Peripathetic, page 16
But it doesn’t matter what I think. The job grinds to a halt. I feel sorry for my editor, whom I am just starting to build a relationship with. She still has a job, but it’s no longer the same job in the same department. I don’t even know what her new job is. Imagine going to work in the same office, with similar colleagues, but your tasks have now completely changed, and not of your own volition either. That must feel weird. I want to reach out, but feel that there may be unspoken boundaries I should not cross. We’ve never even met! Perhaps this is just the way it is.
There’s a bit of an online ruckus, at least as far as these things go. Some people express solidarity, saying it’s a shame. I expect the whole thing to be forgotten fairly quickly, at least as far as these things go. It’s a freelance job, where I sign my name on a contract each month, the equivalent of taking on a month-to-month lease in a private rental. What did I expect? The gutting is concerning, but online furore seems to be the most I’m able to do.
But it’s often difficult, particularly as a freelancer, to parse or make sense of decisions that routinely occur behind closed doors amongst salaried staff in the arts and the media. A month after the debacle, my editor gets back in touch to say that she is looking for someone to file a book recommendation that month. There doesn’t seem to be much notice either. Although I have the choice to reject the commission, I fear that it might lead to no further jobs after this one. After all, I have no idea what is even happening. I don’t really understand where any of this is heading, or if it is even heading anywhere, and I sense that directly asking my editor would result in an awkward response, since an explanation wasn’t provided in the first place. Is she fighting with higher-ups for the column to stay behind the scenes? I know her department is gone, her job is gone, but …?
Nevertheless, I file my recommendation for the month and post about it on various social media channels as usual. Readers and colleagues seem happy the column is ‘back’, but I have no idea if it is. Is it? Should I begin to look at my list for next month? How much time would I have before the next deadline, at the moment still unconfirmed? Two weeks after the column is published, my editor sends me a cheerful email saying that another department head has decided to keep the column, except I’ll now be working under that editor’s remit. I’m glad and confused at once. Perhaps this is just the way it is. The nature of freelance work is unpredictable and rife with alienation, the future uncertain and perilous and shot through with hope.
clocking out
I went to work and I finished work and I went to work and I finished work and I went to work and I finished work and I went to work and I finished work.
INFLUENZA
i think / um / you know / you know what I mean / i guess / it feels like / yeah but / what if / i feel like / feel like / it’s interesting / i think / um / um / absolutely / totally / sure / maybe this is because / maybe / feels like / i guess / right / incredible to think / if we look at / what if / well / well / i suppose / sort of / kind of / something like / excellent / actually / you know what / i feel like / i think / um / um / um / aah / hahah!
We’re in the year 1955. Acclaimed novelist Vladimir Nabokov is on Canadian TV talking about his book Lolita.
INTERVIEWER: Mr Nabokov, I gather from what you’re saying is that you have no message at all in this book.
NABOKOV: Well I don’t feel like I have any special message, and if you ask me whether my own ideas are those of Humbert Humbert, I would say no. I’ve taken great care to separate myself from him. A good reader notices that Humbert Humbert confuses hummingbirds with hawk moths! Now, I would never do that, being an entomologist.
Nabokov is speaking in his hybridised accent, occasionally locking eyes with his interviewer as he speaks. At odd junctures in the middle of random sentences, his gaze keeps flitting downwards – what is he looking at? His shoelaces, a lock of hair, a crumb? Then the shot pans out: he’s reading off a bunch of index cards! Nabokov, writer of more than thirty books, is fielding questions with pre-written answers.
He hardly shies away from this fact. In his 1973 collection Strong Opinions, he writes, ‘I think like a genius. I write like a distinguished author and I speak like a child. […] The interviewer’s questions have to be sent to me in writing, answered by me in writing, and reproduced verbatim. Such are the three absolute conditions.’
Some might respond to this reveal with disappointment. Surely the great literary Nabokov has the ability to shoot from the hip, his oeuvre evidence of his big, mysterious brain. It would appear natural to expect an artist to articulate a position that’s analogous to their output in a human and less robotic way. But thinking precedes writing, and if we are able to articulate ourselves better in writing it is because we can mull over and edit the things we want to express, a luxury not afforded to speaking.
Nearly seven decades later, we can see that Nabokov lived in an era where the constraints of capital had yet to hit the art and media worlds. There’s a reason why the mid-century period was widely considered to be ‘the golden age of capitalism’, where labour unions were thriving alongside a growing middle-class whose hunger for money, knowledge and leisure was seeing an apotheosis. The Milton Friedman school of thought had yet to become infectious. Unlike Nabokov, today’s writer or artist can barely make those requests, even less so if they are not well-known. An interviewer would most probably laugh in my face, or more logically, pretend to have missed my email, should I ask to see preliminary questions before appearing on a panel.
Still, there doesn’t appear to be more writing exploring the ineptitude writers face when public speaking. Surely it’s a common problem – some writers are bad speakers. It is certainly one of the reasons we choose to write. It’s definitely the reason I choose to write. If I had a choice I’d rather not speak at all. Is it not enough for my writing and art to speak for themselves? I suppose not. The dearth of critical thinking around this topic may be attributed to a prevailing sense of shame: if I’m representing the prototype of the clever writer then it must correspond to the way I present myself in front of a live audience. Instead, there exists a plethora of tips on how to help writers become better speakers. ‘Practice makes perfect’, plenty of self-help texts attest. Some people have made entire careers out of training artists to familiarise themselves with the art of expert entertainment.
Here are some tips I’ve personally gathered through the years:
Speak aloud to yourself enough times in front of a mirror or to your loved ones;
Chew mint or take beta blockers before you’re meant to go on stage;
Command the space. Be aware of your body language;
Breathe slowly and intentionally;
Take half a Valium and a shot of whiskey;
Tell yourself that what you’re saying is a gift to the audience;
Hum repeatedly to loosen your vocal cords;
Find the caffeinated sweet spot between being alert and alarmed;
Channel your fear;
Say what you think is true.
———————
The artist is a symbol of something. We know because we created it. In the now-infamous J.T. LeRoy story, often dubbed one of ‘the greatest literary scams’ in history, Laura Albert initially didn’t intend for her literary ‘avatar’ to make any appearances at all. In fact, when she wrote and published her novel Sarah, about a neglected boy who wants his mother’s love so badly he desires to be her, there was no reason to imagine that the book would become a bestseller. The catharsis that was channelled through writing as LeRoy was enough – it was the only way Albert could allow herself to inhabit, express, and re-conjure her trauma, but away from gazes that could be immediately felt and perceived. Albert’s dysphorias made use of the image of LeRoy as a proxy to render a fictional reality.
What transpired at the beginning was rather lovely, but turned out to be short-lived. Albert-as-LeRoy had already been in touch with cult literary authors such as Dennis Cooper and Bruce Benderson, first through her agent and then via Cooper himself, people who helped her get her writing published in various well-known outlets before Sarah’s release. And even though these figures had never met Albert, some were happy to help her organise launches post-publication, probably excited at the prospect of having discovered a hidden talent. At these, fans arrived and read in LeRoy’s stead, relishing the opportunity to stand in front of a crowd narrating a piece of writing which they so very loved. Albert did press interviews entirely via phone or email. But as the author gained more readers, a public demand surged: even if LeRoy emphasised a pathological shyness as the reason why ‘he’ couldn’t appear in public, it was a non-issue, for fandoms crave seeing talent in the flesh. There was already speculation that ‘he’ was Cooper, whose novels contained troubled teenage boy characters that resembled LeRoy.
We have to see it to believe it. It was under these circumstances that LeRoy was pressured to make a public appearance. The solution was found in Albert’s androgynous, gender nonconforming sibling-in-law Savannah Knoop: this reinvented avatar would read under a table, with iconic sunglasses on, in front of a packed auditorium in Italy to receive a standing ovation afterwards. Albert would be somewhere in the midst at these events too, but in a disguise as well. The duo would operate like this for several years. At a Cannes press conferences for The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, a film adaptation of LeRoy’s second book, Knoop-as-LeRoy would mumble, incoherent, but it hardly mattered: ‘they couldn’t understand what he said, they were just riveted’ by ‘his’ celebrity. Accordingly, even when Knoop misremembered important biographical details, the audience would assume that it was simply part and parcel of a prankster persona LeRoy was in the midst of cultivating. Knoop would also see people they personally knew when they signed autographs in Albert’s stead, but those people never recognised them.
A year after her identity was finally exposed in 2005, Albert recalls in an interview that after Sarah became a bestseller, magazines wanted more photos, even though her publisher had paid to use ‘a photograph of a teenage boy who looked a lot like JT and got permission to run it as the author photo’. ‘I knew I needed to supply a body,’ Albert says.
This entire business may very well be a cautionary tale about projection and expectations. Do artists have to be celebrities before they are respected? How much and how often do we have to offer an image of ourselves in order to satiate a faceless audience’s curiosities and fantasies? As the late multidisciplinary cultural critic Dubravka Ugrešić has written, ‘The aura of glamour is, it seems, reserved for those public activities which create the illusion that everyone has the same access to it’. We can see how the artist’s image, then, forms a part of the cultural mythos surrounding the so-called democratisation of art. Ugrešić continues: ‘A media intellectual will be paid for promoting the illusion that we, ordinary people, think about this or that issue the same way he, the clever one, thinks. […] The media intellectual will have to accept the consequences of media engagement, namely that it is not the message that matters, but the messenger.’
Although it was television that Ugrešić was referring to at the time, the hyper-normalisation of social media has made it such that this type of image transmission has become simultaneously pedestrian and bizarre. It is an unavoidable (and sometimes even unimpeachable) fact: to be an artist in the age of social media is to make your self into a consumable product, so that not only can you shift units, you get to be able to continue to do the work.
On image-centric arenas such as Instagram, YouTube, Twitch and TikTok, as well as text-based ones like Substack and Twitter (it’s really a matter of inclination), some artists are personalities first and foremost: legions of stans providing affirmations in the comments, every word lapped up, gaffes possibly defended to the teeth. Sometimes these figures – if they have gained traction early enough during the platform’s beginnings, as in food writer Alison Roman on Substack – are heralded by the platform itself as an exemplar of how it has ‘helped’ the artist gain new followers and unlock new markets. And now you yourself can do it too! Viewers learn to look forward to new drops, which is not unlike anticipating the next episode of your favourite TV show; relationships and personas are scrutinised just as a TV character’s are. It helps if their friends or partner(s) are other artists, which creates a sense that we are participating in a cinematic universe made up of various players.
What happens next? Even if hypervisibility can bring about necessary change, such as when a celebrity uses their platform to speak out against political injustices or amplify urgent social justice causes, an overabundance of attention – especially if they are just starting out – has the propensity to prevent an artist from flourishing. In some circumstances, artists find themselves cornered: trapped within the very image they have created for themselves, eventually finding themselves caught within a tempest of backlash after attempts at reinvention, inundated not only by their loyal followers but also by once-friendly institutions who may believe that a (market) betrayal has been committed. The work, then, transforms into an ongoing effort to maintain the established image.
It isn’t difficult to see how this is an updated version of the idealised image political actors have used to project themselves outwards in the last century. These are often designed to create a devoted and loyal following so as to maintain power in what Gilles Deleuze defined as control societies, a stage of capitalism that ‘is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed’. When Deleuze figured this out in 1992 however, he had no idea how this was going to pan out over the ensuing thirty years. Maybe he didn’t want to; by 1995 he was dead. Nevertheless, what he had observed has only seen its grip tightening in our algorithm-driven era, particularly as machinations are obscured and complex for the layperson to comprehend even as ‘freedom’ is frequently uttered in the same breath.
———————
‘The audience is on your side,’ a friend told me once via email. I was interviewing her about her writing practice, and I had added a question asking for tips on public speaking, which she is very good at. Of course, I think to myself when I receive her answers. This makes sense. As someone else had told me a year prior, the audience’s role is to learn from us. Why would they want to see me fail? Unless …?
I think about the silences that erupt out of uncertainty, that feeling of being ‘tongue-tied’ that materialises out of facing an audience with different expectations than mine. Even their attire is distinct – surely they did not purchase that vaguely professional outfit in an op-shop, the one they put on before going to see a doctor to get more diazepam prescribed, the one ‘look’ they cobble together for any event that seems remotely ‘formal’. A good failsafe method that others before me have applied is to be ‘quirky’, a way to deflect differing class and race positions by assuming a no-fucks-given, funny Every Man. Just that little bit of zaniness, you know? Make the audience laugh (make them comfortable)! Help them empathise. Alternatively, we can help them relate.
‘Practice makes perfect.’ That peculiar axiom again. I practise in front of a mirror and imagine myself an actor, a piece of advice I receive from a friend who works as a teacher. You’re just preparing what to say to others, to give others the same impression of that self you yourself see within yourself. By acting on stage, I can then most be myself. Some may say I’m suffering from that universal affliction – ‘impostor syndrome’ – but I don’t know who I’m supposed to impersonate. Celebrity mind, main character energy. Doesn’t matter what you call it, the compulsion is the same – to be seen and validated and then what? I’m not an actor. I don’t want to do this.
In Soraya Roberts’ essay on the failings of so-called public intellectuals such as Naomi Wolf, Fareed Zakaria and Jill Abramson, she writes about the inevitable farce that’s usually a consequence from mass expectation: heroes must fall. When artists and scholars are naturally touted as lodestars, assigned an arbitrary value while being put on pedestals and judged around ever-shifting notions of ‘taste’, usually assembled from a coterie of what constitutes an ‘inner circle’ made up of those from the middle and upper classes, slip-ups are bound to occur. As Roberts writes, ‘The public intellectual once meant public action, a voice from the outside shifting the inside, but then it became personal, populated by self-serving insiders’.
‘To be honest, we want them around,’ Roberts goes on. ‘Media output hasn’t contracted along with the industry, so it’s easier to follow an individual than a sprawling media site, just like it’s easier to consult a YouTube beauty influencer than it is to browse an entire Sephora.’ In our now familiar and amnesia-facilitating attention economy, many people would more likely prefer to leave it up to their anointed prophets to help them make up their minds, or at least steer them in a direction that they would prefer to follow. Who is more eloquent, more charismatic, more attractive, more sincere and/ or self-deprecating, held up as a standard for others to aspire to, to mock, to scrutinise, to believe in? When the Greeks, as part of their civic duty, were speaking to the public in ancient Athens, the ones who spoke best and most convincingly had prominent social lives. If they didn’t come from wealth, that was easily fixed: good speaking skills were essential for mixing with the wealthy. In this way, value continues to accrue. And it is here that the parameters can remain shady, which allows for a free market of faith – whoever is most convincing receives the most followers. Edification, adification.
In order to ‘sell’ your work, one has to appear personable in the way that an audience might find endearing. It is a kind of relatability exercise, yet it has to be packaged in a way that gives off a sense of novelty as well. This may not be a conscious act, for it is entirely contingent on how one is perceived by others, how your gestures are parsed and understood, whether you have happened to emerge in the public arena during a particular cultural zeitgeist. One such person, Tavi Gevinson – who catapulted to fame as a fashion blogger in her pre-teens during the late 2000s, and then later through her role as founder of indie teen publication Rookie – lays the conundrum bare in a profile in The Cut:
