Erin Madsen

When I was a kid, there was never any question of what I would be when I grew up. The combination in me of an introverted personality and love of reading lead inexorably in only one direction. I wanted to be a writer, and everyone agreed it was the best job for me.

As a kid who loved books, writing them sounded exciting. Books held all my favorite places. Who wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to create those worlds, breathe their air, tell their stories and be paid for the privilege? I couldn’t understand people who thought that writers were boring. Maybe the writers they read were boring, but not my guys. The authors I read were visionaries. Their books changed my world, and it was only natural that I would follow in their footsteps.

Strangely, no one noticed that, throughout my childhood, the pace of my reading stayed fairly constant, but I hardly wrote anything for pleasure. I imagine it didn’t occur to anyone to ask why. My school assignments demonstrated a clear talent for language and composition, so clearly I was learning something. The writing would come later – when experience had given me something to write about.

Fairly soon, adolescence came along and did just that. New experiences – one or two of them even kind of pleasant – came at me from all sides – but I still hardly wrote. It felt, not beneath me exactly, but taken as granted. Writing was a lot of work and the words would always be there if I needed them. I could afford to read and make out with my girlfriend, and save my effort for the times when emotions were high and my feelings demanded expression. Then I could let the words flow with grim certainty and intensity. Then I could be brutally honest and evocative. Then I could imbue the page with all of the passion that languished in the dungeons of my inexpressible heart. Then I could truly CREATE.

That’s how I became and remained, from the age of 12 until I was 22, an insufferable amateur poet.

I was never published. I won no awards. I was no one’s favorite up-and-coming artist. But I did genuinely love poetry, and my taste wasn’t bad for a farm kid. It was just a shame I sucked so terribly at it:

For K___

Penny-ante playing makes five-dollar gains.
but a facetious love makes an end to romance.
If we ever loved incompletely, it was for love’s sake,
No more did we sacrifice, no less did we both relinquish,
Than our life, our souls, our bodies, our minds,
For a love, blind to the torments of outrageous fortune.
We stood fast and took root in a rocky soil,
And made a tower for our affection.
And we worked and we toiled and we labored
Every day, every night, from first light to first light,
Until the work of love was done, and beheld
We a tower of rose and bone and silk and shamrock.

We build this tower every day, and we will never cease,
It is our life, our soul, our body, our mind.
We are each other and we are love and that’s what makes our world go ’round.
No more, no less, than a love that binds like no other.
Like no friend, nor acquaintance, nor father, nor mother.
We are the love that cannot be scarred.
Uncut and unrefined, we walk rough and awkward,
First steps in love, last steps out of bondage.
We will walk and we will kiss and we will share the world,
Our lives, our souls, our bodies, our minds,
And no man can halt our progression.
Love is not earned, but given.
And in the giving we have become one and the same.
You and I.
Together.
Nothing can stop us now.

Perhaps unbelievably, I didn’t realize that I had a problem until my junior year of high school. By then, I had set my mind on the University of Iowa and the Writer’s Workshop, where I fully expected to join a cadre of young writers on our way to greatness. However, to get into the writing programs, I’d have to present an impressive portfolio of work.

My portfolio was thin, grim and disappointing. My classwork was unsuitable. My poetry was myopic, dull and overwrought. The bits and pieces of stories I’d written were just that – bits and pieces. I had nothing finished that I could believe in – nothing to demonstrate that I was qualified to learn at the feet of the masters. I had to create work that measured up to the quality I’d seen in others’ which I admired.

The nights I attempted to write serious poetry were torturous. Traditional poetics never interested me as much as individual poems’ imagery and meaning, so I’d never bothered to practice them. I stacked alternating lines of grace and profanity, over and over, across page after page, creating towers of text, only to find that the finished piece was almost unrecognizable. Every one of my poems were malformed, unbalanced, diminutive monuments to hubris. The only good thing going was that nobody else had seen them.

So, I shifted gears. Fiction was my first love. Why not focus on what I knew? There’s nothing terribly difficult about telling a story, except telling it honestly, of course. And I knew all about honesty from my attempts at poetry. The stories would pile up like firewood. All I needed was one good paragraph from which to begin.

It was about three in the afternoon, October 12th, that L.B. Surrey drove up our driveway. I was at work, so my half-crippled mother had to call the dogs off and host him herself. Coffee and microwaved biscuits from the night before, I expect, which she must have fretted about, but she needn’t. The only ones who care about the quality of our fare are the ones who conspired to split their bids when we had to auction off the farm equipment. She still worries what they think. I don’t let them talk to me.

One paragraph was often all I wrote. Once in awhile, I’d complete a scene, but the effort left me drained and unable to see where a character needed to go. I’d spend hours over the keyboard, waiting for the answer. I refused to write down anything that seemed too obvious, too novel, too emotional, too bland or, irony of ironies, too inauthentic. The page was sacrosanct and I could not afford to let a bad idea slip in.

To further complicate matters, I was convinced that writing unemotionally was disingenuous. Almost as if I were a method actor and not a writer, I absolutely knew that in order to convey an emotion, I had to embody it first. It had to fill me and guide me like a magical invocation so that my words could be honest.

I still have no idea how that notion entered my head, but it was the most destructive of all my misapprehensions about writing. Because of it, my writing world was a living hell.

That’s why, over the course of ten years – 2 of them spent at one of the most prestigious creative writing schools in the nation – I never finished a single work of fiction. Not a novella, not a short story, not so much as a fictionalized Mars bar – nothing. Even as I sat for days, doing everything I knew how to do – reopening old wounds, wearing down pencil leads, abusing my mind and body, and refusing to sleep until I’d expended my last ounce of energy – I never finished a piece of writing that I liked, and I never liked a piece that was finished.

Ten years was, and still is, a very long time to fight. In that time, I ruined relationships, made enemies unnecessarily, embarrassed myself publicly and in private, and managed to barely keep my head above water for the sake of a career I didn’t have. Moments requiring action passed by me like fence pickets. Opportunities offered themselves, waited and disappeared while I sat in my chair, paralyzed. The good writing of which I was certain that I was capable refused to come out of me.

I couldn’t admit it to anyone, but that was when I began to realize that I wasn’t a writer at all. I never had been. Maybe, I never would be.

I began to feel reticent about reading books for pleasure. The better the story was, the more it illuminated the widening chasm between the work that I wanted to do and the work of which I was capable. The hours I spent reading dwindled to minutes, then less. I still kept a book on me, but I rarely read more than a few pages in a sitting.

As the months wore on, my friends and family began to realize what was happening. The great purpose around which I’d built my life wasn’t for me. There was no literary genius hidden up my sleeve. Erin Madsen couldn’t write. Tentative voices began to ask what exactly I intended to do with my life now. For the first time in my life, I had no idea.

Today’s blog post has been called on account of awesome weather.

For you reading pleasure, consider:

• The Vulture’s expert editors picked the brackets. Now and every day until March 23rd, Facebook fans get to vote, “What’s the Best TV Drama of the Last 25 Years?“
• Chuck Wending has a list of 25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing (Right Fucking Now). No surprise – “Keep it brief” didn’t make the cut.
• Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker reads reads Elaine Pagels’s “Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation” and discovers all the subtextual drama you’d expect from the original Big Budget Blockbuster.
• Matthew Klickstein interviews the original brains of Nickelodeon’s “The Adventures of Pete & Pete”, and all I want to know is what’s the weird thing that happens when you hang out at a bar with Big Pete?
• Yes, we all know that TV needlessly leaves a lot of female talent out in the cold because it can’t get its collective head out of its collective ass. Jane Esponson reminds us why just knowing the obvious ain’t enough.
• NPR’s Morning Edition covers Alexander Payne’s Ordinary Day. 10,000 Omahans flip the dial back to Todd & Tyler with quiet, understated grace.
• Michael Boyd tells us about the racially-motivated murder of Joe Henson, and his daughter’s fight, 40 years later, to find his killer.
• Paul Pillar states the obvious – We Can Live with a Nuclear Iran – but it’s still nice to have the facts all in order, isn’t it?

I wasn’t able to finish the piece I wanted for today. Lucky for you, I’m posting a link to an interview that’s far better – in almost every possible way – than what I can write for you. This interview of Maurice Sendak by Terry Gross was voted Fresh Air’s best interview of 2012, and it’s not hard to understand why.

I understand that Terry Gross excels as an interviewer as much by what she doesn’t say as what she does. However, in this interview, she’s even slower to interrupt than usual, and the results are breathtaking. Several times, Maurice Sendak seems almost ready to retire from the interview completely. Vivid memories of his life and relationships with people seem to burst forth between his words. His speech slows, as though it were all too much, then continues with a line that so perfectly sums up the whole of his being in that moment, that you realize he is the sort of man who respects life too much to talk about it with only half a mind.

It’s one of the best interviews I’ve ever heard, and you can listen to it now at http://www.npr.org/2011/09/20/140435330/this-pig-wants-to-party-maurice-sendaks-latest

Not that it excuses my lack of updates, but I learn much more from the writing I don’t publish online than the stuff I do. That being the case, I hope that everyone who is writing today also feels the right to be selfish about their work. It’s our right. Sometimes, the best thing is to keep a piece close by, where we can keep an eye on it.

Case in point: I just quit working on a long-ish complaint piece – which also by coincidence had a 2^nd paragraph that began with “case in point…” – about some young writers’ habit of lashing out against teachers who try to show them the mechanics of story craft. Some of the things I wanted to say were right-on-the-money, and they weren’t ideas that I remember reading elsewhere. I sourced everything back to a small, but crucial misunderstanding exhibited by many teachers.  I spent the better part of 1 ½ days working on it, but no one will ever read it because it’s intent is all wrong for me.

I’m not a teacher of young writers. I don’t even have a relationship with any young writers – not even spiritually. I don’t think about them. I don’t worry about them. I just occasionally see them saying the same stupid things that a million young writers have said before, and it bugs me.

Some people can get away with writing about things that just bug them. I do it once in a while, but it always leaves me with an empty feeling, like I’ve expended a lot of effort to no real effect – probably because that’s exactly what I’ve done.

The only thing less worthwhile than just telling somebody they’re wrong is to tell it to some uninvolved third party. That’s what hack bloggers do. That’s what assholes do. It’s not what I do.

Instead, wouldn’t it be better to offer some kind of solution? Wouldn’t it feel better to try in whatever small way I can to demonstrate how the error can be fixed? I’m no teacher, but I know enough about some of the principles of writing to teach them. Why not do what needs doing while I’m capable of doing it?

Why not, indeed? Stay tuned for my next blog post: “Finish Unfinished (or How I Learned to Stop Bitching and Start Caring about the Work)” Hopefully, I’ll only embarrass myself a little. With luck, I might even say something helpful.

Stranger things have happened.

If I were a published author, I’d be afraid to reprint this poem from Clive James’s Opal Sunset, for fear that someone would see the great sour grape rotting in my soul’s core.

‘The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered’

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy’s much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one’s enemy’s book –
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seeminly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler’s War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyart with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
Is there with Pertwee’s Promenades and Pierrots–
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor’s Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
“My boobs will give everyone hours of fun”.

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error–
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.

Clive James

Life takes some people to interesting places. For others, like me, it mostly goes wherever you tell it and, if you’re not telling it to go anywhere interesting, it’s not going to try to pull you one way or the other.

Right now, I’m unemployed. Scratch that. I’m nominally employed by the company I own: Alternium, LLC. Until recently, we were in the website development and design business. Now, we (read, I) mainly interview for full-time jobs at other companies, (re)educate myself in matters of programming, and do a little writing here and there.

Until recently, I worked as a programmer for a market research company – not the sort that employs analysts and algorithms, but rather white-label models and tools. We were together for six months. They let me go in January and, after the initial shock, I found myself facing the future outside of the company with relief. Call it rationalization or what you will, but I really had no idea until after I was fired how terrible a fit I was for a marketing firm.

Was programming for my old bosses a bad job? Not at all. Did I enjoy it? Some of the time. Would I ever want to go back to it? Absolutely not. Why? Because there is nothing in marketing to interest me in the slightest.

My bosses were fresh, young, optimistic and confident – just the sort of people you’d expect to run a marketing startup. My tools were top of the line; they spared no expense. Our clients and partners were big movers in the industry which my employers were targeting. I was excited about the work and eager to flex a little. I knew the systems we were working with, and I was ready to work as hard as I had to in order to get the job done. The stars were perfectly aligned for success. So what happened?

They succeeded spectacularly. They’re still succeeding, as far as I know. They’re making money hand over fist showing large organizations how they should try to appeal to people in the market place. Target analysis, rich analytics, dashboards, pie charts, persona profiles, et al. They had it all, except for the one element that I thought would be crucial to their business, but actually isn’t at all.

No one seemed concerned about, or interested in, people’s wants or needs, and what we were doing to serve them. Not really. The lives of people outside our office were irrelevant. During the few times when I tried to broach the subject of what people in the market want or need, most everyone recited a similar mix of clichés and advocacies for new market efficiencies. It was considered as granted that all of the important parts of the human experience were either known or unknowable, and that our only real concern was to engineer tools which manifested those magic marketing formulas, which only people in glasses with smart suits can fathom.

To be fair, I think my company was not unusual in this regard. I don’t actually know anybody in marketing who understands people on an intuitive level, but I think that’s more a consequence of my limited exposure than anything else. In my experience, wants and needs were irrelevant. All that mattered was how quickly we could generate a formula that solved for ‘x’, and a tool to automate it.

My former coworkers are good people. I know their hearts are in the right place, and ambition is everything in business, but I still don’t believe the consensus attitude. It’s not enough to solve for ‘x’, is it? Your work, your life, your future and your career aren’t a race to the end, are they?

I think what saddens me the most about the business I was in, and the reason why I finally felt relieved to be done with it was that, all any marketer wants is an answer to the question, “how can we make people give us money?” Clients, vendors, and especially marketers themselves – all that’s important is that there be some answer to that question. Even a wrong one would do, just so long as it purported to be the answer. And for all of the ambition, drive, energy and optimism that blew through our offices, producing a new formula for making a little more money was all we were looking for.

I’m no ascetic. I like nice things. I like nice food, books and the occasional must-have-it-or-I-will-never-forgive-myself-or-letting-it-go painting. Someday, I’d like a sprawling house on a large plot of land, and a household staff to keep it clean for me. I’d like to collect art that’s out of my price range, some day. I think cash is an eminently useful tool, but the cash value of my life’s accoutrements would hardly pay an hour’s interest against the wealth of my experience, and here’s the secret that no marketer I’ve ever met could understand:

The heart of experience is in its happening, not its conclusion. And answers can only tell you the state of things which are concluded, not the course of their happening. It’s the old Heisenberg uncertainty principle – removed from all appropriate context and still serendipitously appropriate. Voila.

As for my firing, I don’t know why I didn’t see it coming. I went into the job with blinders, thinking that I could really sink my teeth into marketing and advertising – those notorious thieves of creative talent. There’s not much that hasn’t already been said about marketing and advertising, and I’ve heard most of it. For the sake of a new career opportunity, I told myself that it didn’t matter whether I believed in the company’s mission. If I could believe in my work, I’d be fine. Unfortunately, in the end, I was the only one who did believe in my work, and brother, that wasn’t enough. So, we parted ways, and your humble narrator turned a corner.

Since that day, the sun has been auspiciously bright almost every day. When I open the blinds and windows, our living room fills with light and fresh air. Most days, you’ll find me drinking my coffee and pushing forward on the things that matter: finding another job, sharpening my programming skills, writing a little here and there, and refereeing the ongoing war between our cats. The hours are right, the parking is ideal, and the mission is something I can get behind. Admittedly, the pay is lousy, but even on the slowest day it manages to mean just a little bit more than answering the question, “how can I make someone give me their money?” As you might expect, I’ve welcomed the promotion.

• The most interesting thing about a hypothetical nuclear attack probably isn’t what it destroys, but what gets left behind. The BBC docudrama  Threads  takes that premise and runs with it. It’s compelling drama if you’ve never seen it. The use of situational reportage distances the audience from the fictional characters’ stories, but the producers make it easy to digest, so the viewer has some freedom to let their imagination run with the scenario, in parallel to what they’re seeing.
• Much less compelling drama – ABC / MGM’s The Day After, starring John Lithgow, Jason Robards and Steve Gutenberg. Proof positive that predictable story beats absolutely kill a story.
• Håkan Nordkvist was fixing his sink, when a wormhole opened up and took him into the future where he met his future self. Several questions left unresolved. When we will discover non-fading-tattoo technology? What are property values like in the future? Did the sink ever get fixed?
• Interpreting MS Paint’s .EXE as sound data produces repetitive descending tones of varying speeds, colors and consistencies. Trance remix predictably follows – despite the fact that that MS Paint was clearly designed with dubstep in mind.
• The greatest voice on earth, Ken Nordine, is still verbally ruminating on words like Bicker, and I still can’t believe his most recent film casting was in a knock-off of Disney’s Aladdin.
• Last night it was snowing. Today, it looks like it’s going to rain.

If I could suppose that there is one supremely virtuous standard to which a person could hold themselves, against which all of a person’s acts could be correctly judged, I would borrow from Kurt Vonnegut and say:

There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

Many people, when they read this line from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, will respond, “of course. You’ve got to be kind to get kindness in return. And even if you don’t get kindness in return, it feels better to be kind. We are better people for being kind.”

Many other people will respond, “of course. Kindness is the root of all virtue and virtue is a subjective quality belonging to all thinking creatures. Nobody is a bad person in his or her own heart. Even cruelty is, at a deeper level, kindness in disguise. And, of course, punishment is a sort of kindness when it purifies the wrong-doer’s heart.”

Or maybe some people respond, “of course. Of course! I never thought of it like that, but, yes! It is that simple!”

But I still can’t help feeling that they are all missing the point. From atop our Ziggurats of cultural reconstruction, viewing the landscape through a rehabilitative post-modern lens that turns all possible truths into self-evident truths—we miss the newness of the idea. New, not because it is original. Of course, it’s not. But new, because it is always not yet the only rule we know.

It has never been the only rule we know. If kindness is a virtue, as I think it is, and if virtue is a reward, as we all would like to believe, kindness is a reward unclaimed.

…

Last Saturday, an American congresswoman in Arizona survived an assassination attempt. The particulars were surprisingly in line with the narratives Hollywood constructs around assassinations.

It was a sunny day. There was a diverse array of supporters around her – old people, kids and all ages between. The event was a personal appearance to bolster the congresswoman’s appeal to average voters and the impression of her as a wholly democratic (in the strict sense, not partisan) political representative. Think Bob Roberts, but appealing to male voters.

Out of nowhere, a lone gunman with a shaved head and a maniacal expression pulled out a gun and shot her, point blank, in the head. Immediately after she fell, he proceeded to empty his pistol into her crowd of supporters, killing 6 people, including several retirees and a little girl.

An unarmed bystander prevented the would-be assassin from reloading and the crowd restrained him long enough for the police to take him into custody. The news agencies then swooped in and began reporting every second of the attack in minute detail. When the first reports come out, they said what everyone expected: the congresswoman had tragically, but predictably, died. The first assassination of a widely-known American politician in the 21^st century.

But, the narrative was derailed. The congresswoman did not die. After hours of intensive surgery, she began to recover.

Rather than pause to plan, both sides of the discussion about Violence in America, threw in with the sort of fervor that really betrays both side’s love for violence. Right blamed left for blaming right for blaming left, etc. etc. I won’t bother with the particular arguments. They’re still coming and will continue to come until the next big event changes the speed of the news cycle.

…

What is important to recognize is not whether physical violence has found (or regained) a role in American politics – clearly it has. If you don’t believe it, ask Gabrielle Giffords.

It is also unimportant to recognize that the popular discussion of violence’s role in American politics was not brought any closer to resolution. After 9/11, Katrina and the continuing adventures of Ted Williams’s Golden Voice and Silver Hammer, we should by now know better than to be surprised by the slothful crawl of our national progress.

What is important to recognize is that both sides of the violence debate claim a right to kindness. Amidst all of the hullaballoo and cross-talk about right and left, guns and medications, governance and populism – both sides are saying, in essence, we will be kinder than those other people will be, once they give up or are defeated.

In a world where one side wins, everyone will be treated more kindly because the instruments of violence will be more mindfully retained. In a world where the other side wins, everyone will be treated more kindly because the instruments of violence will be more liberally distributed.

By both modes of thinking, it’s a wonder our National Dairy Council hasn’t swept the country with campaigns to encourage milk consumption by giving people more or fewer glasses to drink it from.

…

In the new light of this observed trauma (not observed for the victims, surely, but for the rest of us? Let’s not bullshit), those who feel a personal stake in the debate about violence fight harder than ever. For the right to be kind. For a reward that is no less attainable than it was yesterday, last year, 10 or 100 years ago.

If I were a philosopher, this situation would probably be beneath comment, but I’m not and, for me, it isn’t. We have always faced the same question, all of our lives, and maybe for as long as we’ve been human, “Why don’t we give ourselves what we think we want?”

I’m sure the answer lies somewhere in a spectrum between fear and laziness, but we seem to show very little fear or laziness when it comes to supporting the terrifying prospect of world dominated by iniquity and inequality. For every “every day hero”, there seem to be 10 times as many people willing to sadomasochistically subject themselves to violence small and big – the normative violence of the conflicted existence, and the extraordinary violence of coercive action.

Whether the instrument we use are bullets or self-denigrating words, we cannot speak of them honestly. We refuse to own up to our own self-evident hypocrisy. I think that is probably the same hypocrisy that compels us to stay at the top of our Ziggurats of cultural reconstruction, but it’s getting late and I’m afraid I have neither the energy, nor the intellectual capacity, to indict all popular culture.

Take care.