Cranial Gunk

I was always intimidated and self-conscious when I talked to her or was in her presence because she was like art. I mean, she was an object that had been very strongly, effectively created. (Robert Rauschenberg, Edie: An American Biography, 1982)

George Plimpton did an excellent job editing all the interviews Jean Stein gathered for her book, Edie: An American Biography. The amazing thing about it is how well the different interview segments come together to tell a cohesive story – but differ in tone enough so you are reminded of all the different characters talking.

It feels as if Warhol himself pressed Play and Record together on the old Sony cassette recorder and just left it at a party for Edie. I would imagine hearing the din of the party goers and the white noise – the echoes and static — from the recorder’s built-in microphone as I read further.

Edie is very thorough. The Addenda to the book is a family tree that begins with Edie’s Great, Great, Great Grandparents. I kept having the refer to the Addenda to keep all the names and relations straight in my head. Having finished the book, I have a deeper appreciation of how the Plimpton and Stein chose to start it:

John P. Marquad, Jr. – Have you ever seen the old graveyard up there in Stockbridge? In one corner is the family’s burial place; it’s called the Sedgwick Pie… The descendants of Judge Sedgwick, from generation unto generation, are all buried with their heads facing out and their feet pointing in toward their ancestor. The legend is that on Judgment Day when they arise and face the Judge, they will have to see no one but Sedgwicks. 

This starting passage is perhaps the root of all of Edie’s problems. It begins as far back as Judge Sedgwick who moved to Massachusetts after the Revolutionary War. The Pie might be a comment of how much the Judge valued the idea of family or it might be the materialization how egotistical and self-important the Judge was.

The book carefully provides readers with an understanding of the circumstances that created Edie Sedgwick. Starting with those that created Edie’s father, Fuzzy, and the tragic results of his needs on his children. You have to be patient though. In Edie you are watching the painter dip his brush into the paint and carefully apply it onto the canvas. The end result maybe exciting but the process can be potentially monotonous. I found myself leaving my place in the book to skip ahead for mentions and photos of Edie.

Mentions of Edie are sprinkled throughout the book but nuggets of Edie don’t appear until the half way point. Half way through the book is when the discussion turns from Babbo, Fuzzy, brothers Bobby and Minty, and Andy Warhol to Edie. You eventually feel like you know Edie (which is the sign of a successful biography) but you must be patient.

The biography works because as you read about Edie you start applying all of that background information you were fed during the first half of the book. It helps that the story of Edie’s family is an interesting one but the payoff for me was that I was using that information to understand why Edie was always late and why it took her so long to put on make up, etc.

When I wrote my review of Factory Girl, I had seen the movie but hadn’t read the book. It was the movie that inspired me to read the book. I had read somewhere that the book inspired the movie. I believe the book is now named, Edie: American Girl.

Having read the book, I can honestly see why Factory Girl’s critics were so upset…

But I would like to add that it is unfair to have discussions regarding depth when you compare a book to its movie. A book has much more flexibility with time. It can be set down, left aside, reread, and returned to. Whereas a movie is a linear experience without the benefit of breaks. Unless you are watching it on DVD or Blu Ray, when you watch a movie you only have one shot at getting the whole picture (pardon the pun).

I still like Factory Girl — though I still believe its problem is that it lacks “art.” And I still think Andy would have liked Factory Girl because it was a “Hollywood movie” with its perfect people and “happy” (over-the-top dramatic) ending.  There’s another point in Popism where Andy playfully ponders which popular star would portray him in a movie about the Factory. He didn’t make Hollywood movies but he was fascinated by them and the stars they made.

There are some that say Andy Warhol made Edie Sedgwick a Superstar. There are others who say that Edie made Andy a household name (gained him a level of notoriety that everyone thought they knew something about). I like to think that there was a chemistry between them. Each made up for the other’s lack of social ability and vision while suffering the same personal insecurities.

I read somewhere (though I can’t remember where) that Andy Warhol asked Lou Reed to write a song for Edie Sedgwick. He commented, “Doesn’t she look like a femme fatale?”

Some might think that Andy was a “homme fatale.”

Reading Thad Rutkowski is like reading the lab journal written by the rat running the maze. His observations are just as emotionally sparse as those of the scientist conducting the experiment. You are presented with a circumstance (the experiment and the hypothesis being tested) and then you are given a series of actions and reactions. You draw your own conclusions.

I have read Roughhouse and Tetched: A Novel in Fractals. Haywire continues the chronicle begun in Roughhouse. Like its predecessors, Haywire begins in childhood and concludes in adulthood. Haywire also continues the literary construct introduced in Tetched — The idea of “novel.” The complete title for Haywire is Haywire: A Novel. Now, well into the Post Modern and literary Deconstruction Ages of genre ambiguity, I found it curious that Thad chose to anchor his last two books to a genre. I don’t know that the identification added to or took away from my reading experience but I found it curious nonetheless.

Lisa Simmons provides an insightful review of Haywire at The Nervous Breakdown. It includes a quick summation of the novel’s overall plot: Experiences of a biracial boy growing up in rural Pennsylvania. She also cites her disappointment with the lack of closure at the end of the parts of the book.

And yet the fact that he did is one of the chief disappointments in the book. Significant events go unresolved by the end of Part 1, which actually crowns that section with its consistent sentimentality and understatement yet leaves the reader somewhat nostalgic for that time, place and those characters even if our protagonist is not.

The book is organized into three parts, which I interpreted as childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. His previous books followed the same pattern. They begin with straightforward – some times “deadpan” — observations of the darker processes of male development. Thad’s stories are Boys Life stories that include the disturbing experiences of boys becoming men. Once men, the boys discover the canon is insufficient.

In “Stages,” which I want to believe inspired to name of the novel, the narrator is a boy pressured by his father to launch a homemade rocket.

Reluctantly, I pushed a button to open a circuit between the car battery and the rocket engine. A hot copper thread ignited the solid fuel and the homemade projectile left the ground with a hiss. Almost immediately, the missile went haywire. It started to corkscrew through the air. A couple of hundred feet up, it began to pinwheel.

Part One of the book is a collection of memories in which the narrator is “taken” to locations for activities determined by his father. The narrator’s father is a “force” in his life, forcing action and adaptation.  He is half the canon of manhood that the narrator must contend with.

The narrator’s peers form the other half: Boys who live in unison with the canon and boys who have found ways to cope. In “Brotherhood,” Thad uses the tension between the narrator’s college roommate and the narrator to infer a dialogue about the canon and its rules on “man territory” and “man relationships.”

“Brotherhood” also provides a prolonged uncharacteristic discussion of race. I could be wrong but from what I remember of Thad’s stories, race has never been given more than a line or two and usually just to punctuate a point. In this story, a chunk of the passages are dedicated to his “Asianness” relating to his “Caucasianness.”

When I read Thad’s work, the voice I hear in my head is sometimes Steven Wright’s somewhat monotone delivery and sometimes the voice of a young child asking why the sky is blue and then answering himself sort of matter-of-factly.

I disagree with Lisa regarding closure. I think Part One ends when the narrator’s father does. In “Shots and Flames,” it is telling when the narrator’s disgruntled father shouts from his hospital bed, “I want to talk to the boy who lives down the street… He understands me.” The narrator, his father’s eldest son is in the room until he is taken outside by a doctor and told his father is terminal.

There is a lot of family dynamic there in that scene. It is unwritten and must be inferred but it is there. As a father of sons and as a son to a father, I can feel it there.