Getting It

There’s been some investigation here in the DJ comment spaces as to the merits and demerits reference-heavy shows like Family Guy have earned by being such gleeful coked-up cultural magpies. You’ve got to be of a certain age and cultural experience in order to “get it.” How this all relates to art, poetry and novels esp., is that there’s a line the author has to (or not has to, but rather can) walk between making those references clear and accessible to as many readers as possible, a), and b) using those references in a canny, clever way. Because I will make a sub-assertion here and say that these references are of use to TV shows, novelists, and poets only insofar as they are used in unfamiliar, unexpected ways. That’s where the humor or the art comes from after all; that’s the accomplishment.

It occurred to me sometime yesterday that this issue of access is similar to an aspect of the world Infinite Jest creates. (Infinite Jest for those who don’t know is an unsummarizable tome of just top-notch contemporary fiction, with dozens of plotlines and 1,079 pages if you’ve got a 1st Edition hardcover like I do.) There’s a vocabulary to the text that you’re asked to use without understanding it. The Incandenza boys – and the Incandenza family’s one of the focal points through IJ – make reference to “the Moms”, and for awhile there at the beginning, we don’t know if that means there are 2 moms in a socially progressive household or what. We learn that the Moms is Avril Incandenza, of course, soon enough. But over and over the novel includes us via this method of making its characters use invented personal codes and vocabs; there’s a Group using its own Group language, and we’re included into their world by eventually getting the lingo down. “To have one’s face demapped” is metro Boston slang for dying. The male member is known as a “unit.” “To hear the squeak” is to be threatened, targeted, or actually assassinated by an agent by the A.F.R., a radical group of Quebecois separatists, all of whom are wheelchair-bound, are sneaky when assassinating, and have squeaky wheelchairs.

It’s distinctly post-postmodern for this reason: the Group using the term or the lingo represents an Other. But through continued assertion and development and explication, really, the reader and other characters too are able to vault over the differences that divide the Groups from each other and the reader from the writer. Shows like Family Guy are very funny, but it and shows like it are just on another scale altogether. The shows and their audience, big as it is, still only represents a small slice of the larger populace. It’s still just one Group. It lays out its jokes and references in a rapid-fire way and hopes for the best. And it’s really really funny if you’re in that Group. Because it’s just an animated TV show, it doesn’t have any interest in including those people who might not be getting it. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But say that Seth McFarlane wanted to make sure everyone was getting it: he’d have to do adjust his approach to such a degree that in no time he wouldn’t be doing a comedy at all. He’d be doing an animated late-20th, early-21st Century anthropology show about US popular culture. It makes me wonder what a post-postmodern comedy would look and feel like. I want to say Arrested Development but I’ll have to think about that.

*

It’s 1:42 PM on my birthday. I spent the hour from 12:15 PM to 1:15 looking at Jon’s scrapbook, looking through old boxes of cards and letters, trying to find a letter Jon had written me when I was in Oregon and he was in Chicago attending boot camp during his Navy stint. I always tend to use my birthday as a time to look at what I haven’t accomplished yet. Today this took the form of thinking of all the letters I could have written but didn’t. I wrote him back, I’m sure I did. But now I hear something in his signoff – “Feel free to write anytime” – that I didn’t before. I only have the one letter. He wrote it at 11:30 PM after having risen that morning at 3:30 AM. What strikes me when reading the letter is how simple and routine it is: this is what we eat, this is what we do, this is, that is, this is. He does come through when he wishes he could lift weights—no weightlifting during boot camp due to the chance for injury and a squandered human investment—and also when he wishes he could shave his head, which he’d been doing for years well before the Navy. On the whole it’s the kind of letter that you find at the beginning of a written correspondence. I don’t think it’s very dissimilar from the first few letters new pen pals exchange. There’s another self to everybody that comes into being on the page, and there’s another type of relationship that’s sketched into being when you begin a correspondence. I am saddened to think that that correspondence with my brother remained brief—that the complex core person he was wasn’t accessible to me We weren’t letter-writers – not to each other, anyway. We weren’t great placers of phone calls. We weren’t the type of brothers to stay up late with each other and have great times and get drunk and finally spill in all sincerity how much regard each has for the other. Logistics and geography are largely to blame for this. But so am I.

People surmise that when something like this happens, the unexpected will set you off into grief. I haven’t experienced that. Rather, whenever I have been set off it’s been either with a very conscious decision to confront something—in this case, I looked at the scrapbook—or else there will be a very clear connection between what I hear and what I experience next. Kristin Kate, for instance, recently lost her cat Justin. Once he beat his psychosomatic alopecia, meaning he liked to lick his fur clean off due to general anxiety—Justin turned into a fine and noble creature. This is your story, Kris, and I don’t want to tell more of it than I should. But when it came time to put him down, she was able to hold the cat in her arms as it happened. Hearing her tell this story nudged the exact same nerve that controls my Jon-response. It didn’t matter that it was a cat. It was a loss. It was a new absence. She said something I will never forget. Holding Justin when he went to sleep made her realize: “There was something huge making this cat alive.” It was there and then wasn’t. This indistinct, I dunno, aura that derives from the actual biorhythms of the cat’s breathing and vitals and all of the medical information, sure, but also there was an intersection I think with the knowledge we would have that the cat’s alive. The life of something or someone would then seem to be this center of an X in which one bar of the X is the fact of its living and the other bar is our awareness of that living.

But there was something unexpected that fed into this afternoon. There’s a small hill in our backyard where in good weather we all play badminton over a hot pink net. That’s one of the most recent memories I have of him. He’d made a show of psyching himself up, stutter-stepping in place and chanting a anthemic tune similar to the Mortal Kombat theme song, only very loud and over-the-top. He had a term for this process – getting “pumped up” or “going into overdrive.” Only when he really needed a point would he go into overdrive. “That’s it, alright.” And he’d go all into overdrive, throwing his racket in the air in complicated twirls and warping his expression like that of a WWF superstar with no patience left. Overdrive. Are you getting it?