Philistine

So, after tacking this thing together last night and thinking a good deal about it, I’ve discovered a problem:

While I’m at home with the fact that my ramblings here might have a very small and specific audience, I’m not even sure how those masochists would find this blog. I considered

1. adding it as a link to my facebook profile, but that version of me, and many of my “facebook friends” have so little to do with my writing that it seems almost a liability (More on why this is the case, later in tonight’s post).

2. Another option would be to brand this blog with my real name, and in the case that anyone ever gets interested by something of mine they read, they might Google me and find this. This level of fanhood seems positively off-putting now, and seems unlikely even years down the road. This option also incurs costs that I’m plainly not willing to accept (More on why this is the case, later in tonight’s post).

3. A strategy I’ve flirted with in a real way is to create a separate facebook account for my life as a writer. I’m not sure how useful this is, or how far it will go.

4. I think what I’ve settled on is to weed my friends list back a bit. I’ve happily approved anyone I’ve ever met, and while on the face of it I don’t regret this level of promiscuity, it has resulted in my definition of “friend” becoming much more vague than I’m comfortable with. My plan is to: go back through my friends list and only preserve

a) genuine friends. That is, to say, people I see regularly even though I don’t have to; people that have me on speed dial. This, in and of itself, is a broader definition of “friend” than I usually use, as–to my wife’s dismay–I prefer quality over quantity in friends. A very small handful know where the bodies are buried, and they know who they are.

b) writing acquaintances. People from college and grad school, mainly. Since–essentially–my writing life falls under the heading (for me) of “personal life” v. “professional life” (ie., the things I do for money, that have almost nothing to do with my personal life), you could sum up the first half of today’s post by saying that I’ve decided to de-professionalize my facebook account and reclaim it as personal space.

c) fleeting acquaintances. I’m not a recluse, and do meet people when my wife drags me to social affairs. Chances are, if you’re a friend of a friend and I met you relatively recently at one of these things, and you subsequently wound up being facebook friends with me, you’re probably safe. For now.

I’m not trying to be a dick here. The fact is that I’ve failed, in the last three years or so, to pay sufficient attention to my writing life, to the point that I got sort of embarrassed to even call myself a writer–and this after suckering a world-class institution into giving me a terminal degree in creative writing.

As many of us must, I’ve taken a day job. It’s not glamorous or (usually) creative, but I’m pretty damn good at it, and so I’ve almost unintentionally achieved an institutional posture that assumes I’m in this thing for the long haul. Don’t get me wrong here, either: I like my day job. I hang around (and occasionally blend in) with important people at an important university with a great library, and I do something different every single day. I’m overpaid as far as day jobs go, and I often give into the temptation to leave that part of my brain that contains my literary ambitions unplugged upon returning home at night. I have the time to write, I just haven’t made the time to write. I haven’t protected it. I’m out of shape as a serious writer, and I’ve come dangerously close to becoming a fucking hobbyist, and it’s probably hard for people who know me now to imagine that there was a time when I was a full-time writer of serious fiction, or at least did a damn passable impression of one.

The problem with the people I bounce off of (but don’t genuinely become friends with) in my day job, is that they’re probably not that interested in the fact that I write. Some of them probably paint or are into marathons or light bondage, and–while it makes for interesting trivia–it’s really not a priority for me to know this. These are the people who learn that you took a degree in writing and ask you,

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………so you’re a writer, huh? Like, what kind of stuff?

And you can give an honest answer and come off like a complete effing snob, or you can try to be accommodating and vague, or–better yet–you can reply something like

…………………………………mainly porn.

and hope they never ask you again.

I promised you I’d tell you why I don’t want my Christian name all over this blog.

Here’s the deal:

I’m sort of like an assistant principal at a university. I’m one of the guys you see if are pissed off about something in your dormitory, or if you manifest your fury by kicking a water fountain off the wall in your dormitory. You land on my desk if you try to kill yourself, or want us, your parents and your friends to think that you want to kill yourself. I also have to keep some logistical trains running on time–I supervise the people and processes that move you in, keep you alive, and kick you out.

Many of my students are obscenely wealthy, and most are obscenely entitled. Being effective at what I do doesn’t always mean being popular, and some students (and their parents) take our decisions and processes very personally. They like to flex their influence by second-guessing even the most logical things you do in angry, indignant emails to deans and chancellors–folks they imagine (rightly) can make you go away.

In fact, I think you can say your likelihood (not to be confused with worthiness) to advance quickly (as I have) is a function of how easily or quickly those deans and chancellors can endorse what you’re being grassed on about.

Sometimes these folks build ad hominem cases–they nitpick typos in emails, and attempt to reach you at ridiculous times (a non-emergency 11pm weekend email is routine) and, if you haven’t responded within a couple of hours, faxed complaints begin appearing on mahogony desks all over campus. With your name on them.

Remember: the money’s really respectable, though.

All of this to say: I don’t want my writing life–and the fact that I say things like “fuck” for impact–to end up as evidence in one of these deals. I’m not a faculty member, I don’t get paid to “cultivate eccentricities,” as I’ve heard one of my faculty colleagues put it recently.

Poor readers who get pissed off at me could dig and find my work and my entries, of course, but not having my name plastered all over it swings the “Philistine’s plausible-deniability” v. “Philistine-hater’s creepy stalkerishness factor” balance in my favor.

And why “Philistine,” you ask? Well it was the name of my novel and it really, really fit. I killed the novel and made it the name of a magazine (likely online) that I still hope to put together with a couple of really, really stellar writers with whom I’ve worked closely in the past. So I booked the website “philistineliterary” and then built a blog.

I am a Scots-irish Catholic and have never been to Palestine (though my wife lived there once).  So, that’s not what it means.

Think more along the lines of Carlyle’s “person deficient in liberal cultural.” Stir in Appalachian upbringing and uber-Appalachian sensibilities combined with weirdo erudition. Add irony to taste.

I realize it’s a bit weird to sign my fiction and to chicken out of signing my blog–but if you’re here, you know damn well who I am. Don’t worry too much about it, but if you want to post or comment (or post a comment–I’m still learning to sprechen the lingity), and you happen to call out my name, as in

…….damn [my real name]! you are really quite kickass indeed!

and you come back and it’s been changed to

………………………………………………….damn Philistine! you are really superlatively kickass indeed!

don’t let it hurt your feelings.

If you want, I can give you a code name, too. Earlier today, a really close friend of mine who happens to be a genuinely kickass designer/affectation-enabler offered to help pretty up the blog, visually (she’s already onboard for the magazine, whenever that happens). Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Amanuensis to the blog.

Today’s thoughts, to be explored later: my first two posts here are well over 1,000 words each. If only that were good fiction writing, I’d be positively ascetic in my writerly discipline.

I recognize–and hope that you will–that blogging and [W]riting are two entirely different things, like talking and singing. I will fuck up constructions and have uneven voice/tone/imagery here, and that’s sort of the point.

What I do here isn’t really real.

I am, in fact, several orders of magnitude awesomer than this Philistine guy.