Heres the intro to Dont Call Them Pieces: Excursions in Art, Music, Literature, Film, and the Writing Life. Composed it today after doing some Rolling Stone work. Getting closer to the completion of book #5. The paragraphing is weird when you paste these things in, and italics dont carry over, but you get the idea. Introduction Behorned I’m sitting in an agent’s office in New York City. She’s looking at me strangely, running the backs of her thumb and forefinger across the underside of her chin. I’m used to this kind of look. In this instance, I’d already been on the receiving end of that “what-have-we-here” gaze earlier in the day at another agent’s office. He was rather more brusque than this one, but I think he meant well enough. Or he wasn’t trying to be mean, anyway, when he finally broke the silence of his stare by both announcing and concluding at once, “I’m not saying I dislike you. You’re just…odd.” “You mean what I do is odd?” More silence and staring. “Yes. Odd. I don’t know what you are.” The look suggests to me a child, confused, staring at a duckbill platypus in a zoo. I am not sure duckbill platypuses are in zoos, to be honest, given how rare I assume them to be, but were one in one, I’d like to see it, although it’s not the duckbill platypus that the kids would probably want to take home and befriend (be-pet?) like the koalas and the pandas. Finally, the thumb and finger stopped stroking the chin, and this other agent spoke. “You’d be better off if you wrote on one thing, like, food, for instance. And only published three things a year.” “All on food?” “Yes.” “Why?” “Because then I would know what you do. I could say, ‘that’s Colin, one of my writers. He writes on food.’ No confusion. Just food.” “Three times a year?” “Exactly. Because right now, I don’t know what you are.” Her husband was a book publisher. That’s often how these things tend to go. A book publisher who received a manuscript from me once and told me it was illegal—illegal!—for writers to act as their own agent. I thanked this one for her time, declined her offer of representation, and raced outside to beat pavement, knowing full well what I was and what accounted for the confusion. I was, and am, a writer. No limits. Not a foodie, not a critic, not a short story creator, or a novelist. A writer. Or, more to the point, a storyteller. Stories are what I have always cared about most. Mine just happened to have different proper nouns from one to the other. Simple, right? Other people could put the labels on them. But whether I am writing about architectural teardowns, the best concert the Beatles ever gave, Victorian decadent poetry, Jackson Pollock, Stone Roses bootlegs, Star Wars, men on Cape Cod who never existed out in the world we all walk around in, apparitions in the shape of eyes, Bram Stoker, a woman who floats past a house by the sea, The Searchers, or John Coltrane, it’s all the same to me: stories. These days, writers tend to focus on a niche of a niche of a niche. If you are a writer, chances are it isn’t your day job—teaching is—or you’re on staff somewhere; there are very few of us Hessian-like hired guns roaming about the forest. But a writer in 2013 wouldn’t write on all music, but rather jazz (with, say, a speciality in hard bop or swing), or current pop, or old rock, or opera, or baroque music, and so on. It’s highly unlikely you’d be bouncing from Chopin to Metallica to the Arctic Moneys and on to Eric Dolphy, early film soundtracks, and C.P.E. Bach. But if you did, it’d be that much more likely that you’d turn up somewhere writing on hockey, or Jules Verne, with short stories coming out, too, doing your bit in high circulation, million-plus venues, and literary magazines that are lucky to make it to the bookstore. ESPN The Magazine in the morning, Rolling Stone at mid-day, the Virginia Quarterly Review around everyone else’s quitting time, The Atlantic up until midnight, some novel work before bed to see how the guy/character from the suburbs who dresses up as Ben Franklin is getting on off in his world, where he has been waiting for the writer’s return. I figured, for a while, naively, that this life—my life, presently—was how it was supposed to go if you had set out to be a writer, a journey I began at the age of three. It was a journey I was always conscious of, with goals in mind, goals that sometimes came into sharper focus depending on where I was in the journey, whether that was staying in at recess in third grade to work on a new story, or cracking The New Yorker for the first time, or seeing my books come out, or that day when everything clicked into place, and writing became like hitting a beach ball slowly tossed up to the plate, something that was easy to do, with no blank screens and never so much as a second’s hesitation, fingers perpetually flying, or works coming fully formed into the mind in between strides on the day’s seven mile walk to the museum. As a kid, I fretted that I wouldn’t ever attain this mantle that you read about of being an intellectual. It sounded so impressive. Like you needed years and years of learning all kinds of things. Learning that went way beyond school, like there was this secret club you had to gain membership to. I was always interested in a range of topics. A huge range. Pretty much everything but politics. And if something interests me, I remember it. What’s more, I study it, and I mean hardcore; it is against my nature to dabble. I kept Daily Logs, like a ship’s captain—arrrrrrr—of everything I had listened to, screened, read, written. That Beatles bootleg—heard that 10,235 times. Nosferatu—screened it forty-seven times. Tender is the Night—read it six times. Let’s do this—full-on immersion. I was thinking of all of this as I sat in front of that agent with the husband with his dubious take on the law. Some days you feel like you’re a Triceratops long after the other Triceratops are gone. It’s kind of neat what you are, and you certainly have a different life going on, at that point, than the other beings you encounter. But they give you that look. The “I-can’t-figure-you-out” look, and when you are on your journey to your destination—which is to say, you’ve yet to arrive at the spot that will turn confusion into more celebratory talk—this look can be more dispiriting than someone just up and kicking your ass in some alley. Sometimes, theories are sounded. The go-be-a-foodie agent asked if I had a team of writers, each with their own special areas of expertise, who simply used my name, like a brand. Of course, she didn’t know that the famous magazine with the circulation of a million might pay you $100, and you have to fight for months or years to get that $100, and that you do on your own as well, and that my clothes are not uncommonly held together with Shoe Goo, pretty good proof that I was priced out of this hire-a-team-of-writers market. What you really become as the Hessian in the forest, in addition to a writer, is a bill collector, a salesman, a publicist, an agent because you realize you are better at agenting than the bulk of the actual agents and it seems like they wish to know you mostly so you can introduce them to editors they should know but do not. Sometimes, you are dismissed a generalist, as though you could fake your way through a learned work on Russian futurist poetry, or the entire history of Sherlock Holmes films; such dismissals, which have more to do with what other people are not and can’t conceive of being, always make me want to shout: You’re allowed to know things! There’s no limit—you can know as much as you’re capable of knowing. It’s not capped. But the entire time, my entire life, I thought, tell stories. That was always my mantra, my directive, my reason for existing. Stories are what matter. In college, I wrote for my school newspaper. I was fired. They said I sucked too much at writing. Okay. In class, I got lousy grades from professors who also said I sucked at writing. I knew this wasn’t true, but I also knew I was writing in a different way, a way that, if I reviewed an album, I wasn’t really reviewing an album. Because when you review an album, the chances are very low that the reader reading what you write is going to go out and buy that album. It’s not really this Consumer Reports sort of deal. You, in essence, are the show. Your writing is the show. That is the thing, the take away thing, or it would be with me, anyway, a truth that manifested itself to me early on, and which I knew, instantly, would be central to my life and work. And you also want to interest people who aren’t normally interested in what you’re putatively writing about, whether that’s Jules Verne or architectural teardowns or Joy Division. And to do that, you have to give people something to relate to, to see themselves in. Something to connect with, something that makes them feel. You need a story. If you’re writing what I always called an “official story”—that is, it’s going into the fiction section of the magazine—and you have some guy pull up outside a house to meet his girl or confront his ex-wife or whatever, and it’s out in the country, and the guy was inspired by some film the night before, and he has rock music playing, and the house is rather old, well, you need to know a lot about cinema, perhaps, and architecture, birds, trees, and music to, if not set that scene, get that scene set in your head, as a writer, so you can be in the story, so you can put your reader in the story, such that they don’t feel like they’re reading at all. That’s the trick of writing: make the reader feel like they’re not reading. Take the reading out of it. Homework is reading. What you are experiencing in that book late at night when everyone else is asleep or you think they are and meanwhile you are off in some other place: that is not reading. That is something that transcends reading. That is experiencing. Living. Living in ways you’ve not lived before or thought you could. Becoming more alive than you were before you retired for the night. All by just sitting there in your bed and having something happen to you. Sometimes, the characters have existed out in the world; sometimes they exist at that very moment; sometimes they never had corporal existence, but that doesn’t make them less real as characters. And the common denominator of their respective souls as characters? Stories. I had this girlfriend once who went to Yale—a most important fact to her—and said she was a poet and that her named rhymed with banana. It wasn’t even close to rhyming with banana, and that really threw me. She’d phone, and in this arch voice, say, “Tell me, what piece are you working on here at this late hour?” Turns out she was loaded on cough syrup, but I didn’t know that at the time. It was always that, this talk of piece and pieces, and I found myself thinking, “a piece of what?” Why would anyone set out to create a portion of something? Stories weren’t pieces. They were rich and full. Don’t call them pieces, I’d think. Pieces are those things you read that often require foreknowledge on the subject, or you to be into the subject before coming across the piece in question. I never wanted that for my own work, I didn’t see the point, and it would have been limiting to myself and what I long ago set out to try and do. And the notion of pieces was exclusionary to me. Something good stories never are. They can be loaded with facts and truths you didn’t know, and they can feature deep analysis, they can change how you hear your favorite record, alter your own critical take on your once-favorite novel, get your ass in gear with Netflix to check out some film you had never heard of, make you send a check for membership to your local art museum, or just entertain and edify you for five, ten, forty-five minutes, a couple hours, however long it takes to get through that particular story. So that’s what I am. I’m these pages, really. If you prick me, yeah, I’ll bleed, but no biggie, in one sense. My soul is housed in parchment. In stories. I even wrote all of these works with a little cardboard horn, fashioned from that thing at the center of a paper towels roll, affixed to my forehead with Scotch tape, just to get me in Triceratops mode. That part’s not true. But everything in the following pages is, in some form or other. Bloody labels. So: thanks for picking me up, and nice to meet you, Reader. Let’s take a stroll together…
Posted on: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 17:51:25 +0000
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