this is one of my great shameful emails, mostly because it is an emotional outpouring to someone that i didn’t know, and wouldn’t know. XXXX is a writer that a friend and i both became kind of enamored with when we saw him give a reading. portland being the town that it is, i later saw him around and we got coffee.
this writer had a mfa in creative writing and name-dropped russian authors and obscure beat poets and art films and lit movements during our conversation. intellectual snobbery isn’t my bag, but both despite this and because of this, i walked home home feeling like a philistine. i stewed a bit and wrote a long, defensive, expository email to this stranger.
the note is overwritten, which is annoying, and too personal, which is also bothersome, but what shames me most about this email is that i even felt a need to write it. i’m not interested in russian lit and poetry. what of it?
portland, oregon
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Hi. Hello. Hey.
I have been eating lavender-laced chocolate and doing spurts of work and thinking about books and writers and writing. You mentioned works by a lot of writers I have never heard of. This had me feeling very un-literary and poorly read, and I have been thinking about why that is.
I have always been wary of the literary scene, personified for me by all those people I knew at university who majored in lit and sucked hard. I read because I seek words that speak to me, move me, break my heart and make it sing, and I always felt that lit classes and discussions of great works muddied that experience. I was never really interested in historical context or the movement to which it belonged; to me reading is very personal. I resented having to listen to pretentious lit students who domineered discussions with speeches peppered with GRE vocab words and literary theories, who spoke lots but said very little. And so I became an anth major (encountering a vanity of a whole different sort), turning my back on the lit department but also on authors and writers that might qualify as “literature” because I associated their works with the masturbatory speeches of obnoxious coeds. Acknowledging this makes me feel very young.
I am slowing realizing what should have been obvious: scoffing at the big names has left me shunning some very good writers. I won’t say important, because I’m not sure that I care about important. But there is even some hypocrisy in that.
Have you seen The Devil Wears Prada? It is a movie, not a film, one outfitted with pretty people and pretty clothes, a Cinderella story with a flash of the self-made woman thrown in. At one point the main character – a very unfashionable girl who gets a gig as the assistant to an Anna Wintour-esque fashion mag editor – says she doesn’t care about high fashion, it’s all so ridiculous and pointless. And the editor looks at her and says that even the sweater that she is wearing, the one she plucked from the sales rack or a thrift store for its color or texture or practicality or whatever, the sweater she chose for totally personal reasons, that sweater– and probably even her subconscious draw to it – exists because however many years ago, the people in that room, the eds of this fashion magazine, plucked a similar style from the samples from an up and coming designer, and the rest is history. I think about this often. Not necessarily with regard to clothes, but with regard to philosophy, to literature, to music. I can feign disinterest in literary history and great writers, but that history percolates throughout my subconscious and the subconscious of writers I love, so that disinterest is pretty juvenile.
I took your list and picked a few poets and short story writers to start with – plus Peeling the Onion and To The Wedding - and put some books on hold at the library. The resulting stack may last me into the winter, but I’m hoping to find at least a few that move me immediately, so I can buy my own copies and mark them up with a number two pencil.
I said that I am unfamiliar with poetry. I rescind this statement. Bob Dylan, Joanna Newsom, Joni Mitchell - these people are my great loves and yet I disregard their words as poetry because they are set to music. Perhaps in the writing community there is something impure about songwriters as poets - I don’t know. Are you familiar with Joanna? If not I’ll burn her for you. The first time I listened to YS, her latest album, it was in San Diego. My brother had seen her in concert and sent me the CD. I listened the first song – it’s like, eight minutes long – in the car while driving to meet a man I was just starting to date, and then I listened to it again. I think I had been nervous about this date; maybe we were still in that nebulous phase. I don’t remember. But I do know that I got to the bar where we were meeting and didn’t want to get out of the car. I had been looking forward to this moment all day, anticipating his face and his smile. Now all I wanted was to stay and listen to Joanna, over and over. I reluctantly got out of the car and tried to snap out of this trance I was in from her music and words and couldn’t, really, so I said, hi, I just listened to this album, and I think it’s going to change my life, and I need a drink and a few minutes of not talking to you. He said he understood, it was cool; I think in reality it was probably the beginning of the end with him, a flash of my crazy flag. I didn’t care and still don’t. Because who is he? Some guy a few thousand miles away with whom I shared several weeks of seemingly deep conversations with. We no longer speak. And she? Well, she’s forever, and she’s tops.
