DO U <3 THIS SHIT ?
TELL DA TRUTH BUT TELL IT ///
— 1 .
WHAT IS A NOVEL? —
. . . a question I suffered this week between bouts of borrachomaxxing; finishing edits on my book Abolishing Time, pitched, originally, as an essay collection, but the concept of non-fiction began to reek odiously as I typed;
— left me feeling like the 70 year old musician, Langdon, who’s chained, prometheanly, to Local 42 & punctuates every utterance with “NOT A LIE!” which dubiously palls the simplest declaratives. . .
Henry James says, in his surprisingly banal “The Art of Fiction”,
“A novel is a personal, direct impression of life: which is greater or less according to the intensity of that impression. . . the air of reality seems to be the supreme virtue of the novel—the merit on which all other merits helplessly & submissively depend.”
REALITY! But in his definition of a novel, there would seem to be no difference between fiction & non-fiction: the point of both being to elucidate reality. . . anyway, gimme a perspicuous gloss on what-is, — now what?
I contend: the abiding concern of NON-FICTION is fidelity to factual REALITY, in order that U might understand it better; FICTION is a closed system which creates its own REALITY in order that U might go outside, transformed,
“To give a truthful account of [--------] at that time or indeed at any other is beyond the powers of the biographer or the historian. Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it, — poets & novelists, — can be trusted to do it, for this is one of those cases where truth does not exist. Nothing exists.”
But what is the fucking POINT of reading fiction?
“Just when we thought to elucidate a secret that has puzzled historians for a hundred years, there was a hole in the manuscript big enough to put your finger thru.”
There’s the broccoli school of thought: fiction is world-expandingly edifying; read novels to BE a better person! But how do U explain rank bastards like Faulkner or Steinbeck? or the illiterate saints who have dazzled history like a constellation?
Entertainment can’t be the answer; the arc of progress bends toward perfect entertainment; why would U read Virginia Woolf when U can tie off for Mommy Algorithm to inject dopamine directly into Ur brain?
. . . or do we read fiction to wrestle that burly unpinnable question:
WHAT IS LIFE?
“Having asked then of man and of birds and the insects, for fish man tells us who have lived in green caves, solitary for years to hear them speak, never, never say, and so perhaps know what life is — having asked them all and grown no wiser, only older & colder (for did we not pray once to wrap up in a book something so hard, so rare one could swear it was life’s meaning?) back we must go and say straight out to the reader who waits a tiptoe to hear what life is — Alas, we don’t know.”
Maybe literature is BULLSHIT. . .
— 2 .
HAVE U EVER MET A WRITER? —
. . . I was lucky I didn’t until I was in my 20s, or I might’ve been barf-turned from the whole enterprise; a writer of literature, whose vocation: — bridging the yawning abyss between man’s finite destiny & his infinite potentiality, — would seem to evince a being so much grander than the common lot pocked by sloth, vanity, greed, lust, self-pity, & grievance. . .
The best literary friends are dead ones. . .
Orlando, the hero of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928), — as a young man (because then, there was no doubt he was a man), — is sugarplum enamored by Literature,
“. . . turning the pages of Sir Thomas Browne. . . like an incantation rising from all parts of the room, from the night wind & the moonlight, rolled the divine melody of those words which, lie entombed on this page, not dead, embalmed rather, so fresh is their colour, so sound their breathing — and Orlando, comparing that achievement with those of his ancestors cried out that they and their deeds were dust and ashes, but this man and his words were immortal.”
Until he finally gets a writer over to his house: Nick Greene, an Elizabethan poet, who is whiny, drunk, & uncouth, and declares literature DEAD,
“the Elizabethan a great age! the Elizabethan was inferior in every respect to the Greek! In such ages men cherished a divine ambition which he might call La Glorie (he pronounced it Glawr, so that Orlando did not at first catch his meaning). Now all the young writers poured out any trash that would sell. Shakespeare was the chief offender. Much as it hurt him to say it — for he loved literature as much as his life — he could see no good in the present and had no hope of the future.”
But Nick Greene doesn’t love literature as much as his life; not like Orlando, for whom reading & writing are inextricable from his existence. Greene wants a steady paycheck, worldly fame. Literature sucks now because he’s not being appropriately lauded.
But Orlando still wants Nick Greene’s approval: he gives him a manuscript; and Greene publishes a best-selling pamphlet ridiculing it. . .
Orlando, — doubly heartbroken after having been also spurned by a Russian princess, — burns all 57 of his manuscripts: the fruits of his youth: and gives up on literature & love, — life’s most invigorating baubles.
. . . though, he does save one manuscript: “The Oak Tree”, the first poem he ever worked on; and for the next hundreds of years, with no intention to publish, Orlando scribbles on the manuscript,
“Orlando felt in the bosom of her shirt as if for some relic of lost affection, and drew out no such thing but a roll of paper, sea-stained, blood-stained, travel-stained — the manuscript of her poem, “The Oak Tree.”
She had carried this about with her for so many years now, and in such hazardous circumstances, that many of the pages were stained, some were torn, while the straits she had been in for writing paper had forced her to overscore the margins and cross the lines till the manuscript looked like a piece of darning most conscientiously carried out.”
Orlando treating literature like a true calling: toiling privately, eternally, on the same tattered sheet of paper. . . Orlando is Woolf’s testament to her love of reading (she dedicates the book to several illustrious dead friends,
“no one can write without being in the debt of Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, Emily Brönte, DeQuincey, and Walter Pater, — to name the first that come to mind.”
and to the consequences of the private vocation of literature on the SELF thru time. . . but so what is Woolf saying about the effect of reading, — and its natural extension: writing, — upon the SELF?
— 3 .
WHAT THE HELL DID I DO THIS WEEK? —
. . . I once joked on a podcast: when I am deep in the throes of submission to book-work all I wanna do is write all day & get DRUNK at night; Gaby confronted me with that comment, asked, “are U gonna die of liver cirrhosis?”
I said, “I was JOKING!”
She said, ‘it’s not a joke if that’s what U actually DO!”
“Baby, beer is extremely important to me.”
. . . life is a constant navigation of the private self; of this literally unfathomable ocean burbling, volcanically, in some untraceable location at the pit of my soul, I must decide: what sliver will I open the dam to let flow for this fool, this friend, this lover?
Who will get the most inklings of my truth?
But the insanely deranging thing about writing literature: U have to crystalize a statement of Ur private self for the public record of eternity,
“every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one & biographers to expound the other. That time hangs heavy on people’s hands is the only explanation of the monstrous growth.”
How can that statement, — compromised & truncated as it is, — from the soul to the lips a thing goes dying, — be anything but a FICTION?
. . . so yes, after hours spent on an impossible project, I like fucking off at Local 42 to drink beer & hear Langdon tell, smoking a cigarette, gawking doddypollishly at every passing woman,
“I went to the hospital today and they told me my lungs looked like fish sticks. Not a lie! I’ll tell U what I love about life, everywhere I look there is a beyooooootiful woman. Mary sue! Come sit on my face! But yeah, I’m ready to die. . .”
The lubricious public SELF is EASE; the tenebrous, unruly private self is DISEASE; but coming to terms with life’s dis-ease is the only task that makes any sense,
“Birthday resolution: from now on never again make any concession to the ninety-nine percent of you which is like everybody else at the expense of the one per cent which is unique. Never listen to the False Self talking.”
and the time U spend alone, cultivating & listening to the true SELF without the necessity of understanding or compromise is the business of life:
— What are U, alone with LIFE?,
“was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter & praise; blame & meeting people who admired one, and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself, — a voice answering a voice. What could have been more secret, she thought, more slow, and like the intercourse of lovers, than the stammering answer she had made all those years back to the old crooning song of the woods. . . ?”
A voice answering a voice. . . maybe literature is not about edification, delight, knowledge, maybe it’s about NOTHING but the fact that one day it will be U URself, alone, and U must answer the question,
WHO ARE U?
but the truth is, even if U spent all Ur time atrophying Urself thru TikTok, distraction, & the books du jour, or if U inhaled the whole canon and spit back out Ur own contribution, the answer still might be,
I GOT NO FUCKING CLUE. . .
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Fiction is like drain cleaner — it's meant to clear out the pipes and restore flow, removing all the grime caked up on your soul's sense organ. That's why it doesn't matter whether you remember what you read. Same effect as leaving a matinee and finding the wind has something new to say.
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