i like it when i feel smarter than you
I’ve been thinking a little this morning about the appeal of books you could categorize as intelligent fatties: Ulysses, Infinite Jest, other books I have started but haven’t finished.
People experience joy reading these kinds of books and that makes me happy in the same way that some people like having gay sex makes me happy. I don’t have gay sex but I am happy that it’s being had and enjoyed because uniformity of desire scares me. It reminds me of that acidic feeling I had in sixth grade when a classmate told me all men wanted to have sex with Pamela Anderson.
But my question is this: Does anyone openly admit that they experience joy reading an ‘intelligent fatty’ because it makes them feel smarter than other people? Is that part of the appeal or is that the dirty little secret of the appeal or is that not even a factor?
Is Reading Really the Most Important Thing?
I have been really enjoying the interesting and insightful blog posts being written by the editors of Uncanny Valley. In a recent post, frequent HTMLGIANT commenter and Uncanny Valley co-editor Mike Meginnis offered notes on teaching an introductory creative writing class. He says really smart, practical things about teaching creative writing but I’ve been mulling over his first note quite a bit. He says, “1. Intro to CW should be more about ways of reading than ways of writing.” The more I think about this statement, the more I wonder if we rely too heavily on the notion that the best writers are the best readers. I think we offer this kind of advice more out of reflex than anything else. Hear me out. There is ample evidence that to write well, one must read well. Reading and learning how to read critically, exposes us to different writing styles, voices, and techniques. We can study styles we want to emulate. We can be challenged. We can see examples of how we want not to write. I cannot deny that some of my best writing instruction has come from reading everything I can get my hands on.
That said, I firmly believe while reading is important, it is not more important than writing and increasingly I worry we are sacrificing the practice of writing for young writers at the altar of reading. Without fail, almost every writer who is asked about what writers need to do to improve their craft states, first and foremost, that writers need to read. I’ve stated this myself, quite a few times, but either we’re teaching writing or we’re teaching reading and to have a creative writing class where writing is not foregrounded gets me thinking. Why isn’t it writing that is most important? Why don’t we say that to be a great writer, you need to, well, write?
Harry Houdini on Writing
“No performer should attempt to bite off red-hot iron unless he has a good set of teeth.”
“My professional life has been a constant record of disillusion, and many things that seem wonderful to most men are the every-day commonplaces of my business.”
“Only one man ever betrayed my confidence, and that only in a minor matter.”
“The great day of the Fire-eater–or, should I say, the day of the great Fire-eater–has passed.”
“It is still an open question, however, as to what extent exposure really injures a performer.”
Ars Poetica
Because I’m doing a presentation today on Horace’s “Ars Poetica” I’ve been reading various other versions of the poem about poetry. Horace, of course, being that dastardly villain who has filled countless heads with the tedious idea that literature should not just delight but also educate, who reached back to Aristotle and pulled those cumbersome ideas about unity, clarity, decorum, and morality up through the ages for people like Sidney, Pope, and Sartre to latch onto and pass along. Horace, who opens his version of the “Ars Poetica” (circa 30-10 BCE) with a preemptive attack on Surrealism:
Suppose a painter to a human head
Should join a horse’s neck, and wildly spread
The various plumage of the feathered kind
O’er limbs of different beasts, absurdly joined;
Or if he gave to view a beauteous maid
Above the waist with every charm arrayed,
Should a foul fish her lower parts infold,
Would you not laugh such pictures to behold?
Such is the book, that like a sick man’s dreams,
Varies all shapes, and mixes all extremes.
Horace, who liked his shapes and extremes clearly separated.
Anyway, I thought I’d share a few of the other Ars Poeticas I’ve come across. It’s an interesting form that allows for a wide range of approaches.
“You have no idea how repulsive it is to borrow a pencil only to discover it is a mimi kakki”
Sometimes I turn on one of the local Western Massachusetts channels and there is a commercial to promote the news. You see an anchor, then the anchor’s name, then the anchor talking in earnest about their roots in the area. “I’m Slop Slowdorf,” they might say. “I renewed my wedding vows at the Dr. Seuss Memorial. The Slowdorfs have lived in Springfield for six generations. How lucky am I to live and work in the same town where I grew up?” And watching this commercial I grow terrified and throw soup at the television. READ MORE >
Do You Mean What You Say?
Are the enemies of God welcome here at the Bay Shore Mennonite church? Verse 11 of Matthew 5 reads, “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.” But, seriously, what if the enemies of God (whatever that means) walked into church one Sunday morning screaming obscenities or staging a hunger strike in front of the podium? I seriously doubt the Mennonites would be down. Not to mention, this sign is probably not saying what it means (or meaning what it says for that matter). Does it mean, “Praise and worship the enemies of God” or “The enemies of God are welcome here” or “Praise and worship. The enemies of God, with reference to the Beatitudes. Welcome” ?
Look at this (bathroom poetics No. 3):
I believe that someone in the bathroom stall at Smokin’ Joes was tired after a few beers, a few missed opportunities, too much inhaled smoke. I believe it because it’s a likely scenario. But welcoming the enemies of God into your place of worship is not as likely on a number of levels, the most obvious being that “enemies of God” is the dumbest phrase in the world. Not that I am a realist, by a long shot. I like unlikely scenarios when the writer gives me the freedom (leeway, wiggle room) to not believe them literally.
On Vandalism, Ownership, Masturbation, and I/O
In April I visited the Cy Twombly museum in Houston. The door was open and there was no one at the desk. I walked around the series of rooms that form a rough circle by myself for twenty minutes before I saw or heard anybody else. I felt like at many points I could have done anything I wanted in those rooms to myself or to the paintings. I didn’t do anything but look.
In 2007, at another exhibition of work by Cy Twombly, a woman named Rindy Sam kissed 1 panel of the triptych titled Phaedrus, a set of all white canvas, getting red lipstick all over it, altering the white. She was arrested and tried in court.
The prosecution, calling it “A sort of cannibalism, or parasitism”, while admitting that Sam is “visibly not conscious of what she has done”, asked that she be fined 4500€, compelled to an assorted penalty, and to attend citizenship classes. The art work, which is worth an estimated $2 million, was on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Avignon. In November 2007 Sam was convicted and ordered to pay 1,000€ to the painting’s owner, 500€ to the Avignon gallery that showed it, and 1€ to the painter.
John Holmes on Writing
“A happy gardener is one with dirty fingernails, and a happy cook is a fat cook. I never get tired of what I do because I’m a sex fiend. I’m very lusty.”
“Sometimes you get a girl to work with who is gorgeous and with a fantastic body. That makes it all much easier. But I can concentrate on just one aspect of a girl if she doesn’t sexually appeal to me. I can concentrate on the color of her nipple or something like that and it gives me the necessary mental focus.”
“Friends will get you killed.”
‘I’ve never found a girl who could not take it. It’s really in the way you do it, though. I’ve had some women say they’ve had guys half my size who couldn’t get it in. The problem is that most guys don’t know how to read a lady and what she really wants. With some, you have to be gentle and romantic and with others you just have to get down and dirty. The secret is you have to get in touch with what they want.”
“I don`t always hide in the bathroom, sometimes I hide other places. It`s just that the bathroom is usually the only room with a lock on the door.”
“I don’t take drugs. Drugs take me.”