I Think You're Totally Wrong (24 page)

DAVID:
Let me get all these dates right.

CALEB:
In 1991 I had the experience with the transvestite at the birthday party. Noella had her son and left Australia in 1991. In 1994 I had the second transvestite experience and met Noella. I got the AIDS test in 1997.

DAVID:
Hmm. To be blunt, there are two things about you as a person that especially interest me.

CALEB:
Only two?

DAVID:
Part of you is very knowledgeable and insightful, and part of you is stunningly blind to your own affect.

CALEB:
Maybe that's who I am. If so, I'm doomed. I can't change.

DAVID:
I'm sure you could say the same thing about me.

CALEB:
Of course, I think I am aware of my obliviousness, but it's a contradiction. If I am oblivious, then how could I be aware of it? When an author starts questioning, it drags the story down. It's aesthetic. You may say the opposite.

DAVID:
Completely, because to me there's no separation between—

CALEB:
You want questioning of the self, and memory, and so on. All memoirists do it.

DAVID:
I'm not a memoirist. None of the writers I love are memoirists. I'm interested in the book-length essay.

CALEB:
Distinction without a difference.

DAVID:
You don't know what you're talking about.

CALEB:
I'm trying to get at suffering, why people suffer, and how they can stop suffering. Maybe I haven't perfected my craft, but that's my goal—not an endlessly self-reflexive questioning of self.

DAVID:
And that's why your work still feels to me pretty generic: because you haven't learned how to wire the investigation through the central intelligence agency of your own sensibility. Without that, it's just something coming in over telex.

CALEB:
Telex?

DAVID:
I was flashing on
Swimming to Cambodia
, for some reason. I've been totally riveted by the story—who wouldn't be? But it never, in my hearing, really built to anything, about you or sex or suffering. You gotta get to your own obtuseness. The way—let me finish, Caleb—the way I'd write it is this: Here's a guy who has a peculiar experience at a birthday party, then he has another experience in
Samoa with a transvestite who gives him a blow job. Everyone teases him—ha ha. Then, to me, the really interesting moment is his brief connection with Noella. That should have been the aha moment for you, but it wasn't. Maybe this is my own Western prejudice or heterosexual prejudice, but wasn't she hoping that you would take care of her in some sense?

CALEB:
Damn straight. There's a magazine in Bangkok called
Farang
. Phnom Penh, Taiwan, Korea—half the travel literature in Asia is about this. Somaly Mam, the author of
The Road of Lost Innocence
, married a john, a Frenchman working for an NGO in Phnom Penh. She wanted to be saved, and he wanted to save someone, but they started off as Mr. John and Mrs. Whore, no sugarcoating. All over Asia, and the world, there are women like Somaly or Noella, all at various stages of wanting to be saved.

DAVID:
Were you attracted to Noella?

CALEB:
I rate women on a binary scale: either zero or one. She was a one.

DAVID:
(laughing)
I'm sure you have equally devastating insights into me, but you're a funny mix of gentleness and obstreperousness. You sometimes seem belligerent, but you're also compassionate. You're very interested in culture. You're a better anthropologist of the world than most of us are. But the story, or the essay, has to build to either (1) you remain studiously oblivious in three cases, and the reader gets that, or (2) you yourself finally confront in yourself your own blindness.

CALEB:
Hmm.

DAVID:
I think you're very smart, but underneath that you're
stupid, whereas I'm very stupid, but underneath that I'm smart.

CALEB:
I almost think our conversation about the story might be, in essence, the story.

DAVID:
Ooh, I like that.

CALEB:
What did you mean, though, when you said you think I'm a funny mix—

DAVID:
Calling me a “dork,” say—why would you do that?

CALEB:
(laughing)
I was toning it down.

DAVID:
What happened to your face?

CALEB:
The scars? Car accident. July 1985: I was sixteen. I'd been invited to a Chicago Cubs tryout camp at Skagit Valley Community College. All the local prospects were there—mostly college. It was before my senior year of high school. I'd been an all-league pitcher. Everyone did sprints and played catch and then played a simulated game. I pitched two innings, didn't allow a hit—not much of a sample, but it got a scout, Andy Pienovi, interested. He talked to me and gave me his card.

DAVID:
So you could throw a ninety-mile-per-hour fastball?

CALEB:
Mid-eighties. I weighed about 160 pounds but had an odd delivery and could put English on the ball. I worked nights at a restaurant and always smoked pot afterward and sometimes got drunk. Couple weeks later I was driving home from work, probably high and drunk, and I ran into a
tree. Scars on my face, broke my arm, some vertebrae, and my brain. I was flown by helicopter to St. Luke's in Bellingham, in a coma for four days, and in the hospital for two months. This factored in my early writing. Mark and Vince lost their parents. They saw death, but I almost died.

CALEB:
What's so great about Jackson Pollock?

DAVID:
His work is unspeakably beautiful, and he changed the history of art. Other than that, not much.

CALEB:
I'd argue he changed art negatively. Why do you find his work beautiful?

DAVID:
More than anyone before him, he showed you the artist in the process of making art. He showed you—

CALEB:
Whoop-de-fucking-do.

DAVID:
I share your skepticism. I hate art talk. But I honestly respond to Pollock, Diebenkorn, Rothko. I just do. Most artists do nothing for me—de Kooning, say. Visual art is completely visceral: I love Gerhard Richter's work—immediately upon looking at it. You either get, I don't know, Rauschenberg, or you don't. I love collage, so I do.

CALEB:
“You either get it or you don't” is a brick wall. You either get Christianity or you don't. You either get French wines or you don't. Or Franzen. Basically, you're saying, “If you can't see value, it's your fault.” We both agree the Cascade Mountains are beautiful, but Pollock?

DAVID:
To me, the Cascade Mountains are nowhere near as beautiful as a painting by Jackson Pollock.

CALEB:
Now you're just being stupid.

CALEB:
In one corner we have Eula Biss's
The Balloonists
, seventy-two pages of lyric essay. In the opposite corner we have Eula Biss's
Notes from No Man's Land
, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. David Shields speaks for the former. Caleb Powell speaks for the latter.

DAVID:
I like both books.

CALEB:
You said you were surprised
No Man's Land
won that award.

DAVID:
I like the book. I don't love it anything like the way I love
The Balloonists
. You know this line of Picasso's I always quote? “A great painting comes together, just barely.” That, for me, is the definition of art. The casual reader reads
The Balloonists
and has no idea what it's about, whereas
No Man's Land
pretty much spells it out; there's nothing to get.
The Balloonists
is this incredible generation-defining anthem about how Eula simply can't get the hot-air balloon of romance off the ground, because she just can't believe in it anymore, not after everything she's seen happen to her mother.

CALEB:
(laughing)
Big fucking deal.

DAVID:
Is that right? To you, that's—

CALEB:
We're endlessly dreaming about being in a balloon?
This balloon will save us? That's an X factor? I'm chewing gum as I'm tasting wine.

CALEB:
The artist has to have a foot in the world, be open to journalism, expository writing. I'm a writer first, artist second. You may be the opposite. I want writing to mix artistic with nonartistic, to link to interest in human crises. Hitchens or Samantha Power or Jon Krakauer on Mormon fundamentalists who commit a brutal murder. Orwell's good, because he combined a great writing style with firsthand knowledge of the world. The microphone didn't catch that, but when I mentioned Krakauer, David Shields gave a “yuck” face and a thumbs-down gesture.

DAVID:
Two thumbs down.

CALEB:
He's a writer first and an artist second.

DAVID:
When I talk about Chomsky, I paint in very broad strokes and I sound foolish, since I don't care sufficiently about the details. I don't care as much about politics as you do. When you talk about Pollock, you paint in very broad strokes and you sound foolish, since you don't care sufficiently about the details. You don't care as much as I do about art.

CALEB:
You don't sound that foolish regarding Chomsky; you're too aware of your own ignorance. I hoped you might go to the mat for Chomsky; things would have gotten heated. If I sound foolish to some people, so be it, but I
have a sophisticated distaste for Pollock. My mother was a painter. I grew up around painting and art history books. I've engaged. I care about the details. His work is crap.