bookfraud

I once dated a lady who was a good person and had a charming sense of humor, but when it came to the physical act of love, her intensity bordered on the pathological. I don’t remember laughing once before, during, or after sex, and perhaps I should find this humorless approach to lovemaking a good thing, lest I were to mistake her laughter for contempt.

In matters less personal and less embarrassing, I find that as I get older, I cannot bear humorless people, listen to humorless music, and, most importantly, read literature that lacks a hint of laughter, irony, or any other scintilla of wit.

Upon closer inspection, this preference has is apparent in my tastes. Elvis Costello over Bruce Springsteen. Salman Rushdie over Nadine Gordimer. “Seinfeld” over “24.” It’s not that Springsteen, Gordimer, or “24″ lacks humor (though they pretty much do), but they favor raw emotion over wit, power over subtlety.

Why, you ask? Humor is less threatening than intense, and I usually find cerebral more appealing than soulful; and while to thine own self be true, I am sure that these prejudices have been debilitating when it comes to my choices in literature, and probably my writing.

That’s what they told me in grad school, at least. For instance, take the case of a robot/writing teacher who conducted a class on style and form would gush at length if she happened to agree with one’s comments, and averted her eyes when she didn’t like it.

“OK, what else?” she would say after a particularly egregious comment. Or “Thank you for your comment, anybody else?” while looking at someone she knew would support her point of view.

This year’s model, and next’s

We were talking about favorite authors and books, and when a fellow student mentioned that Grace Paley was one of her favorite writers, the teacher went on at length about Paley’s stories, and her point of view, and all the challenges she faced, and blah blah blah, thanks for stroking me…

So when I admitted that “A Confederacy of Dunces” was one of my favorite books — one of the funniest books ever written, I might add — she looked at me perhaps a milisecond as the punch cards filed in her brain to spit out the conclusion, “Alert! Alert! System shutdown possible!” before turning away and saying, “Alright, what else?”

A friend — also a lover of the humorous and profane — also suffered a throwdown after a comment did not agree with the teacher’s inner robot. “Am I stupid?” asked my friend, an extremely funny but insecure woman.

“We’re the villiage idiots,” I said.

And so it went in writing workshop, where to have a sense of humor was to be avoided like Herpes Simplex II. If you’re stories were not DEAD SERIOUS and HEAVY WITH EMOTION, you were DISHONEST and LACKED DEPTH.

But, as I was sad to discover, there is a little problem with putting such a heavy burden on laughter.

Although one may not glean it from a certain short story of mine, when I am writing and am stuck, I’ll try to get out of the jam by writing something humorous. If I want to avoid an emotional confrontation between characters, I’ll write something funny. And, above all, if I write a sex scene, it’s going to be a laugh riot, though the one sex scene I’ve written came out like a mix of Jim Carey, Jenna Jameson, and one of those romance novels with Fabio on the cover. Which probably ends up looking like Tom Cruise having sex with a farm utensil.

Wouldn’t want to wake up next to this

My personal defense mechanism is humor — I use it to deflect emotional confrontation in my own life. Being serious often makes me unconfortable, and it was more than one ex-girlfriend who asked, “Bookfraud, are you ever serious?”

After a couple of decades of this immaturity masking as wit, I finally figured out that it was simpler to answer a delicate question rather than make a joke out of it; in my fiction, it dawned on me that emotional depth of character is mandatory, and it’s hard to do that when everything is a one-liner (”Did you hear the one about the narcoleptic comedian doing standup in airplane cabins?”).

I am probably addicted to wackiness more than anything, and it can be a hard thing to break. My novel is chock full of wackiness.

Like I said above, “A Confederacy of Dunces” is one of my favorite novels, but if you know anything about the book, and you have a sad sense of irony like I do, you probably know where I’m going with this. In a famous story about the book’s genesis, the mother of the author badgered the great Walker Percy until he agreed to read it, and immediately recognizing the man’s genius, Percy had “A Confederacy of Dunces” published to great acclaim.

Its author, John Kennedy Toole, didn’t see his work published, much less win the Pulitzer Prize, because he’d killed himself. Nothing funny about that.

This is my 100th blog post, a number that is not a big deal for some but certainly a highlight in the snoozefest known as my life.

So I thought I would do something “special.” I contemplated a “Greatest Hits” blog, but I couldn’t think of any hits or special favorites, not that I would gratuitously insert links to old entries or tried-and-true chestnuts, so instead I will address a Major Big Subject With Capital Letters That Illuminates Our World.

In the grand tradition of lame anniversary pieces, such a post should be hackneyed, dead serious, and use words in French (Latin is also acceptable). Such a piece should be weighty. It should tell you something.

Thus, I will tell you Why I Write, which is not only a subject that someone who blogs about “the writing life” should address, but is also a subject that can completely flummox me, as when I am near a breakdown after 17 straight hours of writing crap and I cry, “Why do I fucking write? Why? Why? Why?”

George Orwell penned a famous essay entitled “Why I Write,” published in 1946. In 1976, Joan Didion wrote an essay of the same title, and now, I do the same in 2006. No more such essays until 2036.

Orwell fully admits there is more than a bit of the unknown in the question he sets out to answer: “All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.”

Amen to all that, but for me, there’s much less mystery. I have loved fiction forever, and since I was young, thought that I might be adept at expressing myself through the written word.

Though I am plagued with the desire to create or perform, I’m too withdrawn to act, have too much dignity to try standup, and I sing like American Idol castaways. I am far too uncoordinated to paint, dance, play an instrument, or hold a glass object in each hand without the serious threat of dropping one or both of them.

Fortunately, I could always hold a pen without letting go. Starting back in my college days, I carried around a notebook of ideas that popped into my head. These ideas were brilliance beyond brilliance (or so I thought at the time) and it was obvious that the best manner to give them life would be the printed page.

For instance, I once envisioned a production of “West Side Story” in which one gang wears New York Jet uniforms (full gear, with shoulder pads and helmets), and the other gang wears giant prosthetic shark heads. I probably would have a little trouble reinterpreting “West Side Story” in this manner, though “Maria” might be a little more bearable if Tony sang while wearing a helmet and mouthgard.

Shark heads

I could not bring my bold vision to stage, but I couldn’t forget about it, either. Could I paint it? Write a song about it? Chisel a giant marble statue of Bernardo that resembled the famous “Land Shark” of old Saturday Night Live days?

No, the only way to include my costumed version of “West Side Story,” I ruefully concluded, was to write a fictional account of this production. (Which I did, in my terrifically bad, unpublished first novel).

As all these ideas sprang forth out of my sophomoric mind, I spent my waking hours writing for the college newspaper. Among other duties, I wrote a sports column festooned with my photo, an image that is so seriously cringe-worthy today that I might pucker up into a dried apricot if I were to look at it again.

One of my columns, a well-reasoned thesis about the negative I.Q. scores of New York Mets fans, created a mini-tempest on campus. A lot of pissed off New Yorkers called my house all day and night and said some not-so-nice things about my mother, and some seriously angry folks wrote letters to the editor.

Suddenly, I was the subject of campus discussion, and, sadly, I loved it. Every damn second of it, and, in retrospect, it was probably the worst thing that could have ever happened to me. I’ve been trying to recreate that moment ever since, with my fiction, to no avail.

My talent with words, my need to express ideas and stories, and fatal ambition have thus delivered me into the realm of fiction writer, however unrealized those ambitions became. Also, by nature I am shy, withdrawn, and self-reflective (i.e., nerdy, anti-social, and neurotic), perfect personal traits for a writer.

I probably could have pursued career in non-fiction with more success, except for the fact I have all these damn stories in my head, trying to escape.

They still suck

Wife thinks I should write more first-person essays, and I have considered penning a book involving a certain addiction (not having to do with money, sex, or any type of intake).

As those of you who wandered over to Storyfraud can figure out, short stories are not my strength (maybe I’ll put up novel excerpts instead), but the idea of abandoning fiction rips a major hole in the gut. To come this close to publishing a novel gives one hope and energy, and also healthy doses of insanity.

In this vein, I got a rejection notice the other day for a short story, on which the editor (I presume) wrote, “Thanks, [Bookfraud]!”

Of course, I interpret this not as a word of encouragement, but that she had read my blog (whose address I foolishly included in the cover letter), seen my animus towards literary magazines, and decided to write a thank you note following my complaint that editors ever bothered to write them. It couldn’t have been that she might have liked the story.

Such is the life I’ve chosen.

So, as I have urged dozens of others in person or online, I keep plugging away, never abandoning hope, hoping for that novel to sell, hoping that I can get a few iotas of recognition in this lifetime, and hoping that one day very soon, Wife will bring home Uma Thurman to live with us.

The other day, it occurred to me that since I’m not getting my crappy fiction published with “mainstream” journals with “big-time” names with “brilliant” grad-school editors, I might as well publish it myself.

(This epiphany occurred after several cups of coffee, not to mention several hits of Benzedrine, and I didn’t run it by Wife, a shrink, or someone less prone to wild mood swings.)

So I bring you Storyfraud, an all-new blog with a less-than-brilliant name where you will find short stories and novel excerpts from this fair author. Some pieces will be polished and relatively coherent; some will be rough and generally incoherent; others, just plain crazy.

New posts on Storyfraud will be unscheduled and infrequent. If I’m in a good frame of mind, and don’t despise myself and my writing, I’ll be inclined to publish on Storyfraud. Unfortunately, those happy days are far and few between, so you won’t have to suffer too much.

The first selection I have deemed worthy of the Storyfraud name is called “The Last Dance.” It runs 5,000 words, and after reading a few screens and scrolling down, your eyes will start to melt, but such are the limits of technology (and my technological aptitude). “The Last Dance” has been rejected many times, though I get encouraging rejection notes for it, once in a great, great while.

If you feel so moved to actually read my otherwise unprintable slop, also feel free to comment, even if you hate the posting. I’m not looking for a virtual workshop, or asking you, as a Bookfraud reader, to please please please read my fiction, for you may find it disagreeable, and quite different than my missives posted here on the writing life.

Really, I’m just hoping someone will read it for his or her enjoyment. If, in reading my fiction, you form a negative opinion of my work — “No wonder he’s not published! He can’t write for shit and should shut the fuck up with all that whining!” — so be it.

So for those of you who choose to peruse Storyfraud, my hats off to you. For everybody else, I’ll see you in hell.

Just kidding about that. A little.

I was all ready to write my latest entry — it involved dachshunds, hang gliding, and the Swedish bikini team — when I chanced upon this article about the possible release of a new novel.

Out went the Swedish bikini team, in went Thomas Pynchon.

To say I was once obsessed with Pynchon is to put too a fine a point on it; but it is a fair assessment to say that I once called him my favorite author, though I didn’t completely understand (nor could I explain) his books. There is something hypnotic about the man and his work, even though most all of we know about the man is through his work.

For it is not necessarily his writing that people know of Thomas Pynchon. If you have read all of “V.” or “Mason & Dixon,” you have little company. And if you’ve read his magnum opus, “Gravity’s Rainbow,” cover to cover, raise your hand. Ah, just as I thought. No stink in here, because nobody raised their hands and exposed their armpits.

If you know about Pynchon, it is because you know he is obsessive about his privacy. No pictures. No book tours. No interviews, blogs, or appearances at the National Book Awards.

His secretive existence has created a mystique about the man that undoubtedly outstrips the reality, which is that Pynchon is, by all accounts, simply a quiet and withdrawn dude, though he “appeared” on The Simpsons.

There have been many a thesis written on Pynchon that have less to do with his work than on his identity: he doesn’t exist, he is an amalgam of several writers, he is really Anita Ekberg or Paris Hilton, etc.

If you need a book explaining you…

Which brings me back to the latest book. A blurb on Amazon.com reportedly is by the great man himself, describing his forthcoming work. Without going into detail, what I found interesting was less the description itself than the commentary from readers, at least one person in particular:

“Pynchon has engaged in hypertextual self-parody of the strangest order…”

“This is the new conspiracy, the conspiracy of identity (an attack on identity politics?).”

“My guess is viral-marketing or, more hopefully, a Swiftian self-parody and critique of Internet subcultures (a sort of new, updated Tale of a Tub.)”

Granted, the same fella wrote all three of these comments. But it reflects the conspiratorial nature of Pynchon’s work and his obsessive fans’ desire for, well, more Pynchon.

While the prospect of a Pynchon novel first excited me, it ultimately left me depressed, like the time a writing teacher first described a short story of mine as “promising” then compared it to an “effluent stream.”

I first read “V.” when I was in college, and the next 10 to 15 years I spent trying to crank out pale, pale imitations. If I didn’t want to be Pynchon, I certainly wanted to be able to write like Pynchon. This turned out to be a grave mistake.

For Pynchon’s strengths — his dazzling erudition and brilliant sense of humor — are also his weaknesses, and I was drawn to these things like sleaze to Atlantic City.

Pynchon’s characters can be flat, and the emotional import of his work can border on constipated, but I never really cared because everything else was so brilliant, funny, and even moving. (The chapter “Mondaugen’s story” in “V.” and the short story “Entropy” are simply some of the best American fiction that’s been written the last half century.)

And if Pynchon could get away with limited character development and emotional depth, why couldn’t I?

So much of my early fiction is marked by wackiness and incoherent, pseudo-intellectual ramblings, just like Pychon, except without the wit or actual intelligence.

We all imitate our influences when we first pick up the pen, as we feel out what we know and search for that elusive voice. Sometimes, however, imitation can be dangerous.

Trying to write like Pynchon is like trying to make a movie out of “Gravity’s Rainbow”: you may think you are undertaking a noble endeavor, but futility is your reward. A mere mortal like myself just doesn’t have any business trying to replicate or even imitate someone like Pynchon, no more than I have any business imitating Joyce, Virginia Woolf, or the late, not-so-great Mickey Spillane.

Pynchon traffics in conspiracies and dark secrets, plots translated on milk cartons, cabals embedded in Zip codes. This has great appeal to certain types like myself, who seek deeper meanings to explain the chaos of human existence; or, you could say, a lot of his readers are guys who grew up on comic books and science fiction. If you were to make “The Matrix” even more didactic, obscure, globe-trotting, and without Keanu Reeves, you’d have a Pynchon movie.

My path of destruction started here

Even if I were to get an IQ implant and could write like Pynchon, it doesn’t mean that I would get a lot of fans — Pynchon leaves a lot of readers cold. With their brainy, hyper-intellectual, erudite work, Richard Powers and David Foster Wallace are considered the natural heirs to Pynchon, but I can’t seem to get into their work. Because at this age, it I probably want more than mere brilliance (though I been told to read “Galatea 2.0.” Told several times.)

So when it’s released, I’ll buy Pynchon’s latest, read it, not understand it, and flap my gums on its greatness. But I won’t mimic it.

Please, God, stop me.

Passion is an essential element in art, we are told: passion to create, passion for the process, passion for the form. These are considered all good and well.

But let’s not get into the power of positive thinking and all that! Let’s talk about something destructive and angry. Let’s talk about your passionate hatred of certain novels and stories.

Close (and casual) readers of this space know that of late, I have spoken of certain ficciones that have made this author insane with anger, not unike telling bad things to Zinedine Zidane about his mamma. I find the offending writer on a soccer pitch and apply a chest-cavity collapsing headbutt, though I imagine I would find it quite satisfying to do so.

I tend to both love and loathe books. The best novels and story collections are worth telling everyone about, to the point of embarassment.

When it comes to prosthetyzing, I can give you many reasons why Ellison’s “Invisible Man” or Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” are wonderful books, but there is usually nothing objective about hating a book. The works in question do not posit a loathesome message (overtly, at least), and aren’t always poorly written (though often).

I recall an English professor in college get enraged when we were discussing Hemmingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”

“Doesn’t this just make you furious?” she asked. Sluggos all, we shook our heads in confusion. (The teacher was referring to Hemmingway’s mysoginst tendencies in the short story, but since most of us didn’t see that or, more likely, hadn’t read the assignment, we didn’t have anything to add.)

At least the professor had a good reason for her anger. I usually don’t. My reasoning is simple: it just fucking pissed me off. Usually because I find it pretentious, slick, presumptuous, or haughty, or that I am furious with disbelief that such garbage got published, in lieu of my brilliant story, of course.

He insulted Zidane’s mother and Proust

But enough about me. Since this topic has been on my mind of late, and, since, I’ve already making asked what books make you want to sing their praises to the world, answer me this:

What books, stories, or authors turn you into an irrational mass of shaking fury?

We’re talking fiction here, so forget about “Mein Kampf,” “A Million Little Pieces,” or anything by Ann Coulter, although, if you think about it, both” A Million Little Pieces” and Ann Coulter’s entire body of work are nothing but lies. Which is fiction, of a sort.

Don’t feel you have to rationalize your anger with a “reason” — feel free to give reasons, of course, but, to paraphrase Irvine Welsh, And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’re just sodding pissed off?

In light of the recent New York State Supreme Court ruling prohibiting gay marriage in that fair state, not to mention the Republican Party’s apparent enthusiasm for banning a practice that has yet to exist, I have to say that I’m 100 percent behind this bigoted, homophobic effort.

Not because I think gay marriage is immoral or a threat to traditional marriage and the family unit. I’m not against it because I hate homosexuals or don’t think gays and lesbians deserve full and equal treatment under the law.

It’s because of writing. I’m against gay marriage in order to protect the institution of literature.

Because if gays got married, they would, like, have a better chance at domestic bliss. At happiness. And if they’re happy, that means all the great writers throughout history who happened to be gay would be less miserable and less likely to write great books.

Think about it. Take Walt Whitman, the perfect Everyman for his times. What if he’d settled down, married a man, and not been fixated on creating the American poetic idiom? He’d be baking cookies and working at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, that’s what! He’d still be there, goddamnit, writing stupid newspaper stories, and “Leaves of Grass” wouldn’t exist!

A threat to the institution of fiction

Or take the ancient Greeks. What if Plato had married Socrates, instead of publishing the Dialogues? They would have had a nice Athenian existence, dining on olive oil and feta, taking vacations on Crete and collecting Attic vases. Ditto for Aristophanes and all the other great Greek thinkers and writers. They’d be so happy, all domesticated and such, they’d have nothing to write about.

Too far in the past? How about Thomas Mann? You think that a happy dude who spent his weekends grilling kielbasa and drinking warm beer with his husband would write “Death in Venice,” the perfect distillation of sexual repression on the Lido? Don’t think so!

Face it — you can’t write great literature unless you’re goddamn miserable! You have to suffer! If I were gay, I wouldn’t want the security, happiness, and legal standing that marriage confers upon its adherents. No! I’d want to be denied basic rights to health care, parenthood, property, and the societal acceptance that I was “normal.” If I had all of those things, I wouldn’t write!

OK, you’re saying, Wait a Minute, Bookfraud! You’re married. You’ve got the dignity and legal rights of the betrothed. Sometimes you even say you’ve got a good marriage. And you write.

And hey! There’s plenty of people who are miserable and married, and even those who are gay, single, happy, and do write! You can suffer for your art and it may have nothing to do with your sexuality or marital status! Alright! You got me there.

(Irony-challenged, sit over there.)

Sure, you can bet your subscription to Martha Stewart Living that if Tony Kushner had been happily married, he wouldn’t have summoned the anger and depth of feeling needed to write “Angels in America.”

But of course, if gay marriage had been legal all the time, perhaps we might not have had an AIDS crisis in this country among gay men, and there wouldn’t have been “Angels in America” in the first place.

Actually, there are few issues that befuddle and anger me as much as the battle against gay marriage. That we have different classes of citizens (true as it is) makes me sick, that because of who you sleep with disqualifies from the benefits of what is supposed to be an egalitarian society.

What’s humorous (if not sickening) about the anti-gay-marriage homophobia is the idea that the “institution” of marriage is “under attack.” The “defense of marriage bill” and all that. Those of us fortunate to have been hitched a few years already realize we don’t need any help from gays and lesbians for our marriages to go careening off a cliff. We can handle that just fine ourselves.

If you’re married, I know, you don’t suddenly become happy. That’s why the strongest proponents of gay marriage are divorce lawyers! Think of the business they’re going to get!

Walt Whitman Mall - yes. Mrs. Walt Whitman - no.

Oh, I hope all of those groom-groom and bride-bride couples lining up in Massachusetts know what they’re in for. Turning even the most perfect relationship into marriage changes the rules of the game. Usually for the better, but it’s not the same as before. (Trust me on this one.)

But I’m still sticking to my original thesis: if you’re completely content, you’re probably not going to be a novelist, poet, or playwright. I don’t think you’re going to write if you were Prom Queen.

No gay joke intended.

Like those suicidal moments that can begin with reading about a successful author half one’s age and twice one’s talent, my latest round of depressing self-discovery started in The New York Times Book Review.

Specifically, in the review of Andrea Lee’s “Lost Hearts in Italy.” The book shouldn’t have attracted my interest; I really know bupkus about her. But as I read the review, Lee’s novel sounded suspiciously similar to a short story she’d written 13 years ago.

I knew a single thing about Lee’s work, but that was enough: one of her stories, “Winter Barley,” appeared in the “O. Henry Best American Short Stories” of 1993, a story that didn’t make me want to vomit as much as eat the pages in anger, and then vomit.

So I wasn’t too disappointed when the review of Lee’s novel, which, like “Winter Barley,” was about an affair between a young American woman and an Italian geezer, got slammed.

Often art will upset us, but usually in the manner of drawing attention to injustice, for instance, or in the manner of frustrating our expectations. The former is known as political, the latter is the book or story that we will characterize as “maddening.”

Lee’s story that I read years ago falls into neither category. No, “Winter Barley” just plain pissed me off. Part of the reason was that I couldn’t believe just a piece of crap won any accolades, much less had been published in The New Yorker.

But really, what it boiled down to was a single element: pretense. The whole notion of writing stories is based on pretense, of course, but there’s a fine line between stupid and clever, and “Winter Barley” veered way of into the world of stupid long before I finished it. The story was all-knowing, smarter-than-thou, and, worst of all, smarmy. (They’re the same reasons that I couldn’t stand the “Wings of Desire” and “The Pillow Book.” I hated them. Hated hated HATED them.)

The protagonist jet sets around Europe, works for Citibank, and is screwing some old Italian dude as they vacation on the Scottish moors. It was self-indulgent expat tripe. I’ve traveled throughout Europe, I’m fluent in French, and I even know about finance!

Worth a thousand words

More recently, Anthony Doerr’s “The Shell Collector,” a recent collection of short stories, is written in a tone that I found about as appealing as green olive ice cream. One story, “The Hunter’s Wife,” had won some type of award but just made me want to find a shotgun. To shoot the book, not the author. Or me.

I slogged through about a third of “The Shell Collector” before throwing it against the wall. Wife, who enjoyed the book, wondered why it bothered me so.

“Because…because…because…” I stammered.

Rarely do I sit down and ask myself why some fiction drives me to distraction, and to say that such pieces are pretentious isn’t enough. The real questions are: are they truly pretentious or is this simply my defensive reaction to them? I am close-minded to certain works of art?

(It’s for this same reason I’ve avoided Jenette Winterston, who has been recommended to me on several occasions. It’s only because of her public persona that I’ve avoided her; she’s known as conceited and, yes, pretentious. Worse, she’s got a rep for stealing girlfriends. Like from heterosexual men like me.)

My inability to accept such works puts me in fairly rotten company: George W. Bush. The best pithy description of this incurious man was in (again) The New Yorker, which called him a “classic schoolyard bully,” intolerant of anything that differs from his narrow view of things and dismissive of (and intimidating) those who dare have different ideas, like maybe protesting doesn’t make one a traitor.

Much worse than George Bush finding the truth or the best solution to a problem illuminating his ignorance. At news conference with the French president, an American reporter dared asked Chirac a question in French, and W. flipped out. The reporter was just showing W. up! How dare make the President of the United States look stupid! How dare the reporter be so pretentious.

And this is where I get the sick feeling in the gut, like when I can no longer ignore the fact that I’ve spent all of my money on a Las Vegas weekend orgy on gambling, hookers, and front-row seats for Wayne Newton.

Yup

If there is something that makes me nuts, it’s being shown up. Save for masochists, nobody likes public humiliation, of course. But this agony can translate itself into the private realm as well, in which fiction that has the whiff of pretense drives me batty.

Is it that I hate the idea that the writer and a coterie of loyal readers get it and I don’t? Is it hatred of the fact that perhaps these writers are operating at a higher level of some sort, and that I cannot hope to emulate them? Is it a mere case of hating what I cannot understand, or hate what I fear becoming?

Am I afraid of being unmasked as a fraud? Wait, I’ve already done that. I imagine we all have our demons. Might as well admit to mine.

And I haven’t even talked about my thing for doughnuts, beer, and demolition derbies. Man, those are awesome.

As I have been virtually invisible online the past couple of weeks for reasons that have nothing to do with my health, believe it or not, and, because I am leaving town for the weekend, I have decided to post the down-n-dirty blogger’s crutch, the “list” post, for no other reason that I have been suffering “guilt” over the fact I’ve been invisible, and feel I need to publish something before I depart. (Make sense? Doesn’t to me.)

For me, books are the obvious list-maker to address, but movies are easiest to do, and so I offer a couple of lists devoted to the Art of Cinema, published in concert with the highly anticipated premier of “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.”

(Will someone tell me whose idea it was to include “Dead Man’s Chest” in the title? The images that come to mind are gruesome. At least make sure that the dead man’s chest doesn’t resemble Alec Baldwin’s or Andy Garcia’s, men whose hirsute torsos resemble the Amazon rain forest viewed from above.)

I love movies as much as the next fellow, but I am hardly a student of the genre and cannot discuss film in any manner befitting a cineaste. Or in any matter befitting an idiot, for that matter.

Though I don’t know Art but I know what I like, I do have one insight into the matter of these lists: the older one gets, the less likely it is that one will discover your all-time book, movie, or piece of music.

Such revelations happen all the time, of course, and it wasn’t until I had passed 32 that I first saw “Touch of Evil” (see below). But had I seen it at 22 or 18, it would affected me in a way that it could not have years later. The simple reasons for this are:

–You’re young, impressionable, and once you get out of high school, realize it’s a good thing to become cultured. You want to educate yourself. You want to find something that speaks to you in a way most pieces of art cannot.

–When you’re younger, there is a tendency to find things that make you “better,” and, out of high school, talking about them won’t get you beaten up.

–You have raging hormones, and for losers like me who couldn’t get laid with pre-paid prostitution calling card, you have to direct that energy elsewhere.

Dream come true

So, without further introduction.

My Favorite 10 Movies That Make Me Look Smarter Than I Really Am:

10. Brazil
9. Y Tu Mama Tambien
8. The Magnificent Ambersons
7. Yojimbo
6. Talk to Her
5. Jules et Jim
4. Rashomon
3. Touch of Evil
2. The Seven Samurai
1. Citizen Kane

If you see a pattern here, you win! No prizes, though.

My Favorite 10 Movies That Make Me Look Stupider Than I Really Am:

10. Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery
9. The Man From S.E.X.
8. The Men Behind the Music (Devo)
7. South Park: The Movie

Chantastic!

6. The Naked Gun
5. Any and all of The Three Stooges (Curly Howard only)
4. Police Story
3. Office Space
2. Drunken Master II
1. This Is Spinal Tap

I imagine that “Tap,” “Office Space,” and the two Jackie Chan movies don’t make me look dumb, but I wouldn’t bring them up in conversation. Then again, I usually do.

Comment and have a great World Cup weekend.

Now that the long holiday weekend is over, I’ve actually cleaned the apartment for Wife’s return after an unexpected trip, why not return to Blogworld, as I have been skittering around its edges like a scared kitten of late? Why the hell not?

But it’s not my weekend boredom that I want to waste your time with. Instead, I’ll waste your time relating to a dinner conversation of a week ago, the subject of which made me extremely uncomfortable. That subject would be me.

Like most writers—the only ones you can trust, rather—I despise it when the conversation is myself, or if I have talk about myself. What was at issue was my behavior during poker games, mind you. One of my friends noted that I have the disconcerting habit of making others uncomfortable with my poker play—intimidation, dirty looks, trash talking.

I was so taken aback by these accusations that I had trouble swallowing my beer. But my friend was right. I can act this way, but only to people who are my friends, who know that I’m joking, and are in on the joke. However, those unfortunates at the table but don’t know me are less than charmed.

“And, you can be intimidating,” my other friend piped in, though he had been sitting in my defense until them.

The ultimate insult was being compared to Phil Hellmuth, the “bad boy” of poker and winner of the title of “Poker’s Biggest Asshole.”

I tried making excuses. I tried showing them I was certainly not the biggest jerkoff on the planet, maybe just third- or fourth-biggest. I told of others who were acting immature but wasn’t an act; that there were people DEAD SERIOUS ABOUT POKER; that my behavior, really, was directed towards people who know better.

Unlike Picasso, no self portraits here

But like I said above, my friend was right. Meet a stranger who is acting like an asshole, and you think, “That guy’s an asshole,” and the notion that this fellow is engaging in a “shtick” doesn’t come to mind.

I’m not here to make excuses for my behavior, but rather to say that others view us based on a set of parameters given our behaviors. As writers, it is our business to observe behavior, to turn what people say and do into the written word.

There is a Great Debate among Great Writers about how much of fiction writing should emanate from the imagination and observation, and how much from research and reportage. OK, it’s just between Everybody Who’s Anybody in Writing Vs. Tom Wolfe.

The man who gave us The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Right Stuff—books whose greatness few question—also gave us The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons, a trio of novels that are about as respected in highbrow literary circles as Moe, Larry, and Curly.

Which is an apt comparison, as Wolfe compared John Updike, Normal Mailer, and John Irving to those three stooges by name, saying how their literary techniques were being pushed aside in favor of an approach that entailed immense amounts of research and reporting before a single word of fiction is committed to paper.

The life I would not expect Tom Wolfe to fictionalize is Tom Wolfe’s. And this is where I must be one of the more atypical writers out there. I try not to base fiction on my life.

Sure, the details leak out, it’s inevitable. My novel is set in the city of my birth, the protagonist is grew up about the same time I did, his family is Jewish. But that’s about that.

Philip Roth, on the other hand, has written more about Philip Roth than critics have written about Philip Roth. His Zuckerman books are a largely based on his own life; characters in other novels, like Operation Shylock or The Plot Against America” feature a protagonist named “Philip Roth.”

The assumption is that you base a novel on one’s own experiences, if not one’s life. One of the first things my agent asked was, “How much do you have in common with the narrator?”

It only gets worse, of course, when dealing with non-writers. As many viewers will assume that the person playing Zack on a soap opera is a murderous, evil man behind his happy veneer, many readers conflate writer with narrator: they assume you are no different than a protagonist of your own making. You’re a serial killer, junkie, compulsive butt-picker, and all-around jerk.

His way or the highway

This gets back to my bad behavior while playing cards: as observers, we are constantly monitoring others, not ourselves, and I shudder to think that one of the people I’ve played poker with decides to write about it, be it an essay or a story featuring a fictionalized version of me.

But if I were to base a character on myself, I would make this person was handsome, brilliant, smart, giving, sweet, five inches taller, higher cheekbones, and capable of typing 90 words per minute. If one of my poker non-buddies were to write it, I would be snide, churlish, and totally impressed with myself.

That, I’ve come to realize, is one reason I write a blog. I’m needy for the praise of viewers just like you, but I put myself online because I cannot fathom putting myself into a work of fiction.

After all, why should I write that much more about someone I hate?