Most of the pain came from researching the publication history of this fucking essay. Oh yeah, real juicy details to be found there. It was published in three places?2-4 Oh my lord! How did that come to be? Could that be interesting? It wasn't! The 'Fuck essay' was published three times! Almost four times! It was originally set to be published in Might issue #17 had the magazine lasted one more issue. But Might folded.1 New York Press ended up publishing the 'Fuck essay' instead. Then Metro got a hold of it. Finally, it was included in a collection of Might essays titled Shiny Adidas Tracksuits and the Death of Camp. I tried emailing John Strausbaugh, the former editor of New York Press, to get a comment from him. We've had our conversations about New York Press before but the subject of the 'Fuck essay' was not going to be one of them.
Blah, blah, blah... William Monahan... blah, blah, blah... William Monahan. He needs to be constantly on my mind if I wish to continue to work in the world of New York Press scholarship. If you read through Mr. Monahan's reviews in Bookforum magazine you'll find that he has actually said a few things about Dave Eggers. This is helping me right now. Mr. Monahan refers to Mr. Eggers as a "primary artist", which at the time was apt because Mr. Eggers was becoming The New Big Thing in Literature. Everyone wanted to write like him. At least this is what I gather from Mr. Monahan's cautionary advice. He advises writers imitating Mr. Eggers' style to look into what has historically happened to their kind "when the ambitious and resourceful primary artist evolves beyond them." Grabbing these acolytes by the throat, Mr. Monahan advises them in a snooty, erudite voice that "Knowledge of literature is very useful." I can imagine Mr. Monahan, lakeside, on a Sunday afternoon, watching a man recently ejected from his kayak, who is desperately trying to keep from drowning, and chuckling to his friend Mike Ruffino, Knowledge of swimming is very useful.5
Despite that, Mr. Monahan is a sensitive guy, as is Mr. Eggers, but while Mr. Monahan portrays himself as a very hard man, Mr. Eggers seems to have fun with his overly sensitive side. Although the title of his 'Fuck essay', "Never Fucked Anyone," seems to imply an intact virginity, Mr. Eggers is actually about to take you on a journey through the very lush world of his sex life. He goes off on those who describe the intimacy of sexual intercourse as mere "fucking." Oh boy, Dave Eggers is obviously not any sort of badboy. Characterizing sexual intercourse as "fucking" seems to be too crude for him. Fair enough. And that's essentially what Mr. Eggers' 'Fuck essay' is all about.
When, in 1997, "Never Fucked Anyone" was finally available for reading, in an issue of New York Press no less, it generated quite a few letters in the following weeks. People--the oddball letter writerers of New York Press--could really relate to Mr. Eggers' sensitivity toward using the word 'fuck' as a verb, particularly when it describes having had sex with someone. It was a hit! You need those every once in a while.
Ahem. Let me just take a paragraph now to address a few of my friends. Hi guys! I know you think my blog is really lame and only read it so that you have further material to mock me with, but anyhow, this is for you: remember that cute froshie last week, the one with the really caring eyes, the sweetheart. Well, I fucked her after the party. I've since fucked her a few times. I will continue to fuck, poke, obliterate her, or whatever verb best conveys the animal that is released from within me when we have sexual intercourse. I know you thought I didn't have a chance with her. You guys were wrong. We're suited. Please don't show her this.
Was that disrespectful, improper, deviant? That's the kind of usage of the verb 'fuck' that Mr. Eggers finds distasteful. So he wrote a whole fucking essay about it. For a time, it was legend in certain hipster circles. It may be largely forgotten now.
I understand where Mr. Eggers is coming from. I don't usually characterize "the deed" as "fucking". But other, less sensitive twentysomethings, like my friends, definitely do characterize an intimate moment with a lover as "fucking."
For your reading pleasure, I excerpt the introduction to the NYPress version of Mr. Egger's 'Fuck essay' below.3 You'll have to switch over to the Metro version of the essay toward the end of this excerpt to continue reading the 'Fuck essay' since I don't want to violate copyright by excerpting the entire essay, which would be publishing. So I'll help you make that transition toward the end of this blog entry, or you could just read the Metro version from the beginning, which has a different introduction that isn't as highbrow but good nonetheless.
Ah, the rock'em, sock'em, explosive art world of New York in the 80s. Could you stand the excitement? It was palpable, no? Auction prices ever higher, Japanese bidders snapping up Van Goghs for what it would cost to buy a pyramid. Speculation, speculation: Longo and Schnabel and Fischl selling their stuff for $100,000 before it was dry. Yes, it was a heady time. Money and art and fame and even more money—as sexy as a David Salle diptych, and without the misogynistic aftertaste. It screamed novelization.
But still, it's been over 10 years and we've had virtually nothing. Seems a cinch for Tom Wolfe—collate The Painted Word and The Bonfire of the Vanities and you've got something, no doubt. But no such luck. Instead, we have only the bizarre residual side projects of the period's A-list. Robert Longo's, um, darkly prophetic Johnny Mnemonic, Salle's movie that no one saw, Schnabel's Basquiat and the singing career, clearly a cry for help. To date, we have heard so little about the era itself, of lives lived in that lustrous time.
Until now. With Fernanda Eberstadt's When the Songs of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth, released a few months ago, the Knopf publicists promised the first novel-y look at the culture of the art world's boom time. And though the canvas is a bit smaller than advertised—it really doesn't go too far into the market as a whole, and the references to actual people are clouded—it's still a good book. Kind of a lame third act, but really great most of the way. In it, we meet the Geblers, a Manhattan family of unconscionable wealth, whose matriarch, Dolly Gebler, presides over the Aurora Foundation, a non-profit art space made possible by the family's fortune, created in Chicago by her father, in pharmaceuticals. Presiding over the foundation, Dolly is brilliant, domineering and cooly passionate about art. Her taste runs toward the minimal—she decorates her home with work by Stella and Agnes Martin—and her life is similarly ordered. She has settled into middle age with three teenage children and has come to terms with being attached to an infantile, adulterous husband. For fun she surrounds herself with artists and writers and such, and at her parties, everyone's fabulously rich and well-bred and articulate, and they all speak in wonderful, quip-laden prose. One finds "the Renaissance overrated," another deems "the young people of today so censorious," while another finds the pato negro "a bit gamey."
Meanwhile, across the city, we are following the plight of one Isaac Hooker, a rough-hewn castaway from New Hampshire, an almost-homeless painter of unrefined talent but great passion. He's also a Harvard dropout, and like all Harvard men speaks like the brilliant rogue in a Victorian drawing room. When he is displeased with an avant garde opera about the Trojan War—one that Dolly, through Autora, has sponsored—he lets a guest at the post-party know what he thinks: "[For] everyone to everybody to stand around gushing about the lighting is to accede to her meretricious pretentious gall in lobotomizing one of the most heartrending stories in Greek tragedy."
After 300 or so pages of setup, Dolly and Isaac finally fall in love. She is attracted to his intensity and becomes infatuated with his primitive and sensual artwork, full of allegory and religious imagery. He responds to her loving encouragement, and to some extent the allure of her money and power. Soon there are the Central Park walks, the weekends at the house on the North Fork, the clandestine meetings at his dingy studio. For a fleeting while we are convinced that they are meant to be. Their relationship is lustful but tender and respectful, and we imagine that she's found a new life at middle age, and that he's found love and stability in Dolly 20 years his senior.
But then something happens on page 357, really deep into the novel, actually, that sort of sticks out, and changes the feel of things. The two have been meeting often, sometimes at hotels—"the St. Moritz or the Pierre"—and during of one their encounters, Isaac muses on his good fortunes: "[He] could not resist these wayward autumn afternoons decanting into evening. The delectable melancholy of lying on crumpled hotel sheets, watching ever-diminishing reflections of Dolly in the bath, and wondering if he couldn't fuck her once more before he dropped her home."
Did you flinch? I flinched. I flinched, and then I was troubled. It really came from nowhere, that word, "fuck," used as it was, as a verb. Isaac and Dolly are no doubt in some sort of love, and have a certain clear respect for each other. They talk endlessly about art and philosophy and literature, treat each other to various kindnesses. But when Isaac thinks of her sexually, he wonders if he can "fuck her once more before he drop[s] her home."
And so I wondered why it was that Isaac wanted to "fuck" Dolly. I wondered what Eberstadt meant there. Had I missed something in their relationship, in Isaac's character? I guess he was supposed to be sort of tough, kind of unrefined in his manners, but essentially he's a sensitive, intellectual, artsy type. So then why does he want to "fuck" her? Nothing in the text until that point led me to believe that Isaac would, while having an affair with a 50-year-old heiress and mother of three, look at her and hope to "fuck" her. It leapt out. After that, reading the book became about trying to decipher the meaning of that word's appearance, and the other times when Eberstadt used words like "pussy" and "prick" and "gash" in the middle of her otherwise genteel prose.
And just as the book became about that word, so will this essay, which really has nothing to do with Eberstadt's book, or novelizations of the 80s art world. It's about that word, "fuck," and what I'm saying is that I have a problem with using that word. As a verb.
Every language must have its profanity, and "fuck" is our most astringent and versatile specimen. I use the word all the time...
END OF EXCERPT. Now follow this link to the Metroactive website and find the paragraph beginning "Every language must have its profanity" to continue reading. Enjoy!
Take-away question: Are there any other contributions to NYPress by Dave Eggers, other than his "Fuck" essay and a cheeky letter in the NYPress letters column in which he complains that John Strausbaugh has incorrectly described his literary journal McSweeney's as a "zine".6-7
Sources:
1) "Foreword: We Tried.", Shiny Adidas tracksuits and the death of camp: and other essays from Might magazine. 1998. New York: Berkley Boulevard Book, p. xi. QUOTE: "5) A few of the essays included herein never actually made it to print in Might. The thing about the word 'fuck' and the thing about nail polish were both scheduled to run in Might #17, but then we folded and they were left homeless. The 'fuck' thing did end up being published in the New York Press, while the nail polish thing appears for the first time here."
2) Dave Eggers. "Never Fucked Anyone", Shiny Adidas tracksuits and the death of camp: and other essays from Might magazine. 1998. New York: Berkley Boulevard Book, pp. 97-112.
3) Dave Eggers. "A Tough Look at an Ugly Verb: I've Never Fucked Anyone", New York Press, vol. 10, no. 26 (June 25-July 1, 1997), pp. 1, 34-37.
4) Dave Eggers."The Problem with an Ugly Verb: And why I've never fucked anyone", Metro, October 1997.
5) William Monahan. "Critical Mess", Bookforum, Summer 2001, p. 52.
6) John Strausbaugh. "Publishing", New York Press, vol. 11, no. 39 (September 30-October 6, 1998), pp. 1, 9.
7) Dave Eggers. "Letters column: Arch Support", New York Press, vol. 11, no. 41 (October 14-20, 1998), p. 3.
