The commons

I put up "Gl0ry Box" with many reservations. I wanted to write something experimental that tapped the feelings that people keep down. It was hard. I'm not sure it worked.

My way in to that space of intense feeling was to track to it in my own life. I started with a book in which the intellectualizing of struggle and voicelessness seemed sappy and tired, not to mention unreal (Gilligan's The Birth of Pleasure). At first I wanted that distance from the emotion. It kept it safe, but hella boring. Yes, you can appreciate the idea behind anything, but the power of it is in the doing, not the idea. I think I made that clear in the piece.

Music and it's capacity to act as a carrier wave for raw emotion, for me, offers a much more meaningful contact with the power inside all of us. Consciously, I picked out a set of CD's that I knew could "go there". Maybe it's just because I was so willing to follow their path - Hole's Live Through This, Jane's Addiction's Nothing's Shocking, Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville - that led to the intensity. It's like the start of any one of a dozen Hole (or Nirvana) songs - begin in a place of irony and critique - softly and acoustically, and then the pick scrapes down the guitar strings with the amp pegged to max distortion, and the song slams us face first into images like fists. The fists don't move, we do. POW.

So I ask the readers if it works? Does it need explanation? It's funny, because even writing this out I see ways to change it. However, then I'm acting at a step of remove. Can you write a book this way? I'd change it to weave in the shift of voice from male to female to gender neutral more subtly at first. I'd change it, but then it wouldn't be a punk song.

So I'll just leave it be. Comments welcomed though.