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we were ugly...
A few weeks ago I bought a few little self-published things because I thought I should support independent bookstores and writers. Luckily, one of the things I bought was David Barringer's We Were Ugly So We Made Beautiful Things, which is just about the best title ever and makes me completely jealous that I never thought of it. Also, the stories and illustrations inside are pretty good. But the real luck came from getting to read Steve Almond's introduction, which is funny and right and amazing and goes, in part, like this:
Listen: most of the good writers out there are ugly. Butt ugly. Plug ugly. Fugly....Except for Faulkner. Faulkner was pretty hot. But he was a drunk, so a caveat on drunks....I can tell you that I only trust the ugly writers. Deep down, those are the ones who have earned their wrath. All the rest of them, the pretty-boy and pretty-girl authors, fuck 'em. Or, better yet, don't fuck 'em. Get 'em all hot and bothered. Tell 'em you have connections at NPR. Tell 'em you did Terry Gross from the backside and she's in your hip pocket. Then tell 'em, with ice in your veins, you're suddenly hungry--the buffet table is looking pretty inviting--and walk away and leave 'em there. Leave 'em lathered up, flexing their Kegels, mentally reviewing Cosmo's latest Top Five and a Half Ways to Get What YOU Want in Bed, but with nothing more surgically enhanced to grope than their own fabulous bone structure.
and also, this:
If you want to make art in this culture, if you want to shake people down for their feelings, you're ugly by proxy anyway. All that's going to happen is this: you'll sit down and decide you're profound and you'll write a lot of dreck for a long time and various people along the way will give you niblets of praise, which you deserve, but not for what you're actually writing, which is still a stinking heap of narcissism. Eventually, you'll send your work out to the bad parents of the world, and they'll find it (and you) ugly and send you slips of paper with passive-aggressive inscriptions printed by machines, and you'll start to see yourself, finally, as they do: an ugly wannabe freak with no business card and a car tha tmakes guys stop you in the parking lot of your supermarket and offer body work for cheap. This is called progress.
and finally, this:
STAY AWAY FROM HEALTHY ROMANTIC INTERACTION. The worst thing you can do, actually, is to use the funk of sexual success as a hedge against the appropriate depths of self-horror. Remember: you're probably clever enough to fool someone better looking than you are for a while. But, in the end, you're ugly. That's where you live, and you live there alone.
It may seem harsh, but it's actually hysterical and inspiring and makes me want to buy his books and keep the cycle going.