Today I posted a Facebook status update that said, "I feel like saying something inspirational. I'm the best writer of all time. There we go, I'm feeling inspired already." I was nervous before I hit "post" because, even though it's clearly a joke, people tend to get really defensive and oversensitive whenever people praise themselves. So far the joke was met with, well, not really anything at all. A couple funny comments, a couple likes. But it really got me thinking.
Why do we hate people who love themselves or their work? I listen to mostly hip-hop, where bragadoccio is essential. Some of my favorite writers are super-high on themselves. James Ellroy routinely refers to himself as awesome. Bolano was totally up his own ass. But why does this bug folks?
If I say, "James Ellroy is the best writer of all time", you might very well disagree with me, but you would realize as it a subjective statement and certainly you wouldn't get your feathers ruffled. Now, if I said, "I am the best"...
In a sense I understand the "hater" label, because it is just hating. It's irritation at someone else's self-confidence. How can you dislike the fact that someone truly loves what they've done? Or that they'd prefer it to something else? If they've stayed true to themselves, then their art is the essence of them, ergo of course they think it's the best.
So, go ahead. Look in the mirror, and say it. "I'm the best writer of all time." I won't hate you for it. But I do disagree.
Friday, December 23, 2011
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Lddre thoughts
A little writing on writing: downside of beasting through and marathon finishing LDDRE is the increase in smoking. I had this conversation with Cody Goodfellow: you stop, smoke, and when you come back the scene is there. Also I realized the strangeness increases with how distanced I am from a character. In BTTWL, all the characters deal with weird shit, because I have no idea how Russians think. In this book there's a kid, a woman and a deeply evil man, and all of them are written in a magical realist way, because they are people I don't understand, or want to understand. Third, I added a subplot about two brothers who find a body in a river about three weeks ago. Today, after reading a recommendation online, I checked out 'Suttree', a McCarthy novel I have overlooked. It begins with a man fishing. He sees a dead man being pulled from the river. It is written more beautifully than I ever could. The Universe both checking my ego and giving me an atta boy, I think.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
goddammit obama
You're about to get a big helping of moderately informed ranting, so tuck in.
My understanding of the Tea Party is that they were frustrated racists with no polite way to express their distaste for a black president. They felt they were losing "their" country. So they took to protesting. Which is great. You can do that. They were ideologically loose until they had that one banner under which to fight: NO OBAMACARE. While their protest made no sense and actually worked against their best interest, they bitched. Because you can't just say, "I don't like his face, nor the faces of the citizens who voted for him." It was very McCarthy, their adoption of the word "socialism."
Obama caved to their demands because their astroturf ideals were manufactured by the corporations that bought his presidency. He met them halfway. I was always waiting for the boom to drop, for Obama to simply say, "I understand you, but this is why I was elected."
He didn't. Always the diplomat, he played both sides and reached a compromise that left no one happy.
The Occupy movement was similar to the Tea Party only in that it had no clear manifesto. Soon it became clear, however, that like the Tea Party's "Obamacare", the Occupiers had a banner they could bongo under: fix the fucking banks. "We're tired of being screwed by giant, irresponsible banks." Pretty simple.
So you'd think maybe we'd get some kind of half-assed compromise like Obama did with the Tea Partiers. Nope. We get tear gas and secret mayoral meetings, where nervous men in suits decide how violent they can be without looking bad. We get nothing. So far, at least. Obama met the crazies more than halfway, and he has met the Occupiers not at all.
I am ashamed. I'm wearing my Obama t-shirt today because it's comfortable, one of my favorites. But every time I wear it I get really fucking mad. Because he is failing, has failed. He's a corporate puppet in a different way, but he's still got strings.
It frustrates me that he'll still get my vote in 2012, because who the fuck else am I going to vote for?
My understanding of the Tea Party is that they were frustrated racists with no polite way to express their distaste for a black president. They felt they were losing "their" country. So they took to protesting. Which is great. You can do that. They were ideologically loose until they had that one banner under which to fight: NO OBAMACARE. While their protest made no sense and actually worked against their best interest, they bitched. Because you can't just say, "I don't like his face, nor the faces of the citizens who voted for him." It was very McCarthy, their adoption of the word "socialism."
Obama caved to their demands because their astroturf ideals were manufactured by the corporations that bought his presidency. He met them halfway. I was always waiting for the boom to drop, for Obama to simply say, "I understand you, but this is why I was elected."
He didn't. Always the diplomat, he played both sides and reached a compromise that left no one happy.
The Occupy movement was similar to the Tea Party only in that it had no clear manifesto. Soon it became clear, however, that like the Tea Party's "Obamacare", the Occupiers had a banner they could bongo under: fix the fucking banks. "We're tired of being screwed by giant, irresponsible banks." Pretty simple.
So you'd think maybe we'd get some kind of half-assed compromise like Obama did with the Tea Partiers. Nope. We get tear gas and secret mayoral meetings, where nervous men in suits decide how violent they can be without looking bad. We get nothing. So far, at least. Obama met the crazies more than halfway, and he has met the Occupiers not at all.
I am ashamed. I'm wearing my Obama t-shirt today because it's comfortable, one of my favorites. But every time I wear it I get really fucking mad. Because he is failing, has failed. He's a corporate puppet in a different way, but he's still got strings.
It frustrates me that he'll still get my vote in 2012, because who the fuck else am I going to vote for?
Sunday, November 20, 2011
BTTWL Wins the Wonderland Award for Best Novel!!!
"By the Time We Leave Here, We'll Be Friends" has won the Wonderland Award for Best Novel at Bizarrocon. I am ecstatic. Two years is a long time to write a small book. Over the course of those two years I put my soul into this thing. To see it honored in this way is truly amazing. I am so fucking happy, my face hurts from smiling. Thank you to everyone who voted, and to everyone who's taken the time to read it. I love all of you.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Thoughts On My Third Viewing of 'Drive'
*SPOILERS*
The Driver is a sociopath who thinks that he's in his own movie. That life is a movie. I know a guy like this. This guy has awarded himself the role of the rogue who doesn't conform to social mores. This is frustrating to deal with at times because of its disingenuousness, though any annoyance you give off is in a sense playing into this guy's role that he's created for himself, because of course you're upset, he's the rogue who doesn't conform to social mores.
It makes sense that Irene falls for The Driver. While not a sociopath, she is definitely introverted and quiet, like The Driver. No one else in the film takes as long to speak as those two (recall the scene when the police are speaking to Irene re: the death of Standard, when the cop says 'Can you...answer the question?').
All of the music in the film is being played in real time by The Driver. The love song fades when he shuts his door, the operatic song disappears with his car when he drives past Nino.
The Driver wears gloves every time he kills someone, except twice. The first is in the elevator, when the murder is witnessed by Irene. This scene signals their end, the real world clashing violently with the world he has in his head. The second is when he and Bernie stab each other, a scene shot in the shadows, the most 'realistic' killing of the film. You can see the gloves in his shadow's back pocket. He has re-entered the real world, his fantasy has not turned out the way he wished (Irene didn't fall in love with a murderer). The Bernie killing is preceded by the Nino killing, a scene in which he's wearing his mask from his stuntman job. This is the peak of his fantasy. He is the 'Real Hero' of the song. This of course juxtaposed with the fact that his mask is rubber. When the song plays again, at the end, he actually is both the hero (as he did, after all, save Irene and her child) and a real human being (the fantasy is over, he's not playing a character in a film anymore).
New layers every time.
The Driver is a sociopath who thinks that he's in his own movie. That life is a movie. I know a guy like this. This guy has awarded himself the role of the rogue who doesn't conform to social mores. This is frustrating to deal with at times because of its disingenuousness, though any annoyance you give off is in a sense playing into this guy's role that he's created for himself, because of course you're upset, he's the rogue who doesn't conform to social mores.
It makes sense that Irene falls for The Driver. While not a sociopath, she is definitely introverted and quiet, like The Driver. No one else in the film takes as long to speak as those two (recall the scene when the police are speaking to Irene re: the death of Standard, when the cop says 'Can you...answer the question?').
All of the music in the film is being played in real time by The Driver. The love song fades when he shuts his door, the operatic song disappears with his car when he drives past Nino.
The Driver wears gloves every time he kills someone, except twice. The first is in the elevator, when the murder is witnessed by Irene. This scene signals their end, the real world clashing violently with the world he has in his head. The second is when he and Bernie stab each other, a scene shot in the shadows, the most 'realistic' killing of the film. You can see the gloves in his shadow's back pocket. He has re-entered the real world, his fantasy has not turned out the way he wished (Irene didn't fall in love with a murderer). The Bernie killing is preceded by the Nino killing, a scene in which he's wearing his mask from his stuntman job. This is the peak of his fantasy. He is the 'Real Hero' of the song. This of course juxtaposed with the fact that his mask is rubber. When the song plays again, at the end, he actually is both the hero (as he did, after all, save Irene and her child) and a real human being (the fantasy is over, he's not playing a character in a film anymore).
New layers every time.
Friday, October 7, 2011
the ending of drive and the connective power of alienation
I
Drive is, to me, almost a perfect film. Every shot is expertly framed, the acting is beautifully restrained, and the music…Badalamenti, neo-new wave, so great. It ranks up there with No Country For Old Men as one of the great existentialist crime films, and I will probably watch it twenty times. I went to Jim Emerson’s “Scanners” blog to read his thoughts on it, as he had several brilliant insights into NCFOM upon its release. While Emerson didn’t care for Drive, he went about his critiques in a generally inoffensive and thoughtful way. What bugged me, in the comments sections, were the assertions that, at almost the very end of the film (which I won’t spoil), the protagonist acts in a “stupid” way which does not jive with his character as we’ve known him to that point, and therefore the film has broken the spell and become a disappointment.
II
The University of Oklahoma recently had a gathering of international authors come to campus for a week to do internationally-famous-author type things, amongst them a reading which I attended. I enjoyed a couple of the readers (including a massively powerful poetry reading by Ilya Kominksy) but found most of them to be lost somewhere up their own assholes. Their poetry and writings were self-absorbed, conveyed in voices that somehow managed to be weighty and breathy at the same time. If it sounds like I’m shitting all over them, I have to clarify that I don’t mean to be disrespectful. These are massively accomplished writers who have spent years honing their craft. I’m the one who thinks they suck. I’m also the one spilling muffin crumbs on my pants. So it’s my problem.
Whenever we find that people are taking themselves too seriously, what we’re saying is that something in their writing failed to reach us. There is such a thing as bad writing, don’t get me wrong. On a technical level, it exists. But when we’re all on this (sort of) equal playing field, where we’re all at the very least competent, “bad” becomes, more honestly, “unrelatable”. There was a great post from Conley Wouters over at McSweeney’s when DFW died, that went “A good writer makes the reader feel less lonely. A good writer makes the reader believe in her own feelings—he assures her (through fiction, no less) that whatever it is she’s feeling is True, and not a psychic symptom of being alone.”
Different readers attach this relatability, and the subsequent less-loneliness in different ways. There are some, like probably most of the people on the Neustadt panel, who feel most connected to a piece when it traverses, via what I’m assuming are incredibly well-sharpened literary tools, relatively familiar terrain. The “coming of age story” and the like. We will follow our hero as he relates to his (surely oddball) family, the pangs of growing up, first loves, embarrassments, angers, comedy, tragedy, and depression. Having felt these things ourselves at one point or another, we will certainly see ourselves in this other’s story, and perhaps, like DFW wanted, feel less lonely.
But what if what you feel like an alien?
What if your most pervasive feeling is a fascination with and fear of all the ways in which we as tiny parts of big things are so different?
While I would be lying if I said I haven’t connected with a book based on the standards of the former, I feel the most connected to a book when the author presents a situation that seems to baffle her just as much as it does me, and we can kind of share that moment of bewilderment, so that I’m not connecting to abstract, thinly veiled events from her past, but with her actual, present-tense, as-she’s-writing-it fear and alienation.
III
People find characters like Anton Chigurh or The Driver fascinating because they are sociopathic blank slates. They are enigmatic. A small facial tic could mean everything, or nothing. Some folks argue that this kind of quiet, strange man is interesting because we are allowed to project what we’re thinking onto them, and that just like a hidden shark is scarier than a shark with an oxygen tank in its mouth, our own stand in thoughts are worse than anything a screenwriter could come up with. But that’s not it for me: the blank slate is so compelling because it’s so weird and distant. The way the camera nonchalantly ogles these men without giving us even a hint is the cinematic equivalent of how I feel every day, watching all you weird fuckers. And what these films do, is to say that the feeling of not understanding and that everything is weird, is okay. That’s when I feel the most community with my fellow man, when they admit to me, through some badass prose or mise en scene, that they’re just as freaked out by this thing that I am.
IV
It doesn’t matter if The Driver’s actions don’t make sense. All characters exist, in some sense, in the world they were created in. They made their decisions, we figure out what they mean, or don’t. Something might not speak to you, but everything shouldn’t make sense. Life is weird and lonely. Existentialism is mostly about how lonely and weird life is. Drive’s ending works, in that respect.
Drive is, to me, almost a perfect film. Every shot is expertly framed, the acting is beautifully restrained, and the music…Badalamenti, neo-new wave, so great. It ranks up there with No Country For Old Men as one of the great existentialist crime films, and I will probably watch it twenty times. I went to Jim Emerson’s “Scanners” blog to read his thoughts on it, as he had several brilliant insights into NCFOM upon its release. While Emerson didn’t care for Drive, he went about his critiques in a generally inoffensive and thoughtful way. What bugged me, in the comments sections, were the assertions that, at almost the very end of the film (which I won’t spoil), the protagonist acts in a “stupid” way which does not jive with his character as we’ve known him to that point, and therefore the film has broken the spell and become a disappointment.
II
The University of Oklahoma recently had a gathering of international authors come to campus for a week to do internationally-famous-author type things, amongst them a reading which I attended. I enjoyed a couple of the readers (including a massively powerful poetry reading by Ilya Kominksy) but found most of them to be lost somewhere up their own assholes. Their poetry and writings were self-absorbed, conveyed in voices that somehow managed to be weighty and breathy at the same time. If it sounds like I’m shitting all over them, I have to clarify that I don’t mean to be disrespectful. These are massively accomplished writers who have spent years honing their craft. I’m the one who thinks they suck. I’m also the one spilling muffin crumbs on my pants. So it’s my problem.
Whenever we find that people are taking themselves too seriously, what we’re saying is that something in their writing failed to reach us. There is such a thing as bad writing, don’t get me wrong. On a technical level, it exists. But when we’re all on this (sort of) equal playing field, where we’re all at the very least competent, “bad” becomes, more honestly, “unrelatable”. There was a great post from Conley Wouters over at McSweeney’s when DFW died, that went “A good writer makes the reader feel less lonely. A good writer makes the reader believe in her own feelings—he assures her (through fiction, no less) that whatever it is she’s feeling is True, and not a psychic symptom of being alone.”
Different readers attach this relatability, and the subsequent less-loneliness in different ways. There are some, like probably most of the people on the Neustadt panel, who feel most connected to a piece when it traverses, via what I’m assuming are incredibly well-sharpened literary tools, relatively familiar terrain. The “coming of age story” and the like. We will follow our hero as he relates to his (surely oddball) family, the pangs of growing up, first loves, embarrassments, angers, comedy, tragedy, and depression. Having felt these things ourselves at one point or another, we will certainly see ourselves in this other’s story, and perhaps, like DFW wanted, feel less lonely.
But what if what you feel like an alien?
What if your most pervasive feeling is a fascination with and fear of all the ways in which we as tiny parts of big things are so different?
While I would be lying if I said I haven’t connected with a book based on the standards of the former, I feel the most connected to a book when the author presents a situation that seems to baffle her just as much as it does me, and we can kind of share that moment of bewilderment, so that I’m not connecting to abstract, thinly veiled events from her past, but with her actual, present-tense, as-she’s-writing-it fear and alienation.
III
People find characters like Anton Chigurh or The Driver fascinating because they are sociopathic blank slates. They are enigmatic. A small facial tic could mean everything, or nothing. Some folks argue that this kind of quiet, strange man is interesting because we are allowed to project what we’re thinking onto them, and that just like a hidden shark is scarier than a shark with an oxygen tank in its mouth, our own stand in thoughts are worse than anything a screenwriter could come up with. But that’s not it for me: the blank slate is so compelling because it’s so weird and distant. The way the camera nonchalantly ogles these men without giving us even a hint is the cinematic equivalent of how I feel every day, watching all you weird fuckers. And what these films do, is to say that the feeling of not understanding and that everything is weird, is okay. That’s when I feel the most community with my fellow man, when they admit to me, through some badass prose or mise en scene, that they’re just as freaked out by this thing that I am.
IV
It doesn’t matter if The Driver’s actions don’t make sense. All characters exist, in some sense, in the world they were created in. They made their decisions, we figure out what they mean, or don’t. Something might not speak to you, but everything shouldn’t make sense. Life is weird and lonely. Existentialism is mostly about how lonely and weird life is. Drive’s ending works, in that respect.
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