Do you want to be a writer?

October 20, 2010 7:16 PM

Do you want to be a writer? This is your tradition. In 1978, Michael Ventura co-founded the 'LA Weekly,' serving as film critic and feature writer until 1983, when (while continuing to write features) he began his biweekly column Letters at 3AM. The column appeared in that publication until 1993; since then, it has been published by the Austin Chronicle.

17 years of archives available at the Chronicle as text, or ad-free PDFs on his site.

posted by Devils Rancher (6 comments total)

Mark Twain: made his fame and fortune by writing funny and trite, while his one serious work (Huckleberry Finn) is still censored nearly a century after his death.

Ummm, not true. He made is fame and fortune writing brilliant and funny, and "Huckleberry Finn" is one of the most widely owned, read and available books in America -- and despite little storms of objection here and there, hardly "censored" in our time or any other.

As far as Herman Melville is concerned, John Updike's essay "Melville's Withdrawal" has some brilliant research showing that Melville did pretty well by the standards of his time, and Moby Dick was far from a dismal failure in sales.

Most of Ventura's other assertions about American authors are equally exaggerated. Actually, being a writer is pretty fun. You make a little money and you get to write all the time. The hard part isn't succeeding at it. The hard part is being good at it.
posted by Faze at 7:59 PM on October 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

Do you want to be a writer/actor/comedian/musician/artist? This is your tradition.
posted by Uppity Pigeon #2 at 8:45 PM on October 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

I've really enjoyed reading Ventura over the years, good writing, often a take that others just don't see.

Two essays of his that come to my mind immediately upon seeing this post are "The Talent Of The Room" and "Why Love Sucks."

"The Talent Of The Room" is an essay on writing, the point being that you can have oh so many talents -- your words may sing, your creativity may hum, etc and etc -- but if you do not have the ability to sit by yourself in a room and stack words one on top the other, creating essays or poems or novels or whatever it is that you're called to write, if you can't get into a room by yourself and do that deal then you're not going to be a writer. He talks (writes) about how scary it is, or can be, climbing into your head, which is where your words are, and not knowing what may come tumbling out; he talks about sitting in that room for long, long years before knowing if you're really talented or not, etc and etc. He (very accurately, and comically, too, except it's not comical to the person who's living it) describes how people say they need this studio or that one, they need this pencil or that word processor or quiet or the city or the country or WHATever and then they get whatever it is that they think they need and then they are in that room and they shit their pants and their head explodes and they run for cover. One of the places that many run to is to teach, but he speaks of the fact that teachers teach, which is a totally different animal from writing, which is something you do alone in a room. A good read, and it's available (pdf) on his website. I've not read it in over a year, which will become perfectly clear to you if you read it and compare what you've read to what I've written here, which is sorry at best.

"Why Love Sucks" isn't online anywhere that I know of and I have looked. Too bad; a great essay from 1994, I've got a copy of it as a jpg on another puter somewheres, I'd like to post it online for you all but if I did I'd bet some of you would want to come after me with a hatchet and I suspect you'd be correct in doing so -- they're not my words, they're his words. The meat of the essay is his description of love (paraphrase here for sure)" "Love is that which brings all that is not love to the surface to be healed." He states (correctly, in my opinion and damn sure in my experience) that we may go to love for comfort, for adventure, for peace, for joy, for god, for any number of reasons, but why we go to love doesn't mean shit; what happens when we go there, and when we get there, when we're in a place where we feel safe enough with another human being to really be ourselves is that all of "our stuff" then comes rising to the surface, to be healed in that place of love, in the safety of that love. This has surely comforted me, as I've struggled to understand my battered, tattered, wasteland love life, and I've used these words seventeen hundred forty-seven times in explaining to others why they act as they do in the place where they least ought to act that way, with those they love the most, who love them the most, I've given copies of that essay out to many people over the years, an old friend had it on his fridge door, all tattered and torn, he was so glad to get a copy of it. Be nice to me and I'll dig around and find it and send it to you, but don't tell anyone from here, as I'm not interested in hatchet corrections...

Great post, Mr. DR, I've considered an FPP about Ventura before, you got it done, thanx.
posted by dancestoblue at 8:49 PM on October 20, 2010 [5 favorites]

Thank you so much for posting this, Mr. DR!

I lived briefly in LA in the mid-eighties and discovered Michael Ventura in a roundabout way. Having grown up with the Village Voice, spent four years in the Boston Area and the next two In San Francisco, the "free weeklies" were a kind of ritual. I was newly married, had a baby girl and when I wasn't doing laundry or changing diapers I was walking in kind of a dream-state with my little one in a stroller to Chatterton's, the independent bookstore a mile and a half away, browsing around while my daughter slept. And reading.

A review of Steve Erickson's Rubicon Beach led me to pay more attention to Ventura, who was writing I think film criticism at the time. He reminded me of then recently gone Lester Bangs. His voice was always immediate, whether I agreed with him or not.

As for his list, it made my day, in a way, and it is barely 7 a.m. I wrote my (some might argue regrettable) thesis on "The Popularity of Jack London and John Steinbeck," and The Iron Heel remains all too relevant today. When I first met my husband (not in college, mind you), his opinion of Martin Eden was among many things that got my immediate attention.

And William Dean Howells? What a great quote! I was just at a paint store the other day and actually asked the clerks if they had ever read "The Rise of Silas Lapham." Not because I am a snotty twit (okay, maybe sometimes) but because I thought anyone who deals with paint all day should have a special interest.

Thanks again.
posted by emhutchinson at 7:14 AM on October 21, 2010

I picked that one column more or less at random to lead the post off with because it's not as dated as some of his political rants, but what I really meant to point out was his whole body of columns, which has stacked up mightily over the lasy umpteen years. Ventura, along with Lapham at Harper's, was always a beacon of sanity for me in the darkness of the Bush years. I'm really digging going back through all these columns one at a time.

Just for pure rank sentimentality:

Sun editor and instigator Jeff Nightbyrd asked, "Can you write?"

My answer (it was just pure gumption): "Yeah. I can write."

I handed him a crumpled typescript – a 100-page essay I'd written as a way to talk to myself a couple of years before. He read four sentences.

"You can write. What do you know?"

I lied about the extent of my experience in the theatre.

Just that suddenly, I became the Austin Sun's theatre critic.
posted by Devils Rancher at 7:41 AM on October 21, 2010

What about his "HEAR THAT LONG SNAKE MOAN"? A fascinating piece of historical research tracing the roots of rock and roll back to Voudun chants brought to Jamaica by captured slaves, and connected these with the the folk music of young Irish men and women who were taken by their English masters and shipped off to the Caribbean to be crossbred with the Africans who were not thought by the slave traders to have enough stamina. But their Irish folk songs also got crossed with the music of these Africans, and then the hymns of Christian missionaries and the whole thing evolved from that into Gospel and on into the blues and from there via jazz into rock and roll. Fascinating.

And then there was also his collaboration with James Hillman, "We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the world is Still Getting Worse". A brilliant critique of the psychotherapy trade. Hillman by the way is a major figure in the Jungian world.

The guy is brilliant. So thanks for the reminder
posted by donfactor at 9:10 AM on October 21, 2010