Hey have a look. In some ways this is a stronger column than last month's, though I ended up with 2,000 words' worth of ideas and only around 650 words to fit them into, so the column doesn't tackle the post-VA Tech media frenzy and its links to the Imus sideshow (in terms of permissiveness, broadcast standards, shallowness of message, etc.). Probably for the best, all things considered; it has an abbreviated feel to me already.
[Note: You should go read the column before proceeding with this post. I'd like to know whether my own reaction to the piece as it stands is anything like that of a reader who isn't, um, me. It might not be; that wouldn't bode well.]
[Update: I closed comments on this post, and deleted Sherv's (sorry dude!), for reasons of diplomacy and so forth. If you have a comment on the column, leave it at Misstropolis! If you have agita about this long-ass post, lemme know directly; my Gmail address is waxbanks.]
Now, two points only determine a line, not a pattern; still it's interesting in my view that both of my Misstropolis submissions have originally ended with accusatory cadences, and both have been edited to be more positive, more expansive. Whatever that says about me - that I'm a judgmental bastard playing out a private drama of guilt-projection and externalization, perhaps? - I'd like to talk about these changes from a purely 'writerly' standpoint if I may. And lemme preface by saying here that I think both columns have been ably and generously edited by Robin at Misstropolis, no question. If any tone of defensiveness or possessiveness creeps into the following, it's because I want to rid myself of such impulses, and for me it helps to talk about them. Plus I want to credit her with improvements that left alone I wouldn't have made.
OK.
The very first draft of my first submission (on ethical filesharing and Phish fandom) ended this way:
More importantly, a generation of kids raised on Instant Messaging and instant gratification could be learning from the positive communitarian example of 'filesharing' communities that existed long before the Internet, and the admirably strict (but generous) ethical systems cooked up by communities of their (yes) peers. Some kids already are. Maybe even yours.
Out of curiosity, when was the last time you asked?
The final turn ('You have an obligation as a parent to deal with your kids') is one that's important to me morally, but from a rhetorical standpoint it doesn't jibe with the rest of the piece, nor with the overall vibe at Misstropolis: too aggressive, too dark. My editor at Misstropolis, Robin Hauck, provided a new ending for an intermediate draft, which I tweaked slightly for the published version:
Just imagine a generation raised on Instant Messaging (and gratification) adopting the positive, systematic ethics of true 'peer-to-peer' communities that existed long before the Internet. So much for the hoops and cutlasses; sounds a lot like the foundations of liberty and goodness to me.
That's a savvy piece of editing. The 'liberty and goodness' line echoes the opening paragraph...
To hear entertainment industry groups like the RIAA and MPAA tell it, these downloading savages - like their Barbary Coast forerunners (sans cutlasses and hoop earrings) - represent a threat to not only the Hollywood bottom line, but the very foundations of liberty and goodness.
...and is a good deal closer to the intent of the article than (for whatever reason) I was able to achieve on my own. The article is only provisionally about Phish, as you hopefully noticed, but the 1,600-word first draft went into a lot of detail about the band and its fan-history. Over the course of several hack-n-slash edits the original shed 50% of its wordcount and 90% of its fat, by the application of a simple principle: any plot that didn't move the story had to go. I have a tendency in my writing hereabouts to toss in lots of self-deprecating/aggrandizing asides and 'look how worldly I think I am!' cultural bric-a-brac/allusions, all of which needed to be cut to bring the filesharing piece down to a manageable length. More importantly, that shit distracted from the ethical insistence of the piece. The original ending was a reminder to me that the point of the column was its moral implication, but I appear to have missed the memo; Robin responded to that imperative immediately. You can train your own editorial faculties to handle that kind of paring-down and focusing, but I think I have yet to do so, as this blog's flabbiness attests.
Nonetheless, this month's column represents a small step in the right direction. The first draft of the thing, on Don Imus and Russell Simmons, was originally called 'Racists aren't the problem, racism is: Why Imus doesn't matter.' It ended this way:
There are some things that simply needn't be heard - ask the newsmen who aired Cho Seung-hui's deranged suicide message - but the Imus sideshow encourages us to keep pretending racism is his problem or theirs or someone's for God's sake...rather than mine. And yours, of course.
What I like there is that the final sentences recapitulate the media work described in the column - the audience casting about for a proxy through which to experience the psychodrama of transgression, titillation, expiation, and so forth. And in context, pointing the finger at the reader makes sense; the column is, after all, one more (hopefully thoughtful, but still) entry in the Don Imus Is A Big Racist media frenzy, and the reader has hopefully devoured it. (I'm sure you'll just skim, Reader(s); no one expects you to care about my political opinions at this point, least of all me. And a hit is a hit!)
But what I'm clearly not getting is the tone of the website itself. For better or worse, my prose has a pretty personal rhythm to it - one reason I respond with instinctive defensiveness to editing of any kind - and it's been strange trying to adapt it to Robin's vibe. Her own prose and mine don't look much alike; she attains a breeziness and inviting quality - echoing her own energetic personality - that often elude me, and even when my own writing seems to me to achieve something like lightness, it often does so through a kind of abstraction that adds a sometimes-unwanted distance. What's worrisome is that it used to be easier for me to shift into other tones; I can go 'academic' in style easily enough now, and this first-person confessional mode comes quite naturally these days (write three quarters of a million words on your blog and that'll happen), but getting out of that comfort zone is tough. The Milch exercises help but don't exactly posit a radical break with my writing-tonal past.
In any case, the new ending of the Imus/Simmons piece looks like this:
There are some things that simply needn't be heard - ask the newsmen who aired Cho Seung-hui's deranged suicide message - but the Imus/Russell Simmons sideshow prevents a meaningful conversation about racism from taking place. Let's shift the discussion away from Big Media's overemphasis on racist vocabulary and syntax and look around us to see if we can change about not only what we say but what we do.
Now I agree with the sentiment and the cultural postulate in the final sentence (which I didn't write): it's in the best (fiscal) interests of Big Media to focus on local faux-problems, like whether one white asshole calling a bunch of black women 'hos' is an acceptable or unacceptable transgression. That sideshow allows corporate media types to keep pandering to the basest instincts of their larger audiences while offering a palliative for the well-meaning liberal guilt of the watchdogs whose chosen (content-free) media entertainment is the xenophobic slip-up. The apparently invisible systemic phenomena - 'extreme left talking points' never up for discussion - point to the deeper, perhaps insoluble problem, which is that Imus isn't the only white dude in America who's got a problem with them niggers. I don't think racial animosity in America can ever be done away with, anymore than poverty can be eliminated, anymore than unhappiness can be made obsolete. But we'll get a lot more out of outreach programs and cross-cultural exchange than by tiptoeing around one another's goddamn sensitivities.
As such, Robin's call to action fits the substance of the column and its underlying hope. No problem there.
What tweaked me when I read it this morning is just that I would never in a million billion years write it.
That doesn't mean it doesn't belong. The idea of a naked call to action remains foreign to me; I experience that final sentence as a literary/psychological artifact, not an ideological one (since the ideology is invisible to me, a Cambridge resident and obvious Dirty Communist Sympathizer), and literarily speaking, I know too much about the author's intent and usual style to experience it neutrally, i.e. as an authorial choice. I know that sentence is an imposition and can't contextualize it in the article - e.g. I can't retroactively see the article as this kind of call-to-action writ large, in light of the imploring final couplet. Which is why I've now written about 1,500 words around these editorial changes, which matter only to me. Oh well.
You can discern other editorial touches in the two columns too: there's something pleasantly chatty about words/phrases like du jour and sans, largely foreign (heh) to me but appropriate to both Misstropolis in general and (in a way) my own writing, and those come from Robin. Additionally, Robin has buttressed the 'academic' flavour of some of the writing, bringing the tone up with somewhat more media-studies-ish observations where I had favoured ad hoc definitions and idiosyncratic euphemisms or jokier turns of phrase. I had worried, initially, about being too formal in my phrasing; gratifyingly I find that there's wiggle room on both sides.
One little bitch from me, though: two 'jokes' have been cut, and though both cuts have been totally justified, they're illustrative of the way I interpret the particular Misstropolis mandate. In the latest column I initially referred to Imus's 'untimely meditations (and timely firing)' - maybe a lighthearted Nietzsche reference, I thought, and a concise summing-up of the Imus flap. But it's a bit...cute. ('Cute' isn't the site's vibe; I'll get it, I'll get it.) Gone with the first stroke of the red pen. Makes sense: it reads as coyness, and a pro forma declaration of abhorrence toward Imus's remarks was probably called for, to get it out of the way. As you can see we settled on compromise language, at my probably misbegotten insistence that taking a sentence to deplore racism in a webzine column wasn't a wise use of space and only added to the lip-service problem I thought I was complaining about. This morning, removed from the process by a day and a byline, I almost wish I'd just pissed on Imus in that sentence and then ignored him thereafter. Oh well.
Then, from the first column's second or third draft:
There was no worse crime among traders [than selling freely-traded tapes for profit], and the band didn't have to do anything to crack down on this practice: the fans enforced this policy themselves via public shaming and ostracism. Camille Paglia and the ancient Spartans would've been proud.
(And then destroyed you.)
I foolishly assumed that allusion - which to my mind illustrates a little something about Paglia's often-admirable ethics, registers perhaps as a tossed-off 300 reference, and incidentally points up the overwrought quality of Phish fans' rhetorics of self-policing - would help the piece, or at least not hurt it. But never mind the high-minded intended effects: not a single person other than me liked the Paglia/Spartans bit at all, whether in a footnote or moved into the main text. Gone! Just like a train. (FYI: the GF hated it but I insisted on leaving it in. Yet more evidence that I should be making better use of the fact that I've got a strong writer and sensitive reader living in my apartment and allegedly sharing my bed. Bad enough that we're 'living in sin'; worse to allow sins against the English language to go unnoticed and unpunished.) That was a good edit, no question; I'm just too petulant to accept it without whining on my blog. But that's what you come here for, Reader(s), I've no doubt.
OK, enough of this. I don't mean disrespect by this; if it comes off that way, lemme know. I just figure it's helpful, to me if no one else, to work through some of my possessiveness/egotism issues in the very safe space of the ol' BL0G. I'm pleased with this month's column; it's denser with implication and evaluation than the filesharing piece. And I consider my early fumbling attempts at cultural criticism for a broader audience a teachable moment - the worst sin would be to let such moments go without making the effort. I suppose I could be reading other jackasses' blogs instead of taking 90 minutes to work through this stuff, but the one form of selfishness seems more productive and forgivable than the other. 2,240 words and hopefully some of them stick: that seems a reasonable thing to hope for.
Besides, if I just wrote 'OMG go read my shit I need your love' how would that look? Seriously now.
