Your Life's Work Makes Any Cocktail Party That Much More Interesting

I think everyone has at least two minutes at a cocktail party. Which is to say, there's a brief grace period when someone asks "And what do you do?" and you go on explaining how you oversee document maintenance for a department in the [insert city here] office of a multi-national firm, and then that person nods and asks some pertinent followup question, which you answer thoughtfully yet vaguely. This repeats until the other party runs out of questions, but I think everyone on the planet gets about two minutes at least. It doesn't have to be a full-on cocktail party, either. It could be a kegger. Or even some sort of opening event with free cheese and white-or-red wine.

Those of us fortunate enough to have a really interesting resume or life experience can hold court much longer than two minutes: Maybe seven, eight, even 14 minutes, until a drink is empty and one's palm has long since cut waterlogged napkins into pulpy cookies, or given up entirely and bunched them up between the ring and pinky finger. Pulpy masses of napkin sticking to palms is a terrible image. Suffice it to say, which is to say, no one stands around forever just soaking up war stories, anecdotes or off-the-record tales.

Which is also to say, there's a genre of book where academics make a case for how whatever it is he or she studies applies in ways large and small to most of our lives — hopefully large, but even small will do. It's not Team of Rivals or The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, because that comes much, much later. It's more like a paperback supervised parole in, or back in, the real world.

Not that that's a bad thing — people in academia and those in the outside world should know what each other does for a living. It can't ever hurt to be better able to explain a theoretical concept, even if it gives you a headache. Your poor mother deserves to know what your weird postdoctoral advisor has you cooped up for all winter break. I think all academics should be required to write one piece of popular history, or a Nova special, or blow up balloons or make bubbles at a children's birthday party. Society would be the richer for it.

Hal Herzog's Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals is like blowing bubbles a children's birthday party. Large, luxurious, freeflowing, earnest bubbles made from a wand unlike any you've seen. Which is to say, Herzog is really trying to captivate you with anthrozoological issues. "Anthrozoology," simply put, is the study of how animals and humans interact.

Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat has a higher bar to overcome in part because no one has really heard of anthrozoology. There are no real departments of anthrozoology; an anthrozoologist seems sort of like a cross between a psychologist and an anthropologist, though Herzog notes that some veterinarians, historians and sociologists count themselves as anthrozoologists.

Some was one of our book club choices because the person who suggested it noted, in part, how children seem hardwired to love animals. That's part of Some, for sure, but only a tiny part (maybe because no one can really explain it?). The book brings up lots of issues in anthrozoology, and is a great primer for the field itself, but in the end it seems that so many of the issues that are brought up are simply noted, and then you move on to another one. Yes, there's something really interesting about a mouse research lab with a rodent problem, and it does seem to be a perfect symbol of humanity's schizophrenic relationship with other species, but I'm not sure where it goes from there. I'm thinking about the next drink I want to get, but I haven't walked away just yet. And that part of the book does get into the issues of using mice in research, and there are some good things to know — a lab mouse is not considered an animal for the purposes of the federal Animal Welfare Act; the research animals rights activists use to show that animals feel pain was performed in experiments where animals felt pain; weird! But this, and a lot of the book are just issues and topics brought up. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it does make it difficult to remember a lot of the anecdotes and topics.

Something I did remember was the part about vegetarians who own cats: If you oppose killing animals for moral reasons (i.e., you're not a Bill Clinton vegan) then you shouldn't own a cat on the grounds that cat food is all animal based — not to mention that the quality of animal in pet food is probably some of the worst industrially farmed shit around. I never put that together. (PETA argues you can have a vegan pet; it seems better not to have one at all, or maybe a manatee or elephant instead.)

All told, Some We Eat is a good book. That said, when unraveling the conundrum of why we love some, hate some and eat some the conclusion seems a little wanting: "What the new science of anthrozoology reveals is that our attitudes, behaviors, and relationships with the animals in our lives — the ones we love, the ones we hate, and the ones we eat — are, likewise, more complicated than we thought."

Complicated? That's it? What is this, Avril Lavigne? I need closure! Simple answers! Grand unifying theories! HuffPo pieces! Cable news stories! Instant Indices! Or at least another scotch and soda — can I get you something at the bar?

What, Me Worry?

Renata Adler's Speedboat is just over 36 years old. Well, if it was published in 1976, then it's 37 years old, so it's 37 years old, not 36 years old. Let's just call it 36 years old plus one year.

People who turn 36 seem to feel fucked up about the fact that they're turning 36. I've seen this more than once. Twice, in fact. So it's not a trend, but it makes a lot of sense to me, so that's good enough. I'm sure it has something to do with the idea that you're closing the gap with 40, which should be anxiety producing except that it's really not nowadays. I mean, maybe it is if you're a virgin or some other Judd Apatow plot — or maybe just Judd Apatow in general. Whatever. Point being, if you spend too much time letting Judd Apatow invade your mental space, you might feel fucked up about turning 40.

Which is why 36 is so scary to people. They worry about their prospects. They change careers. They get married. They stop being married. They cut their hair. They grow their hair. They freak out. In short, they get screwy and emo and start to "reevaluate" things.

The same is not true for books, but while reading Speedboat, I considered the symmetry and subsequently avoided the incoherence of thinking of a book turning 36 (plus one).

Speedboat is not a long book — only 170 pages — but it takes a long time to sift through. One, its fragmentary conceit requires more attention than you're used to giving a book — the fragments are memories, anecdotes, random thoughts. Sometimes it sounds like the character is holding court at a bar. Sometimes it sounds like she's talking to a therapist. Sometimes it sounds like she's being deposed for an affidavit. I think what it's meant to do is — wait, I should back up now.

So such as it is, there is a character in Speedboat named Jennifer Fain. She is a reporter for maybe a tabloid or something in New York City. She has a boyfriend or two — I think — the names sort of run together. You get the sense she comes from a privileged background. She has no attachments in the world, so she's able to travel and go out to dinner and attend cocktail parties and take tennis lessons — basically a typical urban existence. She's sort of neurotic about shit.

OK, back to the previous paragraph: the fragmentary conceit mirrors her tabloid job — you imagine the character constantly hearing snippets of details along the way and recording them, and a neurotic lets all the shit jumble together. And her personal life is sort of logged and recorded with the same kind of clinical approach.

At the same time it's sort of a "New York" kind of book, in the sense of cramming in all this humanity into one's mental space; I can see how such an environment might crowd out other parts of your world. I don't get the sense a lot of people have that problem, even people in New York, but it's an impression of urban life, so there's that.

And ultimately the fragmentary conceit is the cadence of the neurotic — skipping around, glomming onto fleeting thoughts, imbuing thoughts with extra weight. It's interesting in that respect.

These were my impressions while reading Speedboat. I don't know if Guy Trebay would validate these impressions because I didn't read the afterword, though I do really appreciate the fact that it was an afterword and not a foreword, so I wouldn't be tempted to read anything in advance. I don't like to read commentary beforehand. It's not that I feel like I'm cheating. It's more that I'm stubborn.

Also, those last couple of sentences, and probably most of the sentences and paragraphs herein, consciously ape the way she constructs these snippets of story. There's a cadence to it. It's got a flat, affectless tone (like a news article). At the same time, it's somehow super emo; world weariness plus hopelessness multiplied by koans. And there are no exclamation points. Just a few words at the end of a paragraph. They kind of thump on the floor toward the end, just like this.

And on and on. It's kind of addictive to write like this, and I need to stop myself or I'll be stuck in an eddy of writing this way. Forever, perhaps. It's tough to stop. I will excerpt a short passage from the book, to illustrate what I'm talking about, and also to get out of my own head space:

Friends kept wandering into Mattie's apartment to talk about legal matters. Everyone was drinking beer. I drank beer. I tried to look as though I knew what I was doing there. "Are you here for an interview," Mattie finally said, "or are you going to sit there like death on a soda cracker?" We became friends, of course.

While reading Speedboat I began to wonder whether Seinfeld was a watershed moment in that it finally allowed people to indulge their true neurotic selves. You know: double dipping, festivus, SHRINKAGE! It went on and on and on — and sometime in the early 1990s we all became George Costanza, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. And the world became insufferable.

Jen Fain existed in a pre-Seinfeld world, so instead of goofing about whether Jim is spongeworthy, she . . . well, you see where this is going.

I don't know if Adler totally telegraphs the ending, but in the recesses of my wandering mind — and it's easy for your mind to wander as you read Speedboat — I feel like it sort of occurred to me that it might be going in that direction, and it wasn't surprising when it did go there. Well, I guess all that abortion doctor stuff was a big clue, but — ironically — there's nothing like a baby to get you to chill the fuck out and focus a little.

(Interesting — out of curiosity I just Wikipedia'ed Adler because I had a hunch from the ending that she never had a kid — I was half right: her kid was born ten years later. Someone should study writers who lob baby bombs in stories; for childless ones, merely being pregnant is the game changer in a story; once you actually have a kid you start to realize that there's a very long grace period before "things have to change" — maybe up to two years! This doesn't apply if you're on drugs, however.)

There's something interesting about the fragmentary conceit — the overwhelming sense is that they read like scraps of ideas for scenes or characters. They're totally incoherent otherwise. I know each of the seven parts are thematically related, or at least they seem that way, or that they should be, but honestly, it feels like an onslaught of sketches. And yet it's interesting because I think every writer on the planet probably — probably — writes this way; the germs of ideas are sketches and snippets and not fully formed and dripping with emotion and laden thick with meaning. But they're not stories. And so 96 percent of them get shunted aside or lost or edited out. So when I say that the conceit is "interesting," I'm not just being lazy — it really is interesting to get lost in these snippets. It's like a giant ball pit of neuroses. Fun. But also kind of draining, and a lot of times you're wondering where the story is going, and then it really doesn't go anywhere, because you can't really construct a coherent story this way. So while it's interesting . . . it's just kind of "interesting."

I think I will read Guy Trebay's afterword now.

[A few minutes pass . . .]

OK, I read Guy Trebay's afterword. I forgot about the 1970s thing — we talked about that in book club, how the tone evokes the hopelessness of the decade (or what you hear about it at least). Twitter isn't the right comparison: yes, tweets are fragmentary and "short" but it's a facile comparison. I don't see Adler as a DJ. I don't think DJs are that interesting. I mean, they're "interesting," but . . . I suppose you could say that Speedboat anticipates the fragmentary, undisciplined blockquote culture of blogs (or whatever you want to call them), but "blog" is such an ugly word, and why use an ugly word like that when you could call it "sharply observed miniatures rendered aslant" (SOMRA)? But why go there? Why be neurotic about what it all means 36 years later (plus one)? What if it's not like a DJ, or a Tweet, or anything else from the mid- to late-2000s? Because then it's just a period piece, and the last thing someone 36 years old (plus one) wants to hear is that he or she is a period piece.

Me Like Black; Like Me, Black!

As a title, Black Like Me is pretty over the top. Yes, I know it's from a Langston Hughes poem, but if you read the poem, I think it's kind of saying something different but, yes, "black like me" — funny — ha ha — I get it — but seriously, it's kind of a facile reference. Sort of like the title of this post.

So yeah, you know Black Like Me — it's that book where the white guy loads up on pills and sunlamps to make himself look African American — or "black," as they said in 1959, which facilitates flourishes of symmetry such as "I knew now that there is no such thing as a disguised white man, when the black won't rub off." (You can see pictures here.) You might think the experiment sounds strange and slightly offensive, and it is. But there's also a reason it had an impact and continues to be read.

I don't know if John Howard Griffin is actually single-handedly responsible for the first-person gonzo style of writing that seemed to get so much traction in the post-9/11 era, but clearly all that stuff owes a huge debt to him. Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man is basically exactly the same thing, though much more in depth and perhaps a little less defensible (if I recall correctly, the guys she interacts with don't really deserve to be misled, though the white racists in Griffin's books are fuckers).

On the one hand, there's something slightly sociopathic about the undercover genre and probably undercover work in general. Deriving at the truth of something by faking out and lying to people is ironic at best, and mostly ethically murky. I guess it just goes to show that you can explain away a lot of shit by attributing it to a writing project of some sort.

Black Like Me works best when Howard's punking racists. Where it gets weird — unaccountably bizarre — is when he begins fool black people. There's a point in his second day — the second day! — "as a black man" where he's asked his opinion about "the problem," and he actually opines that the community's biggest obstacle is "lack of unity." Like I said, weird.

But in terms of helping contemporary whites understand what it was like to live in a segregated society, Black Like Me seems important. In terms of recording the experience of segregation for posterity, Black Like Me is important. And yet, you just kind of cringe at points. And then at some point you're kind of like, Dude, blackface? Really?

And I can't believe people at the time weren't creeped out by the whole enterprise. Apparently Stokely Carmichael called Black Like Me "an excellent book — for whites." And later on, Eddie Murphy's "White Like Me" was a pitch-perfect sendup of the endeavor.

I don't want to make it sound like I'm undercutting the bravery in painting yourself black in 1959 and traveling through some mean parts of the south, but it is interesting how much mileage Griffin got from the experiment. According to the book, he was only darkly pigmented from November 7 to December 14 — so like five weeks total. Which is to say, this was no No Impact Man. And while Griffin traveled through some mean, nasty parts of the south, if you pay attention, it didn't seem like he was in those really fucked up places all that much — a lot of time he seems to be in New Orleans, then there was a harrowing bus ride to Mississippi — but he's quickly rescued by a friend who he stays with in safety (speaking of which, the gallows humor moments he shares with this friend is kind of uncomfortable). There are a bunch of bus rides around Mississippi, then several days in Mobile and up to Montgomery (where he takes a bit of a break and "passes" back into white society for a day or two) before heading to a Trappist monastery (!) in Georgia and then some days in Atlanta before going back to New Orleans. Again, I'm not saying what he did wasn't intense and crazy and . . . "Yikes!" And like I said, translating the experience of segregation for a non-black audience is powerful and important. But it is surprising how much followed from just six weeks. It makes those "year of . . ." writers seem like Edward Gibbon or something.

To that point, the book is 147 pages of the experiment itself, then another 47 pages of the subsequent reaction — although he and his family had to move out of their Texas town, there was also a lot of getting flown to New York and interviewed. That last part felt self-congratulatory.

And let's be real, it's easy to read a line like "My first afternoon as a Negro was one of dragging hours and a certain contentment" and dismiss the whole thing out of hand. But despite all that I kept thinking how great it'd be to do the same thing and test Ray Kelly's Stop and Frisk policy. Perhaps this will be moot soon enough, but if anyone wants to load up on Methoxsalen, it'd be interesting to see what happens. Again, it's about punking the bad guys (or the bad policy).

Ultimately, Griffin comes across as so gentle and earnest that it's hard to get too worked up about the book's obvious ridiculousness. Sometimes I kept thinking about the big reveal in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which I am going to ruin for you because it's a stupid fucking piece of shit, where you find out that the boy's mother has figured out what the boy is doing and contacts in advance all the, uh, Blacks he has looked up and is planning to visit, just to sort of . . . actually, I don't know, why she did that. Anyway, I imagined that Griffin's wife was able to let all the towns know in advance that her guileless painted husband was headed their way. Impossible, I know, but I'm sure Jonathan Safran Foer could work with this detail . . .