B:

I've been listening to Viva Last Blues whilst reading your portfolio & journal. Excellent combination. Your writing reminds me of Will Oldham. From an excerpt of a terrible interview with him (in which, in spite of the idiocy of the interviewer, he was able to say some pretty intelligent things):

"I don't know what the point would be," he [that'd be the Bonnie Prince, himself] said of autobiographical songwriting. "The songs are not meant to be real life. They're meant to have a psychic -- rather than a factual -- bearing on the listener. It's rare that a song grounded in reality moves me because I don't feel like I'm getting the whole story. Songs are made to exist in and of themselves, like a great James Jones or Robert Louis Stevenson novel -- they're not autobiographical, and yet there's a reality in every single page. It's real life of the imagination."

In fact, Oldham said, autobiographical songwriting would lead to a "perversion of an approach in life that I couldn't live with. How could you have a good time with a brother, wife or girlfriend or have an argument with them and not think about how to capitalize on the situation in your material?"

Your journal entries have given me much pleasure over the course of the semester. Frankly, though, I've also been rather perplexed by them. You give nothing away--reading them along with all of your classmates' entries, I've often became frustrated. I couldn't figure out what you were doing. I'm not quite sure that I have figured it out. But thanks to Will Oldham and your final exam, I've got more of a sense of what you were trying to do with both your journal and your essays. I think.

I respect your writing a great deal and find much of what you do hilarious, heartbreaking, and more enjoyable than anything I've read in an Eng. 101 class. My only caveat: You seem to hold such strong opinions about what is good and right writing and what is not.

Henry James, at the dawn of the modern novel, wrote, "Grant the writer his premise." This has, since I first read and understood his meaning, become my mantra as a reader: look for what the writer is attempting. Judge her on that.

There is, of course, the matter of taste. I'm not crazy about inspirational, insipid, or sentimental abstractions. This is a matter of my taste. Others may find such works (i.e. Chicken Soup for the Idiot Soul) uplifting. Fine.

As a teacher, I look to see if a student accomplishes what she/he is fully capable of accomplishing. Sometimes, all I look for is the ability to create a single, sensible sentence. As your teacher, I think you're getting there. You've a distinct voice, which you are, clearly, flexing. I want to insist that you read a million different writers (stay away from the Beats, B! You've already got the soul of a Beat--you need to imbibe some Elizabeth Bishop, now!), while at the same time giving you all of the undue praise and thanks for writing innovatively, intelligently, and both hilariously and poignantly all semester. So. My teacherly dilemma: I want you to maintain your own narrative focus, but I also want you to explore all of the great writing that you seem purposefully closed from.

You write in several of your free writes that you are not so crazy about writing that talks about writing. To some extent, I'm with you on this (if I have to hear one more fucking dickwad poet quote Rilke's "Letter to a Young Poet" AGAIN to me, I may commit dastardly crimes). But, I also believe that all writing, to some extent, is about writing. From W. H. Auden:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

When you write, whatever you write, you are, somehow, expressing your thesis about how writing should happen. Most writers write explicitly, at some point, about writing. It's what they do, after all. I know nearly nothing about the visual arts, but it strikes me the same way: if you make something, aren't you saying, in some way, this is how to create? Or this is how I create?

Well. A philosophical discussion that can happen some other time, perhaps. I have much more to say (what about that whole bit that Will Oldham says about perverting one's own life for art--I have millions of things to say about this), but I will force myself to desist.

As I have mentioned at least twice before, you have been a real pleasure to have in class. You have often raised brilliant points in discussion and your writing has also left me with much to digest. Won't you come and sit in on all of my classes? (Hmm...there must be some rung in purgatory--Eng. 101 ad nauseum, infinitum.)

Cheers, B. Someday we should drink and smoke and participate in overblown conversation. Keep in touch--

M.