I saw Avan Jogia at the L.A. Times Festival of Books
Ruminations on performance, vulnerability, trick mirrors and truth.
Hawks for fame, fiends for anything resembling vulnerability from this figure they idolize, fetishize, admire — “grew up with,” as he said.
I don’t think there’s a correct way to attend a poetry reading, rather, a few incorrect ways — though this could be said of most experiences in life.
Fame is not something I envy or crave, but I really do feel for all the moderately successful child stars out there. Those who cemented themselves in people’s minds when they were 15, 16, 17, 18, only to go on to maybe bigger and definitely better things, but not so big as to eclipse what made them famous in the first place. It must feel like an impossible battle, like shouting out into the void of the Internet and the world, begging to be seen as they are instead of how they once were. How would you feel if everyone saw you only as you were at 19? I try hard these days to see people as they are rather than who they used to be or who I want them to be, if only out of some selfish desire to be given the same grace.
The woman who read before him was not my cup of tea. She was a Poet, the kind whose work perhaps does best after it percolates in your mind, rather than after it just barely settles in your ears. Her tone was exactly what you’d think if I told you to imagine a middle-aged, white, female poet with too much attachment to New York City. And now I’m making the same value judgement I try to avoid, all because I don’t know of her in the same way I know of him. But truly, she was how I describe her. Grating, but maybe just to me.
After, the moderator for the Poetry Stage introduced him by way of mispronouncing his name, bringing up his mother’s battle with cancer and commenting on the sheer number of young people (read: women) who were overflowing the bounds of the canopy. He took it in stride, though, fiddling with an awkwardly-positioned microphone while chatting with the crowd, warming us up. How many poems he ended up reading, I don’t know. Based on his own comments and the way he flipped through his book in search of the right material, I don’t know if he knew, either. But maybe that was just part of the performance.
Contrary to widely-held perceptions of what actors are like, I think it takes a level of humility to be one — or to be a good one, at least. Acting requires honesty, with both yourself and your audience. They say that the best acting is reacting, becoming so immersed in your character and their story that you transform into them, responding to stimuli as if it’s all actually happening. It’s less about word-for-word line reads, and more about the crease that forms between your brows when your scene partner says something your character would disagree with. To act truly, you must rip open the parts of yourself that connect with the material, and lay them out to bare. You must be vulnerable, and you must put yourself in the hopefully trustworthy hands of your audience, letting their perceptions and preconceived notions blanket you as they may.
Writing, I’ve found, works similarly.
When you write about yourself, or from your own perspective, you are centering your life in the vastness of the world. It’s not an inherently bad thing, of course, to do this. After all, your worldview is essential to unlocking the through line in your works. Your perspective is paramount, and what is something like arts criticism, or merely just reacting to a piece of art in a museum or the privacy of your own home, if not a reflection of who you are?
Still, though, and perhaps more explicitly for its medium, first-person writing requires vulnerability, and an absence of it is hard to miss. For a course in my final semester of grad school, I was assigned select chapters of cultural critic Jia Tolentino’s book “Trick Mirror.” Aside from the chosen chapters, though, I went on to read the entirety of the book in an attempt to peer through some window into Tolentino that the excerpts I was reading for class failed to provide. I found some answers, but few satisfying ones.
In an attempt to rationalize and understand my own frustration with this book, I described my perception of it and of Tolentino to a friend over email, one who knew of the piece beforehand, but hasn’t read it. (An aside: it’s both a wonderful and tragic thing to me, that some of the best writing I’ve ever produced is to an audience of two, via a years-long email thread.) “I so deeply loved reading you analyze her to filth Divya, I can see it so clearly,” my friend said. “Carl Jung has a step ladder of omnipotence: we see our parents as god, then god as god, then ourselves, then others, then a wholeness. It sounds like she just got to herself.”
My favorite parts of “Trick Mirror” were those where Tolentino broke down some social or cultural practice with an intellectual or historic lens. I liked when I was learning something, whether that be the formulation of barre workout classes or the fraught history of women attending the University of Virginia. But whenever the self — her self — came into the picture, my interest waned. Because for all that reading “Trick Mirror” paints a portrait of a woman who grew up in Texas to Filipino immigrant parents, attended an Evangelical megachurch and private high school, starred on a reality TV show as a teenager, attended university at age 16, did a year of the Peace Corps in Kyrgyzstan only to finally end up a culture writer in New York City and a staunch critic of the concept of marriage, there is no depth to the colors of this painting. There is no depth, because there is no vulnerability. And there is no vulnerability, because Tolentino must be in control.
Like Tolentino, seemingly, I have control issues. I don’t care to control others — this is, ultimately, impossible — but I want to be in control of myself, at all times. I do everything with methodical precision, I like to know a restaurant’s menu before I arrive, I’ve never been truly drunk and Google Street View is my best friend when I’m visiting a new place for the first time. I intellectualize my emotions in some kind of poorly-veiled attempt to make sense of myself. Of these facts, I’m well aware. But I am not (at the moment) writing a semi-memoir. I am living these facts rather than writing through them at length in a book, which is frankly a, if not the, saving grace in this whole matter.
There is a way to write about and through yourself without creating an explicit character who has your thought processes and experiences. Hanif Abdurraqib, in his book “A Little Devil in America,” does this beautifully, his personal stories revealing ugliness and beauty and love, all tied into the art he talks about. You can tell, reading his work, that despite how much pain he sees in the world, he ultimately loves it. I wished for a similar experience from Tolentino, though not so much the same writing style — because ultimately, being a poet versus being a critic requires different muscles to be flexed. But I wanted something more.
Perhaps, though, it’s my own fault that I’m in this conundrum. In the first chapter of “Trick Mirror,” Tolentino writes about the Internet, and begins with her own usage of it as a precocious 10-year-old. “I am going to be completely honest about my life,” she wrote at the time, on her personal Angelfire site. “Although I won’t go too deeply into personal thoughts, though.” I would argue that there are moments in “Trick Mirror” that border on dishonesty, at least through omission, but for the most part, Tolentino keeps true to her promise. She shares about herself without delving into her feelings, not really, anyway. If this is her thesis when it comes to the personal anecdotes in her book, then how can I blame her following through?
Back under the Poetry Stage tent at the L.A. Times Festival of Books, it was hard not to feel a bubbling, visceral sense of superiority in comparison to the people around me, the people who held their devices up as though they were at a concert, capturing the messy truths that spilled out of his mouth. People who, when he read an unpublished poem straight from his phone’s notes app, perked up and pushed through, their camera rolls suddenly worth something more than they did before. I felt this sort of arrogance, then immediately became aware of that feeling. Because ultimately, how am I any different? Sure, I didn’t videotape his reading, but I was there, sans having read his book. I was there because he was on a TV show I liked when I was a kid (and when he was a kid), because he made interesting creative decisions after that show, because I think he’s smart or attractive or whatever else. I was still there, and the depth of my interest was no less shallow than anyone else’s — not in any way that matters, from our collective, removed vantage point into his distant but perceivable life.
We’re all hawks, I think. We crave vulnerability because seeing it in others proves to us we’re not alone. It’s why we like movies, books, poetry, art. Art doesn’t have to reflect you, but when it does, or at least makes you think or feel, you remember it. It’s why when we’re cheated of expected honesty, it feels like a slight. And maybe it is a technical failing on some part, if a work promises truth and doesn’t provide it, but still, what would that truth ultimately give us? Humanity? There is only so much of that, that can fit into a combination of words.
I don’t know if the people around me, that day, were attending the poetry reading incorrectly, just as I don’t know if I was doing it correctly. On that stage, though, he was vulnerable about his thoughts and humorous about his tragedies. He was everything you’d imagine an actor might be, when reading something aloud. It was a performance, and he seemed to be aware of that in a way that the poet who preceded him didn’t, in a way that through her writing, Tolentino is perhaps too aware of. The performance can only take you so far if the truth underneath it isn’t a strong enough current, and at the end of the day, we’re all just vampires for truth and all the messy, beautiful, convoluted and staggering feelings that come with it. He knew that, and he delivered. I can only hope that if or when the time comes, I’ll be able to do the same.