Excerpt from Crust (P3)
It is important to note that my life was in no better shape than my marriage. I’d never known worse depression. I was drinking too much coffee, watching too much television, spending too much time in newspapers or the Internet. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept well. Worst of all, after thirty-one years of productivity and, if you’ll forgive my immodesty, success as a writer,[17] I’d lost my interest in work altogether. If you’ve read Harriet Flavor’s critical biography[18] or James Fenton’s bibliography,[19] you know how prolific I’d been before sinking into this quicksand. From the time I published my first story, when I was sixteen years old, I’d written almost every day for a minimum of seven and sometimes as many as twelve hours. In thirty-one years, I’d published twenty-four books - twelve fiction, ten non-fiction, and two essay collections - as well as an almost uninterrupted stream of articles and reviews which had recently been published - the ninth and tenth of my non-fiction books - in a two-volume set by Murgate. Few were the days when I’d failed to meet the 2,000-word minimum I set for myself, and on good days I could produce 15 or even 20,000.[20] As Flavor points out, diverse rewards had come to me during the first twenty-four years of my career, but the last seven, when I’d written The Complete Book of AIDS,[21] The Complete Book of 9/11,[22] and The Complete Book of Terrorism,[23] had brought me attention and honor that dwarfed what I’d known before. The Completes[24] owed no small debt to the formation - by means of News Corp’s merger with Microsoft - of Murgate. Soon after the deal was made, writers in the Murgate stable were given state-of-the-art hardware, sophisticated software, and access to the Murgate mainframe, as well as, of course, fiber-optic access to the Internet and to all the research-training one required. Joining such power to the research staff which Sara had helped me develop and train, I worked more quickly and efficiently than I ever had before. It was a matter of public record that for the last five years I’d received serious consideration for the Nobel Prize. But since the completion of Terrorism, I’d produced nothing but the blog. It’s true that Norman Harkness, blog reviewer for New York Magazine, called it “an account of writer’s block which, for candor and anguish, surpasses any we have on record,”[25] but it made no dint in my depression. Like any writer, I’d known my share of gridlock over the years, but my current state was different, all-encompassing. It wasn’t just my own work I’d rejected, but language in general. As I wrote in the blog of June 11, 2010, “More than mute when I sit at my desk, I am disgusted with any thought of writing or reading or the least hint of internal description.”[26]
Others may argue (indeed, many have) about the reasons for my block, but even though Jason Friedman had not yet published his celebrated Culture Glut,[27] I had no doubt that my problems derived from what he calls the “plague of information which has swept the world since the last decade of the Twentieth century.”[28] There wasn’t a writer alive who hadn’t seen his work trivialized by the flood of information, entertainment, and culture - “the ultimate censorship,” writes Friedman[29] - that had engulfed the world like smog. The onslaught of books, film, television, magazines, newspapers, and, most of all perhaps, the endless flood of Internet material had not only swamped the writer’s audience with distraction but so diminished its attention span that serious reading had come to seem as anachronistic as typing or traveling by steamship. Books such as Friedman’s or Edmund Cleve’s The Word Eclipsed[30] would soon explore and quantify the extent and repercussions of this deluge, but obviously, its effects were more extreme for writers like myself. Not so long ago, we’d been able to send our manuscripts to editors and friends with confidence that they’d be received with gratitude and read at once, but nowadays, they were more likely to be greeted with resentment and, often as not, put out with the garbage. How could it be otherwise when every reader’s shelves were filled with more than he or she could get to in a lifetime? The truth was undeniable: once a happy love affair, the relationship between writer and reader was now adversarial. It made no difference whether the work was good or bad. Indeed, it’s not unlikely that good books, being harder to ignore and requiring more effort and attention, evoked more resentment than bad.
Finally then, my struggle was anything but uncommon. From sociologists like Friedman and websites like Glut.com and Saveusfromwords.com, we had frightening data on the numbers it affected, and from Cleve as well as Peter O’Reilly,[31] we had personal studies of the psychological effects on writers like myself. The former, in fact, quoting extensively from my blog, devotes an entire chapter to the situation in which I found myself.
“The whole of his adult life had been centered on the act of writing. How was he to live, now that he found it obsolete? What was he to do with his time when, for more than twenty years, seven to twelve of his waking hours had been spent at his desk, producing work which had won him universal acclaim?”[32]
What indeed was I to do? Well, as Cleve so vividly describes, his words almost unbearable for me to read even these eight years later, what I’d mostly done was persist in my routine with disregard for the pain it caused. If anything, my daily schedule had become less flexible. Every morning I was at my desk by eight. Except for my usual half-hour break for lunch, which I ate in my office, I never left before six in the evening. As before, I avoided all forms of relief and escape, allowing myself no telephone calls, no music, no walks, almost no activity outside my work except the practice for which I was yearning just then.
When finally, a few days after my breakthrough, I did my first Internet searches on the practice now known as Nasalism,[33] I found that my case was anything but uncommon among the population in general. As Patterson has shown, however, no one pursued the practice with more vigor and frequency than so-called “creative” people, and none among them more than writers. Given the bias and contempt which surrounded it in those days, it is not surprising that most of us did it surreptitiously, without serious appreciation or any considered idea of its meaning or value. For all intents and purposes, Nasalism as we know it today was virtually non-existent, PreNasalism not only universal but, until Klondyke identified and described it, completely unknown. In effect, our denial itself was denied. We were all of us trapped in what he calls “the deadly nasal tautology.”
“PreNasalism must first be understood as a state of dissociation. When a PreNasalist lifts a finger to his nose, he is, for the most part, unaware of doing so. Indeed, on those rare times when he is unable to deny what he is doing, he experiences such disappointment with himself that, often as not, he vows that he will never indulge again.”[34]
[17] Two National Book Awards, a Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, a Pulitzer Prize, membership in The American Academy of Arts and Letters.
[18] Flavor, Harriet. Walker Linchak, A Critical Biography (New York: Random House, 2008).
[19] Fenton, James. Walker Linchak, A Bibliography (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
[20] In the interest of objectivity, I should note that more than one writer had linked my productivity to hypergraphia, but I have to note as well that I was rarely mentioned alone in this regard. For example, Conrad Negroponski’s Hypergraphia and Other Neuropathologies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), lists 116 writers as “inarguably symptomatic” and many are well known.
[21] Linchak, Walker. The Complete Book of AIDS (New York: Murgate, 2002).
[22] Linchak, Walker. The Complete Book of 9/11 (New York: Murgate, 2004).
[23] Linchak, Walker. The Complete Book of Terrorism (New York: Murgate, 2008).
[24] Linchak, Walker. The Completes Boxed Set (New York: Murgate, 2010).
[25] Harkness, Norman. “Blog Update,” New York Magazine October 2010: 65. See also Clara Adams’ review of the edited version of my blogs, published in 2006 by Murgate, in The New York Times Book Review, September 3, 2006.
[26] Linchak, Walker. Linchakblog.com, June 17, 2010. Also: Linchak’s Blogs (New York: Murgate, 2012) 287.
[27] Friedman, Jason. Culture Glut (New York: Harcourt Brace, 2011).
[28] For a painful but accurate account of the situation writers faced even before the turn of the century, see Lawrence Shainberg’s “Writers’ Prep” in The New York Times Book Review, September 11, 1988. Before publication of his novel, Memories of Amnesia (Paris Review Editions, 1988), Shainberg attended the first of James Orloff’s “addiction clinics” [see David Weller’s biography of Orloff, Anti-Culture Hero (New York: Harper Collins, 2013), for an extensive description of Orloff’s clinics and their international proliferation], which aimed to awaken writers to the fact that an overwhelming number of books, as well as a plethora of entertainment and cultural options, had preceded, would follow, or would appear simultaneous with the one they were about to publish.
[29] Friedman, op. cit., 28.
[30] Cleve, Edmund. The Word Eclipsed (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2012) 245. See also The New Yorker’s special issue on Information Glut, August 2013; “The Neuropathology of Information Overload,” The New York Times Science Section, August 23, 2013; and, of course, the definitive study on which The New Yorker’s issue was based, Scientific American, December 2011. Further and constantly updated information is also available at Glut.com, Informationzero.com, and Braindamage.org, as well as countless blogs which are best found through searching “Information overload” on Google.
[31] O’Reilly, Peter. War Against Words (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2009).
[32] Cleve, op. cit., 120-154.
[33] Where I discovered, among other things, surveys such as Dorothy Patterson’s and polls done by Murgate’s Gallup division, Roper, and others.
[34] Klondyke, Rhinotillexis, op. cit., 17. Figure 2.