Author Archives: Molly Pozel

Cute Copy

I haphazardly applied to a few jobs this semester. One of them was a copywriting position for a clothing company whose dresses I would like to purchase, but could never justify if I want to keep buying fancy, glass bottle, hormone-free milk. It was not until after I sent my application into their cyberspace submission machine that I actually studied the clothing captions I would be writing. The template for the copy on this particular website went, “Awesome [article of clothing] featuring [clothing material]. Looks rad paired with [any pair of shoes or any belt]!” Variations replace “awesome” with “perfect” or “rad” with “amazing” and once, “totally hot.”

I did not hear back about my application because, I’m assuming, I did not pass the background check portion that detailed my order history of zero items purchased. A couple of the other sporadic jobs I applied for were not interested in my wardrobe, but impressed by my choice in milk so I think things worked out for the best. My nights spent filling internet shopping carts until they reach laughable totals hasn’t waned and now the result of applying for that job has only been to make clothing copy impossible for me to ignore. The photo below is not from the website I applied to that sells really expensive dresses. It is from a different website called ModCloth that sells pretty expensive dresses. Their punny product titles and “The Story” tab for each article of clothing rivals Elaine Bennis’ work writing for the J. Peterman catalogue on Seinfeld.

I came across the above dress on ModCloth’s website a few weeks ago and tried to like it just as much as I try to like every Molly I encounter, but the references to blogging, wallpaper, and The Story’s suggestion that I “hook a thumb on this dress’ self belt” were ultimately unappealing. I think a lot about how difficult it would be to write for this website. How many different ways could I describe an A-line, semi-retro dress? Do they have a bank of cutesy titles like “Cowl of the Wild Dress,” “Teal It In Dress,” and “Only Time Will Toile Dress” to choose from or does a copywriter have to come up with that within 24 hours of knowing the dress? I would stay awake nights trying to rhyme “pleat” with “please.”

Most of the time on this post was dedicated to think of a slant rhyme as mediocre as pleat and please, which means by the time I got around to writing a narrative about pockets, I would probably only have the creative capacity to come up with “totally hot.” The Story portion of ModCloth is the same tool that has been utilized in print long before I signed in to these websites. The J Peterman catalogue is not entirely Seinfeld fiction. As with most Seinfeld episodes, the show only portrays a more entertaining truth. The real J Peterman catalogue does provide an almost notoriously great example of the belief that a backstory on a product heightens its appeal. This article pokes fun at the discrepancy between J Peterman’s elaborate narratives versus the actual product. A short-sleeved linen shirt is captioned with:

“Anything was possible then. She took him hunting for blue crabs along Chesapeake Bay… They shook hands with Elektro The Mechanical Man. They gasped at the television-telephone in the Drug Store of Tomorrow…”

I like to think that I’m not the kind of consumer who gets taken by a paragraph that makes me visualize what it would be like to be the kind of girl who could drive with the windows down in a drop waist skirt. Then again, if the copy printed on the side of my glass milk bottles romantically referred to shaking hooves with a cow, I might be more inclined to try to be a hat person.

Meet the Past

William Faulkner has never been on my list of (dead or alive) dinner invites or authors who I wished I could have seen give a reading or even men with accents who I would want to spend an hour with. I came as close as I ever will in meeting my uninvited non-idol recently though when I sat through a one-man Faulkner impersonation as part of an assignment for a course titled Performance of Literature. The act was bizarre, but apparently part of a professional genre of performance called Chautauqua where actors take on the role of a historic figure in an effort to educate an audience while entertaining. The beginning of the performance felt like a play, with an actor arriving on stage and in character. As Faulkner-Not-Faulkner began reading excerpts from his novels and laughing at his own autobiographical jokes, I couldn’t help comparing again the subtleties of literature to the production of performance.

John Anderson, the actor portraying Faulkner, recounted stories of the author’s life in an accent with a pipe in hand. The performance became odd with a question and answer portion where Anderson remained in character. It seemed that as an audience we were supposed to pretend like we didn’t know how this whole thing would turn out. There was a moment of tension when an audience member asked Faulkner about how much of the author’s own attitude on race is present in his books, but the question seemed more like a challenge to Faulkner (but not really Faulkner, who is dead) to admit that he is/was a racist. Faulkner stumbled over his words and the silence following his response made most of the audience cringe. Finally a woman two rows ahead of me broke the silence with a question that she asked with complete sincerity and curiosity, “How many children do you have?”

The real William Faulkner wearing a blazer.

Anderson removed his blazer after Faulkner had answered everyone’s questions and explained that the costume change signified his return to reality. A second round of questions and answers began. Anderson called Chautauqua a storytelling genre, a medium less about mimicking and more about knowing an author like Faulkner in a personal, performance way as well as having vast scholarly, literary and historical knowledge of the character. The art of storytelling line is one that I’ve used before to describe writing and to hear Not-Faulkner use it made me wince a little as somebody who always believed the art was in the subtle details rather than the accents.

The sort of suspension of belief required during the first Q and A was a stretch for me. I’ve seen plays and musicals and read fictional stories where I could get behind operatic phantoms and Emerald Cities, but the imposed agreement that the audience ignore our foresight of Faulkner, a real person, seemed unfair. As my Performance of Literature class continually points out, acting a story and writing a story are much different mediums, but from my theater chair I still tried to think of a literary equivalent. Authors ask audiences to pretend not to know all the time. The audience knows before Jennifer Egan’s characters in A Visit From the Goon Squad how the eighties punk scene ends. It’s not only fiction either, an audience senses tragic implications in Richard Rodriguez’s Late Victorians at the mention of AIDS and San Francisco. Chautauqua is an elbow nudge and a wink after somebody tells a joke whose punch-line is already apparent, while good use of time and history in literature shape a believable narrative. Overall, I can appreciate that the use of performance to narrate a figure’s life can be more entertaining than reading a biography and certainly takes up less of my Friday night.

Not Amelia Earhart

The Kansas City public library series Meet the Past created time warp interviews with some of Kansas City’s local, dead historical figures. The library director wears a suit and tie to talk to Jesse James, Amelia Earhart, Langston Hughes and others. James showed up with two holsters and a surprising willingness to tell the story of the first daylight bank robbery, which incidentally took place in my hometown. The interviewer gives the more likable, less chiseled James a flippant definition of collateral damage after the innocent, unintended victim of the robbery comes up. James makes a joke about watching where you’re going and the audience laughs. I suppose the literary equivalent of Chautauqua is reading the same book a second time and knowing that Dorothy makes it home, the only difference in performance being the hand-over-mouth giggle of a Q and A session where an eager audience member asks her, “What size shoe do you wear?”

Little Literature

Recent trailers for the animated film The Secret World of Arriety based on the children’s novel The Borrowers reminded me of another series I read as a child, The Littles. The entirely unappealing and disturbing concept of both of these books is that I may be the biggest threat in a reality where small, proportionate humans survive on my crumbs. I do not want to read a book or watch a movie that makes me wonder if a tiny family has run off with a turkey leg. If I drop a pea, could I hurt one? I would feel responsible, but I also don’t really want them living here. I donated the series over Thanksgiving break (I had a hard time forgetting this cover over dinner) and was surprised by the discrepancy between my childhood and adult feelings for the books. I had sought out and read the entire Little’s series at some point in my life, but could now barely stand the sight of a cover.

I spent last weekend at AWP with a Hilton hotel full of adults, where adult is synonymous with professional, successful, tall or married. I didn’t feel like I was going to be crushed by a pea, but the distinction between feeling big and small was on my mind. The conference was open and welcoming despite my intimidation. There is though a level of cynicism, elitism and doubt that acts as a rite of passage to feeling big that does not only apply to writers or artists, but to adults. It is a made-up pressure that I have put on myself in situations like AWP to separate myself from the naiveté of smallness. It is the pressure that makes me nod along when fellow writers claim that children’s and young adult literature have no merit and it is probably the same pressure that convinces them to make such claims in the first place. More often than not, I think these generalizations are meant for Stephenie Meyer, but their broadness reaches Lois Lowry, Maurice Sendak, Ezra Jack Keats, Roald Dahl, C.S. Lewis and all of the littles checking out books.

The purpose of children’s literature to me was to prepare a young generation that will one day grow big and read real literature. My stance has changed and I know that it began when my high school French teacher assigned Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The Little Prince is marketed as a children’s book, but the themes are about bigness and smallness. Our French class spent a semester on what is still one of the most in-depth book analyses I have ever taken part in discussing adulthood, innocence and human worth. It is a book about being small and having merit.

Writing literature for children is a daunting task that I will probably never face as a writer. Knowing your audience, understanding the nuances of literature and believing in imagination are essential for holding the attention of children, but not necessarily for writing a novel that becomes a good book club read.  The challenge for an adult writing children’s literature has to be remembering that they are writing for an audience who still believes in original ideas. Writing children’s or young adult literature seems like the smallest, most confining space, but not in a claustrophobic way. I can combat the land mines of an intellectual adult mind because education and adulthood have prepared me to question, but in a systematic way. Navigating a child’s mind is like squeezing through a maze that is constantly being built and redirected with “why?” and “how?” in the places that adults don’t know to ask.

Even Saint-Exupéry’s seemingly simple sentences need unraveling: ”Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.” I take my steps a little bit more carefully and can combat the pressures of intimidation if I remember that I might be living with French royalty.

Twitter Trash

I made a Twitter account and pierced my nose the last time (first time?) I was pseudo-dumped. As far as post-relationship “I’m going to make a change that I can control” attitudes, it was a tame change especially compared to the considerations I made for a tattoo and an asymmetrical bob, but Twitter was just as uncharacteristic and seemingly ill fitting. I resisted the website with a long list of reasons, although pointless and obnoxious summed them up. These are the same sentiments that keep a lot of people from making an account, or more often among my peers, keep them from using already made accounts.

I have had a Twitter for nearly a year now and think that I am getting better at explaining its purpose. I try to think beyond the timely updates I receive via Twitter from politicians, local businesses, my favorite bands, news headlines and the university, because what people grapple with and what I resisted was the short format and immediacy in a personal account. The question “Who cares what I’m doing all the time?” came up a lot for me and the answer is definitely, nobody. I have been successful at Twitter, and success is only defined here in that I have maintained one, because I treat the site as a thought trash can.

As soon as I send a 140 character tweet into the internet, a place where I assume everything is lost forever never to be found by future employers, it’s out of my head. I do not use the medium to recount my day because breakfast in the morning, work in the afternoon and homework in the evening aren’t the kind of thoughts that get stuck. Wondering what my Gouda cheese would say to me is the kind of thought that will be lodged for days and it will have nowhere to go because I could never talk about it aloud. When I send “‘How much do you think I’m worth?’ -Gouda cheese” to Twitter, the thought isn’t weird or consuming, it’s just gone. For a writer who has never been able to maintain a journal, having a record of short, immediate observations that are composed without the stifling context of an essay or even a blog and that receive some form of feedback, is valuable.

I don’t mean to get hung up on personifying cheese, but the notion that my cheese tweet is not odd and is drowned immediately in tweets from around the world speaks to the paradox of Twitter. On their own, my tweets are valueless, passing thoughts that don’t deserve a second glance and that is how I treat them. My narrowed audience of followers finds some value because they read them. It’s not until I look back on a week or month of tweets that I can find any real worth outside of my own entertainment.

I am able to see trends in my own thoughts that would have been filtered out in a different medium. For a couple of weeks it seemed that I had a lot to say about babies and teeth.  The nights that I’m up trying to write first drafts or blog posts or second drafts, my tweets are progressively more aggressive. I retweet @SpringsteenSays, an account that only tweets quotes from Springsteen songs, approximately every two weeks. I think about outfits, food and television a lot. I see these trends the same way that I think about dreams; I won’t analyze them, but if my mom wants to, I won’t stop her. For the most part, everything I say on Twitter is still trash, but to know my own thought process and be able to revise a 140 character tweet into a real sentence (the first sentence of this post) is worth maintaining.

Speaking of the value of Twitter, don’t forget to participate in TMR’s first Twitter contest. Send us your literary hot dog recipes as a final sendoff to our staff visiting AWP in Chicago this weekend and follow us @Missouri_Review. Follow me @MollyPuzzle for AWP baby updates.