“Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.”
—Marguerite Duras, The Lover
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I’ll read anything by Hilton Als, and this 2003 profile of Toni Morrison is why.
“‘I know it seems like a lot,’ Morrison said. ‘But I really only do one thing. I read books. I teach books. I write books. I think about books. It’s one job.’ What Morrison has managed to do with that job—and the criticism, pro and con, she has received for doing it—has made her one of the most widely written-about American authors of the past fifty years. (The latest study of her work, she told me, is a comparison of the vernacular in her novels and William Faulkner’s. ‘'I don’t believe it,’ I said. ‘Believe it,’ she said, emphatically.) Morrison—required reading in high schools across the country—is almost always treated as a spokeswoman for her gender and her race. In a review of “Paradise,” Patricia Storace wrote, ‘Toni Morrison is relighting the angles from which we view American history, changing the very color of its shadows, showing whites what they look like in black mirrors. To read her work is to witness something unprecedented, an invitation to a literature to become what it has claimed to be, a truly American literature.’ It’s a claim that her detractors would also make, to opposite effect.”
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Image via The New Statesman
“A Year in Reading: Lydia Kiesling” on The Millions is terrific. You have to read it. So do it.
I became obsessed with Norwegian and Swedish social policies. Back with Karl Ove, I underlined every part where he scoffed at Swedish sanctimony and hypocrisy. TRY LIVING HERE, I would scream in my head, to no one. I couldn’t help noting that this reading assignment was the corner office in the women’s work of thinking about men who are not thinking about you.
Buy "The Tumor" — my short story that’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
I went to Jim Ruland's Vermin on the Mount reading series this evening and ended up listening to Lol Tolhurst read about the early days of The Cure, so that was pretty cool. The reading took place at Book Show in Highland Park; it's a curious place, filled with sideshow art, amusing zines, and general curios. I particularly enjoyed hearing Ben Loory read "The Writer" from Tales of Falling and Flying. It's a really beautiful story. Buy a copy of the book. I did. You should, too. Sometime next year, I'll be reading in the series. I'll post the when and the where when I know. And Book Show is a really curious place. Check it out sometime.
It's hard to pick just one when I consider which one of my screeds is the most hated, but "Why You Shouldn't Be a Writer" is the likely winner. ("Trigger Warning: This Blog Post May Freak You the Fuck Out" is a close second.)
I wrote WYSBAW in 2012 on my Forbes blog. To date, it has close to 300,000 views and 356 comments. (My guess is that it's the most-commented-on post I wrote at Forbes, but I no longer have access to the back end data that I think would clear that up for me.)
The post is only 626 words, and my guess is I spent less than an hour writing it. It consists of an introduction ("I’m going to be a writer, you decide one day, sitting on the crapper," a paragraph begins) and three "tips" ("You're Not Good at It" is the first).
"But here’s the question you should be asking yourself: Can I write? Not literally. Not physically. Not technically. Anyone can do that. Can you make the words sing? Does your prose have that certain something? Are you gifted at showing not telling, or telling not showing, or creating an entire world that didn’t exist before that is born again when someone else reads your work?"
I get hate email from the post on a regular basis -- perhaps a couple a week. These aspiring writers/WYSBAW haters find me standing in line at the grocery store, having just woken up, in the middle of writing. Mostly, they are the same: poorly written, illiterately defiant, stridently outraged. I'm going to show you! they squawk in jumbled prose riddled with spelling errors. I'm going to be a writer anyway! Good luck on that, I think, and then click delete.
There is no saving the self-deluded.
The post resurfaced in my mind lately because of Ryan Boudinot's "Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One." In it, he lines up writers, MFA programs, and shitty writing and smashes them all off the table with one fell swoop of his arm. "Writers Are Born with Talent," he dares to assert. And for confessing this truth, he is pilloried.
In a response piece on Electric Literature, written by someone who was so cowardly they couldn't even share their name, gets at the why behind the outrage:
"For some reason it has become taboo to suggest that people might not be able to do whatever it is they set their mind to. A diet of inspirational narratives in which all it takes is a dream and a montage to reach your loftiest ambitions has clouded common sense. We’ve managed to confuse the fact that a good writer could be anyone with the idea that anyone could be a good writer."
And, indeed, in all likelihood, you are not a good writer. Because most of us aren't. I've started going to the gym several times a week. This doesn't make me an Olympic athlete. Next week, I'm starting an improv class, and I'm not very good at improv because I'm physically stiff and in a book that was written about a TV show that I used to be on I am classified as "awkward," which is basically objective proof of how not good at physical "acting" I am. I take care of the dog, but I feel that something is lacking in my canine caretaking because I am not a dog person, I am a cat person. There is no shame in not being good at something. The shame is when you think you are good at something, and you are not. Like writing.
There is nothing to be gained by encouraging poor writers to consider themselves writers. It is far more charitable to suggest they look around themselves and pick up something else. Like needlepoint, golf, the tango. Let's face it, you want to tell them, you were not born to be a writer. It is highly unlikely that you will become a writer. So admit that, get on with it, and figure out what you do well, because that will be the gift that you give the world. Not your poorly written prose.
I'll close with a recent comment that went up on WYSBAW:
"This post is delicious; and as someone who gave up his other career only to write (been writing a novel for two years, working every single day on it), I believe this piece only means to caution. Writing is a difficult and lonely job, which, unlike heart-surgery, a lot of people tend to think is easy, primarily because, unlike heart-surgeons, everyone who ever went to a school was taught elementary writing in some language. Advising caution in a world where publishing has been ‘democratised’ and a large percentage of literate people think they can write something of true value to the reader (in such a way that there may soon be more writers than readers) is the sole point of this piece. That, it seems to make well. The opinion that this piece may demoralise the person who would otherwise go on to write the next Hundred years of Solitude or Tin Drum (substitute your favourite books here) has little merit; Márquez or Grass wouldn’t give up writing if they had read this when young."
Buy THE TUMOR: "This is one of the weirdest, smartest, most disturbing things you will read this year."
The reason there aren't more Great American Novels written by women: Women aren't sociopathic enough. Engineered for empathy required to take care of small, squirming child bodies, women lack the ruthless, guiltless, narcissistic drive required to produce a masterpiece. Instead, women are distracted: by men who need, living room drapes, the hollers of children. Men tune out: wanting wives, bad carpet, succubi. It is important to note that the act of writing lit-er-a-ture is not confined to the author's relationship to the page. Instead, this sort of high-level literary excretion demands total immersion. The writer must be consumed: by his ideas, his thoughts, his words. Put another way, like Ouroboros, the Great American Novelist consumes himself. Men refuse to live in the world so they may live in their own world. That is the world we see in their books. Women allow the world to tear them from the imaginary, their desperate hands and idle minds grasping at the air for a long lost purchase.
My friend Clayton Cubitt has another installment of his wildly popular "Hysterical Literature" series. Playboy considers the project in "The Case of the Missing Orgasm." The latest episode stars Marne, who is awesome.
"O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
[Ulysses]
