In 1840, Charles Dickens conducts the first public reading of a novel, addressing a packed hall of excited followers, leading to chain of events, that, 159 years later, resulted in some twit taking me and 20 others hostage in a bar for 52 minutes, reading an excerpt from his novel, which included the word "buttjuice."
This blog entry is about me, or the lack of me, or the unfathomable reasons that I have not existed the past six months–Bookfraud, the blogger, not Me, the Man Behind Bookfraud Who Wants to Believe He Looks Like and Gets as Much Action as George Clooney But Looks and Acts Closer to Richard Dawson After a 72-Hour Bender.
It starts like this: When I think of something being "perfect," in the Platonic sense of the word, in that representation is the enemy of the real, in that nothing that can be written, sung, painted, or performed on stage can ever match the Form in which it imperfectly represents, I think of Bach and Glenn Gould.
(Stick with me here.)
I am of limited intellectual capacity and lesser patience, but if a recording of Glenn Gould playing "The Goldberg Variations" was playing in a car, and that car was speeding at 100 miles per hour about to run off a cliff, and if you were to drop me in the driver’s seat, the car would surely dive over the cliff unimpeded because I was thus transfixed. My favorite composer is Beethoven, my favorite pianist is probably Vladimir Horowitz, my favorite rock singer probably Joey Ramone, but if I had to pick one recording that puts me into a state of hypnosis, it’s Glenn Gould playing Bach.
Now, the last time I wrote regularly in this space, I had a different job, lived in a different city, did not suffer from pestilence or pain. And when I actually wrote in this space at all–that being in August–Tiger Woods was still known as a golfer, when Jay and Conan were still friendly, the Supreme Court had not officially put plutocrats in charge of the United States, and we associated Haiti with a simply terrible history, overwhelming poverty, and helplessness.
For this golfer, perfection no longer entails making a hole in one
I consider those (relatively) stress-free days of 2008 in which I would check four or five blogs each day, usually at the office, without fear of prying eyes or corporate overlords, the latter of which was spending most of its time trying to figure out how avoid government indictments which I can happy testify was not on account of my actions.
No, looking back, I can see when the decent into non-blogging began: when I got laid off last year. I didn’t succumb to depression, nor did I lack subject material or desire, but it was time, that evil crook, which took everything away from me. That, and perennial, pathetic exhaustion.
After our fun-filled trek across this great nation of ours to relocate for a new job, I find myself somewhat settled in. My job keeps me busy, not that I’m complaining, and I am dutifully going to the pool to stave off the knee implants at least until age 60. Totster is entering daycare, Wife is complaining about my fill-in-the-blank fuckup but just every other day, and I have grown bored with surfing the Web for scantily clad ladies. Or naked ones, for that matter.
You talkin’ to me?
What has been hampering me–nay, crippling me–has been this nagging sense of imperfection in all of my deeds. I sit down, intending to write or blog or tap out a sentence of some coherence, and nothing happens. Call it what you like: writer’s block, primal fear, general neurosis, knowing that my words will lack meaning or the likelihood that I will be overwhelmingly imperfect (see Plato, Glenn Gould).
The best advice I ever got (and the only advice I remember from graduate school) was from a fellow scribe, who said in response to a mediocre story, "You can’t be afraid to suck." And that’s been me–scared to suck.
So here I sit, doing what is the last refuge of writing scoundrels in our Internet age: blogging about blogging.
I promise to all of you to get off my proverbial ass and animate the being once known as the blogger "Bookfraud" once again.
Fortunately, I doubt anybody will bother to read the entire thing. Here’s to negativism!
And here’s the truth about writing, by a non-writer.
This is what happens when you decide to better yourself following that pleasantly boring interregnum called "unemployment," get a job and move cross country. You drop off the face of the Internet for several months, lose Internet service altogether, lose the four readers of your blog, and lose contact with the rest of the world.
Right now, our new apartment is a disaster. Little Boy (formerly “Baby” and “Baby-Tot”) insists he lives in his previous city and demands to visit the playgrounds of our former home. Wife is running around like a madwoman and I’m not far behind. I may turn into a woman at this rate.
So, in order to pretend that I still have a “blog” and that I’m a “writer,” I’m posting this “down n’ dirty” entry for now. Thus I bring you…
Five Hard-Earned Lessons Learned From My Moving Trip
1. If one must attache suitcases to the roof of the rental car, make sure that they are firmly tied down so they don’t fly off on to the Interstate, making Wife nearly have a breakdown, almost causing an accident, forcing the assistance of two state troopers with crewcuts and dour demeanors, and causing you to find the nearest post office where you must mail your suitcase to your new home. Yes, you really can mail a suitcase.
2. Little Boy, now two years old (Now Two! Now Able to Answer "No!" to Everything!), does not like sleeping in hotel rooms with his parents and makes his displeasure known through not sleeping. And making copious noise punctuated by tears.
In addition, the $3.18 Disney TV show (about a talking bear who can drive a car but needs help to learn how to brush his teeth) one orders in the hotel room to pacify Little Boy will only make him go insane with lust for more craptastic $3.18 Disney TV shows and make him cry all evening in withdrawal.
3. DSL is one of the worst technical innovations of the last 400 years and should be put out of its misery with an extremely large-caliber weapon. Also, I cannot think of a suitable acronym for what DSL should stand for, though “Dong Sucking Lousiness” or “Defintely Shitty Linkage” come to mind.
4. Bad moving companies are very, very bad, but good ones are very, very good. We were lucky to have the latter. (Added so you don’t think everything was awful.)
5. No matter how many boxes you’ve opened, there’s more to follow.
If only I could say the same about my blog entries.
Recently seen on the citizens review board of Amazon.com, regarding three different volumes:
The popularity of this book stupifies me—do people like it because they think they are supposed to?
This book was a peice [sic] o’… you know and wasn’t worth the time or effort to read.
Classic or not, I don’t care for this book.
These reviews are for major, major bestsellers, and so perhaps you were thinking they refered to the latest Tom Clancy, James Patterson, Nora Roberts, or Harold Robbins, even though the old cokehead died a few years ago.
But no. These (real) reviews are for Goodnight Moon, Harold and the Purple Crayon, and Babar, respectively. Yes, classic children’s books. These reviewer-parents say the books are of inferior literary quality and are not appropriate for our nation’s youth—I kid you not.
Things only get better from there. Curious George is panned because it promotes cruelty to animals. Other experts slam The Very Hungry Caterpillar because it teaches children to overeat and telling kids that butterflies emerge from cocoons (as opposed to moths) teaches bad science.
Worst of all, my all-time favorite children’s book is taken to the woodshed because it 1) promotes anarchy; 2) will scare children because animals in the book talk and are human-sized; and 3) isn’t about promoting imagination or literacy but is instead a subtle examination of id versus superego and the dynamism of the ego.
I chanced upon this gems of critical insight after searching for a training potty for Baby-Tot, being that he keeps saying things like "made a poo-poo" and "I’ve got a wee-wee! I’ve got a wee-wee!" Modern parent and writer that I am, I also bought several "how-to" books on helping kids learn how to take a proper dump, and ultimately landed upon the reviews mentioned above.
What is perhaps more odd than the reviews themselves—hating Dr. Seuss is like hating ice cream—is why anyone would bother. Does one really think their review will stop people from buying (and their children loving) Cars and Trucks and Things That Go? In my earlier, feckless days of youth (I was in my mid-thirties), I would post an occasional review on Amazon, mostly of music and movies. I once slammed a well-known music album that I likened to the vomitus that emerges after doing battle with a bad batch of raw seafood.
This is your id on drugs
Why did I embark on this endeavor of nastiness, full well knowing that it would not make one iota of difference in the greater artistic consciousness of the world? I can’t say for sure, but I remember feeling a distinct sense of self-righteousness when considering the work in question: These people love a total piece of donkey dung! They are deluded! They are wrong! I am right! But at least I had reasons for these (admittedly) juvenile criticisms.
The beauty of the Internet is that it gives a voice to all, and the horror of the Internet is that it gives a voice to all. You don’t have to go farther than the comments section of most news Web sites to see the bile; if you really want to feel the hate, go to a sports Web site, scroll the comments section, and see why fans of a certain sports team are inherently inferior to fans of a competing sports team based on the fact the former fans were born in Chicago and the latter in St. Louis.
I carry no brief against the amateur critic, but when some nimrod weighs in and slams, say Great Expectations ("The fool author made it up as he went along") or One Hundred Years of Solitude ("Don’t waste your time or money"), it brings the death of literary fiction that much closer. These claims are in the minority, of course, but that somebody felt their empty thoughts were even worth writing down shows some serious hostility to some of the greatest works of literature, like, ever.
That was exquisitely awful
This is not a grad student expounding on a blog or a well-read civilian actually having insights into the book in question. This is like Rush Limbaugh saying waterboarding is not torture or Wall Street bankers don’t earn enough. Or, more to the point, this is just like Rush Limbaugh.
So if you don’t have anything intelligent to say, just shut the fuck up. Which I really, really wish I could make happen to Rush Limbaugh.
When the lovely and fetching (and brilliant) Voix asks me to blog, how can I say no? Even if she wrote this, like, six months ago.
There’s some good reasons I haven’t blogged, and some not-so-good ones as well, and I will dispense of the latter before getting to the good stuff.
Bad reasons for not blogging: I haven’t blogged because the Cubs are the Cubs, because I’m still mad about Bernie Madoff, because I’m being disappointed in advance for President Obama, because Republicans still suck ass, because I’m really unhappy with my keyboard, and, finally, I haven’t blogged because a Irish wolfhound looked me in the face and told me if I ever blogged again, he would have to kill me.
Real reason for not blogging: For the first time in my life, I have a Blackberry.
This came with my new job, which I was fortunate enough to land in February and start full-time in March. I will not go into more detail about it save to say it is an excellent position, they’re working me harder than a Marine grunt in basic training, and I’m grateful to be working, as grateful a man who has regained the ability to walk.
So there’s that. Also, we have to move 800 miles away in July as part of my new employment. "We" being me, Wife, and Baby-Tot (ne Baby). We were in my new city of employment a couple of weeks ago and signed a lease for an apartment, thus "sealing" "the deal."
(Anybody in the market for an overpriced, underloved, and never-will-be-purchased-in-time place to live? Mention Bookfraud.com to the realtor and I’ll give you a 3 percent discount. That’s three-fucking-percent! Off a place nobody is ever going to buy!
My vote for Obama is paying off already!)
Also, my mother was visiting us in April, took a spill and her temple introduced itself to the sidewalk, ended up going to the ER, got stitches, had trouble breathing later that night, went back to the hospital at 2 a.m. in an ambulance that got lost, got a buttload of chest scans, found out that she had pneumonia, and ended up extending her stay a week. A week in an out-of-town hospital, in isolation, no less.
(Did I ever mention that pneumonia was what felled my father? You might imagine I had a little stress no-sleep thing going there.)
After I started my new job—I’m really grateful to have it, did I mention that?—I became just a mite scared of blogging, if only of my new bosses discovering it. (Why they would suddenly discover it is beyond me, but I still had the fear.) Also, a minor point: I’ve been working nights, weekends, and sections of the morning marked by hours lower than "6."
Waldman: Loves Michael Chabon this much
And if it was not just my inability to find the hours to sleep, not to mention blog, I was about as active in the blogosphere overall as Ayelet Waldman is withdrawn and sane, which is to say, not at all.
I don’t know how much more of this I can take, honestly. If I loved Wife more than Baby-Tot, like a certain writer currently in the news, then I guess I could put the little bugger up for adoption, which would have the copasetic effect of giving me time to shower, cut down on the number of communicable diseases I contract, and save expontentially on the food bill. But when I entertain such ideas, Baby-Tot will do something like say "Delicious!" when eating dinner, will ask to hear Yo-Yo Ma, or runs up and gives me a hug, his arms wrapped around my knees.
Plan B it is, then. Baby-Tot will stay.
Maybe I’ll write something in another week, or another six months, or something. Don’t stay up for me.
The blight known as Facebook has now foisted upon us the "25 Random Things" chain letter, in which people post 25 random factoids about themselves, and tag other Facebook friends to do the same. That bloggers have been doing this type of thing for the last five years appears not to have impeded the popularity of of "25 Random Things."
Being that a) I was tagged, b) I try to avoid Facebook like light beer and Republicans, and c) I think everyone is getting sick of this, I post my own list, all things that are bad, humiliating, or have other negative connotations. Except for two, one of which involves the greatest TV theme song ever played.
25 RANDOM THINGS ABOUT ME (ALL TRUE) YOU WOULD JUST AS RATHER NOT KNOW
1. The first time I got high, I urinated on something, but I can’t remember what it was.
2. I used to listen to Simon & Garfunkle’s "Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine" on my parent’s turntable and imagine I was on television singing it, dancing and gesticulating to my imagined, adoring life studio audience. I continued this behavior from age eight until sometime last year.
3. I’ve gotten in three car accidents, but only two were my fault, and one was when I was 18, so it doesn’t count.
4. My sister made fun of my lousy efforts me during my quixotic quest to be a soccer goalie in high school. In anger, I threw a piece of chicken at her. Like most of my athletic endeavors, it missed the mark.
5. The closest I’ve come to dying, metaphorically speaking, was when a friend and I were driving to a basketball game in high school when a cop pulled us over—my friend was about to light up a joint in the car. The cop, enraged we did not stop immediately, searched the car, padded me down, and gave me three tickets. He didn’t find my friend’s pot. But I saw my life crumbling before my eyes.
6. When I was a teenager, I was a total loser when it came to asking girls out on dates.
7. When I became an adult, I remained a total loser when it came to asking women out on dates.
8. Codicil to #6: Masturbation.
9. Codicil to #7: Masturbation.
10. The number of inappropriate women I’ve slept with far exceeds the number who were actually appropriate. If you’re reading this, and I’ve had sex with you, that means you were definitely appropriate.
11. Once, when The Who were on tour back in the 1980s, they tried to make a stop in a city I was living, but the only night they could play, Billy Joel had booked a concert at the only suitable arena. Joel, who could have moved his concert a day, refused, making 12,000+ wieners happy in the metropolitan area. So if you think Billy Joel is better than The Who, I can’t be friends with you, and I think you suck.
Joel: don’t get me started
12. I have urinated on the basin of my toilet in order to clean it. Try it some time—the remove the blackish buildup from three months of not cleaning, aim right for the heart of the stain.
13. You’ve entered middle age when you have to trim your ear hair. Not that I would know.
14. Next to deaths in my family, the worst two days of my life was when I was eight and my puppy ran away. I cried non-stop over a weekend. I’ll never forget opening the front door and seeing a person in the neighborhood holding my dog. That was probably the happiest moment of my life. The following year, she had puppies, and she lived another 16 years.
15. If you try to tell me about the superiority of cats to dogs, not only will I question your judgment, but your sanity.
16. Jobs that I’ve had include: horse-carriage driver, costumed pizza parlor mascot, pizza delivery driver, McDonald’s indentured servant, camp counsellor, civil servant, cafeteria worker, window washer, hospital policy manual writer, the guy who tries to sell you an apartment when you walk into the front office, pseudo-software writer (fired), twice a busboy for a day (fired from first place, didn’t show up for my second day of work at the latter), survey taker, and temp office worker (I tested out at 90 wpm). Amazingly, none of the jobs panned out as a career.
17. I would tell you the time I was most humiliated, but there are far too many candidates to choose from.
18. There are people in my extended family I don’t like very much. You know who you are, except that I don’t talk to you and you don’t know Bookfraud exists.
19. I have nicknames for bowel movements, including Thunderdump; All-Star Crapathon; Human Shitstorm; Laying a Lincoln Log; Tossing the Whole Bakery, not Just a Loaf.
My favorite, however, has a literary pedigree: Turdgantua.
20. My formula for life: (Times Having Sex*Number of Partners2)+Money When You Die+Number of Children Who Don’t Hate You5/(Number of Major Disappointments Involving Women, Money and Publishing+Hospital Visits3)+(Years in Therapy*Money Spent on Therapy). If your number is > 1 when you die, you’ve had a successful life.
21. I watched so much television growing up that I knew each night’s network schedule. As a result, I do not speak a foreign language, play an instrument, cook,mountain climb or participate in any activity that entails paying any attention for more than 15 seconds. However, I know what "Book ‘em, Danno" means.
Also, I will say without equivocation: the theme song and title credits from "Hawaii Five-0" are the greatest in television history. I mean, that song totallykicks ass. And the tracking shot when they zoom in on Jack Lord at light speed is totally badass. Totally.
I will look for any excuse whatsoever to run this
22. One of my grandmothers was a country Baptist girl who got a nursing degree and made something out of herself. But I was sometimes ashamed of her, and didn’t want her around my friends out of fear she’d say something embarrassing.
23. I have visited blogs because the subject was sexual. I’ve visited porn sites for the same reason, believe it or not.
24. On more than one occasion, I have reduced someone to tears.
Ah…just what the hell are you doing here, anyway? Wearin’ that fancy suit ‘n piece a’ silk ‘ya neck?
Oh, that. I got my ass fired from the place where I worked for over a decade.
Blimey, I understand. It’s just that we don’t get too many older ‘uns from the 21st Century here. ‘Specially those who sound like they come over from the colonies.
The United States hasn’t been a colony of England for over 200 years. And I don’t understand the dynamics of the space-time continuum myself.
What the ‘ell are you talkin’ about?
Oh, I meant, "I don’t understand the dynamics of the space-time continuum meeself, sir."
That’s better, laddie. Oliver Twist, it is?
I’ve been called worse. Of course, I’m not a fictional character or metaphor for a street urchin.
Stop talkin’ in ya’ fancy-pants Cambridge talk! Get the feck out of here, you slimy Yank!
Just can I have something to eat? It will serve as a metaphor for feeding my hunger for approval, now that I’ve been unemployed for several months.
Off with ‘ya, I say!
A week later…
You sure have a funny way about you. What’s with all the fucked-up dance moves?
Why, I’m the Artful Dodger.
I hate the Dodgers. They swept the Cubs in the playoffs. Get the fuck out of my face.
What? I’m gonna teach you the ways of the streets, m’boy.
Do I look like I need your help?
As a ‘atter of fact, you look a bit downtrodden. There’s a stain on your scarf.
What is it with you people and ties? And that stain is soup. From the orphanage. But I’m not an orphan. I’m Bookfraud, 21st Century Writer and victim of the financial malaise gripping the world.
Financial crisis, you say? Why, I know just the bloke to help ‘ya! He’s a Jew!
Guinness as Obi-Yid Kenobi
Don’t tell me—his name is Fagan, he has an enormous hook nose, and he makes Shylock look like Jesus.
Egads, the man reads minds! How ya’ know?
I was an English major, what else?
Upstairs in a hidden attic, the Artful Dodger leads Bookfraud to a dark corner where a deformed old man with a nose the size of Queen Victoria’s left buttock is counting his money.
Stay back, I say! Stay in the light where I can see ya!
Uh, OK. How come I have a feeling I already know you?
Shat up, ya’ pathetic ragamuffin!
I’m 44-years old. Do I look like a "ragamuffin"?
Well, blimey, you are a bit on the old side to be doing this type of work.
I don’t steal stuff, if that’s what you’re talking about. Even if I wanted to pick pockets for you, I’ve got the manual dexterity of an office chair.
What?
Just forget it, old man. I’m not going to steal for you. I’m a writer and I’m looking for a job.
A writer? No wonder ‘ya don’t ‘ave a job! Nobody knows how to read, everyone knows that. And if you did read, why do you need to hire someone to write for ‘ya? It’s bloody stupid, I say.
I guess things were the same in the 1850s as in 2009.
You do look like you shouldn’t be here. What you same your name was?
Bookfraud—it’s a pseudonym.
You do fraud on books? You’ll fit just nicely ’round here, just nicely!
No, I—
You a regular ‘ookkeeper with a crooked streak to ya? We could make so much more with you ’round.
No, no, I chose the name because…oh, never mind. Let’s just say I’m not a crooked bookeeper…crooked bookkeeping…why does that ring a…hey—now I recognize you!
Oh, don’t tell me you’re with the police? I never done nothing illegal in my life!
You’re supposed to be Fagan, Dickens’ anti-Semitic character in Oliver Twist!
What are you talkin’ about? I don’t know any Dickens, but me name is Fagan—
You’re not Fagan! You’re Bernie Madoff! Shit! You’ve done more to set back Jews than anyone since Barry Manilow! I hate you! You’re the reason I’m going to reattach my foreskin!
Off with ‘ya! Get out of my attick, you non-interest-paying traitor!
With pleasure! I hate you, Madoff! You’ve given anti-Semites around the world more reason to hate me! They hate me even more than I hate me! Thanks a lot, you fucking wanker!
Bernie sucks
Why, you…people gave me their money, you buffoon! I only took from other Jews! They were just too stupid to question the returns—
Shut the fuck up! I’m outta here. But I have one question.
I like football as much as the next guy—probably more than the average fan, in fact. I covered my college team for the school newspaper, and still follow them with some fervor. And, being that my best friend in high school’s father worked for the Chicago Bears, I got tickets to games and other assorted ephermera (on which I will elaborate later).
Walter Payton, the late, great Bears running back, is one of my few true sports heroes. I can name the starting lineup of the 1985 Bears, which was one of the greatest NFL teams ever. Some of my fondest memories have to do with football.
So it is not the game of professional football I hold a brief. It is the SUPER BOWL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Today’s SUPER BOWL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! leaves me flat, unmoved, uncaring. For it is no longer a football game, no longer a bunch of oversized men headed for multiple joint replacements slamming into each other. It is our own secular holiday. It is the most-watched, most-advertised event in the United States, making the ratings for Obama’s election and inauguration look like a 3 a.m. weight-loss infomercial.
It is a the source of parties, celebration, sorrow.
It is the pinnacle of human achievement.
It is the SUPER BOWL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
say it again, with feeling:
SUPER BOWL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(I have a specific image in mind for this. A muscled, bare-chested man, arms raised to the sky, beseeching the gods to grant the SUPER BOWL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! to mortals. Kind of like Achilles’ screaming at Zeus, or me screaming at my computer when eats a document, minus the muscles and bare chest .)
Now, this is not to judge those of you attending pre-game parties, watching the game for the commercials, football fans interested in the game, or if you are actually a Pittsburgh or Arizona fan. Nor any of you to watch the post-modern "bowl within a bowl" like Bud Bowl, Lingerie Bowl, Puppy Bowl, or Heroin Bowl. Have fun, get drunk, don’t make a pass at your boss’s wife.
That kind of minor innocence is lost on the legion of sportswriters, TV "analysts," programming executives, and any other person with a stake in promoting damn thing. There have been millions of words spilled about the game, both in print and television, micro-analyzing something worth about 10 minutes of pregame.
For it is then it morphs from merely a big game to SUPER BOWL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Hype isn’t even the right word for it: deification is more like it.
If you ever think that some people do not take this seriously, I submit to you the following:
I don’t know what is worse: this fan’s bathetic response to the collapse of his beloved Giants, or his unfortunate resemblance to Jonah Hill.
OK, OK, enough of the post-modernist, pseudo-intellectual, uninteresting blather. Here’s the real reason I’m writing this: Pat Summerall, and an incident that illustrates this hot, overhyped mess much better than my hot, overhyped hyperventilating.
For those of you too young or unlikely to have seen Summerall, he is an ex-player who was an NFL sports announcer for CBS and FOX for years, having reached some modicum of fame, particularly with his work with John Madden. Summerall was known for his laconic, terse delivery: "Montana drops back in the pocket…to Rice…touchdown 49ers." He had the type of voice that lent itself to this kind of thing, and was actually quite good at it.
In any case, because of my best friend’s father, I was able to attend the NFC Championship game the year of the glorious ‘85 Bears. As part of the package, I got to attend an NFL party the evening before. It was quite the swank affair, with a band, open bar, ice sculptures. Impressive to a college kid like myself.
Among the luminaries attending the party were Pete Rozell, the NFL commissioner, Madden, and Summerall, who would call the game the next afternoon. It was January in Chicago, and the forecast for the next day’s game was well below freezing. But Summerall was dressed like his name dictated the weather: lemon khakis, a white buttondown shirt with open collar, and a cream sportsjacket with thick green tartan stripes. It was as if he were stuck in 1974, about to step on a plane to Bermuda.
I approached Summerall, thinking, what the hell, this guy’s famous, he’s by himself, why not chat him up? Standing alone, Summerall was holding a drink of an amber hue and staring at the scene between sips. I introduced myself, and said I was the guest of B_____. Summerall glanced at me, nodding slightly, saying nothing. My friend’s father had been a sportswriter in a prior life, and I said I was thinking about becoming one professionally as well. I said that B_______ was kind of a role model.
Summerall: You too
This seemed to stir Summerall, for he looked at me with heroic intent. There was no gleam in his eye, nothing but stoic earnestness. He then turned away and stared into the distance.
"If you follow B_______’s footsteps," he said, "you too will be a champion."
And then he walked away to refresh his drink, his tartan sportsjacket flapping in his wake.
Those were the only words Pat Summerall said to me. It was the greatest, weirdest moment of my life. So as you plunge your chip into your salsa, slam down your eighth beer, or begin to cry like Jonah Hill above, remember to follow B______’s footsteps. You too, will be a champion.
Great. I just updated Wordpress, and now all the comments are gone. Technology giveth…
Long before getting food poisoning last Sunday night and its subsequent vomitus Monday morning, before there was Sarah Palin or "Obama Girl," before Baby had been conceived or Bookfraud had made its debut, before Steve Bartman had his date with infamy, before the non-plague of Y2K or the real plague known as "Bush Cheney 2000," even before Girlfriend became Wife, I saw a Neil LaBute film called "Your Friends and Neighbors."
Besides seeing Ben Stiller with a goatee, "Your Friends and Neighbors" was notable for the music accompanying the title sequence: disturbing, basso profundo violence of what sounded like a string quartet whose instruments were on ‘roids. It was loud, cacophonous, and was the most memoriable aspect of the movie (other than Jason Patric playing football with a baby doll).
Move ahead 10 years, to Saturday, 36 hours prior to consuming the extremely bad scallops that led to a 5:30 a.m. technicolor yawn. A friend of Wife’s is a cellist, and upon learning that Baby is about a music-besotted 21-month old as can be, graciously lugged her instrument to our home and gave Baby a concert that included a Bach cello suite, "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," and several cat-death notes created when Baby tugged on the strings.
For some reason, I thought of "Your Friends and Neighbors" and the soundtrack. The cellist friend didn’t know what I was talking about (though we did note that a group she was in and Kronos Quartet both had covered "Purple Haze").
Following further research that day, I finally discovered the source of the music after a decade. It was a trio who play heavy metal on the cello.
Yes, that you read that correctly.
Apocalyptica (see pictures above and below) are three classically trained cellists (I imagine there’s no other kind) plus a drummer. Of course, they’d have to be from Finland.
Though I am not familiar with Apocalyptica’s entire body of work, and will not become familiar with Apocalyptica’s entire body of work in this or any other lifetime, they are known for playing covers of Metallica songs, including "Enter Sandman," the song from "Your Friends and Neighbors" that had perplexed me all these years.
Even longer before I had seen this movie, I had written in a stupdendously bad novel (one of three stupendously bad novels that have flowed from my fingers) a scene involving a tuba quartet:
“Gerard’s Tuba Quartet No. 3, ‘The dance of the piglets’” the program read. “A T.U.B.A. command performance.” Yves Gerard’s third Tuba quartet, The dance of the piglets, c.1989, represents a return to form for the great French composer. It reflects Gerard’s obsession with livestock and the deconstruction of agriculture as metaphor, a theme reflected also in his Tuba Concerto in C-major (the “Farmer St. Jean” Concerto) and his famed “Barnyard suite.”
I don’t repeat these silly lines to show the craptastic nature of my writing, but to illustrate that no matter what I or anyone else writes, reality will trump it. Philip Roth’s famous screed that fiction writers cannot compete with the news of the day ("The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist") is made flesh each day: reality beggars the writer’s imagination.
Look at this picture; try not to laugh
This is really why I like to blog, not only to comment on the literary life, because given my literary successes, this would have been a short blog indeed. It’s things like Apocalyptica—I mean, if I had made up such a thing and put it in a short story, the derision from my fiction workshop would have been palpable.
After several months of unemployment, things are looking better. I’ve got a few job leads and some steady freelance work. The worst president since Harding (Nixon included) is gone. Baby is healthy and happy, and Wife hasn’t left me (yet) for the gainfully employed. It’s only a month before Spring Training and the cycle of happiness-despair known as the Chicago Cubs 2009 Season.
In other words, I don’t have a reason to wash myself in the bathos of self-pity, a state that allows me wide leeway not to blog, not to write. You see, I’ve tried to blog; I even wrote some heartfelt encomiums to our new president. But the writing wasn’t any good, and it wasn’t anything you couldn’t have read in 8 billion other blogs.
It’s because of things like Apocalyptica that remind me just why I do this.
So let us give thanks that Obama is president, and greater thanks for heavy metal cello. Rock on, Eicca, Pavvo, Perttu, and Mikko.
They said that while the stress of not drawing a paycheck might wear down my fragile psyche, it would be worth the short-term financial burden. For not having to clock in each morning would afford me the time to reflect, to meditate, to discern the true nature of one’s self.
They said I would have time to write. They said I would have time to read. They said I would have more time with Baby.
Of course, they lied.
"They" being friends, family, career counselors, headhunters. To a person, they all said that while getting the axe sucks ass, at least I’ll have the time to catch up with life.
Apparently, all of these people are employed.
In the 21st Century, looking for a job takes far more time than actually working at one. It is more time-consuming than the pursuit of sex, reading Tolstoy in Russian, or trying to find the perfect pasta lifter. Looking for a job is not something you can do in one’s spare time, like, say, blogging or relieving oneself.
Add the fact that jobs are about as plentiful as Mormons in favor of gay marriage, and I am an extremely unhappy fellow.
They also say that a project expands to the amount of time allotted to it, and for this, they are correct. The ironic thing about searching for work in this Internet-dominated, 24-7 environment, is that what makes finding job leads so easy makes actually getting a job so difficult.
Take job hunting in the Dark Ages, when I was 22 and a freshly minted college graduate, in the late 1980s. One interviewed with companies who sent recruiters to campus. You found a few companies you liked, and sent your resume off and waited. If you were a loser, you scoured the newspaper’s help wanted section.
The Dark Ages
Or, in my case, I sent out my resume and writing samples to several newspaper editors, one of which apparently laughed at my clips so hard he suffered a seizure and inadvertently hired me.
These days, it’s not so simple. Looking for a job is like starting a relationship. You are completely paranoid about every single aspect of the search. You obsess about the things you said, and worry about the things you didn’t say.
Did I apply to the right job? Should I update my resume on Monster.com? How many contacts can I add to LinkedIn? What additional research should I do on Company X, in addition to the 18 volumes I’ve already downloaded?
Even as I write these words, I think of e-mail to write and answer, Web searches to do, resumes to upload. And that doesn’t even count the calls I need to make and the meetings I’ve been trying to schedule.
Is there an echo chamber in here?
Now, I know everybody here wants to know what I think of Roberto Bolano’s 2666, the death of the literary best-seller, and the sorry state of short fiction. You want to know about what I think of our nation electing an African-American president (holy fuck! It actually happened!), the long-term prospects for the Democrats, my learned opinion on Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.
It’s not that I don’t have opinions, or that about 9,334,222,798 other blogs have written more and better words on these topics than I could ever hope to do. It’s that I haven’t had the time. I mean, literally. Anybody reading this who has a blog and who I haven’t visited or commented — that would be all of you — I don’t apologize, but rather say, give me a job, please.
Not because I simply need the money (I do). It’s because I need a life.
This is less a blog entry than an exercise in that thing called writing, which I’ve done precious little of in the past three weeks.
Fun times in Bookfraud-land:
Trapped in a conference room with a nice, perky lady, a moribund old guy wearing a hearing aid, and a librarian who gives "cliched" new meaning.
A poor schlub yakking for ten minutes about a computer patch management system.
Half the room clearing out after lunch.
The worst computer tutorial in the history of the world.
Suicidal thoughts.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, this was my introduction to "outplacement services," or a three-month tour of duty that’s supposed to help me find a new job. My previous employer paid for this service, though I would have preferred that they had given me the cash outright.
I arrive early one morning, find a seat in a crowded conference room, and think about ways I can leave gracefully. Enter the perky lady, once an airline employee (no, not a flight attendant), who will be our instructor for the morning.
Our instructor introduces us to the office managing partner, an older fellow who reeks of wisdom and Fixodent, for a pep talk. He tells us that he knows what it’s like to be unemployed, for he’s had to change jobs four times in his life, but there’s positions out there, if you know how to look. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack, he says. Though with this economy, "the haystack is twice as big," a comment that effectively reverses the happy caffeinating effects of my Starbucks in a millisecond. I look around the room for a samurai sword to impale myself upon, with no luck.
Then, all the enthusiasm sucked out of the room, we go to work.
The morning features a couple of highlights. First, as a matter of "defining" our skills, the patch-management dude talks about a work-related "challenge," and how he overcame it. How any of this will help anybody find a job I don’t know, and the homunculus residing in my left temple starts tossing pain-tinged darts at my brain.
Not before or after: instead of
Later, everybody has to write a two- or three-sentence explanation of who you are and what you want to do. Stupidly, I volunteer to read mine.
As I should have expected, it’s ritual humiliation. Double for me, as I’m supposed to be an expert in the art of communication. It’s not punchy enough. It’s got too much information. It just sucks.
We break for lunch, when I wander around the lobby for 45 minutes in a catatonic state of Faulknerian realization that my job is gone left for parts unknown for budgetcuttingpinheads lopping off the department, the interstices of brain and soul and bodyspirit, the accursed soil, bookfraud without direction is bookfraud without faith without hope without…
After a security guard slaps me, I find a sandwich shop and whomp down a lunch of indeterminate matter (carbo, protein, sliced vegetables) and a Diet Coke, then return to a classroom now one-half full, the rest of our former classmates apparently going to job interviews, finishing that novel, or having sex with tranny prostitutes. Then, the fun begins.
The outplacement agency has a members-only Web site to which we will have access. An older, bespectacled woman who looks as if she stumbled out of the dictionary’s entry for "librarian" addresses us, which is appropriate, since she’s the company librarian. Her hair is curled in a helmet, her pantsuit is bright and generous, her shoes are, of course, sensible. The librarian is wearing a pin in the form of a jack-o-lantern, which I somehow feel is a bad sign.
And it is. The librarian gives a presentation on how to use the Web site. Apparently, the presentation has been geared towards first-graders. The librarian tells us how to sign up. How to choose a password. That you have to fill the fields with asterisks and if you want to see another part of the Web site, click on its link. Now in an extremely ungrateful (and unfair) mood, all I can think of is, "How come this idiot has a job and I’m unemployed?"
They’re not lining up to vote
After our computer savant is done, we are released from purgatory. I’m about as fired up as a Frenchman, Jew, or a person with a college degree contemplating a Sarah Palin presidency. It’s grim.
Things will get better. Two days later, I meet my counselor, not the perky not-a-former-stewardess lady. This person is calm, empathetic, smart, and has several excellent ideas. I actually have some hope here that I might find a decent-paying position.
Then, as I ride the elevator downstairs, it occurs to me. I know what I’m going to do. I envision a job in which I have to work hard, hustle, be creative, but make gargantuan amounts of money. It’s completely legal, and I don’t need to get anyone’s permission or even get hired to do it.
I’m going to become Baby’s talent manager! He’s cute, he’s got a fabulous smile, and has an excellent vocabulary for an 18-month old, including "cheese," "yellow," "boat," "bear," and says "clock" and "flag" without the "l"s. As they say on "American Idol," we’re going to Hollywood!
A number of you perceptive folk have asked me, "Bookfraud, it’s been weeks since you posted. What the fuck?"
For this I have no answer, except to tell you I was laid off last week after 11 fun years at my job.
Yay capitalism.
The following post is far longer than my usual fare, but I feel weirdly entitled to do so, as my job, retirement money, and what reason I had for getting up each morning have now evaporated.
It was a Saturday morning, and I was about 10 years old, furitively watching Memphis Mid-South Wrestling. This show was strictly prohibited in the Bookfraud household, but my father was out of town, and my mother was watching my brother and sister in parts unknown.
A wrestler of great local import was addressing the camera. "I’ll wrestle anyone, anytime, anywhere!" he said to a hapless emcee holding a microphone with an unsteady hand.
"And that includes…" the emcee said.
"Yeah, and that includes the heavyweight champion of the world — Muhammad Ali!"
"And I understand you have an interview with Ali you want to show."
"That’s right, Lance. Now, I haven’t seen this yet, but I guarantee you that I will whip this man in the ring — I don’t care who he is!"
Lance grimaced and nodded, as if he’d seen this type of ridiculous gamesmanship before. And he had. The wrestler, Jerry "The King" Lawler, had a long list of local enemies — Jackie Fargo, Tojo Yamamoto, Dutch Mantell, Bill "Superstar" Dundee. Every week on Memphis Mid-South Wrestling, Lawler, who was currently playing a "heel," would yammer and rant about he was going to put Fargo in the hospital or Dundee out of wrestling.
But this was not Jerry Lawler challenging Dutch Mantell, a man whose body hair could support a wig factory, or Tojo Yamamoto, who was actually Hawaiian. This was Muhammad Ali — The Greatest. The Greatest of All Time.
"Let’s take a look," Lance said, gesturing to the camera.
Ali was standing at an airport gate, wearing a gray trenchcoat buttoned to the neck. It was a couple of months after he’d regained his title by knocking out George Foreman. A small, elderly man with white hair but deft movements held a microphone, standing in front of Ali. (Sadly, it was not Howard Cosell.)
"We’re here with Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight champion of the world," the man said in a nasal voice that sounded as if he was chewing gravel. "Muhammad, first of all, congratulations on reclaiming your title in October–"
"That’s right, Leo. I shocked the world again, didn’t I?"
"You certainly did, Muhammad. Now, I understand that another professional wrestler, Jerry Lawler, has sent you a challenge to meet him in the ring."
Of course, I had seen Ali before on television and in the papers, but today he looked benign, his face a little cheekier than I had remembered.
“Well, let me tell you something, Leo,” began The Greatest, his voice laconic and knowing. “Every day I get telegrams and phone calls and letters from ordinary folk sayin’ they want me to fight them. Now, I ain’t afraid of any man, but I don’t want to fight no Jerry Lawler King or whatever he says he is. I’m sure he’s a good rassler and all that, but I’ve done finished fighting with them rasslers.”
“O.K. Muhammad,” Leo said in all earnestness, "but Lawler says that you’re scared to go down to Memphis, Tennessee, and fight him. He says you fight him and he’ll beat you, and you’ll no longer be the greatest.”
And then came that grin, wide as a ship’s berth and teeth that seemed to shine on cue. I got shivers.
“Awww, Leo, don’t be givin’ me no jive now.” Ali’s face lit up, his eyes spread wide.
“No, no, Muhammad, he really said that.”
“Well, let me tell you something. Is that camera filming me so that Jerry Lawler King can see me? Will he be able to see this here film? Good. Now everybody watching this, stop talking NOW. Pay attention. I ain’t afraid of nobody, and I’ll fight any man, any time, because I am the greatest fighter, not just of this time, but of all times.
“Is this going out to Jerry Lawler? Do you hear me Jerry Lawler? You think you know something about boxing, Jerry Lawler, you big ugly hairy wrassler? You don’t know a damn thing about steppin’ in the ring with a pro boxer. And I am a pro!
"You’ve been reading about boxing in all the wrong places. If you want to know any damn thing about boxing, don’t see no Jimmy the Greek, don’t read no Ring magazine, you must come to me, Muhammad Ali. Like I said after I whupped Big George in Kinsasha, Zaire, I am the scholar of boxing! You just some rassler! I am the greatest fighter of all times! I told you all that I was the greatest when I whupped Sonny Liston, and I’m still the greatest!”
Ali crept towards the camera, Leo gamely stepping forward with him. Ali’s features came more into view: round face and bushy eyebrows. He had a wide nose with flashing nostrils but what really got me were his eyes, heavy with intent.
“The goverment took my title away because of my reglion, but God, Allah, is more powerful than any government! I was ready for the Rumble in the Jungle! With Allah’s help I beat big, bad George, and got back the title they took away from me. And everybody—EVERYBODY—said I was gonna get whupped, he was too big, too strong, too powerful and I was gonna get hurt!
"But you see what happened? Allah will make any man, even George Foreman, look like a baby! I told you I would knock out big George! I told you I would shock the world when I beat Sonny Liston! You all said I coudn’t do it! You said I was through! But I’m fast, I’m pretty, I’m the heavyweight champ-ee-on of the world! I must be the greatest!”
Now Ali was throwing punches, slashing uppercuts, tight roundhouse rights, and that famous left jab faster than an eyeblink. Despite his buttoned overcoat, there was a fluidity to Ali’s movements that was breathtaking: one could even tell that he was moving his feet beneath the camera’s range.
“Jerry Lawler, you ain’t nuthin’! Nuthin’! You think you so bad? Let me tell you something about people who are baaaaaaad. I’ve fought Sonny Liston, Floyd Patterson, Jerry Quarry, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, and whupped them all! They’re baaaaaad men! And I beat them all! All of them! Because I am badder! I shook up the world! I am the greatest, Jerry Lawer! I am the greatest fighter of all times! Of all times! OF ALL TIIIIIMES!”
Lawler and Russell: Childhood heroes take a fall
The tape ran out, and the TV went back to the studio: the audience — almost entirely white – had gone wild, laughing and screaming and clapping more furiously than they had for any match that I had seen. Jerry Lawler stood next to Lance Russell, his body angled to the camera; in my eyes, there was suddenly something vaguely inconsequential about him. Lance Russell shook his head, grinning, unable to contain something approaching glee. “Well, King, there you have it,” Lance said.
“Lance, let me tell you something. If Ali comes down here, I’ll show him who’s the King of professional wrestling.”
But it was too late. Lawler tried to keep his stature or even his dignity: he cast a I’m-the-meanest-son-of-a-bitch look at the audience and then at people watching at home. But it was too late. The audience knew it. The viewers knew it. Lawler knew it. Lance Russell knew it. I knew it.
“If Muhammad Ali is too chicken to come down and fight me—”
But his voice couldn’t be heard: the crowd was chanting, a one-word, two-syllable call that cast a spell upon me and made Jerry Lawler awash in resentment. “ALI! ALI! ALI!”
“Now listen here!” Lawler barked.
“ALI! ALI! ALI!”
“I want to say something here! If you rednecks—”
“ALI! ALI! ALI!”
And so it went for the next 20 seconds; Lawler would try to tell the audience to shut up, or say something about The Greatest, but the crowd would drown him out, each time hiking up the volume, as if in rejoinder. They cut to a commercial on auto transmissions.
I can’t really describe how radical a scene this was. This was Memphis, only six years after Martin Luther King Jr. had been assinated at the Lorraine Motel. This was Memphis, where you couldn’t spend a day without hearing the word "nigger." This was Memphis, rich with African-American history and thick with bigotry.
And you had a studio full of white, uneducated folk who wouldn’t look a black man in the eye giving Muhammad Ali their love and affection.
This was before I knew of Ali’s cruelty, of torturing Floyd Patterson in the ring for 13 rounds because Patterson called him Cassius Clay, of calling Joe Frazier an Uncle Tom and well before calling Frazier "a gorilla" for the Thrilla in Manila even after Frazier had once paid Ali’s hotel bill because he didn’t have the cash for it, of imitating punch-drunk Jerry Quarry long before Ali’s gift of gab had left him because of boxing-induced Parkinson’s syndrome.
I did not know that Ali had said, “Man, I ain’t got nothing against them Viet Cong” and he had made a stand of conscience that cost him his title, nor that he had four wives and that Angelo Dundee had called him a “pelvic missionary.” I did not know he had repudiated Malcom X under the orders of his spiritual leaders, nor that he later said he regretted that more than anything he had done. He had yet to lose to Leon Spinks and Larry Holmes; he had yet to drop out of the Nation of Islam and become a Muslim. I didn’t know that he’d beaten Sonny Liston and shocked the world. Angelo Dundee, Bundini Brown, the Louisville Syndicate, Elijah Muhammad—those were just words.
I simply saw the most charasmatic person alive, the most alive person alive, someone who Jerry Lawler could not begin to challenge in word nor deed.
There was something outside of my life that was greater, more interesting, more full of life. I needed to find out.
If not for the "Why I Really Write" series, I would title this blog entry "Caught in a Morass of Baseball, Politics, Economic Meltdown, and Mind-Melting Sleep Deprivation."
The Cubs, my team of personal preference, have the best record in the National League, and if they are not prohibitive favorites to reach the World Series, nothing less would entail a defeat of soul- and spirit-crushing dimensions. Being that this is the Cubs, I should prepare for said crushing.
I have also found solace in wasting time "following" the presidential elections, which is another way of saying that I’m surfing the ‘endlessly for 1) comfort in polls saying Obama is winning; 2) comfort in polls saying McCain is losing; and 3) any and all information on the hot mess known as Sarah Palin.
Did I tell you that after the last week’s economic events, I plan to retire when I die?
And for a kid who isn’t yet 18 months, Baby has quite a loud voice. (He also seems to learn new word each day, much to his parents’ delight. None of the words are of the four-letter variety, much to my amazement, since he’s essentially mimicking me.)
Yes, these are excuses for the improper preparation precipitating piss-poor performance on this blog, not to mention the blogs of many others. They’re the same excuses I have for not writing, except in that case, I only have to lie to myself.
Sorry to have to do this, but let me tell you a little about my history of neuroses:
1. One night trying to sleep when I was about eight, I came to the horrifying realization that one day, my grandparents and parents would die, leaving me all alone in the cold, dark universe.
I started to cry, and my father came in to my room; between sobs, I told him of my overwhelming fear. My father explained as best he could that dying was part of life, and that nobody was going to die for a long, long time — certainly not him nor Mom. He gave me a hug and a kiss, and I soon went to sleep, comforted.
I daresay that if that was not one of the defining moments of my childhood, I certainly won’t forget it.
We’re gonna Zoom, Zoom, Zoom-I-Zoom (to my doom)
2. A couple of years after my father staunched my tears, he betrayed me. A children’s television show had debuted on the local public television station featuring a covey of young children as its stars, sort a local version of "Zoom." I harbored a secret desire to be one of the kids on the show. Unfortunately, I had let my father know in passing.
My mother, who was a budding musician at the time, wrote the theme song for the show, so we were invited to a fundraising party for the station. The director of the children’s show happened to strike up a conversation with my father as I stood next to him, and, much to my horror, my father said to him, "[Bookfraud] has something he’d like to say to you about being on the show."
We were standing near a wall with curtains, to where I promptly retreated. I mumbled something through the curtains about wanting to be on the kid’s program, which the director must have interpreted as, "This kid is insane."
3. Every time I asked out or tried to asking out a girl on a date: projecting calm, internalizing agony.
4. When I was in graduate school, I took an undergrad theater class in comedic acting as an elective. As part of the class, each student had to do a 15-minute stand-up routine before a live audience.
Suffice it to say that the five hours preceding my performance were some of the most agonizing minutes of my life. One can interpret this as mere stage fright or, perhaps, wish fulfillment. Despite the fact that my routine went smashingly well, I can’t say it’s was an experience I would want to repeat, despite the fact I loved being the center of attention.
Rock: Not neurotic
5. Also, consider all the rest of my neurotic embarrassing public moments, too many to recount in this space, though if you buy me a few beers and give me a shoulder to cry on, I’d be happy to share them.
If you don’t understand the gist of these anecdotes in relation to writing, you’re probably a well-adjusted, intelligent, and reasonably happy individual who is probably wildly rich and successful.
But if you do understand without further clarification the connection between one’s neuroses and writing, you’re probably a writer.
Congratulations. Or condolences. Whatever is appropriate.
Given the tone and tenor of this presidential campaign, I thought this would be the time to publish this entry.
Also, I don’t have anything else to post.
Being a "creative writer" with lots of "fans" and acolytes, people invariably want to know "Who are your influences?" If I’m in a buoyant mood, I’ll say "Faulkner, Ellison, Atwood, Dickens, etc."
If, as is more likely, I’m in a pissy, angry, enraged mood, about to kill myself or a conservative, I’ll say, "My influences are beer, sex, professional wrestling and extra-absorbent Pampers, and just go away, I hate stupid questions like that."
Actually, nobody has ever asked me about my literary influences, but if they did, I’d probably lie and give them the usual suspects, adding, at the end, "and of course, Chekov."
One name I might not mention is George Orwell, because he isn’t "literary" enough in some quarters, and also because I’ve read only 3 ½ of his books: 1984, Animal Farm, A Collection of Essays, and half of A Homage to Catalonia. And I read the first two books before I was 18, the third when in college, and the last half-volume when I was in my mid-20s.
His work all had its particular impact, but his masterpiece "Politics and the English Language" resonated on the tabula rasa of my young brain unlike few essays before or since.
In short, Orwell decried the decay of language in public discourse in "Politics." In order to hide the truth when it can’t be hidden, politicians and bureaucrats will turn to obfuscation via language. And when language goes bad, liberty will follow.
Torture: it’s not just for despots any more
Orwell lists several examples of bad writing, and then enumerates why they stink. But the key to the entire essay (at least for an impressionable 21-year-old) was just how language related to political argument, circa 1946:
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.
It’s an easy jump to the present.
Take, for instance, our current jokers running the White House and their attempt to hide the truth regarding torture. "Enhanced interrogation techniques."* "Black sites." "Extraordinary renditions." "Illegal combantants." These proclamations are bogus and designed to obscure the truth, and when the public accepts them at face value, you get monstrosities like Guantanamo, warrantless searches, Abu Ghraib, waterboarding, kidnapping, and out-and-out torture.
Or one can turn to the current election — oh, can you ever — and see lies being turned into "truths" through the currency of language. A know-nothing, incurious governor suddenly has "executive experience" that qualifies her for the vice presidency, for instance. Twisting the meaning of a phrase like "economic fundamentals." And so on.
Unfortunately, we’re fighting a losing battle. Falsehoods like "collateral damage" and "downsizing" have made it into the daily lexicon. Citizens blindly accept bogus language as long as it doesn’t challenge their preconceived notions of wrong and right. People are careless with language, and worse, they don’t seem to care if you make something plural with an apostrophe s, much less use euphemisms that hide meaning.
Waterboarding, skateboarding, what’s the difference?
Now, if I were a true intellectual, I would have repudiated Orwell as a overrated socialist hack, pointing to the ordinariness of his diction as a sign of his simplicity.
But I’m not smart enough to be considered an intellectual, and Orwell’s ideas are still rattling around my brain like an atom in a particle accelerator (or some other clichéd simile that Orwell would have loathed). Orwell may not have been an intellectual either, but he was a brilliant writer, and was so brutally honest as to be painful.
If it didn’t inspire me to pursue writing, Orwell’s essay changed how I view language and how I use it. I think about "Politics and the English Language" every time I write, even if I’m not aware of it.
*It has been pointed out that the Gestapo used the same phrase – "verschaerfte Vernehmung" — to describe their torture techniques.
I am really the last person on earth who should be writing this.
I can’t add to the blizzard of encomiums for the late David Foster Wallace, who died of an apparent suicide Friday night. I have read precious little of his work, had not met the man, and have no claim upon recognizing anyone’s greatness, even among those authors I have read widely and idolize.
And the title is a misnomer of sorts — it is not specifically because of Mr. Wallace’s genius that I am inspired to write, either in appreciation or disdain.
In short, I am woefully equipped to write about the man. But since I heard the news of this awful event, I’ve felt sick to my stomach. It’s as if someone I personally knew had hanged himself.
By all accounts, Wallace was a generous soul. Among many works he left behind, his now-famous commencement address to Kenyon College is a testament to his open-mindedness and degree of intellectualy honesty. His interviews, magazine articles and essays displayed a remarkable range and brainpower. His 2000 feature story on John McCain, "The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and the Shrub," is required reading for those following the 2008 presidential campaign.
Of course, his magnum opus, "Infinte Jest," is certainly one of the most well-read cerebral novels of all time. (You usually don’t get many people to read 1,000-page books with 100+ footnotes.) In a sense, he was the Thomas Pynchon of his generation, or Pynchon had been the David Foster Wallace of his generation. He displayed more literary talent and smarts in one short story — hell, in one page — than I could ever hope for in a career.
But, as mentioned above, I have no expertise in assessing Wallace’s life or literary production.
I have a little experience with depression, however, and the more I read of his life, the more depressed I have become. He published his first book at 24, won a MacArthur "genius" award at 35, and could write for any publication he desired. Wallace had a teaching position in California and was beloved by students and faculty.
Having it all was not enough. Wallace had struggled with depression for two decades, and the last episode was too much for him to bear. He was all of 46. Through all of his pain, he wrote. He persevered until he could no longer.
So I do not write because David Foster Wallace inspired me through his style, intellect, wit, or otherwise. It wasn’t because he could turn a simple feature story about tennis into a cross between Hunter S. Thompson and Derrida, considered one of the better pieces of sports journalism the past decade. Nor is it because of his unstilting committment to probity, his questioning of widely held truths and striving for something not confined within the boundaries of the page.
It was the fact that this man, so blessed with talent and the will to turn it into art, did this despite the agony that daily living could present to him. He didn’t just churn stuff out because of his depression, though he could have, and he didn’t quit writing because of his depression, though he could have and nobody would have questioned him.
He kept writing, and kept his work at the highest possible standard because, I imagine, truth mattered more than anything. We should all be so enamored.
Baby arose from sleep this morning bearing a cold. I use "arose" in a figurative sense, since he basically woke up five times during the night. Poor thing. Poor me.
No more politics in this space, I promise. No more extended comments (ignorant or otherwise) regarding the economy, either. Those will be deleted. I’m trying to tell a narrative here, OK?
Those who know me will see the obvious irony in the following.
The louder someone is, the less he usually has to say.
For instance, the quality of Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity’s argument is in inverse proportion to the number of times they interrupt guests and the volume of their voice, meaning they have nothing at all worth saying.
I learned this lesson in the fall of 1986, during my senior year of the large Midwestern university I attended.
My career as a scribbler started in college, where I wrote for the school paper. The school had many students who hailed from in and around New York City. Now, for those of you who are baseball fans, you may remember 1986 as the season the New York Mets won the World Series after a fair ball went through Bill Buckner’s legs (see the picture to the right), he of the then-cursed (and now un-cursed) Boston Red Sox.
When the Mets closed out the Series, the obnoxious ventings of Mets fans filled the crisp fall air like non-stop air raid sirens. Some kids took to the streets. They filled dorm hallways with noxious cheering. They whooped it up as their Mets proved (once again) that New York City Is The Greatest City in The World, not a hick wannabe city like Chicago. One New Yorker even got in a car, turned on "New York, New York" on his stereo at full blast, and drove around campus.
It was quite nauseating for the rest of us.
Now if they could just stop talking about themselves
Two days following the Mets’ triumph, I wrote a column in the paper: "Mets Win World Series, ‘U’ Must Live With the Fans." In said column, I daresay that I evicerated each and every New Yorker attending our great university. If memory serves me well, here are a few of the bon mots I unloaded:
"The Mets have won the World Series, and the New Yorkers around us are celebrating. There are two reasons you may not have noticed this: 1. You are tone deaf. 2. You are completely deaf."
"The Mets’ marketing motto is ‘Baseball as it oughta be.’ I’m sure they read Shakespeare between innings, too."
"I would suggest that frontal lobotomies would help reduce the volume of the obnoxious New Yorkers who we must hear every day, but medicine suggests that New Yorkers’ tongues work independently of their brains, and their brains aren’t as big as they would like you to believe."
It was a nice throwdown, painting a picture of New Yorkers who came to the Midwest and spent the next four years complaining that it wasn’t New York.
People — New Yorkers — were predictably incensed. They called my house all day and into the evening. They came to the paper’s offices to protest. They wrote bilious letters en masse. Generally, they said I was ignorant, stupid, a southern redneck, bigoted (I was accused of being anti-Semetic!), and overall moron with a stunted world outlook.
The louder they got, the less they had to say.
And of course, I loved every second of it.
New York said the same to me
For about three days, I was a campus celebrity. It was my 15 minutes of fame, collegiate style, and the effect was intoxicating. People were talking about my article. People were talking about me.
To a writer of modest talent like myself, wanting fame is a fatal flaw. In the deepest grottoes of my troubled soul, I realize that I would do anything to relive that heady, three-day buzz of 22 years ago. And I concede the following from a less-troubled perspective: wishing for notoriety is one reason that I write, which probably affects my writing in ways I would never care to admit.
Of course, if you want to be famous, there are better ways than writing novels, such as becoming an actor or robbing banks. These days, all it takes is a reality TV show or some online angle. Even the best, most-well-known novelists can’t hold a candle to the fourth-place finisher on Survivor, the hooker with the blog, and the Paris Hiltons of the world, famous for being famous.
I’ve spent two weeks writing the entry below, and it’s excellence is reflected in the fortnight of effort poured into it. Actually, I just banged it out today. I was out of my home for another week, as Wife forbade me to sleep in our place while the painters finished their thing, citing "my health" as a reason. As if. I’m gonna try to get back on a regular schedule. No promises, not that you were seeking any.
Having a child reveals a parents’ true nature, for good and bad. I daresay that Baby has exposed to the harsh light of marriage my temper.
Oh, I knew I could get pissed off, have for years. But I lived under the delusion that it was limited to certain things, including (but not limited to) computer malfunctions, my sports teams’ meltdowns, and the cast of criminals currently running the White House.
The added stress of sleep deprivation and sleep deprivation and sleep deprivation, not to mention a year of battling bed bugs and bed bugs and bed bugs has brought to light the fact that small things can get me enraged to the point that I must summon every iota of control in my being not to scream, "Fucking asshole!", for instance, at the contractor who managed to leave dents in the baseboard after we paid him an amount of cash equivalent to the GDP of a small Eastern European nation.
Like happiness or sorrow, anger comes in different flavors and degrees, and it is a certain type of anger that has been motivation since my career as an Angry Young Man started two decades ago.
My anger is the self-righteous kind, which, like all sorts of anger, will eat one alive if one doesn’t let it pass. For instance, there was a girl I fancied in college, and I thought I had the perfect opportunity to get a little closer to her when she, myself, and some friends went out one Saturday evening. As we got liquored up in a bar that was less-than-diligent in checking ID, one of the group decided it would be an awesome idea to go to a midnight showing of "Purple Rain."
Mad enough to write
Up until then, I had been carrying on a nice conversation with the lass who I wanted to meet. And I would have been perfectly happy to keep talking with her in the bar, or go dancing, or escort her home and find my way into her arms. But no. Everybody decided that "Purple Rain" would be a much better thing to do than me getting laid, or at least the .001 percent possibilty of me getting laid.
To skip my protests and the subsequent coversation, the group — the girl of my 20-year-old dreams included — went to the movie, and I went home, stewing. Not knowing what better to do, I pulled out my typewriter and hacked out a three-page, single-spaced letter to my best friend about the evils of Prince and how I’d been wronged.
If my friend wanted to blackmail me, he’d have good evidence. However, even if it doesn’t turn out as I’d planned, more often than not when I’m steamed, hitting keys on the keyboard certainly beats breaking the device in two.
Right now, the subject of my anger is a certain political couple that hooked up just last week. We now officially have the scariest mainstream ticket in presidential history — an old reactionary codger who couldn’t stand up to wingnuts in his own party and named a political hack whose inexperience, intolerance, and rank stupidity have now been chronicled far and wide, much better than I will attempt in this space.
This not only scares the shit out of me (I’ve actually lost sleep at thought of a President Palin) but the oozing stream of lies from the GOP infuriates me to no end, not to mention the fact there are people wholly willing to believe in it. Of course, the country re-elected Bush, and there’s enough moronic, unemployed white fucks in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania looking for any excuse not to vote for a black person to put McCain-Pallin into office.
Ach, you can see rage getting the better of me already…
Fake pic, fake person
Anger, and its close cousin, jealousy, have fueled many a writing sessions, even if the results were bad. It’s always self-righteous fury at stupid politicians, stupid writing teachers, stupid writers, and stupid people who all seem to exert some power over me, a power that I have no recourse to change. (Perhaps I should title this entry, "The Stupids.").
It’s too bad that every time I write in anger the result is rotten. It’s often unpleasant or unreadable. It sounds like a bad polemic from a bitter old man, shaking his fist at the world and screaming how much the world owes him because of his past suffering.
I had a boss who, upon inspecting an inferior piece of work, would always say the same thing: "Pit-i-ful." He would positively spit out the first syllable, would pronounce the "i" long, and put a grave emphasis on "ful."
If he read my blog, he’d say "pit-i-ful" with such vehemence that it might crack the earth. My best excuse for not blogging is that Wife and I are having our place painted, and the floors sanded and stained, all because of the bed bug woes of earlier. This requires an inordinate amount of cleaning, planning, and trying to find places to stick Baby without access to a choking hazard.
I am returning from a week away with the in-laws while the contractor does his magic, which, upon inspection, I will utter, "pit-i-ful." For now, here’s another entry in this forlorn "series" of entries. And before you mutter, "Welcome back!", this will be, in all likelihood, my last post for a while.
Remember that I am about to go home, alone, to an apartment half finished, sleeping in brain-eating varnish fumes. Then again, it will probably help my writing.
I am cursed with a wealth of ideas. This might not seem like a plague — it’s hardly frogs raining from the sky — but it’s less of a blessing than it would appear upon first inspection.
When I was in college, I started writing my ideas down in a notebook, since lost to time (though you can probably find it if you’re willing to wade through a garbage mountain outside of Chicago). I kept a purple-ink pen latched to the notebook, which was a leather-bound datebook pilfered from the offices of a job I had showing apartments in Ann Arbor, Mich. (I spent more time thinking of ideas than actually working, but never mind.)
There was no orderly progression of these ideas, or real reason for them, other than they were persistent, odd, and occasionally disturbing. If I were to be held hostage, I could probably recall some of the contents of the notebook, which were ideas for stories, characters, band names, and other assorted ephemera that has been largely lost to the mists of time.
I numbered each successive entry, and I know that it passed 100 rather quickly. The best of the ideas were eventually transferred to computer, where it resides upon the hard drive of the very computer upon which I write these very words, a very ironic thing indeed since it’s been a very, very, very long time since I’ve actually looked at them. The file is collecting the electronic version of dust, you might say.
Despite the eventual displacement of paper for electronics, and its ultimate demise in landfill, there was a time that I would have guarded The Notebook with the same ferocity as a Mama Bear on amphetamines protects its young. And if you’ve ever had to do battle with a Mama Bear on speed, you’ll know what I mean.
The problem I’ve had with this curse is that I’ve always had great ideas, and burdened by a dearth of ways to express them. If I had the cajones, I would have tried standup comedy, acting, or screenwriting. And if I courted faith in the unburdening powers of mind-altering substances, I would have tried expressing my ideas through interpretive dance.
But, no: I am cursed (again) with reticence of several flavors. I have stage fright that turns me into a zombified caricature of myself, and the fact I am less-than-aggressive makes me ill-suited to the world of screenwriting or other forms of writing that require selling one’s wares or other forms of human interaction.
The situation boils down to this: while I struggle to translate ideas into something worth expressing — an actual short story or novel, for instance — The Notebook remains as real as ever, a Muse or albatross, depending on my mood. I’ll remember a brilliant idea conjured from nothingness two decades ago and think, "You know, Bookfraud, you really are a creative dude," then remember a cringe-worthy stupidfest of a story idea and think, "You know, Bookfraud, you have the creativity of a robot accountant."
There’s even a movie about it
I always wondered if others suffer from this ailment. They call writing fiction "the midnight disease," as it afflicts those crazed individuals at all hours of the day and night. But to be harried by ideas is more like a "dream disease," as all of the best notions come as if one is in a state of extended stupor.
The Notebook is like the crazy ex-girlfriend: lots of fun and wild-as-a-insane-aslyum sex, but there’s really no way it’s gonna work out in the end. You’ve got to put up with the 3 a.m. phone calls, the stalking, the dead bird at your front door with a note that says, "If you don’t get back together with me, I can’t be held responsible for what I’m going to do next."
Not that this actually happened to me. But it’s not a half-bad idea for a story.
I’m trying to get back into things. I only have eight more installments of the "Why I Really Write" epic series left. All of them laughably bad.
Imagine a library.
It contains the greatest works of Western literature, from the Bible to Shakespeare to the present day. There are volumes from some of the planet’s greatest philosophers — from Plato to Nietzsche, Aristotle to Hegel. The library also has a compendium of LPs featuring music by Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, Mozart, Chopin, Brahms, and Wagner. On the walls hang reproductions of da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Monet, among others.
Now imagine a group of men who partake of this library’s treasures. They read the books, listen to the music, and study the paintings. They discuss with each other the meaning of these works of art, what each writer or musician or painter was trying to say, and what their work reveals about human nature.
They take all of these discussions very seriously, as it represents one of their few opportunities for leisure.
So I ask you, as Mr. Wicklund, my high school AP English teacher, asked our class 25 years ago, does all this reading and listening and studying and thinking make these people better human beings? Are they more evolved? More sophisticated or smarter? Think hard before you answer, my teacher warned us. This place actually existed.
We might have been 18 and stupid, but my classmates and I were smart enough to know that it was a trick question. And it’s a good thing we didn’t answer. This library, our teacher told us, was for the commanding officers at Auschwitz.
I don’t know if the Auschwitz library actually existed, but Mr. Wicklund’s aim certainly hit the mark. I’ve been semi-obsessed with the place ever since, as it turns on its head the very idea of civilized society.
Library or not, there were certainly Nazis who were well read, who were musicians, artists, and philosophers. How could people partake of great art and debate the nature of humanity while committing one of the most barbarous acts in the history of humanity? Talking about dialectical materialism and the Brandenburg Concertos as human carcasses burned. As Eisenhower said when his troops liberated Dachau, it beggars explanation.
You can make a straightforward argument of actions trumping thoughts, but remember, the Nazis had developed philosophical rationalizations for their actions.
I’m not mentally equipped to get too far in depth about this (I’m just not PhD. material, boys and girls) but the fact that supposedly evolved people can be animals permeates my thinking. It makes me want to write about them.
And if I don’t write about monsters disguised as college-educated aesthetes, I can’t stop creating characters who are not what they seem, who hide behind facades, who justify their actions with rococo rationalizations.
Does living the literary life make one a better person? Think hard before you answer.
And my job has been really, really, stinkingly, ridiculously bad. As in, working at nights, early in the mornings, during lunch, and, through the miracle of wireless fidelity, also known as "WiFi," just about any wonderful place I can carry my computer.
The precious little downtime I’ve had has been spent in slothful pursuit (reading, television, and other forms of brain wanking), and my little baby boy has discovered the magic power of the full-throated yell when he is ignored for more than three seconds. But it’s really been the job — due to a computer system malfunction making it run as if designed by a team of Chilean sea bass, one essential part of my work is taking about four times as long as normal. Until the programmers/sea bass fix the problem, I’m basically screwed.
I’ll try to do better. I’ll try to visit all the blogs I know and love. I’ll try to post something more than once a fortnight. I’ll try not to slowly lose my sanity in the fiery caldron of my job.
And now, for something pretty much the same as everything else.Yet another entry in listing the reasons I’m a masochist writer.
I was all of 19, home in Memphis for the summer in an unpleasant 1984, and in a perpetually bad mood. For “home” was a city where I hadn’t lived for seven years, knew not a soul, and had to take two jobs to pay off my freshman-year debt. That entailed about 80 hours or more of work a week, which left very little time for fun. Bookfraud was a dull boy indeed.
One of those two jobs was a government “internship” with the county government. My job was to sit an a car and help catalog tax-lien properties. It paid minimum wage, offered nothing in the way of personal fulfillment or actual experience to help in the job market, and entailed driving into parts of town that were less-than-savory.
My partner in crime was an older man, a man whose name I will not reveal here except that it is so perfect for a character, it’s a shame I can’t use it. I will allow that he had been a colonel in the Air Force, his nickname was “Bubba,” and that Col. Bubba was so over-the-top that if I were to make him up as a character, you would never find him plausible.
He was about 65, stood about 6-5, and would have weighed 650 pounds if he’d had his beloved pork barbeque sandwiches every day for lunch. Suffice to say he probably tipped the scales at 250. He wore houndstooth jackets and fine leather shoes, shiny silk ties that looked like they’d served time since the 1960s, and his combed-back hair looked like he’d cleaned out the local Walgreen’s of Grecian Formula.
Col. Bubba sounded like a stereotypical southern sherif: “Boy…” he would start sentences when addressing me, managing to stretch “boy” into three syllables.
He loved to give me a hard time about my attendance at a college north of the Mason-Dixon line — “This here boy goes to a Yankee school, but we’ll forgive him for it” he’s say by way of introduction to others, not to mention my relative ignorance of the ways of the opposite sex.
“Boy, lemme tell you, when I was runnin’ my own oil company, I had all the poontang thrown at me I could shake a stick at. But most of them was married women, and I never do it with a married woman. I’d rather beat the meat than do it with a married woman” — which, in Colonel Bubba’s world, was worse than dying a virgin.
His favorite (actually, his only) topics of conversations were sex, his adventures in the Korean War, his life in business, and the 1942 University of Tennessee Volunteers football team, “coached by the great General Neyland, undefeated, untied, and unscored upon,” on which he played defensive end.
There was plenty of time to talk. We would usually catalog three or four properties by noon, finding them on unnamed and deserted streets, and drive around for the rest of the day. I can still hear him reproaching me, saying, “Boy, we’ve already done three for the day. If we do five or six, bossman will expect us to do that every day.”
He occasionally used the word “nigger” in these conversations, as in “There’s a nigger on Lamar Avenue that makes some fine barbeque.” I would tell him it was wrong to use that word, and he was genuinely surprised — “I don’t mean anything bad,” he would say, and he was as perplexed at my protests as I was of his use.
Don’t pick a fight with the Colonel
But he seemed to know a lot of black people — in the office, at restaurants, at the stores and shops we’d frequent while wasting time. He would embrace them, figuratively and literally, treating them with dignity, and if he didn’t think of them as his equals, he didn’t act like it.
I daresay he was an oddly complicated fellow ("three-dimentional," as they say in workshop) and far more intelligent than he let on. One minute, he would tell me ribald tales of encounters with Korean prostitutes, and the next, he’d be quoting A.E. Houseman. He was funny and witty, but bitter as well, twice having lost money, once in oil, the other in his own airline company. Or so he said, which was why he had to suffer the humiliation of working at a government job when he should have been retired.
There is a reason for reavealing all this, and it’s not to explain away Col. Bubba’s use of the n-word or his casual sexism. It’s that perhaps you get to know perhaps two or three real-life people like him in your lifetime. They’re burned into your brain as if you were cauterizing a wound. No matter how you feel about them, there is no getting rid of them.
In the end, all one can do is immortalize them. And if you don’t or don’t want to, you probably have better things to do than sit before a keyboard and summon the muses.
I’ll just get right to the point. One reason I became a writer is that I thought it might help me get laid.
I didn’t consciously plan it that way, of course, because doing so would make me a very stupid person indeed: there are about 10 billion better ways to chase girls other than sitting before a typewriter, alone, unshaven, undressed, and depressed.
I could have tried making a lot of money. Or learned to play the guitar. Or bothered to actually ask someone out once in a while.
But men aren’t the brightest bulbs in the world when it comes to Little Elvis, in more ways than one. Without going into deep, ill-informed flights of Darwinian fancy, let’s just say that I, like 100 percent of the rest of the male population, have sought status in one form or another, and one of the main byproducts of status has been access to more than one ladyfriend, so to speak. And for me, status-seeking comes in the form of the written word.
The most popular scribes among us — those who are male, that is — have often found themselves surrounded by groupies, lit bimbos, and other ladies caught in the swoon of genius. A fellow Chicagoan and novelist once said Saul Bellow had "two hobbies. Philosophy and fucking."
Bellow was an extremely famous writer. There appeared to be no shortage of willing victims.
Or take Salman Rushdie. OK, he’s witty, brilliant, charming, a fantastic novelist, a would-be jihad victim, and one of my favorite writers, but he isn’t going to be modeling anytime soon. I don’t think he would have gotten Padma Lakshmi had he been less than famous, or merely an adequate novelist.
There are lots of ways to get status, of course, but I never fancied myself a financier, was never going to be a successful jock, and as far as guitar playing is concerned, I sound like Andre the Giant picking at a ukelele.
I never really thought of myself as handsome, for that matter. If I was going to get attention from the ladies, it would have to be through some other means, and though I can be accused of being a mite charming, demonstrative I am not. It’s not as if I could hang a sign outside my house that said, "Ladies, Line Up Here for a Good Time With a Hot Guy" and expect any action save for a dog taking a crap on the doorstep.
It was rather pathetic, to be honest: like the a pizza-faced teen nerd that I had been, I secretly harbored a fantasy that my writing would show the world and the beautiful ladies inhabiting it the real me, which was funny, smart, brilliant, and worth a shag or two.
Once in a great while, my lust for words and my lust actually intersected. Once, I met an older lady at a party — I was 22, she was 33, and when she walked up to me, she threaded a finger through a ringlet of my hair and twisted it lightly, so I imagine she had other ideas than just debating the merits of Camus versus Sartre.
Sex? Yes, please
However, before the festivities began, I was forced to enter into conversation in which I revealed that although I had a boring job at a boring company, I was actually working on a novel. Which seemed to suit her just fine, though it was not a topic of post-coital conversation (which was as awkward as the sex was bad).
I dated another lady who, if not enthralled with my writing jones, demanded some form of creative expression from her men, which seemed to fuel her jets.
And then there’s Wife. If I had not been a writer, I would have never met her, though it had nothing to do with my actual skill or status as a writer other than the mere fact that I wrote, since we met through graduate school, even if they were different graduate schools (long story).
But I imagine that it didn’t count as sex, since we got married.
I mean, that it didn’t count as merely sex. Sex and marriage. It’s a beautiful thing.
Below is the second of the much-anticipated, highly debated 13-part series of why I decided to write. Picking up where I left off, I continue on the music theme. Though Three Dog Night is nowhere to be found.
My favorite Beethoven story is a true anecdote that has nothing to do with the man at all. One Saturday afternoon when I was in my early 20s, I was riding in a car with some friends, when the driver, tooling around with the radio, landed upon a piano and violin piece of almost painful beauty.
We wondered who wrote it: one ignoramus, trying to sound cultured, quickly said, "Well, I know it’s not Beethoven." It was an opinion the other passengers quickly validated; for, if we knew anything at all about classical music, Beethoven was all thunder and bombast. He didn’t have a exuberant or joyous note in him.
The piece ended on a note that was filled with such happiness you could have sworn it was written by an eight-year-old, and the announcer said, "That Beethoven’s sonata for violin and piano number 5…"
This was shocking to me, since I was the one who so confidently proclaimed that a Beethoven work was far too radiant to have actually been composed by Ludwig van Beethoven. After that embarrassment, I set upon learning about him. And the more I learned about Beethoven, the more amazing he became, as both a person and composer — which has made me want to write.
My admiration for his work has few equals. There was no classical form that Beethoven could not master: sonatas, quartets, contertos, and the symphony, which he basically invented as we know it. The comparison is unfair at any level, but it’s as if Shakespeare, in addition to being the greatest playwright and poet of the English language, wrote groundbreaking novels and short stories.
Though I’m no musicologist, and somebody is bound to disagree with my opinion (especially one of the snotrag, self-styled aesthetes who review classical CDs on Amazon), it’s hard to disagree that Beethoven was one of the giants. And, as discovered in my wrong initial opinion, he wrote music that is in equal measure joyous and beautiful as it is loud and bombastic.
That Beethoven wrote all this while being famously depressive and cranky to a fault is part of his attraction. He’s probably the quintessential tortured artist; he never married, his only love being his never-identified Immortal Beloved. He was also unwavering in his beliefs, politically and morally, and was a true believer in freedom when such an idea was still forming on the Continent.
OK, there’s a point to all this hero worship. It’s not only that such a person as Beethoven existed — that one person could master so many forms is mind-boggling to begin with — but that he was able to create despite his disdain for himself and the world. Everybody knows Beethoven went deaf, and that he went into an extended depression that lasted the rest of his life.
After he started to lose his hearing, he composed some of the most ground-breaking works in the history of music. It doesn’t only amaze me he did it while deaf, but that he did it while he was basically bummed out 24/7.
Time to rock
I complain too much about my problems, minimize others’, and will find a reason to procrastinate in the air. Beethoven had more talent in one day’s nail clippings than I will ever have in my entire being, but what truly made him special was he did not surrender, he did not quit, he never stopped making music though he had a million legit reasons to do so.
Listening to Beethoven puts me in the mood to write, but the idea of Beethoven makes me want to write, and though I will never write a work of fiction as remotely sublime and inspiring as the Triple Concerto, I want to try.
This is the first in a series of short posts revealing the true reasons I took up writing. Or at least the ones I’m gonna tell you.
It was New Year’s Eve, 1973, I was nine years old, and spending the evening with my grandparents.
Improbably, instead of Guy Lombardo and his fuddy duddy Royal Canadians, the television was tuned to the first-ever "Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve," which would become the Guy Lombardo of its time, but upon its inauguration seemed impeccably cool.
On a stage in the foreign land of New York City, Three Dog Night was singing their immemorial (and only) hit, "Joy to the World," resplendent in miles of gnarly hair, gnarly moustaches, bell-bottoms, jean vests, and other post-60s crap clothes.
(If you don’t remember "Joy to the World," you were born after 1965 or have had a successful lobotomy that removed all the annoying, awful, shitty music from your head. You know the song I’m talking about, which had nothing to do with the Christmas carol of the same name:Jeremiah was a bullfrog/Was a good friend of mine/Didn’t understand a word he said/But I helped him drink his wine.)
I really didn’t care about Three Dog Night or the music — I was desperately trying to stay awake until midnight. Then my 70-something grandparents, who were watching with something approaching horror, said something I’ll never forget:
"They’re just a bunch of hippies on drugs," my grandfather said.
"That’s right," my grandmother said. "Hippies on drugs. They’re hippies on drugs."
Their voices creaked with age and resentment, distrust and incomprehension. They all but waived their crooked fists at the television set. Who were these damn kids, with their strange clothes, hair, and music? They were on television! They were taking over! The world was falling apart!
"Oh…just look at them. Hippies on drugs."
"They’re just all hippies on drugs!"
Though I didn’t want to be a hippie on drugs, my grandparents’ utterances made Three Dog Night extremely cool. Better still, I knew that what had happened was meant to be repeated.
When I related the story to my friends, nobody thought it funny or interesting. But wasn’t important — I just had to tell someone, whether because it would raise my status among my peers or that I wanted to share it. I had to tell somebody, it just had to get out, it just had to be told.
Now residing in the "Where are they now?" file
On its surface, it’s not much of a story, but an anecdote: once it’s been read, there’s no reason to read it again. (Many of you probably don’t even find it amusing.) But I couldn’t shake its persistence, nor could I ignore the fact I was dying to tell others.
I discovered that I liked telling stories, but what I really liked was telling stories that illuminated a larger truth — my grandparents’ old-fashioned, square attitudes reflected in their dislike of hippies on drugs, for instance. Or stories that simply entertained others in some way. And though my aptitude as a verbal story-teller was limited, I found that when it came to the written word, I had a few skills, and that I really enjoyed doing it (present barren output notwithstanding).
I still haven’t found a place for this encounter; the closest I came was in my novel, when the narrator, at age 13, sees Kiss and The Ramones on "Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert," much to his grandmother’s horror.
But it’s a story, however small, that I still want to tell, one of many that usually end up on paper. In a way, I’m still nine years old.
This blog entry is about me, or the lack of me, or the unfathomable reasons that I have not existed the past six months–Bookfraud, the blogger, not Me, the Man Behind Bookfraud Who Wants to Believe He Looks Like and Gets as Much Action as George Clooney But Looks and Acts Closer to Richard Dawson After a 72-Hour Bender.
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Oh fatal ambition!
I like football as much as the next guy—probably more than the average fan, in fact. I covered my college team for the school newspaper, and still follow them with some fervor. And, being that my best friend in high school’s father worked for the Chicago Bears, I got tickets to games and other assorted ephermera (on which I will elaborate later).
A number of you perceptive folk have asked me, "Bookfraud, it’s been weeks since you posted. What the fuck?"
The louder someone is, the less he usually has to say.
