MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

A brief outtake from “Natural Histories” (New Yorker, 24 October 2011):

Although Çağan and I both eventually went to Stanford for grad school, we rarely crossed paths. One day, however, I received an announcement for a lecture he was giving on the wildlife of Sulawesi, Indonesia, where religious warfare had overshadowed the endemic fauna, including “tiny primates that look like gremlins.” As I contemplated the attached image of a spectral tarsier—its enigmatic little face, meek half-smile and gigantic eyes—I was deeply impressed by the range of human and nonhuman endeavor on earth. Right across campus in the literature department, I was studying the mimetic theory of religious and sacrificial violence. Had it ever occurred to me to think of the saucer-eyed creatures living out their parallel existences in the underbrush?

SPECTRAL TARSIER / PHOTO BY ÇAĞAN ŞEKERCIOĞLU

Connected readers!  I’m just back from an idyllic week in Urfa, sacred carp capital of all four hemispheres.

Because the state of internet was not as well-developed as the local cyprinid species, I was unable to post a couple of videos I’d been meaning to share, from a dramatic reading of Lightning Rods (the new novel by Helen Dewitt).  The reading, which was sponsored by n+1 and the Center for Fiction, took place on September 10. By chance I was in town then visiting my mother – just imagine how honored my mom and I were, when I was asked to participate!

I was especially honored once I received the script, and saw that I got all the best lines:

His first fantasy was about walls. The woman would have the upper part of her body on one side of the wall. The lower part of her body would be on the other side of the wall. Sometimes, in fact most of the time, the upper part of the body would be fully clothed. There would be nothing to show what was going on on the other side of the wall.

Sometimes the woman would be naked from the waist down. Most of the time she would be wearing a short tight skirt that could be pushed up and underpants that could be pulled down. Sometimes he would have trouble deciding whether it was better with or without the pants. The high point was pushing the skirt slowly up to reveal a firm, tight, unsuspecting ass. Later a cock would go in and the vantage point of the fantasy would shift to the other side of the wall, where you would not know from the fully clothed upper body of the woman that a cock was hard at work on the other side of the wall. For some reason or other she would need to pretend that nothing was happening.

My mom suggested I should demand a small surcharge every time I said “cock.”  She is always looking out for her little girl.

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Because of my great love of monuments, I was really touched to read about the Isaac Babel monument unveiled last week in Odessa.  It represents Babel seated on some steps, a moderate distance away from a large enigmatic wheel.

According to sculptor Georgii Frangulyan, the steps represent Babel’s front stoop, and also the famous Potemkin stairs.

The wheel represents the tachanka wheels in Red Cavalry, the wheels of Mendel Krik’s horse cart in the Odessa Stories, the wheel of fate, the Red Wheel, and the wheel of history that ran off the track and crushed the writer.

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Concerned readers! I was deeply moved by the recent international outpouring of sentiment, both pro and con, regarding the potential use of “douchebag” in my forthcoming essay on Dante. In the past week I’ve given a lot of consideration to the different views that were expressed. Frankly, I don’t think I’ve struggled more over any single mot juste in my whole career.

At first, I was feeling pretty good about “sleazebags.”  So was my editor.  He said he had intended “assholes” less as an actual substitution for “douchebags,” than as “a prompt to a third way”—and we had found it!

As the days went by, though, I started to feel less confident.  I was increasingly bothered by the connotation, with “sleazebags,” of criminal slickness—an issue raised by several readers. What if “the thousand and one sleazebags of Florence” was understood to play on some image of Italian corruption or, worse yet, greasiness?  That was the last thing I wanted!  And didn’t “sleazebags” designate a particular kind of behavior or vocation, by contrast with the more existential “douchebags” (the inevitable douchebags, regardless of class or income)?

I began casting about for an alternative.  Although I did appreciate the many piquant suggestions I received from readers, none, to my ear, was quite right in context. That is, the historical moment may come when it sounds OK to refer to “Homer, Moses, Judas, Jesus, Brunetto Latini, Beatrice, all the thousand and one asswizards of Florence,” but I’m pretty sure it isn’t here yet.

One night I lay awake “brainstorming” about all the nimrods, ass-hats, jerks, jerk-offs, knuckleheads, fuckups, fuckwits, et alii, ad nauseam, but only succeeded in giving myself terrible dreams about an exboyfriend.

In the morning, I realized it was time to reevaluate the objections to “douchebag.” These seemed to fall into two categories:

1. Shelf-life: We should avoid fad words of recent coinage, because they might go obsolete.
2. Staleness/ annoyingness: We should not join annoying, repetitive people in overusing their favorite words.

Interestingly, Objection 2 has been around since at least 2006 when Gawker called a moratorium on “douchebags,” offering, as an reward for the reader who came up with the best alternative, a bottle of Balneol Perianal Cleansing Lotion (“it may not seem like much, but according to a commenter at drugstore.com, ‘it will last at least 6 to 8 months even in the most busy of households’”). What was the result? Choads, twatwaffles, snatches… nothing suitable. The unclaimed bottle of Balneol ended up in the Gawker lavatory.

In 2008-09, the death of “douchebag” was again announced/ called for by various publications, on revamped charges: the word was not only “completely played out,” but was now being bandied about for purposes other than its “true intention”; “the douches themselves” had sinisterly coopted it for use against less deserving candidates; its very transcendent historic-philosophical conditions had expired, along with the financial bubble that brought us the platonic douchebags; etc.

Oh readers—it’s a thankless, dreary task to separate the issues at hand. But did I go into this line of work for the yucks?  Let’s start with the “shelf life” objection. Here, I think there’s been a conflation of normative and prescriptive: people say that douchebag is on the brink of extinction, because they believe it should be on the brink of extinction. Yet the very insistence that it should be extinct is proof that it’s still here.  People have been trying to exterminate this word for 5+ years, and not even the massive incentive of a bottle of Balneol could elicit a viable alternative… these things mean something.

As for overuse: since when is being used a bad thing, for a word?  “Asshole” is obviously used way more than “douchebag,” and nobody says it’s time to retire “asshole.” The view seems to be rather that “asshole” is time-tested—a classic.

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Forward-thinking readers! You don’t need me to tell you that our language is a living, growing organism. So, in an effort to stay with the times, I recently attempted to use the word “douchebags” in print. The context was an essay on Dante, which is scheduled to run in the September issue of Harper’s, albeit probably with some minor revision to the following sentence: “Dante goes to the afterworld, and everyone is there: Homer, Moses, Judas, Jesus, Brunetto Latini, Beatrice, all the thousand and one douchebags of Florence.”

This line elicited the following wonderful query from the managing editor:

“douchebags”: This feels out of place, which is sort of the point, but it feels a little too out of place. It’s a word that’s been ruined by the Internet, Kanye West, et alii, ad nauseam. You’re writing for the ages, and to me there’s something slightly stale and stroppy about using that term in such an important place. “Assholes”? Less anachronistic, and a word and concept that certainly existed in Dante’s time and tongue.

So many thoughts went racing through my mind when I read this, e.g.:

1. “They aren’t letting me say ‘douchebags.’”
2. “What a thoughtful response to ‘douchebags’!”
3. “Assholes?”

I realized that, familiar as Dante doubtless was with assholes, and meaningful as this consideration may be, “douchebags,” to me, better expresses both the sleazy political small-timeyness and the frenzied contemporaneity conveyed by the portrayal of Florence politicos in The Inferno.

I also realized that, maybe thanks to Kanye who made them loveable again, I have a soft spot for the douchebags—more so than for the assholes.¹  And although I concluded that, for Dante essay purposes, “sleazebags” will suit the purposes just as well, I begin to wonder whether the title of my next book shouldn’t really be The Douchebags. Thinking ahead to the foreign editions, I imagine it being untranslated, like Les Misérables, or Mein Kampf…

But I’m getting ahead of myself, as usual. For now, I will just raise a parting glass to the douchebags.  Alla salute, gentlemen!

P.S. Another five-star Amazon review here.