The Hive
The official blog of science fiction / horror author Terence West.
William Gibson Blog
Famed author of Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic: The Screenplay.
The Word Foundry
Joe Clifford Faust's "blog of a working writer: tracking writing projects, musings on the
creative process, occasional side trips into music, media, politics, religion, etc."
A Writer's Diary
By Cynthia Harrison, who has the good sense to quote Virginia Woolf: "The truth is that writing
is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial."
The American Sentimentalist
"Never has any people endured its own tragedy with so little sense of the tragic." Essays by Mark W. Anderson.
Screenwriting By Blog
David C. Daniel writes a screenplay online. "I've decided to publish the process as a way to push myself through it.
From concept to completion, it'll be here."
SeanAlonzo.com
Official site of occult fiction author Sean-Alonzo, exploring symbolism, alternative
history, philosophy, secret societies and other areas of the esoteric tradition.
Crafty Screenwriting
Maunderings of Alex Epstein, tv scribe, about life, politics, and the tv show I'm co-creating.
Stealing Heaven From The Lips Of God
Writer & Artist, Dee Rimbaud reflects upon politics, religion, art, poetry, the meaning of life,
the nature of God and why toast always lands butter side down on carpets.
Robert Peake
Heart and Mind, Fully Engage ... a poet's website.
Sidestepping Real
By Ren Powell, poet, children’s writer, essayist and editor.
(Posts archived here are from 01/10/03 - 10/31/06)
Wednesday, April 30, 2003 Whew Feel like I've been working without a break for days on end, writing and teaching, teaching and writing. Been mainly working on the memoir and am into chapter nine, which is proving to be the most difficult to write so far because of some personal things that happen in my life then. Still on page 60 of the script-to-novel, so I hope to return to that tomorrow. Also have two deadlines this week, a book review (of three books) and a screenwriting column. Looks like those get done Friday. Still have my composer on hold, waiting for more libretto pages. Too much to do!
4/30/2003 04:51:00 PM |
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Berkeley [from a memoir in progress]
Moving from Pasadena to Berkeley in 1959 was like moving to another planet. The energy on the streets in this era, particularly around Sather Gate near an entrance to campus, and down Telegraph Avenue from the University, was electric, especially to a 19-year-old living away from home for the first time. Tables set up outside of Sather Gate were manned by representatives of more political positions and social ideas than I knew existed. Street musicians were everywhere, as were more beautiful young women than I’d ever seen in one place at one time. So much was going on I felt immobile, unable to choose what to do first. But suddenly the last thing I felt like doing was sitting in a classroom.
Quentin and I rented an apartment together and found a part-time job to help us make ends meet, “hashing” at a sorority near campus. We were dishwashers and servers to long tables of still more beautiful young women, and for this honor we received free meals and a small stipend to make up for the weekend meals when we didn’t work.
From the beginning I had little interest in school at Berkeley. My studies at Cal. Tech. put me far ahead of the sequential calculus courses I enrolled in, and I got bored by having to study things I already knew. Instead of using this advantage to ace the classes, improving my grade point average, I did the opposite and spent class hours hanging around Telegraph Avenue, soaking up the street life and becoming more and more influenced by it.
A high school friend, Eugene, had enrolled at Berkeley. He’d been a part of our nerd group in Pasadena until he transferred to another school for his last two years of high school. After I looked him up, Eugene ushered me into the Berkeley folk music scene, where I quickly renewed my interest in the guitar. I was introduced to the music of The Weavers, Barbara Dane, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, and others, many of whose records I bought, learning songs from them. My guitar style was a strange hybrid between the Carter lick and two-finger Travis picking, a personal style I’d developed on my own from self-instruction books and early informal tutelage from Merle Travis himself. This served my purposes well enough early on but would prove to be a handicap later, a collection of bad habits to unlearn if I wanted to graduate to more advanced finger picking techniques or the bluegrass flat picking style.
I began to think of myself less and less as a student and more and more as a street folk musician, although I still was too shy and unskilled to share the latter behavior with strangers. I performed mostly for myself. Quentin, who still was attending classes, somehow suffered through my practicing as I informally dropped out of school and spent my day practicing the guitar or just hanging around.
Despite working for most of our meals, we still had to come up with the rent, and our finances quickly proved to be tougher to manage than we’d calculated. We either needed to get another job or to find cheaper rent.
Many times in life, the gods have dropped wonderful accidents into my lap. They did so now. Just when we needed to hear it, the gods who care for reckless young men sang us their serendipitous song.
4/30/2003 06:46:00 AM |
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Tuesday, April 29, 2003 Genius & Wit [from a memoir in progress]
Before bidding goodbye to Cal. Tech., I have to say a few words about the extraordinary world of humor that gets created when genius and wit come together. I never witnessed more outrageous practical jokes or witty behavior than during my short stay as a student there.
One afternoon at football practice David, who played guard, came to me with an idea. David was short, barely five foot, but feisty and fearless. What he lacked in size he made up for in creativity, and his specialty was biting the ankles of opposing linemen in pileups, a practice that earned him more respect than his small stature warranted.
David had been studying the football rulebook and discovered what he considered to be an ambiguity that we should take advantage of. The game of football, he noted, is played with a ball of such-and-such dimensions. Nowhere however, does it clarify that the game is played with only one ball. At most the interpretation would be that there was only one ball of the specified dimensions – but the possibility of using a second ball of different dimensions was totally within the grammatical meaning of the rules, according to David. Since he was a genius with a photographic memory, I took his word for it.
In our next game, therefore, we had a trick play prepared. It worked beautifully, we scored a touchdown, and then we argued with the referees that it should count, only abandoning the cause when they threatened to make us forfeit the game. Why would we want to lose 1-0, the score by forfeiture, when we already were losing 21-0?
Our trick play worked this way. David came into the huddle with a miniature football, which I hid in my jersey. I then tossed a quick incomplete pass to the right with the standard ball. After it fell to the ground I took out the peewee ball and threw a perfect strike to my left end sprinting down the sideline. The greatest surprise of all was that he actually caught it. Touchdown! The argument began, and even our coach was against us. Cal. Tech. never learned to hire coaches with senses of humor.
Another example of the Cal. Tech brand of humor happened on the morning of my first final exam at the end of fall quarter. The exam was scheduled at eight o’clock. I entered the classroom a bit early and sat down. The lights were off. More students trickled in, sitting down without turning on the lights. Finally the teacher came in, and he turned on the lights. As soon as he did, loudspeakers hidden on roofs and in bushes all around campus began blasting at great volume the stirring sounds of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. Welcome to exam week at Cal. Tech.
On another occasion a student living in the dorms flew home during a long weekend. He was wealthier than most of us and had his own sportscar. His room was on the third floor. When he returned, he couldn’t find his car in the dormitory parking lot. With panic he rushed up to his dorm room to phone the police and report the car stolen – and then it was, in the middle of his room, idling as sweetly as a kitten. His buddies had disassembled the car and reassembled it in his room!
A few years later, I was able to witness the Cal. Tech. brand of humor on international television. I was watching the Rose Bowl game. I believe UCLA was playing. During halftime the UCLA card stunt section prepared to start its famous UCLA spell out. As the letters spiraled out across the section, however, they did not spell out UCLA at all. They spelled Cal. Tech.! I and other former Techies all around the world went crazy with delight.
4/29/2003 07:10:00 AM |
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Monday, April 28, 2003 The Humanities [from a memoir in progress]
Ironically enough, the Cal. Tech. professors who taught courses in the humanities were the ones who first got me thinking of majoring in something other than mathematics. The humanities courses at Tech. were extraordinary, as good as anything I later took at UCLA or the University of Oregon. In American history we compared early drafts of the Declaration of Independence with the final draft, studying the reasons for the changes. In a literature class we studied Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I was getting seriously interested in history and literature for the first time.
In high school, I had been able to earn A’s in these subjects by just going through the motions. The only “literature” that interested me was science fiction. I subscribed to several sci-fi magazines, including Galaxy and Astounding. My favorite authors were Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Sheckley.
Sheckley now lives in Portland, and it was a great thrill to meet him in person decades after I had become a big fan of his wonderful sense of humor. But I was distressed to learn that such a giant of the Golden Age of science fiction struggles to get published today, even though his oldest fans say he is doing his best work. In American culture, the question always is: What have you done lately?
At any rate, at Cal. Tech. I began to pay closer attention in my history, philosophy and literature classes. As a result, my central interests were beginning to change once again. There seemed to be so much I didn’t know, so many books I hadn’t read. How would I ever catch up?
Linus Pauling, my chemistry teacher, published a book called No More War, and I became a Pauling groupy. I followed him to area lectures against nuclear arms, and I marched behind him for peace.
One afternoon I saw him approaching as I was eating my sack lunch on a bench on campus. He asked if he could join me.
Pauling was easy to talk to. After some casual chat, I confessed that I was less happy as a sophomore than I had been as a freshman. I was even thinking of changing my major into something in the humanities. Pauling was gently supportive, telling me that good minds were needed in the humanities as much as anywhere else, that there was no shame in leaving Cal. Tech. to pursue other interests elsewhere. In retrospect, I think his support was a real turning point in my self-reflection about my future.
As it turned out, Quentin was going through the same self-searching. We decided to transfer to the University of California at Berkeley together, leaving at the end of our first sophomore term, which would have us starting over in Berkeley in January, 1959. Since we were in good standing, both with B averages, we were able to get scholarships.
I had discussed none of this with my parents. Now it was time to let them know my decision. I fooled myself into thinking I was doing them a favor because Berkeley was considerably less expensive than Cal. Tech., and with a scholarship I wouldn’t need much in the way of financial support at all. I thought of my move as saving them money. If Dad was disappointed by my plans, he didn’t say anything – but mother was devastated.
She loved being a Cal. Tech. mom. I had no idea. She was on several committees at the college and had become good friends with Mrs. DuBridge, the wife of the college president. Mom had built a new social life around the college, and this would be damaged now that I was leaving Cal. Tech. How could I leave such a fine college – especially since I was maintaining a B average? She must have thought I had lost my mind.
Quentin and I bought an old car for the trip to Berkeley. It was a World War II model, a two-door sedan; loaded with boxes of our belongings – and it didn’t even make it over the San Gabriels. We blew the engine on the long, steep upgrade and ended up trashing the car for pennies on the dollar, shipping our boxes and taking a Greyhound to Berkeley.
We had convinced ourselves that we were transferring to change our majors to something or other in the humanities. But I stayed a math. major, and Quentin stayed a physics major, as if we still needed our past majors as security blankets. We found an apartment to share and got ready to begin a new life. Neither of us had ever lived away from home before.
4/28/2003 07:55:00 AM |
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Sunday, April 27, 2003 Today's rotten reviews What some critics have said about some of my favorite works.
Chekhov's Uncle Vanya: "If you were to ask me what Uncle Vanya is about, I would say about as much as I can take." Journal American
Hart Crane's The Bridge: "A form of hysteria." Poetry
Dos Passos' The 42nd Parallel: "[Dos Passos] is like a man who is trying to run in a dozen directions at once, succeeding thereby merely in standing still and making a noise." The Spectator
James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: "There are many objectionable passages and references." Library Journal
Faulkner's Light In August: "...what he is actually offering us is a flight from reality." The Bookman
Fitsgerald's The Great Gatsby:
"...a book of the season only." New York Herald Tribune
"an absurd story" Saturday Review of Literature
Flaubert's Madame Bovary: "Mons. Flaubert is not a writer." Le Figaro
Heller's Catch-22: "gasps for want of craft and sensibility" New York Times Book Review
Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises: "His characters are as shallow as the saucers in which they stack their daily emotions..." The Dial
Huxley's Brave New World: "A lugubrious and heavy-handed piece of propaganda." New York Herald Tribune
Jones' From Here to Eternity: "Certainly America has something better to offer the world..." Christian Science Monitor
Joyce's Ulysses: "a misfire" Virginia Woolf
Malamud's The Assistant: "too grim a picture to have wide appeal" Kirkus Reviews
O'Connor's Wise Blood: "Neither satire nor humor is achieved." Saturday Review of Literature
O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra: "a symptom of a lack of knowledge of the novelist's real art." Saturday Review of Literature
Sports (sort of) [from a memoir in progress]
You didn’t really try out for sports at Cal. Tech. You showed up. Apparently there was little doubt in the coach’s mind that I was going to be his freshman quarterback. Only about 15 guys showed up for the team, and of these only one other wanted to try out for quarterback. Coach gave us each a football and told us to throw it long. I threw a zinger, about a forty-yard spiral. The other guy threw a soft, wobbly pass that went end-over-end for about fifteen yards before crashing like a ripe coconut. I was the quarterback. He was my backup.
This was an era in which players went both ways, playing offense and defense, which was fortunate since we had so few players. Eventually we browbeat others to join us so we at least could put 22 guys on the practice field and scrimmage. But we never had anything close to depth.
We had a four-game season, playing against the likes of Occidental College and Whittier College, small schools like ours but schools less concentrated in their curricula than Tech. They may even have had a physical education major.
Our first game was against Occidental, and the first half presented the most auspicious beginning in the history of Cal. Tech. freshman football. We scored two touchdowns! I scored the first, by running untouched around the right end after calling for a halfback sweep around left end. I noticed that our linemen were giving away the direction of the play by the way they lined up. In the huddle, therefore, I lied. I told them I was going to toss the ball out to the halfback running left but instead took the snap under center and, after faking left, suddenly sprinted around right end. The Occidental defense had gotten lazy by this time, also realizing that our linemen were telegraphing the play, so I took everyone by surprise and dashed into the end zone almost before anyone, including my own team, realized what was going on. Unfortunately, this was the kind of trick that only worked once.
Our second touchdown was more traditional, a halfback run off-tackle late in the second quarter, which somehow went for eighty-five yards and a score. The back who ran the ball was so exhausted afterwards he missed most of the third quarter , still trying to recuperate. My dad, who was at the game, told me later the halfback looked like a cartoon, running scared with his feet in front of him, leading the way.
We were behind 28-12 at the half, and this was the closest half we would play all season. Occidental ended up winning the game 52-12. Moreover, these two first half touchdowns ended up being the only points we scored all season! Our auspicious start fell flat on its face. Our worst game was losing 85-0 against Whittier in a driving rainstorm on a field that soon became a mud bath.
If ever sports was about playing the game for its own sake and not whether you won or lost, it was football at Cal. Tech. I loved playing and so did most of my teammates. Even losing 85-0 in a mud bath was fun – it fact, it was delirious fun! We were very good at amusing ourselves, cracking jokes in the huddle and pulling stunts that drove our coach crazy, such as trying a 90-yard field goal on first down. When your game plan is three plays and punt, creative play-calling becomes attractive.
As quarterback, I must have lost hundreds of yards by the end of the season. Despite the 85-yard run in our first game, we really didn’t have much of a running game. I could pass accurately if I was given time to get it off, so mostly I called passing plays, or plays with a pass option, and most of the time I got sacked before getting the throw off. I may have lost over five hundred yards by season’s end.
On defense, I played safety. The coach’s strategy behind this was to keep me from getting injured by keeping me far from the ball. As it turned out, I led the team in tackles!
I played every offensive and defensive down in the season except two. Once I had the wind knocked out of me on offense and had to come out. For two plays the backup quarterback ran the team, and he was a sight to behold. Not only did his passes go end over end, when he ran he waddled like a duck. It was hard not to laugh from the bench, and even the coach had a hard time keeping a straight face. I ran back in for fourth down, just in time to punt, and the backup came out with a great grin on his face, knowing that he had just won his letter.
Football was such a blast that Quentin talked me into going out for basketball, which was his sport. Quentin, at about six-two, made first string forward, and amazingly enough I played first string as the other forward even though I was only six even. Our center was about six-three.
The freshman basketball team actually won a few games, solely because we had a guard who could make almost half his shots taken from anywhere between the top of the key and mid-court. His job was to get free somewhere over the mid-court line, and our job was to get the ball to him. When he got hot, he was amazing to watch – I’ve not seen such a display of long-range accuracy since then. His shooting let us occasionally experience something that Cal. Tech. teams almost never experienced, the joy of winning.
After lettering in football and basketball, I decided to go out for track. My motivation was to build up my speed for football, but the track coach had other ideas. First he tried to make me a shot putter. I could never get the hang of it. Next he tried the javelin. I almost nailed him with an errant throw. Finally I ran the third leg on the mile relay team. Our freshman track team won one meet, a close victory over the House of David and its team of long-bearded preachers.
The best part of playing sports at Cal. Tech. was the camaraderie that developed among the athletes. Since much of the time we not only were losing our competitions but getting slaughtered in them, we depended on one another to keep our spirits up. We told jokes, we discussed homework problems, we horsed around. The coaches were forever trying to get us to behave like respectable athletes who took the competition at hand seriously, losing with grace, but we were built of difference stuff and were participating for different reasons. We were having so much fun an observer would think we were winning. Of course, we didn’t expect to win. We just made sure we had a hell of a lot of fun losing.
In the summer after my freshman year, before school started, I reported to early football practice. I was going to play for the varsity, which ran the single wing because its coach was a former UCLA coach whose teams had done the same. The coach wanted me to try out for two positions: quarterback, which in the single wing is primarily a blocking back, and tailback, who is the passer and runner.
I loved playing quarterback in the single wing because I got to call the plays and yell out the signals. Most of my blocks were traps, a pretty easy line of work. Since I could catch the ball as well as pass it, the coach even activated a couple of trick plays in which I became a primary receiver. At tailback I was not as good as the starter, a returning senior, but I thought I had a good shot at becoming the starting quarterback, even if I was only a sophomore.
The same summer the season preview issue of Street & Smith’s Football Digest came out – and miracle upon miracle, in the Southern California regional supplement my name was listed in the back as one of the promising new prospects for the Cal. Tech. varsity football team! In high school, I had bought this preview religiously to read about UCLA and the Fortyniners and find out what their seasons would be like. Now my name was listed between the same covers as the names of my past heroes. With my name in print, I felt like a football star!
Unfortunately, my prospects crashed as hard as those of the freshman football team the year before. I hurt my knee in a late summer scrimmage and quit the team. The coach wanted me to undergo rehabilitation, telling me I would be ready to play before the season ended, but I already was thinking of leaving school. Playing football, even for the varsity, no longer appealed to me. I was trying to figure out what to do with my life.
4/27/2003 04:39:00 AM |
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Today's rotten reviews From Bill Henderson's fine book, some jealousies, rivalries, and jibes at literary reputations.
George Meredith on Matthew Arnold: "...a poet without passion, whose verse, written in surplice, is for freshmen and gentle maidens who will be wooed to the arms of these future rectors."
Edmund Wilson on W.H. Auden: "...seems to have been arrested in the mentality of an adolescent schoolboy."
Macaulay on Francis Bacon: "His faults were -- we write it with pain -- coldness of heart, and meanness of spirit."
Revue des Deux Mondes on Balzac: "...Balzac's place in French literature will be neither considerable nor high."
John Quincy Adams on Lord Byron: "His versification is so destitute of sustained harmony, many of his thoughts are so strained, his sentiments so unamiable, his misanthropy so gloomy, his libertinism so shameless, his merriment such a grinning of a ghastly smile, that I have always believed his verses would soon rank with forgotten things."
Lord Byron on Chaucer: "Chaucer, not withstanding the praises bestowed on him, I think obscene and contemptible..."
Saturday Review on Dickens: "We do not believe in the permanence of his reputation."
Atlantic Monthly on Emily Dickinson: "Oblivion lingers in the immediate neighborhood."
Carlyle on Emerson: "A hoary-headed and toothless baboon."
Poe on Emerson: "Belongs to a class of gentlemen with whom we have no patience whatever -- the mystics for mysticism's sake..."
Aristophanes on Euripides: "A cliche anthologist ... and maker of ragmuffin manikins."
Coleridge on Edward Gibbon: "Gibbon's style is detestable; but is not the worst thing about him."
H.G. Wells on Henry James: "James' denatured people are only the equivalent in fiction of those egg-faced, black-haired ladies who sit and sit in the Japanese colour-prints..."
Carlyle on Charles Lamb: "A more pitiful, rickety, gasping, staggering, Tomfool I do not know."
The Dial on Poe: "A verbal poet merely; empty of thought, empty of sympathy, empty of love for any real thing..."
Gertrude Stein on Ezra Pound: "A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not."
Lord Byron on Shakespeare: "Shakespeare's name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down."
Hemingway on Gertrude Stein: "It's a shame you never knew her before she went to pot. ...she was damned nice before she got ambitious."
The Bookman on Mark Twain: "A hundred years from now it is likely that 'The Jumping Frog' alone will be remembered."
Contemporary Review on Walt Whitman: "Incapable of true poetic originality..."
California Institute of Technology [from a memoir in progress]
Before starting our freshman year at Cal. Tech., Matt, I and the other 98 entering freshmen spent a required long weekend camping in the San Gabriel Mountains with selected upperclassmen and faculty, an orientation to the special world of the Cal. Tech. community. We felt special indeed. Here we were, still in our teens, hobnobbing with past or future Nobel Prize winners like Linus Pauling. In the campground setting, all sense of intellectual class disappeared, and somehow it seemed as if the only thing separating us, the freshman class, from the top minds in the country (our faculty) were a few years, that soon enough it would be us getting the grant money, making the profound new discoveries, winning the Nobels.
The orientation weekend was casual and largely unorganized. Many activities were available at the campsite, and one afternoon I found myself playing quarterback in a spontaneous touch football game. Afterwards a balding man approached me and complimented me on my passing ability. He identified himself as the coach of the freshman football team. Had I thought of trying out for the team? Of course not. I wasn’t even aware that Cal. Tech. had a football team. The coach pointed out certain advantages to playing team sports at Tech., such as being excused from afternoon lab schedules and not being required to take any other gym classes. I told him I’d give it some thought.
We left the mountain to start classes. Or so we thought. The casual sense of the weekend, in which entering freshmen felt equal to faculty, changed dramatically as soon as we returned to campus. Before starting classes – and at Cal. Tech. the entire first term for freshmen was required, without electives – we found ourselves taking a battery of tests. But we’d already done brilliantly on our college boards, which had helped us get admitted in the first place. Why more tests?
These tests weren’t graded, they were ranked – from 1 to 100. In other words, on each test, in each specialized area of mathematics or science, you would know how many entering freshmen scored better than you. On each test, someone – no doubt still full of self-congratulation and confidence, if not downright arrogance, from being accepted into one of the toughest schools in the country – was going to finish dead last and was going to know about it.
Fortunately I didn’t finish dead last, or even in the bottom third, on any of the tests. In a couple areas of mathematics I finished in the top quarter. But mostly I finished where my total score placed me, just a tad above the middle. I’d had a straight-A average in high school and was the Salutatorian of my class, but at Cal. Tech. I was decidedly average. This was the first moment in the greatest lesson the college was going to teach me.
Suitably humbled, we began our freshmen year in earnest. I soon learned what my strengths and weaknesses were in the sciences, reinforcing what I’d begun to learn in high school. I shined in the areas of mathematics that derived from algebra but had difficulty in areas deriving from geometry. I was strong in theory classes in chemistry and physics but weak in laboratory work. In mechanical drawing, which was required, I was so atrocious I got the only D I ever received in a college course.
Classes at Cal. Tech. were small. Since you found yourself moving from required class to required class with many of the same group of guys (no girls admitted), friendships came quickly. These friendships also were influenced by whether you lived on campus in a dormitory or not. A surprisingly large number of the freshman class of 100, perhaps 20, lived in Southern California and commuted. I was still living at home in Pasadena, though I now had my own bedroom, and joined the subclass of commuters. We missed out on a lot of campus life, of course, by going home every day, but we tried to make up for it by hanging around together and creating our own sense of camaraderie and fraternity. All of us really wanted to be living on campus with the majority of the students.
Early on I found myself making friends with a commuting student from Glendale named Quentin, who was another “just average” Cal. Tech. freshman. Quentin and I also shared a passion for sports, which defined another way in which Cal. Tech. students defined their class structure: there were those who liked to participate in sports and those who didn’t. So I quickly found my place on campus as a commuter and a jock.
Indeed, in such a focused environment of mathematics, science and technology, with stiff intellectual competition all around you, sports became more important to me than ever as a kind of escape valve by which to forget studies and recharge the mind. It became clear to me right away that I needed some kind of structured diversion to keep sane, and to find it I decided to take the coach up on his offer and try out for the freshman football team.
4/26/2003 07:04:00 AM |
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Friday, April 25, 2003 Today's rotten reviews What some folks have said about some plays you'll recognize.
Bertrand Russell on Shaw's Man and Superman ... "it disgusted me."
Literary Gazette on Shelley's Prometheus Unbound ... "absolute raving ... his poetry a melange of nonsense, cockneyism, poverty and pedantry."
Shaw on Shakespeare's Othello ... "Pure melodrama. There is not a touch of characterization that goes below the skin."
Pepys on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream ... "The most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life."
Manchester Guardian on Pinter's The Birthday Party ... "What all this means only Mr. Pinter knows, for as his characters speak in non sequiturs, half-gibberish and lunatic ravings, they are unable to explain their actions, thoughts or feelings."
Sporting and Dramatic News on Ibsen's A Doll's House ... "It was as though someone had dramatized the cooking of a Sunday dinner."
Daily Telegram on Ibsen's Ghosts ... "a dirty act done publicly."
News Chronicle on Eliot's The Cocktail Party ... "nothing but a finely acted piece of flapdoodle."
Girls & Guys [from a memoir in progress]
Biology rules. For all my interest in astronomy and mathematics, for all my preference in spending a late night with my telescope than with a girl, I still started having wet dreams. I still became more curious with each birthday about the opposite sex, especially when it was naked.
I want to begin with something I’ve remembered vividly for fifty years. This took place when I was in 9th or 10th grade, I believe, putting me in what now would be called the freshman or sophomore year of high school. All the students were standing outside on the school grounds. It may have been a fire drill. I was standing near a group of Hispanic kids. Though I had only a rare black classmate, Hispanic classmates were common. Two guys older than I were admiring an Hispanic girl down the way, and one observed, “Look at all the hair on her arms.” To this the other said, “Think of all the hair on her pussy.”
I can hear that line as if it were spoken only a moment ago. Think of all the hair on her pussy. There was something at once mysterious and forbidden about such a thought, a promise of secrets offering pleasure beyond measure, perhaps made more mysterious, more foreign, by the accent of the speaker. But try as I might, I couldn’t imagine such a thing. I became obsessed with finding out what was so special about a girl’s pubic hair. What was I missing?
The first place to look, of course, was in magazines, but no magazine I was aware of – Playboy, Adam – showed female genitalia or pubic hair. I managed to get hold of some nudist magazines but every crotch had been smudged out, regardless of sex. This, of course, only whetted my desire to see female pubic hair even more. It must be something spectacular to justify hiring someone to smudge out all those crotches!
I became so desperate in my quest to see female pubic hair that I did something incredibly stupid. Lust is irrational. I could solve number theory problems in my journal but I couldn’t figure out that I was about to do something so reckless that it guaranteed I would get caught. Getting caught never even occurred to me.
What I did is come up with a plan so I could see my mother’s pubic hair. The bathroom had a window that faced the driveway. The window was covered by curtains. I went to Mom’s sewing basket and took out a dozen straight pins. I used them to pin the curtains back in what I thought was a very subtle way, creating a narrow slit through which I could see into the bathroom from the driveway. And it worked! The trouble was, Mom grabbed a towel before stepping out of the shower, covering the magic area. When she dropped the towel, her back was to the window.
I saw her breasts, of course, but breasts were nothing. I’d been seeing naked female breasts since Dallas when Dad mailed home movies from Guam full of women of all ages and shapes, naked to the waist in their grass skirts. Boobs were nothing. My quest was for pubic hair.
The next day I went into the bathroom to remove the straight pins of my failed experiment. They were gone from the curtains. Clearly I’d been found out! But mother never mentioned a thing about it to me. My quest continued.
I found an advertisement in a magazine for a European nudist magazine with unretouched photographs. I sent off for it, inserting American money into the envelope, an order on the honor system. I don’t think I actually expected to get the order filled because soon I had totally forgotten about placing it. Several months later I came home from school one day to have mother tell me, “You got something from Denmark in the mail today. I put it on your bed. It looks like a magazine.”
I believe my mother actually thought I had ordered a Danish astronomy magazine. It would be just like me. I closed my bedroom door and opened the magazine-sized envelope with considerable trepidation.
Astounding! Absolutely amazing! Female pubic hair did not disappoint. Think of all the hair on her pussy. How could you not, after seeing such a thing? It was well worth waiting for.
In the Danish nudist magazine, there were no provocative poses. Most of the photographs were of families doing outdoor family things together, such as playing croquet or swimming. But not all of them. My favorite photograph was an action shot of four teenage girls playing volleyball – because the girls could have been my classmates, and they were naked. They also were beautiful, they made me feel hot and bothered, and they all had pubic hair.
I never looked at my female classmates in quite the same way after that. Not that I suddenly became a stud. I seldom dated. I rarely had time, for all the hours I spent keeping track of my variable stars for Harvard Observatory. But I looked at girls differently all the same.
I especially looked differently at a cheerleader named Kathy. She was my first crush. She was almost failing in some subject or other, I don’t remember which, but I do remember that when she asked if I’d help her with her homework – which turned out to mean actually doing it for her – I had no hesitation in complying. And what else can I do for you, Kathy? Think of all …
A few girls, amazingly enough, took an interest in me, but these were the female brains in school, the small minority who took math. and science classes right along with the nerds. A girl named Janet kept asking me to the Sadie Hawkins Dance until one year I said yes. I remember feeling her breasts against my chest when we danced, an extraordinary surprise that seeing movies of half-naked girls in Guam somehow had not prepared me for. Janet kissed me on the lips after I walked her to her door, but I never asked her out again. Too bad, because she grew up into a stunning young woman – and her family owned the biggest jewelry store in Pasadena.
I never had a real girlfriend in high school. I rarely dated. But I was very tight with four guys – Doug, Ed, Matt and John. We were the smartest five guys in school, and if you didn’t believe it, all you had to do was ask us. We were the future scientists of America.
In fact, we actually were the smartest guys in school, or at least had the highest IQs. One day I found a memo in a faculty waste basket that listed the IQs of everyone in the senior class! There we were, the top five, though of course I really didn’t need to know that Matt’s IQ was higher than mine. As I recall, Matt came in highest at 154, which made him an official genius, the only one among us. The lowest I.Q. among us was 135. Mine was 140.
We all got accepted at top colleges. Matt and I went to Cal. Tech., Doug and Ed went to Stanford, and John went to M.I.T. Only Doug and Ed went straight through to graduate. I transferred to Berkeley in the middle of my sophomore year. John joined the Army even before I did. Matt committed suicide.
The circumstances of Matt’s suicide remain puzzling to me. At Cal. Tech. we drifted apart, interestingly enough, because I suddenly discovered that I was a latent jock. Moreover, Matt’s primary interest was chemistry, not mathematics, so we ran in different intellectual circles.
I have a theory about why Matt committed suicide, though I can’t prove it. I think he was gay and couldn’t deal with it in the climate of the 1950s. Additionally, I think his mother put extraordinary pressure on him to succeed – and at Cal. Tech. he learned, before anything else, exactly the same thing that I learned: we weren’t as bright as we had been led to believe we were in high school.
At any rate, the tragedy happened in the summer after our freshman year. One afternoon Matt’s mother phoned the house to ask if I could come over and talk to Matt, who was very upset about something. We lived close to one another, so I hustled over to his house. Matt had a private apartment above the garage. When I went in, I remember he had a wild look in his eyes, unlike anything I’d seen in him before. He talked a lot but wasn’t really making any sense. He obviously was upset but I couldn’t understand, or get him to explain clearly, who or what was disturbing him. But I saw in his room the clue that later became the basis of my theory: he had some gay pornographic magazines. He’d never made any overtures to me in this direction, or to anyone else as far as I knew. But the magazines were like a statement.
I never succeeded in settling him down and finally gave up. I went on home. The next day I heard he had killed himself that night. For a while I felt guilty, wondering if there was something I could have done to help him, but we’d drifted so far apart by then that I knew there wasn’t. He was a genius, he was probably gay, and he had reached one of those moments of personal crisis through which he couldn’t find his way to the other side.
I returned to Cal. Tech. for my sophomore year, now the only representative from PHS’s Class of ’57. I don’t think I knew in October (Cal. Tech. started late) that I’d be gone by January.
4/25/2003 03:52:00 AM |
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Thursday, April 24, 2003 Office hours Relatively quiet office hours, only 2 students coming by so far. The rain has let up today, drying things out enough to be mowing the lawn if I were home. Hope I can mow it tomorrow. Meanwhile, I'm making great progress in the two main writing projects and expect to continue forward on them Friday and Saturday. I also expect to write more on the libretto. All cylinders firing strongly these days.
It was "a trip" to write in my memoir about my first love affair at 19. A pleasant thing to remember. I am close to writing about my first marriage, which I expect will not be a pleasant thing to remember. The going will get heavier pretty soon now. I'm letting it all hang out this draft, more or less, but when I go back to shape and rewrite, a lot may get cut in order to keep the thing in focus and moving. At the rate I'm going, it's looking like something of a 350 page book and something in the low 200s would be more appropriate, I think. We'll see how it goes.
I think I should be able to finish the draft of the novel in the next month or six weeks, before I begin my summer break, leaving the summer to rewrite it. I really look forward to this next step, tossing the screenplay aside and letting the novel reshape itself on its own terms. I am almost certain I will not change the tone of the prose, however, "the voice," somehow I seem to have stumbled upon the right way to tell the story this early on.
I also have to assemble the pieces of a Dorothy Parker appreciation I'm directing this summer at the Unitarian Church here. Well, I have pretty much picked out what I plan to use, need to shape it and write some narration to hold it together. Busy, busy. Onward.
4/24/2003 04:02:00 PM |
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Today's Rotten Review Bill Henderson has edited a slim and wonderful "literary companion" called Rotten Reviews. Every writer will enjoy reading the trashing of the classics by sometimes famous, sometimes not-so-famous, commentators. Here are some reviews of Whitman's Leaves of Grass:
"No, no, this kind of thing won't do ... The good folks down below (I mean posterity) will have none of it." James Russell Lowell in 1904.
"Of course, to call it poetry, in any sense, would be mere abuse of language." William Allingham writing to W.M. Rossetti, 1857.
"Whitman is as unacquainted with art as a hog is with mathematics." The London Critic.
Many adjuncts feel like second-class citizens. However, I am very happy in my position as an adjunct teaching screenwriting at Portland State University. It perhaps helps that I teach a very popular subject matter -- my classes usually fill with a waiting list. But I've been treated with respect and fairness by the English Department administrators, although some of the full-time faculty still walk by me as if I, a mere adjunct, don't exist. I don't let this bother me. I'm only on campus Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and love teaching my class. I give my energy to my students and don't let department politics or anything else bother me.
4/24/2003 10:15:00 AM |
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The Journals [from a memoir in progress]
I kept the records of my variable star observations in an accounting ledger book. I no longer have it. However, my senior year of high school I began a journal (also in a ledger book) of different content, in which I posed to myself and reflected on and tried to solve various mathematical problems and puzzles, many of them in the mathematical area called “number theory.” Number theory studies the properties of numbers, and I became fascinated with the subject after reading a book, the title of which I still recall: Number, the Language of Science by Tobias Dantzig. For Christmas around this time, I received a thick four-volume set of books called The World of Mathematics. If astronomy was my first intellectual obsession, numbers became my second. The amateur astronomer was becoming an amateur mathematician.
I went through five accounting ledgers before I abandoned making entries into them. I still have all of them. Today they look like notes by someone else, a person I can’t remember being, and my math. is so rusty I often can’t understand what I am doing in row after row of mathematical equations. The journal entries are most interesting in their prose, which in the early volumes occurs much less often than the pages of equations. But eventually the journals stop being mathematics journals and become the journals of, first, someone struggling to find his way and, later, of a struggling writer. Taken together, the five volumes of journals present documentation of a major change in the direction of my life.
The first journal entry is made on February 2, 1957, and the first line reads, “21 Card Trick: Proof.” Following is a mathematical proof of why the 21-card truck works the way it does. And so it goes, a budding mathematician in Socratic dialogue with himself, with snippets of prose stuck between pages of mathematical equations:
Feb. 4, 1957 … An interesting discussion is given on page 1134 of Newman’s World of Mathematics. I note here the main part.
Feb. 24, 1957 … I have been trying to determine if a parabola is asymptotic.
Feb. 26, 1957 … My proof is wrong. A Cal. Tech. student got hold of it and left me the following note … I can sleep again.
March 23, 1957 … A real stinker than I’ve yet to solve.
March 25, 1957 … At last, I’ve found a worthwhile solid geometry problem (had it on homework tonight).
April 2, 1957 … A solid geometry problem listed only because of the beauty of its solution.
April 9, 1957 … My own generalization and proof of the “Polygon Puzzle” by Cletus Oakley (Oct. 1956, Jack & Jill).
April 12, 1957 … From a recent “chat” with Mr. William H. Glenn, Assistant Coordinator of Mathematics at the Pasadena Board of Education …
May 6, 1957 … I thought of an interesting problem late last night.
June 1, 1957 … Have been concerned with problem of completing the cube. Investigations have led me to [the] work below.
June 16, 1957 … I have generalized an example on pg. 27 of Courant’s Differential and Integral Calculus, Volume I” [note: I had just graduated from high school and already was studying calculus on my own].
The first journal ends on June 26, 1957, 151 pages later. All entries are made with an ink pen using black India ink. Presumably I had worked out all these mathematical equations in pencil beforehand!
On the inside of the cover of volume two of the journals, in capital letters, is written: “DO NOT STEAL! CONTENTS HAVE NO PRACTICAL VALUE!!” I was learning the ways of the artist, the mathematician as artist. Indeed, when I imagine all the solitary time I spent writing in my mathematics journals as a teenager, and compare it to the solitary time I use to write today, I see more in common than different in the two activities. Then I was interested in solving mathematical problems and puzzles in clear, elegant ways. Today I am interested in solving storytelling problems in elegant, dramatic ways.
Volume two continues in the same vein as volume one to June 15, 1958, the end of my freshman year at Cal. Tech. On Dec. 21, 1957, a journal entry notes: “I am taking Freshman Honors Work at Tech. in Number Theory, using LeVeque’s book. I’ll solve the books [ibid.] problems here.”
Everything changes in volume three of the journals. My life changes. At the end of the first term of my sophomore year at Cal. Tech., I leave home and transfer to Berkeley. I’ll have more to say about this later. Here I want to focus on how my journals change.
Through the summer of 1958, there is no hint of the major change to come. On July 24 I am able to write, “So far a lot of beautiful conjecture but not one bit of proof.” In the Sept.-Oct. 1958 issue of Mathematics Magazine, I am published for the first time, taping a reprint into the journal. My article, under the byline Bob Deemer, is entitled “A Recurrence Formula Solution to dy2 + 1 = x2.” But it’s as if publication marks the end of a mathematical career, not the beginning of one.
Suddenly the journals contain more prose and fewer equations. As I enter my second year at Cal. Tech., there are hints of the personal turmoil to come.
Sept. 27, 1958 … As of late I have been in a very depressed state of mind. The result – a poem:
The Dipper swings its counter-clockwise course,
The “Heart of Charles” lingers close beside,
And I look up in saddened, cold remorse,
And seek into the dark of night to hide. …
Oct. 2, 1958 … Is there a God? … I maintain that perhaps it is unimportant – even undesirable – for man to try to answer the question …
Nov. 6, 1958 … I am convinced that the problems of the modern world will not be solved by scientists …
Nov. 15, 1958 … Just read 3 plays by Upton Sinclair in Plays of Protest.
Nov. 29, 1958 … [a poem begins with the line] It’s good to be lonely.
Then, suddenly, all entries stop in November and don’t pick up again until March 31, 1959, a silence of almost four months. “Many months since I’ve written here. I am now at Berkeley – still a math. major. My love for the subject could not let me change into a different major.”
But this attempt at continuity would be short-lived. 1959 would prove to be a year of radical change in my life, of which the end of mathematical entries in my journal was a foreshadowing. Berkeley is such an important transition in my life that it deserves its own section, which will come later, and the next time I quote from my journals – for there are still two more volumes after the third, in which so much changes – the context will be far different from anything we’ve seen.
When I look back at the first twenty years of my life, 1939-1959, I see a solid foundation for the literary life to come, even though there is no hint that I am interested in becoming a writer. I express little interest in literature in the journals. Up to this point, references to books that are not mathematical are to books of social and political criticism. When I write poems, they are the rhymed doggerel of an adolescent. I only have to compare them to poems my brother wrote as a teenager to see how a real poet gets born. The solid foundation I see has to do with solitude and self-reliance. From the time my mother taught me the arithmetic tables in order to keep me busy in a doctor’s office, to an obsession with astronomy that had me out in the back yard with my telescope at three in the morning, alone and deliriously happy, to the private mathematical scribbling in my journal, posing obscure problems to myself to solve – I was learning a life of solitude, reflection, and self-reliance. This is the stuff from which writers are made.
4/24/2003 06:48:00 AM |
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Progress report Good morning of writing, even with the interruption of an online class chat. To page 46 of the script-to-novel, starting the sequence that is the midpoint plot point. 62 pages into the memoir. Printed out the libretto to get back up to speed. Would like to get some guitar time in before the evening chat but presently exhausted, need a second wind. All projects going well. An easy day teaching tomorrow, showing the last half of The Birdcage. Then back writing Friday and Saturday before giving myself back to my students on Sunday. Onward.
4/23/2003 03:30:00 PM |
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The Telescope [from a memoir in progress]
Another obsession of my early teen years was my telescope. My father built it for me. This was proposed as a project for us to do together but projects with my dad ended up turning into his project, with me holding and passing him the tools. At any rate, I became the proud owner of a six-inch reflecting telescope with an equatorial mount, its focal length of 12.5 giving the tube a length in excess of six-feet. When mounted on top of our Packard for trips into the Mojave Desert, it looked like a small canon.
With my telescope, I became an avid amateur astronomer. When most teenagers were carousing at night, I was deep in the back yard, observing the stars with my telescope. Mostly I used a 150x lens, though I also had 250x, sometimes using this one on such objects as the moon or the rings of Saturn. But I typically cruised the heavens at 150x, a star atlas at hand as well as a flashlight with a red bulb to protect the sensitivity of my eyes. I stopped at star clusters, double stars, nebulae, and planets. Occasionally I would make drawings of what I saw, charting the movement of the four readily visible moons of Jupiter during a week. Now and again a comet would come within range of my telescope, which was always an event not to miss. “Huggy Boy’s” radio show started at midnight and often I’d be deep in the back yard by then, peering through the telescope, and I’d listen to Huggy Boy play rhythm-n-blues and rock-n-roll at low volume in the silent neighborhood night, staying up till two or three in the morning.
I built a cardboard device that held a screen at the telescope’s eyepiece so I could project the image of the sun onto it, and I charted a cycle of sunspots. One afternoon while drawing sunspots, an extraordinary thing happened. As I was drawing, my eyes moving from screen to paper, three oval objects in a “V” formation crossed the face of the sun. The sun was perhaps six inches in diameter on my screen, and it took these objects only four or five seconds to make their pass. I looked up – and saw flakes of ash. In those days every household had its own backyard incinerator, and Mom was burning trash. I dismissed what I saw as flecks of ash passing in front of the telescope.
But a few hours after I had put away the telescope, I realized this could not be so because the oval objects, like the sun, were in perfect focus. I had a problem to solve! I calculated the least distance from the telescope that an object would have to be in order to be in focus. It was far too great to be ash in the sky – the objects had to be flying. I made a graph, estimating their relative size, speed and height in order to pass across a six-inch sun in five seconds. The figures were literally “out of this world.” In other words, I had made a very unusual UFO sighting! I’ve believed in UFOs ever since.
Eventually I applied to become a member of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, an organization of amateur astronomers working for Harvard Observatory to record the varying brightness of variable stars in the sky. I was accepted and became one of the few teenagers in America to be a member of the A.A.V.S.O. I was assigned three variable stars to watch as often as possible, and I reported on the brightness of these stars with regularity throughout the year. If I had to get up at three in the morning to see them, then I set my alarm to get up at three in the morning. These stars were my responsibility, and as far as I was concerned Harvard Observatory was depending on me. I wasn’t about the let them down. My stars, for the moment at least, interested me far more than girls or even sports. I was on my way to becoming what many kids would call a nerd.
When I left home in 1959, I did not take my telescope with me. Although I reclaimed it in time, I never again used it with the almost nightly regularity that I did through most of high school. Eventually I gave it away to the astronomy department at the University of Oregon when I was a graduate student there.
I also stopped being an active amateur astronomer. I still remember much of what I learned in those years, such as the names of constellations and the location of galaxy highlights, but when I look at the night sky today it is with as much nostalgia as wonder, remembering a past life when nothing seemed more important in the world than to get up at three in the morning to estimate the brightness of a variable star so I could get the result in the morning mail to Harvard Observatory.
4/23/2003 07:08:00 AM |
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Update Been buried under the first batch of student scripts, so haven't done a lot of writing lately. But over the weekend I made good progress ... 59 pages into the memoir, almost as much into the novel. Both are coming along well. The hard writing in the memoir begins soon, with the first marriage, when I begin talking about relationships. I don't want to censor myself. I also don't want to get repetitive through a dirty laundry list. This will be the most challenging writing. In the draft, I suppose, I can just let it all hang out and go back and give everything its shape later.
Finally picked up the guitar after a while, too, and am learning my first flat picking fiddle tune. I actually made some real progress in just a few days, I quite surprised myself. I should have learned flat picking 40 years ago! Better late than never. Onward.
4/22/2003 01:32:00 PM |
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Rock-n-Roll [from a memoir in progress]
I became a teenager in the right place at the right time. In 1952, in Los Angeles County, white kids were beginning to turn on to black rhythm-n-blues music, and I was one of them. Suddenly the radio was more important than the new upstart, television, again. Over the radio came sounds of sensuality unlike anything I’d ever heard before. Up to my teenage years, I really wasn’t much of a music aficionado. I would listen with my Aunt Billie to her big band records. Billie was my mother’s sister, one of my favorite aunts, who in her youth had been a vocalist with a big band. I think I listened to her records as much for her stories as for the music.
I also was playing a little guitar by my teens, mainly cowboy songs. I wouldn’t get serious about my own musical expression until the end of my teens, after I’d moved to Berkeley, when I’d recreate myself as a folksinging beatnik.
But black rhythm-n-blues came over the L.A. airwaves like a signal of revolution, which in fact it was. Two shows in particular were listened to by most of the teenagers I knew: an afternoon show hosted by Hunter Hancock and a late night show hosted by a disc jockey who called himself Huggy Boy. I didn’t know any black people, though we’d had a black maid in Dallas, I had an occasional black schoolmate in Pasadena, and once even a black history teacher. But when Hunter Hancock and Huggy Boy played The Clovers, Billy Ward and the Dominoes, or The Flamingos, I was in a world that was new and exciting, sensual and forbidden, all at once.
It’s extraordinary how innocent the titillating lyrics of the 50s sound today. In "One Mint Julep" by The Clovers, there’s the line, “I’ve got six extra children from a-gettin’ frisky.” I’m sure the first time I heard the line on the radio I blushed. Even more daring was the song "Sixty-Minute Man" by Billy Ward and The Dominoes, with its chorus, “I rock ‘em, roll ‘em, all night long, I’m the sixty-minute man!” And later, “fifteen minutes of teasin’, fifteen minutes of squeezin’, and fifteen minutes of blowin’ my top!” At 13 I wondered how such sexual explicitness could get on the air.
And then there was the most titillating performer of all, a rock-n-roll hall-of-famer who died in 2003, Hank Ballard, who sang with his group, the Midnighters. Hank Ballard and the Midnighters was the most sexually daring rhythm-n-blues singer to hit the airwaves in the early years of rock-n-roll.
Ballard, who wrote and performed “The Twist” several years before Chubby Checker turned it into a smash hit, became best known for his infamous “Annie” records, the most notorious of which were the first two, “Work With Me, Annie” and “Annie Had A Baby.” The year was 1954, and I was 15. This is a pivotal year in the history of music, the year when most critics say black rhythm-n-blues gave birth to white rock-n-roll, a phenomenon led by a white singer who sounded black, named Elvis Presley. But the real notorious news of 1954 for teenagers like myself who still preferred the roots black sound to the new white sound was Hank Ballard and the Midnighters.
“Work With Me, Annie” has the lyric, “Let’s get it while the gettin’ is good, so good, so good, so good.” And later, “Annie, please don’t cheat. Give me all my meat.” This was incredible stuff for a white middle-class teenager to hear in 1954.
“Annie Had A Baby” was a more sophisticated song, full of wit and irony that I wouldn’t understand until years later. One verse goes:
She sings to the baby
Instead of me
Clings to the baby
Instead of me
Talks to the baby
Instead of me
Walks with the baby
Instead of me
Now it’s clear
And it’s understood
That’s what happens
When the gettin’ gets good
Annie had a baby
Can’t work no more
When Sam Philips discovered Elvis Presley for Sun Records, fulfilling his dream of finding a white man who could sing like a black man, the music scene changed forever. But I was already beginning to move on in my musical tastes by then to the cool west coast jazz sounds of Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker. For me, the sensual energy of black rhythm-n-blues in the early 1950s was more exciting than the white rock-n-roll that sprung up from it.
But there was no better time to be a teenager. More than the music scene changed when white kids started listening to black music. The culture changed. The excitement of this change is difficult for those who did not live through it to understand. The 1960s would present a dynamic cultural change of another kind, moving the borders expanded in the 1950s to still farther limits. I think all these changes began in the early 1950s when white kids like myself, living in cities large enough to have black radio stations, began turning the dial and discovered a kind of music that had far different energy and meaning than the relatively bland music of their parents. Today the Internet is offering the same kind of alternative to kids around the world. There are still cultural revolutions to come.
4/22/2003 06:31:00 AM |
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Monday, April 21, 2003 National Friendship Week A Friend Is Like A Good Bra...
Hard to Find
Supportive
Comfortable
And Always Close To Our Heart.
4/21/2003 06:40:00 PM |
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Chris Rock's quote of the day "You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named 'Bush', 'Dick', and 'Colon'. Need I say more?"
4/21/2003 05:09:00 PM |
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C. Day Lewis Today's light verse is by C. Day Lewis. Links:
Avoiding Armageddon Exploring the intersection between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Website for the PBS documentary. Access now.
4/21/2003 08:52:00 AM |
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The Sextant [from a memoir in progress]
My introduction to the sextant began with a challenge from Dad. His favorite columnist in the morning paper, F.G. Runyon as I recall, had gone to a lecture by a World War II general – I’m pretty sure it was Omar Bradley – and in the lecture the General said the distance from Moscow to some place or other was longer than from Moscow to this other city. Runyon called the local library to see if this was correct – and was told it wasn’t. So Runyon lambasted the General in his column for not knowing his geography.
Dad, however, thought that Gen. Bradley was correct, not the local library via Runyon. He told me there was a way to figure out the distances from the map coordinates of all the cities involved, using principles of trigonometry and a book of tables by someone called Driesenstok (over half a century later, I can still remember the name!). He asked if I’d like to learn how to do this, to see if Bradley or Runyon (the library) was correct. I jumped at the chance.
I was nine years old – and was learning trigonometry! Dad taught me how to figure out the distance between two cities from their longitudes and latitudes, and I was off to the races. I spent most of an afternoon figuring out the distances involved. Dad’s instincts proved to be right – Gen. Bradley, not Runyon, knew his geography accurately.
I can’t remember who suggested that I write a letter to Runyon correcting him. I have a suspicion my dad put me up to it. At any rate, I wrote a letter to the columnist, with a copy to the general, informing him he was wrong – and pointing out why.
A few days later I was featured in the column. I became quite the celebrity for a day. I no longer have a copy of the column, I’m sad to say, but I remember clearly what fun Runyon had at my expense. First he quoted excerpts from my letter. Next he wondered why I was spending a sunny afternoon over math. tables instead of being outside playing baseball. He asked rhetorically how I could trust a book of tables written by a guy whose name sounds like he’s a communist. He scolded me for squealing to the general by sending him a copy of my letter. Finally he said that he still trusted the local library more than a commie book of tables.
It was a great column written in good spirits, and for years I used to carry it in my billfold. Dad was very proud to see my name in the paper, which made me twice as proud. I began to understand that you could get favorable attention from using your brains. You didn’t have to be a sports hero.
The exercise with Dreisenstok’s tables was the tip of the iceberg. Dad brought out his sextant, the very one he had used through the Navy, and taught me how to use it. He told me how at sea, in the middle of the ocean without land visible anywhere, he could figure out the ship’s exact location using the sextant to “shoot the stars” and applying the results to the book of Dreisenstok’s tables. This seemed incredible to me. The sextant seemed as powerful as a magic wand. I wanted to know what else it could do.
Dad said with the sextant, using the principles of trigonometry he had taught me, you could determine the height of a tree, or anything else, without measuring it. I didn’t understand how you could learn the height of a tree without measuring it. This sounded like a contradiction in terms. You don’t measure it, Dad said, you calculate it.
Dad fetched paper and pencil to show me more. He drew a rough sketch of a tree. He drew a horizontal line at its base, at the end of which he drew a stick figure. Imagine, he explained, that you step off a known distance from the base of the tree, then you use the sextant to measure the angle from the bottom of the tree to the top – he wrote in some numbers by way of example. Notice if you change the angle, the tree height would have to change. In other words, for every distance along the base, there is one and only one angle of elevation appropriate to a particular tree height. By using a book of tangents in a trigonometry book, and a simple algebraic equation, you can calculate the height of a tree from the base distance and the angle of elevation.
Algebra! I was on a roll now. I had the method down in no time, and it was my idea to use this powerful knowledge to advantage. I became a nine-year-old entrepreneur, the Bobby Deemer (I grew up called by my middle name) Tree Height Calculation Company. I went door-to-door through my neighborhood, offering to calculate the height of the sycamore trees in front of each house for twenty-five cents a crack. Not only could you get favorable attention by using your brain, you could make some money as well. In my formative years, the primary lesson was that brains and knowledge matter.
One of my early published short stories is called The Sextant, which appeared in the summer, 1970, issue of Northwest Review and was selected to the Roll of Honor in Best American Short Stories 1971. It’s a father-son story, needless to say, and more explicitly autobiographical than much of my work, in which I use personal experience more obliquely.
I still have the sextant. It stands in a wooden mount made by a friend of my dad’s and is right behind me in my home basement office as I write. I haven’t shot the stars with it, or measured the height of a tree, in many, many years, but the sextant is exactly where it belongs, so close I can reach for it whenever I have to calculate where I am.
4/21/2003 08:42:00 AM |
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Sunday, April 20, 2003 And you thought you were prolific ... Alexandre Dumas published well over 600 books in his lifetime. You'd have to write 16,000 words a week for 40 years to match his literary output. Read all about the king of romance.
4/20/2003 03:27:00 PM |
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Growing Up [from a memoir in progress]
Dad and I really bonded in Pasadena and began to do things without mother or Bill. One of the things I really looked forward to was going to Los Angeles Rams football games at the L.A. Coliseum. We never missed a game when the San Francisco Fortyniners were in town because this was the big California rivalry, and Dad loved cheering for the visiting team while surrounded by noisy Rams fans. It’s how I became a Fortyniner fan growing up in Southern California! This was the era of Y.A. Tittle, Joe Perry and, my favorite football player of all, Hugh McElhenny, who was known as “Hurricane Hugh.”
This also was an era when there was team stability before free agents, and professional sports stars weren’t millionaires. My dad loved to repeat an interview he heard on the radio with McElhenny, who had been an All-America halfback at the University of Washington. After his first year with the Fortyniners, the star was asked to compare pro ball with college ball. “I like pro ball all right,” said McElhenny, “except for the salary cut.”
Dad and I also were fans of the Los Angeles Angels team in the Pacific Coast minor league and never missed a cross-town rival series with the Hollywood Stars. I remember the great controversy when the Stars introduced a new uniform featuring Bermuda shorts. The new fashion didn’t catch on, and the next season they were back in long pants again.
I became a great sports fan and participant in Pasadena. I played sandlot sports – football, baseball and basketball – and was a fair athlete but I also was too much of a serious student to give time to organized sports in school. Ironically enough, I wouldn’t blossom as a school jock until I was in the toughest school of them all, Cal. Tech. In Pasadena, Dad put up a basketball hoop on the garage, and my friends and I would shoot baskets for hours on end. We played touch football and baseball in Victory Park, across from where I went to Elementary School, where the Rose Parade floats went on display.
I also began collecting autographs of professional football players. A school friend by the name of Charlie Ostberg got me started on this. Charlie had had polio and walked with a distorted limp, one arm askew, and didn’t have many friends. But he was an extrovert despite his handicap, and I grew to like him. Charlie collected autographs and broke me in on the best way to get them.
Teams coming to L.A. to play the Rams often stayed at the Green Hotel in Pasadena. Charlie would take me with him to the hotel lobby, where the gridiron heroes often were playing cards or reading magazines, and we’d hit them all up for autographs. Charlie had been doing this for so long that many stars knew him by name, and I about fainted the Saturday afternoon we walked into the lobby to hear Hugh McElhenny call from across the way, “Hey, Charlie, get over here!”
Hurricane Hugh, my all-time favorite football hero, knew Charlie Ostberg on a first name basis! Moreover, he needed Charlies’s help. McElhenny wanted to buy a gift for his 10-year-old nephew and wanted to know if Charlie had time to help him go shopping for it. Did we! I was introduced to my hero, of course, and we walked from the hotel to a department store with the best running back on the planet. After we picked out a gift for McElhenny’s nephew, the star took us to the fountain counter for ice cream sodas. Altogether we spent almost an hour alone with Hugh McElhenny, and obviously I’ve never forgotten the experience.
I met another hero through my mother, though I wouldn’t understand the importance of the experience until later. Mom used to like to shop at the big Farmer’s Market but didn’t like to drag the two kids along. Next to the market was a television station. This was in the very early years of widespread television – in fact, we didn’t even own a set yet – and daytime television consisted largely of all-afternoon variety shows. At the station near Farmer’s Market, the show was a country-western music program with a live audience. Mom and other mothers would drop off the kids for an hour or so and go shopping across the street. The television station served as a kind of volunteer day care center.
This was all quite acceptable because there were television employees herding the kids into various activities. Sometimes we even participated on the TV show. One performer in particular took a liking to me – and this was Merle Travis. I wouldn’t learn how significant he was in the history of guitar picking until I was a young adult. But I learned my first guitar chords from Merle Travis, and soon thereafter I got a Gene Autry guitar for Christmas.
Before we bought our first television set, there was radio, of course, but I was not a big fan of radio drama. The only two shows I remember listening to with regularity were The Shadow and another that featured Buster Brown and Froggie. What I remember most about the radio is listening with Dad to sports events, especially boxing matches (Joe Louis, Jersey Joe Walcott, Ezra Charles, Rocky Marciano), the Indianapolis 500-mile race, and the Army-Navy football game.
My dad’s father lived with us for a while, and he liked to play the horses. Now and again he would take me with him to Santa Anita. I remember one time Granddad won big by betting that a gray horse named Miche would upset the great Citation, which he did by a neck, breaking a winning streak by the hall-of-fame champion.
Once we brought a television set into the house, of course, everything changed. We actually did more together at home than before, gathering to watch a number of shows each week. The family favorites included I Love Lucy, Milton Berle, The Honeymooners, Dragnet, Maverick, Gunsmoke. Mom loved Lawrence Welk but I don’t think anyone else shared her enthusiasm. After school I used to watch a cartoon series called Crusader Rabbit. I also was a big fan of the sci-fi soap opera, Space Patrol.
Pasadena, of course, is noted for its Rose Parade. Since we lived only two blocks from the parade route, January 1st was always a very big deal in our home. Often a group of kids would sleep out overnight along the curb to reserve our parade seats, supervised by an adult. In the early morning hours, before the parade arrived near the end of its long route through the city, we might be relieved by a new shift so we could run home for breakfast. Then I would discover that total strangers would be all but camped out in our driveway and front lawn, squatting to get near the parade route. My parents and neighbors seemed to take this in course as one of the consequences of living where they did, and I recall few tussles resulting from over-aggressive squatting. They all would be gone in a matter of hours anyway.
After the parade came the Rose Bowl football game. Despite being a football fan, especially of UCLA, a team I liked because they were among the last to abandon the single wing formation, I never saw a Rose Bowl game live as a kid. In fact, I‘ve never seen one live. Instead we usually had a house party and watched the game on television.
As I approached my teens, I began to do less with Dad and the family and more by myself. My interest in astronomy was growing. An early consequence of this was a love affair I had with the primary instrument Dad had used as a navigator in the Navy, the sextant. I used it for fun but later for profit, small profit that it was. I became the only kid in the neighborhood, maybe the only kid in L.A., with a door-to-door sextant service.
4/20/2003 09:11:00 AM |
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What do you see when you see a play? Last night my wife and I saw Edward Albee's Pulitzer Prize winning play Three Tall Women and were blown away by it. Ironically enough, we almost didn't go because about five years ago we saw another production that we disliked very much. But this was on the bill where we had season tickets, so we gave it a second try. Thank God we did!
This is one of Albee's best plays, especially the highly theatrical second act. It is intimate and true and funny and powerful, theater at its best, theater that would only be ruined in its essence if adapted to film. This is a play that would make a terrible film, as all good plays should. Unfortunately most American plays would make better films, so little do they use the theatricality that is the playwright's unique tool.
So why was the production five years ago so bad? Because the play was performed in a large auditorium on a proscenium stage. This, in fact, was close to what the play would look like on film, all intimacy lost, the tone one of a lecture rather than a dialogue with the audience. The small stage last night, 3/4 in the round, was the perfect vehicle for this most intimate of dramas.
The script, of course, was the same. Astonishingly enough, the director of the two productions was the same! But the actresses were different. But it was not bad acting five years ago that didn't let the play speak fully. It was the staging.
How often powerful plays must lose their power because of bad staging, or poor acting or direction. The playwright is at the mercy of these collaborators. This is one of the reasons I no longer write for the stage. And yet I must admit -- seeing a play as purely theatrical as the one last night got my playwright's juices running. I'll just ignore them. I don't have the energy to produce and direct plays myself, which is what Albee did with the first production of Three Tall Women, which happened in Europe.
Albee, by the way, has insightful things to say about the current state of theater in the U.S. Here he is on the current practice of developing plays with readings and workshops at regional theaters: "There's a very, very good reason for that: It is to de-ball the plays; to castrate them; to smooth down all the rough edges so they can't cut, can't hurt. It's to make them commercially tolerable to a smug audience. It's not to make plays any better. Most playwrights who write a good play write it from the beginning." Read more from this interview.
Exhaustion Have been getting so much writing done these past few days, I'm exhausted. 46 pages into the memoir now -- and those are published pages because I'm writing in published format, not double-space manuscript format, for this draft. I've started doing this because I like to see it as it actually will look on the printed book page. Then I can reformat for rewriting later. The novel from script is 52 published pages in -- so both projects are moving along nicely! I expect the novel to come in at under 200 published pages, a short novel. Hard to say what the memoir will be. I'd like it to be around 300 pages but it seems to be pushing that now. Of course, rewriting can change a lot. Right now I'd rather the memoir be fat than thin. Onward.
4/19/2003 04:04:00 PM |
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Dad In Motion [from a memoir in progress]
For Dad, Pasadena was a base camp. His retirement from the Navy in no way reduced his appetite for travel. Dad, I came to learn, was a man who was happiest when he was moving. For our first years in Pasadena, his rhythm defined the rhythm of the family, and this rhythm was to keep on the go.
We camped long before it was fashionable. We camped on weekends, and we camped while driving from Pasadena to New Jersey to visit Dad’s relatives. Mom’s sole relative was a sister, my Aunt Billie, and we’d visit her on the east coast, too, before she moved to Southern California to be closer to Mom.
The weekend camping trips usually were into the Mojave Desert where the stars were as clear as at sea. Dad taught me the names of the constellations on these trips, and soon enough I became an avid amateur astronomer, eventually owning my own sizable telescope (more about this later), which mounted on top of the family Packard like a cannon.
We usually slept outside under the stars when we camped. I recall only a few times when we set up a tent. On our cross-country trips, we seldom camped in a park but instead just pulled off the highway and found a secluded spot in a field somewhere. I recall many moments of hospitality on these trips, when after spending the night with our sleeping bags lined up on a tarp in a field at the edge of a farmer’s land, we’d be greeted by a farmer’s wife bringing us biscuits or bread or other treats for her surprise guests. I don’t recall a single moment of fear, stress, or worry when we camped off the highway at the edge of a farmer’s field. If we saw anyone at all, they came bearing gifts. I feel lucky to have lived when the country was this kind and to have vivid memories of the experience. The country has been much crueler for a long time now.
Dad had a favorite saying when we camped: “One hundred miles before breakfast!” And that’s how these trips would go, with Dad rousting everyone up into the car, where usually Mom and Bill would sleep more while I kept company with Dad, driving the obligatory couple hours before breakfast.
We also had a traveling game we played as a family, called Chinky. The goal was to find horses before the others did. A white horse scored two points, and all other horses scored one point. “Chinky!” you’d yell, and everyone would tabulate your score. If you saw a graveyard, you’d yell, “Graveyard, throw away your chinkies!” and everyone else would have to go back to zero.
We’d start a game of Chinky in California and finish it in New Jersey. I remember winning my share of times. Sometimes, however, Dad would cheat. He would pretend to take a scenic side-trip near the end of the journey (and therefore the game) and then deliberately drive to a graveyard he knew about, which gave him the advantage of finding it before everyone else.
Although we drove all away across the country every few years, sometimes we kept our camping vacations closer to home. Home movies record that we visited most, if not all, of the National Parks in the west. I remember hovering with the family inside a tent while bears at Yellowstone ransacked the groceries we’d left on the table. I recall the nightly “fire falls” at Yosemite. I remember getting very tired and kid-cranky during long hikes through Bryce Canyon. I remember feeling like Tom Sawyer in the caves at Carlsbad Caverns.
Even closer to home, we visited Knott’s Berry Farm and were regulars at Disneyland from the day it opened. When we went to the beach (my parents, being from the east coast, had to learn to say “beach” and not “shore”), it usually was to Long Beach. However, I had a friend, Todd, whose parents always rented a cabin during the summer on Balboa Island, and several times I got invited along. I first saw High Noon during one of these Balboa summers.
Dad was more interested in traveling than mother, and as time passed she was able to keep him home more. But Dad never really lost the wanderlust that had driven him to escape the paper mill in New Jersey and see the world. Later in life, when he had to adjust to the surprise that he’d outlived his mate, his wanderlust would express itself in new and eccentric ways.
4/19/2003 03:18:00 AM |
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Pasadena [from a memoir in progress]
Personal adjustments aside, in many ways Pasadena must have looked like Eden to my family in 1948. Our house at 2862 Estado Street faced north to a spectacular view of the brown San Gabriel mountains. Our front yard was lined with sycamore trees. In the back yard were apricot, lemon, avacado and peach trees. The house had two bedrooms, one for my parents and one for Bill and me. We had a dining room and a den. The back yard was large enough that later my dad, with the help of his dad, would build a considerable patio, shaped like a navigator’s compass. Through much of his Navy career, my dad had been a navigator.
Our neighborhood in east Pasadena was middle-class and lily white, bordered on the west by a large avenue that marked the end of the route of the famous Rose Parade on New Year’s Day and on the east by a large gully, called “the wash,” across which was a poorer neighborhood of Hispanics.
I started school in Pasadena in the third grade, at an elementary school across from the park where the Rose Parade floats lined up for viewing. Today Pasadena High School is located there. I have a strong memory of my first day in school because the experience was very unpleasant.
The teacher began to call the roll. When she got to my name, I quickly stood up, stood at attention, and said in my southern drawl, “Yes, ma’am!” Immediately I was surrounded by laughter as all my classmates thought this was the most hilarious thing they had seen in their lives. I burst into tears.
Welcome to Southern California. Shortly after this trauma, my parents informed me that I would be taking a speech therapy class after school several days a week. Apparently the school administration had called them in to suggest this, arguing that my future would be bleak indeed unless I learned how to talk like a human being, which is to say, like a Californian.
So a dozen kids with southern accents began meeting after school to learn how to speak human. We played games, one being fish, and if you didn’t ask for a card with a proper accent, your request was denied. I don’t remember how long I took speech therapy in the Pasadena School System but the brainwashing mostly took. Now and again I would say something as an adult to someone that would lead him to ask if I’d ever been in the south, but this hasn’t happened to me in decades, although my wife still accuses me of saying "beautiful" like a southerner.
But more than my accent was changed. Speech therapy also gave me the notion that “southern” was stupid. I say this because I remember how put off I was years later, sitting in a calculus classroom at the California Institute of Technology, listening to a teacher with a southern accent explain a point of mathematical theory. I couldn’t get past his accent, couldn’t get myself to accept that this joker with the accent actually knew what he was talking about. This bias, I’m happy to say, was temporary. Today I find southern accents perfectly charming and, when spoken by a woman, very sexy.
Despite the handicap of my accent, I did well in school in Pasadena. In fact, halfway through the third grade I was moved up to the fourth grade, doing both grades in my first year at George Hale Elementary School. Part of the reason for my promotion was my age. With a birthday in October, after the school year began, I was older than many kids since in Dallas I started school 11 months later than if I had been born in September. I was moved up to be with more kids my own age. I think they must have studied geography in the last half of third grade because I missed it and have been ignorant of the subject ever since.
My memories of Pasadena include my first memory of having lots of friends, of being a social being. According to family stories, I was something of a ringleader, always organizing kids into activities like track meets or baseball board game tournaments or star-gazing parties. The shy kid on the pony in Dallas was growing into, if not an extrovert, at least into a young person with social skills.
I have only fond memories of Pasadena, whether those memories were filmed or not. I lived at home until 1959 when I transferred from Cal. Tech. to the University of California at Berkeley, and many of these years will be related in later sections of this memoir. Today I consider myself lucky to have had such an idyllic childhood.
In November, 2002, I returned to my old neighborhood for the first time in decades. I was in Los Angeles to teach at a screenwriting conference and took the side trip to Pasadena. My neighborhood had been changed forever when much of it was taken out for a new freeway, called the Foothills Freeway today, one of the reasons my parents moved to Medford, Oregon, shortly after I left home. I expected to find little that was pleasant in my old neighborhood but still was driven to check it out and see if I could remember anything.
I was astounded at how familiar the neighborhood looked. Our house and block on Estado Street had been taken out for the freeway but the houses across the street were still standing, Estado Street being the last street before bare land that stretched to the gigantic pillars holding up the Foothills Freeway. You still could drive north into the neighborhood from location of my old house at 2862. And when you did this, almost everything looked exactly as I remembered it. The cars were new but the homes, the streets lined with sycamore trees, everything looked just as I remembered it when I rode my bike through the neighborhood on my paper route. In the distance was the drone freeway traffic, but here in my old neighborhood I felt a tranquility straight out of the 1950s. I felt as if I were a character in Pleasantville, thrust back through time into a less stressful and anxious era.
I learned something else about Pasadena. It felt like home. Much of the city had changed hugely, of course. But the San Gabriels to the north looked just as I remembered them, the same brown mountains I had grown up with. What had been the seedier side of town when I grew up, full of bars and bums, where after the Army I would “slum” to drink with “winos” who somehow seemed romantic to a budding writer, now was called Old Pasadena and was a trendy, gentrified area full of sidewalk cafes and art galleries.
After graduating from UCLA I had fled Southern California for graduate school in Oregon with a promise never to return. The Pasadena I had grown up in, the Southern California I knew as a kid, had been ruined by growth and expansion. I never expected to return. Yet in 2002, almost forty years after I had fled, I felt nostalgic as I roamed through Pasadena, like a long lost traveler returning home.
I could live in Pasadena again. I doubt if circumstances will lead to this but there is something pleasant in the knowledge that this town in which I grew from a kid into a young adult still feels like home. There’s a sense in which you can go home again after all.
4/18/2003 04:53:00 AM |
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Dallas [from a memoir in progress]
We lived in military housing in Dallas, in an apartment in a long line of World-War-II-era billets on a street called Trainer Circle. Dad was a recruiting officer, something of a bigshot judging by the celebrities he got photographed with. My brother Bill had recently been born, and we now were a family of four.
As in all periods of my life, my memories are mixed with images from home movies. Dad had his camera by Dallas, and over the years I’ve spent hundreds of hours watching snippets of my life pass by.
But let me begin with a couple of memories that were not photographed. One is of my bathtub game with cockroaches. Roaches would come out of the plumbing when I was taking a bath, and I would line them up on toy boats in the water. When my mother – or sometimes a black maid, I recall – came in to check on me, she would pull me out of the water immediately, as if I might be poisoned to come in contact with critters that I, after all, considered friendly actors in my bathtub adventures.
My second sexual memory happened in Dallas. I was playing doctor with a girl my age in a closet. Apparently her parents were visiting mine. At any rate, we were caught. I don’t remember if I was punished or not. And I really don’t remember the game itself – what I remember is the closet door opening and looking up to see an adult. What I remember is being caught.
Movie memories from Dallas are many. All of our Christmases in Dallas were filmed, starting from about 1946, when my brother was a year old and I was seven. In one home movie I am struggling to ride my first bike; in another I’m trying on a football uniform, blue and gold in color, my jersey sporting number 7. One year I get a bow and arrow; another a BB gun.
Home movies document a strong sense of community in the military housing in Dallas. The long billets were built parallel to one another, sharing the lawn between them, and families and kids would spill out onto the grass in what the movies record as spontaneous block parties with dozens of kids running around and considerable horseplay for the camera by adults, many of whom hold drinks in their hands.
I started school in Dallas at George Peabody Elementary School, which many kids called “George Peed All Over His Body” school, a description that always caused everyone to break into hysterics. I remember that a few kids rode ponies to class. I remember that sometimes, when weather permitted, a few kids came to school barefoot. I never did either.
I remember nothing of school in Dallas and have no home movies to prod my memory. I did well – or at least there would be evidence later than I did well in grades one and two in Dallas. I remember being friends with twins, named Jimmy and Johnny as I recall, who were Texas natives with thick accents. I had developed something of a southern accent myself by now, from Virginia and Texas, which also would have consequences.
I have a photograph from the Dallas years in which I am dressed in a cowboy suit and sitting on a pony. A cameraman with his equine prop had made the rounds through the military housing, getting considerable business I’m sure. Sitting on the pony, I look more shy than enthused. I don’t look like much of a cowboy.
When we left Dallas for Southern California, it was a major transition in several ways. Dad had decided to retire from the Navy. I wouldn’t learn until later what a momentous decision this was under very unusual circumstances, coming unexpectedly a few years after his decision to go for thirty. Dad had gone west first and bought a home in Pasadena, the first home my parents were buying instead of renting. This meant mother would be driving from Texas to California alone with two kids in the car.
There was a big sendoff, and someone used the movie camera to record it. I was sick, stretched out in the back seat of the car with a fever. The most stressful part of the drive would be across the long desert, and a male neighbor showed mother how to attach a canvas bag of water in front of the Packard’s radiator to cool the engine. It also would be wise to cross the desert at night instead of in the heat of day.
I recall no trauma from the trip. Mother was an extraordinarily capable and independent woman, a trait that would make her more suited to be the wife of a sailor than a civilian since the former demanded more responsibility during the long periods when her husband was at sea. The adjustment to civilian life would prove to be difficult for them both.
The adjustment to life in Pasadena was difficult for me. I soon learned that many kids in Southern California thought I talked funny and had very peculiar manners. They weren’t shy about sharing this with me.
4/17/2003 07:33:00 AM |
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_The Writing Life