May 2009 Archives

I often ask my graduate students on the first day of a creative writing course to write down their cultural influences. I do this because I find that the biggest problem in student writing I see, other than poor mechanics, is self-absorption. Too many of them write about their personal wounds: drug and alcohol abuse, car wrecks, anorexia, dysfunctional and failed families, failed love affairs, depression, anxiety, and rage against feelings of powerlessness. I don't mean to suggest that these are not suitable catalysts for making literature, but my students tend not to see these stories within a social matrix or cultural lineage. They feel locked within themselves and think of artistic expression as a key that will let them into the kingdom of emotional freedom, rather than seeing art as a mindful reframing of experience and emotion through a forming intelligence. They write with too much "I" and no sense of "we." They can tell me what has happened to them - but they cannot tell me the significance, the moral and psychological consequences. They cannot step outside of their anguish to see the cultural context that shapes them. They just know that they, who among the most privileged people who have ever lived on Earth, feel they don't belong anywhere.

Alison Hawthorne Deming
"Culture, Biology, and Emergence"
The Georgia Review, Spring 2009

Over the years (he said, settling back into his worn chair by the fire and picking a stray strand of greasy mutton from his voluminous beard) I've been using the phrase "It's all material" as a kind of mantra, especially when life presents me with one sort of drama or another. It's true. Anything decent I've managed to write, no matter how weird, always has some kernel of reality in it somewhere. That kernel might not be the heart of the story, but it's there. In Sumerian Pot, it was the bit about the martinis.

Other stories, like the one I woke up with in my head a couple of weeks ago and managed to write down before it got away, are firmly grounded in real experience. In that case, it was September 11th. That's a big one.

But it all goes into the meat-grinder. Being in downtown Manhattan during a terrorist attack. Drinking too much on New Year's Eve. Jacaranda blooming outside my window. Every last little bit gets filed away somewhere.

Some people carry notepads around to write these sorts of things down. I'm of the opinion that if I have to write it down to remember it, it's not worthy of remembrance. I have a somewhat freakish memory for that sort of thing, though, so that might not work for everyone.

The trouble is, if something's too close to reality, the story breaks. At least, my stories break; I know there are plenty of folks out there who can put a skim coat of fiction over their lives and don't get yelled at by Oprah for lying. I was all impressed with the story I wrote a couple of weeks ago: it had emotional impact, weird punch, all of that. But the impact and the punch were there because I was too close to the experience I was using as the basis for the story. What seemed to me to be a dense, meaningful conk on the head in 1,400 words fell flat when I asked a writer friend to read it. In fact, she missed the central point of the piece entirely, and it wasn't because she "didn't get it." That which seemed crystalline to me was clear only because I knew it was there. To someone outside my bubble it was obscure to the point of absence.

That's not always a bad thing. If you throw something out there thinking it's about The Meaning Of Eucalyptus and everyone says "This is a fantastic piece, it's like Watership Down for koalas," then maybe take a few steps back and see if you can discover something unintentionally fabulous and work with that. In my case, I was trying to do a specific thing, and failed. So, I need to find out whether I still want to accomplish what I thought I was going to do when I started out, or if what I actually did might turn out to be better than what I intended to do.

We all clear on that? Good.

No, this isn't the third Exciting Thing.

There are will be three exciting things!*

Including this one.


*Edited because Anne pointed out that it didn't make no damn sense. Politely.

Ramón González, editor of the Spanish-Mexican literary magazine Letras Libres, read "It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Gets Their Head Stuck in a 3,600-year-old Sumerian Pot."

He liked it. Quite a bit, actually: enough to translate it into Spanish for print publication in Mexico and Spain. Apparently archaeological misfortune is cross-cultural.

It'll be out in July or September, depending on which issue it lands in.

So, I'm pleased about that.

Hee!

A continuous stream of clouds and mist has not such a manner as his; waters stretching far off into the distance have not such a mood as his; all spring's flowering glory has not his gentleness; autumn's bright purity has not his strictness of form; masts driven by the wind and horses in the battle line have not his daring; tile sarcophagi and tripods with seal-script have not his antiquity; the season's flowers and fair women have not his sensuality; walls run to weeds and ruined palaces and tomb mounds overgrown with brush have not his resentment and mournfulness; the leviathan's gaping maw and the leaping sea turtle, the bull demon and the snake god, have not his sense of fantasy and illusion.

So wrote Du Mu in his preface to Li He's collection of poetry. But he didn't actually like Li He's work...or, if he did, could not permit himself to praise it unreservedly, as was expected in such prefaces.

Li He died in 816 at the age of twenty-six, and had entrusted his bundled manuscript to his friend Shen Shushi, who toted it around with him for fifteen years, neglecting his duties as literary executor.  Du Hu was a young but promising writer employed by Shen Shushi's brother in Xuanzhou, and late one night, in the throes of drunken guilt over his neglect, Shen Shushi sent sent a messenger over to Du Hu's house to request that he write a preface for Li He's manuscript.

As the story is told, it was well after midnight when the messenger banged on Du Hu's door, and such things simply weren't done. So he refused. But Shen Shushi kept after him, motivated, perhaps, by the fear of his friend's unquiet ghost. Eventually Du Mu relented.

Within the context of this period of Tang poetry, one aesthetic norm was a kind of poetic gravity expressed by the subtle illumination of moral and political issues, achieving what we today might call "significance." By those standards, Li He's poetry was beautiful, but frivolous. Summarizing Du Mu's unusually critical preface, Stephen Owen writes, "...Li He's poetry depends on gorgeous diction and fresh ideas, only without the engagement in the social and political world that produced one kind of depth in a Tang context of values [...] In effect, Du Mu is saying that Li He's poetry rings hollow."

Du Mu held to accepted standards of "serious" poetry even as he was seduced by the fantasies of Li He, and he produced the fanciful passage above while writing what was, for the time, a rather harsh critique: "...he sought to capture the quality and manner of the moment, yet he departed so far from the usual paths of letters that one scarcely knows of them."

We should all be damned with such faint praise.

Li He, The Tomb of Little Su

  Dew on the hidden orchid,
  like crying eyes.
  Nothing ties a love knot,
  flowers in mist I cannot bear to cut.
  Grass like the carriage cushion,
  pines like the carriage roof,
  the wind is her skirt,
  the waters, her pendants.
  A carriage with oiled sides
  awaits in the evening.
  Cold azure candle
  struggles to give light.
  At the foot of West Mound
  wind blows the rain.

That's right.

Because I'm a rebel.

But! I have two very exciting things to tell you. Exciting to me, anyway.

I can't tell you about them right now, because I have to go do another thing that was going to be the Most Exciting Thing for this week, until these other two more exciting things happened.

I feel bad for the Formerly Most Exciting Thing. But, you know, shit happens. One day you're the Most Exciting Thing, and the next day you're in a clock tower zeroing the scope on your rifle.

Gosh, it's like old home week. I found a yellowed copy of Home Planet News #38 in a box in the closet. It's their "Focus on AIDS" issue from 1995, and it happens to contain the first short story I ever published. That was a good season: first publication, got invited up to read in NYC at the issue release party...all sorts of nifty things were going on. I brought my handsome friend Andrew along, who wasn't bent in any way all, but when I sat back down at the table with him after enthusiastically performing high-class works like "What I'll Think About While Pat Robertson Swallows My Load," (I was so In Your Face™ back then!) I'm sure he could feel the eyes on him, which, I must confess, I enjoyed in a slightly wicked sort of way.

Home Planet News is still around, although they don't have much of an online presence and they certainly don't have archives going back fourteen years. So, I scanned it.

That took a some doing. Home Planet News is printed in tabloid-format, on newsprint, and the story was spread out over two pages and three lengthy columns, so I had to do a bit of cropping and stitching together. And scanning. Then more scanning. It took several tries to get it right, so I hope you appreciate all the work I've done for you. Which is a polite way of saying it was an incredible pain in the ass because the HP PhotoSmart scanner sucks moose ass. Why do technology companies seem to think that "smart" means "We will program our device to make decisions based on assumptions about what you want to do which are totally incorrect and will transform an otherwise simple job into an unending hell full of profanity and holes punched through wallboard?" Bastards.

No, really. Hey, HP? Here's a hint. When you have a nice, friendly, selectable indicator on your scanner that says, "Actual Size," it would be really helpful if the scanner didn't resize the image. If I ever meet someone who works in HP's scanner division I will kick them square in the crotch. Twice. Once for making a fifteen minute job take two hours, again for increasing my cortisol levels, and once more for stealing my evening. So that's three times. No, let's make it four. Plus a blow to the head with whatever's handy.

Or! I'll just disembowel them, drape their viscera about my shoulders, plant both feet into their steaming, empty gut-hole (provided I'm wearing shoes and pants I don't like), and belt out "Jerusalem." Then I will order coffee. 

Anyway, the .PDF is here (1.6MB). I make no promises about the tale. Freshman effort and all that.

Oh, and...you might want to wait awhile to read it, because the story might clash with this murderous tirade right here.

I mentioned recently that I was searching for my copy of FEH!, which contains "my four line epic, 'Ode to Rubber.'"

I found it! As it turns out, "Ode to Rubber" is longer than four lines, and the complete title of the publication is FEH! A Journal of Odious Poetry. It was edited by one Simeon Stylites, which is either his actual name or a nom de plume taken from a fifth century pillar saint. These days, he has a blog over at Salon, where apparent co-blogger "Howard Testicles" shares this reminiscence about FEH!:

Simeon's first magazine was The Sodden Rag: a Bhuttanese Buddhist journal to counter false religious attacks on Bhuttanese Buddhist monks. It was a really strange piece of writing. When I first got a copy in the mail I thought it was junk mail. Mikey soon called me up and asked if I had received some shit in the mail. "It's from the kid. I really got to have a talk with him."

The Sodden Rag became FEH the journal of Odious poetry which would only print poems about flatulence and mucous. It evolved into accepting poems about love, hockey players, and death and, of course, religion. Simeon would write to famous poets send them copies and they would send him new poems. Amazing! He'd photocopy the poems and presto a magazine. He also had a classified section and ran personals and wrote an editorial piece under the name Simeon Stylites. Simeon ended up marrying Morticia who submitted poems with lines like:

   I hate it
   when my titties bounce
   and some stranger, some pig-dog
   dribbles-
   over yonder

FEH! now sells for a small fortune.

I hope so, because I have right here a copy of FEH! numer 10, from August of 1991, that is only slightly if mysteriously stained. It even has the original subscription card in it ("Yes, I do confess my need for FEH! in my life. Yes yes send me lots of FEH! Send buckets and cauldrons and bales and crates of FEH!").

I share page 18 with "Inflatable Penile Prosthesis," a poem by Michelle Perez, an unattributed limerick about a lady of Chichester who made the bishop's britches stir, and "The Reader's Digest Condensed Version of the Carpe Diem Poetry Genre" by Cielle Owens.

But now, without further ado! "Ode to Rubber," by me:

O rubber, O latex!
Heavenly bouncy stuff!
Give me balls,
 give me gloves,
   give me condoms!
Pencils are grand
 with a hard pink nipple,
  galoshes excite me
   so soft and supple.
Tires are splendid
 so filthy and black,
   prophylactics divine
    a man's private elastic
     sack.
Bounce, stretch, pull, and twist,
 ne'er was there such a
  substance as this!

I'm so proud.

If you've got a mind to run away to the mountains to write and hang out with other people who have run away for the same reason, give Writing Away Retreats a look.

Staff for the October 2009 retreats (there are two) includes authors Matt Marinovich and Signe Pike, editors Michael Signorelli and Kate Gale, and agents Sorche Fairbank, Scott Hoffman, Robert Guinsler, and Eddie Schneider.

Cicily Janus runs the show, and you can find her right over here.

Read this thing I wrote over at McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

If you want to, I mean.

No pressure.

I started this project on April 28, 2008. The original tagline was "One Year. One Novel. One Contract." The blog was to be a focused narrative of my attempt to reach that goal. Have I reached that goal?

Of course I haven't. Don't be silly. If I'd reached it I'd be knee-deep in opiates and loose women and men and would have already forgotten about all you little people.

I gave up on the whole One This And That intention thing for the blog on June 2 of last year, saying,

I've come to the...well, I won't call it sudden...but I've come to the realization that that's well, stupid.

Not just the practical aspect of it, I always knew that I was asking the near-impossible of myself. But: it's a stunt. Let's see how clever and good and talented I can be.

My previous blog, which stumbled and arced and streaked through Tha IntraTubes for over five years, was described in admirable terms by a long time reader as a "conceptual train wreck." He liked those sorts of blogs, as do I. But I thought I'd give the subject-specific format a shot, because Doctor Internet's Prescription For Blog Success at one point involved such focus. My focus was going to be a novel in progress and writing in general. Nothing else.

But that was dull. Dull. Dull. My god it was dull, it was so dull and tedious and stuffy and boring and desperately dull. Even leaving aside my utter failure to meet the unitary goal stated at the project's inception, I really don't think I'd have much luck producing regular posts on a single subject that would be worth reading.¹

So, I shifted to an emphasis on writing, and more snippets of things I liked. That got tiresome after a while as well, so finally I gave up and started posting whatever struck my bent head at any given time, provided it fit within certain ill-defined boundaries that changed on a regular basis and had some correlation with the table of tides from a 1927 edition of The Old Farmer's Almanac that I found in my pants the morning after what was apparently a very good night out with a group of urchin fishermen.

The stats tell the tale. I started writing whatever sucked the toes of my fancy sometime in March. My traffic roughly doubled, and the number of repeat visitors steadily increased. Those repeats are the coveted regular readers. I've got some now. Not many. But some. You know who you are! Thank you.

This, then, would be my delayed The Show So Far post. I now return you to your regular programming.

---

¹"Or regular posts on multiple subjects that are worth reading!" Yes, yes. Shut up.