November 27, 1964– David Rakoff:
“There is little in this world that I find more galvanizing than someone in trouble. I am well aware of how dubious that sounds, coming from someone who makes a living writing in the first person.”
This is an emotional one to write. David Rakoff is so much what I aspire to be: the author of essays that are sarcastic & sassy without being bitter, writing that is wise & wry, but still honest & generous in spirit. Oh, to be friends & colleagues with the Sedaris siblings, David & Amy, work as an actor in Off-Broadway plays, & be a favorite contributor on NPR’s All Things Considered & hang with Ira Glass. Plus, be cute & Jewish & Canadian & Dead. In summer of 2012, Rakoff was taken by the same cancer that nearly got me a year later. It is not the easiest thing to admit, but I was probably at my best when I was at my worst.
The Humorous Essay is my favorite form & my favorite authors: Nora Ephron, Fran Lobowitz, Erma Bombeck, S.J. Perelman, Garrison Keillor, Dave Barry, Joan Rivers, Lenny Bruce, Bruce Jay Friedman, Robert Benchley, are all great wits who inspire me, but it helps to have one that is a cheeky gay man to hold up as the ideal.
You may not be familiar with his wicked, smart, powerful, funny writing, but I urge you to read at least one of his pieces to get what I am celebrating today. Rakoff was one of the most original voices of my era.
Rakoff was anything but prolific, he produced just 3 very short, pithy books: Fraud (2001), Don’t Get Too Comfortable (2005), Half Empty (2010) in the span of a decade, & one terrifyingly brilliant posthumously published novel, Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish (2013) written entirely in verse, a kind of homage to Dorothy Parker, with a big dash of Frank O’Hara.
Starting at the beginning of this century, I always sought out his magazine pieces. Rakoff wrote regularly for Conde Nast Traveler, GQ, & The NY Times Magazine. His essays also appeared in Details, Harper’s Bazaar, New York Magazine, & Vogue, & online with short stuff on Salon, Seed, Slate, & Spin.
Rakoff’s essays were always the funniest thing in any issue of my favorite magazines, suffused with brazen honesty & world-weary wisdom.
Here’s an excerpt from an essay he wrote about the first time he saw Times Square when he first moved to NYC to study at Columbia. It is the perfect blend of smart writing & biting humor:
“The colossus towering over this particular moment shuddering between decadence & recovery was not Bartholdi’s Lady Liberty but the first of Calvin Klein’s bronzed gods, high above Times Square. Leaning back, eyes closed, in his blinding white underpants against a sinuous form in similarly white Aegean plaster, his gargantuan, sleeping, groinful beauty was simultaneously Olympian & intimate, awesome & comforting. Here was the city in briefs: uncaring, cruelly beautiful, & out of reach.”
In 2011, Rakoff was awarded the James Thurber Prize For American Humor. Like all my favorite great wits, he wrote with determination to dazzle with style. Rakoff describes an unhappy couple he observed on New Year’s Day:
“He began that unmistakable wet-mouthed, lip-smacking, compulsive swallowing that indicates the impending need to vomit. His upper lip shone with perspiration, & his eyes were closed. The woman had nowhere to go, indeed, there was nothing else she would be able to do until the train reached the station, & that might not be in sufficient time. If the first thing you do on the first day augurs the spirit & tone of your new year, this woman was in for a very bad 1987.”
1987 was also a really bad year for Rakoff. At just 22 years old, he was hit with a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, but he managed to beat the cancer with 18 months of brutal treatment. He wrote about it with brute realism & biting humor. But, in 2010, he was diagnosed with another malignant tumor, & in one of life’s cruelest ironies, Rakoff was forced to begin chemotherapy once more. Yet, he kept on writing:
“I try to comfort myself with the first-person accounts I’ve heard of those who die on operating tables & come back: the light, the warmth, & the surge of love from one’s dead ancestors urging you forward. But even that doesn’t help as I wonder what on earth the Old World, necromancing Litvak primitives from whom I am descended would make of me? You’re 44 years old & not married? You’re a what? We had one in the shtetl & he was chased from the town with brickbats. How much treyf do you eat? What kind of writing? & from this you make a living?”
It was a matter of “the show must go on” for Rakoff. He continued to write until the end. His writing that last year had a funny yet realistic dignity that inspired me to take a curious defense against the cruel setbacks in life when it came my turn to be sick.
From Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish:
“The facts were now harder, reality colder
His parasol no match for that falling boulder.
& so the concern with the trivial issues:
Slippers nearby & the proximate tissues
He thought of those two things in life that don’t vary
(Well, thought only glancingly; more was too scary)
Inevitable, why even bother to test it,
He’d paid all his taxes, so that left… you guessed it.”
Rakoff said this about his own writing:
“It is essentially about pessimism & melancholy: all the other less than pleasant to feel emotions that because they are less than pleasant to feel have been more or less stricken from the public discourse but in fact have their uses and even a certain beauty to them. It is a defense of melancholy, pessimism, anxiety & all of the emotions that have been tarred with the brush of negativity & therefore stricken from the larger cultural conversation. I hope to argue that, while these emotions may well be hedonistically less pleasant, they remain necessary & even beautiful at times.”
I could not have said it better myself. No, really, I could not.
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