I Am The Man Now, You Old Scottish Bastard

I’m fucking sick of these pussy-ass movies making my profession look like pansy-shit. I saw Finding Forrester a few years ago, and thought little of it, except “Haha, Sean Connery’s still alive…” I saw a small section of it in the background a few days ago without really paying attention, though, and this time I was infuriated. Mostly, I was pissed off by two horrible, horrible stereotypes that passed for characters: William Forrester as the reclusive, brilliant, human-condition novelist who has agoraphobia and a heart of gold, and Professor Cunt, the snooty, old-fashioned, black-hating pedagogue. There are two reasons characters like this suck big floppy donkey cock.

The first is that this is basically a movie about things that the moviemakers know absolutely nothing about. This happens a lot. Whenever you watch a cop movie, you know if you went with an actual police officer or detective, he’d tell you that on a daily basis, he doesn’t get to shoot people. It’s even funnier when someone tries to make a movie about intellectuals or artists and they clearly have never been smart or creative for a minute in their entire lives. Because they make the characters speak the way a stupid person THINKS smart people speak. Remember that one Simpsons episode where Homer and Mel Gibson rewrite Mr. Smith Goes to Washington? And the president walks in wearing a ten-gallon top hat and a monocle, marches up and yells in a snooty British voice, “I demand to know what’s going on here! I’m the President of the United States!”

Real English professors don’t wear tweed all day long and pride themselves on their fine manner of elocution and hate minorities. Dickheads wear tweed all day and pride themselves on their fine manner of elocution and hate minorities. Sometimes English professors and dickheads overlap, but they do so with any profession. Regardless, Professor Cunt (I forget his character’s name, if he had one) is not what real English professors are like. This guy is more like a creepy stuck-up child molester who corrects people’s grammar. Real English professors would hate this guy. “Excuse me, Charles,” he would say in his effette way with condescending superiority, “but I believe the actual Shakespearean quote goes something like this,” and Charles would say, “Shut the fuck up you little bitch. Why don’t you go molest some children?” And if Professor Cunt tried to retort, probably with something ridiculous like, “Well, I never in all my years of teaching!” then Professor Cunt would just get depantsed and forced onto his knees for a good old fashioned faculty circle-jerk, and you know what? He would deserve it. He really would. Real English Professors tend to be very liberal, very open-minded, and very anti-establishment and anti-traditional, which brings me to:

REASON 2 THIS MOVIE SUCKS BIG FLOPPY DONKEY COCK: It doesn’t know what the hell a writer actually does. Now, I’ll admit, I’m not exactly an expert, being only 21 and never been published or anything, but even I can tell you that no one who writes life-changing novels spends all of his days cooped up in a lonely apartment with a bunch of books and an old-fashioned typewriter and rides a bicycle around New York when he’s forced into going out.

Because, and this part is actually important: to write, you must have something to write about. Why do you think undergrad creative writing workshops are filled with stories about 1 of 2 things: boring relationship problems, and murders? Because all undergrad college students do all day is have relationship problems, and murder people! Or, more likely, all they know about is their own lives and so they either write about their own problems, or they make up crazy outlandish plots about murder in attempts to be interesting. The best writers have gained perspectives and experiences from years of living, traveling, working, raising families, exploring the views of other people, taking risks. What does William Forrester have to write about if he sits in his aparment all day for fifty years? “(Sean Connery voiceover) Day 3057: This morning that sexy Puerto Rican woman who walks by my window every Tuesday to sell oranges on the street corner was wearing particularly tight red shorts, and I noticed for the first time that she is in fact a Puerto Rican man. I’ve loaded the revolver, Journal, but something in me is just too scared.” And then, when his world is opened, he does his duty as a writer, and moves away so he can die of cancer at the end of the movie. Oh yeah, spoiler alert. But, seriously, if you want to get the whole taste of the movie, just go find one of those internet sites that has a picture of Sean Connery and repeats the sound of him going, “You’re the man now, dog!” over and over. Fucking gold.

Seriously. I’m fucking sick of your shit, movies. You always paint the brilliant writer as some cooped-up hounds-tooth-jacket-wearing bearded sophisticate who locks himself up in his study for 8 hours a day to come up with brilliant insights on the human condition out of the PATTERNS ON HIS WALLPAPER. No! Bad movie-writers! Bad! Real writers, and this I can claim to have learned from my years as an undergrad in English Lit, real writers are horrible, demolished, volatile, self-destructive people. Most of them suffer from severe depression, alcoholism, drug addictions, and/or emotional disorders. They go around drinking until they forget their overwhelming neuroses, having sex with people they shouldn’t, and then fighting in goddamn wars. Pretty much every writer in the U.S. and England in the late 1930s went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Why? They hated dictatorship? Probably. But mostly, they were drunk! And they didn’t give a fuck if they lived or died, because they were so horribly depressed and having so much sex. They fought a war for the hell of it! And they lost. But at least they tried.

Which brings me back around to an important point: Neither writers nor English professors are stodgy and traditional and dislike change and want to honor the great masters of the past neglecting new talent, and correct everyone until they speak perfect proper language. One of my current English professors, who teaches the advanced-level History of the English Language course and who is an awesome and interesting teacher but I won’t name only because I hesitate to place people’s personal information in a blog with the word “cunt” in it so many times without asking permission – he has spent an entire semester trying to show us that English is a diverse and changing language and that our pre-conceived notions of what is “correct” and “incorrect” have not only been changing throughout time but are almost arbitrary and dependent upon their function as a tool for people to use. It’s okay if you want to speak a certain way! It’s fine! Real English professors don’t care! They like it. It’s little old ladies who sit up after Church on Sundays eating prunes who think English Professors want you to speak a certain way who will get all pissy and correct you. Tell them to suck it and come back to correct you when they have their Ph.D’s. If they actually make it through the whole grad-school Ph.D thing, they’ll have wasted the last few remaining years of their lives and will soon die, bitter and alone. Joke’s on them.

Pretty much every great literary movement of the past century, perhaps of the past milennium, has focused on overthrowing the dead culture of the supposed masters of the past and doing something new and exciting and rebellious that most stodgy people hate. This is what the experts do. It’s only the ignorant who cling to what they think is real English language and literature. Scholars and artists want to innovate and experiment.

Post-modernism, Modernism, even the Enlightenment – were all new and innovative and scary to ignorant stodgy people. Now they’re what we learn about in school. Even things like the translation of the Bible into English several centuries ago was not only controversial at first but actually punishable by death and heavily persecuted – now the Bible in English is how most people assume the Bible was written! Shakespeare himself was hated by stodgy old traditionalists – they thought his theaters brought disease and crime and moral looseness to England, and by golly, they were right! Disease, crime, and moral looseness is what all great literature should be about! Milton wrote essays like “Areopagitica” and “Tenure of Kings” that heavily criticized government control over people and urged a true democracy, which read now, could be read as a relevant modern critic piece. Emerson, obviously, was hated by religious and government officials in his time with a vile passion. Thoreau wrote a whole book about not paying your taxes! Even Wordsworth was trying something new, wanting to talk the way normal people talked in his poetry (it’s not his fault he had no idea how normal people talked…), and now we consider him stodgy and traditional! Pretty much every great author ever, throughout time, was trying to rebel against the government and the stodgy art world and was hated and ridiculed and persecuted for it. This is actually at the heart of the history of English Literature. The old masters were trying to rebel! They would encourage you to rebel now. Do some reading, bitch.

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To follow our own advice, we the writers of the bItterness Movement are currently at work on our foundation pieces. My partner, Jeff Brandt, has already completed a seminal bItterness poem titled “I Resolve.” I am half-way on the first draft of a novella-length short story titled “Congestion,” which currently has an F-bomb count of 13. I’m getting that up to 25 before it’s over, I promise. I pride myself on my per-story F-bomb count. Read it here sometime around Christmas. My gift to you.