I want to start a grad school just for you
To the guy who writes the firmuhment blog, I want to start a school just for you. Every few weeks you post a rejection letter from a MFA program or creative writing grad school, and I want to type a letter, find an envelope that isn't work stationary (this is big as I'm having trouble finding one) and mail it back to those admission officers. They should know how wrong they are. They sit in offices and varying on department structure have either stacks of letters or stacks of books around them, and they don't have materials. They don't write them on paper, paste them to other paper or scan them anywhere. When they put something down, that something content has one purpose, and one purpose isn't good enough anymore. You, my unmet friend, you put that something down because you have many purposes or you have a purpose you haven't named yet. You and your purposes are the reasons they have grad schools and MFA, and if only they could recall their reasons for existence or at least the French translation.
Anyone else who's reading this, which is most if not all of you, I want you to read three pieces from my unmet friend at firmuhment blog.
First, I want you to read the post that made me subscribe, made me click just via a headline from wherever I first was, what made me stay to read the post in its entirety, made me stay at all, a modern miracle.
After that, I want you to read what I read (other pronunciation, I admit I always feel we have to say) halfway from them until now and got me thinking of the box of McDonald's toys my brother and I had when we were kids, wind-up McNuggets and Muppet cars and Berenstein Bears on skateboards, and how my older cousin Matt came over once, maybe when cousin Tim was in the hospital, and said how we must sure go to McDonald's a lot. We probably didn't go more than anyone else, but I liked to keep a box. As a kid, I would have said how my brother and I wanted that box, but growing up I know I was the box one. That post was a quiet masterwork. Funny doesn't get grad school, but it should.
Last, I want you to read how the blog reviews a Don DeLillo book. Me, I haven't read the book, only interviews about its writing. But if you at all believe life is about the pieces you put together — the happy, the seemingly neutral and the sad — and the ways you put them together, you stay up at night and hope those new ways come to you. You let another's words or other media sink into you and find you wanting for expression. I think about a great green lawn and debate empty or full.
March 9th, 2010 at 10:05 AM
This was such a nice thing for you to say; beautiful in its own right, too (love the last lines especially). Thanks.
May 17th, 2011 at 12:30 AM
[...] Sure, the blog likely has many readers, and this concern is irrational, similar to the fear of jinxing a no-hitter in progress on television. But when a blog runs on creativity and upon returning the blogger names its mental demands as a reason for quitting, I think a commenter can fairly be nervous. Especially when you agree with the blogger's aims. [...]