Helping translate Carles

This began as a private Facebook post for friends and family but, you know what? A lot of folks are telling me (via Twitter, okay) they're having some trouble hustling through Carles's latest. And all that really says to me is, I have read WAY too much Hipster Runoff in my time.

"Carles," by the way, is the anonymous, erstwhile proprietor of a blog called Hipster Runoff, which -- underneath several layers of "hipster" "scare-quotes" denoting "irony" -- was, ironically, a home for spectacularly adroit culture commentary. (I guess I'd point toward Hulk Film Crit, BAKOON, Steve Roggenbuck, and some other alt-lit personalities as Carles's nearest analogues, although I suspect those writers would hate the comparison.)

What follows below will be kind of an overreduction of some of Carles's points (here I refer to "Netstream vs Mainstream: How the internet created a new breed of lamestreamers"), but hopefully you will find this little rumination helpful, if that type of thing remotely even floats your boat.

- Carles begins his essay with a Venn diagram and I think he means, with it, to illustrate that culture is no longer really monolithic. This is to say, there really was a time everyone watched Cosby Show; everyone listened (willingly or not) to Cher; everyone watched the same nightly news report. But thanks specifically to the advent of cable television, culture has fractured in turn. (There was a recent furor because some Olds struggled to understand how younger, nonwhite music fans had never heard of the Beatles, if you'll recall. Well, this is how, and we're the ones who built it.)

Simply put, no matter whether you espouse right-wing or left-wing ideology, there is a channel specifically for you; you can read Pitchfork for music reviews tailored to your tastes; you can branch away from that onetime "monolithic" culture and hone more "eclectic" tastes (oh my god now I'M doing the quotes thing), and good for you, you fucking hipster.

Lengthy aside: But it isn't really that hip or "indie" of you at all, is it? Like, there was a time you had to root through the stacks for great music, had to dig through Factsheet Five for cool zines, had to follow a bunch of comics blogs on Livejournal to discover the "next big thing" -- whereas, now, a media outlet or, worse, a Netflix or Pandora algorithm is doing all the legwork for you, just as Carles asserts in his op/ed. They're all serving you media; you aren't the one finding it. Yeah, sure, you're a hipster, except you're not. You're not authoring your sense of "self" [which is really to say, your "stats card" of "likes" and "dislikes," and I would say it was Friendster that ushered in that era of consumption-as-identity] as retaliation against the monolith, the Man. Entirely on the contrary, you're being served your identity -- which I think is Carles's Old Man Hipster point here. Given the Internet and its accessibility, none of us has hipster cred; none of us is an indie, a nerd, a geek. Not anymore.

But what we do have now, given this cultural fracture, is not necessarily a good thing -- we're all branching off into our own respective echo chambers, and the result of that seismic drift is less diversity on network television, no Saturday morning cartoons, and a whole lot of non-information peddled for entertainment's sake. (Sorry, I'm only partway through Amusing Ourselves to Death.) Basically, instead of changing society, changing a monolithic culture, we've preferred to splinter into several separate, discrete factions -- discrete channels of culture, if you will -- so that a FOX viewer who likes The Wire (I don't know! whatever!) has trouble even communicating with a CNN viewer who enjoys, uhhhh, interior design shows, so little common ground do they share. The point is, politics and news are just still more shit you're being sold, and what you purchase as a consumer -- what you pay your eyeballs toward, what receives your attention and, therefore, your advertising revenue -- doubles as all the markers of your identity. This is the future we deliberately constructed.

So I think that's why Carles included the Venn diagram, and I think the overlap is supposed to represent the "best" of us, who are literate in both spheres, who function as sort of cultural polyglots.

- I do think, to be successful at anything, you have to appeal to the sensibilities of "both" spheres (these are, according to Carles, "netstreamers" and "mainstreamers"). I don't know if you remember the backlash when Jonathan Franzen refused to let The Corrections become an Oprah Book Club selection, but some perceived his snub as anti-housewife, intellectual class warfare. Now, that said, I do get the instinct to refuse to let Oprah shill for your book, so I guess I don't really have an opinion here, except only to say that, yes, it behooves you to be able to be transient, to move fluidly through different spheres.

- Carles himself is pretty great at straddling those spheres, actually, because his work functions on at least two levels. I think a good half of his readers are feeling what he's putting down; the other half just thinks he's funny. It's very early-'00s Vice in that way -- that magazine pretty much defined "hipster irony" -- where some readers "got" the articles intellectually, others only "got" that it's so cute and funny to be a social provocateur, and a few stragglers were left going "well, which is the joke?" In short, being able to have your cake and eat it is, really, a goldmine.

- At this rate I'm gonna out-talk Carles, while somehow being even less coherent, so let me speed this up.

- As a freelancer or a person who works in a creative field, you are already a business, already a "brand" (the piece I'm discussing here is only the latest in Carles's series of manifestos about "scalable" brands, "scalable" social media).

Actually, that isn't a surprise: You're already a brand no matter what you do because, with the advent of social media, you're your own marketing team, you're choosing what and how to present, and it's usually an idealized version of yourself. Maybe your brand is "cute family pictures" on Facebook, but if you're tracking what your friends respond to and kind of playing to that, you're already doing what, in actuality, any monolithic media corporation does.

And any social network that hosts your profile -- they really do have ownership of your posts and pictures, by the way, and in essence those networks function as your mediators, your editors and publishers, and that's why they get to censor your status updates -- is using you as an unpaid content-generator. As Carles says, it's all symbiotic: Those networks make incredible amounts of money, yes, but without you, they'd shrivel and die. You are the one of value -- not Facebook, not Twitter.

- By the way: Not paying your content generators is one of the best moneymaking schemes around.

- The other best moneymaking scheme I can think of -- and on some level it's disingenuous as all get-out -- is to make a magazine, website, or brand seem authentic, seem sincere and "indie" and grassroots, when it secretly has all kinds of sponsorship. (I touched on this briefly over here. It's the media version of political faux-activist "astroturfing," basically. We can learn a lot about marketing our own selves from any collective that "astroturfs" -- collectives that, in turn, learned it from, ha ha, viral marketing. It's an ouroboros.)

- I've said it before, though, and it's well worth repeating: People are shrewd and cynical, they expect to be taken for a ride and are duly suspicious of that, and anything less than utmost transparency will, in time, simply not work. Yeah, I do realize just how funny it is that I've typed this -- you know, given…ethics…in… -- but I've always cited my moral belief in utmost transparency as, if at the very least, the best business practice of all, and so in retrospect everything is very funny, yes, thank you.

- (Some time ago, I transitioned to "confessional essays" in public, in part as a reaction to readers suddenly seeming very interested in, and entitled to, my private life, which at that time contained two gravely sick parents. I decided that complete transparency was preferable to obfuscation, and for me, transparency was absolutely a sort of defense mechanism. How can you badger a person with questions when there are literally no more questions to ask? So... I guess I learned a lot last year, ho ho.)

Back to Carles.

- Carles's work is emblematic of the "New Sincerity" movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Sincerity), although it isn't quite clear whether his work is intended as satirical.

- I used to often say that "irony" was distinct and separate from "hipster irony." If irony is saying one thing and meaning another, "hipster irony" adds one more layer: It's saying one thing as if you mean another, when at heart you really meant the first thing after all.

Similarly, if "kitsch" (in which New Sincerity has some roots) is professing to like something because it's ugly, "hipster kitsch" would be professing to like something "because it's ugly" when, in actuality, you find that thing very beautiful. In that regard, I might "hipster-ironically" adore Sheryl Crow -- because I sincerely think her songs are catchy, that she has tremendous vocal range, and that she's a wildly talented singer-songwriter who effortlessly produces perfect pop.

If I had a slightly different temperament I'd call her music "a guilty pleasure"; I'd use a semantic loophole to sound disaffected, to not have to perform my fandom for Sheryl Crow for others. In that regard, "hipster irony" -- the act of saying exactly what you mean as if you don't really mean it -- is intended as an added layer of obfuscation, keeping your private thoughts private by putting them out in plain view, while smirking.

- The New Sincerity movement gets confused a lot with "twee," but it isn't always twee, or maudlin.

With that said, a lot of creative nonfiction writing -- here I'm actually thinking of the "confessional essay" niche, which has always existed as a sort of variation on "magazine-style writing" but which Dave Eggers, himself a onetime editor of magazines, perhaps finally made marketable with A Heartbreaking Work -- really does qualify, satisfying the aesthetic's few criteria. That's because, on some level, the confessional essay, the memoir, is going to be manufactured in some way. Maybe it will aspire for the heights of "truth," sure, but it'll still fail simply because the narrative is, yes, constructed -- and that is inescapable.

At the very beginning of Alone With All That Could Happen, writing professor David Jauss outright laments that there is little truth to be found in memoir -- only people putting forth their idealized selves (which, I'd warn, you know, some of us DO enjoy self-flagellation, DO enjoy punishing ourselves by experimenting with making ourselves look just as awful as possible, but in that case the "lie" skews in the opposite direction, this time toward humiliation instead) -- and, Jauss puts forth, this is why everyone ought to abandon nonfiction writing in lieu of fiction. Because there CAN be no truth in nonfiction, he says; fiction, meanwhile, gives us opportunities to couch the truth.

- This last point used to drive me into existential peril pretty much daily, and I think the same crisis is happening to Carles. That is to say, I suspect not even Carles is sure whether Carles is being sincere. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. If I'm right, though, I sympathize.

- At the time that I first watched the movie Synecdoche, New York -- which discusses, very well, "memoir" and memoir's sad descent into fiction, delusion, and simulacra -- I remember typing out my thoughts on it, and I distinctly remember using the phrase "concentric rings of bullshit" to describe the main character's horrible gradual distancing from his "authentic self," which is to say, his real emotional core.

Admittedly I've only seen the movie once, and that's because I can't stand to watch it twice through. (All Charlie Kaufman's movies give me serious agita.) But on all that, I think you can eventually become so performative -- whether that performance is one of "sincerity" or the alternative performance of never saying what you mean at all -- that you yourself can become incredibly confused by those obfuscating layers.

- Carles, meanwhile, is trying to sell off the Hipster Runoff domain, and I think he's in the process of attempting to explain the artistic vision he'd like for the website's new owner to maintain in his absence.

But I do think he's also presenting, on another level, a warning -- you can't maintain that stylistic choice for too long before it starts to require any existential relief -- and, without cognizance and vigilance, you're going to lose a certain sense of personal identity when you create a "brand" for yourself. It's an eventuality.

"Why do you write?"

You asked me this three months ago, and I ought to have answered it right away, since it plays so heavily to my ego. But I've written so rarely in the last three months, I guess I didn't have an answer. I never *didn't* write. My first short story, which is barely written in a human language, is scrawled in crayon in the Dr Seuss book 'My Book About Me'. In it, I and my siblings (I have no siblings, which is to say, this was a fiction piece) all fly away from my parents' house on the broad muscular back of Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was, you know, a first draft. My first software was 'Storybook Weaver', a piece of edutainment that combined clip art with blank pages. I used it to make "Choose Your Own Adventure" stories. I graduated to Microsoft Works, where once every day I'd hammer out a chapter of my terrific novel, 'Tears of Aphrodite' (your guess is as good as mine). A few years later, I'd decided I would write adventure games -- playable novels -- for a living. I remember my mother telling another woman this, and the woman turned to me and said, "Well, you won't be able to have children, then!" I remember actually agreeing with her, as if co-signing to an emotional or intellectual fertility meant relinquishing a biological fertility. In middle school I briefly published a sort of broadsheet. I likely believed that, despite my low social ranking, I could use my great grammar and nerdy vocabulary to produce something other students would feel special about *reading*. Even at that remote time I think I understood that what one consumes -- and by extension, what one writes -- could be a status symbol. So at that time I was writing for the same reasons a guy might become a musician ("to land chicks"), except in my case I seriously thought I could "land friends." In college I learned that the opposite is true: Especially if you're writing "from life," writing is a spectacular way to *lose* friends. I think I always knew, too, that writing was a piss-poor way to make money; after college, I discovered it is no way to win any prestige, either. Two nights ago my grandmother worried aloud, on the phone, that I'd never been taught to handle money; she knew, thanks to my mom, that I'd never managed to quite make my own monthly rent. I explained (in an unconvincing way) that even when I'd had a salary -- just once, the only time I've ever had a salary, in San Francisco -- it was $30k, which put me beneath SF's poverty line. I explained to my disappointed grandmother that the most I've ever been paid for a piece is $250 (by the New York Times), and that most outlets competitively pay $50 per 2000-word article. I admitted to her, on the phone, that there is no good reason to continue writing. I recently explained all this to Some Guy on Twitter, Some Guy who thought it was "ironic" that a writer at The Atlantic was writing on the subject of poverty. I tapped out a quick response -- about how writing does not pay so much, and I used experiential data in my reply -- and he told me, if there is no living wage in what I do, I am clearly not good enough, and it is time for me to seek another avenue. I pretended to be offended, but I do think he's right. The terrible reality is, at this stage I can't say why I write at all. I do like to say that "writing can be taught," and I do believe that, but I especially believe it when I read things from authors who've only written for a couple years, and they already intuit things about "writing" I can only hope to understand after several more lifetimes. So that is painful knowledge, when you have always written but, indeed, have very little hope at ever being "the best" or even "good" at it. I am answering this question at a strange juncture in my life, you know. I am almost 32, I hope to start a family, I live in a city of 15000 people, and it has become impossible for me to imagine a life where games writing, or any writing, is a real possibility anymore. So now I've arrived at a stage in my life where, instead of waking up each morning and picturing what I'll write, I try to picture *not* writing. Instead, I try to think of, literally, anything else I could be capable of doing. It is not a self-pitying mental exercise; rather, I just try to concentrate on anything else. I'm not sure yet. I think very hard on the real possibiliity that I've misspent my life. I've always encouraged young writers but, at this point, I worry one of them will find me and shoot me.

This is such a lovely question, I feel like crying. No, "creative nonfiction" doesn't need to be a perpetually oozing sore. I often worry that's what I'm doing. I also worry that, without my parents' interminable march toward death, I now have nothing left to write about. And I don't mean I've run out of "material"; I mean, I worry that everything I loved is gone. I worry about that a lot. Ugh, that's some emo crap. Let me actually step back several years. When I first began a new job in 2006 -- a very visible, "full-frontal" job as a CM -- I quickly learned the score. People online wanted to figure out everything I'd ever done prior to the age of 23, and violate that. (Now we call that process "doxxing.") And I reacted! I reacted by burying my Internet presence, which had begun in 1995: I concealed all my writing, all my essays, plus my decade-old journal; I erased the Chicago plays I'd been in; I hid my old songs and my old band. And when that CM career ended, people -- not the same group of people, a broader swath this time -- felt really bizarrely entitled to discovering what had "happened to me." At this stage, and convinced I'd never work again, I went into further seclusion with my parents. My father had descended deeply into Alzheimer's by now; a year later my mother would experience septic shock and organ failure for only the first time. It wasn't until her sepsis that I realized *I wanted to talk about that*. And in 2010, writing for the first time about his Alzheimer's and her sepsis for Kill Screen Magazine, I gnashed my teeth a little: "I'm finally writing about what everyone is DYING TO KNOW, but this isn't anybody's fucking business." But I liked writing about it. I felt really bolstered by the idea of writing a 10,000-word piece in a print magazine -- how could anybody ever even read it? If no one ever reads it, I figured, I can write down whatever I want. So that was the first time I ever wrote exactly what was on my mind, and I really credit my editor, Chris Dahlen, with that. Afterward I kept thinking about how invigorating that two-month writing exercise was. My next big piece, for Unwinnable, was maybe a third of the length, and a third of the intricacy, of that Kill Screen thing I'd written. I realized I could make "easier" versions of that piece of writing for a web audience, make the same type of writing faster, more relatable, more consumable. And there was a huge benefit to that: Instead of deliberately concealing my life, my history, and my family's life, I could *write my own origin story*. I could finally take ownership of all those old horrors that popped up when you google my byline. I could change them into something, not positive exactly, but human. I've never really become "at ease" about writing about myself, but I understand some people do want to "know" and, rather than hiding myself, I put it down onto paper or screen. It's actually a way of taking control of my own identity, of "protecting myself." Mind you, I don't want to make myself look "good." I realize the worst thing about creative nonfiction essay writing is the author's dying need to absolve herself over this or that or the other. Rather, I paint myself in as ugly colors as possible. If the author doesn't have a religious experience -- if she doesn't completely eviscerate herself in search of her point -- what does it matter? What does it all mean? If I include other people in my nonfiction writing, I usually (but, admittedly, not always) run the piece past them for fact-checking. If it passes my friends' and acquaintances' "veracity" tests, I publish. If not, I revise until my version of reality matches my friends'. If I were to start over right now -- if I were to become 23 again, and become my old precocious self -- I hope I would not hide. I hope, when people prodded at my accomplishments and my history, instead of hiding those, I would write a nice big full essay about being happy and fulfilled. If people were to wonder about my lack of productivity at work, I hope, instead of hiding beneath my desk, I'd describe my father, that great old man with his great big hands and his gravelly voice, and explain what that loss feels like. What I'm saying is, there's nothing to be lost via openness and receptivity, and everything to gain. I've never actually hurt people by being open; I've only hurt others by closing myself off. And I DO think there's lots to be gained from those realizations: Writers, creators, makers of all ilks, would do well to practice authenticity. Because the reality is, people CAN tell when you're lying! No, being a festering wound of truthfulness isn't "cool" by any stretch, but at least you're trustworthy and reliable. And those count for a lot more than being "cool." So thank you, anonymous querent. No, you don't have to divulge every life detail when meeting a new person, but I do think imbuing your interactions with authentic anecdotes -- coloring moments where you have to do PR, introduce new people, introduce yourself -- makes you much more reliable. Just make sure you aren't fibbing. If you have to, make sure you're uglier than usual. Just make sure it's the truth, or at least that it sounds like it. People can tell.

My mother

(It's International Women's Day, so I wrote a quick thing about my adoptive mother, who was also my great-aunt, who was also a woman.)

Writer's Block

"This stupid fucking horse," Daphny said, punching the buttons on the Xbox controller. I opened a blank document on my laptop. "Oh, did that hurt?" Daphny said. I looked up at her. "Talking to my horse," she explained. "Your horse is a Shit Horse," Ted said thoughtfully. "I hate Horse," Daphny replied. My writer's block is terrible. "Did you get to the part where the moose is a forest god?" Ted asked me. "That was a pretty important part, I thought." I typed that part, too. "This is the worst open document in the history of laptops," I announced. Ted and Daphny continued to narrate Skyrim out loud. Meanwhile, Ted's cat landed on the coffee table in a single fluid leap. She pressed her feline nose daintily against an empty bottle of cider, then against the lip of my beer bottle. "Jen, look at this butt," Daphny commanded me. Ted told me to move the laundry from the washer to the dryer. "Oh! It worked!" Daphny exclaimed, cutting off Ted mid-instruction. "I shot an arrow into the butt!" "Good lord," Ted said from over my shoulder. "I can't believe I said that," he added, acknowledging Shit Horse. "That seems so out of character." It did seem out of character, but Ted had really said it. "I can't believe how blocked I am," I sighed. "How can you have writer's block?" Ted said. "You're writing right now. You're a writer. How can you be a writer and have writer's block?" "Well," I said. "I think you've answered your own question." "Just don't start typing things before we actually say them," Ted warned me. On the television screen, Daphny's hands were illuminated. Somehow she was driving tiny motes of light out of her fingertips and palms. "Did you go to the Mage College yet," Ted asked her. Now Ted and Daphny were arguing over whether Ted had said "Mage School" or "Mage College," and also whether it were even called "Mage College." "It's the Mage College at Winterhold," Ted huffed. "Winterhold?" I asked. "Winterhold," Ted agreed. "Is that one word?" "Yes," Ted told me. He frowned and circled my laptop. "Well," he said, "that looks ready to publish."

"Yes," I agreed, "I think I'll call it 'Writer's Block'."

blog comment to Laura

This is supposed to be a comment on a blog. I'm posting it -- ugh -- over here on my Tumblr instead, just because I ended up going way outside the bounds of whatever is permissible as a blog comment.