I am a double agent for the KGB, pt. 2

Check out my new review on the KGB Bar's website!  This time I'm writing about Pirate Talk, the new novel by Terese Svoboda.  Here's the link:
http://kgbbar.com/lit/book_reviews/pirate_talk

I am a double agent for the KGB.

This is sort of cheating on my promise to post daily this week, but here goes: I've started writing (non-pseudonymous) book reviews for the KGB Bar Online Lit Journal, and my first one was just published to their site. So check it out! Here's the link:
http://kgbbar.com/lit/book_reviews/the_kasahara_school_of_nihilism

Clowning Around

Sometimes I think I was born in the wrong era: I was meant for a time when words were chiseled in stone.  As I've mentioned in previous posts, blogging does not come naturally to me.  Despite my mantra of quantity over quality, my neurotic tendency toward perfectionism tends to keep me from posting early and often, and when I do blog, the two or so hours following the new piece's first appearance on the site are usually filled with partial rereadings and the micro-panics they induce (Jesus Christ, I used the same verb in two sentences!  What is up with all these dashes, this shit reads like Morse code!).  The sentences I write haunt me, replay in my head, like the weird pronouncements of a schizophrenic's dog.  I need to get them right, or they'll never leave me alone.  In a discussion about his novel Motherless Brooklyn, which features a narrator with Tourettes, Jonathan Lethem once described his revision process as itself Tourettic, a "compulsive grooming" of language, and while my results are nowhere near as well-coiffed as his, I have to say the description resonates with me. 

It will probably not surprise many of my readers to learn that I'm working on a novel -- or, perhaps more accurately, that I am working on working on a novel.  This is not my first book.  I wrote a novel before when I was in graduate school: a bildungsroman, unsurprisingly, about a naive clown who can only understand his life and the people around him through the zany antics of his art.  I wish I could say that the book was universally reviled, but even that wouldn't be accurate.  Imagine if, at the end of the Lord of the Rings series, after all their trials and adventures, Frodo & Co. threw the magic jewelry into the Cracks of Doom, only to receive no reaction whatsoever.  Imagine now that instead of a hobbit, he's a pretentious Manhattanite in velvet overalls and pirate boots and that the ring is an MFA thesis.  Now you're beginning to understand my pain.

 The tears of a clown.

Probably because I've been burned before by the molten lava of rejection, I am writing my new novel even more slowly than I write my posts for this blog.  And it's nearly impossible for me to work on both simultaneously.  Which I find incredibly frustrating, because I need both outlets, both forms of communication.  For periods of time in the past, I've abandoned the novel, but going without writing fiction makes me feel trapped, claustrophobic in the narrow confines of reality.  Yet since I started blogging, responding to books and film and ideas in writing has become essential for me too -- it's as though I don't know precisely what I think until I work it out in prose.

I promised last month that I was going to try to write more on here -- that, like the pencil sculptor, I would adopt the credo, "This will break eventually but let's see how far I get."  Then I disappeared from the blog for nearly three weeks, a fact probably unnoticed by most everyone but me, but which I regard as a personal failing nonetheless.  So here's what I'm going to do: starting today, I am going to blog something every day for one week.  Some of the posts will be stupid.  Most of them will be short.  But all of them will be available online, for your perusal and entertainment.

Driving Sideways

Awhile back, I blogged about blogging, or more specifically, not blogging -- about the temptation to pick at my posts endlessly, or, when that's time prohibitive, simply not to post at all.  In her amazing memoir Writing Past Dark (which should be required reading for everybody seriously pursuing fiction in or out of the MFA system), Bonnie Friedman writes about what she calls "anorexia of language" -- a far more accurate term for writer's block, in my opinion.  Not-writing is a kind of perfectionism, a way of seeking control over the messy, primal process of creation.  We love our work so much that we're afraid to touch it.  We want so much for it to be flawless we're afraid to let it grow.  And so it starves in the dark.

Yesterday, I saw this blog post about the artist Dalton Ghetti, who carves tiny sculptures from the lead tips of pencils.  As a writer, they appeal to me for obvious reasons: a writing utensil re-shaped into a tiny world of its own probably has metaphorical import for anyone who's ever scratched out a story longhand.  Specifically, it reminded me of a possibly apocryphal anecdote I heard about Victor Hugo and the creation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame: he considered titling the novel What Is In a Bottle of Ink, since he wrote the entire thing by dipping his pen again and again into a single well.  The way that art, specifically language, can open up a tiny space -- turning a pencil into a monument, a page into a window, a keyboard into a galaxy of swirling possibility -- is magic, pure and simple.

But the part of this story that struck me most was the pencil graveyard, the place for sculptures that Ghetti's accidentally broken while working on them.  "People might think it’s weird I keep them but they’re still interesting, " he says.  "I worked on them for months so they might be dead now but at one point I gave them life."  It occurred to me that maybe the pencil graveyard itself, rather than the perfected sculptures, is the best metaphor for writing, or at least writing of a certain kind.  On a blog, for example, where the emphasis is on process over product -- where the past's ill-considered relics greet you every time you scroll down the page.  It can be dismal, at times, to look at all the ways I've fallen short as a writer, intellectually and at the level of language.  But Ghetti explains that, in order to keep doing his nerve-wracking work on his miniatures, he had to change his attitude, to say, "This will break eventually but let’s see how far I get."  From now on, I'm going to try to start thinking about my own prose more that way.  Instead of focusing on reaching my destination, I'm just going to aim to get into the most interesting wrecks I can along the way.  Fasten your seat belts.

Pecked to Death

I have a hard time imagining a critic I'd disagree with more than Dale Peck.  In fact, it's hard to imagine anyone agreeing with Dale Peck with any degree of consistency.  In his essay collection Hatchet Jobs: Writings on Contemporary Fiction, Dale Peck just hates so much: "most of Joyce, half of Faulkner and Nabokov, nearly all of Gaddis, Pynchon, Delillo, not to mention... their contemporary heirs," a category that includes David Foster Wallace, Colson Whitehead, Jamaica Kincaid, and, of course, Rick Moody.  But that's not all.  Peck, like a small, aggressive child who has just learned the meaning of the word "no," emphasizes his renunciation of these authors over any subtler points he might have to make about their work -- and, like a small, aggressive child, he is more intent on kicking you out of his blanket fort than persuading you to come around to his point of view.  Regarding Pynchon, Peck writes that "the US literary world can be divided into two camps: those who think Pynchon is a very clever guy, and those who think he's a great writer... I'm of the former camp."  Of Rick Moody's work he declares, "My gut feeling is that if you honestly don't believe it's bad, you're part of the problem."  And Vonnegut's old-age slump is the fault of his fans: "It's not the Vonnegut's fans don't believe what he has to say.  They just don't seem to care." 

Peck is not just controversial.  He's profoundly unconvincing.  It's possible to write a negative review, even a diatribe, yet seem as though you're having a good time.  The seduction of negative reviews, in fact, is that derision sometimes seems more entertaining than sincere enjoyment: over there at the grown-ups' table they're laughing harder at the clown.  Yet Dale Peck, like Patton Oswalt's unfortunate heckler, seems doomed to "miss everything cool and die angry."  The writers he reviews not only appear to be having more fun than Peck is; they also, surprisingly, even sound like they have a better sense of humor (and this is based on Peck's descriptions alone).  Peck's bon mots are the province of an unseasoned stand-up comic, veering from da-doom-crash punchlines ("As we say in the East Village, that and $2.50 -- not including tip -- will buy you a skinny mochaccino" and "with friends like this, literature needs an enema") to clumsy attempts at harnessing catchphrases ("As a friend of mine says, That is just so wrong").  Dale Peck seems to not quite get the jokes of the books he reads.  He's quick to take offense, to jump to conclusions, to take things literally.  Even A Confederacy of Dunces comes under his ire ("a book nearly as bloated as its protagonist"), which I find ironic, since if Ignatius Reilly were a book reviewer, he would write a lot like this.

Peck is a master of the unintentionally funny.  His rage, like that of a cartoon character, sends him wheeling off cliffs, tiny fists pummeling the air, or yanking on the fuse of a bomb that winds up detonating in his hands.  Many of the funniest moments here are hilarious not because he's right or wrong, but because of what he inadvertently reveals about himself.  In the Rick Moody essay, he writes, "When I finished The Black Veil I scrawled 'Lies! Lies! All lies!' on the cover and considered my job done."  Let's unpack this statement for a moment.  There are two possibilities here.  Either Dale Peck defaced his own hardcover copy of the memoir (reminiscent of the US patriots who dumped French wine they had already purchased down toilets in the early, heady "freedom fries" days of the second Iraq war) -- in order to, I guess, prove a point to anyone who noticed it proudly displayed in his home?... or Dale Peck is pretending that he did just that in order to, I guess -- sound punk rock?

His persona is larger than life, and larger than any of the points he makes.

And yet, despite all this, I find it impossible to dismiss Dale Peck's Hatchet Jobs, if only because of the weird humility that underlies the entire project.  In the Afterword, he writes, "The very extremity of my views does as much to undermine my authority as enforce it, or at least I hope it does, because I am by no means convinced of the hallowedness of my own ideas... These reviews, if not as direct as a barroom brawl, are, I hope, some kind of dialogue with my generation... My hatred of all this teenaged posing has reached such a fever pitch I'm willing to be clownish in my denunciation of it."  The fact that Dale Peck is willing to embarrass himself for the sake of literature, the fact that he's willing to sacrifice his own intellectual credibility "to start some kind of dialogue," is a strangely noble thing, even if it is itself a kind of adolescent posturing.

The Future of Criticism: or, A. O. Scott, Time to Get in the Fridge

About a week and a half ago, I read a misguided and admittedly self-serving piece on the future of film criticism by the New York Times critic A. O. Scott.  Until recently, Scott – whose reviewing style will one day be remembered as a pioneering influence on the the "Vague-Plot-Summary-Followed-By-Dismissive-One-Liners" school – has continued to believe, despite, as he puts it, "all appearances to the contrary," that the future of criticism is bright.  But this was until what he calls his "own brush with the grim reaper" of contemporary cultural malaise: his syndicated TV show "At the Movies," which back in the day used to star Siskel and Ebert, has finally been canceled. 

Please don't cry.  Here's a little something to help you take the news:

Who needs therapy when you have this picture, seriously?

Anyway.  Scott's article addresses how "At the Movies," which "in its twilight, looks exalted and heroic" (to him), was once regarded as an enterprise that would dumb down the level of the cultural discourse about films into a simplistic see it/don't see it product evaluation.  Ya think?  Citing an older article called "All Thumbs, or Is There a Future for Film Criticism?" by Richard Corliss, Scott writes, "The threat Mr. Corliss identified has migrated to the Internet, where self-credentialed commenters snark and snipe and where the simple binary code of the thumbs-up or thumbs-down voting that Mr. Siskel and Mr. Ebert trademarked has been supplanted by the crunched numbers of the Metacritic score."  Where once we had "James Agee, now there is Rotten Tomatoes."  (Apparently Scott is unaware that if James Agee were writing now, there would be links to his articles on Rotten Tomatoes; there are unfortunately links there to A. O. Scott's.)  But all is not lost.  Scott indicates – and I believe he thinks he's being generous – that the future of criticism is "the same as it ever was," that the detractors of today's internet criticism are no more right or wrong than the generation that took Siskel and Ebert to task for their moronic reductionism.  "How can you do a movie justice in 60 seconds?" he asks, referring to the time allotted for discussion on his now-defunct show.  "You can’t, of course – or in 800 words of print or in a blog post – but you can start a conversation, advance or rebut an argument, and give people who share your interest something to talk about.  And that kind of provocation, that spur to further discourse, is all criticism has ever been."

A. O. Scott is not always wrong, but he is always shortsighted.  And in this case, he's absolutely both.  Criticism has not always been about "starting a conversation," the intellectual equivalent of chatting up a hottie in a dark bar, and criticism at its best is not about that now.  Criticism is fundamentally, ideally, about having something to say.  Now, there are times when that can be said in 800 words, or a blog post, or in sixty seconds of dialogue.  But the idea that extremely limited space or time constraints are an inherent part of the critical enterprise is something A. O. Scott has brainwashed himself into believing, probably because he wants to think the snarky blurb fodder he shells out for the New York Times is the apogee of commentary on film. 

Great criticism, like great art, finds its own shape.  Sometimes it sprawls and meanders; sometimes it explodes.  I think of David Foster Wallace's masterful essay on the films of David Lynch, or Mark Twain's truly wondrous "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses."  But, since A. O. Scott brought up online criticism, I think first and foremost of the best movie reviewer I may have ever encountered.  You might've met him already.  His name is Mr. Plinkett, and he's got just one question for all the pretentious assholes out there:

 What's wrong with your FAAAACE?

Mr. Plinkett isn't a real person.  He's a pizza roll-devouring serial killer, the brainchild of one Mike Stoklasa, a writer/director/Star Wars fanatic, and his bite-your-tongue brilliant, coughing-fit hilarious reviews of sci-fi films have held YouTube viewers as captive as prostitutes shackled to a basement wall.  The same week that trees died for A. O. Scott's misinformed "At the Movies" elegy, Plinkett's epic ninety-minute long review of Star Wars Episode Two: Attack of the Clones was garnering views on hundreds of thousands of screens around the country; Red Letter Media production company, who put this masterpiece online, announced their channel was the most viewed on all of YouTube.

The phenomena of Mr. Plinkett gives me hope, and not just because he's able to attract an audience without the grandfathered-in prestige of a dinosaur print publication or high-overhead cable station.  Rather, I'm blown away by how thorough, and smart, and dead-on-target his critical assessments are -- and by the fact that viewers seem to notice that. 

Here's the thing: in a world where what Scott calls the "democratic forces of the Internet" have supposedly made everyone a potential critic, people can still tell the difference between lame generalizations and incisive, witty critique.  If anything, they're more discerning than anyone could have possibly expected.  To watch a review the length of an entire movie represents a wealth of patience, intellectual engagement, and deep curiosity about the mechanics of narrative that a lot of so-called intellectuals would have us believe flew out the window sometime before The Elements of Style was published.  "But maybe people just find these videos entertaining," a naysayer might argue.  To that, I'd say the fact that Plinkett's reviews are well-written, carefully edited, with masterful comic timing and even fragments of story only serves to further prove that, when given the option, viewers, at least these ones, prefer criticism that aspires to the condition of art.

Only time will tell what the Internet holds for American intellectual culture in general, and for film reviewing in particular.  But I'm hoping that the world of pat, cramped mini-essays and 60-second discussions die with the media outlets that contain them, and that something more idiosyncratic, more expansive, more deeply thoughtful will take their place.  To me, the future looks like a much better time for what Scott calls "a commitment to the independent, open-ended exploration of works of art in relation to one another and the world around them" than the recent past ever did.  Then again, maybe someone's just fucking with my medicine.

America's Next Top Novelist

I like this painting.

I like White Castle hamburgers.  I like Cinnabons.  I like the TV show Carnivale.  I like the chocolate waterfall in the Bellagio hotel.  I like toy dogs wearing clothes.  I like the rinky-dink kiddy rides at Disneyland, and unlike David Foster Wallace, I actually had a great time at the Illinois State Fair.  I only recently kicked my Mountain Dew addiction, and that's because I moved on to Red Bull.  I've seen Mars Attacks half a dozen times, and you know how I feel about the Kids in the Hall.  I'm going to be frank: I love William Shatner.  It's not an easy thing to admit, but there it is.

Oh the humiliation.

Now don't get me wrong.  With the possible exception of the Kids in the Hall (whom I'm going to discuss again in the near future), I don't regard any of the above as considered opinions.  In fact, if someone argued with me about, say, White Castle hamburgers, I would have to concede every point: yes, they are nutrition-less.  Yes, they are made from horse meat and fingertips.  Yes, their restaurants resemble public bathrooms, with more french fries on the floor.  Yes, I will take a Crave Case, please.

When I started this blog, one of the things I promised to talk about was the fallibility of taste, my own included.  I appreciate it when people say that they don't believe there's such a thing as a guilty pleasure; in theory, I agree that I shouldn't be ashamed of anything that brings me joy.  But those folks clearly do not have the same relationship that I do with objets d'art from Urban Outfitters, or even the worst episodes of Fraggle Rock.

I own this lamp.

I recently re-read Susan Sontag's essay on camp, a classic piece of analysis and beautifully written besides.  However, as much as I'd like to excuse all my bad taste as a "way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon," it's more complicated than that.  Although my feelings on say, Santa vs. the Devil easily fit this bill, there are, to my chagrin, a whole slew of inferior artistic products that have moved me, unironically, in one way or another, and it would take a lot of thought for me to properly explain why.  To pick a random example: in the mediocre 2007 indie flick Year of the Dog, Molly Shannon's beloved pooch dies in the first fifteen minutes; to show the character's grief, the filmmaker treats us to a montage of images of the now dearly departed being cute and generically doggish.  Reader, I wept.  And not just a little bit, either.  Oh no, I was sobbing uncontrollably.  In the theater.  At a Molly Shannon movie I didn't even like.  To paraphrase the Pixies, where was my mind?

In the aforementioned essay, Sontag writes, "Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those mysterious attractions, mainly sensual, that have not been brought under the sovereignty of reason. They allow that considerations of taste play a part in their reactions to people and to works of art. But this attitude is naïve... Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas." 

I emphatically disagree with Sontag's statement that morality is merely a kind of taste, and I think her claim that intelligence is also simply a "taste in ideas" is absurd, possibly even facetiously intended.  But I am intrigued by what she's suggesting here about the arts.  She goes on to say that, far from being ineffable, as is commonly supposed, taste has a logic all its own -- "the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste" -- which can, in fact, be articulated, commented-upon, explored.

In popular culture, it seems to me that there are two basic schools of thought on criticism of the arts (especially books and movies).  There's the Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down school, which holds that criticism is a kind of product recommendation, an all-or-nothing or graded scale of merit.  For them, the fundamental question is, "Is it worth the money?"  Thumbers evaluate pieces of art alongside one another, often in direct comparison, regardless of differing aesthetics; to them, prizes, awards, rankings make sense as a way of navigating any landscape of creative endeavor.  This is the school of thought behind "Top 100" lists of books and movies, the "Must See" inserts amid Time Out New York's event listings, and even behind a television show like Top Chef, where cooks from widely different traditions and with vastly different aesthetics are pitted against each other with the assumption that someone will emerge from the contest as the "Winner," the "Best," and will then be rewarded financially for his efforts.  (I'd imagine this also applies to American Idol, though I've only ever seen this show once, in a bar with the sound on mute while waiting for a drag show to start.)  And this way of thinking spills out beyond the realm of professional critics: I find it telling that Amazon.com has user reviews in the same format for both books and vacuum cleaners.

Then there's the even lazier school of thought, which holds that "whatever floats your boat -- it's all just subjective."  This is the school of thought replicated through the cruel brainwash machinations of the worst suburban book clubs, where novels are valued for how much their readers can "identify" with the characters.  This makes artistic opinions personal to such a point that they can only be discussed in terms of autobiography.  If you dislike a film that someone else loves, then why try to argue with him?  You can't change who he is.  And similarly, if a book doesn't "work for" a certain reader, well, what can you do?

On the surface, these schools of thought appear to be opposed: the Thumbers see the quality of a work as an objective property to be measured, while the Boat-floaters regard it as entirely subjective, truly in the eye of the beholder.  But both of these schools of thought are, I think, deeply rooted in the capitalist system, because both see the piece of art as a product.  In both schemes, the audience's taste is immutable -- a market to be tapped.  The only difference is that according to the Boat-floaters, saying a film that's grossed a billion dollars is still a failure is absurd (it "worked for" so many!), whereas the Thumbers see success in one particular market (among "sophisticated," meaning educated, savvy viewers/readers like themselves) as more inherently valuable than success in others.  Yet, like the book club frau who requires her novels to feature victimized women springing back from adversity, this "sophisticated" market still has "standards," pre-existing expectations that must be met: generally, in the narrative arts, a "good story" with "developed" characters and "serious" themes, something that's "challenging" without being "offensive," "complex" without being "confusing."

I'm using the scare quotes here because I think these terms represent critical assumptions that are so common they've become nearly invisible to us.  We anticipate that any new book or movie will be evaluated along these lines, as if each reviewer is issued a rubric to score the work in each category.  These tacitly agreed-upon terms make it easier to shrink reviews to a paragraph, or even a pithy sentence or two: convenient, considering the decreasing availability of review space in popular magazines and newspapers.  Strictly descriptive terms acquire positive or negative connotations: "dense" is worse than "lean" but better than "bloated," "shocking" is better than "disgusting," but has nothin' on "haunting."

I'm not faulting reviewers; for the most part, and with the exception of the truly insensate, they're doing the best with the space they have.  But I wonder what would happen if those same critics turned their analytical gaze not on a new work, but on the critical assumptions themselves, attempting, as Sontag does, "to snare a sensibility in words." 

One effect would be that readers would be empowered to correct for the taste of their reviewers.  For example, I only occasionally agree with Roger Ebert.  But since I've been reading him since childhood, I am now able to gauge, with a high degree of accuracy, what I'll think of a film based on the way he describes it.  I don't mean that I only read his reviews for what they reveal about a film's content; his evaluative statements also contain valuable information about what the movie is like.  But now, when he says a film is "deplorable" or "inexplicably riveting," I know what he's getting at, what it means when he makes that statement.  I can see through it.

The second, and perhaps even more important, effect of reviewers laying bare their critical assumptions would be the reviewers beginning to correct for these assumptions themselves.  But, you might argue, if reviewer corrects for her taste, what will be left?  "Objective" standards?  Whose are those, and why shouldn't they be corrected for too?  For the sake of argument, let's agree that Sontag is right and that, in the arts, there is no higher authority than taste.  Even so, the "tentative, nimble" work of explicating one's sensibility would force a reviewer to think harder about the standards she's using, and at least try to apply them more consistently.  Working out a theory in writing has a funny way of opening one's mind, too.  It can start a dialogue, with others or even within oneself.  Far from setting a reviewer's sensibility in stone, I think that more often than not, it would lead to her questioning -- and perhaps ultimately rejecting -- the most knee-jerk of her received ideas.

This is what I'm working on, anyway.  And the more honest I am with myself -- and you, dear reader -- about my weird proclivities and turn-offs, the more meaningful any criticism I offer will be.  At least I hope so.

Honest to Blog

As I mentioned in my first post, blogging does not come naturally to me.  Why is this?  I think the main issue is one of control.  As a fiction writer – and, hell, as a human being – I tend to obsess over the way I present my words to others.  When I was in my MFA program, I would read my submissions over and over, often aloud (to the amusement, and probably irritation, of my partner and dog), checking and re-checking the sentences for imprecisions, repetitions, grammatical mistakes, and weird punctuation.  After I printed out a copy, I invariably found more flaws.  Our windowsill is still cluttered with a pile of scrap paper from my torn-up drafts.  Although the finished product still sometimes bore unfortunate sentences like, "She shoved her glasses up her nose" ("Wouldn't that hurt?" inquired a friend), for the most part I at least had the illusion that what I was offering up in class was polished, thought-out, complete.  The same is true for me even with communication where that shouldn't matter.  I preemptively bought a bottle of white-out for writing holiday cards this weekend (and promptly put it to use), and whoever invented the "review and re-record your message" function on modern voicemail is both my savior and my tormenter.  If I could have three wishes, one would be for an edit function on emails already sent.

One of the purposes of a blog, for me, is to provide myself a low-stakes forum for hashing out half-formed ideas.  In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott extols the "shitty first draft"; similarly, another writer pal and I often exhort each other to "poop it out," to get words down on paper, regardless of the quality.  Rewriting and polishing are essential, of course: though charmed by it as a teenager, I'd never endorse Allen Ginsberg's credo, "First thought, best thought" now.  But sometimes, I err too far to the other extreme: I can prune the first thought away to nothing before it has the chance to grow.

I don't yet have a wide circle of readers on this blog, but I do have a handful now, and I find that the more people I imagine might see my posts, the longer and more worked-over those posts become.  Although I like the idea that I can delve into my ideas and opinions deeply here, and I want to keep that trend going, I also think that goal can, at times, undermine what a blog does best.  The blog post can and does bear a resemblance to many earlier forms – the newspaper column, the journal entry, the book review, the editorial, the essay, the memoirist's vignette – but at heart it is a new animal, mutant and rangy and omnivorous as a Sendak beast.  The tendency of the poem is toward an austerity of language, the novel toward a broadness of ambition and scope, but the tendency of the blog post is toward immediacy, speed—and then dialog, as the blogger's voice spills out from the main post into the comments.

Though I grew up in the first generation of bloggers, this idea is still foreign to me.  But I think it's a beautiful one, and it's something I'll try to keep in mind as I continue my work here at Ye Olde Chaw Shoppe.

Tearing It Up and Starting All Over Again

I tried to have a blog before. I failed. Now I'm trying again. But this time, with humility.

I had an idea before that I would use this space to write a kind of extended literary manifesto, something like Charles Baxter's Burning Down the House or John Gardner's The Art of Fiction. Fiction writing, fiction reading, is and has always been the most important thing in my life, and if I was going to say anything about it, I wanted my thoughts to be measured, precise, timeless, true. This would be fine if my thoughts were measured, precise, timeless, and true, but unfortunately they're not. They're jumbled and confused and internally contradictory, much to my chagrin, and beyond that, they are all mixed up in the stuff of my life, which is also fucked-up: I am an obsessive, neurotic, pathologically cranky person; I cry often; I am moved at times beyond reason by low art and I'm not talking about hipster low art I am talking, quite specifically, about Kids in the Hall and Fraggle Rock and MOVIE PREVIEWS, for God's sake; I live in New York City down the street from a halfway house nicknamed "the hotel" by residents and sometimes, staggering home after a long night out, I suspect I am mistaken for one of them; I read the news, including the tabloid news, and I am not immune to its hypnotic powers; and perhaps worst of all, I work in the publishing industry, which perfumes all my thoughts with the smell of money.

Who am I? I'm twenty-five, a failed novelist already, graduate of an MFA program that was very like Valhalla, except for the fact that after our coursework ended we were forced to return to the land of the living. I had the embarrassing misconception that all my life had led up to those two blissful years of artistic integrity, and since then -- well. In the film Patton, there's a scene after the war has ended, when George C. Scott sits atop an enormous horse, turning circles in a narrow barn while reporters ask him questions. He is like a ferocious creature who's been caged, a machine in storage. I feel like that sometimes, as pretentious as that sounds.

I've decided not to worry about sounding pretentious anymore, though, at least not here. I know at least one other person will probably read this, but this space isn't primarily meant for public consumption; it's where I'm going to put down my own thoughts and ideas and questions, about fiction but also about other kinds of art, and all the other junk that clutters up my mind. I'm going to try not to sound stupid, but I often will, and none of this is the final word on anything even for me. But I'm going to write here every day I can -- a message in a bottle from me to you, from the American cultural wasteland of the early 21st century.