often, now that he’s perfected the Financial Page (along with the Greatest Unsung Editor of Our Times, Susan Morrison). Well, at least he’s allowed to ask questions through the bars. Yesterday at Slate, he conducted a very interesting Q&A with one of “24”‘s writers, Michael Loceff. Lots of interesting information there, especially as regards the first season–which had been written, actually, before 9/11, but began airing two months later. The whole premise of the show was happily prescient, if that’s the right word.

    Slate editors, who are masters of the homepage teaser, marketed the story as potentially a discussion that would address the morality of the show’s depiction of torture, which is a frequent and (frequently abominable) method used by Bauer and his federal colleagues (and, to be sure, by the bad guys too). Sadly, Surowiecki lets the “24” writer entirely off the hook on the question.

    Surowiecki:

    One of the places where 24 and the real world have intersected most powerfully is on the question of torture. On 24, torture is regularly used in interrogation. Some critics believe that 24 actually plays to our desire to witness torture, that it is, in some sense, “torture porn.” How do you make sense of and justify the role of torture in the show?

    Loceff:

    “If you look at any given torture scene in the show, you’ll find that there’s something in it that shows someone’s distaste or disgust. And Jack Bauer’s decision to torture people for information in the past has cost him, because it’s shown other people just exactly what he’s capable of. Jack himself is appalled by what he feels he has to do, but he’s also convinced he has to do it. That is a real dramatic conflict.”

    It continues:


    Slate: One of the familiar critiques of using torture as an interrogation technique is that it doesn’t work. On 24 it tends to be very effective.

    Loceff: I don’t know that torture works, and we don’t write it because we think it works. So, I don’t think any of us are trying to make a statement about the efficacy of it one way or the other.

    Slate: Back to the realism question: 24 is shot in real time, which creates a very powerful illusion of reality.

    Loceff totally misses the point, and redirects the conversation. Jack feels bad about torture? And that’s it?

    Jack, friendless and bereft, bounces back and the story moves forward. In every instance now for five years, the dramatic storyline proceeds. Torture pushes the plot forward, it is never a dead-end. Naturally, no one who is innocent is ever tortured. Logically, then, only the guilty are tortured… you see where I’m going with this. (When the bad guys torture the good guys, they get nothing, of course. Either becuase their victims are innocent, or dsisciplinedf federal agents.) If torture is any way a negative element of the show or its themes, then Jack Bauer is merely a martyr for the larger cause of national security. This conveniently ignores the fact that civil rights are, sui generis, a national security issue.

    I don’t worry that full-throated Bush apologists would look to 24 as some kind of precedent. But I do worry about the astonishing parallels to the real world, and about Americans becoming innured to these noxious ideas. The Bush administration obviously doesn’t require precedents in any of its activities. It’s this idea that “if you were innocent, you wouldn’t have been arrested” (or it’s equivalent, as enunciated by Jonah Goldberg the other day, “we only use illegal wiretapping on obvious terrorists and their abettors”) that truly frightens me.

  • Another Day, Another Incredibly Violent Series

    Having spent last week fasting, meditating, flagellating, and otherwise chastening and prostrating ourselves for the important job at hand, this week we’re busy tacking, gluing, hot-waxing, tucking, nipping the new issue–and we’re sure you’ll agree that all this radio-silence at the blog is going to be worth it. (Hint: Nudity! Much nudity!) But something I wanted to point out while briefly on the hustings. As you know, dear reader, there are two sorta inexplicable tangents we indulge in around here, just because you are powerless to stop us–(a) the occasional thoughts on modern ice hockey, and (2) the TV series “24.”

    Well, you cannot have failed to notice that Fox programmed the first four hours of the new season of Kiefer Sutherland’s real-time name-taking and butt-kicking on Sunday and Monday nights. I found it kinda creepy that the first episode, on the eve of MLK day, featured former president David Palmer getting assassinated in a hotel room by a sniper. That was either wicked foresight or accident–but wicked in any case. Also, it seems clear that the show will continue to dwell on dangerous issues that tend to give red-state Americans a lot of bad ideas. (Like how its funny that anyone who gets tortured is obviously guilty–otherwise why would we torture them, duh! I don’t normally get all moral and snobbish like this, but what the hey. It’s really pretty frightening to ponder what a full-throated Bush apologist would make of this show, while pantywaist lefties like myself can’t keep track of all the “teaching moments.”) This season’s Pandora appears to be the modish topic of the relativity of truth and the fabrication of reality. Already a main element of the story line is the constant, improbable, high-tech maniupulation of information–particularly digital media. There is something perfectly meta about this, given how the show itself has shamelessly manipulated our emotions for five years now.

  • The Fakirs

    Folks everywhere are in a righteous huff about James Frey and his book “A Million Little Pieces,” which turns out to be full of fabrications and embellishments. Years ago, I received the hardcover in the first round of publicity. I myself couldn’t get through the first twenty-five pages, and had no idea it was as good as everyone says. It reminded me of the novels of Irvine Welsh, which everyone raves about too, but which I can’t make any sense of. I thought the cover was cool, though.

    As you already know, The Smoking Gun reestablished its bona fides late last week in a lengthy investigation that makes Frey look like a pathological liar. (Also, by the way, offering a shout-out to our pal Deborah Caulfield Rybak at the Strib for being quick to smell a rat. Well done, DCR!) Considering how much Frey has stumped for himself and protested against the “haters” and practically dared the entire english-speaking world to knock the battery off his shoulder, I think the indignation is appropriate.

    According to at least one report, Frey’s original manuscript was presented as fiction and it was turned down by seventeen publishers. The eighteenth, Doubleday, bought it but insisted on editing it and publishing it as nonfiction. Assuming the best about Doubleday, they presumably tried to eliminate all the fictional hyperbole.

    A couple of things I find interesting about this. What does it say about readers (and publishers) that a book no one would touch as fiction rides to the top of the bestsellers list as nonfiction? Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that it’s the exact same book. That means that the story’s main virtue is its sensational plot elements. It therefore hangs its entire selling proposition on the truthfulness of those elements, rather than some other virtue inherent in the writing itself. (Again, a comparison to Welsh is useful, maybe.) That kind of credibility speaks to the persistent cult of celebrity, in which the reading public and the reading industry still care an awful lot about the personality and the biography of the author. That’s natural, of course, when the author writes autobiography or memoir. The point is that we value history more than we value imagination. “True Story!” carries an extra charge of voyeuristic pleasure that you just don’t get from “Amazing fabrication!”

    Because we care so much about the biographies of bestselling authors, they must feel tremendous pressure to participate in their own celebrity. Remember what a tremendous flap occurred when Jonathan Franzen, years ago, declined to be in Oprah’s Book Club? That was just a minor, counterpositive moment in the otherwise well-lubricated machine of pop cultural coronation. You write a good book, get lucky with a few positive reviews, pretty soon New York producers are calling and scheduling you on daytime television shows, strange people become your “handlers,” you begin to live in airports and hotels, you begin to make a lot of money, lots of important and powerful people begin to make demands of you, a backlash of naysayers and skeptics develops, and so on and so on. And here, just a few months ago, you were living under a pile of dirty clothes eating off of paper napkins.

    Some have drawn comparisons to J.T. Leroy, also supposedly outed as a “literary hoax” in recent days by the Times, which seems to have a personal score to settle. Eariler this week, I sort of defended Leroy, and I do think it’s unfair to equate Leroy with Frey. Here’s why: Leroy, whether that’s the writer’s real name or not, has done little or nothing to inflate his celebrity other than write a lot. With writing success, he was pressured to become another bean in the star machine–talk at awards ceremonies, partcipate in charities, sign books, the old grip and grin tour–and he resisted to the point of hiring performers to impersonate him in public. Again, because Leroy has a unified body of respected, published work, it seems to me more a clean case of pseudonymous writing from a recluse, rather than wholesale prevarication. I suppose I could be wrong; perhaps Leroy’s biography is as bogus as Frey’s, and therefore all that fine literary work is impeached.

    I guess I tend to look past the usual distinctions of fiction and non-fiction, and I merely enjoy a good book. I don’t take it personally if a writer makes stuff up about himself–until he becomes pathological and arrogant about it, the way Frey appears to have done. (Or when innocent bystanders are injured as collateral damage… as has been the recurring claim against everyone from Nicole Helget to Dave Eggers.) This is one of the main pitfalls of writing memoir, and no one in the industry will give you a straight answer when you ask if there is any place at all for fabrication in the world of autobiography. But I think you can be sure that if they decide you’re flying too close to the sun, they’ll make sure you fall on hard ground.

  • Housekeeping

    By the way, I wanted to mention that tomorrow night kicks off the new season of The Rake’s monthly happy hour of literature–the one we call “Raking Through Books.” It’s an opportunity to come to our favorite watering hole, Kieran’s Irish Pub, rub elbows with your fellow Rake readers, and, y’know, generally participate in the Cultural Conversation. (Plus: Delicious complimentary appetizers!)

    The new season brings a new format, of sorts. Our guest will be novelist Julie Schumacher. I’ll be facilitating a (hopefully) interesting conversation about fantasy literature (think Narnia, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter) and the intersection of children’s and adult literature, among many other things. Ms. Schumacher, you probably know, is also a professor at the University of Minnesota, where she specializes in monsters under the bed and that sort of thing.

    The microphone switches on around 5:30 p.m. in the Titanic Room, to the rear of Kieran’s. Hope to see you there!

  • More on J.T. LeRoy

    I read with interest Warren St. John’s continuing investigation as to the “true identity” of J.T. LeRoy. You’ll remember the little dustup about a month ago when New York magazine raised doubts about the real identity of LeRoy, suggesting a person of that name does not actually exist. LeRoy, who has been writing professionally for ten years, had recently written a lovely piece for the New York Times magazine, which had led to another assignment writing about a television show. But the Times, feeling a bit woozy from all the recent scandals among its writers and reporters, is now in the habit of drowning the dog to get rid of the fleas. They cancelled the assignment. Or, as St. John says so delicately, they “reassigned the piece.” (I’ve already bitched about this at length elsewhere. This is an area where the Times really does not cultivate much respect or sympathy from the general freelancing community, but no one wants to speak out loud and piss off editors at the World’s Greatest Newspaper. Like this: The ethical thing to do is to honor an agreement and pay a kill fee.)

    My main point here is that no one seems to have gotten the memo on post-modernism. Folks, read the text and forget the author. LeRoy has written dozens of fascinating stories, critical reviews, essays, short stories, and novels, and any nitwit can apprecite the consistency of voice and sensibility.

    St. John’s piece today provides the service of identifying the person who has “portrayed” the camera-shy LeRoy in public. St. John writes:

    “It is unclear what effect the unmasking of Ms. Knoop will have on JT Leroy’s readers, who are now faced with the question of whether they have been responding to the books published under that name, or to the story behind them.”

    I guess my view is that St. John is here part of the problem rather than the solution. If I were to attempt a translation of what he’s saying, it would go something like this: We are a culture that remains obsessed with celebrity, with the cult of personality, and a person like J.T. LeRoy exists in an uneasy limbo–celebrated for his actual work, but increasingly persecuted as a person (of whatever basis in reality) because of his unwillingness to play by the rules of modern celebrity (be a real, pinchable, and charismatic person who spends as much time as possible in the klieg lights).

    LeRoy’s agent, Ira Silverberg, is himself apparently feeling duped by the public imposter, and his point (as quoted in the Times) seems to be a more serious moral one:

    “To present yourself as a person who is dying of AIDS in a culture which has lost so many writers and voices of great meaning, to take advantage of that sympathy and empathy, is the most unfortunate part of all of this,” Mr. Silverberg said. “A lot of people believed they were supporting not only a good and innovative and adventurous voice, but that we were supporting a person.”

    The point is well taken. But, hypothetically speaking, I wonder who is more cynical: The person who claims to have HIV but does not actually exist, or the one who needs a bona-fide celebrity to be infected in order to care about the plague of HIV. More to the point, every day our sympathies and empathies are cultivated and manipulated by fictional characters in literature, film, art, and theater. It is our obsession with celebrity that has us worshipping the beautiful talking heads that pronounce the words and dance the dance of the culture’s true prophets, its (normally anonymous) artists.

    It seems to me that reaching a final verdict on the reality of J.T. LeRoy is a reductive process of slowly subtracting Big Truth in order to sell a smaller truth, one that will fit in a Monday morning newspaper. It is still an interesting whodunnit, of course. But I worry that the current environment of vigilantism in journalistic circles will unnecessarily put an end to the career of a worthy and interesting writer, whatever his or her true indentity.

    Full disclosure, for what it’s worth: I’ve spoken to J.T. LeRoy, and I think I know the answer to the Question At Hand, but I intend to keep it to myself. Why? Because it’s not particularly useful to anyone–not me, not LeRoy, and not his readers. Is LeRoy who he says he is? To me, it is not an essential element of the narrative, except among the most superficial sort of literary ambulance chasers. I suspect most of LeRoy’s acquaintances feel the same way, which explains why this modern mystery has persisted for as long as it has.

  • Sounding the Alarm

    A while back, I was saying I thought my old friend Ana Marie Cox deserved to be writing IN the New York Times, rather than being written ABOUT in the New York Times. (I haven’t seen her novel yet, but the fact that she even wrote one hints at the fact that she has some facility with the language that goes somewhat beyond the clever 50-word anal-sex jokes.) This week, she managed to do both, on the same day! Nice work, Ana Marie.

    Close readers of everything ever printed within the last five years will know that the last time Ana Marie wrote longform for a print publication, it was here in The Rake. Hereby claiming our bragging rights, I think we’re entitled to our little portion of celebrity fairy dust, to sprinkle on ourselves here in the outback.

    Media alert: For those of you who know that the second best thing to do on a Friday night is to watch TPT’s Almanac and imagine Eric Eskola wearing ONLY his scarf–I’ll be representing the Rake in a couchsit with other more interesting local media folks, including the gracious Dylan Hicks, the lovely Heidi Raschke, and the witty Claude Peck. Topic is reported to be a look back to 2005, and a look forward to 2006 in the wonderful world of art and entertainment. We’ll appear at the end of the program, so probably be getting bombed in the green room…

  • Are You Going To Finish That?

    I’ve been reading with interest Ann Bauer’s provoking story at Salon, “Food Slut.” More interesting than the piece, to me, has been the somewhat predictable but volumous flamewar that has erupted among readers who are arguing the finer points of food criticism as it appears in most modern glossy magazines, many of them sawing on their tiny violins for the dyspeptic Bauer.

    Bauer has a special talent for writing stories that polarize readers. She tends to take noxious positions that reflect somewhat poorly on her person, but she is such an elegant and intimate stylist that she usually edges out a win with the tie-breaking sympathy vote. Personally, I’d love to see her write about something other than herself, and I did enjoy many of her less narcissitic food and restaurant pieces in Minnesota Monthly.

    It’s telling, I think, that she seems to have a special taste for reductions. All writers, about food and not food, try to reduce the cacophony of their little corner of the world into a trickle valve of distilled meaning, but they must be careful not to let it be curdled by the acid of falsehood-by-simplification (or its herbal cousin, the composite character or event), and I worry that Bauer indulges sometimes in this kitchen shortcut, much as she doesn’t have time to thaw her hamburger before she pans it.

    True, when the cold-pressed virgin truth you are supposed to arrive at is “Write positive reviews about our advertisers, dammit!” “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all, dammit!” it leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.