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Taylor Negron, and LA vs NYC

hqdefaultFinally got around to reading the LA Review of Books’ eulogy on Taylor Negron, who I’ve been amazed by since his turn with Rich Hall in Better Off Dead (pictured, Negron’s on the right). And I came to the following paragraph:

But Taylor was always meant for fabulous things. He was a local boy who grew up, in his own words, ?California Gothic.? His childhood house was in Echo Park, on grounds where the old Mack Sennett studio once stood, and there he watched black-and-white movies with his film-besotted grandmother. He came of age in Glendale during the Charlie Manson era, and he remembers seeing Joan Didion crying at the steering wheel of her green Jaguar ?on Moorpark, below Ventura.? He used to say, ?I remember when the palm trees were short and Tomorrowland was modern.? Taylor was made of Los Angeles ? woven from palm fronds and eucalyptus, red carpet and call sheets. He connected old Hollywood to new Hollywood. He knew Mae West and the Olsen twins. He knew everyone, worked with everyone, and was loved by all.

Something thrilled inside me a bit while reading this (probably the datum on Didion) and I wished more than anything that I knew Taylor Negron. And then I realized that I’d like to know anyone who’s lived in Los Angeles as long as he did. And that’s when I realized I like Los Angeles better than New York, and one way I know this is that I’d much rather hang out with a longtime Angelino than a longtime New Yorker.

Teaching Memoirs to Debut Memoirists

debutmemoirYesterday I wrote a thing about how the debut memoir seems?in order to be a success?to require a rote approach to structure and form. That memoirs need to look like novels, with a reliance on scenes and a macrostructure that ends with its protagonist’s coming to ultimate terms with his or her conflict. This post picks up where that one left off, and I’m going to try to answer a question: What kinds of memoirs should I assign my students?

Position 1: I SHOULD ASSIGN J.R. ACKERLEY
You may recall that what I love about Ackerley is that his book is an original, and that it’s structured intrinsically (i.e., it Proustianly finds its own structure, it lets its unique voice lead the way). It’s a masterwork. It never once reads like a novel-that’s-true, and in this way it highlights the memoirness of a memoir?i.e., the things it does better than any other form.

So, then, I should teach it, right? We should all give our students the highest examples of the form. As guides. Except, my students pay $40,000+ for their MFA degrees, and given the stuff I blogged about yesterday I don’t trust that writing a memoir like Ackerley’s would help them land a book deal, with, maybe, an advance to help them pay off their loans.

Position 2: I SHOULD ASSIGN J.R. MOEHRINGER
It’s an artless hit, a poorly written success, but it does a great job of presenting students a way to take an experience they’re dying to write about?before many have ever written a book or, on the whole, read many old memoirs?in a way that can make it easily shared/absorbed by a wide variety of readers. This in itself isn’t an easy thing to do. Given that my students are risking so much and putting so much on the line to spend 2.5 years doing something they’ve long dreamed of doing, shouldn’t I help them spend this short amount of time learning the tools of how maybe to find commercial success?

Moehringer’s book feels good to the student memoirist the way workshop feedback does: it shines a torchlight on what’s always a dark and murky path. Or does it, again like feedback, build thick guiderails, steering students tightly through what should otherwise be a wild adventure?

Position 3: THE OBVIOUS ANSWER
I know, the answer was clear 8 paragraphs ago: teach both. Show the breadth of approaches students can choose between or orient themselves within the continuum of.

Which means that when it comes to building a diverse reading list we’ve got Formal Approach to add to our already lengthy criteria.

(I’m not complaining, just giving myself a reminder.)

Opening Paragraphs, Debut Memoirs

Here’s the opening paragraph of The Tender Bar, a debut memoir published in 2006 by a Pulitzer-prizewinning journalist that, according to my copy, every critic in America loved:

We went there for everything we needed. We went there when thirsty, of course, and when hungry, and when dead tired. We went there when happy, to celebrate, and when sad, to sulk. We went there after weddings and funerals, for something to settle our nerves, and always for a shot of courage just before. We went there when we didn’t know what we needed, hoping someone might tell us. We went there when looking for love, or sex, or trouble, or for someone who had gone missing, because sooner or later everyone turned up there. Most of all we went there when we needed to be found.

You can see where this comes from: parallel constructions and repetition as a quick way to set some prose rhythms. The sentence structures are easybreezy beautiful covergirl.

Here’s the opening paragraph (emphasis added) of My Father and Myself, a memoir published posthumously in 1968 by the estate of a longtime editor of a BBC literary magazine[1] that one of the Trillings called, in Harper’s, “The simplest, most directly personal report of what it is like to be a homosexual that, to my knowledge, has yet been published”:[2]

I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919. Nearly a quarter of a century may seem rather procrastinatory for making up one’s mind, but I expect that the longer such rites are postponed the less indispensable they appear and that, as the years rolled by, my parents gradually forgot the anomaly of their situation. My Aunt Bunny, my mother’s younger sister, maintained that they would never have been married at all and I should still be a bastard like my dead brother if she had not intervened for the second time. Her first intervention was in the beginning. There was, of course, a good deal of agitation in her family then; apart from other considerations, irregular relationships were regarded with far greater condemnation in Victorian times than they are today. I can imagine the dismay of my maternal grandmother in particular, since she had had to contend with this very situation in her own life. For she herself was illegitimate. Failing to breed from his wife, her father, whose name was Scott, had turned instead to a Miss Buller, a girl of good parentage to be sure, claiming descent from two admirals, who bore him three daughters and died in giving the last one birth. I remember my grandmother as a very beautiful old lady, but she was said to have looked quite plain beside her sisters in childhood. However, there was to be no opportunity for later comparisons, for as soon as the latter were old enough to comprehend the shame of their existence they resolved to hide it forever from the world and took the veil in the convent at Clifton where all three had been put to school. But my grandmother was made of hardier stuff; she faced life and, in the course of time, buried the past by marrying a Mr Aylward, a musician of distinction who had been a Queen’s Scholar at the early age of fourteen and was now master and organist at Hawtrey’s Preparatory School for Eton at Slough. Long before my mother’s fall from grace, however, he had died, leaving my grandmother so poor that she was reduced to doing needlework for sale and taking to lodgers to support herself and her growing children. What could have been her feelings to hear the skeleton in her family cupboard, known then only to herself, rattle its bones as it moved over to make room for another?

You can’t see where this comes from, is the point I want to make in this post. You can’t broadcast where it’s going from the opening sentence. The sentences are controlled by the voice rather than the other way around. Apart from other considerations, for instance, note the mastery behind the passage I put in italics.

Here’s the thing: My Father and Myself is not J.R. Ackerley’s debut memoir (he published two while alive, neither of which were his literary debut). But The Tender Bar is J.R. Moehringer’s first book. His acknowledgements page rather gratuitously tells the story of how a literary agent bent over backward to give this Yale- and Harvard-grad the time and pond-view New England writing rooms necessary to write his story as a memoir.

And his memoir reeks of it.

The book is bad. It’s very badly written. I can show you passages where the sentences show such a lack of care (“To me, the unique thing about Uncle Charlie wasn’t the way he looked, but the way he talked, a crazy, jazzy fusion of SAT words and gangster slang that made him sound like a cross between an Oxford don and Mafia don”) or passages where the protagonist is riddled with anxieties about manhood I’m asked not just to sympathize with but even to accept as legitimate. But I don’t want to get into what makes Moehringer’s a lesser book than Ackerley’s.[3] I want to talk about one idea I had about why Moehringer’s book is a bestseller and Ackerley’s book you probably haven’t heard of.

(One quick reason aside: Ackerley writes about being gay and full of shame, and his gay sex never gets past first base.)[4]

Moehringer’s book is scene-y. The chapters are short and usually focused on one character. The book sets up its protag’s internal conflict early?no father figure!?and shapes the story of his life accordingly, such that this conflict gets resolved in the book’s final chapters. It’s the opposite of a life. It’s a story. Even if every line of dialogue is verifiably true, the memoir in its careful, by-the-book structuring is an orgy of lies.

Which, I’m thinking, is the only way it could’ve ever gotten published.

There’s probably evidence to the contrary, but whereas the NYC publishing world likes to see a dashing new voice, or a daring sense of form when it comes to the debut novel, debut memoirs are praised and well marketed when their stories are dashing and daring. Moehringer grew up 142 steps from a bar that was for its Long Island town what we Americans imagine Irish pubs are for their villages. He was, in a sense, raised by the characters who drank there every night. What’s not page-turnable about this?

Ackerley’s story, on the other hand, is confusing, which is broadcasted by its opening sentence. He has a very hard time figuring out his dad’s story, and after he’s figured it out, he’s still left with questions. 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.

And now I’m getting to what hurts the most about all this: I was this close to assigning The Tender Bar next spring. But then I realized that another NF class read it last year. And then I read it. When I was reading Ackerley, I thought, My god, I’d love to teach this book, but then I decided I couldn’t. That it would be irresponsible to. Here were my reasons:

  • It’s not structured in scenes.
  • It has its own intrinsic structure that’s hard to parse out, much less show students how to copy.
  • It wasn’t written in the last 10 years.
  • It’s about growing up gay.

That one hurts the most. I didn’t think it would be helpful for my students (only a few of which are gay) to read a memoir about growing up gay.

But they read The Tender Bar, which may as well be subtitled “A Heteronormative Memoir”. One chief reason the book is such a piece of garbage is because it sees the world as a place where boys raised without strong and present fathers will grow up damaged, which even if true the book decides the only way to avoid this damage is to grow up with straight male father figures.[5]

Try as I might not to make this long post about The Tender Bar‘s badness I keep going back to it. My point is this: memoirs after Karr are market-driven books, not artistic ones. Or, if that’s unfair, then my point is this: when it’s your debut, for your memoir to succeed it has to fit the mold. And after Karr, after MFA Programs’ decades-long instruction in James’s scenic method of narration (i.e., show don’t tell), that mold is scenes strung together toward a linear plot.

When memoirs start to look like novels they always turn out lesser. But they probably make a lot more money.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. I imagine this was like what Garrison Keillor’s become.↵
  2. As soon as I read this silly thing I lamented the impossibility of my ever receiving such praise now.↵
  3. One thing both J.R.s have in common is that they like, in the final sentence of each chapter, to broadcast the content of the next.↵
  4. BTW, gay first base is kissing naked and frotting to ejaculation.↵
  5. It’s in the book’s penultimate chapter that Moehringer realizes “Hey, maybe my strong mother was the strong figure I needed all along” without ever showing the effects this (completely fake, fabricated for the sake of memoir) epiphany has had on him.↵

Outline for a Short Story I’m Not Writing

Not right now, at least. But this one came from a student in my graduate fiction workshop, the first such class I’ve taught, which is ending tonight. The exercise or prompt involved taking an object?each of us wrote the name of an object on an index card, then these got distro’d at random?and … I think we had to either sketch the outline for a story or write a scene in which that object and got used, mentioned, or looked at in different ways.

Use The Object To Progress The Work was the gist of the exercise.

I didn’t bring any paper to class, so I had to use the index card itself. The object I got was “notebook”:

  • Slam notebook seen as object passing hands near lockers between two rivals of narrator.
  • Narrator in next class; passing mention of its designated notebook, places for notes taken, homework, etc.
  • Daydream/reverie of what narrator’s page in slam book might look like. Dark and mean. Reveals a sense of narrator’s self-regard and martyr fantasies.
  • Nicholas Sparks reference in dialogue at lunch.
  • Oh, and there’s a new car that narrator has driven to school that day that narrator is sad people aren’t noticing, the newness. Also, there’s a threat of its removal from Dad if bad driving record.
  • Narrator gets hands on slam notebook and finds the relevant page. Under name it says just “who?” or “Nobody.”
  • Scene of confrontation/violence or humiliation in class; public exposure for perhaps the first time.
  • Student drives home and misses a stop sign. Gets pulled over. Evocative use of cop’s notepad to issue an official ticket for narrator to then be codified criminally.

Do kids know what slam books are?

Findings is a Dolphin

findingsWishing a happy pub day to Findings: An Illustrated Collection, which might be the perfect Xmas gift for anyone interested in facts, science, data, or earless rabbits born in Fukushima, Japan. It’s Amazon’s #1 New Release in “Scientific Experiments & Projects”!

The last page of every issue of Harper’s is dedicated to the Findings column, which compiles the month’s scientific findings into a brilliant and moving three-paragraph lyric of sorts. I’ve got an interview in the book with the current longtime writer of Findings, Rafil Kroll-Zaidi. In celebration of the book’s publication, the interview is up today at Tin House.

A lot of what I’ve learned about the creative use of facts and data in nonfiction comes from these two conversations I had with Rafil three years ago. He’s a guy who speaks in paragraphs. Someone should give him a tenure-track job.

Dreams of a New Kind of Writer’s Conference

Last week I said I didn’t get why writers decided on the academic conference model for their annual get-togethers. I mean, I get it: we’re writers in the academy. To be allowed into the Ivory Tower and be subsidized by it, we had to play by some rules. Is that it, really? I don’t buy that we need to be scholarly in our conferences?even though our travel costs are, on the whole, covered by universities. Or: I don’t buy that we need to be scholarly the way scholars are scholarly.

To that end, here’s a few ideas on how to make a writers’ conference not only more enjoyable, but a better place for the transmission of new ideas:

  • Ban the reading of written papers. I acknowledge I’ve got a low threshold for boredom, but I can’t be the only one perpetually bored by these. The thing with the paper is that despite its endgame (i.e., being read aloud to a group of quiet strangers) the aim of the paper (delivering new ideas about writing) doesn’t offer room for most people to make it listenable-to and engaging. It’s a written thing, and as writers we work to make it our own?when what it should be is everybody else’s. Ban the reading of written papers.
  • Ban the reading of PowerPoint slides. Just because you have visuals doesn’t negate the above.
  • Require any PowerPoint-style lectures to follow a PechaKucha format. Limit of 20 slides, each shown for just 20 seconds. That’s 6 mins 40 seconds for you to get new ideas across. It’s Twitter for conference presentations. Or, I don’t know, pick some other format?but provide restrictions, as Oulipan as they need to be, that writers will rise to the challenge of.
  • Early deadlines for panel materials. Often the panelists on a panel don’t all know each other (when they do, get up and leave the room). This can be made a productive thing. Get half of them to turn in to the conference their materials (notes, slides, etc.) one month prior to their timeslot. Then send these materials to the other half of the panelists, who in putting together their talks should in some way acknowledge and respond to the first half’s. In short: force a conversation to happen across the panel. (Bonus outcome: no first-draft papers that were written on the plane ride over.)
  • Strategize a few They-Said/They-Said panels. I say “strategize” because these can’t just go to anyone, but similar to the above, I’d much rather watch Writer A and Writer B size each other up at the dais on where they each stand on, say, place in nonfiction?with more of a two-way interview format going on than, of course, a debate?than I would Writer A talk, then Writer B, then Writer C, and then Writer D. A and B don’t need to disagree on anything, but each should have strong, new ideas and be curious about the other’s. Here’s a model in print of what I’m talking about, with Jennifer Egan and George Saunders talking about the future in fiction.
  • On- and offsite readings need to showcase unpublished work in progress. We can all get access to polished work through the books/journals they’re in, but what’s hard to get access to is an artist in the midst of a project?except, of course, when we convene each year. So let’s take advantage of that moment by getting exposure to, and then maybe talking about, the anxiety of being only partially done with something.
  • Accept only panels that have a diverse body of writers. I was talking about this with a friend at NonfictioNow. They blamed the whitewashed nature of the conference for its paucity of new ideas. And I thought: Wait, it’s not like the only new ideas are about race or gender. And then I realized: This wasn’t their point. It’s not that the only new ideas in writing, or the academy, anymore have to do with identity. It’s that a diverse environment stewards the airing and dissemination of new ideas. We conference in order to share new ideas. Put a bunch of different people in a room and you’ll end up with a dozen new ideas before lunch. Try it with people who share most things in common, and odds are those commonalities will get celebrated or reminisced about. Those are old ideas. They’re maybe even tired ideas. A writers’ conference shouldn’t be a family reunion, as much as we all annually miss each other.
    • POST AWP16 UPDATE: Four white women is not a diverse body of writers.

I need to run to an appointment here, but that’s just a few off the top of my head. There are imaginative ways of doing anything. AWP is like the missionary position of conferences. Let’s all try to be sexier.

Things I Picked Up from NonfictioNow 2015

I went to this conference a couple weeks ago, and then had a visit from the goon squad (i.e. my parents). Only now getting to think about it. It’s a brief list. The biggest lesson I learned is that if you organize a panel where you come prepared with some new ideas, minimal slides to project so folks have something to look at, and a Q&A format that loosely lets panelists talk casually about their ideas and what interests them, strangers for days afterward will come up to you in hallways to thank you effusively for not making them sit still for 75 minutes listening to academics read short papers.

Other lessons, some of them dubious:

  • When it comes to the question of what’s not allowed in nonfiction, the only answers I can satisfactorily come up with are behavioral. Or attitudinal. You can’t patronize or talk down to the reader. You can’t think you’re smarter than the reader. You can’t be boring. Etc. When it comes to what you can say or how you can say it, everything is fair game.
    • I’m not, then, interested in conversations about what writers should or should not do in an essay, or how other writers grappled to justify their formal or semantic choices.
  • Every journey?be it a travelogue or a tour through memories?is a journey into the unknown. Otherwise it’s a commute.
  • In conversation with someone, Lawrence Weschler reportedly said, “The job of the writer is to remind the reader of something.” As though we’re all pieces of string around the finger.
  • Other than preparing you for a job in the professoriat, what a PhD in nonfiction is great at is narrowing the scope of your writing to someplace highly specified, and encouraging you to talk about that writing in academic terms, not aesthetic ones.
  • A misfire happened sometime in the 1980s (or whenever AWP first started), where writers?wanting, like at MLA, to meet and share their work and scholarly developments on the craft of writing?adopted the academic conference as their model for doing so. The 75-minute panel where 4 or 5 people read papers on new research (i.e., the academic conference) is a quick and easy way for academics to absorb that research. Academic papers in print would take hours to read aloud and are, by necessity, dull and full of citations?in comparison, a panel talk is a treat. An injection of new ideas. Writers, though, don’t publish their research on craft or aesthetics in academic journals (AWP’s Writers’ Chronicle being the notable and often-dull exception), but for whatever reason the default at a writers’ conference is to read pre-written papers.
    • I have a series of questions. Why, if we’re creative writers, are those papers so dull and hard to listen to? And why, if we’re writers of nonfiction, aren’t we better at writing this kind of nonfiction? Can’t it, also, be creative? And what, in the end, is it about the academy that it could lead hundreds of writers?i.e. creative types?to get so uncreative when it comes to the model it adopts for its (bi-)annual meetings?
  • I saw all of one mile of Flagstaff, Arizona, and feel qualified to say it’s a great town. Gorgeous and full of good people.
  • More on academics: the biggest nonfiction books this year, at least on my radar, were Coates’s Between the World and Me and Rankine’s Citizen. I don’t think I heard a single person mention these books in the three days of panels. I did hear Montaigne’s name mentioned several dozen times each day, though. “NonfictioNow 2015” proved a misnomer.
  • Georgia Review and Passages North are some pretty great places for essays. Now, let’s start a Kickstarter to help the latter become a thinner semiannual.
  • Rumors are the next conference will be in Reyjavik, which means attendance chiefly from tenured academics whose universities will subsidize that pricey trip, which given the state of the academy will probably translate to even less diversity than I saw this year.

Perhaps a name change is in order. NonfictionAgo-Go? NonFrictioNow?

Very Good Paragraphs

From Benedict Carey’s How We Learn, which is the best collection I’ve found of recent (and historical) findings in cognitive science that explain how our brains work and how we might treat them better as a result. This bit specifically is Very Good because of how it articulates a problem with beginning writers that I’ve noticed but never been able to characterize before:

When I was in high school or college, trying to write an essay or research paper, I was forever looking for someone else’s thinking to rely on. I would hunt for some article written by an expert that was as similar as possible to the assignment. This perfect “model” essay never existed, or I never found it, so I’d end up stringing together quotes and ideas from the articles and books I had looked through. If someone else said it, I figured it must be insightful. In my defense, this isn’t all bad. When looking into the emergence of Christianity in ancient Rome, we should know who the experts are and what they think. The problem is that, when we’re embarking on a research project?especially when we’re younger?we don’t necessarily know how to identify those intellectual landmarks. Often, we don’t even know they exist. Through high school and much of college, I remember longing for someone to tell me how to proceed, sinking into a passing, tentative frame of mind, a fear of embarrassment trumping any real curiosity or conviction. The result was that I rarely consulted the wisdom of the one thinker I had easy access to: myself. I was so busy looking for better, smarter opinions that I had trouble writing?or thinking?with any confidence.

The solution Carey gives comes from a teacher named, no shit, Ronda Leathers Dively. Instead of assigning 6 short papers, she assigned one long one, with 5 short response papers to 5 different kinds of sources toward the semester-long project. Students then gradually got immersed in their topics and became scrutinous experts on the source material out there.

When it came time to write the paper, they were comfortable thinking on the page.

Ronda Leathers Dively!

“I Still Have to Write a Story Today” ? An Interview with Josh Fadem

I Didn't Attend CollegeWith little fanfare other than a daily Tweet about it, the comedian Josh Fadem has been writing a short story every day for a year, and then posting it to his blog. On the whole, the stories are funny, sometimes bawdy, and sometimes sad or even heartbreaking. Often uplifting or inspiring. One of my favorite moments comes in “The Introspective Human Men’s Club”, when a robot pretending to be a person misspeaks and nearly breaks his cover:

The robot pretending to be a person made a mistake. It was eerily similar to human beings in that it even made human mistakes like letting true motives, that were meant to remain concealed, slip. He was just as human as the rest of them. He even felt shame and embarrassment for his learned imperfection.

Tomorrow marks the publication of his 365th story. (As of “press time” he doesn’t yet know what it’ll be about.) On the eve of such an achievement, I asked him some questions about comedy, short-stories, and the impetus behind the whole project.

—

You write for TV and you write your own standup material and you write sketch comedy?all of which are genres that seem to get good attention from the public. Why, then, did you decide to write short stories, which like 1 percent of the public ever talks about?

Thanks for your interest! It sort of turned into being something I could do, and put out, and have control over, where the success or the reaction of them didn’t matter in the same way writing for someone else, or even acting for someone does. I could do it and act like no one was watching, but still put it out there and say, “Check this out!” No one is going to give me a deal based off a one-page story called “Pussydad’s Big Farm” (not a story I wrote, but could have easily been). I’m not competing, it just turned into a thing to do for fun and practice.
Continue reading “I Still Have to Write a Story Today” ? An Interview with Josh Fadem

On Superjail!

superjail_cc_110_pt1-03
Last week Christy Karacas, the creator of what’s become one of my favorite TV shows, tweeted something disconcerting:

That link takes you to a post on the best approach to story structure, “from Aristotle to Dramatica” (which from what I can tell is some new potentially trademarked schema for analyzing narrative structure that after this post I’ll read because like maybe it’ll be useful?). Why it was disconcerting is that one of things that’s made Superjail! a new favorite is how awe-somely it seems to disregard story structure.

Summary: The Warden is a manic, possibly magical Wonka-type genius who owns Superjail!, which has a seemingly endless supply of hyperviolent criminals that have to be kept at bay. To do this job, the Warden has Jailbot: a floating superfast robot with any number of weapons hiding somewhere in its fuselage; and Alice: a brawny sexed-up prison guard who readily smashes the skull in of any out-of-line convict. Also there’s Jared, a kind of man Friday/admin assistant. Oh right and there are these Eurotrash alien twins with whiteblond hair and dark unibrows who teleport in and out of scenes and seem to regard Superjail as an arena for their practical jokes and chicanery.

Superjail exists underneath a volcano that is inside another volcano (and yet, each episode, a rockabilly jailbird named Jackknife finds a way to escape). I both want to go there and want never to go there.

* Continue reading On Superjail!

“Pneumonia” ? Fog

This is my song of 2015. I heard it during an Adult Swim bump that was chiefly about nipples. Not one of their best. It was too short to Shazam, or nothing came up, so I took to Adult Swim Bump Forums (yes they exist, and yes there is more than one) and posed the question to the group and within a day they got back to me. All I heard on the bump was the first 8 bars or so, and then a bit from the outro. I was very pleased to find the rest of the song even better:

I found chords for the song online but they’re mostly wrong. Here’s the song in full:

Chords used:

        E A D G B e                 E A D G B E
Gmaj7:  3 2 0 0 0 2         Cmaj7:  x 3 2 0 0 3
Dsus4:  5 5 7 7 7 7         D1:     5 5 7 7 7 5

A:      x 0 2 2 2 0         F#m:    2 4 4 2 2 2
D2:     x x 0 2 3 2         F#dim:  x x 0 2 2 2

Intro:
[Gmaj7 Cmaj7 Dsus4/D1 Cmaj7] x2

Verse:

Gmaj7                  Cmaj7
Is it depression or disease?
                  Dsus4    D1           Cmaj7
Tell it to the millipedes.

Gmaj7              Cmaj7
The casserole was good,
                        Dsus4
and the drives were so nice.
D1                   Cmaj7
Welcome to the worst part of your life.

Chorus:

A  F#m  D2/F#dim  Cmaj7

A                   F#m
I'm hard to fix because
                 D2
it took me so goddamn long
   F#dim            Cmaj7
to figure out that I broke down.

(Verse chords over weird synth solo.)

Verse:
Mold spores fill my lungs.
The silverfish hide in the venetian blinds
in the wintertime.
In the bathroom,
With the shower running and my clothes on
I figured out that I hate you all.

Chorus:
I'm hard to fix because it took me so goddamn long
to figure out that I broke down.

Hold Cmaj7 for many bars, then back to Verse chords until out.

Dialogue in Alex Lemon’s Happy

happy

“Moving to Iowa Falls was like going back in time, I say, belching out weed smoke. The light is frayed grayscale. Empty bottles turret the tabletops.

“BACK IN TIME!” KJ shouts. “Fucking Huey Lewis and the News!”

“Fireworks over Riverbend Rally and jumping from motorboats and weed in the ditches. Camping and skinny-dipping when the fire started going out.” I go on and on, laughing to myself, eyes sewn shut. “It was like Grease or something. Cruising Main Street and fistfights. Dances after football games and homecoming parades. It was all Mayberry and shit.”

“MAYBERRY! MOTHERFUCKING MAYBERRY!” KJ yells, standing. He mutters something about pissing and uses the wall to feel his way out of the room.

“It’s called Iowa, Happy,” Ronnie says. “No bad guys come from Iowa Falls. Not until Happy Lemon! Yeah, playa!” He laughs and nods, then says that nothing was better than SoCal back in the day.

“Stockton,” Tree says solemnly, and pretends to pour his beer on the floor. “Get that shit right.”

“Shiiiiiit, bro!” Ronnie leans back into the couch and smiles. “Fuck that place.”

I laugh and keep talking, but hardly anyone is listening anymore. Tom and Tree and Ian are watching TV and playing cards. KJ comes back and passes out cold, and Ronnie is blazed. I chug and mumble to myself about fields of soybeans and corncribs in the moonlight. Gravel jamming through the countryside in old Chevelles. Getting high and the Doors and tripping our balls off and Black Sabbath.

“We had fucking birds in the freezer, man.”

“What the fuck did you say, Happy?” Ian turns.

“Pull it together, man! You’re hardly speaking English.”

Everyone is looking at me.

“Birds. We had dead ones … dead birds in the freezer. I’d get some ice, and there one would be. Dead grackles, man. A house finch. Fucking birds, you know? A bird. Wings and beaks and shit? Birds.”

“GRACKLE!” KJ is awake again. “Fucking grackles. That’s crazy good.”

“You serious? That’s fucked up is what it is.”

“Loco shit, Happy.” Ronnie laughs. “But my moms had a taco stand!”

“What? A taco van?”

“GRACKLE!”

“Naaaw, I’m playing, you fool! Fucking taco stand.” Ronnie slaps his thigh. “Jesus, no, silly fucks. It was all concrete jungle for me. Ghetto birds!”

“CAAAWWW! CAAAAWWWW!”

“We had birds in the freezer.”

“Happy’s studying too much, it’s making him hallucinate. He thinks he’s fucking Audubon.”

“Assholes.” I pick a shred of loose chew from my lip. “Ma and Bob are artists, man. We had wild shit—bowling balls rolling around the floors, busted mirrors on the walls. Snakeskins tacked above the dinner table. It was awesome.” I shake my head and try to laugh it off. I don’t usually talk to my teammates about how I was raised because I want to fit in with them. “Fuckin’ loved it.” I smile, but part of me has always resented it.

“Happy, you’re a goofy bastard. You know that homes?”

This is a passage from the opening chapter of Lemon’s memoir. The list of “rules”—by which I mean the things I’ve been trained to teach my students for what constitutes “good writing”—this dialogue breaks is long. It doesn’t progress the plot. It doesn’t reveal anything about the personalities of the characters (not exactly true but I’ll come back to this). It doesn’t edit natural dialogue—langy, repetitive, fragmentary—to make it literary and intelligible.

In short: this shit would get annihilated in a workshop.

Which makes it great. It’s the most NFive dialogue I’ve read in a very long time. We get so much of it throughout Lemon’s memoir of brain injury, and gradually I came to feel so fully there in the scene. It’s Knausgaardian maybe. Lemon’s greatest talent is his ability (not just through dialogue; chiefly through sensory detail) to so fully recreate the moments of his past, and to edit this dialogue as we naturally tend to as writers would be to lie about the moment. It’s stunning.

But stunning only in retrospect. I wasn’t much “amazed” by the book as others often are by “good writing”—that is, I didn’t feel the language of the book was trying to dazzle me by its goodness. Sure, there are lots of watch-me-now verbs, but more so I was struck by this goofball dialogue. It’s how these characters talk, and when you spend enough time among them you start to hear the very subtle emotional shifts among such nonstop braggadocio.

I loved it. I loved watching literary dialogue get opened up like this.

Very Good Paragraphs

From Andrew Hacker’s piece on tech workers in the 9 July 2015 New York Review:

Contrary to such alarmist demands [from Obama et al that we need to add more STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) graduates], Falling Behind? makes a convincing case that even now the US has all the high-tech brains and bodies it needs, or at least that the economy can absorb. Teitelbaum points out that “US higher education routinely awards more degrees in science and engineering than can be employed in science and engineering occupations.” Recent reports reinforce his claim. A 2014 study by the National Science Board found that of 19.5 million holders of degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, only 5.4 million were working in those fields, and a good question is what they do instead. The Center for Economic Policy and Research, tracing graduates from 2010 through 2014, discovered that 28 percent of engineers and 38 percent of computer sciencetists [sic!] were either unemployed or holding jobs that did not need their training.

On Knausgaard and Writing Young

Just seeing the word introvert threw me into despair.

Was I an introvert?

Wasn’t I?

Didn’t I cry more than I laughed? Didn’t I spend all my time reading in my room?

That was introverted behavior, wasn’t it?

Introvert, introvert, I didn’t want to be an introvert.

That was the last thing I wanted to be, there could nothing worse.

But I was an introvert, and the insight grew like a kind of mental cancer within me.

Kenny Dalglish kept himself to himself.

Oh, so did I! But I didn’t want that. I wanted to be an extrovert! An extrovert!

MyStruggleBook3_CatCover_r5This passage comes at page 336 (of 420-some) of the third volume of Knausgaard’s My Struggle, after he reads about the key difference between Dalglish and his Liverpool soccer teammate Kevin Keegan. It’s simply great, the passage. One concern my NF students have is how to write from the perspective of our younger selves. Are you allowed to use words you wouldn’t have used when you were 7? If no: how do you make the experience interesting and insightful? If yes: how do you make it feel authentic and not as though you’re now, as an author, giving your young self big ideas you never had?

This passage is great for the way it shows us how. Knausgaard gives the writing a childish syntax (the short sentences, the single-sentence paragraphs, the repetition) while allowing himself an adult diction (the “mental cancer” bit) that can put the passage into a greater perspective. In other words, the syntax lets us hear and feel his despair, and the diction tells us something of what that experience was like or what it meant.

It ends a section, this passage.
Continue reading On Knausgaard and Writing Young

Remembered Today

Before I started using next-door-neighbor Jim Black’s hunting trailer as a summertime teen hideout, the bulk of the sleepovers I had in the neighborhood growing up were at James Darne’s house. He lived up at the bottom of Fall Place, the older of two boys, and around about age 9 his parents gave him the run of the downstairs, making the entirety of it his bedroom. Like our downstairs, it had a shelf running all along the walls at about boy-shoulder height. The back wall of James’s basement, though, the one opposite the front windows, was covered above this shelf ledge in mirrored tile with gold veining.

This kind:

mirroredtilegoldveining

On Josh Fadem’s Comedy

FademI’m afraid to write this post because I’m going to get it all wrong, because so little about what makes this guy amazing looks good on paper. Like, you’ll never see Comedy Central turn him into a lousy tweetmacro.

This “problem” with Fadem will I hope slowly become the very thing I want to champion.

Josh Fadem is a comic in his low 30s from Tulsa, Oklahoma. He now lives in Los Angeles. He does sketch and standup. Vids of the former are more forthcoming online:

You’ll see a Chaplin/Keaton/Atkinson influence. Clowning. Fadem looks funny (see above) and he knows he looks funny and one way to touch on his genius is to say that he knows how to let himself be silly. More on that later. Here’s how the slapstick stuff enters into his standup:

A few weeks ago I saw Fadem do an hour at Doc’s Lab in North Beach and it was maybe the best hour of standup I’ve ever seen. He opened with similar micstand mishaps, and then after a good three or four minutes of it he grabbed the mic and the first thing that came out of his mouth was a brash and nasal tone singing Ray Parker Jr’s, Ghostbusters theme:

“Duh-nuh-NAH-nuh-NAH-nuh. Duh-nuh-nuh-nuh-NUH-NAH-NUH. Duh-nuh-NAH-nuh-NAH-nuh.” Ghost…TRUSTERS! I trust them! They’re just ghosts. It’s not a big deal. “If there’s somethin’ strange…” What’s strange about it? It’s just a ghost!

Etc. The bit continued accordingly. If being in stitches means that your sides hurt from laughing so hard I was in stitches.

Now: there’s no way for me to convince you that this was extremely funny. I can try to convince you how it was smart, but it wasn’t very smart. It was mostly stupid. It wasn’t one note hit over and over again, because Fadem grabbed additional lyrics (“I ain’t ‘fraid of no ghost”, “Trustin’ makes me feel good”) that let him develop the bit. But not really. It was mostly a loud and silly bit about a guy who trusts ghosts.
Continue reading On Josh Fadem’s Comedy

Let’s Stop My Growing Conservatism

The other weekend my friend Adam pointed out how my worrying over certain problems with tech/media was a kind of conservatism. Tony Judt’s talked about this, how as the Right has embraced free markets and libertarianism more and more it’s become the job of the Left to preserve/conserve certain American values: union labor, environmental conservation, social democracy, safety nets, etc.

What I want to do to feel good is make things, and this is my chief problem with what I mean by “tech” (i.e., phone apps and interactive media): it doesn’t help me create anything. In fact, it encourages the opposite; hashtag games, ice-bucket challenges, even likes and reposts all reward a kind of open conformity. (Adam had fun making fun of me for sincerely calling myself “a child of the 90s”.) One way to respond is with ludditisim. But I don’t want to be that person.

I want to find a way to not shuffle backward into the future, eyes on the sepia-toned past. If I were a filmmaker or photographer, the way forward would be clear. Phone cameras are good now! As a writer, it’s less clear. Everyone’s writing online. A luddite would start writing on a manual typewriter, “to get back to original prose rhythms” or something. One less conservative way forward would be to embrace the medium and write for it better. Like: to develop an aesthetics of the post. Online writing could use a good critic. The problem of course is that everyone’s a critic, and that criticism comes in the form of shares or comments forums.

Another way forward is to find stuff of the present that’s new and original and championing it, then extrapolating what makes them good and new and applying it to one’s own work. Like Dali reading Freud or Warhol growing up in Pittsburgh. Two things come to mind here: The Comedy of Josh Fadem and The Art of Superjail!. Since online aesthetics[*] are telling me that this post is already too long, I’ll touch on why each of these is new and important in separate posts to come.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. One thing I’ve already noticed about online writing is that links (clickbaity ones or otherwise) either (a) do the job or (b) negate the necessity of introductory paragraphs. If I’m reading a thing because I’ve been enticed to click to it you don’t have me at the same level of attention as if I’ve turned the page on something I’ve bought. In other words: get to the point. How can we artfully start with the point and then artfully develop it?↵

Bruce Jenner & the Soul of a Woman

4-24-2015-9-35-46-pmN & I finally caught the Bruce Jenner interview everyone tweeted about a couple weeks ago. It was not hard-hitting. At one point early on, Diane Sawyer asked him point blank, “Are you a woman?” Jenner said he was, “for all intents and purposes.” He said that despite the male body he’s lived in for 60+ years, he has the “heart and soul” of a woman.

Here was the point for Sawyer to ask the question I ask more than any other, especially of students and people I’m interviewing: What does that mean?”

Instead, they cut to archival footage of his Olympic victory.

I don’t imagine Jenner—or even Sawyer for that matter, given her confusion about Jenner’s situation—has read Judith Butler, so it’s not like I wanted them to start talking about gender as a performance. But this is what gender is, and Jenner is beginning to perform “female” with his hair and skin and nails and jewelry and blouses. We all do it. I’m “male” because I buy certain clothes. I wear my hair a certain way. I ask people to use male pronouns when referring to me.

What does it mean for Jenner, then, that he has the soul of a woman?[1] What are the traits in there that distinguish it from the soul of a man? How does his soul—his genuine, unperformed self—differ from mine? Any answer I might come up with for him brings us back into the realm of lockstep gender traditions. Is his soul passive? Is it nurturing? Is it social? What does that mean?

There’s more to say here in a longer post about the genderqueer, essentialism and legislation, or desire and public perception, but my point here is that Sawyer missed an opportunity at bringing notions of gender fluidity to light.[2] Also: a soul is not a performative space.

Unless, of course, you’re a reality TV star.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. “I’m me,” he said in the interview. “My brain is much more female than it is male. That’s what my soul is. Bruce lives a lie. She [how he referred to his post-transition self] is not a lie.”↵
  2. Not that this was the aim of the interview. The teasing throughout about what a post-trans Jenner would look like, and what name he’ll go by—neither of which data were actually revealed—showed us that what we spent two hours watching was a long trailer for his forthcoming reality show on the subject.↵

On Growing Up

When I was younger and saw stuff like this I’d leap out of my seat to point out what was false and corny about it. Now when I look at stuff like this I think, Good for them for having made something new without dredging up something old and laughing at it.

Like: can’t you just see a comedian-filled shot-for-shot remake of this going viral, tiredly?

Very Good Paragraphs – Charlie Hebdo Protest Edition

From Justin E.H. Smith’s “The Joke”, an essay from the April 2015 Harper’s:

It is exceedingly difficult these days to call attention to the dull-minded policing by academics and online activists without being ridiculed in return as a frightened, ignorant old man who bemoans “political correctness.” We do not wish to be assimilated to those old duffers who wear Hawaiian shirts and do not understand why we can no longer call a dame a dame, and so we avoid worrying in public about the phenomenon. We stop ourselves even when we find that our peers have begun half-rationalizing the assassination of cartoonists on the basis of a glancing judgment that their drawings were racist, a judgment that rests only on the overt content of the images, generally without any translation of the French captions, without any consideration of context or pragmatics, and without any concern for the relationship of any individual cartoon to its creator’s body of work. In this age of visual illiteracy, of perfect tone-deafness to satire, the murders get cast as a blow not against freedom of expression, against subtlety, nuance, and laughter, but against racism. So, the thinking goes, adieu.

The essay’s opening, of which this graf is a part, ends with a comment about “the false presumption that humor is but one of the minor protectorates of freedom, when in fact humor is freedom itself, or at least freedom’s highest expression.”

This, for the record, is precisely the problem I had with Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist. Despite her continual uses of humor, she argues in the book that there are some topics that are too serious to be joked about, without ever considering that their utter seriousness is what obliges us to make jokes. This seems to be the faulty line of thinking behind those protesting the PEN Awards. The second we decide something is out of bounds for humor, we are in its thrall.

Of course, I’m not the first person to make this argument. Subscribers to Harper’s (which means all of you, right?) can read the whole piece here.