jordan's diary -- shooting to kill

2000-11-10 :: 21:07:37
shooting for universal appeal

Soundtrack: Various Artists, "No Alternative"; Radiohead, "Kid A [limited]"
I had to write on 11|10|00. 'Cause it's so binary that way.
Jesus fucking Christ, would Windows 2000's CD Player get back to downloading CD playlists like a good little bitch? It errors every goddamn time I put a disc in now.
I've been an MTV junkie lately. I can't get enough of Jackass or Real World. Jackass shows you that people tend to be naturally good, non-confrontational, and horrible suckers. I find it tremendously, embarrassingly funny. This season's end of Real World was sad to me (not just for their parting ways) but for this one particular reason: many of the housemates felt that they didn't really "know each other" until they had two weeks left. What is it about us that makes us not care until the luxury of time is taken away? Why is it that I just came back from the rare books library, having put in nearly no work at all because I got a paper extension due to my Capture the Flag injury (smashed wrist, nicely black'n'blue and draining now). So I had several hours I could have used today (and hours I could use for other work now instead of writing this) before they closed for the weekend, but now I'm going to milk the extension, as usual. Idiocy. I have done nothing before today for this paper, which was supposed to be due on Monday the 13^th. How sad, though, to live in a house with six people and feel that you didn't know them until you had fourteen days left. Like most people, I liked Julie, it was nice to watch her wrestle with Mormonism and seeing how great a person Danny is and how valid his love for Paul is. When she got the article on the Mormon homosexual who killed herself and was sobbing (retching?) in her room, I was thinking about how I tend not to have such extremes.
I don't really like swinging my mood around. I think it's a reaction to my Type A family. Most of the time I think I take things in a laid back manner, but there is constant evidence against this claim. Stephan tried to do a quick backrub for me in the lab yesterday and I was so tense he gave up until I pleaded and he bashed my shoulders until he could get his thumbs in a little. I wonder if this is the price of maintaining a relative calm. People get the depression, I get the malaise. There aren't too many things that make me ecstatic. I used to divide the world between people whose emotions ran on sine wave patterns and people who were flatliners, but now I almost feel like I'm somewhere in between, like I'm a sine wave with a small amplitude and a large period. Back in August when we had a surprise anniversary party for my parents, I didn't feel myself well up and want to cry, and my sister made a joke about how she knew I wouldn't sob and that she would. That made me feel almost ashamed, like I wasn't feeling enough emotion, or not caring enough. It didn't help that my impromptu speech was horribly awkward compared to her well-composed piece. Whenever my parents get angry at me for waking them up, for taking their sleep away from them, I never get too bent up about it. That makes Mom even madder; she thinks I don't care. That isn't quite right. I never get really upset about hurting them; it bothers me, but somehow I feel entitled, 'cause you know, I'm twenty and it sucks being at home with maybe three good friends around, and no car available to get around, and nothing in walking distance -- so of course I can stay up late online talking to everyone I can't see, of course that's valid. When I see how shitty David was to everyone I realize that that is probably how I come off to them. No wonder they were infuriated. David was an asshole nearly all of the time, so "on the go" he forgot to take people with him.
I was thinking about how I'd come off on there, on camera. How do I come off to you. Not a very new thought, but still present. How is my character being reconstructed out there on your end of things. Would we get along if we met, or do you prefer this distance, being able to mold me as you like from the words I give you. Would you want to date me, or would we be just friends. Would you want to go get drinks, drink until we are hammered, or just go for coffee. Would we clash and grate and eventually be best friends, get along from the start, or just clash and grate with no progress at all. Some of you have asked me to keep secrets, you think I can do that. Why, where's this Nick Carroway factor coming from? If you were writing a story, would I be a good character to put in it? Do you like/dislike me: personality, writing, or both. This paragraph could be taken to mean more than it does, I think. (Cryptic!)
Which brings me to writing. One person wrote to tell me that my my previous entry was my "best. entry. ever." Maybe, maybe I ought to just write like that: exhausted, scrambling, passing out during proofing. But. I could easily see people saying quite the opposite. So self-serving. All telling what I did, no thoughts.
"Audiences," as one of monologues during Works in Progress said, "can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em." I read something by Paul Maliszewski that said: "7:49 a.m.��Write long e-mail to the students in my on-line fiction workshop, on the subject of why they should please reconsider their position that stories with very little detail and loads of ambiguity leave things "open," thus "reaching a broader audience," thereby achieving "universal appeal." Ask them rhetorically what in their lives actually can claim universal appeal. Some band I haven't heard of? A pasta sauce? Coca-Cola? Posit that nothing whatsoever can be said to have universal appeal, except�and here I'm employing an absurdist pedagogical technique that I have no idea where I picked up�gravity and air, and gravity and air only matter to the living. Ask them about what this goal of universal appeal is all about, anyway? Do they really want to create something with universal appeal? Why? I can't imagine."
First of all, that makes a lot of sense and is good advice to the artist in general. But I'll tell you why people want universal appeal. Because, duh, people want to be liked. But more than that, I think people think they have something to share that is worth hearing. Like this. Hello. Tap tap. The microphone is shrieking, can you make this out? We want to share our hard-won knowledge to do something, to help others, to show the Truth we have found. Whether you believe in the Eggersian lattice, the Caulfieldian showing up of phonies, the Bensonian caffeinated wake-up kick, or the Ibsenian 'Summons of the Ideal' -- which are all pretty much the same thing, to be honest -- somehow you have to appeal to a large audience in order to do this. Unless you believe you can just change three people who each change three people, and then I call you Haley Joel Osment and don't see your movie. I'm inclined to believe that change comes best through one-to-one personal interaction, but I think the best pieces of art are like skeleton keys to the internal combination locks that hold people's emotions and personal thoughts safe, reaching as wide a swath as possible while being as unconcerned with the audience as possible. Pyramid schemes don't work.
So I can see why people shoot for that, but shooting for that with abstraction is a cop-out. Like the aforementioned Religious Studies major, who is prone to the abstract statement, saying they hold great truth but that you need to plug in "the right coefficients." The wrong coefficients, of course, are what lead to false and dangerous interpretations. Well. How to get around Occam's Razor, I don't know, but it seems to me that most great art tends to have a statement that is definitive, so on that front I can agree with Maliszewski. While broadness and lack of detail may not be the proper path, the goal of universal appeal seems okay to me, but only with the caution that it is best achieved when it is not a conscious goal. Which probably means this paragraph is a failure.
Since it got started publicly and who knows what Kate will do with her diary since she breaks the deletion rule:
dear jordan,
i am pleased to announce that mission #1 has been aborted. its feeble opening attempts will remain because they're kinda funny.
it has been completely replaced by mission #3! i bet you can't wait.
signed,
THE VERY SUCCESSFUL & ONGOING MISSION #2
p.s. i might think about this entry further when i have done my homewrokrerker
Well, we'll see what Mission 3 is. Jesus Christ, that broke about half of my rules. Such is the price of evolution, hey?