"But the real romance is being young and writing with your friends."

Yesterday I finally had the chance to catch up on my Interview subscription, and in the September 2009 issue with Natalie Portman on the cover, there's a great interview that Aziz Ansari does with Jason Schwartzman. You can read the entire thing here, but I isolated this portion, about Schwartman's experience writing The Darjeeling Limited screenplay.

SCHWARTZMAN: The writing process was incredible. I wrote it with Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola, and it took about two years. We ended up finishing the script in the Himalayas.

ANSARI: Wow! Geez. That's awesome.

SCHWARTZMAN: Yeah, it was fun. And then we came back and had to rewrite it all in New York. It sounds so romantic- and it was romantic, because I was with my two great friends and we really were working on something very personal- but it wasn't romantically beautiful all the time. It was rough at times. But the real romance is being young and writing with your friends.

ANSARI: Do you have any advice for young actors, such as myself?

SCHWARTZMAN: You don't need any advice from me, man. You're incredible! You're like the funniest motherfucker in the world.

ANSARI: Aw, come on.

SCHWARTZMAN: I'm serious. But let's see. I'm not really one for advice other than, if you can write, write. If you have the ability to write, then you should write. Be diligent about it.

Schwartzman knows that a lot of the best art was created by groups of 20-somethings who had nothing better to do than sit around all day drinking and talking shit and smoking unfiltered cigarettes in dingy apartments and unfurnished houses. Think H.D. and Ezra Pound. Think the Beats. Think Warhol's Factory (hello, that's how Interview mag started anyway). Let this Interview snippet be a rallying cry for all you writers out there and get your pens (or keyboards) moving! Jason Schwartzman commands it.

(image from Interview Magazine.)

Anger = Fuel

"I will confess to you now that anything I have ever accomplished as a writer, as somebody doing TV, as anything I have ever done in life down to, like, cleaning up my room, has been accomplished because I was going to show people that they were fucked up and wrong and that I was the fucking center of the universe, and the sooner they got hip to that, the happier they would all be … That’s what’s going on in my head."

-David Simon,

creator of "The Wire"

I am an unabashed fan of The Wire and David Simon has in many ways become the end-all-be-all to me, not only in his being a journalist, a screenwriter, a novelist, a newspaper advocate, etc., but because his anger seems palpable in anything he pours himself into. His ego may seem bigger than Baltimore, but at least he's a screenwriter with convictions.

His statement also brings up one of the bigger(biggest?) questions about writing, whether it's short stories, poems, essays, articles, novels, blogs: Who are you and why does what you're writing matter to me in my separate universe?

Sometimes, definitely in Mr. Simon's case, anger and self-righteousness can help the writer blaze on through that question. Others, as Dubus' quote a few posts back about Hemingway's "lack of talent" shows, have doubts about their worth as writers and their perception on the human condition.

So maybe we should take a lesson from David Simon every once in a while. If we hit a brick wall or come to an impasse filled with doubt, tear that shit down and shout, "I am the smartest motherfucker who ever constructed a sentence."

You Got Served

I'm a waitress and a poet. Sometimes these two roles intersect: I try to focus in on "the image" of a customer who's ordered something specific. What does calves liver say about you? How about French-toast-style bread pudding? So far many assumptions commonly made based on food prejudices have been wrong.

In the case of a woman I call “Veggie Burger,” she is not super friendly and organic-crunchtastic as one would guess. She’s actually a big time complainer and one of the most impatient and unhappy people I’ve ever seen. I don’t know how her husband puts up with it.

And then there are the old men who order spaghetti and meatballs. You expect them to be pretty uptight and a little mean, but they turn out to be the sweetest customers and the best tippers.

How about the guy who always orders orange juice, even with dinner? Is he concerned about his tooth enamel, because if so, I should really give him a straw. Does he have super evolved health consciousness? Is he warding off a cold? Was this his favorite childhood drink? I have so many questions and only one object- a citrus beverage- to act as the answer. So in the spirit of trying to use my day/night job as fuel for my writing, here’s a little poem (it’s bad) that I wrote the other night as an exercise in streamlining my money making talents with my love for lyricism:

orange juice

you ask for

orange juice,

and we’ve joked

about this drink

for weeks—whether

you’ll have that or

cappuccino instead—

and I want to tell you,

“forget the OJ

and take me,”

but I carry the cup

to your table. this glass

of orange juice

is nothing. it’s all the things

I could give you:

watercolor sketches

of west end avenue,

free tickets

to the new museum,

my body to hold

as you sleep,

homemade lentil

soup on saturday

mornings.

In Defense of the Word

"One writes out of a need to communicate and to commune with others, to denounce that which gives pain and to share that which gives happiness. One writes against one's solitude and against the solitude of others. One assumes that literature transmits knowledge and affects the behavior and language of those who read... One writes, in reality, for the people whose luck or misfortune one identifies with-- the hungry, the sleepless, the rebels, and the wretched of this earth-- and the majority of them are illiterate."~ Eduardo Galeano, 1978, translation by Bobbye Ortiz

Andre Dubus' "Letter to a Writers' Workshop"

"We can't make them perfectly, only as best we can. Hemingway once said that he had very little natural talent and what people called his style was simply his effort to overcome his lack of talent. Don't take it lightly. What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?"

-Andre Dubus
"Letter to a Writers' Workshop"
MEDITATIONS FROM A MOVABLE CHAIR

Hiatus

Youwillgetpapercuts is hereby resurrected.

The summer hiatus is over.

Let the posting begin.

The Romantic Dogs

by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Laura Healy

Back then, I'd reached the age of twenty

and I was crazy.

I'd lost a country

but won a dream.

As long as I had that dream

nothing else mattered.

Not working, not praying

not studying in the morning light

alongside the romantic dogs.

And the dream lived in the void of my spirit.

A wooden bedroom,

cloaked in half-light,

deep in the lungs of the tropics.

And sometimes I'd retreat inside myself

and visit the dream: a statue eternalized

in liquid thoughts,

a white worm writhing

in love.

A runaway love.

A dream within another dream.

And the nightmare telling me: you will grow up.

You'll leave behind the images of pain and of the the labyrinth

and you'll forget.

But back then, growing up would have been a crime.

I'm here, I said, with the romantic dogs

and here I'm going to stay.