Is it fair to use real people in poems or fiction? Strictly speaking, it’s probably not. But the people in poems and stories are never “real.” Even in memoir, they’re re-imagined and re-purposed.
This leaves them in an interesting spot. Charles Foster Kane is not William Randolph Hearst—not exactly. The Charles Lindberg in The Plot Against America is not really Charles Lindberg. Richard III is not Richard III. Consider this hypothetical: I make a friend of a bad-ass death metal guitarist who happens to also have a non-ironic tattoo of a little kitty cat. I decide to incorporate these two contrasting details into a novel in a character who shares no other characteristics with my friend. Still, my new friend quite reasonably believes himself reproduced in the book, and if the character is evil or stupid or perverted, my friend will justifiably object. I think the only answer, really, is to write the best books and poems you can, try to write what’s true—even in a fictional context, especially in a fictional context—and go to bed at night dreaming about what you’ll write tomorrow.
In High School, a man came to speak to our class. This happened now and then; various so-called inspirational and motivational types came in and told us not to do drugs or to try our best or whatever else. (Kevin Butler from the Bears also came and spoke but that was his community service.) But I remember this man. Most speakers spoke in the auditorium or the gymnasium but this guy had to speak to our Study Hall, which was a room about the width of a classroom but three or four times deeper. He had to shout to be heard and the farther back you sat the less chance you had to see him. I couldn’t see him at all. But I did give him an A for effort; he certainly was trying. I have no memory at all about anything he said except his closing. I think I remember it because:
a) it involved monks (which I always thought were cool–especially the sort that could beat ass with their bare hands and use psionics) and
b) because he made a point of saying he was cutting some part or another of his talk because he had to save time for this story. In a very simplistic paraphrasing, the story went something like this:
In order to pass the last of a series of intense trials, the young, aspiring monks at the monastery were required to enter a room full of horrors. This room contained such awful sights and sounds, they were both too terrible to behold and at the same time impossible to ignore. In fact, the room was filled with monks who had entered and never left, but stood, dull, gray ghosts enchanted by the room’s contents.
One of the aspirants asked, “But how then can anyone get through it?”
The older, wise monk leader said, “As long as you keep moving forward, it can’t hurt you. It’s only when you stop to look that you will never emerge.”
Now, picture a boiling classroom of a hundred or so snoozing students and you can imagine with how little enthusiasm the man’s story was greeted. I thought about it a lot though. I liked it and I wanted it to be significant but really couldn’t figure out how it could be. How did the analogy work exactly? Were the awful sights drugs? Or drinking? What did “moving forward” mean? Doing your homework each night?
But lately it resonates. The awful sights are the ones we all know about plus the deep ones that we don’t talk about. The moving forward–for me at least–is writing. Word by word, word by word, word by word…
“Writers only think they are interested in politics, they are not really, it gives them a chance to talk and writers like to talk but really no real writer is really interested in politics.”
“After all, everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.”
“One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.”
I hope Tea Party Gothic is the right writing project and yields something at the end. The miracles have come but they aren’t daily. Too much of it seems to end up in odd back story, that, if untold, would seem like omission, but as told seems less than compelling. When I wrote Q Without A U, I muddled my way through it but when it was done, it was more or less finished. Here, my goal is just to spill all the ink and see what pattern the stain takes.
A few months ago, a friend sent me this video of a Family Feud. It’s hard to hear but the question is “Name a crime that we’ve all considered committing at least once.” The man answers, “Rape.” You can hear my friend laughing. I laughed too when I saw it. As everyone knows, it’s funny because rape is not a crime we’ve all considered committing at least once. Well, almost everyone knows that…
I’ve watched the strange recent journey of Dilbert creator Scott Adams with morbid curiosity. From his strange post about men’s rights (in which he compares women to the mentally disadvantaged) to his sock puppetry (in which, under a different name, he declares himself a “certified genius”) to, most recently, his odd post about “Pegs and Holes.” In this post, he begins by arguing that society has repressed all of the male human’s natural urges, some of which have surfaced recently as bad behavior including, as he says, “tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world.” (Full disclosure: I have taken part in tweeting.) Then ends by positing a dystopian future in which men will take castration pills to free themselves of their annoying sex drives. (Spoiler alert: that’s not happening.)
Afterwards, Adams challenged writers critical of him to an email exchange, warning them, “It will not go well for you.” Among those taking him up on his challenge was Mary Beth Williams, who fully and completely pwned Scott Adams (or as I called him in my tweet to her “Mr. Douchey”). You can read for yourself. But it wasn’t a fight, it was an execution.
After I read it, I did tweet at Mary (Mary Beth?) to thank her for defending me (from the charge of secretly longing to commit some sort of sexual assault) and my daughter, 19 months old (from the cynical world Adams thinks he inhabits where girls and women exist only as meat on sticks to tempt the caged beasts).
There’s no need to cover again the merits (ha) of Adams’s argument. Or lack thereof, because a lot of his energy seems to be devoted to complaining about being misunderstood–always with the implication that we’re just not smart enough to understand what he’s saying. But I did want to cover one thing. I’ve seen him make the point more than once that “My only goal is to be interesting. Ideas are society’s fuel. [blah blah blah].” But the tension between what a man’s heart wants and what his dick might momentarily want is not a particularly original thought (not even with the rape element added). I’ve had a number of discussions in dorm rooms and bars where friends and acquaintances have the expressed this very notion–and usually much more eloquently and interestingly. (My response FWIW has always been, “There’s no law that says you have to get married. There’s no law that says you have to stay married. And as for ‘society,’ what can it actually do to you after all?”) If you want to be interesting and provocative, Scott Adams, why don’t you try doing it in your work? That’s what art is for. Give us all a break from the fundamental unfunniness of Dilbert.
Today’s 20×200 featured art work is Yosuke Yamaguchi’s brilliant, evocative “slow ending.” Based on the title, I guess it’s supposed to be a concert lasting so long that the audience has left and not only left but left a while ago. On the other hand though there is the elephant. And for me at first glance (and second and third), it seemed more like an audience left in devastation. Something’s gone horribly wrong yet the show goes on.
My novel Q Without A U ends with a performance of The Music Man. In the early stages of writing, I’d pictured an ending something like this one. Some disaster, some misfortune, and the performance would collapse and in a surreal, stylized disappointment that would be, actually, much cooler than its real ending. In other words, if I could draw the above picture, I would have.
At the time, I was particularly influenced by an Edward Gorey drawing. I was looking for it this evening. In my memory, it was a picture of a girl on stage, her hair blowing in the wind from an open door somewhere in the theater. In the doorway, you could see the prickly tops of leafless trees. I couldn’t find it. I’m not sure it ever existed. I may have been thinking of this picture from The Headless Bust and made up the rest:
(Captioned:
When the piano lid fell down
It ripped the back from off her gown;
The diva in a tearing rage
Forever left the concert stage)
But as any artist knows, the work often makes its own decisions and nothing quite so stylized happens, though it is a disaster in its own way. That section of the novel ends with:
Then, just as quickly, the auditorium empties. Darcy and Marlo don’t leave right away, but stand to let the other patrons in their row out.
Marlo shakes her head. She looks confused. “Was it just me? Or was it really weird this time?”
Families often have empty spaces and places you’re not allowed to tread, though usually they’re figurative. In Jonathan Lethem’s “The Empty Room,” they’re physical. Or rather one, a single room in a suburban home that the father requires to be kept vacant of, well, everything. It’s not a sinister locked room like the attic in Gothic novel, but neither is it the fun sort of nook I remember from my grandparents’ house years ago. It just sits empty. The kids can bring their toys in but have to take them out again when they leave. The father takes the (in my opinion, unlikely) step of creating a sign-in sheet for the room which the mother proceeds to monitor and enforce. Eventually, the narrator grows up and leaves for college, and, later still (spoiler alert) returns home with his new girlfriend in tow and smugly fills the empty room with awesome sex and pot smoke.
For a very short story, it has a lot to say–but the larger, symbolic meanings seemed to crowd out the literal ones.
An odd story this one. A nicely written and understated prose poem about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas interspersed with a first-person love story that didn’t say much of anything. Well, it did have a lot to say about what “Love is…” “Love is an ecosystem like any other” and “harder to solve than the Grand Unified Theory of Everything”. Word. Then, like a little dash of spice, there’s a paragraph or two of contempt for social media and younger people: “Look at their Facebook faces, defiant, unhappy. The F-words. Facebook, fucking, frigid, faking it.” The narrator doesn’t find it endearing to find museum patrons not appreciating the art. (And, really, who does?)
I’ve always liked Gertrude Stein. The first thing I’d ever read of hers was “As a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story,” which, if you haven’t read it, is the words in the title repeated along with “nearly all of it to be” for a page and a half or so. This was in a 300-level seminar on modernism. We had to write a response paper and I filled it with academic nonsense only to find out the next day that “cow” was Gertrude’s word for an orgasm. A fact that Jeanette Winterson also mentions then expands upon with a gorgeous pair of sentences that do as much towards explaining why I like Gertrude as anything else:
Nobody knows why – unless Alice made moo noises when she hit it. Gertrude said, ‘I am the best cow-giver in the world.’ Gertrude Stein liked repetition too – of verbs and words and orgasms.
Looking at my bookshelf this weekend while choosing a new book for the train, for a moment, I let my hand rest on Gertrude Stein’s Q.E.D., a very early work that I’ve always meant to read. Maybe it’s time to pick it up.
My friend’s dad died yesterday, and even though my own dad died a long time ago, I don’t ever like to say, “I know how you feel.” I can say with some confidence that it sucks though.
I love Lydia Davis and I love her short piece in, Granta, “The Dreadful Mucamas.” It reads like a series of short diary entries. Often repeating words multiple times in the same paragraph, she’s always been a fan of breaking literary conventions, but always to a purpose. In this story, the perfect juxtaposition of the mundane and the sinister. Buried in the minutiae, the exact reason I’ve always been glad to be nowhere near rich enough to hire servants.
