Post about the Black Eyed Peas. And also misery.

Hey all. It's Rachel L. I won't type out my full last name for fear of exposing this secret little blog to the millions who have me on Google Alert. Bizness just invited me, and although I was initially certain I'd have nothing of value to contribute besides inappropriate jokes and updates on 2 Live Crew, I find myself already wanting to ask a really depressing question: what are your thoughts on writing and misery? I'm going to be frank: writing poetry depresses the shit out of me and for all of the obvious reasons: Introspection ends in the recognition of futility. Introspection magnifies and mythicizes one's mistakes. Writing often requires analysis of the past and all the bad memories thereof. Even good memories are often painful, in the way that snowfall and christmas lights and thinking about perfect fishing trips with your brother as a child make you cry. Beauty is painful. The sublime is painful. My arm is painful. Oh wait, that's because I did a cheesy aerobics class last night...or IS it? DAMN you, poetry!

Maybe this is specific to poetry and not fiction? Maybe this is specific only to me. Maybe this is specific only to people who would be depressed anyway, and writing only exacerbates it. But I feel like I remember being happier before I wrote poetry (though maybe that's because I was young and lithe and didn't have hormones). I wonder if what would make me happier is thinking about those fishing trips, watching the snow, crying, and leaving it alone.

Did I even ask a question? Oh, writing and misery? Does writing make you miserable? If so, what ever will you do about it? Anyone ever consider just stopping? There's also the entire side issue of writing making you miserable not for the personal, psychic crises it causes, but because it's so difficult not to sound like yourself...or for me not to sound like myself...which is taxing and sad. I give up. Thoughts?

Glad I can bring so much mirth to my inaugural post! I absolutely must end this on a lighter note. Hey did anyone hear that that song "My Humps" was the most successful download campaign ever...or something? I have no absolutely no documentation of this, nor can I cite where I heard it...or if I dreamed it...which would be alarming....

Love,
R

Thanks, Ralph. On to you, James.

"These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies--captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly."

--RWE

and who's letting it (die)?

Damn good social commentary on the Win/frey spectacle of yesterday's afternoon.

the story that just won't die

okay, I don't exactly feel sorry for Frey, but still, embarrass & discredit the guy & be done with it already! Instead it looks like the scandal that rocked book clubs all across the land is going to ooze into its second month with Oprah's tearful reversal of her previous support for the book. Man, if you make Oprah cry hot tears of rage on TV, where can you hide? He's a ratfink, but any publicity is good publicity for book sales: when will this story die?

kumbayah

So, the other day party of my heart & jesmimi & I did a little panel for MLK day on creative writing and social justice. Party organized it, it was great, a completely surprising number of people came, we all looked hot doing it, fine. Since then, I've been thinking about some of the issues we talked about: politics & aesthetics, who gets to speak for/to whom, teaching writing as a mode of social justice, beauty and morality, guilt, truth. Heavy stuff. What happened to me a little bit at the panel discussion is something that used to happen to me in grad school classes. I've thought about the issues, done some reading, I think I know what I want to say, and half way through saying it I feel 1) like I don't really even know what I'm talking about, and/or 2) like I am completely wrong and want to immediately reverse all my previous statements & argue the exact opposite. These are just the flashes I'm getting as words are physically coming out of my mouth. Sure, I get the occasional flash of "wow, hit that nail on the head, I didn't even know I had that in me," but those are few & far between.

I felt okay, even good, about the panel afterward though, but now my appetite is whetted. I want to think more about these things, so I figured I'd throw it out there. What do you all think about morality in your writing, or the responsibility of your art to contribute to The Greater Good? Have you read anything lately that seems relevant to these issues? We'll have our own little panel discussion here, and no aggressive nail-clipping, dog-rescuing Christian speakers will be able to muck up the Q&A.

(title=party thought we might start the panel with a rousing chorus of kumbayah, but we saved that for later, when the Christian speaker heard us gossiping about her & came back to kick our asses.)

And what about JT LeRoy?

I came into the bookstore today all up and ready with my Frey news, ideas about how I would tell customers (on the sly, on the sly) that it was made up, cruel little schadenfreudes about making tense lesbians all flustered with disbelief/-appointment. I was gonna be the cool kid in the bookstore, finger on the pulse, but when I got in there--boom--there's talk of this.

[Quick summary for those who've never heard of LeRoy (as I hadn't) and who are too lazy to travel to link.... Or not; this shit's so complex; please travel to link and read and come back.]

And it's all so crazy, right? It's all so crazy and complex. I can't hold any of it in my mind, I can barely understand the first steps of these messes, and I know there are endlessly more. Layers inside layers. An enigma wrapped inside of Churchill's belly. Being made all the more complex by my having to now stand behind that rash call to arms of three months ago. To refresh everyone's memory:

What if we write non-fiction that's fictional? No I'm serious. This is kind of like my earlier post, the one about adding fiction to this world, little lies, small sparkles that aren't true.

.... Give them non-fiction, yeah, but make the shit up.

So yeah--there's that.

But what did I mean by that? Oh fuck I meant, in so many words, in four to be exact, A Million Little Pieces. But why do I not mean that now, and why does it feel like there's no way I could have meant it then? And why do I think what Frey did was wrong, and why am I uncomfortable, right now, with saying that?

His book had meaning, it meant something to me and it meant something to millions.

He lied.

How do I reconcile the two? How do we all?

On the one hand, it's so simple and it goes like this: The whole reason we are here to write--or the whole reason I am, and the whole reason I hope we all are--is to tell the truth, there is no point in writing if we are not revealing what we know to be true. This is why I don't read things that help me "get away," because "away" is not where I want to be, "away" is not at all where I want to be, I want to see things and help people and help people to see things. And if these things are true, and if what James Frey wrote is not, then no matter how much good his book effected, and no matter how much people may have been helped, he lied, and so he did not tell the truth, and so he did not effect good. His readers were lied to. His readers were disrespected.

But then there's this, from a December article on LeRoy in the Chronicle:

[Paul] Greenberg called the LeRoy debate a symptom of celebrity culture. "Celebrity has become a way of moving up to a higher class. Lesser writers, lesser artists are going to their real experience and to their memories just to promote their social ambitions."

...

Either way, Berkeley critic and author Greil Marcus sees something insidious behind the debate.

"What it all signifies to me is a deepening mistrust of the imagination, or the driving out of fiction by nonfiction," Marcus wrote in an e-mail this week.

"People will read fiction about a gender-confused teenage or preteen parking-lot hustler -- but only if they can believe that what they are reading is true. Then they can celebrate the person as an artist while avoiding having to actually engage with art."

A "driving out of fiction by nonfiction"--this is exactly what jesmimi was talking about in November. But I want to move past that and get to this: "Then they can celebrate the person as an artist while avoiding having to actually engage with the art." To wit, if people picked up AMLP and read the first few pages as a novel, as fiction, why, in this cultural milieu, would it have been so much less compelling? I'm culpable in this, too--I'll cop to that, I have to, I read it (the first several pages) in a store in Berkeley two summers ago and was transfixed--I can't at all guarantee that I would have bought it were it registered as fiction; I was riveted because it was memoir, because it was true. Because I could say to myself, every time I turned the page, This happened, this happened to someone, this happened.

But why is this? Of what is this a sign? Earlier in the article, there was a mention of a post-9/11 turn to reality, that somehow the incident--or perhaps the fallout--or what have you--somehow called for "the verity of non-fiction," in some fashion created "a tremendous thirst for authenticity." Leaving aside metaphysical inquries into the derivation of this feeling--viz., could this not just as easily have led to an avoidance of reality, a burrowing in, and away?--its existence can't be denied: jesmimi pointed to it this fall, Frey enacted it three years ago, and we all know how reality ('reality') TV has exploded in the past 5 years....


Oh, man, this fuckin post is everywhere, all over the place and of course it's also nowhere. But I'm gonna post it because I think there's at least something to wrestle with, and I'd love it if you all would take up the baton, even for just a few steps. This all is really blowing my mind, and I probably should have sat down for a minute before writing, probably should have laid down. So that's just what I'll do right now, and write more, maybe, in my morning.

this article reminds me of a conversation had a while back (youpeople, i believe you were urging us to make up memoirs?) about memoirists taking "creative liberties." digested version, for those of you not into reading police reports as a form a procrastination, here.

As in, 'funny ha ha.'

So, a funny thing is happening.

Sometime last fall, Matt Klam shared with the workshop some quote from some old(er) British writer that said something like, If you ever write a sentence that makes you satisfied--because it's nice, or deft, or cute, or knowing, or brilliant, and you get the picture--then you should immediately throw it out. Delete it. Banished.

Why? I don't know why, not exactly, just like I don't know exactly what the quote was, but I think the reasoning went something like this: We're not here to come up with zingers; we're here to say something honest. We're here to try, just once, to say something honest.

I think that's what he meant. And I'm pretty damn sure that's what Klam intended for us to think it meant. (He was big on cutting to chases, not being ornate.) Either way, that's pretty much what I, sitting in that Angell Hall classroom, took it to mean, and I remember thinking at the time, What horseshit. And I remember thinking at the time, Leave it to the scientists and the anthropologists to write truth unvarnished and -adorned, ugly and plain like those news anchors on Batman (the first one, people) after the make-up scare courtesy of the Joker. Splotched. Ashy. Etiolated. We're writers; half of what we do is make it sound nice. Otherwise any nitwit with an email account and enough fingers to type can be widely, and satisfyingly, read (forget for a moment blogs, okay?).

But a funny thing is happening. I'm starting to...if not agree with Klam and his limey hero, then at least, I don't know, at least I'm beginning to not stand up and scoff and shout against this position. And I'm beginning to tire a little of paper thin back flips.


Definition of terms: I'm not calling for owner's manual prose here. I'm not demanding that it be pared down. This is not a banner for clauseless sentences, I in no way want to do away with metaphors, similes, allegories, what I'm talking about is not gettothepointpeople. Rather, it's just....

I'm reading this book right now. The galleys, or the advanced reader's copy, or whatever they call it (love the bookstore job)--Which Brings Me to You, by Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott (man, would you check out the consonants on that girl??), "a novel in confessions." Boy and girl meet up at a wedding, both single and alienated (subtext: both single and alienating), they don't have sex in the coat closet because he thinks he likes her, they agree to send each other confessions in the form of letters. The trail of dead in their love lives. I didn't say it was plausible, but that's not the point.

The point is this: leaving Almond aside, I like the way this girl writes, but that's the problem. I like the way she writes. Understand? I like the way she writes. Eh? As in, she's writing, right, and I'm trying to feel something close to true; as in, she's writing, and I can feel her wanting to make those sentences, and not that those sentences are making her write themselves.

About a month ago I got a gift in the mail from a friend who was then traveling in Poland. A Soviet cigarette case with a lighter inside it, so that when you closed the case after extracting your cigarettes you could pull at a button/trigger/flange and light your cigarette. Way cool I thought, loved it so much that I decided to not continue quitting smoking like I'd started to, and when I busted it out a week later one of my friends out here, an Italian guy named Manlio (not a typo--pronounced 'Mah-lee-oh'), he said, Ohh, dees peece of sheet is yours?? I was flabergasted. How could he? What a great thing this was, what a babe magnet and what a party trick, and how could anyone but think that I possessed so much coolness to own such a thing, it was great.

But he was right. It is a piece of shit. The lighter stopped working two weeks ago, and it looks like if I want to use the lighter--that cute, fantastic sentence that makes people go aww--I'll have to fill it up with butane every fortnight. Dees peece of sheet.

I don't know I don't know, maybe it's because 45k words into my novel and so few of them are precious, so few sentences are the kind of beautiful I always hoped a child of mine would be, and so now I'm making a virtue of necessity, but maybe it's not that? Maybe language should be less about impressing people, and more about getting it right, whatever it is that's in our heads?

Sweet Life, or Suck It!

Happy New Year.

Has anyone watched any of the clips on the
Wholphin DVD that came with this month's Believer? How about those different versions of the Turkish sitcom? As much as my eyes watered with embarrassment, for various reasons, I have to admit, I was cracking up. There is a certain element of "Aren't Turkish People Funny?" that made me a little uncomfortable, hence the eye watering, but I think it's safe to say that sitcoms from all cultures are pretty ridiculous, particularly ones that involve a wacky, eccentric neighbor and a hot, new secretary.

I think I'd like to write my own version.