Although I don’t have details, I learned yesterday that fiction writer Harold (Hal) Jaffe has died. He lived in the San Diego area, where he taught at San Diego State University for many years. He was generous to me, inviting me to read at San Diego State University and publishing my work several times in Fiction International. He visited my campus twice to read, and brought with him all the flair, power, and danger for which his work was rightly loved by those who knew it. The students I met who worked with him were devoted to him. He acted from a set of beliefs that included the idea that the goal of politics should be art, not that the goal of art should be politics, and that crucial to the role of the artist should be not just to challenge everything, but to experience everything, to always put oneself at risk in one’s practice.
His writing was often astonishing: blunt, experimental, surprising, risky.
In memoriam, I’m posting here my review of his book Anti-Twitter, 150 50-Word Stories, that appeared in the Jan / Feb 2011 issue of American Book Review.
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Hal Jaffe, Anti-Twitter: 150 50-Word Stories
163 pp.
Raw Dog Screaming Press
978-1-933293-88-2
If it was inevitable that writers would take up the problems and possibilities of Twitter, it was also likely that Harold Jaffe would be one of the first to do so. Jaffe has long been interested in the relationship between mass media and literature, seeing the two not as separate, autonomous realms but as intertwined, subject to similar historical conditions and often enough having similar goals. One of his earlier and best books, False Positive, showed how media stories and literature are both constructions designed to inculcate, on a subliminal level, readers into various ideologies. In False Positive, it’s less through the message than through the details, nouns, verbs, and adjectives which readers unquestioningly accept as normal that both mass media and literature prop up dominant global ideologies.
In Anti-Twitter: 150 50-Word Stories, Jaffe is not interested in critiquing the shallow interactions that Twitter makes possible and that are easily mocked by the mass media that also loves them. Instead, Jaffe’s book suggests that Twitter isn’t so easily dismissed. Those who relegate Twitter to a sub-literary realm in which developing one’s thoughts seems outlawed overlook Twitter’s ability for social manipulation as well as the possibility of using it for socially conscious and self-aware literary creation. To critique shallowness for being shallow is shallow, Anti-Twitter suggests. Instead, Jaffe’s goal is to take shallowness, as well as systematic restrictions on what can be said, and do something insightful with them.
As he has done before in False Positive and elsewhere, Jaffe constructs his 50-word stories in Anti-Twitter by borrowing mass media language then twisting that language for new ends. Most of the stories are presented as brief snippets of news, which many originally were, although a few stories vary the approach. Some stories stay on one topic throughout their whole 50 words, while others offer tangents, counterpoints, or subplots, just in case anyone thinks that 50 is only enough words to tell one story. Even at their most ludicrous, contradictory, or appalling, it’s often impossible to know which words Jaffe found and which he changed. Which is part of Jaffe’s point, and not for the first time in his work: all writing is intervention into the world and never merely portrays it.
How much can one portray in 50-word stories, even when there are 150 of them? Jaffe’s answer is simple: pretty much the whole world. Not every aspect of it, obviously, but there’s no doubt that these stories are global in their reach. Although the primary focus falls on the U.S., other locations visited in these stories include Sweden, Great Britain, Germany, China, Thailand, Italy, Latvia, Denmark, Canada, Pakistan, Iraq, Israel, India, Chad, France, Kenya, Japan, Tanzania, Albania, Australia, Venezuela, Russia, Poland, Nigeria, Spain, Egypt, Nepal, Ghana, Switzerland, Austria, Palestine, Afghanistan, Brunei, Greece, Belgium, and Tibet. For each location visited by the media, something can be found and exploited as news. Something odd, at the least, and usually much more than odd. The stories are by turns hilarious, creepy, repellant, brutal, and unfathomable.
It’s safe to say that the stories in the book all tend towards the seamy and sensational. Both the mass media and Jaffe know that people often want to read about things that titillate them but at the same time can be denounced. Consider the story “Albino”:
Tanzania is urging the public to identify those guilty of murdering humans with albinism.
73 albinos have been slaughtered in the past year.
Albino body parts are sold to witchdoctors who compose potions designed to make people wealthy.
231 people have already been arrested.
No one has been convicted.
In “Albino,” readers are treated to a full dose of the exoticizing racism of the global media, which searches out and revels in the barbaric while at the same time congratulating itself on its own superiority. The fact that the story may contain some truth only makes the situation more disturbing.
Of course, as the story “An Austrian” shows, there is no shortage of horrifying otherness to be exploited among Europeans:
who sexually abused his daughter over 24 years, will plead guilty to all but one of the charges.
He admits to deprivation of liberty, rape, incest, coercion.
However he denies murdering one of the seven children he fathered with his daughter.
The trial is scheduled for March 29.
Readers can be assured that the United States doesn’t fare any better under this gaze, and often looks worse. Nor do the above examples exhaust the variety of subjects in these stories: global politics, the animal world and natural environment, and many related subjects prove just as useful for highlighting people’s desire to get a thrill out of the inexhaustible range of human depravity, foolishness, and self-regard.
Make no mistake: nobody comes out looking good in Anti-Twitter. There’s nothing that the media’s eye, not to mention Jaffe’s, won’t expose viciously. Of course the fact that Jaffe is just as responsible for the world on display here is crucial to the book’s point. According to Jaffe, authorship is not some privileged, authoritative removal from the morass of the world. It is instead exactly that which gathers up and manipulates the morass for us, whether the author in question is a reporter for The National Enquirer or a winner of the Nobel Prize.
And yet, because of the flat and ironic style of the book, Anti-Twitter never lectures or moralizes. After all, Jaffe suggests, none of us are in a position to do that. Our desire to feel superior to others was crucial to what got us into this mess in the first place.
