Dipterocarp forest

Armand Marie Leroi has a good diary piece at the FT (I am excited to read his new book) - here's a nice bit about visiting Borneo, FT site registration required:

There was a canopy walk, a series of metal towers that led to the arboreal world where most of the forest lives. We set out in the dark, climbed at first light, and watched morning mist dissolve to reveal a sea of green. You could also pick up a mobile signal there. As we got to the top, the chimes of iPhones springing to life competed with the bird song and the distant whoops of macaques.

Closing tabs

Miscellaneous light reading: Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (very good); and, inevitably, 'Robert Galbraith,' The Cuckoo Calling. It is quite decent, but feels very artificial: just as the Potter books were curiously redolent of Enid Blyton, so this one recalls a lost Agatha Christie world of 'mansion flats' and high-end women's accessories! (I think, too, of the Margery Allingham novel set in similar fashion-world environs only of 1930s; and there is a touch of course of Brat Farrar also.) I will read further installments with enthusiasm, and I commiserate wholeheartedly with Rowling's desire to write and publish a book with no pressure or expectations.

Unrelated, though perhaps touching on some of the same underlying questions about fame and expectations and pressure: Andrew Hultkrans gives me a strong desire to see the Big Star documentary.

APPROVED

John Jeremiah Sullivan on what it's like to live in a house where a TV show is filmed.

The libido and the desire for fame

I'm excited about this one: my interview with Cintra Wilson appears in the May issue of The Believer! Only an excerpt is available online - buy the issue...

Fabulous beasts

I cannot resist sharing Lynn Barber's 2001 Observer profile of the wonderfully dreadful Marianne Faithfull....

"See my name on the wall"

Peter Terzian blogs at Earworms about Kristen Hersh and the music of 50 Foot Wave.

I've been meaning to get her book Rat Girl, which sounds very much up my alley, but I was also struck by Peter's thoughts on Hersh's advice to audience members at a panel discussion ("Don’t try to get famous, just try to get good at what you do, because to become famous, you probably have to suck at least a little").

There are certainly exceptions to the assertion offered in the second part of the sentence, but the first part of the advice seems to me extremely sound; Peter then adds:

The truth is that ever since I was a little kid I’ve wanted to be famous. After all, is this not America? I used to watch television and fantasize that I would be cast in a sitcom as a wisecracking adopted orphan, the kind who used to show up in the fourth or fifth season, when the ratings were going south. (Why such a marginal part? Why not a starring role? Why not my own show? To be saved for a future therapy session.) The particulars changed, but the fantasy never went away: At the bottom of my mental list of things to do over the course of my life, right underneath “Travel a lot” and “Be good to other people” and “Read all of Dickens” and “Dress better,” is written, in invisible ink, “Get famous.” To be known and loved by everyone! It always seemed like a great idea. But as I’ve grown older and watched some friends gain fame, I see that it can also become loaded with problems. It’s not like fame has been banging on my door, begging to be let i[n], but lately I’ve taken up the slow process of crossing that particular bullet point out. Family, good friends, a partner, a dog who does a crazy dance every time you walk in the door—that’s famous enough.

When I was little, I too wanted to be famous, partly because I knew I wanted to be a writer and it seemed to me that good writers should be famous (!?!) but also because of an unwarranted assumption that life would only be interesting if I were famous.

In adulthood I realize that it is much more important to me that life should be interesting than anything else (i.e. interestingness and intellectual and artistic stimulation rank considerably higher than fame or fortune); fame or fortune are only incidentally valuable insofar as they increase the opportunity to do interesting things, but in fact fame may undercut that possibility, because many or most people find it hard to converse normally with famous people.

I do know some famous people, both of my own peer group and of others, and I definitely can see that the famous are often subsequently restricted, for their real emotional or intellectual sustenance, to the friends they formed before they became famous - it seems to me now not at all an inherently desirable thing that one should become well-known outside extremely specialized circles, though of course one wants to have a certain amount of authority in daily life (i.e. to have people one likes and respects care about and listen to what one thinks).

Bonus link: the Throwing Muses song that I used to listen to all the time when I was a Young Person....

Chronicles of the IBM Selectric

Joanna Smith Rakoff used to have a job answering J.D. Salinger's unwanted fan mail...

Warp factor ten

Ozzy Osbourne's memoir excerpted at the Sunday Times:

1982. Ozzy’s Diary of a Madman show involved the hanging of midgets, a giant mechanical arm, and a catapult that fired raw meat into the audience. But on this occasion it was a prop supplied by the audience that stole the show.

On January 20, 1982, we played the Veterans Auditorium in Des Moines.

The gig was going great. The God-like hand was working without any hitches. We’d already hung the midget.

Then, from out of the audience came this bat. Obviously a toy, I thought.

So I held it up to the lights and bared my teeth while Randy played one of his solos. The crowd went mental.

Then I did what I always did when we got a rubber toy on stage.

CHOMP.

Immediately, though, something felt wrong. Very wrong.

For a start, my mouth was instantly full of this warm, gloopy liquid, with the worst aftertaste you could ever imagine. I could feel it staining my teeth and running down my chin.

Then the head in my mouth twitched.

Oh, f*** me I thought. I didn’t just go and eat a f***ing bat, did I?

So I spat out the head, looked over into the wings, and saw Sharon with her eyes bulging, waving her hands, screaming: “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!! IT’S REAL, OZZY, IT’S REAL!”

Next thing I knew I was in a wheelchair, being rushed into an emergency room.

Every night for the rest of the tour I had to find a doctor and get rabies shots: one in each arse cheek, one in each thigh, one in each arm. I had more holes in me than a lump of f***ing Swiss cheese.

On the feeling of accomplishment

Ugh - day of uselessness and exhaustion. Let us hope tomorrow will be significantly more productive!

In the meantime, an interesting essay by Sue Erikson Bloland on the power and costs of the fantasy of fame. It was published in 1999 in the Atlantic, and I learned about it via Lowebrow; I liked the essay enough to get hold of a copy of Bloland's book In the Shadow of Fame: A Memoir by the Daughter of Erik H. Erikson.

Here's a bit, anyway, on Laurence Olivier, a figure Bloland came to write about as she underwent analytic training and became interested in a cluster of traits she saw in her father also:

Writing of his boyhood, Olivier confesses that "the wish for this treacherous glory . . . has been obsessive all my life." Along with this ferocious appetite, he had a penchant for grandiose fantasy regarding the stardom he craved. He says quite simply of his early ambition, "My will was granite. I was determined to be the greatest actor of all time."

Many would claim that Olivier achieved this lofty goal. But within the account of his extraordinary success as an actor is evidence that his spectacular career failed to provide him with the sense of accomplishment that he so desperately longed for - accomplishment sufficient to free him from his deepest feelings of unworthiness. He reports having experienced great happiness during periods in his life when he was working at a frenetic pace - a pace he seems to have required to ward off feelings of depression. But he was rarely able to feel happy doing anything other than work. It was only in the exercise of his magical talent that Olivier experienced even momentary freedom from feelings of self-loathing.