The Grasshopper #62: Irritation
Bad joke and all
“A grasshopper walks into a bar and the bartender says, ‘We have a drink named after you’. The grasshopper says, ‘you have a drink named Irving?’”
Bada boom.
Errata: great piece about Truman Capote’s recently published notes for In Cold Blood in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jun/28/truman-capote-in-cold-blood-manuscript
Capote claimed to have invented nonfiction fiction, a genre now known as true crime. When I read it as a callow youth I had already seen the movie. My brother, a friend, and I were staying in hotel room in Toronto, the first time I had a room away from my parents, and we stayed up most of the night watching the film.
I was thirteen. On that same trip I lagged behind my parents on Yonge Street and bought two hits of LSD from a guy walking down the street muttering ‘acid, acid’. I had not even smoked pot when I tried the acid and it changed my life.
I had an experience that is still with me over fifty years later, a moment of luminous transcendence. I believe it helped me become a writer.
There are moments in a creative life that define our style and outlook. You can’t always know what they are when you are experiencing them. It could be the discovery of a favorite writer or the first time you see a Jackson Pollock painting in a museum, another momentous moment for me.
Pollock shows us the power of controlled mayhem in his action paintings. I have seen enough of them to know there is no accident happening here; they ripple with intent and emotion. The man was a drunk and it eventually killed him, but he left behind a major body of work that transcends his ups and downs as a human.
So, where is the irritation in my title in this tale of transcendence? It is the itch that annoys us into finding a path to something bigger. The only way you find your way to that, in my experience, is to push a little harder, to get to unfamiliar ground.
Then you have no choice but to explore.
It’s summer and I’m slacking a bit on the regularity of this newsletter. We’re in a period of hotter humid weather and afternoon thundery downpours interspersed with sun. There’s a ninth floor rooftop bar at the hotel next door to my building with a great view of our skyline and the sunsets have been spectacular. But the Canadian wildfire smoke is back today as a heavy, gray layer blocking the sun.
Climate change has been a fascination of mine since the eighties. When blogs first started I had one called Burner Trouble. The theme was coping with warming and I wrote a lot of posts. But I had no evidence anyone read any of them. That was a big problem with early blogging. Unless someone stumbled onto your stuff, it just disappeared into the maw of the Internet.
Writers without readers are a sad bunch. It’s one of the reasons I so strongly believe in finding ways to publish your work. The good news is that it is a lot easier to find readers than it used to be, if you steadily write and publish and work to develop a unique voice.
I know that is a big challenge. My voice didn’t come until I stopped writing things that others wanted or were willing to pay for. I did every kind of writing for money and did develop my skills, but that voice thing proved elusive. So I went into marketing because it paid. And I could still write.
Earning a living counts for something, but it was not always satisfying. So, as a hobby of sorts, I wrote a novel. I self-published it on Amazon, watched as no one bought it, took it down, and moved on. No regrets, but…
Oh yeah, there’s always regrets. I’ve been debating serializing that book here on Substack but I admit to being wary of no one reading it, again. It’s the writer’s dilemma. Readers are a form of confidence that helps us keep going, but you can’t take them for granted.
I can’t take you for granted. Thanks.
Martin
733 words
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An interesting train of thoughts. Enjoyed following along on this one.