“I saw a happy man, whose cherished dream had so obviously come true, who had attained his goal in life, had gotten what he wanted, who was content with his fate and with himself. For some reason there had always been something sad mixed with my thoughts about human happiness, but now, at the sight of a happy man, I was overcome by an oppressive feeling close to despair…Just look at this life; the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, impossible poverty all around us, overcrowding, degeneracy, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lies…Yet in all the houses and streets it’s quiet, peaceful; of the fifty thousand people who live in town there is not one who would cry out or become loudly indignant. We see those who go to the market to buy food, eat during the day, sleep during the night, who talk their nonsense, get married, grow old, complacently drag their dead to the cemetery; but we don’t see or hear those who suffer, and the horrors of life go on somewhere behind the scenes…And this order is necessary; obviously the happy man feels good only because the unhappy bear their burden silently, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. It’s a general hypnosis. At the door of every contended, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall him—illness, poverty, loss—and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn’t hear or see others now. But there is nobody with a little hammer, the happy man lives on, and the petty cares of life stir him only slightly, as wind stirs an aspen—and everything is fine.”
-Anton Chekov, Gooseberries

I realize that’s a rather bleak quote, and I imagine that from reading it one might come away with the impression that I’m in some way depressed. You needn’t worry. I was just rereading that story, and I was suddenly reminded how much I love that passage. It was written in 1898, and with the advent of the internet and 24-hour news channels its message doesn’t seem quite as ubiquitous as it probably once was. But on some level it’s still, even more than 100 years later, tragically relevant. And that, to me, is what makes it great.


I AM A STAR. I’M A STAR, I’M A STAR, I’M A STAR. I AM A BIG, BRIGHT, SHINING STAR

I’m not the smartest guy in the world, and I’m certainly not cursed with an overabundance of self-awareness. I am smart enough to realize, however, that my current career goals are exceedingly lofty and the odds are, to put it mildly, against me. Thus, I have developed a pretty solid backup plan. If at some point within the next five years, give or take a year, I don’t make it as a screenwriter—whatever that means—I will throw in the towel and pursue a career in the porn industry.

I know what you’re thinking, and no, I’m not looking to get into porn because I like sex. First of all, if everybody who liked sex got into porn, then the industry would be grossly oversaturated and, it seems to me at least, that most menial labor jobs would become vacant and society as we know it would fall apart. That just doesn’t seem practical. Secondly, no matter how fun a job is, it can’t remain fun forever; anything you’re forced to do on a daily basis sort of loses its luster after awhile. Similarly, I like ice cream quite a bit. But if I had ice cream after, before, or during every meal, I wouldn’t like ice cream too much anymore. I’m sure you see my point.

No, I want to get into porn for one very simple reason—I want a legitimate reason to self-apply a cool, vaguely clever porn name. So far I’ve got it narrowed down to Gregory Pecker or Hugh Mungus. I haven’t done any investigating whatsoever to determine whether or not these names are already taken, but let’s just assume that they’re not. I think that, regardless of the fact that I have questionable bedroom skills, the name alone would lead to a rather long and prosperous career in the porn industry. Who wouldn’t hire a guy named Gregory Pecker? How could you not watch a movie starring Hugh Mungus? And who knows, in five years maybe I’ll come up with an even better name.

I don’t know, on some level I’m kind of hoping the whole screenwriting thing falls through. I think the porn world needs me.


A NOT SO STRONGLY WORDED LETTER TO THE CITIZENS OF THIS COUNTRY WHICH I’M SURE AT LEAST SIX PEOPLE WILL READ

Dear America,

Please, for the love of god, stop watching shitty television shows. I know you’ve just had a long day at work--maybe the guy who sits in the cubicle next to yours did something exceedingly annoying today or your boss came down on you for something that wasn’t your fault--and you’re simply looking for a way to pass the time, to let your brain rest from the various stresses of your work day, but let’s aim a little higher than Don’t Forget the Lyrics or The Moment of Truth. These shows are horrible, the people who make them are not on your side, and you should have more respect for yourself. Let me explain…

Reality TV is one thing. Who doesn’t enjoy a good reality show once in a while? Whether it’s Top Chef or That’s Amore, your only reason for watching, let’s admit it, is that you have nothing better to do, and as the season wears on week after week you invariably develop a certain affinity for some contestants and a natural dislike or distrust for others. To a certain degree, that’s understandable; you’re not actually friends with these people, you don’t know them, but you’ve spent enough time with them that you feel as though you do. The problem with shows like Don’t Forget the Lyrics and The Moment of Truth is that they’re largely filler, drawn out to give us seemingly candid moments with the contestants, during which time we’re supposed to develop some kind of relationship with them. But these shows are only an hour long. Except for rare, special circumstances, who and the hell can you truly connect with after only knowing them for an hour? This is assuming, of course, that you haven’t recorded the show and fast forward through the commercials, effectively cutting the length of your relationship by roughly 25%.

Do you really give a shit whether or not Dwight knows the lyrics to Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head? Or whether Cindy harbors secret feelings for her next-door neighbor? No, you don’t. I’ll give you an example which I’m sure you can relate to. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you have a friend named Bob, and one day Bob starts telling a long, in-depth story about Fred and Kiki, a married couple that he knows. Now, you’ve never met Fred or Kiki, and before today you’d never even heard of them. After about, oh, 42 seconds the story holds no interest for you whatsoever because it has no real personal connection. If Bob were talking about a mutual friend, on the other hand, the odds would be better that it would.

My point is that you don’t know the people on these shows, and their successes and failures have no impact on your life whatsoever. Now, why do I care what television shows you watch in the privacy of your own home? Strictly speaking, I don’t. But somewhere between The Real World and Survivor, television producers became convinced that the American television viewing audience would watch any show, no matter how disgustingly melodramatic and overly hyped, so long as the people depicted displayed qualities of some easily relatable and immediately identifiable stereotype. And the more you watch these shows, the more the producers become convinced they’re right, prompting them to continue to churn out drivel as opposed to taking the time to develop intelligent, thought-provoking television.

So please, I beg you--particularly those of you with Nielsen boxes—to knock it the fuck off. You’re not only hurting yourselves, but you’re making me hate America a little bit. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Will

THE AWE-INSPIRING BEAUTY OF MICHAEL CHABON, HOPEFULLY TYPO-FREE

Later, after the world had been torn in half, and the Amazing Cavalieri and his blue tuxedo were to be found only in the gilt-edged pages of deluxe photo albums on the coffee tables of the Upper West Side, Joe would sometimes find himself thinking about the pale-blue envelope from Prague. He would try to imagine its contents, wondering what news or sentiments or instructions it might have contained. It was at these times that he began to understand, after all those years of study and performance, of feats and wonders and surprises, the nature of magic. The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.
-The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay


“I doubt very much,” the old man said, “if we shall ever learn what significance, if any, those numbers may hold.”

It was not, heaven knew, a familiar or comfortable admission for the old man to make. The application of creative intelligence to a problem, the finding of a solution at once dogged, elegant, and wild, this had always seemed to him to be the essential business of human beings—the discovery of sense and causality amid the false leads, the noise, the trackless brambles of life. And yet he had always been haunted—had he not?—by the knowledge that there were men, lunatic cryptographers, mad detectives, who squandered their brilliance and sanity decoding and interpreting the messages in cloud formations, in the letters of the Bible recombined, in the spots on butterflies’ wings. One might, perhaps, conclude from the existence of such men that meaning dwelled solely in the mind of the analyst. That it was the insoluble problems—the false leads and the cold cases—that reflected the true nature of things. That all the apparent significance and pattern had no more intrinsic sense than the chatter of an African gray parrot. One might so conclude; really, he thought, one might.
-The Final Solution


I say that Albert Vetch was the first real writer I knew not because he was, for a while, able to sell his work to magazines, but because he was the first one to have the midnight disease; to have the rocking chair and the faithful bottle of bourbon and the staring eye, lucid with insomnia even in the daytime. In any case he was, now that I consider it, the first writer of any sort to cross my path, real or otherwise, in a life that has on the whole been a little too crowded with representatives of that sour and squirrelly race. He set a kind of example that, as a writer, I’ve been living up to ever since. I only hope that I haven’t invented him.
-Wonder Boys

More to come tomorrow...