The Question of Taste -- A Beginning

During my last year of workshops for my MFA I had a pair of Siamese twin epiphanies – one, that I no longer particularly cared whether or not people in my workshop liked my writing; and two, that some of the people in my workshop were working on projects that I had nothing worthwhile to say about.

It took me a while to accept that, for me, this was an achievement, the very state of elevated consciousness that the my whole course of study had for three years been urging me toward. I was deeply focused on the craft of writing, and the momentary opinions of others had become at best a kind of mirror allowing me to see my stories from new, slightly awkward angles. And I felt strongly, morally, that it was unacceptable for me to blabber about someone else's work if I felt I didn't really understand what the writer was doing.

Not commenting on someone else's writing was hard to come to terms with, because it was a violation of a social code. Not commenting on someone's work had one self-evident meaning – that you did not consider it worthy of your time. Our poet friends often confided in us fiction writers their resentments about such-and-such a person who never commented on anyone else's work and for the most part, we fiction writers were able to feel properly judgmental about such asshattery because we did, as a rule, spend a lot of time close reading and commenting on our peer's work.

But that final semester, I was in a class with writers whom I'd known for nearly three years, long enough to have formed judgments and been forced to discard them at least one time and maybe more. One of my workshop peers was writing long, richly detailed stories that bewildered me. I didn't know whether he intended it to evoke the feel and language of a real place he knew or whether it was a florid, folksy surrealism. I wasn't sure if there was a plot structure I ought to have been following or if I was expecting something that was not there. And, most important, I wanted to figure out these things the same way any reader figures out what an unfamiliar new writer is doing: by reading it, not by commenting on it to the author. I wanted him to do what he wanted to do. And I wanted to find my own understanding of it.

The post-World War II critical approach which came to be called the "New Criticism" is not something that many critics or academic writers have defended for many decades now. It is generally seen as conservative and homogenizing, among other things -- but nevertheless its approach is still in many ways the definitive critical approach of our time. A critic following this established model will diagnose a work in supposedly objective formal terms, and come up with an explanation of how these formal qualities equate to a successful or unsuccessful work. In this view, a story is a machine, and its parts must be operational to produce a certain movement. When the critic finds a story successful, there is almost nothing subjective to say about that – it is successful because it works. Now, what else can you talk about in workshop besides whether or not a piece "works"? Whether its details, its prose, its story structure, "function" together?

There is almost nothing in this approach that allows you, as critic, to talk about whether you like a certain piece of fiction -- or on what basis an intelligent human being "likes" something. It tends to force us to insist that anything we don't like or understand is poorly crafted. Or, conversely, we can give up and say that liking or not liking something is beyond criticism.

Liking or not liking something which may be perfectly well crafted for its author's purpose and in other intelligent readers' eyes – that to me is a question of what we call "taste." No one doubts that critics form, promote, and police "tastes" in contemporary literature but they do not talk about taste as they do this. My impression is that right now "taste" is a vastly undertheorized area; and that other approaches of criticism are weakened and tainted by being forced to do the duty of conveying ideas about taste. So this is my beginnings of thinking about taste. Cheers!

clothes i can't throw out #3

My friend Jodie was the queen of thrift store shopping in the early 90s. At a certain point she owned literally about twelve rack feet of random vintage clothing, in variable condition, all packed in tight. Sometimes on a Saturday night we would drink and dress up. Eventually we might even go out, but much much less often than you might imagine.

This shirt from the early 70s is polyester. It is patterned in a sort of random Indian calico fashion. It is brown. It is fairly see-through. I wanted it, at a time when my aspiration was to dress somewhat like Madonna and somewhat like Axl Rose, all at the same time. At some point Jodie decided that she never wore it and never would wear it and that I could have it. I was happy as a clam. Was it flattering at the time? Impossible to say. Is it flattering now? Certainly not, although I was pleased to note, this past weekend, that I can still get the motherfucker buttoned all the way up.

clothes I can't throw out #2

I think there's a picture in one of Molly Griest's facebook picture albums showing me wearing this cummerbund and tie set in 1986 or thereabouts.

They were old and they were my dad's. I don't know exactly how old they are -- whether they were from my dad's high school or college formal stuff in the 50s or whether they were for Lions Club formals in the 70s. My dad died in 1985 and I'm the only boy so I got to sort out his clothes and non-golden accessories. I had a lot of things of his. I miss a pair of polyester glen plaid pants tremendously. They were already ten or so years old and the knees fell apart almost instantly. I got another year or so out of them as cutoffs.

My dad used to let me pick the lining of his suits when he had some made, when I was seven or eight. We were not having an especially good teenage-year father-son relationship. I know that there are often worse, but still. I would have liked to have worked past that but you know what, in life you often are stuck with things being other than what you would have liked.

I have another formal set like this one, only maroon satin, and one of my dad's business ties, in dark wool, with moth bites now. I will probably never wear them again, although I do feel that the look of being a boy in his dad's clothes is one that has never entirely left me. Part of that is because I gain and lose weight more frequently than I buy a lot of new clothes.

clothes I can't throw out #1

I wore these leather gloves from the winter of 1991 to sometime in the mid-90s. They seemed inappropriate for my corporate job and were beginning to seem worn. They left blue-gray smudges on very light clothing, such as a broadcloth buttondown shirt.

They came into my possession in this way: In 1991, after graduating college, I moved into a brownstone on Willoughby Avenue in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, NYC, and shared an apartment with my friend Danny, who had lived there for a year already. It was a strange building -- a former boardinghouse where the division between apartments was somewhat permeable. We had a front door on the ground floor that led into our kitchen, but between our bedrooms on the second floor a hallway linked two stairs for the upstairs floors. And there was a set of back steps that led into our apartment from the second floor that had no door at all. Consequently Danny had developed an informal relationship with one of our upstairs neighbors. This was before Seinfeld so the idea of a neighbor who just popped into your apartment randomly was not quite a familiar thing. Our upstairs neighbor was a painter in his mid to late forties named Carlos Hernandez. He painted pictures of devils, among other things. There was one devil with a blond flip and heart-shaped glasses called Lolitadevil. Carlos was a leatherman. Sometimes he wore black leather suspenders. Sometimes he wore a red silk kimono. He berated me for keeping unsweet tea in the refrigerator. He said, "I am spick, I need a lot of sugar in this, honey." He was born in Cuba, raised in an Catholic orphanage in Nashville and had the vocabulary of a San Francisco leather queen and performance artist. Altogether it was a memorable accent.

Anyhow, the gloves. He forgot them several times and we stopped making a point of reminding him that he'd left them. I was cold one day and they seemed like good gloves. I've never been "into" leather but I did have a leather biker jacket (that belonged to my friend Shelby when she was a student at an all-girls' boarding school in Rome, Georgia) and the gloves seemed to go along with that. I realized living in Brooklyn, taking the endlessly slow and unreliable G train, that I needed a new style. I was also poor. I was thinking of how I should dress, what I should look like, who I could be, when those gloves came along. And they fit. I felt like a scary biker and Cher all at the same time. I got my first tattoo not too much later, choosing a guy who had advertised in a gay weekly magazine called NYQ, which later changed its name when the New York Quarterly, a noted poetry review, hinted at legal action.

Carlos died in 1992 or 1993, after I had stopped living in Brooklyn and he had moved to a new apartment. He was sick but it wasn't supposed to be HIV, but then it was, and then he had died. He had been a junkie when he was younger and had told us lots of stories about friends dying and people ODing. Years later I would find practical application for some of his stories about things to do to keep your friends from dying so I am always grateful to him.

Six Little Things #16 -- Fall 2009 now online

The new issue of Six Little Things is now online at Six Bricks Press -- http://www.sixbrickspress.com/ -- Issue #16 Fall 2009, is themed "The Unannounced Guest" and features new, short work by Arlene Ang, Cheryl Chambers, Michael Fontana, Bob Heman, Terrie Leigh Relf, and Maryanne Stahl, with paintings by Alex Warble.

The next issue will be #17 Winter 2010, themed "Half in Jest" -- Deadline November 30, 2009. Please direct submissions or inquiries to Bard Cole at editor@sixbrickspress.com.

If you are in Memphis, TN, feel free to drop by Burke's Books tomorrow evening, Thursday, Sept. 17, to hear Six Little Things editor C. Bard Cole read from his new book, This is Where My Life Went Wrong (BLATT Books, 2009). The event starts at 5:30 with the reading portion of the entertainment scheduled to begin at 6:00 p.m. Please feel free to say hi!

BC

from Chapter 52 of THIS IS WHERE MY LIFE WENT WRONG

A small town catastrophe: a minyan rampaged down the streets of Airborne, Georgia, on March 11, 1939, angry about the elevated prices charged for Kosher salt at the Merriwether Grocery. The town milkman lost his horse, Buster, who took flight that morning and had an aneurysm two days later, he reported.

Small town tragedy: One Mister Clarence Dawkins of Chelsbrough TN died as the result of a traffic light explosion predicated by a light bulb accidentally filled with freon during a routine repair. A fragment of yellow lens glass approximately three inches in length penetrated his right eyeball and thence his brain as he escorted his elderly mother home from the epidemiologist's.

Small town mishaps: According to deputy sheriff Mona Honsbach, the worst fire in the history of the Cardiff Falls, TN, police department happened on June 10, 1992, when one single match used to relight the pilot light of a gas stove caught the box of grocery store plastic bags she kept under the squad room pantry sink on fire. The melting plastic quickly spread the flames to the wallpaper, which adhered with some kind of petroleum-based cement. For several minutes, Honsback says, all four walls glowed with a blue light. Besides needing a clean-up, the police station was otherwise undamaged.

Small town accidents: On September 12, 1978, the homecoming hayride tractor of Dutton Wainwright High School of Meridien Iowa was run off the road by Mr. Jake Issit, director of Bob Weins Funeral Home, who wanted to deliver a corpse to the home so that he could have it refrigerated with enough time for him to catch the game. Melanie Gamble, 15, broke her left clavicle in the accident. Issit paid her hospital bills and her folks consider the case resolved satisfactorily.

Small town Criminal Misadventures: County Alderman Meryl Normins picked up a teenage prostitute in his hometown of Diamond Falls, KY, and took her to the Good-Nite Motel where he read to her from the Bible and lectured her about her sinful ways. At some point, the young lady, Miss Doniqua Watson of Fairleigh KY, reported, he physically touched her by holding her forearms & pushing her into an armchair. This was the evidence cited in his later arrest for kidnapping and endangerment of a minor. He received a $500 fine & 40 hours community service from Judge James Dickerson, who commended him for his action. Mother of Doniqua Watson, Mrs. Cheryl Lee, personally thanked Normins by baking him brownies with peanut butter chips.

Watson was reported dead of a heroin overdose three months later.

Six Little Things #15: Summer 2009 now online

The new issue of Six Little Things is now online at Six Bricks Press -- http://www.sixbrickspress.com/ -- Issue #15 Summer 2009, is themed "Captain McHurkeydurkey's Utterly Masturbatory Prose Parade" and features new, short work by Rev. Wayne Austin Goodchild, Amir Kenan, C.J. Krug, Dan Piepenbring, Terrie Leigh Relf, and Ben White, with paintings by Erik Parker.

The next issue will be #16 Fall 2009, themed "The Unannounced Guest" -- Deadline August 30, 2009. Please direct submissions or inquiries to Bard Cole at editor@sixbrickspress.com.