What We're Up To Right Now.

Our lives are very similar, I think, in that we are both awake right now at 2 in the morning tape-measuring a bag we bought from the Goodwill to make sure that it meets the Frontier Airlines “personal item” restrictions because we spontaneously bought tickets to Denver next month simply because the fare was too good to pass up ($78 round trip).  

See how much we have in common? It is weird how similar our free time activities are.

Our paths may diverge from there though because I was also just rewriting in my head a paper I turned in on Thursday. Your paper was likely not due on Thursday. I was required to write a book review, which meant finding a recent book and reading it and then writing the sort of review that one would read in Entertainment Weekly or Jezebel or Slate or The Awl. The project of this book review will likely later require that I actually submit it to someplace like The Awl or Slate or Jezebel or Entertainment Weekly.

Since it is on my mind, I’m going to go ahead and post my book review here. It may not be to your liking … let me ask: do you enjoy unicorn erotica?

For the 0.05% of you who said, “Fuck yeah I do!” please enjoy what’s below.

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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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Dodging the Draft.

The piece below is a first draft an “Aesthetic Manifesto”. That was the assignment anyway. What you see below is not so much a first draft as it is a thinking-out of what I need to articulate in something called an “Aesthetic Manifesto”. The keen reader of this blog might notice how similar my academic writing has become to my blog writing.

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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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Desert Island Reading.

Below is a reading response to a book called Bending Genre which is a collection of essays about Creative Nonfiction. It is edited by Margot Singer and Nicole Walker. The edition I am citing below is the one published in 2013 by Bloomsbury. It has many good essays in it and a surprisingly large number of annoying ones. It is very much an inside-Baseball kind of text, but if you end up trapped on a desert island with it, well then you certainly could have done worse!

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Bending Genre.

Response to Bending Genre

James Bezerra

There was a significant, though never previously reported upon meeting long about 1852 which brought together the greatest American minds living, dead, and otherwise. Tesla was there too, but dressed in drag as he was not at that time a citizen and because Edison had said he would not attend if Tesla was invited. Whitman was there, sitting on Emerson’s lap. The ghost of John Winthrop was there, annoying everyone by sliding a penny up a wall, which he had only recently learned how to do. The as yet unborn consciousnesses of T.S. Eliot and Thomas Pynchon were projected into dilithium crystals. Andrew Carnegie had called the meeting. He was at the time beginning the project of assuaging his soul by building libraries across the country and when he called the meeting to order he set down on the table in the center of the hall two books, one was The Scarlet Letter and the other was Moby Dick and he asked the honorable assemblage of Americas, “What are we supposed to do about this?” He was an officious man and needed his adopted country to choose a literary tradition.

Before reading Bending Genre I had a vague notion that it would either be about creative nonfiction or that it would be composed of creative nonfiction.

After finishing reading Bending Genre I have a vague notion that it was either about creative nonfiction or that it was composed on nonfiction.

I’m still not sure.

That was and is, of course, the point.

Though the transcripts of the meeting have been lost to history, the minutes were kept in an un-numbered safe deposit box in the vault below the tower which J. P. Morgan built and filled with gold doubloons and which he frequently amused himself by swimming through while wearing a top hat and waistcoat. The minutes are clear about the group’s decision, but one need not read them to know what was decided. It was Nathaniel Hawthorne who carried the day and this decision has been rippling down through the American literary tradition since. It was a decision in favor of the straight line, a decision that texts are allowed to be no more than 20% weird, and a decision in favor of retaining guilt and shame as primary characteristics of the American consciousness, though ones which need not ever be addressed directly.  

In “Ostrakons at Amphipolis” Michael Martone tells us that the original title of North by Northwest was The Man in Lincoln’s Nose (173) and what a wonderful world it would be if that title had remained. How ashamed we would all have to be if one of our most sacrosanct films came fitted with the albatross of such a stupid name. How required we would have been to acknowledge the sublime and the strange present in the incongruity of all things. Low how that might have challenged our sense of the superiority of rigid categorization.

One of the chief claims made against Moby Dick was that its alternating chapters presented too much information that was essentially true, albeit about whales. It was wondered if the country’s population would have to begin to be able to distinguish on their own between that which was fiction and that which was not. It was worried that asking the reader to develop the muscle to discern the difference would create an unruly population no longer willing to simply believe that what was written in their newspapers and hymnals was true because it claimed to be. Ultimately it was a decision made in favor of protectionism. A tariff placed on the imagination.

In “Genre-Queer: Notes Against Generic Binaries” Kazim Ali writes, “What is painting: Ono, who first exhibited paintings along with their instructions and then dispensed with the paintings and exhibited only the instructions.” (30)

As a concession to Melville, it was agreed that Moby Dick was henceforth to be regarded as a Great American Novel (GAN), though with the provision that no one would actually ever read it.

In “Study Questions for the Essay at Hand” Robin Hemley warns us, “This essay practices Hot Yoga, but it’s tired and it’s bent out of shape and is blending with other essays and other forms of discourse within its personal space” (193).

Once the meeting was adjourned, Melville was summarily executed and replaced by an imposter who was a very handsome lunatic. The body was buried at sea.

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