Poet as a ... Career?

This article is about tightwad parents.

I am continually amazed at the power parents have over their kids' degree choices. Specifically, if a teenager wants to study poetry in college (per the New Yorker article), it's the norm for their parents to say, "No. You can't have a profitable career in poetry." Duh. But I can have a profitable career in advertising with a poetry degree (and do). I could have a profitable career in teaching with a poetry degree. I could have a profitable career in the food service industry with a poetry degree. I could have a profitable career in firefighting with a poetry degree. I could have a profitable career in law with a poetry degree. I could have a profitable career in nursing with a poetry degree. Crap, I could have a profitable career without any degree. You know why? BECAUSE THIS IS FREAKING AMERICA, PEOPLE.

Parents actually refuse to help their kids out financially if they choose to major in English! That is so ridiculous to me. There is such a thing as a graduate program, even a doctorate program for those who wish to be more specialized. How many lawyers do you know who studied English for their Bachelor's degree? Advertising execs? (Rhetorical question since you may not know any lawyers or ad execs). They're really common and it's not a coincidence. People who study English are actually very adept at ... English. Any job that requires great communication skills will probably accept an English major, even (dare I say it?) a poetry major.

Thank God for my parents. When I said I wanted to major in Creative Writing, they didn't even flinch. They were actually supportive. I know. I was shocked, too. I even asked why they had no qualms. My mother answered that there are a crap-ton (not her phrasing but mine) of career choices if you have just a degree, let alone a degree in English. And she was right. Even though I am only an admin and not a lawyer, I've got it pretty cushy for a recent grad. And I majored in Poetry. Financially unstable? Eat my shorts. I make much more than most recent business grads, I love my job, and I enjoyed college - not only because I was inebriated most nights out of the week - but because I was (gasp) interested in what I was learning, not motivated by possible financial security .... possible.

Books I'm Ashamed to Say I've Never Read but Probably Never Will

I've read enough best-novels-of-all-time lists to realize I should have maybe sort of considered reading those books I was assigned in high school and college. Meh .... I was too busy being cool and perusing obscure books that nobody else read because they were too busy writing essays on The Scarlet Letter every semester. (A couple of asides: What is it with teachers and The Scarlet Letter? Jesus Christ. Also just for clarification, I have read The Scarlet Letter, but I refuse to do so more than once. Murder.)

Now I always have a book handy, so one would assume that I've read, say, 1984. Negative. I'm still in that reading-obscure-books phase, and 1984 still hasn't made it onto my to-read list. The only reason it would even make it on "the list" is shame. If somebody asks me if I've read it, I have to lie and say "Psssssshhhh, who hasn't?" And I cross my fingers that they don't launch into some opinion quest, because then I have to resort to my recited Sparknotes dialogue about the dangers of totalitarianism. But regardless of all the shame, I will never read 1984. Not only have I heard enough about it from everybody else who's read it (and I mean everybody) but I won't be caught dead reading that on the train. How provincial!

So I'm letting it all hang out. Here's a list of all the books I should have read by now but never will:

1. 1984
2. Animal Farm
3. Beloved
4. Catch-22
5. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
6. To Kill A Mockingbird (Oh, sweet shame! Hey, I watched at least 20 minutes of the movie.)
7. Brave New World
8. Farenheit 451
9. The Old Man and the Sea (I've read every other Hemingway novel but refuse to touch this.)
10. The Red Badge of Courage
11. Moby Dick
12. The Color Purple

See? That wasn't so bad. I've been walking around for the past decade carrying this heavy sense of guilt on my shoulders. But who cares what I haven't read, because I have read a lot of really complex-for-the-sake-of-being-complex and confusing-so-everybody-else-will-think-I'm-eccentric-and-way-smarter-than-them books that most people wouldn't come within a 10-mile radius of (2666, anyone? My poor brain is twitching at the thought of it.)

Now I know I'm not the only person to have a guilt list of books they've never read. What do you feel stupid for never reading? Speak up! It feels grrrr-eat!

Kurt Vonnegut: Here Is a Lesson in Creative Writing

http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/kurt-vonnegut-at-the-blackboard.php?page=all

I just went ahead an copied and pasted into my blog. No commentary other than this is great and needs to be read. Oh, Kurt, you slay me.

I want to share with you something I’ve learned. I’ll draw it on the blackboard behind me so you can follow more easily [draws a vertical line on the blackboard]. This is the G-I axis: good fortune-ill fortune. Death and terrible poverty, sickness down here—great prosperity, wonderful health up there. Your average state of affairs here in the middle [points to bottom, top, and middle of line respectively].

This is the B-E axis. B for beginning, E for entropy. Okay. Not every story has that very simple, very pretty shape that even a computer can understand [draws horizontal line extending from middle of G-I axis].

Now let me give you a marketing tip. The people who can afford to buy books and magazines and go to the movies don’t like to hear about people who are poor or sick, so start your story up here [indicates top of the G-I axis]. You will see this story over and over again. People love it, and it is not copyrighted. The story is “Man in Hole,” but the story needn’t be about a man or a hole. It’s: somebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again [draws line A]. It is not accidental that the line ends up higher than where it began. This is encouraging to readers.

Another is called “Boy Meets Girl,” but this needn’t be about a boy meeting a girl [begins drawing line B]. It’s: somebody, an ordinary person, on a day like any other day, comes across something perfectly wonderful: “Oh boy, this is my lucky day!” … [drawing line downward]. “Shit!” … [drawing line back up again]. And gets back up again.

Now, I don’t mean to intimidate you, but after being a chemist as an undergraduate at Cornell, after the war I went to the University of Chicago and studied anthropology, and eventually I took a masters degree in that field. Saul Bellow was in that same department, and neither one of us ever made a field trip. Although we certainly imagined some. I started going to the library in search of reports about ethnographers, preachers, and explorers—those imperialists—to find out what sorts of stories they’d collected from primitive people. It was a big mistake for me to take a degree in anthropology anyway, because I can’t stand primitive people—they’re so stupid. But anyway, I read these stories, one after another, collected from primitive people all over the world, and they were dead level, like the B-E axis here. So all right. Primitive people deserve to lose with their lousy stories. They really are backward. Look at the wonderful rise and fall of our stories.

One of the most popular stories ever told starts down here [begins line C below B-E axis]. Who is this person who’s despondent? She’s a girl of about fifteen or sixteen whose mother had died, so why wouldn’t she be low? And her father got married almost immediately to a terrible battle-axe with two mean daughters. You’ve heard it?

There’s to be a party at the palace. She has to help her two stepsisters and her dreadful stepmother get ready to go, but she herself has to stay home. Is she even sadder now? No, she’s already a broken-hearted little girl. The death of her mother is enough. Things can’t get any worse than that. So okay, they all leave for the party. Her fairy godmother shows up [draws incremental rise], gives her pantyhose, mascara, and a means of transportation to get to the party.

And when she shows up she’s the belle of the ball [draws line upward]. She is so heavily made up that her relatives don’t even recognize her. Then the clock strikes twelve, as promised, and it’s all taken away again [draws line downward]. It doesn’t take long for a clock to strike twelve times, so she drops down. Does she drop down to the same level? Hell, no. No matter what happens after that she’ll remember when the prince was in love with her and she was the belle of the ball. So she poops along, at her considerably improved level, no matter what, and the shoe fits, and she becomes off-scale happy [draws line upward and then infinity symbol].

Now there’s a Franz Kafka story [begins line D toward bottom of G-I axis]. A young man is rather unattractive and not very personable. He has disagreeable relatives and has had a lot of jobs with no chance of promotion. He doesn’t get paid enough to take his girl dancing or to go to the beer hall to have a beer with a friend. One morning he wakes up, it’s time to go to work again, and he has turned into a cockroach [draws line downward and then infinity symbol].

It’s a pessimistic story.

The question is, does this system I’ve devised help us in the evaluation of literature? Perhaps a real masterpiece cannot be crucified on a cross of this design. How about Hamlet? It’s a pretty good piece of work I’d say. Is anybody going to argue that it isn’t? I don’t have to draw a new line, because Hamlet’s situation is the same as Cinderella’s, except that the sexes are reversed.

His father has just died. He’s despondent. And right away his mother went and married his uncle, who’s a bastard. So Hamlet is going along on the same level as Cinderella when his friend Horatio comes up to him and says, “Hamlet, listen, there’s this thing up in the parapet, I think maybe you’d better talk to it. It’s your dad.” So Hamlet goes up and talks to this, you know, fairly substantial apparition there. And this thing says, “I’m your father, I was murdered, you gotta avenge me, it was your uncle did it, here’s how.”

Well, was this good news or bad news? To this day we don’t know if that ghost was really Hamlet’s father. If you have messed around with Ouija boards, you know there are malicious spirits floating around, liable to tell you anything, and you shouldn’t believe them. Madame Blavatsky, who knew more about the spirit world than anybody else, said you are a fool to take any apparition seriously, because they are often malicious and they are frequently the souls of people who were murdered, were suicides, or were terribly cheated in life in one way or another, and they are out for revenge.

So we don’t know whether this thing was really Hamlet’s father or if it was good news or bad news. And neither does Hamlet. But he says okay, I got a way to check this out. I’ll hire actors to act out the way the ghost said my father was murdered by my uncle, and I’ll put on this show and see what my uncle makes of it. So he puts on this show. And it’s not like Perry Mason. His uncle doesn’t go crazy and say, “I-I-you got me, you got me, I did it, I did it.” It flops. Neither good news nor bad news. After this flop Hamlet ends up talking with his mother when the drapes move, so he thinks his uncle is back there and he says, “All right, I am so sick of being so damn indecisive,” and he sticks his rapier through the drapery. Well, who falls out? This windbag, Polonius. This Rush Limbaugh. And Shakespeare regards him as a fool and quite disposable.

You know, dumb parents think that the advice that Polonius gave to his kids when they were going away was what parents should always tell their kids, and it’s the dumbest possible advice, and Shakespeare even thought it was hilarious.

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” But what else is life but endless lending and borrowing, give and take?

“This above all, to thine own self be true.” Be an egomaniac!

Neither good news nor bad news. Hamlet didn’t get arrested. He’s prince. He can kill anybody he wants. So he goes along, and finally he gets in a duel, and he’s killed. Well, did he go to heaven or did he go to hell? Quite a difference. Cinderella or Kafka’s cockroach? I don’t think Shakespeare believed in a heaven or hell any more than I do. And so we don’t know whether it’s good news or bad news.

I have just demonstrated to you that Shakespeare was as poor a storyteller as any Arapaho.

But there’s a reason we recognizeHamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.

And if I die—God forbid—I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, “Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?”

Mark Twain's Autobiography Hits Shelves After 100 Years ... ?

 So, Mark Twain's autobiography will be published mid-November. The clever chap banned its publishing until 100 years after his death. Genius. Am I excited? Oh, yes.

And yet ... I'm a little bummed. My papa (my favorite grandparent and the smartest person I've ever known) was a Mark Twain know-it-all. A bit of interesting trivia: he was also a very accomplished Mark Twain impersonator. I know - I've got super-cool relatives. So with the publication of the autobiography, I really miss my pop and wish he were here to read it. But I'll read it in his honor and think of him the whole way through.

Is There a "Number One" Writer Today?

I found this article semi-interesting, especially in a day and age where we seem stretched for solidly authentic writers, those who could ascend to the pantheon of literary greats. Who is Number One? I know a lot of us have debated this around the keg water cooler. I tell you this with the utmost conviction - tis Martin Amis!

And I'm glad to see his name mentioned. Because he is seriously brilliant. If you're unsure, just do as I did: Read Money by Amis and then immediately after, read Water for Elephants. You won't even be able to read Water for Elephants. You will read the first paragraph and then set the book on fire and then you'll search the pubs of London for Martin Amis and kiss his satirical feet. Okay, I didn't go to London, but I would kiss his feet if ever they were placed before me.

Now I haven't read every contemporary writer out there - come to think of it, I haven't read many - but I've noticed that literature has evolved into this monster of easy, immediate satisfaction. Contemporary novels are easy to read, easy to access, and easy to forget. They are easily made into movies that easily make a huge profit and are easily forgotten. Nothing of value stays. Contemporary fiction is like a Twitter feed: something meaningless yet slightly entertaining is delivered to the masses and then it disappears with the next twenty bits of meaningless entertainment.

But Martin Amis hails from the class of writers exclusively focused on delivering art. And by art, I mean creations that add value to life. He is of Saul Bellow, of Philip Roth, and of Vladimir Nabokov. He believes in the art of the written word and has dedicated his career to mastering it. Amis's writing doesn't revolve around his plot, but his plot revolves around his writing. And that's what literature should be. I don't want to read the Jodi Pecoults, the Nicholas Sparks, and the Stephenie Meyers. The stories are entertaining, yes. The writing? I need a little more entertainment in that department. They read like high school essays, like user manuals with adjectives piled on top of adjectives. The grammar is correct, the message clear and understandable, but nothing takes a risk. Not one thing is ballsy.

Even the writers a few steps above Stephenie Meyer - Jonathan Franzen, Sara Gruen maybe - they're good writers .... in theory. Sentences are structured well; they're clear and concise. But they don't have balls. I realize that Sara Gruen is a gal, but writing needs to take a risk. You can't follow a formula, you can't be safe and great. Martin Amis never plays it safe. And he gets flack for it. Even his own father (Kingsley Amis, a renowned British author) accused Martin of "breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to himself." The younger Amis is an exhibitionist, his obscenely large vocabulary on 24-hour display. It can be a bit offensive for those who don't have a great sense of humor. But finish one of his novels, and you'll realize that there wasn't one cliche in the whole book. And if there was - have no fear! - it was written with brazen irony. I love Martin Amis, because he's a scientist. He experiments, he challenges himself and his readers, yet he knows the rules. Amis knows the confines of his discipline and he knows how to navigate them, to disrupt them without destroying them. He shakes things up a bit. Martin Amis is Number One, because he's been a student of great writing his whole life and continues to be even into his literal and metaphorical professorship. He consumes it. He emanates it. He believes in great writing, challenges it, and delivers it.

This is my ode to Martin Amis, my only idol. If you have not read anything of his, I recommend that (some of you) do. He's not for everyone. Here's a checklist:

1. You like a challenging read.
2. You enjoy an ironic, slightly perverse sense of humor.
3. You long to bask in the glory of immaculate writing.

If all of the above apply to you, then go buy a Martin Amis novel from Amazon for God's sake! Okay, not for God's sake, but your own, for mine, for the future of creative writing! Go forth and spring life unto the earth!

So Weird

I was just plotting my next poem - the theme to center around The London Blitz - and what is the first article on New York Times' Books section of their website?

Oh, just a book review about WWII poetry, particularly that of air bombing .... It's a creepy sign. I love those.

UPDATE: If this isn't creepy enough, check out what happened last night (for clarification, last night is the same day I wrote the above, so it's über creepy, okay?):

At the recommendation of the pictured book, I started reading a little TS Eliot (he's a big player in WWII poetry, so I figured, Inspiration, eh?). Then I moseyed around, played with the kid, put him to sleep, then started my "Mad Men" night cap (like I do every night), but something eerily coincidental happens, something out of the ordinary: I get another sign. The character, Kinsey, is lying on his back reciting:

This is the way the world ends.

This is the way the world ends.

This is the way the world ends.

Not with a bang but a whimper.

You know what that's from? No? "The Hollow Men" by TS Eliot. The end.

Shout Out to Ben Sullivan

I received my alumni magazine the other day. Hoorah! ..... Actually, I was not anticipating anything cool and unusual to be published between its covers. There was a familiar-looking guy on the cover - long hair, plaid shirt, faded jeans - but every guy at Texas State looks like that, so I paid no mind. Then I flipped open the mag ... lo and behold (by the way, why can you never use lo by itself?) the man on the cover was a peer of mine, Ben Sullivan (Sully). Is it weird that I'm writing about him and hardly know him? I don't think so. I just want to take a few minutes out of my day to pay him some respect.

Sully and I took a poetry seminar together my last semester. He is a fantastic poet, and I always thought he would "make it." Some way, some how, he just has a gift. Here's the link to the article: http://www.txstate.edu/rising-stars/ben-sullivan.html.

Here's a run-down:

Sully was assigned a research paper in his class about baseball and American culture, and he chose to write about Lou Gehrig. What was supposed to be a research paper turned into a story about Lou Gehrig's life/battle with ALS. What's unique is that Sully's mother died from the disease when he was eighteen, and he intertwined his firsthand experience with ALS into the biography of Lou Gehrig.

Now, I never knew any of this in our workshop together. All I knew from his poetry was that his mother was sick ... and I couldn't even be sure of that since not all poetry is biographical. The poetry that seems biographical usually is, though. I spoke maybe ten words to him total. But I always admired him. I think it's very cool to see a peer writer get recognized. The workshop environment is just very intimate, and even if you never hang at the bars with your classmates, or whatever it is you do to be best buds, you know them in a way that their family could never. When you write, and not just write, but open yourself for criticism from fellow writers, you really bare everything, you open some of the darkest, most vulnerable corners of your life. You write about things you could never tell the people closest to you. So in a way, I feel very connected to Sully, even though I didn't immediately recognize him on the cover of the magazine.

Anyway, his poems were so well-written that I kept them ... you know, just in case. I feel a sense of pride, really. Read the article, it's very interesting. And I'm including one of his poems without his permission. Hey, at least he gets credit. And I got his back in a court of law. But I want to give him some more publicity because I have mad respect for him and we went through workshop together and I'm totally proud of him as if I were his sister.

Untitled by Ben Sullivan

A mother and two sons make Alabama
with soccer games and Chinese food
sometimes fight with lots of church.

Then sick came into her, to what was
ours, to what we owned, and stayed.
Step father for a mother and two sons.

A lingering drunk with a leather belt
pulled tight, welting fresh skin, taught a
stupid mother with stupid sons blisters,

picked a stick and beat Alabama bloody
and sent a crying mother to freezing Massachusetts
And two stupid sons to scorching Texas

Where they fry their egg rolls in rancid milk
And feed pinches of soccer to the pigeons
While their churches whisper thumbtacks and shoelaces.

Then what was ours was no longer ours but hers
And hers alone. Her and Massachusetts and the sick.
It ate her legs, then arms, then throat, then the rest.

Texas smiles her crooked yellow teeth
And serves warm guacamole as a show of good faith.
Two stupid sons scrub their hands at the kitchen sink.

I'd love to include more - I have three more - but that's pushing it. So I bid you adieu. Congrats, Sully!