A Skull, A Suitcase, and a Long Red Bottle of Wine

The March Believer appeared in the mailbox yesterday, arriving unexpectedly as it always does. The essays I've read so far -- a weird and uncontrolled text collage by David Shields, an essay about fat literary characters by Rachel Aviv -- haven't done much for me, but Nick Hornby's column is funny and there is an interesting interview with Robyn Hitchcok and one with Harold Ramis, which you can read online.

The interview with Hitchcock shows that he's a bit less surreal in conversation than in his music and stage banter, though just about as fatalistic. He sees the Bush Administration as a kind of symptom of system collapse, in a way that echoes the concerns about technology in Neil Postman's Technopoly (which I used in my last semester of teaching English composition). Hitchcock says:

I'm not very optimistic about the next few hundred years, but I'd be very interested to see what has happened when all the mud of the immediate future has settled. It's a bit like 2001. I mean, basically what you've got is apes with power drills. We're still thinking like savages, but we're savages with technology, and we're not mature enough as a species to deal with the consequences of what we've discovered. If we've got things like nuclear technology and laser beams and the internal combustion engine, we need to be a damned sight more mature in order to use them, and the problem is, we're not.

Ramis, the Quiet Ghostbuster, is much more lucid and thoughtful than I would have supposed. He's clearly well-read, a samaritan, and interested in culture. He's got an unexpected attitude towards satire, however, which he calls "a luxury of literate middle-class people" and suggests that some people are interested in satire because they like "the feeling of being pissed off."

Maybe it's a useful kind of venting. But it's not productive. It has no ideology behind it. It's not really interested in social change. At the Lampoon, we liked to laugh at any injustice, or laugh at death. Nothing was sacred. That's different from saying that satire is inherently useful. Second City had a liberal idealism that one might associate with Chicago and progressive politics. They had a belief that "Gee, if we just all work hard enough and hope hard enough, we can make meaningful social change." There was more cynicism at the Lampoon. It was more along the lines of "We're all fucked." Usually, satire is intended for the people who agree with you.

The Rachel Aviv essay ("Fat Fiction") suggests that most fat characters in fiction are exaggerated or cartoonish,and that few realistic examinations exist. Aviv shows that fat characters are always either gluttons or dieting, either loving themselves despite the view of society or hating themselves for it, etc. Essentially, that characters like Falstaff or Ignatius Reilly or Judy Bloom's Blubber are defined entirely by -- and their fictive lives are centered on -- their fatness. Though Aviv doesn't expound* to the same degree, her argument is essentially the same as one made about the African American characters of Modern novels in Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark. I suppose this is part of the powerlessness of a minority state of being -- you are defined by your state, and so defined in opposition to a majority. (And I guess I include cultural norms in that majority status, because while there are probably more fat people in America than there are "regular"-sized people, I don't think we think of ourselves that way.) In literature, if not in life, fat folks are fat first.

* Sorry.