Adventures In Bad Writing, Part 1

"Experience is the best teacher," says the sage. Once again, however, the sage is full of crap. I've found a better teacher, and it isn't experience. It isn't the sage, either, with his long white beard and his staff, looking like something from the gatefold of a Led Zeppelin album. (I'd have more respect for the sage if he ever said anything useful, like, say, "Drinks are on me; what are you having?" As it stands, as far as I'm concerned, the sage can take a hike. See ya, Gandalf. The sci-fi convention's at the Hyatt.)

Other people say that observing the masters of the craft is the best teacher. Say you're talking about writing, which, as it happens, I am. The watch-the-masters school would tell you to immerse yourself in Shakespeare, Kafka, and Faulkner, and just sort of, you know, do what they do, only as yourself. The problem with this, aside from the near-suicidal feeling of inferiority which it engenders in the student, is that, by definition, the masters do not make the kind of beginner's mistakes you've got to watch out for.

No, in my opinion, the best teacher is the stupidity and failure of others. Let's say you're just learning to swim. Now, you could spend untold hours viewing Olympic freestyle highlights, and maybe you'd pick up a few of the finer points. But when it comes to sheer practicality and a lesson that's going to stick with you for life, I say nothing beats spending 10 minutes watching just one person drown. You may not learn all the subtleties of the art from the experience, but I just about guarantee that you'll walk away with a sound grasp of two or three things that you definitely don't want to do.

What I'm trying to say is that you can learn as much or more from bad writing as you can from good writing-- and these days, we have access to bad writing like never before. As recently as five years ago, ghouls seeking the edifying experience of watching their fellow writers choke to death on their own literary vomit were pretty much out of luck. Outside of finding some goth kid's journal on the street, or maybe dating the teacher of a freshman creative writing class, there were precious few opportunities to see the kind of linguistic train wreck that leaves the young prose stylist muttering, "There but for the grace of God go I."

Now, though, we've got the Internet, and you can get a virtually unlimited supply of other people's unedited scrawlings streamed directly into your home at 60 kilobits per second. Over the next few weeks, we'll be taking occasional looks at some examples, based on real stories by real people, of some of the basic obstacles that lie between you (and more importantly, me) and that National Book Award.

We'll be focusing mostly on fiction, which I can't write any better than you can. (In fact, I'm undertaking this project mostly to educate myself.) What I can do-- and you can, too; I'm nothing special-- is spot a huge, obvious clunker when I see it. So join me, won't you, as we embark upon... Adventures in Bad Writing!

Okay, so I didn't get home from the party until, like, 8 a.m., so I'm going to rather shamelessly punt today's post. (Don't worry about this becoming a habit-- I get invited to maybe two parties a year, and I go to about two, though not usually the same two.)

Anyway, on to the punt: instead of reading my monotonous ramblings today, might I suggest that you read this essay instead. I think every English speaker should be required to read it. It's by Michael O'Donaghue.

Sadly literal

The World appears finally to be taking notice of and addressing one of the many, many petty annoyances that have been slowly driving me mad for lo these many years, specifically, the use of the word "literally" to mean-- exactly-- "figuratively." As in, "I'm literally starving to death," or, "My blind date was literally a yeti."

I still remember the announcer of a televised basketball game in 1988 saying, "Kevin Johnson has literally exploded here in this second half!" That definitely would have been something to see. It didn't really happen, though.

I've heard standup comics and a few people on the radio mention the "literally" thing lately, so at least it's on the radar. And it's only taken about 15 years for people to catch on. As such things go, that's pretty good, I guess-- people still haven't caught on to the distinction between "comprise" and "compose."

On a related note, I've recently discovered a new meaning of the word "sadly." Obviously, it still means "in a sad manner," as well as "unfortunately." However, used in political or scientific discussions, "sadly" can now be used to mean "is also an asshole."

For example (from a letter to Science Fiction Weekly-- geeks love this usage): "If Mr. Gheesling believes that the spirit of Warner Brothers animation lives on through Animaniacs, Histeria and Duck Dodgers, he is sadly mistaken."

Before we continue, I think we should pause for a moment to laugh at this man, and the deadly earnest he brings to the subject of Duck Dodgers cartoons: BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

Anyway, what the writer is really trying to say, of course, is: "If Mr. Gheesling believes that the spirit of Warner Brothers animation lives on through Animaniacs, Histeria and Duck Dodgers, he is mistaken, and he's also an asshole."

This new usage of the seemingly-innocuous "sadly" is a pretty sneaky way to call someone an asshole. It can also be used as a mea culpa, as it was in this Amazon reader review of the 2002 book The Rumsfeld Way: "At one time, I held Rumsfeld in awe. I was sadly mistaken." Again, the writer's meaning can be expressed more directly: "At one time, I held Rumsfeld in awe. I was mistaken, and I was also an asshole."

As the tenor of cultural debate in America becomes ever more shrill and passive-aggressive-- actually, let me rephrase that: As cultural debate in America becomes ever more dominated by assholes, the "sadly" construction is well-positioned to have a banner 2004. Watch for it, or you'll find yourself sadly behind the times.

-

- Are we done? Okay-- what? No, it's good...

- Fuck, I can't believe I actually ended with that sentence using "sadly." You know, like, "Get it, here's the word I was talking about, and now I'm using it." God, that's pretty weak.

- Right... right. Such are the hazards of daily journalism...

- [inaudible]

- Yeah; puts hair on your chest.

Personally unappealing

Last night I had a dream about an internet personals site that featured, on its homepage, the ad that users had voted to be the most unappealing of all the ads posted. In this case, it was an ad featuring a picture of a woman in her seventies. Everyone made fun of her and had good sport cracking wise about what a cold day in hell it would be when they would go on a date with her. It made me sad when I woke up, because I'll bet there are a lot of real 70-year old ladies out there who are pretty lonely and can't even think about placing a personals ad without risking almost universal derision from acne-riddled net geeks who themselves have not had a date in three years.

This is also sad, because an idealistic person who had no experience with the real world might imagine that the hard-favored would be more tolerant of physical imperfections in others. If anything, the reverse seems to be true, at least for guys. I see message boards all the time where links are posted to news stories that include photos of the women involved. The appearance of the woman in the picture is usually a far more popular topic of discussion than the substance of the story.

Any woman over 26 or so is usually described as an old crack-whore, and any woman over, say, 115 pounds is a white-trash sow who needs to lay off the Mallomars and get her ass to the gym.

I guess that the above makes the tacit assumption that guys who sit around posting rude cracks about women whose pictures they've seen online are themselves unlikely to rate a perfect 10 on amihot.com. That could be false, I suppose. I haven't seen these guys, so for all I know they could all be perfectly ripped Adonises who make Michalangelo's David look like the second runner-up in a Buddy Hackett look-alike contest.

I bet they're not, though. I picture them as overweight, socially inept guys in their twenties and thirties. They sit in front of their computers for hours with their pants undone. They mostly wear sweatpants and stained t-shirts from the last tech conference they went to, and they're surrounded by empty Cheez-It boxes and randomly scattered PlayStation 2 game discs.

I'm glad I'm not like that. I don't have a PlayStation.

Let no man say I spent my Christmas break-- all one-and-a-half days of it-- idle. Here is a new essay (or something). I call it Even a Hunchback Can Use Bubble Wrap. It's sufficiently long and self-contained that I'm putting it on its own page rather than making it a blog post. But it could have been a blog post, a really long one, so don't anybody say I'm not doing enough work on the blog.

As part of my commitment to have something new on the site every day, today I finally got around to posting The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook. This challenges the very definition of the word "new," since I think it's the oldest piece of writing by me that I still have in my posession. (Also, it's available all over the web, which is why it's here-- I didn't have to type it.) Still, there it is, enjoy.

Christmas pudding I realized today, prowling the aisles of Safeway at the ungodly hour of seven-something a.m., that this is really only the third or fourth of my thirty-some Christmases that has been completely and totally suffused with the stench of death. (Yeah, I know, thanks; Merry Christmas to you, too.) It really wasn't so long ago that, while not looking forward to Christmas per se, there were things going on that day to look forward to-- parties, dinners, rooms full of warmth and light and not-altogether-strained gaiety. Now Christmas is dragon-ridden; the nightmare rides upon-- well, I was going to say isolation and despair, but I'll leave the teenage histrionics to Morrissey. What the nightmare really rides upon is inconvenience and irritation, which is how I came to find myself buying refrigerated pudding in the predawn hours of Christmas Eve this year. Pudding. To be precise, six little plastic cups of Swiss Miss creamy fresh pudding (in the dairy case, yo-de-lay-he-ho), tapioca flavor. I don't eat pudding, and never have, as far as I know, but I bought it, along with about $60 worth of other crap, just in case I decide to start tomorrow. It will be Christmas, after all, which is a day when people develop tastes for all sorts of bizarre things they wouldn't eat at any other time of year (when was the last time someone brought mincemeat pie to a 4th of July picnic?) And if I do decide I want pudding tomorrow, I won't be able to get it, because everything will be closed. I may still be a relative neophyte when it comes to mortality-flavored solitary Christmases, but give me some credit; I've been at it long enough to know that if you want to eat anything during the feast of our lord, you'd better lay it in well in advance. I've learned this the hard way, and I'm not going to be taken in again. I've got plenty of Diet Vanilla Coke, a goodly supply of deep-fried honey-mustard pretzel nuggets, and if, for some reason, I feel the need to eat three one-pound rib steaks in the next 36 hours, then by God, I'm ready.

Blog, blog, blog. I think I'm getting the hang of this blog thing. It's simple, really-- you just have to accept the fact that your lack of anything cogent to say presents no hindrance to saying it. Just go ahead, write about nothing. You talk about nothing all the time, why not write the same way? "How about those Blazers?" "Shitty weather we've been having." "Can you believe what she was wearing?" Even if you fancy yourself a fairly clever lass or fellow, I'm willing to bet that few of your conversations with your friends have any actual substance the way, say, Moby-Dick or The New York Times-- or even the operator's manual for your new waffle iron that you got for Christmas from somebody who obviously has no concept of who you are or how you live your life-- has substance. The chats you have with your acquaintances may, on some subtextual level, express bonding, or fondness (or possibly disrespect, or a veiled, passive-aggressive feeling of superiority), but the actual subject matter could be anything; it doesn't matter. And that's in real life. Here, in the eternal blackness, it's even less important to communicate anything of value. It seems clear that all I have to do is be here for all my non-existent readers, murmuring into the abyss in soothing tones, in a gesture of solidarity with all of you who aren't there. Trust me; I know just how you feel. How was your day? Without form, and void? Mine, too. What did you do? Nothing? Me, either. Anything exciting coming up? No? Well, I have to say I don't have a whole lot to report myself.. See how easy it is? Once you accept that you're writing for nobody, it only makes sense that you should feel perfectly free to write about nothing. It really takes the pressure off-- and, though the quality of the prose may leave something to be desired, I can take comfort in the fact that it's worth every penny I'm getting paid for it. I feel no guilt, no remorse. If anything, this realization makes me feel remiss in my obligation to occasionally say something substantive to those who actually do exist, who have to listen to me drone on about nothing in their real, extant, spatio-temporal lives. But I feel no guilt about my vapid uttereances to you, my pretty wraiths. You're used to a diet of wind soup and air pudding. You wouldn't have it any other way. So have a second helping, or even a third, on me. You are what you eat.

This has got to be the crappiest blog in the world. The thing that makes it the crappiest blog in the world is the fact that it's actually exactly as crappy as 99.8% of all the other blogs in the world, and it's crappy in exactly the same way: It started out with a burst of what, for the present author, passes for enthusiasm, with frequent, meditative, self-indulgent posts. There were two in the first two days. Then there was one a week later. Then there was one three weeks later. Then there wasn't one for over a month. Now there's a new, desperate one that will attempt and fail to breathe life into a boring pile of crap that no one will ever read anyway. On balance, there are some mitigating factors. Staring into an uncertain abyss of abject failure has taken up a lot of my time and energy lately. Worse, all my friends are experiencing varying flavors of the same experience at about the same time, so I can't even get any soul-gratifying pity from them (nor, more to the point, are any of them in a position to help me get a job). My grandfather just moved into a retirement community, so I suppose I could go and live in his house rent-free. Unfortunately, his house is 2000 miles away, about 15 minutes outside a tiny, dying mining town in Southern Illinois. If I did this, I would say I was doing it to make a documentary about this town that I've already shot a little footage for, but in actual fact I'm afraid I would be going home to die, my 20-year experiment with class mobility having failed. Where does white trash like me get off thinking it can get a fancy college degree and become a big, famous writer? Where? Here, apparently.