Why Puppet Essays

Reading some of the posts on this blog, I can’t help but think that there is some over-analysis of a documentary that is as uncomplicated as its title: Puppet.

This is a documentary about puppetry. It seems that the documentaries mentioned to compare to Puppet are apples to oranges. The word, “puppet” is a ridiculous word (a thought I had so many times while watching this movie) comes from the French word for “doll” not the French word for puppet, which is “marionette.”

So if I had to compare this documentary to another it would be Marwencol (available on Watch Instantly on Netflix). That film is a biopic of a man who photographs dolls. The dolls, at times, do seem silly but the art created from it seems so real, so moving. The underlying theme is that we’re seeing something that we normally think of as puerile, adding life to it, and making it into an art. The story in that documentary is this man’s incredible art born out of rehabilitation.

We’re not told the history of dolls or photography of dolls because we don’t need it. Adding some of the interesting history from experts to Puppet was absolutely necessary to me because I was like Soll whose “initial reference point was the Muppets and Sesame Street,” (and Topo Gigio).

Another question that was asked is: How does the form fit the content?

Suggesting that all documentaries cannot essay is a harsh blanket statement. While there are more documentaries being produced using conventional methods, that doesn’t mean some of them can’t essay. It suggests to me that because something is informative, that is, presenting us with just facts, that information presented to us in a certain way can’t change the way we think or the way we feel (which is kind of what I saw in Reality Hunger), especially if the “facts” juxtapose ideas of how we see a marginalized art and a man who experiences it first hand.

Because Soll is like me, I can see how he was the “puppet-master” in manipulating this information. We get the expert advice we don't know about puppetry. It was all about puppetry, and not other arts. We don’t need to see other marginalized arts in the discussion of this film. This film already has a lot going on it without confusing it with more arts or experts.

Soll didn’t show us Dan Hurlin’s life outside of puppetry because the only reactions that we needed were from the performing arts realm. If we had met people in Hurlin’s life talking about their thoughts on his puppetry, we could have easily dismissed it.

Neither did we need to see Soll, the creator, any more than we already did the same way the audience of the production Disfarmer didn’t see Hurlin, the creator. We saw an interpretation of an artist who did an interpretation of an artist. Hurlin didn’t photograph Disfarmer. He used his own art as did Soll.

It’s really quite simple: Puppet essays because it changed the way I thought about puppetry. It changed the way I saw how it was performed, how it’s received, and its place in society. That, to me, is the actual triage of this film.

Not dispuppeting.

I was so excited about Puppet after having seen the trailer. The film didn’t disappoint me – I am always beguiled by the unfolding artistic process, independent of the medium under exploration. See also Lost in La Mancha, Looking for Richard, or a whole slew of mediums examined through the lens of reality TV: Project Runway, Top Chef, Work of Art, and the long-defunct Project Greenlight.

In his review of the first Project Greenlight film, Roger Ebert raised an interesting point via his old sparring partner:

Gene Siskel proposed an acid test for a movie: Is this film as good as a documentary of the same people having lunch? At last, with "Stolen Summer," we get a chance to decide for ourselves. The making of the film has been documented in the HBO series "Project Greenlight," where we saw the actors and filmmakers having lunch, contract disputes, story conferences, personal vendettas, location emergencies and even glimpses of hope.

For Ebert, this film did turn out to be as interesting as the documentary about it, but with Puppet, most of us (all of us?) will never know if the performances of Disfarmer were as good as the documentary about its making. Such is the ephemeral nature of theatre, or any live performance, really—certain concerts have grown epic in my memory, for example, based on whatever odd/interesting thing happened onstage. Through this alchemical-seeming process, I switch from being just an audience member to a witness.

Anyhoo. What does all that have to do with David Soll, or Puppet, or Dan Hurlin, or Mike Disfarmer?

To be honest, I’m not completely certain. But it’s interesting to me that in our discussion of the film yesterday, and in the other blog entries below, and in my blathering above, we seem to be projecting an awful lot onto the film: what we think it should be doing that it’s not, what it reminds us of, what implicit thing(s) it seems to be about. On one hand, whatever—this is what people do when they talk about anything. But on the other hand, isn’t this curiously akin to the experience of watching puppetry, as described in the film? It’s almost as though this film, like its subject matter (puppetry, Disfarmer the man) is open enough to contain all sorts of projected associations from the viewer (which is why we looked at Scott McCloud's book before our discussion).

I think that alone is one kind of argument for the degree to which the film essays. Isn’t it grim when the essay under discussion yields nothing in the way of conversation? A silent, collective shrug is the worst kind of damnation, I think. (Note: I don’t think that applies to anything we’ve discussed this semester.)

But here is another argument for this film as an essay, from this interview with David Soll:

And what I was hoping to do was not just make it a lot of context for this guy [Hurlin], but have Mike Disfarmer, Dan Hurlin, and the form of puppetry as three intertwining threads, which have these overlapping themes of disappearance and revival. All three experience issues of disappearance and legacy and marginalization, and I was hoping to find a way to put those three in dialogue with each other.

This strikes me as a fundamentally essayistic impulse, and I am not bothered by David Soll’s lack of screen time or apparent invisibility in the film. As someone in our class pointed out, David Soll edited this film as well as directed it, and he co-produced it too. If we want the project to fulfill the criteria of being present with the author/creator’s idiosyncratic mind—well, it is. What else could the filmmaker’s choice of subject matter be, if he is his own producer? That Soll largely absents himself from the final project in terms of voice over or screen time is a stylistic choice and not a defining characteristic of the project’s status as essay. Finnegan is just barely in “Silver or Lead” as a first-person narrator, for example. Similarly, the inconspicuous visual language of this film is a stylistic choice, a decision to get out of the way of the material, to let it speak for itself.

I’m talking myself into making a pronouncement here. It’s this: To me, Puppet is unequivocally an essay.

Before our class discussion, I was on the yes side of undecided in that matter, so I’ve tipped into more definitive territory. But the real question is whether this is the best essay we’ve discussed this semester, all mediums being equal. I tip on the no side of undecided in that regard.

If we weren’t writers, but scientists – OK, fine, there are scientists among us, too – maybe we would have a neat and tidy rubric to consult, through which we could indicate whether we think each essay succeeded or failed on a series of agreed-upon measures. (This is top of mind for me because the head of a program where I work showed me a really beautiful and exhaustive analytic document she developed to determine her students’ learning outcomes – a three-judge panel quizzed each of 23 teams and cued in their responses to 11 learning outcomes in real time using clickers – !! – and now the program can tell which of those outcomes is struggling to gain traction in the classroom, etc.)

I AM SO DIGRESSIVE TODAY. Sorry.

In conclusion, it’s not so much that Puppet falls down for me in terms of its essaying (although I wanted the threads Soll speaks of entwining above to collide more spectacularly), but that in decision making of the sort we’re being asked to take on, I tend to rely to some extent on my gut, and I have been more in thrall to other projects we’ve looked at.

A different reading

I, too, must admit, there were points at which the film attempted to wax too poetic, and waned for it's audience.

And, also, I'm not sure how much a documentary can "essay" either. Especially a prototypical documentary with basically only one (polemic) dissenter.

What interests me in this film is the notion of puppetry as a marginalized but apparently still-vibrant art form. Cyrus Console called poetry "a possibly sustainable art form". Although very different, I wonder if puppetry might fall under this category. With a rich and varied history, we are shown the various cultural responses to the proprietors of the uncanny. Puppetry is, of course, like many art forms, even our own, being kept alive by those passionate about it, and those curious enough to buy a ticket. Similarly, advances in technology (although one of the puppeteers is very distrustful of technology) and design seem only to serve and challenge this form of art to evolve. 

More interestingly, I think, is the meditation the audience is asked to perform: what is the value of puppetry? What is beautiful about an inanimate object being brought to life through the choreographing and cooperation of multiple, visible human beings, obviously devoted to their art? Can we dismiss puppetry as easily as David Sefton, that is, asserting that it is more interesting to watch his dog run around the yard than to watch him, although that doesn't make it "more beautiful" and it "certainly doesn't make it art." It seems problematic to have such a reductive approach to the art form, and art in general, especially as we trudge ourselves out of the (post)postmodern era. Do I trust an art critic to define art for me, simply because of his credentials? No. Moreover, the analogy doesn't fit the bill. The fascinating thing about puppetry, which is pointed out time and again, is that the puppets are lifeless without human beings, and dependent upon their hands, bodies, and mutual interaction to highlight the smallest motions in life.

Like one of the puppeteers mentions, there is a growing renaissance for many ancient art forms that seem in danger of extinction* - often these are forms that rely on patience, innovation, cooperation, etc. Things that force us to slow down in an over-stimulated world. I myself bought a quill and ink last week, and it has taught me to appreciate the physical act of writing in a way that I had heretofore been unable to consider. And I can now somewhat, in an oblique way, come a little bit closer to understanding why writing, and the alphabet itself, have often been considered sacred in ancient cultures.

I guess what I'm saying is, I'm not sure this film, if it is capable of essaying, is about puppetry. It's a case study within a case study, and it challenges us by asking us to make - somewhat uncomfortable - judgments about what we consider "art" is capable of being in the 21st century. In this documentary, the construction of the puppets is minimized - that is, puppetry as art is presented as a live act, rather than the puppet itself as art. I'm not sure how the puppet really differs from sculpture, or the live act differs from dance, other than that the medium is reliant on humans using an inhuman object to heighten the subtleties of human motion.

I'm not sure that this film is actually that far off from Schlansky. It presents a whimsical approach that harkens us back to childhood, and challenges notions of form and genre. Could Soll have done better? Probably. Is any work of art ever "finished"? 

*This is an unexplored moment in the film, when Dan Hurlin ventures the possibility that the Disfarmer production is actually autobiographical.

Note: Although it is long, I encourage everyone to read the linked review. It is quite interesting, and I think, relevant.

Watching puppets breathe, seeing myself wanting more.

At first, I started to fall in love with David Soll’s Puppet. I admired its convergence of cultural history, behind-the-scenes exposé, and biographic information about a tornado-swept photographer. But as the film pressed on past the twenty or twenty-five minute mark, I had more and more trouble staying in love with the film. I kept thinking, puppets are cool, unique. Where else am I going to find out about them? But the problem with Soll’s film, I realized more and more sitting in front of the television, was that I didn’t find out enough.

I certainly felt that the experts interviewed gave enough of a historic and cultural background for puppetry, but I wanted more. I listened to expert after expert wax historic about how puppetry and puppets are the red-headed step-child of theater, but I never heard any of them put puppetry in the context of other art forms. The Lion King, Being John Malkovich, and the like were mentioned, but they were mentioned as other forms that are beginning to feature puppets. Not other art forms that relate to puppetry. It was as if puppetry evolved completely isolated from other art and culture.

Yet the film lets me know that this wasn’t quite the case. Earlier on in the film, an expert tells me that puppetry has improved the lives of Americans in eras of conflict. The 1930s, with its economic and social dislocation, was a time that needed puppets until after World War II. Similarly, the chaotic social and political moment of the ‘60s created a socio-cultural need for puppets. This idea of the social need for an art form, this close tying of artists and the public en masse, engages me. It takes artists a bit out of control of their work and puts them at the whim of history in a way. Though I’m not sure it’s entirely new, I do still like it. It makes me reconsider that I may have known this, in some sense, of visual art but more importantly, that I rarely grapple with this fact when it comes to essay writing and essayists.

Nevertheless, this analysis of American societies need for puppets in various decades is one of few instances in the expert commentary that’s very enlightening. Aside finding out that the form has ancient roots in almost every culture, I’m given fairly thin information. Again, I’m reminded again and again of how much of an underdog puppetry is, how its only subjugated to the world of children in the States. I wished that more of this time was taken to interview folks outside of who you might expect but who could give a broader scope of insight. What if Soll had interviewed a famous pantomime actor or a choreographer from Joffrey or the Merce Cunningham company? What if I got to hear what a philosopher specializing in theory of mind had to say? What if Soll had interviewed theorists like Brian Rotman or Andy Clark? What if I got to hear from a cultural studies expert who didn’t necessarily write a book about puppetry but still had a vantage on it? It’s not hard for me to rattle off a rather long list of folks I would’ve rather heard from than those that I did. Certainly they serve a function and, in my mind, serve it well for the first half hour or so of the film. But the overall thrust of the expert interviews almost never diverged from a rather easy-to-predict path of informed support.

There is perhaps one voice of dissent among the chorus. David Sefton, former executive and artistic director of UCLA Live, gets a few minutes late in the film to voice his critique. He tells us how he feels that part of the problem is that too many people have been doing it over the past fifteen years. And slightly more poignantly, he questions the view that puppets can make banal movements and activities more profound. “It’s no more significant if a puppet does it or if I do,” Sefton says. “Look, it might be a bit more fun to watch my dog run around the garden than me, but it makes it no more significant, and it certainly doesn’t make it art.” Sefton’s argument might be a bit of a straw man but at least it’s a bit dissonant from the rest. At least he questions the gravitas given again and again to puppets. And, for me, it’s not that I dislike puppets or that I necessarily dislike what most of the experts are saying about puppets, it’s just that it hits one note and stays there. I want at least nuanced voices of approval and probably a bit more active questioning of the form as well. Perhaps the point is that enough people question puppetry in the States, so the film wants to wave the banner for it a bit. That’s fine, but I just think that there are much deeper and broader ways of doing it.

There are even moves that Soll makes as a director that could’ve been capitalized upon more. One of the most captivating parts of the film for me were moments of slightness, quiet moments when I was able to watch the puppeteers work. To watch the grace, uncanny rapport between a puppeteer’s hand, a camera trigger, and a puppet’s body. Somehow it all gets elided and is visually acceptable. My heart hits the bottom of my stomach when I watch the puppeteers of Disfarmer rehearsing with an incomplete, armature version of Mike Disfarmer. The rapport between puppeteer, puppet, space, and motion hit a lyric fluidity that engages me and proves so much to me about the ability of puppetry as a form. Perhaps more than the intellectual through-line of expert interviews.

And, of course, there’s also the thread of Dan Hurlin and his production of Disfarmer. The thread did give me a behind-the-scenes look at the world of puppetry. It also allowed me to have a few rather ecstatic moments of awe while watching puppets move. But even with these noteworthy aspects, watching Hurlin and his colleagues prepare for opening night felt a little stayed. Something I’ve seen before. We start in medias race on openings night then jump back three years and work our way forward. The form is typical of documentary and is surprisingly out of sync with Disfarmer itself. Hurlin seems to have a much more artful way of portraying Mike Disfarmer’s life than Soll does of capturing Hurlin’s production. Hurlin employs a more impressionistic, almost magical realist tack while Soll stays in the typical documentary mode.

Perhaps Soll doesn’t need to parallel Hurlin’s aesthetic. Maybe this kind of mimesis isn’t needed. But I do think that something more is needed in its place, if not. I’m simply not invested enough in Hurlin and his colleagues to feel the emotional weight of whether or not Disfarmer is going to succeed after opening night or not. Instead, I’m more so waiting for the form to finish. I can sense that I’m supposed to be invested in a way that I’m not. And more than that, I can feel the way that I wished that Soll would’ve taken some cues from Hurlin. The Mike Disfarmer puppet gets smaller and smaller, he becomes more and more paranoid that every sound he hears is a tornado, but the accretion in Hurlin’s show doesn’t translate to Soll’s film. Neither does the mystique that Hurlin and his colleagues portray in their show. Instead, we find out perhaps too much about Mike Disfarmer’s origins. Soll goes the easy route of using Hurlin’s research for Disfarmer as a foil to give me biographical information about Mike Disfarmer.

Maybe this is a “two pony” reading of Soll’s Puppet; perhaps I’m trying to make his film into the film I would’ve made or just the film that I wanted it to be. Though, I’m not so sure. It feels a lot more like I saw the potential in Soll’s subject matter and even in the first twenty or twenty-five minutes of his film but both the content and the form fell flat for me soon after. I wanted to love it a lot more than I did, and perhaps all of these comments are my way of trying to fill a gap of creative work that I felt was left undone after I finished the film.

Soll-Searching

If Puppet is an essay, it’s a braided one with three strands: the creation--from conception to delivery--of puppeteer Dan Hurlin’s production; the history of puppetry; and the life-story of a withering small-town photographer. But Puppet isn’t an essay, it’s a straight-forward documentary: informative not speculative, objective not subjective, rigid not amorphous.

Puppetry is a transgressive, marginalized artistic movement turned out by its visual and performing arts family. One expert in the film explains that puppets are used at whim by American culture when a throw-back to simplicity is desired, in times of conflict, and during “economic and social dislocation.” Puppet shows, for instance, do not warrant critics who specialize in the field; it is the theater and dance critics who are relegated to cover the performances. We see this idea of the transgressive marginalized in the life of Disfarmer, the town photographer, “the ultimate insider” documenting his neighbors’ major life events, but also “the ultimate outsider,” allegedly ousted by his family, an alcoholic recluse who one former acquaintance notes he had never seen converse with another human being. Hurlin, as mentioned in the film, came of age in small-town New Hampshire to a “Mayflower family” that was as “‘in-crowd’ as you can get,” but, as a visibly gay child, was simultaneously an outsider. It is their inborn disenfranchisement that bonds Hurlin to Disfarmer and both of them to puppetry: each one navigating societal norms. But this transgression is embedded solely in the content; Soll adds little, if anything, to the conversation.

We literally hear Soll’s voice a handful of times throughout the film: once when he asks a puppeteer what he does for a living, and again when he asks a puppeteer if he’d like to read the New York Times’ review of the show. Of course we shouldn’t have to actually hear the author’s voice to sense his presence--we might be able to sense his presence on the other side of interviewees--the unheard dialogue. But among the many fervent talking heads in Puppet, the viewer gets no sense of Soll. Instead we get a more authoritarian presence deviating from the very essence of Essay. Experts like Eileen Blumenthal provide us with gobs of historical and cultural insights resulting in a 74-minute long video research paper rather than Soll’s reflection on “disappearance and revival”--his own words to describe the film’s themes.

Puppet’s composition fails to complicate or question--it just tells. Visually it is unremarkable save for intermittent splicing of Hurlin’s fully realized production throughout the film. The sequencing is chronological and methodical. Opening with the creation of the featured puppet’s many heads, we are subsequently provided with a lengthy history of the art form beginning with the Cro-Magnon period. Next we’re present for the first rehearsal and alerted to the fact that Disfarmer will be at least two years in the making. We can assume then that this will, in large part, be a journey piece--we will see this production carried through to fruition. We receive background about Mike Disfarmer--connections are made between his disintegration and that of the form of puppetry thus returning us to the talking heads, back to rehearsal, to the talking heads again, the story of Disfarmer, repeat, repeat, repeat.

While screening Puppet, the documentary queen in me could not help but be reminded of Douglas Keeve’s 1995 film (and one of the top-grossing documentaries of all time), Unzipped, about the development of fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi’s fall ’94 collection. The film is framed by scenes of Mizrahi at his neighborhood bodega, pouring through a Women’s Wear Daily to find the review of his most recent fashion show. A similar scene plays out in Puppet as we witness Hurlin read an underwhelming New York Times review. Unzipped, like Puppet, is part creation story and part rebound chronicle, an attempt at redemption from a naysaying media outlet. However, unlike Soll, whose only “initial reference point was the Muppets and Sesame Street,” Keeve was a successful fashion photographer and Mizrahi’s former lover, which, according to the New York Times, only “heighten[ed] Mr. Keeve’s acuity rather than compromising his perspective.” There is no evident intimacy--or passion--between Soll and his subject.

Keeve does not rest on Mizrahi’s laurels--he utilizes conceptual and structural tactics. Title cards are used throughout, directly addressing the viewer: a hallmark of the essay film according to film theorist, Laura Rascalori. Vignettes seemingly unrelated to the creation of Mizrahi’s collection break up what could be a typical linear progression. At one point, Keeve leaves the screen black to emphasize the comedy in a Mizrahi voice-over. He uses grainy black-and-white super-8 film in the opening to provide a sense of historical footage, later transitioning to a sleek 16 mm black-and-white, but astutely switching to color when Mizrahi’s textile creations see the light of day. The cinéma vérité style of Unzipped is described by one critic as “a conceit. Many scenes appear staged, and a great deal of cutting-and-pasting has been done in the editing room. Genuine spontaneity is at a premium, and everyone is aware of and playing to the camera.” One might ask that critic how anyone who knows they’re being filmed could not play to the camera, but Keeve “couldn’t care less about the ‘truth’...I was more interested in capturing the spirit and love in Isaac and in fashion...I was not interested in making a textbook about fashion.” Puppet is, in great part, a textbook about puppetry.

Unzipped, in the tradition of Essay, breaks the rules of “legitimate” documentary or non-fiction by planting itself somewhere between fact and fiction, and by effectively merging reason with sentiment. Puppet, on the other hand, resides comfortably in fact and orthodoxy and, perhaps as a result, lacks any kind of introspection from its creator. With that said, I doubt if Soll’s intent was to produce an essayistic piece. He accomplished what I suspect he set out to do: convince the layperson of the cultural significance of this other art form.

Another Day, Another Memoir Controversy

Let's add Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea to the list:

The CBS News report questioned, in particular, a central anecdote of the book that was as dramatic as it was inspirational: in 1993, Mr. Mortenson was retreating after failing to reach the summit of K2, the world’s second highest mountain, when, lost and dehydrated, he stumbled across the small village of Korphe in northeast Pakistan. After the villagers there nursed him back to health, he vowed to return and build a school.

The CBS report, broadcast on “60 Minutes” Sunday night and citing sources, said that Mr. Mortenson had actually visited Korphe nearly one year after his K2 attempt. Mr. Mortenson said on Sunday that he did reach Korphe after his climb in 1993, and that he visited again in 1994.

But he added a disclaimer in an interview with The Bozeman Daily Chronicle, saying that while he stood by the information in the book, “the time about our final days on K2 and ongoing journey to Korphe village and Skardu is a compressed version of events that took place in the fall of 1993.”

I feel like the discussion comes up a lot, but I don't think it's ever come up on this blog: what do we make of the false memoir, the "compressed version of events" that create a better pacing/story at the possible cost of fact? Personally, I'm at a point where I basically read everything as fiction anyway: I don't necessarily feel like I get more out of a story based on it's truth value.

With that said, as a writer, I like the idea of the "truth" as a formal constraint: how can I write this story in a way that engages a reader without having to compress time/make shit up? I think dealing in fact forces us to find innovative ways to work with what we have, to push on our stories and memories in more challenging ways.

In short, I like to write nonfiction because it's more difficult, but I wont hold it against you if you fabricate as long as you do so in a way that interests me as a reader.

What's your take on the false memoir?

David Shields = Straight Gangster

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, author David Shields is straight up gangster. To call something you produce a manifesto is like posting up, which means standing your ground wearing your colors. In this case the ground is Essayland and the color is the essay, at least as he sees it. And let’s face it, in bookstores, on campuses, and in people’s home libraries the essay is still a second-class literary form, or the “fourth genre.” In fact many people wouldn’t even refer to essays as essays, but as nonfiction, a term that mirrors and reinforces the supremacy of fiction, sort of like when you categorize a person as nonwhite. In his book Shields argues for the dissolution of copyright laws and genre. He is a proponent of writing that is driven by thought rather than narrative. He likes brevity. He loves doubt. He quotes Mobb Deep.

The book is organized into twenty-six sections labeled with the alphabet in its order. Each of these sections is given the name of the subject it will engage, and contains numbered bits that go to six hundred eighteen. There is a frame and it all seems very organized, but the ideas push against this order. One of the strongest threads that run throughout the book is uncertainty. From the very first page in the “a” section titled “overture” number one starts, “Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art.” It is not an attempt to smuggle, but “an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle.” It is not more reality; it is “more of what the artist thinks is reality.” In fact, there is an entire section titled doubt, which seems somewhat strange since doubt is so heavily present throughout the book. The section titled “memory” might as well have been called the unreliability of memory, or doubt II. Even in the very next section titled “thinking” number four hundred twenty four reads: “If I had the slightest grasp upon my own faculties, I would not make essays. I would make decisions.”

Even with all this doubt, Shields seems certain that the essay is the superior literary form. This may seem counter to another thread that runs throughout the book, which is that genre should be obliterated, and that the constraints that separate forms are illusory, but just turn to the “o” section titled “contradiction,” for a possible fix. No? Okay, maybe look to number three hundred eighty six: “‘Essay’ is a verb, not just a noun; ‘essaying’ is a process.” Certainly doesn’t provide certainty, but at least for me is a notion that makes essaying much more exciting than crafting rigid narrative fiction, even rigid narrative memoir. Or four hundred thirteen, “Maybe the essay is just a conditional form of literature—less a genre in its own right than an attitude that’s assumed amid another genre, or the means by which other genres speak to one another.” So I correct myself, Shields seems certain that essaying is what writers should be doing, or what writers should be filled with and motivated by.

Shields wants Reality Hunger, to be a collage, or mash-up, or remix of ideas. A collage is an assemblage of different forms, for example a visual collage may contain newspaper clippings, a piece of cardboard box, a lock of hair, and the disparate forms crash into and inform each other. The fragments may have overtones or cultural codings attached, or they may be selected for their texture. In this text the fragments, although gathered from a diversity of sources, seem somewhat homogenous visually, syntactically, and thematically, which doesn’t disqualify them as collage, but leaves me a tad wanting. I wouldn’t call it a mash-up or remix, because that implies a fluidity and continuity present in most music, at least the hip-hop that Shields mentions in the text. When reading the book I often found myself needing to take breaks, but that is to be expected with aphorisms, which take time to savor and unpack.

At times, the text becomes repetitive, seems less like circling an idea than merely repeating. Number two hundred sixty: “Good poets borrow; great poets steal.” And number two hundred sixty one: “Art is theft.” These two seem so similar and in such proximity that they can be combined: “Good artists borrow; great artists steal.” When parsed the aphorisms in this book get at a core of truths, the question for me then becomes how many of these numbered sections are necessary to get the point across? My thought is that if you have a section titled “in praise of brevity,” perhaps shaving away some fragments that really syntactically similar or approaching an idea from a similar angle could be cut.

I think Shields achieves something else, which is perhaps not the most important part of an artistic manifesto for the world, but it certainly affects those participating in an artistic tradition: the creation of solidarity and unity among young essayists, which is why I’ll reiterate that David Shields is straight gangster. To my understanding not only does this mean posting up, as in writing something unabashedly and standing by its colors, but also helping to bolster a sense of community for those who essay.