My Grandmother and Nirvana

I found an old scratched-up CD of Nirvana’s “In Utero” in my desk drawer today, no jewel case. I put it in the tray, pressed play. Of all Nirvana’s records, I like it best. It is the most raw, the most punk rock. At the time it was released, I remember, it was kind of a middle finger to the mainstream radio stations and fans that had annointed the band some kid of voice of a generation. They’d hired Steve Albini to produce their sequel to “Nevermind,” and no one likes Steve Albini. (Don’t feel bad for Steve. He prefers it that way.)

Until In Utero, I was skeptical of Nirvana. I remember hearing “Smells Like Teenage Spirit” on the radio while I was in Boston, in graduate school. Between classes on medieval church history and Mesopotamian creation myths, I said to myself, “This will be huge.” In the world of rock music, there aren’t many sure bets, but you had to be pretty dense not to realize that song was going to make a few people very, very wealthy. Nirvana, as far as I was concerned, was never really “underground,” never really “punk rock” the way I understood it (and preferred it), even though that’s one of the things they most wanted to be. They were trying desperately to be authentic outsiders, trying to espouse noble causes, to pay obeisance to the saints of latterday punk like the Meat Puppets and Husker Du. But as far as I was concerned, they’d always been a commercial enterprise. They just sounded too good and pleased too many people. It was easy to see their endorsements and pronouncements as poses, as commodifications of the things I valued. (I realize now that no one was better equipped to recognize imitative, faux punk rock than a semi-privileged white kid from exurban Minneapolis, who wanted deperately to be a beer-swilling, heroin-shooting, bin-liner-wearing bloke, pogoing to the amphetamine beat of the Jam or Black Flag or the Minutemen. Now I see the diminishing value of belonging to a club where you recognize other members by their haircuts.)

Anyway, at about that time I started publishing a weekly zine. Yeah, weekly! It was insane, but I didn’t have much else going on. It was a weird little xeroxed pamphlet that I called “The Blue Reader.” It contained short little experimental stories, the type of thing that has come to be called micro-fiction or “short-short” stories. (After putting this thing together for about a year, I realized the much-loved writer Donald Barthelme had been doing the same thing, a helluva lot better, about thirty years previously. Ah me; there is nothing new under the sun.) But part of the fun was publishing this thing just the way I wanted to, without any real consideration at all for who might pick it up and read it. In my egotism, I assumed the brilliance of my stories would be self-evident. It was a very mannered kind of experiment; I refused to put page numbers or titles on the pages. The only way you knew where one story ended and another began was a sudden change in fonts. (Yes, the heady early days of desktop publishing. I loved my fonts!) A couple of friends began to write stories for The Blue Reader, and the way you found out who had written what was to look on the last page, where the stories were indexed by their first line, sort of like in a protestant hymnal.

Well, my grandmother, who died last Friday at the grand old age of 93, once got a hold of several copies of The Blue Reader. Her critical verdict? “Too many dirty words. Do you have to use those kind of dirty words?” As far as I know, she never looked at my work again. (I am at her funeral today.)

I realize now that there is a lot of value in thinking about your audience, thinking about who might pick up your little pamphlet or magazine or book. It is the final little shine you put on a story, it is the impetus for one last read-through and brush-up, make that cowlick behave, dandruff off the shoulder. What will an indifferent reader think of this? Have I made an honest effort to invite him in? If not, what am I trying to hide? Just how badly would this alienate my grandmother?

When you sit down to create something, your first thought should not be about who you might offend, either intentionally or accidentally. But it should not be your last thought, either.-Jem Casey