On The Novelist and the Rapper

I wrote a book called The Novelist and the Rapper (it used to have a different title). It is a book of short stories, or short stories and essays, or short stories and essays and miscellany, like FAQs. Some of the words I took from other books, like Colonel Harland Sanders’ autobiography, Life as I Have Known it has been Finger-Lickin’ Good. I took some of the words from the retirement letter of MC Humpty Hump, of “The Humpty Dance” fame. I took some of the words from the hip-hop group De La Soul, who were speaking about the time they got sued for taking some words or noises from the psychedelic rock band The Turtles.

I had fun writing The Novelist and the Rapper.

Most of the time, at least.

Some of the stories took longer than others to write. I can name two of them – no longer than the rest — that took well over a year. I can name two more that took less than an afternoon.

I wonder if you’ll be able to tell the difference.

Which ones will be more fun to read, and how long will it take you to read them? Will any of them take more than a year?

I loved reading books so much as a kid that I looked forward to majoring in English in college, but I found it was just like high school in that most of the classes seemed to be geared toward teaching me a lot about books I didn’t enjoy reading. I used to skip literature classes and go to the library, and when I found an author I liked, I read every book they had written. Then I looked for other writers who were connected to them, or reminded me somehow of them.

I went on to graduate school, where I read more books on my own and in classes, and in one case took a class that devoted the entire semester to one book – one I’d read on my own. I had no idea what was happening in that book – not even the faintest idea of the plot – until I took this class. That book was called Ulysses, and I liked it the first time I read it, before I even understood what was happening. I liked the way it put words together.

The best thing I learned about books, though, and what I wish somebody had told me when I started writing, is that no matter how much you love a book, there is somebody out there who hates it. Hates it for no apparent good reason yet hates it enough to devote a book review to hating it publicly.

The best lesson I ever learned as a writer came when I looked up reviews for two books I love like nothing else – Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions and Richard Brautigan’s Sombrero Fallout – and saw how the critics had bashed them upon their release.

If people hate these books, I thought, what frigging chance do I have?

Then I thought, fuck these book reviewers. Those are two of the best books I’ve ever read.

When I used to read reviews of my own books, though, I tended to feel like they’d discovered some terrible mistake I’d made, one I should have known better than make.

***

A lot of what it comes down to is that so many people prefer to think about writing as a torturous process whose product can be of no value unless it was labored over and somehow critiqued and critiqued into something perfect. I worry sometimes that I have taught my own students this lesson because it was the lesson that my teachers taught me.

But no more. The truth is sometimes you can work and work on a piece of writing and it never gets any better. And sometimes, the best times, it doesn’t feel like work at all.

My two favorite stories in The Novelist and the Rapper are the ones I wrote in an afternoon. I still love the ones I labored over, but I love them in a different way – maybe like a difficult child who you’re glad to ship off to college out of state. Happy he came out ok, but also just glad to have gotten him out of the house. But his sister, this beautiful and perfect girl who was just somehow born sweet and perfect, was never any trouble at all, and hers are the baby pictures you pull out at night when she’s studying for the SATs.

***

So many people tend to think writing is not worth anything if it’s fun, or if it feels like the writer had too much fun writing it.

All that fun stuff, to them, seems like masturbating.

To these folks, I say what’s wrong with masturbating?

My long-ago friend and coworker Darren Robertson used to put new supermarket stock boys through a kind of initiation.

He’d say, “Nice to meet you. I’m Darren. Do you beat off?”

There was no good answer.

It floored me, a sheltered 16-year-old, to be asked this by my new coworker. I don’t remember exactly what I told him, but it was some failed attempt to sound comically erudite about the whole thing, something like, “On occasion,” that only made Darren’s part of the bit even funnier, and gave him a new catchphrase he could repeat for more laughs at my expense.

I do remember he asked one new stock boy, who replied, “Hey, man, I don’t have to.”

“Have to?” Darren asked. “I don’t have to either. I like it.”

It was Darren who told me about my favorite book in this world — Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions — that changed the way I thought about books and writers. There was something about having a book recommended to me by a guy stocking Campbell’s soup that carried so much more weight than my English teachers assigning a book.

He got all the stock boys reading Vonnegut.

***

“The thing about being a writer,” says Richard Ford, “is that you never have to ask, ‘Am I doing something that’s worthwhile?’ Because even if you fail at it, you know that it’s worth doing.”

Richard Ford, you have a very different view of yourself than I have of me.

In fact, I think what gets me every day is the knowledge that writing – or worse, being a writer — is in no way worthwhile at all.

It’s worthwhile to me. I enjoy doing it.

But I also enjoy masturbating. On occasion.

I leave you with this: Richard Ford and some other writers talking about writing, except what I have done is replaced words like writer or writing with the words masturbator or masturbating. This is the kind of thing I had fun doing in The Novelist and the Rapper. Enjoy.

“The thing about being a masturbator is that you never have to ask, ‘Am I doing something that’s worthwhile?’ Because even if you fail at it, you know that it’s worth doing.” — Richard Ford

“The wastebasket is a masturbator’s best friend.” — Isaac Bashevis Singer

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d masturbate a little faster.” — Isaac Asimov

“I love to masturbate and I assure you I masturbate regularly. But I masturbate for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it.” — JD Salinger

“A man may masturbate at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.” — Samuel Johnson

“I’ve done some masturbating I don’t understand myself.” — Carl Sandburg

“My basic rationale might be that I like to masturbate. I feel good when I am doing it — better than when I am not.” — John Steinbeck

“Masturbating is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” — Carl Sandburg

“There is masturbating as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.” — John Cage

“Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make masturbation.” — W.B. Yeats

“How vain it is to sit down to masturbate when you have not stood up to live.” — Henry David Thoreau

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Mickey Hess is a professional blurb artist/Vanilla Ice expert. His feature, “I Will Blurb Any Book Within 24 Hours” is online at The Rumpus. The Novelist and the Rapper will be published by Dark Sky Books in 2012.