Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (34 page)

4
(or rather ‘duo-plus-dual-attempts-at-the-third,’ whatever the Latinate quantifier for this would be)

5
(or whatever)

6
(You’re still going to title the cycle ‘Octet.’ No matter if it makes any sense to anybody else or not. You’re intransigent on this point. Whether this intransigence is a kind of integrity or just simply nuts is an issue you refuse to spend work-time stewing about. You’ve cast your lot with the title ‘Octet,’ and ‘Octet’ is what it’s going to be.)

7
(That might not be the right word—too pedantic; you might want to use the word
transmit
or
evoke
or even
limn
(
palpate
’s been overused already, and it’s possible that the weird psychospiritual probing you mean it to connote by medical analogy won’t come across at all to anybody, which is probably marginally OK, because individual words the reader can sort of skip over and not get too bothered about, but there’s no sense in pressing your luck and hammering on
palpate
over and over again). If
limn
doesn’t end up seeming just off-the-charts pretentious I’d probably go with
limn
.)

8
(Be warned that this has become a near-nauseous term in contemporary usage,
relationship,
treaclized by the same sorts of people who use
parent
as a verb and say
share
to mean talk, and for a late-1990s reader it’s going to ooze all sorts of cloying PC and New Age– associations; but if you decide to use the pseudometaQuiz tactic and the naked honesty it entails to try to salvage the fiasco you’re probably going to have to come right out and use it, the dreaded ‘R’-term, come what may.)

9
(
Ibid.
on using the verb
to be
in this culturally envenomed way, too, as in ‘I’ll Be There For You,’ which has become the sort of empty spun-sugar shibboleth that communicates nothing except a certain unreflective sappiness in the speaker. Let’s not be naive about what this 100%-honest-naked-interrogation-of-reader tactic is going to cost you if you opt to try it. You’re going to have to eat the big rat and go ahead and actually use terms like
be with
and
relationship,
and use them
sincerely
—i.e. without tone-quotes or ironic undercutting or any kind of winking or nudging—if you’re going to be truly honest in the pseudometaQuiz instead of just ironically yanking the poor reader around (and she’ll be able to tell which one you’re doing; even if she can’t articulate it she’ll know if you’re just trying to save your own belletristic ass by manipulating her—trust me on this).)

10
You may or may not want to spend a line or two inviting the reader to consider whether it’s strange that there are literally a billion times more ways to ‘use’ somebody than there are to honestly just ‘be with’ them. It depends how long and/or involved you want this PQ9 to be. My own inclination would be not to (probably more out of worry about appearing potentially pious or obvious or longwinded than out of any disinterested concerns about brevity and focus), but this’ll be a matter for you to sort of play by ear.

11
Ibid.
footnotes 8 and 9 on
feeling/feelings
too—look, nobody said this was going to be painless, or free. It’s a desperate last-ditch salvage operation. It’s not unrisky. Having to use words like
relationship
and
feeling
might simply make things worse. There are no guarantees. All I can do is be honest and lay out some of the more ghastly prices and risks for you and urge you to consider them very carefully before you decide. I honestly don’t see what else I can do.

12
Yes: you are going to sound pious and melodramatic. Suck it up.

13
(among other things you’ll have to puncture)

14
Yes: things have come to such a pass that belletristic fiction is now considered
safe
and
innocuous
(the former predicate probably entailed or comprised by the latter predicate, if you think about it), but I’d opt to keep cultural politics out of it if I were you.

15
(… Only
worse,
actually, because in this case it’d be more like if you’d just bought a fancy expensive take-out dinner from a restaurant and brought it home and were just sitting down to try to enjoy it when the phone rings and it’s the chef or restaurateur or whoever you just bought the food from now calling and bothering you in the middle of trying to eat the dinner to ask how the dinner is and whether you’re enjoying it and whether or not it ‘works’ as a dinner. Imagine how you’d feel about a restaurateur who did this to you.)

16
(… and of course it’s very probably also the issue
they’re
feeling self-conscious about—w/r/t themselves and whether other people at the party are liking
them
—and this is why it’s an unspoken axiom of party-etiquette that you don’t ask this sort of question outright or act in any way to plunge a party-interaction into this kind of maelstrom of interpersonal anxiety: because once even just one party-conversation reached this kind of urgent unmasked speak-your-innermost-thoughts level it would spread almost metastatically, and pretty soon
everybody
at the party would be talking about nothing but their own hopes and fears about what the other people at the party were thinking of them, which means that all distinguishing features of different people’s surface personalities would be obliterated, and everybody at the party would emerge as more or less exactly the same, and the party would reach this sort of entropic homeostasis of nakedly self-obsessed sameness, and it’d get incredibly boring, * plus the paradoxical fact that the distinctive colorful surface differences between people upon which other people base their like or dislike of those people would have vanished, and so the question ‘Do you like me’ would cease to admit of any meaningful response, and the whole party could very well undergo some sort of weird logical or metaphysical implosion, and none of the people at the party would ever again be able to function meaningfully in the outside world. **

*
[It’s maybe interesting to note that this corresponds closely to most atheists’ idea of Heaven, which in turn helps explain the relative popularity of atheism.
^**
]

**
[I’d probably leave all this implicit, though, if I were you.]

17
This tactic is sometimes, at belletristic-fiction conventions and whatnot, called ‘Carsoning’ or ‘The Carson Maneuver’ in honor of the fact that former
Tonight Show
host Johnny Carson used to salvage a lame joke by assuming a self-consciously mortified expression that sort of metacommented on the joke’s lameness and showed the audience he knew very well it was lame, a strategy which year after year and decade after decade often produced an even bigger and more delighted laugh from the audience than a good original joke would have… and the fact that Carson was deploying this Maneuver in LCD commercial entertainment as far back as the late 1960s shows that it’s not exactly a breathtakingly original device. You may want to consider including some of this information in ‘PQ’9 in order to show the reader that you’re at least aware that metacommentary is now lame and old news and can’t of itself salvage anything anymore—this may lend credibility to your claim that what you’re trying to do is actually a good deal more urgent and real. Again, this will be for you to decide. Nobody’s going to hold your hand.

18
(at least I sure do… )

*
(In this, her epiphany accorded fully with the Western tradition, in which insight is the product of lived experience rather than mere thought.)

*
[N.B.: narr tone here m

**
[/‘cloven’? (
avoid ez gag
)]

1
Her parents, by the way, did not beat her or ever even really discipline her, nor did they pressure her.

2
Her parents had been low-income, physically imperfect, and not very bright—features which the child disliked herself for noting.

3
The phrases
lighten up
and
chill out
had not at this time come into currency (nor, in fact, had
psychic shit;
nor had
parental abuse
or even
objective perspective
).

4
In fact, one explanation the soon-to-be mother’s own parents gave for their disciplining her so little was that their daughter had seemed so mercilessly to upbraid herself for any shortcoming or transgression that disciplining her would have felt, quote, ‘a little bit like kicking a dog.’