Like a lot of struggling writers, there is one thing that I am absolutely positive about not quitting, unless I eventually go blind, and that is reading. I haven't tried crack, so I'm about to be one of those presumptuous idiots who use "like crack" in a sentence, but I do honestly feel that I buy books as if they were crack. Why? Because I don't care what it feels like to be on crack; I'm on books. Any junkie out there should feel free to use my irrational book purchasing behavior as a lame analogy for their supposedly harmful addiction.
I just made a promise to myself not buy anymore books for the next three months since I still have two shelf-high stacks worth of backlog, tracing back to last year's Powerbooks and National Bookstore sales. But of course the discount tags have shown up once again, so now I have miraculously ended up with Jonathan Lethem's "The Fortress of Solitude", the short story anthology "Dream Noises", and Haruki Murakami's "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running". Now that I have added three more to a pile that is enough to preoccupy me for the next two years, I still don't think I'll stop soon. I just can't.
I've been reading more the past few years because I've grown more frustrated over my writing the past few years. I have no doubt that those two things are correlated. I'm trying to convince myself that I'm trying to learn from the masters; that somehow people like Jonathan Franzen, Chuck Klosterman, and Jeffrey Eugenides could inspire me or influence my own writing. But the more I read, the more I realize that I'm not using their work for my own writing; I'm using their work as substitute to my own writing. I find myself constantly seeking the exhiliration of consuming their beautiful prose because it replaces the giddiness I feel when something I wrote happened to be good or got published, a giddiness that has likewise been shelved for years. I do not fantasize having written the gorgeous sentences I come across with in my reading, sentences such as this:
"It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together."
I will never mistake those words for anyone else's other than Jeffrey Eugenides', from a book whose brilliance I can never match, even if I quit my day job and consign myself to a life of literary writing. Yet I feel immensely gratified for having read that.
But for the life of me, I cannot find any comfort whatsoever from a book I came across with in one of my book-buying binges this week:
My first reaction was: "Oh, that's funny. James Franco has the same name as a literary author." But upon further research, it turns out to be not funny at all.
Really? James Franco has to be a goddamn author too? There is no real reason for me to be bothered by this book. I haven't read it, I have no plans on reading it, but I'm quite certain it isn't about me or my race. Yet it bothers me that it exists, that James Franco, the handsome, successful and considerably talented actor has now achieved something that I have worked almost half my life towards achieving without having been nominated for an Oscar on the side.
I am aware that the central reason for my dismay is unquestionably unreasonable. My opinion of James Franco isn't based on who he is - obviously because I never hung out with the dude, I have no reference point for that - it's based on the only material available to me, and that is the characters he has played. It never bothered me that Ethan Hawke published a bunch of books, even if he probably has a worse overall filmography than James Franco. I suspect this is because of the character he played in the highly literate "Before Sunrise" and the even more literate "Before Sunset", which he also co-wrote. Plus he always looked borderline dorky, with his unthreatening, boyish eyes, and literate, Beat Generation goatie.
James Franco, on the other hand, was the pothead in "Pineapple Express" and, worse, the dim-witted slacker Daniel in "Freaks and Geeks", the ultimate antithesis of everything that smart, literate, and sensitive guys stand for. The TV series' main protagonist, Lindsay - the erstwhile math geek turned rebel - was every nerdy boy's dream: smart, sweet, and disdainful of the bimbo elite. And who does she pine for? Of course, the hot airhead Daniel. And for the entirety of "Freaks and Geeks'" one-season existence, we hated her for it, the same way we hated Angela Chase in "My So-Called Life" for her obsession over vapid, yet otherworldly handsome Jordan, who now fronts a rock band that fortunately sucks, so he doesn't bother me the same way as Daniel/James.
We hated both character's blindness, but they were the product of an honest portrayal of smart teenage girls, and to a degree, smart adult women: that they claim to want someone who is smart and sensitive when what they really want is someone who looks like James Franco or Jared Leto, and then retroactively convince themselves that deep down he really is smart and sensitive, and when he turns out to be a complete insensitive dick, they convince themselves that they can change this stupid, uninteresting, and extremely attractive zombie, and miraculously turn him into whatever Prince Charming they originally imagined. Because God forbid that this supposedly smart girl is really, in essence, shallow. You know, like guys.
I imagine other struggling writers being petty about James Franco's debut book because he already stole Lindsay Weir's affection from us; and now he's stealing our dreams. And I imagine them being aware how ridiculous all this is too. And still we wish that his stupid short story collection sucks, so that it could validate the whole undeserved-author-status narative we all want to believe. But then you read a review from Booklist that ends like this:
"These stories were not published because James Franco is a movie star but because they are good. He makes the difficult appear simple, which only a talented writer can do."
Okay, James Franco: you win. You know that saying, "you can't have it all"? Well that's a lie perpetuated by parents of mediocre children. Some people do have it all, and if you can't accept that life is inherently unfair, then go find another planet to live in.
I concede that I can never look at James Franco's writing career objectively as long as I see him as the character he never even wrote. While it is true that I know very little about James Franco outside of his iconic roles, I do know him as the guy who couldn't get along with Anne Hathaway during this year's Oscar's hosting team-up. If you're a straight, attractive guy and you can't and won't get along with Anne Hathaway, then you are officially beyond comprehension. So fuck you, Franco. Seriously, fuck you.
I just made a promise to myself not buy anymore books for the next three months since I still have two shelf-high stacks worth of backlog, tracing back to last year's Powerbooks and National Bookstore sales. But of course the discount tags have shown up once again, so now I have miraculously ended up with Jonathan Lethem's "The Fortress of Solitude", the short story anthology "Dream Noises", and Haruki Murakami's "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running". Now that I have added three more to a pile that is enough to preoccupy me for the next two years, I still don't think I'll stop soon. I just can't.
I've been reading more the past few years because I've grown more frustrated over my writing the past few years. I have no doubt that those two things are correlated. I'm trying to convince myself that I'm trying to learn from the masters; that somehow people like Jonathan Franzen, Chuck Klosterman, and Jeffrey Eugenides could inspire me or influence my own writing. But the more I read, the more I realize that I'm not using their work for my own writing; I'm using their work as substitute to my own writing. I find myself constantly seeking the exhiliration of consuming their beautiful prose because it replaces the giddiness I feel when something I wrote happened to be good or got published, a giddiness that has likewise been shelved for years. I do not fantasize having written the gorgeous sentences I come across with in my reading, sentences such as this:
"It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together."
I will never mistake those words for anyone else's other than Jeffrey Eugenides', from a book whose brilliance I can never match, even if I quit my day job and consign myself to a life of literary writing. Yet I feel immensely gratified for having read that.
But for the life of me, I cannot find any comfort whatsoever from a book I came across with in one of my book-buying binges this week:
My first reaction was: "Oh, that's funny. James Franco has the same name as a literary author." But upon further research, it turns out to be not funny at all.
Really? James Franco has to be a goddamn author too? There is no real reason for me to be bothered by this book. I haven't read it, I have no plans on reading it, but I'm quite certain it isn't about me or my race. Yet it bothers me that it exists, that James Franco, the handsome, successful and considerably talented actor has now achieved something that I have worked almost half my life towards achieving without having been nominated for an Oscar on the side.
I am aware that the central reason for my dismay is unquestionably unreasonable. My opinion of James Franco isn't based on who he is - obviously because I never hung out with the dude, I have no reference point for that - it's based on the only material available to me, and that is the characters he has played. It never bothered me that Ethan Hawke published a bunch of books, even if he probably has a worse overall filmography than James Franco. I suspect this is because of the character he played in the highly literate "Before Sunrise" and the even more literate "Before Sunset", which he also co-wrote. Plus he always looked borderline dorky, with his unthreatening, boyish eyes, and literate, Beat Generation goatie.
James Franco, on the other hand, was the pothead in "Pineapple Express" and, worse, the dim-witted slacker Daniel in "Freaks and Geeks", the ultimate antithesis of everything that smart, literate, and sensitive guys stand for. The TV series' main protagonist, Lindsay - the erstwhile math geek turned rebel - was every nerdy boy's dream: smart, sweet, and disdainful of the bimbo elite. And who does she pine for? Of course, the hot airhead Daniel. And for the entirety of "Freaks and Geeks'" one-season existence, we hated her for it, the same way we hated Angela Chase in "My So-Called Life" for her obsession over vapid, yet otherworldly handsome Jordan, who now fronts a rock band that fortunately sucks, so he doesn't bother me the same way as Daniel/James.
We hated both character's blindness, but they were the product of an honest portrayal of smart teenage girls, and to a degree, smart adult women: that they claim to want someone who is smart and sensitive when what they really want is someone who looks like James Franco or Jared Leto, and then retroactively convince themselves that deep down he really is smart and sensitive, and when he turns out to be a complete insensitive dick, they convince themselves that they can change this stupid, uninteresting, and extremely attractive zombie, and miraculously turn him into whatever Prince Charming they originally imagined. Because God forbid that this supposedly smart girl is really, in essence, shallow. You know, like guys.
I imagine other struggling writers being petty about James Franco's debut book because he already stole Lindsay Weir's affection from us; and now he's stealing our dreams. And I imagine them being aware how ridiculous all this is too. And still we wish that his stupid short story collection sucks, so that it could validate the whole undeserved-author-status narative we all want to believe. But then you read a review from Booklist that ends like this:
"These stories were not published because James Franco is a movie star but because they are good. He makes the difficult appear simple, which only a talented writer can do."
Okay, James Franco: you win. You know that saying, "you can't have it all"? Well that's a lie perpetuated by parents of mediocre children. Some people do have it all, and if you can't accept that life is inherently unfair, then go find another planet to live in.
I concede that I can never look at James Franco's writing career objectively as long as I see him as the character he never even wrote. While it is true that I know very little about James Franco outside of his iconic roles, I do know him as the guy who couldn't get along with Anne Hathaway during this year's Oscar's hosting team-up. If you're a straight, attractive guy and you can't and won't get along with Anne Hathaway, then you are officially beyond comprehension. So fuck you, Franco. Seriously, fuck you.
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