Remote : reflections on life in the shadow of celebrity

188 Pages·2004·2.07 MB·English

by  Shields

Praise for Remote

“A wonderful, wildly original, illuminating book about the perils of being a
citizen in a celebrity culture.”

—DAVID HALBERSTAM

“A brilliant mix of scrapbook, cultural criticism, autobiography, travelogue, and
found poetry….. Shields holds a mirror to society and sees himself. He holds a
mirror to himself and sees society. And it is always a fun-house mirror—warped
by irony and goofy insight. There are sections of this amazing, funny little book
composed (beautifully) of nothing more than bumper-sticker slogans; there are
pages of bold pronouncements, many of which are lacerating in their acuity.”

—STEVEN REA, Philadelphia Inquirer

“A colorful gallery of cultural significance ….. a lively and inventive collection
of fifty-two short takes on contemporary American life….. What Shields reveals
about himself and others is often wise, frequently hilarious, but not always
comforting to hear. His deadpan wisecracks hang precipitously over despair—
like a cross between Fran Lebowitz and Milan Kundera.”

—JOHN HAWLEY, San Francisco Chronicle

“A witty and original cultural scribe and voice of his generation.”

—IRENE LACHER, Los Angeles Times

“David Shields’s Remote, a smart and disturbing collection of fifty-two short
essays, dissects our obsession with image and television celebrity and, in the
process, dissects the author himself….. Shields’s book forces one to feel the
insidious power of the desire to be connected to what everyone else is doing. He
forces thought about the absurd little kinks in one’s own responses to mass
entertainment.”
—THOMAS MALLON, GQ

“Breathtakingly intelligent ... electric insights ... cool, dry, arch irony ...
addictive ...”

—LANCE OLSEN, Review of Contemporary Fiction

“What makes Shields’s perspective on popular culture so interesting is its highly
personal, even confessional nature: his essays often examine the private
connections he feels to public figures and events.... Shields is a gifted writer
capable of surprising perceptions and considerable wit, and his idiosyncratic
book offers intriguing insights into the ways the media can shape both the
identities and the perceptions of its viewers.”

—Publishers Weekly

“I recently had a wonderful time reading Remote, by David Shields. It took me a
day and a half of picking it up, putting it down, picking it up. I really love this
book. I said to someone, ‘You should read this book.’ And she said, ‘What’s it
about?’ I said, ‘I don’t know exactly.’ It’s just an experience that you have with
this object—this book—over the course of a couple of days.”

—RAY SUAREZ, host, Talk of the Nation, NPR

“Frightening and funny and courageous. David Shields breaks every rule with
perfect elegance. Then he tells the truth of an age.”

—PAM HOUSTON

“One of 1996’s slept-on gems, Remote is an extended, collage-style meditation
on media, fame, distance, the nature of observation, and the location of one’s
self in all of these. As much reflexive autobiography broken into tiny chunks as
pop cultural commentary, Remote is sharp, funny, poignant, and exceptionally
media-savvy, featuring a David Shields who can pull apart complicated
relationships between observer and observed with poetic ease.”

—JOE GROSS, Austin American-Statesman

“The terrain of celebrity culture is constantly shifting ground, and what Shields
has invented is, at least, a new way to map the landscape.”

—BRAD TYER, Houston Chronicle
“By turns sardonic and tender, this really quite brilliant book crafts fragments of
the cultural landscape into a telling commentary on the American obsession with
confession, personality, celebrity, image, simulacrum.”

—PETER BROOKS

“In a series of vivid verbal snapshots, David Shields’s Remote captures an all too
familiar America frighteningly obsessed with fame. Shields’s postmodern
memoir provides an ironic conduit to a media-mad society. In fifty-two short
takes, Shields brilliantly takes the measure of America.”

—JANICE LEE, Elle

“Shields’s ruminations on life and culture are not just a diary of experience, a
chronicle of his willing embrace of our culture. Rather, this strange little book . .
. achieves a kind of hypnotic power by Shields’s standing apart from his
subjects. He is a trenchant observer, a talent no doubt honed through learning to
manage the stuttering that marked his childhood and youth (and that became the
subject of his second novel, Dead Languages).... Remote is an iconoclastic and
unclassifiable, quirky and irreverent meditation on the cluttered surface of late
twentieth-century American life.”

—DONN FRY, Seattle Times

“Unclassifiable, wayward, inspired, and very funny, Remote is one of the most
intelligently self-exposing books I’ve encountered in a long time. By
documenting his own sensibility without insisting that it be representative, David
Shields strikes wild chords in this reader.”

—WAYNE KOESTENBAUM
Also by David Shields

Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography

“Baseball Is Just Baseball”: The Understated Ichiro

Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season

A Handbook for Drowning: Stories

Dead Languages: A Novel

Heroes: A Novel
Remote
Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity

David Shields

With a foreword by Phillip Lopate
THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS
The University of Wisconsin Press
1930 Monroe Street
Madison, Wisconsin 53711

www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/

3 Henrietta Street
London WC2E 8LU, England
Copyright © 1996 by David Shields
Foreword copyright © 2003 by
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved
1 3 5 4 2

Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shields, David.
Remote / David Shields ; foreword by Phillip Lopate.
p. c.m.
ISBN 0-299-19364-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Shields, David. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title
PS3569.H4834 Z476 2004
813′54 B—dc21 2003006269

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
excerpt from The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, by Arthur Schopenhauer, translated by E. F. J.
Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), reprinted by permission of Dover Publications; excerpt from
“Esthetique du Mal,” from The Collected Poems by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1947 by Wallace
Stevens, reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; excerpt from “Audiogenic Epilepsy Induced by a
Specific Television Performer,” by Venkat Ramani, M.D. (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 325,
no. 2, July 11, 1991, pp. 134–135), reprinted by permission of the New England Journal of Medicine;
“Around Pastor Bonhoeffer,” from Passing Through: The Later Poems New and Selected by Stanley
Kunitz, copyright © 1970 by Stanley Kunitz, reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
“The System,” from Three Poems by John Ashbery, copyright © 1970 by John Ashbery, reprinted by
permission of the Viking Press, Inc.

eISBN: 9780299193638
For Laurie
Contents

Prologue: Life Story

The Nimbus of Her Fame

Problems and Solutions to Problems

Information Sickness

Life Story

Life Story

Radio

Blood and Guts in High School

Always

Almost Famous

The Nimbus of His Fame Makes a Nullity of Us All

The Cultural Contradictions of Late Capitalism

Robert Capa, Misunderstood

Love Is Not a Consolation

Desire

The Nimbus of Their Fame Makes a Nullity of Us All

The Tradition Is Here, the Memories Are Waiting

Always
The Confessions

The Cultural Contradictions of Late Capitalism

Almost Famous

The Nimbus of His Fame Makes a Nullity of Us All

Robert Capa, Misunderstood

The Nimbus of His Fame Makes a Nullity of Us All

Why We Live at the Movies

Desire

Where We Live and What We Live For

Where We Live and What We Live For

Where We Live and What We Live For

Life Is Elsewhere

Almost Famous

Stuttering

Robert Capa, Misunderstood

The Nimbus of Her Fame Makes a Nullity of Us All

Where We Live and What We Live For

Problems and Solutions to Problems

Problems and Solutions to Problems

The Subject at the Vanishing Point