Doogie Howser was the first person I ever saw use a computer as a journal. Ricky from Silver Spoons was the first person I ever saw IMing with his crush.
Gains today: Quite a few words written. A few stories read.
I reread “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” for the first time in many, many years. I must have been very young the last time, because I don’t remember it being so short. I also read “A Day’s Wait,” which, I mean, isn’t very good. You have to really be into the code hero and all of that to delve into the scholarship, and I’m just not that interested. I’m too old for that side of Hemingway, at least right now. I also read “The Killers,” and have decided that “Fifty Grand” is much better. Though I do like the sparse description of the lunch counter.
I also learned that George Saunders was a young Objectivist, which reminds me very much of Andrew Sullivan’s explanation of his youthful Thatcherism. I can relate to both of these experiences. I got into Rand because of a girl. There were weird tracts in the Rand books at the public library, and that could probably make for a decent story. Not right now, though.
I did get some good words down and out. But they were divided between two stories, and none went toward the story I planned on adding to today. So I feel a little scattered, but that’s okay, because the ideas are really coming. Depending on who you listen to, control is a myth or a must. The more you sort of whittle down, the more you tend to know which claim is most helpful in the moment.
Earlier today, I shared a piece that I said was the first thing I had published in a print journal.
Later, I was working on a story partly set at a sort of proxy for my undergraduate alma mater.
When I came to campus in 1998, the website was in very basic html, and the college email ran on DOS (I think. It was text-based at any rate). 21 years later, there’s a fairly robust digital history of all kinds of things Ursinus.
I went down the rabbit hole.
Regarding the venue from this morning, what I should have said was it the first print journal run by people I didn’t know or go to school with to publish my creative work.
Of course, I hadn’t forgotten about the Lantern. Of course it was the first print journal to ever publish my creative work. (Alright, here again I’m wrong. In sixth grade, I was co-founder, co-editor, co-publisher, and staff writer for zine called ZAP! In middle school, we briefly considered relaunching as The Jolly Rancher, but it wasn’t meant to be.)
The Lantern piece, which you can find here, was written a few years before I got to Ursinus. I was about 16, broken-hearted, and listening to a shit-ton of Beck. That it was published alongside things written by 22-year-olds, and that it won the yearly prize for creative writing, has always meant a lot to me.
This piece was published maybe 10 years ago at a venue that no longer exists. When I first started publishing short fiction, there were many new, experimental web journals. Many of them were very good. Many good ones still exist, but many are, as David Thomas might say, now ghost-towns.
This piece also appeared in the first edition of my chapbook, What Other People Heard When I Taught Myself to Speak. That manuscript is going through some new revisions with a second edition coming sometime in the spring.
I Love You When You’re Pretty
When you said hi, I didn’t see you in her fitted polka dots and your hair like a USO girl and your legs in heels. Everyone is beautiful in your grandma’s pictures but we dress with conscience now, buffing out your curves or the square cut of my shoulders with fair-trade cotton. What right do you have, anyway, in eye shadow and stockings, wearing lipstick I can only see close? What right do I have, now, to closeness, to feel like cigarettes won’t kill me and sex is not transaction? What right to be pretty? And to love you when you are?
As you may know (I pretend there are people following along), I have been reading The Crying of Lot 49. The post horn is a central image. Yesterday, I reported back that an extraterrestrial encounter with Billy Joel has made me question what Pynchon makes of the modern world. So much terrible, lying media (the muting of truth), and so much inconsequential media (the scholarly paper from 1975 I linked to is one example, this blog itself is another).
Entropy and synchronicity are central to the novel. The abstract to this piece on JStor suggests that Pynchon’s obsession (speaking of Synchronicity) with punning shows that Lot advances language as the only possible perpetual motion machine. Puns are necessarily synchronistic, and they generate all kinds of permutations without requiring more input:
Thomas Pynchon offers, in “The Crying of Lot 49” (1966) and other novels [Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), “Mason and Dixon” (1997)], the pun as an energy-generating alternative to entropy in its ability to multiply meanings, to proliferate “output” from a single source, a word, or an image. In Pynchon’s usage, the pun, even more than Maxwell’s Demon, defies the second law of thermodynamics: it actually creates energy, causing a word to do the work of several with minimal effort. A look into Pynchon’s Puritan past sounds the historical possibilities ofLot 49, suggesting that Pynchon’s puns reinscribe the sacred into the secular world, visiting a supernatural effect upon the world of physical laws to defy those laws and to create life out of the void.
I’d say that this whole enterprise requires more than minimal effort. Yes, thesethree posts have all come from variations on the words post and horn, but, inconsequential as they are, writing them was only possible because of my undergraduate studies, two advanced degrees (divinity, creative writing) and an obsessive, life-long romance with popular music. I mean, just because the inputs aren’t new doesn’t mean a hell of a lot (there, again, a pun) didn’t go into their acquisition.
Then again, if the point is that once you have acquired the needed inputs of language and culture, you can propagate a hell of a lot without going back to the well, then maybe. But Chapter 5 was a lot of work. A lot of new work. The reading itself, I mean.
I’m also reading Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow. I understand most of Humboldt’s increasingly pedantic obsessions, and relate to them, only because I’ve been educated in an adjacent world. And look, to extend the Lot image, I’m not trying to toot my own horn (no post on Sundays). I’m able to do what I do because of a long story of generational struggle and sacrifice.
But what do I do? What are any of us doing? I said these posts are inconsequential, and they are. How many tens of thousands (Saul has thousands, David his tens of thousands) of people are on these delivery systems, heavily educated, desperately trying to unmute? We think blogs and tweets give us a voice, but they don’t. Not really. What’s the sound of one hand clapping? Of a tree falling in an empty wood? Put your ear next to your keyboard and you’ll know.
But still, we can’t just do nothing. Doing nothing just won’t do. There is too damn much invested in all of this. There is too much invested in you. There are too many miracles, too many traumas, too many things have gone into the making of you to do nothing. One option is interpretation, putting some kind of frame to the collision of worlds (remembering that a pun is a collision of words, expectations). As we learn in Chapter 5:
“You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world’s intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there’s cataclysm.“
I wrote this on Saturday but scheduled it for Sunday, mostly because I posted once already on Saturday, but also because I wanted to make a Harry Potter joke. People like wizards because we all want to believe that if we get the words right, something will happen.
This being Sunday, we could talk about Pynchon’s religious imagery, and, again, about the collision of worlds and words. We could talk about our writerly catechisms, our largely muted efforts at mediating the process of flesh becoming word. We could talk about the irony of voice-to-text, of “ones and zeros, twinned” and so on. It’s all there in Pynchon, in Milton, etc.
Twenty years ago, Charles Baxter named the unsettling traits of America’s then-adolescent “culture of deniability” and what its “dysfunctional narratives” meant for politics and fiction.
I recently read “Dysfunctional Narratives: or: ‘Mistakes Were Made,’” the first essay in Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House. This collection on the craft of writing was published in 1997, which means the discussion about who, precisely, is to blame for the prevalence of what Baxter calls a culture of deniability in politics, life, and fiction (he thinks it’s finally Nixon), was written before Bill Clinton parsed the manifold definitions of the word is. Certainly, his warnings about the passive language behind statements like “mistakes were made” have not been heeded in what passes, now, for the exchange of moral and political ideas emanating from centers of institutionalized power. That said, there’s an absolute brilliance to Baxter’s synthesis of the mores native to what wasn’t, after all, the end of history.
Regarding fiction (the craft of writing stories, not the mastery of White House pressers), what displeases Baxter most is the dearth of characters owning up to their mistakes. In contemporary story-telling, he says, no one is responsible for their poor decisions. He sees clear parallels to afternoon talk shows: “Usually…there’s no remorse or shame. Some other factor caused it: bad genes, alcoholism, drugs, or — the cause of last resort — Satan. For intellectuals it may be the patriarchy: some devil or other…” Contemporary fiction is like this, Baxter says, dedicated to “uncovering and naming” the scars of childhood that explain our shitty actions, all narrative arcs bending in and finally inward.
Baxter prefers the scheme handed down from Aristotle, wherein a person, though tragically flawed, may also be essentially good, but is only a story’s hero if s/he comes to terms with having made mistakes. Mistakes in this vein are never things made manifest by abstract forces. “Mistakes were made” is not the hero’s mantra. “I made mistakes,” or, even better, “I fucked up” are the proper declarations and discoveries.
I’m in my late 30s, which means I came of age in the milieu vexing Baxter. Since this essay first appeared in print, we have two decades more experience with uncovering and naming the systemic pathologies that shape us: never-resolved racism, sexism, misogyny, and all other forms of privilege; the death of civic institutions; the unbound power of late capitalists and their late capitalism. Baxter allows for some of this, and is particularly effective when explicating the ways in which people in power have convinced us that the problems in our lives are due not to default inequality and every kind of alienation, but to the dynamics of our always-breaking families.
At the same time, as a child of the 80s and 90s, I am not entirely convinced that Baxter doesn’t underplay the far reach of what we might euphemistically call our family traditions. Certainly, the sickness in our civic body and the crises in our own emotional and mental states of being are perpetuated from the top. But they’re also, necessarily, perpetuated in the domus. Baxter is too quick, in my late Gen X experience, to dismiss the impact of what Flannery O’Connor wryly called the “comforts of home.” Consider: “Confronted with this mode, I feel like an Old Leftist. I want to say: The Bosses are happy when you feel helpless. They’re pleased when you think the source of your trouble is your family. They’re delighted when you give up the idea that you should band together for political action. They’d rather have you feel helpless. They even like addicts, as long as they’re most out of sight. After all, addiction is just the last stage of consumerism.”
We know better now. It’s clever, for example, using addiction to critique late capitalism. But it’s more apparent, these days, that addiction is self-medication in the mold of Huxley’s soma. The sicknesses we seek to blunt are certainly systemic, but the systems that produce them are not always commanded by Nixons, Bushes, Clintons. Often, yes. So often. But Goldman Sachs is not behind, for one thing, the sexual abuse of children in their homes by family members.
Our manias and wounds come from many places. To me, uncovering and naming our scars and their sources is pretty damn heroic. If that preoccupies the narrative action of so much fiction, well, so what? Like any other art, story-telling is forged in real cultures, times, and places. The West, in the 20th century, was the locus of unspeakable atrocity, broadcast, for the first time in human history, across the world in photographs, in never-ending loops of film, eventually in color, now in ever-higher definition. Of course we’re fucking crazy. Of course it is (and isn’t) all our fault.
Baxter does not resolve the tension between feeling like an Old Leftist and allowing for the possibility that some things really stem from generational transgressions. After the riff on helplessness, he says “And I suppose I am nostalgic — as a writer, of course — for stories with mindful villainy, villainy with clear motives that any adult would understand, bad behavior with a sense of scale that would give back to us our imaginative grip on the despicable and the admirable and our capacity to have some opinions about the two.”
Villains do exist. That they’re absent from the fiction Baxter’s thinking of might have something to do with their omnipresence in real life. Like other Baby Boomers, mass media was in its infancy when O’Connor began parading her grotesques. If contemporary story-telling lacks villains as clearly drawn as The Misfit, it may be because fiction has in some senses grown up. We consume the images of real-life evil every day. Fiction serves a different function now because it can and must.
Written over 100 years ago, Joseph Conrad’s Victory is full of made-up villains with the kinds of intentions and motivations Baxter longs for. Published in 1915, it is perhaps the last big work before the psychological (and geopolitical) repercussions of the World War I (then still in early stages) were talked about in fiction. In that way, it is perhaps the last great novel of the 19th century. I’m currently rereading The Sun Also Rises. There’s no great villain there in Baxter’s sense, or Aristotle’s. There are people who eat and drink and fish and fight and cheat and succeed and fail at sticking to subjective moral codes. The villain, really, is the Great War, the 20th century’s first true mental breakdown. The Sun Also Rises is the perhaps the first big work to say so.
O’Connor, for her brilliance, was in some senses a throwback. While Conrad dealt with “human satans,” and Hemingway with the great devil of the war, O’Connor mined the extent to which, to her, the actual devil reigned in human hearts and territories.
Reading after 9/11 and Iraq, after Donald Rumsfeld’s second act, after Barack Obama’s drone wars and in the midst of Donald Trump’s own brands of villainy and narrative dysfunction, at which we scratch our heads and posit reasons why, reasons why he’s like this, reasons why rich Republicans enable him, even as we catalogue the anxieties (of displacement, poverty, addiction) and out-right hatreds he exploits, “some devil or other” is, as ever, in the details. In systems, in families, in fiction, with or without grotesque or mundane villains, in wars large and small.
About a year ago, I sat down in the chair and got back to writing short fiction.
It is hard work.
People who think writing is about sitting and waiting for a muse or for some inspiration aren’t really thinking about writing. They’re thinking about some idealized notion of something.
Like anything else, inspiration comes from hard work.
Yes, the creative process can be unwieldy. Creative flow is a thing, and you find yourself in the middle of it at inopportune times. You have to work to get it back. Again, that word work. Creativity may be mystical, but it needn’t be mystifying.
Because this is hard work, breaks must be taken. And that’s when I tend to start submitting finished pieces around. Or write a blog post. Or, in this case, both.
When I’m as sure as I can be that something is ready go out and find a home, I submit to the biggest journals first. You know the ones. They’re the ones everyone knows. They get tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of submissions a year. The process is long and your chances are slim. I hit them first, and I wait. A few weeks later, I might start submitting the same work to the next tier. This is all very subjective, of course. On and on it goes until a piece is accepted or until I have run out of journals that I’d like to see myself in. Between rounds, I keep reading and writing.
As for the lesser-known journals, there are many very good ones. Because it’s impossible to read them all on anything approaching a regular basis, everyone has some innate process for screening which ones might be good fits. Sometimes the name of a journal stands out, or sometimes a journal has the kind of aesthetic that probably means they put hard work into the entire process. Again, it comes back to hard work.
Chris Cocca 