(Dave Hickey, Douglas Unger) Sponsored by University of Nevada Las Vegas. A world-class writer about art and culture reads from his cutting-edge Connoisseur of Waves, essays on art and democracy. Author of seven books, and recently featured in Newsweek as an iconoclastic voice in contemporary art, Hickey is always engaging, provocative, and highly acclaimed for his mastery of the language.

Published Date: September 7, 2011

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP podcast series. You're now tuning into a reading by Dave Hickey. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Denver on Thursday April 8th 2010. The reading was sponsored by the University of Nevada Las Vegas Creative Writing Program. Now you'll hear Douglas Unger provide the introduction.

Douglas Unger:

Good afternoon. On behalf of the Creative Writing International Program at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, thanks for coming out. This talk was supposed to be from his forthcoming book, A Connoisseur of Waves, but very much like Dave, he decided to overturn expectations and he'll present instead a new piece to be published in Harper's on Terry Castle, writing about a writer and writing about writing. I'm sure it will astonish us with its language and sharpness and may even piss a few of us off. Dave always stirs things up. As a critic, that's his job.

He comes to the American cultural scene, not mainly from the academy, though he's a graduate of Texas Christian University and earned a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. But more, he honed his sensibility in the tough cultural marketplaces of the Nashville music scene and the hustle of New York art galleries. Then by writing for magazines, Rolling Stone, Art News, Art in America, his Columns for Art Forum, and more recently as a regular contributor to Vanity Fair and Harper's.

Looking over a list of Dave Hickey's publications is astounding. He has essays in more than 150 books and catalog exhibitions, which are still in print and ranging in subject from the enshrined and iconic Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Roche, Richard Serra, to far less broadly known talents, he has helped to establish Karen Carson, Elizabeth Murray, and Tim Bevington to name just a few.

His major books are must reading for any of us who wish to know where the culture is coming from, what wave is about to land on shore and wet our feet whether we like it or not. Hickey somehow sees the wave before the rest of us can even make out the line of the horizon. Examples are The Invisible Dragon, in which he redefines contemporary aesthetics, and last year Newsweek picked his collection Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy as among the 50 most essential books of all time.

Hickey has also published a book of stories, Prior Convictions. Plus he publishes a lot of really fun, crazy books like Stardom, and a big section of a book called Post Hypnotic. In some, his writing is everywhere and all over the place, equally capable of appraising the latest exhibition at site Santa Fe or Guggenheim Bilbao. At the same time, he's got his eye on tonight's Lakers game or serving as the unofficial writer laureate of Las Vegas. He defined our strange postmodern city, which others see as filled with fakeness and pretentiousness, as accurately expressing, in its frank representations, one of the most honest cities and real places on the planet. He can do anything in words.

When I asked Dave what he considered to be his most important work to date, he said it was the Peabody Award for broadcasting he received for his work as associate producer and project advisor for Rick Burns's documentary on Andy Warhol. In 2000, the MacArthur Foundation awarded a genius grant to Dave for writing and they were right to do so. There's genius everywhere in his work. That quality Dave teaches our students to recognize as one of our students put in his thesis acknowledgements page, "Fucking great writing."

Over the years, Dave and I have argued a lot about teaching creative writing and if we can really do that, if we can really make writers. Or if the creative writing workshops shelters and coddles young writers too much and distracts their talents from the realities of the marketplace, that tough world out there, that they might be better off facing on a daily basis.

Still even as Dave is saying this, he's one of the best writing teachers I've ever worked with in my 26 years of teaching creative writing. He forces students to pay attention to the energy of a sentence. He's been known to make whole classes spend an hour just counting verbs and parts of speech. He demands that students know how to use a subjunctive and he makes them explore the weird ambiguities of the future in perfect tense. He teaches the difference between writing and typing, how to recognize fine art when we see it, and how to toss bad art into the trash. More than anything, he teaches how to make art by showing what art is.

Our writing programs, emergence and success at UNLV belongs as much to Dave Hickey as to any of us who have labored in the vineyards there, faculty and students. As you listen to his talk today, I trust you'll experience the gift we experience in just having him around, and that he will have been astonishing for the power and genius of his language. Ladies and gentlemen, Dave Hickey.

Dave HIckey:

Thank you very much, Douglas. I needed that. I've never spoken to a larger auditorium with a smaller audience. This is just to help the guy set the sound. This essay is called Firecrackers. It's about a new book called The Professor by Terry Castle, who is one of my heroes and I wanted to... And she has for a long time, been a major sort of feminist theorist, and lesbian theorist and aficionado of the gothic, and during that time, she has been actually learning how to write. So when her book came out, I thought that it was time to try to write a fairly sophisticated review of her work as I have tried to do.

And so I was telling Doug I wish that I had a little sign here on my text that was like the sign... The words that are drawn on the top of Charlie Watts snare. He is a drummer for a band called The Rolling Stones, but written right across the top it says, "slow down." So if I start to rattle, I apologize. I wrote it to rattle, but it's no fun to be read rattle. Anyway, this is an essay called Firecrackers.

"Chasing that old school rush can seem futile sometimes. Paying $30 to read 47 pages of literary tapioca and recycle yet another pine tree, but I keep on trying. I picked up Terry Castle's book to The Professor, despite the title and the shadowy prospect of tenured vipers slithering across the Persian sumac and the faculty club. This turned out to be the right thing to do. I read the first page, then read the book three times straight through like a kid, printing a new chunk of sleigh bells snatched off the internet. This because The Professor is special, a bravura series of autobiographical essays with the musical attribute of altering and renewing itself every time you punch and repeat. The tone darkens with each experience, but there were always new angels in the clouds.

On my first reading of the professor I was beaming throughout. It was also swift and dead on so profoundly an artifact of the adult world. On second reading the book was still funny, but sadder too, because we all contribute to the vanity of intellectual culture. On my third reading, the atmospheres turned toxic, the landscape of blanched California, the snow mantle knights of in the high Midwest and the gray rainy streets of Tribeca began closing in and we were rescued every time by a majestic slalom turn in Castle's prose, that while digressing from the content of one essay elaborate the content of another, so piece by piece everything falls into place. As a consequence, one finishes The Professor pretty much convinced that one has experienced a work of art.

So there I was, with a real book coming at me, like a Bush League catcher, I marveled at the spin on the high hard ones, at the arc on the curves. I marveled at things that could have gone wrong, but it didn't. How I wondered had Castle resisted the marketing pressure to begin her memoir with the acrobatics and sexy talk show stuff, with the novella linked title essay that recounts Castle's fraught and feverish lesbian affair with one of those envious, charismatic brain gobbling professors who entangled gifted children in duals to the death in the guise of grownup love. I have no idea how she won this argument, but in the book, as it stands, we come upon Castle's romantic train work, train wreck on the way out. Excuse me.

By this time, we are well acquainted with its high hearted protagonist and she seems okay. We have accompanied her to France, Sicily, Santa Fe and Ocean Beach. We have suffered with her through a dinner party and Tribeca with Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Marina Abramovic and Susan Sontag, these four being special together.

We know that Castle prefers Agnes Martin to Georgia O'Keefe and that her mother does not. We know that, like Mario Praz, Castle finds intelligent people who dwell in fundamental and systematic ugliness, disturbing and not to be trusted, especially if they're tenured. That was an aside.

Most critically, we know that Castle [inaudible 00:11:37] victimhood, even when she is victimized. We know that she is obsessed with Nicole Eisenman, Ingrid Bergman, cool jazz, rubber stamps, buttons and twee shelter magazines, all of which stand as a hedge against the gothic, all of which remind us that Castle is the comic hero of her own adventures. She plays Dartanion, the bumpkin with the flashing blade. She may feel clumsy, insecure, easily humiliated and foolish and she often is, but she is very, very swift to respond when challenged.

We know that Castle is rather charmingly bonkers, and so discombobulated by the shadow of oncoming tedium, that she will fill three shopping bags with a complete pharmacopia of CDs for a boring drive from Berkeley to San Diego in her girlfriend's Taurus.

In addition to Bird, Dexter, dizzy, sunny miles and Jimmy Gere. The list includes Conlon Nancarrow, Fatboy Slim, DJ Chubby, Sabbath, Ludwig [inaudible 00:12:51], Brenda Lee, [inaudible 00:12:54] Ali Khan, Gus [inaudible 00:12:59], the Pogues, early Leon Price, White Stripes, Charpentierexcuse me, Della Lande, Coney Island Baby, Historic Flamenco, [inaudible 00:13:14], Bad Plus Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Sun House, Ronaldo Han, Busoni's Bach Arrangements, Jeanette Nivetu, the Stanley Brothers, Terry Oche, Milton Babbitt, A Rough Guide to Rye. Gladys Knight, In the Pips, Charlie Trinet, Style Mighty, John Dalland, organ music by Johan Fox, Ian Bostridge, The Ramones, Aster Bisinella, Ethel Merman's disco album, Magnetic Fields, A Flags Stat and Spun Home in Devale Curri, Lord Kirchner and the Calypso Allstar, Sonic Youth, Uso De Noor, the Andretti Quartet, Kurt Cobain, Sturzy Somedoore, John McCormick, Garret Vinbito, Jan and Dean, Los Quintos De Narte, Shastakovich film scores, Some Girls, Erlich doing Butterfly, Cuban Contra dances, Planet Squeeze Box, Profield, The Carter family, Morton Felden, Beatrice Lily, Elmore James.

It's better if you read all of it. Someday, graduate students will write dissertations on the architecture of taste and inferred by this Homeric catalog. But the joke is that the Taurus didn't have a CV player. That Castle's boombox loaded with new batteries, refused to make a sound so Bif and Terry listened to am evangelists down the length of California steam coming out of Castle's ears like Wiley Coyote.

This cascades of Ms. Cascade of misadventures is funny enough to stand alone of course, and this cleverly disguises the true function. Its true function in me, say my heroine Christmas to provide an oral scrim, a musical backdrop for Castle's, discovery of Art Pepper. Who's Alto sax saved her life as only music can, whose biography Straight Life is the greatest book Castle has ever read. Even better than Clarissa, she says like Castle herself. Art Pepper grew up in the raggedy suburbs of San Diego, but well to the dark side. As jail yard aristocracy, a beautiful jerk, a musical genius, a sleazeball junkie, and a guilt-free sex fiend whose attics were frowned upon even in the jazz world because except for the music, everything about art Pepper was bent.

Even his pictures are bent. There is a famous photograph of Pepper taken by William Platon. Pepper is climbing up one of those steep inclines in Echo Park and the inference of the photograph is that the tortured pepper is struggling upward towards some sort of redemption. In fact, Pepper is looking for a fix and at that time most of the smack dealers in Los Angeles lived to top these hills in Echo Park for tactical reasons they learned in Korea. Y'all are learning here.

Okay, so that was Art Pepper. And Terry Castle's relationship with him is by far the most complex in the book. They never met and Castle never shot smack, but Pepper's writing and music shared the world and weather of Castle's youth. His music saved her life and the book stunned her with the heartless grit of genius. Pepper showed Castle, the neighborhood they shared that sunshine, slum. And more to the point Pepper's outrageous transgressions with drugs, women, money, friends, crime, and violence made Castle's predisposition to have sex with females seem like a mini booboo like biting your fingernails, and that in itself is a kind of absolution. Throughout our win in logic of association, Pepper's biography also brings Castle face to face with the theatrical suicide of her lonesome stepbrother Jeff and with her own fierce ecstasy at his death. Jeff was mute, violent, drunk, burglar, recidivist and closet hottie in the rough trade and it is clear enough from the essay, although Castle doesn't quite say so, that she recognizes Jeff and Pepper to be comparably bad dudes from the same bad seed distinguished by nothing more than Pepper's, charm, courage and genius.

This is a bitter pill for a nice girl like Castle, but when pressed to the wall, she defends her affection for Pepper as a man, and an artist as a sex thing, as something alive intangible. She quotes a lifelong unsullied lesbian who is in rehab with Pepper on Santa Monica Beach. The woman who had never been touched by a man reveals that she once considered sleeping with Pepper anyway, mainly because he was funny and intelligent and the kindred spirit, somehow. Castle understands this in her view, the tenderness between lesbians and straight men is the real love that dare not speak its name. This is a brave sentence from a mini big wig, or a big mini wig in the lesbian studies game.

But Castle has always been interested in men as fellow mammals in the benign way that one might be interested in beagles or speckled horses. Having grown up in and around the military, she possesses a reservoir of role and specialized experience with the masculine beast. Enough at least that in her anthology, the literature of lesbianism, she had the insight and the onions to include Casanova, Hemingway and a host of other swinging. So Castle knows a lot about men.

The professor in fact begins with men, with young men dying in droves nearly a century ago "Courage Mon Ami," which recounts a trip Castle took with her lesbian cousin Bridget through the cemeteries of First World War to locate the grave of Castle's great uncle, Rifleman Lewis Newton Braddock, who died in that war and was buried somewhere near [inaudible 00:20:25] . Compared to all the laughter that follows "Courage Mon Ami" is Castle's most gothic and Riven essay and it is clear that she has willfully begun her book at its spiritual nadir to flatten any incipient affect and introduce herself as an odd duck, a dusty, plain style, lower middle class girl, afraid of being afraid.

She grew up in on the channel coast of the United Kingdom and the Pacific Coast of the United States. Her family's favorite movie was Noel Cowards "In Which We Serve," which they saw so many times and love so well that the dry-eyed gallantry and lattice humor of Coward's script still floats through Castle's prose like dry perfume. "Courage Mon Ami" ends with a long meditation on valor. Castle stands in the wild grass and gazes down a trench line out of which thousands of young men rose up and walked slowly forward through the mud and rain into death. She can't believe that they did it or that or that she ever could have, but this coda is very close to the theme of the book. A celebration of courage is a non-generational virtue indispensable if one is a lower middle class Navy brat too bright for her school to glib for those who might have admitted her and a lesbian to boot.

Subsequently, it is Castle's image of Tommy's marching slowly through the rain into death that puts the edge on "Desperately Seeking Susan," Castle's essay about her friend Susan Santo. This essay has been petulantly labeled as notorious, but is really just an and parable about the fantasy lives of modern intellectuals. Nothing in the essay is new. We all have friends more famous than ourselves whom we see right through friends for whom our affection stands in for our approval. Friends who hate everything we love except for maybe one Author and one Opera. It takes courage to write about these sacred monstrous, but courage is subject here and in "Desperately Seeking Susan," Castle rides the tiger. The essay begins after Sontag's return from Sarajevo where she dodged sniper fire, pimped for the volcano lover and meditated on the suffering of sontag's persona by this time had been stylized into vintage Chuck Jones, like Bernard Shaw's "Dashing Tricks" and "Misalliance."

She would land on your lawn if you had one and complain about the berms. On this encounter, Sontag and Castle walked down between down the main drag of Palo Alto. Sontag stops abruptly, looks serious at Castle and ask if she is ever dodged a sniper fire. "Unfortunately not," Castle said this dry wood is wasted, however, and lickety-split, Sontag is off dashing from one boutique to the next all the way to Restoration Hardware in the Baskin-Robbins bobbing in and out of doorways, pointing at imaginary gunman on rooftops, and gesturing wildly for Castle to follow. Castle doesn't follow. She tells the story as the good soldier Schweik might comment on the behavior of his colonel. In this Castle is child of her class. She is the doomed Tommy down in the mud looking up an amazement at the plumed major astride his black stallion. But there is courtesy in the cruelty here throughout the professor.

In fact, there is a prose to decorum at play when the subject turns dire, Kessel plays pianissimo, sly and glib like of Michael Frank's tooth. When the ground gets rough, she keeps the prose sleek and wiggly. Moving with the uncensored fluency of Art Pepper's alto. When there's a bad story to be told, the narrative floats on the rye bubbles of happiness as Dickens prose floats through its most brutal narratives as if to say, "this is a nasty story, but what joy to be writing it." Castle's, true decorum, however, can be measured by the fact that her account of Susan Sontag, in full chauvian goofiness, follows on the heels of Sicily diary in which Castle herself is quite literally the butt of the joke. This essay locates Castle in her own element, trooping through Italy with a pride of shameless lesbians and bright American tourist togs like medieval mums on a spree.

They visit Naples first, then set out into the blue Tyrrhenian Sea to visit Stromboli, an important station of the cross for those who worship Ingrid Bergman. Castle takes the free time afforded by being on vacation to get really sick this time with some mafioso brand diarrhea. Right there on the brink of communing with Ingrid of standing where she stood. At Panoria, Castle suffers a rough, gasping, passionate bout of diarrhea surrounded by mops and buckets in a little [foreign language 00:26:28]. They land at Stromboli at dusk, the volcano is belching smoke Castle's innards arriving like [inaudible 00:26:40]. Castle sets off down the pumice beach thinking perhaps a swim then, and I'm quoting her here then, "nothing to do but to break for it. Bow is suddenly on fire, be watching in horror, mad self flinging plunge into the waves, followed by boronic exaltation. This is something I've never done. This is I'm breaking every law of God and man. Then the sorted liquefying release catharsis accomplished. I hurried back to the beach groaning like Mr. Putter after the umpteenth insult from lupine, his annoying ne'er-do-well son."

Castle's stomach is never as bad again, but the ordeal doesn't end. She is off her food and all her food. And the Polish lady who runs the hotel who wore sunglasses indoors like an elderly cokehead, takes Castle's failure to clean her plate as a commentary on the hotel fair. She showers Castle with frosty disdain Castle hides in the front lounge with a gorgeous book of paintings by Antonello de Messina. Then in an Art Pepper moment, Castle is suddenly tempted to steal the damn book. Thus Castle is driven toward a life of crime by illness, and the sheer foreignness of everything like Kurt is in "Heart of Darkness," If Graham Green had written heart of darkness. The point being that there are a lot of seamless [foreign language 00:28:29] in the professor. Glimmering subtexts and literary illusions inserted one suspects and as much for the author's amusement as our own.

Some are dead serious, some are sheer play like the conclusion of travels with my mother in which Castle, her mother, and Castle's companion, Blakey tour, the sites of Santa Fe. Their group dynamic and the eccentricities of Santa Fe are run through their paces and it seems for a moment that Castle is at a loss for a physical way to get the trio out of Santa Fe and a literary way for Castle to get herself out of the essay. But no Castle reaches up in the air and grabs Larry McMurtry's Gallant 19th century dictionary and reviewed the Trio's exit as it might have happened a century ago. Today we set off on the arduous eight-week stagecoach journey back to California.

Though rough and indelicate in manner, as I learned to my dismay when one of them was so careless as to miss the Spittoon adjacent to where we stood waiting. The young gentleman in the stetsons at our hotel in Santa Fe were most eager to secure our heavy boxes. I wore my pretty calico dress for the journey. Ms. Brook had chosen her usual frayed blue gingham suit with the buttons missing so as not to delay our embarkation, I thought it wisest not to mention that her muslin petticoat was besmirched with some small unknown thalemens. The day was fine and bright and despite an often expressed fear of those savages who might molest us in route, my venerable mama proved a delightful traveling campaign. This pathetic snap from the new west to the old is what I call a firecracker. Castle sets them off whenever she feels like it to announce her freedom to write a serious book, bereft of solemnity.

They also declare for liberation from scholarly decorum. You can actually feel the lift of freedom as sentence follows sentence once tethered to by footnotes to the vast tundra of the texts and takes flight in the pure air. It is an amazing achievement to have studied literary prose for 20 years, taught it and thought about it and then done the deed as one might learn to bloom by watching the rose books. In truth Castle's prose has always been lurching toward the pure air. In an essay from 1992 called "Resisting Casanova," she notes that "like the gentlemanly sued seducers of today. Casanova was careful to take hygienic precautions whenever any of voluptuous combat was about to ensue. To minimalize the risk of fatal plumpness in his lovers, he tells he never failed. He never hesitated to wear a little garment of fine transparent skin, eight inches long, closed it one end, but resembling a purse and having it at its open end, a narrow pink ribbon."

In my copy of the text. Okay, I'll read Casanova's quote here, or Terry's quote about Casanova. "In the gentlemanly seducers like the gentlemanly seducers of today, Casanova was careful to take hygienic precautions whenever any voluptuous combat was about to ensue. To minimize the risk of fatal plumpness in his lovers, he tells us he never hesitated to wear a small garment of fine transparent skin, eight inches long closed at one end, but resembling a purse and having at its open end a narrow pink ribbon." Way excellent. In my topic of the text, there was a large check mark in the margin beside "way excellent," because I thought for a moment that Castle had experienced a little Tourette's event and written what she was thinking. Then I thought, "way excellent." I imagined the abyss, the light, years of culture, geography, diction, rhetoric, and genre that separate Castle's, account of Casanova and memoirs from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

Put them together and they go, "bang," like a firecracker. Because to embrace the whole language as Castle does, is to liberate words from their proprietary vocabularies to give us Bill, and Ted, and Castle, and Casanova. Two as writers from Ulis, to Curtis Mayfield, to David Foster Wallace have so happily done, not because it's cool, but because it's liberated to write with the unabridged language in play. One can't write everything of course, but the idea that one might write anything, it's exciting. All of this leaves the impression of course, that Terry Castle is a very flashy babe and on the page she. Is as a working artist, however, Castle is one of those thoughtful, studious, late comers like George Washington or Andy Warhol who make plans, study hard, plot things out, then make them sow. These heroes aspire to be the epitome of what they are. As Andy would be the epitome of an artist, as Washington would be the epitome of an American Republican, as Castle would be the woman she imagines in the apparitional lesbian this in 1992.

Her book about victorious lesbians like Greta Garbo, Sylvia Townsend, Warner, Juno Barnes, Janet Flanner, Bridget Fastbinder, and many others. In an introductory homage to Garbo, she insists that we need to recognize how fully, if invisibly, the lesbian has always been integrated into the very fabric of cultural life. How thoroughly, despite the hostility raised against her, she has managed to insert herself into the larger world of human affairs. None of the women invoked in this book ever led a sense of sexual alienation or marginality stand in the way. However, curiosity, self-education or ambition each sought to participate to the utmost in the rich communal life of her time and usually did as Castle does herself.

Who conceptualized the kind of lesbian she planned to be early on? Who imagined the [foreign language 00:35:58] hero she planned to play in prose before the professor was a blip on the radar. In Castle's cultural model, lesbians for the last two centuries have been lively, apparitions, whispering in our ear, shaping our expectations so subtly that I myself walked Janet Flanner's Parish for decades and never noticed. Castle's candor and dazzle go a long way toward bringing the ghostly presence to life. So I make you this promise. If "The Professor" should turn out to be the only book you read in 2010, you'll almost certainly greet 2011, happily diluted that we'd live in a witty, candid, and generous literary republic. Okay, thank you.

Speaker 4:

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