I don't know who posted about Alexander Chee's piece in the Paris Review "On Becoming an American Writer" but it speaks to many of the SC themes and I wanted to post this fantastic excerpt from it:
"There’s another Alexander Chee in my mind, the one who I would be if I’d only had access to regular dental care throughout my career, down to…
I don't know who posted about Alexander Chee's piece in the Paris Review "On Becoming an American Writer" but it speaks to many of the SC themes and I wanted to post this fantastic excerpt from it:
"There’s another Alexander Chee in my mind, the one who I would be if I’d only had access to regular dental care throughout my career, down to the number of teeth in my mouth. I started inventing him on a visit to Canada in 2005 when I became unnerved by how healthy everyone looked there compared to the United States, and my sense of him grows every time I leave the country. I know I’ll have a shorter career for being American in this current age, and a shorter life also. And that is by my country’s design. It is the intention.
I have been to convenience stores where I see people working with untreated injuries, and when I leave, I get panhandled in the parking lot by someone in a chain-store uniform who is unable to afford the gas to get home on the last day before payday—someone with two jobs, three jobs. Until recently, I struggled to get by, and yet I am in the top twenty percent of earners in my country. I am currently saving up for dental implants—money I could as easily use for a down payment on a house. But I’m not entirely sure I’ll see the end of a mortgage or that any of us will.
*
Only in America do we ask our writers to believe they don’t matter as a condition of writing. It is time to end this. Much of my time as a student was spent doubting the importance of my work, doubting the power it had to reach anyone or to do anything of significance. I was already tired of hearing about how the pen was mightier than the sword by the time I was studying writing. Swords, it seemed to me, won all the time. By the time I found that Auden quote—“poetry makes nothing happen”—I was more than ready to believe what I thought he was saying. But books were still to me as they had been when I found them: the only magic.
To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth but into it. My job is to make something happen in a space barely larger than the span of your hand, behind your eyes, distilled out of all that I have carried, from friends, teachers, people met on planes, people I have seen only in my mind, all my mother and father ever did, every favorite book, until it meets and distills from you, the reader, something out of the everything it finds in you. All of this meets along the edge of a sentence like this one, as if the sentence is a fence, with you on one side and me on the other.
If you don’t know what I mean, what I mean is this: When I speak of walking through a snowstorm, you remember a night from your childhood full of snow or from last winter, say, driving home at night, surprised by a storm. When I speak of my dead friends and poetry, you may remember your own dead friends, or if none of your friends are dead, you may imagine how it might feel to have them die. You may think of your poems or poems you’ve seen or heard. You may remember you don’t like poetry.
Something new is made from my memories and yours as you read this. It is not my memory, not yours, and it is born and walks the bridges and roads of your mind, as long as it can.
All my life I’ve been told this isn’t important, that it doesn’t matter, that it could never matter. And yet I think it does.
*
I began this essay as an email I wrote to my students during that first weekend of the Iraq War. I had felt a sudden, intense protectiveness of them. I didn’t want my students to go into the draft, rumored then to be a possibility. I wrote to them that weekend and told them that art endures past governments, countries, and emperors, and their would-be replacements. That art—even, or perhaps especially, art that is dedicated somehow to tenderness—is not weak. It is strength. I asked them to disregard the cultural war against the arts that has lasted most of their lives, the movement to discredit the arts and culture in American public life as being decorative interruptions of more serious affairs, unworthy of funding or even of teachers. I told them that I can’t recall the emperors of China as well as I can Mencius, who counseled them, and whose stories of them, shared in his poetry of these rulers and their problems, describe them for me almost entirely. And the paradox of how a novel, should it survive, protects what a missile can’t.
I have new lessons in not stopping, after the election. If you are reading this, and you’re a writer, and you, like me, are gripped with despair, when you think you might stop: Speak to your dead. Write for your dead. Tell them a story. What are you doing with this life? Let them hold you accountable. Let them make you bolder or more modest or louder or more loving, whatever it is, but ask them in, listen, and then write. And when war comes—and make no mistake, it is already here—be sure you write for the living too. The ones you love and the ones who are coming for your life. What will you give them when they get there?"
— Alexander Chee is the author of, most recently, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. He teaches at Dartmouth College.
I think this post is a pretty good illustration of a "strawman" argument, where the writer sets up a Boogyman opponent to argue against, as well as a blanket assertion, "Only in America do we ask writers to believe they don't matter as a condition of writing," that he uses to justify his own insecurities about writing. Considering the nation was founded by largely self-taught people who based their ideas about founding a new nation based on their extensive reading of history and philosophy, and up until (roughtly) the Sixties we had many "Great Book" series and serious television programs devoted to authors talking about their fiction and non-fiction works, this assertion simply doesn't hold water. Even today, although those programs have largely passed, "Progressives" in Gov and Big Tech certainly take writing seriously considering they have warred against "disinformation" ie Free Speech from the Plebs by censorship and weaponizing the government justice agencies to try and chill opposing BadThink. I'm not "gripped with despair" at the coming election(s), I'm elated that the brain-dead "leaders" who have weakened this nation and the slimey lackies who have profited off it are about to have their asses handed to them (assumiing they don't commit enough fraud to tip the scales) and something resembling sanity (or at least the start of it) restored.
Wow, plenty to think about here, Michael. It's good to have an excerpt of a piece stir things up. And yes, here's to the election helping us find our way to a better tomorrow!
I don't know who posted about Alexander Chee's piece in the Paris Review "On Becoming an American Writer" but it speaks to many of the SC themes and I wanted to post this fantastic excerpt from it:
"There’s another Alexander Chee in my mind, the one who I would be if I’d only had access to regular dental care throughout my career, down to the number of teeth in my mouth. I started inventing him on a visit to Canada in 2005 when I became unnerved by how healthy everyone looked there compared to the United States, and my sense of him grows every time I leave the country. I know I’ll have a shorter career for being American in this current age, and a shorter life also. And that is by my country’s design. It is the intention.
I have been to convenience stores where I see people working with untreated injuries, and when I leave, I get panhandled in the parking lot by someone in a chain-store uniform who is unable to afford the gas to get home on the last day before payday—someone with two jobs, three jobs. Until recently, I struggled to get by, and yet I am in the top twenty percent of earners in my country. I am currently saving up for dental implants—money I could as easily use for a down payment on a house. But I’m not entirely sure I’ll see the end of a mortgage or that any of us will.
*
Only in America do we ask our writers to believe they don’t matter as a condition of writing. It is time to end this. Much of my time as a student was spent doubting the importance of my work, doubting the power it had to reach anyone or to do anything of significance. I was already tired of hearing about how the pen was mightier than the sword by the time I was studying writing. Swords, it seemed to me, won all the time. By the time I found that Auden quote—“poetry makes nothing happen”—I was more than ready to believe what I thought he was saying. But books were still to me as they had been when I found them: the only magic.
To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth but into it. My job is to make something happen in a space barely larger than the span of your hand, behind your eyes, distilled out of all that I have carried, from friends, teachers, people met on planes, people I have seen only in my mind, all my mother and father ever did, every favorite book, until it meets and distills from you, the reader, something out of the everything it finds in you. All of this meets along the edge of a sentence like this one, as if the sentence is a fence, with you on one side and me on the other.
If you don’t know what I mean, what I mean is this: When I speak of walking through a snowstorm, you remember a night from your childhood full of snow or from last winter, say, driving home at night, surprised by a storm. When I speak of my dead friends and poetry, you may remember your own dead friends, or if none of your friends are dead, you may imagine how it might feel to have them die. You may think of your poems or poems you’ve seen or heard. You may remember you don’t like poetry.
Something new is made from my memories and yours as you read this. It is not my memory, not yours, and it is born and walks the bridges and roads of your mind, as long as it can.
All my life I’ve been told this isn’t important, that it doesn’t matter, that it could never matter. And yet I think it does.
*
I began this essay as an email I wrote to my students during that first weekend of the Iraq War. I had felt a sudden, intense protectiveness of them. I didn’t want my students to go into the draft, rumored then to be a possibility. I wrote to them that weekend and told them that art endures past governments, countries, and emperors, and their would-be replacements. That art—even, or perhaps especially, art that is dedicated somehow to tenderness—is not weak. It is strength. I asked them to disregard the cultural war against the arts that has lasted most of their lives, the movement to discredit the arts and culture in American public life as being decorative interruptions of more serious affairs, unworthy of funding or even of teachers. I told them that I can’t recall the emperors of China as well as I can Mencius, who counseled them, and whose stories of them, shared in his poetry of these rulers and their problems, describe them for me almost entirely. And the paradox of how a novel, should it survive, protects what a missile can’t.
I have new lessons in not stopping, after the election. If you are reading this, and you’re a writer, and you, like me, are gripped with despair, when you think you might stop: Speak to your dead. Write for your dead. Tell them a story. What are you doing with this life? Let them hold you accountable. Let them make you bolder or more modest or louder or more loving, whatever it is, but ask them in, listen, and then write. And when war comes—and make no mistake, it is already here—be sure you write for the living too. The ones you love and the ones who are coming for your life. What will you give them when they get there?"
— Alexander Chee is the author of, most recently, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. He teaches at Dartmouth College.
Find at https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/04/19/on-becoming-an-american-writer/
I think this post is a pretty good illustration of a "strawman" argument, where the writer sets up a Boogyman opponent to argue against, as well as a blanket assertion, "Only in America do we ask writers to believe they don't matter as a condition of writing," that he uses to justify his own insecurities about writing. Considering the nation was founded by largely self-taught people who based their ideas about founding a new nation based on their extensive reading of history and philosophy, and up until (roughtly) the Sixties we had many "Great Book" series and serious television programs devoted to authors talking about their fiction and non-fiction works, this assertion simply doesn't hold water. Even today, although those programs have largely passed, "Progressives" in Gov and Big Tech certainly take writing seriously considering they have warred against "disinformation" ie Free Speech from the Plebs by censorship and weaponizing the government justice agencies to try and chill opposing BadThink. I'm not "gripped with despair" at the coming election(s), I'm elated that the brain-dead "leaders" who have weakened this nation and the slimey lackies who have profited off it are about to have their asses handed to them (assumiing they don't commit enough fraud to tip the scales) and something resembling sanity (or at least the start of it) restored.
Wow, plenty to think about here, Michael. It's good to have an excerpt of a piece stir things up. And yes, here's to the election helping us find our way to a better tomorrow!
Always happy to say "It's Brussel Sprouts and I say To Hell with It!" :)