Category: Conformist Culture

Digging to China: Utopias Always Become Nightmares

 

One of my favorite Johnny Cash songs is his cover of Porter Wagoner’s “Satisfied Mind.”  The refrain goes like this:

How many times have
You heard someone say
If I had his money,
I could do things my way

But little they know
That it’s so hard to find
One rich man in ten
With a satisfied mind.

It’s very country and it rests on the country music genre cliché of human relationships being more valuable than wealth, status, and power.  It also makes me think of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Richard Cory,” from Sounds of Silence, which was the first time I encountered the idea in music outside my uncle’s self-produced country albums.  Richard Cory has everything, then shoots himself, yet the impoverished speaker in the song continues to envy him.  They’re both good songs.  They both carry a timeworn message in popular music: money can’t buy love.

Still, as a cynical friend of mine has pointed out more than once, it may be true that money can’t buy love, but it can buy travel, leisure, interesting rich-person adventures (vs. the poor-person variety), politeness, serenity, entertainment, granite countertops, educational opportunities, good food, access to the gifted and fascinating, and quality healthcare, which in the aggregate starts to look a lot like love.  Love of the world.  Love of life.  Love of fate.  Amor fati.

It’s easy to love what your life has become when you can do things your way.  Oh Allfather Zod, I don’t often pray to you (because why?  I have a shit ton of money), but I’m here at your subterranean temple of fire and perdition on Zodsday, just like last year, to recite my only prayer: DON’T CHANGE A THING.  Amor fati, you know?  I’m good.  You do you.

The rest of us will have to sacrifice two blocks of insect-soy protein at the altar of the Allfather on a regular basis or our paranoid, sadistic deity will smite us.  We may ask ourselves why the Sam Bankman-Frieds, Martin Shkrelis, and Anna Sorokins of the world have millions (ostensibly there are many, or at least some, of these individuals who have not yet been indicted), while we labor in Zod’s gulag, but that’s asking the wrong question.

The real question is whether we are about to own nothing and be happy, which is to say, whether we are authentically mentally ill (as opposed to performatively “mentally ill” as part of a curated online identity).  Think of Elon Musk declaring that he was just going to live with friends for the rest of his life instead of owning houses—because friends are the spice of life, no?  I wonder what sort of friends Elon has.  Sure, take the fifth wing.  Yeah, kitty-corner from the spaceport and the athletic complex.  Stay as long as you like!

Amor fati, brother, amor fati.

If the definition of mental illness is, to a certain extent, mediated by culture and indicated by transgressions that show deviant behavior (i.e. behavior that indicates deviation from cultural norms), then Elon’s version of owning nothing might qualify.  Klaus Schwab’s utopian vision of the post-pandemic “Great Reset,” in which every human culture, corporation, nation, and industry must immediately “act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions” likely also qualifies.

                                           Klaus Schwab, at the World Economic Forum, envisioning utopia.

We might ask why utopian visionaries, who seem to know the truth and have a final solution worked out for the world, always end up as Robespierres.  Moreover, why do social movements dedicated to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” tend to devolve into bitter gestures of intolerance, over-compensatory bias, and exclusion?  Well, money.  It’s the economy, stupid.  And pandemic dread really seemed to fuel that sort of white-knuckle utopianism.  It goes without saying that any future vision according to a tight group of political and economic experts will not stay very bright.

Utopia nearly always leads to the dys– version. Utopian visions born out of pandemics and other global traumas seem the worst.  As the British sci-fi roleplaying game, Carbon 2185, put it: “Carbon 2185 has a highly detailed economy with reference tables and charts to help you instantly know how much a bowl of street ramen costs.”  I tried playing this game by post with some friends during the pandemic and we gave up.  According to the rules, a bowl of street ramen cost more than my monthly take-home and we had to rent all our guns.  I’ll pass on the ramen, thanks.  Bring on the insect-soy.  It was depressing.  Someone proposed D&D instead.  Someone said, “Fuck that.”  We didn’t talk for a bit.

 

Why lean into cyberpunk dystopia when talking about the future?  Why put a frame of Max, from Elysium, visiting his parole-officer bot, who asks, “Are you being sarcastic and / or abusive?” at the top of this piece?  Why call it, “Digging to China”?  Am I implying that, in the Monbiot-Thunbergian horseshoe irony of the post-pandemic near future, we will be eating processed insects and living in the pods of a grubby rental economy, where the CCP and the USA have arrived at the same socio-economic terminal?  Am I now going to start referencing the episodes of Black Mirror that made me the most depressed because they seemed the most likely?  Am I committing tone crimes and microaggressions in this paragraph?  I’ll spare you.

Instead, I’ll propose that there has never been a better time to stop monetizing your hobbies (or your art or your body).  The impetus for such a proposition comes from Colleen Doran’s excellent, “How Long Does it Take to Draw a Comic Book Page?” on Colleen Doran’s Funny Business.  I love Colleen Doran’s newsletter.  She’s a wise professional who’s been around long enough in her industry to have a few things to say about creativity, money, and staying sane.

At the same time, the way she tracks her time (“I tried to stick to an eight hour day for awhile, but it is impossible for a working cartoonist to work only 8 hours per day.”) reminded me of how I’ve been tracking my fiction words-per-day and how stressed I’ve felt (for decades) about staying productive.  Where does this stress come from?  From the same economic imagination that envisions being priced out of a bowl of street ramen.  From illusions like “upskilling” which seems to borrow logic from the old trickle-down economics that clearly worked so well.  And the self-publishing option is no consolation for a working writer.  You have to grind.  You have to write more or nothing works. You have to monetize everything and keep a straight face. No sarcasm permitted.

Yes, there have been some slot-machine winners in the self-publishing game (read their work and the slot-machine metaphor will begin to make a lot of sense).  There have also been slot-machine winners in social media influencing, self-managed parasocial porn sites, and various forms of crowdfunding.  And I have no doubt that some of it is good (Chuck Wendig’s writing comes to mind along with the band, Scary Pockets—no comment on OnlyFans and its clones).  But mostly people seem to have been lured, at least for a while, into another self-exploitation gulag.

The self-publishing platform (Amazon, Lulu, etc.) now stands in the place of a traditional publisher, only with non-existent gatekeeping.  Sure, buddy, you’re an author now.  Good luck with that . . . another utopian vision gone westward to seek its fortune while the company takes its cut.

As a writer, you will eventually eat the bugs.  You will own nothing.  You will labor to pay rents to monolithic inhuman organizations with AI customer service—economic entities that conflate sarcasm with abuse and practice zero tolerance toward any microaggression that may question their mission statements.  You will prostitute yourself from your temporary pod.  And you will be happy.

I’ve learned a lot about how my body and mind get monetized by scrupulously tracking time spent working on various projects.  I think Colleen Doran and my many creative friends are right to pay attention to how they’re spending their days.  But I also think, absent a trust fund, time and grind eventually converge violently in you.  The personal sacrifices, the mental illnesses, the continual self-betrayals in the interests of time, money, and productivity point more to the cruel altar of Allfather Zod than to some glorious worker’s paradise.

How to Be Good

Black Swan is Midsommar.  Stop talking, Winston.

Hollywood has never seemed more Orwellian in its insistence that it is the repository of everything admirable in culture and that it represents the right side of history.  We know Hollywood will hold its own mother down and pull the gold out of her teeth with a pliers, but it prefers to pretend otherwise. And no one wants to dwell on this as long as the entertainment keeps coming.  With streaming, the rapaciousness of the entertainment center of the world is even harder to see.  Hollywood says it’s your friend.  In reality, it’s INGSOC conformity and you’re awful if you disagree.

Streaming technology is as 1984 as it gets.

The tragedy of streaming content is that it never goes away.  It’s in your house, up in your perceptual field, at all times.  Even when you’re not watching, you’re getting emails reminding you to log back in.  Back in the halcyon days of Blockbuster Video, a pretentious, emotionally manipulative stinker might show up on VHS, but there was a bit more personal agency involved in renting and watching it.  It wasn’t accessible unless you physically sought it out.  It was a tangible thing and you weren’t quite such a passive blob of content consumption—seeing the movie demanded that you get up, at least temporarily, from the couch.

You also didn’t have the same plausible deniability if you found yourself watching a lousy film.  At some point, from the rental store to the final credits (if you made it that far), you had to remind yourself that you put down good money for the thing and brought it home.  You did it to yourself, friend.

In the worst cases (Tree of Life?  Vanilla Sky?  The English Patient?  Legends of the Fall?  Crash? Life as a House?), you may have admitted that you were powerless against the overwhelming pretentious hype-suction and were thereafter drawn into a vortex of melodrama against your will.  Then you may have made a searching and fearless moral inventory and resolved never to relapse again.  Sometimes, bringing back drippy garbage from Blockbuster could be a cathartic, healing experience, like going out with the guys while on Antabuse.  The best lessons are the ones we teach ourselves.

But now, with streaming television and movies, everybody’s on the juice 24/7 and done learning.  You can now quietly demean yourself with bullshit Hollywood affectation and faux-political posturing every month for a discreet subscription fee.  Nobody has to know.  You don’t have to look the Blockbuster cashier in the eye and say, yes, I want to rent The Fountain.  You can violate yourself, from beginning to end, with all the pungent streams you desire in the privacy of your home.  Draw the curtains.  Click on I Am Love.  It’s okay.

You might occasionally feel a twinge of self-criticism—why have I watched Babel 15 times and The Maltese Falcon only twice?  What does this say about me?  But there are certain politically coded stinkers that remain beyond criticism, no matter how fetid and endless their streams may be.  Those are the films you are permitted to enjoy without needing to painfully reflect on why you are doing it to yourself.  Or if you do happen to wonder, the Party has provided a simple thought-stopping idea: because I am a good person.

The Party tells me I enjoy Magnolia for its drawn out emotional exploration of human meaning and compassion in the San Fernando Valley, a concept which, in itself, is astounding.  Thankfully, it’s streaming right now on Netflix.  I watch Magnolia because I am good.  It provides an emotional release and ultimately represents the best parts of me.  I enjoy what is good because I am a good person.  War is peace.  Freedom is slavery.  Ignorance is strength.  Thank you, Netflix.  I feel happy.  Let’s watch it again.

What’s going on in my brain?  Why is George Orwell haunting my laptop?

Ideally, a movie will go through a production funnel that starts with a compelling idea, and ends with a completed feature. Along the way, there will be setbacks and workarounds, windfalls and compromises. And as Rachel Ziegler, the most likeable actress in Hollywood, has so famously put it, “That’s Hollywood, baby.” *  But we do not live in an ideal world, which means the “completed feature” can come into being before its concept.  That, too, is Hollywood, baby.  In fact, that’s even more Hollywood than Hollywood. **

A film is sometimes made and then the hype apparatus around it tries to make it into something.  Is it a trenchant commentary on the state of race relations in inner-city schools?  It could be.  Is it a masterwork of ironic feminist critique?  It could be.  Is it a moving historical epic in which unrequited love is cast against a tapestry of chaos and war?  It could be.  Let’s see.  And if we can’t “position” it—

A book publicist once asked me how I’d position my second short story collection, Cruel Stars.  I said, “Wut?”  She took a deep breath and said, “What are the books on either side of it in the bookstore?”  Then I took a deep breath and said, “Well, the one of the left is, of course, my first collection, Gravity.  The one on the right is the collection I’m just finishing, Living the Dream.”  She nodded slowly at something over my shoulder.

—does it even exist?  Art is nothing without the marketing because marketing is what communicates The Message, the values of the Party.  It explains why you are good, why certain things should make you feel happy and sad, and why this should matter to modern audiences.  And if such an explanation is impossible or requires too much scaffolding, the Party might want to delay the release or even consign it forever to the vault.

But those of us who are not Party members, who are not on board with what passes for the New York Times concept of the right side of history, may object that this seems untoward for everyone concerned—like pushing a baby back in so the birth might be restarted more strategically, in a more profitable and impactful time.

Most unfortunate. When something is created, you can’t uncreate it so it can hit the zeitgeist more advantageously. You can only change it. And generally the more post-hoc changes and delays you make to a creative product, the more it becomes a horrific golem, an accidental parody of a commercial concept, instead of a coherent piece of art.  Put differently, one usually does not do a thing and then justify or position it without making a mess.  No, no, I’m not criticizing the Party.  Don’t look at me like that.  I’m merely making a small, harmless observation . . .

This brings us to the example of Black Swan and Midsommar, which is the same horrendously pretentious, emotionally coercive movie.

Black Swan is now available again on Netflix.  We might say it’s been raised from the dead one more time thanks to the always-already necromancy of streaming video.  It’s definitely a film approved of by the Party: a break-up story, masquerading as feminist folk horror, in which the main character, Nina, is romantically involved with herself and finally decides it’s not working out.

There are certain inchoate feelings loudly expressed.  There is a certain amount of weeping and there are various episodes of emotional violence that we are encouraged to think must mean something.  Sympathizing with her struggle (even if she would seem repellent and self-involved to non-Party members) means you are good.  You get the message.  You are indeed on the right side of history.

Midsommar is the same break-up story, masquerading as feminist folk horror, in which the main character is also romantically involved with herself and finally decides it’s not working out.  Sympathizing with her struggle (even if she would seem repellent and self-involved to non-Party members) also means you are good.  Criticizing this Frankenstein’s monster of highly telegraphed political position statements means you are a counter-revolutionary, a subversive, not of the Party. You are bad.

To be fair, there are some hapless men who travel through the scenes of these movies like runaway spaceships soon disappearing beyond the rings of Saturn, behaving awful or squeamish or unreliable according to the plot-furniture needs of the moment.  At least one of them is immolated in a bear suit, which might be interesting if we could bring ourselves to give two shits about him.  Instead, we think, well, there he goes.  He’s a crispy critter now, kids.  Woo.

The reason Black Swan-Midsommar is a good example of Hollywood’s shallow, monosyllabic politics is that these films (or we might say, this film) are actually very overt in their need to seem right and to make you agree that they are.  They’re the same yoked-up melodrama we’ve always gotten only now repositioned as edgy and essential, now back in our homes, telling us about politics and social justice, and not going anywhere.

They’re pretending to be one thing (folk horror) as a container for another thing (third-wave feminist critique) and are actually neither.  They’re telling us that if we like this, if we watch it many times, if we digest it, if we approve of it, we “get it.”  We’re in the know.  We’re correct.  And so we are good human beings.  2 + 2 = 5.  Of course, this is abject bullshit.

Why is Florence Pugh having a hysterical meltdown throughout the movie?  Stop talking, Winston.  It doesn’t need to make sense.  Just go with it and you’ll be safe.  There is no need to think critically or make small, troubling observations.  All you need to do is accept that she is sad.  You may cry with her if you wish.  That shows solidarity and that you are loyal.  Yes, you are a true believer . . .

Unintentional Orwellian patterns are ubiquitous, especially in the pop-culture mediated by Hollywood, which is most pop-culture.  Orwell wasn’t just concerned about totalitarian communism, his deeper project was criticizing thoughtless social conformity in general.

For example, in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, one of his largely forgotten novels (perhaps because it cuts a little too close to middle-class status anxiety and the obsession with money), the protagonist, Gordon Comstock, gives up on art to make a modest living in advertising.  What is art without marketing, the novel asks?  In the end, when he discards his poems, Comstock concludes it really is nothing.

Ultimately, there is no accounting for taste.  There is also no accounting for technology.  And when taste and technology coincide, there is no accounting at all.  Black Swan and Midsommar would have flashed through the pan with a lot less “positioning” had the big streamers not put them in perpetual rotation—unlike many far superior and less ideological films, which blink out of existence on streaming platforms all the time.

We hope Hollywood goes on a retreat in the mountains and finds itself,  comes to terms with its pathological need to always be class president, and decides to stop bullying its audiences.  But the aspidistra’s airborne and, let’s be honest, nobody knows how to land.

—

* Interestingly, it’s the same when writing a novel, only you get to create all your own obstacles, betray yourself, meddle with your own story, make all the compromises, and know from the beginning that you’re not going to get paid.

** There is no point in arguing that a particular production “isn’t mainstream” or isn’t influenced by Hollywood in whole or in part.  The global movie industry in general and streaming technology in particular has had an enormous centralizing effect on film.  “Indie” is now a flavor.  It is not a substantial alternative.

Hollywood’s Burning? Let it.

The actor eyed me with a chilled-out glare in the lounge of a restaurant on La Cienega. “I’m not looking for a dude,” the actor said. “And even if I was, you’re not him.” In the jovial language of men I suggested that if he didn’t comply I would try to make sure he wouldn’t get the part. There was so little hesitancy that the moment became even more unsettling than I had initially made it. The actor simply sighed, “Let’s roll.” I couldn’t tell if the indifference was real or faked. He was planning a career. This was a necessary step. It was just another character he was playing in the bedroom on the fifteenth floor of the Doheny Plaza that night.

— Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms

In the eighties, we had the Cold War.  I was in high school.  Alexandra, my perpetually sullen, perpetually goth lunch companion—rebel enough to be seen eating with me five days a week but not rebel enough to date me—liked to dwell on the prospect of imminent nuclear armageddon.  It’s what she talked about more than anything else.

There was something cleansing about it for her, imagining what would happen nationally, locally, and biologically as nuclear winter enveloped the globe and fallout slowly poisoned everything.  Alexandra might have been unhappy, might have had eggplant-purple hair and a certain amount of fishnet on her at all times, but she also had a great imagination and a gift for describing the creeping symptoms of radiation sickness.

She could quote made-up facts and bullshit statistics on the inevitability of the Soviets nuking us within five years.  She did so loudly in our American Government class when the hicks on the football team said anything remotely respectful or patriotic about the country.  Alexandra loved the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the Nazis’ faces melt off and, of course, she’d tell everyone this was bound to happen, since we lived in San Diego and there was a major Naval base and training center there.  Boom.  And our faces would just melt off.  You think the Russians care?  They’re targeting our subs.  They don’t care about your stupid family.

I went along with it everyday at lunch because of course I did.  It was self-consciously morbid meets hypersensive and lonely at 12:30 on the bleachers of the upper field.  And it was a time before the internet, before smart phones, and before elaborate plagiarism software that can almost pass the Turing test.  We seemed to bullshit each other more and draw less prepackaged bullshit from the inexhaustible media sewage-flow we enjoy today.  And the bullshit wasn’t so monetized.

It was a time when zombies were starting to move out of niche horror and into the mainstream as a purgative for middle-class anxiety.  It was the era of The Terminator, Rambo, and Rocky IV.  Sensitivity was not an issue.  Feeling victorious was.  Dolph Lundgren was supposed to catch a beating by Sylvester Stallone like the Soviet Union was supposed to eventually catch a beating from the west; though, it’s worth noting that Lundgren actually put Stallone into real-life intensive care as a result of his in-scene punches.

We all felt, at least from our teenage high school perspective, that the USSR was mostly genocidal scientists, hulking super-soldiers, and spies.  Those were the movies we saw.  If we thought critically about them, it was about how the films were put together, whether they were unbelievable or dumb or boring.  We never said, you know, I think the Russians might not all be evil, sadistic, and obsessed with world domination.  Why are we constantly being shown this?  Dolph Lundgren was born in Stockholm, dude.

This was because the movie industry existed behind its own iron curtain.  Or maybe a better metaphor would be Macbeth’s Birnam Wood.  One moment you’re looking in the arts section of the paper for when Red Dawn is playing at Cinema 21 in the mall.  Then you’re coordinating with your friends (or in my case, just getting in the car and going by myself).  Then you’re sitting in the dark, eating your bucket of oversalted popcorn, waiting for the movie to start.  And then, all of a sudden, Birnam’s come to Dunsinane and Colorado is being occupied by a commie invasion force: In our time, no foreign army has ever occupied American soil.  Until now.  God bless the USA.  It could happen right here.

You didn’t know how they came up with such a propagandistic idea or really anything about how movies are born, live, and die.  You didn’t know much about Red Dawn other than the poster outside made it look like some kind of action film and maybe someone you know saw a trailer of Patrick Swayze holding an assault rifle and screaming about wolverines.  It was six years before IMDB.  All you had was Siskel and Ebert’s At the Movies or selected reviews in the paper.

You definitely didn’t know Hollywood was, is, and always would be terrified of being on the wrong side or maybe terrified of being unpopular or maybe just terrified of losing money.  And in 1984, that meant the Soviets had to be evil, ruthless, baby-eating devils.  They’d replaced the evil, ruthless, baby-eating Nazis dispatched from central casting since the end of WWII.  Though rooting out Nazis and crypto-Nazis would make a comeback in 2016, we didn’t notice any of this in the 1980s the way we do now.

Alexandra, for example, had no idea that her fears and desires, a good part of her teenage pain,  even her style of speech and choice of wardrobe were mediated almost completely by Ally Sheedy’s image in The Breakfast Club and a growing fascination with Robert Smith’s depressed-electrocuted-kabuki look in The Cure’s post-1982 goth phase.  At lunch, we didn’t talk about the subtle influence of pop-culture or the movie industry because its machinery was invisible to us.  We talked about our faces melting and whether we’d resort to cannibalism to prolong our lives after 90% of the country turned to irradiated ash.

But Hollywood was constantly whispering.  It was obsessed with us.  It wanted our attention.  It wanted to hold our hand through our nightmares.  It wanted to be the object of our desires, the interpreter of our dreams, the focus of our worship.  Above all, it wanted us to love it more than anything or anyone else.  And it was willing to make certain demands.  Like a lingering house demon in some proto-Ugric folktale, it started off only wanting to help churn the butter.  But we couldn’t give it enough affection.  And so it killed little Vanya in the shed out of spite.  That was almost four decades ago.  It’s been mutating in the dark ever since.

The movie industry—at least since the eighties but probably since the rise of talkies—has always been a cruel, neurotic presence, glorifying consumerism, ridiculing the life of the mind, punishing promiscuousness while transforming our sisters and daughters into horror fetish objects, and holding up the impedimenta of suburban life as the ultimate in personal achievement.  Feminism never made a dent.  Early diversity and inclusion efforts gave us lame racial tokenism for 30 years before metastasizing into the story-wrecking virtue signaling we have today.  And the vague materialism of Alex P. Keaton stayed with us, though whispered by ever-stealthier avatars in ever more camouflaged forms.

TV started as a way to sell Buicks but has become a way to sell a certain range of political opinions.  Money is still the point.  At the beginning of our new, not so roaring 2020s, 39 years had gone by since Red Dawn suggested Russian paratroopers could occupy the mall where Cinema 21 used to tell us how to think and feel.  We got where we are today by lingering at a three-way crossroads: Donald Trump unrest, a weaponized bat virus from China, and a highly publicized moment of police brutality in Minnesota.  Then everything started to burn.  And so did the propaganda machine.

The mall had already died.  Cinema 21 was already disrecognized space.  Someone threw a brick through the Overton Window and certain conversations became impossible in public.  So Hollywood had to change once again to stay on the right side of profitability.  But the new woke lip service is already falling apart along with revenue and, possibly, the entire streaming model, which Steven Soderbergh has rightly called “the crypto of the entertainment business.”  Watch the wreck catch fire and sink.  It’s already well underway.

Now the most important audience demographics are the investors in corporate streaming and, ironically, the Communist Party of China.  With this in mind, said corporations would love to utterly replace creative labor with AI, which isn’t going to make shitty Hollywood writing any better.  Said creatives are striking, which also isn’t going to make shitty Hollywood writing any better.  Ted Hope, “a producer on over 70 films, studio exec on over 60, [who] launched Amazon’s foray into feature film production,” argues in “The Coming Cinema Apocalypse (is Here)” that we’re completely controlled by “surveillance capitalism” and “AI is a real threat to all film people’s jobs.”  And he should know.  Beijing certainly does.

Current Hollywood remains a vile changeling, still willing to say anything, fixated on being cool enough to keep getting paid above all else.  It’s Dorothy Thompson’s “Mr. B” from her acidly satirical 1941 essay, “Who Goes Nazi?”:

Mr. B has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money and he has done lots of other things for money. His code is not his own; it is that of his class—no worse, no better, he fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value—success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would.

Whatever pattern is successful, whatever needs to be said, whatever constitutes a growth mindset—no matter how moronic or destructive—is what Hollywood will voice and therefore transmit as cultural propaganda.  The problem is that attitudes (and economics) are transforming faster than the movie industry can effectively track.  As the medium and message of the movies becomes ever more ephemeral, abstract, supercilious, and politically homogenous, the industry is beginning to seem more volatile than Chinese Ethereum.

So is Hollywood burning?  Yes.  Should it?  Certainly.  At least in its present state.  As Vecna puts it in the season four finale of Stranger Things, “There is nothing—nothing you can do to stop it now.  Hawkins will fall, then the rest of this senseless, broken world . . . and I will remake this world into something beautiful.”  It’s the clichéd mission statement of every two-bit canned Hollywood warlord, commie, evil wizard, and garden variety baby-eater since movies began.  Burn it down so we can rebuild.  It’s Ming the Merciless for modern audiences.  And unfortunately it’s the most optimistic sentiment available to us at the moment.

Given Russia’s war with Ukraine, we might still get nuked, rendering such criticism as relevant as brass sconces on the Titanic.  But I don’t think most teens these days are as afraid of nuclear war.  It’s not as real to them as it was to us because the messaging, the propaganda, is different.  Gen-Z, in particular, doesn’t seem to be very worried about foreign paratroopers landing at the capitol building.  What’s a “capitol building”?  They haven’t gone outside in six months.

If Alexandra and I were having lunch on the bleachers in 2023, she wouldn’t be draped in black and I wouldn’t be tolerating her in silent desperation.  We’d be sitting quietly, passively, barely aware of each other, tapping on our phones, waiting for the next reboot of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, written by a computer to avoid offending anyone about anything (so as to maximize global streaming revenue, even from certain high-population totalitarian regimes).

We wouldn’t be feeling upset because we wouldn’t be feeling very much at all.  But I’m too old-fashioned for that.  Give me some face melting and a story that doesn’t require me to hate myself.  I’ll take corny Rocky Balboa or the Terminator.  At least those stories were vaguely more real than the spineless, self-consuming, fake puritanism we have now.

On Going to Parties

Don’t.

Hear me out.  I know: parties are an opportunity to hook up and possibly get drunk or high in a situation where you can feel less alone.  In some cases, going also fulfills a social duty.  At least one person wants or needs you to be there.  Or you feel obligated to make an appearance because if you don’t there will be social or professional consequences.  Maybe that’s where the deals are being made.  Or you go because all your friends (the people you see regularly when you’re not at parties) will be there and you’re afraid you will seem alien and awkward and will become a target for gossip if you stay home.  Or you go because you’re secretly bored or depressed, which worries you and makes you think a party will be good medicine.  Note: it never is.

There are other reasons, of course.  But these seem to be the most common ones.  And sometimes these reasons are good, which is to say, not anxiety-provoking or depressing or otherwise liable to leave you with an emotional scar and a bad memory.  But think about the parties you’ve attended.  I mean, the ones you can remember.  How many of them can you look back on and say “That was a good time” without certain regrets, without a flash of pain, like running your tongue over a sore tooth?

Maybe you’re an extrovert and you don’t agree with this at all. Maybe you like to say “I love parties!” the way you say “I love shopping!” or “I love parades!” or “I love concerts and riding the big roller coaster and telling jokes to the whole room!”  Sure.  You have an amazing life, oh thou Paragon of Well-Adjusted Exuberance and Charm.  But even extroverts get the blues and, for the rest of us, it’s not that simple.

Even if you rate on the manic end of the social spectrum and regard filling the air with words as one of the best things in life, you’re not immune to darkness.  In fact, I suspect the loudest, most visible attention magnets are sometimes the most sensitive.  They feel, somewhere, perhaps inexpressibly, that there are things slithering down there in the dark.  They’ll do anything to remain on the surface where life is bright and cheerful.  And who can blame them, even if a certain obnoxiousness and studied insensitivity is part of their armor?  As an unfortunate ex-girlfriend of mine used to say, “I like to keep it easy and breezy.”  Still, just because you turn up the television when you’re by yourself doesn’t make the madness disappear.  It will be there no matter what you do.  But, by all means, turn it up to eleven and pour yourself a stiff one.

On the technique of avoiding parties, there is ultimately little to be said.  Just stay home and read a book.  A book won’t stab you in the back at 2:00 AM by seducing your best friend.  A book won’t demand you perform the Esoteric Rites of the Porcelain God in someone’s weird guest bathroom while people continuously pound on the door.  A book won’t have you riding a bicycle for a month until your arraignment.  A book won’t gift you with questions you can ask yourself for the next 20 years.

Why?

Why did I go?

Why did I drink?

Why did I say or not say that?

Why couldn’t I have foreseen what would happen?

Why the aftermath, the fallout, the inability to ever speak with so-and-so again?

Why the difficult conversation the next day?  We were drunk.  It’s not you.  I’m just not looking for a relationship or anything at the moment.  It was just . . . a party.  You know?

Chapters 14 – 17 would have treated you better.  There are no repercussions that follow reading, having a cup of tea, and going to bed.  You’ll wake up the next day feeling better.  You will be blissfully unaware of the catty gossip, the betrayals, the bad decisions, the inside of the drunk tank.  You will have all your teeth.  Your brain cell count will hold relatively steady.

This is not to say you should become Fernando Pessoa and spend all your time staring at raindrops and probing the dark vicissitudes of your soul—though that wouldn’t necessarily be a waste of time.  Surely, it would be better than listening to Bob tell a joke about his cousin’s lawnmower.  Drink!  Or nodding while someone bitches about a politician.  Drink!  Or smiling at a not-unattractive person who might, after a certain amount of tequila, decide you are also not-unattractive.  Drink!

Drink!  Drink!  Drink!  Drink!  Drink!  So you don’t have to see.  So you don’t have to know.  So you don’t have to feel.  Because otherwise, even if you suspect your brain cell count may be in precipitous decline, you will understand that parties are a fool’s game.

“I was in a uniform, a costume, pretending to be the boyfriend, taking a year’s worth of classes I had no interest in, disguising myself: I was an actor and none of this was real.” — Bret Easton Ellis, The Shards

Consider the Kitten

When I see something ignorant, robotic, and false being held up as brilliant, innovative, and true, I think of how good my life must be.  I tell myself there will always be stupidity and hypocrisy in the world, especially in writing and publishing.  I remind myself that it’s better to feel compassion for people caught up in mistakes than criticize their blindness.  And I admit that I’m fallible.

Yet there are moments when human nature undercuts my better judgment and I feel willing to kick the kitten that just vomited something on my doorstep.  I’m not proud of such feelings.  But no matter how much I meditate, no matter how much Thich Nhat Hanh I read, there’s a cruel, stony part of me that just doesn’t care.  It’s a hard world, Fluffy.  Get off my porch.

I quit smoking 20 years ago.  Everyday some part of me still wants a cigarette, which is probably why the characters in my short stories smoke.  At least someone still gets to enjoy it.  But I’ve had some great writing insights over cigarettes and coffee—more, I’m inclined to think, than I do now, even if my caffeine consumption has grown to replace the nicotine.  I have clean lungs and a rapid heartbeat.  I’m wired but not as wise.

This might be the root of my intolerance.  Some writers really need to start drinking again.  They’re not able to produce unless they do.  Maybe if I went out and bought a carton of Camel Lights, I’d look at many of the insipid things currently promoted as quality writing and smile along with the alcoholic cigarette ghost fume of Jack Kerouac, who once declared in a letter: “I don’t know; I don’t care; and it doesn’t make any difference.”  That’s it.  Light up.  Nothing matters.

Long ago, at the University of Montana, I found myself on a smoke break during a one-day-a-week, four-hour creative nonfiction workshop that nobody wanted to take.  There were five or six other MFA-program degenerates in the class.  We couldn’t get the workshops and literature sections we needed due to a writing professor having a midlife meltdown the previous spring (which included loudly and publicly criticizing his terminally ill wife, sleeping with his students, physically threatening other faculty in the hall, and declaring that he thought we were all imbeciles).  Of course, he had tenure.  So he went on leave.  Now it was almost Christmas.  And we’d signed up for electives to kill time and keep our tuition waivers flowing until the search committee hired a temporary replacement.  Morale was low.

When English studies people fall, they fall hard.  This is known.  We were all trying to keep it together.  Hence multiple smoke breaks behind the five-story, brutalist classroom building in the dark, snow up to our knees.  There was, I should admit, a deluge of alcohol being consumed that semester.  Cocaine was too ambitious and, honestly, too expensive.  But whiskey in Montana?  Shit, it came out of the water fountains.

Andrea was my smoke-break buddy.  She’d go out the back of the building and lean against the parking lot hydrant.  I always ran into it because it was covered in snow.  Paying attention to things like hidden fire hydrants seemed to require a volume of positive life-affirming energy I just didn’t have.  So I barked my shins on it regularly.  But that was Andrea’s bitter smoking spot.  Out in the desolate lot in her enormous down jacket, she was a shadow and a tiny ember.  I’d walk over and stand next to her.  We wouldn’t talk much.  The protagonist in every one of Andrea’s stories was Taylor Swift.  Once you know that, there isn’t much left to say.

She spent a lot of time obsessing over Lauren, a fellow student and the darling of the department, whose dad was a media executive and had paved his daughter’s way to a book deal and literary fame well before she came to grad school.  This was the ostensible origin of Andrea’s bitterness.  No one suggested that, apart from having family in publishing, success might have been more forthcoming if Andrea hadn’t made every story about Taylor Swift.  But nobody knew anything.  If her collection of stories had gotten published alongside Lauren’s novel and Andrea had gone on a big book tour, everyone, especially the faculty, would have seen it as a sign of the new literary age, the new 20 under 30.  But as it was, Lauren remained the “it girl.”

Sometimes we talked about Lauren, who no one ever saw in class because she was skiing in Vail or visiting friends in Spain or doing a book tour or attending a gallery opening.  We had to sit in a bright classroom that smelled like hospital disinfectant.  We had to read each other’s boring attempts at fiction-adjacent prose and make helpful comments.  And when we weren’t doing that, we had to talk about things like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Year of Magical Thinking, and the rhetoric of Vietnam war propaganda.  Meanwhile, Lauren was living the life.

Maybe Andrea forgot what I remembered: I was here to talk about those things, not to lead the life.  This was not real life.  This was a sub-dimension, a demimonde, an absurd mirror world where we could obsess about each other, be jealous and competitive over silly things, and wind up reading texts we never wanted to read in classes we never wanted to take.  A small part of me knew it was glorious and someday I’d look back at it like a weird fairyland where I had seemingly unlimited hours to write and think and talk about art.  And maybe that radiated outward because I always seemed to cheer Andrea up on our smoke breaks, even if we didn’t talk all that much.

But the smoke break I remember so vividly was the one where Andrea pulled out a hardcover of Lauren’s recently published novel and handed it to me without comment.  I’m not going to name it because Lauren and her novel are real and the book is still in print.  I’d read parts of it in previous workshops and I knew, just as Andrea knew, that it was garbage.

Lauren had everything necessary for meteoric success and it didn’t hurt that she was charming, smart, cultured, and gorgeous.  But she couldn’t write.  Years later, I’d hear that her prestigious publishing house performed a very invasive round of edits to the point where subsequent drafts were almost ghostwritten (maybe ghost rewritten).  But I chalked that up to jealous post-program rumors.  Now, I’m not so sure.

I remember angling the book so I could see it in the light from classrooms, snowflakes landing on the pages.  I remember Andrea blowing a funnel of smoke at my face, as if to say, “See?” or maybe “Take that, you cheerful moron.”  Take that.  Take it and like it.

I handed the book back, and said, “Good for Lauren.”

And I remember Andrea shaking her head, smiling at the corners of her mouth, taking long drags, saying, “Yeah.  Good for Lauren.”

I don’t know what became of Andrea.  After the program, we lost touch.  I know Lauren didn’t publish another book.  She got her degree and disappeared into the soft world prepared for her since birth, a world in which Andrea and I would never set foot.  And to be honest, I don’t blame Lauren for anything.  In the arts, you have to use everything at your disposal, every advantage you can, to do what you’re called to do.  If I’d had fancy connections and book deals, I’d have been leveraging those things.  Andrea would, too. Without a doubt, there’d be a book of short stories with Taylor Swift’s face on the front and Andrea’s on the back.

But sometimes, when I see the same things over and over, when I see the vampires and shills of the publishing world salivating over the shitty writing of a young, attractive first-book all-star, who—let’s be honest—can’t help that she’s young and attractive or that her writing is shit, I don’t feel all that compassionate.  I don’t blame her.  I feel angry at the cynicism in the marketing.  I know she’s a lost kitten who only wants to be loved.  But when I read something like this about to come out with a Big Six publishing house, I might feel inclined to kick her off my front step:

In the little courtyard off Piazza di Santa Maria, the robins are flitting like a crimson rain around the fountain and the statues of great writers no one remembers.  The sky is sad, overcast, and the wind from the café carries the scent of patriarchy and the tears of the forgotten whose poems will never be spoken.  You sit across from me in the melancholy breeze, sipping your Cinzano, your long lashes seductive and unaware of the robin at your elbow, and I am brought back to the fields of San Salvador.  The robins are joyful, but soon they will cry.

I wonder if this person’s parents are famous designers or wealthy investors or successful movie producers.  I hope so.  Otherwise, the sky will truly be sad after this book gets pushed out to pay some business debt that has nothing to do with its author or its contents.

My smoke breaks with Andrea may have taught me more than the classes we were in.  At least I’m still working.  I hope Andrea is, too.  Now I can look back at our writing program with a certain amusement, maybe amazement. I am not a monster, most days.  And I wouldn’t say no to anyone who wants to write a book and happens to have the juice to put that book in front of a large audience.  Better this author than an AI; though, an AI might write it better.

In my more generous moods, I want to bless anyone who cares about literary fiction enough to get involved and try to make some.  But the Andrea part of me, the skeptical, hard-hearted part, is still standing in the snow, thinking, “What the fuck?”

Don’t Weep for the Oompa Loompas

I loved Roger Ebert’s wit and lack of pretention.  His movie reviews in The Chicago Sun-Times often struck a delicate balance between honesty and generosity.  He had a great sense of film history and he’d contextualize Hollywood stinkers in ways that made them interesting as artifacts of a silly and unforgiving industry.

Over time, I found his approach to be applicable beyond the movies: first accept that there will be a lot of garbage in a given field or system.  Then understand that garbage can teach you as much, if not more, than quality if you’re willing to pay attention.  That is, if you can continue watching, if you can manage to withstand it and keep your lunch down.

Sometimes, I have a near visceral reaction to pretentious media, especially when it comes to literary fiction and nonfiction.  I can trace it to when I was getting a master’s degree in writing and every other literary novel seemed to be about an attractive young woman on the east coast exploring bisexuality and working in an art gallery.  Most of the stories submitted in my workshops were also about that or something very close to it.  I spent my MFA depressed, alienated from a literary scene steeped in cloying trendiness.

Besides, I didn’t know how to write about that stuff, even if it was required reading in my classes.  My characters, as one of my instructors put it, were rather from the “low end of the service economy.”  And that dog wouldn’t hunt if I wanted a career as a writer.  So she hoped I had plans after graduation.  Maybe sell some insurance or, you know, the Navy.  Half-drunk at a faculty party, I laughed and said something like, “Don’t do me any favors.”  She didn’t.

The formula was ubiquitous in those years and seemed to whip my professors into a lather whenever one of the Big Six offered up another clone—probably because my professors were working writers trying desperately to stay in step with what their agents and editors demanded.  Then Candace Bushnell anthologized her New York Observer columns, which applied the formula to a type of harder-edged, jaded, status-anxious Manhattanite and everybody wanted to be Carrie Bradshaw.

I tried to channel my inner Ebert when writing critiques of the new Bushnellian short stories coming across the table.  I drank my Milk of Magnesia and tried to learn.  And I did learn at least one thing: marketing is rarely about art even when art is being marketed.  But the artists don’t always realize this.  Everyone’s just trying to do their best.  Everyone just wants to be loved in a world that won’t love them back.  So what’s it gonna take?  Go ask Candace.

By the time Sex and the City hit HBO, 9/11 had already seared itself into the national consciousness.  So naturally the usual illicit love triangles, existential crises, career failures and ineffectual husband stories that had been previously set in five-bedroom homes, fancy restaurants, galleries, and uptown lofts—with an odd chapter sometimes taking place at a resort in Vail or, saints preserve us, on a boat off the coast of Mallorca—now featured explosions.

I was advised to rewrite my current novel and make the protagonist a fireman.  A well-known British novelist, who I’d previously considered above all this, published a divorce novel almost identical to his previous divorce novel, save that the new one was set not far from ground zero at the World Trade Center.  My former classmates, now selling insurance, preparing to ship out on aircraft carriers, or working in the low end of the service economy, were suddenly writing stories that read less like quotidian Nobel Prize Alice Munro and more like overheated radio dramas from the 1940s.

Maybe Ebert got his compassionate take from “Sturgeon’s Law,” formulated in 1957 by science fiction writer, Theodore Sturgeon, who declared in a column for Venture Science Fiction that “ninety percent of everything is crap.”  Subsequent writers reformulated this as: ninety percent of everything is garbage meant to hold up the ten percent that isn’t.”  Sometimes, this is referred to as “landfill theory.”  Still, if we’ve learned anything from modern horror movies—a genre that seems densely compacted with trash—one does not take the landfill for granted.

So I tried to embrace the new NPR-coffee-table terrorism fetish like every other young writer planning on attending the next AWP conference, but it was hard.  Hard to keep down.  Hard to contextualize as just another trend.  Reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close helped because I thought it was really good.  Maybe I’d read it differently now, but I remember thinking Foer’s 2005 novel was the only good thing I’d read with 9/11 as a backdrop.  I started to wonder whether the New York publishing industry had the potential to become less squeamish, less trendy, less risk-averse.

Nevertheless, when David Foster Wallace killed himself three years later and Little, Brown, and Company jumped at the chance to publish his unfinished Pale King, it seemed like a new low.  The marketing around the book wasn’t about pushing units anymore or the possibility of an HBO special somewhere down the line.  Maybe no one knew what it was about.  Maybe the reptilian DNA of Little, Brown’s sales reps had finally asserted control and the lizards were running amok in a wild frenzy, fucking and consuming everything in sight.  Then again, maybe I just hadn’t been paying attention.

I had a Skype meeting with an agent around this time who looked very much like the students I used to see coming out of the London School of Economics when I’d get off the Tube at Holborn: impeccably clean, flinty expression, driven, deeply unhappy.  She asked me what the books on either side of my novel would be in the bookstore and didn’t smile when I said, “Well, that depends.  What bookstore are we in?”

I should have said, “On one side we have The Pale King.  On the other, of course, is Emperor’s Children—it culminates on 9/11, don’t you know.”  She knew.  I knew she knew.  And she would have approved. Messud’s Emperor’s Children is the Sex and the City of 9/11 literary opportunism.  For some inexplicable reason, I didn’t say anything like that.  We simply looked at each other for a moment and she wished me good luck.

We’ve come a long way since then; though, it seems like we’re doing the same dance to different music.  Much has been made of the wokification of publishing, whatever that means, and the censorship of Roald Dahl, whose work in its untreated form has now been adjudged dangerous for the youth.  I suspect this has something to do with Millennials and Gen Zs being really, really, really, really sensitive and therefore risk averse.  More than we ever were.  In some ways, I suppose it’s good to be that sensitive.  In others, perhaps not so good.  And Roald Dahl’s estate better watch out.  Because now they’re saying the Oompa Loompas are the “subject of some racial controversy” and I have no doubt they’ll be evaluating the corruptive influence of Switch Bitch and Esio Trot before long.

Still, the cynical insensitive Gen X voice in the back of my head says commerce will undermine equity, safe spaces, and sensitivity readers in the end.  The scaly reptiles of the publishing industry are mostly nocturnal, preferring to stay hidden during the day.  But when they catch the scent of profit, they invariably rise up and stop doing good so they might do well.

Then into the landfill will go yesterday’s social justice homilies along with the newly expurgated Bond books and whatever Dahl stories were rewritten by an administrative assistant at Penguin Random House using ChatGPT.   And there will be a new renaissance of insensitive fiction and non-inclusive speech.  Well, the grave’s a fine and private place.  If Fleming and Dahl are turning in it as a result of all this bad noise, who really wants to know?  Maybe the AI rewrites will improve between now and the next big thing.

I’m reminded of one of Ebert’s funniest reviews: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) which, in the first sentence, he called “a horrible experience of unbearable length.”  Unwilling to pull punches, as this seemed like one of the few movies Ebert really hated and resented having to watch, he wrote that “the movie has been signed by Michael Bay.  This is the same man who directed The Rock in  1996.  Now he has made Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.  Faust made a better deal. . . . The two most inexplicable characters are Ron and Judy Witwicky (Kevin Dunn and Julie White), who are the parents of Shia LaBeouf, who Mephistopheles threw in to sweeten the deal.”

That always makes me laugh.  Yet, this was not one of Ebert’s most compassionate reviews.  It was one where the balance shifted conspicuously from generosity to blistering contempt.  Maybe it was his age or the fact that he was definitely of a less sensitive generation, less concerned with being non-offensive, and it was starting to show.  But there’s no denying that his serrated wit could sometimes reach neoclassical dimensions.  And that may be why we read him—not for how much safety and inclusivity his ingenium could provide, but for how dangerous he could be.

Being a Creative Writer in an Age of Anxiety

A colleague of mine, a self-employed commercial artist and science fiction writer I will call “Jim,” recently declared, “If you’re a man getting close to your 50s and you haven’t done something yet, don’t say you’re doing to do it someday because you probably won’t.”  Jim was criticizing another guy in the same industry, who he doesn’t like and who seems to be loudly and visibly struggling in his career. 

Strangely, Jim is also getting close to his 50s, hasn’t done all the things he wants to do, and is also existing paycheck to paycheck, trying to live off his self-published work (which is quite good, in my opinion).  The difference between them is the other guy whines loudly and constantly plugs his GoFundMe, while Jim works harder and (mostly) swallows his frustration.

Jim’s comments on social media are usually criticisms of people who complain about their difficult lives instead of working hard like him.  I can accept that attitude.  If anyone has earned the right to be scornful of the weak, it’s someone who started off in a weak position and made themselves strong or, in Jim’s case, perhaps marginally stronger.  Still, it doesn’t feel good when his angst rises and he starts punching down.

His pronouncement above sounds like flinty entrepreneurial wisdom—Yoda in a self-made, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps vein: do or do not (in your career, in your life); there is no try.  But I know his criticism and anger are rooted in his own insecurities, not in some external source.  We’re always the most critical of our own family, our own friends, our own professional colleagues, members of our own communities and cultures because, when they fail, it makes us feel like we’re next. 

Jim was, to use a trendy term, “triggered,” and he had to release the vapors.  We all have that friend who tries to speak like a philosopher or social critic as a way of purging anxiety and legitimating his concerns.  Sometimes, I do that, too.  So I’m not trying to be inordinately critical of Jim or except myself from a behavior that seems common among sensitive people, particularly artists and writers.  If you’re not bothered by something, you usually have little motivation to write or speak about it publicly, especially on a blog or in a magazine op-ed or on social media.  But in order to understand the criticism Jim’s making, we also have to know something about arts communities and social timing.

A creative community, whether physical (like a writer’s colony, a brick-and-mortar magazine, or a college art program) or on social media, is a perpetual knife fight in a submarine.  It goes without saying that in every creative field, money is always tight, careers are always precarious, hyper-competitiveness is the rule, commercialism undercuts everything, and exploitation is a fact of life. 

These hardships and uncertainties naturally produce immense anxiety, since survival is always at issue on some level, even when you ostensibly “make it” and get famous.  As the actress, Jewel Staite, drolly notes on her Twitter profile, “I like routine, predictability, and living a non-stressful existence, which is why I’ve chosen the film industry.”  That’s darkly funny.  But it’s also true: life as an artist isn’t simple or calm.  You don’t get job security, even when people know who you are.  You’re always on the make.

Keeping this in mind makes it easier to see how tearing down other creatives can become a Malthusian side hustle.  If they’re wounded, the instinct may be to kick them where it hurts.  If they’re down, put your foot on their back.  Do unto others before they can do unto you.  More table scraps for you that way.  You’ll feel less vulnerable, less likely to die in poverty and obscurity, less hopeless, lost, and ashamed that you ever considered yourself worthy to live a creative life.

If publicly criticizing others relieves your constant, grinding dread, even if only for a moment, it will be tempting.  But there’s a problem with that way of being, apart from its meanness and craven pettiness: it makes you less able to do your own imaginative work.  Competitiveness and the anxiety that stimulates it erodes creativity.  It demands your emotional energy, the power you should be channeling into your creative process.  And it makes you feel like you have to court public visibility at all costs to protect yourself from others like you.  It brings to mind Putin parading around his nukes, saying don’t mess with me.  I’m serious business.  That’s exhausting.  Artists should not have nukes.

This is why I have generally avoided arts communities; though, social media has put most writers like me in a perpetual online detention camp with my peers (and the current surge of AI art paranoia isn’t helping one bit).  The pandemic only exacerbated the tensions and forced online interactions that would not have been advisable in any other era.  Add the wave of self-conscious, humorless, social-activist writing still moving through pop-culture and the creative life seems nothing but an exercise in misery.

Western, middle-class, social timing says that by certain decades of life, one should have certain things and be certain things.  But very few people will admit that they fall short of those ideals.  One cannot log onto Twitter or Facebook without seeing some financial marketing come-on that goes, “How many millions will you need to retire?”  In other words, how much money will you need to avert an ugly humiliating end after you retire?  Millions?  Most artists and writers have thousands (or hundreds) in the bank.  Some, who are actually very gifted and good at what they do, live below the poverty line.

So I think I understand Jim when he says if you haven’t done a thing by 50, you aren’t going to.  He’s not talking to you or me.  He’s talking to himself.  Because he’s thinking about social timing and emoting like a neurotic artist in a creative community, wondering if he’s destined to die in the gutter.

While I don’t accept the assumptions that go into the success / failure binary encouraged by middle-class social timing—I think it’s a little more complicated and there’s more room to live how you want to live, if you’re willing to make compromises—I also think it’s better to work hard than pump your GoFundMe for sympathy change.  But I feel sad when I see a talented colleague desperately cutting down some other poor sap who’s just trying to make the rent any way he can.

We get one life.  It isn’t over ’till it’s over.  And ultimately we get to do what we want as long as we’re willing to accept the consequences.  That means, if you really love being an artist, you’ll choose art.  The hard part is making that choice in a relaxed, generous way.

Interview with the Vampire Reconsidered

I rewatched Interview with the Vampire last night and it just doesn’t seem dark enough. Maybe that’s a reflection of how my emotional self has darkened after Covid, rapacious politics, and so much social turmoil. But it seems to me that the story, the myth, of the vampire is dangerous because it is Dionysian and feral.  It has to be dark.  It has to flirt with real evil and suffering. 

Interview is too tame, too inhibited.  It tries to show evil but it stops at longing for redemption.  There has to be heartbroken bitterness (Lestat pretends to be bitter, but he’s just bored and infatuated).  And that bitterness has to become so intense that it doubles over into malice.  Then we have something.  That would be a vampire story fit for 2021.

Anne Rice (who became a super-Christian) thought of the vampire more the way Mary Shelley thought of Frankenstein’s monster: a messianic anti-hero.  That’s great.  But Rice didn’t come up with the vampire mythos.  And when you make a vampire movie, it goes beyond your particular ideas into the greater mythic paradigm that contains all vampire symbolism and stories, especially those of the vampire as a 19th century expression of human suffering and desire, a twisted reaction to the oppressive side of industrial capitalism. 

Romance, blood, eternal life, its price, and its consequences only come with the darkening of the world—a rejection of daylight, machines, industry, and Protestant ideas of clean living. The vampire seems like an embodiment of Victorian longing for nature, for Pan, for the Wordsworthian overflow of feelings denied by the western progress narrative and cynical social Darwinism.  And so you only get the vampire if you’re willing to accept a certain amount of darkness and violence.  It’s why you traditionally have to invite the vampire over your threshold.  It has to be your choice to let the darkness in.  Of course, you might turn into a rotting corpse or a raving madman like Dracula’s R. M. Renfield.  But nothing comes for free in this mythology.

I guess most of us are over messiahs and redemption narratives these days.  I think I definitely am.  I don’t care about being brought back into the great huddled mass with its dead gods.  Maybe I’m looking for a different sort of vampire tale, not one born in the lingering optimism of Anne Rice’s 1990s pre-Christian return.  Suffering.  Darkness.  The Eleusinian Mysteries come around again in a story drenched in blood and derangement.  Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker.  That’s where it is for me these days.  The vampire archetype still matters, but it goes a lot deeper and gets a lot more disturbing than sexy-but-guilty anti-heroes in velvet, tormented by their otherness, seeking some kind of reintegration into banal conformist culture.

The Lost Art of Avoiding Office Romances

A Bit of Sage Love Advice From Master Po

A former co-worker of mine called me on Skype a few months ago.  After a certain amount of hemming and hawing, he got down to it: I’m really into so-and-so and, now that we’re all working remotely, I want to let her know.  But I have no idea what I’m doing.  Tell me how.  I’m summarizing about 2000 words of wind-up, preface, and self-obfuscation, but the heart of the matter, like all truths, came out relatively simple.  He has an office crush in a time of no office.  Ah so.

I lied and told him I was busy.  He Skype-called me a few days later and wanted to talk.  I told him I had no idea and suggested he ask his therapist.  He told me he didn’t have a therapist and called me an asshole.  Then he started crying.  He’s in his 20s.  I’m in my 40s.  Gen Xers don’t cry.  But I felt bad.  I know.  I really am an asshole.  And to be completely honest, a small part of me was flattered.  Nobody asks me for advice about anything and probably for good reason.  I’m a horrible misanthrope.  And I know nothing.

Why he came to me I will never really understand.  Maybe I was the only person he could trust, since I’m also acquainted with so-and-so but I don’t work there anymore.  Maybe he sensed some sympathy on my part—a shared belief that, in a perfect world, they’d be wonderful together.  I suppose they would.  But we don’t live in a perfect world.  Some of us don’t even live.  I’m not sure what you’d call the day-drinking lockdown existence many people are leading these days, but I suspect “living” ain’t it.

After some awkwardness, I agreed to entertain his tale of woe in exchange for him not being upset if I wrote about it.  A devil’s bargain was struck.  Consummatum est.  I feel like people of my generation, having grown up before thirst-trap selfies and Onlyfans side-gigs, would never have agreed to such terms.  But Generation Z seems less inhibited.  That’s probably a good thing.  I’ll shoot my mouth off in writing, but if you know me in real life, you’ll find me to be pretty quiet and withdrawn.  Call it the Gen X split personality.  I remember a time when there were consequences for revealing too much of yourself.  Now everyone has closeups of their nipple rings on Instagram.  I guess that makes me an old fogey.

Fogeyism aside, I really didn’t know what to say.  Apparently, the stress was killing him.  He couldn’t stop thinking about her.  And he wanted to know if I thought he should unburden himself, if that would at least provide some kind of catharsis.  And then they could avoid each other in perpetuity on Zoom.  I thought about it for 30 seconds and this is what Master Po said.

First, don’t come on to co-workers.  Just don’t.  My thinking on this has evolved over the years.  I used to be romantic about it, asking, who am I to stand in the way of love?  But now I believe I have an answer to that question: an adult.  Adult self-control, being the basis of all civilization, requires that you keep it in your pants in a professional environment.  It’s right up there with germ theory, running water, and not frightening the horses.  It’s how the pyramids got built and why grandpa never had to go to prison.

So that’s the first premise: nay, lad, control thyself and petition Venus in her proper temple.  Here’s the logic.  If it turns out so-and-so isn’t interested in you like that, it’s a problem.  If she is interested, it’s an even bigger problem.  Keep work at work and don’t go looking for love in all the wrong places.

Second, there’s always a reason when it’s hard to talk to someone.  Yes, you’re shy and that’s something to consider, but there’s more to it than that.  When people are interested in you, no matter how shy one or both of you are, you will eventually feel that affinity.  This why the pre-Covid-19 handshake was so useful.  It was like taking a reading of the other person.

Between men and women, the nonverbal interaction can be subtle, but it’s always there, for better or worse.  And if it’s positive, it will eventually bring the two of you into proximity.  If it doesn’t draw you together, that means, on some level, there is resistance.  And that, Grasshopper, should not be overlooked.  If she’s nice but keeps her distance, respect that resistance.  It’s telling you how she feels, at least right now.  If she’s an adult, the resistance may also be there because she wants to keep work at work.  Respect that, too, and take a lesson.

Third, stop thinking strategically.  You can’t think your way from how you feel into her life.  There are no formulas.  Dating formulas and methods are, without exception, worthless and designed to part clueless men from their money.  They nearly always treat women like objects, complex puzzles that can be solved with a series of deft manipulations.  So-and-so is far more like you than she is like a combination lock.  And like you, she will resent it when she realizes you’re trying to game her.  So don’t do that.  Don’t confuse her with a boss fight in a video game.  Analytical thinking has no place in this.

Fourth, stop taking lust for love.  Master Po recommends large helpings of both, but he cautions you not to mix them up.  When you work with someone to whom you might feel attracted and you’re looking at that person every day, it’s easy to tell yourself that you’re developing feelings.  Maybe you’re just sexually frustrated.  It happens.

Here’s the test: picture Monica Lewinski being interviewed on Oprah.  After visualizing that conversation, revisit your feelings about so-and-so.  Do you like her just because you work with her and she’s the president (at least, the president of your heart) and has strong masterful shoulders?  Or do you actually have something that might qualify as two adults at the beginning of a romantic relationship?  Be honest.  Don’t change your name to Monica.

Last, I offer the relationship advice given to me by an older woman when I was in my 20s and lacking a clue: don’t start anything you can’t finish.  In other words, don’t trap yourself in a situation that you can’t walk away from if it makes you miserable.  This is a more general version of “keep work at work,” and it applies to just about everything in life.

We’re always telling ourselves stories about who we are and what we do.  Society is always telling us who we should be and what we should do, even though society could care less if we’re happy or fulfilled.  Everybody wants to be in charge, enforce their values, boss people about through the power of storytelling.  It’s almost a fact of human nature.

But nearly everything that makes us consistently happy involves a degree of antinomian rebellion against other people’s narratives, against should.  We’ve got should stories running all over the place designed to trap us into particular behaviors or commitments.  Consummatum est, as Mephistopheles said to Dr. Faustus.  But obligation-inducing narratives and reality are two different things.

Never start something if you can’t finish it, which is to say, if you don’t control the narrative and have to accept “shoulds.”  That includes research projects, reading books, baking pizzas, and starting up ill-conceived office romances that take place in a situation where you don’t have power and alternatives.  I know talking about power is unromantic.  But a huge power differential usually dooms a relationship from the beginning, especially if it’s situational.  Even if the situation has gone remote and online.  

After I told him all this, there was a moment of silence.  He said, “Thanks” and that he had to go.  I haven’t heard from him since.  I don’t think he took my sage advice.  It’s probably for the best.

Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

— Andrew Marvell

How to be Good

A rhetoric professor of mine used to amuse himself by saying, “The truth is always simple.”  By this, he usually meant that accurate-seeming propositions are built from small assumptions, arrayed around a central premise easy to accept as common sense.  The central premise is simple.  The rest is usually a complex rhetorical exoskeleton designed to protect it.  He didn’t believe in a single monolithic truth.  A genuine sophist, he looked for the validity of persuasive discourse.

It took a while to understand that his “simple” was shorthand for this idea.  But that’s how some people communicate, by elision, ellipses, implication.  It gives them room to persuade, to demonstrate, to marshal sources and mould arguments without being hampered by culturally prescribed truth narratives, attestations of belief, professions of faith, declarations of what is real, what all respectable people of good character are expected to think.

I find I’ve increasingly come to resemble my teacher in this way—not in his preference for indirect expression, but in his distrust of the “true” and the “correct.”  There seems to be no shortage of sacred truths and respectable opinions in the United States right now.  Everyone is suddenly in church.

Maybe it’s the Coronavirus.  Maybe it’s the emotional fallout from the recent protests and riots.  Maybe it’s because I’m turning 47 this year—not yet old, but no longer young—that I feel like I’ve had enough.  Enough newsfeed.  Enough hypocrisy.  Enough banal evil.  Enough stupid authoritarianism and reflexive outrage.  Enough identity politics.  Enough lip service and moralizing.  Enough monetized nostalgia.  Enough sadomasochism, dread, and consequences.  Enough fake performative virtue.  R. Crumb was fond of asking in his underground comics, how much can one man take?  I’m at a point where I feel I can answer that, at least for myself. 

I’m sick of being told what’s true and false, right and wrong—as if anyone actually knows.  I think I’ll need to find a mountaintop soon, or a subterranean cavern, someplace quiet, away from all the respectable people telling me what to do, what to think, and how to feel.  America is obsessed with propriety but unwilling to admit it.  And it’s only getting worse. 

I just read about the Arctic explorer, Augustine Courtauld, who, in 1931, was trapped in a polar weather station for months.  The biography made it seem like a dreadful ordeal, and I suppose it was.  But the idea of that much solitude is very appealing right now.  I suppose I might feel differently after months of it.  Then again, maybe not.  At least, in that deep isolation, I wouldn’t be waiting in line at the confessional.

For the last few days, I’ve been thinking about Mark and Patricia McCloskey, now immured forever in the pages of the New York Post, which is where I first read about them, along with every other newspaper and social media platform in existence.  They are the suburban St. Louis couple who recently brandished their guns at a crowd of George Floyd protesters. 

Not a very nice look.

Since first seeing the McCloskeys’ terrified vacuous expressions, I’ve felt that the fact pattern in their dumb predicament is all rhetorical exoskeleton.  What really happened?  Two mousy attorneys thought their house was going to be burned down by a mob and overreacted.  They also happened to be white, irritating to look at, and apparently prone to making terrible decisions—just like four cops in Minneapolis not too long ago.  And they could have killed someone.  It seems like sheer luck they didn’t.

They said they were defending their property.  They said they’d only touched their weapons twice since moving in.  They said they were afraid of a “storming of the Bastille” situation (they thought of their home as an 18th century French prison?).  They said they were afraid of terrorism.  They said they had guns in order to keep mobsters away (The Untouchables in suburban St. Louis?).  And they said they support Black Lives Matter.  Of course they do.

I imagine them saying all these things in a single exhalation, without pauses, then dabbing their faces with perfumed handkerchiefs.  Honestly, Valmont, it sounds like an ordeal.  Howsoever did you survive it?  Well, dearest, they’re called the underclass for a reason.  You have to be fair with them but stern.  Violence is all they truly understand.  Oh, Valmont!  You ravish me!

The central premise, on the other hand, is something easy to accept: white people are afraid.  It dovetails nicely with the abundance of twitchy columns and articles steaming out of the New York Times, The Atlantic and, to a slightly lesser extent, The Washington Post, which often seem more like professions of faith instead of reportage: this is what good people everywhere now believe.  Rich white people are dangerous.  Proof positive of what we’ve been saying all along right here in St. Louis.  The truth is always simple, isn’t it?

As a white moderate liberal who believes in the marketplace of ideas, humanistic inquiry, literacy programs, diversity, the possibility of equal opportunity through non-violent reform, and the continued applicability of certain quaint democratic ideals, I’ve been accused by those to my left of willingly perpetuating a racist system (as if I were something more than a nobody with a laptop).  Those to my right have called me a snowflake, among other unpleasant things, and accused me of writing thoughtless garbage.  I’ve even gotten a few death threats in the post-apocalyptic hellscape of Twitter, which now just seems par for the course, especially on social media.

What I haven’t found is anyone willing to agree with me that the riots made perfect sense but the fanaticism of critical race theory does not.  Kill people and their friends, families, and communities will respond in kind.  They should protest.  Everyone should when the police have gone feral.  It’s understandable that when people feel oppressed, they’ll act out their frustration until they see changes.  At least, they’ll destroy some monuments, burn some cop cars, throw the butt urn down the courthouse steps, and spray “ACAB” on the windows of the local network affiliate.  Well, it’s something.

But the current woke gamesmanship being played by our corporate, managerial elite willing to indulge in the worst excesses of critical race theory in order to be on the right side of profitability is repugnant.  As a fellow writer at Splice Today put it: “lots of white guilt and centering individualistic narratives of change,” a venting mechanism meant to preserve the status quo: “Class and socioeconomic privilege are preserved and movements such as Black Lives Matter and Me Too can only exist to support class status.”  Put the right slogan on your T-shirt and you can have your BLM cake and eat it, too.

Maybe it’s better to say that, while I don’t know what’s true, I have a sense of what isn’t.  It’s a sense that tells me certain perspectives are more profitable than others right now for celebrities, politicians, and brands.  It tells me the only way positive changes come about is when people stop trying to leverage the trends, set aside their differences, and work together in the spirit of common humanity and good will.  And it adds that such changes are never going to happen if you’re preoccupied trying to storm the Bastille or if you’re out on your front lawn with an AR-15, trying to defend it against the mob.

Mostly, I’m just as tired as anyone in this pathological country.  Every government is somewhat horrible and evil.  But I’m not interested in pulpits and commandments.  I’m not trying to be virtuous or right.  I’m not interested in today’s purity test.  I didn’t even plan to be in the United States for more than two weeks.  It’s been almost four months.  I’ve had enough American exceptionalism and respectability to last me at least until our brave new police-free utopia hits its stride sometime in November.