Joseph Grammer's Blog, page 7

The Batshit Hallucinogenic Experience That Comes Back For More

Being alive feels like constantly tripping on acid, except fewer objects squiggle around in your field of vision. I often find myself a dumb slave to my emotions, forever changing my worldview in accordance with how hungry I am, or how many hours I've holed up in my room with a sweater and a messed-up copy of Doctor Zhiavgo. Hence the feeling of LSD.

I'm sick right now, again, since I've just traveled to the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and I always contract a fun virus whenever I step beyond the threshold of my fuzzy apartment. So, in bed, my brain fizzles and pops with angry, aching, joyful thoughts that will not leave me the fuck alone.

Are you happy? How do you get happy? Is happiness a byproduct of living a baller, good, hardworking life? Should I be attached to everything? Nothing? Should I live underwater in a research sub with no outside contact beyond the translucent shrimp whose mating habits I study? Things like that.

I have zero answers for these queries. Having said that, I know millions of people cherish their own opinions and worldviews with regard to happiness, industriousness, sociability, and achievement. Maybe your answers are cool; keep them to yourself.

I say this not to be a dick (for the most part), but to preserve my own weird unknowing for as long as possible. This is unhealthy.

Oh, wait, but I'm sick! Now it makes sense. When the germs leave my bloodstream, I know I'll feel a surging rush of hope, and the sunrise will appear all the more radiant and precious because I can breathe without my nose funneling mucus onto my chin.

What? External environment significantly impacts internal human conditions? How scintillating.

In other news, the Writers' Workshop was great, and all the humans I met were inspiring and talented. These include: jaded lawyers, a high-schooler, a former rock star, an engineer, a displaced urbanite, and a really smart guy who quoted old works of literature. I am none of those people, but I hung in there and let strangers peer into my book and churn it up like slush and show me beautiful things about it I didn't know before, plus useful ways of improving. Talking to writers is a good thing, I am learning (take note, brain).

They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom.

On Friday I'm leaving for Iowa City for my first writer's workshop. The specific program is called The Literary Fabulist, and it's part of the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

Since I'm calling myself a writer and seeking agents for my book, I figured the University of Iowa, one of the strongholds of American fiction education, would be a good place to check out.

I'm staying (hopefully) at a bed and breakfast, renting a car, and flying my ass into corn country so I can meet cool writers and learn how to make my book suck less.

I'm sure the workshop will be an odd and refreshing entity, since whenever I travel I manage to get myself lost or stumble into a backwoods karaoke bar and listen to an elderly fire chief sing the Ronettes.

Also, here's Gary Oldman as a pimp with dreadlocks in True Romance.

Mush: A Memoir

My brain feels like an orca whale is belly-flopping on top of it. Inertia is the word, and it's difficult to break through its dumb, invisible bricks.

The air pressure has a lot to do with the stuffiness inside my skull, but I can't control the air pressure (Oh, hi, Storm.)

I'm sending out letters to agents, but I don't care enough to make them good. Why not? It's my life's passion to sell a book and write professionally.

Maybe I can blame the mush, but I really shouldn't. There will always be something stopping me from reaching out to humans, whether in the professional sphere or in my personal life. I just have to drink water, or push my head into a wall real hard, or leave the apartment. Stupid logic. Why can't I disintegrate in bed instead? It'd be easier, if a great deal less rewarding.

Whine, whine, whine. Go write you idiot. Be outside.

Sing it, Ziggy.

Midnight's Children

Listen: after sleeping for a scant and dreamless three hours...no, I must be precise...in June...yes, but a time is required...on June 18, then; the day Ram Manohar Loha called for Direct Action against the Portuguese in Goa...and the year?; well, the year is important too: 2014, there's no getting away from it: the season of ascending Ministers in India (Narendra Modi, a brand new mode of control as the first PM to be younger than his country's independence)...with all these names dates figures in mind, I reflect upon my conquest of Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie, at dawn, on a rooftop outside of Washington, D.C. No vendors called "Cold sandwiches; sandwiches cold!", and no distinct smells wafted up from the antiseptic depths of my more-than-suburb; I, Joseph Grammer, lank-of-shank writer, unprofessional professional hack, pickler of unsalted thoughts, had only the cold, gleaming screen of sun to comfort me in the moments when I turned the last page of this Booker-winning book and found the back cover's creamy blankness inviting me to meditate further upon Indira Ghandi's tumultuous reign; yes, or the frantically fresh creation of Bangladesh as a newfangled, war-torn nation; or, even before tumult and tumbling of country, before Prime-time ministrations of promise (which I shall attend to in depth if time permits--all these voices are jostling-hostling for space in my crowded pepperpot of a brain)...before all this, during independence a la carte (freedom being not-too-smoothly eschewed from the menu), prior to the Partition of India and Pakistan;--forgive me these fragments, by the way, for memory fails even now as events tenements ventings of emotion flood back to me with all the subtlety of a club--but yes: the primary triumph and crisis (all rolled into one, because we all contain multitudes) must be this: let me say it plainly, before the cracks of my sunburnt shell give way to the pressures of blue-June-hotness Obama (the old banyan tree, Mr. Piece-of-the-Moon) monument worst-traffic-you've-ever-managed-to-find metro-heckling-politic-populace...no, enough uncharitable prevaricating; I must lay it all on the table, as they say...plainly, then: doubletime quick: what I am talking about is the birth of India as a nation.

Fame and nascency, then, served as snake and ladder, depending on the auspice of the day. Saleem Sinai, main character extraordinaire, wielder of cucumber-nose and forehead-projections and All-India-Radioplay in his brain--connecting him to every child born between midnight and 1 am (with mythical powers descending in order of temporal distance from the zero stroke) on the day of Indian independence from the Anglo sahibs. Suffice it to say this excerpt is only that--a snippet from a many-headed history, and I am leaving out most of the good bits.

I will say this, though, at least (before the cracks open wider in my sun-tamed frame, which, despite specialists homeopaths psychologists, refuse to mend or even make themselves visible to others): there is a cold tussock of earth in Kashmir, and Old Delhi prophecies, and framed pictures of Nehru letters (I told you I would speak of this if time permitted); there is hiding in a washingchest and first love and bicycle-collisions and Shiva's deadly knees; there is betrayal, and weddings with ghetto magicians...but I am getting ahead of myself. Read the tome on your own time and make your own judgment: now: doubletime quick!

Abandoning the Screaming Infant that is your Unfinished Novel

I love all the words in my book. I know no one else will forge the same relationship with those squiggly syllables, and that no one else will care as deeply, but it's still hard to push the text out of the nest. I.e., publish.

I have the story in my head. It's cinematic, full of neon lights and guns and tearful subversions, but on paper it looks like a deformed pancake.

I'm okay with this half the time. The other half, I'm sweating like Rents in Trainspotting, resolving to either burn my book (it's in a computer file, do I burn the computer?) or run away to Siberia, where, according to the documentary Happy People, life is rugged and simple and full of minks.

I have a list of literary agents I'm going to contact, but I haven't sent any emails. I teeter on the edge of connection, biting my nails, losing myself in Wikipedia holes and emerging in the middle of the night, naked and gnawing on unsalted almonds.

I'm in the stage of wondering if I'll find the "perfect" (shut up, fool) agent to sell my book and make up all the rent I haven't been able to pay myself. Good luck, me.

The Beach Boys' "Please Let me Wonder": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc4jR...

Stories about Organic Weaponry and 90s Videogames

I just watched the sci-fi/shitshow film eXistenZ (thanks for the capitalizations, Cronenberg) and can safely say it is stranger than most plots I could ever come up with.

Essentially, assassins hunt down the wunderkind creator of an organic video game system (eXistenZ), as well as the marketing intern who gets saddled with protecting her. Sound normal? Sure. Also, the video game system "ports" into a hole drilled into your lower back, and you never know what type of game you're playing until you're in the system.

This is all fine, except someone has corrupted the game, so the creator and her reluctant bodyguard become embroiled in a fictional web of corporate subterfuge and mutated frog carcasses. Yep.

The story spins into one of those "what is reality" loops that makes you feel nauseous and boxed-wine sleepy. It's essentially a 90s-era Inception with guns that shoot human teeth. Did I forget that part? There are guns that shoot human teeth.

Also, Willem Dafoe makes an appearance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdU-6...

Illness is the Night Side of Life

My body is full of germs. Usually I push through and ignore it, but in this weird netherworld called 2014 I am implementing new habits. Taking care of self: no, no, no.

I loaded up on vitamins and Nyquil, then added some coffee for good measure. A strange combination (it's making me listen to Arctic Monkeys, whom I've never listened to before in any conscious way...the song Mad Sounds reminds me of Lou Reed). I've been reading and editing and planning for a moderately lucrative future, although I really have no idea how to plan so I mostly just worry and watch Samurai Champloo.

I took an Amtrak home on March 27 for my dad's birthday, which is when the cold probably wormed its way into my cells. I gave my dad the only extant copy of my book Cocoon Kids, as well as some electronic stuff that is a lot more practical and cool. We ate enchiladas. At night I jammed with some Jersey friends, lifted with my brother (new gym, really purple, open round-the-clock), wrote with my friend Dan, and saw an old friend I hadn't seen since high school. Anthony, the said friend, became a convert to the Tullamore Dew school of whiskey, which I highly approve of -- because I made it happen.

On March 31 I NJ Transit-ed it up to NYC to see my friend David and eat vast quantities of food. At the KGB Bar on E 4th St I taught the Japanese bartender some Russian and discussed Putin's foreign policy, which we both disapproved of in our various languages. Hand gestures and eye movements usually get the point across just as well as a clear phrase.

David and I met up with Eldis, our human friend who can do anything and everything, and then with my brother Jim and his girlfriend. We got hammered and played darts; I hurt my foot. We yelled in Scottish accents about cyberbullying and confused most of the other bar patrons.

On April 2 I took another Amtrak up to Boston, then a commuter rail over to Worcester to see my buddy Phil, who just received a fellowship for an exercise physiology Ph.D at the University of Florida. Meals included: filet mignon and kielbasa. That's it. It's everything I need. Thanks to Carl's in Oxford and Phil's parents.

I flew home for free from Boston on April 3, using up some air miles that were about to expire, and ended my journey with a smile in my head and a vague, fuzzy feeling of fatigue in every other organ.

Then I got sick. It's all good, because seeing my family and friends was absolutely worth it, but now I have to cough up the consequences. At least I edited my book and sent it out to some people to read. And I can watch more Samurai Champloo.

Intuition Peak

In Antarctica, there is a mountain named for that feeling you get when you just know somebody is a scumbag, even if you can't put your finger on why. Your judgment of this dude is influenced by your past experiences with scummy-looking guys, to the point where your brain makes a conclusion without considering other options. Maybe you see him on a street corner where you've seen other scumbags standing, hollering at ladies, making vaguely threatening remarks to passersby. This guy is a scumbag, then, because he's doing the same thing.

Can this heuristic be wrong? Sure, why not. It sounds like a pretty reliable way to stereotype, and as a result I propose to challenge intuition whenever I can.

In a dangerous situation, I won't have time to decide the best course of action. I just react. But with a less damaging problem, I look at my gut feeling and skeptically tilt my glasses at it.

Post angry comment on Facebook? My belly says yes, but a host of pathways in my brain remind me how I value courtesy in my exchanges with others. Maybe saying "You're a dumb asshole" won't bring me the satisfaction I initially think it will.

Now, plenty of people never do this. Someone snipes at them, they snipe back. It's human nature, you might say, and to a degree it is. But reason is as equally human in my book.

Having said this, I'm not an exceptionally logical guy. I'm crappy at math and engineering, and I've been heavily right-brained my entire life. I prefer parallel links and feelings to hierarchies of logic; it's what helps me write fiction. To sense a random impulse and follow it along in a story is an immensely rewarding activity.

But I've written myself into some holes this way, too. At the time it might seem like an awesome idea to add an action-style firefight, but then I realize the repercussions of such an event in a realistic book. Characters' injuries would severely slow them down; the police would arrive, and would give chase; fingerprints would be everywhere.

What are the odds, then, that my narrator will actually escape to Denmark like I want?

Now, it's cool to stretch credibility in a story. You can make a guy super-smart and superhuman, so that he makes it onto the departing ship with three bullet wounds in his torso and nine squad cars in pursuit. But it's not always what you want.

Intuition is supposed to save you time by shoving the right choice in your face. This is a fantastic brain invention, even if it fails sometimes. The way to minimize failure is to gain a great deal of experience with whatever it is you're making decisions about. Which means learning.

In many stories and films, there's some elderly character who believes his intuition is infallible, and an opposing young character who spends the tale proving the old person wrong. "The world has changed, old man. You can't judge things by your outdated standards and expect to come out on top."

Intuition Peak is so named to honor the contribution of "gut instincts" to science and research. Some people view it as being "in tune" with yourself, tapping into a spiritual "oneness," or seeing things "as they really are." Whatever. It's just a way to save brain space.

Intuition led me to write this tangent and keep myself moving so I don't feel like crap about my career, which felt much better than sitting and weighing the merits of a possible blogpost would have. Maybe I should've used my time to do my taxes or dead-lift 100 pounds, but I didn't.

Sometimes my gut tells me to make astoundingly shitty choices. It's difficult, then, to parse out when instincts are helpful and harmful, and when reason is helpful and harmful. Everything turns into this gray, nebulous mass. How do I decide anything?

By accepting most decisions won't be perfect, I guess. Relinquishing some control and trusting your body and mind, while not abandoning all choice to fate. Here lie the boundaries of human action.

If intuition is a mountain, don't bother climbing to the top: you'll only dig yourself into a hole. But it's cool to have a mountain in the background.

Fools, Inspiration, Dexedrine

I hate outlines. I always have. For most of my life I’ve behaved erratically, on impulse, letting my emotions dictate my actions. So often, when I am overcome with intense desire, or anger, the feeling seems to obliterate all logic and trust. The feeling forces me into a claustrophobic space that deprives me of my value system. In other words, I appear to be “not myself.”

For my in-progress book, though, I’ve been working on planning my plotline and character development. This is, for me, a complete 180 of behavior. In many ways, the content of my novel also deals with a shift towards living according to systems. This shift feels like ripping out your insides and rearranging them into a more appealing shape, but it is better than being a slave to your own shitty habits.

Writing on a basis of impulse feels good. It makes me feel creative and free, but it is stressfully uneven. I can’t foreshadow properly or flesh out a consistent character. My writing suffers. In my head, there is this stereotype of the Jack Kerouac novelist typing on a scroll for three weeks on a cocktail of coffee and adrenaline. Over the past several years, as I have moved from “wanting to write” to “writing,” I realize how harmful this stereotype is for my wellbeing—for a number of reasons.

First (and most obvious): Stimulants are a poor long-term strategy for getting any work done. In World War II, pretty much every country jacked its soldiers up on amphetamine salts to keep them awake in chronically under-rested conditions. This is true, I expect, of every subsequent war. Air Force pilots (especially in combat conditions) use Dexedrine (“go-pills”) to continue long past the point at which their bodies would normally fail. While this may be useful for short-term goals, the long-term effects, in my opinion, are inevitably damaging. Not that war without amphetamines isn’t damaging.

My point in saying this is not to critique the military’s policy on legal speed, but to critique the mindset of doing everything right now. It’s not fun or sustainable to be Jack Kerouac, furiously writing “On The Road” in an intoxicant haze. He died in his mid-forties, by the way, of internal hemorrhage brought on by cirrhosis (which you get by drinking a fuck-ton of alcohol for years).

Second (less obvious): The Jack Kerouac in my mind is a lie. The real Jack planned “On The Road” for years, in various journals, before his three-week spree of the first draft. His book was not spontaneous—obviously. Any lasting creative endeavor requires some set of rules in order to make sense (even if your rule is “nothing matters except right now”). What's more, Kerouac's lifestyle masked a slew of childhood traumas and debilitating struggles with alcohol.

In “The Cloud in Trousers,” the Russian poet Mayakovsky says,

Formerly I believed
books were made like this:
a poet came,
lightly opened his lips,
and the inspired fool burst into song—
if you please!
But it seems,
Before they can launch a song,
Poets must tramp for days with callused feet,
And the sluggish fish of the imagination
Flounders softly in the slush of the heart.
And while, with twittering rhymes, they boil a broth
Of loves and nightingales,
The tongueless street merely writhes
For lack of something to shout or say.

To me, writing on impulse and writing according to a plan are needed in tandem. The spontaneous kind helps push the story in ways you might not expect, and can prevent your writing from sounding stilted. But planning is pretty damn important, too. It keeps you, hopefully, from dying in your mid-forties.

Two-Face

My book is getting out of hand. I love the thing, but I wanted to end it months ago. I already wrote one version of the novel over the summer of 2013, finishing on my birthday (Sept 24). I racked up 75,000 words, then scrapped the entire project and redid it from scratch, with new characters and a new plot. Sounds like some fear of completion stuff if you ask me (Moby Dick: "God keep me from ever completing anything.").

Both versions are about Okinawa, but the first one was a lot more personal. It was also more magical realist in nature, since it involved things like ghosts and mythical demons (specifically, the tengu). The core of the novel dealt with suicide.

Then, after my latest birthday, I decided this story was crap and rehashed everything after watching Fargo for the first time. It's a cool movie.

I changed from first person to third-person omniscient, expanded my cast of characters, and took out anything supernatural. I also wrote an outline, which for me is like running eight consecutive marathons in uphill terrain, without any GU energy gel (they don't pay me to say this, I swear, it's just a funny name to me).

I love my new characters. They're broken, and weird, and groping for dumb slivers of knowledge. I love my old characters too, but they seem to belong to a different Joe. I'm worried about fucking up both books, although I only want to publish one.

In my new novel I'm up to 78,000 words. I'm afraid of finishing the story, but I'm more afraid of procrastinating forever. Writing a book for me has been like hugging a dog really, really tightly for a year straight--sometimes it's the absolute definition of joy, and sometimes you just want to take a shower and wash off all the drool and, well, talk to humans.

At some point I was terrified that I had wasted months of my life by investing in this new story, and that the old one was far superior. Reading over the early pages, I found passages I actually liked. At the time, I was sick of working on the new plot, and sure that I had bitten off more than I could chew. Should I go back to the first draft? I wondered.

In some ways the old novel is better than my current one. That was hard to understand and harder to accept. But too bad. I'm working on 2.0, and that's the way it's going to stay.

Of course, I could freak out at the very end and flip a coin to determine which version I should present to the world: magical realist roman a clef, or planned, post-modern adventure. But at this point I just have to keep going. Write, edit, drink coffee. Coins aren't going to do shit for me.