Stu called up. He was all, "Dude, Jeremiah Purdy's doing a reading tonight at Black Oak Books. We should totally Pollack him."
"Wait," I said. "Don't you mean 'Eggers him?'"
"Dude, no. It's Pollack now."
"Cool." I made a mental note. Nothing blows more than being found in possession of stale lingo.
"So do you want to do it?" Stu asked. "It's too late to rent a costume or anything, but we can pose as preppy neocons."
"Yeah," I said. "Let's take down Purdy. He's a total spitoon."
"Yeah, he is. Okay, Jack's is in too. We should get something to eat first. Where do you want to go?"
"I don't care -- as long as there's no sushi on a boat."
"Dude. Come on. If you can't take the kitsch, then don't claim to be hip."
I had no smart comeback so I hung up.
We ended going to the Brazilian pizza place. It's a little World Cup '94, but the chow is good.
We tried to plot strategy over dinner, but ended up talking about fruit liquors, the possible re-re-birth of swing, and which foreign cars were now hip (in a word: VW is out. Nissan is in.).
Jack tried to claim that peach schnapps was the latest hip drink, but Stu and I convinced him that the only cool drink that evokes memories of robbing your folks liquor cabinet is Scotch. Jack is dating a pr bunny right now so sometimes his hip meter becomes super-uncalibrated.
We got to the reading late and had to stand in the back.
The audience seemed to be composed of earnest, upper-middle, KQED liberals and a few Young Republicans from Cal (or maybe it was *all* the Young Republicans from Cal).
Purdy did his thing. I scanned the crowd for possible plants from the McSweeney's crowd (I mean Chabon lives just up the street), but if there were any there they were well-blended.
When Purdy finished, he opened up the audience to questions. I kept nudging Stu in the ribs, but he wouldn't say anything. The crowd was silent too. So I raised my hand and asked in my best Marin-county, surfer-dude-goof voice, "I gotta ask. What are your thoughts on High Anxiety?"
"Mel Brooks is not unfunny," Purdy said. "But his portrayal of the perils and follies of psychology minimized its status as a serious threat to American culture and values by presenting an over-inflated view of the field and its practitioners."
I got a few weird stares, but nobody said anything so I raised my hand again and said, "I have a follow up."
Purdy nodded.
"Your stance on the dangers of irony is well known," I said. "But what if irony is misapplied as a term and a concept like in the Alanis Morissette song where the dude crashes on his first airplane flight and then it rains on the chick's wedding day. Is that still dangerous?"
Purdy literally peered at me for a minute.
"I got one thing to say to you, g," he said. "I've got one hand in my pocket and the other one's about to bust a cap in you a**."
That shut me up pretty good. Stu and Jack stopped snickering too. I mean you got to respect a home-schooled, tightwad Harvard dude who can bust out the ghetto slang.
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NOTES 1. Jedidiah Purdy: a home-schooled, Harvard-educated, gen-X, social conservative cultural pundit. I've never read any of his books. I think I read an editorial he wrote.
2. Black Oak Books: A real bookstore located on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley just north of the gourmet ghetto. It's a good bookstore. Specializes in rare books and in philosophy, theory (cultural, political, anthropological, etc.) and art titles. I doubt that Black Oak would ever have a Jedidiah Purdy reading, but it's possible. I've been in there a couple of times, but I've never actually bought anything there.
3. Pollack: Neal Pollack. A gen-X writer who has created an oversized, gonzo literary persona [think Papa Hemingway combined with Hunter Thompson]. He likes to do book readings in unconventional places and treats them like performance art [funky costumes, goof stunts, etc.]. He is associated with McSweeney's and Dave Eggers.
4. Eggers: Dave Eggers. The author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and You Shall Know our Velocity and the founder and editor of the McSweeney's literary journal, Web site, and publishing company. Eggers is know for his uber, self-reflexive, so-ironic-it-becomes-sincere style. I haven't read either of his novels, although I have read reviews of them. I did read a short story of his that appeared in the New Yorker last summer. It wasn't that great. Some writers have tried to contrast Eggers and Purdy and cast them as representative of two opposing schools of Gen-X cultural thought, but as far as I know, it's a media convention that's useful for mainly for writing articles that appear to be in touch with the Zeitgeist.
5. Spittoon: a repository for expectorations i.e. an unoriginal, wannabe public intellectual who can only parrot the ideas of others [and always in diluted form]. I made this particular usage up. Feel free to adopt it. I'm sure you'll find it useful in some context or another.
6. Sushi on a boat: this is the one place where my tastes and attitudes coincide with those of the narrator. I have an implicit, visceral distrust and immediate dislike of any sushi place that has one of those sushi on a boat bars.
7. Hip: this entire piece congealed as the result of reading about Purdy and Eggers in the past and then, this summer, this book called The Hipster Handbook by Robert Lanham. I have only read media coverage of the book. I haven't read the book itself. I hear the book is totally deck, though.
8. Brazilian pizza place: Nino's Brazilian Restaurant and Pizzeria located on Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Berkeley (just north of University Ave.). I've never eaten there but I've heard (and read) that it's pretty good. It actually was totally World Cup '94 -- several newspapers sent reporters to the restaurant for material for the requisite 'wow these Brazilians are really into soccer and know how to have fun' story.
9. Swing: I've never danced swing. I think that it's still considered cool by some Bay Areans -- or at least I still see guys wearing bowling shirts.
10. Peach schnapps, etc.: I have no idea what I’m talking about here because I've never had alcohol. At least I don't think I have. There was a dubious rose-hip syrup drink that I was served in Bucharest by a young man and his mother who were exactly -- and I mean exactly -- totally the same level of unctuousness -- like Uriah Heep and his mum.
11. Nissan vs. VW: I'm not sure that Nissan vehicles have ever been considered hip, but I'm sick of seeing all the thirtysomethings in the casual carpool line that drive new VW Jettas. I drive a VW Jetta, but it's old school -- a '94. And I bought it from a sleezy used car dealer whose dealership went incognito a year afterwards. I got a good deal on it and it's been a fine vehicle, so that's good, dubious provenance notwithstanding.
12. Pr bunny : I saw this term once in a New York times article or something like that, but I've never heard anyone actually use it. Maybe it's a Manhattan thing. Anyway, a pr bunny is, of course, a young, female, public relations professional who most likely comes from money and isn't super smart and probably went to an expensive liberal arts school on daddy's (or mommy's) dime.
13. KQED liberals: KQED is the local PBS station. KQED liberals are your standard middle to upper middle class liberals who are into new age music and wine and cheese and self improvement, etc. In the 80s, they all used to drive Volvo stations wagons. I'm not sure what they drive now. Luxury suv's maybe. Saabs. VW Passats.
14. Chabon: Michael Chabon. Author of the Pulitizer prize-winning novel The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. He does live in Berkeley (although I don't know where), and he is supposed to be a friend of Eggers. I've never read any of his novels or short stories, but I have read reviews of them.
15. Cal: The University of California, Berkeley. I did actually do my undergraduate work there, but I never met any Young Republicans while there.
16. High Anxiety: A 1978 film written and directed by and starring Mel Brooks. I have actually seen this film. It's somewhat amusing.
17. The Alanis Morissette song: "Ironic" from her 1995 album Jagged Little Pill. I've heard the song, but I don't own the album.
18. Ghetto slang: Why is that white college-educated men of my generation use ghetto and hip-hop slang? That's just wacked, yo.
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Zal, I think what lends this piece its credibility is the meticulously unnecessary nature of the footnotes.
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Scott: If that's all you got out of it, then you are missing some seriously deeper meanings and amazingly brilliant and trenchant insights. .
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Do people actually expect you to read the footnotes in their books? I hate footnotes they break up my reading. I threw up my hands at Infinite Jest because it felt like I was supposed to stop reading and go and look to see what the footnote was.
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sarah: Ding-ding--ding-ding-ding-ding-ding! You just name-dropped one of the targets of this piece.
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Zal, I always feel like they really don't expect you to read it and it's a secret joke. You see they're secretly laughing at all the people who bother. The only problem for me is sometimes I feel like the footnotes are the only amusing/interesting pieces of the book.
Perhaps one could just one up them and write a book totally comprised of one sentance and a then 200 pages of footnotes.
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Aw, crickey, It's Robert Anton Wilson for the footnotes and the use of names as slang. Potter-Stewarting decade old rememberances!
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I LIKE footnotes. For me they actually keep the narrative flowing, as well as add lots of new or necessary source information. I can hardly imagine what it would be like if every source, note, and etc. were to be part of the main.
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I guess the video equivalent of footnotes is the "visual commentary" Disney DVDs are now released with.
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You know, I thought just now about writing a story that was one sentence long in the main but contained seventeen or eighteen pages of footnotes (in which the real story would be explained, of course), but then I figured that Dave Eggers has probably already done something like that.
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I am not sure why or how I did(1), but thanks(2)
(1)see Sarahdipity, "Ambushing Jeremiah" Hatrack River. post of June 14, 2004 07:47 PM.
(2)Assuming that it is really a serious "make my day" statement. There is no clear indication of actual emotional meaning, and could be just a wise crack. Lack of emotional hangers is a common criticism of faceless posting at web forums.
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1. The Hipster Handbook media coverage did not, as reported, occur this summer. It was last summer. Or it may have been two summers ago. I really don't know.
2. Nino's Brazilian Restaurant and Pizzeria is no longer "World Cup '94" -- it is now "like totally Carnaval '02."
3. There is a misspelled word in either the thirteenth, fourteenth or seventeenth paragraph.
4. Jedidiah Purdy has never seen "High Anxiety." Nor has he ever used ghetto slang or, for that matter, any form of incorrect English grammar or usage. I may also have misrepresented his views on irony and American culture.
5. It has come to my attention that my comments on KQED liberals were hurtful, gross stereotypes. I wish to express my sincere apologies to the entire Williams-Sonoma-shopping, chai-drinking, essential-oils wearing KQED community.
6. The last Berkeley Young Republicans were hunted to extinction in the mid-90s, thus, considering the timing of the piece, none could have actually been present at the reading.
7. Portions of this work may contain McSweeney's derivatives or may have come into contact with texts containing McSweeney's. If you are allergic to McSweeney's you may wish to refrain from reading the text.
8. The reports of a re-revival of swing were based on the accounts of defectors from the hipster nation. The author now has reason to believe those defectors may have falsified or at least greatly exaggerated their reports in an attempt to win adherents to their anti-hipster cause. A recent team of culture inspectors has carefully scoured the San Francisco Bay Area and has found no compelling evidence of swing activity or the production of swing-related material. The team did run across a couple of bowling shirts, but the evidence suggests that these shirts were being used by an actual bowling team for legitimate purposes.
9. Although this story appears to have been filed from Berkeley, California, it turns out that, at the time of the reading, the author was actually holed up in his apartment in suburban Seattle doing lines of Parmigianno Regianno. Much of this story, therefore, may have been taken from other newsreports. Most of it, in fact, seems to have been lifted from an AP story on MacWorld '03.
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I forgot to mention that I received two angry e-mails in response to the above...
quote:dear zalmoxis (if that is your real name):
I think you and all the other alanis haters should just shut up. she is so smart and pretty and talented. I think ur just jelous because you aren't. ur are probably some old guy with bad breth and stoopid hair. too bad alanis cut her hair though. it was cuter long. but what I really want to say is that u need to read a dicshunary because alanis was right!!!! and ur rong!
i'll give you an example: when my friend lindsey's mom went to paris she saw paris hilton there. isn't that ironic? dont u think? (yes, I really do think. lol!).
alanis 4-ever! zalmoxis 4-never!
I didn't respond. I'm not sure that I am capable of responding.
quote:Zalmoxis*
Ha. Very funny. One might even say humorous**. Of course that one would be me. Or rather: I am one. And where there is one I -- Cyclops. Or in other words uni-vision, lack of depth. Yes, I know you jest. I myself have jested***. But your empty footnotes contain (in their lack) an absence that is. Or rather than adding upon, you have drained **** them so that they are removed from the sensual-textual world. The dance of above and below, of text proper and text plus is cheapened. Footnotes fight against the tyranny of the unbroken page. Your's are tin soldiers*****.
Signed: DFW
*or should that be Xalmoxes? **as in the humours, that is to say, fluidly so ***of course during the 16th century that was a much more serious matter as evidenced by the line "Go jest yourself!" in George Peele's The Two Sisters and the Oxcart ****and yet despite your best efforts the drainage remains -- whether your recognize it or not *****tin and tinned -- a cheap sort of stasis
I wrote DFW back:
quote:David:
Point taken. Thanks. Truly you are the arrow root that thickens the watery soup of modern literature.
posted
Oh and why did you pick the name Jeremiah Purdy? (Just wondered because I liked Jeremiah on Showtime and the minister dude in The Dead Zone is Rev. Purdy. Two shows that I liked but they canceled Jeremiah and The Dead Zone. . . well, it just sucks because you never know when new shows are going to start to air.)
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Purdy is a Law Prof at Duke now. Yeah, he is 28. I agree with the one piece of his I've read. I haven't read any of his books, but I've read a long article in the Atlantic Monthly. Don't get me wrong, I think that he thinks that he is more profound than he is, but he is a charming and interesting case. The article was on the importance of trust in civilization.
posted
Holy carp, that's a real person. I'm really losing my mind. I thought that was a story or something you were telling. No wonder I couldn't make heads or tails of it.
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Kayla: Sorry for the confusion -- no really, I am. I actually intended to clarify things for you last night, but life intervened before I got a chance to post. I'm glad you figured it out.
Yep, Jedidiah Purdy is a real purson. The Jeremiah thing is part of the joke. But the fact that your mind created the kind of connection that it did by pulling together two cultural references shows that scarily enough our minds seem to work in similar ways.
So, yes, it is a story -- but it is a story that includes current public figures and cultural references (albeit used in a spurious manner).
And I'm sorry: but Correction No. 8 still totally cracks me up.
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