It is easy to take the side of the outsider; they are the “artist” or the “rebel” fighting the crusade against mainstream. Rallying against topical, trodden writing on the Xanga front page, or the next Jerry Bruckheimer movie, these people you can spot from a distance and they may even look a little like me.

Yet most writers or artists would like to reach a wider audience, or apparently just change culture one artwork at a time. This is good because why else would they do it? For their own self? C’mon, artists aren’t that narcissistic.

For one to take down society, one must write something that utterly fails…on purpose. I watched an interview with one Charlie Kaufman who said he intentionally wrote Adaptation so it would fail. The ending makes sense in terms of sequence but it doesn’t make sense on a thematic level. I have heard many people say many profound things about this movie and I have to laugh at the inside joke I wasn’t even on, until now.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote his first piece of work called One Hundred Years of Solitude, which was then as well as now considered his masterpiece. He followed it up with Autumn of the Patriarch, which is a novel that has few capitalized words, few periods and a whole lot of commas, like someone took a deep breath for two hundred odd pages. It is the kind of book that English teachers follow up with words like “artistic license” and “you have to be careful using this form”

It technically is a failure of standard grammar; those squiggly lines in Microsoft Word Documents would get tired of following all the lines of the story. He could have written Two Hundred Years of Purgatory, with expanded family trees and a new country to explore. He instead made the decision to explore and to fail, and to have people still market and publish it.

You see something that fails has pushed pass some paradigm long held, what you have to decide is why it is there to begin with. Aristotle said that good art it one that has been fully reasoned, you have to know you are failing and why.

If you fail enough times people call this your style and then your style gets picked up by other people until you are popular. Bob Dylan is a good example as he is a failure, can’t even hold a tune. Failures rule the world.

So as it should, writing (or other forms of love making) not as an act of restraint, but one of profanity, that is, until one takes a breath from on high to see what is good. To see what is left after the failure. NS 7/14/09