Disappointed in You.

In one of my classes we just read the Gertrude Stein essay “Composition as Explanation” and I had to write a “response”. I’ve posted it below. If you’re not familiar with Stein, she was one of those boho American writers living in Paris in the ;20s. She was played by Kathy Bates in “Midnight in Paris” (See? Now you’re all like, “Oh yeah, I remember that!” I’m so disappointed in you). She was big on repetition in her writing but like REALLY into it and she would write sentences that worked like mobius strips. Imagine if someone with a stutter was obsessed with the word ‘repetition’, that’s what her writing is like.

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Wilbur Wright Finally Opens Up About Creative Writing.

Below are a couple of pieces of writing I have done recently for my Theories of Fiction class. You were probably smart enough not to pursue an English degree (you probably majored in something like Getting-a-Job or Having-a-Skill) and so I will briefly tell you what a Theories of Fiction class is:

Basically it is just a study in how writing works and what it does. Sort of. Imagine that you wanted to learn how to fix a bicycle and so you took a class called “Theories of Bicycle Repair” and then you showed up to class with a wrench and some spare tires and they handed you a book about how to fix a bicycle. And you’re all like, “Well that’s cool, but I had to walk here because my bicycle needs fixed” and then for the rest of the semester you talked about different ways to fix a bicycle and people were saying things like, “In Wilbur Wright’s essay about bicycle repair he said that before you can fix a bicycle you have to understand what sort of bicycle you are fixing, so let’s spend a couple hours talking about different types of bicycles” and you’re all like, “Well that’s cool, but I have to walk home later because my bicycle is still broken” and everybody was like, “Yeah, but is it really broken? It is still a bike, right?” and then you’re all like, “Well yeah, but …” and then they’re all like, “Maybe you just aren’t appreciating the multitude of possibilities of what a bike can be? Maybe you have an ideological bias about what a bicycle is supposed to do. Why are you oppressing the liminal potentialities of what a bicycles can be? Did you ever think of that?” and then class is over and you walk home.

This is an unfair characterization. I actually love the class and I enjoy the people in it and I like the reading. That being said, the nature of the class is that it is about how to repair a bicycle, not about repairing a bicycle.

For the sake of clarity I should mention that a Theories of Fiction class is different than a Critical Theories of Literature class (which I have talked about on here before). A Critical Theories of Literature class is more like a history of intellectual thinking as it relates to literature. Critical Theories also tends to be one of the hardest classes any English major has to take, but it is invaluable to me as a writer and as a person, primarily because it requires one to rapidly move between different modes of thought. One week you will work your ass off trying to understand one way of thinking (say Structuralism) and when you finally get it you say, “This is fucking great! I totally get it and I think I am a Structuralist now!” and then the very next week you will have to work your ass off trying to understand a way of thinking which is actively diametrically opposed to the way you just learned to think (say Deconstruction vs. Structuralism) and you end up saying, “Wait, I also understand this! I now renounces my Structuralist past! I am a Deconstructionist now!” then a week later you end up being something else.

The end result of all this a sort of wonderful elasticity of the mind, known in most other disciplines as “Schizophrenia”.

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Getting My Manifesto On.

Aesthetic Manifesto: Draft 1

James Bezerra

One sure sign that you have ended up in the weeds while attempting to write your aesthetic manifesto is that you freely and under no threat of duress return to the manifesto of Dadaism. Asking Tristan Tzara for help is probably about as good of an idea as asking William S. Burroughs to write the tax code; it will be fascinating, it will likely not be illuminating.

Because we expect our manifestos to be jaunty and bombastic and pamphlet-able, I am breaking this one up into bite-sized chunks, like chicken in soup.

The nighttime work of a writer is writing. The day job work of a writer is the amassing of tools to be placed into a toolbox. These tools can be words or styles or strategies or thoughts or images or people or - as is frequently the case in my own life - whiskey.

I have not yet formulated a Grand Unified Theory of my own writing. Or rather, I have not yet figured out how to write it down. But I have some thoughts:

Tzara did write things like, “knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: DADA”. You gotta admire a guy who writes like that. I think I would have enjoyed being a Dadaist, though I don’t think they would have enjoyed me. I think I would have liked being a Trotskyite too, though I have never been able to decide if my affinity for Trotsky is entirely the fault of David Ives.

My aunt used to own a small box. It was made of light colored wood and half the size of a brick and it didn’t open, exactly. It was a kind of rudimentary Rubik’s Cube she’d picked up in Hong Kong. Slide one side in order to move a peg inside in order to release the top panel to slide away in order to be able to hinge open the other side, etc etc etc.

I write like that.

I try to build magical little clockwork black boxes. All writing should have within it a kind of mystery; that creates the joy of reading. The act of writing then, is the act of building that mystery (shout out here to Sarah McLachlan) and it is one of the most problematic acts of joy and most complicated acts of problem-solving I have ever even heard of. I think about writing the way that chess players think about chess: that it is an insane pleasure which will probably one day crush me and drive me completely batshit out of my mind.

I’ve been writing basically my entire life. I used to use a machine called a ‘word processor’, which was like a box where you kept all of your frustrations and paper jams. Early on as a writer I made a list of things that I did not want to write about. An excerpt:  

• Cops
• Doctors
• Medical examiners
• Criminals out for one last score
• Astronauts (I have no idea why this ended up on the list. I was 12.)
• Heroic G.I. Joe-esque soldiers
• Wise-beyond-their-years children
• Fearless and high-moral investigative journalists
• James Bond ripoffs
• Any type of character that Tom Cruise might one day want to play
• Chosen Ones (Luke Skywalker, Neo, Jesus, Harry Potter, etc.)
• Rockstars
• Serial killers

The list goes on.

Other people will invariably write that shit and god love them for doing it, but the world is far too weird and complicated and confused and mysterious of a place for me to spend my time doing it.

The most recent thing I wrote was about a guy who needed to find 50 mimes real fast.

I find myself returning to Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins about once a year. The way that some people return to Don Quixote or the Bible. For me, Still Life is about as perfect, small, and beautiful of a novel as has ever been written. From the kitchen table where I do all my writing I can see it. I also make sure that I can always see the spines of Steve Erickson’s Amnesiascope, Amiee Bender’s Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, One Hundred Years of Solitude by my man Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and at least one Vonnegut novel though I waffle often over which one that should be (Slaughterhouse-Five or Mother Night). These books are my extended, portable, literary family.

For the record: Yes, I just said Still Life is as nearly perfect of a thing as I have read.

That’s not true.

I have actually read the one perfect thing that exists and it is a short story by Carol Shields called “Various Miracles”. I will not defame it by saying any more about it.

I feel like I am still in the weeds.

Our writing must contain joy. Not happiness, but joy.

I like the act of attempting to make the ridiculous not ridiculous.

I love the words: svelte, duck, ephemeral, tart, slick, syllogism, phosphorescent, emitting.

I hate the words: cacophony, webinar, Hegelian, parataxis, jurisprudence, chalk.

Our writing should be charming bordering on snarky, sexy bordering on lurid, clever bordering on obnoxious, honest bordering on profane, and ultimately when the mystery box finally slides open and reveals itself to us, it should be tender. Our writing should always be like writing to a complicated lover, in that it should hold everything we are capable of feeling. It should be the most true thing about us.

Dada.

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You Are Welcome.

So if you have any interest in going back to college and majoring in Creative Writing, there are some things that you need to know. I am not going to try to tell you about it all, but what I have done for you is start to make you a crib sheet for understanding what the hell everybody is talking about. It is not as bad as law school or anything, but it is significantly more subjective.

The list below is wildly incomplete, but what I have tried to do is translate a word or phrase that you might hear in an English or Creative Writing class and give you the actual meaning.

A special thanks to Chris P. who unwittingly has helped compile this list (Chris is a man among men, a champion among winners. He created “English Department Buzz Word Bingo” which is exactly what it sounds like. We play it during class).

So onward to the translation!

What we say = What we mean

“Thumbnail sketch” = A quick physical description of a character.

“Dialogue” = When people talk.

“Conflation” = Confusion.

“Plot” = The part that was like a movie.

“Exposition” = Boring.

“Poetic” = Pretty-sounding words.

“Motif” = Something that happens a lot, as in, “I like saying ‘motif’. Motif!”

“Deconstruction” = “I have had a Critical Theories of Literature class.”

“Autobiographical” = “I am too lazy/self-absorbed to write about anything but myself.”

“Fragmented Narrative” = “I ran out of time before class to finish writing this.”

“Theme” = “What I really want you to know about what I think about stuff.”

“Diction” = The words in this story.

“… Hegelian …” = “I’m an asshole.” (Anyone who ever invokes Hegel is an asshole).

“I’m a grad student.” = “I’m probably an asshole”

“(Your story) is structurally unfit.” = “I am an asshole with both a superiority and inferiority complex.”

“I’m not making a value judgment …” = “I am totally judging you right now.”

“Nouveau riche” = “I took a class where we had to read The Great Gatsby.”

“Tertiary Removal” = “I know lots of big words about stuff.”

“Authenticity” = “Why don’t you write like Juno Diaz?”

As I said, this is an incomplete glossary. I will work on it some more for you.

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Teeth.

By now you have probably caught on to the fact that I am largely of the mindset that you (dear reader) do not exist and this blog is just a vanity project and maybe also a way to have an online presence as a writer. No, no, it’s okay, you don’t have to try to convince me otherwise, because I know you can’t, because you’re a Russian internet bot. It’s okay, I accept you as your are.

That being said, I do find it to be tremendously freeing to know that no one reads this thing and that the bots probably don’t speak English anyway.

I find it freeing because I can say whatever I want and also that if I want to just drop the word TEETH into the middle of a sentence for no TEETH reason, well then I can do that and it doesn’t even TEETH matter, because you’re not reading this anyway.

I mention all this only because last week I was sitting in a creative writing class and we were in small groups doing critiques of one another’s (very) short stories. Well a guy I know from another class who is actually a really great TEETH guy and about whom everyone can agree (on his great-guy-ness) read this thing I had written and all he really said to me was, “You must write a lot” and I thought it was an odd comment at the time and I have been thinking about it off and on over this last week and it occurred to me that, yeah, I guess I do write a lot. I’ve been at this since I was about 6 and while I do not TEETH write as much as I should be, between the academic work I have done for school over the years, the creative work I have done for school over the years, the creative work I do on my own for fun, and the writing I do here for you (dear reader), that I do a lot of writing.

I’m not boasting or anything. Malcolm Gladwell says to be good at anything you have to put in 10,000 hours and so I always just figured that I’m putting in my TEETH hours.

Well, enter this article that a friend sent to me:

Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One.

There is some great stuff in here which in my limited experience is applicable to any group of writers, not just the MFA kids.

This is probably the line that resonates with me the most because I am constantly thinking of saying it (politely-ish): “The vast majority of my students were hardworking, thoughtful people devoted to improving their craft despite having nothing interesting to express and no interesting way to express it.”

Many of my peers in the MA program I’m in right now seem to be between about 24 and 27, which more or less means that they have gone straight from high school to college undergrad to grad school. They’re generally okay people but I want to tell them that they need to get the fuck away from college for awhile and go do something. Really it doesn't even matter what, just anything. Just be elsewhere for a bit. I tried to convince the department chair that part of the creative writing curriculum should involve being forced to work on a fishing trawler in the north Pacific for a season, but she looked at me like I was crazy. That happens to me a lot around here. You try telling a 24-year-old working on her Masters degree that her writing would get so much better if she spent a year working a loading dock somewhere. People don’t like to hear those things and sometimes I occasionally forget to say them nicely.

I’m being a bit too navel-gazing-y here, but what do you TEETH care? You’re a Russian internet bot, what the hell else do you have to do right now?

Obviously my opinion that writers should have to spend a while suffering out there in the wild (that’s what I say to people here, that I learned to write in “the wild” — meaning not-school. Yeah, I’m that much of an insufferable prick.) is entirely based on my own experience with the world. I’m at least not pretending otherwise. All I can offer is the best advice I have, but in this case, I think the advice is solid.

I was recently having a conversation like this with some friends and I said that despite how uncomfortable I am with the fact I am frequently TEN YEARS older than some of the other students in my classes, I’m happy with the circuitous path I’ve taken through life, if only because I’ve had the opportunity to figure out what I value as a person and because as a writer I had the opportunity to learn how to write on my own. What I actually said was, “Can you imagine how much more of an asshole I would be if I had gone straight through college and into an MFA program?” See? I do have the occasional lucid TEETH moment.

I do take one small issue with a paragraph at the end of the MFA article. He says:

We've been trained to turn to our phones to inform our followers of our somewhat witty observations. I think the instant validation of our apps is an enemy to producing the kind of writing that takes years to complete.

All the current thinking about the online life bothers me because of this “instant validation” idea. I have a Facebook, a Twitter, an Instagram, and this here blog, and I have always found validations completely elusive. So let’s not conflate the digital existence with "instant validation". I took a really good picture of my food yesterday and I don’t think anyone even TEETH cared!  

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The Future of Literature. And Stuff.

Because I am desperately trying to avoid writing my linguistics paper (and because I had kind of a weird day), I have spent the last few hours reading about the future of literature. I’m not trying to seem fancy; all I did was type “the future of literature” into google and then read the first couple pages that came up. Anyway, having conducted this survey of “the literature” on the topic, I think that I can say with authority that no one has any idea what they are talking about.

That is not -- BTW -- to say that I do.

Life is not a zero sum game, people.

If this is a topic that interests you, then you should absolutely read Ewan Morrison’s two-part series for The Guardian. It’s some of the most interesting and thoughtful and fun and wonky writing I have read in awhile. He also -- very gently -- goes to town on the complicated and troubled legacy that Harry Potter leaves us with. I’m glad people are starting to tackle that. I’ll get to it one of these days.

Otherwise, I can’t say that I have learned that much from my readings tonight. The crazy homeless stark raving mad contrarian in me would normally be happy to stand in the digital town square and yell at listicle writers who have never heard of me about how wrong I think they are about stuff, but I’m just not in that kind of mood.

I have things like “the future of literature” on my mind because I’m doing revisions on a short story right now and I think it is one of the more interesting and complicated short stories I’ve written (this is the D. B. Cooper thing I have mentioned before) and as good as I think it could be, I am left with this resounding and empty feeling that can only be described as who-gives-a-fuck-ness.

Now keep in mind, I said already that I am having kind of a weird day. If who-gives-a-fuck-ness was a big concern of mine then I wouldn’t have been writing this blog for the last 150 years, because - you know - no one reads these things anymore anyway.

I think the who-gives-a-fuck-ness thing is on my mind because I have been thinking alot about a conversation I had recently with one of my professors, who I respect very much. He is a professor second and a writer first and that’s why I respect him. He mentioned casually that MFA programs seem now to be looking for extracurriculars in their candidates just as much as undergrad admission officers are. That is to say that the fancy writing programs of America care as much about whether you were the prom king or the treasurer of your frat as much as they do about your writing.

I am being simplistic and reductive here, of course. But not by much.

The professor I respect was not saying that this is a good thing, he was just saying.

Well that thought has been stuck in my craw for a little while now.

I’m not Salinger or anything, but I am a bit of a loner simply as a matter of practicality and the idea of having to join things and make small talk with people in order to get what I want just annoys me to no end. “There is something to be said for Fascism, after all” Ezra Pound said.

(I made that up about Pound, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t say it.)

So add to that festering thought the idea (gleaned from my research tonight) that no one has any earthly idea what they’re talking about ... well that just seems unreasonable. The idea that there are gatekeepers I can accept (agents, editors, publishers, MFA boards, etc.) but the idea that the gatekeepers themselves have no fucking clue what they’re doing? Well that just annoys me.

In many ways I guess the internet is just a bunch of people standing really far apart while screaming at eachother. So maybe that is what I am trying to say here: that there is a lack of reasonable authority in the answers I am finding.

That’s life though, right? No religion or value system really holds up to pragmatic scrutiny, ultimately.

I guess that I sat down here tonight and googled something as pretentious as “the future of literature” because it is something that I find interesting both professionally and personally and because it is 100% not a conversation that I am having with human beings in my actual life (and I am a grad student in a creative writing program). I sit through (and sometimes enjoy) a lot of lectures and discussions about writing and literature in the the western tradition and yet I have no earthly idea if I should e-publish this collection of poems I have sitting here. They’re not particularly good, but not a single article or essay I read tonight addressed the issue of “good” writing and “bad” writing. Neither has my entire college education, by the way.

I guess I’m kind of just disappointed in a lot of things right now.

I’m not asking the world to take notice, especially not right now. There are plenty of real problems in this world and this country right now, but this is my little corner of the internet where I get to talk about what I want.

Also, I wasn’t kidding about avoiding my linguistics paper.

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Vector 23 (Excerpt).

1.The man who bought a one-way ticket with cash at Portland Airport on the afternoon of 24 November 1971 - who was the 36th passenger to board Flight 305 to Seattle-Tacoma Airport, who sat in seat 18C, who carried with him only a black attache case, and whose FBI file is now more than sixty volumes long - most certainly existed. 

He gave his name at the Northwest Orient Airlines counter as Dan Cooper.

Clyde Jabin, a young reporter rushing to file his story with United Press International that night spoke hastily on the phone with a records agent at the FBI.

“D. Cooper,” the agent had said.

“Is that ‘D’ as in dog? Or ‘B’ as in boy?” Jabin asked.

“Yeah, that’s right,” the agent said back in a hurry. “Look, I gotta go Clyde. Lots going on here tonight.” 

Jabin’s story identified the hijacker as D. B. Cooper. This was an unfortunate coincidence for a petty Portland Oregon criminal actually named D. B. Cooper who was visited by FBI agents Thanksgiving morning.

At about 8:13pm on the night of the 24th the nonexistent D. B. Cooper of Jabin’s story leapt from the aft stairway of the Boeing 727 as it passed over the Lewis River in southwestern Washington. He disappeared. Which is no small feat for a man who didn’t exist in the first place.

2.Everything presented here as fact is actually fact. Except for the things which aren’t.

3. The man who would be DB might have been born in 1926 in Vancouver Canada. His father could have been a fisherman, tall with thick arms, and a big beard that hung from his otherwise thin face. DB could have stood at the end of the dock each time his dad’s sixty-foot salmon trawler put out in the direction of Vancouver Island. DB might have waited there every time watching as the boat disappeared around a bend in the channel on its way out to the sea; such a very small boat when compared to the vastness of such a dark sea. As a little Canadian boy he could have read the Belgian comic book Les Aventures de Dan Cooper about the adventures of a Royal Canadian Air Force test pilot named Dan Cooper. The comic was never sold in the United States.  

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A Moment Today.

I had a strange and interesting moment today which involved you, dear reader. Today I presented my first ever conference paper. If you don’t know, or have never cared to know, a conference is just what you think it is: a bunch of people with similar interests/professions get together to talk shop. Engineers have conferences and so do after-market car accessory retailers and so do English majors. We super-fancy English academic types just happen to have a fuckload of conferences and they all have themes and esoteric panel names like, “The Locus of Language” or “Liminality of Race and Gender”.

Anyway, today was my first time presenting a paper. Which doesn’t actually mean that I presented a paper. Rather it means that I gave a presentation about a paper that I have written. It is all very confusing.

But that’s not what I want to tell you about.

What I want to tell you about is this: after my paper got accepted (Oh, I should mention here, I never actually sent in my paper, I sent in an ‘abstract’ which is a summary of my paper) I was asked to send a bio. Well I just sent my standard bio. I have a ‘standard bio’ because it is common that when I send out a short story I also have to send a bio. This is my standard bio:

I am a graduate student in creative writing at CSU Northridge. My work has been published in Prick of the Spindle, Blood Lotus, The Blueprint Review, Cease Cows, The Northridge Review, and The American Drivel Review. I’m a recipient of The Northridge Review Fiction Award, The Oliver W. Evans Writing Prize, and San Diego Playwrights’ Project Award. I co-wrote the film Strange Angel and I blog at standardkink.com.

Thank you for your time.

James

So I just sent that along without a second thought.

Well when I went to my panel today I had the happy opportunity to talk to the panel moderator before we started. He’s a professor at CSUN but I’d never met him - though I recognized his name - and he mentioned that he’d checked out my blog (THIS VERY BLOG!) and I instantly turned to stone and got a cold white chill down my stone spine and thought, “Oh shit, when was the last time I bitched about panel moderators?! What did I accuse them of?!”

Well luckily I think it has been awhile since I posted anything like that. But if my life were a (very very very long and very very very boring) movie, then this would be the part that Guy Ritchie would have to direct because it would need to happen very very very fast:

SCENE: INT. DAY. A SMALL COLLEGE CONFERENCE ROOM (it is at least on par with any conference room in any Best Western anywhere in the Midwest).

THE PROFESSOR who is eminently human and personable, approaches THE WRITER who is short and bald and bespectacled and who just seems kinda shifty.  

PROFESSOR: Hi, I’m The Professor and I read your blog.

WRITER: Oh … (Immediately and without hesitation, THE WRITER drops his backpack, flips over the table, starts a fire, throws a smoke grenade, flees backward out of the room, boards an international flight, buys a new identity, begins a new life as a Greek goat herder, ponders the purple-blue Aegean Sea at sunset as he smokes a hand-rolled cigarette and writes in his goat-hide journal, he dies alone.)

END SCENE.

So that’s basically what happened today.

Or, at least, that’s what it felt like.

More accurately what happened was that a bunch of fireworks went off in my brain and one of them burst open and said: I need to update my ‘About’ page! Another said: My writing portfolio page is totally out-of-date! Another said: Was I half-drunk when I wrote that last post?

But - as fireworks are want to do - all of that faded pretty quickly. Between you and me, I take some small pride in this blog and I’m willing to stand behind the things I write here. It would be a waste of everybody’s time if I were only writing intensely polite things. Several months ago - while I was job-hunting - my mother very sensibly suggested that I should take this blog down for a little while, in case any prospective employers were to Google my name. That was very good and reasonable advice, but I had no interest in taking it. (God bless my mother though, she really is the best.) That thought flickered in my brain today when THE PROFESSOR mentioned this blog. But I’m not going to sweat it. This place exists so that I can always be writing. I don’t have to depend on getting published or even on the production of good and well-thought-out writing. For me this place is half therapy and half writing exercise and half mental gym and I’m always completely bumfuzzled to discover that anyone reads it at all. So thanks for that!

Otherwise, I just wanted to tell you that a funny thing happened today and that it involved you, dear reader.

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Oh! If you care, the presentation I gave today was on a paper I posted on here a month or two ago. It was the one about The Hunger Games and Feminism and Capitalism. Just click back a couple of pages and wait for the boring to start, that’s how you’ll know you found it!

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