'The Great American Nose-Picking Novel'

The May issue of Dazed & Confused has a bitchin' write-up on Crust and interview with author Lawrence Shainberg.

Here's a highlight:

"A witty-erudite and gleefully gross-out satire of our information-clogged and techno-bananas age. An energetic and thrillingly modern romp through a habit that's as old as the hills."

And here's one Q/A from the interview:

"Dazed: Crust effectively satirises the sheer glut of information that contemporary readers are exposed to. Are you apprehensive about the future of reading in the age of the internet?"

"LS: Yes, no . . . yes. I don't think anyone understands the extent, meaning and effect of the information explosion. Among other things, I think it creates a situation in which our basic relation to information - which most of us grow up believing to be an unquestionable virtue - becomes adversarial. Add to this the fact that information glut is finally the ultimate censorship - since it trivializes all information (if 100 orchestras are playing under your window, does it matter if one is playing Mozart?) - and that nothing thrives on such repression like corporate media, and you have a situation which may well turn out to be catastrophic."

To throw in an appreciation for Dazed & Confused: It's a beautiful magazine. The May issue has an interview with Oliver Stone and pieces on Fernando Pessoa and Al Jarnow. Easier access is another reason it's time to ditch the OH.

A Warning from Dr. Nathan Louis

Though I’m a great, if reluctant, admirer of Crust, I feel it’s my duty to inform its potential readers of my recent research at the University of Alabama Institute of Neuro-Otolaryngology, where I’ve been a visiting professor since 2008. As Lawrence Shainberg makes clear, it’s long been understood that the pleasure and frequency of Nasalism is inversely proportional to the picker’s level of self consciousness at the moment of initial impulse and investigation. Despite the fact that I am a lifelong Nasalist, I was not aware of this unfortunate equation until I read Crust myself and noted, as have so many (see AntiNasalist.com, NoShainberg.com, or for that matter, any of the 3234 other AntiNasalist sites which, according to Internetdirectory.com, focus on the dangers of Nasalism), the book’s disastrous effects on a habit which has long been my most dependable source of happiness and tranquility. I’m sure I share with many Nasalists the grief and anger one feels at such loss, but as a neuroscientist, I believe I was the first to realize that such effects are part of a reversible equation which could help us understand the mystery of self consciousness which, as all neuroscientists know, is one of the most important and elusive functions of the brain. We have suspected since 2007 that the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) is the neurochemical root of self consciousness, but thanks to Nasalism and Crust, I believe I am the first to confirm the hypothesis. Here at Alabama, working on a grant from the NIH, I have found clear evidence that Nasalists who’ve read Crust show significantly more activity and a greater number of synapses in the VLPFC than those who haven’t. Furthermore, my data has been confirmed by Dr. Elwood Baskin, our chief Otolaryngologist, who has shown a similar parallel between VLPFC metabolism and nasal activity, eg, the quantity and quality of secretion and the size and liquidity of crusts it produces.

As a neuroscientist, I am obligated of course to state again that my research remains incomplete and controversial, but as a Nasalist, I have no doubt that, even at this stage, it requires me to warn all Nasalists to avoid books like Crust and all other information about their habit. The message coming out of my laboratory is clear and unequivocal: if picking matters, don’t think about it.

The Most Downloaded Image in History

by Lawrence Shainberg

With rare exceptions of someone like WG Sebald, novelists don’t tend to think about illustration, but since Crust has always been a mock-dock in my view I decided early-on to add this dimension to the book. Fortunately, my good friend, Michael Flanagan, a painter and novelist who was once a book-designer, is also a fan of the novel, so he was enthusiastic to assist me.

Most of the illustrations I wanted -- portraits of major characters, brain scan images, historical and anthropological images, etc -- weren’t terribly difficult to develop. Anyone who knows his way around Google and PhotoShop could produce the sort of images needed to substantiate a novel which is explicitly about nosepicking and implicitly -- since this forbidden habit becomes a media sensation as well as an endless source of scientific, medical, theological and philosophical research and controversy -- about the terrifying world of information overload. One image however eluded us. George W. Bush is a close friend of the narrator who in the early stages of the book admits to being a passionate nose-picker. More important, his admission, which occurs (in one of our best illustrations) on Larry King Live, has cured him of a paralyzing depression which put him in a mental hospital when he left office in 2008. Needless to say, Bush is no ordinary picker. His public -- and much publicized -- embrace of the habit sends him on a complex paradoxical journey which has him -- publicly, of course -- embracing it, rejecting it and embracing it again, and finally, blaming it for his failures as a president. “Tell me how a man who can’t stand a moment’s discomfort in his nose is gonna deal with hurricanes or terrorists or global warming?” Finally, unable to resolve his dilemma, he leaves home and family and vanishes from public life. His disappearance produces a flood of rumor on blogs, websites and the whole spectrum of Internet news. There are reports of him working on a farm in Iraq, living with Osama Bin Laden in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan, hospitalized with depression, dead by suicide, and kidnapped off his Texas ranch by “terrorists of unknown nationality.” Most of these tales, of course, are accompanied by photographs, video streams, or personal accounts which claim to verify them. The last, shows him sitting with hands tied in a straight-backed metal chair, guarded by two men or women wearing masks, one of them armed with a submachine gun, the other with a pistol, was the one I wanted to illustrate.

Michael and I tried at first to fabricate the image but eventually we realized we had to create it ourselves. My wife is a good photographer; my office has a white wall for a back-drop; Michael and I in ski-masks could do a fair approximation of terrorists; and the doorman in our building, a stocky spirited fellow named Julio who shares my opinion of Bush, was more than happy to impersonate him. All in all, it seemed like a morning’s work at most.

I called my film-director nephew, Steve Shainberg (Secretary, Fur), and asked him to put me in touch with a prop-person who could help me obtain the guns. As it happened, the woman he recommended was busy on a film, but she suggested I call a source she used -- Kaufman’s Army-Navy store, on 42nd St in New York City. The prop-man at Kaufman’s was a guy named Jim. I told him I needed to rent “some equipment for a photo shoot.”

“Like what?” he said.

“A machine gun and a pistol.”

“Not in our store,” he snapped.

If I’d been less naive about such matters, his voice alone would have warned me off, but when he asked for my email address -- “in case I think of something” -- I gave it to him. It was only later, when I told my wife about the conversation, that I began to think I’d been less than smart to be so forthcoming.

She’s not inclined to overreact but her eyes spread with disbelief. “A guy calls and wants to rent a machine gun? I’d say his next call is to the police. For all we know, our phones are tapped already! The building is surrounded! But don’t worry. You can always explain when they arrest you that this is for a couple of terrorists who want to kidnap George W. Bush.”

As it happened, however, her reaction was off the mark. When I called Jim the next day to ward him off, he apologized to me before I could him. “Sorry I couldn’t come up with somebody right away. As soon as I got off the phone, I remembered the guy who can help you.”

He gave me a number in Soho. Weapons Specialists, on Grand Street. On the phone, they were discouraging at first, explaining that real guns require police permits and a handler to go with them. With its handler, a single machine gun would set me back $1200 a day. I was about to sign off and look toward Google again for my illustration when he added, “On the other hand, we’ve got replicas. A machine gun will cost you about $150. Pistol, $50 to $75.”

Weapons Specialists is a two-floor business, its basement a huge spread containing guns and ammo belts and holsters and swords and suits of armor from any age in history and anywhere in the world. Some of the guns were made of rubber, some of metal, and many were real, with firing pins removed. The replicas were convincing enough for any sort of robbery. As a matter of fact, the salesman who helped me explained that Spike Lee had used the same guns I rented in his last film, when bank robbers actually acknowledged that the weapons they used were dummies.

Thus it was that two days after forsaking the Internet I returned from Soho with a long black case containing a machine gun and a pistol. Michael and I donned ski masks, Julio sat in a metal chair for the photograph, and later that day, his head was replaced, courtesy of Google, with George W. Bush’s. Check it out in Crust. As the narrator reports, “No YouTube image has been viewed, downloaded, or emailed more often.”

Richard Pryor's War on Terror

By Lawrence Shainberg.

I can’t believe I’m unusual, as a writer, in feeling the loss of Richard Pryor as of a crucial ally, a man whose work I turned to, year in and year out, as if to an intimate friend or, more to the point, the best medicine available for the various illnesses that bring a writer down – self-absorption, self consciousness and the illness he treated as no one else could, those inexplicable departures of humor that leave one’s work solemn and moralistic.

I was an unlikely disciple, for sure – a middle class southern white who grew up in the days before Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and others came along to show Whites how arrogant and ignorant we were, how much we lost by condescending to the Blacks who surrounded us. But it diminishes Pryor, in my view, to speak of him only as a black man. He was a man who’s work attests to what Jean Genet said, when someone suggested, during the days of the French-Algerian crisis, that he write a play about Blacks: “I’d love to do so, but first I have to know what color they are.”

Pryor used his blackness, for sure, and our whiteness, but he wiped away all color except that of life itself and the suffering it entails and our mysterious capacity to laugh at anything, even pain, when it’s fully inhabited. See him as a deer in the concert tape, consumed with thirst and leaning over water but afraid to drink because the woods are full of sound and every one an enemy approaching. See him as a heart attack victim, whose seized up heart has him literally by the throat, sinking to the ground and pleading, “Please let go! I’ll be good! I swear I’ll be good!” and hear his heart answer, “Good? What about all that pork you been eatin?” Finally, in the climactic scene from his concert tape, Live on Sunset Strip, see him as a burn victim, elated to hear that he’s about to be bathed for the first time since his accident until he feels the excruciation of a hand on his raw body: “don’t you… ever… touch me again.”

It’s important to remember that Richard Pryor, though he might be one of America’s greatest novelists, was writing non-fiction. His riffs came out of his own pain, fear or humiliation. His life had taught him everything about fear so great and unrelenting that it blocks your need to quench a thirst when water’s inches from your mouth. It was his own heart attack and his own catastrophic burns he re-lived on stage. He made us squirm as he made us laugh because we felt the pain he was laughing at as if it were our own.

Comedy, as we all know, can be undone by familiarity. Often as I’ve watched his tapes, there are often long stretches when, even if I continue to enjoy him, I do not laugh because I know what’s coming. Even so, there is one riff in the first concert tape that never fails to dissolve me. As a macho character from the old school of street fighting, he is confronted by a new breed young tough who’s trained in the Martial Arts. Brash and confident, dancing around him like Muhammad Ali, he bellows “bring it on!” or some such until a swift kick to the groin makes him double over slowly, and he sinks to the ground still bellowing, only now in a voice a couple of octaves higher. Why does this riff, unlike equally funny ones that don’t, make me laugh every time as if I’ve never seen it before?

It’s an insult to Pryor to treat of him intellectually or impute didactic purpose to him, but I think it’s because his fight in this case is topical and urgent. I never watch it without thinking of what’s come to be called “The War on Terror.” Pryor’s macho man is fighting the war we’re fighting today. His adversary, like ours, not only doesn’t play by his rules but is trained to use his aggression and power against him. But pause a moment before you see this riff as anti-machismo, anti-left, right, liberal or conservative. Remember that Pryor’s riffs came out of his life. It’s hard to doubt that he knew his share of this sort of street fights as well as the arrogant bluster that leads his Macho Man to defeat and humiliation. Such humiliation, however, doesn’t make him come back for more, with weapons or allies, but to take the sort of hard, painful look at himself that makes it possible to see his own shortcoming and absurdity. That’s the recipe for his comedy, the hard painful look, the honest appraisal of his own absurdity and the humility which allows him to treat of it with compassion. One does not walk away from his street fight thinking about the malice or power of the Martial Artist anymore than one walks away from the heart attack riff thinking about the malice and power of the heart. If one thinks about anything it is two human beings trapped in their own absurdity, facing off in a way that will ultimately bring the both of them down.

Pryor was always fighting a War on Terror but his terror wasn’t other people or an idea of evil he attached to them. It was the fear that paralyzed you in the woods, the aggression and pride and ignorance and egoism that got you into fights from which nobody benefited and everyone got hurt. In other words, his terror was the human condition itself – the body and the pain to which it’s vulnerable, aggression and pride and paranoia, fear and habit and danger so vividly imagined that you’d sooner die of thirst than ignore it. For Pryor, life is the terrorist, and blacks and whites, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, Christians, Muslims, and Jews, terrorists of every sort, suffer its threat alike. The ultimate protection will not be found in fists but in the magical purification we experience when we find our way to the humility and compassion that makes it possible to laugh at ourselves.

Here’s how Pryor found his way to it when after his heart attack he woke up in the ambulance taking him to the hospital and found himself surrounded by white attendants: “Goddamn! I done died and wound up in the wrong heaven. Now I got to listen to Lawrence Welk the rest of my days.”

Lawrence Shainberg is the author of Crust.