A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again Read online

  Oh God, I’ve just reread my criticisms of Gilder. That he is naïve. That he is an ill-disguised apologist for corporate self-interest. That his book has commercials. That beneath its futuristic novelty it’s just the same old American same-old that got us into this televisual mess. That Gilder vastly underestimates the intractability of the mess. Its hopelessness. Our gullibility, fatigue, disgust. My attitude, reading Gilder, has been sardonic, aloof, depressed. I have tried to make his book look ridiculous (which it is, but still). My reading of Gilder is televisual. I am in the aura.

  Well, but at least good old Gilder is unironic. In this respect he’s like a cool summer breeze compared to Mark Leyner, the young New Jersey medical-ad copywriter whose My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist is the biggest thing for campus hipsters since The Fountainhead. Leyner’s novel exemplifies a third kind of literary response to our problem. For of course young U.S. writers can “resolve” the problem of being trapped in the televisual aura the same way French poststructuralists “resolve” their hopeless enmeshment in the logos. We can resolve the problem by celebrating it. Transcend feelings of mass-defined angst by genuflecting to them. We can be reverently ironic.

  My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist is new not so much in kind as in degree. It is a methedrine compound of pop pastiche, offhand high tech, and dazzling televisual parody, formed with surreal juxtapositions and grammarless monologues and flash-cut editing, and framed with a relentless irony designed to make its frantic tone seem irreverent instead of repellent. You want sendups of commercial culture?

  I had just been fired from McDonald’s for refusing to wear a kilt during production launch week for their new McHaggis sandwich.

  he picks up a copy of das plumpe denken new england’s most disreputable german-language newsmagazine blast in egg cream factory kills philatelist he turns the page radioactive glow-in-the-dark semen found in canada he turns the page modern-day hottentots carry young in resealable sandwich bags he turns the page wayne newton calls mother’s womb single-occupancy garden of eden morgan fairchild calls sally struthers loni anderson

  what color is your mozzarella? i asked the waitress it’s pink—it’s the same color as the top of a mennen lady speed stick dispenser, y’know that color? no, maam I said it’s the same color they use for the gillette daisy disposable razors for women… y’know that color? nope well, it’s the same pink as pepto-bismol, y’know that color? oh yeah, I said, well do you have spaghetti?

  You want mordant sendups of television?

  Muriel got the TV Guide, flipped to Tuesday 8 P.M., and read aloud:… There’s a show called “A Tumult of Pubic Hair and Bobbing Flaccid Penises as Sweaty Naked Chubby Men Run From the Sauna Screaming Snake! Snake!”… It also stars Brian Keith, Buddy Ebsen, Nipsey Russell, and Lesley Ann Warren

  You like mocking self-reference? The novel’s whole last chapter is a parody of its own “About the Author” page. Or maybe you’re into hip identitylessness?

  Grandma rolled up a magazine and hit Buzz on the side of the head…. Buzz’s mask was knocked loose. There was no skin beneath that mask. There were two white eyeballs protruding on stems from a mass of oozing blood-red musculature.

  I can’t tell if she’s human or a fifth-generation gynemorphic android and I don’t care

  Parodic meditations on the boundaryless flux of televisual monoculture?

  I’m stirring a pitcher of Tanqueray martinis with one hand and sliding a tray of frozen clams oreganata into the oven with my foot. God, these methedrine suppositories that Yogi Vithaldas gave me are good! As I iron a pair of tennis shorts I dictate a haiku into the tape recorder and then… do three minutes on the speedbag before making an origami praying mantis and then reading an article in High Fidelity magazine as I stir the coq au vin.

  The decay of both the limits and the integrity of the single human self?

  There was a woman with the shrunken, wrinkled face of an eighty- or ninety-year-old. And this withered hag, this apparent octogenarian, had the body of a male Olympic swimmer. The long lean sinewy arms, the powerful V-shaped upper torso, without a single ounce of fat….

  to install your replacement head place the head assembly on neck housing and insert guide pins through mounting holes… if, after installing new head, you are unable to discern the contradictions in capitalist modes of production, you have either installed your head improperly or head is defective

  In fact, one of My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist’s unifying obsessions is this latter juxtaposition of parts of selves, people and machines, human subjects and discrete objects. Leyner’s fiction is, in this regard, an eloquent reply to Gilder’s prediction that our TV-culture problems can be resolved by the dismantling of images into discrete chunks we can recombine however we wish. Leyner’s world is a Gilderesque dystopia. The passivity and schizoid decay still endure for Leyner in his characters’ reception of images and waves of data. The ability to combine them only adds a layer of disorientation: when all experience can be deconstructed and reconfigured, there become simply too many choices. And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as “liberating” as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of a particular construct’s quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience.

  Leyner’s own novel, in its amphetaminic eagerness to wow the reader, marks the far dark frontier of the Fiction of Image—literature’s absorption of not just the icons, techniques, and phenomena of television, but of television’s whole objective. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist’s sole aim is, finally, to wow, to ensure that the reader is pleased and continues to read. The book does this by (1) flattering the reader with appeals to his erudite postmodern weltschmerz and (2) relentlessly reminding the reader that the author is smart and funny. The book itself is extremely funny, but it’s not funny the way funny stories are funny. It’s not that funny things happen here; it’s that funny things are self-consciously imagined and pointed out, like a comedian’s stock “You ever notice how…?” and “You ever wonder what would happen if…?”

  Actually, Leyner’s whole high-Imagist style most often resembles a kind of lapidary stand-up comedy:

  Suddenly Bob couldn’t speak properly. He had suffered some form of spontaneous aphasia. But it wasn’t total aphasia. He could speak, but only in a staccato telegraphic style. Here’s how he described driving through the Midwest on Interstate 80: “Corn corn corn corn Stuckeys. Corn corn corn corn Stuckeys.”

  there’s a bar on the highway which caters almost exclusively to authority figures and the only drink it serves is lite beer and the only food it serves is surf and turf and the place is filled with cops and state troopers and gym teachers and green berets and toll attendants and game wardens and crossing guards and umpires

  Leyner’s fictional response to television is less a novel than a piece of witty, erudite, extremely high-quality prose television. Velocity and vividness replace development. People flicker in and out; events are garishly there and then gone and never referred to. There’s a brashly irreverent rejection of “outmoded” concepts like integrated plot or enduring character. Instead there’s a series of dazzlingly creative parodic vignettes, designed to appeal to the 45 seconds of near-Zen concentration we call the TV attention span. In the absence of a plot, unifying the vignettes are moods—antic anxiety, the overstimulated stasis of too many choices and no chooser’s manual, irreverent brashness toward televisual reality. And, after the manner of films, music videos, dreams, and television programs, there are recurring “Key Images,” here exotic drugs, exotic technologies, exotic foods, exotic bowel dysfunctions. And it is no accident that My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist’s central preoccupation is with digestion and elimination. Its mocking challenge to the reader is the same one presented by television’s flood of realities and choices: ABSORB ME—PROVE YOU’RE CONSUMER ENOUGH.

  Leyner’s work,
the best Image-Fiction yet, is both amazing and forgettable, wonderful and oddly hollow. I’m concluding by talking about it at length because, in its masterful reabsorption of the very features TV has itself absorbed from postmodern art, Leyner’s book seems like the ultimate union of U.S. television and fiction. It seems also to cast the predicament of Image-Fiction itself into stark relief: the best stuff the subgenre’s produced to date is hilarious, upsetting, sophisticated, and extremely shallow—doomed to shallowness by its desire to ridicule a TV-culture whose mockery of itself and all value already absorbs all ridicule. Leyner’s attempt to “respond” to television via ironic genuflection is all too easily subsumed into the tired televisual ritual of mock-worship. It is dead on the page.

  It’s entirely possible that my plangent noises about the impossibility of rebelling against an aura that promotes and vitiates all rebellion say more about my residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than they do about any exhaustion of U.S. fiction’s possibilities. The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. Today’s most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line’s end’s end. I guess that means we all get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased.

  1990

  getting away from already pretty much being away from it all

  08/05/93/0800h. Press Day is a week or so before the Fair opens. I’m supposed to be at the grounds’ Illinois Building by like 0900 to get Press Credentials. I imagine Credentials to be a small white card in the band of a fedora. I’ve never been considered Press before. My main interest in Credentials is getting into rides and stuff for free.

  I’m fresh in from the East Coast to go to the Illinois State Fair for a swanky East-Coast magazine. Why exactly a swanky East-Coast magazine is interested in the Illinois State Fair remains unclear to me. I suspect that every so often editors at these magazines slap their foreheads and remember that about 90% of the United States lies between the Coasts and figure they’ll engage somebody to do pith-helmeted anthropological reporting on something rural and heartlandish. I think they decided to engage me for this one because I actually grew up around here, just a couple hours’ drive from downstate Springfield. I never did go to the State Fair, though, growing up—I pretty much topped out at the County Fair level.

  In August it takes hours for the dawn fog to burn off. The air’s like wet wool. 0800h. is too early to justify the car’s AC. I’m on I-55 going S/SW. The sun’s a blotch in a sky that isn’t so much cloudy as opaque. The corn starts just past the breakdown lanes and goes right to the sky’s hem. The August corn’s as tall as a tall man. Illinois corn is now knee-high by about the 4th of May, what with all the advances in fertilizers and herbicides. Locusts chirr in every field, a brassy electric sound that Dopplers oddly in the speeding car. Corn, corn, soybeans, corn, exit ramp, corn, and every few miles an outpost way off on a reach in the distance—house, tree w/ tire-swing, barn, satellite dish. Grain silos are the only real skyline. The Interstate is dull and pale. The occasional other cars all look ghostly, their drivers’ faces humidity-stunned. A fog hangs just over the fields like the land’s mind or something. The temperature’s over 80 and already climbing with the sun. It’ll be 90+ by l000h., you can tell: there’s already that tightening quality to the air, like it’s drawing itself in for a long siege.

  Credentials 0900h., Welcome & Briefing 0915h., Press Tour on Special Tram 0945h.

  I grew up in rural Illinois but haven’t been back for a long time and can’t say I’ve missed it—the yeasty heat, the lush desolation of limitless corn, the flatness.

  But it’s like bike-riding, in a way. The native body readjusts automatically to the flatness, and as your calibration gets finer, driving, you can start to notice that the dead-level flatness is only apparent. There are unevennesses, ups and downs, slight but rhythmic. Straight-shot I-55 will start, ever so slightly, to rise, maybe 5° over a mile, then go just as gentle back down, and then you see an overpass bridge ahead, over a river—the Salt Fork, the Sangamon. The rivers are swollen, but nothing like out around St. Louis. These gentle rises and then dips down to rivers are glacial moraines, edges of the old ice that shaved the Midwest level. The middling rivers have their origin in glacial runoff. The whole drive is a gentle sine wave like this, but it’s like sea-legs: if you haven’t spent years here you’ll never feel it. To people from the Coasts, rural IL’s topography’s a nightmare, something to hunker down and speed through—the sky opaque, the dull crop-green constant, the land flat and dull and endless, a monotone for the eyes. For natives it’s different. For me, at least, it got creepy. By the time I left for college the area no longer seemed dull so much as empty, lonely. Middle-of-the-ocean lonely. You can go weeks without seeing a neighbor. It gets to you.

  08/05/0900h. But so it’s still a week before the Fair, and there’s something surreal about the emptiness of parking facilities so huge and complex that they have their own map. The parts of the Fairgrounds that I can see, pulling in, are half permanent structures and half tents and displays in various stages of erection, giving the whole thing the look of somebody half-dressed for a really important date.

  08/05/0905h. The man processing Press Credentials is bland and pale and has a mustache and a short-sleeve knit shirt. In line before me are newshounds from Today’s Agriculture, the Decatur Herald & Review, Illinois Crafts Newsletter, 4-H News, and Livestock Weekly. Press Credentials turn out to be just a laminated mugshot with a gator-clip for your pocket; not a fedora in the house. Two older ladies from a local horticulture organ behind me engage me in shoptalk. One of these ladies describes herself as the Unofficial Historian of the Illinois State Fair: she goes around giving slide shows on the Fair at nursing homes and Rotary lunches. She begins to emit historical data at a great rate—the Fair started in 1853; there was a Fair every year during the Civil War but not during WWII, plus no Fair in 1893 for some reason; the Governor has failed to cut the ribbon personally on Opening Day only twice; etc. It occurs to me I probably ought to have brought a notebook. I also notice I’m the only person in the room in a T-shirt. It’s a fluorescent-lit cafeteria in something called the Illinois Building Senior Center, uncooled. All the local TV crews have their equipment spread out on tables and are lounging against walls talking about the apocalyptic 1993 floods to the immediate west, which floods are ongoing. They all have mustaches and short-sleeve knit shirts. In fact the only other males in the room without mustaches and golf-shirts are the local TV reporters, four of them, all in Eurocut suits. They are sleek, sweatless, deeply blue-eyed. They stand together up by the dais. The dais has a podium and a flag and a banner with GIVE US A WHIRL! on it, which I deduce is probably this year’s Fair’s Theme, sort of the way senior proms have a Theme. There’s a compelling frictionlessness about the local TV reporters, all of whom have short blond hair and vaguely orange makeup. A vividness. I keep feeling a queer urge to vote for them for som
ething.

  The older ladies behind me tell me they’ve bet I’m here to cover either the auto racing or the pop music. They don’t mean it unkindly. I tell them why I’m here, mentioning the magazine’s name. They turn toward each other, faces alight. One (not the Historian) actually claps her hands to her cheeks.

  “Love the recipes,” she says.

  “Adore the recipes,” the Unofficial Historian says.

  And I’m sort of impelled over to a table of all post-45 females, am introduced as on assignment from Harper’s magazine, and everyone looks at one another with star-struck awe and concurs that the recipes really are first-rate, top-hole, the living end. One seminal recipe involving Amaretto and something called “Baker’s chocolate” is being recalled and discussed when a loudspeaker’s feedback brings the Fair’s official Press Welcome & Briefing to order.

  The Briefing is dull. We are less addressed than rhetorically bludgeoned by Fair personnel, product spokespeople, and middle-management State politicos. The words excited, proud, and opportunity are used a total of 76 times before I get distracted off the count. I’ve suddenly figured out that all the older ladies I’m at the table with have confused Harper’s with Harper’s Bazaar. They think I’m some sort of food writer or recipe scout, here to maybe vault some of the Midwestern food competition winners into the homemaker’s big time. Ms. Illinois State Fair, tiara bolted to the tallest coiffure I’ve ever seen (bun atop bun, multiple layers, a veritable wedding cake of hair), is proudly excited to have the opportunity to present two corporate guys, dead-eyed and sweating freely in suits, who in turn report the excited pride of McDonald’s and Wal-Mart at having the opportunity to be this year’s Fair’s major corporate sponsors. It occurs to me that if I allow the Harper’s-Bazaar-food-scout misunderstanding to persist and circulate I can eventually show up at the Dessert Competition tents with my Press Credentials and they’ll feed me free prize-winning desserts until I have to be carried off on a gurney. Older ladies in the Midwest can bake.