ketchup randomness

it must suck to be james franco right now.

every artist knows the fear of completion. the fear of success--you get what you want and sometimes even praise is difficult to hear, because the praise isn't right. you don't want to hear, "it's good," you want to hear, "ah, this is the next great american novel." as if. what's worse is when no one says anything, when they nod and smile and say, "well, it looked like you had a great time up there!" which is code for, "dude, your band sucks." but it's got to be especially awful when bloggers have compiled lists of groaners, i mean, similes, from your freshly published short story.

if you haven't bothered to read the story, or read the tidbits of "just before the black" that accompany the story's many scourges on various blogs, let me summarize:

young-ish, flippant guy often considers death. crashes car. gets high. asks the sort of questions i imagine boys ask each other in lieu of having those scary emotional conversations. young-ish, flippant guy gets high and wishes he were some other ethnicity or sexual orientation because it's oh-so-boring to be him, just plain old him, white, we can assume, wondering what it means to be alive and how strange it is to be alive, how all we have is breath and time (that last part's a gimmie, franco. you shoulda used that shit instead).

yawn. i mean, beneath the outrageous similes and the slightly annoying way the narrator thinks and speaks, this is basically and MFA over-workshopped story that does have its merits (because it contains all the things a good story should contain, and is quirky) and, if not written by james franco, would likely have appeared in a little journal edited by an already overworked someone who likes writing so much that she agonizes over it for free.

so yeah, i am a little bitter. not because i think i could write james franco under the table (if that were the case, i'd actually have been published; ultimately, who am i to talk, really?), rather, the homogeneous climate of the larger literary community is absolutely disgusting me. "just before the black" is one of those slightly despondent fauxhemian buddy films in prose form. it's the dancing plastic bag scene in american beauty. we have seen and read and heard these stories so many times over; when will we get tired of them? the seedy underbelly isn't so much of an underbelly anymore. the underbelly is made of the stories that don't get told--or, they do, but no one ever gets to read them.

from my perspective, writing and publishing have always been privileged interests. to engage in these things, you must be willing to be broke, and you must be willing to suffer, because they are thankless pursuits until some years pass and you realize you've actually managed to make something of yourself. of course, when you don't have to worry about being broke, the thanklessness is a little easier to bear. i hate to be the angry black woman in this situation, but consider: i once had a professor respond, when asked how he'd managed to become so successful--how he found the time when certainly he had to support himself, he said his parents were willing to support his career and then, later, a girlfriend helped him out, too. consider: most publishing internships are unpaid affairs, so the persons who take them on are those who can afford, as oxymoronic as it sounds, to be unpaid. most of those people are the same type of people and i hope by now you'll know the type of people i'm thinking of. and most of those people have the same tastes and are looking for the same thing as they sort through all the unsolicited manuscripts, so your story, or your book, a refreshing, well-versed piece, is clearly not as exciting as someone else's work, who might now be compared to james franco. and james franco can write away because, in between acting and "studying" (people in art school do not study, don't kid yourself), and so easily getting into yale to get his ph.d., he doesn't have to hustle to stay alive.

lovely.

i should qualify all this and say, as a fan of literature in general, none of this is easy to generalize. i recently read didion's "play it as it lays" and thought, "wow, a book about a white lady on drugs;" by the same token, i adore kate braverman's "tall tales from the mekong delta," which is roughly about the same topic but so well formed that i could weep if the whole story didn't have a layer of slime over it, which only enhances the story's overall effect. still, i'm ready for something else. i'm ready for the mainstream to stop being the mainstream, and let something else get an edge in. let's get tired of something else the way we are tired of cookie-cutter literature and reality television. let's read some different stories. i want to know about other things. i want to be punched in the face with a tumble of words so revelatory and extreme and orgasmic that i can't bear to read days afterward. instead, i guess i'll take, "he breathes his smoke out of the black gaping gap."





illustration via. it's how i feel when i think about "the industry."