Un/selfconscious writing

 Some writers write in a very self-conscious writery way. A classic "writery" move is to write your first (nonfiction) book, or other stuff "early" in your "career" like this:

I'm a writer. I like writing. I'm doing writing right now. Woah, what's up with writing? I'm like sitting at a desk typing words, but like, you're also reading them! I got a book deal! I'm writing my first book right now! I'm a writer! I do writing! Writing is so hard, but I'm really into writing.  Check out my writing!

I for sure did this a lot in my first book, and in a lot of other places. One of my very first attempts to write "fiction" in high school was a very high-minded two page piece of metafiction which was really just me being unable to come to terms with not being able to make up characters and stories, and was a sort of passive-aggressive version of Salinger's narrator, Buddy Glass,  in Seymour: An Introduction. (To his credit, I think Salinger actually does this very well, but it's easy to do badly.) My freakin' writing textbook is written in a very wink-wink, nudge-nudge, self-conscious voice. I didn't know how else to do it.

I wish I didn't have the impulse to write like this. It's sometimes really embarrassing to go back and read. When I encounter someone else who writes this way, I cringe inwardly; not so much on their behalf, but on my own, because I realize what I must sound like to other people. Nevertheless, I often do it because I feel like I must, and I feel like the artifice with which many writers go about writing about things that really happened is pompous and unnecessary and even maybe uncharitable and untrue. 

 

Paul J. Griffiths in Intellectual Appetites makes a distinction between the way that the "curious" (which he defines as the bad kind of knowledge seeker) and the "studious" (the good kind) express their knowledge. For the studious:

A doubt is raised, an imperfection acknowledged, the beauty of a public depiction of knowledge’s creaturely intimacy shaded by an acknowledgment of the failure of exactly that intimacy. There is...a high degree of self-referential awareness in the texts, oral or written, of studious knowers: the stammer requires this. The curious, however, do not stammer. They are loquacious, which means much more than just that they speak (and write) a lot. They present their spectacular masteries in a form that shows no doubt, no stammering, and no uncertainty; and they do so because they have none. The spectacles they have constructed are wholly owned. No remnant remains unpenetrated, undominated, and so the findings can be presented loquaciously, in well-wrought words whose central purpose is to convince those who hear or read them that, yes, this is exhaustively known; and, equally (if not more) important, I, the one speaking and writing, exhaustively know it. Ideally, the reader or hearer of what the curious write and speak should be struck dumb with admiration of the perfect mastery there being displayed. Those who read what the curious write should respond as the prophet Isaiah did in the presence of God: my lips, they should think, are unclean before knowledge of this extent and profundity. All I can do is be silent before it. The curious, as always, aspire to be treated as if divine. This leads me to the final contrast between the stammering works of the studious and the loquacious works of the curious. It is that stammering is an invitation, while loquacity is no more than a declaration. 

 

So yeah, I feel like I want to stammer, I want to be self-referential. 

Yet I do think that one can have a quiet confidence in one's prose, one can jump right into the telling of something without the self-referential, without the demand that people accept your "spectacular mastery." I am reading Hua Hsu's book Stay True right now and I feel like he's doing it. A writer may have to do literally years of yeoman's work, of stammering, to be able to write hospitably, invitationally, without succumbing to the caricature Griffiths lays out here. I wonder if it is because Hsu spent years immersed in the showy loquaciousness of indie-minded pop music criticism that he is able to finally lay it all aside and write honestly and confidently in this book.

 I'm thinking about a lot of things that I want to go into my Big Book o' What Writing Is -- and one of the biggest issues I'm dealing with is that I've neglected 'literacy studies' almost entirely, for reasons I may try to get into later -- but one of the ones I keep coming back to is the reification of concepts like "Writer" and "Writing" and what these things mean to those of us who claim them as identity and/or vocation. 

 

Scattered Thoughts on a What Should Have Been a Disappointing Weekend at CCCC 2024 in Spokane (But Somehow Wasn't)

“How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire."  

Seymour Glass in J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”

 

“But yield who will to their separation,

My object in living is to unite

My avocation and my vocation

As my two eyes make one in sight.” 

Robert Frost, “Two Tramps in Mud-Time” 

Spokane’s official tourism slogan, ever since I can remember, has been “Near Nature, Near Perfect.” Having grown up here as a bookish, non-outdoorsy kid, that never really resonated with me. As the STA bus I took from the airport – certainly the first time I’d ever taken a bus and not been picked up by a family member here, and possibly the first time I’d ever even been on a city bus in Spokane – pulled off the highway and into downtown, and I saw the twin towers of the Our Lady of Lourdes cathedral looming above the city, a much more personal slogan came to me: “Spokane: Where Every Catholic Church is a Place a Girl I Loved Got Married.”

Maybe I’m exaggerating a bit. But from the beginning I knew that my time at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in downtown Spokane last April was going to be as much personal as professional. A ten-minute drive in either direction would take me to my childhood home, where I learned to love reading, or my high school, where I learned to love writing. I was staying two blocks from the church basement where I I went to punk rock concerts as a teenager. To get to the conference location from my hotel I walked past my all-time favorite bookstore, the eye doctor where I got my first contact lenses, and an intersection where I once hit a pedestrian with my parents’ car. (I never saw him till he hit the windshield; he got a ticket for running across the street against a red light and survived with minor injuries, for which I will forever be grateful.)

There were professional things I wanted to do, certainly: finally present some preliminary findings from a research project that had begun and then stalled three years ago, see some sessions about AI and writing, and maybe get some books that might be helpful for teaching.The first day I attended a business meeting of the Writing about Writing standing group, which had five members in attendance. Because it was so small, it became a sort of informal conversation, mostly about AI and writing.

I spent all of Thursday evening in a frenzied state of writing and thinking. I had been neglecting  some data my two research assistants – long since done being paid by my grant money - had collected via interviews three years ago, and faced with the first hard deadline this project had ever encountered, I buckled down and read all the transcripts, looking for interesting patterns and insights. While it wasn’t perfect, I was excited to be finally working on this project I’d been putting off for so long. Being at this conference gave me some confidence that it might work, that playing around with ideas could be valuable. Anyway, I knew I’d have a chance to bounce this stuff off people tomorrow. I actually said out loud, in a kind of insomniac moment of clarity, “what a gift!” To be able to read, write, and think? And get paid for it?

Well, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans, as they say. The exhilaration of the all-nighter wore off, and Friday morning, fifteen years into the academic conference game, I had my first ever honest-to-goodness 100% no-show. I couldn't believe it. A very kind woman from Centralia college came by to count the number of attendees at the presentation (charitably, she wrote down two: her and me) and I explained a bit about the data to her, and also attempted to diagnose the source of the problem. Some likely possibilities:  I signed up for the wrong type of session (a 90 minute panel instead of a 20-minute paper); the timing (first thing in the morning is the least coveted time slot at any conference); the subject matter (Economics professors’ beliefs about writing - boooooring).

With that out of the way, I was able to focus on what turned out to be the real reason I was in Spokane: to eat meals with friends I’d made between the ages of six and twenty-seven. Over the weekend, I had food and/or drinks (as Lloyd Dobler says in Say Anything - “that’s eating, sharing an important physical event”) with the following people:

• D, who has been my friend since my first day of kindergarten
• V, who I dated in high school
• A, who I played in a band with all through college
• R, who was in my masters program cohort and also went to the same junior high I did

I was struck by how things I’ve been thinking and talking about professionally came up, and the way my professional concerns are deeply personal, though most conversations I had were not professional in the traditional sense. R and I did talk about the vagaries of teaching writing, the stubbornness of precarious employment in our field, the arbitrariness of not being eligible for tenure, a bit about the people we went to grad school with, and a lot about her recent divorce.

D talked about how he felt difficulty communicating with most people in his life - how an artist friend of his had died recently, and he felt he’d lost one of the few people he could carry on free and easy conversation with. We talked about how much we appreciate our own friendship, how we each value having not only shared life experiences and cultural touchstones to refer to – a few words of a Simpsons reference, a mention of specific rock song from the 90’s – but that we both tend to, and allow each other to, speak in multifarious garden-path sentences, allowing for mutual interruptions, absurd digressions, and neck-breakingly fast shifts in tone and subject matter. Like in the research I’ve read about English as a Lingua Franca: coherence is less important than connection.

Whenever I talk to V, I feel like we're both taking stock of our lives – probably not actually imagining what life would've been like if we’d stayed together, but tacitly comparing where we are now to when we first met, the people we’ve grown into from the valedictorian and national merit scholar we were back in the day (read: giant nerds). I usually refer to V as “my high school girlfriend,” which is really not fair, because there are many more accurate and respectful ways to describe her; she’s an extremely accomplished person, and we’ve been good friends much longer than our brief teenage romance lasted.“Well, we’ve both ended up exactly where anybody would have expected,” she said to me over coffee. Which: fair. (I am a university professor; she is a government lawyer.) We spent a lot of time talking about our kids’ education and what it’s been like for us as people who were labelled “gifted” to navigate the school system as parents.

A is a very science-minded person, almost definitely a genius at computer programming, music, and anything else he puts his mind to. We got into a discussion about meaning, and I realized that I let the word “meaning” do a lot of heavy lifting. I’ve gotten used to using the term “symbolic meaning-making,” which I suppose is influenced by Kenneth Burke as well as the multiliteracies people, as a shorthand for a wide swath of language, literacy, music, and art that interests me.  A took issue with my notion that that meaning is inherently human. Algorithms are meaning, he said, in that they are relationships of numbers with each other. We discovered that we had different working definitions of words like meaning, information, and knowledge. I'm still recovering from this conversation and its implications, to be honest, and expect it to reverberate in my future thinking about AI and writing.

Spokane was an absolute bust for me, conference-wise, but in terms of being able to let myself think and have meaningful conversations with people I care about, and that are going to keep bouncing around in my brain, it was pretty great. I'm glad I got to go back.