christopher cocca

I’m finally reading Leonard Cohen’s 1966 novel Beautiful Losers.  So far, it’s exquisite.  Yeah, parts here and there are overwritten or a little too winky, but it was the 60s.  Some of what’s become hackneyed since then wasn’t.  You know you’re into a book (and into the writer) when you make editorial comments about style or unnecessary parenthetical asides as field notes for your own work.

What strikes me about the book is how natural Cohen is as author.   A few affected indiscretions aside, this is very organic work and the best parts seem effortless.  I’m not very far through it, but I’m far enough to know how much I’m going to like it (a lot), and to see Cohen anticipate “transgressive literature” and connect the dots to current forms. 

As a non-Canadian, I hadn’t heard of this book until after I got into Cohen’s songwriting and poetry.  Wikipedia says Beautiful Losers is considered a Canadian classic.  I wonder if it’s ubiquitous like On The Road is here.

this came in an “you know you were a child of the 80s/early 90s” email.  so true.  But I always thought it was spelled  ’psych.’

The freshman boys’ room is crashes and cologne-sweat and white-boy lucha libre. Army surplus beds are piled matting. Body checks that last year hurt into dry rot panel and broken chairs and complaining peace church Christian neighbors saying it kept them up or ruined their devotions. The Bible Camp director with your names on a clipboard confronts you in the morning and says he’ll send you home but you know they want you here too much to mean it. Your straight-faced promise to be better is stand-off penance. Vassal deference and authorities you tolerate. You laugh at him through breakfast.

A few days ago I got something in the mail from The Sun (the ad-free journal, not the tabloid). I don’t know how I got on their mailing list, but I neglected to open it until yesterday.

Affirmation is a funny thing. Here’s what hit me about The Sun’s promo piece from founder/editor Sy Safransky:

“Years ago, I was trapped in a newspaper job I couldn’t stand. Then I heard Graham Nash sing ‘Make sure the things you do keep us alive.’ The next day I walked to work, quit my job, and kept walking. Better to be a pilgrim without destination, I figured, than to cross the wrong threshold everyday.”

I think this is true. I think it has to be. My friend Nathan Key recently wrote a post about the fact that we’re not what we do. I’ll soon be transitioning into a work situation that will afford more time for writing, and I won’t have a provocative title to share at parties anymore. I’ve thought a lot about what I’m going to say at the next wedding:

“So, Chris, what do you do?”
“Well, my job is xy and z, but, well, I like to write.”

It’s like that scene from Taxi on Elaine’s first day at the Sunshine Cab Company: Bobby’s an actor, Tony’s a boxer…Alex Reiger is a cab driver, “the only cab driver in this place.”

So, there’s what we do, ie, the way we spend 40 of our waking hours every week, the thresholds that for many are wrong, and then there’s what we do in Nathan’s sense, the things we create and the things we’re proudest of. Neither define us, but we do define the latter. We’re driven to define the latter, to create, to express, and that drive is who we are. In that sense we are what we do, but not because we’re defined by it; rather, we’re defined by our own need to make meaning, to converse, to challenge and remold, reject, rejoice.

“So Chris, what do you do?”
“The Dude abides.” I get that now. I’m not what I do, and I’m not what I create, but I am an abider, a creator, a pilgrim. As for destination, I was encouraged by a note from Will Braun at Geez after reading part of one of my experimental manuscripts: “Keep going.”

It’s not that we’re without destination. It’s that our destinations don’t fit neatly into most answers to the “what do you do” question. I don’t know what I do, but I know what I’m doing. And I know that I abide, that I try to live simply and with balance so that I’m not too exhausted to do the other things I do, the things that give life and energy and meaning to my vertical hours. The things that help communities, the things that teach children and make clean air and good art. Make sure what you do keeps us alive. Make sure it keeps you alive.

This is a test post. The facebook application I’m using says I can view blog stats, add posts, and add links all from within facebook. If it works, I suppose I’ll never have to log in to my WordPress account again (until I change the header). The question is, will this save time since it’s one less reason to leave the facebook interface, or will it empower facebook to become an even larger part of my online work?

Far removed from the heyday of all-in-one services like AOL, it’s funny to see our online lives reaggregating like this. It makes sense, and it goes to show how far the web has come as viable social network.

A few months ago we talked about meaning nonfiction as fiction.  Now the Bloomsbury Review is going the other way with “imaginary nonfiction”, that is, fiction that’s meant to be read as nonfiction but (and here’s the key!) admits that it’s fiction. 

I’m not sure how imaginary nonfiction differs from fiction, since most fiction presents itself, within its fictive universe, as true.   Pitch call below:

The-Out-of Bounds Essay: Bloomsbury Review’s New Bi-Monthly Imaginary Nonfictions Feature

Editors: Reamy Jansen and Daniel Nester

We’re both looking for fresh, off-beat, non-fiction prose. No more than 300 words.
Send two copies of your entry to Reamy Jansen, 16 Homestead Ave., Highland Falls, NY 10928. Include SASE, brief bio, e-mail address, and phone number.

This is my first podcast.  These thoughts were shared at the Barn gathering in the Lehigh Valley back in June.  There are some lapses in the audio during the interactive parts of the message, so keep listening through those lulls. And then for some reason at the end it goes on and on in silence, but the track is supposed to end at the part where I start asking people to share around the 26 minute mark. On the tech side, I have some kinks to work out but this is a start.  Let me know if it works. 

The Gospel According To Ruth

I admit that post about “The Shack” was a little snarky, but it has renewed some thinking on issues around spirituality and art. 

Didactic art is often bad or often isn’t art.  I think part of the reason for this is that art is about searching for answers, contemplating truth, (for Plato, taking in the divine forms), and evoking emotions and thoughts that, in turn, evoke conversations of the same but not finally coming down in concrete ways with those answers.  Even the great works with religious characters or stories as their focus don’t try to argue or teach us into belief; they present us with compelling evocation and ask or force us to encounter their subject and consider it with them.  His religious standing aside,  Da Vinci’s great Christ-themed work forces us to consider the subject because it forces us to react.  Salvador Dali’s “Christ of St. John of the Cross” does the same.  It doesn’t matter what the artist believes or if she believes anything.  What’s important is the process she draws us into, the presentation of something compelling and asking us to make something of it, the artistic dialectic that goes on when our work is not driven by answers but by the asking. JS Bach, most certainly someone of strong devotional conviction, does the same, even though his own belief is well known and replete in his work.  Importantly, though, Bach’s work doesn’t argue or teach us into belief; it awes and amazes us and forces us to consider.  Bach’s goal wasn’t to make people believe, but rather, I think, to make them encounter.  There’s something to that. 

More in a bit.

You may know about “The Shack,” William P. Young’s self-published and then picked-up novel about a conversation between a grieving father and God.  I am reading this book for discussion in the faith community I’m involved with, though it’s not something I’m necessarily looking forward to completing. 

This is an actual line [the bracketed, cynical comments are mine]: ” ‘Idiot,’ he [WASPY main character Mackenzie Allen Phillips] grunted, thinking about Tony the mailman; an overly friendly Italian with a big heart but little tact. Why would he ever deliver such a ridiculous [unmarked, unstamped] envelope?” [Hint, I bet it's a letter from God!]

A slovenly Italian named Tony? Are you kidding me?  There’s more nuance in Super Mario Brothers. Even if I wasn’t offended as someone who identifies at least partly as Italian-American, I’d still think this was really bad suburban noir.  But I’m only on page 17.  Perhaps the parts of my brain saying “overwritten” and “show, don’t tell” [I'm more offended by these deficiencies than by the slight at my paisan] will be drawn in by something else.  Right now I’m taking notes on the perils of publishing without an editor. 

Featuring a piece I made in collaboration and other great content here.