The Cliché, Walking about Town
I’ve gone to a few readings over the past couple weeks, good readings, readings which—for the most part—I’ve enjoyed. But at these readings, I discovered the firm cliché that I inhabit and perpetuate: the nervous writer, fraught with agoraphobia and insecurity.
I’m a nervous person, yes. I’m an anxious person, naturally. And I’m insecure, obviously. In most social situations where the social circle is greater than three in number (myself included), I perform the role of quirky, smart, anxious writer. I make myself smaller—usually by sitting with my legs under me, my body squeezed into a tight, strange shape. When I speak, I speak either too gregariously—making bold statements about this or that, generally unsubstantiated by anything but my own opinion and a few writers/thinkers I can quote with ease, old stand-bys like Nabokov or Kafka, Adorno or Bataille, if I’m feeling particularly insecure, I’ll go with Benjamin or Baudrillard or Baudelaire, people who make me seem smart—or I mumble to the point of inaudibility.
Don’t write all over the goddamn books please.
I hate blurbs on book covers, at least put that shit on the back if it’s all you can do you think you have to to sell your shit and maybe you’re right, I’m no good at selling it. A terrible telemarketer, I would probably make a mediocre regional fertilizer salesman, which is to say I would be shitty at selling shit. So you go on building bridges and stuff. I mean I get it. It’s silly but I’m better at burning them britches. What I like is to consume my brain food from a plain colored box, like an Oreo milkshake, or expensive yogurt the way Muslims frown on figure drawing in the mosque. I think that’s rad. Frown away Mohammad. Patterns are whatever. Pyramids are when. They are good to think on I think. I like to gaze at them and think on Gawd oh gawd the stars the trees. But my kind of cover is a naked Knopf hardbound from the 60s. Maybe I’m boring and probably it’s vain but I don’t want other people’s opine opinions influencing my internal dialogue, not until I’ve digested my lunch which is to say eaten the text the film the album the thing and pooped out an opinion of some kind, however odd it might look oblong and oblique, not until I’ve had time to play with it to prod it to scrape and slice it beneath the blade of my tongue. But I like first for a thing to be in space like a rock in the ground pulsing tight 600 million miles a fucking hour going this is True btw, and then to have it there in my mouth in my ears my eyes huge like a fresh batch of fungus, a bunch of firecrackers going off in my bulb my skull my head. My favorite thing said in French is J’ai mal à la tête. To think of it rolls off the tongue like butter on bread.
Some Thoughts on Fundraising
This morning I backed three fantastic literary projects over at Kickstarter. I am a fundraiser by trade, and watching all those fundraising videos kind of raised my ire. All three of the fundraising campaigns I backed had huge problems with the structure, arguments, conception, and tone of their videos and accompanying text. I thought: Why can’t these people fundraise right? Then I thought: Because no one’s taught them. (To be clear: these three projects are all worth funding. Very worth funding. I urge you to back all three of them.)
Book Selling Strategies 101
Last week, I had a book launch for The Evolutionary Revolution, which came out a while ago, sure, but whatever. It was fun times. It was at a small, independent bookstore. I read in front of the cash register. The bookstore was packed, and I sold a good number of books. It was a “best selling” night for the bookstore.
But then, last night, I went to a friend’s place and met another writer who had his book launch over the weekend at Indigo Books (the Canadian equivalent to Barnes & Noble or Borders), and he told me for his launch, he didn’t read. O no no. They set up a table right at the entrance to the bookstore and had him greet customers as they came in. By the pure virtue of his being a writer—A real writer who wrote and published a real book! How amazing is that?—people bought! He sold more books than I did. And he didn’t even read.
DECRIMINALIZED
So Schwarzenegger decriminalized marijuana a couple days ago (law goes into effect January 1). What writers are huge stoners? David Foster Wallace… who else? I’m thrilled to hear about this news, since on principle I think all drugs should be decriminalized, although personally I loathe weed — always seems like an incredible waste of time, doesn’t do anything particularly interesting to your thoughts the way more intense drugs do, after 20 minutes I get impatient for my mind to return to normal, and I don’t like being around other stoned people.
HTMLGIANT Birthday #2
How many fingers are we now? Two fingers. Any two you want! Thanks for hanging out and being cool and talking about books.
This weekend I ate bbq and read past page 750 in 2666 and had some gin and coffee (not together) and deleted a bunch of words out of a manuscript. What did you do?
Once There Was Great Writing Here
I am a big proponent of electronic and online publishing but there is a permanence to a physical book or magazine that cannot be denied. This is not to say that physical books cannot disappear. They can and do, but it takes time and effort or neglect. When something is published online, it only takes one click of the mouse to remove it. That work might remain in Google’s cache for a while but eventually, it will disappear entirely, like the words were never there.
Friendly Fire
Dear Stephen,
I actually started writing this as a private email to you, but then I thought that posting about it would be more in the spirit of the Rumpus, and that the resulting conversation might be a useful one–more useful than if it was just you and me emailing. So here goes.
Why do so many posts on The Rumpus start from the premise that the author is somehow incapable or a weakling? I feel like I see examples of this all the time, but looking at the frontpage right now, there’s the Angela Stubbs article on Gina Frangello (second sentence: “She’s [the] kind of person you meet and you know seconds after meeting them, they’re capable of things you’d never be able to accomplish.”) and then the newest installment of Sari Botton’s Conversations with Writers Braver than Me, which I’m sorry, is about as terrible a name for a column as I can imagine–which is a shame, since it’s a good column. Oh and there was the Steve Almond’s “One Over Forty,” which was, actually, in some limited but real sense brave, and yet insisted on assuming the posture of a whipped puppy, even though the only one doing the whipping was Almond himself. Other examples abound, if anyone wants to go dig them out. I guess what I am asking is, have other people noticed this trend? And what is the deal with it? Does anyone have any ideas?
Unsurprisingly, I have an idea–and it’s that the Rumpus just happens to be where I’ve noticed something that is much larger: part of a general trend in contemporary indy- and small-press lit-land that insists on modesty to the point of self-abasement, encourages people to get awestruck at the drop of a hat, and rewards the expression of self-doubt rather than self-confidence. I think it’s related to the question Blake posed the other day, about why writers obsess in public over their rejections in a way that they never would (and, crucially, would never be allowed to) over their successes. In the case of both the above-quoted Stubbs sentence and the Botton column title, the attempt seems to be to pay a compliment to the subject of the piece, but the actual effect is to deflect positive attention from the subject (Frangello; Gould) and back onto the writer of the piece in the form of negative attention. In both cases, the reader has been put on notice that the author may not be equal to her chosen subject-matter.
It has not escaped my attention that both these examples are of women writing about other women. I keep trying to figure out how gender and gender-role-enforcement might play into this, but it’s a little bit more than I’m prepared to take on right now, other than to say that in American culture women are consistently forced to adopt or rewarded for adopting an aww-shucks posture in relation to the people and things that they would champion. This is a tendency which ought to be resisted with main force. Last thoughts: There’s no honor in being called brave by a self-professed coward. If your goal is to tell somebody “you are awesome,” try not to follow it right away with “and I am shit.”
Keyhole Book Submissions
Kudos to Peter Cole for writing the best submission guidelines since those at Muumuu House. From KeyholePress.com:
Books. Fiction Collections, Novels, Novellas, etc.We are not accepting book submissions. Really, we can’t do much for you that you can’t already do for yourself. We encourage authors to release books independently.
Right on. I am for that too, once he convinced me of it. I called Peter a while ago and asked him to put the Keyhole logo on Say, Poem so that later I could put it on a CV saying I had a book from them. He basically said, why bother? He said, get a backbone. Make self-publishing worthwhile and legitimate. If you’re smart, he said, that’s the way to go.