“They” say that you shouldn’t immerse yourself too deeply in fiction while writing the same, lest you end up mimicking too closely the author you’re reading, which might be a good thing if it’s reading Muriel Spark but not so great if it’s Nicholas Sparks.
I can’t say if there is a corollary in non-fiction. When I read David Sedaris, my blog doesn’t suddenly morph into wacky but acutely observed tales of wacky but interesting people. Or when I’ve read Adam Gopnik, I my blog doesn’t devolve into, uh, tales of Paris and Manhattan and whatever Adam Gopnik is known for.
This is not necessarily a good thing, and as I find myself in funk, I am wondering if I should be reading fiction at this stressful and unproductive point in my writing life, in which I seem to know more about meconium and colostrum than what’s happening in the literary “scene.”
To wit, here’s the most-read books currently on my nightstand:
1. The Happiest Baby on the Block
2. Healthy Sleep Habits, Healthy Child
3. Waiting for Birdy: a Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family
4. What to Expect When You Are Expecting and Insane
4a. Some Other Title Involving Pre-Natal Care, Early Childhood Care, or Interpreting the Color of Your Child’s Feces
You may imagine I don’t find this stuff particularly inspiring. If my blog began to resemble what I read, it would be a dull, little-read, school-marmish collections of cliché and banalities, which, I suspect, it might be already.
Another type of self-absorption
I’ve been kicking around the idea of writing a non-fiction book involving personal experiences, none of which involve losing weight, recovering from abuse, or making my first billion on Wall Street. But I can’t really seem to find a corollary tome as a model, or, truth be known, to rip off.
“You should write the book like your blog,” Wife is fond of saying, and while this is a flattering thing indeed, I doubt a reader could stand this semi-snarky, fully gloomy pose for more than 50 pages. Or five.
The only thing I will reveal about the topic of this book is that it concerns a waste of time, and my attempts to give it up (not Sudoku. Or WWE. Or blogging.) This appears as if it’s a natural parallel with a diary, but I have never been a fan of diarists, either my own or others. A good diary is the ultimate solipsism, existing nowhere but within its own universe.
I mean, a blog is good for self-absorption, but I’m not writing down the day’s events here:
I woke up, and took a piss. Showered, shaved, dressed, went to work. Got to work, had coffee, crapped out a lung. We’re talking nuclear warheads here. Grown men ran in horror. Went back to desk, and worked five minutes. Co-worker comes to bother me to talk about NASCAR. Doesn’t seem to realize my eyes are glazing over. Shooed him away and surfed the ‘Net three hours, until it was time for lunch.
Had a bacon double cheeseburger and snuck under a desk for a nap. Was busted because I hadn’t taken my Beano. Damn busybodies. Went outside and wasted a couple of hours with Samuel Adams before going back to desk and pretending to work until it was 5.
Only interrupted by a call from Wife asking me about the $300 credit card charge from LiveHotAsianTeen.com. Said I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I said I had to go.
One hundred years of solitude
So I am not reading Anais Nin, Samuel Pepys, Edmund Wilson, and Anne Frank, not because they are inferior but because, in their ideal state, diaries are written for oneself. While such inspection of the self may make for great literature, for me they are as inspirational as a barrel of sour, flat beer.
They inspire me not to be a great writer, but to be like Anais Nin.
I am thus confronted with a rare dilemma: I want to write but my inspiration has run dry. When I was working on my novel and needed such succor, I would slake my thirst with Salman Rushdie, Charlotte Bronte, or Garcia Marquez.
Now what? Tom Wolfe? Joan Didion? Ron Jeremy? Hey, he just put out an autobiography. Which makes for a great excuse to run his picture:
I’ll try slogging along. Perhaps I will start a diary for myself and draw upon it later. Perhaps this will be my inspiration.
After I get over the horror of meconium.
If I’m not fantasizing about riches from my writing, or what local football fame would have would have been mine had I not messed up my knee before high school, my mind will turn to what every nerd teenager has dreamed about being: a rock star.
Keeping with tradition, I would have to play the guitar, of course, though now, I would rather be a violin or piano virtuoso, a change in vision brought on by due to my advancing age.
Yes, I am decrepit. But I am not as decrepit, as it turns out, as Eddie Van Halen, probably the foremost rock guitar god of the last 30 years.
Mr. Van Halen looked like this 14 years ago, a man of 38:
And today:
No public service announcement could say it better: This is Eddie Van Halen; This is Eddie Van Halen on drugs.
Mr. Van Halen checked into rehab last week, after denying for years that he didn’t have a problem.
I’ve always looked a bit older than my years; when I was 38, I probably looked 40 to 45. But Eddie Van Halen always possessed the facade of eternal youth. Now, thanks to the miracle of methamphetamines, our appearances have undergone a stunning inversion: I, a man of 42, look my age, while Eddie VanHalen, a man of 52, looks about 80.
Sadly, his face does not look like someone long for this earth. He is missing teeth — a result, he claims, from mouth cancer — and no amount of airbrushing can conceal the fact that something has gone wildly wrong in this man’s life. Mr. Van Halen bears a striking resemblance to Jack Palance, and it makes me say something I thought not possible: there is a person in the world of rock and roll who looks worse than Keith Richards. At least we expect Keith to look like death on a stick.
I’m not a huge VH fan, though I like some of their early songs, and find them mildly amusing, especially because David Lee Roth is Jewish, proving beyond all doubt that us Jews are not inherently smarter than the rest of the world.
What is interesting is that although Van Halen was rich and famous at an early age, and, while a close observer may conclude the band’s downfall was when Sammy Hagar joined, it is odd that, unlike most rock and roll substance abuse disasters, Eddie Van Halen’s apparently happened in middle age.
Why the case of Eddie Van Halen interests me is as revealing about what it says. I certainly would not have done well coping with fame and riches in my 20s, and if this is a fantasy, it is one that was best unfulfilled.
But to think someone would be immune — writers, in particular — from the lures of money as they pass 40 is the height of folly. Any 65-year-old rich dolt ditching his wife for a 25-year-old bimbo is illustration enough. They have often scrimped and struggled through their careers, and once they hit the big time, start thinking they should have their fun. That they deserve to have fun.
There are plenty of writers who, despite their august pedigrees, turn to various forms of bad behavior as they enter the autumn of their lives. It may not involve crystal meth, coke, or smack, but it may involve long stretches at the bottle and mistresses. Just because you fancy yourself a genius or philosopher does not make you any less immune to human foible.
David Lee Roth: not related to Philip
I do wonder, however, how many of these (male) writers become louts or addicts only when they get older. Fame and money supposedly amplify the bad traits that already exist in one’s soul, and sometimes it just takes a while for it to catch up to you.
Which is why I’ve chosen not to be a rich and famous novelist, you see. It’s all for my own good.
Ahab had the whale. Javert had Valjean. I have the Bugaboo.
Let me explain. I have not really blogged much about the upcoming arrival in our house, for the mere reason I want to keep my family out of this, kind of like Dick Cheney keeps his lesbian daughter out of the news unless it suits him politically.
But the welling up of frustration and mounting bills has forced me to expound angrily on what I suspected but did not fully admit to myself: even before my child breathes his first gulps of air, I have spent tons of money, energy, and emotional capital on him.
I am fully convinced that weddings and babies are the biggest corporate rip off ever foisted upon the middle class. A wedding preys upon ones fears that a one-day event will not be perfect in the eyes of the guests; an impending birth preys upon the fears that a rest-of-your-life event cannot be considered successful unless you have the Biggest, Most Expensive Crap for Your Child. Otherwise, one will be the worst of all possible things, worst than being a serial philanderer or heroin addict or someone who hates Uma Thurman: you will be a BAD PARENT.
If you have ever endured this nesting-buying marathon before, you will know that most of the baby crap is, well, overpriced, low-quality crap. And when you want to spend some money to really get something nice for your kid, it turns out to be a joke.
To wit, Wife and I spent a humiliating afternoon trying to find PC, environmentally OK diapers that cost less than first quarter revenues at Google. Fuggetaboutit. You can get Huggies and save some dough, or get bleach-free, gel-free, biodegradable diapers that will seriously impede your ability to pay for food and shelter.
We’ve chosen a crib, bassinet, rug, diaper changing station, bottles, and car seat with the utmost care. The kid has a billion hand-me-downs, enough to clothe him for his first year. Most of the stuff we’ve bought, we’ve done the research and gotten off (relatively) cheap.
Then comes the matter of strollers.
I have warned our great nation about the plague known as Thomas the Tank Engine, and have watched my spleen explode as I rail against adults appropriating children’s holidays. Now, I come to something just as nefarious. Something called The Bugaboo. And if you bought one, I don’t despise you, but I wonder just what the hell were you thinking.
A Bugaboo is a nifty, lightweight stroller that is truly an impressive feat of engineering. It has a nice, smooth ride, and adjust to many different stroller positions. It looks swell and was featured on “Sex and the City.” It’s the stroller pictured above, courtesy of a company out of Amsterdam.
And it only costs $800.
Conspicuous consumption is bad enough, but when you use a baby for it, I start to question your fitness as a parent. I’m sure that someone reading this has a Bugaboo, I’m sure a friend of family member has a Bugaboo, and I’m sure you’re thinking, don’t be a pompous ass.
(But being a pompous ass is one of the benefits of blogging).
In that spirit, I am trying to figure out a way to halt sales of the Bugaboo. I will claim it’s a safety hazard (not true), that it retards childhood development (not true), that Bugaboo owners are more likely to forget their children’s birthdays, vaccinations, and deadlines for getting their brat into their first-grade SAT cramming class (perhaps true).
If you want to spend some bux on a nice stroller, fine. Make it a $350 stroller, put the rest in your child’s college fund (and believe me, every Bugaboo owner has a college fund) or give it to charity. Stop making your child a fashion accessory. Set a good example. Be a good parent.
Whew. Glad that’s out of my system. Next time: Bookfraud rails against someone at work.
One of benefits of writing is that I don’t have to share credit with anybody for the massive brilliance that is known as my work. It is also unknown brilliance, so it’s not as if people are beating down the door to share credit, but still — all the crap I’ve written is exclusively my crap, exclusively.
I have been thinking a lot about this these days, following a lawsuit involving the 2005 epic “Dodgeball.” It turns out that stealing is the least of Hollywood’s credit-hogging woes.
It seems like movie producers are in a constant scrap over who gets producing “credit” on their work, thus giving eligibility to Academy Awards, payment for royalties, and access to hot babes who would look at these lumps of men and say, “If you didn’t have money and power, I would find you as sexually appealing as Harvey Weinstein in a Speedo.”
Of late, there are incidences of this taking place, but probably the most well-known is a credits fight over the movie “Crash,” which won last year’s Academy Award for Best Picture, a fact that makes one ponder the definition of the word “best.” A seriously pissed-off gentleman named Bob Yari has filed suit against the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences and Producers Guild of America, which again makes a guy wonder what “Sciences” they’re talking about, and why someone like Bob Evans needs a union.
The idea that I would want to share credit for my work is about as alien to me as buying the “Weekend at Bernie’s” DVD box set. This is not about, say, stealing ideas or plagiarizing, two loathsome activities that I would probably indulge in if 1) it would make me rich, famous, or unfathomably sexy to women; and 2) I could get away with it.
Protecting credit
Certainly it is not my place to impugn screenwriters, directors and movie producers. Mr. Yari may very well be in the right. However, upon close, careful inspection, and objective, nuanced analysis, I think it is a fair assessment to say that that a certain portion of those involved in the film-making business are amoral, venal whores. So to speak.
Now, I am hardly one to accuse my creative brethren of being amoral, venal whores, because I would love to be an amoral, venal whore, as long as I got all the benefits of such, which would mean money, power, and tons of hot, brainless babes who want to have sex with married, middle-age expectant fathers whose chests have sprouted more than a little hair.
(I realize I am not supposed to admit such longings mere weeks before Wife gives birth to Baby. Set a good example and all that. Let’s just say I’m being honest, and you want your child to learn honesty, right?)
This gets down to my definition of an artist: the public still gives a damn about an artist’s work long after he or she is six feet under. You can be famous during your lifetime, like Dickens, or not-so-famous, like Kafka, but people are still reading their scribbles.
I imagine Mr. Yari wants an Oscar for his work on “Crash,” and I can’t say I blame him. It also reinforces why many fiction writers aren’t filmmakers, screenwriters, playwrights, or other collaborative artists: we don’t play well with others.
Take, for instance, the case of The Ruined Sketch. When I was in grad school, I took a theater class. One assignment called for us to write a five-minute comedic skit, and other students would act it out. I thought I had a sure-fire winner, a Saturday Night Live-SCTV-esque piece of brilliance: Dr. Cindy Hoover, Lesbian Urologist.
Don’t mess with Chuckie
This was a perfectly executed piece of comedic genius. Think about it: why do women even bother going to a male gynecologist? Why would a man go to a female urologist, supposing there are any? I mean, what man would want a woman handling his balls?
Ostensibly, my classmates were aspiring actors. But the woman who played Dr. Cindy Hoover, Lesbian Urologist had the charisma of a laundry pile and the acting chops of burnt toast. She read everything in the same monotone, sentences running together, jokes buried under her infintile reading. It took every fiber in my being not to scream, “You talentless bungler! You’ve ruined my skit! You’ve ruined my life!”
As a result, one of the first lessons I’m going to teach my son will involve sharing and giving others’ credit. The lesson will be: once you are older and in the working world, if things go great, it’s because of your hard work, but if things go bad, blame the annoying person in the cubicle next to you.