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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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Monday, June 30, 2003
Saroyan
Here is the incomparable William Saroyan on the matter of rejection:
"Last night, the last night of February, I read a snide belittling reference to my writing and of course my name was spelled out in full and very neatly, William Saroyan. Something about the most atrocious or spurious rapture of William Saroyan. Think of it. Somebody having the gall to say such a thing about my writing, about me. Dear lady, reader, dear gentleman, leader, that's not right, it isn't right for living folks to put down other living folks, and least of all is it right for any kind of folks whatsoever to put down this writer or his writing. And I'll tell you why, too: it hurts, that's why. It is no fun to start getting hints that your writing isn't the greatest, the most real, the most useful, the most helpful, the most entertaining, the most lifegiving, the most death-defying, the most death-delaying writing of this or any other time. But Christ, the competition, have you ever thought of the awful competition, reader, as you sit or lie somewhere eating bonbons and turning the pages of this book, or of any book. The competition is fierce, it is ferocious, and everybody has his own favorite, or favorites, and that means a lot of other writers have got to be left out, or scorned, or belittled. It was the competition that I thought of last night when I read the slur on my name and my writing. Well, there is no other writing anywhere in this living world that is better than mine, and I mean on almost any level, not excluding care about the sound of English being accidentally wrong in an arrangement of words, such as something sometimes somebody and right there, let me tell you, a lesser writer could leap upon just those three words and work steadily for seven years, being encouraged on the way by his agent, a bright lady or a clever man, and then have a clever publisher (part of an oil company, however, for extra millions of dollars for just about everybody) bring it out like the greatest novel ever, and he means ever. Something Sometimes Somebody, wow. And they have the audacity to be snide and sneering about my beautiful writing, using such slanderous terms as the bullshit rapture of himself. That hurts, folks, I expect better than that from the human race. Any rapture I have ever known, any I have ever put in writing, has been straight, not bullshit. People try to understand why writers commit suicide by jumping off boats or by alcoholism or by being heroic continuously or by rope or gun or drug or knife or water, and I can tell you, and not in the strictest confidence, I can tell you straight out, right outside, right out in company, right out where everybody can hear, it is reading slurring remarks about their writing that drives writers to the grave. Dirty remarks passed by dirty dirty but damned nicely educated and very highly-paid ladies and gentlemen have the effect of killing writers. Yes, that's right. Dirty words on toilet walls or in slick paper magazines read by smart people do kill writers, they do murder writers, they do assassinate writers, and boy let me tell you I am all for it, even when by some miscalculating or misunderstanding the dirty words are directed to me rather than to the party really deserving them."
6/30/2003 08:42:59 PM |
Double talk
Received the first response from an agent reading the memoirs -- and it sounds like double-talk to me. First, she said she really loved the chapters she read. But then she said she thought she wouldn't be able to find a publisher for it since, after all, I'm not exactly a writer of note. Couldn't she have figured this out before she asked for the chapters in the first place? And, well, isn't this rather the point when you subtitle a book "the education of a marginal writer"? So who the hell knows what she really thought. One down, two to go. Onward.
6/30/2003 04:12:07 PM |
Parker on Hepburn
Here's a memory you won't be seeing on TV this week, Dorothy Parker reviewing a performance by Katharine Hepburn on stage in New York:
"I saw Katharine Hepburn in 'The Lake' last night. Miss Hepburn runs the gamut of emotions from A to B."
Go to my Dorothy Parker script.
6/30/2003 02:01:09 PM |
Ilwaco, Washington
On the Long Beach peninsula, this was the highlight of our recent trip to the Garlic Festival. Get information.
6/30/2003 01:14:04 PM |
Update
Back at work on Love in the Ruins, only 20 pages to go in the script, so I should have the draft done this month. Requires tons of work yet, however. But at least I'll have something down to work on. I began in the present tense but recently changed to past -- present sounded too artsy fartsy. Lots of details yet to fill in, and the voice still needs work. But the foundation of the story is well-structured and sound, thanks to working in out first in the screenplay. The next rewrite will be the most fun. Still some groaning going on in this draft.
Also need to get back to the libretto ... maybe will work today on it. Hope to finish that draft in July as well.
Ger's book already "in formatting," according to an email today from the publisher, which really means they double-check the print-ready file I sent them. This should only take a week or two, so I may get my first copy proof in July.
Already thinking about the project to do after Ruins. Not sure -- except I expect to draft it as a screenplay first. I have one in progress, based on my Army experiences -- I may pick that one up, with a short novel in mind in the long run. I like this form -- 150-250 page novels (published pages).
I'm also very excited about getting into earnest rehearsal on Dorothy Parker next week. I have such a great cast, I expect much from them. And we have lots of time to get it together.
I go on jury duty a week from today. An article about jury duty was the first article I sold to Northwest Magazine back in the 1960s, which began a long relationship with the magazine and its editor Joe Bianco. Eventually I wrote over 100 features for them. I haven't been on jury duty again since then.
Onward.
6/30/2003 01:01:21 PM |
On this day
From Dr. Mac's Cultural Calendar.
- On this day in 1914, Mahatma Gandhi was arrested, campaigning for Indian rights in South Africa. It was his first arrest for civil disobedience.
- The 26th Amendment, granting the vote to 18 year olds, went into effect on this day in 1971.
- Playwright Lillian Hellman (The Little Foxes) died at 79.
- Singer Lena Horne was born on this day in 1917, as was drummer and bandleader Buddy Rich in Brooklyn.
- On this day in 1939, Frank Sinatra made his first appearance with Harry James’ band.
6/30/2003 06:37:56 AM |
The Krispy Kreme story
"They begin lining up in the cold darkness, hours before the store opens. Some come wearing pajamas, some lug couches and TVs, others bring beer. And when dawn finally breaks and the ribbon is cut, the rabid customers bolt through the doors. Many of them, in what must be an anticipatory sugar rush, scream at the top of their lungs: "Krispy Kreme doughnuts, yowweeee!" Last year it happened in Fargo and Philadelphia and Amarillo and dozens of other cities in North America. This year it will happen in Boston, Sydney, and elsewhere. All for a simple doughnut." Well, I've never had one. And I can't imagine standing in line for a donut. But one opens here soon, so maybe I'll get my first taste. Access article now.
6/30/2003 06:12:35 AM |
What is irony?
"The end of irony would be a disaster for the world - bad things will always occur, and those at fault will always attempt to cover them up with emotional and overblown language. If their opponents have to emote back at them, you're basically looking at a battle of wills, and the winner will be the person who can beat their breast the hardest without getting embarrassed. Irony allows you to launch a challenge without being dragged into this orbit of self-regarding sentiment that you get from Tony Blair, say, when he talks about "fighting for what's right". Irony can deflate a windbag in the way that very little else can." Reflections by Zoe Williams. Access now.
6/30/2003 06:06:26 AM |
My death
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
Like most writers, I’ve written a bit about death. Two of my protagonists, in the play Famililly and in the novel Emmett’s Gift, are older men dying of cancer who decide to take their own lives. Here is Emmett, hanging himself in the barn behind the farmhouse in which he rents a room:
He stood very still on the ladder with the rope around his neck. An observer might have assumed he was having second thoughts but he wasn’t. Emmett was reflecting on his good fortune, his good life. He had enjoyed both of his careers and had been able to share them with a good woman, a wife who had been his best friend. When all seemed lost and his life was slipping away, Shandy had appeared, giving him not only intense pleasure, the memory of which still energized him, but renewed courage as well, courage to take control of his life again and to die with dignity, just as he was momentarily prepared to do. Emmett felt lucky for his life. He had experienced Eros, Fidelia and Agape. He had no regrets. Well, one. But in a way he was settling the score now, making up for his failure to put a bullet in Mary’s brain.
A horse whinnied. High in the barn an owl hooted. Somewhere far in the distance a truck shifted down its gears.
Emmett kicked away the ladder, feeling like the happiest man under the stars.
In Famililly, George’s death is more weary than Emmett’s, in response to changes in the world that he does not understand:
GEORGE: You get to be my age, you look back for what went wrong. What happened to the traditional American values? You used to go out and work hard for what you wanted. You used to get married for life.
Well, I fault ourselves. I fault the kind of parents we became. We tried to save our kids from going through all the hardships we went through, and that was a mistake. We had the experience of standing in soup lines during the Great Depression, of being bombed by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor — you don't forget experiences like that. They become rooted in the fabric of your being. Because those experiences are clear, they are without ambiguity.
When a foreign country makes a surprise attack and sinks your navy, you don't get lost in rhetoric about whether war is right or wrong — you roll up your sleeves and get to work. You do what has to be done to defend your country. Everybody pitches in and works together as one big American family.
Maybe you have to suffer to learn these things, and when parents of my generation started protecting their children from going through the hard times that we went through, we ended up doing them a disservice. We spoiled them, is what it amounts to. We gave them the idea you could get what you wanted without working for it, that the world was some kind of play thing for their personal and selfish amusement. Our children never learned how to pitch in and work together, all they looked out for is number one.
When's the last time you heard of a marriage staying together for the sake of the children? Something like that is unthinkable today. Community and family values have gone down the drain.
(A pause.)
GEORGE: Well, there's nothing I can do about it. It's not my world any more. The thing is — and this is sad in a way — it makes it a hell of a lot easier for me to think about throwing in the towel. Because I just don't understand America any more.
Since outliving all my close male friends of my own generation, I’ve found myself thinking about my own death. I, too, want to be cremated, despite my belief that cemeteries are useful institutions for the living. If Harriet chooses to, she can get a plaque from the military and set it wherever she wants. I assume, of course, that she will outlive me. She should. She’s lived a healthy life, and I abused my body in a major ways for over half my years. Yet the gods are always full of surprises, and maybe the last surprise they’ll give me is to outlive my wife.
I want my ashes put at least two places: with Dad in the Shakespeare Garden and with Dick at the top of the White Bird grade.
The worst thing that could happen to me is to lose the ability to write but to remain alive. I can’t imagine such a life. Indeed, I think I would make every effort to terminate such a life. Writing is so much a part of my being that I can’t imagine existence without it. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ll be able to write mentally even though I can’t literally write anything down.
I’m not sure I want to drop dead as my parents did. At the top of my literary archive in the University of North Carolina’s Ibiblio Collection is the title: Charles Deemer, 1939 - ? Perhaps the most fortunate alternative of all would be to be able to write in the closing date myself. To know I was going to die and so to take care of business, consciously and deliberately. To experience death as experience, not as an accident.
I wonder how many years of writing I have left. If the gods give me ten more years, perhaps I can finish everything that currently is on my plate. By then, of course, new ideas will have occurred to me. But I’d be happy to finish the books I already have in mind.
In any case, I don’t need new experiences. If I lived to write past 100, I wouldn’t be finished writing about the experiences I’ve already had. In this regard, Harriet is much more open to new experiences than I am, always eager to travel and discover new things. I am the opposite. What I want, what I require, is peace and quiet and stability, so I can focus and write and make sense of the experiences I’ve already had. The end of my life is like one long meditation, eventually shaping words into forms that finally give meaning to everything that has happened to me. I can’t think of a swan song that better suits my character.
6/30/2003 05:58:13 AM |
Sunday, June 29, 2003
A new record!
Well, over 1000 folks sang "This Land Is Your Land" for over an hour, and according to our hosts this is a new record for the Guinness Book and documentation is on its way to London. I felt more good vibrations in a downtown Portland event than I've felt since the original Artquake over 20 years ago! I was honored to take part.
6/29/2003 03:47:26 PM |
Music on the front porch
 "Beautiful Brown Eyes"
6/29/2003 11:10:12 AM |
"I Ride An Old Paint"
6/29/2003 10:32:19 AM |
"Darlin' Corey", a-pickin' and a-singin'.
6/29/2003 10:05:12 AM |
Woody Guthrie, "I hate a song that makes you think you're not any good."
6/29/2003 10:00:30 AM |
"Cripple Creek" on the Deering 5-string.
6/29/2003 09:05:07 AM |
On this day
- The Globe Theater burned on this date in 1613, during a nighttime performance of Henry VIII, a play by the Globe's most famous author, William Shakespeare.
- George Ellery Hale, American astronomer and developer of the Hale telescope, was born on this day in 1868. I went to a grade school named after him.
- On this day in 1956, President Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highways Act, which created the system of expressways that now links the population centers of this country. It was one of the most ambitious building programs ever conceived.
- On this day in 1980, Iceland elected Vigdis Finnbogadotir as president, making her Europe's first democratically elected woman head of state.
Doctor Mac's Cultural Calendar
6/29/2003 08:18:22 AM |
California Authors
A website dedicated to them. Go to CaliforniaAuthors.com.
6/29/2003 08:09:00 AM |
Sunday
Today I do the Guthrie the gig, the short reading to begin the (hopefully) 3000 guitar chorus doing "This Land Is Your Land." Looks like good weather. Wonder if that many guitar players will actually show up. I think they plan to sing for an hour. Wonder how many new verses will be created. Guthrie's original radical verses, of course, are seldom sung any more except by folkies now and again. Verses like:
As I was walkin'
There was a sign there
And on the sign said
No Trespassing
But on the other side
It didn't say nothin'
That side was made for you and me
Or:
One bright sunny morning
In the shadow of the steeple
At the Relief Office
I saw my people
As they stood hungry
I stood there wondering
If God Blessed America for me
Guthrie's original title, in fact, was God Blessed America?
Guthrie lived long enough to hear folkies start singing his songs and generally he hated the kind of "fancy" musical treatment the likes of Peter, Paul & Mary gave his music. He would have hated more the musicals that have sprung up around his music. He wrote clearly that he believed in honest, no-frills, straight-forward dellivery of his songs so the lyrics came through.
I feel the same way about jazz singers. Too many use a song as the excuse to demonstrate their vocal acrobatics. I like the straight-forward singers like Billie Holiday and Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles, where phrasing and tone are the tools, not vocal histrionics. But this brand of singer appears to be a dying breed.
6/29/2003 08:02:44 AM |
Ger's death
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
My best friend in Portland, Ger Moran, also died within weeks after being diagnosed with cancer. My personal experience with cancer has not been encouraging.
I met Ger in the mid-1980s. He’d recently come to Portland to change careers and to be near his girlfriend, who was a theater fan and a particular fan of my work. When she recognized me sitting at an adjacent table at a sidewalk café one afternoon, she got Ger to introduce them.
Ger had done some acting in San Francisco and was a great theater fan himself. We immediately hit it off. I introduced him to the regulars at Seafood’s and Nobby’s, and he became an occasional frequenter of the bars, where we’d always talk some more.
Ger became my closest friend next to Crooks. Interestingly enough, when I finally had the opportunity to introduce my two closest friends to one another, they didn’t get along at all. Crooks thought Ger was a phony for wearing an ascot, as he often did, and probably gay besides, which was a pejorative term when Dick gave it a certain inflection (even though Dick did have gay friends), and Ger thought Dick was a blue-collar ruffian and a phony for his barroom stories, which Ger didn’t believe even though I knew for a fact that many of them were true. I didn’t try to become a peace maker and instead enjoyed each as my friend, never again making the mistake of bringing them together.
Ger and I became closest after Dick’s death when Ger moved downtown close to Portland State University, where I taught on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We’d meet at least one of those times for coffee before my classes. Ger had been laid off in his late fifties and had had a hard time finding employment since then, finally taking an early retirement at 62. Then everything began to break his way. He found a wonderful downtown apartment where part of his rent was subsidized, which allowed him to live fine on social security and a small retirement benefit. He started writing poetry again and was given a poetry column in his apartment building’s monthly newsletter. He took an interest in dating again after a disastrous, brief marriage to an alcoholic, a city hall ceremony Harriet and I had witnessed. He even quit smoking. Life was looking good.
One a Thursday afternoon over coffee, Ger told me he thought he might be coming down with the flu. He’d neglected to get his flu shorts. Maybe he should go up to the V.A. hospital and get them. He decided to see how he felt after the weekend. I told him if he needed a ride to the V.A. on Monday, to give me a holler.
I didn’t hear from Ger on Monday so figured everything was fine. On Tuesday he called me from the intensive care unit at the V.A. hospital. On Saturday he had fainted in his apartment. They’d found lung cancer that had spread to his brain.
The outlook wasn’t good. They tried a week of chemo, which changed nothing. In less than a month, he was gone.
Ger had spread his mother’s ashes in the same Shakespeare Garden where I had spread part of my father’s ashes. This is where Ger wanted to be as well. His sister and stepfather, some friends (including Zeena) and I all went up and had a brief ceremony, during which I read several of Ger’s poems. Then we spread his ashes.
I helped his sister clean out his apartment and found much more writing than I was aware of. In the early summer of 2003, I assembled and edited a book called Midnight Cabaret: The Writings of Ger Moran.
Ger was a student of eastern philosophy and took his fate well. “It’s all in the hands of the gods,” he told me while he was still cogent. He lingered on for days with no ability to communicate before his sister asked my advice about removing the life support systems. As it happened, after Dick’s sudden death, Ger and I had talked at length about this, and both agreed that we wouldn’t want life support systems keeping us alive just for the sake of some kind of official life. Quality of life concerned us more than quantity of life. When his sister learned this, she made what I, the doctor and Ger’s friends considered to be the right decision, although it remained a very hard decision for her to make.
So now I have two loved ones in the Shakespeare Garden. It’s the closest thing to a family plot I have.
6/29/2003 07:00:09 AM |
Saturday, June 28, 2003
Happy birthday, Luigi Pirandello!
Winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature, best known for his play Six Characters in Search of an Author.
The Pirandello Society of America.
Biography & Bibliography.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1934: Presentation Speech.
6/28/2003 08:21:45 AM |
Erratic blog
Publishing this blog is still an erratic affair. Sometimes the editor works fine, sometimes not. For example, the memoir excerpt today published fine but the next two posts did not. When the editor doesn't work, however, I've found another way to publish -- so maybe I'd better leave well enough alone. I used this "backup" method to publish these last two posts and bring the blog up to date.
6/28/2003 07:40:44 AM |
Tired of telemarketers?
Here is a do-not-call registry for various states. Access now. I've been on the Oregon list since it began -- and it works.
6/28/2003 07:02:12 AM |
Dick's death
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
Each of my parents died instantly. There may be no better way to go.
Dick Crooks died within weeks after being diagnosed with cancer. Shortly before the diagnosis, he’d visited us in Portland, and he was in worse shape psychologically than I’d seen him before. Sobriety did not seem to be agreeing with him.
On the drive home to Idaho, one of his legs swelled. A doctor in Lewiston didn’t know what to make of it, so Dick went to the V.A. Hospital in Spokane. This is where he was diagnosed with cancer, which was in his pancreas and already was terminal. There was little to do but make him as comfortable as possible for the end.
I was very close to Dick’s mother, Esther. She was a short woman, under five feet, with red hair that turned silver as she aged. Feisty and funny, she’d grown up in logging camps and bars and took no shit from anyone. She was very active in Democratic politics in Clearwater County and for a time served as Orofino’s mayor.
The first time I met Esther, during a trip when Dee and I drove up to visit Dick in Moscow, where he was attending the University of Idaho after getting out of the Army, we’d gone to Esther’s house in Orofino for dinner. I found the address and knocked on the door. When it opened, I looked down to find this short woman grinning up at me. “So you’re fucking Deemer,” she said. This was Esther.
Esther took Dick’s death harder than anyone. She had been only a teenager when she’d had him. Dick was her only child. She talked about how it wasn’t right for a parent to outlive her children.
Dick was moved from the hospital to a hospice in Moscow. I visited him with his two sons, Brad and Kass, and it was clear he didn’t have long to live. He was rapidly losing coherence but while he was still able to communicate I told him I loved him and then kissed him on the cheek. Dick smiled and said, “Lovely.” This was the last thing he said to me.
I returned home and a few weeks later he died. I went back to spread his ashes with Esther, his two sons, and a cousin of Dick’s who was especially close to the family. We spread them at the top of the steep grade descending to White Bird, Idaho, above the Salmon River, where the Crooks family roots were.
Because Dick was a veteran, Esther had a simple memorial plaque made, which we set in cement in the White Bird cemetery just out of town. I like being able to visit it, not only to stop at the top of White Bird grade where we scattered the ashes in the summit wind that never seems to stop, but to drive down to the small town graveyard and stand at his plaque, reading his name, engaging his memory. Like most institutions that exist in this life, we have cemeteries because we need them.
Dick’s spirit lives on in his sons and in me. Brad has continued the mortgage business that his father started. Kass wrestles with the same demons that haunted Dick. I would not be who I am had Dick and I not become soul brothers. Each of us carries a little bit of Dick Crooks around with us every day.
Sometimes I wonder if my spirit will live on in anyone after I’m gone, but I can’t think of anyone so I think of something more pleasant.
6/28/2003 06:56:38 AM |
Friday, June 27, 2003
Islam Under Siege
Ahmad Faruqui reviews a new book by Akbar S Ahmed.
"The world's 1.3 billion Muslims are being squeezed between two equally strong forces. On the one hand are the forces of the West that want to modernize them, if need be through regime change. On the other hand are the forces of Osama bin Laden who want to de-Westernize them, if need be by wrapping their women in dark flowing robes. The pain is being shared equally by the two-thirds of the Muslim population that lives in Muslim countries, and who are often governed by tyrants that suppress all independent scholarship and dissent and the one-third that lives in non-Muslim countries, where even some of the longest standing democracies are rapidly regressing toward tyrannical control over their Muslim minorities." Access now.
6/27/2003 10:00:51 PM |
Guinness Book of Records
Steve Einhorn and his wife, Kate, folksingers and owners of the local Artichoke Music, hope to set a record this Sunday by assembling two or three thousand guitar players at downtown Pioneer Square to sing "This Land Is Your Land." This is a benefit for Sisters of the Road Cafe. Einhorn, who saw my Woody Guthrie show some twenty years ago, has invited me to open the affair my reciting these lines of Guthrie:
"I hate a song that makes you think that you're not any good. I hate a song that makes you think you're just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody, no good for nothing. Because you're too old or too young, or too fat or too thin, or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or songs that poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or your hard travelin'.
"I'm out to fight these kinds of songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I'm out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world, and if it's hit your pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter how hard it's run you down and rolled over you, no matter what color you are, what size, how you are built; I'm out to sing the songs that will make you take pride in yourself. And take pride in your work."
I look forward to the event. Onward.
6/27/2003 06:50:22 PM |
Memoirs
I'm about a week away from completing my daily serialization of my memoirs. One way or another -- either commercially or less commercially as a print-on-demand paperback -- It's All Material: The Education of a Marginal Writer will get published.
If you are interested in being kept up-to-date about its publication, drop me an email with MEMOIR INFO in the subject line.
6/27/2003 03:52:22 PM |
Done deal
Managed to wrap up two projects today: got the review written and off to the magazine; and I finished Ger's manuscript, uploading the print-ready file to the publisher. Good to get those two off the back. Onward.
6/27/2003 03:37:46 PM |
Projects
Here's what I'm working on:
- Today I hope to finish a review of 3 books on screenwriting craft for Creative Screenwriting magazine.
- Am back to work on my novel, Love in the Ruins, and hope to finish a draft (from the screenplay) by the end of July.
- Back at work on my libretto to Dark Mission and also hope to finish it by the end of July.
- Should have Ger's book I am editing off to the publisher this afternoon. Am including some sheet music and waiting for composer's notes, due at noon today.
- Still waiting to hear about Emmett's Gift, 4 months now at its last-chance publisher.
- 3 agents have the memoirs; don't expect to hear anything until later in the summer.
Full plate, perfect. Onward.
6/27/2003 08:15:02 AM |
Dorothy Parker
About ready to begin rehearsal of a tribute to Dorothy Parker I am directing, called You Might As Well Live (access script). This is the best cast I've ever assembled for one of my annual dramatic presentations at the Unitarian Church, and I'm excited about this show. Onward.
6/27/2003 06:46:52 AM |
Update
Woke up this morning -- and the blog is working perfectly again! All morning so far. Knock on my wooden head.
6/27/2003 06:26:00 AM |
James Agee
Profile by Georgia Steinhardt. Access now.
Info on Agee's novel, A Death in the Family.
Bibliography.
6/27/2003 06:13:17 AM |
Return of the Weepie
"Sixteen years ago, though, and squarely within what most would have reckoned as the Age of Irony, Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast took on the apparently narrow and outdated worldview of the weepie and provided an exhilarating sense of what it could teach us. A decade and a half before movies such as Far From Heaven seemed to offer their take-it-or-leave-it option-either solemnly accept these conflicts on their own terms, or patronize the entire project-Babette's Feast opened up a more generous possibility." Article by Jim Shepard. Access now.
6/27/2003 06:11:04 AM |
Dad's death
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
Dad’s death – like my UFO sighting while observing sunspots as a teenager and like sitting next to Robert Kennedy’s future assassin when learning of President Kennedy’s assassination – was filled with a sense of the mystical. I tell the full story in my essay “The Weight of My Father’s Soul,” which appeared in Oregon Magazine.
After mother’s death, Dad was beside himself. He moved back to New Jersey to be near his relatives. He never got interested in another woman.
Somewhat selfishly, Bill and I convinced him to move back west in order to be closer to his two sons. We found him a nice room in an assisted living building near Eugene, which also was near Bill, whose life was far more stable than mine. I flew to New Jersey to help Dad settle his affairs and to accompany him west.
I’m convinced that Dad decided to die on the east coast. Here is how I pick up the story in my essay:
What I remember most about that trip are the final minutes of my father's life. We were invited to Gubby's for a farewell dinner, and the drive to his country home was spectacular along country roads lined with the bright oranges and reds of a New Jersey fall. I pulled into the parking area near the secluded house and turned off the engine. Reaching for the door, I felt Dad's hand on my knee.
"I'm sure glad I got to see the leaves change before I go," he said.
This remark haunted me for years. At the time, of course, it made perfect sense in its literal meaning: he was happy to see one final New Jersey fall before moving to Oregon. In retrospect, however, I wondered if he were referring to a different kind of "going," if he were speaking of his own death. After all, in only several minutes after the remark, he would be gone from this world.
Gubby and especially his wife Betty were loving caregivers to my father. They phoned him daily and saw him as often as possible. They'd been concerned, I'd learned, because Chick had been losing a little weight lately, and when we walked up to the house, the first thing Gubby said was, "Chick, I think you've gained back some of that weight."
We entered the kitchen, and Gubby immediately came in behind us with a portable scale.
"Step on this," he said, setting the scale on the floor.
I didn't see what the weight read but Gubby said, "Look, you've gained three pounds!"
They had a weight chart for Dad on the wall, and Betty wrote down the new figure.
Then the scale went to zero. Then my Dad stepped off the scale and without a word headed for the bathroom. Then he fell dead
Apparently the battery on the scale had gone dead just before my father died. But the story doesn’t stop here.
It was late when I returned to Gubby's. I'd been invited to spend the night and accepted, rather than returning alone to my father's apartment several hamlets away.
I was sitting in the kitchen, drinking a beer, when I noticed the scale on the floor. I got up and slowly walked to it. Then I stepped up onto it.
The scale registered my weight.
I stepped down and up again. My weight appeared again.
"The battery isn't dead," I said.
Gubby and Betty came forward, and each stepped on the scale. It was working perfectly.
"Why did it register zero?" I wondered aloud.
Somewhere I'd read that, according to some ancient superstition or wisdom, the soul left the body at the moment of death. Had the scale registered the departure of my Dad's soul from his body, only moments before he came crashing down onto the bathroom floor?
It's a ridiculous possibility, of course, and one that still haunts me.
One thing Dad did after Mom’s death is often tell me he loved me. I told him I loved him, too. Don’t wait, he said, because one day it might be too late. Apparently he hadn’t told this to Mom as often as he felt he should. Indeed, from my perspective, their marriage was not a particularly happy one after he became a civilian but particularly after his stroke when, according to mother, he became less social and less active. She once told me that Dad was “a great date and a lousy husband.” Still, she stayed with him long after her two sons had left the house, long after she’d completed her obligations as a mother.
I remember them happy in Pasadena. They went out a lot, and they had a lot of friends. Friends often filled the house for canasta parties. In Medford I only knew them on visits and increasingly (especially after Dad’s stroke in the early 1970s) they bickered or, more commonly, stopped listening to one another. Sometimes visiting them would be almost surrealistic, as each would converse with you without paying any attention to the thread of the other conversation.
Yet Dad had a hard time living without her. After she was gone, perhaps he realized how much he loved her. Dad and I did not talk as intimately as mother and I did, but once he told me that he had never been in love with another woman or ever cheated on Mom. I suspect he must have had sex with prostitutes or someone else during shore leaves in the Navy. I suspect he must have known about oral sex to ask mother to perform it. But in his mind this was not cheating, and he loved her more than he was able to tell her while she was alive.
I like to remember my parents as they appear in the home movies, laughing together during a block party in Dallas, or embraced in front of a Christmas tree in Pasadena. They were married when it was fashionable to endure marital problems for the sake of the children, and I have no doubts that my childhood was happier than it would have been in our modern age when parents think of themselves first and their children second. There is something to be said for parental sacrifice. Of course, this is not a theory I practiced. Far from it. But I admire and thank my parents for providing a stable home full of family activities and joy.
Dad, like Mom, was cremated. I put a part of his ashes in the creek in the park in Milford. Part I gave to Bill, who scattered them in the Willamette River near Eugene, and I scattered the rest in the Shakespeare Garden in Washington Park, which overlooks the Portland skyline. I wanted to scatter part with Mom’s ashes but by this time her fishing hole was nowhere to be found.
I miss not having a parental gravesite to visit. Even visiting the Shakespeare Garden is not quite the same thing as standing at a gravestone and reading a name carved in stone. Cemeteries exist for the survivors.
Dick’s mother knew this. When she learned that Dick wanted to be cremated, she made sure he got the best of both worlds.
6/27/2003 06:05:15 AM |
Thursday, June 26, 2003
Aren't we clever?
I think I discovered a very, very convoluted way to publish my blog -- too much work but it will do until the "company" gets its act together. We'll see. Onward.
6/26/2003 10:38:14 PM |
The nightmare continues
Well, 2 folks who tried to help me so far haven't been able to. Is the 3rd time the charm?
6/26/2003 07:00:08 PM |
Happy birthday, Charles Messier!
Anybody know who Charles Messier is? He catalogued star clusters, nebulae, and other objects in space, and amateur astronomers learn to identify these objects by their "M" or Messier numbers.
6/26/2003 07:59:57 AM |
Automatic Bad Movie Trailer Generator
This looks like a real hoot! Access now.
6/26/2003 06:27:27 AM |
Toward a personal philosophy
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
Sobriety has brought me many gifts but perhaps the greatest has been a reintroduction to myself, to the self that got sidetracked in the Army when I learned that I had an abnormal capacity for alcohol and used this to pursue the social life I thought I’d been missing. Sober, I’ve learned that I’m reclusive by nature and that there is nothing wrong with this.
As I approach retirement, I find myself spending more and more time reflecting on my life and on the meaning of life in general. This memoir is a product of some of this energy. Today I’m able to articulate my belief system with greater clarity than ever before, even though I considered myself something of a barstool philosopher when I was drinking. But in those days, I was pontificating. Now my beliefs inform my actions, not my tongue.
Every experience I’ve related in these pages has influenced my philosophy of life. But I’ve purposely delayed sharing several important influences until now. Among these are the deaths of four people I loved.
Most people who knew my parents believed that my mother would outlive my father. Dad, after all, had had a stroke in his early sixties. Women, in general, outlived men. There was no reason to believe that Mom would die first.
There certainly was no reason to believe her days were numbered when she was scheduled for a routine rectal operation. I talked to her on the phone from Maryland the day before she checked into the hospital and teased her about her condition. I knew she would consider this particular kind of operation very “unladylike.”
We were always teasing Mom. She was the perfect person on whom to play a practical joke because she was so gullible. Dad set up the most involved traps for her, and his greatest practical joke of all was the night of the Willapoo.
Carol and I were visiting them in Medford. One hot summer night we were sitting around the kitchen table playing pinochle. Carol and I, of course, also were drinking cold beer. There was a large round thermometer on the patio, visible through the window, and the temperature was still in the 90s after nine at night. Mom, who hated heat, couldn’t stop complaining about the weather.
During a break, Dad took me aside and told me to keep Mom occupied when she came out of the bathroom until he gave me a signal to return to the kitchen table. I knew something was up and agreed.
We were back to playing cards when Dad suddenly shouted, out, “Oh my God, Flo, look! It’s a Willapoo!”
He was pointing at the thermometer outside – which now was registering only 60-odd degrees! Mom rushed outside, and we all followed her. Immediately her face lit up, and she started dancing across the patio, saying, “Feel how cool it is! This is so nice!”
Carol almost fell into the trap as well, mentioning that it did feel cooler. Dad explained that a Willapoo was a rare atmospheric event that happened only once every 250 years when the such-and-such and the so-and-so collided to cause a low pressure trough that pulled cold arctic air into southern Oregon.
Finally we went back to playing cards. Mom was no longer miserable from the heat. At the next break, I took Dad aside and asked him what was up. While I was keeping mother occupied during the previous break, and while Carol was in the bathroom, he had taken out some ice and held it on the thermometer until the temperature dropped. He had caused a Willapoo.
The temperature finally climbed to the high 70s again, and before the night was over Dad gave in and told Mom the truth, as he always did. She said, “Oh, Chick,” as she always did, and the matter was forgotten until the next time Dad had an audience to whom to tell the story.
I was very close to my mother. She told me things she told few other people. Once she told me how shocked she was that Dad had asked her to perform fellatio. “What kind of a woman does he think I am?” she wondered aloud. This speaks not only to the prejudices of her generation but to the intimacy of our relationship. I never missed sending her flowers on Mother’s Day or her birthday – except on one occasion, which she never forgot. I was raised by her, of course, while father was at sea, and for six years there were just the two of us. This formed a special bond that lasted all our lives.
In my office at home is a photograph of us, taken when I was about three, and both of us have bright eyes and broad smiles, mother with dark hair, pretty, myself silvery blond, cute, the pair of us looking like the two happiest people in the world, the bond of mother and son. When she was gone, I missed her terribly.
Mom dropped dead in the hospital lobby as she and Dad were checking out the day after her operation. The operation had gone well. Then my mother’s heart short-circuited, and she died instantly before she was able to walk out the hospital door.
I was stunned when I heard the news. I flew from Maryland to Oregon immediately. I drank through most of the long flight, thanks to an understanding stewardess who sympathized with me and let me buy more than my limit of liquor. I was pretty drunk by the time I stepped off the airplane. Mom was cremated and her ashes spread in the Applegate River at her favorite fishing hole. A few years later a dam project flooded the area, and the fishing hole disappeared.
6/26/2003 05:56:33 AM |
Day 3
Still no visible progress in getting my blog fixed. The only way I can update it is to ftp to blogspot.com, open the source for the index.html file, change the file, save it, and ftp it back to replace the original one -- in this way, I do manage to continue the serializing of my memoir. But what a drag. Meanwhile, the Pro publishing tool appears to work fine on my end, all my normal posts appear to be saved, but nothing is getting published. 36 hours without any word from "blogger control," which is the help institution here. Patience, patience! Wish they had a goddamn phone number for assistance.
6/26/2003 05:52:28 AM |
Wednesday, June 25, 2003
Frustration!
End of day 2 of my blog publishing problem. Very frustrating -- mostly since I haven't heard from anyone for over a day, when a fellow wasn't able to help me. Customer service here isn't at the speed of light. Patience! I tell myself. Not always easy. This is a great site when everything is working but when it isn't, well, a good deal of patience is required.
6/25/2003 06:29:47 PM |
Happy birthday, George Orwell!
George Orwell Page.
George Orwell Links.
George Orwell Bibliography.
6/25/2003 08:34:28 AM |
Keeping the faith
My editing tool here at Blogger (Blogger Pro) is working fine, and from my end everything appears to be getting published. In the split screen environment, the bottom record of the blog looks perfect. Only nothing is getting published at the website. So I'll continue here in the editor as if nothing is wrong, keeping the faith that once the bug is fixed, everything will go online and we'll be back to normal. We'll see!
Meanwhile, I am using ftp to add new installments of my memoir as a temporary fix for my readers until this situation is fixed.
6/25/2003 08:23:47 AM |
Mom, apple pie and ...
Potato salad! Especially for the 4th of July and other summer picnics. I belong to the traditional, keep out the fancy stuff, school of potato salad. Here is an all-American recipe I approve of. All-American Potato Salad.
6/25/2003 08:19:53 AM |
Sobriety
[from a memoir in progress, which started on 4/13/03]
I loved sobriety. I loved waking up without a hangover. I loved how much better I felt physically and mentally. For a long time, I still missed a few things about drinking, especially its ability to distract myself from immediate stress, but one thing I didn’t miss was hanging out with my drinking buddies. Even what I missed about drinking was its private moments, not its social ones.
Dick Crooks’ adventure in sobriety was very different from mine. Dick behaved as if he hated sobriety. He said he loved it – but he was always grouchy and on edge about something. Drinking, he could be positive to a fault, but sober he became someone who would find something wrong with everything. He had loved jazz and blues all his life but went as cold turkey on music as he did on booze. He couldn’t listen to Billie Holiday or anyone else without it bringing along memories of drinking, and so he stopped listening to the music he loved.
Typical of this change was something he said during our last visit before he was diagnosed with cancer, passing away very quickly after that. We were driving somewhere or another and were stopped at a traffic light. A middle-aged man was crossing the street. There was nothing particularly noticeable about him that I could see. But Dick suddenly observed, “Look at that asshole. Who the fuck does he think he is? Jesus Christ. This fucking world, man.”
When I asked him what he meant, he either didn’t hear me or chose not to expound on the subject. I let it rest. But this was typical of his change in attitude, from a man who frequently laughed, who could crack a joke under the most stressful circumstances, to someone who verbally attacked strangers passing in front of his car.
Since Dick lived such a short time sober, I’ve often wondered if sobriety was even a gift to him at all. Then I remember what he told me about his last days of drinking, alone in his apartment, buying cheap wine because it’s all he could afford – this wasn’t much of a life either. I just wish he could have experienced more of the joy of sobriety.
As I write this, I am one month and two days away from ten years of sobriety. I don’t make a big deal of milestones like this because I know how fragile sobriety is. I hope I never forget. In treatment, I met a woman who had relapsed after almost eleven years of sobriety. She had remarried and built a new life. No one knew about her life as a drunk, except from her stories. They had never witnessed it.
One night, to celebrate something special, she had a single glass of wine with her husband at dinner. She turned down a second glass and didn’t miss it. This worked so well that she began to have a glass of wine with dinner more often. After a week without problems, she allowed herself to have a second glass of wine with dinner. This was all it took. Within a month, she was drinking a fifth of vodka a day again.
I hope I never forget the conversations I had with this woman. I hope I never forget the awe in her voice as she told her story, as if she had become possessed by some demon greater than herself. This is the sense in which the alcoholic becomes powerless over alcohol.
At the same time, I must go back to what I learned from my reading in the medical library. There are abusers of alcohol who have learned to drink responsibly. There is always the danger, therefore, of anyone aware of these studies deciding that s/he, too, is the exception.
Since I was a binge drinker, since I most enjoyed drinking when I was drinking to excess, I do not believe that I am one of those people who will ever enjoy a glass of wine with dinner. I assume alcohol is out of my life forever, and I remind myself of this as often as necessary.
6/25/2003 06:48:45 AM |
Tuesday, June 24, 2003
What a mess
Blogger moved to a new server, I guess -- and it's a NIGHTMARE!!
6/24/2003 11:15:40 AM |
The Pledge
Rewatched this 2001 movie last night, based on a novel by Durrenmatt, directed by Sean Penn, with Jack Nicholson in one of his fine performances. Like it as much as the first time, a lot, maybe more. A taut psychological drama wrapped in a crime story. "Within this peculiar hybrid of European existentialism (Fredrich Durrenmatt) and American Gothic, Sean Penn has produced something that looks like a masterpiece," writes Lawrence Russell in his review (access full review). I would agree.
6/24/2003 06:07:10 AM |
E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime
My third reading of this fine novel has been my most enjoyable to date. Don't miss it. Review by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the N.Y. Times, July 8, 1975.
6/24/2003 05:59:24 AM |
Happy birthday, John Ciardi! Happy birthday, Ambrose Bierce!
Ambrose Bierce Appreciation Society.
Academy of American Poets: John Ciardi.
6/24/2003 05:43:46 AM |
Doomsday?
"Citing the hazard of genetically engineered viruses, eminent astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has said, 'I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years.' Martin Rees, the knighted British astronomer, agrees; he gives us a 50-50 chance. Serious thinkers such as Pulitzer Prize winner Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague, and Bill Joy, who wrote Wired's own 2000 article 'Why the Future Doesn't Need Us,' warn of techno-calamity. Stephen Petranek, editor in chief of the science monthly Discover, crisscrosses the world lecturing on '15 Major Risks to the World and Life as We Know It.'" Greg Easterbrook is more optimistic. Access article now.
6/24/2003 05:35:31 AM |
Harriet
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
I’d met Harriet less than two weeks before I entered treatment. Some months before, when I was trying to get sober on my own, I’d replied to several personal ads in a moment of intoxicated loneliness. I’d forgotten all about them by the time I got a response from Harriet, who had written one of the ads. She already had dated several men who had responded to her and apparently was working her way down the list after they hadn’t panned out.
No bells rang when we met for coffee on the day before her birthday. She headed back east to visit her sister, and I entered treatment. To my surprise, she visited me at CARS once we were allowed to have weekend visits.
We began seeing one another as friends. I was thankful to have someone in my life who wasn’t a barfly, as virtually all my friends were at this stage of my life. Harriet introduced me to some of her friends, and I began to get a sense of a social life away from the bar scene, which also was a new experience for me. Harriet, although Jewish, was shopping around for a church to get interested in, and I sometimes accompanied her, which was a very new experience for me. The last time I’d been inside a church other than for a wedding was when I’d pulled chapel duty in the Army.
Then, one night when she invited me over for dinner, the first spark of romance flashed, and our relationship took a new direction. By the time I was ready to graduate from the Dom, we’d decided to live together, and I moved in with her. Four years later we got married.
Harriet provided a solid foundation for my early years of sobriety. She made the transition far easier than it would have been otherwise by giving me a new social world to discover, a companion into activities that I’d ignored for many years or done only within the context of drinking. Without her circle of friends, and her social base, I’m sure I would have ventured back into the only social world I knew, the bar scene, especially at Seafood’s and Nobby’s. If today I can comfortably go to Nobby’s for breakfast and visit with Greg, Millie and others from the “good old, bad old days,” it’s because I’m secure in my sobriety – and Harriet played an important role in helping me attain this security. I’m not sure I could have done it without her.
In the beginning of sobriety, everything was new to me. I, sober, was new to me. I rediscovered the teenage recluse I once was and realized that when not drinking, I was not a very social person at all. I enjoyed my solitude more than I enjoyed company. As I had written in a sonnet, the inside of my head is my country. Sober, I discovered that I liked myself a lot.
As I was discovering this, I also faced a very different challenge. With Harriet, I began something very new to me – a sober relationship.
6/24/2003 05:28:55 AM |
Monday, June 23, 2003
Cyborger
"The Cyborger will tell you what your name would mean if you happened to be a shallow imitation of humanity with a dark purpose." Try it out. When I did: C.H.A.R.L.E.S.: Cybernetic Hydraulic Android Responsible for Logical Exploration and Sabotage.
6/23/2003 04:30:22 PM |
Whiteness studies
"Advocates of whiteness studies -- most of whom are white liberals who hope to dismantle notions of race -- believe that white Americans are so accustomed to being part of a privileged majority they do not see themselves as part of a race." Article by Darryl Fears. Access now.
6/23/2003 07:57:44 AM |
Harry Potter and the Meaning of Life
"Since it began, Potter-mania has represented a cultural infantilism, that only grows as the years go by. It is about what we expect from our kids, our books, our value system and ourselves. Whatever happens in The Order of the Phoenix, the story of our obsession with Harry Potter is unlikely to have a happy ending." Article by Jennie Bristow. Access now.
6/23/2003 07:48:29 AM |
The Dom
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
Mel was right. I never would have stayed sober going directly from CARS to my apartment. I almost didn’t make it through the three weeks I had to wait before checking into the Dom.
One afternoon, in fact, I bought a six-pack of beer and took it home. I kept staring at it. I took out one can and set it on the table. I kept staring at it. I still had over a week to wait before checking into the Dom. While I was still thinking about whether or not to open the beer, a sober friend knocked on my door to see if I wanted to go for a walk. When I got back, I took the beer, put it back in its sack and carried it outside. I left it in a doorway, a gift to a passing drunk who needed it more than I did.
Life in the Dom was good. I retained my job in the medical library, continuing to educate myself about alcoholism. There were only a few classes during the day, giving me a lot of time to write. I started working on the screenplay that became Recovery. I also made some new friends and shot a lot of baskets on the Dom’s outdoor court. We got passes to go downtown, and I took a lot of walks.
While I was in the Dom, Dick Crooks entered CARS. I couldn’t believe my eyes the day I saw him in the mess hall. I thought he was there to visit me but he was a new patient. I’d written him from CARS, letting him know I was getting sober, and he had written me, telling me he’d decided to get sober, and our letters had crossed in the mail. However, his letter to me had been mailed to my apartment, and I didn’t receive it until some time later.
It was great to have Crooks around. I didn’t get to spend much time with him except at the mess hall until after he graduated from CARS. He decided to remain in the area for out-patient treatment, renting an apartment near the V.A. facility, but in a few months financial needs sent him home to Idaho, where he eventually started a mortgage business in Lewiston, near his home town.
In the meantime, I found someone else to spend time with. I started dating Harriet, who was the head of the Women’s Studies program at Clark College, which was located right across the street from the V.A. facility.
6/23/2003 07:45:08 AM |
Sunday, June 22, 2003
Health
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
We were walking along, enjoying the day, when I suddenly felt dizzy. I had to sit down to clear my head. Zeena, who worked in a hospital, suspected something or other (a potassium deficiency comes to mind) but made me swear to see a doctor as soon as we got back.
I went to doctors only when I was in pain or worried about something – and suddenly I was worried. Back in Portland, I went to the V.A. for a checkup and learned, to the horror of the doctor, that my blood pressure was something like 240/170. I was put on blood pressure medication immediately.
My doctor gave me a stern lecture about the relationship between my drinking and my blood pressure and my survival – and since I’d admitted to only a fraction of my daily alcohol consumption, she scared me to death. If I was being this reckless with my life based on the lie, imagine how much more I was flirting with death based on the truth. What I was doing was drinking myself to death. This obvious fact was a revelation to me.
I didn’t want to die. My best writing was still ahead of me. I decided to do something about it. I decided to quit drinking.
I decided to quit drinking on my own. Most drunks make this decision first. It took only a few months for me to realize this wasn’t going to work at all. I needed help.
The Veterans Administration (V.A.) had a program that, if I were accepted into it, wouldn’t cost me a cent. It was an intense 28-day in-patient treatment program, followed by months of out-patient care. The program was called CARS, which stood for Chemical Addiction Rehabilitation Services.
Even though the program wouldn’t cost me a cent, I was living so close to the edge financially that I didn’t feel I could take a month off from my freelance writing income. How would I pay my rent if I took a month off? The gods heard the question. Quite unexpectedly, Chateau de Mort got scheduled for a revival in the Pittock Mansion in the summer of 1993. My contract provided decent royalties for each season they performed the play. Now I could admit myself into CARS and come out with a fat check waiting for me. I bit the bullet and applied.
I entered CARS on June 14, 1993, a Monday. The previous Saturday night I went out and got plastered, having one each of every favorite drink I could think of. I wrote about this experience in my essay “Liquor and Lit: A Portrait of the Writer as a Drunk,” which was published in Oregon Magazine:
For a nightcap, I ordered a special drink for old times, a farewell toast to a way of life, a moment I expected to remember forever – and have. I ordered a B-52. Its layers reminded me of the different periods of my life – the high school science nerd, the confused mathematician, the Berkeley street person, the linguist-spy-mascot, the ambitious grad student, the less ambitious playwright – each period clearly set apart from the others. When I raised the small, narrow glass and tipped it, the fragile spectrum dissolved as each color ran into its neighbor to become a drab concoction of spirits, suddenly dark and dreary, just as the periods of my life finally had succumbed to one all-encompassing description, which had become more meaningful than any colorful distinctions between them: I was living the life of a drunk. I belted down the B-52, paid my considerable tab, and left.
One B-52 pilot on one final mission. Over and out. (But somehow I lived to tell the tale.)
Upon admittance at CARS, I was assigned a room and a roommate, a counselor, and a part-time job. My counselor was Mel, a no-nonsense former addict with a reputation for taking on the tough cases. To my surprise, I was considered a tough case because I was “a college boy.” Mel told me that the failure rate among those with college degrees was higher than in any other demographic. We thought we knew too much, we’d second-guess everything we were told, we had perfected rationalization to an art form, we were arrogant – all of which would make sobriety difficult for us. I was determined to prove him wrong.
Mel’s no-nonsense approach became the model for the character of the counselor in my screenplay, Recovery, a thriller about an abused woman who tries to hide in a treatment center. Here he is addressing a group who have just entered treatment:
How many here want a drink right now? Or a fix? Drag a weed, snort a coke, shot a Wild Turkey? (No one responds.) You lying sacks a shit. You scumbag assholes. You'd kill your mother for a drink. You'd sell your little sister to a known carrier of AIDS to buy some crack, you'd take money off your grandma's night stand to buy your weed.
The style at CARS was in-your-face and confrontational. Though I rebelled against it just like everyone else, in the end it was just what I needed.
Each morning, we read a proclamation that summarized the CARS philosophy: “Our concept of a meaningful life is not merely to stop drinking or using drugs. It is to replace that part of yourself that caused self-destructive behavior in the first place. … If you're not ready to examine yourself with ruthless self-scrutiny, then you may want to reconsider your reasons for entering this treatment program. You may want to leave before we kick you out.”
My part-time job was in the medical library. As a result, I read everything about alcoholism that I could get my hands on. What I learned didn’t always jive with what I was being told in treatment. For example, in Europe, according to medical journals, a large number of studies had shown that the success rate for getting sober in treatment was no better than for getting sober on your own.
Mel, to his credit, did not chastise me for reading medical journals at work. On the contrary, he started slipping me books that were not part of the official reading list in treatment. Three books in particular became important to me: Under the Influence, Rational Recovery, and Man’s Search for Meaning.
Under the Influence is a scientific disease-model discussion of alcoholism, which coincided with the V.A. treatment approach. Yet the V.A. didn’t approve of the book because of its criticism of Alcoholics Anonymous, which also was a cornerstone of treatment. The book did not approve of A.A.’s contention that all alcoholics have a character flaw. In the disease model, this would be like giving a diabetic a character flaw.
As a result, Under the Influence was not even in the medical library! It was as if it had been banned for its small criticism of the holy A.A. Indeed, when Mel lent me the book, he did so surreptitiously, as if he were slipping me forbidden material.
Rational Recovery challenged everything about A.A., including the contention in the first of its twelve steps that the alcoholic is powerless. R.R.’s approach was to empower people to take control over their own lives. This appealed to the existentialist in me. I decided that I did, in fact, have complete control over whether or not I started drinking. After that, after the booze kicked in, I became powerless to stop drinking – but I was in control up to this moment. I always had the free choice whether or not to begin drinking. Rational Recovery supported this contention but A.A. did not.
Man’s Search for Meaning is a philosophical look at surviving the holocaust, written by a philosopher who did. What the Nazis could never change, the philosopher learned, was an individual’s attitude – and this was the foundation for survival and finding meaning in life, even under the most depraved circumstances. This was a lesson I’d learn to put to use in less inhumane environments than the one in which it had been forged.
Because of the books Mel loaned me and my other reading in the medical library, my approach to sobriety became a program based on knowledge. Know the enemy – and conquer it. This, too, rubbed against the approach of A.A., which had an anti-intellectual streak in it, if not in theory at least in practice. “Keep in simple, stupid,” was the retort to anyone who might raise a question or challenge a presumption. I went to A.A. meetings through treatment because I was required to do so, but I became less interested in them. During my out-patient phase, I attended meetings of Rational Recovery and felt much more at home.
An important part of treatment were group therapy sessions. As a result of one such session, Mel again showed creativity in dealing with his “tough case” patient, yours truly.
During one session, in the middle of talking about my daughter, I broke down. I couldn’t stop crying. I was crying so hard that it was disrupting the session. The next day, when Mel asked me to go on about my daughter, the same thing happened. Mel didn’t want the daily group therapy session to turn into everyone watching me bawl, so he came up with a plan.
He gave me an assignment: every night, from seven to seven-thirty, I was to sit alone in my room and think about my daughter and cry. It was very important that I cry. I was to do this every evening until I had not cried for three days in a row, and then I was to report back to him.
As a result, I cried myself out about my daughter in about a week. What I was crying about, of course, was my failure to become a part of her life. I had no one to blame for this except myself. How hard would it have been to write her or call her every few weeks, to visit her once a year? I’d done none of these things. I had pretended she didn’t exist. In treatment my guilt about this erupted like a volcano.
Once I was able to talk about my daughter in group therapy without breaking down, I told the full story. I also decided to write her a letter and explore the possibility of a future relationship with her. I drafted the letter while I was in treatment, reading each draft to the group, but when it was time to mail it, the address I had was no longer current. Considerable time would pass before I tracked her down – and you know the story of what happened next.
My original plan had been to enter CARS for 28 days, then move back into my apartment with my royalties check and go on with my life. I really hadn’t given much thought to what “go on with my life” meant. Halfway through treatment, Mel forced me to put my plans in writing. When I did, he scoffed at them. Where was I going to spend my leisure time? Who were going to be my friends? I assumed that I’d go to Seafood’s or Nobby’s just as before but sit at the bar drinking coke. I really had made no plans to change my routine, other than to quit drinking. Mel tried to make me understand that my routine was part of the problem, that I needed to find new things to do with new friends, friends who weren’t themselves alcoholics.
This is when he brought up the Domiciliary, which everyone called the Dom. He wanted me to stay for six more months of in-patient treatment, moving into the Dom. Six more months! This was not part of my game plan.
Mel was clever. Seeing my resistance to the idea, he started working on me where I was vulnerable. He began talking about six-months in the Dom as a kind of writing retreat for me, where I could get free room and board while I worked on my next script. Sure, there would be classes to attend and chores to do, but so what? I’d have lots of free time, he said, and I could bring my laptop computer and write. Since when did a writer turn down six months of free room and board?
This was a ploy, of course, but Mel also was on my side. During a meeting in his office one day, he looked me squarely in the eye and shook his head, saying, “What a waste. You have so much to contribute. So much to contribute. What a goddamn waste to spend your time on a barstool.”
I told Mel that if he could get me into the Dom, I’d do it. I’d sign up for six more months of in-patient treatment.
6/22/2003 03:08:39 PM |
Friday, June 20, 2003
The writer's laptop
First, a disclaimer. I own no stock in the company Alphasmart. I'm going to rave about its product because I mean it.
I've talked here before about the Alphasmart 2000, a light-weight laptop word processor that runs for 700 hours on 3 AA batteries. I bought it for myself for Christmas. I use it regularly. I am still running at 96% battery strength!
That's what bugged me about the laptop computer I owned ... 3 or 4 hour battery life. Taking it camping was a drag. It also did a zillion more things than I needed it to do. All I needed a laptop for was to write. The Alphasmart 2000 was the perfect portable writing machine for me. 700 hours battery life and a capacity of about 100 written pages. With a USB connection, I can dump everything on it into Word, my screenplay program, email, or whatever else I bring up on my desktop.
And the price is right, too, a mere fraction of the cost of a laptop.
I see the new model is Alphasmart 3000. I don't know what features have been added. In fact, I can think of no new features I actually need. I hope my Alphasmart lasts forever.
It just might. One reckless day I had it sitting on the passenger seat of our van, in its case but unzipped. When I retrieved it, the case opened and the laptop crashed to the pavement with enough impact that all but two of its key-caps fell off! I was sure I had destroyed it. I retrieved all the caps, snapped them back on ... and with much worry, turned on the machine. It worked fine. It's been working fine ever since. These babies are practically indestructible.
I haven't been more delighted with a tech tool than with my Alphasmart 2000. Check it out. Information on Alphasmart 3000.
6/20/2003 07:52:48 AM |
Piano player in a brothel
Christopher Howse's homage to Malcolm Muggeridge. Access now.
6/20/2003 07:32:08 AM |
Sonnets & Seattle
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
The sonnets came in a great rush out of nowhere. I never wrote sonnets. Suddenly one appeared in my head when I woke up in the morning, fully formed, and the next morning another one appeared. I seemed to be writing them in my sleep. Soon I decided to see if I could write one while awake and discovered I could.
Because my affair with Zeena was topsy-turvy, as she continued to move between Mike and me, unable to give one of us up for the other, the sonnets ran the full gamut of emotions, from ecstasy to despair. Here are some examples:
The inside of my head is my country.
It does not matter whether trees and lakes
surround me; whether gulls above the sea
adorn my walk; whether sunsets make
the curtain of my day. My own thoughts
are scenery enough. What my thoughts need
is ground. The dazzling dance of thinking, caught
up in itself, can recklessly not heed
anything but its own reward. Mind
for mind's sake is no way to live a life.
I need the space where mind can best unwind.
I need the sheath in which to rest the knife.
I need, darling, for you to come to me.
The inside of my head is my country.
If our lips should never meet again;
if your arms should not around me wrap
in such a way to tell me of your ken;
if our bodies never draw the sap
each from each, flesh to flesh, the way
we've done before in miracles of night;
if it doesn't happen how it may
have been between us if my health was right;
if, I say, all dreams are lost and barn
doors closed; if this should be, my heart of hearts,
do not grieve for us or weep or mourn.
For a brief time we knew Cupid's darts!
Cherish the way women can touch men,
instead of pining for what might have been.
The smallest things demand the biggest heart.
Passion has its place, and lustful screams
that penetrate the silence of the dark
can get two lovers through their lonely dreams.
And then the morning comes, and day is long;
the screams gone, silence fills the room
and what was passion doesn't seem as strong
as when the screams were offered against doom.
But flowers make their gesture toward the sun:
as day is when the bee will come to drink,
so day is when the finest deeds are done,
and day is when the mated become linked.
Screams of passion often have their say -
true lovers bond in silence through the day.
I wrote dozens of sonnets during my tumultuous affair with Zeena. Later I collected 27 of them into a chapbook called The Moods of Love. Zeena was the first woman who inspired me to write poems I later considered sharable, publishable. I have no idea where this energy came from. When we broke up, the energy was gone. I haven’t written a decent sonnet since.
Even the end of our affair was complicated. Zeena finally chose me over Mike but in the meantime I’d made a decision that would not permit us to remain together. I decided to get sober. Zeena, a daily drinker herself, wasn’t ready to quit, which meant that she became a threat to my sobriety.
I used a similar moment in my play Bedrooms & Bars, a play that owes a lot to my affair with Zeena (I even use some of the same sonnets in the play):
QUINN: I've been thinking a lot about what I want, Deadra. The first thing I want to do is get healthy. That requires a lot of change, and sitting in a bar watching you get drunk isn't cutting it. Maybe the person I'm becoming isn't someone you want to be around.
DEADRA: That should be my decision.
QUINN: I can't party the way I used to.
DEADRA: I can't either.
QUINN: You did a pretty good job last night.
DEADRA: It's my birthday, for Christ's sake. So what are you saying? Suddenly you don't want to be around me because I drink?
QUINN: That's part of it.
DEADRA: Then I'll quit.
QUINN: Don't be ridiculous.
DEADRA: I'm willing to make sacrifices here, Quinn. Accommodations. It would be nice to see you do a little of that in my direction.
QUINN: You don't really want to quit drinking, Deadra.
DEADRA: Quit telling me what I want.
I was at a point in my life when I knew that my choice quickly was becoming one between sobriety and death. Ironically enough, I got my first insight about this, which eventually was going to drive Zeena and me apart, as a result of something that happened on a wonderful trip we took together to Seattle.
My first sonnet was about a ferry ride we shared during this trip:
The skyline hangs above the bay, a mist
of mystery as in a dream, and we
stand close upon the ferry's deck and kiss,
and I feel all the world as it should be.
These are moments that my heart holds dear.
When you are near, somehow I am alive
more than I've been, and everything is clear
to me: I know for what I want to strive.
Yet I don't want my love to burden you,
a chain around your heart, presumption of
your time. The things that I would hope to do
for us are full of caring and my love.
I love you for each moment that I have
and ask from you such love as you can give.
I never had the good sense of the persona in this poem (I’ve never had the good sense of any of my better characters). I demanded much more from Zeena than “such love as you can give” and often felt insecure in the relationship. Every time she went back to Mike, I thought it was because I wasn’t good enough a lover for her. Since sex was often the main reason why a woman and I would stay together as long as we did, this felt like a different kind of rejection than I was used to feeling. I didn’t like it.
But all insecurity momentarily faded during a wonderful weekend we spent in Seattle, during which a single episode signaled that it was time to change my life.
6/20/2003 07:24:18 AM |
Thursday, June 19, 2003
"Old Joe Clark" performed by your host on his beloved Deering 5-string banjo.
6/19/2003 10:22:21 AM |
Hillary for President?
"Despite its status as a crucible of feminism, the US has oddly lagged in producing viable female candidates for the top job — partly because American presidents are also commanders-in-chief and most women politicians (like Hillary) have been overly concerned with caretaking issues at the expense of military expertise. "
Camille Paglia looks at Hillary Clinton's new memoir from an unusual perspective.
"On the evidence of this book, Hillary appears to believe that good intentions excuse all. Impediments to her lofty goals may have arisen partly through minor miscalculations on her part, she concedes, but most of the problems, in her view, have come from pigheaded reactionaries 'who want to turn the clock back on many of the advances our country has made', thanks to the Democratic Party, a congregation of the elect whose mission is the salvation of mankind. "
Access now.
6/19/2003 03:02:13 AM |
"Zeena"
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
I’ve always wooed women with words. I’m a writer, what else am I supposed to do? In the movie Dead Poets Society, a teacher gets his students interested in poetry by telling them that men study poetry in order to woo women.
I wooed women with letters, even when they lived in the same neighborhood. My letters were full of energy and hyperbole and hope. Sometimes I’d write a poem, which varied in quality from poor to very bad. Most of the time I had the good sense to leave out the poetry, or to include poems written by actual poets, especially E. E. Cummings. How many men have sent women the poem that begins, “somewhere i have never traveled…?” Woody Allen even used this lover’s gesture in a movie.
The letters were always sincere. In the beginning of a relationship, I always believed that all things were possible. I always believed that this one wouldn’t end like the last one. Fooling myself, I had little trouble fooling someone else.
I don’t regret writing any of them. From a certain point of view, they may look naïve and silly, self-delusive and deceitful, manipulative and aggressive. To me they are a sincere expression of how I felt at the time. I own up to every one of them.
However, once I learned my craft, love, lust or infatuation never turned me into a better writer – with one possible exception.
"Zeena" was a regular at Seafood Mama’s. I first noticed her as the companion of a man I’ll call “Harry.” Because it’s not my nature to compete for women, I entertained no fantasy of connecting with her in any romantic way, even though she was tall, thin and very attractive.
The first time we spoke I told her she reminded me of Dorothy Parker. I meant this as a compliment. Zeena, however, confused Dorothy Parker with Dorothy Killgallen and thought I was comparing her to the regular panelist on “What’s My Line,” which she took as an insult. We didn’t talk much after that.
Some time later, after she had stopped going with Harry, I was drunk enough to need a ride home from Seafood’s one night near closing time. Another regular, “Cal,” had a jeep and offered me a lift to the room I rented downtown. We were halfway there before I noticed that Zeena was in the jeep as well.
I assumed that she was heading off with Cal after they dropped me off. To my surprise, Zeena hopped out of the jeep behind me and followed me to the door of my building. She decided she was going to spend the night with me.
I have little recollection of what kind of night it was. I remember waking up with the How did I get so lucky? feeling. Zeena, on the other hand, wasn’t acting as if she’d had such a great time. In fact, I got the impression this was one of those one-night stands she could have lived without.
Normally this would have been enough to discourage me. I’m not sure why I didn’t bid her sayonara on the spot and send her on her way. Instead I invited her out to breakfast at Nobby’s. Before breakfast was over, I’d convinced her to spend the night with me again.
On our second night together, on which I made sure I was sober enough to remember what was happening, I watched Zeena undress. She felt self-conscious and said, “I feel like a character in a John Updike story.” This, of course, was the perfect thing to say to a writer. I was smitten.
We kept seeing one another and kept sleeping together – but I soon learned I wasn’t the only man Zeena shared a bed with. She had a boyfriend I’ll call “Mike” who was considerably younger than either of us (and Zeena was ten years younger than I). As I saw it, I (who didn’t compete for women) suddenly was in competition for Zeena with a young stud.
This went on for months, with Zeena sometimes spending the night with me, sometimes with Mike, but mostly spending the night alone. Mike and I knew about one another, and each of us wanted Zeena to ourselves, but she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, choose between us.
But it’s more complicated than this. The complication is that my relationship with Zeena was developing in a way that broke the usual pattern of my relationships with women in two important ways.
First, the initial connection between us was not in the realm of Eros. Good sex usually initiated my relationships with women, but Zeena and I weren’t clicking in bed with any consistency, which of course made me feel even more threatened by the young stud in her life. Yet it wasn’t Fidelia that was keeping us together either. We were still getting to know one another. What kept me interested in Zeena was – in some mysterious, irrational, magical way – something close to Agape. I felt like I’d known this woman all my life. I felt we had some deeply rooted connection that I couldn’t explain. It was as if we’d been lovers, or mates, or twins, in a previous life.
Probably it was all alcoholic wishful thinking, a delusion raised on insecurity because I found her so attractive but didn’t think she found me attractive. If she did, why was she always running back to Mike?
On a more mundane level, Zeena and I shared opinions on issues about which women usually disagreed with me. She shared my disdain for the culture of victimization and its exaltation of the art of whining. She believed dirty laundry was best kept in the closet out of sight. She didn’t like to be around people who were always feeling sorry for themselves. She looked at the glass as half-full, not half-empty. She had a big heart, befriending and knowing many homeless people by name.
Zeena had two grown sons of which she was very proud. She also had a boy who was being raised by the father’s parents, a situation about which she felt some ambivalence. Should she be raising the boy herself? I once entertained the fantasy that Zeena and I would go to Michigan, pick up her son from his grandparents, and all sail together into a sunset that led to Ireland, where we’d live happily ever after. Fortunately Zeena had better sense than to go along with such a crazy plan.
Even though our relationship was rocky, on one erotic occasion I felt as connected to Zeena as I’ve ever felt to anyone. In the middle of making love, we made eye contact – and there was something so open and fragile and wondrous in Zeena’s expression, as if her eyes were a portal leading me to the very core of her being, that I’ve never forgotten the moment. In memory, it remains a vivid, mysterious image. But I don’t know if this moment was shared and, at any rate, it never happened again.
The second way in which Zeena changed the pattern of my relationships with women was that she inspired me to write in a way I’d never written before. She inspired me to write sonnets.
6/19/2003 02:50:41 AM |
Wednesday, June 18, 2003
Renewal
Nothing like renewing the spirit after the dissatisfaction of "pop lit" (re post below about popular literature) by rereading an old favorite, in this case E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime. I'm enjoying this gem of a novel even more this time around than my earlier readings. I think I'll next tackle my favorite Doctorow novel, The Book of Daniel, which I haven't read in a long time.
6/18/2003 05:40:09 PM |
Death: the Last Taboo
Exhibit from the Australian Museum. Access now.
6/18/2003 07:32:21 AM |
No accounting for taste
I read very little "popular fiction" but lately I've been trying, if without success. I almost never can finish a "popular" novel that I begin.
My latest attempt was with Gone For Good by Harlan Coban. I'd heard an interview with Coban on the radio and liked what he had to say about storytelling. He'd won prestigious awards and was frequently on the NY Times bestselling list. I thought I'd give him a try.
I made it through about fifty pages before I abandoned the book, which is farther than I usually get. Why did I put it down?
It wasn't the writing. Coban is a clean, crisp writer. I liked his style. A bit too glib and cute in spots but that goes with the genre (thriller), I suppose.
It wasn't for lack of suspense. I admired how Coban constructed his story so that I wanted to know what happened next ... well, a part of me did. But a part of me couldn't care less, and this part finally led me to abandon the book.
I quit because the characters had nothing to do with my life, not even remotely. They were stick figures for the plot, in the final analysis. And the story, for all its suspense, was so convoluted and extreme that I began to doubt it, I began to see that it was constructed as a game, a trick, for my attention, for my entertainment.
There is nothing wrong with entertainment -- in fact, I believe storytelling must be entertaining. But it also must be more than this. When I compare this novel with two I read and enjoyed this year -- Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress and July, July -- the difference is all in character. Not in the writing, not in the strategy of storytelling, but in character, in the people in the story and what problems and conflicts they face. These two novels I like have "ordinary" stories, ordinary situations, compared to Coban's convoluted world. These characters exist in a world that I recognize. These characters feel to me like they are real, that they have something to do with my life.
This is why what I habitually read and enjoy is what is usually called "a literary novel," though the term seems to have become pejorative among certain agents and publishers. When I began writing in the 1960s, the literary novel was a genre, an accepted and respected genre. In today's marketplace, where books with only modest sales (the best a literary novel usually could hope for) become B-list backseaters, everyone is after the big popular novel, the Coban novel. Seldom am I able to get through any of them (an exception is Elmore Leonard).
The actor William Macy, in talking about films, once said he demanded two things from a film: one, that it makes him want to know what happens next; and two, that it has something to do with his life. I would say the same thing about fiction. For me, popular novels often fail in the latter. There's no accounting for taste.
6/18/2003 07:21:03 AM |
The Serial Monogamist
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
Along with too much booze came too many women. They fit into one of two categories: one-night stands and those with whom I attempted a relationship, most of which lasted anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, only a couple lasting as long as a year or more. The one-night stands were few and far between. Mostly I was a serial monogamist, moving from one steady girlfriend to another.
Most of these women I met in bars, which meant that more often than not they, too, had a drinking problem. Sometimes, in periodic frustrations with the bar scene, I met a woman by replying to a personal ad in the paper, and on one memorable occasion I even put in an ad myself. But mostly they were women who came to bars with some regularity, barflies like myself.
Very few of these women treated me as badly as I treated them. At best, the affair ended of its own inertia when not even sex, which was what brought us together in the first place and often was good and sometimes all we had in common, could keep us interested in one another. When the breakup was worse, it would be noisy and loud, full of drunken accusations, and when it was worst these histrionics would take place in a public bar.
The pattern was always the same. You bought a woman a drink, or she bought you a drink. You moved to a table for two or maybe just to adjacent barstools. You talked. You hit it off. One or the other suggested going to another bar, usually to one where you weren’t well known. You drank and talked some more. One or the other suggested going home together. Your place or mine? If there was booze in the apartment, you drank some more. You made love. You fell asleep, or passed out, together.
The next morning was always the key, the moment that defined whether this would be a one-night stand or an attempted relationship. Did I wake up with the feeling, My God, how did this happen? Or with the feeling, How did I get so lucky? If you felt the latter, if you made love again, if you had breakfast together, then the signs were good that a relationship would be attempted. You’d do this again. If you still were interested in one another a week later, you would do something besides go to a bar together. Maybe you’d go to a play or a movie or to dinner. Maybe you’d take a trip together out of town. Eros might find Fidelia standing by its side. Agape was usually nowhere to be found, but you can’t have everything in this world.
The women got bored with this routine before I did. Usually they wanted more than what we had together. Relationship gurus call this the “intimacy issue” but I don’t think it had much to do with intimacy at all. I think it had to do with the fact that, as a writer, I spent a lot of energy and focus within the world of my imagination, a world that was private. When a woman realized she was not a participant in this process, she felt left out, as indeed she was.
But this has little to do with intimacy. When someone speaking Chinese has a communication problem with someone speaking Arabic, it’s not a problem of intimacy, it’s a language barrier. Within the world of my imagination I was being intimate indeed, and in time, after the creative process was completed, the special arrangement of language we call a play or a story would become public, as intimate a communication as my art and craft permitted me to make. I might even hang out considerable dirty laundry in public, as I am doing here. Who gets more intimate than a writer?
This very discussion between a man and a woman occurs in my play Sad Laughter, which is based on the life of Moliere (excerpts appear in both The Best Stage Scenes of 1996 and The Best Men’s Stage Monologues of 1996). Here is the great playwright in an exchange with his young wife:
ARMANDE: I can only try and make sense out of your actions, Jean. You never talk to me. I never know what you want. One day you say I should leave the stage, the next you offer me a great part. I don't think I really know you at all.
MOLIERE: Everybody knows me — I reveal myself to the world!
ARMANDE: Only on stage.
MOLIERE: All it takes is the price of a ticket to know me.
ARMANDE: I'm talking about my husband, not the playwright and actor. We play roles on stage, not ourselves.
MOLIERE: I don't always distinguish the difference.
Later Moliere tries to explain the relationship between his work and his life:
I often play the cuckold on stage, don't I? So maybe I'm just practicing. That's what we live for, isn't it? Perfecting our parts? Fine-tuning our roles? I know I haven't given you much attention lately. I mean, you're right, our life is a rehearsal. My life is a dress rehearsal for a play. Even now, as I hear myself talking, I wonder where I'll be putting this, in what future scene in what future play I'll be standing before someone like you, perhaps before you yourself, the actress, and I'll be the actor, and we'll be talking — in some play, some day — much as we are talking here now. Because that's what my life seems to be, a dress rehearsal for a play. Which, strictly speaking, doesn't really make my life much of a life at all, does it?
It’s all material – which is not necessarily a good thing. But it’s the way life is for a writer. Or at least for this one.
My writing, even more than my drinking, was the mistress against whom many women felt secondary and unable to compete. There were exceptions to this – Carol and Linda come immediately to mind, both of whom found ways to participate in my work (and in the next chapter you’ll meet “Zeena,” a participant as Muse) – but most women found that I did not have enough emotional energy left over from writing to give them what they needed. Who can blame them for leaving?
If the pattern of the relationship was similar, the women were not. In all ways they were different, and when I think of them now it’s as the individuals they were. Two, in particular, stand out in my memory, not because these short relationships were special but because the women were such remarkable and individual characters. They were, in fact, characters a writer might create.
The first I’ll call the Director. I met her on a sunny afternoon at a beer garden. I was ordering beer by the small pitcher, as I usually did, and drinking one after the other as I revised a play I was writing. This was during my residency period at the New Rose Theatre.
In time, a woman took the table next to me, also sitting alone, and she too began to work on something. We may have exchanged a smile but physically she was not the tall lithe type of woman I’m readily attracted to, so I entertained no thoughts of seduction and went back to work. It was she who made the first move.
Without asking, she joined me. She had noticed I was working on a script. She was a theater director and actress. I put aside my work, and we started chatting about theater. She was new in town and hoping to make connections, how serendipitous to run into me. She had a great personality, we hit it off, one thing led to another, and I ended up going home with her.
The next morning I dismissed the experience as a one-night stand. A few days later I received something in the mail from her. It was a report card. She had graded my lovemaking performance in a variety of categories. I was not too pleased with my final grade, a B-minus, until I realized that this was about the grade I would have given her, too. We just hadn’t clicked in bed, which was fine. At the bottom of my report card, like a teacher’s note, she suggested a relationship as friends and theater artists, keeping sex out of it – but did I have any friends I might fix her up with?
How the hell can you not like a woman like that? She was ballsy, eccentric, unique – and she ended up being a talented theater artist as well. A few years later we worked on a grant project together, and she directed a script I wrote.
Still later I met a guy in a bar who had recently experienced the strangest one-night stand of his life. The woman had sent him a report card on his lovemaking, giving him a final grade of B+. The Director was up to her old tricks. I reminded the guy that his grade could have been worse and bought him a drink.
The other woman I remember so well is someone who responded to my personal ad. By and large, running the ad proved to be a confusing, immobilizing experience because I received over 100 replies – and every one of the women who wrote sounded like someone worth meeting. How was I supposed to choose between them? I also found it depressing that so many neat-sounding ladies were as unable as I was to find a partner of the opposite sex. Of course, in my ad I failed to mention that I spent four or five hours a day, on the average, in a barroom.
I probably wouldn’t have responded to any of the women at all had not one response caught my interest by the extreme measures it would take to meet its writer. This woman was a doctor, and she only could be reached by phone at home between the hours of four and five in the morning on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
I’m a morning man. The thought of having an actual conversation with a woman before nine in the morning was very titillating. I called the woman as soon as I could, and we made a date to have lunch later in the week.
We agreed to meet at a downtown restaurant near the waterfront. I went early and sat at the bar, lubricating my nerves while wanting to call the whole thing off. I tried to imagine dating a doctor and couldn’t.
She was late, which actually was a relief. I entertained the fantasy that she was standing me up. Then, just as I was about to give up on her, a red sports car swerved to a stop on the sidewalk in front of the door into the bar. A tall dark lanky woman, just my type, rushed through the door and grabbed a man who was sitting on the stool nearest to her. “Are you Charles?” she asked. The man was a born comic. He replied, “No, but I wish I was.”
I identified myself, and the Doctor, grabbing my arm, pulled me outside. The sports car’s engine was idling. She introduced herself and asked if a picnic lunch would work.
She had prepared a wonderful gourmet feast, which we ate in Washington Park overlooking the city. It was about as romantic a first date, a blind date at that, as you can have. We seemed to hit it off and before she had to rush back to the hospital, we made a second date.
I was very optimistic about this relationship for several weeks. She had an incredible apartment on an upper floor in a downtown highrise. She loved theater. She was even familiar with my work. Maybe going out with a doctor, with a woman rolling in dough, wouldn’t be so bad after all.
But then came the rest of the story. She said she liked me. She liked me so much that she wanted to give me a complete makeover. She wanted to buy me expensive clothes, getting me out of my usual jeans and work shirt. She wanted to set me up in her apartment. She wanted to buy me a car. She wanted me to escort her to all the fine fancy events of the city. I had to look the part, of course. She wanted me to be her boy-toy.
I think I actually considered the offer for a few minutes. In those days, I always gave free rent the time of day. But I already had free rent, and all I had to do for it was to collect the rent of others and keep honest books. What I liked least about the offer, of course, was the makeover. Today your jeans, tomorrow your soul.
The funny thing is, the Doctor wasn’t used to being turned down. She wasn’t used to being rejected. She couldn’t believe that I, a starving writer, wouldn’t let her take care of me. Who the hell did I think I was, pseudo-bohemian slob that I was, not to let her buy me a thousand dollar wardrobe? Didn’t I know that clothes make the man? How do you expect to become a famous playwright if you dress like that? And so forth and so on.
It wasn’t a friendly separation. A few years later, when I ran into her at a play, looking a tad ridiculous in her furs at this particular dungeon of a theater, she refused to acknowledge my presence. I was happy to notice that the boy-toy accompanying her looked miserable as hell.
6/18/2003 07:03:56 AM |
Tuesday, June 17, 2003
3 Perspectives
WatchBlog runs a 3-column blog reflecting 3 points of view: Democrats, Republican, Third Party (everything else). Access now.
6/17/2003 08:35:16 AM |
Good times, bad times
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
In treatment, counselors reminded us that we had to come to think of our drinking days as “the bad old days,” not “the good old days.” They had a point. Every drunk has horror stories, and I have many of my own, some of which I’ve already shared here. But as I became confident in my sobriety, or as confident as one can become, I began to realize there were, in fact, things I liked about drinking, that I did have good times as well as bad while under the influence of alcohol. This is not to condone abuse of booze but to face reality squarely in the face. Sometimes it was just damn fun to get plastered.
The most fun I ever had drinking was when sitting around a table at Nobby’s or Seafood’s with three or more drinking buddies who also were in the arts, many of them writers, or wannabe writers. On these occasions, everyone would be talking at once, telling stories, cracking jokes, making puns, kidding one another about some past escapade – it was hard not to miss us when we were in gear and oiled with just enough liquor to be loose but still quick and coherent in our thoughts and speech.
As the night wore on, as we consumed more liquor, the mood would change as wit turned into repetition and quick repartee turned into loud arguments, until we were just a table of loud drunks all shouting at once. But the bartender and waitresses always indulged us – we were good, paying customers, after all. By the time we broke up and wandered off our separate ways, some to go home, others to hit another bar (as I usually did), the charm of the evening’s early hour or two, before our intelligence got washed away by the booze, was forgotten, another good time lost to memory.
There were many of these good times, many more than I remember. They were great fun in their own present tense, the best of drinking times. And what I remember most is laughter.
Most of my worst drinking times were private – either because I was alone in my apartment, drowning myself in some self-pitying ritual of personal or professional pain, almost entirely self-induced, or because I managed to slip away into the shadows before my personal atrocity was discovered. Let me give an example of each to represent all such bad times, many more than I have the stomach to recount.
When my first hyperdrama, Chateau de Mort, opened at the Pittock Mansion, it was a very big deal. What with one-hundred dollar opening night tickets, the affair was as formal as an event in Portland is likely to get. To celebrate the special occasion, I rented a white tuxedo, and it caused such a stir, including my one and only appearance in the newpaper’s society pages, that I decided to make this a trademark – to attend my opening nights in a white tuxedo. I didn’t do this all the time, for reasons soon to become obvious, but for a few years the white tux became my costume for the occasion.
Naturally I hit Nobby’s and Seafood’s to show off before going to my opening. This caused more of a stir than at the theater, where I was never the only formally attired man in the house. I always was wearing the only tuxedo at the bar.
On one such opening night, I hit the bars in my white tux earlier and to a more rowdy crowd of regulars than usual, with the result that I had more than usual to drink before the play began. Everyone was buying me drinks, it seemed. I ended up running late, so went to the theater in a cab instead of walking, as I usually did.
The cab stopped across the street from the theater, which ended up being the proverbial blessing in disguise. I paid the cabby, got out and started to step across the street. Without warning, I suddenly passed wind – and in the very next moment, I shit myself. The cab had pulled away by now, and by good fortune no other theater goers were near me, though a dozen or so were across the street, making their way inside. The stench was terrible and immediate, closely followed by discomfort as the not-quite-solid excrement started sliding down my legs.
Well, you get the picture. I missed my opening night. I managed to walk back to my northwest neighborhood without grossing people out by sticking to side streets and moving away from anyone who approached. But how to get into my apartment undetected? Somehow I accomplished this, too.
After I got cleaned up, I went to bed. But I woke up before the bars were closed and – you guessed it – made Seafood’s before the last round, and I lied to everyone that opening night had been a grand success.
I never did get the nerve to return the white tuxedo. It was ruined. I couldn’t figure out a story to tell them that would explain its condition, other than the embarrassing truth, so I just waited for them to bill me, which they did, and I paid the bill the same day. This was the last time I rented a white tuxedo for opening night.
My most extended period of wallowing in drunken self-pity was after Linda left me, taking her piano with her. For almost a week I did nothing but sit in my apartment and listen to records, mostly the Chess recording of “The Best of Little Walter,” drinking, in a trance of “the booze and the blues,” as a friend called it later.
My apartment was half-a-block from a supermarket, which is about as far as I ventured out, and then only when I had to buy more beer and wine. I was eating very little and drinking very much, and I must have played two particular songs by Little Walter a hundred times each: one with the line, “This is a mean old world, try living by yourself,” and the other with the verse and refrain, “There’s just but one thing, baby, that makes your daddy drink; I see you with another man, and I begin to think. I’m in love with you, baby; wonder do you ever think of me.”
The booze and the blues, endlessly – but not so endlessly, after all, because a week or so later, it was over. I showed up at Nobby’s and Seafood’s again and, yes, I’d been feeling under the weather, thanks for asking, but I feel just fine now, and why don’t you make that a round for the house while you’re at it?
6/17/2003 07:42:28 AM |
Monday, June 16, 2003
Universal Studios: archives and collections
Access now.
6/16/2003 10:09:50 AM |
About writing books
From the 2Blowhards blog, Michael on the realities of writing a book. Links to considerable discussion this generated. Access now.
Missing from this discussion is writing as existence, as a way of existing and responding to the environment, I write, therefore I am. There is more to writing than commerce.
6/16/2003 07:36:48 AM |
Watering holes
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
Throughout this time – working for Shaw, managing apartments, writing for Northwest Magazine, helping to create Oregon Business Magazine, getting plays produced and screenplays optioned, being in a brief relationship with one woman or another – I was drinking. I was drinking every day. From the summer of 1960 to the summer of 1993, I don’t believe there was a single day in which I didn’t drink at least three beers. I didn’t even consider drinking a six-pack a day drinking. It’s what I did when I wasn’t drinking because when I wanted to drink, I did – until the bars closed or I passed out, whichever came first. Most often it was the former.
From the time I moved back to Portland after leaving Carol to the day I entered the V.A. Treatment Center, I did most of my drinking at two watering holes in northwest Portland. One was a tavern called Nobby’s Bar & Grill, which is the only establishment in the neighborhood that hasn’t changed much in the past twenty-plus years. The other was a bar-restaurant that no longer exists, called Seafood Mama’s.
Here was my living room, den and kitchen for over ten years. I stopped by each bar every day. I knew everyone, and everyone knew me. I was friends with the owners. Most of the women I slept with I met at one bar or the other. My social life, such as it was, existed totally within the circle of regular customers who also hung out at Nobby’s and/or Seafood’s. This was my community, my extended family.
On holidays, like Thanksgiving, Greg at Nobby’s sometimes would host an open house for the regulars and anyone else in the neighborhood who didn’t have anywhere to go for turkey. Now and again I would help out, contributing oyster dressing or shrimp aspic to the sprawling food tables. These were large neighborhood affairs since there were many of us who had nowhere else to go.
Jack at Seafood’s built a magnificent patio behind the restaurant, beautifully designed with gardens and a pond, and in the four or five months a year when Oregon weather invited outside activity, the patio was a popular place to hang out.
I spent far more time at Nobby’s or Seafood Mama’s than I did in my apartment. I used my apartment for writing in the morning and for sleeping at night, but whatever social activity I did, I did in one of my two favorite watering holes. Sometimes, especially if finances were tight, I’d drink at home first before wandering into a bar. Near the end of my drinking life, I’d drink at home because I preferred to be alone.
There were many other drinking establishments in the neighborhood, and I stopped by most of them regularly. The Gypsy was the place to go if you wanted a drink at seven in the morning. When there wasn’t a writing deadline hovering over me, often I did. In fact, I preferred morning drinking to night drinking, partly because I’m a morning person by nature but also because there was something more demonstrative and unacceptable about being able to party when all the other poor slobs were dragging themselves to work. Since I made most of my income on a per-project basis most of the time, I had great flexibility in scheduling my days and weeks, leaving lots of time to hang out in bars. I was a binge drinker, carefully picking my party times between deadlines.
If you stood at the bar at the Gypsy at seven in the morning, or even better downtown at Kelly’s, you would see a surprising flow of upstanding citizens come in for a drink or two before going to the office. I saw judges, lawyers, CEOs, politicians and others belly up beside me at the bar on such occasions, the kind of people whose photographs got in the paper. Down the hatch, and they were off to become their admired responsible selves.
6/16/2003 07:22:18 AM |
Sunday, June 15, 2003
Film shorts
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
In the last few years I’ve been writing short scripts for a filmmaker named Mariana Arevalo, two of which – Love (Revised Edition} and Blind Date – have been made and can be downloaded from the Internet.
Serendipity again. I received an email from Arevalo after she found me as a screenwriter on the Internet. She was an NYU student, looking for someone to help her with American dialogue for her short film thesis. Her home was Mexico, and English was her second language. I ended up giving her some story ideas as well as dialogue help. We hit it off, and I proposed a short based on my own story idea, which became Blind Date. We continue to work together.
This is a not a lucrative venture but a satisfying one because I get to see an end product, which has not happened in my screenwriting career before. I’ve decided I’m too old for the grind and stress of marketing in Hollywood. Writing shorts gives me a way to see results while continuing screenwriting.
At the same time, having done this I may be ready to move on. I’ve discovered that the screenplay can be an excellent first draft to a short novel – a student convinced me of this – putting down a solid story upon which one then can build the parameters of voice and rhetoric that make or break a novel. As I write, I am working from a screenplay on a short novel, and so far I love the new process. The screenplay is like a security blanket. The story is already there, letting me concentrate on the telling. If this process continues to work as well as it has so far, this may be my new methodology in fiction.
6/15/2003 08:16:53 AM |
Saturday, June 14, 2003
Ger's book
If you've been following this blog for a while, you know about the death a few months ago of my good friend, Ger Moran. Ger, a poet, was working on a book when he died. I'm going to bring it out, plus a section with other writing I found when I helped his sister clean out his apartment. Hope to finish up this project in the next few weeks. He'll have his place on the library shelf, as he should.
6/14/2003 10:01:32 AM |
No Book Writer Blues
Cindy Harrison's blues for writers. Access now.
A few days after writing this, Cindy says she ran into my own Screenwriter Blues, and they make a nice pair. SW Blues was originally posted at my original website, The Screenwriters & Playwrights Home Page, a number of years ago as a "Real Audio Screenwriting Tip," a popular audio series on the page. For a while these audio tips were mirrored at a site in Finland but I think this site is gone now, too. Maybe I'll repost the tips here one day when I have time on my hands.
6/14/2003 07:16:43 AM |
The Screenwriters & Playwrights Home Page
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
Somewhat by accident, I became the first screenwriter and playwright active on the Internet.
I went online in the early 1990s, first using a service called Prodigy. As the World Wide Web became the foundation of the net, I saw immediately that “linking” text was a literary environment perfectly suited for hyperdrama (which I still was calling “simultaneous-action theater” at the time). Reading a hyperdrama script as a linear book was inconvenient, to say the least, because action was happening simultaneously and the continuation of page 17 might well be on page 59. What was needed was a way to move around the script in a non-linear fashion quickly and easily – and this was exactly how one navigated on the new World Wide Web. I wanted to learn how to code web pages in order to learn how to put hyperdrama scripts on the Internet for easier reading. Thus I had to teach myself HTML (hypertext markup language, the computer coding system for writing web pages).
I decided to look around for some models to learn from and naturally began my search for websites relating to playwriting and screenwriting. I couldn’t find a single site.
In fact, there were none. This is how new the World Wide Web was! I decided to create the first Internet website for scriptwriters.
In 1994 I put up a website called “The Screenwriters & Playwrights Home Page.” I was in the right place at the right time, rather like a participant in the Oklahoma Land Rush laying claim to a hunk of earth and saying, “On this land I am founding the first school and support group for screenwriters and playwrights!”
Being the first screenwriter on the net, through the 1990s I became a combination of Godfather, guru and favorite uncle as the Internet exploded and dozens of sites went up to serve the needs of scriptwriters. At its height, my website consistently attracted over 500 visitors a day, over 15,000 a month. I took the website down several years ago, replacing it with something much more modest, but even today a Yahoo! Search on the Internet for “screenwriters playwrights home page” yields over 6000 links.
The website was packed with educational and support material for scriptwriters, and everything I offered was free. After a few years, with so much traffic coming by, I decided to see if I could take advantage of my reputation and make some money on my website. I looked at several possible ways to do this, including turning the website into a subscription service, and decided on writing an electronic screenwriting tutorial and selling it via my website. The site itself would remain free.
It took over a year to write my screenwriting course in hypertext. I called it Screenwright: the Craft of Screenwriting, an electronic screenwriting tutorial that read like being on the Internet itself, being layered with links to new material. I offered the ebook for sale in 1997 for only $35, advertising solely on my own website. There was nothing quite like it on the market.
This was a risky venture because, in fact, all of the essential material in my ebook was also available on my website for free. In other words, my major competitor was myself! But the ebook was more tightly organized, a step-by-step electronic course in conceiving, structuring, writing, rewriting and marketing a spec screenplay in the contemporary Hollywood environment.
Screenwright became an immediate hit. Critics loved it and its first buyers loved it. Praise and testimonials filled my email box, which I used in my onsite advertising and which in turn increased sales even more. I’d found a way to make an income from my website. Moreover, since this was a self-publishing project, I wasn’t getting ten percent royalties but the entire price with very little deducted for expenses. However, I quickly signed on with a company to handle the sales for a fee so I wouldn’t have to spend my time filling orders. I had a hit on my hands but I still was a writer first, a businessman second.
One of the things that set Screenwright apart, besides being written in electronic hypertext, was that I wrote it from an academic point of view. Screenwriting texts remain primarily “guru written” in tone even today, advice from a wise author who knows more than the reader. I took a different approach, looking at and evaluating all the advice on the market and tempering it with my own experience in screenwriting.
I also wrote the book for a kind of writer most writing texts ignore, those who don’t like to do too much planning before they start writing. This, in fact, is my own creative style. The common advice is to plan first, making story outlines and character sketches, and only begin writing after these are done. Some of us, however, are “sink or swim” writers, who like to jump right into the creative waters and figure out the details as we are struggling to keep from drowning. I called the planning folks “tree people” and the sink-or-swim folks “forest people,” and in Screenwright the needs of both get addressed.
Screenwright is in its sixth edition (2003) and still selling steadily, though not as well as in the early years. I’ve based two paperback books on it for use in my university screenwriting classes, the first one under the same title and a recent expansion and revision called What Happens Next? An Introduction to Screenwriting.
Amazingly enough, the electronic Screenwright still has no hypertext competitors, even though hypertext provides an extraordinary pedagogic environment.
Screenwriting “gurus,” who write most of the screenwriting books, must not appreciate hypertext.
6/14/2003 07:07:49 AM |
Friday, June 13, 2003
Happy birthday, W.B. Yeats!
A great many of his poems are available online. Start here.
A Prayer For Old Age
GOD guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone;
From all that makes a wise old man
That can be praised of all;
O what am I that I should not seem
For the song's sake a fool?
I pray - for word is out
And prayer comes round again -
That I may seem, though I die old,
A foolish, passionate man.
6/13/2003 07:27:23 AM |
10 years
Ten years ago to the day, I consumed my last alcoholic beverage. This is, to believe my doctor, the only reason I'm alive today. The transition was not an easy one, particularly early on, nor was it accomplished through traditional means. I didn't do a 12-step program, although I went through a V.A. treatment program for almost a year. Instead I educated myself about alcohol. My job assignment at the V.A. was to work in the medical library, and I took full advantage of the resources there. I learned, for example, that there were many scientific studies, especially those done in Europe, that the U.S. "recovery industry" ignores because they don't serve its purposes. I learned that just as many folks get straight on their own, without help, as those who go through a treatment program (I, however, don't think I could have done it on my own in the beginning). I learned how much politics and moralizing are a part of the recovery industry. I learned that business, after all, is business. I worked for about seven months in the medical library and had lots of time on my hands to read books and journals -- I felt like the prisoner teaching himself law in jail. I learned everything I could about alcohol, its effects on the body, and its cultural role. Getting sober was more an act of common sense (after all, the alternative was to die) and self-education than any kind of leap of faith or dutiful adherence to a program. In a few years, it seemed amazing to me that I'd spent as much time drinking as I had. (More about this upcoming in the memoirs.) At any rate, it was ten years ago today that this journey began, so I thought I would note the occasion. I don't go to meetings or anything like that, so they'll be no "chip" to collect. But my wife says she's taking me out to dinner. Why not? (For more, see my essay Liquor and Lit.)
6/13/2003 07:17:37 AM |
What to read this summer?
Here is a site that suggests books based on your interests. Go to whichbook.net now.
6/13/2003 06:51:27 AM |
Rogue nation
American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions, a new book by Clyde Prestowitz. Reviewed by John Rossant. "In October, 1999, candidate George W. Bush told a campaign audience: 'If we are a humble nation, [other nations] will see that and respect us.' Alas, if only Bush as President had stuck to that idea. Instead, in case after case, the new Administration seemed to thumb its nose needlessly at the rest of the world." Access now.
6/13/2003 06:37:48 AM |
Ruby's Tune
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
I’ll call her “Helen.” She was a professor of theater close to an early retirement. But she wasn’t interested in retiring, only in changing careers. She wanted to produce movies, and she had her eyes open for projects.
Helen loved my play Waitresses. This mother-daughter story, about a closet country songwriter trying to keep her daughter from making the same mistakes she did – and with the same man, touched her in a special place. This was going to be the project that broke her into the film industry.
When she made me an offer to option the film rights to my play, she had in mind hiring a screenwriter in Hollywood to make the adaptation. But I wouldn’t sell unless I got to write the screenplay. I told her I’d done some work for local producer Tom Shaw. This seemed to count for nothing.
Since I’d never written a “Hollywood” screenplay before, Helen tried to talk me out of being the writer by increasing the offer. We played this game for a while until she realized I was dead serious. She told me the project became more risky with myself as the screenwriter. The option offer would be less than before. I signed a contract.
The nine or ten months I spent writing draft after draft of a screenplay based on Waitresses was on-the-job training as important to my future screenwriting as working with Leland Starnes had been to my future playwriting. Helen had a deep understanding of film story structure, about which I knew nothing at the time. Patiently she gave me a crash course in the incredibly efficient and modular storytelling strategy that goes into screenwriting.
Waitresses is a four-character play set entirely in a kitchen. In making the story work as film, I not only had to get outside but add characters and subplots that had never occurred to me while writing the play. Suddenly Ruby, the protagonist, had not one love interest – but two (she’d had none in the play). We left the kitchen to go to bars and laundromats and shopping malls, to rodeos and fly-fishing streams and fireworks displays. If I had sold the rights straight out, and a Hollywood screenwriter had added the same additions to the script that I ended up adding, I would have been horrified – because I still would have been ignorant about the huge differences between the stage play script and the screenplay.
It took almost a year but under Helen’s patient tutelage I learned how to write a screenplay. I also was bitten by the screenwriting bug, loving getting free from the practical constraints of live theater. Being a minimalist in my prose anyway, I took immediately to the “less is more” mantra of screenwriting. This form of writing was as much fun as any kind of writing I’d ever done before.
Ruby’s Tune, the movie based on Waitresses, never got funded despite Helen’s optioning the script on four different occasions. More than once she thought she’d put her funding together. One night Helen called me from Las Vegas to say she was signing the final papers in the morning, and a fat check would be in the mail to me by ten a.m. I was so excited I emailed Harriet, who was on a tour in China, that Ruby’s Tune was finally getting made. We were going to get a lot of money.
It took Helen several days to recover enough to tell me that the deal had fallen through at the last minute. Back to the drawing boards.
On another occasion, she thought she had a deal together – until an investor learned that Jennifer O’Neill was packaged to play Ruby, the lead. O’Neill was looking for a comeback after several bad television movies, and Ruby’s Tune struck her as the perfect vehicle. Unfortunately, her reputation for failed TV movies caused one investor to withdraw, which is all it took to stop another “done deal.” And so it went.
Observing Helen through all this, I was glad I wasn’t a movie producer. I don’t know how many tens of thousands of dollars Helen spent trying to get Ruby’s Tune into production. She always paid me writer’s guild minimums or more, and all her checks were good. I think I became more heart-broken for her than for myself, so badly she wanted this movie to happen and so long and hard she worked to fund it.
This was my first experience with screenwriting. Over the next fifteen years, I’d option five more screenplays and go through a similar dance of close calls and almost “done deals,” but nothing ever got fully funded and nothing ever got filmed.
However, I did get hired to write the screenplay on a couple of projects, though neither of these made it to film either. For a while an assistant to Robert Wise was a big fan, pushing several of my scripts, but eventually to no avail.
But here’s the kicker. As a playwright, I’ve had dozens of plays produced, several of them winning awards. Yet I made more money as a screenwriter, optioning six scripts that never went anywhere, than from all my royalties as a playwright (I’m not counting the film and television rights sales). There is something very wrong, perhaps even immoral, about this.
Screenwriters are always crying that they don’t get any respect. They get a ton of money instead. Their union sold their souls to the devil, exchanging artistic control and integrity for cash, and now they live with the consequences, crying all the way to the bank.
6/13/2003 06:32:30 AM |
Thursday, June 12, 2003
Fascism anyone?
Lawrence Britt on the characteristics of fascism. "For the purpose of this perspective, I will consider the following regimes: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’s Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia. To be sure, they constitute a mixed bag of national identities, cultures, developmental levels, and history. But they all followed the fascist or protofascist model in obtaining, expanding, and maintaining power. Further, all these regimes have been overthrown, so a more or less complete picture of their basic characteristics and abuses is possible. Analysis of these seven regimes reveals fourteen common threads that link them in recognizable patterns of national behavior and abuse of power. These basic characteristics are more prevalent and intense in some regimes than in others, but they all share at least some level of similarity."
Access full article. The fourteen characteristics are:
- Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
- Disdain for the importance of human rights.
- Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause.
- The supremacy of the military/avid militarism.
- Rampant sexism.
- A controlled mass media.
- Obsession with national security.
- Religion and ruling elite tied together.
- Power of corporations protected.
- Power of labor suppressed or eliminated.
- Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.
- Obsession with crime and punishment.
- Rampant cronyism and corruption.
- Fraudulent elections.
6/12/2003 01:05:23 PM |
Experiencing War: Veterans History Project
Another wonderful resource from the Library of Congress. Access now.
6/12/2003 11:03:12 AM |
Sum-sum-summertime!
Got my final grades in, finished up the last of my online students ... and I'm done with spring term! A nice break now before I teach a 5-week online class beginning in July. But online classes are more flexible, even though they also tend to be more intense. At any rate, the summer officially begins for me ... and I'm ready!
6/12/2003 09:13:15 AM |
Power workshop for screenwriters
My 5-week online class begins July 7. Details here.
6/12/2003 08:58:09 AM |
The poet who disappeared
About the disappearance of Weldon Kees. "As James Reidel notes in Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees (published this month by the University of Nebraska Press), friends and admirers soon began to speculate that the author might have staged his own death, then fled to start life over in some new place." Article by Scott McLemee. Access now.
6/12/2003 06:49:33 AM |
Hyperdrama on the Internet
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
But there proved to be a fringe alternative to a playwriting career in New York: writing hyperdrama for the Internet. Here one had access to a worldwide audience with a new form of theater that fit the Internet perfectly because hyperdrama scripts were written in hypertext, the same language that created pages on the World Wide Web. Reading a hyperdrama script on the Internet became an interactive, engaging experience as it never could become within the linear restraints of the traditional book.
My first experience with hyperdrama on the Internet was in 1996 when I wrote a one-act hyperdrama for Andres Espejo and his theater group Prisma in Santiago, Chile. I’d met Andres after he sent me an email, asking for permission to translate one of my earlier hyperdramas into Spanish. As we exchanged ideas, we decided it would be better to collaborate on a new, short hyperdrama specifically written for his theater company.
Through the summer we met weekly in a chat room as I developed the story with Andres and Prisma. Espejo knew English well. When I finished the script, called The Last Song of Violeta Parra, he translated it into Spanish. Both versions were put on the Internet, where they remain today and often get accessed.
In the meantime, I had been working on my most ambitious hyperdrama project yet, the one I hoped would bring respect to the form. I decided to write a hyerdrama version of Chekhov’s The Seagull. To own the full rights, I first drew on my Russian background to translate the play, which took me several years. Then I began the very long process of writing all the new scenes for Chekhov’s actors when they were “off stage,” which is to say, off somewhere else in the estate when not on “Chekhov’s stage.”
I finished The Seagull Hyperdrama in summer, 2002, and put it online immediately. From start to finish, the project had taken me ten years.
Did I bring respect to the new theater form? I have no idea. Will I write another hyperdrama? I doubt it. I’m not sure I have the energy.
But from the moment Steve Smith commissioned my first hyperdrama, I became fascinated by, perhaps even addicted to, this layered, complex way of telling a story in live performance. Through most of the 1990s, this was the primary focus of my writing energy. I wouldn’t have missed the ride for anything in the world.
In retrospect, perhaps my fondest hyperdrama experience was not on the Internet at all but in the classroom. In the late 1980s I was a writer-in-residence at the prestigious private school Catlin Gabel in Portland, where I guided eight seniors through the process of conceiving, writing, and performing their own one-hour hyperdrama. These kids were brilliant. The form did not intimidate them at all. On the contrary, hyperdrama brought out their best writing, and they collaboratively created a layered play full of wit, surprises, intelligence and fun.
Their central story concerned a new headmaster at the school who was determined to make French the official language at Catlin Gabel. A group of students work to make sure this doesn’t happen. Within the play a short film was shown, which they wrote and shot themselves, a hilarious spoof on the school’s own recruiting film.
Catlin Gabel encourages individual, even eccentric, behavior, and one girl was so independent she chose not to participate in the collaboration of the script. Finally we found a way in which she agreed to participate. She was a poet, and we let her wander randomly through the action, reciting her poetry, costumed in a white sheet and looking very ethereal, representing the Spirit of Catlin Gabel.
The short hyperdrama was a great success with their classmates, although perhaps some of the parents were a little bewildered by the performance. When I saw the enthusiasm of the students in putting together the piece, and in their classmates in watching it, I knew that hyperdrama had a future.
This future may still belong to the Internet, given the fact that hyperdrama is so difficult to produce live. Or the Internet may be the holding cell where the new form can grow and win converts. I’ve never believed hyperdrama was just a fad. I still don’t.
6/12/2003 06:36:30 AM |
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
Happy birthday, Athol Fugard!
South African playwright, author of "Sizwe Bonzi Is Dead," one of the great late 20th C. plays.
6/11/2003 02:22:35 PM |
Noise Free America
"Noise pollution is getting worse. In the last 15 years, noise levels have risen six-fold in major US cities. The Census Bureau reports that noise is Americans' top complaint about their neighborhoods, and the major reason for wanting to move." An organization that wants to reverse this trend. Access now.
6/11/2003 06:42:37 AM |
Hookers as heroes
Blake Linton Wilfong wants to change your opinion about the world's oldest profession in this website focusing on the contribution of prostitutes throughout history. Access now.
6/11/2003 06:39:11 AM |
Performing Arts in America, 1875-1923
Digital resources from the New York Public Library. Access now.
6/11/2003 06:25:40 AM |
The HUAC and Hollywood
A summary of the obsessive search for commies in LaLaLand. Access now.
6/11/2003 06:23:05 AM |
Free-Speech Follies
"The modern American version of crying wolf is crying First Amendment. If you want to burn a cross on a black family's lawn or buy an election by contributing millions to a candidate or vilify Jerry Falwell and his mother in a scurrilous "parody," and someone or some government agency tries to stop you, just yell "First Amendment rights" and you will stand a good chance of getting to do what you want to do. In the academy, the case is even worse: Not only is the First Amendment pressed into service at the drop of a hat (especially whenever anyone is disciplined for anything), it is invoked ritually when there are no First Amendment issues in sight." Article by Stanley Fish. Access now.
6/11/2003 06:16:57 AM |
New York
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
Late in my career, over 20 years after I’d received my M.F.A. in playwriting, I decided to try once again to get my plays produced in the Big Apple. Very early in my career, you may remember, I had a New York producer interested in my political play, My Town, Your Town. But only a few years later, marketing from nearby Chesapeake, I couldn’t get anyone to give me the time of day.
When the first version of my play about Moliere, The Comedian In Spite Of Himself, opened at the New Rose Theatre in 1984, a New York actress in town to teach a workshop saw it and loved it. She asked the theater for a copy of the script, which she sent and recommended to her old friend … Hal Prince. I later received a letter from Prince, who called the play “first rate work” before saying he was already committed to a project that would take several years of his focus (this turned out to be Phantom of the Opera). His and the actress’ enthusiasm didn’t find the play a producer, however. A decade later I revised this three-act play into the two-act Sad Laughter, which remains a favorite of mine.
In the mid-1990s I found a New York director interested in my new play, Who Forgives? He had a small theater in SoHo. After putting the script through a few staged readings, and after a few rewrites from me, he decided to produce the play.
In rehearsal, he decided the script was lacking an important moment. The play is the story of Ed, a recovering sex offender, and the director decided we needed to see a flashback of Ed’s seduction of a young girl. This scene, played in the nude, would be very powerful.
I was communicating with the director by phone from Oregon and was shocked at his request for such a scene. The challenge of the play, it seemed to me, was to get the audience on Ed’s side, to make a pedophile sympathetic, not for his deeds but for the possibility of his recovery. I was creating Ed as Everyman, as the play’s closing monologue suggests:
ED: My name's Ed, and I'm a perp.
Cynthia once told me that the whole human race belongs in recovery. I think she has a point. Take denial, for example. The denial that people like me are, in so many ways, just like you.
Last week, when you looked out your kitchen window, that was me mowing the lawn next door. You waved, and I waved back.
Sometimes I bag your groceries at the supermarket. You tell me how your kids are doing in school. You tell me that corny joke you heard earlier in the week.
One summer I coached your boy's Little League team. Over the years, I taught both your daughters how to swim.
I've done many things in my life that I'm proud of. I won a Bronze Star on the battlefield. I was chosen Entrepreneur of the Year. Last Sunday I sang a solo in the church choir. Of course, I've also done things that horrify me. That's why "change" is the most important word in my vocabulary. "Change" is the first thing on my mind in the morning and the last thing on my mind at night. I don't expect you to understand me. I don't expect you to forgive me. I expect you to believe me when I say I'm in recovery, that I'm changing.
My name's Ed, and I'm a perp. Thanks for calling on me. Keep coming back.
But I don’t let too much optimism compromise the moral horror of Ed’s crime. One of his victims, now a hooker, gets the last word:
(LAUGHTER in the darkness: LIGHTS UP on Heather, the hooker.)
HEATHER: Keep coming back! You got that right, Mr. Music Man — the johns always come back!
(Ed looks at her in horror.)
HEATHER: Anybody want a date? Keep coming back!
(The THEME plays, rising. and BLACKOUT. The play is over.)
This is a difficult play, and my task was tricky enough to do without showing the audience a nude scene of child molestation! I refused to write the scene.
A power struggled ensued. The director refused to direct the play without the new scene. I refused to write it. Subsequently I withdrew the play entirely when it was clear to me that he wasn’t going to back down. It was like resigning before I got fired. I left with my head held high, but this experience didn’t endear me to New York.
Only a few years ago another company, The Theater Studio, accepted two of my scripts for their “script bank” from which directors chose new work to showcase. I was told it was an honor to have a script accepted into this program – and I had two, Bedrooms & Bars and Famililly, now available to directors looking for new work. It became quickly clear, however, that the club into which I was being admitted was closely knit. If I wanted anything to happen with these scripts, I should be in New York myself, perhaps even directing the plays myself. At this point in my life, I did not have the energy to move.
In fact, I decided to do the opposite – to retire as a playwright. The need to be in New York was abundantly clear now, and I should have gone there decades ago if I were serious about a playwriting career. I didn’t have the energy to deal with New York at my age.
In fact, I also didn’t have much interest in collaboration any more. Most of my creative life I’d been working in collaboration with directors and actors. What an audience sees in a play has more to do with the actors than with the playwright – look at the example of an amateur production of Shakespeare if you don’t believe this. I remembered a demonstration I’d seen once when skilled actors performed the local telephone book. They could turn the telephone book into any genre you wanted, from comedy to tragedy. What does this say about the relationship of the audience to the playwright (as opposed to its relationship with the actors)?
I’d begun my writing career in fiction, where no interpreter stood between the work and the audience. I decided to retire from playwriting and return to fiction.
6/11/2003 06:08:01 AM |
Tuesday, June 10, 2003
Doowop Horses
This is one of the coolest sites I've seen in a long time. Access it with link below.
Wait for the entire screen to load up with all four horses and a fence in front of them. Make sure your sound is on. Click on a horse ... I suggest left to right to start, clicking on them one at a time. Re-click on any horse to make it turn off or turn it back on again. Try clicking on the horses in different orders. Be your own doowop musical director! Have fun!
Access now.
6/10/2003 01:16:02 PM |
Happy birthday, Saul Bellow!
Biographical sketch.
Two of Bellow's novels, Seize the Day and Henderson, the Rain King, made strong impressions on me when I first read them as a young writer. I've gone back to each several times since then ... and it may be time to go back to them again.
6/10/2003 10:57:26 AM |
American Memory
Historical collections in the National Digital Library. Over 100 historical collections. Access now.
This is an incredible collection. For example, you can find:
What a resource from the Library of Congress!
6/10/2003 07:31:25 AM |
Vietnam war protests
Reflections by Martina Bexte. Access now.
Memorable stories I have from this era include two: the term I had a dozen Black Panthers in my English Comp class, which I taught at the Univ. of Oregon (more to say about this soon in the memoir); and the evening my student colleagues in the anti-war movement burned down my office (because it was in the same building as the ROTC program).
6/10/2003 07:10:43 AM |
You've got spam
"WE ARE GOING TO NEED a new way to think about spam, those importunate unsolicited e-mails advertising products, pandering to vices and insecurities, and bearing headers like GET LOLITA OUT OF DEBT BY ADDING THREE INCHES TO YOUR MORTGAGE! The problem is changing before our very eyes." Article by Christopher Caldwell. Access now.
6/10/2003 07:06:09 AM |
The Rise and Fall of Portland Theater
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
What had changed was the building of a Performing Arts Center (PAC) to host, among other things, a resident theater company. Gary O’Brien and other theater artists worked hard to prevent this from happening. They cited examples in city after city where vibrant local theater communities were ruined by creating an “official” theater company housed in an expensive new performance space.
O’Brien led the way with a counter-proposal, which would keep theater out of the Performing Arts Center and use the money instead to connect all the existing downtown theaters, which would be upgraded, with trolley tracks spinning off the new light rail system being built downtown. A theater district connected by trolleys! This would have put Portland on the map. But, of course, such an innovative idea was too creative for the city fathers and the wealthy patrons putting up the money.
I had joined the group of theater artists backing O’Brien’s idea, writing articles and letters in the paper that documented the failure of other cities to maintain a vibrant theater community after the building of a PAC. Eugene, just down the freeway, was the most recent example. In fact, when I was a graduate student, Eugene was a better theater town than Portland. Then its PAC was built and contributions to smaller theater companies dried up, eventually bankrupting them. This happened in city after city – and it happened in Portland.
Within a few years of building the Performing Arts Center, Portland lost its most energetic theater companies to bankruptcy: Storefront Theatre, The Portland Civic Theatre, The New Rose Theater, The Willamette Repertory Theatre, and many smaller companies stopped getting enough financial support to keep them alive. Suddenly the way to support theater in Portland was to give generously to the new resident company in the Performing Arts Center, which initially was a wing of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. Portland theater wasn’t even home grown any more.
Local theater would have to reinvent itself. It did this slowly through the 1990s with young theater blood that reminded me of the Minnesota Mafia, which had come to town almost twenty years earlier to infuse the theater community with new energy. I had no place in this reinvention, which was just as well. I was learning the hard lesson that being a playwright in Portland, Oregon, really didn’t amount to much. Portland was irrelevant on the larger theatrical map. I’d been spending my time being a big fish in a very small pond. I’d been afraid to face the reality that playwrights make their careers in New York.
6/10/2003 07:00:28 AM |
Monday, June 09, 2003
Urban legends
Today I rec'd a "Hanoi Jane" email that has been circulating on the net for years and is considered an urban legend (thanks to KB for pointing this out). Here is the email I received:
This is for all the kids born in the 70's that do not remember this, and didn't have to bear the burden, that our fathers, mothers, and older brothers and sisters had to bear. Jane Fonda is being honored as one of the "100 Women of the Century." Unfortunately, many have forgotten and still countless others have never known how Ms. Fonda betrayed not only the idea of our country but specific men who served and sacrificed during Vietnam.
The first part of this is from an F-4E pilot. The pilot's name is Jerry Driscoll, a River Rat. In 1968, the former Commandant of the USAF Survival School was a POW in Ho Lo Prison-the "Hanoi Hilton." Dragged from a stinking cesspit of a cell, cleaned, fed, and dressed in clean PJ's, he was ordered to describe for a visiting American "Peace Activist" the "lenient and humane treatment" he'd received. He spat at Ms. Fonda, was clubbed, and dragged away.
During the subsequent beating, he fell forward upon the camp Commandant's feet, which sent that officer berserk. In '78, the AF Col. still suffered from double vision (which permanently ended his flying days) from the Vietnamese Col.'s frenzied application of a wooden baton. From 1963-65, Col. Larry Carrigan was in the 47FW/DO (F-4E's). He spent 6 years in the "Hilton"- the first three of which he was "missing in action". His wife lived on faith that he was still alive. His group, too, got the cleaned, fed, clothed routine in preparation for a "peace delegation" visit.
They, however, had time and devised a plan to get word to the world that they still survived. Each man secreted a tiny piece of paper, with his SSN on it, in the palm of his hand. When paraded before Ms. Fonda and a cameraman, she walked the line, shaking each man's hand and asking little encouraging snippets like: "Aren't you sorry you bombed babies?" and "Are you grateful for the humane treatment from your benevolent captors?" Believing this HAD to be an act, they each palmed her their sliver of paper.
She took them all without missing a beat. At the end of the line and once the camera stopped rolling, to the shocked disbelief of the POWs, she turned to the officer in charge and handed him the little pile of papers. Three men died from the subsequent beatings. Col. Carrigan was almost number four but he survived, which is the only reason we know about her actions that day.
I was a civilian economic development advisor in Vietnam, and was captured by the North Vietnamese communists in South Vietnam in 1968, and held for over 5 years. I spent 27 months in solitary confinement, one year in a cage in Cambodia, and one year in a "black box" in Hanoi. My North Vietnamese captors deliberately poisoned and murdered a female missionary, a nurse in a leprosarium in Ban me Thuot, South Vietnam, whom I buried in the jungle near the Cambodian border.
At one time, I was weighing approximately 90 lbs. (My normal weight is 170 lbs.) We were Jane Fonda's "war criminals."
When Jane Fonda was in Hanoi, I was asked by the camp communist political officer if I would be willing to meet with Jane Fonda. I said yes, for I would like to tell her about the real treatment we POWs received different from the treatment purported by the North Vietnamese, and parroted by Jane Fonda, as "humane and lenient." Because of this, I spent three days on a rocky floor on my knees with outstretched arms with a large amount of steel placed on my hands, and beaten with a bamboo cane till my arms dipped.
I had the opportunity to meet with Jane Fonda for a couple of hours after I was released. I asked her if she would be willing to debate me on TV. She did not answer me.
This does not exemplify someone who should be honored as part of "100 Years of Great Women." Lest we forget..."100 years of great women" should never include a traitor whose hands are covered with the blood of so many patriots. There are few things I have strong visceral reactions to, but Hanoi Jane's participation in blatant treason, is one of them.
Please take the time to forward to as many people as you possibly can. It will eventually end up on her computer and she needs to know that we will never forget.
RONALD D. SAMPSON, CMSgt, USAF
716 Maintenance Squadron, Chief of Maintenance
This email contains both fact and fiction. Details here.
However, as one POW said, "She did enough to place her name in the trash bin of history," McGrath explained. "None of us need to make up stories on her." Maybe arguing about this email is like arguing about how many millions died in Nazis death camps -- the argument can distort the focus of the deed, as if to excuse it. Hanoi Jane gets no votes from POWs to this day.
6/9/2003 11:38:13 AM |
Trotsky's ghost
"As evidence of the continuing intellectual influence of Trotsky, consider the curious fact that some of the books about the Middle East crisis that are causing the greatest stir were written by thinkers deeply shaped by the tradition of the Fourth International." Article by Jeet Heer. Access now.
6/9/2003 06:13:38 AM |
Retrospective
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
In the late 1980s, Steve Smith decided to devote a theatrical season to my work, a “retrospective” of my contribution to original Oregon theater. He called the season “Charles Deemer’s Oregon” and scheduled The Half-Life Conspiracy, Waitresses and a new play’s premier. I received a grant from the Oregon Arts Commission to write this new script, which became Varmints, the reworking of an idea I had had a false start on while in residency at the New Rose Theatre.
The retrospective was both an honor – and a hex. The revivals were excellent productions, well received and well reviewed. My new play was successful with audiences but less so with reviewers, who couldn’t figure out the tone of this black comedy about the old west. But from the beginning I felt awkward having a retrospective honoring my work when, as far as I was concerned, my work was far from finished. It was like having a wake before you were dead yet.
But I was “deader” than I realized. No one produced another play by me in Portland for ten years after Varmints closed! The retrospective played like a swan song.
Portland theater was changing rapidly, and it looked as if I, who once had been called “one of Oregon’s greatest natural resources, a living, breathing playwright,” might not have much to do with its future.
6/9/2003 05:56:49 AM |
Sunday, June 08, 2003
Classical live online radio
An attempt to collect all live-broadcasting classical radio stations on the Web. Access now.
6/8/2003 06:15:14 PM |
"Ruth"
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
“Ruth” was an actress who loved the new form of theater as much as I did. Acting in hyperdrama requires the ability to move from script to improvisation and back to script again at a moment’s notice, depending on the context of how a scene plays out. It’s not for everyone. Indeed, in every rehearsal of every hyperdrama I’ve been associated with, at least one actor has dropped out, unable to handle the special pressure.
But Ruth loved the challenge. She was in both Chateau de Mort and Bateau de Mort, and I cast her in a new hyperdrama I was writing, directing and producing myself called Cocktail Suite. I was trying out a new story strategy with this hyperdrama, three self-contained plays running simultaneously in a restaurant-bar environment, in which major characters in each play became minor characters in one of the other plays – but now the audience had the option of staying seated to watch either of three plays, rather than following actors around the performance space. I was trying to make hyperdrama a tad more traditional in order to educate the audience about the new form slowly.
Each of the three plays in Cocktail Suite was different in genre and tone. I cast Ruth, who also was a singer, in what was essentially a two-character romantic musical about a social worker and a homeless man. Playing the homeless man was a regular at one of my watering holes, a man with a lot of community theater experience, who hadn’t been in a play for a while. I more or less brought him out of retirement. They made a good pair, and this play became the most popular of the three.
Midway through rehearsal, however, a problem surfaced. Ruth came to me and said that “Carl,” as I’ll call him, was contacting her at home, asking her out, and generally harassing her. I went to Carl about it, and he confessed he was falling in love with her. Oh, my. Just the kind of problem an overworked director/producer needed a few weeks before opening night.
The tension between them was disastrous because now they couldn’t convincingly play the love scenes together. I worked overtime with them but without progress. Carl was in love with Ruth, and Ruth wanted nothing to do with him. Since Ruth was the more experienced actor, and she was the one looking most awkward in the romantic scenes, I concentrated on changing her attitude. I took time to spend with her alone, talking about the actor’s craft and the difference between art and life.
The gods are humorists. Unknown to me, Ruth had a great crush on me. Since I had no woman in my life at this time, I was receptive when Ruth made it clear she was interested in me. Suddenly Ruth and I became an item – and the hyperdrama hadn’t even opened yet! Now I had to tell Carl what was going on. He was heartbroken – the director had stolen his girl!
It was a big mess about to get bigger after Cocktail Suite closed. Not since marrying Dee in Reno did I make such a bad impulsive decision. Ruth, it turned out, was much like her character in the play, a “social worker,” a woman who decided that I was a playwright with a drinking problem and she was just the one who could save me from myself. As my wife, she could provide just the kind of support and stability I needed to do better writing than ever.
I have absolutely no memory of who proposed to whom, only a memory of waking up and realizing we were engaged. Amazingly enough, I actually went through with the wedding. We had a ceremony in the courthouse with Crooks standing up as my best man, raised eyebrows and all.
Only a few months later I returned home one afternoon after spending a typical day in my watering holes to find all of my belongings packed in boxes on the front steps. I didn’t need to go in to ask what was going on. Ruth’s experiment to save me from myself had failed. She was giving up on me. Marriage number three ended with all the sudden finality of waking up from a dream.
6/8/2003 11:53:22 AM |
Saturday, June 07, 2003
Rethinking Work
"Welcome to CLAWS at whywork.org. We're a pro-leisure and anti-wage-slavery group of people dedicated to exploring the question: why work? This site provides information, support, and resources for those looking for alternatives to traditional employment. We actively promote alternatives to the wage slavery mindset and what we call "The Cult of the Job" which automatically equates having a job with making a living."
After all, work is the curse of the writing class.
"Our vision is of a world where everyone spends their days doing what they love, while all their needs are met, with ease, abundance and joy. Stress, strain, struggle and guilt are unknown and there is no concept of 'work.' All activity is experienced as play." Access now.
6/7/2003 01:47:49 PM |
Love letters from the Civil War
Access now.
6/7/2003 01:41:55 PM |
Pick your card
Optimism and pessimism about the Middle East ... see the two articles below: "The case for continued force" and "Addicted to oil."
6/7/2003 01:39:00 PM |
The case for continued force
"Unlike his predecessors, who thought peace could be brought by touchy-feely peace talks, Mr. Bush has grasped that military power is key: the magical spear that heals even as it wounds. By showing them just how easily Saddam could be overthrown, Mr. Bush has made it transparent to Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia that Saddam's fate could befall them too." An article by Niall Ferguson. Access now.
6/7/2003 01:38:25 PM |
Hyperdrama
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
Eventually this new kind of theater would be called “hyperdrama.” In the mid-1980s, the few writers working in the form were all calling it something different. I was calling it “simultaneous-action theater.”
In my essay “What is Hypertext?,” I relate how difficult it was for me to begin writing my first hyperdrama. If many scenes are happening at once, how do you even number the pages?
The foundation of my confusion was this: the action of the play was not going to be linear, one scene happening after another, but simultaneous, with many scenes occurring throughout the mansion at the same time. This was what made the commission so unusual, the dramatic form was modeled after a strange new kind of play that was selling out in Los Angeles, a play called Tamara.
If many scenes occur at once, I was asking myself, what does it mean to have a "page whatever"? And how was my director going to read the script – how was I? – if two or three or – the number, at one point, would turn out to be eight! – many scenes were happening at once? How is a non-linear script read within the confining format of textual pages arranged in numerical order?
Without knowing it (I had never heard the term before), I was having my first experience with "hypertext."
Steve Smith had secured an extraordinary space for the performance, the Pittock Mansion, a tourist attraction that overlooks the Portland skyline. The performance space would include over a dozen rooms spread out on four floors. The actors would move through the mansion following their individual story threads with the audience in pursuit. Many scenes would happen at once at every level of the huge building.
Hyperdrama was like real life. Imagine a crowded Thanksgiving dinner. Imagine everyone milling about the house before getting seated. Imagine that each person there is an actor, and that what they say has been written by a playwright. This is hyperdrama. Now drop the audience into the middle of the activity as invisible voyeurs. This is hyperdrama.
Today I know that a script for hyperdrama is most conveniently written in hypertext, the “branching” (“linking”) language in which Internet web pages are written. In 1985 I’d never heard the word hypertext before, and there was no popular Internet yet. Consequently I fumbled forward as best I could, finally writing a different script for each room I used in the mansion, with time codes in the margin to synchronize each page to the rest of the action going on.
Chateau de Mort was a theatrical event unlike anything Portland had seen before. Opening night sold out immediately at one hundred dollars a ticket. The entire run, at fifty dollars, sold out just as quickly. Praise was lavished on me, the director, the actors, the producer – this was a city happening. A performance newsletter in Seattle called the event the second most important theatrical event in the Pacific Northwest in 1986, second only to a dance performance by Barishnikov. I was commissioned to write a sequel, and this became Bateau de Mort, a black comedy set on a sternwheeler in the river.
For all the hoopla and praise, I was disappointed that no one seemed to be taking this new theatrical form as seriously as I was. This was much more than entertainment. This was a genuine new dramaturgy that, it seemed to me, gave playwrights a way to tell stories that was consistent with the new model of reality being developed by quantum physics. Traditional theater was Newtonian in the way it sat the audience down in the dark to be spoon-fed its stories. Here the audience was on its feet, each member having constantly to decide which actor to follow, and therefore which story to see, creating the play s/he would see by this very sequence of decisions.
Of course, no one was much interested in hearing something that sounded so highfalutin. But I made a pledge to myself to bring respect to hyperdrama, a pledge I wouldn’t keep until the summer of 2002. In the meantime, focusing on this new form of theater would lead me into still more unexpected experiences.
6/7/2003 01:33:52 PM |
Addicted to oil
An interview with Robert Baer. "Robert Baer was part of the Central Intelligence Agency for twenty-one years; for most of that time, he worked for the Directorate of Operations in the Middle East as a field officer. He is the author of See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism. His article for The Atlantic is adapted from his new book, Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Its Soul for Saudi Crude, to be released in July." Access now.
6/7/2003 01:31:08 PM |
Friday, June 06, 2003
Cubiculo Theatre
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
My residency at the New Rose Theatre ended when Gary O’Brien resigned in a dispute with his board. I was a playwright without a theater again, which actually is the normal condition for a playwright. But good fortune again came to me, this time during the most trying of circumstances.
I was back east settling my father’s affairs after his death when the phone in his apartment rang. To my surprise, it was Peter Fornara, one of Portland’s more talented theater people, a brilliant actor and a skilled director. I recalled that he had just started his own company, the Cubiculo Theatre.
How had Fornara gotten the phone number to my father’s apartment? His phone call baffled me as much as my daughter’s call had baffled me during the rehearsal of Cocktail Suite. Fornara expressed his condolences – and then made me an offer. Would I be willing to be the playwright-in-residence for the Cubiculo Theatre?
Having a theater home to return to in Portland greatly helped me get through my father’s death. After spreading a part of his ashes in Milford, New Jersey, and another part in the Shakespeare garden in Portland’s Washington Park, I buried myself in my work. My new play for the Cubiculo Theatre was called Waitresses, which would become the vehicle for my entrance into the film industry.
Unfortunately the Cubiculo Theatre folded the following year. I was working on an ambitious quartet of plays called The Quantum Quartet, the first play of which, The Sadness of Einstein, was scheduled for the Cubiculo’s new season. Later this play was scheduled to open in Seattle at a new play festival but this, too, got cancelled. The play never has been produced, and I never did finish the quartet.
My writing energy moved into two new directions now. A film producer wanted to turn Waitresses into a movie, which became my introduction to screenwriting. And Steve Smith commissioned me to write a fund-raiser for his new theater company, The Musical Company.
Steve wanted me to write a new kind of play that was taking Los Angeles by storm, a play in which many scenes were played simultaneously through a large performance space, a sprawling new kind of environmental theater that was so new and so different that no one knew what to call it.
6/6/2003 04:57:24 AM |
Thursday, June 05, 2003
Charlie Chaplin Stays Silent in the Machine Age
This site designed and created by Claudia Silverman for the America in the 1930's project, American Studies at the University of Virginia, May 1998. Access now.
6/5/2003 06:15:12 AM |
JFK Assassination Page
Includes entire Warren Commission Report, plus a rebuttal of it. Most interesting section may be on a wide variety of conspiracy theories, giving both reasons to believe and reasons not to believe them. Includes forum. Access now.
6/5/2003 06:04:47 AM |
The myth of the paperless office
"... paper works better. You can mark on it with coloured ink, scribble your responses in the margin, develop new ideas on top of your old ideas, compare three or four documents on your desk at the same time. And of course, at present technological levels, anything on paper reads better than anything on a screen. They discovered something else: When people deliver a report to the boss, they feel much better handing it over in printed form. Sending it as an e-mail attachment, while more efficient and cheaper, isn't as emotionally satisfying." Article by Robert Fulford. Access now.
6/5/2003 05:46:02 AM |
Christmas at the Juniper Tavern
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
The local news at this time was filled with the controversy of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his many disciples who were building an ashram in central Oregon. The Bhagwan himself was on a vow of silence. I began wondering what he would say once he started talking again. In particular, I wondered what he would say if he were face-to-face with an unemployed logger from Bend. In a larger context, what did the East and the West have to say to one another? How did Eastern mysticism and Western capitalism address one another?
One of my earlier plays was a cycle of one-acts called The Death Cycle. In one of these one-acts was a Zen clown based on the historical character Teng Yin-feng, a 4th century monk. Using this character as a prototype, I created a Zen clown named Swami Kree and created a story that would bring him face-to-face with the unemployed loggers of what I called Juniper county. This became Christmas at the Juniper Tavern, for which Linda wrote another song.
Although we were working together again, Linda and I were drifting apart. Dick and Bev were having marital problems, creating stress that spilled over into our own relationship. Moreover, Crooks and I were spending a lot of time drinking together, and Linda wasn’t used to being left alone. She began to feel neglected and isolated.
When it was time to return to Portland, Linda decided to stay in Bend. She’d found a job she liked. She’d made some girlfriends. Maybe she’d join me later. This would be a kind of trial separation.
Back in Portland, Shaw saved my ass by giving me some work. I presented two new scripts to O’Brien, neither of which was the work he’d commissioned, which already was scheduled on the upcoming season. I assured him it would be done on time. In the meantime, he scheduled staged readings of my two new plays to test them in front of an audience.
I found a new way to survive as an artist. I began to manage apartments for free rent. I had experience, having just managed a resort in Bend, and I found work easily. Linda decided to join me. Somehow we got the piano up to the top floor apartment in the building I was managing in northwest Portland.
But Linda and I never got back into the wonderful rhythm we’d shared while working on Country Northwestern together. I continued drinking too much. She found a job and began to meet new people. Finally she met a guy who interested her. She moved out.
I felt betrayed. I felt I was being abandoned. When she took the piano with her, I felt especially betrayed. I stayed too drunk to cause a real scene, and her new boyfriend was younger and bigger than I was. But it would be years before I understood that I’d caused her more pain with my drinking than she’d caused me by leaving.
At the staged reading, the audience loved Christmas at the Juniper Tavern so much that O’Brien decided to produce it, which required renting another stage from another company. It went up quickly, even before the play about Moliere, which I’d finally finished. Gary came up with the name for the commissioned work, The Comedian In Spite of Himself.
My play about Swami Kree, with Steve Smith again playing my protagonist, was a huge hit. Serendipity returned to my life. A young film director visiting his girlfriend in Portland saw the play and loved it. He knew a lot of people connected with Oregon Public Broadcasting. On incredibly short notice, he managed to put together all the pieces for a public television version of the play. I got well paid for the rights. The week the play appeared on television, there was a half-page spread in TV Guide, which included a small photograph of me.
I felt like I’d finally made it. I was a playwright who was going somewhere.
6/5/2003 05:40:43 AM |
Wednesday, June 04, 2003
Update
I've begun querying agents about my memoir, not really expecting any response. To my shock, three have asked to see pages, two sample chapters and one the complete manuscript. I'll get them off today.
The next week I'll be buried in student scripts. I pick up their term projects tomorrow and their take-home finals on Tuesday. But today, a day off except for marketing chores and online class chats -- it's Harriet's birthday. We're going to spend the afternoon at the Rose Festival fun center, eating junk food and riding the ferris wheel. Then out to dinner tonight after my last chat.
The weather has been incredible for June in Oregon.
6/4/2003 06:45:28 AM |
The Morality of Laughter
"Mr. Buckley shows that laughter is not simply a physiological tic or a vacation from earnestness. On the contrary, it is a potent civilizing force, binding together jester and audience, on one side, and upbraiding the butt or victim of the joke, on the other. 'Those who laugh,' he says, 'are moralists,' whether they know it or not." A book review by Roger Kimball. Access now.
6/4/2003 06:33:06 AM |
New Rose Theatre
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
The offer was too good to pass up. Although I wouldn’t be on salary, the theater company would make a commitment to put a new play by me on its season each year. To begin and announce the relationship, they would revive The Pardon.
My first new play for the New Rose Theatre was The Half-Life Conspiracy, which remains my favorite play today. It is bold, reckless and highly theatrical. A reviewer called it “a taut and explosive comic drama that balances amusing soap-opera situations with serious reflections about maleness and aggression.” Another said the play reminds us “how good this Portland writer’s plays can be.” Steve Smith, my first director in Portland, was cast to play the lead.
The Half-Life Conspiracy was my Carol play, my way of coming to grips with losing my soul mate when she became a lesbian. In my story, an alcoholic TV writer and sometimes playwright wins a one-act play contest in Portland and flies up from Hollywood for the production. His play is an angry black comedy about a man whose wife leaves him for another woman. In Portland the playwright discovers that his winning play is being directed by his ex-wife, who also left him for another woman. In my play, as opposed to the play of my protagonist, the writer and ex-wife manage to make their peace. It was as if I wrote the resolution with Carol that should have happened in real life.
A central theme in The Half-Life Conspiracy is the incredible fragility of human existence. Olson, the TV writer, explains it this way:
OLSON: I have a theory. Behold the stars!, twinkling happily away. More than we can see in L.A., as a matter of fact.
WILLOW: Aren't they lovely?
OLSON: They don't exist.
WILLOW: Well, I certainly see them up there.
OLSON: They are not shining. Poof!, the stars have vanished, to the twinkle. However: since, to toast dear Albert once again, since their little twinkles take so long to get to our own untwinkling hunk of hot rock, we don't know they're dead yet. So here we are, writing love songs and poetry and fascist ballot measures in a universe that no longer exists. Cheers.
WILLOW: I see what you mean — some cosmic explosion may already have happened, for all we know.
OLSON: Precisely! In fact, there are no more stars anywhere, in any firmament. All gone! And like you say, we won't find out that cosmic fact for thousands of years. Or until tomorrow.
WILLOW: That's very pessimistic.
OLSON: On the contrary, I toast stars that don't exist! I'd say there's a bit of good will there.
The same conceit informs Olson’s curtain line that ends the play: “And it came to pass that all the stars in the firmament had ceased to shine. But how was anyone to know?” A cosmic explosion may have ended human life on this planet forever – but we haven’t gotten the news yet. Reason enough to live every day as your last.
I was on a roll. O’Brien commissioned a play from me for the new season, a play based on the life of Moliere. As part of my challenge, I could use only four actors – and he told me who they would be. This was playwriting the way it should be done – the way it had been done by Shakespeare and Chekhov and Moliere himself – in residency at a theater company, working with actors with whose work I became more and more familiar. I started research for the new project.
Meanwhile my grant money was beginning to run out. I was getting nervous about my future income sources – and lack thereof. Linda and I couldn’t live on the royalties from one play a year at the New Rose, and I was learning that a second production was more difficult to get than a first. I did have an ace in the hole, going to work for Shaw, but this was always a card I refused to play until I had nothing else left in the deck.
Then the gods sang their serendipitous song again. At least I thought that’s what they were singing. I missed the undertone that was crying, Danger, watch out!
Crooks had started a new business venture, and he wanted Linda and me to come to Bend to help him maintain it through the winter. He wanted us to housesit a resort he was building for skiers at nearby Mt. Bachelor. He offered free rent. I’d have a lot of time to write. It looked perfect.
So Linda and I packed up and headed for central Oregon. By the time we arrived, Crooks had changed the game plan.
Half the rooms in the sprawling project were livable, the hot tub and sauna were functional – why let them sit idle all winter? Linda and I learned we wouldn’t be housesitting, after all, we’d be managing a motel. When Crooks saw the expression on my face at the news, he told us we’d be getting a salary and free rent, of course. And it shouldn’t be all that much work.
This wasn’t the deal I’d left Portland for but we had little choice but to go along with it. We’d already given up our apartment and money was tight. I had my commission, of course, and some grant money left. But we’d need money for relocating again once the winter was over. An income in Bend would be helpful, so we decided to give it a try.
It ended up we could live on our manager’s salary. Feeling secure, I went out and did a financially reckless thing. I spent most of our money buying Linda a small piano.
She was overwhelmed – so overwhelmed, I learned later, that she felt pressured to put the piano to productive use and became frightened by it. I hadn’t meant to pressure her about anything. I thought she was a brilliant song writer, even though I’d written no play needing songs since Country Northwestern. A song writer needed a piano as much as a writer needed a typewriter. Besides, I had a new play in mind, one other than the commissioned work about Moliere, and it would need a song.
Despite our managerial duties, I got a lot of writing done in Bend. I finished my research on Moliere and began the first draft of the play. I finished the other new play I’d been working on, called Song of the Salmon, for which Linda wrote a fine song about the life cycle of the salmon (“You want me to write a song about a fish?” I remember her asking in disbelief when I gave her the assignment). And, out of nowhere, came an entirely different story, one that would go on to become the play for which I am best known.
6/4/2003 06:26:37 AM |
Tuesday, June 03, 2003
Are intellectuals overthinking the Middle East?
"When Baghdad finally fell, reaction in the Arab world took many forms, each intense and ambiguous. But one unmistakable variety was a sort of chagrin over the fact that it had taken the tanks of a Western power to rid Iraq of what was an unmistakably hideous regime. Antiwar liberals, if they were frank with themselves, couldn't help but feel a parallel moral unease. As much as President Bush had acted as a bully on the international stage, as much as the lead-up to war had been destructive, clumsy, and dishonest, by early April the war he started had brought down a regime of death squads and secret police, foreign aggression, and internal oppression. Those are things liberals are supposed to oppose, and usually do. Yet those who opposed Bush's war--even with good reason--had to concede that their preferred course would have left the torture chambers running indefinitely." Article by Joshua Micah Marshall. Access now.
6/3/2003 07:05:52 AM |
A new paradigm for using American power
"What's needed is a new paradigm for how America should use its unprecedented power--one which recognizes that, while we may be able to fight wars on our own, we can't build a stable peace on our own; and one which takes advantage both of our overwhelming military strength and of the legitimizing force that comes with working with allies and through the United Nations. In fact, such a paradigm already exists. It's been brewing for decades. And it's one that both the Republican and Democratic parties may be more in agreement on than you might think." Article by Michael Hirsh. Access now.
6/3/2003 06:57:23 AM |
"Linda"
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
I arrived a few days early. Tom had a hot tub, and I was alone in it one afternoon while everyone was at work when a young woman suddenly entered, stripped naked, and slipped into the water across from me. “Hi, wolf man,” she said. It was “Linda,” Tom’s daughter, who was around ten when I’d first met the Andersons and Crawfords, a homely, gangling girl with braces, one of many kids I’d chased across the lawn while doing my wolf man impersonation. Now Linda was a gorgeous young woman, and she was naked in the hot tub with me.
We didn’t exactly cause a scandal but we raised a lot of eyebrows. Linda was recently divorced, I was lonely, and we hit it off fabulously despite our considerable age difference. As the house filled with guests for Thanksgiving, we escaped to walk around the city for hours as Linda gave me the grand tour of San Francisco. There was no hanky-panky going on, just a lot of good company and even more laughter. We laughed very well together.
We started corresponding after I returned to Portland, then talking on the phone for hours at a time. Eventually I invited her to visit me “in God’s country.”
Linda was a talented folk musician by this time, with a wide range of musical interests. She could sing jazz, pop, gospel, and everything else. She often accompanied her folk songs on a dulcimer that her father had built for her. She also proved to be a talented song writer.
The relationship turned romantic, and Linda moved in with me in Portland. Somehow Tom Anderson didn’t disown me for shacking up with his daughter.
I was working on Country Northwestern, a story about two country singers who used to be married and unexpectedly meet in the final days before their home town gets flooded by a dam project. The play required several original country songs, and I put Linda to work on them. One song became the title song for the play:
GAYLE: (singing) I was born in a place where the sky was always clear
Where you took the trees for granted in a forest live with deer
Where every face was friendly and every voice was kind
And that country northwestern soothed your mind
(Chorus) I've been through Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee
But my home in the west won't let me be
Where the clean sparklin' river comes flowin' through the pines
Got that country northwestern on my mind
Another was a beautiful love song. I had to change the play to find a place for it:
BUCK: (singing) I've always been a rambler
I never settled down
I took the road to be my own best friend
But lately I've been finding
All my roads lead back to you
I've found my home
You are my journey's end
BUCK AND GAYLE: (singing) Thank heaven for you
You've always seen me through
You know the ways to ease my troubled mind
Thank heaven for you
For the love that's been so true
You are the one I never thought I'd find
Her songs were perfect, far better than anything I expected.
I liked one of her songs so much that I decided to end the play with it:
BUCK: (singing) Well, I once met an agent
He said he liked my song
Said he'd make me famous
But my image was all wrong
He was talking about a sequined suit
As I headed for the door
I guess you just can't make a star
From a ramblin' dinosaur
(Chorus) Hangin' in
Hangin' on
Another drink, my friend, and another song
Hangin' on
Hangin' in
If life is just a game, my friend, then few folks are playin' to win
( FADE TO BLACKOUT. The play is over.)
Not since Carol’s partnership as my editor was I working so closely with the same woman I was sleeping with. I was beginning to feel the possibility of having a soul mate again. The period surrounding the development of Country Northwestern remains one of the happiest memories of my life.
This play, more than any of mine, reflects the influence of Dick Crooks. The story is set in the “God’s country” of loggers and backwoods culture introduced to me by Dick. The humor in the play especially owes a debt to him. A practical joke I use in the play was first pulled by Dick on Dee, in a backwoods tavern in northern Idaho:
BUCK: I know some tricks. I can turn a glass into a peach.
DOTTY: Lord, that trick's older than I am.
MRS. AMES: Lester can have you pick a card from a deck and put it back and then when he shuffles, the card just flies up into the air!
(Buck moves to the bar for a glass and a bar towel.)
BUCK: What we have here is an ordinary glass, am I right? And here you see one ordinary bar towel.
DOTTY: There can't be anybody who ever knew a logger who doesn't know that trick.
BUCK: You ever seen a glass turned into a peach, lady?
MRS. AMES: Oh no, but it sounds wonderful!
BUCK: Great. I'm going to turn this here glass into a peach. But I need your help. We drape the towel over the glass like this ... and say a few magic words, abra-cadabra ... and now I want you to hold onto the glass through the towel while I take the other end. There you go.
(Mrs. Ames holds the glass through the towel and Buck will begin to twist the other end of the towel.)
BUCK: A few more magic words ... abra ... cadabra ... shazam!
(The towel is twisted and Buck suddenly moves his end to his crotch: a huge phallus is suggested, with Mrs. Ames holding its head.)
BUCK: Now ain't that a peach!
MRS. AMES: Oh my!
The Pardon and Country Northwestern established me as a playwright to keep an eye on. Watching my growing reputation was the artistic director of a new group of theater artists in town, who had become known as the Minnesota Mafia because they’d moved en masse to Portland to start a theater company. They’d selected Portland after doing some research, deciding here was the best prospect for getting on the ground floor of a significant growth in regional theater. The artistic director was Gary O’Brien, and his new company was called the New Rose Theatre. He invited me to be the company’s playwright-in-residence.
6/3/2003 06:49:46 AM |
Monday, June 02, 2003
Theatre Workshop
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
The first person to support my dramatic work in Portland was the artistic director of Theatre Workshop, Steve Smith. I first met Steve while interviewing him for a story for Northwest Magazine. Learning I was a playwright as well as a journalist, he invited me to send him a script. As soon as I finished the play I’d started in Maryland, I gave Steve first shot at it.
The Pardon was a breakthrough play for me, incorporating theatrical ideas I’d been taught by Leland Starnes. It differs from my earlier dramatic work in style. My previous plays had been naturalistic, the audience regarded as invisible voyeurs watching the action from beyond an invisible “fourth wall.” The Pardon uses a more theatrical and presentational style, the same style Wilder uses in Our Town. As in Wilder’s play, a central narrator tells my story, a young man named Frank, who fled to Canada during the Vietnam War. He opens the play by speaking directly to the audience:
There was a war. Perhaps you remember. There was a war but there were no heroes.
I assumed I'd never return. Who could have foreseen a Presidential pardon? So I'd learned to live with it. At least, after ten years, a few things were going my way again. I found a job in my profession, which is radio. And I met someone. You'll meet Jocelyn later. I really don't know where I'd be without her. Not that a sense of debt is the best foundation, if you know what I mean.
There is no attempt at naturalism in The Pardon. All actors sit in chairs around the periphery of the stage, visible to the audience. There’s no realistic set and few props. When it’s time to perform, an actor comes forward and simply begins, giving a kind of “show and tell” rhythm to the story. None of these techniques were original but they were all new to me. For the first time, I was writing a “pure” stage play, told in such a way that the play would not make a better film. By then I’d come to believe, and I still believe today, that most American plays would make better films. As a result of working with and learning from Leland Starnes, my goal as a playwright became this: to write plays that would not make better movies. Indeed, I came to decide that a great play couldn’t become an effective film at all.
Thus in Sad Laughter (which was originally produced in a longer form with the title, The Comedian In Spite Of Himself), I use a comic theatrical device to represent the gossip of the Parisian salons:
(LIGHTS UP on a "caricature prop," a flat on which are painted two aristocratic women with fans. In the "head holes" appear the faces of the actresses playing Madeleine and Armande. Each has an arm through an "arm hole," holding a fan.)
ARMANDE: He married his own daughter?
MADELEINE: His own daughter.
ARMANDE: But that's so — unthinkable.
MADELEINE: Why, he even flaunts the sin on stage, portraying the very crime he commits. Surely Satan owns his soul. There can't be a more evil man in France.
ARMANDE: More evil than the King?
MADELEINE: Yes, more evil than the King.
These moments work in a theatrical, non-realistic way that cannot be duplicated on film.
In another play, Famililly, I create a counterpoint between a tense realistic scene (family members confronting the patriarch, who is dying of cancer) and a fanciful rewriting of the “Declaration of Independence” as a declaration of the rights of children against the tyranny of traditional family values:
EMILY: Do it [commit suicide] bravely, not cruelly.
GEORGE: Who's being cruel here? Is it too much to ask for the support of my family?
(Vincent steps out to address the audience, continuing his one-man show. [note: Vincent wears 18th C. costume])
VINCENT (to audience): "The history of the present Family in the United States is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of absolute Disregard for the well-being and security of children. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world."
GEORGE: I wanted family support and didn't get it. You turned on me yourself.
EMILY: I apologize for that. Seeing what was in the bag made it seem more real to me than before. I panicked for a minute.
VINCENT (to audience): "Over half the marriages in the United States end in divorce; almost one in three divorced adults cite abuse as the reason for termination;"
EMILY: This isn't easy for any of us, Dad.
VINCENT (to audience): "one-quarter of the violent crimes in the U.S. is wife assault;"
GEORGE: Please don't cry, mother. I need you to be strong now.
MARTHA: I don't think I have any strength left.
(George moves to Martha.)
VINCENT (to audience): "A woman is physically abused in this country every nine seconds;"
GEORGE: Give me your hand.
(Martha does. George helps her to her feet.)
VINCENT (to audience): "Two-thirds of the attacks are by someone she knows, often a husband or boyfriend;"
GEORGE: I'm asking you to come upstairs with me.
MARTHA: Are you sure this is the only way?
GEORGE: Positive.
VINCENT (to audience): "Sixty percent of battered women are beaten while they are pregnant;"
MARTHA: Don't you want to wait and see if June changes her mind?
GEORGE: I wish I could wait for a lot of things. But I can't.
VINCENT (to audience): "Forty-two percent of murdered women are killed by their intimate male partners;"
This is a layered moment, one actor playing against the others, that cannot be duplicated on the flat, two-dimensional movie screen. Scenes like this lose all their power when put to film. But these are the very scenes that make live theater a unique form of narrative, as it should be, rather than a dress rehearsal for a future movie, as “realistic” theater so often is. Starnes taught me this difference, and The Pardon was my first play to take advantage of what I’d learned.
Steve Smith produced and directed the premier production of The Pardon in 1979. Better, he wanted to see my next play, which became Country Northwestern, produced at Theatre Workhshop in 1981. This seemed to be my new theatrical home.
But I wasn’t able to live on play royalties alone. What helped make ends meet was that I learned how to play the grants game. The Oregon Arts Commission grant had let me leave the magazine, and I stretched out the money for as long as I could, living without frills – but still with a considerable bar bill, always the high cost item on my budget. Then, shortly after The Pardon, and partially as a result of its success, I was commissioned to write a play based on labor troubles on the Portland docks in 1934 as a longshoreman’s union struggled to be born.
This play became 1934: Blood and Roses, which was toured widely by the Portland Labor Players. The play’s subject matter was considered controversial to conservative elements in the business community, and initially a scheduled performance at the Oregon State Fair was cancelled. The play, in effect, had been banned, and local editorials rallied behind it. The controversy made the national wire services and National Public Radio, giving myself and the Portland Labor Players considerable publicity. The State Fair backed down and reversed their cancellation.
I was surviving as a playwright – but barely. I also was lonely. No one after Faye had taken my fancy.
I was invited to San Francisco for Thanksgiving, where Tom Anderson lived now, and the Crawfords and others were coming up from Los Angeles. It looked like a grand reunion of the old Ash Grove crowd, and I was excited to renew old friendships.
6/2/2003 07:38:31 AM |
Sunday, June 01, 2003
Oregon Business Magazine
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
An Oregon business magazine was the dream of a couple I’ll call “Mitch” and “Betty.” Betty was heir to a lumber fortune. She’d met Mitch at some kind of New Age seminar, at which you paid thousands of dollars in order to get in touch with your Inner Child or something. They married shortly thereafter and looked around for something to do, not because they needed the money (Mitch definitely had married up) but because they wanted to keep themselves busy.
Mitch had read an article in Fortune magazine that regional business magazines were the up-and-coming thing. Oregon didn’t have one. Barbara had done well in her English classes in school and always enjoyed writing. Mitch was a born salesman. When a local magazine went up for sale, they bought it in order to convert it into Oregon’s first business magazine.
The magazine they bought was a worthless assembly of press releases, exaggerated success stories, reborn Christian testimonials, and paeans to free enterprise, all stitched together with clip art, called Business Success News. The magazine was to journalism what one of those lawns filled with flamingos and other exotic plastic figures is to good garden design.
When Mitch and Betty hired me, the notion was that the three of us would be the only staff until we got the new magazine up and running. From the beginning I argued that we needed a fourth permanent staff member, an art director. Eventually I won them over, and we hired a bright young art director named Rob. The four of us then began the process of converting the godawful Business Success News into something entirely different.
From the beginning, Rob and I wanted to change the name of the magazine. Mitch refused to give his approval. He loved the sound of “business success news.” Isn’t that what business was really all about, being successful? Almost two years would pass before Rob and I convinced him that the magazine should be called Oregon Business Magazine. Actually we didn’t convince him at all. Our readers and advertisers did.
Rob and I made a great team. Barbara, to my surprise, ended up being a decent writer, so the three of us produced a magazine focused on and serving the statewide business community while Mitch went out on the road to sell advertising. In no time at all, Rob managed to give the magazine a professional look, cleverly designing a new logo so the “Business” on the magazine cover was paramount and the “Success News” small and almost lost. I convinced Mitch to give me a budget so I could hire some freelance writers to help Barbara and me fill the magazine with solid features and business news. We were on our way.
The magazine grew rapidly in size and began to gain respect. Mitch and Betty graciously shared the magazine’s growth with Rob and me, giving us raises. Soon Rob was able to hire an assistant art director. Mitch hired two more salesmen.
I did many stories for the magazine that I remain proud of. In order to give the magazine a statewide appeal, I convinced Mitch to send me on the road, so all my stories wouldn’t be about business in Portland. I began a series of small town business profiles, going to remote and not-so-remote Oregon towns to interview their business leaders, spending as much as a week away from the office at a time. I did profiles of Salem, Albany, Eugene, Medford, Grants Pass, Ashland, Astoria, Newport, Coos Bay, The Dalles, Pendleton, La Grande, Bend, Redmond.
Once we changed the magazine’s name to Oregon Business Magazine, we became firmly established as one of the important periodicals in the state. I was there from the beginning and contributed significantly to the birth. I interviewed the top C.E.O.s in the region. I am especially proud of an interview I did with the late Oregon governor, Tom McCall. I hired a freelance writer to do the first serious feature on the fledgling Oregon wine industry. I used my knowledge of Russian to advantage in writing a feature on changes in the Oregon fishing industry when fishermen began selling their catch to large Russian motherships.
I was proud of much of this writing – but it also was taking time and energy away from what should have been my primary focus, writing for the stage. The conflict between the commercial writer and the artistic writer grew with each new issue of the magazine. Finally I received a large grant from the Oregon Arts Commission (interestingly enough, for my past work in short fiction, not drama), and I used this income to support a new transition in my life. I resigned from the magazine and decided to see if I could survive as a full-time playwright.
6/1/2003 06:19:53 AM |
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__The Writing Life
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