I'm
sitting here thinking of 1984. I can smell it: hairspray (Gen X was
solely responsible for the hole in the ozone layer, I contend), Marlboro
cigarettes and other things that have a grassy, smoky aroma, Jordache
perfume, diesel fuel. It is my own warrant to speak of this time,
and let me tell you, I do and often. After reading "Tesla Matters
(Dude)" all I can think of is this: what are our warrants? How do we
utilize them in our writing? Do they put folks off? Draw them in?
When, and in what kind of writing, do we use them?
I
would contend nonfiction deems them critical to the power of our
message. Let me prove this: how often have you been reading along,
innocently accepting the message (or maybe trepidatiously) when BAM.
There it is. A cultural misstep. That is NOT what Reagan said, or
Clinton, or Bush--the timeline is totally off--no one would have worn
those shoes then . . .
(Yep, I totally just used all of the devices we talked about today.)
A
professor I had once upon a time (her name was mentioned in class this
afternoon) taught me something like this once. It went something
like: never break the suspension of disbelief with your audience. You
lose them. Badly.
You
know the moment. You read the book. And then? There it is, the
popcorn halfway up to your mouth, your feet jauntily hooked onto the
chair in front of you, and there it is. Bastards. Sophie (The Da Vinci
Code) has a brother? What the? That was not in the book. You
look around, expecting riotous indignation from your fellow
moviegoers. Nothing. Yet you have psychically left the building.
Over and out. Suspension? Nope. Disbelief? Yep. The rest is
just, well, garbage. I am personally still bitter about every single
Stephen-King-book-turned-movie I have ever seen. (One of the only
screenplays he has written is Maximum Overdrive. The others were Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. Stellar.)
No
warrant. You can't come in. That is our right as readers, though, I
believe. To refuse entry when we call qualitative bullshit.
And
yes. I have cursed more than once in this blog. Why? Because I am
about to use a warrant, and there is no way you would buy me if I came
off as a pretentious, ivy-league prof.
It
was 1984 and the Cradle Will Rock tour hit hard, right on the heels
of the Back in Black tour (AC/DC, folks). I had no intention of ever
working for "the man" and had even less intention of staying
chemically lucid for more than, well, five or ten minutes. The
t-shirt was black and had SEX DRUGS AND ROCK AND ROLL emblazoned
across the front, and it was about two years before most of us had
even heard the word "aids." And I was ruuunnning. (Little
Forest Gump for you there.) Smart kid, lost, angry, scared, with a
serious Peter Pan complex and no vision of my thirties. Kids like
yourselves made no sense to me. How did they study and mind and cut
their hair and eat their Wheaties? No way, man. Sunlight hurt my eyes
and Walt Disney was blasphemy to my soul. Purposefully, vehemently, I
threw away my childhood when I threw up my lighter to David Lee Rothe
in crimson spandex. Part of me is still back there, waiting for the
lights to come up and force me out into the street. Strangely, all
the songs and all the bands and all the beer-soaked nights add up to
this one moment in my teenage wasteland:
And when some local kid gets down
They try an' drum him outta town
They say, "Ya coulda least faked it, boy"
Fake it, boy (Ooh, stranger, boy)
At an early age he hits the street
Winds up tied with who he meets
An' he's unemployed--his folks are overjoyed.
They try an' drum him outta town
They say, "Ya coulda least faked it, boy"
Fake it, boy (Ooh, stranger, boy)
At an early age he hits the street
Winds up tied with who he meets
An' he's unemployed--his folks are overjoyed.
But
here I am, Dr. PD, thirty years later, talking about warrants. I
suppose I could have just "faked it," but I think I learned the regret
of that decades ago.
And
so. I begin sentences with and. And do a lot of ---- stuff like
that. Proper English? Um, no. But it's in line with the signature on
my warrant. I wonder, do we ever know the voice in our heads without
examining the paperwork . . .