Brain-Death in Venice

April 12th, 2006 Posted in 2006

At the magazine where I work — Cracked Magazine, on newsstands in September! — my Editor-in-Chief Monty recently bought a big-assed stack of magazines as reference material. I’ve been liberally stealing from the magazine pile all week for my 40-minute subway commutes.

By now I’ve made it past the good ones (i.e. the ones with tits), and was forced to reach deep into the pile for periodicals I wouldn’t have bought otherwise. This resulted in me reading the fruity-toot McSweeney’s literary review Believer on the subway this morning, on the grounds that it had a Harold Ramis interview, who is awesome.

Problem was, I finished the Ramis interview in ten minutes; and with another six stops to go before I got to work, sheer boredom forced me towards the other pieces in the magazine. One article by Jeff Fort, for instance, is titled “The Man Who Could Not Disappear” and spends 8000 words wondering why people desperately want to know the details of Kafka’s life — a problem I wasn’t aware existed, though the answer that leapt immediately to mind was “Maybe they wouldn’t if you stopped writing 8000-word essays about him.”

I skipped over to a “manifesto” by David Shields about why the lyric essay is better than fiction. Several pages in, it occurred to me that I honestly didn’t care one way or another which David Shields preferred, and skipped onto something else.

I tried to read an interview with a painter named Ed Ruscha who, according to the article, paints art that offers vivid commentary on the state of America. Ruscha spends the majority of the interview complaining about how people gleaned the impression that his art is about what it’s about, and harps that “there is no single correct interpretation. Try many. Try forty.” Something to keep in mind the next time you’re enjoying the work of Ed Ruscha: he’d prefer it if you interpreted it forty times.

This one killed me. Titled “The Partisan Review”, the essay is entirely composed of thoughts the author had while reading another literary review published in 1949. (Alternate title: “Help Me! My Head is Buried… in my Own Ass!”) Why someone would engage in a post-modern exercise so pointless as to review a review of nineteenth-century French artist Eugene Fromentin’s work from a 60-year-old magazine is baffling. Who has this kind of time? If you’re that out of ideas for things to do, my bathroom needs to be cleaned. (Of course, I’m now reviewing the review of the review myself, and it fills me with a need to never read books again and just go watch The Sopranos instead — quite possibly social commentary of a far more meaningful caliber than anything I’d have been able to come up with on paper.)

And so on and so on from there, until I finally reached my stop. All of this dense literary criticism, aside from making me realize I’m far too much of an idiot to read literary criticism, caused a jolting epiphany, which is that I actually used to read this stuff all the time. I was suddenly reminded of Death in Venice, a novella by German pederast Thomas Mann that, through the use of complex metaphors, is essentially a rigid, damp love letter to a small half-naked boy the narrator leers at throughout.

It’s thoroughly creepy business, in other words, and I’m ashamed to admit I actually recommended the damn thing to several of my non-college friends at the time. Evidently, though I didn’t realize it while I was in college, I used to be quite a pretentious ass. I even recall, to increasing embarrassment, my non-college friend returning the book to me with the complaint that it was “sort of perverted” and “really really gay” — a criticism I pish-toshed on the grounds that the author’s love of the boy was clearly a platonic love of beauty itself, and observe the Dionysian symbolism at play here with the tiger in the forest, and blah blah blah I feel like kicking my younger self in the face.

This led to a further epiphany, which is that I certainly don’t feel that way about Death in Venice now. The heavy-handed metaphors and story construction haven’t stayed with me through the many years since I last read it; I’m left only with the imagery of a boy-hungry pervert licking his lips on a beach while he checks out the wet buttocks of a young lad building sand castles nearby, and the fact that this came up an awful lot in Thomas Mann’s books. ‘Unreliable narrator’ my ass: Thomas Mann’s a sick motherfucker.

This led to a third — and, luckily, the last — epiphany of the morning: since that brief period of time where I was forced to read great works of literature—by way of being told which ones to read and then graded on my ability to parrot back the professors’ understanding of them—I haven’t read much since. I think in the few years after college I picked up one or two books out of habit, but it wasn’t long after that I got a job and my Reading List tapered off to a Renting the Film Based on the Book List, digressing from there to an “I suppose I could rent Lolita, but on the other hand I could also rent Charlton Heston cold-cocking zombies in The Omega Man” list. You can sort of see the progression.

First Hypothesis
The fault lies with the impenetrable nature of most literary criticism. But this strikes me as just the sort of hopeless argument a muttonhead might make. People who accuse others of pretentious intellectualism, in my experience, are typically those who can’t admit that others aren’t trying to sound intelligent; it’s something that simply comes naturally to them in a way the accuser cannot grasp.

Second Hypothesis
My capacity to enjoy provocative entertainment has simply, and through no fault of my own, diminished as I get older. Fiction that struck me as unbelievably in-my-damn-face at age 20 has since been trumped by far more shocking real-life events, which weren’t really all that illuminating or entertaining so much as sad. This is also plausible; but I think it cuts me too much slack, which brings me to my…

Third Hypothesis
I’m getting dumber.

I’m leaning towards the third one, and not just because I stood yawning in my living room for eight minutes this morning with a sock in my hand and a bare foot, wondering what I’d intended to do next. And not because I was also running late for work, and so didn’t go the bathroom before running out of my apartment (a move that would have delayed me all of five minutes), leading to a long wait on a subway platform for a late train while trying not to shit my pants. No, I think I’m getting dumber simply because the time where I would have given a crap about any of the high-minded literary posing in Believer are long since past. Nowadays, the closest I come to the written word are the dialogue balloons in Captain America comics, which I’ll read on the couch between commercials.

Here’s a quote from the Harold Ramis interview: “I can’t tell you how many people have told me, ‘When I go to the movies, I don’t want to think.’ It offends me as a human being. Why wouldn’t you want to think? What does that mean? Why not just shoot yourself in the fucking head?”

The irony here — that the only article I actually liked in a literary review is basically castigating me for being the sort of retard who didn’t like the others — is not lost on me. What’s worse is that I think I even said “I don’t want to think” verbatim a few weeks ago, after coming home from work exhausted and getting badgered by my girlfriend to watch Hotel Rwanda, a thoughtful, critically lauded film about a hotel manager who, Schindler-like, saves thousands of Tutsi refugees from being massacred by the Hutu militia.

“Isn’t that about Tutsi refugees getting massacred by Hutu?” I asked, groaning. After being told it was, I groaned further and rubbed my temples. “Let’s watch that Scrubs DVD instead.” Unlike Harold Ramis, there are times when I’d rather not be challenged intellectually by my diversions. Alarmingly, those times seem to increase exponentially with the passage of time.

Therein lies the problem — not with The Believer, but with The Believer’s intended audience, and the fact that I seem to be getting further away from being part of this audience the older I get. I used to go out of my way to watch complex independent films and read provocative young authors. Now I go out of my way to avoid them. (The critically applauded Hotel Rwanda is, as of this writing, still in its cellophane package under the TV, where it’s been since it was given to us this past Christmas. I’ve watched Batman Begins like four times since then — a depressing thought to contemplate under normal circumstances, when one isn’t talking about a film where a guy dresses up like a bat and beats up ninja terrorists because his parents died.)

It turns out the passage of time is turning me into a moron — one who’s not only forgone learning new things, but seems to be forgetting the things he already learned. (For instance: when cooking bagels, after they’re cooked, they’re hot and will burn your fingers. Apparently my brain erased this fact to make room for fond remembrances of a Mop ‘N’ Glo ad and a room-clearing brawl between Captain America and his brainwashed ex-sidekick Bucky.)

Luckily there’s no dark cloud without its silver lining, and I’m taking my ongoing descent into full-blown mental incompetence in stride. On the plus side, for instance, I’ll never have to watch another depressing film by Todd Solondz, and that’s undoubtedly a timesaver. Another perk: less poetry, more Spider-Man. That’s fantastic no matter how smart you are.

Most importantly: less defending of literary pederasts. The dumber you get, the more cut and dry it strikes you that it doesn’t matter how flowery you’re able to say “I’d like to fuck a boy in the ass” in prose. No amount of Pulitzers are letting you babysit my kids.