(The Merry-Go-Round is Beginning to Taunt Me[1])

 

1. Author As [not circus] Dog Trainer (Cris)

You can’t lie to a dog. Or you can’t lie badly. While training dogs, you need to be “telling” them, with both body-language and voice, that they are the center of the universe to you, and that what they do for you—and what you’re doing together—makes you happier, and means more to you, than anything else in the world. They can tell if you’re lying. If you’re unconsciously communicating to them that you’re disappointed or upset because you’re thinking about something else, something offstage—whether your life’s true dilemma or your most current disappointment—they take it on as stress. To dogs, it’s all about them. So the trainer has to be able to convince the dog of that, whether it’s true in the trainer’s larger life or not. Problem is, the dog can usually tell. A good trainer doesn’t have “a larger life.” It’s never “just a dog” and therefore easy to lie to.

Is an audience at a reading “just an audience at a reading,” and easier to lie to than a dog? If your true, or larger feelings, infringe on the party atmosphere, on your cheerful gratefulness that you have a book published and an audience to read to, will they also decide your angst is all about them and therefore have no interest in whether the book itself is worthwhile, interesting, important, or even possibly entertaining?

After finishing a series of readings for my 15^th book, I received this advice:

Be fun, vivacious, personable and amusing. Be substantial and invested, but leave them smiling. Everyone wants to be where the party is. If folks are kind enough to make a party atmosphere around your book [by attending a reading], then let people have a good fucking time at the party, and be happy and grateful for that.

I responded: “I wonder if being a fun-chameleon is really the way to give a book a better chance at some modicum of success. I mean, why can’t some of us have a different personality? And if I’ve lost some of my burn and zeal, I think I’ve had some of my corners worn down (to the bone, it feels) in an indie-press career spanning 20 years now. Has it come to this: I really need to act like a cheerleader?”

My advisor:

The reason I’ve given you any advice at all about how to “act,” which is presumptuous of anyone to tell someone else, much less a newer writer to tell a more experienced writer, is that a lot of people we know mutually have remarked to me over the past couple of years on how negative, depressed, anxious or bitter you have seemed. Taken individually, this doesn’t mean anything except that the person saying it may be judgmental or just wants to gossip. But taken collectively when I’ve heard it from 5 or 6 people, especially when I know some of these people really like you and aren’t just trying to be assholes, this is why I’ve given you the advice I have about not coming across as negative.

And when a couple of the occasions after which people remarked stuff like this to me were not “private” occasions, but after seeing you at someone else’s reading or sitting with you at a group table or something like that, this is why I thought I should mention it.

This is not surprising—you’ve had a few really hard years. The thing with [your last publisher] was very hurtful. . . albeit if none of the huge unearthing of issues in your life had taken place, it’s possible you would not have taken career things as hard. But, I mean, for a while you were clinically depressed. I know it’s very hard to give a shit about literary stuff, or to have optimism or “illusions,” when one’s personal life and psyche have been in an uproar.

I don’t mean you should act like a bubbly 25 year old. I don’t even mean to act differently than you have for the bulk of your career. I just mean that, whatever you have been willing to “put out there” over the past few years in terms of your mood or personal disillusionments / insecurities, I would recommend that you don’t put that out there anymore when promoting the book. And in case you were not “willing” to put it out there, but rather unaware that you were doing so, I guess I was trying to just give a subtle hint.

The subject here, then, is author as entertainer, as life-of-the-party (or life of the it’s-all-about-me-but-I-care-about-you party); as friendly, funny pal everyone will want to hang with; as popular girl (or guy) in the high-school halls with a peer group that now includes 3 or 4 different generations. Those pensive, faraway, or serious-thinker author photos had better also disclose someone ready with a hilarious quip for any occasion, the teasing nature of a camp counselor, the gracious vivacity of the party’s host, the beguiling animation of a really good tour guide. The subject here is a popularity contest.

The voices here will have to be anonymous.

All of the people I’ve spoken with are writers I admire, and friends, people I care about to one degree or another. If I disagree with anything they’ve said, I’m not here to embarrass or out them. They’ve caused me to think. I like that. If I have to think about my inability to be personally popular … it’s not their fault that’s my reality. Not their fault that I feel like an actor who joined a serious theatre group (even if only cast in bit parts) and over the years the company morphed into a circus without her realizing.

 

2. #AuthorFail (Davis)

If dogs teach us anything, it’s that our trusty domestic companions have come a long way from their wolf-roots. As my oldest daughter Athena says, “I’m evolving now, and it doesn’t hurt a bit.” Sure, even the toy breeds probably have the pack instinct and yearn to howl at the moon. Perhaps miniature pinschers everywhere wait their chance to turn on their benevolent masters and caretakers—us. This is why I’ve always been a cat person, and even though I had to put my long-time super cat, Cassie, to sleep some months ago, filmmaker John Waters reminded me recently that, “your cat hates you!”

Sure, Cris, we’re up against the wall as authors-of-a-certain-generation who can’t live 24-hours-per day on social networking sites and blogs and within the too-incestuous miasma of small-press book promotion that churns and churns and never stops but for the most part has the collective yelp of the chickapoo of whatever else these cross-bred former-wolves might now be called. Can you hear the French onomatopoeia for the dog bark: “jappe jappe”? Esperanto: “boj, boj.”

Sadly, or perhaps not-so-sadly, much small press/indie authorship serves within a matrix of production-for-producers. We write books that other small-word writers read or pretend to read or never read and never pretend to read and we review and cross-promote each other with a vehemence that makes Gregor Mendel seem like a pea-pod dabbler and we conspiratorially make like nothing untoward may be happening or better yet we call it “community building” and we really mean it—we do—this is more than rhetoric—but most of us also really do mean this in the same double breath that we’d like to break through the indie ceiling and cash a big check from a New York publisher even though we realize that path is almost never sustainable and almost never going to happen without a goodly amount of aesthetic give-and-take or take-and-take. Or just take. Let’s look at two types of writers in this matrix:

1) The Modern Romantic (MR): The type of writer who secretly (or not-so-secretly) craves a “wider” audience, and for whom—and this is essential—it is not enough to wish for demonstrable authorial “success.” Rather, the MR sees his or her exile to the small press world as either

a) A temporary state of affairs, or

b) A great indignity foisted upon her by a entropic universe concerned only with the marketability of books, a universe with little room for a new author to break into the pack, an author whose work is undervalued yet “better” that whatsoever appears on the spring list, will toil for an unspecified period below the surface of Manhattan’s wide Sargasso Sea.

Deep sighing breath. Get centered.

Namaste.

The MR author has also, unsurprisingly, been found guilty of some Kafka-esque sin, which given only the possible zyzzygy of lucky break, talent, and perseverance, might still upend the cruel fates. (There is a bit of good ‘ol Yankee boostrapism at work in this one.)

Of course, a certain version of the MR had some success at first with a book from a major label or a well-regarded minor literary press (Milkweed, Greywolf). Now, books later, this MR toils in the rear of the wolfpack, where her books are poorly copyedited, under-marketed, and forever relegated to the footnotes of a literary topography that has long since shifted its tectonic plates.

Where to spot the MR: You can find the MR in a writer’s colony or garret or subway car or coffee shop writing her way out of the world in the possession of a dog whose been kicked and left for dead and buried and whose book is pulped after a year in a warehouse and who goes back now, tail between legs, to the minor league small press world where she grows increasingly embittered[2] as the newer generation of MFA-bred cross-promoters “like” each others Facebook links until Facebook wets itself into some collective virtual orgasm where even Mark Zuckerberg gets his share of vicarious click-thrills.

2) The Young Turk (YT, and yes, the archaic term is meant ironically): This latter group, while certainly possessing some traits of the MR—and after all, how could any American writer schooled in an MFA or Ph.D. writing program not to some extent internalize the ideas of genius, authenticity, and old-style creationism internally programmed into the system?—also represent a new genus of the literary scene[3].

Defining characteristics: The YT lives online, perhaps not to the extent of the zapped-into-the-screen absurdity of Jeff Bridges in Tron, but the YT sees writing-as-networking, using new-media as an extension of the page, networking to the point where networking disappears and becomes something else: “living.” The YT has at least 1500 Facebook “friends,” can expect “likes” or comments in the dozens for postings on the order of “I’ve just had lunch” or “It’s on” or “Just finished writing a short story” and “The universe,” ad infinitum. The YT probably writes for a collaborative literary site such as BigOther, HTMLgiant, The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown (yes, I write for two of these), etc; the YT carries a smart phone and is live tweeting while reading this article; the YT’s website is miminalist and sharp, easy to navigate and positively airy (compared to the accomplishment-thick website of the MR, redolent in garish colors); the YT will respond to emails anytime of the day and generally until 2-3 am; the YT, despite being a publishing writer for less than three years, knows more people than the MR: the YT has published 100 or so creative pieces in journals edited by other YTs (whereas the MR has published 12 stories over her long career, and only in the “best” lit mags); the YT enjoys going to AWP and participates in bar readings that last 7 hours with a cast of thousands (each reader has 38 seconds to perform); the YT would love to teach or get a tenure-track academic job, and some do), while the others look to break into this work, which many MR’s have long-ago conquered only to be then defeated by the byzantine minutiae of administrative politics, committee meetings straight out of Dante, and a loathing of student papers that makes 1984’s Winston’s rat-fear seem like a soft phobia on the order of disliking wax beans.

 

3. The Ante is What? OK, I’m In (Cris)

Troubled by events where I felt overshadowed by not just humor, but something bigger than humor, I had various email exchanges with other writers. Some noteworthy comments and responses:

#1 But if you’re reading with 4 other people, it helps to stand out.

#2 … if we want to stand out, we have to stand out. Plain and simple. The work itself matters first, of course, but the quality or distinction of the work won’t “sell” the work, necessarily. So maybe just maybe, the …  public perception of a certain image or persona or personality or crazy multipronged marketing party-plan that’s somehow both honest and original could do the job. And that means something about it has to be radically different from the pack. That’s partly why I’m all into the transmedia/freakshow angle for [TITLE OF BOOK].

#3 This is offensive. It means that a group reading isn’t about experiencing different voices, different aesthetics. It means that it’s about competition, of one-upping, of being the “best of the bunch.” Which translates into book sales.

 Me: Like in high school, whether we knew it or not, whether we were aware of it or not, or whether we actually received the advice directly or not, there was an underlying understanding that boys wouldn’t like girls who were pensive and smart or who looked serious and intellectual, or worse yet, somber, gloomy, reclusive, or a snob (i.e. shy). Back then, I got labeled “the sad girl.” Is this like that? The bubbly, effervescent girls will succeed as writers too?

#4 Vivacious for girls, yes; however, for guys one option is the smarty-pantsiosity that becomes the know-betterism—a kind of unequal equal of muscle. I try to be clever and fun and instructive and usually end up also being fairly emotional (two of the poems I’ll read are about suicided friends of mine, and another is for my dead sister—though none is angsty). I have seen you be amused if not amusing at events here, but I want to know your thoughts on giving oneself permission to not be so amusing or clever and smarty-pants-ish.

How could I hope to express anything about this better than #4? (So … would I want to read with him? Well, I did once. Almost 3 decades ago. I’ll get to that. )

 

4. Are we even playing cards? Doesn’t matter. (Davis)

Some of my (recent) shameless reading gimmicks: A 100-foot rope threaded through the audience and clipped to my belt and then you-the-audience pull me pull me pull me and I pull back while I read; forgetting the rope and so asking audience members—six eager writing students—to push me or try to steal my text as I read and they chase me and I run and jump around the room; strobe lights set to the alpha-wave frequency and you listen with eyes closed while I read and, hopefully. you see stuff; shouting; dressing as a mime to read from my novel BLANK, a largely blank novel; pouring water all over Lidia Yuknavitch with you, Cris, as you and Lidia did the same to me; using Google Earth to geo-locate texts during a “Neighborhoods” Chicago Reading at the Chicago Cultural Center.

The last two, Cris, were more or less your ideas.[4] This proves that you are willing to jump into this strange pool of standing-out self promotion even if you want to be the quiet Svengali in the background and let others figure out how to do it, but that’s not exactly true because you even brought the pool to our reading with Lidia and a tarp to protect the floor of the gallery and this was damn thoughtful and then you laughed with everyone and you were in on the joke and you so thoughtfully left the pool at a bus stop in Chicago.

We went out for drinks and dessert afterward with the organizers of the Red Rover series and some of audience members—including the couple who drove over 100 miles to see us dump water on each other—and we basked in the afterglow of the deed itself and sounded pleased when we heard about the photos and the videos and the way this would not be merely an afterglow but have an afterlife beyond this table, this story, these people—and so live on forever and ever amen.

How would the pure MR respond to such tasteless gimmickry? With disdain (perhaps tinged with jealousy.)

How would the YT respond? By exploiting the event online in a much-more-effective manner than either of us are capable of doing.

Let’s take the example of the videos and photos of the Red Rover water-experiment.

Before the event: Jen Karmin and Laura Goldstein, the Red Rover organizers, insert us into the schedule and prepare their email announcement. I don’t know about you or Lidia, but I invite a few Chicago folks.

The event itself: You and Lidia meet at a coffee shop in Bucktown and I’m not sure I can even make the thing because my father, in his firth-year of advanced brain cancer, sits thick with a bacterial infection in the hospital. The day before, he shakes for a four-hour period in an advanced fever state. He tells my mother in a fit of delirium, “It’s because of Kennedy and Castro. That’s why I’m sick…” He takes a turn for the non-feverish and I truck down to Chicago from a northern suburb.

The three of us meet, laugh, and plan out the general water pattern of the event. We are three deeply wounded people. Maybe. Or not. We go out to dinner and talk more about mutual acquaintances in the avant-writing world. We leave for the event, and I arrive five minutes later, since we are only three blocks away. You drive with Lidia and somehow get lost and I panic and call and text both of you over and over while assuring the kind organizers that you are both on your way. I stand outside the venue, a nondescript third-floor walk up gallery space in Wicker Park, and discover you, standing in a trance state, lost, holding the kiddie pool. We move into the space and lose our breath walking up the stairs. We do the water thing.

We submerge ourselves.

After the event: Aside from the aforementioned dinner, there is documentation. A series of photos and a few videos appear on Facebook. People comment and then it all fades away.

What else have we done with this? Nothing. We are failed YTs.

Except in this essay.

We live forever now.

 

 5. Will You Do It For 10-Cents?

Whadda-ya Think I Am?

We’ve Already Established That, Now We’re Haggling Over a Price[5] (Cris)

Either it started to rub off on me, literary Darwinism took hold, or I’m turning into a conceptual reader (or book-promotion werewolf) and just don’t know it. I had some unfortunate (or advantageous, depending on who you’re asking) big ideas. Honest, I was joking. I was trying to survive.

In one, four writers from the Chicago area were going to stand on various places on a city map, drawn or projected onto the floor, and read pieces depicting some aura of their corner of the city. Whew, good thing no one could figure out how to draw the map. I’m from California and didn’t have anything to read from the exurbs of Chicagoland where I now live, and yet the bright idea was mine.

In another recent event, three of us are supposed to read from books that by some means involve water, while sitting in a filled plastic child’s wading pool. This possibly brings body image into the competitive mix, as in: if you’re not funny, maybe you look good in a speedo. Or maybe we’ll reduce this idea to squirt guns (supplied to the audience). I have to remind myself, stop having these reckless ideas. The water imagery in Waterbaby was never meant to be funny, irreverent or snarky. It was supposed to be Alice Munro’s “gray, deep, baleful, magnificent sea.” (Is this like disgraced former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich comparing himself to Gandhi?[6] Dan Quayle comparing himself to JFK?[7] I’ll say it first, Mazza, you’re no Alice Munro.) But is this idea akin to having Rosanne Barr read (perform) Alice Munro?

No, my fellow readers at these events are not caricatures, not clowns (at least not yet), not avatars. We meet before events to have (usually) sushi or Thai food, laugh over past events where the audience numbered one or two (and one of those had wandered into the wrong room then left after the first reader), then each of us turn our backs halfway to call home and tell someone there we love them. Real people with pathos, needs, fears and hope. Or is it hope and fears. Or is it just plain anxiety?

 

6.  Will You Do It For Nothing? Then you’ve already won! (Davis)

A farm boy follows a rainbow to its end within a ancient forest, and finds, to his delight, a small leprechaun with red-hair stuffed under his garnet-green hat. The leprechaun guards—no surprises—an overflowing pot of gold, fat with bullion.

I’m taking the gold, says the boy, because I found you here, at the end of everything.

Right is right. Take whatever you can carry, me boyo.

The boy stuffs his pockets with bullion, tucks in his shirt and proceeds to dump coins down his collar. He’s lousy with the stuff. And the gold weighs him down with an absurd flourish. Jupiter gravity. Pancake flat.

Too greedy, me boyo. Leave some gold here. Yer’ sure to be rich still with just a few pieces of me coin.

Your whole pot-o-gold is mine by rights, and I’ll get a wheelbarrow to take all the gold.

Listen to me, boyo, take what you can now, and you’ll be happy fat rich.

The boy wants it all, though, and convinces the magic leprechaun to tie a green ribbon around the tree so he can find the gold and the leprechaun again.

There, around an ancient oak, the leprechaun stands, misty eyed, as the boy tromps out the gate of the forest toward his small farm, away from the faded rainbow.

The stakes are so low in the world of the small press that they are at the same time absurdly high. In the same way that one can be so far to the left that she can come out on the right. In the way that the singer can be so avant, so non-authoritative, so Duchamp-like in her contortions and arabesques and willful un-marketability, that she comes out with the scarlet A: Author.

Author.

Author.

 

7. Not funny or all that clever, but maybe the original smarty-pantsiosity: a brief history of my readings (Cris)

So, that reading I referred to, almost 30 years ago. It was my first reading, paired with two poets, two of us graduate students, one a talented undergrad (now a published avant-garde poet). I chose a story where a forestry worker, sexually abused by a dirt-biker who’s ripping up the wilderness serenity, responds with frenzied superhuman anger, dams up the river and watches as the stranded fish “waited for someone to put them back into the water.” I chose to supplement my reading with a simultaneous slide show of tranquil home photographs of my siblings, as children, fishing in our beloved Sierras. My two peers simply read their work. What did they think of my show-offy special effects? Perhaps they were secretly glad that the slide projector jammed and several of the pictures only showed up halfway on the screen.

Six years later I was writer-in-residence at a public university in Tennessee, and began my reading there with a story about a dog-trainer’s obsessive interest in a Marine taking dog-obedience classes from her, and I read dressed in a student’s cammo Army fatigues. For the story that followed, I shed the uniform right there on stage, down to the black leggings and T-shirt I’d worn underneath. Amusing or clever—that can be debated—but smarty-pants-ish in a very literal way. At least I was reading alone, but still two decades ago, I had the notion that the event should be something beyond the words I had written read aloud.

After that I became more of a “straight reader,” (as well as the straight man for whomever was reading with me) except when I toured for my 1998 novel, Dog People, and perched my obedience-trial champion Shetland sheepdog on a director’s chair beside me. No tricks: all she did was sit there without attempting to leave. This encouraged many questions from the audience: mostly about how to get dogs to behave better at home. If I’d been touring with a dog-training manual, I might have become the dog-whisperer before Cesar Millan got there first. (Make no mistake, he deserves his title, a superior trainer, and never lies to his dogs, although he hides the electric collar and transmitter from the TV camera).

In the late ‘90s a group of writers associated with independent, innovative presses planned to read together to celebrate Banned Books Week. I thought we discussed what we would read: material that might have been banned in previous eras. So the reading happened, and I read a very short story titled “Hesitation,” from my collection Former Virgin. I vaguely noticed that other pieces being read didn’t seem to fit the “would have been banned in previous eras” theme. After the reading, the authors sat in the reading space, in chairs around the perimeter, and the audience circulated, bringing books to be signed, asking questions, expressing their pleasure or appreciation for the piece an author had read. Not one soul talked to me or brought a book to be signed. When anyone came to talk to the writer I was sitting beside, they did not look at me. To this day I don’t understand what happened or what code I broke.

 

8. The Code (or Writing as Data) (Davis)

Winded, the boy returns to his farm and keeps away from the questioning looks of his older brother whipping a scythe through a handful of wheat. The boy makes for the barn. In his eye, the barn may be already on fire; he must be of fleet-foot.

Pulling the wheelbarrow from the corner and dumping its load of fresh, steaming cow dung onto a pile of ragged hey, the boy runs back across the field and past his brother whose eye tears in the wind. The boy streams past the farmhouse and back into the entrance to the woods and through the path he just came pushing the wheelbarrow over knotted roots. He becomes a mouse returning through a lab maze to exactly, precisely, the spot where the leprechaun should be. There, as planned, hangs the green ribbon around the oak.

A fat, emerald bow.

Come out, leprechaun, I’m back with the wheelbarrow and aim to take your entire pot-of-gold.

The boy searches around the tree. No leprechaun.

He falls to knees, crying, traces of shit steaming from the wheelbarrow.

Every tree in the forest, were he to look up from his sorrow, stands marked with a garnet knot.

The pot-of-gold is not so much the book or the book deal, of course, as the sustainable “career” within the industry, also called the book business. Authors who operate in even a vaguely innovative or indie forest become conditioned to desire the pot of gold, but the trouble is their inability to locate or agree upon the nature of the “rainbow” the “ribbon” the “leprechaun” or the “gold.”

For the Modern Romantic, the rainbow spectrum meanders circuitously through thickets and brambles and glens and patches of poison sumac and the tortuous ambiguities of the writing life—the isolation, the static of non-writing life always threatening to interfere with and perhaps inflect or overwhelm the act of artistic creation—this leads toward not so much wealth as the frustration of losing the impossible to pinpoint pot-of-gold.

For the Young Turk, the path is to forget the forest and the leprechaun and the pot-of-gold and simply recreate new versions of these things, each moment, on Facebook and Twitter and in the data-sphere where it’s not so much about the object itself as it is about the discussion surrounding the object. For many YTs, there is no object at all in the sense that the MR supposes.

The pot-of-gold is simply the story’s method of recreating itself.

 

9. The literalized metaphor (Cris)

I once gave an unremarkable reading at a small conference for experimental fiction. I believe it had a fancier name than that. I sat in attendance for some of the “papers” also being presented. One was in the form of critifiction,[8] which at the time I understood to be literary criticism written in the form of narrative using familiar techniques of fiction (dialogue, character, conflict) etc. The same presenter would, in the next year or so, do a critifictional piece on one of my novels, with a literary critic narrator who has just been diagnosed with cancer while teaching this novel, so the critifictional narrative parallels his personal conflicts with class discussions on the novel. (The same critic died from cancer about 6 years later). The other presentation I remember was called “Writing on the Body,” and while I realized the meaning of the word “on” would be tooled, I was amusedly surprised (not aghast) that the mode of presentation included posing an undergraduate female on a dais, undressing her, and writing on her body. Another literalized metaphor in action. As is frequently my experience, I didn’t understand the philosophy or theory being illustrated with the literalized metaphor, but I do, these many years later, still remember the presentation. So perhaps this is the allegory for some of the “readings” I have helped plan and am still am facing pending participation. I remember she had a dog there, but don’t remember which novel she was reading from. I remember she was sitting in a pool of water but don’t remember the title of the novel.

 

10. The de-literalized metaphor/ the end of the book (Davis)

We don’t remember much of the past, really, and even less details from a reading we might attend. Ten years out from the best reading we’ve ever experienced—the most effective literary tour-de-force, gimmick free—will we recall the name of the book, the name of the author, a line that turned us on and for a moment cut into the stream of our wandering mind? On some level, the act of reading functions within the same paradox: reading Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is no different than reading a well-crafted summary of Fear and Trembling once the endless march of time has steamrolled over the old-growth forest.

Certainly, the best books that stay with us—for me, recently, Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland, or Proust’s A La Recherché du Temps Perdu, which I recently finished for the second time—being two of the most memorable—becomes books that become experiences. Books that interface with our lives and our obsessions in some way that moves beyond the books themselves.

Tomasula’s, the more recent, epitomizes a move toward the non-book. VAS gestures to the network rather than the stream. This is a roman-glitch rather than roman-fleuve. To enter into discussion with VAS is to let go of your notions of the book almost completely.

Proust, the elder, by sheer virtue of its length and the time-commitment it takes to finish the damn thing, stands out in the way that we encounter a Modernist idea of mastery. We read such texts from start to finish and invest ourselves in their procession because we have no choice but to on some level internalize their aspects in order to finish. If you’ve just moved through Heidegger’s Being and Time or Joyce’s Ulysses or insert-title-of-massive-tome here…well, if you can’t get with the thing on some level then it’s been a colossal waste of your life. Sucker. It doesn’t matter if you’ve understood Heidegger or Joyce or read very word or skimmed or let your mind wander or whatever. You’ve finished. You mastered in. You’ve found a leprechaun. Congratulations!

Just try to find him again.

 

10. What If I Was Sitting in a Pool of Metaphoric Quicksand? (Cris)

This whole contemplation began when I was given the semi-solicited advice[9] I quoted at the start, including: “I know it’s very hard to give a shit about literary stuff, or to have optimism or ‘illusions,’ when one’s personal life and psyche have been in an uproar.”

Part of my “failure” to properly pursue promotion for my 2009 collection of fictions was a personal crisis and the darkness that lingered. I had a new book, yet I spent an inordinate amount of time lying on the floor of my study, not caring about anything.[10] I knew I had to do better in 2011. But among other personal dilemmas the literary world doesn’t care about, it seems my own life also caused me to not properly pay sufficient attention to others’ private lives. If this seems paradoxical, it’s because it is.

Author book-promotion includes (but is not limited to), readings—of course—but also class visits, interviews, blog appearances, book blurbs, writing reviews, etc., which we (most of us) earnestly try to keep from seeming to be quid-pro-quo[11].

We all know we’re supposed to contribute, heavily, to the publicity of our books. But the word self-promotion is still nasty. Some group blog sites have rules for posts: no self-promotion. We filter the most egregious self-promoters off our Facebook feeds. We don’t admit this. We’re caught in the middle, pretending not to be talking about our books while we’re talking about them. We don’t admit this. Whereas it used to be a book itself might create an “industry buzz” (often with the help of an agent or publisher), now instead the key is to “build a platform,” and spend time networking. We don’t admit this. And we’re all networking among other people networking for the same purpose—and, if lucky (no, it’s not luck, but we don’t admit what it really is), will become an internet or blogosphere darling, or will say or do something that goes viral. The marriage of these euphemisms would be: book publicity now requires that one become an internet virus. [12]

… or a trained bear.

San Diego Zoo, circa 1970: Chester is an Alaskan brown bear. He lives in a formerly progressive enclosure (without bars), with a pool for cooling off, a tree trunk (chained to the ground) for scratching or rolling around, and a cave if he absolutely positively had to go hide somewhere. But Chester didn’t hide because the tour buses came around every 20 minutes or so. The bus stops alongside Chester’s enclosure, and Chester is already ambling toward center stage, while the straight-man bus-driver begins the shtick.

Driver: Here we have our Alaskan brown bear, also known as a Kodiak brown bear or grizzly bear. Hello there Chester, can you show your guests how big an Alaskan brown bear is?

Chester stands on his hind feet, just on the other side of his moat.

Driver: The largest subspecies of the brown bear, Alaskan brown bears grow up to 1700 pounds, due to their rich diet of salmon. Give a San Diego Zoo greeting to these fine guests.

Chester raises his paw.

Driver: Brown bears also live inland, mostly in the Rocky Mountains, where their habitat has shrunk due to pressure from vacationeers and huntering. Chester, show us where you put the hunter.

Chester pats his stomach.

Now, the driver, at the same time he revs the engine to move on, frisbees a slice of wonderbread into the enclosure. Chester returns to all four feet, ambles to the bread and eats it. If the spectators are lucky, the bread may have landed in the middle of the pool, so Chester would slide in, suck the soggy dough into his mouth, then leave the water.

I remember Chester, that he was a Kodiak brown bear, a different, larger species than black bears. I remember that the San Diego Zoo pioneered cageless enclosures and Chester’s was one of the originals. I live in a society and culture where I remember these things because Chester put the hunter in his tummy then went to eat a slice of wonder bread.

 

11. Sounds Bytes that Speak to and Around the Key Questions of This Reading Experience. (Davis)

1. William S. Burroughs: Language is a virus.
2. Davis Schneiderman: Language is a virus.
3. The author-as-quipper must speak in the form of gregariousness that takes content to be a secondary function.
4. Content only works in so much as it serves the larger form of the communicative function.
5. Here. At a reading. Online…The message remains the same: look at the clever way in which I am participating in this game of authorship.
6. It’s not so much notice me, notice me, notice me, as look how competently I speak within the rules of the available speech act.
7. The source of the agon is that the rules are changing: time was, pre-internet, when the sole publicity duties of the author consisted of personal appearances at readings—and, thus, the events became one-of-a-kind moments, with little cyber-baggage to inflect the performance space.
8. Now, the event itself is secondary to its continued contextualization in the cyber-realm, and so, since everyone and anyone can comment and participate in these streams, each author who participates, even at the entry level in the game, begins to bark and bark and bark.
9. Put another way, it’s not the bark-as-message but bark-as-bark.
10. Bow wow.

 12. Of Course Eventually, Davis, You Quote Burroughs and I Don’t Understand (Cris)

 Instead I’ll quote Laura Miller of Salon.com:

People become writers because they’re introverted or awkward in personal encounters and have poured everything they want to say to the world into their work. What usually gets lost in the perpetual refrain about authors becoming their own marketers is that there’s no particular connection between writing talent and a gift for self-promotion.

I majored in journalism and never spent a day as a journalist because I didn’t want to go out and talk to people. I have spent more than a few days in a row, on more than a few occasions, without getting dressed and leaving the house—because I didn’t “have to,” so why would I want to? I decided to live almost 50 miles away from the campus in downtown Chicago where I teach. I have started four sentences in a row with “I” because I am sitting alone in my study and have not talked to another soul in-person today. I want to hug Laura Miller for understanding.

And yet, it won’t bail a teacup of the tide of change that occurred (and continues) my first book appeared in 1989 and People magazine called me to ask for a photo for a review (which never ran).

Despite my apparently hypocritical history in this matrix of production-for-producers, where the emphasis is “on being a writer, not the writing itself,”[13] I am sad … and tired.

 

Chester RIP

May your species live in natural dignity.  It’s too late for mine.

 

 

Credits:

Photo of Davis bound and gagged courtesy of Andi Olsen.

Photo of the “water reading” by Melanie Page

Photo of Cris Mazza reading with her dog by James Comunale

Photo of Chester by Cris Mazza

 

Cris Mazza has authored sixteen books, most recently Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls, a novel.  Her other fiction titles include Waterbaby, Trickle-Down Timeline, and Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?  In 1995 & 1996, Mazza was co-editor for the original Chick-Lit anthologies: Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction, and Chick-Lit 2: No Chick Vics.  In 2006, her essay “Who’s Laughing Now: Chick Lit and the Perversion of a Genre,” explaining the co-opting and corrosion of the title, appeared in Poets & Writers Magazine.  In addition to fiction, Mazza also has published a memoir, Indigenous: Growing Up Californian, and has another hybrid memoir, Something Wrong With Her, forthcoming from Jadid Ibis Press.  A native of Southern California, Mazza grew up in San Diego County.  She currently lives 50 miles west of Chicago and is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  She can be found online at www.cris-mazza.com.

 

Davis Schneiderman‘s bio is below.

 

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I was asked recently to explain what I’m doing here. At first I thought the inquiry was directed at some big cosmic question, like, What are you doing here, on earth? Or, likewise, What is the meaning of your life? Assuming that to be the question, I answered honestly: I haven’t a clue. But my interlocutor was not asking the metaphysical question. The question was directed to my writing, as in, What do you write about? It is a more embarrassing question to answer, actually. Embarrassing because, again, I haven’t a clue. People really don’t expect you to be able to answer the big cosmic questions. The questions have been around too long and everyone knows there aren’t really any answers. But the more focused question, like what do you write about? or the dinner party question, What do you do? those questions are due an answer. (The dinner party question drives me crazy. What do I do? I do what everyone else does: eat, sleep, shit, work, die. The real question being asked is: Are you above or below my socio-economic caste?–a disdainful and not-so-coy method of evaluation. But, for god’s sake, just come out and ask it straight-up.) The question, again, was What are I doing here? Here being this forum, TNB, or likewise my blog, or other such efforts. What do I write about? What am I doing here? The question achingly begs the sad answer: I haven’t a clue.

The pursuit continued: “I mean,” she said, “but…well, what do you write about?” To which I replied, “Look, my writing, like my life is a free-for-all. It comes and goes, meanders, twists and turns and just generally follows the topography of my experience, up, down and around.” I sounded like an idiot, which truthfully, isn’t (sometimes) far from fact. I’ve been called evasive, this perhaps being a case in point. But it’s not–completely–about being evasive. In truth, it is because I have spent most of my adult life trying to wrestle questions to the ground and beat them up; but, time and again, I end up being the one who gets a thrashing. It’s all part of this “examined life” quest I’m on. I’m not keen on taking anything for granted, so I’m always attempting to sort things out. And my life is my biggest challenge. Unfortunately, I haven’t sorted out all that much; but there is one thing, I think, I’ve pinned to the mat: Much of my life has been spent trying to avoid boredom.

I remember I used to proudly declare that, “I’ve never been bored.” It was a statement delivered with much the same self-serving gusto one hears when over-achieving mid-class poseurs declare, “We don’t own an TV.” or “I only watch PBS.” It makes my eyes roll and my gut contract. “I’ve never been bored” now has the same effect on me. Agghh, what pretentiousness! (I also used to pontificate, in a similar vein, that boredom, like guilt, was a manufactured emotion.) I now understand that boredom is the foundation of everything. It is the pearl-constructing grit in the oyster’s shell, the red phosphorous that makes the match explode. Avoiding boredom is the motivation of modern life. I say modern life because I’m not sure this–boredom–has always been the case. The word boredom didn’t even appear in the language until 1852, when it showed up six times in Dicken’s novel, Bleak House. Given that the English language has been around in a form we (might) recognize since Chaucer (c1340-1400), it strikes me as dead-on that this notion is rather recent, that boredom is a symptom of modern existence.

It’s not an original thought. Heidegger, as have others, spent a lot of time on the subject. “Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference,” he wrote. “This boredom reveals being as a whole.” I don’t want to get up on a soap box, nor do I wish to write a thesis on the existential significance of boredom on modern life. That would be boring, would it not? And that is precisely the point. We should avoid that. Let’s not do something that is boring. To the opening question: What am I doing here? I now have an answer: I’m trying to out-sprint boredom.  Does my life have meaning? Only to the degree I can appreciate Heidegger’s “remarkable indifference.”

We live in a consumer society fueled by the economics of production. What do I consume, if not things which hold the potential to ameliorate the consequences of  boredom? To wit: my iPod, my Pandora station(s), the vacation I take, the pets I keep (I don’t consume them, of course, just their distraction quotient–unless the fish in the fish tank get too big, then all bets are off), and so on. And what do we produce? Everything we think we can sell, from jet planes to running shoes–anything that will distract us from the potential for remarkable indifference.

Boredom is, paradoxically, the disease and the antidote. We might be terrified by the thought that nothing remains that is new, a thought which prompts (some of) us to create the new. I have long held that creativity is a key to something profound in existence. What I never really understood is that creativity is the response, should one be inclined to respond, to the threat of remarkable indifference. Creativity is the fear of the same styled into the unsame. What am I doing here?–both the practical and the highfalutin metaphysical answer is: wrestling against the threat of boredom through creativity. I am now fully prepared for the next inane dinner party interrogation.

“In all radical parties, I enjoy a strange, almost mysterious respect.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

This is a curious business, this matter of writing about a book, and at that a book written about a book, or books, or even more curious, the writer of books. This “meta” business is potentially so tedious. I guess we have the French to thank for that. Yet, it is something I am drawn to, a thing I am compelled, for reasons which escape me, to further in my own singular  fashion. So, I layer on, like a hiker going out into a New England winter, layer upon layer: the writer writing about other’s who have written before him. And it is so that I come to a biography of a writer who took the writers and their work before him and tried to make sense of it all. And someone writing about him writing and me writing about that writer and the writer of which he wrote. It does make sense, however; is that not what we all do, try but to make sense of what precedes us? And make sense of that sense? What if in doing so, we are driven, like some wild beast gone crazy, to a center that cannot hold, that makes us mad, that renders us to the world inchoate, such as the subject of this biography, Friedrich Nietzsche. What if then?

I doubt, no, I am certain, that Nietzsche was not aware of his life, how it had been lived, when he exited this world. And this saddens me. For as Freud said of Nietzsche “he had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was likely to live.” And yet he went mad. Which begs the question as to what the common individual, a poor sap, a simple reader-writer, might expect; can a person come too close to the edge, peek over into the void, and be ruined for it? Punished even? Do we turn to a pillar of salt if we look too deeply? Was his “penetrating knowledge of himself” destructive, such that the self disappeared?

That is what draws me to Nietzsche. It is not his philosophy, entirely, though that is part of it. It is not the time, the place, the history, the events, the books read or the languages learned, though these things too exert their influence. Rather, it is the life lived. “…we want to become poets of our lives,” he wrote. How did he live? It is not lost on me that the ancient philosophers of Athens where judged, not only on the quality of their thought and their philosophy, but on the life they lived. That is why I come to books: to learn how to live. I fear that I will never find the book that reveals to me that secret, though I am most certain and expectant that it is out there, a naiveté which I refuse to expunge. As Guy Davenport said, to paraphrase, the life of the reader is still valid, it is just the challenge of finding the right books to read which validate it. And so it was, that I came to the new biography of Friedrich Nietzsche, a book subtitled, A Philosophical Biography, by Julian Young. For in Nietzsche I held out hope that a template would be discovered, held out hope even against the mirror of his madness. Socrates said, while defending himself against charges of corruption of the youth of the state, and not without a good bit of self-righteous indignation, that the unexamined life is not worth living–a tag line that has captivated my attention since I was nine years old. If there was an examined life out there, I was going to find it. Nietzsche seems, amongst few others (Montaigne and Thoreau come immediately to mind), as a possible candidate. In that self-appointed yearning spirit, I read Julian Young’s “philosophical” biography of Friedrich Nietzsche.

The book starts page one, paragraph one, with the meat of the matter, that is, this business of how to live. “Nietzsche’s greatest inspiration…” writes Young, “was the idea that if one is in a state of perfect mental health one should be able to survey one’s entire life and then, rising ecstatically to one’s feet, shout ‘Da capo!–Once more! Once more! Back to the beginning.’” Young continues:

“In perfect health one would ‘crave nothing more fervently’ than the ‘eternal return’ of one’s life throughout infinite time–not an expurgated version with the bad bits left out, but exactly the same life, down to the very last detail, however painful or shameful. [Nietzsche’s] own particular task was to become able to do this, to reach a point where he could shout ‘Da capo!’ to his own life. Let us see what he had to contend with before reaching that point.”

What follows are six-hundred and forty-nine pages (including notes and index) describing the titanic struggle of one individual to shout Da capo! Sadly, we all know how it ends, this struggle. The hero is lost unto himself.

Nietzsche–”Fritz”–was born October 15, 1844 in a Prussian Saxon village. He died August 25, 1900. Consider this: Fritz was fifteen years old when Darwin published The Origin of Species; He was twenty-seven when Bertrand Russell was born, forty-one when Ezra Pound came into the world. The year he collapsed into madness, 1888, Susan B. Anthony organized a Congress for Women’s Rights in Washington DC and Katz’s Delicatessen is founded in the Lower East Side. The year he died, 1900, saw the first flight at Kitty Hawk, the first automobile trek across the United States (It took fifty-two days. It was a Packard.), and the first Tour de France. If ever there was a thinking person dropped into a critical time of behavioral, intellectual and industrial history, it was Nietzsche.

Though I am hesitant to call this period the birth of modernity, it is a time and place and collection of new ideas befitting that notion. Louis Menand wrote in his book, The Metaphysical Club, that “Modernity is the condition a society reaches when life is no longer conceived as cyclical.” He continues:

“In a premodern society, where the purpose of life is understood to be the reproduction of the customs and practices of the group, and where people are expected to follow the life path their parents followed, the ends of life are given at the beginning of life. People know what their life’s task is….In modern societies, the preproduction of custom is no longer understood to be one of the chief purposes of existence….Modern societies do not simply repeat and extend themselves; they change in unforeseeable directions, and the individual’s contribution to these changes is unspecifiable in advance.”

To Nietzsche, the world he examined was a world apart, a place and time without culture, myth or shared continuity with the past. It was a place, to use Menand’s phrase, of “change in unforeseeable directions.” Modern man, Nietzsche wrote, is a “mythless man.” A sea change was taking place and he knew it. Everything was up for grabs. Religion had lost it’s hold (“God is dead.”) and scientific materialism had picked up the mantle as forerunner of thought and action. Indeed, as Young suggests, “Nietzsche’s whole life and philosophy is, above all else, a struggle to find a new religious outlook that will re-found culture.” Nietzsche observed that as moderns, we are subject to a “pandemonium of myths…thrown into a disorderly heap.” (It is refreshing to read a book by an academic that is not, well, academic. Young is not afraid to weigh-in with his personal observations, though they sometimes detract. For instance, as he discusses this pandemonium of myths, he writes: “ our culture is full of shiny things, of ‘gods’ and ‘heros’: Princess Di (as immortal as any of the Olympians) Madonna, the Beckhams, the winner of the latest Oscar or reality TV show, and so on.”) He was driven to put an end to the pandemonium and set humankind (again) on a proper course.

Nietzsche’s life-work sought to address the shifting cultural topography of his times. His goal was nothing less than the creation and preservation of a new community, a culture modeled on the ancient Greeks, sans metaphysics. (It is here, sadly, with an image of a Nietzschian culture and the overtones of his later übermensch concept, that many readers will think: Nietzsche the anti-Semite, the precursor of the Nazi Aryan race. Young masterfully dispels both notions, demonstrating once and for all, the posthumous damage done by Nietzsche’s sister, Elizabeth, to his reputation, his work and his memory. Nietzsche called himself “the anti-anti-Semite”. (Indeed, Nietzsche once wrote that he “lost [his] sister to anti-Semitism.” Among the photographs in the book is one taken of Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Chancellor Adolf Hitler.)

Nietzsche was, arguably, the first modern man. I am drawn to him for this reason. Like Thoreau, he recognized the troublesome onset of what he called “the herd mentality.” (Nietzsche was eighteen when Thoreau died in 1862.)To anyone interested in a unique life of non-conformity, Nietzsche holds certain and obvious appeal. Later philosophers, particularly Heidegger and his “dictatorship of the They” and Sartre with his faith gone sour, latched onto Nietzsche’s insight on and aversion to conformity. Sadly for us perhaps, Heidegger wrote that authenticity is linked to a non-technological lifestyle (one must worry/wonder what he would make of our iPod-slinging subway-riding, text-messaging society); Sartre felt that we, as moderns (or properly, post-moderns), where already lost. (My imagination runs wild with the worry that Nietzsche figured this out, saw the harsh truth, knew that he had failed humanity and it drove him mad.)

Nietzsche could peer deeply into the mist of the past. The ancient Greek ideal obsessed him. Too, he could see far forward. His mind, it seemed, did not know time. There are instances of his prescience evident in the notebooks and writings. He worried, for instance, that cutting down trees would cause the world to warm. His concept of the Dionysian clearly predates Freud’s “life drive”, though Freud claimed to have avoided Nietzsche, worried at the influence he might wield. To this reader, a particularly striking observation is his summing of modernity, using poignantly, “the Americans”, as the quintessentially troublesome example:

“The Americans strive for gold; and their breathless haste in working…is already spreading to the old Europe…Already one is ashamed of keeping still; long reflection almost gives people a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch in hand, as one eats lunch with an eye on the financial pages…all forms are being destroyed by the haste of the workers…one no longer has time and energy for ceremony…more and more it is work that gets all good conscience on its side the desire for joy already calls itself ‘the need to recuperate’…’one owes it to one’s health’–that is what one says when caught on an excursion in the countryside. Soon we may well reach the point where one cannot give in to the desire for a  [contemplative life]….”

“Nietzsche is one of the few philosophers since Plato whom large numbers of intelligent people read for pleasure.” That quote comes from Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche scholar and translator, writing in 1966, almost fifty years ago. And still we come. We come to him not only as a philosopher and writer, but as a human being. For this reader that holds the greatest appeal. Young’s book, A Philosophical Biography, ties the human to the ideas, ties the man to the world.

I have purposefully avoided here outlining the philosophy of the man. There are many who are better suited for such tasks. Young’s book, however, will for the lay reader provide insight and education to that end. I once held an aversion to secondary texts, the explanation and explication of a primary source, usually dumbed down for the non-specialist reader. Not so now. No so, after discovering here that Nietzsche learned his Kant and a few other mind-numbing thinkers from secondary texts. “Biographies,” writes Young, “sweeten the hard-to-swallow pill of philosophy.” One can learn Nietzsche here, as I think one should: the life and the mind.

Give me the man wrapped up in his thoughts, as it should be. Deconstructionism be damned.