And So

The beginning begins. One piece of equipment and one piece of software have been purchased that will make it possible for production on the first episode of Next in the Series: The Podcast to begin. I hope to have the first episode, which is called "The Anniversary Schmaltz," available for download sometime in January.

In honor of that, I will endeavor to make more frequent contributions to this blog so that historians and scholars in the vast, dim future will be able to understand the genesis and development of this epoch-making project. It's been a long road, but I am determined to get these scripts recorded and available. From there, let the Fates do what they must, which is, presumably, to be fateful. The bastards.

A Small, Correctable Glitch

There will be a small delay in going forward with the first episode, which is called "The Anniversary Schmaltz," because the software that I bought for editing doesn't do as much as I thought it did. Therefore, I will be acquiring Adobe Audition 3 in the next week or two.

The software that I got over the summer will still be useful, it just doesn't have the number of production features that I am going to need if I am going to realize my vision. Or my hearing, I guess, since this is an audio project.

Dreg

I've decided to go ahead with the podcast using the resources available to me, probably beginning in January and continuing at a rate of one episode per month.

As part of the preparation process, I have been cutting down and then building back up an episode called "Let's Revue," which is a collection of songs and short plays. Since I had cut it back, it seemed a bit light in the short play department to me, and last week I had the idea of adapting three short stories I had written in the 1980s.

Adapting the first one, which was called "Seminar," was a piece of cake. I turned the whole thing around in two evenings--and late evenings at that. I still need to take one more pass at it, but it's in pretty good shape as it stands.

The next story I set my sights on was one called "Dreg of the Wildebeest," the story of a Neanderthal who is having a midlife crisis. This will not end up in "Let's Revue," however. As I started to do research on it yesterday, I found this bit of information at the Neanderthal listing on Wikipedia:

Steven Mithen (2006) proposes that the Neanderthals had an elaborate proto-linguistic system of communication which was more musical than modern human language, and which predated the separation of language and music into two separate modes of cognition.

Well, after reading something like that, how could I not realize that "Dreg" needed to be transformed into "Dreg: The Musical"? This is going to become a major project that might even begin life as part of the podcast, but not for some time. there's too much reading to do, too much thinking, too much pondering to find a word that rhymes with "paleolithic."

The third, story, an odd, Kafkaesque piece called "Odyssey," should be simple enough to adapt this coming weekend. I'll report more next week.

The Death of Caesar

As I've been putting together a new version of Let's Revue, I've decided to revamp a piece--it's really more of a one-act play than a sketch--called "The Death of Caesar" that I wrote years ago for the audio comedy team I was then a part of. The Rule of Three version was good, and it took us to a new level of complexity in recording technique. We had a mix of it that made people almost pee themselves while listening to it that one of my then-partners--a guy who could find small items from the remotest sectors of his life in a matter of moments--managed to lose. The second mix--and both mixes were done by the same fellow--flat out sucked. Since that fellow had profound problems with passive-aggressiveness, one can imagine how accidental I find that sequence of events. And when one member of a team decides that it is good for his ego to sabotage the efforts of the whole, then you have no team at all. It is, in retrospect, no wonder that Rule of Three died.

Which is all ancient history, but was something that I've needed to get off my chest for a while now.

There was one part of the original script that always ate at me, though. Part of the premise was that it was a recording of an old time radio show called The Mercurochrome Theater on the Air Featuring Orson Wellfed, Certified Genius. It was introduced by Orson, and then the playlet was performed. I originally wrote the part of Julius Caesar based on a sketch I had written a dozen years earlier than that in which I imagined Groucho as Caesar. In the Rule of Three version, this was tempered into Caesar as Borscht-Belt comic, a part that I played. And that was fine, except for one thing. I knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that Caesar should have been played by Orson instead.

This was reinforced when I realized, some years after Rule of Three had died, that the theme of the piece was concerned with the way that envious societies have of tearing down and betraying men of genius. And having Orson portray Caesar would only strengthen this theme.

And so, that is what I am doing. Oddly enough, there's a fair bit of material that I can retain, but I think the work as a whole has improved. Of course, I've been tweaking all of the material, trying to tighten and improve as I go along. That should always be the goal: to produce the best version possible without wallowing in egotism.

A New Approach Deserves a New Look

Since I'm angling to get the show done as a podcast, I have decided to redesign the website. As part of that, I've redone the logo to reflect the notion of it being in support of a podcast. Here's what I came up with:



It's based on the original one, the one that I paid cash money for, and one that I think is wonderful. I just needed it to say the word "podcast."

And now on to the much longer process of redesigning the website.

I've also rewritten almost all of the scripts. I'm in the process of assembling a new version of "Let's Revue" so that it also reflects my interests in storytelling rather than being a collection of so-so sketches. (The sketch "Don't Get Rooked," which makes me laugh, has been retained.) I'm also debating whether the two sections of "The Quality of Marcy" are up to the standards that I hope to maintain.

A discussion with an associate led to us identifying a couple of possible trails for getting some money. There was nothing concrete, but you never know.

No Soap

Once again, I've come acropper the need to raise money. I did not get the grant that I applied for.

On the plus side, I used the opportunity to refine a couple more scripts and to further develop my vision for the project and my approach. Not all bad.

So, I'm going to see if I can't come up with any other ways of raising money, with luck for the entire run of the show. Never give up hope. There always has to be hope.

Step 1 to the Future?

I just dropped off my proposal to do three episodes of what had been Next in the Series: The Radio Show as Next in the Series: The Podcast. An application is not an acceptance, of course, and it is hard to predict what will happen over all.

Still, it could be a start.

I've been listening to comedy shows on BBC Radio 7 recently and am enjoying them quite a bit. Listening to these shows is reaffirming my love for the form. Audio theater might only ever be a hobby for me, but it's one that I love.

Resurrection

When I first began keeping this blog, I did so because I was writing scripts for a radio show that I had hoped to produce, first on public radio and then on satellite radio. Unfortunately, although I am a person of many talents, the talent for being a producer has never been among them. And so, because of failures in money-raising and marketing, because of failures in vision and in acquiring a proper understanding of the industry I was trying to infiltrate, the venture failed.

There I was, with about a dozen scripts and nothing to do with them. I sent one script to an outfit called Shoestring Radio Theatre, and they accepted it and produced it this past September. All of which is fine.

Except that I have this inability to keep my mind from working. I get ideas, all the time about all sorts of things. I just can't restrain myself from thinking. And I've thought more about this show, and about the ways that technology has evolved, even over the short number of years that I've had this blog. And I've come to realize that I was a fool to concentrate on radio. Radio, especially the kind of radio that seeks to tell a story, is an artifact, a piece of history. The modern approach would be to produce these scripts as podcasts.

Podcasting, since it is not reliant on sponsorship, requires much smaller budgets than did a radio show. There is no inherent need for "name" guest stars for marquee value. It gets marketed in a completely different, viral sort of way.

I think this might be a possibility. I cannot, at this time, reveal too much, mostly because I don't want to jinx anything and also because my resolve to attempt this is so new that I can't say much of anything with confidence. Let's just say that I can see possibilities for production and even a source for small bits of funding, most of which would probably go into purchasing the proper amount of bandwidth.

But the wheels are turning.

My first challenge, though, is to find the right producer.

Change

As time is passing, I'm seeing less and less reason for maintaining this blog. The radio series that it was meant to support never got going and even if I do manage to move forward with it as a piece of audio publishing, a new name will have to be found, something with the word "Theater" in it, just to make it marketable.

Sometimes it is important to simply make the past the past and move forward, and to that end, I have created a new blog called Are You Happy Now, Norman Mailer? which is where I shall be posting my half witticisms and myopic insights from now on. All are welcome to join me there.

And if you decide to not come along, thanks for your patronage, and I'll see you on the other side of the mirage.

Len

The Continuing Saga of Next in the Series

Although, some months ago, I had to admit to myself that I couldn't make Next in the Series work as a radio show (mainly because it's too difficult to convince the guys with the money to take a chance on it), I haven't been able to give up the dream entirely. I really like many of the scripts I wrote and think they work best as audio plays. And I like the medium. There are things that can be done in audio that no other medium can achieve.

And so, I've started to think about it again, only, this time, I plan to concentrate on the world of audio publishing rather than radio.

I'm still faced with some of the old problems: lack of money and actors. However, I could approach the whole series differently, more piecemeal. It would cost less to get started, far less. And I could put my toe in the water by producing (or publishing, if you will) just one to start with and follow up with others if there is any sign of a demand.

I doubt that anything will come of this soon. It's all very back burner kind of stuff. However, after a period of thinking it dead, it's fun to be thinking about pursuing it again.

Dad

My father died 25 years ago today. He was 56 at the time and I was 23. I've been without him longer than I had him.

I'm not sure, at the moment, what I have to say about him that I didn't already say in an earlier post. Still, it's an important milestone, a reminder of the fragility of life and the passage of time.

25 years gone, and I still miss him and regret that he never got to meet either my wife or son. It's a shame because they would have liked him and he them.

But life goes on. There is always a hole inside you that used to be filled by the presence of the person who died, but you almost get used to that emptiness, because, if you didn't, you'd end up in a padded cell. And it would be a world full of people in padded cells.

I miss you, Pop, wherever you are.

And Will It Include Forwarded Jokes?

Okay. I'm going to let one of a variety of cats out of the bag. I work in the English Department at Emory University. Now, since my employer is rarely mentioned here and since I have no problem with Emory, the English Department, or my coworkers, or the professors, or the students, I'm not particularly worried about getting dooced. In fact, all-in-all, it's not a bad gig, and I've enjoyed working in an environment that puts the acquisition of knowledge ahead of the acquisition of cash. In short, good job, good people, good institution.

I had to mention it today, though, because, in order to properly discuss that which I have on my mind, I have to refer to one of our professors and a volume he has co-edited. The book is called, The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Volume IV, (co-edited by Emory's Ron Schuchard, who is, in addition to being a crackerjack editor and scholar, is a truly nice person) and it won a prestigious award presented by the Modern Language Association of America. And reading about this book led me to wonder whether this kind of tome is completely doomed and if it were to survive, how would it have to develop.

Because the thing is that people no longer have the kind of correspondence that Yeats had. The traffic in letters dwindles and the volume of emails, instant messages, and text messages grows. A generation is already growing that will never receive a meaningful letter in the mail and who will never use a pen and paper to sort through themselves and to attempt to explain who they are to another person distant who attempts to do the same thing in return.

For letters work differently than email or any of its electronic brethren. The best letters are part of an exchange, and they form a drawn out and contemplative conversation, often about a wide range of subjects. Emails and IMs and texts tend to be short and direct and tend to lack depth. They are skewed toward screens and moments and shudder and quake under the burdens of complexity and subtlety. People can't even be bothered to type out words like "you" and "for," and the ubiquity of abbreviations and emoticons make a mockery of any pretense to depth.

Part of the praise for the Yeats Letters concerns the way that the letters show Yeats's personal development and the development of his thoughts and intellect. Would a collection of emails have the same force? Would the transcript of a chat session provide the same insight? Would it even be sensible?

It is quite possible that I'm entirely turned around on this thing, but it seems to me that something of interest and value is being lost. And I don't think it can be recovered. These sorts of collections, with their insights and delights, will be extinct, and I think, in a small way, it will be another instance in which the servers will conquer the served.

The Pumas and the Cravasses

As I have remembered on this blog before, I once not exactly met, but encountered, Tommy Smothers.

I was working in a bookstore on Concourse B of what was then Hartsfield Airport in Atlanta, and in walks Tommy Smothers. He was the only customer and I was the only customee (or employee) in the place, and I noticed and recognized him immediately. He set to work in browsing the fiction section and soon enough turned up at the cashwrap with a Cormac McCarthy trade paperback in his hand. (I don't remember anymore if it was All the Pretty Horses or Blood Meridian or what. I just remember appreciating that he didn't read crap.)

Well, it became obvious from his manner that he didn't want to be recognized. He just wanted to buy his book and get on his plane, so I just rang him up and took his money and made the proper change. And that was fine. I was glad to have encountered him. My only regret is that I didn't get to say the one, tiny thing I wanted to say to him: "Thanks for the pumas in the cravasses."

This YouTube video explains it all. Enjoy.

Kindle Schmindle, Give Me a Book

Courtesy of Baby Got Books, I have been keeping abreast of the early reactions to Amazon's new e-book reader, The Kindle. I have to say that I'm not impressed.

I don't see where the improvement is. You never have to recharge a book, and if you accidentally leave your book on the subway, your entire library isn't gone. Books are too easy to be replaced like that. And that's what the makers of these products don't seem to get: Books are easy.

The way most technology gets sold to us is with the notion that it will make life easier. That tends to not be true once you scratch below the surface, but is true enough up front that everyone is willing to buy into it. And some things are an improvement. The vinyl record improved on the wax cylinder, and the 45s and 33s improved on 78s. There is still some debate over whether the warmth of vinyl is outweighed by the clarity of CDs, but that is a small point.

The only improvement that the Kindle can point to is capacity. Up to 200 books can be stored on one device. The problem is this: Do you really need to carry around 200 books all the time? And what happens if it is lost or stolen? Or the battery dies, which it inevitably will? Will they keep trying to sell you Kindle after Kindle? Of course they will. That's the Corporate American Way. There will be endless software updates and threats from hackers. If it is digital, somebody out there can figure out a way to get into it and fuck it up royal.

And this is, ultimately, the difference between The Kindle and the iPod. iPods are not dependent on you going to the iTunes Store. That is one possibility, but not the whole shooting match. I have almost 500 songs on my iPod and almost all of them, at least 99% were downloaded from CDs, not from iTunes. And while other people certainly have greater percentages of songs downloaded from Apple, they are not cornered into getting their content that way.

Maybe The Kindle will take off, although it's not looking so good right now. That's fine. The world is going to go its own way whether I like it or not. But I will stick with the humble book. It's a beautiful piece of technology, a small, wonderful thing that's easy to use, never needs updating, and works just as well outside the grid as in it.

And it's also compatible with my iPod. Take that, Kindle!

He's at It Again

I've gone and done it. I've created yet another blog. This one is devoted to politics and my reactions to things I read in The New York Times. It is called I'm Not Neutral, I'm Against Everybody, and it exists partly because I thought up the title.

It will also give me a place in which to post my rants and reactions to the passing scene, as well as the things I get ticked off about on The Times's website. From the Bush Administration to Stanley Fish, all my ranting will now be found at I'm Not Neutral. I will continue to update this blog with the usual dreck.

Why not subscribe to both this blog and the new one? It's quick and easy and you can even read the feeds on your iGoogle and My Yahoo! homepages. Why bother with bookmarks when you can have the bookmarks bother with you! Get a free subscription today!

Willie the Shake

I just finished reading Bill Bryson's brief biography of Shakespeare, Shakespeare The World as Stage. The volume, an entry in the "Eminent Lives" series that is now appearing under the Harper and Atlas Books imprints, is a good, straightforward primer in Shakespeare's biography. Bryson writes clearly and entertainingly about what is known and unknown about Shakespeare the man and avoids the mountains of speculation and "he must haves" that litter most accounts.

Interestingly, Bryson has become enough of a celebrity writer that his moniker takes up more than three times the space on the cover than Shakespeare's. It's one of the few times in which the flea gets bigger billing than the dog.

My favorite part was the final chapter, in which Bryson calmly and systematically demolishes the notion that those plays and poems were written by anyone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, writer, actor, and businessman. In doing this, and in bringing his celebrity to bear on it, he has performed an important service to both the world of literature and the cause of sanity everywhere.

For here is the truth, and it is one of the truthiest truths that I can impart: The idea that someone, anyone, besides Shakespeare wrote those works is bunkum. If you've had that thought, cleanse it from your mind. There are no other "candidates." It is all an illusion, a pretentious and muddleheaded delusion. There was never even a whiff of this alleged conspiracy at the time, and the Englishman of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period was as gossipy as a smalltown newspaper. Shakespeare was a major literary figure at the time, well known and written about. The idea that he was the beard for some nobleman (the most popular formulation) would have been all over in no time. Instead, the one item of gossip about Shakespeare we have from the time had to do with him outflanking Richard Burbage when the chance arose to consort with a young lady.

The notion that anyone but the son of a glover from a town in Warwickshire wrote those plays, poems, and dedications was popularized by a woman named Delia Bacon in the 19th Century. She ended her days in a looney bin, as should anyone else who propagates this tripe. The time has come to stamp out this fallacy and to come to appreciate how genius is just as, if not more, likely to occur among the masses as it is in the mansions.

Are You Happy Now, Norman Mailer

This is almost like a meme or a virus or something, but I have to post this video that I saw on Baby Got Books. It's from, of all things, an episode of The Gilmore Girls, and nobody is more surprised about me typing that title than I am. Just give it a watch:



RIP Norman Mailer.

My Inbox Overfloweth

The inbox for my Yahoo! account has taken the aspect of the legendary Sargasso Sea, and all manner of detritus has accumulated in it. When I looked at it earlier this morning, I had amassed some 1800 emails in there, most of which were either headlines from The New York Times or ads or coupons or reminders to pay some bill or other. Little to be saved, much to be discarded.

And so, the trashing process has begun. I whittled the number of emails down to 1612 a few minutes ago, with only 15 surviving the cut. At that rate, it will take me somewhere around ten days to get it back to some kind of shape, although that shape will probably still be portly. Like owner like inbox.

The accumulation of virtual trash is one of the hazards of modern life. A series of magnets click on and off a number of times, and another piece of nothing blows up against your virtual shoes. Newsletters, offers, reports, threats, invitations, come ons, blow offs, all drift in like snowflakes until there's a great pile against the door and nobody's going anywhere until spring.

Unless, of course, you have a shovel. Then, you start shoveling.

Or maybe I'll just see you in the spring.

Pat: Beware of Squirrels

I submitted a comment in response to this blog post on the Opinionator at The New York Times yesterday, but I don't think I made the cut. It is possible that they may have considered my contribution to be defamatory, so I have amended it very slightly and am publishing it here.

For those who don't wish to click over to the link, I'll just sum up the post in question. It concerned Pat Robertson's recent endorsement of Rudy Guiliani and included a quote from another blog that referred to Pat Robertson as "a political hack." My response, as amended is this:

In my opinion, Pat Robertson isn't "a political hack," he's off his chump. Can anyone seriously, with a straight face, look over Robertson various antics in recent years and not conclude that he's sanity-challenged?

That is my opinion, and I think a fair one of a "Christian" who called for the assassination of a head of state. He should just change his name to Wacky Wackerson.

President of What? Scarytown?

Now that I've exposed the reason why Mike Huckabee will never be President, I thought it prudent to continue my investigation on the chances of the various candidates in both parties as the thought occurs to me. And so, today, comes my second prediction. Rudy Giuilani will never be President because he looks too much like that guy Jack from The Nightmare before Christmas:



(I got this image from The Daily Show. If you haven't heard Jon Stewart's report on waterboarding, you can either click that link or just watch the full video below.)



The point of all this is that Rudy is just too damn scary looking. To sum up, we are not going to have a President with the name of a hog caller or one who looks like he's come to take your soul to the other side.

Sorry, Rudy. It's time to go back to playing chess with Max von Sydow.

No Joking

As I am persuading myself to write less funny and more seriously, I am encountering one problem I hadn't expected: Most of the ideas I've come up with over the years have some humorous notion underpinning them.

The question that's developing is, "Can I get away with writing in a somewhat comic manner if I'm not trying to write jokes? And is that possible? Or should I just dump those stupid old ideas no matter how much I like them?"

The thing is that I've already used most of these plots in other media, predominantly in the radio show scripts. There's one story that's about two guys who work for an ad agency who lose their jobs. It is farcical throughout, but I love it. Now, I don't know whether this idea would make the transition to prose or not. Would the various twists and turns fit into the short story structure? I'm really not sure. Should I just convert it into a stage play? And if I did that, how in the hell would I market it?

This transition is harder to make in some ways than I had anticipated. It involves changing some very basic assumptions that I had made about myself since childhood, and those ideas don't go away easily or without a struggle. In fact, I'm feeling very much at sea these days and am trying desperately to understand once again who I am, particularly as an artist. It is a strange circumstance that I find myself embroiled in at the advanced age of 48. It's the kind of thing that a person is supposed to be done with by now.

However, the only way to go is forward and the only way out is on the other side of a forest called "Struggle." That's how it works.

No foolin'.

It's Like Eating Potato Chips

There's a reason why I can't stop posting comments on various New York Times blogs: I keep reading them.

My life would be much simpler if I could just wean myself off news and the blogs that are now inevitably attached to the opinion pages. And, of course, that's where my problem lies: I read the opinion pages most of all, and I do this for the very simple reason that I have too many opinions and want to see what's on the minds of other people who suffer from the same malady. Birds of a feather, I suppose.

I have cut back to the point at which I'm only likely to submit a comment if I see something that's factually wrong, such as the instance quoted in this post. The gentleman I was responding to was relying on secondhand information and not delving into the relevant statistics or the possible prejudices of his sources.

For example, take his statement that "there’s much debate as to whether on balance they [New Deal programs] prolonged/deepened it." Now, I just did a small amount of research on Wikipedia and came up with this:

The majority of historians and economists believe that the New Deal helped resolve the Great Depression, but a significant minority of economists believes that it worsened the depression. A 1995 survey of economic historians and economists asked "Taken as a whole, government policies of the New Deal served to lengthen and deepen the Great Depression." Of the economists 27% agreed and 51% disagreed. Of the economic historians, only 6% agreed and 74% disagreed. ([T]he rest were in the partly agree/disagree group).

What this shows is that very few economists and almost no historians have signed on to this notion that the Depression was either prolonged, deepened, or both by The New Deal. In other words, the "debate" over the effect of The New Deal on the Depression is probably nonexistent. And, in fact, simply contradicting a mainstream theory isn't having a "debate." Anyone (and this is something I really know something about) can contradict accepted theory. The question is: Can you back it up? If you can, you just might find yourself in a debate. If not, chances are that you are a partisan hack hoping to put enough smoke in the air to cover whatever nonsense your ideological masters are up to.

Actually, the problem usually arises from people believing in an ideology to the point where it becomes a religion for them. Whatever contradicts their precious theories becomes the enemy and must be fought at every turn, regardless of what sort of tripe or cooked books they have to come up with in order to justify the attack.

I've long said that I think it something less than a coincidence that the words "ideology" and "idiot" begin with the same syllable. My advice? Don't get in line. Think for yourself and get your own information whenever possible. Mull it over. Come to your own conclusions.

And if you ever find yourself calling a radio program merely to say, "Ditto," check yourself in for deprogramming and spare your loved ones the trouble and expense.

Okay, So I Couldn't Help Myself

In that discussion on The New York Times's Editorial Board's Blog that I cited earlier, there was one sentence in one of the comments that kept eating at me. It was: "Interestingly, New Deal programs did little to fulfill their original goal, which was to *end* the Great Depression. Indeed, there’s much debate as to whether on balance they prolonged/deepened it."

This statement is plain poppycock, so I ended up writing and submitting the following comment in response (and I'm sorry, but it couldn't be helped):

The truth about the Great Depression without the New Deal can be summed up in two words: Herbert Hoover. The simple fact is that without government help and intervention, the Depression reached its nadir in 1932/1933. By then national GDP had plummeted by about 25% from its peak in 1928/1929. From 1933 on (and Roosevelt was sworn in on March 20, 1933), GDP rose precipitously until the recession in 1937. By that point, it had already outstripped the peak of the late '20s and did not drop below that level in either of the down years of 1937 or 1938.

The New Deal also gave us a huge number of public works projects, including the Hoover Dam, The Grand Coolee Dam, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. It also brought the first electric power lines into rural areas, built roads and sidewalks, and built schools and other public buildings. In fact, thanks to the New Deal, America had the infrastructure that allowed it to gear up for the Second World War in lightening speed and laid the foundation for the postwar boom.

The idea that the New Deal prolonged the Depression can be challenged simply by remembering that the Depression was a worldwide phenomenon and that nobody got out of it quickly.

It should also be remembered that the expansion of the middle class in the postwar era was sparked by another government program: The GI Bill of Rights.

There are limits to what government can do. The old Soviet example shows the folly of having the government control industry and farming. However, when it comes to such things as healthcare and other concerns of the society as a whole, there is no better resource. Government is the means by which the entire society can express itself as a community.

Progress

I'm proud of myself.

The Editorial Board of The New York Times has started publishing a blog. Now, I don't go there often, just when something catches my eye. Well, the other day, there was a post about some website somewhere called govermentisgood.com, which led to a discussion of the merits of government that has been, to my mind, pretty poorly reasoned on both sides of the question. And despite the shallow and merely prejudiced views on display, I have not written a comment. Oh, I was tempted a couple of times, and even started to at least twice, but I always navigated away. After all, what would have been the point?

There's that line from The Beatles's song Eleanor Rigby, "No one was saved." That kind of sums up my feeling about these sorts of debates. At the end of the day, no matter how compelling or well-reasoned one's arguments, no one will be saved. (And just for the record, the person doing the best reasoning in that NYT discussion seemed to be anti-government, although he might have just been against that website, which did sound rather dippy.) People argue mostly from belief rather than logic so it always devolves down to the "Says you/Your mother wears Army boots" level of discussion.

True discussion involves a give-and-take, an exchange of ideas. It is an opportunity for learning. Unfortunately, the current fashion in debate is to assume the faultlessness of one's beliefs and to scorn the beliefs of all others. It's a celebration of ignorance and willfulness, and it has moved me to a profound cynicism. And that is a true shame because idealism was so much more fun.

Not the Calling I Was Really Looking For

My wife and I are both fans of The Office. Who isn't? It's a good show, well written, thoughtfully directed, and beautifully acted. I would heartily commend it to any of the sixteen people under the age of 90 who haven't seen it.

I do, however, have a quibble with it. I have a suspicion that no one who works on the writing staff has ever had a real job. Now, this is in contrast with the British version. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant got out of their corporate prison by creating the original The Office, and it shows in the writing.

The British version can be somewhat uncomfortable to watch because it gets things so right in a bleak and funny way. (And don't get me started on their follow-up series, Extras. The bleakness of its vision, its unblinking understanding of all the petty and self-centered traits that people hold in common, its unwavering nihilism make it all but unwatchable for me. It is brilliant and unbearable in its brilliance. It makes me wonder how Ricky Gervais gets through the day.) Gervais's David Brent pushes the lines of what is permissible and what is the basis for a lawsuit. On the other hand, Steve Carell's Michael Scott (and I admire Mr. Carell's performance enormously) consistently bounds into areas in which a lawsuit would be the only logical recourse. In the real world, Michael Scott would have been fired long ago. The David Brents, however, are everywhere.

The most recent episode of the American The Office ("Money") involved Michael getting a part-time evening job doing telephone sales. Now that's fine. That happens. However, I'm pretty sure that not only have none of the writing staff ever held a real corporate job, I'm almost certain that none of them have ever done telephone sales. I can say this because I have.

One of The Many Jobs of Len™ was approximately 12 hours spent trying to sell Time-Life Books over the phone. It was my job to sell The Civil War series of books to an unsuspecting public using only a phone, my dialing finger, and the script I had been provided.

My first day was a half day. Three of the four hours were spent "training." The last hour was spent on the phone. I had a good hour--made three or four sales--and went home convinced that I was king of this particular universe. Day Two went a little differently.

We had quotas for how many numbers we were to dial in each hour--sixty, if I remember correctly. (Today, of course, it's all automated. A computer dials number after number and kicks any phone that's answered over to the next available sales rep.) There is little chance for the kind of lounging around that was shown on the show, and we did not gather in a conference room for our top-of-the-shift sales meeting. The supervisor stood where everyone could see him to announce what the goals were for the day. It took all of about 85 seconds.

The sales reps do not chat with each other. There's no time for that. We were supposed to ring a bell after each sale so that the supervisor could place a mark next to that person's name on the white board at the front. To steal Eric Idle's phrase, the number of marks next to my name at the end of the day was "nearly one."

Most of the numbers called were busy (remember that? busy signals?) or no one answered. Of those that did, interest in the Civil War was almost nil. I did, however, have two memorable calls. One was a lady who, after I got about a sentence of my spiel out, screamed, "We don't want to hear about no Civil War!" and slammed down the phone. The other was a gentleman who taught history at a university and specialized in the American Civil War. He patiently explained that there couldn't possibly be anything in the Time-Life series that wasn't already exhaustively covered in the hundreds of books on the subject he had on his shelves. I agreed with him and thanked him for his time and hung up.

I went home that night a physical and emotional wreck. It's funny in retrospect, but was a tragedy at the time, which is, of course, the basis for a great deal of comedy. And I wish that the producers of a certain TV comedy would realize that those of us out there in the world--the viewers--actually have jobs and show us enough respect to get at least some small idea of what they're talking about.

Not that I'm going to stop watching it. I can't. I love it.

Random Thoughts and Sayings

When you become a parent, you almost instantly find yourself saying things that you swear you never would have said otherwise. My wife's favorite example is, "Don't scratch your neck with your chicken."

Last night, I heard myself saying a smaller example in the same genre: "Just give me a minute and I'll help you fix your pumpkin." And that wasn't a metaphorical pumpkin. It was the real thing.

Of course, this morning I got to type another phrase that you wouldn't expect to come up with. You see, the Dalai Lama has been visiting the university where I work, and some special event was taking place under some tents in the athletic field this morning. In order to accommodate the crowd, extra parking passes were apparently issued to the parking garage where I park. This gave me the opportunity to type, "Some Dalai Lama-lovin' jerk nicked my parking spot."

This led me to wonder what I would say to the Dalai Lama if we happened to run into each other, most likely in the men's room. Assuming that I would avoid saying, "Hello, Dalai!" what could I possibly say to this truly holy man? "Keep up the good work?" "How about those Red Sox?" "It must be easy to get a fit off the rack when you're wearing drapes." "¡Cuidado! ¡Lama!"

Or maybe, simply, "Eyes front, mister!"

However, thus far, we seem to be two ships who passed in the night. Just one of those things.

Finally, there is a blog post on The New York Times by Will Leitch in which he argues that it is time for Red Sox fans to stop the moaning and realize that their team is now a powerhouse, not an also-ran. And I agree with him. Failure is a habit though, and so is expecting failure, so I'm sure you'll forgive me if I tell you that, when I checked Game Channel last night and saw that the Sox were up 3-1 in the top of the fifth and that the Indians had runners on the corners with one out, the thought, "I wonder how they're going to blow it this time?" wafted through my mind. That they ended up winning 11-2 and that the Indians--an excellent team--lost through the kinds of screw-ups that the Sox were noted for over the years (can you say "Johnny Pesky and the double pump" or "Bill Buckner's legs" or "Bucky 'Effin' Dent"?) should have shaken the faithful out of their fear, but I doubt that it completely has.

There is pride in accomplishment, but romance in failure. Particularly failure by a series of near misses. And romance is far more addictive than pride. Still, it's not a bad thing that the Sox are in the World Series. I just hope they don't blow it.

Sorry, Dude

It's never gonna happen. What's that, you say? What's never going to happen? Mike Huckabee becoming President. I only bring this up because suddenly, over the last couple of days, he's getting presented as being the dark horse for the Republican nomination, such as in this op-ed by David "How Do You Like the Tortiseshell Frames I Have for My Rose-Colored Glasses" Brooks in The New York Times.

Now, my argument here is not ideological. I really know nothing of the man's political positions other than a vague notion that he's slightly to the right of Mussolini. But that's fine. That is certainly no bar to the highest office in the land regardless of how I feel about it. He has a right to his opinions and beliefs, and it is carved into the First Amendment of the Constitution.

No, the whole reason why he will never be President is his name. President Huckabee. Say it to yourself. Okay, this time, out loud. President Huckabee. Perhaps if he were running for president of Possum Holler, but not President of the United States.

It's never gonna happen, my friend.

Rebel Without a Clause

I am that most dangerous of creatures, the self-educated man. Of course, I am a high school grad, graduating 104th in a class of 400 despite almost being ejected in 9th grade, and I attended The Community College of Rhode Island for two fitful years.

However, I did not emerge with a degree since they had some persnickety rules about showing up to classes and a reluctance to award credits for scene work done in acting classes to which I was not formally enrolled. I had my grade on the final in World History lowered almost 30 points because of cuts and still got a C. I refused to take the final in Jazz History because I felt I had gotten everything out of the class that I wanted and didn't want to taint it by taking a test. (The professor had a policy of giving students 70 points for putting their names on the papers.)

The point is that formal education and me don't mix. There is some anti-authoritarian strain in me that just won't let it happen. Battles with teachers went on from the very early years, probably first showing up when I refused to learn my 11 and 12 times tables because most of 11 was self-evident and I could figure out the rest of that and all of 12 using the times tables I had already memorized. I could never see the point of homework. If they couldn't teach it to me during the hours I gave over to them during the day, why was it my problem? Why should I compensate for their lack of efficiency when there were TV shows to watch and sports to play?

One incident occurred when I was in 8th grade that is emblematic of the entire situation. My English teacher that year was Mr. Cornelius McKeough. The kids all called Mr. McKeough Ichabod Crane because he was long and lean and prissy and also because we had just read "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" the year before. Well, my confrontation with Mr. McKeough didn't stem from his prissy manner or his take on the English language. No. It stemmed from his one rule: All English books must be covered by the end of the first week of class. What choice did I have? I covered every book except English, each a monument to that version of brown-paper bag origami that we all used to practice except one.

Mr. McKeough didn't take it lying down, of course. He had been teaching 8th grade English for approximately 300 years, and I'm sure he had encountered a raft of two-bit punks well before I turned up. I don't remember every trick he tried on me, but I do remember the most ingenious. It quickly became obvious that I am not a good speller and that I was not spending much, if any, of my free time memorizing the list of words presented in each succeeding lesson in the spelling book. Mr. McKeough's habit was to go down each row, starting by the windows, and give each student a word from that week's list to spell. He went in order, from beginning to last, and would end up each week with more words than students.

A few weeks into The Battle of the Book, he moved my seat from somewhere in the anonymous middle to the last seat in the last row. He then introduced a new rule into our spelling lessons: The last student would be required to spell every word left over when his or her turn came up. Once a week, I would be required to spell about half-a-dozen words relying on intuition, logic (a dicey companion when it comes to spelling in English), and an intense desire to not be beaten.

Of course, neither of us won. The book remained uncovered, and he eventually failed me for the year (by a single point, if memory serves), even though I thought I should have passed based on my test grades (probably by a single point or so). The truth, of course, is that we were both failures, failed by our mutual rigidity and combativeness. Mr. McKeough continued to teach, I'm sure, eventually retired, and inevitably died, a male spinster in a world of roads not taken.

As for me, my various battles in 8th grade led me down a path that turned into a total tailspin in 9th grade that led to my rebirth after I discovered that I wanted to be a writer. I was just never going to be a scholar.

The Linkingest Miscellaneous Friday Ever!

I haven't posted much in the last week or so for a very simple reason: I haven't had anything that I wanted to talk about enough to go to the effort of actually typing it out. However, today is Friday and I am trying everything I can think of in order to not do productive work, so I might as well spit out what little passes for thought that's floating around in my brain today.

First, I'd like to report that my self-imposed news drought (a phrase I copped from The Firesign Theatre's Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death) has continued with some exceptions. Although I successfully canceled the Atlanta Journal Constitution newsletter, my cancellation of the New York Times email digest coincided with their eradication of the Times Select service, so delivery has continued unabated.

And I do skim the headlines every morning, and even read an item or two, but I do not spend significant portions of my day mulling over current events or getting into pointless arguments with other commenters on the various blogs The Times now supports. I even let Stanley Fish's latest bowl of nonsense pass without comment.

That being said, I have been keeping up with Paul Krugman's blog (and I read his columns along with those of Gail Collins and Frank Rich), and I skim The Opinionator most days. The difference is that I am normally merely a spectator and not a participant, and I have, on numerous occasions started to comment and then backed out.

What has really sunken in with me is the absurd toggle-switch dualism of every discussion. This is an argument between tribes, not intellectual comparisons of competing points of view, and I think we need to start understanding the current deadlock in our politics as a form a tribalism. Since The Times caters to a politically liberal audience, the majority of responses fall that way. I'm sure that the comments on The Wall Street Journal tend the other way in the same basic proportion. The opposition, in each case, lobs verbal hand grenades into the midst of the crowd, and everybody wallows in their own certainty and self-satisfaction.

Again, Monty Python says it best: "An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition" and "Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says." We live in the age of contradiction in which opposing points of view are not listened to, considered, and responded to, but attacked and ignored. And I'm sorry to say that "Shut your festering gob, you tit!" isn't an argument.

Of course, I've gone and commented just today. I couldn't help myself. A commenter on an Opinionator post concerning Hilary Clinton's inability to acknowledge that the use of torture is always wrong used the naive saw about "what if a prisoner had information that, acted upon, would save hundreds of lives." We'll call this idea "Jack Bauer Syndrome." My response was as follows:

The fallacy of arguments such as Mike V's (and by extension, those of President Bush and Senator Clinton) is the notion that torture is the most effective way of interrogating prisoners. It is not. For example, as shown in this article in The Washington Post, during World War II, our intelligence officers gathered better information by eschewing coercion.

If this fictional situation of one prisoner having information concerning an impending attack were to actually occur, then we would be far better off by not torturing that person. Being humane is a far better interrogation method. Period.

And Senator Clinton should be willing to come flat out and say that if she is to prove herself worthy of the office she seeks.

I doubt that Mike V will listen, though. He'll be too busy getting received wisdom from the leaders of his tribe.

Let It Be--Naked

Over the years since I started making the switch from vinyl and tapes to CDs, I've had to reacquire the entire Beatles catalog, among other projects. Although they have been acquired in a somewhat higgildy-piggildy fashion, overall, I have tried to collect them in the order in which they were released in their Parlaphone incarnations. Last week, I went after the final album of the original set, Let It Be. Armed with a 40% off coupon, I headed for the local Borders expecting to return with the familiar article, replete with ad libs and Phil Spector's Wall of Sound. They didn't have that. They did, however, have Let It Be--Naked, the authorized (mostly by Paul McCartney, one suspects) remix that appeared in 2003. At first blush, it seemed to me a compromise, and I was, frankly, expecting to be disappointed.

I was wrong.

Every single cut on this CD is stronger than the version that was originally released in 1970, and it comes very close to being the album the Beatles had envisioned when they started making both the album and the film in January 1969. In fact, in my opinion, the album should have been called Get Back, as was originally intended, rather than given the lame title that now adorns it.

The Beatles' idea (mostly Paul's) was that they should make a record that was as close to live as possible with no overdubs. Just the band playing together while being recorded using the then state-of-the-art 8-track recording machines. And that's what this captures, and it turns out that the Beatles, even during this late, contentious time, were one hell of a live band, contrary to popular belief.

Paul always hated the Spectorized versions of "Let It Be" and "The Long and Winding Road" and with good reason. Here, however, they have been restored. No strings, no choirs of angelic voices. The treacle is gone, and only two great songs remain.

What's missing are the spoken bits that had been edited in as lead-ins or end matter to various songs, the most famous being John's ad lib from the top of the Apple building, "I'd like to say 'thank you' on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition!" as well as two song fragments: "Dig It" and "Maggie Mae." (Most of the ad libs and different versions of "Maggie Mae" and "Dig It" can be heard on the second disc in the set, "A Fly on the Wall.") These are small omissions.

In short, I highly recommend this version both in addition to or in place of the original. The specter of Spector is gone, much to the relief of this listener, for one.

Villainy

The other morning when I was talking to the vet after she informed us of Oscar's death, it seemed to me that she was being somewhat tentative and that she kept expecting me to shout at her, "Murderer! You did this to us!" That, of course, would have been nonsense. There are no villains here except cruel life itself. No one involved could have anticipated the sequence of events. I certainly didn't and don't know who could have.

It was a surreal journey, and surreal journeys can only lead you to an unexpected place. It is unfortunate that the destination in this case was one dark and cloaked in pain. It was a stark reminder that we are alive, for we are never more aware of life than when we grieve.

Quite often in these situations, people try to find the villain of the piece, the prime cause of our sorrow and the catalyst of our pain, however, my experience of life is that there are few villains. Most people are just trying their best to get by in the circumstances in which they find themselves and act in the manner they deem wisest at any given time. Sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong. It's all a crapshoot.

In the meantime, I'm more stunned than angry, more bewildered than incensed. Oscar is gone, and it doesn't seem possible. I still expect to see him asleep in our closet or hiding by slipping his head under a bed while his body still hangs out in the open. I can't believe that he is gone.

It's life that is the villain. It gives us beings to love and then takes them away. It is a cruel thing, this life.

He Embraces

DYSART: With one particular horse, called Nugget, he embraces. The animal digs its sweaty brow into his cheek, and they stand in the dark for an hour--like a necking couple. And of all nonsensical things--I keep thinking about the horse! Not the boy: the horse, and what it may be trying to do. I keep seeing that huge head kissing him with its chained mouth. Nudging through the metal some desire absolutely irrelevant to filling its belly or propagating its own kind. What desire could that be? Not to stay a horse any longer? Not to remain reined up for ever in those particular genetic strings? Is it possible, at certain moments we cannot imagine, a horse can add its sufferings together--the non-stop jerks and jabs that are its daily life--and turn them into grief? What use is grief to a horse? --Peter Shaffer, Equus

He used to kiss me. Our cat, Oscar, who died at about 4:30 this morning, used to kiss both me and my wife. We would hold him and caress him and kiss his head and cheeks and then he would lick our faces in return, eyes squinting and larynx going at a full purr. There are many people who think that cats are incapable of showing affection unless it is somehow in their self-interest, but those people have not had not truly experienced life with a cat. And they certainly never met Oscar.

My wife got Oscar less than two months before we were married. He was six weeks old, really a couple of weeks too young to be separated from his mother, and he transferred his loyalty and affection to us immediately. He was tiny and fuzzy like a dandelion frond, and he ran and jumped and climbed and did all those things that kittens do. That was 11 years ago.

The cat who died this morning was over 20 pounds. He was fat, of that there can be no doubt, but he was a big boy even without the fat. He had suffered some shocks of late and stopped eating. This can happen to cats his size, and when their bodies try to use the fat on their frames to get energy, their livers have trouble processing it, and it starts to shut down. This is information I didn’t know until the last couple of days.

He had surgery yesterday. The vet put a feeding tube in his neck, the idea being that eating consistently would repair the damage and that he would eventually go back to eating from a dish so that the tube could be removed and he could go back to being his old self. If any cat seemed a candidate to be back on the dish within hours, it was Oscar. We all have our talents, and his was for eating.

The surgery seemed to be a success. He was fed several times yesterday with no complications. For some reason that no one knows, at about 4:30 this morning, he just slipped away. Everything says that he shouldn’t have died. Somehow, he did.

We tend to, at times like this, want to see life as a rigid series of causes and effects. We want to see certainty and inevitability, but, unfortunately, that is not how the universe works.

Life is an experiment or maybe a series of accidents. Although we like to think of ourselves as marching boldly through our existence, the truth is that we are constantly testing the floorboards. If this one holds, we move on to the next. If our foot crashes through to dangle in the basement, we try our best to pull ourselves out to test the next board. Sometimes the entire floor seems to slip away and we are falling.

The floor has slipped away.

We will recover. We will not forget. One who loved so much deserves to be honored with love, with love shared and love accepted. He was a wonderful presence, and I am thankful for my time with him.

He will be missed.