"If you don't stock any books by Alfred Jarry in this atrocious excuse for a bookstore in one week's time—one week!—I will burn this place to the ground! D'you hear me?"
In fact, everybody within the postal zone heard it. Fred and his Joe Pesci act. A kind of overcaffeinated gnome of a man. And, surely, he would act on this threat, perhaps thinking the most awful thing any book merchant could imagine is the destruction of another precious library by fire. Sadly for Fred, the recipient of this threat was some lowly clerk in one of those mall-sized mega-chain bookstores where good literature had to give up room to fatuously ghostwritten presidential memoirs, fad diet books, and decorative fruit baskets.
"I swear to you, Kenny," he turned to me. "What is this world coming to when bookstores won't show the grace and basic tact in stocking the greats?"
Fred's conversation lacked a center, but then again, most conversations did. In my experience, when people became outraged about some issue—election recounts, whaling, careless valet parkers—it was never a good idea to play the soundly reasonable side anymore than it was good to join in their mad chorus. It was always better to just nod occasionally, make a few grimaces that vaguely suggested accord with the spiel, and just let the whole episode run out of steam. People's outrages were generally self-contained fires that smothered themselves in time, unless one is an effective squeaky dictator like Hitler.
To be honest, Fred's outbursts were a bit too on-stage for my tastes. Lacked conviction. But then, he was some clueless parlour-style doctoral student in some languages program upstate, and so prone to bouts of drama that outpace the means to sustain them. It was not long before the clerk appealed to his rote memorized training for dealing with irate customers, perhaps in section IV of the bookstore's customer service mandate for employed idiots. The canned responses came, and with each succeeding failure, the clerk proceeded to the next memorized line in the corporate scripture. Failing that, he had recourse to the corporation's grid system policy which is the same everywhere where business is done: diplomatically signal the security personnel to throw the bum out—with kindness. Fortunately, I was able to yank Fred away before the clerk was forced to move to Defcon 3.
I've smashed some cathedral windows in my time. Sometimes I paraded about like a fat target and provoked the critics to attack. In writing, there is no such thing as friendly fire—it's one or the other. Most critics showed a fair deal of tact, even when they were putting you through the shredder with some pretty foul assessments of your work. With but a little flip of a wry and nasty word, a critic can give a writer the mark of Cain. Of course, writers shouldn't take the efforts of critics so seriously, good or bad, and critics should not take themselves so seriously either. How many people actually read literary criticism anyways?
And sometimes we get baited. Some foul-mouthed cretin-critic takes a few potshots and you find yourself bristling and knuckle dusting in the sandbox. Scenes like that are terrible and should be fervently avoided. They reduce us to the level of beasts, and no one ever really wins…these fights have no bells, no final hit count, no closure. They just go on in perpetuity like bad weather or taxes. I had one such incident, and the only closure I could squeeze out of that was just to turn my back. Angry discourse loses all the air in its tires when you realize that it's just a monologue where the other participants have already left and turned out the lights. Nighty-night.
I was asked to do a review of a friend's book for some review magazine. It paid nothing, but I figured that it would be of some help to my friend who could—like all writers who don't write unimaginably bad shit all the time—use some public buff and polish. I had never written a book review before, and scanning how the others did it just made me queasy. Book reviews are generally boring fluff that moves either for or against a work. A bad review attacks the writer personally. Tired with the form of the book review, I decided to get creative. If I'm going to write, might as well be something that piques my interest instead of just leaving another floater in the toilet bowl of review writing. I got fancy, threaded some concepts together, and generally was ok with making an ass of myself. I've done worse things while drunk in bars.
It is not usually a good idea to write reviews for friends. It's like giving a running commentary to someone's sexual talents. It's also a bit incestuous, but if it weren't for a little incest in the writing market, hardly anybody would get published. Maybe not such a bad idea after all. But I relaxed my hesitations and just wrote the damn thing. It was not so much glowing as it was an exercise in being esoteric, which I thought did better tribute to an esoteric book than some fatuous expression of personal taste on the order of I like it or I hate it. I wrote it, sent it off, and it appeared in print by month's end. That was when the silly torment began.
The magazine had some kind of letters to the editor section. It was the most active part of this rather dead collection of bad poets. People who fancied themselves standing as the great vigils of literary taste aired their grievances against my review. A little controversy isn't too bad, I thought. Not everyone has to like everything I write, and if they did I would seriously question their mental health. The big literary pontiffs acted as backers to minions who deployed hateful critiques of my review. Having never written a book review before, I felt somewhat culpable. I had this silly need to engage the public with some form of explanation of clarity. I gave the whole thing away, how and why I did the review the way it appeared. Publishing is a whore's gambit anyhow, but I was still green.
The letters section tripled in size by the next issue. People were taking sides on the relative merits or atrocity of my review, and mostly taking sides against me. As soon as one critic slammed me, they started really popping up in a feeding frenzy. The smell of my blood really excited them, and by the subsequent issue, I was being slashed in red on just about everything. Things took another turn for the worse when they started talking "over" me, concurring with each other that I was a hack, that I was on some vicious ego trip, that I was some pretentious philosophy cyborg, and cheap indirect shots where they questioned the state of our education system in producing a monstrosity like me. Fred, who I knew from some reading, got wind of this gang-up and decided to write a letter in my defense. This, of course, made a simple hatchet job on my reputation a mass slaughter.
I am partially to blame for whatever hex I'm under while writing, and fully to blame for getting bogged down with these silly entanglements. I've got overly sensitive reading antennae, and whatever I read lots of seems to affect me down to the bones. At that time I was filling my head with contemporary French philosophy and all their confusing guru language, so it was bound to seep and spill all over my pages in both terminology and style. Otherwise, my "normal voice" (and I have no patience for scribblers who saw the air with this hobbyhorse of the "authorial voice") is to write things that sound like the last words of earth's last lunatic.
In the love and hate matrix of writing, among alliances and broken alliances, professional and not-so-professional envies, you just can't take any of it personally. They love you, they hate you, the same amount of suspicion or indifference should be your lighthouse. And then the emails started. It was soon after Fred had penned in my defense. A voracious critic named David who had slagged me in the public prints had thought my battle engagement lacking in effort and conviction, and so sought to rile me where I live: at home, hunkered over this silly machine, checking my emails. Vast swathes of hateful prose gibbered from his lips, poured through insecure tapering fingers, tappity-tapping its way to me. On any given day, I would be the proud recipient of about 14 or 15 emails from him per diem. If that wasn't bad enough, he enlisted the help of all the lonely buffoons he could to harass me—although, in the reductive world of email, it is hard to say if he didn't just create a whole new cluster of email accounts and was deploying from them to add to the sour flavour of the whole debacle.
The emails started numbering into the hundreds after a few months, and then the thousands by year's end. David had taken to the stage of repeating himself, berating me on the same old points…and because I just wouldn't bother responding, I wasn't giving him any new material to work with. Sometimes he would harangue me about some piece I published, but mostly it seemed that he had lost his bearing on what he wanted to chastise me about in the first place. After the repetition phase where he, like any writer, recycled a lot of his most biting lines, the tone began to change. His prose started wandering. At times, his insults gave me something to chortle about when they were good and I didn't take it personally, but his grievances were starting to get a bit trite…even by my standards, which aren't very high. The guy was a nut, and one can always tell a nut by their persistence. Psychos and junkies can be sniffed out by their never giving up. In fact, I was beginning to see that David had set his life purpose on this. And I have to hand it to him: he was a self-sustaining psycho given that I never once bothered to give him a reply. Maybe it just wasn't about me at all. I was just some symbol, a place to invest time and effort…
As I said, the tone was changing. It became less an attack on how horrible a writer I was and adopted a more confessional tone. He once even told me that he was taking up Burundian cooking in night classes and was getting more houseplants. Great. The insults started falling off, and I guess this is where I started getting bored. David wrote to me about his insecurities as a writer, as an aging bachelor, and all the other universal crap that we don't really need to air.
At some point, David found a girl. The daily email count fell off, and I was lucky if I got one a week from him. After about two months, it was clear that whatever he had with this girl had gone sour because he resumed his regimen with more gusto, even resuming his insult barrage. That was fine because like all distasteful things we grow accustomed to—taxes, raging cases of the clap, and politics—we miss the structure and dependability they give our lives when they disappear. In a strange way, he was becoming something of a friend—or as much a friend this kind of relationship can afford.
And this is where we are today. He continues to flood my inbox with his hourly missives on this and that, occasionally remembering his function to take pokes at my lack of talent. I named him, in my mind, the writer's conscience and the Modesty-Making Machine. Any time I feel a bit too inflated with self, I just read David.
Kane X. Faucher is a doctoral candidate at the University of Western Ontario's Centre for the Study of Theory & Criticism in London, Canada. He has published in several academic and literary journals both online and in print. He also has published three novels, Urdoxa (2004), Codex Obscura (2005), and Fort & Da (2006). His web page is at http://www.geocities.com/codex1977.