January 2007

It was a lyric I loved when I was a teenager, from a song called "Gettin' In Tune", an off-track on the Who's album Who's Next:

I'm singing this note 'cause it fits in well with the cards I'm playing ...

I understood this as songwriter Pete Townshend's admission of his own guile as a creative artist. This admission is different from the common attitude of self-consciousness, often found in meta-fictional works, in which an author pins his or her self like a butterfly on the corkboard of their prose as an ironic alternative focus of narrative awareness. You can find that stuff everywhere (Auster, Eggers, Wallace), but lately I'm more interested in meta-fiction where the author's self is not passive but active, where the writer is openly plotting to attack us (the readers) as we read.

I'm talking about the endless poker match between reader and writer. This is the game we play as we read. What is the writer holding back, what is the writer bluffing, what is the writer about to lay down? And how far will the reader ride, and when will the reader fold (as I've folded many books) and how far can the writer go before the reader will catch a fatal bluff? It's in this spirit that I loved this lyric. "I'm singing this note 'cause it fits in well with the cards I'm playing". I assumed Townshend was talking about his techniques, his "power plays" as an author, which in his case seemed to include the following: emotional vulnerability (Tommy), humor (A Quick One), bluntness (My Generation), spirituality (Pure and Easy). It thrilled me to hear the artist refer to these "cards", to admit that his process of songwriting was not only an act of sincere expression but also an act of creative, manipulative guile.