— 1 .
WHAT IS ORIGINALITY? —
. . . U would be forgiven for being surprised, at this stage of human civilization, — where stepping outside means wiping history’s residue off our face like soot, — at walking into the bookstore bombardment afoot: the surfeit of dazzling ORIGINALITY!
How are so many debut novelists pulling off the incredible feat of writing something NEW under the sun?
Especially if U knew their ilk; it would seem like a cacophony of bilk.
Writers cut from the cloth of low-learning & anemic ambition. . . I remember I took a class on contemporary fiction for writers as an undergraduate. The professor asked, — ridiculously, — “who likes to read?”
About a third of the room raised their hands. She called on somebody, “what’s your favorite book?”
Reader, do I have to tell U it was Harry Potter?
I saw similar attitudes in my MFA program at Columbia; writers who languished their days sleeping off long trivia nights; rigorlessly traipsing thru bookdujourish blights, — calling it reading.
. . . but sometimes it’s worse when a writer has nascent ambition; they’ve dipped their toe, finally, into the canon, emerged with nothing but a supreme opinion of their own brilliance. . .
And I see this attitude in the gym. Young boxers without a record to skim, complimenting each other, boasting mayweatheringly about STYLE; — but when U see their jab that shit looks VILE. . .
In 2020, I finally read Shakespeare, Milton, & Dante all on my own; I was writing fecundly, too: there was energy in my sentences for the first time. How was my self-estimation? I was like the young Alexander Pope as Dr. Johnson writes in The Life of Pope (1781),
“He tried all styles, and many subjects. He wrote a comedy, a tragedy, an epick; and, as he confesses, thought himself the greatest genius there ever was. Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings; he, indeed, who forms his opinion of himself in solitude, without knowing the powers of other men, is very liable to error. . .”
That’s where my story ends; unlaureled by the marvelous turn of Johnson’s sentence,
“but it was the felicity of Pope to rate himself at his real value.”
I was 23. Pope, — when he decided (on his own) to read thru all the Greek, Latin, English, & French writers in the original languages, — was 12 (!),
“Pope, finding little advantage from external help, resolved thenceforward to direct himself, and at twelve formed a plan of study which he completed with little other incitement than the desire of excellence.”
Furtherly starkifying Pope’s rigor: he got an illness of life-sapping vigor. A shockingly disgusting 18th-century story: he got tuberculosis of the bones (!) from drinking infected milk (!!);
his growth was stunted: he was 4’6: he developed a hunchback: he suffered for the rest of his life,
“Each beast, each insect, happy in its own: is Heaven unkind to Man, and Man alone? Shall he alone, whom rational we call, be pleased with nothing, if not blessed with all?”
. . . the paperback edition of my first novel comes emblazoned with the blurb, “ORIGINAL & HIGHLY IMMERSIVE — GOOD MORNING AMERICA.” As if they spent time on Good Morning America talking about Tropicália (2023), — when really, it was one of 30 books on their website’s summer reading dump.
But I certainly didn’t feel like a chump. I took my novel’s structure from Dante, — DANTE! Which I skimmed in three days & thought was AITE. But in the pure spirit of self-delight, I ended each section of my book with the words STARS, — leave that one for the scholars in 100 years!
I thought nobody had ever done that before; until I read Sergio de la Pava’s novel A Naked Singularity (2010) which indeed does the exact same thing. — What I thought was suigenerisly RADICAL was overwhelmingly. . . CONVENTIONAL. . .
The 21st-century literary maverick wants to conceive of themselves as a brain in a tank, self-contemplating in amorous loops before spewing generational goops. Read? Learn? Why let anything snuff out the fire of my innate genius?
But how can U be ORIGINAL if U don’t know SHIT?
— 2 .
HOW CAN U TELL A WRITER IS GREAT? —
. . . I was back doing stand up this week because my friend Eric Walsh was headlining a show and asked me to do 10 minutes; Eric has such a high standard of excellence I was abounded by fret (there better be a rhyme coming from this awful phrase).
I spent all week at open mics, putting together my set (oh, ok). Gaby perfectly encapsulated the WORST version of stand up when she said, “you’re like forced to listen and just smile politely at some annoying narcissist!”
Open mics are usually grim & deflating: it’s STUNNING that someone can hold a microphone, stammering thru bitter, stupid, conventional inanities, and think there’s anybody in the world that actually wants to hear them make a “joke” about Jared Fogle in 2026.
The most depressing paragon I saw this week: a young man who twice bombed horrifically with nothing resembling a punchline. And at one point on stage, he bragged about recently graduating college with a degree in Comedy Arts,
“Where as he fished her nether realms for wit, she oft had favoured him and favors yet. Renewed by ordure’s sympathetic force, as oiled with magic juices for the course, vigorous he rises; from th’ effluvia strong, imbibes new life, and scours and stinks along. . .”
Obviously, getting a degree in comedy is as maniacally misguided as cutting Ur dick off to piss better (Harold, chill) — and everyone involved in his decision-making process from his parents to the university should go to jail, — still, the kid’s intuition is RIGHT:
I want to be an artist: I have to learn to do that somehow: here’s a school, they’ll teach me!
Obviously, expecting a school in the United States of America to teach U anything is as fantastically foolish as sticking Ur balls up Ur ass to prevent diarrhea (JESUS, HAROLD!), but the question still remains: how does an artist learn what to do?
. . . there can’t be many better apprenticeships than Alexander Pope’s; (it’s easy to tell that he wasn’t no dope) when he was 25 years old he started translating Homer’s Iliad; on his 30th birthday, the translation was finished, and Pope was rich, famous, and a fully formed POET,
“A work of this kind seems like a mighty tree which rises from the most vigorous seed, is improv’d with industry, flourishes, & produces the finest fruit; nature & art conspire to raise it; pleasure & profit join to make it valuable: they who find the justest faults, have only said, that a few branches (which run luxuriant thro a richness of nature) might be lopped off to give it a more regular appearance.”
Utmost scholarship don’t a poet make; what ingredients serve to bake the cake? There is still a mystery at the heart of artistic triumph; Pope calls this mystery quality INVENTION,
“Homer is universally allow’d to have had the greatest Invention of any writer whatever. It is Invention that in different degrees distinguishes all great Geniuses: the utmost stretch of human study, learning, and industry, which masters every thing besides can never attain to this.
It furnishes Art with all her materials, and without it, Judgment itself can at best but steal wisely: For Art is like a prudent steward that lives on managing the riches of Nature.”
But how the fuck can we learn INVENTION?!
— 3 .
WHAT IS THE PROPER ATTITUDE FOR AN ARTIST? —
. . . while Pope was toiling on his translation of the Iliad, a young lady got a lock of her hair surreptitiously snipped by a young suitor who deserved to be whipped; it caused a rift between two of the most prominent Catholic families in London.
An acquaintance of the family asked Pope to write a poem to demonstrate to the young lady, Belinda, how she was making a jeroboam — out of a regular wine bottle (don’t invent idioms to fit Ur stupid rhymes!) i.e. that it was a completely trivial matter,
“What dire offense from amorous causes springs. What mighty contests arise from trivial things, I sing! Say what strange motive, Goddess! could compel, a well-bred lord t’assault a gentle belle?”
And so Pope wrote The Rape of the Lock (1714), — which I read in high school guided by a teacher with such a paucity of elucidation I thought it was about sexual assault & keys. . .
Pope’s learning, — his deep investments in Homer, Virgil, & Milton, — allowed him to abuse the EPIC form for his own perverted ends; (though hardly to salacity Alexander bends), COMBINED with his unique sensibility & life experience,
— his consummate OUTSIDERDOM as a physically disabled Catholic, like one of his enemies writes (a passage Pope himself CITES in The Dunciad),
“the deformity of this author is visible, present, lasting, unalterable, and peculiar to himself. Tis the mark of God and nature upon him to give us warning that we should hold no society with him, as a creature not of our species”
fertilized his wit, rage, & sensitivity, — was the cultivated field from which sprung his INVENTION.
The moment when the Lock is cut,
“Then flashed the living lightning from her eyes, and screams of horror rend th’ affrighted skies. Not louder shrieks to pitying heaven are cast, when husbands, or when lapdogs breathe their last, or when rich china vessels, fallen from high, in glittering dust, and painted fragments lie!”
The joke here about dead husbands being on the same level as dogs and broken china is great; but it’s hard to imagine another 18th-century male poet taking Belinda’s attitude to her hair being cut so seriously,
“For ever cursed be this detested day, which snatched my best, my favourite curl away! The sister-lock now sits uncouth, alone, and in its fellow’s fate foresees its own; uncurled it hangs, the fatal shears demands, and tempts once more thy sacrilegious hands. Oh hadst thou, cruel! been content to seize hairs less in sight, or any hairs but these!”
At the end of the poem the clipped lock floats up to the skies and becomes a constellation; but the real winner is Pope’s immortality,
“Then cease, bright nymph! to mourn thy ravished hair, which adds new glory to the shining sphere! Not all the tresses that fair head can boast, shall draw such envy as the lock you lost. For, after all the murders of your eye, when, after millions slain yourself shall die; when those fair suns shall set, as set they must, and all those tresses shall be laid in dust; this lock, the Muse shall consecrate to fame, and midst the stars inscribe Belinda’s name.”
Pope had NO DOUBT what he wanted to be: an ETERNAL POET. He thought he was Homer, Virgil, Milton, and he wrote consistently trying to prove it. A vanity Dr. Johnson sometimes censures him for,
“Pope, in one of his Letters, complaining of the treatment which his poem had found, owns that such criticks can intimidate him, nay, almost persuade him to write no more, which is a compliment this age deserves. The man who threatens the world is always ridiculous; for the world can easily go on without him, and in a short time will cease to miss him. I have heard of an idiot, who used to revenge his vexations by lying all night under a bridge.”
Rigorous, vain, rancorous Pope used all the recourses of his life & learning to briefly make it new! And without him we might’ve not had Byron, or Joyce, or Nabokov, but no name is inscribed on earth forever. . .
Someone asked me what I was reading at the gym, and I said, “Alexander Pope, an 18th-century English poet.”
And some other dude cut in, “It’s pronounced POE! He’s from Baltimore!”
SORRY 4 DA RHYMES
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