Showing posts with label writing life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing life. Show all posts

Sunday, March 13, 2016

Consolation? Perhaps, but not a prize





Artists struggle to survive in age of the blockbuster

RUSSELL SMITH

Special to The Globe and Mail


In the artistic economy, the Internet has not lived up to its hype. For years, the cybergurus liked to tell us about the “long tail” – the rise of niches, “unlimited variety for unique tastes” – that would give equal opportunities to tiny indie bands and Hollywood movies. People selling products of any kind would, in the new connected world, be able to sell small amounts to lots of small groups. Implicit in the idea was the promise that since niche tastes would form online communities not limited by national boundaries, a niche product might find a large international audience without traditional kinds of promotion in its home country. People in publishing bought this, too. The end result, we were told, would be an extremely diverse cultural world in which the lesbian vampire novel would be just as widely discussed as the Prairie short story and the memoir in tweets.





In fact, the blockbuster artistic product is dominating cultural consumption as at no other time in history. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on each successive Hunger Games, and the rep cinemas have closed. A few sports stars are paid more individually than entire publishing houses or record labels earn in a year.

A couple of prominent commentators have made this argument recently about American culture at large. The musician David Byrne lamented, in a book of essays, that his recent albums would once have been considered modest successes but now no longer earn him enough to sustain his musical project. That’s David Byrne – he’s a great and famous artist. Just no Lady Gaga. The book Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment, by business writer Anita Elberse, argues that the days of the long tail are over in the United States. It makes more sense, she claims, for entertainment giants to plow as much money as they can into guaranteed hits than to cultivate new talent. “Because people are inherently social,” she writes cheerily, “they generally find value in reading the same books and watching the same television shows and movies that others do.”





Well, the same appears to be true of publishing, even in this country. There are big winners and there are losers – the middle ground is eroding. Publishers are publishing less, not more. Everybody awaits the fall’s big literary-prize nominations with a make-us-or-break-us terror. Every second-tier author spends an hour every day in the dismal abjection of self-promotion – on Facebook, to an audience of 50 fellow authors who couldn’t care less who just got a nice review in the Raccoonville Sentinel. This practice sells absolutely no books; increases one’s “profile” by not one centimetre; and serves only to increase one’s humiliation at not being in the first tier, where one doesn’t have to do that.





Novelists have been complaining, privately at least, about the new castes in the literary hierarchy. This happens every year now, in the fall, the uneasiness – after the brief spurt of media attention that goes to the nominees and winners of the three major Canadian literary prizes, the Scotiabank Giller, the Governor-General’s, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust. The argument is that the prizes enable the media to single out a few books for promotion, and no other books get to cross the divide into public consciousness. And, say the spurned writers, this fact guides the publishers in their acquisitions. Editors stand accused of seeking out possible prize-winners (i.e. “big books”) rather than indulging their own tastes. This leads, it is said, to a homogenized literary landscape and no place at all for the weird and uncategorizable.





But even if this is true, what can one possibly do about it? Abolish the prizes? No one would suggest this – and even the critics of prize culture understand that the prizes were created by genuine lovers of literature with nothing but the best intentions, and that rewarding good writers financially is good, even necessary, in a small country without a huge market.

It’s not, I think, the fault of the literary prizes that the caste system exists. Nor of the vilified “media” who must cover these major events. It’s the lack of other venues for the discussion and promotion of books that closes down the options. There were, in the nineties, several Canadian television programs on the arts. There were even whole TV shows about books alone. Not one of these remains. There were radio shows that novel-readers listened to. There were budgets for book tours; there were hotel rooms in Waterloo and Moncton. In every year that I myself have published a book there have been fewer invitations and less travel. Now, winning a prize is really one’s only shot at reaching a national level of awareness.






So again, what is to be done? What does any artist do in the age of the blockbuster? Nothing, absolutely nothing, except keep on doing what you like to do. Global economic changes are not your problem (and are nothing you can change with a despairing tweet). Think instead, as you always have, about whether or not you like semicolons and how to describe the black winter sky. There is something romantic about being underground, no?

Look on the bright side: Poverty can be good for art. At least it won’t inspire you to write Fifty Shades of Grey.




BLOGGER'S NOTE. I re-ran this article strictly to make myself feel better. I was surprised to see how old it is, but in three years, things have only gotten worse. Strangely enough, it helps. It helps me feel that maybe-just-maybe I'm not the only one, though talking about failure is the greatest taboo and career-sinker there is. I don't remember seeing a single article about it on the internet, except for "oh, I was such a failure" followed by "but here is what I did to overcome this failure and find soaring success." Failure is something that really doesn't happen unless you go on to succeed, right? This is reflected by all those chirpy little Facebook memes about failure being a wonderful thing that you should "embrace", not be afraid of, and see as a stepping-stone to greater and greater victories. But what if it doesn't happen that way?

When this article first came out, I felt a tremendous amount of comfort in these words, but it's the only piece I've ever found that dares to criticize the industry. Or something. The whole system? In no way, shape or form do I blame individual publishers for this state of affairs, because they're just trying to survive. It's a juggernaut, and if "numbers" are any indication (and sheer numbers of "likes" and "stars" are now the ONLY measure of a writer's worth), I've failed.




I've seen fellow writers strive and strive and hurl their work at the wall, and once in a while it cracks. I'm not so sure I am willing to do that. The system was always hard, but it wasn't impossible. I didn't sell a huge number of copies of my first two novels, but I guess you could say they were critically well-received. "Fiction at its finest" from the Edmonton Journal now seems particularly heartbreaking. The Montreal Gazette books section gave me an entire page, with (mysteriously) a huge picture of me in colour, and said this book deserved to be on the bestseller list but never would be, because it was published and publicized on such a small scale. So the praise was sort of backhanded, after all, and only set up false hopes.

I thought I had a shot.

I didn't, and I know now that it would've been better, if I wanted TGC to see the light of day, to just set up a blog for it and hope for the 10 - 25 views I usually get. But it's 10 - 25 more views than I'd get if I did nothing. 

I can't lie in wait any more. I have to "move on", wherever "on" is. "Let go", and not "let God" because there isn't one, though I was a lay minister and taught Bible classes for fifteen years. Now THERE is a story of heartbreak, but I didn't just make it up out of my own head.




I know I don't make myself popular by getting into this stuff, as it's seen as "being negative", which is a big no-no no matter how dire things are. Just paste a smile on and keep turning that facet of yourself towards the world/social media (though turning and turning and turning it like that can be completely exhausting). People who are seriously interested in writing (or becoming writers, which is another thing entirely) want to believe that I am an anomaly. I suspect I'm not. The difference is, I talk about it, openly admit I have failed, and no one else does. If somebody tells me not to do something, I will immediately want to do it. And usually I do, fuck the consequences, because as a writer, it is all I have. Shouldn't I be able to write about anything I want or need to? I will continue to, whether it is popular or not. It does not matter, in the long run. In the world's terms, success will never come to me, even though I have been told over and over again that I have the "right stuff".

So I will write whatever comes into my head. No law against it. And I can guarantee it will always be honest and tell my truth, whether it would fit on a Facebook meme or not.


Sunday, March 2, 2014

My hero bares his nerves: hopelessness and hope in the writing life





When I renamed my blog after Harold's professional moniker, I made a vow to myself that I would not write "essays", that in fact I would write whatever-the-fuck I wanted to, always, because at the time it was all I had. So here lies a bunch of thoughts, along with a sinking, fainting hope, a glimpse of a deer; no, not a doe but a buck, magnificently muscled about the neck, which I feverishly pursue even in full knowledge of the spiked collar around his neck which proclaims, pursue me not, nor touch me; I belong to everyone, but not to you.

So. Lately on Facebook, which I have mixed feelings about, I've seen a few posts that speak to me, whether for good or ill. One particularly poignant piece was about a young woman, a university student, who experiences chronic low-grade depression which sometimes becomes disabling under academic pressure. Not one health-related agency in the school would help her, in fact they all looked either puzzled or embarrassed when she asked who she should approach, or just shrugged her off with "I don't know" (perhaps the worst of all, as if she was the only person in the world who had been diagnosed with some mysterious and untreatable disease).





What's that about? Is no one allowed to be damaged, to need surcease? Are we all supposed to be constantly stoking ourselves for the feverish race, the incessant jockeying for position (nowhere more in evidence than in academia)?  Or are people just craven in their inability to risk compassion?

I saw another post which frankly ravaged me, a poem I've quoted here several times:

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

I know about that feverish chase, for it has occupied a huge chunk of my life to date. In writing a novel about the incredible life and career of silent screen comedian Harold Lloyd, I became enraptured, even inhabited. I felt I not only knew him, but was with him. (If that sounds totally nuts, I hope you'll at least read the book to find out for yourself.) And yet, there was always some aspect of him that was elusive, even unknowable.




Fainting, I rushed through the bracken, falling and getting up again, sometimes catching just a glimpse of the impossibly fleet deer with the glancing diamonds about its neck. Thomas Wyatt in his insane passion for the doomed Anne Boleyn knew of this, I am sure of it. The drivenness, the hopelessness, the failure that just stokes the fires of pursuit. 

Well, why not do something else, then? I realize with no small measure of horror that I'm really not much good at anything else. I have spent my entire life pursuing something that would appear to be doomed. Thus the Wyatt poem doesn't just speak to me: it screams in my ear, run. . . RUN!





And yet, and yet. I am still filled with a fizzy excitement about this book. I can't help myself. it relit the flame for me when I was sure I would never write a novel again, or at least one that I felt I could send out and sell. Blogging was a consolation, and, for a while, my longstanding gig as a book reviewer, until even that outlet dried up in the wake of nearly-nonexistent books sections filled with "canned" reviews. But surely I would never again allow the heartbreak of full-length fiction to take over my life. 

On Facebook I read of professional magazine writers who can no longer write for magazines, and I see why. I don't buy or read them except in my dentist's waiting room, but when I do, I keep searching for content and find virtually none, just the glossy flab of more, and more, and more ads. The actual magazine starts some 50 pages in, if it starts at all. Someone has deemed that readers want a brief chunked-up Facebook-type read, skip, skip, skip. I know I should not be so contemptuous of this, because the truth is I do it myself.




According to Facebook, and let's face it, Facebook is a different Facebook for everyone who is "on" it, things are pretty bad in literary-land, even in the once-comforting groves of Academe where you are no longer allowed to express your pain (perhaps part of the happy-face syndrome of social media). It's a crap shoot, though (more crap than shoot), and as people incessantly tell me, it has always been that way. A line from Dylan Thomas insanely jumps into my head: "My hero bares his nerves along my wrist". What does it mean? Jesus on the cross? Heroin abuse? Sex? Death? The Colossus that was toppled or washed away in a tide of booze? Thomas had every advantage a poet could have, was lionized and widely published and even (gasp) appreciated, and yet, like too many poets before/after him, the result of his "success" was that he went broke and died.

When I am in this turquoise/cobalt state I listen to too much Shostakovich, and as is normal for abnormal me, I fixate on one work and play it to death. Lately it has been the towering Fifth Symphony: not just any version, but the revered Bernstein interpretation from the 1960s. My hero bares his nerves, indeed. Bares his ache. I'm not sure what Shostakovich was like, though I remember reading that a great deal of his music was written for Mother Russia. Perhaps that even explains the triumphant ending of the searing, almost-unbearably dysphoric Fifth. OK, let's go major here, because really, we don't have any choice.




And the rest of the time he wrote movie music, which was probably kick-ass, and there's nothing wrong with that because 95% of movie scores are dreck. But he was keeping body and soul together, was he not? Nothing wrong with that. Or so it seems. We have no record of what he thought about it.

And as for Bernstein, once a magnificent bubble of brilliant ego, he deteriorated with the years, and NOT because after years of hiding he decided to come out of the closet. He deteriorated because, like Dylan Thomas, he drowned in alcohol, falling off the podium and propositioning young men at random.




Harold Lloyd didn't sell out, or at least I don't think he did. But in spite of the fact that he certainly didn't need the money, he made one last grab at a comeback in a strange film called The Sin of Harold Diddlebock.  This was shot in the early 1940s, and if Harold's "boy" of the 1920s was dated with the advent of sound, he was downright archaic in the '40s, when Tracy and Hepburn were working themselves into a comic fever. It's not that he didn't look good - he did - but in a sense, he was a 50-year-old boy, a man trapped in amber and stopped in time whose career and love life had not advanced in more than 20 years.

I didn't like this film, nor did the public, but what ruined it wasn't just Harold's legendary clash with the smart and snappy director Preston Sturges (who is named Sterling Prescott in my novel). It was the opening, in which for the first time we see the Glass Character deeply depressed. I still can't watch it: Lloyd is a subtle, mercurial and often brilliant actor, which is the key to his comic genius, and when he plays depressed, it's depressed. It's painful. We don't want to see the Boy that way. The picture was supposed to be a continuation of The Freshman, but since when was the Freshman supposed to turn out like this?




He chased after a successful comeback, and ran and grabbed, and for all his phenomenal determination, he didn't win, the prize slipped through his fingers. To his credit, he did NOT drown himself in alcohol or otherwise go insane, but turned his formidable energies to other things, positive, life-affirming things,  including philanthropy.

Is there a lesson? I am no good at lessons, or I wouldn't write at all. I simply have to do this, though I still don't know what "this" will mean. It took me three years of pain to find a home for Harold, I was beginning to lose all hope, and now this, another chance! I'd rather feel the pain of success (with all its attendant horrors) than the existential funk of failure, scrambling around to find meaning in it all.





My hero bares his nerves along my wrist
That rules from wrist to shoulder,
Unpacks the head that, like a sleepy ghost,
Leans on my mortal ruler,
The proud spine spurning turn and twist.
 
And these poor nerves so wired to the skull
Ache on the lovelorn paper
I hug to love with my unruly scrawl
That utters all love hunger
And tells the page the empty ill.
 
My hero bares my side and sees his heart
Tread, like a naked Venus,
The beach of flesh, and wind her bloodred plait;
Stripping my loin of promise,
He promises a secret heat.
 
He holds the wire from the box of nerves
Praising the mortal error
Of birth and death, the two sad knaves of thieves,
And the hunger's emperor;
He pulls the chain, the cistern moves.



"You had me at hello"

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!


Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Valentine poems: an arrow in the heart





Valentine, O, Valentine / I'll be your love and you'll be mine,
We'll care for each other, rain or fine / and in 90 years we'll be 99.
-Ian Serraillier


If you won't be my Valentine / I'll scream, I'll yell, I'll bite.
I'll cry aloud, I'll start to whine / If you won't be my Valentine.
-Myra Cohn Livingston


Plenty of Love / Tons of kisses
Hope some day / To be your Mrs.
-Author Unknown




My love is like a cabbage / Divided into two
The leaves I give to others / The heart I give to you.
-Author Unknown


Valentines is near / Just wishing you were here
You will always be near / My heart will never be the same
-Jose Villalpando

Are we friends, Are we not / You told me once, but I forgot.
So tell me now and tell me true / So I can say I'm here with you.
-Author Unknown




Raindrops on our dresses / Sunshine on our face,
No matter what the weather / The look of love won't be replaced.
-Donna Wallace

I was lonely, sad, and blue / until the day that I meet you.
You came into my life and changed it around / turned my frown upside down.
-Author Unknown


To see my darling on his special day / Would put two Valentine wishes at bay.
Happy Birthday to him is the Valentine for me / Then two hearts once again get to share ecstasy.
-Lisa D. Myers




Someone asked me to name the time / Of when our love became sublime.
I searched high and low but could not find / It within the vast regions of my mind.
So now as I close it is time / Would please be my Valentine.
-Author Unknown

There's nothing in this world / That can express my love
You're as beautiful as an angel / And pure as a dove.
-Osman Espinoza





I searched high and low (as in one of the poems, above) to find Valentine poetry that is not terrifically bad (some of it is gross or obscene, which just does not do it for me), but truly mediocre. This is poetry with good intentions, poetry that doesn't KNOW it's bad. It's the Stairway to Stardom of Valentine verse, not quite rhyming, not quite NOT rhyming, with meter (if there is any) that is all over the place.


This collection appeared along with snippets by Shakespeare and Dorothy Parker ("one perfect rose"), which of course had to go. Some of these are by "known" writers, even known poets, which amazes me. The Florence Foster Jenkins of verse, perhaps?


I remember my crazy brother Arthur and I having a bad poetry contest which we called Peotry Korner. "Hey, that's spelled wrong!" one of our friends exclaimed. We were so dumb, and he needed to point that out! I think I may have won the contest with this:


"When skies R grey
and it precipitates
You remind me
of a load of wet hay.
Happy Doomsday -
glad you're not here."




I was briefly part of a truly hair-raising "writer's group" called Women and Words, in which the main goal seemed to be not writing by a variety of means. We drank sangria, we talked about our kids and household products, and then someone came up with an idea for fundraising: not an anthology of our writing, but a COOKBOOK! I noticed the group had a "poetry expert", a little old lady with her hair in a bun and a print dress, as if someone had rocketed back in time to the 1950s to collect her. "Doris is our poetry expert," someone said, and Doris colored, saying, "Oh no no no no no."


Several times I heard statements from people like, "I just can't stand all that modern poetry. It doesn't even rhyme." Sooner or later someone had to get up to recite. The poems were not unlike the examples above (and I'm sorry I'm sounding so mean - I know I am - but this was just so frustrating for me, as I'd had high hopes for the group helping to dig me out of the landslide of loneliness I was trapped in).


"Oh mighty eagle who flies so high in the sky
Every time I see you I wonder why
Why you lift your wings and fly so high
Oh mighty eagle who flies so high in the sky"


The standard response to a poetry reading was, to a person, "Oh that's LOVE-ly!". I wondered if that really passed for a critique. By this time I was afraid to get up and read my own self-absorbed laments, most written in abstract form.  I just now realized that a version of this gathering found its way into my first novel, Better than Life, in which a Christlike, charismatic stranger named Bob attempts to initiate the good ladies of Harman into the mysteries of Yeats and Kahlil Gibran.




I went to two sessions of this group, and at the second one it looked as if we had attracted some actual writers (and one of the ladies outright admitted, "Oh, I don't really do any writing, I just come along for the social part"). One fiercely beautiful black woman got up and cast webs of fire over the room, after which there was dead silence.


"Well," said the old lady expert.


"Keep working on it," said Bev, the unofficial matriarch (unofficial, my ass - everything she said was law!). The writer looked distinctly uncomfortable. Another writer had built the substructure for a play, showing a definite talent for discernment - what doesn't need to be there, in other words - thus constructing the foundation for a major work.


Not much comment there, either.





At a certain point, when I made the embarrassing admission I'd written a novel (a truly bad novel, though at the time I thought it was pretty good), someone exclaimed, "Oh, are you Margaret Gunn?" I wanted to say "ING". I had a weekly column in the local paper then, but it seemed she had only managed to read half of it. Another woman asked me, "What's the conflict?", something straight out of Writers Group 101. Obviously, it was the thing to say, the question to ask to show that you understood, that you Knew. I still don't know what it meant.

Oh, but I do remember one actual exercise - we were supposed to take a pen and paper and write down the name of our character, then write down EVERYTHING we could think of about them. There was even a questionnaire. Where they were born, when they were born, who their parents were, what they looked like, their shoe size, and blah blah blah blah blah. It was only later that I realized that trudging through writing a novel would be intolerable if you already knew everything. It's the finding out that is the thing. And if it doesn't interest you - fascinate you, in fact - then it sure as hell will not interest the reader.


Where is all this coming from? There's nothing wrong with drinking sangria and exclaiming "oh, that's lovely!" after every poem. But in a way, "writer's group" is a contradiction in terms. In my experience, giving yourself to the process is often horrendously lonely, to the point that I understand why so many poets commit suicide.
 



I don't know why I've done this for so many years, except that I'm not good at anything else. No, I mean it, or at least not anything I can do professionally. I haven't had anyone refer to my work as a "nice hobby" for a while now, maybe because they've given up talking to me altogether.


People fall away. They lose interest, or find they can't do it, bury their ambition where it festers and ruins their lives. I become sick of halting myself, to keep pace with their faux interest/dedication. They just stop, or they make themselves stop. I had a friend exclaim, when I made a friendly suggestion that she try keeping a blog, "What would I write about?" But it was her facial expression that cut me: baffled, as if I'd said "why don't you start a worm farm"; offended, as if I'd said "why don't you have an affair with your neighbor"; disgusted, as if I'd said "why don't you shovel shit for a living." And even at that, there was an aspect to her reaction that I can't describe, a mouthful of vinegar or something else awful, with her tone of voice full of "whaaaaat?" Not just incredulous, but ferociously judgemental. It was casting her own insecurity and frustrated ambition back in my face, not unlike the cobra-strike ploys used by my sister for years and years.





I had obviously said the wrong thing. But she had no idea why her reaction bothered me, which was even worse. That friendship died in a torrent of bile which made me realize her ambition had long ago been interred and was sending up noxious fumes of decay.


OK, I never expected to go on and on like this. Are there "real" writers" then, to be divided from the dabblers like the sheep from the goats? YES. Does this have anything to do with money or prestige or even getting widely published and becoming some sort of quasi-celebrity like that bitch who wrote Fifty Shades? Of course not.


It has to do with dedication, but it's something else. Painful as all this is, you can't live without it. I find I replicate my initial experiences of utter obscurity again and again, and the chances of this changing at my age are extremely slim. But I've come to realize that if I needed recognition, I would have quit long ago. Keeping on with it at this level of intensity would have been impossible. So it's something else that drives me, and, I suspect, almost every other writer.




I don't always like what I do. It's kind of like being married. Habit? Not quite. Just a need, something I can't describe or even get away from. It galloped away with me a very long time ago.


A long long long time ago when I was seeing a therapist, I was also listening (incessantly) to k. d. lang's brilliant Ingenue album (which I have started listening to again). I was talking to her about a certain song, how I felt it was much more than a love song.


"Why do you say that?"


I wasn't sure what I was saying.


"I think it's about her work. You know. . . not so much the singing as the writing."






I often wonder
is it so
All I am holding
wants let go
How could I manage
I don't know

I often question
Is it so
Life's contradictions
tend to grow
Spawning the choices
and the woe

But still somehow thrives this love
Which I pray I'm worthy of
Still somehow thrives this love

I often wonder
Is it so
Lessons of patience
are learned slow
Earnings of labour
may never show

But still somehow thrives this love
Which I pray I'm worthy of
Still somehow thrives this love

k. d. lang