(
the entire front page right now is a 20,000-word interview with noah cicero; it will remain this way for a long time, i think; so discussion in the comments section is encouraged)
noah cicero was born in 1980, has two novels—
burning babies (12/05 undie press);
the human war (6/03 fugue state press)—and used to be a member of the underground literary alliance (
the ULA); here are some noah cicero related links:
a review of burning babies, by michael allen
noah cicero's review of jonathan safran foer's extremely loud and incredibly close
noah cicero's review of dave eggers' story-collection, how we are hungry
noah cicero's report on a poetry reading he attended: "She kept naming locations like towns in Latin America, and if she ran out of towns, she would speak Spanish, Greek, German, or words in English so obscure that even if you knew what the word meant at one time, you probably forgot because no one ever uses that word."
an existential psychoanalysis of the republican character, an essay by noah cicero and bernice mullins
underground vs. the professionals: the great literary experiment, an essay by noah cicero with an intro by bernice mullins
i clean in silence, a story by noah cicero
nadia the human, a story by noah cicero
case analysis of some humans, a story by noah cicero
a strange fear, an excerpt of a novel by noah cicero
poem by a fourteen year old or a staind song or a puddle of mud song, and even that dumb girl who dresses like a punk but who is really a pop star scum fuck, a poem by noah cicero
fox network, a poem by noah cicero
a poem written by a narcissist; the rib cook off, two poems by noah cicero
in solitude; the shattered; the modern age, three poems by noah cicero
(what noah cicero said is blocked in the middle; things double-blocked are when noah cicero quoted me)
(also, to make it easier to know who's saying what, what i said is bolded, what noah cicero said is not)
interview begins now
Why did you leave the ULA? I left The ULA for three reasons.
1. Wenclas hates too many people and mostly the wrong people. He hates people just for being rich or just not growing up dirt poor. He hates Rick Moody and Easton Ellis who don't paint great portraits of the wealthy. I personally like Easton Ellis, his book Rules of Attraction I really enjoyed. Probably my favorite book written since the sixties. And I've read some Moody short stories and saw "The Ice Storm," I personally think he is real wordy. But I'm a minimalist so that is just what I like. Some people like a lot of description, some people don't, who cares.
Dave Eggers I don't care for at all, but I do respect his marketing skills. He is no way a literary genius, but he does get books sold.
2. Wenclas loves to complain about cronyism. A small press that publishes two books gets an average of five hundred submissions a year. Imagine how many Random House gets a year, that would be impossible to sort all that shit out and read it all. Half the jobs I've gotten were because I had a friend working there. It is more math than anything that creates literary cronyism.
3. Wenclas is fine by himself. Nobody would be screaming at him to shut up if he just had a site by himself. A blog where he screamed about literature. And maybe a site where essays like the monday reports went up with guest writers. But he decides to create a movement to combat the McSweeney's movement. Both of them are fabricated movements. You can't just go, "Hey who wants to be in a movement with me?"
Another reason has to do with the ULA writer named Crazy Carl Robinson who writes huge annoying novels about his chauvinism. Crazy Carl hates women for one reason because he can’t get laid. All his books are about how awesome men are for no real reason and how shitty and disgusting women are. He thinks he is telling it like it is, but he is saying what he thinks. Which puts him in the same category with Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh. The fact that The ULA holds him as a good writer is horrible and detrimental to their whole theory that they are so awesome and intelligent compared to published writers. I could do the same kind of horrible review I did with Foer as I could with Crazy Carl’s “Fat on the Vine.”
Wenclas is now attacking Lemony Snickett and Dave Sedaris. All right, lets bring this back to reality. Lemony Snickett writes books for tweens, funny, dark, little books that entertain children. And Dave Sedaris writes books for nerdy twenty somethings, Sedaris makes sad nerds laugh. Neither of these guys are claiming to be geniuses, or that their writing is changing their world. Attacking them is absurd, caring about an attack by them is absurd. The fact they mentioned his name he should consider good.
Another thing he talks about is how The ULA has been blackballed, but in the six months I was in The ULA, I never talked to one person that ever submitted their manuscript to a major publisher. And seriously if you call people dickheads and fascists they aren't going to talk to you. If I went to apply for a job, walked in and said to the manager, "You are fucking a dickhead and a fascist, hire me!" He would tell me to get the fuck out of there. That doesn't make sense. He couldn't write well enough to get published at major places, and so he starts The ULA to take more down with him.
Another thing, I tried to think of why I joined The ULA. Kostecke sent me the slush piles zines. I read Zapone and Urban Hermitt's stories, which I enjoyed, so I said I would do it to be with those authors. Then I find out Zapone isn't even in The ULA anymore, and in the six months I was in it, I never heard a word from Urban Hermitt, I doubt she knows she is still a member of The ULA.
I want to comment on the zinesters, I've met some zinesters and they are having fun writing zines. And I've read some good zines, Steve Kostecke and Urban Hermitt zines and The Inner Swine are really entertaining. I find no reason to degrade zine writing. I think writers could benefit from reading some zines. Also Wenclas has some good points, his voice is needed. But it also occurs to me that thing Dave Eggers said about "pissing in the fragile eco system that is the literary world." If the actual non-genre literary world of today only extends to 25,000 people, and Eggers would know exactly how many because he sells the books. If something really bad happens and it splits, then the literary world is like 12,500 people. At least if everyone gets along then they can sell 25,000 books. That is really funny to me but at the same time kind of sad.
I noticed that it seems that an author who writes non-genre literature in 2005 can sell 150 books, 25,000 books, or a million. And that there is no real in-between.
A non-genre author that sells 150 gets published on a little newpages.com press. A lot of those presses are POD, and people won't review POD books, and stores won't buy POD books. In short nobody will deal with a POD book. If the company prints a thousand so it is an offset book, it will sell like four hundred because some indie bookstores will take it and six hundred will remain in a box in the publisher's closet. I also heard that fiction even when distributed by a small press has like 60% returns.
A non-genre author that gets aligned with Dave Eggers or Rick Moody might be able to sell 25,000 in one year, which isn't bad if they can keep doing it, that's $1.50 a book, so that's like $30,000 which is good money if you have another job like teaching or journalist, and perhaps that fame will allow the person to write articles for magazines which will make money. But you basically have to get published by McSweeney's to do that.
And you might be able to sell a million if you have a movie made out of one of your books, like Palahniuk, Easton Ellis, or Foer but then you have to have some movie star on the cover of your book. Which is hard for me to stomach, it doesn't so much make me hate the author, but more the world. It makes me hate the world because it is hard for me understand why someone would suddenly buy a book because Elijah Wood or Brad Pitt is on the cover of it. It horrifies me that America is constructed in that way. Also if Ophra thinks you're awesome you can sell more books, but of course if Ophra thinks a new car or a new home appliance is awesome those will sell millions too to the same exact people.
TV shows like "The Lost" get 30 million viewers every wednesday. A non-genre book at most sells a million a year and I don’t think any single one does considering that it takes all of Bukowski's books to make a million books a year, and I think he sells half of them in Europe. Kerouac sells like a million a year but it takes all of his books to make that. Thompson gets like 700,000 of them out. And Thompson has Johnny Depp on the cover of one his books.
The Amazon.com sales rank is kind of lie. If you sell five books in one day that book will be in the 900s. There is a massive sales difference at the 150 point, it goes from thousands on 150 to maybe ten at 151.
I concluded from these facts two things. 1. That non-genre literature has become a hobby for Americans, that it is in the category of home gardens and collecting electric trains. 2. That it makes sense that literature would become cliquish because so few people actually are involved in it. My estimate would be 25,000 people at most are actually involved in NEW literature or care about it at all. What I mean by new literature, is literature written by people under 50 years old that are still writing today, Eggers, Foer, Easton Ellis are examples. Like if you walked out in a super market and asked everyone in any city but New York City or San Fran who Maud Newton or Dennis Johnson is, for sure everyone will just stare at you. But you might find some people who know the classics, like I know many people that love Hemingway, Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Thomspon that work at Factories and in Nursing Homes etc. but they have no interest in new literature, if you look on Amazon.com the dead guys are selling more than the living. A good chunk of the first two thousand are the dead writers. Also another good chunk of the first 2,000 are books about dieting.
Wenclas is right to a certain extent that the new writers are very upper class and aren't speaking to the working or lower classes. But that doesn't make sense on why those books don't sell to the working classes, because the working classes watch Soap Operas and lifetime movies and other block busters that mainly feature rich people, and they have no problem with that, I would say that those classes are just watching television and listening to the radio instead of reading. What would make more sense to help America is not a literary revolution, but a TV revolution. That's why the government doesn't care about policing books anymore, they used to have obscenity trials for books, now an author can write anything he wants and no one cares. There a million books about how awful Bush is, but Bush knows that the only thing he has to do is make sure those books are published on small presses and never reach the stores. He can still claim, "You have the right to freedom of speech because you got your book published by a small POD publisher." But Bush knows that if someone says something against him on television that person needs to be cancelled out quickly. Like when Kanye West started talking shit about Bush and the government at that football game, it was immediately fucked with and spinned to death. And the football league demanded no one say anything concerning Bush. It is obvious that a writer has no voice in America.
Also I do not think why the working classes (especially men) do not read more has much to do with economic factors. A working class person at a factory or fast food restaurant etc. views life in labor. They are constantly producing. They have no concept of a finished product. I noticed that working people when they asked me about my writing usually said, "What are you working on?" They never asked, "What is the book about or how are you gonna publicize it?" Just "What are you working on?" Working people usually do not comprehend like it is a different language that a person can produce something then get to keep it like a writer does with a book. Because a worker makes things constantly if it be plastic parts or cheeseburgers, and as soon as they are done with it, it is taken away. It is more existential why they do not read, just a lot more complex than what Wenclas was saying. I would say middle class women read more than men because they have babies, so they produce the baby and get to keep which creates a different affect on literature in their mind.
I have also heard the upper class college kids say in person that working class people do not read because, "They are stupid monkeys." Which is also false, why they do not read is caused by the work they do and how it affects their mind.
I would say the lowest classes in America do not read because they kind of can't. The statistics (this is why Bush is pushing reading so much) comes to 20 percent of the population aren't be able to read. I would say the others can barely read, they can get through directions on how to build things, but even 25-dollar words and correct grammar messes up how they comprehend the text. Because if you can't write remotely correct grammar, then you won't be able to understand it when you read it. If you don't understand correct grammar it would be very hard to enjoy a story, because you wouldn't know what the author is trying to emphasize. For a person to learn to read, they need a somewhat stable life, parents helping them when they are little, and not too serious of a situation at home in those early years. If momma is a crack head and dad is drunk beating them all the time, and they can barely eat, then they will not have the time and help it takes to learn how to read well.
Bret Easton Ellis, who I love, even though he writes about rich people, he shows them to be what they a lot are, morally bankrupt, sadistic and drug addicts. That is what Easton Ellis knows, so it makes sense that is what writes about it. Which is what most authors do. They look around themselves and analyze their world with a microscope and write about it. That brings us to Foer who writes about the same characters as Ellis does and makes them heroes and grand old people, there you have a contradiction. But I noticed in reviews of Easton Ellis' new book a lot of people are saying, "Why does he keep writing about these people he hates." So Foer in the last year have turned many against Ellis. They have to make a choice, "Do we choose Foer who makes upper class people look like heroes and moral or choose Easton Ellis who makes upper class people look morally bankrupt and drug addicted maniacs who live empty lives." Foer's book "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" and people's acceptance of it is a direct result of liberals sliding to the right, not totally on Bush's side, but to a more moderate political stance. Foer's book is conservative in values, it has family values, and people are phony and nice in it, just like Bush wants them to be. There is no real emotion or sadness or truth in Foer's book, the people have false emotions, a false emotion would be an emotion based off the belief in a bourgeois notion, or a notion that exists only because the media tells you it exists. His book works like our movies do nowadays, it is push button bad faith. The author says, "I need emotion, here is a scene with a baby or child, here is a scene with a mother and child, the child is in distress, here is a scene with a black and white person, the white person is being racist, mention 9-11, play tragic piano music in the background, play tragic piano music in the background." Those are dirty tricks by authors, those events at one point made sense and deserved to be in the movie, but now all there is these simple candy emotion triggers. Writers have turned very serious human events into candy emotions. Racism is very serious, children getting shot is very serious, 9-11 was very serious, but today's writers have turned these serious events into simple thoughtless experiences only brought up in their writing to cause phony emotions.
Foer's dad died in 9-11, but in his book he made it happen to a nine year old boy. That is a perfect example of a dirty trick candy emotion by an author. Foer knows that people will feel more sorry for a nine year old boy then a grown man, so he chose to make himself into a nine year old to make his book more emotional.
I would like to say also that a person cannot like Foer and Easton Ellis at the same time. They contradict each other philosophically too much. So I understand there being a split, and hope that the literary world chooses Easton Ellis.
I don't understand why Bad Faith is bad. It's when you get meaning from outside of yourself, therefore not taking responsibility for your own freedom; giving your freedom to someone else. Right? But three words in that sentence are meaningless to me: Meaning, Responsibility, and Freedom. Here's how I see the world, I guess. There's Badness and there's Goodness. For each person, Badness is different than Goodness. Meaningless words, really, until defined, which I’ll do right now. Badness can be defined as what you don't want in your life. Goodness is what you want in your life. For some people, Goodness is to avoid Badness. It doesn't matter. That's still a kind of Goodness, and the same as any other kind. In the brain, neurons or whatever do not care if your Goodness comes from playing golf, having sex, smoking crack, cutting your arm with a razorblade, hating other people, or putting on a coat in cold weather.
Freedom, Meaning, and Responsibility do not fit into this view of the world.
Here's what I think about free will. Cause-and-effect is a real thing. Anything that happens in the universe is the effect of the thing before it. Therefore we don’t have free will. This is obvious in a way. There was only the first choice, of whether or not the universe should happen. And it did. (And even that doesn't make sense.) But going by the laws of the universe (cause and effect), I do not have free will right now, even as I type these words. (But how is that even possible? I have no idea. Can a conscious thing not have free will? It’s really strange.)
The world is meaningless, then, which means that any truthful (Bad Faith-less) discussion of literature cannot (because the world is meaningless, and therefore valueless; without spectrum, but just everything there, and the same) use the words Important, Good, Better, Best, etc. (any value judgment).
Unless you give the world meaning. Which I think I did, above (if you ignore the thing about free will), which is to avoid Badness and get at Goodness, and to treat everyone in the world as just parts of one whole. For example, if this is the world's meaning, then if ten people suffered Badness so that eleven people could get Goodness, then that's good; do it. But not really. Because why can't all twenty-one people get Goodness? And if ten million people suffer Badness for a billion years so that one person can have goodness for infinity, then is that right? Since infinity multiplied by one is still infinity, and infinity is ‘more,’ I guess, than 10,000,000 multiplied by 1,000,000,000? But even this—this Goodness thing—is a meaning that I’ve created, a kind of Bad Faith. Everything, really, truthfully, is still meaningless. So my point, I guess, is that there is no way to truthfully (without Bad Faith) get meaning in the universe. I feel like the universe wants us to kill ourselves. If you’re dead you’re not thinking anything, so you’re not committing Bad Faith.
This kind of worldview that I'm talking about right now makes any discussion of whether or not the world would be better if everyone read Foer or if everyone read Easton Ellis meaningless and itself an act of Bad Faith. You can't say Foer is good or Easton Ellis is good without first defining what your meaning, what your goal, in life, is. And if you do that—like I did above, with all the Goodness crap—then you’re still only speaking for yourself. If you want to say Foer is good and have it be applicable to everyone and be the truth (a once-removed sort of truth, since real truth is being dead), then you have to define what everyone's meaning, everyone's goal in life, is. And it will be different for everyone, and you will need to use a computer to compile data and statistics (and you will have to include animals, trees, etc.), and in the end you will only be able to answer, truthfully (without Bad Faith; in the frame of already committing Bad Faith, just by being alive), something like "Foer is 45% good, unless there's some alien life form we haven't discovered yet, which is possible," or whatever.
Only someone who is secure financially, has food and shelter, and is pretty much bored with anything there is in life, like me, pretty much, will think these kinds of things; I know that. If I was starving I wouldn’t think these things. Food would be what I wanted. That means something. I'm not sure what. So, what can I say? I'm not sure. I have thoughts about why people don't read; about guilt, the upper-class, etc., but they are all meaningless after having established, I think, that everything is meaningless. Tell me what you think about all this. I mean, now what? Your thoughts were already, mostly, more intelligent and comprehendible and truthful than most things I've read (on those topics; most people are incomprehensible to me; you are not), but still, they didn't take everything into account; they blocked out some things, some of the things I talked about above. I'm curious how anyone can possibly respond to what I just typed. If a response isn't possible, then there's nothing more to talk about, I guess. What do you think about that? I haven't read much Sartre and Camus said something about suicide being the only real question in philosophy, but I haven't read much of him either. You have, though, right? Bad Faith is bad because of this: Bad Faith a lot of times is when someone actually wants something but tells themselves they don't. A lot of people hate their families but the media keeps telling them that family matters, that she should never leave their family. So people who have horrible parents stick with them even though they hate them, causing themselves to suffer needlessly. Needless suffering like that is just ugly. Another example would be married couples that live together for forty years, they don't fuck, talk, or even sleep in the same rooms, but they stay together demanding the other one sleeps with no one else, they live lives of useless needless suffering. Or women who have babies because of the notion of the maternal instinct and that children will give their lives meaning, both are false. What happens is a woman has the baby and tortures it for 18 years, makes a mentally ill creature, and throws it out into the world. All these things are caused by Bad Faith, and they are all needless dumb suffering.
I would say people have free will, or as Sartre said they, "Condemned to freedom." But at the end of Sartre's career in his Marxist books he concluded basically that humans are "Condemned to freedom" and condemned to to be conditioned. That is no one is absolutely free but at the same time each person has a past that they must depend upon to select their choices from. Like for example, if you got someone raised in poverty and someone with an easy life and put them into a dangerous situation involving criminals, the person who grew up in poverty will stay calm and escape, and the person with the easy life will panic fuck up and die. But to reverse the situation, stick the same people in charge of millions of dollars, and the person with the easy life will figure out how to conserve the money and spend it wisely, and the person in poverty will blow it all. People enter into situations, then they choose what choices they have made or seen done in past situations similar to the one they are in. Most people though pick the mob's choice, because most people are afraid. Life is terrifying so I understand that. Life is easier when you just go with the mob, because if violence breaks out, there is more of a chance of you not getting hurt or killed, and you aren't alone, and people generally don't like to be alone.
Concerning "Meaning": If you are working for $5.15 an hour, you can't pay all of your bills, half of your friends are crack heads or drunks, you have cavities and no matter how little you make the government will not help you, you have not eaten a good sized meal in over two months, some days you barely eat at all, the rising gas prices just took all your fun money away (what little you have), you sit reading letters from your friends in prison, you know several people living in motels, and you can't raise the thermostat in your house above sixty degrees because you just can't afford to pay the bills, and if you have kids all that is even worse. Then the word "meaning" means a lot to you. How much gas cost means a lot to you, how much food cost means a lot to you, if your car breaks it means a lot to you.
Responsibility: That's a hard one, should an author be responsible or the publishing company be responsible? Well, the publishing shouldn't, because logically the job of the publishing company is to sell books, and for most authors they want to sell books. And if the world wants nice little notions to get them through the night and they are willing to pay for it, well, I guess that's what they will do. Likable ideas have been selling good since the beginning of civilization.
But that is how people work mostly, they want their freedom and they want concrete solutions to their meaningful problems, but when it comes to responsibility they don't want to take any. Problems are hard to solve when no one takes responsibility for them. That makes sense because civilization has brought nothing but suffering to the bulk of humanity.
I've never thought about if the world had any meaning. I can see what people need and do have meaning that is all. There are people who need money to stay alive, people who need to rebuild older cars to feel like they are doing something, people who need to write books because they like to express themselves, people who need to oppress other people to feel better about themselves. People are small, little things, they aren't big, we aren't all connected in any way except labor really. If the world has meaning or not, some people choose to make a meaning, and some of their meanings affect other people's lives. Like Bush's Christianity, he has bombed and killed thousands with the help of "his meaning" and the people that believe in "Bush's meaning." Bush's Christian Meaning is fueling this crusade to close down strip joints in America, my girlfriend is a dancer, so if "his meaning" makes that happen then we are on the verge of starving, and so are thousands of other women who have children and bills. But we really aren't talking about "Bush's meaning" we are talking about "Bush's money." If the world has any meaning right now if there is one or not one, if we want there to be one or not one, it is money, who ever has the most money controls what means something in this culture. If the rich threw billions at commercials and TV shows sponsoring a "No Pizza America" they could make it happen, they could make pizza disappear.
People need to understand that there is a God or Gods, and they are the rich people of this world. They make the meaning of things, they control what is on television, what books come out, what people think about. But even when there are no rich people like there was in communism, the government makes the meaning. So no matter what, there is a controlling force making meaning out of no meaning at all. and what is really sad, lets say a government decided to tell the truth for once, and people took it and said they believed those things. Would those same people who believed in anything the government said before really believe in those things, we can assume not, it wouldn't be so much Bad Faith, but more that the bulk of humanity just doesn't believe in anything.
I think I get your point now: If the upper classes did not have the Bad Faith that they should own the world because they are Gods and we are their work animals then there would be no meaning. So, for life to have meaning there has to be at least one asshole with Bad Faith to give meaning to other people. Well, that's true. But there is still Bad Faith. So there is still "meaning" that makes other people suffer needlessly.
Easton Ellis is better than Foer because there is still "meaning" because people make the "meaning" and that "meaning" affects lives. You and me could create thirty blogs showing why life is meaningless and that we should just all get along in our meaningless. There are several hundred books written on the meaningless of life. But there are thousands written on how life has so much goddamn meaning. If the show "The Lost" tells everyone that if the new American meaning to life is ham and bacon they will sell a lot more ham and bacon then you and I will sell meaningless with thirty blogs.
People, especially liberal arts people have to understand this. Just because you say something really true on a blog or in a coffee shop it doesn't mean it matters. In America, in this world, action matters, money matters, what you can buy matters. Bush is action, Bush buys stupidity and feeds it to the masses. Bush wants to start a war, Bush starts a war. Writers can write the truth down until their hands bleeds, but it doesn't matter, if a person goes on television and says, "I think Americans should invest in ham and bacon." There is meaning in the world because people make it, if there is philosophically not one, we still have to deal with the ones people make up. I haven't read much Sartre and Camus said something about suicide being the only real question in philosophy, but I haven't read much of him either. You have, though, right?
Yeah, Camus said that in the "Myth of Sisyphus." He concluded the same thing Nietzsche did that if we are alive at least we can dance. My desire to study philosophy was more to understand people better, to make more interesting character development. And the only philosophers I've read a lot of have been Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Wittgenstein, De Beauvoir, and Marx so I'm not really qualified to answer that. The rest I have no interest in. The most important question I had concerning philosophy was "why do people buy a novel because Brad Pitt's fucking face is on it?" Sartre had the answer in "The Critique of Dialectic Reason" talking about public opinion, "The other tells the Other, tells the Other, till no one thinks it."
Would you put a movie star on the cover of your book if they said it would sell five hundred thousand copies? Send me the check
People make meaning and I’m required to live by their meaning. You're right. If someone else in the world has meaning then I have meaning, because those people are out there, spreading their meaning, and I can't ignore it. And that meaning is as real to me as anything else. You're also right about fixing your car. And if you're starving. That's meaning. Rich people have meaning too. They want more success or money or respect or to feel less guilty. Everyone has meaning. Great. Except that some people do not have meaning. Some rich people. Some rich people, they realize a few things. They realize death; the arbitrariness of everything; no free will; time moves in one direction; and whatever else. They realize any kind of truth about the universe. And then anything else seems like a lie to them, and it depresses them. And the truth also depresses them. Then they have no meaning, partly because they refuse to have meaning, because meaning is a lie, and lies make them feel somehow wrong and agitated and meaningless. I'm talking about myself partly. This is melodramatic, whiny, and stupid, I guess. But there's no escape from it. The truth is bad; lies are bad.
The difference between the depressed person who is depressed because of not having things that can be bought by money and the depressed person who is depressed because of the universe is that you can make that first depressed person undepressed by giving him or her money, I guess. So you should do that. And ignore the second depressed person because there's nothing anyone can do for that person. So, if there’s a poor depressed person, depressed because of bad quality of life: give them money. If there’s a rich depressed person, you ignore that person. You can’t help them. Not really, though. You can be their friend. Or not. Since being their friend won't convince them there's free will or that they won't die.
To me, anyone who is conscious and not committing suicide right now is committing Bad Faith.
Free will: I don't believe in free will at all. No one can explain to me why I have free will. I throw a rock at a tree. The rock does not have free will. My brain told my arm to throw the rock. My arm does not have free will. My brain told my arm to throw the rock because some other part of my brain something, something, something. The rock moves through the air because of the laws of the universe. The laws of the universe do not have free will. Etc., etc. It's all cause and effect back to the first thing. It's absurd to believe that we have free will. The idea is ridiculous, even. It’s like believing in Santa Clause, almost.
Here's some questions:
What do you think of each of these writers? If you haven't read them, that doesn't matter, say what your impressions are of each. Jean Rhys. Lorrie Moore. Joy Williams. Kafka. Richard Yates. B.S. Johnson. Frederick Barthelme.
B.S. Johnson hated lies and killed himself; Richard Yates was depressed a lot; Jean Rhys hated people; Joy Williams thinks everything is cruel; Lorrie Moore seems to have no opinion on these things or else has resigned to them to the point of not mentioning them anymore, but just assuming them; Kafka was funny and thought life was absurd and wrong; Frederick Barthelme never talks about these things in his fiction but just has dialogue and narrative and commentary on the real dialogue and narrative. All people realize the pointlessness of existence, from the poor to the rich. Why do you think the poor are obsessed with doing drugs and religion, it helps them flee from the contingency and absurdity of existence. They know it, we all know it. If we didn't know works of art like Waiting For Godot, To Build a Fire, and I'm gonna say it The Blair Witch Project wouldn't have been accepted by such a wide range of audiences. Those three stories all have the same literary devices in common: Man alone, facing the raw universe, with unseeable forces making situations. Waiting for Godot played in San Quinton and did great, I know many working people that say, "To Build a Fire" is the scariest story they have ever read. And everyone loves The Blair Witch Project.
You don't have to realize that life is meaningless, it stares us all in the face everyday we wake up.
Sartre said in the Condemned of Altona, "The only truth there is, the horror of living." If you are rich, and you don't become a macho asshole Easton Ellis character. Do what working people, what I find helps, is an extremely menial job like dishwashing to pass the hours. And a silly hobbie like putt putt or gardening. It takes your mind away from the horror, but doesn't break your back and make you so angry you want to kill someone. But I've learned personally, writing a book does not help an existential crisis, only menial labor and hobbies that don't involve thought can.
I'm not gonna fight you on free will, if there is or not, I still have to pay bills.
So it doesn't really matter.
I've only read Jean Rhys and Kafka. I've Jean Rhys' short stories. I really like them, they are sad and they have a point. She didn't have much delusion about anything, she took reality full force. There is anger and sadness in Rhys’ writing, I like that. Kafka is like reading directions on how to work a blender, when I read him, I read the text, then play it back in my head in my own language, then it is kind of fun.
On the writers I haven’t heard of. If you aren’t in the academia they aren’t easy to know about. The only people I really know who know and read those writers are people that have to private universities and live in big cities that have a lot of culture in them. I only heard of Jean Rhys because my girlfriend took a women in lit class and learned about her.
Most of the writers I’ve read I got from other writers. When I was sixteen I wrote down all the names Kerouac and Ginsberg mentioned in their books. Then I went and found those writers, then I wrote down all the writers they mentioned in their books. And just read everything on the summer reading lists at the stores and then found the ones I liked and read all their books. And got books about the writers and found names in there. I tried to go to college, but my parents wouldn’t pay for it, so to do it, I had to work constantly and try at the same time to get good grades, that would stress me out and I would just end up in the mental ward by the end of the semester so I just gave up.
You said you don't believe in free will, but you believe in Bad Faith. The two are irreconcilable. You believe that people lie to themselves, that people are conscious of something, but deny it so they won't have to change. You admit that. But that would be impossible if there was no free will. If you say there is no free will, that people are Determined, then people could not lie to themselves. People would just do. But it is obvious that people just don't do. You agreed to the situations I showed earlier of the married couple. That there was no maternal instinct. If there was a maternal instinct fifty percent of women in America wouldn't have had abortions.
I don't think you know exactly what Determinism is. Here is an explanation.
The origins of Determinism: Determinism has its roots in protestant capitalism The catholics believe in free will. It didn't really show up till the 1500s. It was used to justify slavery and there being rich people, that God chooses certain people to be winners, and some to be losers in civilization. The original theory of capitalism had nothing to do with Ayn Rand's genius, or Adam Smith's Personal Interest. It was that God chooses some to be lucky and some to suffer. Later it became Social Darwinism, which was used by Hitler and is still used to justify capitalism today. That some humans are born genetically stronger than other people. That genetics make rich people and poor people. But we have seen people like Fifty Cent become rich, and we all know a rich kid that is an absolute moron, note Paris Hilton. We also have witnessed Feral Children, if a baby is given to wolves, it will grow up thinking it is a wolf. It is the same with all animals. If a bird is raised around humans, it thinks it is human and will not even know how to fuck other birds. We all know if we left our domesticated dog in the woods it would die because it would not know how to survive. So there is no proved instinct. Squirrels around YSU in Youngstown don't hibernate in the winter because the college kids feed them. Sartre thought it was possible to create a dialectical zoology based off his existentialism and Marx's dialectical materialism, but sadly no one has ever even attempted it.
Also Social Determinism is what European Fascism held as a core theory. That certain races were instinctually stronger and more intelligent than other races. But Fascism contradicts its own theory because fascism uses military force, violence to get their citizens to behave in a certain way. Why would a group of people that have inherent instincts need violence to get them to act out their inherent instincts. The theory falls apart.
Determinism is always used when people don't want to take responsibility. Hitler blamed the jews. The protestant capitalist blamed God. No one wants to take responsibility.
This is where it gets weird: A racist says, "He's white, that's what the whites do." So in that sentence the racist is actually saying, "He is white, therefore he is inherently prone to do that." Which actually gives that person an excuse. it is impossible using language to actually make a racist statement. Because you can only logically blame someone and hate someone if they chose it. When choice is taken away all blame is taken away.
Also instinct implies that all animals and humans have a picture of the reality they are going to live before they are even born. Bush is funding studies right now to find a stealing gene, seriously. But that would imply that a person before they were even born had a picture of a supermarket where the item is that they are going to steal. The social darwinist also claims that men prefer to procreate with big hipped women. But in reality Asia and India have the biggest populations on earth, which implies they have the most men procreating but the women that live there have small hips. That is strange to me.
Here's another point I want to make: Some people say things like this, "He couldn't help it, he doesn't know what he does." First question? How can a person not know what they do? Are we not with ourselves all day. Do we not control our arms and legs. I think it would better to say this, "He did what he had to do to attain whatever desired goal he had." Like for example Al Pacino's character in Scarface Tony Montana. Tony Montana wanted to be a millionaire, he had no education, couldn't speak great English, and was fucked in America. But he had the desired goal of being a millionaire. The only way he could become rich was if he sold drugs and killed people. He had to do what he had to do. Jean Valjean had to steal that bread to not die.
If there was instinct all people would have the same instincts, but we know that isn't true.
Jack London in the story The Call of The Wild had the same contradiction. He was an actual Social Darwinist, a racist and all that shit. He wrote a story about a dog that was thrown in the wild and survived and then left for the wild. He thought he was writing a Social Darwinist story, but the whole fucking time he shows how Buck learned through watching how to dig a hole in the snow to stay warm, how to fight among more vicious dogs. London tries to demonstrate Darwinism but ends up showing Cognitive Behaviorism. Buck learns by watching, and Buck learns those things because he does not want die, he chooses to learn. Then at the end he leaves humans because he grows weary of them and has more fun in the forest killing moose, London negates his own theory. If humans were naturally talented doing certain things because of genetics then they would not need to be apprenticed. Contingent situations wouldn't change their behavior.
Tao, I think your writing is really good. I enjoy reading your poems and articles. But I do not think you are a naturally talented writer. I think you are someone who works hard at what they do. You read books and analyze, you just don't read them to say you read them. You work hard, all your good writing is your fault, no one else's. If you were Determined to write those good poems, then you must of had those poems in your head before you were even born. But you know that isn't true. You choose each word. You can change an adjective fifty times before you show it to someone. But if it was instinct, you would have written that adjective only once. And how could someone have an instinct to write when writing has only been around for three thousand years. How could writing well be an instinct?
A person cannot be conscious that they lying to him or herself if what they do is instinct.
One question: If the phone has ever rang and you have ever thought once, just once. "Should I or should not pick it up?" Determined Darwinism and even behaviorism fall apart in that instant. You should immediately pick up the phone, but if you even think for a second, should I not pick it up, you have chosen. In your theory the word "choice" shouldn't even be allowed in the english language.
Reality is complex, so complex I can understand why someone would want to simplify it. But simplifying reality will only lead to more needless suffering.
You're right. Bad Faith can't exist without free will. But I'm not simplifying reality by saying there's no free will. If there's no free will, then that's so complex that it's nothing, and impossible. Impossibly complex. If I don't have free will right now, then I don't even have free will with regard to what I'm typing right now. That’s absurd. It's like graphing 1/2 on a graph, only a lot more complex. There's just no way anyone can explain to me why we have free will. The word "Choice." It's just another step, between two things. It doesn't mean "Free Will." Here's what Schopenhauer said about free will. He said that a person would have acted differently under different circumstances, but since the circumstances weren’t different, then the person could not have acted differently. That's not what he said. I forget what he said exactly. But he also said that our lives are like words on a page, and we should view it that way. He did say that. Free will goes against logic. It's interminable to talk about it, and impossible to prove if we have it or not.
Hitler isn't bad, to me. There is no bad or good, truthfully. Those are words to simplify reality. I believe that many people—if you use logic against them, and treat their worldview logically—actually believe that Hitler is good, though they would not admit it. I mean this: that if you hate life, then anyone who kills people is good. Kurt Vonnegut says humans do not deserve to live. But he is against Bush. That doesn't make sense. Bush is the kind of person who will destroy the environment and stockpile nuclear weapons and do all kinds of shit that will end the human race. Once all humans are gone, animals can take over the Earth again, and go on for billions of years, sustaining themselves. I think that's miserable, for life to go on that long. Animals suffer so much. They don’t have retirement homes. Think about it. That’s terrible. I think people, especially literary people, always assume that life is good, whether they believe it or not. Because in book reviews, books are always praised as "Life-Affirming." But that is closed-minded and unliterary. What if life is bad? Then Bush is good. Because Bush will destroy the Earth, ending life forever. Everyone simplifies reality. Liberals are often more pessimistic than conservatives. But liberals are against Bush. Liberals want life to go on forever, then. But many liberals supposedly hate life and think humans are cruel and shouldn’t exist. I'm generalizing and I feel stupid doing it. But you get what I mean. And this is something that I have never heard anyone talk about, ever. If you believe that life is horrible, then you should probably support Bush. One thousand years of suffering is not as bad as one billion years of suffering. With the right leader (Bush?) we can destroy the Earth pretty quickly, which—if you think that life is suffering—is good.
I don't think simplifying reality leads to more suffering. If you don't simplify reality, then you're unconscious. If you're conscious, then you're simplifying reality. If you want to live truthfully then you need to commit suicide. People who don't like to simplify reality, in my experience, are depressed and agitated all the time.
I like what you said about Kafka.
I am curious about why you like my writing. I would think that you would not like my writing. I complain about things when I have money, good parents who didn’t beat me, and a place to live. I'm happy you like my writing, but how can you like it? A lot of the time I myself don't like my writing—and not because the prose is bad, but because I am just whining all the time. Isn't this exactly what the ULA is against? I do not write about class, the lower-class, politics (not in anything I have online), culture, foreign cultures, etc. I don’t write about “Real Problems.” So I'd like to know why you like my writing.
But working on a story does not mean I am not Determined. Each moment of time has to be filled with some action. Each time I "Choose" an adjective it’s just the effect of the thing before. If I throw a ball, and you looked at that ball, in the air, each moment you could say, "Look, it can choose to go this way or that way." You could say, "The ball is choosing to go there. Look how hard it's working." And then it goes in one direction. But you don't say it chose that. I'm like that ball.
Here's why I liked your novel Burning Babies. Because the voice. Because of who you are, I guess. If I like someone's voice, then I'll read anything they write, because I trust them. Subject matter doesn't matter to me. I like your voice because you do not explain things that are obvious. And if something is too complex to explain—if you don’t know someone’s motive (that scene with the Native American selling Top Gun)—you just leave it there in its complexity, and that’s how I experience it, when reading, as a complex thing that I can’t explain, which is satisfying to me. You don't simplify. I can tell almost immediately whether or not I will really like a writer. If a writer uses anything but "Said," for talking verbs, then they are simplifying, and I won't like them as much. You only use, "Said." You don't use "Explain" or "Added" or "Replied," or whatever. When someone uses "Explain," that is simplifying, that is looking at someone and saying, that person is explaining, that's his goal right now, to explain. This use of "Said," tells me a lot about a writer. How they see the world. I especially hate when writers use "Announce."
Also, you don’t use stock phrases. Stock phrases ruin a book for me immediately. A stock phrase is a kind of received knowledge. If you use received knowledge then you are not thinking for yourself. If I read a stock phrase, I am not connecting with you, the writer, but with some kind of nothingness, a kind of unperson. Here’s an incomplete list of writers who use stock phrases, in interviews or in books, without being self-conscious about it: Sam Lipsyte, Diane Williams, Gary Lutz, many of the so-called experimental people, Salman Rushdie, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Nabokov. Here’s an incomplete list of writers who do not use stock phrases, or when they use them they use them self-consciously: you (Noah Cicero), Stephen Dixon, Kurt Vonnegut, Jean Rhys, Lorrie Moore, Frederick Barthelme, almost every Kmart-realist.
But you aren't one of those writers who say, "My job is to observe," or whatever. Those who never comment on things. (Raymond Carver, before Cathedral; Bret Lott?) Because you have that part about karaoke. That was sad and it stopped me. And you have an entire section of aphorisms. One of the aphorisms in there, about how if you feel like you're in a movie all the time that is because people around you are play-acting and you are not. Yeah, I feel like that all the time. So you don’t block things out. You aren’t one of those people—going by what I’ve read of your work—who say, “The job of a writer is to _____, ________.” You start the novel with someone committed suicide. So you acknowledge that. Death. And the novel is funny. It has domestic moments, and talks about class, and rich people. It has that karaoke part where the character connects with the karaoke person and cries a little. It’s interested in things that are human and complex and unexplainable. That is why it has all those parts where it focuses on other people and tells about them. It’s like you’re in real life and telling me a story. And at the end of each story you don’t say, “GET IT?” or “HERE’S WHAT I LEARNED FROM WHAT I JUST TOLD YOU,” or “ISN’T THAT HILARIOUS?” You don’t do that, and I just get it. And want to hear more. The tone is all-encompassing, and so it feels real. You don’t dramatize. Also, you even acknowledge in the novel that it is a novel, and comment on why you wrote certain things. So you aren’t one of those people who are like, “Separate the art from the artist,” or whatever. You have no interest in trying to trick me into believing that your novel is a real world. I like that. I am like that too. A book is a book, why should I try to trick the reader into forgetting about the real world? When someone tells me a story in real life they don’t try to convince me that they—the person telling it, the author—don’t exist. They just tell the story. That’s how you are in your book. But not exactly. The main character in the book is not named Noah Cicero. But that just acknowledges that not everything in the book happened to Noah Cicero. So I like that too.
And there’s a weariness to the writing. People who are weary of life do not simplify, become melodramatic, or over-explain. It’s like you know it—what you’re writing, and life—so well that you’re bored of it, a little. You never get too enthusiastic about a thing. This is a way of viewing things that is unmelodramatic and undelusional. You are not a person who would blurb someone else’s book as “Acidly scathing and bitingly hilarious.” Things are either funny, not so funny, or really funny. Nothing is “Bitingly hilarious.” I have never witnessed a thing in life—or read a thing in a book—that is “Acidly scathing” or “Bitingly hilarious.” But apparently a lot of people witness that sort of thing almost every day, and read books that are like that, and write blurbs, and make me feel alone in the world.
Also, you do not hate people because they are rich. You have the question, in your book, why do the rich deserve to be rich? People are born, they have no choice, why do some get more money than others? You don't answer it. You don’t hate god, either, you say (though a little sarcastically, maybe). What do you hate, then? Life itself? That’s good. That’s right. It directs your anger at something that doesn’t have feelings, and so can’t be hurt.
I want to ask you. Why do you like Easton Ellis so much? He portrays the rich people as having no morals, etc., but so what. What does that do? Not all rich college kids are like that. People who read Easton Ellis, I believe, I guess, read him to feel doomed and good and justified in their feelings of doom and hopelessness. They read him. Then they go be an asshole to people and feel cool and not guilty, because the world is hopeless anyway, apparently. You watch Fight Club and you feel free, like you can do anything. Fuck anyone else, you think. But you (I) read Jean Rhys or Richard Yates and you go outside and you feel sorry for everyone. You read Richard Yate's biography and you go outside and you feel so sorry for every old person that you just want to treat them so nice. You read Easton Ellis and you're like, Fuck all rich people, the universe is meaningless, lets do drugs and not care about anything. It's interminable to talk about it, and impossible to prove if we have it or not.
Yeah, that's why I wrote that thing about paying the bills. I just wanted to write that there was a contradiction, and show you the origins.
That thing about Bush and Hitler caused me to laugh my ass off. I don't know about all that, seriously. I still like some people. There's this mixed girl named Kee that works at Arby's on the midnight shift. I go to Arby's and get a sandwich, she comes around the counter and gives me a hug and we make jokes and laugh. It is fun. There's this guy named Ernie from Kentucky who bartends at this place I go, he always tells funny stories and talks about how he cries sometimes. And this guy is real tough, he is usually the bouncer. One night it was him and this one woman who was sad as hell and me on a sunday night, and we all bought each other shots, and it was kind of fun. I also like to play putt putt. And every four years I like to watch the olympics and see women's figure skating, I cried at Sarah Hughes performance. I also like looking at pretty girls. And seeing pretty landscapes like mountains and large bodies of water. I buy my cigarettes at Speedway so I go there everyday, and when I go in there this guy I worked with at a restaurant named Matt works there now. He yells "Noah" and I yell "Matt" every time I walk in. Then we all stand around for a little bit talking about how many points we have on our speedway cards and the girls on the magazines. And it fun. I don't think the human species needs to be blown up. I would say there are a good amount of assholes in this world, and I can see how someone could come to that conclusion, it wouldn't be hard. But most of us living little lives in towns like Youngstown, and all over America, are just people, you know, going to work, paying our bills, and trying to smile over a few drinks and our speedway points. I don't think simplifying reality leads to more suffering. If you don't simplify reality, then you're unconscious. If you're conscious, then you're simplifying reality. If you want to live truthfully then you need to commit suicide. People who don't like to simplify reality, in my experience, are depressed and agitated all the time.
I never simplify and well, I mostly feel like killing myself. But since I don't simplify reality I know death means that nothing will happen after my heart stops beating. Asleep forever, that scares me, and causes me to drink sometimes. But simplifying to point of Manichaeism I've seen nothing but suffering caused by that worldview. I am curious about why you like my writing. I would think that you would not like my writing.
It doesn't describe a lot. And you don't write boat and sea poetry like most of the academia, you wrote that in one of your poems, something about a boat poem. I laughed very hard when I read that. You're funny, literature should be funny, funny is entertaining.
Here is my theory on literature, which you do. But I think a lot of people have this theory, so it really isn't my theory. Asian poetry has been doing for hundreds of years and Dostoevsky did it. A poem or story should be terse, just give what is needed, with some internal monologue. Because we have to think, what is the difference between a written story and a movie. In a movie you can't do internal monologue. In a movie you write something short, everything has to be exactly 90 minutes. You can't write a movie vignette, I mean you could, but no one is going to watch except for three art fucks in NYC who will say it was genius even if it wasn't. And a story doesn't have a setting while a movie gives you one and you can't see the character's bodies in the story like in a movie. But in a story you can write something short, with some internal monologue thrown in. You do that. And also what I think is important is that the reader can use their imagination also. Like when I read I make myself a character, then I make people I know who fit that character development the characters in the story, and the story if it be The Brothers Karamazov or The Sun Also Rises are full of people I know, and we are all living the story together, and it is mad fun. But if you describe a character too much, especially too much physical description, it ruins it a little. And a lack of setting description is important, like if I read a story and they are in a coffee shop in Paris, well, I've never been to Paris so no matter how much description there is I will never be able to imagine a Paris coffee shop especially if the book takes place in the 1800s, but I can imagine if the author allows me to put the scene in a coffee shop I know, maybe the one I sit in all the time. And that makes reading fun. And you do that, you don't describe in your poems what your house looks like, it is probably nicer than mine, so if you described it, I would probably lose interest. But I can make your poem take place in my living room. Your poem about aol instant messager easily takes place in my shabby living room, but it could take place in a big expensive house too. You allow the reader to participate in the story. A reader is reading because they want to use their imagination too, just like when the author writes. An author has to understand that the reader is writing too, that they want to write the story with the author as they read the text too. It makes the experience fun.
If a person just writes in their voice about shit they know about, it usually comes out good. But when an asshole tries to justify their dumb existence with a long dumb novel full of description about boot straps and puddle ripples then it gets annoying.
Also a writer should be a reader first and an author later. People who rebuild old junk cars are people who love cars first. They are car lovers. Hobbies are like that. You love something, and while loving it you learn more a lot about it, and join in on the fun when you’ve learned enough.
I want you to elaborate on if you are annoyed that I don't write about "real problems," and if the ULA would like my writing or not? I don’t know if I write about real problems either. A real problem is the oil running out in thirty years. I don’t mention that. Probably the only real problem I discuss is the class conflict between poor and rich. And I do that because poor people constantly bitch about rich people, most Americans don’t know that. But they do, an awful lot. And not sentences like, “I wish I could have that money.” But sentences like, “Why the fuck would anyone spend 20,000 dollars on a wedding?” So it isn’t really like I’m consciously writing these “real problems.” I’m writing about what my world talks about. Honestly I don’t think I care if you write about real problems or not. Proust didn’t write about real problems and neither did Beckett, and those are two of my favorite writers. And Jack London’s “Iron Heel” sucked I thought. As long as you aren’t lying and doing a bunch of dirty tricks to get emotions where none are deserved I consider the writer writing about problems in their own way. I think Beckett and Proust did that. They aren’t adding to them and they aren't government propaganda, that’s what matters in the end.
Probably the ULA would like your writing Here's why I liked your novel Burning Babies. Because the voice. Because of who you are, I guess. If I like someone's voice, then I'll read anything they write, because I trust them.
Same here, the voice matters. I think a lot of people try not to write in a voice, but in that "literary voice." Like you know how you meet someone on the street and they tell great stories, they have a million funny and great experiences, and you think, they should write a book. But then you realize it would come out bad, because if you don't work your ass off with your writing, a person is just gonna sit down and write in that literary voice, it won't be natural. Honestly, I read hundreds of books, wrote 1000 poems, and a thousand pages of prose before I could even write in my own voice. I just kept writing in some literary voice, like I would sit down, and start writing, and some strange voice would come into my head. It is really fucking hard to shut that damn voice off.
That "explain, declare, announce" shit gets on my nerves too. I think I do a lot of shit like that because before I got to the point I thought I was writing stories well enough to submit I was reading a lot of plays. I just stopped reading novels, and read Beckett, Ionesco, Sartre, Genet, Jean Anouilh, Williams, and Ibsen. I had never seen any of the plays I was reading, and probably never will, honestly I don't have any interest in seeing them, I think that would ruin how I pictured the plays in my head. I wouldn't even read the description in italics, just do the action myself. I could put the plays anywhere I wanted in my head that way. I didn't give a shit what kind of set the playwright desired. I think my writing is probably just one acts with some internal monologue thrown in. I think that happened because the only novel I was reading at that time was Proust's The Fugitive. Also, you do not hate people because they are rich. You have the question, in your book, why do the rich deserve to be rich? People are born, they have no choice, why do some get more money than others? You don't answer it.
I don't blame a person for being rich or wanting to be rich. I haven't had much money for years now. I'm a pizza boy at a Papa John's to be honest about that. I sit in my car and listen to rap songs about becoming rich. When you don't have much money, you know what money means, you know that money means a fuck of a lot. When you've owned six cars in two years because you can't afford to buy a car for than $800 it makes a person break shit and cry. You know when you see gas prices rise that there will be no fun this week, because you can't buy any, money means a lot. A lack of money affects every facet of a person's life. In my car I don't even have a tape player, the radio works with a piece of scotch tape. Etc etc etc. So you sit there in this wretched poverty, and you think all the time, only if I was rich I would never have to worry again about tape players or broken transmissions, or gas prices. I didn't listen to rap music until two years for those reasons. That is a hard question to answer. My hate is derived from the fact that people aren't getting paid what they could be paid. Statistics show that if minimum wage got raised like CEO pay did starting in the 90s, minimum wage could be 25-dollars an hour. At my job at Papa John's, the store makes on average 1,600 dollars a day. $345 goes out in labor, around $290 in food product. Which leaves $865, take out rent and electricity that leaves $800. Invisible men I will never meet and don't know my name just made $800 off my labor and time. I think the numbers show that the CEOs of corporate America are STEALING the worker's money. Even if they kept $400, and doubled our pay. They would still be rich and have everything they need. They for sure could afford to give us health care. But lower class people have no choice in the matter, because if we don't work for that small pay, we die of starvation. America has a gun at the heads of the poor; they have aimed the gun at us and said, "Work for this amount or die!" So we do it, we do what we have to. The liberals and republicans are running around talking about red and blue states, the iraq war, but that's not the problem, the problem is that people no one ever sees or know is stealing the bulk of America's money to buy boats and get into Forbes magazine. That saddens me more than anything. Also if they took less money from the bulk, the bulk could spend it on it shit and make America a wealthier place, a lot more money could be in circulation.
Very few rich people are involved in owning companies and outsourcing and destroying people's lives. Those are the ones to hate, I don't hate Jay Leno or the guy who owns the local bar. They’re just simple people that are doing what they love.
I like Easton Ellis because he has a great voice, he lets the reader have fun. He doesn't fuck around with phony notions or play any dirty tricks. he gets down to business when he sits down to write. You get the feeling Easton Ellis has to say this, or he will explode, he has been saving it up for a long time, and if can't just write these sentences, his mind will explode. it is violent, and brutal. He never gets sentimental, which is nice. Life ain't sentimental, life is brutal sometimes and mostly kind of boring. I saw the movie Crash the other day, and there is that scene where the racist pulls out the black woman he somewhat raped, and it was so fucking dramatic, it made me feel like a loser, I said to my girlfriend Bernice Mullins, "I feel like a loser, nothing like THAT dramatic will ever happen to me." Easton Ellis doesn't make me feel like that, his scenes of rich people I will never experience for the most part, but he doesn't make it retardly dramatic so you just end up feeling like a loser.
There's people I like too. I think a lot of the time, sometimes, I am a happy person for no reason. Sometimes if I'm alone I'm happy, I think, and for no reason, just because I have pretty good chemicals, or whatever.
I worked at Domino's one Summer, delivering pizza. I was really happy, driving and listening to music. One guy there used to be a martial arts champion, and I got a flat tire and he drove out to help me when he could've been delivering and making money. He was really nice about it. He said his wife hit a deer one night and was afraid to drive anymore. The other drivers were all thirty or something. There was one other college kid. The managers were 22 and 23, and they made $50,000 a year. There was an area that never tipped. This was in Florida. One time I drove through a swamp and it was late at night and the guy had a bonfire in his front yard, and dogs not on leashes. He was drunk and had country music on loud and was alone, and this was in a field some place, after a swamp, no lights or other houses around. I thought he was going to murder me, but he was a good guy and didn't murder me. It made me very happy that he was a good guy. I felt sad for him because he was drunk and alone and he ordered pizza and was a good guy. His dogs didn't bite me. If I panicked, they would've. There were two pinschers, or something, and they stared at me when I walked to the door and back to the car. I felt really sad about all that, the drunk guy mostly.
I like the same kind of writing that you do, then. Mostly. Lorrie Moore has a lot of description but somehow I like it all. It's so new and original that it's better than my imagination. All the Kmart realists, Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, etc., use only "Said," and I like that. They don't use the word "Certainly." I read your story about cleaning and it was like a Raymond Carver story, as good as his best stories, I thought.
I went to a reading tonight and the guy had published seven books or something. He read his story. I heard him say, "Incessant chatter," "Blaring TV," "She shot back" (you would’ve used "She said.") and "Abusively berated," (you would've used "She said.") and I stopped paying attention. I didn't want to listen to what he had to say. Even if I tried, I would feel guilty, or something, like I was wasting my life. Each time people laughed, I felt more alone. People like that, this guy with seven books, I think, are the kind of people that make me feel like I'm in a movie all the time. They say things like, "At any rate," and "But I digress," and they use the word "Naturally" to start sentences. They're oblivious of the actual meanings of words, and use a lot of clichés and stock phrases. They never feel fake. I always feel fake. Or I always feel like I need to not be fake. I used to use a lot of clichés and stock phrases, actually. Thinking back, I view that person who used a lot of clichés and stock phrases as a completely different person, someone who was oblivious in the world—oblivious especially to language, the actual meanings of words. I’m not sure how I changed. I think I just wrote and read a lot. But some people never change. They use stock phrases until they die. I’m not sure what makes people change. I’m sure it’s both genes and environment.
You said you feel like Easton Ellis has to write what he writes or his mind will explode. I haven't read much of him, actually. I will, though. I feel that way (about exploding) with Jean Rhys and Lorrie Moore and Joy Williams (the story Honored Guest) and Ann Beattie (Chilly Scenes of Winter) and maybe some of Richard Yates (The Easter Parade). And I feel that way when I'm writing too. Not exactly like that. More like, I need to write this or else what else am I going to do? And not with most of my internet stuff, except some of the poems. But when I write my longer stories (nothing on the internet) and my novel, I write them when I feel lonely or shitty or sad. When I write them my brain is like, “What am I going to do, in the world?” My brain’s like, “What the… am I alive… what is going on… this is terrible… I feel terrible.” Something like that.
Tell me what you feel like when you write.
I didn't see Crash, but I feel that way with almost all movies. The movie seems like it's making fun of itself. And I want to make fun of it, but everyone around me is telling me to shut up and calling me heartless and inhuman. It's absurd to me how many people think that Lord of the Rings is good. If someone tells me that they thought Lord of the Rings was great, then I cannot understand that person. I can't talk to them without feeling sarcastic. These things make me feel alone. The Great Gatsby is melodramatic to me, and everyone loves that book. What do I do then? Feels like something is wrong. I want to punch The Great Gatsby in the face when I'm reading it. I'm like, “Are you serious?” And the book is like, “Yeah, I am.” And I'm like, “Um, are you sure?” And that makes me feel… wrong.
About rich people. I agree. When I was like five or something I told my mom they should tax rich people so that you can't make over a billion dollars or something. I couldn't understand why they didn't do that. Maybe not five. But I remember saying that. I listen to this band called The Broadways, and they are like that too. If you aren’t like that, then I think your meaning in life is to cause more pain and suffering. My parents were really poor when they lived in Taiwan, and we were poor until I was like seven or something (or ten, or something), but my dad is good at making money by inventing lasers, etc., and soon we were pretty rich, decently rich. Making money is a kind of meaning, though. And if you have too much money, you lose that meaning. You can't say, “I'm going to work hard and get money and use that money to feel good.” You lose that. I complained sometimes to my parents about that. How now that they're rich I've lost that meaning. This is why some rich kids donate all their money away and go to Alaska, I think. (Like in that book, Into the Wild.) Maybe. Because I remember saving up money when I was really young, and how that felt good. And it’s the same kind of feeling to survive, I guess. To have to work to survive. For rich people, it is, I mean. For poor people, who have had no contrast, of sitting in a house, bored, all day, and rich, it probably is not that way. Tell me what you feel like when you write.
Like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, when he sitting with the cop and I think Sollozzo in the restaurant. And there's this huge plan going into it. And he executes the plan perfectly and kills both of them. When I write, I write it all in my head, then sit down and do it. I make a bunch a little notes and sit them out around the computer and just do it. It is very violent, I pound the keys and write it very quickly. If I can't finish what I'm going to write in less than a month, then I won't finish it. I write as much as possible and get it down. It is Sicilian how the whole thing gets done. You plan, plan, plan, then execute. I just realized I didn’t describe how I feel except for that scene, but I assume Michael Corleone felt brutal and justified. And that’s what I feel like. Not macho, but brutal, like a slave turning around at the yelling overseer and stabbing him.
I feel happy when I write. I feel in power. When I walk around the world, at work, at stores, in restaurants, in my car, I don’t feel in power. I feel senseless, useless, expendable and little. When I write though I control the sentences, I can make a sentence say and do anything I want. I can say, “I’m gonna get a hoodrat up here to kick her ass,” or, “My shoe hurts, I will take me off.” I can say anything, Bush cannot stop me from choosing the order I put my words. No one can. I can make a sad ending, a happy one, or just end the story on a blank. It is my will that makes the story, no one can stop that. And for once, I feel like a human, a human that has some power over my life.
When the writing is going good, it all makes sense then. Life is worth it. Life isn’t a series of ugly dumb boring events that lead nowhere but to more ugly dumb boring events. But it is great, that death will be conquered somehow. It won’t be. But it seems like that.
I like the idea of contributing back to literature. Literature has kept me together, I have used what literature has taught me to make my life better, painting and music doesn’t do that. A painting does not show you that your ex-fiancé is a evil cunt, that your parents are evil. Like for example, if you are reading a story and you hate this certain character, and then you realize that character reminds you of somebody you know. You realize you hate that person and you should get them out of your life. Or you read On the Road and you get this idea you should take off across the country and it is awesome. Or you read Dostoevsky and he shows how people lie to themselves, and you realize you are lying to yourself in the same way as one of the characters. Literature does that for people, not the other arts. Music for me should always be just sad or happy, basically just entertaining whatever emotion I have in my head. But novels, novels put the reader through a bunch of emotions, with the different scenes. I like that.
Have you submitted stuff to print magazines? Not really, I was in some print magazine called Brittle Star in England, some magazine called Crimson Feet in India, and The Prague Literary Review, Dennis Cooper had a story in there. I've never been published in print in America. Actually most of the ezines I've published on have been based outside of America too.
I’ve never submitted to The New Yorker or The Paris Review, or any of the reviews. I don’t think they would accept it anyway. Places like The New Yorker and Paris Review are big shit, you gotta be big shit to get into those mags I’m not big shit, I’m from Youngstown, I like chili dogs and Black Velvet, I don’t even own a tie or a suit. It seems like if you write for The Paris Review, you should have a tie and a suit.
Perhaps it just my Youngstown inferiority complex, people are raised in Youngstown to believe that there were born only to fail in some horrible ugly way. And perhaps if we graduate from college it is only to make the failure more complete and horrible. Most people from Youngstown never communicate from people outside of Youngstown. I’ve met people from all over America writing, and when I tell people I know people here and there, they stare at me like an asshole. When I tell people I write, they don’t believe I got a book published, they all assume I just paid to have it published. It is very sad here. A person grows up in Youngstown watching all the great lives on television, American lives. But they look around and none of their lives look like that. It is all a strange sick joke it feels like.
For example the kids I grew up with, some are crack heads now, some have DUIs and don’t leave their houses, some are drunks, most are on coke. Very few have done anything worth talking about. It is a terrible mess. Over fifty people have been shot and killed in Youngstown during the year of 2005. Probably over 100 were shot. I get letters from one my friends every other week who is in the pen on some fucked up charge, he said he was convicted before the trial even started. And it was obvious if he could have afforded a good lawyer he would have got off. I know countless women with their men in the pen and their children taken away from them. I deliver pizzas to whole families in living in hotel rooms. I know young people who got sick and had to go the hospital and now are so in debt their lives are ruined before they even got to start them. Nobody wants to hear about someone accomplishing here in Youngstown. And none of that makes a person believe that they can accomplish something either. It also makes a person feel like they are betraying those people in some way. Like what right do I have to get something published in The New Yorker while Jimmy is in the pen.
What's your experience with submitting stuff online? Rejections, editors, etc. How's it been? In 2002 when I started submitting to online mags, it was a lot of fun. The online literary world was just starting out then and it was exciting. You could send a submission and get a reply within two weeks. Now it has become like print mags and you don't get a reply for months. And magazines didn't care if you got your shit got posted somewhere else too, now they care. It has become very serious like print mags now. And I don't like things that are too too serious. I still read them, but I don't submit as much as I used too. And I wrote two books last winter and spring and I usually don't write during the summer, so I haven't had much to submit either.
This is funny like five places I submitted to online, stuck what I sent them up on their site without telling me. So I have to google my name every once in a while to see if someone did that.
Do people email you about your writing? Yeah, people email me. And I've read things on blogs and Myspace, which is really exciting. It is very exciting to me when someone I don't know read my book and enjoyed it. The people on blogs and Myspace wrote that they liked it and that it was weird. Someone wrote Beckett is better than me, so I commented, “yes he is.” That was fun. All that shit is very fun.
And, what was your experience publishing your first book on Fugue State Press? My first book was pretty much premature ejaculation. I didn't know anything about the literary world, about selling books, about anything really. I didn't have any literary friends and there is no literary scene in Youngstown. So I didn't sell many books. This book though, I know a shit load more, so I think a good amount more books will be sold.
I’m not sure how many were sold. It is very hard get people to deal with POD books for publicity. I emailed like every library in Ohio, and everyone except for like two said they don’t buy POD books. I only got three reviews, out of thirty books being sent out to reviewers, reviewers don’t wanna deal with POD books. I got a review from The Ohioana Quarterly, they bitched about it, citing all the reasons people tell me they like the book as the reasons it was bad. But the same people gave good reviews to jerk off professors who wrote boring dumb books, so I don’t care. I have never been bothered by criticism.
If there is no literary scene in Youngstown, how did you become so literary and knowledgeable about literary things? Publishing on the Internet and knowing about McSweeney’s and everything? I became literary because I decided that I wanted to be a writer when I was fifteen. For some absurd reason I thought that would be fruitful. I’m tone def and can’t paint, so I couldn’t do those arts. But I wanted to express something, so I took to reading. Started out with Poe of course. Then like I said earlier I just kept reading books and writing down the names in them. And wrote down all the words I didn’t know, and wrote the definitions next to them. Filled a notebook doing that. Also the cheapest books are the classics, Bantam came out with that series of classics for seven dollars and I bought a shit load of them. Also I would read anything considered a classic, didn’t care what it was. I would go to a thrift store and just buy anything that looked like it was considered classic or literature. It was all very naïve. My parents are blue-collar workers, a Kmart butcher and an assembly line worker at a car plant. I had no one around me that graduated college, no one that knew anything about literature, or anything educated or artsy. My mother reads Danielle Steel and Sandra Brown novels and I never saw my dad hold a book in his life. My parents didn’t even listen to music. No music, no paintings, and no literature, no discussion of politics. My neighbors were the same way. All the kids I grew up had parents who worked in the factories, steel mills, and distribution centers.
I found out about publishing on the Internet because I thought I wrote some stories that were good enough to publish. So I went to the computer, went to google and kept putting things in like, “Experimental literature, literature, weird literature, independent literature.” Phrases like that until I found newpages.com. If it wasn’t for the Internet I would be at home showing my stories to my friends, that’s all.
I found out about McSweeney’s through The ULA. Sometimes the attacking enemy has the most information on what they are fighting. Like Marx’s writings. Marx wrote more and more accurate shit about capitalism than the capitalists ever have. And Sartre did that too with capitalism and human beings. If you understood Marx well enough, and had some money, you could probably build a capitalistic empire in a week with all the shit he wrote about how capitalism works. That's the same thing with The ULA. Reading Wenclas’ blog I learned about McSweeney’s, who all the head blog people were, who the big names were. If you are just reading blogs, it is so random what gets said on them that it is hard to piece together. But The ULA gives you all the info about them, what they do, what they are doing, the whole shebang.
What “a shit load more” do you know, and how’s that going to help you sell more books? I know what gets a book sold, not readings, not even really good writing. Even though I think “Burning Babies” is a good book. What will make the book sell more, I’ll list them.
1. An offset book: More stores will take it.
2. I got a blurb from Harvey Pekar to go on the book. Blurbs matter. Blurbs are part of The Literary World. A blurb given by someone that gets good reviews will help the reviewer choose what kind of review it gets. We all know that. It changes the perception on the book. If someone gets a blurb from Norman Mailer, we know what happens; they become awesome that second and sell books. Noam Chomsky is like that in nonfiction.
And I got a review from Michael Allen (Grumpy Old Bookman.)
3. I know that blogs and literary ezines now. If literature has become a hobby, blogs will keep it together and alive. The Internet is a tool, it must be used. Many writers have benefited from the Internet.
4. I plan on getting publicity in local papers; I didn’t do that last time. But this time I will. I know several people who work for the local Youngstown papers, they will do the articles for me. Some good old fashion cronyism.
Publicity sells books. Not readings. Readings unless you are already famous is a joke. I don’t know anyone that has sold shit at readings. Readings are fun, but not “core readers” producing. If I read somewhere, I have more luck with open mike nights. I go on between the bands and try to get some regular people interested.
I used to post annoying jokes on there, making fun of the ULA. What did you think of that? I thought it was funny, that was after I decided to leave anyway.
Also, how'd you come to join the ULA? Steve Kostecke wanted me in the group. And there were some things I wanted to write that would only get posted by them. Those reviews of the Foer and Eggers book, that experiment thing, and that one article you put up. Nobody else would post those. So I did it. I also enjoyed battling on Wenclas' blog, but that led me to speak in some strange blogger voice my girlfriend said, and I had to stop that. I was very depressed and angry then. I am still angry, but not so much depressed.
Can you explain what you “battled” about on Wenclas’ blog? About anything. Mostly about the literary world being corrupt. That Columbia and Iowa graduates got a free ride in the literary world. That the Paris Review and The New Yorker only published people from private colleges. Shit like that. I argued mostly because I noticed it was interesting how people fought. How people from different economic classes arranged their arguments. The existential psychology of it all was very interesting to me. And to try out some of Wittgenstein’s methods on them laid out in “The Tractatus.” I was testing theories and learning about other people mostly.
How'd you end up leaving it? Were they angry at you when you left? Some were angry, most weren't. I just started to see that The Literary World is small now. It is cheaper to go to a movie or watch television than read a book. Obviously people are not going to read as much. And Wenclas keeps talking about zines and how working class they are. But I got a collection of zines, and a lot come out of the Hamptons. And Aaron Cometbus' parents are professors. And Urban Hemitt's dad is like a Lawyer or something like that. It is all just a "Who is the Coolest most Indie Most Underground Mother Fucker Competition." There is no difference as far as I can see between an Anarchist Zine and Harper's in intelligence. It is just some college kids who want to be cooler than the other liberal arts college kids and start doing zines. It is just a competition. It isn't intelligence, just competition. The same people that wear certain sunglasses, and wear certain vintage coats that do that a lot of that shit etc. I have no interest in being underground or writing for Harper's. If a publisher was like, "Noah we want to give twenty thousand for your book and will sell it in every bookstore in America." I would answer, "Give me the money and take it." I need money, not some story about, "I worked so hard for years doing my art, and my art is genius and no one knows it because The Man is keeping me down." I don't wanna go down like that. Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Sartre, the whole bunch got their books put out by big publishers, I need money not some story to tell people in a bar when I'm eighty.
Also the problems of the literary world are subsidiary problems to a larger problem. The people who run the publishing companies are millionaires with stock in fifty other economic sectors, most of them probably don’t even know they even own a publishing company.
I also don't want to be a writer that is only read if you attend an academic writing program. I don't want to write articles for Harper's, I had my choice it would be for magazines like King or Maxim
I don't mind either if people only read horror or read my books too. I know a lot of people like, they only read Anne Rice or Steven King, but they got a collection of Thompson or Bukowski books on the shelf too. That would be fine with me. I totally respect horror and detective novelists.
What would do with $20,000? Because I don't think any amount of money could make you happy (happy in a way that you're constantly happy, like some people are). I think you'll be happy with money, but then after a while you won't be anymore. (When Jean Rhys finally got money at the end of her life, she still was not happy, but just complained all the time.) It's the same with me. Earlier, you talked about death. You know about death. You can't buy your way out of death. Reality is just bad and depressing, and you can't buy a new reality with money, and that'll always depress you, won't it? With twenty thousand I would pay off my bills. I got $12,000 in credit institutions at this moment. My credit is like zero. So that twelve thousand of that would be gone the next day. I would be left with 8,000, I would go to the bars and buy everyone I like some drinks, buy my girl some new dancer outfits, and get her a Subaru Outback, she really likes those. and if I got more money I would to buy like a 3,000 dollar HO foxbody mustang from the eighties, automatic (can't drive stick) that goes like 14s on the quarter mile. Maybe a digital camera, I've never owned a camera before, my parents didn't own a camera, that would be cool. I don't expect happiness, but fuck man, a digital camera would be cool.
But what are you going to do with a digital camera? Take pictures of stuff, I don’t know. Sometimes I think, that looks pretty, I wish I had a camera. Maybe a sunset or something. My girlfriend naked, like all good Americans do.
Tell me everything you can about what you think about this article about poverty written by the person who does moorishgirl. Yeah, I rea
