Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

The Time I Method Acted a Clock

Author: April 15, 2020 0 Comments

I had a ridiculous childhood in many ways. On the one hand, I was a free-range kid whose parents more or less stopped worrying about my whereabouts or safety between the hours of 8AM and 8PM — seriously, my childhood was filled with me just rambling around Jersey City dodging serial killers and clowns offering free candy1. On the other, I was involved in a lot of organized activities like Little League and the Boy Scouts2, and also found time to collect approximately 5,000 Star Wars figures and create complex dioramas with them that told intricate fan fiction stories.

Like I said: Ridiculous.

I wasn’t a shy kid, not really, but like a lot of people who grow up to become writers I also was not exactly a Type-A, Put Me In Coach person who craved the spotlight3. I feared the spotlight; then as now I much preferred to stay in the shadows like Gollum and gurgle my sarcastic asides to myself in the safety of anonymity. Like a lot of authors, in other words, I am and have always been more comfortable writing than performing.

Which is problematic when you’re trying to sell your work, because you’re pushed to get out there and do a bit of performing in order to do so. Whether it’s readings or panels or social media, this sort of thing can be painful for a writer. For me, any time I’m forced to be in front of a crowd I get extremely sweaty4. Sadly, if you want to try and market your work you’ll find yourself in front of a crowd at some point, and if you’re like me you’ll be sweating like a nervous wreck and possibly5 chugging from an unmarked bottle of liquor.

Here’s what not to do: Don’t be like me and the clock.

Look Upon My Many Participation Trophies!

Childhood is, of course, filled with bullshit. I wasn’t in Little League and Boy Scouts only because I wanted to be; I was there in part because my parents, like all parents, needed me out of the goddamn house on a regular basis. As I’ve grown older and found myself occasionally dealing with children, I have come to understand the need to keep them busy at all times6.

This means sometimes as a kid you get thrust into strange places. When I was in Cub Scouts we put on a play and everyone was more or less obligated to participate, so we all got some sort of role. I was cast as: The Clock7. This entailed standing on stage holding a cardboard clock face.

That was it. I had no lines8.

I was petrified, and extremely unhappy about the whole thing, so when the time came to stand on stage for what seemed like infinity, I took that clock face and held it directly in front of my real face so I couldn’t see the audience. And stood there like that for the entirety of the play, with all the adults whispering from the wings and urging me to show my face9.

Fuck that, I thought.

That’s how I view promoting myself, but of course you have to get out from behind the, er, clock face, which isn’t easy if it doesn’t come naturally. The key is to come up with a virtual, transparent clock face of sorts — a persona to hide behind, a shtick. The more distance you can put between yourself and that sweaty idiot standing in front of a crowd, the more comfortable you’ll be10.

Or, why not — go for the literal clock face. Your shtick could be Clock Face Man! Which is better than what we all are in public these days: Pandemic Face Mask Person.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, promotion, Writing

The Joker is Our New Hamlet

Author: February 16, 2020 0 Comments

Actors and musicians sometimes encounter a challenge other artists and creatives don’t: Interpreting the work of others11. Sure, writers might twist a classic into a modern form or tell an old story in a new way, but it’s not precisely the same12. Actors and musicians often find themselves asked to reinterpret a role or song without fundamentally changing the words and other aspects of the performance. Think about that—you have the same words, the same basic stage direction, the same overall form, and you’re supposed to do something new and exciting with it13.

For actors, as a result, there’s usually a role that everyone has tried at some point or another in their career. For a while that role was Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the glum and slightly crazy Prince of Denmark charged by his father’s ghost with avenging his murder14. When Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted to poke fun at his limited range and thick Austrian accent in 1993’s Last Action Hero, he imagined himself reciting the infamous ‘Yorick’ soliloquy from the play, riffing on the idea that Arnie might try his hand at a serious role like that. It was pop culture shorthand. Almost every ‘serious’ actor has tried to put his own stamp on Hamlet, your Oliviers and Gielguds, and when Kenneth Branagh was riding the crest of his Hot Young Classicist phase, he used his currency to make a 4-hour film version of the play that let him chew some serious scenery15. For actresses there are, unsurprisingly, fewer such roles—fewer such characters—with which to define themselves, but the Austen roles of Emma and Elizabeth or perhaps Brontë’s Jane Eyre come around every few years, and can make a career in similar fashion.

Recently, Hamlet has fallen out of favor. Not among Shakespeare fans or classicists (or even among actors), but in a pop culture sense; there hasn’t been a screen adaptation since 2009 and you sure don’t hear any buzz about the role when actors take it on16. Into this vacuum we have a new role, a new character that actors will try to make their own: The Joker.

Why So Serious?

Credit where credit is due: The first iconic performance in the role of The Joker was Cesar Romero on the 1960s-era Batman TV show. In part because it was television (there was a theatrical film starring Romero as The Joker, but it was really just a super-sized episode) and in part because it was a terminally silly show, Romero’s performance is rarely mentioned in the same breath as the actors that followed, but it is a remarkable performance. Romero brings some real manic pixie dream Joker energy to his performance. His Joker is constantly laughing, playing pranks, and always in motion, and yet there’s a sour thread of real menace there. Romero’s Joker is always laughing at you—at your pain and suffering—never with you.

But to be fair, Joker wasn’t an iconic role in the 1960s, and Romero’s robust performance has little to do with its late bloom as the new Hamlet for actors. That began in 1989 with Jack Nicholson.

Tim Burton’s Batman is a terrible movie. You might have fond memories of it—as I do17—but it is … not good18. It was, however, a smash hit and a cultural phenomenon, in part because of Nicholson, who was still an A+ movie star, a serious actor, and an outsize celebrity personality back then. Hearing that an actor of Nicholson’s caliber had signed on to portray a character previously portrayed by Cesar Romero was surprising, and instantly elevated the role to a higher status. If Nicholson could play The Joker, after all, anyone could play The Joker, even the biggest names in Hollywood.

And Nicholson’s performance is good-to-great. He’s not sure how to handle the silliness, which was still a part of Joker’s DNA in 1989; you can almost see the drugs in Nicholson’s eyes when he’s forced to prance about like a silly clown. But he also brought a real sense of psychotic danger to the role; you can see echoes of Nicholson’s brutal shifts from maniacal silliness to coldblooded violence in more recent portrayals, and some of his line readings are absolute classics. Nicholson took the role seriously, and thus made it a role that you could take seriously.

Which opened the door for Heath Ledger two decades later. Ledger’s performance is legendary, of course; he won an Oscar for it, after all19. Consider Cesar Romero in 1966 and Heath Ledger in 2008—the same role, and yet so vastly different in gravitas and approach. Ledger’s performance is in every way brilliant, from the flat, nasally Midwestern accent he affects to the twitches and tics he indulges in, to the sudden growl he puts in his voice when he echoes Nicholson and downshifts from silly to homicidal. More than anyone else, Heath Ledger made The Joker the new Hamlet20, a role that can define a career (for good or bad, as we’ll see) and which young actors will aspire to when they want to assert themselves as serious actors.

The Crucible

Ledger’s performance is what made The Joker the sort of role that serious actors would accept with the intention of leaving their mark on it. Jared Leto attempted to make the role his own in 2016’s Suicide Squad with disastrous results; his take on the character is what a fifteen-year old kid who shares memes about releasing their inner demons would come up with. While the performance is … bad, what’s notable is how Leto clearly wants to make the role his own. There’s obviously a sense that The Joker is the sort of iconic role that you are remembered for, and Leto’s frenzied, desperate energy in the performance reflects that21.

Which brings us to Joaquin Phoenix and 2019’s Joker, which has raked in awards and made Phoenix a serious contender for Best Actor. Phoenix’s interpretation of the role is quite different from all the other Jokers, and the film’s success (and the success of his performance) has solidified the role’s new stature. Phoenix hasn’t pursued the sort of career that would normally bring him into a superhero universe like D.C.’s, and it’s hard to imagine him appearing in an effects-heavy fight scene with Robert Pattinson’s Batman22, so it’s easy to speculate that what attracted him to the role was, in part, its iconic status. Simply put, if you want to make a splash as an actor, try your best to get cast as The Joker. If you nail it, people will take you seriously.

Which is, in some ways, perfect for our current moment. There’s something appropriate about this shift from Shakespeare’s glowering Prince of Denmark to a comic book villain as the defining role for actors, something appropriate in having a maniacal clown as our most important fictional portrayal. The world has become a darkly funny place. To paraphrase another kind of fictional joker, “Once you realize what a joke everything is, being The Joker is the only thing that makes sense.”

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing, Writing

‘A Christmas Story’ is The Greatest Horror Film of the 20th Century

Author: January 22, 2020 0 Comments

LIKE tens of millions of other people, I traveled over the holiday season. My wife, referred to in my writing as The Duchess in order to protect her reputation from my public incompetence23 and ramshackle approach to fashion, has family in Texas and so every year we board a plane at some ungodly, pre-sunrise hour on Christmas Day and emerge, starving and confused, in the humid air of Austin some hours later24.

We then have a visit. Greeting people you literally see once a year is a strange and awkward proposition, made doubly strange and awkward due to my natural state of strangeness and awkwardness. But The Duchess’ family is welcoming and the dinner they prepare is huge and delicious, so the day usually goes well25. The bulk of the trip, however, is spent visiting The Duchess’ mother, a woman in her nineties, spry and typically ensconced in a comfortable chair in front of her television. Which means we spend a lot of time sitting and watching TV with her. It usually falls to me to find something appropriate for us to watch; even at my advanced age watching something with your mother-in-law can be nerve-wracking. No one wants to suffer through a Fifty Shades of Grey-like experience with a woman whose DVR is filled with videos of a nun reciting the rosary26.

The key is to balance wholesomeness with entertainment that The Duchess and I can also enjoy, which isn’t easy because apparently we are much more jaded than we might initially appear27. This year I settled on A Christmas Story, which seemed holiday-appropriate and as wholesome as they come; after all, this is a film whose central conflict involves a toy gun. But as I sank into the pink recliner I’d been provided and we watched the movie in the perpetually-dim room, I slowly realized I’d made a terrible mistake. Because A Christmas Story isn’t wholesome at all. It’s terrifying.

(more…)

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

Goodbye, Year

Author: December 25, 2019 2 Comments

WE’RE in the end game, now.

Normally, I live my life like one of those only-in-movies characters who has some sort of specialized amnesia that makes them wake up every day like Frosty the Snowman, without any memory of their lives before. I live in the moment, not because I’m living like I’m dying as Tim McGraw instructed us, but because my brain is weird and crumpled and I am almost incapable of remembering anything that didn’t happen within the last few hours.

Oh, I remember things, kind of. They’re vague impressions. Let it drift. I’ll never remember your name, don’t be insulted. I often confuse my many, many Catholic cousins named Mary and John. Let it drift

Around this time every year I like to look back in anger on the year in writing I just had. It’s fun. And depressing. I am a man obsessed with statistics pertaining to his own existence, as if the number of things I accomplish will somehow protect me from being completely forgotten within a few decades of my death, unless I am lucky enough to die embracing another man under a mountain of hot ash and am discovered centuries later by fascinated scientists wondering about our relationship. So in these sorts of posts I like to tabulate stuff and somehow equate it with accomplishment, to stir up the illusion of forward motion. I am that guy who measures his life in coffee spoons.

MY YEAR IN WRITIN’

So this is Xmas, and what have I done? On the freelance side of things, I had a good year with a sad ending; I picked up a few new jobs (most notably over at BookBub, which has been a blast) but of course the Barnes & Noble blogs shut down, which was a total bummer. I’ve been writing for the B&N blogs since 2014, and it was an incredible experience. Not only did they pay well, the editors were uniformly smart, fun, and excited about books. It’s been a few weeks since the news, and I still can’t get used to not pitching every idea I have about books to them. (Seriously, I pitched a lot to my B&N eds. They must have braced themselves every time one of my pitch-bomb emails arrived).

Still, freelance-wise this was a good year. Anyone who pays their bills by writing words knows that every day is a fresh opportunity to starve to death, so making it to December without having done so is a triumph.

Fiction-wise, also not bad. I finished 11 of my monthly short stories, so far (and trust that I will finish #12 in a few days even if I have to kill all the characters in a plane crash). I also finished 4 other stories outside of that monthly exercise. I didn’t complete any novels this year, but I’m 50k words into one and 40k words into a short-story cycle, so I wasn’t napping. I also finished and completed 50k words worth of novella-length parts of the new Avery Cates novel The Burning City and published them, so there’s that. And my agent has two novels in hand that we think have legs, and that’s never a bad position to be in as an author.

I submitted a ton of stories (74, to be exact; note this doesn’t mean 74 separate stories, but 74 submissions of a few stories I currently think are great), as usual, and sold three of them, of which two have published: The Company I Keep in Life is Short and Then You Die, edited by Kelley Armstrong, and Zilla, 2015 in The Lascaux Review. My system for submitting stories is sloppy and disorganized and probably favors volume more than it should, but it is my way.

And I started a podcast, like everyone else in this sadly imitative world. The No Pants Cocktail Hour actually launched in December of 2018, but I produced 16 solipsistic episodes this year and had a blast talking about myself, as usual.

So, the stats say I had a good year. Active, creative, somewhat lucrative. I hope your own writing year was a good one. Tell me about it in the comments, or on Twitter, or by tracking me down in a bar and leaning in too close and putting your hand uncomfortably on my thigh as you tell me the tale with far too much detail.

Happy 2020, folks. It’s coming whether you’re ready or not.

Bullshit, career, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Short Stories, Writing

Don’t Fear The Reaper

Author: November 13, 2019 1 Comment

Photo by Skitterphoto from Pexels

Like, I don’t know, every other human on Earth, I am not really aware of my own aging process. Well, somewhat aware. I mean, every time I stand up and some piece of my body literally falls off, or any time I stay up until 6AM drinking liquor that’s so fresh and corrosive it has a grit to it and instead of bounding into my day with a few aspirin and a therapeutic vomit like when I was 25 I die for 35 seconds in the back of an ambulance, I feel it a little. But in general I feel kind of the same as I did long ago when I was cool. From my perspective, I’m the same asshole I always was.

But that’s not really true. In reality, I’ve changed a lot, I think. And that’s changed my writing. And that’s okay. In life and writing, you gotta be willing to change.

A Game of Suffering

Two conversations. First:

2000 Duchess: Why have we been standing in line for Mets playoff tickets for eight hours?

2000 Jeff: BECAUSE THE METS ARE GOING. ALL. THE. WAY. And also because the Mets front office is incompetent.

Then:

2019 Duchess: Who’s gonna be in the World Series this year?

2019 Jeff: I have no idea.

Baseball used to be such a core part of my personality it was sometimes the only way my friends and I could communicate effectively. Well, that and Simpsons jokes. But just like I stopped watching The Simpsons about ten years ago, my love for baseball has ebbed. I still have affection for the game and the beautiful stats, but I can’t summon the energy to watch games or follow the season any more.

It’s strange to realize that something I once devoted so much energy to is no longer of interest to me, and I struggled with it. I tried to force myself to care, because it disturbed me that I’d changed so fundamentally. But then I just relaxed into it, because if you think about it for a moment there’s nothing that strange about losing energy for something after thirty fucking years. I mean, I’ve changed. Evolved. For the better? Probably not, but that’s not the point.

What does this have to do with writing? It’s the same principle. You should find that your approach to writing changes. You should be reading different books, weird, challenging books and easy satisfying books that show you tricks and techniques you’ve never seen before, and at the end of a decade of such books you should be writing differently. Better? Maybe. Maybe not. Doesn’t matter.

Just like Beisbol Jeff, this can be tough to deal with when your writing is part of your identity. When a reader or reviewer wonders why you don’t write the stuff you used to, or when you get bored writing stuff that once kept you up late because you couldn’t wait to nail down that scene. It goes straight to who you are as a writer, as a person. Your identity. Just remember that it’s normal for this to shift and evolve. It really has to. If it doesn’t, you’re stagnating.

Or maybe this is all because baseball games are 57 hours long and I’m just kidding myself. Carry on.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

Zombies Everywhere: The Graying of Genre

Author: September 25, 2019 0 Comments

The power balance in my marriage is despairingly unequal—my wife is unquestionably in charge. I confess this to explain how it is that I watched every single episode of The Big Bang Theory; my wife has a weakness for Chuck Lorre sitcoms, and I have a weakness for making her happy. Incidentally, The Big Bang Theory is also prominently featured in my moments of Existential Horror when I realize that I, too, will someday die; it’s incredible to realize the show debuted in 2007, six months before Marvel’s Iron Man.

For anyone who wasn’t alive or aware back in 2007, you can now look back on it as possibly the last time that a concept like The Big Bang Theory—which can be summed up as Haw Haw Lookit These Funny Nerds!—was a viable pitch for a TV show. Because not only have nerds clearly inherited the Earth in terms of pop culture domination (the Top 5 highest-grossing films of all time, for example, include two Avengers movies, The Force Awakens, and Avatar—all released post-2007), but the genre distinctions that once separated us from the rest of the world are quickly becoming meaningless.

The Thin Gray Line

Genre has always been a meaningless invention of marketing forces, to a certain extent. While defining something as ‘science fiction’ or a ‘thriller’ has utility for the consumer, it’s a messy business that was never well-defined. The reasons we might categorize Homer’s Odyssey or Shelley’s Frankenstein as ‘classics’ or ‘literature’ instead of epic fantasy and sci-fi horror are pretty thin. The argument against considering many James Bond films (not so much the novels) works of sci-fi is kind of weak, and so many TV shows, films, and works of modern literature have used the magical realism of A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life for lame plot devices they’ve become genres unto themselves—and yet are rarely called out as speculative in nature.

The main reason for such seemingly arbitrary genre classifications is due to a general attitude that genre was juvenile, the sort of stuff kids enjoyed because they’re dumb and immature. It was perfectly okay to love comic books when you’re eleven; by the time you grew up you were supposed to leave those childish things behind. A show like Doctor Who was conceived in the early 1960s as a children’s program, and an educational one at that, because no one at the time would have imagined that adults wanted to watch a show about a time-traveling alien magician who lectures about Earth history for reasons unknown. With a few exceptions, sci-fi, fantasy, and horror films were always low-budget affairs designed to serve what was assumed to be an audience of teenagers and younger kids.

And then Star Wars happened, kicking off a four-decade shift as people began to realize two simple things: One, adults were just as into sci-fi and fantasy as kids; and two, there was money in speculative genres. A lot of money.

The Nerdening

It’s no joke to say that the last few decades of pop culture have been a slow triumph of all things speculative. So, so much of modern-day pop culture is driven by science fiction and fantasy, from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to Game of Thrones and Stranger Things. What was once the province of grindhouse and pulp is now mainstream, and one unexpected and oft-overlooked effect of this shift is the erosion of genre lines. Put simply, it’s increasingly common to find speculative tropes used in ‘literary’ genres—and vice versa. The result is a kind of new Gray Genre that isn’t clearly definable as old-school literary fiction but also doesn’t seem to fit neatly into the classic sci-fi or fantasy categories.

Two easy examples of this new, mixed Gray Genre is Never Let Me Go by Haruki Murakami and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Both are clearly science fiction—one telling the story of clones grown to be sources of replacement organs, the other about the grinding attempt of a small number of people to survive the end of the world. Yet both are usually categorized and discussed as literary fiction, largely due to the prior work of both authors and a lingering prejudice against sci-fi in literary circles—writers with reputations for serious work still fight hard against what they see as a cheaper, more juvenile classification. Ian McEwan recently worked pretty hard to insist that his novel Machines Like Me, which deals with artificial intelligence in an alternative universe, is not actually sci-fi. And Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, also won an Arthur C. Clarke Award, though you wouldn’t know it from the book’s official website, where the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal, and the Man Booker Prize are all mentioned prominently.

But these lingering prejudices are the product of that earlier age, and are fading fast. The fact that Whitehead can publish a novel that is essentially a work of alternate history and magical realism and have it win a Pulitzer proves that. As more and more novels like these—and more and more writers follow in Justin Cronin’s (The Passage) footsteps as a writer who moves between genres without losing anything for it—there will be less of a focus on the specific genre of a story, and having speculative tropes pop up in all kinds of stories will be more common.

Consider a TV series like HBO’s Years and Years, which is marketed as a drama but has a clear-if-subtle sci-fi premise that follows a British family over the course of fifteen years stretching into the near future. Notably, the discussion surrounding the show has little to do with whether the conceit makes it any less a drama, signaling that general audiences—people who have been watching Marvel movies for more than a decade now, and who undoubtedly include folks who never read epic fantasy growing up but became hooked on Game of Thrones—no longer find these elements foreign or juvenile. They’re just tools of the storytelling trade.

None of this excuses my having watched all 279 episodes of The Big Bang Theory, of course—but it’s how we got to the point where a film like Hobbs and Shaw (a spinoff from the ridiculous and ridiculously successful Fast and Furious franchise) can be marketed as an ‘action’ film when the plot involves a cybernetically-enhanced supervillain, a deadly virus, and a complete suspension of the laws of physics. All the genres are being slowly baked into each other, until eventually they just won’t matter any more.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing, Writing

Speech at Mepham High NEHS Induction

Author: April 10, 2019 0 Comments

Through my literary agency, I was invited to offer a few remarks at a high school induction ceremony for the National English Honor Society. Of course I agreed, because I love any opportunity to put on an adult suit of clothes and pantomime competence. And also any opportunity to make a speech, because listening to myself talk is hella fun.

Here I am speechifying; tell me it’s not hot:

Pants? I’ll never tell.

It’s interesting to note how the high school experience, at least in this narrow way, is exactly as I remember it. Aside from the security on the entrance, things don’t seem to have changed much since my day, despite the constant sense you get as a middle-aged person that the Youth have strayed onto darker paths than you could have imagined at their age, and are evolving into strange creatures you can’t possibly understand. The kids sitting, bored to tears, during this induction ceremony were exactly like me and my friends when we were that age. It was … oddly comforting.

It always amazes me that I’m asked to make remarks and then no one wants to vet those remarks before I make them, especially when I’m known for talking about drunkenness and pantslessness and those remarks will be directed at children. And yet this is what happened. For my speech, I decided to put a button on the whole competency issue by talking about my own lack of it, but the ultimate point I tried to make was that English and language skills are fundamental to just about every industry. You hear a lot about how to make a living and career choices, but what’s often lost is that being able to read and write with skill and efficiency is absolutely a superpower no matter what industry you wind up in. Anyone who’s had to parse the gibberish emails of colleagues will know what I mean.

Anyways, here’s the speech I made:

First of all I’d like to congratulate all of you for this achievement—you should be proud of yourselves and very smug about this. And I’m kind of an expert in being smug, something my wife will confirm for you if you want, so I know when it’s a good time for smugness, and this is one of them.

And I know that it must really mean something to you, hearing it from me, person you’ve never heard of before. But I know what I’m talking about here, because I’m one of you. I’m one of those people who started reading big adult books when they were kids, one of those people who started writing stories when they were nine years old. I even sold a novel when I was sixteen, though it never published due to an incompetence singularity so powerful it destroyed several careers.

But words and writing had been so good to me in my childhood, so when the time to go to college, I naturally chose to earn a degree in English, mainly because I’d already read all the books. I started to understand how powerful it is to have this sort of grasp and control over words when my a professor in a 200-level class accused me of plagiarism because I was too good at mimicking the style and tone of the reference books I was using. I offered to show him other examples of my writing to prove it was my work, and when he saw the stack of manuscripts I brought in he instantly gave in and changed my grade. The kicker? The writing that seemed too good to be mine got a B. But I knew then that being able to write was an advantage over most other people.

After graduation, unfortunately, my parents informed me very sadly that seeing as I was legally an adult with a college degree, they could no longer pay my bills, and so I had to get a job. Which is when I discovered that I am a man afflicted by what scientists call No Marketable Skills Syndrome. Which is something else my wife can confirm for you, if my performance up here isn’t confirmation enough.

I’m not athletically gifted, which I know surprises you based on my appearance here. But the fact is, when I played Little League as a kid I pioneered the little-known position of Left Out, and the kid playing Center Field used to routinely practice racing over to shag any fly balls hit towards me.

I’m not musically gifted; I’ve been playing guitar for ten years and still can’t do a proper barre chord.

I’m not good with numbers, I can’t program, and I have the hand-eye coordination of a rock, so there was no professional Fortnite playing in my future—especially since I don’t play any video games that don’t have a God Mode. I’ve got really poor attention to detail; I was once fired from a job in a convenience store because I could never stock the sodas correctly in the cooler, and believe me when I say that stocking the sodas in the cooler was not difficult. I’ve also got a strong tendency to space out and daydream during lectures, meetings, and disciplinary hearings called to address my tendency to space out and daydream. As my sainted wife will tell you, I’m virtually unemployable.

And yet, here I am, making this speech, which obviously means I am successful and important, because unsuccessful and unimportant people do not, as a rule, get to make speeches. The reason I’m up here making a successful and important speech despite having no marketable skills or, apparently, fashion sense, is simple: Like you, I pursued English, and the skills that mastery over language have given me have enabled me to publish ten books and dozens of short stories, to sell film and TV options on several of those books and stories, and to make my living as a writer for websites like Barnes and Noble’s book blog, for magazines like Writer’s Digest, and for corporate clients writing terrible things I am largely ashamed of.

Because, here’s the thing: English, the stuff you’ve learned here in school and that you’ll hopefully continue to learn, is a superpower. No kidding. You’ll have to take my word this despite the fact that I just used the phrase ?the stuff’ instead of some creative and well-crafted metaphor.

Here’s a few things that will happen because of what you’ve learned here in school and will continue to learn going forward:

1. People will assume you are smart, whether you are actually smart or not. Again, I know this from personal experience as a not-very smart person who has been given the nickname Shakespeare more times than he can count. Also the nickname Einstein. It’s always Shakespeare or Einstein. I’m not sure why Einstein; I guess he’s the only other really smart person people can think of off the top of their heasds. People see you reading a book or writing in a notepad, and they just assume you’re brilliant. It’s really useful.

2. You’ll be able to see through people and know what they’re really thinking. This is because most people don’t have the skills you’re getting through studying English—deep reading comprehension and the ability to write effectively and efficiently. Whether it’s emails, texts, or angry, anonymous notes left on your windshield, no one’s gonna be able to get anything past you in this life. At the same time, you’ll be able to fool everyone because of your language skills. Think about that for a moment: If you happen to be a sociopath—and science tells us that there’s a very good chance at least some of you are—that means you’re practically Lex Luther already.

3. People will pay you to write things and read things for them, because they can’t. Or don’t want to. You won’t want to believe this, because for folks like us who have this mastery over language reading and writing seems easy, so the idea that someone will pay you, for example, tens of thousands of dollars for the right to publish a book you wrote in your spare time in-between a heavy schedule of playing video games and napping will strike you as a ridiculous fantasy.

But the thing is, these things are extremely difficult for a great many people, and so it does, in fact, happen. Even to people who have No Marketable Skills. Because writing is fundamental to everything. Everything begins with words. Every movie, TV show, and video game begins with a stack of memos and outlines and instructions. Every product begins with research papers and more memos and emails and reports. Music—even music without lyrics—requires language to be arranged and performed and composed. Every business and academic endeavor is fueled by words, and the people who can write those words and the people who can easily digest and comprehend them are absolutely necessary to their success. With the skills you’ve acquired and will acquire, there isn’t an industry in the world that doesn’t need you—possibly in a hidden, non-glamorous sort of way that will be forever disappointing, but still.

Of course, I am duty-bound to also inform you of the downsides to this life, which mainly boils down to the social shunning you’ll experience because you won’t be able to ignore bad writing. You’ll become that person who complains about plot holes, idiot dialog, and undercooked themes in movies and TV shows. People will stop inviting you to things because you can’t stop talking about how the ending of Us makes no sense—just incomprehensible nonsense that gets increasingly incomprehensible the more Jordan Peele makes attempts in interviews to explain it. Trust me—these sorts of observations do not make you very popular.

Look; its lonely being the smartest person in the room, but thanks to what you’ve achieved here, that’s gonna be your cross to bear. Once again: congratulations!

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, More Shit I Gotta Do, Writing

The Unreliable Unreliableness of “The Affair”

Author: June 27, 2018 0 Comments

When it comes to television, The Duchess and I have very low standards. We’re talking The Ranch on Netflix low. I will not apologize.

So, take my thoughts on the scripted dramas I consume with a grain of salt, because I am a guy who is at least willing to feign amusement at watching The Ranch in order to make his wife happy. Though I do not, it should be noted, feign it well.

Another show we watch is Showtime’s The Affair, starring Dominic West’s American accent and Ruth Wilson’s epic eyebrows. If you’ve never watched it, it’s about a middle-aged man who blows up his affluent family by having an affair with a woman he meets while on vacation in the Hamptons, and the ongoing ripples going through everybody’s lives as a result. It’s a bit melodramatic and soapy, but it’s fun. Except for the unreliable aspect.

Part of the show’s pitch (which I’ve discussed in a previous post about the show) is that each episode is divided into two sections, usually, from two different points of view. For example, the Season 4 premiere was split between Noah and Helen, a divorced couple, showing much of the same events from their different POVs. In theory this is interesting—sure, it’s been done before, but unreliable narrators that are explicitly unreliable are always interesting, in my opinion. Playing with the idea that reality isn’t set, that we all bring our bullshit to our memories—not to mention the fact that memory is itself incredibly unreliable to begin with—has a lot of potential. And there is some fun in the way The Affair will show us how one character perceives another. In Noah’s section in the premiere, for example, he sees himself as occasionally confused or upset, but generally sane and rational. In Helen’s memories he’s a jittery asshole who causes more problems than he solves.

Cool. Cool cool cool. The main problem is that instead of making these differences subtle and rational for the viewer, they go off the deep end.

Seriously, Mariachis?

The unreliable nature of everyone’s memories make the characters seem insane, because they are remembering vastly different things—in every sense. For example, in the premiere Noah tags along with Helen, their kids, and her new beau to a Mexican restaurant. In Noah’s recollection, the place is a lowbrow joint with a Mariachi band and a lot of loud chaos. Helen’s memory sees every detail of the place differently. There is no band, there is no noise, and the place looks totally different.

Why does this bother me? Because when two people go to a restaurant they might remember the evening differently, but they rarely hallucinate a Mariachi band. Or the lack of one.

In other words, the show is using a machete on the unreliable device where a butter knife would do. I’d argue that the unreliable aspect of the POVs would be even more effective and powerful if they kept the spot-the-difference stuff to the small things, the tiny details, and made those details more thematically interesting. I can totally buy that Noah and Helen remember each other completely differently. But when you throw in such stark differences in the visuals and physical aspects of their memories, I get distracted.

There’s a lesson there for us writers, of course: Less is more. Unless your whole point is that more is more, in which case of course you can ignore this lesson, this supposed rule I just made up, and do your thing. You can break any ‘rule’ or do any sort of ill-advised literary trick if you can pull it off. The Affair‘s problem is that it’s not pulling off what it’s trying to do.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

Haircuts & Writing

Author: June 12, 2018 3 Comments

I’ll take one of each, thanks.

When I was a kid, I was an insufferable bootlicker. My brother, older and smarter, was socially inept and often difficult in public, and thus despite my slightly dimmer mental prospects I was often the Golden Boy in the sense of being relatively well-behaved in public. For example, at the barbershop, where my brother fidgeted and complained and generally made it a torturous experience for all involved. Knowing that he’d fallen short of the mark, I made an extra effort to be the perfect little kid in that barber chair with the kid booster. I sat rock still, responding like a puppet to the whispery touch of the barber as he positioned my head.

The fact that we have to occasionally trim back our horrifying, disgusting bodies has always bothered me in the same way the fact that I have to spend 1/3rd of every day unconscious bothers me. It’s curiously intimate, to the point where I’ve spent a lot of energy in my adult life seeking out a person who will cheerfully cut my hair without speaking a word to me. Being a captive audience while some jackass with a pair of scissors insists on small talk is a terrible thing, and I’ve burned through a ton of barbers in my search for the Glorious Silent Barber.

Between sitting on that booster seat and my Gloriously Silent Barber, I’ve had plenty of haircuts. I suffered through haircuts as a teenager where my barber not-so-subtly rubbed his crotch against me as he strained to reach the top of my head. I’ve endured a savage, brutal act of hair vandalism when I took my longhaired college mullet to an old Italian barber and asked for a “trim”; his disdain and dislike for me resulted in a haircut that took five seconds and left me looking like I’d recently jammed my head into some sort of terrifying machinery. I’ve spent plenty of awkward hours in SuperCuts resisting their incessant effort to upsell me hair product and shampoos, conversations that usually started with a gaslighting campaign regarding the awful state of my hair in terms of health and appearance, leading to a heartfelt endorsement of some bottle or other guaranteed to make me look like a normal human being again.

I’ve spent my time in the hair trenches. Which is why haircuts fascinate me; I tend to announce them on social media, and I write about the experience more than is normal, which is to say at all.

Socially Acceptable Weirdness

Getting a haircut is a strange experience for a guy who, you know, isn’t exactly a fan of being touched by strangers, much less touched on the head. It’s weirdly intimate. You might not mind, or even enjoy the experience, jetting off to head-touching orgies in Ibiza and the like, but to each their own, and my own does not include a weird old man putting his sweaty hands in my hair.

The other aspect of a haircut is the forced socialization. In every aspect of my life I aspire to having zero conversations with any of you people. Ironically, the only people I do want to have conversations with are the people who also don’t want conversations; the moment that changes I lose my will to speak with you. So making small talk with someone while their sweaty hands are in my hair is possibly the worst experience known to man. If anyone is ever going to spontaneously develop the ability to teleport themselves, it’s gonna be me, through sheer force of will, while some barber is telling me about his weekend.

Being Alone with Yourself

So what does all this have to do with writing? Nothing and everything.

There’s precious little time in the modern world to just sit and be alone with yourself, to have a conversation with yourself. To meditate in some sense. Yes, you can make that time, but there’s something special and creative, in my experience, with the sudden and surprising moments when you’re prevented from distracting yourself. Getting a haircut is, for me, one of those moments, because I am sloppy and pay little attention to my grooming. So my haircuts are always spur-of-the-moment things.

And then I’m sitting there, and if the damned barber will shut up I have a half hour of just staring into the void while I am groomed like a dumb animal, and I do some good thinkin’ under those circumstances. And some occasional napping. Hell, I fall asleep when I’m at the dentist. The barber has no chance.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing