Speed Trap

I first read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius when I moved to Jersey City in 2000.  It was before I knew what parental death was, a year before 9/11, and a few months after college.  I saw the book at the Union Square Barnes & Noble and the title was just so amazing.  I picked it up and read it quickly, not really understanding all of it, not entirely sure if I loved it or merely liked it.

It was hard to decide if this was even good writing, because I'd mostly read fiction before that.  AHWOSG was the first personal narrative I'd read that resonated with me. It didn't occur to me that anyone would want to write (much less read) a contemporary memoir about someone who was young and not famous.  His book was so quotidian

There were so many conversations about Dave Eggers around that time, as everyone seemed to be reading his book and judging it.  "Did you read the preface first?  What did you find funny? What was your favorite part? Did you finish it?"

After some hesitation, I soon become an Eggers fanboy, just like so many others. I never got into his fiction though, or even What Is the What and Zeitoun. Instead I just followed all his other pursuits, The Believer, McSweeney's, 826 Valencia, Teachers Have It Easy, and his various Best American Nonrequired Reading collections. I just wanted to know more about Dave Dave Dave.

During the events of AHWOSG, Eggers was twenty eight or so.  That seemed like an insurmountable barrier between us, his additional six years of maturity.  I wondered if my late twenties would be like his. Thrust into adult-ish responsibilities, amusing anecdotes about life, love, and friends, that kind of thing. While cleaning up my book shelf the other day, I found a copy of Staggering Genius and have started rereading.  Now at five years older than AHWOSG Dave, I feel like maybe missed out on my own late twenties for some reason.

And now that memoirs by young people are just about my favorite genre of book, I totally understand what all the fuss about Eggers was back then. For better or for worse. For example, here was Michiko Kakutani's review from 2000. And a much less favorable view of Eggers from two years ago.

"Billed as a memoir 'based on a true story,' his book is a furious whirlwind of energy and invention, literally wearing its originality on its sleeve: blurbs on the jacket describe the uselessness of blurbs; the inside flap reprints a passage removed from Chapter 5. There are rules and suggestions for enjoying the book, 'an incomplete guide' to the book's symbols and metaphors, an explanation of the book's major themes, the apparently real phone numbers of several of Eggers's friends, a musical score to indicate the tonal quality of certain conversations and so on."
-My Brother's Keeper (2000)-

Around the time Eggers was blowing up, I bought a little gadget for my girlfriend that could identify songs on the radio.  She was always asking me what this or that song was, and back then it wasn't easy to find out. You clicked this device when a song you liked was playing, and then you manually input the radio station.  Later, when you synced the thing to a computer, the time of the button press would be logged and a program would search the radio station's playlist to find the song title.

I thought it was the greatest gift in the world and so magical.  Remember, back then you couldn't find out what song was playing unless you waited around for the DJ to say the title, or maybe for someone near you to recognize it.  Same with channel surfing on TV.  You could sit on a movie and have no idea what it was until the end credits.  I don't even recall being able to successfully find songs by searching lyric snippets, or movies through IMDB.  Was there an IMDB?

It was a dark time.

Now, when I think about how technologically amazing Shazam is, I kind of laugh at how ridiculous that gadget was. And I wonder if she thinks the same about our past relationship.