I continue to wrestle with the contextualization of art—especially my art—even though I am getting better at not caring. If I were to create a beautiful table, there would be a shared context for that table: it’s a table. No one would question the rounded corners or intricately designed legs. No one would wonder why I created this specific table. Everyone would simply appreciate it for what it was to them—even if it was simply something to set things on. Art, on the other hand, is purely symbolic. A book is paper, glue, ink; but unless one understands the symbols represented inside it, it is roughly the same as a rock. Unfortunately, it is not enough just to understand the words as signifiers of things. One could easily read and understand every word in a book and gleem not a single idea from it. Thusly came my idea for a kind of theater that coddles the audience—that teaches it enough to enjoy what it is watching. People want to find meaning in art, but it stands alone—without context. This is why artists of all kinds need to produce a critical mass of work; it usually takes time for others to contextualize the work.

Consider this: Fifty years from now, Tom Stoppard will not be considered the great artist Samuel Beckett is today. This is not to say that Stoppard is not a great writer—I think he is; I am reading Rock’N’Roll right now—I don’t have time to read plays by hacks. But let’s look at Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead for a moment.It is basically Vladimir (as Guildenstern) and Estrgon (as Rosencrantz) from Waiting for Godot thrown into the middle of Hamlet. There is nothing new here. Admittedly, it is wonderfully creative and great fun; but it is just a variation (and a minor one at that) on Godot. In fact, I would say that Stoppard is ripping off Godot more than Beckett ever did after he wrote it. Endgame? Happy Day? These plays are in no way variations on the theme of Godot.

Under ordinary circumstances, Waiting for Godot would have been a flop; it would have taken years for it to be seen for its greatness. But it had two things going for it. First, Beckett was James Joyce‘s assistant and I think most people thought he was going to take up where Joyce left off. (Thankfully, he did not; I would love to discuss this, but it doesn’t matter and it is getting off track.) But he was already a respected writer and scholar when he wrote Godot. Second, there is something about the nature of the play—the stripping away of what was still (is still) largely Victorian theater that made the fact of meaning in the play obvious to even the most ossified audience. I specifically mean that the audience could not help but understand that there was meaning in the play—maybe important meaning; I am most certainly not saying that they knew what that meaning was.

Barring the part about getting to work with Joyce, I would prefer to have the life of Stoppard; but oh, how I wish I could create like Beckett!

You can see why I write a lot of drafts: they don’t improve very much from one to the next.

Kristen McHenry has made a list of her fears. One of them is fear of someone reading my first draft. By this, I must assume that either her second drafts are final, or she is not afraid of someone reading her second drafts, or—and most troubling, she simply forgot to list the drafts that she fears someone reading. This last one bothers me so much because, other than this blog, I write many drafts of my work—upwards of 100 drafts for a piece of work. I don’t know about Ms. McHenry; maybe it’s plop, spell check, publish. But I doubt this. Thus, I wonder: does she fear someone reading any draft other than her final draft? Is it just certain drafts—say, 2,3 5, and 11? Or perhaps just the even drafts? Perhaps the prime numbers? Maybe it is even a mathematical sequence, like: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on. Perhaps it is a more interesting sequence? One that I couldn’t even figure out and I am rather good at these kinds of things.

I understand the desire to withhold a work of art until it is finished. I have, for example, never let anyone read my first novel Kamping on Asphalt—not that people were tripping over themselves to get a copy. The truth is that the very idea of a draft is not clear to me in the sense that it usually takes an enormous amount of writing to get to something that one might call a first draft. I find the process goes something like this: crap, crap, crap, crap, crap with an interesting idea, crap, crap, crap with that interesting idea turned into a major dorky part of it, dorky crap, dorky, dorky, something readable but bad. The final result: the “first” draft.

Let me explain with the current draft of the first chapter of my second novel Treading Asphalt. I decided that because KOA was written in limited third-person, I would like to do TA in first person. That’s what Joseph Heller did, so how hard could it be? It was a bitch. It took me two years to find the voice of the narrator (and he was a major character in KOA, so I had a running start at it). And so here is what I would call my first draft of the first chapter of TA (note my fearlessness):

Okay. Okay. It is genre crap, but I’m trying to make a living here. I would show you my second draft, but I fear people reading my second drafts. No, just kidding. But I won’t show you my second draft anyway—I can’t find it. Here’s my third (or maybe fourth), however:

So I say, free yourself Ms. McHenry! Free yourself from this first draft fear! I have never met a writer whose work didn’t suck 99% of the time. Hell, I can show you writers whose published work sucks 99% of the time! Embrace your ineptitude; accept your ignorance; relish your double commas and similar typos; proudly right, “Theirs know perphection end da whirled.”

I have so much to do, especially finish my article and interview with Pow Wow (Wayne Poehlman), but I just ran into an old friend Yana Bogosian who I wrote a song with about eleven years ago. Actually, we didn’t write it together. She had written a little nursery rhyme about a pipe that was leaking behind the wall in her apartment. She wrote more than I’m going to quote, but I don’t remember the rest, because I didn’t rip that part off. Here’s what I remember:

There’s a leak, but we can’t find it
There’s a bust hiding behind it

I was struck with this. For her it was a poem/song that was concrete: it was about her life. But it started in me a creative explosion. And never being one to shy away from ripping off other people’s lives (and I gave her lead songwriting credit even though I wrote all of it except for those two line), I went with it. I thought it would be really surreal if a leaky pipe caused a whole town to flood. Hence the song.

I will get my little studio hooked up shortly and provide an MP3, but for now, here are the lyrics:

There’s a leak but we can’t find it
There’s a bust hiding behind it
And it’s spraying you can’t hind
Turning indoors to outside.

And my friendly next door neighbor
Turning angry into labor
He knows something isn’t clear
In my house it’s very queer.

The Police come, they’re not grinning
‘Though my friends are now all swimming
There’s a beach ball flying high
Hits a cop right in the eye.

Now it’s seeping out the doorway
And I’m mute ’cause no more to say
And the streets are filling up
Watch the floating coffee cups.

So the ‘copters come to save us
And we try hard to behave, must
Tell them all we didn’t know
‘Bout the pipe before it broke.

There’s a leak but we can’t find it
There’s a bust hiding behind it
And it’s spraying you can’t hind
Turning indoors to outside.

There’s a leak but we can’t find it
There’s a leak but we can’t find it
There’s a leak.

Great art? Perhaps not. But the songs that I have written like this tend to be among my favorites. Things like: “My Suitcase and a Clown” and “You Make me Want to be a Meat Inspector”; things that share much with Shel Silverstein, but which are far more adult in content—silly on the surface, but troubling below (e.g. “My Suitcase and a Clown” is explicitly about a violent contract negotiation between a ventriloquist and his “dummy” but is implicitly about the American class system). And musically far more adventurous than the late great Mr. Silverstein.

But it was great to see Yana again.