From the suggestive pose of the silhouette on the cover, and a brief flick through in which phrases like “desperate sluts” and “big tits” jumped out at me, I didn’t exactly expect much from Clinton Caward’s debut novel Love Machine. Even the blurb made me think “oh, great, a story about a down and out guy who wants to save a prostitute.” Love Machine’s book trailer on youtube, gives much more of an accurate representation than the cover or the blurb. And yet, I still picked up the proof from work and promptly settled in with it. The strengths of Love Machine allowed me to see past my first impressions, and to find in Clinton Caward a gritty realist writing style which I look forward to reading more of in the future.
The Kings Cross circus was free and open for business every day of the year. It drew people from everywhere into this tiny postcode, stripped them back to their most basic needs, and played it out on the streets. The sex and the drink and the drugs were there for all to see, but you didn’t have to watch for long until the violence began to show itself too.
In Love Machine, Spencer is an underpaid, somewhat aimless, retail monkey in an underground sex shop in Kings Cross. The cavalcade of clientele and co-workers are colourful with innumerable quirks, kinks and fetishes, all of which Spencer has the means to fulfill. In his time away from work, he is filming a biblical epic with blow-up dolls. A chance meeting with a young prostitute, Livia, sets in motion a series of life changes causing Spencer to start question what he really wants.
Just saying Livia’s name lit something up inside me. I saw her moving under the moon and I wanted to put my arms around her and protect her from all the horrors of life, although she’d seen many more of them than I had. Like characters in a novel, we’d be happy, fixing our problems, moving toward self-revelation, culminating with her straddling me on a beach in a windstorm. But life lacked that kind of structure. It was formless and full of dark emotional things that changed shape like the weather.
While being a mildly amusing piece of ladlit, Love Machine’s strengths lie in the portrayal of the seedier side of inner-city living; of small-time criminals, of drug dealing, of prostitution and a general unsettling and grimy vibe. It also grasps at the frustration of working a low wage job, and the brief camaraderie that comes with such careers. As Spencer spends time with his brother in the house they grew up in, the banality, dysfunction and casual violence of poorer suburbs is also adequately captured, and lends it a distinct, albeit dirty and often brutal, dignity. I think this sense comes from not trying to romanticize working class suburbia, but rather accepting it fully, faults and all. It is suburbia that offers Livia and Spencer their escape from the constant barrage of sleaze in their lives.
I took the cover from his hand to look at the pictures. I wondered what would happen after all the taboos were broken. What would excite us? Boredom was the real truth about too much pornography. What would happen when we were completely bored with everything that was streamed live through the internet twenty-four hours a day? Once we were desensitised, would the economies of the world, no longer lubricated by sexual advertising, grind to a halt?
Although there were a lot of aspects of this novel that didn’t appeal to me – particularly the idea of Spencer as the male saviour of Livia, saving her from working in the sex trade, drugs and a violent ex-boyfriend; the religious undertones which never fully took shape – but it wasn’t completely without merit. Although I imagined I was not exactly the target demographic of such a novel and a lot of it is rehashing out the same male fantasy, I otherwise thoroughly enjoyed it.
No, no dangerously leaning piles of new books this week either. My continuing level of self-restraint surprises you all, doesn’t it?
The Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas officially opens next week with A Gala Night of Storytelling. I’m very excited to be attending so many wonderful – and mostly free – events over the coming months, as I’ve never really gone to any sort of literary events before. A combination of not really being interested, seeing reading as a solely solitary pursuit, and an illogical presumption that I wouldn’t fit in. This year I’ve decided to throw all self-doubt aside and just go for it, and hopefully I’ll enjoy myself.
Speaking of events, in preparation for a little festivity I am planning for the anniversary of a certain author’s birth in a few weeks, I discovered this photograph of Carson McCullers by Louise Dahl-Wolfe on flickr that I hadn’t seen before. I really haven’t changed all that much from when I was twelve and hunting out new pictures of Hanson, only now it’s with Southern gothic writers from the 1940s.
Painting: “The Bath” (1867) by Alfred Stevens.
My, these Saturday Soiree’s come along ever so quickly. This past week I’ve been reading Salinger’s For Esmé with Love and Squalor and Other Stories as my public transport book, so another Salinger story is the feature of this week’s Soiree, and I’ve chosen the quietly affecting “For Esmé with Love and Squalor.” In “For Esmé” an enlisted soldier and aspiring writer reminisces about a young girl he met in London during the war.
Following a training session and awaiting reassignment, the soldier takes a walk around the rainy town and happens upon a small church where a children’s choir is practicing. Sitting in on the practice, the soldier takes notice of a young female singer who appears to be bored but has a very sweet singing voice. Out in the rain again, the soldier avoids the recreation center where his fellow soldiers are spending time, and retires to an empty civilian tearoom. The young girl, her younger brother and their governess come into the tearoom out of the rain; the verbose and precocious young girl strikes up a conversation with the soldier.
‘I thought Americans despised tea,’ she said.
It wasn’t the observation of a smart aleck but that of a truth-lover or a statistics-lover. I replied that some of us never drank anything but tea. I asked her if she’d care to join me.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Perhaps for just a fraction of a moment.’
Esmé and the soldier discuss his reasons for being in town, her encounters with Americans, his personal life and her relationship with her deceased father whose watch she wears despite being too big for her tiny wrist. Esmé’s younger brother Charles eventually joins them, becoming Esmé’s topic of conversation and occasionally interjecting. Upon learning that the soldier is an aspiring writer Esmé asks him to write her a story, something about squalor which she loves reading about. The story then moves into what the soldier calls “the squalid, or moving, part of the story”, thinly disguised as Staff-Sergeant X, the soldier is quartered in a house in Bavaria after the Allies victory in the war, whose mind and psyche have been damaged by his war experiences.
He put his arms on the table and rested his head on them. He ached from head to foot, all zones of pain seemingly interdependent. He was rather like a Christmas tree whose lights, wired in series, must all go out if even one bulb is defective.
After a brief discussion with his companion, Clay, about Clay’s girlfriend who is studying psychology and has offered her diagnosis on X’s mental breakdown. Left alone again X discovers a parcel which has been readdressed to him three times. Esmé has sent him her fathers watch, and a short note telling him how much she enjoyed their time together that afternoon beforehand. Charles adds his own note as well, which made me laugh out loud:
Charles, whom I am teaching to read and write and whom I am finding an extremely intelligent novice, wishes to add a few words. Please write as soon as you have the time and inclination.
HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO LOVE AND KISSES CHALES
Thematically, it is very similar to “A Perfect Day for Bananafish“; a shellshocked soldier is touched, inspired, affected by the innocence of a child; the contrast between what he has seen in action and the unaffected innocence of the child almost becomes too much to bear. Unlike “Bananafish”, “For Esme” ends on a more positive note, with the soldier inspired by Esmé positivity and he finally senses the possibility of recovery. Though the watch has been damaged in transit, for the soldier it is a symbol of hope, of faith, and of the goodness that humans are, against all odds, capable.
When I read Francesca Lia Block, I tend to go on a binge of her writing, catching up on everything that has been released/acquired by local libraries since the last Block binge. A chance wander into the young adult section at the library and I happened upon the slight Blood Roses, very likely setting myself up for another rampage of her dreamy prose. Blood Roses is composed of brief glimpses at the lives of a group of very loosely connected evolving young women. Block’s signature chimerical prose takes us through these moments of transformation imagined as supremely powerful and magical.
Essentially modern day parables of adolescence, Block introduces mythological elements – centaurs, fairies, angels, aliens, and such - into everyday adolescent lives in order to articulate their various struggles. A boyfriend imagined as an alien with supernatural powers over his paramour. An abused daughter who sees Death taking home in her dollhouse. A grieving young man meeting a young fairy to escape from his pain. A girl who finds herself transforming into a giant after her first kiss.
What shall we do, all of us? All of us passionate girls who fear crushing the boys we love with our mouths like caverns of teeth, our mushrooming brains, our watermelon hearts?
I’m not usually into such fantastical elements in my fiction, but the way Block writes about them makes it possible to read them as allegorical, imagined in order to cope with the stresses of life. Her prose is so luxurious and sumptuous, so based in the natural amid a chaotic mechanical modern world. It’s not a style that is for everyone (and I myself wouldn’t be able to only read this sort of writing), but it is brilliantly evocative, even when talking about admiring the scars of the clipped wings of (well, possibly) an angel. I think that is where the power of Block’s writing lies, in an ultimate belief in the possible and the power of perception.
You Know You Love Me is the second installment in Cecily von Ziegesar’s wildly successful Gossip Girl series, and although I still feel mildly embarrassed about reading these books, it is a small improvement on the first novel. The characters, their personalities and ranking in their social system now familiar, continue to play out their superficial dramas in the Upper East Side. Alongside the ubiquitous references to sex, alcohol, brands and bitchiness, the tribulations of college interviews, young romantic love and the pressures of the final school year add a level of verisimilitude that was missing from the first novel. And manages to add just a touch of reality for those of us that led a decidedly less chaotic adolescence.
Welcome to New York City’s Upper East Side, where my friends and I all live in huge, fabulous apartments and go to exclusive private schools. We aren’t always the nicest people in the world, but we make up for it in looks and taste.
Blair Waldorf is still an excruciatingly spoiled brat. Her mother Eleanor is gearing up for her wedding to the so not up to Blair’s standards, Cyrus Rose, and to further disappoint Blair, has announced the wedding will take place the same day as Blair’s all-important eighteenth birthday. Add to that, her attempts to lose her virginity – although her constant mentions of “doing it” in place of any actual reference to the sexual act itself grates on the nerves, and adds immaturity to her character. I wonder if this is to appease the teen audiences or (cough) intentional characterization – with her altogether unwilling boyfriend, the perpetually stoned Nate. Blair sees consumption and material gifts as the ultimate signs of her love. She steals a pair of cashmere pajama pants, her credit card is declined while her mother joins her bank accounts with her fiancé, for Nate in order to show just how much he means to her. Nate, despite existing in a permanently drugged haze, recognizes this for what it is: a blatant demand for his attention toward her. Nate, meanwhile, is avoiding Blair and nurturing a rather sweet blossoming relationship with Jennifer Humphrey.
This was definitely not in the script.
And as she looked on in horror and fascination, Blair had the most starkly disappointing realization of her entire life. Worse even than the thought of not getting into Yale.
Nate wasn’t her leading man. He wasn’t going to sweep her off her feet and love her and only er. He was just a supporting actor, some loser who would drop off the screen before the final act. And if that was the case, she definitely didn’t want him.
Serena van der Woodsen is spending more time with Dan Humphrey, who pines and moans even when he has the girl of his dreams. Thankfully, Serena becomes suitably creeped out by Dan’s Young Werther shtick (although, apparently that kind of thing works for some: Goethe as a seduction strategy!) and distances herself from him; he then realizes that Vanessa is the one he’s really supposed to be with – ah, that old “oh I’m really in love with my best friend, the artsy alternative girl with the shaved head and not the model-esque, impossibly perfect dream girl” trope coming into play – Vanessa is clearly the most interesting character out of the lot of them, I wish she had more of a central role.
In between all the romantic entanglements, the kids go on separate and converging road trips to their desired college destinations; mostly spectacularly flubbing the interviews. Blair bonds with her new stepbrother, the potentially interesting Aaron Rose, and despite breaking down in her important application interview, a sweetly worded email to Daddy and a swift generous donation are sure to undo any necessity for hard work and effort. It’s this sort of reliance on money and its powers that contradict Blair’s drive to achieve perfection. Is it solely ambition? Or the desire to work for what she receives rather than have everything handed to her on a silver platter? An inferiority complex? Just completely unable to comprehend personal failure on any level? Apparently this conundrum is what makes Blair Waldorf such a multi-faceted character, although I’m not convinced.
While it is very easy to get caught up on the lackluster writing (why does Blair’s middle name change from Faith to Cornelia toward the end of the book? Why the reliance on a gossip blog which only discusses the same six characters over and over, is the world of the Upper East Side teenagers so inane that they are only really interested in a handful of their peers?) and the trash value of the series, You Know You Love Me allows for a few hours of escapism into the petty, often spiteful world of the over-privileged children of the wealthy.
Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust is such a curious novel. At once acerbic social satire and vicious family melodrama, it examines the question of social propriety among the upper echelons of the moneyed classes and yet loses steam in the last third of the novel. For the most part, however, it beautifully illustrates the ultimate cruelties and snide savagery that humans are all too capable of.
‘That’s always the trouble with people when they start walking out. They either think no one knows, or everybody. The truth is that a few people like Polly and Sybil make a point of finding out about everyone’s private life; the rest of us just aren’t interested.’
Waugh begins the novel by introducing us to John Beaver, a hideous young man of little social standing – he’s always being called up at the last moment to fill in empty seats at dinner parties, he’s something of a joke within the moneyed social circle he moves in. Waugh moves on and introduces the Lasts, Lady Brenda and her husband Tony and their precocious child John Andrew, living in the Gothic surrounds of Tony’s familial estate Hetton. Their lifestyle seems to be largely idyllic, they don’t want for anything and Brenda and Tony’s relationship appears to be healthy and thriving, if a little fallen to routine. Into this idyll the unexpected arrival of Beaver has a profound effect on Lady Brenda, whose fascination with him leads her to London and eventually, embarking on a scandalous affair with the younger man. Scandalous not because of the age difference, or because she is already married – these sorts of frivolous affairs are quite common amongst the married set – but because of the disparity between their social positions. Brenda’s desire leads her to taking up a flat in London, apart from Tony, her son and Hetton.
It had been an autumn of very sparse and meagre romance; only the most obvious people had parted or come together, and Brenda was filling a want long felt by those whose simple, vicarious pleasure it was to discuss the subject in bed over the telephone. For them her circumstances shed peculiar glamour; for five years she had been a legendary, almost ghostly name, the imprisoned princess of a fairy story, and now that she had emerged there was more enchantment in the occurrence than in the mere change of habit of any other circumspect wife. Her very choice of partner gave the affair an appropriate touch of fantasy; Beaver, the joke figure they had all known and despised, suddenly caught up to her among the luminous clouds of deity.
Waugh’s writing is careful not to lay the blame on either side of the marriage. Showing the moroseness of both John Andrew and Tony left behind in Hetton, not aware of why Brenda is so taken with London all of a sudden, shifts our sympathies from her boredom and listlessness to their loss. After the tragic death of John Andrew, Brenda feels compelled (or freed) to tell Tony the truth about Beaver and London and that she wants a divorce. Because of her social status and to maintain social propriety – despite the fact that everyone already knew about the affair – Tony’s lawyers go to great lengths to create marital disruptions on his side to allow the divorce to move smoothly. A clandestine weekend with a woman from a club is more comic that it should be given the circumstances. Once the divorce proceedings are underway, suddenly Brenda and company are talking about Tony’s mortifying actions that lead to the necessary divorce, which is a confusing about face. I suppose maintaining the reputation of her good name is more important that anything even close to resembling the truth.
‘I hear Brenda disgraced herself,’ he said.
‘Goodness,’ said Brenda. ‘People do think that young men are easily come by.’
Whereas the social comedy is largely written in sparkling dialogue, but when Tony ventures to avoid all divorce proceedings and familial manipulations by taking an exotic trip overseas the tone significantly changes. Rather than relying on conversations to drive the narrative forward, it takes on a very different, more reflective and descriptive tone once Tony is abroad. Here the novel lost me a bit. Tony’s travels may have been interesting in their own right, but to become so involved in the inner workings of the social circles of the Lasts and then to be torn right out of it had a somewhat jarring effect. Perhaps this is to suggest Tony’s equal removal from society through no real fault of his own?
After such effective portrayal of the petty worries of the London elite, the ending is rather unsatisfying and bleak. Tony is lost in Brazil, captive to an old man who forces him to read Dickens to him every night; Brenda has remarried, not to Beaver, but to another of Tony’s close friends, and Hetton has passed into the hands of Tony’s relatives. Reflecting on it, I suppose that in A Handful of Dust Waugh was trying to show that all humans are capable of great savagery – whether it is discussed discreetly among friends in beautifully decorated drawing rooms or in the remote jungles and clay huts of the tropics.
Another week passes, and no new books. I am, surprisingly, still being so responsible! Standing outside of bookstores, looking longingly through the windows, but otherwise well behaved. The purse remains safely in my handbag.
And don’t even get me started on the reason I’m trying to save my dollars – my Library Services course. I am suffering from the most frustrating and stressful enrolment based angst ever. How hard is it to reply to a.) an email (admittedly, more than one email) or b.) a phone call? Semester starts, oh only tomorrow, and while all my on-campus subjects are, or at least seem to be, organized, my one remaining subject spot remains blank no matter how hard I try to get in contact with the powers that be. Their system is so unprofessional and disorganized. I like to be prepared weeks if not MONTHS in advance, none of this last minute stuff. Argh.
As someone who went through a stage of reading The Catcher in the Rye at least once a year, the news of J.D. Salinger’s death this week made me pause and reflect on the special place that he held in my reading life for such a long time. I know that you have to be of a particular disposition to connect with Holden Caulfield, but it is a bond that once forged seems to be unbreakable. I think for many people it is the first book that lets them know, in the words of Mr. Antolini, that:
Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them — if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.
And hearing that can be such a powerful thing when you’re a teenager, it’s just too easy to dismiss (or forget?) the urgency of that emotion when we’re all old, jaded and desperately trying to shed anything that remains of our adolescence.
I was planning to continue with Jay McInerney with another Alison Poole short story, but with the death of J.D. Salinger this week – a round up of the various tributes was published by the Guardian – I felt that it was a good time to look back at some of his shorter fiction. This week I’ll be reading the first of the Glass Family stories “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” from the short story collection Nine Stories, usually published outside the U.S. as For Esmé with Love and Squalor and Other Stories.
“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” follows two separate dialogues, presumably occurring at roughly the same time. The first is a telephone conversation between Muriel and her mother. The dialogue is mostly banal, Muriel is on holiday in Florida with her husband Seymour, who her mother has some misgivings about. There is constant mention of some “funny business with the trees” that concerns Muriel’s mother, especially when she discovers that Seymour drove down to Florida. Muriel asks her mother about a book that Seymour sent her from Germany:
‘No. Only he asked me about it, when we were driving down. He wanted to know if I’d read it.’
‘It was in German!’
‘Yes, dear. That doesn’t make any difference,’ said the girl, crossing her legs. ‘ He said that the poems happen to be written by the only great poet of the century. He said I should’ve bought a translation or something. Or learned the language, if you please.’
‘Awful. Awful. It’s sad, actually, is what it is. Your father said last night—’
Muriel’s mother further reveals that Seymour has been seeing a psychiatrist and has recently been discharged from an Army hospital. The psychiatrist has told Muriel’s father that “Seymour may completely lose control of himself.” The emphasis in italics in their dialogue really allows their voices to sound out, you can perfectly hear the stress they place on particular syllables. After briefly discussing a dinner with the local psychiatrist, Muriel and her mother move on to more important matters, such as the state of Muriel’s blue coat and the season’s clothing styles. Meanwhile, young Sybil Carpenter is talking with her mother as she slops sun-tan oil on her skin. Sybil keeps asking “Did you see more glass?”, driving her mother crazy. Sybil runs down to the beach and reaches Seymour Glass in an out of the way part of the beach. They strike up a conversation, suggesting familiarity.
‘The lady?’ The young man brushed some sand out of his thin hair. ‘That’s hard to say, Sybil. She may be in any one of a thousand places. At the hairdresser’s. Having her hair dyed mink. Or making dolls for poor children in her room.’ Lying prone now, he made two fists, set one on top of the other, and rested his chin on the top one. ‘Ask me something else, Sybil,’ he said. ‘That’s a fine bathing suit you have on. if there’s one thing I like, it’s a blue bathing suit.’
Sybil stared at him, then looked down at her protruding stomach. ‘This is a yellow,’ she said. ‘This is a yellow.’
Seymour’s ease of communicating with Sybil reminds me of Holden’s relationship with his younger sister Phoebe in The Catcher in the Rye. Children are easy to talk to for these characters because they don’t hide behind any illusions, that barrier that we’re forced to set up to protect us against the world hasn’t been put up yet. Innocence. Seymour engages Sybil in a hunt for the elusive bananafish, and tells her the story of the tragic life they lead swimming into holes filled with bananas. They stuff themselves so full with ripe banana flesh that they can’t swim out of the hole again, and so they die of banana fever in the hole. Again, doesn’t this suggest innocence and innocence lost? Once we gorge ourselves on all that adulthood has to offer, we can’t get out of it and reach that purer state of childhood naivety again. Here the story takes on a severe shift. After an altercation in the elevator with a woman he thinks is looking at his feet, Seymour returns to his hotel room.
Then he went over to one of the pieces of luggage, opened it, and from under a pile of shorts and undershirts he took out an Ortgies calibre 7.65 automatic. He released the magazine, looked at it, then reinserted it. he cocked the piece. Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple.
It’s a powerful story, deceptively simple and with a macabre humour simmering below the surface. Vale Jerome David Salinger, goddamn could you write a story.
J.D. Salinger, January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010
I’ve been reading a lot of non-fiction lately, and while I always enjoy learning about new things and discovering new perspectives, I also love getting lost in the imagined worlds of fiction, so I turned to some of my staple comfort fiction: Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis. Not the typical warm and fuzzy type of comfort fiction, but I wrote my undergraduate thesis on novels and films about adolescent malaise, youth disaffected by everything around them: Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge, one of my favourite films, and the films of Gregg Araki (many of which have dialogue lifted straight from Less Than Zero.) It could be familiarity, or recognition, with these themes. Nonetheless, rereading Less Than Zero has confirmed that I still really enjoy it, disturbing, unsettling and confronting as it is.
I turn the radio up, loud. The streets are totally empty and I drive fast. I come to a red light, tempted to go through it, then stop once I see a billboard that I don’t remember seeing and I look up at it. All it says is “Disappear Here” and even though it’s probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out a little and I step on the gas really hard and the car screeches as I leave the light. I put my sunglasses on even though it’s still pretty dark outside and I keep looking into the rearview mirror, getting this strange feeling that someone’s following me.
Less Than Zero sees eighteen year old Clay returning home to Los Angeles for Christmas after four months away at school in New Hampshire. He returns to his old life of endless parties, excessive drug use and general sense of apathy. Gradually, the horrors of L.A. infect his psyche and he begins to see violence evident everywhere, deciding to never return. He has an ambiguous sexuality, sleeping with both men and women, and having had an on/off again relationship with Blair, which neither of them seem to be too emotionally involved. This lack of involvement extends to every aspect of Clay’s life, frequent “I don’t know”, “I don’t care”, “nothing”, he just doesn’t care about anything. He’s not alone in this, his friends are all equally detached.
He’s staring at me and I look down and take a drag, a deep one, off the cigarette. The man keeps staring at me and all I can think is either he doesn’t see me or I’m not here. I don’t know why I think that. People are afraid to merge. Wonder if he’s for sale.”
The strength in Less Than Zero is how Ellis captures Clay’s disenchanted voice, everything is recorded with this blank monotone as though nothing can possibly touch him. It’s infectious, sort of rhythmic in a jagged, paranoiac kind of way. It’s only as Clay’s so-called normalcy becomes more and more surreal, that anything really begins to register with him. The images of violence start off relatively tame, watching a sick friend shoot heroin at a party wearing a vest that makes her look like she’s been shot, to coyotes hit by cars, dead bodies found in alleyways and his friends engaging in brutal rape. Clay’s search for his old school friend Julian takes a similarly violent turn as he discovers that Julian has become a male prostitute for a vicious pimp in order to pay off a drug debt. As Clay watches Julian engage with his pimp and his clients, his current image of Julian begins to clash with the images he has of him as a child. I think this, really, begins the descent into mayhem that eventually sees Clay denounce Los Angeles, as well as cementing the theme of the desire to return to the past, even if it is unknown, imagined, or just doesn’t exist anymore. Or never did.
The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children. Images of people, teenagers my own age, looking up from the asphalt and being blinded by the sun. These images stayed with me even after I left the city. Images so violent and malicious that they seemed to be my only point of reference for a long time afterwards. After I left.
Less Than Zero is so much more than a novel which captured the zeitgeist of the materialist 1980s, not just a blank look into the superficial lives of bored, numb and dumb teenagers. Hypnotically narcotic, it is a reflection on moral deterioration and an underlying meaningless than we struggle (or refuse) to grasp.
Craig Schuftan’s Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone!: The Romantic Movement, Rock & Roll, and the End of Civilisation as We Know It is not only a great title for a book, but an absorbing study of the connections between modern pop music and its relationship with artistic traditions stretching back some two hundred years. Inspired by his attraction to the grandiose My Chemical Romance song (hey, stay with me now) “Welcome to the Black Parade”, Schuftan sets out to discover why this song hit such a nerve with him and thousands of music fans around the world. Schuftan digs through history to find the common ground between the Romantic poets of the 19th century, and modern pop punk music, and what emerges is an outline of why many of us find music such a powerful relay of emotion and solidarity.
Gerard Way has found that society, the real world, adult life-whatever you want to call it-cannot provide him with happiness or satisfaction. So he’s moved the search for happiness from outside to inside, and has found it, deep within himself, in his own dreams, his own imagination. This is what puts the romance in My Chemical Romance–the rejection of society in favour of the individual.
While Schuftan begins and ends with a focus on the lyrical and subcultural aspects of My Chemical Romance, he draws on a wealth of other cultural acts, from David Bowie to Saves the Day, Frankenstein to Edward Scissorhands, Wordsworth to the Dadaists. Using this collage technique, he manages to continually keep the reader interested as he moves swiftly from one to another, but brings each point of his argument together in a truly engaging manner. Whether he is citing a goth influenced pop punk band or a revered philosopher from the 19th century, all are treated with equal respect and importance, without the high art/low art distinction invoked.
As we contemplate art, we are able to see life–with all its striving and willing–in a detached, aesthetic way. We are freed, briefly, from the desiring that takes up so much of our time, and leaves us so unsatisfied, as we look at life from the artist’s point of view. In this way, the suffering of the world becomes bearable, and art, according to Schopenhauer, becomes our most important consolation for the pain of life.
Schuftan draws some startlingly accurate parallels, for one example, between Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s rejection of The Sorrows of Young Werther and the cult like following it inspired, and Rivers Cuomo’s rejection of the rapt devotion Weezer’s Pinkerton inspires. The way that Schuftan so subtly suggests the likeness between two cultural events leads into his premise that culture is always building upon itself, we are constantly moving backwards in order to move forwards; hinting, without saying as much, toward postmodernism in art and how audiences derive meaning from it. Not only that, but that the constant revival of cultural traditions can suggest similar social contexts, a reaction toward something unsettling within society – Enlightenment and reason for the Romantics; mass consumerism and denial of self expression in contemporary pop punk music.
Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone! sometimes comes across as on overzealous paean to My Chemical Romance, for the most part it reads like a lecture given by someone who can manage to meld the material you’re supposed to be learning about with the things you know in order to bring you to a greater understanding of both.
[The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Fora.tv has a really good hour long video of Craig Schuftan and Zan Rowe discussing his book. Most of the basic concepts of his argument are outlined here.]
