Putting this behind a cut because it gets awful navel-gazey.
Friday, July 16, 2010
A thing to read.
Kyle Minor's piece in the new PANK is pretty incredible:
He kept a catalog of women’s eyes. Not just green, brown, blue, or hazel, but the shapes of eyes, almond or hooded or deep-set or Oriental, and how evenly spaced they were or weren’t, and how long the eyelashes, and how thick the eyebrows, and plucked or not plucked.What cool stuff have you read recently? Link us up!
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Missing the Trees for the Forest
I've seen the same idea presented about three hundred times in the last five hours, so I feel like I should say something; people seem worried that the rapid growth of people who consider themselves writers is making it less likely that good work (read: their work) will find the audience it deserves. This is another situation where it seems like people are speaking more from fear than from knowledge or experience. The incarnation I've chosen to highlight comes in an otherwise good post from Submishmash, because it's the least obnoxious version I've seen.
Secondly, I don't know how anyone who's read slush can seriously worry that great writing is being passed over because of a surfeit of crappy submissions. If there's a remotely decent piece of writing that fits the aesthetic priorities of the magazine I'm reading for, you'd better believe I find it. All the other stuff? The stuff I don't care for? It makes me that much more grateful for the good stuff when I find it. I will seize instantly on any clue that there's a piece I like in the pile. Every time I see a title I like, a writer whose work I've enjoyed in the past, a competent opening sentence, a strong first paragraph, I get excited. I think, Maybe this is the one! If you're sending us good work, you can be sure there are at least three or four seconds of joy in the reading of it. Does everything good get accepted in any one place? Of course not. But it's not because of the lack of quality work. When that happens, it's because of a surplus -- if I can afford to turn your great story down, it's only because I've got thirty more great stories right over here that I like even better.
To be sure, there are some places where I think mediocrity holds sway, but even there it's not the excess of submissions that leads to trouble, it's the poor taste of the editors. If, meanwhile, you're convinced your own work is in this category, let me propose a few possibilities: 1) You haven't been doing this long enough. I've written six novels and dozens of stories. Only recently have I started to find publishers receptive to my work, and some of my favorite material seems unlikely to ever find a home. It takes a long time to get good enough! 2) You're not being fearless enough. If your work is easily mistaken for bad work, it's a good sign you haven't found a unique voice yet. The pieces most likely to be buried under mediocrity are mediocre -- they're imitators of Raymond Carver that don't have the courage to be something more than that. They're poems written in pursuit of trends rather than greatness and passion. 3) You're just having bad luck. The math is on nobody's side. Personally I think it's exciting to live in a time with so many great writers doing great work -- a period that I think students of literature will look back on with something like awe. And I'm fairly certain this energy comes from the increased accessibility of community, education, and publishing.
Honestly, I suspect most good work is finding a home these days. There's such a broad range of venues sharing such a wide variety of work. Sometimes not as quickly as we might like. Sometimes, maybe, never. But I think the biggest reason this happens is that writers give up. They fail to keep chipping away at their work, they fail to learn as much as they could learn from each story. My advice then would be not to give up as long as you still love writing. But this advice will, of course, if followed, lead to more "bad writers" persisting to swim amid the slush. That's fine by me, of course, and I wish we could accept it more generally.
Some seem to find it more comforting, though, to blame their challenges in running a publisher, or their challenges in finding a publisher, on the writers who only want to be a part of their world. It must be those "bad writers." Who are these bad writers? Not me, of course. Not you. But they're out there! And it's all their fault.
A couple things. First, when you've got a hammer -- and especially when you want to make sure other people go get their own hammers, everything tends to look like a nail. Or, in other words, when you've got an online submission management system, the challenges your system is meant to deal with will probably tend to look like the biggest, most important issues in publishing. I don't mean to pick on Submishmash -- they provide an incredibly useful service, for free, with tech support that's downright aggressive in its attempts to help (I've gotten e-mails from them making sure I'm comfortable with the program, etc., simply by virtue of using it), and I appreciate that tremendously. But when they say that dealing with the problem of too many submissions is on par with the problem of attracting readers, it seems to reinforce the publisher-centric model advanced (unsurprisingly) by most people in publishing. In this mindset, it's the writers' and readers' faults that this oversupply has what sometimes feel like distressing results. It's not that publishers need to do their job better, it's that writers and readers need to this. This mindset leads to exploitative relationships with writers and a failure to attract readers.Submishmash would add only that “the basic capability” to publish is itself no longer so basic, thanks also to oversupply. The surplus of choice that afflicts audiences also afflicts publishers. There is an oversupply of writing both published and unpublished, an ever-present risk that as readers both amateur (in the bookstore or on the internet) and professional (trying to filter our submission stacks), we are missing the good stuff amid the surplus of output from (often charming) eight-year-olds.Navigating the twin challenges of oversupply—how to attract and maintain an audience with too many choices, and how to filter an ever-expanding mass of submissions effectively—constitutes the central struggle of the publisher in the digital age. It will take inspired curators, certainly, to thrive under these conditions. It will also, we believe, take new technological tools and ways of thinking.
Secondly, I don't know how anyone who's read slush can seriously worry that great writing is being passed over because of a surfeit of crappy submissions. If there's a remotely decent piece of writing that fits the aesthetic priorities of the magazine I'm reading for, you'd better believe I find it. All the other stuff? The stuff I don't care for? It makes me that much more grateful for the good stuff when I find it. I will seize instantly on any clue that there's a piece I like in the pile. Every time I see a title I like, a writer whose work I've enjoyed in the past, a competent opening sentence, a strong first paragraph, I get excited. I think, Maybe this is the one! If you're sending us good work, you can be sure there are at least three or four seconds of joy in the reading of it. Does everything good get accepted in any one place? Of course not. But it's not because of the lack of quality work. When that happens, it's because of a surplus -- if I can afford to turn your great story down, it's only because I've got thirty more great stories right over here that I like even better.
To be sure, there are some places where I think mediocrity holds sway, but even there it's not the excess of submissions that leads to trouble, it's the poor taste of the editors. If, meanwhile, you're convinced your own work is in this category, let me propose a few possibilities: 1) You haven't been doing this long enough. I've written six novels and dozens of stories. Only recently have I started to find publishers receptive to my work, and some of my favorite material seems unlikely to ever find a home. It takes a long time to get good enough! 2) You're not being fearless enough. If your work is easily mistaken for bad work, it's a good sign you haven't found a unique voice yet. The pieces most likely to be buried under mediocrity are mediocre -- they're imitators of Raymond Carver that don't have the courage to be something more than that. They're poems written in pursuit of trends rather than greatness and passion. 3) You're just having bad luck. The math is on nobody's side. Personally I think it's exciting to live in a time with so many great writers doing great work -- a period that I think students of literature will look back on with something like awe. And I'm fairly certain this energy comes from the increased accessibility of community, education, and publishing.
Honestly, I suspect most good work is finding a home these days. There's such a broad range of venues sharing such a wide variety of work. Sometimes not as quickly as we might like. Sometimes, maybe, never. But I think the biggest reason this happens is that writers give up. They fail to keep chipping away at their work, they fail to learn as much as they could learn from each story. My advice then would be not to give up as long as you still love writing. But this advice will, of course, if followed, lead to more "bad writers" persisting to swim amid the slush. That's fine by me, of course, and I wish we could accept it more generally.
Some seem to find it more comforting, though, to blame their challenges in running a publisher, or their challenges in finding a publisher, on the writers who only want to be a part of their world. It must be those "bad writers." Who are these bad writers? Not me, of course. Not you. But they're out there! And it's all their fault.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Heavy Rain reviewed
The second-best part of Heavy Rain is the first scene. You're a guy. You wake up in your underwear. The game tells you how to get out of bed. The camera angle indicates that you might want to go outside on your balcony and look at your back yard, and it's a nice day, and you're feeling pretty good, so why not? You walk outside. You lean on the rail if you want. You breathe. There's some nice music. It's quiet. Eventually you remember your day is about to start, and so you go shower.
You groom yourself. If you want to pee you can do that. In fact your characters can always pee on command, any time you see a toilet. I always made mine go. They looked like they could use it.
This section is a tutorial in how the game works, but it's mainly about being this guy. You can listen to his thoughts for clues about different ways to pass the time if you want, but don't do that. Instead just walk around the house.
You're a husband and a father. You can play with your sons' toys. You can work in the garden. You can walk around in the yard, breathing. You can do some work. You can watch television. Eventually your wife comes home and if you're watching TV instead of doing something productive you'll feel like a lout. Help her with the groceries. Set the table. You can walk around while you talk with her. You can take a drink. You can watch more TV, if you want to be a shit all your life.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
I Write Like H. P. Lovecraft?
No cutting comparisons or lofty praise here, just a piece of prose (your choice as to what to submit-- I used something from the story I'm working on; more on that below) "statistically analyzed" to produce some vaguely astrological answer to that burning question: What writer do I most write like? As the site itself somewhat inelegantly puts it:
My own answer you will have already gleaned from the title to this post, but if you must have proof, here it is. H. P. Lovecraft, commonly adduced a not merely baroque writer, but frankly something of a windbag and a buffoon as far as grammar and diction go (to say nothing of his peculiarly vaginal creatures, natch). For much of this year, I have been writing a novel not merely about Lovecraft, but as the man. I might thus be more pleased with the result of this Cosmo-quiz if the particular piece under consideration by I Write Like's algorithms were part of that manuscript. But alas, it was instead the first paragraph of a short story I have spent the last few weeks writing and rewriting. Anyone familiar with the plotline of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward? Only partially vindicated by the fact that Margaret Atwood writes like Stephen King.
Update, 7/14/10: I seem to have missed a trick, not submitting "An Interpretive History of Addition," the story that will appear in Uncanny Valley 1. Here is a page-by-page breakdown by way of apologia:
Page 1: Edgar Allan Poe
Page 2: Kurt Vonnegut
Page 3: George Orwell
Page 4: Stephen King
Page 5: Dan Brown
Page 6: Stephen King
Page 7: Raymond Chandler
Page 8: H. P. Lovecraft
Page 9: Kurt Vonnegut
Now, doesn't that sound like an exquisite exquisite corpse?
Check what famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them to those of the famous writers.
My own answer you will have already gleaned from the title to this post, but if you must have proof, here it is. H. P. Lovecraft, commonly adduced a not merely baroque writer, but frankly something of a windbag and a buffoon as far as grammar and diction go (to say nothing of his peculiarly vaginal creatures, natch). For much of this year, I have been writing a novel not merely about Lovecraft, but as the man. I might thus be more pleased with the result of this Cosmo-quiz if the particular piece under consideration by I Write Like's algorithms were part of that manuscript. But alas, it was instead the first paragraph of a short story I have spent the last few weeks writing and rewriting. Anyone familiar with the plotline of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward? Only partially vindicated by the fact that Margaret Atwood writes like Stephen King.
Update, 7/14/10: I seem to have missed a trick, not submitting "An Interpretive History of Addition," the story that will appear in Uncanny Valley 1. Here is a page-by-page breakdown by way of apologia:
Page 1: Edgar Allan Poe
Page 2: Kurt Vonnegut
Page 3: George Orwell
Page 4: Stephen King
Page 5: Dan Brown
Page 6: Stephen King
Page 7: Raymond Chandler
Page 8: H. P. Lovecraft
Page 9: Kurt Vonnegut
Now, doesn't that sound like an exquisite exquisite corpse?
Enrichment vs. Creativity
Via Reuters:
It's a good thing to talk about, definitely, but I share others' guarded skepticism. The link above has some good rebuttals. From the first quoted paragraph, though, I started to wonder about another possible culprit, one perhaps more plausible than the ever-scapegoated TV and video games. "Enriched environments are making kids smarter." Could enriched environments also be making kids less creative?
With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”…
It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.
It's a good thing to talk about, definitely, but I share others' guarded skepticism. The link above has some good rebuttals. From the first quoted paragraph, though, I started to wonder about another possible culprit, one perhaps more plausible than the ever-scapegoated TV and video games. "Enriched environments are making kids smarter." Could enriched environments also be making kids less creative?
Angband Reviewed
Here is another review of Angband. I've eschewed screenshots because posting screenshots of a text-based game in order to spice up this block of text seems inane.
*
*
The general principle of RPGs, and the reason everything will be “an RPG” by the Year of Our Lord 2020, is the joy of watching a bar fill up. It's irresistible. Look at this bar:
**------------------------
See how empty it is. Just two stars.
For geek college students, who were the audience for and creators of the original Rogue, the closest experience to leveling up has been passing from one grade to another. You get marginally more capable with each year, the challenges ramp up a little more slowly than your abilities, and by the end you're barely paying attention, but there isn't much else to do. You are, after all, a geek college student.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Thanks, the Internets!
This is neat. Apparently a Toronto book blogger, Shaun Smith, has picked up on both the HTMLGiant controversy over Tin House's trial show-us-the-receipt submission policy and Mike's response to it on this blog. What's funny and flattering is that, apparently, in the scope of the whole wide Internet, we look like a "rival lit mag" next to Tin House. We might have pretensions! Of course, we do like Tin House, wish them well, wish they'd rethink their bad ways of doing good things, et cetera...
He is absolutely right about being able to touch the Stanley Cup, however--I myself have access to a recent picture of a friend with his arm wrapped loosely around it, as if taking an old buddy into confidence. I take no responsibility for the error, as I was out of town. (Sorry, honey.) But we'll change the guideline anyway. Here is the revised version:
Try to get that past security.
He is absolutely right about being able to touch the Stanley Cup, however--I myself have access to a recent picture of a friend with his arm wrapped loosely around it, as if taking an old buddy into confidence. I take no responsibility for the error, as I was out of town. (Sorry, honey.) But we'll change the guideline anyway. Here is the revised version:
Anyone submitting a manuscript accompanied by a picture of their bare foreskin touching the surface of the Stanley Cup will be automatically accepted.
Try to get that past security.
Fallout 3 Reviewed
I originally wrote this for Action Button Dot Net, but I suspect they're too busy developing their video game (which will probably be super awesome) to read unsolicited submissions right now. A couple more will be coming.
*
You begin Fallout 3 with your mother's still-hot blood on your face. Your father looks down on you with loving eyes, a medical mask, and a lot of bright lights situated behind him. He has Liam Neeson's voice. Liam Neeson's voice asks you a series of questions that define you as a person. Your gender, your appearance, and your name – which no one will ever say – are here selected. This also has the effect of defining your father, whose appearance is partly determined by yours. The question is more or less how ugly you'd like to be, or more accurately which kinds of ugly you find most appalling. Most players probably prioritize avoiding what they hate most about their own appearances. Because I think my chin too soft, I always give my avatar a strong one.
In the next scene, you use a baby book to choose your statistics, and maybe, if you want, you kick around this really beautiful red ball. I always work on this for as long as I can – kicking it into corners, kicking it back out, and so on. The beautiful red ball doesn't matter at all, which makes it the most important and lovely thing in the entire game. If you press the talk button, your character makes a baby sound. I like to time this so that it seems I'm responding to the events on the screen – I goo when my father talks to me, I gaw-gaw when I kick the ball, and so on. This doesn't matter either.
*
You begin Fallout 3 with your mother's still-hot blood on your face. Your father looks down on you with loving eyes, a medical mask, and a lot of bright lights situated behind him. He has Liam Neeson's voice. Liam Neeson's voice asks you a series of questions that define you as a person. Your gender, your appearance, and your name – which no one will ever say – are here selected. This also has the effect of defining your father, whose appearance is partly determined by yours. The question is more or less how ugly you'd like to be, or more accurately which kinds of ugly you find most appalling. Most players probably prioritize avoiding what they hate most about their own appearances. Because I think my chin too soft, I always give my avatar a strong one.
In the next scene, you use a baby book to choose your statistics, and maybe, if you want, you kick around this really beautiful red ball. I always work on this for as long as I can – kicking it into corners, kicking it back out, and so on. The beautiful red ball doesn't matter at all, which makes it the most important and lovely thing in the entire game. If you press the talk button, your character makes a baby sound. I like to time this so that it seems I'm responding to the events on the screen – I goo when my father talks to me, I gaw-gaw when I kick the ball, and so on. This doesn't matter either.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Anniversary
It's our first anniversary! We celebrate with movies, pizza, and cuddles. We're just jealous for time together, really, since I was away for quite a while. Today is all ours.
Enjoy some pictures, if you like.
Enjoy some pictures, if you like.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Laura LeHew, our third contributor
We've just confirmed Laura LeHew as a poetry contributor for the first issue of Uncanny Valley.
Laura LeHew has been crazy busy. I wish I had encountered her work earlier. She's published in about a million journals, including A capella Zoo, Gargoyle, PANK, as well as several collections/anthologies, including Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems, out from Ragged Sky. Also, her chapbook Beauty, published by Tiger's Eye Press, is now in its third printing. She's done so much that her alma mater has done some serious bragging about her.
She's also an editor; Uttered Chaos seeks to expose new poets and bring their chapbooks to audiences, operating under the contention that poetry is something everyone can enjoy. So she's a woman after our own heart.
What we like about Laura's work is that it plays with language and the page without being coy or show-offy. No quiddities, no esoteric musings on the higher meaning of mundane things. In her poetry, mundane things seem to be just the object under consideration. A sister's health problem is a serious thing unto itself, and it takes center stage in a frenetic, dodgy poem you'll see in our issue. The same is true of an act of remembrance and forgetting after a father's death. The story is never all that's going on in the works, but there is no embarrassment about or shying away from the heavy weight that her subjects--family, health, love, death--carry. We appreciated their straightforwardness coupled with their precision, energy, and often humor.
Her poem at PANK really shows off one of the forms that her linguistic and formal experimentation can take. And here's a video of her reading "Snakes in a Bowl," for an example of that humor and insight into family dynamics.
Welcome aboard, Laura!
Laura LeHew has been crazy busy. I wish I had encountered her work earlier. She's published in about a million journals, including A capella Zoo, Gargoyle, PANK, as well as several collections/anthologies, including Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems, out from Ragged Sky. Also, her chapbook Beauty, published by Tiger's Eye Press, is now in its third printing. She's done so much that her alma mater has done some serious bragging about her.
She's also an editor; Uttered Chaos seeks to expose new poets and bring their chapbooks to audiences, operating under the contention that poetry is something everyone can enjoy. So she's a woman after our own heart.
What we like about Laura's work is that it plays with language and the page without being coy or show-offy. No quiddities, no esoteric musings on the higher meaning of mundane things. In her poetry, mundane things seem to be just the object under consideration. A sister's health problem is a serious thing unto itself, and it takes center stage in a frenetic, dodgy poem you'll see in our issue. The same is true of an act of remembrance and forgetting after a father's death. The story is never all that's going on in the works, but there is no embarrassment about or shying away from the heavy weight that her subjects--family, health, love, death--carry. We appreciated their straightforwardness coupled with their precision, energy, and often humor.
Her poem at PANK really shows off one of the forms that her linguistic and formal experimentation can take. And here's a video of her reading "Snakes in a Bowl," for an example of that humor and insight into family dynamics.
Welcome aboard, Laura!
Friday, July 9, 2010
Love: Owen Pallett
It is almost my and Mike's one-year anniversary. It has been an amazing year with him. In some ways, the first with any sort of stability--it is good to go to sleep next to someone who has promised to be yours. It is good to know you love the person who sits next to you. Knowing you love and being the object of love lets you play more with the other pieces of your life, it lets you risk.
But it may be possible for us to love the people who don't sit next to us. There's a line in one of the final episodes of Sailor Moon, when Usagi is confronted by Rei, and then by Haruka and Michiru, as to whether or not she already has someone important. Usagi replies tearfully, "I love Mamo-chan...but I...love other people too!" For her there is not one person only to love, or a system of different intensities of love--she can love so many, in the same way, and still love only Mamoru as her future husband.
I think this effusion of love is important to have. And part of what we're trying to do with this magazine, I think, is to show love to our writers--to wish them well on both personal and professional levels. To find the text we love is a common goal of literary magazine editors, but we want also to love the person who worked on, pondered over, and perhaps pained for writing that text. We want to be generous with our love.
So when I say that I love Owen Pallett, I hope that my meaning will be clear.
Mike found Owen Pallett for me. I loved the music immediately--it was exactly the kind of music I had once dreamed of making. As a teenager, I holed myself up for hours building MIDI tracks of original songs. Occasionally I'd write lyrics. The songs were never quite what I wanted, but they weren't so far off either. It wasn't that I was transcribing the orchestral to the digital--I was learning to write for the digital medium, to work within it rather than in spite of it. I built melodies of loops. I did not use the patch for "Violin" if I wanted a violin, but a patch that seemed to more accurately evoke a particular style, quality, voice of violin I heard in my head. I wanted to write a musical at this time. I wanted to be a composer, but I didn't have an instrument. I was modest at clarinet, and could play piano by ear. I could sing. I had a 3/4 size viola that I couldn't figure out the fingerings for. I didn't have enough to go on, and I gave the idea of making music up.
When I heard Owen Pallett, a part of me woke up. It burned. This was what I had wanted to do. Not just the concept, but the implementation. A layering of loops, creating a complicated texture. Unusual, fantastical themes; thick, rambling lyrics. An incredible attention to rhythm, dynamic. Purity of voice, and flexibility of voice. I loved everything about it. I started to want to make a musical again. I felt acutely my desire to make music and my obstacles, the musicianship I would need to regain, re-practice to produce anything near his. The music made me hurt, and want, and need.
Gotta find and kill my shadow self...gotta dig up every secret seashell...
You may have been made for love
But I'm just made
Listening to more, I realized how powerfully that hurt and need was in the music, and not just in me. How powerfully it reached for...something. Everything. How the music bristled with knives. How his voice broke when he screamed.
Owen Pallett himself is likely not in such painful need. But to make an analogy: I know that when Mike writes a story about, say, a suicidal character, that he is not himself that character and is not himself suicidal. (Rookie mistake.) But I do know that he inhabits that character, and that he calls to mind the times he's felt that pain, that need to escape. And he makes himself inhabit that pain. Just as I do, when I write someone who needs a mother, who needs a job, who needs a talent, who needs someone to love them. Writers can divorce themselves from their characters. (I myself have a very good mother.) But usually if they're worth their salt, they're making themselves feel what their characters feel. They're filled with the same need as the character as they work to create it. And I think that this is true of good musicians as well.
If what I have is what you need
I'm never gonna give it to you
And when you expose yourself to a lot of work by a particular artist--just as when you read a lot of work by a particular author--sometimes you feel something more than admiration, more than appreciation, more than enjoyment. You feel for them as much as for their art. You want them to be happy. You want them to eat well. You want them to be safe at night, and when they wake up. You love them. It is a kind of love.
I love Owen Pallett. I will be going to his concert in Tucson in October, and I will feel love for him there, I'm sure. But that's all I will do, all I want to do. I'm not going to storm the stage. I won't be in the front row. I'm not going to write comments on his YouTube videos. I won't write replies to him on Twitter. I don't know his birthday. I keep forgetting where exactly he lives, where he's from (Canada, I'm pretty sure, somewhere). I don't watch all his interviews, and in the ones I've seen I don't play a monologue in my head: He's a genius or What a hottie or How cute or Oh man what if we kissed.
It's not really meant to be any more sort of pretentious or bizarre than somebody singing about, you know--a baby, or--
(gets up to shut the door)
--oh, this door doesn't shut. Than a baby, or a shorty, or, you know, girl, or boy, or whatever people sing their love songs about. It's just meant to--I just kind of, because I wanted to sing the songs from the perspective of the Other singing back to me, I wanted to kind of make him as specific as possible, really give him, you know, almost make him seem like more of a real character than myself in this record.
Owen uses himself, ill-uses himself, in almost every record. He is often explicitly a sort of God to whomever he sings about--a God who sometimes coddles, sometimes abandons, sometimes fights, sometimes eats his creations. A God who eats himself. And when you love someone who partakes of themselves this way, you can't help but worry. You make a wish from the bottom of your heart that their art will gratify and not destroy them, and that life otherwise will treat them well, that they will get whatever they need, that they will prosper. That when the needs they've given their creations manage to overcome them as creators, they will be comforted. Not by you. But by someone who sits next to them.
And that if there is no one sitting next to them, they will feel your warmth for them, and that they will know there's someone listening and asking them to live, to live, to live. Just as they want to. Just as they need.
Who (else) do you love? Do you love?
But it may be possible for us to love the people who don't sit next to us. There's a line in one of the final episodes of Sailor Moon, when Usagi is confronted by Rei, and then by Haruka and Michiru, as to whether or not she already has someone important. Usagi replies tearfully, "I love Mamo-chan...but I...love other people too!" For her there is not one person only to love, or a system of different intensities of love--she can love so many, in the same way, and still love only Mamoru as her future husband.
I think this effusion of love is important to have. And part of what we're trying to do with this magazine, I think, is to show love to our writers--to wish them well on both personal and professional levels. To find the text we love is a common goal of literary magazine editors, but we want also to love the person who worked on, pondered over, and perhaps pained for writing that text. We want to be generous with our love.
So when I say that I love Owen Pallett, I hope that my meaning will be clear.
Mike found Owen Pallett for me. I loved the music immediately--it was exactly the kind of music I had once dreamed of making. As a teenager, I holed myself up for hours building MIDI tracks of original songs. Occasionally I'd write lyrics. The songs were never quite what I wanted, but they weren't so far off either. It wasn't that I was transcribing the orchestral to the digital--I was learning to write for the digital medium, to work within it rather than in spite of it. I built melodies of loops. I did not use the patch for "Violin" if I wanted a violin, but a patch that seemed to more accurately evoke a particular style, quality, voice of violin I heard in my head. I wanted to write a musical at this time. I wanted to be a composer, but I didn't have an instrument. I was modest at clarinet, and could play piano by ear. I could sing. I had a 3/4 size viola that I couldn't figure out the fingerings for. I didn't have enough to go on, and I gave the idea of making music up.
When I heard Owen Pallett, a part of me woke up. It burned. This was what I had wanted to do. Not just the concept, but the implementation. A layering of loops, creating a complicated texture. Unusual, fantastical themes; thick, rambling lyrics. An incredible attention to rhythm, dynamic. Purity of voice, and flexibility of voice. I loved everything about it. I started to want to make a musical again. I felt acutely my desire to make music and my obstacles, the musicianship I would need to regain, re-practice to produce anything near his. The music made me hurt, and want, and need.
Gotta find and kill my shadow self...gotta dig up every secret seashell...
You may have been made for love
But I'm just made
Listening to more, I realized how powerfully that hurt and need was in the music, and not just in me. How powerfully it reached for...something. Everything. How the music bristled with knives. How his voice broke when he screamed.
Owen Pallett himself is likely not in such painful need. But to make an analogy: I know that when Mike writes a story about, say, a suicidal character, that he is not himself that character and is not himself suicidal. (Rookie mistake.) But I do know that he inhabits that character, and that he calls to mind the times he's felt that pain, that need to escape. And he makes himself inhabit that pain. Just as I do, when I write someone who needs a mother, who needs a job, who needs a talent, who needs someone to love them. Writers can divorce themselves from their characters. (I myself have a very good mother.) But usually if they're worth their salt, they're making themselves feel what their characters feel. They're filled with the same need as the character as they work to create it. And I think that this is true of good musicians as well.
If what I have is what you need
I'm never gonna give it to you
And when you expose yourself to a lot of work by a particular artist--just as when you read a lot of work by a particular author--sometimes you feel something more than admiration, more than appreciation, more than enjoyment. You feel for them as much as for their art. You want them to be happy. You want them to eat well. You want them to be safe at night, and when they wake up. You love them. It is a kind of love.
I love Owen Pallett. I will be going to his concert in Tucson in October, and I will feel love for him there, I'm sure. But that's all I will do, all I want to do. I'm not going to storm the stage. I won't be in the front row. I'm not going to write comments on his YouTube videos. I won't write replies to him on Twitter. I don't know his birthday. I keep forgetting where exactly he lives, where he's from (Canada, I'm pretty sure, somewhere). I don't watch all his interviews, and in the ones I've seen I don't play a monologue in my head: He's a genius or What a hottie or How cute or Oh man what if we kissed.
It's not really meant to be any more sort of pretentious or bizarre than somebody singing about, you know--a baby, or--
(gets up to shut the door)
--oh, this door doesn't shut. Than a baby, or a shorty, or, you know, girl, or boy, or whatever people sing their love songs about. It's just meant to--I just kind of, because I wanted to sing the songs from the perspective of the Other singing back to me, I wanted to kind of make him as specific as possible, really give him, you know, almost make him seem like more of a real character than myself in this record.
Owen uses himself, ill-uses himself, in almost every record. He is often explicitly a sort of God to whomever he sings about--a God who sometimes coddles, sometimes abandons, sometimes fights, sometimes eats his creations. A God who eats himself. And when you love someone who partakes of themselves this way, you can't help but worry. You make a wish from the bottom of your heart that their art will gratify and not destroy them, and that life otherwise will treat them well, that they will get whatever they need, that they will prosper. That when the needs they've given their creations manage to overcome them as creators, they will be comforted. Not by you. But by someone who sits next to them.
And that if there is no one sitting next to them, they will feel your warmth for them, and that they will know there's someone listening and asking them to live, to live, to live. Just as they want to. Just as they need.
Who (else) do you love? Do you love?
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