Hi guys,
I’m an old friend of Jed’s. I’ve been having a really hard time getting this piece to a point where it could be sent somewhere. Just fire away, basically, I’m pretty thick-skinned. I get like a rejection letter per week, probably.
I appreciate the links to the Save Net Radio. That bill is fucking ridiculous, so thanks for addressing it. My representative wrote me back about it. His letter was funny, maybe I’ll post it on here sometime. Best,
John Paul
John Paul, there’s something here. You write a lot like I do- that is, I end up writing pieces like this. Have you worked a lot on this? Or did it come out pretty spontaneously? I’m curious about that. There’s a few things I would say about the story. The dialogue in the beginning is a little long. I think an episodic piece like this needs to be short, it needs to have a very acute temporality to it. It’s a sort of modern American adaptation of good old Russian absurdism. The ruskies have been writing this sort of thing for centuries, except now, I think we have a different bottled up energy that finds expression in such (not-so-)absurd episodes. The violence, the repressed violence, is very interesting. But the delivery needs to be a little cleaner, the narrator a little tidied up. Like when you say: “That made sense because for the five years Hank had known Sparky he’d never been known to rob a gas station.” How about just “Sparky’d never been known to rob a gas station.” The narrator needs to get out of the car. He needs to walk into the gas station a little later than them, or at least come in through the window or something. If he’s going to use a lot of words, let him use a lot of words; if he’s going to be sparse (the short paragraphic style, which I also like, indicates that you are going for some sparseness), he needs to stay sparse. Long sentences need to be used only occasionally, and for good reason. If you didn’t write the piece when you were high, I would recommend going back and doing so. You have some great little lines in there; I would aim to make the whole thing a single ‘great line.’
July 16th, 2007 | #
Wasn’t high. I’ll consider it. I write a little drunk sometimes. This came out in a seratonin storm, within the space of like six hours or so. That’s not normally the case when I write, and I think that inconsistency you talk about is that…
The tone should definitely be a litle more uniform, you’re right.
The other thing I’ve heard about this piece, though, is that people don’t get a very strong sense of who the characters are. I’m wondering if shortening the piece might aggravate that even more? what do you think, ttl? Your comments are much-appreciated.
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July 16th, 2007 | #
I think we should be trying to move a little beyond specific characterizations of really concrete imagined people. I think the best characterizations are described in form but not detail, so that the reader projects their own notions of who would fill that space in society onto them. I think that what you are already trying for is: Don’t develop the characters through dialogue or description, but mostly in the narrative. the more plot there is, the more human there is. Not saying the plot has to be more convoluted or long, but actions should carry the story more.
July 16th, 2007 | #
Hmm, this is some good food for thought. Character development is something I never quite think through… for me, I get a sense of what someone’s like by seeing how they frame thoughts, how they tell stories; little revelations of what they value. I like your point, Jed - it sounds somewhat Soviet. I agree that choices made in action are the best indicators of character, but they can be as deceptive as any other aspect of the narrative. I’m more interested in a person’s intentions than in what they pull off. That’s why there’s something very funny in a mock hold-up, especially one that ends with ‘You guys better scram.’ “What were they thinking? What led them to do that?” I like when a story raises that question first and foremost, because it brings you to this very remote intersection of personal choice and social drive, where the forces playing out are not a totality of social codes, but an interplay of those mixed with one’s personal inclinations: like a sport, where there are rules, but also talents. So I don’t fully agree that the plot needs to be based in actions. You’re not depicting a tragedy here (tragedy is the necessitation of action by the demands of morality), but rather, an episode. Episodes are brushstrokes of thought. Action takes place, but the inner forum provides the stage, and the actions are merely proscenium. Surprise becomes the holding force here, whereas in action-driven narratives, the gradual aggregate of situations builds to climactic moments and ethical resolutions. What you’re doing in this piece is pointing to an aesthetic, which has no rationality, or at least no well-known ethos; it’s activity per se, continuity and disruption. Any thoughts on this Jed?
July 17th, 2007 | #
This is exactly what is keeping me from writing fiction, to be honest. I really can’t figure out a style to approach caracterizations–it’s the hardest part for me. I really need to spend serious time overcoming this particular writer’s block in myself. And my favorite authors have been criticized for having flat characters–most notably pynchon, whose characters are like cardboard parodies of themselves. So I’m really not the best one to ask. I tend to be drawn to the appearance of characters, the superficial aspects of them: their names, their roles in the economy, their faces and bodies. I think that the New Critics would call this “unsophisticated taste” or something.
The story asks the question of what the two character’s motives are, but it would seem to me to be impossible to provide an answer. That’s why I didn’t look there for the characterizations. To me, motivation implies rationality; I don’t think that these characters should be rationalized; humans do and think irrational shit so much beyond what is captured in most narrative literature. But I think that both of you, Alex and John Paul, in your very very different ways, are attempting to capture that irrationality. I would like to do that too, but am stimed about how; I would like to write a story that was true to the experience of zenghut, for example. But that project is completely overwhelmingly impossible for me.
July 17th, 2007 | #
how about you just go through and insert paragraphs of semi-relevant prose poetry? Work from delerium?
or alternately: one night when you get drunk, decide to act like Sparkey all night. with an accent.
July 18th, 2007 | #
Yeah, I think I’m on the same page with you guys–I agree with/am compelled by your arguments. I wanted to respond mostly because I feel I should try to give what for.
The effect I like to achieve with my aesthetic–and maybe this is an impossible task–is to straddle that gap between the irrational and the rational. To give that gap a hot carl, as it were. I think there are good reasons people do things, but there are often not very good reasons people do things. And personally, in terms of my own experience, I’m intrigued by the things I’ve done and said that have absolutely no rational explanation… a co-worker of mine wrote a department-wide e-mail about a Shakespeare play this Saturday. I said, “Wow, sounds great–I’m not sure I can go because I leave for Colorado the next day.” That’s a lie on two counts: one, it didn’t sound great. Two, I’m not leaving for Colorado on Sunday. That’s just a fucking wild lie. Why did I say these things? There’s probably a good reason lying around somewhere deep in my psyche, having to do with like guilt or something.
But ultimately, by definition, this was an irrational action, an irrational response. People do that all the time–they do it so much and so often that I think the form of narrative often fails to do life true justice…
Still, I think there are moments we grasp a whatness or quiditas or whatever, of things. And so in some ways writing for me is a balance between absurdity (a-la-Camus’), and truth (I don’t know–I’m thinking about the bird girl in Portrait of the Artist). It’s a balance I try to find–it’s why I like to write, why writing is “a long-term cure for depression”–but which aesthetically doesn’t always work out.
I think the most substantial bit of criticism I’ve gotten on here–though it’s all been good–is the distinction between tragedy and episode. I’m not interested in tragedies, or comedies. Maybe histories. Really, what I like to do is to jar the reader. I like to create a space where conjecture is irrelevant. I don’t know if that makes the story easier to write.
But, that’s what I like about art. I think I’m being rational here.
All right. So, here’s what I’m getting:
1) The tone and pace need to be more consistent throughout the piece.
2) The characters may not need to be more developed–their development comes with the piece, and it is enough (?). This piece isn’t so concerned with who these characters are as much as what this moment is. Its ambiguity is its strength
3) Get fucked up and try to write it
Add anything I missed
Thanks for your feedback
Jed–what’s zenghut?
July 18th, 2007 | #
it’s funny, “write fucked up” seems like such a sophomoric reaction or feedback. But it made me think how canonical and well accepted it has become. I took a class this last semester that seemed to only be unified by the drugs the authors took. Rimbaud.
I also like the idea of episodic writing. good way of saying it.
you feel very free to post something else, and soon. At least for me, this is a better forum for me to give feedback because I can think about it over time and keep on commenting about it, rather than just giving first impressions over email. And, plus, we can bounce ideas more with more players.
July 18th, 2007 | #
Regarding tragedy and comedy. A lot of what I was saying up there was fueled by a recent reading of an early chapter in Either/Or (by Kierkegaard), which is called “Ancient Tragedy Reflected in Modern Tragedy” (with a subtitle ‘An Endeavor in Fragmentary Literature’). I recommend it to everyone, but barring that you get the chance, I will try and post some more of it soon (I posted a segment about a month ago). His main point is that in modernity (and yes, he knew what modernity was going to be despite writing in 1840), isolation reproduces itself and people start to cling to their isolation, to assert it over and over, and that this fact is, in itself, comical. But another point he makes is that insofar as people lose the capacity for tragedy, for thinking tragically, they lose the ability to convey or perceive sorrow, they fail to see the contradictory consubstantiation of guilt and guiltlessness which marks the tragic hero; our modern tragedies become ethical, their protagonists are persons with no past, persons whose fault is wholly his or her own, and who therefore bears the full responsibility for his or her own downfall. We have become depressed. (And those of us who read any existentialism are fully aware of this.) But what is brilliant about Kierkegaard is his next step: we are isolated, and this is COMICAL. He also says ‘and I would say that the individual incapable of tragedy will never be happy.’ Nietzsche has a lot of the same feelings about tragedy, if you get a chance to read his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (his word for it all is Dionysianism). The point of tragedy and comedy is to supercede it all, not to transcend, but to show the degeneration, innocence, futility, beauty, and fatalism incumbent upon all life. So while our modern fragmentary writing, I think, is what necessarily grows out of our modern decadence, our modern leisure, our modern complacency, it is also necessary to rediscover the sensibility through which tragedy and comedy cast their glow over the whole. Fragmentary multiples, but a tragico-comedic whole. Jed, the Nathanael West book you gave me does all of this.
July 20th, 2007 | #
TTL,
i like the cut of your jib. it’s kind of funny, the other night i was free-writing and i started to think about hank. i think i was on a similar wave-length:
Poor Hank, who’d thought his hernia was a venereal disease.
Poor Hank, who, with eyes pointed like arrows toward the heavens, had mumbled something mordant to the crowd, and made things quiet.
Poor Hank, with his drinks.
Poor Hank, without excercise
You know, just Hank with his little soccerplayer’s physique. Or something.
You know, just little Hank, that skinny one
With that gorilla, old Sparky
You know. Hank, his little junkie pal
Those two jsut little junkie pals.
They dress in their fifties costumes
Hank, came in, with foam around his mouth. Junkie
Stealing things
Poor little Hank
With his friends
And they’re all Oxy junkies
And little hank just from a farm
Never hurt anybody
Sweet hank
His little physique
Those absurd little silly biceps
That peanut of a shaved head.
That little hank
That physique of a twelve-year-old soccer player.
Little hank, poor little hank
Never did anything wrong
Just in that car
In a vague participatory way
Nodding, almost
when they went down the wrong end of the gaping mouth of I-90 West
Little hank, heading East
Scattered in poor little bits
Little hank
Junkie
Junkie little hank
Across the highway in three parts,
At least
i think why what kierkegaard says is so unsettling to me is because i like to think of my depression as soulful and artistic. really, there’s a a guile to it, a dishonesty. it’s performative. i still think modern life is depressing.
so there.
July 20th, 2007 | #
sure, me too, but I like ways out of depression, and I like anything that commands me out of it. like listening to animal collective. i don’t think it’s so much that it’s performative, as that something has to be done. tragic sensibility, whatever that is, is something to do.
if you got real drugged out and skinny and found an old fender you could turn that piece into a velvet underground song. ohhh sweet nothing…
July 20th, 2007 | #