Mule by Shane McCrae.

Mule by Shane McCrae

These are from a book of poetry called Mule by Shane McCrae. He has a very odd style on the page. Lots of unusual spacing and uses of the slash mid-line when usually a slash denotes the end of the line. I’ve tried to replicate his formatting as closely as I can.

These fragments look weird, but I will say this: if you read them out loud the rhythm and force of them is really well done. The meanings can be a bit opaque though.

(pg 3)

The marriage bird and flies in the sunlight on the snow/ Between the sunlight and the snow

(pg 8)

I had a lover and a lover and a fine

Lover I had a lover and she was mine.

(pg12)

and we didn’t drink

For fear that we would leave ourselves no water.

(pg 12-13)

We felt our bones disin-

tergrating in the sun and freezing back

Together wrong in the night

(pg 19) On traveling on a foreign train with other passengers:

The farther the train traveled

From home the fewer of

Each other’s words/We understood.

(pg 22)

Half of love is hope.

(pg 37)

We want what we had then we didn’t know

We had it then we didn’t know how far

We’d have to go how much we’d lose

(pg41)

And every child can sing and knows the songs

And you will recognize yourself in the singing

(pg42)

You

Will recognize yourself in the singing you

Will not recognize yourself in the songs

(pg 73) On poetically confusing moths and honeybees:

The moths

made honey of the light to make

Honey they left the light they brought

the honey back/ Or died in the light the light

itself too sweet to leave

I didn’t love or understand this bit until I rewrote it in the margins of the book like this:

The moths

Make honey of the light

(but) to make honey

They leave the light.

They brought the honey back

or (didn’t) and stayed

to die in the light.

The light itself too sweet to leave.

Yes, I rewrite poems in the books they come in. I don’t do this to make them better. Mine is quite worse, but I rewrote it to try to understand what the poem was getting at before it got all fancy as shit about it.

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The Sellout by Paul Beatty.

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

These bits are from the novel The Sellout by Paul Beatty. It recently became the first ever American winner of the Man Booker Prize. It is a fascinating book. The protagonist is a lively and interesting narrator and Beatty does cartwheels and somersaults of language that I do not think I have encountered anywhere but in Tom Robbins. The book plays with complicated questions about race in LA and, by extension, in America. It is a good book and resists being simple in either its questions or its answers.

There is a lot more to love about the book other than what I’ve typed out below, but - real talk time - one of the projects of the book seems to be performing a normalization of the N-word and while it is quite effective in the books, I’m not going to retype those passages with my white fingers and post them here, I just don’t want to get into the debate about whether or not it is appropriate for me to do that. You go do it on your blog.

(pg 37)

“... pretty much everything that made the twentieth century bearable was invented in a California garage.

(pg 39) On watching police lights in the city.

“... hurtling away from me like some distant spiral galaxy, the red and blue sirens spun silently but brilliantly, lighting up the mist of the morning marine layer like some inner-city aurora borealis.”

(pg 89)

At 4,084 square miles, much of Los Angeles County, like the ocean floor, remains in large part unexplored.”

(pg 138)

“The subtle message of the luxury car commercial is ‘We here at Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Lexus, Cadillac, or whatever the fuck, are an equal-opportunity opportunist’”.

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How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti.

These are from a really exciting book called How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti.

This is not my favorite book in the history of the world, but it is doing some interesting work which I appreciate and Heti writes well. It is one of those “auto-fictions” kind of a fictionalized version of the author’s own life. You can never quite trust in what is true and what isn’t. I’m always kind of uncomfortable with those, even though I have written a couple of them. They often seem sort of lazy to me. I would never call this book lazy, but I might think it once in a while.

So, I guess, let me say this: if you like or appreciate the project that is Lena Dunham’s Girls, then you will probably enjoy this book and want to keep it on your nightstand. If, on the other hand, you find Girls to be a spoiled, mildly narcissistic, privileged white girl riff on how hard life is a white-washed metropolis, then you should still read this book, you just might not like it as much.

This book presents a version of the contemporary woman’s life which is very different (and probably more true) than anything else I have ever read.

(pg 2)

“I know that inside the body there is just temperature.”

(pg 2)

“To go on and on about your soul is to miss the whole point of life. I could say that with more certainty if I knew the whole point of life. To worry too much about Oscar Wilde and Andy Warhol is just a lot of vanity.”

(pg 3)

We live in an age of some really great blow-job artists. Every era has its art form.”

(pg 28)

“Instead, we smoked together quietly, and as she exhaled, the trees touched each other’s branches in the wind.”

(pg 169)

How can these artists we read about - who have been married five or six times - how can they have enough time for all that life, and make art?

(pg 175)

Buddha was the one who turned his back on the suffering of the world to sweeten himself with good feelings - privileged feelings of benevolence and purity”.

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NANOWRIMO!

I have not made a big deal about it because I have not decided yet if I am all-in, but I have quietly been working on a NANOWRIMO novel (failing at Nano is just what I do in November, you know?).

My current word-could is: 5,165

That puts me 164 words ahead (for the day), and I hope to write some more tonight.

I will post some snippets from it on here once I figure out if I’m serious about it or not.

Keep your fingers crossed for me!

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What to do with a one-act play about Hitler.

A couple weeks ago I spent an entire day gathering up all of the various pieces of short writing that I have (two lines long all the way up to 30 pages long) and sat myself down and started submitting it out. This is something I try to do every six months or so. I was not able to do it early this year because life just got so chaotic and busy. It was starting to bother me though that I had not published anything since the end of 2015 and if I now that I have started this MFA program, I can not reasonably go around bitching about wanting to publish “for real” (ie: a serious work with a serious publisher, and preferably a novel) if I do not have my nose pressed against that old grindstone. So I submitted out about 40 pieces total (stories and poems) and now they are floating out there in the ether.

I’m making it sound easy, but it really is an endeavour. I like to go to the Poets & Writers database of lit journals. If I have pieces that I already think would appeal to particular journals, then I get those out of the way first. Then I - sort of randomly - pick out a punch of lit journals and learn about them and read some of their old stuff and then read ALL of their submissions guidelines (this is one of the most tedious ways to spend one’s freetime) and then if everything looks good, I submit.

As of this morning here are my stats:

I’ve had 2 pieces of fiction accepted for publication.

4 pieces of fiction and 5 poems rejected.

There are 36 other pieces still floating out there.

Believe it or not, that is not bad. That is actually pretty fantastic and I am very happy so far.

Sometimes it can take months to hear back from a magazine or journal, assuming your hear back at all, many places just never respond, that’s why I wait about 6 months before doing a big push to get stuff out there. One of the more prestigious locally published Los Angeles journals (which still required paper submissions) has never gotten back to me at all and I submitted to them in 2014.

Once I get a few more rejections in, I will go resubmit that stuff out again. I also have about two dozen more pieces that I did not submit last time because I just couldn’t find a good place for them (For instance: I have a one-act play about Hitler. You know how hard it is to find a place that will even consider a one-act play about Hitler?)

Doing all of this stuff is a little stressful because it means that the writer is going through every day always knowing that at any moment a new rejection email can come in (On Tuesday I got two completely separate rejections within hours). That, however, is the life.

I often wonder if any of this means anything. Unless I’m getting published in The Paris Review, does it make any difference? I don’t know. And here’s the thing - which I have always suspected, but since starting this MFA program feel truly confident about - no one else knows either. There is no career path for a writer and no prescribed guideline.

I guess the best shot any of us have is to do the best work we can and then try to get it out there into the cold and cruel world. Don’t take the rejection that hard, accept that it is part of the process, and keep going.

There are two other new and interesting things I have been working on:

I got in touch with a small press I have always liked that is down in LA and asked how their submissions works, hoping to pitch them the book I am working on as part of that artist-in-residence thing I did with the San GAbriel National MOnument. Well I was able to get the first half of it into their hot little hands. I doubt that anything will come of it because its not quite their jam, but still, they’re reading it. That in and of itself is cool. I have never had the courage to do that sort of thing before.

Long have I wanted to play around with some of the print-on-demand self-publishers set up to work with Amazon, so I took a poetry chapbook I had sitting around (about 30 pages long) and went over to the PSU library (because I no longer have a PC) and set it up using a company called Blurb. The layout was incredibly frustrating to learn, but will likely be easier in the future since I have kind of learned it now. Through that company I have ordered a (hopefully) real-looking version of the book (I made a cover and everything!) and it should be here this week. If it looks good enough and I’m happy with it, I can get it set up to sell on Amazon. How cool is that?? Now, obviously no one is going to buy the thing because I am a TERRIBLE poet, but still it would be pretty cool.

So that I what I have been doing. In addition to, you know, all the work that goes into earning an MFA degree while also looking for a job and also trying to write a Nanowrimo novel.

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Writing on Writing and George Orwell.

For one of my classes we had to write a “manifesto” which answers/grapples with the age-old question always posed to writers who are in classrooms: Why I Write.

Yes, I know that is not a question.

You can blame George Orwell for all this, he wrote the first truly famous modern why-I-write essay, cleverly titled, “Why I Write”, and writing students at all levels, in all places, and all at all times since have been asked to write their own. This time though, there was a twist! It had to be either in the form of a manifesto or a (self) interview. I went with the manifesto form because it is more malleable (a manifesto is whatever I say it is!) and because not even I am arrogant enough to write a fake interview with myself and then ask other people to read it.

My “manifesto” is below.

A note: I did not write it to be read online and it is going to be frustrating unless you read it in two tabs in your browser and ain’t nobody got time for that.

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Manifesto.

James Bezerra’s

Writing Manifesto

Calm down,

no one cares about your masterpiece until you’ve written it. (1)

If you have a story to tell,

determine the form which is most advantageous for that story. (2)

Read everything ever written in that form;

learn to breathe that form. (3)

Now write

until it is written. (4)

If you have no story to tell,

stop wasting everyone’s time. (5)

Despite themselves,

all people enjoy the occasional use of the word ‘fuck’, (6)

learn to use it sparingly and effectively.

Also, do this with all the other words too. (7)

If ever in doubt,

sexy is always better than not. (8)

Always know more than your reader

and always tell them you know more than them. (9)

Understand that love and fear are basically the same thing, and

that fundamentally those are the only things. (10)

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(1)

Most of the writers you meet don’t write. Not really. Most of the writers you meet are low-rent philosophers, aspirational authors, deeply hopeful searchers, or lying. This explains the growing prevalence of theory-fictions, of writers writing novels about writers writing novels, of the reduction of the Humanities to relativistic pseudo-sciences. Having an idea is not the same as successfully birthing that idea into a piece of writing. The idea is not the thing. Writers, to be writers, have to make the thing.

(2)

If you are packing for a ‘round-the-world cruise and you would like to take your pet dolphin with you, it would be wise to have a vaguely dolphin-shaped suitcase in which to put him. A smaller suitcase is no good because it isn’t big enough to hold him. A too-large suitcase is no good either; how would you move it? Consider the weight of the water in addition to the weight of the dolphin. Once on the cruise ship, you can put the dolphin in the wave pool, so all you need is a tool to get the job done. This is not a decision that is ideological. It is a practical decision. As a responsible dolphin-owner, you should be familiar with many different types and kinds and shapes of dolphin-transportation-suitcases, so that you can choose the best one for any of your dolphin transport needs. This is also true of the form and structure of a piece of writing.

(3)

There are many things I like about running, chief among them is the fact it is simple. Own good shoes and possess the will to go out and run. That’s about all there is to it. One need not study Usain Bolt to improve as a runner; because none of us will ever be Usain Bolt. This philosophy does not, however, hold true of the structural engineers who build bridges. We ask those engineers to know everything there is to know about bridges. We ask that they have studied bridges: big bridges, little bridges, bridges made of steel and bridges made of stone, good bridges and failed bridges. We ask our bridge builders to know more about bridges than we do. We ask a lot of them. While there are some other similarities between writing and running, in this regard, writers are engineers.

(4)

There is no easy way to break this to you: the only way to write a book is to write it. It will involve many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many hours of your life spent sitting still and hallucinating into a keyboard and likely no one will ever even notice or care. You may spend years of your life writing it and a quick reader will read it in a day, shrug, and go microwave a pizza. No writer, no matter how profound, will ever stop the Earth from turning. Despite these things, there is no other way to write.

(5)

Writers descent from shaman and fireside story tellers. The written word is an extension of the spoken one. Storytellers serve a social function; we have a job, a duty, an obligation. Writing - good writing - is not only self expression, it does something. It is something, if it isn’t then it's nothing.

(6)

Believe it or not, not everyone says the word “fuck”. My grandmother abhorred it. But she did like George Carlin and sometimes he said it. Be it naughty, or offensive, or even a little mean, we all sometimes like to have our boundaries pushed. Also, “fuck” is a versatile word.

(7)

If you ever get the chance to stand very close to a Jackson Pollock painting - so close that it makes the security guard in the gallery a little nervous - you will begin to notice that it is not quite as much of a mess as it initially seemed. There is control in it, there is even order to the composition, though it is a Big Bang kind of exploding order like the explosion one can get by shaping a plastic explosive before detonating it. The energy that created a Pollock painting is controlled, effective, and even - when you really look at it - sparing. Write like that.

(8)

“Sexy” is a transmutable word. There can be sexy in the grotesque, in the violent, in the well-crafted sentence, in a good line of description, in a well-rendered tragedy. Sexy is that which makes a thing attractive to us. Often that attraction lurks somewhere below what we say or do or understand. There is an animal instinct within us that determines what is sexy and the writer must try to access that.

(9)

The reader has to make an investment of time (and therefore of a quantity of their own life) in you, the writer. It is your job to be good enough not to waste their time (and therefore their life). The reader likes to know that you are not going to screw them over on their investment. The reader likes to be able to believe in you. The reader wants to believe in you. The reader should be able to read you and stand confident in you. Your writing should allow the reader to believe in you.

(10)

When boiled down to their essential elements, most emotions are only either love or fear. Though somewhat different, these both can strain the knotted muscle of our heart. Both make us sweat and dilate our pupils. Nearly all things can be reduced to either love or fear and the writer must know that and must be able to control those things and use that knowledge as a tool. Manipulative as it may be, it is only this way that the writer can cross the gulf and reach out to the reader.

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