Possible first chapter of the novel-in-progress One Yes & Many Know.

.



I had just published a short novel about a man who washes dishes for a living who decides to kill a billionaire for political reasons when I received an email that I at first ignored. It was a strange email, seemed almost like a prank. “Dear Mr. Wren,” it began, “you don’t know me and there’s no reason you should.” This is actually where, at first, I stopped, writing it off as spam, or as a fan letter written in a particularly distasteful style. Either way it failed to maintain my interest even to the end of the first sentence and it wasn’t until several weeks later, scrolling through old emails, trying to decide which ones to delete, that I first read it through all the way to the end. “I have read your most recent novel with great interest. The main reason for my interest was personal, as is perhaps always the case with literature. One of your two main characters, since they are both unnamed I am unsure how to refer to them, bore a striking resemblance to my own history and character. I too began in relative poverty and have worked my way up to become one of the world’s richest men. I too see life through a complex web of cynicism and hope. There were moments, reading your book, when I wondered if I should in fact sue you for libel, moments too close for comfort, in which I was painfully aware of your characters shortcomings and therefore of my own. But instead of a lawsuit I have decided to come to you with a proposal. I would like you to write my biography. I suspect anyone able to write a fictional character so close to my own would also be able to capture my real self in all its complexity and nuance. From reading your work I of course realize that, politically, we are neither on the same page nor on the same side. However, as a struggling author I also assume you are very much in need of money, and that I would obviously be able to provide in substantial quantities. Let me be clear, I am not looking to pay you off, not bribing you in order for you to whitewash either my history or my character. I simply wish for you to write about me honestly, using your full abilities of both observation and research, including all of my shortcomings and flaws and bringing to bear upon them the full force of your literary craft. But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself. As a first step I simply propose that we meet in person. You can see for yourself, decide if I might be a worthy subject for your pen. There are many extremely boring books being written about CEO’s and business hero’s of our time. I very much hope you will understand my desire to have a more interesting, one might even say eccentric, book written about me. I kindly hope you will consider my proposal, at the very least the first step in which we meet in person. If your only temptation is monetary I will certainly not be offended. By this point in my life I’m used to it. Sincerely,” at this point I believe I should withhold his name, for fear of incurring an actual lawsuit at some future point in time. But I did, after reading over his email several times, trying to decide if it was for real, staring at page after page of google search results, all of which confirmed his enormous wealth, eventually reply to his email and agree to meet with him.

Our first meeting took place almost surreptitiously. It was only much later that I realized he had hired someone to watch me, learn my routines, and when he approached me in the bookstore it was the furthest thing from a coincidence, though he most likely already knew about my fondness for coincidences and that I would be taken in by the appearance of one, that I would want to believe it, believe it was a sign of some sort that I should write his biography after all. He said hello, said his name (though by this point I already recognized him), that we had already corresponded over email, that he was happy to meet me for the first time in person. What was strange was I immediately liked him. We had already arranged a meeting for later that week so our first encounter was brief. It’s only now I see how skillful this first chance encounter actually was. (What the hell would he have been doing in that low rent bookstore otherwise.) And also what it meant, how much he must have wanted me to do as he wished in order to go to all that effort. But even as I’m writing this I see it is incorrect. It had so little to do with me. He is simply a man who puts his mind to something and then does everything possible to get his way. In this way we are almost opposite, since so many of my desires and wishes over the years have almost completely eluded me.

Then there was our second meeting, a somewhat more substantial encounter. Very quickly I understood I was speaking to someone with certain skills, someone considerably more persuasive than I would ever be. He was talking, telling me about his life, and as he did so I could feel myself being persuaded that I should take him up on his offer, that working with or for him would make my life considerably more compelling. But what seemed strange to me in retrospect was, to the best of my recollection, I don’t believe he mentioned his offer once, or even alluded to it. (Except maybe at the very end in the form of a joke.) How did he do it, why was I persuaded? As I examined this question in my mind, turned it over and around, in fact spending the next several days wondering, I came to the conclusion that the right solution must be the most obvious one. It had to do with money. I thought, if you were to show me a nice looking watch, and give it to me, I would say thank you and wear it and be pleased with the situation. But if you were to show me a nice watch, tell me it was worth one million dollars, and then give it to me, against my better judgment, perhaps even against my most deeply held convictions, I would be overwhelmed. The man who wanted me to write his biography was just such a watch. He made a good impression, but the extra kick I got from him had almost nothing to do with whatever he may have done or said. The more I wondered about it the more I felt it came from somewhere else, from my own insecurities and doubts around the topic of money. From feeling that money is meant for other people, I want enough to get by but otherwise don’t really care for such things, and yet when I tell myself this supposed fact (about myself) in a more conscious way, the only place it leads me is to doubting whether or not it is actually true. I certainly have my own kind of ambition: ambition to write great literature and be recognized for it. How can I keep telling myself this ambition is so different from the ambition to accrue wealth? How is it so different from the man I met who so effortlessly persuaded me to write about his life? I thought the persuasion was little more than my unacknowledged desire to be close to money, to see a kind of wealth that honestly I can barely imagine – or, more accurately, my imagination runs wild, but I have no idea what it would be like in reality – and to witness it up close.

The end of this second meeting was particularly intriguing. Quite suddenly he changed his tone, in a sense changed his approach. He told me that when you have a lot of money you start to attract a different kind of person: brownnosers and sycophants, and he always worked hard to ensure there were enough people around him who knew how to say no, who knew how to stand up to him, to tell him when he was going off the rails and not just always what they thought he wanted to hear. He was sure I was this kind of person: stubborn, my own man, willing to speak ‘truth to power’ as an activist protesting against his corporation once described the true value of activism to him, and as he told me this, for the first time in our meeting, I doubted him, wondered if he was now simply telling me what he thought I wanted to hear. Sitting there across from him, what I actually felt is that I was just another potential sycophant in a coterie of the same. I knew that in my life, in so many positive but also self-destructive ways, I could certainly be stubborn, but I really wasn’t sure if standing up to the person who was paying my rent (and perhaps also my retirement fund) was one of those ways. At the same time, I told myself, if for whatever reason at any point the situation became intolerable, I could simply walk away. I would have the financial courage to walk away. Then he told a joke that seemed strange to me at the time, that I didn’t fully get, in fact I wasn’t even sure it was a joke. He said: “You and I are completely different people. We have completely different lives, different politics. But I always negotiate on the basis that everyone has something in common. And I’m certain we have a lot. That as you begin to work on the book you’ll really start to see it. And one thing I think maybe we have in common is this, you and I both: when we’re staring into the eyes of a pig, we really know how to grab it by the ears, we really know how to get our knee right in there, right between the eyes. You in your writing. And for me, of course, its just business.” Then he laughed, a genuine, hearty laugh, it was one of the few times I heard anything so joyful come out of his mouth, and, in one of the few moments in this story I’m genuinely ashamed of, I laughed along with him. I laughed as if he had just said the funniest thing in the world.

It will be no secret to anyone who knows me that my life is, in large part, a struggle with depression. However, it is often difficult for me to describe or explain the exact nature of my depression, what it is like for me. And what happened next was – instead of tearing into the large package of research material that appeared on my doorstep the next week, instead of reading the thirty-seven page contract that also arrived a few days later, instead of thinking about him or reconsidering whether or not I should actually write his biography – I instead fell into a deep depression and did absolutely nothing for several months. For this entire period the thick package remained unopened, propped up against the wall next to my front door. The contract remained unread.

Of course, I did not literally do nothing during this period. I was reading a great deal and continuing to half-heartedly work on the unfinished novel I had been chipping away at for several years. This novel was going to be different from any of my previous books. It was going to be more personal, closer to non-fiction, closer to my real daily life and thoughts. I wanted to write a book that went more in this direction, felt it was part of my natural progression and also part of the general zeitgeist, but at the same time within me there seemed to be an incredible resistance towards the undertaking. It was as if I wanted to write about my life without actually giving anything away. For example, I didn’t want to write about my romantic life, and when I did allude to it in certain passages, I would just as quickly edit those allusions away. Mostly what remained were my thoughts on philosophy, literature, activism and politics, and yet I refused to see it as a book length essay or collection of aphorisms, continued to think of it as a kind of autobiographical novel, and did everything in my power to continuously push the manuscript in this, perhaps unrealistic, direction. After the relative success of my last book, the book that had gotten me into this biography mess in the first place, I feared this new book of philosophical and political reflections would be seen by many as a disappointment. It had no characters (only me), no narrative energy or forward momentum. I realized I was up to my old tricks. My books had always alternated: a more accessible work followed by a more difficult or experimental one. I am never sure if this is a form of career self-sabotage or a way of keeping my artistic edge. But I know I can’t seem to help myself. I once thought of writing three unpublished books in a row: an accessible one, a more difficult one, and then another accessible one. This would make it possible for me to publish the two more accessible books back to back, allowing the second more accessible book to build on the first one’s success. But such nefarious long-term plans also seem beyond me. As soon as I finish an acceptable draft of a book I immediately want to get it off my desk, out into the world, out of my life, to be free of it. Keeping two unpublished books in a desk drawer while I attempted to complete a third would have required an act of pure will I was simply incapable of. It occurred to me that at the same time I was attempting to write a book about my own life, I was also going to begin writing a book about someone else’s. I wondered how these two books would bleed into each other, contaminate one another, how each book might make writing the other one easier or more difficult.

I said I did nothing during these three months, and felt I was doing nothing because the depression had once again overwhelmed me, but if I think back upon it there was actually so much that happened. One thing that happened is more and more unanswered messages accumulated, and were deleted, on my voicemail. These messages were from the potential publisher of the biography and became increasingly aggressive, even hostile, over the course of the three months. At first they were messages simply inquiring whether or not I had received the contract and whether the terms were acceptable to me. There were also emails. But as the months progressed the messages and emails wanted to know why they had not heard back from me, if I was planning to accept their extremely generous financial offer or if I was planning to continue ignoring them, if I wanted them to instead find another writer to complete this project or if, instead, it was my desire that this important book would not be published at all. I assumed, in the depth of my depression, that I would simply lose the gig, but as the messages grew angrier began to realize something else might be going on. That perhaps the subject of the biography had even insisted that the writer had to be me, and if this was the case it might be possible for me to demand even more money. Or was I only flattering myself.

During this time there were also difficulties in my romantic life that I was not able to write about in my non-fiction novel-in-progress and therefore will also not attempt to write about here.

One aspect of my ongoing depression is that it comes and goes, even though I don’t quite experience it in this manner. What I experience is that I am always depressed. It is only in retrospect that I am able to see that during certain periods I am slightly more functional and during others I am considerably less. Often, with these periods of more severe depression, there is something, some event, that snaps me out of it, and in this case it was a visit from my potential biography subject. I was sitting at the exact same café I go to each morning, a novel in my hands and a notebook open in front of me (years ago I had started writing longhand because spending too much time on the computer was hurting my back.) I was reading Volume One of The Aesthetics of Resistance by the German author Peter Weiss. There was a rap at the window and I looked over. I always prefer to sit as close to the window as possible, as if literally enacting my desire to be closer to the outside world. It was him, smiling at me like I was his favorite person in the world. He came and sat across from me. I was expecting him to be angry, but he didn’t seem even remotely upset.

“I was expecting you to say yes right away, which you haven’t,” he began, “but of course you also haven’t said no. You haven’t said anything. I’ve spent some time wondering how to interpret this rather ambiguous situation but haven’t come to any real conclusions. So I thought the best thing to do would be to ask.”

He was asking me a question, but I didn’t reply. And, in fact, I had no idea how to reply. In that moment it felt to me a bit like I was meeting the devil and he was asking me whether or not I was willing to sell my soul. I realized I hadn’t told anyone else about his offer, which suggested I felt shame, that I was ashamed to even be so fully considering it. Because I was definitely considering it, at the back of my mind where often it felt like I thought about almost nothing else. I considered all of this while an awkward silence settled deeply into the space between us.

“I don’t know,” I said, “your offer seems to have short circuited some part of my life. And left me paralyzed. I’m not sure I can write about you. I want the money but I’m not sure I can write about you. I just don’t know what it would mean.”

“That is a very honest answer,” he said, “that’s why I’m asking you. Because I believe you’d give me more honesty than some other writer. Of course I might be wrong about that. I don’t actually know you. Here’s what I propose. Why don’t you shadow me for a week. Get a sense of what my life is like. Find out whether or not a week in my life makes you feel like writing. We’ll of course pay you for the week. It could be a first step. Then at least you’d be basing your decision on something rather than nothing.” A week felt like a reasonable offer, and I definitely needed the money.

What was most unnerving about the week is that everywhere we went he introduced me as his biographer. And I didn’t correct him. In a way, he was only explaining why I was there. What other reason did I have to be there if I wasn’t going to write his biography? And because I was his “biographer” everyone we met treated me almost as if I was someone important. I carried a notebook and took as many notes as possible across the course of every day, not really because I wanted to get anything down, but because I wanted everyone to see I was taking notes. Sometimes I was tempted to write things like “this is so stupid” or “these people are all assholes” but I refrained, not because I didn’t agree with such sentiments, but because I was afraid of someone reading over my shoulder and catching me in the act. In actual fact, a week of his life didn’t provide so much to report. A lot of long tedious meetings, during which everyone went back and forth between normal speech and some sort of awkward business jargon I often didn’t fully understand. Dictating emails to a series of secretaries who could have easily written the emails themselves without the benefit of his tedious assistance. Some very expensive dinners during which everyone laughed at his jokes and were careful he always had more opportunities to hold the floor than anyone else at the table. A week of his life was like a string of living cliches, all of which he apparently enjoyed and enjoyed having me witness.

On the Thursday he asked me if I’d like to join him for a drink after work and I assumed this would be the meeting during which I had to give an answer. Was I going to write the book or not? But it wasn’t that kind of meeting at all. Instead, it was the meeting in which he told me he knew I was depressed, and he could relate, since he was also often sad. It was the meeting where he confessed that him and I weren’t so different after all. But I didn’t think depression was the thing that made us different. The thing that made us different was he was a capitalist and I was anti-capitalist. That I was completely against everything he stood for. That he was my enemy and, instead of sitting here drinking this very expensive scotch, listening to him talk about how sad he is while considering just how badly I need the money, and if I needed it enough to write this very questionable book he was proposing, I should instead write another book loudly calling for his death and the deaths of every one of his kind (since I’d already written at least one.) I realized he was still talking and I was barely even listening to him. Worried that I might miss something important, I made an effort to tune back in. But it was nothing so important, he was just explaining how he’d started poor, worked his way up from the bottom to where he was today. I of course didn’t believe him. If I were to write his biography maybe its main purpose should be to completely demolish this self-aggrandizing myth. To find the smoking gun, the irrefutable proof that he was born with far more privileges than he admits. Wasn’t meeting someone, gaining insights into their daily life, walking a mile in their shoes so to speak, supposed to grant you a little bit more empathy for them? Yet it was true I didn’t really dislike him personally. Spending time with him was more or less okay, if a little bit boring.

As we said our goodbyes, I mentioned I was going to rush to catch the last subway, and he insisted that his driver was already here, they’d drop me off, it wasn’t exactly on their way but they’d make the necessary detour. In the car, he finally asked me if I was going to do it. He couldn’t wait forever. It was a simple question requiring a simple yes or no answer. I hesitated, said I still have one more day of shadowing him and I’d decide by the end of the workday tomorrow. “You’re quite a strange person,” he said, “I knew that already when I read your book. I guess I want people to read about me through the lens of that strangeness. Which must mean I’m kind of a strange person as well. Don’t you think?”

I didn’t find him particularly strange, he was almost too normal for words. I guess this was yet another argument meant to persuade me to take the gig, and he really had no idea what kind of arguments might actually persuade me. But, then again, I didn’t really know either.

Our last day together began normally enough with a small, casual breakfast meeting with a handful of his top executives. It was actually the most relaxed I’d seen him, though later he told me it might have only seemed that way because he was a little hung over from the drinks we’d had the previous night. I hadn’t even noticed he was particularly drunk. Everyone around the table gave a short report on how things were going in their departments, but the reports seemed almost beside the point. It occurred to me for the first time that this entire week might have been a PR exercise staged for my benefit. Perhaps that’s why basically nothing had happened. I was really trying to pay attention, listen to what each executive was saying, but there didn’t seem to be any real content to it. All just variations on the same theme and the theme was: everything’s just going so damn well, we all just keep on making so much money. I wondered if anyone would have said anything differently if I weren’t here. If everyone around the table was simply auditioning for their small cameos in the biography I was allegedly going to write. And I also wondered if there was any way I could write about a scene like the one I was currently witnessing and make it seem interesting to a reader. In general, I’ve found the reader is only as interested as I am. And I was so uninterested I could barely stay awake. Then something almost interesting did occur. There had been a large oil spill a few years back and the negligence lawsuit against the company was about to go to trial. They of course wanted to settle out of court, but the plaintiffs wanted a full trial with all the damning evidence as fully on display as possible. The topic wasn’t so much whether they’d win or lose the lawsuit, or how much they’d have to pay if they did lose, but rather how much bad press they’d have to endure and what that might feel like. “It was the second biggest oil spill in recorded history, one of the executives said, and then everyone suddenly looked at me, to see if I was writing this down. I did not write it down, and satisfied that I wasn’t there only to rat them out, someone quickly changed the subject. But then, after the meeting, as we were walking down a long hallway back to his office, my potential biography subject said: “It's all right if you write about the oil spill. It’s a matter of public record anyways, so it would be conspicuous if you avoided the topic. And, also, I don’t want the book to be whitewashed, I definitely don’t want something over-sanitized, if I did I wouldn’t have asked you in the first place. You can’t make as much money as I’ve made without getting your hands dirty from time to time. And sometimes things do go wrong, that’s just a fact of life. But I believe, if you really get to know me, you’ll see I always work in ways that minimize the damage.” He clearly had a fantasy that I would write a biography in which he still came off looking relatively good. And, thinking about all of this later, I could begin to understand why. Because the fictional billionaire in the novel I wrote, the novel he read, was humanized. He was both an evil capitalist and an interesting, critical human being, with an almost Marxist perspective on his own capitalist role, which is another way of saying he was fictional. But I wasn’t going to take this billionaire asshole walking alongside me in the hallway of a building he basically owns and make him seem like a nice guy. There wasn’t enough money in the world to squeeze that out of me. Or was there?

Next, he said because this was my last day of shadowing him, we’d make an unexpected visit to one of their factories. We got in a car and the driver pulled away. Several times along the way my potential biography subject emphasized that they weren’t expecting us. I would get to see things as they were, not some sanitized play acting performed for my benefit. Each time he said this I wondered if they were actually expecting us and were now simply preparing to pretend like they weren’t. It was quite a long drive, out past the suburbs then through an industrial area that took us far past what I normally thought of as the outer boundaries of the city. Eventually our car pulled up in front of a building that, from the outside, looked exactly like my clichéd idea of what a factory might look like. When we walked in the front door it really did seem like they weren’t expecting us, and my first thought was that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. I had the strange feeling that most of the people here had never seen the big boss in person, and it was almost like a mean practical joke to spring himself on them like that. Everyone he spoke with interacted with him in a tone that suggested they might be fired at any moment. That he had shown up unexpectedly in order to fire everyone in some sort of mass layoff. I thought to myself that if he suddenly fired everyone it would make a really good scene in his biography, genuinely dramatic. Then I hated myself for having such an evil thought. People appeared to be hurrying in every direction to alert the others about our unexpected visit. It all gave me a bad feeling, as if we were cats and this was the kerfuffle of mice with nowhere to flee. My potential biography subject wanted to be given the grand tour immediately, but they insisted on a bit of time to prepare, so we were taken to a corner office, I assume what they felt to be the nicest office in the building, where I was introduced to a woman in business attire, who was also the first black person I’d been introduced to since the week began. I believe she was introduced as the foreman, but at the time I didn’t know enough about such titles, so I’m not entirely sure. There were a few rounds of small talk, which I made no mental note of, and then I was taken off guard when the foreman said: “After we unionize there will be some repercussions when you drop by unannounced like this.”

Without missing a beat my potential biography subject said: “I believe pushing through your union is not going to be as easy as you think.”

Just as quickly, the foreman replied: “I believe that stopping us isn’t going to be as easy as you think.”

The tone of this exchange is difficult for me to describe: cordial, almost sportsmanlike. It felt like they’d sparred like this before. And, at that moment, I wanted nothing more than for their union bid to be successful. That would really give me something to write about.

Someone knocks at the door to say that they’re ready for us, and we’re taken down a back staircase onto the factory floor. Everyone is standing by their machine, but all the machines are off, creating a kind of eerie silence, we’re told because it would be impossible to hear the explanations over the din of the machines. The explanations are very much by the book, as if we were a visiting group of schoolchildren being given the standard tour, this machine does one thing while another machine does another, everything must be done with absolute precision for the end product to be as reliable as necessary. I realize that no one explains just exactly what it is they make here, I guess because it is assumed that we all already know. But I don’t know, and the hyper-specific explanations provided by the tour guide don’t bring me any closer to that key piece of information. The workers, standing beside their machines, don’t make eye contact. I have to admit, the machines do appear to be state of the art, one step away from fully automated, so soon the workers might be superfluous as well. Our tour ends at a maquette of an offshore oil rig, and it takes me a long moment to realize that some prankster has added a giant oil spill to the diorama. They’d done a good job. The oil looked menacing and viscous, making the entire diorama look like a world gone wrong. Everyone else seemed to be noticing this at about the same rate.

When we got back outside, someone had spraypainted a message on the car. It read: “What will you tell your grandkids when they ask you: grandpa, why did you fuck up the planet?” The graffiti covered the hood and front windshield, making it impossible to drive away. We had to wait for another car. The driver apologized several times. He’d only left for a few minutes and when he returned it looked like this. There was some talk of calling the police, but my potential biography subject decided not to bother. He didn’t want to draw further attention to the situation, didn’t want even more photos of the graffiti going out onto the internet. Activists had been tailing him for a while now, so such incidents seemed like par for the course.

On the drive back he gave a speech that felt like he’d been rehearsing it in his head for a long time: “We’re not only an oil company. That’s a misunderstanding about who we are and what we do. We’re actually at the forefront of renewables. Our wind and solar divisions are the fastest growing aspects of our organization. When the time comes we’ll be part of the first big wave to phase out oil and implement the growing alternatives.”

I interrupted: “I have a feeling that might make people even more angry. You reap all the rewards of destroying the planet and then also want to reap the rewards for mitigating that destruction. As well, if you’re interested in reading the room, most people I know believe that by the time people like you decide ‘the time has come’ it will already be far too late.”

He looked at me for a long, dark moment. It was the first time I had openly disagreed with him since we’d first met. I must have been emboldened by the oil spill diorama and by the graffiti. I wondered if he was going to lash out at me, and there is a moment in which it seems he might, but he quickly calms himself down and, it seems to me, starts to reflect on what he should say next. He eventually decides on this: “I must be surrounded by too many yes men. Almost no one talks to me like that anymore. It doesn’t feel good, but it does feel interesting. Nonetheless, it makes me realize that maybe you really are the wrong person to write my biography. I need to be honest with myself. I don’t think I could handle reading that level of criticism about myself in a book, out there for all the world to see. It was an intriguing idea, but I see now that it’s the wrong way to go. Thank you for spending this week with me. It was instructive.”

I realized I had just lost the gig. I didn’t even know if I wanted it and yet, in that moment, losing it still stung. Actually, I think the only part that bothered me was the prospect of losing a big, fat paycheck. Some part of me had already started spending the money in my head. The potential biography subject, for this biography that was now never meant to be, looked out the window. Our car wasn’t moving at all. We were stuck in a deadlock of traffic. He asked the driver how far we were from the head office and it was only a fifteen minute walk. He took out his phone and called his security retinue, asked them to walk over and then walk us there. He said, almost to himself: “Maybe a short walk would do me good.” It was a beautiful day outside. Before now I hadn’t really noticed that he didn’t go anywhere without some sort of security. We waited in silence. There was some part of my brain that thought, if I played my cards right, there might be some way for me to get the gig back, and another part that thought that was the worst idea I’d ever had in my life. We were almost complete strangers, but in that moment we’d both managed to hurt the other one, though probably not so deeply. After fifteen minutes there was a tap on the window and we both got out of the car. There must have been an accident up ahead, because in those fifteen minutes traffic had barely moved at all. As we walked, it was educational for me to experience how the security agents kept their distance, giving us enough space to feel like normal civilians, yet remaining close enough to rapidly intervene in anything should happen. There weren’t so many people on the sidewalk, yet just enough for the security agents to at least partly blend into the crowd. We mostly walked in silence, though from time to time he’d make some polite, innocuous comment to which I didn’t reply. Now that I no longer felt this might be my big payday I no longer had the energy to be polite, at least not to this figure who represented everything I hated in the world.

What happened next happened so fast I’m not even sure I’m recounting the events in the correct order. A man in a mask stepped out of a corridor, walked up to the billionaire and shot him in the face. It happened so quickly I didn’t see if he was already holding the gun or if he pulled it out at the last minute. As he did so, the four security guards all ran toward us. The assassin was already fleeing, but one of the agents grabbed him and was about to pin him to the ground when another man, who appeared to be a random bystander, grabbed the agent and managed to pull him away just long enough for the assassin to get away. In all the chaos I didn’t see where he went and apparently, neither did any of the other three security guards. Already I heard police sirens, though perhaps that happened later. The billionaire was dead on the ground beside me. I stood there unsure what to do. I was taken to the police station for questioning, my phone and computer were confiscated, but I was released around seven a.m. the next morning with a warning not to leave town. I returned to my apartment still very much in shock. I had written a book about a person who wants to kill a billionaire, and then I had walked alongside a billionaire at the very moment he was killed. It was a coincidence that completely boggled the mind. However, in the novel I had written, the billionaire was not shot. He was strangled with a piano wire. And he survived.

The next day there was a picture on the front page of every newspaper. That picture has changed my life more than any other thing that has ever happened to me. Some very quick-on-the-draw bystander had managed to pull out their phone and snap a picture at the exact moment the billionaire was shot. The picture shows a masked man firing the gun and the billionaires head shattering, with me standing stock still beside him. However, it is really only the caption underneath the picture that triggered the coming, overwhelming changes in my life. Because the caption described me as ‘his biographer.” And there could be no book more in demand at that moment than a biography of that murdered man.

The days that followed were a blur of emails, phone calls and meetings. Every publisher and every agent was interested in a firsthand biography of this man whose assassination perhaps signaled the first volley in the coming revolution (though probably not.) The search for his assassin was of course equally voracious. A photo was circulating of the most likely suspect and the internet was utterly obsessed with it. The internet was considerably less obsessed with me, frequently wondering to what extent I was a traitor to the cause. To what extent I had betrayed all the values I had been associated with leading up to that strange reversal which had rapidly become my sole claim to fame. I did no issue a statement of any kind, wondering over and over again what I should do. Should I cash in and write some sort of biography? I would likely never have such an opportunity again. If I wrote it in a way that was effectively critical of capitalism and the oil industry, maybe it could be a kind of trojan horse, smuggling my ideas into the mainstream where they would be seen by far more people than had read any of my previous books. Or would they? Maybe people would see through this ruse and respond by not buying my book in the first place.


*


[This is an expanded version of my long ago attempt to write a sequel to Rich and Poor. A sequel that I previously left unfinished. However, I am now considering that I might some day finish it under the new title: One Yes & Many Know.]



.

True Lovers are as Rare as True Rebels

.



My interview with Masha Tupitsyn for The Believer Logger: True Lovers are as Rare as True Rebels



.

Chicoutimi Writing Exercise

.



What I understand about things I think I already know in a language I don't understand. What I don't understand because I don't understand French. What I don't understand simply because I don't understand.


.


I've always thought the most important part of teaching is to admit you don't know. I don't know why I think this or in what sense it could be true.


.


I feel the most important task for politics today is to re-think our sense and experience of time.



.

Walter Benjamin Quote

.



Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely, the human race – to activate the emergency brake.

- Walter Benjamin



.

Possible List of New Projects in Alphabetical Order

.



Adventures Can Be Found Anywhere

Manifesto for Collective Childrearing

Melancholy is the Depression that Says Yes to Life

Music and Theatre Must Learn to Disassociate

No Double Life for the Wicked

Ouvroir d’optimisme critique

Past, Present, Future, Etc.

Resistance as Paradox

Speaking These Lines for the First Time…

You Can’t Judge…



.

In Different Situations Different Behavior Will Produce Different Results: A Chapbook

.



“In Different Situations Different Behavior Will Produce Different Results: A Chapbook” (Paper Pusher), featuring an interview with me and an interview with Chris Kraus, is one of BLOUIN ARTINFO's Top Six Art Books for Fall. (Special thanks go out to interviewer Yaniya Lee and publisher Danielle St-Amour.)



.

Ten Short Quotes

.



For – back to Schlegel – the nature of the world only reveals itself to us in fragments. The fragment is the only way to refer to the lost totality of the world without offering some kind of unified whole as a consolation; that is, without lying.
- Adam Jasper


In the vision I had two years ago I came to the end of myself and found other people standing there- and knew that the present was a gift of time in which to sing a true history of equal historical selves.
– Peter Dimcock


Amongst the many definitions, there is one that may be generally agreed upon: modernity is the epoch in which simply being modern became a decisive value in itself.
- Gianni Vattimo


The state is to its map as its citizens are to their passports. No map = no existence; that is the hard verdict modernity hands down to upstart states no less than to travelers.
- Michael Taussig


The deplorable thing is that the people who were tortured yesterday, torture today.
- B. Traven, The Death Ship


Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often what we need?
– Ludwig Wittgenstein


If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.
- Pier Paolo Pasolini


Revolutionary constituencies always involve a tacit alliance between the least alienated and the most oppressed.
- David Graeber


Reality suffers from a species of inherent fragility, such that the reality of reality must incessantly be reinforced in order to endure.
- Luc Boltanski


If all insects on Earth disappeared, within 50 years all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the Earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.
- Jonas Salk, Biologist



.

Finalist

.



My yet-to-be-published novel Polyamorous Love Song was a finalist for the inaugural Fence Modern Prize in Prose.



.

A short history of anti-theatre, non-music, counter-philosophy, semi-specific art and unpolitics.

.



The things I like are, in general, in opposition to things most generally accepted. There are of course exceptions. No one wants to be contrary simply for the sake of being contrary and neither do I. Without an enemy, without something to resist against, most things fall flat. Co-operation and symbiotic relations are also necessary. There are no shortage of evils in the world that must be resisted, no shortage of mediocrity in art that must be pushed against or undermined. It is not the mediocrity of a single work of art or artist that must be resisted, but the mediocrity of art itself. And it is in fact these false dichotomies that must be undermined since, to some extent, all dichotomies are false. The energy gained from such frustrations goes to waste if it is not put to use, and so much of what exists in the world, and is most appreciated, is a waste of its own fragile potential. There is what is, and what could be, and what could be most often contains the greater energy. We must struggle with what is, in the here and now, without regret, seizing every last opportunity. How are we to understand criteria when the search is for something new and there is nothing new? How are we to understand selection? Does it entail risk to fight the status quo or is it more of a risk to fight within and against ourselves? The world is wrong in so many ways and each of us is also wrong, but everything that exists contains at least a modicum of the future. It is within the tension of this future, in its likely partial failure, that each history begins. This entails saying what you mean as precisely as possible, but not letting any preconceived meaning overwhelm you. Going against things also entails going along with some specific idea of the against. We must avoid parody, avoid satire, embrace genuine humor, find the joy within our lived refusal. There are several mysteries here that will not be explained. Several operations. If we fall behind at least we are still in movement. If we are impatient at least the situation surrounds us. Everything has not yet been done.



.

Listening

.



Yesterday, for ten dollars / I bought a used hip hop CD by Talib Kweli / the 2013 (this year) release Prisoner of Conscious / knowing I wouldn’t like it / but ten years ago, fifteen years ago / he made so many tracks that I loved / and I saw it for ten dollars and didn’t want to write him off / wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt / listen anyway / see if I could sense where he was at now / what he was trying to do / if he had lost the plot or was only missing the mark / and I listened all the way through five times in a row / but had little idea what he was trying to do / his flow frustrated, always rapid yet somehow aimless / keeping it positive yet unconvincing / strange choices that were often intriguing but not more / a few of the beats stand out and those are the best tracks / I feel I should keep listening / trying not to compare it with tracks from the past / to be with it now / keep listening / in the hope that when I lost the plot / someone out there might still buy my book (a used, cheap review copy) / might spend some time with it / try to understand where things went wrong / there’s something about knowing a good beat / something about being young / in youth the tension is sharper / Talib Kweli sounds adult, in a way / less tension / and as I’m listening through the clenched jaw of my mild disappointment / I have the feeling that perhaps he sounds relaxed / that he’s happier in life / he’s doing all right / and wonder what romantic, misguided idea of art makes me want to state / or to believe / that the record suffers because of it / and still the more I listen / the more it grows on me / the more I like it / something about repetition.



.

John Dewey Quote

.



Prejudice, the pressure of immediate circumstance, self-interest and class interest, traditional customs, institutions of accidental historic origin are not lacking and they tend to take the place of intelligence.

- John Dewey, Quest for Certainty



.

Opening from Eruditio ex Memoria by Bernadette Mayer

.



I saw a doctor, a doctor. It was Antonin Artaud. He was elected to the Royal Academy, no, that was Chekhov. This is the Russian Theater, it’s 1962 or so, the moralist of the venial sin is here, resigning over Gorky. Doctor, a doctor. “The Seagull” defends Zola and Dreyfus, it’s the Moscow Art Theater. Chekhov is Godard. This is what I learned in school. This is what I thought: Artaud, Antonin. Hemispheres become loose in the country, there are new forms. Stanislovsky, etc. Add up a column of numbers, it comes to William Carlos Williams to me. What are the spiritual heights, she said. Just as Uncle Vanya looks like a dial, Paris comes and goes, prissy, lightfooted and beautiful-looking, but, by and large, the outside forces come to the surface. 13y the same token, we seem fully uneven, without the bones and stays. The homecoming; she opened and closed her conversation with adequacy. There’s a picture of a man with a spring for a body. There’s a picture of a woman dancing with a leaf for a hand, her head on a string, hanging forward. It’s Madam Shaw. Relevant is revelant, irrational knot, unsocial socialist, unpleasant and pleasant Madam Shaw. Oh Shaw, polyg-mammalian, the candidate, there’s a heart and a louse on the skunk.

- Bernadette Mayer, Eruditio ex Memoria



.

Two Heather Palmer/Jacob Wren links

.



Heather Palmer interviews me for Poetry Teachers NYC.


Heather Palmer reflects on the interview at her blog.



.

Emily Gilbert on fictitious capital

.



The “fictitious capital” that worried Marx over 130 years ago has exploded, especially over the last 40 years. In 1971, Nixon suspended the convertability of dollars into gold and brought about the end of the Bretton Woods agreement. The connection between currency and metal reserves was broken. In the words of Philip Coggan, “From that point on, the final link with gold was removed and the ability of governments to run deficits, on both trade and budget accounts, was vastly increased. Money and debt exploded.” Yet the problem was not so much that money was no longer rooted in gold or silver. Although their value appears to be “natural” or intrinsic, the value of metals is just as much a social construct as paper. What the metallic anchor had ensured, however, was that there was a built-in limit to the system, determined by the natural scarcity of gold.

- Emily Gilbert, Currency in Crisis



.

The cool cat was now rolling with the fat cats... : Jay-Z, Picasso Baby, Frank Sinatra and knowing how to quit while you're ahead

.



I've spent the past day thinking about Picasso Baby-gate. I read this beautiful, scathing piece by Sasha Frere-Jones and it was all true. This line was particularly striking: "Those civilians, in another country [victims of U.S. drone attacks], see America the way Trayvon Martin saw George Zimmerman—a force they couldn’t stop physically creating a story they couldn’t fight historically."

The overwhelming anger I feel at the Zimmerman verdict, and towards American foreign policy (now and for the past sixty years), is in violent need of some popular culture expression. This protest song by PJ Harvey about Guantanamo is clearly what we need more of, is what I wish I heard every time I turned on the radio. ("With metal tubes we are force fed / I honestly wish I was dead.") For that matter I would love to turn on the radio and hear Misogyny Drop Dead by planningtorock. Protest is out there, yet somehow endlessly marginalized, hidden away unless you're already looking for it. The closer you get to mainstream, the less really effective protest-rhetoric makes it through.

However, it seems to me, that Jay-Z has never felt particularly at home talking politics. (And not only because of his ongoing desire to become the mainstream.) He spits the occasional political line ("Blame Reagan for makin' me into a monster / Blame Oliver North and Iran-Contra"), but quickly moves onto territory he's more comfortable with (boasting, running his 'army', money, sex, more boasting, and, of course, the further you go back in time, drugs, crime and the streets.)

Daniel Nester had a good line on Facebook: "Everything is interesting about Jay Z except Jay Z."

And I came up with this rather mild quip: "Jay-Z should cover that Modern Lovers song, the one with the chorus Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole."

Then, today, I remembered a Frank Sinatra obituary I read a long time ago in, I think, Rolling Stone magazine (or maybe it was Spin.) In particular, I remembered (or perhaps misremembered) one line, the author explaining why he felt Sinatra had betrayed him, in fact betrayed all of his fans, (I feel it also had something to do with Sinatra's Vegas years): "the cool cat was now rolling with the fat cats." (I'm constantly amazed at these short phrases still in my mind fifteen years later. Though I tried to find it on line, and couldn't, so maybe I simply made it up.)

I wondered if this Jay-Z / Sinatra comparison might lead somewhere. They were both pure entertainers, rags-to-riches aura, their own trademark style, different versions of mafia-chic, false retirement announcements, generally considered to be 'the greatest' in their field. They both started cool and eventually got lame in ways that might have something to do with having lots and lots of money. (That quote by Sinatra where he says what he wants is 'fuck-you money'.) I'm not sure. There are certainly people out there who know so much more about both of them than I ever will.

The Beatles broke up and The Rolling Stones kept going. So The Beatles remain legendary while the Stones most often come across as an embarrassing shadow of their former selves. Tupac and Biggie are dead, while Jay-Z just keeps rolling. (Rock 'n' Roll eventually became embarrassing and perhaps now it's Hip Hop's turn.) Is ongoing reputation simply a question of knowing how to quit while you're ahead?

I actually don't find the Picasso Baby art world cluster fuck all that embarrassing. Jay-Z handles himself well. He looks like he's having fun. But if I compare it to any of his best tracks, I suddenly feel something has gone horribly awry. Then again, I came to Jay-Z really late. The first track that got me was The Takeover ("A wise man told me don't argue with fools / Cause people from a distance can't tell who is who"). I think my favourite track might be the much-too-late-period Trouble ("I try to pretend that I'm different but in the end we're all the same".)

"I try to pretend that I'm different but in the end we're all the same..." It's clear that Jay-Z thinks he can escape his fate, that the same boasts he once made from the streets will remain convincing now that he's a multimillionaire with friends in the White House. And of course they're not. While once they seemed angry, hungry, aspirational, now they feel aimlessly arrogant in an unnecessary, deluded way. Why continue to boast when you already have everything? Why rub our faces in it? I suppose that's what makes it car-crash-fascinating, why I've been thinking about it all day. Most of us will never be as successful as Jay-Z, and therefore have no idea how we would deal with such fame (artistically or otherwise), and clearly he doesn't know either.



.

Mary Zournazi and Brian Massumi on hope and affect

.



Mary Zournazi: The idea of hope in the present is vital. Otherwise we endlessly look to the future or toward some utopian dream of a better society or life, which can only leave us disappointed, and if we see pessimism as the natural flow from this, we can only be paralysed as you suggest.

Brian Massumi: Yes, because in every situation there are any number of levels of organisation and tendencies in play, in cooperation with each other or at cross-purposes. The way all the elements interrelate is so complex that it isn’t necessarily comprehensible in one go. There’s always a sort of vagueness surrounding the situation, an uncertainty about where you might be able to go and what you might be able to do once you exit that particular context. This uncertainty can actually be empowering - once you realise that it gives you a margin of manoeuvrability and you focus on that, rather than on projecting success or failure. It gives you the feeling that there is always an opening to experiment, to try and see. This brings a sense of potential to the situation. The present’s ‘boundary condition’, to borrow a phrase from science, is never a closed door. It is an open threshold - a threshold of potential. You are only ever in the present in passing. If you look at that way you don’t have to feel boxed in by it, no matter what its horrors and no matter what, rationally, you expect will come. You may not reach the end of the trail but at least there’s a next step. The question of which next step to take is a lot less intimidating than how to reach a far-off goal in a distant future where all our problems will finally be solved. It’s utopian thinking, for me, that’s ‘hopeless’.

Mary Zournazi: So how do your ideas on ‘affect’ and hope come together here?

Brian Massumi: In my own work I use the concept of ‘affect’ as a way of talking about that margin of manoeuvrability, the ‘where we might be able to go and what we might be able to do’ in every present situation. I guess ‘affect’ is the word I use for ‘hope’. One of the reasons it’s such an important concept for me is because it explains why focusing on the next experimental step rather than the big utopian picture isn’t really settling for less. It’s not exactly going for more, either. It’s more like being right where you are - more intensely.



[The rest of the interview can be found here.]



.

Artist’s Pledge

.


[Here in Zurich, at the Gessnerallee dance Laboratoire, we made Artist's Pledges. This is mine.}



I pledge to complain less, or to complain only in a way that is incredibly entertaining for the people around me who have to listen to it.

I pledge to be less actively jealous of artists considerably more successful than me.

I don’t know how to put this next one in the form of a pledge, but I would like to change my attitude towards those who have power over me: at the same time being more stubborn in fighting for my artistic integrity and more generous with them on a human level.

I have to admit I like working for free. Artistically things seem possible when working for free that for some reason seem less possible when getting paid. So perhaps I pledge to search for ways to create the same loose openness in well-paid situations that I have so often found in unpaid ones.

I pledge to always remember that working for free is not some artistic panacea that has been lost. That my present is in so many ways better than my past.

I pledge to remember that many things that seem artistically important to me in terms of working conditions may well be only placebos.

I pledge to continuously reevaluate what is and isn’t important for the work.

My greatest fear is making work that’s empty and not knowing I have done so.



.

Must lead to something else

.



Most of my favorite artists follow a fairly standard trajectory. They start out okay or good, have a period of getting better and better, peak, then slowly or rapidly decline. (Some of them die young, before the decline begins, but that’s another kind of question.) I have now been making work for about twenty-five years and wonder if my decline has already begun, or will begin any minute. I believe there are artistic strategies for staying good over a long period of time but, then again, am not sure any such strategy can really work for long.

Chief among these strategies is produce less. There is an enormous pressure on the artist to over-produce. I myself succumb to this pressure far too often. (It is also my nature to be prolific, but I think an artist should, at times, work against their own nature in the name of quality control. Or at least I used to think this.) Already I feel my artistic decline approaching. I feel it in my attitude towards my own work: there is less tension, less confusion, I feel more experienced, more sure of myself, and suspect that all of these can only be bad signs. In general, I also have less energy, am more tired, than I was when I was younger. This is of course normal. But I fear that my work now also has less energy and wonder constantly where this road can lead, how to turn it inside out, do something unexpected. Honestly I don’t think I have the perspective to really know what’s what. Then again, what kind of perspective is required to take a genuine artistic risk?

We live in a youth-obsessed culture and, as I express these anxieties, wonder if I am simply falling into this youth-obsessed trap. The artist must believe in their own work to keep going. But no one believes in their own work more fervently than a bad artist. (Robert Hughes: “The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.”) Faith is always a struggle with doubt, and one aspect of my work has always been about trying to find a place where art actually feels worth doing. So in one way, all this is nothing new, I have struggled with these doubts for as long as I can remember. But in another way, something is shifting, perhaps the ground out from under me.

For the past few years, much of my inner life has been consumed by overwhelming feelings of failure. I spend a great deal of time analyzing these feelings (time better spent doing almost anything else), wondering if anything I could do might actually feel like success. To leave art for activism? To make better work, or work that was seen by a larger number of people? To write books that are still being read 100, 200, 300 years from now? (Of course I won’t know if they are.) It occurs to me that my failure is also a failure of imagination, a failure to imagine something worth doing, to imagine a success worth having. Then I wonder if it’s a problem with me or a problem with success. Am I empty or is success?

For the past few year I have also been searching for some way to write about these questions that doesn’t sound only like complaining, like whining, like a failure to acknowledge my relatively easy, reasonably successfully artistic life. Then, today, in the first chapter of the novel Calendar of Regrets by Lance Olsen, I read this:

Slowly, [Hieronymus] Bosch came to admit that he would never be famous. He would never be the talk of this town, or any other. The recognition ached like a body full of bruises. He could hardly wait to take his place before his easel every morning to find out what his imagination had waiting for him, yet he had to make peace with the bristly fact that recognition was a boat built for others. He had to content himself of the rush of daily finding – the way milled minerals mixed precisely with egg whites create astounding carmines, creams, cobalts; how the scabby pot-bellied rats scurrying through his feverscapes were not really pot-bellied rats at all, but the lies flung against the true church day after day. 

Of course Bosch’s work is today revered and remembered, while so many of his contemporaries are more or less forgotten. At the end of the day, I think this is the only accurate definition of art: something that lasts, outlasts its contemporaries, survives, captures the imagination of the future. And what does the future know? Why think the future knows any more than now? But this passage was also a reminder of how I have never been able to take refuge in the idea of artistic work as its own reward. I always feel that making art must lead to something else.

I was going to finish there, but then remembered the three quotes I long ago copied out from Panegyric Volume 1 by Guy Debord:

Never to have given more than very slight attention to questions of money, and absolutely none to the ambition of holding some brilliant post in society, is a trait so rare among my contemporaries that some will no doubt consider it incredible, even in my case. It is, however, true, and it has been so constantly and abidingly verifiable that the public will just have to get used to it

Our only public activities, which remained rare and brief in the early years, were meant to be completely unacceptable: at first, primarily due to their form; later, as they acquired depth, primarily due to their content. They were not accepted.

This time, what was an absolutely new phenomenon, which naturally left few traces, was that the sole principle accepted by all was precisely that there could be no more poetry or art – and that something better had to be found.

And I suddenly remembered how much respect and admiration I have for artists who refuse the system in anything resembling a significant manner. The power of that refusal, how it speaks so directly to my frequent disgust at the corruption of art and of the world. I wonder so much if my struggle is also a form of this refusal, or at least half-refusal, or if more honestly it is a form of self-sabotage. There is something pathetic in only refusing half-way, but also something worth thinking about. There are so many different and ineffective ways to fight. But what is ineffective now might still some day strike.



.

Julie Carr Quote

.



Vollmann reports that suicide rates drop dramatically in people older than forty. Because, as he rightly surmises, the absurdity of doing what nature will do anyway reveals itself.

- Julie Carr, 100 Notes on Violence



.

Ten Short Sentences

.



Some police play the protesters while other police play the police.

Be the elephant you wish to see in the room.

And free love made a non-alignment pact with jealousy.

The autodidact is often marked by a fondness for quotations.

The feeling that the poor weather is a direct result of environmental calamity mixed with the feeling that one is in a bad mood because of the poor weather.

Anti-capitalist artist seeks wealthy patron.

When inhuman things become legal, commonplace and generally accepted, there is no limit to the hell we are capable of.

The knight who comes to slay your dragon turns out to be another dragon.

The tendency in conceptual art to foreground intention.

When nothing is finished, everything is possible.



.