Deluded / Inexperienced / Just Really Bad

Last night, after over a week of trying, I finally finished Sean Penn's atrocious debut novel, Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff. It's so terrible that I am numb with horror. As I explained to Matt, my state of mind recalls how I felt watching the first episode of Cop Rock: overwhelmed with the amount of work that had gone into this lotto-ball-tumbler of bad ideas, feeling stricken, astonished, that no one considered how bad, how really really bad, it all was.

If this is the first time you've heard of Cop Rock, it is (rather amazingly) just what it says on the tin: a police drama with many musical numbers per episode. I didn't believe the person who first told me this, but I promise it's true. This is my favorite number. 

You might already know about me that I am an outright connoisseur of bad film. I love it. I love what it reveals about good film. Plus, occasionally I come upon films that are basically outsider art, delightful in their lack of adherence to conventional cinema--even if the results are (for most people) unwatchable. Bad writing is a slightly different situation. The reason I was reading Sean Penn's book at all is related to some very bad turn-of-the-century writing I'm familiar with, and a feature I'm writing about that similarity. (Stay tuned.) But I learned from my flirtation with that writer of old that bad writing is, for whatever reason, not as easy in the intake process as bad film is.

A lot of people who make bad art are either inexperienced or deluded. A filmmaker like James Nguyen (deluded) sincerely believes he's making good films, because, for whatever reason, he can't see the divide between his camerawork and Hitchcock's. He can't hear that his bad, echoey, overclocked sound is different than the crisp sound of the average dialogue scene in a commercial motion picture. Students I've met who write badly (inexperienced) have not read or written enough to encounter and understand some of the pitfalls of bad prose. They think that certain kinds of metatextual writing are fun and new (when in fact they are neither) because they don't understand what makes that particular metatext cringey and gimmicky instead of profound.

But I can offer no quarter to the makers of Cop Rock. They were highly experienced crafters of television. They had seen and made enough TV to be neither inexperienced nor deluded. And yet, what they made was so bad, a spectacular collision of dumb ideas. That was the root of the stunned sensation I felt during the first episode: I cannot explain this away with my usual analyses of bad art. They went into this with their eyes open and the product is still terrible.

That's close to how I feel about Sean Penn's book. I know that this person has read a lot of books and has done a lot of thinking. And this book is garbage. It's got as many bad ideas as Cop Rock but it adds "lazy" to the pile, which I find unforgivable in a writer. And I don't know how it happened this way. I'm no longer surprised that bad books get published with big money, because I have come to understand how that happens, even for people who have not a sliver of the name recognition Penn has. But I simply can't fathom that this lies behind a man who, for his many faults, never comes across as underprepared or undereducated when I see him at work.

(To be clear, I think Penn should've been cleared off the table decades ago when he was violent toward reporters and allegedly violent toward Madonna; I think he is hilariously pretentious; I don't think his choice of roles is especially interesting across time, except as demonstrations of Hi, Mom, I'm Acting; but I respect that he's particularly good at his job in a crowded field of middle-aged white male actors.)

The above may have been nothing but outtakes from the essay I'm going to write about this awful book. Or early exercises for a novella-length essay I want to write about bad movies. But I am unhorsed about the unfathomable badness of Bob Honey and had to let it out somewhere. Toward the end, I had to sit in the room where Matt was gaming to read it, because I didn't want to read it alone.

Out in the world:

Something hysterical (hysteria in this sense being composed of equal parts fun + anxiety) on Medium. It's no fun to have your favorite stress purchase be suddenly a source of stress.

A tiny memoir piece I wrote appears in issue 5 of Beacon Quarterly, a Portland-based, design-focused (?) magazine. I'm not sure I understand the magazine really at all, but I'm pleased that my words are in it. I saw a PDF, and they treated me well. What I wrote, "Five Stories, Collated," was designated as poetry, which isn't quite right but it's fine if they/you want to read it that way. In a few months, the issue will be free to view digitally, and I'll link to it again then.

My work appears in Tiferet's current issue (spring/summer 2018). It's a "tif," a short piece on the theme of transformation, and I feel it's not of the same weight and caliber as the full-length contributions in this really fine magazine. But I loved writing it - it's an idea I'd wanted to put out in the world for a long time - and I'm proud it's in print. Here's a link to buy a digital copy of the issue, should you desire to.

I reviewed a remarkable book, The Underneath, by Melanie Finn, for sinkhole. I liked working with them a lot - they turned down something weird of mine but assigned me this book instead, and all went well - and I'm already reading a second book for review for them. This book, though. It gave me the opportunity to dig deep about my opinions of New England and its darker side, and I'm grateful.

And I reviewed a writing reference anthology, Credo, for Craft Literary. I did my best to give it a mixed but not unkind review. The book means well, but it's got filler.

I've filed multiple other reviews and a couple of interviews, all soon to come. May ain't over yet.

Elena as Opposed to Elena

Over the long weekend I finished the third book in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan series. I'd read the first book in just a couple of large gulps, but the second one took me a little longer due to school, timing, whatnot. The third took me from Los Angeles to Chicago and part of the way back on three plane flights. I'm going to start the fourth right away; I can't help but devour. But this post is mostly about a single thing I perceived in the second book. (If I said all I had to say about these books, I'd be blogging about them for weeks.)

It is not fair to say that, since starting My Brilliant Friend, I'd been proceeding on the notion that the first-person narrator of the novels, named Elena, definitely was Elena Ferrante. The notion I had was not precisely that the entire book is 100% a roman à clef, top to bottom, everything true. However, the books are so vivid, their detail so minuscule, their characters so woven together, everything so thoroughly of a piece, that I thought at least I was dealing with a Proust situation, where certain details are different but mostly it's just the shape of the author's life. Her global audience knows almost nothing about Elena Ferrante, and the nature of these novels supports her privatizing herself, in a way. That is: we don't necessarily need to know about Elena the author because we know Elena the character so well.

Multiple assumptions helped me to go forward into the second book with this idea in mind, that the novel was not a novel as much as it was a mild fictionalization. I assumed that Elena the author was the same age as Elena the character, and grew up in the same era. I assumed that no one could write these books from scratch, without pulling them mostly from life. I assumed that whatever she'd done to fictionalize these characters was tremendous authorship, but still not whole invention.

At the end of the second book, Elena the character publishes her first novel. Elena the character is in her early 20s, and the year is 1968 or 1969. This was the first moment when I definitively knew that Elena the author was not taking the books altogether from life. Elena the author's age is unknown, but she published her first novel in 1992. Obviously, something has been altered.

After doing this math, my reading experience changed, and I felt personally disappointed. (This is a stupid reaction, I know, but bear with me.) I had been wondering how much in the books was true and how much was invented, and wondering how Ferrante was capable of such sorcery even if it was mostly true and only a little invented, and so on. Instead, now, I felt as if the ground had shifted, was unstable. If this one aspect of the book - crucial in character development, thematically critical - was fictionalized, what else was? Some things? Everything? I didn't know, suddenly, when before I'd thought I had a handle on it.

In reality, nothing changed. I was foolish to think I knew anything about Ferrante's endeavor (at her desk, I mean), or about her life, only because I'd read the childhood and young adulthood she'd shaped for me in about 800 pages.

This is not Elena Ferrante. But it could easily be Lila.

Isn't that interesting, that I felt unstable because of my own perceptions of the book changed? Not because the book itself changed in any way?

Whether we want to get into the metaphysics of readership and writership or not, I thought it was worth noting that there was an actual pinpointable moment in my reading experience where it was no longer possible that Ferrante was writing about herself. At least, this moment was when the average reader with an internet connection knew that the author wasn't writing about herself with total factual accuracy.

In my view, this only intensifies her achievement, which is already lauded as one of the most remarkable in contemporary literature. If she's made these books up, completely, I'm staggered. The way the characters grow and move and change around and with each other, and the way the characters' movements demonstrate the books' thematic underpinnings, seems too real, too consistent, too true to be fiction. There's melodrama in the reappearances of certain characters, but it's always believable melodrama. There's a cast of dozens and there's depressing consistency in the way the cast ages and matures (or fails to); there's mundane tragedy via deaths and degradations.

If this is absolute fiction, it is indistinguishable from witchcraft.

All Fiction is a Farce

So, remember that required, requisitioned radical revision I did on the Girl Scout story for my workshop class? I'm still kind of eh about what I did with it, but something came out in class that's worth analysis. Here's the beginning:

Now this is a story all about how my life got flipped, turned upside down.

Yes, that's really the way I'm starting this. Because it's hilarious how much my life is a replica of the premise of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. 

One of the students who read my revision in class last week pinged the second sentence up there. He said that sentence implies that the narrator is conscious of an audience, although nothing in the rest of the story mentions or clarifies that awareness. Tallulah (the narrating character) appears to be telling this story to someone, per that sentence, but the story doesn't say who that someone is. Who is it? he asked me.

What do you think? I said.

I don't know! he said. Who is it?

Sharp guy, this student. He's asked questions like this before - questions that imply I have a concrete answer about some aspect of a story I wrote, an answer that he wants. He's quite right about the sentence, but the answer isn't simple, and I doubt it's the one he wants.

The answer is, I wanted the reader to read that sentence and think about the nature of reading stories, of authorship, and of narration. All fiction is a farce, see. There is no Tallulah. I made her up for the purposes of writing the Girl Scout story. Tallulah is narrating to an audience because there is a reader sitting there with the story I wrote in her voice, and for no other reason. The Fresh Prince theme song is really the way I'm starting my story, and it's really the way Tallulah's starting hers. I meant to pull back the curtain on the Great and Powerful Oz: whether you like it or not, reader, all there is is me at my desk. No smoke, no flame, no Tallulah.

I'll grant you that I went about this exposure pretty clumsily/lazily in this story, and that there are only two moments in the 2,500 words that even bother with it. The rest of the story is straightforward and not really all that good. I think the reason I wrote that second sentence into the story at all is that I was harried about having to write it, and I fall back to my Big Writing Concerns when I have to write and I don't know what to write about. (Or when I can't think of a better way to transition from the Fresh Prince theme song into the meat of the story.) BWCs for me are the nature of reading stories, of authorship, and of narration, along with truth and the other stuff I wrote about in this post.

There are authors who dance with these issues gracefully. I am not one of them as yet. John Barth does it in "Lost in the Funhouse" (the story), Wallace does it in "Good Old Neon", and a Canadian writer named Lee Henderson does it in "Attempts at a Great Relationship", which was probably my first exposure to this kind of metafiction.

Although this was likely my real first exposure.
There's a reason I loved Harold. 

I copied some aspects of Henderson's story when I wrote "How [Not] to Bake Bread" this spring, a story which I do not claim is any good at all but which felt like my first major foray into the kind of writing I deeply want to do. I haven't managed to write anything like it since, and I don't really know how to go about doing so, but I find that my desire to make readers think about the nature of reading stories, of authorship, and of narration keeps leaking into even the most mundane fiction over the last few months. Especially when I don't have a clear idea of what I'm writing about.

So I get meta when I get stressed. I find myself jabbering about Barthes and Prospero and how bizarre reading actually is - the various levels of delusion that we elevator downward and through when we open the cover of a book. When I sit down to write something I don't know how to write, I dig into the lotto bowl, and I come up with, say, something in pop culture. I use that thing as an entry point, and then I seem to just pass the burden of what I'm doing on to the reader with "Wow, you guys, reading is fucked up, amirite?"

Later on in that revision of the Girl Scout story, this appears:

Hearing [my life history] laid out for Naomee like that changed things, though. The way it came out of me wasn't complex, or lasting - it didn't resonate in my bones, didn't lie on top of my skin like a film of cheap soap. It did sound like a TV movie plot. Was my life so easy to summarize?

I'm trying to poke the reader into realizing the sham in which she and I are complicit. Yes of course Tallulah's life is easy to summarize. I MADE IT UP. I made it up and you have read it and that is some crazy shit.

I wish I was better at that poke. Sometimes I feel it's the only thing I want to write about - that stories and characters are far less crucially the thing that motivates me to put words on the page and that the meta stuff, the stuff that comes out when I'm stressed (like, oh, now) is all that matters to me. Writers can't expose those issues in fiction without coming up with stories and characters, of course, and doing so unconvincingly leads to terrible fiction. Just ask the people who read my revision of the Girl Scout story.