As Seen on TV: Provocations

AS SEEN ON TV

AS SEEN ON TV

PROVOCATIONS

LUCY GREALY

Contents

YOU ARE HERE; A MAP TO THIS BOOK

AS SEEN ON TV

NERVE

MIRRORINGS

WHAT IT TAKES

FOOL IN BOOTS

THE COUNTRY OF CHILDHOOD

MY GOD

A BRIEF SKETCH OF MYSELF AT FOURTEEN

WRITTEN IN FOUR VOICES FOR THE HUNGRY MIND REVIEW ISSUE ON REGIONAL WRITING

THE STORY SO FAR

THE RIGHT LANGUAGE

THE PRESENT TENSE

TWIN WORLD

THE GIRLS

THE YELLOW HOUSE

A Note on the Author

By the Same Author

YOU ARE HERE; A MAP TO THIS BOOK

Sometime around my junior year in college, a year when I was particularly earnest in my desire to know the meaning of life, and a year when I had just enough education behind me so as to inform and direct but not yet temper or tamp my zeal, it occurred to me that rather than spend my time trying to find the answers, it might be more worthwhile, or at least worth the change in scenery, to focus on the questions themselves. I'd been reading a book on theoretical mathematics (don't let that fool you; I can barely add and subtract and I can't multiply past 3 x 7; reading books on theoretical mathematics is my way of overcompensating), and for the first time I understood the abstract meaning of an equation; the information on both sides of the equal sign are equal. Of course the concrete aspect of this had been unsuccessfully forced upon me for years, so much so that the abstract meaning of it eluded me until this one particular day while reading in the college coffee house. Before, equations, particularly algebraic equations, had seemed a torture of the Inquisition genre, where the assumption was that simple terror and complex physical suffering would uncover the truth. All equations were, mostly, about how stupid I was, and the journey from one side of an equal sign to the other, from 3n to 25, from the question to the answer, was a deeply murky crossing completed successfully only by blind groping and luck.

But the sudden simple truth of the matter, that in essence and in fact the answer was already present, startled me. I had to look up from my book at the others sitting innocently around me and wonder if I should go tap someone on the shoulder and ask if it was true; you mean that the information on one side of an equal sign is the same as what is on the other side of an equal sign, but stated in a different form? I'd always been so linear about it before, thinking in terms of an exacting narrative, a process of answering Sphinx-like questions that made no sense. To see an equation as a whole unit, however, was a uniquely different experience; it was no longer a progressive mystery, but a sublime statement about how the question and the answer are distinguishable from each other only by form, that 15 is 3n; the same thing said in different ways. Before, my questions about life were like large bowls I filled as best I could with fragmented answers I picked up along the way. Now, however, life itself was the answer, and my job, as I saw it, was to start finding the questions worthy of it, equal to it. The obtuseness of my repeated verbal pleas with the universe to surrender its meaning became immediately apparent; of course there is no grammatically correct answer, or logical answer, or even a purely emotional one.

Martin Heidegger, in What Is Thinking?, suggests that intelligence, rather than being the assertion of what is known, is like an arrow piercing continuously into the unknown, and that it can only be of value when treated as something that provides us with ever greater stores of ignorance. Jacques Lacan also felt (along with many poets and mystics) that the 'real' is what cannot be said, and that our apparent selves are simply the detritus of what we do say. In Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp says he would rather risk sounding bumbling and foolish while trying to say a true thing than to sound smart while speaking in well-ordered platitudes.

These essays are the leftover evidence of my asking questions in various forms, and I also like to think of the essays as questions themselves, questions that focus on trying to perceive and experience the already present answer, life itself, as openly as possible. Necessarily, because it's impossible to occupy all possible forms at once (is that what enlightenment is?) the forms here vary widely. I wanted to know what I would find if I asked my questions in a very prescribed, precise way, as well as what is to be found from letting sentences open up and wander, as well as what is created when disparate topics are layered one upon the other.

Many of these essays were written at the request of anthology editors, all of whom allowed me great leeway; some are the twisted results of magazine editors' requests and were written for money, though most of my magazine pieces get killed because I get carried away and then can't bring myself to neuter the results; and many of these essays I wrote simply for the pleasure of the act. Though the accents in which these questions are asked span the frontal lobe, it's my hope that the voice they are asked in remains, if nothing else, and even when foolish and sputtering, earnest.

AS SEEN ON TV

So, for reasons that will become obvious, I've changed a few identifying details in the following anecdote. It all started with my sitting at home feeling ignored one afternoon, when the phone rang. It was a producer at a certain daytime talk show. I don't watch daytime talk shows with any regularity - I don't actually watch TV with any regularity because I don't have cable which means, in Manhattan, that I don't have any reception. When I do get near a TV - in hotels, when I visit my mother, when I visit my friend Stephen's house - I watch it with great hunger and amusement. The so-called real shows are my favorites, like that one where people with gunshot wounds and pit bull bites and knives in their heads get rolled into various ER rooms around the country; or that I-just-happened- to-have-my-camcorder-on show in which planes crash into the audiences at military air shows and circus elephants run amok and toss innocent bystanders into the air, or actually, come to think of it, not-so-innocent bystanders because they were participating in the public humiliation of the elephant by watching it in a circus and thought that this culturally imperial activity of parading around interesting 'things' from the provinces for their own amusement was suitable entertainment for their kids, and come to think of it those people at the airshow, I mean, what kind of entertainment is that, showing your kids how glorified it is to fly a military plane whose original purpose it is to kill people anyway and then thinking it's a big tragedy when they crash into the audience and kill people, even though those weren't the actual dead people the designers of the plane had in mind; or that show which I don't really like but watch anyway because sometimes it's the only 'real' thing on, that show about the cops.

But daytime talk shows; no, I'm sorry, I just can't watch those no matter how desperate for TV I may get. The level of reality channeled there is just too depressing, the reality of what a big bunch of losers we all are. But my disdain of daytime talk shows doesn't mean I don't know about the various daytime talk shows. Stephen, for instance, watches them with great relish, and sometimes I am, well, sort of forced (my word) into watching them. And James, this guy I used to go out with, he loved them too, and I kept finding myself, on dates, having to discuss issues that had been aired on these shows. All of the issues, it seems, concern interpersonal relationships, and are about the various ways in which we cheat on, are turned on by, don't understand, are misunderstood by, and generally don't get on with but are willing to be, after being long lost from, reunited with each other. Though I've heard rumors that some of the 'better' talk shows tackle (their word) important issues, I have yet to actually see this happen. Or maybe the issues are important; just because I don't want to sleep with obese people and have hurt my obese mother's feelings because I don't want to sleep with obese people doesn't mean that, if I were to parse the situation carefully enough, there isn't an important issue being presented.

So, though I had never watched the show the producer who called me produced, I had seen enough Today on X we will be discussing X promo spots to have a sense of the show. I had the vague recollection that it was one of the 'important' shows that tackled 'big' issues. The issue dujour was physical suffering, how people were able to survive and come out better people for having gone through some form of horrendous physical suffering. Now, not my physical suffering; no, the producer (a woman, perky sounding, young, blond, and skinny sounding) didn't want me to talk about my own physical suffering, something I'd already talked about ad nauseam on my very own number of talk shows (though never this particular talk show) in a deluded effort to sell my book to all those serious readers out in the audience. No, this show was about other people telling their own horrendous suffering stories, and this one guest, my guest, one of six guests (the other guests had suffered horrendously because of things like, though not exactly like, being crashed into at military air shows and gored by righteously outraged elephants), his horrendous suffering was that some nut had kidnapped him, tortured him, and then tried to bury him alive. It sounded like a nightmare, even just in that one short sentence. And after it was all over, while he was recuperating in the hospital, he happened to read my book about my own horrendous physical suffering and now I was his hero. I was such a hero and he was such a vocal fan about how I was his hero that the producer called me up and asked if I would secretly come on the show to surprise him. After all, she pointed out, he's been through so much. It'll be a beautiful moment, she said.

So, because I am a good person and because I was in an I-don't- get-enough-attention mood, I agreed and the next morning a limo was waiting for me outside my apartment. This was unfortunate because my landlord happened to see me getting into the limo and it just so happened I was late with my rent. Even though it was obviously not my limo, the very act of getting into a limo in order to be delivered to a TV studio doesn't jibe with the matter of one's rent being late. Any jury would convict me based on the evidence. Ever since I'd been on TV all of my friends - and my landlord and the student-loan people and my brother - thought I was rich and that I should give them money, and I'd discovered it was tiring and fruitless to explain the reality of how, even though I was an author who'd been on TV, all that meant was that I earned as much money as any low- to mid-level secretary without the medical benefits or retirement fund or paid sick days or the pretense of job-security or the interesting possibility of being sexually harassed. The only thing that made the limo remotely OK was that it was actually a super stretch limo, which meant that we, well, I mean, he, Angelo, my limo driver, who later on the way home asked me out on a date but I turned him down because I was still freaked out over what I haven't told you about yet, had to take turns really wide and so block Midtown traffic. This gave people a much-welcomed excuse to honk their horns and glare righteously at us, all of which pointed to the fact that the limo was so long as to be ridiculous, and I tend to think the act of being ridiculous is by itself a redeeming act, except, of course in the cases of military airplane pilots, congress, and people who refuse to spay/neuter their pets (and don't think I don't know these activities overlap).

Limos used to be sure signs of celebrity, but now they are just crass. The truth is, I thought they were crass even when they were sure signs of celebrity, but no one was listening to me back then. Doctoral students in cultural theory and cultural criticism programs around the world have written many a thesis on the limo, its tangled web of signifier and significants. They've also written many a thesis and many an article (whole books in fact) on daytime talk shows. I have to confess something here; I love reading cultural criticism. I think it is very entertaining, and since I don't watch TV, I think I deserve a little entertainment now and then. My friends think I am nuts; they don't understand why someone would willingly read books with sentences like 'Ultimately, the surface meaning system means that the system of veneration, the process of succession of valued human identities, is more important than what anyone individual may represent.' They just don't get what a hoot that sentence is, how much it tickles me, and at the same time they don't get how incredibly tender and meaningful I find our pretentious and idiotic attempts to sound like we know what we're talking about. Take this essay for example, the one I'm writing right now and the one you'll be reading in another now; I mean, I started the whole essay with the word So, and since then I've been relentlessly vernacular, interrupting myself and going off on tangents and including extraneous information, all of which makes this essay the embodiment of exactly what I was taught not to write in high school. Back then, it was all about making a statement and then supporting it, about trying to sound smart, like you knew what you were doing, what you were thinking, what was important and why. Ha. The original purpose behind the early cultural critics (German and East European intellectuals that came to America after they got booted out of or voluntarily left Fascist World War II Europe) was that even while they were using the most smart-sounding (or dumb-sounding, depending on your stance) language to explain themselves, what they were actually trying to say was not just how meaningless such formal structures were (the idea of how an essay should be written, for instance) but that the true meaning of such structures were hidden, and that the 'true' meaning often lay in how the meaning was hidden. You might think it's a good idea to write a formal essay and sound smart, and it's not a bad place to start from, but what's also happening is that you're being taught the value of neat, containable ideas, which is a total sham because the truly interesting (and radical) ideas are usually rather sloppy and run-on, and unless you learn (and no one is going to teach you this) how to be sloppy and run-on in a genuinely honest and productive way (which is almost impossible, let me tell you), then you can only continue to interact with the 'structures' (whether it's an essay or a limo) in a way that's never going to get beyond the popularly accepted meaning of them, which, if you believe these guys, is a false meaning anyway (false in that the accepted meaning - like that the best essays are neat essays - pretends to be the whole truth when it's actually only a part of the truth, which is worse than being openly false), and it's also exactly what the so-called power structure would like you to keep on doing, because if you don't get beyond the initial meaning of a form or structure you can't question it, or challenge it, in any serious way. It's intensely political stuff, and all about power: who has it and how they get to keep it It's not just who gets to be driven around in the limo and why, but why we care in the first place, and why we think getting into a limo and going on TV means that you should have enough money to pay your rent on time.

A big problem I used to have with ideas like this is that they sounded so Dr Evil, that there was this 'they' who were living in a bunker in Colorado and planning to