Category: writing

Critic’s Perspective

I was thinking about how one of the ways I use this journal is to get a critic’s perspective on my own work. If I see trends or themes emerging, I can start to move toward them or away from them. If I get too involved in it, though, I start to delve into metafiction, which a lot of people see as a bygone phase. However, I think to a certain extent it’s inherent in the written word. Other art forms don’t have that. Movies and plays are almost entirely voyeuristic. Life is just happening in front of you. With literature, someone has to have written it, and the author has to decide: do I want to be upfront about the fact that I wrote this, or do I want to put up a pretense that someone else wrote it? Or do I want to play with that uncertainty?

Sometimes I think the critic’s perspective is none of my business. But then I start writing stuff that nobody understands at all, including myself. Or I’m just transcribing sex fantasies.

Excuses

I have no progress to report, either emotionally or literarily. The heat wave hasn’t helped.

I feel like I’m always making excuses for why I’m not writing. I have too much other work to do. It’s too cold. It’s too hot. I’ll be able to concentrate once the stress of moving is over. Every excuse feels real at the time.

Truth is, when I look at my work on paper, I’m so hypercritical of myself that I get discouraged. That seems to be the main problem. To get anything done, I have to get beyond that. Anything that’s weak can be fixed later. The important thing is to get it done! Damn it!

Really, it’s like I’m cursed.

Anyway. I’m in the middle of a musical project. I was asked to write a theme song for a children’s traffic safety program using the catch phrase, “STOP (See The Other People).” I asked George to write some lyrics, which he did, and I set it to music easily after tweaking the words only slightly. I need to record it this weekend.

Meanwhile, I can’t stop thinking about sex. I have all these stories about sex, and when I start editing them, I get all worked up.

BWC Notes, Metafiction

I’ve been taking a writing workshop and showing them pieces of BWC as I rewrite it as an independent piece. Next week is the last class for the semester, and they’ll be reading some sections near the end. My guess is that they won’t get what I’m trying to do.

Although it’s been a comically long time since I utilized this journal in any way, I figured this would be the place to clarify, for my own purposes, just what that is. I’ve held back from explaining it in class so far for two reasons: (1) it might give away too much too soon and (2) it will probably sound incredibly pompous. Nevertheless, here goes…

I don’t think there’s anything experimental about metafiction at this point. There’s not much more it can say about itself and the nature of narrative. But it is now, in my opinion, an established tradition, which can be used for whatever purposes an author sees fit.

Within that tradition, there’s an idea of the author or artist as a kind of god-like figure. One of the things I’m trying to do in this piece is have a character, Thom, who believes in that rather literally – that he is a character in a book, and that his every thought and motion is subject to the whim of some author, and he carries a deep resentment about that. Maybe he thinks that BWC is somehow that author. I’m not quite there yet.

The point, though, is that I’m not trying to use this technique to say anything about the nature of narrative, at least not anything particularly new. Instead, I’m hoping to use that established tradition as a foundation for making a statement about the nature of God. Because to me, that’s what all art is about at its core.

With BWC, we have a counterpoint to Thom – an artist in a state of spiritual crisis, which is solved through meeting Jennie Mae and thus shedding that layer of solipsism that isolated him. Through Jennie Mae, he is able to become an active member of the human race and to become the artist that before was only an insular fantasy, one of a thousand possible worlds, none of which were reality.

Poetry Lives at the Cloisters Diner

So much poetry that you’re inundated with in New York just sucks. I mean, it’s not really inventive or artful or even any of the things we traditionally judge poetry by, to say nothing of the fact that most people don’t have the foggiest idea how to appreciate good poetry on the rare occasions that they come across it.

Tonight, two seats down from me at the counter of the Cloisters diner, a woman was either having phone sex or talking someone out of suicide, I’m not sure which. I’d like to think both, maybe to two different people, one on the call waiting line.

When I was thirteen I started writing poetry, some of which involved suicidal fantasies.

Cinematic Writing

There’s convention in movies where a story that begins as an oral anecdote, after two or three introductory statements, transitions into the movie itself. And so all of a sudden, details are available that would never be included in the oral version, such as what kind of clothes the protagonist is wearing or some distraction occurring in the background. Even the slightest gesture is captured on film. But if this is all the manifestation of an oral retelling, aren’t all these details inherently suspect and unreliable?

Wonder how one might capture that same effect on the page.

On Poetry

I know a number of open-minded and intelligent people who claim to “hate poetry.” I think most of this group would make some exceptions for a handful of poets or at least individual poems, but their derision for the art form is nonetheless prominently pronounced.

I feel some empathy for these people, but I never considered myself one of them, even though my appreciation of poetry seems to be more and more theoretical as time goes on. Fiction is more my game. But it seems to me that if prose, esp. that prose that purports to be “literary” doesn’t contain some elements of what we’d call “poetic language,” then it’s hard to find much about it that is more rewarding than your average episode of [fill in your favorite soap-y television series here]. If we’re to admire (and practice) “poetic language” there must be some good that can come of reading (and writing) poetry itself.

Anyway, in my efforts to develop some sort of literary track record of my own, I occasionally buy a copy of some or other “literary journal,” usually one that has published or is edited by a writer whose work I already admire, in order to familiarize myself with the type of fiction that journal generally likes to publish and decide whether it would be worth the effort to send them some of my own work. In some of those journals, and one in particular that I’m thinking of, I found that said journal also published poetry in addition to fiction. I always attempt to read it, but in the great majority of cases, I can’t make heads or tails out of what the poet means to say, if anything at all, and I naturally find this frustrating.

If I had a point I was making, I’ve forgotten it now. Damn.

A Note on Post-Modernity

Man is increasingly aware of his part in some greater drama. Not a new idea, certainly, but in an age where reality is manufactured for television audiences as easily as bread is baked, individuals are hyper-conscious of the traits that make up their public persona. And for some, there’s a greater desire than ever to be someone else.

Shannon Johnson told me in ninth grade, entering high school, that this was our moment to define whatever we wanted to be. I wonder what made him so wise at that age. I ran into him a couple of years ago when I was passing through Dothan, and he seemed no different than in high school.

Another image that keeps popping up when I think about this idea of “identity” is William S. Burroughs, curled up in some Greenwich Village hovel with a frightened and naked fifteen-year old boy, telling him how to relax, that he doesn’t have to be himself, he can be anybody at that moment.

The Tunnel

The footpath to the river starts with a pedestrian bridge over the Northbound side of the parkway, takes a wide and steep arc to a tunnel beneath the Southbound. Every time I pass through this tunnel, I get the feeling it is nothing short of miraculous. In an instant, the traffic seems distant, even as I come out on the other side and cars are passing just a few feet over my shoulder. Everything I can see is suddenly serene and bucolic. There is still the rumble of the G Washington Bridge, but it is not unlike that of the ocean, and it makes the river seem bigger, makes New Jersey across the way seem like a distant continent somehow still visible despite the breadth of the ocean.

With uncertain footing, I climb down a short embankment to the edge of the rocks. I try to sit next to a duck, but it flies away, makes me remember that I am not stealth like a Ninja, the way I sometimes think I am. The duck also reminds me that I am not small. It is actually the red lighthouse a few yards away that is small.

But soon there is nothing in my thoughts except the moving water and the still rocks, makes me feel like I’ve re-arrived at some primary stage of development, unable to conjure any words. How many times, how many ways have moving water and still rocks been described by writers? This must be one of the most basic things there is. I soak it in. I hope that it somehow renews and recharges me. I could sit here for hours not thinking anything.