Watching Sentimental Value, Talking to Fathers
For a while, I've been maintaining a separation of concerns: self-published fiction goes on my Patreon, other stuff goes in the newsletter. But practically, not much goes in the newsletter during periods of my life when I don't have much time or energy. Fiction is what I love, so fiction wins when I have to prioritize. And I do, very often, have to prioritize. Sometimes I fantasize about how it would be if I were liberated from my day job, but even in those fantasies, I'm not making my living writing fiction. Instead, I've found a big sack of money with dollar signs on the side, or I've excavated a human-sized diamond with a cock-sized hole in it that a billionaire wants to buy so he can marry it.
In reality, my search for the diamond-wife has been fruitless, so I need to figure out what to do with this newsletter. Most likely, I either need to take it less seriously or more seriously. The only provably wrong amount of seriousness is the amount I have been using previously, unless it turns out the problem wasn't on that axis but on the thousands of others that hide beneath the toothy smile of causation.
Before launching into the either undercooked or overcooked–again, my aim is wavering around the bullseye– meat of this newsletter, I want to call your attention to a couple short stories of mine that have recently been published or otherwise made available.
A Night as Violet - available behind the paywall at Typebar Magazine. A woman named Violet shows up at the trans night at a local bar, plagued by an uncomfortable sense of unbelonging and a strangely incisive gaze.
As Above, So Below - available for free on my Patreon, after previously running in an earlier issue of Typebar Magazine. A father and son, named Senior and Junior, each find themselves trapped by the other in a basement prison, but also discover that they are imprisoning another copy of the other in another, lower basement prison. A story of family grudges, of causing pain, and of struggling to get free.
Faster on My Own - I originally released this novel as a serial on a now-deleted Substack. The concept of it is that Steven Williams, a radical leftist with very vague politics, arrives at a basic form of accelerationism from first principles and decides that, since the revolution won't come, he needs to try to make things worse until they do. So he reunites with his rich family, becomes a conservative ideologue, and then things truly spin out of control. As they do, the structure of the novel itself also begins to morph and degrade. Right now, I'm publishing it chapter by chapter for paid members of my Patreon, and that's where it'll probably stay. Trying again to get it published as a physical novel isn't a priority, compared to the other works I'm trying to get out there, but I'm proud of it and encourage you to read it! Chapter 1 is free here.
A few nights ago, my partner and I had plans fall through and found ourselves with hours to kill. Often, when this happens, we look toward movie showtimes. I love seeing movies in theaters. The minor social element, the salt of the popcorn stinging my chapped lips, the experience of being engulfed by the enormous screen and the sound. Even the best home theater can't compare because at home, you're in control. You can pause, and even if you don't, the possibility of letting your attention wander remains. Going to the theater is surrendering yourself and attention fully to the movie.
We ended up seeing Sentimental Value, a new Norweigan family drama–it's described in some places as a comedy, but what funny moments exist are there to cut tension and are below the emotional narrative in the hierarchy of the film. Maybe this is the what the word "dramady" is for, but I don't actually think that genre exists. There are just dramas with jokes in them, just like the way that even the bleakest periods of life sometimes contain moments of stunning comedy.
Nora, a theatrical actress whose mental health is absolutely dismal and whose reputation is soaring, is invited by her famous, somewhat-estranged father to star in his first feature film in decades. A part written just for her, but also, her presence would make the funding easier to manage. Of course, she refuses. She doesn't trust him and every time they talk, it eventually results in arguments and hurt feelings. There are a few moments in this film that are of interest to me, including the very last scene, so the extremely spoiler-minded of you should consider yourselves warned. As an aside, I'm more sympathetic to those fearful of spoilers than people expect. One of the tools of storytelling is the ordering and pace of the dispensation of information, and spoilers subvert that. But also, most of the pieces of media that have roiled audiences afraid of being spoiled have been terrible. Dumbledore dies; you can't spoil rotten food. Anyway.
Midway through the movie, at a birthday party for Gustav's grandson/Nora's nephew, Gustav says that the artist must be free to create. That confinements like a minivan, like dropping the kids off, like a day job, are all deleterious to the creation of art. In short, that responsibility and artistic success are opposed to each other. When Nora gets upset, and points out that he split up with their mother and left his children, and asks if it was for the sake of art, he states with no apparent contradiction in his mind that having children was the best, most important aspect of his life. This might seem to be Gustav just trying, petulantly, to have it both ways, but there is a way to make this thought consistent: it is the act of creation, of knowing that one's creations are in the world, of loving those creations. Sincere love, love that breaches the surface of the mind on a daily basis in any of its manifestations, whether it's affection, longing, worry, and so on. That is Gustav's love, and he wants it to be accepted for what it is, but it isn't what Nora wanted.
Putting the lie to Gustav's assertion is that his career has declined since he left his children behind. His drinking has become worse. But he's not entirely wrong. So many women writers have found their careers derailed, or at least challenged, by the responsibility and effort of having children. As costs of living rise while wages stay stagnant, fewer artists can get by on the kind of part-time jobs that leave the body and mind free and energized for long periods of the week, periods necessary not just to create, but to develop one's craft in whatever art one chooses. Children of the rich have an advantage not only in connections, but in freedom from exertion, from finding oneself spent in one's free time, and so continue to carve out more and more of a presence in America's decaying arts scenes.
I'm lucky enough to have a well-paid day job, so I'm free from the constant pressure of making ends meet that is the biggest challenge to artistic flourishing. I'm not asking for pity, I don't deserve it. But even so, in order to write consistently, I wake up early and write before work. If I went to sleep later and woke up later, the same amount of time in the day would exist, but I would have already given my best hours to my job. My focus in the evenings is weaker. I struggle to lust after the work of writing a novel the way I can when I'm well-rested. When I consider residencies, writing fellowships, the way writers socialize themselves into the literary world (especially if you haven't done an MFA, the pursuit of which carries its own financial realities), my job places limits on me. This limitation, this daily subjection to mundane and disheartening wage-labor sucks the life out of me, leaving me with less life to put into my art. And life is what art is made of. The state of art in our culture won't get better either until life gets easier and cheaper or until more artists work themselves into early graves trying to make it happen in spite of everything. I'm not in favor of the latter.
Another instructive moment comes at the end of Sentimental Value. The emotional climax is Nora, who is so depressed that she has cancelled performances, has been avoiding her sister, finally reading the script that Gustav wrote with her in mind. Ostensibly, the movie is an exploration of the suicide of Gustav's mother, but in actuality it is an expression of the despair he sees in Nora, the latent suicidality, and an attempt to intervene. This is love, it's worry, but he can't just say it to her, talk to her the way a normal father would. Because his past failures are too significant, because she doesn't trust him, because he can't change his ways enough to become someone worthy of trust. The film is truly about the two of them forging a connection through the process of making this movie, in a way that allows each of them to make themselves understood to the other. And, when the filming of the climactic scene of Gustav's movie finishes, they look directly at each other, they see each other, but there's a palpable awkwardness to this because outside of the movie, they're still disconnected. This was one chance for Gustav to try and save his daughter from the same fate as his mother, and Gustav is probably too old to make another film. There's no indication that they'll suddenly be able to communicate again, so this understanding they share is also a goodbye of sorts. It's lovely, it's tragic. The kind of complex emotion that justifies an entire film spent building the structure necessary to house it.
Sometimes people wonder about my relationship with my father. I've written a number of stories with fucked up relationships with fathers, two of which I linked above. The truth is that my father was wonderful, and that he died, and that he and I didn't understand each other very well. Like many people who later become artists, I was a strange child and my ability to understand other people in general hadn't yet been developed. It has been a life's work to do so, and my father died before I was really any good at. He tried his best to understand me, but I didn't understand myself and had no way to make myself understood to others. Even now, I write to make myself understood, even though what I'm asking people to understand with my work isn't myself. I cut every shred of myself out of my work, to try and leave it clean. All bones.
The act of understanding others is fraught, it is difficult. For two people who have a past that has obliterated trust, it may be impossible to do directly. But understanding is one of the great joys of being alive, so every strategy to understand and be understood must be pursued. Conversation, art, screaming. Leave nothing unused.