Tag Archives: Writing

On having no hustle

January 15, 2016 12:44 pm , 1 Comment ,

Several major players in my life have recently pointed out that I lack hustle. They say that I don’t apply to enough things. I don’t ingratiate myself with powerful people. I don’t ask my former writing professors to recommend me for fellowships and residencies. I don’t dress like a ham sandwich and hang out on the street corner, proselytizing about ham sandwiches. I just don’t have the temperament for it. Which is not to say that I haven’t defied my own nature at times and attempted to hustle. I’ve sent some embarrassing emails over the years. These bids for love and attention trill with false modesty and labored charm. I always feel far more sympathetic to the poor souls on the receiving end of these needy emails than I do to myself, the sender.

We’re told that everyone hates the hustle, but you just have to suck up your pride and crippling social anxiety and do it or you’ll never get anywhere. You have to play the game, fake it til you make it, network, ask for help, never give up, never surrender. But I’m not sure hustle is a quality I want to have. Other people impress me when they aggressively go after what they want. I don’t devalue their hustle (unless they’re Republicans). And I’m not naïve enough to believe that successful careers just happen organically, without cocktail parties and emails. But why do I need to be successful in the first place? I think my real life’s ambition is something more in line with being an anonymous contemplative than sharing a billboard with Jeffrey Eugenides.

Which brings me back to my perennial dream of working as a long-distance truck driver. A person has to make money somehow, and I love to drive. I love to think about things through a wide window. And you can only go so fast behind the wheel. There’s always a speed limit. I find that fact really comforting, especially coming from the literary field where there’s no cap on how smart or talented or prolific you’re supposed to be. Even if you’re happily driving your beat-up Subaru 35 miles an hour through a school zone, you imagine that someone else is driving 95 miles an hour, with the cops chasing him, jumping drawbridges and shit, and your experience is ruined. As a professional truck driver I can drive 65 miles an hour all day long, receive a consistent paycheck, eat snacks from my lap, and have total freedom to meditate quietly on life while an unobtrusive radio bolsters my thoughts with an 80s soundtrack.

I can still write short stories at truck stops. I can still read books if they’re on tape. But no one will be able to accuse me of not having hustle. “In this business,” I’ll say, “hustle kills.”

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How to be human & not hallucination

September 16, 2015 11:38 am , Leave a Comment ,

You wish to be perceived a certain way, and you tend to become agitated and embittered when your work is misinterpreted. You’re sick of people seeing you the way they see you and not the way you want to be seen. You trusted them and they betrayed you. You never trusted them and their views still register as bottomless disappointment. You resent these obtuse outsiders for questioning your worth, the nature of your project, the value of your cultural contribution. These critics take no time, have no courage. You grapple with their ontological judgments. This is your art they’re talking about.

You are a female novelist who wants to be read like a male novelist. You are a white American poet who wants to be read like a Chinese poet. You are a female visual artist who wants to be treated like a male visual artist. You are a writer with a name who wants to be read like a writer with a different name. You are a writer with a name who wants to be read as anonymous. You are an Asian Poet who wants to be read as a Poet. You are a famous author who wants to be read as a debut author. You are a young and beautiful novelist who wants to be read like a novelist without a body. You are a middle-aged author who wants to be read like a literary ingénue. You are a Serious Male Poet who wants to be read as “a lesbian writer of girls’ school stories.”

I’ve always had a severe distaste for all the mindless biographical drivel that serves to prop up this or that writer,” Pearson admits in an interview in a publication called Cow Eye Express, part of the auxiliary Web material associated with the novel. “So much effort goes into credentialing the creator that we lose sight of the creation itself, with the consequence being that we tend to read authors instead of their works. In fact, we’d probably prefer to read a crap book by well-known writer than a great book by a writer who may happen to be obscure,” the unknown writer asserts.1

It’s human nature to take mental shortcuts, to deposit individuals into preexisting accounts. Art is expansive, but first it must be seen. Art can hold multitudes, but first the mind must consent to dilation. Other people are complicit in creating your art. You don’t have the privilege of prescribing their brush strokes.

All intellectual and artistic endeavors, even jokes, ironies, and parodies, fare better in the mind of the crowd when the crowd knows that somewhere behind the great work or the great spoof it can locate a cock and a pair of balls. (“Harriet Burden” in Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World)

You’re desperate to transmit signs that will communicate your value and challenge the reigning taxonomies. The female novelists with medical degrees are read differently than the female novelists without, despite the relative merits of their fiction. The women with PhDs are automatically granted more substantial intellects, no matter what field they’re in. You’re not as smart as they are. Perhaps you’ll go back to school. But school would be more of the same:

The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student.2

And your credentials can only do so much. You’re a woman citing a canon of dead male philosophers and dead male scientists who would discount you at the first opportunity. You reflexively assign them an authority that you don’t naturally assign to yourself. Your brain is a bedlam of footnotes and references, each clamoring to prove something vital to the skeptics and reductionists. You’re like a lawyer whose whole case is based on the testimony of expert witnesses. You no longer know why you know what you know.

“I have observed that male writers tend to get asked what they think and women what they feel,” she says. “In my experience, and that of a lot of other women writers, all of the questions coming at them from interviewers tend to be about how lucky they are to be where they are – about luck and identity and how the idea struck them. The interviews much more seldom engage with the woman as a serious thinker, a philosopher, as a person with preoccupations that are going to sustain them for their lifetime.”3

You sense that it’s futile to dictate the terms of your critical reception in the maddening world that exists outside your head. Rationally you get that you can’t control the brains of other people. You can’t always overcome their generalizations and implicit biases. (Often you fear you’re just as guilty of these charges.) You’ll run yourself ragged trying to counteract their sexism, racism, homophobia, myopia. Unless you intentionally exploit their cognitive failings. Unless you beat them at their own game! And so you carry out hoaxes. You employ subversive tactics that will, when discovered, either endear you to your audience or forever lash you to the whipping post. You try to manipulate perception in order to be pure. You try to be someone you’re not in order to be pure. Be nobody in order to be pure. Have no mythology, no smiling photograph, no biography on your book jacket, in order to be pure. You erase or distort yourself in order to please the tastemakers.

And it’s the way, frankly, that many of us read, regardless of background, identity, or politics: we bring our own dreams or baggage to bear upon whatever we have chosen to lay our eyes on. We might abide by different critical cues, but we are all looking for something. And when culture turns into an extended game of “gotcha,” it can be an act of self-preservation to assume that everyone is always acting in bad faith.4

What is the upshot of all this masquerading? You want to befuddle the establishment so every critic responds to new work with the fear that Thomas Pynchon might have written it or that Picasso might have painted it. To avoid embarrassment, they’ll learn to treat every piece as authoritative, at least until it betrays them. But you are not a trickster. You just want to examine things as you see them. You want to be considered legitimate, whether you’re appraising the walls of a bedroom or the fucking Milky Way.

[Diane Johnson] observes that male readers at least “have not learned to make a connection between the images, metaphors, and situations employed by women (house, garden, madness), and universal experience, although women, trained from childhood to read books by people of both sexes, know the metaphorical significance of the battlefield, the sailing ship, the voyage, and so on.”5

You write a story about a dollhouse. You write a story about a war. Your war might as well take place in a dollhouse.

Recently, when the novelist Mary Gordon spoke at a boys’ school, she learned that the students weren’t reading the Brontës, Austen or Woolf. Their teachers defended this by saying they were looking for works that boys could relate to. But at the girls’ school across the street, Gordon said, “no one would have dreamed of removing ‘Huckleberry Finn’ or ‘Moby-Dick’ from the syllabus. As a woman writer, you get points if you include the ‘male’ world in your work, and you lose points if you omit it.”6

You want to transcend this phallocentric point system. You can’t keep up with it. You’re too bad at math. (You kid, you kid.)

Have you heard anyone say recently about any book written by a man, It’s really a woman who wrote it, or maybe a group of women? Due to its exorbitant might, the male gender can mimic the female gender, incorporating it in the process. The female gender, on the other hand, cannot mimic anything, for is betrayed immediately by its “weakness”; what it produces could not possibly fake male potency.7

You write a poem about a black man. You write a poem about a white man. The poems might as well be about blackness, about whiteness.

You pretend to have authority as they define it. You fake it till you make it. You can only make it on their terms. But wasn’t your ambition to be pure? And good? And lasting? What is “making it” with regard to eternity? And the few in your boat who are victorious only demoralize you further because they substantiate your deepest fear: that it’s you who’s not good enough. That it’s not the establishment at all. But that’s the power talking. You’ve internalized it. You’ve turned it against yourself.

You’re underrepresented and you seek acceptance from the same dominant culture that subjugates you. You need to be validated by the mercurial patriarchy. You let the existing power structures dictate your worth. Because the same power structures helped create you. You’re the artist you are in part because you’re reacting to their mold.

Subjection exploits the desire for existence, where existence is always conferred from elsewhere; it marks a primary vulnerability to the Other in order to be. (Judith Butler in The Psychic Life of Power)

But what if this subjection can be reversed? What if you pull the sovereigns into your system? Make them vulnerable to your vision, and not the other way around.

Yes, I hold that male colonization of our imaginations—a calamity while ever we were unable to give shape to our difference—is, today, a strength. We know everything about the male symbol system; they, for the most part, know nothing about ours, above all about how it has been restructured by the blows the world has dealt us. What’s more, they are not even curious, indeed they recognize us only from within their system.8

You want your audience to be colorblind, but you don’t want your color obliterated. You want your audience to proclaim the death of the author, but you’d rather not be murdered. You want your audience to commit to a list of rules before judgment, but not everyone can be so circumspect. You want to be a cyborg, but you feel your flesh and blood. You want to be a god yourself, but this country breeds disciples. You want to be the judge, but you keep pleading your case to the jury. You want to tell them all to fuck off, but you also need to make a living.

Heller did survive, of course, and four years later the critics decided that the flighty little upstart who had had such trouble piecing together a sentence, or narrative, worth more than a few minutes of their precious attention had undergone some miraculous metamorphosis in which infelicities were replaced by seamless elegance, plodding one-liners with timeless apercus.9

They tell you there’s a chip on your shoulder. It doesn’t look like a chip to you. Informing people of what is and isn’t on their bodies is the height of lunacy. But then you remember: the way we see each other is always part hallucination. And then you return to your work.

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Model Fancy

July 31, 2015 2:08 pm , 1 Comment ,

She decided that she’d like to help him with his career. “That’s sweet of you,” he said. “What did you have in mind? Updating my web portfolio? Helping me set up the monolights on Tuesday? I told Anichka and Danya that I’d have sushi for them on set except the place they like doesn’t deliver…” But she was an autodidact zoologist and these services sounded beneath her.

“I’d like to art-direct your next photo shoot,” she said. He turned from the naked female image he was editing on his 27-inch computer monitor and faced his girlfriend. She sat primly on their couch wearing his boxer shorts and an XL t-shirt with an anthropomorphized cartoon of a goat on it. She’d recently dribbled Nutella down her chin.

“But you hate fashion,” he said.

“No I don’t,” she said. “Even though fashion is responsible for decimating the beavers and for yanking the hair out of millions of angora rabbits and for driving one more wedge between rich and poor, I can still respect your job.”

“You’re rich and I’m poor,” he said, smiling, “and it didn’t drive a wedge between us.”

“But I know fashion photography isn’t about that stuff for you,” she said. “It’s more about making art. Which is why I want to get involved.”

“I saw that the coffee shop across the street is hiring,” he said. “It might do you some good to get out of the house, away from your terrariums.”

“No offense, but I think all your editorials are starting to look the same.”

“That’s actually the most offensive thing you could have said to me.”

“You could use an outsider’s perspective. Like, why do all your photos have to be so gloomy, and shot in black and white?”

“Because heavy contrast is on trend right now.”

“Is it?” she said. “Or has everyone just run out of ideas? Here’s what I think. Have you ever read Cat Fancy magazine?”

“No.”

“Well the reason Cat Fancy magazine is so popular is not because the quality of its photographs is especially high. It’s because the magazine features cats.”

“Sure, that makes sense.”

“Cats are really fun to look at. They’re gentle and beguiling and often quite colorful. Plus they have such charismatic personalities that a photographer doesn’t have to do much to make an image sparkle.”

“Okay.”

“If you look at the success of Cat Fancy magazine, a few things leap out at you. Or pounce, I should say. One, the art directors aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel with their stories. They don’t feel the need to take the cats out into the desert and, like, shoot them rolling around naked in the sand in front of giant sheets of gauze like they’re Kim Kardashian. A staff photographer just puts the cat in front of a solid, neutral background in a studio, takes a snapshot, and tada, there’s your cover.”

“Right.”

“I mean you can change the background color depending on whether it’s Christmas or whatever, but for the most part it’s pretty simple. That way it’s all about the cat, you know?”

“Sure.”

“Two, no one is trying to tell the cats they need to lose weight.”

“Right. I know you hate that.”

“So with your 19-year-old anorexic Polish models on Tuesday, I think you should just, like, put them on the floor there, so they’re kind of lying in that patch of light from the window, and maybe scatter some catnip around so they’re kind of happy and docile, but not with those dead eyes you like so much, no offense, because all your models seem to be on heroin, which is another way in which your art is sort of dated.”

“Okay.”

“And then I think you should, like, optimize the image for poster or billboard size. And maybe Photoshop some words into the background that could easily be a speech bubble coming from a cat, or a motivational message that a cat could be thinking, or perhaps just existentially representing, you know?”

“I get you. You want the image to capture a feline essence. Even though it’s people.”

“Right. I don’t want to say ‘Garfield’, because that’s too obvious and plus I know you like things to be sexy, but just take a look at Cat Fancy when you’re doing your mood board for Tuesday. I have a whole bunch of back issues in the bedroom.”

“Okay, sounds good.”

“I just really want you to break out of your artistic rut, baby.”

“Thank you. I appreciate that.”

“You’re welcome.” She went back to reading Misty of Chincoteague.

“Hey sweetheart,” he said.

“Mm?”

“I know you promised you were going to get me that Canon 85mm fixed 1.2 lens for my birthday, but I was wondering if you could order it a little early, especially since it would really help with this upcoming photoshoot you’re art-directing. Which is going to be awesome, by the way.”

“But I thought you wanted the Canon 5D Mark III camera for your early birthday present?” she said.

“That too,” he said. “You’ve inspired me.”

“Thought so,” she said with satisfaction, and went to get her credit card.

137tn

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Super genius saves the world on her lunch break at the DMV

July 23, 2015 9:40 pm , Leave a Comment ,

It’s hot enough outside to liquify rubber and she wants to continue using her five 30,000 BTU window air conditioning units around the clock. Unfortunately, every so often she feels guilty about the toll that her 62-degree apartment takes on the environment, especially when she’s hard at work in her DMV kiosk for eight hours a day, unable to luxuriate in the cold air blasting away at home. Therefore she uses her Thursday lunch hour to devise a series of ingenious solutions for global warming and its consequences.

First she conceptualizes a tree that generates its own water supply via photosynthesis. This vegetation makes absolute sense on a Post-It note partly stained with fried lasagna. When the sun is shining, the tree’s roots produce enough water to hydrate the surrounding soil and replenish local aquifers. When the sun is not shining, the tree simply produces oxygen, and sometimes apricots. People will plant these chemically-enhanced trees in deserts and in two years those same deserts will be deciduous forest. Even people who don’t get out much into nature will go bonkers for these trees. When planted in clusters, these trees will sculpt out deep ponds where before there had only been desiccated craters. These trees will either cost nothing or be available at deep discount after federal tax rebate. These trees are gods amongst thirsty men.

Her second ingenious solution has to do with population control. She will move everyone in the world onto a single continent. This continent will probably end up being North America for the sake of her own convenience. When humans see how many other humans exist on Earth and begin to feel claustrophobic, they will probably not want to have sex with one another. Within a few generations, cities will revert to a manageable, medieval size. Meanwhile plant and animal populations on the remaining six continents will bounce back because they’ll have more food and territory at their disposal. But if anyone misbehaves in North America, they will be deported to Australia, same as before.

Her third ingenious solution addresses the frying of the oceans. The oceans need to be cooled. What cools water? Ice. What objects are made of ice and can be dropped into the ocean like rocks into a glass of Smirnoff? Moons. Just off the top of her head, she can think of two icy moons that are currently going to waste in the immediate solar system: Europa and Callisto. Europa alone has enough ice on its surface to chill Pacific bathwater into polar bear central for at least five years. All it takes is a space rocket and the kind of machine that breaks up highway cement. But she is not in charge of logistics. She is the idea person.

Lastly, air pollution. This is a no-brainer, at least for anyone who has ever had a connecting flight in Phoenix or Las Vegas. If power plants and oil refineries are to be located exclusively in North America, where all the people are, there is no reason why industry, in its entirety, can’t be situated inside the Grand Canyon, which the Senate will have covered with a tarp. The toxic gases will collect under the tarp, then get sucked down many miles of canyon into a giant vacuum built for that purpose in Lees Ferry. There, the pollution will feed into a factory operated by Original Americans who will know how to convert toxins into something innocuous, like fresh breeze or a cancer vaccine.

But what is to be done about the existing atmospherics, the extreme weather conditions and the deteriorated ozone layer that humanity lives with everyday? She would prefer to leave this job to Obama, but she shouldn’t stop now, not when she’s already come so far and still has half a Diet Coke left. Her solution is this: if chemists in New Jersey can put disinfectant, cheese, and hair product into aerosol cans, surely they can determine how to spray an element into the air that will rise up in a heroic cloud to bind with CFCs, causing chlorine to fall to earth in the form of raindrops. And if scientists play their cards right, they could even get the chlorinated raindrops to descend directly into untreated public swimming pools, thereby saving the government money. Every human will receive two of these specially formulated aerosol cans free of charge, care of the House Budget Committee, and he or she will use them liberally, though always after reading the cautionary label which provides instructions for what to do if someone’s eyeball is sprayed accidentally.

Now that she’s done her part to save the world, she can’t wait to get home and lower all five of her AC units to a goosepimpling 55 degrees. She’s bored of her entire August wardrobe and has been longing since April to sleep under a pile of blankets in her fuzziest flannel pajamas. Before bed she’ll crank both her bathroom and kitchen sink faucets so her apartment will sound like the Colorado River in the midst of winter monsoon season. Then she can rest easy, knowing the government has it from here.

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Beach Justice

March 20, 2015 2:29 pm , Leave a Comment ,

All the other beach authorities have a vessel or a crib that distinguishes them from the spring-breakers. You’ve got the guys in helicopters, searching the high seas for man-eating sharks or whatever. You’ve got the guys on ATVs, patrolling the dunes for illicit picnic activity. You’ve got the lifeguards in their stands, keeping an eye out for pretty people who might need resuscitating. But I, Ben Cube, originally from the land of New Jersey, do my law enforcement on foot. When someone is in danger, I don’t need to arrive on a glimmering white jet ski or leap out of a pastel cabana on stilts. I don’t even need the sanction of the South Florida government. I just need my swimming trunks and my impeccable sense of right and wrong. Yes, you’re correct. Mine is the face of vigilante beach justice.

On a typical day I wake up before dawn so I can reach the pier while the local rednecks still think they can fish with impunity. Many of these fishermen know me, having been on the receiving end of my justice in the past, and they pack up their gear and their coolers as soon as they see me coming. It takes all my self-restraint not to frogmarch them back down the boardwalk. But there’s always at least one oblivious tourist, or some doofus kid partaking in his first fishing lesson with Daddy, who needs to be taught the rules. “It’s right there on the sign,” I say as I approach these latter miscreants at the end of the pier. “No fishing. Read it and weep.”

The father stops reeling in whatever endangered sea creature he was reeling in. “Are you a game warden?” he says.

“If you don’t throw those squid back into the ocean by the count of five,” I respond, “I’ll be forced to make a citizen’s arrest. Do you really want your son to see that?” Nine times out of ten, they don’t.

Once the pier is purged of its lawbreakers, I extract my Sharper Image binoculars from their all-weather case and train them on the horizon. If I see too many people in a catamaran, or not enough lifeboats on a cruise ship, I don’t hesitate to call in reinforcements. Though as far as I can tell, the Coast Guard just sits on its collective ass 24 hours a day.

Next order of business is the nude beach. The nude beach attracts your standard law-abiding soul who just wants to sun his or her privates, but unfortunately it also attracts the scum of the earth. If you wonder where all of Florida’s creeps and perverts congregate during daylight hours, it’s here, where boobs and wangs can be tossed about freely in open air. If I see a young female spring-breaker, lounging on a towel, shyly baring her breasts to the sky, you can bet that right behind her will be sitting a fully-clothed troll filming her incognito with a camera hidden in his duffle bag, as if he’s a degenerate James Bond or some shit. This does not fly with me. Babe or no babe, this young woman does not deserve to have her boobs live-streamed to the internet.

So what do I do? I plop myself between woman and pervert, effectively obstructing the camera’s view. Sometimes I leisurely remove my swim trunks in the duffle bag’s line of sight so the pervert will be treated to artsy footage of my jiggling testicles. The pervert usually leaves quickly with his contraband, and after that my only duty is to inform the young woman of the valorous steps I’ve just taken to thwart her career in amateur porn. When I reach for a business card in my pocket so she knows that she can call me anytime if she ever sees anything suspicious, even if it’s in the middle of the night, I often forget that I’m still naked, and my hand skips comically over my thigh and collides with my sweatiest area. But such is life on the nude beach!

Next I break for lunch in the shade beneath the lifeguard stand.

In the afternoon most outlaws tend to be sun-stricken and lethargic, so I try to round up some beach cats for Animal Control. While securing one of these stray varmints in a sand dune last weekend, my hand got scratched up pretty bad, but I’m watching the wound closely. Plus I have faith in the ocean to sterilize 99 percent of infections, even rabies.

After the cat round-up comes my least favorite part of the day, but every hour can’t be a heroic hour when it comes to justice. You would not believe the amount of garbage these Spring Break hooligans generate during their week-long revels on the beach. I’m talking Silo cups, plastic bottles, water-logged underthings, cans of Bud Light, broken sunglasses, abandoned kiddie pools, candy wrappers, and once even a papasan chair. It takes an entire industrial trash bag to clean it up every afternoon, and that’s only for a two-mile stretch of beach. You’d think these kids were raised by animals. Still, I appreciate their youthful spunk. I was also a boy once. Though I don’t recall ever disposing of used condoms in the sand. Speaking of which, what kind of woman gives it up on a family beach? If I ever catch any of these litterbug hedonists in the act, trying to hide their hanky-panky under sun umbrellas or thinking that I can’t see them blatantly humping each other in the surf, I won’t stop until they’re registered as sex offenders. The occasional glass bottle? Fine. A loud radio every now and then? Fine. Sex on the beach? Not on my watch.

At the end of the day there’s always some human flotsam who thinks it’s a good idea to empty her bag of Cheetos into a quiet arrangement of seagulls and warmly invite hell to rain down upon us. This is intolerable beach etiquette. In what world is it okay to feed human snacks to nuisance birds so that everyone within a five-umbrella radius must flee like extras in a horror movie to avoid being pooped on? Or worse? No no no. This old woman has earned herself the full heat of my errant frisbee.

Finally, as night descends, I remain seated on my towel until I’m sure everyone has vacated the beach in a timely manner, before they start thinking about singing songs around an illegal bonfire or drunkenly setting off fireworks as if they’re somewhere in Mexico. When the last of the nudists put on their cover-ups and the final spring-breakers hurl their Silo cups into the ocean, I can finally return to my bungalow knowing that I’ve preserved the sanctity of the beach for another day. If I could afford a white jet ski, this would be my moment to ride it into the sunset.

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Interview with celebrity diarist Albert Knox

March 7, 2015 8:31 pm , 1 Comment ,

Interviewer: We’re here today with Albert Knox, the famed diarist who made his living documenting the day-to-day lives of high-profile celebrity clients. Hundreds of people, from pop stars to presidents, can rest easy knowing that their mundane emotional moments were preserved for posterity by Mr. Knox and his ubiquitous spiral notebook. On the eve of his retirement, Mr. Knox was kind enough to grant The Diary Journal an exclusive interview reflecting on his career accomplishments, his plans for the future, and his own dear diary. Mr. Knox, thank you for joining us.

AK: It’s a pleasure to be here.

I: Let’s begin with some softballs. Can you describe a typical day with one of your long-term clients, say Katy Perry?

AK: Katy hired me to write her personal diary for her California Dreams Tour [2011-12]. She told me that she’d kept a diary as a child, then got too busy to maintain it, so she was thrilled to be able to delegate the job. On a typical day I’d start by writing down her dreams and what they might signify, then we’d eventually move into thoughts and feelings on musical performances, meals, social interactions, and outfits.

I: Did you ever have trouble gaining access to the talent?

AK: I was always competing with photographers and film crews for access [Katy Perry’s California Dreams Tour was the basis for the documentary Part of Me], but as a diarist I usually developed a more intimate relationship with my clients than most full-time staff members. For example, Katy liked seeing pretty pictures of herself, but by the time we reached Japan she was even more addicted to reading about her complex emotions, as captured in my longhand prose. Only I could offer her that. They say a photo tells a story, but I told actual stories about Katy’s mental trajectories as she coped with the ups and downs of everyday life on the road.

I: Did the talent ever object to the way you depicted them in diary entries?

AK: If I couldn’t wrangle a client’s vanity, pettiness, insecurity, cruelty, rage, and selfishness into an endearing diary entry, then I wasn’t doing my job. I would not be where I am today if I couldn’t turn a celebrity tantrum into a profound existential crisis through my gift for language. I remember Justin Bieber throwing a fit on the tail end of his Believe Tour because he found out there was no coconut water within a 100-mile radius and his hydration depended on the unique chemical properties of the coconut. I sat in that armchair in Iceland with my spiral notebook in my lap as Bieber hurled whiskey bottles at his hotel wall, and I wrote, “I feel sometimes as if I’m living in a desert of my own design. It might seem from the outside that I don’t understand the vapidity and ephemerality of my fame, but I thirst for genuine human contact, a relationship to God that isn’t beset by panoramic ego challenges, and the liquid warmth of a nut.”

I: When I think of Justin Bieber, I think of those words, and they are precisely why I own eleven of his albums.

AK: The power of the diary can’t be underestimated.

I: As our readers know, your ample skills were put to the test by more than Caucasian pop singers. Political figureheads came to you as well when they needed someone to articulate their hopes and dreams in a diplomatic and easily digestible format. Let’s talk about the former President of the United States.

AK: He was committed to our collaboration more than any client I’ve ever had.

I: Why do you think that is?

AK: He thought about his family more than most world leaders, and many of his geopolitical and military decisions came from a place of anxiety about how his father might judge him. So that conflicted pattern of wanting to please a parent, wanting to rebel against a parent’s expectations, wanting to exceed a parent’s accomplishments, etc., was particularly conducive to the diary medium, for obvious reasons. And tear stains always lend authenticity to the page.

I: Whose tears were they, if you don’t mind my asking?

AK: Sometimes his. Sometimes mine. It was a long eight years.

I: Did you ever feel limited as to what territory you could cover in a client’s diary?

AK: The parameters were usually dictated by the client, but my expertise and literary finesse got me through most doors. When I first started working for John Travolta, for example, he was skeptical about my work. I think I was originally his publicist’s hired gun, meant to squelch some scandal or another. But once John saw what I could do, he began dragging me into the bathroom with him. He told me I was a fecal alchemist. I spent hours in there, sitting on the edge of the crystal bathtub, just jotting down notes. He still calls me sometimes when he’s shitting.

I: Do you keep your own diary?

AK: I did for a while, but when I was working I realized that I was just writing a diary about writing other peoples’ diaries, and then their diaries became about what it was like to be in my diary, and it became this weird sort of ouroboros literature, so in my meager free time I just focused on my poetry.

I: You’re a poet, too?

AK: Like diary entries, poems aesthetically temper experience so you don’t despise everything.

I: Do you despise everything?

AK: Let’s not talk of hate. I’m in love with elevating life to the uppermost reaches of linguistic activity. Does a photographer try to reproduce exactly what he sees, or does he try to filter the image through his particular aperture, and in so doing make the world seem like a more beautiful place? Do the right words make people more likable and humanity less bland and disgusting? Be honest with yourself: would you rather be purple or periwinkle?

I: A few final questions. Would you ever write a novel?

AK: Fuck no. I have to draw the line somewhere.

I: Are Jay-Z and Beyonce really headed for divorce?

AK: They’re considering a personal unpeopling, but their erotic energy will forever be united on a cellular level.

I: Were you ever starstruck on the job?

AK: If anything, my celebrity clients were starstruck by themselves. They were often moved to tears by the impact of their own words. As transmitted through my hand, of course.

I: Do you think your position will soon become obsolete because of video diaries and Vine and the like, or will the famous continue to need professional emotional translators?

AK: The inner world is in less demand every day. I don’t think anyone would care to read Kim Kardashian’s diary when he could see a photo of her bare bottom instead. But I continue to hope that other people like me exist in the world. People of great depth who yearn to know what Kim dreams about, and what she desires in her heart of hearts, and where her deepest doubts reside. People who value psychological substance over superficiality. But between you and me, the older I get and the fewer diary entries I write, the more I just want to see Kim’s ass and leave it at that. You could bounce a pencil off that ass.

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One honey bee, four near-death experiences

February 26, 2015 6:42 pm , 4 Comments ,

Spring

The drones sent me into exile. They said that I was worthless to the hive if I wasn’t going to mate with our queen. But I only want to mate with the boy bees. It almost makes me wish I were a worker, because the workers don’t have to put out. They just get to sit upon the flowers. I’ll have to find someplace new to live. Yesterday I landed in a bucolic meadow, but a black bear almost stepped on me, and then I flew up his nose for a second, and it was just bad times all around. Until I met Mulligan sucking nectar from a dandelion.

Summer

This afternoon I fell into the deep end of a swimming pool. It was stupid, I know, but I was only trying to skim the surface of what I thought was a pond. It took me a while to realize that not only was the blue water undrinkable, but its vessel was a death trap. My wings became sodden and useless. I could barely stay afloat. I knew it was only a matter of time before I drowned. But then a flightless man spotted me as he swam by with a pincher on his nostrils. He seemed to take pity on my frenetic form. With the flat of his hand he began pushing the water in which I was sinking toward the edge of the pool. He never made contact with my body, presumably so he wouldn’t be stung. As if I’d be so ungrateful! At this point I was about to lose consciousness, but the thought of Mulligan in the meadow kept me going. At last the man splashed me onto the concrete, my antennae still clinging to life and love, and I felt my wings slowly begin to drink up the sunshine. I would be reunited with my fuzzy, striped companion after all.

Fall

Mulligan seems to be ailing and I’m afraid he’s not long for this earth. I wonder if he stung one of the old lady’s cats while I was out foraging in her garden. He wouldn’t have told me if he had. And his anatomy seems to be intact. That handsome, bulging thorax. That perky stinger. But what is he saying now? Speak up, Mulligan. You make no sense. All I hear is buzzing. Don’t eat the goldenrod? But I love… oh. The old lady sprayed it with poison, didn’t she? That explains the collapsed colony behind her garage. I saw the corpse of the queen herself. You…you saved my life, Mulligan. Here, let’s lie together on this purple flower petal and watch the setting sun.

Winter

I see the geese flying high with their mates and the horses stabled with their foals, and here I am, alone, luckless, deprived of all society, just trying to keep my compound eyes from freezing in this malicious cold. Though I miss Mulligan terribly, I’m grateful he never had to suffer like this. All my enzymes are shivering. I’m drawn to the fragrance of a smoky chimney and I know my time has come. But frost glazes my wings before I reach the rooftop and its eternal stupor. I tumble like a pistachio nut into a snowbank. So this is it. At least the ants won’t eat me in this icy weather. But what’s happening now? I’m perched in a human palm. Warm clouds of air heat up my wings. The old woman holds me like that, enveloped in her breath, until I thaw back to life, and fly once more toward the promise of honey.

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Girl power

November 16, 2014 9:52 am , Leave a Comment ,

You’re becoming too much of a celebrity. Cloistered and out of touch. All your shoes are unattainably expensive. You have the physical dimensions of a fruitatarian fashion model. You own houses in places that would have fallen into the sea ten years ago if money hadn’t intervened. And the boys are no longer on your side.

Why not? My stylist has been lowering the necklines of all my formal gowns.

You have a reputation for being a prude.

That’s hurtful. You know I have always been a closed system. It’s just how I operate as an artist.

That works for novelists and schizophrenics, but if you want to remain a power player in the music industry, you need to make some changes in your lifestyle before consumers turn on you.

But I surprise and delight my fans all the time by showing up unexpectedly at their Bat Mitzvahs and baking them cookies and things.

True, but it’s like watching a baby snow leopard leave her zoo enclosure and pretend to enjoy a shopping spree at Wal-Mart. It just looks off. And creepy. It doesn’t help that you lack friends in real life.

But I have lots of friends in real life.

Who?

My mom. My dad. The attractive Latin woman who does my hair. Sometimes my fellow celebrities and I exchange mutual admiration on Twitter. I always sign glossy photos with “xoxo.”

But female friends go shopping for makeup together and they have secrets and sleepovers and they take hilarious selfies and have inside jokes and defend each other against evil boys. Your fans need to feel that you’re best friend material. If you’re best friend material, then they can potentially squeeze in there. If you’re a hothouse flower, then you’re just another millionaire idol, and idols fall every day.

Of course I’m best friend material. I just haven’t met anyone who really gets me yet. Someone who shares my drive and ambition. People should be allowed to communicate through personal websites and music videos. That’s what Bey and I do.

Would you feel comfortable calling her Bey in person?

No.

Here’s the thing. From an outsider’s point of view, your world is becoming more rarefied by the minute. You’re transitioning from being an earnest, vulnerable young woman with relationship problems into an omnipotent robot with a hundred burned bridges and twice as many tubes of red lipstick. So I brainstormed this list of famous women who are considered sincere and down-to-earth—and who maintain loyal fan bases within the blogosphere. If you can be seen disporting with these women on social media and if you mention them enough in magazine interviews, noncompetitively, people will forget that you’re a snow leopard and an emotionally stunted former child star and they’ll want to buy your next album.

I’ll do whatever you say. You’re my best friend.

I’m your 63-year-old male publicist.

But you sent me that Dean & Deluca gift basket.

…

Please don’t make me wear sneakers.

You can still wear your Louboutins. Just get photographed tripping in them every now and again. Clumsy girls scream “relatable.”

What are you doing now? Do you want to go for a drive in my Town Car? Do you want to come over and watch Dance Moms?

I thought we talked about this.

You’re right. I’m sorry. Just give me the list.

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Incubation Period

November 15, 2014 1:48 pm ,

“Tighten up, Felicia,” says Felicia. “Two more houses and you’re done.” She wrings the sweat from her bandit mask then stuffs it into the pocket of her stretchy jeans. How long has her fly been down? “These stretchy jeans came straight from hell,” says Felicia, zipping up. She leans over a blue mailbox, murmuring ad jingles and trying not to vomit, as the shortie princesses pass by with their parents.

“What are you supposed to be?” asks a preteen gremlin in a surgical mask. “A fat old lady?”

“Fuck off,” says Felicia. “Halloween is for everybody.” She’s got thirty years and seventy pounds on the gremlin, making her infinitely better at trick-or-treating. His plastic bag barely bulges, while her flannel pillowcase is almost at capacity. She peers into its gaping maw and begins to salivate, which induces a coughing fit. “You will feast tonight, Felicia,” says Felicia, when she catches her breath. Precisely once a year everything goes right for her.

Rich neighborhoods are known for the superior quality of their candy giveaways. Five city blocks of Georgetown will net Felicia enough booty to take her through November. Sours are her favorite. If it doesn’t make her mouth pucker into a butthole, it’s barely worth opening. No to caramel apples. No to toothbrushes. Yes to Jolly Ranchers, but predominantly greens. No to things that taste like coconut. Her stomach is killing her so she sucks down a WarHead’s bitter medicine.

A solitary witch skips by wearing goggles and holding a plastic pumpkin bucket. The bottom hem of the girl’s black gown collects more filth than the bristles of her broomstick. Felicia tails the witch to the next townhouse, the kind you live in if you’re a United States senator. They make their way up the stairs through the warm gauntlet of jack o’ lanterns. “Go ahead and do the bell if you want,” says Felicia, feeling weak in the jeans, and the witch rises gratefully to her tiptoes.

“Trick-or-treat,” they both say when a statesman answers the door in a werewolf onesie. He seems surprised to see a middle-aged woman standing at eye level on his stoop, brandishing a pillowcase. Maybe he’s from the country. When he removes his merkin of a monst

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An addendum to my roster of embarrassments

November 14, 2014 4:52 pm , 4 Comments ,

Because I always start out trying to be inspirational and end up being discouraging and overly ironic, I thought I would add a little something to my last post and not be so evasive this time.

For a long time I didn’t do my blog. I was embarrassed. I felt ashamed of what I’d already written and of what I might write. Strangers could see me in all my unbearable colors (i.e., earth tones). Worse still, friends and acquaintances could find me and scrutinize me through the aquarium glass of the Internet like I was some scaly, immobile thing in the Reptile House and they had to figure out if I was dead or not.

But that is all in the past. I no longer care what goes up and whether my visitors think I’m such a poor specimen that the snake handlers have forgotten to feed and water me. I am committed to busting loose. Here is what happened:

  • My friend A started an art project. Every day she forced herself to post one item of work online. One picture per day. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re sad or cranky or down on yourself, it’s everything. And now she has this badass portfolio that no one would ever guess she created with a gun to her head.
  • My friend X has kept a LiveJournal since 2006. She doesn’t publicize it, but it’s there and it’s wonderful. She’s been published in lots of prestigious journals, but writing something secret online every day makes her feel less lonely in her art. Right now I find her quiet URL to be the most powerful place on the Internet.
  • I read the book Show Your Work which basically told me to get over myself.
  • I let go of projected opinions. That snobby old writing professor is not looking over my shoulder, judging me for my attempt at online relatability. David Remnick is not sitting in his corner office at Conde Nast thinking, “I’d give her the fiction centerfold in the next issue if she weren’t such a blogger.” Nobody gives a shit. Besides, my mom’s opinion is the only one that matters.
  • I finally found my visitor stats, which indicated that no one was reading my website anyway.
  • Unemployment.
  • My therapist started working with me on being more assertive. Being assertive is not only about saying, “Hey buddy, it’s not okay that you’re stepping on my toes.” It’s also about saying, “Hey buddy, here are my toes tra-la-la-la-la and when I wiggle them the sparkle nail polish catches the light and yes I might have a mild case of athlete’s foot but only angels are immune to fungus.”
  • I realized how unhappy I was not participating in the world, even in a little, whispery way.
  • I’ve changed my mind about so many people. On too many occasions I’ve judged as I’m petrified of being judged myself. And yet I’ve often found my judgments to be wrong—or at least pliable. A writer I thought was a talentless hack eventually wins me over by her unapologetic hackiness. A novelist’s second novel makes me go back and read his first with new eyes. Someone on Facebook whose feeds I once found obnoxious starts posting about whales or something and I’m like, “Hey, this guy’s actually pretty cool.” So even if I annoy the shit out of someone one or one hundred times, there’s always a chance I can redeem myself later. If Gawker.com can eventually come around to Lena Dunham, a handful of people can eventually come around to me. (Gawker hasn’t done this yet but I imagine that one day maybe they will under duress from their advertisers.) The important thing is to keep making people sniff your fungus until they finally realize that they’d miss it if it disappeared. Never stop itching. Never buy the Tinactin.
  • Whatever I put online does not affect the sanctity of my work in progress, which will not see the light of day until it’s absolutely ready. In my novel I can indulge the perfectionism that would make blogging unthinkable. Whether I have a complete mental breakdown if that novel is ever published remains to be seen.

Finally, the only person I hurt when I’m in my hidey hole of embarrassment is myself. I like to write. I like to throw various foods on the wall—Twinkies, spaghetti, whole cabbages—to see what sticks. And in my limited time on this earth I’d like to be the party guest who tries to add to the conversation rather than run to the bathroom where I pretend to wash my hands for an hour. In the long run, being embarrassed is more embarrassing than doing embarrassing things.

Now if I could only stop crapping my pants.

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