Reintroduction & On Being A Mark

a welcome to the new format and purpose of this substack and an essay on wrestling and choosing joy

*taps microphone*

My name is José Olivarez. I started this substack years ago under a different banner. My idea was to write three times a week. I failed. Oh well. It won’t be the last time I fail. And this won’t be the last time I dust myself off and try again.

So, what is this new iteration? I am calling this newsletter Office Hours because when I looked at the literary landscape, I figured that while I could offer writing workshops and prompts, there are already many awesome places doing that. If you are looking for a generative writing community, you could, for example, try to get into Jon Sands’s awesome Emotional Historians workshop. If there are other excellent ongoing writing workshops, please feel free to shout them out in the comments.

Instead of offering a generative writing workshop, I decided to offer Office Hours. I was inspired by sitting at the University of Wisconsin with a friend of mine who is a professor there and remembering how cool it is that university professors will just open their doors to their students and offer them a chance to stop by and discuss literary texts, questions, future career prospects, and writing projects. When I was an undergrad at Harvard University, I felt so intimidated and lost that I never took full advantage of office hours. I wish I had spent more time asking Professor Glenda Carpio about her favorite books and how to use humor effectively in writing.

This substack is my offering to the writing community that has given me so much. Every other week, I will open up a zoom for subscribers to stop by and ask questions. We can look at a particular piece of writing you’ve been struggling with. You can ask questions about publishing. You can ask for reading recommendations. We can read a poem together and talk through what it means to read a poem as a writer. Whatever is helpful to you.

So what about the weeks in between when there are no zoom office hours? Well, every week I will publish an essay about creativity or writing or reading. I’ll post a lot about reading because I am trying to improve my reading practice and because I believe reading is an important part of writing.

For now, everything will be free, although you may choose to pay and subscribe. It would be greatly appreciated.

The first office hours will be Wednesday, May 14th from 8pm EST-9:30pm EST. The first essay starts right about now:

On Being A Mark.

In the last few years, I’ve gotten into professional wrestling again. I hadn’t watched since I was a kid rooting for Stone Cold and The Rock, but now I’m fully invested again. In wrestling parlance, a mark is a fan that behaves as though wrestling is real. Perhaps they know that the matches are scripted and who wins and who loses isn’t decided by the wrestlers but instead by writers and a creative team backstage. However, they don’t care. They go along with the show and root passionately. Allow me to introduce myself again. I’m a mark. I don’t care that wrestling is scripted. I love rooting for my favorite wrestlers.

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Last night, my wife and I were discussing Sinners (don’t worry, there will be no spoilers.) and she mentioned that a friend of hers liked the movie but didn’t think it was a masterpiece. I think that’s a fine opinion. I asked my wife what her friend’s critiques were of the film. One of her friend’s critiques was a scene that they felt was illogical. the scene broke the rules of the film’s universe and therefore it took them out of the movie.

There was a truth to the critique. However, I didn’t care. The inconsistency was so small, it didn’t matter to me. Sinners is such an incredible film—especially early on—that I became a mark for the film. I lost myself in the universe of the film. I didn’t watch to find inconsistencies. I watched because I cared about the characters and I wanted to see how their stories intertwined and what happened to them.

I’d like to offer that maybe one way to experience more joy in the world is to allow yourself to be a mark when experiencing art and beauty. Give in to the illusion. Understand that everything is temporary and give in anyway. Be a mark. If the only way you experience art is to look for every flaw, you might want to reconsider.

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Look, as a card-carrying member of HATERS UNITED, the United States’ first union for professional haters, I must be clear. I am not against negative reviews. I am not against critical reviews. I love a good critical review.

However, I am telling you out of my own experience that I have allowed my desire to be perceived as an ‘intellectual’ to override my enjoyment of something. I have walked into a movie theater looking for reasons to hate a movie. I did this when Marvel movies first got hot. I thought they were silly. They are silly. Some of those movies are also excellent. If you go into an experience looking for flaws, you will find flaws. You find what you look for. Perhaps it is worthwhile to go into an artistic experience willing to surrender to the artist’s ambitions, and if you leave that experience feeling underwhelmed, not-at-all-electrified, dull, or bored, then go ahead and figure out why. But I would suggest that you allow yourself to be a mark first. You might be surprised by what you enjoy when you allow yourself to enjoy it.

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What do you think? How do you approach artistic experiences?