christopher cocca

The MFA Collective recently asked who the greatest novelist writing in English is/was.  They say Conrad.  I was/am happy to agree.  Sure, it’s subjective.  But I stand by it.

We had a brief pre-class discussion last week about who the most influential writer of the 20th century was.   It struck me that there are any number of writers who we might call “quintessentially 20th century” but that doesn’t really help.  And what to do with the fact that many, many people don’t even read (or hear of) Flannery O’Connor until college (and then usually only if they persue English)?  Or was that just the English program at my mid-to-late 90’s high school? (I’m not knocking that program, by the way.  It’s a huge reason I do what I do).

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 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.

I’ve always thought that my writing is very heavily influenced by cinema.  I think and write in terms of scenes, and this has much to with with the enmity that exists between me and the use of typically structured literary transitions.

What I didn’t realize until recently was how heavily my reading of comic books as a kid influenced this same preference/aesthetic.  Obviously, writing comics and writing cinema have much in common, but my view of movies as visual literature grew, I see, from my read of comics.

That’s not to say I didn’t read traditional books as a kid.  I certainly did.  But I read “The Dark Knight Returns” and “Untold Legends of the Batman” before I read “Johnny Tremain” (excellent all).  I’m not sure where “My Side of The Mountain” fits into this chronology, but I know I read it at the same time I was working through the “Peanuts Treasury.”

And so my literary terseness and impatience for descriptors have pedigrees predating my work in microfiction/nonfiction or the way I structured DREGS.  It’s where my rhythm comes from and informs from the inside the way I hear my writing.

Have you read it?  What did you think?  I expect spoilers to follow.  Are you looking forward to the movie?

On a related note, my first novel, DREGS, sits now in the hands of a supremely able editor who will be helping me get it ready for a new round of submission.  I’ve had some very promising and detailed feedback from some great agents and am looking forward to the next editing phase.  In the meantime, I’ve decided to cut some tension by focusing on a new medium.  I’ve started writing comic book/graphic novel scripts and it’s unleashed new creativity.  I’m not abandoning microfiction (or in the case of the novel, episodic fiction) by any means, but there’s a lot we can all learn about storytelling, plot and voice from writers like Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman (not a exclusively comic book writer, but still).

Oh, I also just got Leonard Cohen’s “Beautiful Losers” and “Let Us Compare Mythologies” in the mail.  Am looking forward to those.

Usual car-ride music with my son is the Beach Boys’ “Smiley Smile/Wild Honey” double-packaged albums and, when he’s really cranky, “Pet Sounds.”

This morning when we got to the car, Nirvana’s version of “The Man Who Sold The World” just started on the local alternative station.

I’ve always gotten a Christ vibe from that song and it’s latent in Nirvana’s unplugged track and in Bowie’s original.

I started thinking about setting it to various scenes from Jesus movies, specifically ones around the resurrection and doing the same with “Mad World” and the crucifixion. The uncertainty of both songs is so anxious and human.

Every culture recasts the central figures of its pantheon from age to age. For scientifically confident 20th century Western people the Formulaic Christ made sense – the legal codes and logical proofs and self-improvement sermons. The postmodern Christ strikes me as anxious…not tentative or provisional; faithful but not triumphantly certain. Fear and trembling in the Garden. OK-God-if-you-say-so-(and-I-think-you-say-so). That this faith is vindicated in the narratives by the resurrection is not a foregone conclusion in the Garden on Thursday where there’s tension and anxiety. We’re mostly Thursday people. And so this Thursday Christ is one I relate to in moments of piety. The Anxious Christ is also hopeful, and that’s often the best we can do. I think that’s probably okay.

Because we don’t have time.  I don’t mean this literally.  I mean we don’t have patience.  At least I don’t.  I don’t have patience for very long things unless they’re very good.  I don’t have patience for dying metaphors and rough drafts.  As a reader, I don’t need to invest very much patience into someone’s micro-fiction.  If something I read is bad, at least I didn’t have to spend too much patience on it.  If it’s good, everybody wins.

As a writer I have even less patience.  I write micro-fiction because, like I said the other day, it’s how people actually live. This isn’t a conscious choice I make.  I haven’t plotted to mimic the disconnected lives we lead with terse prose that rudely (an adverb!) refuses segue or transition or explanation.  It just feels honest as a matter of form. Honesty in terms of content is something that comes after much struggle most of the time.  How to say what I mean as succinctly as I feel or know it?  is the issue.  Sometimes it’s quick. Mostly, though, the stuff that comes quick needs a good deal of work.

Micro-fiction punches in the way things really happen and it’s popular because it’s moment to moment, like we are, and because it exalts the moments we cling to, love, hate, or fear.  In the end there’s nothing small about it.  Most things we carry happened in a moment and evoked something in us outside of the context of our narrated-backstory lives.   It’s the mind-numbing, cliched details of that narration that are more rightly called “micro,” the tired conversations around the same sets of issues and people by which we keep ourselves small.  Micro-fiction subverts that with its impatience for those parts of your story that aren’t yours only.  

The kids next door have names like Jessie and Jordan.  They’re college-age but don’t go. My wife and I are 25 and we bought this house for the nursery because she was still pregnant.

We’re on the end of our row in the West End of town 10 blocks from where downtown is bad. There’s a bar on the corner and the elementary school a block down where I walk the dog but Amy stays in.

We usually hear them, Jessie and Jordan. Conversations mostly, loud sex through our thick plaster walls just once, and starting last night it’s pool balls cracking, dropping in pockets, rolling down plastic tubes towards the front.

There’s a black curtain over their door you can see from the street. We have one too but it’s white. There’s a TV in their front room, but we have nice new furniture that matches our walls and trim.  The pool table sounds come from that part of their house that should be the dining room.  We have antique pecan chairs and a table and hutch with good glass and china.

We sit in the living room and hear their TV and we talk about our day and how we’re depressed. Amy’s sick this week. I hate my job and talk about quitting. The cat buries herself in the fringed needlework pillows that match our new sofa.

“I think they got a pool table,” I say. I picture their half of our twin. They watch TV from the table and wear hoodies and cargo pants and it’s dark in there I bet it’s a place you can crash. Like when we were dating.

We should move the pecan set downstairs and bring up the TV.That way we can eat and watch cartoons and Cheers like we used to. That way we can crash upstairs on old couches and smoke and play pool and 8-bit Nintendo with games from the 80s. We’ll put action figures in the hutch and put our china and glass in the coal room. In the spring we’ll watch baseball with the windows all open even when it rains.

These things won’t really happen and so I don’t say them. We are young professionals. We are 25. Amy’s sick this week, same as last. The cat lifts her head and buries it again and I talk about quitting.

Missy recently commented on a older post about saying what you have to say in ways that only you can. I came across this explanation of what George Orwell called “dying metaphors” and I think it’s worth sharing:

From wikipedia:

“A dying metaphor is a derogatory term coined by George Orwell in his essay Politics and the English Language. Orwell defines a dying metaphor as a metaphor that isn’t dead (dead metaphors are different, as they are treated like ordinary words), but has been worn out and is used because it saves people the trouble of inventing an original phrase for themselves. In short, a cliché. Example: Achilles’ heel. Orwell suggests that writers scan their work for such dying forms that they have ’seen regularly before in print’ and replace them with alternative language patterns.”

What are some of the worst?