Writing Art Club[PG]

[Mitch]

Well, I was posting it, then I pressed stop, because I forgot the rating. So now it's posted the thread twice. Sorry to cause trouble once again, but just delete the one without a rating. Thanks once again, Asphy.

[quote]?The first rule of art club,? the guy says, ?is you don't talk about art club.? This is my first time here. There's fight clubs and then there's these. That's right: art clubs.

The ringleader of the movement is no Tyler Durden. This man's a bum. He's reading off the rules, but they are identical to fight club's.

All around me are other bums. People who believed so much in art that they resigned to their fate. This fate being the fact that in a consumer culture, art has no value unless it can mass produce a smile. If it doesn't cater then it'll rot away.

Around me are could've beens: Tennysons, Robert Frosts, Poes, Dylan Thomases: the list goes on. Poets who America doesn't give a care about. Poets who are poets anyway. Who threw away the CEO jobs, the useless work-till-you-die mantra, and instead live for something.

Then there's the fiction writers: those should've beens. They should've been George Orwells, should've been John Steinbecks. Should've, would've, could've. But that's right, this is America: all your dreams come true, as long as you work hard at them. Work till you die, that is.

This is an underground movement, and the leader calls himself Durden Tyler. He's the Bob Dylan of Dylan Thomas. He's the next step from figh club. He's carrying the torch in his own way.

Durden says, ?We were pissed that they wouldn't listen to our words. So instead we're just gonna write more. So we're gonna do it right underneath their eyes. Jobless, poor, we're richer than that man who's got all the things money can buy. 'Cause all you can do with money is give it away, but words you can keep.

?We were pissed 'cause they wouldn't look at our canvas. So instead we're just gonna paint more, draw more. So we're gonna paint with our own blood. Gonna smear it until they'll look.?

A giant roar comes from everyone, and once everyone's quieted, he says, ?One guy once said, 'Give me liberty or give me death.' Well, truth is, there's no such thing. What I say now is this: give me words or give me death. Give me art, or give me death. So let's begin! If this is your first time at art club you've got to compete. Who'll go first??

I step forward and I say, ?I'm new. I'll go.? He nods his head.

My competitor is chosen. He's a tall scraggly man, and from his pocket he pulls out a chewed up pen. I take out my pencil.

Durden says, ?These two men will write for thirty minutes straight. A story, a poem, whatever it is they write, they can't stop writing once the timer starts. If they stop then they've succumed to writer's block, and they've laid down their pen.

?They'll keep writing till their hands cramp, till they can't even feel their hand. Then they'll read it to us, and we'll find out which is the better piece. We'll find out who is an artist and who's just a poseur. Pain is the stimulus that makes the world go round. An artist always keeps his pain and his words are letting out that pain. It's a catharsis. Now who's gonna triumph??

Durden motions us over to where two desks are, each with some notebook paper sitting on them. I take my place in one, my competitor in the other. I am Poe's morbid curiousity as I sit. I'm expecting something great. I stare down my competitor. He cold stares me back.

We're surrounded in a circle of other artists, and they're screaming and yelling. Durden holds up his hand. ?Silence!? he says. Once they've calmed again, he says, ?Now let's begin!? He gets a timer from his pocket, sets it to thirty minutes, and yells, ?Go!?

I grab a piece of paper and begin writing away. My competitor does the same. At first the words come easy, flowing from my hand to the paper. Time trickles away.

Fight club was all about letting out your anger in a physical manner, but this is something more. It's about mental intimidation. We may not be fighting, slamming, and beating the shit out of one another, but right now, in our separate minds, that's what we're doing.

I look up but keep my hand writing words and see that my competitor is staring me down. I give him a hard stare back. It's fifteen minutes into it. My hand's starting to cramp from how quickly I'm writing. I focus on the pain. It makes me push harder, go faster, find more words.

Twenty minutes. I'm still resisting the pain, but it's getting more and more painful. My face curls into a grimace. I'm still staring him down. He's still doing the same.

Twenty-five minutes. Beads of sweat are going down from my head. I'm writing the words slower now. My mind feels wracked. I want to stop, I've reached my prime, but I refuse to put down my pen. He's showing no pain. I try not to either.

Thirty. The clock dings. We insantly stop, and I tumble onto the floor, grasping my hand, screaming in pain.

Durden comes over and helps me up. ?You did good, man,? he says. I can't even move the fingers on my hand. All I feel is pain, more and more pain.

Everyone's cheering, they probably have since the clock dinged, but I couldn't hear them since I was deaf from my pain.

Next we read our creations. He goes first. His is a poem, written in free verse, talking about the simple life of the farm. I am Walt Whitman's acceptance. It's a nice piece of work, no doubt, and makes contrasts to the ugliness of consumerism and the complexity of our roads, buildings, and cars. As he reads, he complements it with a body language that further makes us feel what he feels.

I read next. Mine is a story about a man who was a CEO his whole life, and then one day quit the job, withdrew all his money from the bank, and drove out into the wilderness to start a fire and burn his money, one by one. Then he rustled around in the ashes of millions of dollars, and was happier than he'd ever been.

When I'm done, Durden takes center stage and says, ?There you have it, boys. Now who do you think's got the better one? What do you say?? People start screaming out. ?The farm!? ?The guy who burns his money!? He silences them down again.

?Now, make some noise if you liked his better? - he motions to my competition. There's noise, and it's pretty loud.

?And what about our newcomer?? There's less noise, and it appears I've lost. He says, ?Well there you have it, another duel complete! Who's gonna go next??[/quote]

[Baron Samedi]

[size=1]Aside from the typo right at the end there, that was excellent. I really enjoyed reading that - I liked how you perfectly captured the mannerisms of Fight Club, and the whole mood that that movie generated. It's a quite different take on it, heh, but a good one anyway. Nice work Mitch.[/size]

[Mitch]

Yeah, that typo was odd. It's been fixed. Glad someone enjoyed it enough to comment. Thanks Baron. To me, though, the piece seems kind of abrupt. It doesn't really take its time at all, and this idea was such a striking one that my writing's sort of telling me I should've taken more time with this one. Maybe sometime I'll smoothen it out so it isn't so abrupt, but overall I think this was a wonderful idea that I executed nicely.

[Baron Samedi]

[size=1]Fight Club, whilst a very slick movie, wasn't really smooth to me. There is a difference, and it feels intended to be both abrupt and staccato, in it's own way. As I said, I think your writing style for this piece really caught the tone of the movie.[/size]

[Lady Asphyxia]

[font=Arial][size=2]I don't know how I'm going to say this without it coming out harshly, so I'm just going to be honest and then try to explain it. I know that you value honesty.

Having been aqquainted with Fight Club about two days previous to having seen this, it's remarkably fresh in my mind. While I liked fight club, and I do agree with Baron that it's quite stacatto, but I felt that this was -- well, here it is -- self-indulgent knock-offs.

Like Baron, I think you got the tone of the movie quite well, but when I read this, all I could read from it was "I'm a writer and I've been rejected too many times and so I'm going to write this story where I'm better than the commercial world in order to get them back." The fact that both the stories are about rejecting the 9-to-5 world annoys me, and the fact that the narrator won shits me to tears. To me fight club was about the fact that, regardless of who won or lost, the adrenaline was running high at the time and they loved it.

This I feel is just a way to certify to yourself that your writing is great. The fact that you've commented that it was 'A wonderful idea that [you] executed nicely' just further inforces my impression that it was almost purely self-indulgent.

There's nothing wrong with being self-indulgent, not at all. I do it all the time. I just think you have to realise when you are crossing the line between empathising with the character and [i]being[/i] the character -- one side has faults, the other you are too close to the character to fault them.

So, yeah. Tone-wise I think it's not badly done, but the message in it just annoys me. I think I would have preferred it if the other person had won.
[/size][/font]

[Mitch]

Well, it doesn't matter to me who won. I'll be changing it to so that he lost.

The main message is this: art has no place in a capitalist society. Once business gets into art, it kills it, and if a piece of art doesn't mass produce a smile and isn't a [i]pan et circenses[/i], then it likely won't become known. Most novels these days are "pop novels" that have a lot less literary value than works done in earlier times.

Most of the mainstream fiction that comes out here comes out to mass produce a smile. If it doesn't cater to the people who are most likely to buy it, then it's not going to sell. And the end-all function of any business (which is what writing has been turned into) is to make money. In the end, the quality of the writing doesn't matter; the story of the fiction doesn't matter, what matters is it sells.

About the only way to "make it big" as an artist/ writer these days is to sacrifice a lot of what your words say and do as your editor tells you to an extreme. And when you make it big, and if, you have to be generally good-looking and become the businessman for your publisher. This involves going on a tour throughout the country, reading from your published material so that the publisher can make money. If you don't make them enough money, then you're likely to be dropped altogether.

Poetry, too, is even worse here in the US. If something isn't in high demand, then it isn't going to be made. Poetry has little to no demand here in the US. Thus there's probably many poets out here in the US, but who do it on side. Just go outside and ask someone if they like poetry. They'll either laugh at you in the face, say that's stuff for kids, or give you a vacant stare.

In Russia, though, they value their poets so highly that when one reads, sometimes they fill a whole stadium and there's as many people there as come to the football games here. But people rather like their bread and circuses, I fear.

When writing this, beforehand I had an idea of a harsh society (somewhat like 1984) where artists are obsolete and hated, and so they have to hide. Being that an artist would end up at the lowest tier of society in this society, for being what he is, he would end up being a transient. And so they would form an underground and hide behind the facade that they are simply bums, and so the upper tiers of the society would go about their lives ignorant and blind to the words and images these artists created that showed how wrong their society was.

Then I was sitting there at lunch, and fight club hit me, and then the two ideas merged together.

Anyone who's a serious artist in our society, who completely devotes most of their energy towards that end, isn't going to have a job at all, but instead they'd be bums. Unless, however, they were lucky and somehow "made it big" which involves mass producing a smile anyway, so the quality of their work would be destroyed nearly anyway; that is, unless they were to develop a cult status (a la Chuck). So that's why they're all bums: because they are serious artists, and an artist has no value to a society that's all about consumerism and has little to no need for art whatsoever.

I'm not trying to justify what you see: that it's self-indulgent. But I do think you're overlooking a lot of what it's about. Like I said, I'll change it so he loses: I really don't care. It's a pretty minute detail that has nothing to do with what the story's about. You're getting too caught up in it in my opinion: notice how the fact that he won fills little to no space in the story, but instead the story is all about what I've pointed out above.

I guess the message does come down to the fact that I'm going to keep writing even if it has no value in general to my society, in a sense, but it's a lot deeper than that as I've shown.

Fight Club, the book and movie, are all about a hatred of consumerism. The main narrator of the novel/ movie is a had-been consumer: he worked his cubicle job and purchased more and more [i]things[/i]. Tyler Durden is the antithesis of what the narrator had been. "The things you own end up owning you" and so on and so forth.

There's also a lot of pessimism and nihilism mixed into this message as well, but overall that is what fight club is about: it's about people who were pissed with their life and its rampant consumerism and endless focus on money, and so got it off their chest by physical means. It was like a self-help group. Remember earlier Marla and the narrator going to those self-help groups, being around those sick people, and how they became addicted to it and needed to feel wanted? That's what fight club was. A self-help group with a very destructive nature. In this regard, Asphy, I think you missed the main message of what Fight Club is about, and thus overlooked much of what this story tells, too.

[Brasil]

[quote name='Mitch']And the end-all function of any business (which is what writing has been turned into) is to make money.[/quote]This sentence makes my eyes hurt, Mitch. And it really pisses me off, too, because you really need to do more research if you think writing has only recently been transformed into a money-grubbing empire. "Has been turned into" seems to point to those types of sentiments. I have neither the time nor the inclination to spell it out for you, but...Christ, man, you really, really need to take a look at the past 1500 years.

[quote]About the only way to "make it big" as an artist/ writer these days is to sacrifice a lot of what your words say and do as your editor tells you to an extreme. And when you make it big, and if, you have to be generally good-looking and become the businessman for your publisher. This involves going on a tour throughout the country, reading from your published material so that the publisher can make money. If you don't make them enough money, then you're likely to be dropped altogether.[/quote]Let's see...you need to appeal to a readerbase, go on book tours to promote, read excerpts on those book tours, be somewhat presentable.

Forgive the bluntness, but, dude, what in the hell did you expect? That you could show up in torn jeans, a stained shirt, oily hair, read random words from the pages of a tattered MEAD notebook on a corner in a major city...and get published?

I [i]guaran-freaking-tee[/i] you those requirements were never, ever, [i]ever[/i] a literary requirement that just sprung up during the last 20 years.

[quote]Poetry, too, is even worse here in the US. If something isn't in high demand, then it isn't going to be made. Poetry has little to no demand here in the US. Thus there's probably many poets out here in the US, but who do it on side. Just go outside and ask someone if they like poetry. [b][u]They'll either laugh at you in the face, say that's stuff for kids, or give you a vacant stare[/u][/b].[/quote]Which is no more juvenile that condemning an entire industry for something that's been prevalent for as long as writing and the public have co-existed.

[quote]In Russia, though, they value their poets so highly that when one reads, sometimes they fill a whole stadium and there's as many people there as come to the football games here. But people rather like their bread and circuses, I fear.[/quote]So why condemn writing and the industry as a whole, when there are still places that value literature?

[quote]When writing this, beforehand I had an idea of a harsh society (somewhat like 1984) where artists are obsolete and hated, and so they have to hide. Being that an artist would end up at the lowest tier of society in this society, for being what he is, he would end up being a transient. And so they would form an underground and hide behind the facade that they are simply bums, and so the upper tiers of the society would go about their lives ignorant and blind to the words and images these artists created that showed how wrong their society was.

Then I was sitting there at lunch, and fight club hit me, and then the two ideas merged together.

Anyone who's a serious artist in our society, who completely devotes most of their energy towards that end, isn't going to have a job at all, but instead they'd be bums. Unless, however, they were lucky and somehow "made it big" which involves mass producing a smile anyway, so the quality of their work would be destroyed nearly anyway; that is, unless they were to develop a cult status (a la Chuck). So that's why they're all bums: because they are serious artists, and an artist has no value to a society that's all about consumerism and has little to no need for art whatsoever.

I'm not trying to justify what you see: that it's self-indulgent. But I do think you're overlooking a lot of what it's about. Like I said, I'll change it so he loses: I really don't care. It's a pretty minute detail that has nothing to do with what the story's about. You're getting too caught up in it in my opinion: notice how the fact that he won fills little to no space in the story, but instead the story is all about what I've pointed out above.

I guess the message does come down to the fact that I'm going to keep writing even if it has no value in general to my society, in a sense, but it's a lot deeper than that as I've shown.

Fight Club, the book and movie, are all about a hatred of consumerism. The main narrator of the novel/ movie is a had-been consumer: he worked his cubicle job and purchased more and more [i]things[/i]. Tyler Durden is the antithesis of what the narrator had been. "The things you own end up owning you" and so on and so forth.

There's also a lot of pessimism and nihilism mixed into this message as well, but overall that is what fight club is about: it's about people who were pissed with their life and its rampant consumerism and endless focus on money, and so got it off their chest by physical means. It was like a self-help group. Remember earlier Marla and the narrator going to those self-help groups, being around those sick people, and how they became addicted to it and needed to feel wanted? That's what fight club was. A self-help group with a very destructive nature. In this regard, Asphy, I think you missed the main message of what Fight Club is about, and thus overlooked much of what this story tells, too.[/QUOTE]And you've just illustrated one of the precise reasons why literature "inspired" by film never works--or rarely works. I don't think the respective ideologies of Fight Club and this piece are similar at all, honestly.

Fight Club and the Decadent movement in Victorian England are similar. On a good day, one could make an interesting analysis of Tyler Durden and Oscar Wilde.

But I never get the sense at all that the main character of your piece is motivated by anything remotely similar to the social conditions that prompted Tyler and Oscar. I don't feel anything from this main character. His motivation--correction, his [i]narration[/i], feels completely artificial. Jack's narration in Fight Club never felt this artificial. This piece, the message, the construction...it all feels forced as hell.

And you're missing a huge, huge distinction between your piece and Fight Club, Mitch: Fight Club was a destructive (and self-destructive) self help group whose mantra was basically stamped on the cover of the film: Mischief, Mayhem, Soap. The Space Monkeys were going out and destroying things. They were actually lashing out. Their anger, frustrations, reactions, and actions made sense because they were targeting the things and institutions that pissed them off so much.

Basically...as screwed up as the Space Monkeys were...they were still adhering to the principle that formed the Space Monkeys.

What does the group in your story do?

They hang out in a basement and hold write-offs. Where are they actually lashing out? Where's the publishing house destruction? The building collapses? The bombs? The violence? These are things that made Fight Club what it was: sociopolitical revenge.

There's nothing of that in this piece, which is a major reason why it feels so lame. There's nothing happening. We're told what the conflict is...but we don't see it. We're told what the group's philosophy is...but we never see it.

We see everything in Fight Club--and that story is being told by a schizophrenic, for Chrissakes.

I suppose the only similarity to Fight Club is the underground "fight" sequences, but given the blanks, the inconsistencies, the scattered themes of the piece...one underground "fight" sequence just isn't enough.

Am I the only one here who sees no point at all to this piece? Am I the only one who sees a barebones attempt at a plot...a severely malnourished and underdeveloped concept and execution?

[Mitch]

[QUOTE=Brasil]
Basically...as screwed up as the Space Monkeys were...they were still adhering to the principle that formed the Space Monkeys.

What does the group in your story do?

They hang out in a basement and hold write-offs. Where are they actually lashing out? Where's the publishing house destruction? The building collapses? The bombs? The violence? These are things that made Fight Club what it was: sociopolitical revenge.
[/QUOTE]

I will only comment concerning this quote. And briefly, I will say this: I do realize art and business have been shaking hands unsteadily for quite a while. However, I have my feelings about writing and business being together, and you have yours. It is fruitless to argue because our opinions of this matter shall not be swayed: you, nor I, are fickle.

Down below here I'm not even arguing, but just stating what I've already stated vaguely before (when I was saying it was abrupt and felt like it needed more):

Well, you need to realize this is only one part of what art club would be. This is why I was saying I need to expand it more. Fight Club and its movie adaptation are fully developed ideas. The novel is hundreds of pages long. This story is only a small part of something I could make bigger. It's the rough of an idea that shaped in my head. You're being much too overly-critical and need to realize how small this is and how bigger it could be if I went about developing it. Do you seriously expect it to be a fully developed idea right off the bat? Of course not. You're being facetious. Although nothing seems to be happening, that's because in this piece there is only a short amount of it covered. The above that I quoted is the direction I need to take this piece in.

So, if I want to get going on this thing, then I will have a lot of work to do. Perhaps eventually. However, I find it hard to keep interest in something, and I've already got a novel that I need to invest most of my time into.

[Adahn]

[font=Trebuchet MS]From the writing and the comments made by the author afterwards, I believe that this piece was an emotionally charged response to an exciting idea the author had. I've done the same thing when I've had an idea. I get all excited about the connections I've made, and everything makes sense. The words just come.

The author was in this mental state when he wrote the piece. This piece was not written for an audience, it was written for the author. He is the only one who understands the connections. He thinks we are blind because [u]we[/u] don't see them, but this is because they are all [u]he[/u] can see.

If the author wants to parody [u]Fight Club,[/u] he has a useful collection of ideas in this piece. However, the piece does not stand alone. A parody of [u]Fight Club[/u] for the purpose of bringing to light the author's views on art in the U.S. would be a daunting task. If this is what the author intended in this piece, then he has failed. Nobody will read this and understand the author's views without reading his explanation. Intellectually engaging pieces should explain themselves.

My advice is for the author to either finish what he has started by completing the parody, or to bring his ideas into the Lounge, where his ideas would be more effective. Justifying the piece by explaining the ideas behind it does not make it a good piece, it makes it a bad piece.

EDIT: This post was written before the above post was seen.
[/font]

[Mitch]

[QUOTE=Adahn][font=Trebuchet MS]From the writing and the comments made by the author afterwards, I believe that this piece was an emotionally charged response to an exciting idea the author had. I've done the same thing when I've had an idea. I get all excited about the connections I've made, and everything makes sense. The words just come.

The author was in this mental state when he wrote the piece. This piece was not written for an audience, it was written for the author. He is the only one who understands the connections. He thinks we are blind because [u]we[/u] don't see them, but this is because they are all [u]he[/u] can see.

If the author wants to parody [u]Fight Club,[/u] he has a useful collection of ideas in this piece. However, the piece does not stand alone. A parody of [u]Fight Club[/u] for the purpose of bringing to light the author's views on art in the U.S. would be a daunting task. If this is what the author intended in this piece, then he has failed. Nobody will read this and understand the author's views without reading his explanation. Intellectually engaging pieces should explain themselves.

My advice is for the author to either finish what he has started by completing the parody, or to bring his ideas into the Lounge, where his ideas would be more effective. Justifying the piece by explaining the ideas behind it does not make it a good piece, it makes it a bad piece.

EDIT: This post was written before the above post was seen.
[/font][/QUOTE]

Yeah, you said what I said before, and I agree with everything you said, too. However, I wouldn't like this to be called a "parody" - the word denotes something that satirizes something else and above all exists to make fun of what it's parodying. In that stricter sense, art club is not about that; it's simply fight club but in a different sense, and it is above all serious about what its message is, just as Fight Club was.

[Brasil]

[quote name='Mitch']I will only comment concerning this quote. And briefly, I will say this: I do realize art and business have been shaking hands unsteadily for quite a while. However, I have my feelings about writing and business being together, and you have yours. It is fruitless to argue because our opinions of this matter shall not be swayed: you, nor I, are fickle.[/quote]
My point is that you were saying or implying that writing has just recently become a business, and I was pointing out that it's always been like that. Replying with "you have your opinions and I have mine" is irrelevant and unnecessary, because your opinion is straight-out wrong, and you wouldn't have made such a statement originally if you took the time to do the research (or if you really cared about being correct and making accurate statements in the first place), simple as that.

Make no mistake: my issue was not that you have those views; my issue was that you were taking those views and applying them solely to the current state of the industry, as if modern times is what originated that trend. If your views are based on that (blatantly) incorrect assessment, however, then, yes, I do have a problem with your views.

[quote]Down below here I'm not even arguing, but just stating what I've already stated vaguely before (when I was saying it was abrupt and felt like it needed more):[/quote]
And I'm going to reply to clarify what's going on here.

[quote]Well, you need to realize this is only one part of what art club would be. This is why I was saying I need to expand it more. Fight Club and its movie adaptation are fully developed ideas. The novel is hundreds of pages long. This story is only a small part of something I could make bigger. It's the rough of an idea that shaped in my head. You're being much too overly-critical and need to realize how small this is and how bigger it could be if I went about developing it. Do you seriously expect it to be a fully developed idea right off the bat? Of course not. You're being facetious. Although nothing seems to be happening, that's because in this piece there is only a short amount of it covered. The above that I quoted is the direction I need to take this piece in.[/quote]
Overly-critical? Facetious? lol. I was pointing out glaring errors in both the ideology and construction of the piece, Mitch. That's hardly being insensitive and that's hardly making fun of you. That's being [i]realistic[/i].

And honestly, when you say something like "but overall I think this was a wonderful idea that I executed nicely," what do you expect people to expect to see? You're saying how good it is, how well executed it is...how wonderful the idea is.

The piece wasn't all that great for the reasons have stated above. The execution wasn't all that great for the reasons have stated above. The idea wasn't all that great for the reasons stated above.

The piece is too short, yeah.

But given the "iffy" idea to begin with...I don't even know if this will sustain a longer piece; it already barely sustains a few pages, then sputters out too far before the end. I don't know if it's capable of a longer piece. I'm not even seeing an Oscar Wilde/English Decadent angle here...and the Decadent movement is the closest literary relative to what you want to do here. So...not to sound "overly-critical" or "facetious," but I don't think there's any hope for this piece. lol