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Narratives and the American Landscape

I watched the Bill Moyers interview of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt with great interest. Haidt tried to describe what has essentially become what might be called the Two Nations Problem—that is, that America, the United States, has become in many ways two very distinct countries.

At its simplest, what this means to me is that people, using the same documents, the same laws, and the same presumptions of national character, have created two very different narratives about what it means to be an American.  Quite often these beliefs overlap, but at the extremes such instances are ignored or treated as anomalies or expressions of hypocrisy.

It might be reassuring to keep in mind that it is at the rhetorical and ideological extremes where this happens, that the larger portion of the population is between the extremes, and by inference less rigid in their misapprehensions of both sides, but in reality this may not matter since it is those who establish the most coherent narratives who dictate the battle lines.  And we have come to a point where a willingness to hear the opposite viewpoint gets characterized as a kind of treason.

As an example, try this: for the Left, any suggestion that corporations are important, vital, and often do beneficial things for society is relegated at best to a “So what?” category, at worse as an attempt to excuse a variety of evils committed in the name of profit.  For the Right, any criticism of the shortcomings of corporations and attempts to regulate activities which can be demonstrated as undesirable is seen as a direct attack on fundamental American freedoms.

We can go down the list.  Attempts to regulate the distribution and availability of firearms is seen by the Right as a threat to basic liberties while for the Left the defense of an absolutist Second Amendment posture is seen as irresponsible at best, the promotion and propagation of a culture of violence at worst.  Environmental issues divide along similar lines—for the Left, this is, using Jonathan Haidt’s term, sacred, but for the Right is again an assault on the freedoms of Americans to use their property as they see fit.  And taxes? For the Right, taxes have become a penalty, for the Left a kind of grail for equitable redistribution of wealth.

Tragically, none of these hardened positions—none—addresses the reality of most Americans’ lives.

Oh, there’s some truth in all the positions, otherwise it would be simpler to dismiss them.  But the hardest truth to get at is the one being used to advance a false position.

What Haidt suggests—and I’ve heard political strategists talk about this—is that the difficulty lies in the particular narrative embraced. The story we use to describe who we are.  In the past, that story has been less rigid, porous in some ways, and flexible enough to include a variety of viewpoints from both Left and Right, but in recent years both narratives have taken on the stolidity of religion.

But the related problem is that really there’s only one narrative, at least one that’s cogent and accessible, and that happens to be the one best described as conservative.

Recently, I’ve been giving thought to this dichotomy of Left-Right, Liberal-Conservative.  I’ve been uncomfortable with it for a long time, but have found myself shoved into the Left-Liberal camp as a reaction to policy proposals I find unacceptable which always seem to come from the Right-Conservative side.  In the hurly-burly of political competition, sometimes there isn’t room for the kind of nuance which, say, historians can indulge.  You find yourself defending or attacking in an attempt to preserve or change and the finer points of all positions are reduced to sound-bites and slogans.  I’ve never been particularly pleased with the welfare system, but faced with conservative assaults that seem determined to simply tear it down and leave a great many people without recourse  has found me defending it against any criticism that seems aimed at finding a reason to end it.  It has always seemed to me that people opposed to it are not interested in offering a viable alternative (“They should all get a job!”) and dismantling welfare would do nothing but leave many millions of people with nothing.

But nuance, as I say, gets lost.  I don’t care for the way in which welfare is administered, but that’s not the same as saying we should not have a system for those who simply cannot gain employment.  And in the economic environments of the last forty years, it is simply facile posturing to suggest there are plenty of jobs.  If you want to see a real-life consequence of the kind of budget cutting being discussed, look at the upsurge of homelessness after Reagan gutted the HHS budgets and people who had been in mental hospitals were suddenly on the streets.

But I don’t want to continue the excuse making.  The problems Haidt elucidates have to do with an avoidance of reality on both sides and a subsequent process of demonizing each other.

And with a political mischaracterization that has resulted in the alienation of a great many people from both camps.  Often such people are given the broad and thoroughly undescriptive label Independent.  I consider myself that, though I have voted consistently Liberal-Democrat since 1984.  (Admission time.  I voted for Nixon in 1972 and I voted for Reagan in 1980.  In hindsight, it would seem I had always been looking for the Other Designation—Progressive—for which to cast my ballot, but that’s a very slippery term.  Reagan was the last Republican I voted for in a national election.  I have felt consistently alienated by GOP strategies and policies, but the reality has been that my votes for Democrats have usually been “lesser-of-two-evils” votes, not wholehearted endorsements.  Until Obama.  He was the first presidential candidate since John Anderson in 1984 who I felt actually had something worthwhile to offer rather than merely a less odious choice to the Republican.)

Once upon a time there were Liberal Republicans.  There are still Conservative Democrats.  But I think in general we no longer know what these terms mean.  The narrative that has been driving our politics since Reagan has buried them under an avalanche of postured rhetoric designed to define an American in a particular way that no doubt was intended to transcend party politics but has instead cast us all in a bad Hollywood movie with Good Guys and Bad Guys in which a final shoot-out or fist-fight determines the outcome.

I think it is fair to say that this America is ahistorical.  On the Left, it is a country demanding atonement, built on the backs of the abused and misused, hypocritical,  concerned only with power and wealth.  On the Right is the only country ever that has offered genuine freedom for its citizens and has stood on the principles of fairness and justice (which are not always the same thing) and because it has done more good than not its sins should be absolved if not ignored.

Neither portrait is true, although many true details inform both.

What perhaps needs to happen is for new storytellers to come to the fore.  I’m not sure how they’re going to be heard through the constant din of invective-laden blaming, but I think Obama took a stab at it.  He got drowned out more often than not and didn’t finish constructing the narrative, but he seems to have a grasp of how important the story is.

Because here, almost more than anywhere else, the Story is vital.  When we broke free from England, our story up till then had been England’s story, and it was long, deep into the past.  When we stepped away from that it was into political and social terra incognito, and if there was going to be a story for us it would have to be one that looked into the future.  We had no past at that point, not one we could claim as our own.  We have been constructing that narrative ever since.

Here’s where the crux of the problem now lies, I think.  For one side, there is the sense that we finished the story quite some time ago and that it is fine as it was and should go on unmodified.  For the other side, that narrative is too filled with burdens of a past it seems no longer applies.  This ex stasis has left us in a kind of limbo.  Neither side seems willing to admit that the other might have something of value to add to the narrative and that maybe some of the narrative went off the rails here and there.  Neither side wants to admit that their version of who we are really needs the other as well.  Until that occurs, those caught in the crossfire find themselves having to pick and choose the parts of both narratives that work for them and then figure out which way to go with the hodge-podge so assembled.  By these means we lurch on into an uncertain future.

I’m likely going to revisit this from time to time.  For now I think I want to do without labels.  But I’ll leave off for now with this: My Way Or The Highway is absolutely idiotic when we’re all still building the road.

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New Look, Errata, and a Policy Statement

I’ve seen some blogs that change their look every month. Frankly, it’s too much bother, but once in a while…

So, here’s a new look.  I’ve noted a few comments about the difficulty of reading white-on-black (or pale blue-on-dark blue, etc), so I found one that reverses that and reads pretty well.  I’ve also found one that allows me to put my own images in the header, and that I may change more regularly, but for the foreseeable future, this is what the Muse is going to look like.

I suppose I should make a few other comments to go along with that.

I promised a post on the content of the Moyers-Haidt video and that’s still coming.  I’ve been working steadily on finishing a novel and I’m within striking distance of the complete first draft.  Oculus is the sequel to Orleans, which is currently in the hands of my estimably cool agent, Jen Udden.  Once I finish this, I will hand it to my wonderful partner and first-reader, Donna, who will take a red pen and scrawl viciously all over it so that I may take the shredded remains and build from them a better book.  While she’s doing that, I will be doing a number of things, among which include cleaning my office (which is a shattered and broken No Man’s Land, unfit for human habitation), doing some more work for Left Bank Books (link on the sidebar, go visit), working on more writing (surprise!) and penning more annoying commentary to post here on matters political, philosophical, personal…

Speaking of which, I recently endured one of the pitfalls of having strong opinions and the ability to voice them that, when it involves relative strangers, usually scrapes no skin off any body parts.  I hope I’m wrong, but I seem to have lost a friend as a consequence of one such post.  Politically, we were quite far apart, but managed what I thought was a fairly solid relationship—based on music, good food, good wine, things like that.  After a few political conversations, we had, I thought, opted for detente and simply didn’t discuss it.  But when you have a public face, that becomes a bit difficult to manage.  What do you say to people?  Don’t read this if you know we disagree fundamentally?

My attitude is caveat emptor.  You come into my online home, feel free to froth and fret or even agree wholeheartedly.  Feel free to take umbrage, throw money, tell me I’m wonderful or the scum of the earth.  It is a public forum.  I won’t back down from my principles or beliefs.  If such offend to the extent that you feel compelled to collect your marbles and never visit again, so be it.

I will say this, regarding the broader arena of public discourse: I can become furious over a stated position and manage to regard someone as a friend.  I’m willing to talk about anything, with just about anyone, as long as the dialogue is honest and honestly engaged.  I may go away wondering how such opinions over this or that can possibly be held by a thinking human being, but I promptly caution myself that I am no judge of absolute right or wrong and no doubt some react the way to me.  But I will ask that my writings be read completely and taken for what they say and judged according to their content.  Factual mis-statements, hyperbolic distortions, and hissy fits do nothing to further anything and I will call anyone on them.

As I would expect them to call me on the same.

So.  If you know in advance that your sensibilities may get rubbed raw by what you may find here, and you come anyway, react as you will, but know it’s on you.  There are plenty other places on the intraweebs to go visit, many of which may offer solace rather than sandpaper.

That said, all are welcome.  I have a FaceBook page with over four thousand “friends,” many of whom I doubtless disagree with on some topic.  I do not unfriend anyone who disagrees with me.  That’s childish.  I believe we should engage other viewpoints.  The polemical in-group isolation that has arisen from the self-selection of media has caused enormous damage to our public discourse.  It has become far too easy to avoid opinions and beliefs and even facts that make us uncomfortable or that we wish were not true.  I try not to do that.  It is limiting and potentially destructive.  What we are doing thereby is creating entirely separate languages.  Words that mean one thing to one group mean something entirely different to another and because they no longer converse with each other on any regular basis, such meanings concretize and become barriers.

Anyway, I hope you all like the new look.  The mission, however, remains the same.

Art

The Last One

The last motion picture theater of my youth is gone.

For several years, The Avalon, sitting on Kingshighway, across the street from a mortuary that has now become a church, has been shuttered and slowly decaying and finally has met its inevitable fate.

In a way, good.  It has been an eyesore for some time, a constant reminder of neglect and a ruin of a bygone era.

Hyperbole? Indeed, yes, but true nonetheless.  As you can tell by what remained, it was an elegant, simple building, with a lovely facade.  A symbol of an age thoroughly gone—the single-screen, stand-alone movie theater.

The last film I saw there was back in 1986 or ’87—The Last Temptation of Christ.  The theater had passed into the hands of a single owner who was a bit of an eccentric, and he tried everything to keep it going.  He had a bit of a windfall with that film because of the timidity of every other movie theater in the city and county.  They all refused to show Scorcese’s flawed depiction of Jesus’ final days.  The Avalon announced it would screen it and it was no doubt the last time it had sell-out audiences for several days.

By then, the wear and tear was already very apparent.  One of the speakers had been busted for years, generating an annoying buzz off to stage left, and he had never, evidently, made enough money to fix it or replace it.  For ordinary dialogue it was fine, the buzz only became noticeable during very loud sequences.  Probably a torn cone.

But the air conditioning worked, the concession stand still operated, and the seats were kept in repair.

After that, we never went back.  When the doors closed, I expected someone to buy it and try to restore it, but I always thought that during the ’80s and ’90s, when so many of these disappeared one way or the other.

There’s a scene in Woody Allen’s film Radio Days that shows the family Going To The Movies during the 1930s.  In Allen’s handling, it is a reverential scene, like people going to church, slow, a processional, and while I never quite felt that way, there is certainly something of that in my memory.  Nostalgia often becomes a frame for reverence.  Going to the movies for us was a Big Deal and our major entertainment, up till the age of VCRs.  I have vivid memories of a childhood with many options for movie-going.  St. Louis was full of them.

A few of the buildings remain.  The ultra-modernist Martin Cinerama is still there, but it serves as a church now, which pains me.  It was the most expensive theater to go to, but it was the only Cinemascope screen in town.  I remember seeing Grand Prix there.  I also saw 2001: A Space Odyssey there four times.  But not much else.  We may have seen How the West Was Won there, but my more vivid memory of that was seeing it in our local theater, The Shenendoah, and being annoyed at the peculiar warp in the center of the screen where the wide Cinemascope picture had been compressed.

The Melvin is still there, but it, too, is a church, one of those little revival things that can barely support itself.

And of course The Fox is still there, majestic centerpiece of our threater district, and up the street a little bit is Powell Hall, which was once The American, a movie house of the grand tradition.

The rest?  All the stand-alone neighborhood theaters are pretty much gone.

The ones I spent my adolescence in were within walking distance, albeit long walks:  The Shenendoah, The Ritz, The Washington, and The Columbia.  I saw Gone With The Wind in The Columbia.  To be fair, that one is somewhat still there.  The building is, anyway.  After the theater closed, it was converted into a sports facility for a while, with handball courts.  It burned.  Now it is a private home, a showcase bit of architectural bravura owned by the architect.  I sometimes wonder how many people anymore know what it once was.

But the others are just gone, torn down.  Parking lots.  That’s also what became of The Granada, another of my favorites.  I remember when it was demolished, standing in the remaining space and trying to fit the immense theater of my memory into the claustrophobic area of the empty lot.  That’s another one I recall the last picture I saw in—Star Crash.  It rained hard that night, too.

The Granada in particular galls.  I knew a bunch of people, my age, who had formed a company to try to buy it so they could turn it into a revival theater.  The owner, for reasons that escaped us all, refused to sell, delayed and delayed, until one year the roof fell in and the building became a hazard.  The cost of renovation at that point was too high and soon after it fell to the wrecking ball.

The Ritz…yes, I remember the last picture I saw there, as well.  The owners had tried to convert it into a multi-screen venue, which sort of worked, but the crowd had deteriorated into a Roman mob and I was threatened with a knife in the hands of a ten-year-old I told to shut up.  The film?  Airplane II.

Not sure about all the others.

The litany is long, like absent friends.  The Crest, the Crestwood, the Ambassador,  all the Loews theaters, Midtown, State, another one that eludes memory just now, the Mark Twain, the Creve Coeur…

I remember the first time I went to a multiplex.  I didn’t know then that it was the wave of the future.  My dad took me to The Des Peres to see 2001, on a screen not much larger than a widescreen LCD you can put in your home now.  They were known as “Jerry Lewis Intimate Theaters” and we thought they were a joke.  Well.

Movie houses, as they were once affectionately called, suffered, I think, the demise of the B Picture more than anything else.  In an era where the cheapest Hollywood production can only be done for close to ten million, the need for box office returns simply will not support the way theaters used to operate.  Oh, there are certainly B pictures, but they go direct to television (cable) or direct to DVD.  No one is going to pay the cost of an evening at the theater for less than a major motion picture, so the bread-and-butter of the former age is gone.

I can understand, intellectually, what happened, and if I had been a businessman in the movie house business back then I probably would have taken the same series of decisions that has resulted in the current loss of what for many decades was an American institution.

Going to the movies is a social activity.  It’s not like gathering a couple friends at your home to watch a DVD.  It is a civilizing activity when conducted the way it once was.

One benefit of this, probably unforeseen (I didn’t see it), is the revival of live theater.  If you’re going to pay a lot of money to go be entertained, the novelty and impact of the stage is the thing that draws the audience.  Not, perhaps, large audiences—many local theater groups struggle—but devoted audiences, and this, I think, is a good thing.  Live theater is about the story, the characters, not the special effects.  At live theater, you have to pay attention.

I miss going to the movies.  We stopped doing it years ago because, frankly, it was just more convenient to rent the video.  The “pause” button has spoiled us, weakening out bladders, giving us opportunity to replay what just happened because we don’t pay as close attention as we used to, and avoiding sitting in a hall with people who don’t know how to shut up during the film.  It became expensive and a bother.

Now it’s a special event, something we might do once or twice a year.  (I have every intention of going to see John Carter of Mars at the theater.)  And, yes, there are still theaters—multiplexes, often in shopping malls (although that peculiar institution itself is struggling, so who knows what may happen)—and they are expensive.  Now we have OMNIMAX theaters, which, impressive as they sometimes are, is nevertheless part of an ongoing tradition in film to try to coax people to leave their homes and go to the movies, like VistaVision, Todd-AO, Cinemascope and a dozen others, all trying to offer people what could not be had on television.  The current revival of 3-D is such a gimmick.

Anyway, I thought I’d take some space to lament the passing of yet another monument from my youth.  The intersection where The Avalon once stood was home once to a remarkable piece of urban architecture, a Famous-Barr department store that, when it was built, was shocking for its modernity.  That’s gone now, too, a strip mall in its place with a Walgreens and an Office Max.  Around the neighborhood you can see the architectural motifs on apartment buildings and private homes that speak of a more optimistic, confident time—and, perhaps, a more thoughtful time.

Or not.  Nostalgia is deceptive and memory a dangerously mutable realm.  But there is still some comfort there, to go along with the melancholy.

 

Art

2012

So we survived the night.  The mad hordes banging on the steel shutters disturbed our sleep not at all.  This morning we looked out at the devastation and counted ourselves among the fortunate survivors, nevertheless aware that this year—this year—is the one to fear most…

I never make resolutions and usually I don’t even make plans.  Over the last many years I’ve found that all I accomplish is an increase in guilt when I fail to live up to my promises to myself.  I have enough self-deprecation already, I don’t need to make an annual celebration out of it.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t have things I want to accomplish.

I think I’ll keep most of it to myself.  Anyone keeping up with this blog has a pretty good idea what my ambitions are, and they don’t really follow an annual cycle.  If there is one thing, though, that needs to change, it is my deep conviction that much of what I wish to do will never happen.  I surprised myself between 1990 and 2001 by doing exactly what I had till that decade thought I’d never manage—publish.

The fact is, I have always held back from myself the kind of faith that opens up possibilities.  I’m ready to accept successes when they happen, but I always seem to keep myself from believing they will.  Sometimes—often—this can result in self-sabotage.  Never intentional, always unconscious, but effective all the same.  And I don’t know why.  Thirty or forty years ago, untried and with nothing to show for any effort, it made a kind of sense.  I hadn’t proved anything to myself or anyone else.

Starting in 1980 that changed and I have a track record now.  So it’s maybe time to start believing in myself.  At least more than I have been.  And enjoy it.

So here’s a few things I’d like to try to do this coming year.

One, publish a new novel.  At the very least get a contract for one.

Two, take a long vacation or two with Donna and travel to some new places.

Three, maybe actually mount a decent photographic exhibition.  It’s long overdue, I have a lot of good work that will, if I don’t do something about it, disappear into oblivion without anyone ever seeing it.

Four…

Well, four, have a better time.

So, irresolute but with purpose, I welcome 2012 and wish you all the very best in the coming 12 months.  I’ll keep you posted on how things go.

And thank you for paying attention and giving a damn.

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The Ancient Past

Over the weekend my mother presented us with something that surprised, pleased, slightly embarrassed, and produced a slew of other less-definable reactions.  Mothers do this sort of thing, I’m told.  We have no children to whom we might have inflicted this on, so I’m unable to say what must go through a parent’s mind on such occasion.

But it’s sweet and important and after my initial “What the hell…” reaction I was really very pleased.  She came out with a big file folder full of “stuff” from my grade school years.  Among the items were class portraits and…well…

 

  Yes, this is me, circa 1965.  Note the three-piece suit?  I was very much into my James Bond period at this time and dressing well was part of it.  Obviously I didn’t wear a suit every day—this was special—but when I did, I took Sean Connery as my model and did it up right.

Of course, I didn’t really know how to wear it.  Posture was still a work-in-progress and my hair has only ever been in control one year, about two years after this when I went through my heavy Brylcreem phase, with pompadour and everything.

And of course note the smirk.  I have no idea what I was thinking at the time, to produce such an expression, but doubtless it had little to do with what was going on around me.  Doubtless I was trying to exude some semblance of cool, something I’ve never possessed in any measurable degree, but in my own head I certainly was.

Now here is the next year’s version—same school, mind you, Emmaus Lutheran School.

 

Note the sartorial change.   This would have been my Man From U.N.C.L.E.  phase—that or Lost In Space—and turtlenecks were the fashion of the moment.  Now this I likely would have worn most days.  I had some notion then that clothes made the boy, hopefully into the version of the boy desired.  Illya Kuryakin cool, someone not to mess with, in the know, capable and maybe a touch dangerous.

Yeah, right, with that face.  Dangerous.  Uh huh.  Cute kid, isn’t he?  In 1966 I would have been 11 or 12, depending on the time of year this was taken, and I don’t recall that anymore.  I look at that face now and I wonder what happened to that kid.  He actually looks happy.  And I suppose most of the time I was fairly happy.  Not in school, though, but I learned to play a part, and I was playing one there, I’m sure.  The pictures were always for that, I remember, the chance to get down in the record what I thought I was and what I wanted to be.  It never worked, I always ended up looking like any other hapless kid, goofily unaware, and absurdly pleased to be getting my picture taken.

But that smirk…that, I think, stayed with me.  Take a look at this one from almost 30 years later.

 

A friend shot this for me as a promo image for the writing career I was convinced I was about to have.  You can still kind of see that kid there, cocky, a little divorced from reality, and somehow knowing something the photographer or the audience doesn’t.  A bit more practiced, obviously, and the freckles are gone.  In a way I kind of miss the freckles.  (For many years I actually found freckles erotic—I’d had a couple of girlfriends who had them in ample supply, fair-skinned and somehow the freckles just…anyway.)

Now, along with the pictures, I found in my mother’s file a couple of report cards.  Mind you, this was from a parochial school, and for the most part I was unsurprised.  I was a poor student.  Mostly Cs and C-s.  The surprising grades were in Religion, which generally were Bs and As.  I tell people when it comes up that at one time I was a righteous little christian and evidently it showed in my classroom performance.

What else? There was one composite, one of those sheets with thumbnails of the whole class, and I was asked if I remembered them all.  This was the 4th Grade and I did amazingly well.  I think I named 80% of them.  There were a few I didn’t recognize, and a couple I did but could not put names to.

There were also merit badges and such from my Boy Scout days.  I didn’t do well in that, either.  I had a merit badge in fire safety, marksmanship, basketweaving (yes, basketweaving—don’t ask), first aid, and a couple others, plus achievement patches from state Jamborees.  I’ll tell you about those sometime—the second one I attended was cause for me quitting the scouts.

It felt more like a record of someone else’s life, to be honest.  Not me.  I’ve worked to distance myself from that kid in a lot of ways.  He did not impress me at the time, though he hid it well.  But I have to wonder how much is still in here, still influencing, still informing who I am and what people see.  I mine my own past for material to build stories with and I have utilized my childhood often.  I am still surprised sometimes by what I find.

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Books, 2011

It seems unlikely I’ll finish another book before this Sunday—if I do it will probably be Stefanie Pintoff‘s second Simon Ziele mystery, A Curtain Falls.  I read the first in the series, In The Shadow of Gotham, not too long ago and enjoyed it.  It’s a period mystery, set in 1905, and features a progressive police detective from New York—Ziele—who teams up with an amateur criminologist, Alistair Sinclair, who is attempting to construct a science of criminal behavior.  Ms. Pintoff avoids many pitfalls by keeping the level of expertise firmly locked in 1905 and Sinclair makes as many if not more wrong conclusions as right, but it was an entertaining piece of work and the evocation of 1905 New York was excellent.  Somewhat more engaging than a similarly period series by Rhys Bowen, the Molly Murphy mysteries, which are also rich in period detail, but a bit more of a stretch about an Irish immigrant who falls into the detective business rather by accident and then tries to make a go of it. These are set during and after the McKinley presidency and one book even deals directly with his assassination.  For a peek into the more bohemian parts of New York, they are wonderful.  Ms Bowen sells the conceit well, but once you put one of them down you have to wonder just how likely it would be.

I found myself reading a lot of mysteries this past year.  As I’ve been moving into that genre—two of the novels in the hands of my new agent are mysteries, one a historical, the other contemporary, and I have every intention of continuing them as series (and even the alternate history is largely a mystery thriller)—I decided I needed to become better acquainted with what’s being done.  I read a couple of the more obvious ones—Laura Lippmann and Tess Gerritsen made the list, as did a couple of Michael Connelly’s and one James Patterson—but I also found some less obvious ones (at least to me).

One series I’ve become quite taken with is Margaret Maron‘s Deborah Knott series, beginning with Bootlegger’s Daughter.  I’ve read eleven of these, all this past year.  They are charming.  Deborah Knott is the only daughter of a man who was once the biggest bootlegger in North Carolina and adjoining states.  He’s out of the business—sort of—and she has become an attorney.  By the end of the first novel she’s decided to run for a local judgeship and through the rest of the series she is a judge.  This is of the “stumble into murders” kind of cozy mystery writing.  It’s as much about the people of the area and the history as it is about solving a murder and the first-person narrative is comfortable and evocative.  I found myself devouring one of these over a weekend like popcorn.

I also continued reading Laurie King’s Mary Russell books, ending this year with The Pirate King, which is a comedy.  Not quite as successful as the rest of the series, but not bad.  I caught up on her Kate Martinelli novels, too.

Among the other mysteries this past year I read another of Cara Black‘s Paris mysteries featuring Aimee LeDuc, private investigator.  This one was set on the Ile St. Louis and I read it as much for that as for the mystery, since I have upcoming scenes in one of my novels set there.  If you like Paris and you like tough female detectives of the Honey West pedigree, these are worth the time.  (I recall the first one of these I read annoyed me because it involved a WWII Occupation mystery.  Some of this is becoming a stretch by now—these people are getting ancient and dying and I have to wonder how credible contemporary plots concerning survivors from 1942 can continue to be, but…)

I mentioned I read a James Patterson.  I’ve been hearing so much about this guy that I decided I had to read one.  I won’t even mention which one, it was terrible from the first chapter.  Cliched writing, facile plotting, and predictable…everything.  I put it down wondering, what is supposed to be so great about this guy?  But he comes out of a marketing background and the sheer volume he produces—much of it now with other writers—must simply overwhelm the public.

However, both Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly did not disappoint, although in Lehane’s case the level of mayhem seemed borderline cartoonish.  Nevertheless, he held my attention, quickened my pulse a couple of times.  Connelly proved solid, at least in the one I read, Blood Work.  In Lehane’s case, I found a curiosity, a historical novel, The Given Day, which is on my list for next year.  So as this is about what I read in 2011, you’ll have to wait.

I also continued my Ross McDonald reading with The Drowning Pool.  I have a bunch more of these to read, but they are so far all gems.  Ross McDonald is I think underappreciated.  He was a master of the noirish and hardboiled style.  Which segues into a classic I read which I’d never read before, James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce.  I don’t know exactly what I expected, based on The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, but it wasn’t this, and it was a surprise.  It’s not a mystery—at least not in the detective sense—and yet you can fully feel the noirish elements come through in this story of a woman during the Depression who boots out her philandering husband and then has to make a go of it on her own.  She subsequently becomes a very successful restaurateur, but her attempts to live up to the standards her daughter—a true enfant terrible—thinks she should embrace end up bringing her down, even as the daughter grows up to get just about everything she wants.  At the end Mildred is back with the husband and you get the sense that she’s going to build it all up again—and this time make it stick, since the daughter has finally been banished.  I put it down with a “Jaysus” reaction.

I can also recommend new writer Rebecca Cantrell‘s series, beginning with A Trace of Smoke about a female reporter in pre-war Berlin.  This would be a decent companion piece to Philip Kerr’s  Bernie Gunther series.

I read my first Val McDermid novel, A Distant Echo, which I highly recommend.  It details the consequences of a false police accusation on four friends over the years.  They find the corpse of a barmaid in a cemetery, but as the police have no leads going anywhere else these four become the prime suspects.  Of course, nothing connects them to her murder, either.  But the press gets ahold of it and their lives all take unexpected turns.  Then, years later, someone starts killing them and two of them work to solve the crime.

Among the non-mysteries I read this past year were also a couple that I ought to have but never got around to.  I read Richard Powers’ The Gold Bug Variations, which is a kind of tour-de-force of kitchen sink writing that ties Bach’s music into the unraveling of the genetic code, all through the lens of a woman trying to solve the puzzle of a scientist who should have been one of the luminaries of the discovery of DNA but instead suffered the end of his career and ignominy.  Tight, colorful writing, bizarre connections.  It reminded me of Thomas Pynchon, only more controlled and with a readily-discernible plot.

I also read Charlotte’s Web for the first time ever.  I am woefully under-read in childrens and YA literature.  During the time of my life I should have been reading this, I was deep into comics and then my mother’s book-of-the-month club books, which were all adult.  At the same time I discovered science fiction and, well, that’s one category of Jeopardy I always fail.  Along with that one I also read—for the first time ever—The Phantom Tollbooth.  I doubt this is going to signal a spree of children-and-YA reading, but both of those books were well worth the read, especially the Juster.

I only read one Dickens this year, The Old Curiosity Shop, which has to be one of the most maudlin of his novels.  I kept thinking about Little Nell “Will you bloody die already!”  But I can see how this would have been a show-stopper when it came out.  It may be one of the best treatments from the period of addictive behavior, especially of gambling addiction.

I finally read Michael Moorcock’s Mother London, which has been on my shelf for a decade at least.  It’s not an easy one to get into, but once you realize what’s going on—a trio of telepaths who don’t quite realize that this is what they are finding solace with each other through the changing landscape of wartime and post-war London—it is marvelous.  Moorcock is deceptive in that he has written some real crap (The Blood Red Game should be avoided).  But he is a truly fine stylist and a first-rate imaginative intellect when he chooses to be and Mother London is a fine novel that should be considered a classic.

And speaking of London during the war, I read Connie Willis’s massive opus, both volumes—Blackout and All Clear—and can recommend it to anyone who is seriously into WWII history.  She has clearly done her homework and her decision to write about the Blitz from the viewpoint of the residents, albeit using her time traveling historians as vehicles, has produced a fascinating take on London at the time.  (I must say, though, that one of Willis’s hallmark plot devices—the continual miscommunication and near misses of people trying to find each other—which has worked effectively in the past, is growing wearisome by now.  We get it, reality does not follow a neat plot logic, people fail, messages don’t get delivered, etc etc—but enough is enough already.)  This may be the end of the Mr. Dunworthy stories, though.  May be.  This is time travel, after all.

I read a couple of newer novels that I want to recommend, both more or less science fiction.  The first is The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer.  This is a steampunk take on The Tempest.  Sort of.  I don’t wish to get into it too deeply, but I was taken with it primarily because it is steampunk without zombies!  I am growing tired of the monster-of-the-week in genre fiction.  Vampires, now zombies.  Dead things that move around do not fascinate me and too often they entail grue for the sake of grue.  Enough already!  (I put aside two steampunk novels that looked otherwise intriguing because, within 10 pages, there are zombies.)  To me, good steampunk is in the vein of The Difference Engine.  And Palmer delivers.  The writing is elegant, the world evocative, the symbolism and metaphors nicely deployed.  Not the best it could be, but high up on my scale.

The other is by a good friend of mine, Carolyn Ives Gilman.  Isles of the Forsaken is a novel with which I’ve been familiar for a long time.  It was the first manuscript Carolyn gave me for a critique.  It has finally come out—though this is but the first half—and it is wonderful.  Set on a world that is like but not like ours, during a period much like the hegemony of Great Britain in the 19th Century, it is about the clash of cultures.  Bear in mind, who is the good guy and who is the bad guy is pretty much dependent on the reader’s expectations.  This is fine stuff.

I didn’t read much science fiction this past year.  Out of the 79 I read cover to cover, only 16 were definitely SF.  I can recommend Leviathan Wakes by James S. Correy—a very good thriller, a shitkicker, well-written and realized.  First one of a series (of course—I miss they dominance of the stand-alone anymore).  I also read Keith Roberts’ Pavane, a classic alternate history, and a fine, fine piece of writing it is.

The other SF novel I’m recommending is Gene Wolfe’s Home Fires.  It’s been a while since Gene has done a straightfoward science fiction novel (if any of his work can ever be called straightforward!) and this one is a subtle study of mismatched personalities and desires that will not be thwarted.  It’s love story with a relativistic time-dilation element complicating it.  Now, I tend to like almost anything Gene does, so take this recommendation in that context, but I think it may be one of his best.  He has pulled back from the epic vistas of some of his earlier SFnal efforts, like The Book of the Long Sun and such and centered this through one viewpoint character and closely-controlled scenario that is almost claustrophobic compared to his other work.  But it works.

I read some flops, but I won’t go into them here—except for the comments on Patterson above—because I’m not sure if the books were really bad or if they just bounced off.  (One of them I thought a derivative bit of schlock, phoned in by an author who has done excellent work in the past, but just took a stroll on this one.)  There was another that was a convoluted bit of experimental strain that couldn’t decide if it was a mystery, Kafkaesque, Pynchonesque, or an exercise in abstruse symbolism.

I will read less next year.  I already know that.  I have several bricks on the pile that will require long hours and extra attention.  At least, it is my plan to get through some of them, but we’ll see how that works out.

Among the others that I enjoyed and can recommend I offer: Counting Heads by David Marusek,  Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt, A Conspiracy of Paper by David Liss, The Gift by Lewis Hyde, On Mozart by Anthony Burgess, and Birth of the Modern by Paul Johnson.  Allen Steele has a new one out, Hex, set in his Coyote universe and well worth the read.  Scott Philips also has a new one out, The Adjustment, which is a fine example of Scott’s idiosyncratic noir style.

Notice that the book links included all go to Left Bank Books.  I’m going to be doing that from now on, at least where I don’t link directly to an author’s page.  Support your local bookstore.  You’ll miss them when they’re gone, so don’t let them be gone.  Believe me, there really isn’t much Amazon can offer you that a good independent bookstore can’t, and that sucking sound of local tax revenue leaving your community and your state is the sound that accompanies our current fiscal woes.

End of sales pitch.  I’ll talk about the other things in 2011 later.

 

blog

Season’s Wish

We didn’t get around to sending out cards this year.  It’s been busy and in some ways not particularly festive, but we’ve had worse years, so there really is no excuse.  Time just got away from us.

Which happens more and more lately.  So in lieu of a card (which we promise to send out next year) I thought I’d post this and for those of you who come by, we can wish you well and hope for a terrific next year.

We had Changes of Great Significance happen in 2011.  I signed with a new agent(s) and promptly spent a good chunk of the year rewriting a pair of novels at their requests, which is a good thing.  The attention they have given me, shown my projects, has increased my optimism and I now have real cause to believe this writing thing will work out.  For Jen and Stacia I am most grateful and wish them particularly wonderful holidays.

The two novels in question are much improved.

Donna is free from a job that was slowly killing her.  Money really isn’t everything, not when it comes at the cost of health and well-being and the time to do anything worthwhile with it.  We were able to put enough in the bank that she can be a bit choosy in her next job and I can still concentrate on my writing.  For now.

I acquired a new camera and have begun—tentatively—to do photography again.

Most of our friends are doing okay, some better than others, but none of them are in dire straits.  We haven’t seen enough of most of them.  (Sorry.)

We didn’t take the trips we’ve been intending to take—but that’s been true for a few years now.  Perhaps with the time we now have we can do that.

I started working part-time for Left Bank Books, doing a kind of goodwill public outreach task to bring people into the stores.  I have no idea if my efforts had anything to do with this, but they showed a sharp increase over last year, especially in the downtown store (which is the one for which I was hired to act) and this is a Good Thing.  The people who work there are great, every one of them, and now that I’ve seen it from the inside, so to speak, and I can say that a special thing is going on there.

I read a bunch of good books this year, which I’ll talk about in January (still reading) and we ate some great food, made some good music, smiled a lot, and have come through in good spirits.

We’re both going to the gym now, something we haven’t done together in many years.

It’s been okay.  It will be better.  So while I apologize for the lack of a card in the mail, please accept this instead and know that we wish you all well and look forward to another year on a planet with such fine people living on it.

Be well.

Art

No Politics

Not this morning.  It’s hard, I know, because so much is going on that I could  comment about, but…

The novel revision I mentioned a couple of posts back is done.  Done and at my agent.  I did a top to bottom revision, adding in the new material that desperately wanted to be included, and except for yesterday it all went remarkably well.

Yesterday, though…yes…Murphy was in residence.

We went to the gym and then Donna had an errand to run, so I descended to the dungeon  office and began.  I’d already started the final work on the last chapter a couple days earlier, but I had Other Things To Do on both Tuesday and Wednesday that kept me away.  That was fine, it gave my subconscious time to work out some kinks and so I was more than ready to work on the remainder.

It was good stuff.  I say that because much of it is gone.  I practically rewrote the entirety of the last chapter and I was very carefully laying in the new material and deleting the old as I went.  But I became caught up in the work—it happens—and neglected to hit SAVE as often as I should.  (Yes, I have a timed save, but it was not quickly enough to prevent what happened.)

Revisions complete, I had a large chunk of old text to delete and I proceeded to highlight it for destruction and—

It crashed.  Don’t know why or how but suddenly WordPerfect complained (it never does this!) and shut down.  When I rebooted I found everything intact, but now I had this little box telling me that since it hadn’t exited properly, in order to preserve the back-up I had to open it and rename it, which I tried to do, but something was preventing it from “taking” so I tried cutting and pasting to get the changes into the original and then it crashed again and—-

The long and the short of it is, I lost my revisions on the last chapter.  All of them.

By which time Donna was home and I was fuming.  No, that’s not quite it.  I was in a blood-red, Conanesque rage, stomping around the house, yelling, cursing computers and the spawn that created them, almost but not quite punching things.

We had lunch. I returned to the deeps, sucked it up, and started over.

In all this, I had forgotten the dog.  Coffey still needed her walk and I forgot.  I’m a bad owner.  Donna came down and asked if I wanted her to take Coffey and after a few minutes of guilt-ridden negotiation, she did.

And I finished the last chapter.

Then I went on to make the final corrections to the epilogue, saved the puppy, and sent it to my agent.  (And then another weird thing happened to it, but that’s all straightened out now, so never mind.)

When I began the revisions, the manuscript was just a hair under 90 thousand words.   It’s gained 4,000 and a lot more cohesion.  In my humble opinion, it works now, whereas before it merely sufficed.

You might get the impression from the foregoing that I don’t enjoy my work.  Quite the contrary, the reason I tolerate these little instances of Murphyesque meltdown it because I love it.  I slept the sleep of the righteous last night, and this morning I am thinking back over the work and smiling.  Though I know I have at least one more pass to get through with it, when Stacia gets done making all her notes and edits, at this point I am pleased with the product.

What I now have to do, which is long, long overdue, is clean the dungeon office.  I have piles of stuff everywhere.  It’s been a few years since I’ve done a really thorough cleaning in here, which includes new bookshelves, sorting through notes that have lost all significance, finding things I’ve forgotten I misplaced, and just generally making the room livable.  When I work on a novel, there is a kind of conservation of chaos at work—as order increases in the story upon which I labor, a commensurate increase in disorder occurs in the immediate environment.  So as the novel nears completion, its maximum point of order, the room falls apart in near ruin.

In the last few years, I have written one and a half new novels and rewritten two from top to bottom, without pause.  You can imagine the task before me.

So…is Gingrich still the GOP frontrunner?

Home

Dressing Up

It’s Hallowe’en.  No news to anyone, we’ve been immersed in it for weeks now.  But this year I’ve been doing a lot of introspective reminiscing and I’ve come to realize that Hallowe’en should always have been my favorite festive occasion.

See, I’ve been wearing costumes all my life.

 

The last time I went out on a Hallowe’en night in costumes I was 14.  A little old you say?  I agree, but I wasn’t doing the trick’or’trreating, I was being part of the security detail accompany a group of littler kids.  Nevertheless, I always liked getting into costume, into a character, and I went as a town sheriff, complete with a six-gun on my hip.  That would be questionable today, especially as the weapon I wore was a Mattel Fanner Fifty, which looked real.  Except for some high-end models, toy guns don’t look real anymore, and I understand the thinking behind it.  Even when I was a kid there were incidents of robberies done at (toy) gun-point, because for over a decade toy companies, following the Mattel model, made more and more realistic guns.  The Mattels were all like three-quarter size, but in the heat of the moment that’s not going to count for much.  So gradually, authenticity yielded to social reality, and now you have all these bizarre looking things out of bad SciFi movies with tell-tale orange tips screaming TOY!

Anyway, I went out for a couple of hours, acting as protector of the smaller children, wearing a beard made from burnt cork, a dime-store Stetson, and my six-shooter slung low on the hip.

I loved it.

But you get older, some things that were adorable at eight are just weird at eighteen.  Going to dress-up Hallowe’en parties in my adolescence and early adulthood were not that common.  Besides I lost all my toy guns.

(I had a double-holster set of Mattel “shootin-shell” pistols, black holsters, silvered with fake ivory grips.  They were wonderful!  You could get bullets for them with pressure-plate releases on the back of the spring-loaded cartridges that, when the hammer struck, launched little plastic shells about five or six feet.  I was rough on my toys, always was, and eventually the grips came off, they broke, they ended up neglected and one day tossed.  Here’s a picture of the set:

 

 

 

 

I loved that set.  Outrageously expensive now.  Here is a site with all the Mattel western toys of the period.)

Even before that, though, I used to get creative.  When first introduced to Hallowe’en, the costumes were less than wonderful.  Basic sized pull-overs, like jump suits, tied in the back, and a molded plastic mask with large eye holes.  The fabric was cheap, the costumes usually ill-fitting, and almost always ending up in the trash.  The last one of those I had was a Superman costume when I was eleven—it was a little embarrassing because they insisted on tricking it out with glitter on the chest sigil and there was no symbol on the cape.  No matter what, you didn’t look like Superman.

(Yes, I know—eleven?  Seriously?  What can I say?  I prolonged childhood as long as I could.  In some ways, I’m still a kid.)

Childhood for me was a series of roles in which I would immerse myself.  Anything, I suppose, to escape the prison of my own self.  Despite my “delicacy” I was really invested in being a soldier.  One year I even had “real” fatigues.  Never had a steel helmet, but I recall the Sixties being a very cool time for toys like this.  I had a G.I. helmet with the mesh for stuffing camouflage in—leaves and the like—which my mother hated because I tracked debris into the house after a hard day fighting Nazis or Japanese.  I had a real cartridge belt with canteen, the envy of the neighborhood, and a couple of very cool rifles.  I had one of the first battery-powered M-14s in the neighborhood.  This one actually made a very neat sound, a heavy thum-thum-thum as the tip of the barrel moved in and out (in what now I can see was a rather disturbing sexual motion, but then it was all about killing bad guys).

I took on a James Bond persona for a few years—my best dressed time in childhood, even my hair was perfectly groomed (lot of Brylcream) and I had a couple of automatic pistols—but never a shoulder holster.  Awkward when trying to carry a replica Luger in the small inside pocket of a sport coat.  It kept falling out every time I bent over.

Much of that faded through high school, but by then I was trying to write.  I look at it now and I see that I never stopped putting on costumes, only now I do it in my stories.  Try on a character, go through an adventure, be the cool secret agent or starship trooper or whatever.

We dabbled briefly in costuming when we started attending SF conventions, but drifted away from it fairly quickly.  That wasn’t the aspect of the community that really attracted us, though I confess to a deep admiration for the skill and dedication some costumers bring to their passion.

But tonight we will sort of dress up for the kids coming to the house to receive their booty and admire and enjoy their glee in being Something Else for the night.  Looking back, I admit that sometimes I got a little weird with some of it, but in the long run it did me no harm and probably a great deal of good to try out different personae.  And I haven’t actually stopped.  Just that the wardrobe is more expensive now—and fits better.

Have a boo-tiful evening.

culture

An Age of Wonder and Annoyance

I have two things to talk about that are related by the slenderest of threads. Bear with me.

First I’d like to say something about how marvelous is the age in which we live, at least from the perspective of someone who has now lived in a couple of “ages” since arriving on this planet in 1954.

A short while ago I had lunch. While having lunch I like to watch something, so I popped the DVD of The Right Stuff   into my player and settled back to my roast beef and movie.  While watching, it occurred to me how blase I’ve  become at this technology.

See, growing up, movies were a Big Deal.  My parents went every other week at least and took me.  Going To The Movies holds a special, nostalgic place in my memory.  It was a shared event, but more than that it was in fact An Event.  TV was there, sure, but it was crappy and even at age four I kind of recognized the difference.  Movies were Big, they were Special, they were Unique—and they went away.  Though it was dependable.  The first run theaters got the new films and ran them for a week, maybe two.  The next batch were due in and they swapped them out, so the films went to the cheaper neighborhood theaters, usually only for a week.  Plus, these were double features.  You sat in the theater for up to four and half hours to see two movies.  Before I was born, it would be two movies, plus—cartoons, a short subject, maybe a news reel.  Going to movies was a significant amount of time and a major outing.

We brought our own snacks.  Mom would make up some popcorn or put a brown bag of candy together, and we might—might—bring a bottle of soda to share.  The concession stand was more than we could afford usually.

And after the movies left the theaters, they were gone.  If you  hadn’t seen them when they came out, during the three or four weeks they were in town at one or another theater, you were s.o.l.  Some of the bigger hits might be rereleased a year or two later and a few films were perennially rereleased, but the vast majority did not come back.  You had to remember them.

Television changed that somewhat when networks started leasing movies to show at certain low-traffic times, and then in the late Sixites and early Seventies there were a variety of movie programs—Movie of the Week, Thursday Night At the Movies, A Picture For A Sunday Afternoon.  Suddenly all these old films started turning up again, and of course after ten P.M. local networks aired a lot of B pictures or films from the Thirties and Forties, but you had to stay up for them, and you never knew what you would get.  (Some of my favorite memories with my dad come from Friday nights, sitting up late, watching some of these movies, some of which were unintentional howlers at which we’d poke fun.)

A lot of people today probably don’t see the wonder in being able to go to a store or online and buy a film and watch it at home.  VCRs didn’t come in till the late Seventies (and the early models weren’t great), but it ushered in an age of comparative cultural wealth.  The idea, when I grew up, that I could actually own one of these movies, for myself, and watch it when I chose to…

You forget occasionally to sit back and appreciate what we now have.  It is amazing—the technology, yes, but the fact that I can drop a disc in a machine and watch The Maltese Falcon or  Gone With The Wind  or  The Right Stuff  whenever I please is…incredible.

That’s the good part.

The other amazing thing is this vast and complex online community—several communities, actually, some overlapping—that we have with more ease than it used to be to make a long distance phone call.  It’s amazing.  I can communicate with people I would never have known existed in one of those previous “ages” and talk about things only a rare handful of people I ever met face to face would even have been interested in before.  Like-minded, like-enthused, like-whatever people around the globe who can now “chat” online.

And with whom one can trip over an area of sensitivity so fast and so inexplicably that it makes your head spin.  I have recently had this shoved in my face just how easily some folks take offense and how impossible it can be to explain yourself or extricate yourself.  Unless you want to be an ass, it is often better to simply leave the group in question rather than see the crap continually stirred.

But because it is so easy to leave, not to mention remain anonymous, I think many people never learn the nuances of real interaction.  Distance used to serve a vital social function, namely keeping people apart by virtue of the difficulty of communicating.  Letter-writing requires thought—the trouble you have to go through to draft the letter, address it, go to the post office, etc. I think tends to make people more thoughtful and thorough.  It’s not like a casual conversation, which the ease of communication has sometimes turned the most serious conversations into because it is difficult to tell when it is time to stop cracking wise.

Further, though, once a foul has been made, it doesn’t go away.  It perpetuates, spreads, and suddenly people all over may know all about the reputation you have earned through misadventure.

Part of the problem—a big part, I think—is the fact of the words remaining behind after the conversation is over.  Spoken conversation has a half-life, very short, and events carry people past ill-considered phrasing or cliches, aided by the visuals, the body language and facial expression.  But when you write something down, it has weight, and online exchanges acquire significance never intended for a brief exchange.  You can consider the words, read them over again and again, and derive meaning and intent whether it’s there or not.

The wonderfulness of our enabling technologies render us lazy, allow us to take for granted things which in an earlier time, with less speed and availability, would not have been so poorly used.

So instead of a thoughtless sentence being immediately apologized for, brushed aside, and forgotten, the offending sentence lingers, a solid legacy that reminds and continues to irritate.  The down-side of modern ease.

Part of the pleasure of all these things should be from not taking them for granted, from a near conscious recognition of just how cool things are.  On the one hand, we maybe have to grow thicker skins—certainly we have to learn new interpretive skills—and on the other maybe let our skins thin a little so we can sense the amazing gift much of this world is.  Hard to know where to apply what and for a whole generation or two there is the perfectly understandable if annoying question, “What’s the big deal?”

Unfortunately, if you have to ask…