“I want to mention another way information circulated through the country in 1986 around the Challenger disaster, and I think those of you who are more or less my age will know what I’m talking about: jokes. My brother, who is three and a half years older than I, would tell me one after another as we walked to and from Randolph Elementary that winter: Did you know that Christa McAuliffe was blue-eyed? One blew left and one blew right; What were Christa McAuliffe’s last words to her husband? You feed the kids — I’ll feed the fish; What does NASA stand for? Need Another Seven Astronauts; How do they know what shampoo Christa McAuliffe used? They found her head and shoulders. And so on: the jokes seemed to come out of nowhere, or to come from everywhere at once; like cicadas emerging from underground, they were ubiquitous for a couple of months, then disappeared. Folklorists who study what they call ‘joke cycles’ track how — particularly in times of collective anxiety — certain humorous templates get recycled, often among children. When the IRA blew up a fishing boat with Admiral Mountbatten on it in 1979, the year of my birth, people told the same dandruff joke. When an actor named Vic Morrow died in a helicopter crash in 1982, there was the joke again — head and shoulders. (Procter & Gamble developed the shampoo in the 1950s.) The Challenger joke cycle, which seemed to exist without our parents knowing, was my first experience of a kind of sinister transpersonal syntax existent in the collective unconscious, a shadow language to Reagan’s official narrative processing of the national tragedy. The anonymous jokes we were told and retold were our way of dealing with the remainder of the trauma that the elegy cycle initiated by Reagan-Noonan-Magee-Hicks-Dunn-C.A.F.B. (and who knows who else) couldn’t fully integrate into our lives.
“So at the beginning of my story of origins is a false memory of a moving image. I didn’t see it live. What I saw was a televised speech that wasn’t written by anyone, but that, through its rhythmic structure, was briefly available to everyone; the next day I went to school and another powerfully unoriginal linguistic practice enveloped me, an unsanctioned ritual of call-and-response that was, however insensitively, a form of grieving. If I had to trace my origins as a poet to a specific moment, I’d locate it there, in those modes of recycling. I make no claims for ‘High Flight’ as a poem — in fact, I think it’s a terrible poem — and Ronald Reagan I consider a mass murderer. I don’t see anything formally interesting about the Challenger jokes, I can’t find anything to celebrate there; they weren’t funny even at the time. But I wonder if we can think of them as bad forms of collectivity that can serve as figures of its real possibility: prosody and grammar as the stuff out of which we build a social world, a way of organizing meaning and time that belongs to nobody in particular but courses through us all. Thank you.”
I thought the applause for my remarks was enthusiastic, but I might well have been mistaken, because almost none of the questions in the ensuing conversation was addressed to me; the other two writers on the panel were much better known. I sat in a modernist leather chair on the stage at Columbia’s School of the Arts, unable to see the audience clearly because of the tungsten lights, a distinguished professor of literature moderating, and mainly listened to the distinguished authors — so distinguished I’d often thought of them as dead — talk about the origins of their genius. (Would you believe me if I said that one of the distinguished authors was the same South African man I’d observed from across the room at Bernard and Natali’s fifteen years before?) There were the usual exhortations to purity — think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form — exhortations poets don’t have to make, given the economic marginality of the art, an economic marginality that soon all literature will share.
But at the elegant dinner the distinguished professor had arranged for us after the panel, all the initial small talk was about money: had you heard about X’s advance, how much money Y received when her aggressively mediocre book was optioned for film, and so on. After two quick glasses of Sancerre, the distinguished male author started holding forth, periodically tugging at his salt-and-pepper beard, his signature gesture, moving from one anecdote about a famous friend or triumphant experience to another without pausing for the possibility of response, and it was clear to everyone at the table who had any experience with men and alcohol — especially men who had won international literary prizes — that he was not going to stop talking at any point in the meal. Unless he dissects, I thought. When a young Latino man tried to refill his glass of water from a pitcher, the distinguished male author snapped in Spanish, without looking at the man, that he was having sparkling water, and then switched back into English without missing a beat. The distinguished professor was sitting immediately across from the distinguished male author and seemed more than happy to receive his logorrhea; a younger woman — probably also an English professor, but too young to be distinguished — was sitting beside him, smiling bravely, realizing her evening was doomed.
I was on the other side of the table sitting across from the distinguished female author, enjoying how the crispness and lightness of the wine had a rightness of fit with the restaurant’s pear-wood paneling and bright terrazzo floors. Seated to my right was a well-dressed graduate student about my age who was plainly starstruck by the distinguished female author, perhaps the subject of his dissertation. To the distinguished female author’s left was her husband, probably also distinguished in some way, who had the look of many husbands: eyebrows perpetually raised a little in a defensive mask of polite interest, signifying boredom. I was unsure if I should say gracias or thank you to the man refilling my water glass. Even here, where a meal for seven would cost at least a thousand dollars, much of the work was done by a swift underclass of Spanish-speaking laborers. I thought of Roberto, of his terror of Joseph Kony. I tried to picture, as I looked around the restaurant, those towns in Mexico in which almost all of the able-bodied men were gone, employed now in New York’s service industry.
“I enjoyed your story in The New Yorker,” the distinguished female author said to me. It seemed that the story — which was in part the result of my dealing with the reception of my novel — had been much more widely read than the novel itself.