Carole Maso - Break Every Rule - Essays on Language, Longing, & Moments of Desire

You fear the electronic ladyland. Want it painted black.

You’re afraid of junk food. The real junk food and the metaphoric junk food the media feeds you. Want it painted black…

painted black.

You fear the stylist (as you have defined style) will perish.

You consider certain art forms to be debased and believe that in the future all true artists will disappear. Why do you believe other forms to be inferior to your own?

You consider certain ways of thinking about literature to be debased. You can’t decide whether they’re too rigorous or too reckless, or both.

Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, Harold Bloom et fils —make my day.

You think me unladylike. Hysterical. Maybe crazy. Unreadable. You put me in your unreadable box where I am safe. Where I am quiet. More ladylike.

In your disdainful box labeled “experimental.” Labeled “do not open.” Labeled “do not review.”

You see a red door and you want it painted black.

No more monoliths.

You who said “hegemony” and “domino theory” and “peace with honor.”

All the deaths for nothing. All the dark roads you’ve led us down. No more.

The future: where we’re braced always for the next unspeakably monstrous way to die — or to kill.

All the dark deserted roads you’ve led me down, grabbing at my breasts, tearing at my shirt, my waistband: first date.

Second date: this is how to write a book.

Third date: good girl! Let’s publish it!!!

Brown Sugar, how come you dance so good?

Fourth date: will you marry me?

You fear the future, OK. You fear anything new. Anything that disrupts your sense of security and self. Everything threatens you.

Where is the change over the course of the thing in the hero?

Where is the hero?

Where’s the conflict? Where the hell is the dénouement ?

I see your point. But haven’t you asked us to write your fiction for just a little too long now? Couldn’t we—

Couldn’t we, maybe just possibly, coexist?

Why does my existence threaten yours?

It’s been too long now that you’ve asked me to be you. Insisted I be you.

Lighten up. Don’t be so afraid. Put up your hand. Say: Bunny, Alfred, Harold, bye-bye.

You fear. You fear the television. You loathe and adore the television.

You feel numbed and buzzed by so much electronics. Numbed and buzzed by so much future.

I’m getting a little tired of this “you” and “I.” Still I am learning a few new things about you — and about me.

The future of literature. The death of the novel. You love for some reason, the large, glitzy questions and statements. But the question bores me — and all the usual ways of thinking and speaking and writing anymore.

I’m sorry you are so afraid. You want it to be something like the movie 2001 , the future. You want it to be ludicrous, the future, easily dismissable. Like me. If only I didn’t dance so good. You demand to know, How come

you dance so good, dance so good, dance so good…???

You can’t see a place for yourself in it and it frightens you. You dig in your heels as a result. Spend all your considerable intelligence and energy conserving, preserving, holding court, posturing, tenaciously holding on, now as you munch your last green leaves, yum.

Where is the resolution of the conflict? Where the fuck is the conflict?

What if a book might also include, might also be, the tentative, the hesitant, the doubt you most fear and despise?

Lyn Hejinian: “Closure is misanthropic.”

Fear of growth, fear of change, fear of breaking one’s own mold, fear of disturbing the product, fear of ridicule, fear of indifference, fear of failure, fear of invisibility, fear of, fear of, fear of….

You say that language will cease to be respected, will no longer move us. But we’re already becoming numb thanks to what you are afraid to give up. What you flood the market with.

Soyinka: “I am concerned about preserving a special level of communication, a level very different from Oprah Winfrey.”

Wish: that all talk-show fiction be put to bed now. Its fake psychologies, its “realisms.” Its pathetic 2 plus 2.

Language of course has an enormous capacity to lie, to make false shapes, to be glib, to make common widgets, three parts this and two parts that.

Wish: that all the fiction of lies be put to bed.

That the dishonesty running rampant through much contemporary fiction be recognized as such.

What deal must I strike in order to be published by you? What pose, bargain, stance, is it I must strike with you now?

What mold do you make of me to pour your elixir, your fluid into, and then reward?

The bunny mold? The kitten mold? The flower mold? The damaged flower mold? Pregnant at twelve, illiterate, but with a twist? The gay mold? The white trash mold? The battered child mold? The bad girl mold?

Paint me black. Paint me Latina. Paint me Native American. Paint me Asian and then pour me into your mold. Use me. Co-opt me. Market me.

Debase me and in the future I shall rise anew out of your cynicism and scorn — smiling, lovely, free.

I know a place that burns brighter than a million suns.

Wish list: that the business people who have taken over the publishing houses will focus themselves elsewhere and leave the arts alone again.

Not to own or colonize or dominate….

Despite all efforts to tame it, manage it, control it, outsmart it, language resists your best efforts; language is still a bunch of sturdy, glittering charms in the astonished hand.

A Utopia of possibility. A Utopia of choice.

And I am huddled around the fire of the alphabet, still.

Even though you say one word next to the other will cease to be cherished.

You say rap music is poison. Hypertext is poison.

Even though you call me sentimental — on the one hand girly-girl, on the other hand loud-mouthed bitch, on the one hand interesting and talented writer, on the other hand utterly out-of-touch idealist, romantic — it is you who wants the nineteenth century back again. When things were dandy for you, swell. You want to believe in the old coordinates, the old shapes. To believe in whatever it was you believed in then. You were one of the guys who dictated the story, sure, I remember. Who made up the story and now go teaching it all over the place. But even then, when you sat around making it up, even then, my friend, it had nothing to do with me. With my world. With what I saw and how I felt.

Wish: that all graduate writing programs with their terminal degrees stop promoting such tiresome recipes for success or go (financially) bankrupt.

Your false Crescendos. Climaxes. False for me, at any rate.

The future is all the people who’ve ever been kept out, singing.

In the future everything will be allowed.

So the future is for you, too. Not to worry. But not only for you.

For you, but not only for you.

Not to discard the canon, but to enlarge it.

No more monoliths. No more Mick Jaggers. No more O. J. Simpsons. No more James Joyces. No more heroes.

Everything threatens you. Hacks, hackers, slacks, slackers, cybergirls with their cybercurls and wiles, poets of every sort. Rock bands with girls.

You believe your (disappearing) time represents some last golden age of enlightenment, to be guarded, protected, reproduced against the approaching mindlessness, depravity, electronic states of America.

But maybe as you become more and more threatened, you’ll take a few more risks yourself. Who knows? Anything is possible in the future.

Wish list: that the homogeneity end. That the mainstream come to acknowledge, for starters, the thousand refracted, disparate beauties out there.

That the writers and the readers stop being treated by the mainstream houses like idiot children. That the business people get out and stop imposing their “taste” on everyone.