Your thoughts answered before you’ve even finished thinking them

Let me do this for you. Although if you have seriously thought any of the following then surely you can’t still be reading.

Dear Solid Wall of Writing guy (Notice how I put spaces between each word)

Firstly, I’d like to say that I don’t know who Fido Dogs-dove-skee is. As such, I do not know how you expect anyone to understand your site without this crucial bit of information. The idea that you think that anyone would be interested in whether this unheard-of writer had a better writing desk than the great Charles Dickens, is extremely naïve. Also, Dickens wrote Scrooge, which is one of the best films ever.  

You make references to people I’ve never heard of. Who is Bill Hicks? And why do you bring his name up like we should all know exactly who this is. You also think you’re some kind of poet because that whole bit about “a hundred billion castaways” is clearly amateur hour at poetry open mike night. And speaking of being amateur, you’ve been published once in a book that you’re not even trying to promote and you won’t even tell us the name of it. How do we know you’ve really been published?

If you were famous your work might be taken more seriously. Have you tried podcasting? If you became a famous podcaster then you might get more traffic. And then with more traffic you’ll get more companies wanting to buy advertising space from you. Maybe then you can pay someone to proofread for you and tell you when you do that thing where you don’t put spaces between words. Also, I don’t know if you’re aware but the words behind your title are all blurry, as though someone accidentally laid one page of text over the other. What happened there?

You manage to come across as a bit erudite and as I write that now I do need to ask, “What is erudite?”  Is it someone who talks a lot about Shakespeare? You said that Shakespeare was being Meta when he wrote Hamlet’s last words. What is meta? Is this meta? Am I breaking the fourth wall here? How many walls are there?

The best idea you’ve had is that thing about Hamlet but you completely spoiler-ed the ending. And last but by no means least, there are just too many words maaaan.

Does anyone think like this? Maybe they go, “I’ve no idea what a Dog-Dove-Sky is, so I’ll pass.” I’ve written at length, and will probably continue to do so, about taking an interest in something you previously had no idea about. I had no interest in Russian literature, until that moment that one person, sadly not the whole room of people, thought that I’d written something Dostoevsky-like and then my ears pricked up. That’s why I read Notes from the Underground and then Crime and Punishment and then The Idiots and then The Brothers Karamazov. And then I thought, whilst I’m on a Russian lit bender, I’ve never read any Tolstoy, and the next thing I know I love Anna Karenina. I’ve read more about Leo Tolstoy than I’ve read his works. I’ve watched at least one really good documentary about his life. I didn’t read any of those books to seem clever. I’m not sure reading any great works of literature makes you seem clever. But I’m certainly used to, and grew up with the idea, that you’d reference War and Peace when you wanted to benchmark anything super-long. As in – “…..it’s a long read but it’s not War and Peace.” I think you didn’t have to know that War and Peace was written by Leo Tolstoy, you just knew it was the longest book anyone knew of. And if you could read it, then you had to at least be able to claim you were a little bit clever. 

I really didn’t think that knowing anything about Dostoevsky was a big deal. I didn’t think that it was some sort of secret reference that only lit grads are going to get. There are plenty of references to Fydor Dostoevsky and Crime and Punishment in popular culture. Yet, I’ve been surprised by educated people asking me about who or what Dostoevsky is or was. There’s a Crime and Punishment Graphic novel. It’s not bad. There’s also Manga Shakespeare. I was rather annoyed when a colleague told me that they used Manga Shakespeare to make it more palatable for his primary school kids. Hey, adults like Manga too!  I thought that popular culture embraced classic literature a long time ago. You have to remember that I grew up with the idea of Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes as my Romeo and Juliet on film. The point being, all those things that some might label highbrow, may never have been that in the first place. Dostoevsky, imprisoned in a Siberian Gulag for being a radical, where he faced a firing squad and was given a last-minute reprieve, only to later find out the whole thing was a hoax, was treated like a rock star by the Russian people.

The juxtaposition of Russian literature and communicating in emojis as a marker of being very smart or being rather dumb, echoes the words of Homer. I’m not one to shirk away from the classics but obviously in this case, Homer Simpson fits my needs better than anything in classic Greek literature. On being asked by FBI special agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, to explain where he was last night, Homer explains that he was, “…discussing Wittgenstein over a game of backgammon.” Although when Scully points out that it’s, “… a felony to lie to the FBI,” Homer comes clean and confesses,”…we were sitting in Barney’s car eating packets of mustard.” It’s typical Simpsons humour, with Homer being dumb and the script being smart. That Homer could pronounce Wittgenstein, let alone claim to have read any of his works, is all part of the joke, in a very meta way.

“You always take things to extremes,” so Dad would say. Well, it’s one way to drive home a point. Reading Wittgenstein, even before Homer talked of it, had been a go-to for any obvious fake claims of intellectual pursuits. And it was largely because even saying the name sounded clever. This was before I actually knew how to pronounce it myself and years before I knew anything at all about the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I’ve still never read any of his work. I think I have a “Wittgenstein for dummies” style book and I know that his philosophy focuses on the connection between meaning and language. You’d think it would be right up my street.

At the thought of anyone saying, “Why? Why are you writing about these things?” I’d like to now take the chance to point out that at some level I’m explaining a Simpsons joke, and you can’t get much more everyman pop culture than The Simpsons. I guess I could have run with the idea of, Wittgenstein versus Emojis, except for Wittgenstein being synonymous with philosophy more so than literature. What it was never going to be was, “How to write like a professional when you can’t use words very well.” I wouldn’t even know where to start with explaining why that makes my skin crawl.

“I don’t know who Bill Hicks is. I don’t know any Russian authors.” Why do you need to? Isn’t any writing, to a large extent, telling you stuff you didn’t know? I never felt that we needed context to the Nth degree to be able to understand anything. You take it as you find it and everything else you can Google. (This will not appear in any future Google marketing campaigns) You get the gist of things. It’s up to the writer to make it all sound good and worth investigating further. Go along for the ride and don’t worry about what you do or do not know.