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Volume CXXXII, Number 16 |
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Mixes and mistakes
JAY KANG
COLUMNIST
My mix tape: 1000 stars
My mix tape rules. It is one of a kind. If you send a CD-R to 321 Smith Union, I'll burn a copy of it for you. Or download the songs. Then you can listen to its subtle hints. Depending on how I feel about you, I'll send you one of two versions. These are the first five songs in the "I hate you, please get out of my life before I regret this," version and some of the lyrics you should listen for.
Magnetic Fields: "Yeah! Oh Yeah!"-Female vocal lead: "If we lived apart, do you think we could make a brand new start? Do you want to break my heart?"
Male vocal lead: "Yeah, oh yeah. I enjoyed making you miserable for years."
Pavement: "Come Join us in a Prayer"-"I'm the only one that laughs at your jokes when they are so bad and your jokes are always bad, but they're not as bad as this."
The Cure: "Boys Don't Cry"-"I would say I'm sorry if I thought that it would change your mind, but I know this time I've said too much, been too unkind."
Leonard Cohen: "Coming Back to You"-"I can't turn the other cheek, I looked for you in everyone and they called me on that too. I lived alone but I was only coming back to you."
The Silver Jews: "Random Rules"-"I asked a painter why the roads are colored black, he said Steve it's because people leave and no highway can bring them back."
These are the first five songs in the "Lets have fun, get drunk and do that Little Bunny FuFu thing with our fingers, smash stuff and slam dance to this mix tape" version. Download all these songs and throw your own glam dance party.
Buzzcocks: "What do I get?"
Andrew WK: "Ready to Die"
The Breeders: "Full on Idle"
Le Tigre: "Deceptacon"
Johnny Cash: "Cocaine Blues"
Dave Eggers newest: two stars
Somebody please get Dave Eggers a tourniquet. He's bleeding all over the place and wants the entire viewing population of MTV2 to get a good look. He's walking into every coffeehouse from the Lower Haight to the Upper Village yelling, "I am earnest! I am earnest!" leaving a legion of disciples in his wake.
He has just released his second novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, a loosely sketched "tour de force" that piles a heap of conflicted emotions about death, friendship and love on top of what amounts to a travel guide to Western Africa and Eastern Europe. Will and Hand, the novel's two protagonists, are mourning the death of their friend Jack.
Will comes into a large sum of money and somehow decides that a trip around the world with Hand will help with the grieving process. During the trip, the two plan to give away the rest of the money to people that they deem worthy.
The conflicts that arise between the two friends on this trip range from sexual jealousy to comparisons of who is a better friend to the other to what impoverished people are more deserving of the money than others, and this wide array of difficult themes stretches the novel way out of Eggers' grasps so that the last hundred pages read like a series of angsty, emotionally diarrhetic journal entries.
In his first novel, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers succeeded in reigning in his more colorful flairs and language by centering the novel on his own conflicted and admittedly self-obsessed thoughts. You Shall Know Our Velocity strays outside the Eggers formula of me, me, me, but fails in holding together a cohesive or compelling story. The sentences ache for tightening that Eggers' publishing company McSweeney's did not provide and his old bag of tricks feels stale (the first page of the novel is printed on the cover, complete with the atrocity, "It was an eyeblue day.") . A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, for its part, was not a skillfully written book, but Eggers' ability to precariously balance tragedy with cuteness and humor with discomfort and quick pace with almost unbearable moments of reflection made reading the novel the literary equivalent to watching a bobsled crash across the finish line.
Like with Salinger's Buddy Glass, you wanted Eggers to sort things out because there were those moments when nobody seemed to be more true-to-life or honest. Almost all of that reckless charm is gone from You Shall Know Our Velocity and replacing it is constant motion and stagnant emotion.
Instead of layering the frantic self-searching like he did in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers just lays what happens to Will and Hand next to what Will and Hand think about death and the result makes you want to skip over large chunks of text.
Eggers' style of navel gazing melodrama is hardly original, but his flair for publicity has vaulted him into a rare American literary celebrity status. His books and short stories are deemed "buzzworthy" by MTV and a growing population of teenagers and twenty-somethings eagerly await his next appearance in print with the same cultish attentiveness that many of their parents devoted towards Mr. Salinger's hill in rural New Hampshire.
His novels mention The Real World and Mr. T, and he goes on book tours with nerd-rockers They Might Be Giants and smashes up hotel rooms.
He is young literary America's rock star and bears the responsibilities that go along with that sort of fame.
Instead of merely focusing on the content of his novels, Eggers has to package them differently, provide pyrotechnics for his book tours and wiggle his way into the media spotlight usually reserved for much better looking and charismatic men. Salinger has held the public's fascination captive by disappearing into mystery. Eggers seems to want to hold it by exposing himself as much as possible. It works. The sales for You Shall Know Our Velocity are alarming for a novel distributed by a small, independent press, and youth literary journals like Our Time is Now are sprouting up naming Eggers as inspiration.
His popularity comes from the fact that he is a gimmick writer in an era where young readers need that extra hook or special effect to keep their interest. In A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers' tricks were fresh and they worked well within the honest, open structure of the novel.
For example, the itemized list of expenses incurred during the writing of the book that he included in the book's introduction sent the clear message to the reader that Eggers was not part of the Prestige class of novelists and that he did not see writing as some holy art where the author is the giant on the hillside coming down every few years to visit his public. This open-handed approach to writing has reverberated throughout the guild of young writers, as more and more books are printed with illustrations and self-effacing jokes on dust jacket flaps. Zadie Smith, England's young literary superstar, recently released her second novel, The Autograph Man, is burdened with unmistakable Eggersian touches (the two collaborated on McSweeney's Quarterly Journal #4)-like quirky fonts and self-referential humor-and suffers as a result.
However, it is undeniable that it was this sort of Warhol-style unraveling of entrenched thoughts that writing was some holy act of creation that made A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius exactly what the title advertised.
Eggers was a writer with a story worth telling, but he was going to keep you reading with innovative techniques.
Perhaps, now saddled with his own celebrity and the pressures of maintaining all that Dave Eggers has become, he is struggling to find a story that isn't about just himself.
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