Syncopated Syncopations

It's all about finding the rhythm when there is no rhythm.

Because beauty

We want to be loved. Or we want to be understood. Or we want to just not be misunderstood. At the very least. So we write. Except by telling our story, in grueling and grinding fashion, in the fullest of devotion and reverence, with hope, we’re sometimes misunderstood, even when we’re the most open we can be—or maybe because we’re the most open we can be—or we’re just not understood in the way we want to be understood, so all of this truth, our truth, turns out to be something like a cheap piece of jet trash, and so the question is why, why do it? Why not stay silent? Why try?

Because beauty.

Because a shapely mind

I read somewhere (I increasingly don’t know where I read things) that Jack Kerouac aspired to having what he called a “shapely mind.” I googled that and found a quote of his: “If the mind is shapely, the art will be shapely.”

The idea brought up questions for me. What is a shapely mind? Is it a mind shaped by tenderness and patience, a mind shaped by restlessness and hunger, a mind shaped by attention and devotion? Or all of those things and more.

When I set goals for this year (here’s the post on that), I decided that a shapely mind should be one of my resolutions, similar to how some people decide on a word they’ll honor or meditate on for a year, because if I have a shapely mind as a resolution, then I have to always be alert to whether I’m doing and thinking things that will shape my mind in the way I want to shape it.

Do I want to shape my mind with anger and envy, in other words, or do I want to shape it with love and generosity? Do I want to shape it with the cadence of a long walk or the scroll through social media? Do I want to cling to being right or let things go? I’ll find out…

Because because

Where do dads keep their dad jokes?

In their dada base.

Because laughter

One downside (except it’s also an upside) is that the pandemic has reduced my ability to watch shows that are dark and depressing and confrontational and intellectually challenging. I find myself either rewatching old movies (seeking the comfort of familiarity) or watching music documentaries or comedy specials.

I’ve always viewed comedians with the highest of reverence among all artists because their art demands that they say the unsayable. Their job is to risk embarrassment. That’s the job of every artist, but with comedians, it’s more so, and they have to do it while looking people in the eye for an immediate response.

I just finished watching the documentary on the Comedy Store, the hallowed and crazy laboratory of comedy for the past 50 years. David Letterman, Jay Leno, Freddie Prinz, Richard Pryor, Sam Kinnison, Jim Carrey, Whitney Cummings, Bill Burr, Andrew Dice Clay, Sandra Bernhard, Byron Allen, Damon Wayans, Louie Anderson, Howie Mandel, Mike Binder, Joe Rogan, Marc Maron, Louie Anderson, Bob Saget, Chris Rock, and many more tell the stories behind the stories of Mitzi Shore’s club and the rise of comedy in America (yeah, there were mainly white guys, unfortunately and predictably).

One thing I love about comedians is how much they enjoy being around each other. It’s fun to watch this documentary just for that: seeing artists loving their art and loving those who do it. Which is beauty.

Because the odds

I’ve got this heart condition called atrial fibrillation, which is a type of arrhythmia. My heart beats a little like a Thelonius Monk piano solo, disjointed, a little wild. It beats a little like it’s looking for something in the dark. I lived for years thinking this was just the way hearts were supposed to beat (which was weird) or that I drank too much coffee (which was true).

Anyway, one way they try to return a heartbeat to a regular rhythm is to put you under and shock your heart to try to get the electrical charges to coordinate and beat regularly. It’s called a “cardioversion.” I’ve done two of them now. Strangely enough, I kind of like medical procedures when I have to be put under. I don’t take much time off from work, so it’s my version of going to the beach (strange, I know, but this is one purpose of illness: to take us out of our lives and return us to ourselves).

After my second cardioversion didn’t work, I asked my cardiologist if we should try it one more time.

“The odds aren’t high that it will work at this point,” he said.

Not high to me meant under 80%. Maybe 70%. Not great, but not bad odds. And I’d get to take an afternoon off work.

“Does that mean the odds are low?” I asked.

“Yes, the odds are low,” he said.

So now I’m thinking he meant under 10%. Funny how doctors talk.

Truth be told I like the Thelonius Monk rhythms of my heart. My heart beats to its own careening heartbeat, going where it wants to go. It’s like a Mexican jumping bean. It’s like Ian Curtis slam dancing.

Syncopation, in music, is the displacement of regular accents associated with given metrical patterns, resulting in a disruption of the listener’s expectations and the arousal of a desire for the reestablishment of metric normality. Syncopation is created by resting on a normal accented beat, or by tying over a note to the next measure.

My heart is an artist, in other words. Its beat asserts a strange but welcome aesthetic (I’ve decided to welcome it, because why not?). It invites me to pay attention to interruptions and pauses. It disrupts any expectation of continuity. Everyone else gets a regularly beating heart, but I get this special thing, a heart determined to do things in its own way. I get “fibrillation,” which is a lovely sounding word.

There’s a beauty in every troubled child.

Because a haiku

The sweat plays 
   on my brow
doing its own work

Because a quote

This is it, right? This is what I was getting at in the “Because beauty” section.

“In some ways, all language is errant translation. Language wanders from its intended assignments, language is slippery, and what makes the desire to communicate so beautiful is its desperation and inevitable failure; it revels in something basic and intrinsic to humanity, a primal longing, like Sisyphus and his round boulder, Wu Gang and his moon tree. In some ways this is every writer’s and artist’s ongoing work: to continuously rename the world anew, and in this renaming we attempt to grasp it while also giving it up to the ether.”

~ Jennifer S. Cheng (from this wonderful essay on refraction)

Because thank God for good stories

Reason no. 517 why I like flash fiction: flash allows a writer to focus intensely on a moment in a way longer stories don’t. The moment becomes the story, whether it explodes or reveals layers.

In Smoothies, by Venita Blackburn, it all starts with a single phrase said in line at Jamba Juice: “You look like a man.” An explosion of sorts. Then we move through layers. The phrase and the many things it holds echo through a lifetime. All in a flash.

Because prompts take us to new places

I took this photo one night while waiting for my daughter to finish soccer practice.

Use this photo as a prompt, as a random catalyst, as an igniter for any writing project you're working on.

Or … write a story about this photo in less than 250 words and share it.

All the Comfort Sin Can Provide

If you like this newsletter, please consider checking out my recently released collection of short stories, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide.

Lidia Yuknavitch said:

“Somewhere between sinister and gleeful the characters in Grant Faulkner’s story collection All the Comfort Sin Can Provide blow open pleasure—guilty pleasure, unapologetic pleasure, accidental pleasure, repressed pleasure.” 

Grant Faulkner is executive director of National Novel Writing Month and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. He’s the author of Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo and the co-host of the podcast Write-minded. His essays on creative writing have appeared in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Lit Hub, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer.

For more, go to grantfaulkner.com, or follow him on Twitter at @grantfaulkner.