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On the New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give”

This thing was inspired by March Fadness, where Megan Campbell and Ander Monson rank 64 one-hit wonders of the 1990s in bracket form and let them square off against each other. You can join in the voting, if you’d like. A song I happen to love somewhat irrationally is up against an indomitable favorite, and with it running through my head all day I came up with some thoughts on why I had to vote for it.

The greats are often tiresome. There’s a certain sterility to them that comes from realizing you were born too late to take part in any interesting conversations to be had about the topic at hand. The Mona Lisa. Anything of Mozart’s. Even the Beatles: whatever joy I felt listening to those greats felt reduced solely by nature of the late 90s air I was breathing.

So often I find myself with a joke to add to a conversation but not the means or the timing to add it when it counts, and so I chew on it and wait and modify it as the time passes and the conversation morphs, say, from brains to minds. To like “You Get What You Give” is to be that person, spitting out a joke well after anyone’s eager to hear it. To hear “You Get What You Give” is to feel the way you do when the joke first hits you, when everything in your world is potential and you feel so good for being smart and ready.

There is no way in 2017 that I can convince you that the New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give” is anything but a pop music footnote. I don’t, simply, have the talent to impart in you the joy I feel every time it plays on a jukebox. What happens in my heart on the opening countoff?the one, the two, the one two three four?can’t be put into useful words, and if I believe in the essay as a form I shouldn’t sleep until I found a way to do it. Instead, I can point to what my body does when the chorus happens. The two, the three-and and the four-and. The compounded syncopation of Gregg Alexander’s vocals is a secret cord tied tight to the root of me. I’m always pulled up dancing like a puppet.

“I’m sick of meaning, I just want to hold you.” This is a line from a newer song that’ll never be a wonder, but it comes to mind now, thinking about what I want to do, which is play “You Get What You Give” for a room of people and raise all of them out of their seats. Some songs are usefully dumb. When I feel bullied by my brain, pop songs are a braver friend, standing up to that monster so that I might feel like other people.

Escapism might be God’s way of righting ourselves. I want to be dumbed by some songs. I put on the New Radicals, and look at the way my teeth bite my lip! Look at what work my hips can accomplish!

How I Came to Change My Mind about Trans People

This is a post inspired in part by Frank Bruni’s “Two Consonants Walk Into a Bar” from Sunday’s NY Times, which itself cites John Aravosis’s “How did the T get in LGBT?” which I’ll refer to below.

I.
In 2007, I was freshly out and Congress was considering whether to add gender identity to the list of categories protected under the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. I was against it. Mostly, if I recall, because I read and was convinced by Aravosis’s argument: what do we gay and bisexual people have in common with trans people, when our identity is formed by sexual orientation and theirs is formed by gender? These are different, but for some reason we’ve been lumped into the same dumb acronym together. Trans people, I felt, were hopping onto our fight, and if they wanted the same rights we were about to get, they needed to fight their own fight for them.

These were ideas I carried around for nearly a decade. We weren’t comrades, us gays and them trans folk. All we had in common was that we weren’t cis-straight people.

II.
The other night, we had friends over to watch the Oscars, and a strange thing happened. It’s not the strange thing everyone’s talking about, the strange thing at the end where the wrong movie was named Best Picture. The one I’m talking about happened about halfway through.^[1] Host Jimmy Kimmel had a bit where he led unsuspecting tourists through the room (they thought they were going to tour a studio or something). Everyone had a phone out. Celebs were kind of enough to take selfies. Kimmel made Aniston give her sunglasses away. Etc. He asked one woman her name, and she said “Yulree. It rhymes with ‘jewelry’.” Kimmel scoffed at this, and when he met her husband Patrick, he said, “That’s a name.”

El, my friend who just came out as trans last month,^[2] was livid at how blatantly Kimmel shamed Yulree for her difference. Our friend, Andy, objected that it had less to do with her ethnicity and more to do with having a strange name, as his white sister does. Furthermore, he felt that overall the left had to calm down these days with the “political correctness.” It led, usefully, to an argument.

My contribution: “political correctness” is itself a conservative idea. We leftists ought to call it what it really is: egalitarianism. Or courtesy. Sympathy. Egalitarianism, though, is too hard a word to soundbyte. “Political correctness” as a term takes one good thing and turns it into what are for a large number of people on Both Sides Of The Aisle two bad things: politics and correcting others.

When we see the act of granting others equal treatment as “being politically correct” we turn empathy into a kind of test to fail. (This is why “check your privilege” is such a lousy clarion call, turning egalitarianism into a shaming competition.) Complaining about “political correctness” means complaining about giving people equal treatment in our discourse. It means we ought not call people what they ask to be called but what we choose to call them. And once you decide not to grant people equal treatment in our discourse, it’s easy not to grant them equal treatment in the workplace or the courtroom.

“Political correctness” favors having an opinion over having an imagination, and how I came to change my mind about trans people was that I stopped having an opinion and started having an imagination.

III.
It happened, in all places, at a writers’ conference. I met a trans person for the first time. In fact, I met two. I had admittedly probing, personal, othering questions they were patient in answering. But the big shift in my thinking happened while sharing a cigarette with my friend, Clutch, after one of the keynote speeches. The conference overall had been short on new ideas. A lot of old dead writers trotted out as models. Clutch blamed this on the utter whiteness of the panelists and attendees and speakers. “Wait a second,” I said. “It’s not like the only new ideas are about race or gender.” That wasn’t their point, they said. Their point was that diversity isn’t just a feelgood move of including people for its own sake. Diversity is what’s needed for the airing and dissemination of new ideas. When everyone in the room looks the same and comes from the same background, you end up with a lot of reminiscing and endorsing old ideas that have worked only for the people in the room.

Trans people, I saw, weren’t different from me so much as different like me. It took me much longer than it should have, but that was the night the LGBT(QIAA) acronym looked small for the first time. Suddenly, I wanted more of us in the room together.

IV.
One debate happening right now is over letting more people into bathrooms together. The president doesn’t want trans people in bathrooms with cis people. I try to imagine where this idea comes from, this fear, or maybe it’s just a concern. It’s easy to see it as coming from transphobia, because we’ve been given no evidence to the contrary. It comes from a fear of change, I imagine. A fear of lost ways. What is a bathroom but a place where for so long men and women have retreated from each other? Maybe retreating from one another is the old way we ought to lose, and all bathrooms should become like the egalitarian shared one on Ally McBeal. There are few things more egalitarian than the human body we all live with; maybe when men hear the sounds of women shitting they might realize they deserve equal pay.

Pissing wherever you want to is a freedom.^[3] And people with freedoms others don’t have are historically grumpy about sharing. If you have uneasiness about a trans person sitting in the stall next to yours, that’s understandable, because new things make many of us uneasy. But imagine being a trans person. Use your imagination. If that itself is difficult, then talk to a trans person. Ask them what they need and why. Whatever opinion you’re holding onto will change, and I promise you’ll be better for it.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

You’ll find a great summary and commentary on the weirdness of this bit here. In short: despite everyone’s phone, the bit was a Vonnegutian nightmare, turning us middle-class people into zoo animals some untouchable alien elite got to gawk at. Or, here:

Hollywood has never prided itself on being in touch with the working class, even when the movies were sometimes about poverty. Hollywood was always supposed to be a thing people wanted. The money, the fame, the power: The Oscars are where we got to see the people from the movies, playing characters based on themselves. We?re supposed to want to be them, or have sex with them. So when a smart writer like John Robb tweets that the ceremony was an ?amazing example of ultra-orthodox cultural neoliberalism? that was ?pure jet fuel for #trumpism?? I think he?s saying that to the millions of people who voted against the pop-cultural elite alliances they saw in Hillary Clinton?s campaign, the Oscars aren?t aspirational. They?re an insult.

↵
El, for what it’s worth, is not only the first trans member of the San Francisco Symphony, but the first trans person to ever play for a major orchestra in the world.↵
I’m thinking here of Taraji P. Henson’s character hoofing it across the NASA campus in Hidden Figures just to pee at the one bathroom designated for “colored women”.↵

Very Good Paragraphs

Haven’t done one of these in a while. This one’s from Gary Greenberg’s stunning review of Charles Foster’s Being a Beast and other recent learning-from-animals books in the Jan 2017 Harper’s (cutting the first sentence as it’s mostly gluework from the prior ?):

…As civilization fails to provide sufficient balm against our loss, as its costs become unbearable for more and more of us, the world’s stink begins, by comparison, to smell like fresh air, and devolution begins to seem attractive?or at least attractive enough to inspire three books on the subject in the same publishing season, which, it is hard not to notice, was also an election season, one in which Americans cast off reason in favor of passion. In its terrifying aftermath, the yearning at the heart of these books for a return to instinct takes on a meaning, and an intensity, their authors could not have intended. Some people will step off the evolutionary ladder into a realm where they can ramble with dogs or goats or badgers, and claim that they’ve become more human in the bargain. But some may land where wild instincts rule. A dog, lest we forget, will gleefully rip your pet cat in two, a billy goat will fuck whatever doe he can get his hooves on, and a fox will eat all your chickens in a heartbeat and call it a perfect day. They will be remorseless for the pain they cause. But at least they can’t be accused of giving up on themselves or one another.

This is some expert-level criticism, not only capable of finding ties among three books (on admittedly related subjects) but to set these books’ concerns amid our own, those arising out of the times we’re finding ourselves confused by. It #resists, in today’s parlance, by looking past the partisan narratives we see retweeted every day in favor of its own reasoned understanding of who and where we are.

Kiss My Ass with Dicker Troy and Josh Fadem

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a comedy show before like the one I saw at Doc’s Lab last night. Typically, standup showcases are hosted by one guy (usually), himself a comic, who does 5 or 10 before bringing out the first comic, and then maybe a joke or two in between. The host is an emcee, which is where the standup comic started, back in the postwar Catskills.

Kiss My Ass is hosted by Josh Fadem and Dicker Troy, a studio driver who grew up on a charcoal farm in Bakersfield. The latter wears a ballcap and dark glasses inside a nightclub and has a braided rattail about as long as a Slim Jim.^[*] Dicker is an amateur DJ and sits at a table with a laptop and sound FX machine, which modifies his already low voice into weird echoes and flangerings between his cueing up such hits as “Red Red Wine” and “Plush.” While he does this, Josh talks to the crowd and gets people excited to see a show. There are no bits?no rehearsed ones at least. It’s all extemperaneous and chaotic.

That chaos and unpredictability is what makes Kiss My Ass such a joy. Dicker is a sharp and quick-witted one-linerman, like a less-precious Mitch Hedberg crossed with Sam Elliott ready for a barfight. Josh rolls with every punch thrown at him, and he knows how to turn the discomfort he himself has instilled in the audience (“I like losing a crowd!” he admitted at one point last night) into a source for more laughs. They’re two comics expert at “being themselves”^[**] on stage.

Which is made all the more apparent when the local comics come up (i.e. when the showcase starts). Chad Opitz begins a joke about Sex on the Beach (the drink) that contrasts it with a drink of his own invention: a Rimjob on the Bus, “which is a PBR where the rim of the can has been licked by a guy with a cold sore.” It’s a fine joke, and comes to us with a fine joke’s standard rhythm and timing. Very few of us in the audience laugh. “See you shoulda played ‘Red Red Wine’ at the punchline,” Opitz tells Dicker.

“Do it again,” Dicker says, working his laptop, and Opitz sets up the joke again. He gets to the punchline, says “cold sore”, and silence. Another beat of silence. Then the drumbeat and “Red Red Wiiiiiine”, and that’s when the room finally laughs.

The old saw that comedy is all about timing might always be true, but Kiss My Ass shows how even this is subjective. Opitz’s act was timed to the second through practice and rehearsal. (Later he had a bit about Robocopera, which was a Robocop opera, which he sung word for word from a thing he’d written and memorized.) On its own, it works fine. On the stage that Dicker and Josh have set, though, it all fell apart. So did DJ Real, the next comic, whose bits involve pre-recorded music and sounds he responds to in perfect time on stage. Dicker’s timing in the “Red Red Wine” moment was traditionally poor timing. Josh often stood and looked at us in silence, patiently waiting for the next idea to come to him.

Their bad timings made the good timings less funny, because too worked.

With the showcased comics, the material is what had been practiced and worked toward perfection. Whereas Dicker and Josh had no material. Came with no material (well, Josh brought a watermelon-sized ball of yarn, but in bringing it on stage he admitted he had no ideas on how to make it funny). And yet they were the funniest people in the room because what they had practiced and worked toward perfection was their selves. Their personas. They spoke from the experience of having thrown themselves at chaos. It’s not quite improv, but it was definitely improv-adjacent. It was trickstery, looser, and I ate it up.

I should say it was also funny. It was so funny I hurt from laughing. Kiss My Ass is off to Portland and Vancouver and Seattle, and if you live anywhere near those places you should go see them.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

Dicker Troy is a character of Johnny Pemberton’s, whom you might know from Fox’s new semi-animated show Son of Zorn that’s pretty funny. Because Kiss My Ass works better when you see Dicker Troy as a real person this post will do the same.↵
Quotes here because neither of these guys is actually being himself. Pemberton is doing a whole character and Fadem off-stage is a much more subdued version of himself. But every comic has a stage persona, and my point here is that these guys are experts at being comfortable on stage as their personas.↵

Why Aren’t I Online More? (With boldface passages for easy skimming!)

Easy:

Public U.S. life now has become one of resistance to the federal government’s continually terrible and dangerous policies, and the most convenient and quickly satisfying arena in which to work out this resistance is social media.
Social media is a lousy and terrible arena for activism and argument. This is for at least two reasons:
1. Posts tend toward brevity (esp. on Twitter or in the 600×600 pixel box of Instagram) and few issues regarding national politics benefit from being discussed in brief, which is what cable news taught those of us who were paying attention.
2. Posts come engineered with the possibility of like- and share-rewards, which reward us not on the content of the post so much as the feeling it rustles up in the post’s viewer, and as such we learn to write posts less with our messy thoughts and feelings in mind and more in terms of how the post will play out to our followers.
I get enough information on what is happening and how to resist from the news I read, and I haven’t been convinced that I need this information sooner or more rapidly than I want it.

But I miss it. I miss the Twitter I came to love in Obama’s second term. I miss irrelevant Twitter, and I miss having a place where irrelevance could be given free rein. I get that times are different now, but I reject, I think, the idea that different times call for unilaterally different behavior.

I, too, am worried and insecure about the future, and about the future’s total unforeseeability. I acknowledge that I am the source of these feelings, that they’re mine. Therefore, I’m in charge of deciding whether and how to act on them. The worry I’ve had is that by being irrelevant and silly on social media I would appear irresponsible and ignorant, a kind of head-in-the-sand apologist/Pollyanna. But I’m not in charge of how I’m read, I’m in charge of how I am.

In short: if now’s not the time for jokes then when ever is?

I Got My Picture Taken

I’m leaving MacDowell soon after four weeks here, and one of the many generous things they offer you is a photo shoot. During mine, the photographer had me pretend to be working. Here is what I typed:

New project. She?s taking my picture. I keep laughing. Can?t imagine I?m looking good. Telling bad stories. My waddle must be shitty, too. Never know wheter to close my mouth or not. Or keep it open. So I don?t know what else to do much here alos. My eyes, too. Stern brow? Gentle look of curiosity? Look right at the camera? Or here at my laptop screen? I guess here and not at her. Here. How?s my posture? Hopefully it?s beeter this way. Proud chest

For the record, my waddle in the pics was shitty.

Here I Am Bragging About My Teaching

Did my semiannual review of my students’ course evaluations this morning, which at my school are complex and quantitative and?if you’re the sort of person who sees your score and then sees your school’s average score and maniacally compares them free of any context, even if the thing scored doesn’t apply in any way to your subject?unhelpful. Sometimes, but rarely, do students write in qualitative comments. For one course, one student did. Here’s part of what they said:

His feedback is so helpful for students needing to make revisions to their written work. In rare instances when perhaps the dialogue exchange isn’t helpful, he hears himself not being helpful and fixes it.

Reading that was one of the proudest moments I’ve had as a teacher.

One of the last things people who know or are partnered/related to me would commend me for is my communication skills, but early on in my teaching ? especially when I started teaching nonfiction ? I realized that listening to what students want to do with their writing is more important than what I think they should do. Being clear about the difference, being clear about how what I think they should try to do stems from what I hear they want to do, is always a challenge. It’s one of the hardest parts of teaching artists how to grow.

So here I am bragging about my teaching, but with the greater point of pointing out something all writing teachers should be working toward.

The End of Anti-Intellectualism

I.
Here’s something I found today in my notebook:

Anti-Intellectualism has always been a part of America, and no one?s done a more patriotic job of carrying that banner than its creative writers. We?re told, in craft books and MFA classes, to ?write down the bones,? whatever that is. Maybe this is because people who feel things very easily are the people who most often become writers, but I?ve never been such a person. Feeling an emotion is as difficult for me as finding the derivative of a function by using the definition of a derivative, or swimming a swimmer?s mile?I can do it only after a lot of concentration and effort. But ideas come at me in flashes ten times a second, it feels like. Going through CW school I was taught to treat all this as a kind of noise I had to fight through or silence to get at something truer, as though the fire that lit up my brain was the wrong kind of fire, something showy and inauthentic.

What was it I was feeling?

II.
The passage is labeled “excerpt for Ackerley blog post” but I’ve long since forgotten what post I must have been planning. I re-read, for class, J.R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself the other week. You can read my thoughts on it here. In sum: Ackerley’s book is great because it performs the act of thinking more explicitly on the page than any memoir I’ve read, and to me the art of memoir lies never in the events recalled but in the process/method/textures of the recall itself. Here’s how I put it specifically:

The book swims forward and backward in time in order to work all this stuff out, and in doing so it?s rarely scene-y. It?s thinky. It?s also a masterpiece. I was stunned by the book. I thought, I?ll never be this smart to put such a book together.

That emphasis is in the original, but I’ll repeat it here: I’ll never be this smart to put such a book together. I want in this post to talk about where smarts fit in with writing.

III.
Sometimes I look at the world of “creative writing” the way I look at my own country. How did I end up here? When will I fit in? This goes doubly for the genre I write most: nonfiction. Searching Twitter for smart memoir, the most recent tweet was back on Nov 19. Shrewd memoir goes all the way back to Oct 29.

But Heartbreaking memoir? Dec 4. Sad memoir? Dec 5. Beautiful memoir, moving memoir, and haunting memoir were all used in the past two days. Brave memoir? Seven hours ago.

When we talk about the hallmark of the genre we use emotional terms, even though the only job of the memoir is to remember.

IV.
There is a general confusion about where the art of memoir lies, one best captured by John D’Agata:

If one were to examine recent high-profile nonfiction book reviews … one might venture to argue … that the reception of nonfiction literature is also often focused on the books? autobiographical facts?the illness, the incest, the poverty, the depression, the rape, the heartbreak, the screwing of the family dog?rather than on the strategies employed to dramatize those facts, rather than on the ?how? of their tellings, instead of only their ?who,? only their ?what,? only their ?where,? their ?when,? their ?why.? Only their facts.

Dave Eggers?s writing in his popular memoir about the conviction with which he raised his younger brother after the deaths of their parents, for example, was described by The Toronto Star in 2000 as having ?gorgeous conviction.? Mary Karr?s writing in her memoir about growing up in the rough east Texas town of Leechfield among the tough-minded family and friends who raised her was described in The Nation in 1997 as ?rough and tough.? Frank McCourt?s writing in his memoir about the searing conditions of his childhood in Limerick, Ireland, was described in the Detroit Free Press in 1995 as ?searing.? In fact, nearly every review describing Frank McCourt?s writing seemed to insist on linking the qualities of the prose directly to the condition of the author?s childhood, as in, for example, The Clarion Ledger?s review??Frank McCourt has seen hell, but found angels in his heart??or USA Today?s review??McCourt has an astonishing gift for remembering the details of his dreary childhood??or The Boston Globe?s review??A story so immediate, so gripping in its daily despairs, stolen smokes, and blessed humor, that you want to thank God that young Frankie McCourt survived it so he could write the book.?

I think people read to feel things they might otherwise not. Or to feel that their feelings aren’t strange. I’ve never read this way, but for years I’ve been trying to write this way.

V.
I’ve got this residency coming up in January. Four weeks in a cabin in New Hampshire to write whatever I want to. I don’t yet know what I’ll work on, but regardless of what it is I know I have a job to do?shut up the voice in my head that says I’m being too smart here. That says I’m thinking and not feeling. That says my writing is no good because it won’t be called “brave” or “haunting”.

I’m committed to the idea that there’s a form of artistic bravery and risk that’s not tied to confessing, or evoking in the reader sympathetic emotions. I have to be, because otherwise my work doesn’t succeed not because of what I’ve done but because of who I am. And that’s too scary a possibility to consider.

UPDATE: The news that OUP chose post-truth (“relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”) as 2016’s word of the year helps me read the above as a kind of cri de coeur. Stop trusting your emotions, folks. They’ll never not betray you.

On It Probably Being Time Once Again to Disable Social Media Accounts

I.
I, along with dozens of online thinkpiece writers, feel that Facebook and Twitter helped sway the election for the worse. Trump trolled the U.S into voting for him, realizing early on that the presidency could be had for a lot cheaper than folks in the past had spent on TV ads. All he needed was to be loud and passionate. When the experience you focus on hourly unfolds before you as mute text in the same font, noise becomes very attractive, even as it’s repellant.

The 2016 election was the most emotionally charged, intellectually bankrupt election I lived through. Emotional charge + intellectual bankruptcy is what gets you mad likes/retweets.

II.
Twitter isn’t any one thing. Everyone builds the Twitter they deserve by following whom they choose to follow. The problem for me is that I don’t know what kind of Twitter to build where reading it will expand my understanding of, or wonder at, the world. These days all Twitter does is make the world feel flatter and less colorful.

It’s a shame. I’ve always preferred it over Facebook because of how I felt the 140-character constraint challenged us to be interesting in fewer words. Also, following is a much less loaded activity than “friending”?kudos to s/he who has the strength on FB to unfriend their actual friends. For people on FB, it must feel weird to be friends in real life and not on FB. But then again the people I’m friends with in real life are different on Facebook. On Facebook, I don’t want to be friends with anyone.

So now I’m torn between using social media as a broadcast medium for these blog posts and other news, and leaving it all in full. I did this once, in 2012. I left Facebook after being an early adopter (back when one had to have an .edu address to join). People were confused and some people were mad. For years after most people assumed I’d unfriended them and blocked or hid in some way. People assumed I did this silent, cruel, passive-aggressive thing. That I had just disabled my account wholly seemed unfathomable.^[&]

III.
What’s great is that right as Twitter has become almost intolerable?today everyone feels impelled to share the same opinion about the VP-elect’s reception at a Broadway musical?it’s also tripled the number of promoted ads I now have to see, all of them autoplay videos. What’s the draw? How would I sell Twitter to a non-user?

It’s an app/website where people share hasty opinions in one or two sentences, without nuance, between flashy vid clips for Hollywood retreads and junk food items. Also a lot of reactions to the nonsense tweets of celebrities and slow-witted politicians.

“Having an opinion is so boring,” one of my closest (real life) friends once told me. He’s in many ways a role model for me, and today he’s in the hospital, and I’m worried about his health. It’s one of the wisest things I’ve ever been told. To me, imagination trumps opinion every time. And nothing kills my imagination like logging on.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

Though I killed my personal profile, I forgot that I’d made a profile for Carl Akeley, the father of modern taxidermy, to promote The Authentic Animal. This is how I’ve since been a lurker and then, with a new book to promote this summer, a revived intermittent user.↵

I can’t Sleep

Chalk it up to a number of things. Election results. Flying to the east coast the weekend Daylight Savings Time ended. A court date yesterday N & I spent a very long time preparing for. I fell asleep (maybe? never clear whether I was out or just trying to be) past 1:30 last night and woke up for no good reason at 4:00. Around 5:30 I got out of bed and went to read on the couch.

Right now it’s 8:15.

These days I’m reading a biography of Talking Heads. David Byrne has been a hero of mine at least as far back as my senior year of high school, when I wrote about him and Warhol and Picasso in a college application essay. The movie he directed, True Stories, and the overall embrace of pop culture that it and his music presented which somehow also made room for critiquing it,^[x] is what helped me see DeLillo’s White Noise as a feeble thing written with the critical acumen of a dull pencil when assigned it in graduate school.

Talking Heads’ story is a sad one about three art school friends, two of whom get married after the third serially ditches them for collaborators he’s more excited by. Where I am in the book is they just put out Remain in Light, which is both their most collaboratively created record and the one (if their biographer is to be believed) with the skeeviest denial of credit-giving. Tina and Chris did the cover up at MIT, but all the credit went to the design firm that laid out the liner notes. After agreeing on a “Songs by” credit with all four members + Eno in alphabetical order, the first pressing said, “All songs by David Byrne, Brian Eno, and Talking Heads.” Even, you can see up there, their faces are masked.

It’s not my favorite of their records,^[y] but it’s the one I’ve been listening to the most these days. I don’t have a point in this post. I just need to wake up to get my day started. I need to read students’ thesis work closely enough to understand what it’s trying to do and come up with constructive tips for revision. This is a kind of collaborative work.

I have periodically in the past collaborated with writers and artists. The Cupboard was created with the idea of being an anonymous collaborating collective, but that iteration never took off. What I like about collaboration is making something that’s mine and yet new to me, that’s something I wouldn’t’ve been able to make, stuck as I am in my own brain.

It is, though, a vulnerable place to put myself in. To have another person negate a thing I added in the pursuit of creation is scary, and when it happens it hurts and makes me feel stupider than I am. I imagine it’s like co-parenting a child. Maybe collaboration is a way to grow up.

I’m led, in the Heads biography, to sympathize with Tina Weymouth, who seemed only to want to make art with her friends for the rest of her life. Is it a form of arrested development? There’s a tie between collaboration and open relationships I could make if I were better rested.

Right now “Listening Wind” is about to end. Byrne is singing about the wind in his heart and the dust in his head. Once again he’s saying it better than I can.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

“I discovered that it’s more fun to like things, that you can kind of like things and still be gently critical, without blind acceptance,” Byrne told Time in 86.↵
That would be More Songs About Buildings and Food.↵

Whiteness and Gayness and Americanness

I.
This week I’ve thought about my country the way I’ve imagined people with abusive or deadbeat parents think about their abusive or deadbeat parents. (I mostly know such people from bad movies.) No matter who they are or what they do, the parent will continually let them down. The parent has too long a history of putting their own needs before the child’s. The parent has never really been there for the child. Eventually, the child gives up on the parent.

The question then is to what extent I give up on my country.

Then I remember that only 27 percent of eligible voters chose the president-elect last week. That’s 18 percent of the total population. When I say “America” or “Americans”?when I look around and wonder whom to feel betrayed by?I almost never know what I mean.

But this week, of all the things I am, I’m most ashamed of being an American.

II.
Reading Nell Irvin Painter’s NY Times op-ed this morning made me turn to whiteness. “Who defines American whiteness right now?” Painter asks. “How will white people who didn?t support Mr. Trump in 2016 construe their identity as white people when Trumpists, including white nationalists, Nazis, Klansmen and [Breitbart News], have posted the markers?”

I’ll be damned if I’m going to let myself get lumped in with those fucks. But I don’t have an answer to Painter’s question of how to construe my identity, how to publicly and visibly be read as the sort of white man who would never want himself represented by the president-elect. Who would never see his race as something noble and pure, something he needed to protect.

I used to roll my eyes at the A in LGBTQIA. Unless you’ve been hated for who you want to fuck, don’t horn in on our acronym. But I’ve changed. One path I can see through the miasma of race and history I’m lead through when I consider my fearful brethren and white shame ends at being, and maybe identifying, as a capital-A Ally.

It’s not horning in on someone else’s struggle, it’s showing solidarity with that struggle. When you love people different from you and see them being hated, hurt, and killed, wouldn’t you want to do something? I want to do something. For me, the days of criticizing others acting out of love might be over. Thanks, Trump.

III.
Ally thoughts have led me to queer rainbow thoughts. Specifically these:

I am, for the first time, worried about spending the holidays in South Dakota this year.
I no longer want to pass as straight.

The problem with the former is one Neal and I have talked about and will face together, surrounded there by his family which is full of people whom I know love us. The problem with the latter is that I don’t know what to do.

I never had the conscious goal to pass as straight (when it happens, that is; God knows I’m no Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor). It’s mostly a factor of straight folks’ naiv?te. Or how shabbily I dress. I was also maybe afraid to be different. Now what I feel most is the need for solidarity among the majority of us who did not want this man in charge, and I want this solidarity to be visible.

I want that 18 percent’s face slapped with my gayness. I want to wear pink T-shirts with all-caps messages on them. Or hold Neal’s hand more often in public. Or tattoo BUTTSLUT across my knuckles. Of course, I run into an immediate problem: What does “look more gay” even mean? Aren’t I engaged in the struggle to enlarge the common conception of what “a gay man” looks like?

As soon as I “look gay” to someone who doesn’t know me, I enforce something false at best (I dress the way I am) and homophobic at worst. Other than sucking dick in public, there might be nothing I can do. Is this a kind of victory?

IV.
Maggie Nelson read at USF last week, and she kindly signed my copy of The Argonauts. “I want to give you some seeds,” she said, slipping inside the front cover a packet with morning glories on the front. I thought it was a quirky gesture until I got home and read the printed message she’d taped to the front. Maybe you’ve seen it passed around online these days, but it was the first I’d heard it:

They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.

Why I Write

I had to teach a class the morning after election day, and knowing my students and myself I knew it wouldn’t work to discuss “Consider the Lobster” and talk about the uses of research in nonfiction. So I went to church in the morning to pray over what to do and I was reminded of George Orwell’s essay “Why I Write” (PDF), and I thought, let’s talk about that.

I read it aloud and we talked about it. We talked about the election. We talked about the role of the writer in society. We talked about the role of the writer in the self. I asked students to write essays titled “Why I Write” and said that the only way to do this wrong is to be false about it. If you write to get revenge, write about that. If you write to explore erotic fantasies about your junior-high classmates, write about that.

I said, “And think right now. Why do you write right now? It’s not a contract you need to hold yourself to.”

I invited them to share the essays with me. A couple actually did. Here’s the one I wrote:

Why I Write

I am sitting in the chair I sit in in my living room and Neal is around the edge of the wall in the kitchen area and I have an idea for dinner. We should, I think, make frozen Chinese food. Neal, though, may have his own idea for dinner and it may be better than my idea for dinner. So I think that I should ask whether he has any ideas for dinner. I say it in my head: Do you have any ideas for dinner? I wait patiently until he comes back into the living room.

?Drrvnideusdurn?? I say, my tongue a slug in my dumb mouth.

?What was that?? he asks.

?Doyouhaveanyideasfordinner?? I repeat.

*

Once, in an election year summer, I was on a porch with a man telling me that my generation was going to bring about the end of the American Democratic Project. He and I were born within a decade of each other. I was trying to say that I wanted to vote for the candidate who inspired me the most, but he was telling me I had only one choice and that was to vote against the candidate he feared the most. He has, I think, been made afraid by messages and images he sees on TV and the Internet. I say instead, ?You?re, like, bullying me,? and I leave the porch.

*

Sometimes, certain words strung in a certain order have a kind of beauty to them. Here?s one I discovered and chewed over in my head for a while just last week: Help me not to feel that people feel that way about me. There is a feeling there, and an idea about the self and how the self is seen and maybe created by others, that I hadn?t known or understood until the words came to me in a rough but interesting order and I reshaped them into that sentence. The process of doing this is what I think of when I hear the word ?writing.? Writing isn?t just the record of thinking it is the mechanism through which I think, and what I have found over the last decade of doing it is that aesthetics?say, the careful attention paid to words? sounds and effects?can lead me to new truths.

This is ancient, this idea. It is at least Keatsianly ancient: beauty is truth and truth beauty. It has the pleasingness of facts and folk wisdoms and what I?ve for a long time erroneously called ?universal truth?, but it is only partially true, and at times dangerously untrue. There are many strings of certain words in certain orders that have a beauty to them on their own, but the problem with words is that they signify, and some beautiful words create lies, or obfuscate truths.

A not nefarious example: once, I heard on the radio a eulogistic essay for a newly dead coach. The man reading it was a longtime sportswriter. It ended with the line, “People talk about someone being a gentleman and a scholar. Well, he was a gentleman and a coach.” It had, I could hear, the sound and feel of a beautiful ending, but it said, in the end, nothing. The sportswriter let his beautiful language take over and get in the way of my understanding his subject.

*

Some beautiful words tell truths and some beautiful words tell lies. Why I write is to know the difference, and to use that difference to be understood. I speak and no one listens. I write it down and people know it to be true. That?s Rene Ricard. Replace ?know? in his second sentence with ?feel? and I begin to get a sense of why I write.

Why I Voted for Hillary Clinton

The long and short of it: I didn’t want to feel more alone.

For much of my life I had desires about who I wanted to touch and see naked that nothing in the culture around me supported or made me feel good about. I was gay, in other words, and while I didn’t grow up around homophobes I grew up adjacent to enough homophobes to know that what I desired made me worrisomely different from people. It kept me out of what I saw as the community. One of the more courageous things I’ve done was decide to leave that community and find another where I could feel happy being who I am.

I’m in a place where I might need to find another new community, but I’m afraid of leaving behind the one I’ve spent my life among.

You might argue with me how political orientations aren’t the same as sexual, that the latter are fixed by biology more than the former, but I can point you to studies that argue the opposite. Regardless of which of us is right, this is how 2015/2016 has felt for me: like being in the closet again. When I’ve told people that I was voting for a third-party candidate?maybe Jill Stein, probably Gloria La Riva?I’ve been met with bemused condescension at best and verbal shaming and belittling at worst.

2016’s biggest lesson: people on the left are just as intolerant as people on the right. There are shitty, hate-filled people voting alongside me this year.

People have called what I’ve wanted to do “protest voting” or “throwing my vote away.” That has felt at times like hearing I’m “going through a phase” or that “maybe I’m just not good at bedding women.” I’ve found very few people willing to listen to where I am and how I’ve come to my decision, that when I look at the Socialist Party’s platform I agree with every single point, and when I imagine working to make such a future possible I’m filled with hope and happiness.

But when I was finishing my ballot?five pages long, front and back, full of local and state-wide referenda I researched one-by-one?I had one more decision to make. I had to choose someone for president, and after days of putting the decision off I chose the person everyone else I know in my life is choosing. I chose, this time, to stay in the community.

Or maybe “stay” isn’t the right verb. I didn’t leave my community when I came out, I just clarified my position within that community. That’s why I’m glad, I think, to have voted for Clinton: I can do the political work I see making me happy and fulfilled within the very community (i.e. the Democratic Party) I see as problematic.

Also, I’m happy to be part of the public that put the first woman in the White House. This morning, in church, I found myself thinking about 2024. (I know, yikes.) In 2024, the 18-year-olds who will be voting for the first time will only know a U.S. that’s been led by a man of color and a woman. White men running the country will seem quaint, maybe old fashioned. I don’t think white men are per se a problem, but I’m keeping those 18-year-olds, the world they might help bring about, in mind on election day.

We’ll keep doing things as a country that give me shame. We’ll keep killing civilians in drone attacks. We’ll keep protecting corporate profits at the cost of public health and financial security. We’ll keep ignoring environmental destruction and putting guns in the hands of anyone who wants them. I know that if I want things to be different I have to work outside the election booth to get it done. I hope some of you in my life will join me.

How Not to Write a Statement of Purpose for MFA School

caveat 1.
I’m one person with strong ideas, so read all of the below with as much skepticism as helps. Also: nothing in here can guarantee you’ll get into the MFA program of your choice. Your writing sample is going to do the major lifting there.

But I’ve been reading MFA applications for five years now at two very different programs, and as a person with strong ideas I see the same misfires come up enough that I thought I might write this guide to help. It’s a weird thing to write, an SOP, particularly when your purpose for MFA school seems ignoble. You’re out of options. You’re afraid of office environments. You’re sick of the town you live in. You’re tired of just reading books but have no idea how to write them, and you trust higher education so much that you want to run back there to learn how.

Those were pretty much my purposes. They tell you why I wanted to go to grad school, but they don’t tell you what I planned to do there, which is one of the things I’m looking for when I read SOPs.

what I’m looking for.
I want to know how we’re going to work together. The best SOPs give me a sense of what kind of student the applicant will be in and out of the classroom. It tells me what the work alone can’t. I’ve found this comes down to two data points I always want in an SOP but rarely get:

A sense of the applicant’s plan for how they’re going to spend their time here.
Some evidence the applicant is thinking critically about their own work.

your plan.
So many applicants treat the SOP as a kind of defense: explain to readers why they are most deserving of admission. Or even crazier: why they desire it more than any other applicant. You are not in competition with other applicants. (Not in this way, at least.) So, never begin with a story about how you’ve always wanted to write, or were born a writer, or a reader, how at a young age you wrote poems or novels or read the backs of cereal boxes. I just don’t care about it. And why I don’t care is that I’ve never been shown how a lifelong love for writing translates to success in graduate work. The logic of it seems wrong. People come to our program having discovered writing very late in life, with maybe two years of experience behind them, and they succeed as incredibly hard-working students who improve dramatically in two years and go off to write the rest of their lives. Are they for some reason less deserving of admission because they didn’t write their first illustrated novel at age eight?

I was one of them. I came to my grad program after just like a year or two of thinking I wanted to try to be a writer. So maybe I’m reacting personally here, but even if I am, the truth of SOPs is that 75 percent of them begin with some story on how the applicant has been writing since they were little. Maybe even 80 percent. And if there’s one thing you shouldn’t do in an SOP, it’s something that everyone else is also doing. The SOP is just as much a place to stand out as the sample is (though see “more don’t” #1 below).

It does help to give me a sense of who you are and how you came to want to apply to our program. But it’s at most 20%-of-your-total-SOP important.

Instead, focus on your plan. Not why you want to come here but how you imagine spending your time once you’re here. You have two or three short stories and you’d really like to write enough to end up with a full collection, but you don’t know how to do that. You’ve written a lot of poems but they all look the same and have the same sense of the line and you’d like to expand your understanding of what else poetry is and can do. You want to focus for two hard years on your novel. You want to dabble in every genre and emerge a well-rounded writer. Whatever it is. Ask yourself: what’s the best way I can imagine spending my time in my MFA? Then tell me about it. Talk to me about the work you want to work on.

caveat 2.
With your plan, always be personal, honest, and specific. Write what is honestly relevant to you and where you are, not what you think I want to hear from “an applicant”. And by “specific” I mean avoid the generic ideas everyone puts in their SOPs. Everyone wants to find themselves immersed in a community of writers. Everyone wants the time to focus on their own writing. Everyone wants to grow in a supportive environment. Don’t do what everyone else is doing in the SOP.

your own work.
So much of MFA instruction involves thinking critically about other people’s creative work that it helps to see your ability to do this kind of work with your own. Looking specifically at your writing sample, or at the stuff you’re writing more generally, what do you feel are its strengths, and what do you feel you need help with? What is your work doing that other writers’ work is not doing? What are you concerned with as a writer that you wonder why others aren’t as concerned with? Do you celebrate a kind of regionalism in your work? Is it important that you depict the lives of sex-positive people, given the oppressive role of shaming in our culture? Is it time, do you think, for a return to the 5? essay form?^[*] And don’t be afraid to talk about weaknesses. We want to know what we can help you with. Do you find dialogue a challenge? Does it feel like your essays are too narrow in focus, or that you rely too much on outside research?

Knowing you’re thinking critically about your writing tells me you’re ready to be a writing student.

why us?
It’s often a good idea to include some explanation on why you’re applying to that program specifically. This is tricky, because you’re probably applying to multiple programs. Yes, I think you should tailor your SOP to each individual program. Don’t use the same reasons for every school you’re applying to. Don’t just find-replace to swap our University of Iowa with University of Michigan or wherever you want to apply. Again (see above), know that everyone else is doing this.^[?]

Instead say something honest. Most people want to come to USF because they love San Francisco. That’s fine. That’s 100% perfectly fine and well and good. We hope to be the best MFA program in the Bay Area. We actively try to make connections to SF’s literary history and community. If that’s the only reason you’re applying, great. Fine. Well and good. It’s specific. If you sincerely like that we have cross-genre courses, or something else you’ve found on our Web site, also great.

But don’t blow smoke up our asses. Just be honest. With everyone. If you want to go to Iowa because it’s the oldest and most prestigious MFA program in the country, great. It’s your loss, but say that.

more don’ts.
The SOP, I feel, is not the place to show off your creativity. Your writing sample is the place to show off your creativity. This is the place to show off your teachability. Or if that sounds too passive or Orwellian, then think of it as the place to show your readiness to learn and work. So can it with the vivid verbs and dramatized moments of discovery.

Maybe don’t mention any faculty members by name. It can be a bummer to read an SOP that mentions many of my colleagues by name but not me. Especially when the SOP lists every single NF professor except me. Do I get over it? Of course. Can you ever know who will read your SOP? No. Is it your job not to damage the fragile psyche of neurotic, insecure writer-teachers? No. But still: it’s a bummer. Best not to bum me out before I’ve read your sample.

Don’t say that getting your MFA will help you realize your dream of teaching, especially at the college level. This makes us feel bad because it’s untrue. MFA degrees don’t guarantee anything in this job market, and most of the time there’s nothing we faculty members can do about it. That’s a dean- or state-admin-level problem. If you want to teach, it’s not impossible, but use the SOP to focus on your time in the program, not what you’ll hope will come after. (So don’t talk about wanting an agent or book deal, either. There’ll be time to get there once you’re in.)

caveat 3.
I should say I’ve never passed on an applicant because of anything they wrote in an SOP. Again, it’s the writing sample that matters. Also, I’ve never made the lone decision on an application. Both programs I’ve taught in required at least two readers for each application because a colleague might see something I didn’t in an applicant, and vice versa. It’s hard to find this out, but if the school you’re applying to doesn’t put at least two eyes on your application, don’t try to go there. (At Iowa, students working toward MFA degrees read your application, btw.)

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

There are plenty of shitty writing professors out there who will read this in an SOP and think, I can’t possibly work with someone who doesn’t see that the way of writing I’ve built my career on is the only way to write. And then potentially pass on your application. So there’s danger, potentially, in following this advice, but wouldn’t you rather study with people who respect your tastes as a student writer, and who understand they’ll continue to change? A visiting poet once told me a story about a professor at Iowa who won’t allow anything other than realist fiction in her workshops, because to her that’s the only real literature worth writing. “And I won’t say her name,” he said, “but it rhymes with Marilynne Robinson.”↵
And sometimes poorly. It’s always a shame when we at USF get an SOP that includes a line like “…which is why I think I’ll be a perfect addition to the MFA program at the University of Minnesota.” Triple-check those SOPs, folks!↵

Art is a Gift

One thing I like the most about Goodreads, as a Goodreads Author, is how the site regularly does book giveaways. The idea that I can give a book or two to a stranger and maybe they’ll read it is something very special. I don’t imagine I have any strangers reading this blog, but on the chance that you need or would like a free signed copy of If You Need Me I’ll Be Over There mailed to your home, here’s a giveaway you’ve got one month from today to enter.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

If You Need Me I'll Be Over There

by Dave Madden

Giveaway ends October 23, 2016.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

And if you already have or don’t need a signed copy of If You Need Me I’ll Be Over There, maybe you can go to Goodreads or Amazon and leave a review? It would mean a lot to me.

Thank you, friends.

The Long, Dark Night of the Nascent Queer

I.
Just before the fall semester hit me like a wave I’d underestimated, I finished Randall Kenan’s^[1] A Visitation of Spirits, and I’ve been wanting to write some things about it. Much of the book follows Horace Cross, a teenager from rural North Carolina, throughout a night where a demon leads him through the sites of his past as Horace struggles with his gayness and what it might mean for his future. The demon is real, tangible, manifest. There’s also an angel. What kept me reading was the way Randall took this night of self-reckoning and rendered it as a battle between the forces of good and evil in a way that never felt overwrought.

It didn’t feel overwrought because it felt so familiar.

II.
I want to tell you the story of the night I woke up gay.

I was living in Lincoln, Nebraska, having moved there just months prior to start learning how to be a fiction writer. I’d recently left Pittsburgh, where I’d lived for 7 years, dated one woman for 6 months, and went on single dates with a number of other women before finding excuses not to follow up with date 2. In Lincoln, the plan was to find the right girlfriend to help me redefine myself, which had been the plan when I’d moved to Pittsburgh to college.

In other words, I kept running away from being forced to look critically at the porn I liked and the things I thought about alone in bed.

Early in the spring semester I asked Heather out on a date. She was a fellow MA student, a regular at the bars I liked, and we’d both been told by mutual friends that we were interested in each other. I suggested we go to a dive bar I liked, the sort of place it would never occur anyone to ever suggest going on a first date. But then again, I wasn’t thinking about setting any sort of mood other than drinky-social. We talked the whole night and had a great time. She dropped me off at my place, and I went inside.

Then the anxiety hit. The same fear that hit me every time I’d come home from a date. If things continue to go well, she’s going to want to sleep with me. What would she think, I wondered, when my body didn’t respond the way my brain wanted it to? What would she tell other people?

I turned out the lights and I lay down in my bed but I couldn’t fall asleep. I was 24 years old and every day of my life had been a lie I kept telling. That night, I’d turn from side to side, and then back on my back. I’d close my eyes or I’d leave them open. Either way, I felt the same. I felt like I was falling. It was the constant sensation of sinking deeper and deeper into the bed, as though I was falling away from the normal world.

III.
A Visitation of Spirits takes Horace through a haunting of his past, much like the first third of A Christmas Carol. He’s there watching the scene but unable to affect it. It’s not exactly a falling (he moves forward through it), but throughout his long, dark night he’s not exactly in control. I recognized it immediately. I can’t say this experience is universal, that all queer people have this kind of sinking, but I did.

Neal did, too. Though his long, dark night happened years before mine did, far earlier in his life than mine, he remembers it as a sleepless night of sinking slowly and endlessly into his bed. We shared this with each other very early in our relationship, maybe the second month. It made me fall in love with him, knowing exactly what he’d been through.

That night was so terrible, so full of regret and hatred for the person I’d been and yet wouldn’t let myself be, but all the same I was happy to relive it while reading Randall’s book, if only to see that I maybe wasn’t alone. And also to be reminded that I eventually came through it (things go worse for Horace). At some point that night I saw that all I had to do was make a decision. I could be like everyone else, be the person I felt others expected me to be, or I could try to be happy. Put that way, it wasn’t much of a decision at all.

That morning, I got out of bed a gay man.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

I had the privilege of being Randall’s fellow at Sewanee this summer, and much of that privilege involved getting to watch him read and get right at the heart of a story’s chief concerns and how the writer at hand might revise toward them. It was like surgery, but with a kind of elegance and a continual list of books to look into.↵

The ‘If You Need Me I’m Totally Going To Be There’ Summer Book Tour ? Now Coast-to-Coast!

(Not an official name.)

Announcing additional dates for my tour, reading from If You Need Me I’ll Be Over There, a collection of stories about everyday people trying their best. If you’re near any of these cities this summer, come on out. I’d love to see you if we’re friends, or meet you if we’re not friends yet.

Omaha, NE*
The Bookworm
Wednesday July 6, 6pm

Minneapolis, MN*
Magers & Quinn
Thursday July 7, 7pm

Milwaukee, WI*
Boswell Book Company
Friday July 8, 7pm

Chicago, IL*
The Book Cellar
Saturday July 9, 6pm

Iowa City, IA*
Prairie Lights
Sunday July 10, 2pm

Des Moines, IA*
Beaverdale Books
Monday July 11, 6pm

Lincoln, NE*
Indigo Bridge Books
Tuesday July 12, 7pm

Washington, D.C.
Upshur Street Books
Sunday, July 17, 5pm

Sewanee, TN
Sewanee Writers’ Conference
July 19 ? July 31

San Francisco, CA?
Green Apple Books (on 9th Ave)
Tuesday, August 2, 7:30pm

Berkeley, CA?
Pegasus Books
Wednesday, August 3, 7:30pm

Portland, OR?
Mother Foucault’s Bookshop
Thursday, August 4, 7pm

San Francisco, CA**
The Booksmith
Thursday, September 8

* With Tyrone Jaeger and Theodore Wheeler
? With Amina Gautier and Theodore Wheeler
** With Kate Folk, John Jodzio, and Kara Vernor

“No Sky” ? Guided by Voices

I was a late fan to GBV, and after years and years of Bee Thousand supremacy in my fandom,^[*] their Under the Bushes Under the Stars has usurped all their records as my favorite. I was surprised that this song’s tabs weren’t posted online anywhere, and then surprised that I was able to figure it out. Lots of open chording.

Tune down a half step (EbAbDbGbBbEb), which everyone should always be doing anyway.

Play all chords with open, ringing B and e strings, sliding the E/powerchord shape up and down the neck.

INTRO RIFF:

  E     A           B
e-0--s--0-0-0-0--s--0-0-
B-0--s--0-0-0-0--s--0-0-
G-1--s--6-6-6-6--s--8-8-
D-2--s--7-7-7-7--s--9-9-
A-2--s--7-7-7-7--s--9-9-
E-0--s--0-0-0-0--s--0-0-

INTRO/BRIDGE: same open E-A-B chords

VERSE:
A                                  E
Seen you around, yeah. I wanted to call you around (x2)

BRIDGE:
E                                A              B
     Could you, could you keep a secret from me, yeah? (x2)

VERSE

CHORUS:
A                            G       Bb
When I'm alone, I can see no sky. (x2)

BRIDGE (repeat to fade)

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

While I was supposed to’ve been writing the taxidermy book I instead spent some months in the spring of 2009 recording, track by track, this record, titling it, stupidly, Me Thousand. It’s been heard only by close friends who don’t judge.↵

Laughing from Tragedy and Horror

I.
Early Sunday, as everyone knows by now, a man went into a gay club and shot more than 50 people with an assault rifle. I woke up to the news. I tell myself not to go online before I’ve gotten out of bed, but that morning I did, and I saw the news, and I didn’t know what to think, so I stopped thinking. I saw that Orlando, where the shooting happened, was low on blood, desperate for donors, and I thought about how gay men continue to be barred from donating blood in this country, and then I stopped thinking about that.

Neal and I had a busy day planned. We’re redecorating?which sounds fancier and more expensive than what it really is: we’re swapping out beat-up furniture that’s gone through two moves with replacements he’s finding on the cheap through Craigslist. It’s requiring a lot of loading and unloading of our Volvo. Renting moving vans by the hour via apps. Our place, after three years, is slowly coming together.

II.
More and more I’m coming to adopt?or maybe it’s that I’m coming to trust?an absurdist view of life. I’ve been worried it was making me colder, harsher, and more cynical than I’ve always been. But yesterday I stopped worrying.

Here’s what happened. We were watching Veep,^[1] where this season a jackass character named Jonah is being puppetstringed into running for a vacant congressional seat in New Hampshire so that he could help vote to keep Selina Meyer in the presidency. In last night’s episode, Jonah shot himself in the foot while on a televised hunt, and his opponent?who also was his 2nd-grade teacher?commented afterward that he should be more careful. That guns are dangerous.

Despite trailing her in polls by double-digits, he turns around and wins the election. Why? Because the NRA began running ads that pinpointed his opponent as being?with her comment about their danger?anti-gun.

It’s Christmastime in this episode, strangely (given the air date). When Jonah’s campaign manager sees the NRA billboard, he says, “It’s a Christmas miracle.”

I laughed and laughed. I cackled throughout the whole great episode. Yes, I believe that the people who were shot the other night are dead as a result of the NRA’s lobbying. I’ll go to the grave believing that. To be led through another instance of the NRA’s incessant madness driven by money and self-interest, and then to be invited to laugh, was maybe the best thing to happen to me on Sunday.

It didn’t make light of the tragedy, is what I’m saying. And it didn’t help me run away from the truth of what happened. It took away some of my fear and helped me see the shooting as it was.

III.
Absurdism, as I’ve been brought to understand it, has much to do with alienation, and borders on a kind of nihilism, but all the same makes me feel closer to (or at least more warmly toward) others. Here’s my trusty Handbook of Literary Terms doing a better job of defining it than I could:

Absurdism is the sense that human beings, cut off from their roots, live in meaningless isolation in an alien universe. Although the literature of the absurd employs many of the devices of expressionism and surrealism, its philosophical base is a form of existentialism that views human beings as moving from the nothingness from which they came to the nothingness in which they will end through an existence marked by anguish and absurdity.

It seems so bleak on the page. And maybe it is. But I’ve come to see it in opposition to romanticism. A romantic view of life holds on to narratives, particularly the narrative of forward progress. The narrative of heroes and villains. It views thoughts and prayers, or candlelight vigils, as messages that will be seen and understood by their intended audiences.

I’ve long been, and might still at times think like, a romantic. I’ve been concerned with how things should be. How I should be, should act. What is right and wrong. I’ve been googling things like “how to be a good person” in the faith that such a thing, such a character, even exists. It’s kept me from looking at the world as it is, from looking at myself as I am (instead of how I’m coming across to others).

Listen: I’d never want to disparage thinking, praying, or candlelight vigils. Some people are romantics, and through such a viewpoint is how they choose to handle and manage the unmanageable feeling of grief and tragedy. It’s not, though, the only way to do this. And these days I don’t think it’s mine.

IV.
There’s an idea I get exposed to every now and then that some things are too serious, or too dire, to joke about. Most recently I came across it in Roxane Gay’s essay (in Bad Feminist) on Daniel Tosh, written for Salon after his rape-heckling fiasco of 2012. “Humor about sexual violence suggests permissiveness,” she writes, for those people who might “do terrible things unto others.” In other words, it’s possible that would-be rapists are only waiting for the right joke to allow them to become actual rapists. As a claim, it’s probably unsupportable and definitely unsupported in her essay. But also: it shows a terrible lack of imagination.

The essay begins with an anecdote about the day of the Challenger explosion. Gay and her classmates are watching the liftoff, including James, the class clown. It blows up and everyone is silent. Then James says, “I guess there are a lot of dead fish now.”

As Gay tells it, the joke had bad consequences for James. “He had finally crossed an invisible line about what one can or cannot joke about,” she writes, and “suddenly became an outcast.” It was, everyone decided, “too soon” to tell that joke.

My sympathies are with James, telling for himself the joke that nobody would tell to him. I imagine death was very scary to him, the way it is to me. Murder, accidents, tragedy. School shootings. As a professor I worry very gravely about being shot one day, just for showing up at work. Which is to say that death and murder hold a certain power over me. This is what fear is and does. It traps you, it heightens your emotions, and it convinces you to react emotionally against that which scares you.

V.
Laughter is maybe the best way everyday people can disenfranchise the powerful.^[2] We seem to understand this about our politicians, but we don’t understand it about our fears. For some, a joke told from tragedy is a kind of gift that weakens the sting of what hurts us. For others, a joke told from tragedy disturbs that narrative which reads that silence and solemnity are the way through grief. That tragedies are things to act reverently toward.

This is why nothing is too serious to joke about, why nothing should be off-limits for humor: you never know whose pain that joke is going to alleviate. And you never know how soon that person needs a joke. When Neal went to the Mayo Clinic years back about some troubling long-term stomach issues he couldn’t get diagnosed, I was living alone in Alabama. He called me to fill me in on the news.

“They say it might be Celiac,” he said, a disease I know well since my sister has it, and as a result she hasn’t touched gluten in more than a decade. “Or it could, actually be cancer.” I didn’t want to believe it. Cancer happened to people on TV. I didn’t know what to say. Then Neal, gratefully, spoke again: “I hope to God it’s cancer.”

It remains the most generous joke I’ve been told.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

A lot of what got me thinking about the power of an absurdist view of life came out of realizing that when it came to DC-political shows on TV I liked Scandal and House of Cards but I felt something phony and artificial in them that made me only just like them. But I loved Veep and found it somehow truer, despite its never trying to seem authentic or realist.↵
Armies historically have done a better job for those who get to wield them.↵

Geoff Dyer on Earnestness and Reverence

A couple weeks ago I saw a talk and ping pong match between Pico Iyer and Geoff Dyer. They were old friends. English expats who’ve traveled the world. It made for an easy, spacious talk. At one point Iyer (who took the role of interviewer, chiefly about Dyer’s new book White Sands) asked Dyer about something he’d once said: that the worst things a writer could be were earnest and reverent. Iyer felt that Dyer were at times earnest and reverent in his new book. Dyer did a very gentle British scoff, shuddering at the idea. “I would hope I avoided being either of those things,” he said, and then quoted Nietszche’s saying that earnestness is the sure sign of a slow mind.^[a] It’s similar to reverence, which holds the viewer or thinker in a static, deferential position. Why these are bad for writers is that they are atitudes that create boundaries, or hierarchic dynamics Dyer sees the job of the writer being to break down or transcend.

The way I’ve been putting this for years is that I know I can write about something when I’ve got perfect ambivalence toward the subject. I have to both love the thing (taxidermy, standup comedy, my past) and loathe it, or find it distasteful, in order to write my way in.

All this came to mind after writing my post earlier in the week about bitchy book reviews. In making the point about how bitchiness is a useful tool, I think I was somehow iterating Dyer’s point here. I worry that book reviews are too earnest, and that what they do to books leaves them static and dead, like relics.

Dyer went on to propose two things a writer should be instead: loving and admiring. Camus reportedly called these “the two thirsts one cannot long neglect without drying up.”^[b] Loving, Dyer said, as those of us in the audience who were married well knew, leaves all kinds of room for criticism, commentary, disappointment. And admiration, too, keeps the admirer open to inquiry, explanation, and analysis?which form the basis for all good writing.

At any rate, it’s an idea I’m going to keep in mind next time I hear about the new sincerity.

Oh, and Dyer won the ping pong match, though Iyer’s line of people waiting for signed books was much longer.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

I can find through about 5 mins of Googling no source text for this quote, other than an interview Dyer gave years ago with Interview, though some sources point to it maybe being found in Beyond Good and Evil.↵
You can find the quote in context (somewhat) here.↵