30.12.09: muumuuhouse.com

As I spend more free time writing, I have also devoted more time to studying contemporary writing.

(This is all cutting into my special TV time with Beau when I come home from the office emotionally, physically and sometimes even morally drained to stare at a TV showing any one of the following three programs: Californication, Sons of Anarchy or Big Bang Theory. But I digress.)

I am definitely a reader, but I tend to buy my own books, and I don't ever let myself buy new fiction. Not only do I suspect anything very popular and easily obtained of being poorly written, but also a college classmates and self-appointed intellectual superior (JD, you know who you are) once told me that I shouldn't read anything contemporary until I have read the rest of the Western canon. I started following his advice but at some point I must have lost my way as I ended up with a lot of Henry Miller, some Proust, a collection of Flannery O'Connor's short stories, a secondhand copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, some political non-fiction, and a slew of textbooks for learning Chinese and French. All in all, it's a pretty shameful disarray of a collection for someone who likes reading and wants to write.



I did come across a number of online literary journals that have been very stimulating in the past few days. I won't go into it because if you are into it, you already know the most well-known, such as McSweeney's. Muumuuhouse.com was a really fun find for me, thanks to the interview on bookslut.com with Brandon Scott Gorrell. I couldn't stop reading the stories, poems and excerpts posted there, although I found many of them pretentious:

They were the kind of writers that appeared in McSweeney's and collections edited by Dave Eggers. They weren't my kind of writers. They were sitting in their nice apartments or dorm rooms reading the latest Haruki Murakami story while I was sitting in a shitty little ramshackle house reading a used copy of Erskine Caldwell's God's Little Acre.

When I read that I am not sure if I am hearing the author or the narrator, but I am not sure that it matters. I don't know any of these people and it makes me wonder if these categories of people exist. And then it makes me wonder what category of person I am, and what categories all the people I know would fit into. I think it was less descriptive than taking an unfair opportunity to name drop and possibly slight McSweeney's and Dave Eggers and I think it would have been useful to actually tell me what kind of people he has at this party, unless this is a technical piece written by a writer for other writers only - I have heard of McSweeney's before but not Dave Eggers. Writing should speak to something in the human experience, and I get liking and not liking types of people, but I am not sure if the category of "writers who appear in McSweeney's" is a large enough category to be valid, or if it even exists beyond a very small group of writers who try to get their stuff published online.

I also took issue with the end of this story:

On the street I thought, "My life is sort of like that smelly guy's life in that there is something definitely wrong with me but I don’t know how to fix it and people are moving away from me so I am just going to keep moving towards them until I figure out what is wrong, hopefully I get fixed soon."

The thing is, I actually like the piece and initially I even liked this parallel drawn at the end. But it was stated so bluntly that I felt like he punched me in the face. And then I was offended on behalf of the homeless man that this budding wordsmith thought he could compare his emotional insecurities with what I imagine must be the real trials and tribulations of being homeless and mentally ill.

And I also found it sometimes ungrammatical, which I thought was amusing and strange. I think we can afford to be flexible on grammar when it comes to genius, but I'm not sure that anything I read at Muumuu House really registered on the genius scale. Sentences like "the Thai person who I had been communicating with beckoned me" need 'whom,' not 'who." There are a few places, like "Sometimes I glanced at people and felt annoyed about a pressure I detected to be sociable," where the meaning can be misconstrued, like the pressure was sociable and it was annoying him? But actually, I know exactly what he means, when there are people around who seem open to talking, or worse yet, actually come and talk to you, when the last thing you want is to get trapped in a conversation with another person.

And I would have preferred the subjunctive for - "It felt as if I was on 'E'" - and a few other places but I know better than to argue about that. But kudos for using Oxford commas.

I did, however, find reading story after story in their signature choppy, dry and detached style to be something like eating some lemon sorbet between courses. I'm overstuffed on Henry Miller lately as I've been trying to get through the Rosy Crucifixion and everything I've been writing privately has been soppy and sappy and I was getting stuck in long scenes and long conversations that couldn't resolve themselves. However, a refreshing bit of alarmingly simple and detached prose has given me some new ideas about how to keep moving. It all reminds me of this blog I once read (and man have I just wasted a huge chunk of time trying to find it again) that was called something like "The World's Most Boring Blog." The blog that currently holds this title is not the one I am thinking of and is boring in a very mundane way.That other blog was just fantastic - entry upon entry about sharpening pencils and lining them up on the top of the desk, closing the door that was ajar, etc. It was fantastic. And that's another thing that bothered me about what I read - it was freakishly detached sometimes, to the point of being disturbing, and I really just hate disturbing stories/movies/music/graphic t-shirts/plush toys, etc. I hate Quentin Tarantino, for example. I have seen anything associated with him since I saw Reservoir Dogs for the first time a few years ago, and I think my life is better for it. I am all for being prodded out of complacency by an intellectual gadfly, but I have been so underexposed to popular culture that I really don't need a gory bloodbath (i.e., a crazy psycho that tortures people).

And I've digressed again. What I would like to point out is that when Mr. Gorrell writes:

I looked at the toilet paper holder and saw that there was no toilet paper. There was a hose next to the toilet that had a spray nozzle attached to the end of it. I felt very bad. I tested the hose by pressing its lever. I stood a little and put the sprayer behind my ass and sprayed my asshole with it. It seemed to work, my asshole felt clean. I stood and got my notebook out of my bag and ripped a quarter of a page out and wiped my ass with it. It had traces of shit.

I think it's very funny. This kind of objective, value-free perspective is really suitable and really amusing. But when he bums a cigarette from a French woman and then later writes:

There were many different places to sit at the pier and I switched between them a lot. The French woman had a problem with her ticket and her voice rose to a yelling tone. She said, "Please, I have a child." There were chickens walking around the pier.

it makes me a little nauseous. I thought the piece was amusing and it really made me want to give it a shot, just try to write something like them because I think the results would be funny. But I spent a lot of time last night and this morning wondering what happened to that poor French woman with her child. I've traveled with a tight budget before and it's really scary, and I keep wondering if that was her problem, if she had no money to change the ticket, or if she had to stay there until the next ferry left the next day or something, and whether or not she could afford a hotel room, and if she had to sleep outside, did anything bad happen to her? Because Bangkok is a pretty damn unsavory place and bad things happen to women and little children in Thailand. I think talking about your shit in a squatty potty in a monotone, staccato voice is pretty fun. Mentioning that a woman with a child was distressed at the ticket counter in Bangkok between talking about where you sat and talking about the damned chickens is, in a word, disturbing. I don't like disturbing.

Ultimately, muumuuhouse.com was only one of the sites that I found, and while I wouldn't actually want to write in that style, I thought it was pretty effective at creating a sense of humor and when everything is flattened to the same saltine-high level, it can be very revealing (when it's not disturbing).

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