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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Unfictional.

In the Fall semester (which starts in a few weeks) I will be taking a creative nonfiction class. I am looking forward to it.

When I tell people this they almost invariably ask what ‘creative nonfiction’ is.When they ask me this I always say, “Well, let me tell you …” and then I smash one of my smoke grenades on the floor and disappear in the ensuing chaos. In the last few years smoke grenades have increasingly become standard issue for English majors. We use them when people ask what we think we’re going to be able to do with an English degree, or when people at class reunions ask if we have sold any books yet, or when people ask if we have written anything lately.

I will admit that I have been abusing my smoke grenade privileges. When I’m at work and need to go to the bathroom I will smash one in my cubicle and then scurry to the bathroom. Only once or twice have I failed to find my way out of my own smoke-filled cubicle. I’ve also started using them upon entering a room. I’ll quietly pull the door open a few inches and toss one in and then BAM! And when the smoke clears, there I am, all like, “Hey what’s up?”

I knew a girl who had to change majors because she had asthma and couldn’t handle all the smoke pouring out of the English department.

That’s a true story.

You know what else is a true story? Creative nonfiction.

I am excited, but it is with some trepidation that I am approaching the class. I’m excited for the writing I’ll be doing, but I’m worried about the writing other people will be doing ( ← That is the most ‘writerly’ thing I have ever written. In this example we are just going to accept that ‘writerly’ actually means ‘aggressively narcissistic’). I’m afraid that people are going to assume ‘creative nonfiction’ is a license to write their memoirs. I do not want to read people’s memoirs, especially not the memoirs of grad students.

So if not the eye-bleedingly bored tedium of grad student memoirs, then what is creative nonfiction?

Well, let me tell you … SMOKE GRENADE!

Hahahahahahahaha!

I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it.

Anyway. Sorry, So! Creative nonfiction? Right.

It isn’t that hard to figure out. It’s just nonfiction that borrows the tricks and devices of narrative fiction. Malcolm Gladwell has gotten himself and his head of supervillain hair famous and quite rich writing creative nonfiction that seeks to explain the to us the world we are already living in. BTW - if you were curious - I think that Malcolm Gladwell and Fareed Zakaria are probably the smartest men alive in the world right now. Jad Abumrad is probably up there too. These aren’t the guys out there designing space shuttles, rather they are the ones who can stand in amongst the trees and somehow see the forest. That requires a unique skillset and a mental alacrity that I think is especially important in the world we live in now; a world that is hugely complicated, dangerously polarized, and littered with distractions.

That’s why I’m excited about the class I am going to be taking. Good fiction seeks to stumble assbackward into some sort of eternal truth about the human condition ( ← Nope, I was wrong, that is the most ‘writerly’ thing I have ever written.), but creative nonfiction is already dealing in ‘truth’, insofar as ‘truth’ relates to ‘things that actually happened’.

I’m explaining this poorly. Because I’m a bad writer. Sorry. Let me use an example:

One of the best books I have ever read about anything ever was written by a journalist and professor named Alan Weisman. The book is called “The World Without Us” and it’s a fascinating thought experiment about what would happen in the world if the planet suddenly had no humans on it. How long would the lights stay on? What would happen to my cat? How long would it take for Manhattan to flood? How long would it take for the Amazon to grow back? For the desert to reclaim Phoenix? For the Hoover Dam to crumble? It is a fascinating book and it stays with you long after you’ve finished reading it. It is not just a startling book because of its subject matter, it is also so well written that it seeps into you the way that good fiction does.

Antithetically, if you have ever attempted to read “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by the inimitable and weirdly bearded Jared Diamond, then you know the importance of what I am talking about. It is probably one of the most profound and important books that will be written during my time on this planet, but holyfuckingshit is it dry. And I am a grad student in English, so I have suffered through Walter Benjamin and I am telling you that the genius of Jared Diamond is equalled only by how unentertaining his writing style is. (I say that with all due respect, of course, but he is not a guy who would throw smoke grenade jokes into the middle of his blog posts.) Better you should just watch the 3-part “Guns, Germs, and Steel” National Geographic documentary on Netflix.

The polar opposite of “GGS” (which is how we dorks refer to “Guns, Germs, and Steel” on our sudreddit about how we’re all still virgins) is a book called “The Devil in the White City” and at some point in your life you have seen someone reading it on an airplane.

If anyone ever asks you what creative nonfiction is, you should just be all like, “Psh! Clearly you have never read TDITWC.” (which is how we dorks refer to “The Devil in the White City” on our subreddit about how the D&D episode of “Community” was wildly inaccurate). It was written by the also journalist and also beardy Erik Larson. In a nutshell it has two narrative threads, both of them true. Half the book follows architect and control freak Daniel Burnham (known for designing the Flatiron building in New York) as he organizes the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. The other half of the book follows a guy no one had ever heard of called H. H. Holmes who just happened to be a serial killer living in Chicago at the time. Larson twists these threads together like strands of DNA and you can see the way that Holmes was exploiting the fair to murder people. What’s most amazing is that as you’re reading the book, Larson somehow does this magic trick of writing in such a way that makes the planning of the fair and the invention of the Ferris Wheel JUST AS INTERESTING AND EXCITING as the stuff about how Holmes was burning people alive in his basement. It really is an amazing book and if ‘creative nonfiction’ was previously a literary bastard child of a genre, Erik Larson married its mother and gave it his name.

For my money though, it doesn’t get any better than a Brit named Ben Macintyre. He is pleasantly beardless and I love his books. To be honest, I might love him a little bit too. He writes a lot about British Intelligence during World War II. He manages to find the strange, brilliant, and hilarious stories that no self-respecting history book would ever tell you about, like how the British convinced the Nazis that the Allies were not going to invade Sicily by using a dead body to deliver some secret documents. Or how the double agent Eddie Chapman used to practice his morse code by transmitting songs about his pet pig. Or that time that a team of magicians figured out how to “move” the Suez Canal. What’s most striking about his books though is the fact you can read them like novels. He manages to allow you to know the people involved and to suffer with them and to celebrate with them and he has damn near made me cry a couple of times.

That’s the ‘creative’ part of creative nonfiction. It is the part that tricks you into forgetting that you’re reading a history book or an anthropology book. It is the part that cracks open the door of the world and allows you inside. That’s why I am looking forward to my class in the Fall. I am excited to take a shot at cracking the world open, if only a little bit. I have no earthly idea what I am going to write about. Luckily I find just about everything fascinating.

Between you and me, I am thinking that someone needs to write the illustrated history of trashy French-inspired lingerie (I’m looking at you Victoria’s Secret). I also find the American Interstate Freeway system to be interesting.

Just no memoirs.

And now is when you’re all like, “Don’t you think it is a little bit hypocritical to bitch so much about memoirs on the blog you write about yourself and how interesting you think you are?”

And then I’m all like, “Well yes, that is an valid point, but in my defense …” SMOKE GRENADE!

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On Work.

If you have not yet read Mary Roach or any of her books, well then you are unforgivably behind the curve and you shouldn’t even bother because you will never be as cool as those of us who have. That being said, she is a talented writer and her books are the funny/smart/accessible realm, falling somewhere on that spectrum in between Malcolm Gladwell and John Hodgeman.

There are many many snippets of her writing worth being repeated here, but below is a passage in “Packing for Mars” that I quite liked. She is writing here about a conversation she had with a cosmonaut psychologist about a Soviet space mission that had to be cut short because one of the cosmonauts (Zholobov) had some sort of nervous breakdown:

My notes say things like, “self-organization of dynamic structures of interpersonal relationships in human society.” But what he had to say about Volynov and Zholobov was clear and simple. “They were exhausted by overwork. The human organism is built for tension and relaxation, work and sleep. The principle of life is rhythm. Who out of us can work nonstop for seventy-two hours? They made them sick people.”

This passage made me think of the famous quip by the British humorist Jerome K. Jerome: I love work; it fascinated me; I can sit and watch it for hours.

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I'm Not Fat, I'm Awesome.

Here is a New York Times article that makes me feel a little more okay about all the weight I have put on over the past year.

Apparently the NY hipster crowd is packing on the pounds now too.

I have always said that I am a trend-setter (Malcolm Gladwell would call me a Maven)!

More to act superior about.
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