Setting: A narrow, gas-lit, cobblestone alley. Shadows. Dusk or dawn, as you will. The late nineteenth century, perhaps earlier.

Dramatis Personae: Mark, Mark, Mark, Jean, Jean, and David.

Motivation: Each of the three Marks has pledged his troth to one of the two Jeans’ three sisters, oaths given in all solemnity and with all due expectation of consummation, but, alas, in acts of the most despicable gallantry, two of those three Marks have each impregnated one of the other, unpromised, Jean’s sisters before the wedding banns could even be announced. David acts in this scandalous commerce as second for a fourth, absent, Mark, who, because he shares the name (though never the inclinations) of the more infamous Marks, fears confusion may result among his fellow parishioners and therefore wants to clear his name of any possible association with the sordid, unseemly, immoral affairs of his namesakes, in whatever fashion proves most expedient and most discreet.

Afterward talked with Tracy about changes in how film is made, actors are trained and cultivated, norms of delivery and characterization. Actors like Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder seem to me to have been phased out, in part I think because they are by today’s standards too “stagey.” Stagey in general seems to mean broad, obviously affected, self-consciously performative, and etc. In film, in prose, in poetry, even in theater itself, the performer who acknowledges his/her own performance is thoroughly out of style, and probably understood by the majority to be hackneyed, flat, boring, and etc. The impressive thing about Mostel is that though his body is in some sense repulsive (especially in said film, wherein his comb-over was so terrifying they really had to give him a hat once we were supposed to like him) he exercises such perfect control over it. The man can clearly dance, sing, project, etc. And this is (or would be) today his greatest sin, especially because controlling your body is now supposed to mean training it to be beautiful, or at least sexually provocative.

But manner has been surgically removed from film (though not, I think, television). Daniel Day Lewis is understood to chew the scenery, perhaps excessively. There are few other actors who approach his affection for mannered performances, unfortunately — Crispin Glover has his moments, as does the current model of Bill Murray. Jack Black isn’t too far off, but is usually wasted (mostly his own fault). His performance was the main reason to watch King Kong, because he understood he was in a broad, broad movie about a giant ape fighting dinosaurs and fighter planes. Women are I think generally allowed to be closer to this model because it is generally understood that women spend most of their lives performing, while men are understood to spend more time existing unselfconsciously. Well bullshit, of course.

At its root, the rebellion against manner in performance (and writing, and music, and everywhere) seems to be at heart about flattering humanity, rather than describing it. The mannered performance is not acceptable in any medium today because we have a myth of human authenticity underlying our art. Any person in any scene or passage is meant to be first and foremost a genuine human being, meaning A) one with depth and complexity and secrets, and B) someone like YOU. Which is mainly a way of saying that YOU have depth and complexity and secrets, when I think we both know that is a damn lie: a human being is not complicated except insofar as it contrives to be so. It used to be understood in general, I think, that a character in a scene should be fundamentally motivated by one of several basic impulses: hunger, greed, or lust. That’s what it is to have a mouth and hands, and if you can’t find those impulses in everything you do it’s only because Hollywood and Nicholas Sparks or whatever have been kind enough to disguise, if only thinly, your needs: to convince you that you don’t have a body, not really, or that you are at least not beholden to it. Today we invest absolutely in ideology (idolatry) in order to forget our real needs and wants, which is a political convenience/disaster as well as an interpersonal one.

The ironic part is that in attempting to flatter our humanity, we in fact destroy it in every portrayal. We do not like Zero Mostel’s song and dance because it seemed to acknowledge the camera — we would today reject Gene Wilder’s “muggy” performance style because the only reason to mug is if there’s somebody watching. How could he always angle those beautiful blue eyes just so without knowing where the camera was? But of course there is someone watching, not only in film but in our own lives, and we are indeed mugging constantly for our own audience — we sing and dance too. What frightens us is the presentation of artifice as genuinely human, which it is. But of course an actor or a writer without artifice is crippled. In modern writing the goal seems to be to write as if you don’t know there is a reader, to have a hand so gentle it is invisible — to create the impression the object has washed up on the shore, unexplained, and may disappear soon. But how are we to create the most powerful and resonant effects in our readers without tipping our hands? How can we write well without letting on that we are writing?

A character in a movie who is forbidden from playing to the camera is a cripple in a fairly literal sense: the screen and speakers being his body, he is told not to acknowledge that he has one, and so he must stand limply on screen, mumbling listlessly and pathetic. Sometimes it is appropriate to cripple our characters in this way. After all I am not an expert in my body either, and probably neither are you. And so we are alienated by self-conscious performances at once because they are too bad, and too good. Most of the time, though, I think the best characters in any form are at some level aware of their existence within that form — not so much as to destroy the illusion, but with the understanding that the illusion is not so fragile.

Perhaps another way to say this, because I feel I have been circling my point, is that the greatest irony of naturalistic art is that it renders its human subjects unnatural. The actor who cannot acknowledge he’s acting is alien to his own film: the flowers have all been arranged to their best advantage, and so have all the other objects, and so have even the secondary characters, most likely. The leading man and lady, however, cannot admit to be what they are; they must waltz clumsily through the otherwise immaculate set. A prose character whose fumbling dialogue stands in too-stark contrast to the careful, pointed prose seems at root to be speaking another language, because he is. He does not belong in this book. It may be that we prefer alienated characters because we want to believe that we are ourselves alienated from our own surroundings, that we are unnatural ourselves — or rather supernatural. Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, by belonging unambiguously on film, imply that we might belong where we are, which is embarrassing and painful to contemplate. Better to be clumsy angels than lovely dancers all full of need and malice.

1) The editors of this magazine do not see their job as creating a whole and satisfying experience. Arranging the work they publish in order that each piece compliments the other pieces is too much work.

2) The editors are more concerned with their own social advancement than the quality of the magazine — they see themselves as part of a “scene” first, and editors second. The reason it feels this way is that alphabetical organization is a political strategy to abdicate responsibility; Zelda Zabadoo can’t complain if she’s placed after Aaron Ackerman. It’s the alphabet’s fault, not the editor’s. So everyone can stay happy and they can all be part of the club.

One could argue that arrangement doesn’t really matter in online magazines, where readers rarely read from “beginning” to “end” anyway, and indeed where the concepts have very little meaning. This doesn’t pass the smell test. If arrangement doesn’t matter, then a script should be written to randomize the order of pieces, or there should be one canonical order drawn from a hat. If order doesn’t matter, then you might as well arrange it all somehow anyway — why not? The only reason to sort alphabetically is to pointedly and demonstrably *not* sort, to avoid being seen to play favorites, etc. It’s bullshit.

In short, it’s editors telling me they don’t really want to be editors. This is not uncommon among editors, who are usually writers as well — but it’s frustrating. And of course at this point it seems the majority have agreed that this is the way to do things, so it doesn’t actually mean anything of the sort. It only turns me off (and perhaps it really is only me who is bothered by this).

Most online publications also seem to feel that each genre should be cordoned off from the others, listed in their own boxes, columns, or pages. This makes more sense to me, because many readers will legitimately want to read some categories but not others. Certainly I am sometimes in the mood for poetry, sometimes fiction, and almost never flash (vile “flash”). However I think ultimately that I would like to see more people experiment with actually designating an order in which things should be read. Sometimes the order of a magazine helps me to appreciate its contents, and to be open and engaged. Editors should be editors — they should arrange their work such that readers understand why it is in one place all together, rather than many places apart.

Several years ago I wanted to write a game about a character called Mr. Hand. Mr. Hand was an eccentric millionaire giant walking hand with a head on its wrist. He liked to kidnap people, drop them into a dungeon, and then make them lead him around on a leash, solving problems. No I do not know why I thought this would be fun. Yes I still kind of want to do it.

Here is a better idea:

The game is about making people happy. It does not matter how you do this. You have the power to rename any noun in the game — in other words, you can make a key a door, and you can make a dog a present, and you can make a frog a golden egg, and so on. I don’t know how this would work exactly — I mean, I know enough about programming that I know this would be utterly simple in general, but text adventures are generally built in specialized languages or platforms that might not have the right features.

Anyway, all of the characters you meet are sad, and they need something to be happy. If you ask them about themselves you can learn about them as people and get clues as to why they are unhappy, and then you can rename various objects and give them those objects and if you have selected the right name they will be happy, because as far as they know they will have the thing they need to be happy.

So for instance say someone lost his dog Sparky when he was a kid. You could solve this by giving him a “dog,” but you might also solve it by giving him “Sparky.”

Another character might need “The Peace that Passeth Understanding” or “the presidency” or “his soul mate” or “a message from God.” You could make any character happy by giving them “true happiness.” You might also make them happy by giving them “a million dollars” or “penile enhancement,” though the game would suggest that this happiness was fleeting, at least in some cases. Although perhaps we would all be happier with bigger junk, in a lasting and authentic way.

Except when you played chess, I said.

No, I was tied up then too. He made my moves for me. Sometimes he’d deliberately move a piece ot the wrong square and pretend not to understand if I objected. You wouldn’t have thought I’d have cared, with everything else, but it made me absolutely furious. I’d refuse to play, and he’d beat me. Or he’d beat me if he lost. He didn’t beat me if he beat me.

He said

He was kind of split up. He’d be quite friendly when he brought out the board, and he’d smile. That would last for a few moves and then sometimes he’d start to cheat, and sometimes he’d lose his temper and hit me with the gun, and sometimes. The friendliness was the horrible part, because he’d be hurt, genuinely hurt, when I wasn’t pleased to see him or took offence because he’d beat the shit out of me the day before. And now that I’m back that’s all I see. That horrible friendliness everywhere.

In some ways it is like death it is like what happens to you when you die.

In this way you could call actors killers. You could say that acting is a kind of killing which it certainly is.

Of such was Neary’s love for Miss Dwyer, who loved a Flight-Lieutenant Elliman, who loved a Miss Farren of Ringsakiddy, who loved a Father Fitt of Ballinclashet, who in all sincerity was bound to acknowledge a certain vocation for a Mrs. West of Passage, who loved Neary.

“Love requited,” said Neary, “is a short circuit,” a ball that gave rise to a sparkling rally.

“The love that lifts up its eyes,” said Neary, “being in torments; that craves for the tip of her little finger, dipped in lacquer, to cool its tongue–is foreign to you, Murphy, I take it.”

“Greek,” said Murphy.

(And when do they offer themselves up to be berated for not knowing who Stanislaw Lem is, or for not reading my other favorite authors? Why don’t they all know Kelly Link, and when are they planning to fix it?)

Anyway, I have been doing better about remembering and wanting to read for myself, I think because finally it was that or belch up my guts. And this is why I’m glad David McLendon has been kind enough to post so much as the new and monstrous Unsaid online — I can direct you to Brian Evenson’s story “The Second Boy.” Evenson is one of the most important sources of new words in my life right now, and this story in particular nourishes.

Here is an excerpt:

There were around him other trees as well, he soon found, encountering one and then another and then a third. He struggled his lighter out of his pocket and watched his gloved fingers try to flick it alight, was surprised that they finally managed. He cupped the flame with one hand and saw below him nearly bare ground, almost no snow: a matrix of pine needles and dead vegetation and mud spidered through with veins of frost.

He prodded the ground with the toe of his boot. Some places it remained hard, like a single consistent organism. In others it came slowly apart, the ice not strong enough to hold the dead leaves and other matter together.

He kept at it until he found a large spot that was loose and mostly dry, the leaves and needles such that he could push them together into a heap with his boot. From there it was little enough to bring the lighter down among the needles and leaves until they smoldered and, crackling, caught flame. He kept uprooting needles and leaves and adding them to the fire until the flames were high enough for him to start stripping bark off the nearest trees.

The underside of the bark was threaded with worm trails. It was also studded with black blotches which, as the bark caught fire, began to unfurl and move, becoming small black vermin that spun madly about before sizzling away. Unless it was just that he was seeing things, parts of his brain going dim and dying from the cold. He tried not to think about this, carefully feeding bigger and bigger chunks of wood onto the fire until he had a roaring blaze.

Step one: I have neglected this blog. I have thought of it often, promising posts to myself and others, including my wife, but I have failed to write these posts, and I am ashamed of what I have done, and how I must look to these others, including my wife.

Step five: God, readers, I am sorry for my neglect. I have neglected this blog because I am getting an MFA, and because my last semester was from Hell. It was consensual, of course, but so many of the most painful things are. I was teaching a new class designed entirely by me, for one thing, but (apart from one element I shan’t discuss in public) that was not so bad. I was also in the fiction workshop, of course, which was probably the worst workshop I have been in yet, but that is not uncommon; many workshops seem, as they unfold, to be the worst. And it is sacred (always sacred) to read, and to be read.

I was writing a play. It was a short play, but I wrote it over many times. (I am not done, but I saw it rehearsed publicly performed, which is *similar* to being done; I am reluctant to reclaim it from our collaboration and put it back inside me.)

I was also in a class where we wrote one story, at least nine pages, every week. Of course these stories were all more or less awful but they took a long time to squeeze out, as a general rule. And then there was the charity event I helped to assemble, and the magazine I helped to run. And have you seen how beautiful above-mentioned bride? These things take *time,* my dears, my God.

But (baby) I can be better. I can post twice daily, or thereabouts. I can tell you what I am reading. I can change! I’ll show you. I’ll start tonight.

How have you been? Was it cold? Did you have a YouTube you wanted to show me? Tell me of your holidays.

<3,

mike