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silveradept[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
As I alluded to in an earlier post in this series, I am a writer. There's far too much of my text all over the Internet, in notebooks, document files, work guides, forum posts, and journal entries for me to claim otherwise. And since I've done both fiction and nonfiction writing, opinions and linking to other sources, short form and long, poetry and prose, there's not really an escape for me to claim I'm not a writer. I could claim not to be a writer because I haven't written a breadlik or a vianelle or any specific form, but that's a rather pest-eaten fig leaf to try and hide behind.
Most people are artistic in one way or another, in some form they enjoy working with, or that they have success in, such that they have a medium that they prefer. Some people are multi-media artists, who can work in different things, or at different things, and produce works that fit their taste, or they use their chosen medium in such ways that their designs appear on other objects through the use of other professionals and their machines that create such things. In an earlier entry, I said that I was a person who draws things, but I wouldn't step that all the way up to being a visual artist, because I'm not drawing the things out of my head onto various media, or engaging in cinematography or cut-up artistry or other such things that would indicate that I feel like I'm something more than a complete amateur at those things. They are things I could do or learn and study how others do them, but I'm not practiced enough at them to think of them as art, necessarily.
Words, on the other hand, are things that I've been doing since I was a very youngling, and so have so many other people. Writing is one of those fields that there are more than enough people of skill and practice that the opening of publishing up to people who didn't have to go through traditional publishing houses meant an entire explosion in possible titles that are of excellent quality, even if you take Sturgeon's Law into account, more titles than could be comfortably read by any one person in a lifetime. In some other universe, I might have become a professional reader of words in addition to being a writer of them, given how many people have told me that I have a good announcer's voice when I do the public announcements or leave voicemail messages. Broadcasting school, or voice acting, might have been very interesting to try for in that other life, if I knew it was something I wanted to go for. But acting is also one of those professions where you have so many people who will be good at it that you could cycle through as many of them as you liked and there would still be more, so there are a lot of people who are hoping for a big break and holding down jobs that pay the bills in addition to their ambitions for acting. So when it comes to words, whether writing them, reading them, or acting them, there's a crowd of people who are hoping to make a living with them.
The slightly smaller group of people that I can lay claim to is that of a published writer, in more than the sense of "I have a blog/journal and publish my writing to those spaces." A few of my essays have appeared in professional publications of regional or national distribution, and I've contributed to book chapters in anthologies on various professional topics that have been traditionally published. There have been enough of them that I have sections on my resume-on-the-web to catalog them and link to them when they are published on-line, or, in the case of some of my publications, publishing them on the Web because the publication they appeared in has disappeared into non-existence and the archival copies that I have in print are in my house. I didn't think that librarianship would be a vehicle for publication (or giving presentations to various audiences), but it turns out that there are plenty of places that are looking for people to publish with them, and I have Opinions often enough, and can summon the courage of the mediocre white man often enough, that I end up with publication (and presentation) credits at various places over time. Getting published and presenting is also one of those things I try to encourage others to do, because so many of them have perspectives that are more valuable than mine. (This is not so much a matter of negative self-talk as it is that the profession is often flooded with perspectives from people who look like me, and therefore it especially needs to hear from people who don't look like me.)
I can even claim the title of professional writer, if the bar of "professional" is "At some point in my writing career, I have been paid for something that was published." They were magazine pieces, and I got paid what probably was a pittance for them, but it did happen where I got paid in more than a complimentary copy of the work my writing appeared in. I tend to think of that set of paid articles in the same way that I think of my fractional amount of a Hugo: a fun party trick, or possibly something that I can use if I should ever appear on a panel show like QI and I need to make myself sound as impressive as possible. I am certainly not an author who has scaled the issues of traditional publishing and written best-sellers, nor braved the wilds of self-publishing to create an excellent series, or even a single book, that has sold copies. I can write long form things, but I much prefer to play in the fandom sandbox than to strike out with my original characters and become a "real" novelist. (Even though I know there are people who could just change the names of their characters and otherwise file the serial numbers off and sell what they've created as original novel work. And plenty of fic writers who have also published and sold books and articles that had nothing to do with their fic.) I don't have the ambition to write the Great American Novel, or even the next genre hit series. I also don't have the dedication to do it, and I really don't have the conditions in my life where I could devote time and energy toward getting such a project done. (While the other people in my life picked up the slack that I produced from spending my time on my writing.)
It's possible that I may have moved into even more rarefied heights of being both published and having my work cited in someone else's work, but if that's the case, I haven't officially seen it yet, and I'm sure my h-index is extremely low. I am a front line working person, rather than an academic in any discipline with the expectations of publishing substantive scientific papers regularly. My job has turned out to be unexpectedly stressful in having the bad boss, in working with other people who have turned out to be more hostile than collegial, in bigger trends in public and political spaces, and in dealing with people who have specific ideas of what a library space and library behavior should be like that are fundamentally incompatible with our published expectations of those things, but it is not the stresses of teaching combined with the publish or perish treadmill for tenure. Or any other system where climbing the corporate ladder is required, regardless of whether that will be a promotion to the level of your incompetence. It's another one of those things to put on my QI biography, rather than to try and use as a measure of my superiority over other people.
(Actually, my QI biography would sound rather impressive. Multiple publications, at least one academic citation, presenter at multiple venues on topics of professional interest, librarian, have played a John Williams piece under the direction of John Williams, appeared on regional television multiple times before I was 18 and on national television before I was 25, have caught a touchdown pass in the largest-capacity stadium for collegiate football games…this could go on for a bit.)
Saying all of these things is not meant as a brag or a measure of superiority, unless it's specifically talking to that person who is using their accomplishments to brag and feel superior. (Several relationships ago, a friend of my then-partner dismissed my taste in music and let it be known that he had successfully bedded an adult film star (or was it "was commended on his technique by a courtesan?") That person gets the biography that is specifically meant to be hagiographical, because they're very obviously showing their fan and I'm ready to start plucking plumage.) The accusation of "arrogance" hurt deeply. In large crowds where plenty of people are brilliant, I can shine to the fullest extent I know how, but in smaller groups, I'm not as willing to show anything unless specifically asked, and even then, it's downplayed. I've seen a lot of what goes on behind the curtain, and I've been taught through social reactions that someone openly talking about their accomplishments is more likely to be seen as arrogant, boastful, or otherwise egotistical. (Even as a whole bunch of advice in settings specifically says to talk up your own accomplishments, like when you're going for jobs, raises, or a useful hit of self-esteem.)
Which brings us back around to the community of writers, and of published writers, and how many of them are not present because they've been told they're not going to amount to anything. Or the creator of the words feels the words they write are still too raw, too personal, too vulnerable to let anyone else see. There's so much of creativity that gets squashed, crushed, or displaced in the vulnerable years of childhood and adolescence, and without effort to bring it back, to nurture it, and to give it appropriate audiences, it doesn't really show back up again. For a lot of kids and teens who get denied more traditional, more upper-class, more white-dominated pathways to creative expression, it's no wonder that hip-hop (and several of the other forms pioneered by people of color and then in conflict with appropriation and assimilation forces) holds a prominent place of creativity in so many places and lives. In addition to the brilliance of the Four Elements themselves, each one of them highlights a different type of artistic skill. Breakers are physical artists, taggers are visual artists, DJs are musicians, and MCs are word masters. All of them living and making their art in the cracks and the joins between, the spaces they make for themselves at the seams and the margins. And sure, it feels a little weird to be thinking about Olympic breaking, graffiti hanging in galleries, and the ways that MCs and DJs combine to make albums played across radio and on the players of millions and millions wordlwide. But it's a sign of at least some amount of acceptance or recognition that there's enough interest and enough practitioners of those arts to offer them a greater stage and the possibility of reward, recognition, and possibly even some money for doing that artistic work.
We could do more, of course. We could always do more, and we won't really understand just how much art we are capable of until we live in a society that takes care of people well enough that they can create their art without having to worry about whether or not they can stay alive doing art. I really do wonder what people do as work and as art in that world, and whether we would recognize anything at all about it from our own perspective. I suspect we wouldn't, because true utopia would be entirely alien to us, without even a frame of reference to orient us.
As I alluded to in an earlier post in this series, I am a writer. There's far too much of my text all over the Internet, in notebooks, document files, work guides, forum posts, and journal entries for me to claim otherwise. And since I've done both fiction and nonfiction writing, opinions and linking to other sources, short form and long, poetry and prose, there's not really an escape for me to claim I'm not a writer. I could claim not to be a writer because I haven't written a breadlik or a vianelle or any specific form, but that's a rather pest-eaten fig leaf to try and hide behind.
Most people are artistic in one way or another, in some form they enjoy working with, or that they have success in, such that they have a medium that they prefer. Some people are multi-media artists, who can work in different things, or at different things, and produce works that fit their taste, or they use their chosen medium in such ways that their designs appear on other objects through the use of other professionals and their machines that create such things. In an earlier entry, I said that I was a person who draws things, but I wouldn't step that all the way up to being a visual artist, because I'm not drawing the things out of my head onto various media, or engaging in cinematography or cut-up artistry or other such things that would indicate that I feel like I'm something more than a complete amateur at those things. They are things I could do or learn and study how others do them, but I'm not practiced enough at them to think of them as art, necessarily.
Words, on the other hand, are things that I've been doing since I was a very youngling, and so have so many other people. Writing is one of those fields that there are more than enough people of skill and practice that the opening of publishing up to people who didn't have to go through traditional publishing houses meant an entire explosion in possible titles that are of excellent quality, even if you take Sturgeon's Law into account, more titles than could be comfortably read by any one person in a lifetime. In some other universe, I might have become a professional reader of words in addition to being a writer of them, given how many people have told me that I have a good announcer's voice when I do the public announcements or leave voicemail messages. Broadcasting school, or voice acting, might have been very interesting to try for in that other life, if I knew it was something I wanted to go for. But acting is also one of those professions where you have so many people who will be good at it that you could cycle through as many of them as you liked and there would still be more, so there are a lot of people who are hoping for a big break and holding down jobs that pay the bills in addition to their ambitions for acting. So when it comes to words, whether writing them, reading them, or acting them, there's a crowd of people who are hoping to make a living with them.
The slightly smaller group of people that I can lay claim to is that of a published writer, in more than the sense of "I have a blog/journal and publish my writing to those spaces." A few of my essays have appeared in professional publications of regional or national distribution, and I've contributed to book chapters in anthologies on various professional topics that have been traditionally published. There have been enough of them that I have sections on my resume-on-the-web to catalog them and link to them when they are published on-line, or, in the case of some of my publications, publishing them on the Web because the publication they appeared in has disappeared into non-existence and the archival copies that I have in print are in my house. I didn't think that librarianship would be a vehicle for publication (or giving presentations to various audiences), but it turns out that there are plenty of places that are looking for people to publish with them, and I have Opinions often enough, and can summon the courage of the mediocre white man often enough, that I end up with publication (and presentation) credits at various places over time. Getting published and presenting is also one of those things I try to encourage others to do, because so many of them have perspectives that are more valuable than mine. (This is not so much a matter of negative self-talk as it is that the profession is often flooded with perspectives from people who look like me, and therefore it especially needs to hear from people who don't look like me.)
I can even claim the title of professional writer, if the bar of "professional" is "At some point in my writing career, I have been paid for something that was published." They were magazine pieces, and I got paid what probably was a pittance for them, but it did happen where I got paid in more than a complimentary copy of the work my writing appeared in. I tend to think of that set of paid articles in the same way that I think of my fractional amount of a Hugo: a fun party trick, or possibly something that I can use if I should ever appear on a panel show like QI and I need to make myself sound as impressive as possible. I am certainly not an author who has scaled the issues of traditional publishing and written best-sellers, nor braved the wilds of self-publishing to create an excellent series, or even a single book, that has sold copies. I can write long form things, but I much prefer to play in the fandom sandbox than to strike out with my original characters and become a "real" novelist. (Even though I know there are people who could just change the names of their characters and otherwise file the serial numbers off and sell what they've created as original novel work. And plenty of fic writers who have also published and sold books and articles that had nothing to do with their fic.) I don't have the ambition to write the Great American Novel, or even the next genre hit series. I also don't have the dedication to do it, and I really don't have the conditions in my life where I could devote time and energy toward getting such a project done. (While the other people in my life picked up the slack that I produced from spending my time on my writing.)
It's possible that I may have moved into even more rarefied heights of being both published and having my work cited in someone else's work, but if that's the case, I haven't officially seen it yet, and I'm sure my h-index is extremely low. I am a front line working person, rather than an academic in any discipline with the expectations of publishing substantive scientific papers regularly. My job has turned out to be unexpectedly stressful in having the bad boss, in working with other people who have turned out to be more hostile than collegial, in bigger trends in public and political spaces, and in dealing with people who have specific ideas of what a library space and library behavior should be like that are fundamentally incompatible with our published expectations of those things, but it is not the stresses of teaching combined with the publish or perish treadmill for tenure. Or any other system where climbing the corporate ladder is required, regardless of whether that will be a promotion to the level of your incompetence. It's another one of those things to put on my QI biography, rather than to try and use as a measure of my superiority over other people.
(Actually, my QI biography would sound rather impressive. Multiple publications, at least one academic citation, presenter at multiple venues on topics of professional interest, librarian, have played a John Williams piece under the direction of John Williams, appeared on regional television multiple times before I was 18 and on national television before I was 25, have caught a touchdown pass in the largest-capacity stadium for collegiate football games…this could go on for a bit.)
Saying all of these things is not meant as a brag or a measure of superiority, unless it's specifically talking to that person who is using their accomplishments to brag and feel superior. (Several relationships ago, a friend of my then-partner dismissed my taste in music and let it be known that he had successfully bedded an adult film star (or was it "was commended on his technique by a courtesan?") That person gets the biography that is specifically meant to be hagiographical, because they're very obviously showing their fan and I'm ready to start plucking plumage.) The accusation of "arrogance" hurt deeply. In large crowds where plenty of people are brilliant, I can shine to the fullest extent I know how, but in smaller groups, I'm not as willing to show anything unless specifically asked, and even then, it's downplayed. I've seen a lot of what goes on behind the curtain, and I've been taught through social reactions that someone openly talking about their accomplishments is more likely to be seen as arrogant, boastful, or otherwise egotistical. (Even as a whole bunch of advice in settings specifically says to talk up your own accomplishments, like when you're going for jobs, raises, or a useful hit of self-esteem.)
Which brings us back around to the community of writers, and of published writers, and how many of them are not present because they've been told they're not going to amount to anything. Or the creator of the words feels the words they write are still too raw, too personal, too vulnerable to let anyone else see. There's so much of creativity that gets squashed, crushed, or displaced in the vulnerable years of childhood and adolescence, and without effort to bring it back, to nurture it, and to give it appropriate audiences, it doesn't really show back up again. For a lot of kids and teens who get denied more traditional, more upper-class, more white-dominated pathways to creative expression, it's no wonder that hip-hop (and several of the other forms pioneered by people of color and then in conflict with appropriation and assimilation forces) holds a prominent place of creativity in so many places and lives. In addition to the brilliance of the Four Elements themselves, each one of them highlights a different type of artistic skill. Breakers are physical artists, taggers are visual artists, DJs are musicians, and MCs are word masters. All of them living and making their art in the cracks and the joins between, the spaces they make for themselves at the seams and the margins. And sure, it feels a little weird to be thinking about Olympic breaking, graffiti hanging in galleries, and the ways that MCs and DJs combine to make albums played across radio and on the players of millions and millions wordlwide. But it's a sign of at least some amount of acceptance or recognition that there's enough interest and enough practitioners of those arts to offer them a greater stage and the possibility of reward, recognition, and possibly even some money for doing that artistic work.
We could do more, of course. We could always do more, and we won't really understand just how much art we are capable of until we live in a society that takes care of people well enough that they can create their art without having to worry about whether or not they can stay alive doing art. I really do wonder what people do as work and as art in that world, and whether we would recognize anything at all about it from our own perspective. I suspect we wouldn't, because true utopia would be entirely alien to us, without even a frame of reference to orient us.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-19 07:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-19 03:36 pm (UTC)That particular incident mentioned about the braggart was before her.