The Chairs Are Where the People Go Read online

  To Margaux

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  1. People’s Protective Bubbles Are Okay

  2. How to Make Friends in a New City

  3. The Uniqlo Game

  4. Going to the Gym

  5. How to Be Good at Playing Charades

  6. Don’t Pretend There Is No Leader

  7. The Chairs Are Where the People Go

  8. How to Teach Charades

  9. Miscommunication Is Nice

  10. The Gibberish Game

  11. The Residents’ Association

  12. There Are Some Games I Won’t Play with My Friends

  13. Social Music

  14. Manners

  15. How to Improvise, and How Not to Not Improvise

  16. The Crazy Parts

  17. Charging for My Classes

  18. What Is a Game?

  19. Spam

  20. Margaux

  21. Charades Homework

  22. Harvard and Class

  23. The Rocks Game

  24. Some Video on the Internet

  25. People Who Take My Classes

  26. Shut Up and Listen

  27. Is Monogamy a Trick?

  28. The Conducting Game

  29. Sitting on the Same Side of the Table

  30. Seeing My Friends Drunk for the First Time

  31. A Decision Is a Thing You Make

  32. All the Games Are Meant to Solve Problems, but Problems Are Unpleasant

  33. Home Maladies

  34. Keeping Away People Who Would Be Disappointed

  35. The Happiness Class

  36. The Converge / Diverge Game

  37. Going to Parties

  38. Kensington Market

  39. Keeping People Quiet

  40. Feeling Like a Fraud

  41. Negotiation

  42. Fighting Games

  43. What Experimental Music Is For

  44. These Projects Don’t Make Money

  45. Seeing Your Parents Once a Week

  46. Asking a Good Question

  47. A Mind Is Not a Terrible Thing to Measure

  48. Doing One Thing Doesn’t Mean You’re Against Something Else

  49. Get Louder or Quit

  50. Why Robert McKee Is Wrong About Casablanca

  51. Conferences Should Be an Exhilarating Experience

  52. Improvised Behavior

  53. Storytelling Is Not the Same Thing as Conversation

  54. Introducing People in the Classes

  55. Making the City More Fun for You and Your Privileged Friends Isn’t a Super-Noble Political Goal

  56. Seeing John Zorn Play Cobra

  57. Impostor Syndrome

  58. Nimbyism

  59. Conducting from the Center of a Circle

  60. Why Noise Music?

  61. Absenteeism

  62. Failure and Games

  63. Why a Computer Only Lasts Three Years

  64. What Are These Classes For?

  65. Who Are Your Friends?

  66. Neighborhoods Change

  67. Atheism and Ritual

  68. Social Capital

  69. Sitting Down and Listening as a Role

  70. Everyone’s Favorite Thing and Unfavorite Thing Are Different

  71. Finding an Ending

  72. Wearing a Suit All the Time Is a Good Way to Quit Smoking

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Misha Glouberman is my very good friend. Years ago, we started a lecture series together called Trampoline Hall, at which amateurs speak on random subjects in a bar. He was the host, and I picked the lecturers and helped them choose their topics. I was interested in finding people who were reticent about talking, rather than showy people who wanted an opportunity to perform. After three years of working on the show, I quit, but Misha kept it running.

  A few years later, I really missed working with Misha, so I decided I would write a book about him. It was called The Moral Development of Misha. I got about sixty pages into the story of a man who wandered the city, who was nervous about his career and his life, yet was a force of reason in any situation. Work on it stalled, however, when I couldn’t figure out how to develop him morally.

  Worse than that, I never found the project as interesting as talking to my friend. I have always liked the way Misha speaks and thinks, but writing down the sorts of things he might say and think was never as pleasurable as encountering the things he actually did say and think. If I wanted to capture Misha, in all his specificity, why was I creating a fictional Misha? If I wanted to engage with Misha, why not leave my room and walk down the street?

  One day, I told him I thought the world should have a book of everything he knows.

  He agreed to collaborate on this project with me, but only if I promised not to quit in the middle as I always do with everything.

  We spent a few days coming up with a list of things he cares about, and those topics became the chapters of this book. Over the next several months, we met a few times a week at my apartment, usually at around ten in the morning. We drank coffee and worked our way down the list. Misha sat across from me at my desk. As he talked, I typed.

  Misha speaks in fully formed paragraphs, I was surprised to discover, and the words here are pretty much as he said them. Very infrequently, as he spoke, I would ask a question. I chose the chapters I wanted to include and put them in some kind of order.

  As you read the book, Misha may come off as this very opinionated person—but in life he’s quite the opposite. He’s not the sort of person who goes around giving his take on things. At parties, he can often be found explaining to one person what some other person meant. At Trampoline Hall, Misha leads a Q&A after every lecture, and he is really good at revealing the essence of what each person is trying to communicate. He’s usually very reserved and cautious in his opinions, always seeing the other person’s side.

  Sometimes when he and I spend time together, a more opinionated side of Misha comes out. When we were doing this book, often he would say something, then say to me, “Don’t put that in,” and then I would say, “But that’s the best part,” and I would.

  We had a really nice time.

  —Sheila Heti, Toronto

  1. People’s Protective Bubbles Are Okay

  I hear people complain that, for instance, in this city, people don’t say hi on the street or make eye contact on the subway. And people try to remedy this problem by doing public art projects that are meant to rouse the bourgeoisie from their slumber. But that’s ridiculous! It’s perfectly reasonable for people not to want to see your dance performance when they are coming home from work. People are on the subway because they’re getting from one place to another, and for all you know, they’re coming from a job that involves interacting with lots and lots of people, and going to a home where there’s a family where they’re going to interact with lots more people. And the subway’s the one place where they can have some quiet time, get some reading done, not have to smile, not have to make eye contact. That’s what a city is: a city is a place where you can be alone in public, and where you have that right. It’s necessary to screen people out. It would be overwhelming if you had to perceive every single person on a crowded subway car in the fullness of their humanity. It would be completely paralyzing. You couldn’t function. So don’t try to fix this. There is no problem.

  2. How to Make Friends in a New City

  If you’re just finishing school—maybe you’re in your early twenties, maybe you’re moving to a new city—you need to make friends. The very most
important thing to know is that this isn’t easy. It’s really easy to make friends when you’re a child, and it’s really easy to make friends in high school and in college. And for a lot of people, I think, it’s a real shock to discover that making friends doesn’t take care of itself in adulthood. When you come to university you’re crammed together with a couple of thousand people who are around your age and who share a bunch of stuff in common with you, and most important, are at that very same moment also looking for new friends. In this sort of situation, it would take a lot of conscious effort to end up not having friends. But adult life isn’t like that. You may move to a new city, maybe for a job that doesn’t easily put you into contact with a lot of people with whom you have much in common. So what that means is that it’s work, and maybe for the first time in your life you have to actually take making friends on as a project. I knew so many people around that stage of life who suddenly found themselves isolated and couldn’t understand why, and had never thought of making friends as something they had to bring conscious effort to.

  If you see making friends as a project, you can understand that there will be efforts and costs and risks. You have to go to functions that you don’t exactly feel like going to, you have to stick your neck out and make gestures that are embarrassing or can make you feel vulnerable. You’ll have to spend time with people who initially seem interesting but then turn out not to be. But all those things are okay if you see them as the costs involved in a project.

  It’s useful to identify what you like to do, because friends are the people with whom you can do those things. So if you like to cook, you might take a cooking class and meet people who are interested in cooking. Or if what you like to do is go drink in bars, then find people who want to drink in bars with you. If you like to watch television and make fun of it, find other people who want to do that. It’s useful to remember that friendship needs an activity associated with it.

  If you’re the ambitious sort, you can try to create your own world around you, and maybe have a party at your house every two weeks. I think Andy Warhol’s grandmother gave him similar advice. This gets you more than friends—it can create a whole community. I’ll say it takes a certain kind of person to do this, though. But if you can do it—if you can put yourself at the center of something—it really works.

  When I came to Toronto, here’s what I liked to do: I liked drinking in bars and I liked thinking about the Internet. This was at a time when thinking about the Internet wasn’t so popular, but drinking in bars was, so I just started a club, and I put out the word, and I invited other people. I was the only person at my organization at the time who was really interested in thinking about the Internet. It was at a time when sort of every organization hired one person to be their web guy. So there were all these lonely, isolated web guys scattered around the city, and we started a biweekly bar night. I was completely new in town, but just by starting something like that, you really put yourself in the center of all kinds of things. Being a host—it’s a really super-valuable service that a lot of people are disinclined to do, and if you can do it, it’s a great way to meet people.

  3. The Uniqlo Game

  There’s an online game which I love—from, of all places, a Japanese clothing company called Uniqlo. The game has a fast-paced pop culture feel to it. There is a grid of Uniqlo logos on the screen, and you manipulate them in different ways. You can make big ones or little ones. You can chop them up or merge them together. You can make them disappear. It’s a multiplayer game. All they tell you about the players is their sign-in name and what country they’re from, so you and someone in France and someone in Korea and someone in the United States, all of indeterminate age and gender, are manipulating these shared sets of blocks.

  The genius of the game, to me, is that there’s no chat area. There’s no way you can send messages to the other players. You can only communicate by dragging these logos around. It’s so interesting in the context of that to think, Can I make this person in Korea like me? Can I flatter this person in France by echoing the moves that they’re making on this grid? Can I do something terribly mischievous in a way that won’t be perceived as hostile, or can I do something hostile in a way that will be?

  I like playing this game a lot.

  4. Going to the Gym

  One idea that came up a lot around the time I was in college was that some ideas or opinions were social constructions. So, for instance, if you could show that ideals of female beauty were something that society had created, then you could also show that these ideals aren’t something that people naturally feel, but rather they’re a brainwashing tool created by society—in this case to perpetuate the patriarchal hegemony.

  Another example of this: I read a book a little while ago which made the point that while we worry a lot about status, maybe we shouldn’t, since after all, the things that are associated with status in our society aren’t associated with status in other societies right now, and weren’t associated with status historically in other societies, so really it’s all arbitrary. Today, being thin and having strong analytic skills are valued, whereas in another society being a fast runner would have been important, or in another one, obesity was a sign of status. The author sort of concludes, Why worry?

  But all that stuff’s crazy! Just because something’s socially constructed, doesn’t mean it’s not real. I mean, we can show that every society has a different set of standards for feminine beauty, and that every society has different sets of standards for status, but it’s equally remarkable that every society does have standards for feminine beauty, and does have standards for status. We’re humans. We exist in societies. We create cultures. And these cultures may be different from each other, with different beliefs, but they’re who we are. There’s not something more “real” to discover about us if you take all that away. A human who doesn’t exist in a culture isn’t somehow more true. In fact, I think a human who doesn’t exist in a culture—that’s not what a human is. I exist in the culture that I exist in, and I can know that other cultures see status in different ways, but I will be swayed by the ideas of status that affect mine. I can know that other cultures have different standards of feminine beauty and still be attracted by the standards of feminine beauty that exist in mine.

  This doesn’t seem any more shocking to me than finding a passage of literature written in English beautiful but not a passage written in a language I can’t read. I don’t feel like my impression of beauty in the English passage is destroyed by someone pointing out that the correlation between these words and the objects they describe isn’t actually real—that other societies use different words for the same things, and that the use of one symbol to represent a certain object or sound is at base somewhat arbitrary. I’m okay with that.

  I went to the gym pretty regularly for a long time, and it always felt so crazy to me. The gym is like the meeting point of all these different things that are emblematic of our time. It looks like the shopping mall and the factory, and it’s where our crazy desire to exert ourselves and work hard meets our crazy desire to be young forever, along with our crazy confusion about our appetites, and our imagining that we can subject everything to rational, super-mechanistic processes. Fifty years from now, if you wanted to pick something that encapsulates the old days of the early twenty-first century, you’d show the gym.

  For a while I was kind of embarrassed to be a part of what seems like a huge fad of our day, but then I figured: Fuck it. I am of our day. I don’t have to see through everything. Or I can even see through things a little bit, but I’m still a part of them.

  5. How to Be Good at Playing Charades

  I have taught How to Be Good at Playing Charades in a bunch of contexts. I have taught corporate charades classes. I’ve taught charades as part of a regular games night I ran at a hotel, and I taught it on the radio. The most fun was teaching charades as a six-part series of classes that people signed up for. They paid me money to come to a classroom every week. W
e did charades drills and exercises. Sometimes I gave them homework. I gave out charades certificates at the end.

  For reasons that are completely unclear to me, I was very nervous about whether I was qualified to teach charades. This is crazy! I’m perfectly okay with teaching a music class to trained musicians, even though I don’t read music or really know anything about it, but for some reason I was worried that my qualifications as a charades expert might be challenged.

  So I did something I never do in my classes, which was that I really tried to establish my authority on the first day. People acted out clues, and we would collectively try to guess them, and I would guess the clue before everyone else in the class every single time. I felt like some old martial arts instructor, challenging people in the class to try to push him over as a way to win their respect. I did this consciously.

  * * *

  When I planned my first charades class, I worked really hard on the announcement because I didn’t think anyone would sign up. I figured that just sending out the announcement might constitute the whole project, but I was pleasantly surprised when quite a lot of people signed up.

  A lot of people also dropped out. I think they dropped out when they realized it really was just a course in charades. I think they expected there to be something else happening.

  There are basically two sets of skills for playing charades. There are acting-related skills and guessing-related skills—sort of like fielding and hitting in baseball, or offense and defense in hockey.

  When you’re acting out a clue for another person, it’s really important to remember that the other person does not know what you’re acting out. This seems obvious, but a lot of the time, people will act out a charade in a way which would make perfect sense if you knew what the title was, but from which the title would be completely impossible to guess if you didn’t know it.

  This seems like a trivial point, but it’s important. It means that, if at all possible, you shouldn’t get angry at the other person for not knowing what it is you’re trying to act out. It’s one of the most common failures that people have: they’ll act something out, and the other person won’t be able to guess it, and their response will be to do the same gesture again, but more exasperated this time. So the first step really is just an acceptance of the fact that the other person does not know.