Posts from — September 2008

 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.

Oh, fatal ambition.

It’s worse than Mets fans.

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.

You know, like John McCain.