Category: Literature

Still reading through The Believer‘s Music Issue, I came across this great bit of advice in Gina Gionfriddo’s epic essay on the literary and psychological merit of Nine Inch Nails:

“In his controversial primer on fiction writing, John Gardner advises the miserable, misanthropic writer thus: If you see the world as a pit full of baby skulls, that’s fine; in fact, you may be seeing it clearly. But you do yourself no favors by taking up residence at the edge of the pit and writing – however accurately and beautifully – tome after tome about what a pit full of baby skulls looks like. Gardner advises that we address our writing to what can be done: how is a person to stay alive in a world where there are pits full of baby skulls?”

I’d like to paste that statement on the walls of America’s high schools. It’s not just for writers; it’s for everyone who sees the world clearly and is saddened. It encapsulates my own general take on the Universe: Yeah it’s crappy. Did you expect something better? Quit complaining and do something to improve it. Gionfriddo continues:

“[Reznor’s void] is, like Gardner’s pit of baby skulls and the Gothics’ torture dungeons, a room in our psychic house – let’s say the psychic basement – that we aspire to live with, but not in. Put a lock on it and you’re dishonest and naive; move your bed and stereo down there and you’re lost.”

I’ve seen a lot of people who have put locks on it (most Americans prior to the 1960’s, the Catholic Church), others who live in it (Goths, metalheads, drug users), and very few who successfully live with their psychic basement.

Somehow a copy of The Believer‘s 2007 Music Issue materialized on my kitchen table recently. I have a lot of magazines on my table, so the only conclusion I can draw is that they’re breeding. Apparently The Oxford American got together with my back issues of Paste and bore offspring. I’m going to go add more copies of Wired and Guitar World to the pile and pray for the Ultimate Colter Magazine.

I came across this Nicholson Baker interview today and thought I’d pass it along:

“When an interviewer asks you what was important to you when you were learning how to write, what were the texts, you’re tempted to come up with people like Henry de Montherlant or the Brothers Goncourt. You don’t want to say John Updike because he’s commonplace and familiar and it’s not exciting.”

I’m the same way. I don’t even want to listen to Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin because they belong to everybody. I want my influences to myself so I’m always seeking out the lesser-known, the obscure.

“I do seem to be attracted to things I think are unsung. Or, if I’m writing about literary figures, I prefer to write about the guy Alexander Pope copied from, rather than celebrating Pope, since he has plenty of people making a fuss over him. I’m still by nature a contrarian.”

I’m a musical contrarian. Or as Douglas Coupland would say, I often engage in “underdogging,” the tendency to almost invariably side with the underdog in a given situation. Seeking out the unsung and siding with the underdog….what is the root of this condition? A desire for originality in the face of popular things being automatically less valid? We’re living in artistically confusing times because, as the middle class has ascended over the last 60 years, middle class tastes dominate the culture, and so often what is popular is crap. Then popularity gets equated with crap, so it’s not cool to like what’s popular because if it’s popular it has to be crap. Which is a lie of course, but it’s easier to cling to that dogma than to decide for oneself what is artistically valid.

“The unpleasant, distracting feeling of wanting to protect your ideas is dumb and contemptible. Still, it’s one of the unfortunate emotions that comes with any attempt to say something new.”

This is another thing that I think about in music. Ask any truly great musical artist and they will tell you that music comes through them. It does not start with them. The best musicians are instruments themselves of music, which comes from somewhere else. Being a creative musician means getting out of your own way and letting the music flow through you. So, the ideas are not yours to protect. The ideas belong to Music and Music was nice enough to let you transmit them. So how can you claim that any idea was truly yours? Unfortunately you have to in order to make a living in any economic society. It’s just a compromise you have to make between art and commerce.

Anyway, as I pressed on in search of more Baker interviews to digest I found that the man was apparently following my musical train of thought:

“I got interested in time in the 4th grade. I had the discovery that you could split up the present moment infinitely. There’s no present…As a musician, I used to love the fermata. I loved the chords that you could sustain it with. It’s a nice looking symbol with a nice name. It sits on top of a chord and just looks at you.”

And then he goes and wraps up with another thread that has been running through my head lately: Frank Zappa used to say that the most important thing in art was the frame, which took me by surprise. Then it became even more apparent to me when I found this Art or Crap Quiz, which rather elegantly states “For the purposes of this quiz, ‘art’ is something that has been exhibited as such by an artist.” It seemed a pretty good definition of art, regardless of the quiz’s context. Anyway, here’s what Baker said:

“I want the books to be about things that you don’t notice when you’re noticing them. You kind of notice things in passing, and never put a frame around them — and then somebody like me comes along and writes a book about them. And then that book itself becomes the frame.”

The Oxford American has published Kevin Brockmeier’s fantastical tale, A Fable with Slips of White Paper Spilling from the Pockets. My only complaint is that the title is unwieldy, and not at all reflective of the simple magic of the story. I heard Kevin read a version of it at this year’s Arkansas Literary Festival and I was completely entranced by it, so I’m very excited that it has not only been published, but that it is available digitally for dispersal around the Internet. I think it will become the most popular destination on the OA’s server. Give it a read and send it along to others.

It was something of a minor revelation to me when I read Chuck Klosterman’s bit in Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs about how John Cusack’s movies have set too high a standard for modern romance. For me, it was an important realization that even good movies can be bad for you. Everyone raises a stink about violence and sex in movies, but isn’t unrealistic romance just as dangerous and psychologically damaging?

I bring this up because I am currently reading The Real Frank Zappa Book and came across this choice passage, which outlines an assumption embedded in all of Frank’s work since his debut in the early 60’s:

“You’re a young kid and you hear all those ‘love lyrics,’ right? Your parents aren’t telling you the truth about love, and you can’t really learn about it in school. You’re getting the bulk of your ‘behavioral norms’ mapped out for you in the lyrics of some dumb f*cking love song. It’s a subconscious training that creates a desire for an imaginary situation which will never exist for you. People who buy into that mythology go through life feeling that they got cheated out of something.”

Good work, Frank. You’ve been dead over ten years now, and you’re still smarter than the rest of us. I’ve seen so many people who seem dissatisfied with their love lives because they apparently had unrealistic expectations about what their relationship was supposed to be.  Particularly dangerous is the female ‘princess’ myth that the goal of life for girls is to find a prince and live happily ever after.

The first in what will likely become a series.

Here in this world, popular songs are used in commercials to sell things like cars. Often songs are re-written such that, for example, “Para Bailar La Bamba” becomes “You Could Be Driving a Honda.”

In a parallel universe, though, commercials employ poems:

so much depends
upon

a red Dodge
Ram

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chicks.

I’ve been reading Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke. This excerpt was written a hundred years ago, but in a way it predicts the rise of Women’s Liberation and same-sex couples.

We are only just now beginning to consider the relation of one individual to a second individual objectively and without prejudice, and our attempts to live such relationships have no model before them.

The girl and the woman, in their new, individual unfolding, will only in passing be imitators of male behavior and misbehavior and repeaters of male professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions, it will become obvious that women were going through the abundance and variation of those (often ridiculous) disguises just so that they could purify their own essential nature and wash out the deforming influences of the other sex…This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be astonished by it. Someday… there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.

This advance (at first very much against the will of the outdistanced men) will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman. And this more human love…will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle. The love that consists in this: two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other.

Writing styles of the 19th century tended toward the prolix (or do I just think that because modern communication is so brief?), so I edited out a few digressions for easier digestion. The full text of Rilke’s letter can be read here.