By Joshua Cody, Waiting Room Waiting Expert
Just so you know, I write these blog posts in hospital waiting rooms, where, fortunately, I find myself spending less and less time. This one, a spoof of blogs of lists of commandments for writing blogs, was written over the course of three hours during which I was interrupted every two to four minutes, which accounts for its utter stupidity.
Record scratch.
Until now.
What happened then – speaking of events in an order, response, and writing – was Ryan Boudinot's controversial essay Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One, located here. Suddenly everybody was writing about writing. I had no idea.
There's another thing that happened, too; it also has to do with writing; as an event in an order, it's definitely serious, and it makes my satire less stupid and, in fact, made me realize that writing is in fact serious and wonder at everybody writing about it; but let's talk about that in a sec. First, advice tip recommendation Arabic numeral one.
1. Write Daily Letters
It could be a felt need to respond to that good old, “new era” feel of a dusky dawn of a novel New Year, now three months old. It could be the desire to capture experience. Or it could be merely the simple cusp of a cup of a wholly impersonal but holesale commitment to the pure abstractions derived from a real-life “becoming-into-itself,” as seen by the Other, of being a published author in the timespace! Whichever the case, peeps are writing a lot.
As a lawyer, which I'm not, it'd be funny if there were only three cases: the YA, the laconic, and the Hegelian. No wonder lawyers only laugh bitterly. When they do.
I wrote already that peeps had been writing a lot pre-Boudinot: to the extent, in fact, that I was moved, waiting in a waiting room, to ape the untold blogs of unprofessional enthusiast's practical habits, of tips from “pros,” by which we don't mean “sex workers,” as certain literary critics were kind enough to call dear friends of mine who figured in my first book, a sort of memoir.
These advice columns aim to help the reader go up from staring down a Miketysonian, Taylorswiftian blank space gaze page to – literally, virtually, figuratively – pile up the manuscript pages, papyrus scrolls, or graphic interfaces on monitors or napkins into something that Latina culture, which we should totally respect, calls litteratura. It's easy to see what they're aiming to do. What's difficult is to figure out why they're aiming to do this.
Almost every list includes something about writing daily letters, assuming the literary impulse is essentially a epistolary one. The blogs will go on to say something like
After all this time we learn Yoda was right. Don’t “try to find the time to write letters.” Make an appointment with yourself — call your secretary, if necessary, and if you don't have a secretary, consider getting an intern, or just be your own intern to the self of you that needs to schedule the appointment with the other self of you — to write letters to yourself. Write letters you might send to a friend, a relative, a despot. Do it at a specific time and, above all, treat it as sacrosanct.
I would have warned the reader to first, “before even that,” make sure you know what sacrosanct means. How some writers claim they don’t know what it means, but most people who make their living writing find the time to look up the word in a dictionary to find out what that word means. How the prolific humorist Erma Bombeck, whose very name is an anagram with meek carbomb, might, or might not, have known what it meant. How either way, "five to six days a week” was a fairly hefty schedule of television and promotional public appearances on television intended to promote her humor, which was, and that was, prolific.
How television mogul and mystery book author Stephen Cannell suffered from dyslexia, which made sacrosanct sacrosacnt or sarcosanct; yet he always felt guilty, so he must have been doing it right. (How real writers feel guilty; how that's really all you have to know; how I could have just written that: if you feel guilty, and you write, you're fine; but how that's not the most valuable sentence in this article, only the most practical, how the most valuable sentence arrives later, towards the grand finale.)
Then I'd have written – well, I did write – that “meanwhile I'm so tired I literally can't keep my eyes open.”
However, in one of the boxes Yasira and I recovered today under unusual and frightening circumstances is a letter from my dad to my grandmother. It's dated Sunday, October 4, 1953, so the Korean War had been over for about three months. It's written from Paris.
Dear Mom,
Sunday afternoons are made for writing home; I hope you are doing the same – writing to Ruth and me. This is some French stationary I bought in a little shop in Orléans, quite accidentally, as I had purchased a book earlier and returned to exchange it for something more readable, but they had nothing else in English, so I settled for stationary and notebooks. The khaki shirt with brass (can't be used here) came the other day, finally. That second tie is definitely lost, I suppose.
I'm glad to hear your students are so nice. Certainly philosophers should give you no trouble, unless this one is the absent-minded type that forgets where the bathroom is.
Ruth continues to write. She is very excited about your Christmas plans, and figures to show her old mom a dazzling time in New York. Be careful now! I mean, Ruthie probably doesn't realize who's got the most energy in the family, and may be worn out before your curiosity is satisfied. She says, though, that you won't take the foot tour special that left our feet aching by the time we got to the Battery, and glad to sit down and watch the ships go out. She's told me about this Jewish center close to her apartment that offers courses in poetry, crafts, art, etc., which she will subscribe to. Now that's excellent, I think. She must look around in such ways to reduce her loneliness – anything is preferable to sitting home nights and moping, and of course, there's no telling what a person can learn being involved with educational and cultural programs.
I didn't know my grandmother was teaching philosophers; I didn't know my aunt Ruth was lonely in New York; I didn't know a second tie was lost, and after two weeks, and actually fourteen years, of mainly loss I'm glad it was, and the notion of a spoof of blogs that recommend daily or even Sunday letter-writing is less amusing, although not legally bitter.
[con't]
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