September 2010

Michael Largo is the author of "Final Exits: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of How We Die", "Genius and Heroin: The Illustrated Catalogue of Creativity, Obsession, and Reckless Abandon Through the Ages" and "God's Lunatics: Lost Souls, False Prophets, Martyred Saints, Murderous Cults, Demonic Nuns, and Other Victims of Man's Eternal Search for the Divine". I was curious about the human being behind these unique books, and recently got a chance to ask the author a few questions.

Levi: I've enjoyed three of your books, but I don't know the first thing about you. Can you please fill me in on who you are, and how you became a writer and an alternative encyclopedist?

Michael: I became a writer because books captivate me. Gripped not only by words, or by certain authors’ lives, I like the very idea of what a book is. From earliest memories, I always had a book to read and at least a few in waiting. I read, and still do, anything and everything. But there were certain books that became better, or at least more interesting when I learned of the authors’ backgrounds, how they lived, wrote, and died. Hemmingway, London, Poe, Keats, Thoreau, D.H. Lawrence, Colette, Kerouac -- no matter the consensus on their works, all had intriguingly perilous biographies that hooked me when I was a teen: If you lived intensely, it might be possible to one day write a book people would read. Many have this idea; however, what turns a reader, even an avid one, into a writer is something different. I believe it has to do with the desire to defy death. With books, you can read the ideas of a writer who lived long ago, know of his or her life, and in theory, make them immortal. To become a writer I obviously had to write and keep writing even when everyone said to give up, get a regular job. Like most writers, I have a huge file of single sheet rejection letters. Persistence has to be a writer’s most consistent virtue. I wrote my first poem after reading e. e. cummings, and was deceived into thinking it was simple to break all the rules. I grew up in Staten Island, New York; back when it was a countrified suburb, and I had a relatively “normal” childhood, one that any kid of a New York City homicide detective might have. I got a B.A. at Brooklyn College, back when Clarence Major, Peter Spielberg, absurdist playwright Jack Gelber, and John Ashbery were teaching writing there. I had a chapbook of poetry, Nails in Soft Wood (Piccadilly Press) published in 1975, and a novel called Southern Comfort (New Earth Books), a few years later. I lived in the East Village during the 70s and 80s, was heavily involved in the small press scene, and edited a few lit magazines, most notably New York Poetry. I got a grant from the New York State Council of the Arts for fiction. I kept publishing or posting poetry and fiction when the Internet sprung up. (Here’s a sample of one in The 2River View.)

Not the New York Times too!

A recent essay titled Plato's Pop Culture Problem, and Ours by Princeton professor Alexander Nehamas reinforces a tiresome cliche about the great Athenian thinker that has been spreading, meme-like, for years. I'm talking about the idea that Plato advocated censorship of poetry and music.

Nehamas mainly uses Plato as a foil in this New York Times opinion piece about video game censorship in California, an article that begins with a strained attempt at relevance:

This fall, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on a case that may have the unusual result of establishing a philosophical link between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Plato.

The case in question is the 2008 decision of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals striking down a California law signed by Gov. Schwarzenegger in 2005, that imposed fines on stores that sell video games featuring “sexual and heinous violence” to minors. The issue is an old one: one side argues that video games shouldn’t receive First Amendment protection since exposure to violence in the media is likely to cause increased aggression or violence in real life. The other side counters that the evidence shows nothing more than a correlation between the games and actual violence. In their book “Grand Theft Childhood,” the authors Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olson of Harvard Medical School argue that this causal claim is only the result of “bad or irrelevant research, muddleheaded thinking and unfounded, simplistic news reports.”

The issue, which at first glance seems so contemporary, actually predates the pixel by more than two millennia. In fact, an earlier version of the dispute may be found in “The Republic,” in which Plato shockingly excludes Homer and the great tragic dramatists from the ideal society he describes in that work.

We live in a world suffused by the awareness of Evil. Not so much "evil" as described by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

morally reprehensible, sinful, wicked; arising from actual or imputed bad character or conduct

but rather a notion of complete, essential and immutable Evil -- more like the definition in The Catholic Encyclopedia, which begins:

Evil, in a large sense, may be described as the sum of the opposition, which experience shows to exist in the universe, to the desires and needs of individuals; whence arises, among humans beings at least, the sufferings in which life abounds.

This is Evil with a capital E, a singular thing, a characteristic that is applied to humans but seems to originate beyond nature and beyond the bounds of normal life. Like a villain's superpower, this Evil is not a compound object but rather a basic element. It can be defeated but it can't be destroyed. And this Evil walks among us. It has a human face.

1. We told you about artist Malcolm McNeill's Ah! Pook Is Here, a vast extended collaboration with William S. Burroughs, two years ago. Great news -- the work is going to be published by Fantagraphics.

2. Sean Michael Hogan was one of the five winners of a writing contest we held on this site in 2003. He's an excellent writer, and also an opinionated sports nut, and he's combined both inclinations into an e-book, It's Not Just A Ballgame Anymore. Here, also, is a short story by Sean about the frustrations of being a writer.

Congratulations to up-and-coming indie novelist Tao Lin for scoring a full-page review -- not necessarily a positive review, but a riveting one -- in yesterday's Sunday New York Times Book Review. Nice break!

I'm not workin' the NYTBR beat anymore, but I will pay attention at moments like these. I've been watching Tao's unusual career from the beginning (when I reviewed his first book and called him "faux naif"), and I've appeared at a couple of literary readings with him. His performance style, like his prose, is highly deadpan. The nervous laughter in the audience comes during his awkward silences, just as it does in his novels.