Putting the last of March's Lantern together and last night I was hit hard by a toothache. Nasty, vicious one it was, but I made it through the night before being able to see my dentist. During that time, the tooth well and truly died, so it's a root canal next week, and I'm not feeling tooth pain just now, rather just a bit of sick from the sewage dripping down my throat from the small abcess that was caught in time and is now diminishing. Good times.
As such, did not spend a lot of time working today, with the deadline close now, while I spent too much time watching youtube. That usually means some discussion on writing these days, as I've already said, this time with the main complaint being the poor white male writer who has been mercilessly cast aside by the publishing industry, the bastards, mostly in favour of women. Such diatribes that I see are usually put forth in content hosted by women, because this stuff is even worse when the subject is on a video hosted by men.
There are a few reasons I don't count myself as part of this pity party. First, I know I didn't "make it" as a mainstream writer largely because of my angry youth period, when all those who reached their hand out to help my career got it slapped away. Later, I didn't "make it" because I tended to rise up among groups of writers rather fearlessly to point out that their material wasn't going anywhere because it wasn't any good, just as I did not consider my work at the time of about the same caliber. That tended to make sure my work was not included in that sort of "grant sanctioned" collection that became so popular (and now so obscure) in Canada in the 1990s. Since then, I haven't "made it" because, well, fuck the publishing industry. As such, no pity party. There's a responsible person for this white male failing to become a bestselling author, that being me.
As such, as I write in my inimical, less than polite style, I want to make a point here that as I writer I've never self-identified as either white or male. Obviously, others have done so; I argued that on this blog less than a month ago. But I can't ever recall stopping mid-sentence and thinking, "Wait, is this how a man would write this sentence?" or "is that description of a farm house in Saskatchewan legitimate from a white perspective?" Predictably, I'm going to be accused of this by default anyway, since obviously there are fifty ways to describe the slats of an old house in a sparsely wooded country — the white way, the black way, the catholic way, the Guatemalan way and so on... with my knowing only the first of these. As such, I can only write about anything in the particular way associated with circumstances of my birth having nothing to do with my choices, and therefore I pay no attention to this. Not only do I pay it no attention while I'm writing, I pay it no attention if I hear someone else comment on this while they're reading... for, as well all know, there's only so many ways to read a text also: the white way, the black way, the catholic way and so on.
All of this is attitude is a ridiculous game that I am not interested in playing. Because of my name, and because I grew up in an age when a great deal was expressed through letters and mailings, I have been mistaken hundreds of times of being a woman. Far more, I think, than a Sandy or a Sidney or a Sam might be, because for the most part, people are aware that those names might be a man or a woman, and written responses are less hesitant to judge. But as an "Alexis" in erstwhile days, virtually unknown at that time as an Eastern European or Russian name in the very bland whiteness of Alberta where I still dwell to this day, I have nearly always been assumed to be a woman first, and a man only later at the "unveiling" that happened again and again. And, of course, being a writer, where the name is attached to the work that is in text, there has always been the moment where it comes out: "Oh, you're a man. I though you were a woman."
That is perhaps a reason why my rhetoric, what I write here, is in a different tone from my "writing," such as occurs with the Lantern and other official works. Not to prove that I'm a man writing this blog, but because I have little reason to cultivate my reader. The more I cultivate, the more gracious and kind I am, the more likely it will be that my reader will think I'm a woman... I am, after all, in such cases, "so polite." Because I can, if I wish, write just as sweet as cream. It's really not that hard.
I think this relevant because none of those who assumed I was a woman back in the day added the phrase, "But you don't write like a man." Rather, the instant they understood what I was, once they'd seen the label on the wrapper if you will, then in their heads my writing automatically snapped to being that of a man. If this happens once or twice, it might be overlooked... but when it has happened many, many times every year, and especially so when I was writing for articles and newspapers, the whole "write like a man" or "write like a woman" frankly becomes an obvious hoax. It's all just horseshit to assume that because a writer includes constant references to a cultural frame or a supposed "identity" in text, that the identity is automatically "authentic," is just hokum. What makes the identity "authentic"is that the Guatemalan author's name is "Juan José López Pérez" and not "Carlos Martin," either of which are common names of that country.
Even after it was known that Cary Grant's given name was Archibald Leach (the name appears on a gravestone in the film Arsenic and Old Lace), they preferred Cary Grant because he didn't "look" like an Archibald. I mean, really... Grace Kelly and Archibald Leach? Ridiculous.
If it really is that tough for a man to succeed in the modern publishing stream, then for heaven's sake, why not just write like a woman? In the late 1940s through the 1950s, the Hollywood blacklist turned authorship into a kind of covert tradecraft. Writers accused of Communist sympathies found themselves unemployable under their own names. The result was an underground economy of authorship in which blacklisted writers continued to work by using "fronts," pretending to submit the author's scripts under their own names. It sounds awful, but it let writers go on making their living as writers, and not as ditchdiggers, cooks or door-to-door salesmen.Some people are "shocked" to discover this about me, far more so than learning that I'm not a woman. I find this funny. I rather like having my prose being mistaken for that of a woman, because it says very clearly to me that there is no such thing as "gender identity" writing. That's just a thing people made up. All the carping about male authorship and the lack of male readers and such only reveals that whatever the problem, it's almost certainly that the writing itself isn't really all that good. I say this as someone who, I argue, does not write well enough to win the Booker Prize. But then, that's not an atmosphere I ever want to breathe. What a bunch of stuffed mannequins.
When I find myself watching a video that features a white man bleating about the unfairness of the industry, and how his thoughtful, nuanced book about a man undergoing trauma about some thing or other reveals the depths of his themes or his value as a writer, I usually take this with a grain of sale. I have had too many discussions with both would-be and successful writers (far more successful than me, yet strangely no more secure for it) to be certain that this "deep theme" is more than dishwater with a few plates in it. And when I hear that this self same book has been struggling to get published for 15 years, I am not assured that this isn't another case of Chinese Democracy by Guns and Roses... a sort of competent work that in reality is almost instantly forgettable. And when I am actually told what the book is about, it invariably falls into the realm of some other book written by a white man between seventy and a hundred years ago — because it turns out that this is a man struggling in his marriage in a way not unlike Revolutionary Road, or this is a young man being crushed under his responsibilities and ennui not unlike Catcher in the Rye, or this is about a man from the rough sides of the tracks trying to get out, not unlike The Man with the Golden Arm, or this is about a man whose dreams didn't pan out like he thought they would, not unlike Death of a Salesman. In fact, I never hear anything about a white man's trauma that I can't locate in some book I read before I was twenty, when the actual age of the book was much older than that.
The emotional value of these books is important, and were valuable at the time, but my having read them convinced me that they were also ground I didn't need to cover. I recognised while the age of Biff in the play the pitfalls of Willie and thus did not allow myself to fall into them. I have zero desire to write such a novel because, first, if I wanted to make the point I'd tell the reader to see the play or read it through themselves; and second, because I lived my life entirely different from Willie, the thoughts rolling around in my head are not mixed up with feelings of inadequacy. My not "making it" as a writer is not a Willie problem for me; in the end, the writing in fact mattered more than the glitz. Willie's problem is that he hated being a salesman; he sold his comfort for a dream that never materialised, while I gained comfort and joy despite a dream that never materialised. My "trauma" isn't one. That's how good Arthur Miller's play really is: it taught me as a young man the pits and perils of not going down that road. So when I meet an author now who wants to write a book that sounds like Death of a Salesman, all I can think is "Why didn't you read the play young and learn something?"
Yet, I see these same books pitched over and over on the Internet by white men who bemoan the system that is aligned against them. Yet to paraphrase the line from Sorkin's American President, the failure isn't that the modern male writer doesn't get it, it's that they can't sell it. No one is interested in their 1950s based emotional problems not because they are white problems, but because they are problems that none of us have any more. No one anywhere believes that a man who cannot deal with his marriage has a right to complain about the "trauma" he's suffering, because there are now literally a hundred different approaches a person willing to be flexible and change their nature can do something about that. It's not the 1950s, it's not the land of fault divorce, it's not the male's responsibility to do all the earning, it's not the male's right to have a pity party because the marriage isn't going well. Those are problems that dinosaurs have. Present day males simply agree with their wives to call it quits, take up an activity that encourages growth and self-awareness, accepts that life is pain, that everyone feels it, and moves the fuck on. There's no room left for wallowing, which is what those old works of 70 years ago did. Not to their fault, but due to the time in which they were written.
This explains why so much literature and so many films take place three, four, even five decades ago, so that writers who want to write about the old problems all over again can do so without looking idiotic. But really, these stories only tell us to be grateful we're no longer those people. They don't enlighten, they don't really engage. They're largely judged on how faithful they are to the time period (within specific modern taboos), never upon the insight they offer into anything.
The pitch for why I should care about such writing — for there is always a pitch — suggests to me a fellow who arrives at my front door to sell me a new, great product he's invented. It's "sensational," every home needs one, it performs a service unlike no other appliance, the very presence of it will change the way I start my day every morning... and then, the reveal: it's a toaster. The man has invented a toaster. It may be a very nice toaster, it may do the job it's designed to do, but I already have one and it's the least modern gadget I own. In fact, I'm so tired of toast after a lifetime of eating it now that my toaster has one single purpose: to toast bagels. I don't eat sliced bread and the buns I eat don't fit in the toaster, so now this is all that's left. And if there are no bagels in the house, the toaster goes in a cupboard — where it sits, for months, until I want bagels again.
This is modern writing produced by the kind of complaining male I happen to find on youtube. Mind you, outside the "lit" community, I have no problem whatsoever finding books written by males... about history, science, geopolitics, mechanics, you name it. But I don't buy these.
I have the internet now.
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