The documentary opens in the lobby of Bebe Zeva’s condominium. Tao Lin asks: “Why’d you move into this thing?” For the next 88 minutes, they carry the laptop from Zeva’s condo, to Tao Lin and Megan Boyle’s hotel room at the Tropicana Hotel and Casino, to the Miracle Mile Shops, (where Bebe shoplifts a Bebe purse), another casino, and finally the movie ends in a hot tub. Tao Lin is shirtless. Zeva is wearing an EAT WHEN YOU FEEL SAD shirt.

As they travel around Las Vegas, Tao Lin and Megan Boyle feed her vegan ice cream, whipped cream, a cookie, diet coke, Kombucha, candy — she’s eating or drinking in basically every scene. Zeva says, “everyone who has an internet presence binge eats,” but that she doesn’t drink alcohol or do drugs. Tao Lin and Megan Boyle ask her funny questions:

Q: What are your thoughts on eating?
A: I concentrate on the cuteness of what I’m eating.

Q: Would you rather eat one pound of steamed shrimp every day at 11AM or get a Windows 95 chest tattoo?
A: Oh, I would get the Windows 95 chest tattoo even if that wasn’t a question.

At some point, Zeva says: “I understand that life is bleak and you can either kill yourself or donate yourself to social commentary. I’m just a brand. I’m just shit. All of my content regarding my personality is available.”  After the screening, Tao Lin told the audience, “She seems like a genuis to me.”

Zeva is endearing, but often I didn’t know what she was talking about. (Before the movie started, I overheard someone at the screening use the expression “mad gayface.” I thought it was funny, but I didn’t know what it meant. I had to Google it. In some ways, this moment set the tone for an entire evening of partial-recognition.) For instance, Zeva tries on a dress at Urban Outfitters and says it is “post-ironically matronly.” On her Twitter this week she said: “I officially declare it post-ironically chic to wear Misfits t-shirts.”

What is post-ironic? Is Bebe Zeva joking? I asked Megan Boyle to help.

***

The Rumpus: What is post-ironic?

Megan Boyle: This seems hard to explain. I’ll give an example. Around 2004, wearing large glasses and mustaches seemed funny and cutting-edge to an artsy/intelligent/hipster counter-culture of young people, probably because of growing up surrounded by family members who considered wearing mustaches and funny-looking large glasses to be simple, boring, normal facts of life. When juxtaposed on the body of an attractive young person, the deadpan “large glasses” aesthetic created an appealing sense of irony and caused people to make friends and either overtly or subtly influence them to wear similar things. Urban Outfitters noticed what was happening and started selling clothes that family members with large glasses would wear, if those family members were in their sexual prime and wanted to make friends. This clothing style became hugely popular because of the sense of humor, authenticity, and shared experience it suggested. It made people seem both inclusive and approachable. Individuals. Then there were a lot of individuals wearing the same thing because they shopped at a store that made it possible for a lot of people to be individuals together. Post-irony, the way Bebe uses it, is the new “identity canvas” for a person overexposed to the first wave of ironic personal expression.

Rumpus: Is Bebe Zeva’s age (17) important to the documentary? Did you feel a responsibility to present her in a positive light?

Boyle: Bebe seems different than other people to me, but I don’t think that has much to do with her being 17. A documentary about any person with the kind of existential intelligence I see Bebe as having would be equally compelling to me. I think I only started considering her age when it came to editing, knowing that presenting certain scenes which made me think she was spontaneous and funny (shoplifting, humping the plant) could be perceived as exploitative. Tao and I wanted to make sure Bebe’s family would feel okay with it, so we showed a version of the film to Bebe’s sister and mom, who noticed the shoplifting scene was cut and said it might be funny to include.

Rumpus: At the beginning of the documentary, we see you and Tao meeting Bebe Zeva for the first time. It was the first time you’d met, as Zeva calls it, “physically.” Up to that point, Zeva only existed online for you or Tao Lin. Aren’t people so different in real life than we are online? Does it matter? Were you excited to document this moment of “physical” meeting?

Boyle: People can be different in real life than online, though I think it’s always possible to predict certain “real life” behaviors by observing how a person presents him/herself on the internet. For instance, I could infer from Bebe’s online presence that she probably wouldn’t have a really deep voice and want to ask me questions about horse racing. I felt excited to document the moment of “physically” meeting, but maybe only in an abstract sense at the time. My thought activity before meeting was split between the expectations created from discussing the night’s plans with Tao, the image I had of Bebe, feeling excited about what we were doing, and trying to quiet my awareness of the camera/environment/social anxiety so I could focus on ensuring Bebe would have fun and feel comfortable.

Rumpus: Bebe Zeva says, “Everyone can be described by whether they use haha or LOL. I say hehe. I don’t think I could ever say hahaha.” This is a funny moment, but what does it mean?

Boyle: The sound of laughter seems highly personal and futile to transcribe in universal way, and I think Bebe knows this. Not only does “hahaha” hardly mimic the sound of a person laughing, it indicates a lack of awareness of the advancement of “LOL.” I think Bebe either finds “hehe” appealing because it is more phonetically delicate than “LOL” or “hahaha” or because it seems like a word that has been created to say “I see that you’ve said something clever. If we were standing next to each other I would vocally or non-verbally communicate this to you, but we both know we’re not standing next to each other, so here is this funny little place-holder.”

Rumpus: During the Q&A you said, “We thought, no one has filmed a person like her.” What do you mean “like her?”

Boyle: Someone who has found existence, internet culture, and herself in the midst of all of it intriguing enough to form an image/brand that has made her relatively internet-famous. Someone home-schooled in Las Vegas. Someone with over 900 unanswered Formspring.me questions. Someone able to generate extended sarcastic commentary about her surroundings. Someone who likes salt & vinegar potato chips.

Rumpus: So much of the movie is talking about Twitter, Formspring, Stat Counter vs. Google Analytics, Windows 95-chest tattoo. Zeva says the grossest image is when “when people apply too much sharpness.” You ask her a lot of questions about her family and school, but the conversation often returns to life online. It seems like the most fun thing for Bebe Zeva to talk about “physically” is what’s happening online. Is this part of what you set out to document?

Boyle: I didn’t set out to document that, no. The questions about “real life” seemed to generate sometimes emotionally reflective, but mostly concrete/direct answers from Bebe, because I think there is a finiteness about the physical world that feels separate from the world of the internet. I’ve spent a huge portion of my life looking at the internet and I can only offer a vague explanation of how it works or what it is, exactly. There is something mysterious about that. We learn the laws of physics whether we consciously know them or not just from existing in bodies on a planet. There isn’t anything like that for the internet. Maybe Bebe “physicalizes” what happens online because of the larger variety of possibilities within that world. It seems a little more interesting than “real life,” maybe, because of that.

Rumpus: Bebe Zeva says, “Nautical creatures are not alt. It’s too easy to turn into a gimmick — like narwals — it’s entry level.” What is entry-level? Bebe Zeva says she invented the term “lifer?” Is that ironic? Is it condescending to call someone a lifer?

Boyle: “Entry-level alt” is a phrase that appears a lot on hipsterrunnoff.com to describe someone who primarily identified with mainstream culture but was recently exposed to “alt”/hipster culture. This blog post explains it pretty well: http://www.hipsterrunoff.com/2008/08/proud-grin-entry-level-alt.html. In the film, Bebe defines a “lifer” as a “mainstreamer who loves life, God, and playing softball and writes about it on Facebook.” I don’t think the word “lifer” is ironic because it describes something Bebe perceives earnestly. If I believed I was innately superior to someone who played softball and updated their Facebook status a lot, it wouldn’t matter if I called them a “lifer” or “Caucasian” or “Michelle” — I would condescend to them.

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Last Friday night, for about one hour, Richard Ford asked Shirley Hazzard questions about her life and her writing. It was part of the PEN World Voices Festival. It cost $20.

Shirley Hazzard walked onstage with a cane in one hand and her black purse in the other. Her hair is red. She’s 79. She kept the purse beside her in the chair and sometimes gripped its strap as she spoke. “I’m so glad to see you, thank you for coming,” she told the audience. Salman Rushdie was there.

First, Richard Ford asked about her short story “Harold.”  She said it was the first story she’d ever written.* She said she sent it to The New Yorker because why not send it to the best place and that William Maxwell had accepted it. Richard Ford told us that Hazzard was 20-years-old at the time.** He was flabbergasted. The audience laughed. He wore pink socks.

Hazzard worked for the U.N. at the time, not “an encouraging place.” Because she wasn’t “brutally ugly” everyone at the U.N. expected her to marry so they didn’t give her interesting work to do. Richard Ford asked whether Maxwell edited her fiction very heavily.

“I didn’t want changes,” she said.

Ford said Hazzard was “natively funny.”

Hazzard said: “It’s nice that we have the alleviation of being amused by things.”

Three times friend and novelist Annabel Davis-Goff came out and read Hazzard’s work.

Hazzard said poetry was “the longest important thing in my life.” Ford said he thinks writers now “feel challenged to be tough on the page.” Hazzard said we are lucky to have “a very flexible language” but that it is nonetheless “a challenge to find another shade or tone.”

Richard Ford: “Do you think places have spirits?”

Shirley Hazzard: “I don’t know how to express that. A place is always changing… and yet the language gives us continuity. I wish I had a more romantic vision of place.”

Richard Ford: “What is the hardest part of being a writer?”

Shirley Hazzard: “I like writing dialogue. I like to have an open ear for speech.”

Richard Ford: “Is there something you don’t like about writing?”

Shirley Hazzard: “No.”

Shirley Hazzard: “Well, writing checks or something.”

Richard Ford: “Literary theory has pretty well strangled itself.”

Shirley Hazzard: “I don’t feel we need to be instructed all the time. The more criticism the less spontaneous acceptance there is.”

Richard Ford read to us from Transit of Venus. I felt that he was performing Hazzard’s greatness, even with Hazzard seated beside him. It was uncomfortable. Two people instigated a standing ovation.

*Both authors indicated that “Harold” was Hazzard’s first published story — in The New Yorker or anywhere. This Guardian interview corroborates said indications. But New Yorker archives suggest that “Harold,” published in October of 1962, was actually her EIGHTH New Yorker story. The first was “Woollhara Road,” published in April 1961.
**This too doesn’t make sense. If she was born in 1931–she’s 79 today–she would have been 30-years-old in 1961, not 20.

The whole event was recorded. You can watch the video here.

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In his much celebrated third novel, Netherland, Irish-born Joseph O’Neill writes:

“Not counting the lobby, the Chelsea Hotel had ten floors. Each was served by a dim hallway that ran from an air shaft on one side to, on my floor, a door with a yellowing pane of frosted glass that suggested the ulterior presence of a private detective rather than, as was actually the case, a fire escape. The floors were linked by a baronial staircase, which by virtue of the deep rectangular void at its center had the effect of installing a precipice at the heart of the building. On all the walls was displayed the vaguely alarming art-work of tenants past and present. The finest and most valuable examples were reserved for the lobby: I shall never forget the pink, plump girl on a swing who hovered above the reception area gladly awaiting a push towards West Twenty-third Street.”

O’Neill set his novel in the Chelsea Hotel and he himself actually lives there, with his wife, Vogue editor Sally Singer. (From Netherland: “Our problems were banal, the stuff of women’s magazines. All lives, I remember thinking, eventually funnel into the advice columns of women’s magazines.”) Rumor has it that Singer rejected O’Neill’s second novel when she was an editor at Farrar Straus and Giroux. They’ve been in the hotel since 1998. They’ve got an Obama sticker on the door and silkscreened images of Sid Vicious over the couch (Sid Vicious allegedly killed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen in the Chelsea). A couple of years ago, a Guardian reporter joined O’Neill and his family for breakfast: “When I visit, we sit over takeaway coffee and croissants in the tiny retro-chic kitchen as a flurry of small, screaming boys dash around us. The cat, Lola, a tawny, green-eyed queen with a powder-puff tail, swishes in and out of the room. O’Neill, dressed in cricket gear for his weekly game, is gracious and chatty.”

It took O’Neill seven years to finish Netherland. He almost titled it “The Brooklyn Dream Game,” but then poet Paul Muldoon “raised a friendly eyebrow.” When it came out, the New York Times’s Dwight Garner called it “the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.” In it, a man and his wife, Hans and Rachel, move from London to New York with their son Jake. 9/11 forces them out of Tribeca and into the Chelsea Hotel.  Hans says: “Over half the rooms were occupied by long-term residents who by their furtiveness and ornamental diversity reminded me of the population of the aquarium I’d kept as a child, a murky tank in which cheap fish hesitated in weeds and an artificial starfish made a firmament of the gravel. That said, there was a correspondence between the looming and the shadowy hotel folk and the phantasmagoric and newly indistinct world beyond the Chelsea’s heavy glass doors, as if the one promised to explain the other.”

Briefly, O’Neill and his family moved into a house in Brooklyn, but they missed the hotel so much that they sold the house and moved back into the hotel.  “I like that there are transients coming in every night,” Singer told the Guardian. “I love the continual stream of people to look at. I don’t want to live in my own closed-off space. People just drop by and knock on your door. I want to open my door and let the world in—and let my kids out.” Singer asked her son, Malachy, why he lives in the hotel:

“Because I was born here,” he snaps.

“What do you like about the hotel?” she persists.

“I like the guy who lived in the bathroom.”

Netherland’s Hans says: “Our hotel apartment had two bedrooms, a kitchenette, and a view of the tip of the Empire State Building. It also had extraordinary acoustics: in the hush of the small hours, a goods truck smaking into a pothole sounded like an explosion, and the fantastic howl of a passing motorbike once caused Rachel to vomit with terror. Around the clock, ambulances sped eastward on West Twenty-third Street with a sobbing escort of police motorcycles.”

Other descriptions of the hotel are somehow simultaneously insider-y (like you’d-have-to-live-there-to-know) and cliché’s of New York City: “Most evenings, once I’d showered and put on some casual clothes, I went down to the lobby and fell listlessly into a chair by the non-operational fireplace. I carried a book but did not read it. Often I was joined by a very kind widow in a baseball cap who conducted an endless and apparently fruitless search of her handbag and murmured to herself, for some reason, about Luxembourg. There was something anesthetizing about the traffic of people in the lobby, and I also took comfort from the men at the front desk, who out of pity invited me behind the counter to watch sports on their television and asked if I wanted to join their football pool.”

Later, Hans walks down the Chelsea’s famous stairs with a woman who is not his wife:

“Together we descended, as the wide-eyed transients did, the streaky gray marble steps. When Danielle surveyed the sulfurous, wildly expressive canvases, I found myself freshly eyeing the pipes and wires and alarm boxes and electrical devices and escape maps and sprinklers that cluttered the wall of each landing. These tokens of calamity and fire, taken in conjunction with the fiery and calamitous art, gave a hellishly subterraneous aspect to our downward journey, which I had undertaken only once or twice before on foot, and I was almost startled when we reached the bottom of the stairs not to run into chuckling old Lucifer himself and instead to find myself on the surface of the earth and able to walk out directly into the cold, clear night.”

As I typed these descriptions from Netherland, and felt how it might feel to write like O’Neill, I worried. I don’t know whether I am worried about the ease with which Hans self-mythologizes or worried about O’Neill’s decision to make Hans that guy. In her essay for the New York Review of Books, “Two Paths for the Novel,” Zadie Smith wrote that Netherland is a “novel that wants you to know that it knows you know it knows. Hans invites us to sneer lightly at those who are ‘prone to general observations’ but only as a prelude to just such an observation, presented in language frankly genteel and faintly archaic (‘so one is told and forlornly hopes’). Is it cheap longing? It can’t be because—and this is the founding, consoling myth of lyrical Realism—the self is a bottomless pool. What you can’t find in the heavens (anymore), you’ll find in the soul.”

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