Travelslag
This year I’m travelling a lot for work and for weddings. Since maybe I’d like to do some travel writing one day, here’s a new blog exclusively for my thoughts on the places I’ve been. Only one post so far, and I imagine I will try different styles of posts in different places, but for now, there is one on my recent trip to Chicago.
Read, follow. First new non-work blog in five years, y’all!
The women of Mad Men “sing” the Supremes classic “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” A very good combo of clever editing and pointed commentary.
1. Trudy.
2. Peggy’s Ma.
See also Dolan Morgan’s awesome poem “The Inheritance,” which consists of lines from Mad Men, in The Believer this month. Dolan’s going to be the first friend to be drawn by Charles Burns one day, I know it.
(Source: vimeo.com)
If you want writers to continue getting paid, stop reblogging badly written illogical arguments from content farms about how writers are not getting paid.
Stop buying into the idea that literary magazines don’t need to be paying writers, even if they are well designed or whatever. If there’s a finished product and an established audience, someone, somewhere needs to be getting paid, or you, as a businessperson, need to figure out a way to pay them. And you don’t need a Kickstarter to do it!
And also stop promoting the idea that it’s somehow noble to not make money for writing, or publishing others’ writing. Stop writing for free, unless it’s for yourself (or maybe for a startup project you really believe in, but only one pet project per person, please). If you’re publishing or writing, make sure you get paid. Don’t hire interns unless you can pay them, too. Stop taking unpaid internships. Stop hiring people who took unpaid internships.
Support the models that support writers. Yes, there are tons of things to feel gross about, but you don’t have to contribute to all of them.
Lessons Learned in 2011
- Just like you didn’t see 27 Dresses when it came out, begin avoiding 95% of writing that uses personal pronouns, which means almost everything online. It doesn’t matter if it’s written by someone you’ve met in real life, or in a publication you’ve read any liked before. If it’s someone who claims “my ‘I’ gives me transparency,” they are playing football and you want to be watching Nadal. Their way is not wrong, but it’s certainly not to your taste.
- If there’s no flow or style, don’t bother with that either.
- Also, collect a blacklist of bylines and URLs that make you angry, and avoid them, too. Sure it’s Nixonian, but it will also help you write more about things you care about writing about… rather than writing about things that piss you off.
- Reading work that pisses you off doesn’t help you “see what’s out there” because it’s really easy to see what’s out there with a glance, and not an in-depth engagement.
- The internet systems of writing suck. It’s a forced pissoff economy. Go to Slate and Salon and read “why x is ying z” or “the 8 people who give you reasons to hate everything” or any other “cliffhanger clickthrough” headlines and ignore all of them. Write down the number of times per month you learn anything from one of those stories. (It’s zero, or maybe one.) There’s no worthy payoff from a cliffhanger, just write a hook. A cliffhanger is not a hook. A cliffhanger lacks the style and intrigue of a complex detail or imperfect theme.
- There is joy joy joy everywhere amid all the bullshit and your job is to find the joy in the bullshit, even when the joy is just in the craft of it, even if you are reporting on it, find the fucking joy, and the joy is not in yourself, writers are conduits not subjects, or at least writers make joy by constructing it within the worst of situations. “Joy” in this context is not so much “happiness” as “exuberance.”
- It feels good to write sentences like the sentences in point 6, but keep them on your blog and not in your serious writing.
- The best cure for bad internet is making your own thing that is not a response to another thing but building your own whatever.
- Stop reading bad writing. Keep writing good writing.
I wrote about cover letters for the new issue of C.L.A.P. One mystery reader said my contribution was “hilarious.” But you don’t have to take her word for it: Pick one up at your local zine retailer.
Dorothy Parker, “The Standard of Living.”
Last night at work I ate an unholy amount of leftover cheese, which was endlessly delicious but wound up sitting at the bottom of my stomach in a gigantic cheese mush. Then I came home and read my Portable Dorothy Parker and came upon this paragraph and felt that much worse. It’s the best bad food writing I’ve ever read.
The Office for Soft Architecture (Lisa Robertson), “A Common Architectural Decorative Motif in the Temperate Mesophytic Region: Rubus Armeniacus.”
The above is the final paragraph in an essay on the Himalayan Blackberry in the Pacific Northwest. It is a perfect piece of writing. An overload of seemingly purple but actually precise vocabulary highlighted by short sentences with imprecise subjects—“this,” “here.” And that last sentence— isn’t that a punch in the face? The word “style” always gets me, as it always gets any writing-oriented person, but fuck. Clearly it reduces me to imprecision.
All of the Office for Soft Architecture’s writing is about Vancouver and the Pacific Northwest— somewhere I have never travelled (yes). But if I don’t feel like I’ve been there from reading these essays, I have never been anywhere in my mind, ever.
the voice you choose is an argument, is what i'm saying here
But the thing is that language and thinking are interconnected, to some extent. Zoom out a little, and little slang tricks, tones of voice, modes of humor, and ways of reacting to things turn into an overall persona or personality. And various people and institutions on the internet have developed overall voices that can be really, really seductive — the kinds of voices that people lodge in their heads and sometimes emulate.
Sometimes I pay attention to what other people write about each other on the internet, more than I’d like, and then a piece like this comes along and explains why I do love and hate those arguments. It’s quite lovely.
On Beauty, con’t
I can’t imagine remotely enjoying On Beauty if I hadn’t read Howard’s End a couple years ago. Forster was entertaining, if stuffy; Smith was… plotty. Some aspects of Smith’s novel were thought-provoking, most lacked development and understanding, and I have no idea how the whole thing was shortlisted for a Booker. Of course, I haven’t read any Booker Prize-winning novels in a few years.
My biggest complaint: I’d like to read a book or see a movie about wanky, stuffy academics without an older male professor being seduced by— and almost invariably sleeping with— a younger female student. Come on Zadie Smith, you’re about breaking stereotypes at least a little bit: why did you fall into that trap? Unlike actually sleeping with a professor, which I imagine to be rather complicated and difficult, writing about younger female students sleeping with their older male teachers remains cliche, even if you point the banality of it out within your text. I understand it when coming from publishing boys’ club dudes like Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon, but Zadie… surely you could have found some other plot points.
How often does that even happen? I didn’t sleep with my professors (even when they were attractive), and I don’t know of anyone else who did. In novels and movies, some 18- to 21-year-old minx takes her clothes off or sends dirty pictures to the professor until the dirty old man can no longer resist. Sometimes the truth is outed and the dirty old man is punished, and sex with a young vixen always helps the old man realize he is not young anymore. The young woman is usually portrayed as being naive or insecure, and is left to fester as a vehicle for the professor’s downfall without being given any agency of her own after the sex is over.
Really? Could we tell this from the point of view of the student, perhaps? Could we give her some credit for sending dirty pictures to a professor— that’s a ballsier method of seduction than I would ever use— or at least address what this means as a larger trope?
If there are any examples contrary to what I’ve written about here, I’d love to see them. Or, if there are any real-life instances to prove that this is a common occurrence, by all means, provide them. Maybe I’ll do some internet research after I go into school.
By “internet research” I mean I’m going to seduce a professor. Yep.
