"I
was one of those skinny young men in scary glasses and thrift-store
clothes whom you see on Boston or Brooklyn subways, young men who look
like they possess
massive amounts of data about small-label rock bands or avant-garde
literature or video technology, the very size of these data-sets
affording a kind of psychic protection."
- Jonathan Franzen, "Mr. Difficult"
When
I read Franzen's essay on his major influence and literary frenemy,
William Gaddis, it was that quote, more than Franzen's remarkably
intelligent analysis of how we approach
difficult systems-novels, that resonated with me the most, and it's not
the physical stereotype -- true as it might have been -- but the fact
that it's there's something protective in those data sets.
Consider
the archivist, the curator, the enthusiast who has translated their
passion into expensive, exhaustive collections and bases of knowledge
about things that few people
care about.
Now
consider how unlikeable that person is, by and large. We think of the
snobbish douchebag record store clerk, the Simpsons Comic Book Guy type
who brutally gatekeeps his fandoms,
the sweaty-palmed erotica hoarder who actually went to the effort to
start a Pornhub account, the sports-stats guy who knows just how to turn
a great play into a mere data point (the subcategory of baseball dads
being the worst of the bunch), the health and
exercise fanatic who has uses the word "gains" unironically, the
conspiracy theorist who can manage to string together every major
current event of the past 100 years, the frugality Nazi, the video store
weirdo (nearly extinct species, that), the natural healing
guru, and so on.
I
can't say I'm a fan of most of these types, either, and it's largely
because I've been most of these at some point in my life, at least to
some degree.
All
my life people have asked me how I amass so much useless knowledge. I
don't know, nor have I ever known. It was always said with a mix of
wonder and contempt. Because outside
of bar quiz nights where it occasionally yields a free pint, useless
knowledge is indeed useless, especially in an era when the whole fucking
encyclopedia is in your pocket.
As
a small child, I made lists in my spare time, lists to accompany the
drawings of trucks and rockets, maps of imaginary nations. I kept boyish
collections, Hot Wheels cars,
brightly colored bottle caps, street maps, old atlases I found at
garage sales, foreign coins -- an interest sparked, I believe by an
Indonesian 100 rupiah coin with a Sumatran longhouse on the obverse,
which I accidentally got in change at some point in time
in the early '90s.
And
as an adult, I might not collect much, but instead I keep obsessive
lists of books to read, movies to watch, places to visit, recipes to
cook, fitness goals to reach. So even
when my obsessive habits are productive and yield positive results --
when I read those books, watch those movies, travel to those places,
cook those recipes, reach those fitness goals -- I wonder how much I am
truly enjoying myself, and how much I am simply
trying to bring some veneer of order to a life that so often seems
directionless and dysfunctional, against the backdrop of an uncaring and
disordered universe.
Hence
Franzen's use of the phrase "psychic protection." This is my attempt to
cope with that chaos. OK, I hate it when laymen use psychiatric
terminology without regard to the
actual implications -- consider how many times per day you hear words
like "OCD," "bipolar," "autistic," and "anxiety" radically misused. But I
can't help but think that my amassing of knowledge and lists is only
one or two steps from washing my hands 30 times
a day.
