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Novel Approach
David Rakoff’s ‘Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish’

By PAUL RUDNICK
Published: August 1, 2013

There’s an absolutely essential video available on YouTube, of a 2012 segment from NPR’s “This American Life,” in which the writer and frequent guest David Rakoff walks onstage with his left hand tucked into his pocket. Rakoff has recently undergone surgery, his “fourth in as many years” for cancer, he explains, and now possesses a “flail limb.” Aside from “being able to shrug talmudically,” he says, “I can neither move nor feel my left arm.”

He describes relearning basic chores, including brushing his teeth and grating cheese, then says he once believed that “if I just buckled down to the great work at hand . . . my best self was just there, right around the corner.” Now, he insists, “I’m done with all that. I’m done with so many things, like dancing.”

Rakoff danced a lot as a child, “like a straight boy obsessed with baseball, except . . . better.” He took more serious dance training in college and then in Manhattan, where the classes became “an exercise in humiliation.” He concludes that this was all “a version of myself that’s long since ceased to exist.”

Then he moves away from the lectern and — to a recording of the aching Irving Berlin ballad “What’ll I Do?” — he begins to dance. He dances intently, with a precise grace. He’s a superb showman, and he knows that the moment is both gorgeous and heartbreaking.

Rakoff died three months later, at 47. I’ve watched this video countless times, and I always think, with regard to life and death and dancing: That’s how it’s done.

I knew David just a bit, and I happily blurbed the first of his three collections of morally fervid, gleefully caustic essays. (To quote one example, about his early attempt at a publishing career: After a particularly troublesome author lapses into unconsciousness following cosmetic surgery, Rakoff e-mails a friend, “Do you think her being in a coma will affect the quality of her writing?” To quote another, about the Hodgkin’s disease that first surfaced in his 20s: “Even though laughter may well be ‘the best medicine,’ it is not, in point of fact, actual medicine.”)

Yet by all rights I should hate Rakoff’s newly published novel, “Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish” — and not just because it’s so awful to contemplate a world without any more David Rakoff books, or any more David Rakoff. No, I should hate this book because it’s written entirely in verse, and I am a committed poetryphobe. I am a crass and ignorant person who considers all poetry, from Shakespeare on down, to be a complete hoax. Like a bore at a cocktail party, most poems discuss only the weather, their feelings and that little gray bird they saw on their way to work. As with yogurt and math, I’m convinced that anyone who claims to enjoy poetry is lying.

But here’s the miracle of “Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish” (which I will henceforth, and justifiably, refer to as “Love”): It’s an extraordinary and deliriously entertaining work. It didn’t make me love poetry, but it certainly affirmed my love for David Rakoff.

Belligerent Savant » 03 Aug 2013 21:39 wrote:.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/books ... eview&_r=0

Novel Approach
David Rakoff’s ‘Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish’

By PAUL RUDNICK
Published: August 1, 2013

There’s an absolutely essential video available on YouTube, of a 2012 segment from NPR’s “This American Life,” in which the writer and frequent guest David Rakoff walks onstage with his left hand tucked into his pocket. Rakoff has recently undergone surgery, his “fourth in as many years” for cancer, he explains, and now possesses a “flail limb.” Aside from “being able to shrug talmudically,” he says, “I can neither move nor feel my left arm.”

He describes relearning basic chores, including brushing his teeth and grating cheese, then says he once believed that “if I just buckled down to the great work at hand . . . my best self was just there, right around the corner.” Now, he insists, “I’m done with all that. I’m done with so many things, like dancing.”

Rakoff danced a lot as a child, “like a straight boy obsessed with baseball, except . . . better.” He took more serious dance training in college and then in Manhattan, where the classes became “an exercise in humiliation.” He concludes that this was all “a version of myself that’s long since ceased to exist.”

Then he moves away from the lectern and — to a recording of the aching Irving Berlin ballad “What’ll I Do?” — he begins to dance. He dances intently, with a precise grace. He’s a superb showman, and he knows that the moment is both gorgeous and heartbreaking.

Rakoff died three months later, at 47. I’ve watched this video countless times, and I always think, with regard to life and death and dancing: That’s how it’s done.

I knew David just a bit, and I happily blurbed the first of his three collections of morally fervid, gleefully caustic essays. (To quote one example, about his early attempt at a publishing career: After a particularly troublesome author lapses into unconsciousness following cosmetic surgery, Rakoff e-mails a friend, “Do you think her being in a coma will affect the quality of her writing?” To quote another, about the Hodgkin’s disease that first surfaced in his 20s: “Even though laughter may well be ‘the best medicine,’ it is not, in point of fact, actual medicine.”)

Yet by all rights I should hate Rakoff’s newly published novel, “Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish” — and not just because it’s so awful to contemplate a world without any more David Rakoff books, or any more David Rakoff. No, I should hate this book because it’s written entirely in verse, and I am a committed poetryphobe. I am a crass and ignorant person who considers all poetry, from Shakespeare on down, to be a complete hoax. Like a bore at a cocktail party, most poems discuss only the weather, their feelings and that little gray bird they saw on their way to work. As with yogurt and math, I’m convinced that anyone who claims to enjoy poetry is lying.

But here’s the miracle of “Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish” (which I will henceforth, and justifiably, refer to as “Love”): It’s an extraordinary and deliriously entertaining work. It didn’t make me love poetry, but it certainly affirmed my love for David Rakoff.

nashvillebrook » Sat Aug 03, 2013 5:07 pm wrote:holy crap. i had not seen this before. i love/d Rakoff. Love/d his precision as a writer and monologist. that's devastating. he died way too young.

“Is there some lesson on how to be friends?
I think what it means is that central to living
a life that is good is a life that's forgiving.
We're creatures of contact regardless of whether
we kiss or we wound. Still, we must come together.
Though it may spell destruction, we still ask for more--
since it beats staying dry but so lonely on shore.
So we make ourselves open while knowing full well
it's essentially saying "please, come pierce my shell.”

“It bears repeating a third time: Not being funny doesn't make you a bad person. Not having a sense of humour does.”

“There is supercomputer somewhere in the Nevada desert whose sole function is to count the number of times that I have said the following, because it is unquantifiable by human minds at this point, but this time it’s really true: I should have stayed home.”

“For most of my life, I would have automatically said that I would opt for conscientious objector status, and in general, I still would. But the spirit of the question is would I ever, and there are instances where I might. If immediate intervention would have circumvented the genocide in Rwanda or stopped the Janjaweed in Darfur, would I choose pacifism? Of course not. Scott Simon, the reporter for National Public Radio and a committed lifelong Quaker, has written that it took looking into mass graves in former Yugoslavia to convince him that force is sometimes the only option to deter our species' murderous impulses.

While we're on the subject of the horrors of war, and humanity's most poisonous and least charitable attributes, let me not forget to mention Barbara Bush (that would be former First Lady and presidential mother as opposed to W's liquor-swilling, Girl Gone Wild, human ashtray of a daughter. I'm sorry, that's not fair. I've no idea if she smokes.) When the administration censored images of the flag-draped coffins of the young men and women being killed in Iraq - purportedly to respect "the privacy of the families" and not to minimize and cover up the true nature and consequences of the war - the family matriarch expressed her support for what was ultimately her son's decision by saying on Good Morning America on March 18, 2003, "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? I mean it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

Mrs. Bush is not getting any younger. When she eventually ceases to walk among us we will undoubtedly see photographs of her flag-draped coffin. Whatever obituaries that run will admiringly mention those wizened, dynastic loins of hers and praise her staunch refusal to color her hair or glamorize her image. But will they remember this particular statement of hers, this "Let them eat cake" for the twenty-first century? Unlikely, since it received far too little play and definitely insufficient outrage when she said it. So let us promise herewith to never forget her callous disregard for other parents' children while her own son was sending them to make the ultimate sacrifice, while asking of the rest of us little more than to promise to go shopping. Commit the quote to memory and say it whenever her name comes up. Remind others how she lacked even the bare minimum of human integrity, the most basic requirement of decency that says if you support a war, you should be willing, if not to join those nineteen-year-olds yourself, then at least, at the very least, to acknowledge that said war was actually going on. Stupid fucking cow.”

“It must be murder to be an aging beauty, a former Tadzio, to see your future as an ignored spectator rushing up to meet you like the hard pavement. What a small sip of gall to be able to time with each passing year the ever-shorter interval in which someone's eyes focus upon you. And then shift away.”

“There is much in our culture to affront the eye of the fervent terrorist postulant, things out there that do us no favors, to be sure. If, for example, it came to light that the dangerously thin, affectless, value-deficient, higher aspiration-free, amateur-porn chanteuse Paris Hilton was actually a covert agent from some secret Taliban madrassa whose mission was to portray the ultimate capitalist-whore puppet of a doomed society with nothing more on its mind than servitude to Mammon and celebrity at any cost, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.”

“All of the designers I have met up to this point have been very nice, although upon being introduced to Karl Lagerfeld, he looks me up and down and dismisses me with the not super-kind, "What can you write that hasn't been written already?"

He's absolutely right, I have no idea. I can but try. The only thing I can come up with right now is that Lagerfeld's powdered white ponytail has dusted the shoulders of his suit with what looks like dandruff but isn't....seated on a tiny velvet chair, with his large doughy rump dominating the miniature piece of furniture like a loose, flabby, ass-flavored muffin over-risen from its pan, he resembles a Daumier caricature of some corpulent, overfed, inhumane oligarch drawn sitting on a commode, stuffing his greedy throat with the corpses of dead children, while from his other end he shits out huge, malodorous piles of tainted money. How's that for new and groundbreaking, Mr. L.?
”

“There are many things in this world that are an outrage, to be sure, but death at our current life expectancy doesn’t strike me as one of them. Maybe I sound like some Victorian who felt that forty years ought to be enough for any man, but one of the marks of a life well lived has to be reaching a state of finally getting it, of not needing more, and of being able to sign off with something approaching peace of mind.”

“you happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless hair trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness-- a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest self which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver on yourself over the back of the kitchen chair”

“During the act of making something, I experience a kind of blissful absence of the self and a loss of time. When I am done, I return to both feeling as restored as if I had been on a trip. I almost never get this feeling any other way. I once spent sixteen hours making 150 wedding invitations by hand and was not for one instance of that time tempted to eat or look at my watch. By contrast, if seated at the computer, I check my email conservatively 30,000 times a day. When I am writing, I must have a snack, call a friend, or abuse myself every ten minutes. I used to think that this was nothing more than the difference between those things we do for love and those we do for money. But that can't be the whole story. I didn't always write for a living, and even back when it was my most fondly held dream to one day be able to do so, writing was always difficult. Writing is like pulling teeth.
From my dick.”