collections: a semi-seasonal reset

It’s a weird week, so this is some writing about writing.

  • semi-fictitious: so you want to write about the real thing
  • english class canons: let the people read what they want
  • disorganized thoughts: from the incomplete drafts


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semi-fictitious

so you want to write about the real thing

In the best and worst of my teen years, I wrote a lot of fiction. Mostly short sketches of situations and characters, anything I could plot down within one to two pages of a Word document and abandon forever. It was easier then than it is now. It was easier to dream up people and places interacting when I had a incipient sense of how the world worked (and those senses are still nascent, for the record). So imagined it was almost real. When I dig back into my archives, I roll my eyes in the can you believe I wrote this kind of way, at the cloying and saccharine sentiments of purple prose. The prose is still purple, but hopefully a sharper mauve these days. I’ve impatiently migrated those words across many third-party services over the years—from blogspot to tumblr to whatever newsletter platform is the rage—and I’ve settled for a simple markdown editor in the present. I’ll notice the time stamp (eight years ago), and the time is gone but the words stand still.

The last full piece of fiction I wrote is dated August 29th, 2018. The cruel irony is that I wrote the entirety of it listening to Fall Out Boy’s American Beauty/American Psycho album; it had felt appropriate in the misguided compulsion to write subversive, modern Americana. We’re going to skip over the part where only three people have read this seventeen-page dual POV monstrosity, and one of those readers was an actual respected writer. I was deluded enough to think this held any merit. I was very clearly imitating a style I wanted to write, but had no business in portraying. It’s amusing to revisit now (and find the few hidden gems in the knockoff paragraphs), because I wrote a cliché about a writer and a subject. And when you write about a writer, that writer has to pontificate about writing too.

At the climax, this is what my wordsmith had to say: “As a writer, he is familiar with the frazzled, torturous clawing in his chest when he is searching for the right word. The word escapes him, torments him. It reaches the tip of his tongue but fizzles out before he can reach for a dictionary. The panic rises because the sentence is incomplete, and punctuation cannot wrap around an unfinished sentence with a gaping wound.”

Fiction got harder when imagined people got less real; and non-fiction got better when time made everything else more real. The evolution compounded when I had lived a little longer and the assembly of those lived experiences stare back at me every time the cursor blinks on a blank page. It really is easier to think and write about what you know. Fiction was easy because the words could be invented to describe contrived feelings, yet once you know how they actually feel, you need to search for the words that do them justice. It becomes an anthropological dig.

I’m doing the writerly thing where instead of writing about anything of substance, I’m writing about the things I’ve read and writing itself. Because writing makes you fundamentally opinionated about how the words are smithed.

But in writing this, I surfaced two pieces from my reading backlog: Parul Seghal’s keenly-observed “The Case Against the Trauma Plot” and Brandon Taylor’s blithe response, “emotional support trauma plot,” which I may have enjoyed reading more than the original. Here’s the quote I haven’t been able to shake loose from my brain:

“Fiction is, I think, always kind of about the shock of human experience. The shock of being alive.”

I’ve been shocked quite a few times in this lifetime; every day is a shock to the system, in the million tiny miracles it takes to be alive. Shell-shocked into waking, into more writing.

english class canons

let the people read what they want

This is a pretentious bit about my longstanding regret of not taking more literature classes. I think about this whenever I remember how much time I spent in them during high school, and knew I liked them then but truly value them now. Something about high school English teachers leaving an indelible imprint on our inchoate psyche.

I say this to myself, repeatedly, stewing in the could-have-been when I know I definitely don’t think I’d enjoy sitting through an entire semester’s literature class now. Those classes are filled to the brim with book after book, and it’s too much reading in a compact space to be motivated to keep up with it week-after-week. The very good punchline here is that I’m not well-read at all. I haven’t read most canonical texts of classical and contemporary culture (see: junior year of high school, Contemps & Classics), and managed to evade the bulk of it in my schooling (meaning: I did not deliberately seek them out; and so I remain as uncultured as ever). I’ve amassed enough of the references that I can tell you what they’re supposed to allude to, but can’t cite any of the source material.

What I think I actually miss about English classes were the generative parts of it. The part where I read and analyzed texts, or locked myself down with my computer for hours to pour out original thoughts in a double-spaced essay of forms. I missed listening to the beats that others paid attention to, the things I missed the first time around. I would’ve been a terrible English concentrator, but I still entertain the fantasy repertoire of classes and classics. I’d find a new thesis in the mire of a revered work, and someone would have to parse and attempt to understand my re-interpretation in all its tired originality.

Let me wax poetic here and talk about literary criticism through the lens of functional critique. Every paper I’ve written about a novel and text conversation I’ve had about a piece of media has emerged from the same directive—find something new in something old. The context won’t change, but your interpretation of it can. Here’s a bad example: there is literally nothing new to be said about Fitzgerald’s omnipotent and synesthetic green light, but there is a point of discussion around Taylor Swift’s invocation of Gatsby references in her lyricism. The mirrored practice of calling upon a Great American Novel to echo the cultivation of her Great American (Musical) Dynasty. There’s something there, and while nobody cares to discuss this, it’s still fundamentally an interrogation of wealth, and achieving the dream, and the beautiful, broken people we aspire to be by the end of it. From there, we go to Min Jin Lee’s foreword for the Penguin Classics reissue of The Great Gatsby (she provides an excellent commentary of it in this interview-as-profile; not in spite of the novel’s faults, but appreciation in light of it: “Recognizing the specificity of Fitzgerald’s choices is a way to read and appraise his work fairly.”) An Asian-American novelist introduces the Great(est) American Novel and guides the next generation on how to read it. This novel isn’t anybody’s true, lived experience, yet we still relish in the mythic Americana.

I’ve never had the attention span nor the patience to sit and read every book on a syllabus, but I do love syllabi. I love what they stand for: a window into the soul of a well-trodden path. If some faint relative of my soul could speak, it would be in the highlights of words I’ve stolen from others; but here, definitively, is the curated list of origin points. There’s a moral compass to the syllabus. I like to think if I had all the accumulated time in the world, I’d read everything I ought to; yet I’ve had so much of this time, and I’m still nowhere close to making my way through the Classics. They’ve never excited me. I admire them with reverence and respect their significance, but I think the form and function is ultimately more interesting when we reinterpret it. We’re telling the same stories over and over. When we hold something new to the light, in all of its counterfeit glory, and contrast it against the original.

disorganized thoughts

from the incomplete drafts

The world is in disarray once again. Here are some things I wanted to write about, but couldn’t get past the first paragraph:

typecast (ryan atwood talks about crypto): apparently Ben McKenzie, of Ryan Atwood fame, is a prolific crypto critic on Twitter and this did not hit my radar until the news of his book deal broke. It broke my sense of reality, too, for a moment, because the brooding teen idol of early 2000s Fox was partnering with a renowned journalist to expose the highs and lows of the crypto wave. The cognitive dissonance was weird, because there was nothing disqualifying him from doing this, but my idea of him was permanently cast in this former mold. He was a teen actor, and therefore I couldn’t take him seriously in this endeavour (and well, I couldn’t even write a book about this); no more than I could I take a reality star running for commander in chief seriously. But it’s an incredibly dismissive attitude, because people are capable of holding multiple interests, even if diametrically opposed. He’s more than the job he had at twenty-four.

new song (old song, lost to time): around december-january, I listened to the duet “New Song” on repeat. I’d queue it up on my way to work and savor every second of the six minutes and twenty-two seconds as Maggie Rogers and Del Water Gap traded off on this soft ballad. They co-created a song they both deeply loved while they were in a band together, stuffed it in a drawer for nearly a decade as they parted ways—and as the story goes, a stroke of a sonic miracle preserved the original music stems and enabled them to remix this track. That is the artifact that lives with us today. This unfurling, aching song that never got a name (always referred to as “New Song”),was almost lost to time: but it still endures, and I still listen to it, and it’s almost a complete accident that I get to do this. Something like how life is all the little accidents we call serendipity.

wolves (carnal, as in, of the flesh): this came from a train of thought around people and their pets; people love dogs and canine friends and the wolf family. Wolf packs as a metaphor when we don’t actually want to confront a conversation about power, head-on. When I think of wolves, I think of werewolves. The werewolves of the young adult fiction lineage, wherein men (teenage boys) would turn into wolves of the night. I have a themed playlist of songs where the wolves are coincidentally featured in the title. Sharp Teeth by Tony Barlow is one of my favorite books I’ve never read, written in free-verse about rival werewolf clans in Los Angeles. Wolves as a stand-in for the primal and feral. People are beholden to the sun; wolves are bound to the moon. If dogs reflect the best of modern friendship, then wolves reflect the worst of primitive instincts. Sharp teeth. Razor claws. Lone wolves, loneliness. Power and dominance. Family, feud. Belonging to the pack. Fierce and ferocious. Violence, bloodshed, flesh. Wildness.

this past week

  • watching: still a few episodes behind on euphoria, season 02
  • read:
    • “woven” by lydia yuknavitch
      • this is where i learned what it meant to write a braided story. her style is concise but razor-sharp; cuts through her bone and yours.
      • “Every story I have ever told has a kind of breach to it, I think. You could say that my writing isn’t quite right. That all the beginnings have endings in them.”
    • “candace bushnell is back in the city” by jia tolentino
      • jia tolentino interviews are always so zesty
      • “You mention it in your one-woman show—this desire to write something that people will take seriously. The Great American Novel.”
  • listened: mitski. her music is the spring, when some of the flowers are late bloomers and those that were early are now wilted.