November 28th, 2009 by Richard under dontfollowmeimlost. No Comments.
I’ve got a piece up on The Daily Beast about the pressures of trying to write a memoir in this new social networking age when the past is online ready to chat all day and won’t stand back far enough to let you form detached theories about it. It begins:
Around 2004, I began writing the memoirs of my wayward college years in the mid-1980s. My writing was initially inspired by news of the death of one of my old classmates. It had been more than a decade since I had last seen my friend, whom I call Frank in the book—and his death from a drug overdose came after years spent adrift, floating through life; a road that many of my peers had taken. On learning of Frank’s death, my thoughts drifted back to those chaotic times 20 years ago, when the party of the ’70s and ’80s had given way to the earnestness of the ’90s, and many of my generation, caught between the two eras, had made their stand by checking out in a nihilistic wave that would become known as grunge.
Looking back in time, I saw that in that brief moment, something had been permanently knocked loose for many of my peers, and I began writing my book to figure out what it had been. When I started writing, I was only in contact with a handful of college acquaintances, and reflecting back on my wayward youth, reading through old papers and journals, became a pleasantly wistful bit of therapy.
Read the rest here.
November 18th, 2009 by Richard under dontfollowmeimlost. No Comments.
Some nice notices for and about the book around the internet for all your Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost, a Memoir of Hampshire College in the Twilight of the 80’s needs.
• My former LA Times colleague Scott Timberg did a very nice interview with me for his blog, which you can read right here.
• The NY Post gave us a very nice review.
• We had a lovely write-up on The Readers Book Blog.
• And this is from a week back but was interviewed by Media Bistro’s Tina Dupuy about me and the media.
More to come! As ever, click here to find out much more more about this thrilling adventure.
November 5th, 2009 by Richard under News. 2 Comments.
Video of me not being able to keep my yap shut from the #140 characters conference in LA last week.
November 3rd, 2009 by Richard under News. 4 Comments.
My book has not been out a week and probably not more than a dozen people have read it yet, but based I suppose on its cover and its subject matter, some recurring themes are popping up that I wanted to take a moment out from the busy international junket to address. Most of the questions are coming at this point from the campus itself and some alumni, so here’s my first stab at some responses.
Q: Aren’t you presenting a very stereotypical view of Hampshire students? I mean, all my friends at Hampshire were really hard-working, dedicated seekers of knowledge?
A. The vision of Hampshire when I arrived as a wasteland of self-absorbed deadbeats may a stereotypical view, but at that time, if memory serves the drop-out rate (or non-completion rate was somewhere pushing up close to 50 percent, which suggests that the stereotype held for somewhere close to half the school.
Q: Do you really think this is what Hampshire is like today/was like for everyone?
A: I can not speak to that at all. This is my own memoir of my experience during a very particular time (1986 – 88). Whether anyone before or after, or even during experienced the same is for them to say. But as the subtitle of the book suggests, I was writing about the twilight of an era; when the carnival atmosphere that had reigned over this sub-strata of America from the late 60’s through to the 80’s gave way to the much more self-serious, earnest age that we live in today. So even in the book, this carnival is dying away.
Q: Aren’t you just glorifying people who were a bunch of jerks and your own irresponsible jerky behavior?
A: Portraying is not glorifying. At least it wasn’t intended to be. I think I make out my youthful jerky behavior as fairly jerky and if I show the what led to it, that’s not to justify it. Jerks are jerks and dicks were dicks and no one is saying otherwise.
That said, to while my comrades and I were certainly ridiculous, that doesn’t make the self-righteousness of the rest of the school any less insufferable.
And all that said, while the Dicks were certainly “not nice” there was a rather beautiful purity in their total refusal to get swept away into the stream of life, their almost monastic refusnik tendencies.
Q: Why should I care about these idiots?
A: That is perhaps the hardest question of all to answer. For starters, if you don’t care about them, you don’t and nothing I can say will change that. But I guess the reason I thought these characters were worth preserving on the page is that they represent an apotheosis of an era, of my Generation’s ethos of ironic distance from the world. Coming as it did at the end of the disasters of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, just as the baby boom were taking the reins of American culture, the Dicks absolutely refusal to take anything seriously can be seen as the only possible route for generational survival in a hostile landscape. Certainly, that ethos is what became the driving force of the one moment when my generation found ourselves in the drivers seat of the culture – the Grunge Era, that brief window between the Baby Boom and their children when we were at the center, and ironic nihilism was our animating ethos, for better or worse. And it was born here, on a moldy, unaired couch at Hampshire College.
That’s enough questions for tonight. If you have any more, please leave in the comments section and I’ll try to answer soon as I can. Check back for events info shortly. And as ever, find out more about the book or buy yourself a copy by clicking right here.
I’ve got a piece up on The Daily Beast about the pressures of trying to write a memoir in this new social networking age when the past is online ready to chat all day and won’t stand back far enough to let you form detached theories about it. It begins:
