I am venal and glib and too clever by half.
My daughter was just involved in the Sears Festival, an adjudicated presentation of youth plays from area high schools, and we showed up on the night that the awards were to be presented. When my husband and I entered, we saw her with some friends and asked how the plays went that evening. Her boyfriend told us that the first play of the night was really strange: A person would come out and start telling a monologue about how he was feeling and then a dancer would appear and start interpreting what he was saying. The lights would go down and then up again, and then there would be another monologue, and another dance, and so on and so on. Zach and the other kids were trying to be respectful and not laugh, but the whole thing was overly serious and melodramatic, and they were especially put off by the fact that it was written by the performers-- it seemed manipulative and self-important. When the last monologue started, the music became even more ethereal and bordering on the satirical, and just when Zach could hardly stop himself from laughing, something happened that made him "feel like a total douchebag": a girl in a wheelchair came out to do the final dance, spinning and turning, and the entire audience was on their feet by the end, a mix of tears and smiles. When the awards were then presented, the Adjudicator announced a special award of merit for the brave young lady who inspired such a moving work, and when she rolled onto the stage to accept the award we could see she was not some pretty teen who had been in a tragic accident as I had been imagining: this was a small and twisted girl, obviously someone who has spent her entire life in the high tech wheelchair in which she now proudly received her certificate. I understood what Zach meant by feeling like a douchebag…and yet, if the play wasn't all that good, does the presence of tragedy mean you're a bad person if you didn't like it? Was that award even appropriate, or was it a bit condescending? Was that certificate the highlight of the young lady's high school career, or is she bombarded with a constant stream of people acknowledging her bravery for dealing with the crappy hand she had been dealt? I really do hope that the play and her participation in it and her dance and its recognition were pure and meaningful experiences for her, just like I hope my own daughter benefitted from her experience with the Sears Festival.
And that brings me to David Rakoff: Does it make me a bad person that I didn't love Half Empty, even though I know that he died last summer? I appreciated that it was read by the author-- he was obviously a wonderful storyteller and I am not surprised to learn that he had a presence on public radio. And that's the thing about his voice-- it sounded more like a performance than a friend confiding in me. Rakoff is funny and intelligent, urbane I guess, exactly like a gay Jewish New Yorker who was born an Anglo-Montrealer might sound; measured and slightly bored, his voice cracking on cue at the wriest bits. As for the writing, it's wonderful, really; not quite memoir, but first person essays nonetheless.
In “Isn’t it Romantic”, Rakoff explains why he didn't like the musical Rent: For a bunch of would-be artists, the characters in the musical are never shown making art. Unlike Rakoff himself, and even the playwright who created Rent, they are also never shown paying their dues or working at crummy minimum wage jobs in order to support their dreams, and indeed, they decide to stick it to the suits by refusing to pay their rent from then on. As Rakoff notes:
". ..hanging out does not make one an artist. A secondhand wardrobe does not make one an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, nor even HIV - I hate to say it - none of these make one an artist. They can help, but just as being gay does not make one witty… the only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.”
I believe that Rakoff paid his dues and suffered for his craft and in the end pushed out art-- and Half Empty is so well-crafted that I admired the words and the sentences and each essay, but I didn't love them. In another essay, Rakoff is introduced to a socialite-type at a party and the hostess mentions that the two guests could have a lively conversation at some point. Looking him up and down, the socialite purrs, "Oh yes, I'm sure we could have all sorts of bitchy fun." Rakoff smiled at the time, a polite Canadian at heart after all, but in his essay explains that he is never intentionally bitchy or catty or gossipy-- and was that what I was expecting, just like the shallow socialite? Was I disappointed that his observations were piercing and smart but never cruel?
I heard the quote I started this with while walking along, and it struck me as my chief complaint-- Rakoff comes off as venal and glib and too clever by half-- and I hurried home to type it so I wouldn't forget it. It wasn't until I was looking at the impressions of others here that I saw someone had the entire quote:
“I am the furthest thing from a do-gooder. I am venal and glib and too clever by half, I know, but the thrill of the most brilliantly quicksilver aperŅ«u is no match for the self-interested high I get from having done someone a good turn. You'd think I'd do more good turns as a result, but there you go.”
It seems uncharitable of me to have remembered that quote out of context. I'm sure that if I had met Rakoff while he was alive, I would have liked him, and the world is certainly diminished by his absence.
The final essay, “Another Shoe”, is an account of Rakoff's second cancer scare and its treatment, and of course that was a poignant experience, listening as I was to him tell the tale from beyond the grave. The title, Half Empty, refers to his philosophy of the positive power of negative thinking : one should hope for the best but prepare for the worst; don't be afraid to leave the house but know where the fire escapes are in the movie theater; expect nothing and you'll never be disappointed. After serving him well in the variety of experiences described in this book, it proves no match for a recurrence of cancer:
“The best-laid plans, one's most fastidious contingency strategies have revealed themselves in the cold light of day to be laughably inadequate, no match for the happenstance that seems of late only to promise death, mayhem, poverty, flood. And here you are, having spent all that time protecting your home from the oncoming elements only to find that it has been shored up with crackers."
Poignancy aside, I'm going to take a chance and assume that David Rakoff is not perched in the heaven that he didn't believe in, hoping that I'm going to award him a special certificate of merit just because his personal tragedy is attendant to my experience of his art. I hope that doesn't make me a douchebag…
This is a very good book in my opinion, although a 3 star experience, and I am looking forward to listening to another collection of his essays that I have cued up next.
