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.

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.

You Might Live to be 100

Too much death in the air these days . . .

The truth is you have no idea. If you’re morbid and enjoy reading tragic stories, you might have nevertheless noticed that the terminally ill, those infected with bizarre venereal diseases (or run-of-the-mill venereal diseases, or even run-of-the-mill venereal Covid), people given personal doomsday clocks by their doctors, and people condemned to death in exotic penal systems often pull through anyway. They live.

Why? Nine times out of ten, the odds are bullshit. That’s why. You know this whenever you look in the mirror and see a miracle looking back, which is every time. Every singularity is as remarkable as it is improbable, and it’s a straight-up miracle that you exist because you are that.

It’s amazing that you have enormous student loans; can worry about paying taxes on time; can have an orgasm, even one with another person; can search on the internet for poems by John Donne, who lived 450 years ago, and find them in less than five seconds; and are reading this right now. Yes, a miracle, a completely improbable singularity, like a fat orange on a snowy day or a fire held in the hand. You’re magic, kid.

So you simply do not know how long you’ve got, no matter the odds you’re given or the conventional wisdom that says boo-this and blah-that. First tell me how magic works—i.e. why and how you exist—and then I’ll be willing to accept some metric for longevity that doesn’t have to do with actuarial computation and Big Gerontology. Don’t swallow another protean manifestation of ghoulish capitalism that seeks to monetize everything, even life and death. Don’t capitulate to capitalism.

Average lifespans are death propaganda. Don’t drink that Kool-Aid. Live. Live long and motherfucking prosper. As Sly said, “You can make it if you try. Push a little harder. Think a little deeper. Don’t let the plastic bring you down.” And know that everything trying to harness your assumptions about your life, how long it will last, and how great it could still be is plastic above you. Highly profitable plastic, perhaps, but for someone who is not you.

Rather, with Donne, look at the years to come and say, “Twice or thrice had I lov’d thee,/ Before I knew thy face or name;/ So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame” come the angles of our nature, our better angels, our reflections in the mirror getting older, getting greyer, but still here. We’re still kicking and we’re unwilling to trade the uncertainties of decades to come for the quiet enjoyment of the grave.

The Inner Work of Being a Writer

The transition from dilettante to serious artist is always indistinct. As with any art form, one becomes what one does. One becomes a writer by saying, “I’m a writer” and then writing. I suppose one becomes “serious” after demonstrating or announcing one’s seriousness at some later date. But isn’t it a little absurd to say, “I’m a serious writer”? It immediately raises the question, “How serious?”

To which one may respond: I’m dead serious, more serious than a heart attack. So serious I got two degrees in it. So horrifically, agonizingly, putridly serious that I’ve kept doing it through poverty, flood, plague, and famine. More serious than a white sale in June. More serious than the fine print. Hell, I am the fine print. I’m a serious dude. It’s my thing. I might as well put it on my business card: Serious Writer Since 1997. That’s over two decades of seriousness, okay?

Maybe that is the required declaration, the necessary attestation of commitment at the necessary volume to prove you’re the real deal. Because you have to prove it, right? Because no one can assume how serious you are by just looking at you the way they might if you were some other sort of professional. No one’s a part-time brain surgeon. No one does constitutional law as a hobby. No one flies for Lufthansa as a side gig. No one asks how serious a nuclear engineer is. When Red October is about to go under the ice, no one says, “Sure, but how serious is the captain?”

In the arts, however, people always wonder. Some journalist, critic, competitor, or professor is always ready to say, “You Don’t Deserve to Live was an entertaining novel, but it’s not serious.” And then everyone must nod as if that makes sense. This is probably because no one will ever truly agree on how to define a serious writer producing serious writing. No one has a clue.

Does money show it (James Patterson)? Do numerous film adaptations of your work show it (Stephen King)? How about literary and cultural iconicity (Alice Munro, Bret Easton Ellis)? What about your books frequently showing up on university syllabi (Michael Cunningham, Francine Prose)? What about your writing having been convincingly marketed as a “modern classic” such that it will one day be hermetically sealed in the basement of Cheops for post-apocalyptic archaeologists to dig up (Margaret Atwood, Donna Tartt)? Where’s the benchmark for quality? Who can say? I can say I like some of these writers and dislike others. But I like a lot of things and people, many of which will no doubt be adjudged “not serious” as soon as we can determine what that is.

Maybe no one asks Alice Munro whether she’s a serious writer anymore because she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. Maybe that’s the only reliable standard. No one argues with the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Nobel committee called her a “master of the short story” and said she revolutionized modern literature. Of course, three years later they said as much about Bob Dylan. Three years between literary revolutions can make one’s head spin, but these are interesting times. Next, the Nobel committee may award Munro a prize for her influence on folk music. Then we can all relax. They know what they’re doing.

Of course, there’s still the inner, subjective, impressionistic option. At various stressful moments in my childhood, my mom would quote a line from “Duration,” my birth hexagram in the I-Ching: “[T]he dedicated man embodies an enduring meaning in his way of life, and thereby the world is formed. In that which gives things their duration, we can come to understand the nature of all beings in heaven and on earth.” She said this often enough that I had it memorized by age 12. An enduring meaning in his way of life. Maybe that’s it. “Enduring meaning” has a nice sound. It’s certainly a better formulation and standard than any of the others given above.

But Nobel doesn’t award prizes for embodying an enduring meaning in one’s way of life. It happens quietly, without parades and gold medals and book tours and exhausting four-hour dinners in New York and swarms of desperate grad students. The only revolution it can incite is an inner revolution, an inner revelation. The New York Times Book Review won’t be covering it. Alice will remain in Canada. Bob will stare at a tree outside the window and hum a little tune.

So how do you know if you’re a serious writer, if you have talent, if you aren’t wasting your time? You can never know these things relative to what people say or how much money you’re making off your work or whether the gatekeepers and critics deem you worthy. You can know whether the act of writing sometimes makes you feel good. And in that feeling, there may be a quiet, personal meaning. And if you write regularly, you may embody that meaning such that it becomes part of your life, a way of life. And then you can stop asking questions that originate in commercial and social status anxiety instead of in the metaphysics of the creative process.

Two Women

A new story in Terror House Magazine. Click here and read it on their site: https://terrorhousemag.com/two-women/

Ok Boomer

Consider this hypothetical. You’re standing in your kitchen, cutting slices of cheese with a razor-sharp carving knife. You realize there are such things as cheese knives, but you don’t have one. For those readers currently languishing in suburban opulence, who can’t imagine someone not owning a cheese knife, I’m here to tell you such people exist, and they are probably more numerous than you have imagined.

Anyway, you’re cutting some cheese. It’s not difficult because the knife is a diamond-sharp Japanese “Zebra” blade, perfectly weighted for carving your burned pot roast, which is otherwise as uncuttable as second base. Now let’s say you drop that knife in a moment of privileged carelessness and it goes point-down through the top of your foot. Stop screaming. You’re not going to die. But there is quite a bit of blood welling up in your slipper. Better attend to that. You limp to the bathroom, whimpering and cussing, and start looking for the antiseptic.

In spite of what you plan on telling your spouse (My hand was wet. It just slipped.), you really have no idea why or how this could have happened. All you know is that it hurts. Did you deserve it? Think about this. Did you deserve to have a skewered foot?

One argument says, yes, if you hadn’t been worrying about your Bitcoin investments at that moment and whether the new walnut end tables really express your essential joie de vivre, you might have paid closer attention to what you were doing. You might have taken better care. Now small ripples of dread and frustration will radiate through your life for the next few weeks the same way pain radiates through your foot.

Your mindset will be affected. Your spouse’s mindset will be affected. Maybe your acuity at your job will temporarily decrease. Your irritation levels with Ralph, your neighbor, when he decides to fire up the lawn mower at 5:40 AM next Sunday, may run considerably higher. You might even speak harshly to the cat—a small thing, like the cat himself, but surely not something he, as a fellow living being, deserves. You’re the one who dropped the knife, you careless dolt. There are consequences for everything. Close your mouth and own up to them. Be an adult for a change.

But another argument says, no, accidents will happen. No one wants to injure themselves and no one ever truly asks to be hurt. There are so many opportunities in modern life to harm yourself or others that it’s likely to happen, now and then, even if you aren’t naturally accident prone.

No matter how much care you take, there are acts of god; there are times you break your foot stepping off the train, even if you’re minding the gap; a tree hits your bedroom wall; a texting teenager rear-ends you 45 feet into an intersection and you almost get hit and have to wear a neck brace for a month; you drop your phone in the airport toilet; you forget your wallet at the register.

These sorts of things happen whether or not you look both ways, don’t inhale, read Consumer Reports, wear three condoms, and keep your windows triple-locked. Feeling ashamed and responsible for unforeseeable disasters is just adding insult to undeserved injury. Sit down. That’s right. Have a cookie. And tell me where it hurts.

Two good arguments: one about responsibility, the other about compassion. One is not better than the other, but here we stand on the diamond edge of that Zebra knife between them. Which one seems more persuasive on its face? Well, that depends on our emotions, doesn’t it? The argument that resonates more powerfully depends on who we are as emotional beings. The one we choose says volumes about us and very little about the event itself.

Hold that thought. Before we decide which argument style we prefer, let’s talk about how this distinction applies and let’s take it even further, foregrounding the discussion by characterizing the “baby boomers.” Because the boomers have been the deciders, standing on that diamond edge since 1946. And much of what terrifies us today was authored expressly and overtly by them choosing a flimsy kind of emotional “responsibility for the responsible” instead of the more compassionate feels—which tells us a lot about them, if not everything we need to know.

The boomers spent the precious freedoms their parents bought for them as traumatized adults in WWII and before that as traumatized children of the misunderstood, alcoholic, Silent Generation—and the boomers act like they earned it all themselves through true grit and moxie.

Actually, the boomers are the ones who economically fucked over Generation X. The boomers built the nuclear stockpiles, created the student debt crisis, lusted after Gordon Gekko and Ayn Rand, and are the ones who currently despise millennials more than any others. Well, we all despise the millennials. But still. We know who the boomers are. We’re still dealing with their fuckery.

There’s an internet catchphrase going around these days, “Ok Boomer,” which the dictionary tells us is used “often in a humorous or ironic manner, to call out or dismiss out-of-touch or close-minded opinions associated with the baby boomer generation and older people more generally.” Ah. That sounds about right for the generation that established our current ruinous, self-serving climate politics.

As Sorya Roberts puts it (quoting Michael Parenti) in “Happily Never After,” as the environment collapses, elite panic in “strong states with developed economies will succumb to a politics of xenophobia, racism, police repression, surveillance, and militarism and thus transform themselves into fortress societies while the rest of the world slips into collapse.” Isn’t that a lovely vision of the future? Most of the boomers won’t be around to see it. They’re going to die on the golf course well before that. But the rest of us might live to enjoy it. That is, if we’re the lucky ones.

In the art world, particularly in creative academia, worsening since about 1975, boomer narcissism has taken this form: there is always room for talented people. Oh, there are no jobs for you? You must not be one of the talented few (like me). Too bad. Even though, in the boomer generation, you could get a tenured position with an unpublished manuscript and no teaching experience.

“Always room for good people” is a veritable baby boomer mantra, the meritocratic fever dream of those steeped in imperial luxury, who turn beet-red when someone points out that the they got where they are because they were born into a fortunate time and place between global catastrophes; that the emperor is not a god; that the empire is not eternal; and that its luxuries were founded on a pylon of human skulls. Boomers comprise a large part of Donald Trump’s “base,” the leering retirees in the MAGA hats. And though academics generally despise 45, they conveniently overlook that he has more in common with them than any other generation.

So you’re a millennial or, hell forbid, a gen-Xer in your 40s and the socio-political-economic Zebra blade has now gone straight through your foot. Are you trying to stay interested in the impeachment? Are you crying “Why me?” when you realize that halving global greenhouse emissions by 2030 is neigh impossible at this point? Have you been taking solace in Oprah’s self-care philosophies and burning Gwyneth Paltrow’s special candle? Are you ready for what comes next? Are you one of the anointed few like dad was?

You’re not. You can’t be. But why not just pretend you are, just for a bit, after the Bactine and the Band-Aids, while the Parthenon burns?

Read my latest at Splice Today . . .

Read it here: https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/the-new-york-times-is-rotting-at-the-seams

On Knowing If You’re Any Good

If you’re a writer, you’ll live your life not knowing if you’re any good. And you’ll die not knowing. I think John Berryman said that.

After Phil Levine published his first book of poems, people said, yeah, but can you do it again? Then he did it again. Then they said, yeah, but have you been featured in the New York Times Review of Books? Then he got a review. So they said, yeah, but have you won any major awards? He won several. Then they said, yeah, but we remember you back when you were broke in Detroit. You’ll always be a bum.

There is no escape. Nobody from the old neighborhood wants to see you get ahead. It’s a law of nature, the Bumfuck Reflexive Property. You can ruin your life if you burn your emotional energy wondering whether they’re right. Every moment you spend doing that is a waste. But all writers do it.

Hang around with writers and artists and you realize they’ve got a particular tangible proficiency at their kind of art. Maybe they were born with it or, more likely, they worked hard at developing what little gift they had into something presentable. The gift, whatever it is, is real and observable. But whether they’re mediocre or brilliant, derivative or original, a flash in the pan or someone whose art is set to be preserved in the basement of Cheops, you will never know. More significantly, they will never know.

If you like their work, great. If you don’t, you can always recall the time they were broke and living in the projects across from Wayne State. HA. HA. HA. Let’s all laugh at the sad clown. Some people and their lousy choices. Am I right? If they were any good people would want to pay them for their work. I mean, that’s just common sense.

I suppose it’s sad when an artist hasn’t learned how to fail (or how to stubbornly and angrily reject failure), when she takes the Bumfuck to bed and makes love to it, when she’s covered in despair, when she finds herself thinking about her choices. The rest of us chose to avoid that humiliation early. We were smart and didn’t even try. Or if we did, we never let anyone see it and gave up shortly thereafter. And look at us today. We just got back from our annual trip to Florida. It’s a good life.

But she has to spend some nights staring at the wall, probing for answers that will never come. Because her friends and family don’t know what to tell her, even though they have many strongly held opinions on her work and direction in life. Her teachers didn’t know (even the ones who praised her back at clown school). And ultimately, she doesn’t know, can’t know, even if she wins a Golden Bozo next year and gets to put “Genius” on her resume. She might just be a lucky clown, a clown of the moment, a one clown wonder. How do you ever really, truly know if you’re any good?

Genius. Hell, she can barely afford lunch. And so the questions: am I actually a no-talent, deluded ass-clown? Was taking out a loan to go to clown school the worst decision of my life? Should I have listened to my old high-school friend who went straight into an apprenticeship as a waste management professional and who is now debt-free, pumping out the city’s shit everyday for a middle-five-figure salary? The dude owns his own house. He loves reminding me how debt-free he is. He loves it.

Can I say the same? Do I love being a clown? I thought I did. But now that I’m out of clown school, I feel so alone. At least back there I had a useful amount of social friction, mutually shared productive spite, the catty competitiveness of nervous art students to hold me up and distract me.

Now I only have these four walls and the dirty mirror over the sink and the constant message that if it doesn’t make money, it’s a hobby, not a calling. A life spent vacuuming out the municipal sewer, by that definition, would be the Grail Quest. But that tract house and the vacation package in Florida speaks for itself.

How good do I have to be to take clowning seriously, to argue that it is my reason for living and not just a lukewarm pastime that regularly torments me. Sometimes, I wonder what good is—if it is something metaphysical, some hidden imprimatur, some mysterious proof, like divine grace received only through predestination. Do we know it when we see it? Or do we see it because we only know what we’ve been told?

How much telling is good? How much showing? If I get the emotional effect I want by the last line of my story, does that justify anything I do along the way, any narrative impropriety—like Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” one of the most structurally verfucked stories I have ever seen that nevertheless works? It works because it moves me. Me. Not necessarily you.

What’s more, when I get to the end, I know in the way that comes from having spent too much time with fellow ass-clowns, that “Hills Like White Elephants” would have never gotten a pass in clownshop. Poor sad clownbear. Put on your hardhat and gas mask. There’s shit pumping needs to be done.

I read the New Yorker and The Paris Review. For clowns, those are basically trade publications. Those clowns really know how to do it. They know what’s good, what’s right and wrong about art and culture, what should be published, what should be condemned. The people they feature—man, that is some serious clown shit. They really push the clownvelope. In fact, they are so serious at times that their work transcends everyday clowning and enters the Mime Plane. It’s a micro universe. All the mimes who ever existed and who ever will exist live there in an eternal limbo that can fit on the head of a pin. And yet it’s enormous. Space and time. You know. Like warm bubble-gum.

But I stay away from the mimes, like Alice Mimero and Jonathan Mimezen and Jeffrey Eumimedies and Mimeberto Eco. Their work is—I don’t even know how to describe it—it’s mysterious. Like pushing the wind or the transparent box or juggling the invisible chainsaws. Somehow, it’s supposed to seem dangerous or terrifying. Risky. But when an invisible chainsaw slips, there’s only invisible blood. Hard to see. You have to pretend it’s there. Mime stuff, you know. Everyone acts like they get it.

And yet they’re held up to us as the cultural elite. How does that work? Why are we still encouraged by the Big Six to think of these clowns as mysterious and compelling? I guess only those who put out effort to remain mysterious will continue to be seen that way. And perpetually wrapping yourself in a glamour of mystery is a lie. Because no one is actually that. But we lionize our artists. The publishing industry runs a lion circus. We want to believe they know something we don’t when they jump and roar.

Them lions is pathological. All they know is that gazelles are tasty. And us? We don’t even know that much.

I might know that shit stinks and pumping it for a living is a bummer. I know I’d give a hundred tract houses and a timeshare in Pensacola not to have that be the substance of my Grail Quest. I’d rather squander my life writing, even if I am a no-talent ass-clown.

But you? I’m not so sure about you. Maybe you’re not one of the Cheops Basement All-Stars yet. Maybe you’ll always be a bum somewhere in municipal Detroit, freezing in your bloodied clown suit. But I can tell you one thing. You’ll never really know if you’re any good. And you won’t be able to look at others for the answer. They’re all a bunch of ass-clowns, too.

All you can do is keep at it, day after day, hoping somebody somewhere sees what you see. All you can do is show up.

My latest on Splice Today . . .

Read it here: https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/trump-impeachment-syndrome-and-the-uses-of-political-theater

Writing the Hard Thing

If I could tell you the number of stories and novels I’ve begun writing and not finished, we’d be here too long. But “not finished” doesn’t mean “discarded.” It means what it says.

The difficulty comes when I’ve convinced myself that I’m one sort of writer (the consistent, cheerfully productive kind) as opposed the other, less glamorous (or, at least, less visible) sort—a slave to the vicissitudes of the moon or some shit, the guy with 25 ongoing projects and an inability to stop working on any of them.

I know this about myself. I tell myself that it’s all part of the bigger creative process. I imagine all these incomplete pieces fermenting, cross-pollinating, mutating. Nothing lost. Everything in motion. And I take refuge in those ideas and metaphors so I can keep working. Being a writer, I tell myself a story. But it might be bullshit self-deceit.

The Romantics smoked opium to get closer to the moon and further from the Victorian head trauma of “productivity.” And when my genre writer pals do highly Victorian social media posts that go, “Sigh. Only 10 pages today,” I wonder whether they’re writing from inspiration or simply turning a lathe in some Dickensian word factory. Productivity equals commercial success, while moonbeams are their own reward. Still, I have word count envy no matter what I do.

The problems of productivity and self-deceit are at the center of trying to write the hard thing. They are the essential obstacles in making the fiction I came here to make instead of clocking in and lathing out a bunch of words to satisfy something or someone else. I don’t want to produce that which has been assigned to me by industry, necessity, or convention. I hate obeying. But am I achieving anything in my disobedience? For that matter, is achievement even the point?

When yet another publishing industry blog post comes out sounding like the vehement Alec Baldwin scene from Glengarry Glen Ross, I feel repulsed. I don’t want to spend time creating a fucking audience platform. Being an artist is not about “closing.” Just doing the actual writing takes up all my energy. I don’t want to frame pieces of my fiction as marketable units. I want to sit in a moonbeam and make something that arises from my own unique imperatives and disposition. I want the serendipity of inspiration. I live for it. And I resist the overtures of commercialism dedicated to consumption and to bullying artists into seeing themselves as part of a service industry.

Unfortunately, I also can’t avoid wanting the world to read my work and maybe give me some money so I can feed and clothe myself. It’s terrifying sometimes. Years ago, at an AWP conference, talking with a publisher after I put out Gravity, my first collection of stories, I felt like Nunez in “The Country of the Blind”—faced with the choice of getting what I loved if I voluntarily blinded myself or seeing clearly and climbing out of the hidden valley forever. In the end, I chose to keep my eyes.

“If you want to get a second book out using the momentum of your first,” he said, “you need to complete the manuscript in less than a year. More than that and people forget who you are. You won’t be able to position it. You’ll be starting over.” Six years later, my second book was done. And he was correct: from the marketing, word factory standpoint, I was starting over. From a creative-process standpoint, those six years were predicated on the six that came before. I wasn’t starting over. I was writing something hard that had emerged from my ongoing creative process, something I couldn’t have written in under a year.

Finishing writing in one’s own time instead of in service to the word factory is difficult. Discovering one’s limitations as an artist and then transcending them is very difficult. Putting in the years is difficult. Doing this up to and beyond age 30 is not only difficult but scary. Nevertheless, all can be accomplished if one is willing to believe in something greater than the word count. One says, it’s all part of my creative process and tries to calm down. One decides not to read (or write) certain self-aggrandising Facebook posts.

Of course, there might not be a bigger process. Maybe there is only Random House, Amazon, AWP conference ugliness, building a platform, positioning and branding, and Best American Monotony. Maybe. Maybe we exist in a world full of cynical anti-creative money-making ventures, cautious art, and nothing else. It’s always possible. The thought of it sometimes keeps me up at night, especially in those blocked periods of worrying and not writing.

It’s like reading about nuclear war or the earth dying from climate change: you have no agency, no option to mitigate the damage, soulless politicians are making horrible decisions, and there is only one way this can end. Apocalypse. Tragedy. No one at the wheel. Inhuman corporations controlling everything. And death, ignominious and unnoticed, unless you get with the program and start churning out formulaic units.

Capitalism wins. It usually does. But if there is a bigger process at work in your struggle to be an artist, it can’t have anything to do with metaphors of productivity on a factory timeline. That is a reality you must not accept.

How does a writer know what’s real? Is it moonbeam or production line? Is it both? Can it be both? Andy Warhol, Ernest Hemingway, and David Bowie say yes. For the rest of us, maybe not. For every Warhol, Hemingway, and Bowie, there are multitudes who weren’t lucky enough to have their unique artistry coincide with commercial demand.

Hugh Howey likes to write about Wool the way Elon Musk talks about launching a roadster into space: let me tell you about my unique genius and the origin of my success. But self-publishing fame and running a car company have one thing in common that never gets discussed: they exist because they are timely. So it is with any highly lucrative creative effort. And that intersection has to do with luck. Meanwhile, someone out there is no doubt making Peking opera, but they are unlikely to be buying villas on the Riviera anytime soon. Nobody cares. Their units don’t ship. And yet they also have the favor of the moon.

Writers are especially predisposed to misunderstand what is real—what is objective versus just a moonbeam. They spend a lot of time deliberately thinking in metaphors, some more useful than others. And if they’re not paying attention to their minds, they can mistake such metaphors for objective reality (which, incidentally, has nothing to do with capitalist realism). Over-absorption in a world of imaginative metaphors can become a source of anxiety when the non-make-believe world reaches out and reminds us that we can’t live totally in our imaginations. Make your Peking opera, sure, but also accept that the six years you put into it mean nothing in terms of branding and positioning.

A writer will see something and begin to imagine things about it—everyone does this, but writers seem to do it with particular intensity—and before long the writer starts to feel like he or she knows it or, even worse, is it. Then something from the world of physics and money communicates: no, you are not that. You can’t imagine yourself to fame and fortune if you’re doing original work. You might get lucky, yes, and I hope you (I hope I) do. But commerce and true creativity exist in different spaces.

So I look at my 25 open projects with a bit of trepidation as the days go by. I’m turning 46 this month. I’ve published a lot of stories in magazines and two books. These have been hard things. Are they enough? Will they ever be enough?

Don’t worry, I tell myself. There’s bigger process at work. There must be.