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Rappahannock Review is/are Good People

I’m from Virginia.

The first ever Virginia-based periodical I got published in was the Herndon Observer, where in high school I wrote an op-ed defending us students against something I’ve long since forgotten. My mom clipped it out. She might remember. That was in 1996. Then, nothing…until 2014, when Mary Washington College’s Rappahannock Review (named, in classic academic-journal fashion, for the river that goes through Fredericksburg, Va.) put out one of my Meme pieces. You can read it here.

Today, they also posted an interview with me, where I talk about the piece (about my first trip inside a gay bar as an out gay man), nonfiction more generally, and what if anything gives me the right to write about people I love.

I like doing interviews. It’s way easier to be on the answering side of them, except of course if you’re a politician, man on trial, or person recently cuffed by police. I haven’t been any of these, yet, so check back on me later about my cavalier attitude re answering questions.

Very Good Paragraphs

This paragraph showed up in Kiese Laymon’s title essay from his collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America precisely at the moment I needed it to:

This isn’t an essay or a woe-is-we narrative about how hard it is to be a black boy in America. This is a lame attempt at remembering the contours of slow death and life in America for one black American teenager under Central Mississippi skies. I wish I could get my Yoda on right now and sift all this into a clean sociopolitical pull-quote that shows supreme knowledge and absolute emotional transformation, but I don’t want to lie.

Would that every essay took such a step. You can read the whole essay here.

Memorize Joan Didion — Check!

Why would someone bother memorizing two paragraphs from an old Joan Didion essay? Answers here and here.

This is a post to say I’ve done it. Typed from memory, from what I like to think of as the center of Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”:

Of course the activists—not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic—had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we ~~no longer believed~~ had stopped believing in the rules ourselves. Maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. They are children who have moved around a lot—San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts: Vietnam, Saran Wrap, diet pills, the bomb.

They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words—words are for typeheads, Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips—their only proficient vocabulary is in the society’s platitudes. As it happens, I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for oneself depends upon one’s mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from a “broken home.” They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.

That strikeout bit always trips me up.

Well This Should Be a Treasure…

Stay tuned, dear readers. I mean: Mom.

Plagiarized! (Maybe.)

I’m working on an essay that’s mostly a revision and updating of my series of Taxidermy in Trouble posts from a while back. In doing some research on big-city taxidermy classes marketed to hipsters, I found this article on Atlantic.com. Here’s a bit from the second page:

The actual procedure of taxidermy varies from animal to animal, but it always starts the same: with a longitudinal incision down the animal’s midline — a great big cut from neck to nethers

A couple years back, I wrote a book on taxidermy. Here’s how it opens:

To skin an animal, you start with a single cut somewhere around the throat and draw the knife downward in a thin, straight line to the nethers. It’s a lot like unzipping a fly. The thrush. The tomcat. The tusker. The beginning is always the same: a single cut. After this beginning, every animal presents its own challenges, the idiosyncrasies of its own terrain.

So I had a taste for the florid. I had 75 thousand more words to write! At any rate, it’s not like the way to skin an animal is my idea, but reading the piece I saw a little piece of my work in it, which is the first time that’s happened.

Earlier in the article, the guy references “at least three full-length books [that] have documented the growing taxidermy subculture.” I wonder if I can get him to write a blurb: “The Authentic Animal is one of at least three full-length books I scanned the beginnings of to put an article together once.”

Reading Student Manuscripts as an Act of Curation

Dedicated Feedlyers of this blog will recall my trying to rethink the spirit behind reading and responding to student manuscripts. Well, leave it to the always-great Harper’s to find it for me. From this month’s Readings section, excerpting from Ways of Curating by Hans Ulrich Obrist:

[Artist Alighiero] Boetti told me that if I wanted to curate, I should under no circumstances do what everybody else was doing—just giving artists a certain room and suggesting that they fill it. More important would be to talk to the artists and ask them which projects they could not realize under existing conditions. Ever since, this has been a central theme of my exhibitions. I don’t believe in the creativity of the curator. I don’t think that the exhibition-maker has brilliant ideas around which the ideas of artists must fit. Instead, the process always starts with a conversation, in which I ask the artists what their unrealized projects are and then find the means to realize them. At our first meeting Boetti said curating could be about making impossible things possible.

More and more, in looking around for ways out of the Iowa-workshop-model-trap I feel myself stuck in as a teacher, I’ve found ways forward in the world of visual art. I’ve already adopted the model of the studio classroom in rethinking how to manage the space and time of the creative writing class, and here, from Obrist, is a solution to manuscript writeups.

Replace “curator” with “creative writing professor” and “artist” with “student writer”. I don’t know that I can necessarily make impossible things possible, but I can go into my job in the spirit of helping my students realize their projects, using whatever experience I have as a writer.

I plan to start with a conversation: What do you want to write this term? When it comes time to mark up manuscripts, then, my job isn’t to butt my way into the student’s process and correct or even comment on the work I’m seeing in terms of what I understand An Essay to be. Instead, it’s to respond to what I’ve read in terms of what I’ve already heard about the student’s aims and hopes.

In short, it’ll come down to “You did it. Keep writing.” or “Not yet. Keep writing.”

I am Not a Lyricist

But if I were Stephin Merrit, say, I’d write a song about mustaches just so I could rhyme Mayim Bialik with Magnum P.I.-like.

I’m a Faggot Who Likes Gay-Bashing Jokes. Can I Explain to You Why?

I’m asking myself, mostly. How can I explain this? Look here:

This is funny and I laughed at it, and I was delighted to laugh at it because child abduction is something we should be making lots and lots of jokes about. Lots. Of the number of children who are abducted or kidnapped (the Dept of Justice has different shades of meaning for these terms [PDF]) in a given year, 99 percent are returned alive and .08 percent are either killed or never returned. In fact, it’s better to look at the hard numbers and not the statistics, in that on the average 50.7 kids each year are killed by kidnappers or never returned. There are 73.6 million kids under the age of 18 living in this country as of the latest census data, which means, each year, .00006 percent of US kids are killed by kidnappers or get abducted and never returned.

It happens, but it’s nothing to be afraid of. And yet people are. I imagine I might understand it better if I were a parent, but I don’t understand it. It’s an irrational fear that leads to important news getting shut out of the airwaves when a child is abducted and to increased paranoia about one’s neighbors.

The problem is that it can be easy to equate “laughing at child abduction” with “laughing at a parent who has lost a child from kidnapping”. It’s not the same. Nor is “laughing at child abduction” the same as “dismissing child abduction as not tragic”. It is tragic. It is rare and tragic, like sarcomatoid renal cancer, which kills its victims, on the average, within 9 months of diagnosis, but accounts for .02 percent of all cancer deaths. That’s less than one person a year.

Straight people beating or killing gay people because they are gay or perceived as gay isn’t rare. In fact, Psychology Today reported last year that it’s on the rise. I live in a city of gays, but I also live in a city of people and violent crime. There’s a poster in my building’s stairwell that says if you can walk down the street holding your partner’s hand without fear of exposure or reprimand you are suffering from heterosexual privilege. Here, I pretty much suffer from heterosexual privilege. And yet, I make sure I look around before grabbing Neal’s hand. Last time I did it, actually, was during Pride.

So there’s this joke:

I’m kind of a magician. I can turn fruits into vegetables. Or, as the police call it, “gay-bashing”.

It’s not great, but it’s not bad. It does its jokework fine. Rendered within the voice and character of a relatively innocuous standup comedian I can easily imagine laughing at this joke within a set. And again, I’m happy to laugh. Because what I’m laughing at is not my fellow gay men having been victims of violence, nor is it even the idiot bragging about what he can do to gays. It’s this: laughing at dark stuff takes its power away. I’m less anxious when I’m laughing, and it becomes really hard to be afraid of something you can laugh at. Hence J.K. Rowling’s riddikulus charm. Laughter is such great defense.

I know myself and trust myself to know what’s right and to act and move my life toward goodness whenever I can. I can also laugh at jokes about gay men being beaten into comas. One more problem: some jokes are op-eds. But it’s good to remember that most jokes are balms.

A San Francisco Saturday

Piqued, I decided to get outside and go read somewhere public. It was too windy for the park, so I found myself at a bar near my house that looked mostly empty and wouldn’t be noisy. My Guinness cost seven dollars, and within minutes of my first sip a woman with a British accent sat down next to me at the bar and ordered a mimosa. It was 2:45pm. At the other end of the bar sat a hefty MF couple in black leather jackets who seemed chummy with the bartender: a short, wiry woman in a greying white tanktop. “Can you do a mimosa?”

The bartender assured her she could. “I could put some fresh grapefruit juice in it?”

“Lovely,” said the Brit. “And a bloody Mary.”

She was met by her friend, and soon afterward a pearish dude, late 20s, in a navy blue hoodie sat at the end of the bar, next to them. I finished “How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)” and went on to “Amahl and the Night Visitors”. Between underlining passages that I felt illustrated lessons I’d like my students next week to learn, I overheard some chitchat. The threesome at the end of the bar became a threesome and got along famously. He just moved here from Dallas in May, being called out to San Francisco by a college friend to help on his startup. They sell smoking accessories. Pipes, bowls, vaporizers. Started with just $250,000 seed money, but it’s going quite well.
Continue reading A San Francisco Saturday

Some Notes on Student Manuscripts

These days I’m trying to think more about how I might better use my imagination, or create something new in the world, or both, not just when I sit down to write, but when I go through my day-to-day life. I’m also listening almost exclusively to The Mountain Goats’ The Sunset Tree, for what it’s worth. I’m reminded of something my friend Peter asked a visiting writer back when we were both teaching in Alabama:

“As an artist, do you feel impelled to act artfully in everything you do?”

Peter mentioned he himself did, and wanted to see how another writer (I’m feeling pretty sure this was a fellow poet) thought about it. I passed it off at the time as poet/artist silliness, but now I see it as a pressing question.

Most of the work I do every day, other than read the books I picked to teach, is to sit with a pencil over double-spaced manuscript pages of 12pt Times New Roman and figure out what to write on it that both expresses my reactions to what I’m reading during the act and also encapsulates my response to what the piece has said or done as a whole. Also: I have to do something with my pencil to help the student learn how to develop either the piece in front of me (in revision) or just personally as a writer (when it comes to write the next thing). I’m not complaining about my job. It’s very hard work.

It’s not creative work. In fact at times it seems like destructive work: Here’s a map of all my confusions about what you’ve done, also lots of corrections of things you neglected to proofread. I do what I can to be encouraging and to point out successes, but even that seems destructive. It emphasizes that the point of having made this thing is to see how teacher responds.

It can easily become work I dread. In fact, right now I’ve got 20 projects to start reading and marking up and rather than get started (and but also to give myself a sense of purpose when I do start) I’m here writing a blog post about it. Anything to get out of doing the actual work. What I dread isn’t my students’ writing—when I get into it their stuff is continually surprising and great and worth sharing—it’s the role I have to step into. It’s not a foreign role. I’ve been doing this for ten years now. But it’s not my role, or it’s not a role I’m eager to understand myself as.

Yesterday on Twitter I asked, “What if marking up student manuscripts were more like a collaboration between two interested writers?” and it got precisely one favorite. (Thanks, Chris!) It’s one way to bring a sense of the creative process to this job of mine. The danger, of course, is for Teacher to lord his creative self all over the student’s work, but this happens all the fucking time in creative writing workshops, doesn’t it?

Here, finally, are some notes on what this theory might look like in practice:

Understand the student not as a subordinate but as a fellow writer asking for my help and advice as a fellow writer.
Continue using a pencil, because I will mess up and be wrong in some of my responses.
Stop correcting grammar and usage and typos, but point it out when it leads to genuine confusion about what’s being said, because I’m not an editor, and I know so many great writers who fuck up in this regard and there’s no correlation between proper grammar and moving art.
Suggest in notes at the end that the student look up some business of grammar or usage s/he consistently gets wrong, and name a good and useful resource for him or her to do so.
Point out what I’m jealous of and wish I’d come up with.
With flat/boring parts, which we all end up with in our drafts, be honest and clear about why I’m being bored and what I’d try as a writer (as opposed to what I need as a writer or what I expect as a teacher; that is: suggest tacks always out of a spirit of creativity and invention).
Be clear on syllabi about my philosophy or rationale when it comes to responding to manuscripts, and invite students to stop by office hours to collaborate in person and address their concerns, or if that’s not convenient do it over email or via Skype—i.e. be available.

There’s more thinking to be done about this. But I’m done thinking that the chief way students learn to become writers is through the feedback they receive on their manuscripts. I did this last term and I’ll do it every term coming up: assign students a revision plan to be turned in with a draft and you’ll be amazed at how much of “your work” they’ll have done before you even get a chance to.

UPDATE: I’ve at least partially solved this problem.

On "For Lack of Anything Better"

It was a wild coincidence that the day I derided what’s become its rallying cry to writers, The Rumpus publishes an essay of mine, but that’s how Monday unfurled.

It’s called , and it’s about yarn art, essay-writing, my mom’s dad, and loss.

A good amount of the behind-the-scenes stuff about writing the essay is in the essay itself—mostly about why I never wanted to write it (because personal essays about this stuff are often such cliches) and then how I tried to and probably failed. I think it’s a good essay, and I’m proud of it, but I don’t know that it’s a good personal essay because of feelings and lyricism.

I at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference this year, and though I had practiced it a half-dozen times in my office, alone, making sure I didn’t go over my 15-minute allotment, being completely fine with the piece as it sounded in my ears, when it came time for me to stand up in front of 100+ people and read it aloud to them, I almost couldn’t do it at the end. I got choked up. I don’t get choked up. Maybe two people have seen me cry. I wasn’t prepared for it at all.

I guess what I want to say here is that this is the first essay I’ve written and released into the world that said something critical about my family I hadn’t already said to them face-to-face. I’m mad, in parts of this essay. When The Rumpus said it wanted to publish the piece I knew I had to talk to my parents about it before what was between us suddenly became everyone else’s.

I sent my folks the essay in an email and heard back from my dad within a couple hours. It was a thoughtful take on the essay, and he told me he was proud of me, and that my mom was crying. But, she said, she always cries when she reads something of mine because it makes her miss me.

I miss my parents, too. When I sent them the email, I made sure to include a line that said something like “I just want you to know that this is a way that I feel about the situation. It’s not the only way, just a way,” because that was the truth. I feel my parents are proud of me, and I feel that they’re ashamed of me. I’m proud of myself, and I’m ashamed of myself. When I got choked up reading this aloud, I was feeling both of those things at once: I was so proud to be getting laughs and attention by that room full of incredible, dedicated writers, and I was so ashamed of what kind of grandson I’d been.

This essay taught me how to write creatively—which is to say fruitfully—about my life, and that’s paratactically, which is another post for a later time.

(You can read it . Thanks to Mary-Kim Arnold for taking the piece and Paige Russell for the great illustrations.)

Lessons from the New President

That’s the new president of my university: Fr. Paul Fitzgerald. He spoke yesterday with some of the Arts & Sciences faculty. Someone asked him about his teaching philosophy (Fr. Fitzgerald demanded he be given an appointment in the Theology and Religious Studies faculty). This isn’t a direct quote, but here’s what he said:

Number one, you have to love the student. Because if you give love, the student can learn and grow. Otherwise we just end up trying to impress or dazzle them with what we know.

I’m trying to learn these days about love, and this was good advice. It immediately brought to mind some work of contemporary essayists, and also a lot of millennial aphorisms like BE AMAZING and Dear Sugar‘s now proverbial WRITE LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER.

Let’s mince words: a mother fucker is a disgusting person. Why would anybody want to write like one?

No mother fucker fucks out of love.

The New Hammy

Before irony and winking became the chief way advertisers tricked you into wanting to buy their products, they relied—ages and ages ago—on rhetoric and persuasion. Like in this Subway ad:

Then came cable TV and MTV and commercials had to compete entertainment-wise with programs and so ads got performative and hammy. Like in this Subway ad:

I think the hammy quotient—and what I mean by this is the exaggerated or overly theatrical quality of the acting—is legible to us post-millennial viewers. There’s something immediately artificial about them. Like, no sandwich artist has or will ever present a sub to us this way:

And this guy is such a risible failure of a punker:

In this way, TV commercials have always been things we laugh at, which was lovely because (as I’m going to keep developing and thinking about in some blog posts to come) what you can laugh at has less power over you.

Lately, though (and yes this isn’t a new phenomenon just newer), TV commercials have become things we’re meant to laugh with. They’re aiming to be funny the way vids people forward from Funny Or Die are. Like this Subway ad from 2014 (which runs twice in the clip, no need to stay for the whole 30 seconds):

The elementary way of talking about what’s happening here is that it’s self-aware hammyness. Meta-ham. I think something more complex is going on. This ad isn’t so much about the hammyness of commercial actors, it deliberately opts for hammyness as a way to keep us entertained—us who have grown immune to hammy actors in commercials.

Here’s the thing, though, these bacon lovers are just as risible and inauthentic as the punker with a burger in his hand nosing that chain-link fence. The way they archly express their love for bacon so widely misses the mark of how performative post-YouTube/rise of foodie culture folks archly express their love for bacon.

I can’t pinpoint yet where the difference lies, and Subway is one example I’m picking on. This is, for certain products aimed at a demographic I’m slowly growing out of (or—horrors!—is this sensibility growing up alongside me?), the norm for selling ads now: a winking irony that claims to vault above advertising’s base cloyingness, but in its failure to spring from anything real ends up reading just as inauthentically as every ad in TV history.

All right, work to do. And don’t worry, I, too, hope I don’t turn into Jon Rosenblatt, 27, a Harvard University English graduate student specializing in modern and postmodern critical theory

What Montaigne Taught Us

Taught Montaigne for the first time last night, and one thing we talked about was Montaigne’s comfortable doubt, which I got somewhat at in my last post. One student compared him with Tom Wolfe, interestingly. We read The Right Stuff last year, and she wanted to compare his style to Montaigne’s. No doubt there, she pointed out, and it’s true. Wolfe is so certain about his subjects, so emphatic. It’s like night and day.

We thought about other stylists (particularly Gay Talese in the Sinatra profile and Zadie Smith in her ), and there was a consensus that we accept certainty when people are writing about others or the world, but expect doubt when writing about the self. And that the opposite wouldn’t work. Isn’t it weird? You’d think that writing about the self—i.e., writing about the one thing you can claim to have absolute authority over compared to anyone else on the planet—would allow for certainty, but we seemed to think it was poor form.

It is poor form, but why? Was it that Talese has so much detail to deliver through observation, so much of the world he’s been inside to recreate on the page, that we treat his scene-building observation work as certainty and confidence? And thus Montaigne’s world he has to build is that of his mind, which is a murkier and less stable setting? Some students posited that it was a matter of interiority: when you have to re-create the inner thoughts of other people (a la Wolfe) it’s poor form to be unsure and doubtful about what they think and feel, whereas when you delve into yourself you have access to you own unsureness.

I wondered whether it was a result of bifurcating yourself. If you’re only a narrator, you’re a stable entity in your book, and that stability can lead to a steady, certain voice. But as soon as you appear also as a character in a scene, you become two simultaneous people for the reader, often separated by time, and in this splitting of the self that stability is out the window, and so too better be your certainty.

Pet theories to keep developing. Who’s a good uncertain reporter, and who’s a good certain memoirist? Is it possible?

Very Good Paragraphs – Teaching Edition

I’m teaching some Montaigne essays next week. Reread this passage today, from his “On the education of children”:

Be that as it may; I mean that whatever these futilities of mine may be, I have no intention of hiding them, any more than I would a bald and grizzled portrait of myself just because the artist has painted not a perfect face but my own. Anyway these are my humours, myopinions: I give them as things which I believe, not as things to be believed. My aim is to reveal my own self, which may well be different tomorrow if I am initiated into some new business which changes me. I have not, nor do I desire, enough authority to be believed. I feel too badly taught to teach others.

From Screech’s superior translation. The maddening fact of becoming a creative writing teacher after getting a creative writing degree is that too few of us in graduate CW programs are taught how to teach—creative writing in specific or even just students in general. You have to do a lot of extracurricular work amid your harrowing first job, lest you end up treading the same water you saw your otherwise occupied professors tread.

Also this: I never learned in grad school how to do the work of writing things and more importantly how to enjoy it. How to enjoy the perseverance needed. So again: how do you learn to teach what you yourself weren’t taught? Montaigne: I’m an honest, open model, not a teacher.

Paradise vs. Parking Lots

You’ve heard the chorus to Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” before:

Don't it always seem to go
that you don't know what you got till it's gone.
They paved paradise
and put up a parking lot.

It’s always seemed to me a childish, naive complaint. Not because of progress in the free-market enterprise sense, but because of art and culture in the progressivist, futurist sense. I always heard Mitchell’s song in the shadow of a better one, Talking Heads’ “(Nothing But) Flowers”:

(Nothing But) Flowers from Pentagram on Vimeo.

(I was going to link to a performance of this song at the 2010 TED conference with David Byrne, Thomas Dolby, and a string quartet, but at the first chorus the TEDers start clapping along and it’s…. Well you can imagine it’s excruciating.)

The lyrics are clear if you watch the video, but if you’re not an online video-watcher (me neither!) here’s a sampling:

There was a shopping mall
Now it's all covered with flowers
You've got it, you've got it

If this is paradise
I wish I had a lawnmower
You've got it, you've got it

...

This used to be real estate
Now it's only fields and trees
Where, where is the town
Now, it's nothing but flowers
The highways and cars
Were sacrificed for agriculture
I thought that we'd start over
But I guess I was wrong

...

We used to microwave
Now we just eat nuts and berries
You got it, you got it

This was a discount store
Now it's turned into a cornfield
You got it, you got it

Don't leave me stranded here
I can't get used to this lifestyle

Byrne’s lyrics are far more evocative, brave, and tragic than Mitchell’s, not only in their specificity (and there’s also just more of them) but in their treatment of the world. Just how, he seems to ask her, are we to live in paradise? What’s a person supposed to even do there?

It’s also why I could never fully enjoy DeLillo’s White Noise (or Cosmopolis, which is guilty of similar missteps): he treats the mess of mass culture with this bewildered Boomer-esque gawking. Every other page he’s all “Can you believe this, folks?” I can believe it, Don. This world Mitchell laments and you shake your head at is the only world I’ve known.

DeLillo is 77. Mitchell is 70. David Byrne’s only 62. It’s not much younger. But for whatever reason he was able to treat the pop of our culture the way Wordworth treated flowers and clouds—as a place where we might find salvation. That’s why he’s been my go-to guy since I wrote my college entrance essay on him.

Who Pays for the MFA?

I can think of a variety of answers.

I. Your Students
Or their parents. If you are the kind of MFA student who has to teach writing or other courses to earn your tuition remission, then it’s the tuition money from your students that, for the most part, pays for you to be there. What does it mean when your students pay for you to do whatever you’re doing for 2, 3, or 4 years? What sort of duty or obligation do you have to those people?

II. Foundations
There’s lots of private money in the MFA game. Sometimes this is clear. At Alabama there was all kinds of Truman Capote money floating around. Also the McNair Foundation. When foundations pay for your MFA it’s like you’ve got a patron. What is it like to have, in 2014’s job market, a patron?

III. You
There are plenty of people who don’t get private money to fund their degree, or who don’t teach courses paid for by their students, and who thus have to either find the money to afford their education, or take out loans and make plans on how to pay it all back. These people pay their own way. What does it mean in a democracy for someone to pay his or her own way?

Despite what they say about lunch there are lots of things to get for free, and more and more these days I’m thinking that an MFA degree might be one of the worst of them. The strings attached, you see, are like spider silk: you don’t even see anything until you walk face-first into them, and then they’re stuck on you.

At stake here, or maybe just at question, is the writer’s obligations. If it should be to anything but the writing itself, to what, then? To whom? If the MFA is understood to be the start of a career, what does it mean to start that career owing it all to yourself?

Should vs Ought

It’s a distinction I have a hard time making. While a quick scan through recent writing projects shows I opt for should over ought, I feel I do the opposite when talking. I feel I ought to say should, but I opt mostly for ought. So I took it, as I ought’ve months ago, to the dictionary to see for sure:

Reserve ought for expressing obligation, duty, or necessity, and use should for expressing suitability or appropriateness.

So I’ve got a new rule of thumb: “should is appropriate,” meaning that when given the choice should not only expresses appropriateness but is pretty much always the more appropriate word than ought.

It’s not that easy, though, in that doing one’s duty is doing what’s appropriate and often vice versa, so I’m afraid I’m going to continue to opt for ought because it sounds smarter and more literate. This is a boring post, I know, but here’s what I’m really trying to get at: I’ll always go for the higher-diction option in this situation. I feel bad when I say who when whom is appropriate, even when usage guides whose authority I trust tell me that whom is pretty much gone from any non-formal use.

Hypercorrecting up might be the clearest marker of pretentiousness. It’s, like, its definition maybe. I’m sure I hypercorrect on ought, and I know I hypercorrect on further v. farther, but I think I’m good at not hypercorrecting to “[X] and I” models when used in non-subjective cases (e.g. My mailman never gave my dog and I much love). I grew up among friends where one’s grammar/usage errors became weapons for others to rhetorically destroy you with^[1], and so it became over time important for me to be right and that importance still lingers well into adulthood. It’s a problem I need to work on harder.

And yet, I don’t know: my voice is mine. Do I sound pretentious in conversation? Probably. Did I get Amazon Reader Reviews on my book that called out its arrogant tone? Yes. Do I have a choice on how I sound? Sure, but I’ve spent so long worrying that I wasn’t coming across the way I needed to in order for others to see me as normal/interesting and like me as a result, and all that worry still hasn’t made me normal or interesting. Not in the way I’d hoped. And I’m getting tired of worrying. It’s really important for me to be right. But it’s also fun to be wrong, I’m slowly learning.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

Despite what you may have been told or picked up, it’s 100% a-okay to end sentences in English with prepositions. It’s not grammatically possible to do this in Latin, however, and so where this non-rule comes from is like 100-year-old attempts on the part of misguided philologists to make English operate more like Latin, which they’d thought to for whatever reason be ideal and perfected. Ditto with the split infinitive.↵

Endings of Things

I had two models in mind when I had to start writing the ending to the taxidermy book. One was Eggers’s Frisbee-throwing soaring prose at the end of A Heartbreaking Work, and the other more pressing influence (my book’s practically dripping with it) was Rick Moody’s The Black Veil, with its incantations of black and blacknesses. I guess I wanted a huge buildup of feeling, and then a kind of slap in the face. I’m proud of it, the ending, but I don’t think I want to write those kinds of endings anymore.

Lately I’ve been thinking about this stuff in terms of songs on records. There are songs that are Grand Endings. Radiohead’s “Motion Picture Soundtrack” for instance. Most of Bill Callahan’s final tracks. I interviewed him once, Bill Callahan, and he admitted to being proud of his sequencing on records, and though I don’t think I’ve ever said a bad thing about the guy I’ll say his sequencing is a bit too spot on. It’s so stuffily perfected, like a short story in a literary journal that comes from someone’s MFA thesis.

What’s weird is that Callahan’s got worse at this over the years (cf. Julius Caesar‘s “Stick in the Mud” to Apocalypse‘s “One Fine Morning”) while Radiohead seems to’ve gotten better. This whole idea came to me while listening to Hail to the Thief‘s “A Wolf at the Door” which is a shockingly good final track. It ends the record like a leaf blowing quickly off screen, as opposed to a slow pan skyward or a slow fade to black.

Another model ending: the final shot of Grey Gardens, Little Edie’s face spinning out of the frame. I’m hoping to write more endings like this, ones that sneak up on you and leave you bereft of something. Endings that, if they were a poem, wouldn’t even signal to listeners at your reading that it’s time to sigh audibly.

The best final track ever sequenced is the Pixies’ “Brick is Red” off Surfer Rosa.

In related news, I’m a big fan of the Irish goodbye.

Hack Tweets

Among other things going on in our apartment, we’re watching CMT’s broadcast of the Starsky & Hutch remake. I thought about tweeting this:

It seems the Ben Stiller character just messed things up irreparably. (Watching every Ben Stiller movie at once.)

It was unsatisfactory, because this is just a sarcastic and convoluted way of saying “Man, Hollywood movies are so formulaic.” So then I came up with this one:

This year for Halloween I’m going as that moment when the Ben Stiller character messes everything up irreparably.

More dissatisfaction. I mean, it performs a kind of cleverness in how it turns something abstract (hackneyed film trope) into something concrete (costume), and there’s a kind of surrealness to the tweet that (at least initially) feels nice. But that surrealness is just trumped-up artifice, and that’s why I think it’s a lousy joke tweet.

Then, when trying a third time, I realized why I wasn’t going to succeed: this is a tweet about watching TV and feeling like I’m smarter than the TV I’m by choice here watching.

This morning I read much of Mike Sacks’s And Here’s the Kicker, a collection of interviews with comedy writers. There were a number of refrains among these men (and two women) when it came time to give budding comedy writers advice, but the one that stands out now is how many people urged writers to get out in the world and write about what they find. That too often writers write jokes about the kinds of jokes they’ve seen before and know are funny.

It’s how I tend to tweet.

Twitter is neat, but too often it becomes a tool to socially enhance our (mostly) solitary TV watching. This is not the same as being social.