Coens/McCarthy Update

Roger Ebert has a policy of not reviewing films until their official release, but he apparently "admired" No Country for Old Men so much that he posted an article on his Chicago Sun-Times site about seeing it at Cannes.

While most of his article is actually a discussion of how much he loves Cormac McCarthy's novels, Ebert goes on to say that the movie version of NCFOM doesn't seem like a "Coen brothers film." Dig this, true believers:

"It was and it wasn't a 'Coen Brothers film.' It didn't have the deliberate quirkiness and flywheel plot, but it had the intelligence, the humor, the human nature pushed to extremes, the violence raised to the level of classical irony."

To me, Ebert's impression sounds like Blood Simple or Miller's Crossing, rather than the sad Coen films of late (named by BEM in a comment below, but whose titles will not be repeated here).

Additional news: Oprah Winfrey will be interviewing Cormac McCarthy for her show airing June 5. This will be McCarthy's first televised interview and only his third interview—ever—since he began publishing in 1966.

If anyone needs me, I'll be breathing into a paper bag for awhile, just until my head stops swimming.

Norah O'Donnell, Suppurating Turd

Cindy Sheehan, mother of fallen soldier Casey Sheehan, announced on Memorial Day that she is leaving the anti-war movement she has unofficially headed for some time. Watch Norah O'Donnell, masquerading as a journalist on MSNBC while shilling for G. W. Bush, grill Sheehan to gain some insight as to why Sheehan decided to go home.

Gore Vidal would have called O'Donnell's technique "cryptofascism," I believe. Then again, there is nothing too cryptic about MSNBC's banner—referencing Sheehan's hunger strike—which reads, "Starving for Attention." Note the absence of even a question mark to provide a fig leaf for MSNBC's naked contempt for Cindy Sheehan and MSNBC's obvious support for the Iraq War and George W. Bush. In honor of that banner, I declined to place a question mark after the title for this post.

Since the rare few of my fellow Americans who still pay attention to news get it primarily from cable TV, how does one challenge NewsBots like Norah O'Donnell here? If she were suddenly stricken with journalistic integrity, another well-coiffed clone would simply take her place. (A study of this phenomenon, dubbed the "Katie Couric Effect," is underway at Johns Hopkins.)

If even so committed an individual as Cindy Sheehan withers before the NewsBot offensive, what is a poor Crayon like me to do?

No Country for Old Men: Coens, McCarthy, and the best film of 2007

No Country for Old Men was a better novel than The Road, in the humble opinion of this Crayon. It's a grim, cynical vision of the embodiment of evil (represented as an incarnation of the laws of chance and the nature of chaos: one hitman named Anton Chigurh) triumphing over two guys operating way out of their league—a hapless Vietnam vet who decides stealing money from drug smugglers is a good way to get out of the Texas shithole he's in, and a good ol' boy sheriff who just can't understand how the world has passed him by yet wants to save the vet and his wife from themselves.

Evil, of course, wins—as it usually does in Cormac McCarthy's USA and in the real one (see Falwell posts below). And the action freakin' rocks.

"So, what could be better than reading this wonderful little black hole of a novel," thought I back in 2005. "A movie would be good, but how could anyone make a film out of this thing? What if the Coen brothers (not the lackluster Coens of late but the glorious, black Coens of Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing) somehow returned to form and filmed it?"

Then I found out the Coens were making it, and, after cleaning myself up, I have been trembling with fear and desire lo these last years. Would the film be tight, nasty, and evil, like the book, or would they play it for laughs? Would they *shudder* cast George Clooney? Well, No Country for Old Men has premiered at Cannes and the results are in ...

...IT'S GOING TO BE THE BEST FILM OF THE YEAR.

I base this rather optimistic opinion on two pieces of evidence other than the obvious fact that this is a Coen brothers movie based on a Cormac McCarthy novel. 1) A guy saw it at a tiny preview screening in Pittsburgh with an audience of jocks. The jocks loved the action but were totally mystified by the ending. The guy wrote that it was brilliant and difficult, and that he wanted to see it again with an audience looking for more than just the Terminator-style action that punctuates much of the movie. All this told me that the Coens actually stuck to the novel and didn't weasel out on the bleak ending for market reasons. 2) The Hollywood Reporter said Javier Bardem is nearly perfect as McCarthy's perfect killing machine Chigurh. They also wrote they didn't like the film overall because it was "too faithful to the novel" and the ending suffered because it focused on "lost ideals" instead of offering a craptacular action finale à la Spider-Man 3. Well, I'm sold.

Oh God, I'm so happy to be alive. Only 186 days until November 21.

Jerry Falwell Still Dead; or, Golly, Now I'm Really on the InterWebs

In celebration of my first anonymous flame exchange (see previous post), I decided to weigh in again on the national discussion around Jerry Falwell's demise yesterday.

Being of a genteel nature, I blanche at feelings of joyfulness around the death of any person. Falwell's death, however, puts a tremendous strain on my sensibility. Nonetheless, in the previous column, I tried to remain as factually accurate as possible. Bigots everywhere must indeed be saddened by "Dr." Falwell's passing, since he was such an effective purveyor of bigotry. Falwell did, after all, give the segregationist governor George Wallace a platform on the nationally broadcast "Old Time Gospel Hour." Falwell did rise to national prominence as a conservative Christian leader while attacking Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and what Falwell termed "the Civil Wrongs Movement."

It is important, too, to shine a bit of light on Falwell's ongoing impact on our national political landscape. Falwell shaped the contemporary Republican party as much as Ronald Reagan did. George W. Bush has publicly expressed strong feelings for Falwell, and the president counted on Falwell's tremendous financial and network support to get him elected, just as Reagan did. This is all a matter of public record and easily available from countless sources.

Here are the first round of comments from the leading Republican candidates for president about Falwell's legacy:

John McCain, who in the 2000 campaign for president listed Falwell among the "agents of intolerance," changed his tune of late (another testament to Falwell's power amongst Republicans). McCain described Falwell yesterday as, " "a man of distinguished accomplishment who devoted his life to serving his faith and country." (McCain was also the commencement speaker at Falwell's Liberty University last year.)

Mitt Romney called Falwell, ""an American who built and led a movement based on strong principles and strong faith."

And Rudy Giuliani, while inspecting the Republican debate site on Tuesday, called Falwell, "a man who set a direction" and someone who was "not afraid to speak his mind."

Note that the three top candidates all used weasel words. On one hand, none of them stated any direct support of Falwell's "principles" or "direction." On the other hand, not one of them spoke ill of the segreationist, gay-baiting, Apartheid-supporting late pastor from Virginia. (See a fine article about some of Falwell's rather scary, bigotted positions and political rise on the Southern Poverty Law Center's Website, here.)

It should be enough, I hope, to point to Falwell's long record of hate and intolerance and ask Republicans, whose party platform was largely built by Falwell's labor, if they wish to continue to support that record now that the bigot is dead. Falwell was a very public, hugely influential conservative. Although I'm sure his death is painful for his family, pointing out the facts of the man's history upon his death and asking President George W. Bush and the Republican candidates if they continue to side with him is not only perfectly fair, but also urgently necessary.

Jerry Falwell Dies, Bigots Everywhere in Mourning

The Baptist Minister, racial segregationist, anti-gay activist, and eminent Republican champion Jerry Falwell has just died.

Prominent since the 1960s, when he spoke out against Martin Luther King on his "Old Time Gospel Hour" TV program, Falwell founded the Republican political action group he named "The Moral Majority" in 1979. One of the architects of Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential victory and a major source of support for current president George W. Bush, Falwell will be missed by Republicans nationwide.

Falwell visited South Africa in the early 1980s to support South African President Botha and the segregationist Apartheid regime there, urging conservative Christians in America to invest in Botha's brutal government.

In 1994, Falwell produced and sold a tape on his Republican, conservative Christian TV show attacking President Bill Clinton. The faux-documentary featured Paula Jones denouncing Clinton and went on to claim that both Bill and Hillary Clinton were involved in a massive drug-smuggling operation, and that the president and Mrs. Clinton had murdered a number of their critics. In 1996, Falwell's dream of the destruction of America's public school system came close to success when Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole made it a platform plank in his campaign. More recently, Falwell claimed, while on Pat Robertson's 700 Club TV show, that gays, feminists, and members of the ACLU (among other liberal Americans), were directly responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center of September 11, 2001.

Although a strong supporter of the current Republican administration (especially its "Faith Based Initiatives"), Falwell suffered from poor health in recent years; his survival of a cardiac arrest prompted a personal call of support to him from President George W. Bush on May 30, 2005.

Jerry Falwell's impact on the GOP of today cannot be overestimated, and conservative Republicans everywhere are sure to mourn his death. I await the inevitable public statement about Falwell's passing from President Bush and Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who gave the commencement address at Falwell's Liberty University in 2006. The self-styled "Dr." Falwell founded Liberty University and was its chancellor at the time of his death. Falwell leaves behind the campus, a history of dedicated work against civil rights and public education, and a fundamentalist Republican party he helped in large part to create.

Do the Bluto

My pal over at A Cookie Full of Arsenic, Queercat, posted this letter written by one of her students to the plenary lecturer in the course she's teaching. Those of you who are university instructors will find this note familiar. For those who are not currently teaching at an American university, I include it as an exhibit of why I left the idyllic groves of The Academy. The student has received a 'B' (due to the de rigueur phenomenon once known as "grade inflation"). Like so many, however, he knows that anything less than the usual 'A' is cause for alarm and must be argued about with a higher official. Deans, in my experience, want to keep their student-customers happy. Superlative grades for obvious incompetency is normal, and failing a student is frowned upon because it costs the the college money. If this kid makes it to a dean, he may get the 'A' he's after.

Names have been removed out of respect for the victims. The spelling and "grammer" have been left just as it was found out of respect for our once-proud American universities.

HI,Professor _______;
My name is ______ and I was a student in your world civ. class this semester. Grades have been recently posted by our TA. Almost all grades looked terrible or misrepresenting to the amount of effort we put in the class, but I cant speake for everyone. In bringing up this argument, I completly understand that their was a grading system set in place,during the first week of class, and I understood the requried work inorder to succseed in the class. As we began to hand in work to ____, we Immediatly saw that she was unlike the other TAs, which
was fine. But when it came to grading, It felt like we were getting screwed, when we compared grades with our friends in _____'s or the other TA's class. In doing the work, I spend lots of time and was very careful and never took shortcuts. For example, My first article paper, I spent so much effort to get it perfect, and when i got it back I had a D. I was suprised, and asked _____ what what the problem with the paper. Her only reason was grammer, and she even stated that "I did good covering the article, but needed to becarful with the grammer." My grammer was fine, It was just her oppssetion with comas and their use that got me that D(if it was english class I'd understand). Had I handed that paper to another TA which I did, they gave me an A. For the 2nd paper Professor, I did it and went to her office hours to get it inspected, which she did and said it was excellent, she gave me a B, also due to grammer, even-though she fixed my grammer. As for the homework, reguardless of how much you read and write to answer the question, It was up to her wheather she gave you the point or not. For me the only fair parts of the class where the exams minus our Ta's essay questions, which she never probelly warned us about like the other TAs did. And I still managed to get higher grades than other kids in that class, but in the end they ended up getting the A in the class
and I got a B. So Dr. ______, I hope that you could place your-self in our shoes and maybe do something about these unjust actions, if not this semester,hopefully next semester. I thank you so very much, for the wonderful expirence in lec. and have a great summer.

Ps; Can you please respond to me in any matter, just so I could see that yoyu read this.

News completely unrelated to the note above: I signed the contract to teach at the private school, so it's all official now.

They Still Let George W. Bush Talk?

I was reading the Washington Post this morning, and I found an article about King George's recent speech at a high school in Tipp, Ohio. The article had a link to the White House web site, where you can find a transcript of the speech.

It is breathtaking. I mean, there's the usual garble, a transcription of the king's inarticulate muttering: "Nobody ought to ever hope to be a war President, or a presidency -- a President during war." And there's a moment of unintentional irony during the Q & A when the king was asked about his terrible approval rate in polls: "When it's all said and done, when Laura and I head back home -- which at this moment will be Crawford, Texas -- I will get there and look in the mirror, and I will say, I came with a set of principles and I didn't try to change my principles to make me popular. You can't make good decisions -- (applause.)" But those examples, and all the others like them from this address, weren't the startling ones for me.

Anyone who has listened to the king during his reign so far has noticed his trouble speaking clearly, his malapropisms, his lack of decorum, etc. The new, interesting moment for me came when he said, "And so, if you were to come in the Oval Office, what you would see is this fantastic rug that looks like the sun."

The sun-rug formed a significant, even central role in the speech. He was trying to use the example of the sun-rug to demonstrate his role as the "Commander Guy." (Early in the speech, he gave himself the title "Commander Guy" and attempts to defend that new title with the simile of the sun-rug.)

Um, doesn't that sound, you know, crazy? I mean, inarticulateness is one thing--even incompetency--but I tremble anew to see the leader of the free world tripping among the flowers, lost in the kaleidoscope, tippling with the wee folk, etc. As long as he's dining harmlessly with the queen or something (I mean Elizabeth II, not Laura), I suppose it's ok. (I wonder if he leaned over during dinner and whispered in Elizabeth's ear, "Want to see my fantastic rug? It looks like the sun. It's a model for my decision-making during this war.")

But frankly, they should just not let him speak in public anymore. Not without medication, anyway.

Pàrtaidh Nàiseanta na h-Alba

After a Florida-like election fiasco (ah bourach!), the Scottish National Party has won the elections in Scotland.

Tony Blair's venture in Iraq has pissed off the Scots so much that they threw his Labour Party out of power in Scotland for the first time, ever!

What's more, the SNP is the independence party of Scotland, and they will now have the opportunity to hold a referendum on becoming more independent from the auld enemy or seceding outright and dissolving the union of Great Britain itself. The referendum, according to new First Minister Salmond, will occur in 2009 or 2010. That means Blair's Iraq stupidity may lead to the end of Great Britain itself.

Biggest Irony: Tuesday marked the 300th anniversary of the Act of Union, which formed Great Britain by dissolving the Scottish Parliament (they got it back in 1999).

I know it's a weird fascination for me to have. My family got kicked out of the Highlands due to brutal English land laws exploited during the "--- Clearances" (which were named after my family, should you care to Wiki it) 200 years ago. My ancestor William emigrated to America through Canada in 1806. That was a long time ago. I shouldn't care so much. But I do.

And seeing Bush's lapdog humiliated to a degree beyond anyone's predicting over this stupid war is so deeply satisfying.

The Offer

So, true to their word, the private school called for me to meet with their headmaster two weeks to the day after my interview. I was prepared to regard the whole proceeding with disdain. And now I must eat tasty crow and pick my teeth with the quills.

Word must have gotten around about an inappropriate comment offered by one of the teachers when I was on the campus before, because the headmaster was prepared with a full-on demonstration, complete with charts (!), about how his school is progressive. Before he even showed me the contract or discussed the job offer in any detail, he gave me the full-court press. It was a private meeting, tete-a-tete, so it felt odd when he walked over to the easel and elaborated on their massive project ($5 million) to make the campus environmentally responsible. It was like sitting alone in the audience while a play is performed just for you.

Then came the vow that his school gives no merit-based scholarships (which I have always translated as affirmative action for white people)--only need-based financial aid, "because we have a responsibility to reflect the diversity of our city and open doors for the economically disadvantaged." I think that's an exact quote. They spend over $1 million a year on need-based aid, he told me. Holy crap, I thought at that point, now I can't just sneer and go home.

Next, we talked about my neighborhood on the West Side. He knew T's school. He knew it because his wife works with Somali immigrant women (some of whose children T teaches): she helps them to learn English and so become more independent in Buffalo. My head grew light; now I was taking the place seriously. We talked about other things, which I don't need to elaborate, but it was all extremely positive. Damn, he's a good administrator.

Then he showed me the offer, and I tried not to drool. The salary and benefits are as good as, and in some cases better than, the contracts for assistant professorships I've seen on other searches for college jobs. I mean, it's still a teaching job and not stock-brokering, but the numbers were a bit, well, startling. Somehow I managed not to sign it right then and there.

He said the Board wanted to "respect my Ph.D. and university teaching experience." Hell, the university didn't respect my Ph.D. and university teaching experience.

When I left that meeting, clutching the contract (which the headmaster had signed), two of the other teachers were there. They expressed their embarrassment over their colleague's remark at the previous interview and wished me a warm welcome.

Now the contract sits here beside me on the coffee table. T has joked that I should sign it before they take it back.

Yet, a passage from John Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist keeps going through my mind. Gardner talks about a number of different jobs a novelist might take while writing--night clerk, forest watchtower-sitter, etc.--and then specifically names teaching as "too demanding" a profession and thus harmful to writing fiction. Hm. But then I recall that a very successful writer, some of whose work I admire very much, taught at this particular school once. Mm-hm.

Who am I kidding? I know I'm going to sign this thing. Crow is pretty tasty, and less filling than you might guess.

Bourgie Nights

T and I registered for our baby shower last night. Eek.

It took 3 hours. Eek, eek.

Negotiating the ambiguous area between acquiring things one needs and hoarding instant junk is tricky. Going bourgie triggers a nervous response for me; I've devoted much of my life to thinking about possessions and how to keep them from possessing me. I grew up, you see, in a place where people acquired all sorts of stuff--vineyards, mansions, jet airplanes, etc.--and nobody seemed particularly happy about it. Many of the children with whom I played seemed quite, if you'll pardon the expression, fucked in the head.

So, I'm interested in keeping my own impending child from also being fucked in the head.

Undeniably though, we will use the tiny clothes and the pad for the cradle and many of the other items on our list of 43 things for which we registered at (gasp) Babies 'R Us. But when I clutched a pair of miniature Chuck Taylor All Star sneakers, it was out of that false consciousness of consumer rapture against which I try to maintain a certain guardedness.

Around the age of 22 I decided books and films were the only material things I'd allow myself to indulge in buying regularly and with little restriction. And I have. This self-imposed rule has worked for me, and it has restricted my forays into spastic bourgieness. When I impulse buy, it's almost never anything but books or DVDs now, and I suffer little to no buyer's remorse.

But now I sense the rules are changing. The kid will want things. Worse, I will want to buy things for the kid.

A professor friend of mine, who teaches the Bible as literature and was herself once a nun, told me she could not lead a spiritual life (meaning, for her, an ascetic life) because she knew she took too much pleasure in material things to ever give them up. She lives in a big, beautiful house with marble everywhere. I don't know her kid, but he doesn't seem fucked in the head.

Still, I think it's necessary to regard temporal things with a certain contempt in order to have good character. And yet there I was, in a hideous crackerbox store in a hideous suburb, firing away with a scanning gun at bar-coded merchandise with the expectation that friends and relatives might spend their hard-won money buying some of it for us. And what does a baby need sneakers for, anyway?

My god though, those mini-Chucks are so cute. I gotta have them.

Cormac Mac Airt

No word yet on when the Cormac McCarthy interview with Oprah Winfrey will take place. (Sweet jesus, did I just write that sentence?)

I still can't believe The Road has garnered all this praise (the Pulitzer Prize, mainstream celebrity, etc.) when earlier, better novels didn't. It seems sort of like Scorcese getting the Best Director Oscar for Faithful Departed when he directed Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull all over twenty-five years ago. I guess McCarthy's old and those in literary officialdom decided they hadn't celebrated him enough.

He won the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses back in 1992, and I thought that strange as well. Blood Meridian was published only seven years before, and it was a masterpiece on the order of Absalom, Absalom!. I remebered ATPH as a good novel, and less demanding of the reader, but not as one of his very best. No Country for Old Men, I thought, was better than The Road in certain ways, and I couldn't understand why it won nothing, wasn't on bestseller lists, etc., even though it was published just a year before The Road.

Then I started reading ATPH again (and I'll probably cycle through the rest of the border trilogy) just for comparison with the present Road phenomenon. Holy crap. Listen to this:

"Bye and bye they passed a stand of roadside cholla against which small birds had been driven by the storm and there impaled. Gray nameless birds espaliered in attitudes of stillborn flight or hanging loosely in their feathers. Some of them were still alive and they twisted on their spines as the horses passed and raised their heads and cried out but the horsemen rode on."

Those are just a few sentences buried in a paragraph a third of the way into ATPH. Having read the novel before, I know that the weird image of the birds perfectly foreshadows all of the awful shit about to happen to the protagonists, and even why it will happen. And those are magnificent sentences.

And so I am reminded--even when a McCarthy novel is not his best, it's better than just about anything else. And, in time, I can forget about the Matt Damon movie.

In time.

Carpe Diem?

I didn't tell you about the interview I had last week with the prep school. You may remember from a previous post that they had considered me (without my knowledge) for a teaching post a couple of years ago, and they tracked me down through the English department last month. Anyway, I agreed to go in for a series of interviews on Tuesday. It was weird.

On the way there I nurtured fantasies of a Dead Poets Society sort of gig (but without any student suicide and subsequent firing). You know, eating my lunches in a posh, mahogany-panelled room in between classes in which I found new ways to inspire my students by standing on furniture. That all seemed ok, I figured, if I got paid enough.

Well, I arrived and discovered no one had put much planning into my visit. The chair of the department had sent me an e-mail Monday afternoon--less than a day before the interview--informing me that I would teach a class on The Scarlet Letter. Good thing I reread it (a couple of years ago).

Because I am a bit of a planner, and because I did not care to look like an ass in front of a room full of students, I worried over the lesson. I spent the evening looking at crucial chapters and planning a discussion before going to bed. Then I awoke at 3 AM and neurotically rehearsed said lesson until the alarm rang at 6:30 AM.

So, after my unpleasant night with Hester Prynne, I arrived at the sprawling, 25-acre campus and jauntily strode to the main office--it was 8 AM, sharp. The chair of the department introduced himself and then promptly dropped me off in a colleague's empty classroom where I could wait. And wait. I guess they weren't ready for me.

45 minutes later, he retrieved me and thrust an itinerary into my hand. When we set up the interview, I was told I would be there from 8 AM until noon. The itinerary showed meetings until 2:30 PM. Sigh.

If only I had known that the itinerary was not real. Some of the meetings would be moved around, and one would be cancelled. I still had to roam the campus until after 2 PM, awash in confusion. I've seen more organization in single-celled bacteria.

Anyway, I met with the whole department for a chat in an enormous room which did, in fact, have mahogany panelling. I liked the younger people. There was an old-timer, as well, who has been teaching at the school for 34 years--after having a previous career at another school in New England! He is a great big guy, broad-shouldered and well over six-feet tall, but can best be described as doddering.

The only remotely Dead Poets Society-esque moment came when I taught. I gave a lesson to a group of sophomores, and they were excellent. They were, in fact, better than any college students I've ever had. Of course, the tuition at this high school runs about $12,000 per year more than my former college students' tuition, so they'd better be good. In fact, the students should probably have valets following them around, brushing off their sportcoats and carrying their books for them.

Later on I met the Head of School. Apparently she had decided to hate me before we met. I sat down in her office, and, after saying "hello," she asked me what I could possibly know about teaching in an "independent prep school" anyway? The hostility in her voice was disconcerting.

I replied that I helped to design and found a high school in California. (A damn fine college prep school, in fact.) In the middle of my sentence, though, she waved her hand dismissively at me and muttered, "Yes, yes; I read your resume."

Okey-dokey.

Somehow, I managed to struggle on. It turns out she's moving to a new job in Southern California. To the same ultra-rich town in which I grew up, in fact. She started to warm to me, which made me feel creepy. The conversation got around to the California state senator who wanted to hire me as a campaign advisor and sent me packing for graduate school in terror over the offer. At this point, the woman seemed genuinely impressed that I'd turned down a political career for academics. Things were going swimmingly.

Then the chair of the English department walked in and said I had to get to another meeting. The Head of School made the same sort of dismissive hand sweep that she'd used on me just ten minutes earlier. "Get out," she said to him, "I knew you were lingering out there!"

Then, with him standing just outside the open door directly behind me, she inveighed against him. Railed against him, really. "I hate lingerers!" she said. "He's a lingerer--always hanging outside my door! Don't you hate that type?"

I thought, "What the hell am I supposed to say?" I said nothing. You might say I felt uncomfortable.

Then it was back to lunch, eating a prepared meal in the panelled room and listening to my potential colleagues making jokes about the students. This time, they were discussing the giving out of awards.

Again, I sat silently.

By the time I got home, I was sick. I mean truly, physically sick. I spent three days with the flu. Coincidence? You decide.

Well, there has been no mention of money--but it would have to be more than the typically poor private school pay for me to give up my writing life and teach there. Harumph, I say.

Dead Rat

I located the source of the odor in our basement. For the last two weeks, I thought it was due to the mold that flourished after our tenant's hot water heater ruptured. No amount of bleach seemed to clear away the stench.

Then, last night, T was collecting the laundry when she noticed a bizarre, highly viscous drizzle from some insulation in the ceiling. She told me about the drizzle (it had the approximate color and flow of rubber cement), and I went down into the basement for what I realized would be a nasty job. I put on a mask and gloves and pulled the insulation down.

I now know the meaning of the word "miasma;" I feel what it means in the center of my being.

Because I Love You

This video appeared briefly on YouTube and has since been yanked. It is one of the best uses of the Internet I have ever seen: storage for a public access TV program from Atlanta.

Let Alexyss Tylor's zen-like ramble about sexual power wash over you as it appears to wash over her mother. I found two still-active links here

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2007/04/another_excitin.html

and here

http://www.glumbert.com/media/power

Go. Watch. You'll be glad you did.

And so it goes.

Today I was building a bookshelf, and I found out Kurt Vonnegut died.

Tideland

Richard Roeper and A. O. Scott got together (sans Roger Ebert) to hate Terry Gilliam's new film Tideland. This once again proves what a couple of boneheads they are. Roeper said there was "no real fairy tale" element in the movie. "Real fairy tale"? Does he mean it doesn't contain the Disneyfied version of fairy tale-telling that somehow supplanted the older tradition of grotesque fairy tales in our culturally malnourished civilization? In that case, he's right. Tideland isn't Disney's version of Alice in Wonderland; it's Gilliam's.

A real fairy tale is cold and cutting and factual as death. And that is why fairy tales are beautiful--because they're honest in a way stories aiming at realism somehow cannot be. This is what Gilliam gets right, and why the film is worth seeing. It is also unpredictable, which goes far with me. No guns, no car chases (although there are explosions), and a resolution hard to foresee and yet mythically satisfying. I would pay to see any recent film that pulls off all of that.

Gilliam gets, I think, some things wrong, too, but the movie is certainly good enough for me to recommend it. He flirts with some cliched characters and ideas, the brain-damaged man-child for example, but in the end I think he pulls them off satisfactorily.

I think Tideland is unsafe in a way general audiences could not help but hate; people who have a particular fancy of what a little girl is like will most likely fear it—and therefore hate it—the most. I think the success of Little Miss Sunshine's protagonist could be instructively contrasted with the nearly uniform critical attack on the protagonist in this film; it might help us diagnose our cultural inability to see and understand children (which is why we crank out so many damaged ones).

This isn't Terry Gilliam's best film, but, thank god, neither is it The Brothers Grimm. Grimm was a look at fairy tales and folklore designed to make money, where Tideland is simply art.

See it. My only suggestion is NOT to listen to Gilliam's introduction, which is just a publicity stunt and quite misleading about the nature of the film. I suspect he's joking when he says the little girl is "innocent"—playing on the empty, self-deluding definition we tend to assign to the concept of innocence. Something far more interesting is going on here than edenic childhood bullshit, and I think critics are pissed because they wanted edenic childhood bullshit with a smattering of trendy dysfunction (viz Little Miss Sunshine). This is not neo-Indie Hollywood-approved dysfunction, it's sordid desperation—including such unusual subjects as mummification, necrophilia, incest, child abuse, and sociopathic mass murder.

Elsewhere, I heard Gilliam dryly say, "Children are resilient. Drop them and they bounce." The comment gets to the heart of the film: we're watching a little girl get dropped and seeing how she bounces when she hits the ground. Unpalatable, sure, but good fiction and a good film.

Saccadic Changes (without much of anything really changing)

What a difference a week makes.

On Monday, an English teacher at one of the country's most prestigious college-prep schools called. He left a message on my answering machine informing me that the faculty there had considered me for a teaching post last year. That was news to me. I had never sent a vita or anything. All I remembered was meeting him once in graduate school a few years ago. I called him back.

Apparently an old friend, now teaching at another prep school in New England, bandied my name about so much at this school that a contingent formed with the mission of hiring me. It feels strange to have been talked about for the last few years without knowing about it. Anyway, I'm going to visit the school—right here in town—in April. The chair of the English department asked me to give a lecture, tour the school, etc. I think I would enjoy teaching literature again, getting paid for it (not much, to be sure, but a fortune when compared with the near-charity wage of a college lecturer), and finding myself in a stimulating environment for my writing. Still, the whole thing is so odd and unexpected that I'm not sure precisely what to think. I told the chair that I'd also like to coach the cross-country team if it were possible (it turns out that it is possible). Sort of a Garp impulse on my part, I suppose. I've talked with B and my Prestigious Poet Friend in Japan about the job. I'm no less confused, but I am reminded it's good to have friends. (B is easy to talk with, since he lives across the street; conversations with my PPF cost 39¢ per minute because he lives in Kobe, so his advice is more expensive.)

We'll see.

Also last week, I wrote about 5,000 words of a new novel I'm throwing away. Yet another false start. The writing was competent, I think, but if I'm not interested in the protagonist, who the hell will be? I am slowly beginning to realize that writing a draft novel every few months may not be possible for this scribbler. One manuscript per year sounds more reasonable. But maybe not--now I have to consider teaching again, since I fell ass-backward into it. Hm.

Tuesday, I found a good university press that may be interested in the first novel, which is nice. It's a press everyone knows, so their interest strokes my ego just so. Ahh. They will take around six months to get back to me, but I am reasonably certain they'll read the whole MS, at least. And perhaps I can publish without an agent after all. Hope rears its ugly head anew.

And on Friday, I ticked off another year in my early thirties with a fine party. The people were dear, I sampled nine varieties of single malt scotch in a blind test and identified most of them correctly (excellent present B), and I enjoyed having attention and gifts lavished on me (the cake, once again, will live on in legend, M!).

Earlier on the very same day, I found out my nascent kid is perfectly healthy. He will be a boy, weighs the right amount, has properly developed internal organs, and all the rest of the developmental jazz. The temptation is there, of course, to say the news was the bestest pwesent I could ever wish for. Ok, it's true. But to temper the saccharine quality of the experience, I relate for the record: on an ultrasound he looks like Skeletor.

Step Right Up

James M. Cain is dead enough. I read Postman and now Double Indemnity. I’ve been thinking about how to make a good gutter-American novel with a fastbuck bastard protagonist, so I read Cain. His short stories are great, as I wrote in the last post, but I really wanted to read the two first-person pov novels to learn, I hope, something about how he did it. I also chose Cain, I suppose, because he’s dead.

He’s dead and people still read him. There are plenty of popular writers now living to choose from, of course. Nora Roberts had 5 simultaneous New York Times bestsellers, last I checked. I’m not so sure people will read her books long after her death, though.

Everybody wants to sell. I want to sell. More important for me, though, would be to write books one could read twice or more without becoming bored. I could read Double Indemnity again, no problem. The ending is so beautifully weird. So nasty and poetic.

The patron saint of American writers who toil in obscurity, St. Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote literature is “news that stays news.” I love that definition. My litmus for books, the ones I read and the ones I write, is always the same: if I can read it twice, and it’s just as interesting the second time, it’s good work. After revision, by my standard, I actually like about 1% of my own work. And I have my doubts about that 1%.

Cormac McCarthy has a bestseller at the moment—The Road. Once I’d finished reading it, all I wanted to do was read his previous novel, No Country for Old Men again. No Country seems a better novel to me than The Road. I want to read it again with greater urgency. Blood Meridian is better still. I read it in one day and night, then got up the next morning with the equivalent of a literary hangover and had the hair of the dog—I read it straight through a second time. I’ve read it twice more in the intervening years, and it’s still as interesting, or more so, each time. I know I’ll read it again in a couple of years. That, to me, is a very good novel.

So I want to write novels people will want to read over again. This much I know for certain. But of course, I have little positive idea what others will want to read once, let alone read again. Do people buying all those Nora Roberts vampire or romance novels read them over and over? Will people read them over and over in 20 years? I have my doubts.

Stephen King, when he complained about the little journals to an audience in San Francisco (see last post), said the writers of the fiction in those journals did not seem to care very much about catching a reader’s attention. He seemed to detect a sort of subtlety for subtlety’s sake that got in the way of writers grabbing a reader by the nostrils and yanking her forward. Ok, so there is a carnival-barker aspect to the kind of writing that sells. “Step right up, laidees and gentlemens, see a world of sex and violence you’ve never seeeen beeefore!” King sure knows about that. But some of his novels are clearly worthy of a second reading, I think. Some of them will last after King is in the ground. Of course, maybe after 50 novels, the odds are simply with him. How does one write novels that not only buy groceries, but turn into gold?

Ah, the alchemist’s stone. What is it? Being prolific, perhaps. Kinging out dozens of novels and getting some of them really, truly right. John Updike falls into that camp. I do not care for Updike’s work, myself, but I know he has written a hell of a lot of fiction and some of it will survive after he’s dead. But then, of course, there’s the J.D. Salinger scenario—only three novels and a book of short stories in fifty years, and everybody still knows his work, and they will continue to know it. William Gass, too. He doesn’t exactly roll them out every year.

The alchemist’s stone—what is it, what is it?

Little Journals are Killing Me--a rant

I read The Postman Always Rings Twice yesterday. I love the film noir with John Garfield and Lana Turner, and I enjoyed Cain's novella more (I know, I know--you can't judge the same story rendered in different artistic media, blah blah blah). If Cain is a hack, he is an American hack in the tradition of Edgar Poe. I mean he maps the hardscrabble terrain of alluring psychotics from the first person point of view better than most anybody. To get into the American psyche is to understand a certain type of psychotic (in this case, the fast-buck killer). And, like Poe, Cain definitely makes literature out of a hack's story.

These days I am writing about a (fictional) murder, so I thought Cain would be a helpful detour. I have been having this horrid doubt, however, that the story I am working on will not be "literary" enough. However, I think I traced the source of this peculiar insecurity.

One of the major problems with much of the "literary fiction" being published in the usual little journals (i.e. GlimmerTrain, Zoetrope, and the others Stephen King recently referred to as, "the shit nobody reads") is that the writers are not trying very hard to engross an ordinary reader. What I mean by that is they are trying only to engross other writers of "literary fiction." Gentle humor underlies either a) lyrical intensity (conventional fiction), or b) clever prose styling (metafiction, also known as conventional fiction). Yawn. With subtlety and nuance, fully formed characters make dinner, go shopping, and discuss food in Paris or New York City (I'm looking at the current issues of the two journals named above). Yawn, *stretch*.

Of course, in the shit most people do seem to be reading, in the novels with pink covers and pictures of Renee Zellweger on them, unmarried female characters make dinner, go shopping, and discuss food in LA, London, New York, or Paris. Hm. I guess that makes it "chick lit" and not "literary lit." I haven't read any chick lit other than Jane Austen, so maybe some of the new stuff is literary. It would surprise me if it weren't. Whether it is or not, it won't make it into the little journals.

It is as if a narrative in danger of sliding into any genre whatsoever might not get the dubious prestige of being identifiable as "literary." There are, of course, great stories in which almost nothing happens in the sense of a plot (Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style is a personal favorite), but now it seems that if anything were to happen, it wouldn't be called "literary fiction." It's hard not to blame James Joyce. (Goddamned Dubliners!) Of course, the problem is the strange negotiation publications in the late capitalist era are making to try to capture the diminishing market. The little journals seem to be carving out their niche—something they call "literary fiction." They are, of course, merely smaller businesses identifying a market they want to capture. Zoetrope has the tagline, "The New Generation of Classic Short Stories." Hilarious! Can you imagine a story such as Cain's "Baby in the Icebox" making it into Zoetrope?

I guess one of the problems is the drive on the part of publishers, even publishers of the little "literary" journals unread except by other writers, to market their product. What is "literary fiction" as distinct from all other genres supposed to mean, anyway? Can you imagine dear Ray Bradbury trying to get his start now? He'd be pegged as hopelessly inconsistent for the marketplace: "Sunlight and Shadow," literary fiction; Dandelion Wine, lad lit; The Halloween Tree, children's lit; Fahrenheit 451, current affairs. I can hear the query letters dropping unceremoniously in editors' trashcans. Thank god large-market magazines like Playboy (which first published the short version of Fahrenheit 451) still published good fiction when Bradbury "emerged," as they say in the little journals.

Truly, who wrote the law that a horror story, for example, can not be "literary"? What about Stevenson, Poe—even Henry James (a writer of ghost stories)? I know there has always been market pressure in fiction, but sweet Jesus! Look in the Writer's Market and you will see publishing houses of all sizes and, even worse, scurvy agents demarcating their interests along extremely restrictive lines. Interesting writer? Don't care. Easy to define? Easy to peddle? Okey dokey! RIP Marion Boyars.

Of course, reading culture itself now has been taken off life support. How many of you not married to K-12 teachers know that silent reading is now banned in a growing number of school districts around the country? Don't believe me? Check it out. It seems silent reading is deemed not conducive to raising test scores. Teachers are no longer allowed by their administrators to have their pupils sit silently enjoying a book in school. No wonder writers are left as the only readers of the cramped little journals. No wonder the little journals print cramped little literature.

When the most successful, the very top, literary mags have a readership of ten thousand in a country of over 300 million, we are screwed. When the ten thousand readers are all trying to write the same way to garner the "literary" label so they can recruit agents representing "literary fiction," literature is screwed.

And yet, I write. What the hell is wrong with me?

The Jolly James

I was reading Henry James' "The Jolly Corner" today. For some reason, I never think I'm going to enjoy James until I start reading him. Even a story such as this one, a story I know I liked when I read it before, seems more work than pleasure until I actually get into it. I took it off the shelf this morning because I thought it would be helpful for the story I'm working on now.

If you haven't read it, it's about a man who haunts himself. That is, it's about an older man who returns to his empty family home after years abroad and tries to catch the ghost of the self that might have been if he'd stayed. I don't mean he tries to catch him on some figural level; he literally creeps around the house in the middle of the night pursuing his other self. Well, it is figural too, of course, but somehow the story gets away with the protagonist actually chasing himself around an old dark house without seeming merely silly.

James can be such a nut.

Anyway, we are to have the coldest day of the whole winter tomorrow—so close to spring! fie on you, Global Warming!—so I'll probably be shivering under a blanket, typing away, chasing the novel that might be.

Ice

Why am I feeling down today? It must be: 1) Arthur Schlesinger Jr. died; 2) everything outside is slowly being coated in ice; 3) I'm slowly being coated in ice.

Hm. I sent the MS out to a first novel contest, and I spent time reading today and not writing anything. Zip. Nada. (This blog doesn't count.) I usually read three novels at a time and switch between them depending upon my wildly erratic mood changes. Lately, I've been working on The Good Apprentice again. It's, uh, good.

The first time I ever read Murdoch was about six years ago; it was a short story I adored, called "Something Special." It is beautiful, sensitive, and brutal. At the time, I was still working on my Ph.D. in American literature; whenever I would read anything other than an American work or some bit of philosophy or theory, I felt as if I were cheating. (Graduate school has so many disadvantages. The only major difference between graduate school and hell seems to be that, when you piss people off, they never think to say, "Go to Graduate School!")

Anyway, now that my time is my own, I'm reading whatever I damn well want to read. Today, feeling an icy morbidity, I grabbed TGA and lied down on the sofa near the living room windows, bathing in the blue glow of filtered winter light.

So I finally got past the 250-page mark, and things have gotten bizarre and mythic. It's become involving, and there's still more than half the book left to enjoy. Ahhh. The two Murdoch novels I've read thus far, A Fairly Honorable Defeat and this one, don't have much in the way of energia. I mean, they don't exactly make one feel he is getting somewhere while reading. This is not a flaw for some reason. When I write, I try to unfold character and movement in a manner that might guide a reader's attention onward. Murdoch's characters burn in place. It isn't that nothing happens to them, it is just that one senses the characters' own discoveries about themselves are the most important thing. Plot should always be subsumed under character and language, in my opinion, but Murdoch's characters are an extreme case.

What the novels do have are cerebral people committing adultery, flirting with incest, failing to love one another, failing to be good people, or purposefully being bad people—and thinking about it. And it is good. So good.

False Starts

One of the odd things I learned after (finally) getting serious about writing last year: the pure mechanics of the thing matter as much or more than the quality of the ideas. In other words, writing is as much about sitting in a chair, hands on the keyboard, fingers moving, as it is about having something to say.

You see, inside every writer there's an inner fourth-grader—the one who got beaten up on the way to school, the one who forgot her lines during the play, or, in my case, the one who wore big leg braces and gray-plastic framed glasses thicker than scotch tumblers—who still hates him or herself. This inner fourth-grader says, with a voice in much the same timbre as Carrie White's mother, "They're all going to laugh at you!" So, instead of writing sentence after sentence and piling up draft pages, you end up killing everyone in sight with your telekinetic ability. Well, maybe nothing so extreme, but you don't write any drafts. And this leaves you feeling like killing everyone in sight with your telekinetic ability.

Without a draft, there's nothing to edit. With nothing to edit, there's nothing to send out. And so it goes.

It works like this: you wake up with an interesting thought. You lie in bed for awhile with this interesting thought. This thought is good. This thought is better than good—it's book-sized. This thought has energy, profundity, it is so great and so huge it will spill over from chapter to chapter until you have a manuscript, perfect and precise and ready for the printer.

You get out of bed. You make a cup of coffee, tea, what-have-you, and you sit down to write. You write two sentences. You sip whatever is in your mug. The sentences don't look so good. You revise them. That's better. Now what comes next? Ah, one more sentence. No, that's not going anywhere. More sips from the mug. I'll start again, you think. And you erase the meager sentences you have. And the page remains blank. Or you write a little more and then erase again. And now the idea is gone.

The inner fourth-grader has just played a hideous false note on his saxaphone, and, instead of continuing the solo already in progress at the school talent show, he reddens and starts over, and starts over again, until he finally quits the stage in tears.

At some point, you must let the fourth-grader make his mistakes. It's too difficult to shut the poor bastard up! Trust me, he's 10. He knows how to annoy. He will provoke, wheedle, and irritate you right out of productivity with his constant questioning and self-reproach. It doesn't matter if the solo sucks—let it rip, kid. It doesn't matter. Nobody's really listening, and you can go back and make it better or cut things out when you are editing.

Of course, it's easier to do this if you imagine completing something manageably short each day. I write 1,000 words. My word processor has a nifty word count in the lower right corner that lets me know how far along I am. Most of the time the writing is crap. But it doesn't matter. No one cares. Save caring for the revision.

I know these things; still, I have quite a few false starts this month. Each false start is now between 1,000 and 2,000 words long instead of just a few sentences. The new problem is that I have a finished manuscript with which to compare what I'm working on today. The fourth-grader still won't shut up, and he's found new lines of attack—what if it's not as good as the last one? shouldn't this manuscript be longer? your characterization sucks compared to last time! you call that plot development?!

So the fourth-grader never goes away, I guess. Fortunately, I can remind myself I don't care what he looks like anymore. It doesn't matter. It never really did.

A Query Letter

I sent off fifty pages of the novel, bundled with a SASE and query letter, to a literary agency. This, I suspect, is much the same as approaching a stranger and asking for bus fare. "Dude! I'll pay you back double tomorrow!" Ah, well. It seemed like a good, small agency with a nice client history. To my amazement, they said they were actually interested in representing "literary fiction" and "seeking new clients." This is like seeing a unicorn. I felt I had to act before it teleported away.

I spent two days on the query letter. As with writing the novel, simply finding the courage to face my appalling lack of perfection, to write something down, and to send it out seemed to be the primary issue. Since I'm procrastinating before writing my 1,000 words today, I might as well address a related literary incident (ok, loosely related—it has to do with courage, both in deed and (again loosely) in symbol). Apparently, the latest winner of the Newbery Medal for children's book of the year, The Higher Power of Lucky by children's librarian Susan Patron, contains the word "scrotum." In the book, the scrotum in question belongs to a dog.

Naturally, the American Tightass Club of Children's Librarians have organized to ban the book from school libraries. The ATCCL wants to be sure that no scrota pass through the hallowed doors of our nation's school libraries. Sorry, boys.

One of the most hilarious aspects of this story is a quote from Dana Nilsson, a leader of the anti-scrotum charge and apparent contender for president of the ATCCL. Nilsson, a teacher and librarian (god help us), said in this Sunday's New York Times, "I don't want to start an issue about censorship, but you won't find men's genitalia in quality literature." Nilsson, having not read the book she seeks to ban, seems unaware that the scrotum in question is canine, not human. She also hasn't read much Lawrence or Joyce, I suppose. (One of my favorite jokes in Ulysses, by the way, is about the "scrotumtightening sea.")

To be fair, Nilsson did modify her remark later, restricting the necessary absence of male genitalia to quality literature "for children." This seems even more troubling to me, though. Why define children's literature negatively? Why should children's literature consist of books with things left out? How odd to refuse to give the proper name for a part of the body to an audience of 10-12 year olds. That seems like a good way to produce gutless and unimaginative adults.

But then, the ATCCL needs future members, I suppose.

Bleeding Radiators, II

I had hoped that the benign spirits of Washington and Lincoln would shine down upon our heating system over the weekend and restore order. Alas, the pressure remains low in our boiler. Like Washington himself, perhaps my radiators were bled a bit too much.

I'm feeling a rising sense of anxiety because our tenants, my friend J and his son E, only have a few radiators working at capacity now. And it is still winter.

When T and I decided to buy a house in Buffalo, we bought one split into two apartments (upstairs/downstairs) so we could pay our mortgage with the rental income while I wrote. And it was a good plan. I make almost as much from rent as I did teaching multiple college courses (sad, isn't it?), and we can write off a good deal of the improvements to this very old house on our taxes.

The downside is I have to work on the house, which takes time away from writing. A few of the small projects I have done by myself this year include: tearing old sheathing off the garage roof and reshingling, painting 1/2 of the exterior of the house (so far), putting a new floor in the rear entry, hanging a new steel door in the rear entry, and replastering and painting the walls in the foyer (which are 25' tall). There is more, but I forget.

I enjoy the work. It is not so much the desk time stolen by these projects that impacts my writing, it is the sense of accomplishment that is the problem. I enjoy the work too much.

When I build, renovate, or restore some part of the house, I have very nearly the same emotional experience as when I draft, revise, or edit some piece of creative writing. My compulsion to write comes from the need to craft something—to make something out of nothing or to improve on what I've already done. Once I get that feeling from a house project, my jones for writing begins to flag. I wonder if other writers feel this way? I'll bet they do.

At any rate, I'm calling professionals to deal with our hydronic problem. Now I can work on a query letter.

Bleeding Radiators, I

I grew up in Newport Beach, California. I went to college in San Diego. I never knew until today that radiators bleed; or, rather, that they need to be bled.

You see, now I live in Buffalo, New York—a writer's city. Mark Twain lived here and wrote for the newspaper. F. Scott Fitzgerald lived here. Ishamel Reed used to teach at the high school in my neighborhood. I could go on. Really.

Quite a few literary luminaries have called Buffalo home. Why am I here? Well, I moved here for graduate school; primarily I wanted to study with one of my poet-heroes while earning a Ph.D. in American lit. I thought it would make me a better writer. To be honest, the more compelling reason is that I was afraid to strike out on my own earlier. So my adviser at UC San Diego said I had, absolutely had, to go to SUNY at Buffalo's maverick, theory conscious, raucous English department for my Ph.D. And he was right. And it was great.

But then we stayed, my wife and I. We stayed because we love this town. For one thing, it's gorgeous. I'm serious. It was the wealthiest city in the U.S. around 1900, and the architecture still shows it. Frank Lloyd Wright built several homes here. Frederick Law Olmstead layed out the system of parks and parkways. Joseph Ellicott designed the core street system—not a grid, but a series of traffic circles joining the major arteries. Late twentieth-century stupidity obscured some of the grandeur, but if you go for a walk, it's still there. Getting out for a walk and being surrounded by historic beauty is good when you've changed three lines of dialogue 1,356 times over eight hours and it still doesn't sound right.

Oh yeah, and we bought a five bedroom Victorian house, with a three car garage and hardwood floors throughout, for less than $80k. That would not have covered the down payment in San Diego.

So I write and enjoy the educated people (there are over a dozen colleges and two major universities here) and the parks and the art and the gorgeous summers and the snow in winter. But I don't care for the cold. And that's why I had to learn about radiators today. Now there are buckets of water in my basement, and I'm nervously eyeing the pressure gauge on something called a boiler. Sometimes I'm still just a tourist from a beach town. I think things will be ok, but I'll let you know more later.

Love Plus One

So the other big change in my life is that T and I are going to have our first child. The due date is August. (Yes, I was prolific this year.)

We decided in November. (If you're clever and counted back from August, you're right—T got pregnant right away. Well, we had a thirty-day marathon, so "right away" is open to interpretation. I still feel tired just thinking about it.) At any rate, we made the decision in November, and I've been thinking about decisions and decision-making lately.

Daniel Dennett, in a New York Times article from 1/2/07, commented on making decisions. If you don't know his work, he's a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts who writes about the concept of free will. He's a materialist. (A materialist in the scientific sense, as in a monist—I don't know if he has a big screen TV or drives a Mercedes.) Anyway, Dennett said that when we consider whether the traditional idea of free will is merely an illusion, as he seems to think, we confront "nihilism or despair." Thinking about whether we're just meat puppets driven by DNA and the vicissitudes of our endocrine systems, in other words, can be depressing.

But, says Dennett, his particular materialist view of choice isn't really a downer because we have what he calls "imagination": "We have the power to veto our urges and then to veto our vetoes." Whoopee. The story, then, runs something like this: after years of vetoing our urges, T and I vetoed our veto and conceived the kid. How parliamentary!

As a writer, I have to say I'm more than a little invested in free will and the imagination. I can't see how one writes a novel by vetoing one urge or another. I can't see how one has a child that way, either. [Insert joke here. (Probably a joke with the word "insert" inserted in it.)]

We decided, T and I, to live how we want to live—as ever. I prefer my philosophers to be nutty, so I'll quote some others who are more fun. Here's Deleuze and Guattari from A Thousand Plateaus (I think it's plateau #367), "Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly: the simple Thing, the Entity, the full Body, the stationary Voyage ... Yoga, Krishna, Love, Experimentation." Why try to fix definitions for "free will" or "imagination?" Why not exercise them instead?

Some of our friends might be worried that T and I will sell out or grow into bourgeois idiots because we're breeding. Well, perhaps I'm already an idiot. But I'm not going all bourgie. For one thing, I don't have the money. For another, I'm not giving up my art. (Which means, of course, that I'll never have the money. Damn.)

Having the kid, for me, is writing another kind of novel. This novel will be cool in the same way the ones made out of words are: she/he will generate his/her own metaphors in a manner wholly unpredictable. This novel might form a punk band or become a corporate lawyer (hopefully the former). This novel will almost certainly drop something expensive in the toilet by age four. But who knows? The way I look at it, I'm inviting a healthy dose of chaos into my life—the same way I invite chaos every time I sit down to write.

Yoga, Krishna, Love, Experimentation.

New Career

I wrote a novel this fall. Well, I wrote the first draft in the fall, and then I revised it—sentence by sentence, all the way through—six times during the winter. It's my first novel. It's finished.

So now what?

Last week I sent the sucker out to a publisher's first book contest. Since then I've been harried by doubts—which I try to choke down like so many meatballs rising in my gorge after a heavy Italian meal. When I wrote the first draft it was more than 50,000 words long. Now it's less than 50,000. So I look at it and think, Is it too short to be a "novel"? The events occur over the course of five days, and the whole narrative is told from the first-person p.o.v. of a 13-year old boy. Structurally, therefore, it's clearly a novella. But a long novella? Does that make any sense? Who the hell will publish this abberration?! And so on.

I'm starting to write another novel this month. It will be longer. Last February (2006), I quit my so-called career lecturing in American literature to become a full-time writer. Desire trumped fear. Actually, my adoring wife (spouse, life partner, etc.) pushed me to take writing seriously and quit wasting my time in "real" jobs. I listened to her. Now I start work at 8 AM and write until she gets home at 4:30 PM. This has been going on for many months, and there ain't nothin' in print yet, y'all. Maybe I should stop using words such as "ain't" and "y'all" in my query letters.

Perhaps I'll teach again after I have a few manuscripts in the rejection rotation. I don't know. One thing I realized: I loved, absolutely and without reservation, the feeling of putting this first novel(la) together. John Gardner said one does not write merely to publish, but for glory. Well, ok, I feel good about the thing itself. The funky architecture of it, how obdurate it now seems—as if the story always existed in just that form. It's a peculiar sort of glory, and it's utterly insular—though better than spending your days masturbating in a dark room. Someday, at least, you can show people the results.