After careful review and some serious spell checks your boy has been asked to present at the NAES conference in D.C this April, good for me hugh, however in the peer review someone said “the author has a distinctly male and subtly hostile voice”. Sounded like a comment from this here blogs comments. But I see this in most of us, from the Bauhaus Barista to our good friends at The Stranger and all in between, I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers: this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader. Here is where I have to be careful as a writer, and as an artist, because it can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire me instead of an exercise in creative art.
I guess this is hard because everyone, even myself, wants to feel a part of something, one impression the hill leaves me with is the overwhelming fear of loneliness, The interesting thing about this is the question it stirs: why we’re so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness. Perhaps that’s why we as artists strike out, against the loneliness in order to be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I’m scared about how sappy this’ll look on screen. But not for nothing that is how I feel. Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Bowman and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion — these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated. The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life is the source from which self-respect springs. To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference… Fuck You… I need to clean my apartment…really!
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