if you're a "believer"

As much as I may lambaste McSweeney's... I read this anyway. If you didn't already know it, Jonathan Lethem is my favorite author ever. I do think Dave Eggers is occasionally amusing... but in this conversation the both of them are brilliant in their own ways and it is good. It is very good.

Some quotes that I believe to be true statements:

I've been in LA this week, and as horrible as it was staying on Sunset, I do really like the city's enthusiasm for just about everything, every stupid ugly cheap thing. I like that they get excited about making TV shows. That they want to make things, and make them quickly, and then make more things, and reach people, and make them laugh or cry or whatever. It's nice — it's jumpy and desperate in a healthy and wide-eyed sort of way. They obviously fear death, and this is good. - Eggers

(I feel it now, in my current bi-coastal life. LA to NYC to LA to NYC and back...)

Okay, several thoughts, an attempt to burrow further inside this subject, our subject, our slippery, elusive hydra-headed rant. Too much I feel we're surrounding the real subject, pecking at it. But that feeling is good, actually, that urge, that itch, it suggests we're somewhere worthwhile, scrabbling to get in. That's the lovely, quite traditional frustration which drives everything worthwhile: art, falling in love, good conversation.

First, I have a superficially amused response to your pitting California-naive-liveliness-creativity against New York-sterile-academic-death urge — after my ten years in California, and my return to New York (from whence I came) I've consoled myself and ordered my self-understanding around a rejection of California's ahistorical, goofy, new-age, banality-of-evil olestra (nothing sticks, I get drunk, I fall down, what's the problem) atmosphere in favor of New York's intense, achievement-ratifying and knowledge-based substantiality.

But those are my silly biases. Needless to say, safe to say, cultural 'life-urges' and 'death-urges' thrive in their many (remarkably) different urban biospheres equally, in close coexistence, and so often, so confusingly, wearing one another's clothes at unexpected moments. -Lethem