So, I'm Going to Ramble About Movies for Awhile

The makers of Hangover 2 should watch Cars 2. That’s how you rethink things, fellas. Cars 2 ain’t brilliant, but it’s nothing like the original.

In case I wasn’t clear, Hangover 2 was bad. Has there been a lazier sequel to a good movie in recent memory?

I said sequel to a GOOD movie. Transformers 3, you may put down your hand.

I haven’t seen Transformers 3. But Roxane Gay has. And I trust Roxane.

Still, could it be worse than Green Lantern? I’m a comic book nerd and I thought the GL movie bit more than either of the Hulk movies (both of which bit terribly hard—like gnawing on over-smoked jerky). Amorphous bad guy. Hero who just needs to learn a little selflessness. Final fight scene that mistakes special effects for drama. And the Green Lantern Corps? Oh, lord. They managed to retain all the lameness of the GLC from the comics and STILL butcher the main facts. That takes work.

I officially hate 3D now. Terrible thing. Pointless. Most of Pirates of the Caribbean 4 was unwatchable through those dark, bulky glasses. Biggest rip-off in entertainment.

My kids saw King Fu Panda 2 twice. I didn’t see it at all. I consider this one of my biggest victories of the year. Hot parenting tip: convince other people to take your kids to kid movies.

Bridesmaids is the best movie I’ve seen this year. Not that the competition is strong. But, still. I definitely cared more for Kristen Wiig’s character than I’ve cared about anything in any of the other movies I’ve attended this summer.

Although, actually, Super 8 was okay. Nostalgic for anyone of my generation. A bit “hermetically sealed,” though. Other than the computerized effects and the continuous utterances of the word “shit” from young mouths, it was like a found volume of early ‘80s Spielbergness. A Movie with that capital M. You could feel the gears turning.

I never walk out on a movie. But I’ll stop reading a book pretty quickly. This says something about me, I suppose.

I have fallen asleep in movies.

Movies I wish I slept through recently: Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, Hop, Despicable Me, Owls of Gahoole

I see a lot of kids movies. I need to take my “hot parenting tip” more seriously.

And, yes, Despicable Me is bad. I could write an essay on why. The short version: it’s cynically constructed.

I have high hopes for the newest Harry Potter, though.

I read the first four books to my son. Decent reads. But we never made it past the first 100 pages of the fifth book. It was horrifically slow; J.K. Rowling is just lounging in her fictional universe by this point, enjoying the process of world creation far too much and leaving the reader with scant plot. Also, as the series draws on, the POV choice becomes an increasingly frustrating mess. Everything is 3rd person from Harry’s POV. We don’t learn anything that he doesn’t learn. But, because Rowling expands the wizarding universe to such extremes, this POV means the books increasingly become a series of people telling Harry what has happened and will happen next. Yes, Rowling invents various magical devices that allow Harry to see and even experience events outside of his own life, but it’s never quite enough. Switching to a multi-POV style after the second or third book would have greatly improved the novels, I think. Although, admittedly, I haven’t read the last few.

Somehow a post about summer movies became a lazy book review.

But, seriously, Cars 2 is a spy thriller. Cars was a coming of age movie. More sequels should be so bold.

I Was Going to be Crass

I dreamed I called an old friend. I was in my kitchen. The conversation was filled with pauses and words used to end those pauses. “Well.” “Anyway.” I had the sense that I needed something resolved but I – the dreamer – didn’t know what this thing needing resolution was. More-or-less, I was observing myself in a private moment. Two degrees to my own left. This is how I feel every time I write a story. I never quite have a grasp as to what the hell is going on.

I want to complain about something but I don’t want to seem like a whiner, or ungracious to a world that has, overall, been very kind to me. Maybe it’s my Texas stoicism. Or Celtic pride.

I was invited to a party and they let me have a beer then asked me to leave. I stood on the street and watched everyone else through the window. It was bright in there. People moved like cattails and swallows. No one looked down to see where I’d gone.

If you type in swallow on Yahoo’s search bar, it will suggest that you’re searching for “swallow birds,” “swallow tattoo,” “swallow my load” ... in that order. I was wondering if swallow like the bird was really spelled the same as swallow like the action of the throat. Apparently, yes, it is.

Part of me wants to title this post: Swallow my load. As you can see, I did not. I’m uncomfortable being crass. Your crassness, however, bothers me not at all.

Drought

There’s a drought on and everything’s going towards dead.

There’s a drought on and the sun has gone mean with heat.

I could bake cookies in my car.

I sweat and think of Brooklyn, where there was no drought but no air conditioning either. I was about as young as you can be and still be an adult. My white shirts went to yellow. I thought I’d soon publish in the New Yorker.

There’s a drought on and my inbox fills with work requests and newsletters and promises of Vegas.

I could stay in the desert for $35 a night. More fun than waiting for the desert to come to me. Which I think it’s trying to do.

I assume we’ll irrigate and overuse and predict the best of outcomes.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt rain. Not once.

Not even in Brooklyn. Which may have been a fever, come to think of it.

Cocktail Hour

I want you to accept me or reject me. I don’t like being stared at. I don’t like being the thing you will stoop to if it’s last call and you’re feeling drunk and needy.

I sit with a six-o’clock whiskey. Irish. It’s too hot for the Scotch. Or, rather, I don’t drink scotch on rocks, so the hot is not for Scotch.

Gin was once believed to cure gout. I sometimes believe it cures the insufferability of being trapped inside one’s own body forever. A good friend once stuck that bit of silliness into gin’s Wikipedia page. It lasted a week before someone erased it. I think the erasure was terribly shortsighted.

Hemmingway said he could tell the exact point on the page where Faulkner took his first drink of the day. I paraphrase. But I wonder if Faulkner wrote drunk. That seems preferable to revising drunk.

Jameson, Hendrick’s, Tito’s, Tanqueray, Caol Ila, Bacardi, Milagro, Jack Daniels. Crown Royal. That’s one each of the four whiskey groups, two gins, a vodka, a tequila and a rum. For those keeping score at home. Or considering your cocktail options should you decide to visit.

Accept me and I’ll buy you a drink. Reject me and I’ll pour myself one.

Short Getting Shorter

I haven't been writing much flash. I've been enjoying taking a little more time with things, leaving room to extend language. Not that I'm writing epics, mind you.

But I wonder what the popularity of flash is doing to our perceptions of things. And by "our," I mean the world of journals and journal readers. Today, I had a story rejected. The reason given: the story is too long to be so reliant on the poetic over the narrative.

The story is 1,500 words.

I'm pretty sure that's quite short.

I assume the journal had issues beyond the poetic-to-narrative balance (not claiming it's the most brilliant thing I've ever done), but I do find the specific concern over the length strange. It's as if flash has trained us to expect a full story in the tiniest possible spaces. Maybe this story needs to be cut in half. But, eight years ago, I would've never imagined a 1,500 word story referred to as "a story of this length." As if it were something bloated and unwieldy.

Something Something

Something cool: Hazel Foster talks about my story “Leap” at Matt Bell’s blog, here.

Something new: I finished three stories this week and sent them into the world. They are all at just one or two places. I find that I prefer this method to the scattershot. Of course, this method may also be why I have so little coming out right now.

Something old: Novel. In rewrites. Thought I was done last summer. Turns out: not so much. This could be a post all its own. I have a second novel just banging itself against my skull, but the first one is still something I want to pursue. Oh the complications...

Something worth buying now: Like poetry? Buy Lauren Schmidt’s new chapbook from Main Street Rag. It’s Voodoo Doll Parade and you’ll love it. Find it on this page. Lauren was in my MFA class and I can more than vouch for the amazingness of her work.

Something worth getting ready for: The one-and-only Roxane Gay has a book of stories forthcoming. Ayiti. Preorders from Artistically Declined Press begin this July!

Something else: Saw a bunch of shiny, youthful Mitt Romney supporters in a Las Vegas casino. They were standing around in a cheery sort of way, apparently anticipating Romney’s arrival. Politicians and slot machines. Plenty can seem bright and alluring. Then you put some money into one and ... well ... yeah.

Chosen

The thing that mattered came packed in a box filled with tight little bags of air. I don’t know where that air came from, how the exhalations were chosen. But they nevertheless took up most of the space with their cushioning. Large percentages of space. All of them just sitting there with their purpose already over. Lasting until I deflated them and disposed, carelessly, of their skins.

The Sweet Smell of Failure

That was the title to an original oratory I used in theater/debate competition when I was a senior in high school. It didn't ever win. No one wanted to hear about failure. The people who won talked about patriotism or gun rights (this was Texas) or how important it was that we beat the Japanese (economically, of course ... this was the early 90s). I think my oratory took people too far out of their comfort zone. I also think I could've used a better title.

Anyway, that's the long intro to this video by friend and fellow writer Yuvi Zalkow. It's more-or-less about how to get past writing failures while revising. It's great. I think you'll like it. I've even embedded it below for your convenience.

I Am A Failed Writer. Episode 1: Revisions from Yuvi Zalkow on Vimeo.

Justifications

A forty, maybe fifty-foot pecan looms over my house. I say looms (not towers, rises, soars or stands) because I want the tree to sound menacing, like it has some want for authority over me. Of course, it’s just a pecan tree. It only looms in my mind. And, really, only when I’m thinking about storms and wind and the unfortunate proximinty of the tree to my house. If not for the wall, I could touch it from my bed.

So, I remind you of storms.

And I say the tree looms.

Then I tell you: I think I'm going to kill it.

This Other Thing

I should be revising a novel; instead I burned a week on one of the worst short stories I’ve ever written. That’s probably not true. I’ve probably written worse, but this one is closer so it feels uglier.

I do this a lot. Write bad stories. Sometimes I even submit them. Sometimes I submit them repeatedly. Then, one day, I read them and I see that they are bad and I feel ashamed about that, although, truly, there shouldn’t be anything shameful about producing bad art. Not giving up your seat on the bus to an old lady – that’s shameful. Failing at art? Hell, least you’re focused on something outside of your own personal comfort, right?

And yet...

I don’t know. I wish I could better identify a bad story early on – like before I even start writing it. Time trickles into this jar beneath me and I can’t get it back and more time just keeps falling and I know this shouldn’t make me all antsy, but it does. I believe I have some great writing within me, but it takes so damn long to extract that I could die before I ever hit the main vein. That’s what this is about, of course. Death being what everything is about. Even love, I think. Although that’s probably one of those simple statements that sounds profound but is really just simple.

I’m a bad reviser. I try to correct every little thing and I obsess on those things too much and just end up making things fake and inaccessible. I can’t seem to shake the belief that all things CAN be corrected with the right effort. I’m not talking writing, although it applies in full to that. I’m talking about my state of being. My mistakes ... well ... I don’t ever believe things are ruined. I believe, if I just work at it, I can fix what I broke. This, I think, seems admirable. Or, at least, that’s what I’d tell someone who told me they don’t give up on fixing what they broke. But sometimes shit is just broke. It’s trashed. And all the tape and glue will never make it anything more than this wad of tape and glue that somewhat resembles an unbroken thing.

I wish I had more time, or started earlier, which is the same thing in a way.

I wrote a story about a rainbow because I dared myself to. It’s pretty good, I think. Then I wrote a story about two women who are married and have no genitalia – because someone suggested I should write such a story. That’s the horrible one referenced above. I would’ve thought the results would’ve been the other way around. Then, again, I thought Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was going to better than 30 Rock. Sometimes premise and potential are nothing. Sometimes it’s just about knowing who you are and not trying to be this other thing.

This other thing. Whatever that is today.

So Close and So Far

I love a story I could never write, that I couldn’t even conceive of writing, the diction and the plot and all of it existing somewhere outside of myself and yet – YET – somewhere so close to me that the damn thing makes me feel, makes me read the story again, then again.

That’s “Men Glass” by Sarah Rose Etter in The Collagist this month. Good stuff. Good read.

Tournaments and Tragedy and Everything

So I’m sitting with a fellow writer at a chain restaurant bar in a part of town that only has chains and people who want chains and we’re watching the spread of TVs and the NCAA men’s basketball tournament is being covered on most of the TVs except one that is covering the devastation in Japan and I look to my writer friend and I say: isn’t this the kind of thing modern writing should be trying to capture? This shattering of attention, this bizarre alignment of the banal and the horrific, what we consider important being shifted and moved by the programming needs of media as well as our own selfish needs to be insulted from things such as catastrophe and comforted by things such as sports where winners are clear and the pattern is so set that it’s known even before the participants are known, the only unknown being the final way those participants will be organized within the pattern. And here we’ll be, filling out our brackets while Japan bags up its dead and searches for enough capacity in their crematoriums. Although, I imagine, there are plenty of banal distractions in Japan, too. Then again, the thing is, I’m not so sure the NCAA tournament IS a distraction for a lot of people ... I think, for some, Japan is the distraction and that the NCAA tournament is the more important happening, will use up more emotional energy. I don’t place a moral judgment on that; it’s just an observation. There’s too much happening at any given moment and too little energy within any one of us to FEEL something about everything. Libyan rebels are getting murdered, btw. They’ve picked a bad news cycle.

This Thing, Right Now

I finally saw The Social Network. Seeing a highly praised movie well after its “moment” is a good recipe for disappointment. That expected disappointment didn’t disappoint.

The movie was fine. It was well-acted and the dialogue was that fun, nobody-really-talks-like-that-but-wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if-we-did thing with which Aaron Sorkin has been delighting me for many years. But I completely missed how this movie captured anything about the times we live in – or rather how it captured anything more about the times we live in than say, Inception, which, if nothing else, cut right to the way our modern world relies on controlling the opinions of others (leave your “Inception sucks” complaints elsewhere – I’m celebrating its premise more than its execution).

In my mind, The Social Network wasn’t about “this world” but rather “that world,” meaning the world of programmers and hackers that occasionally creates fantastical explosions of humanity-altering change that rockets several odd, probably-on-the-spectrum, geniuses to fame and fortune. This movie, I think, could be about Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Which isn’t to say the movie had nothing to say about the current times, just that what it had to say was submerged beneath a character study of Mark Zuckerberg and those his rise to success affected most. Just because it’s about Facebook doesn’t mean it’s about Facebook.

And, really, I’m not sure any film can adequately capture what things like Facebook are doing to our culture. And that’s because what Facebook is doing is so internal to each person. Our external lives look pretty much as they have for awhile – we take kids to school, we make dinner, we sleep and root for sports franchises. But inside of this, we’re building these new communities that have the power to affect our wellbeing as much or more than our physical world.

This is significant. This is an alteration of the psyche that I’d argue is on par with the kind of shift caused by the great wars of the 20th century. How we perceive and relate to the world is radically changing.

A movie about the founder of a social networking site doesn’t really capture this (in America, young white men have long been able to get filthy rich and screw over their friends by taking control of a valuable product). What I believe can capture this in all its complexities is literature. Because, out of all the arts, literature is most capable of piercing the interior of human thinking and reflecting the way we order thoughts and emotions.

I’m sure a gifted filmmaker can and will prove me horribly wrong in my assessment of film’s ability to capture the social networking revolution; but I’m also sure I will, in the coming years, read far more fiction that captures this than I will see movies that capture this. In fact, I already have. What is Matt Bell’s How They Were Found but a representation of the reordering of thought and the imprecision of truth that comes from a world where our access to information is as likely to complicate as it is to solve anything? And what is Kevin Brockmeier’s new novel The Illumination (which I am reading now) but an examination of what becomes of us when all our inner pain is broadcast for the world to see? (as so many seem intent on broadcasting ever ache and misfortune on Facebook)

We live in a heady time, y’all. This is happening now. And those of us who write, have the opportunity to help make sense of this all ... or at least provide evidence of what it’s like to be alive in this time of incalculable change.

Just the other night I said to my wife that I’m glad I was in college before the proliferation of digital cameras and social media. There weren’t a lot of photos taken in those days and those that were taken are sitting on film, likely forgotten in someone’s closet. That fact right there separates me in profound ways from those who were in college just as few years after me. In fact, my college experience –or, at least, the repercussions thereof, are closer to my parents’ experience than they are to my friends’ who were born half a decade later. If that’s not evidence of something radical happening, I don’t know what is.

How do we capture this? That redefining of privacy? That change interpersonal relationships? That effect on the ways we conduct our daily lives? That alteration in the ways we perceive and present ourselves?

Those, I think, are excellent questions for us writers writing now. Excellent questions.

What Shall Not Be Disliked

Jason Jordan wrote this post about some writers he doesn’t much care for. Indie lit world (is that the proper terminology?) went all flamey. Maybe it still is all flamey. I was away and missed the beginning of this and so I’m not sure where we are on the outrage arc. At least far enough to have passed through immediate attack against Jason and the following stages of various defenses.

(I would link to all this talk but I am lazy and if you read this place you probably read other places and I’m recapping what doesn’t need recap. Which I hear is excellent writing.)

Anyway, this is all interesting. I used to political blog. A lot. And if you are ever inclined to find reasons to dislike me, feel free to Google my political pieces. I wrote from the contrarian center and almost certainly wrote an opinion or fifty you’ll find obnoxious, even ignorant and callous. I’ve been called a supporter of evil – from people on both “sides” of the spectrum (I consider this a feat worth mentioning). I’ve been emailed hate mail so vitriolic, so dismissive of my humanity that I’ve questioned the very stability of our national psyche.

But that’s how it works in the political blog world. Bloggers going after each other with high-tech rhetorical weaponry (and low-tech vulgarity). It’s free speech at its most audacious. Not for the thin skinned.

I mention all this for what is probably an obvious observation: the indie lit world (still don’t know if this is the right word combination) operates under very different “rules”. We praise effusively that which we like and stay mum on that which we don’t. I imagine this is out of some shared sense of fragility, that our community needs protection and encouragement because we’re cultural outliers and already suffer under the weight of constant rejection, not just from journals but from all those who look at us not-famous writers and say “have I heard of anything you’ve written?” as if such a thing is the only conceivable measure of our worth.

That said, I tend to think too much carefulness is stifling. Too much tending of the walls means not enough tending of the sheep. (I don’t know who the sheep are in that metaphor, but go with me here.) If the indie lit world can’t suffer a guy listing some indie-ish writers whom he doesn’t like, how can we expect to survive the metastatic dismissiveness of the greater culture? Who even cares if Jason Jordan gave fleeting rationale for his personal tastes or not? Are we not allowed to dislike something publically? Do we really feel such a thing will topple our walls?

I think the proper reaction to Jason Jordan’s post is to debate his opinions not attack him for having one or hide behind attacks on his chosen style of critique. This is the first and almost certainly the last time I say this, but: we could learn from the world of political bloggers. There’s something to be said for sucking it up and moving on.

Questions, Questions

If I gave you a page of fiction and said “this is the first page of a three-page story,” you’d have certain expectations, right? And if I said “this is the first page of a novel,” you’d have other expectations. But in each case, what would it take for you to want to read more? Is the bar set higher or lower for a novel or a three-page story? I mean, if you know there’s only two more pages to the conclusion, does that make it more likely for you to read more? Or, conversely, if that first page is promising but not, say, “gripping,” is it the novel that would make you read more (because there’s so much space for things to develop)?

Does knowing the length of something impact your judgment of its beginning? Is it even fair to judge a novel on a page or a few pages? Do you expect literature to begin like an episode of Hawaii Five-0 with a lot of action and a clear establishment of stakes? Or do you just want something that displays a compelling voice or sets up something big and potentially grand?

I often make judgments on a piece of short fiction in a journal within the first paragraph. I’ve done that with books in a bookstore, too. There are plenty of times I’ve stopped reading right there. But, clearly, whoever published the piece or the novel had a far different reaction. Chalk that up to variations in taste.

But it makes me think. Is it possible to write something that can’t be dismissed? Or can everything be dismissed by someone? And if everything can be dismissed by someone, what percentage of dismissing is acceptable for you, as a writer? 10%? 45%? 85%? I mean, even if only 5% of people who read what you write think its existence is necessary, that’s a lot of people. And aren’t those people worth writing for?