Phthursday Musings: The Writer's Spiel

“One writes to try and answer the questions that buzz in one’s head, obstinate flies that disturb one’s sleep; and what one writes can take on collective sense when it coincides in some way with the social necessity for a reply.”

I found this sentence in Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. It came on the heels of a short discussion about the intent and import of writing that a few of us recently had. (I have much to say about the book itself; that will come later.)

This idea that writing is an attempt to answer the questions that buzz in one’s head, this is marvelous, this is what I’ve been thinking about all along myself. Perhaps if I’d spent enough time I’d have come up with that answer myself. I’ve certainly thought about the subject plenty.

Maybe this is a variation on the idea that a writer must primarily write for onesself (or, similarly, that an artist primarily creates for onesself.) But I have never found that argument sufficient. And I think Galeano solved this problem as well, through his precision. Writing can take on collective sense when it coincides with social necessity. He leaves vague, but not too vague, the notions of what might be meant by “collective sense” and how “social necessity” might be determined. But the use of “can” and “coincides”, there is a connotation here of something almost magical or mythical. Things happen, if they happen, when they happen, according to a candence external to ourselves, and the mysteries around this represent perhaps the most obstinate of all flies buzzing around our heads.

Obviously we learn to write from a young age. In my memory, though, the first time I recall really writing something of any heft is eighth grade.

As part of our Language Arts class that year we had to write a paper. I don’t remember what the parameters were, but the paper I wrote was titled “The Physical and Psychological Effects of Apartheid”. I do not remember why apartheid was a subject of interest. I do not remember what anyone else wrote about. But, I remember writing a paper, using my grandmother’s incredibly heavy 8088 for word processing. (The word processing software was something called Eight-in-One. It came on 5 1/4” floppy disks. I believe that the OS was Falcon DOS 3.1. Imagine trying to explain any of this to a kid today.)

Around the same time, I had a dream that spanned multiple nights. I know this sounds like total bullshit, but really, the dream picked up one night where it had left off the previous night. I wrote out the dream, as best as I could remember the pieces, I believe under the title “Once Upon a Dream”. I still remember details. My dad was in the hospital dying, and my friend snapped his fingers and brought him back from the edge. Several of us found ourselves at one point in a house in a Japanese man’s house in Arkansas, where there was a huge World War II era rising sun Japanese flag. The extended dream was filled with people I went to school with. And I wrote it all up. I don’t know whatever became of it, but it was long and super bizarre.

The same friend around then started writing, on paper, a series of stories that all began with “Today I went to…” So we had “Today I Went to the Zoo” and “Today I Went to the Museum” and so forth. The characters were all the people we went to school with, largely exaggerated versions of them. He started the series, and I joined in.

I wound up with the 8088 when she upgraded to an Emerson 386 (!) and I recall spending real time on it writing very short stories, including “Today I Went To…” installments. I also recall writing similar short stories in my freshman year keyboarding class (we still used typewriters!) I’m hardly going to claim any notable literary merit to any of this, but certainly the creative instinct was there.

In some capacity or another I feel like I’ve been writing ever since. In college I was very deeply involved in the t-file / e-zine community, at a time before this stuff was on the web. I was also deeply involved in numerous rock band listservs, where unlike chat rooms, a lot of the written communication back and forth was in paragraph form, not sentence fragment form. (It’s not that unlike the distinction between a long Facebook post and a short tweet.) When Livejournal came around, I was writing at some length there. All of that crazy time in the Green Party, I was well-known (notorious?) for writing extremely long emails on listservs. That was definitely part of the process of answering the questions buzzing around my head.

And, of course, I got a graduate degree in a writing-heavy field. I remember a time as a TA when a student was complaining, asking why, if this was a history class, he had to do so much writing. I think the answer given was something about general education requirements blah blah blah, but of course the real answer is that there’s something more than just the demonstration of knowledge of isolated facts. Writing is a way to not only demonstrate that you understand the connections between things but also to build those connections. In searching for a way to take pieces of information and synthesize them into your own words, you’re also satisfying the buzzing flies.

I had a very interesting student my final quarter at OSU. He had a nominal learning disability whereby he simply could not take a written exam. If you asked him an essay question out loud, he could rattle off a well-formed answer. But if you asked him to put it down on paper, he literally could not do it.

I have thought at various times that for me, writing is a means of achieving a Faulkner-lite-lite method of stream of consciousness, that I can generate more thoughts through the process of sentence construction than just by buzzing them around in my head. Maybe this is an alternate way of describing what Galeano much more eloquently stated. But one of the things which makes Galeano so exacting is that he doesn’t get into method. There’s a what, but there’s no how. And perhaps much in the same way that different people more effectively learn from different methods, perhaps even within one of those methods - writing - the submethods are notably different. Perhaps for some it’s like an act of mental carpentry, while for others it’s more like an act of mental engineering.

And for the student I had who could not take a written exam? Perhaps today he is able to do things in written communication that are far beyond what you or I could do, because he had to learn how to use speech in lieu of writing. Or perhaps there are other tremendous public speakers who can soothe the buzzing while standing in front of people. Galeano does not attempt to dive deeply into the how, and it is one of the strengths of the book as a whole that the narrative does not present how as though anything were foreordained.

Open Veins of Latin America is 50 years old, but still felt immediate to me. Whether it was because there were such gaps in my understanding, or because it had just been so long since I’d covered any of the material, for me Galeano synthesized much of what I’d understood about not just Latin America but about the United States as well.

The subtitle of the book is Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, which very much sums it all up. The literal veins have been those of goal, silver, copper, and tin; the metaphorical ones those of the exploited people, such exploitation now well over five centuries running.

Galeano makes a fascinating central argument that I’d never synthesized before: pillagers don’t show up in barren lands. It is because of Latin America’s inherent wealth - its abundant natural resources and available people resources (some of those, of course, not quite inherent) - that it has been so thoroughly exploited for so long. How can a country with tremendous natural resources be remarkably poor? Well, that’s the wrong way to frame the question. The question, rather, is how can it avoid such a fate?

I’d been over some of the material before, especially regarding Brazil, but alas, those studies are now nearly 25 years in the past. The modern media barrage, the nature of outrage culture, the information we’re closer to and therefore the information we’re necessarily farther away from… for a while I’ve felt disconnected from certain realms. It’s just so damn hard to try and be up on everything. You can’t do it. Well, maybe you can. I can’t.

It’d be very stimulating to talk through the content of a book like this. Inevitably though I find that the most interesting things I read are so far off from what anyone else is reading that the only way to address the buzzing is to… write my way through it.

I have long envied people who might credibly say, when asked what they do for a living, that they write, that they are writers. To me they might as well claim to walk, or to speak, and to have somehow found a way for these basic activities to be remunerative.

Beyond any potential for remuneration though is the desire to tap in to what Galeano calls the “social necessity”. There’s only so much that I can do with even the most obstinate flies if I’m taking them on by myself! It would take remarkable conceit to believe that we can work out all the answers purely on our own.

I’ve tried to get some pieces published over the last couple of years, but I haven’t had any luck. I spent a lot of time working on a piece based on my Election Day experiences in Clinton, Iowa, and had a particular site in mind, but they passed. I even, inspired by my own ludicrousness, wrote a short story, specifically intended for inclusion in So It Goes, the literary journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, but they passed too. I’ve been asked what I’d like to get published, but in both of those cases, I wrote with a specific place in mind. I suppose that’s not the best way to go about such things, but as META-SPIEL readers realize, I’m liable to write about a whole lot of different things.

The thing I feel I’ve never been great at is the research side. Although I’ve written plenty of academic papers and I’ve done some quasi-journalistic work, the allure has rarely been there to dive deeply into source material. Of course, I’ve never really been paid for anything I’ve written… sort of a catch-22 at work there.

META-SPIEL provided me with a forum for some of the esoteric thoughts I wanted to work out, and Phthursday Musings have sort of forced me to keep it up week over week. I’d like to tackle a larger project, but it seems like maybe some flies are obstinate because they don’t buzz. Or… maybe it’s just easier to quiet the little ones. Maybe the big ones, the sound turns into a hum. You just get used to it.

I only knew one writer growing up:

What flies must have been buzzing around the beagle’s head?

What flies must have been buzzing around Charles Schulz’s head?

How far can I take this section?

Good grief.

A whole bunch of people have Substacks at this point, or similar types of blogs elsewhere. Mostly though the ones I follow aren’t weird like this one.

What I’m curious about is: Who’s got a Substack like this, but they’re in some far-flung place (at least, far-flung relative to me?) Is there a SPIEL-DOWN-UNDER? An ESTONIA-TALK-TALK? Goodness me, can we have Substack pals? Need I rummage through random Substacks to find ye people?

Or, are there topics people want me to dive into? I’ve already demonstrated a willingness to write at length about bird poop. Why not marbles? Tacos? Milwaukee? Yemen?

Meanwhile. Galeano’s best-known work is Open Veins of Latin America, but apparently a close second is Soccer in Sun and Shadow. I’m eager to get my hands on that one next.