Ventriloquists

Comes a time in a man's life when he has to take a good long hard look in the mirror and think about what he's doing. In fact, comes that time more often that one would hope. In further fact, maybe the frequency of that time a-comin' is one of those things that need be faced in the mirror. Ahem. So, look, I'm going to level with you: I love to write on this blog about the bad attitude and bad decisions made by Young Fat Schratz. He is always doing dumb things, and I am always able to sit and think about what a clever fellow I am now that I have wised up past him. Well, the reason that I have had to give the mirror good long hard looks and all, is that I got all excited to write, in this post, a Young Fat Schratz story, when I realized that the version of me protagonisting in the story is not all that much younger and not all that much fatter than the me as currently operating. The main guy in this story (which is still forthcoming), has much more in common with the me writing this in 2010 than he does with the YFS we've come to know and love, the one who hit on girls at the library with Greek-root puns and who failed to appreciate Wise Blood and who did all of those other things I had supposedly Risen Above. Nevertheless, I will face my shame and tell the story, and then keep talking. Which is, I hope, no less than you'd expect.

Not So Very Young and Not So Very Fat Schratz was once on an airplane flying from Boston to Buffalo, reading The Emperor's Children and thinking about what a grand success the previous National Poem in Your Pocket Day had been. In particular, I was thinking of a girl with whom I was soppily in love, and how the previous N.P. in your P. Day I had been the lucky recipient of hearing her read several of the poems that I and my hangers on had had in their pockets. What a voice! I thought. What poems! I thought. And, like an idiot, once I got bored with The Emperor's Children, high in the sky on my way back to my native land, I decided to write a poem, on the back of a receipt from the Logan Airport Hudson News.

For almost as long as I can remember, I have been soppily in love with a succession of girls who did nothing to deserve it. My grandfather once told us a mildly offensive piece of doggerel, and when we asked him where he picked it up, he told us that they said it all the time in the Service. When we asked him why, he said, "Well, we had to do something" which I think also explains my decades-long free-floating soppiness. And given that it has spanned the decades, it is something of a marvel that I have been able to restrain myself to writing as few soppy poems as I have. And yet this poem I was writing on the back of that receipt, if I still knew where it was, might strike me now as one of the soppiest. I believe it was built on the kind of conceit that would shame Abraham Cowley, with a bunch of guff about how when I read Shakespeare I imagine Kenneth Branagh's voice reading the parts, and when I read Dr. Johnson I imagine Professor Fix, who taught my Samuel Johnson class, reading it aloud, and how I, the poet, could think of few things in this vale of tears nicer than making her the default voice for poems in my head. Like I said, none of these women deserved all this sop, and I am sorry for it. But it's what I did.

And I've been thinking a lot about that poem I wrote half of and lost because I have been listening to stories in voices like never before. Since I have moved to Brooklyn, I have had no television, and since I have frittered away my loan money, I have had no netflix account, and so I have been exulting in the New Yorker Fiction Podcast (which is the occasioning event for this post and which makes its appearance here, I believe, burying the lede). The way that podcast works is famous writer X reads a story published at any point in history by Famous Writer Y and then talks about it with Deborah Triesman, the fiction editor of the New Yorker. All of which is good clean fun, but it is making me think things like that every story by Donald Barthelme sounds like it's read by Donald Antrim, or that every story by John Updike is read by Roger Angell (the only writer on the podcast so far who has remained like unvoiced, when I read him later, is Nabokov, who's been read on the podcast twice). And check out this nutty piece of syllogism: I now think that Joshua Ferris sounds best like Monica Ali, that George Saunders sounds best like Joshua Ferris, and that Isaac Babel sounds best like George Saunders. That's right: now when I read Babel, I imagine it read with George Saunder's great Chicago accent flattening out all of those translated vowels.

It's a typical response at this point, when I go through these things in my head, to wonder who cares at all. Babel may sound like George Saunders, but it's not like this is making me think that Makhno's Boys took place near Lake Superior. But, after all, the problem of voicing once got me to write a poem on the back of a receipt, so maybe it means something. Voice can't be unimportant; once, it was all that stories had (and I'm not even going to get STARTED on the things I've thought of regarding this and Derrida's wonky take on voicing writing in Signature Event Context, because I thought about that once and it kept me up all night). The iterability (ok, just a little Derrida) isn't even the issue here, because whatever Famous Writer X sounds like is STUCK as what Famous Writer Y now sounds like to me. Like everything else, I think that what it comes down to is a defense against loneliness: it may be dire when it's just me and Don Delillo, but if Don Delillo sounds like Chang-Rae Lee, then, it's me and Don Delillo and Chang-rae Lee, and that makes a difference, I guess. It hurts your head sometimes reading, that you're alone with your gods, and it helps to have someone (and the promise of intelligent discussion with that someone and Deborah Triesman minutes away).

It occurs to me, as I finish it, that it is perhaps germane to this discussion that, when I imagine myself speaking, I imagine neither my actual voice (blech) nor my head voice (too clever by half!), but the impression that my brother Connor does of me, usually when he is making fun of me for being a mope. In fact, a lot like the way he would say it if he were talking about me writing those soppy poems.