Interviewed by Ron Hogan
Interviewed by Ron Hogan
'm interested in art that has a strongly self-reflexive quality," author David Shields says. He identifies writer/performers like Spalding Gray, Dennis Leary, or Sandra Bernhard, or documentary filmmakers like Ross McElwee and Errol Morris, as "people who know that they are participating in the media process, and don't shy away from that.
"I like work that has an autobiographical element," the writer says, "a memoir element in which you're telling some kind of confessional story, but one that is married to huge cultural history, like McElwee in Sherman's March, or Gray in Swimming To Cambodia."
In his latest work of fiction, Remote, Shields is attempting a similar project, analyzing American society's obsession with media culture at the end of the century in large part by presenting it through his own experience.
"I don't know if you're familiar with my previous novel, Dead Languages, about a kid growing up with a stutter. I grew up with a stuttering problem myself, and so a recent interviewer was asking me how the issues raised there tie into this book."
He ponders the question again, still unsure of how to encapsulate his response. "Growing up, that woundedness, the vulnerability and imperfection of my stutter, made me want to exist in the perfect world of media culture, sometimes TV, sometimes baseball. The depth of that stutter made the fluid, glib world of mass culture seductive and alluring."
Many of Remote's 52 'meditations,' therefore, are about Shields himself, from his childhood collection of Dodger photos to his chance encounter as an adult with O. J. Simpson. But even when he does not appear as a character, his writing is infused with his personality, with a constant questioning of what it is to be famous, why we treat famous people the way we do, and what that does to our own self-esteem.
How does it feel, then, for Shields to be going out on a national media tour, participating in the very process of fragmentation and alienation that he writes about? "The tour is really a sort of weird epilogue to the book," he says. "In Remote, I'm trying to jam the wires in some way, fuck up the whole operation of the media culture. So for me, it's not a contradiction to be doing a media tour because I'm just still trying to throw a monkey wrench into the whole process." Antics like covering up a camera lens with his hand during a television interview, for example, allow Shields to have self-conscious fun, keeping him from taking the whole process too seriously and getting caught up in his own potential stardom.
He hopes that readers will experience that sense of fun and playfulness as well. "Without being too self-helpish about it," he proposes, "Remote can be seen as a tool kit, with which the reader can fashion his or her own weird scrapbook of their relationship to popular culture."
That's certainly true of the book's website: after seeing excerpts from the novel in which Shields creates mini-narratives from bumper stickers and transcribes dreams about Kurt Cobain, online readers are invited to append their own material to the website. The original material thus becomes a springboard for others to begin to develop their own ideas, a development that might hopefully continue beyond the simple online interaction into sustained self-awareness and thought.
© Copyright 1996 Urban Desires
