Off Topic

The King’s English, Part II: The Born Writer

At the beginning of each semester of freshman composition, I give the students a pep talk. Probably only one in any group is truly confident about his or her writing ability. Many of them already have decided they just can’t or won’t, and they don’t have any aims at trying any more than necessary to pass the class and get on with nursing or engineering or public safety or whatever else they think they won’t need English for. That feels like the majority, though I couldn’t say for certain. The rest are a mix: writing pragmatists who have little interest in theory or artistry; the good-but-don’t-know-it-yet; the terrified; and the couldn’t-tell-a-comma-splice-from-conjunctivitis.

 Part of the pep talk lecture centers on Stephen King’s assertion that at the heart of bad writing is fear. Writing and fear are perfect topics for King, and I believe he’s right. One way he illustrates the point is by exploring passive voice; a writer hides behind it, afraid of his or her own soul’s shadow. Active voice is bold and direct. It forces the writer to own what he or she wants to say. That’s good especially for southerners to hear, considering the polite hedges we use to protect ourselves and others from unpleasant thoughts, i.e.: Bless his heart, he’s just so stupid.

Writing is vulnerability. My brief stint as a journalist taught me that. The audience is all too eager to find the chinks in your armor, be it an incorrect rendering of an idiom you thought you knew – long road to hoe, for example – or any sliver of inaccuracy. Likely this is what makes writing such a romantic profession: the same wounded heart driving the craft is the one tested in the fires of battle, the one willing to be wounded more. It’s a sweet sort of bravery that shouldn’t be ruined with passivity. In one way or another all writers become the Man of La Mancha. You have to at least pretend not to be afraid. You have to commit to impossible dreams. A touch of madness helps, too. That’s bravery through vulnerability, and that’s beautiful.

In a way, the pep talk I give my students is as much for myself as it is for them. For most of them, the pragmatists, it’s a simple matter of ownership and active voice. For a select few others, it’s a matter of soul, those few who are like I was once, compelled yet terrified. In Kentucky yet there are mothers and fathers still unimpressed with the need for education in general, and so many of these students were brave just to fill out a college application to begin with. The culture, especially in the rural areas, still values extreme pragmatism and family devotion. Going to college means you’re leaving. It means you’re likely not to come back and fulfill your familial obligations. It means somehow the seemingly innate ingenuity and practical intelligence that ensured hillside survival in isolation for centuries has a role in other things. With this bravery very often comes a pure and tragic voice, not from all of them, but from enough of them to make me think it’s true.

I didn’t grow up on a farm. I was a generation removed from that. My parents were teachers, pioneering college degrees ahead of me and my sister. Their parents were not educated formally, and were, aside from unfair ideas of unintelligence, fairly stereotypical eastern Kentuckians with Appalachian foothill stories. My grandfather once told me that as a boy he wouldn’t have shoes until after the first autumn frost, and that first frost morning he’d go to the barn, wake up a cow and make it move so he could drop his bare feet into the warm straw where the cow had been sleeping. For me there were Nikes, very specific and expensive ones. Don’t get me wrong. I had to chase a cow or two, toss more than a few bales of hay, but mainly I had the freedom of imagination in a little house by the sidewalk near downtown. I had a mother who wouldn’t rest until I understood the difference between direct and indirect objects.  I had a father who loved stories.  

For my family, the reintroduction to education and the slight class upgrade was perhaps long overdue. All sides go back two or three centuries in the same general area. Trace them back to Europe and you start to discover titles of nobility, primarily Scottish and Irish titles. They were knights and kings. It doesn’t take much historical exploration to understand how nobility end up Kentucky farmers: your kin sell you out to the British or you find yourself a Protestant among Catholics, and the draw of the wilds of Virginia – now Kentucky – become very attractive, and since your title means nothing now anyway, you might as well leave it across the Pond.

I bring that up only because heredity and environment play into this concept of the born writer, toward which I’ve been meandering now for about 850 words. In my pep talk, after we address fear, I launch into a rebuttal of King’s assertion that great writers are born. Nature versus nurture is an old debate, and one that incorrectly pits the two against one another as though our abilities and proclivities and personalities aren’t the result of beautifully complex combination of the two. Still, I tend to side with nurture – not so much for any objective reason, but because, very selfishly, I must for my own sake. That great writers are born is a concept I must reject. It must be rejected precisely because of the fear the idea creates, the fear that prevents writers from becoming in the first place, like the fear that prevents great, would-be Kentucky writers from breaking or challenging tradition in a place so wedded to tradition that change sometimes seems impossible. The idea embraced within and without that we, Kentuckians, are born a certain way is defeatist and belies the Kentucky spirit. The same goes for writers.

Like others, I am wowed by the savants, those with extraordinary natural abilities from a young age. Mozart, for example. Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein at 17 or some ridiculous age. Akiane Kramarik. Or my childhood classmate, Shane Stanley, who in the first grade could create intricate houses and cars with an Etch-a-Sketch. Bushes and everything. Wheels that were actually round. A very small subset of people seem to have astonishing natural abilities. But I don’t think we should confuse gift with skill. After all, a lot of people thought young Einstein was retarded.

The brain is an incredibly adaptive organ. One study showed that if a person meditates 30 minutes every day for 30 days, the person actually alters the brain’s neuro-pathways. The brains of blind people reroute the senses in a way that sound, like a bat’s sonar, can substitute for sight. Other research says it takes 10,000 hours to become a master of some skill. That’s 1.15 years if you don’t sleep or do anything else. Likely that is accelerated if one begins early enough, say 3 years old. Brains are born, and then they are trained.

For a long time it was thought that boys and girls were naturally different in their talents and abilities. A recent study shows something else. In it, parents set up an incline for their crawling infants to climb. They could adjust the steepness of it as they saw fit. Across the board, the parents of baby boys set the incline at a steeper angle than the parents of baby girls. Right from the beginning, little girls are being taught they have limits while boys are taught to push themselves and overcome obstacles. Again, the mind is trained, not born.

I have lots of other reasons to think we are, for the most part, products of our environments; I could go on and on. To be fair, I could go on and on about brain chemistry, which can suggest we have absolutely no control over ourselves whatsoever, but in addition to my need to believe in free will, I have a need to believe that we are not “born” to do anything. What we are and what we do are the results of the environments we find ourselves in and the actions we take within those environments. I must believe this or I might as well quit now.

When I was 17 I set a ridiculous and dreamy goal for myself. It was an incredible thing to me that the works of a short list of authors were presented to, I presumed, all American kids. I wanted to be one of them. My dream was that one day I would be required high school reading, placed on a list alongside Harper Lee, Mark Twain, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. This was the most satisfying of any of my silly fantasies.

I’ll chalk up the arrogance to think I might actually achieve that to teenage bravado. It wasn’t entirely my fault. My head had been pumped up by a string of literary successes. I had won several essay and poetry contests. I was one of a few who got a “Distinguished” on his writing portfolio. Enough people told me I was gifted that I really bought into it. I bought into it enough that I began to believe I was born to do this. And it was at that moment, I stopped growing as a writer.

College was different. It took a lot more than pizzazz to get an A. College required substance. I stopped winning contests, and others I knew had started winning. But the real challenge wouldn’t come until graduate school.

A friend of mine suggested I apply to Spalding’s MFA in poetry program. He had liked my poetry. The first chapters of my novel? Not so much. I applied to the fiction program anyway, even though I’d barely written any fiction, even though I had no idea what an MFA was or why I should have one. To my surprise, I got in, and then I had to ask a bunch of embarrassing questions because I had applied to a program I knew nothing about completely on a whim and, partially, on the advice of another. I chose fiction because I didn’t know how to write it. Poetry for me was a question of the soul, and I wasn’t about to have people try to teach me how to express my soul. If I was going, I was going to explore something I knew nothing about.

Clearly, I was not prepared. At my first residency it didn’t take me long to realize I was suddenly sitting among the literary elite. Many of these people were famous, and all of them, unlike myself, had read Moby Dick, and were constantly telling Moby Dick jokes, which I pretended to understand. They used foreign phrases like “story arc” and “third-person limited point of view.” They informed me there were such things as lyrical essays. They used words like “genre” and “ekphrasis.”  

It was terrifying.

When 7 out of 9 workshop members didn’t understand my story, I really began to think I’d made the wrong decision. I’d put everything I had into that story. I went back to my room and mourned. For days. The first half of the first semester didn’t go well, either. I was drowning in my lack of skill. And then fear really took over. I thought of cutting my losses, of going down a different path. I wondered why I had chosen this path to begin with. I had no answer for that. I had to do a serious life review.

Why writing? Well, first of all I couldn’t draw. Or play guitar. Writing was fun, or at least had been until I found myself in over my head. Why not math? I hated and feared math, that’s why. This fear was developed by the torture of timed multiplication tests where I knew the answers but couldn’t write them down fast enough. It was compounded, in a special program I was in, by a too-early introduction to algebra without any explanation whatsoever. I focused on what I was good at, instead, and I quit focusing on math altogether.  

I hadn’t quit much else in my life, except one thing: basketball.

I grew faster than most kids. After a fifth-grade growth spurt, I hustled my way to the starting lineup of the Summit Elementary Wildcats basketball team. I was a forward. I had a hot cheerleader girlfriend. I was top ten in the county in scoring and rebounding. In the ninth grade things changed. I stopped growing. The other kids continued growing. I was now a forward in a guard’s body. I tried to adapt. I mastered the fade-away, practiced the Jordan-esque up-and-unders.

Soon, the YMCA said it was time for me to move to the adult court. In my first pickup game, I found myself the only player back to guard the basket against a charging Marty Thomas, a rival school’s star varsity player. I peddled back, ready to defend. It’s unclear if what happened next is only my memory of the event or the actuality of it. I watched the trim of that dude’s shorts fly over my head and heard, not saw, the dunk from behind me. This was the moment I understood my basketball career was over.

But I shouldn’t have understood that. I should have understood that was fear taking me over. I should have understood that if I really wanted to play basketball, I needed to adjust my game and keep at it. Some things come easier for some than others, the Shaqs of the world. But there are some who succeed despite their limitations. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, but he continued after his passion. Not me. I was afraid. I wasn’t cut out for it. I wasn’t born to do it.

Later, in grad school, where it felt like everyone around me was a Marty Thomas, I was faced with the same decision: believe I can do it or believe I wasn’t born to do it and quit. It was good I didn’t quit. I succeeded, and I succeeded well – eventually. I believe these moments pop up again and again in life, and each time we have to believe there’s no such thing as “born to do” something.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The King's English, Part 1

Stephen King’s On Writing is a great source for any literary aspirant. It’s gruesome in King’s usual way, sometimes involving anonymous teeth in an industrial laundry or cotton swabs damming up the nasal bloodlines of a drug-addled creative – did you know he doesn’t remember writing Cujo? It’s a joy to read. I teach from it sometimes, though, naturally, he can’ t be right about everything. Two things in particular spring to mind:

1. No one ever asks about the language.  It’s only about story.
2.  Great writers are born not made.

No one asks King about the language because he has the rhythm of a flat tire. That’s not to say he’s not awesome – he is! A storyteller 20 years at the top of the New York Times best-seller list, but not one of those books with the vibratory, rattle-your-bones rhythm of Poe or the seductive uncoiling vine-lines of Woolf. His error is not entirely his fault. Writers are trained to make bold, unequivocal statements of truth from the first moment they hear the word thesis. A journalist seeks to be objective, removed, while a writer must jump into the arms of a viewpoint and elope with it. This type of reckless romanticism is exciting. You are Puss-n-Boots, sword drawn: I tell you the truth! Now pet me.

Showing your bias can be endearing – you are exposed, awaiting reproach, and this can be interesting to a reader. I have my own bias in regard to language and story, and that’s because I’m not yet a very good storyteller. When I began focusing on writing 17 years ago, my main concern was language. I loved language, the power, the rhythm, the beauty, the structure. I wanted to be able to string words together like Shakespeare. In the early days I didn’t even care if the words made sense together. I paired them up to see how they danced. I put them into sordid threesomes. I took them apart, reassembled them or bunched them up until I found a word like blabbersprawl (Felling, 2011) or a phrase like “the Isthmus of Thisness or something else untongueable” (Ousia, 2011).

Well, those examples are fairly recent, but I still consider these days “the early days.” There’s nothing necessarily special about the process, just a big kid playing and tinkering with the sacred language because it’s fun for him.

I’m not saying that’s any good – very often I have no idea – but if I have any skill with language it’s because I’m always out to have a good time with it. We know from childhood or having children how playtime can get out of hand. Too much invention can lead one to perform a kind of language circus of daring and fatiguing stunts. I’m the worst offender when it comes to putting on a top hat and tap shoes and youngfrankensteining my way across a stuffy literary boardroom. But that’s who I am as a writer, really, perpetually anachronistic, out of context, contrary. Oh, you’re looking for something funny? Let me tell you a story about my dead puppy. It’s not because I don’t know better. It’s because I absolutely detest doing what everyone else in the room is doing. This is as much benefit as flaw. It keeps things original. It also keeps people from knowing what to do with it. My story, “Now,” a.k.a., “Now or Something Very Similar,” is a good example, begrudgingly rejected by a dozen publishers because they can’t get it to fit in with their aesthetic though they tell me they liked it very much. In a sense, my avoidance of pigeonholes keeps me on the fringe – and that’s okay for now, at least until I master the story.

Regardless, my stance is that language matters. If you’ve had the unfortunate experience of reading the Celestine Prophecy, then you know that there’s more to it than plotting out some action and dialog. The success of that excruciating book shows there are enough readers who don’t care about the finer details; this would seem to prove King’s point. Then again, we live in a world where velvet paintings of Elvis and Grilled Cheese Jesuses become popular.  Anyone, perhaps anything, can tell a story, but not everyone can write one.

I tend to get a bit mystical about it. My critical essay on “Quantum Fiction” got itself involved in a Wikipedia debate about a new genre that may actually exist. In it, I talk about the energy transference of rhythm, about how the vibrations beneath the words mirror the guitar-string vibrations underlying the fabric of the universe. If the rhythm is off, your invented reality is off.

Not long after the essay was published, I read articles about computer reproduction of art, about how bots with the right algorithms can pump out any kind of art and it can be technically correct. A computer can produce a novel just by pumping out all possible combinations of words. A bot can paint a picture for you. A machine can play the piano. I worried a moment that robots would take even the jobs of artists.

But what the machine can’t do is experience. What the machine can’t do is transfer energy via art, human to human. I’m not just blowing smoke. In a blind experiment where people listened to different renditions of piano music – one played by a computer and the other played by a human musician—the people physiologically responded to the human player even though there was, very technically, no difference in the notes being played. They somehow knew the difference, and the difference is the soul riding those notes.  

Cynics, I am aware the Jonas Brothers are still popular. Some other boy band – which is it now, New Directions or something? – will be popular for the next cycle of teenage girls. Manufactured soul has a shelf-life. True artistry is with us forever.

Language is sacred. It is magic. I don’t know why people aren’t asking about the language. It’s the first thing I notice. It’s the first method I use to judge a writer. Story isn’t the only reason Shakespeare is still with us. Story isn’t the only reason the King James’ version of Luke’s Christmas story is still the best version, the one we (I) still want read aloud at the Christmas Eve service even if I generally avoid the KJV every other day of the year.

If King’s right about this, what happened? I blame Hemingway and Carver, who remind me of 1960s office furniture, but I’m sure whatever happened is much bigger than they. Likely the aversion to finely crafted verse is due to technological shifts and fractured attention spans. Maybe when we get to a point the robots can do everything except art – you know, mow the lawn, fix the gutters, pick up the kids, balance the checkbook, whatever – art consumers will again have the time and patience to appreciate the rhythm and flow of words. As important, they may have time again TO TEACH that appreciation. 

In Part 2, I'll address King's assertion that great writers are born. 

Response to the Critic's Critic

Nobody likes a critic. I knew that before I became one, and it was also not surprising that a recent (only half-negative) book review I wrote was not well received by the book's author. I totally understand; you work so hard, you have such high hopes, and then somebody just comes and pops your balloon. I hope one day to be in a similar situation to this author, who took time out from his book tour to weather a not-so-glowing review. I took no pleasure in the criticism--because I do sympathize. The first email had the tinge of hurt I expected and dreaded back before I decided honesty and journalistic integrity were more important than sweet talk and empathy. The book's author, to the editor, said:

"...kinda laughable. is this kid right out of high school? all he can reference to wrap his head around the novel is catcher in the rye and stephen king and postmodernism, which doesn't even mean anything and which he fails to define. are you planning to review, to give the book a more legit read? it's not a book for kids, after all. I'd love it if you'd direct this guy to [another review] in [another mag], which digs in deeply and gets what's going on. "

The message didn't sting as much I thought it might. I took it as the words of someone with hurt feelings. I hoped he felt better. But then, a week later, there was a second message with the same theme, and I wondered at this point what exactly the author was now trying to accomplish. An admission of wrongness? Of not getting "what's going on?" Of being a stupid and half-literate kid? Did he want the review scrapped and retraction issued? Would this be considered honest/professional? The second message read as follows:

"I know it's bad form to dialogue with 'critics' who, um, reference Catcher in the Rye (high school), Stephen King (pablum) and 'postmodernism' (without ever explaining it?)... for starters... so many holes in this so-called review... I don't have time or interest in getting into it, honestly, but I'm on a break for a minute from the tour, compiling reviews for the web site, and I just had to say that it's clear to me that a certain level of maturity and, I guess, life (not to mention literary) experience is needed to read [my book]. I hadn't considered that before, but... well, check out the links below, if you like. These writers dig in deep and manage to understand and explain the book on its own terms. Literary Criticism 101. Feel free to share these links in the comments on your site, you know, for balance. Let your readers decide."

Hmmm. Condescend much? Assume much? Still I wondered if I should dignify with a response. I've been hit before. Heck, in the past there've been whole campaigns launched against me, death threats from CEOs, blog comment lynch mobs of teens angry with me because I didn't like their band. And after years of grad school and professional rejection, I've become thick-skinned enough to handle somebody getting pissy or not liking me. My pride wasn't scratched by the comments--obviously they are ridiculous and immature comments--but the author was suddenly very irritating. I hadn't mentioned in the review that same irritating tone in the book, where the narrator seems to look down on others for not liking the "right" music, though I did mention the constant authorial lecturing as one of the primary downfalls. I got it just fine, especially with all the dumbing down and explanation this author seems to think lots of people need. 

Sometimes, I think I'm too nice. I tried pretty hard to be diplomatic in the review, tried to cushion the blow as much as possible, you know, out of sensitivity. I wonder how he would have reacted if I had been harder than I was. Even now I'm too nice because in this instance I've refrained from naming names or criticizing directly; and though I've penned a snarky response, I sent it to the editors first to let them decide whether it should be sent on. Holy smokes, I hope they do. That response is below, sans identifying language:

Dear Mr. ___________,

I wondered for a while if I should respond to your concerns. I thought maybe you were just upset. I understood that. A guy writes a book, wants people to like it, and some idiot craps all over it. But since you emailed a second time, I thought maybe I should explain myself so you might feel better.

But you know, being a recent high school graduate, I’m not sure there’s much I can tell you that you don’t already know. Maybe this will be a “from the mouth of babes” moment, since we’re busy assuming anyway. I’m sorry I compared your book with the great Catcher in the Rye. I was wrong to do that. Your book is positively nothing like it. It was just that the iconic book was fresh in my mind from Senior English. I went to an odd high school, one where students graduate in their mid-30s with an MFA. And unfortunately, I became one of those southern statistics: married young with kids before finishing school, and writing book reviews barefoot while wiggling yet another loose tooth. Getting learned has been difficult, what with trying to keep my jaw un-slacked during dissertations.

In general, I share your distaste for Stephen King’s writing. The eighth-grade level his stories are written on can be fatiguingly lofty and verbose, and the man has zero sense of rhythm—I wrote about that in my critical essay “Quantum Fiction,” where I tried really hard to apply the theories of quantum mechanics to message transmission via prose rhythm; I even BSed it well enough to get it by some snooty Harvard types I studied under. Sometimes I wonder how such an inaccessible writer like King has sold so many books. I mean, that story about Lard Ass and the pie eating contest kind of rocked, but what was he on when he wrote The Langoliers? Not that I read either of those stories. Thank God for Hollywood, you know? But anyway, what does King know? Just because a writer spends two consecutive decades at the top of the New York Times best-seller list doesn’t mean he knows squat about anything. Haven’t both Sarah Palin and Snookie been on that list, too? Rest assured, Mr. __________, you and your book will not be associated with the likes of them.

And correct you are that “postmodern” is not so well defined. I hear Derrida (who I’m told was like the authority on postmodernism) had difficulty defining it, too. Maybe it’s like when Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, when asked to differentiate art from pornography, said he knew [obscenity] when he saw it. I share that viewpoint, I think, as well as the ability to know trash when I see it. In high school (just last month!) we were talking about postmodernism, and the best the teacher could do was point to certain patterns and certain authors and say things like, “Well, Stephen King’s not one of them.” During these discussions, writers like Faulkner and Borges and Barth were brought up, and I like them very much, but I have to admit (sheepishly) it was embarrassing for me not to share the enthusiasm of my classmates (many of whom have finished their own books recently) for writers like Carver or Murakami or David Foster Wallace. I knew I was supposed to like them, but invariably, I’d end up saying something stupid and naïve like, “But how great was JD Salinger?!” Obviously, as you have pointed out, this was a ridiculous thing to say.

Often I seem to run into this problem of differing tastes; so often are my personal preferences just plainly incorrect. All my life, I’ve tried to correct this, to adjust my taste to suit others. My mother always insisted I eat my toast with my eggs and not after them, and wouldn’t accept that I didn’t like cole slaw. Recently, because it was Father’s Day and I thought I could get some marital leeway in movies to rent, I brought home and enjoyed very much the modern re-warming of the A-Team saga; my wife clearly stated this was such the wrong kind of thing to enjoy; we had a similar conversation about the movie Precious, but in reverse. It happens as a parent, too. I’ve tried to be a very cool parental unit, Mr. _________, but when my stepson plays Christian “death core” music I’m tempted to join a satanic gospel choir, but most of the time just go to the other side of the house and crank up some Jason Mraz.  I know I’m not supposed to like him, but the young man can really scat, you know?

I became so concerned when you pointed out other positive reviews of your book from contemporary fiction critics who seem to “get it,” I went and read every one of them because I’d like to be hip and with it too. It’s possible I don’t have enough maturity, life or literary experience—as you mentioned—to understand them all the way you do. I wasn’t sure what to make of [this one critic’s] review (in the link you provided), for example, for though she recommended the book for readers of contemporary fiction, she also, in that introductory paragraph, indicated she didn’t know if the story was narrated from jail or the grave, or whether it was a thinly-veiled autobiography or what. Wow, you’d think a person who calls herself a “critic” would know things like that. I didn’t know those things either, but didn’t want to reveal my ignorance. Guess I did anyway since I didn’t get it and referenced Salinger and King. I’m not sure what she meant by “stroke book” either, but after consideration of the context where she contradicts the idea by talking about “decidedly unappetizing” sex scenes, I’ve decided it must be something filthy and sinful—and that she must be some kind of repressed prude.

This other reviewer I found must be equally as naïve and ignorant as [this one critic] and I. Plus he cusses a lot and only goes by [blog handle]. He has the audacity to say what I said about it: “Thing is, story-wise, [this book] just kind of hangs there for two hundred pages then abruptly ends.” All set up, no pay off, he says. Bet he liked the A-Team movie, too. Moron.

Anyway, thanks for pointing out my personal shortcomings. I hear nobody likes a critic, and I know we’ve never met, and I’ve never until today told you the least bit about myself, but you sure are good at guessing how people really are based on the tiniest bit of information. Some might call that a ridiculous amount of insight! I wish it wasn’t too late to retract everything I said about your book. People might get suspicious about our journalistic integrity, even though it’s clear I’m completely wrong for not liking it. You’ve taught me a valuable lesson, Mr. ________, and a green quote-unquote critic like myself needs all the life lessons he can get. Next time, whether or not I like a book I’m reviewing, I’ll pretend like I do so nobody gets upset. And if anybody says to me some book I recommended was crap, I’ll just reply, “But the author meant for it to be good.” Because, I mean, clearly some people (Snookie,  Ann Coulter) write books they know will suck from the outset. And only those types of authors should be punished with tepid, mixed, or negative reviews.  Besides, as an aspiring novelist myself, I found your book incredibly instructive. Thanks for that.

So my advice to you is just ignore me and my silly point-of-view. Just collect the positive commentary in a basket and float forward as though so-called critics like me don’t exist. The only advice a guy like me can give you for the future is this: Send a quick email to reviewers to see if they softball their reviews out of respect or whatever. If they say no, just move on until you find a person who strokes you like you like it. That way all will be Skittles, Mr. ________.

Sincerely,

 

Jason Lee Miller (recent high school graduate)

 

 

On Self-Publishing (a.k.a. Pride and Prejudice)

Not too many weeks ago, at the Brown Hotel in Louisville where some fine writers periodically gather, a seasoned and beloved writer and mentor conversed over beers with a small troupe of beginning and emerging writers about the prospect of self-publishing. He relayed how he understood but gently rebuffed his son’s hammering on the simple business of ROI, because, he said, “I still have my pride.”  Or maybe I said that. Somebody said it. I’ll pretend he said it. He said something like that, and the level of respect I have for him prevented me from waxing self-righteous about there being no place for pride in art; after all, this is the same man who, after I attempted to defend my fiction, told me “the truth is no excuse”—besides, obviously, I felt the same way. But I wonder if this feeling—this aversion—is akin to preferring a horse and carriage to these faddish “automobiles” a century ago.

I want to say this debate, like capital punishment or abortion, is done to death, and we should find some new thing to argue about. But here we are anyway, groping around in that amorphous and awkward In-between. Amazon says e-books are now outselling even paperbacks. A literary agent, not too far from the Brown that day, cautioned that Amazon doesn’t go into enough detail about those numbers. Newspapers are still gallantly and romantically fighting the cancer of a new age, and still yet other romantics mourn the hefty scent of aging paper as though submerging their noses into the lingeringly aromatic pillows of lost lovers. It may indeed be time to bury them and go on with our lives though pride and sentiment hold us close.

I mean, hell, this is supposed to be a digital age blog post, and I’m too busy thoughtfully essaying to do it right; and by right, I mean quick and dirty. I still have my pride.  I still have decades of (mostly 20^th century) teaching and skill development pressing on my psyche. I have a fancy degree and letters behind my name. And that means I can’t just slap some words down and push the publish button.

Silly, right?

That same agent told a story about a well known writer leaving his publishing company to do it himself. On the same day, a writer who’d built a large internet following by self-publishing took the aforementioned writer’s place at the same publishing company. This appears to be the modern state: a free-for-all of flux. Meanwhile, across the Web somewhere, as new literary mags pop up all over, CJ West, who has five books under his belt already, writes that giving away his latest ebook for free on the Internet boosted sales of his other books six fold.    

I’m sitting on two chapbooks of poetry. Aside from cover art and formatting, they’re ready to go. I’m ready to go, ready to ship these children off into the mean world and make new babies. I don’t know if the books are any good, what literary philosophy is behind them—they are what they are: my creations— if anyone would buy them, if anyone would take the financial risk to print up a few hundred dollars worth and pimp them. Up until this point, I understand I’ve been all art and no business, all pomp and no street smarts. And street smarts in this day and age might mean signing up with Amazon or some other DIY company and believing in yourself and your work instead of waiting for somebody else to do it, so long as you’re not too worried about the next time you meet up at the Brown and have to face the question: Who’s your publisher?

Because saying you are your own publisher is like listing your mother as a reference on your resume. Would my pride be able to stand it?

As of this moment, my pride is beating me to death. I haven’t sent my collections anywhere yet—well, once, last summer, to a chapbook contest. I lost. So I can’t really speak to the horrors of publishing the old-fashioned way if I haven’t really tried. Of course, there’s also some psychological protection inherent in that, the kind of psychological protection a young man gets by not asking his secret crush out on a date. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, but nothing ventured, nothing hurt, either.

And, well, silly, right?

There may be some consolation in the nature of poetry publishing, a safer ground than, say, the ground fiction publishing rests on, at least for now. Poe self-published. I chatted with one young representative of a small, indie press who told me her only goal was to sell enough chapbooks to cover the cost of printing: about $250. Naturally, she has to put in a lot of sweat equity, running around pimping her new authors. Poetry still seems the most purely artistic of the genres. There’s no money in it anyway, it’s especially prone to modern styling and philosophy and the austere judgment of the adherents of those styles and philosophies; and I imagine poets carry with them the same weighty acceptance painters do: the possibility of languishing in obscurity until death, and by the cruel irony of art, then they make it big.

So what’s your pride worth, anyway? Is there really that big a gap between pride and $250? My family spends that much on weekly groceries, and chances are digitally self-publishing will cost far less, depending on the price of your pride. In the end, it may just be a matter of how effectively you’re able to market yourself and how effectively you can believe in yourself despite the down-the-nose looking you fear. It’s a new world, man, a vain world, a (hopefully) screw-the-Man world where the fabled Machine of the 20^th century is choking and sputtering its last.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bone Silence Review Live at Gloom Cupboard

My review of Peycho Kanev's poetry collection, Bone Silence, is up at Gloom Cupboard. First paragraph is below, to whet you're whistle:

Peycho Kanev’s poetry collection, Bone Silence, evokes a theme repeating throughout: Our bones outlast us and remain our only testament in the world, even the greatest of us. Over time we are forgotten, our words are lost, and in the soil a story bones can’t tell. The writer pushes against death, strives for immortality in a temporal and zero-sum world, or as the author puts it: “as the tomb rock rolls among/the skulls of the geniuses of the past.”

Submission

Here’s a word every fledgling author must deal with: submission. I suppose that should be a hint from the very beginning as to what the publishing process feels like. Official definitions are as follows: surrendering power to another; meekness; the feeling of patient humility; the stepped-on side of a gonad-busting fetishistic sex ritual; a wrestling position whereby an opponent is pained under threat of loogie into crying uncle. On good days, the first two definitions apply. On those days, you give up your snootiness about the process, you stop being a prima donna, submit to the will of the God of Literature, and you stop kidding yourself about getting into the New Yorker.

 On the bad days, it’s one of the other two, or worse, the a la Opus Dei cat-of-nine-tails flagellant mortification of the flesh.  You try your specially formatted best, submit, and hope the smell of your offering is pleasing. It’s not exactly great for one’s self esteem, especially the kind of daring nervy chutzpah self-esteem required for writing in the first place.  I’ve often thought it takes a certain amount of arrogance to want to be a writer, to want to write. As Dickens said, you write to be read, and writers have to assume what they write is going to be worth reading, that people will want to hear or consider what the writer has to say. It’s like the sidewalk preacher assuming people really like him. It’s a paradoxical conflict. Writing is holding a mirror up to the ass-end of humanity so humanity may become aware of itself, whether it would like to or not— and that’s bold and stupidly gutsy and requires an artist willing to be slapped for the sake of art.

But submission is different. Submission is anti-art. Submission is bureaucratic red tape. It’s snobby order on artistic chaos. Submission is an iconoclast begging for acceptance, acknowledgement; submission is paying club dues to a club that may never, ever let you in, sometimes just because the doorman asking you for the secret password suspects you have cooties.

Paradox is a natural condition for an artist, though, as is breathless indignation at traditional processes. It’s the classic vocational vicious circle. In the “real” world, you can’t get a job without experience, and you can’t get experience without a job. In the mirror world (the world where artists live) you can’t get published unless they know you, and they can’t know you if you can’t get published.

It doesn’t help that every single literary magazine/publisher on the planet wants you to submit in a different way. Some want email attachments. Some want your work posted in the body of an email. Some, even now, don’t take email submissions. Some want your name on every page. Some don’t want your name on it all. Some want bios. Some don’t care. Some only publish stories about nurses who work the third shift—except the ones in maternity (screw them!). Some demand cuffs, others ropes.

 One source estimates that at any given time there are 600 literary magazines operating in the United States. That’s 600 different pretty girls at the bar with 600 different ways of getting down and a barrage of fumbling suitors trying to come up with the right lines to say to them and none of them knowing that each of those girls “has a boyfriend” already, even if it’s clear that if she did have one he’d be dang upset his girl went to a Friday-night dogfight in a meat dress. Not having to play stupid games like that anymore is one reason I like being married.

It’s a far cry from how I imagined it, but how I imagined it is wildly stupid and romantic. How I imagined it, too, is an impossible reality oddly matching the expectations of some high maintenance mags, especially the big ones. Those high-maintenance mags want you to submit completely. As if they feel it is unfaithful, those trophy-wife magazines want you to submit to them only and give them six months to write you a one-line rejection. If they lower themselves to accept unsolicited advances, they want you to submit by snail mail, write a cover letter, use two-inch margins, not go over 1,000 words (or under 20,000), send them a $15 reading dowry, and mail it all in a #10 envelope addressed in very specific way so that it may be delivered by a pale eunuch on a jenny mule on Palm Sunday. Don’t write about love. Don’t write in diary format. Don’t even think about writing in verse (or not in verse). Make sure your submission is marked with chicken blood and is bound with the hair of a virgin.

I read the submission requirements, sit back, and think who has justification and time for all that? I have a full-time job, three part-time jobs, a volunteer gig, and a family, and I don’t think this is what is meant by “suffering for your art.” The writer those folks are looking for is reading over their requirements while sipping from a brandy snifter in front of a fireplace. The writer they’re looking for, after he finishes his breakfast mimosa and slips out of his silk pajamas and into his smoking jacket, leisurely writes out manuscripts by hand with a special pen and sends out his pure bred hound to get the mail, which may or may not have a long awaited and sweetly-worded reply within. When accepted for publication, he’ll throw a lovely dinner party full of very interesting people and have little impromptu poetry writing contests and tell Moby Dick jokes.

But those mags accomplish their purpose: weeding out hoards of wannabes. Just try to bring up ten literary magazine websites without three or four of them beginning a sentence with “Because of the volume of submissions….”  They have to be picky, and not everybody who’s in this game should be. Some are the highly unfortunate American Idol tone-deaf who can’t take a hint.

Aye, there’s the rub, right? How does one know which artist he is? How does one acquire humility and hubris simultaneously? How do you be humble enough you don’t assume you’re Hemingway but arrogant enough to believe you could be. If you’re going to play this game, you have to take on a certain reality about yourself. You have to, even if approval never comes, imagine yourself sipping brandy in your smoking jacket. You have to assume that arrogance and weather all storms of rejection. You have to be the guy who has no idea he's not handsome or cool. You have to remember that writers from Stephen King to Dr. Seuss got rejected a lot. And you have to be okay with the idea that you might not ever make it.  Because that’s what being an artist is: doing art because you love art, not because you get recognized for doing it.

And yeah, that bites. I informed my father yesterday if ever I reached the point I made 100 grand in one year just from my writing, I’d forever onward go forth to literary events dressed like 
Hannibal Means. I’d become the stereotypical crazy and high maintenance artist demanding bowls of green M&Ms because I’d feel like I earned the right to be nuts.

On the practical side, I’ve been streamlining the submission process, and hopefully maintaining some sane dignity because of it. I’ve weeded out those bent on weeding me out. I’ve broken up with them first, and it wasn’t mutual. If they play hard to get, then they don’t get the benefit of considering my unique brand of brilliance. Snail mail only? Rejected. Reading fee? Rejected. No simultaneous submissions? In half a year I’ll tell you that’s unacceptable in an age with fierce global competition and zero time for brandy sniffing. And I’m doing what I hate most, making a spread sheet, and only the pubs friendly to modern writers make the list. Every single one might reject my work, but at least by submitting more and being submissive less (<--awkward, eh?), it won’t feel so much like groveling at the boots of a few cruel mistresses.

 

 

Filed Under #3

Filed under Math = Awesome + Stupid: The awesome part of the term “yotta,” is that it allows one to introduce terms like “yottasecond” into the vocabulary, which is 32 septillion years. So you get to say pretentious sentences like “It only took a yottasecond for my husband to take out the trash.” The stupid part is—and probably I should have learned this in college at some point—is that my understanding of a number like 32 septillion (32, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000) can not only be computed as zero, but that in French, that number is 32 quadrillion, because the French think in terms of million millions, not thousand millions. In other words, 10⁹ (English billion, French milliard) is 10¹² in French, but only if using a base 10, and if using a different (Logic) system, the number is rendered 1000²⁺¹ unless in French, where a billion is 1000³⁺¹ because I’m guessing the French won’t allow being one-upped by the British, who gave us yards instead of meters, which is why Asian countries are killing the US in math. Well that only took a yottasecond to explain, didn’t it?

 Filed under Stuff That Makes You Want to Holler: Congress first passed the Civil Rights Act in 1875, which was subsequently overturned by the US Supreme Court in 1883. That’s four-score and twenty-odd years of devistating lost progress. The ultimate irony: That law was passed by Lincolnesque Republicans, back when Republican meant Democrat.

 Filed under Awesomest Bet Ever: Dr. Suess’s editor bet him he couldn’t write a book using only 50 words. The result: Green Eggs and Ham.

Filed under What Engineers Do on Friday Nights When the Rest of the World Is Distracted by Romance: Build ridiculous working Lego factories. This video goes on for eight minutes. Don’t knock it. While still in grad school, the Google guys built Lego printers.

 

Filed under Somebody Has Missed the Point Entirely: All Free Speech area postings must be approved by the Office of Student Retention and College Life.

Filed under Skills One Can Master When the Cable Is Cut Off: Olympic Bread Tossing.

Filed under Positive Fashion Contributions from Iran: In 2010, Iran barred men from wearing mullets. In related news, the Hijab and Chastity Festival might sound like a hoot, but with no Kentucky Waterfalls allowed, it’s like a party with no Natty Light.

Filed under Stupidest Thing I Ever Heard: Back in 1999, a federal judge dismissed a discrimination lawsuit filed by a man whose employment application to the local police was rejected on the grounds he was too smart. According the judge, it wasn’t discrimination because everybody with a too-high IQ test score was rejected. Well, duh, stupid genius! The article doesn’t mention why such a hiring stipulation exists to begin with.

Filed under Is America That Racist?: Black dogs get adopted the least.

Filed under A Long, Long Way from Misunderestimated: President Garfield could write with both hands at the same time in two different dead languages.

Filed under Beginning of the End Again: eBooks now outselling paperbacks.

Filed under I Want to Say About a Million Things But I Can’t Express Myself Monosyllabically Enough for You to Understand Them All, and Besides Nobody Will Know How Pithily I Just Insulted You Anyway: Two old men in Mexico are the last two people on Earth who speak the language Ayapaneco. Naturally, they’re not speaking to each other. 

 

Letter to an English Professor

If we're not going to pay teachers what they deserve, then we should at the very least give thanks and honor them whenever we can. I'm biased, of course, as a teacher, and the child of teachers, and the beneficiary of so many great teachers over the course of my education. Teachers let us in on worlds we might never have discovered on our own. That's such a special thing--so special to me I'd like to go on learning forever. I'll be looking into that...I smell a doctorate program wafting down from around the bend. Anyway, below is a letter I wrote about five years ago to a favorite English teacher of mine years after I learned to appreciate him and the new worlds he introduced to me. I post it here in hopes more will remember to thank a teacher. 

 

Dear Dr. D.

I’m sure there is little chance you would remember mine among the blank faces you’ve entertained over the years—especially one four years in the back of your mind from a brief summer session—but in light of things quite recent I thought of you and realized that what I interpreted as a brand of academic torture at the time was nothing of the sort. It was you, after all, who inflicted the tedious, labyrinthine musings of Jorge Borges on me. Who knew I would one day thank you for that sadistic rite and transform it to masochism?

In case you become lost in my verbose effluvia (yes, that is the right word, though I doubt you’ll have any trouble), this is a thank-you note that tries in earnest to sound extra intelligent—an English professor should have no problem wading through with pinched nostrils, as he is accustomed to it.

You clearly said, “this one is my favorite,” referring to Borges, to which I responded (silently), “this guys is nuts.”  You then drew messy diagrams of Reality on the board, which confirmed my thesis. I figured that John Barth’s cyclical madness had pushed you near the edge, and Borges’ ghost had spooked you over.

You had us attempt writing in the style of Hemingway, a task I miserably failed (you gave me a “B,” I think out of sympathy). To this day, I use that experience as an anecdote to explain why I like Faulkner better. But I still wonder why, given your proclivity toward torture, you didn’t have us give a go at rewriting Don Quixote like Pierre Menard.

I joke now, because I am further removed from the pain. That’s not true. I was joking then, even on my final exam, where after attempting a messy sketch of Reality like you had taught us, I resigned myself to draw a bunny instead. You got the joke, I think, because I did quite well on the test. In lieu of Hemingway, your next short story class should be challenged to B.S. with as much skill as I have demonstrated.

I had already exacted my revenge on you by asking you to suffer through a naïve, self absorbed, meandering, and somewhat arrogant Forward I had written about a four-year-long poetic fit of mine. You were kind to say, “it was quite fun to read,” but looking back at my own words I realize it was excruciating and confused. Thanks for that, too.

But I’ve strayed from the point. 

Recently, some event brought to mind "The Sect of the Phoenix." This was the only Borges tale I truly understood at the time of your class, primarily because you explained it. I’m sure the other students joined me in shock as we learned it was about sex. I fished out Labyrinths because I wanted to share this crazy Argentinean with my fiancée. I read it aloud to her and became as tickled as you must have been to inform her of what the hell he was talking about. I tossed the book aside again and forgot about it--that is, until this weekend.

It peeked at me from the hallway outside my bedroom (where I had left it some months earlier), and, being the masochistic type I’ve become (I find myself these days delving into some rather difficult and tedious things on purpose—treasures, it turns out, are not come upon easily), decided to pick it up and give another try at my nemesis, who discouraged me from the start four years ago with his dense tale of discovering Uqbar.

To my surprise, I understood it (mostly, I think). I even liked it. I was amazed at the loaded sentences, the importance of each paragraph, the exacting choice of words. Even more amazing: I had grown enough in four years to comprehend the genius of it, though I still had to read each paragraph more than once (a joy now, not a curse).

I’ve dizzied myself at the thought that rediscovering Borges was no Lottery of Babylon. Chance, or fate, or some in-between, meant for me to find it, and to enjoy it with my fiancée, who is much better at reading than I. She is now a fan as well. The words, especially those of the dreamy "Circular Ruins," I’m sure (and this is not so arrogant as my Forward), were written especially for me (to believe this you have to discount a certain rigidity to time and space and accept that a deceased blind Argentinean and I are intimately and cosmically connected).

I say that because the man whose goal it was to dream a man with “minute integrity and insert him into reality” couldn’t be any other than myself--the dreamt man too, as well as many other fantastic things!

I’m 29 now, barely a man, but grown nonetheless and able to examine with greater clarity the capriciousness of my youth. I see now what you were doing and I think it’s great.

Thanks.  

I’m a writer now. I write incredibly boring things about Google and Yahoo and Microsoft for an Internet news website. I thought and despaired for a moment that I would like to write as Borges did and felt it would be an impossible feat. My fiancée informed me that it was not important that I write like him, but that I should write like me. Also, because of you and a handful of others, I think I should like to teach once I’ve finished graduate school.

Thanks again.

 

My Poetry Review Now Live at Gloom Cupboard

My review of Craig Sernotti's book of poetry, Forked Tongue, is now published in the literary magazine Gloom Cupboard.

Reader advisory: The content of the book was graphic enough that my review is (not gratuitously) rated-R-ish. Disturbing content at the other end of that link.

In other news, I've been asked to a be co-editor and regular book reviewer at Gloom Cupboard. Very exciting, don't ya think? Some of the stuff appearing there has been nominated for awards, and the mag in my opinion has that real cool underground beatnik vibe going. I'm stoked.