Does anyone even remember boxing? It's something I've been thinking about since within the last two weeks I recently took up some of my old fighting workouts. The logic goes that if I was in the shape of my life when I was training to fight, and I'm not in good shape now that I'm not training to fight, the best thing to do is go out to the garage, skip rope, and hit the heavy bag while humming Hearts on Fire.
To clarify, I was never a boxer - there's no good word for what I did. I was a Tae Kwon Do-er. (as opposed to a Tae Kwon Do-n't ...Ha, sometimes I am so funny). The preferred nomenclature of course is "Karate Fighter," which sounds super awesome and also bad assed. It's retro in an unironic way, like it's the last thing in the world where you could be it, and also still believe in yourself, and team up with your buddy to rescue the president from punks who have also kidnapped the girl you love - and you never knew! You didn't know you loved her until she walked out of your life, but now you've got a chance to win her back, so go to her - GO TO HER!
Both sports got sort of co-opted by MMA, or as my hardcore friends M-Murder and J-Vizzle call it, "Ultimate Bro Punch." MMA is one half of the answer to old criticisms martial artists used to level against their sport, the first being that in point matches there was no accounting for strength and toughness because speed was everything - tap someone on the bean, earn a point. In fact, more often than not, you'd get DQ'd if you did real physical damage to your opponent. The second criticism was one leveled at "forms" (Kata in karate, Hyung in Tae Kwon Do, etc) - the old "who cares if it looks pretty so long as it works." The answer to the pretty kata question is modern competitive martial arts which look mostly like gymnastics with weak, unconvincing punches and sparkly, sparkly weapons.
The answer to the pain and strength question is MMA, about which there is nothing pretty. This sport involves two bro-dudes going at it hammer-and-tongs trying to knock each other out or into submission, which naturally leads to all sorts of commentary about bro-dudes getting down to seriously press the flesh. Each others flesh. into each other. Pounding. Man-pounding.
The metaphor is so obvious it's not even really funny. Everyone can look at MMA and call it gay, but just like the epithet of "karate fighter," it's almost above that - like dream analysis, that sort of criticism is the province of the amateur going for the cheap laugh. Yes, it's some half-naked sweaty men rolling around on the ground together. Yes, gay porn is actually less suggestive than some MMA bouts. But real life is not metonomy - two bro-dudes fighting each other does NOT mean they want to have sex with each other. WRITING about two bro-dudes fighting each other MAY mean they want to have sex with each other, but only if that's your angle. Sorry, but London's "A Piece of Steak" is not really open to queer theory reads.
Arguably, MMA is safer than boxing - something hard to believe at a glance. It's certainly safer than an actual brawl since no one is likely to stab you with a busted beer bottle or a sock full of rocks. The only thing missing is the class. I think that's what most critics are really banging on - where is the audience dressed to the nines with big cigars and pretty girls on their arms? Where are the limousines? The champagne?
What they're missing, these critics, is that MMA more accurately reflects the roots of boxing than boxing has in a long time. Think bare knuckles, think blind pig back alley matches - think Rocky I for pet's sake, not Rocky 5.
I won't rag on Rocky Balboa as I've not seen it, and as it's about an aging fighter getting back in shape against all odds, I don't want to talk too much crap. For the record, the lack of Talia Shire is sort of a deal breaker for me.
In any case, boxing got big, fat, and dumb and MMA took it down while his cousin, Modern Competitive Martial Arts, tries on his sister's dresses, not that there's anything wrong with that. Boxing became a bloated self-parody, and the best thing to come out of it in the last 20 years was Don King - that's saying something.
The only thing I lament of the whole crumbling enterprise is the fate of those who could or would have been contenders, who studied the sport (and here's the distinction - it is a sport - calling it a fight may be something of a misnomer) and now find no sport remains. Think of the kids fighting Golden Gloves or up at Kronk who are going to spend their youths on training only to discover that, like an over-hunted forest, there is no game left for them.
Guess they can always go to college.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Monday, December 28, 2009
Unsolicited Advice for New Writers from Someone Unqualified to Give It, Volume 13 - I Want you to Compose...a Theme.
In what I think will be the last of my running series on the essentials of fiction, I'll talk about the concept of theme, and also exorcise a personal demon or two.
Back in 1998 I drew a racist comic book. It wasn't meant to be racist, but it comes across that way now. The comic was a gift for my dad on his birthday, and it was entitled "Police: it's just one word," the title itself having a particularly unsubtle innuendo (there's a tendency in B.E.V. to pronounce the word Poe-lease, with a heavy emphasis on the first syllable and a pause before the second), which, to me, is as nothing compared to the contents within.
The story follows my dad as he is out on patrol and is called out to stop "Warren's biggest (come to think of it, only) street riot!" In Dirty Harry fashion, the character of my dad goes on a violent shooting spree, gunning down rioters by the score while bullets whiz ineffectually by. He finally, through macho force of arms, manages to suppress the riot and bring all the surviving rioters to justice.
Needless to say, the bulk of the rioters are black. The question one has to ask the author here is: why? I was not only the author, but the illustrator. Making the rioters black was obviously a conscious decision on my part as I had to draw them line-by-line.
The answer is that I don't know. I knew when I wrote it that it was over the line, that it was wrong in a lot of ways, and that it was meant to be a personal and private gift just as easily forgotten as given. Of course, that's not what happened. That comic was to be the keystone in repairing my long-rifted relationship with my father. It took a lot of work to make, and it showed. It was an intense undertaking, and one I was unsure of in every respect. I didn't know if I could get it written, drawn, inked, copied, and bound in time, and so I went on autopilot when it came time to make some pretty important choices.
Also, my dad made about half a dozen copies, thus ensuring that that damned comic will follow me around forever.
The point I'm trying to make here besides an awful lot of self indulgence, is that a writer must be conscious of the theme of his writing. What was the theme of "Police: it's just one word"? That I think my dad is pretty awesome, or so I thought at the time.
No, the theme is "white cops can gun down black rioters and it's goddamned hilarious." Actually, most of the jokes in the comic fall flat, so "hilarious" might not be the right word. Maybe "white cops can gun down black rioters and white suburbanites will not only think that it's okay, but won't even really think about it at all."
So you've got to be conscious, but you've got to be aware that what you've written is not necessarily what will be read. It doesn't have anything to do with "being careful" in the sense that I've been warned of before, eg, "be careful what you say or the PC police will come down on you" (whatup Bill O'Reilly!) but careful in that you must know what you are saying and then read it as if it were not you who had said it.
If you mean it, say it. If you don't mean it, cut it out. The parts about my dad, Freudian implications aside, becoming a paragonic caricature of brutal law enforcement were intentional. The parts where lots of dark people died for the sake of comedy were accidental, and stupid.
Writers cannot afford this sort of accident. Writing in haste is one way to bring your prejudices and assumptions to the fore, wrestle with them, and beat them down, and that's a good thing. Failing to recognize those prejudices and assumptions, for whatever reason, is to commit the most egregious of offenses: thoughtless propaganda pretending to be art.
Back in 1998 I drew a racist comic book. It wasn't meant to be racist, but it comes across that way now. The comic was a gift for my dad on his birthday, and it was entitled "Police: it's just one word," the title itself having a particularly unsubtle innuendo (there's a tendency in B.E.V. to pronounce the word Poe-lease, with a heavy emphasis on the first syllable and a pause before the second), which, to me, is as nothing compared to the contents within.
The story follows my dad as he is out on patrol and is called out to stop "Warren's biggest (come to think of it, only) street riot!" In Dirty Harry fashion, the character of my dad goes on a violent shooting spree, gunning down rioters by the score while bullets whiz ineffectually by. He finally, through macho force of arms, manages to suppress the riot and bring all the surviving rioters to justice.
Needless to say, the bulk of the rioters are black. The question one has to ask the author here is: why? I was not only the author, but the illustrator. Making the rioters black was obviously a conscious decision on my part as I had to draw them line-by-line.
The answer is that I don't know. I knew when I wrote it that it was over the line, that it was wrong in a lot of ways, and that it was meant to be a personal and private gift just as easily forgotten as given. Of course, that's not what happened. That comic was to be the keystone in repairing my long-rifted relationship with my father. It took a lot of work to make, and it showed. It was an intense undertaking, and one I was unsure of in every respect. I didn't know if I could get it written, drawn, inked, copied, and bound in time, and so I went on autopilot when it came time to make some pretty important choices.
Also, my dad made about half a dozen copies, thus ensuring that that damned comic will follow me around forever.
The point I'm trying to make here besides an awful lot of self indulgence, is that a writer must be conscious of the theme of his writing. What was the theme of "Police: it's just one word"? That I think my dad is pretty awesome, or so I thought at the time.
No, the theme is "white cops can gun down black rioters and it's goddamned hilarious." Actually, most of the jokes in the comic fall flat, so "hilarious" might not be the right word. Maybe "white cops can gun down black rioters and white suburbanites will not only think that it's okay, but won't even really think about it at all."
So you've got to be conscious, but you've got to be aware that what you've written is not necessarily what will be read. It doesn't have anything to do with "being careful" in the sense that I've been warned of before, eg, "be careful what you say or the PC police will come down on you" (whatup Bill O'Reilly!) but careful in that you must know what you are saying and then read it as if it were not you who had said it.
If you mean it, say it. If you don't mean it, cut it out. The parts about my dad, Freudian implications aside, becoming a paragonic caricature of brutal law enforcement were intentional. The parts where lots of dark people died for the sake of comedy were accidental, and stupid.
Writers cannot afford this sort of accident. Writing in haste is one way to bring your prejudices and assumptions to the fore, wrestle with them, and beat them down, and that's a good thing. Failing to recognize those prejudices and assumptions, for whatever reason, is to commit the most egregious of offenses: thoughtless propaganda pretending to be art.
Friday, December 25, 2009
A Day Off
With presents still to wrap, people yet to see, a workout to squeeze in, and the seashell hum of last night's revelry still playing in my ears, you'll have to pardon my indulging in a bit of brevity.
Merry Christmas, or if you prefer, happy holidays. While it's impossible for me to know if you'll get what you want, I can only hope that everybody gets what they deserve.
Merry Christmas, or if you prefer, happy holidays. While it's impossible for me to know if you'll get what you want, I can only hope that everybody gets what they deserve.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Ah Humanity!
At least once in your life, you should just give up the whole enchilada. Quit. It is hard - so hard that the only thing harder is to keep going, and when the going gets that tough, it's time to get going yourself.
I mention all this because of a game I played called Every Day the Same Dream. It's a really short game - you can give it a try if you like, and it should only take about ten minutes or so, then we can have an informed conversation regarding what I don't like about it.
Once upon a time, I was a cubicle dweller. From about 1999 to 2003 or so, I worked in the IT industry. It's an industry which, all things considered, can be rewarding and stimulating. Some of my best friends are administrators, technicians, and programmers. I, however, hated it.
I liked the money just fine, though I spent a lot of it (read: all of it) on booze and parties and little toy soldiers. Yes, those three things totally go together. I started out as an intern, which was awesome because I'd just come in and install Y2K patches, rack up lots of overtime, and then go out at night and live it up. Then I started working the help desk and was subject to a never-ending parade of (l)user calls that all ended with me telling someone to reboot and commiserating that, yes, they should have saved more often.
After that help desk job came another help desk job, and after that help desk job came a stretch of unemployment, and then a user training job. It was my job to hold the hands of auto-assembly linemen as they labored to understand the essentials of PC operation. You may wonder what line workers need PC access for - so did I, until they started getting fired for exchanging inappropriate e-mails. I don't think it was necessarily a conspiracy on behalf of my employer, but by the time the project completed there was a significant number of persons to whom my employer did not have to pay unemployment benefits.
In any case, it was dull work for which I never developed a passion, so in 2003 I went back to school. The work was hard, I was poor, and the next six years kicked major ass. My writing improved exponentially, and I got to travel, all because I looked at my situation of the 4 years preceding and said to hell with it.
Which is sort of the problem with Every Day, and the small buzz surrounding its so-called bleak profundity. It has a theme that a lot of people seem to get, which is that of "...alienation and refusal of labor," but it doesn't do anything that "Bartleby the Scrivener" didn't do just as well, if not better, 150 years ago. Indeed, the game is sort of like a mix between Bartleby and American Beauty, albeit seeming to explore a new medium - except that to be perfectly honest, Adult Swim's Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself) beat this game to the punch by a good year or two.
But EDTSD is in black-and-white and all slow and mood-music-y and shit, and I think that's the argument that people would like to make. If you didn't read the link I referenced off of American Beauty up above, it makes reference to a manifesto by Manny Farber written in 1962 called "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art." Arguably, EDTSD, Like American Beauty is so much White Elephant Art - high-minded and elegantly executed, but too precious by far.
Really, let's break the themes of the game down: Alienation? If by no other means, that theme is realized by the minimalism of the game's design and a healthy dose of contrasting color - the leaf, the stoplight, the TV all provide enticing notes of variety and set just the right tone. It's got alienation down pat.
But refusal of labor? Yes, ultimately (SPOILER ALERT: Like Nuclear War, the only winning move is not to play) you must refuse to work, to be one corporate cog identical to so many others, but it's your only relief option. There's no way to commiserate with co-workers, no way to actually look at your workload, no way to just quit - nope, gotta try to kill yourself. Gotta let the job push you into all-consuming despair.
The other assumption this job makes, and one I've heard often, is that your character has no reprieve from his daily routine, no diversion or distraction: you have a babbling TV, a domineering wife, and, well, that's it. Then you open your eyes to a magical world of experience, a mystical vision of the world all around you that you never knew was there! But yet, the protagonist implicitly never thinks to read a book, visit a museum, have a cocktail, or go for a walk in the country.
Eleanor Roosevelt once said that "[n]o one can make you feel inferior without your consent," which read one way sounds like the kind of thing you say before you put on a copy of Chaka Khan's I'm Every Woman and dance, DANCE! But read as another extreme reflects why I'm such a big fan of the second amendment. If something is trying to depress, oppress, subvert, or destroy you, HIT IT BACK OR GTFO! Your job sucks? Fix it , find a new one, or sell your shit, quit your job, wait tables and file for bankruptcy.
One of the complaints I grew up hearing was that of the soul-sucking corporate job, the nine-to-five humdrum, the droning whine of the middle class who would sob and sniffle (but never roar) about how work was turning them into a mindless drone, and then spend their paychecks on frivolities.
We heard this sort of thing in the 90's in the grunge rock movement: the mumbling moan of the anti-corporate rejected class, the generation with no goals and no heroes: that people in suits with no souls would try to use your beautiful magical art to sell sneakers or toothpaste or economy cars.
In Western culture, generally, everything is a commodity. That only has to reflect your identity so much as you let it. Are you alienated? Go to the bar, strike up a conversation, make a friend. Would you refuse to work? Good for you. You'll be a little hungry, but good for you. There are worse things - like jumping to your death over a job.
I mention all this because of a game I played called Every Day the Same Dream. It's a really short game - you can give it a try if you like, and it should only take about ten minutes or so, then we can have an informed conversation regarding what I don't like about it.
Once upon a time, I was a cubicle dweller. From about 1999 to 2003 or so, I worked in the IT industry. It's an industry which, all things considered, can be rewarding and stimulating. Some of my best friends are administrators, technicians, and programmers. I, however, hated it.
I liked the money just fine, though I spent a lot of it (read: all of it) on booze and parties and little toy soldiers. Yes, those three things totally go together. I started out as an intern, which was awesome because I'd just come in and install Y2K patches, rack up lots of overtime, and then go out at night and live it up. Then I started working the help desk and was subject to a never-ending parade of (l)user calls that all ended with me telling someone to reboot and commiserating that, yes, they should have saved more often.
After that help desk job came another help desk job, and after that help desk job came a stretch of unemployment, and then a user training job. It was my job to hold the hands of auto-assembly linemen as they labored to understand the essentials of PC operation. You may wonder what line workers need PC access for - so did I, until they started getting fired for exchanging inappropriate e-mails. I don't think it was necessarily a conspiracy on behalf of my employer, but by the time the project completed there was a significant number of persons to whom my employer did not have to pay unemployment benefits.
In any case, it was dull work for which I never developed a passion, so in 2003 I went back to school. The work was hard, I was poor, and the next six years kicked major ass. My writing improved exponentially, and I got to travel, all because I looked at my situation of the 4 years preceding and said to hell with it.
Which is sort of the problem with Every Day, and the small buzz surrounding its so-called bleak profundity. It has a theme that a lot of people seem to get, which is that of "...alienation and refusal of labor," but it doesn't do anything that "Bartleby the Scrivener" didn't do just as well, if not better, 150 years ago. Indeed, the game is sort of like a mix between Bartleby and American Beauty, albeit seeming to explore a new medium - except that to be perfectly honest, Adult Swim's Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself) beat this game to the punch by a good year or two.
But EDTSD is in black-and-white and all slow and mood-music-y and shit, and I think that's the argument that people would like to make. If you didn't read the link I referenced off of American Beauty up above, it makes reference to a manifesto by Manny Farber written in 1962 called "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art." Arguably, EDTSD, Like American Beauty is so much White Elephant Art - high-minded and elegantly executed, but too precious by far.
Really, let's break the themes of the game down: Alienation? If by no other means, that theme is realized by the minimalism of the game's design and a healthy dose of contrasting color - the leaf, the stoplight, the TV all provide enticing notes of variety and set just the right tone. It's got alienation down pat.
But refusal of labor? Yes, ultimately (SPOILER ALERT: Like Nuclear War, the only winning move is not to play) you must refuse to work, to be one corporate cog identical to so many others, but it's your only relief option. There's no way to commiserate with co-workers, no way to actually look at your workload, no way to just quit - nope, gotta try to kill yourself. Gotta let the job push you into all-consuming despair.
The other assumption this job makes, and one I've heard often, is that your character has no reprieve from his daily routine, no diversion or distraction: you have a babbling TV, a domineering wife, and, well, that's it. Then you open your eyes to a magical world of experience, a mystical vision of the world all around you that you never knew was there! But yet, the protagonist implicitly never thinks to read a book, visit a museum, have a cocktail, or go for a walk in the country.
Eleanor Roosevelt once said that "[n]o one can make you feel inferior without your consent," which read one way sounds like the kind of thing you say before you put on a copy of Chaka Khan's I'm Every Woman and dance, DANCE! But read as another extreme reflects why I'm such a big fan of the second amendment. If something is trying to depress, oppress, subvert, or destroy you, HIT IT BACK OR GTFO! Your job sucks? Fix it , find a new one, or sell your shit, quit your job, wait tables and file for bankruptcy.
One of the complaints I grew up hearing was that of the soul-sucking corporate job, the nine-to-five humdrum, the droning whine of the middle class who would sob and sniffle (but never roar) about how work was turning them into a mindless drone, and then spend their paychecks on frivolities.
We heard this sort of thing in the 90's in the grunge rock movement: the mumbling moan of the anti-corporate rejected class, the generation with no goals and no heroes: that people in suits with no souls would try to use your beautiful magical art to sell sneakers or toothpaste or economy cars.
In Western culture, generally, everything is a commodity. That only has to reflect your identity so much as you let it. Are you alienated? Go to the bar, strike up a conversation, make a friend. Would you refuse to work? Good for you. You'll be a little hungry, but good for you. There are worse things - like jumping to your death over a job.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Unsolicited Advice for New Writers from Someone Unqualified to Give it, Volume 12 - Just Shut your Big Yapper.
Dialogue is just one of those things that some people get and many more don't. Luckily, I've got a pretty good handle on it. The one thing that is consistently pointed out as a "done right" in my stories is the dialogue. Even when my plots go to hell and my characters turn into obvious and superficial avatars of my own fantasies and angst, those characters can chat together in a convincing way.
I wrote a good presentation on this matter about 2 years ago, and I meant to just re-post it here, but I seem to have lost the document. Here's the upshot: dialogue isn't neat. People step on each others lines, cut each other off, say everything all at once and say nothing at all.
The best advice on dialogue I ever got was an account that dialogue falls like marbles through a pachinko machine. It bounces off of tangential elements, flows with only the loosest suggestion of a pattern, and is almost never the most direct way to move a story forward.
Dialogue is a creative digression. With dialogue, we can get a sense for what characters sound like, and we can get a more total immersion than a paraphrase or summary (these in turn being the most direct way to move a story forward, but the least characterful).
But dialogue is actually a terrible way to convey narrative information (Aristotle contrasted diegesis with mimesis in Poetics, and it's a worthy distinction}. Characters, if they are realistic at all, are just as confused and prejudiced as their living counterparts. Characters talk about stupid shit and they lack perspective of their own situation. Without meaning to, characters lie to the reader.
Gertrude Stein had a great handle on this, and if you were to read Three Lives, and "Melanctha" in particular, you'd read about a series of characters who seem incapable of either telling the truth or revealing it. They say what they think they mean, and the reader gets the unique vantage point of knowing that what they mean is out of sync with the world about them.
Characters exist in this weird sort of object state wherein they are the focus of the reader's attention, but themselves have limited understanding of their environments. A character is only a single point of perspective, and one of the worst things a writer can do is to have a character function as a truth-sayer. Ayn Rand is guilty of this, and so is Robert Heinlien. While arguably they were making philosophy before art, that excuse doesn't magically make their didactic and pontificatious dialogue any good.
So that got a little bit meta faster than I meant it to. To put it back on track, there are three types of completely craptastic dialogue that must be avoided.
1) Preachy dialogue - this is when the author creates a character that always speaks the truth, always makes deep and profound philosophical points, and is infallible in all matters logic (at least, within the text). This character is the author's in-book surrogate, and a complete Mary Sue. What he has to say is so important that it can't be interrupted by other characters, nor even to take a breath.
Example: "What we're reading here is crap - if you want to study the excesses of depravity, then you should read Anais Nin, who handled this far more ably than anything we've done in this class. Furthermore, if you want to understand American dis-affectation, then I don't know why we're not reading Nietzsche, who was more profound than this printed dribble the elitist academy is foisting on us."
2) Teachy Dialogue - This extremely common faux pas involves two characters spending a great deal of time telling one another things that they should already know, usually for the reader's "benefit." This is most common in specialized setting fiction: science fiction and fantasy, of course but also stories set "at work," stories about lawyers and doctors and other people with jargon-rich professions.
Example: We have to defeat the dark lord Gothbad, who rules this realm of Goodlandia with an iron fist - and if we don't do it by next Tuesday, princess purehymen will die from the curse that Gothbad put on her when he captured her!
3) Inane Chatter - This sort of dialogue, also known as babble-itis, comes from a slavish devotion to verisimilitude. While the devil certainly is in the details, this writer has attempted to include every hem, haw, if, and, and but so that no detail is made significant. Far from actually having the good ear the writer lays claim to, this author could just as easily be replaced by a tape recorder. A good ear can capture nuance, but it is also discriminating, whereas this author's ear takes on all comers. Insert your own very obvious mom joke here.
Example: "How's it going," Bob asked, rubbing his hands together for warmth. "What's that?" Sally asked. "I said 'how's it going," Bob repeated. "Oh fine," Sally said, "nice weather we're having." "Yes, the weather is nice," Bob agreed.
So who's got it right (other than me)? I can't suggest a better dialogue coach than Ed McBain. Pic up any of the 87th precinct stories and just watch how the characters go back and forth, playing off one anothers cues, get distracted, say nothing and everything all at once. These are light reading with exemplary dialogue that drifts, flows, bounces, and reveals.
I wrote a good presentation on this matter about 2 years ago, and I meant to just re-post it here, but I seem to have lost the document. Here's the upshot: dialogue isn't neat. People step on each others lines, cut each other off, say everything all at once and say nothing at all.
The best advice on dialogue I ever got was an account that dialogue falls like marbles through a pachinko machine. It bounces off of tangential elements, flows with only the loosest suggestion of a pattern, and is almost never the most direct way to move a story forward.
Dialogue is a creative digression. With dialogue, we can get a sense for what characters sound like, and we can get a more total immersion than a paraphrase or summary (these in turn being the most direct way to move a story forward, but the least characterful).
But dialogue is actually a terrible way to convey narrative information (Aristotle contrasted diegesis with mimesis in Poetics, and it's a worthy distinction}. Characters, if they are realistic at all, are just as confused and prejudiced as their living counterparts. Characters talk about stupid shit and they lack perspective of their own situation. Without meaning to, characters lie to the reader.
Gertrude Stein had a great handle on this, and if you were to read Three Lives, and "Melanctha" in particular, you'd read about a series of characters who seem incapable of either telling the truth or revealing it. They say what they think they mean, and the reader gets the unique vantage point of knowing that what they mean is out of sync with the world about them.
Characters exist in this weird sort of object state wherein they are the focus of the reader's attention, but themselves have limited understanding of their environments. A character is only a single point of perspective, and one of the worst things a writer can do is to have a character function as a truth-sayer. Ayn Rand is guilty of this, and so is Robert Heinlien. While arguably they were making philosophy before art, that excuse doesn't magically make their didactic and pontificatious dialogue any good.
So that got a little bit meta faster than I meant it to. To put it back on track, there are three types of completely craptastic dialogue that must be avoided.
1) Preachy dialogue - this is when the author creates a character that always speaks the truth, always makes deep and profound philosophical points, and is infallible in all matters logic (at least, within the text). This character is the author's in-book surrogate, and a complete Mary Sue. What he has to say is so important that it can't be interrupted by other characters, nor even to take a breath.
Example: "What we're reading here is crap - if you want to study the excesses of depravity, then you should read Anais Nin, who handled this far more ably than anything we've done in this class. Furthermore, if you want to understand American dis-affectation, then I don't know why we're not reading Nietzsche, who was more profound than this printed dribble the elitist academy is foisting on us."
2) Teachy Dialogue - This extremely common faux pas involves two characters spending a great deal of time telling one another things that they should already know, usually for the reader's "benefit." This is most common in specialized setting fiction: science fiction and fantasy, of course but also stories set "at work," stories about lawyers and doctors and other people with jargon-rich professions.
Example: We have to defeat the dark lord Gothbad, who rules this realm of Goodlandia with an iron fist - and if we don't do it by next Tuesday, princess purehymen will die from the curse that Gothbad put on her when he captured her!
3) Inane Chatter - This sort of dialogue, also known as babble-itis, comes from a slavish devotion to verisimilitude. While the devil certainly is in the details, this writer has attempted to include every hem, haw, if, and, and but so that no detail is made significant. Far from actually having the good ear the writer lays claim to, this author could just as easily be replaced by a tape recorder. A good ear can capture nuance, but it is also discriminating, whereas this author's ear takes on all comers. Insert your own very obvious mom joke here.
Example: "How's it going," Bob asked, rubbing his hands together for warmth. "What's that?" Sally asked. "I said 'how's it going," Bob repeated. "Oh fine," Sally said, "nice weather we're having." "Yes, the weather is nice," Bob agreed.
So who's got it right (other than me)? I can't suggest a better dialogue coach than Ed McBain. Pic up any of the 87th precinct stories and just watch how the characters go back and forth, playing off one anothers cues, get distracted, say nothing and everything all at once. These are light reading with exemplary dialogue that drifts, flows, bounces, and reveals.
Friday, December 18, 2009
I Feel Pretty, Oh so Pretty
I was hipped to this great article from the NYT concerning men my age (20's and 30's) dressing much nicer than they used to, and more to the point, dressing much nicer than their fathers did. They cite this as being a sort of rejection of the casual Friday lifestyle, a way of rebelling against their fathers. As a tie-wearing guy who takes a great deal of pride in stepping out well-groomed, well-dressed, and always in damn shiny shoes, this article made me prick up my ears and pass it along.
Why go to all the trouble of shaving every day, moisturizing every night, keeping my shirts neat and wrinkle-free, and owning more ties than socks? The number one reason is that girls like it. I look good in a suit - everyone does - a well tailored suit is customized to your build and accentuates your best features. It tells the world that when you got out of bed, you decided to to go through a little extra effort just so you wouldn't disgust all around you by showing up in a ripped T-shirt and sweatpants, both stained with liberal smears of nacho cheese.
When you go out looking good, you are telling the world that you have arrived, or at least are ready to get underway. A suit lends you confidence because a suit is the uniform of authority. Many men's sartorial traditions have their roots in military dress, and not the modern work-a-day, remote-control robot-murder army: the cavalry army, the officer's army, the gentleman's army. These traditions carried over to the professional world, and so suit = boss, suit = power, suit = in control.
The article from the NYT is spot on in pointing out that it was this mode of dress that our fathers, the boomers, rejected. They force-fed themselves this sort of anti-establishment faux egalitarianism, convinced themselves that style was effeminate, and started shlubbing to work in khakis and dockers. I don't know what the big deal was - wanting to look more workmanlike? Wanting to look like you weren't part of "the system?" I don't know - knowing would mean that I want to hear a whole load of excuses that grown men have made for dressing like children.
Men of my generation were taught that that was how you were supposed to dress, and in that way we were initiated into the Cult of Blah. But as the guarantees and givens of society started slipping away from us (house, car, job, education), we started to see that membership had lost its privileges, and so our own mod revolution has begun.
Those of us who embrace style, fledgling as many of us are (myself included - financial circumstance dictates that I only go well dressed 4 days a week), do not want to dress like our fathers because we want to be more. Indeed, those like myself from working class families don't want to dress like our grandfathers either.
No, we are dressing like our grandfather's bosses. Certain whiskey ads would have you believe our fathers were swinging hip cats - they were not. These are the people who brought you Woodstock, Wal-Mart, and the SUV. They were the people who roundly rejected the trappings of Western aristocracy and sought to knock it down.
Well now they have it - they've made a good, if quixotic, run and wound up in the suburbs, upside-down on their homes with a titanic collection of disposable plastic crap.
So those of us who want nothing to do with that sort of lifestyle have picked up the uniform of the old elite, the aristocracy, the upper class, and this makes for a complex fashion statement.
As we take up these clothes, so too do we say that we are embracing a way of life, one which honors authority and discipline (our fathers, who so roundly rejected authority, are hard pressed to in turn earn what they themselves would not give over) - we are in fact ready to take our turn holding the reins of empire. We are ready to push the whole cultural anomaly of the last 60 years out of the way.
But even as we say that we are ready to pick up the old mantel of command, we are well served to remember that the gentrified social order fell out of fashion in large part due to its own fatal flaws - racist, misogynistic, and exclusive, "the system" worked so well for so few that its cruelty and avarice became inexcusable and many would-be gentlemen refused to play along.
So to my fellow aspirants in the order of silk-and-wool, let's not be silly about our suits. In re-embracing these fashions, so too do we lend lip service to the lifestyle that spawned them: martinis and cigars, big business, leisure and gentle pursuits, yes, but also oppression, cruelty, and unwavering devotion to old flags and false morals. Let us move forward into a more just and equitable gentle persons club. Let us be more tolerant, more enlightened, and more generous than our great and genteel forebears while still looking just as good.
Why go to all the trouble of shaving every day, moisturizing every night, keeping my shirts neat and wrinkle-free, and owning more ties than socks? The number one reason is that girls like it. I look good in a suit - everyone does - a well tailored suit is customized to your build and accentuates your best features. It tells the world that when you got out of bed, you decided to to go through a little extra effort just so you wouldn't disgust all around you by showing up in a ripped T-shirt and sweatpants, both stained with liberal smears of nacho cheese.
When you go out looking good, you are telling the world that you have arrived, or at least are ready to get underway. A suit lends you confidence because a suit is the uniform of authority. Many men's sartorial traditions have their roots in military dress, and not the modern work-a-day, remote-control robot-murder army: the cavalry army, the officer's army, the gentleman's army. These traditions carried over to the professional world, and so suit = boss, suit = power, suit = in control.
The article from the NYT is spot on in pointing out that it was this mode of dress that our fathers, the boomers, rejected. They force-fed themselves this sort of anti-establishment faux egalitarianism, convinced themselves that style was effeminate, and started shlubbing to work in khakis and dockers. I don't know what the big deal was - wanting to look more workmanlike? Wanting to look like you weren't part of "the system?" I don't know - knowing would mean that I want to hear a whole load of excuses that grown men have made for dressing like children.
Men of my generation were taught that that was how you were supposed to dress, and in that way we were initiated into the Cult of Blah. But as the guarantees and givens of society started slipping away from us (house, car, job, education), we started to see that membership had lost its privileges, and so our own mod revolution has begun.
Those of us who embrace style, fledgling as many of us are (myself included - financial circumstance dictates that I only go well dressed 4 days a week), do not want to dress like our fathers because we want to be more. Indeed, those like myself from working class families don't want to dress like our grandfathers either.
No, we are dressing like our grandfather's bosses. Certain whiskey ads would have you believe our fathers were swinging hip cats - they were not. These are the people who brought you Woodstock, Wal-Mart, and the SUV. They were the people who roundly rejected the trappings of Western aristocracy and sought to knock it down.
Well now they have it - they've made a good, if quixotic, run and wound up in the suburbs, upside-down on their homes with a titanic collection of disposable plastic crap.
So those of us who want nothing to do with that sort of lifestyle have picked up the uniform of the old elite, the aristocracy, the upper class, and this makes for a complex fashion statement.
As we take up these clothes, so too do we say that we are embracing a way of life, one which honors authority and discipline (our fathers, who so roundly rejected authority, are hard pressed to in turn earn what they themselves would not give over) - we are in fact ready to take our turn holding the reins of empire. We are ready to push the whole cultural anomaly of the last 60 years out of the way.
But even as we say that we are ready to pick up the old mantel of command, we are well served to remember that the gentrified social order fell out of fashion in large part due to its own fatal flaws - racist, misogynistic, and exclusive, "the system" worked so well for so few that its cruelty and avarice became inexcusable and many would-be gentlemen refused to play along.
So to my fellow aspirants in the order of silk-and-wool, let's not be silly about our suits. In re-embracing these fashions, so too do we lend lip service to the lifestyle that spawned them: martinis and cigars, big business, leisure and gentle pursuits, yes, but also oppression, cruelty, and unwavering devotion to old flags and false morals. Let us move forward into a more just and equitable gentle persons club. Let us be more tolerant, more enlightened, and more generous than our great and genteel forebears while still looking just as good.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Really? Wow, that's so interesting.
There are things that are stupid and things that are boring, and things that are stupid and boring. The stupidest, most boring thing in the world is listening to someone else recount their dream.
EVERYONE does this, and I'm no exception, but I'm acknowledging today that this is a stupid and boring thing to do. Hi, my name is Vytautas Malesh and I have a problem: but first I'm going to tell you about last night. Okay, I was running away from this guy, and like, I couldn't see his face, because like everything was black, like, super black, and like I had this sword, but it wasn't a sword, it was like a rubber ducky...
If you feel the need to bore someone with your stupid dream, the best thing you can do is keep it short.
You: I had this crazy dream last night.
Your friend: Oh? (Eye rolling)
You: Yeah, I got pinned to the sidewalk and tickled by the cast of Herman's Head.
Your friend: (with the patience of a saint) Then what happened?
You: That's pretty much the upshot.
Your friend: Awesome - let's go to the titty bar.
See? The reward for keeping it short was disproportionately high in this totally real example because your friend knows how stupid and boring your dreams are going to be. When you did not go into a big long tirade about how Yeardley Smith was actually your mom, and Hank Azaria was the devil, you got rewarded with boobs! Also booze! Also c-section scars!
I get that, in your dream, I have NO WAY of knowing how green the grass was - like I know, right? You keep telling me that I don't understand, could not possibly understand, will never ever know, how green the grass was, and how that greenness spread out to everything, the trees, the mushrooms, the skyscrapers, the people, until YOU were at ONE with GREEN!
Then you woke up and your dignity was gone.
If I can't ever possibly know, don't tell me. Here's an idea: maybe the green symbolizes that you are a self-absorbed asshole, ever think of that? And maybe the world turned green because they were "moving on to greener pastures" than the stinking rectal void of your non-personality!
I think the only thing worse than hearing someone else's dream is (again, I'm not perfect - I do commit that most egregious error of dream-babble) having your dream "analyzed."
It doesn't matter if this is some sort of professional analyst, snake-oil selling new-age dream-catcher hippy, or just some chick from psych 101 you're trying to nail by telling her that you dreamed about her but "totally not in that way."
By the way, what are you even taking psych 101 for? Psychology is what strippers major in before dropping out to support their stripping habit. The narrowing gap between psychology, psychiatry, and neurobiology means that the discipline is more and more about the chemistry of the brain and the influence of society on identity than it is "figuring out, like, how people think" or learning why Uncle Rufus wouldn't stop hugging you even after you asked him to stop. If you look at your course catalog you'll see that psych courses go over 200, but if you show up at the room? No one's there. No one's there.
So you get this Cockamamie interpretation about how "wow, maybe the tunnel is like your fears, and like, the train is your ego? Or is it the superego? I always get confused" or like "Hmm, it seems your chakras are out of Googi-googi, so buy a crystal and read this book."
Dreams are like a really bad movie. Just like Megaforce, you go through it, you feel weird, and then you try to clean up your sheets and make some meaning out of it. But like those sheets, and that copy of Megaforce, you should keep it to yourself.
EVERYONE does this, and I'm no exception, but I'm acknowledging today that this is a stupid and boring thing to do. Hi, my name is Vytautas Malesh and I have a problem: but first I'm going to tell you about last night. Okay, I was running away from this guy, and like, I couldn't see his face, because like everything was black, like, super black, and like I had this sword, but it wasn't a sword, it was like a rubber ducky...
If you feel the need to bore someone with your stupid dream, the best thing you can do is keep it short.
You: I had this crazy dream last night.
Your friend: Oh? (Eye rolling)
You: Yeah, I got pinned to the sidewalk and tickled by the cast of Herman's Head.
Your friend: (with the patience of a saint) Then what happened?
You: That's pretty much the upshot.
Your friend: Awesome - let's go to the titty bar.
See? The reward for keeping it short was disproportionately high in this totally real example because your friend knows how stupid and boring your dreams are going to be. When you did not go into a big long tirade about how Yeardley Smith was actually your mom, and Hank Azaria was the devil, you got rewarded with boobs! Also booze! Also c-section scars!
I get that, in your dream, I have NO WAY of knowing how green the grass was - like I know, right? You keep telling me that I don't understand, could not possibly understand, will never ever know, how green the grass was, and how that greenness spread out to everything, the trees, the mushrooms, the skyscrapers, the people, until YOU were at ONE with GREEN!
Then you woke up and your dignity was gone.
If I can't ever possibly know, don't tell me. Here's an idea: maybe the green symbolizes that you are a self-absorbed asshole, ever think of that? And maybe the world turned green because they were "moving on to greener pastures" than the stinking rectal void of your non-personality!
I think the only thing worse than hearing someone else's dream is (again, I'm not perfect - I do commit that most egregious error of dream-babble) having your dream "analyzed."
It doesn't matter if this is some sort of professional analyst, snake-oil selling new-age dream-catcher hippy, or just some chick from psych 101 you're trying to nail by telling her that you dreamed about her but "totally not in that way."
By the way, what are you even taking psych 101 for? Psychology is what strippers major in before dropping out to support their stripping habit. The narrowing gap between psychology, psychiatry, and neurobiology means that the discipline is more and more about the chemistry of the brain and the influence of society on identity than it is "figuring out, like, how people think" or learning why Uncle Rufus wouldn't stop hugging you even after you asked him to stop. If you look at your course catalog you'll see that psych courses go over 200, but if you show up at the room? No one's there. No one's there.
So you get this Cockamamie interpretation about how "wow, maybe the tunnel is like your fears, and like, the train is your ego? Or is it the superego? I always get confused" or like "Hmm, it seems your chakras are out of Googi-googi, so buy a crystal and read this book."
Dreams are like a really bad movie. Just like Megaforce, you go through it, you feel weird, and then you try to clean up your sheets and make some meaning out of it. But like those sheets, and that copy of Megaforce, you should keep it to yourself.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Unsolicited Advice for New Writers from Someone Unqualified to Give It, Volume 11 - A Galaxy Far, Far Away
Having already gone on concerning character, plot, and narration, I now only have dialogue, theme, and setting to go before I have to write about something you couldn't learn from a book, not that learning writing from a book does you much good anyway, but I digress.
This weekend as I celebrated my birthday with martini after martini after martini, I had occasion to sit and watch all three Lord of the Rings movies in a row. The movies are just great, even if the CG is starting to show its age, and the books are something I come back to every couple of years.
The tone of the books tends towards a sort of turgid grandiloquence - they read like a mix between the bible and a harlequin romance, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. In going for the Eddas, Tolkien hits a slightly prosier note and winds up reading like a really rich translation of himself. Of course he throws in lots of ballads and skalds, sagas and songs which, as they are almost all translated from languages long lost and forgotten gives him a great deal of leeway in flubbing meter, rhyme, and alliteration.
But it's worth noting that Tolkien actually wrote many of those poems in those original languages - in this case he really was a translation of himself: he would write a poem in Elvish, cut out the snippets that might make it down through the years, translate them to English (for our purposes,"the common speech"), and then go so far as to organically morph an old history into a legend and a legend into a myth.
The word organic is key here, because if Tolkien was aware of anything, it was the influence of words on reality and vice versa. He knew how events could become muddied over time, but not because the recollection magically goes away like socks in the dryer: someone actually had to go and forget the histories. Real people had to go do something else and forget about the One Ring, which brings us to the point of this post:
The setting is the story. Setting brings context to events and verisimilitude to the plot. It is within the confines of setting that characters come together and know each other, and likewise it is within those same limits that they act. Setting creates mood and steers development, and ultimately any story is bound to it's own time and place.
Where would John Cheever be without the suburbs? Hemingway without Spain? Flannery O'Connor without the South? James Joyce without Dublin? Paul Auster without New York?
Ad Infinitum.
The immediate contrary question becomes: what about the timeless classics that keep getting reinvented? I would argue that plots keep getting recycled, yes, and characters themselves become archetypal once sufficiently exposed, but in the case of both, the plot and the characters are re-adapted to their new setting - for evidence, one need only compare Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to the 1996 film adaptation - the plot and characters are neatly transplanted, but the stories become distinctly different.
Of course, transferring a narrative from Italy to SoCal is an example of picking some pretty low-hanging fruit. Put that story in the middle of, say, Saskatchewan and you've really got something - again, I digress.
A critic whose name I never remember said of Star Wars that it was the first vision of the future to look like it had a past, and that's really what setting is all about: cognizance of the world around the characters, knowing that no matter how much you come down down on the side of nature, it is the environment that nurtured these people. To paraphrase DesCartes, the characters cannot know anything they've not personally experienced, and that experience comes from their setting.
(This is also one of many, many places where the Star Wars prequel movies went wrong - everything looks new, everyone acts like they just got there, not enough blue milk - again, I digress)
It is the setting that captures the events as they unfold: the bodies left behind, the witnessing passers-by, the poet immortalizing deeds in song all come from the same world as the characters. The writer is best served by living in that environment himself: That doesn't rule out imagined worlds at all; in fact, I think it encourages them - the writer must immerse himself in the culture, the geography, the sights, the smells, the food, the language, the flora, the fauna, the entirety of the place, take it in, and color the experience of the story through that lens.
Why do people always tell you to go to Paris? Why do they always tell you to go to Amsterdam, brah? 'cause like in Amsterdam brah? Everything is like legal brah, it's crazy! They tell you that you have to go there to have the experience, to explore that constructed region of the world, to hear its stories.
Locations have their own connotations. Everyone wants to write a New York story because it immediately pulls something to the fore of their minds: skyscrapers, subways, immigrants, whatever, and I don't blame them - New York is a pretty snazzy place.
But the New York many new writers want to write about just doesn't exist. Times Square is Disney World, Central Park is where yuppies walk their dogs, Brooklyn is where hipsters go to spend their parent's money. The old New York is just that: old. Any story set in old New York is immediately dating itself, which isn't necessarily bad - but the author who has his character pull out an iPhone in a smoke-filled tranny hang out on West 42nd should really be paying more attention.
The best thing a writer can do is to start small, and look in his own back yard. You live in Podunk, Iowa? Write a story set in Podunk, Iowa. You live in Los Angeles? Write a story set in Bell Gardens or Lynwood. Find out little details about the piece-of-shit place you live: Who's the mayor? When was it founded? Who supplies the water and electricity? How many cops? Just by going through the trouble of learning these basic facts, a writer often finds a story. Every street corner has a story if you know how to read it.
This weekend as I celebrated my birthday with martini after martini after martini, I had occasion to sit and watch all three Lord of the Rings movies in a row. The movies are just great, even if the CG is starting to show its age, and the books are something I come back to every couple of years.
The tone of the books tends towards a sort of turgid grandiloquence - they read like a mix between the bible and a harlequin romance, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. In going for the Eddas, Tolkien hits a slightly prosier note and winds up reading like a really rich translation of himself. Of course he throws in lots of ballads and skalds, sagas and songs which, as they are almost all translated from languages long lost and forgotten gives him a great deal of leeway in flubbing meter, rhyme, and alliteration.
But it's worth noting that Tolkien actually wrote many of those poems in those original languages - in this case he really was a translation of himself: he would write a poem in Elvish, cut out the snippets that might make it down through the years, translate them to English (for our purposes,"the common speech"), and then go so far as to organically morph an old history into a legend and a legend into a myth.
The word organic is key here, because if Tolkien was aware of anything, it was the influence of words on reality and vice versa. He knew how events could become muddied over time, but not because the recollection magically goes away like socks in the dryer: someone actually had to go and forget the histories. Real people had to go do something else and forget about the One Ring, which brings us to the point of this post:
The setting is the story. Setting brings context to events and verisimilitude to the plot. It is within the confines of setting that characters come together and know each other, and likewise it is within those same limits that they act. Setting creates mood and steers development, and ultimately any story is bound to it's own time and place.
Where would John Cheever be without the suburbs? Hemingway without Spain? Flannery O'Connor without the South? James Joyce without Dublin? Paul Auster without New York?
Ad Infinitum.
The immediate contrary question becomes: what about the timeless classics that keep getting reinvented? I would argue that plots keep getting recycled, yes, and characters themselves become archetypal once sufficiently exposed, but in the case of both, the plot and the characters are re-adapted to their new setting - for evidence, one need only compare Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to the 1996 film adaptation - the plot and characters are neatly transplanted, but the stories become distinctly different.
Of course, transferring a narrative from Italy to SoCal is an example of picking some pretty low-hanging fruit. Put that story in the middle of, say, Saskatchewan and you've really got something - again, I digress.
A critic whose name I never remember said of Star Wars that it was the first vision of the future to look like it had a past, and that's really what setting is all about: cognizance of the world around the characters, knowing that no matter how much you come down down on the side of nature, it is the environment that nurtured these people. To paraphrase DesCartes, the characters cannot know anything they've not personally experienced, and that experience comes from their setting.
(This is also one of many, many places where the Star Wars prequel movies went wrong - everything looks new, everyone acts like they just got there, not enough blue milk - again, I digress)
It is the setting that captures the events as they unfold: the bodies left behind, the witnessing passers-by, the poet immortalizing deeds in song all come from the same world as the characters. The writer is best served by living in that environment himself: That doesn't rule out imagined worlds at all; in fact, I think it encourages them - the writer must immerse himself in the culture, the geography, the sights, the smells, the food, the language, the flora, the fauna, the entirety of the place, take it in, and color the experience of the story through that lens.
Why do people always tell you to go to Paris? Why do they always tell you to go to Amsterdam, brah? 'cause like in Amsterdam brah? Everything is like legal brah, it's crazy! They tell you that you have to go there to have the experience, to explore that constructed region of the world, to hear its stories.
Locations have their own connotations. Everyone wants to write a New York story because it immediately pulls something to the fore of their minds: skyscrapers, subways, immigrants, whatever, and I don't blame them - New York is a pretty snazzy place.
But the New York many new writers want to write about just doesn't exist. Times Square is Disney World, Central Park is where yuppies walk their dogs, Brooklyn is where hipsters go to spend their parent's money. The old New York is just that: old. Any story set in old New York is immediately dating itself, which isn't necessarily bad - but the author who has his character pull out an iPhone in a smoke-filled tranny hang out on West 42nd should really be paying more attention.
The best thing a writer can do is to start small, and look in his own back yard. You live in Podunk, Iowa? Write a story set in Podunk, Iowa. You live in Los Angeles? Write a story set in Bell Gardens or Lynwood. Find out little details about the piece-of-shit place you live: Who's the mayor? When was it founded? Who supplies the water and electricity? How many cops? Just by going through the trouble of learning these basic facts, a writer often finds a story. Every street corner has a story if you know how to read it.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Look at Me, I'm Thirty-Three
I don't know if this blog has a birthday announcement or what, but today is my 33rd birthday, the start of my so-called "Jesus Year." It's not particularly significant unless you are a tinfoil hat crazy that wants to point out that:
A) I'm 33 years old.
B) There are 33 degrees of Masonry
C) JFK was killed in Dallas, on the 33rd Parallel.
D) I'm probably being "brought up" as a Mason this year.
E) 33 + 33 = 66
F) 66 with another 6 at the end is equal to 666!
Circles within circles, my friends.
As I always say on my birthday, it really just means I'm one year closer to the big dirt nap. Some people think that's depressing, but it reminds me that in the end, we're all going to the same place and that everything else is just little stuff.
Still, I sometimes look at birthdays and try to think of what I've accomplished. I do occasionally feel like I come up short. This year I set the mark very, very high - so high that I still feel good about only missing any goals having to do with financial security. Of course, that's kind of a big one for most people, but as far as money goes I've been down so long it looks like up to me.
But F all that in the A. My 32nd year, 2009, was the year I got my MFA. It was the year I got published (twice!) and the year I started my editing career. It was the year I moved back to Detroit!
Knock on wood and all that nonsense, but 33 is going to be hot. I'm back in the D, making money, published - I'm cutting this post short so that I can get my work done and go have a three martini lunch.
Now, keep it real:
A) I'm 33 years old.
B) There are 33 degrees of Masonry
C) JFK was killed in Dallas, on the 33rd Parallel.
D) I'm probably being "brought up" as a Mason this year.
E) 33 + 33 = 66
F) 66 with another 6 at the end is equal to 666!
Circles within circles, my friends.
As I always say on my birthday, it really just means I'm one year closer to the big dirt nap. Some people think that's depressing, but it reminds me that in the end, we're all going to the same place and that everything else is just little stuff.
Still, I sometimes look at birthdays and try to think of what I've accomplished. I do occasionally feel like I come up short. This year I set the mark very, very high - so high that I still feel good about only missing any goals having to do with financial security. Of course, that's kind of a big one for most people, but as far as money goes I've been down so long it looks like up to me.
But F all that in the A. My 32nd year, 2009, was the year I got my MFA. It was the year I got published (twice!) and the year I started my editing career. It was the year I moved back to Detroit!
Knock on wood and all that nonsense, but 33 is going to be hot. I'm back in the D, making money, published - I'm cutting this post short so that I can get my work done and go have a three martini lunch.
Now, keep it real:
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
I listened to Special Ed and D-Nice as I Wrote This.
All things being equal, I've got nothing against crazy people. So long as you're not the "break into my house and shoot me in the face while I'm sleeping" sort of crazy, I say live and let live.
However, I don't think that every crazy person in the world is some sort of divine sybil here to share with us a deep and secret truth if only, yes, if only we could get past our silly prejudices of speaking in coherent sentences and not smelling like vinegar and stale ramen noodles.
In the interest of full disclosure, I'm talking about a certain kind of crazy person: the (probably homeless) neighborhood crazy. I mean, your mom is like crazy crazy: you know how she'd be standing in the kitchen staring out the window and you'd be all like "mom, mom I'm hungry? Mom, can I have lunch? Mom?" and she wouldn't answer, but just keep staring out that window? Or how your little brother doesn't like to be touched, and that one time in school an older kid was like "I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you," but then actually touched him and your brother went apeshit and now he lives in one of those "alternative education safe houses" where everyone speaks in really soft voices and there are bunnies drawn on all the walls? Not like that.
Last night I go into Rite-Aid and there's this guy there: Black, 45-50, heavy-set build. He was wearing a leather jacket and black jeans, and he had this giant security chain around his neck - the thick-linked steel kind, like you go to the hardware store and you go "man, what would I do with a chain that big? Like, what do I care about that much that I would need a chain that would take an hour to saw through?" The chain was secured with a padlock. I thought he was maybe the security guard, but then I noticed that he was yelling out the names of '80's rap and adult contemporary artists.
Me to floor person: I need a replacement head for the Norelco Pube-Buster 9000?
Floor person: I'm deaf.
Chain Dude: CHAKA KHAN!
Me to floor person: Okay, thank you.
Floor person: (shrugs)
Chain Dude: KOOL MOE DEE!
Floor person: Here's a pen
Me: (writing)
Floor person: (reads note, shrugs)
Chain dude: AL B. SURE!
Me: Thank you again.
Floor person: (shrugs) I'm deaf
Chain dude: KURTIS BLOW!
He had an extensive play list. I heard every name in hip hop and R&B from the early "true school" all the way through New Jack Swing, but nothing gangstah. He was a classy crazy, keeping it real.
There's just something about these people hovering at the fringe of society, finding one place to frequent and one routine in which to fall. There was the lady* who used to hang out in front of Giorgio's pizza in East Lansing saying "It's my BIRTHDAY!" over and over again, the wheel-chaired bird woman of Munich who wheeled out to the middle of Marienplatz to pet pigeons, Ernie the can man (R.I.P. Ernie - mourn ya till I join ya). These are the people whom one might say have gone mad in the Victorian sense: you could talk about them being autistic, or bipolar, or schizophrenic, but there's something about shoving a pill in one of these people's mouths and making them "alright" that takes some of the color out of the world.
Of course, YOU can put the pill in their mouths. I don't want rabies.
Chain dude seemed a little unhappy about the current state of hip-hop, bird lady was upset she could only hold one bird at a time, and one day the lady at Giorgio's is going to be really upset when she figures out that, no it is NOT her birthday, but mostly they seem to just take things one day at a time. No, these people probably can't hold jobs. They can't care for themselves. Many of them either collect welfare or live in some sort of state-sponsored assisted living home. With medication, they could ostensibly become normalized and functioning members of society, filing papers, punching clocks, and generally shoveling shit.
But until they hurt someone, or prove to be a danger to themselves, you can't force someone to take medicine. I have very little doubt that all of these people were offered perfectly good drugs at one point or another, and then either turned them down or were unable to afford them, preferring either to live in their fractured solipsistic worlds or to keep the last of their money for food and shelter, or, you know, giant chains.
They hang out at the places we go: the store, the mall, the bank, the pharmacy, reminding us that we're all just one traumatic incident - one car accident, layoff, or protracted conscription - from climbing up a lightpole naked with our underpants on our heads**.
I, for one, welcome our new paranoid schizophrenic overlords. In a world where the dominant cultural paradigm fails the average person ever faster, why not just wig out? The rules of society are breaking - people buy things only to walk away from them, we start families and then break them up a few years later. We live nebulous and solipsistic lives - they're just doing it better than us.
*Stop calling all crazy women "Crazy Mary." I don't know who did it first, and I don't care. Stop. It's not original. Once Pearl Jam writes a song about a person by that name, it's completely over. Yes, this means you should also stop naming children Jeremy. I know you think it's a great thing to call a crazy person because you're all like "Oh wow, Mary was like the mother of Jesus, and like, Jesus was god, so like if god's Mom is crazy, that's like whoa, my whole world is upside-down!" If your favorite band is Creed, that's really deep. If you've actually read a book that doesn't start with the words "Chicken Soup" and end with "soul," knock it off.
**True story - this was a guy that my mom was dating back in like 88 or 89. He was nice enough, liked folk music, had this little efficiency apartment, then one day he went off his meds and did the aforementioned feat of urban scaling.
However, I don't think that every crazy person in the world is some sort of divine sybil here to share with us a deep and secret truth if only, yes, if only we could get past our silly prejudices of speaking in coherent sentences and not smelling like vinegar and stale ramen noodles.
In the interest of full disclosure, I'm talking about a certain kind of crazy person: the (probably homeless) neighborhood crazy. I mean, your mom is like crazy crazy: you know how she'd be standing in the kitchen staring out the window and you'd be all like "mom, mom I'm hungry? Mom, can I have lunch? Mom?" and she wouldn't answer, but just keep staring out that window? Or how your little brother doesn't like to be touched, and that one time in school an older kid was like "I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you," but then actually touched him and your brother went apeshit and now he lives in one of those "alternative education safe houses" where everyone speaks in really soft voices and there are bunnies drawn on all the walls? Not like that.
Last night I go into Rite-Aid and there's this guy there: Black, 45-50, heavy-set build. He was wearing a leather jacket and black jeans, and he had this giant security chain around his neck - the thick-linked steel kind, like you go to the hardware store and you go "man, what would I do with a chain that big? Like, what do I care about that much that I would need a chain that would take an hour to saw through?" The chain was secured with a padlock. I thought he was maybe the security guard, but then I noticed that he was yelling out the names of '80's rap and adult contemporary artists.
Me to floor person: I need a replacement head for the Norelco Pube-Buster 9000?
Floor person: I'm deaf.
Chain Dude: CHAKA KHAN!
Me to floor person: Okay, thank you.
Floor person: (shrugs)
Chain Dude: KOOL MOE DEE!
Floor person: Here's a pen
Me: (writing)
Floor person: (reads note, shrugs)
Chain dude: AL B. SURE!
Me: Thank you again.
Floor person: (shrugs) I'm deaf
Chain dude: KURTIS BLOW!
He had an extensive play list. I heard every name in hip hop and R&B from the early "true school" all the way through New Jack Swing, but nothing gangstah. He was a classy crazy, keeping it real.
There's just something about these people hovering at the fringe of society, finding one place to frequent and one routine in which to fall. There was the lady* who used to hang out in front of Giorgio's pizza in East Lansing saying "It's my BIRTHDAY!" over and over again, the wheel-chaired bird woman of Munich who wheeled out to the middle of Marienplatz to pet pigeons, Ernie the can man (R.I.P. Ernie - mourn ya till I join ya). These are the people whom one might say have gone mad in the Victorian sense: you could talk about them being autistic, or bipolar, or schizophrenic, but there's something about shoving a pill in one of these people's mouths and making them "alright" that takes some of the color out of the world.
Of course, YOU can put the pill in their mouths. I don't want rabies.
Chain dude seemed a little unhappy about the current state of hip-hop, bird lady was upset she could only hold one bird at a time, and one day the lady at Giorgio's is going to be really upset when she figures out that, no it is NOT her birthday, but mostly they seem to just take things one day at a time. No, these people probably can't hold jobs. They can't care for themselves. Many of them either collect welfare or live in some sort of state-sponsored assisted living home. With medication, they could ostensibly become normalized and functioning members of society, filing papers, punching clocks, and generally shoveling shit.
But until they hurt someone, or prove to be a danger to themselves, you can't force someone to take medicine. I have very little doubt that all of these people were offered perfectly good drugs at one point or another, and then either turned them down or were unable to afford them, preferring either to live in their fractured solipsistic worlds or to keep the last of their money for food and shelter, or, you know, giant chains.
They hang out at the places we go: the store, the mall, the bank, the pharmacy, reminding us that we're all just one traumatic incident - one car accident, layoff, or protracted conscription - from climbing up a lightpole naked with our underpants on our heads**.
I, for one, welcome our new paranoid schizophrenic overlords. In a world where the dominant cultural paradigm fails the average person ever faster, why not just wig out? The rules of society are breaking - people buy things only to walk away from them, we start families and then break them up a few years later. We live nebulous and solipsistic lives - they're just doing it better than us.
*Stop calling all crazy women "Crazy Mary." I don't know who did it first, and I don't care. Stop. It's not original. Once Pearl Jam writes a song about a person by that name, it's completely over. Yes, this means you should also stop naming children Jeremy. I know you think it's a great thing to call a crazy person because you're all like "Oh wow, Mary was like the mother of Jesus, and like, Jesus was god, so like if god's Mom is crazy, that's like whoa, my whole world is upside-down!" If your favorite band is Creed, that's really deep. If you've actually read a book that doesn't start with the words "Chicken Soup" and end with "soul," knock it off.
**True story - this was a guy that my mom was dating back in like 88 or 89. He was nice enough, liked folk music, had this little efficiency apartment, then one day he went off his meds and did the aforementioned feat of urban scaling.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Unsolicited Advice for New Writers from Someone Unqualfied to Give It, Volume 10: Somewhat of a Voice
Two weeks ago I started addressing elements of fiction writing one-by-one. I knew I wanted to write about plot and character, but I didn't exactly mean to turn this blog into a tutorial.
Then again, it seems like I have, so everyone can suck it.
Having written about plot and character, that leaves me with theme, setting, narration, and narration's flirtatious sibling dialogue still to discuss, at least so far as I can tell. I mean, I'm sure there's more to fiction writing than just six elements, otherwise you would be better at it, right?
Well actually there aren't. These elements sort of shift around (and as I need more material I will doubtless start exploring each of these elements in even closer detail until eventually I just go crazy and start repeating myself myself myself myself myself). Some sources list conflict as separate from plot, some sources lump dialogue in with Narration, and some call narration voice for some reason or another, but I've got six elements. That's the way it is, and I like it.
In terms of narration, stories usually break into three categories: stories, which are good; mumbles, which are bad; and ramblings, which are worse.
Stories have concise verbiage that is rich and evocative. They have meaningful words that sound good: in a real story, you don't just hit somebody - that's lame! You pummel him, you pulverize his face, you knock him into next Tuesday! The author of a proper story has spent time and energy hunting for the right word, and now having found it he makes use of every part, letting nothing in it go to waste, living in a wigwam and roaming the plains and selling their land for colorful glass beads. Some of that seems to have gotten away from me.
Then, along comes some mumbler who thinks he is being concise when he is in fact being at best terse. In their most inspired moments, mumblers think they are Raymond Carver - raw minimalists who dip their pens in the stingiest ink to scratch out threadbare words that scratch and scourge the consciousness. Some amazing lines come out of skinny and simple language: to be or not to be; upon all the living and the dead; nada y naday pues nada; Caddy smells like trees!
But this is not what a mumbler does. A mumbler, unused to reading and writing alike, is unable to express any but the most rudimentary thoughts and actions with the simplest language. No, a real mumbler is no minimalist, but is a never-will, a can't-do, someone who fancies himself a writer but does not or will not practice putting ink to pulp. It is, I think, a misplaced sense of entitlement which allows mumblers to gird up their loins and join a writing workshop in the first place, and once there to slowly slip unnoticed away, or (and this is a rare treat) to learn to put some fat on those typewritten bones.
Because for all the shortcomings of a mumbler, it is easier to teach someone to add than to teach someone to take away. The spectral opposite of the mumbler, rambler thinks he has already learned everything there is to learn, and he and his thesaurus will not take "no" for an answer. Like the worst of the Victorians, he will never use one word to say what he could with forty. Every word is a precious gift to the eyes of his reader, and every suggestion or criticism is a heresy.
And to be clear, I do not mean the gorgeous but oppressively lengthy (by design, mind you) prose of Nabokov or Faulkner. The tangled stuff that wraps around the reader like a gnarled anchor rope and pulls him down deep into the primordial and black thoughts of the author or the crushing despair of the fictive time and place. No, I'm talking about the words that someone writes so that they can read them back later and get a chubby over their own supposed grandiloquence.
In other words, these people are wordy as all hell, and nothing exemplifies the rambler's wordiness more than one of my least favorite words: somewhat.
"She was somewhat proud, somewhat beautiful, and somewhat intelligent," writes the rambler about a fantasy girl he has only somewhat actualized. Is she proud? Is she beautiful? Is she intelligent? No. She's only somewhat anything - like Mr. Rochester's criticism of Jane Eyre (and Victorian women generally) that she only plays "a little" piano, only embroiders "a little" and so on.
"The day was somewhat cold." Hey, you're somewhat of a shitty writer. When it comes to narration, say exactly what you mean to say, nothing more and nothing less. "Somewhat" is a word that people use in conversation as a dodge, as a way of saying something noncommittally - like telling your boss that you were "somewhat" offended by what he said about your wife, or telling your wife yourself that she's gotten "somewhat fat." It's a mincing, weak little word for half-formed little ideas and if you open one of your stories in word do a find -> replace all on "somewhat" with nothing, I all but guarantee your writing will improve.
(In the interest of fairness, it's not like "somewhat" doesn't have its uses, and it's not like that 's the only word one should avoid like the plague. In the interest of brevity, and of having something for later, that will wait for another time).
Then again, it seems like I have, so everyone can suck it.
Having written about plot and character, that leaves me with theme, setting, narration, and narration's flirtatious sibling dialogue still to discuss, at least so far as I can tell. I mean, I'm sure there's more to fiction writing than just six elements, otherwise you would be better at it, right?
Well actually there aren't. These elements sort of shift around (and as I need more material I will doubtless start exploring each of these elements in even closer detail until eventually I just go crazy and start repeating myself myself myself myself myself). Some sources list conflict as separate from plot, some sources lump dialogue in with Narration, and some call narration voice for some reason or another, but I've got six elements. That's the way it is, and I like it.
In terms of narration, stories usually break into three categories: stories, which are good; mumbles, which are bad; and ramblings, which are worse.
Stories have concise verbiage that is rich and evocative. They have meaningful words that sound good: in a real story, you don't just hit somebody - that's lame! You pummel him, you pulverize his face, you knock him into next Tuesday! The author of a proper story has spent time and energy hunting for the right word, and now having found it he makes use of every part, letting nothing in it go to waste, living in a wigwam and roaming the plains and selling their land for colorful glass beads. Some of that seems to have gotten away from me.
Then, along comes some mumbler who thinks he is being concise when he is in fact being at best terse. In their most inspired moments, mumblers think they are Raymond Carver - raw minimalists who dip their pens in the stingiest ink to scratch out threadbare words that scratch and scourge the consciousness. Some amazing lines come out of skinny and simple language: to be or not to be; upon all the living and the dead; nada y naday pues nada; Caddy smells like trees!
But this is not what a mumbler does. A mumbler, unused to reading and writing alike, is unable to express any but the most rudimentary thoughts and actions with the simplest language. No, a real mumbler is no minimalist, but is a never-will, a can't-do, someone who fancies himself a writer but does not or will not practice putting ink to pulp. It is, I think, a misplaced sense of entitlement which allows mumblers to gird up their loins and join a writing workshop in the first place, and once there to slowly slip unnoticed away, or (and this is a rare treat) to learn to put some fat on those typewritten bones.
Because for all the shortcomings of a mumbler, it is easier to teach someone to add than to teach someone to take away. The spectral opposite of the mumbler, rambler thinks he has already learned everything there is to learn, and he and his thesaurus will not take "no" for an answer. Like the worst of the Victorians, he will never use one word to say what he could with forty. Every word is a precious gift to the eyes of his reader, and every suggestion or criticism is a heresy.
And to be clear, I do not mean the gorgeous but oppressively lengthy (by design, mind you) prose of Nabokov or Faulkner. The tangled stuff that wraps around the reader like a gnarled anchor rope and pulls him down deep into the primordial and black thoughts of the author or the crushing despair of the fictive time and place. No, I'm talking about the words that someone writes so that they can read them back later and get a chubby over their own supposed grandiloquence.
In other words, these people are wordy as all hell, and nothing exemplifies the rambler's wordiness more than one of my least favorite words: somewhat.
"She was somewhat proud, somewhat beautiful, and somewhat intelligent," writes the rambler about a fantasy girl he has only somewhat actualized. Is she proud? Is she beautiful? Is she intelligent? No. She's only somewhat anything - like Mr. Rochester's criticism of Jane Eyre (and Victorian women generally) that she only plays "a little" piano, only embroiders "a little" and so on.
"The day was somewhat cold." Hey, you're somewhat of a shitty writer. When it comes to narration, say exactly what you mean to say, nothing more and nothing less. "Somewhat" is a word that people use in conversation as a dodge, as a way of saying something noncommittally - like telling your boss that you were "somewhat" offended by what he said about your wife, or telling your wife yourself that she's gotten "somewhat fat." It's a mincing, weak little word for half-formed little ideas and if you open one of your stories in word do a find -> replace all on "somewhat" with nothing, I all but guarantee your writing will improve.
(In the interest of fairness, it's not like "somewhat" doesn't have its uses, and it's not like that 's the only word one should avoid like the plague. In the interest of brevity, and of having something for later, that will wait for another time).
Friday, December 4, 2009
Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow
Yesterday was Michigan's first snowfall of the year, and I'm super ultra excited. I mean, I've seen snow before, but I've been living in the desert for three years. Then again, I've been back to Michigan plenty of times, and I've certainly seen snow on a goodly percentage of those trips, so what's the big deal?
A lot of my writing comes from the sense that it's a rainy-day activity. I don't know why, I don't know what started it. I think a part of it may have been living with my dad who wanted my sister and I to go outside and enjoy the fresh air when it was sunny out, but who found it perfectly acceptable that we write and draw if the weather was bad.
I guess it's lucky for my writing career that Michigan weather is usually bad with a 90% chance of terrible moving in by evening.
But I love this terrible weather. I'm built for the cold - very dense and thick-blooded, and a nip in the air doesn't hurt me much. And, as I was saying, there's the association for me between writing and cold, writing and wet, writing and gloom.
It sounds like romantic nappy-dappy crap to say, but I really can't articulate where writing "comes from," as in "OMG how do you think of something to write about?" It's about the closest thing I have to a sense of spirituality. The "place" itself is primordial, dark, savage - Plato's cave, filled with dinosaurs.
So now comes winter. Is it coincidence that I think of "...the winter of our discontent" (poorly paraphrased, as is the parlance of our times, to convey gloom - the opposite of the speech's intent)? There's something about the stillness, the dormancy, the short days and treacherous nights that excites my imagination.
In short, on a day like today I say again that it's damn good to be back.
I left Rosie O'Grady's last night, where I unwound with a couple of cheap domestic drafts after a hard-lost game of dodgeball, and all around me were those bitter icey snowflakes, the big and jagged ones; like rain hard-frozen and angry at the change. They hit the ground, they turned to slush, and then they melted away as fast as they fell. By morning all that remained were some frozen puddles in the gutters and a fragile frost on the ground.
And now my only worry is every other asshole in the world, which brings us to the point of this post:
Michigan people, how long have you lived here? What the fuck is wrong with you that every time the snow falls you freak the fuck out and forget how to drive?
EVERY winter I see pickup trucks crashed into snow banks. Every winter I see little four-speed imports stalled out on freeway turns because the owner flinched and didn't keep the vehicle's speed high enough to avoid sliding into the ditch. Every winter people either start driving about a bajillion miles over the speed limit as if they could dodge the snowflakes, or drive at half speed thinking that it's all their poor little car can handle.
OR my personal favorite, and I know this is cliche, but: Get off your goddamned phone when you're driving eighty miles an hour in a blizzard! Hey, it's awesome that you can multitask - you're going to multitask everyone around you into an early grave just so you can drunk text some bar skank that you think will put out so long as you pay her enough attention.
Ten and two, douchebags. Remember: the speed limit is a recommended speed based on tests done under adverse conditions: that goes for the minimum limit too. Pay attention to the road, drive defensively, and know the limitations of your car. It's not hard people: if I can do it drunk, I'm sure you can handle it too.
A lot of my writing comes from the sense that it's a rainy-day activity. I don't know why, I don't know what started it. I think a part of it may have been living with my dad who wanted my sister and I to go outside and enjoy the fresh air when it was sunny out, but who found it perfectly acceptable that we write and draw if the weather was bad.
I guess it's lucky for my writing career that Michigan weather is usually bad with a 90% chance of terrible moving in by evening.
But I love this terrible weather. I'm built for the cold - very dense and thick-blooded, and a nip in the air doesn't hurt me much. And, as I was saying, there's the association for me between writing and cold, writing and wet, writing and gloom.
It sounds like romantic nappy-dappy crap to say, but I really can't articulate where writing "comes from," as in "OMG how do you think of something to write about?" It's about the closest thing I have to a sense of spirituality. The "place" itself is primordial, dark, savage - Plato's cave, filled with dinosaurs.
So now comes winter. Is it coincidence that I think of "...the winter of our discontent" (poorly paraphrased, as is the parlance of our times, to convey gloom - the opposite of the speech's intent)? There's something about the stillness, the dormancy, the short days and treacherous nights that excites my imagination.
In short, on a day like today I say again that it's damn good to be back.
I left Rosie O'Grady's last night, where I unwound with a couple of cheap domestic drafts after a hard-lost game of dodgeball, and all around me were those bitter icey snowflakes, the big and jagged ones; like rain hard-frozen and angry at the change. They hit the ground, they turned to slush, and then they melted away as fast as they fell. By morning all that remained were some frozen puddles in the gutters and a fragile frost on the ground.
And now my only worry is every other asshole in the world, which brings us to the point of this post:
Michigan people, how long have you lived here? What the fuck is wrong with you that every time the snow falls you freak the fuck out and forget how to drive?
EVERY winter I see pickup trucks crashed into snow banks. Every winter I see little four-speed imports stalled out on freeway turns because the owner flinched and didn't keep the vehicle's speed high enough to avoid sliding into the ditch. Every winter people either start driving about a bajillion miles over the speed limit as if they could dodge the snowflakes, or drive at half speed thinking that it's all their poor little car can handle.
OR my personal favorite, and I know this is cliche, but: Get off your goddamned phone when you're driving eighty miles an hour in a blizzard! Hey, it's awesome that you can multitask - you're going to multitask everyone around you into an early grave just so you can drunk text some bar skank that you think will put out so long as you pay her enough attention.
Ten and two, douchebags. Remember: the speed limit is a recommended speed based on tests done under adverse conditions: that goes for the minimum limit too. Pay attention to the road, drive defensively, and know the limitations of your car. It's not hard people: if I can do it drunk, I'm sure you can handle it too.
Secretary of Waiting in Line
SSS goes up late today, courtesy of the Michigan Secretary of State (that's the DMV for you non-Michigan folks). The whole experience was not so terrible as most would lead you to believe, but I still had to spend my morning finding papers, standing in line, and waiting for the computer to "let" people do things.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
A Committment to Quality
I'm getting to an age where, for one thing, I start to say things like "I'm getting to an age," and for another I am starting to seriously evaluate everything I own which, it must be said, isn't much.
Still, it oftentimes seems like excess. If this sounds familiar, well, I've heard it before too: time to put away childish things and all that business. Among the most intrusive possessions I must count books, war gaming miniatures, and a toy collection.
Why keep these things? Well, it must be said that the books I own are reduced down from a stack several times their number which I kept in Las Vegas. I would conservatively estimate giving away some three hundred books before I moved back to Michigan, and to reduce my collection down to only books with great personal significance or artifact significance (that is, first editions, signed copies, the sort of things that people tell you to hold on to because they might be worth money someday) was a herculean feat of sacrifice.
The wargaming miniatures are at least practical insofar as I do a fair bit of wargaming when time permits. There's a diminishing return in having a large collection, of course - if you buy a miniature to represent, say, the sergeant of the guard in the town of New Phlan and you paint his tunic green, his shield orange, and his sword a gleaming white then naturally he's useless as the sergeant of the guard in the town of Old Nalph as that soldier would wear a blue tunic, a red shield, and a sword of shimmering gold. Regardless, that doesn't stop me from buying new miniatures every time I want to start a new campaign, and naturally forgetting about perfectly usable old miniatures which would be acceptable stand-ins for new heroes and villains.
Still, at least you could say that I'm doing something with them. Furthermore, the better part of them are for specific armies in specific games, and those games require the right miniature for the right army because the companies that make those games are douchenozzles.
Which brings us to the last items that I'm hard pressed to explain owning, even moreso than worn-out T-shirts and underwear with no elastic: my toy collection.
It's not even like I take these things out for display (with the exception of all four original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, none of them are MIB). No, they've been sitting in either a sterilite tub or a busted-up moving box for the last three years. Why bother keeping them at all?
Like a lonely stray cat, little bits of old identity follow me around. It's the same for all of us, naturally - an old shirt we can't throw out, a drink we keep ordering even though we can't stand the hangover, the ballgag an old ex stuffed in your mouth as she rode you around like a horse before leaving you tied up in a downriver basement as she drove away to Chicago never to be seen again outside of America's Most Wanted - all things we acquire when we find them and say "this is it, this is me!"
The problem is that these things don't stay me for long. Even many of the seemingly timeless items of which I'm so fond can be outgrown - what use is my silver cigarette case now that I have largely forgone smoking? Why should I need two hip pocket flasks (one in silver for black, one in brown for brown) if I were to give up hard liquor? Why would I even think that would happen?
In 1988 I was obsessed with Robotech. O-B-S-E-S-S-E-D. For those unfamiliar,it's the story of a spaceship that crossed the galaxy and landed on earth, nearly destroying it, and the subsequent adventures of three generations of earthlings as they try to piece their existence back together. It was a TV show 85 episodes long, cobbled together out of three completely unrelated Japanese series. It was a role playing game using a rather obviously rushed half-completed version of the Palladium system by Detroit's own Kevin Simbieda.
It was of course also a toy line, and I remember sitting on the cigarette-burned second-hand couch in my mom's rented trailer home in Roger's Heights, Michigan, staring at the back of the box for a Swanson Beef Pot Pie which promised that for just three UPC symbols and 4.95 shipping and handling, they would send me one OFFICIAL Robotech Excalibur Destroid toy! I was twelve years old, and I hadn't had a new toy that didnt' come from a gumball machine since Reagan's first term. I wanted it desperately, but at the time 4.95 was simply beyond my reach. That was more change than I could hope to steal or find, and too many beer bottles to pick up (my mom drank 40 ouncers).
My friends down the row, the Godbees, had just about every Robotech toy ever made (excepting the SDF-1) and I was so very, very jealous. They mowed lawns in the summer and then squandered their gains on toys and video games while their mother bought macaroni and cheese with food stamps. The brothers wouldn't have me along on their mowing business, and as we had no mower of our own I was out of luck in terms of payable work that a young kid could do.
Still I coveted those toys and the amazing adventures to be had. I kept playing the role playing game which, while fun and satisfying in its own right, fueled my desire for chinese plastic. Unfortunately, Robotech was introduced in 1983 and even by 1988 it had pretty much run its course. The toys eventually disappeared from retail stores and since Ebay hadn't been invented yet, those that remianed were destroyed or locked up in garages, abandoned, and forgotten.
Then, in 1994, a now mostly forgotten cartoon show called Exosquad rather obviously borrowed some of Robotech's mecha designs. In one of those super ultra rare instances of corporate lawyers getting together and not just ruining something awesome, the makers of Exosquad and the producers of the Robotech toy and cartoon lines got together and - be still my boyish heart - REPRINT MOST OF THE OLD ROBOTECH TOYS!
I was ecstatic - I bought them all (except for the female power armor figure which is just a crappy repaint of the male power armor figure). I not only bought them all, but I bought duplicates. I then went out to collector's meets and bought the stuff that was out of print. I developed a wonderful collection, one that rivalled the Godbee's, and was a culmination of my wanton robophillia.
I bought them, I displayed them, I may in fact have pretended they were shooting at each other over the streets of Macross city, but now they're sitting in a box in my dad's basement and I don't feel I can throw them out.
There's no answer here, no quick fix to my ever present storage problem. Call it human nature, if you must. The things that were me remind me of who I was, good or bad. Old teddy bears, old love letters, card keys from hotel rooms, post cards, toy collections, posters, jackets we've outgrown, books we'll never read again - they follow us around like lonely cats we can't shoe away. They were us, and when we see them, we re-become that old us for just a while; and old me was pretty awesome.
Still, it oftentimes seems like excess. If this sounds familiar, well, I've heard it before too: time to put away childish things and all that business. Among the most intrusive possessions I must count books, war gaming miniatures, and a toy collection.
Why keep these things? Well, it must be said that the books I own are reduced down from a stack several times their number which I kept in Las Vegas. I would conservatively estimate giving away some three hundred books before I moved back to Michigan, and to reduce my collection down to only books with great personal significance or artifact significance (that is, first editions, signed copies, the sort of things that people tell you to hold on to because they might be worth money someday) was a herculean feat of sacrifice.
The wargaming miniatures are at least practical insofar as I do a fair bit of wargaming when time permits. There's a diminishing return in having a large collection, of course - if you buy a miniature to represent, say, the sergeant of the guard in the town of New Phlan and you paint his tunic green, his shield orange, and his sword a gleaming white then naturally he's useless as the sergeant of the guard in the town of Old Nalph as that soldier would wear a blue tunic, a red shield, and a sword of shimmering gold. Regardless, that doesn't stop me from buying new miniatures every time I want to start a new campaign, and naturally forgetting about perfectly usable old miniatures which would be acceptable stand-ins for new heroes and villains.
Still, at least you could say that I'm doing something with them. Furthermore, the better part of them are for specific armies in specific games, and those games require the right miniature for the right army because the companies that make those games are douchenozzles.
Which brings us to the last items that I'm hard pressed to explain owning, even moreso than worn-out T-shirts and underwear with no elastic: my toy collection.
It's not even like I take these things out for display (with the exception of all four original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, none of them are MIB). No, they've been sitting in either a sterilite tub or a busted-up moving box for the last three years. Why bother keeping them at all?
Like a lonely stray cat, little bits of old identity follow me around. It's the same for all of us, naturally - an old shirt we can't throw out, a drink we keep ordering even though we can't stand the hangover, the ballgag an old ex stuffed in your mouth as she rode you around like a horse before leaving you tied up in a downriver basement as she drove away to Chicago never to be seen again outside of America's Most Wanted - all things we acquire when we find them and say "this is it, this is me!"
The problem is that these things don't stay me for long. Even many of the seemingly timeless items of which I'm so fond can be outgrown - what use is my silver cigarette case now that I have largely forgone smoking? Why should I need two hip pocket flasks (one in silver for black, one in brown for brown) if I were to give up hard liquor? Why would I even think that would happen?
In 1988 I was obsessed with Robotech. O-B-S-E-S-S-E-D. For those unfamiliar,it's the story of a spaceship that crossed the galaxy and landed on earth, nearly destroying it, and the subsequent adventures of three generations of earthlings as they try to piece their existence back together. It was a TV show 85 episodes long, cobbled together out of three completely unrelated Japanese series. It was a role playing game using a rather obviously rushed half-completed version of the Palladium system by Detroit's own Kevin Simbieda.
It was of course also a toy line, and I remember sitting on the cigarette-burned second-hand couch in my mom's rented trailer home in Roger's Heights, Michigan, staring at the back of the box for a Swanson Beef Pot Pie which promised that for just three UPC symbols and 4.95 shipping and handling, they would send me one OFFICIAL Robotech Excalibur Destroid toy! I was twelve years old, and I hadn't had a new toy that didnt' come from a gumball machine since Reagan's first term. I wanted it desperately, but at the time 4.95 was simply beyond my reach. That was more change than I could hope to steal or find, and too many beer bottles to pick up (my mom drank 40 ouncers).
My friends down the row, the Godbees, had just about every Robotech toy ever made (excepting the SDF-1) and I was so very, very jealous. They mowed lawns in the summer and then squandered their gains on toys and video games while their mother bought macaroni and cheese with food stamps. The brothers wouldn't have me along on their mowing business, and as we had no mower of our own I was out of luck in terms of payable work that a young kid could do.
Still I coveted those toys and the amazing adventures to be had. I kept playing the role playing game which, while fun and satisfying in its own right, fueled my desire for chinese plastic. Unfortunately, Robotech was introduced in 1983 and even by 1988 it had pretty much run its course. The toys eventually disappeared from retail stores and since Ebay hadn't been invented yet, those that remianed were destroyed or locked up in garages, abandoned, and forgotten.
Then, in 1994, a now mostly forgotten cartoon show called Exosquad rather obviously borrowed some of Robotech's mecha designs. In one of those super ultra rare instances of corporate lawyers getting together and not just ruining something awesome, the makers of Exosquad and the producers of the Robotech toy and cartoon lines got together and - be still my boyish heart - REPRINT MOST OF THE OLD ROBOTECH TOYS!
I was ecstatic - I bought them all (except for the female power armor figure which is just a crappy repaint of the male power armor figure). I not only bought them all, but I bought duplicates. I then went out to collector's meets and bought the stuff that was out of print. I developed a wonderful collection, one that rivalled the Godbee's, and was a culmination of my wanton robophillia.
I bought them, I displayed them, I may in fact have pretended they were shooting at each other over the streets of Macross city, but now they're sitting in a box in my dad's basement and I don't feel I can throw them out.
There's no answer here, no quick fix to my ever present storage problem. Call it human nature, if you must. The things that were me remind me of who I was, good or bad. Old teddy bears, old love letters, card keys from hotel rooms, post cards, toy collections, posters, jackets we've outgrown, books we'll never read again - they follow us around like lonely cats we can't shoe away. They were us, and when we see them, we re-become that old us for just a while; and old me was pretty awesome.
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