For Those Who Want To Write and Who Think They Are Out of Touch With Culture

A rather brutal (harsh?) call to arms for those who think they may fit into the category of writer, and a stern admonition for those who think they are not good enough from John Pistelli's Weekly Readings #222 (05/04/26-05/10/26).

Most historic achievements in the arts have been the work of middle-aged men who didn’t spend a lot of time in the gym.3 That’s the demographic that writes the teen pop songs behind the scenes even to this day. (Youth don’t create youth culture; they’re babies and can’t do anything; it’s created for them by the middle-aged.) You have no reason to introject a contempt for your own person culturally disseminated by entities who do not have your interests in mind, such as corporations that steal your self-esteem and sell it back to you with their products or a political class aggrandizing its own power through a divide-and-conquer strategy. I recently re-watched the movie Heat; I hadn’t seen it since (speaking of middle age!) seeing it in the movie theater with my stepfather when it came out; I’d avoided re-watching it any time this century precisely because I associated it with a “type of guy.” And yet it’s a good movie, for that ineffable noir L.A. frisson if for nothing else, one I didn’t understand as a kid but do understand now because it’s about being a middle-aged man, but also, as many movies are, about making the movie, about a life devoted to the laborious pursuit of some ideal over and above normal life. In the central scene, when our heroes confront each other and realize their mutual likeness, each’s dependence on or constitution of the other, they abandon their abortive laments for the normal lives they might have led and conclude, I quote from memory, “I don’t know how to do anything else. I don’t much want to either.” That’s the reason to do it, or my reason anyway. Now on practical matters: no, I don’t especially recommend blind submissions. I’d say self-publish online and try to build a network among the like-minded. Your writing could be bad, my writing could be bad, but “bad” and “good” are unstable categories continually produced with and by art that doesn’t fit prior canons of taste, so you’ve just got to take the risk without guarantees. But above all evict the voice in your head you have allowed to insult and deride you for no reason, as if you didn’t have as much right to live beautifully on the earth as anyone else. 

sch 5/12