Write Right: A Drayton Story

In the movies, writers are usually shown pounding out words by the baleful, rarely pausing and never stopping. Sentences pour forth in a cascade, as a cataract on a river, and that first effort is exactly what goes to press.

In truth, writers work very differently. Take Drayton, for example. I have a draft of the whole novel now, but am not even nearly finished. Instead, I am taking each chapter as it stands and rewriting it from the top. Right now, I am at work on Chapter 11, and it has changed almost completely. I've hardly relied on the previous version, but have it printed out as a guide to use as I go along. Most of the chapter so far has gone well. I have probably about 1800 words so far and am very pleased.

However, I spent the last week reworking three paragraphs and slowly adding a fourth. I go back, every day, and make changes and then change the changes. I think I'm almost finished, but only time will tell.

And this how writers really work. You write and then you revise and rewrite. You change and you change and you change, and then you get an agent who wants changes and an editor who wants even more. And you work and you revise and polish and never actually get it to the place where you really want it to be.

But that's the process.

Get Me Vegas

Well, Wolfie finally stepped down from the presidency of the World Bank--without taking any responsibility for his actions, of course. He can now go on the neoconservative speaking circuit and tell the faithful how aggrieved he is. That will be followed by his ghost-written book, Everybody at the World Bank Is Mean. And then--Oh, boy!--the chance for another Brit Hume "I Just Want to Help You Like Goebbels Helped Hitler" interview. Good times.

The White House has promised to nominate a successor tout de suite. I suspect that, in the spirit of conciliation, they will nominate either John Bolton or Donald Rumsfeld. Unless, of course, they nominate Brit Hume! Let's keep an eye on the morning line.

What Do They Call That Disease Again?

Last weekend, I had some bright thought about what I would write for my Thursday long essay. I made no note of it and told no one else, which, since no one else would really care, seemed prudent. As the week wore on, I thought about this subject matter from time-to-time, and each time took a moment out to congratulate myself on the brilliance of the subject and on my ability to remember it throughout the week.

This morning, senility won out. The brilliant notion for a post is gone, and it has left no forwarding address.

This, of course, left me in a bit of a bind this morning, especially since I had no idea that I had forgotten my topic until I actually opened up the window to start writing. So, what I did was this: I went for a walk.

Quite often, when I'm walking, all sorts of bright ideas occur to me. Ideas for stories, pieces of dialog, retorts I should have come up with 15 years ago, all of them pop into my fevered brain like kernels of corn popping in a microwave. On rare occasions, I actually remember them, but most of the time they pass through my brain like dandelion fronds floating on a gentle summer breeze. On even rarer occasions, I remember something that I had temporarily forgotten. Unfortunately, today was not one of those occasions.

I needed a new plan, a new brilliant idea that would take the place of the one departed and give me some topic to drone on about at some small length. So, I decided to write about memory and the way it slowly goes away as the years take their toll.

Now, I don't know for sure that this is what happens to everybody. Other people's memories may remain just as strong or poor as always as the years pass; I claim no special knowledge of that. I just have my own tawdry experiences to draw on, and fewer and fewer of them as the minutes tick by.

I used to have a quite formidable memory and could store away long passages from books, movies, and plays with ease. I used to study by reading the chapter in question the night before the test and then simply hocking it all up the next morning. I remembered incidents in my life down to the last, most excruciating detail and could report them at nauseating length. Sports scores, hitting and pitching statistics, and a detailed history of almost every sporting event played within my lifetime came to me like the card at a magician's fingertips.

Now I can barely remember how old my son is on any given day or why I went into the room I find myself standing in. Of course, it's just a function of having more to remember. Every day brings a new avalanche of information, all of which has to be sorted, categorized, and forgotten. It's at work, at home, and on the Internet. It's in the magazines and on the TV. Information, like fluoridation, is everywhere, and the older you get, the more of it you have to deal with. Did I pay them? Did I write that? What's for dinner? Where do we keep my socks? What's this for? Do we really need that? Who the hell am I?

If life is like a river, it has generally been at flood stage for some time now. It tires a person out and steals their focus. It's enough to make a person want to go live in the woods. As long as I could bring my computer, cell phone, TiVo, and satellite radio. Because when you come right down to it, I'm not really one of those--oh, you know, those people. The ones who do those things. The Whatchmacallits.

The Wolfowitz at the Door

Were Paul Wolfowitz a man of any character, he would have long ago resigned as president of the World Bank. Unfortunately, he has proved to be a gutless little weasel who confuses mere tenacity with courage and conviction. He apparently has gotten to the groveling stage in this little drama and has made the assertion that getting rid of him would be "detrimental" to the well being of the bank. The truth is that he got caught using his power to benefit one individual at the expense of the bank. Highhanded and smug, he thought he could recreate the World Bank in an image pleasing to him and his sponsors while avoiding any accountability for his actions.

Men--true men--do not act in these ways. If they slip, though, and this sort of mess comes to light, they do the manly and honorable thing: They resign.

On an unrelated note, hell is just a little more crowded today thanks to the passing of world-renowned hypocrite, Jerry Falwell. If there really is a literal Hell, then I am confident that he is there, dressed in a Tinky Winky costume and serving every whim of those he worked so hard to have hated and reviled.

A Couple of Things

First, I'm tired of trying to maintain three active blogs, so I'm just going to merge the whole bunch into this one. From now on, all my political and social rants, updates about my novel, Michael Drayton, Detective Guy, and the Thursday long essay will appear under this banner.

Second, I'd like to post a bit of a political rant. Based on the inability of the Bush Administration to disavow favored incompetents Paul Wolfowitz and Alberto Gonzales and the sheer stubborn, pointless resilience of both of those gentlemen, it has occurred to me that we need some way of showing these folks what miserable failures they are. Because I think that is the problem: They don't get it. Since they seem to believe that every failure they encounter (and let's face it, everything these guys touch turns to dust) is someone else's fault and that the solution is to try even more of that failed approach for longer with more money behind it, they are clearly delusional. The poor guys need help. And the American people are just the ones to give it to them.

I suggest that we pelt them with over-ripe tomatoes at every opportunity. I think that bombarding them in this way whenever they appear in public just might get across the idea that it's time to retire. And just think of the boost the tomato-growing community will receive! Why, we'd need a couple of truckloads just for Dick Cheney alone.

Unfortunately, I have to suggest just such things because the cowards in Congress won't start impeaching and removing people. Start with Gonzales and move up the list. These people need to be taught that they report to us and not to each other. Although they may work at the pleasure of the President, they work at the service of the People.

Unlike a lot of the anti-Bush crowd (and I've been among them since before the beginning), I don't think that our current ruling junta is constituted of people who mean ill. I don't. And I think that is the truly tragic thing: These idiots think that every idea that pops into their feeble little brains is a gift from God and not just a notion that might be either right or wrong. They also have an instinct for totalitarianism. Karl Rove and Dick Cheney have more in common, intellectually, with Joe Stalin than they do with, say, James Madison.

And when you're faced with people of this ilk, there's only one thing you can do: Grab a tomato.

The Punitive Nation

It has struck me over the years how the default solution proposed to almost any problem in the United States these days involves punishment of some sort. Deal with drug use? Impose draconian punishments. Late with the credit card payment? Impose a fee. Late for work? Write it up for the file. School not performing well? Cut their funds.

The idea is a foolish one. The assumption is that the prescribed penalty will affect behavior, but, of course, it doesn't. And the penalties, instead of making the situation better, make it worse. People's lives are ruined for smoking a reefer. Someone who was already in a financial hole is now a little deeper. A worker who was already poorly motivated has another gripe to add to the list. Students at an underfunded school have an even smaller chance of succeeding.

I'm not necessarily sure what the answers are to all these problems, but I know that punishing people doesn't help. The problem is that, once you've announced a punishment, you can't not implement it, no matter how destructive the imposition of it would be.

People don't like to hear this, but there is no programmatic approach to solving problems. It's all ad hoc. Whatever your ideology, you're wrong. Life is too complicated and random to be tamed by some system. And you don't have to take my word for it. Just pick a random stretch from history, and you will see in glorious black-and-white the failures of every ideology and system. The only way to deal with with the problems posed by trying to live in a society is to take each issue on its own, look at it, take it apart, and look for solutions that are inherent in the problem itself.

But, for God's sake, don't just resort to kneejerk punishments.

Welcome to Babel

A few months ago, I had a brief flirtation with a blog that concerned itself with the problems faced by copyeditors. The posts concerned matters of style, grammar, and usage, and the examples used were generally taken from the host’s place of work, a prominent American newspaper. Despite having been away from actively editing copy for some time, I pitched right in, contributing defenses of The Elements of Style concerning the rules advising use of the active voice over the passive and the misperception that Strunk and White proposed that one never use the word “that.” (Professor Strunk’s prejudice was against the phrase “the fact that,” which he claimed “should be revised out of every sentence in which it occurs.”)

Over time, I became a regular participant and would pop off on every subject, oftentimes in complete contradiction to my actual practice. On one occasion in particular, I came out strongly and vociferously against starting a sentence with “and.” As I worked on my novel later that day, a certain conjunction kept working its way to the front of the line in sentence after sentence. Of course, I never revealed my duplicity on the blog; I considered it a family matter and nobody else’s damned business.

My participation ceased after the blog, which had been home to only current or former copyeditors, started to be visited by linguists. Now, I have nothing against the study of linguistics. I’m sure it has its uses, and it certainly keeps those who are interested in it busy. However, whenever the concern at hand is copyediting, linguistics and the people who study it are as useful as a paint roller is to a miniaturist.

Since linguistics is the study of human speech, no approach can be considered right or wrong, just as no frog can be considered right or wrong to a biologist. On the other hand, copyediting is the art of establishing right from wrong in the use of language, specifically the use of written language.

And this is where the conflicts arose.

“Ain’t” was suddenly defended as being no worse than “am not” or “amn’t” if the writer was feeling Irish. Just like the kid in the wheelchair down the street, “ain’t” wasn’t right or wrong or better or worse. It was just different. And to suggest otherwise was to be narrow-minded and bigoted and just an all-around nogoodnik.

My take on the subject was somewhat different. I stood with those who thought that “ain’t” had little place in formal writing, except when quoting someone or in fiction. Even then, there could be exceptions and no one advocated an Amish-like shunning or stoning over an occasional “ain’t.” After all, sometimes there just ain’t no word like it.

This skirmish was merely a precursor to the real battle though, which was prompted by a discussion concerning the phrase, “could care less.”

A group of us came out against it since the original phrase, “couldn’t care less,” seemed to more accurately reflect the intentions of the speaker. Others defended "could care less" as being an idiomatic expression. And that's fine with me. I disagree with that point-of-view, but it is a legitimate one and one I respect.

The problem for me came up when someone--a linguist--posted a comment that responded to one of mine. This comment was filled with jargon and buzz words and academic nonsense and ultimately argued that "could care less" is correct simply because people say that. I responded with a long, angry comment in which I attacked every point young Poindexter had made, and, not enjoying getting that worked up over a phrase that should be avoided whenever possible in both forms, left that blog and have never been back.

It is important that the idea of correctness in the use of the English language be preserved. Without having some standard, some lingua franca that all agree to, our ability to communicate becomes circumscribed and the American English community will slowly devolve into a loose coalition of small linguistic villages, shells of oarsmen all rowing in their own rhythm and direction.

As I pointed out in my farewell comment on that blog, I can make myself known in any group of English-speakers in the world, even when I might have trouble understanding those I am speaking to. The reason is that I speak Standard American English. And I will continue to prefer "couldn't care less" to "could care less" while trying to avoid both. Although, in the case of the proper use of language, I really could care less.

A Southern Yankee

Red Skelton made a movie in 1948 called A Southern Yankee, and it was based very loosely on Buster Keaton’s wonderful movie, The General. Keaton actually worked on A Southern Yankee as a gag man and contributed its most famous scene: Skelton traverses a battlefield during the Civil War and soldiers on both sides cease firing to let him pass. It turns out that he is dressed in blue on one side and the flag he is carrying shows the Stars and Stripes, while, on the other side, his uniform is grey and the flag shows the Stars and Bars. And this is how I feel: I am a southern Yankee.

I was born in Rhode Island in southern New England and raised partly there and partly in San Francisco and did not make my way south until I was in my early 20s in the spring of 1983. My father had died six months earlier, and a friend, an Atlantan whose family had moved north a few years before, had relocated to DeKalb County and was determined to lure me southward. With a burst of what I would come to know as typical Atlanta boosterism, she convinced me that the city was on the verge of blossoming into a theatrical Mecca, an ultra-humid Broadway that was just waiting for up-and-comers like me. And so I moved south, never ventured closer to the theatrical community than the fringes, and learned to regard the billboard on Peachtree that read, “Move Over Big Apple, Here Comes the Big Peach,” with a little more than a grain of salt.

In the intervening 24 years, I have lived north of the Mason-Dixon line for a mere three. Of the remaining 21, I have spent 17 of them in Atlanta and the remaining four in Northern Virginia in the suburbs of Washington, DC. And if you don’t think Washington is a southern town, think again. An attorney I used to know once told me that if you wanted to know what a Reconstruction government was like, you should try registering a car in the District.

Over time, I have learned that Southerners tend to distrust Northern candor, which strikes them as course and brusque. Northerners distrust Southern manners, interpreting them as shallow, insincere, and duplicitous. The truth, as always, falls somewhere in the great gaping middle, and the perceptions come more from a kind of culture shock than from a true assessment of what the denizens of either region are like. There are, and always have been, Northerners with manners and blunt Southerners.

Racism, America’s original sin, permeates both areas that provided contestants for the Civil War. In the North, however, it tends to be overt and angry and an issue that presents itself in occasional violent outbursts. In the South, on the other hand, it exists more often as an understanding and as an ongoing facet of the community.

I remember once, after a black coworker had flirted with me a bit, having my white supervisor come up to me to say, “That’s fun and all, but you understand that separate is separate.” I was nonplussed since there was nothing in my northern and western upbringing to prepare me for that concept. And I knew that had I confronted my boss with a charge of racism that she would have been flabbergasted. She no more thought of her attitude as racist than I thought of mine as revolutionary.
And this is the part of the Southern experience that keeps me at a distance, the part that knew Jim Crow, the part that can look at another human as something not quite human, not quite equal. Northern bigotry is based in fear; Southern bigotry is based in a perverse kind of faith and tradition. And there lies the difference.

Two Things

Thursday's weekly essay is below. Don't miss it! Unless you have to, of course. You know. I understand.

I know I said once-a-week posts, but this is special. And short. And oh so informative.

First, since I am generally only posting once each week, it might behoove anyone who wishes to keep up with it to subscribe to the RSS feed of the blog, a link for which is located at the bottom of the main page. It's really simple, and that way you'll always know when I post something new.

Second, I have started posting my thoughts on the Virginia Tech massacre and the phenomenon of rampage killings on another of my blogs, Shooting Off My Fat Trap. I'm trying to take a longer view of these tragic events than I've seen elsewhere. I'll just say here that there are no easy answers.

That blog is also available for RSS feed.

M F'in A in Creative Writing

Nathan Bransford is a literary agent who has a blog, and last week he wrote a post that asked his readers for their thoughts on the usefulness of academic programs in creative writing. As part of his post, he said,

[C]reative writing programs tend to stress short fiction writing even as magazines such as The Atlantic are dropping short stories, and short fiction collections have a reputation as being difficult to sell.

I thought this was a very interesting insight and made a connection that I had not made before: Academic writing programs killed the short story.

There was a time when the short story was America's favorite fictive form. All the major magazines, as well as the minor ones and many newspapers, published short stories. Major authors, well-known as novelists, practiced the art, and some were known for almost nothing else. Having read stories by Sherwood Anderson, John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others, I can understand why. These stories cut through me and expose me to life as it is lived.

I don't think I've made my way all the way through a story that's been written in the last 20 years. At a minimum.

Short stories no longer speak to us or speak to our lives. They tend to be self-consciously solemn or ironic and generally just plain boring. They read like term papers written to impress the professor by the clever students, the ones who linger at the podium after the lecture to stroke the professor's pretensions and avoid his wrath.

This is the problem that comes when we stop looking at writing as a calling and turn it instead into a profession.

There are always going to be people who write because they have a knack for it, and it beats working for a living. It used to be that these people became journalists and the authors of various types of hackwork. But they never became leading novelists or poets or playwrights.

This is not to say that all the leading novelists in days gone by were geniuses; the great majority were nothing of the sort. They were, however, generally people who had been called to do their pitiful best in the telling of tales. In fact, the strengths that they did display--sentimentality, a gift for improbable action--were not the strengths of the technicians. The poor saps had no idea how terrible they were and went to their graves thinking of themselves as great artists. And if you don't believe me, I've got two words and a hyphen for you: Bulwer-Lytton.

The thing about the technicians is that they are capable with words. They can arrange them and stack them and even pull off the occasional piece of prestidigitation. They just have no talent for telling us about life as it is lived. They have ideas instead of empathy and theories in place of feelings. They are not artists, but workers, drones who collect enough nectar for a dew drop of honey, but no more.

Turning the vocation of writer into the profession of author makes it easy for the second-raters to rise to the top. The secrets of rising in any profession are always the same. It means playing the game, shaking the right hands, and riding the prevailing wind in whatever direction it takes you.

People who have been called are good at none of these things typically. They are always pursuing their own vision and speaking in their own voices, and nothing scares a technician quicker than an original voice. The profession takes on the trappings of the fraternal organization and the acquisition of an MFA can be understood as the equivalent of an initiation and a secret handshake.

The problem becomes that even the making of prose becomes part of the code. When this happens, the art of literature is doomed.

Blogging Off the Top of My Head

My first experience with blogging came when I encountered Phil Austin's Blog of the Unknown late in 2002, I think, certainly no later than early 2003. Blogging was still a new thing then, and Phil had taken a small squad of Firesign Theatre addicts down a rabbit hole called "Experiments in Writing." It was in many ways a fortunate accident that brought me to The Blog of the Unknown, and I learned a great deal from the writings of my cohorts there. It was, however, like The Journey to the East, doomed from the start. We Wayfarers eventually found our gorge of Morbio Inferiore, and The Blog was no longer what it was. It is doubtful that it ever will be again.

What I did not know at the time was that The Blog of the Unknown was an atypical blog. Most blogs were either political or confessional, with the most outrageous or sauciest ones being the most popular. When I stumbled into creating this blog in September of 2004, I had no idea that blogging was something of a fad and was a fad that had just about peeked. I saw it as a way of promoting my then budding radio show; it was a major component of my marketing plan, a plan that crashed on takeoff, or perhaps just as it was leaving the gate. But that's life.

In these last four or so years in the blogosphere, I have given thought on occasion to the phenomenon itself, to the acts of blogging and commenting, to how blogs work and how we approach them and how they affect us. I have thought about what the meaning might be in a literary activity that comprises mostly blather.

Has there ever been another means of communication that was open to so many and said so little? It is a medium that rewards brevity and courseness. Long posts (such as this one) written with subtlety and wit (it could happen) are anathema to the great mass of blog readers. They are in search of people with similar prejudices or similar problems or a peek into a fantasy version of someone else's sex life. The best posts do not make you scroll down or think a new thought or open yourself to another in compassion. Those things take time, and blogging tends to reward speed rather than depth.

As posts pile up in reverse chronological order, the New takes precedence over the Past, which becomes an artifact safely stored in an archive. Blogging has its roots in journalism, especially in news writing. The latest post is a slender newspaper that gets its day at the top of the pile before being banished to the shadows below.

Does blogging have a great effect on society? I doubt it. It's more of a symptom than a disease, more a reflection of society than its shaper. We live in a society that is devoted to shallowness and emotion and that mistakes chasing the New for living in the Now. Why should we expect any more than that from a blog?

Blogs are now, of course, on the wane. What happened to the Hoola-Hoop can happen here, although I doubt that blogs are in any danger of disappearing altogether, at least not soon. As newspapers move increasingly away from print, official blogs will replace traditional columns and the professional blogger will replace the amateur. And never again will there be a Blog of the Unknown.

Announcements

Well, I tried using the blog for my morning pages, but that didn't quite work out. The problem is that morning pages and journals are things meant to be done in private--you need a place where you can fail bravely and write poorly. Someone asked George Gershwin how many songs he wrote in a week, and he replied, "I write 14 songs a day. That way, I can get the bad ones out of my system."

That's the theory behind a journal.

And so, I have purchased an old fashioned notebook that I'm going to try to fill with an old fashioned pen. (It really is old fashioned; I use a cartridge-type fountain pen I've had for I-don't-know-how-long.) It's the only way to go.

That leaves me with a bit of a blog problem. What to do with this blog? Today, I decided on a course of action.

A couple of things occurred to me. First, I realized that the problem with doing morning pages on a blog is the public nature of it. The little button on the screen I write these posts on says, "PUBLISH," and that is correct. Blogging is a form of self-publishing.

Second, I realized that I don't want to publish inferior product. Any writing of mine that ends up in public needs to be polished and the best that I can make it. My best posts here have parts that make me outright wince when I reread them and this comes from the posts having been written straight off the top of my head. This is not my best work nor at all what I am capable of.

After tossing these ideas around the old brainbox for a while, I came to the conclusion that the best use to which I could put this blog is turn it into a modern version of the periodicals that were popular in the 18th Century. I mean, what was good enough for Addison and Steele and Samuel Johnson ought to be good enough for the likes of me.

In the interest of full disclosure, the appearance of this idea was influenced by a flyer for a talk given at the university I currently work for by the person who blogs under the pseudonym BitchPhD. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and give her a link on the sidebar in recompense. I'm just that kind of guy.

Anyway. The end product of all this mulling is that, from now on, I plan to publish this blog once each week. Every Thursday I will publish an essay on whatever topic I deem worth writing about. This coming Thursday, for example, I hope to write something about my experiences as a blogger.

Topical stuff--the kind of writing that comes when I just have to blow off some steam because we're ruled by a gaggle of morons--will still get posted to Shooting Off My Fat Trap. Updates on the progress in the marketing and revision of my novel will appear at Michael Drayton, Detective Guy.

And all of my journaling will happen in private and on paper. See you on Thursday.

The Dream Is Over--Or Is It?

Michael Drayton, Detective Guy did not make the cut in the contest over at Gather.com. Twenty semi-finalists were chosen yesterday, leaving Drayton, I'm sure, at position 21 or maybe 27. So close and yet so far. I got the impression that all the semi-finalists are genre-friendly potboilers, something which Drayton certainly is not, and since the imprint that all this is directed toward, Touchstone/Fireside, specializes in genre-friendly potboilers, that is all well and good.

Be of good cheer, though. All is not lost. I have already sent a query to an agent. At the very least, this contest gave me a solid deadline to shoot for, and I made it with a reasonable draft left behind for my troubles. The current version isn't perfect--the last half needs a thorough rewrite--but the story is in place with enough good writing along the way to show that I can write somewhat. And whether this first agent bites or whether it takes 100 queries to find somebody, I'll keep on. It's really that good.

This and That

I hadn't written anything today, and there is the idea that there is value in just putting something down every day as an exercise, and I don't know that I have anything specific to say, so I thought I'd just ramble on here for a while with small bits of things as they occur to me.

William Faulkner once wrote a sentence that was 1300 words long. I just came across that yesterday.

As I've looked back on the last several chapters of Drayton, I've seen that value of rewriting from the top, starting fresh and reconsidering every word. That's what we used to do in the old days of typewriters, and it was a good system for a writer. I'd really like to go back to using my manual typewriters, but it's not convenient right now. But once I'm a world famous novelist, I'll be able to do whatever the hell I want. You'll see!

There's been another shooting this afternoon, this one in the Omni Hotel in the CNN Center in downtown Atlanta. The discussion about guns in this country tends to revolve around laws and restrictions, but rarely around the meaning of guns to our society. Since there is far more gun-related violence in the United States than in any other developed nation, there has to be a difference in the way that guns are perceived. And while gun control proponents will argue that differences in laws make for different levels of violence, I'm not sure that that is the whole story.

It seems to me that, culturally, Americans believe two things about guns: 1)Possessing a weapon means having power and 2)using a weapon is a good way of solving problems.

It has become a truism that our basic American myth is not that of the founding or the Revolution, but the story of the expansion into the West. Our shared cultural myth depends on a couple of notions if it is to function in any way. The first is that anyone who goes unarmed is either a fool or a coward and often both. The second is that The Bad Guys need to be killed, preferably with a pistol, and preferably in a showdown. Compromise and discussion are cowardly and useless. Violence is the only means to right wrongs.

The problem with this worldview is that it is wrong. Rationality, compromise, discussion, empathy, and compassion solve problems. Time-and-time again, they solve problems while creating fewer new problems than violence does. Being reasonable, of course, doesn't come with the childish rush of excitement that holding a firearm does, and it often calls for far greater courage than can be found at the butt-end of a gun, but it has its compensations.

Anyway, that's just a longwinded way of saying that I think that if we want to see the violence and senseless deaths diminished, we should start by examining our collective feelings towards guns even before we should change the laws.

The Road to Crap

I've just finished reading a story in today's New York Times about a new blending of technology with theater that, in the words of George Spigott in the original Bedazzled, "fills me with inertia."

A couple of dingbats, working independently of one another, have come up with a way to have a projected image of an actor appear onstage with the actor himself. Now, that alone is an old conjurer's trick and no great shakes. It's the addition of software that can control the video image so that the image can react to the live person. Sounds neat, doesn't it? Here's why it isn't:

This kind of invasion of theater by technology never results in a better product. It merely results in a slicker visual experience that is usually used to hide the paucity of artistic value in the project as a whole. And then the next project is chosen because it will support the gimmickry and the whole of theater is given over to empty spectacle and a sackful of magic tricks.

How do I know this? I this because that is how it has always been. In my own lifetime, I've seen the entire musical form be debased by the amazing sets and pyrotechnics of Les Miserables and the collected works of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Don't believe me? Ask anyone who has gone to see Les Miz or Phantom what they liked about it best, and I'll give you a dollar if the first thing that comes out of their mouths isn't a tribute to the sets.

The problem that modern American theater has is that serious theater is pretentious and everything else is empty show. They try to compete with movies by being just as lame and laden with special effects, and both lose audience to the medium that's least likely to indulge in special effects: TV.

The Morning Page

I had thought of something to write about earlier today, but now it's gone. That's the limitation of blogging as a kind of journal: You need to be near a computer in order to do it.

Back in the olden days, we had things we called pens and other things we called notebooks, and we used to use the pens to write in the notebooks. Now, I understand how quaint and all that sounds, but it's true. And it worked, too! Nope. You never had to reboot your notebook, although you would occasionally have to replace the pen or at least get a refill for it. It was a good system, though, and it worked just fine. Oh sure, you couldn't spend time researching Britney's latest haircut or play a game of something other than tic-tac-toe or hangman, but we muddled through somehow.

Still, despite my complaints about all these newfangled ways, I find myself as trapped in them as anyone else. I, personally, have two computers and a third at work. I carry a cell phone, own a website, and keep a goddamn blog. I'm stuck, stuck in a world not of my desiring, but of my undoing. It seems to me that all this technology that alleges to draw us closer really pushes us further apart and cages us in our separate high-tech boxes.

The problem with the virtual world is its virtualness, and it only offers virtual experiences. We get lost in personas and handles and screen names, and try in vain to connect with illusions and stand-ins for authentic selves. The virtual world is a lonely one, a desolate road, not a superhighway. O! for the return of the lowly pen!

Good Advice

Last night, my dear wife made an observation about blogging in regard to the love/hate relationship a fellow blogger has with the medium that struck me as sound advice for any writer who also blogs. There are probably loads of people out there who pursue blogging from this angle, but I have not. Shame on me.

The great insight was this: A blog is a great way to do what adherents of the book Writing Down the Bones call the daily pages. As my wife pointed out, this used to be known as keeping a journal.

One of the hardest things about writing is doing it every day. There are always excuses to be made: I'm so busy. I need to give time to my family. I want to see the chick with the wooden leg on Dancing with the Stars. Ironically, one of the best ways to keep on track with any creative writing project is to do other kinds of writing as well. Truman Capote liked to start his day with correspondence. Many other writers are known for their journals--some of them better know for their journals than anything else.

Blogging is, of course, the modern form of journaling. To use it consciously as such is only sensible. And that is what I am going to try to do.

I wouldn't expect the contents of this blog to change much, since I've never been much prone to confession either online or in the various journals I've kept over the years. With any luck, the kind of nonsense that I've gotten by with for several years now will just appear more frequently.

In further news, Chapter One of Michael Drayton, Detective Guy has been closed down for viewing after its two-week run. We'll find out next Tuesday whether Chapter Two will go up or not. If it does, that will give me something to journal about next week. If not, I'll just begin the search for an agent.

Why It Matters

Chuck Klosterman has written an interesting and provocative essay that originally ran in the March 26th issue of ESPN: The Magazine and is now available online. In it, he makes a number of points concerning the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs in the NFL, but most of the attention that I've seen paid to it concerns his assertion that

It can be strongly argued that the most important date in the history of rock music was Aug. 28, 1964. This was the day Bob Dylan met the Beatles in New York City's Hotel Delmonico and got them high.

Obviously, a lot of people might want to disagree with this assertion, but the artistic evidence is hard to ignore. The introduction of marijuana altered the trajectory of the Beatles' songwriting, reconstructed their consciousness and prompted them to make the most influential rock albums of all time. After the summer of 1964, the Beatles started taking serious drugs, and those drugs altered their musical performance. Though it may not have been their overt intent, the Beatles took performance-enhancing drugs. And this is germane to sports for one reason: Absolutely no one holds it against them. No one views "Rubber Soul" and "Revolver" as "less authentic" albums, despite the fact that they would not (and probably could not) have been made by people who weren't on drugs.

He uses this line of argument as a basis for saying that using performance enhancing drugs may be at least understandable, if not permissible, in the NFL. He draws no hard-and-fast conclusions, except to say that this is something that fans will have to make judgments about in the future. Fair enough. It's an interesting article and good reading, as well.

However, I'd like to take issue with a couple of points that Mr. Klosterman makes.

First of all, I think that it's rather facile to refer to the drugs taken by the Beatles as "performance-enhancing." There is no evidence that many or any of their songs were written while the composer or composers were stoned and the whole idea of someone being able to write a coherent song while tripping on acid is absurd. They didn't use the drugs to enhance performance, but to alter perception. And the truth of the matter is that they in no way smoked a bone or dropped a tab in order to make themselves better musicians. They did it because they thought it was fun and, in John's case, it made it easier to handle a success he felt inside that he both did and didn't deserve.

Second, he is comparing apples and oranges. Art is not sport and sport is not art. Art is not a competition. Artists create in order to create, not in order to win. There is no winning or losing, just success or failure, and that is experienced on a very personal level in regard to each specific work.

Performance-enhancing drugs should not be allowed in the NFL for the same reason that we do not allow corked bats in baseball or let boxers clutch rolls of nickels: It's cheating. The assumption behind every sporting event is that everyone involved has an equal chance in terms of equipment and playing surface. The difference comes from superior skill and a certain amount of luck. When steroids and human growth hormone enter a sport, the so-called level playing field becomes a field of ridges and rises. As George Orwell put it, all are equal, but some are more equal than others.

This undercuts the fundamental assumptions behind athletics. Sure, it's an entertainment, and it's mostly about money, and the players, while highly paid, are chewed up and spit out with extraordinary disregard. However, part of what makes it entertaining is the notion that some players are more adept than others, that some teams are better coached and are more cohesive units. Performance-enhancing drugs undercut all of that. They reduce any sport to a competition between pharmacies. Is this player better than that one or does he just have a better connection?

Two more small points about the Beatles. First, we can't know what kind of records they would have made without pot and LSD and heroin. Given the extraordinary growth their work had already showed before meeting Dylan, we can assume that they would have made great records anyway, because that's what they did. Second, their meeting with Dylan was not their introduction into the world of illicit drugs. They took prellies by the handful in Hamburg, uppers given to them by a bouncer named Horst so that they could play eight- and twelve-hour sets. So, if Mr. Klosterman wants to give credit where credit is due, he should skip the fashionable Mr. Dylan and go straight to Horst Fascher.

Timing Is Everything

I read the following in a story about how Zsa Zsa Gabor's husband is suing Bill O'Reilly because O'Reilly called him a "fraud." (And, yes, I could say that it takes one to know one, but I don't think Mr. O'Reilly is a fraud. I think he really is a belligerent, know-nothing blowhard. At least in my opinion. And that's the difference between slander and mere insults: While Mr. O'Reilly presented his opinion as fact, I present mine purely as my opinion, however factual it may turn out to be.)

But on to the quote from the story, which refers to Prince von Anhalt's claim to be the father of Anna Nicole Smith's infant child:

"Von Anhalt came forward with his belief that he may have been responsible for impregnating Smith the day after her death on Feb.
8[.]"

Now, is it just me or does this smack of necrophilia? Or was it some kind of Frankenstein deal? To be fair, he has the name for that sort of activity. Was he father to the child in the same manner that Dr. Frankenstein was father to the monster and Dr. Pretorius father to the tiny people in the glass jars (see The Bride of Frankenstein)? To quote Dr. Harry "Happy" Cox in The Firesign Theatre's "Everything You Know Is Wrong," "Could be! Could be!"

Today's Nag

Read and maybe even vote on Chapter One of Michael Drayton, Detective Guy. It's a lot easier than Finnegan's Wake, better than the back of a cereal box, and a lot more fun than the headlines on Yahoo! or Google.