The nuance
Of being
Is to
Capture
The
Seed

Norman Mailer, Death of the Ladies

Manwriting is not even about the phallic references, although if you started looking, you could throw together a phallic manwriting tumblr feed faster than you could write “hair down to her fine ass.”

It’s not necessarily about the verbal sizing-up and branding of women with monikers  – “blondie,” “lady,” “chick” “sweet-eyed insert-your-belittling term of affection”; this might be one indicator, but not the only one, and not even an essential one.

It’s not really either of these things, although it’s undoubtedly more fun to search for explicit cock references than to try and pick up on the distinct swaggering prose, the certain cocked (inevitable, pardon me) male postures.

With sentences that tend towards the staccato (and that, when they do grow more elaborate, do so not so much to expand and question as to definitively explain or to debunk via detail, to reduce to smirking anecdotes) manwriting is authoritative and conclusive and wise in a let-me-tell-you kind of way. It has it all figured out, and has condensed, simplified, and narrowed the world into the manwriter’s purview. It tucks the emotional and the psychological behind the self-deprecating, the overtly macho, and the sardonic. It uses characters like facts to prove a point, or like simplified archetypes to flesh out the author’s comparative fullness and full understanding.

It commands more than it asks; it lectures, in artful but conclusive ways, more than it explores. Listen to Charles Bowden on a beauty queen ravaged by drugs and violence in Ciudad Juárez:

Charles Bowden, Murder City:

I will sit with Miss Sinaloa, and I know I will be mesmerized by the accounts, and she will remain a mystery. Her perfect face will be blank. So will her beautiful eyes cocooned in makeup. By now her hair will have grown out, though I doubt it will cascade to her fine ass. The handprints on her buttocks will have vanished. She will retain nothing but barbed memories of her fine time at the Casablanca when she was doing cocaine and whiskey and then was gang-raped for days. Perhaps she will share with me her memories of the crazy place.

The voice here is beyond questioning; it is decisive and final. It is not just strong (it would be a mistake to confuse “strong” or confident voices with manliness, for the gender stereotypes this implies but also because manwriting is not so much about either strength or confidence but about dominance and attitude): it’s appropriative, taking this woman’s experience and making it the writer’s via a series of “wills.” Her “perfect” face will be blank. Her “beautiful” eyes will be cocooned in makeup. She will retain nothing. Bowden has it figured out. He is telling you how it is. He is telling you how she is. He is telling you what is going to happen and telling you why. He is a man viewing and explaining a woman and a city.

There is no process of inquiry here. There are no fine edges, no hedging or questioning. I know the purpose of Murder City was to act as a lament and a tragic elegy for Ciudad Juárez and what has become of it, but Bowden’s writing in that book is uniformly conclusive and harsh with a repetitive certainty, appropriating whatever it examines, turning it into a tough and unquestionable lecture for the humble reader. Bowden is a sort of lone Western hero coming to town and setting things straight. He is the man shining the bright light of definitive truth on the woman and the city’s experience.

But manwriting doesn’t always have to boom with severity. It can also be falsely disingenuous in a Kerouacian way, jokingly feigning a dumb-guy innocence. Nuanced emotional and psychological realizations are not manly, but they are necessary in literary narratives and in magazine feature stories, so the manwriting way to deal with them is to provide a sort of yo, here I am, just kinda realizing something! self-mockery with plenty of macho asides. Insights have to be pared down to a few pithy yeah-man observations, quickly tempered by irony, humor, and tough-wistful jokes about women.

In Jay Kirk’s story “Hotels Rwanda,” which was selected for the Best American Travel Writing Anthology 2009, the initial suggestion of the story’s larger emotional/psychological theme is couched between ape-y arms and a mountain gorilla being punched in the face.

Jay Kirk, Hotels Rwanda:

He put an arm between the front seats of the Land Rover so we could see for ourselves. Ernest and I agreed: His arms looked ape-y. One expected to be changed by travel; one looked for little symptoms in oneself, signs of alteration, but did this count as a valid transformation? Ernest had never heard of such a thing. Once, he’d had a client who’d come all the way from Australia just to punch a mountain gorilla in the face, but nothing quite like this.

Devon Friedman, in his piece “Will You Be My Black Friend?” has to go so far as wanting to punch himself in the face after admitting that he does yoga. The story’s central question here, about if and how to breach the easy insularity of a particular lifestyle shaped by class and race, gets framed as a comic confessional, culminating with the punch.

Devon Friedman, Will You Be My Black Friend?:

I had a cocktail party the other night. A natural moment to look around at the demographics of your life. And I thought: Jesus Christ, there are a lot of white people in this room. I’ve always thought of the whiteness of my adult life as a temporary condition. Like somehow all these white people have been foisted on me; pretty soon it’ll change; it’s probably my wife’s fault. But it’s time to acknowledge that I’ve become a character in a Wes Anderson movie. I wear white tennis sneakers from the ’70s. I listen to ambient music. I have dinner parties where I serve Spanish rosé and this softer version of mozzarella that has a lovely, almost liquid center that you can only get at the Italian import store. I do yoga, and I get excited when it’s ramp season. Sometimes I’d really like to punch myself in the face.

Manwriting gathers credibility with macho anecdotes, buffering larger spiritual or sociological insights – like Karl Taro Greenfield’s observation about the hope and squalor in “the seedy rooms used to plot a thousand getaways” in “Hope and Squalor in Chungking Mansion”– behind safari vests and snake’s blood:

Within two hours, we’d fallen in with a Canadian man who described himself as a  “Leftenant-General” and told us he knew where we could get injected with a mixture of one part snake’s blood and one part Demerol.

“Wouldn’t that kill us?” we asked.

“Demorol?”

The Leftenant-General shook his head. “Best painkiller in the world.”

“No, the snake’s blood.”

“Hasn’t done so yet,” he assured us, thumping the chest of his safari vest.”

“Hope and Squalor in Chungking Mansion” was also anthologized in Best American Travel Writing. It has become de rigeur, particularly in mainstream magazine feature writing – The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, Esquire, and the handful of other places whose writing is routinely anthologized – to conceal or burrow what could be seen as sentimental or heavy or emotional ideas beneath a very male and often very hipster (i.e., ironic, sardonic, above-it-all, postmodern) posturing.

Here’s Lawrence Osborne in “A Pilgrimage of Sin: Bombs, Booze and Hookers in Islamic Thailand”, published in Harper’s:

My new friends seemed to find the mixture of religious kitcsch and merry whoredom as irresistibly seductive as it was incongruous. In the suffocating cocktail lounge, we compared our phallus-shaped plastic room keys decorated with the words HOT PINK, and I was taught a few useful words of Malay: “Cock” is burung.

Osborne gets at his discussion of terrorism and prostitution in Thailand via this veneer of manly, detached derision.

Yet manwriting doesn’t always have to come with snark. Often it can come across as that one-sided conversation you have at a party with a guy who cuts off your sentences to clarify your point for you, and leaves a pause between conclusions just long enough for you to meekly agree before he’s telling you how it is again.

Paul Theroux, Riding The Iron Rooster:

“I’ve seen you on television, the woman said. “Haven’t I?”

“Probably,” I said, and told her my name.

“Amazing,” she said. “My sister won’t believe this – she’s read all your books.”

Her name was Rachel Tickler, and I found it a relief to tell her I was on my way to Mongolia and then China – yes, to do some writing – and that I had just come from London. What was that about the States? Oh, yes, I did spend part of the year on the Cape – yes, it’s a wonderful place.

…I told her everything, I bought her some tea and we sat up so late that I could be confessional…it did me a lot of good to tell her these things, because I had been so secretive on the tour it was like being invisible…

…In one sense we were like an adulterous couple – or more accurately it was like a one-night stand. It was tender and I was eager to be candid, and she was a good listener.

The puffed male ego is a particularly insidious and central feature of Theroux’s writing, but also indicative of a wider category of travel manwriting in which all other characters orbit around the man and his virility, his ego, the fascinating aura he exudes. Travel writers in general have a tendency to focus on the wonder and awe they invoke the world over, but manwriting – particularly Theroux’s stimulated one-sided conversation above, in which the woman’s voice is excluded and we hear only Theroux’s indulgent responses – takes it to a new level. Observe below how Edward Abbey quickly becomes the center of attention in a scruffy Western bar, setting himself apart as the wise other, the “superior” WASP observer, quickly becoming the focus of attention and the center of both fraternal male envy and female desire.

“You like my girl?” the large fellow said. He was a Mexican, a Chicano, with round, brown, solemn face, dark eyes, the shoulders of a fullback. A Mexican but a big Mexican.

“Now, primo…” the woman began.

“You like her, eh?” The dark eyes were aimed at me – not at the wall, not at the mirror, not at the other guy.

I knew he probably carried a knife, a switchblade. All cholos carry switchblades, everybody knows that. The trouble was he was so big, and ugly, and mean, he wouldn’t need a knife. My sole weapon was my superior WASP intelligence. Which only functions, however, in retrospection.

“I’m never getting out of here alive, I said, to myself but aloud. Primo laughed, gripped my shoulder in his enormous paw, and said, “You’re right, man. You’re not. Better buy us a drink.”

Under the volcano. I was glad to buy time by buying Primo and his Blondie each a drink. Bar buddies. He called me Grizzly Adams; I called him Pachuco.

This category of manwriting, while still central to the travel writing paradigm, has been somewhat overshadowed by the sly and neurotic machismo of gonzo journalism. Instead of emphasizing a barrel-chested ladies man, the latter manwriting takes on the guise of the pseudo self-deprecating Thompson-esque bender: the sinewy journalist recounting his or her feral adventures buying AK-47’s in Kurdistan or running with bounty hunters in Hong Kong, man it was totally f*ed up and I spent forty-eight hours vomiting and then hopped into a handhewn canoe to go down the river with a pig and six crazy barenaked tribesman rocking some badass bows and arrows….We’re meant to think not of smooth Abbey or strutting Theroux but of a wiry VICE photographer or wannabe Kerouac scribbling his red-blooded adventures offhand amidst rebels and prostitutes.

Thus the posture has perhaps shifted from the distinctly macho – one of the best Theroux man-lines is his description of Indians in Uganda “airing their women and letting their children run” – to the squirrely, gonzo macho, but manwriting follows the same patterns, tending towards the detached and the all-knowing: all the other poor dopes in the story are taking things seriously, and the manwriters alone can see, with a prim or poignant or disaffected and derisive but unfailingly erudite distance, the truth of the matter. Keruouc perfected this:

“Marylou was a pretty blonde with immense ringlets of hair like a sea of golden tresses; she sat there on the edge of the couch with her hands hanging in her lap and her smoky blue country eyes fixed in a wide stare because she was in an evil gray New York pad that she’d heard about back West, and waiting like a longbodied emaciated Modigliani surrealist woman in a serious room. But outside of being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things.”

Manwriting’s descriptions are constantly, slyly and definitively placing the writer a cut above the described, which seems like a disingenuous thing to say because most nonfiction writers’ descriptions inherently place them a cut above their subjects (writing is an aggressive act, according to Joan Didion, who is incidentally the first writer brought up whenever one mentions the predominance of manwriting in the MFA classroom: “But what about Joan Didion?”), but in the case of manwriting there is a particular, cool, smirking superior male edge. Marylou is a “sweet little girl” and her “smoky blue country eyes” are “fixed in a wide stare.”

It is as if, described in manwriting, characters are simmered down in a reduction of the writer’s own coolness. This is nowhere more obvious than in Colson Whitehead’s “The Republic of Anhedonia,” written for Grantland:

There was one woman at the table, a quiet 60-something lady with bright red hair, the follicles of which it was perhaps possible to count. Five percent of commercially available hair dyes actually match a color that occurs in nature. Hers was not one of them. I liked her.

If Methy Mike had been hitched, the lady had packed her bags long ago, and if they had spawned, their parenting goals probably ended with making sure their kid did not get a tattoo on her face, and they did not always succeed.

For three years I was cursed with sitting down in the exact wrong seat at group dinners. Wholly and inescapably hexed. Adjacent to a blowhard lush, between two narcissistic twerps, face to face with the mime. You look at what you’ve been dealt and think, This will end badly, and check out of the convo and endure until next time.

In Whitehead this reduction of characters to stereotypes is supposed to be sardonic, tongue-in-cheek, and we’re meant to understand that Whitehead is aware of this reductionism as he’s writing, but ultimately his and our meta awareness of the tactic being employed doesn’t make it any less macho or cloyingly self-infatuated. Ultimately, the effect is one of placing the hip male writer at the center of a universe of one-dimensional stereotypical characters who serve as sounding boards for the writer’s all-knowing intelligence, for the writer’s ego and quest. They are not so much people as they are opportunities for the writer to play around, to make a wry point. They’re bemusing, they’re sweet, they’re ridiculous, they’re bumpkins, but they’re never really foils for the male narrator, never up to his level.

This reductionism can also come via silence. John D’Agata is the master of this technique, the lyric use of extremely sparse and staccato language to convey a concept, and to reduce characters almost to symbols. D’Agata admits he uses composite characters, and while this generally doesn’t violate my personal nonfiction ethics in his case I think it is indicative of a larger tendency to treat characters as mere representations of an idea, or as amusing anecdotes. In About a Mountain he writes:

As we drove toward the mountain in the white Jeep that day, two black jets in the distance sped by. They swept low against the desert. Then each dropped a bomb.

“Fuck yeah,” said a guard as we paralleled the explosions.

“Fuckin’ A,” said the other.

A fascination with how the world will end is not particularly new.

It is almost bullying in its composition of the facts, in its descriptions and juxtapositions. It is curt, cutting and precise, not giving a single character more than an incisive line that definitively sums him up. D’Agata uses characters the same way he uses facts: as things to play around with to get at an idea he’s developing. His writing is all the more imposing for the faux diffidence of its understatement and its silences.

Finally, there’s the straight-up manly strut, about which there’s not much more to say than, Hey, there’s a man in this prose!

Whitehead:

I realized I hadn’t told anyone where I was going, some real hobo shit.

“How many chips do you have?” I started hearing that a lot more, this locker room check: Who has the bigger dick?”

And of course, Mailer:

Definition of a lady
She grasps
the root
While kissing
The bud

Definition of a hero
He
Thrives
In
Dikes

People always ask, when the subject of manwriting comes up – as it has quite often recently in the preparation of this article – “What about women writing?” and they give examples of cuddly afternoons of gingerbread cookies and sisterly bonding, of relationship triumphs and grumpy dads weeping at graduation ceremonies and my response is, “Yeah, but that stuff doesn’t end up in Harper’s. Or GQ, or The New Yorker, or the mainstream publications.”

But manwriting does. It’s not considered manwriting like a syrupy Ladies Home Journal article about redemption through gardening is considered women’s writing. It’s just the norm.

So if you’re a woman writer, or rather, a writer who happens to be a woman, wouldn’t it frustrate you that manwriting is simply equated with the normative standard of intelligence, of insight, of style; that “Who has the bigger dick?” isn’t a question reserved for some marginalized men’s mag (because let’s face it, men’s magazines – GQ, Esquire, Outside – are part of the literary mainstream while women’s mags are out there in fluffland) but rather a normal question at the center of the literary scene; wouldn’t it frustrate you that even though perhaps you’d like to be told how it is by a woman from time to time, only 21% of articles in Harper’s, only 16% of articles The New Republic, only 14% of articles in The New York Review of Books, only 35% of features in The Paris Review, only 26% of articles in The New Yorker, are written by women?

I’m not suggesting some sort of feminist attack here, a banning of phallic references or a cry for real heartfelt emotions from our nation’s male writers but rather, a touch of perspective – so often, what we take for granted as writing, as feature writing, as magazine writing, as the literary writing of our generation, is manwriting, and what does that mean?

Where does that leave us?

Caught with our dicks hanging out?

Or maybe, perhaps, we can think of a better metaphor.


Sarah Menkedick is a nonfiction MFA student at The University of Pittsburgh. Her writing has been published on Amazon’s Kindle Singles, World Hum, qarrtsiluni, Perceptive Travel, and a number of other online and print publications, and she is the founder of velamag.com, an online magazine of travel writing by women.


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And finally, good luck to all of you and we hope you’ll stay turned for upcoming book reviews, podcasts and our glorious fifth issue.

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Our fourth issue is nearly set to debut! Like an anxious dancer it waits in the wings, pulling down its too-short tutu.
Barrring any kind of editorial/personal meltdown, the finest fiction, art, criticism, nonfiction and poetry we could find should arrive on your proverbial doorstep this Monday.

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Yours,
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Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
(Little, Brown and Company/August 2008)
Alexandra Rae Valint

Vampires are cool again. Of course, to we steadfast lovers of the bloodsucking mythical creatures, vampires have always been cool: stealthy, seductive, and inexhaustible metaphors for sex, empire, death, and desire. However, vampires have not always been as sexy as they are now, and as they undeniably are in Stephenie Meyer’s cultishly popular Twilight Saga, the finale of which came out on August 2.

Edward Cullen, our vampire hero and star-crossed love of our human heroine, Bella Swan, is perfection: a chiseled, cold, god-like body paired with an enviable IQ. He’s a guy’s guy who plays baseball and loves fast cars, but he’s also the type of guy you bring home to your parents, who opens doors for you and lovingly records you a CD of songs he’s composed for you on his piano (which, by the way, he’s kind of a prodigy at). Oh, and he’s totally okay with just kissing. He’s inspired a legion of loyal fans who endlessly extoll his flawlessness. He’s nothing like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, who for all his manipulative magnetism always aroused equal amounts desire and repulsion. Neither was Dracula quite the same brooding, tortured type that the vampire has become in today’s fang-friendly pop culture. Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s resident vampire-with-a-soul, Angel, brooded with a stern, apprehensive face and morose eyes for three seasons before broodingly departing (at night, in shadow, without a word) to spin-off show Angel, where he brooded successfully for many more seasons. The recently aired (and cancelled) CBS series Moonlight starred another brooding vampire with a conscience who was, again, in love with a feisty blonde mortal. Such TV series have continued the trend towards the humanization and sexification of the vampire, along with the concomitant lessening of the danger and violence associated with the vampire’s demonic desires. Those sickly anemic looks, pointy fangs, and unwilling neck-scarred human victims have become stunning paleness, a set of perfect teeth, and a jug of extra blood from the hospital or leftover from the butcher’s shop. The vampire has increasingly become the repository for our hopes and anxieties about the human status as hero/victim: trapped within an everlasting yet bloodless and therefore blood-lusting body, the vampire struggles above his demon—his own self—to be “good,” “selfless,” and as “normal” as possible. The vampire has come to represent the human situation. Edward Cullen embodies this paradigm to the hilt, desperately trying to be good and moral in every way still open to him.

Clearly, there is nothing new about vampire lit. After Stoker and Polidori, Anne Rice, L.A. Banks, and Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries (the basis for HBO’s fall series True Blood) followed. But no other vampire lit, to my knowledge, has caused this kind of frenzied, impassioned ferment. Witness: bookstores sponsor nationwide midnight release parties a la Harry Potter; a high school girl band, The Bella Cullen Project, gets their Twilight-inspired compositions distributed on iTunes (I recommend “Switzerland”); I’m up reading wide-eyed until 4 a.m., only to finally go to sleep and dream about the characters, only to wake up and write an acoustic-folk song with my sister (also a fan), only to then brag about said song to all my friends, who one-by-one I have converted to the series (my book conversion rate has never been higher).

To the still un-converted, the premise of the series is fairly simple: Bella Swan, our narrator, moves to Forks, a sleepy, rainy city in Washington State. Her first day at school, as she gazes across the abyss of the cafeteria, she locks eyes with a handsome pale boy sitting with other beautiful pale people (his adopted vampire family). Indescribable attraction and inevitable love ensue, even when she discovers he’s a vampire and even after he confesses that he must restrain himself from biting her because her blood is pretty much the best smelling liquid in the beverage store. Various threats to their love/life occur in the first three books, and through it all Bella desperately yearns to be turned into a vampire so she can live with Edward for ever and ever. The arrival of the fourth and final book in the series, Breaking Dawn, had the Twilight universe atwitter. Would Bella go through with the wedding? Would she become a vampire? Would Jacob (Bella’s best friend and a werewolf) imprint? Would Bella and Edward have sex? When August 2 arrived, and I cracked open the hefty hardback, I nearly read the 754 pages in one sitting.

Twists and surprises and answers to the aforementioned pressing questions make it almost impossible to talk about the book beyond page 25. However, from my investigation into the massive online response, Breaking Dawn has been met with more resistance and less unconditional glee than the previous three books received. Of course, a beloved series’ final book will never be met with hugs and kisses from everyone, and the book does take a distinct turn in subject matter, narrative structure, tone, and mood. The book feels more adult and less young adult, and perhaps that’s why some of the young fan base feels a bit alienated and betrayed. The book is no longer concerned with proving Edward and Bella’s love, but rather with handling the crises that come after love is assured. Such a maturation was to be expected; Bella leaves high school and parents behind, and she ventures into the unknown terrains of marriage and vampire existence (comically, the first causes her much more dread than the second). Even Meyer’s oftentimes inflated, indulgent prose feels more controlled, descriptively tighter here; she spends less time, though still a lot of time, expressing mushy love and describing steamy kisses and instead takes both the mushiness and steaminess of Edward and Bella’s relationship for granted (although the cold planes of Edward’s chest still receive an undue amount of attention).

Meyer is writing a different kind of book in Breaking Dawn: not girl gets boy, or girl gets boy back, or girl gets stuck in a classic love triangle. Breaking Dawn’s winding plot is harder to stereotype as frothy teen fantasy romance when it’s mostly preoccupied with the reasons we form the families we do and the ways we keep them from disintegrating. Thematically, the books have always emphasized choice and sacrifice (ironically within a framework of destiny), but yet again, such topics have matured and broadened in this final book. Breaking Dawn’s climactic showdown, a more psychological and nuanced battle than the one in Eclipse, features relevant questions about power, war, corruption, and the necessity of resisting the politics of fear.

I have spent a lot of time wondering why these books are so gosh-darn popular. Certainly, there is the refreshing, yet endearingly sexy, abstinence of Bella and Edward and the drug and alcohol free high school scene, both which makes the world of Gossip Girl a drunken and stoned red-light district by comparison. Of course, there is the grand, love-at-first-sight, fated passion between Bella and Edward, a soul mate scenario which invokes Juliet and Romeo and Cathy and Heathcliff (Bella and Edward actually quote from Wuthering Heights to express their mutual infatuation). But, I think, at the heart of readers’ intense investment in the series is that Bella, a seemingly ordinary girl who doesn’t fit in in “this world,” whose life in “this world” is defined by mind-numbing mediocrity, has another viable option; she has an escape.

And here is the core fantasy behind the series: not that an average looking girl instantaneously mesmerizes a beautiful and brilliant supernatural being (although that is another fantasy), but that she possesses something special and inherent that makes her belong more to that other world, the glamorous supernatural realm, than to this mundane world of cafeteria lunches and graduation thank you cards. Of course, when Bella bemoans her life of mediocrity she also reveals her own, distinctly not-average strengths: her incredible bravery, loyalty, and ability to notice that an important letter is written, crucially, on a page torn from her copy of The Merchant of Venice. Despite her clumsiness and her human need for food and sleep, she’s always possessed a “superpower.” Although Edward’s superpower is the ability to read everyone’s mind, Bella’s mind has consistently been a closed book to him (it aggravates him; delights her). Bella’s mind is a fortress of sorts, defended by steely resolve and a wry individualism. Breaking Dawn satisfyingly follows this potential in ways that, again, I can do no more than hint at. Bella’s mind becomes her ultimate strength and her ultimate gift—a capitulation proving that an intelligent girl is always already a superhero.

Many thanks, and happy submitting.

Yours,

The Editors