On a recent trip out to Nevada I was standing on the shoulder of a remote desert highway at two o’clock in the morning, quiet along the rutted edge of sun-crozzled pavement thrust amongst a black silence of sagebrush and Joshua trees. Nothing moving and nothing lit, not even a rind of the moon.
A collection of nothings, in fact: no cars; no planes; no radios. No phone service. No insects or birds or rustling fauna. Not even a gentle breath of wind.
Imagine being deaf, or dumb, or blind; or no longer being able to taste, or to have memories, or to love. Imagine the death of a close friend, or imagine there no longer being stars in the sky or galaxies beyond our own, seas beyond the horizon, ships to traverse them. Imagine the inexistence of music and then the inexistence of film. Whither a light switch? Conceive of waking up one day and finding out no one had given you a name, or an arm, or a family.
Votaries of emptiness all, and to our minds, each a kind of dark matter, a negative presence; the sudden cessation of a motion, the final and comprehensive absence of a sustaining otherness.
John Updike said being human cannot be borne alone; we need other presences. This is why we blare TVs and go to the symphony and sit on our porches staring out at the road at the traffic trudging by. Hence Facebook and real books and Wal-Mart and the discarded stubs for Amtrak tickets. The twelve-pack, the four-door, the queen-sized bed. The rituals of Christmas and the birthday alike. Fortune cookies and this blog and t-shirts with words on them; Walt Whitman and Paris Hilton and the Rolling Stones. The Hague, the Statue of Liberty, and the street where I live—all these things are bound to us.
So do yourself a favor and go set yourself down in the middle of a desert in the predawn dark, all the vibrations of culture and knowing fucking motionless on this bald causeway of the earth as the deathbed of philosophy and ideology and politics lay sprawling cold beneath you.
Someday we die. That’s it. Beyond that, nothing.
But knowing that and feeling that and then waking up the next morning is still, now as it ever was, some good hell of a thing.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Saturday, September 27, 2008
What it means to be a writer
When I made my visit to Chicago, one night I found myself sitting on a bench in Wicker Park wondering what I’d meant when years ago I’d subconsciously decided somewhere along the way to commit myself only to writing “important” stories, “important” poems. I was in transit to adulthood now that I was out of school, and it was becoming increasingly clear that “important” only meant “self-important.”
The problem was that, in our heads, we’re all geniuses. We are all the stars of our own lives, as David Foster Wallace had once noted; the most important person to ever exist. We’re all cologned with some slight expectation of greatness.
The problem was also that, when you listened to someone like David Foster Wallace speak, you realized that you were not a genius, and that you were doomed to a lesser level of recognition that was inevitable for writers in this culture anyway. Regardless of your talent, you’re not going to be writing the Great American novel; as you’d long suspected, there are too many Americas, and too many brilliant Americans already writing about each of them.
So I sat on my little bench in Chicago penning the obituary for my own glory. Good. Nice to get that out of the way.
Let’s talk about writing as a tool for survival.
Those of us not in grad school will likely have to adjust to the eight or more hours of day that we will spend at an entry-level job doing little tasks for nominal pay. We have to confront that, four these eight (or more) hours, our brains are sedentary. Fielding calls for customer service means few synapses need to be fired. Less connections need to be made. Your brain becomes maximally efficient at doing menial work that had required very little effort to begin with.
This is your brain on the twenty-first century.
Writing will help keep you in intellectual shape, like jogging for a few miles a week. If you maintain any standard of quality for your work, fiction should force you to maintain a sense of clarity over long distances of plot and characterization, helping to combat the ADHD tendency of your Google-adapted thought process. On the opposite side of the spectrum, poetry will encourage you to reach different parts of your brain not normally accessible and smash them together to create something unexpected.
Reading, naturally, is also encouraged, so that you encounter minds other than your customers’.
Now, what does it mean to be literary if you’re not a professional, or a career academic?
In many regards, it’s about being a repository of culture, thoughtfulness, and idiosyncrasy. Contrary to hipsterism—which is being subjected to increasingly aggressive marketing these days—it’s about being interesting not through the clothes you wear or the quality of your sarcasm but by the depth and breadth of the ideas you hold. People may think reading is dying—it is—84% of Americans want to write a book, yet only a fraction have read one this year—but YouTube notwithstanding, writing will at least be around for as long as people don’t want to embarrass themselves. Writing is the final defense against a culture of instantaneity that values sound-bites and missteps more than thoughtful presentation.
And in a society of rampant consumerism, where sadness is inefficient, and unprofitable (except to sell antidepressants) writing reminds us that it’s still okay to try and be the heroes of our own lives even when things aren’t going so hot. No matter how bad things get, your day, your life still has value; art can still at least be made, no matter how pedestrian.
When David Foster Wallace died, his friend and public radio literary critic Michael Silverblatt commented on his show that “The death of David Foster Wallace seems to speak to the difficulty of life itself; depressed or not, brilliant or not, are we living in a time that makes it hard for us to find the things that allow us to want to stay alive?”
Perhaps. Writing and art can’t heal everything. But it’s still worth trying to leave a testament to the desire we’d once had to be so much greater than ourselves.
And I think that’s something.
The problem was that, in our heads, we’re all geniuses. We are all the stars of our own lives, as David Foster Wallace had once noted; the most important person to ever exist. We’re all cologned with some slight expectation of greatness.
The problem was also that, when you listened to someone like David Foster Wallace speak, you realized that you were not a genius, and that you were doomed to a lesser level of recognition that was inevitable for writers in this culture anyway. Regardless of your talent, you’re not going to be writing the Great American novel; as you’d long suspected, there are too many Americas, and too many brilliant Americans already writing about each of them.
So I sat on my little bench in Chicago penning the obituary for my own glory. Good. Nice to get that out of the way.
Let’s talk about writing as a tool for survival.
Those of us not in grad school will likely have to adjust to the eight or more hours of day that we will spend at an entry-level job doing little tasks for nominal pay. We have to confront that, four these eight (or more) hours, our brains are sedentary. Fielding calls for customer service means few synapses need to be fired. Less connections need to be made. Your brain becomes maximally efficient at doing menial work that had required very little effort to begin with.
This is your brain on the twenty-first century.
Writing will help keep you in intellectual shape, like jogging for a few miles a week. If you maintain any standard of quality for your work, fiction should force you to maintain a sense of clarity over long distances of plot and characterization, helping to combat the ADHD tendency of your Google-adapted thought process. On the opposite side of the spectrum, poetry will encourage you to reach different parts of your brain not normally accessible and smash them together to create something unexpected.
Reading, naturally, is also encouraged, so that you encounter minds other than your customers’.
Now, what does it mean to be literary if you’re not a professional, or a career academic?
In many regards, it’s about being a repository of culture, thoughtfulness, and idiosyncrasy. Contrary to hipsterism—which is being subjected to increasingly aggressive marketing these days—it’s about being interesting not through the clothes you wear or the quality of your sarcasm but by the depth and breadth of the ideas you hold. People may think reading is dying—it is—84% of Americans want to write a book, yet only a fraction have read one this year—but YouTube notwithstanding, writing will at least be around for as long as people don’t want to embarrass themselves. Writing is the final defense against a culture of instantaneity that values sound-bites and missteps more than thoughtful presentation.
And in a society of rampant consumerism, where sadness is inefficient, and unprofitable (except to sell antidepressants) writing reminds us that it’s still okay to try and be the heroes of our own lives even when things aren’t going so hot. No matter how bad things get, your day, your life still has value; art can still at least be made, no matter how pedestrian.
When David Foster Wallace died, his friend and public radio literary critic Michael Silverblatt commented on his show that “The death of David Foster Wallace seems to speak to the difficulty of life itself; depressed or not, brilliant or not, are we living in a time that makes it hard for us to find the things that allow us to want to stay alive?”
Perhaps. Writing and art can’t heal everything. But it’s still worth trying to leave a testament to the desire we’d once had to be so much greater than ourselves.
And I think that’s something.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
The ballad of El Burrito
In the beginning, my dad never actually intended to become a photographer. He went to UMKC in the late 60s/early 70s and got his degree in English (!) and economics before becoming a traveling salesman. He got his start when he shot a few polaroids at a wedding, more out of curiosity than anything.
When he started his business my grandfather told him that he'd never make money taking pictures; he told him that he should get a "real" job.
A couple years before that, and before his stint as a salesman, Dad'd had a "real" job in San Jose at a gas station on the outskirts of the city, near the desert. He wasn't sure what he was doing there, exactly; he'd moved to Cali with my mom to check out west coast living for a while.
On his first day of work, he asked the guy who'd been running the place for eleven years when the last time was that he'd been robbed. Guy says, we've never been robbed.
Two weeks later, at two o'clock in the morning, a shirtless man is standing over my father (facedown in the candy aisle) with a machete to the back of his neck telling him to count to twenty-five; if you get up before twenty-five, I will come right back here and kill you dead. The man ran out the door.
Dad didn't quit this "real" job, though.
His next brush with crime came a couple weeks later, in the afternoon. It's hot. Dad's mopping the aisle next to the foodstuffs when he notices a Mexican migrant worker standing nervously in front of the microwave. Dad asks if he could use any help, and the guy doesn't reply. He starts fidgeting. Dad walks over to him and looks in the microwave and realizes that the man is trying to microwave approximately forty burritos at once.
Dad laughs. "You have to do them one at a time."
The migrant worker doesn't say anything, and Dad makes hand motions. One at a time.
At this, the migrant worker immediately flings open the door of the microwave and dumps all the still-cold burritos into a plastic sack and sprints out the door without paying.
Dad runs after him.
With a baseball bat.
My father had a scholarship offer to play tailback at Brown. He was an all-state sprinter. But the little short guy with a plastic sack full of burritos actually starts getting away. There's a Buick with five passengers (three in front, two in back) out in the parking lot with the engine running and a door open, everyone from the car shouting for him to ondele.
When he realizes that he won't catch him, Dad stops, cocks his arm, and hammer-tosses the baseball bat instead.
He misses the guy-- but he hits the car. BANG. And the driver, who must have been thinking my dad had a gun, immediately panics and punches the gas-- neglecting to make sure that his buddy had actually made it inside the vehicle.
Hombre was being dragged down the street, one hand on the handle of the door, the other on the trailing bag of burritos. He wouldn't let go of either. The driver only figured out what was happening a block later, stopping long enough to get his buddy in the car.
My father watched them drive away. It was 1973. He had a "real" job. He was getting minimum wage.
Monday, July 14, 2008
A Song for You, pt. II
I have a longstanding hypothesis about relationships-- some of you may have heard this before-- that no matter how much two people like each other, there's always one person who likes the other a little bit more. It's not original thinking, nor is it probably a revelation to any of you, but the theory goes that whoever likes the other person more is inevitably the one that gets dumped.
(It's just another of my idiot-proof dating theories kind of like the one I have about knowing when people like you: when someone's into you, they don't make excuses about not being able to hang out; they find a way to make it happen. Add booze, stir, simmer, voila. Your gut is never wrong, folks. Trust it.)
(p.s., Here's another for the road: if you know they like you-- you can tell-- then they are the one that's more into you. If you find yourself asking your friends to interpret mixed signals, you are more into them. Sorry. The more you know!)
Anyway, in that line of thinking-- about who likes who more-- the people who write songs are inevitably the kind of people who always like the other person more.
Think about it. Which set of these generic lyrics I just made up right now would you think are more common?
I've been thinking about youWondering how you've beenDon't want to see you with that other manI want to see you again
Or:
That girl from the coffee shop is kinda cuteI dunno thoughI'm not sure I'm feeling itShe's been calling a lotI think I'm gonna go nail my ex
Exactly.
Of course, the most astounding thing is how cool musicians are in this country when the vast body of their work consists of the kind of clingy sentiments that drive a normal person's significant others away.
For instance, let's say you're trying to win someone over. Pragmatically speaking, what's the best way to do it-- telling them how you feel? Hell no! That's romantic suicide and you know it. Every single one of your friends will tell you to pretend like you're not interested. You have to run away a little bit, not write love songs, you dork.
Think about this: for every awesome love song you know, there is a person out there that that song was written for, and they wish their creepy guitar-player ex would just stop calling them. Bon Jovi, you're eating up all her texts.
If there's an exception to the rule, it's that rappers maybe seem like they're not all that sentimental-- they're too busy tappin' dat ass, I guess-- but I think they're actually dating geniuses. Rappers feel pain like everyone else. But what better way to drive up their stock with the ladies and get revenge on the woman who toyed with their hearts than to brag over national radio about all the hotties that are climbing all over them at the club? Brilliant.
Anyway, I guess there's something to be said for music in that it can turn the inherently uncool into Al Green's "Let's Stay Together."
Sunday, July 13, 2008
A Song for You
I haven’t written a song since my junior year of high school or so, which I guess seems odd since I'm both a musician and a writer.
I think I remember the process of what usually happened when I slapped something together: first, I would find a neat chord progression on my guitar, and then I’d make some weird, shrill singing noises with my voice for a while to find a melody. This is a hugely embarrassing yet suprisingly effective process. I had a real knack for finding catchy hooks, and I had a lot of fun doing it.
Then, I would spend about five minutes writing words. Immortal, immortal words.
Let’s check out bits of this little gem I just found nestled amongst the tabs of popular songs in the bottom of my guitar case. Witness the magic of “Spanish Senorita,” written around the time I was a freshman in high school:
Nevermind that at that point in my life I had never actually met a real, living person who spoke Spanish—I had written a fuckin’ song and I was gonna sing it. I needn’t have ever actually touched (or talked to) a woman to know real love.
There’s a recording of this song floating around somewhere on my hard drive at home, but I’m too scared to listen to it. I don’t want to remember. I don’t think I developed any kind of taste in anything until I was, oh, a sophomore in college. (C’mon, I’m from the country. It took me a long time to catch up with everybody.)
But I feel better looking at the lyrics of the Lil’ Wayne and Rihanna songs currently on top of the charts, and it makes me think maybe I missed my calling:
Powerful stuff. In light of that, I think “Spanish Senorita” has aged rather well.
The fact is that most song lyrics are woefully inartful when they’re separated from the music, at least compared to the bewildering aesthetic and cognitive shit-show that constitutes most poetry. Lyrics often convey only a simple message, and lack the general elusiveness that characterizes most literary writing.
Then, I would spend about five minutes writing words. Immortal, immortal words.
Let’s check out bits of this little gem I just found nestled amongst the tabs of popular songs in the bottom of my guitar case. Witness the magic of “Spanish Senorita,” written around the time I was a freshman in high school:
Spanish senorita… I hear you calling my name
What is it now?
Spanish senorita… What is this game?
You tempt me now.
Nevermind that at that point in my life I had never actually met a real, living person who spoke Spanish—I had written a fuckin’ song and I was gonna sing it. I needn’t have ever actually touched (or talked to) a woman to know real love.
There’s a recording of this song floating around somewhere on my hard drive at home, but I’m too scared to listen to it. I don’t want to remember. I don’t think I developed any kind of taste in anything until I was, oh, a sophomore in college. (C’mon, I’m from the country. It took me a long time to catch up with everybody.)
But I feel better looking at the lyrics of the Lil’ Wayne and Rihanna songs currently on top of the charts, and it makes me think maybe I missed my calling:
You look so dumb right now,
Standin' outside my house,
Tryin' to apologize,
You’re so ugly when you cry,
Please, just cut it out.
Powerful stuff. In light of that, I think “Spanish Senorita” has aged rather well.
Spanish senorita… I bid you farewell
You’ve broke my shell, like them.
Spanish senorita… time to mend
This is the end.
℘
The fact is that most song lyrics are woefully inartful when they’re separated from the music, at least compared to the bewildering aesthetic and cognitive shit-show that constitutes most poetry. Lyrics often convey only a simple message, and lack the general elusiveness that characterizes most literary writing.
Even opera—which seems to have some kind of irrevocable membership in the country-club pantheon of “high” art—has libretti that are dreadfully cliché at worst, and cheesily straightforward at best.
But it’s not fair to separate lyrics from music, because that’s taking away half (or most) of the message.
But it’s not fair to separate lyrics from music, because that’s taking away half (or most) of the message.
What does “Stormy Weather” mean when you take away Billie Holliday’s nuanced delivery? What is “Satisfaction” without Mick Jagger bouncing around that little guitar hook in the background (“dah, dah… dah dah dahhhh…”)? And for that matter, what’s a Wagnerian hero tenor without his 100-piece orchestra?
Taking lyrics out of context is like taking a great piece of literature and then trying to determine its quality by looking at its one-paragraph synopsis on Wikipedia. You'll just realize that most books are basically about people screwing and dying, kind of like songs are all about love/breakups, and that’s not very original, is it? But that’s life. Everyone feels pain, everyone smiles. Unoriginality at the foundation of art is inevitable because life is unoriginal at its foundation.
So when you separate story from storytelling, lyrics from song—message from delivery—you miss that crafty flight from inescapable cliché, and I think that process of evasion is actually the foundation of anything we consider “artsy.”
Taking lyrics out of context is like taking a great piece of literature and then trying to determine its quality by looking at its one-paragraph synopsis on Wikipedia. You'll just realize that most books are basically about people screwing and dying, kind of like songs are all about love/breakups, and that’s not very original, is it? But that’s life. Everyone feels pain, everyone smiles. Unoriginality at the foundation of art is inevitable because life is unoriginal at its foundation.
So when you separate story from storytelling, lyrics from song—message from delivery—you miss that crafty flight from inescapable cliché, and I think that process of evasion is actually the foundation of anything we consider “artsy.”
It would be like writing a generic speech for Barack Obama and also having it read by President Bush, circa 2007; one delivery would have been full of the transcendent rhetoric of hope, while the other would be a tired re-tread from a lame-duck politician who is six months from being a persona non grata.
The point is that content matters, but the delivery counts just as much; lyrics are just a vehicle for expression, and lyrics by themselves are like intercontinental flights that don’t have any passengers.
In conclusion: you are allowed to write crappy lyrics if you’re W.A. Mozart, Rihanna, or Barack Obama.
In conclusion: you are allowed to write crappy lyrics if you’re W.A. Mozart, Rihanna, or Barack Obama.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
The lush life
Some lives seem distinctly more literary-- textual-- than others.
Jack Keroauc was a Catholic and a sufferer and a vagabond and he took all the pent-up energy of the fifties and took it on the road only after he decided that he wanted to create a novel out of a trip. Jorge Luis Borges was handed care of the largest library in Argentina after he had gone almost totally blind and after he had written about the world over, and no one was more sensitive to the irony than he. He had books arranged on his shelves in such a way that he could find his favorites by touch.
I don't feel like I'm living a literary life-- rather, a life defined by literature-- because books rarely surprise me or take hold of me the way that I sense that they do for other writers.
The emotional fabric of my life, thus far, is actually bound to music far more than it is to any literature. Unlike with all the books I own, every album I have has a story, and all the good ones have a history. In fact, the very best ones literally make history. The Long Winters' bizarre first two albums supplied the texture to the weird malaise that was my senior year of high school. Charles Mingus' The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady carved the shape of my bittersweet summer of 2007 into an angry color of trumpets, saxes, tubas, and pianos.
I don't feel like I'm living a literary life-- rather, a life defined by literature-- because books rarely surprise me or take hold of me the way that I sense that they do for other writers.
The emotional fabric of my life, thus far, is actually bound to music far more than it is to any literature. Unlike with all the books I own, every album I have has a story, and all the good ones have a history. In fact, the very best ones literally make history. The Long Winters' bizarre first two albums supplied the texture to the weird malaise that was my senior year of high school. Charles Mingus' The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady carved the shape of my bittersweet summer of 2007 into an angry color of trumpets, saxes, tubas, and pianos.
Each of them were like a relevation, a genesis of sound that seemed to signal that something *new* was happening, sort of like those big obelisks in "2001: A Space Odyssey," as if the time in which I was listening to them was in fact unique and that this period had its own story that could now be embodied by this certain sound, the likes of which I had never before encountered. I was not living the same day over and over again; things were actually changing. Historians name epochs in history much like music gives the moments of my life their own identity. (2001 was actually the year of Pearl Jam's Ten.)
My problem-- my double vision-- lies in the fact that I lack the musical gifts to funnel my own life experience into a song the way that I can put that experience on paper. The distance between what's in my heart and what I can put on the page is closer than, say, what I can create with the strings of my guitar. Any jazz improviser knows what I'm talking about. In order to riff and create your own distinctive sound, your own bag of licks, you have to make playing the horn as natural as possible by closing the gap that exists between the sounds in your head and the sounds that come out of your bell. You literally have to become the horn. Well, writing feels most natural for me. Everything else is just foreplay.
I write, but I'm not living a literary life. I just know what a literary life sort of looks like, and I'm using a substitute. That's just how it works for me. I'm glad, though. I'm allowed to have times when all the stories simply run out, when intuition just says that nothing needs to be said. Those are the good nights when all that really needs to matter is the distinct wordlessness of the sheets of your bed and the sound of the 3A.M. rain on your windows, and the almost never-ending drone of that idiosyncratically absurd latin funk album by a bunch of white kids from Iowa that's been put on repeat, repeat.
My problem-- my double vision-- lies in the fact that I lack the musical gifts to funnel my own life experience into a song the way that I can put that experience on paper. The distance between what's in my heart and what I can put on the page is closer than, say, what I can create with the strings of my guitar. Any jazz improviser knows what I'm talking about. In order to riff and create your own distinctive sound, your own bag of licks, you have to make playing the horn as natural as possible by closing the gap that exists between the sounds in your head and the sounds that come out of your bell. You literally have to become the horn. Well, writing feels most natural for me. Everything else is just foreplay.
I write, but I'm not living a literary life. I just know what a literary life sort of looks like, and I'm using a substitute. That's just how it works for me. I'm glad, though. I'm allowed to have times when all the stories simply run out, when intuition just says that nothing needs to be said. Those are the good nights when all that really needs to matter is the distinct wordlessness of the sheets of your bed and the sound of the 3A.M. rain on your windows, and the almost never-ending drone of that idiosyncratically absurd latin funk album by a bunch of white kids from Iowa that's been put on repeat, repeat.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Most things work out in the end
Today I took my final courses as an undergraduate and went down to the South Quad where they were serving free beer and free food to all the outgoing seniors. The turnout was good, if turnout can ever be bad for a student event offering free alcohol. The lines were long, which was all right, because it gave us all a chance to stand around and look at each other in the hope that we'd see someone we knew. I posed for photos with anybody with a familiar face.
For me-- I'm not going to graduate school-- graduating from Mizzou means that not only do I become an alumnus of the university, but I also become an alumnus of the kind life I'm used to living and an alumnus of spending time with all the people that I've come to know. No matter what happens, things are going to be different from now on.
I've heard a lot of people say that their college years were the best years of their lives, but I think the real tragedy would be to say that the best years of my life are now over. Were they great years? Yes. But the best? That's obviously yet to be seen. There's certainly no doubt that things might not get this posh again. I'm an English major, and so I read the subtext in everything; getting free beer today was sort of like a symbol for This could be the last time you have it this easy.
But I don't think any of us should be feeling sorry for themselves. After all, most of us standing on the South Quad today come from a long line of people who work for a living. Hard work keeps this country running and makes a college education possible in the first place. We certainly shouldn't worry about not figuring what we are meant to "do" with our lives when we can pick up the paper on any day of the week and find that there are no shortages of opportunities for our lives become things of real significance.
Am I scared about what happens next? No. If I'm leaving this place with nothing but an education and a handful memories, then you'd better believe I'm going into the world nothing less than well-armed. And as soon as everybody finishes this beer, it'll already be time that we were seeing to the work at hand.
For me-- I'm not going to graduate school-- graduating from Mizzou means that not only do I become an alumnus of the university, but I also become an alumnus of the kind life I'm used to living and an alumnus of spending time with all the people that I've come to know. No matter what happens, things are going to be different from now on.
I've heard a lot of people say that their college years were the best years of their lives, but I think the real tragedy would be to say that the best years of my life are now over. Were they great years? Yes. But the best? That's obviously yet to be seen. There's certainly no doubt that things might not get this posh again. I'm an English major, and so I read the subtext in everything; getting free beer today was sort of like a symbol for This could be the last time you have it this easy.
But I don't think any of us should be feeling sorry for themselves. After all, most of us standing on the South Quad today come from a long line of people who work for a living. Hard work keeps this country running and makes a college education possible in the first place. We certainly shouldn't worry about not figuring what we are meant to "do" with our lives when we can pick up the paper on any day of the week and find that there are no shortages of opportunities for our lives become things of real significance.
Am I scared about what happens next? No. If I'm leaving this place with nothing but an education and a handful memories, then you'd better believe I'm going into the world nothing less than well-armed. And as soon as everybody finishes this beer, it'll already be time that we were seeing to the work at hand.
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