Mondaugen's Chicago

My writing style

 

Readers are the worst bunch of lazy, good-for-nothing, helpless little whiners who find every excuse imaginable to avoid connecting with the mind of a writer.

Who needs em? Writing would be so much easier without them.

Writers would be able to create with no need to pander, dumb-down, sugar-coat or otherwise disfigure the work to accommodate a fickle public... it would be great!

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Arrogance and Narcissism are not my forte, try as I might. But some self-explanation of my style, every now and again, might be worthwhile, because, you see, it's a thing. No artist should ever explain his work, a most favorite poet once said, as it's not what artists do. That's the job of a critic. Though who says men can't multitask? Poe did.

In an earlier post, I wrote:

You're wondering if I'm being serious or joking. Good. I have you right where I want you -- in an uncomfortable spot feeling uncertain whether you should be enjoying this or not, be thoughtful about it or flippant, and how on earth to respond or not. Your instinct is to stop reading, and go find something easier to engage with, such as a self-confirming post on FaceBook, or a pandering Netflix comedy. My essays are distillations of our engagement with real life -- they are both a bitch to find a footing in. You have to work at it, and the reward is uncertain. The question you're not asking yourself is why this is a problem. In either my writing or life itself. Now answer that question: I fear being thought a fool by _____, even though nobody is looking. So when you stop worrying about judgment, you can begin to enjoy my writing as superimposed fragments of serious thought, frivolous humor, and the absence of an authorial parent telling you how to enjoy it.

I write as if you have agency. And I know that you don't like it. This is why you get exasperated and don't continue. What's the point? His writing doesn't satisfy any of my needs....

One reader of my novel That Precious Ghost in Glass noted that I had a somewhat hostile attitude towards my reader. That I wasn't letting them in on some secret, or, frankly, what the hell was going on at all. I even begin it by introducing an unsympathetic character in a stream-of-consciousness style in which he is trying to be be funny to himself but really isn't. He is nobody's favorite uncle, the kind you don't want to be seated next to at Thanksgiving, and don't invite when you get older and host. It's mainly the whitish boil on the neck but also his politics....

Readership of my novel has been limited.

Tell me. Why do you read? Your answer should be long and complex.

Perhaps knowledge, understanding, pleasure, escape, distraction, adrenaline, excitement, maybe just to know what's going on, in a defensive kind of way, so nobody thinks you're a fool?

What do you not read? Or stop reading after you have started? And Why? Your answer should be short.

Perhaps the atmosphere wasn't compelling, I didn't get it, the writing was horrid, the writing was predictable, it didn't promise to... It was irrelevant. The characters malformed or not engaging. Or boring. The writing bored me. It wasn't me.

When you wander down alleys that promise nothing, you will always find nothing. Yet these are the alleys we all need to wander down. Because being bored is a good thing -- boredom promotes imagination and engagement and ownership and creation of our experience. Submitting to an author's world is an act of faith and charity. If we bring a limited heart to our appreciation, we will find nothing but ourselves.

Moby Dick just a lot of whale shit -- Boring.

Gravity's Rainbow nobody reads it -- Boring; but apparently the title sounds interesting according to Daniel Craig in Knives Out -- what an abstruse cultural reference in a modern movie!

The poetry of Rod McKuen? I still read it from time to time. People say it's bad. Don't waste time on bad! Even the great Harold Bloom suggested that we should spend our lives reading only from the Global Canon of great works, as everything else was just transient dross. He's right about the transient dross. It is bad. Full of itself. Pandering to some current fad. Childish. Hypocritical. Plain dumb. 

Rod McKuen is bad. I suffer brain damage from his industrial-strength pretentious hollow sentimentalism. But there are fields of wonder in his pretense. My mind reels in endless directions contemplating how he came up with his stuff. Why. Who this guy is as a human being. What he's trying to sell me. Why other people value it.

Who bores themselves? It's always someone or something that is boring, doesn't live up to expectations, doesn't fire our imagination. Reading is for pleasure, and if it doesn't immediately pleasure me, I stop. Life is too short. Right?

Readers are the worst bunch of lazy, good-for-nothing, helpless little whiners who find every excuse imaginable to avoid connecting with the mind of a writer. There, I've said it again.

In this world, writers are no better than prostitutes, faking the most ultimately beautiful of ways that humans connect. Fakery has its place: You Don't Look Fat in That, That was Just What I Wanted, etc.

The "good writing" we writers all strive after, after a manner, means not much. It is utterly elusive, fashion-led and intangible. Is Dan Brown a great writer? J.K. Rowling? Neither can turn a phrase (though Rowling has moments of evocative clarity) the way, say Henry James can. But what kind of audience does Henry James have outside of academia? His well-turned, finely-mouthed, perfect sentences and insightful sentiments are not prized any more by any significant percentage of the population. Rowling and Brown, however, offer easily accessible compelling plots using iconic characters, much the way the first Star Wars did in 1977. Fifty years from now, when their plots and characters are no longer to the public taste, their work will be unreadable, considered junk to be forgotten, and the tremendous pleasures of reading their books will evaporate. They will go the way of millions of previously popular writers, even many winners of Nobel prizes for literature, who are lost to history because we no longer value the fashion they rode. Why do we not read Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf any more. She won the Nobel in 1909 “in appreciation of the lofty idealism, vivid imagination and spiritual perception that characterize her writings.” Don't we value those things any more?

The reader always creates the experience, is my point, bending whomever happens to be writing at the time to some kind of fulfilling experience. In exceptional works of writing the author helps the reader create something durable, insightful and foundational about human nature that the reader couldn't otherwise. The complex soul (in a reader) brings the capacity to resonate with another complex soul (the writer). Only Melville's equals find him compelling, and there are many millions of his equals. The reader brings the boring. The reader brings the richness.

Will my fuck-off-jackson, make-your-own-damn-map-to-find-your-way-around-here style doom me to an extraordinarily limited readership? So far it has. It may forever more. I'm fine with that, actually. Until I change my mind.

Pity, smile, puzzlement, thought, inspiration, eye-roll, hostility and exhaustion: your choice! 

Jaws: Hands versus Teeth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"You've got City Hands, Mr. Hooper. You've been counting money all your life."

- Quint

 

Would you agree that the measure of a man is best had through the feel of his hands?

Chances are good you do not. Hands are out of fashion. Social justice and environmental stewardship are in. These issues shouldn't be mutually exclusive; in fact, I believe they are mutually supporting. But if you ask around, um, No, Hands are not a big deal these days. Donald Trump's small hands don't even make the news. They are irrelevant. Fox News and MSNBC would even agree on this point.

Hands have been on shaky ground for at least two or three millennia, and in the last three hundred years suffered a catastrophic decline in reputation. As soon as the architect stopped building with his own hands, but found other people to do it for him, the value of hands began its inexorable decline in favor of words and other symbols, and with them, the fine art of theory, and with it, bullshit.

(You're wondering if I'm being serious or joking. Good. I have you right where I want you -- in an uncomfortable spot feeling uncertain whether you should be enjoying this or not, be thoughtful about it or flippant, and how on earth to respond or not. Your instinct is to stop reading, and go find something easier to engage with, such as a self-confirming post on FaceBook, or a pandering Netflix comedy. My essays are distillations of our engagement with real life -- they are both a bitch to find a footing in. You have to work at it, and the reward is uncertain. The question you're not asking yourself is why this is a problem. In either my writing or life itself. Now answer that question: I fear being thought a fool by _____, even though nobody is looking. So when you stop worrying about judgment, you can begin to enjoy my writing as superimposed fragments of serious thought, frivolous humor, and the absence of an authorial parent telling you how to enjoy it. Now, get on with the question of teeth versus hands in the movie Jaws). 

Jaws is not a movie about Hands so much as Teeth. Wondrously Large and Super-Bitey Teeth. Of course by Hollywood Rules, the movie has a happy ending. The Shark doesn't win, People win. And of course they use their hands to win. They have to do things to kill the shark, and hands are (almost) always involved in people doing things. This is all quite obvious.

But what kind of hands will win the day against the Shark? Jaws plays with this question in a light-hearted but powerful manner.

Blue-collar Quint crushes a beer can -- Quint has all of his fishing tools at hand on his boat. 

White-collar Hooper crushes a Styrofoam cup -- Hooper loads up the boat with his scientific equipment. 

Brody looks on -- He doesn't bring much, except a change of underpants and his policeman's service pistol. 

The shark crushes surfboards, boats, people, etc. -- The shark has all of its tools in its mouth.

What? you ask yourself, and consider switching the channel to Real Housewives of Televisionland. This list makes my brain hurt. It is supposed to. Get used to it. Just remember it for the moment.

First consider what hands can do.

Hands are strong -- they can crush a beer can, and turn the lid off a jar. They can throw a ball accurately at 100 mph, break the nose on another man's face, and hold onto a rope around a wild bull for 8 seconds. Hands pull the rest of the body up a cliff face, and hold a rope for another.

Hands have fine motor control -- they can braid hair and screw in a light bulb. They can thread a needle and handle tools to saw and drill. They can open a car door and make teeny-tiny watch parts with teeny-tiny screwdrivers. They can tickle, they can touch.

Every mammal has a brain, some bigger than ours. But whales have fins, elephants have trunks, bears have paws, sloths have claws (and, yes, sharks have teeth -- see where I'm going?). But none have hands the way we do. They define our relationship with the world. Hands make Humanity. OK, and our brains. Together. With language. It's a menage-a-trois of capability. Other primates have equal hands, but not the same brains or languages.

Back to Jaws: it's three sets of hands against one set of teeth.

Our three heroes: each of them wields tools for a living -- (the ultimate product of hands is technology: Tools!)

Blue-collar Quint crushes a beer can -- Quint has all of his fishing tools at hand on his boat. 

White-collar Hooper crushes a Styrofoam cup -- Hooper loads up the boat with his scientific equipment. 

Brody looks on -- He doesn't bring much, except a change of underpants and his policeman's service pistol. 

The shark crushes surfboards, boats, people, etc. -- The shark has all of its tools in its mouth.

Neither the extensive fishing tackle nor the extensive scientific equipment defeats the Teeth. But Brody sees his shot, and, from a sinking boat, and under tremendous pressure, takes it and makes it.

The point of this essay? You ask for a point? You ALREADY HAVE IT. You should be making it on your own.

I like to think that Brody has spent years at a firing range learning how to shoot accurately; he takes his job seriously, and policing skills include handgun control -- fine motor control in his hands and the ability to place a shot under stress.

The lesson of Jaws, which every astute viewer must conclude leaving the theater, is that Hands Win -- not in direct competition, but through their deep capacity, not just to make, but to master complex skills.

Used un-intelligently, hands will always lose against teeth (everyone we see being eaten by the shark slaps ineffectively at the shark's nose or something). These are lessons for our children: you see that victim slapping helplessly at that shark's nose? That person never spent time learning a specific skill, mastering something, whether it's fishing, oceanography, or simple marksmanship.

These are important life lessons, available even in mostly-mindless summer blockbuster Hollywood movies.

And yes, I'm writing a book about the human hand, a celebration of the its amazing versatility, and an invitation to learn and master a skill that requires fine hand work as a way to find a durable happiness in life. And also winning when pitted against super-bitey sharks.