The Good News
Sitting here in publishing limbo, bracing ourselves for waves of change and tidal surges of destruction, we may feel compelled to ask what exactly did we get ourselves into when we decided to be writers. After all, the consensus of media and other anointed commentators seems to be that the whole writing game is over. To give it a catchy, twitterable title: “Print is Dead, The Book is Toast, And William Shakespeare Were He Alive Today Would Be Writing For HBO and Doing Slam-Tweet Contests–LOL!!!” None of which is refutable.
As this new year dawns, Borders may already be in bankruptcy. E-books surpass print books in sales. And somewhere, in a rude straw-filled library carrel, another would-be writer slouches toward a coffee break. Another would-be writer pauses in making that latte (skim, extra espresso shot) to mentally jot a note about a story unfolding in her head. And in far-off Colombia, a coffee grower’s cocaine-addicted son is typing as fast as his fingers can fly, chasing a vision that nobody can deny and may even get him admitted to an MFA program in the U.S.A.
That’s the beauty of this thing of ours. Publishing may be going to hell, or heaven, who knows. But writing goes on. Writers stumble on their vocation every day.
In future posts, I’m going to try to stick to one topic: What it means to be a writer today. It takes chutzpah to call this first post “The Good News,” but what the hell, it’s a new year and the slate is clean and as I will soon point out, even the “bad” news is good.
As to where I’m coming from, always a valid question with writers on any subject, I figure that in my own way I’m in a perfect position to judge the current scene. I’ve been at the writing thing for my entire adult life, I’ve straddled the academic and “real” world, written for a living and for no reward except the rapture, been inside the beast called publishing, lived on both coasts and in the middle, and I’m not a big success.
I think that last is crucial: success ruins writers in terms of advice. Either they tell you stuff to discourage you (because they’re so unique, and you’re so jejune) or they make it seem so elementary that you feel you’ve been a slacker not to have written and published at least a trilogy by the time you’re twenty-five.
Now for the good news. First, location does not matter. Sure, all the media attention makes it seem so necessary, somehow, to get published before you’re twenty, acquire a quirky ethnic or foreign accent, pal around with the future famous, grow a scruffy beard, and move to Brooklyn or even better, Williamsburg. Well, no. Most of the so-called great writers didn’t come from New York or do their great work there; most still won’t.
If you drag yourself across the country because you think Brooklyn will water your roots, by all means, do it. Rude shocks make for better writing. But thanks to the creative destruction of the publishing mechanism, times were never better for getting your work out into the readersphere.
Second, the door is open. The above-referenced creative destruction is opening a million or more doors for those who, for the first time in history, can bypass the filters that publishing used to weed out the hordes of would-be writers. Not to knock the hard and ill-paid work of agents (the first filter) and editors (the second filter) and publishing executives (the third, hidden filter), but the world they made was never a meritocracy of literature or even storytelling. It was more like a bodyguard working the velvet rope at Club 54. The amount of slush pile submissions was simply overwhelming. And depressing. There was no way to sort it without adopting the most callous triage.
In the end, most books were published by word of mouth–a friend who knew a friend passed along a name, someone sighed and said, “Okay, I’ll take a look.” For those who had really powerful friends, the process was easier and the results often were meretricious: in the ’50s, white males in snap-brim hats apparently had a field day, effortlessly drinking martinis and smoking Chesterfields and single-finger typing huge novels; in the ’80s, any reasonably pretty daughter of a CEO who could put her hair up in a chignon and pout for a photographer could publish her slim volume of stories. (Not to be unfair to pretty daughters of the rich, but writing is a zero-sum game when it comes to reviews and column inches of press coverage, and Daddy’s empire also monopolized attention.) Today, you don’t need to be anybody’s daughter, or white, or male. You just digitize and self-publish and flog that blog of yours. It can happen to you.
Third, the field is clear. Nobody is stopping you. Because the value that the marketplace attaches to books is always much lower than the effort it takes to produce them, those with the drive, obsession, mania or serenity to keep writing and improving (and self-editing) can just motor along and watch the wrecks of wannabe writers pile up on the roadside.
If you start out writing at twenty, by the time you hit forty you’ll be among a very select group–those who kept going. Not that this promises any satisfaction other than that. But as an indicator of mental and psychic engagement in the world, chasing a dream is much better than sitting around wondering where it all went.
That’s enough good news for one day.
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Friday, March 18, 2011
The Two Paths: What It Means to Be a Writer Today Part 2
The Two Paths
In my previous post, I explored the news for writers emerging from the ashes of traditional publishing. Recently, I have been thinking about how writers get started. Two people I know have recently asked me for advice, or else didn’t get out of the way fast enough when I offered it. These two friends couldn’t be more different in terms of age: one is 23, the other 45. They also couldn’t be more similar. They feel frustrated at what life has to offer in the way of engagement with the world. No jobs for the high minded, for the restless of soul, for writers.
They also want to make some money doing something they love. What can I say?
In reality I don’t say anything, not compared to what I feel should be said. It’s not feasible to dump one’s accumulated riffs and rants, the burnt seeds of wasted potential, the caffeinated speed raps, the fruit of reading and thought and experience. Forty years of that.
Instead, I say to the young, go, if you must, to law school, because there is no path that I can even point you down. We know you’ve tried to get internships, job interviews, but as of September 15, 2008 the old ways of wetting your feet while writing your first stories just up and vanished.
Forty years ago, when my wife and I and our friends stumbled blinking into the world, there was such a way. I now know it was more of an illusion but it had the blind unwavering trust of millions and so was stable underfoot. Here it is:
You emerge from your evolutionary pool—school, library, gang—with the sense of a secret power, perhaps your only power: words have extraordinary meaning for you. In turn you value them, honor what they can do, and practice like a samurai until adept in their use.
In college your abilities are recognized, which is nice. But in the old guild style you are expected to hang back, work hard, write a showcase story or novel excerpt, which is brought to the attention of a magazine editor —a quarterly or journal—who after a couple rejections publishes something. After a couple more acceptances the names of an editor or two at the slicks are murmured to you. You write and are terse and polite. They write back one-sentence verdicts, thumbs up, mostly down.
You send a story. Rejected. Another. Rejected. You’re out of stories. You write more; it’s becoming like a regular job now. Either you get on the stick and crank or you’ll still be doing this when you’re 25! And now you’re broke and the family isn’t sending any money and somebody murmurs “Grad school.”
Either you go or you don’t; it’s more of the same. Now you’re 25. Words still do it for you. But money is no longer discretionary; without it creative thinking gets banished to third or fourth on the day’s to-do list.
Now, thus far this story describes a world that still exists in outline, in living memory. But what follows no longer survives: a ladder of literary markets.
Kurt Vonnegut apologized to a bunch of us in 1975 at Iowa, saying he felt shitty about our prospects when he used to be able to sell a story to The Saturday Evening Post or Ladies Home Journal for $5,000 or even $10,000. That money from the “slicks” subsidized the likes of Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-5. Meanwhile we could look forward to fighting over $250 honorariums and payment in copies. Kurt was a sci-fi writer, he could see the future wasn’t getting any better. It never does.
So the ladder vanished, rung by rung. The network of fiction editors was squeezed for pages, lost column inches to diets and TV stars, and then lost their jobs. Short stories no longer ran in magazines—the argument that a spate of unreadable experimental fictions accelerated the process has merit, but really it was TV, then cable, and long before the Internet we’d lost Mademoiselle, Glamour, all the women’s mags we once turned our noses up at. And the ecology of fiction went into shock. Book excerpts, of mid-list novels, used to be subject to bidding wars. An author might get a couple hundred grand on top of her advance. No more.
Meanwhile the old guild system was failing, without all that fresh green money to water the roots the new trees weren’t thriving. Used to be, a writer like John Irving could publish a couple or three books that didn’t sell many copies and then he’d have his “break-out book” and the publisher would rush copies of his old books back into the stores and they’d become retroactive bestsellers, too. And everyone got rich, or at least made good money, and did so while upholding an ecosystem that guaranteed a stable future.
Once that was gone—no slicks, no excerpts, no patience to let writers grow (because money = patience)—book publishing became like Broadway. Where, as playwright Robert Anderson said to us at Iowa, you can make a killing, but you can’t make a living.
This is a good place to pause, with our two writers facing his or her respective paths, or rather, standing where the paths peter out before a great dark wood. The young writer, wondering whether to persist, the more mature writer, starting out in the evening, both are going to make a choice.
What they decide—and the consequences thereof—will be dealt with in my next post.
In my previous post, I explored the news for writers emerging from the ashes of traditional publishing. Recently, I have been thinking about how writers get started. Two people I know have recently asked me for advice, or else didn’t get out of the way fast enough when I offered it. These two friends couldn’t be more different in terms of age: one is 23, the other 45. They also couldn’t be more similar. They feel frustrated at what life has to offer in the way of engagement with the world. No jobs for the high minded, for the restless of soul, for writers.
They also want to make some money doing something they love. What can I say?
In reality I don’t say anything, not compared to what I feel should be said. It’s not feasible to dump one’s accumulated riffs and rants, the burnt seeds of wasted potential, the caffeinated speed raps, the fruit of reading and thought and experience. Forty years of that.
Instead, I say to the young, go, if you must, to law school, because there is no path that I can even point you down. We know you’ve tried to get internships, job interviews, but as of September 15, 2008 the old ways of wetting your feet while writing your first stories just up and vanished.
Forty years ago, when my wife and I and our friends stumbled blinking into the world, there was such a way. I now know it was more of an illusion but it had the blind unwavering trust of millions and so was stable underfoot. Here it is:
You emerge from your evolutionary pool—school, library, gang—with the sense of a secret power, perhaps your only power: words have extraordinary meaning for you. In turn you value them, honor what they can do, and practice like a samurai until adept in their use.
In college your abilities are recognized, which is nice. But in the old guild style you are expected to hang back, work hard, write a showcase story or novel excerpt, which is brought to the attention of a magazine editor —a quarterly or journal—who after a couple rejections publishes something. After a couple more acceptances the names of an editor or two at the slicks are murmured to you. You write and are terse and polite. They write back one-sentence verdicts, thumbs up, mostly down.
You send a story. Rejected. Another. Rejected. You’re out of stories. You write more; it’s becoming like a regular job now. Either you get on the stick and crank or you’ll still be doing this when you’re 25! And now you’re broke and the family isn’t sending any money and somebody murmurs “Grad school.”
Either you go or you don’t; it’s more of the same. Now you’re 25. Words still do it for you. But money is no longer discretionary; without it creative thinking gets banished to third or fourth on the day’s to-do list.
Now, thus far this story describes a world that still exists in outline, in living memory. But what follows no longer survives: a ladder of literary markets.
Kurt Vonnegut apologized to a bunch of us in 1975 at Iowa, saying he felt shitty about our prospects when he used to be able to sell a story to The Saturday Evening Post or Ladies Home Journal for $5,000 or even $10,000. That money from the “slicks” subsidized the likes of Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-5. Meanwhile we could look forward to fighting over $250 honorariums and payment in copies. Kurt was a sci-fi writer, he could see the future wasn’t getting any better. It never does.
So the ladder vanished, rung by rung. The network of fiction editors was squeezed for pages, lost column inches to diets and TV stars, and then lost their jobs. Short stories no longer ran in magazines—the argument that a spate of unreadable experimental fictions accelerated the process has merit, but really it was TV, then cable, and long before the Internet we’d lost Mademoiselle, Glamour, all the women’s mags we once turned our noses up at. And the ecology of fiction went into shock. Book excerpts, of mid-list novels, used to be subject to bidding wars. An author might get a couple hundred grand on top of her advance. No more.
Meanwhile the old guild system was failing, without all that fresh green money to water the roots the new trees weren’t thriving. Used to be, a writer like John Irving could publish a couple or three books that didn’t sell many copies and then he’d have his “break-out book” and the publisher would rush copies of his old books back into the stores and they’d become retroactive bestsellers, too. And everyone got rich, or at least made good money, and did so while upholding an ecosystem that guaranteed a stable future.
Once that was gone—no slicks, no excerpts, no patience to let writers grow (because money = patience)—book publishing became like Broadway. Where, as playwright Robert Anderson said to us at Iowa, you can make a killing, but you can’t make a living.
This is a good place to pause, with our two writers facing his or her respective paths, or rather, standing where the paths peter out before a great dark wood. The young writer, wondering whether to persist, the more mature writer, starting out in the evening, both are going to make a choice.
What they decide—and the consequences thereof—will be dealt with in my next post.
Past Present Future: What It Means to Be a Writer Today, Part 3
Past Present Future
In our last installment we left two beginning writers, one 23, the other 45, at the outer edge of a deep dark wood. We spent a lot of time explaining how the old literary ladders had been busted, that the good ol’ days of big advances and multiple markets for short stories, all were gone. We left them asking the question, “Where do I go from here?”
And like cowards, we ran away. More than a week they’ve been standing there! They’re cold, they’re hungry, they smoked their last butts on the second day.
Now we’re going to do something worse. Instead of bringing them a hot cup of soup and a cold beverage, we’re going to yell at them: “Are you crazy? The world is in turmoil, the economy is in the tank, and you want to be what?”
But guess what? They look right through us. Like we don’t exist. Like we’re the ghosts in the Underworld in Dante’s Inferno. What’s up with that?
What’s up is the best reason to be happy about the future of writing, reading, and even our precious literary standards. Because the ones who are just starting out on the path treat us like ghosts and walk right through us, and on into the future.
Why is that such a good thing? Let’s start with our 23-year-old. First, young beginning writers can be so annoying, no question. They just blithely start writing, without asking the permission of older writers. Don’t they know that’s not how it’s done?
Of course they don’t, and that’s the beauty of being a beginner. It just kinda sucks for the rest of us, who’ve put in our 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell talks about in Outliers, only we put in those 10K, like, 100K hours ago. So we’re due, and we’re sore because here comes yet another tyro who’s just had her hippocampus light up like a mouse brain in a lab test over a short story she’s written. Written without our permission!
And that’s the beauty, I repeat. Let us learn from the young. We should all be beginners. Don’t feel you have to wait 10,000 hours because some woolly headed New Yorker writer said so. Don’t you know he’s saying that to weed out the field of woolly headed rivals?
Just sit down at the table in the laundromat and knock out a dozen poems, like “The Flowers of Evil,” or a book of short stories, including “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Type Typee at age 25, emo Omoo and White Jacket before you’ve even learned proper grammar, and let the critics sniff.
As for the 45-year-old, well, she should really know better. That’s why the rest of us find older beginning writers to be even more irritating. The young, they’re young. The older writers, really, with all the mileage on their souls . . . (How are you going to take a decent plunging neckline author photo?) And yet here they come, looking like Joan of Arc right after she got conked on the head while stirring the cook-pot and had a vision of herself leading France to freedom. They throw aside good jobs, fat pensions, sensible shoes and instead of watching “Mad Men” and “Hawaii 5-0″ and “Dancing with the Stars” while folding socks, they start writing. They write Almayer’s Folly, and Jim, and The Secret Sharer, and Nostromo. They write Stones for Ibarra and Don Quixote. They write The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man.
And they totally ignore the OMG expressions of the youngsters in skinny jeans and high-top tennis shoes who own writing the way strollers own the sidewalks of Brooklyn.
That’s why we should all be older beginning writers, too. Because they’re saying the future belongs to them, hipster beards or not. But also because they’re saying that we who are old like them, but who put in our 100K hours, we should stop carping. Either get aboard or step aside, because this train’s got to run today.
And now, back to you, No. 23 and No. 45 at the edge of the deep dark wood. Did that answer your question? Are you ready to take the next step, and the next, and the one after that?
But they’re gone.
We’ll catch up to them next week. Or not.
In our last installment we left two beginning writers, one 23, the other 45, at the outer edge of a deep dark wood. We spent a lot of time explaining how the old literary ladders had been busted, that the good ol’ days of big advances and multiple markets for short stories, all were gone. We left them asking the question, “Where do I go from here?”
And like cowards, we ran away. More than a week they’ve been standing there! They’re cold, they’re hungry, they smoked their last butts on the second day.
Now we’re going to do something worse. Instead of bringing them a hot cup of soup and a cold beverage, we’re going to yell at them: “Are you crazy? The world is in turmoil, the economy is in the tank, and you want to be what?”
But guess what? They look right through us. Like we don’t exist. Like we’re the ghosts in the Underworld in Dante’s Inferno. What’s up with that?
What’s up is the best reason to be happy about the future of writing, reading, and even our precious literary standards. Because the ones who are just starting out on the path treat us like ghosts and walk right through us, and on into the future.
Why is that such a good thing? Let’s start with our 23-year-old. First, young beginning writers can be so annoying, no question. They just blithely start writing, without asking the permission of older writers. Don’t they know that’s not how it’s done?
Of course they don’t, and that’s the beauty of being a beginner. It just kinda sucks for the rest of us, who’ve put in our 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell talks about in Outliers, only we put in those 10K, like, 100K hours ago. So we’re due, and we’re sore because here comes yet another tyro who’s just had her hippocampus light up like a mouse brain in a lab test over a short story she’s written. Written without our permission!
And that’s the beauty, I repeat. Let us learn from the young. We should all be beginners. Don’t feel you have to wait 10,000 hours because some woolly headed New Yorker writer said so. Don’t you know he’s saying that to weed out the field of woolly headed rivals?
Just sit down at the table in the laundromat and knock out a dozen poems, like “The Flowers of Evil,” or a book of short stories, including “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Type Typee at age 25, emo Omoo and White Jacket before you’ve even learned proper grammar, and let the critics sniff.
As for the 45-year-old, well, she should really know better. That’s why the rest of us find older beginning writers to be even more irritating. The young, they’re young. The older writers, really, with all the mileage on their souls . . . (How are you going to take a decent plunging neckline author photo?) And yet here they come, looking like Joan of Arc right after she got conked on the head while stirring the cook-pot and had a vision of herself leading France to freedom. They throw aside good jobs, fat pensions, sensible shoes and instead of watching “Mad Men” and “Hawaii 5-0″ and “Dancing with the Stars” while folding socks, they start writing. They write Almayer’s Folly, and Jim, and The Secret Sharer, and Nostromo. They write Stones for Ibarra and Don Quixote. They write The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man.
And they totally ignore the OMG expressions of the youngsters in skinny jeans and high-top tennis shoes who own writing the way strollers own the sidewalks of Brooklyn.
That’s why we should all be older beginning writers, too. Because they’re saying the future belongs to them, hipster beards or not. But also because they’re saying that we who are old like them, but who put in our 100K hours, we should stop carping. Either get aboard or step aside, because this train’s got to run today.
And now, back to you, No. 23 and No. 45 at the edge of the deep dark wood. Did that answer your question? Are you ready to take the next step, and the next, and the one after that?
But they’re gone.
We’ll catch up to them next week. Or not.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
"Am I a Genius?" - Part 4: What It Means to be a Writer Today
It’s got to be the least useful question a writer can ever ask him- or herself, and yet—all right—it’s one we’ve all asked ourselves, even while suspecting we already know the answer (if you have to ask . . .) and thus guaranteeing a day of feeling absolutely wretched. So let’s get it over with:
Yes, you’re a genius.
And now you owe me, big-time. I want a big lobster and a gushing blurb when you’re famous.
The whole genius label, like the current passion for the word passion, makes me want to find my inner curmudgeon, take my walking stick off the wall and go hit something, like a cute puppy or the first daffodil of spring. To growl and say, Damn geniuses! Have to talk to the gardener again about letting them into the garden.
But it’s hopeless. We’re in the self-esteem business. And we live in an age when egos inflate and hover like Zeppelins over the Zuiderzee. To dare to raise a pen to paper, ego and self-regard and even a dose of early gushing praise are probably necessary. Still, a steady diet of fatuous self-appreciation can make you awfully unpleasant to be with and contribute to the most ridiculous, bloated, flatulent work. Unless you really are a genius.
The question of genius is a serious one, once we get over the junior high clique aspect. What makes someone really good? Really really good? The best? Can we quantify it? Graph it and fill in the squares? Turn the job over to Watson, the IBM supercomputer?
Well, we know the answer to that. Yes, of course. Maybe it’s Don Foster, the guy who can find a new Shakespeare sonnet in a shredded phone book using a software program. There’s just no question that someone somewhere is already doing it, pouring the relationship of fancy words, complex sentences and the occurrence of the semi-colon into an algorithm that will yield incontrovertible truth; every time.
We also know this, too, will pass and the question will remain: what is genius?
I first heard it applied to someone I knew when I was 19 and a singer in a rock n’ roll band. My best friend from childhood came up to Santa Cruz for a visit, heard us practice, and said later, in an awe-struck tone, “I’ve never met a real genius before.”
He was talking about our rhythm guitarist/songwriter. Boy, were my feelings hurt. Even if Peter wrote 90 percent of our material and could play an instrument. You see, I made really really good James Brown-like grunting sounds exactly where they were needed. For a white boy from Long Beach, that’s genius. Just not genius enough for Mike.
Mike is still my best childhood friend, but hurt feelings are why I’m going to dispense with the genius tag and replace it with something his mother, Trudi, once said of someone who was on a roll: “Why, his hair’s on fire!” I think this is a more useful appellation, because it connotes talent plus energy plus volatility plus combustion. You can just see Beethoven, sitting at the piano bench and his hair’s on fire. William Blake, you know the man’s hair is definitely on fire. And so forth. Frida Kahlo? Even her unibrow is on fire.
So we leave genius to the critics in the next century. Right now, in our lifetime, whose hair is on fire? That’s the question.
And now, quickly, I’m going to put myself in the jury box and answer the question, “Who among writers you’ve actually met was a—that word—you know. Whose hair was on fire?”
As an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, I hit a pretty good era for writers. We had Jim Houston running the program, William Everson doing “Birth of a Poet” in a giant teepee, George Hitchcock publishing Kayak, a free weekly, Sundaz, that ran a short story a week thanks to fiction editor Lou Mathews, Gurney Norman writing a serialized novel in the margins of The Whole Earth Catalog, a large group of fine printers including my pal Tom Killion, a seriously literary bunch of professors up the Hill including my personal Virgil, Norman O. Brown, and a slew of young and old writers milling around the community and classrooms. As a fumbling apprentice, I soaked it all up indiscriminately.
There was plenty of talent in the room, all kinds. Many of us went on to publish. There are some real successes among us. But you know what? Nobody’s hair was on fire. (I think Norman O. Brown’s tonsure was singed, but his writing was academic and interpretative, even if Love’s Body and Life Against Death are among the few books I can think of that actually take you step by step into a different reality than where you started.) Once in awhile Gary Snyder came padding through the forest in roadkill moccasins and you knew greatness had passed. But Snyder kept away from scenes. He was like Obi-wan Kenobi, making himself invisible.
At one point I worked as a busboy-runner at the Oak Room on the Pacific Garden Mall, an outdoor café that was the center of the scene. One sunny day I served a table of writers, including my advisor, Jim Houston, and a handful of others, almost all of them in the UCSC-Stanford orbit, the heirs of Wallace Stegner. A fly on the wall, I hung around picking up elliptical gossip and collecting empty glasses and bringing fresh pitchers.
The talk turned to a guy they all knew, apparently. I gathered he was someone they cared about and had come up through the ranks with. And now, well, he’d hit the skids. He was going to be at the university to give a reading, but his drinking had become a terrible handicap and career-wise he was really blowing it. How? By writing too much, a couple of short stories a week, most of them undeveloped, sort of sketches. And publishing too much, too fast, in any little review that would take him. In places like The Chico Review, Humboldt Review, when he should be massaging one perfect story to showcase at The New Yorker or The Atlantic.
Yeah, poor Ray Carver. Now there was one guy whose hair was definitely not on fire.
See you next week, when I take the “hair on fire” roadshow to the Iowa Workshop.
This blog also appeared on the We Wanted To Be Writers website:
Yes, you’re a genius.
And now you owe me, big-time. I want a big lobster and a gushing blurb when you’re famous.
The whole genius label, like the current passion for the word passion, makes me want to find my inner curmudgeon, take my walking stick off the wall and go hit something, like a cute puppy or the first daffodil of spring. To growl and say, Damn geniuses! Have to talk to the gardener again about letting them into the garden.
But it’s hopeless. We’re in the self-esteem business. And we live in an age when egos inflate and hover like Zeppelins over the Zuiderzee. To dare to raise a pen to paper, ego and self-regard and even a dose of early gushing praise are probably necessary. Still, a steady diet of fatuous self-appreciation can make you awfully unpleasant to be with and contribute to the most ridiculous, bloated, flatulent work. Unless you really are a genius.
The question of genius is a serious one, once we get over the junior high clique aspect. What makes someone really good? Really really good? The best? Can we quantify it? Graph it and fill in the squares? Turn the job over to Watson, the IBM supercomputer?
Well, we know the answer to that. Yes, of course. Maybe it’s Don Foster, the guy who can find a new Shakespeare sonnet in a shredded phone book using a software program. There’s just no question that someone somewhere is already doing it, pouring the relationship of fancy words, complex sentences and the occurrence of the semi-colon into an algorithm that will yield incontrovertible truth; every time.
We also know this, too, will pass and the question will remain: what is genius?
I first heard it applied to someone I knew when I was 19 and a singer in a rock n’ roll band. My best friend from childhood came up to Santa Cruz for a visit, heard us practice, and said later, in an awe-struck tone, “I’ve never met a real genius before.”
He was talking about our rhythm guitarist/songwriter. Boy, were my feelings hurt. Even if Peter wrote 90 percent of our material and could play an instrument. You see, I made really really good James Brown-like grunting sounds exactly where they were needed. For a white boy from Long Beach, that’s genius. Just not genius enough for Mike.
Mike is still my best childhood friend, but hurt feelings are why I’m going to dispense with the genius tag and replace it with something his mother, Trudi, once said of someone who was on a roll: “Why, his hair’s on fire!” I think this is a more useful appellation, because it connotes talent plus energy plus volatility plus combustion. You can just see Beethoven, sitting at the piano bench and his hair’s on fire. William Blake, you know the man’s hair is definitely on fire. And so forth. Frida Kahlo? Even her unibrow is on fire.
So we leave genius to the critics in the next century. Right now, in our lifetime, whose hair is on fire? That’s the question.
And now, quickly, I’m going to put myself in the jury box and answer the question, “Who among writers you’ve actually met was a—that word—you know. Whose hair was on fire?”
As an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, I hit a pretty good era for writers. We had Jim Houston running the program, William Everson doing “Birth of a Poet” in a giant teepee, George Hitchcock publishing Kayak, a free weekly, Sundaz, that ran a short story a week thanks to fiction editor Lou Mathews, Gurney Norman writing a serialized novel in the margins of The Whole Earth Catalog, a large group of fine printers including my pal Tom Killion, a seriously literary bunch of professors up the Hill including my personal Virgil, Norman O. Brown, and a slew of young and old writers milling around the community and classrooms. As a fumbling apprentice, I soaked it all up indiscriminately.
There was plenty of talent in the room, all kinds. Many of us went on to publish. There are some real successes among us. But you know what? Nobody’s hair was on fire. (I think Norman O. Brown’s tonsure was singed, but his writing was academic and interpretative, even if Love’s Body and Life Against Death are among the few books I can think of that actually take you step by step into a different reality than where you started.) Once in awhile Gary Snyder came padding through the forest in roadkill moccasins and you knew greatness had passed. But Snyder kept away from scenes. He was like Obi-wan Kenobi, making himself invisible.
At one point I worked as a busboy-runner at the Oak Room on the Pacific Garden Mall, an outdoor café that was the center of the scene. One sunny day I served a table of writers, including my advisor, Jim Houston, and a handful of others, almost all of them in the UCSC-Stanford orbit, the heirs of Wallace Stegner. A fly on the wall, I hung around picking up elliptical gossip and collecting empty glasses and bringing fresh pitchers.
The talk turned to a guy they all knew, apparently. I gathered he was someone they cared about and had come up through the ranks with. And now, well, he’d hit the skids. He was going to be at the university to give a reading, but his drinking had become a terrible handicap and career-wise he was really blowing it. How? By writing too much, a couple of short stories a week, most of them undeveloped, sort of sketches. And publishing too much, too fast, in any little review that would take him. In places like The Chico Review, Humboldt Review, when he should be massaging one perfect story to showcase at The New Yorker or The Atlantic.
Yeah, poor Ray Carver. Now there was one guy whose hair was definitely not on fire.
See you next week, when I take the “hair on fire” roadshow to the Iowa Workshop.
This blog also appeared on the We Wanted To Be Writers website:
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