An Unexamined 'Burb: Lee Siegel and "Revolutionary Road"

I live in the suburbs. I do it for my children. I want them to live where other children live, where they can play in the front yard, on green grass, under broad leafed trees, where other children will come to play, where the schools are good, where the streets are safe.

I have, though, lived elsewhere. I have lived where drunks vomit and sleep on the curb, where fights break out in the street, where drug deals transpire below my window, where shootouts send bullets to pierce my windows.

Despite these contradictions, my detest for the suburbs continues to this day. It has its origins in my youth. I lived in the suburbs from the time I was eight until I was old enough to run from them. Primarily, I saw my own neighborhood as the embodiment of misplaced ideals. Where the uniqueness of souls was given over to the same uniformity as the tract homes. Where football games were more important to a fulfilling life than art in any form. The suburbs represented sprawl, by man's desire to pave over nature, erect strip malls, and design away the randomness of life.

Lee Siegel, in an article from this weekend's Wall Street Journal, "Why Does Hollywood Hate the Suburbs: America's long artistic tradition of claiming spiritual death by station weekend," uses the film version of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road to minimize my detest of the suburbs as intellectual snobbery and classism. Siegel explains, "With the growth of suburban towns, the liberal American intellectual now had a concrete geography to house his acute sense of outrage."

I won't defend the film. I haven't seen it. Ironically, or maybe typically, it's not playing anywhere near me. I will, though, say that Siegel's interpretation of the novel is symptomatic of someone extremely defensive of the suburbs. Perhaps, pathologically so.

He describes the novel's "fatal deficiency":

Frank and April's total lack of talent or substance makes their ultimately thwarted attempt to leave the suburbs for Paris less the stuff of tragedy than irritating farce.

Or more succinctly, "In "Revolutionary Road," the two principal characters are brought down by lawn sprinklers and station wagons."

The Wheelers are not brought down by the suburbs. Their undoing comes from the notion that they are better than their surroundings. They are not swallowed by it and stripped of their souls. Their fatal flaw is intellectual, cultural hubris. They believed they would some day escape the soulless conformity of their surroundings for fashionable Paris salons. Never did they realize that they lacked the talent or capacity necessary.

The novel is not set on Revolutionary Road as an excuse to excoriate suburban standards. It is an examination of how one's imagination can lead to ruin. Siegel cites, and idealizes, John Cheever's suburbanism. Of his story "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill," Siegel writes that "life's complexity and surprise follow you everywhere, even over the city line, across the river and into the suburban trees. You wonder why the creators of the film 'Revolutionary Road' are blind to such an obvious fact of human existence."

What Siegel fails to realize is that the suburbs where much of America lives are not like Westchester. It is not the place where the well-to-do have escaped the dangers confines of the city for tree-lined streets. The suburbs I know are those of the working and middle classes. It is where those of even meager means attempt to grasp a piece of the American dream. The suburbs are detestable for this displaced notion, not the result of some displaced envy.

The suburbs I know are not those of John Hughes movies, the Stepford Wives, or the "Real Housewives" franchise that Siegel cites. Hollywood does not hate the suburbs, not my suburbs. My suburbs remain, sadly unexamined. And Siegel's idea of the suburbs demonstrates his own regional snobbery.

MFA-MBA: An Ethical Dilemma

When a literary-type enrolls in an executive MBA program, an evaluative eye naturally remains open. I may be doing my best to learn, but a part of my brain remains open, judging, assessing, characterizing what is happening around me. And though the seriousness of it, the workload and the nature of what we're doing, consumes my energy, I still want to write about it.

Here, I am faced with a dilemma that is at least ethical, but goes beyond that. Writing publicly about my experience in the EMBA program is tricky. I think the blog is the perfect forum because it allows me to debate things openly. Not only do I want to write about my experience, but I also want to get into what is being covered in the courses. As well as what is going on in the real world.

My instinct for self-preservation tells me this is risky. Writing critically about the program, the faculty, or other students might get in trouble. It's not as if my name isn't all over this blog. If I fail to mention the name of the college, or the name of any other student or professor that at least might help me avoid any pesky Google searches.

So, I'll tread lightly, I suppose.

What I'm Thankful For...

New Yorker Fiction: “Ghosts” by Edwidge Dandicat

Edwidge Danticat’s story “Ghosts” in the Nov. 24 edition of the New Yorker focuses on a young man living in Haiti among slums and gangsters. Danticat’s style is more reportage than description. Told in third person, the story avoids delving too deep in the mind of the protagonist, Pascal, or giving us any real description of setting. We are given facts, some thoughts, and little else.

The story does, though, go deep. Pascal, a young man trying to find his way and avoid the lifestyle that surrounds him, falls into the fantasies that trap many of us. Dreaming of hosting his own radio show, he imagines,

It would be controversial at first, but soon people would tune in by the thousands. A kind of sick voyeurism would keep them listening, daily, weekly, monthly, however often he was on. People would rearrange their schedules around it. They wouldn’t be able to stop discussing it.

The fact-based style doesn’t illuminate or excite. The reader may be interested in finding out what happens, but he isn’t captivated. Only near the end does Danticat open the story up some, stepping away from the action, to go deeper, with Pascal again fantasizing about, this time, a new radio program:
He would open with a discussion of how many people in Bel Air had lost limbs. Then he would go from limbs to souls, to the number of people who had lost family—siblings, parents, children—and friends. These were the real ghosts, he would say, the phantom limbs, phantom minds, phantom loves that haunt us, because they were used, then abandoned, because they were desolate, because they were violent, because they were merciless, because they were out of choices, because they did not want to be driven away, because they were poor.

“Ghosts” tells of a life, a world about which I know nothing, which I can hardly understand. It does come close to helping me comprehend the problem.

WSJ Editorial Throws Cold Water on Geithner Nomination

After the Dow rallied nearly 500 points on Friday after the leak that President-elect Obama would nominate Timothy Geithner to be the new Treasury Secretary, the Wall Street Journal editorial board has decided take an ideological view of the choice. Instead of providing the reliable, business-centric view of the economy and Obama's choice, the Wall Street Journal seemed to think it should contradict the market, who obviously approved of the choice (as I write this Monday morning, the market is up another 170 points).

Demonstrating the skewed take on the current situation, the editorial reads, "The uncertainty over Obama's team and its direction has itself been fueling the lack of confidence, so we're glad to see the President-elect getting on with the show." Undoubtedly, a period of transition affects confidence, but when the current administration decides to sit on the sidelines during a crisis, it hardly helps anything.

I expect to disagree with the WSJ editors when it comes to politics, but it is disappointing to see the editors' political ideology to interfere with their ability to see things clearly and offer the proper reassuring opinion necessary in the current economic situation.

How does it sound? President-Elect Obama

On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama was elected as the next President of the United States. I am, of course, pleased that the man I backed from the beginning actually won the election (that hasn't happened in many, many years), but while watching him come out to deliver his victory speech I was proud of our country. Much has been made in the last few days about the significance of his race, but it does say something to me personally about who we are that the majority of us voted for him. During the primaries, realizing that I really like Obama, I thought to myself that he never had a chance. "He's a black guy with a funny name; what chance does he have?" Yet, here we are.

I could talk too about what this means politically, what it tells me, but there are a hundred journalists out there slicing up the data and making pronouncements about the state of the country. It is different, for me, to feel that a majority of people have come around to my point of view.

And what a weight is lifted, having the election behind us. I didn't realize how much stress the whole thing was causing. Now we get to get on to real policy issues, the meat of the matter. This, really, is what I like. I could even go on about the decision Obama has made in the last few days and the implication of them, but there are others out there, who watch this even closer than I do, who could do a better job of it. All I should say here is that I'm pleased and proud about how the whole thing has worked out.

Our Moment in History

(I originally wrote this on 8/31/08 and meant to post it immediately thereafter. It's less timely now, but still worth posting.)

This week we were witness to an historical event and we must remember this moment. When Barack Obama accepted the nomination of the Democratic Party for President, he became the first person of African descent to be a major party nominee. I am pleased with his nomination for many reasons that having nothing to do with this historical fact, but this fact may tell us something about where we've come as a country. It was not all that long ago that blacks didn't even have the right to vote in this country. And by itself that was a long way to travel from the time before the Civil War when they had no rights at all.

Of course, it cannot be said that he nominee's race is not an issue. In the primary, as it will be in the general election, many voted, if not primarily at least in part, on race. There are still those who believe that black man should know his place or think that his race means that his politics are suspect. This thinking is abhorrent, but it does not please either when I hear of people voting for him simply because he is black. (Funny how hard it is to right that word.)

While I suspect the eagerness of some to see a man succeed despite the societal hindrances of his race, I want certain things out of my President that have not a thing to do with his or her race.

Serendipitously, I'm currently reading Edward P. Jones's All Aunt Hagar's Children, a brilliant collection of short stories by an African American author. Here, the race only matters because the race maters for many of his characters, despite my ability to forget their race or the author's. And as much as the press has been exercised in discussions of race and the biographies of the Obamas, I've been especially tuned to the struggles particular to their race. I was stunned to hear commentators seeming to learn for the first time about a family's move from the south to attempt a new life in the industrial north. Apparently, they've never read any African American literature. Makes me wonder how they would react to reading Invisible Man. And what stereotypes would they form after reading it?

Despite Thursday night's event taking place here in Denver, I like most people watched on TV as Obama accepted the nomination and delivered a speech on America's Promise with great pride. I was not only proud that the candidate who I supported during the primaries was actually going to be the party's nominee, I was also proud of my country. Now, I want him to win and such a win will say a great deal about where we are as a country. Winning the nomination, though, out of a field of candidates whose views are not altogether disparate tells me much about where we are today. And I'm pleased and prideful to be a witness to this moment in history.

The Importance of a Good Gift

When I was, I'll say, six or seven, I found under the Christmas tree a plastic typewriter with my name on it. I wonder if it was at this point that writing got into my blood. I can't think there were many my age excited as I was to get this gift.

A Coyote in the Valley - An Excerpt

Troy focused on the ball as he prepared to kick it. It was a large one with green swirls through white, the fun kind that you can buy out of the big bins at the IGA, but today he did not kick it in fun. He gave it a solid kick against the grayed boards of what used to be a chicken coop and then jumped quickly to recover the bounced ball before it snagged on the barbed wire fence that separated the yard from the neighboring property. The small old coop sat back against the dark trees of the McAllister’s place. Troy had to be careful to keep the ball from hitting the barbed wire fence. If the ball hit one of those barbs, that would be the end of the ball, and his game.

It was one of those summer days where there did not seem to be enough to do. Troy did not really want to do anything, but he definitely did not want to be burdened with some little girl. Sarah, his eight-year-old sister, sat in the deep grass near by, while Troy kicked the ball, again and again, against the side of the weathered shack. His father was across the yard next to the tan rock of the driveway, building a doghouse for his Malamute, a fluffy black and white, blue-eyed dog. Another dog had been found shot about a mile down the road, so his father had tethered the dog to the front steps of the house without shelter from the sun. Only after noticing that the dog no longer bothered to get up when he drove into the drive did the father decide that a doghouse might be needed.

Book Review: Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

About two weeks ago I finally finished this book. It took a long time. I liked the stories in general, but when a collection gets to this size, it's hard to like them much when you pass 600 pages. Even though I many have suffered from some bias by the length and repetitiveness of anything this long, I think the early stories were the best. There's a bit of the Southern Gothic in them. Killers and losers appear here next to innocents. Welty, though, doesn't impose a morality on these characters, or on us. Inf act , reviewing the last lines of some of these early stories, there really is a kind of existentialism:

- "Billy boy....flung back the words, 'If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?'"
- "You could see that he despised and saw the uselessness of the thing he had done."
- "...I'd simply put my fingers in both my ears and refuse to listen."

As the stories advance in years, Welty draws more on Southern rural life and all its aspects and less on the drama of the early stories. These middle stories, focusing on a single community and its inhabitants at various points in time, are rich. Yet at the same time they have new elements that enrich them, they lack some of what I enjoyed most out of the early stories.

My interest had wained by the time I got to the last third of the collection. There was nothing bad or even frustratingly pointless here, but I was ready to move on by the time I reached page 400.

Welty is a remarkable writer, I just wouldn't recommend this collection in this form to anyone. Instead, go with the novels, Delta Wedding or The Optimist's Daughter, or one of the original (smaller) short story collections and you'll be mighty impressed.

A shift in objective

It is funny how sometimes I feel I have nothing to say and then other times I feel like I could sit down and bang out 5000-word essays non-stop. I've been coming up dry when it comes to blogging. I still like the idea, but there have been so many occasions when I don't feel like anything I say is worth putting out there into the ether to be read by my extremely limited internet audience. And the less I post, the more that audience shrinks.

Yet, I want to be writing. I am willing to take on the most uninteresting of journalistic assignments in order to be writing and to have my name out there in the world--and in print. The trouble is that I remain conscious of a future audience. I worry that the words I write will somehow negatively influence some one's decision about me. It could be a future or current employer. I'd love to write about the Russian-Georgian conflict of last week, but it is likely to be a sensitive issue for people in my organization and I'd be better served by staying silent on the issue. And there's always the idea that sometime in the future my children might get a hold of my writing. If course I'd really be in trouble if they ever began reading through my journals.

For some time I've had the notion of changing the purpose of the blog. There are plenty of people writing about books and writing, and while I'm not likely to stop doing that, there's no reason to compete with people who could do a better job. It is better to capitalize on my unique position, using my life, my personality and personal predicaments instead. And at the same time it would better show case my writing abilities, which really should be the purpose behind the blog.

The work-life-writing balance, an issue that has plagued me for some time, and inspired many too many journal entries, is about to get worse as it, again, becomes the work-life-writing-school balance. I imagine that there are few MFAs out there pursuing MBAs. By shifting the blog's objective somewhat I might actually end up writing more and writing better and more interesting posts.

Mechanisms - An Excerpt

He heard the gunshot, a sudden popping that echoed through the neighborhood’s narrow yards, but he didn’t register it. As Fred sat in his backyard in the growing dusk of a late summer evening, he was looking at the moving blades of grass, the maniacal dance of the leaves of the single elm in the small yard, and he was wishing he could pave it all over with concrete. The movement of these living things, the intangibility of these natural mechanisms, distressed him.

For over twenty-five years Fred had worked in maintenance in one of St. Louis’s largest skyscrapers. His days were spent in the chasms under the building, walking the catwalks among the hulking tanks, the gasping pipes and machines that ran the heating and cooling for the building’s fifty floors. In this sub-basement with its sparse light, with his coffee in his metal thermos and his calendar of topless women in tool belts from a parts supplier hanging above his workbench, Fred was at home. These machines were things that he could comprehend, machines that could be fixed with a wrench, with getting your hands dirty, understood by reading a gauge. The steel and grease, the dials and gauges, were things that he could put his large hands on. The grass and the tree were living things he could not bear to touch. He could not understand their living, their growing.

If the yard were concrete he would mind less these evenings spent sitting in a lawn chair with a six-pack of Schlitz. Nonetheless, it was more peaceful for him outside than inside with his wife and the endless chatter from the television as she watched Hollywood Squares and Wheel of Fortune. Together, he and Sarah had three boys, each of which proved a disappointment in one way or another.

Their youngest, Billy, who was born William, but at twelve had not yet grown out of the youthful nickname, was out this night using up his last free minutes before the regime of the school year returned. School had proven difficult for Billy on two fronts. The schoolwork seemed to challenge him in unexpected ways, but school was a bigger problem for Billy socially. Fred was frustrated by the frequency with which Billy received black eyes and fat lips, of how often a new bike, wrist watch, or school book was stolen. Billy would often dismiss the loss of some treasured object as his own mistake, he’d misplaced the watch, forgotten to lock up the bike, but Fred knew better. His thickness as a youth had put him often on the other side of such things. With his height and broad shoulders, Fred had used his size to intimidate others, and now he found himself with nothing to say to his youngest son, avoiding him.

Who knew Issac Hayes wrote "Hold On, I'm Coming"?

He also wrote Sam and Dave's "Soul Man," but I can't think of that without thinking of the Blues Brothers.

NPR replayed an old Fresh Air interview with Issac Hayes last night. I loved the theme from Shaft, but I had not idea how influential he was. RIP.

The Disguise - An Excerpt

The four of them sat, two on each side of the dining room table, and on the table between them lay what remained of their dinner, plates crusting with the remnants of chicken and pasta with white sauce and stir-fry vegetables. A second bottle of wine was only half full. Isaac carefully noted the table (natural pine), the silverware (hammered), the dishes (store-brand). A desk with a computer sat in the darkness of a corner of the dining room. Under the table, Amy, his wife, squeezed his knee lovingly. The conversation lulled.


"It's a nice house you have." Amy broke the temporary silence. It had been clear to Isaac that she didn’t understand why they were all friends.


"Thanks." Mark included himself.


"Mark always wants to do something else to it. He wants to put French doors where this window is here, so we can walk right out onto the patio." Elizabeth gently patted Mark's shoulder. "But, we never get around to it."


"Oh yeah, Amy thinks she's going to paint the bedroom. She has the paint chips and everything. It's still white, though." Isaac stared at Mark, with his close cropped blond hair and the perpetual smirk he wore. He couldn’t help but believe Mark was laughing at him behind that smug expression.


"Amy, how's the nursing home?" Elizabeth asked.


"It's good."


"Don't people die there all the time?" Elizabeth put her elbows out on the table, brushed her hair back before setting her chin in her hands. "I know it sounds morbid, but how do you get used to it?"


"I don't know." Amy glanced at Isaac. "They don't die that often, really." She paused. "I guess you just don't get that close to them."


"Oh, it sounds awful. I'd be crying all the time. I remember I was volunteering at the hospital, what was it, senior year?" She asked Isaac.


He nodded, remembering.

When the Past Comes Back

In many of my stories is a recurring theme of someone who is cut off from his/her past and is afraid of it coming back. I have to admit that I share this sentiment. And my past has come back, in the form of my entire high school graduating class. Next year is my 20-year high school reunion (quick, do the math) and in advance of it someone has set up a website for everyone to reconnect. Well, they are reconnecting.

On the website, people who haven't talked in twenty years are now leaving each other comments, leaving each other messages, and posting pictures. My in-box is full of messages of people, people I barely remember, leaving me comments or adding me as a "friend."

I have to say--and I'll say it knowing that some of these same people might read this--I find the whole thing creepy.

I am cut off from my past. I hardly feel like I ever could have been the person I was then. And know I'm being invited to relive that. Maybe these people all had a better experience there than I did. I am just not too eager to be a part of any of it. I'd would simply like to on as if none of it ever happened. Anything wrong with that?

From the Kansas Roadside

Deeann - An Excerpt

Ever since she had passed three hundred pounds, Juliet found it hard to do much. And it became hard to keep up with her eleven-year-old daughter. "Deeann!" Juliet shouted, pushing the screen door open with her thick hand and stepping with calloused and dirty bare feet onto the concrete of the front porch. Winded from the twenty steps that she had taken from the kitchen to the porch, Juliet pressed her shoulder against the vinyl siding of the duplex, and took a drink from the sweating Diet Pepsi can in her hand. "Deeann!" She shouted again, her voice sharp and piercing, with its Missouri accent. Then she quietly murmured, "So help me girl, you’d better learn to come when your momma calls."

From the shade of the porch Juliet looked out on the barren area where Deeann was allowed to play. It was supposed to have been a small development of duplexes to house the families of men who worked at the grain mill. It was started in the eighties when some large conglomerate had bought the independent mill, and the prospect was that production would increase, more people would move to Hurdland to work at the mill. After a year under new ownership, the mill was closed. Most of the men were out of work, and a large exodus followed.

What remained of the low-income development was an intersection of two short stretches of black top, lined with its white curbs without sidewalks, storm drains forming a triangle at the intersection as if it were a legitimate suburban street. Juliet and her daughter lived where one road ended at the perpendicular meeting of the other, in one of the only five squat buildings that were constructed. One of these pastel colored buildings was never fully completed, and the particleboard that had been put over the windows and doors did not keep out the teenagers from the neighboring trailer park. In front of the row of homes, a strip of blacktop stretched to the two-lane state highway. On either side were the barren plots of future homes. The ground there had been leveled for construction, leaving two flat fields where nothing grew but brown weeds and assorted clumps of green crab grass. Two mounds of dirt on the far right side, next to the trailer park, were used by kids on their dirt bikes. A place where the fence between the two developments had come down was a well-worn path.

Deeann was supposed to ask before she went to the trailer park. Juliet looked in the direction of the trailers, listening for the sound of children playing. She didn’t think much of the kids that lived there, mostly because she had heard them laughing at her. Deeann only ever left the immediate area to fetch groceries for Juliet, who, herself, left the house less and less. Her disability check went right in the bank, Deeann knew how to use the ATM, and the TV provided all the information and entertainment she needed.

On the far side of the trailer park was Casey’s General Store and, beyond that, the railroad tracks. The tracks crossed the highway at an angle, coming out of the trees and curving in to run along side the mill, which was wedged at the center of town between the tracks and the highway. Opposite the mill was what constituted Main Street. Originally it might have been three blocks of bustling action. Indeed, when the mill ran at full tilt, the three restaurants would fill at lunch with the sickly sweet smell of mill workers. Now the windows of what used to be sunny restaurants had been covered over to conceal the patrons of bars and pool halls, the only businesses in the area that prospered. It was in one of these dark bars that Juliet met the man that became Deeann's father.

The Auction - An Excerpt

It had stopped raining on their way back from the county clinic, but the water still flowed quickly in the gutter of the deserted main street. The sun that by now should have been bringing light to the quiet street remained obscured by clouds left from the storm that had passed during the night. It was early on a Saturday morning and their car was the only one parked at an angle between the stiff rows of buildings that composed the small town's center. The storefronts were all dark and cavernous, without light. Valerie sat in the car waiting for her husband who had gone into the Rexall Drug. He had not bothered to leave the keys in the car. She sat there in silence, without distraction. On the windshield in front of her the remains of a bug spread out across the glass. She began to cry again.

Her hand, cold and weak, pulled on the handle of the door, and it opened. Walking softly and calmly into the street, she was a solitary figure in what appeared a ghost town. She stepped up onto the opposite sidewalk without looking into the hollow True Value hardware store in front of her. She saw only the name of a concrete company pressed into each square of the sidewalk. Coming to the corner, she turned to the right, walking without purpose away from their car, the drug store, her husband.

Halfway down the block in front of her a yellow plastic lighted sign hung above the sidewalk. Donuts. At an angle in front of the donut shop a few cars were parked. Pick-up trucks belonging to farmers who were out early on a weekend morning, others who were without family and in need of company.

She stepped up quietly in front of the store, the rising sun beginning to make the damp air unpleasant. She stopped her walking and looked inside the store. The old men inside under the fluorescent lights drank coffee in styrofoam cups, put out cigarettes into tin ashtrays. They were talking, laughing and telling stories. Weathered faces turned red with excitement, grooved lines stretching with smiles. Thick framed glasses and gray hair cut close on the sides, aged shirts stretched through the middle.

Among the men, her father sat leaned across the pink table. Valerie recognized him there. He smiled and sat back into the fiberglass chair, taking a drag from his cigarette. He turned to the figure at the window, for only a moment, then turned back to his companions.

Riverside - an excerpt

A stomping through the hall, on the other side of the closed door, drew Abagail out of the book she was reading. She had been sitting in the window seat of her room, her eyes flowing quickly over the novel’s small typeface, but she was pulled out of that world.
At thirteen, Gail sensed the growing anger in the house, aware of its flowing in and out, like a fog which had now rolled in and filled up the halls and rooms of their house. On this day, she was the only one of the three children in the house, and thus she lacked the insulation that the presence of others could provide. With them there, shouting was less likely. Her parents might not even realize now that she was still in her room and not out in the afternoon playing with her brothers. She tossed the book down.
Standing, she brushed down her skirt, stood before the mirror, pushed back her glasses, and put her hand gently on the door knob. She twisted it as silently as possible and pulled the old door open. The hinges creaked, but only a gentle creaking, indistinguishable from the general noises the old house made. In the dim hall, light came from her parents’ room at one end, and at the other a diffuse light came from the ground floor below. She was stepping silently down the hall, listening for the sound of her steps and trying to ignore the voices of her parents coming from their bedroom, when she heard her mother’s laugh. What could have been a light laugh at first impression, Gail could tell was full of malice. She was laughing in such a way as to injure someone. She was familiar with that laugh, with the accompanying head tilted to the ceiling, the hands slapping legs. Gail used the shelter of the laugh to dart downstairs and through the screen door that smacked violently closed behind her.
Gail recalled a day that winter when she’d left the house in similar fashion, retreating from the sounds of an overturned table, and had somehow skipped the steps from the porch and snapped her ankle when she landed on the icy concrete of the front walk. Though she knew it was innocent enough, she was humiliated. Not only could she then not escape, she had to lie there on the walk and cry until someone came to help. Hobbling on her cast for the next six weeks convinced her of the unpleasant nature of the home.
Outside, the day was stifling and she immediately missed her window seat, her book. She stood in the shade of a large maple across the street from the house and debated what to do and where to go. Her brothers had gone up to Jackson Park, but she didn’t like the idea of being with them. Harry, in particular.

Short Story Excerpts Coming Your Way

I've been talking here about writing for some time, showing you the many rejection slips, but other than these quick blog posts, I've never really given you examples of my writing. So, I think it's time I did.

Over the next several weeks, I will be posting excerpts from my short stories. It'll just be the first couple hundred words. Enough to give you a taste and maybe leave you wanting a little more.

Romantic, Expatriate Paris

I received my first delivered edition of the Wall Street Journal this weekend (don't worry, I traded in frequent flier miles for the subscription) and beyond the usual business news, things I've learned I need to keep up of for work (you know, the real job) there was an excellent article titled Why the Expats Left Paris, by Dinaw Mengestu.


As the title indicates, Mengestu looks at how different Paris is today from the way it was different expatriate waves that took over it's cafes, when American intellectuals and artists could be found on every corner of the left bank. It is the notion of the American expatriates' Paris that has always made the city attractive. Beyond the city's own dandies and intellectuals, from Baudelaire to Sartre, it is the idea that Hemingway and Gertrude Stein are hanging out at one bar, while (in another time) Richard Wright and James Baldwin are at another.


Those times are gone. I went to Paris in 1999 in search of that Paris, looking for the heady cafe conversations, while chasing the history of my favorite Parisians. Even then, while the city remained romantic in my mind, the old Paris was gone. Walking the Champs Elysees should tell anyone that individual Paris, the city with it's own single identity is gone. The big American stores are here, with all the American vulgarity that the expats were looking to leave behind. The article points out that across Germain de Pres from Cafe de Flore and Deux Magots, an American Apparel store, with all its trashy clothes, has set up shop.

While the old expatriates' Paris is gone, the city remains romantic in the minds of many of us, include the article's author:

Unlike many of the writers and Americans who came here before, my reasons for being here are purely selfish and self-absorbed, with nothing and no one to run from. I used to say that I came to Paris because it was so quiet, in large part because at the time I could hardly speak the language. While today that may no longer be as completely true, the city still strikes me as quiet. There's no romantic ideal to be lived out here anymore -- no cafés, readings or events that can't be missed. What remain today are largely ghosts that are easy if not even comforting to live amongst. They had their Paris -- garrulous and crowded with the politics and culture of America -- and now finally, with no one else around, I can have mine.

Franchising Booksellers

I'm always thinking about ways to resurrect/save/reinvigorate the bookselling business. So, when I heard this week about Starbucks' trouble (closing 600 company-owned stores), I begin to wonder about their troubles and translating it to another retail industry


I am one of those hypocrites who complains about the big-box bookstores killing the industry while simultaneously shopping there myself. There's a Barnes & Noble gift card in my wallet right now. There are maybe two main reasons people like us shop at these stories. First is their ubiquitousness. These stores are everywhere. Certainly much closer to me than my nearest (decent) independent bookstore. The second reason we frequent these sorts of places despite our moral qualms is that we know what to expect.

The retail franchise model supports these two explanations, but does something more. It puts the success or failure of the store in the hands of the franchisee. This is why I think it could succeed as new model for bookselling.

The corporate office in the franchise provides branding, which may be the most important element of what they do, but they also offer support. Support is much different than mandates. I'm not sure how much liberty the buyer at the local Borders has, but I'm relatively certain the books they chose to promote, what ends up on the stores displays, in their windows, are directed from some corporate office far, far away. An independent owner/operator, though, would have freedom to respond to his/her individual market, absent of corporate mandates.

Now, since the time my mind crossed this possibility, I've been imagining many different scenarios, many different ways the relationship between franchiser and franchisee could work. I just want to put the thought out there. I know little about the industry in detail, and my knowledge of the franchise set-up comes from my time as a manager at a pizza delivery chain. So, I'm no expert, but maybe someone out there knows more and could help build the business case--or, tell me I'm just wrong.

Happy 4th

Or as we sang last night over a red, white, and blue cupcake with two candles burning in it, "Happy birthday dear America...."

From Anti-establishment to Executive MBA

About fourteen or fifteen years ago, I wrote a journal entry while sitting downtown at The Market on an early workday morning. I, of course, was not going to work. I had dropped off a lady-friend at work. I sat there, drinking my coffee, in the shadows of skyscrapers about the freshly washed sidewalks, watching the day start, watching the gears of commerce begin to turn. I'd been reading Celine and was feeling very anti-establishment. Watching people going to work, the buildings filling with workers, I wrote a journal entry railing against this world. It was all absurd and served no purpose, I wrote at the time. I had no idea then that many years later would find me at the same location in a very different frame of mind.

This Wednesday morning, I was back at The Market, having a coffee. Only this time, I was wearing a suit. I was wearing a suit and killing time waiting for an interview. An interview for admission to an Executive MBA program. So, however many years ago I had felt bad for those part of the large mechanism of capitalism, thinking about how the system had stolen their souls. And then there I was this week, eager to become further entrenched.

I'm not sure if it is simply ironic, if the system has stolen my soul, or if simply says something about evolution.

Sixth human foot found on Canada's Pacific coast

Sixth human foot found on Canada's Pacific coast - USATODAY.com: "VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) — Another human foot was found Wednesday on a British Columbia shoreline, the second this week and the sixth within a year in a bizarre mystery that has confounded police.
Like most of the others, it was a right foot encased in a running shoe, said Sgt. Mike Tresoor of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He said a citizen spotted it on a beach and no other remains were found."

Okay, this just gets weirder all the time. No one knows anything about six missing people? Or six people with missing right feet?

And Another Book Sale

I made it back in time from by camping trip to go to "bag day" of my local library system's book sale, where a bag stuffed full of books costs you $5.00. Coming in on the last day of the sale pretty much guarantees that I missed most of the good books, the recently published books, but "bag day" means I can rationalize picking up books I might ignore if I had to pay more for them.

The trouble is that I have a hard time remembering what's in my own library anymore. There's a good chance that some of these books are already on my shelf. Here's what I brought home anyway:

Tomato Red - Daniel Woodrell
Situations - Jean-Paul Sartre
Rabbit Redux - John Updike
Rabbit at Rest - John Updike
The Road Home - Jim Harrison
Quarantine - Jim Crace
The Plot Against America - Philip Roth
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital - Lorrie Moore
Transmission - Hari Kunzru
Lucky Girls - Nell Freudenberger
A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
(1949 Bantam edition, on the back "Brutal...Terrific...Awesome...and Beautiful!")
Them - Joyce Carol Oates
Sometimes a Great Notion - Ken Kesey
The Reivers - William Faulkner
Grendel - John Gardner
Falconer - John Cheever
First Light - Charles Baxter
Rising from the Plains - John McPhee
Waiting for the Barbarians - JM Coetzee
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Sportswriter - Richard Ford
The Western Lands - William S. Burroughs
The Wild Boys - William S. Burroughs
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
Black Water - Joyce Carol Oates
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver
Best American Essays of the Century - Edited by Joyce Carol Oates
A Manual for Writers - Kate Turabian
South of No North - Charles Bukowski

Book Sale Finds

When travelling, I have a natural tedancy to turn my head when I see signs for bookstores. A sign for a "book sale" will often get me to hit the brakes and swerve across lanes of traffic. This is exactly what happened over the weekend when I found myself in Alamosa, Colorado, in the southern part of the state. At $1.00 for hardbacks, and $.50 for paperbacks, here's what I nabbed:

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead - Tom Stoppard
Fear and Trembling - Kierkegaard
A Lesson Before Dying - Ernest Gaines
Zombie - Joyce Carol Oates
Childwold - Joyce Carol Oates
Absurdistan - Gary Shteyngart
After Dark - Haruki Murakami

The real find of the day, though, was a rare edition of Anna Kavan's Julia and the Bazooka. Made a whole gas-guzzling, rainy, and wind-blown camping trip worthwhile.

Heartbroken man climbs into morgue freezer

Heartbroken man climbs into morgue freezer - Yahoo! News
TAIPEI (Reuters) - A Taiwan man grieving over the death of his girlfriend climbed inside a morgue freezer to be with her and was only pulled out alive half an hour later, media and an official said on Tuesday.

The 41-year-old man was discovered on Monday when workers detected an unusually high temperature in the freezer and realized the hatch was not securely fastened.

"A morgue manager opened the hatch, saw two people lying inside, felt scared enough to yell out and then even cried," the Liberty Times reported. "She didn't stabilize for a long time."

The man took a drug before entering the freezer to speed what appeared to be suicide attempt, local papers said. They said his girlfriend died on Friday from an overdose of sleeping pills.

The morgue would step up security to ensure that family and others who come by to identify bodies do not stay too long, morgue administrator Chang Lung-ching said.

Overheard in a drug ad

"Call your doctor right away if after taking Lunesta you walk, drive, eat or engage in other activities while asleep."
-From an ad for prescription sleep aid Lunesta. Yeah, driving while sleeping might not be a good thing.

Mystery deepens as 4th severed foot found - Yahoo! News

Mystery deepens as 4th severed foot found - Yahoo! News: "VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - Another severed human foot has been discovered washed ashore on Canada's Pacific coast, but police are no closer to solving the gruesome mystery.
The foot, still wearing a shoe, was discovered on Thursday on a small uninhabited island south of Vancouver in the Strait of Georgia, and is the fourth discovered in the region in the past 10 months.
The previous cases all involved right feet still in sneakers, and each was found on a different island.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have not said if the latest discovery was a right or left foot.
DNA testing has failed to link the earlier discoveries to any missing person cases."

The Cure at Red Rocks

Twenty-one years ago, I saw The Cure at Red Rocks. It was 1987, and I was 16. Then, this week I was there again. Twenty one years later. Twenty one years older.

And it was a great show. Playing as a four-piece again, three of the members the same as the Head on the Door heyday, they really rocked. Even pop songs like "Lullaby" and "Hot Hot Hot!!!" came off heavy without all the horns and strings. Then they pulled out some songs a little less pop, and a little more rare, like "The Blood," "Push," and "If Only Tonight We Could Sleep." And they played a few new ones that made me eager to hear the new album. The third encore, maybe the best part of the show, was all songs from their first album, including "Grinding Halt."

Here's the video for one of the new ones, "The Only One":



And here's one of the many videos on You Tube from the show this week at Red Rocks, "Jumping Someone Else's Train":

Denis Johnson and Antonin Artaud

I forgot to mention that Denis Johnson gets extra points for quoting extensively from Antonin Artaud's "Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumaras."

Mallarmé for Babies

Yesterday, while in my basement study, my son (he's one) pulled from the shelf and brought over to me, with an eager look in his eye, a collection of poems by Mallarmé. I opened it and read to him,


M'introduire...


To bring myself into your tale
is as a hero much afraid
if he has touched with naked heel
any grass-plot of that glade


Ravisher of glaciers I
know no artless sin that after
hindering you'll not deny
its very loud victorious laughter


And am I not joyous, say,
thunder and rubies to the naves
to see in the air pierced by fire


among realms scattered and afar
as in a crimson death the wheel
of my chariots' only vesperal.

Book Review: Tree of Smoke

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

I should begin with an admission. I don't care for war novels. Usually. It's not something I generally relate to or am even interested in even following. Johnson's Vietnam novel does things differently. There's half a dozen characters to follow, so pay attention. There's a fair amount of downtime, some general pointlessness, but when the chaos hits it really is chaos.

The story here is driving, though. It was the kind of thing that pulls you along. There's plenty of mystery and misery to keep things compelling among a slew of characters. It's really the writing here that makes things so strong. The language is solid, the dialogue is spot on. As dense and difficult as this novel could be, I enjoyed the reading all through its 600+ pages.

Now, I could complain some about the ending. I just finished it this afternoon, so maybe I should give it some time to sink in before I criticize, but the ending left me wanting. I'm guessing Johnson, maybe, had a little trouble finding a way out after writing such a long book. And how on earth would I be satisfied with any exit?

It is though, a great novel, and not like any of the Denis Johnson I've read before.

Movie Review: Running With Scissors

Running With Scissors

This movie is so bad that I can't believe the book is any good. Now, I haven't read it, but it sits on my shelf next to other memoirs waiting to be read. There's not a likeable--or sane--character in sight. There should be at least one foil for us to relate to, someone to say, geez, these people are crazy. Young Augusten has no personality. Then when he does begin to act out, it seems out of place and uncharacteristic.

Maybe this all has to do with the film and is not reflective of the book. The movie, though, had nothing pulling me through, nothing that made me care a lick about what happens with any of those people.

Another Damn JK Rowling

Frustrating? Yes.

'Twilight' Author Pens Other-Worldly Romance : NPR: "Few writers can imagine this kind of commercial success. And what may be even more frustrating for those who write in obscurity is Meyer's insistence that she never set out to be a writer. The way she tells it, the Twilight series began with a dream about a vampire and a teenage girl. Meyer wanted to remember it, so she wrote it down and then began expanding on the story."

Notes for a New Project

I'm barely done with the hard work of the last project and still going through it again before I send it out to readers, and my mind is already mulling over the next project.

The jumping off point is a man, up early in the morning, sees one of his neighbors sneaking out of the house of another neighbor. Their spouses are either out of town or working. The man watching is shocked and disturbed by the affair. They are both people that the man and his wife know well from the neighborhood. People they would never think of as doing this sort of thing. It sews doubts in him. It takes him a while to tell his wife, worried at first that she is aware and hasn't told him. It disturbs the foundation for both of them.

I want to do this in a very different style than the last project. I want to be close in, more stream of consciousness, more modern. And I want forward action. So much of what I've been doing involves recall, people looking back and scenes occurring back in the past. And, unlike what I've been doing, this would not be an ensemble work. I want this to be a linear novel, at least on a linear timeline, which seems to require some sort of adventure, a plot. The trouble is that I often resort to a course of disintegration. And certainly that needs to happen here.

This minor neighborhood intrigue, the affair, sets his marriage on edge. Things get turned upside down, things that once seemed firm become fragile. An underlying unhappiness comes to light. His wife, it turns out, is unhappier than he is. She thought she was destined for a different life. In the arts, dance, theatre, with creative types, not here in the suburbs married to this man. It's a pedestrian life.

For him, it's more than the marriage, it's about right from wrong, about justice, and also about what's hidden. If this thing across the street has been going on, what else doesn't he know about? Couldn't his wife be having an affair? Could he have an affair? I'm think this is where it leads him. He sees an opening, the foundations are not solid, and he could be a different person. He could be someone who has affair. He could quit his job, leave his family, and do anything he wants. So, does he go this course, or is it about his consideration of these options?

It seems like it requires some adventures, misadventures. Maybe he makes a move on his neighbor who is having the affair. Or a waitress, or someone else. Maybe he decides to confront the man. The man had been his friend, maybe they played poker together, and maybe they fight. And what about the children? They must have kids. What is his relationship to them?

While this situation opens up some underlying unhappiness for my character's wife, what he must go through is more existential. It shakes the walls, unsettles his sense of being. He'd really only been hanging on a thread as it was. He was achieving great things, on a particular path. And maybe it was stealing his soul, or maybe he never had it to begin with.

Do you ever feel bad for the books in the bargain section?

I do. I admit it. Not for the schlocky books that of course they over-bought. But I feel bad for the quality books sitting there, with their marked down $5.98 price tags, being ignored. It is the first section I go to, before even the new releases. But, did I buy anything there on my most recent trip to that big-chain-box-store? No.

Rain Taxi Reviews Anna Kavan's Guilty

In the Spring 2008 edition of Rain Taxi, Kate Zambreno reviews Guilty by Anna Kavan and, though the article praises Kavan's "lost" novel, Zambreno spends more time describing the book than actually reviewing it.

The writing is good and the review serves as a decent introduction to Kavan's work:

Nearly everyone compares Kavan to Kafka, her alphabetic peer, although there is a difference between "Kafkaesque" and "Kavanesque": in Kafka there is a paranoid fear that everyone is laughing at youer, whereas in Kavan there is the ice-cold realization, the unlaughable certainty, that everyone is persecuting you.

But finding the real judgments is difficult work. To the reviewer, it is "one of Kavan's best works." So sure of it is Zambreno she concludes, "In the best of Kavan, of which Guilty can now be included, Kavan tells the story of not only the homeless but those who feel displaced inside their own home."

But who am I to criticize a review? Some times we really need to learn about the book that is being reviewed. Sometimes that's how I learn that I'd like to read a book. What I really want is to hear about the quailty of the book. I want to hear why the book is good, or bad. Of course, when I review a book here, I do little more than that. Thumbs up, thumbs down. What else do you need?

As far as Guilty goes, I don't really regard it as one of Kavan's best. I do have to say, though, the book has lingered with me since reading it. I still think that if she'd had another chance to revise this book, it could have been great.

Second Draft Complete

This week I finished the second draft of the novel I'm calling Barnes County. While there are likely still some larger revisions necessary, it's just a strong line edit that is left. It is time to look closely at the word choice, the flow, and the the sounds of the words. This is where I should be reading it out loud, though that's hard to get away with in public.

It's been about a year and a half's labor and it feels like a long time coming. But there it is, 435 manuscript pages of hard work. And still more to come.

One of these days I'll have to tell you what it's about.

In the Death Cab

New Death Cab for Cutie. Very nice. Makes me think I need to go see them when they come to Red Rocks next month.

If Only

Rowling tells court she's stopped working - Yahoo! News: "Rowling told a New York court on Monday that the demands of the case had caused her to halt work on a new novel. The author, who wrote seven novels about the boy wizard, said the stress has 'decimated my creative work over the past month.'"

Oh, poor, poor, Ms. Rowling. Too busy raking in millions and suing a fan to do any decent writing.

This woman is a joke.

Book Review: The Lives of Rocks

The Lives of Rocks by Rick Bass

For such a well-reviewed book, this short story collection was extremely disappointing. The stories, though they contain lyricism and apt descriptions, were naive, as if written by a first-year MFA. Nearly each of the ten stories contained some element that was far-fetched, hard to believe, or simply unnecessary or out of place. It's as if they were written by someone just new to the craft and exploring what he can make happen in a story. Either that, or they read as autobiographical, but no less far-fetched. The kind of stories that would be defended by "Well, that's how it happened."

Rick Bass has a name that carries with it some credibility and so coming to this collection with a high expectation and anticipation, I was extremely let down. Let me not discount Bass's ability to put together strong sentences, vivid descriptions, all filled with content that demonstrates his wide ranging knowledge. I only wish he'd been coached some on shaping the stories into what they could have been.

First Freelance Piece

This week, my first piece of freelance journalism was published. I'm happy. I'm proud. But let's keep it in perspective. This is a relatively small trade publication, ACTE Global Business Journal, published by the Association of Corporate Travel Executives. Don't ask how I got hooked up with them.

It feels good, though, to see my name there in the glossy print. And it really wasn't hard work. 1500 words. I've written more 20 page papers than I can count, so this wasn't difficult at all. I had nearly 3000 words to start with and had to cut it back.

There are two things that may be better than see my name up there under the article's title. First, I got paid. That would definitely be the first time I got paid for my writing (other than minimal prize money). Second, I can hopefully use this credit to get more writing gigs.

Book Review: A Sport and a Pastime

A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter

I was very surprised by this book for many reasons. I simply wasn't aware of Salter until just a few months ago, though this novel was published in the early sixties. It is reminiscent of many classics. The style is like Hemingway. If Hemingway was in a colorful mood. It is also reminiscent of On the Road. It is told from the point of view of one character, telling the story of another more colorful and heroic character, here also named Dean. It does benefit from these characteristics, and it is beautifully done in its own right.

Most surprising might have been just how dirty it was. I mean truly explicit. It is not for the faint-hearted. Makes Henry Miller seem tame.

It was the perfect kind of book for a quick three-day immersion. I'll definitely have to read more Salter in the future.

Judging Your Literary Taste

It's Not You, It's Your Books - New York Times: "Sloane Crosley, a publicist at Vintage/Anchor Books and the author of “I Was Told There’d Be Cake,” essays about single life in New York, put it this way: “If you’re a person who loves Alice Munro and you’re going out with someone whose favorite book is ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ perhaps the flags of incompatibility were there prior to the big reveal.”"

Yes, I will judge you by your literary tastes. Let me in your place and I will gravitate to your bookshelves, head cocked sideways, reading titles. Unless, dear lord, you don't have bookshelves. It's almost as disturbing as not having a stereo. And if you don't have bookshelves or a stereo, I'll bet you have a large TV centered in your room like a shrine.

Books definitely tell a lot about a person, though I can't say I've ever dismissed someone because of their literary tastes. I've been attracted to someone based on their literary interests. I once went on a date with a woman because we had struck up a conversation about Steinbeck. She turned out to be about as dull and dry as the Salinas Valley. Books provided a perfect way to strike up a conversation. On a plane last week, the man across the aisle was reading American Pastoral. We ended up talking about our children instead. His wife was reading Driving with Dead People. I'm not sure what this says about them. Their child, crying most of the flight, was watching Elmo DVDs. That might say more about them. Or at least it explains why they thought they could read on the plane with a toddler.

(Also, I almost stopped to talk to a woman at the airport who was reading with an Sony Reader.)

Regarding the quote above from Rachel Donadio's piece in the NYTBR, I list Alice Munro among my favorite writers...and there's only one person in my house who read The Da Vinci Code. It wasn't me.

Children find woman's head on beach

Children find woman's head on beach - Yahoo! News: "LONDON (Reuters) - Children playing on a Scottish beach discovered a woman's severed head in a plastic bag, police said on Tuesday.
The discovery, along with a hand, was made in the town of Arbroath, Tayside police said. 'Officers attended at a stretch of foreshore near to South Street shortly after 10:30 a.m. after the grim discovery was made by children playing on the beach,' a statement said.
'They found what appears to be the head of a woman concealed in a plastic bag. A hand has also been recovered from the beach.'
No other details were immediately available."

The Reading List Revisited

By the middle of the third month I had finished only reading the second book of the year. I'm failing horribly on my reading list. I've put 25 books on that list and at the rate I'm going I'll be lucky to read 10. And what was the third book on the list, the next one I was supposed to read? Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke. Another one over 600 pages long.

So, in order to come away with sense of accomplishment and be able to tick off a few more titles on the list, because of the business and leisure travel over the last two weeks, I've jumped ahead on the list some. And I just kicked that Denis Johnson can down the road.

Book Review: High Lonesome

High Lonesome: Selected Stories 1966-2006 by Joyce Carol Oates

I will be direct. I like this writing very much. I feel a kinship with her methods and approach, and of course the darkness within her stories. It is funny when reading many of the stories, I was simply waiting for things to go horribly wrong. And they tended to do so. I am partial to stories about degenerates, perverts, murderers, and plain ol' bad luck. And it was only when Oates ventured away from this formula that I struggled.

A lengthy story in this already lengthy collection of 660 pages, "My Warsawza: 1980," was an adventure and torturous. It seemed like an attempt to deal with more substantial (less titillating) subject matter, but it wanders without the normal road map.

I enjoyed these stories very much and am encouraged to read more of her work. And also I am reminded of Flannery O'Connor and must read her stories again.

Origins of a Writer

Thinking back this week about what led me to become a writer, what made me want to create and shape worlds, I was led back to one particular aspect of my life. Of course we can't discount the foundation of reading from an early age or being taught to think creatively, but if I were to point to one think that made me being to create fiction it was being in trouble as a kid.

I grew up with strict curfews, deadlines for play, times that I was supposed to be home. Commonly during summers I was told to be home by noon. This wasn't "around" noon; this was BY noon. Sometimes, though, I didn't make it home on time.

There could be many reasons for being late. I never was a good judge of time. I'm not sure what should be expected of a twelve year old.

Hustling home, from a friend's house on the other side of the highway, or limping home a bike with a flat tire or a busted chain, I would think about what it would be like when I got home. I would imagine exactly how it would play out. Not just my excuse, but the expression on my dad's face, the light through the window, the feeling in my gut.

By the time I got home I would have been through the scenario about thirty times, diffusing the situation, taking all the anxiety out of it. This mental exercise, though, made me think about creating a scene, shaping a world, and all the things that were possible with the imagination.

Three Right Feet

From another Drudge link:

In an Answerless Canadian Inquiry, 3 Bodyless Feet
GABRIOLA ISLAND, British Columbia — Should a fourth human foot float ashore here in the evergreen Gulf Islands off the west coast of Canada, the person who finds it would no doubt want to know the answers to three questions.

Is it a right foot?
Is it wearing a running shoe?
Is the shoe a size 12?

Another Faked Memoir

What the hell is going on? Is the world short of supposed inspiring memoirs? Did the whole Frey thing not scare people away from this sort of thing?

Gang Memoir, Turning Page, Is Pure Fiction
In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child who went on to live a gang-banger’s violent life, wielding guns and running drugs for the Bloods.

The problem is that none of it is true.

Margaret P. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in well-to-do Sherman Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley of California, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in North Hollywood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed.

And no one suspected anything? No one thought that the whole think was a little far-fetched, coming from someone clean-cut? Who was the editor who didn't bother looking into it:

Sarah McGrath, the editor at Riverhead who worked with Ms. Seltzer for three years on the book, said she was stunned to discover that the author had lied.

McGrath? Boy, that name sound familiar.

Over the course of three years, Ms. McGrath, who is the daughter of Charles McGrath, a writer at large at The Times, worked closely with Ms. Seltzer on the book. “I’ve been talking to her on the phone and getting e-mails from her for three years and her story never has changed,” Ms. McGrath said. “All the details have been the same. There never have been any cracks.”

Yes, that Charles McGrath, former editor of the New York Times Book Review. Nice.

Some have suggest that the memoir is supplanting the novel, but I think these sorts of things must being turning folks away from the genre. The real question is why? Why on earth is this necessary? What does it mean that someone is willing to cover this sort of thing up, instead of calling it fiction? Does fiction have that bad of a name? Geez.

And what does it mean that Drudge is linking to this story?

'No Country for Old Men' Cleans Up

I enjoy seeing a movie as dark and interesting as 'No Country for Old Men' earn this sort of adulation. Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay. Not bad. Oh, and add Javier Bardem for Best Supporting Actor.

'No Country for Old Men' Wins Big at Oscars - NPR
On a night when the acting awards had a distinctly international flavor, a quintessentially American story of violence — No Country for Old Men — made the deepest impression on Oscar voters at the 80th annual Academy Awards.
A ceremony once threatened by the recently concluded writers' strike was the setting for multiple triumphs by No Country, a film adapted from the work of the unflinching novelist Cormac McCarthy and the wide-ranging writing-directing team of brothers Joel and Ethan Coen.
The bleak tale of the bloody aftermath of a botched West Texas drug deal won Best Picture and the Coens were jointly honored for Best Achievement in Directing and for Adapted Screenplay. Javier Bardem, who played the sociopath at the center of the action, topped a deep field for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.

Richard Ford Leaving Knopf is News?

The Novelist Richard Ford Leaves Knopf for HarperCollins - Books - New York Times: "In a surprise move, Richard Ford, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Independence Day” and “The Lay of the Land,” has switched publishers for his next three books."

I love Richard Ford, but can someone tell me why this is news? Do the other authors' changing relationships make it the New York Times?

I may not think it qualifies as "news" it probably does signify a coup for Ecco. If anything it may also mean that Ford's next book will get a more "literary" treatment.

Book Review: Ward No. 6 and Other Stories

Ward No. 6 and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov


I was amazed by this wide ranging collection. These are psychological stories, with nothing held back. The mode in contemporary fiction, indeed fiction of the last thirty years, is to keep strong emotion hidden. The feeling has been that it is better to show, to express it with action, as opposed to with words. But the truth is that we feel these things, we say these things to ourselves, things that are more dramatic that anything we see in modern fiction.


"Kill me! Kill me!" the protagonist of "The Grasshopper" proclaims.


I often wonder if I have my characters over-think things, putting too much into words. I've been accused on more than one occasion of as much. But I do not write distant stores. My stories tend to take place within the minds of the characters, and it would be false to deny them from expressing what they feel.


What do we miss in today's fiction by not connecting deeply with the characters?


Some of the stories in this collection were so good that I could hardly put the book down. They were strong psychological stories, were sometimes nothing at all happened, or where some decision turned out fruitless. Other stories were long, meandering and devoid of meaning. I will never understand why anyone would the longest and most boring story at the end. There were stories that read like fables full of magic. They were philosophical stories, riddled with ponderances that left me wondering for some time afterward. Yet, as much as I was stirred by some of the stories, I was grateful to get to the end. I may not have been enjoying the collection near the end, but there are stories here that make "The Lady with the Dog" seem just mediocre.

Yes, We Can

I've tried to keep my mouth shut on the whole political issue, but after seeing Obama last week and thinking about the importance of what we do tomorrow, I thought that the least I could do was leave you with this little video to inspire you.

LSD, television westerns, and literary "sex and sadism"

From The Marketing Mode by Theodore Levitt, copyright 1969.

In such a world, combined with generic-product standardization and far-above-subsistence living, it is not surprising that man responds eagerly to the fascinating shock of the unexpected. The enormous attractions of marijuana, LSD, television westerns, and literary "sex and sadism" are understandable. They provide man with escape--not escape from reality but escape back to reality. He wants to escape from the artificiality that the machine has imposed on his life and return to a more primitive involvement of his senses with nature in the raw. The only reason teen-agers and college students are greater consumers of LSD and marijuana than adults is simply that adults have greater obligations to the machine. They cannot "drop out" because they are too deeply in. They are prisoners of the world they made.



This accounts for the intensity of the adult furor over LSD. It represents less adults' concern about the health and happiness of their children than the fact that they are envious of their children's freedom. The young people who take LSD trips or smoke pot need it least because they are already so much less thoroughly bound to society's rigid routines. The people who need most to escape, who are most firmly imprisoned by the world from which LSD is an escape and who have the greatest need to drop out, are the adults. They are understandably unhappy about the liberated behaviour of their children.

Kudos, Garfunkel

Being a fan of reading lists, and always trying to read more and get all the classics under my belt, I have to give Art Garfunkel, yes him, some credit. According to this New Yorker article, Garfunkel has been keeping a list of the books he's read since 1968. 1,023 books.

So, if you're looking for a reading list to last the next fourty years, here it is.

Reading List 2008

I managed to read only twenty books last year, which is just a little depressing. I could blame the slow pace on spending most of the summer reading Ulysses, but either way it demonstrates that I'm not spending nearly enough time reading. Given that my bookshelves are filled with books still waiting to be read, and each year new books come out or there are other books that I learn about and want to read, I'd better pick up the pace.

I figured that the best way to to approach reading this year was to give myself a list. So this is the list:

Ward No. 6 and Other Stories - Anton Chekhov
High Lonesome: Stories - Joyce Carol Oates
Tree of Smoke - Denis Johnson
Collected Stories - Eudora Welty
All Aunt Hagar's Children - Edward P. Jones
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Pushcart Prize 2007
Light in August - William Faulkner
Best American Short Stories 2007
All The Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
Lives of Rocks: Stories - Rick Bass
A Sport and a Pasttime - James Salter
Stories of John Cheever
Absalom Absalom - William Faulkner
Best New American Voices 2007
Death of Sweet Mister - Daniel Woodrell
Heart Is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
Gilead - Marilyn Robinson
Rabbit Run - John Updike
Middlesex - Jeffery Eugenidies
For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
The Orchard Keeper - Cormac McCarthy
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Do With Me What You Will - Joyce Carol Oates
The Idiot - Doestoyevsky
Collected Stories - Richard Yates
Aloft - Chang Rae Lee
An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
Mercury - Anna Kavan
The Liars Club - Mary Carr

It is an ambitious list at thirty titles, with only a couple of epic titles (Garcia Marquez). The emphasis this year is on short stories, including the year's best of collections and collections by some masters. And Faulkner, McCarthy, and Oates each get two slots because I've got some catching up to do on their back catalog.

So, enough blogging, I've got reading to do.

The New Year - The Old Project

I guess it's time to get back at it. And maybe it's time I remark on the progress of my "project." While at this stage of the work, I'm more likely to call it a novel, what it is intended to become, but it remains only a manuscript until it is published as a novel.

I had hoped to be done with the second draft now and I'm probably over half-way to that, but I feel like there is much more to do. There are more chapters to be written. Certain characters got short shrift in the first draft and they really deserve more pages. And I don't think I can be positive about the ending until I see how all the pieces come together. More may be necessary there as well.

The story lines of most of the characters all come to a climax at one point and it's hard to get it all done for them in that moment, at a climactic pace. I would like it to all be apparent in those pivotal chapters what is happening to them, what changes are happening, what decisions are being made, what courses are being altered. And I would like to do it all without chapters of denouement. I fear over-telling in that. It should also be satisfying to the reader, and I know much of the satisfaction in reading a novel comes from learning the outcome, how things have turned out for the main characters. Having an ensemble, like I do, makes it difficult. I'm reluctant to give them each a chapter post-climax so that we know what's happened. I don't think I can really get that right until the rest of it comes together. While I know that much work lays ahead of me, I remain anxious to get ahead, to write new things.