My friend said in passing that my writing reminds him of Dave Hickey’s and, not being the kind to let any kind of compliment-shaped butterfly escape my net, I picked up a book of Hickey’s essays at my local library – the only one of his many books they have – and started reading it. (I only belatedly recognized Dave Hickey as the very person to whom Terry Allen’s great song “Amarillo Highway” is dedicated, and is maybe about.) The book the library has is Perfect Wave: More Essays on Art and Democracy. It’s a slim volume and a late one, published in 2017, only a few years before Hickey’s death. The opening essay, “Baby Breakers,” tells the story of Hickey’s interesting childhood up to and including a major surfing accident. Moving to LA from Texas, getting interested in surfing thanks to the proximity of both celebrities and the ocean; not being very good at surfing, but learning from the topography of the ocean floor where good waves were likely to break, and thus earning in true Nerd Picaresque fashion the grudging and stingy respect of his fellow surfers. Then, the big accident, which is where the limitations of Hickey’s writing become really apparent. His descriptive enthusiasm outruns his narrative skill, and as a result, it’s very hard to tell what exactly happened. I think what happened is that young Hickey decided to catch a “perfect wave” despite knowing, via surfer triangulation, that it would crash him into a pier, and it crashed him into a pier. Though he long predates social media his prose style shares a grating quality with writers who are or have been inveterate Twitter posters – each sentence is written as a tweet, packed and maximalist, coiled so tight with description that it effectively chokes the breath from the piece of writing as an organic whole. It exhausts the very eyes to read. 

I’m also ill-disposed towards “Baby Breakers” because it’s a perfect example of a genre I absolutely hate: Boomer’s Interesting Childhood. I would classify Hickey, born in 1940, as not exactly a boomer, but close enough. He was born such as to have ample time to catch the actual “Perfect Wave,” the tidal sluice of money into the real economy thanks to Cold War military Keynesianism. You wouldn’t believe the type of shit our sixth grade Hickey, a reasonably bright child, was getting up to in Los Angeles, and there’s a base note of self-satisfaction about this. But how justified is that self-satisfaction? It seems like it was pretty easy for a bright child to have a rich and memorable childhood in a place like Los Angeles in a time like the 1950s, but the kind of fetishism that takes place here is characteristic of the BIC genre. The surfing culture, the affordable housing, the city infrastructure (Hickey takes a bus to the Coast Guard office to pick up ocean-floor maps), the mingling with celebrities and the much more modest GINI coefficient that mingling implies, are presented as qualities of Hickey’s – brightness, alacrity, daring, cool – rather than long-gone macroeconomic policy structures. The conditions for a 1950s American adolescence, be that adolescence cool or uncool, boring or interesting, are obsolete. 

If the base note was self-satisfaction about the interesting childhood, the top note was obliviousness to the environment that made it possible, which is what really grates. My omnibus feeling about this first essay is resentment, resentment which extends beyond the actual boundaries of my knowledge about Hickey’s work as resentment tends to do. I actually resent the confluences of history that made a career like Hickey’s possible. It pisses me off that, for a few decades, a person could make art and a living out of the mere act of discernment, of taste. (Recent attempts to recreate this within our current cultural environment – think “Perfectly Imperfect” – are desperately fucking uncool. For example, singer-songwriter Clairo, on the mass-market Bialetti Moka Pot: “It’s the best way to make coffee in my opinion, and I love it as a part of my morning ritual.”) It’s not just how the cultural and media saturation, the algorithmic accessibility of everything, the microtargeting and the slop, are degrading our experience, which they are. It’s that this degradation of our experience is attendant to another, deeper degradation; this degradation of our souls is the soft outer body around a hard endoskeleton of macroeconomic suck. This isn’t the 1970s, you can’t live in Manhattan as a part-time editor of an art magazine, spending your nights listening to records until dawn breaks as Hickey rhapsodizes about doing in his pretty-good essay about the Carpenters song “Goodbye to Love.” Goodbye to love, indeed. And why stop at love? Goodbye to free time, goodbye to disposable income, goodbye to anything open past 7 PM, goodbye to public transit, goodbye to human interaction. Would I find enjoyment in the campy excesses of a fringe-dweller life in Vegas? Probably! But my alarm is set for 7:00, and I’ve got floaters in my eyes that are bad enough already, and there’s no margin of error. You might as well ask me if I’d enjoy living on Mars. I wish it were otherwise but, unlike the boomers, I’ve got no delusions that what I want matters in either a personal or a world-historical sense. 

There exists a 2016 article about Hickey and his oeuvre in the Los Angeles Review of Books. It’s called “The Inside Outsider,” by a person named Jarrett Earnest. Hickey had, over his career, “invented a way of engaging art that is so singular and spectacular it can’t be compared with anyone else’s,” and this way consists of “theatricalizing the distance” between the inner experience of the viewer and that of the artist, on which the viewer’s vantage is “resolutely outside.” “To enact this externalized mode of inner experience,” Earnest writes, “Hickey has fashioned himself into a character in his own writing.” I don’t doubt that this has paid critical dividends; I doubt only whether I’m terribly interested in it. None other than T. Ruggles Pynchon (born 1937, a few years before Hickey, and still kickin’) wrote a whole book about externalizing the internal that couldn’t be more different. (Maybe it’s unfair to compare novels to criticism, or to compare Pynchon to Hickey, but this is my newsletter and I do what I want.)

I’m talking of course about Gravity’s Rainbow. Pirate Prentice is the character whose dream opens the novel; Prentice is a clairvoyant of sorts employed by an Allied outfit abbreviated PISCES (Psychological Intelligence SChemes for Expediting Surrender although, the narrator reminds, they never specify whose surrender). Prentice’s special power is to be able to enter and inhabit other people’s daydreams and fantasies. My favorite reading of the novel is that all the episodes and shifting perspectives are the result of Prentice entering into different characters’ daydreams, adding up to something like a psychogeography or psychohistory of the events of World War II. This reading easily accommodates the oneiric zaniness of the narrative (e.g., hot air balloon whipped cream pie fight) – it’s Pirate’s channeling of other people’s internal experience (channeling is a big theme in the novel), more like the Outside Insider. The resulting narrative of the war is an externalization of people’s inner experience of it, bearing a general but unheimlich resemblance to the established Events of History.

This corresponds to a more “schizophrenic” (in the RD Laing sense) stance on the internal/external distinction. Would that our inner experience were as inaccessible and unknowable as Hickey’s critical mode assumes! On the contrary, our psyches are as permeable as cheesecloth, under constant threat of forced entry, invasion, and colonization. Allies/Axis, Force/Counterforce, friend/enemy, inside/outside all bleed unsettlingly together. Subconscious fantasies merge with external realities, like Pynchon’s BDSM Nazis and their fixation with polymer engineering culminating in the “erectile” plastic Imipolex G, a material with equal narrative, psychosexual, political, and historical import. Many call Pynchon paranoid. Maybe so. But just because you’re paranoid… well, you know the lyric. Pynchon could read the ocean floor to see the post-war wave forming before the war was even over, could see the shared interests that would unite the powers ostensibly fighting each other through the last spectacular stages, and could predict the rippling effects the postwar consolidation would have. This is, perhaps, why his fiction and public persona (what little exists of it) has never fallen for the sentimental fetishism of postwar economy as personal quality. He saw the wave, and the pier, and has never once labored under the illusion of personal agency as far as they’re concerned.