Hello and Happy New Year! I spent my New Year’s Eve watching music videos with my kid. She kept asking me what all the songs were about and because we had closed captions on (I am 95 years old, I keep telling you!), I found myself having to interpret the words for her, which immediately questioned the virtue of watching any of this with an eight year old. For instance: “Betty” by Yung Gravy.
With your baby mama at the crib, I blow her back out
Shawty Filipino and she call me Manny Pacquiao
Alley Oop without the hoop, they call me Jerry Stackhouse
Dazin' out in public, but your mama made me snap out
'Fore I get the dough, I got the morning routine
Wake up bright and early to some brand new cream
Floss three times, baby, I'm so clean
Gravy got cheese, now, that's poutine (Woah, baby)
Gravy coming hot like I'm hoppin' off the griddlе
Pull up on the kid if you're tryna get bеlittled
All the mamas love me, now I think I'm peanut brittle
Flex the rainbow, bag it like some Skittles.
Oh, the double entendres. The innuendo. I’m a MILF who loves peanuts! Um, can you actually call yourself a MILF? Well, enough of that.
In other news, I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few weeks reading a novel by a writer I’ll be working with for the next few months. It’s a very good book and this writer is very talented. That said, the book is also dark and gory to the point of being incoherent in terms of its power of effect. Writers always talk about how the hallmark of JV fiction is its fealty to how “it really went.” Verbatim quotes from friends and family, scenes narrated exactly as they happened at Uncle Vern’s 80th. Standard feedback for this kind of fiction always has to do with art being a manipulated and stylized version of the truth that, in turn, evokes the “truth” more effectively than a one-to-one rendering. So if you’re writing a novel about a woman who, in real life, got beat up 50 times by her boyfriend (just making this up, folks), maybe she gets beat up twice in the novel to generate the same feeling in a reader, be it revulsion, anger, etc.
What I’ve been thinking about in particular, though, is thresholds for feeling, like: when exactly does horror tip over into caricature? Or worse, into nothing at all? I think we talk about this a lot apropos of mass shootings and climate change—it’s all so awful, no one feels anything about these crises anymore, except in the abstract. But when does this happen? When does a person go numb? What’s that tipping point? And is there a way back? I started writing this newsletter before Damar Hamlin—Good God, how awful—but I doubt what’s happened to him will wake anyone up to the unconscionable violence of football in any kind of meaningful and lasting way.
Meantime, I wonder if everyone’s threshold is different. And if age is a factor. It must be, but how much?
And so, yeah, I worry the reason this novel doesn’t rip my heart out isn’t because it’s overloaded with abuse and horror but because I am old and listless and too busy rocking on my porch, sucking down Skittles. But let’s say it is overloaded, what’s the right amount of horror? Too little and it’s a sideshow. Too much and it’s mind-numbing. Of course what I’m really asking about is art and how to move people, which is an old question. A question I ask every time I sit down to write anything. Which is why I’ll be looking to Gravy for all the answers, from now on.
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It’s time for everyone’s favorite game: Name Your Shame, in which I list out everything that’s newly new to me, but probably not to you.
Young Gravy - A rapper. A shaggy, groovy man whose baritone recalls, maybe, Sly Stone.
Musely - not a breakfast cereal or an online MFA program, but a questionably legit dermatology service, mostly for dark spots but also immortality.
Alaskan Cruise Lines or really cruise lines of any kind - it’s not that I’ve never heard of these cruise lines but that I’ve never really looked into them. Holy crap, these ships are insane and, duh, there are hundreds, probably thousands, of blogs debating the best ships and the best tips and the best ways to get Covid, scurvy, and BIOFOUL while aboard a floating jail of your choice.