Cultural Ephemera: The 1960s Generational Divide in Art Linkletter's "We Love You, Call Collect"

I'm repurposing the use of a term ("ephemera" meaning printed matter not intended to exist for long--which seems to be the most popular use according Google searches) by going back to the word's primary use in order to get at a phenomenon that intrigues me--and possibly others, which is "something of no lasting significance" (according to Merriam-Webster).

When I combine the term with "cultural," I refer to those things that momentarily struck a culture's zeitgeist, for whatever reason. The reason is usually the fascinating part. Why did it strike the culture's fancy?

Here's an example. Art Linkletter (Wikipedia) was a talk show host on a variety of radio and TV programs. You sometimes hear people still using Linkletter as the butt of a joke--as if the meaning of the joke should be clear--although its use is rather dated if not obscure to most of society now.

Art's daughter, Diane, [video clip of Diane in a commercial with her father] jumped to her death in 1969, out of a six-story window [further info on her death]. Art said it was due to an LSD flashback although people like Bobby Darin blamed Art's parenting (his song "Baby May") as Art became staunchly opposed to drug culture and figures like Timothy Leary who said LSD was safe. John Waters did a short film about Diane featuring his famed drag queen, Divine [It's early John Waters--the dialogue jumbled]. David Foster Wallace refers to it in his novel, The Pale Kings.

Art released the following spoken word audio, "We Love You, Call Collect," which peaked at #42 on Billboard Top 100 and won that year's Grammy Award:

Supposedly, there's a rebuttal from the daughter ("Dear Mom and Dad") though I couldn't locate that.

The power of this ephemera is not how it delivers its art, which is nigh nil except for its moving last line, but how it captures the generational divide of its time. One can extrapolate both perspectives.

Note that even in Linkletter's excoriation of Leary, he also praises Leary, which makes Leary smile (see video linked above). Whatever else one may have against Linkletter, he was talented at engaging people, even in anger.

Review: The Legacy of David Foster Wallace

The Legacy of David Foster WallaceSamuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou, editors
University Of Iowa Press

Herein lie a scatter-shot of essays that try to limn the legacy of David Foster Wallace, from the personal to the academic.  The strongest pieces shoot between those lines.  Josh Roiland gives insight into not only what makes Wallace's journalism unique, but also where it fits in the canon*.  Ira B. Nadel traces Wallace's use of the footnote from his college essays** to Infinite Jest and later stories.  Both are fascinating and informative.***  

Interviews with Wallace and with Moody**** fill in details of Wallace's accomplishments.  Don Delillo, Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody, and George Saunders offer personal anecdotes on Wallace.  Dave Eggers extols the virtues of IJ.

Two essays were laced with twice the recommended daily allowance of academic fiber*****.  No doubt, I will return to these on rereading Wallace.  A few pieces are too heavily polemical in their demands that readers read in one way, but they did point me to this website which reads through IJ in a summer, Infinite Summer. 

While not as strong as the David Foster Wallace interview volume (reviewed here), this volume has essays sure to intrigue writers, academics, and fans of Wallace.

* Finding contradiction is always a pleasure as it shows our humanity.  Roiland points out that Wallace's journalism, contrary to other essayists, did sprout from Zeus's head.  See also note****.

** noting how the style is similar to Infinite Jest

*** Buried in an essay on collecting DFW's literary remains, the writer briefly discusses DFW's marginalia habits.

**** In Rick Moody's interview on editing IJ, in which we learn that certain anecdotes about editing IJ were myths.  See also note*.

***** Being incontinent, some readers may want this.

“I don’t do as much nonfiction as I used to as a writer, and I think that part of it is that I don’t have the stomach or heart to say even truthful things that might hurt someone’s feelings.”

David Foster Wallace, from Conversations with David Foster Wallace

University Press of Mississippi, 2012

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Review: Conversations with David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace, from Conversations with David Foster Wallace
University Press of Mississippi, 2012
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David Foster Wallace said "that no truly interesting question can be satisfactorily answered within the formal constraints (viz. magazine-space, radio-time, public decorum) of an interview,” which is and is not true--a Schrodinger’s-cat paradox that plays itself here in Conversations, his fiction and his life.  Wallace describes his life/artistic aims:

“[T]he standard arc that just about everybody goes through, in that my interest in intellectual and cerebral and clever stuff--although it’s not like I’m not interested in that [emphasis mine]....  [T]he older I get the more what’s magical about art becomes for me the idea of stuff that’s moving.”

This both neatly describes what this volume manages to capture:  both Wallace’s arc of life and that of his art--their transformation yet their paradoxical uniformity.  This conveys that sense that Wallace is completely honest yet he honestly pulls aside to say that while what he says is true, it’s not completely true, either.  Another instance of paradox occurs when Wallace began wearing bandannas in Tucson while getting his MFA:

“ ‘because it was a hundred degrees all the time, and I would perspire so much I would drip on the page.’  The woman he was dating thought the bandanna was a wise move.  ‘She was like a sixties lady, a Sufi Muslim.  She said there were various chakras, and one of the big ones she called the spout hole, at the very top of your cranium. Then I began thinking about the phrase ‘Keeping your head together.’  It makes me feel kind of creepy that people view it as a trademark or something--it’s more a recognition of a weakness, which is that I’m just kind of worried that my head’s gonna explode.”

After reading this interview collection, one gets the sense of play present not only in his fiction but also his life.  There was no reason to continue wearing bandannas except as a game rule, which also adds significance to the meta-narrative of his life:  “my head’s gonna explode.”

You also witness Wallace’s high-degree of fidelity to reality yet while observing more such rules--a form that’s only necessary within a game construct, which becomes persuasive within the construct but not necessarily so if removed from its context.  An example is visible in his statement about suicide:

“All this business about people committing suicide when they’re ‘severely depressed;’ we say, ‘Holy cow, we must do something to stop them from killing themselves!’ That’s wrong.  Because all these people have... by this time already killed themselves, where it really counts....  When they ‘commit suicide,’ they’re just being orderly.”

This is genius insight into the mind of the depressed, but it only holds true if there actually is no way out.  Who is this paradoxical man that is David Foster Wallace?  Conversations captures the essence of Wallace in a way that no biography or reading of his fiction could ever quite match.  Imagine Wallace’s own ingeniously structured Brief Interviews with Hideous Men transposed on his own life.  The final interview after Wallace’s suicide with those who knew him well brings a kind of closure and fuller understanding.  This book is recommended for writers (to see previous quotes, see David Foster Wallace label) and for any reader who has enjoyed Wallace’s work.

David Foster Wallace on play in fiction, part 2

“The stuff that I cut my teeth on, the stuff that I really like to read, struck me as being challenging but also just fun as hell.  I think a lot of avant-garde stuff in the U.S. has lost touch with the fun.”

David Foster Wallace, from Conversations with David Foster Wallace

University Press of Mississippi, 2012

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David Foster Wallace on play if fiction, part 1

“I hate... those books where you get halfway through and you get the sense that the author is so stupid that he thinks he can fool you into thinking that the book is really sophisticated and profound just because it’s difficult.  It’s an epidemic in academic writing.  And it happens about half the time in avant-garde writing.  And it’s the thing I most fear as a writer because it’s the thing I most hate as a reader.  And I’m sure I’m guilty of it sometimes.”

David Foster Wallace, from Conversations with David Foster Wallace

University Press of Mississippi, 2012

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David Foster Wallace on people watching for fiction writers

“Fiction writers tend to be oglers.  They tend to lurk and to stare.  They are born watchers.  They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow.  Almost predatory. This is because human situations are writers’ food.  Fiction writers watch other humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks.”

David Foster Wallace, from Conversations with David Foster Wallace

University Press of Mississippi, 2012

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David Foster Wallace on the writer's job to notice

"[W]e notice... more than we notice we notice.  A particular job of fiction is not so much to note things for people but rather to wake readers up to how observant they already are, and that’s why for me as a reader the descriptions or just toss offs that I like the most are not the ones that seem utterly new but the ones that have that eerie ‘good Lord I’ve noticed that too but have never taken a moment to articulate that myself.”

David Foster Wallace, from Conversations with David Foster Wallace

University Press of Mississippi, 2012

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David Foster Wallace on Brief Lives of Hideous Men and gender relations

“[E]vents... are being related to [a hostile] interlocutor... so that there is a blur between how much of the stuff is involuntary and how much is the rhetoric of the presentation, because as far as I can see the one thing that most of these men have in common is an unconscious genius for self-presentation and self-defense.  They try to anticipate how they are going to be interpreted and head it off, which seems to me to be not all th[at] different from ordinary discourse between the sexes.”

David Foster Wallace, from Conversations with David Foster Wallace

University Press of Mississippi, 2012

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The sentence

Wallace’s response when read one of his sentences about a disgusting situation:

“I don’t know where that came from, but I do know that I tried to read that out loud once and will never do that again.”

David Foster Wallace, from Conversations with David Foster Wallace

University Press of Mississippi, 2012

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David Foster Wallace on how to introduce play into fiction

“Some people are neurologically disposed to like very pomo, avant-garde--let’s-just-play-games-here stuff--and some people are disposed to need stuff that is grounded and plausible, and once you can persuade them of your ability to do that, you can more or less do what you want.”

David Foster Wallace, from Conversations with David Foster Wallace

University Press of Mississippi, 2012

Amazon

David Foster Wallace on the basic problem in all writing

“[I]n a weird way, there’s really only one basic problem in all writing--how to get some empathy with the reader....  It’s really not completely different from the question, how do you get a reader to inhabit the consciousness of a character who, say, isn’t a hero or isn’t a very nice guy, and feel that person’s humanity and something of his 3-D contours while not pretending he’s not a monster.”

David Foster Wallace, from Conversations with David Foster Wallace

University Press of Mississippi, 2012

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Another humorous intervew line

SCHECHNER:  I read before that you were a fan of Cynthia Ozick’s.  That is surprising to me; you seem so different.

WALLACE:  We’re both politically active Jewish females.  I don’t see the problem.

David Foster Wallace, from Conversations with David Foster Wallace

University Press of Mississippi, 2012

Amazon

Humorous NPR interview

WALLACE:  There’s a whole, very heavy debate to get into here.  There are schools of thought, some which I find very persuasive, that argue that there really is no meaningful reality outside of language.  That language creates in a very complicated way what we call your reality--that would be your poststructural....

GOLDFARB:  One of the reasons that I did not complete my PhD in philosophy--I just didn’t want to have that conversation for professional purposes.

David Foster Wallace, from Conversations with David Foster Wallace

University Press of Mississippi, 2012

Amazon

On Endings and Closure

David Foster Wallace, discussing endings, states, “[T]he truth... [i]s usually a tummy thing: [D]oes this feel real?  Does this make me want to puke?  Does this seem fake or contrived or not?  And there’s not a lot of cerebration, at least for me, going on.... I didn’t want to wrap various plots up neatly within the frame of [Infinite Jest], I think, largely because a lot of commercial entertainments that I grew up with use that and it’s not entirely real.  It’s a kind of falsely satisfying way to wrap up various things that happen.”

This comes up again and again with overly intellectualized examination of texts where they want to throw out some aspect of narrative, yet this line of thinking conceals many errors in reasoning.  1) Fiction is not real.  2)  Any way you slice a life, it is artificial.  3)  Writers must arbitrarily cut a life up as listing every detail in a character’s life would be tedium and readers have to lead lives of their own.  4)  If you regard as true Socrates' axiom, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” then not examining the lives of fiction character is also not worth reading, i.e. A reader should examine the lives of characters in a text.  Therefore, a writer must write/cut/edit a life meaningfully.  He does this so that characters learn something or so that readers learn something.  The art is in how one ends a text, not whether.

Raymond Chandler is often quoted from his introduction to Trouble Is My Business:  "The ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing."  This is often used to justify a lack of closure.  Chandler, on the other hand, was combating the attitude that the ending was everything, that "relative insignificance of everything except the final denouement."  All of the narrative is critical, including its conclusion.

While I initially began reading Lemony Snicket’s thirteen-book sojourn or series because of Daniel Handler's charming voice and the charm of his characters, I stayed with the series less because of the style (which was losing charm) or the plot (which quickly grew repetitive) than because of its central mystery that was implicitly promised to be revealed.  Snicket’s avoidance of actually intellectually engaging with the mystery he created turned me off.  Humans are curious.  The ending did not pay off for the work built up.  Maybe his inconclusive conclusion would be worthy of a short story, but it’s hard not to feel cheated when the ending is an emotional and intellectual cop out.  If Snicket ever writes a proper ending, I’ll read it, but I have no plans of reading Snicket’s work in the future until he repays his readers’ investment.

Ages and ages hence, writers may gather at the morgue to witness the autopsy of fiction.  They may learn that, no, it wasn't the movie with the pipe in the kitchen and not the big picture with the letter opener on the veranda.  No, it was the writer with the reinvention of the wheel on the word processor.

David Foster Wallace on the magic of art

“[T]he older I get the more what’s magical about art becomes for me the idea of stuff that’s moving.  And I don’t necessarily mean sad but a very complicated emotional resonance as opposed to an intellectual or kind meta-artistic resonance.”

David Foster Wallace, from Conversations with David Foster Wallace

University Press of Mississippi, 2012

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"If you operate... from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction's job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough.  The other half is to dramatize the fact that we are human beings."

David Foster Wallace, from Conversations with David Foster Wallace

University Press of Mississippi, 2012

Amazon

"[E]very two or three generations the world gets vastly different, and the context, in which you have to learn how to be a human being, or to have good relationships, or decide whether or not there is a God, or decide whether there's such a thing as love, and whether it's redemptive, become vastly different."

David Foster Wallace, from Conversations with David Foster Wallace

University Press of Mississippi, 2012

Amazon

"[W]hat fiction and poetry are doing is what they've been trying to do for two thousand years:  affect somebody, make somebody feel a certain way, allow them to enter into relationships with ideas and with characters that are not permitted within the cinctures of the ordinary verbal intercourse we're having here."

David Foster Wallace, from Conversations with David Foster Wallace

University Press of Mississippi, 2012

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David Foster Wallace on estranging the familiar

"[O]ne of the things the artist has to do now is take a lot of this familiarity and remind people that it's strange."

David Foster Wallace, from Conversations with David Foster Wallace

University Press of Mississippi, 2012

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