Category: books

Dave Eggers on the Ingenious podcast

Listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

“We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, like, say masturbatory habits (for me, about once a day, usually in the shower), we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our pasts and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself. But it’s just the opposite, more is more is more – more bleeding, more giving. These things, details, stories, whatever, are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see. What does he care where it is, who sees it, this snake, and his skin? He leaves it where he molts. Hours, days, or months later, we come across a snake’s long-shed skin and we know something of the snake, we know that it’s of this approximate girth and that approximate length, but we know very little else. Do we know where the snake is now? What the snake is thinking now? No. By now the snake could be wearing fur; the snake could be selling pencils in Hanoi. The skin is no longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped off and he and everyone could look at it.

And you’re the snake?
Sure. I’m the snake. So, should the snake bring it with him, this skin, should he tuck it under his arm? Should he?

No?
NO, of course not! He’s got no fucking arms! How the fuck would a snake carry a skin? Please.

― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

We’re the snake.

And I have a dog in this fight.

Because I deeply believed at one time that we were all the snake and that by being the snake (at least how Dave is describing it here, back in his very first book) the more we showed of ourselves and left our skins behind, the better. Of course that doesn’t mean we should all go online and tell on ourselves. But we should be able to do what writers do (or artists, musicians—anyone really—priests, dog trainers, maintenance workers, phlebotomists) which is make something which, and be somebody who, reveals ourselves and is true to our warty, actual selves. Not be too precious about ourselves. We sound so young when we say this, but: Let’s stay true to the people we were and the dreams we had.

The story about how indigenous people didn’t want to be photographed because they feared it would steal their souls has new currency in the age of AI. I know this first hand. I was a big advocate for free culture and the open software movement in the early aughts, implementing Creative Commons licenses in Flickr, thereby creating the largest library of shareable media in the world, at least, at the time. I shared my own photos with Creative Commons licenses and joined the Creative Commons board. Artists and filmmakers and other creative people were able to use them to make fantastic things. Jonathan Coulton wrote a song (and made a short movie) named after Flickr using the Creative Commons licensed photos—that’s MY dog with glasses!

Flickr photos appeared in low budget movies, in band posters, in this incredible installation by Erik Kessel at a gallery in Amsterdam. The installation featured prints of every single photograph uploaded to Flickr within a 24-hour period. The more than a million photos are piled up nearly to the ceiling, and spill over into several rooms.

I never got to see it in person. It was an artwork about how we are drowning in photos, in media. How no one can look at all of the photos. It was still a newish idea at the time, 2011. What a wonderful time that was.

It was an era of optimism and trust. We trusted humanity. We knew people to be honest, well-meaning. We trusted technology, audiences, artists—there was so much trust, we were just bursting with trust. It seems almost inconceivable now, so jaded and weary we’ve become. We believed that people are essentially good, operating in good faith, trustworthy, reasonable. We were not wrong. But we discovered that even if 999 out of a thousand people are honest and trustworthy, one bad actor can be incredibly destructive. A mob of angry tweeters. Or, enemy nations.

I talked about this with Chris Anderson, who had been the Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine, on my last podcast Should This Exist?. He had an open source drone company, 3D Robotics, and they open sourced their drone software. A lot of hobbyists hacked their Lego Mindstorms and had a lot of fun making flowers or M&Ms rain down on children’s parties, searching for lost elephants in vast African wildernesses and other great things. Then one unhappy day, on the front page of the New York Times, Chris learned that ISIS had been using his drone software to kill people.

This was about as bad of a consequence as you can imagine. The worst consequence of sharing something online. But it was also happening in my world, the online world. Media, social media, was becoming more and more toxic. We had started out as the aforementioned snakes, sharing our photos, jokes, stories, poems, lives. But at many of the hosting companies, it was no longer about sharing; a lot of it was about stealing. Harvesting and exploiting your “data”, which you had thought of as your life. To my surprise, chagrin and increasing anger, I realized that the Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr were being used to train AI. That even though no human could ever look at every single one of the photos in Erik Kessel’s artwork, or in the Creative Commons archive, or anywhere on the internet, a computer could.

Another conversation I had during the first season of Should This Exist? was with Sam Altman of OpenAI, a company we now know best as the maker of ChatGPT, but which at the time was a non-profit looking to protect humanity from the consequences of what was in the process of being invented. Money came, moral compasses spun around and lost true north—we know the rest. And now we’re seeing the results, watching the whole experiment unfold in real time: people’s faces and data and art and words being stolen, repurposed and put into formats and contexts they never intended or wanted, exploited for purposes that hadn’t existed when they innocently shared pictures of their weddings and kittens online, swindled and diddled and flimflammed and worse. All those words and images, pressed into service for manufacturing lies, flipping elections, and creating enemies where once were friends.

Which brings us to today’s podcast with Dave Eggers. He is the writer, artist, philanthropist and co-founder of 826 Valencia, a non-profit tutoring center for kids that teaches the next generation reading, writing and how to tell their own story. Which seems a paltry effort when you look at the giants and masters of the tech universe thrusting their rockets into space and colonizing everyone’s brains. Just patiently teaching a kid to read and write. Dave, who stands for a value system that is contrary to all this.

Dave and I go way back. We worked together circa 1996-8, at Salon.com, one of the very first online media publishers, which published, and still publishes, thinky articles on society and culture. They also host thoughtful online conversations and civil discourse. Again, it was an amazing time to be online.

Now I’m on the board of McSweeneys, the publishing company that Dave also founded. It publishes books and magazines, old media. So Dave and I have invested a lot of our energy into making places and spaces for writers doing creative work, finding an audience and getting paid. But these are fraught times for writers. The writers in Hollywood are on strike, AI is taking their jobs, teachers are saying the high school essay is dead. You’re here too and you’ve seen it—there’s a lot of dread to go around. Think we’re reactionary luddites? I don’t think so. Techno-optimists turned tech skeptics, maybe. I think we’ve all become a lot more wary since our salad days.

In any case, there’s a lot of these values and thinking and ideation in this podcast. It is a special episode because Dave and I are old friends, and share a lot of the same hopes for the humans. So give it a listen!

I’m so proud of this podcast, Ingenious, which was the co-creation of me and my friend and producer Mary Beth Kirchner, with the tireless assistance of Jyri Engestrom and Beth Malin and the Yes VC team and a host of others. Including the brilliant guests who have always found a way to surprise me, energize me and pave new avenues of thought. I hope it’ll do the same for you.

Thanks Dave, for this and all you do. How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.

Some resources:

A Recommended Book

Having been housebound for the past two days, I was able to read this remarkable book about a family of fourteen, twelve children, of which six–six!–of the sons became schizophrenic in their teens and twenties. An amazing feat of research which follows the family’s story, as well as those of the doctors working to understand this puzzling, difficult and disabling disease.

The Dutch House

by Ann Patchett.

Hardcover The Dutch House Book

The story is told from the viewpoint of the children, who were thrown out of their home by their stepmother, whose story is not told. A beloved older sister and a dutiful younger brother are left to fend for themselves. People loved this book. I only liked it. It was not Housekeeping, a book said to be the favorite of the sister and her mother, and a masterpiece. I often wonder about this: what is the difference between a good book and a great book? The Dutch House could have been a great book, but it wasn’t, and why not? I will return to this question when I have drawn some conclusions.

Race Relief

I didn’t have much of a beauty regime before the lockdown and it’s also the case that I’ve not increased my attention to my appearance since. My disregard for my appearance has always irritated some of the people around me, who believed I could advance myself further in the world if I would just comb my hair. But I’ve always felt that, like men who are not interested in televised sports, women who are not interested in beauty regimes have more time to do interesting things, right?

It is such a relief, my friend told me on the phone, as neither of us had been leaving the house during the lockdown, to not have to wash your hair, or put on makeup. I agreed. To not have an appearance is so relaxing! To appear is mostly to be conscious of appearing. And oftentimes you aren’t even aware that you are appearing at all, until someone interrupts your peaceful and pleasant obliviousness by making you appear, just to point out that you appear differently, or badly, or not how they would prefer you to appear.

This is what many of us experience as Americans (though I am sure it is near universal), and, reading Jaswinder Bolina’s collection of essays, Of Color, it is this rude jolt into another’s conception of us, their questioning of you, and their implicit judgement that is so exhausting, debilitating and wrong. The endless justifications required. The endless appearing. Why are the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria? indeed. Sometimes you just want to relieve yourself of the burden of thinking about your race, and eat your Salisbury steak with those people. As delineated in Bolina’s essay, “Writing like a White Guy.”

I’m guessing more white people are reading books like this, given where we are as a culture, how 2020 went, George Floyd. Most books about race should be read by white people, more so than those who are designated red, yellow, brown and black, who live it and can only nod in recognition. But the white folks? They–we!– might be surprised, learn something new. Like, I wish every book on feminism was read by men. Even ONLY men. How will change happen if men are not on board? So this is one of those books, that I often suspect are read mostly by the POC, nodding.

Bolina is mostly known as a poet, and it was in this context he was accused of “writing like a white guy”, that is, not adding any “Indian” color to his poems. Not representing. Not appearing, as it were, as he was being subtly or not so subtly pressured to appear. You don’t know how relaxing it is to not appear, like white people don’t appear, until you’ve had a chance to be seen-with-expectations.

August Reading

The stand out here, was of course, Middlemarch. I had read it in college and remember thinking to myself, “am I really going to expend my youth reading about agricultural practices in 19th century rural England?” But of course, it is so much more. Many people have called it the greatest English novel, and, to disprove this opinion, I would have to read a whole lot more English novels. So I provisionally agree. 

Last month’s reading of Faulkner required the antidote of Morrison, and I read her essays, and her first novel The Bluest Eye.  Also of undisputed greatness–though censors the world over have been trying to suppress it for years. I doubt they’ve read it. 

The book that left me straddling the fence, wavering in opinion, and wondering about its suitability for prize-winning, was the International Booker Prize winner, The Discomfort of Evening–which announcement and ceremony I accidentally happened upon as it was taking place live online. Prizes invite dispute, which enlivens book reading in general, so I welcome them. The book was great, but green. I was amazed to learn that the distinguished judges read all the contenders, starting with 128 books. 

And if you haven’t already read Signs Preceding the End of the World, run don’t walk to your local bookstore, and pick it up curbside. 

 

Middlemarch and Civil Society. Chapters 23-42

Occasionally, in literature, good men appear. I am thinking of Martin Cunningham, in Ulysses, who always had something kind to say on behalf of Leopold Bloom. And here in Middlemarch I encountered another one.

The good Caleb Garth, whose kind nature was exploited by the n’er-do-well spendthrift and gambler Fred Vincy, who impoverished his family and expunged their savings–Garth is offered his old job back, as the manager of the farmland for the local gentry, and he has this to say:

“…it’s a fine thing to come to a man when he’s seen into the nature of business; to have a chance of getting a bit of the country into good fettle, as they say, and putting men into the right way with their farming, and getting a bit of good contriving and solid building done that those who are living and those who come after will be the better for. I’d sooner have it than a fortune. I hold it the most honorable work that is. … it’s a great gift of God, Susan. “

“That It is, Caleb,” said his wife, with answering fervor. “And it will be a blessing to your children to have had a father who did such work: the father whose good work remains though his name may be forgotten.”

It is because criminals are occupying the highest offices in the nation, because the gangrene of corruption has spread to the furthest corners of America, because we are so endlessly subjected to the most repugnant appalling and reprehensible behavior–that this stood out so much for me: the modest but deep satisfaction that comes from honest work, giving much and leaving things better than they were found. 

Middlemarch is the story of a town, a community, a civil society, and its various personalities, their struggles with each other and themselves, and their eventual fates. Their responses to cultural change, the introduction of new technologies and scientific discoveries. The perspectives of both maids and Lords. And one of the terrible things I realized as I read this book is that, in America, we no longer seem to be living in a civil society. We’re being told that we don’t have it, and can’t.

In a civil society, there’s a sense of trust, fellowship, and solidarity. Even with deep disagreement, and political conflict–which are unfolding in Middlemarch in these chapters–all townspeople and members of the civil society, from the snobbiest Baron, to the filthiest farmhand, grant dignity, humanity and self worth to one another.  Discussion, irritation and exasperation results from differing points of view–but not hatred, contempt, violence or dismissal. The book shows arguments between opposed parties that are not inflammatory. Respect prevails. Any position counter to that of another, any dispute, any selfishness is superseded by that person’s membership in this community, town and society.

Which is still mostly the case in the United States, and in spite of our differences, we mostly agree. So why don’t we bring public conversations back around to the temper and mood of conversations the people are having in Middlemarch? Where has our civil society gone? How do we get to a Middlemarch of our own?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nice White Parents and Point Omega

Nice White Parents. I listened to the first three episodes of this new podcast about how a Brooklyn school serving mostly black and brown students was harmed by the arrival of the titular Nice White Parents, who flexed their privilege, proceeded to fundraise $50,000 (compared to a prior raise by the PTA of $2,000) and whose kids provided some truly squirmworthy comments. About how school integration may not be so desirable after all, how schools keep failing to support nonwhite kids, and how entrenched inequalities persist, and might be eradicated. This will be a five part series, and has already met with some dissension and controversy, but I am curious to hear the next episodes and see where it goes. Whether or not you agree with the portrayal of the issues or the conclusions, it’s a fascinating listen.

Point Omega. When reading Don DeLillo novels, I often feel as if I have entered a cold, white, vast, fluorescent-lit space, like a data center, interstellar terminal, or morgue. Point Omega was no different. Beautifully structured though it was, a brief 5 chapters, it was set in both the desert and the mind–unforgiving, spare places beyond time’s horizon. We were promised a glimpse of a bighorn ram, which never materialized, and though there were sunsets and occasional glimpses of earthly loveliness, human connection was absent and human relations were reduced to voyeurism, stalking, staring, predation and self-absorption. Who is and who is not a DeLillo Fan? I try, repeatedly, but am not.

July Reading

July reading

Reading continues to get done! These are July’s books. The stack looks higher than usual because there are three books in there that have pictures: Blind Spot, writer and photographer Teju Cole’s book of photography from all over the world; Yoshiharu Tsuge’s comic book, The Man without Talent, a man who is the paragon of the unsuccessful man genre, a Japanese genre which actually has a name that I’ve forgotten, or, rather, failed to remember, because in this genre it is always appropriate to note failure; and Nanotecture, a book of photos of very small buildings. I grew up sleeping in a large room in a large house, but moved into my closet when I was 10 or 12, so I really appreciate being cramped. Better for thinking. And also reading. There’s a lot of poetry in this stack too, most of it good. And even some missing from the picture (Dark Matter by Aase Berg, Toxicon and Arachne by Joyelle McSweeney) But I found Fiona Benson’s Vertigo and Ghost absolutely stunning, indispensable, potent. Absalom Absalom was the perfect book for the era of Black Lives Matter, which I mentioned before, and is not my favorite for being long-winded, racist and repetitive. I do prefer Light in August and As I Lay Dying, but I felt AbAb had to be reread. 

Middlemarch Diary #2, Chapters 14-22

George Eliot, circa 1849

Proceeding apace! After the evocative gothic image of the sanctimonious peaches-and-cream maiden marrying the cadaverous Casaubon, Middlemarch has quickly devolved into a village comedy with all the usual types: the aunt busybody, the congenial parson, the young rake, the dull but earnest suitor. I’m a jaded English Lit major, and have never been a fan of the Marriage Plot, general in 19th century novels, unless there is, say, a madwoman in the attic or an egregious breach of manners, say, nakedness in the drawing room. It’s all too genteel and proper, and I await some grisly murder or monstrous betrayal beneath the scrim of politesse. There was a recent interview with Emma Cline, whose first novel was The Girls, about a Manson-like murderer with a cult of young women. She has recently written a story from the perspective of a Weinstein-like protagonist, and her interviewer suggested there might be something wrong with presenting a predator and criminal in a way that might make him sympathetic. Cline rightly retorted that monsters and madmen are better subjects for stories than the upright and respectable, and doesn’t humanizing them serve us all better, enabling us to finally see them? I agree. Unless, say, the subject is repression itself. I’m thinking of Anita Brookner novels, or The Remains of the Day. There are no hard and fast rules anywhere in literature. But are we, with Middlemarch, headed towards Anna Karenina on the train tracks? The Ace of Hearts at the end of Tess of the d’Urbervilles? I know where this is going, I’ve read it already, and every other one of these Marriage Plot books. The women cannot win. 

Except, have you heard of Miss Marjoribanks, by Margaret Oliphant? I hadn’t either, until today’s London Review of Books arrived in the mail and I read this article by Tom Crewe, where he writes:

“The novel tells the story of Miss Marjoribanks, and of her return, after finishing her schooling, to live with her widowed father in Carlingford, where already

preparations and presentiments had taken vague possession of the mind of the town, as has always been observed to be the case before a great revolution, or when a man destined to put his mark on his generation, as the newspapers say, is about to appear. To be sure, it was not a man this time, but Miss Marjoribanks; but the atmosphere thrilled and trembled to the advent of the new luminary all the same.”

Doesn’t this sound good? Read on, that article has choice excerpts. Miss Marjoribanks never gets married! Or does she? I have ordered a copy. Apparently Mrs. Oliphant wrote 98 books, so this may be the start of something I can’t finish. But first, let’s find out what happens to Dorothea Brooke. I have forgotten the details. It’s not looking good for her, let’s all agree. 

And before I go, I quite enjoyed Chapter 13, and the argument between Mr. Vincy and Mr. Bulstrode, with its suppressed insult, insinuation, veiled threat and oblique jabs. So English. Bulstrode is emerging as a villain, a character it gives one pleasure to detest. If the result of all this repression is vicious and amusing banter, and elegant eviscerations, OK OK, I’m along for the ride.