Long Live the Slop
by rsbakker
Daily Aphorism I: The only thing worse than other people is the absence of other people. Somebody has to be judged.
Daily Aphorism II: Indiscriminate, peevish nastiness. There’s no better tonic for an immobile soul.
I wonder whether anyone has ever pondered the stages of blogging a la Piaget. I think I’ve reached my first crisis point – something like, generativity versus boredom. Bored with myself, that is. The fact is, nothing really happens when you make your living writing. My wife comes home from work bursting with stories. Me? Unless I’m lucky enough to overhear something kooky at the coffee shop, I have nada. It’s other people who make life interesting.
Thank God for boredom. For formula, the repetition of the same.
So I caught a snippet of this author on PBS talking about popular culture as a ‘slop of formulas.’ He went on to talk about how his art saves him, because only through his art is he challenged, is he taken places he ‘does not want to go.’ Bullshit. I almost bitch-slapped the flatscreen.
I had this image of him toiling over his laptop, wincing at the blisters on his fingertips. ‘No,’ he murmurs in horror. ‘No! I can’t–I can’t write that! It’s just so… so… painful… Please! Please don’t make me! Not that!’
The stories we tell ourselves. The formulas we use.
Now I’ve written some personally powerful stuff (most all of it in Light, Time, and Gravity), stuff that’s triggered real tears. But was it ‘difficult’? ‘Challenging’? No. If anything, it was effortless. The shit wrote itself.
Of all the ridiculous self-aggrandizing myths humans hoist on their individual flagpoles, none is quite so stupid as the ‘tortured artist.’ I’m not saying that there’s no such thing as writers despairing over the page, weeping over their keyboards, smashing whiskey bottles against their bookcases – I’m sure there are, just as I’m sure that many take secret pride in their antics in some devious pocket of their soul.
The thing is, these are just the things that unhappy humans do, no matter what their walk of life. Since writers happen to command part of our culture’s representational heights, it means that their self-aggrandizing myths possess a cultural authority that overshadows those of normal people. It’s the circumstances that lend meaning to our pain, and make no mistake, established writers live soft lives – so very soft. Stripped of the mythology, their ‘torment’ is more akin to a wannabe diva’s horror over a zit on prom night. The martyrdom of broken fingernails and last place in the football pool.
There’s this woman who stops by the coffee shop every once in awhile, dressed like Virginia Woolf, and always aflutter in this strange way. She always makes a point of sitting next to me, and saying, ‘I’m not going to bother you,’ before delivering a verbal version of her writerly CV, while I struggle to continue typing, my eyelids aflutter in this strange way. She speaks, and all I hear is ‘I’m special. I’m sooo special. I’m not like those people. I’m like you. Yes-yes. We have to stick together, don’t you know…’
And after I finally chase her away with a thousand tacit indications of indifference, I get this hollow feeling, like I should feel guilty, but have forgotten how. Maybe next time I should buy her a sandwich or something.
It’s hard being a writer, you see. So very hard warring against the Slop of Formula – or revelling in it, as the case might be.
Three Pound Brain 
Well, it’s easier to play at being a writer than actually being one and there are those stereotypes to live up to.
When I used to write in a local coffee shop (before I had a single sale) people still thought I was a rich tortured author-made me laugh.
You should consider handing her a post-it next time with the URL of this blog written on it.
When I was younger, and a fledging “artist”, I would frequently make the mistake of telling others that I spent my free time working on novels. Invariably the reaction would go two ways: either a sidelong glance and/or a mute scowl, or the following paraphrased expression: “oh, I’ve always wanted to write a novel! I have such a great story to tell, about my life (etc.), I think it would sell… etc)” After some repetition of the second reaction, I began asking “what are the books you like to read?” Generally I’d get a blank look. Books? Why, aren’t those for *others* to read?
Putting that cynical nugget aside, perhaps the most humbling encounters I’ve had, essentially negating the facade of the ‘tortured artist’, have been in overseas excursions, where *real*, honest-to-earth suffering and poverty has stared me right in the face. The fellow in Angkor Wat peddling a taxicab with his hands because his legs had been blown off by a landmine–that guy had a story to tell. The kid belly-down on a skateboard with open wounds in front of the Forbidden City, pointedly ignored by the tourist hordes as he begged for change–I can’t hope to fathom that kid’s tale. Trafficked women selling their wares to the neon glare in Budapest; the poisonous combo of a mistress & wife sparring for the attention of a traveling companion in Russa; the harrowing life-story related by a porn star a friend of mine dated; etc. etc. Confronted with this, sometimes I wonder why I even bother trying, if my ‘individual voice’ is nothing more than a squeek of relatively-privilaged angst, and quite contemptable at that.
I write mostly as therapy (with dreams, of course, of some published success); in the very least, it helps me channel my demons without bothering or hurting others.
But at least it’s your squeak, Ian! Just remember to shake your head when they pass the oil.
Nice. Self-pity is a wonderfully uplifting remedy, right? I cherish my uneventful (boring) home life. It’s pleasant in contrast to my jumbled work life. Don’t buy her a sandwich, you’ll only encourage her and be forced to find another office.
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So what is Light, Time and Gravity, btw?
It’s an extended meditation on the quotidian minutae of post-colonial, prairie/urban, gay/straight, contemporary Canadian life.
This was the joke I use to describe much of the government subsidized CanLit (the abbreviated term for ‘Canadian Literature’) that gets published up here. On a lark I submitted an application to the Canada Council for the Arts using this as my template, and sure enough, I recieved a check for 20 skins in the mail. So I actually wrote the book in my spare time, using the exact same MO I use for all my other stuff: embrace the generic conventions, then stuff it with as much gnarley content as I can get away with.
Speaking of coffee shops, I never understood how an author can write in a public place like that. When I write, I’m in my own space, with my own carefully planned musical selections playing (or complete silence for revisions). Outside elements like other people, loud traffic, neighbors talking outside my window, drives me bonkers. To write short stories or novels in the relative chaos of a public environment…it mystifies me how anyone can do it. Maybe if I had headphones on with my “writing music”…but even then the visual distractions would probably annoy the hell out of me. Anyway, we all have our own requirements, preferences, and methodologies.
I do hear you about the need for human contact though. When I’m not teaching (i.e. summers) I spend most of my time writing. Between daily bouts of writing, I do crave human interaction. This gets harder and hard to find as you get older. When I was in my teens (and even early twenties) there were people everywhere to hang out with…friends had time to just “hang out” and “chill.” Adults don’t seem to ever do that…they have things like kids, families, jobs, etc. Of course, you do see the odd group of unemployed alcoholics sitting around the apartment complex commiserating, but that’s not exactly the kind of “hanging out” I’m missing.
Those longtime friends of mine who aren’t married usually live in other states. Sometimes we manage to get together over holiday break and do nothing together for awhile. But, man, it would be nice to have more “hang time” at the age of 40.
Yet here’s the other side of the razor: A writer NEEDS isolation in order to write. It’s a balancing act.
Good thing I’m a Libra. 🙂
It’s all about the place with the best “energy.” I like nothing better than slapping on noise-canceling headphones in a Starbucks and going to work. Different strokes for different folks.
one day she enters the cafe, looking especially virginia woolf-ish, and sits next next to you with two coffees. “i brought my novel, as you asked,” she says, smelling of perfume. she hands you a scrapbook containing inane disjointed thoughts. you proceed to read and read and read and can’t stop, until you meet her there the next day, and start reading again. after a while, you assist her with your editorial erudite-ness, and develop her novel—
you wake up in an embarrassingly substantial pool of sweat, hoping nobody noticed, glad it was all just a
Several topics there, really – I’ll go with the last. I would say I don’t know her background except for the brief excerpt here, but I do kind of know what it’s like to be, I dunno, someone who wants to think about stuff amongst people who just want to watch TV or cheer their sports team and you just cheer and anyone who thinks about why one would cheer is, at certain levels ostracised, kind of like you cease to be their species or never were. Indifference, even. In such a case if you take that kind of thinking to be part of your identy (identity in as much as you don’t feel your a sports supporter), you sort of grow up trying to build an identy that’s constantly eroded away like a sandcastle by tides of ostracism. Wait…that sounds a little too wank poetic, yet it’s what I mean, so I’m stuck saying that.
Or maybe she’s got plenty of people around of an equal thinking level to her, and is just doing something like a social ladder climb. So I dunno. Even if it’s the sandcastle thing – years of erosion mean baggage to wade through if you do buy a sandwich, so hey. But really the whole ‘I’m special’ thing can be an attempt to support and maintain a way of thinking in an environment which is kinda darwinistically is tilted against that way of thinking existing. Possibly.
So when are you planning on releasing Light, Time and Gravity?
Gosh, posting on Bakker’s blog, I feel like a school girl at a Jonas Brothers concert…what can I say that won’t make me sound like a gushing tween? Too late?
Well, at least that’s out of the way. Truly a great post on “artists.” I’ve been trying to say similar things for years when sitting around discussing art with Art majors who are insisting Avant Garde is where it’s at…
Art is real, it does great things. It should never get so into itself that it becomes about Art. Art is about human experience, passion, beauty, horror, tragedy. When you’re throwing yourself around a tiny studio apartment in SoHo whining about your tortured existence and the cursed muse…man you need a slap in the face.
Really cool to hear this kind of thing from a writer I like as much as Bakker. Like when you hear about a movie star that manages to stay married for 40 years. It’s strangely satisfying when you can like AND respect someone ‘famous.’