Getting Inspired at 3 in the Morning

Mark Twain said, "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." I would like to propose a more particularly literary corollary to this excellent proverb: The best writing makes you want to participate in it by creating something yourself. For the writers among you, don't you love that feeling when you read a story or book or poem, and you put it down and all you want to do is write something yourself? For Whom the Bell Tolls affected me that way so powerfully that it induced me to re-emerge from a years-long writing hiatus and once again take up the pen.

I was recently perusing Web del Sol's own 3:AM Magazine when I felt once again the thrill of inspiration that comes from reading a good piece of writing. The flash fiction piece "I Am Running Out of Ways to Make You Love Me," by Elizabeth Ellen, made me want to sit right down and pop out my own flash fiction. (I didn't do it, for various reasons, all of them hopefully good ones, but that's another blog post.)

Specifically, the story made me think, "Why isn't more of my writing sexy?" Ellen's piece is sexy, although not pruriently so; it's just about the complicated interweavings of sex, love, and loneliness in a relationship (and potentially outside of it). I immediately fell in love with the story's first-person narrative voice:

I’d never taken nude photos of myself before. I wrote this on the palm of my hand so I’d remember to tell you: I’ve never taken nude photos of myself before. I wanted to make sure you appreciated the gesture. I was trying to make you love me anyway I could. I had a feeling I wasn’t doing so well anymore. I thought about how effortless it had been in the beginning:
1. eat a bag of peanut M&M’s
2. brush hair

Compelling, emotional, nonchalant, and realistic, all at the same time, all without veering into mawkishness, cynicism, obscurantism, or any of the other pitfalls awaiting those who write flash fiction, or who write about relationships, or who write about sex. So do yourself a favor and read some good fiction that will make you want to write, or paint, or sing, or maybe take naked pictures of yourself.

The Old Left Makes New Compromises

Winston Churchill was a brilliant, articulate, eloquent politician. He also had some deplorable political views, especially with regard to race, as a recent biography has pointed out. But the man could turn a mean phrase, and he left us with some great quotations, even when they express views that are, shall we say, regrettable.

For example, here's my favorite Churchill quotation: "If you're not on the left in your twenties, there's something wrong with your heart. If you're not on the right in your fifties, there's something wrong with your head." This quotation is not my favorite because I agree with it (because, for the record, I don't); it's my favorite because it so neatly sums up a trend that's prevalent in many cultures: the seemingly inevitable rightward shift. Communists become democratic socialists, anarchists become Labourites, and Trotskyists become full-on neoconservatives.

The latter group has it the easiest; they can simply say they've seen the light and have dropped a fundamentally flawed set of principles for a completely different and fundamentally sound set. But those who shift right within the left can much more easily be painted as people who compromise for the sake of expedience. You still think capitalism is wrong, or at least not inherently right; but you no longer proclaim your intent to do anything about it. You take the cushy job; you wear the nicer clothes; you compromise.

Author Tessa Hadley writes convincingly, even poignantly, about these issues in "The Enemy," a story (which actually appears to be a novel extract) in The Barcelona Review. I found Hadley's story by going through eScene, Webdelsol.com's excellent archive of links to poetry, fiction, essays, and other literary content located off-site. There's enough great writing here to keep you reading for many a moon.

"The Enemy" is about a woman in her fifties who is visited by her former brother-in-law, who was once a charismatic revolutionary in the 1960s. The tale is suffused by the melancholy mood of a middle-aged woman whose life has never come close to meeting the impossibly high ideals she once used to possess; yet she accepts her life, and herself, with a certain grace. Or is it simply the comfort felt by the bourgeoisie? This is the question constellated by the former revolutionary, who has also changed--at least enough to know something about wine, which he once would have derided as a hopelessly bourgeois (and thus counterrevolutionary) affectation.

But don't let all this political talk put you off. "The Enemy" uses political convictions as the staging ground for an inquiry into psychology, aging, personal change, the texture of a life in its fifth or sixth decade--in short, all the stuff of literature. It's a subtle, wonderful story.