Reference Desk

I've frequently heard – both as a neutral comment and as an active complaint – that my writing is overstuffed with references. A forgotten European battle here, a disco single there, a torrent of names and places and times.

I sometimes wonder why this is. Is it laziness? A failure to develop the subtleties of narrative? Is it a symptom of late-stage capitalism, a cheap Bret Easton Ellis (there I go again...) move in which name brands are substituted for humanity?

No, at least I don't think so. Because so many of the artists and thinkers I love build on references, and it's not because they are lazy, or because they are passive victims of the “postmodern condition,” forced to rely on “intertextual” technique. And in fact we should ask where the line is drawn, or if any line can be drawn between “reference” and mundane metaphor and analogy.

I'm sure there are linguists, philosophers, and others more competent and qualified than myself having this discussion right now. I'll leave well-enough alone for the time being, mere mook that I am.

But whatever it is – reference, metaphor, analogy – has always been an endless fascination. The histories and geographies of the objects of our daily life, the encoded sign systems we barely notice. And I've always been drawn to those who see the world in a similar light.

We'll start with W.G. Sebald in Austerlitz...

 “If language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares, nooks and crannies, with some quarters dating from far back in time while others have been torn down, cleared up and rebuilt, and with suburbs reaching further and further into the surrounding country, then I was like a man who had been abroad a long time and cannot find his way through this urban sprawl any more, no longer knows what a bus stop is for, or what a back yard is, or a street junction, and avenue or a bridge.”

Gorgeous, no? Bonus points if you get the reference...

“Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new
houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.”

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, whose work I tried in my own way to reference before I ever read Austerlitz, before I realized that Sebald way-more-than-one-upped me

But it's not just a figurine in the galette des rois, waiting to be found. At it's best it's an invitation into a world. And so it was I looked for those artists and thinkers who seemed, in their odd way, to be writing such letters requesting your presence in their worlds.

When I was 15 or 16 and I read Joan Didion for the time, I understood damn near nothing. I couldn't understand the objects lingered over – the plumeria blossoms and stray pieces of tulle and Bob Dylan 7” singles, the bourbon flasks and white lipstick. I didn't know anything about the tabloid headlines of the day, anything about ritualized screaming in Synanon or the '64 Goldwater campaign or the coded references to events that occurred on Cielo Drive. And yet somehow... they cohered.

There is always the risk that when a references fails to resonate with the reader, that the reader is alienated. And yet somehow – and maybe this is my adolescent lack of confidence speaking – I was drawn in. It didn't seem unknowable. Rather, it seemed like a skeleton key to a lost world, the sort of world where you might spend the early evening among wealthy Republicans who still saw heavy silken drapes as good taste of the sort that had been lost during the French Revolution, and the late evening splitting an eight-ball with Lindsey Buckingham.

But this has been such a repeated pattern in what I find appealing. And furthermore, the world I discovered inside the text bleeds over into the outside world.

Which is why I walk around, seeing the Tom Waits rain falling into a brand of shoes American-made until 1983, hearing the Mark Fisher bass rhythm in an after-hours club. Having a Robert Coover fever dream at 2:30 in the morning, imagining I am hearing Walter Benjamin sigh on a gray autumn day.

But this is where the breadcrumb trail leads. The city of streets and squares, nooks and crannies outside my window, the plumerias in bloom across the pool.