Sit.
Good dog, now you stay, you hush.
Um, and then I got a job—this is the worst—I worked as a towel boy at something called
the Auburndale Health Club in Watertown.
Which was a very chichi … They called me something other than a towel boy, but I was
in effect a towel boy.
Who every once in a while was entrusted with the job of checking people in, and having
them show their card, and then working out on an unbelievably inelegant and clunky computer
system how many visits they’d had.
But anyway, OK, here’s why I quit that job.
Is that I’m sitting there working that job, and who should walk in, um, to get their towel,
but Michael Ryan.
Now Michael Ryan—who’s best known now for a book called Secret Life, which was this
kinda pretty hair-raising memoir.
But at the time—yeah, not to mention as we’re petting a dog —but at the time,
um, um … But anyway, Michael Ryan had received a Whiting
Writer’s Award the same year I had, like two years earlier, in 1987.
So I see this guy that I’d been up on this rostrum with, having Eudora Welty give us
this prize.
And two years later, I’m like … And I can remember, I can see—it’s the only
time I’ve literally dived under something, to have somebody avoid seeing me.
Like he came in, and I pretended, I pretended not very subtly to slip, and went under the
counter, and had the lady that was there … And I forget: I think I lay facedown, and didn’t
respond.
And she of course didn’t want to be going, “David, what’s wrong?”
while a guest was there.
So she gave him the towel.
And I remember, I somehow worked the rest of that day.
I think I would peer around corners to see what room he was in, and then dash and put
the towel in a towel bin.
And I remember I left that day, and I, I didn’t go back.
I’m sorry to use a word like "centered,”
you don’t think—you were shaking your head when I said “centered.”
You don’t see yourself that way?
No, I don’t.
Why not?
I see myself as somebody who’s been unbelievably burned by no one other than me.
Through not being centered.
I have an enormous ambition to be centered.
But I don’t—I don’t perceive myself as that way.
And I wouldn’t be so careful about this kind of stuff, if I felt very much confidence
that I could handle it well.
And I’m aware that this makes very good copy, and this will be a neat part of the
article.
But it’s also really like—you know, I feel like we’ve sort of become friends and
… understand that.
I mean this stuff, it’s really scary.
And I think if we were in exactly the opposite situation, you’d be saying a lot of the
same stuff.
It’s great.
But it’s also, it’s also really scary at the same time.
’Cause I’ve gotta—you know, I’ve got what I hope is like forty more years of work
ahead of me.
I’m way into—I’ve decided that I need, I really need to find a few things that I
believe in, in order to stay alive.
And one of them is that this is—that I’m extraordinarily lucky to be able to do this
kind of work.
And that along with that luck comes a tremendous obligation to do the best, to do the very
best I can.
Which means that I have to structure my life, you know, sort of like anybody who’s dedicated
to something.
To maximize my ability to do good stuff.
And it’s just like, and it doesn’t make me a great person.
It just makes me a person that’s really exhausted a couple other ways to live, you
know?
And really taken them, taken them to their conclusion.
Which for me was a pink room, with no furniture and a drain in the center of the floor.
Which is where they put me for an entire day when they thought I was going to kill myself.
Where you don’t have anything on, and somebody’s observing you through a slot in the wall.
And when that happens to you, you get tremendous—you get unprecedentedly willing to examine other
alternatives for how to live.
I have this—here’s this thing where it’s going to sound sappy to you.
I have this unbelievably like five-year-old’s belief that art is just absolutely magic.
And that good art can do things that nothing else in the solar system can do.
Now you’ve got me thinking—there’s so much beauty and profundity in all kinds of
shitty pop culture all around us.
Like living in Bloomington: one of the things that I do, I mean, you have to listen to a
lot of shitty country music.
’Cause that’s like pretty much all there is on the radio, when you’re tired of like,
listening to Green Day on the one college station.
And these country musics that are just so—you know, “Baby since you’ve left I can’t
live, I’m drinking all the time” and stuff.
And I remember just being real impatient with it.
Until I’d been living here about a year.
And all of a sudden I realized that, what if you just imagined that this absent lover
they’re singing to is just a metaphor?
And what they’re really singing is to themselves, or to God, you know?
“Since you’ve left I’m so empty I can’t live, my life has no meaning.”
That in a weird way, I mean they’re incredibly existentialist songs.
That have the patina of the absent, of the romantic shit on it just to make it salable.
But that all the pathos and heart that comes out of them, is they’re singing about something
much more elemental being missing, and their being incomplete without it.
Than just, you know, some girl in tight jeans or something.
And it’s so weird.
It’s like you live immersed in this stuff, it’s very Flannery O’Connorish.
And then every once in a while you realize that it’s all the same, and it’s all about
the really profound shit.
And that it’s adjusted in various ways to talk to various demographic groups for commercial
reasons.
But that if you cock your ear and listen real close, it’s—that it’s deep, you know?
Where else do you see that kind of nice stuff coming out of shit pop culture?
Wow.
Oh, God, everything.
I mean even—we were making jokes about Love Boat and Baywatch.
These really—the really commercial, really reductive shows that we so love to sneer at.
Are also tremendously compelling.
Because the predictability in popular art, the really formulaic stuff, the stuff that
makes no attempt to surprise or do anything artistic, is so profoundly soothing.
And it even, even the densest or most tired viewer can see what’s coming.
And it gives you a sense of order, that everything’s going to be all right, that this is a narrative
that will take care of you, and won’t in any way challenge you.
It’s like being wrapped in a chamois blanket and nestled against a big, generous tit, you
know?
And that, OK, artwise maybe not the greatest art.
But the function it provides is deep in a certain way.
That all this stuff is like deadly serious and really deep all the time.
I mean, it doesn’t mean that you should go around being some kind of scholar of pop
culture and dismantling all the stuff.
But that it’s—that we find, that art finds a way to take care of you, and take part.
Kind of despite itself.
And that’s one of the cool things about Kael.
Is Kael, Kael writes about the miracle of … all the odds are stacked against, you
know, the profundity.
You know?
Writing about the Hollywood system and stuff.
And like crabgrass, or like Jeff Goldblum says in Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way.”
You know?
That like, the cool stuff and the magic stuff, it comes out all the time.
The trick—you know, if there’s one thing that the serious art can do, is that it can
try to put you in places where you’re more alive to hearing that.
You know?
That it can seduce you into paying attention to stuff in a way that’s hard to pay attention
to.
Can you give me an example of those things we've seen.
So it’s weird.
It’s like how the, like—I mean it really is, you know.
You’ve got this enormous lump of shit, and then a rose growing out of it.
And then you realize that the more rank the shit, the more, the more saprogenic the shit,
the more fertile it is too.
And it’s not like “Oh, pop culture’s great, we’re surrounded by this beauty all
the time.”
But the trick is that—is if you can get the right arrangement in your head.
And get kind of in the right spirit to really try to pay attention, and do the work, to
like see what’s beautiful in it.
The paradox is that the popular stuff is training you not to do the work.
It’s telling you, you don’t have to do the work.
I don’t think writers are any smarter than other people.
I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.
Stuff said out loud on the page doesn’t look said out loud.
It just looks crazy.