Asking the right kinds of questions of literature

There are two things about my life I've beat to death on this blog: that I used to be a rather devout evangelical Christian, and that when I stopped believing, literature partly filled the gap in my life where Christianity used to be. I ask a lot of literature. So I was intrigued by an essay that appeared on Lithub last week by Rachel Vorona Cote, who confessed to a similar habit. As she put it in her essay ""The Complicated Comforts of Marilynne Robinson,": "I have a nasty habit of asking too much from books."

Her essay is a personal look at her own pain and an attempt to use literature to overcome it. In late 2017, she was discouraged by the first year of Trump's presidency and personally undone by her mother's death. She was in a place where people often turn to religion, but knowing ahead of time from personal experience that heading to church would end up fruitless, she was looking around for something religion-like to fill the void. 

Gilead

She tried Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. It is a very well-regarded novel about an aging Congregationalist minister, John Ames. I read it last year. Almost nothing happens in it in the present. There is some action that takes place in flashback, but much of the action in the novel gets sidetracked by Ames' own theological musings. Still, it's not like being preached to for the length of the novel. Ames, in fact, is a bit too introspective to be a fire-and-brimstone preacher. In one of the few passages I highlighted from the book, he says of himself that "...there is tendency in my thinking, for the opposed sides of a question to cancel each other more or less....If I put my thinking down on paper perhaps I can think more rigorously. Where a resolution is necessary it must also be possible." 

But Ames never really quite succeeds in achieving his resolution. The conflict of the book, if it can even be called that, is that Ames is concerned that the ne'er-do-well son of his lifelong best friend is going to try to move in and marry his much younger wife when Ames dies. But the conflict more or less takes care of itself. 

Cote found comfort in reading the book. She had hoped that Robinson could be her Virgil, "a woman of faith to guide me through her theological web--and who could believe in my stead what I feared couldn't possibly be true. That I would find my mother again. That she had not been obliterated by death. That our shattered country might stumble onto a path of progress, however slow and aching." 

Although Ames asserts that the "purpose of a prophet" is to "find meaning in trouble," you won't find that meaning explicitly stated in Gilead. I found reading it to be akin to looking at a painting for an extended period of time. I was left more with a continuous mood or feeling than with what you might call a discursive kind of impression. 

This was enough for Cote, at least mostly:

 "Gilead could not entirely soothe my despondence: it couldn’t assure me that Mom was peeping into my apartment’s darkened windows, or directing her love-filled gaze at Dad while he slept. It couldn’t even convince me that her soul awaited mine in some obscure afterlife. But John Ames would have believed this to be the case, and somehow, that was enough for me." 

She found that simply vicariously huffing off the faith fumes of someone else was close enough to the experience itself to bring comfort. She read another Robinson novel, Housekeeping, which I have not read. But then, she did something I find telling: she read a book of essays by Robinson. As Cote put it, she was hungering "for a more explicit manifesto." She had been comforted by living in Ames' head for a bit, but she was looking for something that offered a less poetic sense of meaning here in the modern world. 

But Robinson's refusal to be more certain of herself in her non-fiction is a double-edged sword for Cote. Robinson is not an agitator; she is too circumspect about her own conclusions for that. On the one hand, this is the hallmark of a rational thinker, but on the other hand, too much self-circumspection can lead to inaction. 

It's a familiar conundrum for liberals. Cote nicely sums up this conundrum in the concluding paragraphs:

If Robinson’s nonfiction feels insufficient in the face of a political crisis, it’s because certitude seems foolhardy, and a bit smug. The agnosticism that plagues me in mourning strikes me as productive, even necessary in the political sphere. We do not have the luxury of always being sure, especially when we are a solitary voice within a purportedly democratic cacophony. To achieve anything worthwhile we must writhe and grapple like blind animals in a net, stumbling upon deliverance without the satisfaction of knowing it’s within our reach.

          Still, too much fear and doubt becomes unwieldy...

Truth and Comfort

"Too much fear and doubt becomes unwieldy?" Tell me about it. Agnosticism seems to me to be the most intellectually honest position to take, but the thing about agnosticism is that its adherents are, well, agnostic. Which doesn't mean, of course, that they are "indifferent," as many people are now starting to use the word. It means they just don't know what's right. An agnostic can look at the faith of a true believer and be genuinely jealous. Look how that person seems filled with certainty. Look how much she accomplishes. I wish I could believe like she does. 

I don't think it was wrong of Cote to expect a lot from a book. I keep reading because I am constantly hoping I will find something that can help me resolve my honest uncertainty with my desire to be more certain. But I'm not sure Gilead is the right place to look. Musicians and prophets may both have been inspired by the gods, but they bring different things. Musicians--and Gilead is more like music than a sermon--bring comfort. Prophets bring truth that demands action. 

There's nothing wrong with comfort, but even an agnostic like me can see the wisdom in C.S. Lewis's warning: "If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth--only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair." That's the reason Cote found herself wanting to read non-fiction: she wanted truth. 

In fact, I'd say that it's only because Cote was steadfast in wanting truth that she found any comfort in Robinson at all. It wasn't a deep and satisfying comfort, but it was a small comfort. It was enough to keep going on. And maybe that's the most an intellectually honest person will ever get. The most you can hope for is to string together enough moments of hard-won comfort until you reach a point, like John Ames did, where you live long enough "to outlast any sense of grievance you may acquire." 

Can you actually desensitize yourself to rejection?

Following my latest trend of reading whatever the algorithm gods have suggested I read, I recently perused a parenting advice article on getting your kids to become "rejection proof." It had to do with getting your kids inured to hearing no, so they aren't afraid of asking for what they want. The premise was that the more you ask for something, the more you get used to being told no, so the more courageous you become.

I wondered, "Does this work for wrirting?" Am I becoming more desensitized to rejection, and therefore more able to work through it?

I don't think so. The last few months, I've been almost completely unable to write fiction. I stopped in the middle of a rough draft of a story in October. Prior to that, I'd been on a roll. Feeling pretty good about myself, I submitted all of my recent work since the book, six stories in all, to many of the top 50 literary journals in September. In October, the rejections started coming in, and they haven't let up. One day, my creative mind just stopped firing, tired of producing work that is just going to sit on my hard drive.

You'd think I'd be used to it by now. I've had over 130 rejections to only six yesses as a writer, one of those yesses being the book. But apparently, I'm not used to it. Neither has my work for a literary journal, where I see how long the odds are and how haphazard the process of selection sometimes is, helped me to be philosophical about rejection. It feels personal every time. 

I think there are a few reasons rejection in writing is a more difficult thing to get used to than the kinds of rejection this article on raising kids was talking about.

1) Although "never settle for a no" is a rule in sales, if a customer doesn't want to buy your widget, that's not a slam on you as a person. But rejection of your writing is in a class with being turned down for a date or a job. It feels like someone is saying no not just to your work, but to you.

2) No matter how many times I get rejected, I can't keep myself from getting excited every time I see a notice come in. Every no, two seconds before opening it, has the potential to be the definitive yes that could make getting your work out there easier from now on. It could be the yes that means you're taken seriously. I cannot make myself stop doing this. So every rejection hurts a little bit, because it represents a little flicker of hope snuffed out as soon as it starts to burn.

3) Rejections have a strange way of coming in at a bad time, like right after you get the bill that says that your insurance isn't paying for that trip to the emergency room, or right after you find out you didn't get a promotion at work. They are often a fuck-you cherry on top of an already shitty day.

4) Would you want to date someone who machine-gunned through dating rejections until he got a yes? Probably not. Neither, I think, would you want to read the work of someone who didn't put enough thought into his work and who he was sending it to that every no stung at least a little.

5) Courage isn't an obstacle, like it is in sales. I don't talk to the people who read the story and reject it. It's a very impersonal interaction. It feels like nothing. It's not like asking a girl to the dance. It's like applying for a loan. 


Overall, I'm probably a little able to withstand rejection than I was five years ago, but I'm more like rejection-resistant than rejection proof. I can withstand a little splash of rejection, but don't drop me in a pool of it, or I won't keep functioning. I'm pretty sure I'll get through this current patch and get back to writing stories before too long. I'm drying out, so to speak. But I don't think rejection in writing is something you can harden yourself to the way a salesperson can learn to ignore it. That's like saying the best way to protect yourself against getting hit in the ribs with a baseball bat is to do it repeatedly until it doesn't hurt anymore. 

An obscure writer looks at Borges' "Secret Miracle"

A few years ago, a friend of mine shared his draft novel with me, the one he's been trying to find a publisher for for years. I didn't think it was very good; it was a Christian novel that also had vampires in it. Just because I didn't like it doesn't mean it wasn't any good, of course: I thought all the Twilight stories were terrible, but millions of thirteen-year-old girls can't be that wrong. I think he realized that he was fighting an uphill battle trying to merge Christian themes and vampires in a way that would appeal to any audience an agent could sell the book to. But when we were talking about the odds of getting it published successfully, he told me this: "I can't give up. If I gave up, I don't think I could go on with my life."

I can relate to that feeling, as can a lot of writers who don't write fiction as our main gig. Fiction gives us a feeling that we exist for something more than our day jobs, much like every waiter/waitress in Hollywood is really an actor or every waiter/waitress in Nashville is really a singer. Certainly, in my case, after several false starts in life, when I really started to write seriously, it was a moment in my forties when I was asking myself if the life I was leading was really all there was to it.

Like dreams of making it as a singer or actor or professional athlete, one could find fulfillment in the activity even if one never really "makes it." For simplicity, let's say "making it" means being able to make a living entirely off the activity. Even if you can't sing on Broadway or at the Grammy Awards (is that still a thing?), you can sing at Karaoke nights or in churches. You can act in community theater. You can play basketball in a rec league. Even on this much smaller level, talent and hard work will produce better results, so you can still use it as an outlet for your desire to better yourself.

But what if you knew that was as far as you were ever going to get? I suppose it's easier to realize this at an earlier stage as an athlete. For one thing, sports gives us more objective feedback about our ability; zero points in a game means something in a way editors quickly winnowing down the slush pile doesn't. There's also the age factor in sports (and, let's be honest, in acting and singing to a great extent), which doesn't really exist in writing. This makes it possible for a writer to follow a false hope for much longer.

This is a subject I've possibly beaten to death already, but it continues to weigh heavily on my mind. I've had some success in the writing equivalent of community theater, but I haven't had my big break yet. I wrote some stories this year that I really felt were my best yet, and I sent them to the top journals I'd been avoiding. I've had zero breakthroughs. The "right" thing for a writer is probably to just roll with those disappointments and not give them another thought, but I've never been one for doing things the right way. It doesn't seem like an overreaction after four years to doubt that the big IT is ever going to happen for me.

Borges' Secret Miracle

I've referred to this story before, because I can't stop thinking about it. If you haven't read it, there's a decent-ish translation here, but the synopsis goes something like this: Joseph Hladik is a literary critic in Prague of mixed Jewish ancestry who is arrested by the Gestapo in 1939 when they take over. He is condemned to death and spends a little over a week contemplating his life and impending execution. His life hits home for me:

Hladík had passed forty years of age.  Apart from some friendships and many habits, the problematic study of literature constituted his life; like every writer, he measured the virtues of others by what was done by them and asked that others measure him by what he glimpsed or outlined.  All the books he had given to the press infused him with utter remorse.  In his examinations of the oeuvres of Boehme, Abenesra, and Fludd, he had essentially taken part in mere application; in his translation of Sephir Yezirah, in negligence, fatigue, and conjecture.  The Vindication of Eternity he judged to be perhaps less deficient; the first volume recounts the diverse eternities that men have devised, from the motionless Parmenidean One to Hinton’s modifiable past; the second denied (with Francis Bradley) that all the deeds of the universe integrate a temporal series.  It argues that the number of man’s possible experiences is not infinite and one sole “repetition” would suffice to demonstrate that time is a fallacy... Unfortunately, the arguments that demonstrate this fallacy are no less false; Hladík used to go over them again with a certain scornful perplexity.  He had also written a series of Expressionist poems; these, to the poet’s embarrassment, figured in an anthology of 1924, and no anthology after that failed to inherit them.  From all of this equivocal and languid past Hladík wanted to redeem himself with the play in verse The Enemies (Hladík praised verse because it impeded spectators from forgetting unreality, which is the condition of art).

So he's had some small successes, and he's been able to glimpse some big ideas, but hasn't really realized them. And now it's too late, because he's about to die.

So Hladik asks God to help him finish the one work he thinks will justify his existence. "In the darkness, he spoke to God: If I exist in any way, if I am not one of Your repetitions and errors, I exist as the author of The Enemies.  To come to the end of this play which can justify me and justify You, I require one more year.  Grant me these days, You who are the centuries and time.  It was the last night, the most atrocious, but ten minutes afterwards, sleep had washed over him like dark water."

In the end, God grants the miracle, but it is known only to Hladik. As Hladik stands before the firing squad, God halts time, but only Hladik is aware of the miracle. Hladik cannot move, but he can think, and, helped by the metrical nature of his play, he is able to write the play entirely in his head. It is slow going, but he keeps at it--what else is there to do?

Interestingly, he is not writing the play for God, who created the miracle: "He did not work for posterity, nor even for God, of whose literary preferences he knew little." For whom is he writing it, then? I think the answer is in Hladik's prayer: to "justify me and justify (God)." Merely to have written the play will accomplish justification. It is not necessary that anyone should read it.

That's a nice story, but do I really believe this?

A good friend of mine keeps telling me that since I seem to have a predilection for writing fiction, I should just accept that the odds are always going to be long that I'll "make it" and write for myself. Joseph Hladik, standing secretly in an alternate reality before the firing squad, would probably agree with my friend. But is this just mystical hogwash? What difference does it make if I write a story in my head, or--as has really happened--a novel and other stories I'm having a hard time getting published? Does this really justify my existence?

I've often stuck to the line that if I knew, through some divine messenger, that nobody would ever read what I wrote, I'd stop writing. Although I wonder if this is true; I write on this blog without a terribly large audience. I get between fifty and a hundred hits after each post, more or less. I assume half of those are bots or some other kind of Internet weirdness. Maybe there are a few silent folks from my target audience of struggling writers out there, but if I quit writing this blog tomorrow, the world wouldn't notice. For some reason, though, that really doesn't bother me with the blog. I write the blog to help people if possible, but also just to put words to thoughts stuck in my brain so I can then move on to other thoughts.

When I write non-fiction for this blog, I write like my friend would want me to: for the sake of writing itself. But when I write fiction, I take things personally. Rejections hurt--every damn time. Does that mean that I'm actually a non-fiction writer mistaking myself for a fiction writer? Since I can do the former without really caring about the results, is that my real "calling," the real thing that justifies me and the clunky creator who made me?

That's a possibility that occurs to me more and more as time goes by, but I still keep feeling compelled to write one more story. Blog posts generally feel breezy and--with some exceptions--come without me chasing them too hard. Most of the stories I write seem to run from me like Jonah ran from God. They cost me a lot of work to write, which is why I can't help but wonder why I write them when I fail so often to get anyone to read them.

The world seems a graver place to me every day, and I continue to get older. I may not be sentenced to die tomorrow, but the end will come sooner or later--sooner today than yesterday. In 2018, I'm moving in one direction or another with writing. I'm either going to take a long break from it to see if I still want to do it, or I'm going to double down and write a lot more. I haven't decided yet. Eighteen months ago, when I finished my novel, I thought I had already had my moment of justifying myself and God. Maybe God is just taking a long time to decide what to do with what I made. 

Actually, William Faulkner, I think about your daughter a lot

I was sick some this week, sick enough that I got tired of being side-eyed by the germ-adverse at work and stayed home some. That gave me a chance to catch up on a lot of writing work that I intended to do over the summer but never got to. A lot of it was administrative, submitting stories all over the place. September and October are the months more journals are open than any other, so I've got to make hay. I've submitted 20 so far, and I'm going for another 20 by next week (not that I've written 40 stories: we're talking about 6 stories submitted to 40 or so places). I'm also still plugging away at getting my novel query letter out to the magic 50 agents--that number somehow being the underground wisdom for how many you should write before you begin to think something is wrong with your novel.

I also did a little actual writing, finishing a story that's been taunting me since I started it on Memorial Day. I think it finally came together, although there were times I really wondered if I knew what I was even doing there.

My original plan was to have a busy September, get a ton of queries and submissions out there, and then shutter things up for a while with writing, to return to it after an undetermined time. I have been feeling like I both: A) need a break, and B) ought to do some other things, like pay attention to my son's homework or Mrs. Heretic's school year-induced fatigue (she has something like 120 students this year). I also am always aware of the need to retrain myself for work, mainly on Information Technology types of subjects. Probably wouldn't hurt to do some re-training in the languages I translate, either. This would all be self-training, but it still has an opportunity cost of time and energy. I'd need to give up some things, and nothing sucks up my time like writing.

There's that famous story, which apparently is not apocryphal, about William Faulkner, where his daughter asked him to please not get drunk during her birthday party. Faulkner replied, "Nobody remembers Shakespeare's children." Meaning, I guess, I'm a world treasure, and your suffering is nothing compared to the value of the art I produce. I told that story to a non-writer friend of mine one. He went pale and said, "That's terrible." I agree.

I said in my twenties that I'd gladly give up family for writing. I didn't have kids then. Pretty much from the moment Mrs. Heretic was pregnant, I have disavowed that stance I once held. A person is real, a story is not. A story might make the lives of people who read it better, it might not. But investing in a human being always means something. Especially a person I'm uniquely responsible for.

 After I get all this work done, I'll be at another cross-roads. I've published a book. I could call it a day, say I did all that a part-time writer could realistically hope to accomplish, and move on. Or I could keep hammering away. I know a lot of writers insist they write because they have to. Sometimes, I feel that way. I do feel compulsion, but I think it's also a compulsion I could control if I felt it were necessary. Is it necessary?

The "if I won the lottery" question

If I won the lottery, I wouldn't sit around and write, I don't think. I knew what I'd do with the money about six years ago, when I visited Mrs. Heretic's then-school in Baltimore and saw an entire run of about eight row houses, all vacant. If I won the lottery, I'd buy a bunch of vacants like those, rehab them, and set up some type of recreational facility within them, with rock climbing, indoor paintball, etc. There'd be some room somewhere for homework mentoring. Just a place for kids to do something other than get into trouble. Like the Boys' Club, only with stuff I like to do, not boxing.  Hopefully, it could provide a few jobs, too.

There are all kinds of problems with this dream. First, I'm an idiot at real-world stuff, and likely to lose all my money in a year doing this. Secondly, as I've discovered, when you try to help people with a lot of problems, you end up with a lot of problems. It's not a romantic world where you are adored as a white savior. It's hard work. I'm not sure I'm equipped for it sometimes. People with years of training in handling this stuff burn out. I'm likely to, also.

But let's just say that Baby Haysoos came to me in a vision and gave me a choice. Either I can write a novel that will gain recognition and become part of important cultural discussions, or I can have a non-profit that I will somehow manage to run successfully and it will have a tangible benefit to dozens or hundreds of lives. How should I answer that question? If I'm not a monster, I have to pick door #2, don't I?

Of course, I don't have a Baby Haysoos crystal ball. All my decisions are based on guesswork. Maybe writing will never lead me anywhere beyond where I am. Maybe it will lead me to a best-seller, and I'll sell the movie rights and use it to buy my row houses and start my non-profit. Maybe if I put writing away, I'll succeed more at work and get paid more. Money is always useful for helping people. Or, maybe I give up something I love doing and it gets me nowhere.

My guesses about what I should do change almost every day. The important thing to me is that when life asks me to not get drunk today, metaphorically speaking, for the sake of someone else, would I be willing to put the bottle down?

My roller coaster goes up

I apologize if any of my posts, such as the last one I wrote, come across as entitled or pouty. I've committed to blogging about the struggle to find my way as an unknown writer of what I hope is serious fiction. That's going to involve some dark nights of the soul. So I don't shy away from writing about them, because to do so would be dishonest.

I was looking up some information about the Pushcart awards yesterday when I stumbled onto this article. It's an "open letter" from some guy who advises writers not to list Pushcart nominations in their biographies.  I thought it was ultra-fastidious and ridiculous. He argues that because a Pushcart nomination is common to thousands of writers, it's meaningless. This strikes me as nonsense. In the first place, as I've said before, your credits really aren't that important. They might get you a more sympathetic reading, by which I mean if I don't like something, I might give it a page longer than I normally would if you have a top-shelf credit to your name. But 95% of my decision comes just from the story there. I usually don't even look at the bio before I start reading the story.

To me, a Pushcart nomination means someone not only published your story, but thought it was one of the better ones they published that year. It's not a huge deal, but it's certainly not a negative.

One commenter really nailed it. Here's an edited version of what he wrote:

Publishing a story anywhere is goddamned hard enough. You... should tout that journal and then go around and brag the hellz about it because here’s the deal:

No one flippin’ cares anyway.

Not your writer friends. Not your mom. Not your priest. Shit. Even if you get a notable publication in a place high up on Perpetual Folly’s Pushcart nomination list... find someone who gives a shit. ...

You know who does care. The damn editor who accepted your piece in the first place. Listen to him or her, strangle-hug him or her, and bragz the flying F out of their zine because the chances of you convincing another schmuck to like your crap is a million to one. Literally. There are a million lit journals and you happened to find the one journal that liked your stupid story. And you’d turn your nose up at that?.. Who the hell are you?

Unless you’re one of five writers in America (and I suppose Canada and maybe a few other quasi-American speaking countries) who can expect a call from the New Yorker, you should just assume your story is shit and it won’t be read by anyone. So, writers-who-turn-their-noses-up-at-the-only-lit-ragz-they’ll-ever-get-published-in, I bid thee thus: Play with the first damn dog who sniffs your butt. Then yip your nutz off.
100% of the world doesn’t care where or how you were published and the infitesimally small percentage who does care knows how flippin’ hard it is to get someone to, first, read your work and , .B., get someone to actually like it.

Be one of the 60,000. Print out your Glimmertrain finalist certificate and paste it to the back window of your car. Goddamnit. Make a bumper sticker that says “I’m a published Hint Fiction author.” And tell all your cousins that you placed a poem at poetry.com and you have the 1996 anthology to prove it.
You’re writers, you bitches. Everyone hates you and no one cares.
Jesus.

Normally, the comments section anywhere on the Internet is a source of despair. But strangely, although this comment doesn't really offer much hope that anyone will ever notice what I do, I find that somehow hopeful. It was very hard to get my book published. It's an accomplishment. If nearly everyone now ignores it, that kind of just means I'm doing it right. 

If I wrote blog posts modeled off glam rock ballads, this is what I'd write

The other day, Mrs. Heretic and I, nostalgic for Korea, went to the get some 잡채 and 콩나물 for a late lunch, then followed it up when we got home by drinking soju on the back porch. After a while, we moved from the porch to the kitchen table, where we passed the time watching music videos from the era we regard as our childhood, more or less the 80s. Unlike my feelings for Korea, I'm not at all nostalgic about the 80s. I regard it as the time in my life when I realized I was not good enough at sports to become a pro athlete. I dislike almost all of the music I grew up listening to. For some reason, though, with enough soju, it became fun for a while to listen to these songs as Youtube chose them for us and be reminded why I dislike almost all of them.

At some point, Youtube moved us back to 1977 and Meatball's "Paradise by the Dashboard Light," which we listened to, even though I was too young when the song came out to remember it from back then. I don't think I even knew who Meatball was until my late teens. I have no strong opinion on whether "Paradise" is a good song. I'm nearly serious opinion-free on music in general. It's never been a huge part of my self-identity. As a kid, I mostly listened to what was on the radio so I could keep up with conversations at school. (Edit: Mrs. Heretic says people will not get that "Meatball" was a joke. Fine. He's the other staple ground beef meal in American homes.)

I'll say this for the song, though: it's long and it's several things at once and it's self-assured and indulgent and there's a certain joy in that. The song would never get made now; it's too unwieldy and hard to program. It's a vestige of a time when rock stars made the fucking songs they wanted to make and people could play their songs or not. (I guess. I don't know anything about rock and roll history.)

It reminded me of Lydia Davis's "After Reading Peter Bichsell," which I blogged about recently. I said that if I'd seen the story come in to my literary journal as an editor, I'd almost certainly have voted no on it, but reading it gave me a strange pleasure, in part because it took certain liberties I don't think writers take much anymore.

I seem to be doing the same thing with this blog post. I've already spent over 200 words just introducing the concept of the structure of this post. And now here's where the song changes.

Today was one of those "hit a great shot" kind of days

Golfers often talk about how they spend most of the time hating golf, but then once in a while, they hit a great shot, and it keeps them coming back and suffering through a terrible game for a while longer. That was me today. I was really giving thought (again) to pitching it all, mostly because of how unhappy the whole publication struggle makes me sometimes.

Then, today, I had two things happen that were encouraging enough that I'm probably still in it for a while longer.

One was actually a rejection. But it was an encouraging rejection, and it was from The New Ohio Review, which is a really good journal. I have a friend to whom I've tried to explain what writing is like for me, and his reaction to the notion that an "encouraging rejection" is actually a thing was an incredulous "Fuck's a rejection encouraging?" but it really can be. It means that something about the story made them at least take notice. It means there really was something in that story.

The second thing that happened was another agent asked to look at the manuscript for my novel. This could very well just end in disappointment again in a few days or weeks, but at least I'm getting some movement with it.

Those don't sound like very impressive things now that I've written them down. But that's what happened, and now I'm back to grinding some more.

Fucking Anis Shivani

I've quoted this lightning rod critic/poet/novelist several times on this blog. I find much of what he says instantly compelling, because his critique of the academy, of M.F.A. programs, and of modern writing in general seems to match conclusions I'd arrived at on my own. He's suspicious of M.F.A. programs because they're really just socialization of writers, a socialization that teaches us all to be nice, to say nice things about our betters, and that if we do, we'll be rewarded with occasional publications and maybe writing jobs. He says this has led to an insular type of academy-proctored writing, one that is divorced from the public, who largely ignore everything this system produces.

Last year, Shivani was giving an interview. He was talking about his rather ascetic personal training as a writer, in which he turned away from family or even sex, and more or less locked himself away and read. He started to talk about how much reading a writer should do, and said this:

So my question to you, if you want to be a writer, is: Are you willing to shut yourself down and read, read like a writer, the ten or twenty thousand books you need to read before you can know anything about writing? Are you willing to give the best years of your life to reading and writing, are you willing to make writing the first and only priority in life, more than your family and the people you love or money or health or security or anything else? And all by yourself, in solitude? If yes, you can be a writer, if not, you can’t. Community is optional and dispensable. It’s something you do, perhaps, after you’ve established your identity as a writer, not before. But today the cart comes before the horse, it’s the opposite of what it should be.

Those are the kinds of statements that make me think I should pack it in as a writer. I'm not that dedicated. I'm not willing to punt my family for my writing. And maybe, as a result, I'm not that good.

But something about that doesn't sit right. Shivani has himself criticized writers who have no real life experience, who know only teaching and books and the narrow things one learns from domestic life, such as having children and divorce and parents dying. They lack Melville's misery on a merchant ship, or Faulkner's experience in the factory. I've written before about how I prefer to read Carl Sagan, a scientist who writes, to Andrea Barret, a writer who sciences. It's maybe okay if I'm not a pure writer, if I'm a guy who's done some stuff, read some stuff, thought about it and is trying to learn to write well enough to share it.

I haven't read 10% of what Shivani has probably read. When he mentioned the Italian hermeticists in this essay, I had to admit that I didn't even know who the fuck the Italian hermeticists were.

But do I just give up because of that? I do have some stuff in my background that makes up for not being the most well read person out there. (And that's not litotes when I say "not the most well read." I'm not woefully under-read. But I am a slow reader, and I've spent a lot of time reading in foreign languages, books that sometimes took me months to finish. It's limited what I've been able to get through in my life.)

There is enough going on in my brain that it's worth trying to squeeze out, and I'm not just talking about the perfect .gif from a contemporary American sit-com. In any event, I'm not yet despondent enough that I'm able to overcome the compulsion to write.

The Doubt Trilogy, Episode Two: Literary Erectile Dysfunction

Pop quiz, hotshot.  I’m supposed to be doing my homework, but you find me upstairs reading a Playdude.  What do you do?  What do you do?” – Bart Simpson 

“I make you read every article in that magazine, including Norman Mailer’s latest claptrap about his waning libido.” – Shary Bobbins 

I have a pretty simple way of deciding when I've got a real story I need to write and when I've just got an idea I should let lie. A real story has the urgency of a sexual impulse: you're going to do what needs to get done in order to write the story, and nothing's going to get in your way. Think of horny teenagers, and all the obstacles they have in their way to fulfilling their sexual desires: no private room, sometimes no car, curfews, parents checking up on them. They seem to overcome these issues without any great problem, because they want to have sex more than they want to anything.

Now imagine, that your are in your forties and your house is being fumigated. So you, your spouse and your kids are temporarily living in your parents' home. And one or the other comes knocking on your door every 15 minutes. How in the mood would you feel? You're 45. You've got work tomorrow. You going to overcome the obstacles, do what it takes to accomplish the objective? Imagine 16-year-old using these excuses to pass up a night in the same room and the chances to have sex it would afford.

Age just seems to take the urgency out of it. I mean, you can still perform, but it's not the same thing. It can wait while you take care of other things.

That's what writing has started to feel like. It's not that I've become unable to write at all (that never happens to me, baby, I swear!), but the obstacles in the way seem a lot more formidable than they did even just a couple of years ago. If I had a story that came to mind back then, I was agitated until I got a complete rough draft done. Two days later, I'd be touchy to be around until I felt I'd made it look more like a complete draft. I needed to be moving forward. I just don't feel that way now. I've had the same character note sitting on my notepad for a month, and I just wrote a page of a rough draft today.

The book that's coming out has something to do with it. I've been editing and re-editing the same stories, and that's not the most joyous or purely artistic part of the writing process. So many I'm just drained from overwork.

But this lethargy coincides with a physical and mental deterioration I've felt speed up in the last few years. I work out as much as I ever did, but I'm about 10% weaker now than I was at this time two years ago. Mentally, I'm starting to have a very hard time remembering words or people's names that I've known for a long time. Not with every sentence, but with a few sentences a day. I have to re-route the word or name I'm looking for by using associative clues until some synapse in my brain is able to route the thing I'm looking for. None of this is enough to keep me from writing, but it's clear I'm past my prime. I really wish I'd figured out some of the basics earlier in life, when I still had the mental vigor to put it to use.

I wonder how worth it the struggle is to try to keep moving forward developing as a writer when I can feel myself diminishing in so many ways. Some writers extended their writing careers by waxing philosophical about the passing of youth, but they'd already established themselves with more energetic stuff when they were younger. I still need to get my best stuff out, but to do so means keeping up with a more insatiable mistress than I might be capable of.

The Doubt Trilogy, Episode One: What good is an artsy story?

Self-doubt so deep, it's going to need some sequels...

I read a really great short story a couple of weeks ago, so of course I've kind of been feeling like shit since then. The story was "The Devil's Triangle" by Emma Duffy-Comparone. Karen Carlson, who just keeps doing her thing at A Just Recompense, was nice enough to point at that Duffy-Comparone is also the writer of "The Zen Thing," which, like "Triangle," won a Pushcart Prize. I thought both were great stories.

I don't feel shitty because she's far more successful than me. That's true of zillions of writers. It's complicated. I'll try to unpack it. I tried to get all the overlapping zones of uneasiness I'm feeling into one post, but it was impossible. Let's start with one more or less consistent thought.

It's good in a way I can't be good...

She has a knack for punchy and imaginative metaphorical language. I can go to almost any page to find an example:

"Claire's guinea pig, Pam, sat on chicken wire, breathing rapidly. Mika had taken her when she moved out of the apartment. Now the animal was barely recognizable, polka-dotted with scarlet sores like sucked cough drops, her nails brown and corkscrewing into her feet, her left eye oozed shut, the right cloudy as if rinsed with half-and-half."

...but that's not the problem

I just don't write like that. Which is fine, everyone writes to their strengths. A lot of writers I admire don't write like that. But I guess I've lately felt shamed into thinking I should want to write like that. A friend recently sent me this interview by David Vann, in which Vann praised "the quiet and beautiful books, Latinate in style, not violent, slow-paced..." The literary equivalent of Manchester by the Sea, let's say. Sometimes, I feel like that kind of writing is the only "serious" writing. Or at least the only writing that is taken seriously.

but what's the point of that kind of narrative?

I liked Manchester by the Sea. I really did. Okay, not for like the first hour. But eventually, I liked it. It was "quiet and beautiful," to use Vann's phrase. It was also very "slow-paced." The subdued tones, the attention to small things, made the few outbreaks of raw emotion far more poignant when they broke out. I'll admit, I found that scene, when Lee and Randi finally try to talk about the loss of their children, extremely moving. There were two characters I found very believable for the way they tried with so much earnestness to say the unspeakable to one another, and it's hurting them that they can't find the words, so they strain harder to get the words out, but they just can't.

Duffy-Comparone's story had a similar emotional approach and outcome. It is the story of triplets, but one is gone and, by now, beyond just "presumed" dead. The other two, who are now just "twins," are trying, each in their own failed ways, to move on. After pages and pages of slowness, of cloudy-brained wandering through a landscape of sharp details, we get an explosion in the last few pages. The ending, when they both seem to have hit their rock bottom and appear ready to maybe eventually take some baby steps toward moving on, is probably close to how the actual getting over something like that would be. So maybe the reader has experienced vicarious loss and redemption on a microcosmic scale by reading it.

But what has all this emotion accomplished? St. Augustine mistrusted poetry for causing these very same kinds of vicarious emotions:"forgetting my own wanderings, and to weep for the death of Dido, who slew herself for love, while I looked with dry eyes on my own most unhappy death, wandering far from Thee, O God, my life. For what is so pitiful as an unhappy wretch who pities not himself, who has tears for the death of Dido, because she loved Aeneas, but none of his own death, because he loves not Thee?" 

To put it in a more secular way, what good does it do for me to feel emotion over a story if it doesn't result in a change in my way of living in the world? Or, barring that, at least a significant change in my thinking? Proponents of literature like to say that literature (and stories in any form) make us see life more sympathetically by living it through the perspective of another. Fine, I suppose Manchester and "The Devil's Triangle" did that. Moreover, maybe by experiencing the pain of another person whose life we can view with a blend of both emotion and objectivity, we can learn to better process our own pain. 

Those seem like nice things, but they can't be enough to give literature the honored place in world culture it has had for thousands of years. 

An example I can actually think of where fiction might have made me a better person

Here's an example of a story that changed my life: I was about to leave Chicago to come to Maryland and start my job after graduate school. I saw Monster, which is based on a true story, but parts of it were obviously imagined. Aileen Wuornos just has bad damn luck. Most of the world shits on her. A few people are kind to her, but their kindness is not enough or not timely enough to make a difference. The movie doesn't really excuse Wuornos for becoming a serial killer, but it does make one wonder how things would have turned out for her if she had received a little more kindness when it might have still done some good. The last murder she commits is of a man who picks her up and, when she offers to have sex with him, says he'd rather offer her a meal and a place to stay. He and his wife have a room, he says. But it's too late for her. 

I left that movie wondering what difference it would have made if he'd been there ten years earlier. So I decided I would try to make enough money that I would have a spare room in my house to give to someone who needed it. 

I don't think that's the point of most current fiction

That's a pragmatic outcome of fiction. But I don't think that's the outcome most contemporary fiction is going for. A story is considered successful if it merely creates a simulacra of real emotion in the reader/viewer. It is, to use the phrase from Anis Shivani I've already quoted a few times, "cheap counseling for a bereaved bourgeoisie." 

Contemporary fiction often seems not to be offering anything to say about the nature of suffering its characters go through. It's trying to be, itself, a way to experience and overcome suffering. It's not a means to express something, it's the ends. The words and images and internal emotional logic of the fiction are a world unto themselves. The idea isn't to say something true about the world, to hold up a mirror to society. It's to become its own world. A story has succeeded when it becomes itself.

 Meanwhile, in the real world...

 One of my first workshop heretic moments came in 2003, when I openly wondered in class about what the point of writing the kind of poems and stories we were trying to write was. One poet got very angry with me. How could I say there was no point to writing poetry? A woman in Nigeria had just been acquitted of stoning to death for adultery because people wrote about it! I wanted to ask her how many poems she thought the judges had read. More than likely, they read about one document: an order from a government official to let her off. And that official had probably read a threat from a Western ambassador or two. No poems, I'm going to guess.

 I posted a few weeks back about the struggles of a woman I know to get medical care for her daughter, who has a severe medical condition. That post was partly the result of buzzed blogging, but it was also a result of listening to Chris Hayes' interview about his book A Colony in a Nation. He took time to talk about how the proposed changes to the Affordable Care Act would especially hurt mentally ill people. It was non-fiction, and I found it far more moving than any story I can remember reading lately. 

What story could I write that could be as necessary as Bandi's The Accusation, which is fiction but of a pointed political nature, a cry for a people and a finger wagging directly at a dictator?

But this book's coming out...

I have so much more work to do now that I have a book coming out. I have editing. I have decisions to make about the cover, the credits. I'm supposed to do readings and promote myself and send my book to be reviewed and get people to write blurbs for the back of the book and generally become my own literary pimp. Then, I need to write more so I can follow this up and keep marketing myself.

A friend of mine was once a chess player with a very strong rating. I'm jealous of that, because I like chess and wish I were as good as him. I'm always surprised he stopped playing. I recently asked him why, and he said, "I got to be better than 99% of players with X level of effort. But it would take X^2 level of effort to become better than 99.1% of players. I thought my time would be better spent getting good at something else."

As I think about jumping into the deep end of writing and whether it is a humanly enriching enough activity to justify a much deeper time and energy commitment than I have so far given it. How, for example, will writing allow me to keep that room in my house for someone to use? If writing can't provide something better for the world than that, what I am doing spending my time doing it?       

 

In which I take one of those 60's ladies magazine-style quizzes for the edifiation of all

I remember back when the highly unscientific quiz posing as a very scientific quiz was a staple of the ladies' magazines by the checkouts in stores. It seems to me a couple of 70's or 80's sitcoms used the prop of a wife taking one of those quizzes (usually about her relationship to her lout of a husband) and seeing how bad she had it as a way to drive the plot for 22 minutes. In that spirit, I now publicly take the 12-question quiz posed by former Bartleby Snopes editor Nathaniel Tower, "12 Signs You Aren't Really a Writer." May it lead to as much whimsy as a classic episode of The Ropers.  

Here we go:

1. You always force yourself to think about ideas to write about
 

What Nathaniel says: It’s fine to think about writing, but take a fucking break once in a while. If you’re always forcing it, then it isn’t real. Real writers don’t spend every waking moment straining to find things to write about.

Jake's answer:  The last sign in this survey is going to suggest the opposite: that if you think you don't have enough experiences for a story, you're lost. Writing primers are always saying that everybody has enough experience for a story, that a story can come from any little scrap of life. This is one of those times when one can utter two similar phrases, but only one is true. "A story can come from anywhere" is true, but "A story can come from everywhere" isn't. Maybe one sign of maturation is the ability to let some ideas go if they don't seem to be yielding anything after a while.

Conclusion: Point me. 1-0 I'm a writer.

2. Criticism hurts your feelings

What Nathaniel says: Sure, a bad review of what you thought was your career-defining work will get you down, but if you can’t take any criticism, then you aren’t really a writer. This is especially true of constructive criticism. If you’re the type who thinks every little critique is an attack on your skills as a writer, then a writer you are not.

What Jake says: I take criticism very hard. It helps that now I'm a reader who helps decide what we keep and don't keep. I realize the tough odds I'm up against and how often very good stories get rejected. But that doesn't always make me feel better. Sometimes, it makes me feel worse to think that I'm just another guy on the scrap-heap of almost-good-enough. I'm not entirely certain that some level of dislike for criticism can't be good. Michael Jordan seemed to still be carrying around some bitterness about rejection from his younger years in his Hall of Fame acceptance speech. He did okay. It might have helped fuel his fire. But fine, I do still get down when I get a rejection, I'll take the hit on this one.

Conclusion: Point to "not a writer." 1-1.

3. Rejection gets you down every time.

What Nathaniel says: Get over yourself. Rejection is part of being a writer. Sure, some rejections sting more than others, but you eventually just have to accept it. When real writers are rejected, they do one of two things: submit somewhere else or revise their shitty writing. Oh, and maybe drink themselves into oblivion.

What Jake says: Although, upon the advice of a good friend, I've begun to drink more than I used to, I still don't like to drink that much. So I'm left to feel the sting every time. It doesn't hurt as bad as it used to every time, but it does still hurt.

Conclusion: Point "not a writer." I'm down 1-2.

4. You think you’ll lose it if you don’t use it

What Nathaniel says: It’s fine to write every day. It’s cool if you want to set aside time to write or have daily word count goals. But if going a day without writing makes you feel like you’re going to lose something as a writer, then you aren’t a writer. It’s like riding a bike. You don’t forget how to write because you go a day or two without doing it.

What Jake says: I don't write every day, nor have I ever felt I should. I do start to get antsy if I haven't written for a while, but this is probably one of those need-to-find-a-balance things. You can't be always writing, but you do need to write a lot to be a writer.

Conclusion: Point me. 2-2.

5. You don’t recognize your own bad writing

 What Nathaniel says: Do you think everything you write is good? You’re definitely not a writer. Even great writers have a fair amount of shit in their repertoire. The best writers in the world publish less than 25% of what they write.

What Jake says: Let's say I'm "in development" on this.

Conclusion: A draw. Still 2-2.

6. You think everything you write is bad

Flipside of the last one, which means this is a draw, too. I have days when I think I'm brilliant, and days when I think I should have been a locksmith.

Still 2-2.

7. You’ve never made any money off your writing

 What Nathaniel says:You don’t have to make a living off writing in order to be a writer, but if you’ve never made any money, then you aren’t a writer (yet). Especially in today’s world where there are so many opportunities to make a few bucks here and there as a writer (hell, self-publish on Amazon and sell one copy to your mom). Shooting free throws in the driveway a few days a week doesn’t make you a basketball player, does it? Oh, one more thing. Just because you have made some money off your writing doesn’t mean you are a writer. Getting called in to sub for your cousin with a broken arm in a pick-up basketball game on the playground doesn’t make you a basketball player either.

What Jake says: I find this criteria confusing. Is it enough to have sold a self-published book to my mom or not? I do have a job where writing in a very boring, methodical way is a big part of what I do. Does that count? If not, I once made $20 on a poem, and I was offered $25 for my story that won Story of the Month at Bartleby Snopes. I gave the money back as part of my "I support the journals that support me" pledge. 

One could argue that in a very literal sense, shooting baskets does make one a basketball player. 

Conclusion: I don't know. Still 2-2.

8. People often tell you that you can’t make it as a writer

  What Nathaniel says: I often hear people tell these horror stories about all the people who’ve told them they’ll never cut it as a writer. Not to be an ass, but no one has ever told me that. If you’re hearing this all the time, then you probably aren’t a very good writer. Hey, if it doesn’t quack like a duck…

What Jake says: I don't know that people have an opinion one way or another about this. I happen to believe I have very little chance of ever supporting myself fully as a writer. That wouldn't make me different from the vast majority of writers out there who need to moonlight.

Conclusion: I don't know. Still 2-2, now with four draws.

9. You get really mad about other people’s book deals

 What Nathaniel says: Yeah, it probably ticks you off a little that 50 Shades of Grey sold millions of copies even though it’s widely considered to be utter shit. But some shit sells. If you get really mad about everyone else’s book deal, then you aren’t a real writer. Instead, you should spend more time figuring out what actually sells.

 What Jake says: "Why do the wicked still live, Continue on, also become very powerful?" Job asked. It's an ancient and respected impulse to be angry about the success of those who don't deserve it. With literature fighting a tough battle to stay alive, it is sad to see the few mega-hits go to books that are just terrible. You know the people who bought that book were often buying the only book they were going to buy that year. 

Conclusion: Fine. Guilty. 2-3 against me. 

10. You create conspiracy theories about publishing

I can leave out Nathaniel's explanation. I harbor no such conspiracy theories. What publishers like is such a mystery to me, I wouldn't pretend to think I could explain it with a theory.

Conclusion: Point me. 3-3.

11. You spend more time wondering if you’re a writer than actually writing

Nathaniel says: Writers write. If you’re always sitting around thinking, “Oh, woe is me, am I writer?” then you aren’’t a writer. Just shut the fuck up and write already.

Jake says: Ouch. This blog started out pretty much as a place to wonder if I was really a writer. It still is, in some part. But I have written more actual fiction since I started this blog than I have blogged about my doubt about it all.

Conclusion: I have 9 stories out to editors at 20 different journals right now. Point me. I'm up 4-3.

12. You think you’ve never had an experience worth writing about

What Nathaniel says: No matter what type of writer you are, you need some real life experiences. Poets, fiction writers, journalists. Everyone has to be able to draw from something. But guess what? Even sitting in your room without doing anything for five years is an experience you can write about. If you can’t find any inspiration from your own life, then you aren’t a writer.

Jake says: This is the flip side of "sign" #1. I do think I've had enough experiences to write about. But then again, I've been a lot of places and done a lot of things. If there is something that makes me violate "sign" #9, it's that a lot of what I read seems to come from people with rather thin experiences.

Conclusion: Point me, and I win 5-3. I'm a writer. Barely. I think the fact that I have a hard time with failure doesn't mean I'm not a writer, it just means I have temperamental traits which make writing challenging for me. 

I think if you know that you are going to be undone by rejection, and you are, in fact, undone over and over by rejection, and you keep writing anyway knowing you will keep facing that rejection, you might be a writer.

If you can't trust a great musical to tell you what life's all about, what can you trust: La La Land and selling out

Lest I be hauled in like Aziz Ansari in his SNL sketch for not loving La La Land, I'll just say up front: this is a great movie. It reminds me of Steve Martin's line about the movie Chicago. In a year where there was a lot of controversy about cheating to gain an advantage in Oscar awards, Martin claimed Chicago pulled the dirtiest trick of all: "They made a really great movie that everyone liked."

It's a simple musical about staying true to your dreams...

The movie is bookended by two big numbers: "Another Day of Sun," and "Fools Who Dream." The first one is an exuberant impromptu flash mob of struggling entertainers in a traffic jam belting out their indefatigable beliefs that they will make Hollywood bend to their wills to become stars:

I'm reaching for the heights
And chasing all the lights
that shine
And when they let you down
You'll get up off the ground

 In Mia's (Emma Stone) big finale, she affirms her faith in the meaning of chasing her dreams as part of the audition where she finally breaks through:

Here's to the ones who dream
Foolish as they may seem
Here's to the hearts that ache
Here's to the mess we make

...except that it's not

It's what's in between those two numbers that made the movie great, though. There's an almost-too-sweet love story played with aggressive cuteness by Stone and enviable cool by Gosling (as Sebastian). It's so sweet, I can't even hate it for being too sweet. After they fall in love, they attempt to understand one anothers' dreams and support each other, but both are sledding uphill for a while.

Mia, having gone through a wonderful scene early on in which she manages to summon up instant pathos from inside herself to cry convincingly at an audition only to have the scene callously interrupted in a manner destined to make her cry for real, faces the reality that she perhaps ought to give up. She posits to Sebastian that she ought to have been a lawyer. "Like the world needs more lawyers," Sebastian answers. Mia's response is forged from a thousand rehearsals with no call-backs: "Well, it doesn't need more actresses." It's these kinds of exchanges that, as the Village Voice put it, "movingly weight the film with adult loss and disappointment."

Selling out within in the La La Land universe

It's Sebastian who breaks through first, thanks in part to Mia and a friend Keith who help him to move out of his rigid conception of success. Mia first chips away at his stubborn dream to own one particular jazz bar and renovate it into the terribly named Chicken on a Stick, a jazz bar that also sells chicken. Keith convinces Sebastian to come on the road with him and play good music that just isn't traditional jazz, because what made the original giants of jazz great was their willingness to look to the future, to embrace change.

It's all going great until the movie's best scene, a classic case of two people talking past each other. Mia is wondering how long Sebastian will be on the road, when he will parley his financial success into buying his dream jazz bar. Sebastian, confused and hurt because he thinks Mia is accusing him of having sold out, says he thought he was supposed to do this, that he should have been happy to be on a stage where people were finally happy to hear him play. "The difference between selling out and breaking through is not always clear, and “La La Land” is not so hypocritical as to pretend otherwise," as the New York Times put it.

Did Sebastian sell out? Did he just make a logical course correction? The question gathers more urgency as Mia's push to live her dream by writing and performing in her own one person show ends in a humiliating failure. She goes home, convinced the dream is over.

Deus (dea?) ex cantione--whatever the Latin is for an improbable extraction from difficulty by way of a song

Mia's dream is resurrected from the dead, though, when Sebastian, against all odds, gets a call from a casting agent looking for Mia. She saw Mia's one-woman show (she must have somehow gone unnoticed among the nine people in the crowd). Mia rushes back to Hollywood, sings the big "Fools who Dream" number at an audition, and goes off to Paris to become famous. For some reason, she doesn't end up with Sebastian, even though he drove all the way to Idaho or something to bring her back to the audition and found her without knowing her address.

That might be how the movie seeks to keep its emotional authenticity. Not everything is a perfect happy ending. Sacrifices were made. Sebastian has his jazz bar, but his special song is now kept in reserve, only to be brought out one night when he sees Mia, now married to someone else, in the crowd.

So what exactly is selling out?

We never see Mia's struggling friends again after a certain point. Presumably, some have gotten jobs as bankers or teachers or married well. There isn't room for them all to succeed. I once knew a guy who worked in receiving at a crappy drug store for $8.25 an hour as he neared 40. He played bass in a metal band. Last I saw him, he still hadn't given up the dream. He lived with his mom, which is fine; there are sacrifices for that kind of commitment.

Much like Thoreau's experiment in Walden, there are certain levels of artistic commitment that just can't be sustained if a family is involved. By the end, Mia has both family and career, but the career came first, and luckily while she was still young.

La La Land doesn't try to force too many answers. It allows itself out of answering tough questions, even the tough questions the movie itself has raised, by allowing Mia to improbably luck out. It's a musical, so it's allowed to do that.

Me, I get up and go to work every day in the white hot center of what you might call plan B. I still work at writing. I've written what I think is a novel worth reading. I've written short stories, and some have even been published. But I'm a few steps beyond Sebastian playing pop funk for money when it comes to abandoning the artistic high road.

Do we need artists?

Mia sings in her big number that "a bit of madness is key/to give us new colors to see/Who knows where they lead us?/And that's why they need us." It's sort of an unexpected thesis out of no where: artists don't just do what they do according to their own lights they reach for; they do it because it is their essential social function to do something perceived as possibly useless. This very act is restorative to society, the "they" who need "us." This might be reaching a bit too far. It's enough to do it for your own reasons. No need to invent messianic, selfless reasons for what you do.

This is where I leave off. The movie is beautiful enough for me to let it have its cake and eat it too, to both present the struggle honestly and to blink at the moment of truth. Maybe it's best not to think too deeply on the possibility of deep and final failure to achieve one's dreams, to be ever like Han Solo crying "Never tell me the odds!"

American art has failed us: when narrative doesn't do what it's supposed to do

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." -From Lincoln's second inaugural address,

"Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn't know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes. She is a Hillary flunky who lost big. For the 100th time, I never "mocked" a disabled reporter (would never do that) but simply showed him groveling when he totally changed a 16 year old story that he had written in order to make me look bad. Just more very dishonest media!" -Donald Trump on his Twitter account a week and a half before his inauguration


Nobody ever claimed a story could feed the hungry, clothe the naked, or cure the sick. At its best, narrative does a limited, but crucial, number of things well. It engages both our left and right brains, thereby bypassing some of the prejudices of both, to make us see things through the viewpoint of another person. Secondly, it helps us to analyze, vicariously, the moral outcomes of certain actions by examining their impacts in a hypothetical world on people who give us a simulacra of real human feelings.

That doesn't sound like a whole lot, but when it's done well, it can have profound social, even geopolitical, implications. Abraham Lincoln, as I just learned while reading Doris Kearnes' Team of Rivals, doted on Shakespeare. He loved Shakespeare so much that, aside from his well-known love of going to the theater, he would often engage in late-night readings with his secretaries, his cabinet, or people who just happened to stop by. He also read poetry and, on occasion, humor writers. Lincoln's whole rhetorical strategy was built on the power of story-telling, which he first learned from listening to travelers along the turnpike who stopped at this father's house in the evenings.

From the simple framework of story-telling, Lincoln managed to keep the Union together enough to win a war, and to provide the seed for reunification, in spite of enacting unprecedented policies like implementing a draft, introducing an income tax, fighting a war that resulted in 600,000 dead and millions injured, and claiming greatly extended powers for the executive branch. He did it by applying a power Shakespeare had, what Keats called "negative capability," which meant, among other things, the ability to "lose his self-identity," through "imaginative identification" with his subjects. In very non-poetic, very real, human terms, Lincoln was able to see the point of view of abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Charles Sumner, but also those of southern plantation owners. With this capacity, Lincoln not only could find middle ground politically, he could actually sway public opinion with his ability to read fine changes in the zeitgeist and push at the right time.

Consider, by contrast, the past week in "entertainment news," the "entertainment" aspect somehow always trumping the "art" aspect. Meryl Streep, on accepting a rightly deserved award for longtime excellence, dumbly and in tone-deaf Hollywood fashion attacked a guy 49% of the country just voted for.

Other than obliviously calling rich actors and actresses some of the "most vilified people" in society, she started out rather well, pointing out that Hollywood is "just people from other places":

I was born and raised and created in the public schools of New Jersey. Viola [Davis] was born in a sharecropper's cabin in South Carolina, and grew up in Central Falls, Rhode Island. Sarah Paulson was raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids from Ohio. Amy Adams was born in Italy. Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificates? And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Ethiopia, raised in -- no, in Ireland, I do believe. And she's here nominated for playing a small town girl from Virginia. 

The sideswipe at the birther controversy was an unneeded digression, but she was still doing great. And she arrived at a point where she could have been even greater, "An actor's only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us and let you feel what that feels like."

At this point, she could have offered up an olive leaf to the many people who feel Hollywood is all wealthy liberals who hold middle America in contempt. She could have pointed out her own performances where she tried to show a sympathetic side of ordinary folks, some of whom might have voted for Trump. Instead, she launched into judgment on something Trump did where it's not even clear he did what everyone says he did. We all know this part by now--she accused the President elect of mocking a disabled reporter, something Trump denies.

People have different opinions on this. I more than half believe Trump on this one, even though I don't want him to be President and I more than half wish the story were true. But I sometimes mock people who aren't at all disabled in a similar manner, by presenting them as stating their case in a flustered way. (Maybe I shouldn't--something this whole thing has made me think of.) But even if Streep suspects him of having done it on purpose, at a moment when the whole country is looking at her, she ought to have shown a little more charity.

She could have built on her vast street cred ("ethos," in classical rhetoric) to remind us that we have to look for the best representations of one another, rather than criticizing each other based on the worst straw man depictions we can find. She could have encouraged us to take seriously the hopes and fears of our neighbors. Instead, she poked the bear.

The bear, in this case Donald Trump, predictably allowed himself to be poked. His supporters have offered up much better responses, including this one that responded with the respect and charity Streep should have demonstrated in the first place.  Instead, Trump gave us what's at the top of this post.

Trump should have done much better, of course. The following 128 characters, delivered via his favorite social networking medium, would have won the battle right out of the gate:

Congrats to Streep. One of the best ever. Understand your "Doubt" (you were great in that). I hope to exceed your expectations.

Not only does a soft answer turn aside wrath, sometimes it just makes you come off as the bigger person. Streep threw fire. Trump could have won with water, but he went with more fire. Since he's about to be President, he should be criticized for his lack of impulse control.

But I blame Streep more. As an actress, I would hope she'd be the one more steeped in practical empathy. Not only should she be better able to understand Trump and the reasons why people voted for him, she also ought to be able to understand how people on the other side of America's two-country divide would react to such a speech.

Much as I'd expect a Christian to do more to alleviate the suffering of the poor than a secularist, I expect someone who is a professional empathist to be better at empathy. This isn't just a critic, this is someone who is actually supposed to embody other human souls. After a lifetime of excelling at that, she failed to put it into practice on a very simple level when it counted. She had a chance to, in a sense, "evangelize" Trump and his supporters. Did Trump sound evangelized? What's the point of story telling, if it doesn't even do one of the few things it's supposed to do well?