Whenever anyone on Tumblr says, “don’t reblog my posts,” I sit back and I wonder what my life would be like if my idea of security was storing classified documents in the Xerox tray.

C’mon. People. There is such a thing as inviting trouble.

Every time I look at my girlfriend I find some new way that she’s gorgeous beyond compare.

No moral or anything. That’s all.

• “ALSO I THINK SHE’S REALLY COOL AND I HAVE A GIRL CRUSH ON HER AND I WANT TO TALK TO HER ABOUT GENERAL THINGS” — some blog
• “SERIOUSLY THOUGH HE’S MARRIED TO THE LUNATIC IN THE ATTIC AND YOU STILL MARRY HIM” — Jane Eyre
• “SO TANGY AND DELICIOUS” — a bowl of noodles
• “SO BAD” — Jane Eyre
• “TAKE MY HAND AND WE’LL MAKE IT I SWEAR” — a cold I had one week ago
• “NO I DID NOT JUST CALL YOU JESUS DON’T THINK I DID” — her religion
• “I DON’T WORSHIP YOU” — her religion
• “I LOVE YOU AND THAT IS DIFFERENT” — her religion

A response to Angela’s reblog of this post.

amariefox:

What are your solutions then for that argument? How do we differentiate between people? Everyone wants an identity, seeks to have some kind of word to describe who they are. One word.

Hell, even if they AREN’T a serious writer, but want to be called one, because they have wet dreams about Hemingway… what do you do then? Strip them of an identity they have chosen? Maybe they don’t want to be known as a ‘garbage man’ or ‘secretary’ because it designates certain other ideals they don’t feel as comfortable with.

See, to me this is not a problem. A person might want to be called King of the World, but are they the king of the world? What obligation do I have to call someone by the label they choose for themselves if it isn’t true?

Do I have an obligation to participate in the lie, then, to assist them in distortion of the language? I’m not going to call rich people poor if it makes them feel better about their wealth, nor will I call a success a failure—so why would I call someone who hasn’t written a novel a novelist?

Thus, if said garbageman calls himself a writer, reads plenty of books, talks intelligently about writing, and yet does not write, I will under no circumstances call him by this label he chooses. And if he is upset by that, you know, tough cookies, bro. I can always just call him Craig.

Signifiers and the signified, man. It is a tough business. 

Some people find a sense of community in the term ‘writer.’ I just don’t know what sort of outcome there will be if everyone just stops using it. 

I’m not really serious about removing the word “writer” from the lexicon, but we need to dissociate it from all its types and stereotypes. Otherwise, the community will always remain exclusive, penalizing people who do write stories but don’t fit the artistic mold, while encouraging people who fit the mold by wearing berets and smoking from long cigarette holders (or whatever type you choose) and yet don’t actually do anything.

In lieu of being able to simply remove the cloudiness of these definitions, we could help the specificity of the occupation and pin down exactly what people do rather than how they wish to present by more specifically labeling them. You cannot, for example, be a diarist without have a diary or journal; you cannot be a short-story writer without possessing a short story you have written. Likewise, I would like to reduce the term “writer” to the simple definition, “someone who has written.” Meaning, well, virtually everyone. Because really everyone who has written is a writer; this fact is not in dispute.

It’s people who want to delineate an exclusive community of Real Writers within the greater body of humanity that bother me. Insofar as it is exclusive, it’s a problem, because since any writing is Real Writing, the only way to define such a community is by surface actions, aesthetics, superficialities.

Can we just revoke the term “writer” for now? You know, let’s talk specifics: you’re a blogger, a critic, a diarist. Or if you’re actually published? An author, a poet, a lyricist, a novelist. But even these terms are idiotic, inadequate: they force an activity as simple as eating and breathing into a cultural mold that barely begins to express it.

It bothers me when I see people saying, “Oh, I’m a novelist.” How many novels have you written? “I’m finishing this one.” Uh-huh.

This is not to say that amateurs or those outside standard publishing channels shouldn’t be taken seriously—I think they should, because after all, I am an amateur, I haven’t been published for money. But if you have no novel, how is it that you define yourself as a person who creates them? You say this because “novelist” and “writer” now entail a whole set of cultural types, stereotypes and countertypes that have nothing or very little to do with actually putting words in an order. Yet these are not acknowledged as forming part of your submerged perspective, for if you ask this novelist what they do to be considered one, they say they’re making a book, as if the people who put together my copy of Wheelock’s Latin had not done the same thing.

It seems to me that in particular the late period, and the internet in general, has been obsessed with the concept of writer-as-artist, a label that defines who you are—in a tribal, coffee and bookshops and baby-Luddism-of-typewriters sense—rather than just a thing that you do. The sort of people who drink whiskey and smoke cigarettes because they think it will inspire great thoughts, and rhapsodize about Paris or peyote because they read A Moveable Feast and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

And this may be extended to almost any artistic identity, because it is only lately that (aside from the narrow beneficiaries of the patronage system of earlier centuries) it became possible for large swaths of the general population to make a sole living from the arts. After all, Leonardo was an engineer, and Marcus Aurelius an emperor—one must have a trade. The writing of books as trade itself is such a new thing that no wonder it struggles to define itself. Pure teenage rebellion.

It is less important, I think, for Hemingway, the ambulance driver, or Joyce, the tenor, to be labeled “writers” than for them to be identified as the creators of A Farewell to Arms and Ulysses. “Writer” explains nothing, attaches romantic perspective to an extremely broad human activity, doesn’t tell us anything about what they as people had to say about the human condition.

And no, this is not a rant against posers and definitions solely, but it’s frustrating for me to see the term “writer” carry these very specific definitions and stereotypes that a) create clones of existing “writers,” b) force aspirants out of communities because they don’t fit, and c) cause outsiders (as if there is anyone literate who is really outside of the writing community) to finger people as posers who are really not, who really do believe in working crappy jobs for years in the hopes of being published someday, who are not doing it for reasons of appearance but because they truly believe in the Life, in the Calling, in the sport of words.

You call it cultural appropriation, I call it cultural assimilation. We become the old trope, that melting pot. What was once confined to a narrow street now accumulates many new meanings in the public square. And why shouldn’t this be a good thing? Is memory confined to blood? Or can the heritage of any people be shared, divided, distributed? We talk about division, but the history of cultural appropriation is evangelism: “Here,” it says, “the thing which once separated you and I now unites us.”

My God, they included an advertisement for themselves in the link post I just created, without even asking me.