Joseph Hirsch's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing"
Writers, before and after the Bend
Awhile back I was watching a documentary about the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick and someone (maybe Thomas Disch?) said that PKD’s fans could roughly be divided into two categories: those who like the writer’s work when he saw the bend coming, and those who like his stuff after he went around the bend.
Maybe I’m a bit of a square, but I’m a “before the bend” guy when it comes to Philip Dick and also when it comes to most other writers whose writing can be so roughly divided. If I had to pick my favorite Dick book, I would say it’s the beautifully allegorical The Penultimate Truth. Describing the plot here would spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it, but as with the best of Dick’s pre-bend work (like Man in the High Castle), this is the time when the author seems to have sloughed off the last vestiges of the old Golden Age SF trappings that made some of Dick’s earlier stuff feel hidebound, and, at worst, like a pastiche of Heinlein (about whose work Dick himself was not crazy). Yet this was still before he had delved into the sort of quasi-religious, New Age cultic figure he seemed to become after the late sixties, the LSD, and his time as a hostage to his fears about Richard Nixon trying to blow his house up.
The later stuff by PKD has its fans, but the books like VALIS, while still possessed of a kind of divine spark of genius, feel like the writings of a man rushing to finish his last cohesive work before his mind completely cracks. There’s a schizophrenic-with-an-IQ-of-180-riding-public-transportation quality to a lot of the later Dick stuff, a curdled paranoia, and the sense that Dick is trapped in the self-referential world of his own creations, his own mind, and ultimately himself.
This definitely appears to be what happened to Hunter S. Thompson, who, as critic Roger Ebert put it, became a sort of prisoner of his own pleasures at the Woody Creek compound where he lived with his fame, his guns, his booze, and his drugs. Of course, the whole point of Thompson’s post-Hell’s Angels straight reportage was to go around the bend with his pith-helmeted alter ego Raoul Duke and his faithful “Samoan attorney” Dr. Gonzo (based on the real writer and Chicano activist, Oscar Zeta Acosta). “Buy the ticket, take the ride,” as the saying went. Then again, as mentioned earlier, I’m a square and I prefer Hell’s Angels to the rest of Thompson’s oeuvre.
Part of what sidelined Hunter Thompson’s writing after, say, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, is that when you define yourself in opposition to a dominant culture, you must keep pretending you’re the outsider even after you’re rich and have the high ground, literally in this case when one considers the elevation where Thompson lived was contiguous with Aspen (it doesn’t get much more Establishment than that). Nixon was a dead horse long after Thompson stopped kicking him, and some of the people he dropped acid with back in the day had not only also dropped back in with a vengeance, but thanks to Silicon Valley’s reshuffling of the deck and the rise of David Brooks’ Bobos, the longhairs had a hell of a lot more money and power than the religious fundamentalists and skull-cracking fascists (this may have always been the case, and I remember Terry Gilliam talking about how it occurred to him once while being hassled by a couple cops in his pre-Python days that he made more money than they did).
The filmmaker David Cronenberg claimed that after he made Naked Lunch, he got a lot of backlash from Burroughs fans who were hipper-than-thou. I’ve personally always preferred pre-bend Burroughs to post-bend. The early, minimalist, and straightforward stuff like Junky and Queer is somehow just more my speed than the later stuff with the disjointed cutups and Breughel-esque tableaux of strangled boys ejaculating as they’re being gibbeted and sphincter-like proboscises talk about entheogenic plants that must be consumed to exterminate the bane of rational thought.
The square in me (and maybe I’m all square) knows there was a Burroughs without the bend just waiting to be unleashed. I know after reading some interviews with Old Bull Lee (as Kerouac called him in On the Road) that in his own free time he mainly read detective novels and books to help him stop smoking. Other than that, he blurbed for a handful of young bucks (like Richard Price and William Gibson) and was otherwise content with F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom he highly admired even when he was out of vogue.
Maybe, sometimes the constraints of a market, a deadline, and some sort of creative shackling (if that’s the right word) can bring out the best in people. I imagine a twenty-five-year-old kid with some deadline a couple of hours away whose rent is due can compose as well as or better that someone who has a lifetime of laurels arrayed behind them. Philip Dick did good work to keep the lights on, and under less than ideal conditions. Great books have been written in two weeks, and decades have been squandered to produce easily forgotten tomes.
Some writers don’t have a “bend” in their career, something delineating it into two parts, wherein the first part is mostly straightforward and well-grounded, and the latter portion (after fame and drugs) is gonzo, subjective, or experimental. In a way, Charles Bukowski seems to have benefited from a sort of reverse bend. Buk foreswore the hard liquor as he got older, found himself unashamedly enjoying the fruits of his half century of hard living and hard writing (including a nice Mercedes Benz and a hot tub, around whose edge his cats paraded) and there’s a kind of gentleness, gratitude, and clarity in his later stuff that’s missing from a lot of his angry young man verse. His later books like Hot Water Music and Septuagenarian Stew have a reflective and profound quality missing from some of the earlier work.
Maybe wine is a better preservative than whisky and maybe after you’ve opened your third eye wide enough, it gets so big that it can’t discern between what’s real and what isn’t. That state-of-mind has a lot of appeal for a lot of people, but I’m not one of them. I struggle to remain sane while stone-sober and the idea of being insane loses its romantic appeal after you’ve spent enough time in mental hospitals. To throw Bukowski’s hat into the fray one last time, “Don’t play with madness; madness doesn’t play.”
Maybe I’m a bit of a square, but I’m a “before the bend” guy when it comes to Philip Dick and also when it comes to most other writers whose writing can be so roughly divided. If I had to pick my favorite Dick book, I would say it’s the beautifully allegorical The Penultimate Truth. Describing the plot here would spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it, but as with the best of Dick’s pre-bend work (like Man in the High Castle), this is the time when the author seems to have sloughed off the last vestiges of the old Golden Age SF trappings that made some of Dick’s earlier stuff feel hidebound, and, at worst, like a pastiche of Heinlein (about whose work Dick himself was not crazy). Yet this was still before he had delved into the sort of quasi-religious, New Age cultic figure he seemed to become after the late sixties, the LSD, and his time as a hostage to his fears about Richard Nixon trying to blow his house up.
The later stuff by PKD has its fans, but the books like VALIS, while still possessed of a kind of divine spark of genius, feel like the writings of a man rushing to finish his last cohesive work before his mind completely cracks. There’s a schizophrenic-with-an-IQ-of-180-riding-public-transportation quality to a lot of the later Dick stuff, a curdled paranoia, and the sense that Dick is trapped in the self-referential world of his own creations, his own mind, and ultimately himself.
This definitely appears to be what happened to Hunter S. Thompson, who, as critic Roger Ebert put it, became a sort of prisoner of his own pleasures at the Woody Creek compound where he lived with his fame, his guns, his booze, and his drugs. Of course, the whole point of Thompson’s post-Hell’s Angels straight reportage was to go around the bend with his pith-helmeted alter ego Raoul Duke and his faithful “Samoan attorney” Dr. Gonzo (based on the real writer and Chicano activist, Oscar Zeta Acosta). “Buy the ticket, take the ride,” as the saying went. Then again, as mentioned earlier, I’m a square and I prefer Hell’s Angels to the rest of Thompson’s oeuvre.
Part of what sidelined Hunter Thompson’s writing after, say, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, is that when you define yourself in opposition to a dominant culture, you must keep pretending you’re the outsider even after you’re rich and have the high ground, literally in this case when one considers the elevation where Thompson lived was contiguous with Aspen (it doesn’t get much more Establishment than that). Nixon was a dead horse long after Thompson stopped kicking him, and some of the people he dropped acid with back in the day had not only also dropped back in with a vengeance, but thanks to Silicon Valley’s reshuffling of the deck and the rise of David Brooks’ Bobos, the longhairs had a hell of a lot more money and power than the religious fundamentalists and skull-cracking fascists (this may have always been the case, and I remember Terry Gilliam talking about how it occurred to him once while being hassled by a couple cops in his pre-Python days that he made more money than they did).
The filmmaker David Cronenberg claimed that after he made Naked Lunch, he got a lot of backlash from Burroughs fans who were hipper-than-thou. I’ve personally always preferred pre-bend Burroughs to post-bend. The early, minimalist, and straightforward stuff like Junky and Queer is somehow just more my speed than the later stuff with the disjointed cutups and Breughel-esque tableaux of strangled boys ejaculating as they’re being gibbeted and sphincter-like proboscises talk about entheogenic plants that must be consumed to exterminate the bane of rational thought.
The square in me (and maybe I’m all square) knows there was a Burroughs without the bend just waiting to be unleashed. I know after reading some interviews with Old Bull Lee (as Kerouac called him in On the Road) that in his own free time he mainly read detective novels and books to help him stop smoking. Other than that, he blurbed for a handful of young bucks (like Richard Price and William Gibson) and was otherwise content with F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom he highly admired even when he was out of vogue.
Maybe, sometimes the constraints of a market, a deadline, and some sort of creative shackling (if that’s the right word) can bring out the best in people. I imagine a twenty-five-year-old kid with some deadline a couple of hours away whose rent is due can compose as well as or better that someone who has a lifetime of laurels arrayed behind them. Philip Dick did good work to keep the lights on, and under less than ideal conditions. Great books have been written in two weeks, and decades have been squandered to produce easily forgotten tomes.
Some writers don’t have a “bend” in their career, something delineating it into two parts, wherein the first part is mostly straightforward and well-grounded, and the latter portion (after fame and drugs) is gonzo, subjective, or experimental. In a way, Charles Bukowski seems to have benefited from a sort of reverse bend. Buk foreswore the hard liquor as he got older, found himself unashamedly enjoying the fruits of his half century of hard living and hard writing (including a nice Mercedes Benz and a hot tub, around whose edge his cats paraded) and there’s a kind of gentleness, gratitude, and clarity in his later stuff that’s missing from a lot of his angry young man verse. His later books like Hot Water Music and Septuagenarian Stew have a reflective and profound quality missing from some of the earlier work.
Maybe wine is a better preservative than whisky and maybe after you’ve opened your third eye wide enough, it gets so big that it can’t discern between what’s real and what isn’t. That state-of-mind has a lot of appeal for a lot of people, but I’m not one of them. I struggle to remain sane while stone-sober and the idea of being insane loses its romantic appeal after you’ve spent enough time in mental hospitals. To throw Bukowski’s hat into the fray one last time, “Don’t play with madness; madness doesn’t play.”
The Ten Best Books I read in 2017
This year I read something like two-hundred books. Here are the ten best books I read, in order from the tenth best to the very best. I don’t normalize or grade on a curve. I read a work of ancient Greek antiquity with the same set of eyes as I would something I found moldering in the “To-Discard” stack at a Goodwill store, so I don’t create separate lists for Best Non-Fiction of the Year and Best Fiction. Here, without further ado, are the books:
10. “Walking in Berlin: A Flaneur in the Capital” by Franz Hessel: This is the best worm’s eye account of Berlin and what it was like to walk down the streets of the capital between the First and Second World War. Descriptions are evocative, beautiful, precise.
9. “Transformations of Circe: The History of an Enchantress” by Judith Yarnall: Investigations into the origin or meaning of myth can turn down blinds alleys very quickly. Ms. Yarnall holds an even tone and weaves a spell as she effortlessly integrates everything from poetry, painting, and archeology into her short but informative work on the Goddess-cum-Woman known primarily for turning men into pigs.
8. “The Memoirs of a Sexologist: Discretion and Indiscretion” by Ludwig Lenz: Sometimes I’ll get a book just out of sociological interest, and occasionally this book will be good enough to make me forget why I picked it up in the first place. “Memoirs of a Sexologist” exceeded every expectation I had for it, and though it is about human sexuality, fetishes, etc., it is also a portrait of fin-de-siècle Europe and how its cultural mores and belief system gave way after the horror of the First World War. Lenz worked as a doctor-in-residence in a brothel for soldiers during the Great War, and was friends with the father of modern sexology and Public Enemy No. 1 in the Nazi years, endocrinologist Magnus Hirschfeld.
7. “Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA, and More Tell Us About Crime” by Val McDermid: I haven’t read any of McDermid’s fiction, but I need to now. Her book sets itself the interesting and ambitious goal of locating the origins of modern forensic science in ancient techniques used to solve crimes or impel murderers to confess (without resorting to witchcraft or the dunking chair). This was probably the most informative book I read all year. McDermid condenses almanacs’ and centuries’ worth of knowledge into a few hundred pages.
6. “The Big If” by Rick Broadbent: I’m obsessed with boxing, and I read a lot on the subject. The last book I wrote is even about a boxer. That said, an interest in the sport isn’t a prerequisite for reading this book. It’s the tragic saga of a young lad from Merthyr-Tydfil, a coalmining town that would be of little interest except that it was the home of two world-class boxers, Howard Winstone and Johnny Owen. I read a crap book about Winstone later in the year, but “The Big If” is a masterpiece at showing how two men with disparate backgrounds (Lupe Pintor and Johnny Owen in this case) suffered a lifetime of hardships before meeting each other in the ring and fighting, as Chris Eubank once said, to see whose heart breaks first.
5. “Chester Stubbs” by Craig Miles Miller: I had low hopes for this one going in. It’s told in the voice of a Floridian redneck-alcoholic and I was bracing for some Forrest Gump-esque escapades in which the author patronized both his protagonist and the reader. What I got was probably the funniest and most poignant book I’ve come across in at least a year. “Chester Stubbs” is one of the books that, as soon as you describe the plot, sounds insignificant. But in the hands of the unheralded Craig Miles Miller, this character grows and reveals himself to be an incredibly complex man, notwithstanding the bad grammar. That the voice remains believable rather than becoming mannered is a tribute to Miller’s ability to breathe life into the guy.
4. “Once a Jailbird” by Hans Fallada: I’d read previous books by Fallada, like Little Man, What Now? and was blown away by how realistic the story was, and how naturalistic the prose was. It beautifully captured the tedium and despair that comes from barely eking out an existence in the service industry when every day you yearn for more and are surrounded by people with better lives. It made its point without being didactic. The same goes for Once a Jailbird, although I like this book more, since it’s filled with all kinds of details about the underworld culture in Germany, the land of smoky rooms filled with cons and grifters that somehow achieves a romantic quality, like Jack Black’s You Can’t Win or Jim Tully’s Beggars of Life. Fallada is a better writer than both of those men, though, who can spin a near-epic tale out of ordinary lives.
3. “Dark Companion” by Jim Nisbet: Nisbet is, like Tom Kakonis, an acquired taste and a bit of an oxymoron. He’s a guy who writes crime/noir (whatever you want to call it) but he doesn’t do it in minimalist prose or in a straightforward way. The writing is expansive, flashy, willfully literary and calling attention to itself in a way that might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I was in awe of the guy’s technical prowess. The story isn’t the most original, but the way it unfolds reminded me a bit of the totally off-kilter yet believable bloodbaths created by Charles Willeford at his most enigmatic.
2. “Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction” by Grady Hendrix: I was expecting some lush, glossy or matte images of cool horror trade paperbacks from a bygone era (back when writers in the “mid-list crunch” could live off their advances). What I got instead was probably the most pleasurable reading experience I’ve had all year. There is lot of cool info about the lives and works of writers and artists whose offerings in the horror field were as imaginative and bold as anything Breughel could have come up with, had he lived in the 20th century. I got a serious case of nostalgia from this one, along with a solid shelfful of recommendations in the horror department, books and authors whose existence would have otherwise escaped me.
1. “The Taste of Ashes” by Howard Browne: Reading this book was sort of the literary equivalent of watching the film “Chinatown.” As it was unfolding, I thought, “This is pretty good. The plot is coursing along like well-aired tires over hot asphalt.” It’s only after you’re already immersed in the good story, however, that you realize how great it is. Browne (apparently, he wrote a lot of teleplays and other TV pieces) has absorbed all the established hard-boiled works from the likes of Chandler, Hammett (and if you include him in their company) Macdonald. He has bettered them all with this book, I believe, and that is no mean feat. This is one of the darkest and most brilliant (yet understated) PI books I’ve ever read, maybe the best (aside from my personal favorite The Burnt Orange Heresy). It’s a genre I’ve sometimes written in, but there’s no way in hell I’ll ever be this good, or anywhere close.
10. “Walking in Berlin: A Flaneur in the Capital” by Franz Hessel: This is the best worm’s eye account of Berlin and what it was like to walk down the streets of the capital between the First and Second World War. Descriptions are evocative, beautiful, precise.
9. “Transformations of Circe: The History of an Enchantress” by Judith Yarnall: Investigations into the origin or meaning of myth can turn down blinds alleys very quickly. Ms. Yarnall holds an even tone and weaves a spell as she effortlessly integrates everything from poetry, painting, and archeology into her short but informative work on the Goddess-cum-Woman known primarily for turning men into pigs.
8. “The Memoirs of a Sexologist: Discretion and Indiscretion” by Ludwig Lenz: Sometimes I’ll get a book just out of sociological interest, and occasionally this book will be good enough to make me forget why I picked it up in the first place. “Memoirs of a Sexologist” exceeded every expectation I had for it, and though it is about human sexuality, fetishes, etc., it is also a portrait of fin-de-siècle Europe and how its cultural mores and belief system gave way after the horror of the First World War. Lenz worked as a doctor-in-residence in a brothel for soldiers during the Great War, and was friends with the father of modern sexology and Public Enemy No. 1 in the Nazi years, endocrinologist Magnus Hirschfeld.
7. “Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA, and More Tell Us About Crime” by Val McDermid: I haven’t read any of McDermid’s fiction, but I need to now. Her book sets itself the interesting and ambitious goal of locating the origins of modern forensic science in ancient techniques used to solve crimes or impel murderers to confess (without resorting to witchcraft or the dunking chair). This was probably the most informative book I read all year. McDermid condenses almanacs’ and centuries’ worth of knowledge into a few hundred pages.
6. “The Big If” by Rick Broadbent: I’m obsessed with boxing, and I read a lot on the subject. The last book I wrote is even about a boxer. That said, an interest in the sport isn’t a prerequisite for reading this book. It’s the tragic saga of a young lad from Merthyr-Tydfil, a coalmining town that would be of little interest except that it was the home of two world-class boxers, Howard Winstone and Johnny Owen. I read a crap book about Winstone later in the year, but “The Big If” is a masterpiece at showing how two men with disparate backgrounds (Lupe Pintor and Johnny Owen in this case) suffered a lifetime of hardships before meeting each other in the ring and fighting, as Chris Eubank once said, to see whose heart breaks first.
5. “Chester Stubbs” by Craig Miles Miller: I had low hopes for this one going in. It’s told in the voice of a Floridian redneck-alcoholic and I was bracing for some Forrest Gump-esque escapades in which the author patronized both his protagonist and the reader. What I got was probably the funniest and most poignant book I’ve come across in at least a year. “Chester Stubbs” is one of the books that, as soon as you describe the plot, sounds insignificant. But in the hands of the unheralded Craig Miles Miller, this character grows and reveals himself to be an incredibly complex man, notwithstanding the bad grammar. That the voice remains believable rather than becoming mannered is a tribute to Miller’s ability to breathe life into the guy.
4. “Once a Jailbird” by Hans Fallada: I’d read previous books by Fallada, like Little Man, What Now? and was blown away by how realistic the story was, and how naturalistic the prose was. It beautifully captured the tedium and despair that comes from barely eking out an existence in the service industry when every day you yearn for more and are surrounded by people with better lives. It made its point without being didactic. The same goes for Once a Jailbird, although I like this book more, since it’s filled with all kinds of details about the underworld culture in Germany, the land of smoky rooms filled with cons and grifters that somehow achieves a romantic quality, like Jack Black’s You Can’t Win or Jim Tully’s Beggars of Life. Fallada is a better writer than both of those men, though, who can spin a near-epic tale out of ordinary lives.
3. “Dark Companion” by Jim Nisbet: Nisbet is, like Tom Kakonis, an acquired taste and a bit of an oxymoron. He’s a guy who writes crime/noir (whatever you want to call it) but he doesn’t do it in minimalist prose or in a straightforward way. The writing is expansive, flashy, willfully literary and calling attention to itself in a way that might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I was in awe of the guy’s technical prowess. The story isn’t the most original, but the way it unfolds reminded me a bit of the totally off-kilter yet believable bloodbaths created by Charles Willeford at his most enigmatic.
2. “Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction” by Grady Hendrix: I was expecting some lush, glossy or matte images of cool horror trade paperbacks from a bygone era (back when writers in the “mid-list crunch” could live off their advances). What I got instead was probably the most pleasurable reading experience I’ve had all year. There is lot of cool info about the lives and works of writers and artists whose offerings in the horror field were as imaginative and bold as anything Breughel could have come up with, had he lived in the 20th century. I got a serious case of nostalgia from this one, along with a solid shelfful of recommendations in the horror department, books and authors whose existence would have otherwise escaped me.
1. “The Taste of Ashes” by Howard Browne: Reading this book was sort of the literary equivalent of watching the film “Chinatown.” As it was unfolding, I thought, “This is pretty good. The plot is coursing along like well-aired tires over hot asphalt.” It’s only after you’re already immersed in the good story, however, that you realize how great it is. Browne (apparently, he wrote a lot of teleplays and other TV pieces) has absorbed all the established hard-boiled works from the likes of Chandler, Hammett (and if you include him in their company) Macdonald. He has bettered them all with this book, I believe, and that is no mean feat. This is one of the darkest and most brilliant (yet understated) PI books I’ve ever read, maybe the best (aside from my personal favorite The Burnt Orange Heresy). It’s a genre I’ve sometimes written in, but there’s no way in hell I’ll ever be this good, or anywhere close.
“Blessedly Devoid of Subtext”: Or, Iain Levison, Come Back
Some years ago, I was on vacation with my family in South Carolina. I think my parents may have still been together at this time, but I’m not sure. What I definitely remember is making a daytrip to Kiawa Island, a beachside resort that was more expensive and tasteful than the kinds of places where we usually stayed. While in a restaurant in Kiawa, I picked up a copy of the area’s local free alternative rag (I can’t remember the name) and read an interview with an irascible author who’d worked a bunch of crap jobs and written a book about his experience. In the interview he lobbed insults at the soft and feckless types that stayed in Kiawa on vacation. My guess is no one on the island bothered to read the interview, or much of anything in the free rag besides suggestions for where to drink wine or which links to tee off on. It’s doubtful a restaurant would stock an edition of a free paper in which their clientele is openly insulted, unless they hadn’t bothered to read said article.
Flash forward some time and I stumble on the book for which Levison was being interviewed, A Working Stiff’s Manifesto, and started to read. Readers have been suckers for tales about working crap jobs for some time now, probably at least since Charles Bukowski started violating the great taboo with his books Post Office and Factotum. Individual exceptions obviously exist, but it seems that pre-Bukowski, writers liked to be thought of as artists above such meager pursuits as earning their daily bread. Being all the way down and out (a la George Orwell in his early years) was okay and romantic, as was being uber-wealthy (this “top-out-of-sight” class as sociologist Paul Fussell would have it, exerted a mighty hold on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s imagination). But people whose jobs weren’t arduous enough to say, compete with Steinbeck’s day laborers, weren’t keen on revealing how they kept the lights on when the writing wasn’t paying the bills.
Iain Levison’s book was a much better-than-average contribution to the genre. It was hard-edged, funny, insightful, and written in clear and precise language. I liked the book and then didn’t think about it much more after finishing it.
Flash forward again some years and I’m in the Army (as was Levison, although I believe he was in the Scottish Armed Forces). I’m stationed at Kelly Barracks with the 22nd Sig in Darmstadt, Germany. Cambrai-Fritsch (the other barracks / Kaserne) actually had a quality library where I’d found everything from Chomsky to Burroughs to first editions of Gunter Grass, that helped me pass to the time.
I found another small book in the library by Levison, who I vaguely remembered from before. This one was even shorter than the previous one, though, and fiction. The title was Since the Layoffs. It took me something like three hours to read the whole thing (if that) and I devoured it in a sort of trance. It was a straightforward tale about an unemployed/underemployed guy who agrees to work as a heavy for a local crime figure. His logic isn’t too complicated and his morality isn’t too complex. Either be broke or break the law and have better gear, like a leather jacket, and a nice car to cruise around in.
Once, while lounging around in the bees (barracks) with a friend, burning incense and chilling on a lazy weekend, I heard someone shout, “Damn right!” I looked up and saw that my friend was reading the Levison book that I’d forgotten to return to the library at Cambrai Fritsch (I think it was a cold and snowy November weekend and I didn’t have a car). My friend looked down at the book and said, “This dude is right.”
“You can borrow the book,” I said. “Just take it back when you’re done.” My friend lived at the other Kaserne, so he would be able to drop the book off on his way to formation in the morning.
This friend and I were drinking at a bar a couple of weeks later and he confessed that Since the Layoffs was the only book he’d read that he hadn’t been forced to read, in his entire life. “I’ll read TMs (training manuals) but only because I have to.”
One more flash forward and I’m out of the army (finally, thank God) and I’m sitting there thinking, Say, that Iain Levison was a better-than-average writer. I wonder what the hell became of him?
I picked up two more books from Levison, the only other two I could find. The first one was How to Rob an Armored Car. It was, like his previous books, about working crap jobs, and, like Since the Layoffs, it was about the moral dilemma of how many laws a man is willing to break in order to live with more dignity than his station will seemingly allow. Unlike Levison’s first book, A Working Stiff’s Manifesto, this one wasn’t didactic at all. It was straightforward, unalloyed, and made its point without any kind of Michael Moore manipulation or histrionics. It was a fictional foray, like Levison’s second book, Since the Layoffs, but it was longer and much more mature, and better written.
I handed the book off to a writer friend of mine, John, and he passed the recommendation on to another writer we both knew, named Jon. John told me he dug Armored Car, but that Jon wasn’t impressed.
“Why not?” John had asked him.
“Something’s missing,” Jon replied.
To which John replied, “I know. It’s blessedly devoid of subtext.”
He had a point. How to Rob an Armored Car was about some friends who work in a big box chain store, smoke weed on the weekends, and decide to pull off a heist. One can extrapolate from it what they want, but it’s not an allegory or a metaphor. It is what it is, and there’s something appealing about its simplicity. At least for me, there was. I respect Jon and his opinion, but that doesn’t mean we always have to be on the same page.
The last Levison book I read, Dog Eats Dog, was also fiction, and, as in all his previous works, it showed maturation. This book featured Levison’s usual gimlet eye for class, but it was more a cross-section study up and down the economic ladder, a bit like that film Crash (not the one based on the J.G. Ballard book about people who get off on car wrecks, but the one that swept the Oscars). Dog Eats Dog was about an escaped con who worms his way into the life of an affected professor working on some massive study about the Third Reich, and the professor’s Humbert Humbert-esque relationship with his Lolita-like neighbor. A female Federado who reminded me a bit of Clarice Starling interjects herself into this weird mix, and Levison turns the tension up to ten and leaves it there.
Dog Eats Dog was chockfull of subtext, as opposed to Levison’s How to Rob an Armored Car. It was also perhaps an even better book. I looked forward to the next book that Levison would write, and I waited. And waited.
I’m still waiting. Based on the little bit of research I’ve done (not much sleuthing, I’ll admit) Iain Levison said “Screw it” and left for China, where he became an English teacher. It’s possible he’s still doing well based on foreign sales (he’s not “big in Japan” as they say, but like a lot of writers whose view of America is a bit too unvarnished for Americans, his stuff is big in France). Two other books by the man appear in the search on Amazon, but they’re in German. One is Gedankenjäger (Thought Hunter) and the other is the wonderfully titled Hoffnung ist Gift (Hope is Poison).
It’s hard for me to tell if these are translations of his English works, or if they’re Deutsch exclusives. Having a good translator can make or break a writer’s career abroad (look at the beautiful things Ralph Manheim has done) and I can only hope that something gives for Levison, that someone notices how good he was, and that he can somehow be convinced to believe that the game is in fact worth the candle.
Then again, if he’s happy teaching in China and he wishes to maintain radio silence from here-on-out, that’s his prerogative. I miss his voice, all the same. He perfectly documented the lives of the American former working and lower-middleclass that’s been hollowed out over the past few decades, and he took that incredibly depressing and enraging subject and made fiction that was funny and smart and tough.
Anyway, I’d wish Levison a “Happy New Year” but I know the calendar is much different in China and I’m too lazy to learn it. Are we in the year of the monkey or the dog, or is it the rat?
Flash forward some time and I stumble on the book for which Levison was being interviewed, A Working Stiff’s Manifesto, and started to read. Readers have been suckers for tales about working crap jobs for some time now, probably at least since Charles Bukowski started violating the great taboo with his books Post Office and Factotum. Individual exceptions obviously exist, but it seems that pre-Bukowski, writers liked to be thought of as artists above such meager pursuits as earning their daily bread. Being all the way down and out (a la George Orwell in his early years) was okay and romantic, as was being uber-wealthy (this “top-out-of-sight” class as sociologist Paul Fussell would have it, exerted a mighty hold on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s imagination). But people whose jobs weren’t arduous enough to say, compete with Steinbeck’s day laborers, weren’t keen on revealing how they kept the lights on when the writing wasn’t paying the bills.
Iain Levison’s book was a much better-than-average contribution to the genre. It was hard-edged, funny, insightful, and written in clear and precise language. I liked the book and then didn’t think about it much more after finishing it.
Flash forward again some years and I’m in the Army (as was Levison, although I believe he was in the Scottish Armed Forces). I’m stationed at Kelly Barracks with the 22nd Sig in Darmstadt, Germany. Cambrai-Fritsch (the other barracks / Kaserne) actually had a quality library where I’d found everything from Chomsky to Burroughs to first editions of Gunter Grass, that helped me pass to the time.
I found another small book in the library by Levison, who I vaguely remembered from before. This one was even shorter than the previous one, though, and fiction. The title was Since the Layoffs. It took me something like three hours to read the whole thing (if that) and I devoured it in a sort of trance. It was a straightforward tale about an unemployed/underemployed guy who agrees to work as a heavy for a local crime figure. His logic isn’t too complicated and his morality isn’t too complex. Either be broke or break the law and have better gear, like a leather jacket, and a nice car to cruise around in.
Once, while lounging around in the bees (barracks) with a friend, burning incense and chilling on a lazy weekend, I heard someone shout, “Damn right!” I looked up and saw that my friend was reading the Levison book that I’d forgotten to return to the library at Cambrai Fritsch (I think it was a cold and snowy November weekend and I didn’t have a car). My friend looked down at the book and said, “This dude is right.”
“You can borrow the book,” I said. “Just take it back when you’re done.” My friend lived at the other Kaserne, so he would be able to drop the book off on his way to formation in the morning.
This friend and I were drinking at a bar a couple of weeks later and he confessed that Since the Layoffs was the only book he’d read that he hadn’t been forced to read, in his entire life. “I’ll read TMs (training manuals) but only because I have to.”
One more flash forward and I’m out of the army (finally, thank God) and I’m sitting there thinking, Say, that Iain Levison was a better-than-average writer. I wonder what the hell became of him?
I picked up two more books from Levison, the only other two I could find. The first one was How to Rob an Armored Car. It was, like his previous books, about working crap jobs, and, like Since the Layoffs, it was about the moral dilemma of how many laws a man is willing to break in order to live with more dignity than his station will seemingly allow. Unlike Levison’s first book, A Working Stiff’s Manifesto, this one wasn’t didactic at all. It was straightforward, unalloyed, and made its point without any kind of Michael Moore manipulation or histrionics. It was a fictional foray, like Levison’s second book, Since the Layoffs, but it was longer and much more mature, and better written.
I handed the book off to a writer friend of mine, John, and he passed the recommendation on to another writer we both knew, named Jon. John told me he dug Armored Car, but that Jon wasn’t impressed.
“Why not?” John had asked him.
“Something’s missing,” Jon replied.
To which John replied, “I know. It’s blessedly devoid of subtext.”
He had a point. How to Rob an Armored Car was about some friends who work in a big box chain store, smoke weed on the weekends, and decide to pull off a heist. One can extrapolate from it what they want, but it’s not an allegory or a metaphor. It is what it is, and there’s something appealing about its simplicity. At least for me, there was. I respect Jon and his opinion, but that doesn’t mean we always have to be on the same page.
The last Levison book I read, Dog Eats Dog, was also fiction, and, as in all his previous works, it showed maturation. This book featured Levison’s usual gimlet eye for class, but it was more a cross-section study up and down the economic ladder, a bit like that film Crash (not the one based on the J.G. Ballard book about people who get off on car wrecks, but the one that swept the Oscars). Dog Eats Dog was about an escaped con who worms his way into the life of an affected professor working on some massive study about the Third Reich, and the professor’s Humbert Humbert-esque relationship with his Lolita-like neighbor. A female Federado who reminded me a bit of Clarice Starling interjects herself into this weird mix, and Levison turns the tension up to ten and leaves it there.
Dog Eats Dog was chockfull of subtext, as opposed to Levison’s How to Rob an Armored Car. It was also perhaps an even better book. I looked forward to the next book that Levison would write, and I waited. And waited.
I’m still waiting. Based on the little bit of research I’ve done (not much sleuthing, I’ll admit) Iain Levison said “Screw it” and left for China, where he became an English teacher. It’s possible he’s still doing well based on foreign sales (he’s not “big in Japan” as they say, but like a lot of writers whose view of America is a bit too unvarnished for Americans, his stuff is big in France). Two other books by the man appear in the search on Amazon, but they’re in German. One is Gedankenjäger (Thought Hunter) and the other is the wonderfully titled Hoffnung ist Gift (Hope is Poison).
It’s hard for me to tell if these are translations of his English works, or if they’re Deutsch exclusives. Having a good translator can make or break a writer’s career abroad (look at the beautiful things Ralph Manheim has done) and I can only hope that something gives for Levison, that someone notices how good he was, and that he can somehow be convinced to believe that the game is in fact worth the candle.
Then again, if he’s happy teaching in China and he wishes to maintain radio silence from here-on-out, that’s his prerogative. I miss his voice, all the same. He perfectly documented the lives of the American former working and lower-middleclass that’s been hollowed out over the past few decades, and he took that incredibly depressing and enraging subject and made fiction that was funny and smart and tough.
Anyway, I’d wish Levison a “Happy New Year” but I know the calendar is much different in China and I’m too lazy to learn it. Are we in the year of the monkey or the dog, or is it the rat?
The Quinn Effect, or when your Artist Friends are Millionaires and you’re not
For those who haven’t seen it, Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn was a roundtable with five or six comics who sat on couches and tried to make jokes about the hot topic of the day (but mostly just cracked wise at the expense of the moderator, Colin Quinn).
Part of the beauty of the show was seeing great comedians before they reached their stride (like Kevin Hart), emeritus comedians doing Quinn and crew a favor (George Carlin), and comics who earned their stripes by taking shots at each other on the show (Bobby Kelly, Sue Costello, Bonnie Hunt, etc.) A couple of my favorite comics from that time are dead, like Patrice O’Neal and Greg Giraldo.
One of the biggest names to come through on the show was Jerry Seinfeld, who actually got his start in the small clubs and cellars around NYC where Colin Quinn also cut his teeth. Both men were good friends for years before Seinfeld became a massive cultural phenomenon and Jerry’s “What’s the deal with [fill in the blank]” brand of observational humor became so well-known that comics started crafting their own jokes based on how hacky the bit had become.
It’s been awhile since I’ve seen the episode with the two old comrades shooting the breeze on-set, but one of the things I remembered was Quinn getting in a subtle dig about how he and the other minor celebrity comics were still trying to make the “big bucks” like Jerry.
Colin Quinn is by no means a failure, but he is more of a showbiz survivor than flat-out success story. It must cause some tension, I think, when your best friend who came up with you (and arguably isn’t that much funnier than you) is worth, oh…somewhere in the neighborhood of $898 million more than you (according to Celebritynetworth.com).
I only mention this because it reminds me of the time a fellow writer I know (let’s call him Jay) sent me a copy of Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers. “Stone’s a writer’s writer,” Jay said. “Which is another way of saying he doesn’t make much money.” Jay then commented that I was a writer’s writer, too, which I took (and still take) as a compliment.
My needs and wants are nominal (my main luxury being books), but still I wonder what would happen if either someone who I labored in the trenches with became uber-famous and wealthy, or if the same accidentally happened to me. I eke out a living and my books are carried in boutique stores, and while I can go to a convenience store up the street and see paperbacks written by people I know, natural human jealousy doesn’t enter the equation for the simple reason that these people were already successful before I met them. How would I feel if someone I knew who had been subsisting on Top Ramen with me and writing for three cents a word suddenly was sitting on the terrace of a cafe in front of an ice sculpture of a nymph with James Patterson discussing how they were going to spend the five-million-dollar advance Bantam had given them to co-write a thriller? I don’t know, because it’s never happened.
I do know that even after I began to enjoy the first inklings of some real success as a writer (after working at it for about a decade with minor success), I asked Jay if he wanted to read my new book and maybe provide a blurb if he dug it. He’d always done so in the past. This time, however, he snapped and said, “Why don’t you ask one of your famous friends to review it?”
Bitterness is an unpleasant emotion, but it’s also natural and perhaps unavoidable. So is, I think, the fantasy or longshot hope held by authors (privately, because they don’t want to seem superficial or mercenary) that one of their books will break through in a big enough way that they can retire from public life, create their stories from behind the walls of a mansion surrounded by a topiary garden and an ironwork gate, instead of having their skin flayed alive by life day after day and struggling to retain enough of a spark to keep creating. It isn’t so much about greed or materialism as it is about how money can help a hypersensitive soul hide from the world. “There’s only one reason to get rich,” Ferdinand Celine once said, “and that is to forget.” I think most of us have a lot of things that we would like to forget.
A sense of humor can help, though, should your fellow wordsmith escape the vagaries of life as you develop scoliosis while leaning forward to write into a dimming computer monitor, gutting it out in an efficiency while your hotplate burns in the corner next to your mattress sans bedframe. I remember another episode of Tough Crowd, in which a segment concerned comic Ray Romano. The big industry story was that Ray was then being paid an unprecedented $1.8 million per episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, when his fellow alumni like Todd Barry (and probably Quinn) were getting a few hundred bucks a night to do shows in cellars and small venues. Todd Barry just shrugged, however, when asked how he felt about it all. He then remarked that Ray’s success was a good thing, because he used to hitch rides from Ray Romano to save money on cab fare to get to the Comedy Cellar, and he was thinking that now Ray wouldn’t bother asking Todd to pay him back for that gas money he owed.
Part of the beauty of the show was seeing great comedians before they reached their stride (like Kevin Hart), emeritus comedians doing Quinn and crew a favor (George Carlin), and comics who earned their stripes by taking shots at each other on the show (Bobby Kelly, Sue Costello, Bonnie Hunt, etc.) A couple of my favorite comics from that time are dead, like Patrice O’Neal and Greg Giraldo.
One of the biggest names to come through on the show was Jerry Seinfeld, who actually got his start in the small clubs and cellars around NYC where Colin Quinn also cut his teeth. Both men were good friends for years before Seinfeld became a massive cultural phenomenon and Jerry’s “What’s the deal with [fill in the blank]” brand of observational humor became so well-known that comics started crafting their own jokes based on how hacky the bit had become.
It’s been awhile since I’ve seen the episode with the two old comrades shooting the breeze on-set, but one of the things I remembered was Quinn getting in a subtle dig about how he and the other minor celebrity comics were still trying to make the “big bucks” like Jerry.
Colin Quinn is by no means a failure, but he is more of a showbiz survivor than flat-out success story. It must cause some tension, I think, when your best friend who came up with you (and arguably isn’t that much funnier than you) is worth, oh…somewhere in the neighborhood of $898 million more than you (according to Celebritynetworth.com).
I only mention this because it reminds me of the time a fellow writer I know (let’s call him Jay) sent me a copy of Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers. “Stone’s a writer’s writer,” Jay said. “Which is another way of saying he doesn’t make much money.” Jay then commented that I was a writer’s writer, too, which I took (and still take) as a compliment.
My needs and wants are nominal (my main luxury being books), but still I wonder what would happen if either someone who I labored in the trenches with became uber-famous and wealthy, or if the same accidentally happened to me. I eke out a living and my books are carried in boutique stores, and while I can go to a convenience store up the street and see paperbacks written by people I know, natural human jealousy doesn’t enter the equation for the simple reason that these people were already successful before I met them. How would I feel if someone I knew who had been subsisting on Top Ramen with me and writing for three cents a word suddenly was sitting on the terrace of a cafe in front of an ice sculpture of a nymph with James Patterson discussing how they were going to spend the five-million-dollar advance Bantam had given them to co-write a thriller? I don’t know, because it’s never happened.
I do know that even after I began to enjoy the first inklings of some real success as a writer (after working at it for about a decade with minor success), I asked Jay if he wanted to read my new book and maybe provide a blurb if he dug it. He’d always done so in the past. This time, however, he snapped and said, “Why don’t you ask one of your famous friends to review it?”
Bitterness is an unpleasant emotion, but it’s also natural and perhaps unavoidable. So is, I think, the fantasy or longshot hope held by authors (privately, because they don’t want to seem superficial or mercenary) that one of their books will break through in a big enough way that they can retire from public life, create their stories from behind the walls of a mansion surrounded by a topiary garden and an ironwork gate, instead of having their skin flayed alive by life day after day and struggling to retain enough of a spark to keep creating. It isn’t so much about greed or materialism as it is about how money can help a hypersensitive soul hide from the world. “There’s only one reason to get rich,” Ferdinand Celine once said, “and that is to forget.” I think most of us have a lot of things that we would like to forget.
A sense of humor can help, though, should your fellow wordsmith escape the vagaries of life as you develop scoliosis while leaning forward to write into a dimming computer monitor, gutting it out in an efficiency while your hotplate burns in the corner next to your mattress sans bedframe. I remember another episode of Tough Crowd, in which a segment concerned comic Ray Romano. The big industry story was that Ray was then being paid an unprecedented $1.8 million per episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, when his fellow alumni like Todd Barry (and probably Quinn) were getting a few hundred bucks a night to do shows in cellars and small venues. Todd Barry just shrugged, however, when asked how he felt about it all. He then remarked that Ray’s success was a good thing, because he used to hitch rides from Ray Romano to save money on cab fare to get to the Comedy Cellar, and he was thinking that now Ray wouldn’t bother asking Todd to pay him back for that gas money he owed.
Who or what the hell are the Unborn Grandchildren? The Unsolvable Riddle of a Poem
Obtaining my master’s degree in German Studies was a miserable chore for the most part, done, if I’m to be honest, just so that I could get the tax-free living allowance that the GI Bill furnished. Still, there were some lessons to be learned. In one class on translating poetry, for instance, we as students were given a choice which poem to translate from a pool of six works. Being lazy, I naturally selected the shortest poem, in the hopes that the translation would go fastest and be easiest.
I turned out to be wrong. The shorter the poem sometimes, the harder the translation, if only for the simple reason that one has less material to work with. Longer poems tend to either have some sort of refrain or pattern (however unintentional) that allows the translator to grasp some kind of foothold, predict the ebb and flow of where the words are leading.
A short poem leaves less room for pattern recognition. And if the poet in question is insane, the task is even harder.
It is debatable whether the German expressionist poet Georg Trakl was nuts, but it’s probably certain that he was miserable. His poem Grodek (about the battle in the Great War) certainly caused me some good bit of grief.
Georg Trakl started writing young, and had several prose pieces published before completing his degree in pharmacy. As a pharmacist, it is probable that Trakl picked up his cocaine habit (which eventually killed him) and that he also experimented with morphine.
Trakl joined the army before the war, mustered out, seemed to make a go of it as a writer before he was sent to the now-defunct empire of Galicia as a medical officer during the Great War. At one point, suffering a nervous breakdown after battle and being forced to endure the screams of dying and maimed men around him, Trakl attempted to shoot himself in the head with his sidearm.
He was thwarted by some other soldiers, and sent to a mental hospital. Some time later his sister (a pianist) committed suicide, shooting herself in the head on a trip to Berlin to recover some of the family’s furniture during a period of economic hardship. Herr Trakl himself died of a cocaine overdose some time shortly thereafter. It is rumored in some biographical sources that Trakl had engaged in an incestuous affair with his sister. It is not known whether his overdose was intentional or not.
Leaving his short and unhappy life and returning to his short and unhappy poem, however, Grodek is a mere seventeen lines long, and deals with the quiet and majestic decay that accompanies autumn, contrasted with the quick and ruthless manner in which men destroy each other.
To show how much is changed in translation (not necessarily lost) let me give two reasonable translations of the last three lines of this unwieldy mystery which has, after years of puzzling, still not yielded its secrets (at least to me).
Translation 1:
O prouder sorrow! you brazen altars
Today an immense anguish feeds the mind’s hot flame,
The unborn descendants.
Translation 2:
O prouder mourning! - You brazen altars,
The spirit's hot flame is fed now by a tremendous pain:
The grandsons, unborn.
It’s that last line which caused me such especial agony during the translation, this quandary, this stumbling block. Let’s assume a compromise between “descendants” and “grandsons,” settle on “grandchildren” for the moment, just for the sake of trying to find a point of entry into this three-word line that might as well be an ellipse rather than a coda.
Who are the “unborn grandchildren”? Are they those kids of the children the men in the trenches could have helped conceive on the homefront with their wives, if their lives hadn’t been squandered at Grodek (or Verdun or the Somme)? Or are the “unborn grandchildren” those who will eventually inherit the world, and its wars with it, doomed to repeat the cycle of death and destruction which is as ineluctable as the changings of the seasons, that molting which occurs in the autumn that Trakl uses as a point of contrast to the death men visit on each other?
I don’t know, and don’t think I’ll ever know. I’m not sure whether Trakl himself knew when he was writing the poem; for all I know he wasn’t thinking about anything besides tooting cocaine or putting a bullet in his head or screwing his sister while hammering out the final stanza that came to him like a psychographic burst from the unconscious.
It’s a pity at any rate that the other great German Expressionist poet, Georg Heym, didn’t live long enough to write about the Great War. His vision is as bleak as Trakl’s, though it is suffused with a romantic and ecstatic horror that seems to transubstantiate mundane death and destruction into something religious. It’s more Blake and Baudelaire, less Gottfried Benn.
Georg Heym unfortunately died in an accident at the age of 24, a year or two before the outbreak of the Great War would have given him a chance to die or lose his mind in any number of ways perhaps just as suitable to his romantic temperament.
How did Heym die, you ask (assuming you’re even there and not asking, “Who the hell is Georg Heym?” a reasonable question for anyone who hasn’t wasted their time and money on courses in German Expressionist poetry). Ole Georg Heym was a promising young poet who decided to go ice-skating one day with a friend on the frozen surface of the Havel River, a tributary of the Bohemian section of the Elbe (back when Bohemia, like Galicia, was still a thing). The water wasn’t frozen as solid as Heym or his friend thought, however, and when Heym’s companion fell through the thawing layer of ice covering the water, he attempted to retrieve his buddy and ended up plunging into the icy waters himself. Some nearby foresters claimed they heard Heym screaming for the better part of an hour before he finally succumbed and died in the river.
But that’s neither here nor there, and I’m getting off the topic, which is: Who or what the hell are the unborn grandchildren?
I turned out to be wrong. The shorter the poem sometimes, the harder the translation, if only for the simple reason that one has less material to work with. Longer poems tend to either have some sort of refrain or pattern (however unintentional) that allows the translator to grasp some kind of foothold, predict the ebb and flow of where the words are leading.
A short poem leaves less room for pattern recognition. And if the poet in question is insane, the task is even harder.
It is debatable whether the German expressionist poet Georg Trakl was nuts, but it’s probably certain that he was miserable. His poem Grodek (about the battle in the Great War) certainly caused me some good bit of grief.
Georg Trakl started writing young, and had several prose pieces published before completing his degree in pharmacy. As a pharmacist, it is probable that Trakl picked up his cocaine habit (which eventually killed him) and that he also experimented with morphine.
Trakl joined the army before the war, mustered out, seemed to make a go of it as a writer before he was sent to the now-defunct empire of Galicia as a medical officer during the Great War. At one point, suffering a nervous breakdown after battle and being forced to endure the screams of dying and maimed men around him, Trakl attempted to shoot himself in the head with his sidearm.
He was thwarted by some other soldiers, and sent to a mental hospital. Some time later his sister (a pianist) committed suicide, shooting herself in the head on a trip to Berlin to recover some of the family’s furniture during a period of economic hardship. Herr Trakl himself died of a cocaine overdose some time shortly thereafter. It is rumored in some biographical sources that Trakl had engaged in an incestuous affair with his sister. It is not known whether his overdose was intentional or not.
Leaving his short and unhappy life and returning to his short and unhappy poem, however, Grodek is a mere seventeen lines long, and deals with the quiet and majestic decay that accompanies autumn, contrasted with the quick and ruthless manner in which men destroy each other.
To show how much is changed in translation (not necessarily lost) let me give two reasonable translations of the last three lines of this unwieldy mystery which has, after years of puzzling, still not yielded its secrets (at least to me).
Translation 1:
O prouder sorrow! you brazen altars
Today an immense anguish feeds the mind’s hot flame,
The unborn descendants.
Translation 2:
O prouder mourning! - You brazen altars,
The spirit's hot flame is fed now by a tremendous pain:
The grandsons, unborn.
It’s that last line which caused me such especial agony during the translation, this quandary, this stumbling block. Let’s assume a compromise between “descendants” and “grandsons,” settle on “grandchildren” for the moment, just for the sake of trying to find a point of entry into this three-word line that might as well be an ellipse rather than a coda.
Who are the “unborn grandchildren”? Are they those kids of the children the men in the trenches could have helped conceive on the homefront with their wives, if their lives hadn’t been squandered at Grodek (or Verdun or the Somme)? Or are the “unborn grandchildren” those who will eventually inherit the world, and its wars with it, doomed to repeat the cycle of death and destruction which is as ineluctable as the changings of the seasons, that molting which occurs in the autumn that Trakl uses as a point of contrast to the death men visit on each other?
I don’t know, and don’t think I’ll ever know. I’m not sure whether Trakl himself knew when he was writing the poem; for all I know he wasn’t thinking about anything besides tooting cocaine or putting a bullet in his head or screwing his sister while hammering out the final stanza that came to him like a psychographic burst from the unconscious.
It’s a pity at any rate that the other great German Expressionist poet, Georg Heym, didn’t live long enough to write about the Great War. His vision is as bleak as Trakl’s, though it is suffused with a romantic and ecstatic horror that seems to transubstantiate mundane death and destruction into something religious. It’s more Blake and Baudelaire, less Gottfried Benn.
Georg Heym unfortunately died in an accident at the age of 24, a year or two before the outbreak of the Great War would have given him a chance to die or lose his mind in any number of ways perhaps just as suitable to his romantic temperament.
How did Heym die, you ask (assuming you’re even there and not asking, “Who the hell is Georg Heym?” a reasonable question for anyone who hasn’t wasted their time and money on courses in German Expressionist poetry). Ole Georg Heym was a promising young poet who decided to go ice-skating one day with a friend on the frozen surface of the Havel River, a tributary of the Bohemian section of the Elbe (back when Bohemia, like Galicia, was still a thing). The water wasn’t frozen as solid as Heym or his friend thought, however, and when Heym’s companion fell through the thawing layer of ice covering the water, he attempted to retrieve his buddy and ended up plunging into the icy waters himself. Some nearby foresters claimed they heard Heym screaming for the better part of an hour before he finally succumbed and died in the river.
But that’s neither here nor there, and I’m getting off the topic, which is: Who or what the hell are the unborn grandchildren?
You and the Debate over the Second Person
When I was still an undergrad, I wasn’t sure whether I should go into an MFA program. I asked a friend of mine, a writer who was lucky enough to complete his own Master of Fine Arts under the legendary southern writer Harry Crews (whose book, Body, about female competitive weightlifting, remains one of the most over-the-top, insane, and great books I’ve ever read). “You’re too far already,” this writer told me. “You’ve already written too much, and a writing program would be a step backwards for you.”
Luckily, I took this friend’s advice, and never bothered with a formal writing degree. I don’t think I could enjoy being a writer if I felt like I had some kind of certificate proving that I had studied writing. For me, writing needs to feel like something personal, not professional.
Still, I did take the requisite courses in composition necessary to get my associates, before going on to get my BA and MA. It was strange to sit in a classroom and work on writing a five-page essay, and then after school to go home and work on writing another novel or article for the market.
I wouldn’t say the experience was a total waste of time, but my professor (who I knew outside of the program) assured me that I wouldn’t learn anything, but that he appreciated me playing along in class. He also agreed never to put me on the spot and mention in class that I was already a pro getting paid. For some reason I don’t like to divulge that I write for a living, mostly because it sounds like BS. This prof was a pretty good writer, whose work had a literary gen X/punky vibe to it. He wrote stories about girls piercing each other’s noses with safety pins, or kids making cross-country road trips trying to track down the ghost of Bukowski or Kerouac. It was not really my thing, but he was good at what he did.
This professor also definitely helped me improve my style, not with his classes, but by giving a couple of my books hard edits before I put them through further drafts and sent them to the publisher. He charged me three dollars per page, and used MS-Word’s Track Changes feature to tell me what I did wrong (which I paid him to do) and what I occasionally did well (which wasn’t necessary, but still was generous of him).
One point on which I’m not sure I agree with him, even now years later, is on the use of “You.” This used to drive him crazy, my use of the pronoun “You” where he preferred the use of “One.” If, for instance, I wrote, “You would think working a sixteen-hour shift in sweltering heat would be hard, but I didn’t mind the job provided the radio was on and there was a steady supply of coffee,” he would highlight the word “you” and insist I use “one.” At one point in Track Changes he broke down and left a comment along the lines of “I’m not going to fix any more of these instances of ‘you.’ Do it yourself.” It hadn’t been my intention to frustrate him.
I’ve never been a fan of the second person, though I don’t mind it when it’s not overdone. It’s been awhile since I read Robert O’Connor’s Buffalo Soldiers, but as I recall he used the second person to good effect in his book about American soldiers stationed in Germany during the Cold War selling heroin and running amok. I think Chuck Palahniuk uses the second person as well, though I haven’t read anything he wrote post-Survivor.
Then of course, there’s the old Choose-your-own-Adventure series of books, in which everything is presented to the reader as a series of choices, i.e. “You come to a stone chamber with two iron doors nestled in its face. The first door features a brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s snarling visage; the second door features a winged bird of prey done in brass relief, clutching a snake in its talons. Do you A) …”
Every once and awhile I’ll use the pronoun “you,” in my writing and I’ll feel my professor with his finger hovering over the Track Changes feature (the MS-Word equivalent of the dreaded red pen) and I’ll contemplate changing the use of “you” to “one.” And I’ll ask myself if perhaps he was right, if I’m not breaking some kind of necessary conceit, a pact between reader and writer, by directly addressing the reader. Or maybe using “You” is just a mark of laziness?
Maybe, but if I’m to be honest, the main reason I learned to stop worrying and started using “you” without guilt or reservations is, quite frankly, that I’ve noticed writers much better than me or this professor in question using the pronoun all the time, and to no ill-effect. Anyone who writes knows that someone is reading the work (or may in the future). What’s the point in avoiding “you” in the sense that it could be interchangeably understood as “one”? My thinking is Good enough for great writers, good enough for me. Hell, good enough for you, too, and what the hell, in a final act of deference to my professor, good enough for one, as well.
Why not.
Addendum: Curious, I just looked up Robert O’Connor, author of the aforementioned book Buffalo Soldiers. According to the unimpeachable and never-wrong Wikipedia, Mr. O'Connor “received a B.A. in English/Writing Arts from the State University of New York at Oswego, and an M.A. in English from Syracuse University. He currently teaches Advanced Fiction and Intermediate Screenwriting at SUNY Oswego.” He sounds like a man whose bona fides are certainly in order, and yet he did in fact use the second person in Buffalo Soldiers (I just checked on that too; I do deep, in-depth research for these blog posts, I’ll have you know). So perhaps my professor’s bias comes from some other source, or maybe, just as certain words are phased in or out of the lexicon each year, some edict came down from higher saying to nix “you” after O’Connor wrote Buffalo Soldiers but before my professor underwent his own course of education.
Someone less lazy than me should pursue the matter further, and then get back to me. I’ve spent enough time dwelling on the damnable pronoun issue for one night.
Luckily, I took this friend’s advice, and never bothered with a formal writing degree. I don’t think I could enjoy being a writer if I felt like I had some kind of certificate proving that I had studied writing. For me, writing needs to feel like something personal, not professional.
Still, I did take the requisite courses in composition necessary to get my associates, before going on to get my BA and MA. It was strange to sit in a classroom and work on writing a five-page essay, and then after school to go home and work on writing another novel or article for the market.
I wouldn’t say the experience was a total waste of time, but my professor (who I knew outside of the program) assured me that I wouldn’t learn anything, but that he appreciated me playing along in class. He also agreed never to put me on the spot and mention in class that I was already a pro getting paid. For some reason I don’t like to divulge that I write for a living, mostly because it sounds like BS. This prof was a pretty good writer, whose work had a literary gen X/punky vibe to it. He wrote stories about girls piercing each other’s noses with safety pins, or kids making cross-country road trips trying to track down the ghost of Bukowski or Kerouac. It was not really my thing, but he was good at what he did.
This professor also definitely helped me improve my style, not with his classes, but by giving a couple of my books hard edits before I put them through further drafts and sent them to the publisher. He charged me three dollars per page, and used MS-Word’s Track Changes feature to tell me what I did wrong (which I paid him to do) and what I occasionally did well (which wasn’t necessary, but still was generous of him).
One point on which I’m not sure I agree with him, even now years later, is on the use of “You.” This used to drive him crazy, my use of the pronoun “You” where he preferred the use of “One.” If, for instance, I wrote, “You would think working a sixteen-hour shift in sweltering heat would be hard, but I didn’t mind the job provided the radio was on and there was a steady supply of coffee,” he would highlight the word “you” and insist I use “one.” At one point in Track Changes he broke down and left a comment along the lines of “I’m not going to fix any more of these instances of ‘you.’ Do it yourself.” It hadn’t been my intention to frustrate him.
I’ve never been a fan of the second person, though I don’t mind it when it’s not overdone. It’s been awhile since I read Robert O’Connor’s Buffalo Soldiers, but as I recall he used the second person to good effect in his book about American soldiers stationed in Germany during the Cold War selling heroin and running amok. I think Chuck Palahniuk uses the second person as well, though I haven’t read anything he wrote post-Survivor.
Then of course, there’s the old Choose-your-own-Adventure series of books, in which everything is presented to the reader as a series of choices, i.e. “You come to a stone chamber with two iron doors nestled in its face. The first door features a brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s snarling visage; the second door features a winged bird of prey done in brass relief, clutching a snake in its talons. Do you A) …”
Every once and awhile I’ll use the pronoun “you,” in my writing and I’ll feel my professor with his finger hovering over the Track Changes feature (the MS-Word equivalent of the dreaded red pen) and I’ll contemplate changing the use of “you” to “one.” And I’ll ask myself if perhaps he was right, if I’m not breaking some kind of necessary conceit, a pact between reader and writer, by directly addressing the reader. Or maybe using “You” is just a mark of laziness?
Maybe, but if I’m to be honest, the main reason I learned to stop worrying and started using “you” without guilt or reservations is, quite frankly, that I’ve noticed writers much better than me or this professor in question using the pronoun all the time, and to no ill-effect. Anyone who writes knows that someone is reading the work (or may in the future). What’s the point in avoiding “you” in the sense that it could be interchangeably understood as “one”? My thinking is Good enough for great writers, good enough for me. Hell, good enough for you, too, and what the hell, in a final act of deference to my professor, good enough for one, as well.
Why not.
Addendum: Curious, I just looked up Robert O’Connor, author of the aforementioned book Buffalo Soldiers. According to the unimpeachable and never-wrong Wikipedia, Mr. O'Connor “received a B.A. in English/Writing Arts from the State University of New York at Oswego, and an M.A. in English from Syracuse University. He currently teaches Advanced Fiction and Intermediate Screenwriting at SUNY Oswego.” He sounds like a man whose bona fides are certainly in order, and yet he did in fact use the second person in Buffalo Soldiers (I just checked on that too; I do deep, in-depth research for these blog posts, I’ll have you know). So perhaps my professor’s bias comes from some other source, or maybe, just as certain words are phased in or out of the lexicon each year, some edict came down from higher saying to nix “you” after O’Connor wrote Buffalo Soldiers but before my professor underwent his own course of education.
Someone less lazy than me should pursue the matter further, and then get back to me. I’ve spent enough time dwelling on the damnable pronoun issue for one night.
Bret Easton Ellis would have made one hell of a Coal-Miner
The following quote is attributed to William Ralph Inge, but I’ve seen it crop up in too many places and in too many different phrasings to feel comfortable calling it anything but apocryphal:
“Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.”
The writer Jim Tully is remembered primarily today for his book, Beggars of Life, a pre-Beat paean to the life of a tramp fighting to survive in hobo jungles, riding the rails and mixing it up with callous boxcar bulls like the one played by Ernest Borgnine in Emperor of the North Pole (watch it if you haven’t, or watch it again if you’ve already seen it).
In an essay about Jim Tully in his book Writing and Other Bloodsports, the author Charles Willeford mentions that he had contemplated writing a book-length work about the legendary hobo-slash boxer-slash-chain maker, but for one reason or another he never got around to it. For all I know pages from this abortive effort could still be sitting in a box or several boxes, collecting dust at the Broward County Library in the Charles Willeford Archive; just writing the words “Florida” and “Archive” in the same sentence gives the book collector in me the heebie jeebies; between the cocaine and the swampy humidity there, it’s hard for me to imagine anything being well-preserved in Florida, except for a bunch of Parrot Heads’ livers ...Wasting away in Margaritaville.
In his essay Charles Willeford pondered how Tully was incredibly famous one moment (both as a Hollywood reporter and a writer) and then the next his star took a precipitous dip. Every career (hell, every life) has peaks and valleys, but with Tully it was as disconcerting and discernible as the plunge downhill on a rollercoaster. Well, what happened to him?
Willeford put it well when he said that Jim Tully was quintessentially a creature of his time, and when that moment passed, so too did his ability to say anything that interested the wider world (or at least a significant portion of the reading public).
I think Willeford’s right, and it’s part of the reason why abiding clichés like “strike while the iron’s hot” or “ahead of his/her time” don’t really hold much credence for me. A book is either good or not good, a time-consuming labor (that makes the author oblivious to their time rather than attuned to it), and while period pieces can be said to sometimes be reflections of the current age (“glimpsed in a distant mirror” as one critic said of The Assassination of Jesse James), the fact that an artist is willing to ignore their time is part of what can give their works a timeless quality.
I understand this is just a matter of opinion, and that people can glean sociological details from past cultures by consuming art that focused on the Zeitgeist (i.e. Hunter Thompson’s or Tom Wolfe’s gimlet eye turned on certain events may help people in the future to understand what was going on in our time better than a textbook, if they even have those in the future.)
Putting all that aside, and getting to what I wanted to say, it’s hard for me not to view the literary Brat Pack (the most successful and enduring member of which is Bret Easton Ellis) in the same light as Willeford viewed Tully.
He’s protested that he’s not an eighties author, but I can’t see his face or even hear his name without feeling a wash of Proustian recall that involves a Simple Minds or Depeche Mode untrained baritone warble, Andrew McCarthy in a grey polyester blazer and a blue t-shirt, or myriad mixtures of my memories comingled with the rest of our collective nostalgia from the same time.
It’s not Ellis’s fault that I associate him with a moment he clutched from the ether at the age of 22 or so with Less than Zero, but if I’m to be honest it’s also a moot point because I always found him and his other cohorts to be bad writers.
For starters the “bad boy” (and “bad girl”) swirl of PR around these figures in their heyday always rang pretty hollow. Do even a cursory bit of homework (i.e. google “Literary Brat Pack”) and you’ll quickly discover that most of these writers have über-Ivy pedigrees. People who know more about good schools than I (I went to a state school on the GI Bill) claim the expensive eastern Colleges you don’t hear about are more exclusive than the traditional Ivies (Bennington and Williams > Yale and Harvard). It’s hard, in any event, to read an interview with Bret Easton Ellis in which he talks about his time at Bennington College (fictionalized as “Camden” in his works) toughening him up and hearing him prattle about “Generation Wuss,” as if he’s spent the last twenty years as a beat cop in Oakland or something. People would kill to enjoy the advantages which have cosseted him to the point that he views them as a kind of baptism by fire rather than as the privileges they are.
In Ellis’s defense, I seem to be concentrating on him to the exclusion of the other Brat-Packers for the simple reason that he is at least interesting as person, if not as a writer. I read a book by David Cronenberg some years ago in which the director said some people who dismissed him in the beginning of his career were starting to reassess his work, if only because he’d continued working regardless of whether the Zeitgeist wanted him or not. Ellis is not prolific, but neither is he silent, and I may not believe in what he’s doing or be interested in it, but someone who feels they still have something to say- demons to grapple with, a place to explore, after twenty-five years of going there- must at least believe in what they’re doing.
I don’t want to get into quantitative blogging (math has never been my thing) but looking over the bibliographies of the other Brat-Packers, they seem to average two books a decade. A couple (like Tama Janowitz) strike me as leaving behind a literary trail that resembles the tracks of a dodgy doctor who sells supplements, opens a pill mill, loses his license, and gives up after being exposed as a fraud and disgraced after a couple malpractice suits. I remember the very good writer Alex Garland saying upon the success of his first novel The Beach, “I feel as if I’m going to be caught out at some trick,” or words to that effect. He found his footing as a screenwriter and director, but back in the day he seemed uncomfortable with his newfound status as the next Graham Greene, an imprimatur granted by no less a personage than the late J.G. Ballard.
Praise can paralyze people, turn them into “immobilized men” as Charles Willeford had it in another essay in Writing and Other Bloodsports. Perhaps one can equally be frozen by “striking while the iron is hot” rather than using some ochre and clay to quietly paint on a cave wall while waiting for someone to discover their magnum opus washed in limestone. Apologies for the mixed and belabored metaphor. But you get what I mean.
As a final addendum before putting this think-piece to bed, I should add in defense of all the writers mentioned above that authors are sometimes lumped together against their will, or post-hoc, with no regard for how they viewed themselves. Some were comfortable with the label “Beat,” while others eschewed it. Colin Wilson spent a lifetime trying to outrun his association with the “Angry Young Man” tag with which he was saddled after his enfant terrible entre on existentialism, The Outsider, exploded on the literary scene in post-War England.
Speaking of Wilson, he was always quick to point out (accurately, I think) that writers from rougher backgrounds typically had stronger constitutions and a less bleak view of life than their more fortunate counterparts. It’s a curious assertion (made in The Books in my Life), but it’s one I find hard to argue. A homeless Colin Wilson who slept outside at night and toiled by day on his first manuscript inside the British Museum seemed to enjoy life a hell of a lot more than some feted, well-heeled, and well-pedigreed cocktail party attendees currently schmoozing in the stratosphere of a Manhattan or Brooklyn rooftop as I write this.
Maybe Ellis just needs to work as a forklift operator for a couple of years. Or, as Bukowski once said of James Thurber, “He would have made one hell of a coal miner.”
“Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.”
The writer Jim Tully is remembered primarily today for his book, Beggars of Life, a pre-Beat paean to the life of a tramp fighting to survive in hobo jungles, riding the rails and mixing it up with callous boxcar bulls like the one played by Ernest Borgnine in Emperor of the North Pole (watch it if you haven’t, or watch it again if you’ve already seen it).
In an essay about Jim Tully in his book Writing and Other Bloodsports, the author Charles Willeford mentions that he had contemplated writing a book-length work about the legendary hobo-slash boxer-slash-chain maker, but for one reason or another he never got around to it. For all I know pages from this abortive effort could still be sitting in a box or several boxes, collecting dust at the Broward County Library in the Charles Willeford Archive; just writing the words “Florida” and “Archive” in the same sentence gives the book collector in me the heebie jeebies; between the cocaine and the swampy humidity there, it’s hard for me to imagine anything being well-preserved in Florida, except for a bunch of Parrot Heads’ livers ...Wasting away in Margaritaville.
In his essay Charles Willeford pondered how Tully was incredibly famous one moment (both as a Hollywood reporter and a writer) and then the next his star took a precipitous dip. Every career (hell, every life) has peaks and valleys, but with Tully it was as disconcerting and discernible as the plunge downhill on a rollercoaster. Well, what happened to him?
Willeford put it well when he said that Jim Tully was quintessentially a creature of his time, and when that moment passed, so too did his ability to say anything that interested the wider world (or at least a significant portion of the reading public).
I think Willeford’s right, and it’s part of the reason why abiding clichés like “strike while the iron’s hot” or “ahead of his/her time” don’t really hold much credence for me. A book is either good or not good, a time-consuming labor (that makes the author oblivious to their time rather than attuned to it), and while period pieces can be said to sometimes be reflections of the current age (“glimpsed in a distant mirror” as one critic said of The Assassination of Jesse James), the fact that an artist is willing to ignore their time is part of what can give their works a timeless quality.
I understand this is just a matter of opinion, and that people can glean sociological details from past cultures by consuming art that focused on the Zeitgeist (i.e. Hunter Thompson’s or Tom Wolfe’s gimlet eye turned on certain events may help people in the future to understand what was going on in our time better than a textbook, if they even have those in the future.)
Putting all that aside, and getting to what I wanted to say, it’s hard for me not to view the literary Brat Pack (the most successful and enduring member of which is Bret Easton Ellis) in the same light as Willeford viewed Tully.
He’s protested that he’s not an eighties author, but I can’t see his face or even hear his name without feeling a wash of Proustian recall that involves a Simple Minds or Depeche Mode untrained baritone warble, Andrew McCarthy in a grey polyester blazer and a blue t-shirt, or myriad mixtures of my memories comingled with the rest of our collective nostalgia from the same time.
It’s not Ellis’s fault that I associate him with a moment he clutched from the ether at the age of 22 or so with Less than Zero, but if I’m to be honest it’s also a moot point because I always found him and his other cohorts to be bad writers.
For starters the “bad boy” (and “bad girl”) swirl of PR around these figures in their heyday always rang pretty hollow. Do even a cursory bit of homework (i.e. google “Literary Brat Pack”) and you’ll quickly discover that most of these writers have über-Ivy pedigrees. People who know more about good schools than I (I went to a state school on the GI Bill) claim the expensive eastern Colleges you don’t hear about are more exclusive than the traditional Ivies (Bennington and Williams > Yale and Harvard). It’s hard, in any event, to read an interview with Bret Easton Ellis in which he talks about his time at Bennington College (fictionalized as “Camden” in his works) toughening him up and hearing him prattle about “Generation Wuss,” as if he’s spent the last twenty years as a beat cop in Oakland or something. People would kill to enjoy the advantages which have cosseted him to the point that he views them as a kind of baptism by fire rather than as the privileges they are.
In Ellis’s defense, I seem to be concentrating on him to the exclusion of the other Brat-Packers for the simple reason that he is at least interesting as person, if not as a writer. I read a book by David Cronenberg some years ago in which the director said some people who dismissed him in the beginning of his career were starting to reassess his work, if only because he’d continued working regardless of whether the Zeitgeist wanted him or not. Ellis is not prolific, but neither is he silent, and I may not believe in what he’s doing or be interested in it, but someone who feels they still have something to say- demons to grapple with, a place to explore, after twenty-five years of going there- must at least believe in what they’re doing.
I don’t want to get into quantitative blogging (math has never been my thing) but looking over the bibliographies of the other Brat-Packers, they seem to average two books a decade. A couple (like Tama Janowitz) strike me as leaving behind a literary trail that resembles the tracks of a dodgy doctor who sells supplements, opens a pill mill, loses his license, and gives up after being exposed as a fraud and disgraced after a couple malpractice suits. I remember the very good writer Alex Garland saying upon the success of his first novel The Beach, “I feel as if I’m going to be caught out at some trick,” or words to that effect. He found his footing as a screenwriter and director, but back in the day he seemed uncomfortable with his newfound status as the next Graham Greene, an imprimatur granted by no less a personage than the late J.G. Ballard.
Praise can paralyze people, turn them into “immobilized men” as Charles Willeford had it in another essay in Writing and Other Bloodsports. Perhaps one can equally be frozen by “striking while the iron is hot” rather than using some ochre and clay to quietly paint on a cave wall while waiting for someone to discover their magnum opus washed in limestone. Apologies for the mixed and belabored metaphor. But you get what I mean.
As a final addendum before putting this think-piece to bed, I should add in defense of all the writers mentioned above that authors are sometimes lumped together against their will, or post-hoc, with no regard for how they viewed themselves. Some were comfortable with the label “Beat,” while others eschewed it. Colin Wilson spent a lifetime trying to outrun his association with the “Angry Young Man” tag with which he was saddled after his enfant terrible entre on existentialism, The Outsider, exploded on the literary scene in post-War England.
Speaking of Wilson, he was always quick to point out (accurately, I think) that writers from rougher backgrounds typically had stronger constitutions and a less bleak view of life than their more fortunate counterparts. It’s a curious assertion (made in The Books in my Life), but it’s one I find hard to argue. A homeless Colin Wilson who slept outside at night and toiled by day on his first manuscript inside the British Museum seemed to enjoy life a hell of a lot more than some feted, well-heeled, and well-pedigreed cocktail party attendees currently schmoozing in the stratosphere of a Manhattan or Brooklyn rooftop as I write this.
Maybe Ellis just needs to work as a forklift operator for a couple of years. Or, as Bukowski once said of James Thurber, “He would have made one hell of a coal miner.”
That Time the Coen Brothers put out a Cigarette on my Head
The science fiction writer William Gibson once told a story about how during the composition of his famous book Neuromancer he went to see the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner, which was based very loosely on the novel Do Androids dream of electronic Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. Gibson relates how disheartened he became as he watched the film, realizing that the ideas he was grappling with on paper were being presented on the screen, maybe in a form arguably superior to the work he was crafting. He dealt with his unease by getting up and leaving the theater halfway through the film.
Something similar happened to me awhile back.
I was at my last duty station in the Army, running out the clock on my contract at Fort Bliss, Texas. Bliss was in El Paso, flush against the Rio Grande and adjacent to Juarez, Mexico, where open bloodletting in the streets was a daily occurrence, and meant bodies being displayed on overpasses (sometimes sans heads) to send a message to rival cartels, and corruption leading all the way up to the general staff of the Army (maybe higher).
Juarez was off-limits for American military personnel, so naturally I turned all of my attention to the task of getting there. It wasn’t that hard. I talked to a cabbie I knew from on-post, and said I wanted to go to Juarez. He agreed to take me for a flat fee, said he knew the area like the back of his hand, and that if I wanted to get women or drugs all I had to do was ask.
We met at one of the dining facilities near my barracks, which was built like a blockhouse and stucco-walled, facing the hills on the Mexican side of the border that were upholstered in chaparral dense enough to look like barbed wire.
As we drove toward Mexico I told the cabbie all I wanted to do was see Juarez, and he nodded, almost sounding disappointed. “A lot of old gringos come down here to get drugs.”
“Drugs?” I was surprised. I figured the dope market would skew young.
We came to the border crossing, where dirty cars and open-bed trucks were waiting, and he said, “No, I mean drugs to commit suicide.” He explained that Americans who wanted to be euthanized could get their hands on phenobarbital in Juarez as easily as we could get a loaf of bread on the American side of the border.
Once in Juarez, my Spidey sense started tingling, like I was back in Iraq. My heart was beating fast, and I looked on in horror as a man (or maybe a woman) with the same disease as the Elephant Man staggered toward us, selling tempura paintings of the Virgin Mary and salted pumpkin seeds in plastic bags. His face looked like one massive goiter, fluid-filled pouch, or swollen testicle about to explode. I hunkered down in my seat, and we drove to a motel built in hacienda-style with steer horns over the entrance and white Christmas lights wrapped around the building. There was also a strand of yellow “Cuidado” tape cordoning the motel off, and as we ducked under the tape the cabbie explained that the place was run by his sister-in-law and that it had been robbed by masked gunmen the previous day.
“You said you don’t want girls or drugs, so I figure maybe I use this chance to visit her.”
I sat in a dining room with a floor done in beige tiles and a massive fireplace clad in limestone while the cabbie spoke to the hotelier in soft undertones at a saloon-style bar, where every other bottle seemed to be gold-coin-colored tequila. It was cool and dark in that dining room, peaceful as a grotto where a saint sits with his reliquaries, and I had no desire to see anymore of Juarez. The cabbie and his sister-in-law occasionally glanced up from their powwow at the bar, looking over at me and smiling. They seemed to think it was funny that the buracho blanco soldier was so scared, and I had the feeling that they interspersed some jokes at my expense between whatever other words they exchanged.
A few months later I was still stationed in Fort Bliss, and I was close to the expiry of my contract with the U.S. Army. Not only was I going to be a free man soon, but I had some prospects, and even a little hope that I might make it as a pro writer.
I had a ritual, you see, that I’d maintained every week for the better part of the last year. Most weekends I would get a backpack, put my laptop in there, and then head down to the local La Quinta hotel off-post. I’d write a story on Friday, edit it Saturday, and then send it out to the publisher on Sunday morning, before returning to the barracks. I never told anyone what I was doing, and for all I knew my fellow soldiers just thought I was hanging out at a girlfriend’s house.
I got a ton of rejection slips, of course, and even some meanspirited personalized comments from publishers telling me to give it up, or at least not to send them anymore material, but I also managed to sell a few stories here and there. The main publisher to whom I sold work was, incidentally, the publisher of my last novel. We’ve had a professional correspondence going on now for more than a decade without ever having met once, or even spoken about anything besides publishing. To be honest, his/her name is gender-neutral, so I don’t even know if the person who gave me my career is a man or a woman; I’ve never asked.
Anyway, I figured that since I had sold some short stories, and accrued the beginnings of a CV, maybe it was time to try to write a novel. This was before the embarrassment of shows and movies about drug cartels really started to the flood the market (to the point where oversaturation has reached the level of the vampire subgenre), so I decided to write about border wars around the Juarez area.
I’d done as much up-close research inside Juarez as I intended to do (you only have to have a guy with a massive scrotum on his face and pictures of the Virgin Mary in his hand staggering toward you once before your tourism instinct wanes), but I felt the place’s aura deep in my bones, and thought I could at least write something respectably noir or pulpy on the subject and maybe shop the result to paperback publishers.
And then Dunphy (as I call him in my fiction) took me to see No Country for Old Men, and my heart sank, as I imagine it must have for William Gibson all those years ago. No Country got the pace of life along the border, the local flavor and color, and that sinister air of ancient Aztec gods clashing with the white man’s law, that feeling of wildness mixing with corruption and brutality in which every side is evil, and it captured it all so well that I just shook my head and said Shit.
A few years later I did write a book that takes place in and around the area where I was stationed in Texas, called Rolling Country. The book deals with an over-the-road trucker who works with a Mexican human and drug trafficker along the border. This trucker also happens to be a serial killer and a man with a penchant for transsexual prostitutes (in other words, it’s a thinly-veiled autobiography).
Rolling Country got picked up by a publisher, and I sent it to a writer who I respected but had never met or even previously corresponded with. He replied that he thought the book was good, but added the caveat, “You know you’re inviting comparison with Cormac McCarthy with this thing, don’t you?”
I knew. The movie No Country for Old Men was based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, and my book was nowhere near as good as the book or the movie. But it was a start. And though I squirmed a bit in my seat while watching No Country, at least I didn’t get up and leave the theater.
Something similar happened to me awhile back.
I was at my last duty station in the Army, running out the clock on my contract at Fort Bliss, Texas. Bliss was in El Paso, flush against the Rio Grande and adjacent to Juarez, Mexico, where open bloodletting in the streets was a daily occurrence, and meant bodies being displayed on overpasses (sometimes sans heads) to send a message to rival cartels, and corruption leading all the way up to the general staff of the Army (maybe higher).
Juarez was off-limits for American military personnel, so naturally I turned all of my attention to the task of getting there. It wasn’t that hard. I talked to a cabbie I knew from on-post, and said I wanted to go to Juarez. He agreed to take me for a flat fee, said he knew the area like the back of his hand, and that if I wanted to get women or drugs all I had to do was ask.
We met at one of the dining facilities near my barracks, which was built like a blockhouse and stucco-walled, facing the hills on the Mexican side of the border that were upholstered in chaparral dense enough to look like barbed wire.
As we drove toward Mexico I told the cabbie all I wanted to do was see Juarez, and he nodded, almost sounding disappointed. “A lot of old gringos come down here to get drugs.”
“Drugs?” I was surprised. I figured the dope market would skew young.
We came to the border crossing, where dirty cars and open-bed trucks were waiting, and he said, “No, I mean drugs to commit suicide.” He explained that Americans who wanted to be euthanized could get their hands on phenobarbital in Juarez as easily as we could get a loaf of bread on the American side of the border.
Once in Juarez, my Spidey sense started tingling, like I was back in Iraq. My heart was beating fast, and I looked on in horror as a man (or maybe a woman) with the same disease as the Elephant Man staggered toward us, selling tempura paintings of the Virgin Mary and salted pumpkin seeds in plastic bags. His face looked like one massive goiter, fluid-filled pouch, or swollen testicle about to explode. I hunkered down in my seat, and we drove to a motel built in hacienda-style with steer horns over the entrance and white Christmas lights wrapped around the building. There was also a strand of yellow “Cuidado” tape cordoning the motel off, and as we ducked under the tape the cabbie explained that the place was run by his sister-in-law and that it had been robbed by masked gunmen the previous day.
“You said you don’t want girls or drugs, so I figure maybe I use this chance to visit her.”
I sat in a dining room with a floor done in beige tiles and a massive fireplace clad in limestone while the cabbie spoke to the hotelier in soft undertones at a saloon-style bar, where every other bottle seemed to be gold-coin-colored tequila. It was cool and dark in that dining room, peaceful as a grotto where a saint sits with his reliquaries, and I had no desire to see anymore of Juarez. The cabbie and his sister-in-law occasionally glanced up from their powwow at the bar, looking over at me and smiling. They seemed to think it was funny that the buracho blanco soldier was so scared, and I had the feeling that they interspersed some jokes at my expense between whatever other words they exchanged.
A few months later I was still stationed in Fort Bliss, and I was close to the expiry of my contract with the U.S. Army. Not only was I going to be a free man soon, but I had some prospects, and even a little hope that I might make it as a pro writer.
I had a ritual, you see, that I’d maintained every week for the better part of the last year. Most weekends I would get a backpack, put my laptop in there, and then head down to the local La Quinta hotel off-post. I’d write a story on Friday, edit it Saturday, and then send it out to the publisher on Sunday morning, before returning to the barracks. I never told anyone what I was doing, and for all I knew my fellow soldiers just thought I was hanging out at a girlfriend’s house.
I got a ton of rejection slips, of course, and even some meanspirited personalized comments from publishers telling me to give it up, or at least not to send them anymore material, but I also managed to sell a few stories here and there. The main publisher to whom I sold work was, incidentally, the publisher of my last novel. We’ve had a professional correspondence going on now for more than a decade without ever having met once, or even spoken about anything besides publishing. To be honest, his/her name is gender-neutral, so I don’t even know if the person who gave me my career is a man or a woman; I’ve never asked.
Anyway, I figured that since I had sold some short stories, and accrued the beginnings of a CV, maybe it was time to try to write a novel. This was before the embarrassment of shows and movies about drug cartels really started to the flood the market (to the point where oversaturation has reached the level of the vampire subgenre), so I decided to write about border wars around the Juarez area.
I’d done as much up-close research inside Juarez as I intended to do (you only have to have a guy with a massive scrotum on his face and pictures of the Virgin Mary in his hand staggering toward you once before your tourism instinct wanes), but I felt the place’s aura deep in my bones, and thought I could at least write something respectably noir or pulpy on the subject and maybe shop the result to paperback publishers.
And then Dunphy (as I call him in my fiction) took me to see No Country for Old Men, and my heart sank, as I imagine it must have for William Gibson all those years ago. No Country got the pace of life along the border, the local flavor and color, and that sinister air of ancient Aztec gods clashing with the white man’s law, that feeling of wildness mixing with corruption and brutality in which every side is evil, and it captured it all so well that I just shook my head and said Shit.
A few years later I did write a book that takes place in and around the area where I was stationed in Texas, called Rolling Country. The book deals with an over-the-road trucker who works with a Mexican human and drug trafficker along the border. This trucker also happens to be a serial killer and a man with a penchant for transsexual prostitutes (in other words, it’s a thinly-veiled autobiography).
Rolling Country got picked up by a publisher, and I sent it to a writer who I respected but had never met or even previously corresponded with. He replied that he thought the book was good, but added the caveat, “You know you’re inviting comparison with Cormac McCarthy with this thing, don’t you?”
I knew. The movie No Country for Old Men was based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, and my book was nowhere near as good as the book or the movie. But it was a start. And though I squirmed a bit in my seat while watching No Country, at least I didn’t get up and leave the theater.
What Percentage of the Population could be professional Writers if they really wanted to be?
We can argue all day about whether you think the ability to write is inborn, epigenetic, or just a matter of hard work, but I remain convinced regardless that quite a few people have what it takes to write something that is worth reading, and worth publishing. Most 101-level introductions to narratology make a point of saying that the desire to tell a story is inborn, and dates back to the days when our ancient forebears dwelt in caves and used ochre and clay to paint bison and hunters roaming the plains across limestone walls. Humanity managed to focus some of its energy on telling stories even when survival was the overriding prerogative, and there was definitely neither the time nor the luxury for much beyond subsistence. That must mean imagination has always ranked high on Man’s hierarchy of needs.
If you’ve ever been in a bar, around a campfire, or just have decent hearing, you have eavesdropped on someone relating a tale to someone else. This person, who probably doesn’t have an MFA (and may not even have completed high-school) understands innately something about pacing, suspense, and the mechanics of storytelling. Maybe there is some compliment to the hypothetical module than linguists talk about, the LAD (Language Acquisition Device) that makes it almost impossible not to pick up a language, provided you’re young enough and your brain has enough elasticity in it to soak the new language in. Maybe we’re hardwired, when recounting events, to ornament and embellish them as well as chronologizing them. You’ve heard people who automatically segue from voice to voice when playing various principals in some encounter they witnessed. Someone recounting a car crash to the first officer on a scene is capable of telling a story.
How about that transition from telling a story to writing one, though? Is the leap from griot to scribe a large one to make? It depends who you ask, but I always thought Charles Bukowski’s insight that the frame-of-mind one is in when writing a letter is also suitable for telling a story. It could be that the desire to perceive literature as separate from any other form of communication is many times what stymies works and gives them a pretentious quality. Steven King said “You must not step lightly to the blank page,” but there is a granular distinction to be made between “lightly” and “loosely.”
You see this logic in boxing as much as in writing. Good trainers, coaches, and experienced boxers tell their fighters to “stay loose.” It seems counterintuitive on its face, doesn’t it? Relaxing in a situation where you can literally get killed? Still, I’m convinced that the seizing up that trainers caution against is also applicable to writing. Writers who regard the blank page as an enemy, an opponent, a mountain to be climbed, have never been my thing. I understand Hemingway and his “white bull” (what he called the blank page), but I much prefer Knut Hamsun’s gentle perception of writing, as his way of listening to the drip of water to amuse himself, regardless of whether anyone is listening besides him. It needn’t all be binary, of course. One can face a bull one day and then listen to water drip the next. It could be a matter of whim, fancy, mood or age.
To return to my central question, though, and the one posed in the title of this blog piece, I think about roughly twenty-percent of people have the innate ability to write a story or book worth publishing. Where the men and boys separate is in the prosaic, more obnoxious details of the game. It’s the minutiae and attritional nature of the game that discourages people from ever trying, or that grinds them down so that they try, perhaps have a little success, and then walk away, feeling exhausted.
To write, and then rewrite, and then revise, and then to tailor your work to the specifications of a certain publisher, and then to submit your work, and then to have it rejected, and then to begin the process again, and then to have the work rejected again…well, you see where I am going with this. In order to write, I suppose, and continue to write until you finally make it, you must, to paraphrase Camus, learn to see Sisyphus as happy. To return to Bukowski, you must learn to dig through a hard wall with tin spoon. But I think that if you can write an email, you can write a book.
Watch out for carpal tunnel syndrome along the way, though. And good luck to you.
If you’ve ever been in a bar, around a campfire, or just have decent hearing, you have eavesdropped on someone relating a tale to someone else. This person, who probably doesn’t have an MFA (and may not even have completed high-school) understands innately something about pacing, suspense, and the mechanics of storytelling. Maybe there is some compliment to the hypothetical module than linguists talk about, the LAD (Language Acquisition Device) that makes it almost impossible not to pick up a language, provided you’re young enough and your brain has enough elasticity in it to soak the new language in. Maybe we’re hardwired, when recounting events, to ornament and embellish them as well as chronologizing them. You’ve heard people who automatically segue from voice to voice when playing various principals in some encounter they witnessed. Someone recounting a car crash to the first officer on a scene is capable of telling a story.
How about that transition from telling a story to writing one, though? Is the leap from griot to scribe a large one to make? It depends who you ask, but I always thought Charles Bukowski’s insight that the frame-of-mind one is in when writing a letter is also suitable for telling a story. It could be that the desire to perceive literature as separate from any other form of communication is many times what stymies works and gives them a pretentious quality. Steven King said “You must not step lightly to the blank page,” but there is a granular distinction to be made between “lightly” and “loosely.”
You see this logic in boxing as much as in writing. Good trainers, coaches, and experienced boxers tell their fighters to “stay loose.” It seems counterintuitive on its face, doesn’t it? Relaxing in a situation where you can literally get killed? Still, I’m convinced that the seizing up that trainers caution against is also applicable to writing. Writers who regard the blank page as an enemy, an opponent, a mountain to be climbed, have never been my thing. I understand Hemingway and his “white bull” (what he called the blank page), but I much prefer Knut Hamsun’s gentle perception of writing, as his way of listening to the drip of water to amuse himself, regardless of whether anyone is listening besides him. It needn’t all be binary, of course. One can face a bull one day and then listen to water drip the next. It could be a matter of whim, fancy, mood or age.
To return to my central question, though, and the one posed in the title of this blog piece, I think about roughly twenty-percent of people have the innate ability to write a story or book worth publishing. Where the men and boys separate is in the prosaic, more obnoxious details of the game. It’s the minutiae and attritional nature of the game that discourages people from ever trying, or that grinds them down so that they try, perhaps have a little success, and then walk away, feeling exhausted.
To write, and then rewrite, and then revise, and then to tailor your work to the specifications of a certain publisher, and then to submit your work, and then to have it rejected, and then to begin the process again, and then to have the work rejected again…well, you see where I am going with this. In order to write, I suppose, and continue to write until you finally make it, you must, to paraphrase Camus, learn to see Sisyphus as happy. To return to Bukowski, you must learn to dig through a hard wall with tin spoon. But I think that if you can write an email, you can write a book.
Watch out for carpal tunnel syndrome along the way, though. And good luck to you.
Touched a nerve, did I?” Some Quick Thoughts on One-Star Reviews
There’s a writer I love and admire, with whom I was once friends, and with whom I am friends no more. I’ll leave the nature of our falling-out cast to the side for the night, since it’s not the subject of this post. Suffice it to say, though, that the break was mostly my fault.
Anyway, this writer (let’s call him James Sherman) once told me that he’d rather someone hate his book than have a middling opinion of it. In fact, he said he downright enjoyed it when someone hated his work. “Touched a nerve, did I?” He would say, smiling.
Years ago I remember reading Roger Ebert’s review of Tom Green’s anti-comedy magnum opus, Freddie Got Fingered. I had never seen someone so enraged by a creative work in my entire life, and in fact Ebert seemed to unintentionally bestow the mantel of genius on Tom Green when he suggested that, a la a Dadaist provocateur who feared one of his productions may have gone too far, Tom might want to load his pockets with rocks if his movie was screened while he was present just to defend himself from the audience.
And still, Roger Ebert acknowledged that Freddie was benchmark of some kind, that it was the movie he hated against which all others he hated must be measured.
I remember once getting a one-star review for one of my books from a young lady, who also started an angry letter campaign to my publisher, and sent me an email telling me that I was vile. She went on to berate and insult me in myriad ways, and, since I’m somewhat masochistic, I naturally got an erection and hoped she would continue to bombard me with screeds, demeaning me and my work. Alas, however, she relented.
And I’m forced to conclude that maybe, perhaps, I have had a greater effect on her than I have had on anyone else who has read my books. I’m not a troll, and have never derived any satisfaction from pissing someone off or upsetting them with my books. I’m alone when I write, so there’s no one to antagonize except my dog, slumbering behind me on the bed while I type, and she can’t read. An immature desire to thumb someone in the eye is just not a strong enough impetus to make me write eighty or one-hundred thousand words.
That said, every time I think about this young lady’s rising gorge, her concerted effort not just to tell other people I’m a piece of shit but to tell me, too …well, I’m embarrassed to say, I smile and get a little extra bop in my step.
I’ve heard that incredibly excoriating reviews have sometimes devastated artists, that they’ve felt so wounded by critique (admittedly from someone higher on the food chain than an online random reviewer) that they’ve ceased to produce, or at least produce work for public consumption.
A rumor I encountered sometime back had it that the legendary director Terrence Mallick hung his gray Stetson on a peg after getting an incredibly bad review somewhere. Considering his post-hiatus output (in comparison to Badlands and Days of Heaven), I think that critic may have done the world a service by sending Mallick into seclusion for a couple decades (assuming the rumor is true, and it probably isn’t).
My personal view toward negative attention is that it is to any artist what the medicine ball to the gut is to the boxer. It’s a chance to gain another accreted layer of toughness, indifference to those forces against which you worked from the beginning, and which frankly probably did much to hone you as an artist and strengthen your resolve in the first place. Let the fires of another (wo)man’s hate scorch them while warming you.
Understand that the kind of negative attention I’m talking about is not just a reasoned or well-explicated critique. I’ve read negative reviews of my work that were well-articulated, and thought, Yeah, I get why this person doesn’t like what I did. I’m talking about someone you don’t know personally who seems to have some sort of personal rancor for you, and is seemingly baiting you in the hopes that you reciprocate, and can thus marinate together in some kind of comingling misery stew. To which I say, “No thanks. If I wanted to do that, I’d get married.”
Conversely, effusive praise can be fatal. The director Tim Burton talked about the reception that his now-canonized Pee-Wee Herman film got when it debuted. He said some people liked it, and a lot of people didn’t, but that in the end he was grateful for the raking over the coals, saying words to the effect that A lot of guys get this, ‘He’s the next Orson Welles’ and then they collapse under the barrage of flattery and heightened expectations.
I remember shortly after Richard Kelly made the quirky, cryptic, and frankly brilliant Donnie Darko, there seemed to be quite a few people who said he was the next David Lynch. When Kelly made a misstep with his next picture (the overly-ambitious Southland Tales), his defenders shrugged and said, Well, Lynch tried to paint on a massive canvas once and came away with Dune, and the comparison seemed to remain apt.
Then Richard Kelly made The Box, a film based on a Richard Matheson short story, whose intriguing premise was stretched, reworked, and molded around personal elements from Kelly’s life (his father worked for NASA in Langley in the 70s and 80s). The movie had strong atmosphere, but it built only to a steam that finally exhausted itself and evaporated in the third act. Richard Kelly hasn’t directed another movie since The Box, and I think that was like a decade ago, give or take a year.
The point is, I guess, there are worse things than people telling you that suck. Like, for instance, people telling you how great you are.
Anyway, this writer (let’s call him James Sherman) once told me that he’d rather someone hate his book than have a middling opinion of it. In fact, he said he downright enjoyed it when someone hated his work. “Touched a nerve, did I?” He would say, smiling.
Years ago I remember reading Roger Ebert’s review of Tom Green’s anti-comedy magnum opus, Freddie Got Fingered. I had never seen someone so enraged by a creative work in my entire life, and in fact Ebert seemed to unintentionally bestow the mantel of genius on Tom Green when he suggested that, a la a Dadaist provocateur who feared one of his productions may have gone too far, Tom might want to load his pockets with rocks if his movie was screened while he was present just to defend himself from the audience.
And still, Roger Ebert acknowledged that Freddie was benchmark of some kind, that it was the movie he hated against which all others he hated must be measured.
I remember once getting a one-star review for one of my books from a young lady, who also started an angry letter campaign to my publisher, and sent me an email telling me that I was vile. She went on to berate and insult me in myriad ways, and, since I’m somewhat masochistic, I naturally got an erection and hoped she would continue to bombard me with screeds, demeaning me and my work. Alas, however, she relented.
And I’m forced to conclude that maybe, perhaps, I have had a greater effect on her than I have had on anyone else who has read my books. I’m not a troll, and have never derived any satisfaction from pissing someone off or upsetting them with my books. I’m alone when I write, so there’s no one to antagonize except my dog, slumbering behind me on the bed while I type, and she can’t read. An immature desire to thumb someone in the eye is just not a strong enough impetus to make me write eighty or one-hundred thousand words.
That said, every time I think about this young lady’s rising gorge, her concerted effort not just to tell other people I’m a piece of shit but to tell me, too …well, I’m embarrassed to say, I smile and get a little extra bop in my step.
I’ve heard that incredibly excoriating reviews have sometimes devastated artists, that they’ve felt so wounded by critique (admittedly from someone higher on the food chain than an online random reviewer) that they’ve ceased to produce, or at least produce work for public consumption.
A rumor I encountered sometime back had it that the legendary director Terrence Mallick hung his gray Stetson on a peg after getting an incredibly bad review somewhere. Considering his post-hiatus output (in comparison to Badlands and Days of Heaven), I think that critic may have done the world a service by sending Mallick into seclusion for a couple decades (assuming the rumor is true, and it probably isn’t).
My personal view toward negative attention is that it is to any artist what the medicine ball to the gut is to the boxer. It’s a chance to gain another accreted layer of toughness, indifference to those forces against which you worked from the beginning, and which frankly probably did much to hone you as an artist and strengthen your resolve in the first place. Let the fires of another (wo)man’s hate scorch them while warming you.
Understand that the kind of negative attention I’m talking about is not just a reasoned or well-explicated critique. I’ve read negative reviews of my work that were well-articulated, and thought, Yeah, I get why this person doesn’t like what I did. I’m talking about someone you don’t know personally who seems to have some sort of personal rancor for you, and is seemingly baiting you in the hopes that you reciprocate, and can thus marinate together in some kind of comingling misery stew. To which I say, “No thanks. If I wanted to do that, I’d get married.”
Conversely, effusive praise can be fatal. The director Tim Burton talked about the reception that his now-canonized Pee-Wee Herman film got when it debuted. He said some people liked it, and a lot of people didn’t, but that in the end he was grateful for the raking over the coals, saying words to the effect that A lot of guys get this, ‘He’s the next Orson Welles’ and then they collapse under the barrage of flattery and heightened expectations.
I remember shortly after Richard Kelly made the quirky, cryptic, and frankly brilliant Donnie Darko, there seemed to be quite a few people who said he was the next David Lynch. When Kelly made a misstep with his next picture (the overly-ambitious Southland Tales), his defenders shrugged and said, Well, Lynch tried to paint on a massive canvas once and came away with Dune, and the comparison seemed to remain apt.
Then Richard Kelly made The Box, a film based on a Richard Matheson short story, whose intriguing premise was stretched, reworked, and molded around personal elements from Kelly’s life (his father worked for NASA in Langley in the 70s and 80s). The movie had strong atmosphere, but it built only to a steam that finally exhausted itself and evaporated in the third act. Richard Kelly hasn’t directed another movie since The Box, and I think that was like a decade ago, give or take a year.
The point is, I guess, there are worse things than people telling you that suck. Like, for instance, people telling you how great you are.
