All those fantasy careers led me through rough stages of early adulthood and gave me hope while studying what otherwise looked to be bleak, stolid dead-end choices (particularly when you’re about to graduate). No one sits around his or her dorm room and imagines quiet unassuming existences in the bowels of maturity. At least, I hope not. You don’t sit at your desk, stare into the cinder block wall and envision the stacks of bills or the mold on the vinyl siding. You can’t fathom the kids that do not maneuver through the house without exceeding OSHA-approved sound levels, the crab grass, the car that needs tires or the cordless phone that loses its charge in about four minutes. Dreams of the future when I was in school involved creative achievements of some kind that had no connection to actual experiences or talent. Whatever those things were I let them define me along with the music I listened to and books I read. Not having any idea who I was then did not discourage me from thinking I could have everything set up in about three and a half years, including knowing exactly who I would turn out to be as an "old" man. I mean, come on, how long can it take to learn how to make the final assault up Everest from the South Col?
Now at 42, I am seated here firmly in the typical cliché, telling you I had no idea it would be like this. But how could I not have known I would end up in this sweeping landscape of cliché? And so what have I become? Well, certainly not a bad person or a degenerate, dull waste of space. I am a father of two, a husband to one, a neighbor, brother, son and American. I used to be a salesman and worked at the same company for years and years as a loyal soldier of commerce. Then a neighbor gave me a stock tip on an emerging tech company and for some reason we took him deadly serious and plunged everything liquid into the investment. The resulting lottery win suddenly provided a huge amount of time for me to sit around and contemplate. Contemplate stuff like, how come stories involving rich people far out number the ones dealing with average folks. It seems like stories about average people would sell equally as well, because so many could identify with the characters. Again, how naïve can I get? Well, I did say I was an American. Perhaps it’s because we all believe we’ll end up rich.
It’s a strikingly beautiful September day. I am sitting outside at a café in the Central West End. The Chemistry Lab serves spectacular coffee and their Wi-Fi set up makes "working" here a snap. It’s a smart little café during the day before crossing over to become a heaving gay dance palace at night. Such is life in this neighborhood and it’s one of the reasons we pulled up stakes and moved in after selling off the suburban movie set a few years back. Lynn and I always had some vague sense or vision we were more cosmopolitan than we gave ourselves credit for. We’re pleased to announce that we were right (when do I get my free subscription to the Atlantic Monthly?).
Anyway, the air carries just a hint of autumn. There’s a clean edge to the breeze cruising down Euclid and though the leaves on the trees don’t look too close to turning, I can tell they’re giving it serious thought. A school bus just snuffled down the street, squeezing between a garbage truck and a parked laundry van. There are other signs this part of the world is changing out of its summer clothes. Fewer tourists clog the Zoo and the Art Museum over in Forest Park. The Unitarian Church up the street is back in session and just yesterday I saw a dilapidated truck heaped with firewood plying the streets, up from Perryville with a nice load of walnut for someone’s hearth.
The only other person here is a suspiciously familiar man sitting at the other end of the terrace reading the Austin American-Statesman. I pause from my daily journal to chew my bottom lip trying to figure out from where I may know him. Old work associate? Someone I went to school with at Mizzou? Is he famous? Maybe not so famous, but notorious? He’s smoking Marlboro reds and wears a jean jacket. I would say he’s a bit older than I am and is one of those people who can get away with wearing jeans despite advancing years, because there seems to be an assured casual air surrounding them. You know some people just look comfortable and timeless and secure. I take note of this, because I am not comfortable, timeless or certainly secure. If I were I think I’d just call over to him and ask his name.
I am obviously not the person who calls over to a stranger at a café and asks their name, particularly at a café that doubles as a gay bar. Not that I should care if there was a misunderstanding, but you can see what I’m getting at, right?
So it’s back to the droll manuscript I have been pounding away on for the last year. Bit by bit trying to hammer it into something I can call a story. Something I can send around to friends and family as proof that I don’t let my open-ended days drift by. Moving over to the right folder on my Power Book, I make one more attempt to identify my coconspirator in coffee drinking this morning before beginning work. Nope. Nothing.
>>
Sitting in a conference room on the 52nd floor of Kantler Tower, William tries to stay focused on
>>
Wait. I know who it is. It’s Eliot Crudup. Eliot fucking Crudup! Why would he be drinking coffee and reading the Austin American-Statesman here at The Chemistry Lab on a Wednesday morning? He’s a world famous author. An author who I thought lived in New Orleans. Or is it, in fact, Austin? Now if I’m the type of guy who doesn’t call across a terrace to ask, "don’t I know you?" I certainly am not the type of person to ask Eliot Crudup where he lives. I’m guessing he has a reading at the Left Bank or perhaps at Washington U. Someone obviously clued him in on The Chemistry Lab’s excellent coffee and pleasant sidewalk terrace.
"Say Eliot, mind if I join you? I’d like some advice on a couple chapters of my book." I bet he hasn’t heard that…in the last hour. I can’t imagine being a famous person having to deal with people calling over to them at a deserted café, asking who they are or where they live or worse, asking them for an instant critique. It’s not an even trade. Okay, we’ll let you be rich and famous, but you’ll have to put up with idiots of all shapes, sizes, sexes and talents.
I’m just about ready to start reading my stuff again when my super uber-fon rings. The tone is a Joy Division baseline. I notice Eliot look over at me, before turning a page.
I look at the large, colorful screen of my Treo 600. It’s Lynn (and 67 degrees at the airport). I click and answer, "Yes?"
"Sorry to bother you, but can you go by Straub’s and pick up more cheese? I can’t believe we’re out of cheese."
"What are the odds? Sure. Any requests?"
"No. Anything that looks good."
"Great. I’ll do it. I’ll be home later. I’m still at Chemistry."
"That’s fine. No rush. Just thought you could walk over and get some cheese."
"You’re liking that word today. Cheese."
She laughs. "Isn’t it strange how a word will suddenly become funny for about two minutes?"
"See you later."
"Bye." And she’s gone from the airwaves and my screen.
^
Eliot Crudup grew up in Hornchurch, east of London, studied at the University of Durham, and kicked around Europe for about ten years before exploding on to the literary landscape with three novels. The son of a bitch is just a few years older than I am and has ten books to his name and has made the short list for a Booker prize twice. His last, The Party Makers, set against the back drop of bright Mediterranean days and neon pulsed nights on Ibiza is a raucous satire of Euro trash club culture in all its E-taking, water swilling, over-sexed electronica. I’ve been trying to figure out how a guy so removed from that scene can make it sound so convincing. Research. Probably packed up and moved over there for a good year or so to get the vibe just right. Also must be where talent becomes a factor, no?
Maybe I should ask him. In the right forum, that is. I zip to the Left Bank web site and check the calendar. No Eliot Crudup party. I go to Washington University’s schedule for their English Department’s Lecture Series. No Mr. Crudup showing up. Rubbing my chin I check the Biggles and Court site and feed in my zip code, which takes me to information for their blimp hangar of a store in Brentwood. And there Eliot Crudup is -- a book signing tonight. Marketing in support of The Party Makers.
It should not surprise me that he is within the firm clutches of the devil. A man has to make a living. But Biggles and Court? They’re the Wal-Mart of bookstores. Huge, over-sized boxes usually located within a ghetto of retail thrown together around hundreds of asphalt acres. Funny thing is they always have what you want, the staff is pleasant and knowledgeable, discount tables are extravagantly stocked and their coffee and muffins are magnificent. Fucking hell, it’s all a bit vexing. They make it so hard to hate them. On the other hand, this is exactly what makes them the Devil.
Satan is not going to be caught dead foisting bad experiences on the book buying public, because that just would not serve his needs. The dude is trying to suck as many in as possible and to do that, he needs to be as inviting as is possible while still being able to carve away at key standards of society. Slowly but surely we lower our standards in order to get that discounted Franzen first edition and double mocha grande (sans whip cream). But God damn it, I’ve heard Eliot on NPR countless times. He’s been published in Granta and The New Yorker too many times to count. There have been numerous pieces in publications as diverse as The Guardian, Newsweek and Vanity Fair. When he did Parkinson on the BBC last year he sounded so sincere, intelligent, humble and, well, talented. How could anybody who does all that agree to lure the lambs into the belly of the beast?
Money does funny things to everyone. It sure twisted us and took a massive commitment to sanity and well being to hold everything together. Going from suburban slave to urban nouvo riche in the space of about 25 months nearly caused disintegration of our value system. If not for our small family’s general integrity and foresight, we’d be in Vegas, waiting tables to scrape the money together to get back home after losing it all on the craps table.
I might as well walk on over to Straub’s.
On my walk to pick up cheese, I recall my first visit to this neighborhood in the early eighties. It was still quite the experiment then and had not yet captured the imagination of enough intrepid developers to become the buzzing center of New Urbanism it is today. There were just a few restaurants around then and some other notable shops, mainly of the used record variety. West End Wax and Euclid Records interested me, because I came from a world of crappy Mall stores where what selection existed was over-priced and no one had ever heard of a used record. If you wanted a Michael Jackson picture disc, the mall store was fine. But for the budding Velvet Underground maniac, the Mall store had little to recommend. "Velvet who?"
I always thought it was a neighborhood crying out for a big ass bookstore like you see in cool sections of cool cities around the country. No disrespect to Left Bank, I trade there all the time, but my vision was of a multi story, post-industrial bookstore. Like Biggles and Court, accept with soul, taste and an expansive used section with gigantic windows that looked out over the street or some café or fountain.
Turning into Maryland to go west into the open arms of the French confection and cheese perfection that is our neighborhood Straub’s, I walk by Bar Italia, then by the hulking mass of what used to be the Saks Fifth Avenue store. I stop and study it. Vacant for years and years it appears to be the perfect building for that dream New York style bookstore. Punch some big old windows through that hideous Bauhaus exterior and you have a gallery of used books overlooking a fountain in the annoyingly cobbled Maryland Plaza. But alas, the owner finally worked something out with some group and it is to become something else -- probably a Crate & Barn or a Pottery Barrel.
But of course I couldn’t have done such a thing to Left Bank. So plenty of dreaming, but no killer retail appetite. There used to be a rough model for my vision in Clayton, but it was too refined, open and lacked the requisite huge windows in the right places. Anyway Biggles and Court came in, offered the owners a pile of cash and off they went to retire in Napa. Biggles and Court kept it open for a few years to make it look like they were sincere. They fed the fish in the little pond running around the children’s section. They kept collecting the black and white head shots of authors that visited, but then they saw the opportunity to shut it down and conform to their corporate schematic.
What would retiring in Napa Valley be like? We don’t have the baskets of cash that those folks came into, but we’re all right. The bond portfolio we converted to at just the right moment gives us the endowment to waste time staring at old department store buildings during a mid morning autumnal sun burst, to walk over to Straub’s and purchase some imported smoked Gouda or goat feta. I reckon retirement in Napa would feel similar, but with a few more wine fueled hangovers. Probably go to the beach a little more often than we do here in the hinterlands. That is, if the beach holds any amusement for your retired self.
We like to take our beach time in Europe. It is hard to avoid sounding pretentious when you start talking about European beaches and travel in general. I strive to be as matter of fact about it when in a conversation, avoiding the usual hyperbole. But we normally go to Portugal, which in and of itself is lacking mightily in pretension. The pace and people are just right. Though often spoiled by some huge naked German couple, the beaches are pristine. And talk about wine. Were we talking about wine? Oh, yes, Napa and all that. Right. Well, the wine we have in Portugal is good, not great, inexpensive, but not cheap.
^
Back in the day, I’d sit in front of the TV and watch Soccer Made in Germany, astonished that it wasn’t a more popular program. It languished for years on PBS, Toby Charles delivering spirited commentary to an audience of what, a few dozen? But those rainy matches between Schalke and Kaiserslautern taught me the basics of how to watch the beautiful game. I’m not sure why I am thinking about this as I leer at the huge cheese bin at Straub’s, but I am. Perhaps the Germanic offerings got me thinking, festooned with their Aryan graphics and pungent potential, they seem to offer glimpses of life in lederhosens. Not that I’ve ever seen Germans in lederhosens that were actually in Germany. Usually it will be some portly operating engineer at Strassenfest who claims some lineage. But when you see Germans actually in Europe, they’re a slick bunch all dressed up in sleek black and cool superiority without a Panzer or Stuka in sight. So will it be Allgäu Emmentaler or a Butterkäse?
The goat feta looks good. From Greece, it sits in the reach-in cooler without pretending to be something else, awaiting the inevitable marriage with Kalamata olives and a rustic red wine. We eat entirely too much of the stuff. But when you find something that suits the appetite, why venture much further? Why strike out with a chalky French farmer’s cheese or salty Brie when that feta works so well in the hot St. Louis summer? A picnic in Forest Park? Feta on toasted triangles of phyllo dough. A snack before the children’s soccer match? A hunk of feta and a glass of the aforementioned red.
Where is Kaiserslautern? The Ruhr? Bavaria? The years I watched that program and all the times I saw that club and I never bothered looking it up. Over in the next aisle I grab some bottles of wine. Randomly selecting without much care. This is what shopping when you’ve got plenty of cash does to you – indiscriminate selection of wine at an over-priced swankster haven like Straub’s. I sort of miss the days when we had to make everything count, everything add up. There was greater quality control then. Now it’s sort of scatter shot. Is that a term?
I buy the cheese and all the wine only to realize that the bags are pretty heavy and I have a journey ahead of me. Some five city blocks to carry this stuff. Oh well, I wanted to be the New Urbanist so here I am, lugging wine and cheese through the leafy streets of the Central West End. All I need now is a copy of the New York Times tucked under my arms and a Playbill or two in my coat pocket and I would be quite the dandy. I have my Power Book strapped around my neck hanging off my backside and three plastic Straub’s bags dangling from my underachieving arms as I clink and waddle back up Maryland towards Euclid. The Saks building mocks me for earlier making fun of it’s ugly Krafka-inspired architecture all the while I’m a disgraceful poseur lugging groceries back to the castle. Wait, can a building mock?
With bottles thunking against each other through their brown paper bag sleeves, I carry my shopping bags towards home, weaving through clutches of people walking to wherever lunch plans take them. For me, the plan was to make it home before breaking any of the six bottles I purchased (and before the goat Feta turned to mush).
Seeing Eliot Crudup at Chemistry has not bubbled through my brain during the last 45 minutes. Funny how I can see a world famous author having coffee, then promptly allow cheese and wine shopping to push it aside. But, of course, what was I supposed to do, ask him for his autograph? Tell him how much I enjoyed "Esta Bien," yet loathed the next one, "412?"
Few famous figures have crossed my path in real life. I suppose the last one before Eliot was Former Illinois Senator Paul Simon who we found ourselves standing next to waiting to board a flight to Boston. He looked about how you would expect him to look – bow tie, old suit, huge ears and holding a manual, portable typewriter. And again, what was I supposed to say to him? I think it is always best to let these people enjoy their day without bugging them. Let them enjoy reality in some fashion.
Back in college, when I worked as a waiter, I once served breakfast to Timothy Leary. He was reading the local paper and obviously enjoyed being anonymous. I so wanted to ask him about imprinting Tibetan-Buddhist Experiences using LSD (or that Moody Blues song and, well, about a dozen other pop references to him I could think of at the time). But no, I served him his English muffin and coffee in peace. Yes, give peace a chance.
In through the side door and I set our bags of wine and cheese on the steps leading up to the kitchen. I hang my keys by the bulletin board and check the big calendar hanging on it to see if there is a soccer match later this afternoon at which I will be expected. It looks to be so as my oldest lad will be playing for Westminster Youth FC against the likes of St. Anselm’s Under 10’s. It was not very long ago that I could not imagine having an up-and-coming midfielder, nor a budding geologist. Having two lovely boys has been an epiphany. A change in lifestyle on many levels. And hurrah for that!
Up the three stairs to the kitchen I can now stow the Goat Feta in the fridge, leave the two whites in there as well and haul the four reds to the basement where we keep a quasi cellar of twenty to twenty five reasonable bottles. You never know when you’ll be snowed in! If we ever are snowed in, which would mean an unlikely amount of it falling rapidly on a City that does not believe in clearing secondary streets, we will not have much else to keep us going. Besides the wine, I think we may have a few tins of tomatoes or something. Maybe a few boxes of souvenir short breads left over from the last trip into London.
^
If Bush wins I am seriously going to think about moving us to Portugal. We have given it some thought back when we hit the jackpot and cashed out, but decided to hang in there for a while, see if things turn around.
I swear, if the Nimrod-in-Chief gets handed another four years, I think we’re off to Lisbon. There, you don’t have to worry too much about somebody spraying the local Pingo Doce with Teflon-piercing automatic weapons fire. Schools are excellent and health care free. You definitely don't wait too terribly long for a bus or a train to show up at the station to whisk you off on your day (yet don’t try to get down to the Algarve with any speed).
Yes, it is official. I have political season fatigue and do not know where to go for help. My first thought would be to stop racing around Cabledom looking for a phantom soccer match. Second idea would be to stop going online and the third idea would be to avoid the New York Times like the plague! But then, where would it leave me? What else could fill my day properly other than near-useless information?
Card tricks. That’s it!
^
Television is here to kill us. We will all perish from the evil force beaming into our homes and schools. We should resist now while we still have a sense of decency and while there are still people around who remember life before this horrible creation came into being. I personally don’t know what to do about it, since I am rather hypocritical about the topic. I love to make fun of it, call it names and generally denigrate it whenever I can, yet when there’s a soccer match on, who is the first to the remote? My hand is up in the air.
Many call it a drug and so have I in the past. Right now is a perfect example of what I mean. It has sucked me in and engaged my autopilot. My thumb keeps pressing the channel button so I continue to race around Cabledom unabated. Somebody please help me. Step in. Put a brick through the screen.
The side door opening and closing snaps me out. Lynn is home from shopping and the entrance gives me the perfect out. I throw the remote back on to the sofa and go into the kitchen in order to highlight the big cheese purchase. "Hello," I say with hands in pocket looking more avuncular (I imagine) than husband-like. Ward Cleveresque?
"Hey." She leans across the corner of our counter and gives me a peck. "What have you been doing?"
"I went to Straub’s, then lugged 83 bottles of wine home after seeing Eliot Crudup at Chemistry."
"Huh? Who?"
"Eliot Crudup."
She stows her purse on top of the fridge and turns back to me. "Oh, right. The writer. What was he doing there? What’s he doing in St. Louis? I mean, of all places."
"Strange. He was having coffee." I move to the fridge and open it. "Look at this giant hunk of Feta I bought."
She looks in. "Jesus. What were you thinking?"
"Can we freeze some of it?" I let the fridge door close.
"Where’d you get that? Costco? Did you bring it home with a fork lift?"
I change the subject for no particular reason. We launch into a lengthy debate about how to handle transport to and from the soccer match this afternoon. We have a tricky bit of moving around to do between the two boys having to head in different directions, yet two parents who want to watch the entire match. Lots of chin wagging and head scratching works out a complicated scenario, which I almost feel compelled to diagram. I will leave at half time and get Nick from his dance class and move him over to a friend’s house where he is helping to build an elaborate model of Vesuvius for Science Class. And as if this huge cliché could not get any worse, I will then get back to the match and hand the keys over to Lynn who will go to pick up her mother and deliver her to the doctor’s office, then, well, you get the general idea. Somewhere in there my hope is that Jack and his soccer team grab a result.
But this is our world. A world in which automobiles follow close behind television and Super-
sized Retail in the race to be the Great Satanic force of all time.
^
Bird names can be extremely funny. The boys like the Rufous Sided Towhee and it is hard to think of another as funny. Personally I like Stellar’s Jay and I don’t know why. In Nick’s room he has rigged a nifty feeder out his window, which over looks our hopelessly over-grown back yard (I’m going to do something about that one day!). But all he usually reports are Common Sparrows and Purple Finches, both of which are decidedly unfunny.
I walk into his room to place a stack of laundry on his bed and before exiting, shoot a glance out the window. There, sitting uncomfortably out of place is a Male, Adult Cedar Waxwing. A gorgeous bird and for about ten seconds it pecks away at the sunflower seeds before taking off. It has easily been ten years, since I have seen one of these birds anywhere and it pleases me to no end to confirm they still do actually exist. Will it come back? Will it cause a guffaw of derision at the dinner table when I announce the sighting? Will I get a little bit of a laugh?
Inevitably, I won’t even bring it up. This will be one of those private moments you can have with a bird. Looking them in the eye for a second and hoping you can convey a sense of security to them so they will stay longer.
Yes we have never figured out a way to independently confirm sightings at the feeder, though Nick attempted to rig a toy camera to work this problem, until I pointed out the toy aspect of the experiment – a delicate conversation to have with a science-oriented six year old. After all, who wants to be the wet towel with this sort of thing? It was so cute particularly as he was using a stack of Golden Books for a Tri-pod.
I walk down the hall and take another stack of laundry out of the basket resting at the top of the stairs. Jack’s stack is considerably bigger what with soccer clothing and school uniform pants and more underwear than someone should be using in a three-day period. Going into his room is always a test of my orienteering skills. I weave through the mess to place the neat stack on the knot of covers and sheet forming a loose interpretation of bedding.
There isn’t a nifty feeder set up for Jack. Instead his theme is of the large poster on the wall variety. We have the usual Coldplay poster, but then there are numerous soccer-oriented ones. Let’s see, there’s Thierry Henry of Arsenal, Alan Shearer of Newcastle and (against my better judgement) Paul Scholes of Manchester United. Why he chooses to defy me with this poster of the Ginger Prince is frustrating (not really). I reckon it is a bit of rebellion in our boy. Two strikers and a midfielder. Couldn’t he at least replace Scholes with Giggs? After all, Giggsy turns out for Wales. Jack awaits the arrival of a David James poster, which would be the first Goalkeeper to grace the walls. Wall posters are sort of a kid’s way of having bumper stickers – a way to convey a sense of personality quickly and conveniently.
For me, the huge Beatles poster (from a 1969 photo shoot) did the job for me almost all the way through High School. Senior year, I heard The Clash’s London Calling and nothing was ever the same again. Indeed, phony Beatlemania bit the dust.
^
I will never be the lead singer of a critically acclaimed indie rock band. It’s getting pathetic, but when you’re 42 fatalism seems inevitable. I once had dreams, then I had goals and now it seems I have remote, fuzzy schemes. But still no idea about what the final few chapters should look like.
Which is fine. Never figuring life out might be life’s best policy. Or should the word be aspect? Why should we get it all figured out. Religion steps in for many and offers what could be considered a route and an answer, but should that be its roll in a person’s life? What happened to a certain level of mysticism in your spiritual soup?
So how about the lead singer of a critically acclaimed indie rock band? Well, it seems as though the field is extremely crowded. Michael Stipe has already been invented and played himself out of the indie culture and into another, spurring a never ending line of imitation Stipes, which ended up inspiring still others and so on. This thought is predicated on the notion that modern day indie rock sort of started around 1981 or so in a town in Georgia. Not quite true, but for my sake it’s close enough.
I tried for a while to follow the steps that people like Michael Stipe laid down, but my fondness for playing drums, instead of singing was the first chink in the armor. And my further fondness for power trios and laziness probably put the final nail in the guitar case. Damn the work. It always comes down to that. When trying to achieve something within the context of a dream, hard work and solid thinking stand in the way.
Of course, talent is fairly handy as well. Lack of inhibition also may prove terribly necessary and I never conjured either of these. Thus, I did the next thing on the list by working at an independent radio station so I could play all my heroes on the air. But the hours and pay stink in that industry. And so the next thing on the list after that was advertising.
Next to our bed a stack of magazines clutters the nightstand, all of them filled with corporate communications. In my soccer magazines, hundreds of column inches try to sell the reader shoes. In Lynn’s home decorating magazines, its paint. Powers of persuasion on at full throttle attempting to lure consumers, make a buck, and pay the good people of Malaysia or Shanghai or the Dominican Republic a fraction of what they deserve.
Shoes used to be made right here in Missouri. My grandfather was a company architect for one of the biggest manufacturers. He designed their warehouses and factories scattered throughout the countryside. I can’t imagine a company employing its very own architect let alone actually building factories in this country and hiring workers here. How last century can you get!?
^
It’s very late at night after a day finished off with a fine result for Jack’s soccer team, a late pasta dinner accompanied by a smart Rioja and a bit of tutoring for Nick in geography. As smart as the lad is, I can’t seem to get him to visualize maps very well at all. Something spatially that just doesn’t compute. Jack could always figure such things out. From day one it seemed as though he had the Rand-McNally gene. Strange.
Earlier watching Jack put in some solid crosses for the strike tandem up front I could hear in the background, "Giggs lays it off for Pembridge, then to Hartson – Gooooaaaal, Wales! Hartson with a spectacular bit of skill on the edge of the area." This during a match of eight and nine year olds being watched by a knot of keyed-up parents, none of which I believe would have been hearing the same thing in the background.
^
Eliot Crudup examines William Faulkner’s "As I Lay Dying" while drinking a giant cup of coffee. Placed before him by Max, the terminally pale waiter with a penchant for eyeliner and the Cocteau Twins, the coffee sits while Eliot glares at the pages of the tattered novel. I’m trying not to look over very much this morning, attempting to concentrate on my Chapter Thirteen, but, well, why is a famous author at my café? Chemistry is my haunt, damn it!
But Max told me in one of those whispered replies with his back turned to Eliot that this famous author was there to meet someone later. This said with a certain nuance indicating mystery or intrigue or an idolization that spawns jealousy. After this bit of news there could be no other move for me this morning than to wait and see with whom he will meet. Is that the right way to say that?
I recall reading "As I Lay Dying" during that period of time a number of years ago when I still worked. It read quickly, but was such a downer it turned a typical flight from Denver into a dismal, vodka-soaked affair, complete with me getting so exasperated by the mindless characters trying to cross a flooded river in a wagon that I carelessly dumped my drink into my lap. The guy next to me handed me his cocktail napkin in a pitiful attempt at being nice. I don’t often react to characters, but in this case I really wanted the river to rise suddenly and sweep Cash, Darl, Dewey Dell and the rest of the crazy family away. Away far, far away. But that’s Faulkner for you, I think. He does that. He really can suck you in and make you read about people you would sooner not know. Now that is talent for you, no?
Could Eliot Crudup write like that if he chose? Look at him over there with his book and casual ways – the coffee getting cold. He’s so talented of course he could write that way and he has a number of times. This is interesting for me, because I’m having a devil of a time trying to write something where the main character isn’t somebody I can respect. I believe it is a mark of talent to be able to write from a disappointing character’s point of view. I really don’t think I am making any sense at all.
Max came around and filled my coffee. He smells like clove cigarettes and vaguely of ladies perfume. Chanel? And as he turns away, I look up from this screen. "Max could you get me a glass of water?" Max nods and silently pads away back inside Chemistry to find a clean glass, a few ice cubes and maybe even some actual water.
I don’t know much about Cocteau Twins music, but I’ve always thought the name to be pretty cool, in a telling sort of way. It’s a great brand. They’re Scottish, I think. Used to play a song called "Ten Five Fiftyfold" or something like that, when I was in college working at the station. That was somewhere along about 1984? I recall it being ethereal and maybe a bit jazzy and/or really hard to categorize. And thus, I may have just described Cocteau Twins to the world without knowing any of their other songs.
Eliot Crudup just put the Faulkner down and took a big drink of coffee, of lukewarm (at best) coffee. My younger brother drinks lukewarm coffee. He says, "I want to drink it, not sip it. Why should anyone want to burn their tongue?" Cal says this with the faintest of an Old Jewish person’s accent. Why he can’t say it sounding like a young Atheist is beyond me.
Associate Professor Ralph Tipton meets Eliot Crudup with a gregarious handshake and hug. Ralph ran a writing workshop I attended for a while last spring as part of some coursework I did at St. Louis University. He ran the workshop the same way one might run an after-school club in High School. "Welcome to today’s meeting of the A/V Club, guys. Who was cooler, Jim Rockford or Tony Baretta?" We talked 75% of the time about shit and spent 25% of the time arguing about the Beat Movement or Fugitive Poets or some such thing. The Writing we did seemed to get carved up outside of class without any explanation or context (or subtext for that matter). No discussion of theory or point of view. Strange, indeed – but then again it was a pretty cheesy course. He was a nice guy and we got along well after he learned I was a Paul Desmond fan.
My "idea" of a little story back then had something to do with a struggling writer and mislaid files on a disc that ends up containing secret programming information. Essentially a rip off of the Charade plot, but using information on discs, instead of postage stamps. Every single copy I got back from the others said that the world had too many stories about writers and writing and that sort of thing. I agreed and ended up scuttling the whole cliché. Indeed it is like rock songs about the rock life or songwriting or life on the road. No one dinged me for clearly stealing a plot line from a Stanley Donen film. I was slightly vindicated later when someone in Hollywood remade the movie starring Marky Mark.
It is doubtful Professor Tipton will talk to Eliot Crudup about writing about writers and their lives. Doubt he will harpoon the man whose third novel was, you guessed it, about a writer coming to grips with her talent. However, in the workshop he really didn’t rip the cliché either, because it never came up. The other story I handed in featured Vladimir Nabokov as a main character, which obviously must have been a bad choice, because I didn’t hear anything about it. This made me reconsider the work part of the term workshop.
The two men have settled into their table and Max wonders over to see what he’ll need to do for a sufficient tip. I notice that Ralph hands Eliot a packet of some weight and that after receiving it, Eliot’s eyes shoot around the terrace as if a transfer of ICBM launch codes has just occurred in Cold War Budapest. I take a sip of coffee and type out something about this package either being an advance copy of Crudup’s next big thing or a major section of the next big thing that Ralph has ghost written. How should I know what it is, but at least I can use the scene somehow, right?
After dropping off a soup bowl of coffee for Ralph, Max comes circulating by on his way to an umbrella table he needs to set for lunch. "Max, come here." I half whisper.
He stops by and bends down (the whisper an obvious tip-off that some decorum may be necessary). "Yes?"
"What are those guys talking about?"
"Oh, who knows. I try not to numb my brain."
"Well what fun are you then. Can you get me another glass of water?"
He nods and cruises away, leaving behind (despite it being a gorgeous fall day) his Cocteau Twin vibe shrouded in Chanel, B.O. and Clove.
^
Now early afternoon, I am sitting on a bench looking out at the lagoon in front of the Muny Opera. The bandstand on the island was designed by a committee, a member of which was none other than my grandfather – moonlighting from his day job at the shoe company. After spying on Ralph and Eliot this morning, I am compelled to rework Chapter Thirteen and the geese are not facilitating the exercise. They demand tribute!
>>>
They’re at the battle lines in this conference room, hotly discussing brand this and brand that – phrases involving words like brand "awareness" and brand "portability" are the shuttle cocks in this game. He is indignant and ignorant of the process, bored with it all and ready to draw some conclusions. So what does Post-modern mean anyway?
>>>
The fact of the matter is, that my longstanding belief in the story within the story should not be read as cliché. It should be read as a clear example of trying to have it both ways. If I can’t decide where a story should go, why not throw in a whole separate line? Because it is tired and old and silly, you dumb ass.
There’s one goose who keeps giving me the eye, firmly believing I have food and just holding back for some human-taunting-fowl reason. How to be honest with the neighborhood flock. Should I stand and pull my pockets out, hold my hands out, look furtive? This bird is hissing at me, like I’m sitting in its seat on an over sold flight. "Go away. You’re freaking me out!"
Two young Asians walk up at this moment and attempt to pet the bird with which I’m having the stare down. They don’t appear to be put-off by this goose’s aggressive nature. In fact, in the great tradition of Asians around the world, they are taking pictures of it, of the lagoon, the band shell and front of the Muny. I’m waiting for them to ask me to take a picture of both of them in front of…well, something. But no, they move on towards the boathouse down the road, leaving me behind with the malevolent Canada Goose.
It is another startling autumn day here in St. Louis. The Cardinals are in the Baseball Play-offs and to those who follow such things this means that everything else in the world of note takes a back seat. "Another three boys killed outside Falluja? Who cares, Williams is starting Game One." Perhaps that is a little unfair. All through World War Two Baseball was played in this country, under the belief that it took the nation’s mind off defeating the Axis. Once again, corporate interests in anesthetizing the culture strikes.
I don’t want to think about this sort of thing. Don’t need to think about it, yet this sort of thought has a nasty habit of surfacing. One problem with being an idle white rich guy is your mind is opened up to a conspiracy of wrenching big thoughts. Maybe this is the best reason of all to get a job.
There’s a rain on the way and as I walk home from the park I swear the smell of it is all around. Adjusting my glasses, this need to think in lyrical ways not unlike a Dylan song has given me a powerful headache. Headaches used to be common for me along with persistent back pain, but now in a relative life of leisure where I get a lot more exercise, these maladies don’t trouble me. Except for now.
Warding off hissing geese and photo-crazed Asians in the otherwise serene environs of Forest Park somehow resulted in a wicked throbbing behind my eyes. I don’t even stop up here on the walkway above Metrolink to wait for a passing train, a habit I developed out of love for rail travel and fondness for this old Victorian Footbridge. The bridge that heads out to the Northeast corner of the Park (where not many trod) was lovingly restored not too long ago and I feel a sense of duty to use it as often as possible. Metrolink trains sizzle beneath all too infrequently these days as the Transit Authorities attempt to keep the thing running, despite a shortage of passengers and funds.
This part of the park does not get the attention other sections do and that is one reason we like it so much. Our favorite place for picnics is in amongst the Cypress trees on one of the Isthmuses in the fish hatchery ponds. Talk about a place you’re sure to be left alone. The other reason we like the area is that it is the closest corner of the park to our house and getting to it is quick and painless.
As I reach the corner of Lindell and Kingshighway, the clouds make further argument for precipitation. Darkened low clouds sweep from over the Westminster neighborhood and a bit of a wind generates from the more subtle autumn breeze enjoyed over by the Muny. I cross the street to cut through the Chase heading to Maryland and who should come out of the doors going the other way, steaming towards an awaiting Taxi? That’s right, Eliot Crudup. As I walk into the lobby and take a left to head from the Chase to the Park Plaza next door, I am aggrieved somewhat to have chickened out on greeting him. Three times I saw him, one of my favorite contemporary authors of pop culture fiction and I failed to make a peep. He will undoubtedly be forever grateful.
Out the side entrance of the Park Plaza, I now go heading towards Euclid and back by that Saks building that has finally (FINALLY) stopped mocking me for calling it an ugly Bauhaus eyesore – a selfishly designed fortress of fifties retail grandeur. Maybe mocking isn’t the right word. Perhaps it taunted me for the careless way I routinely pass judgement on it. At any rate, it will soon be reconstituted into some other form and I guess we should all look forward to that.
Bar Italia’s lunch time crowd has dwindled, leaving behind smart, crisp-looking servers in bright white aprons to pick up the pieces before the showers dampen spirits (and the white table cloths too). It puts me in mind to take Lynn and the boys there this weekend, partake in a moveable feast, some grappa and to tell stories of Paris in ’24.
Oh, here comes the rain down the street. Run, run for your lives!
^
The White House obviously does not know what Mainstream America really is, though they claim to be the real guardians of it. I mean, think about it. They seem to believe Mainstream America is a white man and woman with three children living out a quiet, Disney-visiting existence driving to and from the local Power Center where they shop at Wal-Mart, greet strangers with a gregarious wave and purchase many Proctor & Gamble products. What "they" fail to realize is that this vision is a fantasy. Mainstream America is a divorced mother of two kids jittery from too much sugar and Xbox. She’s holding down two low wage service jobs all the while hoping her two hyper kids don’t get sick, because she already owes the Hospital $7000 from the last Emergency Room visit when Billy accidentally set his brother on fire while trying to kill bugs with a flame thrower devised out of a can of Lysol and a Bic Lighter. She huffs at the thought of universal access to medical care, thinking that it’s more accurate to say the country has universal access to immediate, long-term debt. She blocks out the constant calls from the credit card thugs looking for their cash, wondering how did it go so wrong so quickly. One day she worked third shift at the Magnavox plant, married to the foreman over at Wheeling-Davis Construction, owned brand new cars, lived on a quiet, leafy cul-de-sac in Abrams Acres. Then the next day, Magnavox closed domestic operations, her husband ran away with the personal assistant of the Korean Concern that bought Wheeling-Davis Construction, the bank foreclosed on the cars and house and her lush medical benefits provided by Magnavox went away. Poof, all that was left was wreckage -- two freaked out boys, massive consumer debt and a string of useless boyfriends that turned out to be far from husband timber. Mainstream America is a whirlpool of failed dreams papered over by wide ranging, high interest consumption -- consumption as spiritual dextromethorphan. Or is it really a suppressant? Maybe it’s fairer to call it a replacement, in which case some other drug needs to be inserted in that sentence. But I conjured the DXM, because Jack brought home a flyer from the Academy about it, cautioning parents to be on the look out for excessive use of NyQuil. And here again we grasp another visage of Mainstream America. A flyer warning parents about cough medicine. This is not what the White House would call Mainstream, the staff locked in their Miss Landers view of schooling as they are, can’t imagine the scions of wealthy white America getting into serious drug trouble by purchasing cough medicine at the local Walgreen’s. But they should ask around. Won’t take them long to encounter the problem. How do kids have time to drink the stuff when there are so many performance tests to study for (or to develop sophisticated cheating methods for)? Mainstream watches reality TV, surfs the Net for Porn, does not attend a church or temple and thinks going to war to line the pockets of golfing buddies who wear Cosby sweaters in the clubhouse to be business-as-usual. Mainstream is beating the youngest at the latest edition of Armed and Dangerous.
^
Sometimes at night while curled beneath puffy blankets we can hear train sounds rumbling in through the open window up here on the third floor. It astounds me we can hear the click-clack on the tracks this many blocks away, because there are so many distractingly loud noises a city makes. But if you’re focused on the romantic, low frequency rumble of freight trains moving goods, then you’re more apt to pick out the sound. Stands to reason, then that this noise fuses into a Robert Penn Warren dreamscape complete with kudzu and an L & N Locomotive kerthunking across a grease-dripped trestle beside which sit two men in clay-smudged dungarees quietly fishing.
Long coal train running down from Sugar Gap, along the Watcheegatus River, heading towards Peek Minnow, Tennessee. It is like something straight off an old train lay out of mine, which makes the dream of rail travel all the easier, because really all my tiny brain has to do is conjure things it has already envisioned in one fashion or another. I certainly do not want to know what others dream about, but reckon most 42 year old men don’t dream about trains.
Robert Penn Warren said, "A young man's ambition is to get along in the world and make a place for himself-half your life goes that way, till you're 45 or 50. Then, if you're lucky, you make terms with life, you get released."
^
Our phone system has competed itself into Third World condition. I remember back when it was Ma Bell or nothing, you picked up the phone and it was crystal clear. The audio was free of clicks and clucks and pops and fizzies. Now, almost every time I go to use a land-line I’m greeted with all manner of noise. I swear I have been transported suddenly and effortlessly to some tiny village on the Angolan/Zambian border.
Sorry to get off on another tangent, but I called over to the Chase a few minutes ago to see if Eliot Crudup was still checked in there. It was as though I was trying to phone in a story from Tora Bora on a Satellite phone rigged from river stones and wheat stalks. My goodness I’m calling a hotel not six blocks away within my own Central Office network. At any rate, the answer was yes he is still a guest and then before I could say anything else they connected me to the room. Yikes!
"Yes?" He answered.
"Um….."
"Yes? Can I help you?" said the voice with a Home Counties accent via Central Texas Hill Country.
"Mr. Crudup?" I manage to get that much out.
"No. Mr. Crudup is back in England. This, however, is Eliot. What can I do for you?"
Wow, he’s right to the heart of the matter. "I wanted to discuss a story with you and wondered if you’d be having coffee again at The Chemistry Lab."
"What?"
"The coffee place."
"Oh." Eliot sighed and I could tell he was rolling his eyes and rubbing his forehead. "No. Sorry. I’m on my way to the airport."
Finally, I wanted to say. "Oh, well, maybe another time, then."
"And this is?"
"Ed. I have been your co-conspirator in coffee consumption at Chemistry." This jaunty, obsequious statement pleased me for some shallow reason.
"I see. Well, another time."
"Right. Yes. Oh, one thing. Where do you know Ralph Tipton from?"
"I taught him at University."
"You taught at Tulane." I said matter of factly. "Right. Sure. He’s a good guy."
"Yes, a good friend. Is there anything else?"
"Er, um, no. Thank you. Have a nice flight."
"It isn’t up to me, really. I will try though." And with that, he became a dial tone.
I placed the phone back on the kitchen table and tried to calm my heart down as it was wildly thumping away due to an enormous surge in adrenaline. Why should I get keyed up about breaking my own covenant and actually talking to a world famous author? It is not the fame he has garnered in the world of literature, but rather the fame inside my head. I am in awe of someone who can write so prolifically and speak directly to me. This used to happen when I would reach a really tough prospect; someone I had been trying to reach for days, maybe weeks. Suddenly my pulse rate would shift quickly through the sequence into 4th for a sprint down the straight-away. There’s racing in the tunnel. Shumacher is over-taking Barrichello in the tunnel. Magic!
Now that Eliot Crudup thinks me a fool, I can go on with my day to day rumination without so much as a wink of regret that the hotel operator put me through to his room. At least I made some sort of an attempt to say hello, though it barely should count. The man sat across from me three days straight at my favorite coffee spot and I never mustered the fortitude to strike up a conversation. But it’s for the best. It’s one thing to make a fool of oneself on the telephone and quite another to do it in person. Many people have said that, but after spending nearly 20 years as a salesman, it is woven into my very fiber.
I would have loved to ask him his inspiration for the novel "412," but I am too certain that such questions are so boring to an author, particularly one who keeps an active schedule of readings and signings that I firmly believe I was right in not bugging him. While I would love to pick his brain, so to speak, about "412," particularly the ending, I know I would not have been satisfied. Eliot certainly would not have cared to go into explanation for a book he wrote some years ago. So why did I have the idea to quiz him in the first place? Why do we feel an impulse to have contact with heroes, stars and publicly famous individuals?
An easy answer would be an internal demand to be liked and to assure ourselves that those folks are just like us. But they aren’t like us at all or me anyway, because of that all important talent factor. However somewhere inside me I still hold out hope that if we all could just get to know the real Russ Feingold or James Spader or Eliot Crudup we would have the assurance that we’re just as cool. So bottom line is now that Eliot Crudup thinks me a fool, I can go on enjoying my small city existence with firm proof I not only don’t have the talent to write, but the cajones to promote my "agenda."
I am well pleased to be a responsive and responsible (I think) husband and reasonable enough father. Enormous joy is mined from this rich seam of love. So I am not talking about this side of me. It is on the vocation front that I wander and only due to a pure accident of capitalistic greed and technological avarice (and some ridiculously long coat tails of both) that I have plenty of time to consider what to do with my time.
Exercise, eat well, read a lot, stay engaged with Jack and Nick and Lynn, pay the taxes, get the Volvo washed, write incredibly silly e-mails to soccer fans in the UK and here in the States (it’s a simple hobby, but fun anyway). Let’s see, what else? Drink coffee, shop for cheese and wine, watch Metrolink trains pass, consider running for office, pay tuitions, wash the windows, sleep, etc…
The drone can be intense and can force me out of the house with any old small excuse. Right now I have left the house to walk over to the Cathedral. No, I have not taken up that sort of vocation, nor have I become particularly religious. I like going into the Cathedral, because of the sound and smell and feel of the place. I can close my eyes and transport myself to the Giralda or Chartres or St. Paul’s. The Byzantine interior gives me a sense of European grandeur. Its biggest claim to fame is the mosaics, which at over 80,000 square feet, is the largest expanse of tile art in the world. Strange that it’s just a couple of blocks away. What strikes me about the place is the number of tourists. I am used to encountering them in Forest Park, because of the Zoo, Art Museum and a few other smaller attractions, but at the Basilica it amazes me. Perhaps because I don’t think of religious tourism as something practiced in this country. Europe and South America? Sure. Here in St. Louis? It’s just a bit of a shock to find us on the Papal trail.
^
Reality television is an oxymoron. Why do people want to watch television, a medium of escape, only to be reminded of how ugly everything actually is outside? Some of the time the damn box redeems itself – not often.
While I struggled to wiggle a chalky cork from a temperamental Tempranillo in the kitchen, Lynn tuned in to Channel 9, our lavishly appointed local PBS outlet. We wanted to see Eliot Crudup interviewed on the McClifton Allory Show. McClifton Allory: sounds like a Civil War General; someone who led the 80th Ohio Regulars up Goat’s Herd Ridge against Buell or Jackson. You get the drift. Who names their boy McClifton and lets it stick?
"Hey, Cliffy, throw the ball over to Mommy!" This sounds better to me than "excuse me, my dear boy, McClifton. Propel the orb towards your Mother." Nevertheless, the man McClifton became is a great interviewer all Owl eyed and bow tied. And there he is across a dark, round, wood table from our story’s shadowy hero, Mr. Eliot Crudup.
Cliffy: "Eliot, you’ve had a mixed bag of best sellers both in the UK and here in America and you’ve also had commercial disasters, yet critical glory. You were runner up for the Booker Prize with "Amiable Discordant" – I could go on and on…"
Eliot: "Yes, please stop. You’re (laughs) embarrassing me in front of your many dozens of viewers.
At this point I give up on the wine to step into the living room to see what Eliot is wearing and what he looks like on Television, instead of reality.
Cliffy: (Laughs and clears throat) "What can we expect around the next turn? What landscape of modern culture do you care to turn your rapier-like satirical skills toward this go round?"
Eliot: "Well, I’ve had a little time off…"
Cliffy: "Yes, it’s been almost an entire month since you last published."
Eliot: "Um, yeah. Um, well, I have been having a look round and while doing so I became highly annoyed with all the books about writers and about their wildly fascinating (he makes quotation marks in the air) lives. I’m sick of it.
Cliffy: "I’ll point out for some of our viewers that your third novel was, indeed, about a writer."
Eliot: (Buries his head in his hands) "Oh God, don’t remind me of that crap. (Laughs) Let’s just say I am going to re-examine the phenomena."
Cliffy: "In what respect?"
Eliot: "It’s just very simple. Basic satirical trappings draped round standard plot convention with a reverse narrative arc."
Cliffy: (Adjusts his glasses) "Okay, for non-members of the literati what does that all mean.
Eliot: (Leaning far back in his seat) "It’s going to be so loaded with cliché that even the semi-technical jargon used is a cliché. It’s one huge (spreads arms out wide) gigantic cliche. (Bellies up to table and points vaguely at McClifton) And you know what Mr. Allory? It will be on the New York Times Best Seller list for 42 weeks.
Cliffy: "You know, you lack such confidence, Eliot. How can you push yourself to even produce (smiling and checking something off an imaginary list).
Eliot: "No, no. Really. I am very humble. Even my bravado is a cliché."
^
"The Etruscans never had anything like this. They may have thought of it in some dreamy Tuscan evening, but they weren’t able to consummate the notion." Our neighbor, Sideburn Larry, is waxing on and on about "box wine." Sideburn Larry, or Lawrence O’Hamlin as his mail reads, likes to pontificate on a great many things and wine is only a sub-heading in his monologue’s outline. Larry teaches at Bishop DuBourg High School and for some unearthly reason he seems to think that this gives him the same intellectual footing as say, a tenured, published and famous professor at Princeton. He has some handsome sideburns and a radically bushy mustache propping up a thin, Irish nose, which is placed between two dark, narrow set eyes. This gives him kind of a demonic sort of look not unlike John Wilkes Booth. I mean, he’s all right and his wife is great -- a tiny, child-like personage of vague saintly demeanor -- but man can he talk some shit.
We are sitting out on our mossy brick patio, which is way overmatched by the surrounding bushes that have gone noticeably unchallenged, since a year ago last Spring. Yard work, for me, is something that comes in fits and starts, ebbs and flows – and recently (the last two years) we’ve been in the "ebb" part of the cycle. This has not gone unnoticed by Sideburn Larry, Dante and Carol across the street or Dr. Chinzsoc on the other side of us. They have been gentle about their prodding, but certainly persistent enough to make me feel a flicker of guilt now and then. I suppose what I should do, as a still-new member of the landed gentry is to hire some refugees from the slums of Guadalajara, hand them a translated list of goals and stand back.
Lynn feels the same way about it. We do just enough to keep the house presentable and certainly not the worst case on our block, but other than that our ambitions are strikingly limited. It really comes down to a lot of shrub trimming and some ivy tending out front. Here in the back yard, well, I wouldn’t know where to begin. I’d like that Irish bloke, Diarmuid Gavin, from the BBC to just jet in and turn the place into a dreamscape. On the other hand (I look around at the riot of autumn color produced by our cavern of foliage) there’s something to be said for "shabby chic."
I retune on the high pitched whir coming from Mrs. Sideburn Larry – Trudy to her family and (other) friends. She has expertly moved her husband off the subject of aseptic packaging and over to politics where she holds the conversational cards. Larry does not ever seem to have an opinion on policy, which appears to be the one and only arena to successfully accomplish this Herculean task. "I don’t see any hope for Kerry in either Colorado or Pennsylvania. I mean Pennsylvania elected that Nazi Rick Santorum. What does that say?"
Lynn is of the opinion that Trudy is actually the one and only Communist left in the State of Missouri. She would like to say the entire country, but I remind her that a great number of Communists live in more receptive precincts – Berkeley, for instance. "Nazi is a pretty harsh term," I offer.
Trudy leans against one arm of her chair (we almost offered her a booster seat when she sat down nearly hitting her chin on the tabletop). "Well, if the Brown Shirt fits…"
^
I’ve been avoiding my story lately, because the last time I addressed it the whole damn thing looked forced and silly and self-conscious. If you’re forcing things I figure it is time to do something else. It has already been established that I will never be a writer, but that does not mean I can’t try to hammer out some sort of nonsense as something of a past time. But if it sounds canned or stiff, maybe is a better word, then I should have the good grace to stop the agony. Instead of writing, maybe I should fill my quiet time with more reading. I’ve been reconsidering all of the Eliot Crudup books and reading them in order as a tutorial on style development. There has to be some sort of new, fresh insight I can gain about the development of his style (now that I have talked with the man, watched him read the newspaper and drink coffee).
Which goes back to a few days or weeks or whatever ago when I was blathering about our collective need to press ourselves into interchanges with "famous" people. Maybe it comes down to the mystery of their celebrity and attempting to figure out once and for all that question many ask in our culture – "why isn’t it me on the cover of Vanity Fair?" Also, I am certain that part of it is the idea that maybe we’ll somehow forge a friendship with some famous person and we’ll become a member of an entourage and so, by association, get plugged in to the good life. Who knows what it is really all about, but the sycophantic nature of an ordinary human encountering a talented and famous human (or actually just famous is good enough) tends to make me feel embarrassed and something akin to shame.
So when I called for Eliot Crudup the other day and spoke to him briefly (accident or not), what the hell was that all about? What really did I want out of that? Validation?
^
I am reading his first novel. It’s a blindingly funny farce about a young bus driver (Simon) in suburban Manchester (Stretford) who stumbles into fame and fortune by doing a flawless imitation of an educated and well-bred painter. The social engineering perpetrated by young Simon is a thing of beauty as he navigates the clubs, pubs, flats and University dining halls of Greater Manchester.
When I first picked this book up years ago, the very first paragraph blew me away, because not only did he mention A Certain Ratio, Charlatans and the whole Madchester Scene, but wrote the entire opening without a prepositional phrase. How the hell do you do that? I have attempted to do it and actually say something and can’t. The other amusing thing about the book is that there are no chapters. It just races from that first, no prepositional phrase paragraph to the very last sentence, which is actually a parenthetical note about Greenwich Mean Time. So cool and to a wannabe writer, catchy and clever!
I vividly remember reading a review in the CMJ, of all places, that started with the (I guess) positive, "When will this book be made into a film, because we want to see who plays Tim Burgess?" This review interested me, because it sounded like the person only read the first page, then switched to some sort of Cliff Note version. I wanted to write to CMJ and let the reviewer know that the lead singer of Charlatans (Burgess) does not feature anywhere in the book. Our bus driving hero listens to them, but does not encounter anybody from that band or even the white hot music scene of Manchester, mid to late eighties. This stood out at the time, because two months later I read a review of the book in People Magazine, of all places. So, CMJ was out in front of the mass publications by a long shot. Unfortunately, the review in People was quite a bit better and it appeared the author actually read the entire 289 page blast.
Reading this book again takes me back to the days when Lynn and I were both working and living in a small bungalow in Maplewood, with plenty of cash to blow on books, music and trips to the Wine store. I remember going to Vintage Vinyl and loading up on Primal Scream, New Order and Happy Mondays CD’s, all excited by the glow careening off the pages of Eliot Crudup’s sparkling debut. The book always puts me in the mood for autumn. I can’t explain that part of it, except to say that the prose are so engaging and describe a stylized England so well, I can see and feel the cool dampness that acts as an ever-present back drop for Simon’s role changes.
You also have to admire the way Crudup worked in a detailed explanation of Thatcherism, during a chaotic love scene involving two acid-dropping Stockport College kids. Another thing I will never figure out. The man is brilliant and he drinks coffee at The Chemistry Lab!
I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing, because the prose are saturated with mentions of political references, trendy bands and actual events, thus flying against the conventional wisdom that counsels against loading a story with such things for fear of dating it or confusing future readers. I can agree with this to a certain extent, but if you are writing for the here and now and wanting to speak to a particular group of individuals, then there can not be restraints placed on what is acceptable. Doubtful that when the young Eliot Crudup penned his story about Simon the bus driver he thought about how the book would be received in the future (or by anyone unfamiliar with Stone Roses, James or EMF).
The bolder you are with place, time, mechanics and plot the more pay-offs await the audience. At least that’s my opinion. It could very easily be wrong. The big risk with this sort of pop music and culture as milieu is it can look forced and pandering. Let’s insert stuff just to have it in there. That kind of thing happens way too often, but talent usually can avoid this tendency.
I’ve had about 83 Hershey bars today as I try to give myself a lift to get up and passed the election results. Two days now after the Moron in Chief was given another four years to screw us all the more and I still haven’t "gotten my head around it." I’ve been trying to avoid thinking about it by reading the Crudup novel, segments of Ellsworth’s "Jenny’s Amble" and a couple of Hemingway’s Nick Adam’s Stories, all done with a perpetual Charlatans soundtrack playing into my ears from my iPod.
As far as mentioning music, well it only matters when you listen to the stuff. I mean, trendy music sounds dated. The more fashionable a tune, the shorter the shelf life, I hear. But is that exactly true? Is it more or less a way to gauge the relative talent of the performer/group? For instance, many Beatles songs sound as fresh and mystical as they did nearly 40 years ago. Example: Tomorrow Never Knows.
I recall listening to a Bar-Kays album somewhere in or around 1985. It sounded so far out in front and cool, but now I am positive the vibe from that mid eighties synthesizer, those soprano sax runs and electronic drum beat would practically induce out right laughter. Sort of like listening to the music on an old ChiPs rerun. So how does that sort of thing happen where some music transcends time and some does not? Why is it some stories work well over time and others get dated and forgotten. This is the difference (perhaps) between high culture and entertainment.
I certainly do not have anything against being entertained. In fact, that may have been the point I tried to make earlier. It is okay to write for pure entertainment value. Really, it is. I promise you it is. But some entertainment stands the test of time and indeed becomes part of college curriculum. Now will there be courses on Eliot Crudup somewhere in the future? Maybe there already are classes. I should check with Professor Tipton.
^
Nick and I sit on Art Hill to watch clouds and people. I like spending time with the boys, particularly the moments of one-on-one, which are all too rare these days. But today Lynn took Jack to her Mother’s and Nick and I took off for the park to do some exploring.
In some respects I liked the Park before the overhaul began, because you could come across quirky, hidden gems. For example, the Friedrich Ludwig Jahn Memorial, which is more or less a monument to gymnastics. It sat amongst overgrown bushes at the base of Art Hill’s right flank. It’s this big, limestone edifice attempting to glorify the significant contributions made by the father of the Turner Society. Or something like that. The Turner’s were a creation of German immigrants to help encourage and maintain rigid physical activity (and loosely provide a para-military group that could defend the immigrants from ruthless "Nativists"). Anyway, you used to pick through thick under-brush (not unlike the Ardennes), a lot of broken 40’s (not unlike Watts) and other accumulated litter (not unlike everywhere in the USA) to make it to the place. Friedrich stands high in the middle, then two walls or arms go out to pedestals where viral junge männer flex poetically.
But now after the complete reworking of the Park, Friedrich looks positively polished and proud as he overlooks Post-Dispatch Lake. He’s accessible to the flocks and it’s too early to tell what the effects will be, but one thing is for sure, the mysterious isolation of Friedrich has been eliminated. On our walk today, Nick noticed the general lack of effacement on the memorial and that is a positive change from the past. It always seemed like Herr Jahn was getting tagged.
Nick favors the General Edward Bates statue, which, as we found out sometime ago, was the first statue in Forest Park, having been plunked down in the Park as early as 1876. I can’t imagine the Park as a wild backwoods spread of land, which is essentially what it was when the Bates piece was brought in. We also found out when we looked it up that it was originally supposed to go into Lafayette Park, but that association could not come up with the money to pay the artist. But I digress. Nick likes it because it’s huge and bronze and looking like a legitimate historical piece. When I tried to point out the Crusader King, Louis IX once, Nick wrinkled his brow and nodded, "they just put him here for the World’s Fair."
I see his point.
Taking a statue off the hands of another Park seems way more legitimate than the huge contrivance that was the World’s Fair.
Can you tell we’re all trying our hardest to forget the election results? We work hard at this these days, lest the wheels fly off and we collectively sink into deep depression. What can we do, but take long walks, plot a lengthy stay in Portugal and lead our minds into the thick morass of Forest Park trivia?
^
A sale is the art of manipulating in the wide-open spaces of avarice. Well, no shit.
I spent twenty years selling and now that I’ve spent a few years not doing it, I can definitely say I am fully relaxed and at total peace with myself. Reflecting back at all those thousands of presentations, airport delays, smelly hotels and bad restaurants, I can thank the Gods I don’t have to do any of it for the rest of my life. This assumes, of course, OPEC does not switch to the Euro, thus scuttling the Dollar and sending a torpedo into our play on the DAX and Nikkei, the boys’ annuities and the big enchilada, our thirty year Treasuries. Maybe we need a position in Gold.
If I had a dollar for every Sales seminar I sat through hearing how sales professionals "fulfill needs" and "solve problems," man I would be even richer than I am already. Face it, the main objective is to convince someone that doing or having a certain thing will improve their situation, thus making the hand-over of cash effortless and, if you’re doing it right, endless. The ultimate purpose is to make money.
This bubbles in my mind today, because I’m on my second Crudup novel now and "Discovery" always unsettles me. Every time I read it I get a strange sensation. At dinner tonight I mentioned this to Lynn and Jack cut into the conversation by asking what the book was about. So I explained as quickly as possible so as not to loose my train of thought on the original subject. "It’s about a computer software salesman who finds God." Unfortunately, this synopsis opened up a huge can of worms.
"So." He answered. "What’s so great about that?"
"Well, not much, unless you have the talent to make it do something for the reader." Let’s see, how to get existential with an almost ten year old. I didn’t want to, but ended up giving a potted oral presentation on morality versus ethics and how certain aspects of each can become compromised when one is attempting to put food on the table. But he didn’t want to hear about this. He was more interested in what sort of "stuff" happened in the book and where it was set, what sort of cars the characters drove. If only literature could be that easy to explain.
One very interesting point about the book is that it doesn’t have a place or a setting per se. This profoundly confused Jack. "What do you mean? How can it not have a place where it happens?"
I took a long drink of ice water and tried to figure out how to explain this quirky little feature. "It’s really very simple. When I try to write a story I always make place part of the plot, or maybe calling it an extra character is a better way of saying it. The author of the book Mom and I were discussing decided it would be a good idea not to do that. About the only thing you know is it takes place somewhere in the English-speaking world."
He considered this for a moment while appearing mesmerized by his carrots. "I wouldn’t like that, I think. Like, isn’t it better to know where things are happening?"
"Sometimes. But the author felt like it was a story that could be about a lot of people in a lot of places. The setting and timeline aspects of a traditional story aren’t important. There are plenty of books like this, you know. It’s just that this one is by a guy who made his name by writing extremely well about a specific time period in a specific place."
"So this book was really to show that he can write without all that, right? Jack lands a fork full of potato into his mouth.
Lynn thinks this funny.
^
When the boys are sick, the emotional gearbox gets a workout. They go from being lovable and vulnerable to acting like Satan’s Spawn in a nanosecond. So you have to be on your toes, when sitting bedside, dirty facial tissues in one hand and a digital thermometer in the other. What always, without fail, gets me is the breathing. The range of noises made by a small nose laboring against metric tons of congestion amazes me. Pursed lips occasionally release air as the mouth acts as the all-important by-pass valve. The pillows and bedding act like a wick to pull heat and dampness away. A nightstand light casts a low beam out over the floor covered in the flotsam and jetsam of a Hot Wheels Grand National Event held earlier.
Nick feels bad. I’m sitting here, standing guard, waiting to swing into action if he needs anything at all. But he is deeply asleep at the moment. And that is for the best. Rest and liquids are the best medicine now and so we take turns acting as servant. It has been a day and a half since he has been outside and that was upon his return from the doctor’s office. We’re in that helpless stage when all we can do is cater to his wishes and keep him as comfortable as possible, although comfort is relative when your nose will not stop and coughing can not be brought under control.
In the quiet of his room (only broken by the wheezy inhales he produces), I can almost bow my head and fall asleep sitting here. His pattern lulls my brain and the eyelids become laden and leaden and impossible to hoist up and over the pupil. Dimness sets in with a penetrating wave and I can no longer be held accountable as I drift off to a thin snooze.
^
Marketing for "The Party Makers" is relentless. Mr. Crudup’s esteemed publisher, Leroy-Crummings-Brigg-Townsend (or LCBT for those of us in the know) have put on their top hat and tails for this one. I seem to be running into Crudup everywhere. First, he shows up in person, then on Evening PBS chat shows. Then it’s as a display at Left Bank, page 14 of the New York Times Style section (I have noted the absence of a mention in the venerable Review) and of course, radio in the form of today’s offering from NPR’s Fresh Bagels program hosted by Emily Grimpull. LCBT have laid it out there and pushed Eliot to make his mark all in the hopes of bucking the disturbing trend of low readership and high publication numbers. Yes, more books than ever are being churned forth, yet it is for fewer and fewer eyeballs. How can this be allowed to go on anymore? (Kill your television immediately).
So why would I have ever wanted to be a writer anyway? To toil and grasp for crumbs, have nervous breakdowns, become alcoholic or drug dependent and starve all the while holding down multiple jobs just to make a third of what I used to make being an agent of capitalism? Forget about it.
I knew pretty early on in my nascent writing years (roughly junior year of High School through two years out of College) that I didn’t have it. Did not possess the talent, the wit and the persistence to make it happen. I kept hoping an easy way into it would reveal itself, but no, there is no short cut to the New York Times Book Review. Just look how Eliot Crudup ground out the gains bit by bit until he was at a point to command the immodest resources of LCBT and the blessings of its German holding company, Spindelkromm AG. Crudup bounced hither and yon for years before he had a regular gig carved out, a teaching position at Tulane and guest shots on Fresh Bagels. He has been relentless and prolific at just the right times. So despite the relative lack of readers out there, LCBT pours it on. Go Eliot Go! I turn the radio in the kitchen up just a bit more so I can hear him over the boys stomping around upstairs.
Emily: After your fifth novel, "412" was badly received you said you went through a period of denial and personal anguish as though you had lost a loved one.
Eliot: Yes, yes, I did.
Emily: So tell us why? Take us through that period.
Eliot: Right (coughs) Yes. Well, you see Emily, I had been on a hell of a run up until then and you know how the ego works. It's really the Devil’s playground while the idle mind is where angels sleep. And I had poured life and limb into "412", more so than the previous books.
Emily: You’re not supposed to ever fail? Is that what you were thinking?
Eliot: I don’t know about that. But hubris carries us all away a lot of the times as we are stroked and cared for in innumerable ways. But to cut to the heart of the matter, what I found out. What it all comes down to, is that I stink when I try too hard. It’s something I had been told repeatedly when I got into the game and always agreed with. But you see, you see it’s not always easy to detect when you’re trying too hard.
Emily: How do you know now, then?
Eliot: Well, I have a superb editor in Andy Gray and he knows right away. And now I have good friends inside, a cadre of mates who can read and see right through.
Emily: The old ‘No Man is An Island’ revelation.
Eliot: Precisely. You get too big for yourself sometimes and you absolutely have to have people close to you to say, hey Eliot, this is shite, mate. Go back to the drawing board.
^
Rainfall has dampened all enthusiasms beyond any reasonably acceptable level. But maybe that’s a good thing. This Thursday rainfall pinned all of us down under our own roof for the afternoon. After retrieving the boys from school we all took up stations in far-flung corners. I am in the study on the couch surrounded by buttes and bluffs of newspaper and magazine. Jack is downstairs trying to turn an old bicycle into an electric generator not unlike the Professor on Gilligan’s Island. Upstairs Nick works at the boy’s computer (our aging, over-worked, under-paid iMac) on some strange kid’s program, which I couldn’t begin to explain. I can just make out odd, muffled cartoon collision noises though and that can’t be good. Lynn is at the kitchen table reading a book. We are lucky enough to have a house that can disperse such a group effectively, because the rain does not look keen to end any time soon.
We are officially in low key setting around the house. I have just finished an article in the New York Times about how a large number of Bush supporters still believe there was a connection between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. This means there must be guilt by association for the September 11th attacks. Of course all of this is nonsense and it amazes me this thinking still prevails in certain quarters. How could this sort of ignorance maintain any sort of level, much less a level above 30%? All right, I better cool it or I’ll work myself up and ruin an otherwise calm late afternoon.
Calm, quiet afternoons for the family are good therapy. They counter the squawk, bang and buzz of a light speed world helping to slow the brain down and hopefully give the old blood pressure and resting pulse a nice break as well. Perhaps it should be a requirement for us to do this at least once a week – several hours of doing your own thing in the quiet inglenooks and crannies of our turn of the century mock Tudor.
In this spirit I pick up the latest issue of The New Yorker, a magazine I used to read religiously, but then found redundant and close to being a parody of itself (which maybe was always the point of it and I just finally got it after 15 years). Paging from back to front, as is my habit with magazines, what should I come across? You guessed it, an article by Eliot Crudup. And as is the tradition of the venerable New Yorker it looks to be about 150 graphs long. He is quite literally everywhere at once and this trend is disturbing on a couple of plains.
First of all, no human should have this much attention paid to him or her, unless they are a man-chimp leader of the "free" world with an inability to understand or recognize the truth. Secondly, it just plays into the hands of an author’s detractors particularly Eliot’s who are always quick to point out the many hypocrisies surrounding the man. Third it’s just boring after a while to be subjected to this many thoughts from the same source.
Of course, if it were my thoughts in the magazines, newspapers and television shows it would be a completely different matter. Or would it?
^
"That is not writing. It is typing." Hemingway or somebody like him said that about somebody’s efforts (Kerouac?). And it certainly frames what I think of those writing books telling me I should sit down and write 1000 words a day, preferably in the early morning, when all is quiet. How is forcing yourself to write each and everyday a set amount going to yield anything useful? If authors talk of how damaging writing for writing’s sake is, can’t we automatically assume the 1000 forced words will be vacuous nonsense?
The idea behind the daily writing exercise is to develop the habit and to get the mind thinking a certain way about language, the assembly thereof and to stretch (hopefully) the imagination. I gather, then, that 90% of what is written in these conditions is going to be useless. What other habits do we develop that are 90% useless? Let’s see, smoking, gum chewing, drinking alcohol (though I am still debating this) and watching television – to name a few off the top of my head. We will give each a 10% useful rating, because there are times when releasing tension or enjoying a nicotine rush or becoming informed about the Coastal Wolves of British Columbia proves to be worthwhile.
I already think way too much about language, but I suppose it is not the right sort of thinking, or of the kind writing workshops mean. Part of my trouble when speaking is I am thinking too much about what I am saying. This is trouble because I end up second guessing thoughts before they leave the head so I end up not saying exactly the right thought at the right time. I am often slow to respond. The sort of thinking "they" mean is more of the word choice and sentence structure variety – stretching the vocabulary, which goes unchallenged during daily conversation between non-academics. So we should all grant this one to the writing instructors. It makes sense, because we all write differently than we speak (with any luck). Right?
Which brings me inevitably to the question of imagination and exercising it. How this works has never really been made clear to me, but from what I gather, I am supposed to capture on paper or in computer memory what presumably would typically only be fleeting thoughts, then think more about them and capture the expansion. And so on and so forth until they are "fleshed out." Is this an exercise or a nuisance? Do I really want to do this with fleeting thoughts?
^
Waldo Pierce does not have a painting in the Museum. This is hard to believe. The guy was at it a long, long time. I hadn’t really heard of him until a few weeks ago, so why should I be shocked? Not that I am, by any stretch of the imagination, an art historian or even art oriented, but you would think those who would know better would, well, know better. I came across the name in an article about "The Lost Generation," which was discussing the probabilities of such a rich cache of talent pooling off shore again, what with this country going to hell in a hand basket. The article, in Journal of Modern Letters (don’t ask), drew broad comparisons to where we are now politically and culturally to where the nation was back in the twenties. I don’t want to digress into a discussion of this article, though I probably should. But in naming off some notable members of the storied generation that drank, wrote, painted and sculpted their way through Parisian streets, the esteemed Waldo Pierce came up -- twice.
The American Renoir lived to the grand old age of 86 (despite knowing Hemingway well). He described himself as a painter, not an artist. This phrase in the article really intrigued me, because I like that sort of self-effacement from a notable genius. So I hiked over to the Museum and went to where I thought a work by Pierce would be displayed but did not get that lucky. I went down to the information desk to ask the tiny, black garbed art elf if they could check to see if any Pierce works were in the vast collection. The woman checked the mainframe and swiveled back to say "No. We don’t have a Pierce. I didn’t think we did, but it’s always a good idea to check the catalog."
This was no good at all. I had walked over to the Museum, because the Internet had proven completely useless. But no "Summer Bathers" or "Girl With Viola" to be seen here in St. Louis. Now it looks like the library next before my curiosity gets the best of me. Outside the Museum I get set for the trek back to the neighborhood, setting course for a new library branch, which is swanky and stylish while also being tucked under a parking garage – imagine! With my iPod poised I take note of a whole bunch of college kids posing by Louis IX. They’re huddled while a cohort takes a picture or two. Strangely, they look as though they have just been sprung from a Maersk Container down portside someplace. Emaciated, pale and even down right sallow, they grin as though Louis IX provides them with the same gilded feeling of unbridled freedom Liberty once did to the huddled masses of Ellis Island – um, or something like that.
As I start down Fine Arts Drive, they break up and run to their awaiting bus shouting something that sounds like Czech or a dialect of Polish the world may not have discovered. Why are they here? Why would the shady underworld black market types spring open the Container, load them on a bus and drive them to Louis IX?
I continue my search for Waldo Pierce information by cranking up the iPod and listening to The Promise Ring.
^
Associate Professor Ralph Tipton eats a scone at The Chemistry Lab. I walk up to take the usual position at my table and there he sits -- a pudgy sort, clearly ten years younger than me, he had spiky blonde hair and wore hopelessly outdated wire rimmed glasses – the aviator shaped ones popular in maybe the seventies. I stopped at the table and turned towards him. "Dr. Tipton?" I asked, sure that he would not know me from Adam.
He looked up at me with an irregularly shaped chunk of scone protruding oddly from his mouth, paused for a second, before snapping the unruly section into his mouth like a Striped Bass. "Yes?" His eyes narrowed as the brain files whirled to an ungraceful start.
"I took your Theories of Modern Writing Workshop a year ago at SLU." Extending my hand, I helpfully offered, "the name is Ed."
He began to nod in a pronounced fashion as he struggled to down the food and engage properly in the annoyance of casual conversation with a former student.
"I wrote a wildly self-conscious piece revolving around Nabokov’s butcher, when he lived in Berlin. The Butcher takes tennis lessons from Nabokov and gets so good he can beat Nabokov, but then the Nazi Party, well..." I stop myself from going further into this Hollywood Pitch and add, to make sure he knows I was not serious, "anyway, thoroughly derivative of half a dozen writers."
He swallows finally. "Yes, yes. Of course. Nice narrative. Great dialog. Really nice piece."
And that right there is the most feedback I had ever received about the little story I cranked out over strong coffee, between helping Lynn with her courses on Poetry and Oil Painting (we were filling our time grandly at that stage of our "retirement"). Unfortunately, those comments have the sound of a stock response trotted out for any former writing student encountered. "I noticed a couple weeks ago that you know Eliot Crudup. I was sitting over there when you met him."
"Yes, yes. I met him first at Tulane. He was my advisor and I took a couple of his classes. Great guy. Great guy." He wiped his mouth. "You should have come over and said hello. I would have introduced you. He’s a great guy, really. A good friend." He pushes a chair out from the table and motions for me to sit down.
I sat down and put my lap top case under the seat. Remembering the large envelope Ralph passed to Eliot, I asked, "anyway, does he ever take a look at your work?"
"No, no. I can’t do that to him. Since he stopped teaching a couple years ago, he is consumed by writing, rewriting, reading and rereading."
"And marketing." I add while looking around for Max.
"Yes, that is too true. He is a machine." He pauses to take a drink of coffee. "A very wealthy machine. Oh man, you have to try the Colombian Hilltop Mist today. What a brew."
"As soon as I locate Max, I’ll do just that. So are you working on a new book?"
"Just finished it, as a matter of fact. It went to my editor a week ago yesterday. We shall soon see how much work I have over the winter. If it’s anything like the past, I won’t come up for air until June."
"Are you still teaching at SLU?" Max appears, grabs a glass and water pitcher and heads towards us.
"Yes. Just enough to keep me in clover."
^
When Lynn and I attend Dr. Tipton’s holiday party in a couple of weeks, I’ll have to introduce myself as an independent investor and philanthropist rather than what I would like to say – novelist. But we have already firmly established I will never be one, so why the desire to give that response. Maybe, because it sounds so much deeper, or at least less vapid and gives me a sheen of intellect I otherwise don’t believe projects (maybe because I am not an intellectual and never will be, but that’s a subject for another time).
When you’re at a party it is already difficult to talk with people. Lynn and I really hate parties, because we never know how to gain entry or make connection with anyone. We end up spending the time circulating and having small talk exchanges with people and hovering over the food and drinks. It would be more productive to rake leaves.
But when Dr. Tipton invited me to his party I could not very well say no, when we had spent 2 hours drinking coffee at the Chemistry, talking about the publishing business. It seemed an appropriate way to pay him back for granting me an audience. Sure, we’ll come and stand around in your living room holding glasses of Vouvray. He promised there would be all sorts of interesting guests, but everyone always says this don’t they?
He seemed remarkably unjaded by the business of writing, considering critics have kicked around his few efforts – terribly chatty for a guy who has to deal with inane students like me on a continual basis. But I guess he is one of those who never tires of discussing the split infinitives, shaky gerunds and dangling participles of everyday hacking. Some people just have the knack.
Lynn rolled her eyes when I told her about the party. Don’t blame her. We’ve been to a few neighborhood events that were pretty painful, even for the hour or so we made the appearance. We’re not precisely sure why we prefer dinners amongst small groupings over the wildly social gatherings of our peers, other than we are mostly an introverted couple. I say mostly, because there are those times at Jack’ soccer matches when I just have to yell approval for a skilled cross or well timed back pass (usually met with a negative gasp from those unschooled in this basic element of sound organization). But being effusive at a sporting event is an acceptable way to be emotive and its possible to share views without raising too many eyebrows. It is no wonder even the most meek in society can go crazy while watching their team surrounded by complete strangers.
What is shyness and is there a cure that does not involve assertiveness cassettes from the multi-media section of the local library?
^
I can not sleep. Laying here in bed, watching the ceiling fan turn round and round, what comes around goes around, I just can’t make my mind shut down. It keeps taking me backwards to a crap apartment I had as I finished up college. My first place all by myself and what a hole -- a converted basement, actually half the converted basement of a house on University. Above me lived the football team’s starting backfield. Why should this place pop up tonight? Absurd what the brain does. Absurd!
A horrible smell clung to the place that was chemical in nature. Bugs were about, though only at night did they dare make an effort. I listened to way too much REM, Rain Parade and Long Ryders in that place. And it was fucking cold. I seem to recall a small gas heater in the main room and snow coming in under the outside door where I hung a blanket to try to cut down the draft. Absurd. It’s all a bit too murky now 20 years on and besides, these irrationally oriented images started life in a pool of alcohol and cigarette smoke. How meaningful could they have been?
"If you twist and turn away
if you tear yourself in two again
if I could yes I would, if I could, I’d let it go
Surrender…dislocate."
-- Bono (naturally)
I remember walking around the University Golf Course in the middle of a snowy night, listening to U2’s "Bad" on a Walkman (the Great Grandparent of my iPod). Why did I do that? Must have been the thing to do when my only responsibility was to wait tables and do a radio show once a week. How bizarre to think of these things, because unlike many, I certainly don’t like or think fondly of college days – for the most part. So I will let it go, let it fade away again for another twenty years.
I’m Wide Awake.
I’m not sleeping.
And the fan still whirls. Lynn just moved, readjusting some pillows. I like watching her sleep. She’s peaceful and relaxed. This always makes me feel peaceful and relaxed. She’s a hell of a person, my Lynn, constantly underestimating her own abilities at being a Mom, friend and wife. There she sleeps, the Lady of the Lake or whatever that mythical character from the King Arthur sagas was. What dream landscape is she walking through right now and why can’t I join her?
Rain begins to fall again outside and that will surely help. I never sleep as well as when we’re in London. Must be the rain, though come to think of it the weather is often quite nice for us when there, so I suppose that isn’t it. Probably very London-like outside tonight with a temperature in the upper forties and that pelting rain, but will it do it’s number on my brainwaves?
Still not sleeping. The clock burns 1:05 and nothing can be done. Guess I will have to succumb to more weird dregs of imagery shooting across the projection screen, making a certain effort at memorializing the black hole of mid eighties psycho-drama.
Where do we go from here?
^
Strangest moment in marketing: Eliot Crudup in Sunday’s Parade Magazine. Blimey that’s just stranger than a Charlie Kaufman script. He is absolutely everywhere to the point of haunting me. So I am paging through the Post-Dispatch that was lying on the Chemistry Lab’s counter and whom should I encounter in Parade? It just is phenomenal, this push. Next thing you know he’ll be on Regis and Kelly or picked as People Magazine’s most eligible novelist, or some other outlandish silliness common to such publications.
AUTHOR AND BRITNEY
CAUGHT IN SOUTH BEACH LOVE NEST
"I’ve never been one who worries about the future, how my writing will be perceived or whether I will be able to keep doing what I do," says Eliot to the interviewer. To which I can only follow up and ask, "what do you worry about then?" Don’t all humans have some type of worry, some kind of concern, at least? But that question did not get asked, or it did not make it by the editor if it did. So Eliot is free of the type of worries plaguing philistines like me.
I told Lynn about this and she couldn’t believe I was reading Parade Magazine. She said I was obsessing over the man and needed to think about something else other than writing.
But I am not obsessing on Eliot Crudup. I am merely in awe of the public relations/marketing offensive his publisher has unleashed. I am also amazed that he seems to be playing along with it – and still has street cred with the literati. This is a bit like the U2 mystery. How can they crank out something in the neighborhood of 11 albums over 25 years and still remain relevant, fresh and critically acclaimed?
The question of talent is a beguiling one.
^
I’ve made a decision. I am going to give my "book" to Dr. Tipton at his holiday party. Won’t he be thrilled? Won’t he be ecstatic over receiving 260 pages of nonsense from a former student? Wouldn’t you be excited, answering the door with a glass of Zinfandel and a robust holiday cheer scrolled across your pumpkin head only to be handed a manila envelope with 260 laser printed pages of American satire too vacuous for even the author to read with any remote pleasure? I shouldn’t be so harsh. After all, I have made this decision only to provide an artificial deadline to cut me off – to cut it out. Stop the madness.
I am slogging through Crudup’s "412" and remember why it did not strike my fancy. The middle third is a thick morass of widely complex sentences and pretensions. The plot is weighted down so laboriously with bobbles and bangles that end up dead ending, frustration continues to mount. Currently, I am right in the middle of that swampy mess, though the story places me in the middle of the Arizona Desert. Anyone reading this would see that the great man pushed the outer limits here, yet he survived and went on to write wonderful books. No wonder he fears nothing. Free passes are granted to those with the talent and desire and back catalog to recover the investment of their publishers and readers.
So now, with Dr. Tipton in mind, I will need to go back and spike my novella up and get with my weak-link technical side. Why bother? Because a small, extremely powerful part of my brain thinks it could lead to something. Maybe he’ll slip it to his agent or know someone who knows someone who looks at this kind of thing for the Utne Reader. I kid myself about stuff like this, because something needs to push me.
Still not sleeping. The clock burns 1:05 and nothing can be done. Guess I will have to succumb to more weird dregs of imagery shooting across the projection screen, making a certain effort at memorializing the black hole of mid eighties psycho-drama.
Where do we go from here?
^
Strangest moment in marketing: Eliot Crudup in Sunday’s Parade Magazine. Blimey that’s just stranger than a Charlie Kaufman script. He is absolutely everywhere to the point of haunting me. So I am paging through the Post-Dispatch that was lying on the Chemistry Lab’s counter and whom should I encounter in Parade? It just is phenomenal, this push. Next thing you know he’ll be on Regis and Kelly or picked as People Magazine’s most eligible novelist, or some other outlandish silliness common to such publications.
AUTHOR AND BRITNEY
CAUGHT IN SOUTH BEACH LOVE NEST
"I’ve never been one who worries about the future, how my writing will be perceived or whether I will be able to keep doing what I do," says Eliot to the interviewer. To which I can only follow up and ask, "what do you worry about then?" Don’t all humans have some type of worry, some kind of concern, at least? But that question did not get asked, or it did not make it by the editor if it did. So Eliot is free of the type of worries plaguing philistines like me.
I told Lynn about this and she couldn’t believe I was reading Parade Magazine. She said I was obsessing over the man and needed to think about something else other than writing.
But I am not obsessing on Eliot Crudup. I am merely in awe of the public relations/marketing offensive his publisher has unleashed. I am also amazed that he seems to be playing along with it – and still has street cred with the literati. This is a bit like the U2 mystery. How can they crank out something in the neighborhood of 11 albums over 25 years and still remain relevant, fresh and critically acclaimed?
The question of talent is a beguiling one.
^
I’ve made a decision. I am going to give my "book" to Dr. Tipton at his holiday party. Won’t he be thrilled? Won’t he be ecstatic over receiving 260 pages of nonsense from a former student? Wouldn’t you be excited, answering the door with a glass of Zinfandel and a robust holiday cheer scrolled across your pumpkin head only to be handed a manila envelope with 260 laser printed pages of American satire too vacuous for even the author to read with any remote pleasure? I shouldn’t be so harsh. After all, I have made this decision only to provide an artificial deadline to cut me off – to cut it out. Stop the madness.
I am slogging through Crudup’s "412" and remember why it did not strike my fancy. The middle third is a thick morass of widely complex sentences and pretensions. The plot is weighted down so laboriously with bobbles and bangles that end up dead ending, frustration continues to mount. Currently, I am right in the middle of that swampy mess, though the story places me in the middle of the Arizona Desert. Anyone reading this would see that the great man pushed the outer limits here, yet he survived and went on to write wonderful books. No wonder he fears nothing. Free passes are granted to those with the talent and desire and back catalog to recover the investment of their publishers and readers.
So now, with Dr. Tipton in mind, I will need to go back and spike my novella up and get with my weak-link technical side. Why bother? Because a small, extremely powerful part of my brain thinks it could lead to something. Maybe he’ll slip it to his agent or know someone who knows someone who looks at this kind of thing for the Utne Reader. I kid myself about stuff like this, because something needs to push me.
Lynn pokes her head into the study. "You coming to the match?"
Jack’ Westminster Youth FC is having a go at Lindell School’s Under 10’s and they need this one to advance into the League Cup. Jack explained that they really don’t want to leave it up to goal differential. "Yes, let me shut this down and we’ll go. Where’s Nick?"
"Nick is at the Florio’s and is going to stay through dinner."
"He doesn’t want to come along? Support his brother?"
She disappears down the hall, but calls back to me. "You know he’s not a soccer fan."
I look at the words of my opening sentence one more time.
>>
He decided to buy the sleek technological summary without giving the consequences any thought.
>>
It’s just never going to grab anyone. Before I finish the sentence I am yawning and wondering how that small extremely powerful part of my brain thinks this will lead to something? The ego is nothing to trifle with and it makes us all do silly things from time to time. If only I understood it more there wouldn’t be such a commanding pull on my common sense.
A call from the kitchen echoes up the stairs to me. "Edward! We’re going to be late."
^
The trouble with decisions can be described in one word: pressure. In my case it is purely self imposed, but I still have slapped a deadline on myself and now I must perform to meet it or look worthless in my eyes. This can not be healthy. But I want to be done with this so I can rid myself once and for all from the reflexive pronouns, verb disagreements (heaven forbid) and split infinitives and just live my life.
Maybe my life needs a little tension, a self imposed nervous hum. There’s no credibility to it, because it’s all just made up, conjured out of magnetic files and an analog clock face. The thing is, I am making real progress. I have hacked out two sections and strengthened three others. I have cleaned up a lot of grammar and pesky spelling errors and this tightening is giving me more energy to finish it off. I am only two chapters away from having freedom. A deadline and a person to write towards as something of a target have made all the difference. Why didn’t I think of this before?
Lynn is out Christmas shopping, trying to accomplish this chore before Thanksgiving spins around. Fortunately we never go hog wild for St. Nick’s arrival so her task should be easier – made even simpler this year by not having me to contend with at the stores (I have great difficulty making up my mind). She is a master at finding the right thing to the point that it strikes awe in the boys and me. How does she do it? Is it genetic? Who knows the answer? At any rate, this has provided a silent house to work within today so I did not make my coffee trip -- home brew and the Power Book this morning.
The achievement level started high, but has steadily bled away to the point now where I am working on this rather than editing that other thing. It is almost as though I need a bit of distraction to stay dialed in on the task. No, wait, it isn’t "as though," it is exactly that. I need a bit of small turmoil to keep the head right in the thick of this story. It goes back to my college days when I did my best work at the Library where a constant level of activity orbited whatever work station I chose. Something about being in Ellis with hundreds of my closest pals (not) kept me in a productive mindset. It might also have to do with working in a noisy office for twenty odd years with coworkers who, never, shut, the, fuck, up. So damn the silence.
Going to the small stereo we have in the study I call up a CD of assorted songs. Neko Case’s "If You Knew" flies out of the little JBL bookshelf speakers. We collect these types of songs all the time. Through downloads or the selection Magnet Magazine sends us each month, songs like "If You Knew" find their way into this home’s vernacular. With the technology and distribution channels available today, why does anyone listen to the radio for music?
We turn to NPR’s Eric Westervelt in Mosul for an update…
^
I will never be a television meteorologist with skin tanned to the point of baked and a smile featuring perfect teeth that reflect the studio lights. Lynn and the Boys watch closely to see if we’re in for snow or not. There seems to be a bit of mystery over where it shall fall and where it will not. Obviously the Boys are pulling for the Central West End to be in the white belt. Lynn hopes to be in the cold rain section. I have no opinion as I rarely drive these days (so snowy traffic is not an issue), but love the sound of rain on our old copper gutters so I can, figuratively speaking, go either way.
Weeks ago Jack pulled the Flexible Flyers out of the rafters in the carriage house and cleaned them up. Remarkable on several levels: First, the carriage house is melting into the earth and the Boys are certain it is haunted; Secondly, Jack had to negotiate our 6 foot aluminum ladder out from beneath a pile of dusty, cobwebbed lumber; Thirdly, he had to find space between Cal’s canoe and old kayak to set the ladder up and hand the bladed instruments of Wintery hysterics down to Nick (without my little brothers water craft avalanching down upon them).
Lynn is supposed to go to Shaw’s Garden for a meeting of her Garden Philanthropy Group and while it is only a few miles away, she does not fancy having to return in a blizzard. She enjoys the Club, but it is not a high enough value target to risk ending up rear-ended on the Kingshighway Viaduct by some South Sider with lapsed insurance.
My ambivalence arises from my "work," which steams along nicely and can almost be pronounced DONE. Since the party at Professor Tipton’s place is next weekend, I am happy to report my progress. The good Doctor and his life partner live in the St. Regis, which is a building Lynn and I have coveted for ages. It’s got location, sprawling floor plans and embellishments that accurately take you immediately to the Upper East Side of Manhattan in a flash! My only stress now is to decide where to cut the ending, because both Lynn and I reread it a couple weeks ago and agreed that it needed to end a lot sooner than it does.
I need to rid the thing of spurious, self-serving and pretentious dialogue, but I also need to insure that I am not hacking something that ties up a dangling rope left earlier in the narrative. Not hard, but this may be a task left for a snow day (if one happens in the next four days).
Or not. A good rain will do. The copper guttering right outside the study has a fine tone particularly when the rain comes from the Southwest and the wind is such to create a perfect 25 degree pitch to the drops. Ping, pock, tonk, ping, tonk, pock, ping, ping. The gutters tell me we’re in for rain only. The Boys will need to wait a little longer before sailing down Art Hill.
My final task to meet my self-imposed deadline involves coming up with some sort of pitch. I need to develop a way to quickly explain what this thing I’ve been writing means. I have a couple of days to hone ideas, shaping them (or hammering them) into sense.
Here’s what it looks like this morning:
The American Dream is not what it used to be. We have left the materialism and self-centered fifties behind in favor of the new vision. The characters of "Moral Kiosk" jettison a variety of responsible executive madness in order to take up the new dream of simple pragmatism, of faith, friends and family. Within the backdrop of a round-the- clock New York City, moving so fast its society does not immediately notice, a cultural shift happens away from the office towers and towards the Green Spaces, the churches and the dwellings of our three main characters.
Jack’ Westminster Youth FC is having a go at Lindell School’s Under 10’s and they need this one to advance into the League Cup. Jack explained that they really don’t want to leave it up to goal differential. "Yes, let me shut this down and we’ll go. Where’s Nick?"
"Nick is at the Florio’s and is going to stay through dinner."
"He doesn’t want to come along? Support his brother?"
She disappears down the hall, but calls back to me. "You know he’s not a soccer fan."
I look at the words of my opening sentence one more time.
>>
He decided to buy the sleek technological summary without giving the consequences any thought.
>>
It’s just never going to grab anyone. Before I finish the sentence I am yawning and wondering how that small extremely powerful part of my brain thinks this will lead to something? The ego is nothing to trifle with and it makes us all do silly things from time to time. If only I understood it more there wouldn’t be such a commanding pull on my common sense.
A call from the kitchen echoes up the stairs to me. "Edward! We’re going to be late."
^
The trouble with decisions can be described in one word: pressure. In my case it is purely self imposed, but I still have slapped a deadline on myself and now I must perform to meet it or look worthless in my eyes. This can not be healthy. But I want to be done with this so I can rid myself once and for all from the reflexive pronouns, verb disagreements (heaven forbid) and split infinitives and just live my life.
Maybe my life needs a little tension, a self imposed nervous hum. There’s no credibility to it, because it’s all just made up, conjured out of magnetic files and an analog clock face. The thing is, I am making real progress. I have hacked out two sections and strengthened three others. I have cleaned up a lot of grammar and pesky spelling errors and this tightening is giving me more energy to finish it off. I am only two chapters away from having freedom. A deadline and a person to write towards as something of a target have made all the difference. Why didn’t I think of this before?
Lynn is out Christmas shopping, trying to accomplish this chore before Thanksgiving spins around. Fortunately we never go hog wild for St. Nick’s arrival so her task should be easier – made even simpler this year by not having me to contend with at the stores (I have great difficulty making up my mind). She is a master at finding the right thing to the point that it strikes awe in the boys and me. How does she do it? Is it genetic? Who knows the answer? At any rate, this has provided a silent house to work within today so I did not make my coffee trip -- home brew and the Power Book this morning.
The achievement level started high, but has steadily bled away to the point now where I am working on this rather than editing that other thing. It is almost as though I need a bit of distraction to stay dialed in on the task. No, wait, it isn’t "as though," it is exactly that. I need a bit of small turmoil to keep the head right in the thick of this story. It goes back to my college days when I did my best work at the Library where a constant level of activity orbited whatever work station I chose. Something about being in Ellis with hundreds of my closest pals (not) kept me in a productive mindset. It might also have to do with working in a noisy office for twenty odd years with coworkers who, never, shut, the, fuck, up. So damn the silence.
Going to the small stereo we have in the study I call up a CD of assorted songs. Neko Case’s "If You Knew" flies out of the little JBL bookshelf speakers. We collect these types of songs all the time. Through downloads or the selection Magnet Magazine sends us each month, songs like "If You Knew" find their way into this home’s vernacular. With the technology and distribution channels available today, why does anyone listen to the radio for music?
We turn to NPR’s Eric Westervelt in Mosul for an update…
^
I will never be a television meteorologist with skin tanned to the point of baked and a smile featuring perfect teeth that reflect the studio lights. Lynn and the Boys watch closely to see if we’re in for snow or not. There seems to be a bit of mystery over where it shall fall and where it will not. Obviously the Boys are pulling for the Central West End to be in the white belt. Lynn hopes to be in the cold rain section. I have no opinion as I rarely drive these days (so snowy traffic is not an issue), but love the sound of rain on our old copper gutters so I can, figuratively speaking, go either way.
Weeks ago Jack pulled the Flexible Flyers out of the rafters in the carriage house and cleaned them up. Remarkable on several levels: First, the carriage house is melting into the earth and the Boys are certain it is haunted; Secondly, Jack had to negotiate our 6 foot aluminum ladder out from beneath a pile of dusty, cobwebbed lumber; Thirdly, he had to find space between Cal’s canoe and old kayak to set the ladder up and hand the bladed instruments of Wintery hysterics down to Nick (without my little brothers water craft avalanching down upon them).
Lynn is supposed to go to Shaw’s Garden for a meeting of her Garden Philanthropy Group and while it is only a few miles away, she does not fancy having to return in a blizzard. She enjoys the Club, but it is not a high enough value target to risk ending up rear-ended on the Kingshighway Viaduct by some South Sider with lapsed insurance.
My ambivalence arises from my "work," which steams along nicely and can almost be pronounced DONE. Since the party at Professor Tipton’s place is next weekend, I am happy to report my progress. The good Doctor and his life partner live in the St. Regis, which is a building Lynn and I have coveted for ages. It’s got location, sprawling floor plans and embellishments that accurately take you immediately to the Upper East Side of Manhattan in a flash! My only stress now is to decide where to cut the ending, because both Lynn and I reread it a couple weeks ago and agreed that it needed to end a lot sooner than it does.
I need to rid the thing of spurious, self-serving and pretentious dialogue, but I also need to insure that I am not hacking something that ties up a dangling rope left earlier in the narrative. Not hard, but this may be a task left for a snow day (if one happens in the next four days).
Or not. A good rain will do. The copper guttering right outside the study has a fine tone particularly when the rain comes from the Southwest and the wind is such to create a perfect 25 degree pitch to the drops. Ping, pock, tonk, ping, tonk, pock, ping, ping. The gutters tell me we’re in for rain only. The Boys will need to wait a little longer before sailing down Art Hill.
My final task to meet my self-imposed deadline involves coming up with some sort of pitch. I need to develop a way to quickly explain what this thing I’ve been writing means. I have a couple of days to hone ideas, shaping them (or hammering them) into sense.
Here’s what it looks like this morning:
The American Dream is not what it used to be. We have left the materialism and self-centered fifties behind in favor of the new vision. The characters of "Moral Kiosk" jettison a variety of responsible executive madness in order to take up the new dream of simple pragmatism, of faith, friends and family. Within the backdrop of a round-the- clock New York City, moving so fast its society does not immediately notice, a cultural shift happens away from the office towers and towards the Green Spaces, the churches and the dwellings of our three main characters.
Okay, looking this over I can see it is a complete mess. Perhaps I better sit down and read "Moral Kiosk" without a red pen within reach. Then I might actually know something about it. I can’t hand it to Dr. Tipton and spout that crappy paragraph of nonsense out to him while great hordes of his associates look on in disapproval. If I am going to make an ass of myself by handing in some work, I better have something snappy to say about it.
I look at the pages stacked on my desk and it certainly looks good. But I am done with the whole idea of typing a lot of pages up so it looks good. It reminds me of High School when I would create "songs" and record them on to cassettes just so I could do the artwork and liner notes. What needs to happen is the almighty fresh approach, coming at this couple hundred page meandering from the position that perhaps I can be a writer after all, despite stating a couple months ago that I was through with that sort of wishful thinking, that kind of gossamer-like American Dream.
Gathering up the pages and slipping them into a file folder, I march out of the study, down the hall, down the stairs and into the kitchen. "My love," I announce to Lynn, "I am off to Chemistry for coffee and to become a writer."
Lynn folds a dishtowel and places it on the counter next to the sink, then turns to me with a smile. "Well, good luck then," she says with appropriate sarcasm.
"No. Really. This time I really, really mean it." I smile while shrugging into my coat.
She hugs me. "Really. Good luck."
I give her a kiss. "With such support, how could I not succeed?" Descending the stairs to the side door I grab a scarf off the unused hat rack and open the door.
I look at the pages stacked on my desk and it certainly looks good. But I am done with the whole idea of typing a lot of pages up so it looks good. It reminds me of High School when I would create "songs" and record them on to cassettes just so I could do the artwork and liner notes. What needs to happen is the almighty fresh approach, coming at this couple hundred page meandering from the position that perhaps I can be a writer after all, despite stating a couple months ago that I was through with that sort of wishful thinking, that kind of gossamer-like American Dream.
Gathering up the pages and slipping them into a file folder, I march out of the study, down the hall, down the stairs and into the kitchen. "My love," I announce to Lynn, "I am off to Chemistry for coffee and to become a writer."
Lynn folds a dishtowel and places it on the counter next to the sink, then turns to me with a smile. "Well, good luck then," she says with appropriate sarcasm.
"No. Really. This time I really, really mean it." I smile while shrugging into my coat.
She hugs me. "Really. Good luck."
I give her a kiss. "With such support, how could I not succeed?" Descending the stairs to the side door I grab a scarf off the unused hat rack and open the door.
"Do you want lunch?" She calls after me.
"No thanks." And off I go up the walk towards the street. I didn’t realize how cold it became overnight. There’s also this funky, half-assed drizzle making a nuisance of itself. Do I need an umbrella? Did James Joyce use an umbrella? Hemingway?
"No thanks." And off I go up the walk towards the street. I didn’t realize how cold it became overnight. There’s also this funky, half-assed drizzle making a nuisance of itself. Do I need an umbrella? Did James Joyce use an umbrella? Hemingway?
I sense Martin Amis would use an umbrella.
^
It’s complete shit. I know that it behooves me to avoid characterizing my prose in such a way, but I can’t help it. I am sipping my Venti Guinea Moonbeam and my story is nearly bringing me to tears. Okay, it isn’t that bad, but it is the same feeling I have always allowed to wash over me when reading through one of my stories and it is exactly what I hoped to avoid this time around. With a more mature conviction I might just have something to say (along with some ruthless and objective editing) and this feeling supposedly could not get a grip.
So much for becoming a writer – again.
I must keep plugging along and hope there is climax and resolution and that the freaking arc falls properly. I want to keep the misspellings and grammatical nightmares to a minimum. Some of these spurious pieces have ended up making some sense, though I chopped most of them out realizing they existed completely for my benefit and not the "readers." Looking at a tree across Euclid I am made to ponder, did John Milton struggle like this? Is that why he really went blind? Shaking my head I return to the pages, not even bothering to figure out why John Milton would pop into my brain at that moment.
There is no doubt my mind is overcoming earlier confidence by flashing images of Dr. Tipton reading the first page, skimming the second and then tossing the entire piece into the garbage. So what? Why does this image trouble me? I am not, after all, a writer nor will I ever be. I am just a guy who likes to write preparing a story for someone who likes to (presumably) read. Of course a great review by The New Yorker wouldn’t be so bad either.
Why would someone like John Milton enter my head? The writers that typically pop into my head are Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald and not someone like John Milton. This is the type of name that must have been served to me subliminally some way. Perhaps the TV in the living room blared a PBS documentary on Oliver Cromwell and Milton’s name came up while I concentrated on dicing tomatoes in the kitchen for stew (all conjecture). Perhaps I really need to get back to reading this story so I know how to properly pitch it. A different strategy would be to just leave it somewhere in Dr. Tipton’s house so I can avoid having to talk sensibly about this.
^
It’s complete shit. I know that it behooves me to avoid characterizing my prose in such a way, but I can’t help it. I am sipping my Venti Guinea Moonbeam and my story is nearly bringing me to tears. Okay, it isn’t that bad, but it is the same feeling I have always allowed to wash over me when reading through one of my stories and it is exactly what I hoped to avoid this time around. With a more mature conviction I might just have something to say (along with some ruthless and objective editing) and this feeling supposedly could not get a grip.
So much for becoming a writer – again.
I must keep plugging along and hope there is climax and resolution and that the freaking arc falls properly. I want to keep the misspellings and grammatical nightmares to a minimum. Some of these spurious pieces have ended up making some sense, though I chopped most of them out realizing they existed completely for my benefit and not the "readers." Looking at a tree across Euclid I am made to ponder, did John Milton struggle like this? Is that why he really went blind? Shaking my head I return to the pages, not even bothering to figure out why John Milton would pop into my brain at that moment.
There is no doubt my mind is overcoming earlier confidence by flashing images of Dr. Tipton reading the first page, skimming the second and then tossing the entire piece into the garbage. So what? Why does this image trouble me? I am not, after all, a writer nor will I ever be. I am just a guy who likes to write preparing a story for someone who likes to (presumably) read. Of course a great review by The New Yorker wouldn’t be so bad either.
Why would someone like John Milton enter my head? The writers that typically pop into my head are Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald and not someone like John Milton. This is the type of name that must have been served to me subliminally some way. Perhaps the TV in the living room blared a PBS documentary on Oliver Cromwell and Milton’s name came up while I concentrated on dicing tomatoes in the kitchen for stew (all conjecture). Perhaps I really need to get back to reading this story so I know how to properly pitch it. A different strategy would be to just leave it somewhere in Dr. Tipton’s house so I can avoid having to talk sensibly about this.
Interesting fact: It says here John Milton went blind reading too much. The man read round the clock and eventually the little words absorbed by candlelight took their toll. He was fluent in most European languages. The Internet gives you facts at light speed. It may just catch on someday. It sure does make fact finding and achieving a quick education on some character (like John Milton) insanely easy. Search Engines do all the legwork and come back with a long list. Then it’s up to you or me to cull through the list to find the nuggets. I always wonder how accurate the information is that is beamed world wide, but I reckon most stuff about old historical figures holds up. Who would make up the fact John Milton went blind reading too much?
I may go blind if I have to continue reading my crappy prose.
^
News blackouts work to calm the post election depression. It’s been a month since this Great Country re-elected its Not Great Leader. It has also been a month since I have listened to, read and watched any news. I feel that I am a better person for having gone "dark," at least temporarily. Some people live their whole lives this way (which explains the re-election of the Idiot-in-Chief) and I would not want to join them in that way of life. But on a temporary basis, it’s a good idea to leave the growing deficit, Falluja offensive, latest cabinet member to resign information overload BEHIND. It’s cleansing and renewing, allowing for a refocus on retail issues, stuff close to the heart, on the ground, next door, etc.
Yes, I am advocating tuning out and dropping in -- tune out the static pushed upon us by the media cabal and drop in on your neighbor (if you have any you like, that is). Tip O’Neal is credited with saying, "all politics is local." Well, I want to be credited with saying, "all sanity is local." It’s so much more sensible than moving to Canada, which is all the rage these days amongst those alienated by their once loved nation. No tests to take, either.
After you have gone a sufficient time unhooked from the world, after you start feeling certain and relaxed (two mindsets seemingly lost long ago), then you can go back to being plugged in. But with the proviso you now will have to be the most cynical and sarcastic individual who knows the cabinet scalp count is now up to seven. Come on, it will be fun! We all know the death of irony happened somewhere back about, say 1992, so there’s room for more cynicism.
I am supposed to be coming up with the pitch for "Moral Kiosk" and yet here I sit, talking about tuning out and dropping in, becoming less embittered through blackout therapy. You see, I’ll do anything to avoid the reality. I finished the story and still can’t boil it down to three or four sanguine bullets. It still boils down to the American dream is now just a murky illusion used as an instrument of corporate greed. Looking behind the characters and their movements, you see that it’s all about the marketing. Suburbia is a public relations disaster covered up daily by corporate and government interests. Can you imagine the revolution when people find that they’ve been suckered into living in vinyl clad boxes strewn around cul-de-sacs with anything resembling culture completely out of reach, simply because there’s over capacity in world wide auto manufacturing (besides the asphalt and concrete junta’s desire to keep building roads)? Well, this is not very sanguine, nor is it ground breaking.
I am not worried about the pitch, because I am quite clearly NOT a writer. I am also not an astronaut, mountain climber, teacher, film director, physicist, fighter pilot or television meteorologist. But that’s okay. At least I can pretend to be a writer.
^
Associate Professor Ralph Tipton’s life partner answers the door. I’d met her once before at a lecture by a William Buroughs scholar from Colgate, but did not recall the uncanny resemblance she bore to Lisa Loeb. "Hello and welcome. You guys come in, come in." Her comfort with strangers surprises me for some inexplicable reason. As we shuffle through the door we introduce each other and Dr. Cole insists on taking our coats. She doesn’t even ask about the manila envelope I hold before leading us into the living space, pointing to the bar tender in the far corner and allowing us to wade into the small crowd on our own. Lynn remarks that with the Miles Davis playing and cocktail shaker sushing, "it’s like a party from another era. Where’s Rosemary Clooney?"
Expansive, the Cole-Tipton apartment rambles along the fifth floor on the St. Regis’ Eastside. After we each secure a giant glass of a rugged Spanish red – a Grenache-Tempranillo blend from an estate near Lodoso (for those keeping score) – we make ourselves busy by gazing out the window across the Central West End. Professor Tipton comes up behind us and puts a chummy hand on my shoulder. "It’s a hell of a view. I never get tired of seeing the city from up here."
I turn to him. "Say, Dr. Tipton. Happy holidays." We shake hands and I introduce Lynn and there is some more small talk involving views and cityscapes. Then, with my heart pumping a little too heavily, I hand him my work. "Not to be too presumptuous, but I wanted to give you this piece in the hopes you could read it some time."
I may go blind if I have to continue reading my crappy prose.
^
News blackouts work to calm the post election depression. It’s been a month since this Great Country re-elected its Not Great Leader. It has also been a month since I have listened to, read and watched any news. I feel that I am a better person for having gone "dark," at least temporarily. Some people live their whole lives this way (which explains the re-election of the Idiot-in-Chief) and I would not want to join them in that way of life. But on a temporary basis, it’s a good idea to leave the growing deficit, Falluja offensive, latest cabinet member to resign information overload BEHIND. It’s cleansing and renewing, allowing for a refocus on retail issues, stuff close to the heart, on the ground, next door, etc.
Yes, I am advocating tuning out and dropping in -- tune out the static pushed upon us by the media cabal and drop in on your neighbor (if you have any you like, that is). Tip O’Neal is credited with saying, "all politics is local." Well, I want to be credited with saying, "all sanity is local." It’s so much more sensible than moving to Canada, which is all the rage these days amongst those alienated by their once loved nation. No tests to take, either.
After you have gone a sufficient time unhooked from the world, after you start feeling certain and relaxed (two mindsets seemingly lost long ago), then you can go back to being plugged in. But with the proviso you now will have to be the most cynical and sarcastic individual who knows the cabinet scalp count is now up to seven. Come on, it will be fun! We all know the death of irony happened somewhere back about, say 1992, so there’s room for more cynicism.
I am supposed to be coming up with the pitch for "Moral Kiosk" and yet here I sit, talking about tuning out and dropping in, becoming less embittered through blackout therapy. You see, I’ll do anything to avoid the reality. I finished the story and still can’t boil it down to three or four sanguine bullets. It still boils down to the American dream is now just a murky illusion used as an instrument of corporate greed. Looking behind the characters and their movements, you see that it’s all about the marketing. Suburbia is a public relations disaster covered up daily by corporate and government interests. Can you imagine the revolution when people find that they’ve been suckered into living in vinyl clad boxes strewn around cul-de-sacs with anything resembling culture completely out of reach, simply because there’s over capacity in world wide auto manufacturing (besides the asphalt and concrete junta’s desire to keep building roads)? Well, this is not very sanguine, nor is it ground breaking.
I am not worried about the pitch, because I am quite clearly NOT a writer. I am also not an astronaut, mountain climber, teacher, film director, physicist, fighter pilot or television meteorologist. But that’s okay. At least I can pretend to be a writer.
^
Associate Professor Ralph Tipton’s life partner answers the door. I’d met her once before at a lecture by a William Buroughs scholar from Colgate, but did not recall the uncanny resemblance she bore to Lisa Loeb. "Hello and welcome. You guys come in, come in." Her comfort with strangers surprises me for some inexplicable reason. As we shuffle through the door we introduce each other and Dr. Cole insists on taking our coats. She doesn’t even ask about the manila envelope I hold before leading us into the living space, pointing to the bar tender in the far corner and allowing us to wade into the small crowd on our own. Lynn remarks that with the Miles Davis playing and cocktail shaker sushing, "it’s like a party from another era. Where’s Rosemary Clooney?"
Expansive, the Cole-Tipton apartment rambles along the fifth floor on the St. Regis’ Eastside. After we each secure a giant glass of a rugged Spanish red – a Grenache-Tempranillo blend from an estate near Lodoso (for those keeping score) – we make ourselves busy by gazing out the window across the Central West End. Professor Tipton comes up behind us and puts a chummy hand on my shoulder. "It’s a hell of a view. I never get tired of seeing the city from up here."
I turn to him. "Say, Dr. Tipton. Happy holidays." We shake hands and I introduce Lynn and there is some more small talk involving views and cityscapes. Then, with my heart pumping a little too heavily, I hand him my work. "Not to be too presumptuous, but I wanted to give you this piece in the hopes you could read it some time."
He casually regards the envelope, then looked at Lynn. "It’s a never ending trail, I’m telling you." He then looks at me. "I’d be glad to look it over. Say, there’s someone here I’d like you to meet." Ralph tucks the envelope up under his arm and motions to us to follow him in the direction of what looks to be the kitchen. "Come this way, you will not be disappointed."
We all pile into the sleek kitchen and are confronted by the man himself. It might as well have been St. Nick, because the character leaning up against the cabinetry is as equally mythic to me.
"Eliot. Here’s the guy I was telling you about." Ralph steps out of the way to let Eliot Crudup shake our hands. He is in solid black, from his turtleneck to his worn loafers, a beatnik only too tall and too much of a presence for accuracy. Standing next to him is a much older and quite stately looking woman.
"Ed." He smiles. "The Vladimir Nabokov man."
This throws me most sincerely and I stumble a bit introducing Lynn. She is, of course, much cooler and calmer, able to exchange some small talk with Eliot and Ralph, getting us introduced to Eliot’s mother who is traveling with him for the month of December.
Eliot turns back to me. "Ralph mentioned your story to me when we were arguing about Pale Fire. And it interested me so he sent it down. Cracking stuff. I laughed my arse off."
Good lord I can’t say whether I’ve been so embarrassed in my life. I am speechless and look at the floor for a moment to gather thoughts and come up with a reply. "I’m, uh, thanks." Brilliant.
Ralph takes a big drink, then helps me out. "Ed, Eliot says he has notes for you on it. Notes! So you might just want to revisit that story." He chuckles into his cocktail, then pulls his nose out again. "Take it a little more seriously."
I look at Eliot. "Really?" I peek at Lynn, then back at Eliot again. "Sorry I’m so taken aback, but I just have no idea what to say. I didn’t hear anything back on that story and haven’t given it another thought." I glance at Ralph. "Maybe I should have kept coming to your workshop."
He smiles knowingly. "Maybe."
Eliot crosses his arms. "Let’s get some coffee tomorrow at that place we like and we can talk about your butcher and some reworking of your German dialog. You did a creditable job of simulating a translation, but to the detriment of flow. The story works well though and it plays well off Nabokov’s ego."
I can NOT believe what I am hearing. A totally unexpected turn of events. After this, maybe Lynn and I will change our opinions of parties. I am holding a conversation about writing with a hero of mine. Next thing you know Peter Buck and Kevin Spacey will walk into the kitchen.
We all pile into the sleek kitchen and are confronted by the man himself. It might as well have been St. Nick, because the character leaning up against the cabinetry is as equally mythic to me.
"Eliot. Here’s the guy I was telling you about." Ralph steps out of the way to let Eliot Crudup shake our hands. He is in solid black, from his turtleneck to his worn loafers, a beatnik only too tall and too much of a presence for accuracy. Standing next to him is a much older and quite stately looking woman.
"Ed." He smiles. "The Vladimir Nabokov man."
This throws me most sincerely and I stumble a bit introducing Lynn. She is, of course, much cooler and calmer, able to exchange some small talk with Eliot and Ralph, getting us introduced to Eliot’s mother who is traveling with him for the month of December.
Eliot turns back to me. "Ralph mentioned your story to me when we were arguing about Pale Fire. And it interested me so he sent it down. Cracking stuff. I laughed my arse off."
Good lord I can’t say whether I’ve been so embarrassed in my life. I am speechless and look at the floor for a moment to gather thoughts and come up with a reply. "I’m, uh, thanks." Brilliant.
Ralph takes a big drink, then helps me out. "Ed, Eliot says he has notes for you on it. Notes! So you might just want to revisit that story." He chuckles into his cocktail, then pulls his nose out again. "Take it a little more seriously."
I look at Eliot. "Really?" I peek at Lynn, then back at Eliot again. "Sorry I’m so taken aback, but I just have no idea what to say. I didn’t hear anything back on that story and haven’t given it another thought." I glance at Ralph. "Maybe I should have kept coming to your workshop."
He smiles knowingly. "Maybe."
Eliot crosses his arms. "Let’s get some coffee tomorrow at that place we like and we can talk about your butcher and some reworking of your German dialog. You did a creditable job of simulating a translation, but to the detriment of flow. The story works well though and it plays well off Nabokov’s ego."
I can NOT believe what I am hearing. A totally unexpected turn of events. After this, maybe Lynn and I will change our opinions of parties. I am holding a conversation about writing with a hero of mine. Next thing you know Peter Buck and Kevin Spacey will walk into the kitchen.
