Craft Notes
On Being Clever
If you’re over eight years old, you don’t want anybody calling your art clever. Right? Clever is bad. Smart is good, maybe the best kind of smart is so smart it’s stupid. Dumbstruck. Two fish / this is water. Bill, a guy my father hated, out on the roof fixing our swamp cooler in the kind of beautiful July afternoon that gives California the best avocados. And Bill calls out: “Ain’t there just some days you’re glad to wake up?” And my father, talking to Bill through the slats of the swamp cooler, agrees. This is so stupid it’s smart. But it would’ve been clever if my father had said “Yeah, and there’s other days I’m just glad to fall asleep.” Too clever by half. Clever as measurement. Clever as cleaver. Perhaps from E.Anglian dialectal cliver, “expert at seizing,” Influenced, perhaps, by O.E. clifer “claw, hand.” Sammy Johnson said: “This is a low word, scarcely ever used but in burlesque or conversation; and applied to any thing a man likes, without a settled meaning.” Clever of me to say Sammy instead of Samuel, to make you think an extra nano-second who I mean, clever doesn’t want to give the other person credit (of course I knew you meant Samuel, asshole), clever means I’m hungry to catch the bus before you. Clever basically as cowardice and fear of intimacy. Right?
Early Eminem is clever. Skittering and bitter, accents on the plosives, rattatat. Clever is the sucker punch. “My name is—what? My name is—who?” By the time you figure me out I’m gone. Shifty-eyed casting for the escape hatch. Clever is the kid you can’t hug. Clever is the refuge of the scrawny. Can’t beat me up, I’m too clever. Fox comes out at night, fox doesn’t throw down in the open. Clever is the wriggle-away, which isn’t to be trusted, clever yourself when you can’t trust. Laughing and wincing at the clever. Clever is the joke that enjoys the violence of humor, the way humor elicits this eruptive shiver. Bark for me, bitches—says the clever. Is humor always violent? Is there a humor of togetherness? Ha ha. Clever is that Lorrie Moore story where there are three pages of Ha Ha. But aren’t all those Ha Ha’s beautiful? Aren’t they also a jail? Clever is to sharpen your skate by making a hole in the ice everybody looks at for a second, and by the time they look up, you’re half-way gone on what’s frozen. Rhyme so fast they can’t catch you. Dazzle. But dazzle like an onslaught of bauble-drabble. Not dazzle like rendering in them a hand-over-their-breath Experience, which is a good dazzle, holy dazzle. Holy vs. holy moley. My favorite football play to run in the old Sierra Front Page Sports Football game was the razzle dazzle, mostly because its skew of receiver routes looked the best. Lines in and out, every receiver and running back a different color. But the most reliable play was when the tight end snuck up the middle for the long toss. I remember that play being called Telekinesis.
Clever when we get a limited turn at the mic. Clever in the comment box, clever in the commentary. Clever as remember me. Not a plea, an imperative. Too scared to plead. Fuggetaboudit. Runnin’ yo mouth. Clever as leaving the g off the active tense. Too fast for that g, bud. Clever as calling people your friends when they’re not. Bud, pal. Wise guy, eh? But this is also a habit of the people who beat up the clever people. Listen, bub. Everybody violent who wants you to know that not only are they going to commit violence against you, it’s gonna be personal. On top of that. That’s what she said. O Michael Scott, you think you wanna be clever, you think you want people to like you and you want to be in charge not only of them but of their feelings toward you, but that’s not what you want. You want love. Plain old. Jim, he’s the clever one, he’s the one with the “winning” smile, he’s the contestant, he’s the one who looks at the camera for approval and comradeship, he’s the one who can’t be comrades with anybody in his eyeshot because he craves the imaginary better-person-always-out-there in the camera, the one who looks suspiciously like his own reflection. He’s the one who has to defend himself with a joke when Pam makes him uncomfortable about the infinity of love. At least Michael wants to talk about how many kids he wants before he dies. Let’s hear Jim talk about death, kiddo. Say what you want about Michael, but he knows that when he leans over the well of love and yells his name, he’ll never hear back an echo.
Clever might be a fun way to pass the time, but it’s not a major accomplishment. “I’m like a head trip to listen to, cause I’m only givin you / things you joke about with your friends inside your living room.” Why is it a hallmark of the clever to make you figure out what the joke is after the clever is gone? Why do people who are clever spend a lot of time making references? Is it clever to be referential? Is it holy to be original? Well of course it’s holy to be an origin, duh. Clever as scornful. I looked at the drizzle out the window, then I looked at my face, and I thought “Smirk-in-residence.” Snark. Onomatopoeia of those words, first the tsk of the hissy S, hiss as in psh or gimme-a-break (cleave me off a piece of that Kit Kat Lever), then the slightest mouth curl to make that k, clever as maximum efficiency of energy. It’s good to be a clever tennis player. Clever is good in games: clever chess player. But art is not a game. Yes, master. Art is life and death. Yes’m. Clever people, ergo, don’t rouse themselves to supplication in the face of the grave. Clever people are too afraid to sign the lease on their own heart. They just squat and hide in the bathtub when the landlord comes over, making shower whoosing noises with their mouth. “Ninety-nine percent of my life I was lied to … I lay awake and strap myself in the bed / Put a bulleproof vest on and shoot myself in the head.” But Eminem got better cuz he got more heart, yo. Heartfelt. Head as the clever master, terrible too, and heart as the humble nun. Or wait, is the head just a terrible master because it won’t shut up? There can be varieties of always on, right? Nothing’s really in the heart, heart’s just Grand Central for blood routes, c’mon, you’re clever enough to know that. Maybe one reason to disable the terrible master is because it’s too full of boundless empathy and curiosity; maybe another reason is it won’t stop snipping. Yakking. Clever as that way certain people always bob their shoulders and eyebrows. Clever as the nervous body taken control of. Clever as the hatred and fear of silence. Clever as the look-over-there-at-that-penis-shaped-banana when somebody tells you they love you but they’re afraid. Maybe, okay, that’s really unhealthy clever, needn’t be that extreme. Or maybe all clever skitters toward this failure, this clever-as-I-can-only-occupy-my-own-awareness-therefore-I-must-be-smarter-than-everybody miswiring of logic, this conclusion borne of loneliness that reinforces 
loneliness, clever as the unhumble. But the reaction to clever is fear too, oh-that-kid-being-clever-again eye roll. Studies show that nervous body language makes you lose your job. Maybe the bosses don’t fear that the kid is actually smarter than them, but at least that she’s younger, that she’s full of energy, that she has discarded any need for us and has chosen to flail in the Burger King ball pit of her own cleverness, and doesn’t this reveal our uselessness? Clever as the world always there for use, the word always there for usurping, and who needs anybody else when you’ve got this philosophy of utility? Too clever by half. Clever as the claw, clever as the ripper. “Hi kids! Do you like violence? (Yeah yeah yeah!) / Wanna see me stick Nine Inch Nails through each one of my eyelids?” Hello? Your name is what? Sorry I can’t hear you because I’m too busy thinking of a funny nickname to give you. Wait a minute, maybe I should put quotes around “give.” Would that be too clever?
Tags: cleverness, Eminem
You’re clever
Everybody’s clever nowadays
You’re clever
Everybody’s clever nowadays
Mike? I hug you. Tenderly.
this is great read.
though while we’re on tennis: it’s good to be a clever tennis player, but it’s better to be one who outwills the clever.
aaron, thanks for the ref; the genre of the unlinked reference in the comment area; the commentator’s wink; dennis miller was a terrible MNF announcer or was he a great one?; aaron, i think of you as an almost obsessively clever poet, and hilarious maybe exactly for that obsession; have you made peace with cleverness?; do you worry about it?; i think that song you referenced is a brilliant complication of cleverness/tenderness; “You are sleeping / You do not want to believe”
better but less popular; that epic long isner match was purgatory incarnate; so boring!; also doesn’t clever in the game suggest an effort to break the will?; make you look stupid; stupid as the enemy of grace, but only in the game, not in life (or art?)
interesting post
Jon Brion has a quote i like in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnhbHFgagIM
about how of Montreal isn’t just doing their impression of the archetype of a cool artist. the band/Kevin Barnes is willing to risk being uncool and raw and earnest as well as cool. i think Kanye has that too
i like when artists seem to be doing more than their impression of being an artist. to me that requires personal investment and vulnerability in some fashion.
Cortazar said something like art is a game to which one may devote his life. That said, I think his puzzles are moving and are of him, he’s in them, they’re not *just* puzzles. This is relative. Obviously one could say of course the writer’s in the puzzle, or conversely the puzzle “did” the artist, the artist has no agency, blah blah. I think an artist knows what he or she is doing, knows if he or she is “in there” or not.
P.S. i would consider my own work “more successful” the more people had a strong reaction to it. that would suggest to me i’ve moved some people and pissed off the others via unfamiliarity/fear/biases/preconceptions
yes, less popular. and clever was better when the ball wasn’t being killed like it is today. now too often clever in tennis, to me, indicates a lack of will, a lack of imposition, a lack of digging down when deeper is what’s needed; when a tiebreak in the third looms, clever won’t do anything but slip. a dropshot, a slice out wide, a slip cleverly into net: the big hitters have also become the grinding workers and those tricks won’t work. it’s why Djokovic is 26-0 this year, Federer has dropped to number 3, and Nadal’s spin can’t save him on hardcourt.
isner is a serve (unfortunately) and is completely unwatchable.
but this is lit blog! no sports!
People should lay off clever. Any Smith’s reference is appreciated, though. Clever is thin, but tougher than you think. I’ve had shifts of bar drinking in mixed company with only 1.3 to 2.0 clever incidents, and that’s with the fog of alcohol lowering the bar.
oh and oh, clever and grace, i think, are obviously not the same, but can sometimes go hand-in-hand, to great affect, in tennis or life or art. clever without grace (whether physical or no), though, is a bit hollow, again in all three.
and this has all made me think of DFW’s “Federer as Religious Experience,” which is still a perfectly accurate assessment of modern tennis, though he couldn’t forsee Nadal’s dominance of Federer’s grace-based game.
yes, that essay is basically an ekphrastic appreciation of the Federer Viewing Experience, and it’s also totally beautiful in itself for how yes-exactly it is
but the next fed will do the same thing as fed: he will shame you into thinking a work ethic will ever work; he will convince you (or trick you) that there is mortality and then there’s more-than–
besides, to kill the ball doesn’t have to mean to obliterate it, to drop a bunch of doh-bombs; i’ve been reading about dictatorships lately and i’ve concluded that outright slaughter is so much less clever than the demoralizing effects of theatrical slaughter–
sadly, tho, this is all to say that i think you’re right about tennis; but tennis abhors itself when it gets like this; i mean l. hewitt for chrissake, ugh; fed saved us from hewitt and the next fed will save us when he feels like it–
it’s interesting, i would agree that someone like kevin barnes is on same basic level vulnerable/raw; but i dunno if i’d say they’re “risking” it; they’re like achilles artists or something; it’s only because they’re so busy trying so hard to be cool, a flurry of posing and retreating from poses; a now-you-see-me-now-you-see-me-over-here; that their vulnerability gapes because of how much it stands out “among” or “against” the rest of their shtick; i would say in this example the artistic failure to sustain cleverness is just that: a failure or an accident; the alien exploding out of the armor; which, of course, makes for some very interesting s—
kanye, i think, is different
it’s interesting, i would agree that someone like kevin barnes is on same basic level vulnerable/raw; but i dunno if i’d say they’re “risking” it; they’re like achilles artists or something; it’s only because they’re so busy trying so hard to be cool, a flurry of posing and retreating from poses; a now-you-see-me-now-you-see-me-over-here; that their vulnerability gapes because of how much it stands out “among” or “against” the rest of their shtick; i would say in this example the artistic failure to sustain cleverness is just that: a failure or an accident; the alien exploding out of the armor; which, of course, makes for some very interesting s—
kanye, i think, is different
clever thrives on being “thin but tougher than you’d think,” yes; that’s its whole strategy, i’d say
clever thrives on being “thin but tougher than you’d think,” yes; that’s its whole strategy, i’d say
frankly, i hope federer himself saves us, at least for few more years, because no one plays with his grace, power, and cleverness; and to watch Federer is to watch everything good about the body – it is his lack of will that’s let him slip. for what is to be won? it’s clear on the court that Djokovic and Nadal won’t let any outdoing be done. that rhymed stupidly.
for Fed, that yeats’ poem applies, i think: “what then?”
I am opposed to cleverness for cleverness’s sake! But cleverness with a target, as in your meditation above, which I read as a moderately clever interrogation of the notion of cleverness, begins to spin in a delightful sort of way. In my own writing I try to purge out the clever-only stuff and keep in the self-defeating, world-weary, love-lorn, spiteful, etc., stuff, because that seems most real. I think the more our writing is things and not *about* things, the more our writing has value. But i can tell you, when I write, I do not wonder or worry about how clever my writing is. I do love Morrissey, too. I also like Amelie, which seems clever with a target to the point that it’s just a beautiful object per se.
It’s nice to see Steve chiming in here. Steve, even in light of the somewhat snarky and probably ill advised comments i made on WWATD about your work, one thing I don’t think about it is that it’s too clever. It’s very much just there, a la Gertrude Stein, or Jasper Johns, and compelling for that reason. There are aspects of what you do I really aspire to. Your work is a huge relief from 90 percent of what passes for poetry out there. “Out there.” Gehh.
hi belz, you’re thinking of my good friend, Steve Roggenbuck. i’m Stephen Tully Dierks.
oh, i didn’t mean obsessively clever as a pejorative; i meant i like the visibility of that struggle, what you call a purging technique; “Let us learn to bore each other / without worrying about it.”; that’s interesting what you write about trying to go after the most real, and about things having targets; clever, in certain default modes, seems definitely hostile without a target, or with everything targeted; i like the idea of clever somehow in a staring contest against the list you made: self-defeating, world-weary, love-lorn, spiteful, etc.
Oops. Well nice to meet you, anyway; i agree very much with your comment that an artist needing to do more than an impression of being an artist. But I ‘ve also found that people get into trouble when they resist acting like what they are, if that makes any sense.
Funny, Mike. I don’t think I’ve ever thought much about clever, but clearly you have. Is that a clever thing to say? I don’t think I’ve ever said clever, the word, out loud before. Maybe my vocabulary’s limited. Where’s the line, though, between clever/etc.? Does it matter? Sometimes I think we think too much.
“clever” is level
Right on. Philip Levine once critiqued a batch of my poems as “too clever by half.” I still have the letter. I thought, at the time, game on then, fella. I’ll be as clever as I want. Now, though, I’ve come round to his perspective and think moderate cleverness is great but it can be overbearing or targetless. Still, i don’t make an effort to be it.
Note, i think, that the clever aspect of literature, or “wit,” used to be prized– in Shakespeare’s day, then in Donne’s, shortly thereafter. It was the Romantics that regarded cleverness suspiciously, as something inauthentic. Then the Transcendentalists were also pretty hooked on being genuine. And you know, Modernists, i think, are just Romantics in sheeps’ clothing. I can’t tell if new stuff (Eggers, Collins, etc) is really witty or clever or just our poetics letting itself relax a bit so it doesn’t always have to paint a landscape.
Obviously this is a topic worthy of discussion, so maybe you should write a follow up piece.
i’ve been thinking about dennis miller lately too, mike
This essay was both exceedingly clever and smug. Try again.
[…] On Being Clever | HTMLGIANT […]
i stopped reading at ‘clever is bad’
the best eminem song is “rain man”
maybe “ass like that” is better
if eminem is clever then odd future is clever
let’s be real god
‘we’re through with being clever’
I confess I didn’t read all of the post but I’m wondering if you/other commenters are concentrating on clever like a clever joke, and ignoring clever like a clever mechanism. I think a clever mechanism is a very good thing, one that works in a way that you maybe instantly appreciate, but also think “I never would have thought of that” or something. if a poem, for instance, was clever in this way, that’d be good maybe?
who wrote “a poem is a machine”? I googled it, it turns out more than one person has used that line. it is clever, after all (ha).
wait wait. marshall mathers?
When sans corkscrew, you can hold the bottle upside-down between your knees and strike the bottom of the bottle with a shoe. Tap with shoe. Cork will gradually slide out. When almost out, upend and pull.
Most any door jamb will open your beer.
Puns.
i think there are a lot of interesting and various complicated definitions of clever / scorn toward cleverness / appreciation of cleverness / etc. it’s interesting to me how it all works together and what sorts of ideological stuff lurks there
i think i would, in an immediate reaction, think of what you’re talking about as more “smart” than “clever,” but i’m not 100% sure why
i think WCW is the origin of the machine/poem fetish? “To make two bold statements: There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem, I mean that there can be no part that is redundant.”
The person who invented chess.
I have a friend in Mississippi who named his yellow dog Yellow Dog.
“clever” used to dismiss an uncomfortably strong argument
It is true that the Elizabethans and the Jacobeans valued comedy, and it is perhaps true that the Romantics disdained it. But for Shakespeare or Donne to say he prized wit is something a little bit other. At that time, “wit” primarily meant intelligence. This sense survives minorly, especially in idiomatic expressions like “to have your wits about you” and “at your wit’s end.” You could say it was even more than intelligence, and included concepts like wisdom, common sense, prudence, acumen, sanity, understanding. Late in the 16th c. it began to mean a quickness or liveliness of intellect, especially with regard to expression. A sparkling wit. But my feeling is that even in this sense, it meant something more than when we say someone is witty. It was a higher compliment. By the time of the Romantics, though, it was much closer to the current meaning, at least predominately. In fact, I get the sense that it meant humor without wisdom, later on.
I’ve had a change of heart about clever, though I think of it less as applied to someone’s art, and more so as a description of a person. I used to think, nobody would want to be called clever. It seemed to mean a somewhat lesser order of intelligence than “smart” or “intelligent” or “brilliant” or “genius.” “A clever girl,” that kind of thing. But maybe because it just isn’t thrown around the way brilliant and genius are, I privately think of the people whose minds I respect the most as being very clever. I like its senses of being nimble, quick, dexterous; the OED says, “the brain in the hand.” It seems a more physical, resourceful, productive, useful kind of intelligence rather than simply one that consumes and regurgitates. I think I understand it differently than you, Mike, but that’s not to say I disagree, just that I’ve gone through a kind of separate but maybe parallel evolution of thinking about it, and I really enjoyed the post and thinking about it as a different kind of thing.
The tactical wit that comes bundled in charm will provide so much more for someone than intelligence, which mostly brings pain.
well, i’ll give ya that; “tactical:” exactly
yeah, i like this; i think our understandings are similar in the sense of clever as tactics, usefulness, resourcefulness; but i think of that resourcefulness almost strictly in the sense of self-protection, and if i’m reading you right you’re talking about it in a more general way, as in resourcefulness for whatever task might arise; i like “the brain in the hand”
There’s a witcrafty sketch for a priority grid: plotting from Provision to Poverty on the X-axis against from Intelligence to Anaesthesia on the Y-axis.
Clever gets you one up from dull, but won’t on its own get you to profound. That being said, in my experience most profound things got to being profound by way of the clever.
Clever gets you one up from dull, but won’t on its own get you to profound. That being said, in my experience most profound things got to being profound by way of the clever.
Clever gets you one up from dull, but won’t on its own get you to profound. That being said, in my experience most profound things got to being profound by way of the clever.
bro it’s marshall mallicoat duhh. @marshallmallico creator of such tweets as “gonna join a co-op and be really shitty to everyone”
but how sweet would it have been if it was eminem commenting? pretty sweet I think.
this comment has nothing to do with being clever or smug
it does have something to do with buffalos
i’m not trying to be clever
i just like the song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWsRz3TJDEY
chic-goods.com
mimi, together we will defeat the haters with early hip hop songs that have the word buffalo in their titles
Amy, you’re right. I received this etymology lesson in stereo from you and a friend of mine who is a Shakespeare scholar.
Another note on this conversation (as if anybody reads a comment buried this deeply in a thread) is that Oscar Wilde was witty/clever. His gaity shone like a beacon. And how about Joseph Heller? This morning I moderated a student panel of papers on Catch-22, which is one clever novel….almost disgustingly clever. It does have a target. The book, i think, is almost as much about the way the human brain misfires as it is about war or bureaucracy.
A final note: there ought to be some serious critical work done on Morrissey. Who will do it? Or does it already exist?
Amy, you’re right. I received this etymology lesson in stereo from you and a friend of mine who is a Shakespeare scholar.
Another note on this conversation (as if anybody reads a comment buried this deeply in a thread) is that Oscar Wilde was witty/clever. His gaity shone like a beacon. And how about Joseph Heller? This morning I moderated a student panel of papers on Catch-22, which is one clever novel….almost disgustingly clever. It does have a target. The book, i think, is almost as much about the way the human brain misfires as it is about war or bureaucracy.
A final note: there ought to be some serious critical work done on Morrissey. Who will do it? Or does it already exist?
Amy, you’re right. I received this etymology lesson in stereo from you and a friend of mine who is a Shakespeare scholar.
Another note on this conversation (as if anybody reads a comment buried this deeply in a thread) is that Oscar Wilde was witty/clever. His gaity shone like a beacon. And how about Joseph Heller? This morning I moderated a student panel of papers on Catch-22, which is one clever novel….almost disgustingly clever. It does have a target. The book, i think, is almost as much about the way the human brain misfires as it is about war or bureaucracy.
A final note: there ought to be some serious critical work done on Morrissey. Who will do it? Or does it already exist?
I’d love to sit through one workshop where it wasn’t evidently clear someone was desperately waiting to hear confirmation on just this point. Yes, you’re clever. Yes, I’ll pat you on the head. Next?
interesting: so you mean in workshops you have a violent/scornful/impatient reaction to what you perceive as cleverness? have you ever confronted anyone about this? like have you asked directly “are you being clever here? do you just want me to say you’re clever?”
[…] asses at HTML have been discussing the idea of clever. Shouldn’t we take this Jason Bredle poem into the conversation? Is he being clever? Is he […]
[…] to read. That is, they read like they’re lit majors: they read for analysis and to say something clever about the text. (I was no exception before and during my […]