A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
Due to the holiday weekend here in America—I’m entertaining guests for a few days—I wasn’t able to post a new literary essay, but I reposted my 2016 essay on Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. I wrote that piece in response to the wave of populism then cresting over politics and culture, while many commentators now agree that this wave is rapidly receding. (Kanye West’s embassy to Mar-a-Lago this week, with his belated alt-right entourage, at least one of member of which is reputed to be a federal informant, may be the final twitch of the corpse.)
And for our Wednesday creative writing post, more poetry. I don’t think I lost a single subscriber from this one, so I thank you for your restraint. This one is a bit out of character for me, more chilly and theoretical, more “European,” than my customary productions, but maybe interesting for that very reason—at least for people who usually find my more heated aesthetic annoying.
Below two small essays. I am still short on time this weekend, so both appeared elsewhere in slightly different forms: the first, about composition and creative writing, on my website in 2016, and the second, about the controversial Terrifier films and the ethics of art, on the Grand Hotel Abyss Tumblr earlier this week.
Mediated Understanding: Typing, Writing, Improvising, and/or Planning a Novel
[The first version of this essay was inspired by a piece by Akilesh Ayyar in The Millions on planning vs. non-planning novelists. I was inspired to revisit it by “Speak, Digits,” at Return, an excellent essay by
on digital composition—“digital” in all senses. When I originally published this, I was midway through writing my 2021 novel The Class of 2000. All the photos and screenshots are from the drafts of that novel.]I have written four novels now. My method is always same, despite my best intentions: I begin blindly with a character or image or situation or metaphor and then explore it at random, writing toward I know not what. I end up with many false starts and dead ends; I delete a lot of text and throw away a lot of paper. In this haphazard and disheartening way, I discover the characters, the setting, the theme, the plot, and the tone.
I could, in theory, avoid being disheartened by planning everything in advance, but the quality of exploration and discovery would then be lost. I have to write the novel itself to write anything authentic; preparing an outline or making notes does not feel like writing at all. By the time I have written about half of the novel, though, I have also usually discovered its complete structure. Then I do make an outline, which I usually follow to the end.
Writing a novel is a deterministic process: you begin with a feeling of infinite possibility, but every choice conditions and constrains each subsequent choice until you reach a point where you have no choices left. This “point” is not the ending itself, but the moment when you can perceive the total structure at last. I really don’t see how someone could write an entire novel without any plan, unless one just does not care whether the novel’s moral accounts balance or its tone and symbol-system cohere. There can be perfectly good avant-garde reasons not to care about these things, but I am not an avant-gardist.
My process is as disorganized materially as it is intellectually. I can never decide whether to write by hand or to type. Because writing by hand feels like more work, it also feels more virtuous (we Americans are all Protestants, whatever else we may be), so I often start with pencils and pens and notebooks. But then my hand gets tired; I weary of smudged graphite and of empty pens and of spiral binding that carves itself into my wrist; and then I take to the laptop. This mixed and frustrating method would be a harmless quirk of my writing life, except that I write fiction very differently depending on whether I write by hand or type.
Writing by hand is such a slow, sensuous activity that it turns me into a writer of precision, concision, and concreteness; my descriptions seem carved out of marble with the Parthenon-envying Flaubert’s chisel, my dialogue incised with the fisherman Hemingway’s fillet knife. Writing by hand leads me inevitably to the visual and audible, to scenes and settings—to those older forms, poetry and drama.
At the keyboard, by contrast, where the writing is about five to ten times faster, I become a manic psychologist and ideologist in the Dostoevsky or Roth manner, and even the descriptions themselves become delirious and bizarre and overwritten, Faulkner rather than Flaubert. Narrative gets faster, the phenomenal world pales before the inner life, and ideas proliferate beyond what a poem or a drama could contain.1
Each of these methods has its virtue: in the one, I am working so slowly that I feel I can perceive and convey what others miss of the observable world; in the other, I am working so quickly that I can evade the inner censor and pluck forbidden thoughts, dripping black water, straight from the unconscious. Each method has flaws too: the written-by-hand can become precious and airless, while the composed-at-the-keyboard can become loquacious and melodramatic.
The insights provided by both writing and typing are too good to miss, though, so I usually do a mixture of both. And usually I do the reverse of my aforementioned planning procedure: for the novel’s unplanned first half, I seek the precision and constraint of writing by hand; while for the planned second half, I take to the keyboard and race to find the hidden potential in the pre-formed material. That way, I hope that the spontaneous first half feels careful and purposeful, and the structured second half feels joyfully improvised.
A novel should get faster and more intense for the reader as it proceeds, which is too often the inverse of the writer’s experience of the waning enthusiasm that accompanies structural clarity. I have decided to embrace my chaotic procedure as at least a partial solution to this paradox of the novel, which must be increasingly logical and increasingly intense at once.
Art’s Sake?: Meatphysics and Metaphysics in Arthouse Horror Cinema
Writing for Compact, Adam Lehrer, in “Away from Arthouse Horror,” celebrates Damon Leone’s Terrifier films. In both, the mysterious Art the Clown stalks his mostly female victims to their grisly deaths—a throwback the slasher genre of the ’80s, inaugurated by John Carpenter’s Halloween. Leone, however, considerably ups the quotient of blood and guts in a kind of gore aestheticism, the artful deconstruction of the body pursued for its own sake, hence our clown’s moniker.
In the first film, from 2016, Art the Clown chains a woman up by her spread legs and proceeds to cleave her two with a hacksaw, beginning at the perineum. This year’s sequel, crowd-funded, runs two-and-a-half hours. If it offers us a more conventional protagonist-centered heroine’s journey than the more straightforwardly exploitative first film, it also gives itself time and space to amplify the violence and gore. In the first version of this post, I referred to the pair of films as “the pointless Terrifier and the endless Terrifier 2” and wondered why they merited cheerleading from the right-wing social democrats at Compact.2
Lehrer says these films, especially the two-and-a-half-hour “mega slasher” sequel, signal a departure from increasingly middlebrow arthouse horror of the A24 variety, with its social conscience and its attempts at emotional depth. I think he exaggerates both sides of the contrast, however. Terrifier 2 perhaps indicates a cyclical return to the 2000s torture-porn era, itself a recapitulation of ’80s slashers, but in its thematic concerns and even aspects of its tone it follows on naturally enough from Hereditary, whose own gore is more naturalistically rendered and therefore more disturbing, even if I find the scenery-chewing family melodrama at its core banal.
Lehrer also calls Jordan Peele’s Us a “hollowly political” falling away from Get Out’s effective subversions, but this is exactly backward. Get Out is an easy political cartoon; everybody loves it because everybody already hates its satirical target, elite white liberals, including elite white liberals themselves. Us is a far more searchingly anxious self-satire of the black bourgeoisie—an actually suspenseful movie since you’re never sure where its aggression and complicity will go next. But the cognoscenti couldn’t wring a portable political message out of this and popular audiences probably didn’t understand it, so the film was unjustly demoted.
Anyway, “cruelty without apology,” Lehrer says in celebration of Terrifer 2. I thought, “These must be some intriguingly fucked-up people,” so I headed to the social media profiles of the filmmaker and performers, as one does these days, but found only the dispiritingly familiar. A symptomatic example, one that parts the curtain of ideology: the director, whom Lehrer associates with Artaud and Wyndham Lewis, was on Twitter offering critical support to the lead actress as she/they joined others in accusing “incels” who complained about the film’s (relative) lack of nudity of being “pedophiles.” The mind reels. Leaving aside the fact that our heroine is all but nude in several scenes, and leaving aside too the “pedophile” nonsequitor (she is and looks like a full-grown adult), what stands revealed here is a telling arbitrariness about where moral lines are drawn.
This is a film where a female character is slashed and scalped, her arm torn off at the elbow, gouts of blood erupting out of the flesh of her back. Half-flayed, her skull exposed, she is doused in bleach, her wounds packed with salt as she howls and moans. The camera lovingly lingers on her backside as she crawls helplessly along her pink bedroom’s carpet, a mass of blood and gore. According to director and performer, no epithet need attach to the devisers or enjoyers of this spectacle. It’s wholesome entertainment, “without apology.” But any male who wishes to see an adult woman’s breasts, sans gaping wound or spouting blood? Incel! Pedophile!
My point is not to advocate for nudity nor even to deny that a (male) spectator who requires a full-frontal shot of the body before he can enjoy its dismemberment may earn himself a legitimate suspicion or two. (Though the decadent frisson of the body’s robustness preceding its obliteration may be healthier than a not-even-decadent destruction-without-beauty.) But on ideological grounds, Lehrer appears to be wrong that these films depart from 2010s ideology: the strange, crazy-making moralism that greeted something like Midsommar still applies. (I once described Midsommar on Tumblr as “advertising the white ethnostate to sad white city girls sick of their insensitive ‘Cat Person’ boyfriends.”) Every deviation from some imagined norm, no matter how baroque, must be celebrated as a triumphant emancipation; every desire once thought to reside within this norm must be castigated as retrogressive, monstrous. Flaying the body? Righteous. Appreciating the body? Heinous.
Skip the Terrifers and watch Us. Or, if you want something that more closely resembles what Lehrer describes, I renew my claim that the Rob Zombie Halloween movies fit the bill with the indescribable and impossible tenderness that somehow arises from their indeed unapologetic cruelty. For my part, I’m not squeamish but I am easily bored by the mere meatphysics of the slasher film. Inside this particular genre and out of it, we have surely heard enough by now about the body. What we need in horror is a new metaphysics.
Postscriptum in Memoriam: Enzensberger on Ecology
The German cultural critic and poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger died this week at the age of 93. He was among the innumerables on my endless to-read list. I like to read such authors for the first time right after they die, because the death of the author should be succeeded by the author’s immediate rebirth in the reader. I didn’t have time to make Enzensberger’s acquaintance in full, but I was able to peruse the German Library’s collection of his critical essays, edited by Reinhold Grimm and Bruce Armstrong. One appealed to me in particular, “A Critique of Political Ecology,” originally published in English in 1974 in the New Left Review. Written in another moment of waning radical chic, it has aged little in our age of climate doomerism. I leave you with two and a half trenchant paragraphs, translated by Stuart Hood.
Those who wish to deprive Marxism of its critical, subversive power and turn it into an affirmative doctrine generally dig in behind a series of stereotyped statements that, in their abstraction, are as irrefutable as they are devoid of results. One example is the claim that is proclaimed in the pages of every other picture magazine, irrespective of whether it is discussing syphilis, an earthquake, or a plague of locusts—“Capitalism is to blame!”
It is naturally splendid that anticapitalist sentiments are so widespread that even glossy magazines cannot avoid them altogether. But it is quite another question how far an analysis that a priori attributes every conceivable problem to capitalism deserves to be called Marxist, and what the political effect of this is. Its commonplace nature renders it harmless. Capitalism, so frequently denounced, becomes a kind of social ether, omnipresent and intangible, a quasi-natural cause of ruin and destruction, the conuring up of which can have a positively neutralizing effect. Since the concrete problem at hand—psychosis, lack of nursery schools, dying rivers, air crashes—can, without precise analysis of the exact causes, be referred to the total situation, the impression is given that any specific intervention here and now is pointless. In the same way, reference to the need for revolution has become an empty formula, the ideological husk of passivity.
The same holds true for the thesis that ecological catastrophe is unavoidable within the capitalist system. The prerequisite for all solutions to the environmental crisis is then the introduction of socialism. No particular skill is involved in deducing this answer from the premises of Marxist theory. The question, however, is whether it adds up to more than an abstract statement that has nothing to do with political praxis and that allows whoever utters it to neglect the examination of his concrete situation.
In defense of the stylistic excesses of the keyboard: I am hostile to the application of journalistic standards to literature. “Omit needless words” is unreliable advice for the fiction writer or poet, as if words were industrial parts or tone and mood a matter of mere calculation. As for the customary prohibitions on adverbs and the like, they mean nothing to me; I’ll use every word in the language if I want. The columns whose scarce inches required these stylistic restrictions barely exist on paper anymore. Strunk and White is a product of its time: the midcentury, with its over-streamlined and over-rationalized version of modernity. The Anglo vs. Norman (or, more broadly, northern-western vs. southern-eastern) ethnic subtext of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” is hardly relevant to contemporary American writing. Orwell and Hemingway and Didion are fine writers, but they can never play some notes on their chosen instruments.
I confess: in the original post I wrote “right-wing social democrats (but I repeat myself).”