For the past two mornings (early A.M.’s are my mindless-surfing-the-internet- allowance, in order to get it out of my system before the writing day before me) I’ve been completely obsessed with catching up on the Marie Calloway mini-literary phenomenon.
Morning 1: I Benjamin Buttoned my way through this take over, first by reading Tao Lin’s 2028-word response to ‘shit talking’ he posted on his blog. I followed by working my way backwards through the ‘timeline’ he provided, my last stop being Marie Calloway’s ‘Adrien Brody’, published on Muumuu House. Unlike ‘shit talkers,’ I found the story to be intriguing, engulfing, relatable and fascinating. Hence the developing obsession.
Throughout the day that followed ‘Morning 1,’ I found myself reflecting back on ‘Adrien Brody’ and Calloway’s writing in general. I found myself frustrated with the ‘shit talkers’ and those vomiting out terms like ‘anti-feminist,’ or ‘feminist’ for that matter, after scrolling through responses on the NY Observer and Gawker article. Further clicks and searches lead me to various literary sites and I wondered why fellow bloggers, of higher stature, felt compelled to dissect something so simple and direct and honest. It continued to haunt me, especially the line “It’s like, how much can you really care about and respect other people when you’re cheating on your girlfriend with me?” and the fact that their connection truly only lasted one day, despite the culmination of emotion. This feeling, the fear of losing something that is always lost, always terrifies me, no matter how hard you try to hold on to it. I recall the recent regret of breaking the marathon of time spent together, and knowing deep down inside that it would never be the same as this very moment.
Morning 2: Stephen Elliott sent out another Daily Rumpus email re: Marie Calloway, reminding me of the prior day’s fixation. He stated in the email “The real ‘Adrien Brody’ is apparently easily recognizable to people who know him.” I clicked back to Muumuu House and began to reread ‘Adrien Brody,’ aggressively, cutting and pasting keywords and anecdotes in order to reveal the identity of the awkward, bald, cheating blogger, referred to here as, ‘Adrien Brody.’ I had a few immediate ideas, based on writers I know or have met, considering the words ‘pornography,’ ‘Queens,’ and ’40yrold,’ but other components of the story would cancel out my immediate suspects. This was only a job for Google.
The following leads to my discovery, from start to finish:
Google: writer blog pornography postautonomia marxism
Google: writer blog pornography marxism
Google: brooklyn writer marxist
Browse n+1 contributors
Click male n+1 contributors with initials A.B.
Google: blog ‘richard yates review’ marxist
Browse vol1brooklyn.com
Click through vol1brooklyn.com contributors
Google: malcolm harris
Browse http://nplusonemag.com/category/harris-malcolm/
Google: blog “malcolm harris”
Click http://open.salon.com/blog/malh
Back Button, Click http://shareable.net/users/mpharris
Browse shareable.net contributors
Back Button, Click http://bigjournalism.com/tag/malcolm-harris/
Back Button, Click http://gawker.com/malcolm-harris/
Click http://thenewinquiry.com/
Browse contributors of The New Inquiry. Found an awkward bald man. Click http://thenewinquiry.com/tagged/R._Horning
Try to verify:
Google: rob horning university of maryland
Google: rob horning blog
Click http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/68
Google: rob horning richard yates review
Click www.popmatters.com/pm/post/134640 — Semi-verified
Google: rob horning spinoza
Find ultimate verification: http://postautonomia.wordpress.com :: “postautonomia | “What is Post/Autonomia Today?” Conference: Amsterdam May 19 – 22, 2011 Rob Horning, ‘Marginal Utility’, ‘The New Inquiry’, New York <Social Media as Social Factory: The personal brand as the neoliberal self”
ADRIEN BRODY = ROB HORNING
Horning seems fitting. I now am satisfied.
Congratulations, you’ve furthered the humiliation of someone who made a stupid personal mistake and whose public persona is now being dragged through the mud because of it.
@stephen: I dunno, ‘Calloway’ explicitly mentions his piece on Forever21 in her original story; it’s not too hard to figure out who he is…
Exactly, it’s not hard to figure out who he is. So publishing his name (it’s far easier than Caitlin makes it seem) is not only redundant, but meanspirited. This will follow him around on Google for the rest of his life, but because Calloway used a pseudonym she’s off scot-free. Why humiliate him (and his hapless girlfriend) all over again? Mercy, people!
hi caitlin,
enjoyed reading this, felt similar feelings about all the ‘shit-talking’
thought your investigation process funny/sweet
tao
Um… all you had to do was Google one of the several articles (by him) that she quoted verbatim. Come on now
Why does everyone feel so bad for a guy who deliberately cheated on his girlfriend with a woman he knew to be an avid blogger and writer?
I liked this – to see that someone else took the same steps I did to indulge in the same obsession.
Perhaps they feel bad for the girlfriend, who didn’t ask to be a part of this and now is. It’s one thing to cheat; it’s quite another to have it dragged through the entire Internet, and posts like this that name names don’t help. (Does anyone realize that this will follow “Adrien” and his girlfriend around forever, and not Calloway, because that’s not her real name? Want to do some real investigative work, find out HER real name.) Relationships recover from infidelity all the time, but having his identity out there must be terrible for the girlfriend. How do you prepare yourself for such public humiliation? These people aren’t celebrities out for attention. They’re just…people.
they don’t sound like any of the people that i know. but then again, i don’t live in nyc. or portland. or las vegas. i live in canada…where we know how to chill.
philip roth writes about his dick: literature
a girl writes about sex: scandal
the piece isn’t the best thing i’ve read but it’s not the worst
i dislike a lot of what the writer says, but i like a lot that it’s a female voice
i remember being in hs and reading that solipsistic updike bullshit story where he is ogling the girls in the bathing suits, and — not yet having the vocabulary to say, oh, right, the male gaze again — just feeling so defeated that this crap was supposed to be Literature
Presumably “A Girl” is referring to Updike’s story “A&P.” Yes, it is literature. Updike the man or the author isn’t ogling the girls in the bathing suits — it’s Sammy, his unworldly 19-year-old narrator who is a supermarket checkout boy. There’s a lot of brilliant stuff in the story — I haven’t read it in a while but remember the one list of what’s in one aisle of the supermarket — and clever remarks and quite wonderful descriptions of people and places and feelings. Finally, it can be read as a more “feminist” story than Marie Calloway’s.
There is a lot of criticism of Updike’s story; it lends itself to that, because it’s literature, not a trifle like Calloway’s. One of hundreds of examples is this: http://jsse.revues.org/index418.html — “Sammy’s Erotic Experience: Subjectivity and Sexual Difference in John Updike’s “A & P” by
Greg W. Bentley, a long piece from which I’ll excerpt this short passage:
“Sammy, by standing up to Lengel’s tyranny, measures himself by a new standard—by his honor and integrity. By extrapolation, Updike encourages all of us to defy tyranny wherever it occurs—whether it is a store manager marginalizing girls, the Dean of a university branch campus who “fires” the Chair of the Division of Arts and Sciences because that person would rather enforce academic standards than virtually sell degrees to the highest bidders, or the sole individual who defies either the financial or environmental tyranny of powerful conglomerates. In this sense, Sammy experiences not only freedom, but he also experiences happiness. But, again, as Updike stresses, Sammy’s newly discovered happiness is far different from the conventional association of happiness with financial success or material comfort. As Aristotle says, “Happiness is more than momentary bliss” (39). Indeed, Aristotle defines happiness “as an activity in accordance with virtue…” (41). And Aristotle concludes by defining the happy man as “one who realizes in action a goodness that is complete and that is adequately furnished with external goods, and that not for some limited period but throughout a fully rounded life spent in that way. And perhaps we must add to our definition one who shall live in this way and whose death shall be considered with his life” (48). Even though Aristotle grants a modicum of material comfort, as he suggests, human happiness, as opposed to animal pleasure, demands knowledge of and action upon virtue. From this perspective, to be a happy human is often a difficult and conventionally unpleasurable condition, and that’s why Sammy says his “stomach kind of fell” when he realized “how hard the world was going to be to [him] hereafter.” But it’s also why he begins the second half of his story—the half in which he details the specifics of his erotic experience—with the statement: “Now here comes the sad part of the story, at least my family says it’s sad but I don’t think it’s sad myself” (192). Indeed, rather than end sadly in the figurative death that Stokesie, MacMahon, and Lengel experience, Sammy is reborn. He begins finally to live, and even though life may be hard for him financially or materially after he walks out of the A & P, he will continue to live as a happy man, for he is a new kind of man, a new kind of being.
27Sammy is a different kind of man because he has an erotic experience. He has an awakening; he becomes conscious—and he develops a conscience. He no longer interprets and evaluates women—and men—on the basis of sexual difference. To Sammy women are no longer simply sexual objects, and men are no longer the sole and absolute executors of power, privilege, and wholeness. That is, Sammy is no longer captated by the conventional masculine méconnaissance that equates the penis and the phallus. Indeed, Sammy, at the end of his career at the A & P, but at the beginning of his life, now not only embodies the positive masculine qualities of reason and reflection, but he also embodies the positive feminine qualities of compassion and understanding. Most importantly, by volitionally divesting himself of conventional masculine ideology—of raw power and privilege (tyranny)—Sammy gains more power, for he embodies a private, autonomous subjectivity rooted in individual and social justice, and thus he becomes a truly empowered human being.
28In this sense,Updike clearly subscribes to the Horation notion of art, which is intrinsically necessary to the psychic life of the macrocosm. As Horace says, the nature and function of art is twofold: aut prodesse aut delectare. Art must teach and delight. Thus, following the great tradition of classical literature, Updike suggests that if each reader consciously and conscientiously understands and embodies the meaning and significance of Sammy’s erotic experience, then Sammy’s story becomes the reader’s story, and it functions as a rite de passage in his or her life. Like Sammy, the individual reader would have an erotic experience and would undergo psychic development, a metamorphosis from adolescence to adulthood. Similarly, to take the process one step further, if we can collectively understand and embody Sammy’s erotic experience, then his story becomes society’s story, and “A & P” would function as a cultural rite de passage. Like Sammy and the individual reader, society can have an erotic experience, for “A & P” can positively affect and permanently alter our dominant fiction. Thus, reading, understanding, and embodying the lesson that Updike symbolically represents in “A & P” can mark a significant stage in society’s psychic development, for Sammy’s story—which is simultaneously our story–can function as a substantive sign of our collective transformation from cultural adolescence to ideological adulthood.”
When the commenter who calls herself “A Girl” becomes an adult, perhaps she’ll figure it out.
The comment by nyu critic is so pompous and full of hot air. Is that really a “short passage”? You couldn’t condense it in any way?
I enjoyed Marie’s piece and the tempest in a bong surrounding it. Found it much better than Updike and his swinging dick.
I leave it to adults to judge the difference between my comment and the ones immediately preceding and following it.
And to those who’d like to compare “Adrien Brody” and “A & P,” here are the ends of both.
“Adrien Brody”:
I slapped him in the face.
“Ow!”
I started to laugh really hard.
I wish I could say that I did it for a more dignified reason: that I wasn’t going to let him use my body for his pleasure, some fake imagined emotional connection that he was forcing in his mind onto us…but really I was just sad and angry about how he was going to leave after we had sex, that he wouldn’t let me go home with him earlier.
But then my laughing died down and tears started to well up in my eyes.
“Oh, no. I don’t want to be that person who cries during sex.”
“Why not? It’s really common…”
Is it? I stopped trying to fight the tears and just started to cry.
I could feel him lose his erection.
“Why are you crying?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because you’re feeling sorry for yourself?”
That was his counter-attack. A verbal slap in my face.
“I feel like you’re the one who has all the power here,” he said.
“You’re the one who wants to leave in a few minutes. That’s why I hit you, because I was sad that you have all the power.”
“Yeah.”
“I hit the last guy I had sex with, too, because I was sad he didn’t want to date me. It’s like that again. Hitting you didn’t make me feel better or change anything. It’s not like I can stop you from leaving.”
I’m totally powerless in the face of men.
He pulled out and threw the condom in the waste bin and started to get dressed.
For the first time, I looked closely at his face as he was getting dressed. I realized that he was actually very attractive, just in a strange way. Or a complex way, rather, where you had to look at him for awhile and think about it.
“I’m going to say something, and don’t say it’s not true. I’m never going to connect with anyone.”
“I think that’s very fatalistic.”
He finished dressing and I laid in the bed naked and quietly crying.
“I know you said you don’t want me to say this, but you will connect with someone one day. It’s just not going to be me.”
It was nice, and I wanted to believe it, but i knew that he didn’t know, and that he was just saying that because it was what he should have said right then.
We hugged and kissed and he headed towards the door.
“Goodbye,” he said.
“Bye.”
He went out the door, stuck his head in again, and then he was gone.
***
“A & P”
“Girls, I don’t want to argue with you. After this come in here with your shoulders covered. It’s our policy.” He turns his back. That’s policy for you. Policy is what the kingpins want. What the others want is juvenile delinquency.
All this while, the customers had been showing up with their carts but, you know, sheep, seeing a scene, they had all bunched up on Stokesie, who shook open a paper bag as gently as peeling a peach, not wanting to miss a word. I could feel in the silence everybody getting nervous, most of all Lengel, who asks me, “Sammy, have you rung up their purchase?”
I thought and said “No” but it wasn’t about that I was thinking. I go through the punches, 4, 9, GROC, TOT–it’s more complicated than you think, and after you do it often enough, it begins to make a little song, that you hear words to, in my case “Hello (bing) there, you (gung) hap-py pee-pul (splat)!”- the splat being the drawer flying out. I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you may imagine, it just having come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known were there, and pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink palm, and nestle the herrings in a bag and twist its neck and hand it over, all the time thinking.
The girls, and who’d blame them, are in a hurry to get out, so I say “I quit” to Lengel quick enough for them to hear, hoping they’ll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero. They keep right on going, into the electric eye; the door flies open and they flicker across the lot to their car, Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony (not that as raw material she was so bad), leaving me with Lengel and a kink in his eyebrow. “Did you say something, Sammy?”
“I said I quit,”
“I thought you did.”
“You didn’t have to embarrass them,”
“It was they who were embarrassing us.”
I started to say something that came out “Fiddle-de- doo.” It’s a saying of my grandmother’s, and I know she would have been pleased.
“I don’t think you know what you’re saying,” Lengel said.
“I know you don’t,” I said. “But I do,” I pull the bow at the back of my apron and start shrugging it off my shoulders. A couple customers that had been heading for my slot begin to knock against each other, like scared pigs in a chute.
Lengel sighs and begins to look very patient and old and gray, He’s been a friend of my parents for years, “Sammy, you don’t want to do this to your Mom and Dad,” he tells me. It’s true, I don’t. But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it’s fatal not to go through with it. I fold the apron, “Sammy” stitched in red on the pocket, and put it on the counter, and drop the bow tie on top of it. The bow tie is theirs, if you’ve ever wondered. “You’ll feel this for the rest of your life,” Lengel says, and I know that’s true, too, but remembering how he made that pretty girl blush makes me so scrunchy inside I punch the No Sale tab and the machine whirs “pee-pul” and the drawer splats out. One advantage to this scene taking place in summer, I can follow this up with a clean exit, there’s no fumbling around getting your coat and galoshes, I just saunter into the electric eye in my white shirt that my mother ironed the night before, and the door heaves itself open, and outside the sunshine is skating around on the asphalt.
I look around for my girls, but they’re gone, of course. There wasn’t anybody but some young married screaming with her children about some candy they didn’t get by the door of a powder-blue Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he’d just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.
THIS is the big intellectual rock star!?!
New York gets fucking lamer and lamer.
Caitlin, when my ex-boyfriend cheated on me, a lot of our friends found out because a third party “outed” him to pretty much everyone we knew. His actions hurt bad enough but years later it’s the actions of the third party that hurt the most. It was meanspirited and hateful. Have you stopped to think that you’re not only humiliating the man here, but the woman too? Presumably she knows what he did. Why are you furthering this?
I just read “Adrien Brody” the other week and loved it, then saw all the hooplah (I live under a rock called Canada) and got confused, then similarly became obssessed with who this Adrien Brody was.
As soon as I found out my interest in who he was died and I focused back on what a great story Calloway had written. I don’t understand why her writing about herself, and especially in such a well-formed way, had to devolve into Brody’s rights and Brody’s girl friend. True, she didn’t ask to be cheated on, but who ever does? She didn’t ask to be involved in this story, and that’s unfortunate for her I suppose, if she even cares because I didn’t see any form of response from her (don’t even know her name) anywhere in my searches.
But suffice it to say, I love this piece on your own search, which was far more concise than mine! Great read!