Philip Roth

Once not so long ago, it was understood among those who thought about such things that writing was a dying art form, a relic from an era when things like time, opportunity, and audiences were available and things like authority, expertise, and artistry mattered. Scholars and critics and other old sticks in the mud mourned the death of the written (and read) word in American culture like other old sticks in the mud in other times mourned the death of gas-powered lamps or the art of conversation or the silent movie. Writers no less important than Philip Roth, who felt his influence waning along with everyone else who made a living behind a typewriter, once told David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker – another relic with waning influence – that the evidence “is everywhere that the literary era has come to an end.” And stodgy pundits and cultural critics like John Humphrys and John Sutherland attacked texting as “bleak, bald, sad shorthand which masks dyslexia, poor spelling and mental laziness” and texters as the linguistic heirs to Genghis Kahn. Even this author may have said a thing or two about the dangers of our “tweeting” culture – all 140 characters of it – in a moment of pre-middle-aged grumbling.

This was the sad reality of the situation. But as disheartening as circumstances were for these defenders of the word, at the very least they all knew that their point about the less-than-slow death of written language was indisputable, that they were unheeded prophets in a decadent age. And they found comfort in their sanctimony.

But then Clive Thompson – a writer himself – came along with a shocking bit of news: It turns out, according to a study by Andrea Lunsford, professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, that college students’ writing isn’t getting worse as a result of all that texting, tweeting, and Facebook-updating; it’s getting better. According to Thompson, “[f]or Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.”

Just look at all the writing these “young people” are doing, Lunsford argued: more than any generation before. “That’s because so much socializing takes place online,” Thompson wrote, “and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it.” Like the fella said, you add 140 to 140 to 140 to 140 and pretty soon it starts adding up to something.

Turns out these kids weren’t putting the written word to bed with all their grammatically indifferent updates about the emotional state of their goldfish or their preference for pizza over hot dogs as it relates to an upcoming lunch break; rather, they were rivaling the ancient Greeks with their mastery of the rhetorical art of kairos – “assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across” – and creating a new golden age of literacy in the process. Sure, it seemed to many that they were squeezing all the life-blood out of the language – leaving trifles like beauty, subtlety, ambiguity, and syntax dying on the floor in the name of quasi-confessional narcissism – but actually they were mastering a new kind of prose, one based on “haiku-like concision” that was designed with its audience (of one or millions) in mind. In interviews, this new generation of Bashos declared that the best prose was the prose that had the greatest effect on the world, whether that effect meant convincing a friend to see this movie rather than that or letting the world know that, indeed, you are bored at work and, yes, you are looking forward to the weekend, and, quite right, you plan on spending the weekend  making tiramisu.

And with that all the grumbling stopped. Suddenly the Roths and the Remnicks and the Humphrys and the Sutherlands of the world were satisfied. They too picked up their iPhones and started grousing about the weather and Brad Pitt’s new hair-do to their friends all over the world. All of a sudden, they ceased to see the point in flaying themselves for months, even years, at a time, in some garret somewhere, trying to map some hidden corner of the human tragedy, when they could let the world know what they were feeling right then and there and still have time to make it home to watch the season finale of Mad Men. They came to the realization that we aren’t living in an artistic age but an age of access, where aesthetic notions like “good” and “bad” and “beautiful” and “meaningful” seem almost comically geriatric and the only thing that matters is availability. They realized, like the Catholics did thousands of years ago, that confession is good for the soul, and so they traded their lonely writer’s rooms for the warmth and comfort of the modern electronic confessional booth that is the Internet, and they were happier for it. And the written word lived to fight another day.

Right this way, ladies and gentleman. Squeeze on in, if you would, so everyone can get a look. I know it’s snug in here, but it was a different time back then, smaller people, smaller doorways. Ha ha. Right, ma’am, as I said already, no cameras please. Flash photography could do damage to the many artifacts and art pieces in the house. Good, thank you. Yes, come on in. Yes, right there by the vacuum cleaner is fine.

Hello everyone, and welcome to the home of Josh Rosenblatt, As you can see, despite the many great things that were accomplished here, the house is a bit on the small side. Surprising, I know, but it does make for a brisk tour. So if you’ll kindly give me your complete attention, we should be done in about three minutes, and then we can go get those hot dogs I promised you.

If you had visited this house in Rosenblatt’s time, you probably would have been greeted here in this modest entrance hall by Rosenblatt himself, provided he had managed to pry the great door open, which was not always the case. The door’s alignment had been compromised during the home’s 2006 foundation repair, known to scholars as “The Great Restoration.” Rosenblatt was often at the mercy of the door’s whims, and depending on certain weather conditions and his relative intoxication level the door would occasionally refuse to open. Many guests told historians stories of paying social calls to Rosenblatt only to be denied entry after he was unable to open the door. In these cases, they spoke of the wild, lavish, inhuman cursing they would hear coming from inside the house, accompanied by the sound of what they assumed was Rosenblatt’s head banging against the door. Once inside the house, visitors were often surprised by the sight of Rosenblatt wearing only underpants.

Upon entering the home, you would have been offered a seat on one of the living room’s two couches, though most likely you would have chosen to sit on the southern couch, as the couch lining the eastern wall – you can see it behind the antique microphone stand and the collection of priceless Danish-modern ash-trays – was usually covered in an assortment of unusual objects, as it is now. Rosenblatt acquired these objects during his occasional trips outside of his home and sometimes even off his street. You’ll notice the several empty cardboard boxes and what appears to be a random assortment of unmatched socks and the occasional folded magazine. Rosenblatt, as you know, was a great reader of magazines and often liked to come to this couch and think about how much he’d enjoy sitting on it and reading his magazines if it weren’t always covered in socks and old cardboard boxes.

In 2006, Rosenblatt purchased from the Swedish firm Ikea this coffee table. He would often move the table on a whim, and over the years it was used as an ironing board, a stand for an antique Tahitian box fan, a chair for prominent guests, and once, at a gathering in Autumn 2007, a make-shift stage for one of Rosenblatt’s erotic scarf-dances.

The kitchen, with its elegant laminate floor, is the room that most closely resembles what it was when Rosenblatt lived there. You’ll notice that there is still ketchup in the refrigerator and a banana peel in the garbage can. The microwave still bares the burn marks from a now-famous incident in 2008 when Rosenblatt misread the instructions on a packet of frozen french fries and nearly burned the house to the ground. After the incident, Rosenblatt never used the microwave again. In fact, he never took the plate of charred french fries out of the microwave, possibly in the hope that one day future generations of visitors, like yourselves, might learn from his mistakes. Either that or he just forgot they were in there. Scholars still debate the topic.

Like most Americans of his time, Rosenblatt ate one to two meals a day, often consisting of eggs and carved meats and cheeses placed between slices of bread. In addition to being a writer, musician, editor, basketball player, and lingerie enthusiast, Rosenblatt was also an amateur nutritionist, and he delighted in the long hours he and his friends would spend in his parlor discussing the relative nutritional merits of vegetables and objects made of chocolate. He even briefly considered writing a book on the subject, which he tentatively titled Seriously, Do  You Have Any Chocolate?. The book aroused the interest of several publishers at the time, but Rosenblatt ultimately abandoned the project in order to concentrate on watching season three of The Wire on DVD for the fourth time.

From the small window on the northern kitchen wall (which Rosenblatt cracked himself by hand in the spring of 2008) we get a gorgeous view of the homes’ quarter-acre lot, complete with Rosenblatt’s cherished brown grass and one of the finest concrete slabs in all of East Austin. Over the protests of friends and family members, Rosenblatt – an avid gardener and horticulturist – decided to keep the natural integrity of his property intact throughout his stay here, rarely mowing the yard and never planting any flora that wasn’t there when he first moved in. Shaking off criticism that he was wasting a beautiful yard that was so full of potential and could have served as a charming meeting place for guests on cool fall evenings, Rosenblatt was resolute in his belief that what grew naturally in his yard was the will of the almighty and so to alter the landscape would have been an implicit declaration that somehow God wasn’t perfect in every way. A man of faith and simple modesty, Rosenblatt never would have presumed such a thing and so left his yard the way it was, even going so far – you will see back there by the east fence – as to leave untouched stray pieces of newspaper that had flown into the yard and the crack pipe left behind by a local prostitute before the Great Gate Reconstruction of 2006.

This way, please.

Rosenblatt’s bedroom is a testament to the owner’s love of minimalism in interior design. Bare walls were a fashionable decorative motif at the beginning of the 21st century, as was a bunched-up terrycloth bathrobe splattered in blue paint and thrown in the corner. Another popular motif was the vague color line separating the blue walls from the white ceiling. At first glance this may look like little more than a shoddy paint job, but in fact this style of decoration was quite common at the time and was intended to remind female visitors of a frieze in the Temple of Fortuna Virilis in Rome – which on one occasion it actually did, causing Rosenblatt to immediately declare his love for the woman and ask for her hand in marriage. This declaration and request were rescinded approximately 43 minutes later, according to historians.

The library, at the time famous for its 23rd-edition copies of both What Makes Makes Sammy Run and The Moon and Sixpence (in whose margins can still be read some of Rosenblatt’s greatest literary observations, including “How true,” “Remember to re-read this page,” and “I wonder if they serve donuts here”), can be seen here near the head of the bed, under Rosenblatt’s collection of rare clock radios and paper scraps. In honor of his hero, Thomas Jefferson, Rosenblatt often declared his intention to donate his collection of 34 volumes to the Library of Congress, but with the recession of late 2008 nearly decimating the household income, he was forced to sell most of his most prized volumes to a local collector, who was kind enough to give him 65 dollars and a ticket to a jazz concert taking place in the store later that evening, a concert Rosenblatt forgot about upon arriving at the liquor store 13 minutes later.

Finally we come to Rosenblatt’s office, where most of his greatest pieces were written. The desk stands exactly as it did when Rosenblatt last worked there. Those are his actual cigarette butts; that is his actual stack of half-finished Daily Jumbles; those are his actual salt and pepper shakers (historians have yet to figure out how or why they ended up in his office); and that is the very window he was gazing out of when he came up with the idea for Mumbly the Lawn Chair, the cartoon creation for which he is still, to this the day, most famous.

Writing was the great joy of Rosenblatt’s life, and the meaning and delight he found there, I believe, can serve as an inspiration for us all. In 2009, in an e-mail he sent to a friend on the occasion of the three-month anniversary of Unfit Times (by which point he had written 432 pieces for the Web site), Rosenblatt wrote, “If I have to write another sentence I’m going to shoot myself in the head.”

Would that we could all be so fulfilled.

This way for the hot dogs, ladies and gentlemen.

Desk or Black Hole?

Notes From These Pajamas: The Diary of a Freelance Writer

Wednesday:

1:05pm – Wake up. Log on to the Internet. 15,000 thousand people died in an earthquake in South East Asia yesterday; 600,000 Americans lost their jobs this month; not a single new message in my in-box. The world is a cruel and unforgiving place.

2pm – Start my movie review of romantic comedy _______. Find three clever new ways to make fun of Matthew McConaughey, am reminded of a quote by Goethe about the greatness of the human spirit when in service of its soul’s ideal. Feeling inspired, I decide to make eggs instead of cereal for breakfast. Unfortunately, by the time I reach the kitchen, a great existential malaise has descended upon me, reminding me of the vast, unfeeling indifference of the universe. I settle for cereal.

3pm – Practice my jump-shot in the mirror for 15 minutes. Imaginary defenders are flummoxed. Imaginary cheerleaders, aroused. Must start practicing with a ball.

3:15pm – Continue working on movie review. Inspiration is slow in coming. Outside my window a bird sits perched on a tree limb. This tableau gets me thinking – about the boundless beauty of the universe; about the fleeting preciousness of life; about the fact that I haven’t been outside all day; about the fact that I may not have gone outside yesterday either.

3:16pm – Are there actually people who birdwatch? If so, why haven’t I met one?

3:17pm – Bird flies away. I resolve to go outside more.

4pm – Small problem. My editor just stopped by and informed me that the weekly newspaper I’m working for can no longer afford to pay me.  Just like that, I don’t feel like a writer; now I’m just a grown man wearing pajamas in the middle of the day. After she leaves, I go into the kitchen and contemplate the contents of my refrigerator vis a vis the contents of my bank account. I may have to start rationing.

4:02pm – Eat one (1) cheese sandwich and three (3) chocolate chip cookies. New rationing project off to poor start.

Idea for a book: A writer, recently fired from his job at a small weekly newspaper, decides to write a book. Gets idea. Writes book.

6:00pm – Basketball at the community center. I’m finding it hard to concentrate on the game. I can’t shake thoughts of impending poverty. I grumble at the other players on the court. I feel like Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man: I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man, I need to work on my hesitation dribble. Endless misery.

6:47pm – I can’t finish a lay-up with my left hand. Actually, the problem is that I can’t make myself jump off my right foot, not after 33 years spent jumping off my left. Have you ever tried jumping off your opposite foot? Can’t be done.

7:15pm: If that guy in the headband and prescription sports goggles scores over me again, I swear to god I’m going to strangle him. I can’t live in a world where he is permitted to beat me.

8pm – After nearly collapsing on the court more than once, I have decided that smoking unfiltered cigarettes and playing basketball in 100-degree weather do not go together. May have to quit playing basketball.

8:30pm –  “Evening is descending like a heavy mist,
Turning the bleached and lively world to cobalt and quiet.
Oh, clouded wilderness of death, into whose embrace we must all fall –  you are the very essence of mystery and languishment.
Oh, spirit of the ancients – tell me which way to turn in a universe without meaning.”
- J.R.

8:33pm – Wait. I find a Web site where I can watch every episode of Lost without commercials. Maybe there is meaning in the universe.

Possible titles for a book of poetry:
1. Evening Is Descending, Like a Heavy Mist
2. The Very Essence of Mystery and Languishment
3. “That Car is a Star,” Said the Cow to the Jar… and other poems for slow children
4. I Never Thought This Would Happen to Me: The Collected Erotic Sonnets of
Josh Rosenblatt

10pm – Perhaps a little pornography will motivate me to get back to work.

Ways I have discovered to avoid writing (abridged): Smoking cigarettes, staring out the window, staring at the wall, staring at the ceiling, making phone calls, watching episodes of TV shows  I’ve already seen, looking at myself in the mirror, making phone calls while looking at myself in the mirror, masturbation, snacking,  arguing with representatives from my bank, contemplating the concept of infinity, napping, shaving,  coming up with lists of ways to avoid writing.

11:30pm – L_____ texts, asking if I’d like to come over. I write back that I’m working and won’t be able to. She texts again to say she’s naked. I turn her down again. I must be strong. The life of a freelance writer requires immense discipline and focus.

11:31pm – Driving to L ____’s house.

11:32pm – My relationship with L _____ is a source of constant confusion. Whenever I think of her, I find myself plagued by philosophical questions. Questions like: Will she think less of me for showing up at her house in pajama pants?

12mid – Make love to L ______. Feel strangely empty afterward, like the distance between us was made even greater by this desperate, late-night grasp at intimacy. Lying in bed, I decide that lust is meaningless without love and that this should be a time in my life filled with meaning.  Resolve not to make love to L ____ anymore.

12:30am – Make love to L _____ again. This time it’s not my fault. She had put on very short shorts.

2am – A breakthrough! I determine that three episodes of The Flight of the Conchords in a row is too many. Damn me for not bringing my research journal to L_____’s house. I must try to remember until I get home tomorrow: Three, three, three, three, three …

2:15am – L_____ is asleep. I pull out my laptop and continue to work on the movie review, which is due first thing in the morning. Realizing that this will be the last review I do for weekly newspaper _____, I resolve to write a closing sentence that is both important and meaningful, even inspiring: at once a scathing critique of modern Hollywood assembly-line filmmaking,  a fond farewell to the paper that nurtured me, and a brave hello to the outside world that awaits. After 17 minutes of careful consideration I come up with “Matthew McConaughey is our generation’s Cary Grant … if Cary Grant refused to wear shirts,” and close my laptop.  There must be wine around here somewhere.

2:35am – Found it! Oh, L ______, did you really think I wouldn’t look in your sock drawer?

2:37am – There must be a straw around here somewhere.

3:15am – I read through the review again and decide to add a new opening. No one’s going to read this thing anyway, so what difference does it make if I call Kate Hudson a racist? She can’t prove she’s not a racist. Besides, I’m speaking metaphorically.

3:37am – Must be another bottle around here somewhere …

3:42am – A-ha!

4:14am – My review is finally perfect. The tone strikes just the right balance between bewilderment and cynicism, taking to task the Hollywood garbage factory and the American viewer who continues to support it. It’s simultaneously movie criticism and sociological meditation, an intellectual link between Pauline Kael and Michel Foucault. I deserve to look at Internet porn.

4:32am – Send. Why not?

4:40am – Climb into L_____’s bed. Tomorrow I will start contacting bigger and better papers and magazines about freelance work. I feel confident. I’m sure they’ve never read anybody like me before. I’m going to come out of nowhere. Surely success awaits. Onward and upward! Life begins tomorrow! Oh, my soul!

5am – Jesus Christ, I am fucked.