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February 6, 2008No happy endings.Except for the ones that were.WAAH.Noir City 6 has ended and I am not happy. Though the program fraudulently advertised “no happy endings,” I counted at least…God, I don’t know, I just saw 20 movies in 10 days. It was one long strange trip down the lost highways of Noir, a black and white blur. But the unhappy endings were tragically so, Shakespearean in scope. I would not wish on Public Enemy No. 1—George Bush—the lousy breaks issued by Fate to Peter Lorre in “The Face Behind the Mask.” Or would I? That’s that compelling nature of Noir—imagining what you would do in the characters’ desperate situations. Would you fuck a fugitive to save your husband’s life (“Jeopardy”)? If you could relive a year of your life, what would you do differently (“Repeat Performance”)? Would you fuck over your best friend because a woman loved him and not you (“Roadhouse”)? Would you lay down your life in the line of duty exposing exploitation of illegal immigrants (“Border Incident”)? Would you force your sister into a hasty marriage so you could escape your loveless marriage in a dirty steel town (“The Hard Way”)? Would you allow yourself to burn to death to escape the torment of and protect others from the murderous “blackouts” you suffer (“Hangover Square”)? If you couldn’t get work because people were put off by your disfigured face, would you turn to a life of crime with the first person who treated you like a human being (“The Face Behind the Mask”)? DON’T BE SO QUICKto say yes or no. Sometimes it’s impossible to know what you would do until you’re faced with your own face. No one is all good or all bad, as Someone said in One of Those Movies. Which part of you will triumph in any given situation may surprise you. “STARE INTO A MIRRORlong enough and it’s hard not to wonder whether that’s a mask staring back, and if so, who’s really behind it,” said Benedict Carey in a New York Times article, “Feel Like a Fraud? At Times, Maybe You Should.” Ever suffer from that particular brand of self-doubt? Someday someone’s going to find out what a fraud you are? “You’re not as good as you think you are,” as Simon Cowl might put it. For instance, I call myself a good writer? Yes, I do. I don’t require myself to compare myself to other writers, to feel equal to, or lesser than other writers. We all just get to be ourselves and to be as good as we are. I don’t need to be as good as Vladimir Nobokov. I just need to be as good as Alexandra Jones can be. But I certainly don’t always regard myself to be a good person, a loving or caring person, or free of rancor or malice aforethought. If someone thinks I am, I might secretly feel like a fraud. If only you knew! I was disappointed when an Australian reader revealed she’d been in San Francisco and hadn’t looked me up. I might have disappointed her, though. Just as well, I told her, I am not nearly as interesting as my writing. I’ve often thought I seem like two different people, but no, my social persona is just a different aspect of me from my ability to write. You just know more about me if you have read me than you would if you hadn’t. NO ONE CARES WHAT YOU HAD FOR LUNCHis a book subtitled 100 Ideas for Your Blog Unless you’re M.F.K. Fisher. I don’t judge myself against James Joyce, but I do, however, require myself to be better than some other writers, some who get paid for being mediocre or churning out potboiling bestsellers, or some who don’t respect the English language, who use words like “springy,” “springish,” “picklize,” “semi delicious,” and (horrors!) the first use of “you’re” for “your” I’ve ever seen! “Your” for “you’re” is common as the catshit in my litterbox, but “I hope you are lunch is springy” is a new one on me. Specifically, Ellen DeGeneres maintains a lunch archive on her site. On January 25th, she had “a very special birthday lunch featuring curry chicken tacos in lettuce leaf shells with Asian coleslaw.” Sounds good, but there’s no recipe included. As I write, today, February 5th, Ellen had apricot sesame crab spring rolls, and relates,
And someone responded with this comment: “Hey Ellen, nice lookin lunch. Just wanted to let you know that it is 75 degrees here in South Carolina today. So your not the only one with springish weather today. :)” [italics mine] Aargh! Look, it’s simple enough. Anywhere you see an apostrophe, it’s standing in for a letter that’s missing. You’re = You (a)re. Your = possessive, belonging to you. You’re taking your umbrella, yes? It’s = It (i)s. Its= possessive, belonging to it. It’s too ahead of its time. “We’re”= We (a)re. Were: 1st person plural past tense (of “to be”). We’re as we were. (My junior high school English teacher gave us a test the first day of class with challenging items like: Conjugate the verb “to be.” I’m surprised he didn’t quit in despair over the results. Anyway he had his work cut out for him.) WHY DO I CARE SO MUCH?Because I’m a writer and all craftspeople respect their tools or their results are substandard. Because I am of the army of what Telegraph Books, which puts out The Daily Telegraph, calls “aggrieved sticklers for standards.” Because some writers are frauds. DeGeneres even calls attention to her use of the word “springy,” not for its meaning (“bouncy”) but for what she wants it to mean, “spring-like.” Sure “springy” sounds more descriptive, but I don’t think you want your lunch to be bouncing up and down at you from your plate. Telegraph Books has come out with a book entitled She Literally Exploded: The Daily Telegraph Infuriating Phrasebook. I would say I’m literally sick to death of sloppy English—but only if they were my dying words. Language is not static. It adapts to people’s usages and new words and meanings evolve over time. Bu that doesn’t mean anything goes. h brown just commented he doesn’t know how the Superior Court is “infrastructured,” and added, “There’s a new word for you.” I have been guilty of “Photoshopped.” Nouns becoming verbs are all the rage today. But why did the verb “to disconnect” have to become a noun (originally it was used as such in computing)? There’s a disconnect between this and that. What was wrong with “disconnection”? “Ginormous,” infuriates me because what concept does it add to either “gigantic” or “enormous”? Just another synonym, but one which sounds like mangled English (although I just read in an online dictionary that it is considered an “informal humorous” adjective). To me the humor lies in making fun of people who use it. I myself have used it, in this column, but with quotation marks to acknowledge its ridiculousness (which means both “unreasonable, unacceptable,” and “silly, amusing”). It is ridiculous that this ridiculous word has entered the dictionary! ANYWAYThough I do not ask myself to be measurably as good as some authors (do I have to be good enough to win a Nobel prize—no), I still insist on having something to say, and saying it well in a fresh way. Do we need to occupy public cyberspace with lunch and weather reports? Talk about a feature story in the Spring issue of Tell It To Someone Who Cares magazine! (Disclosure: That expression, which has entered my language, was derived from my friend Stefan’s comment, “I read it in Who Cares? magazine,” which was in turn lifted from a David Spade crack. I guess there are really no original ideas, says Stefan. Is that why we’re reduced to blogging about lunch and the weather, simply because they change every day?) I suspect, though, that DeGeneres is not concerned so much with the content or quality of her blogs as she is with communicating with her fans. Ellen’s isn’t the only lunch blog. Someone named “Biggie” asks: “Do you have a current blog that’s mostly focused on packed lunches?” If so, Biggie wants to link to you. Her blog, though, is a parent’s or cook’s “how-to” site full of recipes and tips on speed-packing. Ellen’s is concerned mostly with “lunch the way it should be (tasty and between breakfast and dinner.)”
”Today I’ll be eating a pole caught Columbia River salmon lightly salted and pan-fried.” See? She doesn’t pay attention to the words she uses. Pole is a noun. She’s saying “Today I’ll be eating a pole,” and the rest of the sentence consequently makes no sense. “Pole-caught” (with a hyphen) is an adjective specifying what kind of salmon she’ll be eating. Don’t tell me punctuation makes no difference! As a James Thurber wife says to her husband who is wearing a polka-dotted pajama top with striped pants, “Well, it makes a difference to me!” AS FOR YOU, MY READERS,if posting a blog will satisfy in you something you need or want to do, blog away. Your only risk is withstanding whatever commentary expressing yourself to the entire worldwide web generates, as DeGeneres has opened herself to my ridicule. She’s a comedian. She can write blogs and books till she’s blue, but she’s no writer. And she can legitimately call herself one, because she has written (and had published) two books, My Point…and I Do Have One and The Funny Thing Is…, both New York Times Bestsellers, which I “search inside” of on Amazon. Neither passes the First Page Test, which is Do I Want to Turn to the Second Page? But I do, I give each the benefit of three or four. But I am not going to read either of them. They’re humor books—I’m not asking them to be Les Miserables–but Ellen writes like she’s talking, with too many words and sidetracks. I’m not going to wait for her to get to the Point, whatever it may be, nor however Funny the Thing may be. Publishers did not buy her books because she’s an exceptional writer, but because she has a large and immediate market in her preexisting fan base. Ellen was in fact nervous about writing a book. “I was afraid I didn’t have anything important to say,” she wrote. “But when I began writing, I realized that although I don’t know a lot about any one thing, I know a little about a whole bunch of things: baking a pie; dancing; curing the common cold; running the Iditarod–it’s all in the book. And I realized I notice things that maybe some people don’t notice (or they don’t notice that they don’t notice). That’s all in the book, too.” OK, so she’s not a born writer; her gift is understated comedy with clever twists. Who am I to say she shouldn’t use it to write a book? Well, I’m the same as any reader gets to be—the judge and jury. I get to look through her book and decide not to buy it. “WHY AM I DOING THIS?”I told a friend I don’t read very many blogs, because there are too damn many and only so much time I want to spend in front of a screen. And some of them are concerned only with that day’s lunch. “But you want people to read yours,” said the friend. Not necessarily, said I. I want them to read it only if they like my writing; that’s why I post my columns “for whatever [they’re] worth,” for whoever chooses to read them. I’m not offended if I’m not someone’s favorite. C’est la vie. I’m still waiting for someone to tell me I’m full of shit. Ellen DeGeneres, for instance. My Portland friend Margie questioned (“Why am I doing this?) why she was transcribing and commenting on old travel journals. Because you want to, I suggested. Does there need to be more to it than that? Put them out to the universe if you want. The Internet playing field enables anyone and everyone to do that. Or try your hand at the publishing game. Or just keep them for yourself or your family. The same friend quoted Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “Each thing, just by looking at it, aroused in me an irresistible longing to write so I would not die…that word, abominable but so real, that demolishes everything in its path in order to reach its ashes in time.” And he quoted Rilke, said Margie, “If you think you are capable of living without writing, do not write.” Margie may not live to write, but she’s still a good writer worth reading, but I encourage her to write only if she wants to. I don’t write to make myself immortal, but I do write out of an irresistible longing to do what I want to and feel compelled to do (i.e., write). I wouldn’t go so far as to say you shouldn’t be writing if writing is not your be-all and end-all. Express yourself as variously as you are able and as satisfies you. I do think, though, as I’ve said, if you’re a wannabe who never gets around to writing, just allow yourself to forget it. Give yourself a break. You’re not a failure; you’re just making choices. Maybe you’ll want to make different choices at another time in your life. I myself had to force my own issue. That’s why I quit my job, why I’m selling my flat and not going back to work. I COULDN’T WEAR THE MASKany longer, the mask of a writer pretending to be a wage-slave office manager. Am I no longer wearing a mask? I don’t think I am. I no longer have dual personae, a job and a secret life as a writer. I have taken the steps I needed to take to be comfortable with calling myself one, and being one. DAVID ROCHE,founder of The Church of 80% Sincerity, has an unusual perspective on self-acceptance. His face has been severely disfigured from birth and he calls this “a gift, because my shadow side – my difficulty and challenge – is on the outside, where I have been forced to deal with it.” Many of us never have to confront our shadow sides until we’re forced to make some Noir choice or other. Maybe some of us wear a public mask so no one can see the ugliness we suspect or know is within us. “The church…is not a formal organization but a concept – the church of choice for recovering perfectionists,” Roche says in his new book The Church of 80% Sincerity. “You can be 80 percent sincere 100 percent of the time, or 100 percent sincere 80 percent of the time. It’s in that 20 percent area where you get some slack and you can be yourself.” My shadow side does make me wonder if I’m fraudulently passing myself off as a decent person. Why am I being so hard on Ellen DeGeneres, for instance? Because this mediocre writer makes millions of dollars writing when I have to sell my flat to stay in pencils? Probably—that’s the 20% of me that gets to be insincere. She’s a sweet, low-key gal, she is indeed funny and I’ve always liked her. Anyone buying her books surely doesn’t expect more than this. They read them because they like her. But for me, it is unacceptable for a published writer to write, “Hope you’re lunch is springy. “The Church was founded based on “the belief that 80 percent sincerity is about as good as it’s going to get or needs to get,” as Cody’s Books February program describes it. “It’s the belief that the other 20 percent of the time, you just get to be yourself. Anne Lamott, in her book Plan B, describes David’s message as that of ‘militant self-acceptance.’ Roche knows we all feel different and in some way unacceptable…(Our greatest gifts? Denial, resentment, and short-term memory loss. The shelf life of pure unconditional love? About 5 to 10 seconds.) “I’m happy with 80% sincerity, 20% everything else. 80% of me thinks I’m a great writer; 20% thinks I’m full of shit. And I’m 100% OK with that. WELL, SUPER TUESDAY IS HISTORYNo happy endings. Except for the ones that were. Your vote.
The author confesses she doesn’t know, she just doesn’t know. ------------------------------------------------------------ One day
Might as well face it, you’re addicted to loving and hating yourself. copyright Alexandra Jones 2008 |
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