Me and My Important Thoughts

"When you chew, fuck they rules, it's a feeling." -Shabazz Palaces

Writing from the self.

Reply to Miguel

create an ethos that demonstrates your credibility and limits bias

Miguel’s statement that academia, part of it anyway, or rather just essays. Start again.

Miguel’s statement that one of the academic demands, particularly with regards to reading and writing, is to “create an ethos that demonstrates your credibility and limits bias,” which is and has been a real sticking point with me, with regards to reading and writing. That statement, at least to me, appears contradictory. Or, at least, I hate that it’s the truth, or at least taken as the truth by so many people.

Okay, explain it goddamn.

Specifically with arts writing and criticism, and I guess other types of writing too, though this could just be my own personal view, people tend to present themselves as an unassailable authority on whatever they’re talking about. Now, I’ve read that that makes for effective writing, but to me it’s always seemed like bullshit. I guess maybe it is, it’s more forceful, more manly, to touch on what Flynn says (I’ll get to her). Reading, for example, a movie review by a person explaining that the lighting in this particular scene evokes a particular mood which elegantly juxtaposes the internal thoughts of the protagonist’s main love interest, though she’s pretending everything’s okay, and this is why the scene works and why this director is magnificent. Bull. Shit.

I guess what irks me about people’s writing is the conflation of one’s opinions with facts, or else the substitution of one for the other, or else the ambiguous nature of the two when placed closely together. There’s the absurd notion that, as Miguel stated, you can create an ethos that demonstrates credibility and limits bias, which is contradictory.

Okay, apparently I’ve already said it’s contradictory. Here’s why:

You can’t ever eliminate bias from anything. In fact, I think that by assuming you can, you’re more biased than anyone else. If you assume that you’re above such petty thoughts and feelings as affect us mere mortals, then you are more likely, in my opinion, to treat your opinions as facts, or even worse, you’re more likely to forget that there’s even a difference in the two.

Which leads me directly into Flynn. (Wow, that worked out better than I could have hoped. I love it when a plan comes together.)

Okay, Flynn talks about writing as male and writing as female, or something along those lines. I don’t want to reread because that would mess up the flow I’ve got going, but it’s something like that. Now, unlike Amanda, I don’t think she’s being so literal. Or, if she is, fuck it, that’s not what I took from it. I think she’s talking about stereotypes in male in female, the qualities that are more stereotypically male and stereotypically female. Like, individuality, strength of conviction, supreme confidence  are all deeply stereotypically masculine traits so, surprise surprise, they are what constitutes good writing. It also gave fucking Bush two terms, but that’s neither here nor there.

More stereotypically feminine qualities, like compassion, kindness, being unsure and willing to admit doubt, having “feelings” and expressing them, wanting to be understood over everything rather than wanting to be correct over everything, are qualities that have been kind of…discriminated against, or, no, disencouraged (spellcheck doesn’t recognize it, but goddammit it’s a word) from being considered good writing. I think that that’s what Flynn is trying to say in her, admittedly, sometimes obscure way.

So, I guess, to bring it back around, would Flynn piece have worked better for you, Amanda or whoever else, if she’d been more up front about her biases, or admitted them or whatever? I don’t know if that would make more people more receptive to a piece of writing if they knew off the bat what the person’s biases are.

Like, last year, there was a TV show, a comedy, called Go On, starring Matthew Perry that was set in a grief support group. On the show, Matthew’s character’s wife had recently died. Most reviews were pretty tepid, but one was scathing in its rebuke. That review was written by a widower whose wife died a few years ago. I knew this from having read his stuff for years, but at no point in the review was this mentioned. But the entire time I was reading this review, all I could think of was the unacknowledged, unexamined elephant in the room. And because that elephant went unacknowledged and unexamined, I found it pretty impossible to take his opinion at face value.

I've noticed in my writing, and you've noticed too if you've read this far, they way I constantly hedge and temper my explanations of things, letting the reader know over and over that this is only what I Thaddeus think, it's not fact and I'm not trying to pretend it's fact. I don't know if it's super annoying to everybody else, but it's the only way I can do it and feel comfortable.