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.
Category Archives: essays
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.
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.
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!
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.
Author profiles are bunk
There was a fascinating profile of writer Lauren Groff in last weekend’s New York Times, “How Lauren Groff, One of ‘Our Finest Living Writers,’ Does Her Work.” Groff is an excellent writer in the middle of an already distinguished career. Though I prefer her stories to her novels mostly for idiosyncratic personal reasons, she is on my mental list of people to always read. Even if it’s just a little bit of the latest novel, I will read some of it to see what she is up to now.
First, a tenet: profiles are a hoax. I realize that there are some profiles that are “good,” both good journalism and good writing, perceptive, useful, aesthetically pleasing, not completely dishonest and fraudulent. But most profiles are fraudulent. All celebrity profiles are fraudulent, and the New York Times profiles of writers are a specific breed of fraudulent. One could say there’s a long tradition of fraudulence with respect to this category at the New York Times. The fraudulence comes from the two-step conspiracy between profile writer (in this case journalist Elizabeth A. Harris) and profiled subject. You have a journalist desperate for a story, any kind of story, any kind of angle toward something interesting, combined with a writer who by necessity must spend the majority of his or her time inside, alone, listening to voices inside their head. Not the most fertile ground for interesting journalism. Combine this fraught set up with the need to do some myth maintenance. Who can forget David Foster Wallace asking Frank Bruni, “Do you have my saliva?” in that very same august publication? That profile also had Bruni going through Wallace’s medicine cabinet. On the one hand this seems like a creepy invasion of privacy. On the other, this seems like a desperate young journalist looking for anything they can find to hang a paragraph upon. (Upon reread, that old profile has a heroic amount of persona-building from both journalist and subject.)
That’s a long way of saying that profiles of writers are the softest of soft journalism and are usually filled with gargantuan mounds of self-aggrandizing BS, and the Groff profile does not disappoint. In fact, it might win a medal for the highest frequency of raised eyebrows from this humble reader. I realize that profiles like these are basically commercials for the writer and commercials for the sensitivity of the reporters. But even so, this one is an everlasting gobstopper of weirdness.1
“The outing was unusual for an author interview — and, given the pace of the hike, not an insignificant amount of exercise. Typically, these conversations take place over coffee or lunch, at a publisher’s office or maybe in a writer’s living room. But Groff had chosen something different: a five-mile hike through the woods and a swim in a pond, followed by a lunch of chickpea salad and a beet slaw with pistachio butter, all of which she made herself.”
Where to even begin? What a disappointing lunch. Why would you do that to those poor pistachios? And she “made it herself”? What is this, the Ladies Home Journal from 1983?
Groff knows exactly what she is doing, taking your lazy ass on a five-mile hike and swim. She’s giving you the Hook, which simultaneously frames her as a flattering combination of writer/athlete. It’s like something out of Veep. She’s not like these other writers, etc. She is not just accomplished and talented but also athletic and cool with her “goofy sense of humor” and she knows her way around the kitchen when necessary and above all seems like someone you would want to hang with, or barring that someone you would at least look up to.
“A former college athlete who still runs, swims and plays tennis regularly, Groff, 45, has a physicality about her that is central to how she lives and writes.” We also learn that Groff’s sister was an Olympic triathlete, so the jock is strong with this one. One can only imagine how intensely competitive the holiday sessions of Pictionary are up in New Hampshire.
“Groff and her family remain close. Though she lives in Gainesville, where Kallman (her husband) owns and operates off-campus housing for University of Florida students, she spends every summer in New Hampshire, close to where her sister and her brother live, and where her parents have a house.”
First thought: that’s a good job. Second thought: that’s an excellent job for the spouse of a writer. Solidly remunerative and filled with interesting stories. I can only imagine the horrors that greet her spouse daily as he deals with the living consequences of the standard male UF undergraduate. Just think what has been done to all that carpet.
“When Groff starts something new, she writes it out longhand in large spiral notebooks. After she completes a first draft, she puts it in a banker’s box — and never reads it again. Then she’ll start the book over, still in longhand, working from memory. The idea is that this way, only the best, most vital bits survive.”
Really, Lauren. Really?
“It’s not even the words on the page that accumulate, because I never look at them again, really, but the ideas and the characters start to take on gravity and density,” she says.
Her “really” is doing a lot of work in that quotation. Seems like the hardest way to climb that mountain but what do I know?
“When Groff agreed to move to Florida 17 years ago, she did so conditionally. She’d relocate, she said, only if she could travel as needed — for writers’ retreats, for book tours — and if Kallman agreed to reassess periodically. There’s a physical contract stating those terms, signed by her and Kallman, somewhere in her files. The document also delineates some of their child care plans — an arrangement that allows her to wake up at 5 a.m. and disappear into her writing for hours, without having to manage the routine of getting two children fed and out the door.
“Groff and Kallman wake up together, they said, but the morning is not a time to chat
“‘I get so mad at him if he tries to talk to me,’ Groff joked about her husband.”
Here’s where the profile goes from strange to fascinating. First, I bet the “getting mad at” is not actually a joke, no matter how jokingly described it was to the reporter. You don’t have to be Derrida to detect the undulating reservoirs of resentment at being drug down to north Florida to live out her adulthood, a compromise that in all likelihood also financially allows her to write full time. Now, I don’t know that for a fact. I don’t know how much money she makes from her writing. It is not my business and I don’t care. However, I am fascinated by “literary writers,” that is people who write novels and stories that attempt to be art, rather than say genre stuff or TV stuff, and how those people also make enough money to live. It’s the age-old double question: how do you pay the rent? And who takes care of the kids?
To be clear, I don’t care who does what in any kind of gender-role sense. Please. Every family is its own island. A Dr. Moreau-like island, to be sure, but still an island. My hands are too full of grocery bags to throw stones. But one does want to know (per the headline) how the work gets done; one wants details. This profile has the depth of nail polish. Who packs the lunches? Etc.
Second, a good journalist would have asked to see that contract. This is the most provocative part of the profile. She is a mother of two kids and doesn’t have to deal with getting them out to school every morning? I’m a middle-aged father of two kids and I can attest that getting people to school in the morning is a scene, a daily steeplechase of bad yogurt, missing laundry, and rolled-through stop signs.
I wonder if she has hired help around the house. No judgment. Strictly a logistical financial curiosity. Is there a nanny figure?
“‘I like the morning because it’s empty of people and ideas and you’re still sort of in a dream state until the caffeine kicks in. It’s the best time of day, for sure. It’s a very gentle time of day.’”
It’s only a gentle time of day if you’ve got a contract saying that your husband will deal with all that crap so that you can write! It’s not a gentle time of day! It’s a nightmare time of the day! It’s like Wes Craven’s Busytown! If you think morning’s are calm, you’re either medicated or isolated or childless. Just think of the routine caffeine-doped gridlock on the interstate loop of a mid-sized US city. Those people are driving to work — fortunate enough to drive to work. It’s a lot of things but it ain’t gentle.
“She estimates she reads about 300 books a year.”
Don’t believe it. Sorry. And I’ve read press releases with a more developed sense of skepticism.
“Her editor . . . said that Groff reread all of Shakespeare so she could write a version of The Vaster Wilds in iambic pentameter ‘just for fun,’ as a way for her to master Elizabethan rhythms.”
Lauren, honey. Sweetie. You’ve got all morning. Every morning. Please don’t waste it on crap like this. Want to write 30 pages of iambic pentameter, 50 pages, okay fine. But the whole novel? Come now.
Then, the reporter gets a quotation from Hernan Diaz, one of Groff’s friends who she provided a blurb for and who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. His bit that praises Groff is hyperbolic and cliched, overwritten and underthought (“to make the syntactical edifice as sound and capacious and beautiful as possible”) and shares many of the same problems outlined in my ranting against blurbs. First, Groff should not be spending the valuable remaining hours of her life writing blurbs. (She writes them in the afternoons when “Groff deals with the business of being an author.”) No one should be writing blurbs, but we can be hierarchical about it. If Obama wrote you a letter saying how much he dug your novel, you don’t have to write blurbs any more. They are beneath you. And you shouldn’t have to give logrolling quotations to publications about your writer friends either. Jesus. What are we doing here, people?
Groff’s not any good at this either. In a Lorrie Moore profile from earlier this year (I know I know, stop reading them if they make you so mad) by Dan Kois, a writer who should know better, Gross says of Moore’s famous kid cancer short story, “It’s so complicated and brutal. . . . You feel her great reserve is gone, and she’s bearing down with all her might.”2
“Bearing down with all her might”? What is she cracking walnuts? I realize we can’t grade all of a writer’s language output with the same eye we might take to her novels, but level up a smidge.3 & 4
But back to the praise of Groff by Diaz. What else is he going to say? He’s certainly not going to say anything critical, but the larger disappointment is that he’s not going to say anything interesting. I’ve seen more hard hitting reportage from the CBS Sunday Morning Show, in segments about, like, birds. This is embarrassing just in terms of journalism. (Harris, pay attention, I am talking to you.)
Well you’re just jealous, one might say. You’re goddamned right I’m jealous! Granted, I don’t know who the intended audience for these profiles is if it’s not mildly embittered, middle-aged failed novelists. But yes, I am jealous. I’m also jealous of Heidi Julavits’s life, as cataloged in both The Folded Clock and Directions to Myself.5 She summers in Maine! People, I live in Mississippi, the very seam of Satan’s jockstrap. Do you know how much I would give to summer in New Hampshire or Maine? I’d even take up hiking if necessary. When summer arrives I just do what I do during the entire rest of the year except a) the structure provided by school vanishes completely, and b) it’s so hot even the lizards are frightened.6
So yes, I am jealous, but not just of the success and the talent. I am envious of the relentlessness and the discipline and the ruthless vision. To have those oceans of time to focus on your writing. And to actually get it done. The profile is correct in its Hook. Groff does approach writing like an athlete: regular, intense training, and religious routine. Let’s do some math. She’s 45. She made this contract 17 years ago when she was 28. 2006. Her first novel, The Monsters of Templeton, came out in 2008. She already knew, before that book came out. Or what’s more likely, she had the faith. She had the belief in herself to say this is what I’m going to do and you’re going to help me. You’re going to deal with the kids. And I’m not going to have another job. It’s this confidence in one’s own abilities, this self-validation that impresses me. And then the follow-through, actually getting the work done. Making the time for yourself and then using that hard-won time. Think of the arguments. Think of the familial judgment. Think of the clucking that happens at their kids’ school. Think of the strain of having to hack out that path over twenty years and then having to maintain it. People are always talking about how books are “brave” and “necessary,” literary criticism made of styrofoam. But Groff actually did what was brave and necessary. You want to see actual bravery by a writer? That’s bravery. Saying I am good at this and I deserve this time, this freedom.
All of which is to say that I suppose this profile works, because I do admire Lauren Groff, novelist. Props are due.
- The most honest writer profile I have ever read was written by Boris Kachka, published in New York magazine, of novelist Claire Messud. It’s a collaboration in frankness.
- Kois, a sophisticated journalist for Slate and a novelist in his own right, has all the guile of Bambi in that profile. But then again, it’s Lorrie Moore!
- She does drop the valuable intel that Moore is “very, very good with [men],” which totally tracks.
- The story, “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” was devastating when I read it as a 20-year-old childless idiot, and the story was devastating when I read it as a 30-year-old father of a baby, and now that I am a mid-40s parent of two teen-ish kids, you could not pay me enough money to reread that story. I can’t handle it. It’s like an emotional Gatling Gun. Just give me another 20 years to recover. Jesus. Leave me alone.
- I know these footnotes are annoying, but I have a lot to say. In both Groff’s story collection Florida and in Julavits’s memoir Directions to Myself, there is much metaphoric soup made from tide pools and the young boys who play in them. There is a nature/nurture, maternal presence metaphor in both, and both lean into the idea that “my boy won’t be like that.” The that in this case is the predatory adult male, the bully, the chauvinist, the rapist, the assaulter, the vicious threatening male presence that we all know and love. There is much forced wishing and hoping going on in these passages. A mildly unnerving parallel thread of parental paranoia.
- To have the financial and logistical wherewithal to summer in New Hampshire? To have the imagination to even begin to think of summering in New Hampshire? I didn’t even conceive that was something you could do until I was 40. Talk about a failure of imagination.
All houses are haunted
Moving is terrible. “It’s traumatic,” more than one friend said. “It’s the second most traumatic thing after a death in the family.” Well, I don’t know about that, but it has been an old-fashioned pain in the ass, a pain not quickly remedied because the infection is the mountain of your own stuff and how to organize it within a new space. There is a brief moment of excitement, trying to figure out where the golden-spined series of Faulkner novels is going to reside, strategizing about the best drawer in the kitchen to house the spatulas, which hid from you for three days after the movers left so that you were left to flip your eggs with your mind, like some yuppie jedi. But this feeling quickly leaves, and what’s left is all your crap and the endless march of assigning it new places within the home.
All my routines are shot. I’m writing this at 5:42 in the morning on a Tuesday on a desk that needs a shim. I pray the arrhythmic clicking I’m creating with each space bar doesn’t wake the dogs. I haven’t eaten a proper breakfast in weeks. I don’t know when to shower. I can’t find the kids’ lunchboxes. I need a USB cord. God only knows where that blue umbilicus lies within the boxes still unpacked, and we’re mostly unpacked. But there are always the straggler boxes, the boxes scribbled “whatnots,” the boxes that should just as well be incinerated because if you’ve lived without the USB cord for three weeks, you probably don’t need it and should learn to live without it. Purge your sins.
Plus, it’s not just my stuff, but my entire family’s, which brings to mind George Carlin’s bit “A Place for my Stuff,” the central conceit of which is that your own belongings are your stuff, while everyone else’s stuff is indeed shit. Which pretty much sums up my entire theology regarding material plenty. I’m sorry I have to briefly pause my avoidance of cursing with this post in order to make my objects/waste point. I am overwhelmed by my stuff. And I’m horrified by everyone else’s shit that they’ve brought into this house. Brought into the old house and now moved across town to the new house. It’s like the beginning of White Noise except it’s all in my house, and I’m tripping over it. We have met the enemy and the enemy is us.
Plus, all houses are haunted. The sounds in a new house are maddening. The air conditioner kicks on in an odd way, with clicking beforehand. And then the air return is like a giant seashell of swooshing up in the ceiling. The washing machine is inexplicably loud. The laundry room is the coldest room in the house for some reason. I have yet to fully determine the hottest room in the house but tradition indicates that it will be the master bathroom. The ceiling light in the kitchen is not centered, thereby destined to inch several members of my family just that closer to madness. The garbage container area sticks and must be yanked with egg-yolk covered hands. There is a bug in the garage that I can’t find, though it flies by my ear in Top Gun-ian fashion. Part of the yard is a swamp. The garage is still half filled with alien crap, there is entirely too much of it, none of it seems relevant or needed, and yet I can’t find whatever it is I have decided I need to find. When I get home from work, goddamnit the dogs have heard me, when I get home from work I feel compelled to re-enter the trench of unpacking, but I seem to be the only one still at war with our household. Everyone else has settled in. I’m in the trench (the attic), being shelled by the enemy (the invisible insect), while I dig further for shelter (organize our Christmas decorations). We moved because we wanted to change and now everything’s different.
Perhaps this entire project would be easier if I were not so extravagantly uptight. I am like the Liberace of stress. I am like the Pavorotti of coming unglued. I am like that pickle jar your uncle dipped his fingers in over Thanksgiving and then wrenched back so tight that no one has been able to unwrench it since. The briney thoughts are swirling around and off-gassing and creating a further vacuum of anxiety. I can barely enjoy anything for longer than ten seconds without my mind undertowing all that came before. I realize this analogy could be workshopped. My pickle jar is a riptide is what I’m saying. The dogs are whining and perhaps they’re right. Perhaps I should just flip on the lights and start the coffee and get on with my day. Chores are at least manifestable, accomplishable. I haven’t finished the novel but by God I have taken out the trash.
The complete eruption of routine triggers the motion-sensitive driveway light in my mind. My routine, as it was, was not the best, and I need to fashion a new one in this strange environment that I have put myself in. Are you writing? Are you still writing? What are you working on? Please, friendly acquaintance, don’t ask. Please forget I ever wrote. The landfill turnover of my accumulated personal affects reveals just how hopelessly sentimental I am, how hopelessly aspirational I continue to be, even at this late date. Did I really think I was going to read Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination? How vain I still am, hoping someone, anyone will come over one day and admire that small-format Mary Miller short story collection, the one put out by Hobart. Even better, I’ve got her first chapbook, too! Or perhaps someone will appreciate my unblemished run of the first three years of n+1. But no one is coming over, no one cares, and literary theory is an ugly hill. There is not enough space to house every book I have ever read and every book I thought perhaps I might read one day. There are libraries for this, even here in the suburbs, though of course none of them stock the right books. So sayeth the permanent grad student.
The dogs have a hierarchy of discourse in the mornings. First there is the high pitched whistle, a kind of test whine. I am the only person on the planet who can hear it. It’s like my own version of dog ears. Then the whining gets lower pitched, becomes more vocal, more syllabic. Finally the little one just barks haughtily. A couple of paws stamped in the dark, then quiet. If I sleep too late, he will really get going as if he’s barking at an intruder from his crate. But the only person he’s barking at is me. That’s the only intruder I ever find when I stumble in. I thought I wouldn’t be able to hear them in this new and improved house, but even though I’ve reached middle age, I still won’t learn.
Thick in Orlando
In Terminal B of the Orlando International Airport, there is an art installation. A cube of glass contains a man, sitting on the ground, resting against his bags. He is the Weary Traveler. He has fuzzy hair, a mustache, a Polo shirt, bad sneakers, love handles. He looks tired. The mannequin is eerily lifelike, so that there is a vibe of “is this man alive and sleeping? Or is this man actually fake?” outside the glass cube. Spectators, all in some stage of arriving or departing, circle warily, take pictures with their phones. It’s an unsettling scene, because the man is so lifelike and also because the level of irony is difficult to detect. Is this a sincere depiction of weary first-world travel, the culturally compelled hauling of children to tourist sights that are brand extensions of intellectual property franchises owned by an international entertainment conglomerate? Or is this installation making fun of everyone for doing the schlep? Are we being represented or implicated? Both? When headlines ask rhetorical questions in the New York Times or the Atlantic — “Will AI change pancakes forever?” — the safe answer is always No. But whenever I think of a binary question and wonder aloud if a particular situation isn’t both , the answer is yes, of course, it’s both. If it can be both, it is both.
I have traveled to Orlando, Florida, for work and pleasure more than any other American city. There are other cities where the in-laws live that I have traveled to more often, but that’s different. That’s for family reasons. It’s almost a sub home. Truthfully, I mostly come to Orlando for work. I’ve been here maybe fifteen times for two to three-day stretches, and what I remember every time I arrive is how little I remember about Orlando. Nothing in Orlando seems familiar, while still always being familiarly shallow. The sites of Orlando: toll roads, retaining ponds, screened-in swimming pools, flat highway vistas under construction. Palm trees. Malignant levels of sunlight. But there’s no emotional familiarity. The town feels conceptual, abstract, a 3-D printed version of a city. It possesses no nostalgic pull.
I have a friend who calls some locations “thin places,” and I think he means it in a kind of C.S. Lewisian sense of thinness, that is, a place whose pull on you is so strong that it seems to pull you into another dimension — of memory, of nostalgia, of friendship. This is unscientific, admittedly. And it sounds hokey, but I feel it, too. My prime example would be Oxford, Mississippi, a college town built on a square. It has the right mixture of incremental change and decade-upon-decade of sameness, so that it always feels utterly familiar. Also, it has an uncanny ability to act like a portal that leads to everyone else in Mississippi. I often joke that if you want to find someone in Mississippi, just go to Oxford and hang around for an hour. They will appear. Something will have brought them there. In this way it’s much more a hub of cultural activity than the capital city, Jackson, where I live. Oxford possesses a magnetism, and it’s not because of the football team.
In Orlando thickness reigns. I wonder if it has to do with the amount of construction in the city. Perhaps I just always go to different places? But that’s not quite right either, because I’ve stayed several times at the same hotel, though I don’t know what it looks like or how to get there. Its geographic relationship to the airport feels arbitrary, ad hoc, improvised each time upon my landing. The very entrances to the hotel property feel re-drawn before my arrival, deliberately unmemorable. I know I am near the “parks,” but I don’t know how near, or which ones.
At the Brookstone, in Terminal B, they’re selling the new Metallica LP. I read somewhere that Metallica had to purchase their own vinyl pressing facility in order to keep up with consumer demand. Life just keeps getting stranger. The electrical outlets inside the rows of chairs don’t work. Everything here is life As If. It’s not a trip if you don’t take notes.
Perhaps it’s because Orlando is in many obvious ways a deliberately fake city, a city whose primary economic engine is tourism, and not just tourism but a kind of live-action role playing of childhood entertainment, a deliberate fantasy land, a structured nostalgia. (Which I have taken my children to, and yes, they enjoyed the Uncrustables, just like everyone else, so what of it?)
It’s Vegas for children. (No smoking, no copulation.) It feels temporary. It feels season-less, and yet the buildings are simply this season’s model. It’s not necessarily bad. This is old news. This is meant to be observation not indictment. This is what happens when I show up too early for my flight. It’s a place that makes me want to buy a nine dollar coffee-adjacent beverage that contains a thousand calories. I feel there will be no great stories set on a Monorail.
Maybe the fact that I have no sticky memories from my trips to the city is just a consequence of middle age. Maybe I’m late to the magic of Orlando, or anywhere. Maybe it’s not the city but the traveler who is too thick to retain detail. Maybe I am the fake man, weary from my adventures through the fake landscape. The prepared environment. Is it any wonder that Terminal B is the only place that feels familiar, that feels somewhat homelike? It’s where I always end up. It does, after all, have a Chik-Fil-A.
On giving up
Well I finally quit Twitter. As in I stopped going there everyday, all day everyday intermittently, little bursts of scrolling, the networked reading version of smoking. For the first couple of weeks, Twitter would send me emails saying that I was missing notifications, and I would dutifully (that is, addictively) click over and see that the notifications were bogus. Someone had retweeted someone else, etc. No one was actually talking to me or about me. These emails seem to have stopped. Now Twitter doesn’t even care that I’m not there.
It’s a strange feeling. At first, I felt completely lost regarding the news. For some people, for normal people, this would have felt freeing, but I felt anxious. Something out there was happening, and I didn’t know the first thing about it. I didn’t even know the bad jokes about it. I didn’t know the memes. I hadn’t followed its digestion through the memeplex. I was losing touch with the references. Has my other internet usage increased to make up for the absence? For sure. I admit this with shame. The problem is that Instagram is, at its core, hopelessly boring. It’s mostly bad pictures that are advertisements. Even the people who think they are being sincere are posting advertisements, ads for their own vestigial sincerity. I gave up reading the Facebook wall a couple years ago (helpfully blocked by an app). Youtube is briefly distracting, but it is filled with so much algorithmic garbage that it’s like the broader streaming services: unless you already know what you intend to watch, you’re already lost. Plus Youtube is enough like sitting on the couch and watching an old-fashioned TV that it triggers my goofing-off alarm more reliably. It doesn’t have the academic veneer of reading. It doesn’t give the clean-burning freebase jolt of Twitter.
So there’s nowhere to go now. I have nothing to do. There are about five sites I routinely check, even though it’s mostly muscle memory at this point. They no longer spark joy, as the saying goes. There are three individuals whose tweets I miss. I will not name them. About every other day I google their names, and the search results include their last five tweets, which I can read without visiting the forbidden site itself. This has proven to be enough, a methadone for my madness. I don’t want to see all their tweets all the time anyway. I just miss their voices, their quips, their amusing links to other bits in the web of distraction. It helps that there are only three people who I can remember to google. There are others who are totally lost to me, who I only knew via Twitter and their prose-forged personalities there. I miss them, but I am also happy to be free of them because their near-constant presence was agitating. This is especially fraught for writers who are so composed in one form and so un-composed on Twitter. We’re all just so annoying on Twitter, myself included.
I wish I could say I quit because of Elon or some political reason, but the truth is that I quit because it was ruining my life, if just in a small way. When your kids joke that you’re addicted to Twitter; when you go to the bathroom in the middle of a dinner out mostly so you can look at Twitter; when you keep erecting barricades to prevent yourself from seeing so much Twitter, only to figure out ways to tunnel through regardless, it’s time to stop. It’s embarrassing. It’s a waste of time. It’s corrosive to your sense of proportion. If you could have moderated your interaction with all that decontextualized language, you would have done so long ago. Except for the occasional promotional link to a blog bost I had almost entirely stopped writing tweets. It was the reading that was always a problem, getting caught in the machine zone, which had been fun, could still be fun, but in smaller and smaller proportions. One went scrolling for the 5% of fun to be found, somewhere. When had it stopped being fun? I don’t want to depress everyone, myself included, by doing that math right now.
Of course none of this has solved the main problem, that being the internet and how it is the perfect complement to my own will to distraction. I don’t really mean the useful parts of the internet. Google maps is great. Zillow is provocative. Uber is handy on a trip. Having a boarding pass on my phone? Also neat. I like texting everyone. Big thumbs up for texting. Sending pics of the dog doing something cute. All that. I do have a thing now where the sound of texts arriving throws me into a medium panic, but that’s an essaylet for another day. What I mean really is the news, the updates, the media. I would say social media but really it’s anything that’s remotely close to “media.” Anything that moves faster than an ebook. (My review of all ebooks: convenient, but hard to browse.) Wikipedia is addictive in its own way, but it’s like gorging on steel-cut oats. You’ll get full before you do any serious attentional damage. Instead it’s the trolling for stimulation under the guise of being informed, checking one’s internet traps for tasty bits of dirt. What would it be like not to check anything, not to feel the need to check on stuff, to use the internet purely as a tool and not as a mechanism to goof off, which really is mechanism for entertainment, which really is a mechanism for self-soothing, self-care, if you will, a soothing agent, a drug, an opiate for the masses. Hey, if that phrase hasn’t been taken yet, dibs!
I like the idea of Lent, even if I never give anything up. Lent is a reminder, an italicization of the last third of winter, the final blow, the bleakest turn, the unambiguously worst part of the year. You should give up something for Lent, because you have to give up something for Lent, because the root cellar is nearly exhausted along with one’s patience for shoveling snow. My affinity is mostly gestural here in the south, where today it was in the mid-80s. This is one of our false springs.
For years I have joked that “this year for Lent I am simply giving up.” But perhaps I should make it more literal and give giving up a try. I should give up keeping up. Stop reading the news. Stop diverting myself. Stop checking in. Stop refreshing. Stop looking, stop searching. I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. Thus spake Bono, so many moons ago. You probably didn’t realize that he was singing about my problems with the internet back then.
I don’t know what I would do with this free time created by not checking on the internet. It would take me being a different person to accomplish it, but through this effort I maybe then could become yet another different person. And maybe I would like that person better? Or maybe I wouldn’t recognize that person at all.