I slept almost 10 hours last night and still don’t feel particularly great. So instead of what I should be doing this morning, I did some work on images awaiting attention. So, here. For your pleasure…
What follows is a completely personal, wholly biased view.
On average, I read between four and seven books a month. That’s cover to cover. From time to time I have a month wherein I manage ten to twelve, but that’s getting rarer. Between four and seven is what it comes out to and at that rate I’m reading fifty to eighty books a year.
I put that out there so that what follows may make more sense than the usual kind of argument about taste in reading matter and why I don’t wish to waste time on certain things.
I’m sixty, which means I have maybe fifteen, maybe thirty years left to do the things I want to do, and I’m getting picky about what fills my time. Too much trivial nonsense does simply because that’s the way life is. And it’s hard to break habits made when you were much younger and it felt like time was plentiful. I’m not being morbid, just practical. Trivia has a function. Upon trivia, friendships cement, the culture binds itself together, and the time between important things is bridged with something that at least keeps us engaged.
Anyway, given all this, plus the very important fact that I’ve been reading books (without pictures) since I was eight years old (at least—and I’m not, believe me, being critical of comics, I actively read them till I was 18 or 19 and still consider them worthwhile) and my tastes have…
I was going to say, “my tastes have changed,” and that’s certainly true, but it’s just as if not more accurate to say my tastes have evolved. I still like the same kind of things I did way back, but not in the same form I did then. When I was 12, the Lensmen were the ne plus ultra of fiction, the absolute coolest of the cool. Today? Not so much. But I still love space opera as a form. Only now I want a better example, language pitched to my level or higher, and maybe some subtext and a story that isn’t just about finding the next biggest weapon to defeat the slimy aliens but maybe tells me something interesting about human nature under unique conditions, which means characters that inhabit more than two dimensions. While I can’t get through Triplanetary anymore, I can still read Delany’s Nova or Iain Banks’ Culture novels with pleasure. Why?
No single reason, but a constellation of them resulting in what we start to recognize as serious literature. The fact is, I pick up Embassytown by China Mieville and I have an experience which simply cannot be duplicated by—
Ah, there’s a problem. We verge now on comparisons. And that gets tricky, because I don’t wish to denigrate anyone’s work. I have always tried to address the different pleasures of fiction, top to bottom, without resorting to saying So-and-So is great while Such-and-Such is crap. For one thing, a lot of people may very much like Such-and-Such and by calling it crap I am by definition saying they have bad taste. It becomes elitist in a particularly counterproductive way.
For another, this hasn’t much to do with what one likes. That word covers a lot of territory and means many vague things having to do with pleasure. No one has cause to say anyone’s pleasure is somehow less important because of its position on some presumed scale of relative value.
But that’s not the same as claiming all experiences are of equal merit. All books are not the same and yes, some are better than others. “Like” has little to do with those assessments, though.
A well prepared filet mignon is obviously “better” than a hamburger from a fast food chain. The fact that McDonalds has sold billions upon billions is not an assessment in any way that their burgers are better than the steak you’ll be served at a five-star restaurant. Popularity is not an endorsement of quality.
A rough comparison at best, but I make it to establish the idea that while you may eat more burgers than filet mignons garnished with champignon mushrooms, you know the difference and you also know it’s a question of experience that allows us to recognize the distinction and understand it. You’re going to have a deeper culinary experience with the latter.
Unless you have no taste at all and can’t tell the difference. That’s certainly possible and by the evidence of certain groups would certainly seem the case.
Enough with the culinary analogy, let me get back to choice of reading material. What I do not read any longer has to do with opting for the deeper experience. I read slowly, relative to some, and I don’t have time to tear through mediocre books. I have developed to the point where Doc Smith just doesn’t do it for me any longer. I mean, the ideas are great, the seeds of later pleasures, but the execution is pitched to the bright 12-year-old and eschews any kind of nuance. For one thing, you begin to notice eventually, if you read with any kind of acuity, that while we’re all in the far future, everyone acts and talks as if they lived in 1932 Brooklyn. Even the aliens. If it were satire, I could understand, but it’s not, it’s meant to be taken seriously. And, really, it’s the far future and everyone (even the aliens) is so white.
I want something special. I want my synapses engaged as fully as possible. If I have to do a little work to understand the full substance of a sentence, great, especially if the work pays off exponentially.
Which has resulted in a long, gradual drift away from the slam-bang of what once represented the bulk of my reading choice toward material that causes me to react in ways I find much more satisfying.
Some books require more from a reader. The reader has to rise to the level of the book. Experience teaches us to recognize these books when we find them—and sort them out from those that may be obtuse just for the sake of hiding their lack of anything to say—and experience also gives us the desire to have those experiences. Which, perhaps unfortunately, leaves us unsatisfied with less nutritious fare, fare which once filled out requirements.
This is akin to growing up. You just don’t find the things that fulfilled you as a kid to be all that wonderful as an adult.
Assuming we’ve grown up.
Okay, I am here at the point where I either have to give a concrete example or leave this whole thing a vague, kind of hand-wavy bit of stuff with the message so buried as to be useful only to those of an archaeological bent. Ordinarily, I would not feel I need to do so, but given events and circumstances in my genre of first love—science fiction—maybe I should just bite the bullet and go for it. After all, names have already been named and assertions made and being polite to the point of swallowing meaning serves no useful purpose.
I will not, however, name names. If I do, it will be those who are long dead and whose day is past. Unlike some who have dragged the discourse that is science fiction to the level of a political convention floor fight, I will not point at specific works currently in play in order to say “Here be crap” and make the bones of my argument on the unnecessarily scoured sensibilities of people who toil earnestly at their craft.
Earnestness does not inoculate anyone against doing mediocre work. Nor does it guarantee exemplary work.
What do I mean by mediocre writing?
Writing that exhausts itself by one reading, fails to fulfill the potential of its ideas, and/or rests upon cliché to make the page turn.
Good writing by contrast allows for multiple readings from which deeper meaning and new interpretations can be derived.
Sometimes you can see the difference sentence by sentence. Often scene by scene, chapter by chapter.
When you’re 12 years old, the better writing may leave you baffled, because it is not always straightforward and single-pointed. So no one should feel bad for not getting Joseph Conrad at that age.
I pick Conrad because he wrote rousing adventures. But they are so much more than that, and it’s that so much more that has seen his works continue to be published, read, and appreciated by large audiences. Once you’ve internalized the sea-going thrills and fighting in something like Lord Jim you find that, upon further or more careful reading, there is so much more. And that so much more actually calls into question the heroic æsthetic of the surface read and causes—presumably—a deep reflection on the the meaning of heroism—and cowardice—and the mythic templates we accept that define them.
Boring?
Well, if you’re bored by such contemplations, then stick with action-adventure.
If beautiful sentences bore you or you are blind to them, stick to simple plot-thickening prose.
If you are not emotionally moved in ways other than by pure adrenalization, then stick to the slam-bang thrills and avoid anything that talks about the soul in multiple ways.
(If you can read Dante’s Inferno and believe that it has anything to do with the afterlife, then stick to work more facile and less steeped in metaphor. You will do less disservice to Dante and perhaps yourself.)
In short, if a sentence like “It was strange that even sex, the source of so much solace, delight, and joy for so many years, could overnight become an unknown territory where he must tread carefully and know his ignorance; yet it was so*” reads like gibberish, seems pointless, or causes the kind of reaction that refuses to allow for the possibility that more is going on here than simply your inability to decode meaning and apprehend the layers involved, then you may have reached your limit with sentences like “What he really needed was a session with a pleasure unit in order to clear his mind for the ordeal ahead.” If you can’t understand why the former sentence is a richer text, revelatory of character in ways that the latter sentence simply not only fails to be but in some ways actively resists being, then—
But I border now on insult. In light of the current kerfluffle going on in the field, it’s hard not to, though. The essential nature of science fiction is being challenged, all in the name of what appears to be a petty rejection of message. As if science fiction has not always been message fiction.
In terms of plot and idea, if calling into question the basic assumptions by which civilization, culture, and the very lives we lead promises to be an impenetrable drudge, then I have to wonder why you claim to like science fiction at all. Because that’s what it’s all about, dislodging the reader from cozy assumptions of self-justified rightness. And no, stories wherein humanity must wage war against an alien race in order to preserve an identity which goes largely unquestioned do not represent the chief benefit of the form. The physiognomy and bloodlust of the aliens is exciting for only a brief time if there is nothing more to the story.
Yes, I’m indulging a bit of elitism here. I have nothing against well-done action stories. I read one recently that offered, or at least promised, a nice twist on the formula, but then failed to deliver and turned into a pat good-guys-cleverly-defeating-alien-menace-with-cool-explosions story. I enjoyed the ride but will never read that book again.
And that’s okay. It was even well-written in terms of character, exposition, pacing. It’s not a question of condemning things just because they aren’t Dostoevsky.
But using the author of Crime and Punishment as an example, to argue that work deserves an award precisely because it isn’t Dostoevsky is a seriously flawed idea, especially when the award in question is supposedly for the Best of Field. We give awards to the Dostoevsky’s in order to set bars and celebrate potential, not congratulate ourselves for reveling in mediocrity. To insist that the better work is undeserving because it does things differently from the usual is a statement of adolescent resentment.
However, that doesn’t seem to be the source of the spleen. It’s not that SF is message fiction, but the message being conveyed that has sparked all this contention—and who is delivering it.
It can be asserted that overall, since 1926, a good deal of SF, especially of the planetary romance and interstellar adventure variety, has been, in subtext if not overtly, imperialist. Brave Earthmen venturing forth to conquer and pacify an alien and maleficent universe. By default if nothing else, most of those high principled adventurers have been white males. That aspect wasn’t the main point of the choices made, just the default assumption based on current standards of perceived merit. John W. Campbell, jr. was an unapologetic champion of this ethic, so much so that he eventually annoyed many of his best writers with his chauvinism. Nevertheless, the model stuck, because it allowed for the continual generation of really cool stories.
Came a time, though, when we finally became a bit more introspective and realized how parochial much of it was, how chauvinistic, and, yes, how racist much of it was. So, like any healthy art form, stories began appearing that questioned these assumptions.
And the questioning resulted in a lot of really cool stories.
It may be that some folks still like the old ideas and forms so much and, coupled with a weariness of continual reassessment and moral reevaluation, yearn nostalgically for days of unquestioned heroic virtue, that the current noise in opposition to what has been derogatorily labeled as the work of Social Justice Warriors is just their way of stamping their feet and demanding unequivocal action adventure of the so-called Golden Age variety. From some of the sales numbers I’ve seen, there is a healthy market for such stories.
Speaking personally, though, please don’t try to tell me work built guilelessly on discredited values and outgrown sentiment is award worthy—and by that I mean exemplary of the best, indicative of the future, and representative of the limits of possibility.
I end this now because I am coming perilously close to venting spleen and getting personal. I’ve watched this advent over the Hugo Awards with dismay and bewilderment. There has been too much doubling down on false pretense and too much empty fury and not enough genuine debate over what is actually at issue in terms of the work. Those who have brought this to fruition have placed many of their colleagues in unfortunate situations for no good purpose, or at least for purposes poorly stated if not seriously misrepresented. If, by their lights, the “wrong” work wins a rocket this year and they continue to erupt in fury over a perceived injustice in the direction of the field, then in my opinion they seriously misunderstand the nature of the endeavor of which they claim a share.
In any event, I have looked at the work at issue and, from a purely personal vantage, like so much else in what is too little time to spare, I have to say, I just don’t read that kind of stuff anymore.
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*Okay, I’ll name one name. That sentence is from The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, whose works I suspect, were they being written and published today would bring down the disdain of those who have made loud and gaseous cause over “social justice” fiction.
I just spent an hour working on this image. It’s definitely going into the art show, but I’m pleased with it now. I’m laboriously working my way through some of the less difficult aspects of image compilation, blending, etc. So, because it’s Monday, and because I have two essays in the works requiring minute attention to detail, I offer this. New horizons, indeed.
I’m being terribly tardy keeping up with things since coming back from Pittsburgh. I have a lot to do and the doing is being difficult. But I’ve been given a clean bill for my arm, so I’m going back to the gym, but so far that’s the only thing I’ve managed to get on top of. I need to replace my computers, because they are ancient and deserve rest. Not to mention I have now gone full time at Left Bank Books. Not to mention I’m still working on a book (as always), and not to mention…
One thing I did not do was watch the GOP debates. I have enough crazy in the my life just now, thank you very much, and I can rely on the endless news cycle and friends to keep my apprised on the stupidity on display in what accounts for one of the major political parties.
Which is not in any way the implication of the title of this post. I’m not going Green Party, not yet. Rather, I thought I’d put up a new image as place marker and something pleasant for people to gaze upon while I sort through my new schedule and the pile of To Do.
On, and I did shoot this in Pittsburgh. Just, you know, for your information, as if you need it…
We took a brief vacation, long overdue, and drove up to Pittsburgh where reside our good friends, Tim and Bernadette. We hadn’t been up there in several years and this trip in no wise made up for the gap, but it was much needed stress release. Of course, this is a strange land with exotic fauna and we had to be careful in our wanderings.
But the monsters were docile, the scenery beautiful, and the sojourn eventfully uneventful. We spent a lot of time doing not much and enjoying it thoroughly. I’ll write more about it later, but for now I thought I’d leave you with one of the more pleasant vistas from the trip.
So, yes, we took a long weekend and went to Pittsburgh to see some friends we haven’t seen to relax with in too damn long. I didn’t tell anyone here because. I will tell you about the trip soon but not now. Meanwhile, here’s a placeholder, the last (official) picture I shot from the trip, at our last stop before driving into St. Louis. Enigmatic, striking, possibly confusing as hell, but interesting (perhaps) for all that. Hey, I don’t have to make sense allI the time, do I?
The other day I was taking with friends about that pesky subject, wages. Minimum wage is in the news, a big argument, and the politics are necessarily touchy. Comparisons were made and my own situation caused a bit of raised eyebrows and “What’s up with that” detours through personal histories.
According to some, among people who have known me a long time, I have always been seriously underpaid throughout my working life.
Before we get into that, though, I would like to reference this article, written by my boss, Jarek Steele, about the current anxiety-laden question of raising the minimum wage. Go read this, then come back here.
First off, I would like to say that I work at a wonderful place. Left Bank Books is now family. As you can tell from the essay, they are thoughtful, concerned people with no small amount of brainpower and good bead on life as it is and a solid moral sense. I’m lucky to work there. I’ll come back to that later.
Now. Most of my adult life I have been relatively unconcerned about my wages. I don’t know where I got this from, but I’ve always felt they were secondary to several more important factors. Some of this is naïveté, but some of it is a result of early on making a choice between security and fulfillment. For many people, money serves as fulfillment, and for some it genuinely is. They work to have. I offer no judgment here, everyone is different, and it’s all a question of degree anyway, because we fall along a spectrum.
For myself, I’ve always worked to Be.
Perhaps a small difference to some, but a huge difference over time. I came out of the box, as it were, with intentions to be a certain kind of person, to do certain things, to make a crater in the world that looks a certain way, and if the pursuit of money got in the way of that, then I ignored the money. Not consciously, because I always just assumed that somewhere along the way I would have it, mainly as a consequence of having done all the stuff that fulfilled my requirements of Being.
Now, if this all sounds a bit zen and possibly foolish, so be it. I’d be willing to bet many if not most of us have career-type dreams at some point that focus mainly of what we’re doing and not how much money we’re going to make doing it. But this is America and identity is conflated with owning things, so it becomes very difficult to tease apart the doing from the reward.
Which brings me to my rather jagged career path, which saw me graduate high school intent on a career in photography, which I pursued as an art first and foremost and, in the end, only. I never figured out how to make it pay.
So I worked for a major photofinishing chain, then a period as an in-house commercial photographer for a marginal advertising company, then as a delivery driver for a custom lab, and finally as the darkroom jockey of one of the best camera stores/black & white labs in town. That last for 20 years.
I never became the photographer I thought I’d be, at least not commercially. I did all the things. Portraits, landscape, art and abstract, architectural. Occasionally I did them for clients, but mainly I did them because they were cool to do and they produced images I wanted to see. I was Doing Photography and that was the important thing. I was fulfilled.
All the while I drew my wage from my job, which supported the art and all the other stuff.
Then I picked up the writing again. Time passed, I learned my craft, started selling stories, and then that 20 year stint of a job ended with the close of the business. Two years later I applied to and got another lab job, at which I worked for 11 years, most of them rather unhappily.
(And here the concerns over money enter in the most annoying way, because money would have been the means by which I would have been able to just write instead of having to work at something I no longer loved in order to eat.)
The story sales never added up to enough for me to quit that job.
But I was getting published. I was fulfilled, at least in the desire to Do The Thing.
Age does force one to confront certain realities. Looking back, I realized that I had never pushed for more money. I never once, in all the years of “working for a living,” asked for a raise. Somewhere in the back of my head there floated the assumption that good work brought remuneration, so if the people I worked for chose not to give a raise, then it was due to my lack of good work. I could maintain this attitude largely because, with one exception (that first job right out of high school) I have never worked for a large corporation. Never. I have spent my employed life working for small local businesses, the health of which I could see, right in front of me. They all struggled. I was part of that struggle, so adding a burden to them was not in my nature. I never asked for a raise.
Instead, I lived a life that fit with my earnings. One could do that at one time. And I did get raises, so it’s not like I’m talking about trying to scrape by on minimum wage. (Which was, btw, right around two dollars an hour when I graduated high school, and I worked for Fox Photo over a year before they granted me a ten cent an hour raise.) But I never asked. I was always grateful when they came, but I never asked. The people for whom I worked were usually close enough to the ground to show appreciation when they could. For a while I made a decent living.
Donna and I, however, had no children. That one fact explains a great deal about how we could opt to work for who we chose (often) and live as we pleased without overly worrying about income. We were careful. When we bought a house, we paid it off early. We carry no balances on our credit cards. We owe no bank anything.
And we realize how unusual this makes us.
But it also points up the major disconnect many people suffer in their lives in terms of employment and compensation. I never asked for raises because, by and large, I never had to. Had we lived a more traditional lifestyle, money would have been the single greatest driver of all our choices.
However, my comment above about being underpaid…
Several years ago an opportunity opened for me to possibly take a job as an editor at a local magazine. I’m not familiar with the task, but I’ve always been a quick learner, so I had no doubts about my ability to come up to speed, and I could offer myself for a bit less than others might. I went over the requirements of the position with a friend who had been in this end of the industry. She remarked as one point that the salary would probably be X, which was low, but in a couple of years I could probably come up to standard. I laughed and told her I’d never made that much in a year in my life.
She was flabberghasted. How, she wondered, could someone with my abilities have been so undercompensated?
Because it had never occurred to me for a long, long time that I had been. I’d been Doing The Things, and wasn’t that what mattered?
No. At least it’s not the only thing. Money is the means by which we live the kind of lives we wish to. I want “success”—monetary success—as a writer so that I can do that and nothing else. But I’m not good at that kind of success. I’ve never been adept at parlaying skills and artistic ability into money. Whatever it is that allows some people to be skilled at getting compensated, I’ve never been good at it.
And the owners of corporate America know that most people are like that. They depend on it. The main reason unions were so important is for that reason and that most people need someone who is good at understanding that game to struggle on their behalf. But the fact remains, most people take what they can get and then worry about the shortfall.
Because we have consistently misunderstood the relationship between, in the classic terms, labor and management. As the economy has changed, that misunderstanding is becoming critical, because we are collectively faced with the consequences of our failure to address it.
Business knows average people aren’t either interested or especially adept at Doing Business. That alone gives business—and I’m talking business at the disembodied corporate level here—an advantage because they take it. They can shortchange employees because they know how and their employees don’t know they have either any power or can find the means to engage management to worker advantage. Had we kept abreast of the changes to labor’s benefit these past 30 years when we shifted predominantly from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, then the present strained issue of raising minimum wages would not be so traumatic. The problem of catching up is putting strain on small to mid-level businesses that they should not have had to bear. Because we’ve been underwriting cheap product and services for decades by a disproportionate-to-reality compensation formula that treats people like parts. Read Jarek Steele’s breakdown above. Numbers, folks, and realities.
Drastic measures become necessary only because of indolence in the system. As long as the numbers of people receiving poor compensation for work that has become increasingly primary were low, the problem could be ignored. It’s not even so much that so many are trying to make full livings on minimum wage but that all wages are commensurately constrained by the growing imbalance in consumer ability to pay for what we need and want.
Then there are people like me, who frankly have never known how to care about the money. Or at least never felt the freedom to demand it, because we keep getting sidetracked by Doing The Things.
Because Taking Care of Business consumes the one thing that art demands—time. I loved doing photography. I hated running a business. I love writing. Paying attention to marketing and sales is frankly loathesome. I wish sometimes (lately more than ever) that it were otherwise, that I had that ability to engage promotions and negotiations, but I am who I am and do it only because if I don’t then some day I won’t be able to do the art anymore.
Which, by completely unconscious intent, has caused me to work locally, for people I see everyday and can talk to as friends more than as employers. I think this is a good business model, but because it is not primary in this country, because people who think very much differently set the parameters of what constitutes “business practice” for so much of the country, this is not the business model that trumps treating people like parts.
We’ve been arguing about this since the founding of the Republic, since the idea of the yeoman farmer and the independent artisan was turned into a romantic myth by the privileging of corporate giants saw a massive culling early on, when it became harder and harder for the independent owner to function in the face of cheaper prices and savage competition that stripped people of their own labor by turning them into wage-slaves. The argument went on and on, the battle raging for over a century and a half, until finally the Second World War, the Cold War, combined to usher in the era of corporate hegemony that, while not eradicating the small business managed to place the entire economy in thrall to the requirements of giants.*
Hyperbole? Consider what happens when a large corporation closes a plant or leaves a market and dozens of smaller, local businesses—those that survived the initial arrival of that corporation, at least (mainly by learning to service it)—find their customers drying up because so many of them are unemployed. Taxes dry up as well, so relief doesn’t stretch as far, and we no longer have an economy that will support a regrowth in a timely manner. Towns have been abandoned due to this cycle.
Doom and gloom? No, I think there’s enough latent ability and power in local, small business to still have a good chance at not only holding its own but of succeeding and altering the standard model. Because there is still value in prizing Doing the Things over Making the Buck, and compensation can flow in those directions. We’re looking at a crucial time where those kinds of choices are more important than they have been in a long time.
Which leaves me back at where I started, admitting to a kind of aphasia when it comes to this money thing and by and large, as inconvenient as it is, still not much interested in changing who I am in order to meet some mogul’s notion of success. I work where I work and do what I do because I can decide that “career” is not a synonym for sheer acquisitiveness.
I am lucky, as I say, and do not in any way offer my life as an example of how to do this. I might well have ended up in much worse places. But it’s the people around me who have made the difference. They all ought to be better off, but we’re all Doing The Things and making the world, at least around us, better off. Meantime, I am grateful. I can still Do The Things.
It would be good if more of us remembered or realized that that is why we work so hard.
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* Consider further the completely bass ackwards relationship between large corporations and local communities wherein the community is required by circumstance to bride the corporation to set up shop—a bribe done with tax money, which means the community starts off impoverishing itself for the “privilege” of hosting an entity that will then extract profits from that community to distribute among people who do not live there. And when the latent wealth of that community has fallen sufficiently that the profits to the corporation are less than deemed desirable, they then close up shop and leave, the community having grown dependent to such a degree that, scaffolding removed, the local economy collapses, partially or completely. What should be the case is the corporation ought to pay the community for the privilege and the relationship should be one where the community as host is a primary shareholder and gets compensated first. Unworkable someone in the back says? Not so. Alaska did this will the oil companies decades ago and every Alaskan since gets a stipend from Big Oil. Or did till recently.
Confession time. I have never assumed that I am a good writer. I have never taken the position that I know what I’m doing, that I deserve respect, or that I am in any way special as a writer. My default sense of self is that I’m still trying, still learning, still reaching, and I haven’t “got there” yet. If, therefore, I write something that touches a reader, that evokes a positive response, that, given the opportunity, causes them to tell me how much they liked that story or novel of mine they read, I am always surprised and quietly pleased and a bit more hopeful that one of these days I might fully allow myself to acknowledge my own talent.
But I never let myself believe I deserve anything like that. Ever.
Initially, this came out of an inborn reticence characteristic of the fatally shy and an aversion to being the center of anyone’s attention. But you grow out of that eventually, or at least I did, because you come to realize you have nothing special about which to be shy. Also, that shyness is detrimental to your happiness when it causes you to pass up opportunities you might desperately want to embrace. It’s replaced, then, by a gradual sense of politesse, of what you might consider good manners, and a deep desire to be liked. Braggards are generally not liked, so you hide your light so you don’t become That Guy.
Too early success can derail your journey to becoming someone you might wish to be by replacing a perfectly natural humility with the idea that, hey, you really are something special! Nastiness can ensue.
I am very aware of my potential for being That Guy, the boor, the boaster, the “all about me” asshole. Part of me wants to be all of that, or at least have all the attention that leads to that. Why else would I have always been involved in work that has such a public aspect? Art, music, theater (very briefly), and writing. All of it has a Dig Me facet, especially if you have any ambition to make a living at any of it. You have to put the work out there, you have to take credit, you’re the one people have to identify with something they like in order for you to get paid. It’s all a recipe for assholedom, because you can so easily believe the hype that comes with success, and start acting like you deserve it all.
You don’t. You’ve earned it, perhaps, but you don’t deserve it.
If you don’t see the difference, then try harder. Deserving something in this instance implies believing it’s your due, regardless. Just by existing in the world, certain accommodations ought to accrue, whether you have done the work or not. We do have a category of things which fit that description—they’re called rights and everyone deserves them, they are not commodities to be dolled out according to some kind of intrinsic worth meter that suggests some people are better or more important than others. For the special stuff, we work and earn regard. It’s not “due” us by virtue of who we are.
But even in that, it’s not necessarily we who merit the regard but the work. If it has our name on it, then we get to accept the award when it’s handed out, but it’s the work that’s being honored.
We are in no way in charge of that process.
This is hard, I admit. How is the work to be separated from the one who does it? You can’t do it, really, but that’s not the point. The point is how what you put into the world impacts others and creates a space wherein honor and respect are given and received. It’s a condition of regard, one that acknowledges distinctions, sometimes fine ones, in which the work may well deserve an honor but, if given, the creator can only be said to have earned it.
That’s a negotiation and depends entirely on the relationship between creator and audience.
That Guy forgets or never understands that the relationship is what matters here. That in fact when respect and honor are given, it must be returned. Without that relationship, that process, there is no honor and awards are empty gestures.
So, all by accident, because I arrived here without a clear intent, I confess that I have never felt myself to be deserving of special consideration. I don’t think of myself as a good writer, even though I would very much like to be and hope that maybe I am. When one of my stories (or photographs or a musical performance) is praised, I am always surprised—and pleased—because it’s always unexpected.
It’s possible that, in terms of career, I have this all bassackwards, that I really ought to be pushing myself on people and, in the absence of praise, making scenes and telling people how ignorant or biased they are because they don’t like my work. Maybe I should be actively campaigning for honors, prodding, coaxing, cajoling, hard-selling myself and insisting on my worth, letting people know that I deserve something which they seem to be denying me. My sales might go up.
But I’d be That Guy and I don’t want to live with him.
One of the givens I practice in my dealings with readers is to never ask what they thought of the story. Never. That invites the potential for embarrassment. You put them on the spot and you open yourself for criticism. The common solution to that awkward exchange is dissimulation. Certainly honesty is unlikely and perhaps unwelcome. Never ask. If the praise is not forthcoming without prompt, leave it alone. Asking is fraught with pitfalls, the first of which is that comparisons are inevitably made. Praise, like all courtesies, cannot be demanded, even politely, because the expectation subverts it.
And you then become That Guy.
Especially if you ask in public.
I’m being circumspect in this. I trust some folks will understand what this is, in part, about. For everyone else, let it be the confession offered above, an explanation and description of one of the peculiarities of trying to be an artist in a public practice, a peak inside, as it were.
I never think of myself as a good writer. And I hope I’m not That Guy.
Thank you for your time and attention.
I’m procrastinating this morning, distracting myself from a stubborn short story I want very badly to finish but only if it’s finished right. So I decided to do something else until the solution to the problem presented itself.
This is a sketch. I intend to go back in at some point and do a better job, for now this is the result of about 40 minutes of adding color to an image to get a new effect. I’m calling it Enchanted Forest for now, but given how easy it is to lose oneself in this process I could just as well call it The Forest of No Return.
Anyway, enjoy.
It seems longer, but it’s only been a bit over a month since my surgery. Everything, according to the People Who Know, has been going well. The last couple of weeks I’ve been encumbered with a brace, which is intended to keep me from moving my arm in a manner likely to impede healing. It’s been awkward.
But this, too, will soon end. According to Patrick, my physical therapist, I’m tracking the way I should be—even a bit better than expected (for age, injury, disposition)—and he estimates the brace can come off after May 8th. I’ll still have therapy to go through and it will be a few months before I’m battling superfoes and lifting cases of books, but I will at least be able to scratch my nose, comb my hair, and eat my meals with my right hand. It’s the small things one misses most, mainly because you never think about them until you can’t do them.
So I have that to look forward to. I’m wondering now if I should use this shot as my official author photo or something…
