It was what we did before we actually did it, a bunch of mistakes we made while we were doing it and how we thought we were doing it for the first time. (Freeing us from the actual guilt of ripping off our forbears -- i.e. Carver, Barthelme, a bit of T. Wolfe (the "Acid Test", not the "Angel" one); the Pynchon template) and now we are crying over the lot of Mr. W.
No Brit writers at the game please -- irony is unofficially outlawed in England, you know. They have something else, which we haven't figured out yet, but when we do we will appropriate it and bring it out with all due credit. The Brits shrivel under the hot sun of irony (and probably, in their heart of hearts think we have stolen their "dry wit" and bastardized it to our purposes). Even Zadie thought her intelligence diminished somehow in the presence of a master practitioner. (Oh, pish-posh!)
And so irony has become the sledgehammer after all -- the great equalizer leveling the field where those who demand attitude fight those who want the simplicity of unadorned truth.
But what of those who can truly explain the difference, perhaps more noble than the players of either team? What of them?
I was sorry that I didn't visit the old neighborhood the last time I was in the city. I mean the one that the crane fell on a couple months ago, around Second Ave. and 51st St.
It was a good place to go; that apartment where a couple of career girls fresh out of high school (my high school) had set up housekeeping in the hopeful tradition of The Best Of Everything "naïfs in the city"/girls-currently-in-the-secretarial-pool/but-one-day-to-be-company-VP. To me it was a pied-a-terre I would visit to get away from what had become the hell of college on Staten Island. In the wisdom of my ignorance I knew that my profs couldn't teach me anything. So why hang out on campus?
As the drugs of the day that I brazenly toyed with began to play games with my tender brain, the three young women in my life became Macbeth's witches, clouding my mind and confusing my heart. If it hadn't been 1969, I'd have crosschecked my experience with similar travails in literature and art to explain to my nineteen year old self that there are plenty of frights, and there would be no problem, in the scheme of things, "big picture-wise" (to use the lingo of the businessmen looking to my skewed vision like ink smudges as they zapped past me in the streets) with the three plaguing me.
But in my high school a year earlier, lit was all scary -- Hester Prinn and that pastor; Big Brother; Steinbeck's dustbowlers; a kid whose friend pushes him out of a tree; Shakespeare's sappy (to me at the time) Romeo and Juliet. Everything was too far away from my experience to gain any help in finding out why: a) one of the witches had a lock on her ladyparts and I couldn't find the key; b) one acted like the act was a messy inconvenience and more than once ejected me into the New York night where I would drown my sorrows in knishes and Schlitz. But most frightening of all was the one back home who I knew was regularly giving burnt offerings to the gods of matrimony, an institution that I dreaded fully as much as Clyde Griffiths in Dreiser's An American Tragedy. Well, at least that problem, back in my hometown, was solvable. No, not in the way Clyde solves the problem. (There was much more – ahem -- urgency to his situation than mine anyway.) Rather that my situation became clearly recognizable through a work that offered me real hope of finding a solution. My misery had at last found company in an unlikely place -- a book.
Still, the city witches; they were the ones that truly threw me into chaos. The lockbox witch back at college had taken me into an "environment" her abnormal psych professor had her class make out of plaster, plywood and chicken wire. Dragging me through the MRI sized tunnels that honeycombed the structure we finally made it to a modular stopping point, where we could pause and where there was just enough room to...
But she was having none of that as we could hear her classmates scratching through the tunnels like giant ants in a plaster ant farm. And I, in the thrall of about five different drugs started to wonder why we were all in my brain, because I knew that if she didn't want my body, she wanted my brain. And to help her understand me she had convinced her professor to get the class to make a model of my brain -- the very structure we were in now! -- the better to study me in macro -- for what, I didn't know -- but my fear told me once again that her evil purpose was marriage. But how did she manage to find these giant ants she'd obviously trained to protect her from my untoward advances?!
Zzzzzzzaaaappppppped like a bug by my own paranoia, I soon would learn that beyond the truth behind the popular catchphrase of the day, "Speed Kills", it also sabotages your power to think clutter-free coherent thoughts. As the giant ants continued to get closer day by day I drifted farther away from witch number one.
Things seemed much better on Second and 51st. Mescaline, PCP, hash, grass and occasionally acid were to be had. We would do one or more before trips to the Fillmore East to see CSN&Y, Joe Cocker, Procol Harum, Delaney & Bonnie And Friends, etc. and then come back afterwards to do more. When the witch was in a good mood, we would float away on a cloud of unreality and sensuality. I felt I was connected to a higher plane of existence than any of my clueless classmates back at Wagner College could ever attain. Poor devils. I was on top of it all, I knew.
But then -- suddenly -- the lights went out for a year or so. When they came back on I found myself walking on plywood floors beneath the World Trade Center, its construction continuing apace. I was on my way to a trade school -- Germain School of Photography in the basement of the Woolworth Building. It was 1972 and I would never see Wagner again. In that basement I would learn about photography. And thanks to the assignments we were given I would learn about New York, from the Bowery to Fort Tryon Park and The Cloisters. I would meet and shoot characters like the Unhappy Husband, covered with signs and standing on the street handing out anti-marriage propaganda; the statue of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Central Park, forever on her own mind-expanding journey; and those sensible businessmen of Wall Street, the backbone of America, their blue-grey pinstriped suits making them perfect subjects for the black and white film I favored.
Like a proud paparazzo sometimes I would stand outside Tavern on the Green and get shots of the celebrated and famous like Marvin Hamlish, John Denver and Tony Curtis. I never thought to sell the pictures; their value was as amusement to my classmates and friends. And I never got to The Towers' Windows On The World until twenty years latter, when I stood with my wife looking down on the streets I got to know from looking through a viewfinder. It had been a short trip from Staten Island to Manhattan, but it felt like I had to travel halfway around the world to get there. And after all, I thought as I squeezed off another shot of the skyline from what seemed an impossible vantage point, this was a much better way to get high.
Here's something I have to do when I have trouble finding the gumption to write. Whatever comes out is what goes here. This first attempt concerns some British things, especially The Beatles. My goal is to communicate a complete idea/trend/philosophy in the fewest words. My thought is overwriting was fine for an earlier time, say the Victorian era. But now our lives are such that time is tight and complete communications in the most concise form is the only way to go.
Now if you look at a play like John Osborne's The Entertainer, you can see that the cynical abuse that the characters heap upon each other is the last dramatic vestages of WWII. Like Kubler-Ross's stages of death, it is the anger part -- the acceptance part happens when the old art form of the British music hall at last dies, but is reborn with the Beatles and the so-called British Invasion, the irony of that label going right back to WWII concerns. Britain was still rebuilding when the Beatles became popular and some of their early publicity stills are of them posing on some ruins of buildings in London. It would be hard to find a better example of the new (hopeful) order of things than those images.
More than anything else it was the Beatles and the scene they created that finally woke Britain out of the doldrums they had been in since WWII. At the same time in the US the Beats, (a truly scruffy lot that were almost toxic, though so naturalistic, their poems and poetics so visionary and innocent (in a nonvirginal way), and all of it seemingly untainted by the mainstream concerns of money and status) gave way to their equally scruffy descendents, the Hippies. It was that group's philosophy that the Beatles mined for their psychedelic/hallucinogenic/Eastern mystical thing for Revolver. When the group next produced Sargeant Pepper's, the world saw the Fab Four come out the other end of the acid-ego tunnel, utterly changed and producing music that was completely beyond anything that had been created in rock n roll to that time.
It's the dirty little secret behind the greatest rock n roll album of all time: it's total druggie music, made without guilt or apology. The boys had tried spirituality, and all but George gave it a pass, as the others flatly proclaimed that the Maharishi was a fraud. But they had all tasted of Dr. Leary's fruit more than a few times and it took them somewhere that few could manage to go -- a private secret place where the music was all theirs. Their crowning glory -- Sgt. Pepper's -- was the product of the bargain they made with their past selves, who had now become a completely different band -- the Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Of course the price they paid was great. Revelation through drugs is a Faustian deal at best and it wasn't long before the group started showing cracks at the seams, quickly followed by dissension, acrimony, mistrust and finally disolution. The White Album was made before it all became too bad; Abbey Road was a shaky vehicle that was put together by a group that could sell the thing to you, but wouldn't bother to back up the deal with a warranty; and finally Let It Be was the sometimes bad-dreaminess of The White Album grown into a full fledged nightmare.
Names have been changed to protect the annoying*
Current mood: pissed off
Category: Writing and Poetry
It's interesting that (nameless poster that this was written in response to) mentions certain blogs -- in fact the same blogs that are mentioned over and over. It gets to the point where, like the big Hollywood stars, that's all there is -- another Julia Roberts, Mel Gibson, or whoever movie? Please -- no. I beg you, noooooo!
These bloggers will soon learn, if they haven't already, that they don't have enough "stuff" to keep things interesting. Witness Capote quoting Warhol every twentieth post. OK, we get it, you think Warhol is the spokesman for the art world. What, there's nobody else? Really, it gets tiresome.
Poe is just fine -- manic enough to be interesting, bold enough to post opinions that his brother and sister bloggers wouldn't touch. And what does it get him? Well, 40,000 hits a day to the 7,000 of the rather tepid, conservative slogging-through-the-lit-news William Dean Howells manages to scrape up. Sorry, but I'm among those who wonder what all the fuss is about. If Woody Allen's dictum about success being 90% based on just showing up, Howells would be the exemplar of the trend.
And here's another brickbat for Capote -- if all you can do is quote the same ten writers/bloggers, rewrite press releases, or run pictures of sweaty and tipsy authors and publicists at Dantesque parties that often seem to lack proper ventilation, maybe you should think about going into a more exciting walk of life. Perhaps book publishing isn't the most exciting or exotic thing in the world, but with the downer cast you seem to put on things I think drycleaning might even work for you.
* Yes, I'm becoming old and grouchy. (And no, the above does not apply to any of you.)
PS -- Stay the hell off of my lawn.
Currently
listening
:
Hey Ya!
By
OutKast
Release date: 2003-12-30
Well, the fact of the matter is that not one person contributed a penny, though the donation button is right there. The idea was to make the thing self-sustaining. I hope all the writers realized how you failed me...(I'M KIDDING! Play along for the folks at home, okay?)
But seriously, I think I underestimated how "shocking" these stories would be to Mr. & Mrs. Casual Lit Reader. News of the first issue made it to many on arts and cultural boards and various groups who ostensibly take an interest in grassroots lit. Maybe there was one too many zombies, or not enough tea towell moments -- I don't know. (I think I'll try to get Mike Diana (don't Google him yourself -- the result could be upsetting, take my word for it) to illustrate the next issue -- that should show them what shocking really is.)
So the upshot is things are temporarily on hold for Whirligigzine. I know this is where editor/publishers usually say something like "I know I made mistakes" and go on to enumerate them. But actually, I didn't make any mistakes -- the current situation is merely a result of our time, when reading fiction of any type is so far down most people's to-do list as to be without consequence in their lives. Checked off undone.
For the writers who think I have gone to Cancun on all the money I made off their work -- no. The closest I can get to anything like that is sticking a little umbrella in my bottle of Corona as I cool off on my porch. I'll try to raise some funds in various (completely legal) ways and in the meantime perhaps fill the zine with my own stuff. Why not -- I have to get it out there somehow. And in something more than a damn blog.
In my superhero writer dreams I imagine myself as Genre Buster Man. (!) (I'm sure there are critics out there who are in possession of literary Kryptonite to deal with the likes of me. "Bring it on," says GBM!) In any event, I'm going to stick by my guns when it comes to publishing other writers. You deserve to be paid. If I temporarily can't pay you then I won't publish you. Period.
(And yes, I've got a long delayed poetry issue coming out before Whirligigzine makes a change. I'll be in touch about that.)
It's not just we writers that are outsiders, but our characters are too.
Who but an outsider could have created one of the greatest outsiders, Captain Ahab? "Alright what was he outside of?" you ask cynically, your eyebrow arched so that it almost looks like a question mark recumbent. The simple answer: Humanity. It doesn't matter that he was pretty much evil incarnate (or was he?), he was superhuman in pursuing his goal and we love/hate that. Excess in the service of one's beliefs mark some of our favorite characters.
The obsession of Humbert Humbert; the neverending need of Holden to root out and expose the phonies; the desire of Portnoy to masturbate at all costs; the need for Cheever's swimmer to swim across the county, pool by depressing pool. We love the crazies with our own obsession that itself is perhaps story-worthy. And we love them because deep down we think there is something admirable in such purposeful craziness.
Mainstream lit folk will pooh-pooh the idea that such a thing exists. Here's something you might not know: a lot of the literati have no idea that we exist at all. We are outside their "spheres of interest," and they consider themselves lucky if they never have to deal with us at all, except to note us on slow news days when editors tell their reporters to round up the latest "new Beat writers" and "give me 1,500 words and get a quote from one of the original Beats, if any are still alive."
I call the situation of the mainstream literati the "last ride syndrome." And it goes like this:
Think of an upstanding member of your community, employed, following all the rules and doing all he can to be a noteworthy statistic, with all the statistical acoutrements that allow him to live statistically comfortably in the style in which he is accustomed. Every day he travels the same route to work. Every night he retraces that route to get home. It is a routine, but it is his routine. He loves it.
And then one day something breaks his routine. He dies. As the hearse squires him to his final resting place his spirit looks around at the new route the vehicle is taking. He sees things he has never seen before and he is really only a few streets away from the usual route. He wishes that when alive he'd veered away from the routine a bit -- even if it was only to take an alternate route to work occasionally. He continues to be amazed at the things he passes, shocked actually, at the variety he never knew existed in his town. But he has lived a good -- if mundane -- life and now he is on his way to his final reward. As he looks heavenward he asks sheepishly: "Excuse me...sir(?)...but do you think I could keep driving around a bit? I'm seeing some very interesting things I had no idea existe..."
"Oh no, that would be impossible," comes the answer. "I arranged everything just the way you like it -- by the rules. You always loved the routine didn't you?"
"Did I?" gulps the deceased. "But I had nothing to compare it too..."
"Nothing to...Listen Mac!" the voice thunders. "You had two eyes, two ears, a brain and all the rest. It's too late now to want the grand tour. Besides, you've got an appointment. Some of your friends are going to say a few nice things about you and then leave you under a shady Maple tree for the rest of time. Surely you know that death is the biggest routine of all."
The mainstream literati have subjugated their need to break the rountine and they have their degrees and contacts. They're connected like no faction of outsider or underground lit can be. They strive to be mentioned on Page Six and in Gawker. They comment on all the hippest lit blogs. They get Myspace and Facebook pages and write blogs about their latest projects which will ultimately be a DVD or mp3 or podcast or (gasp!) a book. It will look indie/DIY/ziney but it will be produced by a major corporation. It will grab the interest of the media as well as teenage girls just starting to get hip to "irony". The McSweeney's crowd will oh-so-gently mock it, but then pick up a copy in a bookstore on the other side of town. People like me will have to know about it in order to write a rant like this. I may even like some of it, in an offhand "it's not my style, but I can see where it's coming from" kind of way.
But what is that? Just another sort of routine. The outsider/undergrounder routine. Are we just taking the same route to the same thing, gaining no knowledge of anything outside of our little reverse snob sphere? Just recently there was a serious discussion -- by insiders, not outsiders -- about how the term "indie" should be retired from the literati lexicon. In a wonderful example of the snake eating its own tale, we have the likes of Jonathan Lethem (once an outsider by dint of his beginnings in the Science Fiction field; now a very insidery recipient of the McArthur "genius grant" of...a lot of bucks so he can continue to be a genius...And no, I don't begrudge him his winnings) declaring that "indie" is just a branding tool, and has no meaning anymore, as the term "alternative" also has run its course and has no meaning.
Wow.
I have to say that both of those words have meaning to me and inside my (admittedly non-genius) brain I know exactly what they mean. Those folks can declare that words like indie no longer have their intended meaning (snake has now made it well past tail and is chomping its on way up; soon it will disappear completely). Or the meaning they think they should have. Hmmmm.
Look, I can declare my front yard a sovereign state, but that doesn't make it one. For those establishment people to deny the meaning of indie...Well, to me it's sort of like astronauts who have been shot far out into space -- they're heroes; but then all of a sudden they deny Earth exists. I know we look like less than specks from way up there, but really, we do still exist.
The Guild of Outsider Writers is holding a summer writing contest. Each contestant will submit a poem, an essay, and a piece of fiction, all revolving around a theme of the contestant's choice.
The Spring/Summer special poetry issue of Whirligigzine will appear as soon as possible. Those who have been expectantly waiting for their accepted poems to finally see the light of day will get their wish.
Poetry editor Rob Plath, who did a great job for Whirligigzine, has chosen to move on to work on his own. And with chapbooks of his coming out seemingly every other week and a constant demand for his work in both online and print zines -- as well as editorship at d/e/a/d/b/e/a/t/ poet -- he has more than enough to do (without worrying about my little lit zine.)
He says there is a good possibility he will be back for Whirligigzine's yearly poetry issue and I look forward to working with him on that in the future.
Those of you who have submitted your work to Whirligigzine -- whether poetry or prose -- and have not heard from us will get the news you are waiting for very soon.
Those of you who have had your poetry accepted by Rob and are waiting for it to appear in Whirligigzine will see your work online soon.
John Douglas Finch, Editor/Publisher, Whirligigzine
"At a time like this you were fortunate if, like me, you had a brother named Malachy who owned a bar called the Bells of Hell. On my way to West 13th Street I passed other bars where grown men and women cried out piteously for a beer, a gin and tonic, anything, anything that splashes in a glass with a tinkle of ice. Oh, ice above all on this hot 13th of July, the 114th anniversary of the Draft Riots of 1863 when the Irish (my people) tried to burn the city to the ground.
Candles already flickered along the bar at the Bells of Hell and Malachy was praised for his foresight in having such a plentiful supply. He smiled and his regular customers smiled because they knew of Malachy's turbulent relationship with Con Edison, that from time to time he was a little tardy meeting the bill. He proved you can run a bar on candles and borrowed ice though you wouldn't want to make a habit of it. Newcomers to the bar that night remarked on how charming the place was and the regulars smiled and drank the beer that, sadly, was turning warm."
Frank McCourt NY Times Aug 15, 2003
From Novel With Working Title St. M. by J.D. Finch June 16 2008
St. M. and I walked into the bar that was candle-lit and a bit warm in that there was no air conditioning on this warm June day.
Yo, Mike! shouted St. M., you've neglected to pay the electric again have ya?
Oh, shite, M., said the bartender/owner. The only thing that worries anyone here is last call and closing time. Do you think they give a shite if the stout is a tad warm?
St. M. chuckled and allowed for how he guessed they didn't give a shite and proceeded to take us through a curtain that separated the main bar from a private area, where there was a group of men listening to another man, who was reading something.
That's Mick McCabe, said St M. I've brought ya here to show you how real writers get along.
But I get along, I told him. And I'm a real writer.
Bullshite, said St M. If you were the real thing, ya wood'na been reading that damn phony writin' book this morning.
I supposed he had me there: I should have been well past that sort of novice stuff. Still I did have my honor.
But they write about Joyce in it.
I didn't say it loud, but the word Joyce was picked up by some sort of Irish writer sonar that all at the table possessed. The reader stopped; the listeners put down their Guinnesses. Their previously mellow sleepy eyes widened to the size of coasters.
Now boyos, take it easy. The kid here was just talkin'. Didn't mean to lessen yerselves by mentioning "Himself", said St. M.
They seemed to be satisfied with this explanation, and didn't say hello to St. M., simply accepting his presence, while acting as if his companion -- the utterer of the name that was to them a self-contained, complete-unto-itself vow -- didn't exist.
There's an interesting essay on C.S. Lewis's book The Hideous Strength over at The Guild Of Outsider Writers site. Here's the comment I left, which should be posted later today.
Miller's is a cool take on the Lewis book, branching out into the way the work bounces off of pop culture and its lesser traveled and bizarre byways, while relating the reading to his own interests and experiences.
As we've credited Poe with the invention of the detective story we should probably also give him the nod for junk science essays and meta nonfictions started by his Eureka piece! In it he more or less tried to explain the engine that runs the Universe and some of his points sound oddly Einsteinian, while the farther out theories seem like future reference to Illuminati concerns, as well as philosophies of off the map groups like The Church of the Subgenius.
Also see The Museum Of Jurasic Technology for a sort of steampunk take on the science that bends minds but doesn't always convince the experts. (http://www.mjt.org/)
As mainstream writers have more and more started to take on the Science Fiction and Fantasy writers' themes and tropes (Cormac McCarthy's The Road is one example of many) it is an interesting question as to how the mix of science, fabulism and writing come together. Jaie Miller's essay seems to tackle this theme in a tantalizing way.
I will have a related Naked Opinion post based on my reaction to a desire by some mainstream insider writers like Jonathan Lethem to do away with various terms describing what they are not, while somewhat trying to negate (nice try!) what we are: outsiders. I'm sure they don't really mean any harm...
Tune in later this week when all will become clear -- not in the Scientology sense. But if you sympathize with the outsider philosophy you should find it interesting.
pissed off
strong
