Popsicle #23 The Braindead Megaphone

Of the twenty-two Popsicle posts I’ve written this year, my favorite was last week’s post on Reality Hunger. But it was also the longest one I’ve written. I’m certain that very few readers managed to make their way through the whole damn thing.  I was even more certain after reading an article on Slate entitled ‘You Won’t Finish This Article – Why People Online Won’t Read To The End.’

I’m as guilty of this as everyone else (I skimmed the Slate article). That is why I need a printed version of everything I want to read seriously. It is the only way I can truly digest the material.

Which brings me back to this quote from George Saunders (for the 3^rd time in 23 posts):

I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another… The writer… can put whatever he wants in there. What’s important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit… The black box is meant to change us.

After reading Reality Hunger, I was interested to see how Saunders would treat the black box of non-fiction. Unsurprisingly, he’s very good. My favorite essay in the book is about a teenager in India meditating under a tree for months without food or water. The essay is very much in the spirit of Reality Hunger in that it ends up being as much about George Saunders, and the reader, as it is about the boy in India.

I noted two general reactions to the statement Hey, I heard this kid in Nepal has been meditating uninterruptedly in the jungle for the past seven months without any food or water.

One type of American—let’s call them Realists—will react by making a snack-related joke (“So he finally gets up, and turns out he’s sitting on a big pile of Butterfinger wrappers!”) and will then explain that it’s physically impossible to survive even one week without food or water, much less seven months.

A second type—let’s call them Believers—will say, “Wow, that’s amazing,” they wish they could go to Nepal tomorrow, and will then segue into a story about a transparent spiritual being who once appeared on a friend’s pool deck with a message about world peace.

Try it: Go up to the next person you see, and say, Hey, I heard this kid in Nepal has been meditating uninterruptedly in the jungle for the past seven months without any food or water.

 See what they say.

 Or say it to yourself, and see what you say.

 What I said, finally, was: This I have to see.

The thing that drives Saunders’ narrative, the reason we read to the end, is that we’ll eventually get to ‘see’ the boy too, through Saunders’ eyes.

How frustrating, then, to look up the article on GQ online and see a picture of the Buddha Boy at the very top of the page. (DON’T CLICK ON THIS LINK if you have any interest in reading this fantastic story). The picture completely undermines the suspense of the narrative.

In an essay entitled ‘The Perfect Gerbil,’ Saunders talks about storytelling:

When I was a kid I had one of these Hot Wheels devices designed to look like a little gas station. Inside the gas station were two spinning rubber wheels. One’s little car would weakly approach the gas station, then be sent forth by the spinning rubber wheels to take another lap around the track, or more often, fly out and hit one’s sister in the face.

A story can be thought of as a series of these little gas stations. The main point is to get the reader around the track; that is, to the end of the story. Any other pleasures a story may offer (theme, character, moral uplift) are dependent on this…

So if the writer can put together enough gas stations, of sufficient power, distributed at just the right places around the track, he wins: the reader works his way through the full execution of the pattern, and is ready to receive the end of the story.

My primary goal with LBM is to experiment with the combination of photographs and text in book form. Rather than serving as speed-bump illustrations, it is instructive to think of photographs as functioning like little narrative gas stations. Putting the picture of Buddha Boy at the beginning of the story is like putting all of the gas stations at the beginning of a road trip.

Midway through Saunders’ story, the subject of photography comes up when he finally encounters the Buddha Boy:

The young monk says something to Subel, who tells me it’s time to take my photo. My photo? I have a camera but don’t want to risk disturbing the boy with the digital shutter sound. Plus, I don’t know how to turn off the flash, so I will be, at close range, taking a flash photo directly into the boy’s sight line, the one thing explicitly prohibited by that sign back there.

“You have to,” Subel says. “That’s how they know you’re a journalist.”

I hold up my notebook. Maybe I could just take some notes?

“They’re simple people, man,” he says. “You have to take a photo.”

The problem with the GQ website is that they are basically saying the same thing to their audience: “They’re simple people, man.” This is essentially the thesis of the title essay in The Braindead Megaphone. So I’ll end with this gas station:

Mass media’s job is to provide this simulacra of the world, upon which we build our ideas. There’s another name for this simulacra-building: storytelling.

Megaphone Guy is the storyteller, but his stories are not so good. Or rather, his stories are limited. His stories have not had time to gestate ­– they go out too fast and to too broad an audience. Storytelling is a language-rich enterprise, but Megaphone Guy does not have time to generate powerful language. The best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather than quicker. They make us more humble, cause us to empathize with people we don’t know, because they help us imagine these people, and when we imagine them­–if the storytelling is good enough–we imagine them as being, essentially, like us.