ORNAMENT OF MY MIGHT: YEAH, SURE
I like thinking up occupational equivalences to plug into The Idea I Probably Hate Most In The World, which is when authors say that their stories “write themselves” or that their characters “have their own agency.”
Carpenter: Sometimes, I sit down to build a kitchen, and before I know it, I’ve somehow built a library!
Doctor: That angioplasty just kinda did it’s own thing, you know?
Cab Driver: These new taxis drive themselves.
I, too, cringe whenever an author says their characters escaped their control and wrote their own story. It’s too cute and too simple. There is a thing that happens when you stop dictating the events of the story and instead let the plot arise out of the characters that you’ve created — everything gets easier. But it isn’t mystical and it isn’t even very special among writers. It’s called doing your job well.
There’s a temptation among writers to portray themselves as oracles. I guess it comes partly out of vanity, and partly out of a genuine puzzlement over where they get their inspiration, and why they’re the ones who get it. And partly out of a fear that someone will eventually point at them and say, “You’re just making shit up, aren’t you?” So they want to create an aura of mysticism around themselves, as if the work of writing is so mysterious no one ought to try to explain it. It’s easier for readers to suspend their disbelief if they think the writer knows things they don’t. And it’s easier for writers to make shit up when they forget that they are entirely earthly and not at all divine. I think that’s why writers say insipid things like “my characters have their own agency.” They’re trying to remove themselves from the process, to convince you, as they are convinced, that their work is inspired. (And that you should buy it.)
I can’t blame them. Writing is the same as all other work in that there’s an art to everything. But it’s different in that you can never prove you’re qualified to do it. The skills of a carpenter, a doctor, and a taxi-driver are observable and measurable. The skills of a writer are entirely objective. They change as the writer changes, as the times change, as individual readers change. No writer ever reaches a point where they’re safe from any given person reading their book and saying, “Nope, I just don’t believe that.” So they create their own authority — they are the gods to whom their characters are subject. If their characters begin to disobey, then they’ve accomplished their goal: they’ve created something truly human. It’s a calculated perversion of what really happens during the writing process, kind of a creation myth that lets writers give themselves the kind of status they need in order to ask for their readers’ time and attention.
Now that I think about it, I’m not sure there actually are less stupid-sounding means to reach the same end. In fact, it might only sound stupid if you’ve figured out for yourself that it isn’t really like that.
oh god these people don’t understand BOOKS
According to the New York Times: “Book lovers, you can exhale. The printed, bound book has been given a stay of execution by an unlikely source: the design community.”
Apparently there is a whole industry involving rich people hiring other people to fill the libraries of their mansions with books. Books that match the curtains. Because what is important about books is not what’s in them but what they look like.
AUGH. This article was TORMENT.
I, too, decorate with books. In that bookshelves are the focal point(s) of my living room. And they have stuff all over them. And sometimes by accident they’re colorful (thank you, Vintage reissue of Dorothy Dunnett). But the reason I like looking at them is that they are all memories. They represent stories that I love. My bookcase is a pretty good indication of who I am. Having someone else pick out your books for you according to what is aesthetically pleasing is like breaking some kind of decency law!
When I was studying at York, there were two libraries — the main university library on campus, and a secondary library at King’s Manor in the city itself. The Centre for Medieval Studies was housed there, and its library was a strange, cramped place with winding stairs and an unnatural number of corners. Within this library was another library, made up of a collection left to the university under the condition that they stay together. It was incredibly annoying when you were trying to find something, but I completely understood. When you spend your whole life accumulating books, the mismatching volumes start to look right together, as if they’re a family. It is practically unthinkable that they should ever be separated.
This whole create-a-library thing is completely backwards. If you can’t be bothered to choose your own books, you would do better to spend the money donating the books to local public libraries. I have no idea why the author of the article thinks book lovers will breathe easier knowing that physical books have become no more than tokens allowing rich people to appear as if they have a personality. That is the antithesis of what books mean to people who actually read them. I need to stop reading NYT articles on things that aren’t current events. They always seem out of touch in a particularly deranged way.
Boycotting the New Yorker
So there’s this thing going on about a women who noticed the New Yorker doesn’t publish enough women and has resolved to send back copies that do not include at least five pieces by women.
I like it. As she points out, there are just as many women as men in the world. There’s no statistical reason women should be so vastly underrepresented in print. I’m actually quite puzzled over it. Do women not send in their stuff? Are women not encouraged to send their stuff? Does the New Yorker just favor what men write about? Do men and women really write about things that are that different — by which I mean different on gender lines?
And it isn’t just the New Yorker. Women make up less than half (often WAY less) of the contributors to other major magazines as well. This is why I like Bookslut. They review a wide variety of books, have a wide variety of interviews, most of their writers are women, and they tell it like it is. They’re not entrenched in any worldview, unless you can call “not putting up with bullshit” a worldview. As much as I trust any reviews, I trust the reviews on Bookslut.
I don’t have a subscription to the New Yorker. Sometimes I get old copies from the library. Generally I quite like what I read in it, but it really isn’t excusable at this point to publish so few women. Make an effort, New Yorker!
The Gender-Neutral Pronoun
The Awl published a really interesting article on the search for gender-neutral pronouns last week. Right after I read it, I read this article my friend put up on Facebook about how to be a trans ally: Not Your Mom’s Trans 101, which put the first article in a different perspective and made it seem all the more important that we have an inclusive word for when we are referring to any or all of us humans in a nonspecific way.
Obviously people have been using “he” for just about forever, without giving it a second thought, and we are all trained to understand that “he” is generally meant to mean “he or she or anyone.” Our other options are “she,” “they,” and “one.”
Arguments against them are as follows:
1. “He” is sexist. “A pilot is not allowed to nap even if he is very tired.”
2. “She” is sexist. “A lawyer may have a great many books in her office.”
3. “They” is incorrect when its antecedent is singular. “Someone has a secret they don’t want to share.”
4. “One” sounds pretentious. “One wants one’s BBC!”
I’m sure I personally have used all of these, but I usually go out of my way to avoid both “he” and “she” because I’d rather be incorrect or pretentious than sexist.
The article ends in nowhereland, with a brainless exchange between one random writer (a man) who says definitively that “he” is the best pronoun for this purpose, and the author of the article, who is not enough of a linguist to have ever noticed that the common usage of “suck” these days is homophobic. Disappointing.
So I wanted to point out some things that are especially wrong with “he.”
1. It implies that there is a standard gender. There is not. Men do not predate women. Also, where does this pronoun leave trans people?
2. It builds sexism into our language and therefore into our brains, where it already has a firm toehold and needs no reinforcing. Also, where does this pronoun leave trans people?
3. It will be read by girls who will grow up feeling excluded by it. When I read things written before about 1975, I automatically assume that male authors did not mean ME when they used “he.” The effect of knowing your gender has been seen as second-class for the entirety of history (and still is), is brutally discouraging. Also, where does this pronoun leave trans people?
4. Seriously, where does this pronoun leave trans people? I can’t even imagine how invisible they must feel.
(You could object similarly to “she,” and you’d be right, but since there is no history of women dominating, you know, everything, and little evidence that they will in the near future, the dynamic is a bit different.)
To look at this situation and say, “But ‘he’ is the accepted tradition,” is laziness. Language changes to suit the society that uses it, and this isn’t working for us anymore. It implies things about gender that we aren’t — or shouldn’t be — comfortable implying anymore. The Awl evidently doesn’t have a problem with the marginalization of non-males being ingrained in our language, but I do. It’s 2011 and Antonin Scalia doesn’t think the Fourteenth Amendment applies to women, so yes, I’d rather see “they” used as a singular pronoun than leave it up to the public, or the Supreme Court, to interpret the use of “he” as an indefinite pronoun. When it comes to equality, it is best not to leave anything to chance.
These two have been the most terrifying thing on the box for a few years now. Forever compromising, forever touchingly comforting the other as they quit some creative pursuit or professional aspiration. Settle, settle, settle. Gold jewellery handed over with a knowing nod to the camera. Maturation heavily marked by the dropping of alternative interests and the adoption of stability. Never righteous anger, never itchy feet, just American-ironic grinning at the insufferable dreariness of their surroundings. Their function is to reassure the average. It horrifies me that these might be role-models for kids watching TV these days.
This is unexpectedly timely, because I was just rewatching some early episodes of this show. I had forgotten the scene where Jim tells the camera he doesn’t want to put effort into his job because then it would become a career. When I saw it again, it made me genuinely sad. Seven years later, he and Pam are both still there, more ensconced than ever.
But. When I first started watching this show, I had an office job. It was a good job, it suited my interests and abilities, the rules were loose, and I was fairly compensated. I wanted to be a novelist, though, and three and a half years in, I quit. My plan was to work on my novel until my money ran out, and then get another job. It’s been a year and a half, and I have a finished novel but no money, and I’m facing an impossible job market. I have never felt this miserably hopeless about the future in my entire life. I don’t regret what I did, but I have a much more informed perspective on the notion of following dreams now. It is a really serious gamble, and just like I have new respect for anyone who has written a novel, no matter how bad it might be, I am much less willing to judge people who take the less risky Jim-and-Pam route than I used to be. It’s because I had righteous anger and itchy feet that I find myself in the humiliating position of opening my cupboards and thinking, “God, what am I going to eat today?” It’s much harder now for me to feel contempt for people who slog through jobs they hate when they’re capable of more. If you asked me now whether I would rather have my dreams slowly asphyxiated by corporate drudgery, or take a shot at them and end up feeling how I’ve felt for the past few months, I would have to think about that for a while before I answered. I would have to really consider that choice.
Granted, neither Jim nor Pam ever faced the choice of Dunder Mifflin vs. Starving Artist. My situation isn’t really analagous to theirs. It’s just that I once would have thought exactly what Pierce thought, and now I take a much more tempered view of it, and it’s because I went in the extreme opposite direction from them, and it hasn’t made me especially fulfilled. Sure, I feel intellectually satisfied, but I can’t eat that, or wear it, or be in love with it, or buy all the music I’ve been dying to buy but can’t afford with it. I’m not sure what good it’s doing me or anyone else.
I think I might be accidentally be arguing for averageness, which wasn’t my intention. All I meant to say was that trying to reach your potential can be so all-around difficult that I can see why so many people are afraid to do it. Nobody should waste their talents, but sometimes using them involves a legitimately frightening amount of risk. I don’t know if it makes you “average” to give in to that fear, or pragmatic. I mean, I guess it does kind of make you average, but is that really horrifying? If you’re looking to television for role models, you could do worse.
If there’s a problem with the American version of The Office, maybe it’s that they didn’t make Jim and Pam average enough. We’re getting mixed messages from them. Even though Pam apparently isn’t a very good artist, and Jim’s single ambition was to marry Pam, the writers keep suggesting to us that these two are better than their environment. Which makes us want them to get out. Even within the confines of the reality inside the show, they probably both would have left Dunder-Mifflin or advanced up the ladder by now, but since they function as our sane guides in the nuthouse, the narrative can’t do without them. That’s why I don’t hold it against them that they haven’t grown as much as they should have. First, the one realistic thing about that show is how hard it is for both of them to take professional risks; and second, because of the nature of American television (maybe all television, I don’t know), the characters are a slave to the plot. I agree it would be better if the plot were a slave to the characters, and I can only hope that the last season shows the company going bankrupt and Jim and Pam moving on to more fulfilling careers.
I kind of want to address the term “American-ironic” but I have no idea what it means and I have to assume, with some shame, that I am too surrounded by my own culture to see what is especially American about Jim and Pam’s willingness to settle. Doesn’t every country have people who settle? If their method of settling is typically American, I think that makes sense because it’s an American show. If it’s Americanness in general that is bothersome, I can’t argue with that. Quite often it bothers me, too.
Scrolling upwards to look at the length of this response, I wonder whether The Office actually warrants this much critical effort. But I have a lot of time, so why not.
The Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis
Evidently the last episode of St. Elsewhere implies that the entire show took place inside some kid’s head. (To be specific, Tommy Westphall’s head.) Since some characters from St. Elsewhere also appear on other shows, and characters from those shows appear on yet other shows, and so on, evidently it can be concluded that a vast amount of the television universe comes out of Tommy Westphall’s imagination. Some philosophers object, but the logic is sound enough for me.
A friend alerted me to this today, knowing my love for all things metafictional, and I wrote back a whole essay on what I thought about it because that’s just the kind of thing I am unable to stop myself from doing. It’s a really interesting subject, or at least it seems that way when you’re unemployed and have a lot of time to kill between Christmas and New Year’s.
Here’s the most interesting thing. There’s Tommy Westphall’s reality, and there’s Tommy Westphall’s dream (for lack of a better term). Those who appear in his dream seem also to have counterparts in his reality, though they are somewhat different. If most of television takes place in Tommy’s dream, then it stands to reason that most of television also has a counterpart in Tommy’s reality. Which we are never shown. There is an entire unseen universe of television nobody knows anything about!
I’m surprisingly weirded out by the suggestion that most television, being the dream of a fictional character, is twice-removed from our reality. I want to know more about the middle layer, Tommy’s reality, and what happens there to the characters I like on other tv shows. Could someone please write a television show exploring this topic? And can it please not end with someone waking up and/or dead because that will just confuse me more.
Books to read and to avoid at Christmas
Before Christmas, I had been reading The Stories of John Cheever. This is a large orange volume of ennui. At first I thought it was going to be upper-class ennui, but then before long I realized the ennui was indescriminate. The stories are arranged chronologically. In the introduction, Cheever expresses some trepidation at the inclusion of stories he wrote when he was very young and immature. I’m not very far in, and I’m interested in how they will progress. If I read these stories separately, in different publications at different times, I would probably not find them particularly immature. I would not have noticed how often second homes in New Hampshire or Long Island turn up. I would not have noticed that we are always told the first and last names of all the characters up front as if we were being formally introduced. I would not have noticed the suspiciously dramatic propensity of children to die or nearly die. I wonder whether these formulas will continue to turn up, or whether his interests will evolve. After all, what Cheever writes about is very much Cheever’s world. Maybe a better question is how he goes from the straightforward narration in his early stories to the artful way that “The Swimmer” unfolds.
Anyway, I do not recommend Cheever for Christmas. Too much ennui, too many unhappy families, too many people unable or unwilling to do what they ought to do. I left off, ironically, right before “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor,” possibly because the title applies far too well to my life and I didn’t want to be depressed.
What is best at Christmas is children’s books or classics. They’re warm and exciting and they have satisfying endings. Last year I read Treasure Island and then Cranford over my Christmas break — Cranford looked like it was going to be boring but it was a delight A DELIGHT I tell you! This year I’m reading The Mysterious Benedict Society, by Trenton Lee Stewart, which was a gift from a friend. It reminds me in some ways of both Harry Potter and A Series of Unfortunate Events. It is not as clever as either of those, but it is really enjoyable and just the sort of adventuresome reading that is best for Christmas.
In the past I have also found Patricia McKillip’s Riddle-Master series, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell, and Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series to be excellent Christmas vacation reading if you like wintry settings and reality-based fantasy. Since I love Dickens with 99% of my heart, I am also partial to A Christmas Carol, although I realize many people loathe Dickens with all of their hearts. This makes me sad because his sense of humor is weird and absolutely hilarious and often surprisingly modern. You know who isn’t funny, however? Virgil. I had to read The Aeneid once between semesters and dear god that was the worst Christmas reading ever. Thank goodness my grandmother’s house is like a library because as soon as Dido set herself aflame I had to recouperate with Jane Eyre (also seasonally appropriate for some reason).
Last but not least, I have a slight obsession with The Tailor of Gloucester. I’m not sure why an eight-year-old would decide that the plight of an old man and his cat was so enthralling, but evidently I did. The tailor’s humble and lonely existence, the kindness of the mice, and the suggestion that animals can talk between Christmas Eve and Christmas morning — a claim I have not yet been able to verify although I have tried — all fascinated me, and to this day my mental image of Christmas involves Simpkin walking on his hind legs in a frock coat. So I recommend this one, too. It’s sweet, and it’s short!
The literary and the boring
As I said last time, it doesn’t particularly bother me that literary fiction isn’t wildly popular. What does bother me is the assertion that literary fiction is boring and elitist. Boring is in the eye of the beholder, first of all, and it seems to me that being interested in a nuanced depiction of the world around you and the people in it is actually a sign of inclusivity. What’s missing in the literary vs. genre debate is that no one has stated this fact: people who like lit fic are enjoying it just as much people who like genre fiction are enjoying that. It is not “less fun” by universal standards, it is less fun by the standards of people who find cliches to be insightful.
As I was trying to figure out why lit fic, which I find fascinating, is so often seen as dull, I remembered what my reading habits used to be like. Somehow I went from being a kid who mostly read The Babysitter’s Club and wretchedly bad fantasy novels to an adult who has the literary tastes of an unabashed snob. I think it comes down to curiosity. The first time I consciously read a “literary” book was when I had some free time one afternoon and I saw Wuthering Heights in the living room bookcase, and the title made no sense to me and I wanted to know what it was about. That was the only reason. I just wanted the title to make sense. And I wanted to like it, so I did, which led to a genuine enthusiasm for the classics, which led to a preference for books that require interpretation. Books that don’t follow formulas or communicate in cliches take a certain amount of stubbornness to read: you must be willing to find anything interesting. You must be curious for curiosity’s sake.
For some reason, the divide between the curious and the incurious seems to occur in high school English classes. For every person who tells me that Moby-Dick is their favorite book (because it’s the one someone explained to them), someone else tells me they passionately hate Jane Eyre (because it’s the one someone explained to them). Knowing the ins and outs of a work seems to enhance it for some people and ruin it for others — just like some people feel that knowing the nitty-gritty of science brings them closer to the sublime, and other people want to preserve a mystery. Literary fiction tends to reflect the gray areas of the society that creates them; it raises questions. And genre fiction tends to insulate you from those questions. Which one is boring depends on whether you are curious enough to ask questions.
The way literary fiction is talked about is the same as the way smart kids in high school are talked about: as if they are being that way to annoy other people. Not true. Life is just more interesting when you’re interested in it.
