The Muses Are Borrowed: Back and Forth on ‘Reality Hunger’

By Geoff Schumacher and Scott Dickensheets

David Shields’ provocative recent book, Reality Hunger, has generated a great deal of discussion within the writing community. One of the book’s fundamental points is there is too much worry among writers, publishers and readers over the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. Shields argues that most fiction is founded on reality, and most nonfiction contains fictional elements, so why get worked up over whether a book is one or the other? As an example, Shields brings up the case of James Frey’s 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces. When it was discovered that Frey had made up parts of the book, quite a dust-up ensued. Shields, however, defends the act of incorporating fictional elements into a memoir as a way of getting at a greater truth. More controversially, Shields argues against the time-honored practice of copyright protection for works of art. He thinks writers should be able to incorporate someone else’s work into their own without proper attribution. He puts this notion into practice in Reality Hunger, though his publisher insisted, over his objections, that he provide proper credits for the appropriated quotes in the back of the book. Reality Hunger questions much of the conventional wisdom about the practice of creating art, especially writing. How about we start by looking at where we agree with Shields?

SCOTT: A story: In 2001 (I think), at a conference of city and regional magazine editors, I attended a panel in which Esquire writer Tom Junod read lengthy portions of a profile of R.E.M singer Michael Stipe (including a nice set piece at Hoover Dam). Having gotten an advance copy of the story and shared it with a colleague, I was one of three people in the room who knew what was coming next: Junod confessed that he’d made up those parts. (In the magazine itself, readers were alerted that parts were fictionalized and directed to Esquire’s website for the breakdown.) His point in the story was the unknowability, and general banality, of rock stars, and reality-based fictions were the best way to get at that.

Half the room freaked — simply letting the fiction touch the nonfiction that way, they complained, threw the credibility of journalism itself into question, no matter how well labeled for the reader. (The well-known editor of a well-known regional magazine even asked me to call a journalism watchdog site and snitch on Junod.) The other half saw Junod’s ploy as a useful gesture, however controversial, toward keeping high-end magazine writing lively, evolving and entertaining. It might be the single best writing panel I ever attended.

Where do I agree with Shields? Well, hell, I sided with Junod; I enjoyed watching the traditionalists wig out. Looking at the notes I scrawled in Reality Hunger’s margins — I’ve never had it out with a book the way I have with this one — I agree that it can be fun and vitalizing to dick around with that fact/fiction border; that artful quotation and sampling can zap your work with a new, unexpected tingle; that collage might be the foremost art form of the last century; that memoir, that most disputed of fiction/nonfiction minglings, belongs more to the realm of literature than journalism; that “what I want is the real world, with all its hard edges, but the real world fully imagined and fully written, not just reported”; that sometimes good writing is just good writing and to hell with categories.

But none of that means I think you should fuck with people, which is where I begin to diverge, vigorously and sometimes angrily, from Mr. Shields. What about you?

GEOFF: In recent months, I’ve been reading a lot of classic long-form journalism. George Orwell. St. Clair McKelway. Truman Capote. One of the best such pieces I’ve read is “The Muses Are Heard,” written by Capote and published by the New Yorker in 1956. The novella-length article is about an American opera company’s trip to the Soviet Union to stage a production of Porgy and Bess. It’s an amazing piece of writing, rich in detail and insights about the men and women of the opera company and providing an eye-opening (for the time) first-person look at life and thought behind the Iron Curtain. Unlike some other writers who considered their journalism work to be of a lower grade than their fiction, Capote took his nonfiction work just as seriously as his fiction, and perhaps more so. Although he is best known for his “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood, people who follow such things also regard “The Muses Are Heard” as a major piece of Capote’s oeuvre.

Yet Capote was infamous for playing fast and loose with what us hacks call journalism ethics. He often didn’t take notes or tape-record interviews. He claimed to be able to regurgitate dialogue from memory. In regard to In Cold Blood, there are differing views. Many consider the book a spot-on work of literary journalism. Others claim half the book was wildly off base — if not outright fiction, at least a poor approximation of journalism.

As for “The Muses Are Heard,” I learned after reading it that a significant character in the book — a Norwegian businessman — was made up, ostensibly a device to allow Capote to insert more of his own opinions into the narrative. There were other literary flourishes as well that call into question the factual integrity of the entire piece.

The question is, does this matter? Does Capote’s mixing of nonfiction and fiction in the article in fact diminish the piece’s value as a work of journalism? My general reaction is to say not that much. I think Capote’s intentions were good. He wanted to give readers the most insightful piece of writing possible, something that would help them to better understand the Soviet people at a time of visceral Cold War tensions. He wanted to get at the flavor and the truth about the individuals of the Porgy and Bess opera company. If you believe that Capote’s intentions were good, then the piece comes off as a huge achievement.

The risk with this kind of nonfiction writing is that the reader must trust that the writer has good intentions. If the writer is altering reality for political or personal reasons, as a form of propaganda or persecution, then the whole enterprise falls apart. Just as readers trusted Joseph Mitchell, St. Clair McKelway and A.J. Liebling to use their literary license with care, they trusted Capote.

As for Shields, after reading Reality Hunger, I don’t trust him one bit. His strident philosophy of overt disregard and contempt for the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction is, to me, a leap too far. His most troubling assertion, of course, is that it’s okay to steal other people’s words without giving them due credit.

SCOTT: All right — stand back, buttercup, I’m bringing the bullet points:

• A lot of this book is composed with other people’s words — if I recall correctly, during an L.A. Times book-fest panel in April, Shields said about 45 percent — with the only attribution being in the back of the book. Here’s my question: So? I simply don’t see how this petty theft improves the book in any way, how it’s better than simply saying what he means in his own words. Indeed, I think it diminished it in some ways. Appropriation works better in art forms like visual art or music, and it works best when the consumer recognizes it (Aha! That IS a piece of the Mona Lisa in that collage!) and there’s a sudden, wholly unexpected transfer — of energy, of intellectual content — between the old work and the new. I love that brain-crackle. However, a beat from a song or piece of an artwork are much easier to identify than a similarly small patch of prose. While I recognized a few of Shields’ samples, most I didn’t, and therefore felt myself at first frustrated by, and ultimately bored by, the task of sourcing each one, hoping to feel that energy transfer. (Why bother sourcing the borrowed material, Shields defenders might ask; why not just roll with the overall point? Precisely because he has borrowed it instead of creating it — that makes me think there must be a significance to that act that I’m supposed to root out.) That ploy might sound “risk-taking” in concept; in practice is dulled the reading experience.

• It seems to me that only a tenured professor would be so cavalier about doing away with copyright laws; creators who rely on ownership of their work for their actual incomes, might have a different point of view (anyone who’s negotiated contracts with top-level freelance writers and artists knows how vital this is to them).

• It seems to me that the logical conclusion of Shields’ argument is a world in which everyone is an amateur remixer, where people no longer anticipate the work of talented artists for the enlightenment and pleasure it offers, but simply because it’s another thing to take apart and rebuild themselves. At the risk of appearing elitist, that sounds like a very unappealing signal-to-noise ratio.

• At some point, I began to wonder if the real appropriation here was Shields borrowing the outlaw bravado of hip-hop to make writing seem more “risky.”

• I think there’s a useful difference between “being influenced by” and “taking.”

• There’s too much stuff like aphorism 157, which reads, in its entirety: “The world is everything that is the case.” Next to which I scrawled in the margin: “pointless, empty ‘profundity.’”

• So when a friend recently asked what I thought of Shields and his book, my snap response was this: “Smart, clever, full of shit.” I should’ve put more thought into it, sure, but I’m not sure I was wrong.

GEOFF: In a recent piece written for the Huffington Post, Shields contends that “the citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Citation domesticates the work, flattens it, denudes it, robs it of its excitement, risk, danger. I want to make manifest what artists have done from the beginning of time — feed off one another’s work and, in so doing, remake it, refashion it, fashion something new.”

Here’s my objection, which elaborates on something you said above. While it’s certainly true that artists are inspired by other artists, and that to an extent they try to emulate the ones they most admire, I’m not convinced that artists are simply taking other people’s art and refashioning it. Rather, if they’re true artists, they’re striving to create something new and original. They don’t all succeed. But I know this: If I were an artist, and I produced a work of art that people genuinely admired, and I received a lot of public recognition for my work, I would be sick to my stomach knowing that I had appropriated someone else’s work in order to gain that recognition. My instinct would be to give credit where credit is due. “Yes, thank you for your kind words, but really, Hemingway did most of the work. I just rearranged a few things.” My guilt would compel me to do the very thing that Shields despises — provide a citation.

In the Huff Post article, Shields provides a long list of “examples from the history of Western civilization” in which one artist stole  from another. He mentions, among others, Shakespeare, Tchaikovsky, Muddy Waters, Martin Luther King Jr. and Danger Mouse. But truth be told, Shields’ list is pretty thin.

Meantime, his attack on the copyright laws is lacking in practical merit. More often than not, the egregious violator of copyright laws is not one artist stealing from another; it’s some lazy hack stealing from an artist with the intention of enriching himself by claiming someone else’s labors as his own. In other words, it’s apples (artists) vs. oranges (thieving hacks). This is not a problem that Shields addresses.

A creative work, I would argue, can be called art not by cobbling together other people’s creative exertions, but by being something that stands on its own, that offers something that feels new when it is loosed on the world. Shields repeatedly quotes the James Joyce line, “I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors-and-paste man,” as if it should be taken seriously that Joyce, one of the most celebrated novelists in history, simply lifted other people’s work and made it his own. Please.

Now, I can’t say that I know the temperature of the literary world, or the narrower academic literary field, but my feeling is that Shields is delusional, or at least lacking in perspective, when he says that “I and many other contemporary writers, musicians, visual artists, and copyright lawyers are trying to think in new and (we believe) exciting ways about quotation, citation, appropriation, and plagiarism.” On the contrary, I think very few people in these fields of endeavor are thinking much about this subject at all. Most of them are working their asses off to earn enough money to pay their bills and to gain a degree of attention for their work. They have neither the time nor the inclination to champion a fringe campaign to repeal the copyright laws so that David Shields doesn’t have to use quote marks. I do think Shields has titillated a segment of the literary crowd, given them something to chatter about. But I don’t think his budding movement has much staying power.

One area where I think Shields has a compelling point is in his assertion that “some of the best fiction is now being written as nonfiction.” I disagree with his general distaste for most pure fiction today, because there is still plenty of great stuff being produced in short story and novel form. But I do think nonfiction in its various forms — literary journalism, memoir, history — can be every bit as literary and artful as fiction, and often has greater impact and import than most fiction. This is not a new idea, though. Seymour Krim, the New York beat essayist, made the case for nonfiction over fiction way back in the ’60s. Krim wrote: “People are hungry and desperate for straightforward communication about the life we are all leading in common; inflated or overwrought theory becomes an almost self-indulgent luxury — perhaps even a crime — under the hammer of the world we live in.”

It’s still sometimes desirable to read forms of fiction that allow us to “escape” from our everyday lives. Even as I make the case for meaningful, artful nonfiction in an effort to speak to the modern condition, I occasionally indulge the desire for escape by reading works of fiction that don’t come anywhere close to reflecting “the life we are all leading in common,” as Krim describes it. But for the most part, as a reader and a writer, I subscribe to the Shields/Krim argument for the relevance and value of nonfiction.

In summary: 1) There are gray areas between fiction and nonfiction, and the best writers know how to successfully navigate these dangerous waters; 2) Giving credit where it is due is important to maintain a writer’s integrity, artistic and otherwise, even if it somehow “domesticates the work”; and 3) Just try to write your own shit, okay?

SCOTT: Loved that Krim essay, by the way. Yeah, the hash in this rehash has been kicked around for years — decades ago, Philip Roth despaired of the novelist being able to keep up with the reality in the streets. Tom Wolfe has played paramedic more than once, feeling for the novel’s pulse — declaring it nearly dead in his introduction to The New Journalism, and later, in his notorious essay “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” dismissing most fiction except for a brawny realism-of-the-moment based on heavy reporting. (When I suggested as much to a defender of Reality Hunger, he said, basically, yeah, but Shields rephrased it nicely.) So not much of this discussion feels new, despite the fresh coat of hip-hop references Shields applies. “The important thing,” writes Marco Roth in a review of Reality Hunger that appeared in the lit mag n + 1, “is to make the reader believe they are witnessing a transgressive, transformative act.”

Roth very cleverly senses that behind Shields’ bravado, and probably behind the firm embrace this book has received from writers and academics, there throbs a very definite anxiety. High-end letters, the writing of books, essays and stories, has become professionalized and gentrified even as it’s lost its cultural centrality. And so this buccaneering overcompensation — we won’t follow your goddamn rules or ask your permission! — finally feels like at attempt to return to literature a little of the unruly, vanguard excitement we all feel it used to have.

Hey, I’m down with that impulse. But I still want to know what’s true and what isn’t; that’s my reality hunger.

Reading ‘Literary Las Vegas’

By David Boyles

After living in Las Vegas for nearly a year, I decided to better acquaint myself with the city through my favorite medium: books. I came across Literary Las Vegas, an anthology edited by Mike Tronnes and published in 1995. The collection includes some famous pieces, such as Tom Wolfe’s great 1964 profile and the Circus Circus section of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, as well as plenty of lesser-known works. The collection is extremely uneven, but gives a great overview of Las Vegas’ place in the popular imagination from the ’50s through the ’90s.

The most interesting thing is how it made me, as a relatively new transplant, feel so much like a local, and mostly not for good reasons. Most the collection can be tiresome, as it seems like at least half the pieces follow the same format of cynical journalist visiting the city and making an observation about its vulgarity and moral bankruptcy saying something important about American culture. This genre can be brilliant, as both Wolfe and Thompson demonstrate, but later attempts quickly devolve into cynical faux intellectualism. The worst of these are Richard Meltzer’s “Who’ll Stop the Wayne?” and Merrill Markoe’s “Viva Las Wine Goddesses.” Anyone who lives here, even if you’re new like me, will be annoyed by the city once again being reduced to its basest stereotypes. It is amazing that a collection of writing about Las Vegas could include so many writers so committed to having as little fun as possible here.

The intellectual bankruptcy of these pieces is further illustrated by the intelligent writers who decide to accept Las Vegas on its own terms. One highlight is Noel Coward’s “Nescafe Society,” which consists of diary entries from his famous month-long cabaret engagement at the Sands in 1955. Like Nabokov, Coward seems to have an appreciation of American vulgarity that only a European aristocrat could have.

For a new transplant, the best parts of the collection are the bits of history and lore.  Though the stories of Bugsy Siegel and the atomic tests get repeated ad infinitum, we also get an honest memoir by Susan Berman about growing up as a mobster’s daughter; an oral history of the bizarre story of Melvin Dummar, who claimed to have rescued Howard Hughes in the desert and been left millions in Hughes’ will; and a story about black performers playing segregated casinos in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Those pieces treat Las Vegas first and foremost as a real place, not as a metaphor or a symbol of some point the writer wants to make about taste or American culture.

This is a book that desperately needs to be re-edited and updated. Since it was published in 1995, the collection leaves off with Las Vegas in its family-friendly theme park stage, as represented by the last piece, Marc Cooper’s “Searching for Sin City and Finding Disney in the Desert.” This is a bad way for the collection to end, not only because it once again repeats the “cynical journalist in Vegas” bit and adds nothing new to it, but because, in Las Vegas time, 1995 seems like ancient history. And there has been a lot of great writing about Las Vegas since then that creates a more fully realized picture of the city. Here are my nominations for an updated anthology of great writing about Las Vegas. This is far from a comprehensive list, and I encourage readers to add to it.

Dave Hickey, “A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz” (from Air Guitar)

Reading the cliché-ridden pieces in Literary Las Vegas, I was desperately missing Hickey’s brilliant insights on the city. With him leaving for Albuquerque, there has been a lot of ink spilled over his legacy in Vegas, and while it would have been nice for him to produce some work of substance over the last decade in order to justify his six-figure UNLV salary, his pieces on Las Vegas in Air Guitar still stand up as some of the greatest writing ever about the city. “A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz” is the greatest and most celebrated of these, as he turns a visit to the Liberace Museum into a treatise on class and taste and the politics of the closet. It also contains one of Hickey’s most famous lines, which could be adopted as a city motto: “Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else’s privilege.” Hickey’s fierce intelligence and embrace of the city expose the fatuousness of denunciations of Las Vegas by the self-styled intellectuals in Literary Las Vegas.

David Foster Wallace, “Big Red Son” (from Consider the Lobster)

Foster Wallace’s report on the Adult Video News Awards and the “Adult Software” section of the Consumer Electronics Show, originally written under a pseudonym for the movie magazine Premiere in 1998, isn’t about Las Vegas per se, but in taking on one of our more notorious events as part of a larger examination of the porn industry, “Big Red Son” does tell us a lot about Vegas. His description of the AVN Awards, held in an opulent ballroom at Caesars Palace but featuring terrible food and overpriced drinks served by waiters who don’t speak English and only do the job in order to get their pictures taken with naked porn stars, perfectly capture the contradictions of the Strip experience, where glamour mixes with sleaze and transgression becomes mainstreamed.

Bill Simmons, “Destructive Things With No Guilt” (From ESPN.com)

ESPN columnist Simmons made his name by pioneering an informal style that covered sports from the fan’s perspective and quickly expanded out from sports to cover all aspects of modern “guy” culture, in particular the modern strain of overgrown frat boy whomt Las Vegas appealed to over the last decade. His many dispatches from Las Vegas set the template for the cliché of the modern Vegas bachelor party that would be immortalized in The Hangover. This entry from 2004, which finds Simmons and his buddies dealing with impending middle age and Las Vegas’ overexposure as guys’ weekend destination, is the high point of his Vegas columns. The relentless guy talk can get tiresome, but Simmons has a great eye for the small details of vacationing in Las Vegas, from the unintentional comedy of Saturday morning breakfast buffets to the joy of being able to afford your own bed. It is the antithesis of the cynical “journalist in Vegas” story, and while it isn’t very deep, it does attempt to capture the Vegas experience as most tourists experience it (or at least envision it).

James Ellroy, Chapter 1 of The Cold Six Thousand

The Cold Six Thousand, the middle book of Ellroy’s trilogy of novels about ‘60s political intrigue, is perhaps the consummate Las Vegas novel, even though only part of the action takes place here. In this book, Las Vegas becomes the crossroads of Ellroy’s various convoluted conspiracy theories. It also introduced Ellroy’s greatest portrayal of twisted masculinity in Wayne Tedrow Jr., a cop with a stepmother obsession and a penchant for killing black suspects, whose father is a Mormon bigshot and right-wing lunatic.

Michael Lewis, “Spiderman at the Venetian” (from The Big Short)

A book hoping to represent modern Las Vegas would have to address the economic crisis and our city’s central role in it, and Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, the definitive book written so far on the subprime mortgage crisis, includes a wonderfully representative Vegas set piece. Lewis documents a convention of subprime mortgage lenders at the Venetian, where the lenders party while the fruit of their labors is evident in the mounting number of foreclosed homes just a few miles away.

David Boyles is a Ph.D. student in the UNLV English Department, where he studies Shakespeare and tries to teach freshmen to write. He is performance editor of The Shakespeare Standard and also blogs occasionally at ArtsVegas.

Dave Hickey and Las Vegas

The respected essayist and art critic Dave Hickey is leaving Las Vegas. He’s moving to Albuquerque, where his wife, the art curator Libby Lumpkin, has taken a teaching job at the University of New Mexico. Hickey will teach there too, according to news reports. Hickey’s exit from Las Vegas, a city he often professed to love and considered “home,” occasioned the following observations by Scott Dickensheets and Geoff Schumacher.

By Scott Dickensheets

Dave Hickey’s departure from Las Vegas is like a tremor in the force: a distant tug on your awareness, maybe accompanied by the screams of a dying planet, but here, where you are now, its effect can be hard to pinpoint. I mean, it was cool to share a town with the author of Air Guitar: Essays on Arts & Democracy — which is permanently locked into my Top 10, no matter how many terrific books I ever read — but in the ruts and grooves most of us move in, what’ll really be different with him off to New Mexico?

I didn’t refer to the force by accident; there was a certain Obi-Wan-on-Tatooine quality to Hickey’s decade here. If he wasn’t exactly living in quiet self-exile in a desert cave and shooing away the Jawas, it was nonetheless clear that his mystical powers belonged to a larger universe — his real business was out there, among the stars. Over the years, I’d hear sotto voce complaints that Hickey never wrote about us, never turned his high beams toward the attention-hungry local scene — which was true, he didn’t, and also ridiculous, because why would he?

This was the hard pill for some Las Vegans to swallow: The art that interests Hickey is bigger, more ambitious, more international than most of what happens here, which tends to stay here, which is part of its problem. The local arts scene, as is surely the case in most cities, is a self-reinforcing network of career minor-leaguers, sincere hard workers who support each other and the scene, but who probably won’t transcend it to reach the high strata Hickey circulates in. He disdained most of the work you’d see in the arts district — I’m sure he’d say that one Ed Ruscha is worth any number of Downtown amateurs. So it was never realistic to think that Dave Hickey was going to trot dutifully to the Reed Whipple Center or Arts Factory each week to write up the scene for 23 cents a word in CityLife or the Weekly, or even one of the dailies. For a contributor to Vanity Fair, Artforum, Harper’s and Art in America, that amounts to pro bono work, and it’s not really the cosmopolitan audience he wants to reach, anyway.

And so Hickey’s impact here was more diffuse. While in UNLV’s art department, he nurtured some excellent artists, a couple of whom haven’t moved away (yet). I hope his just-ended stint in the English department results in a few more thoughtful writers in our midst. He curated a couple of great exhibits, enlivened some panel discussions, offered a lot of grabby quotes to journalists, groused about university politics and generally held court. A lot of his thing involved simply being Dave Hickey, glamorous art-world maverick, in tacky old Las Vegas. Indeed, I’m sure the people who’ll miss him most acutely — the people most loudly lamenting his departure as a deep bruise on our cultural life — are the Roger Thomases and other sophisticates who actually talked to him regularly (and as equals), rather than the rest of us, who had to wait until he published. Our engagement with Hickey won’t change.

(And by “rest of us,” of course, I mean the rest of the maybe 5 percent of Las Vegans who knew or cared who Dave Hickey is, or seriously appreciate art. The other 95 don’t give a damn.)

But that’s all cool, really. No one should bother with other people’s expectations if they don’t need to; I sure as hell wouldn’t if I didn’t have to.

Still, I like to entertain the occasional what if. What if Hickey had decided to write locally? Not art reviews, but pieces about Vegas in the vein of Air Guitar — mixes of wide-ranging critique, reportage, memoir, wit, informed speculation, cultural advocacy and inspired dot-connecting. Maybe two or three a year for local publication. Would a couple dozen such pieces over a decade have helped nudge forward the cosmopolitan spirit Hickey so badly wanted to find here? Pulled together a crowd of like minds who wanted to talk about smart things and kick up some unfashionable fun? Who knows? I’m probably as naive as the gallery owners who complained that he never touted their shows. But the man himself once noted that in a democracy you have to wrangle for your pleasures, so I kinda wish he’d have tried. Tatooine can be so drab sometimes.

By Geoff Schumacher

My complaint is not so much that Dave Hickey didn’t write for the local papers while he was here, though I agree that could have been interesting.

(I once pitched him on the idea of reviewing a Chet Baker bio that had been sent to me at the Las Vegas Mercury. He told me to go ahead and send him the book, he’d take a look at it and let me know if he was interested in writing something. I sent him the book but didn’t hear from him for a long time. I finally contacted him again. He hardly remembered the proposal, ultimately recalling that he thought it was a lightweight bio and [my words] unworthy of his comment. He probably was right about the book but still.)

No, my complaint is that since the publication of Air Guitar in 1997, Hickey hasn’t publish much at all of even a vaguely general interest. By all accounts, including my personal experience, he had and still has a lot to say; he’s said it with great witty eloquence before television cameras and radio microphones. But for whatever reasons, he hasn’t managed to get much of it into print. Some observers thought the 2001 MacArthur genius grant would give him the time and comfort to get something big done but apparently not. Besides the fact that a much-anticipated sequel to Air Guitar has been delayed for several years now, some of his work for the big magazines has been, shall we say, paltry.

The first piece that comes to mind was published in Harper’s in November 2006. In “It’s Morning in America,” Hickey followed gubernatorial candidate Dina Titus around rural Nevada to, I guess, check the political pulse of the hinterlands. While Hickey conjured a couple of nice lines for the piece, I was left wanting something more substantial than glib descriptions of Pahrump and its libertarian bent. Why, after all, did he take on this assignment while rejecting or neglecting the opportunity to tackle more interesting or important matters for such a wide, sophisticated audience? Surely Hickey could write about just about any subject for any of the big magazines, yet he either doesn’t do anything at all or he picks things decidedly off the subject.

And here’s a related question: If not writing about Las Vegas for local pubs, why not write meaningfully about Las Vegas for the big guys? That could have had a significant impact on public perceptions of Las Vegas, pro and con.

Ah, but who am I to tell somebody like Dave Hickey what to do, how to lead his life? He gets to decide that, of course, not me. If he doesn’t want to write about these things, that’s his business. But the end result of all his iconoclastic puttering is that his value and influence while he was in Las Vegas was muted. Ultimately, instead of having a lasting impact, he’s a blip, a footnote, of importance to just a handful of artists and students.

Unless, of course, Hickey still has something up his sleeve. Maybe he plans to type up something really compelling about Las Vegas and needs to leave town in order to have the proper perspective to do it the way he wants. That’d be cool. But it’s wishful thinking at best.

Interlude: Truman Capote in New Orleans

After Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, talk circulated among those who didn’t know better that the Crescent City should not be rebuilt, that it was located in a dangerous spot and the residents would be better off living somewhere else. There were several problems with this line of thinking, the main one being that many outsiders didn’t appreciate how tightly woven longtime New Orleans residents are with their beloved city.

I was reading an 1946 essay by Truman Capote about his hometown when I came across a snippet that seems to perfectly illustrate the situation. Capote is describing an elderly woman whom he calls Miss Y.

“Miss Y does not believe in the world beyond N.O.; at times her insularity results, as it did today, in rather chilling remarks. I had mentioned a recent trip to New York, whereupon she, arching an eyebrow, replied gently: “Oh? And how are things in the country?”

-Geoff Schumacher

A back and forth about John D’Agata’s ‘About a Mountain’

Copyright 2010, W.W. Norton & Company

By Scott Dickensheets and Geoff Schumacher

Odd book, John D’Agata’s About a Mountain. As one reviewer noted, it’s more of an extended essay than a full-fledged book — heavy on the jumping around and idiosyncratic juxtaposing allowable in the former, with less of the shape and design you expect in the latter. Ostensibly it’s about Yucca Mountain, the now-all-but-dead nuclear waste repository proposed for a site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Except that it makes no attempt to be a well-rounded history or journalistic exploration of the project. Rather, it’s a highly selective sampling of Yucca-related issues: some of the politics that led to the site’s selection; some of the dangers associated with it; the folly of thinking we could devise signs that would warn people away for the 10,000-year life of the project.

But to that subject, D’Agata appends numerous other topics — Las Vegas, where his mother now lives; some of the sad and silly aspects of the city’s 2005 centennial celebration; the suicide of a young man (who jumped off the Stratosphere Tower) whom D’Agata was at first convinced he’d spoken to on the night he died.

So, plenty of oddity already. But then, in the style of the “lyric essay,” of which D’Agata is considered a foremost practitioner, he took a few factual liberties. Tinkered with the timeline; conflated events. D’Agata, in interviews, describes it as applying imagination to the essay in order to deliver not the factual payload of journalism but the emotional and intellectual satisfactions of literature. This is where our exchange begins.

SCOTT: Let me limp into this thing with a disclaimer: Nothing nice I say about this book is meant as a defense of its outright factual sloppiness. That business about I-80 running through Vegas, or the major Strip hotels being 2,000 feet from the freeway interchange we call the Spaghetti Bowl — there’s no excuse for that. You and I are all same-page and shit there. Where we depart, I guess, is my nonjudgmental curiosity — see how tentative I am, protecting what’s left of my journalism cred?! — about the way D’Agata uses certain fictional techniques in his nonfiction. He’s upfront about it, if not so much (not enough, perhaps) in the book itself, at least in talking about it: “I mean, if you’d asked me whether I succeeded in writing a stellar piece of journalism, I would say absolutely not,” he told me in an interview. “I’m not a journalist, it’s not what I attempted to do. I changed things, I conflated time, I changed names, I altered some experiences slightly in order to streamline the narrative a bit. I did things, in other words, that journalists don’t do. Or shouldn’t.”

He defends that practice the way most nonfiction fabulists do, on artistic grounds: “No matter what genre you’re working in, at the end of the day it’s literature, it’s art, that you’re trying to make.” That is, the work’s cumulative emotional and intellectual impact is more important than some niggling concerns about minor factual accuracy. Some are sympathetic to that argument, and not all of them are James Frey apologists; some are David Sedaris fans. Hunter Thompson certainly embroidered reality in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and you can still find that shelved in the journalism section. Of course, Thompson’s style was comic, and so the satirical exaggerations were (sometimes) easier to parse. D’Agata is not a primarily comic writer. But does that mean this kind of license is only available to funny writers?

GEOFF: It is certainly true that there are many well-known and well-regarded works of nonfiction that have been, to use your apt word, embroidered for greater literary effect. Besides Hunter Thompson and David Sedaris, the legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell comes to mind. In these cases, I believe, the writers had two main objectives. First, to make the story more entertaining by smoothing out the narrative and fixing any roadblocks that might slow down or hamper the reader’s enjoyment of the story. Thompson and Sedaris certainly had this in mind. The second objective follows more ambitiously upon the first: to make the story hit home more effectively with the reader, to essentially make it more true.

This second objective is somewhat paradoxical, right? After all, what could be more true than the truth? But the case can be made, I think, using fiction. Advocates for fiction will say that greater truths about human nature often can be revealed through good fiction than through factual reporting. The fictional story, in essence, is truer than the messiness of reality. Mitchell, I believe, would have argued that through slight alterations in his stories about New York City denizens, he was able to reveal them more fully to his readers and his message about reality became clearer.

All well and good. I suspect we’re on the same page there. The problem with About a Mountain, in my view, is that the fabrications, as I understand them, do little or nothing to make this a better book. In fact, the reason we’re talking about them at all is because they jump out from an otherwise lackluster piece of writing. I don’t know what this book is about, and I don’t know what D’Agata wanted it to be about. I don’t know what some high-profile critics saw in the book that made them write glowing reviews. He’s a talented writer, I think, someone who is trying out new ways to write essays. I get that. But I don’t get the feeling this book would have been worse if D’Agata had stuck to the facts throughout. The marketing people tasked with writing the jacket copy and press releases for this book must have been pulling their hair out trying to explain it to prospective readers: It’s about Yucca Mountain, the proposed nuclear waste repository, right? Well, yes and no. It’s about Las Vegas then? Well, sorta kinda, but not really. The book is an interesting grad school exercise, but I don’t think it could find much of an audience. What did you like about it?

SCOTT: As it happens, Sedaris is and isn’t a good comparison — as the New Republic demonstrated pretty convincingly in 2007, he made shit up. Not merely “exaggerations for comic effect”; he wrote pure fiction, which he then retailed, much more lucratively, as having actually happened. But Sedaris is an instructive comparison because his fans, and pretty much everyone but me and the New Republic, give him a free pass because it’s only humor writing, and faking it just makes for a “better story.” No harm, no foul. D’Agata’s factual liberties weren’t nearly as egregious, but no free pass for him; those liberties were part of what ruined the book for you.

What’s About a Mountain about? Not really a mountain, I think. It seems to me that it’s about Yucca Mountain in roughly the same way Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is about the district attorneys convention. Both were pretexts — Thompson’s real subject was a lament for the permissive spirit of the ’60s, already doomed by creeping Nixonism; D’Agata’s, more subtly, is about knowability. Questions about what you can actually know riddle the book. Who can truly understand a project as scientifically dense, as politically compromised, as logistically complex as Yucca Mountain? Who can know why a young kid kills himself? Was the suicide victim really the kid D’Agata talked to that night?

And so you have D’Agata structuring the book using the ancient reporter’s standard for basic understanding: the five W’s. And you have the set pieces. The exhaustive list of everything, and I mean every damn thing, down to the dirt, that would have to be destroyed in the event of a nuclear transport incident — he’s using sheer knowingness to overwhelm the reader’s ho-hum attitude toward yet another apocalyptic scenario. The long section about the project to develop signage that would warn people away from the site for 10,000 years — that’s a graphic depiction of how hard knowledge is to codify, communicate and preserve (never mind that language itself would deteriorate into gibberish over 10,000 years; they can’t even find a material that would last that long on which to inscribe the gibberish). And D’Agata’s attempts to find some connection, even metaphorical, between the larger social anxiety represented by Yucca Mountain and the very private anxieties that led that kid to jump off the Stratosphere Tower — again, trying to discern the limits of what can be known. And, frustratingly, failing in this case. “And,” he told the Las Vegas Weekly, “I think that’s when it gets, toward the end of the book, a little more manic in pulling in more and more and more subjects. And the transitions become slighter, and a little more dramatic. It’s trying to announce its inability to find that significance. … That’s what the experience of the book was like for me — learning that meaning isn’t always possible. And I think in nonfiction especially that’s pretty interesting to discover.”

That’s not a wholly satisfying explanation, nor entirely obvious. I might not have fished some of that out of the often random-seeming narrative if he hadn’t hipped me to it; that’s how over-subtly he handles it. And some elements of the book — some of the Vegas scenes, the centennial — don’t bear on that theme in any way I can figure.

In pursuit of all that, of making it a “better story,” he torqued facts that, as you say, might not’ve needed torquing. Agreed. That still bugs me.

GEOFF: Your explanation of what About a Mountain is really about is persuasive and, I believe, correct. That’s easy to say, I suppose, because the author basically confirmed it. But when I read the book — and I readily admit this is partly my failing — I didn’t glean this deeper meaning from the narrative. And if I couldn’t figure it out, I wonder how many other people couldn’t either. The book opens with D’Agata and his mother participating in a parade that was part of the Las Vegas centennial festivities. Looking back over that chapter, I can’t find any legitimate relation between that scene and the underlying theme of knowability or about Yucca Mountain. At the end of the chapter about the parade, he concludes with something about wanting “the truth of its significance to be revealed.” Nothing wrong with that. Writers try to find significance in everyday things all the time. But in the case of this silly parade, the significance is plain to see: It was a lamely conceived and executed promotional scheme for the Las Vegas centennial. Nothing more, nothing less.

Since I’ve been so mean to this writer and this book, I want to say something nice. As you have explained, D’Agata is big on lists. In his list of things that would have to be destroyed if there was a nuclear waste accident in Las Vegas, he mentions asphalt, newspaper stands, traffic posts, etc. One thing he lists really made me smile. When he’s going through a hotel, listing the things that would have to be removed, he mentions, “The antique table where the elevator stops in the hall with the white marble top. The gold-gilded mirror behind it.” I love that. Isn’t it true that hotels feel the need to place a table and a mirror in that position in the hallway next to the elevator? This is a great observation.

Finally, I must return to the main issue of the discussion: nonfiction that isn’t completely nonfiction. In Reporting at Wit’s End, the recently released collection of New Yorker articles by St. Clair McKelway, a contemporary of Joseph Mitchell, A.J. Liebling and E.B. White, it is revealed by Adam Gopnik in his introduction that McKelway may not have been 100 percent factually accurate in some of his articles.

“There are often in McKelway’s writing bits of shapely storytelling and sprightly dialogue that belie their factual surface. The truth, politely held in a vault on West Forty-third Street, is that writers of his generation worked with a general understanding that a story could be kneaded into shape as long as the kneading was done gently and with good purpose; the well-wishing tone of their work is due in part to its being gently held in hostage to the good will of the subjects. Character can only be revealed, in the shortish span even of a long magazine piece, by a certain element of caricature; the license of cartoonists to draw a black outline and exaggerate an eyebrow was the license they claimed, with the understanding that it wouldn’t be used maliciously — when, in later years by other writers, it began to be, the license was revoked.”

I would argue that in the 21st century, the world is a different place than that in which these “kneaders” operated. Readers today are offended by the notion of being deceived. In Gopnik’s words, the license has been revoked. It’s either fiction or nonfiction — anything in between is a violation of a sacred trust, yet another nail in the coffin of integrity. And as much as I’d like to give writers free rein to do their thing, I have to endorse this modern-day belief in a strict division between fiction and nonfiction. The world is too weird and hostile a place for me to have to parse such things. If it’s fiction, I understand that it’s fiction. And if it’s nonfiction, I ought to be able to trust that it’s nonfiction. That’s not to say a nonfiction writer can’t ever “knead into shape” a story to help get at the truth. For example, a memoirist who re-creates dialogue from an earlier time that wasn’t recorded or written down can, I think, be given the license to build a reasonable narrative — as long as the physical and historical facts remain intact. It’s all very slippery, but my point is I don’t think D’Agata has either lived up to this general rule or, in the tradition of McKelway and Mitchell, manipulated the facts to sufficiently good effect to justify manipulating them.

SCOTT: In one last gasp of defense, I’ll say that some of the meaning and knowability theme is readily available to readers. I picked up on a bit of it in the first two passages I mentioned — the incantatory naming of everything that must be destroyed after a nuclear incident, and the Yuccca signage project. Indeed, it’s because I asked D’Agata about it that he pointed out the rest, which admittedly I didn’t tumble to. Blame my essentially journalistic cast of mind — about much of About a Mountain you can say that instead of directly explaining its themes the way standard nonfiction would (“and now let’s examine the limits of knowledge”), this book more or less enacts that knowing and not-knowing — demonstrates it. That was a literary nicety, the kind you tease out by thinking slowly and deeply about what is and isn’t in the narrative, that escaped me until later.

Not that you’d know it from this exchange, but I tend to surveil the fact-fiction border like a Minuteman on the Arizona state line. For example, my interest in Liebling bled out almost immediately when I figured out he was juicing his pieces. Indeed, for me, that’s the exactly right analogy: It’s like using steroids. Cheating. Liebling has an asterisk now, and he lost my hall-of-fame vote.

I’ve never been entirely comfortable with that “fiction is truer than nonfiction” argument, even though it’s been said by people much smarter than I am. Intuitively, it just doesn’t feel correct to me: If a truth is so rarified that you can’t find its manifestation in real life, what good is it? And if the argument is that you can get at those truths better in fiction because you can delve into people’s minds, well, as Tom Wolfe said, he figured that what people think “was just another door you had to knock on.”

So much of what I want out of nonfiction is bound up in the rasp of the writer’s voice and sensibility as it rubs up against the real, actual world as it exists, encoding that experience into prose. To short-cut those decisions for the sake of a “better story” is to take the easy way out, and I hate that. If your story doesn’t say exactly what you want it to say, either find a story that does, or say something else.

Not to mention that, in the indiscriminate info-bath of modern life, clarity is to be treasured.

And yet I find myself defending, if somewhat uneasily, a book that clearly bends those rules. I guess it’s that I also realize we exist in a hybridizing culture, a culture of sampling and remixing and mashing-up, and I find something captivating about the vigor of all those recombinative energies. So let’s get all subliminal here: Maybe, in the end, what I’m sticking up for is less About a Mountain itself (although I did like it quite a lot) than the hope that this cross-breeding mentality can help keep nonfiction writing alive and evolving. (I think that’s what D’Agata wants, too.)

GEOFF: Of course in the end we find a degree of common ground. Such is life when it is lived properly. As journalists, we naturally bristle or at least worry more than the average person when a writer wanders away from the facts. But in the interest of confusing things further before we conclude, I want to offer something of a concession. In his new book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, David Shields, a D’Agata fellow traveler, makes the compelling point that the blurring of reality and fiction — your mash-up, remix ethic — has become ubiquitous in 21st century culture. He cites, among other things, “VH1′s Behind the Music series” . . . “‘behind-the-scenes’ interviews running parallel to the ‘real’ action on reality television shows” . . . “DVDs of feature films that inevitably include a documentary on the ‘making of the movie’” . . . “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” . . . talk radio.” Shields is absolutely correct that the notion of reality has been forever warped by these new elements of popular culture. These creations aren’t real in any traditional sense of the word, but they still can be informative, entertaining and worth doing.

This, unfortunately, does not alter my view re: About a Mountain. I guess, for me, D’Agata chose a strange subject on which to try out his new-school essaying. His perception that there’s something unknowable about Yucca Mountain, some vague uncertainties about the safety of the project, is ultimately what bugs me the most. As someone who lives 90 miles from Yucca Mountain and who has lived through two decades of political and scientific wrangling over this project, I think there are some very knowable things about it. This is a serious matter for people in Southern Nevada, just as it should be for people across the country. We do not have a workable solution for storing high-level nuclear waste, and yet we keep making more of it. This is a disaster in the making, a very sobering business. For D’Agata to use this subject as the basis for a literary experiment just rubs me the wrong way. VH1 can produce truth-challenged Behind the Music shows for years on end and it doesn’t really mean a whole lot one way or another. But Yucca Mountain does matter.

We still need a good social history of Yucca Mountain, a thoughtful exploration that isn’t just science, isn’t just politics but a book that puts the whole messy story in perspective. When I first heard about D’Agata’s book, I vaguely hoped he had given that a shot. He did not.