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Charles Deemer MFA, Playwriting, University of Oregon Writing faculty,
Portland State University (part-time) Retired playwright and screenwriter.
Active novelist, librettist and teacher.
cdeemer@yahoo.com.
Links:
Literary archive
Personal home page
Photo
Electronic screenwriting tutorial
Online writing classes
References
Bookstore
Highlights:
Dress Rehearsals
A memoir
Love At Ground Zero
Seven Plays
Oregon Book Award finalist
Blogs by (mostly) creative writers:
"Can We Talk About Me For A Change?"
Playwright Debra Neff Nathans
Inkygirl
Debbie Ridpath Ohi, a weblog for writers (resources)
Silliman's Blog
Ron Silliman, contemporary poetry and poetics
Maud Newton
literary links, amusements, politics, rants
Darren Barefoot
Technical and creative writing, theatre, Dublin
Rob's Writing Pains
Journey of a struggling writer.
Mad, Mad World
Cara Swann, fiction writer, journalist, "reflections on humanity, random news & my life."
Writeright
Random musings on a writer's life and times.
Flaskaland
Barbara Flaska's compilation of the best online articles about music and culture.
Write Of Way
Samantha Blackmon's written musings on writing (composition and rhetoric).
Alexander b. Craghead: blog
Writing, photography, and watercolors.
Rodney's Painted Pen
Rodney Bohen's daily commentary "on the wondrous two legged beast we fondly refer to as mankind."
His pen runneth over.
Frustrated Writer
This one named Nicole.
scribble, scribble, scribble
Journalist Dale Keiger teaches nonfiction scribbling to undergraduate and graduate students at Johns Hopkins University.
The Unofficial Dave Barry Blog
The very one.
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."
Bow. James Bow.
The journal of James Bow and his writing.
Ravenlike
Michael Montoure's weblog about writing, primarily horror and speculative fiction.
Globemix
By David Henry, "a poet's weblog from Aberdeen, Scotland."
Modem Noise
By Adrian Bedford, a "fledgling Pro SF Writer, living in Perth, Australia."
boynton
"A wry writerly blog named in honour of a minor character in a minor Shirley Temple film."
Real Writers Bounce
Holly Lisle's blog, "a novelist's roadmap through the art and ordeal of finding the damned words."
2020 Hindsight
By Susan.
downWrite creative
Phil Houtz's notes on the writing life.
Vivid: pieces from a writer's notebook
Blog of Canadian poet Erin Noteboom.
The Literary Saloon
The literary weblog at the complete review.
Rabbit Blog
The rabbit writes on popular culture.
This Girl's Calendar
Momoka writes short stories.
Twists & Turns
Musings by writer Michael Gates.
Plays and Musicals -- A Writer's Introspective
A blog by John D. Nugent - Composer, Playwright, and Artistic Director of the Johnson City Independent Theatre Company
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.
Letters From The Home Front
The life of a writer, 21, home schooled, rural living.
Venal Scene
The blog of bite-sized plays inspired by the news (by Dan Trujillo).
'Plaint of the Playwright
Rob Matsushita, a playwright from Wisconsin, "whines a lot."
I Pity Da Fool!
Glenn's adventures in screenwriting.
Time In Tel-Aviv
Hebrew modern literature at its best, by Corinna Hasofferett.
Big Window
Robin Reagler's poetry blog.
John Baker's Blog
Author of the Sam Turner and Stone Lewis novels.
Suggest a writer's blog
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The Writing Life...
"And it came to pass that all the stars in the firmament had ceased to shine. But how was anyone to know?"
The Half-Life Conspiracy
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Friday, February 28, 2003
 audblog audio post: Today's light verse.
2/28/2003 01:00:16 PM |
Performance nightmare
The "late performer" stories below about Tom Lehrer and Mose Allison remind me of one of my own performance stories. This is from the 1980s when I regularly was touring my one-man show about Woody Guthrie, called Ramblin': the songs and stories of Woody Guthrie.
On a Wednesday I received a call from the Coast Theatre in Canon Beach, asking if I could perform over the weekend, Friday and Saturday nights, to replace a last minute cancellation. I'd taken my show to the Oregon coast several times but never to this popular resort village. I was delighted to get the gig. The only complication was that I was working for a video production company at the time and we were in the middle of a project. I would get there just in time to do the Friday show; no time for a tech rehearsal or anything, but my requirements were simple, there should be no problem.
I arrived at the coast about twenty minutes before show time. I hurried back stage, tuned my 12-string to my harmonica, and waited for my cue to go on. And waited. And waited. When I peeked out into the audience, not a soul was there! Not one person had come to see me!
This had never happened before. By then I'd been doing the show for a while and had some small but select audiences before. I played to half a dozen in the editorial office of a socialist weekly newspaper. I played at small private parties, including one on a yacht. I also had large audiences, the largest over 1000. I was used to just about everything -- except nobody.
Well, I took advantage of the moment to do a quick tech rehearsal with the light guy, happy that at least I was getting paid the same thing that I'd earn with a full house, and left to drown my sorrows at a local bar. As I walked outside I noticed the marque for the first time -- and it listed the act I replaced with a big red "cancelled" across it -- and no mention of me! Duh.
Well, once that was taken care of, they came in great numbers on Saturday and I had a great show. But I still remember that sinking feeling of peeking through the curtains to find not one solitary soul in the audience.
2/28/2003 10:16:08 AM |
"Advice" notes
I seldom write poetry. When I do, the experience often is magical. This was especially true with the poem I recite below, Advice to an Artist on Choosing a Wife. I woke up one morning a couple years ago with the poem full-formed in my head. I have no idea how it got there -- in my sleep, I suppose. But there it was. I raced out of bed and to the computer, writing it down before I forgot it. I did only minor rewriting, and it was finished. I sent it off to the poetry corner of The Sunday Oregonian, the local paper, which immediately published it. How do these things happen? I haven't a clue but I respect the magic.
2/28/2003 09:44:11 AM |
audblog audio post: Advice to an Artist on Choosing a Wife
2/28/2003 09:38:08 AM |
audblog audio post: a couplet by e.e. cummings
2/28/2003 05:00:58 AM |
Technology moves on
The latest whistle here at Blogger are audio posts. I had so much fun in the mid-1990s posting "real audio screenwriting tips" at my original website, The Screenwriters & Playwrights Home Page, that I can't resist giving this a try. If I decide to add this feature, I'm not quite sure what I'll do with it yet, play or do something more regular and serious, but I have to try it out. So here goes.
2/28/2003 04:57:10 AM |
Thursday, February 27, 2003
Mose Allison
I have another "late performer" story, involving Mose Allison. This time the concert was at the University of Oregon, in the 1970s, and once again the performer was an hour late. When Allison finally arrived, boy was he pissed! He came on stage with a six-pack, which he set on the piano, and he started going through it pretty quickly. Instead of taking piano solos, he would dart off the stage and let his trio carry the weight with bass and drum solos! It was a lousy concert, to say the least, and I just chalked it up to Allison being drunk and having a bad night.
Later that night I saw him in a bar, sitting alone. I introduced myself. He asked if I'd seen the concert, I said, yes, the first one. He apologized profusely and assured me the second show went much better. The problem with the first show, he said, was this -- they had not set him up with a piano on stage. The student handling the concert thought he was a guitar player!
I'll never forget his expression when he told me, "They thought I was a guitar player." Man.
2/27/2003 02:54:29 PM |
Tom Lehrer
Another hero of mine is Tom Lehrer, the brilliant song-satirist (here's an intro to Lehrer in the spirit of the man, with links, including this one to An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer). My intro to Lehrer's songs was when I was in high school. I can't remember how I found out about him but I purchased the original ten-inch LP and later I heard him perform at Cal Tech, where I later ended up beginning my undergraduate studies.
I have two favorite Lehrer stories. The first is from 1958, when I was a freshman at Cal Tech. Two of my high school buddies were at Stanford, where Lehrer was giving a concert, so I drove up with a couple other friends and we all went to the concert. A late plane arrival delayed the concert for over an hour. Almost everyone patiently waited, once the situation was explained. Finally a man rushed onto the stage and gave an intro to Lehrer very much in the style of the link above -- and after the introduction, hurried off stage. Then the very same man rushed back on stage and sat down at the piano ... Lehrer had introduced himself! And naturally gave a brilliant concert.
More than twenty years later I wanted to use some Lehrer songs in a play of mine. A collection of his songs was in print by then, so I called the publisher to inquire about rights. I was told Lehrer handled these himself and I was given a phone number. I dialed it -- and Lehrer himself answered. A hero on the phone! I recognized his voice immediately. I was almost speechless. Finally I introduced myself and my request ... and he asked me to tell him a little about myself. I told him about seeing him at Cal Tech as a high school student, and I told him about seeing him at Stanford when he gave the remarkable long hilarious self-introduction. Apparently that was all it took -- he gave me the rights for nothing, promising to deny ever doing this if my play became a big hit and his agent found out what he'd done.
None of those following in the Lehrer tradition (Mark Russell the best known) come close to the brilliance of this satirist, neither in terms of writing nor music. I've had the opportunity to hear an extraordinary bootleg tape of Lehrer at a party, doing his x-rated songs that are not published, and once on the radio I heard his amazing debut as a conductor, leading an orchestra through a piece he had assembled with every classical music cliche in the repertoire included.
For a while, Lehrer wrote for the TV show That Was the Week That Was but this weekly schedule never resulted in his best work. Later Lehrer went on to teach at the University of California at Santa Cruz, teaching both math courses (he was a Harvard mathematician when he began his career as a satirist) and musical writing courses. I felt like I'd made his day with my phone call to him, or at least he seemed surprised that anyone was still interested in using his music. He certainly had made mine.
2/27/2003 12:54:18 PM |
Norman O. Brown
There are three thinkers who influenced my early intellectual growth in major ways: in order of my exposure to them, Bertrand Russell, the mathematician-philosopher; Denis de Rougemont, the Swiss theologian; and Norman O. Brown, the Greek scholar turned mystic.
I was introduced to Brown in a course at UCLA, "American Intellectual History," where we read his early book Life Against Death and his extraordinary essay, Apocalypse: or the Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind. The professor was a great fan of Brown and in his lectures turned me into one as well. Unfortunately, the prof's T.A. hated Brown and we in the class who became infatuated with Brown's controversial ideas paid a price because it was the T.A., not the prof, who read and graded our papers.
Later I learned that the prof only read A and F papers graded by the T.A. I was getting low B's going into the final, thinking I deserved A's. What I did on the final was daring and reckless, born mainly from frustration with the T.A. and his total disagreement with the way the professor was giving the course in his lectures. I wrote a long epic-style poem, instead of an essay, in response to the question on the final, knowing the T.A. would hate this -- and sure enough, he gave me an F! Now the professor had to read it. The prof. loved it so much he asked for the rest of my work because he saw that I had gotten B's and C's on all my papers and the midterm. Not only did he change everything to an A., he gave me my strongest written recommendation to grad school.
Well, obviously the system was flawed there, that I had to gamble on an F on the final in order to get the prof's attention. (He did not have office hours, the T.A. did.) But it all turned out fine in the end, at least for me. More important, I became a lifelong student of Norman O. Brown, and when his book Love's Body was published later, I was more influenced by him than ever. This remains one of a few books that I place on my list of writings that most influenced my own intellectual development.
Brown died last October, in Santa Cruz where he taught at the U-Cal-SC for years, courses such as "The History of Consciousness" (and where another hero of mine, Tom Lehrer, taught). A few years back my wife got me a hard copy first edition of Love's Body, a thoughtful gift indeed.
If you aren't familiar with Brown, a good place to begin is with the essay linked above.
2/27/2003 09:44:02 AM |
Crunch time
Less than a month of classes left now, crunch time for students and professors alike. The big change for me is a much greater reading load, as students turn in drafts and final scripts, each in the neighborhood of 25 pages or more, giving me almost 1000 pages to evaluate. About the time I finish that, I collect their finals. This term I gave them three of my very short stories (under 2000 words), and the task is to adapt one of them to film.
So I generally get little of my own writing done during this period but I make up for it during term break, or usually do. This term break I'm doing some playing -- have tickets to rounds one and two of the NCAA women's basketball tournament at the University of Oregon. Spring term starts March 31.
Rewriting is easier during crunch time than creating new work, and I have the screenplay draft to rewrite, plus the manuscript of my book on hyperdrama to rewrite, so I'll keep myself busy, no question of that.
The online NYRB is up and, alas, does not contain the article on The Hours I mentioned a few days ago, so I can't link to it. I highly recommend it, however.
I've received a few emails from acquaintances of Ger's who regret, or even feel guilty about, not looking him up before he died. These are people who knew him but hadn't seen him in months or more. Kept meaning to call and see how he was doing, etc. In our busy lives, we easily put things on the back burner. There's never enough time to do everything. One makes choices, and I don't think it's necessary to feel guilty about these choices just because fate goes one way and not the other. At the same time, every individual has a perfect right to feel guilty about whatever the hell they want to feel guilty about. Personally I find guilt largely a waste of time. I belong to the get-over-it-and-move-on school.
2/27/2003 07:32:34 AM |
Wednesday, February 26, 2003
Unfinished business
Looked at a script I abandoned halfway through over a year ago -- and love it! Time to finish it. Nice to have my screenwriting chops back.
This script is a dark dramedy based on my experiences in Germany as a Russian linguist in the Army before and after the building of the Berlin wall. My working title is Hitler's Blue Movie.
2/26/2003 12:54:06 PM |
Regionalisms
Reading a student script this morning, I saw the mention of "lightning bugs" and immediately thought of how they are one of two things I miss most about living in the west. I was raised in Virginia, New Jersey and Texas, not moving west (Southern California) until the third grade. By then I had a southern accent (removed with speech therapy in the California school system! see my essay The California Killing of a Southern Boy), a love affair with lightning bugs, and a taste for scrapple.
We always called them lightning bugs and not fireflies. As kids, we boys would catch them in jars and then mash them over our faces so they glowed in the dark like monsters. In this temporary state of illumination, we would chase and terrorize the neighborhood girls until the glow wore off.
I once tried to import lightning bugs into Oregon. I came home from a visit to my parents in New Jersey with a suitcase full of jars of them, which I released in my back yard in Eugene. I had a wonderful night of their show! The next night, there was no sign of them, and I never saw them in the west again. I'm not sure why they can't survive in the west.
Scrapple is a Pennsylvania Dutch food made from pork scraps and cornmeal. You can buy it easily in the east and south but in the west you find it, if at all, frozen and over-priced in the gourmet section. Where it is native, it is not gourmet at all, quite the opposite, a kind of poor folks' substitute for breakfast sausage. At Mom's Cafe in Milford, New Jersey, scrapple is on the menu, and it is a part of my favorite breakfast. Now and again I make it myself, or buy it locally frozen, and once I even ordered it off the Internet. Scrapple and lightning bugs! Those who call Oregon "God's country" haven't a clue what they are missing.
2/26/2003 07:40:16 AM |
Tuesday, February 25, 2003
Research and Writing
My method in the new screenplay draft raises some interesting questions about doing research for a writing project. I finished this draft in something like 4 to 6 weeks, about right. I still have a lot of research to do, however -- some things I need to know about Islam especially. The question arises: why am I waiting so late to do the research? Why didn't I begin with the research?
Because I've learned that the story comes first and that research can take on its own life. I wrote before doing research and when I reached a point where I didn't know something I needed to know I either made something up, adding a note [find this out] or I just added a note [need to find out blah blah] and went on with the story. The advantage is that now my research is focused, I have particular areas important to the story that I need to find out about. Maybe I'll learn other things along the way that influence the story, maybe not.
If I did research first, I still would be doing research. I would be doing research without having written FADE IN. Now I begin research having written FADE OUT. I call that progress.
2/25/2003 05:59:32 AM |
FADE OUT
Ah, those wonderful two words that end a screenplay! Finished the draft of my new one, "Love in the Ruins," this morning. Made some totally uncommercial decisions. My heroine is killed at the end (she's the love interest of the protagonist) -- it's the only logical and true ending of the story, which is a tragic Romeo & Juliet romance set against 9/11. Makes it a tragedy, makes it uncommercial, but also makes it as true as I can tell it -- and I'm at the age where true stories interest me a hell of a lot more than commercial ones. Besides, I think I'll start the novel as soon as I clean up the draft, probably won't even market the screenplay at all, just use it as the foundation of the story for the novel. It can be a nice short novel.
Always feels good to end a draft! No time to celebrate, too many student scripts to read, the usual Tuesday horse race to finish them before I head off to the big U.
Tomorrow I'll print out the splay and take out the red pen. And get back to work on my novel (the one in progress).
2/25/2003 05:41:40 AM |
Monday, February 24, 2003
The Hours
In the current issue of The New York Review of Books, which came in the mail today, is a compelling, thought-provoking article on the movie The Hours, comparing it both to the novel and also to Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The argument is that the movie, unlike the novel on which it is based and Woolf's work, makes changes that make the women characters less strong.
Two examples. In the novel of The Hours, the fifties housewife does not check into a hotel to commit suicide but to be able to read Mrs. Dalloway in peace. She is a wreck, yes, but she is not suicidal, though she has a passing thought of it in the hotel room. She is stronger in the novel than in the film.
The second example: in the film, the Meryl Streep character breaks down when visited by Louis, the ex of the dying poet Richard. "What is happening to me?" she asks. In the novel (which I haven't read, by the way -- I am taking the author and Princeton professor's word on all this) it is not Clarissa who breaks down -- it is Louis, the gay man!
Woolf's charge was to present a new literature of women, to challenge the way men were writing about women. The author of the review believes she accomplished this and believes that the novel The Hours accomplishes this but that the film version retreats back to the more traditional and less complex versions of women as usually written by men, including the film's characterization of Woolf herself.
NYRB is online and if next week it publishes an electronic version of the article, I'll link to it here and quote directly. It's an interesting argument indeed! (The reviewer, it should be said, likes the film a lot -- but in a relative sense, it is so much better than the competition, even though it makes all the women more traditional than either of its sources.)
2/24/2003 09:27:59 PM |
Work and Writing
Work is the curse of the writing class. My screenwriting partner, Alex, is experiencing this right now, trying to find a job in the depressed Portland market, while also trying to finish a screenplay. He's passing it on to me this week to see if I can find the ending. He's reached a blank, besides (and because of) the pressure to find employment very quickly now or he's out on his ear; he has 80 or 90 good pages that I saw some time ago.
Meanwhile, I am a sequence or two away from ending the draft of the new one I started, which probably should be a novel and not a screenplay. I suspect this is the way it will go.
I have to confess that screenwriting from afar makes less and less sense to me, with one exception: entering the Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowship competition. Serious screenwriting wannabes should enter this every year. But other than this, and other than moving to L.A., I'm not sure the rest is all that practical. I think the main decision a beginning screenwriter needs to make is this: do I move to L.A. or not? If not, then accept the fact that screenwriting is your hobby. Another exception: if you decide to become a filmmaker, shooting your own scripts. Then you can be where you can most easily make your movies.
L.A. still controls the industry. The digital revolution may change this but it hasn't yet.
However, I know several screenwriters who went to L.A., spending as much as 5 years there, then returning here because they could make nothing happen down there. One is back with the same script he left with and now he's here to try and make the movie himself. Others have abandoned screenwriting for fiction or, in a more practical mode, journalism.
If you are a screenwriting beginner not in L.A., and don't want to go to L.A., write your script or two a year, enter it or them in Nicholl, and meanwhile do whatever it is you do when you are not screenwriting. If you can make the first cut in Nicholl, then you may find some doors opening just a wee bit. And the more cuts you make, the more and the wider they open. Nicholl rules.
Nicholl information here.
2/24/2003 03:55:55 PM |
Back on track!
Another good writing session today. Up to the ending sequence of the screenplay! Brooding now about which of two ways to go, the dark or lighter ending, leaning toward the former though it makes the material less marketable, at least as a screenplay. But if this is actually the draft of a novel ... I'll brood on it for a bit.
Also wrote my Univ. screenwriting final. A very productive Monday! Harriet returns this evening, hooray, and I'll take her out to dinner to the Three Square Grill, a favorite of ours on the way home from the train station. It is clear but very cold outside. What the hell is an L.A. boy like myself doing in Oregon anyway? I want to be warm!
2/24/2003 12:49:00 PM |
Back on track?
A good very early morning writing session, reaching act three of my screenplay. A great shot at finishing the draft this week, this month on schedule. Now back to bed for a couple hours.
Started the biography of Virginia Woolf. Another good short bio from Viking. I love this series.
2/24/2003 03:35:18 AM |
Sunday, February 23, 2003
Screenwriting jokes
I collect screenwriting jokes. Here are two of my favorites.
Did you hear about the blonde bimbo who wanted to become a movie star? She didn't have a clue. She was so out of it that she slept with the screenwriter.
*
Two producer friends run into one another on the studio lot. Says one: "I've found the most incredible screenplay! You wait an entire career for something like this. It's absolutely perfect. A real page-turner, star material -- in fact, Mel Gibson is reading it right now -- great action and visuals, wonderful love story, there's not a single thing I can find to fault about it. Like I say, you wait an entire career to read a screenplay like this. I smell Oscars."
"Fantastic!" says the other producer. "When do you start shooting?"
Says the first, "As soon as I get the rewrites."
2/23/2003 09:43:16 AM |
Ashes redux
There was a woman at the spreading of Ger's ashes yesterday who had never seen human remains before. She was quite shocked by the experience. Ashes is a misnomer. "Ashes" really have the texture of very finely crushed bone.
The first human ashes I encountered were my mother's and I, too, was surprised and shocked, expecting something closer to fireplace ashes. Yesterday we passed the container each to each, every individual who chose to participate then spreading a bit of its contents around the rose bushes in the garden. The woman above broke into tears afterwards, and I embraced her until she calmed down. Later, over lunch, she talked a bit about it, how stark and ugly it seemed, humans reduced to ashes that really were more like crushed bone, and she went on to talk about her belief in the eternal soul and its journey.
I'm going back up to the garden today, not only for Ger but to spend more private time with my dad, whose ashes also are up in the Rose Garden. A few years ago they replanted some new roses in the area where I put my father's ashes, and those roses are called Immortal Juno. Very nice.
2/23/2003 08:25:33 AM |
Dark comedy
I use the spreading of ashes in my work only once -- in perhaps the most effective moment of dark comedy I've written. This happens in my hyperdrama Bateau de Mort. This was commissioned after the immense success of Chateau de Mort as a sequel, taking place on the Columbia Gorge Sternwheeler. I later adapted Bateau to land as The Bride of Edgefield, and this script is available online in the hyperdrama section of my literary archive at the University of North Carolina.
The moment of dark comedy is this. In hyperdrama, of course, every character is the main character and every plot is the main plot -- all characters are "on stage" (i.e. in the performance area) at all times (if you are new to hyperdrama, see my essays on the form in the hyperdrama section above). Two plot lines intersect this way: in one, a son is there to spread the ashes of his father in the river; in the other, a drug deal onboard is scheduled, involving a considerable amount of cocaine.
You can see it coming, right? Yep, the ashes and the cocaine get switched. All the drugs are thrown into the river. Later, near the end of the play, some druggies snort the ashes, complaining of the quality of coke and how they've been ripped off.
In hyperdrama, a dozen plots are unfolding simultaneously so only a fraction of the audience sees either or both of these moments of dark comedy, at least on a first viewing. But they worked wonderfully and remain my favorite moments of dark comedy.
2/23/2003 07:44:44 AM |
Routine
Back to my routine today, I trust! I need it. Did manage to sneak in a few pages on the screenplay yesterday after the service, before crashing very early, but today I hope to return to the novel as well. And my guitar and banjo practice. I have been out of sync since Ger's news, of course.
Next on the reading list, the Viking short bio on Virginia Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway. Might catch a movie tomorrow as well.
2/23/2003 01:09:46 AM |
Saturday, February 22, 2003
Ger's service
Was short and sweet. About twenty folks showed up. I read half a dozen things he had written, we shared memories and stories, and then everyone spread a bit of his ashes among the roses in the large International Test Rose Gardens in Washington Park overlooking downtown Portland. Now I feel a little numb and am going to vegetate in front of a basketball game on the tube.
2/22/2003 04:40:00 PM |
Need a good laugh?
I do! Maybe you missed these ...
Each year the Washington Post's Style Invitational asks readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter and supply a new definition. Here are the 2001 winners:
- Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
- Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
- Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of having sex.
- Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
- Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
- Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
- Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.
- Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (this one got extra credit)
- Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.
- Glibido: All talk and no action.
- Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
- Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.
2/22/2003 01:39:33 AM |
John Cheever
Last night I read some essays in a collection of literary essays by Elizabeth Hardwick. I picked it up at the library after being so impressed with her biography of Melville. I especially liked her essay on John Cheever.
What a master of the short story! Time to return to them ... I have the complete stories on my shelf.
Here are some John Cheever links:
Here are some John Cheever quotations:
- "Art is the triumph over chaos."
- "The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness."
- "I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss-you can't do it alone."
The stories I remember as favorites, besides "The Swimmer," are "The Enormous Radio" and "O Youth and Beauty!" (if that is phrased right). But I don't recall a "bad" Cheever story. I think he was a better short story writer than a novelist. Yes, time to look at his stories again!
2/22/2003 01:27:25 AM |
Friday, February 21, 2003
Unchain my heart
I didn't chain myself to the computer today, I chained myself to the couch in between a variety of totally meaningless chores, the only purpose of which was to keep moving and distract myself I suppose. Actually I feel the same kind of nervousness I used to feel when I acted, the passing of time before the performance, as if tomorrow's spreading of the ashes is some kind of cosmic performance. When I acted, including performing my Woody Guthrie show (hear it here), I started "preparing" in early afternoon for the evening performance, unable to concentrate on anything other than some strange kind of not-quite-conscious concentration on the show to come. I never did figure out how actors with day jobs did it.
Obviously I won't get any writing done tomorrow. Sunday maybe.
2/21/2003 05:36:58 PM |
Challenges
A big weekend ahead -- not only for the beginning of closure, spreading Ger's ashes on Saturday, but because I take my wife to the train station this morning to begin four days of "baching it," usually a time when I chain myself to the computer and get a ton of writing done. She's off to Canada to celebrate a good girlfriend's 60th birthday. What I hope to accomplish in her absence is finishing act two of the screenplay. It's very doable, especially since I have a very light student reading load this weekend. Sometimes focused work is the best way to deal with grief, too -- and sometimes not. So we'll see how it goes. Hoping to put in a lot of writing hours today, Sunday and Monday. Saturday, sometime after the spreading of the ashes and the sharing of stories with friends, I want to see "The Hours" again. Of course, my real closure with Ger likely will be during the long process of editing and publishing his writings, which will be a longer task than I thought because he was more prolific than I thought. I am particularly curious about his stage plays. I've pretty much selected all the short poetry. There's still some long narrative poems to look at. I'm not publishing everything I find but I am using minimal editorial power in my selection. I am not publishing, for example, an experimental work I found along the lines of Joyce at his most obscure. But I'm also not publishing only things I like. I want this to represent his work, and of course the book he himself had put together is the first and major section of it. But I like the idea of getting the plays into print, too, assuming they are worth it (he was an actor so I suspect they are), because then one day someone might do one of them.
So. Time to run and get my wife to the train station. A lovely way to travel.
2/21/2003 07:18:08 AM |
Thursday, February 20, 2003
Batman v. Superman
A kid on the bus on the way in to the Univ. this afternoon made my day. "Dad," he asked, "is Batman stronger than Superman?" Dad was trying to pacify the boy's little sister and was not in the mood for such a question, or even a bus ride with the kids by the looks of it. The boy figured out very quickly that no meaningful response was forthcoming so he began a Socratic monologue on the question.
He first argued the case for Batman. Batman, he surmised, was younger than Superman but still a grown up, and therefore he might be in better shape. Batman seemed to run and do other physical exertion more than Superman, who flew everywhere. On the other hand (the case for Superman), the boy remembered an episode in which Superman moved a building, a huge skyscraper, because he was in too big a rush to fly around it. He lifted the damn thing out of the way (the boy, of course, expressed this differently). The only encounter the boy recalled between Batman and a skyscraper was when Batman drove the Batmobile around one. If he were in that big a hurry, why didn't he just stop and lift the building out of the way, which is what Superman did.
Conclusion, Superman must be stronger. At this point, I couldn't resist seconding the motion. From my own youth, I remembered a comic book encounter between Superman and Captain Marvel, and Superman was victorious. Yes, Superman must be the strongest superhero.
I have a zero-sum theory of the universe. For every plus, for every good vibration and good karma, there is a negative and bad vibration and bad karma, so the total energy in the universe adds up to zero. As if to remind me of this, as I was walking across campus to my office, I passed a bike rack where a student yelled out, "What kind of world do we live in, that someone steals your bicycle seat!?"
A world with great kids and bicycle seat thieves.
2/20/2003 02:22:34 PM |
Tech stuff
Aha, just read that my blog host has been purchased by Google. Some new servers being put in place, etc, which explains the disruptions lately, such as subscribers not getting the posts, blog sometimes unavailable, etc. Presumably the blog world will return to normal soon.
2/20/2003 12:54:26 PM |
Stuff
It is incredible how much "stuff" we accumulate in a life that is of marginal interest to others. I was reminded of this yesterday, helping Ger's sister and nephew continue vacating his apartment. I found some more manuscripts, including a full-length play I knew nothing about.
I took only a few things to remember him by: a print of Don Quixote he always displayed prominently; a couple of Billie Holiday and Peggy Lee CDs and tapes; and a few books. One of Ger's greatest collections was of classic movies (esp circa 1930s and 1940s) on video. These we left at the building, which is a HUD project for retired folks -- they have a video/entertainment room and an organized movie-watching club, and now they have one of the best libraries of old movies (their generations) around! A lot of his books also were left to the building's library.
A Chinese woman to whom Ger was giving English lessons apparently had fallen in love with him. Ger had some eastern art pieces, and the sister gave one of the best to the woman.
I printed out his poem "May Afternoon in Ireland" (see below) on good stock with a fine color photo of him to pass out during the brief services in the park where we'll spread his ashes on Saturday. I'll also read several more poems, plus a wonderful letter of resignation he wrote at his last corporate job, when he decided to take an early retirement. I still remember what a joyous day that was for him ... but sadly only months ago, maybe five or six.
Ger was on a waiting list for 18 months to get into the HUD apartment. His rent was a fraction of his income, which meant he could live fine on his social security and retirement income -- and paid less than $300 (one-half to one-third market value) for a studio apartment (with a walk-in closet so large he converted it into a bedroom) right downtown, even with a view and with a deck! He was, in the local vernacular, in pig heaven. The building had a newsletter and the editor had given him a monthly poetry column. He immediately was known as the building's poet-in-residence. It's so sad he had so little time left to enjoy all this. I thought he'd managed to find himself a life of moderation and quiet reflection that would last him for decades but in his body the cancer cells already had started to party. They are insatiable once they get going, worse than a platoon of drunks. Cancer knows no moderation.
So we put his ashes to rest on Saturday. I have no idea whatever how many will wander up to the park for the moment. I know of about a dozen.
2/20/2003 12:00:35 PM |
Imagination
The "life of the imagination" has never been taken as seriously in this culture as actions based on so-called "facts." We are a practical, "reality-based" culture, or at least that is our myth. Hence stories "based on a true story" do better in the marketplace, in general, than those not so based. And to take the recent extreme example, "reality-based" TV shows have become the rage, in which "real people" are put into "real situations" so we may watch them squirm.
Of course, as anyone who has ever written fact-based or historical drama can tell you, the first thing a writer does to a "factual story" is change it, rearrange it, so it is more interesting dramatically than the highly inefficient actions of "real life." (For more on this, see my essay Writing the History Play: Why Dramatists Lie in the Pursuit of Truth.) Nonetheless, "based on a true story" continues to attract us more than works based solely on the imagination. At least this is the theory embraced by the movers who buy the stories that become films, TV shows, and books.
This is unfortunate. Despite being false (since, in fact, "based on" is more important than "true story" in the delivery of these dramatic stories, which depend on imaginative changes for their very power), the bias only demonstrates a cultural disrespect for the importance of storytellers. I'm not sure why this happened unless it goes all the way back to our roots and the practical skills needed to survive, tame (i.e. defeat the people already here) and develop "a wilderness." We've thought of ourselves as "a chosen people" ("a city on a hill") from the beginning, and our survival depended on hard practical work, not acts of the imagination.
And those acts of the imagination that have advanced the culture are related to feats of engineering, acts with practical consequences. The unfortunate truth about literary art in our culture is that it has little practical value. Make that art in general. It is pushed off into the back alleys of the culture, into museums and literature classes, and even the popular arts, such as film, cater to the lowest common denominator in the forms which reach the greatest numbers.
All cultures are not like this, so it is not an inevitable arrangement of human priorities. Poets in Ireland, for example, get a kind of respect not given them here (they didn't used to have to pay taxes but I heard about a movement to change that, not sure how it turned out). When I was in Germany in the Army in the early 1960s, I remember being amazed at how much respect "a teacher" received. Some of the parents of my friends were teachers and received to such respect in the U.S. In fact, we even had a little jingle about it, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach."
We also subvert the importance of the arts, of lives of the imagination, by thrusting artists into "the star system," worshipping a few in order to ignore the many. Star artists amount to token artists, the few that the culture is willing to pay attention to, which saves the culture from taking the entire family of artists seriously. If you don't want minorities living next door to you, you single out a few to show that you aren't prejudiced, and then leave the status quo just as it is. It's a very old political/societal technique of usurpation, embracing token elements in order to de-fuse a potentially revolutionary situation. I remember in the 1960s, I knew the counter-culture was dead in the water when bank employees began to wear psychedelic neckties. You stop a revolution by embracing the harmless elements of it, bringing it into the main culture as a barrier protecting the status quo.
The life of the imagination has never received great value in this country. It's one of the realities people in the arts put up with.
2/20/2003 06:14:46 AM |
Wednesday, February 19, 2003
May Afternoon in Ireland
by Ger Moran
1940-2003
During a light rain at Drumcliffe
Meandering through the ruins of an old castle
Strange vibrations crept into the surroundings
A large raven showed bravado
Screeching and jumping around
As if guardian of a ghostly tale
Then a stillness that was throbbing sensing
This ancient diary in stone
An impressive rainbow appeared
With vaporous hues semicircled amid
Vibrant green glistening in the sun
Driving on a short distance
To the grave site of Yeats
Suddenly the day darkened
And an eerie wind began to swirl
Round aged and weathered headstones
Fear of the other world
Swiftly ran along the spine
Chilling one to the bone
Standing by the grave of Yeats his stone read
"Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by!"
While the wind did its dance
In the mind's ear was heard
"Though the gravediggers' toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong,
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again."
2/19/2003 05:57:20 PM |
Automatic pilot
I have my annual checkup at the VA this morning -- interesting timing. I also volunteered to be part of a study on prostate cancer (from a phone call yesterday, also interesting timing). After the hospital stuff, will meet Ger's sister at his apartment and help pack up his stuff. Then this afternoon I have to package my novel manuscript and get it in the mail ... looks like one of those non-stop days. I have an online class chat at 7pm I plan to make. Got caught up on my student script reading early this a.m., though.
Going to read "Mrs. Dalloway," which I haven't read in many years, because I expect to see "The Hours" again soon. In fact, I may see it Saturday after we spread Ger's ashes since I find the movie so life affirming (even though two suicides happen in it!).
And I look forward to getting back on automatic pilot. In my youth, I thought "auto pilot" was a bad thing, all that "lives of quiet desperation" stuff Thoreau writes about, but without order and routine a life can get real messy real fast. I've learned to get crazy in my work, not in my life. I like routine. I like tranquility. These in my life give me the foundation and discipline to write. I've been away from my writing for a couples days now, which is about as long as I can stand it, although as always I've been thinking a lot about it. But I still want to finish my screenplay draft this month and make my usual slow progress on the new novel. I think the voice of the novel is still wrong but I'm not going to worry about it until I have a complete draft of the story points down. Then the rewrite can be like a translation.
Also been going through Ger's poems, selecting some appropriate things to read Saturday. Found a great recent photo of him ... will print up some copies on one of his poems to pass out at the gathering.
I really look forward to spring break -- not only because I need and am ready for a break but because I also have tickets to the women's NCAA basketball tournament, rounds one and two, down in Eugene. We have motel reservations for Sat-Mon there, during the tournament, and I plan to see every shot of every game, though I suspect my wife will not be at my side during all that time (shopping!). This is less than a month away now! No problem.
2/19/2003 06:24:54 AM |
Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Bob Trevor
For some reason the death of Ger reminds me of Bob Trevor, my favorite teacher. He was the one who first encouraged me to write. He was the one who first encouraged me to write something other than poetry (!).
I first took an American Lit class from Trevor at Pasadena Community College. I was just out of the Army and, having decided to return to school, had to make up some units before transfering to UCLA because all my previous credits (from Cal Tech) were on the quarter system, UCLA on the semester system, so I was caught in a bureaucratic nightmare, getting 2 point something credits in transfer for a UCLA 3-unit class -- so naturally they were insisting that I repeat it. It was cheaper to repeat these classes at PCC than at UCLA, so I enrolled for a year there to take care of the transfer credits. As it turned out, this decision changed my life -- because I met Bob Trevor.
I was not yet a lit major when I met him. I was thinking of philosophy or history. But Trevor turned me on to literature in a way no one had before. He began every class by reading a poem. No discussion, no test on it -- he just read it. He was a great reader, and I turned on to poetry for the first time. He liked my essay writing and inquired if I were interested in creative writing. I had no idea; I'd never tried it. He suggested I take a creative writing class, and I did.
I know why Ger brings Trevor to mind. Because of a couplet ending an e.e.cummings poem that we studied in Trevor's class: "the most who die the more we live" ... how it is death that makes life so precious. I remember being the only one in class who figured that line out on a test.
Trevor and I stayed in contact after I went on to UCLA, now as an English major. I began writing fiction, and he encouraged me in this direction (after encouraging me to try other forms once he read my poetry, ha ha) and was the first to suggest I try a play since my strengths seemed to be dialogue and character. After I had gone on to grad school, dropping out of a PhD program and returning on an MFA program, and then changing my emphasis there from fiction to playwriting, I finally tried drama as Trevor had suggested years earlier and my first one-act play won a national competition -- right in Trevor's neck of the words. By this time, he was VP at a community college in St. Louis, and the Tennessee Williams award I won was at U of Mo-Columbia -- so Trevor and his wife put me up and drove me to the campus to see the premiere. I felt like such a big shot, and my old teacher looked very proud.
Trevor divorced and later retired in Honolulu -- he used to send me a case of macademia nuts every Christmas. I visited him there and got the non-tourist tour. I loved Honolulu! I could live there easily. Trevor himself was fighting cancer by that time but he lived for several years with it before leaving this world. His new girlfriend wrote me that a school of dolphins followed the boat out to where she spead his ashes. As soon as they were spead, they headed off into the sunset.
I remember when Robert Kennedy was shot, I called Trevor to ask if the Sirhan Sirhan I used to tutor at PCC was the same one who assassinated RK. Yep, the very same.
the most who die the more we live ... indeed.
2/18/2003 03:14:47 PM |
Gems
Going through my friend's papers, have found some real gems. He wrote a long narrative poem dedicated to John Huston -- and got a very nice letter back from the director about it. I found other long narrative poems I didn't know about (and one I did know about but had forgotten, that I myself published when I was editor of a journal in the early 1980s.) I also found several one-act plays I didn't know he'd written. And I found an absolutely wonderful letter of resignation that I plan to print, it's so perfect about why a poet would leave a large corporate job.
So it will be a larger collection than anticipated, which is nice. Maybe a 150 page paperback or so. I have some grunt work, inputting a lot of the stuff in his papers, the pre-computer stuff. I'll try scanning it but in the past there are enough inaccuracies (scanning typewritten stuff) that you don't save much time compared to keyboarding it in yourself.
People who learned 3 weeks ago that he had cancer are shocked, of course, that he's gone so quickly. As it happens, my own annual VA checkup is tomorrow morning. It would be in really bad taste if ... so bad, I won't even mention it. Onward!
Got my midterms read and about to leave for the big U. Sure don't feel like teaching today! Hopefully, the class will carry the ball. It's a good, lively class, shouldn't be a problem.
And the mail just came -- I thought it was 4 more rejections but one was positive, a request for the entire manuscript of my novel from a small press in San Francisco.
2/18/2003 12:50:24 PM |
Midnight Cabaret
Had a chance to look at the task of putting together Ger's writings last night -- not as big a task as I thought at first. I found a printout of the book he was working on, called Midnight Cabaret, including his own introduction to it. I can use that intact. However, there are many more poems, including (in my view) some of his best work, which I also want to include. So I think I'll arrange the book in sections, "Midnight Cabaret" being one of them. I also may include some prose pieces I found, including the start of a screenplay. I think my overall title will be, Midnight Cabaret: the Writings of Ger Moran, using the short version of his name that he himself used on his book manuscript, rather than the formal Gerald T. Moran or even more formal Gerald Thomas Moran, Jr.
The hardest task for me, then, probably will be to write the introduction. Immediately I need to select some poems to read at the private service we'll have for friends and family when we scatter his ashes, probably on Saturday. His book ends with a lyric called "Goodbye," an obvious one to use. There also are some nice memories of his childhood.
More than anything else, Ger was a frustrated lyricist, frustrated because he had no composer-partner. He was a fair vocalist himself. I remember one time we were in a jazz club (this was in the 1980s), and he managed to talk himself into sitting in on a number with the band (strangers to him). I'd never heard him sing in public before. He did a Sinatra-influenced version of "One For My Baby" that brought down the house.
Ger was with several women (several girlfriends and one wife) during the twenty years of our friendship. The "love of his life" appeared to me to be an artist he went with until she died of cancer. Hers was a long, slow deterioration, not the instant demise that awaited him. While he was still cogent, on my first visit after learning he was in the hospital, we talked a bit about his odds and he said he didn't want to have everything dragged out like she had experienced. "It's in the hands of the gods," he said, as indeed it was. After that first visit, he lost the ability to talk, so the next three weeks were not very communicative, though for a while he could shake his head in response to questions.
So. Today I'm swamped, in a horse race to finish looking at midterms before my afternoon class at the University. And tomorrow the same, reading scripts before my online class chat.
2/18/2003 06:10:45 AM |
Monday, February 17, 2003
House of the dead
Spent a few hours this afternoon with Ger's sister and her son, looking for the will, which we found in an earlier version (when he was married) but I remember him mentioning a more recent one, which we didn't find. I found considerably more writing than I was aware of -- like any writer, he was much more prolific than he shared, and it will be quite a chore going through it all for a book. I found notes for the book he was planning but I suspect I'll do more than this, including much more of his writing, "his" thin book a section in the larger collected writings. My summer project, I guess.
The family found old photos and such, many memories brought back. "This is grandma's handwriting!" -- that sort of thing.
I'm going through the poems this week to select some things to read when we scatter his ashes.
2/17/2003 04:40:16 PM |
And now the living
My friend's sister, who lives 100 miles south in Eugene, is returning this afternoon to go through Ger's apartment, looking for his will. I'll meet her there. She has all the usual arrangements to make -- the will, funeral, emptying the apartment -- and of course I want to help as I can. One thing I want to do especially is find the current state of his book manuscript -- he was assembling a book of poems and cabaret sketches -- and finish it for him.
In the meantime, this morning, I have a stack of midterms to read before my University class tomorrow and hope to get through them, or most of them, before the other chores begin.
I feel relieved that he's no longer hooked up and unresponsive, looking like a science experiment. It's astounding how quickly this all happened. Six weeks ago we were having our usual weekly coffee, discussing some play or movie or other, maybe he was bringing me up to date on his script search -- we were looking for some scenes for two older guys that we could perform together, just for fun to get our feet wet in acting again without a huge time commitment. He was complaining about how a Chinese woman in his apartment building to whom he was giving English lessons was falling in love with him. I remember him saying, "I'll never understand women," which reminded me of the first line of my short story Lessons from the Cockroach Graveyard, which begins, "The older I get, the less I understand women." Guy talk.
But now I've outlived every one of my close male friends. I feel a little like an orphan. I suppose the thing to do is make new friends, of course, but this would require a considerable rise in my normal social quotient. This brings to mind something a classmate of mine said years ago, when I was an undergraduate: "Most of my friends are writers and are dead." I certainly felt like Melville was a dead friend when I was reading Elizabeth Hardwick's remarkable biography recently.
However, I'm not alone. I have a wife. I have a number of women friends (the two best, ex-girlfriends). I have a dog. I have a number of students I care about.
But I'm going to miss the weekly guy talk with Ger, and the Saturday morning breakfast out, where I got to marvel at him complaining that his toast didn't have enough butter on it. In the history of breakfasts, it never did.
I wonder if he had not stopped smoking if he'd have hung in a tad longer. Of course, he should have quit years ago. But I've never known him to be sick a day in his life until he quit smoking. Then his body seemed not to know what to do without nicotine, and he got sick frequently, and then only weeks after he quit, he was dead. Maybe sometimes, when you've ruined your body anyway, it's best not to rock the boat.
Just like my soul brother, Dick, and drinking: Dick was totally miserable sober. By nature, drinking, he was funny and positive -- sober he was hard to be around because his negativity about everything was infectious. He only lived a couple years sober, maybe he would have lived as long drinking and he certainly would have been happier. Maybe "better late than never" is a false premise and there are certain vices that, once a part of the system, should not be messed with in such a radical way. I don't know.
I can't help but think of my own mortality now, of course. Six weeks ago, I would have taken bets that I would die before Ger. He was slender, practically a vegetarian, calm and low key, all areas in which he exhibited healthier habits than I do. But he was a smoker. I've never been a smoker, though I've inhaled more than my share of second-hand smoke in bars over the years. I think we both assumed I would die first.
I've never expected to live past 70, which isn't that far away any more. The gods are full of surprises, and I hope they surprise me.
2/17/2003 08:13:55 AM |
Sunday, February 16, 2003
Rest In Peace
My friend died at 8:15 pm tonight.
2/16/2003 10:00:51 PM |
The Decision
My friend's sister, with my endorsement and support, decided to remove him from the life-support systems and let Nature take its course, intervening only to make his final journey as comfortable and painless as possible. Different individuals react differently to this, so the end might take minutes, hours, days or even a week or more. But now it really is just a matter of time.
2/16/2003 02:45:43 PM |
Wouldn't it be lovely?
The morning news reports that Saddam is gloating. Saddam is proven right. Saddam proclaims a great victory for Iraq. Why? Because millions of people have taken to the streets in support of peace, against a policy of forceful confrontation with Saddam. What else is Saddam supposed to think?
A dozen years ago there was an eight-year-old American boy who today wears a military uniform, waiting to see if he will go to war in Iraq. If Saddam had been confronted a dozen years ago, that grown boy would not be asking himself this question. Today there are other eight-year-old boys and girls, their parents may well be marching for peace, hopeful and well-meaning -- but a dozen years from now, will they be asked to confront Saddam because he is not confronted today?
Or is Saddam going to go away? Is Saddam, gloating and feeling victorious, a safer and saner leader today than earlier, when he thought a gun was pointed to his head? Is he less ambitious, less ruthless, now than before?
Wouldn't it be lovely if the wishes of millions of well-meaning people could change the heart of a tyrant? Wouldn't it be lovely if the history of the human race didn't show that tyrants when appeased become more dangerous, not less?
In my view, we are left to choose between two disasters: the disastrous foreign policy of the U.S. confronting Saddam without world support, and the disastrous inevitability of confronting Saddam later when he has more weapons than he has today. But sooner or later, he must be confronted. How nice if the entire world were united in holding a gun to his head today, he actually might prove to be a coward and slither off into exile. But instead he is gloating and feeling more powerful than ever. Very well. Let our children handle the problem later. What wonderful parents we are, striving for a better world by handing our children a more dangerous one. Humans learn nothing from history. Nothing.
2/16/2003 06:59:19 AM |
Apprehension
The big meeting with my friend's sister and doctor this morning. I assume some decisions will be made. We'll see.
Saw The Quiet American on Friday and liked it very much. A faithful and tight adaptation of the Greene novel. Didn't impress me with the surprising reach of The Hours but this is probably the second-best film I've seen in the past year.
2/16/2003 04:44:34 AM |
Saturday, February 15, 2003
Acceptance
As if to temper the snail mail delivery, an acceptance arrived tonight via email -- of a poem, which I almost never write. This one is being published anonymously because I have no energy to deal with the hate mail it might well inspire, being as politically incorrect as it is. Nor will I say where it is being published.
2/15/2003 08:02:46 PM |
Rejection
The mail today brought six, count 'em, rejection slips! The last time I got that many in a single day was in the early 1970s, I was barely beginning my career, and on that occasion I was so outraged that I sat down and quickly wrote a surrealistic manifesto, sending it immediately to The Literary Review, which had been rejecting me for months. Naturally they published it (see Fragments Before the Fall) Later I added the rejection slips to a gigantic collage of same I was building.
Ah, what age and a dash of cynicism can do for the nerves. Today I just shrugged, made notes for my records, and gently dropped the damn things into the waste basket.
2/15/2003 04:51:40 PM |
2 questions
Writing is done in two broad movements: the first draft and everything after the first draft. The first draft is driven by the question, What is it going to be? Everything else is driven by the question, What have we here?
Dealing with the first question is more difficult in several ways. Here the writer truly plays God, creating something from nothing. The something begins in the mind, often in the unconscious mind, and takes shape in language under the most fragile conditions. The slightest distraction -- a telephone ringing, a knock on the door -- can destroy the not-quite-lettered thought at the moment before it reaches coherent expression. Writers working on first drafts are frequently moody, irritable, distant, because so much of their concentration is focused on the difficult birth of something from nothing.
The second question has the advantage of having a strong analytical component: aha, what have we here? Before something is changed, it is analyzed, it is studied and taken apart. Even then, the new creative process, which is not creating something from nothing but replacing something with something else, has the security of the first attempt to fall back on, a foundation from which to renew the analytical process should an interruption happen. Writers who cannot create new work on a public bus can rewrite on a public bus. Rewriting is more rational, more secure, than writing from scratch.
I believe I am in the majority of writers when I say I prefer the second process, rewriting, to the first, creating. The question What have we here? is much more fun to engage than What is it going to be?
2/15/2003 04:48:21 PM |
Friday, February 14, 2003
Ashes
Most of the people I care about who have died have been cremated. There are disadvantages to the living in this. There is something about the visible marker of a grave that connects more strongly to memory than scenery alone. For example, the ashes of my soul brother were scattered at the top of the old White Bird road above the Salmon River in Idaho, scene of a famous Indian battle, but outside the town of White Bird, in the graveyard, is a gravestone marking an empty grave. I never fail to visit both but somehow the gravestone brings back more memories than the spectacular view where his ashes were scattered.
And the scene of scattering can disappear. My mother's ashes were scattered at her favorite fishing hole in southern Oregon. A dam subsequently flooded the spot. Now she's somewhere out in the middle of a lake.
My dad's ashes were scattered in three spots. One-third are in the creek that flows through his home town in New Jersey. My brother put one-third in the Willamette River near Eugene. I put one-third in the Shakespeare Garden in Washington Park above Portland. This is illegal activity, by the way, spreading ashes in a public park. You do it with the careful attention of the burglar.
My poet friend also put his mother's ashes in the Shakespeare Garden, and we used to hike there to visit our parents. He told me this is where he would like his ashes spread, and presumably his will will mention this. I want my ashes spread, at least partly, with my soul brother in northern Idaho.
2/14/2003 02:15:26 AM |
The pendulum swings again
My friend took a turn for the worst again, his disattachment from life support systems not working out, he is back "online" again (a machine making him breathe) and the doctor has asked to have "a serious conference" with his sister early on Sunday morning, and she has asked that I be there. I suspect this is the "we can't do anything more for him" speech. We'll see.
2/14/2003 01:57:37 AM |
Biographies
I am late to discover the extraordinary "Penguin Lives Series," short biographies written not by academics but by professional writers. The series includes Nigel Nicolson on Virginia Woolf, Jane Smiley on Charles Dickens, Janet Malcolm on Anton Chekhov, Bobbie Ann Mason on Elvis Presley, and (what I am reading now) Elizabeth Hardwick on Herman Melville.
Hardwick on Melville! What a gripping story of a life in her hands: "Not known then, not even by himself, was the frantic application ahead, the fearsome embarkation on a creative life, the unromantic presentation by workers in all the arts of objects for which there is seldom a specific public need." "He would share the fate of being a writer in America, share his ragged banner: Failure is a test of greatness." The writer's life as the unromantic presentation of objects for which there is seldom a specific public need. Hardwick scores from half court, barely moving the net.
2/14/2003 01:53:09 AM |
Thursday, February 13, 2003
A busy funk
Swamped under with student scripts. The last half of the term is always like this. Still managing to make a little progress on the screenplay, ten minutes here, fifteen there, pages moving forward, but not even trying to work on the novel, though I'm thinking a lot about it. Going to be this way for a month or so now. Part of the teaching cycle.
A former student of mine now writes her novel first drafts as a screenplay, to set down the foundation of the story before adding the layers of embellishments. I find this procedure appealing. In fact, I may do it with the current screenplay, finish the draft and move directly to a novel version, a short novel.
Also need to fit in time to visit my friend in the hospital tomorrow. Busy, busy, busy.
2/13/2003 01:18:12 PM |
Wednesday, February 12, 2003
Changes
Yesterday apparently was a very dramatic day for my dying friend. I phoned the VA just before I left for the University to see how he was doing. This was about 1pm. His nurse was not encouraging. He was worse, not responding to anything, being kept alive by the life-support machines hooked up to him. His sister was trying to decide how long to keep them hooked up. Ends up she talked to my wife about this later in the afternoon and decided, Not much longer.
Then, later in the afternoon, he made progress. He began to respond and could shake his head yes or no to questions. He shook "yes" to the question about keeping all life-support systems on and active. This is a 180-degree reversal of what he'd told me he wanted his death to be like when we discussed this very issue a few months ago -- being close to the fact apparently changed his mind. Or perhaps he didn't really understand the question. I say this because only last week I witnessed him shake his head yes to a doctor's question, then yes a few minutes later to a nurse's question that phrased it in the negative -- it other words, he gave opposite instructions within minutes to two different people. So who knows what is going on.
But the bottom line is, he was getting better yesterday late afternoon and if progress continues, he'll be out of the VA intensive care unit ... and, yep, back in the nursing home. What a ride.
2/12/2003 02:51:18 AM |
Tuesday, February 11, 2003
Can writing be taught?
Faulkner is alleged to have said that writing can't be taught but it can be learned. I think there's some truth to this. Many of the most important things a writer needs (like talent, like endurance) probably can't be taught directly. But there are matters of craft that can be taught, and this is especially true in screenwriting, which probably is the most "left brained" form of creative writing we have. Screenwriting is more about a certain kind of storytelling than about writing (in the sense we refer to "writing" when talking about fiction or poetry); screenwriting lends itself to brainstorming and collaboration in a way inappropriate, or less useful, to other narrative forms.
As a writing teacher, I see one of my more important tasks as creating an environment supportive of the act of writing. This means, first, creating an environment in which failure is possible without penalty -- up to a point (I still am required to give grades, at least at the University). A corollary of this is creating an environment in which rewriting is essential, in which the process of writing is clearly important and this process usually takes the form of failure followed by revision and improvement, as the writing product becomes more and more successful, both in the eyes of the writer and in the eyes of the audience.
My students who will become writers show themselves early by their understanding of this process. They don't give up just because a project starts off poorly. They stick with it and fix it. They keep rewriting and reworking it. They become absorbed in the process. Those students who will not become writers give up on the process. They act as if this is It, this draft is the best I can do, this draft is all I am interested in, I've told that story as well as I can and now I'm bored with it. These students see the need for change as a sign of failure, not as a sign of success.
What makes teaching writing fun for me is luck: I am lucky enough to get a few students who are serious about writing and who become very good at it. So far, each term this happens. I also am lucky enough to work with some of these students for several years before they move on in their studies to grad school or other environments. Some become writing teachers. I helped one obtain a recent position teaching screenwriting. Maybe she'll even get my job when I retire.
The classroom is a very artificial environment for a writer. In the real world, we don't have to share how bad we can be so early in the process. The best I can do to reduce the impact of such an artificial environment is to try and get students comfortable in it, letting them know that failure early on is expected, that it is nothing to worry about. In my online workshops, I don't give grades and I prefer this. At the University, I must give grades, and they matter to the students, so I grade their final projects, which they work on all term, letting them make mistakes without penalty up until the final moment.
An interesting observation: if talent and endurance are two things that probably can't be taught, but which every writer needs, the latter may be more important. My former students who go on to be successful writers have not been my more talented students. They've been the students who refuse to give up. Endurance seems to matter in a practical sense more than raw talent.
2/11/2003 03:51:37 PM |
Monday, February 10, 2003
Spy memories
The earlier story of my favorite blind date reminds me of another "dating" story that was unusual. This was when I was in the Army Security Agency, a Russian linguist stationed in Germany during the period before and after the Berlin Wall went up.
Our outfit moved around a lot (if a war started, we were supposed to go the other way since we presumably knew too many secrets to risk being captured), and off and on we were stationed on the outskirts of the "sin city" of Europe, Baumholder, Germany. This once-quaint farm village was host to tens of thousands of troops who practiced war games in the field (waiting for Vietnam, as it turned out), and to service their incredible tastes when they had weekend passes every six or eight weeks were dozens and dozens of G.I. bars along the short Main Street. As I recall, there were only a handful of doors you could enter that would not take you into a bar. Moreover, just before their arrival into town, the train that normally serviced Baumholder only a few days a week suddenly began making many trips a day to carry in the thousands of prostitutes who arrived to service the thousands of soldiers.
A great hobby of the linguists (called "Monterey Marys" by the "real" soldiers, whom we called Animals -- our term coming from our studies at the language school in Monterey, California) was to drink beer in the train station when the prostitutes were arriving into town. Talk about surrealism! We didn't dare wander into town when the Animals were loose; few of us enjoyed their common recreational activities, such as breaking chairs over each other's heads. But in the bright safety of daylight, it was great fun to watch all the whores arrive.
When the Animals were in the field, which was most of the time, we had over 100 bars to ourselves. Since our outfit only numbered 100 linguists, plus as many support troops, we had the run of Baumholder for weeks at a time. Only the regular bar maids (most doubling as prostitutes) were around then but now and again an intriguing "stranger" arrived.
The most interesting was a beautiful, young, intelligent woman who spoke fluent English and identified herself as a University student on break. A University student coming to Baumholder! Right. She would sit alone at a corner table in The Family Club (our favorite bar for the important reason that it was the closest one to our kaserne) reading Faulkner in English. What is wrong with this picture?
At any rate, one by one we linguists introduced ourselves, made the eventual move on her, and one by one she suggested an afternoon picnic in the woods. We all took her up on this, none of us got anywhere with her romantically (except possibly one, to be identified later), but all of us later discovered that we had one thing in common: she had photographed each of us. She also was very interested in the kind of work we did. Hint, hint.
Most of us figured out pretty early that she was a spy, and so we lied through our teeth to her. I know I did. But one poor chap, a shy fellow with an M.A. in mathematics, a very brilliant young man, apparently took a shining to her more than most -- at any rate, he disappeared at the same time that she did. We all assumed that he had defected with her. We never heard from him, or her, again. His name was Harry Smith. It somehow seems fitting.
This was, as far as I know, my one and only date with a spy, a single picnic when my photograph was taken and I lied about my boring work in the motor pool.
2/10/2003 07:46:26 AM |
Sunday, February 09, 2003
Quality v. quantity
Visited my friend, who was moved from the hospital back to intensive care at the VA. Apparently when he arrived early a.m. his blood pressure was 40/unreadable ... but they've managed to bring him back up to 90/70 but he is unconscious and hooked up to a zillion machines, one to make him breathe, one for liquids, etc. This is about the time I ask the "quality of life v. quantity of life" question and wonder how long this goes on. They are going to reevaluate "the situation" in a day or two, I was told.
This morning, before visiting, I managed to get 7 new pages done on the screenplay and get some student papers read. Haven't been worth much since returning from the VA, though.
Was checking the stats on my literary archive at UNC. On two different days last week I had over 900 visits, most ever for a day. I have no idea why the spike but the entire week was high, almost 500 average for the seven days. Hopefully a few folks actually read something.
2/9/2003 04:33:21 PM |
Ways to die
A call last night from my dying friend's sister, he's taken a turn for the worst. Been moved from the nursing home into a hospital, apparently has pneumonia, blood pressure dropping dangerously low.
If the end is near, I belong to the "quick and painless" school of dying. Both my parents dropped dead on the spot. Instantaneous death. I've written an essay about my reaction to my father's experience, The Weight of My Father's Soul. My mother's death was less dramatic but more surprising since hers came first (we all assumed she would outlive dad, especially after his heart surgery) and she dropped dead in the hospital lobby as dad was checking her out. There's PR for you.
There are disadvantages to instantly dying. There's no time for goodbyes. There's no time to wrap up loose ends. But neither does one have to watch slow and painful deterioration.
In my archive, under my name is written "1939 - ?" I suppose I would like my own death to be such that I am the one who removes the ? and puts down a specific year in its place -- I would like to know it is happening. At the same time, once knowing this, I wouldn't want to hang around like a guest refusing to leave the party.
We'll stop by the hospital today and see what's going on.
2/9/2003 04:25:54 AM |
Saturday, February 08, 2003
Hyperdrama
On the international scale, I have the widest reputation for my work in hyperdrama. My essays on the subject have been translated into Italian, Spanish, German, French, Swedish, Turkish and maybe a few other languages I don't know about. I decided it was time to gather them into a book, which I'm calling Hyperdrama: Theory & Practice. Commentary introduces the essays, and I've included a short example of the new dramatic form, even though it doesn't lend itself well to the linear presentation of a traditional book.
I printed out the draft of the book today, and it will publish at about 110 pages, a thin volume but one that will gather my thoughts on the subject over the past twenty years. I should have it ready in the next month or two.
I hope, of course, to inspire young playwrights to explore this exciting new dramatic form, and much of my commentary focuses on advice to them, largely in the matter of pitfalls to avoid and shortcuts I've learned in the tech end of writing hyperdrama. The book will be dedicated to these future playwrights as well. This is not the time for hyperdrama, by and large. But decades from now, who knows? I argue that traditional theater is like Newtonian physics in its mapping of reality, hyperdrama like quantum physics, and in the future the theater world may well belong to the closer model, hyperdrama. But I don't expect to be around to see it.
2/8/2003 08:28:37 PM |
Edward Albee
Albee was in town today. I'm a great fan of his work, particularly of the plays A Delicate Balance, Tiny Alice, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Seascape and Zoo Story. I've heard him speak several times and have not been as fond of the man's presence. Although I greatly admire his artistic integrity, in his lectures he struck me as something of a snob, too publicly arrogant for my tastes.
All that changed today. He won me over. The difference was the format: not a lecture but an informal conversation with a moderator, often in response to questions from the audience. What I earlier had seen as arrogance became wit and charm. He was a delightful man to listen to, everyone's favorite grandfather. What a joy to listen to him today!
2/8/2003 07:56:39 PM |
Morning people
I'm a morning person. Give me a sunrise before a sunset any day. I awake already at the highest energy level of the day, raring to go.
This morning, for example, I headed out at 6:30a.m. for the recycling center, the van filled with Diet-Rite cans, on the periodic chore of returning them. After that I grabbed a cup of coffee to go and cruised around a bit, enjoying the early morning, listening to jazz on the radio. Sunrise is also the best time to drive, the streets quiet and mellow. In this sense I'm my father's son, who also loved to drive early in the morning. We did a lot of camping in my childhood -- this was in the late 1940s and early 1950s when camping was eccentric, at least to my parents' friends -- and if we were on the road, travelling, Dad would announce, "100 miles before breakfast!" and off we'd go, my mother and brother sleeping in the back seat, I riding co-pilot for my dad as the day's early morning adventure began.
I always thought it would be great to have an early morning girlfriend -- until I met one. Several decades ago, without a woman in my life, I decided to put a personal ad in the newspaper. Among those who replied -- and I was shocked into inaction by how many who did -- was one note that especially appealed to me: a woman identified herself as a surgeon and said she could be reached only between four and five in the morning. My kind of lady! I phoned her and we made a lunch date.
This turned out to be an incredible date. At first, though, I saw all the signs of being stood up. We arranged to meet at a local restaurant, and I got there early, as I usually do, and was sipping wine at the bar, far from the entrance, waiting for her and especially checking out each woman who entered alone, wondering if this were the surgeon. After our arranged time passed, by ten and fifteen and thirty minutes, I began to think I was being stood up. I ordered a glass of wine for the road.
Just as I was finishing it, a red sportscar pulled up onto the sidewalk and stopped right in front of the entrance. This wild looking lady -- long dark hair, in bright colors, looking a bit like a very wealthy gypsy -- rushed into the lounge and said to a man sitting alone at her end of the bar, "Are you Charles?" The guy's reply was perfect: "No, but I wish I was." I identified myself, and the surgeon told me to get into her car, she had a picnic packed. And off we sped to Washington Park overlooking the city for a gourmet lunch with a view.
This was an auspicious beginning indeed. The woman was from a small town in Idaho that I was familiar with, in northern Idaho logging country, and I thought I had found a very special lady. She took the day off, and we spent several days in her downtown apartment on the 20th-something floor of a high rise, with its deck and spectacular view of the Portland skyline. We seemed to be getting along great.
Then she revealed the terms of our arrangement. I was to move in and be her kept man. I could write all day. In the evening, I would escort her to the great social events of the city. This would require a new wardrobe -- I was much too casual for such a role. I also should cut my hair shorter and shave off my beard. I would get an allowance so I could quit the freelance journalism I was doing at the time to support myself. I would be her writer-in-residence and boy toy.
I have to confess there were moments when such an arrangement appealed to me. "It's all material," I thought, and I could enter into the arrangement as research for a future book. But in the end my masculine pride or self-respect or good-sense or stupidity, whatever it was, got me to say, No thanks, lady, I am perfectly happy being who I am and doing what I do, and I am not interested in hobnobbing with the city movers and shakers as your escort. And that was the end of that.
But the first picnic! It's still the best "blind date" I've ever had.
2/8/2003 08:26:47 AM |
Friday, February 07, 2003
The marketing game
Since I had such a productive early morning, I decided to bite the bullet and finish the marketing hoops of my novel. Earlier in the week I sent out small packages to the relevant agents who could be contacted only by snail mail; this morning I sent the same package to 15 possible small presses. That wraps it up! If nothing comes from all this, I'll put the novel in my literary archive and perhaps publish a handful of print-on-demand copies to stick in libraries. This latter option makes marketing less stressful than it used to be when "failure" meant the end of possible exposure unless you spent lots of money to publish it yourself.
Print-on-demand is amazingly inexpensive. Of course, the "self-published" label is attached, a pejorative attachment in most literary circles. This is curious in itself. It doesn't seem to matter if musicians produce their own CDs or if artists have their own galleries ... but let a writer self-publish and that's the end of credibility. Most newspapers will not review self-published books as a matter of policy.
I certainly don't recommend self-publishing to my students. It's important to get validation early in a career by having an industry professional want to publish your work. However, more and more of my colleagues, older writers with lots of publishing credits (I include myself on this list), are taking advantage of print-on-demand technology to publish books with anticipated small audiences. Others are bringing their out-of-print books back into print using print-on-demand. More and more university presses are using the new technology as well. It's bound to change things and shake up the usual way of publishing books.
So now it's a waiting game for a few months, but I don't plan to lose any sleep over it. What happens happens. My focus is on the new work, not marketing the old work. I've always been that way. A very fickle lover, I always prefer the manuscript that's right in front of me.
2/7/2003 11:16:23 AM |
The busy life
Crashed early, up at 2:30 to write for an hour, got almost ten pages done on the screenplay, up to the midpoint already, about halfway through a draft. So far, so good.
But I've fallen behind on reading and music. Did take out my five-string last night for the first time in a while. Musically, I've been focusing on guitar, trying to learn a new style (I'm a finger-picker learning flat pick bluegrass style) but the banjo sounded so nice, need to keep those chops up to speed as well.
I have a good shot at finishing my screenplay draft this month. Amazing how quickly a script can go, and how slowly a novel goes. My goal with the novel is to have a full draft before summer but that will be a horse race.
Visiting my friend at the nursing home this afternoon. Got him a present. He's a golfer, so I got him the NYer book of golf cartoons.
Well, back to bed for some more sleep before the daylight day begins. Nice to have gotten a lot of writing in already -- and it's before 4!
2/7/2003 03:39:21 AM |
Thursday, February 06, 2003
Writing, art, music
The creative process in writing has complications as a result of a fact that differs writing from all other creative media: the language of analysis is the same as the language of creation, words. Imagine if musical criticism was delivered -- in music! Or art critics reviewed an artist -- by painting! Because we use words to discuss what is created in words, it's more difficult to get the same kind of distance that analysis obtains in art and music. Using words to discuss music, using words to discuss visual art, are one thing -- and using words to discuss literary art (also words) quite another.
This also puts false pressure on beginning writers. For example, as a matter of course, artists sketch before they start the "real" painting, and musicians as a matter of course fiddle around the keyboard or instrument, just goofing off, looking for a thread that will lead to something more than fiddling. Beginning writers, in contrast, take themselves so seriously in their first drafts! Few beginners approach initial writing as sketching or doodling or fiddling around. I think this is because the language of analysis is the same as the language of the art, not providing an obvious distance between the two acts.
The result of this is that beginning writers are too hard on themselves too early. So what if the first draft sucks? An artist doesn't worry about a rough sketch that sucks, a musician doesn't worry about fiddling around on the keyboard sucking. It's just fiddling around, after all. Beginning writers tend not to fiddle around. They tend to believe the early writing must be really good, really perfect, and if it isn't, they tend to get disappointed or depressed when there's no reason to.
I used to do this all the time early in my career. Then I had the good fortune to see some first drafts by famous, established literary giants and saw first hand how bad they could be. What a revelation! Faulkner sucked! Steinbeck sucked! What they did, is they took these terrible first and early drafts and kept rewriting them until they didn't suck. This was a great lesson in the creative process for me. It's one I try to instill in my students very early.
2/6/2003 11:18:47 AM |
Aging
One of the extraordinary things about aging, I've discovered (and I'm 63), is how often I think, Here we go again. The repetition in life in astounding. It's as if each new generation has to reinvent the wheel. If we learn anything from history, this learning is so slow as to be almost invisible. The same patterns of behavior get repeated over and over and over again. I suppose this is what makes reading Homer feel so "contemporary." Individuals make radical changes in their lives now and again (I certainly did when I quit drinking) but societies, institutions, appear to change little in the short run -- well, unless you are living in the middle of a revolution.
I recently reread a favorite thin book of mine, The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durrant, which reaffirms the common patterns by which nations and civilizations rise and fall. In its own present tense, of course, each civilization believes it's the most enlightened collection of folks ever to live on the planet. And then it, too, meets its match.
As Dylan sang, the first become last. The comfortable get lazy and the uncomfortable get desperate. Maybe our own civilization is entering its lazy-comfortable stage.
2/6/2003 08:36:02 AM |
One step at a time
Back in the writing groove, got six pages done on the novel this morning. About 110 pages into the draft now ... and hoping this is a short novel, under 300 pages in manuscript. Last one was about 107,000 words. I'd be happy if this one came in around 70,000 words. But we'll see.
Visited my friend with cancer yesterday. Seemed about the same, still having problems speaking (slurred words) but I managed to understand one hopeful thing he whispered to me: "I'm not giving up." Later a recent friend of his came by, whom I had heard about but not met, and we had a good long talk afterwards.
One thing I've decided to do, if worst comes to worst. My friend was putting together a book of poems and cabaret sketches (he's a great cabaret fan, a former actor and singer as well as a poet) and told me a lot about his intentions and approach. So if I can get his computer files, I'll edit the book for him if he can't finish it himself. I haven't brought this up yet because I didn't want to suggest the end was certain (even though a doctor at the VA told me he didn't expect him to last the month; but doctors have been wrong before). His sister has the power of attorney for him, and I always can get to his computer through her if need be, I'm sure. I'm really the only one who could put this book together for him, the only writer he's really talked much about it to, so I know exactly what his plan of organization is. He was waiting to write some new poems to add to it, I know, but I can assemble what is there without these if need be. I also can write an introduction about his plans, his vision for the book. So ... if he can't finish this up himself, I'll do it for him.
In my University class today, am showing one of my favorite films, Atlantic City. The script was published in Scenario magazine, and it's one of the best models for good crisp, clean screenwriting I know. John Guare, the playwright, wrote it. Most of my favorite screenwriters came from the stage: John Guare, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter.
Should be able to get some writing done on my new screenplay today, too, before I head off to the big-U. Onward!
2/6/2003 08:11:57 AM |
Wednesday, February 05, 2003
Where does the time go?
One of those days when I haven't stopped from about 6am to now, late evening, and I was busy all day without getting any writing done. I did do a huge printing-marketing job, sending out 15 sample chapter packages of my novel to agents, the first round of snail mail packages after the earlier email blitz. The email blitz got me 17 reads (chapters, only one complete ms) and 14 passes thus far. I'm struck by how polite fiction agents are compared to screenwriting agents. Interesting. Also preparing the final mailing, to small presses.
But where did the time go? No writing, not even any reading, not even any guitar practicing ... and yet I haven't stopped all day!
2/5/2003 10:39:26 PM |
Plays on the web
I am a "retired" playwright. This means that, although through most of my 35-year professional writing career I've written for the stage (with over 3 dozen plays produced), I no longer do that. Today I am writing fiction, first, and screenplays and essays.
However, I discovered something that appeals to my playwriting instincts: online animated drama. An example is Best Maid Plans from a website called Stick Figure Death Theatre, a witty and fun short animated drama. Since part of my escape from playwriting is an escape from collaboration (the need for producers, directors, actors to bring a project to an audience), this form of drama, which a person can do alone, suddenly appeals to me. I'd have to learn some new technical skills, which I'm now looking into.
The uses of the Internet continue to astound me.
2/5/2003 04:08:18 AM |
Tuesday, February 04, 2003
The Devil's Dictionary
If you are not familiar with Ambrose Bierce's extraordinary book, The Devil's Dictionary, and even if you are, here is a wonderful new online edition. Some examples of Bierce's wit:
ACADEME, n. An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. ACCOUNTABILITY, n. The mother of caution.
BACKBITE, v.t. To speak of a man as you find him when he can't find you. BIGAMY, n. A mistake in taste for which the wisdom of the future will adjudge a punishment called trigamy. BRIDE, n. A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her. CLARIONET, n. An instrument of torture operated by a person with cotton in his ears. There are two instruments that are worse than a clarionet -- two clarionets. CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. DENTIST, n. A prestidigitator who, putting metal into your mouth, pulls coins out of your pocket. FIDELITY, n. A virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed. MARRIAGE, n. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
What a gem this is. I've loved it since I discovered it in high school. This is a wonderful edition of it.
2/4/2003 11:22:08 AM |
Generations
My dying poet friend has been moved from the VA hospital into a nursing home specializing in end of life care.
I'm only a few months older than he is, and over the years we've spent many hours talking about how lucky we were to have been born when we were. We're the last generation not to have been raised on television. I was in high school when we bought our first set. We did our military service between wars. We were teenagers for the birth of rock-n-roll. We were young adults during the incredible 1960s. We are the last generation to be born before Pearl Harbor, children of "the great generation." We came of age in a time when publishing houses still brought out "literary novels" as a matter of course, when literature was divorced from commercial demands. Good books were published because they were good, not because they would sell.
I talked to a doctor at the VA yesterday, who gives my friend "a few weeks" at best. Quite a change from the "better part of a year" that was the prognosis only a week ago!
When my friend is gone, I'll have outlived every close friend I have. There ain't none left. And I'm only 63.
2/4/2003 09:43:14 AM |
Film and memory
I have many vivid memories of my childhood but in truth I don't know if I am remembering the actual events or the home movies my dad took of the events. I suspect the latter.
My dad was one of the first home movie hobbyists, purchasing an early 8mm camera and taking movies regularly since just after World War II. Right after the war, he was stationed in Guam where he was captain of a supply ship and he'd regularly send home small reels of movies. These were always delivered in a square, bright yellow Kodak box. Since mom worked, I would get home first and get the mail and be the first to know that a new movie or movies had arrived.
I'd quickly call a few buddies who would rush over for the viewing before mom got home. I was only nine at the time but already something of an organizer, gathering buddies around to do this or that. I'd set up the projector in the kitchen where we could show film on the white wall and always quickly disassemble once we saw mom pull into the driveway. We didn't want her to know what we were doing.
These films from Guam were extraordinary. Not only was the island setting exotic, the people were exotic. The women especially were exotic. They walked around in grass skirts with no tops on. I suppose you might say I ran the first girlie-flick movie house on the block.
One summer, long after my dad had retired, I house sat their home in Medford while they traveled east and to keep myself busy I edited all his home movies, dozens and dozens of reels, perhaps over 100. I spliced Christmas movies into larger reels, dating them. I edited out scenes of various relatives, making each their own reel -- a reel of granddad (on my father's side), of Aunt Billie (my mother's sister), and so on. But the best and most entertaining movie I edited was of my brother, a born ham and show-off for the camera. Bill was already a published poet by this time, his first poems in Poetry magazine and his first book coming out while he was still a teenager. I took all his histrionic scenes out of the home movies and organized them chronologically; then I added scenes from Guam and other appropriate scenes to create a silent movie showing the quest of a poet for the Muse Maiden, and I added subtitles to clarify the story. The movie was a great hit, and even my brother liked it.
It's great to have visual reminders of so many childhood events -- but it's also a bit confusing. What do I actually remember? I'm no longer sure.
2/4/2003 07:30:39 AM |
Monday, February 03, 2003
Author's picks
All writers has favorites from their body of work. These aren't necessarily the most popular things they've written, or the best reviewed, and they may not even be the best things they've written (as determined by time). But for whatever reason, each author is especially proud of certain works. Here are mine.
- Hyperdrama
- Chekhov's The Seagull The most ambitious hyperdrama I've ever written -- and the most audacious, presuming to add scenes to the great Russian playwright. The difficulty of producing this is huge but I've put it on the Internet, giving it considerable and gratifying exposure. This project took me ten years to finish (I worked from an original translation of the play, so I would own it).
- The Last Song of Violeta Parra My most accessible hyperdrama, because it is one-act, but also the first I wrote with a sense of stretching the form beyond the realm of entertainment. Written during an incredible summer when I was "electronic playwright-in-residence" at a theater in Santiago, Chile.
- Plays
- The Half-life Conspiracy I take more risks in this play than in any play I've written, including a play-within-a-play-within-a-play -- and get away with most of them. Highly personal and highly non-autobiographical, showing how writers disguise the extraordinary emotional moments of their lives.
- Sad Laughter Lots of class in this play narrated in verse. Probably the most underrated and under-produced play in my body of work.
- Country Northwestern Also underrated and under-produced, the most regionally important play I've written. Highly influenced in theme and approach by my late soul brother, Dick Crooks. All the logger jokes here I first heard from him.
- Screenplays
- Sad Laughter Based on my stage play, I like this screenplay as much as anything I've written for film -- and it's been close to getting done several times. Makes an interesting comparison with the stage script, showing how much has to change when moving from one form to the other.
- "Don't shoot! I'm white!" I thought this would find more interest than it did. A thriller with social commentary. I still love it.
- Fiction
- The Man Who Shot Elvis Both in theme and craft, very typical of my short fiction.
- The First Stoplight in Wallowa County My best known regional piece that got more exposure than my short fiction usually gets by being published not in a literary magazine but in the Sunday magazine of Oregon's largest newspaper.
- Essays
- Birthing Little Richard It was a joy to write about -- and a joy to live -- the 1950s in L.A. during the birth of rock-n-roll. I consider myself a member of a very fortunate generation: the last not raised on television, the first to be teenagers during the birth of rock-n-roll (not to mention being too young for the Korean War and too old for the Vietnam War).
- Liquor & Lit A personal look at personal demons.
- Poems
- Audio
And that's my list of favorites.
2/3/2003 04:20:13 AM |
Ebb and flow
Writing energy can come and go like the tide. As a young writer I used to worry about this, worry that a sequence of days when I was not producing what I wrote during energetic writing days meant that I might be approaching the frightening notion of "writer's block." But the high energy would return and worrying cease.
Now I know that writing energy has its rhythm. Even if I don't write during a particular day, I think about writing, think about the current structural, rhetorical and dramatic issues facing me in my work. And I never go very long, a few days at most, without doing any writing at all, though a particular project may go dry for days, weeks, even a few months at a time.
But understanding this rhythm, and having faith in it, takes time. Beginning writers, struggling hard enough to learn the craft, still have to learn their own best writing method. Some are planners, some not so much; some write in a frenzy, others more deliberately; some write frequently, some infrequently. It doesn't matter unless it matters to the writer, unless one is not happy with the amount of working getting done.
I've been at peace with my writing method for a long time. Something or other gets done daily. About ninety percent of the time that includes something getting done on paper or the computer screen. I didn't write at all this past weekend but it's Monday now, and I'm raring to go. So I sign off here and begin.
2/3/2003 03:52:58 AM |
Sunday, February 02, 2003
Difficult transitions
Visited my dying friend today and met his sister. His dad was there, too, whom I had met some years ago. The sister has power of attorney regarding his choices during this difficult transition. He's pretty out of it -- but the VA has to vacate his bed in a few days and move him elsewhere, if he's lucky to another campus across the river in Vancouver, Washington, where I spent almost a year a decade ago -- it's a pleasant place to be. All he has is VA care. There's not much to be hopeful about at the moment.
He's stubborn and independent and trying to act more together than he really is. When he had to sign some papers, he stalled for the longest time, until I asked him quietly if he needed help. Ends up he had no control over his right hand, so I got some scratch paper and let him practice signing with his left hand, and when he was comfortable with that, it's what he did.
Everyone is hoping the two weeks of radiation on the brain improve things, but at the same time I don't think anyone is taking any bets.
2/2/2003 07:38:27 PM |
Hobbies and distractions
My passion when I was a teenager was astronomy. I had my own telescope and was one of the few teen members in the U.S. of Harvard Observatory's AAVSO (American Association of Variable Star Observers). I was assigned three variable stars that I observed with great dedication, sending my findings to the observatory. Harvard always published the annual totals of observations by its members, and my goal was to be the top teen observer in the world but I could never surpass a teenager in South Africa who must have been at his telescope eight hours a day, so many useful observations came from him. But for several years I was the top teen observer in the U.S.
Considering this, it's surprising how little I've used astronomy in my writing. I've been thinking about changing this oversight. But I don't regularly watch the stars any more, although two years ago I did make an effort to observe the Perseids meteor shower and was rewarded greatly.
One of my greatest pleasures in recent years is watching the NCAA basketball tournament. When I was a bachelor and living on grant money (i.e. my schedule was my own), I often would rent a motel room for March Madness and watch basketball twelve hours a day for a week or two. This year my wife and I are getting tickets to the first two rounds of the women's NCAA basketball tournament, which is being played down the road in Eugene.
Another recent "hobby" is listening to audio lectures. I've discovered a gold mine of them, college courses on tape, and so far I've listened to a series on Existentialism, brushing up on an old passion of mine, a History of the English Language, and the Search of Extraterrestrial Life. I'm presently listening to The Meaning of History with Modern British Drama waiting in the wings. Each lecture is usually half an hour, one per side, and an hour walk is good for two lectures, exercising body and mind at the same time.
Hobbies and distractions are important, especially when friends are dying, war is approaching, and space shuttles are blowing up.
2/2/2003 07:34:33 AM |
Saturday, February 01, 2003
Musée Des Beaux Arts
This poem by W.H. Auden begins, "About suffering, they were never wrong, the Old Masters..." and goes on to note how tragedy often happens on a normal day, without announcement or preface, and we may not even notice that it's happening until later (read the poem here). I always think of these lines when tragedy happens, as this morning with the shuttle blowing up as it tried to land.
The first time I made the connection between Auden's poem and actual tragedy in my experience was in the fall of 1963. We were studying the poem in class. The door suddenly swung open and a teacher shouted, "The President's been shot!" The JFK assassination was a turning point, a loss of innocence, for everyone of my generation.
In my case, there is more to the story, a coincidence so circumstantial, so unlikely, as to defy explanation. Sitting next to me in that classroom when I heard the news of JFK's assassination was a young Arab student whom I happened to be tutoring -- and his name was Sirhan Sirhan, the future assassin of Robert Kennedy.
About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters ...
2/1/2003 11:07:24 AM |
Scattered thoughts
Attitude is almost everything: in writing, in life, we define our world by our attitude. We make our own realities. Even the holocaust can be survived if one has the right attitude (i.e. the memoir Man's Search for Meaning).
One of the symptoms of alcoholism is to become obsessive, and in my drinking days I often obsessed about all the wrong-doing surrounding me, both in my immediate world and in the world at large. If I were drinking today, I'd be obsessing about my friend dying of cancer, about the war against terrorism which, it seems to me, we are losing. I'd be stressed out, a wreck, reason enough to pour another drink. That's how the drinking cycle can work.
But I'm not drinking, though my friend is still dying, the world as I know it and value it is still crumbling. How do I cope? With a different attitude, which I would call a very dark sense of humor. We are a very imperfect species, always have been and by all evidence always will be. What I find amusing is our earnest belief that we are somehow greater than our nature, that we can transcend Nature. Natural disasters (from hurricanes to wars, which I consider a natural disaster, inherent in the human condition) periodically remind us how this is not true but we always rebuild, get comfortable again, get cocky again, and once again believe we are immune to these natural laws, that we are God's gift to existence -- or Allah's.
A serious writer is like a reporter assigned to the beat of Existence, the Human Condition. We try to tell the stories that will make some sense out of the contradictions of our behavior, within the particular context of our time and place. We learn craft so that these stories will hold interest, so that "what happens next?" will drive the narrative, but the serious writer always has a deeper motive than entertainment, which is the package, and this motive, this content, is based on a great wish, which may well be a delusion: we can learn from the past, both personal and historical. That the stories we tell can change the way people live their lives.
Now there is no doubt that individuals can learn and change from experience. And in moments of time, societies appear to change as well. But there is another level at which nothing seems to change. Reading Homer, reading Aeschylus, reading Aristophanes, is like reading a modern author writing of our own times. And if this is true, what has changed over these many centuries since they were writing? Why are the human concerns they write about still with us?
A forgotten and under-rated writer today, John O'Hara, has an epitaph that says, to paraphrase, that he was a writer who always told the truth and he told it about his time better than anyone. I would amend this to an epitaph any serious writer should be proud to own: s/he was a writer who told the truth and told it as well as s/he could.
Writers are reporters of Life, and they are like double-agents, participating in the very events they are reporting about. Individual writers bring individual attitudes to this endeavor, which shape their work accordingly, and each strives to tell his or her truth in an individual way. At a given time and place, some of this writing will resonate with an audience more than others. Fifty years later what was unread may become read, what was popular may become forgotten.
In the first two decades of its publication, Moby Dick sold less than 500 copies. Today it is a classic. Melville was a popular author when he wrote it and was bitter about its failure. But he did his job: he told a story that dramatized the truth of life as he understood it. A writer can do nothing more important than this.
2/1/2003 07:35:05 AM |
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__The Writing Life
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