Comedy, Tragedy, Rage, and Joy

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. -- Ernest Hemingway

It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one. -- David Foster Wallace

This gold image is called: "The Three Faces of Life: Comedy, Tragedy, and Rage." I am accustomed to seeing the masks of Comedy and Tragedy on playbills, theater programs, and drama anthologies. Usually the faces point this way and that rather than right at the viewer, but I keep staring at this one with its hybrid face of rage staring right back at me. The Comedy mask includes the smile, and the Tragedy mask provides the frown, but the center mask for rage leaves the actor's mouth exposed. An eye from comedy, and eye from tragedy, and blankness where the human mouth must be screaming in rage. Yes. But is that the point? I keep gazing at Rage because I am not sure. Maybe comedy and tragedy are not art so much as artifice, and primal rage is truth. But on the other hand, maybe the face of Rage is the artist, who glares at life with one eye focused through comedy and the other through tragedy. The mouth has no expression at all, perhaps, except as presented through tragic or comic art, or more simply, through language. Rage itself has no voice but what the artist can provide.

I wonder if this vision approximates how some writers approach their work, writers who are sometimes described as Tortured Artists. I recently tuned into an argument being carried on another Blogger channel, Universal Acid. In "This Page is My War Zone," Ryan Amfahr Longhorn collars Sean Platt of Collective Inkwell and berates him for his sneering treatment of "The Tortured Writer." Sean explains that he was so alarmed about the agony purportedly experienced by writers that his fear "kept me from spilling ink at least two decades too long." But now, he notes happily, "I never allow the sun to set without the jotted thoughts of my day, for the best moments of each earthly orbit should never be abandoned." Sean is the smiley face of contemporary writing; he has neither a comic nor a tragic vision, but is practical and commercial. That's fine for Sean, but I am puzzled at his hostility. Why not consider the possibility that different writers experience their lives in different ways? Just because Sean finds writing fun and profitable and suffers angst only when the cash flow runs thin (see the comment stream following his post), it does not follow that authors who pursue their art with gut wrenching passion and intensity are phony, self indulgent masochists. Art, did I say? Sean does not use that word.


Ryan could not be a stronger contrast to sunny Sean. For one thing, Ryan keeps handing out free advice -- I've even seen him offer to read an unknown correspondent's fiction, whereas Sean would ask that aspiring writer for up to $750, depending on word count. No wonder Sean does not want young writers discouraged by accounts of discomfort at the keyboard. When you sell a product, you want a maximum number of potential consumers.


Of course there are poseurs who wear the tragic mask but never actually dive into the wreck, but Sean doesn't introduce us to any. Nor does he directly mock Sylvia Plath or Ernest Hemingway or David Foster Wallace or Virginia Woolf -- extraordinary artists who lost their lives to depression.

Sean says he is talking to "the classic inebriated writer, wasting away as they eek through insurmountable emotional agony and too many adverbs. Sure writing is difficult, but so is driving a car or walking a dog… when you’re drunk." Is that so? I will NOT, I promise I WILL not, stoop to grammar sniping here by pointing out the error in his sentence. But I WILL fault Sean for failing to make an argument that goes past scatter shot insult and conceited assumptions: his blog drips in scorn but is dry of evidence. Where we might expect examples, we get self promotion.

But Ryan offers himself as an example. He says, yeah, I'm one of those arrogant tortured writers Sean complains about: "I think the level of endured psychological torture varies from writer to writer, I'll concede that. But, for someone to even identify as a writer there has to be a certain imbalance in there somewhere." Sean says that if writing is not fun it may not be for you. Ryan says:

Once, writing was fun. Then, I went way down deep and saw the hell burning at the core of my being and I cannot do anything else that comes close to satisfying the self-actualizing urge to reveal, over the course of whatever ends up being my lifetime, exactly what I saw and felt and smelled and tasted and heard down there.

There's the rage, see it? There's the tortured writer right there. And here's another who blogs under the name of Annie Mac:

this. is. necessary.

i am writing this which, i promise, is shit, so that i might not take out my extra-ordinary McRage on parties who shall remain unnamed. My Daddy is sick again; he is - was? i don't know if he still is in the hospital or not because i'm so disconnected from - never mind. . . . despite what's been "diagnosed" thus far, you never know what's to come with him, what's hiding, and i don't trust the sources providing my long-distance clues. this is my blog; my writing; my words; my goddamn truth.

the truth.

And from another of Annie's pieces, "The Glamorous Life of a Writer!":

Honestly, I'm tired. That's the stupidest thing I have ever said. No, that is. But "I'm tired" is one of the greatest understatements of my life. This waking up at 5 am, writing until 2 or 3 pm, drinking mad quantities of coffee throughout the hours - then the exhaustion, like a...it's like some purple-black F5 tornado-tidal-wave of sleepless 3 am and that makes no sense - I know - but that's what it is - comes up over the back of the couch in the middle of the afternoon and just wallops me, bashes me over the head and it's...it's fucking ausgespielt, is what it is. I'm out. But I can't sleep. Can't nap, rest (I know - lay off the coffee, dumbass), but you'd think with that kind of fatigue, a wink or two wouldn't be too difficult to catch. You'd be wrong. . . . No matter how much I eat, The Muse works it off.

How could Sean possibly understand either Annie or Ryan? For Sean, "Creativity is a garden that only grows with nutrients in the soil and sunlight in the sky." It's okay that Sean has a different view, of course it is. But I cannot help but wonder how much better a writer he could be if he dug into the dirt of his garden and sat out in a couple of thunderstorms. At the very least, he would have a better chance of understanding why some writers take their work so seriously:

I want my words to matter to someone. I want them to mean something. I want my electric guitar machine gun in the hands of every starving child—for whom the gun will shoot food. I want it in the hands of the abused girlfriend who clings to that bastard because she doesn’t feel like she has anything else—for whom the gun will provide courage. I want it in the hands of the bastard, too—for whom it will provide salvation. And I want my loved ones and my friends to have it so they can know who I am and what I stand for without me ever having to say it. That’s why I write, at the core. The other stuff just feels good but this part is about love.

Ryan, "Have You Ever Shot a Guitar"

The triple gold mask places rage in the center of comedy and tragedy, but if I could have an artist craft that mask for me, it would have a fourth face. Rage is not the only raw emotion, and the image is incomplete unless there is a mask on the reverse side, also borrowing from both comedy and tragedy, one that expresses primal joy. If rage stares with eyes of comedy and tragedy, so does joy. And it surely hurts just as much to write from joy, to write from a gut-deep love, as it does to write from rage. That is my view.


Am I a tortured writer or just an apologist? I'm not sure. I'm digging in the garden to see what's what. I've got some joy, and some rage, and some confusion. I've got fatigue. This is the second night I've worked on this blog until 2:30 a.m. I threw out a third of yesterday's work but I'm not sure I've improved it. I still don't think I've managed to say what I wanted to say, maybe because when I'm immersed in the writing of others, their voices get busy and my own is harder to hear. Do I need to add a disclaimer? I do not think a great writer must be miserable, and I certainly do not think that because a writer is anguished that writer is destined for greatness. Just because someone is misunderstood doesn't make that person a genius. But why am I working so hard on something only a few people will read unless I'm a sucker for punishment? I don't know for sure. Ask me tomorrow but not today.

In which I take myself to task and high-five Fred

I have begun several blog entries that remain in the embryonic stage, and I may leave them in the incubator lest they turn into mindless rants. Indeed, I should perhaps just delete them, because in my blog here, I sign everything I write, and I make some effort not to embarrass myself.

But I sometimes go slumming in the world of anonymous discussion, and while I aim to exercise self control even there, I do not always resist the urge to punch someone right in their anonymous nose. I remember some jerk smirking, when California's Proposition 8 was declared unconstitutional, "if I want to marry my right hand, is that okay?" I fired back, "Absolutely. I'll send the Superglue." Or to some guy who says President Obama is pandering to Muslims: "How the hell is a mosque a shrine to mass murderers? I don't know whose backside you're kissing, but whoever it is is blocking your view of reality." I'm not always crude, though. Sometimes I am self-righteous instead, presenting myself as a better American than someone who hates immigrants or as a more enlightened Christian than someone who anonymously consigns other anonymi to the flames of hell.

Now see, one reason I started blogging was to encourage myself to make sense instead of adding to nonsense. It's early weeks yet, too soon to give up.

I also have another mode of anonymous personality: klkt


Instead of being an angry smart ass, klkt + a picture of books sometimes tries to engage people in actual conversations, and it is cool when it works. One common gripe about President Obama's conduct of war is that he "shackles" the military with nonsensical rules, making it impossible for them to go ahead and win a war. I think the "nonsensical rules" have to do with silly things like human rights and limiting civilian casualties, but I could be wrong. So I pushed this very question to "Fred," who said he missed Bush because Obama shackles the military. What exactly has Obama done differently? klkt wanted to know. Well, Fred clarified, maybe not Obama so much as Congress. But again, klkt pushed, what has Congress done exactly? I don't understand the specifics. Fred, to his great credit, replied that "I'll be honest with you, I'll have to reseach that further to give an accurate answer. But I would like to disuss this then. Thx for the intelligent and unemotional conversation." Now that, my dear blog readers, was a real triumph of online discussion and I am proud of myself and of Fred for managing a civil interchange in the midst of the usual mud wrestling.

I might have responded to Fred's initial "i miss bush" by saying, "then throw the other shoe," but that would have been too easy. I wonder if Fred will find any credible information on the subject of the shackled US military? But I should go look it up myself so that if we bump into each other again I will be able to explain my view.

Hell's Handbasket: The decline of the English language, young person's digital division

This post is the first in the "Hell's Handbasket" series. Hell's Handbasket entries will weigh the merits, according to my own apocalyptic vision and no one else's, of alarmist reports as to the Decline of Civilization As We Know It. Right now I have several alerts on the Hell's Handbasket short list: The Constitution is Burning and ______ Set it on Fire; Social Justice Christians are Ruining the Country for Antisocial Unjust Christians; Harry Potter is Funneling Readers Away from the Important Stuff (A Sequel to the 1851 "Hell's Handbasket by Hawthorne" entry titled Damned Mobs of Scribbling Women Steal Readers from The Scarlet Letter); and, Today's College Students are Even Worse than Yesterday's College Students.

For now, I let these subjects hang fire a bit longer, and turn my attention to the English language itself, which is, according to many self-authorized sources close to that language, in fast decline. If we don't save the language, after all, then how will I write the next charmingly literate entry in my Hell's Handbasket Series? So, first things first. The language is burning. And it is being roasted by such suspect youthful practices as emailing, texting, and twittering. [Don't make me pause to reassure you that yes, I am well aware that people of all ages email, text, and twitter. But the fact is that digi-text is essentially a young person's language, like Rock and Roll was originally a young person's music. Right Mick? Right Keith?] For an excellent model of anti-young-people's-language tirade, amuse yourself with my favorite Crabby Old Dude's rant.

I will spare you a litany of Historical Hysteria, of times when the English language was spotted going straight to the devil but somehow re-emerged, or never got there in the first place, or was heading to a different destination altogether. But now as in earlier generations, what alarmists and other crabby dudes call illiteracy among young people is probably just different literacy. In my view, the rapidly evolving world of digital communication is not ruining English. On the contrary, it demonstrates the utter awesomeness of our language.You know that an unwritten law for the progress of civilization is that Young People develop slang or other offenses to grown-ups' language to show their defiance of authority, to develop more private ways of expression, to establish personal and group identities, and so on and so forth. It's just that before technology, the slang and other linguistic creativity demonstrated by Young People was primarily an oral tradition. Passing notes in class is horribly primitive by comparison.

Now, you see, most American Young People have constant access to technology whereby they create and distribute a written language. Who needs a press? who needs paper? who needs ink? Many a printer these days gathers dust. This new language delights me even though I am an outsider of the dialect. I'm fascinated by just how visual it is. You cannot translate most digi-speak to conventional writing, let alone speaking, without losing most of the message. Here are some examples that I harvested from my teenage daughter's Facebook page. At first glance they are easy to read, but look more closely at the details and uncertainty emerges.

Sleepover with brittany andd mariamm.((:

Emoticons have become standard practice in digi-speak, but what does the double smile mean here? Is Devin extra happy about this sleepover? Also, I thought the smiley faces usually pointed the other way (as in the next example). Here, Devin did not use an exclamation point, but maybe the double smile serves the same purpose. Then again, maybe something is meant that I know nothing of. Teens are like that, you know. My daughter, be it noted, writes excellent standard English as well as clever digi-speak.

Happyyyy birthdayyy Devin!! :):)

Now, I have a Facebook page, and lots of people wished ME happy birthday, too, but almost all of my messages were written in standard English, perhaps with a simple abbreviation here and there. Here we see a different version of the double smiley face, with eyes as well as smile duplicated. And we have multiple "y"s, four on Happy and three on Birthday.

I have asked Devin how she knows when to tack on extra letters and, true to her native speaker status, she could not tell me. You just do it, Mom, you know, whatever. [Accompanied by quizzical "Why ARE you bothering with this?" look and obligatory eye roll.] Extra letters may simply be a form of emphasis, and sometimes the extra letters are internal to a word, though typically they are repeated final letters. On the other hand, it may be extra letters are stylistic flourishes comparable to the curly-cues I used to add to my in-class notes.

These extra letters appear on texts as well as on Facebook, where they require several different key punches and even, on more primitive phones, pauses between punches. So they must be important to the impact of the communication. Further than that, I am not confident in speculating.

Devin:) ima call yu in a bit, so yu betta answer! I dont care if yu have to repeat yurself a million times because of my mentally challenged phone, we will talkk.;)

I happen to know that this correspondent of Devin's writes with standard English clarity when she so desires, and holds a perfect, or nearly perfect, grade point average.

[initial comment] babe, yur haircut is hotttttt.(;;; iloveyouu♥

[answer] awhh thankyouu boo(: i think its a little short but its okayy(;
&& i love you too♥ (:

Notice how much more is going on here than a simple exchange consisting of "I like your new haircut" and "Thank you." They would not add all those other symbols if they did not mean something.

Here's the obligatory disclaimer: Students must learn Standard English so that they can grow up to change it. They must learn to switch their language from the digi-world of texting or twittering to conventional writing and speech. Over time, whatever innovations may have lasting value to the language will be incorporated into standard practices, and whatever is of ephemeral usefulness--think "groovy"--will be sifted out or dissolved. Much slang does not even survive one four-year high school generation which is why older people (here meaning, anyone over 22) use it at their risk. So be at peace.

And as for Literature! Fear not for literature. Every generation has its incredibly talented authors and they will not be confused, let alone defeated, by alternative uses of language. And what do incredibly talented authors do anyway but create with the language? Excellent literature is a more advanced and complex form of the playfulness of teen-speak.

at least thatt is myy viewww!!!!!! :) ;)