He Didn’t Wanna Be s Star

David Shields is really enjoying this interview.

Just the week before, National Public Radio had nabbed the unassuming University of Washington professor in New York, where he was doing book signings for his new “odd postmodern memoir,” as he describes it. “Remote” (Knopf), a pastiche of autobiography, musings, reportage and bumper stickers, traces Shields’ adventures with that contemporary cultural bugaboo--celebrity.

And oddly enough, somewhere along the book campaign trail, he began to turn into his subject.

“Obviously, if you write a book, you want it to be successful, and you want a lot of people to read it, and you want in a strange way to become a kind of celebrity too,” says Shields, 39, over a plate of tepid French fries at the Beverly Prescott Hotel.

“I felt a little bit like a hypocrite in the sense that the book is in many ways a withering view of the whole celebrity thing, and yet I must admit that when I heard they wanted me on ‘All Things Considered’ that afternoon, I was happy. I was delighted and I was giddy.”

Giddy at the prospect of becoming a wee bit famous, a wee bit like, say, Teri Garr. “How strange it is that almost everyone in America knows who Teri Garr is,” Shields says. “I mean, like, why?”

Why, indeed. Such off-kilter observations about the slanted sides of fame have earned Shields plaudits as a witty and original cultural scribe and voice of his generation--which, in these pop-saturated days, can be a double-edged compliment.

The New York Times called the quirky “Remote” “elliptical, funny and ironic,” although New York magazine sniffed that “this breezy, sideways autobiography” was insubstantial stuff, “the literary answer to fake fat.”

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Shields’ plunge into the belly of the pop beast was inspired, perhaps ironically, by a remark by Milan Kundera. In an interview that Shields read in the late ‘80s, the Czech novelist talked about meshing personal life and political life in his writing.

“He said, ‘It’s not hard when you go to the grocery store and a Soviet tank is sticking out the back of the grocery store.’ For his life, the marriage of the political and the personal was simply there. And I was thinking to myself, what was the American equivalent of Kundera’s Soviet tank sticking out of the grocery store?”

As Shields pondered that, lounging before the TV in his father’s apartment, “There was a proverbial bolt of lightning where I felt that America’s equivalent of Kundera’s Soviet tank is the ubiquity of the camera, just how totally the camera dominates American life and the image and beauty and celebrity and all of that whole package.”

Accordingly, you don’t read “Remote” as much as channel-surf it from riff to riff, 52 in all.

“There are 52 weeks in a year, 52 cards in a deck, 52 chapters in the book. It’s supposed to be like a weird night of watching TV, in which you’re flying through all of these channels, but instead of getting only the images presented to you by NBC, it’s weirdly ‘The David Shields Hour.’ ”

To gather material, Shields set out from the ivory tower of Seattle academia and started “putting myself in harm’s way.” He reported on a taping of “Seattle Today” with Oprah Winfrey and trailed a reporter for “A Current Affair” to “Twin Peaks”-land--Snoqualmie, Wash. There, reporter Mike Watkiss, asked unsuspecting residents about any adulterous affairs or murders they may have committed.

When the reporter turned the camera on Shields, he tried to be glib, arching his eyebrows over the show’s “shoddy sensationalism.” By the end, though, Shields had succumbed to the camera.

“For an endless moment I’ve fallen prey to the awesome power of something toward which I pretend absolute irony: I have wanted the camera to find in me, and love me for, qualities that I do not and could not possibly possess,” he writes.

Indeed, “Remote” turns on the premise that we deify celebrities at our own expense, that in celebrating their virtues, we sap our own importance.

In the chapters titled “The Nimbus of His Fame Makes a Nullity of Us All,” Shields considers his brushes with his sixth degrees of separation from fame, such as his absurd encounter with O.J. Simpson in a Brentwood Haagen-Dazs.

Closer to home, Shields ponders his relationship with his former Yale writing teacher David Milch, who went on to win acclaim as a TV writer and producer (“Hill Street Blues,” “NYPD Blue”). And he considers the possibility that he might be distantly related to the movie actor Joseph Schildkraut (likely) and Brooke Shields (highly unlikely).

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But images of the media’s high and mighty--or even merely successful--are spare in “Remote.” Shields illustrates it mostly with snapshots from his childhood.

“I think of the book as a kind of tool kit or handbook for people to rethink their relationship to pop culture and mass media, and especially the iconography of mass media,” he says. “So to me the pictures from the family album are like guerrilla theater, to replace the icons of Mary Hart and Oprah Winfrey. I’m trying to replace these mass images with personal images, a child and his sister and mother on the beach having a kind of beauty and glamour and power and poetry that everyone could in a way have.

“This book is an antitoxin to the toxicity of media culture. You can still enjoy and get great pleasure from the very seductive and beautiful and glamorous images that pop culture delivers to us, but there’s just a tremendously brutal power to measuring yourself against these images.”

The celebrities who really interest Shields aren’t the Madonnas of the world, who makes a cameo in a footnote, but such fringe performers as Bob Balaban, the dislikable nowhere-man of “Altered States” and “Seinfeld.” Shields devotes one of the longer chapters to Balaban’s career playing unattractive antiheroes against whom all the William Hurts shine. Shields identifies with him in his imperfection.

“What is Bob Balaban, anyway, a professional punching bag? What indignity will the movies not subject him to?” he writes. “Balaban almost always plays Jews . . . he’s a scapegoat Christ suffering for our one irredeemable sin--we are not movie stars, either.”

Shields is fascinated mostly by such minor deities, such marginal personas. And in writing “Remote,” he creates one for himself, turning himself into a character much as we perceive celebrities.

In real life, Shields is L.A.-born and San Francisco-raised by his two journalist parents, freelance writer Milton and Hannah Bloom, West Coast correspondent for the Nation in the ‘60s and ‘70s. He has written three other books, including the semiautobiographical novel “Dead Languages.” And he has a white-picket-fence life in Seattle with wife Laurie, a health administrator, and daughter Natalie, almost 3.

Yet the David Shields of the book, who appears sans famille on the book jacket, is a single man.

“The narrator of the book is a sort of bachelor addicted to mass media, whose love life is the tube, who clearly is living too deeply and too pathetically and too thoroughly through the romance of the camera,” he says. “The book is a highly stylized version of myself.”

But they have much in common--both are babies of mass media, eager consumers of “snail-mail, voice-mail [and] e-mail,” and, perhaps consequently, determined residents of a remote state.

Says Shields: “If you’re on e-mail, you can imagine what the person is like, you can fill the gap. Remoteness is a weirdly ecstatic state to me, because that is where the imagination rushes in.”