Justin,

This is what I’ve come to expect from you — this lev­el trust of gut. It’s one of your best qual­i­ties — both as a writer and a friend. And it’s a qual­i­ty I frankly cov­et for myself. When you write that it doesn’t both­er you to ​“use the same com­put­er to type [your] fic­tions as [you] do to write [me] a note about where to lunch on Sun­day,” my com­mon­sense alert goes off and I get depressed and crawl into a cor­ner where I smoke and drink ice­wa­ter and lament my pre­cios­i­ty. (Both you and I know I could have used the word ​“pre­cious­ness.”)

So I’m chas­tened, but still some quiv­er­ing gelati­nous part of me — say, my knee — wants to main­tain that there’s an ele­ment of com­put­er­writ­ing that some­how eludes analo­giz­ing with writ­ers of the past using the same pen to draft both a shop­ping list and War and Peace Redux. The com­put­er, for me, has always had a busi­ness aspect, or, bet­ter, what the MBAs might call an oppor­tu­ni­ty cost. It seems to pro­fes­sion­al­ize me in ways that dis­gust. It does this by insist­ing, by its boxy gray exis­tence alone, the con­cept that my writ­ing might, will, one day be pub­lic. Now my con­scious mind knows this, my con­scious mind craves this, but I’m not sure that the con­scious mind is the best of all minds, for me, to be writ­ing with. I need to fool myself to write. To tell myself noth­ing mat­ters, no one cares, I don’t care. That the desk and chair I’m describ­ing has noth­ing to do not only with the desk and chair I’m occu­py­ing but with all pos­si­ble desks (escritoires) and all pos­si­ble chairs (Aerons) I might access online. 

Not that the escritoires and Aerons haven’t helped me, but the com­put­er com­pels me toward that help. 

So yes, yes, our con­clu­sion might be the same: the prob­lem ​“is not with the tool but with the user.” But then the very moment I agree to agree, Hei­deg­ger jumps me with his Ge-Stell, or ​“enfram­ing”: the artist makes the tool until the tool makes the artist. I fan­ta­size, when­ev­er I make a mess of my life, that all equa­nim­i­ties and prag­ma­tisms are just tech­no­log­i­cal enfram­ings of a nat­ur­al frenzy.

Here, I’ve searched it up for us: http://​ssboth​well​.com/​d​o​c​u​m​e​n​t​s​/​e​b​o​o​k​s​c​l​u​b​.​o​r​g​_​_​T​h​e​_​Q​u​e​s​t​i​o​n​_​C​o​n​c​e​r​n​i​n​g​_​T​e​c​h​n​o​l​o​g​y_and
_Other_Essays.pdf

This, though, is from The Dis­course on Think­ing:

“Still we can act oth­er­wise. We can use tech­ni­cal devices, and yet with prop­er use also keep our­selves so free of them, that we may let go of them any time. We can use tech­ni­cal devices as they ought to be used, and also let them alone as some­thing which does not affect our inner and real core. We can affirm the unavoid­able use of tech­ni­cal devices, and also deny them the right to dom­i­nate us, and so to warp, con­fuse, and lay waste our nature. 

“But will not say­ing both yes and no this way to tech­ni­cal devices make our rela­tion to tech­nol­o­gy ambiva­lent and inse­cure? On the con­trary! Our rela­tion to tech­nol­o­gy will become won­der­ful­ly sim­ple and relaxed. We let tech­ni­cal devices enter our dai­ly life, and at the same time leave them out­side, that is, let them alone, as things which are noth­ing absolute but remain depen­dent upon some­thing high­er. I would call this com­port­ment toward tech­nol­o­gy which express­es ​‘yes’ and at the same time ​‘no,’ by an old word, release­ment-toward-things.”

In Heidegger’s day I would’ve been too lazy, or too dead, to have typed this out. Thank God for copy/​paste.

The Ger­man for ​“release­ment” (indeed, Heidegger/​his trans­la­tors, John M. Ander­son and E. Hans Fre­und, could have used ​“release”) is Gelassen­heit.

That’s a good old word to repeat while wait­ing for the F Train at 4AM.

“The artist makes the tool until the tool makes the artist” — this is undoubt­ed­ly true, and it com­pli­cates the argu­ment I was try­ing to advance with my per­haps some­what pat exam­ples, but I’m not sure that my entire line of think­ing is negat­ed by the admis­sion that the rela­tion­ship between the user and what he uses is one of rec­i­p­ro­cal mod­i­fi­ca­tion. I don’t share your sense that the com­put­er has an ineluctable aura of ​“busi­ness” about it. Grow­ing up, there was almost always a com­put­er in my house. I can say with some­thing like com­plete con­fi­dence that I was the first of my child­hood friends to ever go online — onto Com­puserve, via a 14400 baud modem that we hooked into the house’s only phone line. I also played a lot of video games as a kid, most­ly on con­soles, because we only had one com­put­er — it lived in the fam­i­ly room — and my father was very wary of any activ­i­ty that might dam­age it (key­boards don’t stand up to pun­ish­ment quite the same way Nin­ten­do con­trollers do). Lat­er, when I got my own com­put­er in my very own room, the feel­ing was not unlike get­ting my first stereo, or, for that mat­ter, my first lit­tle writ­ing desk. What I mean is that it didn’t feel lim­it­ing, it felt free­ing. Here was some­thing that was all mine that I could use how­ev­er and for what­ev­er I want­ed to with­out ask­ing per­mis­sion, wait­ing my turn, or hav­ing some­one look over my shoul­der while I did it. The com­put­er was an exten­sion of the bed­room itself — anoth­er space, this one vir­tu­al, over which I had exclu­sive domin­ion, could per­son­al­ize after my own taste, and which expand­ed the range of work and play activ­i­ties avail­able to me. I’m not sure I’ve ever quite got­ten over that feel­ing. I know so many writ­ers who say that they can’t work at home, so they go to cof­fee shops, libraries, even pay to rent office space — this is a prob­lem I’ve nev­er had. When Aman­da and I got this apart­ment back in Feb­ru­ary it came with a home office. This is prob­a­bly the first time in my writ­ing life that there hasn’t been a direct sight­line to my work­space from my bed. A good thing, to be sure, but it’s tak­en a while to get used to.

None of which is to say that I’m unam­biva­lent about the com­put­er, only my ambiva­lence locates itself else­where than where yours seems to. My last year of high school I spent a lot of time online — in part because I was feel­ing very done with my home­town and in part because bet­ter tech­nol­o­gy made more things pos­si­ble and I was inter­est­ed in see­ing what they were. I IM’ed with peo­ple I could have just as eas­i­ly been on the phone with, I hung around Grate­ful Dead mes­sage boards look­ing for peo­ple to trade tapes with (cas­sette tapes! — sent through the U.S. mail). I down­loaded lots of dirty pic­tures, and I played a mas­sive-mul­ti­play­er online role play­ing game, where you had to team up with strangers you met in the vir­tu­al fan­ta­sy world and fight an unend­ing bat­tle against what­ev­er was around. This, to me, is an exam­ple of ​“the tool mak­ing the user” — I felt it and could acknowl­edge it even as it was tak­ing place — but I’ve switched my ​“user” back in for your ​“artist” because I’m not sure whether the re-mak­ing effect ever extend­ed to my art. If I were writ­ing a mem­oir, I might spec­u­late at length about the effect of the com­put­er on var­i­ous aspects of my life (sex­u­al, social, etc.) but suf­fice here to say that once I got to col­lege, re-sit­u­at­ed in a place and with a group of peo­ple I liked, whose artis­tic and polit­i­cal inter­ests I either shared or adopt­ed, I stopped doing most of the afore­men­tioned online activ­i­ties, because the point of all that shit had been to assuage lone­li­ness and/​or pass time, and now I had places to go and peo­ple to see.

All of which, I guess, is to say, that the com­put­er has nev­er seemed to me to have a devel­op­men­tal role in the way I make or think about my art. Rather, art is — among many oth­er things — the are­na in which I can process/​analyze/​interrogate the role the com­put­er plays in the oth­er areas of my life. Which brings us around to your book. Two of the sto­ries in Four New Mes­sages are explic­it­ly con­cerned with the impact of the way the vir­tu­al and meat­space worlds inform each oth­er. In ​“Emis­sion,” the main char­ac­ter, a drug deal­er, does some­thing sleazy at a house par­ty, which gets con­vert­ed into sala­cious web gos­sip, gunks up his Google-abil­i­ty, and basi­cal­ly ruins his life. Which is tru­ly say­ing some­thing since his life was some­thing of a ruin to start with. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Richard Monomian’s orig­i­nal trans­gres­sion is in any sense redeemed or excused, but as the sto­ry pro­gress­es there is a sense that the pun­ish­ment has out­matched the orig­i­nal crime. Though of course ​“the pun­ish­ment” itself doesn’t seem to be pur­pose­ful­ly deliv­ered — it’s an unplanned side-effect of the report­ing party’s use of the web as report­ing medi­um. In ​“Sent” there’s a kind of rec­i­p­ro­cal feed­back between the vir­tu­al and the phys­i­cal. That novel­la opens with what might be my favorite episode from this col­lec­tion, and one of my favorite pieces of yours in gen­er­al: the his­to­ry of a bed from the time it was a tree in a for­est, hun­dreds of years ago in Rus­sia, tak­en through its chop­ping and carv­ing and gen­er­a­tions of own­er­ship until it final­ly ends up as the ​“stage” for a cheap ama­teur (or ​“ama­teur-style”) porno that gets post­ed on the inter­net, where it’s viewed by an Amer­i­can man­boy of our own era, who becomes so obsessed with the ​“star­let” he watch­es on the vir­tu­al screen that he decides to try and track her down in real life. 

But all four sto­ries engage with aspects of ​“the way we live now.” ​“The Col­lege Bor­ough” is as fine a satire of cre­ative writ­ing-as-aca­d­e­m­ic-dis­ci­pline as I think I’ve ever seen. ​“McDon­ald’s” attempts to resist the total pen­e­tra­tion of our lives and selves by brand­ing language/​ideology: it goes on a kind of hunger strike from the cor­po­rate lex­i­con, and delir­i­um ensues. I love the book, in no small part because it feels so straight­for­ward — not light, per se, but cer­tain­ly more invit­ing than your pre­vi­ous nov­el, Witz. Which, for the record, I loved very much — it was a great chal­lenge and plea­sure, on so many lev­els — but going from Witz to Four New Mes­sages remind­ed me of DeLil­lo going from Under­world to The Body Artist and then Cos­mopo­lis. Did it feel good, with the Great Big Book behind you, to get back to the story/​novella form? How did you go about gath­er­ing these dis­parate tales togeth­er around their sev­er­al cen­tral themes? If I was going to be a total shit about it, and entreat you to tell me, in your own words, what this book is ​“about,” what would you say? Actu­al­ly, it occurs to me that I did get you to do this once before — when you were work­ing on ​“Emis­sion” and we were dri­ving back from the read­ing at the Jew­ish book store in Mass­a­chu­setts, I remem­ber you describ­ing the piece to me before I had ever read a draft of it, and that you said your inten­tion was, in a lim­it­ed but real sense, ped­a­gog­i­cal. That the sto­ry would be offered in the tra­di­tion of the advice-nar­ra­tive, in which the fic­tion illus­trates a famil­iar con­tem­po­rary prob­lem, to which it offers both a solu­tion and a moral. Do you still feel that ​“Emis­sion” works this way? Would you say that the book as a whole does, or that it can? Why isn’t your book called ​“How Should a Per­son Be?,” or since that’s tak­en, ​“How a Per­son Should Be”?

JT

Read Part III of Joshua and Justin’s con­ver­sa­tion here.

Joshua Cohen is the author of Witz, A Heav­en of Oth­ers, Caden­za for the Schnei­der­mann Vio­lin Con­cer­to and, most recent­ly, Four New Mes­sages (Gray­wolf Press). He is the New Books crit­ic forHarper’s Mag­a­zine.

Justin Tay­lor is the author of the sto­ry col­lec­tion Every­thing Here Is the Best Thing Ever and the nov­el The Gospel of Anar­chy. He lives in Brook­lyn and teach­es at the Pratt Institute.