Global Art Forum 7: Biography by Art Dubai

Biography by Elif Batuman Victoria Camblin Douglas Coupland Suna Kafadar James Westcott Charly Wilder Shumon Basar & H.G. Masters (Eds.)

Global Art Forum_7

BIOGRAPHY With texts by Elif Batuman, Victoria Camblin, Douglas Coupland, Suna Kafadar, James Westcott and Charly Wilder Edited by Shumon Basar & H.G. Masters Designed by UBIK Printed at Emirates Printing Press in an edition of 1,500 Biography was commissioned by Global Art Forum_7, “It Means This,” which took place at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art (March 17-18, 2013) and Art Dubai (March 20-23, 2013) Global Art Forum_7 Director H.G. Masters Global Art Forum_7 Commissioner Shumon Basar Global Art Forum was founded by Art Dubai in 2007. The seventh edition is presented by the Dubai Culture & Arts Authority (Dubai Culture) in partnership with Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art (Qatar Museums Authority) © The Authors & Art Dubai

GLOBAL ART FORUM_7

CONTENTS Introduction 5 Internal Affairs Douglas Coupland 6 George Washington’s Extreme Makeover Suna Kafadar 16 Dream-coloring Asiye Hatun into History Victoria Camblin 30 Mohammed Kurban Lev Essad Nussimbaum Said Bey Douglas Coupland 44 Dead or Canadian? Charly Wilder 60 A People’s History of People James Westcott 70 Sorry I am Daring to Write Your Biography Douglas Coupland 88 Cloudgangers Elif Batuman 98 Postscript

INTRODUCTION Internal Affairs

According to Wikipedia, in 1991, Paula Kranz was her high-school valedictorian, homecoming queen and an all-state basketball player in Bismark, North Dakota. In January 2012 (now Mrs. Paula Broadwell, a military officer and a counterterrorism specialist), she published All In: The Education of General David Petraeus, a lauded biography (coauthored with Washington Post journalist Vernon Loeb) of the four-star-general and former commander of United States military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ten months later, news broke that Broadwell had been Petraeus’ lover. Adultery is a crime under US military code, and following the revelations, on November 9, 2012, Petraeus resigned from his post as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The paramours had first met in 2006 following a speech by Petraeus at Harvard University. He helped her with her dissertation—a study of his own career and his counterinsurgency tactics—which would later become the basis of her biography on him. In a 2012 interview, she recounted how as her and David’s “rapport increased, he decided to make it more of an official, um, relationship, if you will, treating me like a biographer.” They conducted interviews while jogging together. To communicate, they shared a Gmail account. They would write letters to one another, save them as drafts, and delete them after they had been read. She affectionately called him “Dangerous Dave” or “Peaches.” While it is not known exactly when their romance started, CNN described their affair as “a lot more than sex.” There might have been pillow talk about national secrets; they could even have been in love. Who’s to say? Just after Broadwell’s biography of Petraeus came out, she preemptively insisted on her objectivity, claiming: “It’s not a hagiography. I’m not in love with David Petraeus, but I think he does present a terrific role model for young people, for executives, for men and women.” We may never know whether or not she considered their extramarital affair a component of, or an exception to, his exemplary life. Biographers develop (quite rightly) a complicated relationship with their subject. Most come to know of them only through the memories of friends and family, written correspondences and documents. A few know the person in real life, while even fewer, statistically speaking, have sex with their subjects. Nonetheless, intimacy comes with empathy, or vice-versa. Judgment comes with intimacy, as well as with the task itself. As the six authors in this book reveal, in our fascination with others’ lives, we cannot stop ourselves from putting information out there about other people—enhanced, distorted, false or some complex combination. Wikipedia tells us much of what we need to know about Paula Broadwell, David Petraeus and most other subjects of current historical or cultural interest—most, but, crucially, not all. Many figures have been lost completely to time, or to the printed pages of old encyclopedias. Or perhaps what they have left behind is largely unintelligible by our standards of historiography. A few intrepid authors have dared to recreate them on the page, imperfections and missing pieces and all. These biographers apologize deeply, for their inabilities, their inadequacy, for the impossibility of the undertaking—even if they don’t mean it sincerely. So: some stories about Biography, about writing and reading about other people’s lives. About personalities, reputations and deeds. About thoughts and dreams. Their problems, which in turn, are also ours. — The Editors

I am You And You Are Not Me Part 1: George Washington’s Extreme Makeover by Douglas Coupland

On vacation a few years back, I chose to read a very long and very worthy biography of George Washington by Ron Chernow. It had been a crazy year. And, to be honest, I chose the book because I was staying at someone’s house and it was the one book I could find on their shelves that I knew contained no technology: no email, no phones, no planes, no smoking-hot wi-fi, no anything. On this level, the book delivered in a big way, and for a good two weeks I had a pleasant brain holiday, one that I now look back on and see almost as a form of ecotourism—visiting a place where there was a guarantee of relief from one’s own daily ecosystem. I learned that George Washington was, by any standards, a worthy fellow. He was possibly one of the few competent human beings in an era largely drunk on badly made home-brewed cider and acidic political bromides—an era when healthy people caught a cold one afternoon and were dead by the next morning. Most importantly I learned that were it not for Washington, there would most definitely never have been a United States, so the man’s historical worthiness is undebatable. He is basically one of those people who changed the world. So, good for him. Washington also had dreadfully bad teeth and spent much of his time, whenever visiting new cities, enquiring about local dentists and new procedures that might allow him to not live in near perpetual dental

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pain and discomfort. One reason there is no image of Washington smiling is that the man never smiled; he didn’t want his teeth, or lack thereof, to show. And although he was graced by good health—he died in 1799 at the age of 67, a true accomplishment for the time—he was not blessed with sound bodily comfort. As with anybody of his era, he endured his share of slow-healing wounds, fungal infections, GI distress and many things that can these days be nipped in the bud by a quick trip to a Rexall drug store. It was in reading about Washington’s chronic bodily discomfort that I began to have a fantasy: one in which George, at the age of 45, and utterly sick of being sick, covered in lice and exhausted from having to rescue his inept countrymen from peril after peril, is teleported from atop his horse somewhere in the slavefriendly Virginia countryside, into a Level 3 cleanroom 500 feet beneath that exact same spot, 236 years later, circa 2013. Once there, he is given a big hit of Valium and told by a gentle off-screen woman’s voice that he has been whisked away by angels to heal his body and better prepare him fully for the task of creating and leading a new nation. At this point, a crew of doctors, dentists and exodontists wearing hazmat suits descend on Washington and begin futzing about with his body, identifying rashes, cysts, abscesses, growths, aches, pains, and every other form of malady, and then goes 8

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about fixing everything. Washington—I’m going to start calling him George here—is totally okay with this invasion because, hey! These are angels! No, they’re not necessarily winged. But a sterile pure-white 21st-century environment could seem like heaven to someone transported from 236 years earlier. A big part of this makeover and healing fantasy would be to ensure that George doesn’t catch any 21stcentury bugs—hence the hazmat outfits. Over the course of about two weeks, George would undergo a rigid antibiotic regimen to remove any blood cooties he may have been harboring. This would then allow for the safe implantation of 32 dazzling new teeth using steelpost-implantation. Along the way George’s skin would be moisturized, defungicized, deloused, and gently kissed a nice honey-bronze color by tanning rays—but as Washington is a redhead (not a commonly known fact)—George’s makeover team has to go easy on the UV rays. George would need to look like he’d spent a week poolside in Tampa; a cocoa-brown tan would look odd in 1777, and instead of making George look like a member of the ruling elites, it would make him resemble a farm laborer. Pretty much the only thing that might complicate this makeover scenario would be if George were to fall in love with one of his hazmat-suited angels—a twist that would please the heart of any Hollywood producer, 9

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but one that would utterly invalidate the mission of George’s bodily makeover. One simply couldn’t have George pining to return to heaven to reunite with, say, the sinewy and lithe Doctor Jennifer Crandall, a parasitologist with a chip on her shoulder and a quivering lower lip (to be played by Charlize Theron). As an added bonus, Theron could undergo a radical makeunder (Oscar bait!) in order to travel back in time to stalk reunite with George, but in going backwards, she brings all sorts of contemporary flus and colds with her that decimate the US population, effectively destroying history. Only a bit of time-travel trickery allows history to be saved, but fortunately, Alien-like, when Theron returns to the present, she’s pregnant with George’s child. As an added twist, the Bush family could buy the child on the black market and the Bush Dynasty is once again ascendant. To be honest, this is the sort of movie that can be designed by a set of novelty screenwriting fridge magnets, but it does demonstrate, even poetically, the power of DNA to transcend time.

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George would be given Lasik treatment to correct his vision, as well as small hits of Botox to loan him a slightly more youthful appearance. The garments he was wearing when he was absconded would have been dry-cleaned and stored for 48 hours at minus 144 degrees Celsius and then thawed, dried, and restitched together. Basically, when George was returned back onto his horse, back into slave-friendly Virginia, he would be a new man. This new man would be one super-healthy stud and would be totally ready to kick some British ass. Fantasy over. Or is it?

Moving forward: George’s rogue ear and nose hairs would be trimmed. His dandruff would be Selsun’ed into oblivion and George’s signature Warhol-in-drag hairstyle would be fluffed and primped into Sassoonlike perfection. In short, he’d become borderline hot, and just before leaving the Level 3 containment area,

Reading about George’s lifelong bodily discomfort made me wonder about history in general, and how even life’s simplest bodily discomforts can have extreme historical implications. What happened to George’s physical body? Maybe a scan of George’s DNA could tell us more than that he was a right-handed heterosexual redhead. Maybe a DNA scan could give us a genetic reading as to George’s predilection for depression; for George’s susceptibility to bipolarity, or who knows what—Ty Sachs syndrome? Hoarding? Fear of spiders? That’s the magic of DNA . . . once decoded it gives and it gives and it gives, and our future only promises evermore precise ways of reading our genetic sequences.

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So what is it, then, that we’ve lost in the losing of George Washington’s DNA? Or . . . is it a loss? Perhaps it’s a blessing. Maybe not knowing too much about a person’s body is a good thing. Maybe considering any biography-subject’s life as the result of nurture and fate is alone enough to create a full biography. But I really doubt it.

He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (1998) 14

Dream-coloring Asiye Hatun into History A Life Well-Slept by Suna Kafadar

Asiye Hatun1 was a dervish woman who lived in the 17th-century Ottoman-era city of Üsküp (now Skopje, Macedonia). Her life had been forgotten until Cemal Kafadar, a history professor at Harvard University, found her dream diary sitting in manuscript in the Topkapı Palace library, mislabeled as a “goldsmith’s book.” Asiye Hatun was the daughter of Kadri Effendi, a learned man and a religious scholar. Married only to her faith and in constant battle with her carnal soul, she was a well-read and committed Sufi dervish of the largely urban and orthodox Halveti order. Her main struggle in life was to unite with God by way of ascending the seven steps of the Halveti path. Her only means of communication with her sheikh, who lived in Uzice (in what is now western Serbia), was writing letters that contained accounts of her dreams. It was another woman (possibly belonging to the community of “rose-women”2) who traveled back and forth between Uzice and Üsküp, and transported her letters in secrecy to the sheikh. Everything we know of Asiye Hatun is derived from these dream-letters and a few responses from her sheikh, as relayed to us by a copyist working 60 years after their original time of composition. The copyist who found or inherited these letters edited them for their inclusion in a volume that he (or she) compiled, perhaps for the sake of encouraging other seekers.

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Cemal Kafadar came across Hatun’s dream diary almost three centuries later. Upon this extraordinary finding, he decided to carve out a place for Asiye Hatun as a living, dreaming individual of the world. In 1992, he published the first edition of A Hesitant Sufi: The Dream Diary of Asiye Hatun in Turkish. 3

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could even get one hanged.4 In the 17th century, such instances begin to disappear, as a clear distinction between fictional and historical literatures is drawn. Correspondingly, this is the period in which the novel emerges as a fully formed literary genre.

Certainly, there are major differences in how biography was written in different eras, and a stark shift from pre-modern to modern times. For instance, up until the 16th century, dreams in Ottoman, Arabic and Persian literatures were mainly treated as messages from the hereafter, among other functions. However, in the following two centuries, this type of dream-narrative faded away. Biographers began to use dreams in what were known as collective biographical dictionaries, which were dedicated to persons belonging to specific professions, in order to establish appropriate social networks. Often, biographical dictionaries state that one must not recount dreams at random, since an inappropriate interpretation

Before this shift happens, many notable figures in history were known to have based major life choices upon significant dreams. One of the most accomplished physicians of antiquity, Galen of Pergamon (129–c. 216 CE) wrote that Asclepius, the god of medicine, appeared to his father in a dream and commanded him to send his son to study medicine. Later on in his career, Galen wrote On Diagnosis in Dreams, which offers a riveting account of the connection between dreams and illnesses. Constantine the Great (c. 272–337 CE) is said to have moved the capital of the Roman Empire to Byzantium (Istanbul) after having a prophetic dream in which the location of the city was identified. Following this revelation, Constantinople served as the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire for more than one thousand years. A later example is the 17th-century Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi, who wrote a ten-volume travel book. In his masterpiece, Çelebi describes a dream in which he makes a verbal slip in front of Prophet Mohammed. Instead of asking for intercession or mediation (şefaat), he wishes for travel (seyahat), which he is subsequently granted. Upon waking up, Evliya

It is easy to find reality as conveyed through dreams to be uncanny, untrustworthy, and threatening to a true version of events. However, what could be more intimate than reading someone else’s dreams? In this vein, such an unusual challenge must begin with the question: How does one build a credible biography upon a person’s dreams? Accordingly, how do we read it?

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Çelebi decided to begin his journey in his birth-city of Istanbul. Voyaging from the Balkans to Sudan, he spent the rest of his life traveling and writing. Today, if a biographer were to write about a person’s life through her dreams, some might consider it an interesting literary experiment, some would ignore it, and most would dismiss it as lacking a fundamental legitimacy. This is because an individual is largely judged on her actions, which are defined by modern notions of agency and the idea of “conscious decision making.” As Jacques Derrida points out, what we call a legitimate biography is a text that is “well documented,” “apparently consistent,” and written and published by authority figures. He proposes that, “Sometimes the one who reads a text by a philosopher, for example a tiny paragraph, and interprets it in a rigorous, inventive and powerfully deciphering fashion is more of a real biographer than the one who knows the whole story.”5

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as an epigraph historian Peter Brown’s observation that, “The historian is in danger of forgetting that his subjects spent much of their time asleep, and that, when asleep, they had dreams.”6 Towards the end of 1630s, Asiye Hatun commits herself to the Halveti path under the guidance of a sheikh named Veli Dede. Before completing the twoyear-long novitiate, she is granted the right to recite the seven names of God. However, just before she does, she suffers a loss of confidence in her sheikh and begins to sense a regression in her battle with the material world. “Just as the eye of [her] soul began to open up” her spiritual advancement stops (Kafadar, 130). Kafadar tells us that she does not know the reason but prefers to blame herself rather than the sheikh.

What type of production is dreaming? We know very little about dreams and the purpose of dreaming. We only agree that it is an integral part of our consciousness—as well as our conscience. Lovers visit each other via dreams. Nightmares determine the mood of the day ahead. Historical figures inhabit dreams, just as they are visited by them. One can meet an emperor, a writer, a prophet, and even come close to seeing God, as Asiye Hatun does in one of her dreams. Kafadar takes

Though disheartened and gloomy, she hears of another sheikh in a distant town, Muslihüddin Effendi, and his miraculous deeds. She confides in her father, and sends a man to the lodge in Uzice to familiarize herself with the sheikh and determine if she wants to join his spiritual community. Upon mutual agreement between her and the sheikh, she starts on an oneirocritical7 regimen, part of a master-disciple relationship, through written correspondence between Skopje and Uzice, and regains her spiritual strength. This is the moment at which Ayise Hatun begins writing her dream log for the new sheikh to follow her progress from afar.

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Not long after Asiye Hatun begins to write these letters, Muslihüddin Effendi dies. Thanks to his prominence as a mystic, scholars are able to date his death at around 1643. Looking at his interactions with Asiye Hatun, Kafadar dates her first letter sometime around 1641–42. After Effendi’s death, his son becomes the sheikh, though, before he dies, Effendi reassures Asiye Hatun that they will continue communicating through her dreams, and instructs her to write to his son (132). When this new form of correspondence between this world and the next begins, Asiye Hatun is only at the second stage. She continues her ascent of determination peppered with self-doubt and hesitation. One can trace her progress as the dreams unfold. Certainly, to see into Asiye Hatun’s dream diary requires many tools: an in-depth knowledge of Üsküp and 17th-century Ottoman society, of the Halveti order of the time and Sufi traditions, of the meanings attached to sleep and dreams, of gender roles and cultural sensitivities, an openness to sensual and sexual readings and, finally, a framework for understanding the signs in dreams, literature and theology. Kafadar confesses his and fellow historians’ lack of knowledge in each of these fields. He laments that the greatest challenge contemporary biographers face when looking at dreams is the interpretation of symbols, for we have been so saturated with Freudian notions and terminology that 22

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we can no longer read symbols outside of the confines of psychoanalysis. In order to wander around someone else’s life without looting the pillars of her world of meaning, the biographer has to listen to the dead, constantly digging in a foreign realm without falling into dualistic explanations and romanticized notions of a history-less past. While reconstructing a history, the biographer has to question any of the pieces that seem to fit together too perfectly. Kafadar does not interpret Asiye Hatun’s dreams; instead, he collects cues that hint at her life. He likens one of her dreams to the scene in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) in which Alice falls down the rabbit-hole. The task at hand for Kafadar, then, is to follow Asiye Hatun on her own adventures: I dreamt on the seventh night that someone came to me and said “A treasure has been found in your house.” I was most pleased and reached the said entrance. It was covered with a marble top. They said: “The treasure is underneath.” So I moved the marble top and looked inside. I saw a staircase. A graceful, most pleasing breeze found me as I descended the stairs. When I asked myself where this breeze was coming from someone said: “This breeze comes from Medina, this path reaches Medina where the tomb of Prophet Mohammed lies.” My astonishment grew inside me. When I reached the end of stairs, I saw a fountain with a basin. It held the sweetest water, like the water of life. I drank some water, and when I proceeded to walk I saw a garden. Across was the tomb of the beloved Prophet. (167) 23

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Upon discovering the tomb, Asiye Hatun embraces it, presses her cheeks against it, and cries in overwhelming joy. Still dreaming, she recites a poem of her own. In a previous dream, she had recited some lines from Rumi. She clearly had read a lot of poetry and also wrote—or at least in her dreams. She was familiar with Persian and Arabic. A dream journey culminating in a poem of her own gives Kafadar necessary hints about her educational background. Kafadar looks at other hagiographies in order to understand Asiye Hatun’s place in the Sufi world as a woman and within the master-disciple relationship. Asiye Hatun stands out for two reasons: first, she is the only dervish woman whose diary has survived, and second, her text demonstrates a great deal of selfdoubt (154). In response to the dreams that granted her to rise on the seven-step path, she refuses to ascend. Once, the sheikh appears in a dream and asks her to dispel doubt from her heart (133). In another dream of hers, the world filled with illusions and desires that betrays the Sufi path is symbolized by the figure of a blind woman. This imagery is bewildering, since such imagery is common in male dervishes and the Christian community (154). Kafadar presents Asiye Hatun’s reluctance as stemming from a certain type of gender inequality of her society at the time. Intriguingly, this inequality 24

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drives her to carve out for herself an autonomous realm that further contributes to this hesitance. She insists on rejecting marriage. Once, she dreams that she is wedded to a sipahi, a high-ranking Ottoman soldier; she wakes up with a feeling of suffocation. Kafadar toys with the idea that perhaps, in terms of class, marrying a sipahi was not considered appropriate for a scholar’s daughter (151). The few instances that she does not fret dreaming about marriage are when she is wedded to her sheikh or to the Prophet Mohammed. Asiye Hatun herself insists that we interpret these dreams as devoid of sexual intimacy (131). The best manifestation of her autonomy, however, is her decision to change sheikhs and communicate from afar, with the belief that her dreams and spiritual growth will be in better hands. Kafadar writes that a “dream is a precious thing, one must not relay it at random because a dream does not say a thing unless it is interpreted, and thus, guide one onto a path, determine one’s faith.” Following this statement, Kafadar quotes from Sheikh Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi, a 17th-century Sufi author of a book of dream interpretation that remains popular to this day: “A dream resides on the feet of a flying bird, unless it is interpreted, there is neither firmness nor rest” (142). As Kafadar points out, in Arabic, the word “dream” (rüya) comes from the verb to see (rey). This form of 25

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seeing, as Kafadar tries to explain, can be understood better in the cases of two of her dreams, in which Asiye Hatun is presented with a mirror that has the image of God. In her initial stages when it is first offered, she fails to hold the mirror and look into it. In the latter dream, which is the last dream in her diary, the Prophet hands her a golden coin. It grows bigger until it becomes the mirror that she had described in the first dream, which was made out of the very material of his Holiness. This time, she holds the mirror in her hands and sees God’s image. Then, she wakes up (165). The reason Kafadar thinks this is not fiction is that 17th-century letters knew no fiction of this kind, but magnificent fiction it would have been. Interpreting dreams is neither Kafadar’s job nor his aim. What makes this biography so inspiring and perceptive is his ability to create an unusually solid narrative by weaving insightful historical research with Ayise Hatun’s dreams. Above all, he challenges his and our understanding of seeing by offering a profound and meticulous reading of a segment of her life. How should we apply, he asks, the notion of “visual arts” if all such seeing is historicized? Kafadar acknowledges his own ignorance towards the universe of values that constituted Asiye Hatun’s world, and instead he provides his reader with the tools necessary to avoid seeing familiar tastes, words and 26

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images where they might not exist. In this, he aims to expand the reader’s vision and challenge the limits of our imagination in contemporary waking life. His analysis of Asiye Hatun’s dreams had no influence on her life, but it does leave us with a necessary self-doubt about the approaches adopted towards someone else’s life. Kafadar urges us to consider that a character as sophisticated and extraordinary as Asiye Hatun might have inhabited a richer universe than can possibly be imagined in waking life.

An equivalent translation of “hatun” does not exist, however, “lady” suffices.

A network of Sufi women that remains very under-researched.

The last and most updated edition, which this text is based on, was included in a book of

collected articles by the historian, Kim Var İmiş Biz Burada Yoğ İken Dört Osmanlı: Yeniçeri, Tüccar, Derviş ve Hatun (İstanbul: Metis, 2009), all four essays of which focus on ordinary

individuals who lived in Ottoman society. Except for the essay on Asiye Hatun, all of these articles were originally published in English in the last three decades in various academic journals. 4

Figani, a 16th-century Ottoman poet, was hanged after he relayed a troubling dream, the news

of which traveled fast and infuriated the Grand Vizier, who ordered his execution. 5

Derrida, directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman (2002: Los Angeles: Jane Doe

Films). 6

Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, AD 150-750, (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), 49.

Relating to the interpretation of dreams.

Art supersedes what’s personal. It’s a philosophy that serves patriarchy well and I followed it more or less for 20 years. That is: until I met you. – Chris Kraus, I Love Dick (1997) 28

Mohammed Kurban Lev Essad Nussimbaum Said Bey The Crude Subject by Victoria Camblin

In October 1999, The New Yorker magazine published an article by Tom Reiss called “The Man from the East.” The piece addressed the puzzling and unknown authorship of the novel Ali and Nino, a blood feudand scandal-soaked love story between an aristocratic Muslim boy and a Georgian-Christian princess set in and around Baku before the World War One. Written by a pseudonymous Kurban Said, the work was a German-language bestseller when it first appeared in Vienna in 1937, and would later be canonized as a national classic in Azerbaijan. Reiss was reporting from the Azeri capital when he was struck by the impressive degree to which the anonymous fiction informed Baku’s post-Soviet cultural identity. The New Yorker article he subsequently devoted to the topic was seductive enough to inspire an English-language reprint of the Caucasian romantic epic by Random House in 2000—its first since the early 1970s—and Reiss was riveted enough by Ali and Nino’s origins to devote the next five years to their study. That endeavor culminated in Reiss’s book The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life (2005). Reflecting back on the scope of his task, Reiss wrote in the introduction that “all anyone agreed on was that Kurban Said was the pen name of a writer who had probably come from Baku, an oil city in the Caucasus, and that he was either a nationalist poet who

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was killed in the Gulags, or the dilettante son of an oil millionaire, or a Viennese café-society writer who died in Italy after stabbing himself in the foot.” A literary forensic trail of press clippings, interviews and memoirs led Reiss from Kurban Said to Lev Nussimbaum (1905–1942), a mysterious and chameleonic personage who—as a Jewish boy from Baku who converted to Islam while in exile in Berlin, adopted the name Essad Bey and became famous in interwar Europe and the United States for his savvy, Eastern aristocratic persona and best-selling biographies of Stalin and the czar—at once fit all and none of these descriptions. The Orientalist nevertheless argues that Nussimbaum was the definitive author of Ali and Nino, something that had been rumored but never “proven” per se, and the book functions as his only comprehensive biography. Yet despite the apparent breadth, depth, and singularity of Reiss’s investigation, the true identity of the sphinx-like Said continues to elude consensus. So do the details of the Nussimbaum-Bey story, with which Said’s is supposedly entwined. With a shape-shifter as its subject, The Orientalist proposes a volatile biographical paradigm: an account of the unaccountable, or a physical grasp of the soluble. It is accepted that Nussimbaum was born to Jewish parents, and raised amid the oil-rich extravagance of turn-of-the-century Baku. Crude was so abundant there that it coated the ripples of the Caspian such that one could set the sea alight. Pre-soviet Bakuvians of all 32

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creeds luxuriated in its glow in mosques, synagogues, cathedrals, and casinos that seemed to emerge organic and polydox from bottomless black springs.The Orientalist’s earliest photograph of Lev shows him among a group of festively dressed children attending a Muslim-Jewish Christmas party in 1913. This was a diaspora capital so prosperous that it could make perceived opposites—fire and water, East and West—cohere. Reiss credits the resultant emulsion with what would prove to be Nussimbaum’s innately elastic relationship to the truth: “Lev grew up in a tradition of hoary eyewitness accounts and miraculous sightings—he was from a land, after all, where the ground burst spontaneously into flame.” Yet the hint of the marvelous that imbues the region’s molten soil and infuses its cultural melting pot, in Reiss’s descriptions, finds a more sinister counterpart in the manifest violence of Azerbaijan’s history. The year of Nussimbaum’s birth was also one of widespread worker strikes, military mutiny, and massacre. As Cossacks were deployed to restore order in the Russian Empire following the Revolution of 1905, the blood of Baku’s Armenian minority would be the first to dilute the promise of the region’s supply of crude oil. Early Bolshevik uprisings and the tyrannical Czarist response drove Lev’s Russian mother, Berta— “a young woman of revolutionary habits but impeccable 33

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aristocratic pedigree,” says Reiss—to suicide in 1911. Or 1912. The Orientalist does not dwell on the dates, and nor shall we. Working in the shadow of so many lost or destroyed pre-revolution records, Reiss found that a scientific approach to the archive was impossible. Nussimbaum wrote in his memoirs that “truth can only be obtained in a police blotter”; after his own efforts at research, Reiss wrote in response that the police blotter—namely the 1930s surveillance file—was “the very last place” to search for authenticity. Following Berta’s death, what remained of the once-affluent Nussimbaums embarked on a caravan tour of Central Asia and, eventually, of Western Europe. Teenaged Lev landed in Berlin. It was in the Weimar capital that he reinvented himself as Essad Bey, an aristocratic Muslim and flamboyant, selffashioned expert in Eurasian affairs. At age 24 he spun his Transcaucasian adventures into Öl und Blut im Orient (1929) (“Blood and Oil in the Orient”), a paraautobiography of sorts in which Bey purports to have pubesced amid machine gun fire during the 1920 Azeri nationalist uprising in Ganja and Georgia, among other pivotal Russian Revolutionary moments of ambush and plunder. The work was as historically unreliable as it was engaging; perhaps by virtue of its subjective grandeur, it properly distilled the spirit of a land in flux. The book sold well, both commercially, as a monograph, and in 34

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Berlin’s cafés, as the narrative backstory to Essad Bey’s prodigious literary persona. Interwar Essay Bey was wildly prolific. In his eight years active as an author he produced roughly sixteen works, from sensational memoirs like Blood and Oil and regional criticism like White Russia: The People Without a Homeland (1932) to biased biographies such as Stalin: The Life of a Fanatic (1931; hostile) and Nicolas II: The Prisoner in Purple (1935; sympathetic, a paean to Russia’s “misunderstood” leader). The shadiness of his oeuvre was mirrored in his social caprice: he successfully courted czarism, American celebrity, and the far German right. He married the literary socialite Erika Loewendahl, daughter of a wealthy Swiss shoe magnate; his international circle included the exiled Pasternaks and Nabokovs, in Berlin, Nazi agent George Sylvester Viereck in the States, and towards the end, in Italy, Ezra Pound. Yet by the time he died on the Amalfi coast—early, penniless, and under house arrest in Positano by fascist secret police—he had lost touch with many of these people and personas. He was suffering from a seemingly speculatively, retroactively diagnosed Raynaud’s phenomenon, which causes gangrene in the extremities and is usually treated with their gradual amputation. Much of the above is curiously resistant to rudimentary fact-checking, though, and the internet 35

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contradicts Reiss (and itself) on everything from Nussimbaum’s place of birth, to his cause of death. While the English, Russian and Azerbaijani editions of Wikipedia currently insist that he came into the world in Kiev, the German and Italian pages concede to the possibility of his having been born in Baku. Among these, the English-language open source is also the most hostile to Reiss’s conclusions about the genesis of Ali and Nino, and is packed with Caucasian counter-scholarship and alternative hypotheses. In Russian, however, Kurban Said is immediately cited among Nussimbaum’s pseudonyms, and the novel among his accomplishments. The people’s Nussimbaum is in this way more medium than man, a multi-use totem to the identity problems of a sullied postwar Europe, and a fragmented post-Soviet Eurasia. As gangrene eroded his body in the early 1940s, the warring Continent cannibalized itself, too. Nussimbaum died as he lived: a reflection of his environment, which had forsaken pluralism and begun to decay. No longer a polymorph, he became a mythological monster unable to shed its skin along with its serpentine identity.

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and commemorative of his meandering nature. Reiss makes explicit his research methodology, and at the helm of his inquiry is a skeptical, anecdote-friendly “I.” He writes that his years spent meticulously collecting evidence of Nussimbaum’s existence “revealed that the most unlikely elements of his life and his stories often turned out to be true—if not taken straight from his own amazing experiences, then borrowed from the adventures or tales of family members or friends or cribbed from the pages of some Turkish journal of German anthropological text.” The intuitive coming together of these meta-factual elements mirrors Nussimbaum’s own “miraculous” reality, emergent as it was from the oil-slicked earth of the Caucasus.

In Reiss’s account, our protagonist’s birth takes place neither in Kiev nor in Baku, but on a moving train somewhere between the two—an energetic compromise, sourced from Nussimbaum’s own notes,

In embracing its subject’s own slippery codes, what The Orientalist encapsulates is that very modern predicament—not the promise of a sterile, objective truth to be revealed in its unraveling. It distills the malleable and murky essence of Nussimbaum’s condition into a powerful biographical model that is as relevant now, everywhere, as it is representative of a particularly explosive time in Eurasian history. Examples from Wikipedia above reflect this: we can edit our own lives and the lives of others and opine with the authority of experts. With this we feel borderless, empowered by the potential to inform ourselves while adding to a cauldron of encyclopedic truths, sourced from within.

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There is a commemorative plaque on the outside wall of the apartment building Nussimbaum occupied in Berlin, attributing to him the following platitude: Sinnlos ist das Leben ohne Heimat (“Senseless is life without a homeland”). Such Heimat-speak is the language of fascism. We know Essad Bey to have been fluent in that lexicon, though it remains unsettling that someone who made a career out of homelessness should dismiss that existence as futile, and tragic that the dismissal should adorn the bronze memorial nailed to his former house. Yet the message is liberating in that, there in the dry, cold capital of Teutonic order and logic, it does away with “sense,” emancipating Nussimbaum’s biography from the requirements of reason. Reiss’s study, like its focus, makes the perceived mutual exclusivity of truth and fiction seem pedantic, and the contrasting of the rational and the irrational seem sterile.

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permeated the thought of early 20th-century Western Europe, where it was at once directed outwardly, towards an increasingly nearby “exotic” other, and inwardly, towards the “inadvertent little gestures” that preoccupy psychoanalysis. To different ends and through diverse means, the scholarship, politics, science and the literary and artistic avant-gardes of the time all sought a kind of continuity—in cultural tradition, national identity, and the formation of the self. Freud developed what he believed to be an integrated model for understanding the human psyche; the Surrealists publicly lived the life of the unconscious that model revealed. Fascism and communism meanwhile sought to congeal a mass commonality. It was an approach that, in an increasingly pluralist landscape, was caught up in a cult of intransience and unity.

Nussimbaum’s is a vivid and potent case study, but neither he nor his biographer are solitary heroes. The Orientalist, like other biographies, fulfills a need to personify a kind of empathy, here for the experience of identity—or perhaps, the burden of modern subjecthood, or the apparent puzzle of our own estrangement. Despite the ostensibly tolerant surroundings in which Nussimbaum spent his early life, he was born into a high colonial period, within the Russian Empire and globally. An ethnographic impulse

Nussimbaum was not the first author to blaspheme that cult, to undermine the transcendent authority of the coherent or “authentic” life. He was preceded by fellow polyglot Russian Empire refugees such as Joseph Conrad, a Pole whose oeuvre, like Essad Bey’s, offends in the light of colonial history, who wrote in English, and who constructed an identity based on the limited expectations of his surroundings—who embraced, as James Clifford puts it in The Predicament of Culture, “the serious fiction” of collective life, and of “culture” itself. Through

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similar osmosis Vladimir Nabokov became a famous American novelist-lepidopterist. Alfred Korzybski, a scientist and philosopher of general semantics and Warsaw extraction, who gave us the maxim, “the map is not the territory,” famously condemned the verb “to be”—what he called the “is of identity”—as structurally flawed because we are not what we are called. Korzybski also crumbled the either/or duality that Western thought had adhered to since the Greeks, which demands that we erect a partition between the instinctive and the intellectual, the hereditary and the environmental. He called for a replacement of that dichotomy with a synchretist both/ and. “It is amusing to discover, in the twentieth century,” he wrote, “that the quarrels between two lovers, two mathematicians, two nations, two economic systems, usually assumed insoluble in a finite period should exhibit one mechanism, the semantic mechanism of identification—the discovery of which makes universal agreement possible, in mathematics and in life.”

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is magmatic. It takes the myth of the marvelous and the fiction of objectivity and brews them into the possibility of a liquid existence. If the Lev Nussimbaum archetype were mineral, he would be crude oil—the product of ancient cultural materials that have decomposed, identities that have been fossilized and then made molten beneath the pressure and the heat of history. If the fashioning of selfhood is a malleable, cumulative creative process, let us not be collage artists, but alchemists. Let us transform “blood” and “soil” into the “black gold” that lies deep beneath them: unrefined, vigorous, the precious product of unfathomable—of senseless— quantities of human time.

We celebrate Ali and Nino for its both/and. The novel highlights a distinction between what it calls “progressive Europe” and “reactionary Asia” and proceeds, quite literally, to marry them. The territory of The Orientalist is far murkier than that. Bubbling up intuitively from beneath countless strata of experience, its biographical methodology is not one of marriage; it 40

Deep mythic structures determine who is likable and who isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t among the famous dead. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Janet Malcolm, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007) 42

I AM YOU AND YOU ARE NOT ME Part 2: Dead or Canadian? by Douglas Coupland

In the late 1980s, a much-younger MTV produced a game show called Remote Control. It didn’t air for very long, but it was fun while it lasted. It was a sortof pop culture Jeopardy!. Instead of asking the name of the world’s third largest body of fresh water (Lake Baikal), Remote Control asked contestants questions like who was the least popular of the four Monkees (Peter Tork). If you were in the right mood at the right time of day, Remote Control was perfect viewing, and one of its recurring question categories was: “Dead or Canadian?” They’d put up a photo of, say, Glenn Ford, Eugene Levy or Doug McLure, and contestants had to determine if they were, well . . . dead or Canadian: (dead; Canadian; dead). Contestants almost always got the answer wrong, and as a category, American contestants must surely have dreaded being stuck with this one. Fifteen years after Remote Control was canceled, my phone rang; it was 2005. I still had a landline and I still answered it. On the other end was John Saul, a Canadian author, historian and public intellectual who was assembling a collection of biographies of “dead Canadians written by living Canadians.” He wanted me to write about Marshall McLuhan, and in my head I felt as if I’d landed the MTV jackpot: dead and Canadian. Like most people I knew nothing of Marshall McLuhan—except that he had coined two aphorisms: 1) “the medium is the message” and, 2) the notion that the

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world is a “global village.” McLuhan had died in December of 1980, during my first year of art school, and his star at that point was at its all-time low; his name was never mentioned in any classes on theory or semiotics. I told all of this to John Saul and asked why he wanted me to write about McLuhan and not somebody else. His reply was (after the briefest of pauses) that I would probably enjoy McLuhan’s ideas but also that I was an embodiment of McLuhan’s notions about the future. I was unsure if this was a put down or a put up, and I declined to do the book. But John was persistent and two years later I thought, okay, this could be interesting. I agreed to write it.

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McLuhan’s two masterpieces were 1961’s Gutenberg Galaxy, and 1964’s Understanding Media. Gutenberg is a neutron-star chunk of book that a typical reader can enter into for perhaps two pages at a time before slamming it down in anger, or perhaps the reader will cradle it to his or her chest in a swoon of new perceptions. My copy of the book is laced with comments in the margins like: what an asshole, and this is great. It is probably the most combative read I’ve ever had, and ever will. Both Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media are vast, cryptic, extemporaneous and dizzying, yet glacial. Intellectually, McLuhan’s books offer a sumptuous Louis XIV banquet of ideas into which one occasionally finds a folding-card table offering stale oatmeal cookies and room-temperature lemonade. Or a fifteen-cent-off coupon for Jell-O. Or peacock McNuggets.

The first thing to do was to actually read McLuhan’s books to see what the man was all about. I didn’t want to read anything biographical about him until I’d established some form of intellectual connection, and I thought this would be easy. But it wasn’t. The first thing I learned about McLuhan is that almost nobody has read his books because, in certain structural ways, they are almost unreadable. They’re opaque, repetitive, endlessly digressive, revel in ontological cul-de-sacs and draw relentlessly on a vast and staggering number of classical sources that are themselves opaque and often tangential. The man can go on for ages on a technicality—Elizabethan pamphleteers, say—and yet dismiss something like all of 20th-century art in one sentence.

Basically, McLuhan predicted and described the internet in 1961, but because he couldn’t describe the internet’s technical specifics—such Google, eBay, PayPal or particular web sites—he came across to people as though he were kind of nuts. In 2013, we’ve all become accustomed to master-theory books like Guns, Germs, and Steel, The Age of Extremes, and Blink. Such books are lucid and written in an almost conversational tone, allowing for easy access to the ideas presented. No such luck with McLuhan. Before

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Being a first-time biographer, my strategy in beginning to read about McLuhan’s life was to enter McLuhan’s mind and body and find something—anything—that the two of us had in common, and build from there. This might have been very difficult were I writing about Joseph Goebbels, Susan B. Anthony or Aung San Suu Kyi, but with Marshall McLuhan I hit the jackpot. First, his family’s ancestral history and immigration experience was a direct copy in time and space of that of my own family: Bible-thumping Scotch-Irish traversing the 19th- and 20th-century Canadian Maritimes and prairies. (McLuhan even lived down the street from my mother in Winnipeg; they attended the same high school; I suppose this overlap is a benefit of me being a living Canadian writing about a dead Canadian.) Second, McLuhan’s medical eccentricities and tics in some ways

mirrored many of my own, sometimes to a level that was spooky—particularly when one approaches the lower end of the autistic spectrum, that magic line where personality becomes pathology. This second overlap very much helped me to bond with someone who was, by any description, very hard to bond with. Remember, McLuhan’s ship came in when he was fifty years old. He was a crusty, highly Catholic fuddy-duddy teacher of Middle English at the University of Toronto. He had many of the uncomfortable prejudices of his era (just think of your parents ranting about whatever at the Thanksgiving dinner table). He would discuss his ideas almost anywhere or any time, but he never ever discussed his beliefs or his fears or his sense of himself. Not that one needs to do that, but it certainly makes it harder to open the gate. I got the impression that if I met McLuhan at a dinner party he’d be fascinating for the first ten minutes and then highly annoying for the next 180, and the only way to get through those minutes would be to perform a sort-of psychiatric armchair analysis along the lines of, “What the heck is going on inside this guy? For example, why is he always punning?” McLuhan loved puns, but punning is actually shown to be a wiring glitch in regions of the brain where ideas are turned into words that are then turned into sounds that are then spoken by the mouth. (Oddly, McLuhan’s only million-seller was a highly art-directed musing on his ideas by a graphic designer, Quentin Fiore; McLuhan provided only the title: The Medium is the Massage, a pun.)

finishing Understanding Media I was able to see why he was invariably reduced to his two main clichés: anything else would take forever to explain. ••• After having read McLuhan’s books, I knew that the heavy lifting had to begin. I’d have to read two preexisting McLuhan biographies, both of which, unfortunately for their authors, were written preinternet. Then I’d have to make a timeline of McLuhan’s life and write, well, a biography.

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McLuhan had many wiring glitches. Everyone does—there is no “normal.” But there are standard deviances. This is undeniable. With almost scientific clarity we can say that McLuhan had a low- to mediumgrade case of Asperger’s syndrome. While he was very social, as a bombast, his interaction skills were poor; his classes were filled with tripping hippies whom he loathed, and who looked at McLuhan in much the same spirit as current students might view a payload of Mentos being dropped into a liter-sized bottle of Diet Coke. The thing is, whether in a classroom or at a dinner table, McLuhan was pretty much a one-way leaf-blower of ideas and theories. He also suffered from hyperacuity (extreme sensitivity to noise). He was an astonishing mimic, a skill he inherited from his mother, and a skill related to hypervascularization of certain portions of the brain. This is where it gets almost science-fiction: McLuhan had a third artery in his head that ran through his brain’s left lobe, a vascular feature only ever seen among mammals in cats. (It was discovered when he had a lemon-sized brain tumor removed in 1968.) McLuhan also had pronounced memory skills—a condition that occurs when factual information is stored in the portion of the brain otherwise used for wayfinding and directionality. For people who remember pi to ten-thousand digits, they’re not telling you a numerical sequence; in their minds they’re simply giving you driving instructions. And finally, McLuhan possessed a sense of what some

members of the psychiatric community call “Christmas Morning Syndrome”—the perpetual, enviable sense that one is in the midst of a holy or numinous situation, something most people experience a few times in their lives; McLuhan lived it 24/7. He was a daily attender of mass and put up with the late 20th century only because upon death, he would be able to escape it.

But let’s focus on autism, which, in the early 21st century is a jumping-off point for endless discussions on the medicalization of personality. I looked at my own family’s experiences across the 150 or so years for which we have stories, and, just like in your family, mine has its own ghosts and legends and people who magically vanish. Certain people are either never discussed, or if they are, a life and a legacy are washed away with phrase like, “Him? He took to his bed and never left,” or, “She had the vapors, and was never the same again,” or, “He was . . . troubled. We never saw him much. Why would you want to talk about him, anyway?” But to view recent ancestors through the lens of SSRI drugs, painkillers or Cipro, is to force one to have true compassion. The vapors is depression. Taking to one’s bed is atrial fibrillation. The village idiot was bipolar. Your reclusive uncle was hermetic, which probably meant he was socially phobic and merely somewhere on the low end of the autism spectrum. Did I say “merely”? That’s where this gets contentious. To describe someone

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by a condition is to somehow diminish their humanity, when, in fact, I believe, it allows us to know why they were the way they were and to allow us to feel greater compassion for them. Your great grandmother by the lake wasn’t possessed by the devil; she had an anxiety disorder. A cure was just a molecule away. Poor thing. So when it came to Marshall and writing about the man, I felt the need to look at autism head on, that to not do so would be irresponsible. I even went so far as to include (with permission) a readerparticipation autism “test” created by English researcher Simon Baron-Cohen. I also investigated punning, alliteration, rhyming and other brain anomalies that, in concert, define a person’s speech and much of what we call personality. In so doing I actually ended up reframing many of the ways I look at myself and the people around me. Do I see others or myself as walking “conditions”? Well, sort of. Do I see someone who whistles while they work as having a medical condition? Yes. But it doesn’t make that person any less endearing—I merely know why it’s happening. (Almost always a human tic can be ascribed to a brain-wiring glitch, or to the amount of blood certain regions of the brain receive.)

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Would I be as medically forensic were I to do the book again? Absolutely. Even more so, actually. I think that any biographer from here on in would be doing a disservice to their subject, their readers and themselves to not attempt some form of forensic reconstruction of their subject’s physical and psychological pathologies. This is not to say there isn’t magic and poetry that arises from all of these glitches and malfunctions. I do see McLuhan as a poet, and it’s to our species’s credit that even though most people had no idea what McLuhan was on about, they realized that it was something valuable and something worth keeping.

Would I do the biography differently were I to do it again? Absolutely. Live and learn.

Again, in many ways McLuhan was the antithesis of what society thought he was, a future-loving technology-crazed booster of high-speed change. Wrong. He despised the 20th century and saw technology as the undoing of the human species and the planet. His utopia would be to live in a kingdom without borders, in a world before the printing press—a world of yarns and stories and troubadours—a world in which one wouldn’t even consider the voices in their heads as their own, but rather, the voices of dead relatives or the king stopping by for a chat and then moving on. This sort of universe is an “aural” universe where the spoken word trumps all. McLuhan thought that the printed book turned us into people where the eye trumped all, creating in its wake, the dreadful, dreadful

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20th century. Whether it was wishful thinking or not, McLuhan saw the successor technology to the TV as being the technology (the internet) that would take us back to the world of the ear. It can sound so simple but he made it sound so impenetrable. He was a man far ahead of his time and a man far behind his time, but he was never actually in his time. ••• McLuhan’s son Eric, now 73, was kind enough to give me an inner-cheek swab of his buccal cells, which I then sent to a genetic-research company to find out more. I was told (three weeks later) that the subject came from Ireland/Scotland/England. Quelle surprise, BUT . . . for an extra $169.99 I could pay to have a matrilineal DNA amplification package which could net me far more targeted results—which is when I learned that much of the DNA industry is as scammy as theater popcorn or weekend mattress blowout sales. Eric’s DNA is on file and some day, when getting your genetic map printed is as common as laser printing a sign advertising lost kittens, we can revisit Eric McLuhan’s DNA and learn at least something of his father. Does any of McLuhan’s DNA survive? Possibly. McLuhan was buried in January of 1981 in Holy Cross Cemetery in northern Toronto. In 1988, I was working 54

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in Toronto as a fact-checker and up-front editor of a longdefunct business magazine. This was before fax machines broke the psychologically significant $1,000 price point. Susan McMillan from the advertising department was asking editorial to do something, anything, interesting about fax machines in order to attract fax ad sales. I actually love this kind of challenge, and in response I created the “Celebrity Fax of the Month.” The first was a really lovely lipstick kiss by supermodel Linda Evangelista faxed to us from the Hotel George V in Paris on its stationery. It floated on the page like a Man Ray sketch and was really gorgeous. Unfortunately I had eleven more celebrity faxes to do that year, and what began as fun quickly became a pain in the ass, and all of us in the junior editorial pool were scratching our heads to come up with new ideas. The series reached a simultaneous acme and nadir one month when, after the previous month’s celebrity fax—a hockey puck from a Russian recently signed NHL player faxed to us from Moscow—we printed a photocopy of a slice of Wolfgang Puck’s new frozen pizza from his flagship restaurant in Beverly Hills. It’s genius caption? “Last month we brought you a hockey puck. This month we bring you Wolfgang Puck!” This was when we juniors knew we were in a level of hell, getting more and more desperate. To this end, 55

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I remember one incredibly cold afternoon I took the subway and then a bus way the heck out into Toronto’s northern suburbs and visited McLuhan’s grave with some 8.5-by-11-inch paper and a piece of graphite from a graphic supply store. Here’s the thing: I didn’t know squat about McLuhan, but I knew that he was all about technology and . . . well, we were all flailing to fill that wretched fax page with something, anything. So I made a rubbing of the surprisingly low-key gravestone that, today, you can easily find on Google Images. In a thenhigh-tech computer font it read, “The truth shall make you free.” I took the image back to the office and faxed it around the world through a chain of fax machines used by friends working in various offices abroad, until the final image returned to Toronto highly degraded, still legible. The meaning of what I did is lost—and maybe never existed to begin with—but I look back on that day now and what really sticks in my mind is this: I was just six feet away from Marshall McLuhan’s DNA, and maybe there’s still some left.

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head and is known to none but himself. – Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain (1870–77) 58

“The eye of one has been replaced by the eyes of all. Life has changed into one vast partouze in which everyone takes part . . . The camera is seemingly interested only in famous people, but it is enough for a jet to crash near you, your shirt goes up in flames and in an instant you too have become famous and are included in the universal partouze, which has nothing to do with delight but merely serves solemn notice to all that they have nowhere to hide and that everyone is at the mercy of everyone else.” – Milan Kundera, Immortality 1

A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF PEOPLE The Wiki-Bio by Charly Wilder

Biography used to be a book. Now it’s a game, a desire, a demand. It is a cross between tombstone etchings and Chinese whispers. It’s the domain of a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free, nonprofit internet encyclopedia. We’re not only using social media to continuously curate our own biographies; we’re combing through the biographies of others, hungrily jumping from one to the next. And if they’re famous, we’re probably doing it on Wikipedia. We are all biographers, and we are all stalking each other. Take a recent yoga class I was thinking of attending. The instructor that day was named Dechan Thurman, who, as his bio on the yoga studio’s website explained, is the brother of movie star Uma Thurman. This is just the kind of thing that might send me to Wikipedia. What else does Wikipedia tell us about Uma? First of all, her youngest daughter with Arpad

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Busson (click 2) is named Rosalind Arusha Arkadina Altalune Florence Thurman-Busson. Uma’s father, Robert Thurman, is an influential American scholar of Buddhism and co-founder of the Tibet House in New York. After the dissolution of his first marriage to Marie-Christophe de Menil (click 3), Thurman shacked up with Uma’s and Dechan’s mother, 1950s-era Swedish fashion model Nena von Schlebrügge (click), who had been discovered in Stockholm by Vogue photographer Norman Parkinson (click 4) at the age of 14. Nena’s father, Colonel Baron Friedrich Karl Johannes von Schlebrügge, was a German monarchist and World War I cavalry officer, who after an interwar stint as a successful Berlin businessman, was jailed by the Nazis for protecting Jews and refusing to join the military.

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Like many of the longer, more fully annotated wikibios, Leary’s has an inconsistency of tone that borders on dementia. Take the following passage, concerning the famous catchphrase attributed to Leary, “Turn on, tune in, drop out”: In a 1988 interview with Neil Strauss, he said that this slogan was “given to him” by Marshall McLuhan when the two had lunch in New York City, adding, “Marshall was very much interested in ideas and marketing, and he started singing something like, ‘Psychedelics hit the spot / Five hundred micrograms, that’s a lot,’ to the tune of [the wellknown Pepsi 1950s singing commercial]. Then he started going, ‘Tune in, turn on, and drop out.’” At some point in the late 1960s, Leary moved to California and made many new friends in Hollywood. “When he married his third wife, Rosemary Woodruff, in 1967, the event was directed by Ted Markland of Bonanza. All the guests were on acid.”

Leary’s wiki-bio is a fascinating document in itself, and not only because the story of his life is consistently ratcheted up to a level of intensity and cultural caricature particular to cult leaders, pop idols and demagogues.

This is typical of Wikipedia, to go from the annotated anecdotal specificity of that Strauss quote to, “At some point in the late 1960s” Leary “made many new friends.” Can we possibly imagine such a comically imprecise sentence occurring in an authored biography? At some point in the late 1960s, he made many new friends. What happened at that point? At what point exactly? Who were these friends? Were these friends he could count on? Then, before any more information about this period in his life is provided, we’re reading a quote from Leary’s 2008 New York Times obituary about his acid wedding “directed by Ted Markland of Bonanza” (click5).

Back to Nena von Schlebrügge, who after working for a year in London, crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary in a snowstorm in 1958, docking in New York City at the age of 17. Six years later she began a short-lived marriage to Timothy Leary (click), soon after he’d been fired from Harvard for not showing up for lectures during the height of the psilocybin project.

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Back to Leary and his third wife Rosemary Woodruff, who was there for the Bed-In with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1969 and for his unsuccessful gubernatorial bid against Ronald Reagan in 1970 and for a short stint in Algeria with Eldridge Cleaver and the remnants of the Black Panther Party’s “government in exile,” but who eventually bailed on him while the couple was in exile in Switzerland. There, in 1972, Leary met and fake-married Swiss-born British socialite Joanna Harcourt-Smith (click), who—get this—is the aunt of Arpad Busson, husband of Uma Thurman and brother-in-law of my neighborhood yoga instructor. It’s almost impossible for me to see a film, read a book, hear an album, without wiki-bio-ing two or three affiliated people—as if biography has gone from genre to a kind of appendage or footnote inseparable from the name. You might even say that the wiki-bio has transplanted traditional biography, taking the genre from something that is singularly authored to something crowd-sourced, hyperlinked and malleable. So, as with Leary, we get ornately bizarre shifts in tone, voice, and precision. We also get a thousand words on MTV reality star Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino (click6) and only one hundred on Soliman Gamil (click7), who someone once told me was one of the most significant Egyptian musicians of the last century, but which I can’t 64

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confirm, since Wikipedia only provides a three-sentence un-sourced stub. We get biography as a site for sabotage, self-promotion and ideological warfare, where zealous PR interns and fanboys constantly edit and re-edit and edit again. In the US, the wiki-bios of politicians are sites of constant sparring, with opposition sides hacking into them or inserting false information. None of which speaks very highly to the wiki-bio’s encyclopedic accuracy, a quality supposedly at the crux of its worth. This fairly well-tread criticism came to the fore in 2005, when prominent American political journalist John Seigenthaler (click) discovered that his wiki-bio falsely pegged him as a suspect in the assassinations of US president John F. Kennedy and attorney general Robert F. Kennedy. Known, according to Wikipedia, as “The Wikipedia Biography Controversy,” the dustup brought attention to the shortcomings of the encyclopedia, or as Seigenthaler saw it, a “flawed and irresponsible research tool” at the mercy of legally protected “volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects.” Maybe so, but I can’t help but think back to a biographical text that made a huge impact on me as a child. It was part of a course book on Jewish history given to me and the other Midwestern middle-class secular Jewish kids in my Sunday School class. The subject was 65

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Yasser Arafat, who was introduced to us as an antiSemitic Egyptian terrorist whose gang of Jew-hating thugs, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, had set out to destroy our Midwestern middle-class secular Sunday School (and Israel). It was accompanied by a grainy black-and-white photo of Arafat that was nothing if not a mug shot. Did I, a second-grader in suburban Kansas City, go to the library to research Arafat and the PLO? No. But if it had happened now, I certainly would have taken to Wikipedia. The first thing I would have learned about Mohammed Yasser Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini (click) is that he had a lot more names than my teachers had led me to believe. Second, I would have read the following:

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Ultimately the complexity—the same multi-textual inconsistent jumble that makes the wiki-bio problematic as a journalistic source—is what might render it less vulnerable than traditional biography to a kind of pedagogical subterfuge, or, in other words, to lies. As the consumption of biography becomes a sort of Trivial Pursuit, triviality becomes increasingly serious. Then again, sometimes you’re just genealogically stalking your yoga teacher.8

1 2

Milan Kundera, Immortality (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics; 1999), 33.

A few ripe tidbits from Arpad Busson’s wiki-bio: his first foray into business may or may not

have been selling toothpicks door-to-door; he has two children with Elle Macpherson (both of

Arafat remains a highly controversial figure whose legacy has been widely

whom also have impossibly rococo names but no wiki-bios); and in 2006 Tatler magazine voted

regardless of political ideology or faction, viewing him as a freedom

Wikipedia page. From the pages of others we learn she is the mother of Robert Thurman’s eldest

disputed. He was “revered by many Arabs,” and most Palestinians,

fighter who symbolized their national aspirations. However, he was

also reviled, especially by many Israelis, who viewed him as a terrorist responsible for hundreds of bombings and deaths.

I would have stumbled into a forest of semi-substantiated, often contradictory information that would have complicated what I thought I knew. Even at that young age I might have begun to recognize nuance, to question things that I didn’t learn to question until years later. 66

him the seventh most-wanted person at a party in the UK. 3

Despite the tease of hypertext, oil heiress Marie-Christophe de Menil has no dedicated

daughter, Taya Thurman. Taya just happens to be the mother of the late artist Dash Snow, whose son is named “Secret Midnight Magic Nico.” 4

“Norman Parkinson’s photo of Jerry Hall sparked Bryan Ferry’s interest to invite her over to

star as the cover model for Roxy Music’s fifth studio album, Siren.” 5 6

Tragically, Wikipedia has almost nothing on this guy.

“In August of [2011], Sorrentino was offered a ‘substantial’ sum of money by fashion retailer

Abercrombie & Fitch not to wear the company’s clothes.”

“Soliman Gamil (Arabic:

b. Alexandria, Egypt, December 24, 1924; died June 13,

1994) was an Egyptian composer and qanun player. In 1963 he began to experiment with the use

of Egyptian traditional musical instruments in his compositions for films and theater, in an effort to evoke the sounds of Ancient Egypt.”

After my Dechan Thurman-prompted Wikipedia binge, attending his yoga class seemed too creepy.

Instead, the next day, I went to a class led by someone named Miriam Iannone, who has practically no web presence.

Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (1918) 68

There sits the biography: a nice weight in the hand, firm but with a tiny hint of cushioning in its numberless pages, reassuringly bound, preferably hardback, probably unread. The biography exudes impossible authority—a life’s work (often), spent on someone else’s life—and triggers in the reader a thrilling intimidation: am I up to this?

Sorry I am Daring to Write Your Biography The Art of the Disclaimer by James Westcott

The reader is free to give up almost immediately though, because there is always the preface. Usually, the preface tells you not exactly all you need to know, but more than enough to extrapolate a larger picture. You glean from it the style and perspective of the biographer, unless her preface acts as a crafty piece of bait rather than an overture. It often skips straight to the subject’s death or narrates a breakthrough moment in their life, when things were just about to turn in their favor, when they were starting to realize their ability in the real world, not just in their heads, or when they are in the middle of a crisis or a failure that later—we all know but must not admit at this point—makes perfect historical and psychological sense. The best thing about prefaces though is that they often contain a very beautiful and complex disclaimer or apology, and, especially if the biography is written before the 20th century, written in florid multi-clause English. I usually pick up biographies just to read these declarations of fear and inadequacy in the face of their

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subject who is: a) just so much better than the biographer in every way; and who b) they must now somehow encompass, master, honor and critique, in order not to write pure panegyric; and c) who they usually had a very intimate relationship with, which makes the whole endeavor—already nearly impossible—even more fraught. Faced with the task of biography, outright terror seems a very correct response. Biography is a genre that must apologize for itself. There are several hallmarks of the classic disclaimer. The biographer must apologize in advance to the reader and to the subject alike for the brazenness of what he has attempted. He might also apologize not only for his own failings but for the inherent limitations of the medium itself. At the same time—disclaimers are by definition an excuse to carry on regardless with what you always planned to do—the biographer must subtly establish his excellent credentials and justify his audacity. Disclaimers are moments of intimacy, collusion and confession, throwing into relief the secret triangle of reader-biographer-subject. They clear the air between the parties, removing doubts and suspicions, venting insecurities. It’s the hurried completion of the mise en scène, with the audience taking their seats, before the performance of writing can begin. What follows are simply a few of the best disclaimers I know of (and also one of my own), chronologically 72

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presented and humbly annotated. If some are too long, forgive me; it’s only an attempt to give the fantastic style of these authors the proper breathing space. And if the chronology of these examples makes everything seem teleological, like we are on an inevitable path of progress and improvement—This is How We Became Modern—then I’m also sorry. It’s not my intention at all. But confronting inescapable chronology without imposing a portentous tone or a sense of inevitability is one of the dilemmas of biography itself. And, finally, if I have missed some of the better examples of disclaimers throughout the history of biography, it is due to a fundamental ignorance (and a lack of space) that I hope the reader will forgive me for, and which this collection—as far as I know like nothing ever before assembled—is an attempt to combat. The World Itself: John One of the earliest biographies, the Gospels, ends the last of its four books (four—already an admission of the difficulty of biography) with a disclaimer of sorts, not on behalf of himself—John does not feel particularly inadequate—but for the limitation of the medium of the book compared with (especially Jesus’) limitless life: And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen. John 21:25, ca.50–90 CE (King James Bible, 1611) 73

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This always feels like a shocking, almost Borgesian, admission of fallibility, incompleteness, or imperfection— in a text that is supposedly God-given, watertight. Perhaps the real message of this disclaimer is more assertive than defensive: yes, I’m being selective; of course there is much more, but please trust that you are being told all that you can handle right now. Risk the Judgments: Einhard Einhard’s Vita Karoli Magni (Life of Charles the Great, aka Charlemagne, 827 CE) opens with the authorial self-effacement necessary for launching what is basically a hagiography of his former master (Einhard was a scholar and a servant of the king). At the same time, embedded within the apology is a germ of defiance, something curiously close to a boast. The contradiction does not render the initial modesty false, but in fact indicates a promising degree of honesty, even to the point of self-incrimination, on the part of an author who knows he is inadequate and still probably the most worthy biographer: Here is my book for you, containing an account of the most famous and greatest of men. In it there is nothing you should wonder at apart from his deeds, except perhaps that I, a barbarian, with too little training in the language of Rome, should have thought I could write something correct or fitting in Latin, and rushed headlong into such great impudence that I might thought to have despised the advice of Cicero, who in the first book of his Tusculan Disputations, when he 74

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speaks of Latin authors, says, “For people to set their thoughts down in writing when they cannot organize or make them clear or charm their reader with any delight is an intemperate abuse of leisure and of letters.” This opinion of the famous orator might have deterred me from writing, but I had resolved rather to risk the judgments of men, and to endanger my own feeble talent by writing, than to neglect the memory of so great a man for the sake of sparing myself [emphasis mine].

Grasping his humility like a weapon, Einhard adds a disclaimer to his disclaimer: even though his talents are inadequate, . . . I did not see why I should refuse to undertake a composition of this sort, since I was aware that no one could write about these things more truthfully than I could. I was present and knew them by the witness of my own eyes, as they say, and I could not know clearly whether they would be written by anyone else.

Your Excellency Should Deign: Vasari The dedication is a very particular type of disclaimer, and it is an excellent vehicle for smuggling through cheeky extra meanings—like ironic servility and robust self-defense—that your patron probably wouldn’t notice. Giorgio Vasari presents his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550) to “the most illustrious and most excellent” Cosimo de’ Medici, Duke of Florence, with the plea: Deign, then, Excellency, to accept it, to favour it, and, if this may be granted to it by your exalted thoughts, sometimes to read it . . . my pure intention has been not to gain for myself praise as a writer, 75

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but as craftsman to praise the industry and to revive the memory of those who, having given life and adornment to these professions, do not deserve to have their names and their works wholly left, even as they were, the prey of death and of oblivion . . . if my writing, being unpolished and as artless as my speech, be unworthy of your Excellency’s ear and of the merits of so many most illustrious intellects . . . pardon me that the pen of a draughtsman, such as they too were, has no greater power to give them outline and shadow; and as for yourself, let it suffice me that your Excellency should deign to approve my simple labor, remembering that the necessity of gaining for myself the wherewithal to live has left me no time to exercise myself with any instrument but the brush.

Thus the dedicatee becomes a foil: under the guise of honor and praise you can unburden yourself, beg for forgiveness, justify your own shortcomings, and sneak away triumphant. In Me a Presumptuous Task: Boswell James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) kicks off with a beautiful two-step disclaimer—like Einhard, Boswell suffers from a sense of inadequacy commingled with a feeling of being called to the task, and that it would be dishonorable to turn his back to fate: To write the life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others, and who, whether we consider his extraordinary endowments, or his various works, has been equaled by few in any age, is an arduous, and may be reckoned in me a presumptuous task . . . Had Dr. Johnson written his own life . . . the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that 76

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was ever exhibited. [Here comes a big BUT] . . . As I had the honour and happiness of enjoying his friendship for upwards of twenty years; as I had the scheme of writing his life constantly in view; as he was well apprised of this circumstance, and from time to time obligingly satisfied my enquiries, by communicating to me the incidents of his early years; as I acquired a facility in recollecting, and was very assiduous in recording his conversation, of which the extraordinary vigour and vivacity constituted one of the first features of his character; and as I have spared no pains in obtaining materials concerning him, from every quarter where I could discover that they were to be found, and have been favoured with the most liberal communications by his friends; I flatter myself that few biographers have entered upon such a work as this, with more advantages, independent of literary abilities, in which I am not vain enough to compare myself with some great names who have gone before me in this kind of writing.

Here is What I Have Done: Rousseau You would think that autobiography lends itself to even more profuse apologies than biography. The subject was indubitably “there” for everything, but when experience recalled is translated into writing, the reassuring feeling of self-coincidence—of really being the person one claims to be—is all but erased. The subject may as well be writing about another person, someone more coherent, someone who is in effect getting a second chance on the page. Added to the charge sheet is the crime of monumental selfindulgence. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1769) is appropriately titled: the whole endeavor for him can 77

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be nothing but an apology. But he launches into it with a bravely unapologetic disclaimer: I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself. Simply myself. I know my own heart and understand my fellow man. But I am made unlike any one I have ever met; I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different. Whether Nature did well or ill in breaking the mould in which she formed me, is a question which can only be resolved after the reading of my book. Let the last trump sound when it will, I shall come forward with this work in my hand, to present myself before my Sovereign Judge, and proclaim aloud: “Here is what I have done, and if by chance I have used some immaterial embellishment it has been only to fill a void due to a defect of memory . . .”

Later in the Confessions, Rousseau makes another apology, but only for his autobiographical rigor. After one has resolved to tell the truth, one must tell the whole truth. A key dilemma of the life narrative is the problem of daunting continuity—life goes on and on, you can’t take breaks, while books cannot include everything (cf. John, 21:25). But how can you remain credible if you pass over certain incidents or periods? How can you leave yourself (or your subject) alone, even for a second? Anything could be happening in those moments. It’s a question of deciding on a thickness of detail.

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for those I shall enter into later, none of which may appear interesting in his eyes. Since I have undertaken to reveal myself absolutely to the public, nothing about me must remain hidden or obscure. I must remain incessantly beneath his gaze, so that he may follow me in all the extravagances of my heart and into every least corner of my life. Indeed, he must never lose sight of me for a single instant, for if he finds the slightest gap in my story, the smallest hiatus, he may wonder what I was doing at that moment and accuse me of refusing to tell the whole truth. I am laying myself sufficiently open to human malice by telling my story, without rendering myself more vulnerable by any silence.

(Not) To Blacken the Radiant: Freud At the beginning of Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood (1957), Freud protests—too much?—that he is not going to do what you think he is going to do: When Psychiatric research, normally content to draw on frailer men for its material, approaches one who is among the greatest of the human race, it is not doing so for the reasons so frequently ascribed to it by laymen. “To blacken the radiant and drag the sublime into the dust” is no part of its purpose, and there is no satisfaction for it in narrowing the gulf which separates the perfection of the great from the inadequacy of the objects that are its usual concern. But it cannot help finding worthy of understanding everything that can be recognized in those illustrious models, and it believes there is no one so great as to be disgraced by being subject to the laws which govern both normal and pathological activity with equal cogency.

Before I go further I must present my reader with an apology, or rather a justification, for the petty details I have just been entering into, and

Freud is justifying not only the psychological biography, but the task of all biography: to look at someone in full and say, like Hamlet, “he was a

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man, take him for all in all”—to criticize where it’s due but not to banalize. The “bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast” (Yeats, 1937) can still be Great, is great in fact because he sublimates all the junk into something transcendent. Professional Burglar: Janet Malcolm Then—let’s say somewhere in the early to mid20th century—something strange happens. At the same moment when we start doubting biography— as we theoretically wring our hands over the impossibility of translating a life onto the page, the primacy of the creation over the creator, the death of the author, the dubiousness of “great men,” the New Criticism, and then poststructuralism and deconstruction—biographers themselves ironically give up the venerable, centuries-long tradition of the disclaimer. There are a few reasons I can think of for this: the diktat of the Strunk & White school of hard, clear writing, that throat clearing has no place in good, manly prose; an outsize fear of appearing falsely modest; the idea that such doubts should instead suffuse the entire narrative . . . As disclaimers dry up, prefaces tend to consist of a kind of movie trailer (a thrilling scene from the ensuing drama) combined with an Oscar speech (“I want to thank my agent . . .”). 80

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Biographers no longer tremble, but they may well agonize. In Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1994; not really a biography, but about biography), we get hyperbolic self-flagellation— which ironically becomes almost worshipful of the subject and her inscrutable sovereignty—rather than good old fashioned, liberating apology: Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world. The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away. The voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity. The biographer is portrayed almost as a kind of benefactor. He is seen as sacrificing years of his life to this task, tirelessly sitting in archives and libraries and patiently conducting interviews with witnesses. There is no length he will not go to, and the more his book reflects his industry the more the reader believes that he is having an elevating literary experience, rather than listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people’s mail. The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography’s status as a popular genre. The reader’s amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) makes sense only when see as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole. 81

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In Case of My Death: Abramović In my biography of Marina Abramović, I didn’t think to write an apology. But I realize now that I did use the subject’s own words to write what amounted to a grand, cowering disclaimer: she’s not dead yet, so please don’t take this book as any kind of comprehensive statement; she’ll make that herself, when the time comes . . . When Marina Abramovic dies, she requests the following procedure, as stipulated in her last will and testament: In case of my death I would like to have this following memorial ceremony: Three coffins. The first coffin with my real body. The second coffin with an imitation of my body. The third coffin with an imitation of my body. I would like to appoint that three persons would take care of the distribution of the three coffins in three different places in the world. (America, Europe and Asia). The special instructions will be written and put in a sealed envelope, with their names and instructions to follow. The memorial will be held in New York City with all three coffins present and sealed. After the ceremony the appointed persons will follow my instructions for the distribution of the coffins. My wish is that all three coffins should be buried in the earth.

Intimate and Sometimes Intimidating: Peeters The most recent almost-apology I could find comes, quite fittingly, in the biography Derrida (2012) by Benoît 82

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Peeters. Deconstruction, Derrida’s theory of how texts are constantly undoing themselves, finds a perfect case study in the genre of biography, such is its dubious but insistent claim on reality. Acknowledging all this, the biographer still has to wrest control back from the subject, understand but not imitate, in order not to be swallowed up entirely: More than once, I have felt giddy at the extent and the difficulty of the task on which I had embarked. It probably needed a certain naivety, or at least ingenuousness, to get such a project off the ground. After all, Geoffrey Benington, one of the best commentators on Derrida’s work, had sternly dismissed the possibility of a biography worthy of the name: It is of course to be expected that Derrida will some day be the subject of biographical writing, and there is nothing to prevent this being of the most traditional kind . . . But this type of complacent and recuperative writing would at some point have to encounter the fact that Derrida’s work should at least have disturbed its presuppositions. I would hazard a guess that one of the last genres of academic or quasi-academic writing to be affected by deconstruction is the genre of biography . . . Is it possible to conceive of a multiple, layered but not hierarchized, fractal biography which would escape the totalizing and teleological commitments which inhabit the genre from the start? Without denying the interest of such an approach, I have sought, in the final analysis, to write not so much a Derridean biography as a biography of Derrida. Mimicry, in this respect as in many others, does not seem the best way of serving him today. 83

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Peeters also has an answer to the ethical agonies of writing biography: Writing a biography means living through an intimate and sometimes intimidating adventure. Whatever happens, Jacques Derrida will now be part of my own life, like a sort of posthumous friend. A strange, one-way friendship that he would not have failed to question. I am convinced of one thing: there are biographies only of the dead. So every biography is lacking its supreme reader: the one who is no longer there. If there is an ethics of biographers, it can perhaps be located here: would they dare to stand, book in hand, in front of their subject?

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is still living is in a way the ultimate disclaimer: such a biography—if we may call it that—cannot dare to claim comprehensiveness. Life exceeds it— just as it does in a posthumous biography, actually. The text must be molten because the life is still f lowing. Leaving the final chapter up to the subject seems like a very decent trade-off for them allowing you to write their life so far. It also gives them a chance to invent another.

This is where the guilty feeling of the biographer comes from: he appropriates a life, usually after it has been lived. That is a pretty risky thing to do, and an apology is in order.

In my case, I realized this too late. Shortly after I’d finished writing a biography of Abramović, she did a performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she sat in a chair all day every day for three months, staring at a succession of people who queued for hours to sit opposite her (also for hours, in some cases). When I had my chance for this theatrically solemn interaction, I felt the overwhelming need to communicate to her, in the telepathy encouraged by silent eye contact, the words sorry and thank you. I agree with Peeters’ ethics of biography, but not its timing: one doesn’t have to wait for the afterlife to confront the subject with the book. That the subject 84

Consider the dilemma of trying to write a narrative account of someone who questioned, repeatedly and systematically, the value of old-fashioned ideas about the “author”; someone who raised the gravest of doubts about the character of personal identity as such; someone who, as a matter of temperament, distrusted prying questions and naked honesty; someone, finally, who was nevertheless inclined to see his own work as, on some level, autobiography. – James E. Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (2000) 86

I AM YOU AND YOU ARE NOT ME Part 3: Cloudgangers by Douglas Coupland

Ten years ago the Cloud didn’t exist and now it inarguably constitutes the largest entity our species has ever created. The Cloud isn’t a fluffy blob floating above Manhattan. The blob is made of an almost staggeringly boring and unimaginable complex assembly of wires, routers, switches and storage drives spread around the planet, usually in big dull structures in the dullest parts of the town you live in. There is no way to make the Cloud sexy: Brad Pitt will never star in the movie version of the Cloud. Nobody would star in the movie version. The movie version would be a 24 hour nanny-cam in the ceiling of Data Containment Vault Number Seven in Google’s data mothership in the Dalles, Oregon. There is an insane amount of data being stockpiled in the Cloud and much of it is about you, and as a result of this data you will very soon be meeting your cloudganger. What is a cloudganger? Imagine there’s a large room with two boxes in it. Your mother is sitting on a chair in front of these two boxes and she’s told that one of them contains you, and one of them contains your cloudganger. By talking with each of the boxes she has to figure out which is which—an elaboration on the Turing box. Also, your cloudganger is hooked up to a vocalizer and speaks just like you. It wouldn’t be long before the real you and your

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cloudganger would be arguing with each other trying to convince your mother you’re the real one, and in the end, your mother wouldn’t know the difference. That’s the start of it. Your cloudganger will be a tapeworm-like thing, a trillion bits long. It will be every email you’ve ever sent, everything you’ve ever purchased, your medical history, everywhere you’ve ever been in front of a camera, your dating patterns, your masturbation patterns, your childrearing patterns, your voice, your inflections, the way you make typos. As an added bonus, it’s connected to Google and Wikipedia and the Arpanet and Al Jazeera and every other data trove on Earth. The only real difference between you and cloudganger, aside from the fact that you’re made of meat and it isn’t, is that it’s a quadrillion times smarter than you. It knows the eighteenth root of pi. It knows the cube root of every book written in the 19th century. And if you attach your cloudganger to a biometrically super-accurate ultraPixar version of your body, even your meat becomes a quibble. You’ve been duplicated. And then, after few decades, you get hit by a bus and die . . . but your cloudganger lives on. For the people who knew you—or the other cloudgangers that knew/know you—the missing meat is no big deal, with the added bonus that you, as an entity, keep growing and growing as a personality and person. You have become an app. The only thing this 90

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app does is look at the world through the lens of what was once your “personality” or your life’s “story.” In the past, one goal in life was to leave behind a work of art or a repeatable scientific discovery from which people could glean or intuit a little bit about who you were. Or perhaps you could leave behind a story, a biography or an autobiography that could inspire you or at least convey to future beings the sense of one’s life having been a story. But what happens when the story is eclipsed by raw data? By travel patterns, shopping habits, search histories and response times and everything else? We must then reevaluate the narrative flow of our lives, and the meaning of what our stories are. Subjectively, all the current signs I see point to a new flattened perspective of personality, or of what constitutes a story—a sense of de-narration, a veering away from the romantic 19th- and 20th-century notions of life’s meaning. Personalities seem to be much more based on data tracks and ISP addresses, lat/longs and everything else that will make your cloudganger. You bought a pair of denim pants from H&M at 2:17 pm on July 5, 2018. On December 19, 2045, you entered the words “Margaret Thatcher topless” into the search engine of the day. It doesn’t take much more to establish who you probably were, and an infinite amount of computing speed could fill in these blanks with a scaleperfect mimicking of your life. It could print out a note91

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perfect redacted transcript of the entire life of a fictional person based solely on a pair of jeans, a goofy porn search and maybe ten other inputs. Billions of possible lives can be created instantly and . . . and then what? The planet is one great big electrical storm, pure synthetic existence which by then certainly will have manipulated humans into making a physical infrastructure for it that is so stable it needs no maintenance and can work perfectly for a billion years. Meat people? Extinct.

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wanted something breezy and California’—also inside: the new supersized Sharon Osbourne!” All of which really does beg the question, “are we so full of ourselves as a species that the entire universe has to be about us?” Personally, I’d rather live in a universe run by golden Labradors or dolphins. But will my cloudganger think differently?

To be in a spaceship looking down on this glistening Tesla planet, this gorgeous glitterball—everyone on earth since 2010 dying, being reborn and reincarnating every single moment—one would be looking at an expression of pure existence, of one species’ greatest triumph. And of course, ultimately, this sentient glitterball Earth will colonize the sun as a storage and data facility. The sun will then implode and then reexplode as a supernova. New planets will be created. Other stars will collapse and be reborn as supernovas, merging with our own sentient newborn sun and planets. Then newer planets will form and a billion years later, carbon atoms, guided by the knowledge embedded in their very being begin forming complex molecules that will eventually go on to create life. Life will evolve for a further billion years, and ultimately it climaxes: in the form of a seven-page Hello! magazine spread, “At Home with Jennifer Anniston: ‘I just

The big question here is, “When do you end and someone else begins?” When you first meet with your eleven other cloudgangers, will the differences between you matter much, or are you all pretty much the same person? Is individualism in this instance sort of embarrassing? Is it realistic? And what about that first group of one million cloudgangers who are closest to you . . . you can find safety in numbers, but only at the declining value of your uniqueness. Is uniqueness a joke? Is uniqueness replicable? If uniqueness is corny or devalued, then does private property become corny and embarrassing and devalued, too? And when does the good of the tribe come ahead of the good of the individual? He’s into snowmobiling. She’s into 1930s Depression-era jam jars. They all love country and western music and those people over there want to regulate weapons and limit contraception for women. Whose needs eclipse those of others? When does belief become a nightmare? When does unearned historical

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privilege become an inarguable right? There are way too many of us right now, and the present is in no way sustainable, so how does it end? When does it end? And who will be the last human being? The last biography? I’m sitting here writing and I feel like “me,” but if a sentient computing system had my cloudganger up and running, would “I” be beside the point? Would that mirror-me end up saying and doing and “thinking” the same things that I would, anyway? I don’t like the notion of an app-like cloudganger version of me, but at the same time, how great it would to live on for a billion more years. But, of course, that’s just my ego speaking.

Nudity is a threat to my existence. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Andy Warhol, Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again) (1975) 96

P.S.

If you had to write someone’s biography, whose would it be? Why that person? How would you approach it?

Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer), and David Shields’s How Literature Saved My Life.

It’d be on Eugène François Vidocq—there isn’t a good biography of him. He was the “first private detective” and also the first novelistic super arch-villain. He inspired Vautrin in Balzac’s Human Comedy. He lived so many different lives. As a writer I feel like I don’t get to live enough, so I’m fascinated by people like him. I would approach it that way, as a series of lives and reinventions, only with this background uniting feature which is that they’re all the same person—kind of like a recurring character in Balzac.

Recently I was reading Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Emperor of Maladies, which is subtitled “A Biography of Cancer.” It’s a great book on cancer, but I can’t think of any meaningful way in which it’s a “biography” and not a history or a cultural history or history of science. Foucault didn’t feel like he had to write the “biography” of prisons or mental institutions—he thought he was writing a history of ideas. But now it’s fashionable to anthropomorphize. I think it’s supposed to sound sexier to have a biography of cancer than a history of cancer.

Is Biography more or less relevant today in the age of Wikipedia? Is the Biography to Wikipedia bio entries what the Novel is to Twitter feeds?

In fairness, I do think there’s some interesting insight there, an analogy between a history of a concept and a human life, where there’s some underlying entity but with variations in time, and how its fate looks different at different times. But I think we can make that point without actually calling every single book a biography.

I LOVE Wikipedia, but I think it’s for something different from biography— more like a repository of common knowledge, like Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas, only for real. When you encounter someone’s name that you haven’t heard of, Wikipedia will tell you whether that person is a heard-of person or not, and who are the people for whom s/he is a big deal. It will tell you, when someone mentions this person, what it’s most likely they’re thinking of, or referring to. It will not tell you what that person’s life-problem was, or what was the solution to the riddle of his/her existence—that’s still for Biography. Why do you think there’s been such a rush to write “thing biographies,” such as Red Nile: Story of the World’s Greatest River (described on Amazon as, “An intimate biography of one of the world’s natural wonders”), or Robbing the Bees: A Biography of Honey—The Sweet Liquid Gold that Seduced the World (“Honey has been waiting almost ten million years for a good biography”) or, in the recent infamous Naomi Wolf case, Vagina: A New Biography? Is it because things can’t talk back (and can’t litigate)? Or is it because people are less interesting than nonsentient subjects? I think it’s the other way round. We’re so obsessed with people and with applicability that nobody wants to read or write history anymore unless it’s a history of a “person,” just like you or me. It’s as if we’ve gone back to the days of the early church, with the obsession with exemplary lives. It’s related to an obsession with self-help and self-improvement, with reading books that tell you how to live. There are a lot of books on that subject, too—Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be: A Novel From Life, Sarah Bakewell’s Montaigne biography (How to Live: Or A 98

By the way, my fave of those titles is: Cod: The Biography of the Fish that Changed the World. If someone decided to write your biography while you are still alive, would you mind if they don’t wait till you’re dead? And what would you like the title to be? Yeah, I’d mind—it’s like harvesting your organs. They should wait till you’re dead, or at least brain-dead. That’s how it is for a writer—or for the kind of writer who writes from life. There’s a quote from John Updike: “I was told, perhaps in jest, of someone wanting to write my biography—to take my life, my lode of ore and heap of memories, from me!” I felt such horror when I read that sentence—it’s actually really painful to think about. I mean, you feel like you own all this stuff; it’s there to sift through and choose from always, like it’s the one thing that’s really yours, but in reality it’s on temporary loan, like everything else. For titles, whenever I try to think of a title, all I can think of is titles that Dostoevsky always thought of. The Idiot? What does Go-gol dancing entail? A slow shimmy out of a stolen overcoat. 99

Elif Batuman

It Means This I am You and You are Not Me

Part 1: George Washington’s Extreme Makeover

Dream-coloring Asiye Hatun into History A Life Well-Slept

Mohammed Kurban Lev Essad Nussimbaum Said Bey The Crude Subject

I am You and You are Not Me Part 2: Dead or Canadian?

A People’s History of People The Wiki-Bio

Sorry I am Daring to Write Your Biography The Art of the Disclaimer

I am You and You are Not Me Part 3: Cloudgangers

Postscript

Go-gol Dancing