Matthew Simmons
Matthew Simmons lives in Seattle.
Don’t name names.
Sometimes I’ll read through a post here and read the comments, and someone will tell a story about an unnamed authors weird/bad/inappropriate behavior and I’ll think, “Man, who the hell did that?” And I’ll want the commenter or poster to name names. Tell me who did that weird/bad/inappropriate thing.
But names won’t be named. And I’ll think, “Aw, c’mon. Why not? What are you afraid of? Go on. Name the name!”
Someone else will ask for names to be named. Someone will say, “C’mon. Be honest. Just tell us who did that thing. It’s in the interest of open communication!”
And that’s about the time when I realize: bullshit. My desire to have a name named has nothing to do with open communication. It has nothing to do with honesty. I have one—and only one—motivation. I may come up with justifications after the fact, but I have one motivation.
I like gossip. That’s it. And everyone else does, too. We can mask our desire for names to be named in all sorts of higher-seeming justifications. But we just want to gossip.
So, fuck it. Don’t name names. We don’t really have any good reason to want them. And when we pressure you, cajole you, or try to make you feel like a coward for not naming names, remember that we’re completely full of shit. Don’t fall for it.
(Apologies for feeding the troll. Happens often enough, though.)
Writing Prompt: Rot
(Image is a gelatin silver print made from expired photo paper by Alison Rossiter.)
Step one: go to your files and pull out an old, old draft of a story that has never been published and never been finished.
Step two: give it a brief reread to remind yourself what the heck you were doing.
Step three: beginning at an unfinished section, begin to rot the story. Eliminate all unnecessary words from the final sentences of unfinished sections first. Make the meanings of those final sentences as ambiguous as possible.
Step four: start to infect the finished portions of the story with the same sort of rot. Pull out words from the middles of finished paragraphs if they were eliminated by rot in the unfinished sections. Eliminating a word gives you a foothold in those sentences and allows you to rot nearby sentences, too, but only the preceding and following sentences.
Rot out the story slowly, and with care. This is not simply hacking and slashing away at an old story.
Bonus: Rot out an entire character.
Happy Birthday, Acid.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-rWnQphPdQ
Happy birthday, LSD. Thanks for all you done for us over the years.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fyxNPz9-ks
Matthew Simmons—
This essay about the book Intermere in The Believer has me thinking about the old, weird Utopian novel. Like this one. Or some of the other books from Health Research Books. Question: do you readers have a favorite oddball Utopian book? Let’s hear about it.
16
Starting at 5:41, genius appears.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta2DePPtLo8
“It’s that easy to play guitar.”
This is one of the five funniest movies I’ve ever seen.
Can books be in love?
I was reading Joanna Howard’s lovely book of stories, On the Winding Stair, and thinking about the setting. And thinking about setting in general. And—for pretty obvious reasons, I suppose—was thinking about Brian Evenson’s book Dark Property. And thinking about his settings. And I was wondering if books could have soul-mates, if they could be made for each other.
My favorite work by Evenson is the stuff placed in a minimally rendered, hot, choked with dust, empty of all but the most barren of trees, flat desertscapes. His Beckett-ian Utah. His Old Surrealist West. READ MORE >
Steve Richmond has passed.
Steve Richmond, the subject of Mike Daily’s essay Gagaku Meat which I wrote about here, passed away on the 20th of October. Daily’s Richmond tribute group, Mr Viced Honest, performed for a final time on October 31.
I haven’t seen an obit anywhere. Mike, would you like to write one for us?
Memoirs are bullshit
James Frey was forced to sit down and let Oprah tear him to pieces before a studio audience because he committed the greatest crime a writer could commit. He made a bunch of people feel something when they read a novel. They thought they were reading something real. They connected with it and felt something. Turned out it wasn’t precisely real. It was embellished. It was changed to serve the story instead of the reality that the story was based on. All those folks who spend their lives vicariously feeling something through other people’s tragedies were angry that they felt something for a story instead of something that happened in the real world. They pilloried the jerk who went and made them feel something over a work of fiction.
This fetish for “real” is the most embarrassing part of the contemporary reading public. The memoir is, for the most part, just exhibitionists flashing their genitalia at voyeurs. Our Puritan ancestry is likely to blame for all of this.
Let’s hope the memoir dies soon and we can get back to the more important writerly pursuit: making shit up.
“What America needs most is tact.”
(Have I posted this before? Am I a broken record? Sorry.)
Matthew Simmons—
It’s nice sometimes to just say some shit, isn’t it? “When it comes to proving points and making cases, fiction’s day is done,” Yagoda says.