I remember registering for some music website a long time ago and writing under my avatar ‘Bullshit detector’ as an affirmation of who I was. I didn’t know at the time it was also the name of a series of compilations by the anarcho-punk band Crass, a title derived as a reference to the Clash song ‘Garageland’ (according to Wikipedia), something that greatly pleases me. We are constantly surrounded by bullshit and I have the feeling I am constantly fighting against it, it’s always me (us at rock nyc) against them, as Titus Andronicus would say, or me against the absurd universe except that the absurd often takes shape as pure bullshit spread all over the place and swallowed as whey by the rest of the world. If I had to define myself, I would continue to use this ‘bullshit detector’ etiquette because there’s a lot of this in me, I can’t stand it and I have the feeling I can spot it better than the majority of people? Either this or I am insane, either this or the majority of people still sees it but ignores it, as people are too absorbed by their life and career…
In his essay about ‘Bullshit and the art of crap detection’, Neil Postman wrote that, when asked about the quality needed to be a good writer, Ernest Hemingway declared, ‘Yes, a built-in, shock-proof, crap detector’, and it seems that too many forget about this. And this applies to readers too, readers should be able to detect crap/bullshit too! Postman was citing pomposity, fanaticism, inanity, superstition (I would say belief) as major role players in bullshit non-detection… and isn’t it the case for this new book about Elliott Smith, ‘Torment Saint’ by W. T. Schultz? I want to be clear before people jump at my throat: I haven’t read the entire book yet, but I have done enough browsing through its preview on Google books to have a good idea of its direction.
Pomposity? The guy is a big professor, a Ph. D. and ‘one of the world’s most respected practitioners of psychobiography’, who has published books about Sylvia Plath, Oscar Wilde, Truman Capote,…it’s impressive, nobody wants to criticize an authority! I am alone on this. I can’t tell from the preview if he used really pompous words, but his persona alone imposes pomposity as people are always impressed by big diploma. I am not.
Fanaticism? I am not talking about the fact that Schultz is an Elliott Smith’s fan, I am one too. No, Schultz is fanatic of suicide, he wrote about Diane Arbus and Sylvia Plath, two women who committed suicide, and from what I was able to read, ‘Torment Saint’ takes this direction too. Thus, three of his books are centered on people who committed suicide? That seems a lot and enough to make him a fan of suicidal people. From the beginning, ‘Torment Saint’ seems to read suicide all over Elliott Smith’s dead body, with sentences like ‘Jennifer Chiba, Smith’s girlfriend at the time of his death, says Elliott romanticized and envied Cobain’s suicide’. I don’t deny Elliott’s constant reference to suicide in his songs and life, but he said a lot of things about the subject, and was far from being such one-dimensional. It is simply amazing how Schultz desperately refutes all data that do not fit with his thesis, or even better, add some new elements that seem to reinforce it. Just like this sentence about the couple sharpening the knives placed in the middle of the narrative of the stabbing scene:
‘For several long seconds there was quiet, only the usual sounds of the ticking house. Then came an awful noise, a scream Chiba vaguely recognized, both familiar somehow and utterly alien. A few nights prior she and Elliott had stayed up sharpening a new set of knives. As she flung herself out of the bathroom and ran to the kitchen, where the scream seemed to come from, she found Elliott at the sink. He had his back to her, but as he turned, she saw a knife in his chest.’
This is manipulative bullshit if I’ve ever seen it!
Inanity? A lot of people are praising the book. I don’t say these people are stupid, but what do they know about the case? About nothing? Have they even taken a look at the autopsy report, have they talked to the coroner, police, friends and family? No. So they are not able to judge if this book was the result of a good research or not. To what I know, the family was not interviewed for this book, although they would be much more knowledgeable about Elliott than many other people. However, Jennifer Chiba is interviewed at length, more than 40 pages make reference to her name. She already had a voice in the 2004 Spin article, in Gil Reyes’ recent documentary and now in this book, how many times does she need to vindicate herself?
Superstition/belief? It all goes back to what I was saying at the beginning, if a big professor, an authority in psychobiography, believes Elliott Smith committed suicide, this must be true! The lack of desire to question authority has always been a problem for me. I will wait to read this book to confirm this, but so far I haven’t seen any new fact that would lead to the suicide conclusion. Once again, everything is based on Elliott Smith’s depression, his omnipresent references to suicide, and his drug addiction. There is a strong belief running through the pages of this book, many reviews are saying it: ‘That ominous and foreboding feeling is there throughout Torment Saint, as it would be in any story where you know the tragic conclusion. Much like watching Titanic, to which he would lose his only shot at an Academy Award, we just keep our eyes open and wait’.
I heard magician Penn Jillett say one time, ‘If there is something you really want to believe that what you should question the most’ and I couldn’t agree more! Schultz is entitled to believe Elliott Smith has committed suicide, but instead of questioning his conviction, he is using his feeling as evidence and this is bullshit.