This may be a touch too ambitious, but Im attempting to write all fifteen section intros to Dont Call Them Pieces today. This is the third one, for some rock and roll stuff (taken from The Village Voice, Record Collector, Salon, and The Atlantic). The book is also kind of a writers guide, and, I suppose, a primer of sorts on how you might, I dont know, get into a given mag in yourself. So were hitting loads of demos here, publishers. Collected, all-inclusive critical works of guy who has written for 200+ fancy places thats like a liberal arts education unto itself with tips to crack Rolling Stone, too. ... I often think of “pull” rather than influence. As in, where does an artist get his pull from? The early Beatles got theirs from American rhythm and blues, Pollock got his from Mexican muralists, the young F. Scott Fitzgerald from Booth Tarkington. You pull from something else, and out comes, eventually, something entirely your own, if you’re good enough. My primary pull, as a writer, has been from rock and roll. From sound abetting sense, and vice versa. The writers that meant the most to me, in following, had a high degree of musicality. Proust, Joyce, Keats, Fitzgerald. In writing story collections, for example, I think of them more as albums, as concept albums, rather than works in a literary tradition. When the Beatles were working on Sgt. Pepper, Paul McCartney would say, “this is our Freak Out!” a reference to Frank Zappa’s 1966 LP. When I write my books, I say, “this is our Revolver,” “this is the Rubber Soul one.” There have been so many days where I have listened to twenty albums, studying each nuance of them, knowing it was all going into me to inform how I wrote, despite not being able to play any traditional instrument or read music. The computer keyboard, though, became an instrument to me, and sometimes, a finger will linger a second too long in the air, because there is an extra beat in the line that should not be there, and it’s that finger’s way of telling me the extra beat must come out, and probably be redistributed elsewhere. Being a twat, I concluded in high school that I’d join the ranks of the great writers by writing nothing more than rock and roll record reviews. Bad idea. I wrote for a free paper in Boston while an undergrad, reviewing the worst shite you’ve ever heard. But I took all of it so seriously—even if I had no problem making jokes in the actual reviews—and sat in my dorm room, on Friday and Saturday evenings, no less, really listening hard to these records by local bands before repairing back to the ones in my own regular collection. When my friends would come by to see what I was up to, I’d peel off the latest review, read a paragraph or two, and then be proud that no one understood what on earth I was talking about. I thought this counted for being smart. What it counts for, really, is being a twat and an idiot. I see a lot of this kind of writing, where you’re aware of the writer being all satisfied with himself because there’s a reference to some obscure lesser-light that no one else is going to get, certainly no one outside of the writerly community. In this example, I’m thinking in terms of the sort of fiction turned out by MFA programs, but you see it in all publishing spheres, really. When you pull that kind of move, you’re doing it for yourself, to assuage your own insecurity over how good you are, or, maybe more to the point, how good you worry you might not be. So you try to prove how smart you are by going over the heads of your readers, which is what the twat-version of me resorted to. I thought those confused looks were signs of real progress. Ideally, you grow out of all of that, and you learn that if you want to prove that you’re smart, you move people at the level of who they are. You bring them in when you write about something that they’ve never heard of or thought they could care about. It turns out that you can’t change the world just through writing record reviews. But you can learn a lot in your own journey as an artist from sitting there writing a mess of them. And, eventually, those early lessons pay off and you can both get your pull from rock and roll and write about rock and roll in ways that, hopefully, make you less of a twat than the twat you had been.
Posted on: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 15:34:22 +0000
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