All I got
This is why, Teressia:
I have never believed, totally, in altruism. All acts, even the most helpful, are inherently selfish. If the person had no sense of pride in their being a good person, or no fulfillment in following some tenet or another of their personal BS (Belief System), then they wouldn’t do a fucking thing.
Giving yourself away makes you feel good. It bolsters up your sagging ego in the face of the serious, sucking, terrifying fear that if you offered the most precious gift of a fraction of you, it would be turned down. That it would be forsaken for a fraction of another. Or for null and void.
In our shiny object monkey brains, we can’t help but assign value through the perceived consensus of others. When you go to a barbecue and everyone is afraid of your potato salad, it hurts. You tell yourself that Gorgonzola and fresh grated thyme are just too high brow for that crowd when you take home the full bowl, but that’s not true in that sick little shiny object monkey brain of yours. You know, deep down inside, that they don’t like it because it wasn’t good enough. It couldn’t be good enough. The opposite, in that case, of good is not bad, it is simply wrong. And you brought the wrong bowl.
You suck. That’s why it hurts. Because what you brought had no value. The ribs had value, they were hoarded inside the boilers of the steaming vessels of capitalized ego piled on the patio. The chips, cheap and greasy and worthless, had value; they were eaten until the remaining morsels were too small to grab. Your potato salad was worse than bad. It was wrong. Wrong for the people you wanted to want it most.
I can tell you that these weeks of waiting and stewing and hating every third word of that fawned over and picked over and never quite done final draft is worse than any failed dish, any failed drink, any failed love. Checking the mail everyday hoping for and dreading the reply from the submissions editor. It’s marginally worse than having the girl say no, were I to ask.
I remember my first rejection letter. It came quickly and without pretense. Rather, it was nothing but pretense.
“Not our style. Too rife with cliche…”
It was supposed to be rife with cliche, I argued with the faceless, obese, zit ridden asshole with the candy jaw and the ugly hanging fat nerd face and the floppy greasy hair. I may not have ever met him or seen him, but I knew. I knew he was taking out his inadequate education and his intense distrust of artists and true writers by typing angry things in his little SciFi magazine editor cubicle where he collected action figures.
But deeper down, I knew something more. It was wrong. Whatever I had written, right then and to that person, was wrong. And it hurt me.
So I wait, now. I wait to see who gets selected in this magazine to rumble up into the winner’s circle of love and warmth and affection. I hope so much it’s me, but I know that there are probably hundreds of other pretend writers like me waiting, too.
If I worked up the nerve to ask her, it isn’t that she may say yes and it would fizzle and fail and we would hate each other, it’s that she may not even want to try. And that hurts. It hurts in places infantile in nature and Permian in age.
And I offer it anyway. It’s all I got.
May 27, 2009 at 2:43 am
Of course, somewhere there is a crowd who will appreciate the potato salad with the gorgonzola and thyme…
May 27, 2009 at 4:46 pm
That’s sort of what I was getting at. Though not a fan of thyme in the potato salad environment, I would much rather eat that than say, Lays Brand Wavy Greasy Potato Things.
I guess the point I was trying to make in the post was that the actual value of what you offer, in this case to publishers, is immaterial because you perceive a different value all together, one based on nothing more than the shallowest supply/demand.
Even though a band like Calexico does amazing and new things, they will never outsell U2, so in the strictest definition of value, they are about worthless. But was the Velvet Underground by THAT definition.
This is one reason I have such a tendency to think The Beatles are a case of Emperor Clothing Absence. Everybody likes them. Everybody thinks they wrote the best songs. Big deal, Everybody watched Mel Bay’s Transformers, too.
This post was sort of an examination into the mind of someone who thinks they could do the writing thing professionally, but finds excuses not to.
May 27, 2009 at 6:40 pm
Speaking from the position of an artist who has always been on the far outer fringe of ‘popularity’ my view is that you do it anyway. As David Cronenberg once said ‘Entertainers give people what they want; artists give people what they don’t know they want’. The poorly understood part of the artistic pursuit is that it is about 90% failure. Failure to achieve what you attempt; failure to communicate what you intend; failure to be in the appropriate place for the zeitgeist to be attuned to understand your process of failing.
I disagree that an entity like the Beatles is a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes – they are an extraordinary success if you judge them by the above guidelines. The Beatles were a phenomenon for their time, probably only matched in that era by the Beach Boys; consummate pop artists. They are not Dylan or the Rolling Stones or Johnny Cash, who occupy altogether different spheres. Nevertheless, much of what the Beatles did was thyme in a potato salad: they ushered in the era of ’self-penned’ pop (before them, pop music was largely written by writers to be hawked to ‘personality’ singers); they plundered ‘world’ music; they attempted experimental music; they mashed together musical genres; and most importantly, they redefined the way music was assembled – they broke down the whole process and made it the familiar ensemble of performance and technology that we take for granted today. Just because they were popular doesn’t make them worthless (even if they don’t appeal to your sensibilities). In sum, they were the right kind of artist for the time.
Likewise, popular film. It doesn’t need to be great art to become worthwhile. I can see the copious flaws in the films like Transformers or Pirates of the Caribbean, and yet they constitute something that caught the wave – there are many good things about those films as well as the many bad things.
On the flip side, we really shouldn’t be without our fringe creators. My art and book and music collections are largely made up of those kinds of people.
In my professional life, I’ve had cause to be an ‘art prostitute’ and the experience is enlightening. In my many years of peddling my music to ad people I’ve had numerous confrontations that I think you would find amusing and/or frightening. I was for most of my ad music career on the position of the guy who was a bit ‘out there’ and if there’s one thing that advertising is always attempting, it’s to attract attention. And yet, even though there was no dispute from most people that my material was very high quality, I would be constantly battling mediocrity. I even used to have a sign on my door that said ‘Mediocrity Free Zone’. The problem with advertising is that it thinks it can have the best of both the above worlds: the ‘Capture the Zeitgeist with Novelty’ world and the ‘Let’s Not Freak People Out with Novelty’ world. That’s where the real problem lies. Very few truly inspirational and adventurous people manage to capture the imaginations of very large numbers of people.
So I continue to serve thyme in the potato salad because 1: I like it, and 2: I figure that if even one other person likes it, then he/she and I will have a bond that is kind of special.
I have a post about blogging and popularity in the queue which I think you’ll like.
May 27, 2009 at 9:24 pm
I like this. And I relate on many levels, not just in writing but in life, and the way you choose to think and live it.
Just because everyone wants to eat greasy chips it doesn’t mean a gourmet salad isn’t appreciated. But it won’t attract the masses. Rejection is difficult, whether it’s a manuscript or a dish served cold, or that person we so wanted to keep.
There are too many people who take the easy greasy road, but what of the pioneers who dared to be different? As Anaglyph says, it won;t have mass appeal. Maybe there is a niche market that is difficult to break into. Failing that, we still have a poor substitute, our blogs.
The question to ask yourself is, would you be happy serving greasy meals when all you want is to be creative in the kitchen? Our passions don’t often yield what we want from others, but there will always be a minority who would appreciate it.
May 28, 2009 at 7:31 am
You just reminded me of a really old post I did called “How to Blog.” you may remember it, it was all about changing font color and size and using euphemisms. It also had kittens. It honestly irritated the hell out of me how popular that post got to be. Because it sort of proved itself true.
Over time, I have veered heavily toward the oddball. I don’t think the oddball is necessarily more likely to be good, in fact some artists are obscure for a reason, but the possibility of greatness is usually buried. Not to say that greatness is never unearthed by the masses.
Which sort of gets back to the potato salad. I’m sure at some point or another, potato salad was strictly anti-thyme. I would say that through most of modern potato salad history, thyme and any sort of non-shredded distinctive cheeses were completely verboten. But because someone may have thrown thyme in it once, even if they completely fucked it up, they opened the door for further modification and invention.
My brother is a very accomplished chef and a very creative guy, but his most successful creation to date, monetarily and by printed acclaim, was a meatloaf. It was a very good meatloaf. And I’m sure it was about as original as meatloaf could get, but it was hardly cutting edge.
Cléa, you made me think of what a very bohemian friend said to me once. We were discussing how much we sucked at life at that moment. I was living in a run down farmhouse in middle of nowhere, I rode my bike everywhere, unless I had occasion to fire up my beat up primer gray truck, and had basically no money. He was in a similar boat. Being men, we were discussing how are living situations were working out in the forever hunt of women.
He said: Man, it’s all just a bullshit filter.
Meaning, all our ‘negatives,’ so to speak, were nothing more than the things that would chase the REALLY shallow women off.
Which makes sense. I think that’s how it works with anything else. Like Anaglyph said above, were you to really appeal to the zeitgeist, there’s about an equal chance you’d chase it off.
July 6, 2009 at 6:50 pm
A psychic-type woman stopped me in front of the Bellagio fountain on the strip in Vegas about a year ago. I didn’t want to listen to her, but I couldn’t help myself. One thing she told me is that I shouldn’t stop myself from following through on ideas I have. But I’ve never been able to buy into the “fail forward” Successories crap I’ve had crammed down my throat at the office. I know how hard it is when the boy says no, so having the greasy-haired editor say no to my heart and soul poured out on paper would be even harder. I value my heart and soul too much to put it out there to be crushed in either arena.
You’re stronger than I am for offering yours up anyway. I’m more comfortable thinking about what might’ve been than knowing for sure that it’ll never be.
And anyone who would send you a letter than says your writing is “rife with cliche” needs to revise their form letter, because that is rife with cliche.