The Moribund Blog

Resolute

Careful crafting and consideration throughout the holidays: I have decided to murder this blog as a New Year’s resolution. The other resolution is to exercise at least four minutes a day. However, this is a very complicated undertaking, this blogocide.  The perfect murder. Let me explain.

Like most people, I’ve had my reservations about blogs—what they meant, what they implied about the culture, the typical quality of thought that goes into any given post on any given person’s website. (I guess mine, not everyone’s. Who knows about everyone.) John Updike’s rather crotchety and backward-looking screed from right around the time of this blog’s genesis has lingered in my mind, despite its dogmatism. And while there are hundreds and hundreds of legitimately good blogs across the internet, I think what I’ve ended up deciding, after 15 months of feeling a little weird about having one, letting various kinds of energy and emotion about writing get slopped down onto the typepad webportal, locating interesting and ridiculous excuses to just surf for surfing’s sake, and really, ultimately, never feeling particularly great about anything having to do with blogging, is that there are probably three or four essential qualities to the production of a blog that’s “valuable” in some way (very mysterious term there), and you definitely need, like, one point five of those qualities in order to justify a blog’s existence—either Blogger Doe has to have an obsessive sticktoitiveness that leads to many, many posts (definitely not me), a particularly fresh and disarming prose (not really), a particularly unique perspective (not really), or some other actual reason to be doing it at all (not really). Otherwise it’s a little dark. Not dark like whiskey alone in the woods, screaming, crying as you lie down into a pile of mud and remember back when you were happy. Some other kind of dark—my generation’s invention of an electronic darkness, one that’s part distraction, part hope for connection, part passionate demand for a larger and more relevant arts community, part capitalistic enterprise, and part babbling. Again, I suppose this is all my own sense of a darkness, not necessarily one that is truly out there inside of the internet, but it’s all I’ve got, so I guess I have to stick with it.

Blogging as a fiction writer introduces another level of complexity; in one sense you are not at all doing the thing you are ostensibly supposed to be doing, but in the other sense, depending on your willingness to stretch the definition of “supposed to” in an economic atmosphere that essentially dooms the majority of authors—especially authors of short stories—you are doing something very close to what you’re supposed to be doing. Writing. But there are many, many different kinds of writers, and one thing I know is very true (especially now) is that just because you’re the kind of person who sits around thinking about short stories or novels or even aspires to write one once in awhile really says very little about whether your opinions on the culture at large—other books, politics, social justice, shoes, surfboards, kitsch, or whatever—are very interesting to other people. That’s not to say there isn’t a tremendous future for fiction and storytelling on the internet, and that enterprising writers, editors, and enthusiasts will not keep finding ways to place art at the fingertips of any person who happens to sit down and load a web browser. I just don’t really know what those ways are, and I find myself either unable or unwilling to properly explore them, preoccupied as I am with trying to write things while not at all connected to the internet.

Just outside, standing on the porch in my socks, avoiding the sort of wet snow/slush of a late Chicago December, I thought of this question: what would my generation’s identity be without the internet? Last night I saw a preview for a movie called “One Missed Call”. Alexis, frowning, turned and asked what possible reason there could have been to make that movie, but both of us sort of knew, both of us again felt the same darkness. Not hard to imagine a room of (in-house?) marketers, one entering with lunch and saying, “I had a thought as I was standing in line, fellows, waiting for these Classic Italian Sub Sandwiches; I was watching a 14 year-old beside me on her cell phone and she never once looked up from it the whole time I was in the restaurant; she both typed messages and talked. What was important, though, was her focus, the way the phone in her hands became a fetish, how she couldn’t not hold it and touch it, even if it wasn’t telling her things. So what I’m thinking, guys, is we can exploit that fetish that’s evolved and plug it into the genre horror machine and see if we can’t get gross sales of around 25 million with a budget of just under 10. It will not be a particularly good movie because it doesn’t have to be. Should we get somebody on the phone?”

As most people who sign up for a blogging account know (I wonder, by the way, how many dormant blog accounts exist—how many blogs are out there with one post, subject line either “Hello?” or “Is Anyone Out There”, post itself saying something about how neat it is to blog? Am I wrong to imagine a whole fleet of phantom blog-ships floating atop the internet ocean, each with one little tiny skeleton standing at the helm? Some of the skeletons still wearing trucker hats?) , once you click that button, a little tiny nubbin of “you should be doing this” pops into existence inside the dark chaos of your brain, and is there, a little seed, all the time. Usually it’s pretty mute. Usually you can just look at it and it wilts away. But it’s there. Sometimes—especially after you find yourself doing things like posting images of Dr. Zoidberg from Futurama with zero accompanying text—it pulses a little brighter and becomes angrier. Have I contributed to the Zeitgeist in my own interesting way? Is it enough? And you wake up one Sunday morning and say to yourself, “This day will be the day I write a really cool post on my blog.”

Looking at that sentence, one that is definitely a real brain-sentence that’s been produced by my own brain, makes me sad.

Anyway, we’re getting into personal issues about what one should do with the hours of a day, and those things don’t really matter. Back to sneaking up behind my blog with a huge knife and slitting its throat.

I looked at the “Delete This Blog” button yesterday and really didn’t want to do it; it was the raw first impulse to kill that brought me deep into the “Configure” pages of the Typepad account. What kept me from doing it right there, though, was the simple sense of lost potential. You can have all the optimistic ideas you want about the future of the internet and it doesn’t really help to then decide not to use it so much anymore. In my case the lost potential feeling links up with this other desire, honestly unrelated, to write more nonfiction and explore things like memoir, criticism, philosophy, and cultural criticism. These are kinds of writing I’ve always been interested in but have never tried too much, feeling, as I usually do, so fucking frantic to produce fiction that it was just unthinkable to sit down and begin writing something about, say, the mutant pumpkin my father grew in our backyard in 1993 and subsequently entered into the state fair. (With memoir it’s a somewhat similar suspicion, isn’t it? Like basic anti-blog positions? Grit your teeth a little bit and think to yourself, “What the fuck is this, anyway? Why would I care? Why would the author be so presumptuous to think I would care?” Is it the central question of the arts? At least the arts in the 21^st century? Even though these feelings occur to me, I think, in the end, they’re not really fair. We could ask the exact same questions about fiction. It’s just that it got decided a long time ago that people should actually care about novels and poems and other “shit people make up.”)

So I think to myself, hey, I wouldn’t mind trying these other sorts of writing, and I also think to myself hey, there’s a blog account with my name on it. I have the password and it actually connects to the internet. So another me walks up and takes my hand as I raise the knife to kill the blog and says, “Wait, you could make this work for you if you just added a little discipline.”

“Discipline?” I say. “That’s the problem. I have discipline. Being disciplined about writing a blog post feels like being disciplined about pissing off the back balcony of my apartment. It’s a little interesting but also totally pointless.

I got stuck in this part of the dialogue for about a day. Then I remembered, though, something about how Michael Chabon’s wife (Ayalet Waldman) had been a blogger but quit or did something interesting…I couldn’t quite remember. In my imagination I remembered a long and tortured decision-making process that was nonetheless interesting, culminating in some sort of internet-peace accord in which she retained her sanity and left the world of blogging happily. Well, it turns out that she just started getting paid for her writing by Salon. So maybe not so romantic as I remembered.

Nevertheless! The idea was hatched by those false memories. I will kill this blog, but this blog will not die until December 31, 2008.

Already I feel the relief of taking aim and firing into its heart. But there’s more. Like World of Warcraft, there is something about blogs that violates my more traditional narrative sensibilities—it never ends. The internet allows for entities that never end. I feel confident, when walking into a movie theatre, that I will at some point in the future walk out of it. Whether or not I will have been entertained is irrelevant. The same goes for opening up a book. And while you could say that newspapers, in a sense, never end in that there’s always a new one the next day, at least you can close the last page and throw it away. Without a physical form, blogs—blog ownership, actually—feels to me, uh, Sysyphean.

 

 

The conclusion to this whole post is simple. I like the idea of an endpoint, and I think that having an endpoint will let me be a little more ambitious when it comes to the various posts I truly do want to write. All future posts will be long and I’ll try to make them essays; what I do not want, not at all, is a casual embedding of a youtube clip. No matter how much I like Townes, putting him up there and just letting him sit makes me nothing more than the Yellow Pages. Or this other problem: the horrendous idea that for some reason has gained traction in our culture that any given person can be defined by his or her tastes, and that to show you what I like (Townes Van Zandt, Futurama) really has anything at all to do with who I am. (I have more thoughts on that subject, but maybe I’ll wait for a 9,000 word post in March. I’ll say things like: why is it that having a list of the 745 books you’ve read posted publicly has somehow become a proxy for intelligence? Why is it that being able to recite the top 80 indie bands of 2007 shows you to be an interesting combination of edgy, arty, and left-wing? Why is it that young people in particular have confused the list of their likes and dislikes with a list of their own beliefs? Isn’t it obvious that this is something that has been done to us, not done by us? That identity defined by taste is the ultimate model for consumerism?)

Anyway, that’s the plan.  Although, fuck. Maybe I’ll just quit in February.

Townes Van Zandt Makin' Uncle Seymour Washington Cry Should Also Make You Cry So Long as Your Heart's Not Been Completely Shrivelled by the Internet

Boring

Here is something I read today:

Only one man in a thousand is boring, and he's interesting because he's a man in a thousand.

-Harold Nicolson

Discuss!

Um

Complicated Literary Metaphor

Now this actually IS ironic

Thou Shalt

How nice, after spending a couple weeks reading about what is not allowed in fiction, to have come across this the other night.  I feel cleansed. 

Read at your leisure, or if you, like me, feel garbagey inside when you encounter meek polemics.

Why the Novel Matters
by DH Lawrence

WE have curious ideas of ourselves. We think of ourselves as a body with a spirit in it, or a body with a soul in it, or a body with a mind in it. Mens sana in corpore sano. The years drink up the wine, and at last throw the bottle away, the body, of course, being the bottle.

It is a funny sort of superstition. Why should I look at my hand, as it so cleverly writes these words, and decide that it is a mere nothing compared to the mind that directs it? Is there really any huge difference between my hand and my brain? Or my mind? My hand is alive, it flickers with a life of its own. It meets all the strange universe in touch, and learns a vast number of things, and knows a vast number of things. My hand, as it writes these words, slips gaily along, jumps like a grasshopper to dot an i, feels the table rather cold, gets a little bored if I write too long, has its own rudiments of thought, and is just as much me as is my brain, my mind, or my soul. Why should I imagine that there is a me which is more me than my hand is? Since my hand is absolutely alive, me alive.     

Whereas, of course, as far as I am concerned, my pen isn't alive at all. My pen isn't me alive. Me alive ends at my finger-tips.

Whatever is me alive is me. Every tiny bit of my hands is alive, every little freckle and hair and fold of skin. And whatever is me alive is me. Only my finger-nails, those ten little weapons between me and an inanimate universe, they cross the mysterious Rubicon between me alive and things like my pen, which are not alive, in my own sense.

So, seeing my hand is all alive, and me alive, wherein is it just a bottle, or a jug, or a tin can, or a vessel of clay, or any of the rest of that nonsense? True, if I cut it it will bleed, like a can of cherries. But then the skin that is cut, and the veins that bleed, and the bones that should never be seen, they are all just as alive as the blood that flows. So the tin can business, or vessel of clay, is just bunk.

And that's what you learn, when you're a novelist. And that's what you are very liable not to know, if you're a parson, or a philosopher, or a scientist, or a stupid person. If you're a parson, you talk about souls in heaven. If you're a novelist, you know that paradise is in the palm of your hand, and on the end of your nose, because both are alive; and alive, and man alive, which is more than you can say, for certain, of paradise. Paradise is after life, and I for one am not keen on anything that is after life. If you are a philosopher, you talk about infinity, and the pure spirit which knows all things. But if you pick up a novel, you realize immediately that infinity is just a handle to this self-same jug of a body of mine; while as for knowing, if I find my finger in the fire, I know that fire burns, with a knowledge so emphatic and vital, it leaves Nirvana merely a conjecture. Oh, yes, my body, me alive, knows, and knows intensely. And as for the sum of all knowledge, it can't be anything more than an accumulation of all the things I know in the body, and you, dear reader, know in the body.

These damned philosophers, they talk as if they suddenly went off in steam, and were then much more important than they are when they're in their shirts. It is nonsense. Every man, philosopher included, ends in his own finger-tips. That's the end of his man alive. As for the words and thoughts and sighs and aspirations that fly from him, they are so many tremulations in the ether, and not alive at all. But if the tremulations reach another man alive, he may receive them into his life, and his life may take on a new colour, like a chameleon creeping from a brown rock on to a green leaf. All very well and good. It still doesn't alter the fact that the so-called spirit, the message or teaching of the philosopher or the saint, isn't alive at all, but just a tremulation upon the ether, like a radio message. All this spirit stuff is just tremulations upon the ether. If you, as man alive, quiver from the tremulation of the ether into new life, that is because you are man alive, and you take sustenance and stimulation into your alive man in a myriad ways. But to say that the message, or the spirit which is communicated to you, is more important than your living body, is nonsense. You might as well say that the potato at dinner was more important.

Nothing is important but life. And for myself, I can absolutely see life nowhere but in the living. Life with a capital L is only man alive. Even a cabbage in the rain is cabbage alive. All things that are alive are amazing. And all things that are dead are subsidiary to the living. Better a live dog than a dead lion. But better a live lion than a live dog. C'est la vie!      

It seems impossible to get a saint, or a philosopher, or a scientist, to stick to this simple truth. They are all, in a sense, renegades. The saint wishes to offer himself up as spiritual food for the multitude. Even Francis of Assisi turns himself into a sort of angelcake, of which anyone may take a slice. But an angel-cake is rather less than man alive. And poor St Francis might well apologize to his body, when he is dying: 'Oh, pardon me, my body, the wrong I did you through the years!' It was no wafer, for others to eat.      

The philosopher, on the other hand, because he can think, decides that nothing but thoughts matter. It is as if a rabbit, because he can make little pills, should decide that nothing but little pills matter. As for the scientist, he has absolutely no use for me so long as I am man alive. To the scientist, I am dead. He puts under the microscope a bit of dead me, and calls it me. He takes me to pieces, and says first one piece, and then another piece, is me. My heart, my liver, my stomach have all been scientifically me, according to the scientist; and nowadays I am either a brain, or nerves, or glands, or something more up-to-date in the tissue line.

Now I absolutely flatly deny that I am a soul, or a body, or a mind, or an intelligence, or a brain, or a nervous system, or a bunch of glands, or any of the rest of these bits of me. The whole is greater than the part. And therefore, I, who am man alive, am greater than my soul, or spirit, or body, or mind, or consciousness, or anything else that is merely a part of me. I am a man, and alive. I am man alive, and as long as I can, I intend to go on being man alive.

For this reason I am a novelist. And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog.

The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble. Which is more than poetry, philosophy, science, or any other book-tremulation can do.

The novel is the book of life. In this sense, the Bible is a great confused novel. You may say, it is about God. But it is really about man alive. Adam, Eve, Sarai, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Samuel, David, Bath-Sheba, Ruth, Esther, Solomon, Job, Isaiah, Jesus, Mark, Judas, Paul, Peter: what is it but man alive, from start to finish? Man alive, not mere bits. Even the Lord is another man alive, in a burning bush, throwing the tablets of stone  at Moses's head.

I do hope you begin to get my idea, why the novel is supremely important, as a tremulation on the ether. Plato makes the perfect ideal being tremble in me. But that's only a bit of me. Perfection is only a bit, in the strange make-up of man alive. The Sermon on the Mount makes the selfless spirit of me quiver. But that, too, is only a bit of me. The Ten Commandments set the old Adam      ^* shivering in me, warning me that I am a thief and a murderer, unless I watch it. But even the old Adam is only a bit of me.

I very much like all these bits of me to be set trembling with life and the wisdom of life. But I do ask that the whole of me shall tremble in its wholeness, some time or other.

And this, of course, must happen in me, living.

But as far as it can happen from a communication, it can only happen when a whole novel communicates itself to me. The Bible--but      all the Bible--and Homer, and Shakespeare: these are the supreme old novels. These are all things to all men. Which means that in their wholeness they affect the whole man alive, which is the man himself, beyond any part of him. They set the whole tree trembling with a new access of life, they do not just stimulate growth in one direction.

I don't want to grow in any one direction any more. And, if I can help it, I don't want to stimulate anybody else into some particular direction. A particular direction ends in a cul-de-sac. We're in a     cul-de-sac at present.

I don't believe in any dazzling revelation, or in any supreme Word. 'The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the Word of the Lord shall stand for ever.'* That's the kind of stuff we've drugged ourselves with. As a matter of fact, the grass withereth, but comes up all the greener for that reason, after the rains. The flower fadeth, and therefore the bud opens. But the Word of the Lord, being man-uttered and a mere vibration on the ether, becomes staler and staler, more and more boring, till at last we turn a deaf ear and it ceases to exist, far more finally than any withered grass. It is grass that renews its youth like the eagle,  not any Word.

We should ask for no absolutes, or absolute. Once and for all and for ever, let us have done with the ugly imperialism of any absolute.

There is no absolute good, there is nothing absolutely right. All things flow and change, and even change is not absolute. The whole is a strange assembly of apparently incongruous parts, slipping past one another.

Me, man alive, I am a very curious assembly of incongruous parts. My yea! of today is oddly different from my yea! of yesterday. My tears of tomorrow will have nothing to do with my tears of a year ago. If the one I love remains unchanged and unchanging, I shall cease to love her. It is only because she changes and startles me into change and defies my inertia, and is herself staggered in her inertia by my changing, that I can continue to love her. If she stayed put, I might as well love the pepper-pot.

In all this change, I maintain a certain integrity. But woe betide me if I try to put my finger on it. If I say of myself, I am this, I am that!--then, if I stick to it, I turn into a stupid fixed thing like a lamp-post. I shall never know wherein lies my integrity, my individuality, my me. I can never know it. It is useless to talk about my ego. That      only means that I have made up an idea of myself, and that I am trying to cut myself out to pattern. Which is no good. You can cut your cloth to fit your coat, but you can't clip bits off your living body, to trim it down to your idea. True, you can put yourself into ideal corsets. But even in ideal corsets, fashions change.

Let us learn from the novel. In the novel, the characters      can do nothing but live. If they keep on being good, according to pattern, or bad, according to pattern, or even volatile, according to pattern, they cease to live, and the novel falls dead. A character in a novel has got to live, or it is nothing.

We, likewise, in life have got to live, or we are nothing.    

What we mean by living is, of course, just as indescribable      as what we mean by being. Men get ideas into their heads, of what they mean by Life, and they proceed to cut life out to pattern. Sometimes they go into the desert to seek God, sometimes they go into the desert to seek cash, sometimes it is wine, woman, and song, and again it is water, political reform, and votes. You never know what it will be next: from killing your neighbour with hideous bombs and gas that tears the lungs, to supporting a Foundlings Home and preaching infinite Love, and being corespondent in a divorce.

In all this wild welter, we need some sort of guide. It's      no good inventing Thou Shalt Nots!

What then? Turn truly, honorably to the novel, and see wherein you are man alive, and wherein you are dead man in life. You may love a woman as man alive, and you may be making love to a woman as sheer dead man in life. You may eat your dinner as man alive, or as a mere masticating corpse. As man alive you may have a shot at your enemy. But as a ghastly simulacrum of life you may be firing bombs into men who are neither your enemies nor your friends, but just things you are dead to. Which is criminal, when the things happen to be alive.

To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point. And at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely, can help you. It can help you not to be dead man in life. So much of a man walks about dead and a carcass in the street and house, today: so much of women is merely dead. Like a pianoforte with half the notes mute.

But in the novel you can see, plainly, when the man goes dead, the woman goes inert. You can develop an instinct for life, if you will, instead of a theory of right and wrong, good and bad.

In life, there is right and wrong, good and bad, all the time. But what is right in one case is wrong in another. And in the novel you see one man becoming a corpse, because of his so-called goodness, another going dead because of his so-called wickedness. Right and wrong is an instinct: but an instinct of the whole consciousness in a man, bodily, mental, spiritual at once. And only in the novel are all things given full play, or at least, they may be given full play, when we realize that life itself, and not inert safety, is the reason for living. For out of the full play of all things emerges the only thing that is anything, the wholeness of a man, the wholeness of a woman, man alive, and live woman.

Best American Nonrequired Reading

This week (or maybe next week?) the 2007 version of Best American Nonrequired Reading hits the stands.  "So Long Anyway," the last story in Trouble, got picked to be in it this year.  A great honor.  Other writers appearing: Jonathan Ames, Alison Bechdel, Scott Carrier, Stephen Colbert, Lee Klein, Matt Klam, Conan O'Brien and others.  Please do check it out.

     

Brander Matthews

Gearing up to teach about the short story this last week, I came across Brander Matthews, a literary critic (and sometimes writer) I had never heard of.  If indeed I am supposed to fancy myself someone who knows enough about the short story to teach a class about it, I most certainly should have already known about him.  Matthews was a critic and teacher who straddled the 19th and 20th centuries.  Once the president of the MLA, he pen-palled with Teddy Roosevelt, taught both literature and drama at Columbia, and helped to found this, which I also know nothing about.  He was a popularizer of fiction, short and long, and he seems to have had a soft spot for writers.  This is a literary critic. 

It has been a pleasant investigation into a person, and I must say one of the more successful e-investigations I've ever been a part of.  Google Books, which, as it should, scares me, has the entire text of Matthew's The Philosophy of the Short Story digitized and available for common consumption.  Never before has life seemed so easy; two nights ago I read the whole thing.  (I should note that TPotSS is in the public domain, and the Author's Guild suit is focused on Google's attempts to scan texts that are still under copyright.)

I also found another fascinating text.  In 1907 Branders edited a book called The Short Story: Specimens Illustrating its Development.  At Bartleby, you can find a link to each one of the short stories Matthews decided to include in the book, as well as the prefatory note and introduction.  This book is especially interesting to me in that it implicitly agrees to a premise I'm interested in teaching about (teaching about and thinking about): namely, that the short story as a genre is as much a commercial entity as it is an art entity; those of us who aspire to work with it and understand it are wise to appreciate and investigate the distinction between "storytelling", however it is done, and "the short story" as something sought after by editors and occasionally paid for.  The Matthews anthology is helpful with regards to this question not only because of its tacit acknowledgement that the short story is something that has grown, changed, and evolved over time, but because the first few selections are pieces that have existed far longer that the European and American short story has existed.  The idea is that people have always been telling small stories to create a desired effect.  The question is: what does it mean that this form saw such elevation and celebration in the 20th century?  And what does it mean, now, that it has fallen as far as it has?  In terms of both money and audience interest?  Are we not still telling small stories to one another?

I actually spent time making this