You Can’t Write About It
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on July 29, 2009
Filed Under Writing
You can’t write a deeply critical piece on Obama and patiently explain that you’re a liberal. You can’t make fun of the homeless or the disabled or the flawed, and yet you also can’t bring yourself to condemn Governor Schwarzenegger’s callous slash and burn, which will hurt many people. You can’t write against a popular position and be considered anything less than a predictable contrarian. You can’t take chances. You can’t express your feelings in this foolishly rational age. For you’ll lose your precious sinecure at the newspaper.
You can’t write about certain people because they might be able to throw you some work. You can’t publicly question some of your more sensitive friends, the advertisers, or the executives. You can’t find the time to quietly encourage someone. You can’t write about the dumbass who gets the work you so desperately need simply because he has a book and you don’t. You can’t write the truth, but you always claim you stand for it. You can’t criticize your heroes or praise the noble qualities of your enemies.
You can’t reveal how men really feel about breasts or what women think of biceps. You can’t write about how much you want him and the whiff of desperation they all smelled on you after so many lonely return trips home without the ephemeral human trophies. You can’t write about the guy you fucked when she was out of town on business and how you never told him and how you fucked him again. You can’t write about the girl you knocked up and the day you called in sick to spend the day at the abortion clinic. You can’t write about your prevarications. You can’t write about how you ignored the struggling friend who needed work so that you could get ahead. You can’t write about that last atavistic impulse you have towards those with darker skin or a sexual orientation you consider peculiar, if not outright sinful. You can’t write about that one time you stepped hard on the gas and almost killed the son of a bitch, the time you didn’t hold the door open for the old woman, the night you drunkenly pissed on the man who asked you for change, and the cruel afternoon in which you told many children that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny didn’t exist simply because you were bored.
You can’t write about joy or something filling the world with so much good.
You can’t write about these things. Because it will reflect poorly on you. Because, oh dear, you’ll be judged. If only you could take a chance.
Small wonder the newspapers aren’t interesting.
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Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
Newspaper readers are some of the most censorious people on earth. Even the noblest of expressed thoughts are greeted as craven.
Where has this been learned?
correct
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWHwI-Hvpzo