Performing Writing, Performing Literaricity

Part Two


It was lovely to read what Beth McGregor had to say about Acting as a Writer. It's like somebody gave a name to what I do sometimes. And now that it has a name, I can call upon it as a tool in my times of need.

One time, back in the good old community college days, I had to write a short paper for an English Lit class. We had the option of either writing a biographical report or writing a fictional interview-type creative thing that included one of a list of literary figures. I chose to write a fictional account of an interview with Keats. How I wrote the thing is the interesting and apropos part. I was out with some friends at one of our older friends' apartment. I knew I had to get this thing written and turned in in maybe two days, so I had my Norton and my notebook and was planning to write it while my friends partied all around me. I never stayed at home nights in community college. After reading the Keats biographical stuff like three times, I found myself narrating out loud in a foppish, learned British accent. My friends played along, laughing and drinking and probably other things besides, and before I knew it, I had British-accent-narrated my way through the project. The final product was not that great, information wise, but it had so much style to it that it didn't matter if it were read with an accent or not. Like Beth, I had act-written my way through a literary project. (Best quote from the paper, Keats's saying "I like horses, but I can't stand surgery.")

It comes back to this idea of persona. Writing fiction gives me lots of practice in developing personae, and finding ways to understand a character that is outside myself, yet produced out of pieces of myself. For illustration I will now change the subject to music.

I was thinking about my alter-ego, my musician stage name personality, Dusty Pyramid. When I write songs, or pretty much just improvise songs for a tape recorder, which is less and less these days but still happens sometimes, I play, sing, and perform as Dusty. This acting as writing is very similar to what McGregor means. It gives me freedom to create and compose in a way that being Jordan just won't allow. Dusty doesn't have to worry about Jordan's problems or concerns, he just gets the compressed diamond of whatever I need to say onto the tape (in place of the page).
I thought about precursors, and I thought about Garth Brooks having to create Chris Gains as an outlet for the pop/R&B persona he never got the chance to use while he was becoming one of the best selling (read:pigeonholed country) recording artists of all time. I thought about how it goes beyond ego or any Freudian terminology, and it gets into what this reading means about audience and what that audience expects from a performer. Garth knew his audience wouldn't stomach a pop album that sounded like Simply Red's outtakes, but he figured out that Chris Gains wouldn't care what Garth's audience expected, Chris would just go and do his own thing.
I also thought about David Bowie and Ziggy Stardust, about Elton John, about Elton John and the whole Captain and the Kid thing which just laid it all out there in explanation for the faithful fans. I thought about the first song the Rolling Stones ever wrote, when their producer (I think) forced Mick and Keith to write an original song. What they came up with, the gem of insight and debate the philosophical connotations of which I wrestle with on a monthly basis are said all within the title: "The Singer Not The Song." According to a young Mick Jagger, "It's the singer, not the song."

Maybe eventually it is, but the song has to make folks dance, has to get kids buying records, get patrons buying libations, before the singer even gets remembered. At least that's how it was before American Idol. Davey Archuleta could never have packed Hal & Mal's. Never before the Idol. (I wouldn't recommend that Davey try to book the Hal & Mal's just yet, either, for his own safety.) But hey, contexts evolve, and we can still find artists our daughters aren't into yet. Flip that onto the creative writing front, consider ourselves fifty years old, and things get really interesting. Pan back a bit, and we're discussing composition theory.