All of them. Everything from the Booker prize on down to the Scholastic awards for high schoolers. They purport to measure and reward excellence and they do no such thing. They can’t do any such thing, because artistic excellence is not measurable, can only be measured by approximation, by appreciation. It cannot be ranked. The judges are compromised, the evaluation metrics are compromised, and the purported value of the awards are compromised, and I don’t mean compromised in some kind of “foetry,” Jorie Graham, nepotism-baby, back-scratching way; I mean intellectually compromised, as in they’re lying to themselves, and they’re lying to you, the audience.
Today’s gripe is brought to you by a promotional email I received from a local concert venue. A bluegrassy, Nashville group is coming to town, and they seemed interesting. It’s basically your standard bluegrass quintet, but with tattoos. Lots of beards and denim and the no-longer-ironic trucker hats. In their bio it noted that their fiddler has won several state championship fiddle contests. I immediately opened a tab to write this rant. I don’t know why one would enter a fiddling contest, but why would you remark upon it, and your winning of it, for any length of time past the day of the contest? Who cares who won a fiddle contest?
Prizes are fine, I guess. A group of people wants to get together and award a prize. Good for them. All judgments are essentially autobiographical. They are always more about the judger than the judged. But contests are where it gets icky. You have to apply for the contest. You have to pay for the contest. You have to submit to the contest.
The problem with contests is that they purport to adjudicate who or what is best, when that designation is artificial, ambiguous, constantly on the move. It’s the roadrunner of adjectives. In a soccer game, you know who scored the most goals. In a 100-meter race, you know who ran the fastest. These are determinable facts. But art is not an athletic event. It might make sense if we had contests for the year’s longest novel. It would be much easier, like judging the year’s largest pumpkin. But best?
To continue with my previous gripe, it costs about $3 to submit to a literary magazine via Submittable. I will save the ethical thumb wrestling about submission fees for another day. (For earlier thoughts on this, see here.) But contests are where the costs increase. Typical contest is $25 to submit with the prospect of getting a $1,500 prize, publication, perpetual acknowledgement that you were the winner, etc. Have I submitted to contests in the past? You betcha. Will I do so in the future? Look, I’m only human.
These have been around seemingly forever, and they quite clearly are a way for literary magazines to make enough money to fund themselves. That is, they can’t sell enough issues of the magazine to fund the magazine, so they sell the chance of being in the magazine, “winning” a prize, in order to fund the magazine. I know that there are lots of ways that literary magazines can fund themselves, such as support from the affiliated institution of higher learning, etc., though in these strange times who knows the future prospects of that funding. I am not saying that lit mags are evil or wrong to do this. They are behaving as rational actors. That ship sailed way back.
The problem for the writer is that these expenses quickly add up, and it creates a tiered system for the table of contents within a magazine. You have the “regular submissions,” those contributors who paid the nominal electronic submission fee, or maybe even just paid for old-fashioned postage. And then you have the contest winners, who paid more for better placement, who paid to get a better seat at the show, paid for premium parking, paid for the Fast Pass. It corrupts the editorial vision of the magazine with a gimmick to gin up money and attention. (I am not against gimmicks. I am just against this gimmick.) But the difference for the writer is that when you pay for the Fast Pass, it’s clear what the exchange is. You are paying more money to skip the line. Simple, straightforward. But for the contests, you are paying more money for the ever-dim prospect of winning and having that dubious distinction put upon you. You are paying for the chance to have your name in slightly larger type. And also the prize money, large enough to be nice, not large enough to change your life. The problem is that you’re trading a collaborative editorial endeavor for a chance to sit at the Craps table. At least when you gamble, they bring you free drinks.
It’s a weird admission for a journal or a book publisher because it says, in essence, Hey, we don’t know how to sell enough copies of this print artifact that we’re making, so we need you to fund it. That would seem to be the very reason one would go to a publisher or a lit magazine. They know where the readers are and how to find them, how to marshal them for a party, how to find a space and rent a keg. I don’t know how to do these things. If I strong-armed all my friends into reading my latest story I’d have, what, four readers? The whole predominant reason to submit to a magazine is — I apologize for using this loaded phrase — its network effects, which as far as I can tell actually means “ability to get people to the party.” You can see this with the teens. Some of them have strong network effects. They will often throw parties. Some can throw parties but no one is driving way the hell out there. Some of them don’t even try. (This was me.) Some of them throw parties and can get people to the parties. And we may not like them as individuals, but we know a good party when we see one, and we want our short story to be at that party.
All that’s bad enough, but then the audience is told, “this is a contest winner!” as if I care one bit about who won a fiddle contest. Great, I guess? I don’t know what goes into winning a fiddle contest. Speed? Ability to boot-scoot while fiddling? What I want to know: will the show next week be any good? Is it worth the ticket and the logistical hurdles I will have to lurch myself over? Will I dig the music? Will I go home and save the album to my Spotify library, text it to my friends, contemplate a vinyl? The annual fiddle awards won’t tell me this. The prize-winning poetry collection won’t tell me this. It’s embarrassing for you to have to put this in your bio. I am embarrassed on your behalf. This is not T-ball, and we are no longer children.
We need to grow culture and stop making lists. I propose that other people are like me and don’t actually care about the false fire of contest-winners. The story, the poem, the Americana fiddle performance needs to enchant on its own without the artificial scaffolding. We need culture that can get people to show up to the party, get people excited to party. Culture happens at the party, not at the casino.
Full disclosure: I have never won a contest, except for the watermelon seed-spitting contest I won when I was eight. I killed it! And remember: all judgement is autobiographical.
All posts by barrett.hathcock@gmail.com
Close reading my rejections
Not too long ago, Ross Barkan posted a terrifying essay on his Substack, which I have read more than once through slitted fingers. It’s called “Pity the Short Story Writer.” The gist is that submitting short stories to literary magazines in the Year of our Lord 2025 is a loser’s game, both in that you will lose by being rejected and you will lose by throwing your work out into the void while you wait for months for a form rejection, if you are lucky. “The void, when you play the short story game, is what you get.” His point is that it’s no way to develop a career, to spend a life.1
Who on earth is submitting their short fiction to lit journals now? Well, I am. Though my diligence has certainly waxed and waned over the years, I have been semi-regularly sending out short fiction to journals, both print and online, for over twenty years. (My genius in the form is currently unrecognized.) I have no idea if this is a wise strategy, a foolish practice, a waste of my time and theirs (whoever they are), or really what I am even doing. I finished undergrad in 2000, my MFA in 2004, and though I started reading blogs right away, the winds of change that altered the aerodynamics of short form publishing in the past twenty-five years have been slow to ruffle my hair, if by “hair” we mean how I think about my work, and if by “think about” we really mean commit to one plan of action in an inspired burst on a Sunday only to completely recant into paralysis by Tuesday. Don’t even talk to me on Thursday. Although AI might indeed be able to replicate my prose style, I doubt it will ever be able to sufficiently duplicate my capacity for corrosive self-doubt.2
Anyway, I don’t read my rejection letters that closely anymore. The best rejection to my mind would be, “Thanks, but no thanks.” There are forms of rejections, forms within the forms. There is the slightly encouraging reject. The best one of these I ever got said, essentially, “Hey, I like this, but we don’t have room.” And it was on actual letterhead! More often they say, “we’d like to see something from you again.” One can dine out for months, nay years, on such oblique encouragement.
But the one I got today was a real winner, a real punch in old dunlap. It read in part, “We’d like to thank you, sincerely, for giving us the opportunity to read your work. Though it doesn’t meet our needs at this time, we’re so thankful for it; now more than ever, the arts feel as necessary as they are fragile, and it’s up to each of us to keep them going.”
Let’s take this one sentence at a time. “We’d like to thank you, sincerely, for giving us the opportunity to read your work.” I think it’s the “sincerely,” fenced off by commas, that grates so. “Like to thank” is linguistic phlegm. “I’d like to thank the Academy.” They’d “like to thank” me. Well I’d like to be 6’3” and drive a G Wagon, thanks. I’d like you to accept my novella.3 I’d like to quit paying three dollars to Submittable every time I want to send a story out. The world is full of actions I would like to do. The most direct way to say thank you is just to say it: “thank you, name, for doing X.” “I’d like to thank” is a performative thanks, a thanks with a smirk and a blink, eyeing for extra credit. Just because people say it in their award show acceptance speeches doesn’t mean you should say it, too. In fact, that’s the reason you shouldn’t say it.4
Now, were their previous expressions of gratitude for reading my work insincere? Do they really mean it now, since they’re saying “sincerely”? I hate cloying language. Do me the honor of directly telling me you don’t like me. Dump me to my face.
The second half of the next sentence reads: “Now more than ever, the arts feel as necessary as they are fragile, and it’s up to each of us to keep them going.”
Really it’s this portion after the semi-colon that bothers me. Some people don’t like semi-colons; I myself don’t mind them. I do realize they are pretentious. As I’ve already confessed, I was technically an adult when 9/11 occurred so the phrase “now more than ever” has been filed in my memory as a reflex — a kind of moral gravitas mantra, uttered unto meaninglessness. Could “now more than ever” signify anything at this point aside from a Warholian series of Dick Cheney snarls? Do they really think that me writing stories is important now more than ever? Really? I mean, I think I’m moderately decent, but even this strains the elastic of my ego. Is this second sentence about He Who Will Go Unnamed? Look, I don’t like him either, but this makes me feel like we’re glass blowing or something. I don’t think literature is fragile. I just think it’s unread and unappreciated, because reading is harder than 99% of the other activities we could be doing. The period of mass literacy that lead to a mass literary culture seems to be a temporary accident of education and technology.
“Necessary” here, like in other literary contexts, strikes me as one of those trendy gesture words or phrases, like “he understood the assignment,” or “so-and-so is doing the work.” They evoke adolescent-level in-group signaling. Are poems and short stories “necessary”? I mean, they’re great, but food and shelter they are not. Remember: poetry makes nothing happen, and thank God for it. We should quit pushing stories and poems through some kind of utilization review. Just let them be free to delight and instruct.
Also, I am not writing short stories to keep the arts going. I am doing it because it’s fun, and I’m good at it. It’s pleasurable on a deep intellectual level that’s somehow not entirely intellectual. I don’t want to get all woo woo on you, but it provides the pleasure of artistic craft, an iterative practice of exploratory variation, with the pleasure of discovery of meaning, the feeling of stumbling over what you yourself are going on about. Writing is an act of thinking, of a kind, that is then presented after the fact as a form of thought, like lava cooling.
Should I just throw these stories up on Substack and pester my few subscribers? I think about it a lot, which means I change my mind about eight times a week. It’s exhausting. I have been trying to figure out my hesitancy in posting my stories online the same way I occasionally post these little grumbles. Part of it is that I want to be accepted. You submit. They accept. They reject. You re-submit. BDSM echoes, etc. I want to be chosen. I think I am good, but my belief in myself is flimsy, worth nothing, a currency in a failed country. I need those crisp dollars of approval from somewhere better, some new world. Look, all I want is an unending string of praise from strangers. Surely that will make me feel whole.
Part of it is the context. Max Read wrote something interesting in his Substack when he talked about what makes successful writing on that platform different. He writes: “. . . while what I do resembles journalistic writing in the specific, the actual job is in most ways closer to that of a YouTuber or a streamer or even a hang-out-type podcaster than it is to that of most types of working journalist. (The one exception being: Weekly op-ed columnist.) What most successful Substacks offer to subscribers is less a series of discrete and self-supporting pieces of writing — or, for that matter, a specific and tightly delimited subject or concept — and more a particular attitude or perspective, a set of passions and interests, and even an ongoing process of ‘thinking through,’ to which subscribers are invited.”
This makes sense to me, as I listen to my favorite podcasts more for the voices of the hosts than any guests or topics. But what are short pieces of fiction if not discrete textual artifacts? They are by definition not me, not perpetuations of a single authorial persona.5 It’s difficult enough getting people to separate the fiction from the author without that fiction being surrounded by other bits of more directly personal essayish grumbling. We’re not Within the Context of No Context but rather in the Context of Too Much Context. Emily Gould had the right idea way back when she named her own website/blog “Emily Magazine.” Each site is a Marvel Cinematic Universe of one.
The final problem is one of audience. Outside of school, reading short stories is a minority pursuit. It ain’t where the fish are. I could probably post TikTok dances and get more viewers/readers than I could publishing short stories, and I’ve got a body built for radio. Why do I keep working in this form where there is so little audience and I have had so little success?6 Is it delusion? Compulsion? An inherent lack of creativity? Is my notion of “good writing” hopelessly narrow and stuck in 1994? Do I just not know what to do with myself otherwise? Am I lying to myself in that I haven’t actually been that diligent in my submitting and really what do I expect from such meager effort? These are questions both rhetorical and real.
Maybe these blog posts are just failed short stories.
1. Of course the word “career” has layers upon layers of implied scare-quotes around it. Perhaps a better way to say it is that it’s not a wise method, under current conditions, to publish a body of work.
2. Just to be clear, I am not whining about being rejected. I expect to be rejected. I welcome being rejected. I just want to be rejected more swiftly and thoroughly and unambiguously. The whole endeavor of short story publication has a slight BDSM whiff about it.
3. I know, I know, what did I expect? If there is any form more hopeless than a short story, it’s the novella. I will spare you any attempts to define the novella. Yes, I have always had a soft, hairy spot for the novella. I refer to it as my Jim Harrison Spot. I think poetry actually has a larger audience, because poetry still lives in mutant form, both high and low. You’ve got Hallmark cards, still. And what were Tweets but poems of rage? For a while there, the Tweet was the perfect poem because it was birthed from an actual technological constraint. And then once that fence was lifted, people kept the 140 character limit. The formal properties persisted! People actually like formal poetry. They just don’t like school.
4. Whoever writes those speeches for the celebrities should be banned from the profession for life. It’s like watching someone pat themselves on the back while giving themselves a hand job.
5. Read also writes insightfully about self-publishing on the internet as a vector for shame.
6. I acknowledge that this isn’t the best word here. Is it a form? A mode? A genre? What is a short story? Just a prose narrative subject to an artificial length constraint.
Against Coherence
I am too old to care about rap beefs.
Pets are overrated.
I wanna give that guy a wedgie.
So much of respectable adult life is just hair maintenance.
Airplane mode all the time, by which I mean I’m wearing sweatpants. Sorry, joggers.
Perhaps online headline shriek is structural more than rhetorical, but also, still, rhetorical.
Cats are underrated.
Mechanical pencils are just fundamentally better than wooden pencils. “Trad” pencils. I’m sorry.
Tweet threads were/are a terrible way to read.
I self soothe by reading online gift guides.
Rust: it never sleeps.
Reading the exposition on the rap beef is not unlike trying to piece together the backstory on Gamehenge when I got into Phish at seventeen but also somehow still even more loserish.
Deer, qua species, have an overdeveloped death drive.
Fondly remembering peeling the perforated spool receipt from freshly printed continuous form paper, and wonder if/when today’s rage-inducing tedium will become an occasion for nostalgia.
I hate standing in line but spend all day on line.
People watching is underrated.
Dogs are appropriately rated.
Words and phrases that should be retired: onboarding, longform, third place, vibe shift.
Listening to explanation of rap beef’s intricate symbolism is worse than listening to teenager’s post-school-dance drama debrief, because with teen at least you recognize some of the names.
I try to skip the first three paragraphs of any online article.
I am building a bridge out of legos. It will be human-scale. It will go nowhere, support nothing. It will never be truly finished. It will make a great video for my YouTube channel.
I have known [giant technology conglomerate] for years. I consider them a good friend. However, I am seriously disappointed in [giant technology conglomerate]’s behavior at the party last Thursday.
In terms of writing, what if the bots are better? Everyone’s saying the same thing already, sis.
There will never be less stuff on the internet.
What I hate about writing on the computer is the formatting, the way the machine formats for me, incorrectly. Let me be ugly in peace.
Trend that in retrospect was innocent, harmless, amorphously adorable: tote bags.
Don’t scrimp on: dental care.
Last night I dreamt I was trapped in a Kroger on the chip aisle while the backing-up beeping of personal motorcarts gradually grew louder. Nightmare buffet.
Bluetooth: unreliable.
Indentation Blues
I tend to read a lot of writing on the internet. Perhaps you’re like me. Perhaps, like me, you have noticed that reading words on the internet is different in certain respects than reading words on a printed page. Perhaps you have enumerated these differences to yourself and discovered the key difference, the pothole in this transition from page to screen, the absence that makes the heart grow fonder. Yes, that’s right, I’m talking about indentation.
Remember when paragraphs each had uniformly sized indentations? Finish reading one paragraph and there is another blank little gap in the bricks of prose, letting you catch your breath. But put those paragraphs on a screen and they lose their wonderful indentations. They now have a blank line in between them, each rectangle floating out on its own. Why is this?
I think it’s because the indentation was difficult to achieve in early HTML. Something about creating that type of blank space, how to define its width. Like if you’re laying out a book or just typing on a page, the indentation width is somewhat proportional to the margins of the physical page itself. If you had a standard 8.5×11″ American-type page but with a 4″ indentation for each paragraph, that would appear odd, off, a mistake, unless you are being intentionally House of Leaves-ian. But on the internet, via the HTML code rendered legible via a browser, text on the screen is malleable. The margins are never really fixed. This is both the glory and the irritation of the hypertexted text. Frictionless delivery through time and space, no more waiting for the ice to melt in the harbor to get those pallets of paperbacks out to the stores, you can just upload that sucker. But then, everyone’s not going to read your upload on the same worn out Dell. Suzy has a sleek little laptop. Sammy’s got an iPad. Sterling’s got a gaming tower with enough juice to mine a meme-coin. And grandma can’t figure out how to make it all look bigger on her phone.
Actually I put on my child’s new VR headset and was briefly immersed in the panoramic view and thought: I could get some good work done in here. However, moving stuff around with my hands feels odd. I am old enough to really like a keyboard and a mouse. I like to click. And when the clicker doesn’t work, I like to rap that sucker three good times on the dining room table, turn it over and blow on it hard, and then proceed with my work. I’m just an analog kid, still.
But my point is that with ever-changing margins, the paragraph indentation becomes vestigial. You can technically add traditional indentation to your blog posts, but it’s going to look weird, and everyone is going to think you’re no fun. It’s easier and quicker to have each paragraph separated by a line break, and we all like easier and quicker.
And this is not fundamentally evil, but I still miss the indentations. I can feel them itching in their absence. Back in the olden times, when we mostly read stories and essays and blog posts in books, the line space, as opposed to the paragraph indentation, was meant to indicate some kind of change, like a scene change, or chronology change, or some kind of throat-clearing pivot that the reader had learned to intuit. A line break was a different degree of break from an indentation, just the way a chapter break was an even greater break with the continuity of the prose experience. (The chapter break is out of scope of this essay1.) It means that I have to subtly readjust when reading online. Those are just regular paragraph divisions, I tell myself, not some greater gap in coherence.
In grad school, we called those free floating paragraphs crottes, using the french word for spot of excrement. We got this from a professor who had gotten it from his professor. At the time it didn’t seem pejorative to refer to unindented paragraphs as droppings of excrement that fell down the page, it was just part of the grad seminar argot, but now I wonder if there wasn’t some generational judgment there. But now crottes are everywhere. One scrolls endlessly through the crottes. You never know where to take a break because all of the sectional divisions are uniform. The only graphical punctuation now are ads or the pleading subscription buttons or the skimmable subheads.
Perhaps this isn’t a sign of encroaching illiteracy but just a sign of changing literacy. Words were once not even separated by spaces, sentences by periods. Those bits of punctuation had to be invented. Paragraphs used to be indicated by the pilcrow, that westward-facing P-shape. At some point, those marks were lost, but the unit of thought that the paragraph had come to represent jumped the line and grew the indentation. And now it’s jumped the line again and floats on slightly freer from the text that comes before or after. Our text becomes slowly more aerated through the changing technology. Call it the breeze of progress.
1. Post? Blog? Substack? Rant? Article? I am going to pretentiously continue to use the term essay. It captures the gist, the tradition, while still being elastic enough to contain whatever it is I’m up to. Becca Rothfeld recently tried to distinguish between “posting” on Substack and “writing” for the Washington Post, to much general confusion and ire. But it’s all text, it’s all writing, with subjects and verbs. (And hopefully proofreading! Substackers: get better at proofreading!) The number of editorial intermediaries is different. And there are potentially different contextual expectations of formality, but it’s still all writing. But modern cyber publishing is convenient enough, machine-enabled enough, that it almost feels like talking, though it still hits like writing, at least to the reader. Also, everyone is worried about how artificial intelligence might affect writing, but I would say we are already using artificial intelligence to write. E.g., I can’t code this page myself.
The Persistence of the Organ Trio
Down here in the Land of Progress some friends of mine just released their debut soul jazz album. Check it:
Soul City 3 on Bandcamp: https://thesoulcity3.bandcamp.com/album/the-bold-new
On Spotify:
What is the organ trio? And why does the organ trio persist? You might think that an organ trio was a fusty, fleeting, postwar-jazz, R&B-adjacent fad, but you would be wrong. They are still out there, writing and performing new music. They typically occupy a liminal space between your harder-core jazz and your instrumental R&B, the elevator and the club. I love this music, for precisely this in-between status. One could argue that “Alligator Bogallo” by the Lou Donaldson Quintet is the first soul jazz organ trio type record, and I find this reptilian identity important. It lives in multiple realms and it absorbs the temperature of the environment surrounding it.
It’s not so much a genre as a format, an arrangement of instrumentation, a severe limitation: Hammond organ with Leslie tone cabinet (with the organist holding down the roll of bass player), guitar, and drums.1
Like the string quartet, or the bluegrass quintet, or (its closest relative) the piano-upright bass-drums acoustic jazz trio, it’s a distinct format that probably developed through historical accident but has proved permanently plastic and pleasing, and thus can contain any manner of song or approach to melody, but by virtue of its limitations transforms the material. It absorbs the songs into its own tradition.
I had the privilege of subbing on guitar in the SC3 a few weeks back, and one of the songs we played was the Daft Punk tune “Lose Yourself to Dance,” a song I don’t particularly like in its original form. The only thing I know about Daft Punk is that they wear those helmets, and I, normie that I am, prefer “Get Lucky.” But once we played “Lose Yourself to Dance,” it ceased being merely a Daft Punk tune and became a much more interesting version of itself. It was teleported from the spaceship dancefloor of Now and thrown into another tradition. I suppose you could make the argument that any instrumental group does this passionate repossessing when it covers a song, but the primitive restrictions of this format makes the altercation more drastic. Like a Mondrian painting, the limited palette helps you see.
And I think that’s the reason why the organ trio has persisted, because of this alchemical just-right mixture of ingredients, this short door opening onto a larger room. It certainly doesn’t make sense technologically. A Hammond organ is a 400 pound machine that is no longer in production. It’s true that it can’t be exactly replicated with current digital technology, but it’s close. I can’t tell the difference. The harder technological hurdle remains the Leslie tone cabinet, which contains two speakers, a horn up top and a downfiring woofer, both of which spin and have an overall adjustable speed. This creates a Doppler effect and gives the organ its ululating, pentecostal fervor. It literally raises hair. The digital recreations of this effect aren’t quite satisfactory, though I will be the first to admit that my ears are too unsophisticated to pick apart why. Does the organist have to use the tube-powered, tone-wheel version of the instrument to qualify as a True Organist for our purposes here? No, I am not that puritanical. Besides, I don’t want to move that thing across town.
Now here are some organ groups that I like:
— Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio, probably the best current example, particularly the extant albums which feature Jimmy James on guitar, true heir to Steve Cropper
— Parlor Greens, a kind of organ trio super group, featuring James, Scone, and Carman — all mentioned here
— Eric Scone down in Miami leads the Scone Cash Players among other organ projects
— The White Blinds, led by drummer Michael Duffy (L.A./Miami)
— The City Champs, out of Memphis. Their first two albums totally slay. A moment of reverent props for their guitar player, Joe Restivo.
— Tim Carmon Trio, whose new album King Comfy is extremely good. Great tunes, perfectly recorded.
— The New Mastersounds (four piece). Their guitar player, Eddie Roberts, is the P.T. Barnum of current soul jazz music.
— Ibrahim Electric (from Denmark, their live album is complete bananas)
— Anything by Wil Blades, organist out of L.A. Special mention goes to his live album with Charlie Hunter and George Sluppick (of City Champs fame) and his duo project with drummer Scott Amendola.
— Special mention to Fat Produce, an organ-less trio (guitar, drums, and upright bass) out of Miami that still produces the same excitement via limitation. Yes, I realize my boundaries are breaking down. What can I say? All categories are arbitrary and inevitably dissolve into a list of stuff I just consistently enjoy.
- For the real heads: specifically, a four-piece drumset in Bop sizes, unmuffled and tuned high, no more than two non-hihat cymbals. Hammond organ of the A, B, or C models, with the footpedals, going into tube-powered Leslie tone cabinet, bass lines played with a combination of feet and left hand on the lower register (contra Gospel practice). Guitar: a full hollowbody with P90 pickups, flatwound strings, going through zero guitar pedals into a low wattage non-master volume tube amplifier. Sometimes that guitar role is covered by a horn, typically a tenor saxophone. Yes, I need a different hobby. Yes, this can turn into a costume drama very quickly. Yes, I am no fun at parties.
How to gig inside
It’s fairly straightforward, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have commentary. As my kids tell me, I am nothing if not overly explanatory.
Create a stage. You’re probably not going to have a raised platform or any kind of physical distinction between the “stage,” the place you’re supposed to set up and play, and the rest of the restaurant, bar, whatever. I mean, there might be. But prepare for there not to be. Prepare to show up and for everything to go wrong; this is not bad advice for life in general, if I may be a little coldly clear-eyed this new January. I’ve found it helps if I try to establish a general perimeter, a defensible space, between the band and the audience. Usually this is done with the monitors and the mic stands. I also use a power cord as a kind of invisible fence. Unfortunately, this doesn’t actually shock any perpetrators, but hope springs eternal. This is all mostly theater, albeit theater of a practical sort. But it’s still a show, and anything that even gestures toward a proscenium interruption in the fern bar is an advantage. Perhaps I’m being too whimsical here. Plus the monitor wedges act like a small guardrail against falling drunks.
Don’t drink. But do eat. Not too much. Mostly salads. Try to stay under your comped limit. You think you can just eat after, but everyone will be a lot less annoying along the way if you have half a meal beforehand. Please, learn from my mistakes.
Do bring a water bottle. Borrow one from your wife or teen. You know they have them, with the overly complex lid-top-straw situation. To me the metal water bottle trend is less a trend and more an example of mass hysteria, or maybe I just resent how my house has turned into a junk drawer for hydration. But nevertheless, you can turn this vicious foolishness into some easy mid-gig refreshment. Bonus: it has a close-able lid, which is handy if you, like me, are a person who spills every drink he ever touches, every drink he thinks of touching. I am particularly adept at spilling drinks on everyone’s amplification equipment. You’re welcome.
75 minutes on the front, 45 on the back. You need to give yourself enough time set up, but not too much time. It all depends on what you are responsible for. I admit to struggling with the time question. In one band, where I only assist with unloading the PA, they want me to get there 90 minutes early, even 120 minutes early. When I acquiesce, we all sit around staring at each other for the last half hour before downbeat. Yes, I enjoy the hang. But the hang here is clouded by time wasted. For a different band, the one where I bring, set up, and run the PA, I tried to stick to 60 minutes before the gig max, in which I’d set up the PA, the guitar rig, the mics, etc. This turned out to be too tight. It’s like leaving for the airport with just enough time; you can make it if you catch all the lights, etc. I am trying to change this habit and now I’m shooting for 75 minutes before showtime. This allows me to hit some traffic during set up and prevents me from lapsing into a panic. Also, I am able to have friendly side conversations with bandmates while setting up rather than the tight-lipped, avoidant sprint I was doing. I still dream of the 60 minute set up though, something about the evenness of that hour.
Afterward, I try to bag it up in 45 minutes. Here you really suffer the consequences of all the stuff you brought. At the beginning of the gig, you set up your stuff. At the end of the gig, you tear down your shit. 45 is the goal. Yes, sometimes I want to hang afterward. But sometimes I want to go home. And the staff in the restaurant want you to go home, so they can go home. But that can’t happen until they clear the tables and mop the floor where you’re standing, so get moving.
To do this it’s important to invoke the Spaceballs rule: take only what you need to survive. Of course, survival here becomes highly variable. And really the rule is more like: take whatever you are willing to carry. If you have help, then everything changes. But I have no help, and I am increasingly willing to carry less and less. Sometimes, to frighten myself, I go on keyboard forums (don’t go on forums) and look at everyone’s keyboard rigs. With the caveat that forums are typically made up of self-selecting nerds dorking out for clout, these rigs are terrifying, like the engine room on the Death Star. Remember: every cord is a failure waiting to happen.1
Other arbitrary but useful limitations: drummers should have only two cymbals max in addition to their hi-hats and at most a four-piece kit. But to be honest, they can get by with one tom and one cymbal. Guitar players should play through a Blues Junior and no pedals for a year straight. Practice skill acquisition through device deprivation. Keyboard players don’t need 88 keys on their board and rarely need more than one board, and they should leave the laptop at home. It’s a job but it’s not an office. Singers should show up on time and be responsible for the PA or at least get really good at rolling cords. What usually creates stage volume problems are electric guitar, crash cymbals, and the snare drum. You don’t need to solve this problem by using in-ear monitors. You solve it by turning down. Bass players: no one wants to hear your slapping or your popping. If you sound like Seinfeld, you don’t get called again. Second guitar players: do not exist in this band. Horn players: no pay until all the gear’s away.
Of course the problem with horn players is that they know they’re precious unicorns and can gallop away at my Grumpelstiltskin suggestions.
Don’t go IMAX. Last night the gig was an acoustic duo in a restaurant, two guitars, two singers. In the back room, there was a corporate holiday party with a DJ. We could feel the thump through the closed doors. Let me see that tootsie roll! We couldn’t compete. We just played our Neil Young tunes to our 12 patrons and had a nice little time. There wasn’t any use getting offended by the juxtaposition. This is just the way of the world. But you can see how some bands want to go IMAX, want to surround the world. This is a false god. You’re never going to sound like the record. It’s more fun for you to sound like human beings playing instruments with their hands and feet. I think the primary charm of the NPR Tiny Desk Concert is that it’s the anti-Sphere. There’s no light show, no choreo, no subwoofers. It’s extremely limited. It’s not “authentic” (the other false god). All performances are acts. It’s just a less cliched performance. We’ve all seen the version with the dancing girls already. Over the holiday I saw a live clip of Shania Twain. She was surrounded by young men dancing shirtless in tuxedo tails. Whatever twinkcake allure this might have provided seemed undercut by the sheer predictability of it all. (Dancing: almost always overrated.) When in doubt, underdo it. It’s easier. It’s more interesting. And if you’re quieter, people have to pay attention.
On break, find somewhere to go. It gives you a break. It gives the audience a break. It structures the show. In one band I play in, the leader likes to go all out the entire time, just one relentless marathon of music. This challenges the human bladder and human patience. There should be peaks and valleys. Always leave them wanting more. Also, if you’re going to eat on break, do it off stage and out of sight. You’re part of the help.
Minimize patter, murder dead air. Every time I have tried to be amusing with my in-between song chatter, I come across like an idiot, like someone walking down the street without pants, selling blowtorches. The patrons are not expecting my feeble, impromptu attempts at humor. I’m just making them self-conscious and uncomfortable. It’s better to stick to “this song is by . . .” or “on bass tonight we have . . .” type of commentary. Remember, they are primarily drinking, not listening. Don’t mess up the flow of energy.
To help, either have a song list or know the available tunes well enough so that you can keep things moving when you’re not on break. It’s annoying to watch a group of musicians sit around playing the what do you wanna play game in between each song. And it’s enervating to be on the bandstand with same, at least for those of us who are uptight and care too much. It’s a show. Get on with it.
1. Lately guitar players have been imitating keyboard players, turning their instruments into synths with all those knobs on the floor. I know it’s fun to make your guitar sound like a vacuum cleaner, but that’s too much to carry. It’s too much to set up. Plus, you don’t need that many sounds. I think aside from vanity one of the reasons people bring all this stuff is the idea of getting their most pristine sound and also the (contradictory) idea of getting the various “sounds” you need to cover the material. I can understand wanting to get a pristine sound in an environment like the recording studio or your home, where you can reasonably control all the variables. But you can’t do that on a gig. Playing music live is like trying to self-checkout your groceries while someone shoots tennis balls at your face. It’s highly contingent on innumerable unknowns.
And as far as getting the appropriate sounds, I don’t think you can do it and I don’t think you should try. A guitar player needs 2-3 sounds a night tops, a regular sound, a lead sound for solos, maybe an overdriven sound. And really, these are all just different gain levels of the same sound. We don’t ask trumpet players to have different sounds other than what they can produce on the instrument with their technique. Plus the guitar pedals start to work on a player like prescription drugs on the body. You always need to add another one to mitigate the side effects of a previous one. Obviously if you’re playing something like metal, I have no idea what to tell you. That music frightens me and I avoid it. I’m talking about normal music, music that people want to hear in public, while they try to politely signal to their fellow patrons that they’re down-to-clown after closing.
If
What am I going to do if he wins again? I asked myself this question earlier in the summer after the first debate. I didn’t watch it (too anxious), but I immediately felt the ambient political crisis, radiating in waves through my feeds. I am not a politically sophisticated person, but it seemed like B had “confirmed the political narrative” that had developed around him: that he was too old, too mentally furry, to effectuate the gargantuan task at hand. T has always maintained his myth of vigor via the Foghorn Leghorn syndrome: loud sound as a stand in for coherence, or accountability, or wisdom. Bluster is all. I don’t know if the relatively quick trade out for H was the correct choice or not. I do think at that point in the election calendar, there was little else the D party could have done. And while I do think that running another woman ineluctably triggers the vast reservoir of misogyny in U.S. society, shared, I’m sad to say, by all genders, the instant contrast between the rage-faced, verbally incontinent king, on the one side, and the Type A, corner-office queen on the other, is stark.
I agree that there are meaningful policy distinctions to make along the political spectrum, but none of this ever altered my opposition to T, who conveniently encapsulates every human impulse I abhor and who proposes policies I consider wrong, both economically (tariffs) and morally (mass deportations). There’s more to it, but I’ll spare you.
How would I go about persuading my peers to not vote for T? I don’t know. Some people argue that no one can actually be persuaded, but I feel like that’s wrong. People can change their minds. It just doesn’t happen often. It doesn’t happen smoothly. It is usually not the direct result of a well-informed, rational conversation or argument. But people can make a turn. After T won the first time, I resolved that I would never again interact with a T-voting person. But then I quickly realized how lonely I would be, that I lived in the Land of Progress, and that my little bubble of like-minded, aspiring professionals was tiny and not nearly as homogenous as I might hope. And further, that my fleeting hope for always agreeable peers was slightly antidemocratic. What is democracy if not the hell of other people? Politicians spend all this time trying to get people to vote, and then they vote incorrectly and for all the wrong reasons.1 I’m not the best political thinker, but I’m not the worst either.2 I wish there were something I could say that would change people’s minds, but we are literally watching different channels, reading different books, thumbing through different memes. We almost speak a different language.
A couple of weeks ago I found myself in Chicago attending a lesbian rally for H. I was neither a host nor a contributor. I was just tagging along with a friend, but I was happy to be there, so far from my usual climate. Those lesbians were fired up, and I found this exciting. In my day to day life I am as apolitical as possible, both as a professional prophylactic and as an expression of personal sensibility, and also, yes, as a kind of defense mechanism. I think the phrase is “conflict-avoidant.” Even so, I am not immune to eloquent political rage, which is what the speakers exhibited. A couple of people there asked me what it was like living where I lived, and I said that it was mostly fine but that it occasionally grew awkward, usually when a peer decided to do an in-person re-post of some right-wing meme, a hand-off in the relay race of ideas. For a while this took the form of Hunter Biden fentanyl jokes having to do with contaminated money? (I don’t know. I am tempted to google it but I don’t care.) It takes the form of “well they say that there’s never been a hurricane that started in the Gulf.” It takes the form of the guy showing me “this year’s scariest Halloween costume” and the picture being a Biden mask. These people are eating from an entirely different salad bar. A more combative person might begin arguing. I instead treat these moments as I would a tic from a person who is obviously, helplessly, psychologically compromised, and start politely scanning for the exits.3 Perhaps I am part of the problem with my reluctance for immediate intellectual confrontation. I am writing this on my little blog, after all.
I do know that I am tired of the discourse, if we can even call it that. Discourse implies some kind of organization of the rhetoric, where instead it’s just a daily primordial stew of new ingredients reacting to one another in a fractal manner. I am tired of the T show, and the people who continue to watch the T show seem self-compromised in some way, as if in a cult or in the late stages of an addiction, an inner struggle tied up inside their particular circumstances, and not really having anything to do with me. How do I help them help themselves? Etc.
Perhaps I am just a smug, aspirational, paraprofessional, yuppie reboot who is both too polite for aggressive lefty rhetoric and too Episcopalian for the pro-wrestling, redneck stench of the modern right. That might be true, but also I think both sides are still wrong in specific ways, aside from the fact that they offend my tastes. I’ve never listened to the Joe Rogan Experience for a couple of reasons. One, podcasts are like audiobooks. If I’m going to let someone whisper in my ear, I better like their voice. Two, Joe Rogan was the host of Fear Factor, a show that was on in the evenings when I worked at the NBC affiliate in Birmingham, and I found it revolting. That show, if you recall, was about people performing weird stunts in order to get money, which turns out to be a good description of contemporary American society, or at least a portion of it, the online portion of it — doing weird, revolting stunts for clout, online attention, with the hopes of spinning that straw into gold. The Hawk Tuah girl is instructive here: she made an ostensibly offhand joke (conveniently under the eye of Sauron) that went viral and now she has an agent and makes media appearances. It’s the American dream: do or say something that would appall your grandmother but which can be monetized via its appalling attention. We used to make widgets; now we make wisecracks. Anyway, I don’t really care. Get that money, queen. Or whatever the kids are saying these days. (Having teens at home makes me feel old, linguistically.) Anyway, I assume the Joe Rogan Experience is just a continuation of Fear Factor: people motivated to say appalling stuff in his presence for the hope of it becoming a vector of attention and consequently an engine of money. And one reliable way to do that is to stoke everyone’s worst impulses, their darkest paranoias — a fear factory, if you will.
Fear Factor went off the air, but now the air has been replaced by this new show, this seemingly inescapable show, that’s everywhere always at once, and I guess the question to pose to myself is: can I escape the show? This feels irresponsible; it feels like I should pay attention. A thousand tote bags cry out: This is not normal! But the show is slowly making me insane, slowly corroding my sense of proportion and ability to move about the physical world, slowly taking away my ability to do anything outside the show. Entertainment, if that word even suffices, at an industrial scope and scale. Move those jokes down the conveyor belt! We’ve seized the memes of production, but we are still alienated.
1. I know that inflation was bad, but it’s getting better, whether you feel like it’s getting better or not. And what did you think was going to happen when all that pandemic stimulus hit the streets?
2. Precious few people seem to vote for a president based on that person’s foreign policy experience or plans, though that seems to be the area where presidents have the most actual control.
3. That old saw about not talking about politics, religion, or your personal income in social situations: good advice!
And now for something different
I’ve been playing music on the side, in a semi-professional, AAA-ball type manner for a while now, but I have never recorded original music and released it. I’ve recorded lots of little bits, back in my four-track days, and more recently via my beloved Voice Memos app. But I’ve never packaged it up and been part of any kind of release, any kind of music “publishing,” if we stretch that phrase to mean making that music publicly consumable.
But now that’s changed. I’m 1/3 of a new band here in Jackson, MS named The Metrocenter, and we have released our first single, “Transcontinental Breakfast.” Here it is on Spotify. Here it is on Bandcamp. The robots tell me that it is available on many other online platforms, but I won’t do the tedious work of linking to all of those.
I’d rather not classify or attempt to explain this music. I find most music criticism overdetermined, and I find almost all self-explanations by the artists themselves distracting at best, actively detrimental to the listening experience at worst. (They sell the same self-mythologies as the author profile.) I’ll only say these are instrumental songs.
Okay, I’ll allow myself one attempt: “It’s like jazz, but without the annoying parts.”
More to come (he said hopefully, optimistically, trying to will it into being).
Credits: Denny Burkes on drums and engineering; Jakob Clark on bass and electric guitar. I’m playing Fender Rhodes and a Mellotron sample.
Is it possible to hear the Mellotron and not think distantly of the Beatles? I think not. The way a Hammond organ always connotes the church, even if obliquely, I think the Beatles “own” that primary sound reference.
p.s. Of course you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram, too.
Michael Martone Interview
Originally published in the Summer 2008 issue of The Quarterly Conversation, Martone has published several more books in the time since this interview took place.
Michael Martone’s most recent books include Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins; Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft And the Craft of Art; Michael Martone, a collection of fake contributor’s notes; and The Blue Guide to Indiana. Quarry Press has also recently published Double-wide: Collected Fiction of Michael Martone, which includes five of his earlier books: Alive and Dead in Indiana, Safety Patrol, Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s List, Pensées: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle, and Seeing Eye.
Martone’s work is hard to classify — Racing in Place reads like a series of experimental essay-like memoirs (or memoir-like essays); Michael Martone is a collection of fake contributor’s notes, except that they were all published as real, true contributor’s notes; The Blue Guide to Indiana includes tours for landmarks and attractions that don’t exist in Indiana, but should. Taken as a whole, Martone’s work doesn’t so much explode convention as expose it and then re-arrange it, as if literature were some vast modular housing structure, so that everyday when you came home from work, someone had re-arranged not just your furniture but the layout of the rooms, the architecture of the house, everything. Today you enter through the front door, tomorrow through the chimney.
— Barrett Hathcock
Barrett Hathcock: You write fiction that imitates nonfiction and nonfiction that at times resembles fiction. How are fiction and nonfiction different from you in terms of composition/approach? How are they different in terms of a reader’s expectations (as to what is or isn’t true)? (In Racing in Place, you write of Bob Knight: “There is a kind of slippage in the viewers’ perception that results in the registering of real horror, not its simulated aesthetic twin.” Is this slippage something to be lamented? Enjoyed? Pursued?)
Michael Martone: More and more, I think less and less of those kinds of differences. More and more I think of myself as a writer. Or as a maker of written things. Like this thing now. This interview. I think that finally we all have to sort and arrange and categorize and install what we come across in the world in order to order it. Order it to make sense of it. But I am less and less involved in that now. I will write something and allow others to make do, make due, make dew with it. That is one danger, I think, of the writer or artist in the university that is really nothing more than a massive sorting calculator of knowledge. My writing students enter a workshop to write but their main function over the 16-week semester is to function as critics for other writers’ writing. They may produce two or three stories over that time and have the stories talked about for maybe one or two hours in all that time. More often than not they are operating as sorters, assigning quality standards, assaying value and worth, labeling genre. It is work that has to be done but it is a dangerous habit to get into if you are wanting to be a writer. To distinguish. To sort. To even make sense of what one is doing before one is done doing it. So, I am hedging your question. I want to think of what I do as writing and let the speciation to others. Many artists draw, use watercolor, pain in oils, sculpt, construct, assemble, paste. They mix their media but it is all seen as art and issues of its fact or fiction seem beside the point to me. Well at least beside the point when the thing is in the making. I am in the fabrication business and there are different gradients on that scale of fiction and non-, I suppose, but none I worry about as I am doing them. I have a fiction in the voice of Dan Quayle who is writing an essay; a book about Michael Martone written by Michael Martone in the voice and form of his, Michael Martone’s, biographer; I have an essay in the voice of Michael Martone on the fictional creation of a character named Bobby Knight. To me the differences are in the details at a microscopic scale not at the much larger one of genre.
BH: Related to the first question, what do you make of the semi-recent memoir craze and the more recent false-memoir craze? Do you read memoirs? Do you have any observations about why these are so popular? What do you think the value of memoir is? Is there such thing as a true memoir? (Or are they examples of another kind of slippage?) (There seemed to be a lot of memoir in this book, and combined with Michael Martone, the two books formed not a definitive memoir but a sort of jazz-like theme/variation version of a “standard” memoir.)
MM: I do think of Racing in Place as a collection of experimental memoirs. The memoir’s problem is that it needs to find, to narrate a kind of death in order to make sense of life. I think of it, the constructed death, as a parentheses, an artificial parentheses, that the writer must draw around a life, or this part of life, to be able to stand outside of it and see it for what it is and isn’t. Hard to make sense of a train wreck that is still happening. So you have “childhood” as such a closed period. “My junior year abroad” is another. “My marriage” or “my divorce” — all this works I think. Memoir for me is always about also the act of memory, the drama of remembering. So, I guess, that is why there is such anxiety about the veracity of the memoir. If it is a function of memory, and it seeks to make sense of the fluid dynamics of a life still being lived, how could we expect it to be accurate in any real sense? The memory is a flawed instrument for record, as we know. Even though other residue of event, evidence of happening such as letters, news reports, photographs, tape recordings, witness statements, etc., can be faked, we certainly trust those more than our own memories. I guess I think the memoir’s real purpose is for the enactment of remembering, the performance of that. That is, I am not so much interested in event per se but in watching the individual writer write and, in writing, remember. My role as audience for the memoir is that of priest confessor or Freudian analyst. I like to attend as the writer surprises him or herself with what gets dredged up once one decides to remember. Freud was a great fiction writer. I would love to have invented the character named the Unconscious. What an invention! This fiction makes memoir possible. It is the drama acted out between a consciousness and its unconscious. How thrilling that so much of what you thought you were is hidden from you. We sit and watch that other side, that deeply buried other you come out and play. I guess in that sense it is all fiction, a staged drama of many possible and simultaneously running lives in one, none of them the “real” life, all of them, however, real.
BH: You have concentrated on Fort Wayne, Indiana, throughout your career; it’s this constant well of ideas and information. For example, I was delighted to learn that the Charlton Heston character from Planet of the Apes is from Fort Wayne. In the book you write, “In geometry, we know that a finite plane bounded on all sides still contains infinite points.” Do you ever run out of Fort Wayne ideas or worry that you might? Also, since you’ve lived much of your life not in Fort Wayne, what is it like writing about it from a distance (specifically writing about it from The South)? (I’m a bit interested in how writers as professional academics often end up living away from the places they write about, and I’m wondering how that affects the writing.) Also, in that same passage (page 100 of Racing in Place), you say, “the more tightly bounded, the more restricted a work is, the richer we find it.” How do you “bind”/organize/structure your essays (or your fictions, for that matter), when the conventional structure — a plot — isn’t used?
MM: Short answer is no, I don’t think I will run out of Fort Wayne–centric ideas. And I certainly don’t worry about it. The distance helps and hurts. My “Fort Wayne” is Fort Wayne of course. I am interested in the possibility of many Fort Waynes, of many Michael Martones. I like the notion of parallel dimensions, many trains running. The distance allows, well, for distance between realms, a buffer buffering. The great drama of America is between place and staying put and movement. To say you are a writer of “place” also implies you are a writer of and about moving. What makes Saturn Saturn? Sure, it is the gas giant planet but it is also the rings. The rings around Saturn are more Saturn than Saturn. As for structure when one abandons plot, one simply realizes that the structure of plot is simply an arbitrary collection of rules, suggestions, protocol. So you just find another set of arbitrary armature. Number. I often use numbers — the hours in the day, the weeks in a year. The number of planets. I am writing a whole book of short fiction now based on the number four. Fictions employing the four seasons, the four winds, the four corners, the four chambers of the heart, the four humors, the 4H Club, the Fab Four, the Fantastic Four, the four railroads on the Monopoly Board, Four Calling Birds. There is nothing natural or normal or elemental or essential in the structure we call plot — setting, vehicle, rising action, climax, dénouement, ending. All is artifice.
BH: How has teaching creative writing affected your own writing? In your students’ writing, do you notice trends or areas of interest that morph over time?
MM: I teach different kind of creative writing courses. Forms course and workshops. In both, I don’t pretend to know anything. I am not that kind of master teacher where I know something and transfer that knowledge to students who don’t know. Instead, I guess, I teach curiosity. I try to create in the classroom interesting environments and then, with the students, discover things that, perhaps, we already knew or know but didn’t know we knew. I think my other job as a teacher is really to resist the bias bred into the institution where I am housed. A university is by nature a critical institution. I want to resist having my students learn to be critics. Instead I want to inculcate the habit of writing and in doing so I think one has to defuse the tendency to judge quality of work, to even resist asking the question, “Does this work?” Students come to me ready to think of the classroom as a place of battle. They have already been naturalized into thinking that a workshop, say, is a simulation of the way the world works. You write something and an editor or reviewer beats up on it. So students have come to think of workshops as a way to create calluses, to out think the critics. Instead, I like to invite them to remember the intrinsic pleasures of the business, the act itself of sitting down and writing, not the ritual of self-sacrifice. My students’ writing have, for a long time, been quite timid and, as they love to say, traditional. The many classes many of them have taken have led them into an aesthetic that is by design static. The realistic narrative — once a highly experimental form — has produced a series of stylistic rules that can be taught and my students have learned — don’t use exclamation marks, underlining, or any graphic measure to intensify emotion, for example. Those kinds of rules are set in stone. What is to vary realistic story to story is the content, the local, the details. You can in that kind of aesthetic do things wrong. And the critical institution we work within loves that kind of knowledge. I have seen recently more and more students attempting fiction outside that particular drama. More interest right now in the fantastic, irreal, the magical. Also a growing interest in more things lyrical, meditative, associative, and less linear.
BH: For your nonfiction (or your fiction?), is the instigation for the writing a request from an editor or some publication, or do you think up the essay ideas first? Traditionally, “occasional writing” has been used in a pejorative sense, as in it’s not a writer’s “true” or “best” work. Do you agree with this? Any thoughts about this dichotomy?
MM: More often than fiction, nonfiction springs from a request from an editor, a prompt. The essay, “Racing in Place,” for example was the result of a request to contribute to an anthology called A Year in Place. Twelve writers were asked to pick a month and a place and write an essay about that connection. I got Indiana and the month of May. Most of the essays in the book Racing in Place were products of such requests, challenges, prompts, what have you. I do think that usually writers are self-prompting. They create first their own problems or sets of problems they then solve with their fiction, nonfiction, poetry, etc. So in that sense I feel that all writing is “occasional” in that it flows out of a particular set of circumstances created to create the work. I know what you mean about “occasional” being used to in such a way to diminish a piece. I think often we like to maintain this notion of complete parthenogenesis — that everything is the work of the solitary genius when, it seems, for me it is much more collaborative an enterprise. Much of my favorite work is “occasional,” derived from suggestions, musings, dares received from friends or editors — most of them friends — readers all. To switch it around for a minute: I have often in the past edited volumes of fiction or essays where I have come up with a writerly problem I hope is interesting to a writer I am asking to contribute to my anthology. Since often I cannot pay for the original work, I like to think an interesting challenge is a kind of remuneration. Writers like to work something interesting. I asked a group of Midwestern writers to write about the township square they grew up in — the township being a very visible part of the Midwestern landscape — and the results were stunning. Not one of the writers thought that his or her contribution was of a lesser order because he or she didn’t have the initial idea. Instead I think they were quite excited to make the idea into something special.
BH: Do you read blogs? What do you think of blogs? Does online publishing — or self-publishing — change what you do, or how would you start out differently if you were a young writer given this blogging, online self-publishing surge that is taking place?
MM: Are you kidding? This, this what is happening now, is revolutionary, profoundly revolutionary. The whole electronic apparatus is simply redefining who and what an “author” is. The categories of “book,” “editor,” “publisher,” “audience,” “reader,” are in flux at least if not collapsing, transforming before out eyes. Much was made of high literary theory’s pronouncement of the death of the author, but the paltry deconstruction that went on in a few English Departments was, is nothing to what is going on now with this machine — the one I am tapped into at this moment. Universities are, by nature, so conservative. My colleagues don’t get, don’t want to get post post-modernism. Meanwhile, their students, their children are in the midst of the real deconstruction of the entire culture and it has not, will not take place at the university but here out there. I love the way the web has worked around anything thrown at it, especially the desire of universities, publishing, etc., to re-impose the gates for gate-keeping of quality and the maintenance of hierarchy. Just work around it. The machine easily ignores it. The author is dead all right but long live writing. This is the end of the Johnsonian Age, the end of the Romantic, Modernist Individual Genius. I think that blogs actually are retrograde — the last attempt of the old-fashioned author to hold on to old-fashioned authorship. I think very soon blogs might evolve to the point where most will be unsigned or the same blog will be written by several people together or separately and also posted without a name of a shared name. The blog lives but the idea that it is written by any one person or consciousness will be so over. It is nothing but net baby. Out of many one. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be assimilated.
BH: How did this book come together as a collection? It consists of pieces written over the past several years. Did you always envision them taking this form or is this incarnation of the book how things fell into place?
MM: I don’t think it was very conscious that way. I am a writer who, I think, likes to celebrate chance and accident and happenstance. No plan. I think of revision as not so much working drafts of the one story but that each new story is another draft of the one story I wanted to write. I liked to think that I write “trying” fiction, that my essays, “essay.” Everything I write is an attempt at getting at the something I am attempting to get at. I like collage for that reason. I can write a fiction, say. Made up of 24 sections of prose, and by cutting and pasting I can get many different permutation from the same piece of writing, gain different effects of juxtaposition in the changing composition. I don’t think I write or read for that matter with an idea of an ideal out there. I am not much for finding the best word, or the best order. I am more for all words in every order at once and all at once. I think this desire to plan, to have things come together in what is assumed to be the perfect way, the best way, is wrong for me. In that sense the metaphor of the workshop — asking if a piece “works” — makes no sense to me. Everything “works” in its own way. When I am finished with that one arrangement, I am on to the next one. The book is pretty much arranged in chronological order of the time of their writing. I am happy with that. I am not wedded to it. The truth is our existential reality of the media we use, language, is sequential, but I am not a slave to the linear nature I am working. I don’t really believe in progress — I don’t think I am getting better or worse. I’m just different moment to moment to moment.
BH: In Michael Martone, your book of contributor’s notes, and in the introduction to Racing in Place (not to mention The Blue Guide to Indiana), you call attention not just to the form of the writing but also its specific genre or context, and you play with the types of expectations a reader might have because of this context. Could you discuss how you came to this aesthetic point and where do you see it going next? Is there another text or context that you see is a fertile place to play and subvert in this way?
MM: When I was working in the English Department at Syracuse University, I began thinking about those things. Syracuse was the high tide of what is called “Theory” and its deconstruction of “English” and “English Departments” for that matter. It was there and then when everything, it seemed, in the world began to acquire “quotation marks.” Many of my colleagues who were creative writers at first were scared of these “scare” quoting manifestations. There were many fronts on which “Theory” was advancing, but probably the one most telling was along the lines of the “Death of the Author.” Many “authors” wanted to resist that. I found it interesting and came to think of theoretical writing as just another genre of creative writing in any case. I should have put those in quotes. Not to go on too long with this but the death of the author (and the less quoted following thought that writing lives) seemed to me to be about the making of meaning of a piece of work. Creative writing had always bestowed the making of meaning exclusively into the hands of the author. The then-current ideas questioned this and suggested that the reader too is involved in the making of meaning. To me this seemed incredibly liberating. A writer no longer needs to worry about such control. Instead, it seemed to me, the writer’s job became more that of an arranger of interesting environments that could be made available to the now very active reader. Or another way of thinking of it is that all of those categories — writer, reader, editor, critic, publisher — were now destabilized. I could be all of these things at once as the readers too could be all these things at once. You said it above. This was “play” in the sense that everything every time was to be re-invented. Nothing in this art, in this aesthetic is fixed — meaning in place or stable — or can be fixed — meaning to aspire to an ideal form. It seemed to me my job was to do just as you said above, to break open these fixed categories, expose them constantly for the constructions they are, and allow the reader to participate in the making of art, not simply its passive reception. Where is this heading? I think one line to follow is the actually disappearance of the signature. The author of a piece authoring the piece, maybe not truly anonymously, but without the audience of the piece really caring who the author is. In that way, the Internet is already deconstructing the “author” far better. So much of the Internet is “written” (you got to love those quotation marks) but who is its author?
Redundancy Logistics
Well, it happened. After a number of years playing live music in a semi-professional setting, my amp died mid-gig. This was a statistical inevitability, like hail damage on a roof. I had skated by blameless for so long, dancing through the raindrops and not bringing any kind of backup, thinking I was different. Depending on who you ask, this was akin to blasphemy or professional malpractice. If you read the music-related internet forums (please don’t; let my squandered time be your warning), showing up to a gig without adequate backup is hubris. It invites the wrath of the gods.
My impromptu solution was to plug the electric guitar directly into the mixing console. Please do not think this was something fancy or complicated. This was not a show. This was not a concert. This was a standard Sunday evening restaurant/bar gig. This means there was no “front of house” soundman. There was just the small mixing board next to me, because on this gig I was running sound from the stage, in between playing guitar and (humbly, intermittently) singing. It worked, but it sounded terrible. It functioned. And this only happened after I sat there helpless for a song while the other players stared at me like roadkill.
If you ask the online mind if you should bring a backup — amp, guitar, anything — the answer will be an overwhelming yes. And I see their point. Stuff breaks at the worst time, and you can’t show up unable to complete the job. But then you start thinking through what this actually means in logistical terms. A backup for everything? Does that mean an entire second amp? An entire second guitar? Pedals? The whole P.A.? This turns into a lot of tonnage to sit waiting in the wings. And remember there are no wings to this stage. There are the walls of the corner of the bar that you are wedged between. There’s hardly enough room for you to stand, much less a place to put your gear, much less a place to store your cases, much less a place for other gear that you will hopefully not even need. This past weekend, playing drums, I had to set up in some bushes, and my high-hat stood Bambi-tipsy atop a decorative strip of river rocks. It’s a good thing that sound itself doesn’t take up too much space.
And this predicament quickly morphs into a larger societal problem that I refer to as Dudes with Gear. I am now going to generalize about cisgender, hetero, male people, so, you know, brace yourself. All dudes like toys; and furthermore, they like accouterments for their toys, stuff that kits out the toys to make them more “useful,” which is the male catch-word for beauty. When they were children, boys liked toys, and now that they are men, these toys are called “tools.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, and these observations are so cliched as to be unremarkable. And yet the utility/beauty can quickly become obscured by the amount of stuff, or the rhetoric/belief system underneath the stuff becomes overwhelming, so that rather than making your life easier, more attractive, more convenient, you’re now carting around a bunch of crap so that you can take a picture of it and show it to your online buddies. See, e.g., any musician dude on Instagram. I am also thinking now of the Everyday Carry crowd. I remember years ago, eons in online time, when there was the “What’s in My Bag” trend on Flickr. Remember Flickr? People would disgorge the contents of their bag, and dudes especially tended toward a proto-MacGyver collection of objects. (The amount of camera gear that people purported to carry was insane.) This has devolved into the Everyday Carry meme, which is what some people purport to carry on their person every day, wherever they go. At the smallest level, it’s interesting to see what people need to have handy over the course of a day. (Does one really need that many knives?) But on a larger scale, some people are obviously prepping for some kind of confrontation, by which I mean the unlikely scenario that the Black Hawk helicopters land in the Kroger parking lot, and you’re suddenly participating in a real life Fortnite. Thus this meme trend combines several elements: the dude need for stuff and ever expanding sub-stuff for the stuff; video games as overarching structural metaphor; and prepper ideology, which entails the paranoia that something systemically bad is certainly going to happen and you’ve got to be ready. You have the moral obligation to be ready. Extreme examples of this are off-site locations where you can hoard canned goods and weaponry in case of a Red Dawn–like invasion. That reference dates me terribly and shows just how little I know about or understand the prepper aesthetic or motivations. I’m not sure what or whom these people are afraid of specifically, but the entire project off-gasses notes of conspiracy theory and apocalyptic thinking. And as the writer Freddie DeBoer has pointed out in a somewhat different context, one way of ensuring that you are special is the constant fear/hope that you live in End Times. A devotion to the coming apocalypse is a grand form of narcissism. Perhaps being a prepper is the fruitful offspring of video game thought and gear, a kind of apotheosis, or literalization of game life. Here we prepareth for the ultimate leveling up.
What this means for the bandstand is a Boy Scout on amphetamines, or a middle-aged man on gin, buying too much stuff under the justification of being prepared. It becomes a morally fortified excuse to buy stuff, which feels good. Hey, I like buying stuff, too. Well, that’s not actually true. Spending money makes me ill, but I still do it, and I am not totally immune to the endorphin high of clicking that Buy Now button. All of this is exacerbated by living in a car city, which makes it much easier to bring more stuff than you need.
Interestingly, if you observe a professional local musician, you will notice they bring very little stuff to the gig. They bring only what is absolutely necessary. I define such a creature as a person who plays professionally full time and yet who does not have a roadie for the majority of their local gigs. They are the performer and the schlepper all in one. And they don’t treat their gear like a yuppie going camping. One person’s device of convenience is another’s extra weight to hump across a parking lot. One of the best guitar players I know doesn’t even bring a guitar stand. He just leans the thing up in the corner on set break. Asked why and he’ll say because it’s another thing to tote. He is not there for the pics; he’s there to do a job. There are so many obligations in life that are actually optional, but we don’t realize they are optional. They are the default settings of the mind. I hardly ever change my default settings, but this guy did. I haven’t asked him about his amp backup situation.
I’m not trying to be irresponsible, but I loathe taking stuff I don’t sufficiently use on the gig, which is why I mostly don’t take toms anymore on drum gigs. They just sit there, their chrome rims smiling placidly at me, which probably says more about my skill level than it does about any rigorous commitment to stuff maintenance. For backups, there is the equivalent replacement and then there is the good-enough replacement. How can I get by in the simplest way possible? These solutions are much less attractive and don’t sound as good and usually can be accomplished with the crap you already own. We have to remember that MacGyver made do with what he had on hand. That’s what made him cool. He didn’t use every predicament as an occasion to go shopping. The ultimate practicality is to be more resourceful and less precious.
To placate the gods (i.e., the forum in my head), I bought one of those small pedal-sized amps. No, not one that’s a computer that mimics the sound of Clapton at Wembley or whatever. There are no Impulse Responses. Get out of here with that mess. I don’t want to program anything. I don’t want anything that has options that you select through a menu. I don’t really want any choices. I want toggle switches, pointy knobs. I’ve plugged it up. I’ve tried it out. It weighs less than three pounds and sounds fine. It’s so small that I’ll probably forget it’s even in my bag. It should be more than adequate. I pray I never use it, but at least now I am protected from the normal distribution of myself.