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MFA (Syn)thesis

The arguments about MFA programs are often repeated, yet seldom get anywhere.  See the threads now in mobylives.com.

My thoughts, one month clear of my thesis defense:

1. This should be obvious, but let’s note it: you can write beautifully without getting an MFA. Example: my friend Joel Turnipseed.  Or Minneapolitan Emily Carter. And, oh yes, Shakespeare. Tolstoy. Woolf.
   
2. There is not an MFA style. Either that or Flannery O’Connor, Denis Johnson, Jane Smiley, T. C. Boyle, Lorrie Moore, Rick Moody, and David Foster Wallace share a style. 
3. What is called the MFA style describes a small number of books written by people in their twenties who have gone quickly from MFA programs to publishing without much of a break. Their prose tends to be obedient; their faces, photogenic.  They have yet to grow adjectives. They sometimes are less writers than articulate demographics. 
4. Writers have always formed communities, showed each other their work, and—either cynically or sympathetically—advanced each other’s careers. See Pound and Eliot, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Robert Bly and Donald Hall, Bloomsbury. 
5. MFA programs will not break your style but they will bend it. MFA courses are taught by serious writers, and to be a serious writer is to evolve a style and to evolve a style is to make aggregated decisions about how to write. Those decisions will influence how you teach others to write. It is one’s job as a student to acknowledge the amazing strengths and human weaknesses of your teachers, learn from them, and then to move on.
6. The connections you make in a decent MFA program may help some; if you are favored by the MFA Gods—I wasn’t—they help a great deal. But the reason people are favored is because they are talented. Those are the plusses. The minus: the term MFA now has a stigma in the publishing world. 
7. Workshops suck, and in doing so they provide a valuable life lesson. Life is a gauntlet of half-assed criticism. One of the essential skills is learning how to ignore bad criticism and even find the good criticism in the bad.
8. All of  my teachers acknowledged the weaknesses of workshops and tried to reform the classic focus-group bullying. Minnesota also emphasized reading-as-writers and writing-as-readers courses. Steven Polansky’s class—in which people imitated classic prose styles—was the one class I really regret missing, although David Treuer's long fiction class also sounded great. MFA programs tend to focus on short fiction and Treuer is a thoughtful man.
   
9. I spent a lot of money, I became an anthology of the effects of stress, and my back hurt like hell.
10. I was a better writer when I left than when I started. And I think I was a better writer than I would have been if I had spent three years writing on my own. 

Thanks--I think--to Stix for pointing me to the mobylives.com "brouhaha."

Stop Reading This Post?

Tuesday night a friend said that now, if she doesn’t like a book by the end of the first chapter, she puts it down and starts something else. And she appears to do this without guilt. 

Me, I can go weeks without reading something new because a book whose calls I haven’t returned sits on the nightstand.

But isn’t my friend’s way best?  Don’t we all know when a book has traction—when the pages turn themselves, when the author is my new best friend, when I skip TV-flipping and internet-loitering to get back to it?

There are exceptions: books I assign myself in a spirit of self-improvement. And, of course, my annual failure to read Freud.   

State Secrets

From a newsletter I get from the Current (89.3), the only radio station I've loved since the demise of The Rev in the mid 90s. This could be fun:

"On July 4 from 2 p.m. to 9 p.m., 89.3 The Current will run through each state in alphabetical order, with at least one song about each state. We'll also take a few detours into the influential music scenes of states around the nation. We need good suggestions for the following states: Wisconsin, Utah, Arkansas and Maine."

I have already submitted Salt Lake City by the Beach Boys for Utah.

To submit a song idea, click on the Current link under "Local Color" and then click on Fifty Songs for Fifty States.

P.S. My favorite Utah quote:

"I was run out of Utah. The Unitarians burned a question mark on my lawn."

Utah Phillips

Good News Radio

We’ve been digging News Radio on DVD, and it struck me that the secret to the show isn’t the lines.  It’s what the lines allow the actors to do.  It’s the way the scripts outline characters and then let the actors cross-hatch and animate them.  Thus, Phil Hartman’s buttery narcissism; thus, Dave Foley’s buys-his-suits-in-the-boy’s department leadership; thus, Maura Tierney’s wonky ambition (she has a criminal record but it’s all “SAT-related.”) The show gets the insecurity of bosses and the cockiness of the powerless. And the Jimmy James character is fantastic. I had a client who said that he thought of being a millionaire as a profession, like being a barber or accountant.  That’s Jimmy, only in his case the rest of his personality has been left in a room with a big rubber ball and a trampoline. 

Besterberg: Pun for Your Life.

Paul Westerberg’s songs have a little extra resonance now. (See post below.)

I’ve been listening to Besterberg, his greatest hits.

Two thoughts:  The songs hold up. Those simple hooks, those seemingly ragged performances: Pop songs that have inhaled some country blues. They stay with you; they sound better ten years later. 

The words matter.  They don’t always for me, but they do here. In fact, there are phrases here I envy. He uses word play the way he uses ragged performances: to crack something open, to surprise a meaning or a moment. 

“I’ve got a dyslexic heart.”

“I took a leap of fear.” 

The words survive outside the songs, but they live in them. The songs sear the words into the brain.

Thanks to Kootch for telling me this was out.  Great liner notes. 

Karl Mueller, 1964-2005

I’ve been feeling sad this weekend. “Elegiac” is more accurate, but feels too fancy.

Mary, who cuts my hair, had attended a memorial service for Soul Asylum bassist Karl Mueller. She had known him since he was a 17-year old bag boy at Lund’s. She had been called to give him one last trim, at home, but he died—at 41, of throat cancer—before she could.

The sadness I felt was the grief we absorb from friends who have lost someone. She had mentioned that, because he was cremated, his bass was placed where his coffin would have been. Someone had put a stick of Doublemint gum in it. Dave Pirner had sung “Morning Has Broken.”   

But I was also sad that I had missed the musical scene that Karl Mueller had helped create. I spent the 80s in a spiritual cubicle—in law school or in bars or both. I would drop off book or theater reviews at the Minnesota Daily offices, hear bits of conversation about this fantastic local music, but then head back to my self-constricted life. I missed Soul Asylum nee Loud Fast Rules and haven't explored the early CDs my friends love; except for a few hellos to Chris Mars at parties, I missed the Replacements; I have still yet to really listen to Husker Du.

Sports Central: Smarter Than Your Average Bar

I missed the Twin Cities music scene because I hung out at joints like Sports Central, a bar in the crust of Minneapolis left over from Southeast and Northeast.  When I drove past Sports Central on the way home from my haircut, it appeared closed. The strip mall that the bar had ornamented since about 1960 was being torn down; condos and more upscale retail were being erected in its place.

For the most part, gentrification has treated that neighborhood kindly. The most vital landmarks—Nye’s Polonaise, Kramarczuk’s, the Terminal Bar—have been preserved and, presumably, reinvigorated by the new Bruegger’s, the new Panera Bread, the new Bibelot shop, the new gay bookstore. 

As I said to E when we had dinner at Bobino’s once,  “It isn’t like, until the yuppies arrived, women in peasant dresses had been leaning out the window yelling colorful things to guys in low-riders. This is Minneapolis, for chrissakes.”

In fact, I had called the strip mall where Sports Central stood “EntropyDale.” The oil stains in the parking lot reminded me of liver spots. The Chinese restaurant did so little business we all assumed it was a front for a bookmaking operation. (It wasn’t.) The Best Steak House served the parts of the cow that the cow didn’t want back. But the neighborhood was friendly in a grimy bachelor way.      

The present rebuilding is returning the vigor that this place—the tripod formed by Central, Hennepin and the river—had enjoyed in the 50s, when everyone from east Minneapolis shopped here on weekends, before the suburban malls drained the city of commerce.

How did I know that the neighborhood was lively in the 50s? Because the regulars at Sports Central told me so.  They had been coming here since the early 60s, when the bar was opened by former Gopher star Bob McNamara.

Sports Central gave its regulars a touchstone in the neighborhoods where they grew up. They remembered when Hubert Humphrey was mayor, when Runyon’s was the Gayety Annex (look at the tile in the entryway sometime), when there were Swedish and Jewish mobsters, when the Minneapolis Millers were the town’s baseball team. If the bartender couldn’t get to the phone, they answered it, “Sports Central, maitre’d” or “Sports Central. He just left.” 

It was a kind of place where the less-famous retired Twins could be stood a drink. (I met Zoilo Versalles. Unless you are a sports-minded boy who grew up in Minnesota in the 60s, you don’t care.) But, on nights when the crowd was just a few lone drinkers, Sports Central was a human dead-letter office.  Only when the regulars showed up, did the conversation get lively—one of them was a Stalinist—and sometimes poker games happened. 

Other than one attempt to determine what happened to these men who had once been my friends, I haven’t been in Sports Central for 14 years. The guys who made the place what it was are now in their seventies.

Only owner McNamara was a star. The rest were just guys who loved sports and who played it in intramural and city leagues. The resentfulness of people who spend too much time in bars would sometimes color their talk. But their memories of their playing days were filled with jauntiness, an all weather, all-terrain version of joy.

Like Karl Mueller, they were guys who had a chance to do what they loved. As Soul Asylum’s star dimmed after “Runaway Train,” the band stayed together but Karl took a day job working in downtown restaurants.  By all accounts, he had none of the “do you know who I am?” bitterness of someone whose life could include a David Letterman appearance on Friday night and working in a restaurant kitchen on Monday morning.   

So, this weekend, I’ve been thinking of the epigraph to Herb Ritter’s history of early baseball, The Glory of Their Times.   

All these were honored in their generation
And were the glory of their times

Ecclesiasticus 44:7

Who Knew?

I’d always assumed the advice “write what you know” included “write about yourself.” I’m no longer so sure. I can’t see myself from the outside; I rationalize and deny my faults; I’m baffled by my failures; and, if I am going to go to the trouble of profiling myself for posterity, I want to look good. When I write about myself, I default to filters and flinching.

It is mildly reassuring that even as masterful a writer as Andre Dubus falls prey to these same temptations. I’m reading some more in Dancing After Dark and discovering that the weakest stories are about large, handsome adult men who’ve been in the military.  These guys all seem a little too normal and noble.  They are a little too much poster boys for the life force. They lack the patina of humor and neurosis that seem to hang on real human beings. 

I Am Irony's Plaything

I am writing a newsletter article on organizing your office.  This is my office. 

Pepys Show

Someone is posting the 17th Century English diarist’s entries as a blog. I would love to see other famous diarists—such as Virginia Woolf—republished online.  And is it really pronouced “peeps,” like the awful marshmallow chicks?