RR, your writer is (hopes to be) a writer who writes, not a corner office capitalist on an expense account binge, bibbing himself with stock certificates. Why should he sponsor or be sponsored by that fastfood company by putting its brandname in his story? in yours? Would that foodstuff corporation ever print his scriving on its wrappers? would they festoon their fries containers with the opening of The Bloody Body? Could you swallow this, RR? “His girlfriend of the tawny mouthsized eyes,” descried across the apple pies, among the chicky nuggets — what tawny fries like fingers! and what a terrible title, The Body Dies Bleeding! Maybe your writer’s afraid of the present? of the genre of the present (ephemeraphobia)? maybe he doesn’t want to date his story? stories should be timeless — anachronistic? The dilemma being that even the slightest details — such as a car and feast of equal speed, pharmaceuticals and spires — serve to date and place a text, fix it in history and geography. Your story’s now become a text, RR, which is when you know the story’s over (it should’ve been over with that sizzly neon you had passed, neon scribbles everything pluperfect).
RR, maybe your writer’s the only writer who has this problem, maybe he’s too serious. Possibly other writers have been better adjusted to their circumstances, as people less inhibited. He would ask them if he knew them, knew any intimately enough. Only A.J. of the cursive mustache and Russian obsession (they were in school together, A.J. writes whodunit juvenilia). B.C.D. (another schoolmate hack, she wouldn’t dryhump) who profiles for a weekly more read for its less logorrheic cartoons. H. who wrote her dissertation on Nabokov in the voice of Nabokov: fractious, lilting, Germanophonic, Francophonic, superiorly unsuburban, the prize for which is tenure. Y. who doesn’t know if the plot he’s “fleshing,” the flesh he’s “developing”—his fiancée has learned to cook from the appropriate TV — wants to be a novel or screenplay. Fear not libel or defamation (I’ve even falsified initials), literature has lost that power. Fair use means only that the user’s unfairly used. Your writer knows visual artists who’ve sold their bodies to corporations, tattooing emblem and catchphrase on cadaverous forearms and calves. He knows more abstract composers whose music features dissonances that must be endured if only to more fully appreciate the relief afforded by a DJ snippet of pop from the 1990s or ’80s or ’70s or ’60s or ’50s. Art that samples other art, quotes that quote other quotes — your writer knows this phenomenon, in jargon he’s aware, he was raised in a culture of (not more ironic jargon, select only the most appropriate gustatory analogy): regurgitation, a culture of glutting to vomit and glutting again on the vomit until reemesis — chunky cheese mimesis — then licking that puddle again. RR, your writer knows that concepts regarding the usage of brandnames and sundry commercial verbiage in fiction have been thoroughly described by other writers using other words, using long words, multisyllabicized compoundlongfrankfurteresquewords that sound and look on the page as repellent as the copyrighted proper nouns they critique (he won’t “instantiate” them here) and, RR, your writer also knows — as fact! as fact! that all his concerns about brandnames & co. are considered old and trite and that most people meaning most of his peers consider him if intellectual then pretentiously stilted (what Y. said when he sent your story to him, “preciously stilted”), grinding and dull (Y. saying, “your story’s all grind grind grind and only then, dull”), they think his problem — that writing the name of a profiting entity in a nonprofit or negligibly profitable story causes him pain — is more like an antiproblem, a solution of years ago, a solution of decades ago, that in the very annus Reaganis your writer was born it was already OK to use copyrighted brands in one’s art. But what your writer senses now is that it has become not OK anymore and that what once was liberating is now just sad, is now also in some sense controlling. What once transgressed today merely oppresses. (Add a clause to the effect that people don’t smoke or drink as much anymore after a century of manipulation by the alcohol/tobacco industries/lobbies) but still writers insist on branding brandnames onto their stories, RR, doing unpaid product placement like this not because to avoid doing so would be incongruous or distracting but because the question to place or not to place does not even occur to them as a question, they’ll insert a brand into a story because brands have been inserted into their lives as if through stabbing gavage or rape and have become, what is the banality, second nature, yes, brands have become a second nature to nature and breathing them in as natural as breathing. Today entire sentences can be made by brands jammed like cars, entire paragraphs like crashed cars your writer’s rubbernecked — his sore sloucher’s neck — on his commute: Redesigned mascot icecreamed telecom spokesperson in re: specialty flavor glitch w/ online airline ticketing. Revise, verise. Make even this technique proprietary. “He would die before he fell in love” translating to, Male celeb would [suffer the same fate as (he did in) his previous film] before he diamonds/dozen roses/boner supplement champagne. He checked his watchbrand. His smile as sticky as brand of tape or glue. Your writer is alone, RR, having no wife to carnificate into hamburger meat or future. He has no girlfriend to mold by pattycake into the burger of the future. An aborted novel he has, set aboard a space capsule that was to be revealed at novel’s end to have never been launched from Camden. A novella, a novelette, narrating at a page per minute an hourlong pornclip starring a pornstar named Jami Joyce. And this, the story of his neuroses, paranoia becoming a style: He never writes the word America, opting instead for allusion or ellipsis; he writes “the City,” CAP optional (instead of New York City); he writes “anonymous strip” (instead of I-95, though a foolish instinct counsels: “I-nonymous”); and, of course, he never uses semicolons. And while we’re at it, RR, let’s insist on “styrofoam,” which was likewise left above in lowercase, in minuscule, though it properly should be “Styrofoam™,” in majuscule, the term for “extruded polystyrene foam,” trademarked by the Dow Chemical Company. Possibly your writer has no reason. Is impractical. Is not practical. Like why, after all this time, is he still writing—“has no reason”—in third person?
I was tired of this, tired of inventing other worlds—“realms,” “dimensions,” I was exhausted by synonym, by quotationmarks too — tired of inventing alternate worlds while misunderstanding my own, yes, yes, but also I was starving.
I got up, left the house (apt.).
No more ambiguities. Imprecision renders nothing worthier, nothing universal.
The following writers have worked as advertising creatives: (fill this in later)
Nothing universal but, galaxies. Nothing universal but, the universe.
I walked — I mclive in Brooklyn, I mchave no car — to McDonald’s. There, there, walked, walked, a welfare visne, nobody has cars, there are barely buses. Gravesend’s what it’s called, the end of graves, the grave of graves (the British buried atop the Dutch). Cameras surrounded by barbedwire like they were gun installations, protecting. The parkinglot, empty, speckled with gums. Lines for the cars that were missing were black like grillmarks. The drivethru window everyone walkedthru was blacked too. When the shade was down you had to knock. I considered walkingthru myself and knocking, reconsidered. I had to force myself to full experience. “Full-Service”—a euphemism used only by callgirls and restaurants. This was not research but living, this was not living but life.