Thursday 1/11/24
People's general attitude in life: "You better not say that true thing about me!"
Also:
"You better think what I want you to think never mind if it's true!"
Also:
"It's true enough because I said it or want it believed!"
Publishing people and especially those who teach like John Williams' Stoner because it is boring and they are boring and it's about meaninglessness within an English department and an empty life, upon which these people project the illusion of scope because their lives are so limited and empty so they force these kind of things. No one else would care.
You could actually go out and live life. This does not mean become a jungle adventurer, necessarily. It means go out and become someone who understands scope and the actual scope that is to be understood from things that might not look to be "huge" on the surface. Don't just live life as a kind of game of grab-ass where all you want to do is align with--and roll the logs for--things that suggest you and your life to you. You've reduced the latter to nothing and you hardly know the former--not really--at all.
A funny thing about MFA programs and getting an MFA is that built into the "logic" behind them is the unavoidable supposition that the writers from before the program era began would be better if they'd gotten an MFA. Shakespeare would be better, Keats would be better, Dickens would be better. Yes, I'm sure A Christmas Carol, Tristram Shandy, and The Master and Margarita would go over swimmingly in workshop. None of these people ever think about that, which, of course, immediately invalidates the whole thing. Or don't want to think about it. Live the lie, be the lie.
MFA people like to say things like, "Being in a program gave me time to write," the implication being they wouldn't have time otherwise, which is bullshit. First of all, you hardly wrote anything at all. I'll write more every morning of my life than almost all of these people will write in years. Secondly, anyone who has ever cared about writing, or had a need to write because of what was in them, what they believed their writing could do, has had the time. You get the fuck up and do it. Nothing but you--and living a lie--stops you from getting the fuck up and doing it. You want to do it because it means enough to you, you can do it. You don't need a special fucking dispensation to do it.
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