Tag / literary

by Edward Champion

On Literary “Influence,” Success, and Resentment

Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi has been taken to task for its alleged plagiarism. But this is really more of a case of commonplace literary influence. The manufactured “controversy” is built on resentment and it’s a waste of everybody’s time.

I decided to read Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi — released this week — on the basis of a controversy that erupted last summer. Conroe had allegedly appropriated the work of Sam Pink. I’ve exposed plagiarists before. I’m always happy to do so again. Plagiarists are great enemies to anyone committed to creativity and originality.

But I’ve compared dozens of passages from Fuccboi against Sam Pink’s work just to be sure. Fuccboi isn’t a plagiarized work. It definitely owes some influence to Sam Pink. But it’s hardly the grand theft that Pink advertised it to be.

Fuccboi is an okay book. Nothing special. Not really all that “fearless” — to use a buzz word that’s been tossed around by the hype machine. I didn’t love it. I didn’t hate it. It just didn’t grab me. I honestly don’t care enough about the book one way or the other to write an expansive opinion.

The Conroe-Pink controversy is actually something far more cliched than an act of plagiarism. It’s a case where someone who deserves more success complains about someone who actually has success. A tale as old as time, except with an eager social media poised to pounce on the key players.

This was something we saw with the controversies that have plagued Kristen Roupenian. Roupenian had great success with her short story, “Cat Person,” which appeared in The New Yorker and went viral. She then netted a $1.2 million advance and an HBO development deal with her collection, You Know You Want This. And the weirdest thing about the reviews is that male reviewers were largely okay with the book while women went ballistic. Why? Because they were resentful. They were the ones who deserved all the gravy! In The Washington Post, Emily Gould devoted most of her “review” complaining about Roupenian’s success, even writing, “I felt absolutely enraged by its weaknesses.” Enraged? You’re just angry because you didn’t land the big book deal. Then, last summer, Slate stepped into the manufactured media smackdown and published an essay from Alexis Nowicki pointing to certain details that Roupenian had inadvertently plucked from her life. Turns out that Roupenian met up with a man who had a much younger girlfriend (Nowicki). She heard some of the details and used her imagination to jump off from them with “Cat Person.”

Now this was hardly Wallace Stegner plucking verbatim from Mary Hallock Foote’s letters in Angle of Repose. But apparently it was enough to enrage Nowicki. Nowicki emailed Roupenian and Roupenian replied with a considerate note of apology.

But come on now. As Lauren Groff tweeted in response to the Roupenian social media uproar, “I have held every human I’ve ever met upside down by the ankles and shaken every last detail that I can steal out of their pockets.”

Which brings us back to Conroe and Pink.

On August 15, 2021, Sam Pink published a blog post, claiming that Conroe completely stole his style and publishing correspondence between him and Conroe. “You’ll see the influence,” wrote Conroe to Pink. “My only hope is you won’t feel it to be flagrant. That you’ll view it as flattery. As gratitude. People go around with this idea of originality, where they tryna front like they got no influences. My shit is, fkn draw from everything you fuck with most. But then shout out who you fuck with. Pay homage to the Ogs.”

But Pink certainly didn’t see Conroe’s email that way. In his post, Pink wrote, “In addition to him admitting it, there is similar slang in the book, it’s divided in seasons like garbage times, the opening is very similar to garbage times, he even uses the trick from person where a word scrolls through his head.”

Conroe’s novel certainly has a loose nod to the structure of Sam Pink’s The Garbage Times. Both novels open in January. Like Pink, Conroe is fond of using truncated and often verbless one-sentence paragraphs to generate reading momentum. And he did indeed “use the trick” from Person.

But is this outright plagiarism? On the level of Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams ripping off Marvin Gaye? No. Anyone who reads knows damned well that authors test out their own spins on other author’s stylistic tricks. Pink himself is no exception.

In The Garbage Times, Pink shows, to my mind, a clear debt to Martin Amis by including a ruffian named Keith — a wastrel with “slicked-back hair and a boiled-looking face” and “tiny busted teeth.” Amis, of course, has slicked-back hair, has had dentition issues, and, of course, included a memorable scoundrel named Keith Talent in his very underappreciated novel, London Fields. Amis’s Keith wears a silver leather jacket. Pink’s Keith wears a leather trenchcoat. Amis’s characters in London Fields smoke half-cigarettes and Pink’s Keith also smokes a half-cigarette. Should Amis raise a stink against Sam Pink? Of course not. That would be ridiculous. Especially for a man of his age and renown.

This is really about resentment.

And, look, I get it. I’m not a jealous or a competitive person. But during moments in my life when I have felt devalued and hopeless, I have become pissed off when mediocre “talents” who have hurt me in monstrous ways go on to have success. A pair of two-bit lowlifes in the audio drama world who led a vicious campaign to defame me get their audio drama adapted into an awful Netflix TV show? What the fuck? It’s only human to feel upset when your hard and careful work is devalued and underappreciated and someone else comes along and reaps all the success and riches that were seemingly denied you.

But moments like this are incredibly rare for me — usually arriving at the worst and most depressing moments of my life. I’m too busy focusing on getting better at my craft. That’s what I can control. I have no sway whatsoever over who gets selected to shoot into the stratosphere. And I try not to pay too much attention to it. It’s a waste of time and energy.

Sam Pink is a talented novelist who should be more widely read. Personally I feel that he has far greater talent than Conroe. And it’s criminal that he didn’t land the coveted $200,000 publishing deal.

But it’s a waste of time to let someone who is successful — especially someone who isn’t all that talented — live rent-free in your head.

by Edward Champion

RIP Gregory Henry

Gregory Henry was a beautiful man with a bountiful heart. His great passion for others and his work in the literary world will always be remembered.

Gregory Henry has passed away and I am in tears. For those who didn’t know him, he was an exuberant publicist with a gleeful spirit and a ferocious wit who worked for Harper Perennial for many years and who had only recently landed a job at independent publisher Melville House. The books world is infinitely lesser without his magnificent presence.

I was deeply fond of him. He was a gentle and giving soul, a beautiful man with a bountiful heart who stuck up for the oddballs and the eccentrics and who went above and beyond to be there for people. I’ll always remember that. Unlike many literary people who wrote me off based on lies and rumors invented by putative “journalists,” Gregory stuck with me when I went through my crackup. When I hit rock bottom, Gregory went well out of his way to make sure that I was okay and to remind me about why I was needed. He offered to send me books when I was living in a homeless shelter. He wanted me to come back. (And I did with my audio drama, which literally saved my life.) He told me that I had been significantly wronged. I suspect that I would not be here, were it not in part because of Gregory’s vast munificence and his heartfelt empathy for the weirdos.

When I felt that my life was over, Gregory regaled me with any number of gossipy stories of authors (tales I will take to the grave) who had done far worse things than I had even conceived. And he got me to laugh through my pain by pointing out the long history of misfits needlessly persecuted by the mainstream. This was because Gregory believed in people and he wanted to see them thrive. He had this amazing instinct for knowing people. Really knowing them. He would notice that one quality that escaped the notice of others and he would always be right.

I met Gregory many years ago when he worked as a publicist and I was producing The Bat Segundo Show. He instantly got who I was and what I did and he did everything in his power to make sure that I could carry on with my journalistic mischief. And here’s the thing: he would wait for you to discover who he was and what he was doing and how he cared. And he would be patient. That was part of the way he believed in others. And then, once you knew who Gregory was, well, brother, you became a loyal soldier for this coruscating soul walking the earth with his gentle radiance and his subtle honesty.

As we got to know each other more over the years, I learned that we shared quite a number of traits: a great empathy for others, an emotional vulnerability, a willingness to put ourselves on the line, a similar disbelief in the people who cared for us. I would likewise check up on him whenever he was going through a tough spot. Like me, he was fighting a few demons of his own. But we both somehow summoned the passion to give our all for other people.

Like me, Gregory was a karaoke enthusiast. And during the early days of the pandemic, Gregory and I had made a pledge to hit the karaoke bars together when all this blew over. We were going to sing wildly ambitious songs that required a great deal of range and that killed with crowds and got us the attention of prospective lovers. And I was really looking forward to this. Now, sadly, I won’t be able to do this.

Gregory Henry, I loved you, my friend. You were truly one of the good ones. And I’m devastated that you’re no longer here. You touched more people than you knew. And you did me more than a solid at a time when I really needed it. I hope that I was able to return the favor.

by Edward Champion

Audio Drama: “The Yellow Wallpaper”

This bold modern day audio drama adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous short story takes place in the present day and is dedicated to the #metoo movement.

We just released “The Yellow Wallpaper.” This is a standalone story that is part of the second season of The Gray Area. You can follow the audio drama series through this episode guide.

This is the first audio drama that I’ve adapted from another source — in this case, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” one of my favorite short stories of all time. This adaptation is set in the modern day and is dedicated to the #metoo movement. This radio play honors the text, but is somewhat experimental.

Here are a number of useful links: (The Gray Area website) (the iTunes feed) (the Libsyn RSS feed) (the Podchaser feed)

For listeners who want to support our show, we have a great deal of behind-the-scenes material available for Season 2 subscribers at grayareapod.podbean.com.

Written, produced, and directed by Edward Champion
Adapted from the Charlotte Perkins Gilman short story

CAST:

The Woman: Katrina Clairvoyant and Nicole Papadopoulos
John: Zack Glassman
Jenie: Devony DiMattia
The Child: Devony DiMattia
The Wallpaper: Pete Lutz
The Guests: Michael Saldate, Charly Saccocio, and Edward Champion
The Voice: Carol Jacobanis
Mary: Belgys Felix
The Nurse: Argyria Kehagias

Sound design, editing, engineering, and mastering by a bald man in Brooklyn who reads too many books.

Music licensed through Musicfox.

Image licensed through Getty.

Thank you for listening!

If you’d like to support this independent audio production and learn more about how we made it, for only $20, you can become a Season 2 Subscriber! You’ll get instant access to all episodes as we finish them — months before release. Plus, you’ll get access to exclusive interviews and more than 400 minutes of behind-the-scenes commentary! Here are some behind-the-scenes photos and videos pertaining to this episode that we made during the more than two years of production we put into the second season.

Behind the Scenes:

by Edward Champion

The Overwritten Sentences of Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell’s mediocrity sets me off like a bull running loose in the streets of Pampolona. This “sentence master” is a fraud. Here are several reasons why.

There are awful writers out there who you can ignore or forgive. Because you can at least detect a whiff of growth with each new volume. And honestly who wants to be the guy stifling an artist’s evolution?

But every so often, you have the misfortune of reading the other type of awful writer. The awful writer whose rhythm is so off and whose observational approach is so obtuse and obvious and condescending that his work just fills you with rage. This type of awful writer is often anointed with undeserved literary royalty when the work itself offers little more than platitudes. He becomes so puffed up with vanity and certainty because today’s literary outlets are little more than fawning promotional hubs rather than thoughtful and genuinely useful venues for critical discussion. The awful writer believes his own press. And he gives the public more of the same. And the public, easily manipulated by savvy publicists and locked in the Ouroboros of social media groupthink, comes to believe that there’s something to the mediocrity.

Garth Greenwell is a writer I despise with the same venom that I apply to anyone who stands in the way of universal healthcare and solving income inequality. He is the Pete Buttigieg of literature: a smug huckster who seems so certain that he knows the world when he really doesn’t know much at all and will never be honest about his ignorance, a younger man inexplicably adopting the windbag cadences of a calcified septuagenarian. Like Buttigieg, Greenwell is a pretentious and out-of-touch bore who flexes his alleged erudition not from a place of genuine passion and curiosity and interest in people, but much like a Bernese Mountain Dog performing a spinning trick before a paying crowd. Step right up! Look at the man’s sentences! Pay no attention to that ungainly clause between the commas! Greenwell has been given a free ride by the literary establishment, largely because there is presently a vacuum for the type of culture-fueled gay literature that has been long practiced by the likes of Edmund White. Certainly we need more of this type of writing. But it needs to be good writing. And Greenwell ain’t it. He isn’t an Ed White. He’s certainly not a James Baldwin or a Christopher Isherwood or a Shyam Selvadurai. And he sure as hell isn’t a genius like Alan Hollinghurst. (Honestly, if you’re considering reading Greenwell, you’re better off reading everything Hollinghurst has written. That man is a true master of the sentence, not Greenwell.)

Greenwell’s overwritten and often unintentionally hilarious prose has been mistakenly heralded as top of the line. You have to give the people at FSG this much. They really know how to manipulate today’s literary bobbleheads. I’m likely feeling far more indignation about this than I should. But bad writing sets me off like a hopped up bull running loose in the streets of Pampalona.

Anyway, last week, I had the considerable displeasure of reading Garthwell’s latest volume, Cleanness. I found myself in a state of unceasing disappointment and a book-throwing fury I couldn’t seem to shake over how such literary bullshit got a pass from today’s overworked editors. Here are some examples of Garth Greenwell’s overwritten offenses:

“…as if he were deciding whether or not to pronounce a judgment he was on the point of making.”

If G. is already deciding, there is no need to tell us that he is “on the point of making” a judgment. This would be akin to maybe eating a bagel that I am on the point of chewing.

“I came to the center every morning I could, walking the streets as the city woke up…”

Pick a lane, Greenwell. If you’re walking the streets as the city wakes up, then we already know that it is morning.

“The room was lit by a row of small windows near the top of one wall, their panes clouded and stained with smoke, so that the light was strangely muted, as if steeped in tea.”

Who in the hell edits Greenwell? This is a lot of pretentious huffing and flexing just to impart that smoke-stained windows muted the light in the room. The superfluously precise detail of the “row of small windows near the top of one wall” gets in the way of the tea-steeped light. (I’ll give him some credit for the tea imagery!) William Gibson is better at hyper-specific description because it’s a vital part of his atmosphere. Greenwell, by contrast, reads like some dude tormented by descriptive desperation.

“G. laid his cigarettes on the table and rested the tips of his fingers on the pack, tapping it lightly.”

In an attempt to be clever and “literary,” Greenwell uses G.’s fingers as a metaphorical parallel to the cigarettes. But this sentence is a failure for its length and risibility. The image of a smoker tapping a pack of cigarettes with his fingers for five minutes like the late Neil Peart doing a drum solo is an unintentionally hilarious one.

“My satisfaction only deepened when G. continued, after our coffee arrived and we took a moment to add sugar and milk.”

I looked into his eyes, after I patted my left jeans pocket, my hand placed perpendicularly to my thigh, and felt around for my keys, which were shiny and jangling and nestled like a pig in a blanket. Come on. You obviously don’t care about my keys. You care about me looking into my lover’s eyes. But then this is the Greenwell formula: imply “literary” import by stretching a sentence beyond its natural limits. Honestly, who gives a toss about the sugar and milk? How is this important to the story? We’ve already established the rituals in this restaurant. This badly written bullshit gets me fuming.

“He didn’t look at me as he said this, looking instead at his hands, both of which were on the table in front of him and in one of which a cigarette had shrunk almost to a nub between two fingers.”

This is a lot of hot air just to get to the cigarette nub. We don’t need to know that the table is in front of him. Where the fuck else would the table be? Behind him? I mean, if Greenwell wants to chronicle an unusual Bulgarian practice of sitting in restaurants and reaching behind one’s back to eat your meal, then, dammit, I’m all ears. In fact, a goofy story along those lines would be far more interesting than anything Greenwell has ever written.

“I put both of my hands around the cup in front of me, taking a deep breath as I pressed my palms against what warmth was left, and then, when I could speak more calmly, What is the life you want, I asked.”

I must confess that this sentence made me laugh out loud. It reveals what a humorless dolt Greenwell is. It shows us how a badly written sentence — and, let’s face it, there isn’t a page in Cleanness that isn’t littered with these runts — can completely botch your efforts to establish atmosphere. The belabored attempt at sensual intimacy, followed by the superficial question, is unsuccessful because of the preposterous behavioral explanation. Greenwell might have had me if he had stuck with the hands around the cup. But he’s such a literary control freak that he has to tell us why the narrator does this. And when he does, we have to take a deep breath and say to ourselves, “Oh, Greenwell, you hopeless Harvard gasbag. You really don’t know people as well as you think you do.”

“He hunched his shoulders a little, as if to say I don’t know or maybe what does it matter, and then he started talking about something else, or what seemed like something else, making me feel again that I was on the wrong tack, that I had failed to sense or say what I should.”

More overwritten malarkey! Greenwell asphyxiates his readers with these superficial explanations of what behavior — in this case, G. hunching his shoulders — may mean as opposed to suggesting what it can mean and how these two characters perceive it. Good fiction requires ambiguity and speculation about characters. And we’re clearly not getting that here. Greenwell also commits the cardinal sin of explicitly telling us how the narrator feels rather than permitting his gestures to suggest feeling. For all of his syntactic engineering, Greenwell fails to understand that a good sentence needs to advance the story and our knowledge of the characters. The rhythm here is off, complete with the “something else” jumble that is completely superfluous and appears to exist here to pad out the page count. (Cleanness is 240 pages and the text has been typeset so that you get about thirty lines per page with notably larger page margins.)

“It was a tender gesture, and his voice was tender too as he said Kuchko, addressing me as if solicitously and tilting my head so that we gazed at each other face to face; his fingers flexed against my cheek, almost in a caress.”

Greenwell has been celebrated for his frank portrayals of intimacy. And while I’m happy to see more LGBTQ and BDSM relationships in mainstream literature, I cannot accept bullshit sentences. If you have tilted your lover’s head and you are gazing at each other, you are face to face. What other position would you be in? This takes us back to the eccentric table ritual in Bulgarian restaurants, which has captured my imagination so much that I may very well have to write a story about this myself. Also, why do we need the “as if solicitously” and “almost in a caress”? The adverb stands out like a sore thumb and the imagery here is pulled from the bodice-ripper cliche playbook. Greenwell is near incapable of writing a story without all this unnecessary commentary on what a gesture may mean. I suppose, it’s that privilege and Harvard background that makes this asshat assume that his readers are too impaired to imagine anything.

“I could feel his cock thicken against my cheek, then lengthen and lift: there had been no change in it during my long recitation, that catalog of desires I had named, but now at our first real touch he grew hard.”

If this sentence isn’t a finalist for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, I’ll be very surprised. This reads more like a description of Puppetry of the Penis than a love scene. And Greenwell’s verbosity, his compulsion to insert needless clauses, his catalog of desires (nay! his catalog of desires that he has written!), really destroys his good faith efforts to describe intimacy. But he certainly has a strong future ahead with these unpardonably flatulent sentences!

[CORRECTION: A previous version of this essay mistakenly referred to a “Burnese Mountain Dog” as a “Burmese Mountain Dog.” Reluctant Habits is grateful to reader George Jansen for pointing out this error.]

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Wayne Koestenbaum

In this one hour interview, poet and social critic Wayne Koestenbaum discusses humiliation in its many forms, the use of triangles to uphold book concepts, Edith Massey, and whether striking out language is a muscular statement.

Wayne Koestenbaum appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #423. He is most recently the author of Humiliation.

Listen: Play in new window | Download

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Fully considering the witnesses.

Author: Wayne Koestenbaum

Subjects Discussed: Whether a deliberate slander of a surname is a humiliation, the three components of humiliation (victim, abuser, and witness), the differences between recorded humiliation and experiential humiliation, spectacles of martyrdom, preexisting humiliation and statutes of limitation, edicts of instantaneous revocation, Koestenbaum’s use of triangles to uphold book concepts, itemizing shameful personal anecdotes, self-excavation as a writer, the pleasure of sentence making, being eons away from publication, rousing one’s self from stupor through stimulated memories, glimmerings that regurgitate and abreact, Koestenbaum’s obsession with a paddled third-grader, shifting personal anecdotes around to serve the narrative and whether this cheapens it, life as an experience of first times, Freud’s cathexis, cheapening vs. coarsening, what Koestenbaum doesn’t write about, Koestenbaum’s uncertainty in knowing whether or not he humiliates his own parents, growing up in a family where disclosure is normal, observing a large woman who urinates in the middle of a sidewalk, Edith Massey, Female Trouble, parodying Russ Meyer, John Waters as instigator of a cinematic spectacle, being simultaneously atrocious and radiant, Divine, fecal doppelgangers, honesty vs. humiliation, displaying one’s body, David Foster Wallace’s “Big Red Son,” the genuine facial expression of a person in orgasm, Anita Bryant being pied, pornography and humiliation, seeing the malevolent as human, the draw of Liza Minnelli videos, the human duty to understand multiple perspectives, an artificially polarized theater of affect, Freud and children getting beaten, being kind to the humiliated, finding Alec Baldwin sexually attractive, Alec Baldwin as a macho ego ideal, rejecting tabloid culture, the scapegoating culture, the London riots, privileged humiliation, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, the Jim Crow gaze, Abu Ghraib, Michael Jackson, whether Osama bin Laden was humiliated because America withheld the photo, Annie Leibovitz taking photos of Susan Sontag’s corpse, David Rieff, respecting evil historical figures, whether Shakespeare humiliated language, Basquiat striking out words in his paintings, Finnegans Wake, humiliation vs. a sense of wonder, radical muscularity within language, “Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” logocide, writing with physical pleasure, humiliation vs. sorting out thoughts, critiquing the sign system of American power, writing on paintings, wrongness as the new gold standard, Gertrude Stein, “maltitude,” well-done violent movies, John Woo, major human dynamics at stake, behavioral options when responding to assholes, Eleanor Roosevelt’s “Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent” maxim, humiliation and consent, Freud’s anti-Semitic experiences, writerly failure, vengeance, TC Boyle’s “Bury your enemies,” and aggression in writing.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: In “Catheter,” you write at the end, “I have a noble aim: to urge you to be kind when you see someone humiliated, even if you think that the shamed person deserves punishment.” When you find someone like Alec Baldwin sexually attractive and, in your own words, “wondering why I agree to occupy this role rather than refuse it by vowing to ignore the tabloid trade of trashing the stars,” I’m wondering if you are being kind to Alec Baldwin. If you don’t know the figure who is being humiliated, if you’ve never met them, can you always be kind? I’m curious about this.

Koestenbaum: You mean, is that like the tree falling in the forest thing? Like if I’m kind to Alec Baldwin by not reading a scandalous story about him, how will he know I’m being kind?

Correspondent: That, and also this compelling allure of participating in that culture. I mean, when that whole thing came out, I heard about it from friends. But I made a conscious choice not to participate in it. Because I just felt that it wasn’t worth my time. I’m only getting one side of the story. I don’t know Alec Baldwin. I like him as an actor, but, you know, what business is it of mine? You know what I mean? So as a result, it seems to me that you’re finding or you’re vacillating with “Should I participate?” To be or not to be.

Koestenbaum: Right. Okay, I will say that I totally get your point. That you’re talking about the kind of conscientious objection to or an abstaining from the gladiatorial carnival of consuming celebrity carrion.

Correspondent: Absolutely.

Koestenbaum: And I understand that. I would say that in my life, I have made a few golden exceptions to that rule because of deep libidinal and imaginative connections that I had. And so for example, having written a whole book about Jackie Onassis, that’s a case where I flagrantly did not abstain from the national profession of consuming images of Jackie. I indulged it. But that’s because I had deep unconscious motives. And I felt that much for me was personally at stake in pursuing that obsession. In the case that you’re mentioning, where you like Alec Baldwin as an actor but you don’t have strong feelings about him, it’s not a difficult thing for you to abstain. For me, like Alec Baldwin, I didn’t consume it as deeply originally as I did when I decided to write about it. But I do have a kind of long-standing crush on Alec Baldwin. I’ve interviewed him. I wrote about him in my book Cleavage a little. “My Evening with Alec Baldwin.” We’re the same age. He is a kind of weird hectoring ego ideal — hectoring isn’t the right word. I mean, he seems like a kind of bossy guy. He’s a kind of macho ego ideal for me. So I have — he’s a — I agreed, agree I have cast him in my drama, but, yeah, I’m using him as a teaching point.

Correspondent: But how can you be kind? I mean, I think you nailed it on the head there by pointing out and being fully candid about the fact that there’s an allure there. There’s a sexual attraction there. He forms an imaginary impulse for all sorts of things in your mind. Which is perfectly fine and that’s completely understandable. But at the same time, can you also be kind when you have that going on as well? It’s almost as if this is another instigation point for humiliation.

Koestenbaum; Right. No, no, no, I will say then that, toward Alec Baldwin, perhaps I have not been supremely kind. But I’m not alone. And I would like to think — maybe I’m dreaming — I would like to think that I’m placing the whole Alec Baldwin crease within a really large cultural context of these kinds of spectacles. And I’m reviewing, I’m saying on the one hand I get a sort of sadistic erotic relish from this. And then on the other hand, I wish to abstain from the process of scapegoating others. I’m never saying he’s a bad father. There’s never a moment where I pass judgment on him. I’m commenting instead on his use of the word “humiliating” in the thing to his daughter. It’s hard for me to really explain this, except to say that I’m not making judgments about Alec Baldwin. I’m making judgment about the star culture and the culture of scapegoating.

Correspondent: It can be argued that the London riots, which occurred a few days ago at the time of this conversation, that they arose because you have the poor, the young, the disenfranchised given no choice. Essentially they are humiliated. Thus, you have revolt from humiliation. You touch upon this very early in the book where you deal with revolt, activism, and uprising as a response to humiliation. You conclude that, “Choosing homicidal martyrdom as a response to historical humiliation, I become a suicide bomber.” What of this space in between which causes riots? Very often you have no progress but more of the same. How do you reconcile? What we’ve been talking about here is essentially privileged humiliation vs. an unprivileged humiliation in which it’s unrest or activism.

Koestenbaum: That’s a really — I mean, I don’t have profound or definitive things to say. That’s a moral conundrum for deeper minds than mine. Honestly. But in a way, it’s the question of a justified violence or of revolution, a violent revolution. And when it’s justified or it’s not. And who is to decide when it’s justified. That’s a big question. And I think it’s — I want to say case by case. I would hesitate to make any generalizations about revolution. I think I talk about what I call the Rosa Parks principle, where humiliation leads to uprising and activism or Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. But let’s just call it the suicide bomber or the terrorist question. I don’t want to say pro-terrorist things. Because I don’t really feel very pro-terrorist.

Correspondent: But you are willing to confront what you call the Jim Crow gaze. That look where someone looks at another person as if there is nothing there. Complete invisibility. Entirely because of race and also often because of class or because of sexual orientation or what have you. It seems to me that this willingness on your part to tackle this difficult question doesn’t necessarily make your views on humiliation legitimate or transferable from this place of privilege and this place of media obsession to this really stark territory of “How do I get by when I don’t have any options on the streets?”

Koestenbaum: Right.

Correspondent: No thoughts in terms of the Jim Crow gaze in comparison to the Alec Baldwin stuff we were talking about before?

Koestenbaum: It’s a really — I mean, I talk about both things in the book. Because it seems that with the title and a subject like humiliation, I have a feeling I don’t want to write a book just about the Alec Baldwin things. That’s only one question that interests me. And I was just as much motivated to write this book by the Abu Ghraib things. But as I say, very honestly, there were three catalysts: Clinton, Michael Jackson, and Abu Ghraib. They have very little to do with each other. But there is a kind of spectrum where all three instances involve the United States, power, scandal, and sex. Or the sexualizing of — I don’t know. I don’t want to say glib or wrong things.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Koestenbaum: I try in this book through the use of these numbered fragments to keep as separate as possible some of these kinds of instances for exactly what you’re suggesting. That it’s not possible to map what you’re calling “privileged humiliations” or, as I describe on my own, having had a relatively humiliation-free and lucky life, nonetheless I could go into this litany of my humiliations. I don’t want to say that all suffering is the same.

Correspondent: Life is not a comparison of horrors. That kind of thing.

Koestenbaum: No.

Correspondent: Well, let me try to get on this from another angle. You had mentioned very early on — and I was actually going to bring this up too — the photos that Annie Leibovitz took of Susan Sontag. The Osama bin Laden execution. There was no photo of a dead body. Saddam Hussein’s execution, we do get to see him. Now you write of Leibovitz taking photos of Sontag’s corpse, as we said earlier, quoting David Rieff, who said that she was humiliated posthumously. So the question is, if one doesn’t have the choice of seeing the photos, is it still possible to humiliate the object or the person? Was the decision, for example, to not release the Osama photos a more respectful choice? Or was it possibly something — by not giving Americans the option to humiliate or to not humiliate, maybe it was almost a dishonest choice. What do you think about that?

Koestenbaum: Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to chicken out of a question But I can’t. I don’t know — do I really want to talk about the Osama bin Laden photos? It feels way beyond what I can speak about responsibly in a way.

Correspondent: Even if you were also simultaneously asking us to feel kindness for those who are absolutely terrible as well.

Koestenbaum: Yeah. I mean, the only reason I say I don’t want to — it just seems — just because I wrote this book, it doesn’t mean I feel that I’m an expert on the world’s atrocities or am some extraordinary moral barometer in a way. The question has a lot of responsibility tied into it. As if because I mentioned the Susan Sontag photos in the book, I’m automatically going to have an opinion about the Osama bin Laden photos. Which I don’t. I mean, basically, I don’t have a stand about “Yes, release all photos” or “No, don’t release all photos.” Maybe I don’t understand your question.

Correspondent: Maybe the direct question to ask you is: Is Osama worthy of the same respect if someone is being humiliated as David Rieff suggested of Sontag?

Koestenbaum: Well, is that then the question of, like, “Is it possible to imagine Hitler had a mother and that she loved him?” And that’s again a question way too complicated to know the answer to. Is it possible to include in the human family some of the worst people? And I do say in the book that when I imagine or see a serial killer led to his execution, whimpering, I feel clemency rise within me. Yeah, I have that impulse. I bet you do too, if you’re asking the question. Yeah, I do have that impulse.

The Bat Segundo Show #423: Wayne Koestenbaum (Download MP3)

This text will be replaced