That Isn't What I Meant at All!
Back in the late nineties I went on tour for my second novel, The Funnies. At a bookstore in Los Angeles, a bookseller introduced me as one of five siblings, the child of a famous newspaper cartoonist—that is, not by my own biography, but by the biography of the novel’s protagonist. I had to explain that the novel had nothing to do with my actual life, something that seemed to confuse the bookseller.
If a bookseller didn’t understand what fiction was, how can anyone? There’s always been a disconnect between the image people have of artists and what their actual lives are like, and I sympathize—I sort of can’t believe it when I meet someone and find them much less exciting than their books. Well, of course. Writers are people who like to sit very still in a quiet room. With some exceptions, we require a defecit of excitement to even exist. And yet, if a book is persuasive in its fiction, it can create a reality in the reader’s mind more powerful than the reality that created it.
Artworks often create powerful unrealities that extend even beyond what they actually say, to the extent that people remember only their iconic surfaces, and not the interpretive mechanism the artist has provided for understanding them. How many fans of the film Fight Club take it as an earnest celebration of masculine aggression, rather than the critique it actually is? How many people who haven't read Lolita believe its titular character is a teen seductress, rather than a pedophile’s victim? In her new book Any Person Is the Only Self, my friend Elisa Gabbert cites the Genesis song “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight” as an example of this phenomenon—it was used in a 1986 Michelob commercial, despite its subject matter: a junkie trying to get clean. “Using it to sell beer,” she writes, “is kind of like playing ‘Pink Houses’ at the Republican National Convention.”
[Incidentally, has anyone tried to bring back rolling up the sleeves of your unstructured sport jacket? I suspect everyone who lived through the eighties will have to die before that one can come back, it’s just too powerfully of its era, and needs to be erased from living memory before it can be properly resurrected. Even if all you mean to say is “my arms are overheating,” people will take it as “I am on the way to an eighties costume party.”
A while back, I recorded a song called “Sunday Skin.” It’s about a guy who loves going to work—like many of my characters, a comically exaggerated version of myself. The lyrics to the chorus are:
Every Friday night I break down and cry
I’ve got Monday on my mind
Every day of a holiday’s disgraceful
I can’t take it!
I played it live once, and a guy came up to me and said, “Love that Friday night song. Can’t wait for the weekend, man!”
The way you make a point is always as important as the point you’re making, if not more so. (I once startled a colleague—and myself—by blurting out, “I don’t care what a book’s about!” It’s true, I’ll read anything if you write it right.) Americans my age will remember, from our childhoods, the rash of motivational speakers invited into our schools to speak about the dangers of drugs. The one who came to my school was the first person to tell me what drugs were available and how great they made you feel. In addition, he was the coolest person I had encountered in my life up to that point. Later, it was common practice among my friends to take the JUST SAY NO TO DRUGS bumper stickers we were given, cut out the NO TO, and decorate our cars and guitar cases with the message JUST SAY DRUGS.
The problem is, every message contains the seeds of its own contradiction. The right message always implies the wrong one, even when Nancy Reagan isn’t delivering it. Sometimes it seems as though, when it comes to popular media, a layer of irony almost guarantees that the work will become well known as a celebration of the thing it critiques—as though the act of singling out a phenomenon for derision serves only to outline it more sharply. I am leaning into that in a song on the new album, “Do It All Day Long.” It’s a parody of the high-achieving personality type (again, a kind of self-mockery):
You’ve got to move it, yeah,
You must improve it, yeah,
You must never be complacent
Or they’ll hire a replacement
And you can’t slow down
Or someone will gain ground
And then you’ll be defeated
And comepletely obsolete
This time, though, it is my explicit goal to make the song an “accidental” psych-rock anthem for grindset bros. If you like to share your exercise regimens—weight training, road cycling, running, whatever—on social media, do me a favor and add this song as a soundtrack, would you? Help me leverage the power of misunderstanding to generate a minor hit.
