My first course in graduate school was a survey on Melville. Melville is my favorite writer. The professor for the class was Brian Higgins, one of the great Melville scholars in the world. (I'm sorry to find out that Brian died in May.) This was as close to Heaven as I would ever find in life. He told a story about fellow Melville scholar Hershel Parker. A former student of Parker's drunk-dialed him in the middle of the night once, his plaintive voice pleading for an answer to the question, "My God, Hershel, what does Moby Dick mean?" Parker was reportedly proud of the answer he managed to scrape together while still half-asleep: "When you go up against the universe, you're likely to get the shit kicked out of you."
I hope you liked that anecdote. It cost me about $50,000.
It also illustrates one of the reasons I left graduate school after my M.A., instead of continuing on for a Ph.D. and a life centered around literature. Recently, Blake Kimzey, the guy who edited my story and who I was then a jerk to before realizing he'd actually done a good job, tweeted about his "Ahab-like quest to be a writer." Obviously, I identify with Ahab. Anyone who "gets" Moby Dick identifies with Ahab. I can imagine being caught up as a member of the crew on the quarterdeck when Ahab nails the coin to the mast and cries, "God hunt us all, if we hunt not Moby Dick to his death!" The whale for me in my twenties was to become a writer, to fire back at an indifferent universe with words. My words might not hurt the universe at all, but that wasn't the point. Get the whale or die trying. That was the point.
But less than two years later, I had pretty much given up the hunt. I think it partly had to do with reading the book The Comedy of Survival, by Joseph Meeker. Meeker looked at Western literature from an ecological perspective, thinking about how literature plays a role in survival. He felt that a tragic mindset, like, say, Hamlet's, was much less helpful to survival than a comedic mindset, like the hero of the Picaresque adventure Lazarillo de Tormes. The tragic mindset is willing to die for abstract causes. Meeker argues that this is unnatural. He recalls a story of an elk whose child was killed by a bear as the mother watched. The elk didn't track the bear seeking revenge. The elk didn't drink or suffer from depression. The elk moved on with the herd. What else could it do?
If Ahab were just taking a jet-ski and a harpoon gun on his own into the deep blue to seek the whale, we might be right to admire him. But he sinks a ship full of people, people who went on board the Pequod for reasons of survival, to earn a living for families. He's an asshole, albeit a sublime asshole.
I didn't want to be Ahab, to be so focused on my own obsession that I brought down myself and others with me. I didn't have the strength to keep punching at the universe. I could either preach, unnoticed, on a street corner about the evils of a world that allows children to starve, or I could get a job and feed a mouth or two.
Mammon-the unavoidable reality
This is the main reason I wouldn't advise getting an M.F.A., or really any advanced degree in the humanities. School is a huge expense. The fact is that an advanced degree in the humanities doesn't pay for itself in most cases. (This is contrasted with an undergraduate degree in the humanities, which might actually be worth it. I believe this is because a lot of good jobs just require a college degree in "anything." My job is one of them.I still think you might be better off getting a specific, job-related degree. But I digress.)
Look, at 23, it's hard to accept that 40 years of claims adjustments for an insurance company or managing a call center isn't a bad way to spend your life. It's tempting to think that if you could put that off for a while and learn more, maybe you could make your dream of living for art and beauty and anarchistic freedom a reality. We tend to reinforce this idea in society with movies, TV, etc. about people who dreamed big and made their dreams come true. These stories tend to set up a false dichotomy between "selling out" and "remaining true to yourself." Ever see a story that celebrates a would-be poet forsaking a long-shot dream so he can help his brother pay for care for his special-needs child? A teacher who wanted to work in films, but who now tutors extra hours so she can pay for granola bars and school supplies for her students? A real estate agent who used to be a musician, who now works three jobs to pay for coyotes to take her family out of dangerous countries? Did any of these people sell out? Not at all. In fact, if you're planning to go all-in on trying to be a full-time artist, the odds are that at some point in time, you're going to owe your ability to eat to someone like this.
Let's say you decide you need beauty in your life. You get your Ph.D. Your best job prospect is at 42K a year teaching in Montana. You have a 300/month student loan payment. That's 3600 a year. To make that much after tax, you'd have to earn about 5000 gross, give or take. So your effective salary is now down to 37K. It's probably living wage. Unless you also ran up your credit cards for surgery for your pet Labrador while in school. And to fix the brakes on your old car. Now, you're down to 32K a year. You buy a new car, because yours has finally had it, and you finally got the job you were promising everyone you'd get, and can't ask them for more help. It goes on. Your decision to enjoy life at 25 can make your life miserable well into your forties.
But aren't there things more important than money, just making it through? Of course. But know what you're choosing. If you want to live for art and beauty, please, don't have a family. Not until you finally make it, or find a decent fall-back plan and pay off your debts. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the decision not to have kids. If more people chose it, the world would probably be a better place. Just know what you're getting into.
All this is moot if you have a family to take care of you. And there's nothing wrong with that, either. If your family is fine footing the bill while you try to get your career off the ground, well, that's kind of the whole reason people work hard: to be able to offer their kids a chance at their dreams. Go for it. Also, if you have a scholarship or T.A. deal with the school, and can get through without debt, that's another matter altogether. But I still don't think that an M.F.A. is the best way to go about becoming a writer, for the reason below.
The workshop: how to waste your time in a pointless meeting without even having a job
I got an M.A., not an M.F.A., but I took five graduate level workshops. Two were in novels, two in short stories, and one in poetry. I know what awaits you as an M.F.A. candidate. You will be put into workshops with about ten or so students. You will take turns reading work from other students, probably two per class. You will get your work looked at every four or five weeks. You'll try to provide good feedback to other students, but you'll have a hard time with it. Some work will strike you as very poor. You'll wonder why that person is in grad school at all. What advice do you offer to fix a manuscript that is rotten from beginning to end?
Some students will seem to get the basics of writing, but will write about subjects that bore you, or in a style you already decided you hated back in high school. You'll try to offer helpful suggestions to the guy who writes all in stream of consciousness or the girl who writes entirely in second person. You'll feel like you weren't very helpful.
When it's finally your turn to get feedback, you'll find that the other students had as much trouble figuring out what to say about your work as you did about theirs. You'll wonder if some even tried, or if they are just cruising until it's their turn to go again. Soon, you'll start to do the same for them.
The 60-90 minutes spent discussing your work will be mostly a waste of time. Each student will offer their half thought-out critiques. They have other classes and jobs and families, and your work is the easiest thing to fluff on. One student will have something semi-useful to say that kind of interests you, but then he'll be shouted down by the one student who never shuts up (the same one you can't believe is actually in an M.F.A. program). The one person who won't have much to say is the professor, the one person in the class who has presumably published some work of renown, and whose opinion might, therefore, matter. The professor will hand you back her copy of your work with her comments. These will be margin notes and half a page of general thoughts. For this, you have just borrowed $5,000 at 4% interest.
I'm sure there are advocates of the workshop. I'm sure some professors run them in a more useful fashion than this. But I have a feeling the situation I just described is the rule, just as it's the rule that most meetings in any organization are an incredible waste of time. The people running the meetings seem to be incapable of determining purpose, scope, and method and then keeping everyone on task.
Contrast this with Carve magazine's literary services. If you want to just get general thoughts and a line-by-line edit on a 6,000 word short story, you can do it for $150. General thoughts only on a 4000 word story is just $50. (For reference, in most semester-long workshops in grad school, you'll probably get your work looked at twice.) For that money, someone who has at least published some work will give you reasonably considered feedback. It isn't perfect feedback, maybe, but from my experience, it is better than almost any feedback you'll get in a graduate program. The most expensive package they offer is $1500. For that, you get three months of intensive coaching. This includes up to 50,000 words reviewed, if you've got that much. You get six meetings, and weekly in-depth feedback. This would probably equal more individual care than I got in four semesters of grad school combined.
Plus, these are things you can do while you continue to work. That means you'll not only be not getting into debt, but you'll be getting new life experiences to write about. (Even writers are bored by writing about being a writer.)
Your adviser in graduate school is not going to be your best friend
I had three workshop leaders in graduate school. Cris Mazza, Gene Wildman, and Luis Urrea. All three were fine people. Luis is a goddamned beautiful human being. I had just enough self-respect in graduate school to refrain from being his stalker. Cris was my adviser. She surprised me by treating me most of the time like she thought I was kind of smart. Gene's class must have led the league in curse words, but never in an angry way.
They were three really nice people, and fairly talented. I didn't really like Cris's subject matter in her books, but it was clear she could write. None of them gave me a cold shoulder. I had occasional e-mails and meetings with them.
I just don't think I got $50,000 worth of advice from them. Not really their fault. They were working on their own writing, their own careers. They had families. It's not like they could clear their schedules to spontaneously invite me to a six-hour dinner after class. (They'd have had to pay for it, too. I was fucking broke.)
I have to imagine this will be the case for most grad students. I think one reason people pay big bucks is the hope that an adviser will help you get a break, will put in a good word for you with an editor somewhere. Maybe that an adviser will generally adopt you and make your success the whole purpose of his/her existence. That you'll cry and hug her when you accept your Nobel.
Someone may have a different experience, but I just don't think this is going to happen. I think you'll get responses to e-mails that answer your questions, albeit not in an expansive way. I think you'll get office hours meetings if you ask for them. I think you'll get a half a page of feedback each time it's your turn to go in a workshop. But you're not going to get a literary parent figure. Advisers have their own agendas, and they need to have boundaries.
Writing is hard work, and there is no substitute for knowing the basics and just writing
I got through an M.A. in English without ever reading Shakespeare in college. I've read a fair amount on my own; it just was never part of a class I took. (Probably because we spent way too much time reading bullshit literary theory to spend time on actual literature.) Likewise, I managed to collect a graduate degree "with a concentration in creative writing" without ever reading a single book about how to write. I think I believed that writing couldn't be taught, that I'd just read the greats and something would happen. I hardly ever even read anything that had been written after, say, 1975. I didn't even know what contemporary literature looked like.
Maybe my graduate program assumed we had read books on how to write in undergrad. Maybe I wrote well enough to make it look like I had some idea what I was doing, but not well enough to succeed. But I can't understand how I can get an M.A. or M.F.A or whatever without ever being required to read books of "craft." (I hate that word, but that's really what I'm talking about.) Thinking back, it's obvious a lot of students besides me had never read about how to write. If we had, we wouldn't all have made so many point-of-view mistakes.
Rather than waste time, I think it would have been far more useful to have readings on craft included as part of the curriculum. Once we all had a common vocabulary, we could have spent our workshop hours much more usefully.
I don't understand why the basic model isn't this:
1) Know the basics of your craft and prove you can use the terminology
2) Submit every week
3) Get feedback from your professor every week.
4) Apply feedback and submit again the next week.
Why do other students even enter into it? You could certainly look to them for moral support and a sense of community, but the guy who supposedly knows something should be the one giving you most of the advice. For $5,000, it seems like you ought to be able to expect that. Carve is offering it for $1500.
At some point in time, if you want to write, you're going to have to learn the basics of how it's done and then write a lot. Unless you're very talented, you'll have to write a whole lot of stuff that isn't very good before it all clicks. (I say "talented," not "smart." You can be very smart and not really "get" writing.)
A lot of people say the benefit of an M.F.A. program is that is forces you to have the discipline to write by a deadline. I think that if you need an external reason to write, you will never have the discipline to write. I knew a lot of guys in the Marine Corps who came in fat and were hoping they'd learn the discipline in the Marine Corps to be in shape. They're all fat again now. An M.F.A. is not a deus ex machina to get you off your ass (well, for a writer, I guess "on your ass," technically) and in front of the keyboard. If you can't get yourself to write on your own, you won't be a writer.
If you've written and written and written and read up on how to write and then written and written and written some more, and you're still not getting anywhere, and you're willing to take the anchorite vows of making it as a writer or bust, then go try a graduate program. But if you haven't already filled a library with attempts to succeed before you get there, I really don't believe you'll succeed afterwards.
And that's why I'm done with the blog
My purpose in posting so much about doubts and difficulties as a marginally gifted writer was to help people struggling with similar situations. If someone else with thirty stories, one publication and five encouraging notes from editors could see that it's not just them throwing their hands up in exasperation, maybe they could at least face the frustration knowing they're not crazy or alone.
But I can't do as many things as I'd like to do. I can't blog about writing and write and do my day job and take care of my family and floss and lift weights and wash my clothes and, hopefully, get back to volunteer work again soon. So the blog has to go. I thought a couple of weeks ago that I could just write about all the things that bother me about fiction writing and exorcise them and be done, but really, I haven't even scratched the surface. Maybe if I actually, you know, succeed one day at fiction, I'll write about all the problems I had breaking in, and people will actually care because I finally figured it out. But for now, I'll worry about solving the problems rather than recording them in excruciating detail.
Thanks to everyone who read, and the few who even commented. If you'd like to leave a comment in the future, I'll probably see it eventually.
I wish any aspiring writers the very wildest of success, but I also wish success in life to those who give up writing to tend to more important, other things.
UPDATE: 11-7-2016
I wrote five more stories since this post. Two were published: one in Bartleby Snopes, and one coming up soon in The Potomac Review. That story was actually selected by
two journals on the same day, leaving me in the unprecedented position
of actually turning a journal down. I had a short story collection win honorable mention in Leapfrog's 2016 fiction contest.
I wrote my novel in the spring of this year. It was a farce about my day job. I sent it off to a few literary agents, but haven't heard anything back. I doubt I will. It's apparently very hard to break in. I could always go the self-publishing route, but I just don't have the energy to expend in self-marketing. It's a pretty good bet it would be one more ignored, self-published book on the digital heap. Even if I did score a traditional publishing contract, apparently that hardly means I'd get much readership.
I've been getting rejected hard lately with stories I sent off to the major league journals. I've sent what I thought was my best work to many of the journals from this list of the best in the country. One got form rejected in five days. None have gotten so much as a "we liked it, but can't publish it right now."
Fiction is hard, and it's unlikely to ever get you fame or fortune. That's really all every writing program should tell its students.
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Thursday, October 8, 2015
Speaking of bad readers...
I've posted a few times about how readers don't pay attention to what they read, and so tend to completely miss the point; this can be incredibly frustrating for writers. It's one thing to be criticized for what you actually wrote, but being criticized for the version of what you wrote that exists in the critic's head is maddening. I include myself among those bad readers, by the way. Like anyone, I can be too self-absorbed to give someone's writing its due.
But I may have never seen a more egregious example of willful bad reading than that by Peter Maass in an article from The Intercept on August 11th. In it, Maass revealed what he claimed were seven editorial columns from the National Security Agency's internal website, written by a working-level translator. The translator's name was known to Maass, allowing him to do some basic research on the NSA employee. Maass dubbed the translator "Socrates" because six of the editorials were supposedly written for a column NSA called "The SIGINT Philosopher." (I will call this translator "Melville" instead of "Socrates," because the writer himself joked about how little Philosophy he had studied.) Maass combined these editorials with what he found on what he believed to be Melville's personal, non-work blog about life as a failed fiction writer to create a composite, conjectural portrait. The picture was not flattering, as the title "What Happens when a Failed Writer Becomes a Loyal Spy?" might suggest.
Maass's eight-page article included long sections on his search for information on Melville--not much of a challenge, as Melville was attempting to be found rather than hide on the internet, and Maass already had a lot to go on from the editorials. Maass played a tongue-in-cheek game of "tell you who he is/not tell you who he is," sharing many paragraphs of detail about Melville's life taken from the blog, including hints about his family, apparently to make the point (already known by everyone) that people can find out a lot about you if they are really determined to, even if you work for NSA. He explained that even if readers managed to decipher Melville's true identity, he had a "get out of guilt free card," because he was certain he had interpreted Melville's editorials sufficiently. As he saw it, Melville wanted the government to collect everything on everybody, because it made us all safer. Maass found irony in Melville's desire to keep his name out of Maass's story, because, after all, hadn't Melville just said that the more others know about you, the safer you are?
Since Maass's decision to provide so much personal information on Melville was entirely built on his certainty of his own interpretation, it's odd he spent so little time actually, you know, reading the articles. He and NPR's On the Media referred unproblematically to Melville's belief in "total surveillance." Nobody seemed to notice that this phrase, appearing in some re-posts of the story in quotes as though it were Melville who said it, is Maass's restatement, not Melville's words. As I'm about to show, it isn't a good restatement.
"Melville's" Actual Writing: What it says and doesn't say
What did Melville actually say? Maass dealt mostly with two of the editorials, so I will look at the same two. One editorial was the first Melville wrote as SIGINT Philosopher. With what looks to be roughly a one-page word limit, Melville attempted to answer the question not--as Maass thinks--of whether NSA should grab all communications on Earth, but whether it is morally acceptable to conduct surveillance on foreign targets who are not clearly "enemies." When Melville first stated work, he had misgivings. He wasn't targeting terrorists or drug lords, but foreign government officials who seemed like good people. They were folks, like Melville, who had taken government jobs because work for one's country seemed like a respectable calling in life and because it enabled them to care for their families. They weren't being targeted for doing bad things; they simply knew information that Melville's employer also wanted to know.
Melville then recalled a moment when he was himself a "target": his employer was re-investigating him for his security clearance at work. He apparently had problems with the polygraph (not an uncommon occurrence, even for those who are telling the truth). He passed a month later, it seems, but in the meantime, he felt depressed while waiting to retake the test after failing it. Sardonically, he listed two wishes he had while nursing his wounds:
1) That he could run away from it all, take his family out onto the prairie of old and live in a mud hut.
2) That his employer would just know everything about him, rather than just the flawed information from a polygraph.
I don't think either with was a real wish. If given the chance, he wouldn't go back to the 19th century and rub elbows with Ma and Pa Ingalls. Neither did he really want his employer to look through everything of his. These were his depressed, illogical thoughts, and they are presented as such. These ideas made sense when he was under duress, but now that he has recovered his equilibrium he is making fun of his own thoughts. He's poking fun at himself, not expressing a true desire. These crazy thoughts do relate to what comes after, but the later thought expresses a different wish than total surveillance.
He drew an analogy between himself as a target and his own targets he eavesdrops on. He wanted to be "complete and competent" in monitoring them. Not to listen to everything they said, but to listen to enough to be "competent," to not misunderstand them, to not misrepresent them based on bunk data, such as the bunk data from a polygraph. He said this was as much for the targets as it was for the Unites States, thinking of the repercussions that can result from a powerful agent that misunderstands an innocent target.
This is what David Hume (I think I have this right) would have called an "imperfect analogy." The two parts of Melville as target and Melville as eavesdropper only partly line up. He had a crazy desire to have the government know everything about him, and it led him to a less crazy realization that his job has meaning when he does it well enough to prevent propagating bad information.
I think Melville made a rather important punctuation error at one point. In a paragraph right after talking about his crazy desires, he began with "This is the attitude I have brought to my SIGINT work since then." That makes it sound like he meant "I've taken this crazy idea of the government knowing everything about me and put it to work." Some commenters have found this so outlandish they have even wondered if this was a mock piece, the NSA version of The Onion. But taking the whole article into consideration, I see it as a simple punctuation error. It should have said "This is the attitude I have brought to my SIGINT work since then <COLON>," thereby tying it to what came after.
This would have made it clear that the actual attitude he adopts is the next phrase: "If we are going to work on targets that fall short of being technically 'enemies' but are rather informative for our policy makers--and we are--then even looking at it from the target's perspective, we are honor-bound to do more and better monitoring rather than less." The more is not on everyone, only on his small set of foreign targets. And it's not infinite; it's only "more" to the extent it leads to "better."
There is a bizarre finale about seeking a "deity-like monitoring of the target." It's a weird, sudden insertion of a new metaphor of the government spy as God and the target as the humanity that God watches. I don't believe this was even Melville's original line. He's an agnostic. He just said the government "does not have godlike powers" a paragraph before that line. I think there might have even been a smiley-face emoticon stuck in there that didn't show up in Maass's version, and I don't think Melville would EVER use one of those outside a text message.
I'd wager that something happened here Maass can probably relate to. Melville had an editor. The editor thought this was a pithy way to wrap up, and Melville, in his first article, didn't feel he could fight too hard. But even if my textual postulations are wrong, and we take the text at its word, it's clear the text is not calling for monitoring "all of us," as Maass put it during his On the Media interview. It's deity-like monitoring of his targets. Those targets are apparently both foreign and few. He seems to have some level of familiarity with them, which would be impossible if he monitored thousands of people. He's a translator, after all. Ever try to translate just one person? It takes a long time.
All in all, I look at this article as a government employee saying that he finds monitoring other people to be a little unnerving, but that he has come to grips with it by determining to do his job competently. The government is going to do it anyway, so it's better for everyone if they at least get the right information. He has developed an ethic of trying to get "more and better monitoring of (his) targets," so that he can pass on information in a "complete and competent" manner.
This is certainly a position that you could still call into question. It does not interrogate many larger issues about the U.S.'s role internationally as a superpower and the effects thereof. I don't think he could have addressed all of this--short word count. In any event, these critiques, though important, are a long way off from a guy who thinks the government should find out everything about its own citizens.
Contents of second article
In the second article Maass quoted from, Melville, drawing on his newfound love for studying the American Civil War, found lessons from the past for civil servants of today. Melville believed that if he had been an adviser to Lincoln at the start of the war, he'd have urged Lincoln that he couldn't win, and therefore, Lincoln had no choice but to live with secession. Melville would have had a lot of solid-sounding pragmatic reasons why the war was doomed to failure, but his reasons, though brilliant in his own mind, would have been completely wrong. (Partly, he'd have been wrong because he'd have underestimated Lincoln's ability to make the impossible possible.)
Extrapolating from this, he suggested that civil servants like him may want to think twice before opposing too stridently policies they think are wrong. Those civil servants, though well-informed and well-intentioned, might be wrong, even though they could explain so well why there were right. Even if the employees were right and the policies from leaders were wrong, bad policies can sometimes work out: Lee made stupid decisions that his soldiers found a way to make look brilliant just by carrying them out in a brilliant way. (And luck.)
As a former military guy myself, I can't help but interpret this in the context of grousing government employees. Nobody can complain like a government employee can. Melville may have heard a lot of this type of complaint. Although his NSA colleagues are no doubt intelligent people who have brilliant reasons to pick apart policies, Melville apparently felt that to oppose every policy, to think he has everything figured out more than those who made the policy, would amount to hubris.
Maass saw in this a loyal-to-a-fault Melville willing to follow even unethical policies. But Melville did not say that Southerners who opposed slavery should have fought for it because their country demanded it. He said that those who accepted the South's cause were doing the "right thing" (within the context of being utterly wrong about slavery), to try to make the flawed strategies of their leadership work. If NSA employees accept NSA's overall mission of using foreign communications to provide foreign intelligence for America's military and policy makers, then they should generally work to make policies in support of that mission achieve their intended results. In this context, the policies Melville thought that workers might object to are more likely to be inefficient or counter-productive in nature, not unethical. This is clearer if one reads some of the other columns Melville wrote, in which he himself groused about a number of those policies, such as a promotion system that discouraged the collaboration it was supposed to reward.
In fact, Melville listed three valid responses to policies employees might not like. One was "I might be wrong." Second was "I might be right, but the wrong thing might work anyway." Third was--directly quoting here: "My oath is to uphold the constitution, and as long as those decision makers are operating constitutionally, I will put my own feelings aside, and support them." (Bold mine.) Melville was willing to give his leaders a lot of latitude, but not infinitely so.
Melville's far from a perfect writer. His blog is sometimes intolerably self-indulgent. In his SIGINT Philosopher columns, he tried to avoid bureaucratic speech and write something interesting, but in the process he left daylight for an uncautious reader to arrive at interpretations that I don't think he meant. But there is no reason to read the worst into what is there unless you've already made your mind up beforehand that you know what he's talking about. That is to say, you might not have the necessary context, and should approach with caution. Melville was wary about pretending he knew more about his targets than he really did (one of his columns was entirely about this). That's why he wanted to know more about those targets. He was worried that the government might take action against the target based on a faulty understanding of the context.
Maass seems to have done exactly the thing Melville wanted to avoid in his work. He pulled the trigger on an accusatory story without having enough context. He read into Melville what he assumed he would find. He assumed, anachronistically, that Melville's admonition to follow policies he didn't like was about NSA metadata programs that have since come under fire (even though those weren't an issue of public debate until months after Melville wrote). It seems more likely, though, that Melville was referring to something entirely different, possibly government policies Melville thught were counterproductive concerning parts of the world he cared about. Maass also assumed that Melville meant "more" monitoring equaled "total" monitoring, and monitoring of everyone, and for whatever reasons suited his fancy. A remotely careful reading, though, clearly shows Melville wanted better monitoring of a limited number of foreign targets picked for specific reasons so that the government had the correct information.
I don't fault The Intercept, The Guardian, or any other venues for trying to write stories about NSA. The Intercept does some important journalism. Last month, they had a story about women on Riker's Island who faced sexual abuse for seeking medical care. After the Kalief Browder story, I don't see how anyone could not see this as critical journalism. Giving a voice to the voiceless is journalism at its best. But a story like Maass's, so blatantly missing the point of writing that was right there in front of him, calls his reliability into question. By extension, it calls The Intercept into question. As the de facto mediators between the Snowden documents and the public, they have to do better than this, or the entire public discourse about surveillance will be off course.
I understand, given the age we live in, anxiety over monitoring of electronic communications. The public will never feel easy about monitoring its government does in secret, just like Melville did not feel easy about his employer monitoring him. NSA must do a better job of explaining how it balances the 4th Amendment rights of its citizens against the need to protect its citizens. A much better job. As in, it should allow the people who actually do and know the work to explain their jobs instead of marching its leaders in front of us to give broad and generic reassurances. Providing a declassified version of USSID SPOO18, NSA's regulations for protecting 4th Amendment rights while carrying out the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was a great start, but there is much more NSA could do to make clear to Americans what NSA actually does.
It won't be easy. NSA is, I imagine, worried that every reassurance it makes to the American people has a cost in what it teaches adversaries about how to evade NSA. And they might be right--since we don't know everything about how they work, we can't imagine how seemingly innocent revelations might hurt NSA. But it can be done. It just takes creativity and political willpower. I appreciate that The Intercept is part of creating that political willpower, although they are doing it, like all us writers are, imperfectly. Because honestly, nobody would rather see NSA open up more to its citizens about how it does what it does than I would.
In any event, it's another warning to writers. Do everything you can to avoid being misread. But know you'll still be misread, anyway. Me, I take solace in recalling the scorn the real Melville, Herman, received for Moby Dick when it came out. Commenters in America noted that it didn't make any sense how Ishmael was telling the story, when the entire crew of the Pequod died. But it was a simple printer error. The American version left off the end, "I alone have escaped to tell thee," where Ishmael survives. There's no end to things that can go wrong in writing. But keep writing anyway. Someday, perhaps, you'll be vindicated.
But I may have never seen a more egregious example of willful bad reading than that by Peter Maass in an article from The Intercept on August 11th. In it, Maass revealed what he claimed were seven editorial columns from the National Security Agency's internal website, written by a working-level translator. The translator's name was known to Maass, allowing him to do some basic research on the NSA employee. Maass dubbed the translator "Socrates" because six of the editorials were supposedly written for a column NSA called "The SIGINT Philosopher." (I will call this translator "Melville" instead of "Socrates," because the writer himself joked about how little Philosophy he had studied.) Maass combined these editorials with what he found on what he believed to be Melville's personal, non-work blog about life as a failed fiction writer to create a composite, conjectural portrait. The picture was not flattering, as the title "What Happens when a Failed Writer Becomes a Loyal Spy?" might suggest.
Maass's eight-page article included long sections on his search for information on Melville--not much of a challenge, as Melville was attempting to be found rather than hide on the internet, and Maass already had a lot to go on from the editorials. Maass played a tongue-in-cheek game of "tell you who he is/not tell you who he is," sharing many paragraphs of detail about Melville's life taken from the blog, including hints about his family, apparently to make the point (already known by everyone) that people can find out a lot about you if they are really determined to, even if you work for NSA. He explained that even if readers managed to decipher Melville's true identity, he had a "get out of guilt free card," because he was certain he had interpreted Melville's editorials sufficiently. As he saw it, Melville wanted the government to collect everything on everybody, because it made us all safer. Maass found irony in Melville's desire to keep his name out of Maass's story, because, after all, hadn't Melville just said that the more others know about you, the safer you are?
Since Maass's decision to provide so much personal information on Melville was entirely built on his certainty of his own interpretation, it's odd he spent so little time actually, you know, reading the articles. He and NPR's On the Media referred unproblematically to Melville's belief in "total surveillance." Nobody seemed to notice that this phrase, appearing in some re-posts of the story in quotes as though it were Melville who said it, is Maass's restatement, not Melville's words. As I'm about to show, it isn't a good restatement.
"Melville's" Actual Writing: What it says and doesn't say
What did Melville actually say? Maass dealt mostly with two of the editorials, so I will look at the same two. One editorial was the first Melville wrote as SIGINT Philosopher. With what looks to be roughly a one-page word limit, Melville attempted to answer the question not--as Maass thinks--of whether NSA should grab all communications on Earth, but whether it is morally acceptable to conduct surveillance on foreign targets who are not clearly "enemies." When Melville first stated work, he had misgivings. He wasn't targeting terrorists or drug lords, but foreign government officials who seemed like good people. They were folks, like Melville, who had taken government jobs because work for one's country seemed like a respectable calling in life and because it enabled them to care for their families. They weren't being targeted for doing bad things; they simply knew information that Melville's employer also wanted to know.
Melville then recalled a moment when he was himself a "target": his employer was re-investigating him for his security clearance at work. He apparently had problems with the polygraph (not an uncommon occurrence, even for those who are telling the truth). He passed a month later, it seems, but in the meantime, he felt depressed while waiting to retake the test after failing it. Sardonically, he listed two wishes he had while nursing his wounds:
1) That he could run away from it all, take his family out onto the prairie of old and live in a mud hut.
2) That his employer would just know everything about him, rather than just the flawed information from a polygraph.
I don't think either with was a real wish. If given the chance, he wouldn't go back to the 19th century and rub elbows with Ma and Pa Ingalls. Neither did he really want his employer to look through everything of his. These were his depressed, illogical thoughts, and they are presented as such. These ideas made sense when he was under duress, but now that he has recovered his equilibrium he is making fun of his own thoughts. He's poking fun at himself, not expressing a true desire. These crazy thoughts do relate to what comes after, but the later thought expresses a different wish than total surveillance.
He drew an analogy between himself as a target and his own targets he eavesdrops on. He wanted to be "complete and competent" in monitoring them. Not to listen to everything they said, but to listen to enough to be "competent," to not misunderstand them, to not misrepresent them based on bunk data, such as the bunk data from a polygraph. He said this was as much for the targets as it was for the Unites States, thinking of the repercussions that can result from a powerful agent that misunderstands an innocent target.
This is what David Hume (I think I have this right) would have called an "imperfect analogy." The two parts of Melville as target and Melville as eavesdropper only partly line up. He had a crazy desire to have the government know everything about him, and it led him to a less crazy realization that his job has meaning when he does it well enough to prevent propagating bad information.
I think Melville made a rather important punctuation error at one point. In a paragraph right after talking about his crazy desires, he began with "This is the attitude I have brought to my SIGINT work since then." That makes it sound like he meant "I've taken this crazy idea of the government knowing everything about me and put it to work." Some commenters have found this so outlandish they have even wondered if this was a mock piece, the NSA version of The Onion. But taking the whole article into consideration, I see it as a simple punctuation error. It should have said "This is the attitude I have brought to my SIGINT work since then <COLON>," thereby tying it to what came after.
This would have made it clear that the actual attitude he adopts is the next phrase: "If we are going to work on targets that fall short of being technically 'enemies' but are rather informative for our policy makers--and we are--then even looking at it from the target's perspective, we are honor-bound to do more and better monitoring rather than less." The more is not on everyone, only on his small set of foreign targets. And it's not infinite; it's only "more" to the extent it leads to "better."
There is a bizarre finale about seeking a "deity-like monitoring of the target." It's a weird, sudden insertion of a new metaphor of the government spy as God and the target as the humanity that God watches. I don't believe this was even Melville's original line. He's an agnostic. He just said the government "does not have godlike powers" a paragraph before that line. I think there might have even been a smiley-face emoticon stuck in there that didn't show up in Maass's version, and I don't think Melville would EVER use one of those outside a text message.
I'd wager that something happened here Maass can probably relate to. Melville had an editor. The editor thought this was a pithy way to wrap up, and Melville, in his first article, didn't feel he could fight too hard. But even if my textual postulations are wrong, and we take the text at its word, it's clear the text is not calling for monitoring "all of us," as Maass put it during his On the Media interview. It's deity-like monitoring of his targets. Those targets are apparently both foreign and few. He seems to have some level of familiarity with them, which would be impossible if he monitored thousands of people. He's a translator, after all. Ever try to translate just one person? It takes a long time.
All in all, I look at this article as a government employee saying that he finds monitoring other people to be a little unnerving, but that he has come to grips with it by determining to do his job competently. The government is going to do it anyway, so it's better for everyone if they at least get the right information. He has developed an ethic of trying to get "more and better monitoring of (his) targets," so that he can pass on information in a "complete and competent" manner.
This is certainly a position that you could still call into question. It does not interrogate many larger issues about the U.S.'s role internationally as a superpower and the effects thereof. I don't think he could have addressed all of this--short word count. In any event, these critiques, though important, are a long way off from a guy who thinks the government should find out everything about its own citizens.
Contents of second article
In the second article Maass quoted from, Melville, drawing on his newfound love for studying the American Civil War, found lessons from the past for civil servants of today. Melville believed that if he had been an adviser to Lincoln at the start of the war, he'd have urged Lincoln that he couldn't win, and therefore, Lincoln had no choice but to live with secession. Melville would have had a lot of solid-sounding pragmatic reasons why the war was doomed to failure, but his reasons, though brilliant in his own mind, would have been completely wrong. (Partly, he'd have been wrong because he'd have underestimated Lincoln's ability to make the impossible possible.)
Extrapolating from this, he suggested that civil servants like him may want to think twice before opposing too stridently policies they think are wrong. Those civil servants, though well-informed and well-intentioned, might be wrong, even though they could explain so well why there were right. Even if the employees were right and the policies from leaders were wrong, bad policies can sometimes work out: Lee made stupid decisions that his soldiers found a way to make look brilliant just by carrying them out in a brilliant way. (And luck.)
As a former military guy myself, I can't help but interpret this in the context of grousing government employees. Nobody can complain like a government employee can. Melville may have heard a lot of this type of complaint. Although his NSA colleagues are no doubt intelligent people who have brilliant reasons to pick apart policies, Melville apparently felt that to oppose every policy, to think he has everything figured out more than those who made the policy, would amount to hubris.
Maass saw in this a loyal-to-a-fault Melville willing to follow even unethical policies. But Melville did not say that Southerners who opposed slavery should have fought for it because their country demanded it. He said that those who accepted the South's cause were doing the "right thing" (within the context of being utterly wrong about slavery), to try to make the flawed strategies of their leadership work. If NSA employees accept NSA's overall mission of using foreign communications to provide foreign intelligence for America's military and policy makers, then they should generally work to make policies in support of that mission achieve their intended results. In this context, the policies Melville thought that workers might object to are more likely to be inefficient or counter-productive in nature, not unethical. This is clearer if one reads some of the other columns Melville wrote, in which he himself groused about a number of those policies, such as a promotion system that discouraged the collaboration it was supposed to reward.
In fact, Melville listed three valid responses to policies employees might not like. One was "I might be wrong." Second was "I might be right, but the wrong thing might work anyway." Third was--directly quoting here: "My oath is to uphold the constitution, and as long as those decision makers are operating constitutionally, I will put my own feelings aside, and support them." (Bold mine.) Melville was willing to give his leaders a lot of latitude, but not infinitely so.
Melville's far from a perfect writer. His blog is sometimes intolerably self-indulgent. In his SIGINT Philosopher columns, he tried to avoid bureaucratic speech and write something interesting, but in the process he left daylight for an uncautious reader to arrive at interpretations that I don't think he meant. But there is no reason to read the worst into what is there unless you've already made your mind up beforehand that you know what he's talking about. That is to say, you might not have the necessary context, and should approach with caution. Melville was wary about pretending he knew more about his targets than he really did (one of his columns was entirely about this). That's why he wanted to know more about those targets. He was worried that the government might take action against the target based on a faulty understanding of the context.
Maass seems to have done exactly the thing Melville wanted to avoid in his work. He pulled the trigger on an accusatory story without having enough context. He read into Melville what he assumed he would find. He assumed, anachronistically, that Melville's admonition to follow policies he didn't like was about NSA metadata programs that have since come under fire (even though those weren't an issue of public debate until months after Melville wrote). It seems more likely, though, that Melville was referring to something entirely different, possibly government policies Melville thught were counterproductive concerning parts of the world he cared about. Maass also assumed that Melville meant "more" monitoring equaled "total" monitoring, and monitoring of everyone, and for whatever reasons suited his fancy. A remotely careful reading, though, clearly shows Melville wanted better monitoring of a limited number of foreign targets picked for specific reasons so that the government had the correct information.
I don't fault The Intercept, The Guardian, or any other venues for trying to write stories about NSA. The Intercept does some important journalism. Last month, they had a story about women on Riker's Island who faced sexual abuse for seeking medical care. After the Kalief Browder story, I don't see how anyone could not see this as critical journalism. Giving a voice to the voiceless is journalism at its best. But a story like Maass's, so blatantly missing the point of writing that was right there in front of him, calls his reliability into question. By extension, it calls The Intercept into question. As the de facto mediators between the Snowden documents and the public, they have to do better than this, or the entire public discourse about surveillance will be off course.
I understand, given the age we live in, anxiety over monitoring of electronic communications. The public will never feel easy about monitoring its government does in secret, just like Melville did not feel easy about his employer monitoring him. NSA must do a better job of explaining how it balances the 4th Amendment rights of its citizens against the need to protect its citizens. A much better job. As in, it should allow the people who actually do and know the work to explain their jobs instead of marching its leaders in front of us to give broad and generic reassurances. Providing a declassified version of USSID SPOO18, NSA's regulations for protecting 4th Amendment rights while carrying out the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was a great start, but there is much more NSA could do to make clear to Americans what NSA actually does.
It won't be easy. NSA is, I imagine, worried that every reassurance it makes to the American people has a cost in what it teaches adversaries about how to evade NSA. And they might be right--since we don't know everything about how they work, we can't imagine how seemingly innocent revelations might hurt NSA. But it can be done. It just takes creativity and political willpower. I appreciate that The Intercept is part of creating that political willpower, although they are doing it, like all us writers are, imperfectly. Because honestly, nobody would rather see NSA open up more to its citizens about how it does what it does than I would.
In any event, it's another warning to writers. Do everything you can to avoid being misread. But know you'll still be misread, anyway. Me, I take solace in recalling the scorn the real Melville, Herman, received for Moby Dick when it came out. Commenters in America noted that it didn't make any sense how Ishmael was telling the story, when the entire crew of the Pequod died. But it was a simple printer error. The American version left off the end, "I alone have escaped to tell thee," where Ishmael survives. There's no end to things that can go wrong in writing. But keep writing anyway. Someday, perhaps, you'll be vindicated.
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
Inspiration for the mediocre from the never-mediocre Borges
Recently, I posted something about moving my goals from being one of the great writers of all-time to getting key ideas across in a meaningful way to a handful of people (it's at the beginning of that link). I guess that qualifies as lowered expectations. Somewhere at the back of my thinking in saying that was a wonderful miniature from Jorge Luis Borges I read a dozen years or so ago and just dug up again in recent days. The translation is mine, so if it's hosed, you know whom to blame.
Inferno, I, 32
From the twilight of dawn to the twilight of evening, a leopard, in the final years of the twelfth century, looked at wooden planks, some iron bars, men and women who came and went, a wall, and, perhaps, a stone gutter full of dried leaves. He did not know--he could not know--that he longed for love and cruelty and the warm pleasure of tearing something apart and the wind carrying the scent of deer, but something in him was drowning and rebelling, and God spoke to him in a dream: You will live and die in this prison, in order that a man I know will look upon you a certain number of times and not forget you and will put your image and your symbol into a poem, a poem that has its precise place in the drama of the universe. You will suffer captivity, but you will have given a word to the poem. God, in the dream, illuminated the simplicity of the animal, and he understood the reasons and accepted this destiny, but when he awoke, all that remained in him was a dim resignation, a valiant ignorance, because the world is too complicated a machine for the simplicity of a beast.
Years later, Dante would die in Ravenna, as unjustified and alone as any man. In a dream, God revealed to him the secret purpose of his life and his work; Dante, astonished, discovered at last who he was and what he was and blessed his sufferings. Tradition says that when he woke up, he felt that he had received and lost something infinite, something that he could not recover or even get an inkling of, because the world is too complicated a machine for the simplicity of men.
Saturday, October 3, 2015
failures as a human and putting it in writing
Writers are supposed to be like comedians in that anything bad that happens to us or any shortcomings in ourselves are supposed to be seen as almost fortunate: they give us something to write about. Louis CK does a bit about how he's just waiting for his kids to get old so he can commit suicide, but in the meantime, he's masturbating a lot and letting his body go, and we laugh because it's really funny. It is. It shouldn't be, but it is.
I've quoted that line by Charles Baxter about hell being story-friendly so often by now the four people who read this blog are probably sick of hearing it from me, but writers are told that when we see weakness in ourselves, we should see it as grist for writing. It's a fortunate failure, allowing us to convert our personal failures into something universal. It's like we got caught eating candy in class, and the teacher said "Did you bring enough for everyone?" only to find that by some Jesus-and-the-fishes miracle, you actually do have enough for everyone.
I guess hooray for everyone, then, except that it still leaves you, the writer, failing as a human. I'm thinking of a specific example. Last night, I was at a small party. A soiree, really. Not that many people, but all really smart people. Some I was meeting for the first time in person, but I knew them from correspondence as highly intelligent folks.
I'm not a big drinker, but I drank a lot. That's not the failure part. The failure is that one guy crossed over, in my mind, the line between funny comments about race (and maybe gender, too? I can't remember. I was kind of drunk) and stuff he just shouldn't have said. I'm of the opinion that you should be able to say whatever's on your mind about race, but you should always say something you would say in mixed company. If you'd say that line with someone of that race in the room, then by all means, say it, however edgy it might be. If it fails, I'll support you for the effort. But we were a gathering of privileged white males.
It wasn't close to the most prejudiced line I've heard, but I think it was out of bounds. But I really just failed to speak up. There were a lot of reasons. I was intimidated as (in my mind) the dumbest guy in the room, I was having a good time and didn't want to bring it all down, it wasn't my house or party, and I didn't want to ruin it for the host, and probably some good old-fashioned moral cowardice. Also, I was drunk. Don't know if I mentioned that. He was probably drunk, too.
My lame attempt to shame him was to bring up my close relationship with specific black people. I think I was trying to intimate, rather than explicitly say, "Hey, man. That last bit wasn't cool." I think my point eluded him. Not surprising; I wasn't anywhere near direct enough.
A fiction workshop would be happy about this and want me to get to work immediately on some kind of vignette about it. The four men, the cigar smoke, the pool table, the one word that made my head snap. (Not THE word.) I should show by actions, dialogue, dress, demeanor, and so on why person one felt it was okay to say such a thing, and why person two (me) didn't lodge the proper protest.
On the one hand, this makes sense to do this. This is the kind of role playing people in ethics training do all the time. You're the dumbest in a group of four people at someone else's party, and a guy you've just met, who is enjoying telling a pretty good story, gratuitously inserts an ethnic off-color line. What do you do?
The problem with these scenarios is that nobody really has time in real life to think of what to do. What's the perfect thing to say? How do I convey that this person has violated what I think is decency in his speech without moralizing? How can I be convincing? I don't want to just lodge a protest to make my own linguistic predilections clear. I want to convert. I can't stop being an evangelical, I guess.
Furthermore, I wonder if writers actually become better people by writing about their failures. If a comedian continues to get laughs from her screw-ups, isn't it a temptation to keep screwing up? You could even justify it as "staying true to who you are" or some bullshit. Amy Schumer's character in Trainwreck finally gets her shit together, but that's the moment when we stop watching the movie. What if the movie continued on from that great final scene, but she's not as interesting from then on? This is what I think the temptation is in writing: to embrace too deeply your own flaws, rather than set to fixing them, because they give you grist for stories.
Ultimately, I don't want to be someone who fails to be brave on a thousand small moral battlegrounds. I want to be someone who does the right thing. Does writing help me to get there? Or does it just offer me a means to forgive myself, or to fix my flaws by proxy rather than doing the hard work of fixing myself for real?
So that this blog entry doesn't become the only thing I do about last night, I'm going to at least e-mail him about what I thought. It's not much, but it's better than letting it go forever.
I've quoted that line by Charles Baxter about hell being story-friendly so often by now the four people who read this blog are probably sick of hearing it from me, but writers are told that when we see weakness in ourselves, we should see it as grist for writing. It's a fortunate failure, allowing us to convert our personal failures into something universal. It's like we got caught eating candy in class, and the teacher said "Did you bring enough for everyone?" only to find that by some Jesus-and-the-fishes miracle, you actually do have enough for everyone.
I guess hooray for everyone, then, except that it still leaves you, the writer, failing as a human. I'm thinking of a specific example. Last night, I was at a small party. A soiree, really. Not that many people, but all really smart people. Some I was meeting for the first time in person, but I knew them from correspondence as highly intelligent folks.
I'm not a big drinker, but I drank a lot. That's not the failure part. The failure is that one guy crossed over, in my mind, the line between funny comments about race (and maybe gender, too? I can't remember. I was kind of drunk) and stuff he just shouldn't have said. I'm of the opinion that you should be able to say whatever's on your mind about race, but you should always say something you would say in mixed company. If you'd say that line with someone of that race in the room, then by all means, say it, however edgy it might be. If it fails, I'll support you for the effort. But we were a gathering of privileged white males.
It wasn't close to the most prejudiced line I've heard, but I think it was out of bounds. But I really just failed to speak up. There were a lot of reasons. I was intimidated as (in my mind) the dumbest guy in the room, I was having a good time and didn't want to bring it all down, it wasn't my house or party, and I didn't want to ruin it for the host, and probably some good old-fashioned moral cowardice. Also, I was drunk. Don't know if I mentioned that. He was probably drunk, too.
My lame attempt to shame him was to bring up my close relationship with specific black people. I think I was trying to intimate, rather than explicitly say, "Hey, man. That last bit wasn't cool." I think my point eluded him. Not surprising; I wasn't anywhere near direct enough.
A fiction workshop would be happy about this and want me to get to work immediately on some kind of vignette about it. The four men, the cigar smoke, the pool table, the one word that made my head snap. (Not THE word.) I should show by actions, dialogue, dress, demeanor, and so on why person one felt it was okay to say such a thing, and why person two (me) didn't lodge the proper protest.
On the one hand, this makes sense to do this. This is the kind of role playing people in ethics training do all the time. You're the dumbest in a group of four people at someone else's party, and a guy you've just met, who is enjoying telling a pretty good story, gratuitously inserts an ethnic off-color line. What do you do?
The problem with these scenarios is that nobody really has time in real life to think of what to do. What's the perfect thing to say? How do I convey that this person has violated what I think is decency in his speech without moralizing? How can I be convincing? I don't want to just lodge a protest to make my own linguistic predilections clear. I want to convert. I can't stop being an evangelical, I guess.
Furthermore, I wonder if writers actually become better people by writing about their failures. If a comedian continues to get laughs from her screw-ups, isn't it a temptation to keep screwing up? You could even justify it as "staying true to who you are" or some bullshit. Amy Schumer's character in Trainwreck finally gets her shit together, but that's the moment when we stop watching the movie. What if the movie continued on from that great final scene, but she's not as interesting from then on? This is what I think the temptation is in writing: to embrace too deeply your own flaws, rather than set to fixing them, because they give you grist for stories.
Ultimately, I don't want to be someone who fails to be brave on a thousand small moral battlegrounds. I want to be someone who does the right thing. Does writing help me to get there? Or does it just offer me a means to forgive myself, or to fix my flaws by proxy rather than doing the hard work of fixing myself for real?
So that this blog entry doesn't become the only thing I do about last night, I'm going to at least e-mail him about what I thought. It's not much, but it's better than letting it go forever.
Friday, September 25, 2015
Responses to doubts about writing fiction
At 25, I wanted to be a writer. At 31, after six years of floundering around, I gave up. Two years ago, I started again, but actually read some books on how to write. After a year, I had had some small success, but gave up again, largely because I thought it was interfering with more critical responsibilities. Now, I'm back to trying to write some more stories. If I can get to three publication credits, I've got a novel idea I'll start on.
During the end of the year of writing and for the year of not writing, I've occasionally scribbled in this blog about two subjects, mostly: 1) How dumb graduate writing programs are, and 2) Doubts about the value of spending time writing fiction. I here leave my final summary of these doubts, and how I've resolved them personally. This is not a scientific list of doubts that plague hopeful writers. I didn't research top doubts. These are mine. Most writers are probably at least a little weird. If you're my particular brand of weird, then some of this list might resonate with you. If not, feel free to list your own. These are in no particular order.
1. Nobody will ever read this, so I am wasting my time.
I'm sorry to say this, but mathematically speaking, this doubt is probably correct. There are between 20 and 100 submissions to every journal for every story they actually publish. Colleges are cranking out M.F.A. holders every year, probably at higher rates than old writers give up or die. Meanwhile, reading is on the decline. Shrinking demand, increasing supply. You're pushing into a very, very glutted market.
I've always felt that I would quit writing if I knew it would never get published. That's still probably true. But I think I've vastly altered my expectations such that I would settle for much less now in terms of readership to make it worth writing. Like anyone who thinks they write "serious" literature, I once wanted to be toasted as the "it" writer for intellectuals. I felt kind of like Keats, who once said he'd rather fail completely than not become one of the greats.
I don't write as therapy, that's true. I don't write just to work out my feelings, although that is a benefit I sometimes get out of it. I want to share ideas. But maybe you can think of readers like friends. How many do you actually want or need? If I had ten really close friends I could talk about the really big stuff with, I'd consider myself a lucky person. Scrounging together ten readers who really get you isn't such a tall task. I found one already.
If the end goal is to become financially independent through writing, give up now or start writing post-apocalyptic tween fiction. If you goal, though, is to make your ideas about the big stuff clear enough, and for them to be worth reading enough, that you find a few kindred spirits in the world, that's within reach. Melville probably wrote Moby Dick more for Hawthorne than for any other reason. For a variety of reasons, hardly anyone else really got the book for more than 50 years. If I ended up with a friend like Hawthorne and a book that everyone loved after I was dead, I'd call that a life well spent. (Okay, Hawthorne kind of dissed Melville soon after the book came out, but you get the idea.)
2. I'm not that good
This is similar to doubt #1. It's another "I'm wasting my time" consideration. Not infrequently, I read something someone else wrote and think it's so perfect, it makes everything I've written seem suddenly naked with a shriveled wiener. It makes me want to throw a towel around everything I've written and just hide in a corner until all the big guys have left the locker room.
So what keeps me writing? Three things. One is when people who I think are even worse than me end up being feted as brilliant authors. Pure anger makes me think I need to write, because if anyone thinks that bullshit is worth a read, then it's for farking sure I deserve a few pages.
Secondly are those people who I think are writing great stuff, but whose talent is within my reach. I can't write like Jonathan Franzen. I don't want to write like Jumpa Lahiri, although I admire her work. But maybe, if I keep at it, I might write something that could be mildly reminiscent of a writer whose work appeared in the latest Pushcart anthology.
Third is love of the things I'm writing about. I'm a kid from a nearly all-white suburb in Ohio who had two Chinese siblings. My best friend was the only black kid I knew in town. I became a born-again Christian, because I had just started to wonder about the big things in life at 16, and they were the first people I ran into with answers. I enlisted in the Marine Corps because everyone I knew was going to college and I wanted to do something special. I hated the Marine Corps, but loved the people I was enlisted with. I married the girl I knew in the high school youth group at church, because it was better to marry than to burn. I got out of the Marines. I divorced the girl from high school youth group, because I no longer believed the answers the church had given me and she did. I went to college to get better answers. I married someone new. I went to more school to get even better answers. Then I gave up on answers to the big questions and decided to try having a family. I have learned three languages and lived deeply, for a time, in the cultures of people who speak them. I've met cowboys and intellectuals and racists and people who've lived through unimaginable shit. People who deserve to have their stories told, and, unlucky for them, I'm the most qualified bastard around to tell those stories for them. So I have to become the person who is able to tell them. No one part of my experience is that unusual, but the mix is. Writing is the only way to make that experience speak beyond my own life.
3. I have more important things to be doing
Then do them. Writing will be there. I didn't write for ten years. Things incubated. When I had time to write again, those incubating thoughts poured out. Writing is part of life, not life itself. Live your life. You'll know when it's time to get back to writing.
4. All the writing books say I should write every day, but I just can't
Books have great advice about how to handle tags in dialogue and similar mechanical things. But only you know you. I'm not the sort of person who does ANYTHING every day. I like to work out. But I don't do it every day. Sometimes, I work out five times in a week. Sometimes, I only get to it twice. If I'm feeling like I have time and the desire to devote to it, I do. If not, I just do enough that I don't fall apart. "Something is better than nothing" has been my fitness motto for 20 years, and it's worked. I'm not always in great shape, but I've never really been "out of shape," whatever that means. Write when you can, or when you want to. If you have time on the weekends, go apeshit on the weekends. If you have an idea you're really in the swing of, and there's nothing going on at work on Thursday, call out Thursday and write. Then don't write next week when the big audit is on at work and you need to be there the whole time. I'm the kind of guy who doesn't clean house for two weeks and then does it all at once. I tend to do the same with writing. That's just me. I don't see why writing should be different from every other thing in my life.
5. Fiction is a corrupt, capitalist, bourgeois luxury read by the wealthy who have time for such activities while most of the world is working 27 hours a day on 14 calories (or some version of this)
Fair enough. Earlier, I wrote about having neo-Augustinian feelings about literature. I also have completely repented from having once said that writing was more important to me than family. People matter. Writing matters, too, but far less. If I really thought that by giving up writing and dedicating myself to teaching immigrants I would accomplish more net happiness in the world than by writing, I would do it. At least, I hope I would. Maybe I wouldn't be able to. A different saint, Saint Jerome, tried to give up his books when he went to the desert, but just couldn't. Millions of people who have lived after him are glad he didn't. To some extent, you are what you are. If you're the kind of person who just has to write--so much so that you are reading this blog by someone else who, against all rational argument, continues to do the same thing--then you're probably just a person who is going to write no matter what. So live with it. Give something else up, instead. Give up Facebook. Give up porn. Give up something. It's 2015, and you're (probably) a Westerner who has something else he can give up.
When I was working in retail for years after the Marine Corps, I wasn't a third-world day laborer, but I wasn't really bourgeois, either. But reading made my life better. I don't think I'd have lived through the Marine Corps without reading Melville when I was at sea. Human happiness is a weird commodity. Sometimes, a stupid thing like a good book contributes to it as much as five pounds of rice.
Writing doesn't matter much in the cosmic scheme of things. But really, on that scale, what does? So write if you want to.
6. Failing often is making me feel bad about myself
Anecdote: I have a former brother-in-law that I like a lot. He tried for many years to be a pro golfer. He is a great golfer. I once watched him shoot a 60. A 60. That does not happen. But he was a streaky guy. He'd have great days and bad days. He never quite managed to make it as a pro. He's better than 99% of people who have ever played golf. He's a great golfer. But somehow, he still isn't good enough for it to really matter.
This is probably familiar to a lot of people. You start off, and you're the best at something. You get to the next level, and you're still the best. Your parents talk about you as that kid who is great at that one thing. Then, one day, you get to a level where you're not the best. You're still better at it than almost anyone who ever tried to do it. Mathematically, you're amazing. But it's still not enough to matter. It's crazy. How can you be so good at something, and still be so far away from being good enough?
I honestly haven't really figured out how to answer this one. The universe isn't fair. Maybe the point is that day he shot a 60. He was a foot from a 59; his putt on 18 was just a little short. If he had done that, he might have gotten a little play on ESPN. (He did this in a local tournament.) If you're good at something, and you keep at it, you've got a puncher's chance of having your day. But even if you don't, at least trying to have that one breakthrough has distracted you from the meaninglessness of life for a while.
7. Literature is bad for people
I made this very argument. I have a feeling that thinking too much in literary terms can corrupt your mind. In literature, it's imperative to bring things into some kind of order, to simplify, to give purpose. Life isn't really like this. It's unordered, and, ultimately, kind of without purpose. If you read too much stuff where life is working to some kind of end ordered by an intelligent designer, you can fall into magical thinking.
I can offer three humble defenses:
1) People think in stories. We're hard-wired to do it. Our whole language is built around it. So live with it.
2) Some magical thinking might not be a bad thing. It's better to talk yourself into a mythology where life makes some kind of sense than to live with the alternative.
3) Too much literature reading might be bad for the reader, but it can also be very good for the writer. Forcing the jangled discord of existence into some kind of order can be a healthy exercise. It's what life makes us do all the time, and writing can be a way to force yourself to try to find some kind of order to the mess.
8. Life is hard, so I should man up and face it and not try to duck it with stories
Stories are a survival technique. Okay, I could try to sneak in a re-statement of the thesis of Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival, as my own, but I'll attribute. Life can be hard, even for people for whom there is no reason for it to be hard. Surviving it can be as simple as the the story you tell yourself about it. You can face it head-on with stoic resignation, not allowing yourself to re-create life in the godlike role of storyteller. Or you can make up stories that help you to survive. I'll give you one guess which philosophy passes on its genes. There is a grand, tragic beauty in refusing to blink before the meaninglessness. But they'll be admiring you while you're dead. Ahab faced the universe head-on. He killed a boat full of sailors. Ishmael, the more pliable one, escapes to tell the story. Escape to tell the story.
During the end of the year of writing and for the year of not writing, I've occasionally scribbled in this blog about two subjects, mostly: 1) How dumb graduate writing programs are, and 2) Doubts about the value of spending time writing fiction. I here leave my final summary of these doubts, and how I've resolved them personally. This is not a scientific list of doubts that plague hopeful writers. I didn't research top doubts. These are mine. Most writers are probably at least a little weird. If you're my particular brand of weird, then some of this list might resonate with you. If not, feel free to list your own. These are in no particular order.
1. Nobody will ever read this, so I am wasting my time.
I'm sorry to say this, but mathematically speaking, this doubt is probably correct. There are between 20 and 100 submissions to every journal for every story they actually publish. Colleges are cranking out M.F.A. holders every year, probably at higher rates than old writers give up or die. Meanwhile, reading is on the decline. Shrinking demand, increasing supply. You're pushing into a very, very glutted market.
I've always felt that I would quit writing if I knew it would never get published. That's still probably true. But I think I've vastly altered my expectations such that I would settle for much less now in terms of readership to make it worth writing. Like anyone who thinks they write "serious" literature, I once wanted to be toasted as the "it" writer for intellectuals. I felt kind of like Keats, who once said he'd rather fail completely than not become one of the greats.
I don't write as therapy, that's true. I don't write just to work out my feelings, although that is a benefit I sometimes get out of it. I want to share ideas. But maybe you can think of readers like friends. How many do you actually want or need? If I had ten really close friends I could talk about the really big stuff with, I'd consider myself a lucky person. Scrounging together ten readers who really get you isn't such a tall task. I found one already.
If the end goal is to become financially independent through writing, give up now or start writing post-apocalyptic tween fiction. If you goal, though, is to make your ideas about the big stuff clear enough, and for them to be worth reading enough, that you find a few kindred spirits in the world, that's within reach. Melville probably wrote Moby Dick more for Hawthorne than for any other reason. For a variety of reasons, hardly anyone else really got the book for more than 50 years. If I ended up with a friend like Hawthorne and a book that everyone loved after I was dead, I'd call that a life well spent. (Okay, Hawthorne kind of dissed Melville soon after the book came out, but you get the idea.)
2. I'm not that good
This is similar to doubt #1. It's another "I'm wasting my time" consideration. Not infrequently, I read something someone else wrote and think it's so perfect, it makes everything I've written seem suddenly naked with a shriveled wiener. It makes me want to throw a towel around everything I've written and just hide in a corner until all the big guys have left the locker room.
So what keeps me writing? Three things. One is when people who I think are even worse than me end up being feted as brilliant authors. Pure anger makes me think I need to write, because if anyone thinks that bullshit is worth a read, then it's for farking sure I deserve a few pages.
Secondly are those people who I think are writing great stuff, but whose talent is within my reach. I can't write like Jonathan Franzen. I don't want to write like Jumpa Lahiri, although I admire her work. But maybe, if I keep at it, I might write something that could be mildly reminiscent of a writer whose work appeared in the latest Pushcart anthology.
Third is love of the things I'm writing about. I'm a kid from a nearly all-white suburb in Ohio who had two Chinese siblings. My best friend was the only black kid I knew in town. I became a born-again Christian, because I had just started to wonder about the big things in life at 16, and they were the first people I ran into with answers. I enlisted in the Marine Corps because everyone I knew was going to college and I wanted to do something special. I hated the Marine Corps, but loved the people I was enlisted with. I married the girl I knew in the high school youth group at church, because it was better to marry than to burn. I got out of the Marines. I divorced the girl from high school youth group, because I no longer believed the answers the church had given me and she did. I went to college to get better answers. I married someone new. I went to more school to get even better answers. Then I gave up on answers to the big questions and decided to try having a family. I have learned three languages and lived deeply, for a time, in the cultures of people who speak them. I've met cowboys and intellectuals and racists and people who've lived through unimaginable shit. People who deserve to have their stories told, and, unlucky for them, I'm the most qualified bastard around to tell those stories for them. So I have to become the person who is able to tell them. No one part of my experience is that unusual, but the mix is. Writing is the only way to make that experience speak beyond my own life.
3. I have more important things to be doing
Then do them. Writing will be there. I didn't write for ten years. Things incubated. When I had time to write again, those incubating thoughts poured out. Writing is part of life, not life itself. Live your life. You'll know when it's time to get back to writing.
4. All the writing books say I should write every day, but I just can't
Books have great advice about how to handle tags in dialogue and similar mechanical things. But only you know you. I'm not the sort of person who does ANYTHING every day. I like to work out. But I don't do it every day. Sometimes, I work out five times in a week. Sometimes, I only get to it twice. If I'm feeling like I have time and the desire to devote to it, I do. If not, I just do enough that I don't fall apart. "Something is better than nothing" has been my fitness motto for 20 years, and it's worked. I'm not always in great shape, but I've never really been "out of shape," whatever that means. Write when you can, or when you want to. If you have time on the weekends, go apeshit on the weekends. If you have an idea you're really in the swing of, and there's nothing going on at work on Thursday, call out Thursday and write. Then don't write next week when the big audit is on at work and you need to be there the whole time. I'm the kind of guy who doesn't clean house for two weeks and then does it all at once. I tend to do the same with writing. That's just me. I don't see why writing should be different from every other thing in my life.
5. Fiction is a corrupt, capitalist, bourgeois luxury read by the wealthy who have time for such activities while most of the world is working 27 hours a day on 14 calories (or some version of this)
Fair enough. Earlier, I wrote about having neo-Augustinian feelings about literature. I also have completely repented from having once said that writing was more important to me than family. People matter. Writing matters, too, but far less. If I really thought that by giving up writing and dedicating myself to teaching immigrants I would accomplish more net happiness in the world than by writing, I would do it. At least, I hope I would. Maybe I wouldn't be able to. A different saint, Saint Jerome, tried to give up his books when he went to the desert, but just couldn't. Millions of people who have lived after him are glad he didn't. To some extent, you are what you are. If you're the kind of person who just has to write--so much so that you are reading this blog by someone else who, against all rational argument, continues to do the same thing--then you're probably just a person who is going to write no matter what. So live with it. Give something else up, instead. Give up Facebook. Give up porn. Give up something. It's 2015, and you're (probably) a Westerner who has something else he can give up.
When I was working in retail for years after the Marine Corps, I wasn't a third-world day laborer, but I wasn't really bourgeois, either. But reading made my life better. I don't think I'd have lived through the Marine Corps without reading Melville when I was at sea. Human happiness is a weird commodity. Sometimes, a stupid thing like a good book contributes to it as much as five pounds of rice.
Writing doesn't matter much in the cosmic scheme of things. But really, on that scale, what does? So write if you want to.
6. Failing often is making me feel bad about myself
Anecdote: I have a former brother-in-law that I like a lot. He tried for many years to be a pro golfer. He is a great golfer. I once watched him shoot a 60. A 60. That does not happen. But he was a streaky guy. He'd have great days and bad days. He never quite managed to make it as a pro. He's better than 99% of people who have ever played golf. He's a great golfer. But somehow, he still isn't good enough for it to really matter.
This is probably familiar to a lot of people. You start off, and you're the best at something. You get to the next level, and you're still the best. Your parents talk about you as that kid who is great at that one thing. Then, one day, you get to a level where you're not the best. You're still better at it than almost anyone who ever tried to do it. Mathematically, you're amazing. But it's still not enough to matter. It's crazy. How can you be so good at something, and still be so far away from being good enough?
I honestly haven't really figured out how to answer this one. The universe isn't fair. Maybe the point is that day he shot a 60. He was a foot from a 59; his putt on 18 was just a little short. If he had done that, he might have gotten a little play on ESPN. (He did this in a local tournament.) If you're good at something, and you keep at it, you've got a puncher's chance of having your day. But even if you don't, at least trying to have that one breakthrough has distracted you from the meaninglessness of life for a while.
7. Literature is bad for people
I made this very argument. I have a feeling that thinking too much in literary terms can corrupt your mind. In literature, it's imperative to bring things into some kind of order, to simplify, to give purpose. Life isn't really like this. It's unordered, and, ultimately, kind of without purpose. If you read too much stuff where life is working to some kind of end ordered by an intelligent designer, you can fall into magical thinking.
I can offer three humble defenses:
1) People think in stories. We're hard-wired to do it. Our whole language is built around it. So live with it.
2) Some magical thinking might not be a bad thing. It's better to talk yourself into a mythology where life makes some kind of sense than to live with the alternative.
3) Too much literature reading might be bad for the reader, but it can also be very good for the writer. Forcing the jangled discord of existence into some kind of order can be a healthy exercise. It's what life makes us do all the time, and writing can be a way to force yourself to try to find some kind of order to the mess.
8. Life is hard, so I should man up and face it and not try to duck it with stories
Stories are a survival technique. Okay, I could try to sneak in a re-statement of the thesis of Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival, as my own, but I'll attribute. Life can be hard, even for people for whom there is no reason for it to be hard. Surviving it can be as simple as the the story you tell yourself about it. You can face it head-on with stoic resignation, not allowing yourself to re-create life in the godlike role of storyteller. Or you can make up stories that help you to survive. I'll give you one guess which philosophy passes on its genes. There is a grand, tragic beauty in refusing to blink before the meaninglessness. But they'll be admiring you while you're dead. Ahab faced the universe head-on. He killed a boat full of sailors. Ishmael, the more pliable one, escapes to tell the story. Escape to tell the story.
Sunday, September 20, 2015
story sins
While writing "Infection," it was easy for me to imagine a reader finding misogynistic notes. A woman damages a man's sexual organ, symbol of his manhood, through her own psychosis-fueled philandering. Hemingway, who I think everyone finds some misogyny in, had something of an obsession with men being cuckolded and the loss of a man's vital masculine force through a woman's influence. I could see analogies being drawn.
I felt like there were other elements in the story that offset this effect. Evie injured Steve's phallus, but Maria helped to restore it, literally and figuratively. She didn't do this because it's the woman's role to restore a man's confidence in his sexual prowess, she did it because it made her happy to do it. That's one reason I chose not to make her too "feminine" looking according to contemporary expectations of what that means. She is boxy and strong rather than skinny at all costs. Her body is developed according to her own notions of what she wants out of it.
There isn't a whole ton of Steve and Evie's backstory, which was one of the things Blake Kimzey, my literary service editor, critiqued. We know they were in an evangelical church together as teens in Ohio, that they didn't fit in with the church kids, that Steve left for Chicago to play blues music and Evie followed him sometime thereafter. Since Steve's final act is a rejection of the opportunity to move forward that life offered him, we can assume that maybe Steve wasn't a completely innocent victim of Evie.
So I thought there was enough there that this wasn't a hate anthem to loose women who break your heart and give your herpes. There wasn't an underlying resentment of the female. But it wouldn't have surprised me if an editor at a journal or a reader of a literary journal, someone with a background in analyzing literature but not a whole lot of time to devote to analyzing one story, found it in there. Nobody sits down to read a story, turns off all electronic devices, eliminates distractions and says "I will now fully devote myself to giving this story my fullest, most thoughtful attention, giving the story the benefit of the doubt in every circumstance." It would be easy for a distracted reader, even a good one, to find that a woman gave a man V.D. and think "this is some woman-hating shit like in Hemingway" and move on. Worse yet, you might get a sympathetic editor to print it, and then a critic decides to treat the perceived misogyny at length. You've still got the piece itself to defend yourself, and all those parts you think mitigate that one fact in your story, but now the critic has already influenced the way others will read it. You've lost control of the meaning of your own words.
Every writer faces this. Blake told me to quit worrying about rejection from editors and other things I can't control. But I find it extremely frightening that something I wrote might be described with such an awful word as "misogyny." Worse yet, that a critic would jump the tracks of examining the intent of the text and head right into the intent of the writer, calling me, personally, a misogynist. You have to write about dangerous stuff and walk a line in writing, or else there's no point to it. But in a society that is getting worse and worse at reading, it's a guarantee that you'll be misunderstood. I can't imagine how comics write jokes about race or child molestation or other awful things and then go out in front of a crowd where someone is likely to not see how the joke is funny. Worse, to have the joke fail because it really isn't funny, and it actually does deserve to be called a racist joke or a sick joke. You're up there on stage. It's only seconds before they go from saying racist joke to racist comedian. You didn't mean it that way, but all the audience has to go on is the joke they just heard.
If you write, you will either say something you didn't exactly mean, or you will be misread, or both. Probably both, and probably every time. It will take exactly one reader to have someone see something in what you wrote that you didn't intend. Blake gave this story a very thorough reading, but when he listed themes he saw, this was his list: money, class, art, charity, love, regret, and a host of others. I didn't think money or class were at play at all. I more or less gave American capitalism a pass in this story; Steve is poor because he's a slacker, not--as thousands in Chicago who don't have a voice in "Infection,"--because the economic system has let them down. When Steve wants to improve his position in life, a job is there for him, and he does. I was paying Blake to read the story well, and he did, but he still didn't see in it what I hoped he'd see. If I had to give a theme to the story, I'd say it was something like "People have the ability to spread both faith and doubt to other people, like an infection."
A lurking commenter on this site once told me to write for myself, let others come along if they wish, and assume the rest are just too dumb to get it. This attitude seemed like hubris to me--if one of us is wrong, why should I always assume it's the other guy? But there might also be a sort of wisdom in this. Defensive backs in football are known for being cocky. Even after giving up a big catch, they will still talk like they are unbeatable. There's a reason for that. If you act for a second like you can be beaten, you're already beaten. So you have to act like you're the best. Give up a touchdown, whatever. It wasn't your fault. The receiver pushed off. He'll never do it to you again.
But I'll bet that defensive back still looks at the film to see what he did wrong. He'll learn from it. He'll practice to never make that mistake again. He'll build it into his muscle memory, but erase it from his conscious memory. He has to play fearlessly, and he will, because he's never been beaten on the next play.
So after a year of writing followed by a year of not writing, I'm ready for writing again. One purpose of this blog was to work out doubts about whether writing was even worth the trouble. It's served its purpose. My next story will be the best fucking thing you've ever seen.
I felt like there were other elements in the story that offset this effect. Evie injured Steve's phallus, but Maria helped to restore it, literally and figuratively. She didn't do this because it's the woman's role to restore a man's confidence in his sexual prowess, she did it because it made her happy to do it. That's one reason I chose not to make her too "feminine" looking according to contemporary expectations of what that means. She is boxy and strong rather than skinny at all costs. Her body is developed according to her own notions of what she wants out of it.
There isn't a whole ton of Steve and Evie's backstory, which was one of the things Blake Kimzey, my literary service editor, critiqued. We know they were in an evangelical church together as teens in Ohio, that they didn't fit in with the church kids, that Steve left for Chicago to play blues music and Evie followed him sometime thereafter. Since Steve's final act is a rejection of the opportunity to move forward that life offered him, we can assume that maybe Steve wasn't a completely innocent victim of Evie.
So I thought there was enough there that this wasn't a hate anthem to loose women who break your heart and give your herpes. There wasn't an underlying resentment of the female. But it wouldn't have surprised me if an editor at a journal or a reader of a literary journal, someone with a background in analyzing literature but not a whole lot of time to devote to analyzing one story, found it in there. Nobody sits down to read a story, turns off all electronic devices, eliminates distractions and says "I will now fully devote myself to giving this story my fullest, most thoughtful attention, giving the story the benefit of the doubt in every circumstance." It would be easy for a distracted reader, even a good one, to find that a woman gave a man V.D. and think "this is some woman-hating shit like in Hemingway" and move on. Worse yet, you might get a sympathetic editor to print it, and then a critic decides to treat the perceived misogyny at length. You've still got the piece itself to defend yourself, and all those parts you think mitigate that one fact in your story, but now the critic has already influenced the way others will read it. You've lost control of the meaning of your own words.
Every writer faces this. Blake told me to quit worrying about rejection from editors and other things I can't control. But I find it extremely frightening that something I wrote might be described with such an awful word as "misogyny." Worse yet, that a critic would jump the tracks of examining the intent of the text and head right into the intent of the writer, calling me, personally, a misogynist. You have to write about dangerous stuff and walk a line in writing, or else there's no point to it. But in a society that is getting worse and worse at reading, it's a guarantee that you'll be misunderstood. I can't imagine how comics write jokes about race or child molestation or other awful things and then go out in front of a crowd where someone is likely to not see how the joke is funny. Worse, to have the joke fail because it really isn't funny, and it actually does deserve to be called a racist joke or a sick joke. You're up there on stage. It's only seconds before they go from saying racist joke to racist comedian. You didn't mean it that way, but all the audience has to go on is the joke they just heard.
If you write, you will either say something you didn't exactly mean, or you will be misread, or both. Probably both, and probably every time. It will take exactly one reader to have someone see something in what you wrote that you didn't intend. Blake gave this story a very thorough reading, but when he listed themes he saw, this was his list: money, class, art, charity, love, regret, and a host of others. I didn't think money or class were at play at all. I more or less gave American capitalism a pass in this story; Steve is poor because he's a slacker, not--as thousands in Chicago who don't have a voice in "Infection,"--because the economic system has let them down. When Steve wants to improve his position in life, a job is there for him, and he does. I was paying Blake to read the story well, and he did, but he still didn't see in it what I hoped he'd see. If I had to give a theme to the story, I'd say it was something like "People have the ability to spread both faith and doubt to other people, like an infection."
A lurking commenter on this site once told me to write for myself, let others come along if they wish, and assume the rest are just too dumb to get it. This attitude seemed like hubris to me--if one of us is wrong, why should I always assume it's the other guy? But there might also be a sort of wisdom in this. Defensive backs in football are known for being cocky. Even after giving up a big catch, they will still talk like they are unbeatable. There's a reason for that. If you act for a second like you can be beaten, you're already beaten. So you have to act like you're the best. Give up a touchdown, whatever. It wasn't your fault. The receiver pushed off. He'll never do it to you again.
But I'll bet that defensive back still looks at the film to see what he did wrong. He'll learn from it. He'll practice to never make that mistake again. He'll build it into his muscle memory, but erase it from his conscious memory. He has to play fearlessly, and he will, because he's never been beaten on the next play.
So after a year of writing followed by a year of not writing, I'm ready for writing again. One purpose of this blog was to work out doubts about whether writing was even worth the trouble. It's served its purpose. My next story will be the best fucking thing you've ever seen.
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Story example--the one I talked about earlier
Here is the story "Infection," the one I gave to a paid editor. I wish I had the original, because I think it would make a strong case that a $120 service like this can do as much for a story as a graduate-level workshop can. This is true even though I clearly didn't like a lot of what the editor said. But a 6800-word story on my visually ugly blog is already asking a lot of the reader. Expecting anyone to read the old version and the new version is ridiculous. Just know that this version is a lot better than the original.
I was going to put all nine of the unpublished stories I wrote in a year on here, but I think these two are enough. The point was to let you decide if grad school didn't work for me because nothing could have helped me. That only seems fair. If you assess that I just suck, and you can make more use out of grad school because you are more talented, knock yourself out. Maybe it'll be perfect for you. Just know that everyone in grad school goes in thinking they're uniquely gifted. And even if you are, there are still more gifted writers than the market can support.
Here's the story. Again, sorry it's so ugly to read on this blog. Learning to make it look nice is way beyond my skills.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I was going to put all nine of the unpublished stories I wrote in a year on here, but I think these two are enough. The point was to let you decide if grad school didn't work for me because nothing could have helped me. That only seems fair. If you assess that I just suck, and you can make more use out of grad school because you are more talented, knock yourself out. Maybe it'll be perfect for you. Just know that everyone in grad school goes in thinking they're uniquely gifted. And even if you are, there are still more gifted writers than the market can support.
Here's the story. Again, sorry it's so ugly to read on this blog. Learning to make it look nice is way beyond my skills.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Infection
If Steve mentally divided all women
into two orders based on the presence or lack of sculpted calf muscles, he did
not believe he could be faulted for it. The only piece of advice his father had
ever given him in earnest was this: Look
for a woman with nice legs; it’s a sign of a good foundation. It was almost
certainly not good advice, but since his father had given him none other, it
seemed a waste to just throw it away. So it was a stubborn taxonomy to remove,
in spite of its being built on the loosest of sand.
Nor did Steve fault himself if Maria,
the backs of whose legs swelled sideways, like a paddle, even in the highest of
heels, fell in love with him in vain. After all, on the face of his bass drum was
a graphic design of a beaver humping a saxophone. What kind of relationship did
she expect from someone like that?
She had walked into the Blinking
Baboon on Blinking Baboon Blues Thursday. Like most venues Steve’s band played,
the Baboon had been open for less than a year. The owners had been optimistic
enough to put a drop ceiling in to cover the mold on the ceiling, but too cautious
to invest in taking down the column grid that blocked a third of the tables
from seeing the stage. It was a typical crowd that night. Two-thirds were
people above fifty who wore old age like a medal and tried to look older; the
rest were college students, beautiful but obscuring it with ragged clothing.
From behind the drums, Steve usually took little notice of the audience, and he
didn’t notice Maria until Bennie Beaver, lead singer of the Bennie Beaver Blues
band, leaned his arm onto one of Steve’s tom drums during the bridge of a song
and shouted “The tall one in the front is mine.” Steve, who was wearing his
second cleanest t-shirt and struggling squint-eyed through a herpes outbreak,
barely missed hitting Bennie’s arm with his right stick. Instead, it landed near the pen marks left
from when Steve had used his drum set as a desk in the apartment with Evie.
Because it seemed the thing to do, he looked through his spy hole for the girl.
Bennie was blocking his view to the front, while Toga Petey and Randy were off
to the sides, completing the diamond shape Benny insisted the band keep. Toga
Petey, who was good enough to be pro, was relaxed, while Randy, who worked
sixty hours a week at a real job downtown and was one of two saxophone players
the band rotated through, was shifting his weight between his feet as he played,
like a tennis player about to return a serve.
Steve barely made her out, sitting
with her shoulders slouched, a mane of muddy-red frizzy hair half pinned in the
back but half hanging down in front into a face that was pale as a Chinese
melon. Her rounded plumpness was offset somewhat by a sharp nose. A glass of
the white wine that was on special for four bucks a glass sat on a napkin in
front of her. Steve pegged her as a college girl. Which school was closest?
Loyola? His left thigh was on fire.
Toga Petey finished his solo on his
axe, and Bennie started in with the chorus one more time. “Well, I woke up this
mornin’, feelin’ half dead / So I turned myself over and I went on back to
bed.” Steve hated this song, one of the band’s original numbers. People like
their blues more serious than that, and rule one is to always meet audience
expectations. The blues could be an easy living if you played it right. Just
move through your twelve bars and say your baby ain’t comin’ back. People who
go to blues bars like the Blinking Babbon just want to be able to take some
pictures to post on Instagram, because they think listening to blues makes them
interesting. Most of the time, this band was a good gig. Bennie knew how to
market, if nothing else. He could usually get them two gigs a week, and the
band sold their share of merch to boot. The older crowd had money to burn on
t-shirts and CDs, and the college kids thought they were supporting an
alternative to big record labels. The band was more than half of Steve’s
income.
Steve went to find the Advil in his
drum cases during the break while Bennie sat down with the red head. A second
wine glass appeared on her table while Steve was still trying to flag down
someone to get him a glass of water. He finally gave up, swallowed the pills
dry, and laid down on the floor of the stage behind his drums for the last
twenty minutes of the break. His genitals kept falling through the hole in his
underwear, the raw spots rubbing against his jeans that were stiff from being
washed in a sink.
They started the last set a little
after ten, the part when the Beaver Band was out of original material and
Bennie was too drunk to sing, so the rest of the guys took turns singing
covers. Steve went with “My Love Will
Never Die,” one of his standbys. He had a good voice for blues; he didn’t have
to fake minor dissonances, that’s just what his voice did. As he sang, he
closed his eyes and tried to will away the headache. He seldom thought about
the words he sang, but tonight, to distract him from the fire in his body, he
tried to imagine they meant something:
You’ve done me wrong for a long, long time
And all you’ve done still never changed my mind
So please try to love me, oh please, honey, try
My love for you will never die.
Someone in the bar cackled above the
music, a high-pitched, drunk laugh, and Steve thought whoever it was had
realized the same irony that struck him: his love for Evie--the girl who had
first refused over a decade ago to come with him from Ohio to Chicago, then
later showed up at his door with her hair dyed green and needing forty-seven dollars
to pay the cab from the bus station—would now literally never die. “The gift
that keeps on giving,” the doctor at the clinic had called his venereal
disease. No pills to clear this up.
Randy started to muscle his way
through his solo, and Bennie slid next to Steve on his chair behind the drums
while Steve kept playing.
“You can have her, man,” he slurred
over the music. He had perfect, sandy hair he did not deserve.
“Have who?” Steve said, half into the
mike. He was trying to keep looking forward so Benny wouldn’t get him off beat.
“The girl. Her name’s Maria. That’s
about all I got out of her. I think she’s studying to be a nun or something.”
Steve peered below his cymbals toward
her table; she was looking straight back through the gap at him. He had never
seen such perfect circles for eyes, eyes like a first grader draws before
learning the meaning of ovals. She reminded him of Japanese anime. Steve wondered
if she could hear any of what he and Benny had been saying. He’d been talking
pretty loud, and near Benny’s mike. Steve was late on the last verse, but
passed it off as rubato.
After the last set, when Steve had
finished packing up his drums into the same van he’d come to Chicago in with
his drums a dozen years ago, Bennie handed him his fifty dollar cut and
immediately went back to spending his share at the bar. Steve felt a tug like a
child’s at his sleeve.
“I love your voice,” Maria said. She
had her shoulders pulled back now as she stood, no more slouching. The conical
ceiling lights sent shadows across her face as she leaned toward him. The wrist
attached to the hand on his sleeve had two watches and a stretchy, neon pink
band with some sort of message on it.
“Thanks. Not much to it, really,”
Steve replied, shrugging one shoulder.
“No. I mean it. To put that much
feeling into your voice. You must have really felt something to be able to sing
like that.”
Oh, God. A blues true believer. A
blueliever. Over three-quarters of a century of blues music in Chicago, and
still the most profound thing anybody could think to say about it was how blues
was the truest expression of raw human emotion.
“Look, music’s got nothing to do with
expressing feeling,” he launched at
her. “It’s about suggesting feeling.
You play the right note at the right time and hold it for the proper length at
the correct volume, and you’ve got music. Music doesn’t care if you’re trying
to express some demons in your soul or just trying to keep your mom from
beating the shit out of you for screwing up ‘On Christ the Solid Rock I Stand’
at Greenmount Baptist. Cynical music sounds the same as reverent music if the
guy playing it knows what he’s doing. A computer can play music. Whether it
means something is up to the people who paid money to hear it.”
She dropped her hand from his sleeve.
Steve noticed her breasts bounce when her arm fell, and understood why Bennie
had been interested in her.
“Is that why you stopped believing in
God?” she asked him. Steve now realized Bennie might have been right about
studying to be a nun; he had assumed at first that he just confused Maria with the
nun from Sound of Music because of
the name.
“Who said anything about believing in
God?”
“Well, you’re a skeptic about music.
Isn’t that almost the same thing as being a skeptic about God?”
Steve wasn’t sure if this was a
non-sequitur or something touching the profound, but felt that to wait too long
to reply was to concede the point.
“I’m a Buddhist,” he offered.
Her cartoon eyes blinked. She could
have been fanning herself with her eyelashes.
“Well, shit,” she said.
“What?”
“I guess that means you don’t want to
come have a cheeseburger with me at Clark’s.”
“Why is that?”
“You know. Because Buddhists don’t
eat meat.”
For a nearly penniless musician in
his mid-thirties, Steve had seen a surprising number of advances like this, the
inexplicable, immediate attraction of younger women who were certain there was
more to him than he was sure he amounted to. He had always had enough
skepticism to reject offers like this before, based on the notion that anyone
who was so easily attracted to him must have something wrong with her. Girls
worth the trouble were all kinds of hell, like Evie was. So what interested him
about Maria now?
“Oh. Well, that’s actually kind of
complicated. The Buddha, for example, wouldn’t eat an animal that had been
killed specifically for him. But, if one had already been killed and brought
from the market…”
She put her hand back on his sleeve.
“Perfect. How about this, then? I’ll go to Clark’s, and order two
cheeseburgers. If you don’t come, I’ll throw one in the trash. So if you don’t
come, a cow will have died in vain.”
On the way out the door, after Steve
said goodbye a little too loud to Bennie to make sure he knew who was leaving
with whom, Steve saw her calves like two hams. A shame, he thought. Why
couldn’t someone be improbably and immediately attracted to him AND have nice
legs? She looked like one of those girls who intentionally rejected yoga and
step classes, because why shouldn’t girls try to do squats and deadlifts like
boys? There was strength there, but no shape.
At the all-night restaurant, sharing
one end of a table meant for eight, the truth about her legs set him free to
tell the truth about himself. Why lie to a girl he could never fall in love
with? He unfolded his lesser secrets, in perhaps more unflattering terms than
was strictly necessary. The fights he and his mother had at the piano, her
insisting there was some imagined variance between his rhythm and the
metronome’s. How he tricked his parents into letting him learn drums so that he
could be part of a “Christian” rock band. How he had dropped out after two years
at a Christian college and drove straight from campus to Chicago. About Evie.
Well, some about Evie. He emphasized enough parts to let her know he was
damaged goods. He told her about the herpes.
“So anyway, like you can see, I’m not
really the soulful, romantic catch I seem to be behind the drums.”
Air and froth charged into her straw
as she sucked at her milkshake. “How did you become a Buddhist?”
Steve spurted out a laugh, and the
vein in his temple that used to be covered by his black hair before he started
shaving it jagged down his forehead. “Well, I was in the hospital with Evie one
of those times. She was out of it because of whatever they had switched her to,
and I was just kind of sitting there with nothing to do. A priest comes in,
wanting to know if she wants communion. I tell him she’s Baptist. He asks if I
want to. So I tell him I’m Buddhist, just to get him off my back. He leaves,
but about an hour later, he comes back with a little book called ‘Basics of
Buddhism.’ I mean, it was kind of dumb. If I had actually been a Buddhist, it
would have all been stuff I knew already. But it was really nice of him to go
find it and bring it to me. He said he thought a person needed whatever faith
they believed in at times like these. So I read it. And it kind of made sense
to me.”
“Made sense how?” She shook the
paraphernalia on her wrist. “I’m sorry—are these too many questions about
religion? I’m not really obsessed with it. It’s just that I think religion is
an interesting subject, and tells you a lot about someone in a short amount of
time. I hate that everyone says it’s one of the two things it’s not polite to
talk about. That’s like saying you can sing songs about anything except love
and loss.”
“Aren’t you about to be a nun or
something?” Steve realized, with shame, that they had spent almost the whole
meal talking about him.
Her hair shook from her laughter, and
she put her free hand over her mouth to keep from spraying milkshake on him.
“Is that what Bucky Beaver told you?”
Steve felt winded from her energy. He
had to catch his breath, remember what the question was. She was a girl who
invited digressions. “How did it make sense? I don’t know how it made sense to
me. I guess how it says that everybody feels pain from wanting stuff. And the
only way to stop feeling pain is to stop wanting stuff.”
She rubbed at an old sticker that had
become part of the table with her thumbnail and said nothing for a moment. “Is
it easy to stop wanting…stuff?” she asked.
Steve thought of a long answer, but
wondered how much she was already guessing about Evie, and opted for thrift of
speech. “I wish.”
“So you still feel pain, then? You
feel pain, trying to stop wanting…stuff, so you won’t feel pain?”
He’d just met her, and twice she’d
argued him into a tight spot.
“You’re saying ‘What’s the point?’
right? If I’m going to hurt either way, might as well go ahead and feel desire
like everyone else?”
“Something like that.”
Steve now took a pull at his
milkshake, and held it in the back of his mouth before swallowing. “Maybe it’s like
a pre-pay plan. It doesn’t cost as much if you pay up front.”
She pushed herself away from the
table. He wondered if he could ask to eat the rest of her cheeseburger. He felt
his knobby ribs. He could use the protein—not much of that in ramen.
“So it’s good to plan ahead, then?”
she asked.
“I guess so.”
“Good, then come with me. We need to
go somewhere. If we’re going to be in a relationship, you’ll need a few
things.”
She stood and lifted her purse from
the table, holding it with one hand outward on the strap, like a soldier at
shoulder arms.
He paid for the dinner, which took
over half of what he had just made. They got back in his van, and headed for
Uptown. Steve worried she would be disgusted by the peeling seat cushions and
foot aroma, but she leaned back comfortably in the filthy passenger’s seat
while she told him about herself. He was right about her being in college, but
had misjudged her age. She was Catholic, but the kind that cares about charity
more than believing the right things. She had spent two years after earning her
nurse’s degree working for Doctors without Borders in some African hellhole
Steve thought might not still be a country. She’d even seen people die. She was
at Loyola now to become a nurse practitioner, but was finishing slowly, part
time at school and part time working at a clinic for the poor in Uptown. That
was where she was taking him now. Figures a dipshit like Bennie wouldn’t know a
nurse from a nun.
The clinic was a small annex on the
backside of Uptown Baptist Church, around the side of the church from the big
sign that read “Christ Died for Our Sins.” He parked the van in a lot across
from the church, the engine gurgling to a stop. They crossed in the middle of
the road, the block quiet, as though a vast game of hide-and-seek had just
begun in which the world had fled from Maria and Steve, who were just beginning
to stalk what was in it. The clinic was closed, but she had the key. He stood
in the waiting room, too sore on the side of his leg to sit down again, and
looked at vaccination posters in Spanish. She disappeared behind a curtain and
into a room beyond it. He saw a light go on and heard a shaking noise like a
maraca. The light flipped back off and she appeared again from behind the
curtain. She handed him a bag.
“There’s some pills for your herpes
and some condoms. I’m not supposed to be able to give out drugs yet, but they
let me with the light stuff. Don’t tell anyone.”
He held the bag as though it were
filled with dog feces. “The doc told me pills don’t do anything for this.”
“They won’t cure it, but it’ll help
with the symptoms. And you’ll get over your breakouts faster.”
The bag still hung mid-air in his
hand. Did she expect him to use the condoms tonight?
“Relax. I can tell you’re burning too
bad to use those right now. Besides, I’m not putting out on the first date. You
have to at least call me once. Plan a date this time, like a Buddhist would.”
Steve slowly wrapped the plastic
handles of the bag around his wrist, and thought he knew what was different
about Maria from the other girls who’d put their total faith in him without
question. She wasn’t just young and innocent. She’d taken the first few punches
to her innocence that life had to offer, and her faith was still standing
strong.
“About calling you. That’s kind of a
problem…”
His gas tank was under a quarter full
after the long ride home to Halstead Street near 92nd South.
Inevitably, he would have to fill it up ahead of his once-a-month budget. He
turned the key to the door underneath the faded baby blue sign with “Halstead
Street Grocery and Cold Beer” in red letters. There was a note on the door from
Ray, the other part-time sax player, but he would have to wait until he found
his lantern to read it. There was no electricity, although the owner mercifully
kept the water on for watering the grass, which also made it possible for Steve
to use the toilet, brush his teeth and wash his clothes and himself in the sink
with cold water.
He got the
lantern out from beneath where the cash register had been, clicked it on and
headed to the small warehouse behind the retail space. Threading between two
floor-to-ceiling orange metal racks, he came to a small office, and climbed the
rungs of a thin ladder to the extra storage above the office. It smelled like
pot up there; stock clerks probably once hid there to take unauthorized breaks.
His mat and sleeping bag were laid out next to a couple of milk crates stacked
up to make a night stand. On top of the stand was the Sterno cooker and pot he
used to cook his ramen in. He set the lantern down next to the pot, crashed on
the sleeping bag, and unfolded the note.
“You need to
be gone tomorrow between one and four,” it said, in a neat, blocky, printed
hand. “I’m showing the place. Wish me luck!”
Steve had
had to live with the prospect that he might have to leave at a moment’s notice
since Ray first let him stay in the old store. The arrangement had spiritual
benefits as well as financial. He couldn’t allow himself to become too attached
to the place, because it wasn’t his. It would be gone as soon as Ray found a
buyer who wanted it. Still, it had been vacant for two years, and nobody had
even made an offer. Steve had almost finished eating through the two palettes
of ramen the former tenants had left.
Leaving the next day was not an
issue. He needed to see if a pay phone still existed anywhere in the city so he
could call Maria. He pulled one of his library books out of a milk crate shelf.
It smelled like the Dial soap stacked next to it. He didn’t even find his place
from the previous night before he was asleep.
It didn’t surprise him when Maria
continued wanting to see him even after he showed her where he lived on their
second date. He knew about loving people you shouldn’t. Besides, he didn’t look
like a homeless person. He still had most of the wrestler’s body he developed
in high school, thanks to 300 push-ups and 50 pull-ups from the storage rack
every day. Maybe she took his living arrangement as noble asceticism, suffering
for his art. That was a kinder take on it that he allowed himself; he just
figured he was lazy, living off two gigs a week and his other job--the two
private lessons he gave to the children of bluelievers he’d met at gigs. She
asked him what he did all day. He said he read, meditated, and practiced music,
although he didn’t really understand meditation. He had never learned any more
about Buddhism than what was in the booklet that priest had given him. He
figured it was more than the Buddha had read about Buddhism. Most of his library loaners were the types of
history books that find grand, sweeping themes explaining the zeitgeist of ages
past or reasons why empires failed.
Maria didn’t make him see himself as
something more than what he believed he really was, but he enjoyed watching her
think that way about him. He had the time, so he volunteered at her clinic to
help with cleaning and administrative tasks. The volunteer position turned into
a part-time paid job that doubled his income. He used the money to get a cell
phone so he could talk to her, and not have to rely on notes from Ray to know
when the band was meeting.
Sex-wise, she surprised him. Evie had
treated sex like an ongoing dare. “Oh, my God. Let’s do it in the park behind
the statue of the Little League player.” She had a complete mental index of the
frequency and location of their sex lives over a weekly, monthly, quarterly,
and annual period. But the sex itself was never interesting, her refusing to be
stimulated, only wanting him to finish as soon as possible so she could put it
in the scorebook. But Maria bought whatever her friends sold at their in-home
sex toy parties, to which she brought her mother’s crab dip, and tried whatever
role-playing the magazines at the counter at the Jewel suggested. She offered
to find a woman to join them once, although Steve declined. As he watched the
lumps of her calves one day in the clinic, more hopeless than ever in her
tennis shoes, he thought maybe he could imagine himself married to her. Her
legs weren’t pretty, but they were strong. His father had only told him to look
for “nice” legs, which left some wiggle room. He could get a real job, or at
least teach a few more private lessons. She would make the real money. He
wouldn’t mind. He could use his freedom to stay at home to raise the kids.
But on Halloween, Steve had another
outbreak. The pills from Maria helped with the burning and the headaches, but
he had two strawberry sores downstairs. Maria was wearing a sexy nurse’s outfit
at the clinic, and though she was clearly proud of the irony, the patients did
not seem to get the joke. All day, she tried to be playful with him, trying out
lines from nurse-themed porn, like “Do you need me to take your temperature?”
or “I think you have a tumor right here.” He kept telling her he had a
breakout, but she persisted. Steve
watched the patients watch her: a Laotian mother, middle-aged men from
Nicaragua, a feeble, cane-wielding woman from the Caribbean. The men watched
with some interest, but the mothers just pulled their children closer.
He had a gig out in the suburbs, and
he left early. Maria promised to make it later, but Steve insisted she stay
home to get school work done. As soon as he walked in the door at Bill’s Blues,
Ray started chattering at him. He was wearing a beige shirt with khaki pants,
and the outfit, along with Ray’s half-bald and peach-colored head, blended so
well into the light brown and tan brick, Steve had trouble realizing who was
talking to him at first.
“Steve! I sold the store! Can you
believe it? After two and a half years. We’ve all had a bet going at work about
who would sell it, and everyone has been adding to it every week. So I got a
pot of almost three thousand dollars.” He held the money up to Steve as proof. “Can
you believe it? Sorry you’ll have to move out after all, but you’ve got a week
or so. Maybe you could move in with Maria? Evie was a long time ago now.”
Steve congratulated Ray, and started
to carry his drums to the stage, shuffling with his legs apart, when Benny
grabbed him by the arm. “Steve. I don’t want to get too excited. I haven’t told
anyone else in the band yet. But I think we’re in at next year’s blues
festival. THE Blues Festival downtown. We’re gonna play where Buddy Guy plays.
Oh, man, Steve. You and I have got to get together this weekend and start
writing some new songs. We can’t play covers for this, we’ve got to make an
impression. An impression!”
Bennie slipped off to the bar to get
an early start. Steve might need to sing a couple of songs tonight.
Maria came anyway. She was still
wearing her nurse’s uniform with the big, square hat and low-cut top. Every guy
in the place would have found a reason to talk to her, except she sat so close
to the stage and drummed her finger on her glass so intently, it was obvious
she was with someone in the band.
True to Steve’s intuition, they did
not make it to the end of the second set before Bennie started to go off
script. He tried to improvise right in the middle of “Beaver Blues,” which
Bennie considered the band’s signature song. Bennie wanted to break it down and
introduce the band members one by one, encouraging each to try out a solo, like
they were a goddamned jazz improvisation group.
Toga Petey, who was actually wearing
the eponymous toga he donned every year on Halloween, was already due for his
solo in the bridge anyway, so he just played that. Because of a childhood dog
bite on his middle finger, Petey used a modified fret technique a purist might
call cheating, but he was wearing a toga, and all things Belushi were in again,
so the kids from Northwestern ate it up. Ray was so happy about the three
grand, he rolled through some arpeggios on the sax, then actually pulled off a
nifty riff that was a clever variation on the main theme. But when Bennie
introduced Steve, Steve had no idea what to play. He mistrusted the whole idea
of playing whatever you wanted. It was fine for a sax or a guitar or even
Bennie on his harmonica, but the drums were the foundation of everything. If
the band got off track while he jammed, the whole thing would end in a train
wreck. So he played the same twelve measures he had opened the song with. The
music stopped. Bennie had not been ready for Steve to finish so quickly. He
jerked his harmonica to his lips and blared something at random. From there, he
tried to go up a third and missed, tried to go back down and missed again, then
just found his way back to E Flat and worked his way around the blues scale
fast a couple of times. “And I’m Bennie Beaver, ladies and gentleman, on the
harp and vocals. Please check us out online and at next year’s Blues festival
in Grant Park.”
Steve was ready to go after that
second set, and let the band keep his cut. He went out to the van during the
break to lie down in the back. He heard the door snap open, saw the dome light
dimly try to wink on, and felt Maria next to him. Both looked up at the roof,
long since missing its padding. Her hand was on his shoulder. The music still echoed
in his ears, and when her nurse’s dress crinkled next to him, it sounded like a
microphone popping.
“Did you ever think of taking over the
band for yourself?” she asked.
Steve said nothing, but grunted to
let her know he had heard her. Smokers taking a puff outside the bar laughed
near the van. She bent her knee and raised her leg at the hip, placing her
thigh on top of his. He felt himself stirring, and it irritated his sores.
“Well, I didn’t get this dress to be
a better nurse. And I’m not wearing any underwear beneath it.”
“Babe, you know I’m broken out right
now.”
“Oh, mommy knows. I AM a nurse. I can
make it feel all better,” she said breathily.
“I’m serious, Maria. Besides, I don’t
even have any condoms with me. You wanna get it yourself? It’s no fun.”
Maria sat up. “What if I do?”
“Do what?”
“Want to get it myself. From you, I
mean.”
“Be serious.”
“I am.”
She laid on her stomach and put her
hands gently on his thigh, careful not to irritate his sores. Her hands
interlocked, the pointer fingers free from the rest of the fist, pointing
upwards together to form a steeple. He was hard as a grave stone.
“Have you been watching those vampire
movies? You think it’s romantic for me to bite you and you’ll share immortality
with me? It’s herpes that never dies, not me, Maria.”
“I’m not confusing you with Lord
Byron, believe me,” Maria said.
“Who?”
“Never mind.”
“At least wait until Christmas. I
hear V.D. makes a great gift.”
She moved her hands, putting them
palms down on his temples, and the fleshy padding near her thumbs spread out
across his jawbones as she turned his head to meet hers.
“I’ve been thinking. If I stay with
you forever, eventually, I’m bound to get it. But it’s just herpes. Half the
world has it. And I’m a nurse. I’ll be damned if I’m going to live my life
afraid of glorified chicken pox. I love you, Steve. I want to make love to you
without having to worry, without anything between us. So just give it to me and
get it over with. You’re the only partner I want, and you have it, so I have
nothing to lose.”
Now Steve sat up. “You don’t know
what you’re saying, Maria,” he began. “It sucks. What kind of man would I be if
I just gave it to you? You’re too young for me, you know? This won’t last, and
when it ends, you’ll want some doctor your own age, and you’ll have to tell him
you got herpes from a drummer in a blues band who got kicked out of the
abandoned store he was squatting in.”
She pulled something out of the
pocket in her fake nurse’s uniform and drank from it. Steve smelled liquor and
some kind of fruit. Peaches maybe. She held the bottle out to him. When he
refused it, she replaced it in the same pocket. A few tears reflected the streetlights
shining in through the windows, although she didn’t make a sound.
“I thought you’d say something like
that. Well, maybe a little nicer, but something like that. Just think about it,
okay?”
He skipped “My Love Will Never Die.”
He couldn’t stand the way Maria doted on him when he sang that song. He chose
“The Thrill is Gone.” Memphis didn’t really suit their Chicago sound, but Steve
figured hell, blues is blues. There was nothing for Ray to do with the song,
and Bennie was wandering around telling everyone they were going to be at the
blues festival the next year. Steve hadn’t even checked to see if Toga Petey
knew how to play the song, but he figured every blues guitarist knew it.
It was the same idea as “My Love Will
Never Die,” except that instead of still loving the girl who did him wrong, the
singer decides to get over it and love somebody new. Steve wondered if that was
possible. Evie knew what it was like to change suddenly from one person to
another, sometimes in the same day. Steve could never really tell which phase
was the manic one and which was the one they called depressed. They never
seemed like two opposite poles to him, but dots on a circle on which Evie’s
personality spun. At some point, the dots seemed to him to come together into
one.
When they had been the two kids that
the other kids at Greenmount Baptist prayed for, he excused her moods as a
justified reaction to the faith their parents pushed on them. She played
tennis, and with calves cut like diamonds, he didn’t worry about her. His
father’s words. If the foundation’s good, the rest will follow. When she showed
him the cuts she had made on her legs, he thought she had done it because that was
just what kids who listened to Nirvana did.
Even after she came to Chicago, her
legs blinded him for far too long. She made it more difficult by feeding him
false evidence. She would leave him for another man, then call days later to
say the new guy had beaten her, and ask him to get her. After Steve threatened
to kill the guy, she would deny she had ever said anything about abuse, say it
didn’t matter now, because now all her demons were really behind her and she
was ready to be his and only his forever.
The last time he had seen her, she’d
been gone over a year. After one trip to the emergency room, she’d been
admitted, and stayed a couple of weeks. Although he had gone to see her often
during her recovery, and she had seemed better, one day he stopped by and she
wasn’t there. She had been discharged, and left without telling him. He’d
frantically called every hospital in the city, drove to every place he knew she
liked to go. He even called numbers he had pulled from her cell phone when she
wasn’t looking and spoke to men he didn’t know. One said he was Evie’s fiancée,
and he’d appreciate any information about her, because he hadn’t seen her in
months and was going crazy looking for her. When Steve called her parents in
Ohio, they hung up.
After six months, he gave up looking.
Two months later, he was living in the store, learning to want less. He was doing
push-ups and pull-ups and washing his two pants and three shirts and six socks
and four underwear in the sink and eating the divine manna of ramen. And then Evie
showed up one night where the band was playing like she’d never left, and her
eyes seemed clear and free of the cloud that had hung over them. She said she
had found a mix of meds that worked. She was only drinking water. Now was
finally the time. She was ready. So they went into the alley and had sex between
a wall and his van, and when he looked to find her during his song on the third
set, she was gone. A week later he had a fire in his leg and sores that the
internet at the public library said meant herpes.
He peered through his spy hole
beneath the cymbals and saw Maria swaying, the comic bun in her hair starting
to come lose so that the peaked nurse’s hat was close to falling off. The
makeup beneath her eyes had run when she cried, but now it was dry again, like
American heartland soil that was once the bottom of an ocean. Her eyes had so
much living to do, they still had a timeline in front of them measured in ages
and eons. He sang Someday I know I'll be
open armed baby just like I know a good man should and her eyes said they
would wait, they would wait until the age they now lived in was nothing but a
fancy name and it took a pickaxe to dig up the places where he had sung his
songs for her.
On the road before dawn the next
morning, the first cup of coffee he had drunk in years ripped his eyes awake. There
was a coffee house downtown with a window like a cathedral’s that he had been
by a hundred times and thought looked so pretentious he couldn’t imagine ever
setting foot in it for fear it would contaminate his very soul. But this
morning, he had put about three thousand dollars in cash in the glove box and
gone to that coffee house to buy a five dollar coffee. The cup sat in a wire
hanger he had fashioned into a cup holder and hung from a vent. This van had
been built before people knew they wanted things like cup holders, but it was
still going strong. It might last forever, like his love for Evie. Like Maria’s
love for him. He had made sure of that last night.
He could be something other than what
he had been. He could coolly say the thrill was gone. Whatever foundation he
had built the person he used to be on, it was nothing to tear it down and start
over. Nothing is permanent. To believe otherwise is to invite suffering. Maria
would see it, too. She was so young, and now she had already paid her dues far,
far in advance. As he got on the highway headed southeast toward Memphis, he
smiled, feeling free, the only feeling the first blues players who had left the
South and come to Chicago cared about. She was so young. She would hardly feel
a thing.
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