LEAH McLAREN

Saturday, May 19, 2001

A couple of weeks ago, I had a run-in with a Lurper. The occasion was a small-press book launch in a dingy old hotel bar. The Lurper had one pint of lager in his hand and several more inside him. He approached from behind and tapped me on the shoulder.

"We need to talk," he said, swaying. His tone was urgent, brooding and familiar, though we had met only once or twice before. (The Lurper knew my e-mail address and had, for several months, been sending me press releases for open-mike poetry jams and post-punk indie band CD-release parties. He sent me so many messages -- sometimes two or three a day -- that I'd long since stopped opening and reading them.)

For a quarter of a minute, the Lurper struggled in silence. Then he said, "Put me in your column."

"Why?" I was genuinely puzzled.

"Because . . . because I want in."

So, then, what exactly is a Lurper?

He is a North American full of contradictory hatreds and hungers, almost invariably youngish, white and male. A Lurper is angry, sometimes clever, and full of a terrible, mind-warping envy. He hates other people for having the many things he lacks -- success, confidence, fame, money, sex, charm, recognition, art, conversational ease, style, respect, drugs, a sense of wonder.

His world view is governed by paranoid conspiracy theories. He wants desperately to be on (what he sees as) "the inside" and yet angrily guards (what he sees as) his superior position on "the outside." He is Holden Caufield 10 years later, a grown boy, who in the words of Philip Roth, approaches life "with all the arrogance of someone who has succeeded at nothing."

For the Lurper, the world is a topsy-turvy place. All people who have had success (except maybe Dave Eggers and Tom Waits) are talentless and undeserving, and those who haven't (either through explicit failure or, more often, because they have yet to try) have been tragically overlooked.

Unrecognized genius fills every greasy spoon and discount draft joint. For the Lurper, of course, there is no other kind.

I came across the name of this post-grunge subspecies a couple of years ago, in the last paragraph of a dreadfully overwritten letter to the editor, which appeared in this newspaper.

"I know not in which drearily savvy and opulent College Street halls this 'new creed' is uttered, but you can leave me out," a Lurper with Literary Aspirations sniffed in response to an article about successful young authors. "I'll be lurping up a veal sandwich on one of the side streets, dripping sauce on my more hopeful poems."

The verb "lurp" doesn't actually exist, of course. The letter writer's use of it was either a pretentious poeticism or typo on "slurp." I still can't decide which is more perfectly lurperish.

Lurpers are the 21st-century version of that existentialist favourite: the Seething Young Dude. But unlike Camus's Outsider, they are not closet idealists.

The Lurper is a profoundly cynical creature. He believes that life is a game in which good guys finish last, and he's fond of expressing this sentiment in constipated prose. Take the following observations on life in Toronto by freelancer Ryan Bigge:

"I mean sure, trapped somewhere between the cleavage of Electric Circus hopefuls and the artist-run gallery circuit lies the truth, but who wants to buck the free beer and fat-free low-cal cocaine by discovering it? Not this cowboy. All I know is that I'm finally living in a city full of people worth schmoozing."

Like so many Lurpers, Bigge is an established legend in his own mind. He even has his own Web site to prove it. His first book, A Very Lonely Planet: Love, Sex and the Single Guy,will be published by Vancouver small press Arsenal Pulp this month.The title could actually be Anatomy of a Hard-up Lurper.

The hopeful news for Bigge is that some former Lurpers find success later in life. In Fraud, a recently published book of personal essays, New York-based Canadian writer David Rakoff reflects on his lurper years as a publishing assistant in New York.

Every night, he and his fellow "menials" would get loaded and bitch their faces off. They were a toxic, ambitious gang who "gathered like wounded veterans of some great war, crystallizing around our despair, our outrage fuelled by our outsized sense of entitlement."

What is it about contemporary urban life that drives so many bright, privileged young men to lurperdom?

Lurpers are the product of a generation brought up with a sense of entitlement to -- and simultaneous deep-seated resentment toward -- the culture of fame. They want in, but know that this involves the risk of failure, not to mention the anxiety that even if they do uncover the secret password to the Star Chamber, it will entail the loss of the primary Lurper advantage: unconditional complaint about the system. Talent -- do I actually have any? -- is never mentioned. Like all obsessives, they are madly in love with the thing they hate the most.

It's a definition confirmed by Hal Niedzviecki, author of We Want Some Too: Underground Desire and the Reinvention of Mass Culture. An admitted semi-reformed Lurper himself, Niedzviecki pleaded with me not to be so hard on these bitter young guys.

"I have great sympathy for the Lurper," he said. "We all have a Lurper inside us. We say, 'Goddamn them, those whoremongering fame sluts -- I'll have nothing to do with them!' And yet if the call ever came . . ."

As for my drunken e-mail buddy, I hope his call comes one day soon. While I'm trying to be sympathetic, the world could really do with one less Lurper.
lmclaren@globeandmail.ca

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