I had chosen what seemed the amiable and neutral turf of the McLeod Residency for a duel with Doug Nufer over the future of Hugo House. Doug stepped in when my initial challenge with Ryan Boudinot went south. Ryan sadly declined to present. But Mr. Nufer was more than happy to take me down. The McLeod Residency, however, is moving. The good people of The Rendezvous were willing to offer up The Jewel Box Theater for a modest amount of cash (I wasn't using my car anyway.) and the hopes that poets and writers and whoever might be interested in a light-show battle to the death will purchase drink. I will I last longer than Obi Wan.
Mr. Nufer sent me his presentation. I was shaken. I have a lot of work to do if I have any kind of hope at all. At this point, I will be obliterated.
I may have to remember the lessons of PowerPoint Master's from the past, such as Portland's Claire Evans I've seen transfix audience with her lectures on The Internet.
I've posted this blog in order to open the conversation to people who may have different views than the ones I've already expressed and had crushed like a dandelion under professionally shined Wingtips. Unless you are a hardhearted business man who worships at the alter of "high culture" you will most likely find Mr. Nufer's vision of the future way too Northrop Frye/Donald Trump.
So please feel free to comment here at any length. A blog format isn't ideal but has advantages over Web forums and suits the perhaps temporary nature of this endeavor. I will post a regular Monday "stub" so people can leave comments, or if you want email me (matt(dot)briggs(at)gmail(dot)com) and I'll post your post as a root level comment.
Posts
Dip Me in Honey and Bury Me Someplace Nice
1 year ago
3 comments:
The thing that has been missing from most communities that I have been a part of is a large population of people who read for the love of it.
I imagine that will appear as a provocative statement -- but I mean it literally and without any intent of insult. People read for escape, they read to be hip, to appear smart -- I think these motivations appear in their behavior.
In terms of participating in a community there are people who appear because they have nowhere else to be, because there are cheap drinks, good looking members of the opposite sex (men get blamed for this -- but I think it's true of women just as much.)
I think that all the way that ego and attachment destroys individuals lives are exactly the same way that they destroy community. My own experience of writing and reading is that it has been transformative -- it has been the best thing I have had to help me understand my own limitations, and the validity of other human beings perceptions. It has revealed to me my own character weaknesses, and suggested ways to be a better person and to have a more satisfying life. I do it for it's own sake because I love the experience, and I find myself rewarded in unexpected ways as a result of my effort.
I have felt stymied in how to offer this in a world where there are competing workshop mavens gouging $20 a head, babbling narcissists, carrerists, leering sex junkies, scenesters and vindictive sociopaths -- not that all these additional motivations are in themselves wrong -- they add texture -- but how to put the experience of reading first -- and then to learn how to write drawing on the best of what I have discovered in the experience of reading.
How to drink, if you will, the creme of the milk of humankindness.
Sorry -- I forgot to sign that:
James D. Newman
Thanks James. I agree about reading being the perhaps inverse of writing that is missing from communities or what we term "community," since this structure I think tends to emphasize communal action, such as parties, readings, classes, lectures, and so on rather than the discrete activity of individuals either actually writing or reading books. However a look at GoodReads or LibraryThing shows that are hundreds of thousands of readers who are reading just about everything they can get their hands on -- it is just that classic, physical communities have difficulty making the individual transactions of a reader and a book visible.
I wish workshops or writing classes only cost 20 dollars a head! And that conversely the teacher was paid 200 dollars a head. From the point of view of people who teach them, I think it may be less about ego and more about trying to make ends meet. Most writing teacher are doing what they can and in particular trying to deliver a class that is "of value" to their students.
You point to a strange effect of classes and workshops in a community, which are the role of classes in determining value. A teacher asserts themselves as an expert not only in whatever subject they are teaching. In the purest sense they are essentially selling their tacit knowledge regarding procedural mastery over some aspect of a subject. In practice though they are also selling their ability to establish contextual value in the community, I think.
A writer who I admire from Portland, Kevin Sampsell, wrote a collection of memoir fragments called "This Common Pornography." I read one particularly brief and infuriatingly suggestive piece at a panel once on "What Makes a Short Story?" A panel is set up with people (the experts) at the front of the room and often elevated and the (the non experts) arranged in front of them and not elevated. It is staged to establish and propagate the idea of experts. We all require this structure because we can make sense of it. My motive to be there wasn't to learn about "What Makes a Short Story?" my motive was to talk about "What Makes a Short Story?" and to promote my book at the time. I can only guess at the motives of the other people in the room, but we were all there spending an hour or so setting together. I read this story by Kevin Sampsell. The panelists agreed that is was a story. The formatlist teacher who had earlier explained the parts of the story agreed and talked about how Sampsell had clearly omitted nearly all of the classic structural components of a story. Someone in the audience pointed out, if they were to submit that story (a story omitting classic elements of the story) it would not get published. And I realized when they said that, there is a gestural component, an inflection, a way of speaking and looking like someone who belongs that is an aspect to writing ... this is one way how communities exert value. I don't think it is superficial, although the signifiers are often superficial. Sampsell's story exerted its value through omission, but only someone who understood the coded language of the syntactically charged writing of writers influence by Gordon Lish would be quick to pick that up. Like any community there was some large and unknown component of waring the right jeans and t-shirt involved. And a role of a class is to learn what those things are.
So this sense of belonging or not belonging is suddenly involved in something that is essentially as private a reader reading a book.
I wonder then how a community can be a community that somehow undoes or operates in opposition to this oppressive impulse to create value through style?
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