I Would Like to Burn a Theme at This Forum

Josh,

You're right, two years is a long time. And like a neglected lawn, apparently, old blogs can actually sprout weeds. Since we last posted, we received a slew of comments--almost all from spambots. I've just spent an hour or so deleting these comments form our old posts. Most were an illegible scramble of code and nonsense; some, though, were charmingly ridiculous. My favorite, from "Anonymous":

"Hi there! I would like to burn a theme at this forum. There is such a thing, called HYIP, or High Yield Investment Program. It reminds of ponzy-like structure, but in rare cases one may happen to meet a company that really pays up to 2% daily not on invested money, but from real profits."

So, Josh, if you do not mind, in keeping with the Eastern European theme you cultivated with your Hrabal talk, I would also like to burn a theme at this forum.

(I've been singing that quote for the past hour to the tune of "Blowing in the Wind": How many themes must we burn at this forum before we can call it a forum?)

Anyway, it's nice to be back. I had intended to work on my novel this afternoon, but keeping with another theme of the blog, I've sought diversion. Writing and not-writing. Lately, it's been hard for me to make the distinction between the two. When I'm not physically writing the novel I'm thinking about it: devising scenarios, constructing sentences in my head. I wonder if this is productive?

Hemingway, in his sometimes helpful, sometimes absurd, basic principles for writing, said: "Do not think about writing when you are finished for the day but allow your subconscious mind to ponder it."

Good stuff? Early on, Hemingway also thought that the energy required for writing came from the same place that sexual energy came from, and so he (he said) he abstained from sex or masturbation while working on his projects.

I'm not sure.

I do know that a lot of the stuff I do besides writing--cooking healthy food, for example, or exercising--explicitly serves my writing life. I run every day because, I believe, running gives me the energy and motivation to continue writing. Without running, I can't imagine how I might sustain this energy or motivation. Of course, I might find it in the work itself, and that would be a nice thing to say, but practically, my brain and body need the fuel that good food and exercise provide. Writing, to me, is extremely bodily.

Of course, there's my soul, too. There's inspiration, which is different, I think, than energy and motivation. And what fuels my soul is sometimes oppositional to what fuels my body. I drink too much wine. I stay up all night talking. I wake up tired and hungover. My body hurts. And yet, my soul's inflamed.

I like what Hrabal says: "Not until we're totally crushed do we show what we're made of."

I spend all day getting healthy so that I might write. I spend all day destroying myself so that I might write. I wake up, and start again. This doesn't seem entirely sustainable. I need a more balanced fuel. I guess I find balance in all the other stuff that sustains me: reading, writing letters, writing blogs.

We wouldn't do this if we didn't care; if we didn't find it necessary. With or without this blog, I'm sure we've both spent plenty of time not-writing over the past two years. We tried another blog, but the forum just didn't seem to work. I never felt at home there. This forum, it seems, might be better for burning. There's energy here at Seventh Draft, even if it has been dormant for the past two years. We should tell Tommy and Alex, urge them to post, if they like.

Ever see this guy?


"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." ~Samuel Beckett

Master of the Myspace Comment Genre

Our tag reads: I need numerous diversions from writing and I figure the best diversion is probably writing. But what happens when I'm not writing at all? Well, obviously: no writing, no need for diversion.

Which is to say, now that our semester's work is done, I'm feeling a bit listless. Basically, I'm not writing all that much. I had big plans for these days--I was going to work hard on my novella; I was going to edit my ghost story to its natural degree of awesomeness; I was going to write actual letters to my greatest friends, telling them how much I love them (this last one came to me in a fit of unrequited enthusiasm.)

Instead, I'm cooking massive pots of soup. I'm eating glorious dinners. I'm drinking too much wine. I'm hanging out, talking. And, finally, four years after the purchase, I'm reading the instruction manual for my camera.

So, yeah, I'm doing all kinds of Not Writing. But you know what? I'm not really feeling so bad about it. I'm feeling like I've written enough over the past months. I need to take a break.

So why am I here, writing a blog?

Well, for one thing, I'm wildly addicted to writing. When I'm not writing I feel itchy. I actually feel itchy. It's an acute physical sensation.

So, I'm itching my elbows and wondering: Is it even possible to take a break?

I mean today I wrote: two or three meaningful e-mails, one very meaningful Christmas card, two or three meaningful messages on Myspace, and about twenty Myspace comments.

Yeah, it's true: instead of working on my novella, I've been tooling around, posting comments on Myspace. I kind of like this one:

"I think I can accurately say I eat more chicken any man ever seen. Do you agree?"

This is a comment I posted on my wife's Myspace page at approximately 4:49 PM.

Elsewhere, I wrote:

"I am chicken."

~Seth, upon being asked, "Do you do chicken?"

Writing this, weirdly, satisfied me. Reading it, weirdly, also satisfies me.

Remember when I said:

Blogs, letters, e-mails--to me, they're part of it, just as important as the "real" work. Your writing life is just that, your life. When you write a blog, it's not like the blog is not you--it is you. I mean do you really look at your writing as something outside your life? You move from one to the other. You write. You figure things out. Without the blogs, you'd be itching to write elsewhere--you'd be sending mad e-mails; you'd take up letter-writing, you'd deliberately fog your bathroom mirror just so you could finger a few lines on the glass.

I think I'm ready to say, for sure, that writing a Myspace comment often fulfills me as much or more than working on my novella.

***

Recently Janet wrote a review of a book by Marie Phillips called "Gods Behaving Badly" for the NYTimes.

Here's a brief excerpt from the review:

"Ms. Phillips’s premise is that the Greek deities have collectively suffered a whopping reversal of fortune, but that they still endure tenuously in the modern world. They live together in a disintegrating London house with a laurel-wreath knocker (nostalgia counts for a lot here) on the front door. Thus ensconced, with time on their hands, they trade spiteful wisecracks about the glory days."

The book looks ridiculous, but that's besides the point. Janet's not entirely kind in her review. Later, she writes:

"In a story so conventionally constructed that it suggests the help of fiction-writing software (yes, there is some), “Gods Behaving Badly” injects a pair of human lovebirds into the world of its downtrodden deities."

Finally, she writes:

"...although Ms. Phillips fulfills her purely lighthearted ambitions for this story, she provides a cautionary example to budding novelists everywhere. Though her background includes stints as an independent bookseller and BBC researcher, she also has a blog full of her thoughts about the hot competition on a television dance-contest show. When writers lived on Mount Olympus, they didn’t talk about things like that."

What the fuck, exactly, is Janet Maslin trying to say?

Basically, she's saying: Of course this novel is a joke, but more than that, the writer is a joke too. At the very least, she's certainly not a serious writer, an Olympian, as she most certainly should aspire to be.

I cringe. What would Janet Maslin have to say about my obsessive Myspace commenting?

Maybe it's just me, but I look at every venue as just another genre. Right now, I'm really working on my Myspace commenting. I'm trying to become a Master of the Genre. I've even met a few Masters. Recently, I discovered a new Master. His Myspace name is boxy and if they ever decide to give a Pulitzer for Myspace comments he will be nominated. From him, I've re-affirmed that the Myspace comment can be: offensive, hilarious, and utterly illuminating.

A few weeks ago, I was deeply immersed in my novella, so deeply that I couldn't even fathom taking a week or two off. Now I'm like novella-shmovela. I have Myspace comments to write!

***

An admission: I've been cooking dinner and writing this blog at the same time.

I would never do that when working on my novella.

But what if I did?

If all writing is the same, as I'm trying to say maybe it is, then why do I always set aside the most special time for my novella? Why do I pace around beforehand, procrastinating?

Perhaps I take it more seriously. Perhaps not. Maybe I'm just psyching myself out.

Whatever. Dinners almost ready.

I have wine to drink, chicken to eat.

The Mope

Josh,

Funny you should mention Rimbaud, of course. I like to think of him as a sort of emblem of what you might call, following Pushkin, the "lazy man". I like to say "the mope."

It's funny too, though, how mopes always seem to be the ones slamming open hidden doors. That monster Elvis, for example, was a classic lay-about. And have you ever read Truman Capote's New Yorker profile on Marlon Brando? The Duke, it seems, the torrent of American Acting, was really a fat, lazy bum at heart. And that's before he actually became a fat, lazy bum.

I love these guys, but I love them, mostly, for their mopiness. I aspire to Brando in Streetcar--cut, virile, ridiculously handsome--but really I feel more comfortable with Godfather Brando--fat, slow, a bit ugly. The one seems full of energy, but a little empty; the other, full of languor, and yet utterly powerful.

I mean, I always admired a guy like Neruda for his industriousness, but I didn't love him until I read his thoughts on wasting time:

"If poets answered public opinion polls truthfully, they would give the secret away: there is nothing as beautiful as wasting time."

But there's a difference, I think, between being lazy in life and being lazy in ART. For example, that bum Pushkin, you mention, throws grapes at us until we see that we've got to keep slapping ART, keep reminding it to pay attention and not lapse into the laziness of inherited forms.

Which is basically what Rimbaud says: "The invention of the unknown demands new forms". And, really, what poet's life better distills the essence of this quote than Rimbaud?

He wrote this famous line in 1871, at the age of sixteen, in the midst of a sequence of two brash and absurd letters that have come to be known as the Lettres du Voyant or, if you prefer, "The Seer Letters."

The first letter, to his teacher Georges Izambard, announced Rimbaud's intentions to become a poet, a seer, and it included a short poem, which begins with a choice Rimbaud line: "My sad heart slobbers at the poop."

Izambard blasted the letter. It was vicious, detestable he later said—the young poet seemed to want to screw himself up, as much as possible, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

But Izambard missed the point. Yes, Rimbaud was screwing himself up, but he was serving an inviolable master: Poetry.

"Right now, I'm making myself as shitty as I can," he wrote. "Why? I want to be a poet, and I'm working at turning myself into a Seer. You won't understand any of this, and I'm almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by a derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. And I've realized I am a poet. It's really not my fault."

This strikes me as one of the most pretentious, ridiculous letters ever written. And I love it. I love it for what it says about the connection between writing poetry and living poetry. The derangement of all the senses is one of Rimbaud's most celebrated phrases. With the support of this bold assertion, Rimbaud transformed the act of writing poetry into an act of living, a voyage into the wild unknown.

"The invention of the unknown demands new forms," Rimbaud wrote in the second of the Lettres du Voyant, sent to Izambard's friend, Paul Demeny, several months later. At this point, the young poet was certain: the new form was meant to be amorphous, as a man's life is, essentially, amorphous. And although Izambard and Demeny both dismissed the letters as utter inanity, practical jokes at best, utter filth at worst, Rimbaud was certainly not joking.

Within a few months he was carousing bohemian Paris, living on little else than absinthe, hashish, and the erotic adulation of Paul Verlaine, and writing his masterpiece, "A Season in Hell."

From poop to poetry—the evolution of Rimbaud was furious.

But still, I must admit, it is this early line that has always haunted me: my sad heart slobbers at the poop.

This line has occupied my thoughts for several years. It comes to me during the most opportune occasions. When, for example, alone and sitting on the toilet, I begin to imagine Rimbaud at sixteen, and I see the portraits of the young poet, the first taken in October, 1871, the second, more famous, taken two months later, in December.

The difference between the two pictures is astounding.

In the first picture Rimbaud, recently arrived in Paris, appears to be no more than a child, a puffy, mopey brat, eminently poised for naughtiness—the type of child who seems capable of writing an entire manifesto on poop.


In the second picture, Rimbaud has aged considerably; his face, chiseled, evocative—Jean Cocteau said, "He looks like an angel"—is the face of a poet, a man.


What possibly could have happened in the span of two short months to bring about this incredible transformation?

Sometimes I linger on the toilet, for up to ten, fifteen minutes, my chin positioned firmly on my fist, thinking about Arthur Rimbaud's life. I can see him, for example, standing on some non-descript corner in the Latin Quarter, kicking a stone, a seventeen year old absorbing the hitherto unfamiliar language of the world that was Paris in 1871: the dung-filled alleyways, the aroma of bodies and smoke, the muggy air. Then, in the evening, when the darkness collapsed upon the city, he would have strolled along the streets until he hit the small alley, the Rue Séguier, where a metal cot awaited him in a studio at number thirteen, the second of four, five, or six addresses in Paris, the filthy rooms where he conceived the lines that won him posthumous worldwide fame.

But eventually my thoughts always turn to his life after Paris, his years of wandering, and his death in Marseilles. The biographies tell us that in 1874, though possibly later—the life of Rimbaud has always remained splendidly ambiguous—he quit writing, irrevocably.

Rimbaud—the seer-poet—was nineteen years old.

He spent the next seventeen years wandering around Europe and Africa. This period of his life is sketchily documented, often vague, and mysterious. His letters, written during the time, reveal a sullen, mopey man. "I am bored all the time," he wrote to his family in 1888.

By the time he died, in 1891, in Marseille, after years of wandering, his poetry had resurfaced in France, but Rimbaud had vanished so completely that many people did not believe the news of his death: they assumed he was already dead. Rimbaud—the wanderer, the mope—was thirty-seven years old.

Rimbaud's life—the early, resounding poetry; the sudden, unreasonable renunciation of poetry; and the inscrutable years of wandering that follow—has fascinated and perplexed me for some time. And this is why I have chosen to evoke him now—as a resounding testament to the intrigue of mopey behavior. And yet, when I am on the toilet, thinking, and even now as I write, I am confounded by what seems to be the inscrutable enigma of Rimbaud.

After all, what is one to make of this enigmatic character?

How am I to evoke the unreasonable Rimbaud?

Was he a seer? Or a mope?

Whatever the case, it's obvious there was a lot of Not-Writing that led to Rimbaud's writing: a lot of getting ready. Does it really matter what you do to get ready, though? Probably. I tend to think boring lives inspire boring writing. But then, of course, there's the Emily Dickinson factor. She basically sat around her place a lot, but she sure wrote a lot of kick-ass poems.

Did she even do drugs? I don't think so.

I suppose the connection between Not-Writing and writing might be too subjective to qualify at all. We all get ready in different ways, of course. Writing, though, the act of sitting down and doing the work--that's easier to define. You sit down, do it. I know you might find that attitude naive, a bit ridiculous, but that's how I've always gone about it.

I live, get drunk, wake up hung-over, and sit down and write. If I don't make this commitment to sitting down, each day, I'll never write. When I'm Not-Writing I don't think about it. I try, instead, to give my attention to what really matters, at least to me: my wife, my friends, my family, food. Funny thing though, this attention, this look away from writing, is me writing too.

Basically, I'm always preparing, but not always thinking about the preparation. That puts an awful lot of stress on your life. Deliberately going out to derange your senses in the service of writing? That's childish. I'll just go out and derange my senses.

Hemingway was a dick-head, for sure, and part of this might have been his need to live experiences for writing. That strikes me as extremely artificial and very bullshit.

Perhaps that's why I prefer the mopes, the ones who love wasting time, which really has nothing and everything to do with the time they spent writing--which, of course, was not wasted time at all...

pushkin47

Polis,

Russian Futurist…French Surrealist…? Are you serious?

Putting the inherent ridiculousness of these two ideas on the sideboard for a second, let’s have a closer look at them. My can-opener in this discussion, as usual, is going to be the Russian serial-amorist Alexander Pushkin, who Russians worship but who nobody else pays any attention to and rightfully so: he sounds stupid in any language other than his own, really beyond shitty.

I think he'd like this – I mean, if anyone spent less mental energy on writing and being a writer it was Pushkin, who founded Russian literature in a few brilliant strokes and then walked into a Frenchman’s bullet because his wife was a flirt. Live by the sword die by the sword; so he’s become a real hero of mine, not just for what he wrote, but for the way he wrote it. Reclined, generous, with swiftness and vigor and complete immersion.

Pushkin was a “lazy man,” by which I mean the usual pose of artistic industry didn’t appeal to him. Easy for us to forget in professionalized America, but art used to be, not so much a matter of when you clocked in and out, but rather how you positioned yourself so as to let the energies of the world flow down your pen-hand most efficiently. As beard-wearer/Soviet-escapee Abram Tertz wrote:

“If Pushkin (let’s assume!) was only pretending to loaf, it means that he needed that pretense to free his tongue, that it suited him as the plot motivation for the unfolding of his destiny, and without it he couldn’t have written anything good.”

I love this quote because it gets to the heart of what is a real writing problem for me. I mean, isn’t that what a long and intense part of what we do is about: not the writing itself but the getting ready to write, the Not Writing that leads to writing: organizing oneself like a circuit, the perfect combination of tradition and re-invention?

For Pushkin this meant giving yourself up, letting Fate (Pushkin loves F-f-fate) make you the greatest writer who ever lived one minute and a ridiculous cuckold the next. Your destiny is someone else’s business, which frees you up to look around and describe everything you see so beautifully and memorably that you end up, strangely enough, outwitting fate completely: escaping it, disappearing Houdini-style through a trap door no one else can see, because they're too busy doing what they do.

Another important fact about Pushkin, who was murdered by a Frenchman: he loved France. All Russians did – most of the upper class at that point spoke French from birth and had to have Russian letters translated to them, sniff sniff. But, attracted as he was to its masterpieces, P. knew he couldn’t compete, for example, with Victor Hugo. And he didn’t have to. He was a Russian. The whole thing was hilarious to him: the wigs and powders (which he loved), the balls (adored), the pretenses and high-blown speeches (made a few in his time). High-falutin’, fascinating but, at the end of the day, kind of beside the point. Now, a Russian horse shaking snow off its back – that was life! That was a moment that deserved to make its way into literature!

So Pushkin becomes one of the first flaneurs – the first walkers, to translate the term stupidly: one of the first guys to try to put everything and especially the underbelly of life back into art. Art is great, but art is also very, very stupid, Pushkin held. We’ve got to keep slapping it, keep reminding it to pay attention and not lapse into the laziness of inherited forms. Keep looking, Pushkin shouts at us – or not shouts, since he’s not really a shouter. He throws grapes at us and threatens to not invite us to his next party.

Empires, cultural or otherwise, develop underbellies, which the provinces explore vigorously; then if they’re smart the empires themselves learn from their subjects and begin dissecting themselves. So genius France develops in the 19th century a generation’s-worth of little Pushkins, which it now officially calls flaneurs: walkers, starers, examiners of underbellies. Rimbaud, for example (sound familiar?). Baudelaire. Alfred Jarry, and all the other people who piled out of that particularly roomy clown car. As archer/vegetarian Roger Shattuck says:

“The intellectual activity that Diderot refers to as libertinage (free-thinking, debauchery) in the opening sentences of Rameau’s Nephew rests squarely on this response to the fragment as ambiguous – both isolated and implicated. Baudelaire developed Diderot’s attitude into the endemic activity of the dandy: flaner (to stroll about, to saunter). The Surrealists in their prose narratives of city promenades refined flanerie into fine art…”

[fragments here – argumentative etiquette suggests I hold my tongue, but come on: there it all is, the 7th Draft aesthetic in a nutshell! Shattuck’s prose is as clear and strained as a man asking a passerby to kindly help him remove the badger from his Balzac, but you can hear the point trembling under there, compact and dangerous as the hum of an electron cloud…]

Pushkin showed France how to strut…but how does this fit up with us, who are anyway just Americans plain and simple, putting on these masks and codpieces as they suit our moments, whims, deficiencies and advantages? Well, to their surprise, the mob of flaneury has discovered in the centuries 20th+ that when a prone position transforms the entire world into a work of art, everybody becomes an actor. As the Shatt-man explaineth, once again:

“What is no longer given – station of self – must be created. It may take a lifetime. To that end most of us own a little property, have some adventures high or low, and revert at intervals to the mutterings of our innermost feelings. It all helps. At the same time I wonder how far the histrionic sensibility, the fourth path [!!!] to a place in the world, has also made actors, and perhaps lunatics, of us all.”

With the curtain closing, then, enter poor belated blogging, this fucking ridiculous enterprise comprised, as has been noted before mon frere, MOY DROOG, of equal parts tragic and absurd, or just plain stupid, and which runs on a frottage and aspires to smitage, the wholesale eyeball-peeling of the sun settling like a grapefruit on some distant dirty rooftop. “IT ALL HELPS” – I hear the famous Be Someone On Which Nothing Is Lost dictum in this, not to mention the dream of miscellaneists/bloggers/diarists, which at the end of the day seems to be nothing more than to catch all the little fragments of life and rub them together until they spark and the world (or, more often, an immediate circle) catches fire and burns.

Pushkin…proto-blogger? Dumber things have been claimed for him, I guess. The way I see it, the dream haunting literature is anti-literature and the nightmare of the Book therefore the Anti-Book, which, solidified, gets busy throwing its own shadow. Pushkin left behind a handful of fragments, which he didn’t think was anything to take seriously.