On Writers

Quick thoughts:

I've been reading a lot of contemporary poetry as of late. Last night I went online and read Keats, Burns, Shelley, Eliot. I read Faulkner. I read Tolstoy. The reason I looked back at these classic authors was because I began to feel conflicted about the true meaning of what intellectual elitists would call "great writing." Yes, yes, I get it. Art is a feeling put to paper, to canvas, to music. It's also relative and subjective. The writers from the romantic period, the renaissance, the baroque, the Victorian Period all had a way with words. Man, could those fuckers make the nastiest and most grotesque shit sounds like the most gorgeous thing you could ever read. They decorated their writing. They varied their syntax and used diction in clever ways. It was calculated. It took time. They made it sound like "art." I use to appreciate the awe inspiring beauty in this form of writing. I still do, yet now it doesn't seem as organic as it once did. Perhaps because it never was. Perhaps it was never meant to be. I read it and roll my eyes. I read it and call bullshit. It sounds like they're faking it. It sounds like they are saying: "Read my shit and see how smart I am." And I get that. I really do, but the words make me feel in those works. The words and the structure. Nothing else. The stories are stories. Love, lust, fucking, hate, envy, jealousy, war, family. The list can go on and on. Stories are recycled. Blah, blah, blah. Reality is stranger than fiction sometime. And that's what appealing. Reality. I want to read about how life really is, not what people think life SHOULD be. This idealized writing is, in essence, a show. A facade. It's everyday situations and people elevated into some unreal bullshit.  Hemingway, Steinbeck, Palahniuk, Bukowski, Orwell, Huxley, Celine, and Sherwood all have a polar opposite form of writing. It's simple. It's clean. It's raw. It's not meant to impress anyone. It simply is. The words and structure don't make you feel, the characters do. Their situations and their conflicts do. They filth does, their insecurities do. Their boringness. Modernist. Gotta love them. They could all give a fuck about structure and conventions. "This is what I wrote, read it or don't. I could give a shit." And there's something to be said about that. I like reality. I like people placed in situations and telling me about  real and raw things as oppose to idealistic and adorned characters and situations. Tell me the truth, Keats. You're the one that so eloquently suggested that beauty was truth and that truth was beauty. So be real then. Tell me what you really think about that couple on the Urn. They'll never get to fuck and cheat on each other. They'll never shout insults at each other. They'll never eat or sleep.They're too busy falling in love. Please. Tell me the truth Shakespeare as you once did in Sonnet 130 with your hideous dark lady and your  four day romance in Romeo and Juliet. You ended it before it got ugly. You, Shakespeare, had me and lost me. So, thank you modernist. More specifically: Thank you Bukowsky. Thank you for writing about your fat prostitutes, drunkeness, nights on the shitter. Thank you Steinbeck, Kafka, and Hemingway for being honest. Thank you for showing me what drives people. Thank you for not sugar coating love or friendship. Thank you for being organic. Thank you Orwell and Huxley. Thank you for long ago showing us our present as well as our grim future. Thank you for painting an image of people I can walk out my door and see.