Writing fiction is a lot getting drunk off the draught of the keyboard (Home Row Happy Hour) and then squeezing your heart into an empty gin bottle and hurtling it as far as you possibly can into an ocean of unknown variables. You don’t know what sort of current your script will get caught in; how large the tidal wave will be. You have no clue how many seasons your heart will spend bobbing up and down, succumbing to the sloshes of nature, the indifference of mankind, the boiled insouciance of an accelerated society whose paws have more and more freely adapted to the rectangular scepter of the remote control and less and less to the tattered lapels of a book jacket. You have no clue what foreign shore will be privy to your psychedelic scribbles or if your heart will even wash up in the hands of an appreciable audience at all.
All you have (intrinsically, I think) is the joy of composition. The moment when that blank slate of the computer screen is gradually dotted with syllables and motion—the inward paradoxical feeling of having somehow, magically, traveled simply by sitting on your ass for eight for hours straight and tapping out crunches into a stream of jittery alphabetical shapes. You have that feeling of feeling less alone in the world, the feeling of connecting with something inexplicably spiritual. The feeling of devising a story, of living out that story through composition and in giving that story (and not caring, in a way, if the story ever quote unquote “makes-it”—in the immortal gothic cadenza’s of Black Sabbath “Give it all and ask for no return/and very soon you’ll see and you’ll begin to learn/ that it’s alright—yeah it’s alright” )
So true. Fiction as genre has been fuckin’ alright but it’s also been a nudist colony. Through the orgiastic process of group anonymity, we’ve been capable of sloughing our linguistic attire, unzipping the fly of our own inhibitions and anxiety and letting everything (from Prince Albert’s to lego lesbians to generously surfeited jello-tacos).
Being anonymous has also allowed me to be naked with many blithe and voluptuous creatures I’d NEVER have the opportunity to get naked with outside of the medium of fiction. What an unbidden voyeuristic delight to watch that sublime creature you’ve harbored a massive hardon on since ENG 101 loop accolades on your prose from across the classroom—knowing that she has your heart in the editorial palette and, judging solely from the winecooler-like color her face has gradually blushed into—she has fallen in love (if only for a moment) with everything left inside of you.
The beauty of anonymity is that it makes circulating fiction less authorial and more of an entitlement for the humanities. As poet Coleman barks once commented on the mystical renderings of Rumi “The fact that we are multiple is not so great as the fact that we are one.”
So go ahead. I fuckin’ dare you. We’re already naked. Put more of yer’ heart in that bottle. Open up a few veins and pinch the reader with something that has never been shown or said before.
What—are you scared to be naked? Are you scared that no one will like what’s left inside of you?
--written with zeal for George Chambers....attfuckingboy!
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1-31-05
WHAT ARE THE FUNCTIONS/PROPERTIES OF FICTION?
“Fictions what it’s like to be a fucking human being vs.
a rather sophisticated mammal.”-- author David Foster Wallace
Good fiction is public transportation. By simply cracking the spine of a novel the reader is capable of finding himself looking out, into a windshield of blurred ink while heaps of alphabetical landscapes whizzes into his eyesight—opening up instant access to new dimensions of human thought. With every blink language escorts the reader into unheralded pastures of sound, plateaus brimming with new-found feelings, interstate gridlock fraught with budding ideas, harvested insights, foreign faces, and of course, the possibility of arriving at a new found port only to find one facet of yourself looking back into your own furrowed brow, wondering what took you so long.
I’ve visited more locations in the past two weeks than I have in my entire lifetime. I’ve surveyed an arid Utah ranch in narrow minded Mormon country (Rick Bass’ ‘In Ruth’s Country’) and have circulated the gay pub scene in London’s Soho district (Hanif Krueshi, ‘Long ago Yesterday’). I’ve experienced romantic destitution (Denis Johnson’s ‘Work’) and have skirted across impeccably manicured lawns dotting the nuclear meadows of suburbia (all-too numerous New Yorker pieces).
In the past two weeks I’ve traveled to Japan, witnessed a working class father pluck out his eyebrows and don his first skirt (‘Its Been just a Year and a Half Since My Boss took me to that Bar’—Ryu Murakami) before visiting a family of hippies in rural Appalachia (‘Flower Children’—Maxine Swann).
Finally I’ve settled down into the seedy confines of a semen-soaked mattress and experienced the unbridled comfort of a quality Dutch handjob (Meredith Elaine Willows- “What things may Cum”).
I’ve traveled to all these places and have experienced all these joys without the purchase of a passport or the nagging paws of a curious customs agent. Intrinsically, I’ve traveled without even moving my ass. I’ve circumnavigated the globe, simply, by reading, by flipping a ruffled page, by hearing what my fellow peers consider to be important.
This is what fiction does: IT TAKES YOU PLACES. If, as ee cummings suggested, “planets are created from hellos and goodbyes” than fiction serves as the working, interactive linguistic atlas—the alpha and omega--which we use to understand our existence.
Fiction not only provides blueprints of the humanity’s dreams, drama and foibles, but fiction shepherds us into a world where we somehow also experience the beauty of a sunset; a lovers nuptial miscarriage; a seemingly search for identity.
It is through fiction that we understand out plant, understand each other and (hopefully) understand ourselves. What a joy to have this fuckin’ linguistic slop at the disposal of our sight!!!!!!!
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