Dennis LeHane has finally published what will almost certainly be the last of his beloved Kenzie-Gennaro detective novels. In honor of the occasion (and to test drive my new Kindle) I downloaded all six, and read them in order, from A Drink Before the War, Darkness Take My Hand and Sacred to Gone Baby Gone, Prayers for Rain and the most recent one, Moonlight Mile. The books have a strong through-line and this was the ideal way to experience them: as a single, self-contained 1800 page morality play, love story, heroic quest and gritty noir procedural combined into one overarching, poignant, harrowing and beautifully sustained narrative.
In short: a masterpiece.
The books are probably most familiar to the public from the movie version of Gone, Baby Gone, which was a strong and admirably faithful rendition of the source material, perfectly cast and unflinching. LeHane has been treated well by Hollywood: Mystic River turned out well and even Shutter Island – a second rate book to begin with – received a pitch perfect second rate film treatment. You couldn’t really ask for more than that.
LeHane has also written historical fiction and short stories – even a play. He worked as a writer on HBO’s classic series The Wire. But for the moment at least, it’s safe to say he’ll be best remembered at the creator of Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro.
When we first meet them in A Drink Befrore the War (1994), they’re friends and colleagues, running a low-life detective agency out of the abandoned belfry of a Dorchester church. Beyond any of the cases they work on, or the dangers and corruption they encounter, the real tension in the novel comes from the fact that Patrick has been in love with Angie since high school, and she’s married to his best friend. Phil Dimassi is an abusive drunk and Angie often comes to work bearing the wounds and bruises of her ill-fated marriage. Patrick understands that toxic combination of love and rage: his own father, a fireman he always refers to as The Hero, once burned him with a steam iron in a fit of rage, and Patrick still wears the disfiguring scars on his abdomen. He and Angie come from a brutal world, and they stick with the friends who grew up with them in that urban jungle: columnist Richie Colgan, hard nosed cop Devin Amronklin and e-Marine and arms dealer Bubba Rugowski, whom Patrick describes this way:
…an absolute anachronism in these times--he hates everything and everybody except Angie and myself, but unlike others of similar inclination, he doesn't waste any time thinking about it. He doesn't write letters to the editor or hate mail to the president, he doesn't form groups or stage marches or consider his hate as anything other than a completely natural aspect of his world, like breathing or the shot glass. Bubba has all the self-awareness of a carburetor and takes even less notice of anyone else--unless they get in his way. He's six feet four inches, 235 pounds of raw adrenaline and disassociated anger. And he'd shoot anyone who blinked at me the wrong way.
Bubba is a handy guy to have around when things get violent and in Patrick’s world that happens a lot. A blackmailed politician leads Patrick and Angie into the midst of a particularly horrible gang war in this first novel, an ominously familiar battle between father and son for the control of the local drug trade. It turns out that Marion Socia pimped his son Roland out as a prostitute many years ago, and photographs of him with the politician spark the action of the novel, which ends with Kenzie killing Roland in self-defense – a moment of projected oedipal violence that you know has to resonate horribly inside him. The worst Patrick did himself was refuse to take his father’s hand, in the moments before the old man died.
The horror strikes even closer to home in the second book, Darkness Take My Hand, where the search for a serial killer leads into the heart of the old neighborhood, and a beloved local character turns out to be an authentic monster, murdering children, dismembering adults and at the end of the book, killing Angie’s husband and mutilating Patrick with a straight razor. This is the most intense and traumatic of the novels, and though Patrick and Angie wind up together at the end, both of them are wounded and grieving.
Sacred is the slightest of the books, an appropriate breather at the midpoint of the series. Despite its murderous religious cult, scheming femme fatale and tanker full of heroin, it remains a relatively routine story, burnished by the pleasure of seeing Patrick and Angie living and working together as a couple. The idyll doesn’t last long.
In the most well known installment of their story, Gone, Baby Gone, Kenzie and Gennaro set out to find kidnapped four year old Amanda McCready. Her mother Helene is possibly the worst parent of all time, neglectful category, leaving the baby alone whole she goes out drinking. Her sister Bea hires the detectives and the case follows a long tortured course involving drug deals gone bad crooked cops, local gangsters and a ring of psychotic child molesters. Kenzie and Gennaro find corruption and murder, they find scraps of a little girl’s life in a deserted quarry. But they don’t find the little girl.
Turns out she was kidnapped by a couple who make a avocation of creating healthy loving homes for abandoned and abused children. The problem – for Patrick at least – is that they do this wholly outside the law, with no oversight from the authorities. So yeah – they’re kidnappers: kidnappers who enforce nap-time and make sure the vaccinations are up to date, who read kids to sleep and help with their homework. “Eat your vegetables” is not a line one associates with child-napping sociopaths. Patrick wants to return Andrea to her mother, however inept or drug addled she may be. He can’t endorse a world where anyone can just grab a kid if they think the parent is doing a bad job. Angie wants to leave the little girl with her new parents. Both sides of this difficult issue have merit, but the conflict tears Patrick and Angie apart. Patrick wins: Andrea goes home. But he loses Angie over the case and winds up alone and the book reaches its dark and bitter conclusion: you can do the right thing and be dead wrong, and pay the consequences forever.
Near the end of the book, Patrick is invited to an all-cop ‘touch’ football game – Homicide Robbery versus Narcotics/Vice. He gets pounded and threatened by Remy Brussard, one of the policemen involved with the case, Later it turns out that Brussard faked the kidnapping to get Amanda into a loving home … and of course, to steal the ransom money for himself. He’s a dangerous thug, perfectly willing to kill to cover up his crimes; Patrick winds up killing him in a shoot-out a little later on.
I sketch this in to set up the following fragment of LeHane’s prose, which I think gives a good sense of how beautifully he writes these books, sentence by sentence:
We won by a field goal.
As a guy who grew up as desperate to be a jock as any other guy in America, and one who still cancels most engagements on autumn Sunday afternoons, I suppose I should have been ecstatic at what would probably have been my last taste of team sports, the thrill of conquest and the sexual intensity of the battle. I should have felt like whooping, should have had tears in my eyes as I stood at midfield in the first football stadium ever built in this country, looked at the Greek columns and he rain boiling off the long planks of seating in the stands, smelled the last hint of winter dying in the April rain, the metallic odor of the rain itself, the lonely advance of evening in the cold purple sky.
But I didn’t feel any of that.
I felt like we were a bunch of foolish pathetic men unwilling to accept our own aging and willing to break bones and tear the flesh of other men just so we could move a brown ball a couple of yards or inches down a field.
And also, looking along the sidelines at Remy Brussard as he poured a beer over his bloody finger, doused his torn lip with it, and accepted high fives from his pals, I felt afraid.
As Prayers For Rain begins, Patrick Kenzie has become a regret-addled solo act, missing Angie, who has gone to work for a corporate detective agency and left him on his own. His regrets multiply when he fails to take a phone call from a client who’d been harassed by a crazy guy that Patrick and Bubba scared off. Easy work: Bubba is good at scaring people. Taking off for vacation, Patrick figured he could touch base with the girl when he got back from Bermuda. But by then she was dead, a suicide victim who threw herself off a tall building downtown. The effort to prove her death wasn’t suicide leads Patrick into the twisted world of a sociopath who destroys people for fun. He doesn’t kill them, but rather takes everything away from them, ransacking and vandalizing their lives until they wish they were dead. The investigation reveals layer upon layer of festering family secrets, guilts and grudges going back decades. It comes to head in an underground bunker, with Bubba leading the way into battle. The villain is revealed, but he laughs when Patrick admits that he could never win at chess because he could never “see the whole board”. He finally does grasp the big picture, of course, but it takes several months for him to do it. When he lifts the rock on that last squirming nest of family dysfunction and walks away, he goes home with Angie and we leave them happily in love, wounded but standing tall, together at last, ready for new dventures.
It seemed that LeHane was finished with Patrick and Angie at that point. He left them to themselves for more than ten years, moving on to other projects, including the sweeping historical epic The Given Day. But the conclusion of the series felt inconclusive, somehow: would Patrick and Angie keep working together? Quit and start a family? Break up? Whatever may or may not have been kicking around in LeHane’s head, the series was just five books about the same two people at that point, a typical detective franchise, cut short and left dangling.
LeHane must have felt the urge to tie things up and finish the story, because he has done it now, with style and conviction.
Moonlight Mile invokes the past: Andrea McCready has gone missing again. She's sixteen now, tough and self-contained, with a hard carapace from living all those years with her drug addict mother. Now she's involved with the Russian mob, trying to save her friend's baby from child trafficking and a particulatrly loathesome crime lord and his psychotic wife. The boss wants the baby back -- as well as a hugely valuable stolen antiquity: the Belarus cross. Fortunately, his immensely dangerous Capo, one Yefim, winds up on the side of the angels. He wants the boss killed as much as everyone else and turns on him in a crucial moment saving everyone's lives and assuring a much more sane and intelligent criminal empire, with himself running things. Yefim likes Patrick, finds him smart and amusing, and we can't help liking Yefim, crazy as he is ... although we know he would have killed Patrick and everyone else we have come to care about if it suited his plans. Horrible enemy -- bizarre jovial ally. A strange combination, replete with Lehane's signature moral ambiguity, clapping Patrick on the back in a room full of corpses, offering him stolen blu-ray players and kindles (Patrick turns down the kindle; the blu-ray he gives to Amanda). Parick finds himself oddly detached, considering the murders he's just witnessed -- tribute to the shit he's been swimming through for so many years. And just like that, he decides to quit the life.
He calls Angie and his daughter -- whom he had sent to her mother's house down south, to hide from the trigger-happy mobsters. He throws his 45. into the Charles and tells her the news.
Let's eavesdrop:
"Know what it is, babe?" I looked back at the trailer. "When you start out doing this, you think it's just the truly horrible shit that's going to get you -- that poor little boy in the bath tub back in '98, what happened in Gary Glynn's bar. Christ, that bunker in Plymouth ..." I took a breath, let it out slowly. "But it's not those moments. It's the little ones. It's not that people fuck each other over for a million dollars that depresses me, it's that they do it for ten. I don't gve a shit anymore whether so-and-so's wife is cheating on him, because he probably deserved it. And all those insurance companies? I help them prove a guy's faking his neck injury, they turn and drop coverage on half the neighborhood when ythe recession hits. The last three years, every time I sit on the corner of the mattress to put my shoes on in the morning, I want to crawl back into bed. I don't want to go out there and do what I do."
"But you've done a lot of good. You know that, don't you?"
I didn't.
"You have," she said. "Everyone I know lies, breaks their word, and has perfectly legitimate reasons for why they do. Except you. Have you noticed that? Two times in twelve years, you said you'd find this girl no matter what. And you did. Why? Because you gave your word, babe. And that might not mean shit to the rest of the world, but it means everything to you. Whatever else happened today, you found her twice, Patrick. No one else would even try."
And that's what sets these books apart, as we come to the final chapter: the violence and trauma these two people see, and suffer (and occasionally inflict) affects them. It wears them down, wounds them, leaves scars that won't heal. That's just not true of other crime fiction heroes. Joe Pike and Jack Reacher soldier on; so do Elvis Cole and Harry Bosch and all the others. Patrick and Angie feel the pain of the world they live in, and allow themselves to be tormented by the tragedies they investigate. They're real people and they wind up doing what real people -- what any young couple with a toddler -- would really do: walk away, take that boring job, go back to school, start living like civilians -- just start living.
It means there won't be any more books about them, but I'm happy to see them go, to see them start over, and I wish them good luck. Lehane has brought them to that rarest of moments: a satisfactory conclusion, a happy ending, a new beginning. And in the process he has created a startlingly bulky (amost 2000 pages!), but graceful, suspenseful, lightfooted and big hearted novel of Boston and its people.
I can't wait to see what he'll do next.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Reading the E-Readers, Part Two: The Nook Color
Barnes and Noble just released their sales figures for the year and e-books outsold paper ones on their website for the first time. Real books are still outselling the digital variety at the actual stores, I assume – though you can both buy and read books for free on your Nook e-reader at any Barnes and Noble ‘brick and mortar’ outlet. That’s convenient for me, because I got a Nook Color for Christmas … as well as an elegant leather cover (with attached reading light) for my Kindle.
I’d like to say “Game on!”, but for me at least, it’s game over.
The Nook color wins on almost every count, so let me get the problems and quibbles out of the way first. The primary liability is price. The thing costs two hundred and fifty dollars. It’s half of what an iPad will set you back, but more than a hundred dollars more than the Kindle. Around now you may be thinking to yourself – you, an internet junkie scanning Open Salon with your morning coffee, no Luddite, no “I-liked-rotary-dial-telephones-and-why-is-the-good-version-of-anything-called-‘analog’” crank …you're cool, you're hip, you're modern ... but you're still thinking … WTF?? Why should I pay 250 bucks to read a buck I can get for free at the library? Or for a dime at the yard sale? Well, in answer to that shrewd piece of economic skepticism … I got nothing. Except … maybe you’re reading the wrong blog post. There are some excellent recipes and family dramas on the home page, some insightful political coverage (Someone even explains Auld Lang Syne!). Enjoy.
This post is for reading geeks who like cool new toys. I mean, pause a second and look at it from our point of view. We don’t particularly like cars, or guns, or fancy clothes, or even high end cooking stuff like pasta makers and ‘mandolins’. We don’t play an instrument, either (most of us) so an actual mandolin wouldn’t be much better. Our hobby, our escape, our primary source of fun, has always been associated with the smell of oxidizing paper, dusty leather and the sickly, soiled-aquarium light from library fluorescents. Our idea of a new development was the trade paperback. Some of us were pleased about ‘big print’ editions. (Or so I’ve heard).
But those days are over.
Now we have something cool to call our own.
But I was listing the drawbacks, so let’s move quickly here. The touch screen is perhaps too sensitive. It reminds me of a dog, sitting net to the couch while you eat a left-over slice of pumpkin pie, alert to every movement, following your arm like the ball in a Wimbledon Final. At any stray brush of the screen and it wants to know if you’d like to change settings, bookmark something, create a note, change the font size, check the table of contents. It’s irritating, but you learn how to deal with the touch sensitive screen after a week or two. What else? It needs to be charged much more often than the Kindle. But there are good reasons for this. It does so much more, so lavishly; Adrian Peterson probably eats more than the average toll booth attendant, but he manages to burn those calories, somehow (See, Vikings Vs. Esgles, 12/28./10).
One actual complaint: the Nook offers a plastic sheet to cover the back-lit screen and prtect it from glare, as well as dust and scratching. Sounds good, but it feels half-baked in practice. They tell you to meticulously clean the screen with the provided, color-matched cloth, before applying the wonder plastic. If you fail at this first step, air bubbles will appear. Well, you could have OCD and spend the better part of a day cleaning your Nook in an hermetically sealed room, and there would still be air bubbles between the plastic and the screen. You barely notice them … but if you’re the obsessive type who really cleaned the Nook in the first place, that won’t be much comfort. I’m waiting for glare-proof plastic 2.0. I suggest you do the same. If I want to read in broad daylight (usually I’m doing other things when I’m outside on a frosty winter afternoon), I’ll bring along my Kindle. It has a gorgeous leather case! Seriously, it looks much more substantial now, somehow part of the library- pipe-smoke-and-brandy-snifters-stuffed-armchair world it’s so rapidly displacing.
Well, enough about the Kindle. We'll always have Paris (or was it Amazon.com?). I'm out complaints regarding the Nook Color, so on to the praise.
First of all, it looks amazingly cool: dark and sleek and powerful, somehow. It’s also heavier than the Kindle, which seems like a disadvantage, but turns out to be just the opposite: a tennis ball weighs more than a Badminton shuttlecock, too; but the game feels more substantial because of that. You don’t play tennis in flip-flops. You turn on the Nook Colotand it feels like a miniature iPad. Or rather, an iPad sized properly for reading. People say it’s hard to read on the back-lit screen, that they get headaches from it, etc. I have no idea what they’re talking about. Lying in bed in a dark room next to a sleeping loved one, with your pug curled up beside you, wolfing down a book on that glowing screen is one of the most pleasurable reading experiences I’ve ever had. It mysteriously evokes the whole sense of entering another, more engaging, more brightly lit world that I remember from my childhood. Maybe it even evokes that famous ‘birth memory’ people are supposed to experience as they die: sliding toward the bright light of a new world. Okay, that may be going too far. But the backlit screen makes you want to go on reading forever. I downloaded The Lord of the Rings for that exact purpose. It seemed fitting anyway, as I caressed my Nook and kept it away from everyone else and muttered “My precious.”
Technically, once you get used to it, that hyper-sensitive touch screen becomes a real pleasure to use. Lightly tap the edge of the page and a new one appears – much more quickly than it does on the kindle, whose irksome ‘tiny-dot’ keyboard seems almost steam punk compared to the virtual one that materializes at the bottom of the Nook Color whenever you need it. In general, the Kindle feels utilitarian, almost like some kind of military issue piece of equipment, after using the Nook Color. In civilian terms, it’s like driving a Dodge Caravan after zipping around in a Lexus. And much the same way, let’s face it -- you don’t really need the Lexus to get to the grocery store. But it’s a life-enhancing luxury, and the Nook Color gives you the same rush for just an extra hundred dollars: seems like a good deal to me. It’s all amortized so quickly anyway – just not buying all those hard-cover books you’ll never read again (saving anywhere from ten to twenty dollars on each one) adds up fast, not to mention eliminating some of the diabolical book-clutter that always threatens to overwhelm any true book-nerd’s house.
You can also play chess, listen to Pandora radio and play video games on your Nook. You can read magazines in full color and just scroll down whole articles without the pesky ‘continued on P. 47’ interruptions. This is true for newspapers, also. If you like, the New York Times can be delivered to your Nook every morning, available when you actually wake up, unlike the physical paper, which never seems to arrive on my doorstep before I have to leave for work. And the color photography – at least in the newspapers – seems to have a much higher resolution on the e-book reader.
So, the Nook Color seems almost perfect to me – smaller and lighter than the iPad, with all of its best reading-related features, sleeker, quicker, more advanced than the Kindle, and still allowing you the same e-book ease of reading – and buying! – books.
Let’s not forget buying. Barnes and Noble offers almost three times as many books as Amazon, so your chances of finding the book you want in digital form are much better. The other day I was roaming around on line and found an embedded trailer for a movie called The Other Woman on Nikki Finke’s web site. I played the preview. The movie, starring Natalie Portman, looked interesting, but wasn’t coming out for a while. I freeze-framed the credits, saw it was based on a book by Ayelet Waldman, clicked onto Barnes and Noble, bought the book for my Nook and was reading it happily, all in less than a minute.
No wonder e-books are outselling the “hinge-and-stitch” dead tree pulp variety. They can’t compete with that.
I’d like to say “Game on!”, but for me at least, it’s game over.
The Nook color wins on almost every count, so let me get the problems and quibbles out of the way first. The primary liability is price. The thing costs two hundred and fifty dollars. It’s half of what an iPad will set you back, but more than a hundred dollars more than the Kindle. Around now you may be thinking to yourself – you, an internet junkie scanning Open Salon with your morning coffee, no Luddite, no “I-liked-rotary-dial-telephones-and-why-is-the-good-version-of-anything-called-‘analog’” crank …you're cool, you're hip, you're modern ... but you're still thinking … WTF?? Why should I pay 250 bucks to read a buck I can get for free at the library? Or for a dime at the yard sale? Well, in answer to that shrewd piece of economic skepticism … I got nothing. Except … maybe you’re reading the wrong blog post. There are some excellent recipes and family dramas on the home page, some insightful political coverage (Someone even explains Auld Lang Syne!). Enjoy.
This post is for reading geeks who like cool new toys. I mean, pause a second and look at it from our point of view. We don’t particularly like cars, or guns, or fancy clothes, or even high end cooking stuff like pasta makers and ‘mandolins’. We don’t play an instrument, either (most of us) so an actual mandolin wouldn’t be much better. Our hobby, our escape, our primary source of fun, has always been associated with the smell of oxidizing paper, dusty leather and the sickly, soiled-aquarium light from library fluorescents. Our idea of a new development was the trade paperback. Some of us were pleased about ‘big print’ editions. (Or so I’ve heard).
But those days are over.
Now we have something cool to call our own.
But I was listing the drawbacks, so let’s move quickly here. The touch screen is perhaps too sensitive. It reminds me of a dog, sitting net to the couch while you eat a left-over slice of pumpkin pie, alert to every movement, following your arm like the ball in a Wimbledon Final. At any stray brush of the screen and it wants to know if you’d like to change settings, bookmark something, create a note, change the font size, check the table of contents. It’s irritating, but you learn how to deal with the touch sensitive screen after a week or two. What else? It needs to be charged much more often than the Kindle. But there are good reasons for this. It does so much more, so lavishly; Adrian Peterson probably eats more than the average toll booth attendant, but he manages to burn those calories, somehow (See, Vikings Vs. Esgles, 12/28./10).
One actual complaint: the Nook offers a plastic sheet to cover the back-lit screen and prtect it from glare, as well as dust and scratching. Sounds good, but it feels half-baked in practice. They tell you to meticulously clean the screen with the provided, color-matched cloth, before applying the wonder plastic. If you fail at this first step, air bubbles will appear. Well, you could have OCD and spend the better part of a day cleaning your Nook in an hermetically sealed room, and there would still be air bubbles between the plastic and the screen. You barely notice them … but if you’re the obsessive type who really cleaned the Nook in the first place, that won’t be much comfort. I’m waiting for glare-proof plastic 2.0. I suggest you do the same. If I want to read in broad daylight (usually I’m doing other things when I’m outside on a frosty winter afternoon), I’ll bring along my Kindle. It has a gorgeous leather case! Seriously, it looks much more substantial now, somehow part of the library- pipe-smoke-and-brandy-snifters-stuffed-armchair world it’s so rapidly displacing.
Well, enough about the Kindle. We'll always have Paris (or was it Amazon.com?). I'm out complaints regarding the Nook Color, so on to the praise.
First of all, it looks amazingly cool: dark and sleek and powerful, somehow. It’s also heavier than the Kindle, which seems like a disadvantage, but turns out to be just the opposite: a tennis ball weighs more than a Badminton shuttlecock, too; but the game feels more substantial because of that. You don’t play tennis in flip-flops. You turn on the Nook Colotand it feels like a miniature iPad. Or rather, an iPad sized properly for reading. People say it’s hard to read on the back-lit screen, that they get headaches from it, etc. I have no idea what they’re talking about. Lying in bed in a dark room next to a sleeping loved one, with your pug curled up beside you, wolfing down a book on that glowing screen is one of the most pleasurable reading experiences I’ve ever had. It mysteriously evokes the whole sense of entering another, more engaging, more brightly lit world that I remember from my childhood. Maybe it even evokes that famous ‘birth memory’ people are supposed to experience as they die: sliding toward the bright light of a new world. Okay, that may be going too far. But the backlit screen makes you want to go on reading forever. I downloaded The Lord of the Rings for that exact purpose. It seemed fitting anyway, as I caressed my Nook and kept it away from everyone else and muttered “My precious.”
Technically, once you get used to it, that hyper-sensitive touch screen becomes a real pleasure to use. Lightly tap the edge of the page and a new one appears – much more quickly than it does on the kindle, whose irksome ‘tiny-dot’ keyboard seems almost steam punk compared to the virtual one that materializes at the bottom of the Nook Color whenever you need it. In general, the Kindle feels utilitarian, almost like some kind of military issue piece of equipment, after using the Nook Color. In civilian terms, it’s like driving a Dodge Caravan after zipping around in a Lexus. And much the same way, let’s face it -- you don’t really need the Lexus to get to the grocery store. But it’s a life-enhancing luxury, and the Nook Color gives you the same rush for just an extra hundred dollars: seems like a good deal to me. It’s all amortized so quickly anyway – just not buying all those hard-cover books you’ll never read again (saving anywhere from ten to twenty dollars on each one) adds up fast, not to mention eliminating some of the diabolical book-clutter that always threatens to overwhelm any true book-nerd’s house.
You can also play chess, listen to Pandora radio and play video games on your Nook. You can read magazines in full color and just scroll down whole articles without the pesky ‘continued on P. 47’ interruptions. This is true for newspapers, also. If you like, the New York Times can be delivered to your Nook every morning, available when you actually wake up, unlike the physical paper, which never seems to arrive on my doorstep before I have to leave for work. And the color photography – at least in the newspapers – seems to have a much higher resolution on the e-book reader.
So, the Nook Color seems almost perfect to me – smaller and lighter than the iPad, with all of its best reading-related features, sleeker, quicker, more advanced than the Kindle, and still allowing you the same e-book ease of reading – and buying! – books.
Let’s not forget buying. Barnes and Noble offers almost three times as many books as Amazon, so your chances of finding the book you want in digital form are much better. The other day I was roaming around on line and found an embedded trailer for a movie called The Other Woman on Nikki Finke’s web site. I played the preview. The movie, starring Natalie Portman, looked interesting, but wasn’t coming out for a while. I freeze-framed the credits, saw it was based on a book by Ayelet Waldman, clicked onto Barnes and Noble, bought the book for my Nook and was reading it happily, all in less than a minute.
No wonder e-books are outselling the “hinge-and-stitch” dead tree pulp variety. They can’t compete with that.
Internet, RIP: Proprietors Win, Again
The internet as we know it is officially doomed, as of today, and I’m already feeling nostalgic. Funny that a technology could move so fast across the landscape of my life – from a geeks-only fluke to a curiosity, to a useful tool, to a powerful engine of procrastination and finally a central venue for all my communications, research, entertainment and shopping, only to be reduced to the closed down, controlled, censored corporate cash cow it’s about to become, with the Obama administration’s blessing.
Internet, we barely knew ye.
But of course the Proprietors of our Nation couldn’t allow this internet business to go on the way it was heading. What a frightening thought – free, unobstructed communications, with no control and no profit … people just saying whatever they want, whenever they want, leaking documents, downloading YouTube videos that make Proprietor-controlled media outlets look like liars. You knew there’d be repercussions after the “Colbert bombed at the Press Association Dinner” narrative was reduced to one more punchline, a million downloads later.
The bigger headache for the Proprietors, from the start, was how to monetize this new tool and use it to consolidate power. After all, the ‘world-wide web’ seemed inimical to the consolidation of anything, an open-source free-for-all, wild and uncontrollable as the American Frontier itself. But they managed to organize that anarchic sprawl – nothing like guns and small pox, railroad lines and highways, corporate tax breaks and zoning variances, to tame a continent. It took a while, but our coast to coast shopping mall stands as the shining trophy of their triumph. We outlasted the last of the Mohegans; welcome to Mohegan Sun!
The free internet will collapse much more quickly. The Proprietors understood almost from the start that all you really need to control the internet is to control people’s access to it. (Remember stuffy old Al Gore’s warnings about ‘toll booths on the information superhighway’?) That’s the real value of the high speed cable or DSL connection. Dial-up was slow, and anyone could get on-line any time and go anywhere. But Comcast controls our access to the internet now, and that's fine with us we like it, we like the speed and convenience, the bread and the circus, football in HD on a giant flat screen TV or a bucket of chicken from KFC.
So Comcast, or some corporate entity identical to Comcast, will soon determine which web-sites you can visit easily and which ones take forever to load, which services you can use at all ... perhaps even what content you’re allowed to see. China is doing that right now and despite all our disapproving noises, our government is moving in exactly the same direction. Netflix is one of the earliest and most prominent victims. They’re in for the fight of their life right now, and it must be disheartening to know that they can take a law-suit all the way to the Supreme Court only to lose with chilling certainty to a court which has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Proprietor oligarchy. This is a group of judges who think corporations are people, though they’re not so sure about actual people, whom they rule against in one cruel and Dickensian decision after another. Am I a crackpot conspiracy theorist to speculate that this is the real reason they decided the 2000 election Bush’s favor? Whether by plan or happy accident, he managed to pack the court with a lifetime’s worth of frightening conservatives who can be guaranteed to rule along Proprietary lines.
Don’t get me wrong: this is nothing new. The ruling elites have struggled to hold onto their power, growing ever more corrupt until toppled be revolution or debauchery or both, allowing another group to rise and self-destruct in the same way, since the caveman with the biggest club figured out he could get the most Mastodon meat. People are predictably awful, power corrupts, history repeats itself.
But something new has arisen in our era, strutting rather than slouching toward its dystopian Second Coming. This Oligarchy has managed to combine the power of mass media with a diabolically subverted education system (Leave No Child Behind) and an unwavering ability to strike the proletarian nerve with ‘values issues’ like abortion and gay marriage. It’s relatively easy to convince an ignorant rabble that government is bad and taxes are worse, that health care is evil and the gilded age for the wealthiest stock manipulators and hedge fund Sun Kings (more despicable than any top-hatted grotesque in a Communist propaganda cartoon) should proceed without a hitch. That billionaires like the Koch brothers are behind this bogus ‘grass roots’ movement should surprise no one. Instead, step back with grudging respect and admire their audacity. How to get poor people who can’t afford a doctor’s visit to cut taxes for millionaires and deny themselves any kind of proper health care, education or secure employment? Use their own prejudices, leverage their fear, manipulate their anger. “Get the government’s dirty hands off my Medicare!” What a perfect delicious, sublime sentiment with which to inoculate a population through the IV drip of a thousand blaring radio and television propaganda shows, a million campaign ads.
The only way to break this Oligarchy would be to outlaw television advertisements in political campaigns. That would sever one of the crucial linkages that bind the system together. If candidates didn’t need the money they spend on television, they could break free from the powerful interests who control that funding. They couldn’t be bought; they wouldn’t be owned: their next election would not be in the hands of deep-pocketed, demanding contributors. But of course that will never happen. It would destroy local TV stations, who depend on that gold-rush of combative ads, and their ‘grass roots’ battle against the socialists trying to deny people (corporations are people now, remember) their right to be heard in ‘the public square’ would be funded by the same people who keep thr Tea Party afloat. Elections will proceed as usual, the only change being that even more money will be spent than ever before. Big money fails sometimes – occasional candidates are simply too extreme to be electable, no matter what. But most of the time, the system works well.
The internet was the first real threat to this unprecedented consolidation of power. But that threat is gone and the only thing that will bring this global hegemony down is some vast international implosion of greed: the end of cheap oil, the acceleration of global warming, the destruction of the oceans the contamination of the drinking water. The world the Proprietors have built as a palace for themselves will have to crumble to bits from its own mindless greed, as all the others have, throughout history. Unfortunately, this time, the rest of the world is going to come down, also. They’ll take us all with them when they go – they’re ‘too big to fail’.
But so were the dinosaurs.
And this afternoon, the thought of a whole planet staggering through the rubble, reduced to plowing with horses, heating with scavenged wood and lighting homes with tallow candles, a life of medieval toil at the mercy of the elements, with travel and indoor plumbing and refrigeration the subjects of a dim racial memory and hare-brained science fiction – it seems like a fine trade-off. If that’s what it takes to bring these foul greedy tyrants to their knees, bring it on. I would go to war against them, but the war has already been lost. Today’s FCC report proves it; we live in their world, and we will go on living in their world until they bring it down around us. Then we’ll be living in their ruins. I can only hope the next oligarchs, the shrewd operators who get control of the fresh water, or manage to piece together the first electrical generator, will have learned something from the blind gluttonous excess of their predecessors.
But I doubt they will. They never have before.
Internet, we barely knew ye.
But of course the Proprietors of our Nation couldn’t allow this internet business to go on the way it was heading. What a frightening thought – free, unobstructed communications, with no control and no profit … people just saying whatever they want, whenever they want, leaking documents, downloading YouTube videos that make Proprietor-controlled media outlets look like liars. You knew there’d be repercussions after the “Colbert bombed at the Press Association Dinner” narrative was reduced to one more punchline, a million downloads later.
The bigger headache for the Proprietors, from the start, was how to monetize this new tool and use it to consolidate power. After all, the ‘world-wide web’ seemed inimical to the consolidation of anything, an open-source free-for-all, wild and uncontrollable as the American Frontier itself. But they managed to organize that anarchic sprawl – nothing like guns and small pox, railroad lines and highways, corporate tax breaks and zoning variances, to tame a continent. It took a while, but our coast to coast shopping mall stands as the shining trophy of their triumph. We outlasted the last of the Mohegans; welcome to Mohegan Sun!
The free internet will collapse much more quickly. The Proprietors understood almost from the start that all you really need to control the internet is to control people’s access to it. (Remember stuffy old Al Gore’s warnings about ‘toll booths on the information superhighway’?) That’s the real value of the high speed cable or DSL connection. Dial-up was slow, and anyone could get on-line any time and go anywhere. But Comcast controls our access to the internet now, and that's fine with us we like it, we like the speed and convenience, the bread and the circus, football in HD on a giant flat screen TV or a bucket of chicken from KFC.
So Comcast, or some corporate entity identical to Comcast, will soon determine which web-sites you can visit easily and which ones take forever to load, which services you can use at all ... perhaps even what content you’re allowed to see. China is doing that right now and despite all our disapproving noises, our government is moving in exactly the same direction. Netflix is one of the earliest and most prominent victims. They’re in for the fight of their life right now, and it must be disheartening to know that they can take a law-suit all the way to the Supreme Court only to lose with chilling certainty to a court which has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Proprietor oligarchy. This is a group of judges who think corporations are people, though they’re not so sure about actual people, whom they rule against in one cruel and Dickensian decision after another. Am I a crackpot conspiracy theorist to speculate that this is the real reason they decided the 2000 election Bush’s favor? Whether by plan or happy accident, he managed to pack the court with a lifetime’s worth of frightening conservatives who can be guaranteed to rule along Proprietary lines.
Don’t get me wrong: this is nothing new. The ruling elites have struggled to hold onto their power, growing ever more corrupt until toppled be revolution or debauchery or both, allowing another group to rise and self-destruct in the same way, since the caveman with the biggest club figured out he could get the most Mastodon meat. People are predictably awful, power corrupts, history repeats itself.
But something new has arisen in our era, strutting rather than slouching toward its dystopian Second Coming. This Oligarchy has managed to combine the power of mass media with a diabolically subverted education system (Leave No Child Behind) and an unwavering ability to strike the proletarian nerve with ‘values issues’ like abortion and gay marriage. It’s relatively easy to convince an ignorant rabble that government is bad and taxes are worse, that health care is evil and the gilded age for the wealthiest stock manipulators and hedge fund Sun Kings (more despicable than any top-hatted grotesque in a Communist propaganda cartoon) should proceed without a hitch. That billionaires like the Koch brothers are behind this bogus ‘grass roots’ movement should surprise no one. Instead, step back with grudging respect and admire their audacity. How to get poor people who can’t afford a doctor’s visit to cut taxes for millionaires and deny themselves any kind of proper health care, education or secure employment? Use their own prejudices, leverage their fear, manipulate their anger. “Get the government’s dirty hands off my Medicare!” What a perfect delicious, sublime sentiment with which to inoculate a population through the IV drip of a thousand blaring radio and television propaganda shows, a million campaign ads.
The only way to break this Oligarchy would be to outlaw television advertisements in political campaigns. That would sever one of the crucial linkages that bind the system together. If candidates didn’t need the money they spend on television, they could break free from the powerful interests who control that funding. They couldn’t be bought; they wouldn’t be owned: their next election would not be in the hands of deep-pocketed, demanding contributors. But of course that will never happen. It would destroy local TV stations, who depend on that gold-rush of combative ads, and their ‘grass roots’ battle against the socialists trying to deny people (corporations are people now, remember) their right to be heard in ‘the public square’ would be funded by the same people who keep thr Tea Party afloat. Elections will proceed as usual, the only change being that even more money will be spent than ever before. Big money fails sometimes – occasional candidates are simply too extreme to be electable, no matter what. But most of the time, the system works well.
The internet was the first real threat to this unprecedented consolidation of power. But that threat is gone and the only thing that will bring this global hegemony down is some vast international implosion of greed: the end of cheap oil, the acceleration of global warming, the destruction of the oceans the contamination of the drinking water. The world the Proprietors have built as a palace for themselves will have to crumble to bits from its own mindless greed, as all the others have, throughout history. Unfortunately, this time, the rest of the world is going to come down, also. They’ll take us all with them when they go – they’re ‘too big to fail’.
But so were the dinosaurs.
And this afternoon, the thought of a whole planet staggering through the rubble, reduced to plowing with horses, heating with scavenged wood and lighting homes with tallow candles, a life of medieval toil at the mercy of the elements, with travel and indoor plumbing and refrigeration the subjects of a dim racial memory and hare-brained science fiction – it seems like a fine trade-off. If that’s what it takes to bring these foul greedy tyrants to their knees, bring it on. I would go to war against them, but the war has already been lost. Today’s FCC report proves it; we live in their world, and we will go on living in their world until they bring it down around us. Then we’ll be living in their ruins. I can only hope the next oligarchs, the shrewd operators who get control of the fresh water, or manage to piece together the first electrical generator, will have learned something from the blind gluttonous excess of their predecessors.
But I doubt they will. They never have before.
Branding Fatigue: The Problem with Populatr Fiction
Finishing the last page of Michael Connelly’s new novel, The Reversal, I couldn’t help thinking of a friend of mine, who met our local author at a party this summer. Elin Hilderbrand writes breezy romances set on our summer tourist island – stories of beach club staffers and waiters, unhappy vacationing wives, lusty locals, troubled families putting their lives back together among the mild Atlantic breezes and the clambakes. Her first books barely made a ripple, but she cracked the New York Times best-seller list with the last one, and it seemed like she had it made: a book-a-year professional scribbling about her home town, supporting herself with her words, vocation and avocation one, work as play for mortal stakes, just as Robert Frost described in his wonderful poem, “Two Tramps in Mud-Time”.
Turns out, not so much.
Actually, she’s kind of miserable. I know, I know – world’s smallest violin: you’re blond and rich and good looking and they make you write the same book over and over again – boo hoo. I’m painting houses sixty hours a week – let’s trade. But her predicament is real. She actually has to write the same book every year, with slight variations, of course. Still, it’s a whole book and you have to put it down on paper word by word, paragraph by paragraph, page by page. That can be a slog.Those books started to bore me five years ago, but I don’t have to write them. The problem is, they’re starting to bore Hilderbrand, too.
And it shows.
She’s not alone, that’s the worst part of it. I remember a thriller writer from my childhood named Alistair MacLean. He’s most famous now (if he’s famous at all) for a handful of his books they made into movies: Where Eagles Dare, Ice Station Zebra, The Guns of Navarone. The last one of these was the beginning of the end … or rather, the sequel was. Force 10 From Navarone (It was Robert Shaw’s last movie and one of Harrison Ford’s first) was bad, but not anywhere near as bad as the book, which was clearly a sequel not to the original novel, but to the popular Gregory Peck film. I was fifteen years old but I knew a sell-out when I saw one. And Maclean’s books after that had a dreary, I’m-only-writing-this-to-pay-my-alimony feeling about them. Finally I just gave up. I didn’t understand what was going on back then, but now I do. MacLean was suffering from the exactly the same malady as Elin Hilderbrand. The plague was in its infancy at that point, but it has reached full pandemic status now: writers sell by branding themselves and reliably turning out a familiar product. The paperback of the last book comes out just in advance of the next book’s hardcover release, usually with a little teaser chapter at the back to spike the reader's interest: momentum builds, sales acuumulate, and the writer has deadlines to meet.
It makes me think of comedians like the Flight of Conchords boys, who spent years developing the material that comprised their hilarious HBO program’s first season Then they had maybe six months to throw together the material for the next one. Fifteen years … six months. Of course the quality went down, Bret and Jermaine had sense enough to cancel the third outing and get back to work at a more reasonable pace. As far as I’m concerned they can take their time – Jonathan Franzen spent nine years writing the follow-up to The Corrections -- and it shows.
As I struggle happily with a new novel myself, I’m encouraged to know that I’m not fighting against a deadline; as I make radical changes in the story, it’s nice to know that I won’t have to defend them to an irate publisher. I can dawdle and write as I like: that’s a luxury few professional authors can claim.
The problem is that the relentless schedule, the unappeasable expectations, begin to wear these authors down, even the best and most consistent of them. The last couple of books by Michael Connelly are showing a kind of metal fatigue (Maybe it’s some consolation to him that even metal gets tired): they groan and creak with familiar tropes and predictable twists. They exhale a gloomy sense of exhaustion. The characters are just going through their paces, now, like road show actors in some long running hackneyed farce. I don’t blame Connelly: it’s the system. It still works for some people – most notably Lee Child, who is happy churning out his Jack Reacher books; others escape into a different set of expectations, like Ken Follett, who has become the new maestro of the ponderous historical epic.
The mechanical quality of so much popular fiction (One thinks of the ‘novel writing machines’ in the Ministry or Truth that churned out cliché romantic pap for the Proles in 1984) comes from turning our best genre writers into machines. My agent is sending out a dark sexual noir thriller right now, and he said to me recently, “I hope you have a few more of these up your sleeve. Anyone who publishes this will want to know you can do it again.” It’s a conundrum: I’d like to be published of course, but I feel for Elin Hilderbrand when I think of being locked into writing an endless series of transgressive sexual thrillers, of being the go-to creepy noir guy, of being branded.
Branding started with cattle, a ranch logo burned into the flesh of a steer to prove ownership. It’s not that different now. I hear the feed is good (lots of corn), but we all know who winds up getting eaten.
As for me, I’m happy to run wild, at least a little longer. The grazing is skimpy, but I’m used to it. And I’d be happy to see Elin Hilderbrand and Michael Connelly out here with me, escaped from the feed lot, working at their own pace, living life on their own time, at last. Their lives would be a lot better.
And so would their books.
Turns out, not so much.
Actually, she’s kind of miserable. I know, I know – world’s smallest violin: you’re blond and rich and good looking and they make you write the same book over and over again – boo hoo. I’m painting houses sixty hours a week – let’s trade. But her predicament is real. She actually has to write the same book every year, with slight variations, of course. Still, it’s a whole book and you have to put it down on paper word by word, paragraph by paragraph, page by page. That can be a slog.Those books started to bore me five years ago, but I don’t have to write them. The problem is, they’re starting to bore Hilderbrand, too.
And it shows.
She’s not alone, that’s the worst part of it. I remember a thriller writer from my childhood named Alistair MacLean. He’s most famous now (if he’s famous at all) for a handful of his books they made into movies: Where Eagles Dare, Ice Station Zebra, The Guns of Navarone. The last one of these was the beginning of the end … or rather, the sequel was. Force 10 From Navarone (It was Robert Shaw’s last movie and one of Harrison Ford’s first) was bad, but not anywhere near as bad as the book, which was clearly a sequel not to the original novel, but to the popular Gregory Peck film. I was fifteen years old but I knew a sell-out when I saw one. And Maclean’s books after that had a dreary, I’m-only-writing-this-to-pay-my-alimony feeling about them. Finally I just gave up. I didn’t understand what was going on back then, but now I do. MacLean was suffering from the exactly the same malady as Elin Hilderbrand. The plague was in its infancy at that point, but it has reached full pandemic status now: writers sell by branding themselves and reliably turning out a familiar product. The paperback of the last book comes out just in advance of the next book’s hardcover release, usually with a little teaser chapter at the back to spike the reader's interest: momentum builds, sales acuumulate, and the writer has deadlines to meet.
It makes me think of comedians like the Flight of Conchords boys, who spent years developing the material that comprised their hilarious HBO program’s first season Then they had maybe six months to throw together the material for the next one. Fifteen years … six months. Of course the quality went down, Bret and Jermaine had sense enough to cancel the third outing and get back to work at a more reasonable pace. As far as I’m concerned they can take their time – Jonathan Franzen spent nine years writing the follow-up to The Corrections -- and it shows.
As I struggle happily with a new novel myself, I’m encouraged to know that I’m not fighting against a deadline; as I make radical changes in the story, it’s nice to know that I won’t have to defend them to an irate publisher. I can dawdle and write as I like: that’s a luxury few professional authors can claim.
The problem is that the relentless schedule, the unappeasable expectations, begin to wear these authors down, even the best and most consistent of them. The last couple of books by Michael Connelly are showing a kind of metal fatigue (Maybe it’s some consolation to him that even metal gets tired): they groan and creak with familiar tropes and predictable twists. They exhale a gloomy sense of exhaustion. The characters are just going through their paces, now, like road show actors in some long running hackneyed farce. I don’t blame Connelly: it’s the system. It still works for some people – most notably Lee Child, who is happy churning out his Jack Reacher books; others escape into a different set of expectations, like Ken Follett, who has become the new maestro of the ponderous historical epic.
The mechanical quality of so much popular fiction (One thinks of the ‘novel writing machines’ in the Ministry or Truth that churned out cliché romantic pap for the Proles in 1984) comes from turning our best genre writers into machines. My agent is sending out a dark sexual noir thriller right now, and he said to me recently, “I hope you have a few more of these up your sleeve. Anyone who publishes this will want to know you can do it again.” It’s a conundrum: I’d like to be published of course, but I feel for Elin Hilderbrand when I think of being locked into writing an endless series of transgressive sexual thrillers, of being the go-to creepy noir guy, of being branded.
Branding started with cattle, a ranch logo burned into the flesh of a steer to prove ownership. It’s not that different now. I hear the feed is good (lots of corn), but we all know who winds up getting eaten.
As for me, I’m happy to run wild, at least a little longer. The grazing is skimpy, but I’m used to it. And I’d be happy to see Elin Hilderbrand and Michael Connelly out here with me, escaped from the feed lot, working at their own pace, living life on their own time, at last. Their lives would be a lot better.
And so would their books.
TV Tonight: "Hawaii 5-O"
Hawaii 5-0 (10:00, Mndays, CBS)is the most surprising new show on television. I dimly remember the original – a blunt and uninspiring police procedural with a palm tree background, shot mostly on sound stages, with its tough guy cop and ho-hum sidekick (“Book ‘em, Dano”).
The new show I a pleasant relief from the cable political shows I often find myself watching. The heroes and villains are no less crudely drawn, but in my tropical cop show the good guys win and the bad guys often get shot, which makes a pleasant break from watching Tea Party candidates advancing in the polls at home and toxic red sludge spills advancing on the Danube, abroad.
Hawaii 5-0 is filmed on location and really uses the culture and texture of the islands. Two of the characters are locals, and the hero, though white, was raised as a native by his police chief father. Scott Caan plays the fourth member of the team, a transplanted New Jersey cop, who has turned his life upside-down and traveled 5000 miles, just to spend weekends with his daughter. Caan is an engaging actor, with much of his father’s macho spirit, leavened by an easy-going sense of humor. You can imagine him as Sonny Corleone, but he would have made a far more appealing hot-head Mafiosi than his Dad. The story-lines involving Dano and his daughter are authentically – surprisingly – touching. The moment where he’s pleading for shared custody into a locked-gate intercom (only to find out he’s talking to his e-wife’s maid), breaks your heart and makes you laugh at the same time. Dano’s ultimate custody victory has nothing to do with his wife’s compassion or clemency, though: it turns out that McGarrett pulled strings with the Governor over some business contracts, to put pressure on the new husband. “You’re not as alone out here as you think you are,” he tells Dano, in a moment of unexpected fraternity.
Not that the show is all touchy-feelie. Daniel Dae Kim’s character was thrown off the force for (apparently ungrounded) corruption charges, and has to deal with becoming a small town pariah among his old friends and colleagues. His cousin, played by Grace Park, takes his side, sometimes against her own friends and colleagues. She rounds out the team, and the intimate knowledge of Hawaii they share with McGarrett contrasts in a very entertaining way with Dano’s off-island alienation. Together they make Hawaii itself a character in the drama.
Beyond all this, she show is fun. They play with the old catch phrases in amusing ways. The second time McGarrett says “Book ‘em Dano”, Dano rolls his eyes and says, “Are we doing this now?” He’s already tired of it; but his irritation makes us smile.
The procedural elements of the show are workmanlike – no one expects Sherlock Holmes or even Michael Bloomkvist here – but the action is sharp and well-choreographed. Alex O’Loughlin as McGarrett is physically credible as a kick-ass ex military man, as much assault commando as policeman. In a way this all is a throwback to the sixties, when hour long cop dramas like Hawaii 5-0 wanted nothing more than to provide escapist entertainment. So much of what I watch these days strives for so much more -- and often succeeds: Mad Men, Dexter, Boardwalk Empire … even The Good Wife, on Hawaii 5-0’s own network. It turns out I had kind of forgotten the simple minded pleasures of old school television. Still it’s not as easy to turn out a frictionless piece of hack work as it used to be. We settled for so much less, in the old days.. Just watching a show in color was a thrill. We didn’t care about the tacky sets and interior ‘exterior’ street scenes, the predictable plots or trite dialogue. To give us those same simple pleasures now requires so much more: sharp writing, committed acting, real locations, big budgets – so much work and investment to make a light-hearted throw-away cop show; and the touch of soul. that lifts it above the average entertainment just feels like good luck. Personally, I’m glad they took the trouble, and I hope they stay lucky.
Pomaika`i Hawaii 5-0.
And keep up the good work. There are a lot of us tired people out there who can’t watch another minute of Chris Matthews or Anderson Cooper, and we’re all counting on you to distract us.
The new show I a pleasant relief from the cable political shows I often find myself watching. The heroes and villains are no less crudely drawn, but in my tropical cop show the good guys win and the bad guys often get shot, which makes a pleasant break from watching Tea Party candidates advancing in the polls at home and toxic red sludge spills advancing on the Danube, abroad.
Hawaii 5-0 is filmed on location and really uses the culture and texture of the islands. Two of the characters are locals, and the hero, though white, was raised as a native by his police chief father. Scott Caan plays the fourth member of the team, a transplanted New Jersey cop, who has turned his life upside-down and traveled 5000 miles, just to spend weekends with his daughter. Caan is an engaging actor, with much of his father’s macho spirit, leavened by an easy-going sense of humor. You can imagine him as Sonny Corleone, but he would have made a far more appealing hot-head Mafiosi than his Dad. The story-lines involving Dano and his daughter are authentically – surprisingly – touching. The moment where he’s pleading for shared custody into a locked-gate intercom (only to find out he’s talking to his e-wife’s maid), breaks your heart and makes you laugh at the same time. Dano’s ultimate custody victory has nothing to do with his wife’s compassion or clemency, though: it turns out that McGarrett pulled strings with the Governor over some business contracts, to put pressure on the new husband. “You’re not as alone out here as you think you are,” he tells Dano, in a moment of unexpected fraternity.
Not that the show is all touchy-feelie. Daniel Dae Kim’s character was thrown off the force for (apparently ungrounded) corruption charges, and has to deal with becoming a small town pariah among his old friends and colleagues. His cousin, played by Grace Park, takes his side, sometimes against her own friends and colleagues. She rounds out the team, and the intimate knowledge of Hawaii they share with McGarrett contrasts in a very entertaining way with Dano’s off-island alienation. Together they make Hawaii itself a character in the drama.
Beyond all this, she show is fun. They play with the old catch phrases in amusing ways. The second time McGarrett says “Book ‘em Dano”, Dano rolls his eyes and says, “Are we doing this now?” He’s already tired of it; but his irritation makes us smile.
The procedural elements of the show are workmanlike – no one expects Sherlock Holmes or even Michael Bloomkvist here – but the action is sharp and well-choreographed. Alex O’Loughlin as McGarrett is physically credible as a kick-ass ex military man, as much assault commando as policeman. In a way this all is a throwback to the sixties, when hour long cop dramas like Hawaii 5-0 wanted nothing more than to provide escapist entertainment. So much of what I watch these days strives for so much more -- and often succeeds: Mad Men, Dexter, Boardwalk Empire … even The Good Wife, on Hawaii 5-0’s own network. It turns out I had kind of forgotten the simple minded pleasures of old school television. Still it’s not as easy to turn out a frictionless piece of hack work as it used to be. We settled for so much less, in the old days.. Just watching a show in color was a thrill. We didn’t care about the tacky sets and interior ‘exterior’ street scenes, the predictable plots or trite dialogue. To give us those same simple pleasures now requires so much more: sharp writing, committed acting, real locations, big budgets – so much work and investment to make a light-hearted throw-away cop show; and the touch of soul. that lifts it above the average entertainment just feels like good luck. Personally, I’m glad they took the trouble, and I hope they stay lucky.
Pomaika`i Hawaii 5-0.
And keep up the good work. There are a lot of us tired people out there who can’t watch another minute of Chris Matthews or Anderson Cooper, and we’re all counting on you to distract us.
Art and Fun: Steve Martin's "An Object of Beauty"
I find it bizarrely ironic that Steve Martin’s recent interview at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan ended so badly. E-mailers from all across the country (the interview was shown to subscribers on closed-circuit TV) were invited to comment and they did, demanding less art talk and more details about the comedian’s career –what was it like hosting the Oscars? Where did you learn to play banjo? How did you get that arrow through your head? The general impression was that Steve Martin had written, and now wanted discuss at droning length, an expository ‘novel’ crammed to bursting with high falutin’ cultural references and dreary factoids – a snob’s piñata full of carrots and pocket dictionaries, not even worth hitting.
The irony comes when you read the book
It’s delightful, and I say that as a dedicated reader who was not thrilled with Steve’s previous efforts -- the wan May December rich-man poor girl romance Shopgirl and the follow up, about a phobia-plagued recluse, The Pleasure of my Company. Most struggling writers I know were irked by these efforts, which would probably never have seen the light of day without a celebrity’s name attached. It’s one thing for a famous performer (Or reality show star) to pen a ghost-written autobiography. Poaching our territory and attempting novel seems presumptuous: an act of pure privilege, some kind of perverse literary droit de seigneur. Steve was dabbling, and it showed.
Well, it’s been seven years since that last book, and Steve used the time well. He’s obviously been working at his craft (did he sneak into an MFA program?) because this book is good. More than that, it’s fun. The story of Lacey Yeager, a rising star in the New York art world, it combines the diverse pleasures of a Christopher Isherwood or Truman Capote-like free spirit viewed from an adoring distance by a male narrator with the gossipy plot of a Judith Krantz novel and the zeitgeist marksmanship of Tom Wolfe. Of course, the writing isn’t as poetic as Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Berlin Stories. You don’t get the delirious page-turning junk food sugar high of trash classics like Scruples and Princess Daisy. And it lacks the red-line energy and epic polymath cultural obsession of A Man in Full or I am Charlotte Simmons. But Judith Krantz hasn’t written a novel in more than ten years, and Capote and Isherwood are dead. While we wait for Tom Wolfe’s big Miami book, this slim volume of Steve Martin’s makes an enjoyable substitute.
We watch Lacey’s rise from Sotheby’s drone to gallery owner, and Steve lets us guess at the dirty scandalous secret behind her success, revealing it at the perfect moment with the understated flourish and impeccable timing familiar from his best comedy routines and screenplays. Balzac said it: “Behind every great fortune is a great crime”, and the spectre of various art world crimes and frauds haunt Lacey’story, from the con-artists of the downtown galleries to the robbery at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, to the subtle tricks of rigging an art auction. The book takes place over twenty years and encompasses many changes in the art world, as well as the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq war. Through all her ups and downs, her brief affairs (She only sleeps with men on the first date), her cunning tactics and shady dealings, Lacey remains a novelist’s triumph: like Holly Golightly and Sally Bowles, like Charlotte Simmons and Billy Winthrop, she’s a character you can’t help loving , even against your better judgment, who you root for even when she’s wrong, and who you want to keep reading about forever.
That should take some of the sting out of a bad night at the Y.
The irony comes when you read the book
It’s delightful, and I say that as a dedicated reader who was not thrilled with Steve’s previous efforts -- the wan May December rich-man poor girl romance Shopgirl and the follow up, about a phobia-plagued recluse, The Pleasure of my Company. Most struggling writers I know were irked by these efforts, which would probably never have seen the light of day without a celebrity’s name attached. It’s one thing for a famous performer (Or reality show star) to pen a ghost-written autobiography. Poaching our territory and attempting novel seems presumptuous: an act of pure privilege, some kind of perverse literary droit de seigneur. Steve was dabbling, and it showed.
Well, it’s been seven years since that last book, and Steve used the time well. He’s obviously been working at his craft (did he sneak into an MFA program?) because this book is good. More than that, it’s fun. The story of Lacey Yeager, a rising star in the New York art world, it combines the diverse pleasures of a Christopher Isherwood or Truman Capote-like free spirit viewed from an adoring distance by a male narrator with the gossipy plot of a Judith Krantz novel and the zeitgeist marksmanship of Tom Wolfe. Of course, the writing isn’t as poetic as Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Berlin Stories. You don’t get the delirious page-turning junk food sugar high of trash classics like Scruples and Princess Daisy. And it lacks the red-line energy and epic polymath cultural obsession of A Man in Full or I am Charlotte Simmons. But Judith Krantz hasn’t written a novel in more than ten years, and Capote and Isherwood are dead. While we wait for Tom Wolfe’s big Miami book, this slim volume of Steve Martin’s makes an enjoyable substitute.
We watch Lacey’s rise from Sotheby’s drone to gallery owner, and Steve lets us guess at the dirty scandalous secret behind her success, revealing it at the perfect moment with the understated flourish and impeccable timing familiar from his best comedy routines and screenplays. Balzac said it: “Behind every great fortune is a great crime”, and the spectre of various art world crimes and frauds haunt Lacey’story, from the con-artists of the downtown galleries to the robbery at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, to the subtle tricks of rigging an art auction. The book takes place over twenty years and encompasses many changes in the art world, as well as the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq war. Through all her ups and downs, her brief affairs (She only sleeps with men on the first date), her cunning tactics and shady dealings, Lacey remains a novelist’s triumph: like Holly Golightly and Sally Bowles, like Charlotte Simmons and Billy Winthrop, she’s a character you can’t help loving , even against your better judgment, who you root for even when she’s wrong, and who you want to keep reading about forever.
That should take some of the sting out of a bad night at the Y.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Remembering Irvin Kershner
Film director Irvin Kershner died today, at his home in Paris. He was 87 years old. I hadn’t seen him since an extraordinary pair of meetings twenty-eight years ago, but he remains one of the most vivid figures I ever encountered in Hollywood.
I didn’t know much about him when the producer of my little family drama movie script set up the meeting, but I could tell he considered it a major coup. I did some research and found out that Kersher had directed some great television shows during what I would refer to as the first ‘Golden Age’of TV (we’re in the middle of the second one, now): episodes of Naked City, Kraft SuspenseTheatre and Ben Casey, before going on to make such extraordinary films as The Luck of Ginger Coffey, A Fine Madness and The Flim-Flam Man. Of course he is best known today for directing what most aficionados agree was the best of the Star Wars movies – The Empire Strikes Back. Indeed he was just coming off that career high success, looking for a new project, when I got the chance to meet him.
It was quite an intimidating set up – the luxurious office on the Warners lot, the giant photograph of Yoda that dominated the wall behind his desk, and the man himself – craggy, bearded, sharp eyed, a true Jedi Knight in his own brand of creative warfare. The rumor about him was that he was difficult, contrary, obstructionist – he could “turn a go project into a development deal” with one meeting. He was tough with me, but I found his criticisms stringent and illuminating, like a semester of film school in a single afternoon.
The main problem he had with my script was the long passage in the middle during which the father character and his oldest friend reminisce and re-litigate their lifetime of conflict over a series of excellent meals and walks on the winter beaches of Nantucket.
“This isn’t a movie!” he barked, dropping the script on his desk liker something dead that had just twitched alarmingly.
“Right,” my hapless producer agreed. “It’s – it’s a play. All that dialogue …”
Kershner turned that beady stare on him. “It’s not even a play! It’s nothing!
There’s no drama, here. It’s just two geezers chewing the fat. A movie is about what happens next. Don’t you get that? Look, I say to you – this script is shit. You can’t write. Get out of the business while you still can. What do you do? That’s insulting! That’s abusive! What are you going to do about it?”
“I,uh –“
“Are you going to break into tears? Run out of the room? Stand up and slug me? I don’t know – but you’re going to do something. That’s a movie! Here’s how EVERY SCENE in a movie should play. Pay attention to me, kid. There’s a nail sticking up out of this desk. I wrap a red rubber band around it and start pulling. The rubber band starts stretching, it pulling thin, turning pink, it’s about to snap, you’re flinching in advance … and then – pow! The nail comes out of the table. That’s what I’m looking for -- that kind of reversal, that kind of surprise.”
He didn’t like my ending, either.
“The father admits the son is talented, and they kiss and make up. It’s shit. It’s a TV movie. Do you watch TV?”
“Sure,” I said “I mean – sometimes, I guess, but –
“Well as long as you’re working with me, you don’t watch TV. Not one second of it. It’s all shit. It’s written like shit, it’s acted like shit, it’s directed like shit and if you keep watching that shit you won’t be able to do anything else.”
A silence fell. My producer, he seemed near tears – he had no idea how jazzed I was – said, “So… we’re done here?”
But Kershner wasn’t done. He didn’t think much of the father son relationship that made up the core of the story.
“It’s all in the past,” he said. “it’s all memory and back story and no one cares.”
“So … what do you think I should do instead?” I asked.
“Give them some real conflict, something that’s happening right now. The kid has a girlfriend – let the dad be fucking her. That should heat things up a little. Write me that draft – and cut thirty pages out of it.”
We reeled out of there, into the dry heat of a Los Angeles September afternoon, and my Producer apologized profusely for his old friend’s rudeness – over a sumptuous lunch at a nearby Taco Bell. He always was a big spender. I told him not to worry about it. I was already framing the re-write in my head and when I met Kershner, two weeks later, I had a new draft that ran 90 stream-lined pages.
He hefted it with a grin “Fighting weight,” he said.
I was dazzled and star struck – I had just seen Sean Connery coming out of his office, wearing a track suit … the meeting before mine. I figured out later what that meeting signified: Kershner was about to direct his own version of a James Bond movie with Connery, a re-make of Thunderball.
His decision had already been made, and I wasn’t even in the running.
I probably didn’t deserve to be.
So I didn’t get a movie made that year, and I didn’t get a screen credit an entrée to the Writer’s Guild or a big slab of screenplay money. But I got a lesson in writing I’ll never forget, and every time I ratchet up the conflict in a scene or somehow manage to pull that nail out of the table, I think of Irvin Kershner and bow my head in gratitude to thewild-eyed genius who played Yoda to my humble Padawan.
It was definitely Kerhner's voice I heard in his movie when old Jedi said "Do, or do not. There is no try."
I was lucky to have met him, and I’m sad to see him go.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
In Defense of the MFA
Poets and Writers magazine features their second annual ranking of the top MFA programs in the country, and “new for 2011’ a list of the ten best low residency programs. My school, Vermont College of the Fine Arts, is ranked number one among them, beating such distinguished competition as Goddard, Bennington and Warren Wilson College.
The issue hits the newsstands in the midst of an impressive anti-MFA backlash. This form of graduate education produces a blandly competent but uninspired, academically homogenized prose that just kind of sucks the life out of you – that’s the consensus of articles I’ve been skimming lately. From Anis Shivani writing on the Huffington Post about overrated writers, to one of his prime targets, Juno Diaz, everyone is piling on the poor old Master of Fine Arts degree. Publishable prose simply can’t be drilled or cajoled out of the untalented, that’s the gist of it.
John Fowles compared the teaching of writing to equipping a fisherman – you can have all the best gear, a state of the art rod and fresh bait, but none of that helps if you’re standing in the middle of a cornfield. “What matters is having a river to fish in,” Fowles pointed out.
Well, true enough. But knowing a bit about fishing can’t hurt; and especially if you have a good trout stream in front of you. Sloshing around in the shallows grabbing at them bare-handed just doesn’t work very well.
Trust me, I’ve tried it.
Still, the idea of going to school, particularly graduate school, just to get an education seems increasingly quaint and eccentric. My own original plan was relatively pragmatic: get the degree, publish a book (the most minor publication would suffice), and then take those letters after my name and the ISBN number after the title of my book and get myself a college teaching job. The first part was relatively easy. I got the degree, but I remain unpublished as of this writing. Nor is this a unique predicament. As the nay-sayers will tell happily tell you, few MFA graduates ever achieve substantial literary success. In a world where you read about six-year-old kids getting book deals, this can be mildly disheartening. One of my own professors, Douglas Glover, put it best, in the first lecture I ever heard him deliver:
Now more than ever, it is possible to get a doctorate in creative writing, and it is possible to get degrees in non-fiction writing, editing, playwriting and screenwriting. And, sad to say, it is possible to obtain one of these degrees without writing a publishable sentence, paragraph, story, novel or essay.
Going to writing school has become a bit like take piano and water color lessons in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a popular outward sign of bourgeois cultural accomplishment, a commercially available testimonial of creativity, the public stamp of approval. You know how, in The Wizard of Oz, at the end, the scarecrow gets a diploma. Well, here’s your diploma, you are a licensed creator, the equal of Joyce and Homer. But it doesn’t mean you can write a book that is publishable, let alone a work of art or, dare we say it, a masterpiece, a classic, that you read with intensity and wisdom, that you love your tools as if they were your children.
Ironically, it was this lecture that convinced me to attend Vermont College in the first place. Regardless of the statistics and the glum professional forecasts for Master of Fine Arts graduates, I wanted to work with Glover. I was sure I could learn some valuable things from him. Indeed, I already had, just at that first lecture. The bulk of it concerned the use of verbs, and the dangers one verb in particular, the ever-present “To be”, that ghastly centerpiece of the passive voice. Why did Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales say “Mistakes were made”? Because if he given up the passive voice and introduced a real verb into his sentence, he would have had to acknowledge who exactly made those mistakes. “I made mistakes,” for instance: a much stronger sentence, but not nearly as cunning and vague. Doug called this lecture “Attack of the Copula Spiders” – referring to his habit of putting a dot in the middle of a page and drawing lines to all the ‘to be’ formulations, covering student papers with giant spider diagrams.
Doug is obsessed with verbs. He counts them in sentences and paragraphs, balances them against the articles and nouns, cherishes them, collects them, celebrates them. As F. Scott Fitzgerald pointed out (in a letter to his daughter that Doug quoted in the course of the lecture) verbs carry sentences. An inert sentence like “The rabbit was on the lawn” can become something beautiful in the hands of a great writer. Fitzgerald says:
Probably the finest technical poem in English is Keats’ “Eve of St. Agnes”. A line like “The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass” is so alive you race through it, scarcely noticing it, yet it has colored the whole poem with its movement – the limping, trembling and freezing are going on before your own eyes.
When I say Glover counts the verbs, I mean that literally. He has made a science of it. In the lecture he discusses this text from Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart:
“That morning’s ice, no more than a brittle film, had cracked and was now floating in segments. These tapped together, or, parting, left channels of dark water, down which swans in slow indignation swam. The islands stood in frozen woody brown dusk: it was now between three and four in the afternoon. A sort of breath from the clay, from the city outside the park, condensing, made the air unclear; through this the trees around the lake soared frigidly up. Bronze cold of January bound the sky and the landscape; the sky was shut to the sun – but the swans, the rims of ice, the pallid withdrawn Regency terraces had an unnatural burnish, as though cold were light. There is something momentous about the height of winter. Steps rang on the bridges, and along the black walks. This weather had set in; it would freeze harder tonight.
This is a landscape opening that also tells the reader where and when the novel starts and what the weather was like which, in turn, establishes a certain atmosphere… astir with life and movement. How is it done? Well, there asre eight sentences, one hundred and forty seven words and twenty-three verbs, verbal adjectives or verbal nouns (Note the one deft use of the passive voice.) You can express this again as a ratio: in this passage, Bowen writes a 23/8 verb to sentence ratio, three verbs per sentence … simple ratios don’t tell the whole rhetorical story, but they begin to tell you about verbs. Beyond the ratio you should immediately notice the quality of the verbs: three copulas (“was,” “is,” “were”), one passive voice (“was shut”), three generics (“left,” “had,””made”) and one slightly abstract verb (“set in”) against fifteen precise, concrete action.
This was a revelation to me. I started counting verbs myself doing it everywhere, even at breakfast. One day, I was reading the cereal box and the milk carton in front of me as I wolfed my morning meal: Alpen and Stoneyfield Farms. It occurred to me that the milk was much more engrossing, so I turned to statistics. Alpen: “Organic rolled oats and crispy whole wheat flakes containing all the bran and wheat germ are combined with toasted hazelnuts and roasted almonds for a rich, hearty taste.” 28 words, one copula (in the passive voice), two verbal adjectives … two verbs.
Stoneyfield: “We started Stoneyfield Farm milking cows and making quarts of yogurt at our little hilltop organic farming school in 1983” 21 words. Three verbs and a gerund.
28/2 vs. 21/3: Case closed.
I know this sounds suffocatingly technical and abstract. In fact, it’s vital – even visceral. But at first this raised consciousness simply paralyzed me, as learning to drive with a stick shift had done, so many years ago – lots of stalling and flooding. Still, I eventually internalized Glover’s analytical perspective, and started to enjoy driving my own prose, down-shifting through its twists and turns, finally starting to take control.
So I applied to the school, got in and followed my girlfriend into the most rewarding and exciting two years of my whole catch-as-catch can educational life. I worked with Chris Noel, author of the beautiful and moving grief memoir In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing; with crime fiction maestro Domenic Stansberry and with short story writer and political activist Diane Lefer. I went to dozens of lectures during the ten day residencies, worked and got worked over in the workshops, found brilliant poets like Brendan Constantine, extraordinary memoirists like Andrew Hood, word-slinging jazz-riffing novelists like Barry Wightman.
The residencies reminded me of those British holiday camps, sometimes: you never had a moment yourself. The days were packed: the longer you’d been there the more people whose final lectures and readings you had to attend. Not to mention the faculty readings, visiting writer readings, student readings and of course the renegade reading, late at night in Noble Hall, where you could try out anything if you didn’t mind being pelted by ping-pong balls. The sense of community thrilled me. You could sit at any table in the Dewey dining hall and start a conversation with anyone – you all had the same things on your minds, had just been to the same lectures, just worked with the same professors.
Finally, in my last semester, I took the leap and signed up to work with Doug Glover. Here’s what I wrote in my final evaluation:
Doug’s approach can best be described as surgical rigor. His first move was to throw out my original lecture plans, assign me a pile of books and explain the new lecture: read these books, figure how the authors did what you’re trying to do, and write about it. As I worked through draft after draft I was always impressed and inspired by the painstaking relentless devotion to clarity and intelligent analysis his comments revealed.
The same is true for the difficult fiction project I was attempting – a group of related stories actually ‘written’ by the various characters in the novel. As Doug pointed out, first things first: learn how to write one publishable short story, learn the basics of story construction, start from scratch. Doing seven stories in seven different styles and voices will have to wait. So that’s what we worked on: conflict, inciting incidents, image patterning, plot structure. Am I an expert craftsman of the short story now? No, but at least I know what I need to work on, and I have a direction to follow in the years ahead. I think I’ll have Doug’s sharp-witted jovial acidic voice in my mind for the rest of my writing life. If it ever starts to fade, I have the lectures on tape!
In other topics, Doug was always supernaturally prompt with his detailed critiques and we spoke often on the phone, as well as e-mailing at various times. He couldn’t have been more accessible or cooperative.
The faint of heart had warned me about Doug, but the nickname ‘shredder’ reflects a basic misunderstanding of Doug’s methods. That would be like calling me “Chaos man” when I help my kids clean their rooms. We invariably start out by making the mess worse, emptying the jumbled drawers and pulling all the clothes, games, old ipods and Dreyer horses out of the closet, retrieving the food, books, mismatched shoes and long-lost band instruments from under the beds. That’s the chaos part, and it’s essential if you ever want to get organized. Doug works the same way – hey, the Marines work the same way. You have to break down the old bad habits and clarify the problems if you ever want to fix things.
Is this fun? No. Is it an ego-boost? Hardly.
But the truth is I entered for the program for the chance to work with Glover, and I’m glad I took it. I said to someone, doing anything else would be like going to the Labyrinth and not bothering to meet the Minotaur. So: a great semester; a great teacher. I emerge battered and humbled but more enthusiastic than ever about the work at hand; and more prepared than ever before to actually succeed at it.
Since I graduated, the first question everyone asks me is how the degree has affected my finances. Did I get a teaching job? Did I sell a book? Do I have anything – anything at all – concrete to show for the time and money I spent? Well, I did write a much better book than I could have written before, and I did find an agent for it. That’s a start. But my real answer to the question of what I got out of Vermont College remains the stubbornly quaint and eccentric one: I got an education.
I highly recommend it.
The issue hits the newsstands in the midst of an impressive anti-MFA backlash. This form of graduate education produces a blandly competent but uninspired, academically homogenized prose that just kind of sucks the life out of you – that’s the consensus of articles I’ve been skimming lately. From Anis Shivani writing on the Huffington Post about overrated writers, to one of his prime targets, Juno Diaz, everyone is piling on the poor old Master of Fine Arts degree. Publishable prose simply can’t be drilled or cajoled out of the untalented, that’s the gist of it.
John Fowles compared the teaching of writing to equipping a fisherman – you can have all the best gear, a state of the art rod and fresh bait, but none of that helps if you’re standing in the middle of a cornfield. “What matters is having a river to fish in,” Fowles pointed out.
Well, true enough. But knowing a bit about fishing can’t hurt; and especially if you have a good trout stream in front of you. Sloshing around in the shallows grabbing at them bare-handed just doesn’t work very well.
Trust me, I’ve tried it.
Still, the idea of going to school, particularly graduate school, just to get an education seems increasingly quaint and eccentric. My own original plan was relatively pragmatic: get the degree, publish a book (the most minor publication would suffice), and then take those letters after my name and the ISBN number after the title of my book and get myself a college teaching job. The first part was relatively easy. I got the degree, but I remain unpublished as of this writing. Nor is this a unique predicament. As the nay-sayers will tell happily tell you, few MFA graduates ever achieve substantial literary success. In a world where you read about six-year-old kids getting book deals, this can be mildly disheartening. One of my own professors, Douglas Glover, put it best, in the first lecture I ever heard him deliver:
Now more than ever, it is possible to get a doctorate in creative writing, and it is possible to get degrees in non-fiction writing, editing, playwriting and screenwriting. And, sad to say, it is possible to obtain one of these degrees without writing a publishable sentence, paragraph, story, novel or essay.
Going to writing school has become a bit like take piano and water color lessons in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a popular outward sign of bourgeois cultural accomplishment, a commercially available testimonial of creativity, the public stamp of approval. You know how, in The Wizard of Oz, at the end, the scarecrow gets a diploma. Well, here’s your diploma, you are a licensed creator, the equal of Joyce and Homer. But it doesn’t mean you can write a book that is publishable, let alone a work of art or, dare we say it, a masterpiece, a classic, that you read with intensity and wisdom, that you love your tools as if they were your children.
Ironically, it was this lecture that convinced me to attend Vermont College in the first place. Regardless of the statistics and the glum professional forecasts for Master of Fine Arts graduates, I wanted to work with Glover. I was sure I could learn some valuable things from him. Indeed, I already had, just at that first lecture. The bulk of it concerned the use of verbs, and the dangers one verb in particular, the ever-present “To be”, that ghastly centerpiece of the passive voice. Why did Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales say “Mistakes were made”? Because if he given up the passive voice and introduced a real verb into his sentence, he would have had to acknowledge who exactly made those mistakes. “I made mistakes,” for instance: a much stronger sentence, but not nearly as cunning and vague. Doug called this lecture “Attack of the Copula Spiders” – referring to his habit of putting a dot in the middle of a page and drawing lines to all the ‘to be’ formulations, covering student papers with giant spider diagrams.
Doug is obsessed with verbs. He counts them in sentences and paragraphs, balances them against the articles and nouns, cherishes them, collects them, celebrates them. As F. Scott Fitzgerald pointed out (in a letter to his daughter that Doug quoted in the course of the lecture) verbs carry sentences. An inert sentence like “The rabbit was on the lawn” can become something beautiful in the hands of a great writer. Fitzgerald says:
Probably the finest technical poem in English is Keats’ “Eve of St. Agnes”. A line like “The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass” is so alive you race through it, scarcely noticing it, yet it has colored the whole poem with its movement – the limping, trembling and freezing are going on before your own eyes.
When I say Glover counts the verbs, I mean that literally. He has made a science of it. In the lecture he discusses this text from Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart:
“That morning’s ice, no more than a brittle film, had cracked and was now floating in segments. These tapped together, or, parting, left channels of dark water, down which swans in slow indignation swam. The islands stood in frozen woody brown dusk: it was now between three and four in the afternoon. A sort of breath from the clay, from the city outside the park, condensing, made the air unclear; through this the trees around the lake soared frigidly up. Bronze cold of January bound the sky and the landscape; the sky was shut to the sun – but the swans, the rims of ice, the pallid withdrawn Regency terraces had an unnatural burnish, as though cold were light. There is something momentous about the height of winter. Steps rang on the bridges, and along the black walks. This weather had set in; it would freeze harder tonight.
This is a landscape opening that also tells the reader where and when the novel starts and what the weather was like which, in turn, establishes a certain atmosphere… astir with life and movement. How is it done? Well, there asre eight sentences, one hundred and forty seven words and twenty-three verbs, verbal adjectives or verbal nouns (Note the one deft use of the passive voice.) You can express this again as a ratio: in this passage, Bowen writes a 23/8 verb to sentence ratio, three verbs per sentence … simple ratios don’t tell the whole rhetorical story, but they begin to tell you about verbs. Beyond the ratio you should immediately notice the quality of the verbs: three copulas (“was,” “is,” “were”), one passive voice (“was shut”), three generics (“left,” “had,””made”) and one slightly abstract verb (“set in”) against fifteen precise, concrete action.
This was a revelation to me. I started counting verbs myself doing it everywhere, even at breakfast. One day, I was reading the cereal box and the milk carton in front of me as I wolfed my morning meal: Alpen and Stoneyfield Farms. It occurred to me that the milk was much more engrossing, so I turned to statistics. Alpen: “Organic rolled oats and crispy whole wheat flakes containing all the bran and wheat germ are combined with toasted hazelnuts and roasted almonds for a rich, hearty taste.” 28 words, one copula (in the passive voice), two verbal adjectives … two verbs.
Stoneyfield: “We started Stoneyfield Farm milking cows and making quarts of yogurt at our little hilltop organic farming school in 1983” 21 words. Three verbs and a gerund.
28/2 vs. 21/3: Case closed.
I know this sounds suffocatingly technical and abstract. In fact, it’s vital – even visceral. But at first this raised consciousness simply paralyzed me, as learning to drive with a stick shift had done, so many years ago – lots of stalling and flooding. Still, I eventually internalized Glover’s analytical perspective, and started to enjoy driving my own prose, down-shifting through its twists and turns, finally starting to take control.
So I applied to the school, got in and followed my girlfriend into the most rewarding and exciting two years of my whole catch-as-catch can educational life. I worked with Chris Noel, author of the beautiful and moving grief memoir In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing; with crime fiction maestro Domenic Stansberry and with short story writer and political activist Diane Lefer. I went to dozens of lectures during the ten day residencies, worked and got worked over in the workshops, found brilliant poets like Brendan Constantine, extraordinary memoirists like Andrew Hood, word-slinging jazz-riffing novelists like Barry Wightman.
The residencies reminded me of those British holiday camps, sometimes: you never had a moment yourself. The days were packed: the longer you’d been there the more people whose final lectures and readings you had to attend. Not to mention the faculty readings, visiting writer readings, student readings and of course the renegade reading, late at night in Noble Hall, where you could try out anything if you didn’t mind being pelted by ping-pong balls. The sense of community thrilled me. You could sit at any table in the Dewey dining hall and start a conversation with anyone – you all had the same things on your minds, had just been to the same lectures, just worked with the same professors.
Finally, in my last semester, I took the leap and signed up to work with Doug Glover. Here’s what I wrote in my final evaluation:
Doug’s approach can best be described as surgical rigor. His first move was to throw out my original lecture plans, assign me a pile of books and explain the new lecture: read these books, figure how the authors did what you’re trying to do, and write about it. As I worked through draft after draft I was always impressed and inspired by the painstaking relentless devotion to clarity and intelligent analysis his comments revealed.
The same is true for the difficult fiction project I was attempting – a group of related stories actually ‘written’ by the various characters in the novel. As Doug pointed out, first things first: learn how to write one publishable short story, learn the basics of story construction, start from scratch. Doing seven stories in seven different styles and voices will have to wait. So that’s what we worked on: conflict, inciting incidents, image patterning, plot structure. Am I an expert craftsman of the short story now? No, but at least I know what I need to work on, and I have a direction to follow in the years ahead. I think I’ll have Doug’s sharp-witted jovial acidic voice in my mind for the rest of my writing life. If it ever starts to fade, I have the lectures on tape!
In other topics, Doug was always supernaturally prompt with his detailed critiques and we spoke often on the phone, as well as e-mailing at various times. He couldn’t have been more accessible or cooperative.
The faint of heart had warned me about Doug, but the nickname ‘shredder’ reflects a basic misunderstanding of Doug’s methods. That would be like calling me “Chaos man” when I help my kids clean their rooms. We invariably start out by making the mess worse, emptying the jumbled drawers and pulling all the clothes, games, old ipods and Dreyer horses out of the closet, retrieving the food, books, mismatched shoes and long-lost band instruments from under the beds. That’s the chaos part, and it’s essential if you ever want to get organized. Doug works the same way – hey, the Marines work the same way. You have to break down the old bad habits and clarify the problems if you ever want to fix things.
Is this fun? No. Is it an ego-boost? Hardly.
But the truth is I entered for the program for the chance to work with Glover, and I’m glad I took it. I said to someone, doing anything else would be like going to the Labyrinth and not bothering to meet the Minotaur. So: a great semester; a great teacher. I emerge battered and humbled but more enthusiastic than ever about the work at hand; and more prepared than ever before to actually succeed at it.
Since I graduated, the first question everyone asks me is how the degree has affected my finances. Did I get a teaching job? Did I sell a book? Do I have anything – anything at all – concrete to show for the time and money I spent? Well, I did write a much better book than I could have written before, and I did find an agent for it. That’s a start. But my real answer to the question of what I got out of Vermont College remains the stubbornly quaint and eccentric one: I got an education.
I highly recommend it.
9/11 Letters: Rage, Hope and the American Jihad
My memory of 9/11 has been shaped by all the events that happened since – wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Patriot Act and the growing surveillance state that legislation initiated; my greater understanding of the Middle East and Islam; a broader historical awareness of America’s role in that part of the world, going back almost sixty years. But I wrote a letter to my local paper that day, and the paper came out two days later. This was raw, uneducated, unfiltered reaction; I suppose it had to be reactionary. I was vilified by my friends and embraced by people I despised. It was a strange moment. My son, who returned this Spring from studying Arabic in Amman, Jordan, just shakes his head at the overheated rhetoric of this crazy broadside.
But I don’t think I was alone, even among liberals. There was a reason George W. Bush had a 90% approval rating in the angry, war-mongering days after the attack; a reason why he could leverage his own catastrophic blunder into an opportunity to attempt the neo-conservative strategy of imposing our way of life on people who hated it. It’s worth taking a look at this troubling snap-shot of outraged patriotism, if we want to understand how the 9/11 attacks led us to where we stand today, fighting two wars and on the brink of a third. Will Yemen be next? And is there any way to pull back? Maybe, by repudiating the knee-jerk vengeful rage of the first letter that follows.
9/11/2001
I don't know what this makes anyone else feel, but I'll tell you what I'm feeling tonight: sheer red-eyed rage and fury. The amputation of the World Trade Center, the violation of my home town, the sheer senseless, blood and cant-soaked religion fuelled hatred of the act make me feel about the whole world of Islam what they have been feeling about us for decades. They want a religious war? I say give it to them. I say let them find out what happens when they awaken this sleeping giant. I say carpet bomb the whole Middle East -- every one of those countries, with all the innocent people in them. This has to be a calamity for them, an act of God, a typhoon, a tidal wave, a rain of toads. They have to learn that they cannot let their lunatic fringe declare war on the most powerful country in the world because if they do we will reach over and crush them like the puny desert bugs they are.
What no American politician has ever understood is that you cannot fight these people in a civilized way. Jimmy Carter never grasped this. He tried to negotiate with a culturally institutionalized mass psychosis. He talked about the energy crisis as the 'moral equivalent of war' and then failed to notice when the real thing actually happened. Iran declared war on us, and we refused to fight it. That sent the terrorists a message they've never forgotten. George Bush Senior only made things worse when he refused to deal decisively with Saddam Hussein. And the same thing is happening again.
George W. is talking about 'hunting down' and 'punishing' the perpetrators. This is just bombastic noise: The ones who committed the act are dead. The ones who gave the orders are impossible to hunt down. It's like finding the one mosquito with the West Nile virus. You don't capture a million mosquitos and give them each a blood test -- you wipe out ALL MOSQUITOS .. or at least you do the best you can. You spray. That's what we have to do.
The sad fact is there's no middle ground between the pathetic nothing of the President’s rhetorical outrage and the ruthless everything of total war. To fight terrorism effectively, innocent people will have to be killed. Beautiful historical sites will have to be destroyed. A whole sick culture will have to go down in flames. It's our God against their God, and Jesus can warm the bench on this play, folks. Because we need the Old Testament God now. We need someone in the White House with the guts to enact the towering rage that is exploding in the American people tonight. If Bush and his geriatric cold warriors can't do it, I volunteer.
It wouldn't cause world war III -- Putin is ready to fight and that's one thing the Russians are good at. If there is a World War III, it will be the whole civilized world united to wipe out this insane cancerous society which has been metastasizing for a thousand years. And we can take out the Taliban while we're at it, and take over the Saudi Oil fields, too. Those towel-heads have been robbing us blind for decades.
The thing that really broke my heart was watching those towers collapse. I know that the actual crash was the true tragedy; the explosion killed the people. But the utter destruction of the buildings just levelled me. It was like ... the terrorist killed your lover, but before that he yanked out her two front teeth. The death is horrible, but the brutalization and disfigurement is worse somehow. That's the thing that gives you the rage to kill in your turn. And I'm in a killing mood tonight. I just wish our President felt the same way.
A wrote a sort of retraction the next week. Its open-hearted optimism strikes me today as even more naïve and tragic than my jingoistic tantrum:
Several people have told me they thought last weeks’ letter in the Inquirer and Mirror was “insane.” They couldn’t believe I was advocating unilateral military attacks against civilian targets in the Middle East. Perhaps I was insane when I wrote those things. But to take a reasonable position on the most appalling attack on our country since the war of 1812 at that moment, before the dust from the ruined towers had even settled on lower Manhattan … that would have been a different kind of insanity. Obviously, I have nothing to do with making military policy in this country. That gives me the luxury to vent my feelings. We all expected Colin Powell and the President to be more measured and – gratefully – they were . But in raving at this murderous outrage I was also trying to articulate feelings that many people shared. My hope was that seeing those raw emotions clearly stated in print might allow others a moment of relief – and a sense of perspective. An aggressive “Right on!” followed by a flinch reaction of “Oh no.”, hate and horror separate but profoundly connected – the lightning flash of bloodlust; and then the slow thunder of rational thought.
I could have written a letter with the opposite viewpoint the next day, and twenty others in the days since. Like everyone else I know, I have felt every possible emotion from helplessness and fear and guilt to the indignation and anger I described last week. The situation is too large and evil and unprecedented for any single reaction, and no one would want the snap-shot of one instant’s emotion to stand as a permanent record of their grief. Even the media, with their relentless ability to hype and exploit and over-dramatize any event, have been outstripped by the reality here.
The tactics I suggested were impractical as well as draconian. We need to find the actual culprits; killing thousands of innocent people in senseless bombing raids would please the terrorists more than anything else we could do. They would love to see us reduced to their level of bloody-toothed grinning barbarism; and even more than that, they would love to see us diminished in the eyes of the world. Because the fact is that we hold the moral high ground against them, for the first time in decades. Even Yassir Arafat is on our side. We have the chance to literally unite the entire globe in a confederation unparalleled in history and unimaginable before the eleventh of September. There might even be greater benefits to be gotten from this alliance than the eradication of terrorism.
Looking up from the smoking rubble of an insane act of war, we can see – if we’re willing to squint through the smoke – the astonishing possibility of a world at peace.
Of course, the future I glimpsed there was quickly and brutally foreclosed by the Bush administration, and continues to dwindle under Obama. I now have little hope and only occasional flickers of anger. A numb despair prevails: buckle into the harness and trudge forward. The situation is bad today, but it wasn’t great when we installed Saddam Hussein in Iraq – or the Shah in Iran. Systems unravel, empires decline. Things get worse; it’s a kind of geopolitical entropy that feels inevitable, now. I feel nostalgia today for the outrage and the optimism that animated those letters. I have very little of either one left … which may be the real legacy of 9/11.
And that’s the saddest thing of all.
But I don’t think I was alone, even among liberals. There was a reason George W. Bush had a 90% approval rating in the angry, war-mongering days after the attack; a reason why he could leverage his own catastrophic blunder into an opportunity to attempt the neo-conservative strategy of imposing our way of life on people who hated it. It’s worth taking a look at this troubling snap-shot of outraged patriotism, if we want to understand how the 9/11 attacks led us to where we stand today, fighting two wars and on the brink of a third. Will Yemen be next? And is there any way to pull back? Maybe, by repudiating the knee-jerk vengeful rage of the first letter that follows.
9/11/2001
I don't know what this makes anyone else feel, but I'll tell you what I'm feeling tonight: sheer red-eyed rage and fury. The amputation of the World Trade Center, the violation of my home town, the sheer senseless, blood and cant-soaked religion fuelled hatred of the act make me feel about the whole world of Islam what they have been feeling about us for decades. They want a religious war? I say give it to them. I say let them find out what happens when they awaken this sleeping giant. I say carpet bomb the whole Middle East -- every one of those countries, with all the innocent people in them. This has to be a calamity for them, an act of God, a typhoon, a tidal wave, a rain of toads. They have to learn that they cannot let their lunatic fringe declare war on the most powerful country in the world because if they do we will reach over and crush them like the puny desert bugs they are.
What no American politician has ever understood is that you cannot fight these people in a civilized way. Jimmy Carter never grasped this. He tried to negotiate with a culturally institutionalized mass psychosis. He talked about the energy crisis as the 'moral equivalent of war' and then failed to notice when the real thing actually happened. Iran declared war on us, and we refused to fight it. That sent the terrorists a message they've never forgotten. George Bush Senior only made things worse when he refused to deal decisively with Saddam Hussein. And the same thing is happening again.
George W. is talking about 'hunting down' and 'punishing' the perpetrators. This is just bombastic noise: The ones who committed the act are dead. The ones who gave the orders are impossible to hunt down. It's like finding the one mosquito with the West Nile virus. You don't capture a million mosquitos and give them each a blood test -- you wipe out ALL MOSQUITOS .. or at least you do the best you can. You spray. That's what we have to do.
The sad fact is there's no middle ground between the pathetic nothing of the President’s rhetorical outrage and the ruthless everything of total war. To fight terrorism effectively, innocent people will have to be killed. Beautiful historical sites will have to be destroyed. A whole sick culture will have to go down in flames. It's our God against their God, and Jesus can warm the bench on this play, folks. Because we need the Old Testament God now. We need someone in the White House with the guts to enact the towering rage that is exploding in the American people tonight. If Bush and his geriatric cold warriors can't do it, I volunteer.
It wouldn't cause world war III -- Putin is ready to fight and that's one thing the Russians are good at. If there is a World War III, it will be the whole civilized world united to wipe out this insane cancerous society which has been metastasizing for a thousand years. And we can take out the Taliban while we're at it, and take over the Saudi Oil fields, too. Those towel-heads have been robbing us blind for decades.
The thing that really broke my heart was watching those towers collapse. I know that the actual crash was the true tragedy; the explosion killed the people. But the utter destruction of the buildings just levelled me. It was like ... the terrorist killed your lover, but before that he yanked out her two front teeth. The death is horrible, but the brutalization and disfigurement is worse somehow. That's the thing that gives you the rage to kill in your turn. And I'm in a killing mood tonight. I just wish our President felt the same way.
A wrote a sort of retraction the next week. Its open-hearted optimism strikes me today as even more naïve and tragic than my jingoistic tantrum:
Several people have told me they thought last weeks’ letter in the Inquirer and Mirror was “insane.” They couldn’t believe I was advocating unilateral military attacks against civilian targets in the Middle East. Perhaps I was insane when I wrote those things. But to take a reasonable position on the most appalling attack on our country since the war of 1812 at that moment, before the dust from the ruined towers had even settled on lower Manhattan … that would have been a different kind of insanity. Obviously, I have nothing to do with making military policy in this country. That gives me the luxury to vent my feelings. We all expected Colin Powell and the President to be more measured and – gratefully – they were . But in raving at this murderous outrage I was also trying to articulate feelings that many people shared. My hope was that seeing those raw emotions clearly stated in print might allow others a moment of relief – and a sense of perspective. An aggressive “Right on!” followed by a flinch reaction of “Oh no.”, hate and horror separate but profoundly connected – the lightning flash of bloodlust; and then the slow thunder of rational thought.
I could have written a letter with the opposite viewpoint the next day, and twenty others in the days since. Like everyone else I know, I have felt every possible emotion from helplessness and fear and guilt to the indignation and anger I described last week. The situation is too large and evil and unprecedented for any single reaction, and no one would want the snap-shot of one instant’s emotion to stand as a permanent record of their grief. Even the media, with their relentless ability to hype and exploit and over-dramatize any event, have been outstripped by the reality here.
The tactics I suggested were impractical as well as draconian. We need to find the actual culprits; killing thousands of innocent people in senseless bombing raids would please the terrorists more than anything else we could do. They would love to see us reduced to their level of bloody-toothed grinning barbarism; and even more than that, they would love to see us diminished in the eyes of the world. Because the fact is that we hold the moral high ground against them, for the first time in decades. Even Yassir Arafat is on our side. We have the chance to literally unite the entire globe in a confederation unparalleled in history and unimaginable before the eleventh of September. There might even be greater benefits to be gotten from this alliance than the eradication of terrorism.
Looking up from the smoking rubble of an insane act of war, we can see – if we’re willing to squint through the smoke – the astonishing possibility of a world at peace.
Of course, the future I glimpsed there was quickly and brutally foreclosed by the Bush administration, and continues to dwindle under Obama. I now have little hope and only occasional flickers of anger. A numb despair prevails: buckle into the harness and trudge forward. The situation is bad today, but it wasn’t great when we installed Saddam Hussein in Iraq – or the Shah in Iran. Systems unravel, empires decline. Things get worse; it’s a kind of geopolitical entropy that feels inevitable, now. I feel nostalgia today for the outrage and the optimism that animated those letters. I have very little of either one left … which may be the real legacy of 9/11.
And that’s the saddest thing of all.
Novel (or Memoir)-in-a-Box Contest
My great professor at Vermont College, Douglas Glover, has a website now, called Numero Cinq, and he has been running interesting contests for the last six months -- an aphorism contest, a villanelle contest, and most eccentrically, a translation contest in which absloute ignorance of the language (Dutch, I think) was a prerequisite. You had to make up your own story based on the sound of the words, coaxing out any repititions, finding parallel sentence structures, writing your own lyrics, as it were, to the music of a foreign tongue. Wild. The new contest is below, and Doug says anyone can enter and in my opinion, not enough people have.
My entry (memoir) is at the bottom of this post.
Doug says:
Augusto Monterroso is perhaps most famous for his short story “The Dinosaur,” which is said to be literature’s shortest story. It reads in full:
When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.
In an 1996 interview with Ilan Stavans for the Massachusetts Review, Monterroso recalled some early reviews of “The Dinosaur”: “I still have the very first reviews of the book: critics hated it. Since that point on I began hearing complaints to the effect that it isn’t a short-story. My answer is: true, it isn’t a short story, it’s actually a novel.”
Brevity was, to say the least, an important concept for Monterroso. His essay “Fecundity” is included in The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays. It reads in full:
Today I feel well, like a Balzac; I am finishing this line.
—from Tom McCartan’s Crib notes on “What Bolaño Read”
The Contest
Okay, the long-awaited next Numéro Cinq literary contest, The First Annual Numéro Cinq Novel-in-a-Box/Memoir-in-a-Box Contest. The rules are pretty simple this time. You have to write an entire (don’t cut corners) novel or a memoir (personal narrative) consisting of 9 (a mystic number) chapters and each chapter can be no more than 5 lines long. (By lines, I mean the number of lines that appear on the comment box on the blog.) Fewer lines if you can. Try to remember what a novel is like: at least a couple of characters or more (usually), a conflict, development through a series of dramatic actions, etc. Alternatively, try to remember what a memoir looks like: a first person narrator (and a couple of other people or more), a thematically continuous narrative line often based on a conflict and or theme, development through a series of dramatic moments or incidents, etc. Indicate on your entry whether it is fiction or non-fiction (there will be separate prizes). (Note that in the Monterroso story quoted above there ARE two characters, the guy and the dinosaur.)
The contest is open to any living, sentient being in the universe. It is not limited to people who are already on the blog or VCFA students or former students. Everyone is welcome, and also welcome to join in other conversations or suggest topics.
Entries will be accepted between September 1 and September 15, 2010, and should be written in English (Gary) and attached as comments to this post (the usual practice at NC).
Remember the values we hold dear here at Numéro Cinq: WIT & ARROGANCE. Remember Gordon Lish’s phrase ATTACK SENTENCES!
P.S. Anyone who mentions the insidious phrase “flash fiction” will have his or her comment deleted from the blog. I mean this! Delete it from your minds. This is not a flash fiction contest.
dg
My Memoir in a Box:
(The actual Memoir ran here last year ... this is the Greatest Hits, ADD version ...)
One:
It was finally over Didn’t I know it already? Wasn’t it obvious?She was right, too – I had no business being surprised. We had been in the middle of the unspoken knowledge for years. It was like living in Chernobyl as desperate Russians were starting to do again now: ignoring the obvious and waiting for the symptoms to show.
Two:
How did I figure out that Ned was sleeping with my ex-wife? I wanted to sell my wedding ring. Nick freaked. Kim said, “I’ll keep it until he’s older.” So I gave it to her, in front of her friends. She called, furious: it was a spiteful thing to do. Ned agreed. Ned? He had to be fucking her. Only one way to be sure: read her diary.
Three:
Why stalk my ex-wife? I wanted to be fully included in my exclusion, in complete control of my helplessness. I found Lisa’s diary in her underwear drawer. Reading it was like a Krav Maga demonstration: pulled by the back of neck into a series of blows, the brutal parody of an intimate embrace. The only solution: walk away.
Four:
The agent said: “When are you moving to L.A?” But I had kids. I couldn’t leave them and I couldn’t take them. But I could resent them and I did.. Then Caity got sick and cleaning her puke off the bathroom walls at two AM I realized: this was what I wanted to be doing. This was where I wanted to be.
Five:
The advantages of divorce: time off, silence. The dishes in the sink are no longer a passive-aggressive statement. They’re just dishes. And no more nonogomy. A much needed new word: being sexually faithful to a woman who’s not fucking you. Happily married, I was the one guy at a party not smoking weed. Now I’m one of the guys. Pass the doobie.
Six:
Maybe divorced men should be quarantined for eight months. The first relationship is always bad – the first pancake you test the griddle with, and invariably throw out. Sasha was a good Catholic girl, so the more obvious erotic encouragements were out of the question. She didn’t want to put anything strange or unusual in her mouth.“I don’t even eat sushi,” she said.
Seven:
I was happily alone when I met Annie. Solo flights – that was my kind of flying. Solo cups – that was my kind of cup! Han Solo, that was my kind of corny outer space smuggler with a heart of gold! O Solo Mio – that was my kind of Mio. Then we read each other’s work and she kissed me under the Chekhov moon.
Eight
So we moved in together. She endured Caity’s pack of friends she battled Nick over his dirty dishes and won. She went to Grad school and I followed her like a horse clopping after another horse. I was no longer living in the past. It was a physical relief, like taking off a bulky coat I should never have been wearing in the first place.
Nine:
My Mom and my brother Peter came to Nantucket for Nick’s graduation. He walked into the house with a bag of groceries. Mom offered to help. He gave her a baffled look, said “I’m fine Mom,” and started unpacking the food. I said, “I guess that’s a look I’m going to have to start getting used to.”
“Yes,” she said. “But you never will.”
My entry (memoir) is at the bottom of this post.
Doug says:
Augusto Monterroso is perhaps most famous for his short story “The Dinosaur,” which is said to be literature’s shortest story. It reads in full:
When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.
In an 1996 interview with Ilan Stavans for the Massachusetts Review, Monterroso recalled some early reviews of “The Dinosaur”: “I still have the very first reviews of the book: critics hated it. Since that point on I began hearing complaints to the effect that it isn’t a short-story. My answer is: true, it isn’t a short story, it’s actually a novel.”
Brevity was, to say the least, an important concept for Monterroso. His essay “Fecundity” is included in The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays. It reads in full:
Today I feel well, like a Balzac; I am finishing this line.
—from Tom McCartan’s Crib notes on “What Bolaño Read”
The Contest
Okay, the long-awaited next Numéro Cinq literary contest, The First Annual Numéro Cinq Novel-in-a-Box/Memoir-in-a-Box Contest. The rules are pretty simple this time. You have to write an entire (don’t cut corners) novel or a memoir (personal narrative) consisting of 9 (a mystic number) chapters and each chapter can be no more than 5 lines long. (By lines, I mean the number of lines that appear on the comment box on the blog.) Fewer lines if you can. Try to remember what a novel is like: at least a couple of characters or more (usually), a conflict, development through a series of dramatic actions, etc. Alternatively, try to remember what a memoir looks like: a first person narrator (and a couple of other people or more), a thematically continuous narrative line often based on a conflict and or theme, development through a series of dramatic moments or incidents, etc. Indicate on your entry whether it is fiction or non-fiction (there will be separate prizes). (Note that in the Monterroso story quoted above there ARE two characters, the guy and the dinosaur.)
The contest is open to any living, sentient being in the universe. It is not limited to people who are already on the blog or VCFA students or former students. Everyone is welcome, and also welcome to join in other conversations or suggest topics.
Entries will be accepted between September 1 and September 15, 2010, and should be written in English (Gary) and attached as comments to this post (the usual practice at NC).
Remember the values we hold dear here at Numéro Cinq: WIT & ARROGANCE. Remember Gordon Lish’s phrase ATTACK SENTENCES!
P.S. Anyone who mentions the insidious phrase “flash fiction” will have his or her comment deleted from the blog. I mean this! Delete it from your minds. This is not a flash fiction contest.
dg
My Memoir in a Box:
(The actual Memoir ran here last year ... this is the Greatest Hits, ADD version ...)
One:
It was finally over Didn’t I know it already? Wasn’t it obvious?She was right, too – I had no business being surprised. We had been in the middle of the unspoken knowledge for years. It was like living in Chernobyl as desperate Russians were starting to do again now: ignoring the obvious and waiting for the symptoms to show.
Two:
How did I figure out that Ned was sleeping with my ex-wife? I wanted to sell my wedding ring. Nick freaked. Kim said, “I’ll keep it until he’s older.” So I gave it to her, in front of her friends. She called, furious: it was a spiteful thing to do. Ned agreed. Ned? He had to be fucking her. Only one way to be sure: read her diary.
Three:
Why stalk my ex-wife? I wanted to be fully included in my exclusion, in complete control of my helplessness. I found Lisa’s diary in her underwear drawer. Reading it was like a Krav Maga demonstration: pulled by the back of neck into a series of blows, the brutal parody of an intimate embrace. The only solution: walk away.
Four:
The agent said: “When are you moving to L.A?” But I had kids. I couldn’t leave them and I couldn’t take them. But I could resent them and I did.. Then Caity got sick and cleaning her puke off the bathroom walls at two AM I realized: this was what I wanted to be doing. This was where I wanted to be.
Five:
The advantages of divorce: time off, silence. The dishes in the sink are no longer a passive-aggressive statement. They’re just dishes. And no more nonogomy. A much needed new word: being sexually faithful to a woman who’s not fucking you. Happily married, I was the one guy at a party not smoking weed. Now I’m one of the guys. Pass the doobie.
Six:
Maybe divorced men should be quarantined for eight months. The first relationship is always bad – the first pancake you test the griddle with, and invariably throw out. Sasha was a good Catholic girl, so the more obvious erotic encouragements were out of the question. She didn’t want to put anything strange or unusual in her mouth.“I don’t even eat sushi,” she said.
Seven:
I was happily alone when I met Annie. Solo flights – that was my kind of flying. Solo cups – that was my kind of cup! Han Solo, that was my kind of corny outer space smuggler with a heart of gold! O Solo Mio – that was my kind of Mio. Then we read each other’s work and she kissed me under the Chekhov moon.
Eight
So we moved in together. She endured Caity’s pack of friends she battled Nick over his dirty dishes and won. She went to Grad school and I followed her like a horse clopping after another horse. I was no longer living in the past. It was a physical relief, like taking off a bulky coat I should never have been wearing in the first place.
Nine:
My Mom and my brother Peter came to Nantucket for Nick’s graduation. He walked into the house with a bag of groceries. Mom offered to help. He gave her a baffled look, said “I’m fine Mom,” and started unpacking the food. I said, “I guess that’s a look I’m going to have to start getting used to.”
“Yes,” she said. “But you never will.”
Beach Rules
Looking back on it, the crucial moment occurred when she noticed she was still wearing underwear.
Normally that would have been a good thing -- modest and prudent. She wasn’t the type to ‘go commando’, especially in a sun dress. But the beach trips with her sister and brother in law had developed their own rituals, and changing into her bathing suit at the beach was one of them. After the first time, when she had been caught unprepared for the decision to actually go swimming (the surf was high and it was almost sundown), she had been more careful. On that occasion, she had been wearing bulky shorts and a flimsy t-shirt. She decided to wear the shorts into the water, but she didn’t want to go home in wet panties, so she slipped them off, sitting on the cool sand, and then struggled back into her shorts. The question was: had David glanced over at her during that unguarded moment? She had stood on her knees to wiggle into the shorts, naked from the waist down for a few seconds. He could have seen everything – or did the sightlines limit him to a view of her bare ass? She would normally have said bottom, or tush or even backside … but something in the way David had been looking at her lately, even fully dressed, made the raw single syllable more appropriate.
Bigger question: did she want him to have seen her? She certainly didn’t care any more if Sam looked at her, and she was supposed to be in love with Sam.
More troubling still: the night after that beach day she climbed on top of Sam and really made love to him for the first time in … well, a long time. Too long. So Sam was happy. And so was David: he had certainly been staring at her after that swim, when she bobbed out of the water with her soaked t-shirt clinging to her breasts, as close to naked as he’d ever seen her, stiff nipples showing pink through the pale membrane of cotton.
Funny, she had caught Sam glancing at her in that shirt a few weeks before – it was a little immodest even when it was dry -- and said something like “I’m never wearing this shirt in public again.” Well, so much for that resolve. She hadn’t just worn it, she had sat on the beach a foot away from her extraordinary brother in law, damp and brazen, and let him stare. Carol acted as though it meant nothing. Maybe it did mean nothing. Beach rules were different. You were supposed to show a little skin there. Anyway, David and Carol’s marriage was strong, supernaturally strong, or so it had always seemed. A moment of permissible summertime indecent exposure couldn’t change that.
She had worn the wet shorts home, and the next time she wore bikini bottoms under them. Still, she had to change into the top on the beach. She would have called it another oversight, then; now she knew better. She had stood a little apart, facing away, while David turned and Carol made a note in the margins of her book, and bared her back to him. But she had left her top on the sand and she had to lean down sideways to pick up the scrap of fabric. David’s could see everything. She could feel his eyes on her, memorizing the slight droop of her small firm breasts.
Their eyes met and he didn’t look away.
That was the sexiest thing of all: that he didn’t look away.
It felt strange and spooky and ambivalent. She didn’t want to cheat on Sam; she certainly didn’t want to seduce her sister’s husband.
But here she was, on the way to yet another beach afternoon, with her bathing suit in her big straw purse, along with the sun screen and bug spray and other practical supplies, wearing her sexiest panties, knowing she would have to slip out of them at some point, or go swimming with them on.She could have pulled over and changed; or just put her suit on in the bathroom at the cottage. But she didn’t want to. Her psychiatrist had said, “Find the thing that excites you, and then do It,” when she complained about her dormant libido.
Well, she had found the thing that excited her.
And she was doing it.
Carol was in Connecticut; Sam was working. This was going to be the first two- person beach picnic ever. Just like a date, except of course it wasn’t because David was like a brother to her. It didn’t have to be a problem. She’d just ask David to turn around while she changed. The beach at Squam was always deserted this time of year. She could have her dip in the water, modesty intact.
Except, she wasn’t going to ask; and she wasn’t sure he’d do it, anyway. He wanted to see her strip. Might as well just say it: he was hot for her and that made her hot. And feeling hot made her feel alive, connected to a world of possibilities, even if they were dangerous possibiulities, forbidden ones, destructive ones
Maybe especially if they were.
As to David, God knows why he was interested -- maybe his sex life was as arid as her own. Maybe he was just cool and adventurous. Maybe he had an open relationship with her sister. She had shared boyfriends with Carol before, when they were in high school and college, though they had usually shown the decorum to wait for a break-up.
Usually.
This is how it happened:
She stood on a chair to reach the picnic basket won from a high shelf, and let him look up her dress; handed it to him and let him look down the front. She let him put his arm around her waist on the way to the car and walked closer to him when his fingers slid down to cup her ass. All she felt at that moment was a raging frustration at the two layers of fabric between skin and skin.
That was the first time he had ever touched her, beyond the occasional brotherly hug or peck on the cheek. Some boundary had been broached. After that, it was easy for him to rest a hand on her knee as they drove, and to slide it upward, gathering the fabric as he bared her thighs.
And then, on the beach, after a glass of wine, she said “I guess I’ll just change then,” and stood in front of him and started unbuttoning the dress. When the two sides were hanging loose, shifting in the breeze from the water, she saw his sharpening attention, and thought about turning around. Instead and eased the fabric off her shoulders and let it fall, glancing up and down the empty beach. They were alone. The sun was warm on her exposed body. She was so white in the private places. It made her pause.
“Go on,” David said. His voice was rough.
She pushed down her panties to mid-thigh and then to her knees, finally letting them gather at her ankles and stepping out of them. When she reached for her bag he grabbed it.
“Let’s just skinny dip,” he said.
She ran for the water as he pulled his clothes off, and plunged into the icy grip of it. He was right behind her, his arms around her again, this time pulling her to him and pressing against the length of her, no fabric between them, skin slippery with the cold water. He was huge and she could feel him growing. He found her mouth and they plunged into a deep briny kiss. They went under for a few seconds and broke the surface laughing. He spread her legs in the dense, charged undertow and slipped into her and thrust once and she was coming instantly, crying out, biting his neck.
Then he carried her out of the water and laid her out on the beach towel. He paused over her for a few seconds, just looking, then lunged into her and her orgasms fell into each other like plush dominoes and she cried out “I can’t stop coming” and he said “Let me join you” and she could feel pulse as he drove himself into her in a last frenzy of lust.
When he rolled off her, he said “That was incredible.”
And she said, “Just wait.”
She slid down his stomach to give him the most intense, committed gluttonous grasping gulping blowjob either of them had ever experienced. She sucked harder when he finally came and he was shouting and screaming as she slipped her finger up inside him and found the spot she had read about in the sex manual when she was still trying to fix things with sex manuals. He arched up like a fish on a deck and twisted and writhed and pounded the sand with his fist.
Finally she slipped him out of her mouth and smiled sweetly.
“You’re mine now,” she said
She knew that she meant it, but she had absolutely no idea what it meant. She was about to find out at least part of what it meant, though. Sam had just crested the dune grass and was running toward them, across the beach.
Normally that would have been a good thing -- modest and prudent. She wasn’t the type to ‘go commando’, especially in a sun dress. But the beach trips with her sister and brother in law had developed their own rituals, and changing into her bathing suit at the beach was one of them. After the first time, when she had been caught unprepared for the decision to actually go swimming (the surf was high and it was almost sundown), she had been more careful. On that occasion, she had been wearing bulky shorts and a flimsy t-shirt. She decided to wear the shorts into the water, but she didn’t want to go home in wet panties, so she slipped them off, sitting on the cool sand, and then struggled back into her shorts. The question was: had David glanced over at her during that unguarded moment? She had stood on her knees to wiggle into the shorts, naked from the waist down for a few seconds. He could have seen everything – or did the sightlines limit him to a view of her bare ass? She would normally have said bottom, or tush or even backside … but something in the way David had been looking at her lately, even fully dressed, made the raw single syllable more appropriate.
Bigger question: did she want him to have seen her? She certainly didn’t care any more if Sam looked at her, and she was supposed to be in love with Sam.
More troubling still: the night after that beach day she climbed on top of Sam and really made love to him for the first time in … well, a long time. Too long. So Sam was happy. And so was David: he had certainly been staring at her after that swim, when she bobbed out of the water with her soaked t-shirt clinging to her breasts, as close to naked as he’d ever seen her, stiff nipples showing pink through the pale membrane of cotton.
Funny, she had caught Sam glancing at her in that shirt a few weeks before – it was a little immodest even when it was dry -- and said something like “I’m never wearing this shirt in public again.” Well, so much for that resolve. She hadn’t just worn it, she had sat on the beach a foot away from her extraordinary brother in law, damp and brazen, and let him stare. Carol acted as though it meant nothing. Maybe it did mean nothing. Beach rules were different. You were supposed to show a little skin there. Anyway, David and Carol’s marriage was strong, supernaturally strong, or so it had always seemed. A moment of permissible summertime indecent exposure couldn’t change that.
She had worn the wet shorts home, and the next time she wore bikini bottoms under them. Still, she had to change into the top on the beach. She would have called it another oversight, then; now she knew better. She had stood a little apart, facing away, while David turned and Carol made a note in the margins of her book, and bared her back to him. But she had left her top on the sand and she had to lean down sideways to pick up the scrap of fabric. David’s could see everything. She could feel his eyes on her, memorizing the slight droop of her small firm breasts.
Their eyes met and he didn’t look away.
That was the sexiest thing of all: that he didn’t look away.
It felt strange and spooky and ambivalent. She didn’t want to cheat on Sam; she certainly didn’t want to seduce her sister’s husband.
But here she was, on the way to yet another beach afternoon, with her bathing suit in her big straw purse, along with the sun screen and bug spray and other practical supplies, wearing her sexiest panties, knowing she would have to slip out of them at some point, or go swimming with them on.She could have pulled over and changed; or just put her suit on in the bathroom at the cottage. But she didn’t want to. Her psychiatrist had said, “Find the thing that excites you, and then do It,” when she complained about her dormant libido.
Well, she had found the thing that excited her.
And she was doing it.
Carol was in Connecticut; Sam was working. This was going to be the first two- person beach picnic ever. Just like a date, except of course it wasn’t because David was like a brother to her. It didn’t have to be a problem. She’d just ask David to turn around while she changed. The beach at Squam was always deserted this time of year. She could have her dip in the water, modesty intact.
Except, she wasn’t going to ask; and she wasn’t sure he’d do it, anyway. He wanted to see her strip. Might as well just say it: he was hot for her and that made her hot. And feeling hot made her feel alive, connected to a world of possibilities, even if they were dangerous possibiulities, forbidden ones, destructive ones
Maybe especially if they were.
As to David, God knows why he was interested -- maybe his sex life was as arid as her own. Maybe he was just cool and adventurous. Maybe he had an open relationship with her sister. She had shared boyfriends with Carol before, when they were in high school and college, though they had usually shown the decorum to wait for a break-up.
Usually.
This is how it happened:
She stood on a chair to reach the picnic basket won from a high shelf, and let him look up her dress; handed it to him and let him look down the front. She let him put his arm around her waist on the way to the car and walked closer to him when his fingers slid down to cup her ass. All she felt at that moment was a raging frustration at the two layers of fabric between skin and skin.
That was the first time he had ever touched her, beyond the occasional brotherly hug or peck on the cheek. Some boundary had been broached. After that, it was easy for him to rest a hand on her knee as they drove, and to slide it upward, gathering the fabric as he bared her thighs.
And then, on the beach, after a glass of wine, she said “I guess I’ll just change then,” and stood in front of him and started unbuttoning the dress. When the two sides were hanging loose, shifting in the breeze from the water, she saw his sharpening attention, and thought about turning around. Instead and eased the fabric off her shoulders and let it fall, glancing up and down the empty beach. They were alone. The sun was warm on her exposed body. She was so white in the private places. It made her pause.
“Go on,” David said. His voice was rough.
She pushed down her panties to mid-thigh and then to her knees, finally letting them gather at her ankles and stepping out of them. When she reached for her bag he grabbed it.
“Let’s just skinny dip,” he said.
She ran for the water as he pulled his clothes off, and plunged into the icy grip of it. He was right behind her, his arms around her again, this time pulling her to him and pressing against the length of her, no fabric between them, skin slippery with the cold water. He was huge and she could feel him growing. He found her mouth and they plunged into a deep briny kiss. They went under for a few seconds and broke the surface laughing. He spread her legs in the dense, charged undertow and slipped into her and thrust once and she was coming instantly, crying out, biting his neck.
Then he carried her out of the water and laid her out on the beach towel. He paused over her for a few seconds, just looking, then lunged into her and her orgasms fell into each other like plush dominoes and she cried out “I can’t stop coming” and he said “Let me join you” and she could feel pulse as he drove himself into her in a last frenzy of lust.
When he rolled off her, he said “That was incredible.”
And she said, “Just wait.”
She slid down his stomach to give him the most intense, committed gluttonous grasping gulping blowjob either of them had ever experienced. She sucked harder when he finally came and he was shouting and screaming as she slipped her finger up inside him and found the spot she had read about in the sex manual when she was still trying to fix things with sex manuals. He arched up like a fish on a deck and twisted and writhed and pounded the sand with his fist.
Finally she slipped him out of her mouth and smiled sweetly.
“You’re mine now,” she said
She knew that she meant it, but she had absolutely no idea what it meant. She was about to find out at least part of what it meant, though. Sam had just crested the dune grass and was running toward them, across the beach.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Bullies Win (Mostly)
What do Calvin & Hobbes author Bill Watterson, country singer Merle Haggard, and Gulf coast fisherman Mike Frenette have in common with my hapless next-door neighbor on Nantucket? They’ve all stood face-to-face with the bully culture of money in America, and felt the hand of power at their throats.
Merle Haggard, like so many musicians, signed brutal, confiscatory contracts with record labels just to get his music heard. He had no choice: they controlled the business and with that power came the opportunity, even the imperative, to exploit him. Musical artists who made millions for their labels died in poverty because of this rapacious disregard for their rights and disrespect for their talents. It’s still happening – only the rise of the internet threatens this hegemony in any long-term way: hence the Verizon/Google deal, and other scams, to control the freedom of the net and turns its immense potential for freedom of expression into profit. You can feel the fuming rage of the stymied power-brokers in the proposals they write and the bills they draft in Congress: how dare some nobody just post a video on YouTube and think millions of people will watch without having to pay for the privilege! The thought that some cocky little John Doe with a cellphone camera can post a picture that contradicts the news stories and the media narrative about some crucial event must make their blood boil. I remember when the video of Stephen Colbert’s Press Corps dinner speech was posted, amid the media spin that he had bombed: ten million hits on the video later, that particular lie was just another Colbert punch-line.
And now I read this on the AP news wire:
The latest guidelines for BP's $20 billion victims compensation fund say the nearer you are geographically to the oil spill and the more closely you depend on the Gulf of Mexico's natural resources, the better chance you have of getting a share of the money.Also, a second set of rules expected this fall will require that businesses and individuals seeking compensation for long-term losses give up their right to sue BP and other spill-related companies -- something that could save the oil giant billions.
The new rules for the claims process were released Friday by Washington lawyer Kenneth Feinberg, who was picked by President Barack Obama to run the fund and previously oversaw claims for 9/11 victims. Beginning Monday, the claims will be handled by Feinberg rather than BP, which is still footing the entire $20 billion bill.
I can’t think of any new story I’ve read in the last year that made me angrier than this one. “A second set of rules expected this fall” --?? Rules written by who? BP can just write new rules whenever they want, with no oversight? These people should be in jail, or better yet tarred and feathered (you can skip the feathers); instead they get to re-write the rules of their own reparations? Can’t the government stop this outrage? Isn’t the government supposed to be sticking up for the fishermen and business owners and ordinary citizens whose lives have been blighted by BP’s arrogance and ineptitude? No one stuck up for Merle Haggard or Frances Ballard, but this isn’t the back office of some cheesy record company, this is the United States of America, and the whole world is watching to see how we deal with the worst ecological disaster in modern history. But it turns out that it was the government itself, through Kevin Feinberg, the President’s hand-picked intermediary, who mandated these new rules. My sophisticated friends with PhDs laugh at me when I ramble on about “The Proprietors” –the corporations who seem to have turned the US Government into a wholly-owned subsidiary. But even these academic thinkers were given pause by the blatant collusion of Government and industry shamelessly paraded in the newspapers on Friday. And why should BP and the President be ashamed? No one condemns their actions, no one questions their motives, no one puts up a struggle … except the odd, ‘angry left’ blogger. We just get some Domino’s take-out and turn on the TV, instead. The Jersey Shore was hilarious this week. The Louisiana shore, not so much.
Which brings me to my neighbor, a smallish, humble, woman who rents one room in a chaotic house that could be the setting for Grey Gardens. You sense that she’s suffered a lot in her life; she’s accustomed to being a victim. How else could she endure the black mold on the walls and the black temper of her landlord? She’s not allowed to open her windows, she’s not allowed to clean up – any effort to turn the squalor around her into a livable home sends the owner into a howling temper tantrum, with insults -- and pots and pans -- flying. My neighbor says she can’t afford to move out. It may be true; I think she can’t afford to stay. The place is affecting her health. But her landlord senses this paralysis and preys on it with a relentless gusto that somehow reminds me of the much bigger predators at large in the world today. My son says I shouldn’t be surprised. We live in a country where the Founding Fathers obviously debated and compromised over what fraction of a human being a slave should be. You don’t get to “3/5ths” in a casual discussion. Perhaps we’re all just baboons, guarding our territory and shrieking at the intruders. The homeowners on Nantucket who build fences with locked gates on public- way paths to the beaches are no different than the Vanderbilts and Posts, using armed guards to keep city folk off the Long Island coastline in the 1920s. Sometimes it seems that nothing ever changes and the good guys never win.
Then you read about Bill Watterson.
When Calvin and Hobbes became hugely successful, the syndicate that sold the cartoon to the newspapers decided that they wanted to license the characters for merchandising: Calvin hats and Hobbes plush toys, and a million other iterations and trinkets. Watterson balked. He made the point that he didn’t want the issue of whether Hobbes was alive or not decided by a stuffed animal in a store window. Was he being a Prima Donna or a snob? Maybe, but it was his cartoon and his choice. The syndicate disagreed. They suggested he look at his contract – and indeed he had signed away all merchandising rights, just as the musicians signed away their royalties and the Louisiana fishermen will not doubt sign away their right to sue BP. Watterson tried to explain that when he signed the contract he wasn’t worried about the consequences and ramifications of Calvin and Hobbes becoming THE MOST SUCCESSFUL CARTOON OF ALL TIME. He just wanted to get one strip in one newspaper and pay his rent. Like Merle Haggard wanted to record “I Saw the Light” or that fisherman wants enough money from the people who destroyed his way of life to just keep on living.
The syndicate appreciated Watterson’s point, but told him it was moot. Watterson disagreed. What could he do about it? This: if they merchandised his characters, he would stop drawing the strip. He’d rather never do another Calvin and Hobbes panel than watch his work be hi-jacked by greedy corporate suits.
The syndicate said, fine, then -- we’ll get someone else to draw it.
And Watterson said – Good luck with that idea.
I guess they tried for a while. That’s the part I find most revealing and absurd and grotesque. These bean-counters were so blind to everything but money, so debased, so scrubbed clean of any vestige of aesthetic sense, so coarse, so mercenary and just so dumb, that they thought someone else could draw Calvin and Hobbes. It was just a product to them, a tool to generate income, a notation on the bottom line. But of course they couldn’t find anyone else to draw Calvin and Hobbes. And so eventually, they backed down. Amazingly, the little guy won. But as Watterson points out in the introduction to the boxed, three-volume edition of the cartoon, he had become pretty big himself, by then. And the victory was a costly one:
In hindsight, I see that, with so much money at stake, the artistic issues I argued about were irrelevant. In the end, it was simply might makes right. I was an unknown cartoonist when I started, and my contractual disadvantage reflected my nonexistent bargaining power when I got the job. Five years later, I was a big enough gorilla that I could turn the tables. Even though I finally got my way, the whole mess is depressing to recall, even all these years later. The fight was personally traumatic For several years it poisoned what had been a happy relationship with my syndicate, and in my disillusionment and disgust at being pushed to the wall, I lost the conviction that I wanted to spend the rest of my life cartooning. Both sides paid a heavy price for this battle.
I feel bad for Watterson, and I miss his brilliant cartoon, but I still find his triumph thrilling. It cheers and inspires me on my most angry despairing day, and I’m sure Mike Frenette and all the other fisherman fighting BP and the rock bands posting their albums on the internet, and even my sad and oppressed next-door neighbor would feel the same way if they knew what Bill Watterson did all those years ago, and they’d join me to celebrate what accomplished, and redouble their efforts to keep that accomplishment and the spirit of that victory alive. The bullies really do lose, sometimes.
It’s nice to remember that.
Merle Haggard, like so many musicians, signed brutal, confiscatory contracts with record labels just to get his music heard. He had no choice: they controlled the business and with that power came the opportunity, even the imperative, to exploit him. Musical artists who made millions for their labels died in poverty because of this rapacious disregard for their rights and disrespect for their talents. It’s still happening – only the rise of the internet threatens this hegemony in any long-term way: hence the Verizon/Google deal, and other scams, to control the freedom of the net and turns its immense potential for freedom of expression into profit. You can feel the fuming rage of the stymied power-brokers in the proposals they write and the bills they draft in Congress: how dare some nobody just post a video on YouTube and think millions of people will watch without having to pay for the privilege! The thought that some cocky little John Doe with a cellphone camera can post a picture that contradicts the news stories and the media narrative about some crucial event must make their blood boil. I remember when the video of Stephen Colbert’s Press Corps dinner speech was posted, amid the media spin that he had bombed: ten million hits on the video later, that particular lie was just another Colbert punch-line.
And now I read this on the AP news wire:
The latest guidelines for BP's $20 billion victims compensation fund say the nearer you are geographically to the oil spill and the more closely you depend on the Gulf of Mexico's natural resources, the better chance you have of getting a share of the money.Also, a second set of rules expected this fall will require that businesses and individuals seeking compensation for long-term losses give up their right to sue BP and other spill-related companies -- something that could save the oil giant billions.
The new rules for the claims process were released Friday by Washington lawyer Kenneth Feinberg, who was picked by President Barack Obama to run the fund and previously oversaw claims for 9/11 victims. Beginning Monday, the claims will be handled by Feinberg rather than BP, which is still footing the entire $20 billion bill.
I can’t think of any new story I’ve read in the last year that made me angrier than this one. “A second set of rules expected this fall” --?? Rules written by who? BP can just write new rules whenever they want, with no oversight? These people should be in jail, or better yet tarred and feathered (you can skip the feathers); instead they get to re-write the rules of their own reparations? Can’t the government stop this outrage? Isn’t the government supposed to be sticking up for the fishermen and business owners and ordinary citizens whose lives have been blighted by BP’s arrogance and ineptitude? No one stuck up for Merle Haggard or Frances Ballard, but this isn’t the back office of some cheesy record company, this is the United States of America, and the whole world is watching to see how we deal with the worst ecological disaster in modern history. But it turns out that it was the government itself, through Kevin Feinberg, the President’s hand-picked intermediary, who mandated these new rules. My sophisticated friends with PhDs laugh at me when I ramble on about “The Proprietors” –the corporations who seem to have turned the US Government into a wholly-owned subsidiary. But even these academic thinkers were given pause by the blatant collusion of Government and industry shamelessly paraded in the newspapers on Friday. And why should BP and the President be ashamed? No one condemns their actions, no one questions their motives, no one puts up a struggle … except the odd, ‘angry left’ blogger. We just get some Domino’s take-out and turn on the TV, instead. The Jersey Shore was hilarious this week. The Louisiana shore, not so much.
Which brings me to my neighbor, a smallish, humble, woman who rents one room in a chaotic house that could be the setting for Grey Gardens. You sense that she’s suffered a lot in her life; she’s accustomed to being a victim. How else could she endure the black mold on the walls and the black temper of her landlord? She’s not allowed to open her windows, she’s not allowed to clean up – any effort to turn the squalor around her into a livable home sends the owner into a howling temper tantrum, with insults -- and pots and pans -- flying. My neighbor says she can’t afford to move out. It may be true; I think she can’t afford to stay. The place is affecting her health. But her landlord senses this paralysis and preys on it with a relentless gusto that somehow reminds me of the much bigger predators at large in the world today. My son says I shouldn’t be surprised. We live in a country where the Founding Fathers obviously debated and compromised over what fraction of a human being a slave should be. You don’t get to “3/5ths” in a casual discussion. Perhaps we’re all just baboons, guarding our territory and shrieking at the intruders. The homeowners on Nantucket who build fences with locked gates on public- way paths to the beaches are no different than the Vanderbilts and Posts, using armed guards to keep city folk off the Long Island coastline in the 1920s. Sometimes it seems that nothing ever changes and the good guys never win.
Then you read about Bill Watterson.
When Calvin and Hobbes became hugely successful, the syndicate that sold the cartoon to the newspapers decided that they wanted to license the characters for merchandising: Calvin hats and Hobbes plush toys, and a million other iterations and trinkets. Watterson balked. He made the point that he didn’t want the issue of whether Hobbes was alive or not decided by a stuffed animal in a store window. Was he being a Prima Donna or a snob? Maybe, but it was his cartoon and his choice. The syndicate disagreed. They suggested he look at his contract – and indeed he had signed away all merchandising rights, just as the musicians signed away their royalties and the Louisiana fishermen will not doubt sign away their right to sue BP. Watterson tried to explain that when he signed the contract he wasn’t worried about the consequences and ramifications of Calvin and Hobbes becoming THE MOST SUCCESSFUL CARTOON OF ALL TIME. He just wanted to get one strip in one newspaper and pay his rent. Like Merle Haggard wanted to record “I Saw the Light” or that fisherman wants enough money from the people who destroyed his way of life to just keep on living.
The syndicate appreciated Watterson’s point, but told him it was moot. Watterson disagreed. What could he do about it? This: if they merchandised his characters, he would stop drawing the strip. He’d rather never do another Calvin and Hobbes panel than watch his work be hi-jacked by greedy corporate suits.
The syndicate said, fine, then -- we’ll get someone else to draw it.
And Watterson said – Good luck with that idea.
I guess they tried for a while. That’s the part I find most revealing and absurd and grotesque. These bean-counters were so blind to everything but money, so debased, so scrubbed clean of any vestige of aesthetic sense, so coarse, so mercenary and just so dumb, that they thought someone else could draw Calvin and Hobbes. It was just a product to them, a tool to generate income, a notation on the bottom line. But of course they couldn’t find anyone else to draw Calvin and Hobbes. And so eventually, they backed down. Amazingly, the little guy won. But as Watterson points out in the introduction to the boxed, three-volume edition of the cartoon, he had become pretty big himself, by then. And the victory was a costly one:
In hindsight, I see that, with so much money at stake, the artistic issues I argued about were irrelevant. In the end, it was simply might makes right. I was an unknown cartoonist when I started, and my contractual disadvantage reflected my nonexistent bargaining power when I got the job. Five years later, I was a big enough gorilla that I could turn the tables. Even though I finally got my way, the whole mess is depressing to recall, even all these years later. The fight was personally traumatic For several years it poisoned what had been a happy relationship with my syndicate, and in my disillusionment and disgust at being pushed to the wall, I lost the conviction that I wanted to spend the rest of my life cartooning. Both sides paid a heavy price for this battle.
I feel bad for Watterson, and I miss his brilliant cartoon, but I still find his triumph thrilling. It cheers and inspires me on my most angry despairing day, and I’m sure Mike Frenette and all the other fisherman fighting BP and the rock bands posting their albums on the internet, and even my sad and oppressed next-door neighbor would feel the same way if they knew what Bill Watterson did all those years ago, and they’d join me to celebrate what accomplished, and redouble their efforts to keep that accomplishment and the spirit of that victory alive. The bullies really do lose, sometimes.
It’s nice to remember that.
Saturday, August 07, 2010
The Paint Whisperer: Disaster and Rescue
The axis of evil in the house-painting trade: toxic liquids, divided attention and gravity. Not quite as deadly a trifecta as angry red-neck, cheap tequila and large automobile; not as insidious as uneducated citizen, PAC money and partisan TV ad … but still quietly awesome in its own way.
Here are some of my favorite paint calamities …and the inspired emergency responses that saved the day (or at least the final payment on the job)
The most common involve a bucket of paint tipping over on a redwood deck. Usually there’s a drop-cloth under the bucket, but unless the drop is backed with vinyl, the paint will soak right through (think: red wine through a silk table cloth). These calamities are also time sensitive, since the owner or the General Contractor could show up at any moment. The normal response is just to stare at the white puddle in dumb-founded panic. This is not the best clean-up strategy. It wastes precious seconds, and even without the imminent arrival of disapproving employers of one sort or another, every second counts. Paint is drying, soaking into the grain. ‘setting up’, doing its job. The solution, and this applies to any porous surface – bricks for instance, or cedar roof shingles – is dirt and paint thinner. Cleaning up with dirt – every kindergarten boy’s dream. But the dirt absorbs the paint and the thinner breaks it down. You get filthy, you waste several pounds of rags and a few quarts of mineral spirits (It’s always good to have several pounds of rags and a quart or two of mineral spirits on hand for just this purpose), you get a killer fume-headache …but it works. A friend of mine who didn’t understand this simple technique wound up digging out and turning over every brick in five square feet of sidewalk one summer morning. This was unnecessary and kind of crazy. It did work, though. An idiot who worked for me tried this system on grass – not a good idea. The grass got clean, but to call that a ‘superficial view’ of the situation is charitable at best – kind of like giving the Wicked Witch of the West a nice hot bath. The thinner soaks into the soil and kills everything. In that case we had to dig up a giant patch of lawn and dirt and re-sod the whole area before the customer showed up. This is a guy who looked at a can of Benjamin Moore “Navajo White” trim paint and said “What does Nava-joe mean?” You may say – well, sure, he was a house painter. Did you expect him to have an advanced degree? Well, everyone on my crew does, these days. That MFA in writing really helps when you have to improvise. And we all know that painting is a job, but the painting on your wall is a gerund. You can’t put a price on that.
A friend of mine slopped some paint into a new cedar roof. He took thinner and rags and spread it out over the whole surface, effectively ‘pickling’ the shingles. It sounds crazy, but so does punching a shark in the nose.
Years ago a summer kid was using a white pigmented shellac product called Bin to seal the knots on some second-storey trim. He had the quart can on the window sill, the window was open, there was beautiful couch right inside …and you can probably feel your stomach rolling already. The situation has a cartoon inevitability to it. And things get even better: we were at the far end of our little island, with no solvent alcohol on hand; that’s what you use to thin or clean up Bin. Oh, and in case you were wondering: this was before cell-phones. We were on our own in the middle of nowhere. The quart went over into the house, spilling white paint all over the couch. I thought we were doomed, but my boss knew a few things that I didn’t know. He had snooped the house and knew the owners had stocked it against some nameless emergency, with cans of soup, and bags of flour and other staples, shelved in the basement. Among the supplies were several cases of white vinegar … which he somehow knew was a viable solvent for shellac. This guy was old school: he didn’t panic, he just started shouting orders, while the crew dashed out to the van for rags and into the basement, up the stairs, racing against time: nothing dries as fast as Bin. That’s why carpenters like it so much. We flooded that couch, and cleaned it, and shampooed it … and got away with it.
I know it sounds like fun, but don’t try this at home, kids. This stuff is for professional stooges only.
The first dozen times paint catastrophes happened I freaked out; but I’ve gradually learned to take control of the situation and try to fix it, however hopeless things seem. Last summer we were painting a big house on one of the main streets in town, next door to an expensive restaurant. I had given a bid to the restaurant owner for his paint job, but he is spectacularly, radically, famously, comically cheap (He has a house in Montpelier and ignores the great restaurants there to eat at the Vermont College cafeteria, crowing that it’s “the best deal in town!”). He took my bid mainly to gloat over the money he was saving by using his dishwashing staff to do the work for minimum wage. They made a number of basic mistakes: painting with full buckets, not using vinyl-backed drop cloths, and not being careful about ladder placement. One of them set a step-ladder at the top of the steps, on the little deck by the front door. One leg was dangling in the air and when he started to climb, the whole thing went over, spilling oil paint on the stairs, the shingles and the bricks. His response: to run away, in his paint soaked sneakers. Working next door, I screamed at him to stay still. My friend and I swung into action – with the usual thinner and rags and plenty of dirt. We had it all cleaned up before the owner arrived. Weeks later, and I mean weeks, the thought occurred to me that we should have just let them try to fix it themselves: it would have been an excellent lesson for the cheapskate in the value of hiring professionals. But in the moment none of that mattered. Twenty years of dealing with these calamities had created a kind of lizard brain reflex in both of us. We could no more not clean up a paint spill than we could not take a breath coming up from under water. I thought we’d gotten away with it, too. But I saw the restauranteur at my next VCFA residency, waiting on line at the cafeteria. He winked and said “Thanks for the clean up.” His smile seemed to say “I’m cheap but I’m not stupid.”
But don’t get me wrong, this stuff can happen to anyone. One of the most experienced painters I know – from a family of painters – did exactly the same thing on the deck of what was, at that time, the most expensive house on Nantucket. The paint flooded the planks, the decorative stone work, the lawn and the lawn furniture. This time we didn’t have enough thinner or rags to fix the mess. Our boss had to buy new decking, new furniture, new sod, new stone work. The only good part was that this particular culprit, who had always been insufferably smug about his qualifications and pedigree as an old world tradesman, never said a dismissive word to anyone again.
Which wasn’t really fair. These disasters not only can happen to anyone, they will happen to everyone. That’s a guarantee, that’s the fate and predestination of physics, the merciless fact of life when you combine those three hilariously volatile elements: toxic fluids, divided attention and gravity. I always think of another friend, first day on the job: he didn’t attach his paint hook to his regrettably over-full bucket properly, and it fell twenty feet off the ladder to the sidewalk below. Even before it exploded onto the antique flagstones, all of us were thinking the same thing: There but for the grace of God go I. And Grace of God or not, it was only a matter of time before we wound up going there ourselves. Fortunately we didn’t have much time to ponder that idea.
We had some serious cleaning up to do.
Here are some of my favorite paint calamities …and the inspired emergency responses that saved the day (or at least the final payment on the job)
The most common involve a bucket of paint tipping over on a redwood deck. Usually there’s a drop-cloth under the bucket, but unless the drop is backed with vinyl, the paint will soak right through (think: red wine through a silk table cloth). These calamities are also time sensitive, since the owner or the General Contractor could show up at any moment. The normal response is just to stare at the white puddle in dumb-founded panic. This is not the best clean-up strategy. It wastes precious seconds, and even without the imminent arrival of disapproving employers of one sort or another, every second counts. Paint is drying, soaking into the grain. ‘setting up’, doing its job. The solution, and this applies to any porous surface – bricks for instance, or cedar roof shingles – is dirt and paint thinner. Cleaning up with dirt – every kindergarten boy’s dream. But the dirt absorbs the paint and the thinner breaks it down. You get filthy, you waste several pounds of rags and a few quarts of mineral spirits (It’s always good to have several pounds of rags and a quart or two of mineral spirits on hand for just this purpose), you get a killer fume-headache …but it works. A friend of mine who didn’t understand this simple technique wound up digging out and turning over every brick in five square feet of sidewalk one summer morning. This was unnecessary and kind of crazy. It did work, though. An idiot who worked for me tried this system on grass – not a good idea. The grass got clean, but to call that a ‘superficial view’ of the situation is charitable at best – kind of like giving the Wicked Witch of the West a nice hot bath. The thinner soaks into the soil and kills everything. In that case we had to dig up a giant patch of lawn and dirt and re-sod the whole area before the customer showed up. This is a guy who looked at a can of Benjamin Moore “Navajo White” trim paint and said “What does Nava-joe mean?” You may say – well, sure, he was a house painter. Did you expect him to have an advanced degree? Well, everyone on my crew does, these days. That MFA in writing really helps when you have to improvise. And we all know that painting is a job, but the painting on your wall is a gerund. You can’t put a price on that.
A friend of mine slopped some paint into a new cedar roof. He took thinner and rags and spread it out over the whole surface, effectively ‘pickling’ the shingles. It sounds crazy, but so does punching a shark in the nose.
Years ago a summer kid was using a white pigmented shellac product called Bin to seal the knots on some second-storey trim. He had the quart can on the window sill, the window was open, there was beautiful couch right inside …and you can probably feel your stomach rolling already. The situation has a cartoon inevitability to it. And things get even better: we were at the far end of our little island, with no solvent alcohol on hand; that’s what you use to thin or clean up Bin. Oh, and in case you were wondering: this was before cell-phones. We were on our own in the middle of nowhere. The quart went over into the house, spilling white paint all over the couch. I thought we were doomed, but my boss knew a few things that I didn’t know. He had snooped the house and knew the owners had stocked it against some nameless emergency, with cans of soup, and bags of flour and other staples, shelved in the basement. Among the supplies were several cases of white vinegar … which he somehow knew was a viable solvent for shellac. This guy was old school: he didn’t panic, he just started shouting orders, while the crew dashed out to the van for rags and into the basement, up the stairs, racing against time: nothing dries as fast as Bin. That’s why carpenters like it so much. We flooded that couch, and cleaned it, and shampooed it … and got away with it.
I know it sounds like fun, but don’t try this at home, kids. This stuff is for professional stooges only.
The first dozen times paint catastrophes happened I freaked out; but I’ve gradually learned to take control of the situation and try to fix it, however hopeless things seem. Last summer we were painting a big house on one of the main streets in town, next door to an expensive restaurant. I had given a bid to the restaurant owner for his paint job, but he is spectacularly, radically, famously, comically cheap (He has a house in Montpelier and ignores the great restaurants there to eat at the Vermont College cafeteria, crowing that it’s “the best deal in town!”). He took my bid mainly to gloat over the money he was saving by using his dishwashing staff to do the work for minimum wage. They made a number of basic mistakes: painting with full buckets, not using vinyl-backed drop cloths, and not being careful about ladder placement. One of them set a step-ladder at the top of the steps, on the little deck by the front door. One leg was dangling in the air and when he started to climb, the whole thing went over, spilling oil paint on the stairs, the shingles and the bricks. His response: to run away, in his paint soaked sneakers. Working next door, I screamed at him to stay still. My friend and I swung into action – with the usual thinner and rags and plenty of dirt. We had it all cleaned up before the owner arrived. Weeks later, and I mean weeks, the thought occurred to me that we should have just let them try to fix it themselves: it would have been an excellent lesson for the cheapskate in the value of hiring professionals. But in the moment none of that mattered. Twenty years of dealing with these calamities had created a kind of lizard brain reflex in both of us. We could no more not clean up a paint spill than we could not take a breath coming up from under water. I thought we’d gotten away with it, too. But I saw the restauranteur at my next VCFA residency, waiting on line at the cafeteria. He winked and said “Thanks for the clean up.” His smile seemed to say “I’m cheap but I’m not stupid.”
But don’t get me wrong, this stuff can happen to anyone. One of the most experienced painters I know – from a family of painters – did exactly the same thing on the deck of what was, at that time, the most expensive house on Nantucket. The paint flooded the planks, the decorative stone work, the lawn and the lawn furniture. This time we didn’t have enough thinner or rags to fix the mess. Our boss had to buy new decking, new furniture, new sod, new stone work. The only good part was that this particular culprit, who had always been insufferably smug about his qualifications and pedigree as an old world tradesman, never said a dismissive word to anyone again.
Which wasn’t really fair. These disasters not only can happen to anyone, they will happen to everyone. That’s a guarantee, that’s the fate and predestination of physics, the merciless fact of life when you combine those three hilariously volatile elements: toxic fluids, divided attention and gravity. I always think of another friend, first day on the job: he didn’t attach his paint hook to his regrettably over-full bucket properly, and it fell twenty feet off the ladder to the sidewalk below. Even before it exploded onto the antique flagstones, all of us were thinking the same thing: There but for the grace of God go I. And Grace of God or not, it was only a matter of time before we wound up going there ourselves. Fortunately we didn’t have much time to ponder that idea.
We had some serious cleaning up to do.
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