On being an unsuccessful writer two weeks before Trump takes office a second time

"Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?'" - from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

Early in 2020, The New Yorker published a George Saunders story entitled "Love Letter." It's an epistolary tale of a grandfather and his grandson in a much-closer-to-a-totalitarian-state-than-before in the aftermath of a then-theoretical second Trump term. Trump is not mentioned, but it is very clear that's the context involved. The grandfather is conflicted. Part of him wants to counsel his grandson to lay low, to make his way in the dangerous new landscape of America the best he can, because doing this and putting himself in a stronger position socially and financially is his best chance for being able to help the people he cares about. Open resistance is not a good strategy, because it only leads to one becoming weak. At the same time, the grandfather knows that what the government is doing to the people his grandson cares about is wrong, and he wants there to be some way to fight back. There is an underlying current in the story of the grandfather feeling he needs to explain to the grandson how older people allowed the world to get like this. His explanations are the only ones a culpable generation can offer: we didn't know it would get this bad, we'd have done more if we knew, we did what we could, but what could we really do?

When Saunders reconsidered the story recently, he expressed his hope that it was more than "just an opinion piece dressed up as a piece of fiction." Of course, even if it was a little too "on the nose," as he put it, that wouldn't have necessarily ruined it. There are plenty of stories that come across as direct commentaries on contemporary political situations that are nonetheless masterpieces, from Wizard of Oz to the works of Aristophanes to Citizen Kane to All the President's Men and on and on. Heck, even Ayn Rand's novels have plenty of people who love them, and they're basically political theory dressed up as novels.  

Of course it was a good story. It was George Saunders. But there was still something that bothered me about it. Coming at the time it did, it couldn't help but be an admonition to its readers: In the fateful election of 2020, when democracy hangs in the balance, what will you do? Will you be able to face your grandchildren when they ask you about it? It was much more of a call to specific action than most stories are. That means that part of evaluating it should go beyond normal literary considerations, such as whether the characters were believable and affecting, and include questioning whether the piece was effective at one of its evident purposes, which was to persuade citizens to undertake political action. 

My perhaps somewhat peevish reaction to the story

Now that we have survived the election of 2020 only to lose in 2024, my reaction is not totally unlike that of the grandfather: What could I have done? What should I have done? Or even: I did what I could, but I wasn't in a position to do much, so my involvement didn't help, echoing a line of the grandfather to his grandson that getting involved would not help. If "Love Letter" is a challenge to its readers to do something, then my reaction to that injunction goes something like this:

• I voted for the right candidate, because I did the minimum that a citizen in a democracy can do, which is to fulfill what Lionel Trilling called the "moral responsibility to be intelligent." That is, I did enough work to vote for the right person.
• Of course, in our system, I get the same number of votes as people who didn't do the work. So my vote isn't worth that much.
• You could argue that I have a responsibility to try to persuade others, and I did, but persuading anyone of anything is very hard. Past a certain age, most people really don't change their minds about big stuff more than a handful of times in their lives. 
• And in any event, whom would I be persuading? I don't have much of a platform. I wish I had acquired a platform through my writing, but whether through lack of talent, lack of focus, or bad luck, I don't. 
• Even if I did have a platform, what would I do? If we consider "Love Letter" not as a detached work of art but as an attempt by a human writer named George Saunders to influence an election, what did Saunders really do with his platform? He wrote a story in the New Yorker, where the majority of readers probably already agreed with him.
• That story, rather than offer readers practical advice for how to get the outcome in the election that author and most of his readers alike agree would be the desirable one, did what literature often does. It didn't really propose a solution, but instead did a good job of describing the problem. Which is great for feeling seen, but not so great for getting the results one wants.
• Which is all to say that even if I had succeeded as an author enough to have significant numbers of people listen to what I have to say, I likely wouldn't have been able to do much with it. I can't even convince my sister-in-law in Ohio that Trump is bad for the country; what am I going to do to change the outcome of an election? 
• The story ultimately feels like a human author trying to pass the problem off to his readers, most of whom have far less ability to do anything that he does. It feels unfair.   

So that's one level of reaction I have to Saunders' story. The other level is somehow even more depressing. 

It's always frustrating to fail at writing, but it's especially so now

There is a weird feedback loop of circular logic in America whereby we assume that if someone is rich and famous, they deserve to be, so they tend to stay that way. And if someone isn't, they get dismissed, because if they knew what they were talking about, how come they aren't rich and famous? We assume winners win because they deserve to win, and losers lose because they are losers.

Faced with this kind of faith in the self-evidentiary logic of outcomes in America, the non-rich, non-famous class has only a couple of choices. We can accept our fate and turn inward, trying to focus on self-improvement in small and humble ways. We can practice a form of idolatry toward the chosen class and look up to them, following them on social media and hoping at most to be able to brush near their greatness, to one day get a like from them or to touch the hem of their garments as they pass by. Or we can press on with a quixotic quest to join their ranks, ignoring the odds and focusing only on the outliers, the occasional examples of people who cross the divide from the bungled and the botched into the successful.

Maybe I've been the bad reader all along, and this guy the good reader of the world, even if he hasn't read the book he's holding. 

Of course, many people have no desire to be rich or famous, and they live happy lives ignoring celebrities, politicians, and magnates alike. They are probably the wisest, and I'd be happy to join their ranks, except that what I most want to do in life is write, and I don't consider my writing to be successful if nobody reads it. There is an aspect of needing public cooperation to my goals in life. I don't want to be rich, and I don't need to be famous in the sense of being a household word in every home. I'm sure most Americans don't know who George Saunders is, either. Enough do, though, that he can rest assured his ideas have propagated in the world and will survive him. That may not matter in a political sense, but I do think that once ideas escape into the world, they never really go away. Saunders will live forever. I don't have that assurance. 

I live inside my head most of the time, and my head is full of stories and ideas that seem to me to have value, so I can't rest until I've gotten them outside my head and onto paper in the best way I can. I'm on the other side of fifty now, and it's increasingly unlikely anyone is ever going to read what I've written in sufficient numbers for it to matter. 

I should keep pressing on anyway, assured that even if I don't succeed at my goal, the presence of those stories and thoughts that won't go away is evidence that tending to them is what I should be doing with my time. I should have faith that they're there for a reason. But the election of Trump--again--and the concurrent existence of so many do-nothing celebrities and hangers-on and influencers and social media personalities, all of whom get to share their vapid ideas with so many, makes me think that there just is no reason or order or meaning to anything. The self-evidentiary logic of America is right. I'm not succeeding because I'm not chosen for success. I lack talent or charm or charisma or good looks or the right blood in my veins. The success of someone who seems to me to be so undeserving is proof that I have misread the world entirely. And if I can't read the world right, why should anyone want to read what I've written?  

If my New Year's resolution was to remain ambivalent about writing, I'm nailing it

For most of my life, when I've considered the ubiquitous question writers get asked about why they write, I've always thought of it as something of an after-the-fact justification of what I was already doing. I wrote all the time, starting almost as soon as I became a serious reader as a teenager. So answering the question was something of a rearguard action, an attempt to justify what I was already doing. I was never going to come up with an answer that made me say, "Oh, you know what? That's a bad reason for writing. I should stop doing it." I couldn't help but write, so seeking to answer a question about why I was doing it was more of a philosophical curiosity than a matter of practical urgency. It wasn't like considering the question of whether I should take a particular job or marry somebody. It was more like finding myself naked in bed with a beautiful woman and for some reason taking a second to ponder the mystery of human sexuality and why we enjoy it so much. There was no doubt about what I was going to do; I was only indulging in a brief reverie before diving in. 

The question now, though, is totally different. After having spent most of my available free time over the last ten years focused as much as time would allow either on writing fiction or writing for this blog, I find myself unwilling to sit down and transfer thoughts into words. I still have the same urge as always, but inevitably, before I put my butt on the back-friendly yoga ball to begin writing, I am waylaid by wondering, "What's the point?"

Most writers will say one reason they write is because they can't stop themselves. I always felt that way, too. So where I am now is like waking up and finding I don't like sex or chocolate anymore. Or maybe it's like still liking chocolate but the last 32 times I've eaten it, it's given me explosive diarrhea, so now I'm reluctant to eat it again. 

I don't like refraining from writing. I don't feel like myself. But there are also some pretty strong reasons why I can't get myself into my seat to write. They're not as strong as explosive diarrhea, maybe, but they're strong enough I don't know if I'll be able to get over them.

1. Maybe I'm not that good

When somebody asked Flannery O'Connor why she wrote, she said, "Because I'm good at it." I don't draw or paint precisely because what I create is ugly, and it gives me no pleasure to look at what I've made when I'm done. With writing, though, there are at least some occasions where I will re-read something I've written and feel joy reading it, the same kind of joy I would feel reading something somebody else had written. 

But for almost three years now, I've just been unable to get anything published. Part of that is on me. For all that time, I've only been sending in work to top-tier journals. After I won New Letters' Robert Day Fiction Contest in 2020, followed soon after by publication in The Bellevue Literary Review, I felt like I had drawn pretty close to my goal of writing fiction good enough to be published in top tier journals. It's not that I'm a journal snob. I was always gratified and grateful when any journal, no matter how small, accepted my work. But I want to be read. When I was sending out to every journal on Earth, it was partly about trying to figure out if I was in the right ballpark. After twenty or so of those acceptances, I had the feedback I needed. If I want to be read, it doesn't do any good to be published in a smaller journal. 

Since 2020, I've written five short stories that I think are better than anything I wrote before. None has broken into a top journal. I've still had plenty of encouraging rejections, including from The New Yorker, The Missouri Review, Agni, One Story, The Georgia Review, The Cincinnati Review, and The Colorado Review. Some have given me positive feedback more than once. 

Maybe I ought to keep plugging away, feeling like I'm close and I just need to bide my time and wait to get lucky, but I feel now like "almost good enough for a top-tier journal" is my limit. I can't write better than what I've done in the last three years, and it's not good enough. I understand that sometimes, it's a matter of luck. Every journal gets tons of great stories and can only publish a few, and they're looking for a blend of perspectives, so I might just not fit that particular edition. But if I were as good as I want to be, I'd be impossible to reject. I'm not, and I don't think I ever will be.

When somebody tells me I should keep going with writing because I'm almost there, I always think of this gambler's fallacy meme my son showed me.

2. For a variety of reasons, I don't think it's realistic I will get better

I might never have been talented enough. I'm sure there's a certain neural makeup to a great writer that's partly there when they're born, and that also has to be nurtured a certain way early on. It's possible I was doomed from birth, or doomed from early childhood because I missed certain developmental processes necessary to building the right neural network for a creative writer. 

But even if that's not true, even if I still had a chance in adulthood, I don't think I have a chance now. It's true that if you work at something, you tend to get better. I've definitely improved greatly since taking writing seriously in my early 40s. But I'm in my early 50s now, and I feel myself slipping cognitively in a general sense. It's maybe not serious yet--I forget a word here and there while speaking more than I used to, I find long hours at work less easy to endure--but it's enough that I'm probably not really building the new connections in my brain necessary to improve creatively. It's like where I am at the gym now. I'm not really out there to be the strongest I've ever been. I'm just trying to slow down decline. 

Even if I were younger, I've always had a stumbling block to developing as a writer, which is that I can't read prodigiously. I'm a good reader, but I can't read for long stretches most of the time. I get too caught up in my own thoughts about what I'm reading, and I have to take breaks to walk around and think about what I've just read. I've always been this way. It's always been a bit of an embarrassment for me around literary friends, who talk about reading a hundred books a year or more. I do read, of course. I don't do it efficiently, and so I don't read as widely as many serious readers do, but I try to make up for it by reading well when I do read. If I have to take a test, I'm capable of focusing for hours at a time, but I can't maintain that every day.  

Reading well if not much is fine for much of the kind of analysis I do on this blog, but I think you have to read both deeply and broadly to improve as a writer.  A would-be great writer has to fill their mind all the time with the best writing. I can't do that, and even if I could, I'm probably too old for it to have the impact it would have on a younger mind. 

3. I can't get away from the world

I recently read Sigrid Nunez's "Life and Story" in The Sewanee Review, in which she ponders the "why write" question at great length. It's a great summary of the many explanations people have given to this question, along with many of the doubts a writer faces if she has any sense. Many are the same doubts I've expressed over the years, such as the question of how to justify writing about unreal things in a world with so many real problems. 

One problem Nunez focuses on is how much concentration writing takes. All that concentration and focus and wrangling means time not spent with those around you. It means time not spent fixing the storm door or edging the lawn. It means time not spent on your day job, the one that pays the bills. 

Nunez recalls how her mentor, Susan Sontag, encouraged her to let writing be the central focus of her life:

"While it seemed everyone else wanted to know how I intended to earn a living, or when I was going to settle down, Sontag was talking about something else. Put the writing first, she said. Teach if you must, but don't feel that you have to become affiliated with an institution. Don't give up your independence. Forget the safety of tenure. Forget safety, period. Forget everything but the work."

Living in financial uncertainty while devoted only to the work has been a popular choice for writers, perhaps second only to having enough of a fortune, through heredity or marriage, you don't have to think about survival at all. There's nobility to it, the same way there is nobility in those who choose penury and celibacy in the service of God. I was planning at one point on that path, but I fell in love and had a child, and at that point, I realized I HAD to care about safety. 

Almost twenty years later, now with two kids, both of whom are struggling to figure out their own path to financial safety, the demands of the world are as great on me as ever. It has an effect on my writing. Even when I try to conserve some energy for writing, the effort and time I put into my job robs me of those same resources I need for arduous creative work. It fills my head with the wrong kind of energy.

Of course, other writers have managed to succeed while working for a living, but I think most succeeded at a younger age than I am now. I have writer friends who work and raise kids and write, mostly at teacher or editor jobs that don't pay as well as my job does, which means they have extra financial concerns I don't. But the thing is that none of those friends are doing any better at succeeding--based on my definition of the term--than I am. That's in spite of the fact that their teacher/editor jobs give them a better network to publicize their work with than I have. Writing is hard to do well even if you mortgage everything to focus on it, and anyone who's trying to both raise a family and cut open their spiritual veins to bleed onto the page is going to have an even harder time of it.

In my case, because my day job I've ended up in could be thought to be important in a cold and calculated "real world" sort of way, I often wonder if the morally right choice isn't to shutter writing altogether and focus on my day job. There's a good chance that an improvement in my ability to do my job could have more of a positive impact on the world than anything I'll write at home. The only reason I've continued to write is because my own mental health couldn't stand not doing it. I wouldn't have been able to do my day job at all if I didn't write, I reasoned, because I'd have killed myself or ended up in a loony bin. Sometimes, though, I think that my indulging of my writing habit is just my own selfishness or ego. 

4. I'm exactly the wrong level of educated as a critic now

Since fiction writing wasn't working out how I'd hoped in the near term, I felt like I'd found a nice niche writing analysis of literary fiction on this blog. This was mostly of short story anthologies, such as Best American Short Stories and, if I had time and energy for it, Pushcart or O. Henry as well. It felt useful to me, because I thought that as a veteran of graduate-level studies in literature, I could be something of a bridge to ordinary people looking to investigate literary fiction. I've certainly been grateful for podcasts from philosophy Ph.D.s or other experts who seek to open up their disciplines to curious outsiders. I hoped to do the same for literature. 

I realized I wasn't quite a full expert. I didn't go on for a Ph.D. myself, and there are gaps in my understanding of literary theory as well as the history of literature and literary criticism. Still, since as one of my favorite professors as an undergrad said, you can never go wrong with a sensitive close reading, I felt like performing my close readings for all would help them to do their own. 

I was happy with my approach of close reading with occasional supplements from theory or literary history until last year. The mistake I made was trying to take criticism more seriously. I'd decided that since I was unlikely to ever make the breakthrough as a fiction writer I hoped to make, I should focus instead on doing the best job of writing the blog I could. I tried to go back and fill in gaps in theory and history.

All I succeeded in doing was to become more aware of how great a gap I have between the knowledge I actually have and what I'd like to have. To fill that gap, I'd have to quit my job and spend years pursuing the expertise I lack. All so I could write a blog that maybe a few hundred people occasionally look at. If I wasn't going to abandon my life for fiction, I certainly wasn't going to do it for writing about fiction. 

So I've ended up in a place where I can't go back to just doing close readings, and I'm nowhere near being able to write what I'd like to be able to write, so I don't want to write anything. My shoot-from-the-hip close readings no longer seem to be enough, and what I'd like to do--a still-accessible but more informed flavor of criticism--is beyond me. I feel like the incarnation of Pope's a little learning being a dangerous thing, only I'm aware of how dangerous I am. 

My cycle

So that's where I am. I'm miserable not writing, because it doesn't feel like me, but I'm also miserable writing, because it feels pointless. Yes, I know that many, many writers offer the therapeutic advice that you should write for yourself and whether it gets published or wins awards or earns praise isn't the point. But I do not want to write just to amuse myself. If nobody is ever going to read what I write, I don't want to write. That's not human connection, which, I think, ought to be at least part of why someone would write. 

My day job values being succinct above all other writing virtues, and they love it when you can draw a picture for something instead of making people read words, which everyone hates. So I've summarized all the above verbosity into the following flow chart:

Pulled in too many directions

I've probably posted the "I'm done with writing" thing a half dozen times in the last few years, and so far, it's never stuck. This isn't that post, because I don't think it's going to stick now, either. This is just to let folks know why I'm not posting much nor will be posting much. 

About six years ago, when I wrote the first of a few "I quit" posts, I referred to a monumental decision I thought I'd made in my twenties, one I later repented of. I vowed then that I'd care more about making great art than about having a family, because anyone can have a family but only a rare few can make great art. Or something like that. I don't really know what I said, because the text in question no longer exists, which is probably for the good. I wrote a lot of strange things in the years after I got out of the Marine Corps. The Marines scrambled my brain a bit, and it took me a few years to get it scrambled back. 

Anyhow, what I'd decided by my thirties was that the "art first, family second" philosophy was morally bankrupt. I'm not totally sure what changed my mind. Maybe it was several things. For one, yes, the people who produce art are rarer than the people who produce human beings, but there's still plenty of art to go around. There's not a shortage of supply relative to demand. Or maybe it's just that I didn't want to be like William Faulkner, drinking on my daughter's birthday when she'd asked me not to because, "Nobody remembers Shakespeare's daughter." Or maybe I just thought that I have a limited time on Earth, and being good to the people around me is a more guaranteed way to use that time well than writing a novel is. Whatever the reason, while I have occasionally had to fudge family responsibilities in order to write, I've never forgotten that family is more important. If I write a novel people are still talking about in a thousand years but fail as a father, then I've wasted my time.

Given that those are the rules I've set up for myself, it's been really hard to find time to write. Not just write, really. Anyone can probably carve out a few hours a week to slap down some kind of prose. Finding time to write seriously is what's hard, meaning to not just write but read good writing, think about good writing, write about good writing, make drafts of my own writing that I strive to make as good as the best of what I'm reading. Maybe even participate in the literary community a bit and also pay attention to some advice on the best way to find places to publish what I've written. It's a lot. Professors are always grousing about not having time to write, which I understand, but it's family, not work, that is the real strain on a writer. 

I've avoided putting this out there for the public to see, but now that COVID-19 has all children in America home-schooling, I don't worry so much about it now. We pulled our son from school at the end of the 2018-2019 school year, and we've been home schooling him since. He was massively under-performing relative to what standardized tests said he should be able to do. A lot of it had to do with him being bored, and therefore not paying attention to what he was supposed to do, then when I emailed teachers to find out what he was supposed to be doing, not getting answers so I didn't know how to make sure he stayed on task. I figured however hard it would be to do it myself, at least I'd know what he his work was.

So for a year and half, when I get home from work, I spend a few hours working with him. He still doesn't do the greatest work for me, but occasionally, he does something that lets me know the lights are still on up there for him. I'm relatively certain he'll be able to pass a GED in a few months when he turns sixteen, and then he can be free to find his own path a little bit. At least, that's the dream. 

Until then, I'm still really straining to keep up. We can't work a full 5-6 hour day every day, so I have to settle for 2-3 hours days that we also do on weekends and holidays (and the summer). We just do a little bit every day, and in that manner, we've kept up with more or less a high school workload. 

Add to my family responsibilities that I have begun to feel lately that I haven't focused enough on my skill as a translator, meaning I've been reading Korean texts instead of fiction in English, and you can see why I don't feel like I'm really working as hard as I need to with writing to get anywhere. Yes, reading Korean literature is probably helpful to me as a writer, because it makes me think outside my own linguistic box, but it takes me a long time to get through Korean literature. My reading time is more than double in Korean what it is in English, and I'm not a fast reader in English. 

Which is why this is just to say I'm not really quitting, but since half-assing it isn't any better than quitting, I don't know what I'm doing with writing, either. I've had to stop my analyses of Pushcart stories. When Best American Short Stories come out in a few months, I don't know if I'll do those, either. 

That's a shame, because I really like doing it. I think it's an important contribution to the literary world, because there's a paucity of online resources for people to go to for help when they feel a little lost by the stories they read in the top anthologies. More than that, I know it's been good for my own fiction writing to focus so deeply on some of the best writing that's out there. Even when I don't like a story, that helps me refine my own ideas of what it is I do like and what I want to do as a writer. 

That's all just a long way of explaining why I haven't been around much and might not be for a while. Maybe it'll get better when the boy passes his GED. Or maybe I'm so into Korean things now, I never get back into writing. I don't know. I'll at least help the world to a gratuitous political rant now and again in the next few months, no doubt. 

It's been great how many people have tuned in for stuff I've written about short stories, especially BASS. Even if those folks just help themselves to an explanation or two and then run off without saying high, it's always great to me to see that a hundred or so folks stop by every day, mostly for short story explanations. Something I wrote became a part of the day of people I don't know. That makes me happy, and probably will never stop making me happy.  

On New Year's Day, at the crossroads as always

On the first day of the new year, I think all aspiring writers are supposed to feel the way this Tweet encourages us to feel:

Am I an aspiring writer? I mean, I write already. I even get published sometimes. I guess I aspire to more with writing, but isn't that every writer? Isn't every writer "aspiring"?

My own current mental state is somewhat less ardent. I never make resolutions, but I do sometimes use the New Year to re-focus on something I've been letting slide. In the past, that has sometimes meant writing. Last year, I submitted stories to a slew of venues on the first day of the year. And 2019 turned out to be a very encouraging year, writing-wise. I got three stories accepted, one of which just got published in what was probably the journal with the biggest cache I've gotten into yet. More importantly, a whole slew of top-tier journals that have never done anything but ignore me before at least gave personal responses. (It's really hard for me to convince friends of mine who aren't writers that getting a personal rejection from some journals is actually a big deal and hard to get.) After six years of focused effort, I felt like I had at least gotten some signs that I was moving the rock up the hill. 

But here at the outset of 2020, I find myself unable or unwilling to make a push to capitalize on that momentum. In the past, my ambivalence about continuing to push forward with writing has usually been values-based. I've questioned whether putting so much effort into a project I'm not likely to succeed at, one where even if I do "succeed," I'm not likely to have much tangible positive impact on the world, wasn't terribly self-indulgent. I don't worry about that now. It is self-indulgent, but I'm at a point in my life where I realize how much we all need indulgences if we're going to be able to convince ourselves to keep stumbling through life. 

The issue is that I'm just at the crux of both my professional and parenting life. At work, I've never felt more pressure to get everything right. That requires a lot of my time, not just at work, but at home. When I finished my annual commentary on the Best American Short Stories collection several weeks ago, I wanted to continue right on with the O.Henry Anthology, because I feel like all these close readings of the best American short fiction has been the most important factor in improving my own writing outcomes over the last two years. But I just couldn't justify the time when what I really need to do with my limited spare time is comb Korean news, improving both my language skills and my awareness of what's going on. 

Meanwhile, although I don't want to invade my son's privacy by putting all his business out here, I will say that his performance in school over the last few years has gotten to a point where it now requires my almost constant intervention. Making sure he's ready for adulthood in a few years is now practically a second full-time job for me. So between my actual full-time job, my de facto second full-time job, my desire to focus on improving my professional skill as a translator, and the need to at least be present enough as a husband that my marriage doesn't disappear, I'm about tapped out. 

I know, I know, we're not as busy as we think we are. There's always time. I've usually been the chief cheerleader saying those very things. All I can say is that right now, I feel tapped out. Something's got to give, and for right now, that thing is writing. That's unfortunate for me, because I've finally felt like I was getting somewhere. But I think it's the right thing to do. 

It is an inconvenient but unmistakable truth. 2020 is going to be a year of going backwards, at least with writing. Hopefully, that going backwards with writing will allow me to move forward in my life enough that when I come back to writing, I have fewer distractions overall and will make up the lost ground quickly. But if I don't pay attention to some other things right now, then all the success in the world won't matter, because I won't respect myself for the choices I made to make it happen.

I'm not saying I won't write at all in 2020. There is a tiny bit of room to squeeze things in, although it will likely involve cutting back my already cut-back time with a group of friends I enjoy spending time with even further. But even with those sacrifices, writing this year is just not going to be what the last few years were. I'm still going to try to do the occasional short story analysis; I just won't do the entirety of O.Henry or Pushcart. 

I neither believe fully in "follow your dreams wherever they lead" nor in keeping my feet on the ground to the exclusion of all dreams. It's better to stay in flux between the two poles, adapting as needed to the situation before you.

Wherever you are in your dream chasing, I hope 2020 brings some progress to you. Thanks for reading and making my catalog of dream-chasing part of your life. 

My semi-annual crisis over whether literature has any social utility: "Anyone Can Do It" by Manuel Muñoz

If it's true that fiction can get around the prejudices people carry with them and subtly change hearts and minds, then our culture now ought to be full of the best, most empathetic people in history. We have more literature available to us than any culture in history, with many of the great works available for free online or on Kindle. There are resources to help understand that literature. And then there's the Golden Age of American Television, with streaming services giving us quality programming to challenge and stretch us. (Yes, there is plenty of good stuff to go along with the straight-to-Netflix Adam Sandler movies.)

When I read a story like "Anyone Can Do It" by Manuel Muñoz, my first thought is whether a short story is actually good for anything in the face of a massive social issue. This is the second year in a row Best American Short Stories included a story from the point-of-view of illegal immigrants. Last year, it was "Everything is Far From Here" by Cristina Henriquez, which I didn't care for, largely because it didn't seem to say anything about the border and incarceration that hasn't already been said a million times. (Incidentally, most of the traffic I get on my site seems to be from students who are assigned Best American Short Stories in school. I can tell which stories are the ones they want to write about by following which of my posts they click on. Henriquez's story is by far the least-clicked link from 2018 BASS.)

This year, "Anyone Can Do It" is a solid piece. It's not clear whether the protagonist is actually illegal. She claims throughout to be from Texas, although, because the characters in the story talk about Texas as though it were still part of Mexico ("the Matamoros side of Texas" as well as the "Texas side of Mexico"), it's not clear that her claim would be recognized by the INS. (And I do mean the INS rather than ICE, because this seems to be set a few decades ago.) What the story does right is take a big social issue like illegal immigration and the socially useful work done by immigrant labor (picking fruit, in this case) and look at it from an intensely personal lens.

Delfina's husband doesn't come back from the orchard one night. Nobody's husbands in the neighborhood do, and everyone is worried they've been rounded up. A woman named Lis from down the street cons Delfina into using the family car to take the two of them to go work in the orchards while Lis's daughter watches Delfina's son. Delfina is suspicious, but eventually gives in. Lis steals Delfina's car, takes their joint daily wages, and runs off.

It's full of suspense for the reader as we watch the bad thing happen to Delfina in slow motion. We listen to her slowly talking herself into it, even though she is right to be suspicious, because what are her options? If she doesn't take a chance with Lis, she won't be able to pay the rent in a few days.

We see the "law" contrasted with "justice," as Delfina's son steals a toy car from a store while she is on the phone with her family. We know he shouldn't have done it, but given his life, who would want him to take it back? Even a reader who has particular political views about illegal immigration shouldn't fail to empathize with her as she struggles to take care of her kid. And the possibility that she might actually be from Texas, meaning she might be legal, means that at least that one objection can be held at bay.

For that matter, because Delfina is cheated by another member of her own community, while the only person who is kind to her is an old white man, a white reader can read the story without feeling personally attacked. So if any story is going to change how a hardcore send-em-all-back immigration hardliner feels, it would be this one.

But I don't think it will. The actual human cost of our current social policy isn't hidden. There are signs all around of what it means. Even if "change" from this story isn't measured in people changing their political views--because I can believe someone might feel genuine empathy and still think it's important to secure our borders--at the very least, the story ought to challenge the comfortable belief that immigrants are lazy and soaking up our social services. The title "Anyone Can Do It" has a double meaning. On the one hand, it's what Lis tells Delfina about work in the orchards, that it's both "easy and hard." Which it is. It's a simple thing to learn, but repeated thousands of times in the heat. The other meaning of "anyone can do it" is what skeptics of immigrant laborers might say, that their lives aren't really that hard, that they've actually got it easy.

Will this story make anyone stop saying that? Because I feel like with the advent of this surplus of great stories our culture is currently experiencing, we're also experiencing a sudden stubborn refusal to be emotionally moved by stories. Maybe we're so used to stories that stimulate empathy in us, we're actually building up an immunity to empathy.

If you're a student looking to this blog for help with meaning or theme or whatever from this story, I doubt you even need my help much. This isn't a difficult story to understand. The meaning is all right there. It's about the tough lessons experience teaches us, about how you can't survive without trusting someone but it's also a great risk, and about the real human cost of abstract political policies. Nobody could read this story and miss those things.

But even if we set the bar incredibly low for what "changing hearts and minds" might look like for a story like this one--if we say, for example, that it's a success if just one person reads it and does not, in his next conversation about immigration, immediately assume the lives of immigrants are easy--will this story succeed? Or is it just written for those who already believe?

It's not the fault of an individual fiction writer that we now live in an age where people can so insulate themselves against beliefs they disagree with that they become impossible to convince. But that's our age. Given how difficult it is to change anyone's mind, what am I actually hoping to accomplish when I write a story? What is anyone?

I don't believe in giving up. We have to keep trying, because to stop trying, to give in to some nihilistic impulse, is to be okay living in a world where nothing we do matters. So people should keep writing, if only to not live in that world. But I don't want to support the false hope that if someone can only write the right story, things might get better. While we have to maybe give ourselves that hope in order to get on with our daily lives, I don't think we can avoid the conclusion that it's probably a fool's hope. It just that it's a fool's hope that's about the only hope we've got.

Sometimes it just smacks me in the face...

Of course I realize that fiction writing is making things up, but when I've really been at it a long time at one stretch, it strikes me how absurd a practice it is to keep creating realities for imaginary people. I often treat fiction writing like it's a very serious business. Many writers do. But it's probably healthy to take a step back sometimes and just think about what it is we're doing in a more macro sense. I just spent the last hour imagining the love life of two people who don't exist until I had given one of the two fake people a little tendency to do something that slightly bemused or irritated the other. I'm daydreaming, which is often thought of as one of the biggest wastes of time one can do--so much that we yell at students who are caught doing it when they're supposed to do something else--and then putting the results of that daydreaming on paper.

No activity could be a more confident assertion that life is ephemeral and not something, ultimately, to be taken that seriously. Or, as Vonnegut put it, "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anyone tell you different."

Not really filling me with confidence here

I took a little break after finishing my critique of all the short stories in this year's Puschart Anthology. In my own fiction writing life, it's been more of the same: a bunch of near success, a lot more not-so-near success, also known as failure, and then the questioning of whether I want to keep doing this.

This last question has been a never-ending loop of self-inquisition for me, not just for the last six years I've been seriously writing, but for the twenty years since I first picked English as a major in undergrad. There are so many problems in the world that need addressing, and my life is passing by. I've had a small impact on a few things that maybe made the world better, but all in all, I don't know if I can really justify the resources the world put into making me who am I now when measured against what I've given it back. I believe stories have value and that they can make the world better. But how much better? And is it likely I personally will make the world better through stories?

As I was pondering whether a long-odds attempt for literary relevance is a good use of my remaining time on Earth, Literary Hub just posted an article about the role of fiction in addressing climate change. I think it was meant to be inspirational or enlightening, but it had the opposite effect on me. Climate change is obviously a massive threat to our species, and there aren't really many more critical issues in the world. So if fiction had a role to play for the better, you'd think it ought to have something to do with climate change.

The article is basically a couple of paragraphs of introduction followed by one or two paragraph statements from a number of writers who've recently created literary fiction with climate change as a major element. Here are the five main moments of this article for me:

1) "...smart policy is needed as much as great art" -from the introduction:

In reality, one drop of good policy is worth an ocean of great art, and an ocean of great art is worthless without good policy. They're not equals.

2) Two writers noted that the main thing fiction does well is create empathy, and this might be a way to engage people to do something about climate change. First, empathy might move those who aren't immediately affected to care about those who are. Secondly, empathy might motivate everyone to care more about the world that stands to be lost.

That's true; creating empathy might be what fiction does best, its most redeeming characteristic. But if I'm being honest, I feel a lot more empathy for the species being wiped out when I watch a nature documentary than I do reading a story. Only the best of the genre, like Ted Chiang's "The Great Silence," can create that level of feeling for another species in me.

3) But even if I do feel empathy, so what? One writer wrote rather anemically that "The fact that we can’t put out the fires and lower the seas with words or pictures or music doesn’t mean we’re off the hook for trying." But how is trying to create empathy really trying to save the world? As fate had it, I also just read an article from the Atlantic about Just, a company trying to master lab-grown meat (or, as they would have it, "cultured meat"). If successful, it would eliminate the suffering of millions of mass-grown animals. But the CEO of Just understands that the company's future isn't in satisfying people like me, the guilty carnivores who fail through on-again, off-again vegetarian periods. As CEO Josh Tetrick aptly put it:

“I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, so imagine one of my friends who doesn’t care about any of the shit that I’m doing now,” he said, while perched on a bar stool in front of Just’s test kitchen. This hypothetical friend goes to a Piggly Wiggly to buy burgers. Except—oh wait!—next to the animal-based patties wrapped in clear plastic, he sees a Just burger patty for less money. “That, to me, is what it’s gonna take in order to break the dam of a habit,” Tetrick said.

In other words, without giving a damn about the welfare of animals at all but by just applying good science and business principles to a problem, Just and companies like it might do more for animal welfare than all the activism in the world has ever done.

The article said this company also makes plant-based eggs, which are available at the Silver Diner, a restaurant in my area. I intend to try them soon. 

4) "One hard lesson I’ve learned from my fifteen years as a community organizer is that changing the minds of our enemies is less important than giving hope and power to our friends. I’m not writing for the people who are against us. I don’t mean to say that it’s impossible to convince people with great art—other writers might legitimately feel like the role of fiction in the climate change fight is to convince the skeptical—but that’s not my priority." -Sam Miller

What did I draw from that? It merely reinforced for the millionth time how similar the literary community is to the evangelical Christian churches I once attended. "Do I focus on evangelism or on discipleship?" is the Christian version of this issue Miller is addressing. And right now, "if they don't get it, then let God deal with them" is a pretty ubiquitous stance among literary folks. This has made literary gatherings feel fairly insular to me, and even the attempts at whatever the liberal political and literary version of evangelism is seem rather lame.

5) "I doubt that many people in power are poring over speculative literary fiction for inspiration to enact climate change policy. But they should be." -Helen Phillips

Yeah, but the thing is, they don't. Maybe they should be, but they don't. And I have to think that if people have to be shamed to read literary fiction, the fault can't entirely be with the people who don't want to read it.

Yes, fiction can be powerful. In the mosaic of intellectual tiles that have made up who I am, a couple of stories are among the most important pieces. But if fewer and fewer people are going to read what I would call serious fiction, fiction that has the power to be transformative, then the possible space to find a wide enough audience to make fiction matter is shrinking. The odds that fiction will be a useful endeavor--by which I mean an endeavor that makes life better for others--is small. It might be small enough that it just doesn't make sense to keep doing.

Or maybe I'll keep going. But this article wasn't the help it meant to be.

Wrapping up BASS 2018: The elephant in the anthology

The Best American series of anthologies--which include poetry, short stories, essays, comics, and probably others I don't know about--are openly acknowledged, even by their creators, to be less-than-precisely named. Nobody is claiming that the 20 stories or 75 poems in each anthology each year really comprise the "best" that America has to offer. Even if it were possible to rate a poem or story with a score like you'd get in a video game and then pick the ones with the best scores, the anthologies wouldn't work like that. Rather, the series gives, in the words of Robert Pinsky, speaking about the poetry series, a "vivid snapshot of a what a distinguished poet finds exciting, fresh, and memorable."

That phrase "a distinguished poet," or, for Best American Short Stories, "a distinguished fiction writer," is critical. The choice of what to put in the volume is left up to the guest editor of the year. Although the guest editor gets help whittling it down, the final product is a product of what the guest editor values. So it's as much about what the guest editor liked at the time as it is about what was good in American literature at the time.

Nobody wants twenty stories about college kids in New England, or twenty stories about poor kids trying to make it in a third-world slum, so every editor tries to balance it out a bit as far as subject matter. The idea is to have the twenty stories that together make the best collection, not the twenty that are individually the best.

Some editors try to balance the series out by giving it as objective a sense of diversity as they can. They try for ten men and ten women, with a sprinkling of ethnicities and sexual orientations that mirror, as much as possible, the American population. Others figure that the diversity comes from changing guest editors every year, and so when it's their year, they should just pick what interests them the most. In 2015, Sherman Alexie raised a few eyebrows when he picked an extremely high number of minority poets for BAP. Alexie is many things, some of them frustrating and full of crap things, but the man is not a liar. He was honest about what he was doing. That volume is probably best remembered for the row over a white poet using a Chinese pseudonym to publish a poem and having it picked by Prairie Schooner and then by Alexie for Best American Poetry...after having first been rejected more than 40 times under the poet's real name.

Alexie didn't duck what he did. He called it "a form of nepotism," and justified it by saying he'd seen plenty of similar nepotism from white editors. He also kept the controversial poem in the anthology even after learning what had happened (and, he says, being furious about it). If that's true, I respect Alexie more than I can say for keeping a record of what really happened. However you interpret it, it's a fascinating anecdote of American literature in 2015.

The Gay BASS anthology of 2018

Roxane Gay followed the "I pick what I like" theory of filling out an anthology. Therefore, the collection doesn't have ethnic or gender "balance" like a lot of volumes do. Of the twenty stories, only four are by male writers. Two of those men are white. (If my numbers are off, I apologize. This was all my own Internet research, and I'm going off pictures, names, and assumptions in some cases. It's not like writers list race on their Twitter pages. Also, Rivers Solomon is, I believe, non-binary, so it's four cis-males, fifteen cis-females, and one Rivers Solomon.)

(As a total aside, I have to note Gay's omission of "Cat Person," on of the most talked-about short stories in years. It was published at the right time to make this year's BASS, but Gay has said before she disliked the story, partly because of its too-frequent fat shaming. She was really following what moved her personally.)

Harold Bloom's unforgettable introduction to the Best American Poetry 1988-1997 edition

Gay's gender and ethnic anthology choices immediately took me back to the introduction Harold Bloom wrote to the Best American Poetry series' "best of the best" book from 1997, after it had been putting out yearly best-of anthologies for ten years. (BASS is a lot older than BAP.) It's Bloom in a nutshell: exasperating, lucid, erudite, anachronistic, codgerly, and wrong in all the right ways. When I read it, I couldn't believe the incredible "fuck you" he was giving to the people who gave him the job; he essentially said, "I picked the best I could find out of what they gave me to pick from, but American poetry will probably die before long, and only a few of these are even close to the best poetry I've ever read."

He started his introduction with a quote from Thucydides: "They have the numbers, we, the heights." By "we," he meant the scholars who still thought art was about aesthetics, meaning what was good, beautiful, and perceptive. By "they," he meant those whose thought art was about politics and the dull sub-categories of politics like gender, sexual orientation, etc. His immediate venom in that introduction was aimed at the 1996 Best American Poetry volume, from which he did not pick one poem for his ten-year wrap-up. He thought nearly all the poems in it were terrible. He claimed guest editor Adrienne Rich had followed "the criteria now operative: what matters most are the race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, and political purpose of the would-be poet."

Bloom had a more enduring irritant than the 1996 BAP in mind, though, and he swept up his vitriol against it along with ranting at Rich's choices. He was taking shots at cultural shifts in American universities, their obsession with the various programs of cultural "studies": gender, race, orientation, etc. He saw the origin of this shift at the university as "cultural guilt," a phrase that isn't too far away in terminology or sentiment from the more popularly used "white guilt."

The focus on "cultural criticism" had weakened the ability to carry out literary criticism. Good readers were dying, and, Bloom suspected, good poetry would soon follow.

I don't know if good poetry has died, but Bloom was certainly prophetic about some things. Mainly, he was correct that the political focus on college campuses had (and still has) done little to change the political culture outside those campuses. Republicans and Democrats continue on with their political charade, capitalism continues apace, the counsels of the powerful are not troubled--then in 1997 and now.

Bloom and those who followed him have been criticized along the usual lines: there is no such thing as apolitical art, even to be apolitical is itself a political position, etc. But I think there is a more direct critique of Bloom one could make, one that is more applicable to a discussion of the 2018 BASS put together by Roxane Gay.

Would BASS 2018 have made Bloom happy, or would it have made him look like this? 

Good art and genius art

Bloom's contention was that Rich, in her choice to put identity issues first, had picked bad poems. I have no opinion on the 1996 BAP Rich put together, but I have an opinion on the 2018 BASS. Clearly, Gay was motivated even more than most editors by concerns centering on the gender, sexual orientation, race, and gender identity (a thing that had barely entered Bloom's consciousness in 1997) of the writers. One could allow that Gay was mostly just picking what interested her, and as a black, feminist, bisexual woman, what she liked reflected those interests, not a conscious decision to have any particular array of writers. But even accounting for that, there was probably some "balancing" that went on. There was still a story from a Korean-American perspective and one from a Chinese-American perspective. There were a couple of stories about Latinos. There was a story about a gay man. It had some of what is typically referred to as "balance," an attempt to have appropriate numerical diversity based on categories of identity. But it was balance on Gay's terms.

Here's the thing about that balance, though. Bloom thought Rich's choices were identity-based and bad. Gay's were identity-based and excellent. What does this do to Bloom's idea that "the school of resentment" would destroy perceptive works of art when the most identity-based collection I've ever seen was also the best BASS I've read in six years?

It wasn't uniformly excellent, but its heights were higher and there were far fewer lows than in past collections. The lowest points, interestingly, were the two white men included in the collection. There's something perfidious going on with the way men are writing these days. Men seem to be encouraged to produce works about men behaving badly, what's called "toxic masculinity" nowadays. These works tend to be gritty and violent and have characters who are not really like most men I know.

I've written my share of stories with men and violence in them. "Brokedick" was about young men who join the Marine Corps to prove their manhood, and how a man's sense of his own fitness as a man can depend on physical factors, some of which he can't even control. I wrote "What Every Parent Should Know About Head Injuries in High School Sports" (maybe the bleakest story I ever wrote) full of violent, racist football fans. But I tried to tell the whole story about toxic masculinity. I was aiming for what Bloom said about Shakespeare: "his men and women never invite us to believe that when we know the worst about them, then we know exactly who they are."

The fact is that when you're threatened by a violent man, you want another man capable of being violent more effectively to stop him. Being ready to deal that violence--which, like it or not, men are still rewarded for being able to do and disrespected for not being able to do--requires a difficult balancing act, if you intend to also live as a functioning member of an enlightened society. You have to keep a wild animal alive inside you, but keep it caged until needed. It's not easy to do, and men fail at it. But the picture we're getting isn't really the balanced and nuanced picture of maleness I'd expect from perceptive writers. In fact, it's women who are writing more memorable male characters than men, because men are expected to write their men as so appallingly bad.

Aside from that, though, the 2018 BASS is excellent. I've already cited the best works from it in my last twenty-two posts. Clearly, there is a problem in Bloom's contention that merely focusing on cultural criticism instead of literary criticism will weaken the aesthetic excellence, or "perceptiveness," of a work.

But there may be a critique of Bloom's that is worth considering here in 2018. His real concern was that genius--inexplicable, mind-bending genius--would disappear when poets had to bend to a particular political ideology. Poets were meant to be "liberating gods," those who "are free throughout the world." The 2018 BASS is full of very good stories, but all but one of them--Emma Cline's "Los Angeles"--are somewhat safe in their political convictions. They are the sorts of stories, with the sorts of sensitivities and underlying political convictions, for which literary fiction writers are rewarded nowadays. With literary fiction being closely tied to universities and their writing programs, the politics of those universities have spilled over into serious writing in America. It's hard to imagine someone with openly conservative political ideology in his work being printed in a BASS anthology. I often think Cormac McCarthy only gets away with the conservative nature of some of his work because it's mistaken for being a commentary on toxic masculinity rather than being a commentary on an effete culture that scolds masculinity on the one hand and refuses to stand up to its worst forms on the other.

The two most truly mind-blowing short stories in BASS since 2013--as long as I have been reading it--were Joshua Ferris's "The Breeze" and Elizabeth McCracken's "Thunderstruck." Neither was political. Writers should, of course, never run from writing about politics. But it can't be the only thing we have to talk about, either.

Racism, sexism, bigotry--these are all terrible evils. But none is the main evil. These are all just tools of the main evil, which is something unspeakable and more terrible than political works could ever hint at. The job of art is to uncover this unspeakable thing, to speak to it in the heart of people and somehow, implausibly, to charm it out of them. Until it's been driven from all of us, politics is just a delaying action, a game of inches gained and inches lost.

Anis Shivani wrote that competence has killed the American short story. It has led, as he put it, to stories "so very good, they're intolerably bad." The short stories of BASS 2018 are very good. But in some ways, they might be like what Bloom saw in cultural studies: a seemingly rational response to the political realities of the moment that somehow doesn't correct those political realities at all.

If Jamel Brinkley and Danielle Evans and Jacob Guajardo and Tea Obreht never move beyond writing the kinds of stories that are in BASS 2018, I'll still read them. They're that good. I hope these writers turn their energies, eventually, to more enduring themes, themes that will be recognized in fifty years or five hundred. There were already hopes in BASS 2018 of breaking out: Emma Cline wrote a political story, but a daring one that flirted with heresy within the liberal enclave of literary fiction; Kristen Iskandrian and Amy Silverberg wrote classic coming-of-age stories. Dina Nayeri managed to write a story about bigger themes than America of the moment, in spite of writing a novel very much about America at the moment.

Bloom's worries for the future were foolish and unfounded in some ways, but also troublingly prescient. America's best literary minds are sometimes too focused on fighting rear-guard actions against the political issues of the day, but because literature is a slow process in a world where we all talk about the Tweet of the day, it is not a very effective tool right now in leading the struggle. It is producing good, but not always genius, work. If I have hope, though, it's that the work is so good, I believe the best minds in American literature today will find a way to transcend the issues of the moment and produce enduring works the world will read centuries from now with profit.

BASS thoughts part one: the Internet and me

This is really a mini-post; the next two will be much meatier. I'll attempt to put this year's Best American Short Stories anthology into some kind of context historically and culturally soon, but for now, I just wanted to muse briefly on the personal meaning of one passage in this year's BASS. It's from Dina Nayeri's "A Big True":

I know the Internet isn't some deity. I know it's made up of people trying to inscribe the void, to mark the very ether with what they've lived and what they know.

I've been at this blog for over four years and written a little over 220 posts. Some of those posts were light little throwaway thoughts, but some took real work to put together. In all that time, I've had a pretty moderate readership. I've had about 33,000 hits. I'd guess one-third of those might be bots, unless Russia and Ukraine really love thoughts about writing from a small-time American writer.

So it's not a lot of readers, but there are some, and a few of those readers have been amazing. They write thoughtful replies that show they've actually taken the time to read something I wrote, absorb it, and form their own thoughts in reply. Anis Shivani, whose criticism I find incredibly on-the-nose, once commented on my blog. Amy Silverberg gave me a "Thanks!" the other day when I tweeted a link to my write-up on her story. A few other writers I've written about have sent me a note in one way or another. One friend of mine, who already spends his time reading everything he can consume, still puts time aside to read and posts on half my posts.

I've met others trying to inscribe the void on their own, like Karen Carlson, who keeps posting away on her blog for no other reason than it gives her joy to do so. There's Marc Goodson, who just wants to tell his story and won't quit until he does.

And then there's all those people who stop by for reasons I can never be sure of, since so few comment. Every post gets at least 20-40 people stopping by, and some get more. Although my son likes to point out all the YouTubers who get millions of views just by playing video games on screen, I'm happy for what readers I have. For whatever reason they browse, when I stop to think about it, it's unspeakably flattering. It's Saturday morning somewhere, and I post something, and then a guy I don't know at all, who could be doing anything and doesn't have to read what I write, chooses, of his own free will, to spend ten minutes of his day with me.

That's ten minutes of a reader opening up her mind to my best shots, my attempts to "mark the ether with what I've lived and what I know." I felt the same way about my book, once I got past the initial shock of realizing how few copies I would sell. Because as few copies as sold, there were still some that sold where I have no idea who the buyer was. Reading is hard, and a person somewhere chose to expend the effort to read me.

I've tried to write seriously about the twenty stories in BASS this year. It wasn't easy. My hope is that this effort will be of use to normal folks who gave BASS a try, the people who do something else with their lives besides think about books all the time, but who still like to try to read well. I was aiming for the literary equivalent of the YouTube video where some guy did shows you exactly how to fix the thing in your house you needed to fix. There won't be thousands of people who read this. Even though I put as much effort into this as if the whole literary world were hanging on my every word, I know I have virtually no influence on American letters. But I'm going to write like I'm America's top critic, just like when I blog about the struggles of writing, I'm going to write like America's next Melville needs my words to get them to the next step. I'm going to write like it matters, because to me it does.

I'm grateful the Internet gives me a place to share what I've written, even though the Internet is not a person to whom I can be grateful. It's easy to dismiss people following their passion projects on the Internet, but I stand by what I've written. The Internet has made us dumber in many ways, but for me this year, it allowed me to see a thing I wished existed in the world and make it exist.

And now, to conclude the way my son always tells me I should: But that's just my opinion; leave yours in the comments below. Don't forget to hit like and subscribe! 

In praise of unheralded accomplishments

Mrs. Heretic and I tried to make good use of our summer over the last few months by taking several hikes along nearby portions of the Appalachian Trail. The A/T is one of the things I most love about not just living in Maryland, but living in America. I don't think patriotism is a feeling. I think it's a kind of commitment you show when you do something for your community. But if there is ever a time I feel intense love for the country I live in, it is probably on the trail. I'm in love with the idea I live in a country with such beautiful places in it, and that we as a society cared enough to create a space within all that beauty for everyone to enjoy.

While walking the trail, we occasionally ran into some through-walkers, the people who were trying to walk the entire 2,100-mile or so trail from Georgia to Maine (or vice-versa). Two from this summer stand out in memory. One I ran into while walking with a friend, not Mrs. Heretic. This walker was actually doing a half through-walk. He started in Harper's Ferry, WV, which is the "psychological halfway point" of the trail, to the end in Maine. (The actual halfway point being some miles into Pennsylvania.) The day I ran into him was his second day on the trail. He was sitting down looking like he was going to die. He'd planned poorly. He had only tuna fish to eat, and his body was obviously out of energy. Fortunately, my friend had packed all kinds of high-energy foods in his pack, even though we were only hiking a little under ten miles. He gave them to the guy. We saw him about an hour later when we stopped along the trail to look around and he caught up to us. He looked like a whole different man.

The other guy who stands out was an extremely chatty and friendly fellow we met during one of our early summer and shorter walks. He asked us if we knew how far it was to the next park, and we stopped to answer, and before we knew it, half and hour had gone by. What I remember about him was how overweight he was. I couldn't believe he had made it from Georgia to nearly the halfway point. Especially because after we turned around on our short walk, we passed him again, shooting the breeze with another couple he'd stopped to talk to. I wondered how he had managed to stay on schedule being so social.

As it's getting on into fall, I'm wondering about those two people. Are they getting close to being done? If they do finish, will anyone be there to witness it? It was a massive undertaking for both, one that required putting life on hold for a long time. I don't know what drove either person to try to do it, but it can't be something either chose lightly.

It's also possible that when both get however far they got, nobody will be there to notice. One of the most significant things either man did in his life, in all likelihood, and of of the most difficult, and at the end, it's possible nobody cared much except them. All that might have waited for them at journey's end was an empty and indifferent parking lot, from where they'd have to figure out how to go clean up, then get themselves and their gear home.

That's what it's like for a lot of writers. There are thousands of people writing stories, and a limited number of readers. There's an especially limited number of good readers. The likely outcome of most stories that get written is that maybe, if you're lucky, a few people tied to you by bonds of love that mean they have to read it when you ask them will have seen it. They'll say a few kinds things, and that will be the end of it.

I've said many times that if I knew for sure nobody would read what I wrote, I'd stop writing. But here I am, years after first putting my thoughts down into words. I've had one book published. I've had five stories published individually. That's about 10% of all I've written, and I was lucky to get that published. I know by now how unlikely it is that anyone will every take much note of what I do, but here I am still doing it. So I clearly don't believe my own message.

The truth I'm slowly coming to accept is this: if something is worth celebrating publicly, it is also worth celebrating even if nobody takes notice. Something worth doing is worth doing for the person doing it. To have labored to walk two thousand miles or write a story or learn to play the gayageum is worthwhile, because it makes the person who does those things better. If I cannot love the thing for itself, if I am not willing to write a story that nobody will read, then I don't deserve to have it celebrated in public, because I did it for the wrong reasons.

These may just be my post-summer, artificially optimistic thoughts after soaking up all that sun and fresh air. By November, maybe I'll be back to thinking it's all foolishness. But this is how the world seems to me this rainy September morning at the end of a month when I almost could not stop writing.

Raison d'etre and the writer, explained mainly in Monty Python references

There's an old Monty Python bit about an agnostic who is protesting the racket coming from church bells. The punch line, after the agnostic finally achieves his end, is this: "I've always said there's nothing an agnostic can't do if he really doesn't know whether he believes in anything or not."

I may have objected to a joke like this at one point. I'm an agnostic, in the sense that I don't believe any religion on Earth has a convincing enough story I'm willing to overrule my skepticism and accept it. But I wouldn't say that equates to not believing in anything. That's the theist's absolutism that without God nothing means anything, not mine.

But the longer I'm alive, the more I wonder if I'll ever really be able to believe in something again, at least enough to be moved to meaningful action by it. I suppose I am moved enough by the feeling of responsibility to my family that I am willing to work a lot every week. I even put a fair amount of effort into it. So I guess I'm moved to do what nearly every other human on Earth does and work for a living. But beyond that?

If I try to come up with ideas I believe in without reservation, I can only come up with one: I believe strongly that the world is complicated and most simple answers are probably wrong. There may be elegant answers that take something complex and express it simply, but if the underlying idea is actually simple, it's probably wrong. That's it. That's all I've got.

Everything else is just things I'm sure I don't believe, followed by a lot more stuff I'm uncertain about. I know I don't believe that any of the main sects/denominations of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism offer deeply true explanations of the world. But that's just an affirmed non-belief, not an affirmative belief in something.

Lately, I've been reading Fashionable Nonsense by the physicists Alan Sokol and Jean Bricmont. It's about the way French thinkers of the 60s to the 90s who are roughly called "post-structuralist" or "post-modern," and later their followers, abused science and math concepts in order to add authority to otherwise nonsensical theories.

The "nonsense" they were attacking is no longer fashionable--the book is twenty years old--but it was still quite influential nonsense when I was an undergrad and grad student in literature in the late nineties and early aughts. I could never quite understand what the philosophers were saying. I used to credit that to my being stupid, but I'm now relatively certain that there really wasn't much there to understand, and that's what was so difficult about it. I don't think anyone else--the professors included--really knew what the hell Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, and so on were saying. They just learned key phrases and would repeat them at what seemed like the right moments--much like Sokol and Bricmont claim that these same philosophers did with math and science.

The writers of Fashionable Nonsense seem to believe these thinkers were the cause of a great deal of epistemological relativism, the notion that one way of explaining things or understanding things is as good as another. I don't know if this weird blend of linguistic theory, sham psychology, abused science, and erudite white noise was every really influential enough outside of the literary theory crowds I hung with back then to effect any real change in the culture at large, but it was certainly influential to me. Having ditched Christianity in my early twenties, finally gotten out of the Marine Corps--another cult of sorts--a few years after that, I was anxious to see what college had to show me. The best it had was these charlatans, whose message, as best I could make it out, was that everything was meaningless. The best you could say about the attempt to create meaning was that it was entertaining to watch people try to make meaning stick and then fail at it.

This intellectual nihilism flew in the face of everything that the centuries before had been about. Ever since the Enlightenment, Western intellectuals had believed in their ability to improve their understanding and the world around them through the application of human reason. I understand that--to use the general explanation of how these theories came about-- Europe grew weary of intellectual optimism after a few world wars built upon a positivism about the meanings of things nearly killed everyone. But to date, there really has been nothing that has come after de-constructionism, no reconstructive philosophy. All we've done is keep applying a new post- suffix: Post-post-post modernity.

As a writer, if I don't have some animus driving what I write, it's all just tricks and workshop hocus-pocus putting together things that seem to have what a story should have. It's achieving all the formal, external characteristics of story without any of the heart of it. Stories can certainly be satirical; they can serve to tear down what needs to go. They have also, though, been the mythos that energized civilizations, that caused them to work and explore and create and fight and do all the good and bad things that civilizations do. I don't see much of that in the stories I read today. The world is too much with us, and our ambition is much too small.

I say this as an inveterate deconstructionist. It's not unusual for me to play the role of iconoclast in the social settings I inhabit. And I don't always have to have the answer. I don't need to know how to cook a steak well to know my steak tastes like shit, to use a metaphor a friend of mine often cites. But once in a while, I ought to be ready to offer a vision of what I want more of rather than just what I want less of.

My brother, a lawyer in the Air Force, recently wrote a piece for the War College entitled "Hope Isn't A Strategy, It's the Only Strategy." My brother has apparently been in one too many meetings where someone wrote off an idea that didn't have every base covered ahead of time by saying "hope is not a strategy." My brother points out that while it is of course important to plan, waiting for a perfect plan before acting just prevents action indefinitely. I read a copy of it before he published it, and it influenced my thinking when I wrote about liberal pessimism last week.

As a writer, I don't have to know everything about the universe to have something worth writing about. There can be a certain ad hoc nature to truth. It can be something you find out as you go. That's a lot different than the intellectual certainty that pre-dated the deconstructionists. It's more difficult to obtain. But accepting that truth on my terms in more difficult than I thought it would be once upon a time doesn't mean it's not there. Some things, you figure out beforehand. Others, you jump, and you figure out on the way down how you're going to land.

Parachute or pancake, at least you've done something. And it's a lot more fun believing you might be able to solve the riddle and failing than just giving up trying.

Quixotic citizenship

When the Nunes memo came out on Friday, I took some time to read through it. Then I took some more time to read a few background stories on some of the key people: Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Rod Rosenstein, etc. It wasn't exhaustive research; all-in, I spent maybe 45 minutes. It was an important moment in the political life of the country, and I thought I should put in a minimum amount of effort to know what was what. I'd say what I did constituted about the minimum.

I then watched as one person after another posted opinions on my social media feed that showed they had done--let's say somewhat less than the minimum amount of reading.

I've been wondering a lot lately whether American democracy is a doomed project. It requires a lot of work out of its citizens, but if it forces that work out of its citizens, then democracy dies. So it relies on a personal sense of responsibility in each of us. A state founded on trust in the sense of personal responsibility of its citizens seems overly optimistic these days.

That makes the work of being an informed citizen feel hopelessly quixotic. It's rather like what writing short stories or these blog posts sometimes feels like to me. It takes a lot of work, and the whole time I'm doing that work, a voice in the back of my head is telling me that it's unlikely all that work will bear any fruit. In the case of stories, I'm up against tall odds getting them published, and even when they do get published, they aren't read by many people. In the case of this blog, it often feels like I'm shouting into the void. Other than a couple of friends, I'm not sure anyone even reads this. But I feel a compulsion and a responsibility to express my thoughts. Leaving behind the results of your own struggle to figure out the world for others is a basic human activity. Without it, I don't think we'd survive long. So I write, and try not to think too much about how little it's heeded.

For a citizen in America, there are other, competing demands on our time, and putting in the effort to know something about what's what in the world probably seems like wasted effort. What difference does it make if I spend a few minutes to learn about something? I have no influence, so the impact in the world of me knowing what I'm talking about is, on a practical level, exactly the same as if I knew nothing.

Yet here I am, writing on another Sunday morning. The world relies on individually meaningless acts of billions of people, acts that are meaningful only in an aggregate manner that we will never comprehend, one we really have to take on faith.

America might be doomed. Nobody who doesn't know me personally might ever read anything I write. I press on, not because I think my individual efforts can change either thing, but because the alternative is to quit, and that seems more frightening to me than to lose a battle slowly, contesting every inch of ground along the way.

Translation as a way of life

My son, much to my chagrin, likes memes. I've been trying lately--mostly to better understand him, but also so I have some idea what to make of this powerful force in our culture--to go through a list of videos he recommended to me on "memetics." I can't say I've yet overcome my initial impression that Internet meme culture sacrifices intellectual honesty and precision in order to obtain wit and conciseness, but I'm learning that it's richer than it initially seemed to me.

One video on my recommended play list is Emp Lemon's takedown of Behind the Meme. For background, "Behind the Meme" is a YouTube channel that explains memes to those who aren't familiar with them. Emp Lemon's main complaint is that in trying to explain meme culture to outsiders (whom they term "normies"), Behind the Meme dumbs down Internet meme culture. Emp Lemon claims that rather than trying to bring outsiders inside, Behind the Meme takes something that only makes sense within its own native culture and bastardizes it by bringing it outside.

If you have to ask for an explanation like I did, then it's you this meme is talking about. Also, I apologize for using what I'm sure is a "stale meme." 

I'm familiar with this 

I'm a translator for a living. I mean that in the literal sense: I take stuff from one language and render it in English. I find it to be a profound responsibility. I not only need to get it right for the target audience, those who will read it in English, but I also have a responsibility to get it right for those being translated. It's hard enough for two people in this world to understand each other when they grew up in the same house. A bad translator can add misunderstanding exponentially.

I've started to think lately that I take on the attitude of a translator in my private life as a semi-professional writer. That is, whether as a fiction writer or a non-fiction writer (like here on this blog), I often semi-consciously see myself as a translator. I try to explain writing to those who are outside, trying to find a way in. But I also try to explain cultures I've had a chance to get somewhat inside of to those who are outside of them. In my last post, for example, I not only tried to explain something about stressed African-American communities in places like Baltimore where my wife taught, but also to explain something about conservative, evangelical-leaning communities to liberals.

This isn't, perhaps, the most purely writerly way of doing things. A lot of writers would think like Emp Lemon, that the goal of a story isn't to bring a character to someone else, it's to present the character in a pure and authentic way that allows the reader to come to the character. The writer isn't a bridge halfway between the world of the character and the reader; the writer is a door that opens to the character's world, and the reader must make a choice to open it and go in.

I can't help myself

I've been accused of waffling a lot as a writer and a thinker. Even when I clearly have an opinion, I feel it necessary to first prove that I understand what the other side thinks, that I know why they have this opinion, that I respect that opinion and see its value to some extent, but that I merely disagree in specific ways. I just can't help myself. A long run as a translator has made me sensitive to how often people are talking past one another, even when they speak the same language.

Of course, any time you try to interject yourself into a conversation two people are having, you risk them turning on you. Even if you did it to try to help, you may face the question, "Who asked you to translate for me?" A younger Ta-Nehisi Coates once determined not to be a translator of his culture to outsiders. As Robin D.G. Kelley sums it up in an excellent summary of the recent Coates-West Twitter war:

Coates found his calling during a particularly combative period for black intellectuals. In March of 1995, West was the target of a scurrilous attack by New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier, an essay promoted on the issue’s cover with the headline “The Decline of the Black Intellectual.” A month later Adolph Reed, Jr., followed with a piece in the Village Voice titled, “What Are the Drums Saying, Booker?: The Curious Role of the Black Public Intellectual” which names West, Michael Eric Dyson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., bell hooks, and yours truly. In the essay, Reed characterizes us as modern-day minstrels and attacks us for being “translators” of black culture to white folks, and thus palatable to fawning white liberals. Reed’s piece left a deep impression on Coates. As he recalls in We Were Eight Years in Power, “I was determined to never be an interpreter."

Later, however, Coates grew to think differently:

"It did not occur to me (Coates) that writing is always some form of interpretation, some form of translating the specificity of one’s roots or expertise or even one’s own mind into language that can be absorbed and assimilated into the consciousness of a broader audience. Almost any black writer publishing in the mainstream press would necessarily be read by whites. Reed was not exempt. He was not holding forth from The Chicago Defender but from The Village Voice, interpreting black intellectuals for that audience, most of whom were white.”

Like it or not, there will always be translation, because it is human to want to understand what is outside our experience. Ultimately, the goal would always be to understand the other on its own terms, but that's simply not possible. We can't all read the Bible in Greek.(And even if we can, we can't all learn Aramaic to try to guess at what the underlying words of Christ were that the Greek is a translation of.)

Translator and Interpreter

Coates used the terms "translator" and "interpreter" interchangeably, but of course, strictly speaking, they are very different roles. An interpreter rapidly changes spoken words from one language to another. I respect interpreters a lot. It's a role that requires linguistic virtuosity, in my view. I can only do it in a pinch, and rather poorly. Except for volunteer work, I almost never interpret. I almost always only translate, and then only into my native language. This is a much easier form of translation. I can translate a Korean novel into English, but I'd have a terrible time translating even my own stories into Korean.

There's something about the etymology and just the feel of the two words, interpreter and translator, that are revealing about the differing psychology. "Interpret" is from a combination of "inter," meaning "between," and, most likely, a verb meaning "to sell" or "to traffic in." The interpreter is literally between two things. "Translate," however has a notion of crossing over, "trans" meaning "across." There is even a meaning to the word where one is literally translating objects from one place to another. In order to translate, you don't stand between two worlds, you go to one and bring something back from it to another.

While in the day-to-day world, both interpreting and translation have their place, if I take the psychological notion of these things into writing, I begin to have some idea what I view as legitimate translation. Legitimate translation is not interpreting, which is primarily a business-focused activity focused on some tangible end, like negotiating a trade deal. Cultural translation is legitimate only if it truly brings one world into another. It requires transporting oneself between two locations.

Ideally, the best translator will be so effective at bringing one world into another, it will almost feel that the translator is in two worlds at once. This is the only way the two worlds really have a chance to understand one another if what they hope for is more than just a transactional kind of co-existence. It is, however, hard on the translator. Being eternally in more than one world ends up leaving the translator feeling a little rootless. I sometimes wonder if I have spent so much time trying to communicate the values of one group to another, I don't even know what my own values are anymore. There is a kind of madness in being a translator.

That's how Borges viewed Shakespeare. In "Everything and Nothing," Borges imagines Shakespeare like this:

There was no one in him; behind his face (which even in the poor paintings of the period is unlike any other) and his words, which were copious, imaginative, and emotional, there was nothing but a little chill, a dream not dreamed by anyone. At first he thought everyone was like him, but the puzzled look on a friend’s face when he remarked on that emptiness told him he was mistaken and convinced him forever that an individual must not differ from his species.

Shakespeare ends up coping with his inability to be himself by being hundreds of people, by being each of the characters he creates. Still, at the end, he desires some self-identity:

The story goes that, before or after he died, he found himself before God and he said: “I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man: myself.” The voice of God replied from a whirlwind: “Neither am I one self; I dreamed the world as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the shapes of my dream are you, who, like me, are many persons—and none.”

I do get tired of writing sometimes. It's hard to work to bring some character to life, to be that character for a while, to bring that character from his world into this one, and then to have nothing to show for it except that I've done it. For now, I'm still continuing along this road I've picked for myself, both in my day job and in the writing I still hope might one day be my day job. But it's a long road to travel on, and I do find myself longing sometimes to be one man and myself.