MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

As promised, the second installment of spooky reader dreams.  This comes from an esteemed colleague Sean Carman, and references my Dante-related essay, “A Divine Comedy,” which you can read right now (with subscription) in the September issue of Harper’s.

The essay mentions (a) a lunch I had at a beautiful hotel in Valpolicella with Dante’s very charming winemaking descendants, Count Pieralvise and Massimilla Serego Alighieri, as well as (b) a legend that Dante buried a manuscript of Paradiso somewhere on the Serego Alighieri estate.

Here is Sean’s dream:

Last year, when I was reading the Hollanders’ translation of the Inferno, I had a dream that was so vivid, and seemed so important, that it woke me from my sleep. In the dream, I was driving up a narrow Italian mountain road when I came across a small cafe and wine bar annexed to a castle. The cafe/wine bar had a trellis, and very little parking, and — here is the important part — an open-air cafe with flagstones and Italian waiters who served me wine. In the dream, I had a glass of pinot grigio and then went on my way, not knowing why I was in Italy, or on that particular road, or why I had stopped at the cafe. Still, the dream was so vivid, so rich in detail, I was sure it was trying to tell me something.

I read your article with interest, but I when I came to your visit to Casal dei Ronchi and your meeting with Count Pieralvise, I was riveted. Here was the scene from my dream repeated in your story. The same drive, the same open-air wine bar, the same flagstones. (For some reason, you didn’t mention the trellis.) What could it mean? I read on, captivated but also puzzled. A few paragraphs later, in the rumor that Dante hid a treasure trove of manuscripts somewhere on the estate, the meaning of my dream and its repetition in your Harper’s article became clear.

It’s true, my dream takes place on a narrow mountain road, whereas you were driving on a tall hill in the wine country. Also, I was at a castle, and you were visiting a hotel. Really, the only elements common to both scenes are the flagstones and the waiters.

But set aside the discrepancies between the two scenes, as well as the inconvenient fact that the Paradiso manuscript was supposedly buried at the estate, and also that it would make sense for it to be buried there. Focus on the flagstones. The flagstones, Elif. My dream and its recurrence in your Harper’s piece can only mean one thing. The hotel where you shared a glass of wine with the Count. Under the flagstones, most likely by the entrance trellis.

Elif: That’s where the Dante manuscript is buried.

The combination of flagstones,  visceral memory, and Italy really reminded me of the trippy scene with the flagstones in Time Regained (search for “flagstone”)… treasure-seekers, over to you.

“Here was the scene from my dream repeated in your story.”

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.

As someone who once wrote a whole dissertation on writing as a physical process in space and time, I’m always interested to learn about the spaces where people write things.  (Plus is it me, or is this an almost-inherently comic premise?  I think Proust in the cork-lined cell is really close to already being funny.)  So just imagine, dear readers, how excited I was to learn about Desk Space, a beautiful site devoted to the desks of various obscure writers whom nobody has ever heard of… now including me!

I spent at least an hour there looking at every single post, and was both touched and impressed by the great variety, within certain actually sort of narrow perimeters, of workspaces favored by my fellow D-list writers.  David McGimpsey, for instance, likes to confront the blank page armed with 2.5 computers, a Colonel Sanders piggy bank, a 1994 edition of Gun Digest, and a television (top)… while the poet Souvankham Thammavongsa prefers a workspace to say, and I quote: “I’m in trouble and I’ve been sent away” (bottom).

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