A close friend of many years, Rex Baird is one of the most literary-minded people I know, and the most insightful and knowledgeable about film. The following excerpt is from his superb memoir of the 1950s and '60s, The Work of Moths.
Rex Baird is a former bartender, English teacher, speechwriter and running shoe rep turned neuromuscular massage therapist and personal trainer. Although his job history has varied, his love of golf and movies has remained constant despite the humility of higher scores and the impossibility of finding a decent drive-in.
In the early 60s, I had a high school-friend Norm who was a Lucky Strike man. Like my mother Jane, he was proud of his brand. Both Luckies and Camels were considered the serious smoker's choice. Filters were for dilettantes.
Norm, a member of the golf team, spoke in a double-negative-laden-pseudo-hipster lingo. When I signed up for tryouts simply to take advantage of the ten-cent greens fee offered to the team by a local municipal course, Norm chastised me. “It’s a lie you aren’t in it for the dime time.”
During my teenaged years, my parents rented a summerhouse next to a golf course on Cape Cod. My father preferred to stay in Boston and would travel down by train only on the occasional weekend. It wasn’t hard convincing Norm to visit. We could ogle girls on the beach every morning and play golf in the afternoon. Better yet, with my traditionally strict father out of the picture, we could drink as many as two beers at night with my mother’s blessing. “It’ll put hair on you chest,” she told us.
Because he admired Arnold Palmer, Norm mimicked Arnie's golf swing and his smoking style. Before every shot he'd take a big drag, then launch his Lucky off to the side with a practiced flick of thumb and index finger. After each shot, he'd retrieve the butt and smoke it out of the corner of his mouth like a racetrack tout as he strutted down the fairway.
Norm's pantomime was accurate but a bit too hammy for my taste, and rather silly coming from a fifteen-year-old. We were playing late one afternoon under heavy storm clouds. Norm's histrionics were slowing our progress.
When the first few raindrops fell, I'd had enough. "Hey Arnie," I said, “are you a smoker or a golfer?"
Norm--all 5'4" and 120 pounds--looked at me sideways with his version of menace. "It's a lie I can't smoke you in golf and out smoke your mother."
The first boast was debatable; the second, ludicrous. The rain was falling harder now, and as we hustled down the seventeenth fairway, I formulated a plan. "Let’s hit the drive-in tonight and you can go one on one with Jane. Just smoke a Lucky for each of her Camels. Think you can handle it, big man?"
My strategy was fiendish. Norm was sensitive about his height. I knew smoking made him feel bigger, or at least older. I also knew he was worried it would "stunt his growth." This kind of internal conflict could only weaken his resolve. His obsession with turning sixteen so he could get his driver's license would make going to the drive-in with my mother behind the wheel a demeaning experience.
The seventeenth green bordered a graveyard. Why not dig the needle a little deeper? As Norm set up over his putt, a twisty, downhill six-footer, I pointed toward the tombstones. "Try to go ten rounds with Jane, and that's where you'll end up, Lucky man."
Norm glowered. The Lucky, which he'd forgotten to flick away, was dangling from his lip. As he looked down at his ball, the smoke trailed up toward his eyes. He stabbed his putt and it ran through the break, coming to rest eight feet below the hole. This was going to be fun.
On the way to the drive-in that night, Norm oozed the false bravado of a promising middleweight trying to move up a couple of classes to fight the heavyweight champ. We agreed he’d sit in the front seat with Jane so he could pace himself appropriately. The bucket seat restrained his natural hyperactivity. I sensed he wanted to pace back and forth and shadow box to release his pre-fight jitters.
The feature that night was The Counterfeit Traitor, with William Holden and Lilli Palmer. The rain had intensified, and when the previews began I could see rivulets cascading down the screen.
Jane set a blistering early pace. If she’d been in our living room watching a movie on TV, she’d have rested her cigarette on the edge of an ashtray. But the ashtray in the T-Bird was small, and hard to find in the dark. So the Camel never left Jane's hand. And the car's cigarette lighter was broken, so Jane simply used the butt of her first Camel to light the second.
Jane's first Camel expired in just over twelve minutes. From the back seat, I could see Norm concealing his mimicry by taking a drag ten or fifteen seconds after Jane's lead. Their battle was taking its toll on me. The car was quickly filling with dense smoke that obscured the screen, but I couldn't crack the rear window more than an inch without getting soaked.
To make matters worse, the rain pelting the roof of the car muffled the sound from the tinny drive-in speaker hanging inside the window. The movie, which I now could neither see nor hear clearly, had become merely a backdrop for the smoking contest. My eyes were beginning to water, and the billowing clouds had reached a toxic level. I could still make out William Holden's faint onscreen image holding a cigarette. Jane responded by smoking faster. Less than twenty minutes into the contest, Norm was on the ropes.
He threw in the towel after the third cigarette. "I'm forlorn if I don't get some corn," he wheezed as he bolted out the door into the deluge.
I translated for Jane. "Norm said he wants some popcorn."
Jane looked perplexed. "That Norm's a strange boy. He's going to get soaked to his skin."
Norm had been gone for twenty minutes when Jane suggested I investigate. I hesitated. I didn't want to get drenched, and didn't relish the idea of finding Norm bent over a public toilet. Jane turned toward me and raised her left eyebrow. This was a sign of intimidation she admitted she'd practiced for months as a teenager. It worked; I departed at a gallop.
Norm was huddled under the roof of the concession building. He looked, as Jane might have put it, "a little green under the gills." It could have been the fluorescent lights, but I doubted it.
"It's a lie that wasn't fume doom," Norm said, shaking his head like a fighter just revived with smelling salts.
He looked so miserable I didn't have the heart to rub it in. "I told you she was tough. You wouldn't expect to outdrive Nicklaus, would you? And hey, smoking Luckies is like playing from the pro tees."
"I guess, so," he said, still shaking his head. "But I'm a doubtful starter for the back nine." This was Normspeak for I quit.
"Tell you what. I'll complain about the smoke. Maybe she’ll tone it down a little."
Jane did slow down, and the rain stopped, allowing us to open the car windows. Norm didn't smoke another Lucky all night, and the next day on the golf course he lit up only once. A few months later at a high school assembly, we watched an anti-smoking film featuring pictures of tar-coated and cancerous lungs. Norm made a vow to quit--which he soon broke--but at least he cut back.
Even after losing a breast to cancer in 1983, Jane didn’t moderate her three-pack-a-day habit. It took a stroke, ten years later, to put a cramp in her style.
Sunday, March 15, 2015
Friday, February 27, 2015
Guest Blog #3: Adam's Task (by Emily Millikan)
Emily Millikan is a thoughtful and tremendously talented young writer from whom I expect great things: stories, essays, novels. Here she is praising Vicki Hearne (1946 – 2001), a fine writer I'm embarrassed to say I'd never even heard of.
This review was originally published online in 2011 by my friend Meghan Krogh. I'm grateful to Meghan for the nudge to take courage and write about this enormous book. - Emily Millikan
Emily Millikan works in private health care and nonprofit administration. Originally from Indiana, she now lives north of Boston. She finds her writing community in Image Journal's Glen Workshops.
If I ask why we read, or why we read what we read, it does not compute: system overload. A smaller question, then: why do I personally reread what I reread? What's so special about C.S. Lewis's novel Till We Have Faces, which I've read so many times I've lost track? What about The Lord of the Rings? What about Annie Dillard's essays, or Neal Stephenson's alternate-universe epic Anathem, or Mary Doria Russel's The Sparrow, or certain of the Psalms?
These have very little in common, and none of them bear any resemblance to the latest book I've been rereading, this year and last year and the year before: Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name by Vicki Hearne. I suppose I list them here together on the same page because they all, in one way or another, teach me how to live.
A bit of a personal preface before I tell you why you should all go read Adam's Task immediately, stopping neither for novel nor essay nor poem.
My day jobs take a lot out of me. Twenty or thirty hours a week I work as a nanny for a family of four kids, three of whom – boys 8, 10, and 11 – are diagnosed with ADHD and a sensory processing disorder. I shuttle them to after-school activities and steer conversations and keep them from hurting each other. I'm basically an assistant parent.
A few days a month I work at a group home for four developmentally delayed adults. I'm also the administrative go-to for a small nonprofit that serves orphan teenagers inUkraine Russia
The job with the kids especially requires minute-to-minute willpower. Across the room I hear the 11-year-old bullying the 8-year-old: do I let it go this one time because I'm already making two lunches and the 6-year-old is begging me to play a game and the coffee's not working and I wake up every morning clenching my jaw and at night all I want is chips and TV? Or do I give him a warning and then talk to him, without anger, about how those comments make another person feel, because it matters how this boy grows up and enters the world.
I wonder constantly if I am capable of working with people this way. Some of it is, simply put, soul-healing work. Outside of work are a girl and boy whom I think of as family, and I wonder too how anyone can be worthy of any child's trust, the way these children trust me. I need courage to persist in all the difficult moments in my relationships, the moments when I feel isolated, young and naïve, insufficient, in over my head.
This is where Vicki Hearne comes in.
Adam's Task is a book about the communication between humans and animals: an amalgam of animal storybook, training manual, philosophical treatise, and literary critique. In Adam's Task, horse training and showing and dog training are lifted up into the realm of the moral life. Or, perhaps more accurately, the mysterious moral underpinnings of animal training are revealed and exalted, shimmering, somehow both delicate and strong. And it’s because of those moral underpinnings that there is the possibility of courage in every page, in every moment of every story.
The story of a horse named Drummer Girl is probably my favorite. It's in a chapter called “Crazy Horses,” which begins with the story of another horse, Halla, who was supposed to be unridable until, as the real stories do sometimes go, a great rider named Hans Winkler began riding her and won a prestigious competition in spite of an injury. Hearne had only heard of, perhaps witnessed, Winkler and Halla's riding. But Drummer Girl came under her care twice. The first time, she says, Drummer Girl was “ignorant, nervous and confused by—one can only guess—the bizarre activities that pass for training on and about California tracks so much of the time.” Drummer Girl was quickly sold to a client who took her to a nearby state, where the training made her crazy.
Hearne took Drummer Girl back for training, because she'd been kicked out of several barns, and because, as Hearne writes, “One of the stories I was determined to stick to at the time was that I could train anything,” or as she writes elsewhere, “Good trainers ride all horses as though they were potentially world-class; that's the only way you end up with world-class horses.” To which I say, Yes, tell me how.
When Hearne met Drummer Girl for the second time, Drummer Girl twisted around coming out of the trailer and kicked. Her shoe came off and “went through the (admittedly not... the sturdiest) wall of the tack room.” This is unusual. Horses will ordinarily go out of their way to avoid hurting humans. Drummer Girl had been traumatized: “The young, silly, confused but tender filly was gone. This was a full-grown mare, enraged, paranoid psychotic, violently uninterested in My Friend Flicka. She had, as it were, been toVietnam
Hearne writes that “simple physical brutality and distress” didn't cause her to be this way; she hadn't experienced what we would call physical abuse. “The significant brutalities for this mare,” she says, “had been linguistic, moral in the full sense.” She was a mare for whom “balance, symmetry and coherence were at the center of the cosmos,” so that incoherent training – poor communication, essentially – became a form of torture, and any kind of communication, coherent or not, became a trigger.
Let me step back from Hearne and Drummer Girl for a moment to say: I know these people. I know, in the first place, teenage orphans who have experienced not just physical trauma but the relational trauma of abandonment, mixed signals, attention offered for sex, adults who think they know how to love a broken person but who falter and fail when tested. And I know people for whom coherence is essential; it “looks hostile in places,” says Hearne, “the hardness we see in the lives of people for whom a certain sort of coherence matters more than the conventions of approval.” And beyond this, I have seen, as I am sure you have seen, the small eddies of panic and fear, the sudden coldness or distancing, the tremulousness, of an otherwise well and whole human being who has been deeply hurt and who isn't yet quite up to the hard task of trusting. I have also been this person.
People who have been hurt, who fear relationship in its widest and most wonderful forms, they have been told the wrong stories.
The question is, then, how does one get a crazy horse interested in the story again? And how does one get a human to pay attention to a real, potentially healing relationship? And how does one find the courage to go at it over and over and over again, with the knowledge that it may not work, the horse may continue throwing you until the end of time, or the small hurt part of the person you love may remain closed off to you until the trumpet sounds?
Vicki Hearne would perhaps slide sideways: “The question ‘Why train horses at all?’ is like the question ‘Why should we like the world?’ Most of the time, the only answer that can be given is a maneuver rather than an answer, as when Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations said, ‘We like the world because we do,’ a remark that can be interpreted darkly or not, as you like.” The maneuver she speaks of is, I think, rooted in the same virtues whether it is a maneuver on behalf of human or beast: in courage and a kind of steely innocence that refuses to be sucked into irony and nihilism.
Hearne's answer to Drummer Girl's craziness is not philosophy, it is a maneuver, the kind of deliberate and knowledgeable maneuver that precedes and chooses love.
A day after Drummer Girl arrived, Hearne attempted to halter her. Drummer Girl “dash[ed] violently around the pasture, kicking and squealing.” Hearne cornered her, at which point Drummer Girl swung around and stamped on Hearne's foot. Instead of getting herself killed, Hearne took out a longe whip (not a whip used for touching the horse) and “chased” her around the pasture until Drummer Girl consented to be haltered. She didn't wear the horse out physically: she just made it clear to Drummer Girl that she would have to pay attention – that here was a human one could perhaps eventually talk to. With Drummer Girl on a lead, she did “what I did with Salty—run in the opposite direction from the one she was going. If she bolted to my right, I went left. If she bolted forward, I did an about-turn and ran. If she went up, I went down, toChina
Then something happened: “About the fourth time my speed spun her away from the can of oats, the situation changed. She tensed to dart forward and then stopped herself (the lead rope was completely slack), turning over in her head the cosmic implications of my behavior. She got it right, snorted, stuck her left eye up to my right eye and pawed the ground furiously.”
Hearne tells more of Drummer Girl's story – how in a few days she was “asking” to be worked, how she learned to stop rushing her jumps: “I had heartlessly set things up so that, if she was capable of any sort of reasoning at all, she must slow down and canter properly. Must, that is, choose a muscular version of the good over the chaos of the stories about a sweet, dumb horse who just couldn’t help herself.” But it's this first moment that interests me, the moment when Drummer Girl stops running away and pays attention.
It's such a small moment. What would an onlooker see? Drummer Girl isn't really “broke”: a few days later when Hearne mounts her for the first time, Drummer Girl busts open her forehead. But this is the first time in perhaps years that Drummer Girl has listened, has found even an inkling of believability in the humans who've been training her. There is eye contact, and there is the potential for trust.
These moments are real outside of animal training, and outside of books. We don't know when they will occur for another person, just as we often don't know when they will occur in ourselves, but we can call upon them in each other, and for me, especially, in those given to my care. And so I leave Adam's Task each time believing, newly and with great determination, that each moment requires all the courage we can bring to it. Each instance of courage, whether it is teaching, or not yelling, or just waking up and going to the place you're supposed to be; or whether it is that small intake of breath in the middle of a conversation, opening your heart again even though it would be easier to leave yourself properly defended: these moments are, as Hearne would say, heroic, and for me these are the moments inherent in the mundane that give meaning to it. These are the maneuvers that precede love, the maneuvers that choose a love as yet unseen.
Many great books turn me inward. Adam's Task ends, not with a relationship between me and a book, but with a relationship between me and a book and the world. It returns me to the world, as it will return you to the world, carrying in your inward places another story or two that will help you to choose the “muscular version of the good."
So I go back to my work with kids with ADHD, with the developmentally delayed, with traumatized teenagers and adopted kids. And I go to them not with a philosophy, and not with a cheap love falsely conjured, but with stories that embody the heroic, that allow me to see what the ending can be like when there is courage on every page. In my best moments I know there is no heartache could dissuade me. I have watched my own maneuvers turn from the vision of love into love itself, and my own stories lie alongside Hearne's stories, so that I can call upon them when I am tired.
“...What we know,” says Vicki Hearne, “is that what we require for goodness and beauty puts us in great risk of the most heartrending grief—but always, always, the risk is worth it. There is nothing behind this knowledge, no reasoning, no inferring: we are born to it, and our tendency to do something about autism, like our tendency to imagine and to live in the hardest-edged disciplines, shows how powerful that knowledge is.”
I would tend to say that there is something behind this knowledge, and it is the love of a God who chose the muscular version of the good even unto death; our love, as a permutation of His love, is the kind with teeth. And always, always, the risk is worth it.
- - - - -
Vicki Hearne (1946 – 2001) was a poet, philosopher, linguist, and animal trainer. She published three nonfiction titles and four books of poetry. Adam's Task (1986) was her first book.
This review was originally published online in 2011 by my friend Meghan Krogh. I'm grateful to Meghan for the nudge to take courage and write about this enormous book. - Emily Millikan
Emily Millikan works in private health care and nonprofit administration. Originally from Indiana, she now lives north of Boston. She finds her writing community in Image Journal's Glen Workshops.
If I ask why we read, or why we read what we read, it does not compute: system overload. A smaller question, then: why do I personally reread what I reread? What's so special about C.S. Lewis's novel Till We Have Faces, which I've read so many times I've lost track? What about The Lord of the Rings? What about Annie Dillard's essays, or Neal Stephenson's alternate-universe epic Anathem, or Mary Doria Russel's The Sparrow, or certain of the Psalms?
These have very little in common, and none of them bear any resemblance to the latest book I've been rereading, this year and last year and the year before: Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name by Vicki Hearne. I suppose I list them here together on the same page because they all, in one way or another, teach me how to live.
A bit of a personal preface before I tell you why you should all go read Adam's Task immediately, stopping neither for novel nor essay nor poem.
My day jobs take a lot out of me. Twenty or thirty hours a week I work as a nanny for a family of four kids, three of whom – boys 8, 10, and 11 – are diagnosed with ADHD and a sensory processing disorder. I shuttle them to after-school activities and steer conversations and keep them from hurting each other. I'm basically an assistant parent.
A few days a month I work at a group home for four developmentally delayed adults. I'm also the administrative go-to for a small nonprofit that serves orphan teenagers in
The job with the kids especially requires minute-to-minute willpower. Across the room I hear the 11-year-old bullying the 8-year-old: do I let it go this one time because I'm already making two lunches and the 6-year-old is begging me to play a game and the coffee's not working and I wake up every morning clenching my jaw and at night all I want is chips and TV? Or do I give him a warning and then talk to him, without anger, about how those comments make another person feel, because it matters how this boy grows up and enters the world.
I wonder constantly if I am capable of working with people this way. Some of it is, simply put, soul-healing work. Outside of work are a girl and boy whom I think of as family, and I wonder too how anyone can be worthy of any child's trust, the way these children trust me. I need courage to persist in all the difficult moments in my relationships, the moments when I feel isolated, young and naïve, insufficient, in over my head.
This is where Vicki Hearne comes in.
Adam's Task is a book about the communication between humans and animals: an amalgam of animal storybook, training manual, philosophical treatise, and literary critique. In Adam's Task, horse training and showing and dog training are lifted up into the realm of the moral life. Or, perhaps more accurately, the mysterious moral underpinnings of animal training are revealed and exalted, shimmering, somehow both delicate and strong. And it’s because of those moral underpinnings that there is the possibility of courage in every page, in every moment of every story.
The story of a horse named Drummer Girl is probably my favorite. It's in a chapter called “Crazy Horses,” which begins with the story of another horse, Halla, who was supposed to be unridable until, as the real stories do sometimes go, a great rider named Hans Winkler began riding her and won a prestigious competition in spite of an injury. Hearne had only heard of, perhaps witnessed, Winkler and Halla's riding. But Drummer Girl came under her care twice. The first time, she says, Drummer Girl was “ignorant, nervous and confused by—one can only guess—the bizarre activities that pass for training on and about California tracks so much of the time.” Drummer Girl was quickly sold to a client who took her to a nearby state, where the training made her crazy.
Hearne took Drummer Girl back for training, because she'd been kicked out of several barns, and because, as Hearne writes, “One of the stories I was determined to stick to at the time was that I could train anything,” or as she writes elsewhere, “Good trainers ride all horses as though they were potentially world-class; that's the only way you end up with world-class horses.” To which I say, Yes, tell me how.
When Hearne met Drummer Girl for the second time, Drummer Girl twisted around coming out of the trailer and kicked. Her shoe came off and “went through the (admittedly not... the sturdiest) wall of the tack room.” This is unusual. Horses will ordinarily go out of their way to avoid hurting humans. Drummer Girl had been traumatized: “The young, silly, confused but tender filly was gone. This was a full-grown mare, enraged, paranoid psychotic, violently uninterested in My Friend Flicka. She had, as it were, been to
Hearne writes that “simple physical brutality and distress” didn't cause her to be this way; she hadn't experienced what we would call physical abuse. “The significant brutalities for this mare,” she says, “had been linguistic, moral in the full sense.” She was a mare for whom “balance, symmetry and coherence were at the center of the cosmos,” so that incoherent training – poor communication, essentially – became a form of torture, and any kind of communication, coherent or not, became a trigger.
Let me step back from Hearne and Drummer Girl for a moment to say: I know these people. I know, in the first place, teenage orphans who have experienced not just physical trauma but the relational trauma of abandonment, mixed signals, attention offered for sex, adults who think they know how to love a broken person but who falter and fail when tested. And I know people for whom coherence is essential; it “looks hostile in places,” says Hearne, “the hardness we see in the lives of people for whom a certain sort of coherence matters more than the conventions of approval.” And beyond this, I have seen, as I am sure you have seen, the small eddies of panic and fear, the sudden coldness or distancing, the tremulousness, of an otherwise well and whole human being who has been deeply hurt and who isn't yet quite up to the hard task of trusting. I have also been this person.
People who have been hurt, who fear relationship in its widest and most wonderful forms, they have been told the wrong stories.
The trouble is that crazy horses have not by and large read My Friend Flicka. (A few have, and there are stories about that, too.) If they know some version of The Black Stallion, they left during the shipwreck scene, or they know only the part of National Velvet where The Pit is careening dangerously around town. They know a story about crazy horses, but they know the wrong one, or else they didn't get a chance or refused to read to the ending where things come out okay; and the trainer has to figure out how to get them to the ending, whereas the horses just aren't interested in the story anymore. The problem is to get them interested, a problem Shakespeare solved with a keen sense of the right bawdy jokes in Act I, Scene I, but the trainers quite often don't even have that much agreement at their disposal.
Beyond which, if the horse does know the right ending to a sufficiently rich story and has tried it out on a human who doesn't, the difficulty is that much worse. The greatest challenges come from horses who have been beguiled by some confused version of behaviorism, or virtually anything from the matrix of academic psychology, instead of by a story that springs from artistic tradition; sometimes such horses might as well be autistic for all the talking that is going to go on for a while.
The question is, then, how does one get a crazy horse interested in the story again? And how does one get a human to pay attention to a real, potentially healing relationship? And how does one find the courage to go at it over and over and over again, with the knowledge that it may not work, the horse may continue throwing you until the end of time, or the small hurt part of the person you love may remain closed off to you until the trumpet sounds?
Vicki Hearne would perhaps slide sideways: “The question ‘Why train horses at all?’ is like the question ‘Why should we like the world?’ Most of the time, the only answer that can be given is a maneuver rather than an answer, as when Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations said, ‘We like the world because we do,’ a remark that can be interpreted darkly or not, as you like.” The maneuver she speaks of is, I think, rooted in the same virtues whether it is a maneuver on behalf of human or beast: in courage and a kind of steely innocence that refuses to be sucked into irony and nihilism.
Hearne's answer to Drummer Girl's craziness is not philosophy, it is a maneuver, the kind of deliberate and knowledgeable maneuver that precedes and chooses love.
A day after Drummer Girl arrived, Hearne attempted to halter her. Drummer Girl “dash[ed] violently around the pasture, kicking and squealing.” Hearne cornered her, at which point Drummer Girl swung around and stamped on Hearne's foot. Instead of getting herself killed, Hearne took out a longe whip (not a whip used for touching the horse) and “chased” her around the pasture until Drummer Girl consented to be haltered. She didn't wear the horse out physically: she just made it clear to Drummer Girl that she would have to pay attention – that here was a human one could perhaps eventually talk to. With Drummer Girl on a lead, she did “what I did with Salty—run in the opposite direction from the one she was going. If she bolted to my right, I went left. If she bolted forward, I did an about-turn and ran. If she went up, I went down, to
Then something happened: “About the fourth time my speed spun her away from the can of oats, the situation changed. She tensed to dart forward and then stopped herself (the lead rope was completely slack), turning over in her head the cosmic implications of my behavior. She got it right, snorted, stuck her left eye up to my right eye and pawed the ground furiously.”
Hearne tells more of Drummer Girl's story – how in a few days she was “asking” to be worked, how she learned to stop rushing her jumps: “I had heartlessly set things up so that, if she was capable of any sort of reasoning at all, she must slow down and canter properly. Must, that is, choose a muscular version of the good over the chaos of the stories about a sweet, dumb horse who just couldn’t help herself.” But it's this first moment that interests me, the moment when Drummer Girl stops running away and pays attention.
It's such a small moment. What would an onlooker see? Drummer Girl isn't really “broke”: a few days later when Hearne mounts her for the first time, Drummer Girl busts open her forehead. But this is the first time in perhaps years that Drummer Girl has listened, has found even an inkling of believability in the humans who've been training her. There is eye contact, and there is the potential for trust.
These moments are real outside of animal training, and outside of books. We don't know when they will occur for another person, just as we often don't know when they will occur in ourselves, but we can call upon them in each other, and for me, especially, in those given to my care. And so I leave Adam's Task each time believing, newly and with great determination, that each moment requires all the courage we can bring to it. Each instance of courage, whether it is teaching, or not yelling, or just waking up and going to the place you're supposed to be; or whether it is that small intake of breath in the middle of a conversation, opening your heart again even though it would be easier to leave yourself properly defended: these moments are, as Hearne would say, heroic, and for me these are the moments inherent in the mundane that give meaning to it. These are the maneuvers that precede love, the maneuvers that choose a love as yet unseen.
Many great books turn me inward. Adam's Task ends, not with a relationship between me and a book, but with a relationship between me and a book and the world. It returns me to the world, as it will return you to the world, carrying in your inward places another story or two that will help you to choose the “muscular version of the good."
So I go back to my work with kids with ADHD, with the developmentally delayed, with traumatized teenagers and adopted kids. And I go to them not with a philosophy, and not with a cheap love falsely conjured, but with stories that embody the heroic, that allow me to see what the ending can be like when there is courage on every page. In my best moments I know there is no heartache could dissuade me. I have watched my own maneuvers turn from the vision of love into love itself, and my own stories lie alongside Hearne's stories, so that I can call upon them when I am tired.
“...What we know,” says Vicki Hearne, “is that what we require for goodness and beauty puts us in great risk of the most heartrending grief—but always, always, the risk is worth it. There is nothing behind this knowledge, no reasoning, no inferring: we are born to it, and our tendency to do something about autism, like our tendency to imagine and to live in the hardest-edged disciplines, shows how powerful that knowledge is.”
I would tend to say that there is something behind this knowledge, and it is the love of a God who chose the muscular version of the good even unto death; our love, as a permutation of His love, is the kind with teeth. And always, always, the risk is worth it.
- - - - -
Vicki Hearne (1946 – 2001) was a poet, philosopher, linguist, and animal trainer. She published three nonfiction titles and four books of poetry. Adam's Task (1986) was her first book.
Friday, February 13, 2015
GUEST BLOG #2: A lost story scoops today’s war reports (by Geo Beach)
Geo Beach and I have been close friends for nearly a half-century; his literary wisdom and counsel stand behind every line of poetry and prose I have written. No him, no me. This review meant the world to me when it appeared, and still resonates deeply. My father admired his writing enormously.
As an appreciative reader of WriteWeller’s timeless and world-wide “A Regular Irregular Blog”, it’s my privilege to have a worthy 2007 column appended here. It comes from faraway Alaska in the distant Noughties, but the topics have grown closer even, and continue to resonate beyond transitory events. I hope new readers will consider my recommendations and pick up copies of First Into Nagasaki. Our worlds today are still at war, and we need, again, the brave writer who might lead us, laughing and crying, to break the siege of monetized media and predictable publishing and help free our thoughts and hearts. – Geo Beach
Independent journalist Geo Beach writes for Anchorage Daily News, National Public Radio, History TV, and TomPaine.com.
Right now, the most important war reporting about Iraq is coming from a dead man who sneaked into a Japanese bomb site more than 60 years ago.
To recognize why that is so, you must admit the colossal failure of American journalism in this Iraq War. As with all wars, there has been military fog and political pettifogging. But in Iraq the willing collaboration of the media was, together with the neocons, coequally responsible for America’s unthinking entry into the war, and for the subsequent uncritical review of its strategy and tactics. (Until now, when it’s become safe to be a quagmire-raker.)
Here’s the enigma that breaks the code of silently going along to get along – “First Into Nagasaki”, by George Weller (325 pgs, Crown, $25). New Yorker subscribers have been tantalized by its advance publicity; Harper’s readers have just tasted a salty excerpt.
Not bad for an author who died five years ago at the age of 95.
But no wonder, either. “First Into Nagasaki” boasts all the right bona fides. “The much machine-gunned George Weller” (as Time pronounced him) was a Harvard man and Pulitzer-winner who covered every theatre of the Second World War, “one of the most-captured [foreign correspondents] as he kept crossing front lines in search of the day's front-page news.” (Chicago Sun-Times).
In “First Into Nagasaki”, Walter Cronkite introduces the reportage of George Weller (“one of our best war correspondents”) as a crucial warning for today, “when our nation is again at war and our citizenry can only guess as to how thick are the blindfolds of censorship that distort the truth of our military engagements.”
And George Weller’s dispatches from the smoking ruins are deftly framed with a deeply-researched and lyric essay by his son, novelist and foreign correspondent Anthony Weller.
(Disclosure: I was privileged to know George Weller for thirty years, with still-growing admiration. And for thirty-five years now Anthony Weller has been a colleague and inspiration.)
As befits the work of father-and-son writers, “First Into Nagasaki” is a thrilling read constructed of stories upon stories. How George, in the guise of a colonel, contrived to reach Nagasaki. How Gen. Douglas MacArthur censored George’s atomic reports. How George persevered with stunning scoops of POWs’ stories. How, at the 60th anniversary of the bombing, Anthony discovered the lost carbons of George’s censored Nagasaki dispatches a scant few feet from his deceased father’s desk. And how surviving POWs subsequently contacted Anthony with poignant stories of George himself.
But the guts of the book is the simultaneously elegant and straight-shooting reportage of George Weller, a man who defined the difference between being “embedded” and “in bed with”.
So “First Into Nagasaki” may spell the last word on getting out of Baghdad.
Here’s George Weller on the military holding a free press hostage: “All censored information is fundamentally propaganda.” (Remember that when you hear a splurge of words like “surge”, instead of “escalation”.)
On bait-n-switch foreign policy: “In war [the American people] are alternately drugged with the promise of bloodless and easy victory, then whipped up with official warnings that peace will be expensive and is far off.”
On compliant media: “The newspaperman’s malady is to accept all the inhibitions of a bad censorship and to discourage himself by precensoring his own work.”
Everywhere George Weller is a genuine correspondent, with letter-like intimacy that conveys respect for readers – a dirt-under-the-fingernails reporter, in striking contrast to today’s repeaters.
And Anthony Weller’s explications retain the old man’s bulldog toughness and beautiful touch: “[T]he Nagasaki reports each contained a dangerous radiation of their own, the unpredictable half-life of truth.”
George Weller wasn’t just first. Sixty years later, he’s still new, with stories of “The Two Robinson Crusoes of Wake Island” and – in a terrifying obverse of Hampton Sides’ “Ghost Soldiers” – “The Death Cruise”, which discloses vampirism, cannibalism, and murder on the Japanese hellship voyages.
Four years ago the Iraq War began under a false “mushroom cloud” of propaganda. Today, George Weller and Anthony Weller drop the more devastating bomb. The real story might be delayed. But, fiercely reported, the truth will be set free. Eventually.
Writer Geo Beach can be reached at geobeach@journalist.com.
As an appreciative reader of WriteWeller’s timeless and world-wide “A Regular Irregular Blog”, it’s my privilege to have a worthy 2007 column appended here. It comes from faraway Alaska in the distant Noughties, but the topics have grown closer even, and continue to resonate beyond transitory events. I hope new readers will consider my recommendations and pick up copies of First Into Nagasaki. Our worlds today are still at war, and we need, again, the brave writer who might lead us, laughing and crying, to break the siege of monetized media and predictable publishing and help free our thoughts and hearts. – Geo Beach
Independent journalist Geo Beach writes for Anchorage Daily News, National Public Radio, History TV, and TomPaine.com.
Right now, the most important war reporting about Iraq is coming from a dead man who sneaked into a Japanese bomb site more than 60 years ago.
To recognize why that is so, you must admit the colossal failure of American journalism in this Iraq War. As with all wars, there has been military fog and political pettifogging. But in Iraq the willing collaboration of the media was, together with the neocons, coequally responsible for America’s unthinking entry into the war, and for the subsequent uncritical review of its strategy and tactics. (Until now, when it’s become safe to be a quagmire-raker.)
Here’s the enigma that breaks the code of silently going along to get along – “First Into Nagasaki”, by George Weller (325 pgs, Crown, $25). New Yorker subscribers have been tantalized by its advance publicity; Harper’s readers have just tasted a salty excerpt.
Not bad for an author who died five years ago at the age of 95.
But no wonder, either. “First Into Nagasaki” boasts all the right bona fides. “The much machine-gunned George Weller” (as Time pronounced him) was a Harvard man and Pulitzer-winner who covered every theatre of the Second World War, “one of the most-captured [foreign correspondents] as he kept crossing front lines in search of the day's front-page news.” (Chicago Sun-Times).
In “First Into Nagasaki”, Walter Cronkite introduces the reportage of George Weller (“one of our best war correspondents”) as a crucial warning for today, “when our nation is again at war and our citizenry can only guess as to how thick are the blindfolds of censorship that distort the truth of our military engagements.”
And George Weller’s dispatches from the smoking ruins are deftly framed with a deeply-researched and lyric essay by his son, novelist and foreign correspondent Anthony Weller.
(Disclosure: I was privileged to know George Weller for thirty years, with still-growing admiration. And for thirty-five years now Anthony Weller has been a colleague and inspiration.)
As befits the work of father-and-son writers, “First Into Nagasaki” is a thrilling read constructed of stories upon stories. How George, in the guise of a colonel, contrived to reach Nagasaki. How Gen. Douglas MacArthur censored George’s atomic reports. How George persevered with stunning scoops of POWs’ stories. How, at the 60th anniversary of the bombing, Anthony discovered the lost carbons of George’s censored Nagasaki dispatches a scant few feet from his deceased father’s desk. And how surviving POWs subsequently contacted Anthony with poignant stories of George himself.
But the guts of the book is the simultaneously elegant and straight-shooting reportage of George Weller, a man who defined the difference between being “embedded” and “in bed with”.
So “First Into Nagasaki” may spell the last word on getting out of Baghdad.
Here’s George Weller on the military holding a free press hostage: “All censored information is fundamentally propaganda.” (Remember that when you hear a splurge of words like “surge”, instead of “escalation”.)
On bait-n-switch foreign policy: “In war [the American people] are alternately drugged with the promise of bloodless and easy victory, then whipped up with official warnings that peace will be expensive and is far off.”
On compliant media: “The newspaperman’s malady is to accept all the inhibitions of a bad censorship and to discourage himself by precensoring his own work.”
Everywhere George Weller is a genuine correspondent, with letter-like intimacy that conveys respect for readers – a dirt-under-the-fingernails reporter, in striking contrast to today’s repeaters.
And Anthony Weller’s explications retain the old man’s bulldog toughness and beautiful touch: “[T]he Nagasaki reports each contained a dangerous radiation of their own, the unpredictable half-life of truth.”
George Weller wasn’t just first. Sixty years later, he’s still new, with stories of “The Two Robinson Crusoes of Wake Island” and – in a terrifying obverse of Hampton Sides’ “Ghost Soldiers” – “The Death Cruise”, which discloses vampirism, cannibalism, and murder on the Japanese hellship voyages.
Four years ago the Iraq War began under a false “mushroom cloud” of propaganda. Today, George Weller and Anthony Weller drop the more devastating bomb. The real story might be delayed. But, fiercely reported, the truth will be set free. Eventually.
Writer Geo Beach can be reached at geobeach@journalist.com.
Friday, January 30, 2015
My First Indian Bureaucrat (by Robin Miniter)
For ongoing reasons, my blog productivity is highly uneven. I’ve invited diverse writer friends to provide Guest Blogs. This, the first, is by Robin Miniter.
An Ipswich, Massachusetts native, Robin's work covering women in sport has seen her moonlight with the Amsterdam roller derby team and receive a Fulbright fellowship to photo-document the rise of women's rugby in India. Now in D.C., she slings drinks with an eye on becoming a photo journalist and freelance writer. Soon, she'll be walking Maine to Georgia on the Appalachian Trail, with words to follow. Visit www.robinminiter.com.
"An American? Why do you come here?"
"To research, sir, on scholarship from the U.S. government."
The steadfast Mr. Greese was responsible for registering all foreign nationals in Aligarh. It was an Indian city a sensible traveler would pass through: ramshackle, low-lying buildings; dead puppies rotting by the road.
My staunch ally, Nazmohammud, a lanky fellow student with tanned Persian cheeks, had been stuck here for three years. He led our way upstairs.
The oily Mr. Greese sported a toothy grin and an amused curl that tugged at his lips. A hooked brown nose with one-armed glasses askew. A thinning mustache, for propriety.
The air in his dingy office — crowded with nine other bureaucrats (all comfortably asleep, legs crossed atop disheveled desks, fingers laced under potbellies) — was thick with body musk, yellow turmeric from yesterday’s lunch, and the dust of paper decay. Though humidity kept the endless stacks of logbook pages and photocopies wilting, the second-floor summit room (bolted, customarily, on the outside) of the Foreign Registration Office was a reprieve from August heat.
"India is a great country, yes? How do you find it so far?"
"Oh, Mr. Greese, I just arrived. But it’s beautiful so far. I’m hoping to register with you today, then I need to go to Pune for my research."
All foreign nationals living in India for more than six weeks need to be stamped and registered — or else, upon trying to exit the country, no exit will be allowed.
"Research of what?"
"Women’s sports, sir."
"Ha-ha, that is so funny. Women don’t play cricket."
"Well, not cricket specifically. I’m a photographer, looking at the sport of rugby."
"I don’t know about this rugby, but no matter. So you, young man: why do you help her? She is American, you are Iranian. She must be Christian and you are obviously a Muslim. You hate each other always."
"She is a friend. My professor will be her advisor."
"I see. How very strange. My office is very, very busy at this time of year."
"Yes, we can see that. Still, she must get to Pune as quickly as possible. So here are the required papers, as stated by the Indian government."
"Yes…yes, I see…but do you understand, here? These papers? You brought me three colored copies of them all. I need two black-and-white. This will not do."
"It is the same document, yes?"
"Ah, but you see, they are the wrong color. This will not do."
"We can photocopy them again, it’s okay."
"It is not okay. I hope it will be okay. And this letter from Dr. Abdul Matin. Where is his signature?"
"Mr. Greese, the signature is there."
"No, but we need a new signature. He must sign over this signature in ink, because you are handing me a scanned copy of a letter with his signature. This is a very big problem."
"This is not a big problem, we can go retrieve it. Will you be here later?"
"It is not possible."
"It’s only ten a.m. Won’t your office be open later this afternoon?"
"You can come back. Perhaps I will be here."
"Can you promise that you’ll try?"
"Ah, we will see. I am a very, very busy man."
"Mr. Greese, sir, when is the earliest you can give me my stamp?"
"That is a very complicated question."
"What about this evening? Or tomorrow morning? I must get to Pune as soon as possible — please, it’s really important to me."
"You can see that I am very busy. And there is so very much to be done. In three days’ time the procedure can be under way. Perhaps."
"But all the required papers are right here. The checklist is here too, as well as these extra copies. It should be okay for you to give me a stamp for my visa. Please, Mr. Greese."
"But I am telling you once again that the procedure is remaining incomplete. I also require a letterhead from Aligarh Muslim University. And an actual signature of their board. Make sure that it is endorsed by the university president, too. In blue ink only. Come back later. Maybe around five p.m."
We found Mr. Greese at 4:15 that day behind his office building. Alarmingly, he was sauntering away down the roadside, kicking up dust as he went.
"Mr. Greese, here we are," said Naz, intercepting the busy man. "We were able to get those copies. Extra ones, too. And Dr. Matin signed those documents for her. It’s all here. Everything you requested."
"That is nice. How very nice it is. Perhaps I will be free to look at them tomorrow."
"Sir, we have them with us now. It’s not five yet. We arrived even before the time you told us."
"You are confused. I am not here now. You can try again tomorrow."
"What if we look at them for just a moment?"
"You can see that now is not a good time for me."
"When is a good time?"
"Maybe tomorrow."
"Can you promise us a stamp tomorrow?"
"Ah, you see, I can promise nothing. It is not I, Mr. Greese, making the rules. It is our government. The procedure may require more than three days."
"But you just said tomorrow you will look at them. Correct?"
"You may arrive as you wish." Palms clasped behind his back, he whistled as he walked off.
The next morning found us desperately waiting at Mr. Greese’s cluttered desk. After refusing to acknowledge us, then wandering out for two hours, he finally returned, sliding languidly into his wooden chair. Elbows bent, fingers pressed tip-to-tip, he asked obsequiously, "And what can I do for you?"
"We have brought you everything you requested. Look, here. As well as extra copies, if you require them. May we please have a stamp?"
Sliding the manila folder toward him, he plucked out the copies. He thumbed through. He studied them. He crossed one leg.
A belabored sigh.
"Does the Pune FRO know that you are coming?"
"I just need this one stamp, from Aligarh, isn’t that correct?"
"You cannot just appear in Pune. It is not possible. You must inform them of your arrival first. You need to write them a letter."
"Sir, I was not told yesterday that a letter’s necessary."
"Oh, but it is. Of course it is. And then you will need my signature." A lovely smile.
"So my letter needs to say, exactly — what?"
"Here, I believe we can use this." He rummaged through the stacks on his desk, at last retrieving a rumpled sheet of paper, frayed on all sides. "Get your pen."
It was the photocopy of a passport, showing the mug of yet another unfortunate visiting student. With approval, he flipped over the weary document.
"Now, follow my instructions perfectly. Write, ‘Dear Pune Foreign Registration Office. It is with the permission of Mr. Greese, supervisor of the Foreign Registration Office in Aligarh, that I, Robin Miniter, request to transfer my registration to Pune'..."
An Ipswich, Massachusetts native, Robin's work covering women in sport has seen her moonlight with the Amsterdam roller derby team and receive a Fulbright fellowship to photo-document the rise of women's rugby in India. Now in D.C., she slings drinks with an eye on becoming a photo journalist and freelance writer. Soon, she'll be walking Maine to Georgia on the Appalachian Trail, with words to follow. Visit www.robinminiter.com.
My First Indian Bureaucrat (by Robin Miniter)
"An American? Why do you come here?"
"To research, sir, on scholarship from the U.S. government."
The steadfast Mr. Greese was responsible for registering all foreign nationals in Aligarh. It was an Indian city a sensible traveler would pass through: ramshackle, low-lying buildings; dead puppies rotting by the road.
My staunch ally, Nazmohammud, a lanky fellow student with tanned Persian cheeks, had been stuck here for three years. He led our way upstairs.
The oily Mr. Greese sported a toothy grin and an amused curl that tugged at his lips. A hooked brown nose with one-armed glasses askew. A thinning mustache, for propriety.
The air in his dingy office — crowded with nine other bureaucrats (all comfortably asleep, legs crossed atop disheveled desks, fingers laced under potbellies) — was thick with body musk, yellow turmeric from yesterday’s lunch, and the dust of paper decay. Though humidity kept the endless stacks of logbook pages and photocopies wilting, the second-floor summit room (bolted, customarily, on the outside) of the Foreign Registration Office was a reprieve from August heat.
"India is a great country, yes? How do you find it so far?"
"Oh, Mr. Greese, I just arrived. But it’s beautiful so far. I’m hoping to register with you today, then I need to go to Pune for my research."
All foreign nationals living in India for more than six weeks need to be stamped and registered — or else, upon trying to exit the country, no exit will be allowed.
"Research of what?"
"Women’s sports, sir."
"Ha-ha, that is so funny. Women don’t play cricket."
"Well, not cricket specifically. I’m a photographer, looking at the sport of rugby."
"I don’t know about this rugby, but no matter. So you, young man: why do you help her? She is American, you are Iranian. She must be Christian and you are obviously a Muslim. You hate each other always."
"She is a friend. My professor will be her advisor."
"I see. How very strange. My office is very, very busy at this time of year."
"Yes, we can see that. Still, she must get to Pune as quickly as possible. So here are the required papers, as stated by the Indian government."
"Yes…yes, I see…but do you understand, here? These papers? You brought me three colored copies of them all. I need two black-and-white. This will not do."
"It is the same document, yes?"
"Ah, but you see, they are the wrong color. This will not do."
"We can photocopy them again, it’s okay."
"It is not okay. I hope it will be okay. And this letter from Dr. Abdul Matin. Where is his signature?"
"Mr. Greese, the signature is there."
"No, but we need a new signature. He must sign over this signature in ink, because you are handing me a scanned copy of a letter with his signature. This is a very big problem."
"This is not a big problem, we can go retrieve it. Will you be here later?"
"It is not possible."
"It’s only ten a.m. Won’t your office be open later this afternoon?"
"You can come back. Perhaps I will be here."
"Can you promise that you’ll try?"
"Ah, we will see. I am a very, very busy man."
"Mr. Greese, sir, when is the earliest you can give me my stamp?"
"That is a very complicated question."
"What about this evening? Or tomorrow morning? I must get to Pune as soon as possible — please, it’s really important to me."
"You can see that I am very busy. And there is so very much to be done. In three days’ time the procedure can be under way. Perhaps."
"But all the required papers are right here. The checklist is here too, as well as these extra copies. It should be okay for you to give me a stamp for my visa. Please, Mr. Greese."
"But I am telling you once again that the procedure is remaining incomplete. I also require a letterhead from Aligarh Muslim University. And an actual signature of their board. Make sure that it is endorsed by the university president, too. In blue ink only. Come back later. Maybe around five p.m."
We found Mr. Greese at 4:15 that day behind his office building. Alarmingly, he was sauntering away down the roadside, kicking up dust as he went.
"Mr. Greese, here we are," said Naz, intercepting the busy man. "We were able to get those copies. Extra ones, too. And Dr. Matin signed those documents for her. It’s all here. Everything you requested."
"That is nice. How very nice it is. Perhaps I will be free to look at them tomorrow."
"Sir, we have them with us now. It’s not five yet. We arrived even before the time you told us."
"You are confused. I am not here now. You can try again tomorrow."
"What if we look at them for just a moment?"
"You can see that now is not a good time for me."
"When is a good time?"
"Maybe tomorrow."
"Can you promise us a stamp tomorrow?"
"Ah, you see, I can promise nothing. It is not I, Mr. Greese, making the rules. It is our government. The procedure may require more than three days."
"But you just said tomorrow you will look at them. Correct?"
"You may arrive as you wish." Palms clasped behind his back, he whistled as he walked off.
The next morning found us desperately waiting at Mr. Greese’s cluttered desk. After refusing to acknowledge us, then wandering out for two hours, he finally returned, sliding languidly into his wooden chair. Elbows bent, fingers pressed tip-to-tip, he asked obsequiously, "And what can I do for you?"
"We have brought you everything you requested. Look, here. As well as extra copies, if you require them. May we please have a stamp?"
Sliding the manila folder toward him, he plucked out the copies. He thumbed through. He studied them. He crossed one leg.
A belabored sigh.
"Does the Pune FRO know that you are coming?"
"I just need this one stamp, from Aligarh, isn’t that correct?"
"You cannot just appear in Pune. It is not possible. You must inform them of your arrival first. You need to write them a letter."
"Sir, I was not told yesterday that a letter’s necessary."
"Oh, but it is. Of course it is. And then you will need my signature." A lovely smile.
"So my letter needs to say, exactly — what?"
"Here, I believe we can use this." He rummaged through the stacks on his desk, at last retrieving a rumpled sheet of paper, frayed on all sides. "Get your pen."
It was the photocopy of a passport, showing the mug of yet another unfortunate visiting student. With approval, he flipped over the weary document.
"Now, follow my instructions perfectly. Write, ‘Dear Pune Foreign Registration Office. It is with the permission of Mr. Greese, supervisor of the Foreign Registration Office in Aligarh, that I, Robin Miniter, request to transfer my registration to Pune'..."
Saturday, October 26, 2013
“My Notorious Life"
The best aspect of writing a blog is that nobody can shut you up. (The worst aspect of writing a blog is that nobody can shut you up.)
Contrariwise, when writing a novel there’s far more static, more white noise: or is that the loudness of blank pages waiting to be filled? Many colleagues also seem gripped by a professional jealousy that must hinder their creative way along the scenic route. How can you enjoy the unexpected diversions of a landscape if you’re worried you’re being followed?
Fortunately, I’ve never been in danger of being followed—I know nearly everybody who bought my first novel, and unsigned copies of my books are rarer than autographed ones. All this is to say that I cannot understand fellow writers who take as personal insult the fine reviews garnered by others; the life is so difficult that it makes me happy when somebody gets applause that seems even partially deserved. To quote Jorge Luis Borges on the Falklands war, it’s like two bald men fighting over a comb.
The purpose of this blog, then, is to laud a new masterpiece of fiction, just published, by a longtime friend, Kate Manning.
Back when I was a college student, many of us dreamed of becoming professional writers; some were too embarrassed to mention it, but thirty-five years ago I personally took for granted that all good things were feasible. I don’t recall if Kate was writing then, but I assume she must’ve been; I can’t believe this sort of virtuosity started late. But I doubt any would have picked her, among all our scribbling classmates, to write a novel inarguably great and profoundly American.
About eleven years ago Kate, living in New York, published a fine first novel. It got strong reviews but one brutal notice that dissuaded the publisher from putting any weight behind the book. Oh, how they must be regretting their cowardice now.
And one month ago Kate published her second novel, “My Notorious Life.” When she sent it to me, like everybody else given the privilege of reading it early on, I realized immediately that it was very special. Here is part of the publisher’s publicity material:
“Inspired by the true story of Ann Trow Lohman, a female physician who became one of the most controversial figures in Victorian New York City, MY NOTORIOUS LIFE vibrantly portrays a charismatic, passionate woman who changed the lives of countless others.
”Set in gritty late-19th century New York City, MY NOTORIOUS LIFE is the story of Axie (née Annie) Muldoon, a formidable child of Irish immigrants who works her way off the brutal streets to become one of the most successful—and scandalous—women of her time. With a quick wit and a sharp tongue, Axie recounts her separation from her mother and siblings, her apprenticeship to a midwife, and how she earns a fortune selling “Lunar Tablets for the relief of Female Obstruction.” As she builds her thriving midwifery practice with her husband, ascending from one room in a tenement on the Lower East Side to a mansion on Fifth Avenue, she finds herself on a collision course with one of the most zealous characters of her era: Anthony Comstock, whose self-appointed mission is to clean up America one ‘sinner’ at a time. It will take all of Axie’s power to outwit him and keep her family from falling back into ruin.
“MY NOTORIOUS LIFE provides a little-known historical backdrop to current debates over women’s reproductive rights. The pleas of the patients who visit Axie in desperation will resonate with contemporary readers who recognize that 150 years later, we are still fighting many of the same battles. This moving and nuanced commentary on one of today’s hottest topics is sure to fuel the fire of an already blazing debate.
“A brilliant rendering of a historical time and heated political climate, MY NOTORIOUS LIFE is ultimately the story of one woman making her indomitable way in a difficult world. Axie Muldoon is truly a heroine for the ages.”
Better yet, rather than trusting the Scribners propaganda machine, or me, you can read the smart and subtle reviews this smart and subtle book has engendered at the Nation and the Washington Post.
Kate has brought to life the grim, grimy tenement portraits of Jacob Riis (look him up) from five generations ago and—foolhardy as it may be for me to predict the future—I believe that this book will still be read five generations from now, whether or not it soon garners the prizes it deserves.
What I love most about this novel, and there is much to love, is how apparently effortlessly the past is put vividly before us, in meaningful (but never forced) detail; and the restraint with which the author handles the social and societal milieu, trusting us (by virtue of our modernity) to feel the proper outrage without any pounding at the piano on her part. We are left, finally, with the honest abrasive voice of that wonderful narrator, telling us all about herself—of what survives, and what finally does not.
Contrariwise, when writing a novel there’s far more static, more white noise: or is that the loudness of blank pages waiting to be filled? Many colleagues also seem gripped by a professional jealousy that must hinder their creative way along the scenic route. How can you enjoy the unexpected diversions of a landscape if you’re worried you’re being followed?
Fortunately, I’ve never been in danger of being followed—I know nearly everybody who bought my first novel, and unsigned copies of my books are rarer than autographed ones. All this is to say that I cannot understand fellow writers who take as personal insult the fine reviews garnered by others; the life is so difficult that it makes me happy when somebody gets applause that seems even partially deserved. To quote Jorge Luis Borges on the Falklands war, it’s like two bald men fighting over a comb.
The purpose of this blog, then, is to laud a new masterpiece of fiction, just published, by a longtime friend, Kate Manning.
Back when I was a college student, many of us dreamed of becoming professional writers; some were too embarrassed to mention it, but thirty-five years ago I personally took for granted that all good things were feasible. I don’t recall if Kate was writing then, but I assume she must’ve been; I can’t believe this sort of virtuosity started late. But I doubt any would have picked her, among all our scribbling classmates, to write a novel inarguably great and profoundly American.
About eleven years ago Kate, living in New York, published a fine first novel. It got strong reviews but one brutal notice that dissuaded the publisher from putting any weight behind the book. Oh, how they must be regretting their cowardice now.
And one month ago Kate published her second novel, “My Notorious Life.” When she sent it to me, like everybody else given the privilege of reading it early on, I realized immediately that it was very special. Here is part of the publisher’s publicity material:
“Inspired by the true story of Ann Trow Lohman, a female physician who became one of the most controversial figures in Victorian New York City, MY NOTORIOUS LIFE vibrantly portrays a charismatic, passionate woman who changed the lives of countless others.
”Set in gritty late-19th century New York City, MY NOTORIOUS LIFE is the story of Axie (née Annie) Muldoon, a formidable child of Irish immigrants who works her way off the brutal streets to become one of the most successful—and scandalous—women of her time. With a quick wit and a sharp tongue, Axie recounts her separation from her mother and siblings, her apprenticeship to a midwife, and how she earns a fortune selling “Lunar Tablets for the relief of Female Obstruction.” As she builds her thriving midwifery practice with her husband, ascending from one room in a tenement on the Lower East Side to a mansion on Fifth Avenue, she finds herself on a collision course with one of the most zealous characters of her era: Anthony Comstock, whose self-appointed mission is to clean up America one ‘sinner’ at a time. It will take all of Axie’s power to outwit him and keep her family from falling back into ruin.
“MY NOTORIOUS LIFE provides a little-known historical backdrop to current debates over women’s reproductive rights. The pleas of the patients who visit Axie in desperation will resonate with contemporary readers who recognize that 150 years later, we are still fighting many of the same battles. This moving and nuanced commentary on one of today’s hottest topics is sure to fuel the fire of an already blazing debate.
“A brilliant rendering of a historical time and heated political climate, MY NOTORIOUS LIFE is ultimately the story of one woman making her indomitable way in a difficult world. Axie Muldoon is truly a heroine for the ages.”
Better yet, rather than trusting the Scribners propaganda machine, or me, you can read the smart and subtle reviews this smart and subtle book has engendered at the Nation and the Washington Post.
Kate has brought to life the grim, grimy tenement portraits of Jacob Riis (look him up) from five generations ago and—foolhardy as it may be for me to predict the future—I believe that this book will still be read five generations from now, whether or not it soon garners the prizes it deserves.
What I love most about this novel, and there is much to love, is how apparently effortlessly the past is put vividly before us, in meaningful (but never forced) detail; and the restraint with which the author handles the social and societal milieu, trusting us (by virtue of our modernity) to feel the proper outrage without any pounding at the piano on her part. We are left, finally, with the honest abrasive voice of that wonderful narrator, telling us all about herself—of what survives, and what finally does not.
Friday, April 12, 2013
"The Old Turk's Load"
As a lifelong writer, I like to tell myself that I’m a magpie collector of useful arcana about the language. (It’s as easy to waste a lifetime as an afternoon.) If you ask me, the sweetest four-word sentence anybody can ever hear is, "I love you, too."
But far and away—by many furlongs, leagues, and miles—the sucrosest, most satisfying, most viscerally enthralling four-word sentence human beings can ever utter is: "I told you so."
As a lifelong writer, I don’t get many chances to state this without lying. However, a couple of years ago I got a golden opportunity. This was when my pal Gregory Gibson—kempt-bearded antiquarian bookseller by day, superb writer by night, or is it the other way around?—handed me the typescript (a nearly obsolete word; of course it was a computer printout, but let’s call it a "typescript") of a novel, his first, and asked for my opinion.
Now, his three prior books are what’s nowadays termed "narrative nonfiction"—a memoir/walkabout/investigation of the murder of his eldest son, at college; a historical account of an infamous mutiny aboard a Nantucket whaling ship in the farthest reaches of the Pacific; the saga of an antiquarian colleague who stumbled on a cache of rare Diane Arbus African-American photographs and had a jolly time getting them authenticated and sold—in short, an eclectic mix as idiosyncratic and dynamic as the burly sexagenarian himself.
But a novel!
He prepared me, naturally, for the worst; and made it clear he wouldn’t be surprised if I didn’t get very far. I read it in one happy, sunny afternoon, and thought it wonderful. Best of all, we were driving down to Hartford for a book fair early the next morning, so I got to savor his tension when I clambered into his van and casually dropped the news that I’d already read his book. I milked the pregnant pause mercilessly before telling him, in no uncertain terms, what I thought.
A few months later he informed me that his literary agent and her cohorts hadn’t liked it at all and felt it merited no chance in the marketplace. Therefore she wouldn’t be trying to sell it for him. (My insistence that he hold her feet over a fire till she relented fell on deaf ears; he knows better than I that it’s pointless trying to persuade a literary agent of fallibility.)
Instead he decided to issue it himself as a paperback (complete with a genuine pulp-art cover illustration) to send around to two hundred friends for Christmas. Luckily one of those friends was Otto Penzler, who started the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan decades ago and has his own imprint with Grove /Atlantic. In other words, an experienced gentleman who knows his mysteries and thrillers and recognizes real quality when he sees it.
Notice, of course, that the central point of all this brouhaha is not how terrific Greg’s novel is, but how I’m right, as usual.
Anyway, Otto loved the book as much as I did and offered Greg a full publishing contract immediately. (The Old Turk’s Load is out this week in hardback, and you’ll love it too, I promise.)
When he told me the news I got to relish the enormous joy of being able to say: I told you so. Now I mutter those words silently whenever I see him; if the book does half as well as advance reviews suggest it might, I may start leaving the phrase on his answering machine in the middle of the night just to rub it in. I’m reminded of the marvelous pianist and raconteur Oscar Levant, who—when asked if he knew Doris Day—remarked, "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin." Well, I knew that TOTL was a fine novel before anyone else did, so there.
Greg’s been working on this book, off and on, since 1969. He was in the Navy then, stationed on the USS Sperry, plying the coast of California and the nearer tracts of the Pacific, reading plenty of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Frederick Exley. And starting to write. An early draft of TOTL earned a promising quasi-rejection from the paperback house of Pyramid Books and an invitation to come speak with them at their New York offices about necessary changes; he refused. Not until they came crawling, whining their miserable apologies! And he’s been rewriting it ever since, shaping and improving it as life altered him. There’s a special flavor that belongs to books worked on across the decades; like a whorled shell carried on an animal’s back, they have the vibrant personality of a cottage tended, inhabited, and loved for many years.
Here’s the dust-jacket copy:
"A tight, fast, and funny crime novel set amid the 1967 Newark riots. When a load of high-octane heroin goes missing, crooks, cops, do-gooders, and lowlifes scramble to possess it. But the heroin has ideas of its own, leading its pursuers on an increasingly deadly trail through the melee.
"Angelo DiNoto, a New Jersey crime boss, supplements his ruthless gains by importing blindingly pure artisinal smack produced by an old Turkish farmer. After a five-million-dollar shipment disappears, DiNoto can think of nothing better than to go on a murderous rampage.
"Richard Mundi, in whose lap the drugs landed, is a burned-out Manhattan developer who plans to use the unexpected windfall to revive his crumbling real estate empire. His gorgeous daughter Gloria, in bed—literally—with a band of wannabe revolutionaries, sees the heroin as a way to escape her father’s influence and impress the woman she loves.
"The Mailman is a longtime postal clerk who’s survived the worst life has to offer—until throat cancer robs him of his voice and all will to live. The drugs are his ticket to a better place. Topping off the chase is Walkaway Kelly, a private eye and Hell’s Kitchen barfly teetering on the brink of redemption.
"Stir in Kelly’s lovelorn sidekick, a pair of closeted gay hoodlums who work as DiNoto’s enforcers, Mundi’s conflicted protégé (a slab of muscle with a conscience, who also serves as Gloria’s nanny), and you have an Elmore Leonard-esque cast of characters running rampant in a convincing historical setting. Gregory Gibson weaves a twisty noir romp whose disparate threads converge in a thrilling showdown for the Old Turk’s Load."
Sadly, the dust jacket is missing a telltale phrase that bannered the original. (By the way, my copy of that "true first edition" is not for sale at any price; however, for $10 I’m willing to let visitors look at it.) That phrase? "A Walkaway Kelly Mystery." It positioned the book correctly, let us hope, as the first in a series about a hero we can believe in— a private dick with, in Greg’s piquant description, "the body of a God, the spirit of a tiger, and the brain of a 2 x 4".
The operative phrase in all this dust-jacket copy is "noir romp". Personally, I’ve never been much of a reader of mysteries or thrillers (despite a profile and appreciation of the master, Eric Ambler, that I hope to include in this space eventually). I’ve never managed to care whodunit; for me only the journey and not the arrival matters. And "noir" as a literary genre now seems utterly airless, a closed room crowded with the moldy furniture of clichés in which there isn’t space to swing an original thought. Whenever the cinematic formulas outweigh the literary possibilities, writers need to find another mineshaft.
I always feel that the noir romp has far more appeal, by dint of its tongue-in-cheek approach, than the works whose tough-guy style seems to be admiring its own trench coat and dark fedora too strenuously in the mirror. (The fake hair on the chest that e.e. cummings noted about Hemingway.) Some works I can thus heartily recommend which Greg possibly hasn’t read but which, in my limited mind, his marvelous noir romp evokes: The Tooth Merchant, by C. L. Sulzberger (one of the best opening lines I know, not suitable for a family blog); The Game of Thirty, by William Kotzwinkle; The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover, by Kinky Friedman; and the first book in the Mortdecai trilogy by Kyril Bonfiglioli.
Get to them when you can; but read Greg’s new book first!
http://www.amazon.com/The-Turks-Load-Gregory-Gibson/dp/0802121136/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_t_4_RCEP
But far and away—by many furlongs, leagues, and miles—the sucrosest, most satisfying, most viscerally enthralling four-word sentence human beings can ever utter is: "I told you so."
As a lifelong writer, I don’t get many chances to state this without lying. However, a couple of years ago I got a golden opportunity. This was when my pal Gregory Gibson—kempt-bearded antiquarian bookseller by day, superb writer by night, or is it the other way around?—handed me the typescript (a nearly obsolete word; of course it was a computer printout, but let’s call it a "typescript") of a novel, his first, and asked for my opinion.
Now, his three prior books are what’s nowadays termed "narrative nonfiction"—a memoir/walkabout/investigation of the murder of his eldest son, at college; a historical account of an infamous mutiny aboard a Nantucket whaling ship in the farthest reaches of the Pacific; the saga of an antiquarian colleague who stumbled on a cache of rare Diane Arbus African-American photographs and had a jolly time getting them authenticated and sold—in short, an eclectic mix as idiosyncratic and dynamic as the burly sexagenarian himself.
But a novel!
He prepared me, naturally, for the worst; and made it clear he wouldn’t be surprised if I didn’t get very far. I read it in one happy, sunny afternoon, and thought it wonderful. Best of all, we were driving down to Hartford for a book fair early the next morning, so I got to savor his tension when I clambered into his van and casually dropped the news that I’d already read his book. I milked the pregnant pause mercilessly before telling him, in no uncertain terms, what I thought.
A few months later he informed me that his literary agent and her cohorts hadn’t liked it at all and felt it merited no chance in the marketplace. Therefore she wouldn’t be trying to sell it for him. (My insistence that he hold her feet over a fire till she relented fell on deaf ears; he knows better than I that it’s pointless trying to persuade a literary agent of fallibility.)
Instead he decided to issue it himself as a paperback (complete with a genuine pulp-art cover illustration) to send around to two hundred friends for Christmas. Luckily one of those friends was Otto Penzler, who started the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan decades ago and has his own imprint with Grove /Atlantic. In other words, an experienced gentleman who knows his mysteries and thrillers and recognizes real quality when he sees it.
Notice, of course, that the central point of all this brouhaha is not how terrific Greg’s novel is, but how I’m right, as usual.
Anyway, Otto loved the book as much as I did and offered Greg a full publishing contract immediately. (The Old Turk’s Load is out this week in hardback, and you’ll love it too, I promise.)
When he told me the news I got to relish the enormous joy of being able to say: I told you so. Now I mutter those words silently whenever I see him; if the book does half as well as advance reviews suggest it might, I may start leaving the phrase on his answering machine in the middle of the night just to rub it in. I’m reminded of the marvelous pianist and raconteur Oscar Levant, who—when asked if he knew Doris Day—remarked, "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin." Well, I knew that TOTL was a fine novel before anyone else did, so there.
Greg’s been working on this book, off and on, since 1969. He was in the Navy then, stationed on the USS Sperry, plying the coast of California and the nearer tracts of the Pacific, reading plenty of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Frederick Exley. And starting to write. An early draft of TOTL earned a promising quasi-rejection from the paperback house of Pyramid Books and an invitation to come speak with them at their New York offices about necessary changes; he refused. Not until they came crawling, whining their miserable apologies! And he’s been rewriting it ever since, shaping and improving it as life altered him. There’s a special flavor that belongs to books worked on across the decades; like a whorled shell carried on an animal’s back, they have the vibrant personality of a cottage tended, inhabited, and loved for many years.
Here’s the dust-jacket copy:
"A tight, fast, and funny crime novel set amid the 1967 Newark riots. When a load of high-octane heroin goes missing, crooks, cops, do-gooders, and lowlifes scramble to possess it. But the heroin has ideas of its own, leading its pursuers on an increasingly deadly trail through the melee.
"Angelo DiNoto, a New Jersey crime boss, supplements his ruthless gains by importing blindingly pure artisinal smack produced by an old Turkish farmer. After a five-million-dollar shipment disappears, DiNoto can think of nothing better than to go on a murderous rampage.
"Richard Mundi, in whose lap the drugs landed, is a burned-out Manhattan developer who plans to use the unexpected windfall to revive his crumbling real estate empire. His gorgeous daughter Gloria, in bed—literally—with a band of wannabe revolutionaries, sees the heroin as a way to escape her father’s influence and impress the woman she loves.
"The Mailman is a longtime postal clerk who’s survived the worst life has to offer—until throat cancer robs him of his voice and all will to live. The drugs are his ticket to a better place. Topping off the chase is Walkaway Kelly, a private eye and Hell’s Kitchen barfly teetering on the brink of redemption.
"Stir in Kelly’s lovelorn sidekick, a pair of closeted gay hoodlums who work as DiNoto’s enforcers, Mundi’s conflicted protégé (a slab of muscle with a conscience, who also serves as Gloria’s nanny), and you have an Elmore Leonard-esque cast of characters running rampant in a convincing historical setting. Gregory Gibson weaves a twisty noir romp whose disparate threads converge in a thrilling showdown for the Old Turk’s Load."
Sadly, the dust jacket is missing a telltale phrase that bannered the original. (By the way, my copy of that "true first edition" is not for sale at any price; however, for $10 I’m willing to let visitors look at it.) That phrase? "A Walkaway Kelly Mystery." It positioned the book correctly, let us hope, as the first in a series about a hero we can believe in— a private dick with, in Greg’s piquant description, "the body of a God, the spirit of a tiger, and the brain of a 2 x 4".
The operative phrase in all this dust-jacket copy is "noir romp". Personally, I’ve never been much of a reader of mysteries or thrillers (despite a profile and appreciation of the master, Eric Ambler, that I hope to include in this space eventually). I’ve never managed to care whodunit; for me only the journey and not the arrival matters. And "noir" as a literary genre now seems utterly airless, a closed room crowded with the moldy furniture of clichés in which there isn’t space to swing an original thought. Whenever the cinematic formulas outweigh the literary possibilities, writers need to find another mineshaft.
I always feel that the noir romp has far more appeal, by dint of its tongue-in-cheek approach, than the works whose tough-guy style seems to be admiring its own trench coat and dark fedora too strenuously in the mirror. (The fake hair on the chest that e.e. cummings noted about Hemingway.) Some works I can thus heartily recommend which Greg possibly hasn’t read but which, in my limited mind, his marvelous noir romp evokes: The Tooth Merchant, by C. L. Sulzberger (one of the best opening lines I know, not suitable for a family blog); The Game of Thirty, by William Kotzwinkle; The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover, by Kinky Friedman; and the first book in the Mortdecai trilogy by Kyril Bonfiglioli.
Get to them when you can; but read Greg’s new book first!
http://www.amazon.com/The-Turks-Load-Gregory-Gibson/dp/0802121136/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_t_4_RCEP
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Why Am I Doing This?
Don’t worry, I’m not turning philosophical. (If I were, my title would be Why Bother?) I mean, specifically, why clutter this blog space with so much old work, rather than fresh mutterings?
Thirty, twenty, even ten years ago—in a publishing economy far, far away—a nonentity like myself would’ve still managed to get out a book of selected essays. Sales would’ve been modest, and the upfront advance against royalties barely enough to buy myself a cappuccino machine, but I’d have been able to preserve between hardcovers, for a pre-digital posterity, those magazine articles that hadn’t aged pathetically.
Those years are long gone, of course, so I’m doing it via this grab-bag blog. Not as selectively as either of us would prefer, no doubt, but it’s my way to “self-publish” a collection which otherwise would never exist. I’m combing my computer’s files, which go back to the mid-nineties; yet because I started writing for magazines in 1982, at some point I’ll have to resort to scanning typescripts.
I’m not including everything. (Shame cannot be suppressed entirely.) Nor am I using the versions of the articles as finally published—I found that editors’ hands got progressively heavier and clammier as magazines became more threatened by the Internet.
These days it’s hard not to feel nostalgia for the magazine world in which I flourished (loose sense of the word) for two decades. The economic model of readers and advertisers which created that culture has cracked, and when I remember how the business used to work it seems almost unbelievable. In 1984 GEO magazine sent me and a photographer to unknown Oman, in the Arabian Gulf, for a month; it probably cost them, all told, $20,000—I shudder to think what that would be in today’s currency. Yet it was perfectly feasible, and in the larger scheme of things (theoretically) profitable for them.
If you could stand the pressures both financial and professional, there were few pleasanter ways for someone single to eke out a living in the 1980s than writing travel articles for American magazines. I’d always imagined that I would see the world as a touring musician; it never occurred to me that grown-up editors in tall Manhattan office buildings would not only front my entire freight to flee fast and far for a couple of weeks but, after I returned, even pay me well—well, well enough—for writing a dozen coherent pages of my impressions of some place overseas where I’d dreamed of going.
I began to get work at just about the time I began to feel stifled by living in New York. I wasn’t making enough of a living doing what I liked—as a jazz and classical guitarist. All I could count on was playing solo a few nights a week in a fancy restaurant that paid me with free dinners, and let me bring a date on off-nights of my choosing. My reliable income, such as it was, came from “temp” work as a secretary, a day or a week at a time; I could type efficiently and answer the phone, I was presentable and agreeable, I kept my hands and face washed.
While trying to get traction with The Garden of the Peacocks I’d worked as a real estate broker in a high-end firm and been miserable, though for a time I knew by memory most buildings on the Upper East Side between Lexington and Fifth. After nearly a year I quit. I thought I was taking no risks whatsoever; I felt sure I’d written a great novel; it never occurred to me it might be an untenable mess. A publisher’s contract and popular acclaim must surely follow. Imagine my surprise!
This morbid revelation was still months away, after I began traveling for GEO and a few other magazines. I never considered that there was a sensible way to go about planning a career, and it was a couple of years of happy accidents before I began to think of myself as someone with a profession. I clung to my self-image as a novelist, a man of literature, and this protected me as much as it hindered me. My mind was on concocting the next magazine assignment only if it might offer something besides money that I could use in my fiction—landscapes or portraits—not just a proposal I could sell to an editor.
This sounds focussed and idealistic, but it was only the blind pragmatism of someone with fixed goals but no long view. A sizeable poetry grant soon allowed me to give up temp work entirely.
For the next fifteen years, traveling the world for magazines was how I made most of my limited income. I never stopped being thrilled by the sensation of freedom that an assignment gave me. Often it meant travel to another season. After growing up in Georgia heat I most looked forward to heading somewhere sweltering; when you’re under forty there’s a sensual pleasure at being physically uncomfortable.
The best moment was not the anticipation that came with being told that a proposal had been approved by editors, nor the electric nervousness of passing through customs in some new country and being made viscerally aware that I had to produce a certain number of first-rate words per day, no matter how unprepared I felt, or I would never get to do this again.
No, the supreme moment was always those extended few hours of escaping Manhattan by airport bus; the sudden relief of time to kill at the airport and the reprieve of being at last not on my own money but on an expense account; the adventure, almost like finding myself in a thriller, of being able to tell anyone who asked that I was going overseas on assignment for a magazine they’d heard of—it gave me a professional identity, an importance, that otherwise I never had—to be followed by the ecstasy, in my airplane seat, of watching the lights of New York dwindle as all my problems, the unpaid bills and the unsolved technical issues of a novel, were left far behind and would grow more distant every day till I returned, when they did too.
My strategy, which editors made clear to me was unusual, was to write as much of the article as possible in place. I never carried a typewriter (and felt an unshakeable allegiance to writing by hand whenever possible anyway). I traveled with plenty of legal pads. I used the small ones to take my daily notes “in the field” and the larger to rewrite those notes into polished prose every evening at my hotel, after dinner.
I’d write the article in discrete blocks—descriptions, history, conversation—that could be assembled, when my time in a place was done, into an organic order which was (I hoped) compelling. As the days went by I always found that the place itself told me, gradually, the structure of its own article; I rarely felt I was guiding it as much as letting the piece decide what it wanted to say.
Naturally, the first page—the first half-page—proved the most important, and could determine the rest. Once my beginning asserted itself (the more tactile, diverse, and suggestive, the better), this meant I was beginning to know what I thought.
I never understood how other travel writers could take page after page of random notes, a line or two here and there, then try to assemble it all back in New York. Their method seemed to deliberately exclude the invaluable, vaporous sense of a place’s “reality” which, willy-nilly, you lose the second you get onto the plane to leave. Why try so hard to recall it from the other side of the world when you could save yourself so much time, and do such a better job, by writing most of the article while eating, sleeping, waking, listening, breathing in the place itself?
Part of the motivation was financial. After all, the sooner I turned in my article, the sooner I’d get paid. Oddly enough, even many successful magazines failed to realize that the easiest way to buy a freelancer’s loyalty was not through taking him out to lunch, or praising his work, but by paying him quickly. Such magazines got offered proposals first, even if sometimes they paid a little less.
My first two assignments, for GEO, came in the late spring of 1982. I was twenty-four. My parents were inexpressibly relieved that I was making definable progress, since clearly I was not going to turn out a real estate magnate and had let that job drop a few months before. My father—who praised, helpfully criticized, and encouraged all my fiction—must’ve breathed an enormous sigh while secretly wondering how I’d conned such a high-profile magazine, with French and German editions too, into taking a chance on a beginner with not one but two Caribbean assignments in a single fell swoop.
The world was different now. I was a working writer, a paid magazine correspondent. I was actually earning a living, too, since GEO paid $2500 for a full-length article. My rent was $348 a month, my total expenses a thousand, so for a few weeks of pleasant work I’d already made enough to live on for half a year. Best of all, I saw no reason for this extravagant success, which was funding another draft of my novel, to ever stop.
The following spring (1983) they sent me to Bahrain—I was savvy enough to give myself a couple of weeks in Rome on the way. I stayed in a soon-to-be-familiar little hotel on the Aventino, got to know the tawny city, and borrowed from my father a pile of books on the Middle East. The prospect of writing about that region had me petrified; the task seemed to call for a maturity of insight and a deep knowledge that I knew I couldn’t possibly fake through research, or acquire overnight; whatever skills I had as a writer didn’t strike me as useful for what was about to come. The more I read, the worse I felt.
He also loaned me a battered manual typewriter, on which I wrote my first published short story, perching the machine on a chair while I sat on the hotel bed. That story, the naturalness with which it offered itself, was a revelation, no less than a phone call to the young woman I’d just broken up with brutally back in New York. An expensive overseas line for a conversation lasting less than a minute.
Still, no reason not to be excited: the world was ripe with newness and energy.
Today few of my magazine colleagues are working, at least not as we used to. We’ve been replaced by a vast amateurism that costs almost nothing for an audience who can’t tell the difference, or don’t much care. And certainly don’t want to pay for whatever difference they do perceive.
I’m not blind to how dull some of our material was, and the magazine biz was always an elephants’ graveyard of lesser talents; but even if our work wasn’t lustrous, or audacious, or insightful, it was still professional. There’s no pressing need any more for readers or advertisers to cough up much money. All we veterans can do is wave goodbye, and pull down the blinds.
Thirty, twenty, even ten years ago—in a publishing economy far, far away—a nonentity like myself would’ve still managed to get out a book of selected essays. Sales would’ve been modest, and the upfront advance against royalties barely enough to buy myself a cappuccino machine, but I’d have been able to preserve between hardcovers, for a pre-digital posterity, those magazine articles that hadn’t aged pathetically.
Those years are long gone, of course, so I’m doing it via this grab-bag blog. Not as selectively as either of us would prefer, no doubt, but it’s my way to “self-publish” a collection which otherwise would never exist. I’m combing my computer’s files, which go back to the mid-nineties; yet because I started writing for magazines in 1982, at some point I’ll have to resort to scanning typescripts.
I’m not including everything. (Shame cannot be suppressed entirely.) Nor am I using the versions of the articles as finally published—I found that editors’ hands got progressively heavier and clammier as magazines became more threatened by the Internet.
These days it’s hard not to feel nostalgia for the magazine world in which I flourished (loose sense of the word) for two decades. The economic model of readers and advertisers which created that culture has cracked, and when I remember how the business used to work it seems almost unbelievable. In 1984 GEO magazine sent me and a photographer to unknown Oman, in the Arabian Gulf, for a month; it probably cost them, all told, $20,000—I shudder to think what that would be in today’s currency. Yet it was perfectly feasible, and in the larger scheme of things (theoretically) profitable for them.
If you could stand the pressures both financial and professional, there were few pleasanter ways for someone single to eke out a living in the 1980s than writing travel articles for American magazines. I’d always imagined that I would see the world as a touring musician; it never occurred to me that grown-up editors in tall Manhattan office buildings would not only front my entire freight to flee fast and far for a couple of weeks but, after I returned, even pay me well—well, well enough—for writing a dozen coherent pages of my impressions of some place overseas where I’d dreamed of going.
I began to get work at just about the time I began to feel stifled by living in New York. I wasn’t making enough of a living doing what I liked—as a jazz and classical guitarist. All I could count on was playing solo a few nights a week in a fancy restaurant that paid me with free dinners, and let me bring a date on off-nights of my choosing. My reliable income, such as it was, came from “temp” work as a secretary, a day or a week at a time; I could type efficiently and answer the phone, I was presentable and agreeable, I kept my hands and face washed.
While trying to get traction with The Garden of the Peacocks I’d worked as a real estate broker in a high-end firm and been miserable, though for a time I knew by memory most buildings on the Upper East Side between Lexington and Fifth. After nearly a year I quit. I thought I was taking no risks whatsoever; I felt sure I’d written a great novel; it never occurred to me it might be an untenable mess. A publisher’s contract and popular acclaim must surely follow. Imagine my surprise!
This morbid revelation was still months away, after I began traveling for GEO and a few other magazines. I never considered that there was a sensible way to go about planning a career, and it was a couple of years of happy accidents before I began to think of myself as someone with a profession. I clung to my self-image as a novelist, a man of literature, and this protected me as much as it hindered me. My mind was on concocting the next magazine assignment only if it might offer something besides money that I could use in my fiction—landscapes or portraits—not just a proposal I could sell to an editor.
This sounds focussed and idealistic, but it was only the blind pragmatism of someone with fixed goals but no long view. A sizeable poetry grant soon allowed me to give up temp work entirely.
For the next fifteen years, traveling the world for magazines was how I made most of my limited income. I never stopped being thrilled by the sensation of freedom that an assignment gave me. Often it meant travel to another season. After growing up in Georgia heat I most looked forward to heading somewhere sweltering; when you’re under forty there’s a sensual pleasure at being physically uncomfortable.
The best moment was not the anticipation that came with being told that a proposal had been approved by editors, nor the electric nervousness of passing through customs in some new country and being made viscerally aware that I had to produce a certain number of first-rate words per day, no matter how unprepared I felt, or I would never get to do this again.
No, the supreme moment was always those extended few hours of escaping Manhattan by airport bus; the sudden relief of time to kill at the airport and the reprieve of being at last not on my own money but on an expense account; the adventure, almost like finding myself in a thriller, of being able to tell anyone who asked that I was going overseas on assignment for a magazine they’d heard of—it gave me a professional identity, an importance, that otherwise I never had—to be followed by the ecstasy, in my airplane seat, of watching the lights of New York dwindle as all my problems, the unpaid bills and the unsolved technical issues of a novel, were left far behind and would grow more distant every day till I returned, when they did too.
My strategy, which editors made clear to me was unusual, was to write as much of the article as possible in place. I never carried a typewriter (and felt an unshakeable allegiance to writing by hand whenever possible anyway). I traveled with plenty of legal pads. I used the small ones to take my daily notes “in the field” and the larger to rewrite those notes into polished prose every evening at my hotel, after dinner.
I’d write the article in discrete blocks—descriptions, history, conversation—that could be assembled, when my time in a place was done, into an organic order which was (I hoped) compelling. As the days went by I always found that the place itself told me, gradually, the structure of its own article; I rarely felt I was guiding it as much as letting the piece decide what it wanted to say.
Naturally, the first page—the first half-page—proved the most important, and could determine the rest. Once my beginning asserted itself (the more tactile, diverse, and suggestive, the better), this meant I was beginning to know what I thought.
I never understood how other travel writers could take page after page of random notes, a line or two here and there, then try to assemble it all back in New York. Their method seemed to deliberately exclude the invaluable, vaporous sense of a place’s “reality” which, willy-nilly, you lose the second you get onto the plane to leave. Why try so hard to recall it from the other side of the world when you could save yourself so much time, and do such a better job, by writing most of the article while eating, sleeping, waking, listening, breathing in the place itself?
Part of the motivation was financial. After all, the sooner I turned in my article, the sooner I’d get paid. Oddly enough, even many successful magazines failed to realize that the easiest way to buy a freelancer’s loyalty was not through taking him out to lunch, or praising his work, but by paying him quickly. Such magazines got offered proposals first, even if sometimes they paid a little less.
My first two assignments, for GEO, came in the late spring of 1982. I was twenty-four. My parents were inexpressibly relieved that I was making definable progress, since clearly I was not going to turn out a real estate magnate and had let that job drop a few months before. My father—who praised, helpfully criticized, and encouraged all my fiction—must’ve breathed an enormous sigh while secretly wondering how I’d conned such a high-profile magazine, with French and German editions too, into taking a chance on a beginner with not one but two Caribbean assignments in a single fell swoop.
The world was different now. I was a working writer, a paid magazine correspondent. I was actually earning a living, too, since GEO paid $2500 for a full-length article. My rent was $348 a month, my total expenses a thousand, so for a few weeks of pleasant work I’d already made enough to live on for half a year. Best of all, I saw no reason for this extravagant success, which was funding another draft of my novel, to ever stop.
The following spring (1983) they sent me to Bahrain—I was savvy enough to give myself a couple of weeks in Rome on the way. I stayed in a soon-to-be-familiar little hotel on the Aventino, got to know the tawny city, and borrowed from my father a pile of books on the Middle East. The prospect of writing about that region had me petrified; the task seemed to call for a maturity of insight and a deep knowledge that I knew I couldn’t possibly fake through research, or acquire overnight; whatever skills I had as a writer didn’t strike me as useful for what was about to come. The more I read, the worse I felt.
He also loaned me a battered manual typewriter, on which I wrote my first published short story, perching the machine on a chair while I sat on the hotel bed. That story, the naturalness with which it offered itself, was a revelation, no less than a phone call to the young woman I’d just broken up with brutally back in New York. An expensive overseas line for a conversation lasting less than a minute.
Still, no reason not to be excited: the world was ripe with newness and energy.
Today few of my magazine colleagues are working, at least not as we used to. We’ve been replaced by a vast amateurism that costs almost nothing for an audience who can’t tell the difference, or don’t much care. And certainly don’t want to pay for whatever difference they do perceive.
I’m not blind to how dull some of our material was, and the magazine biz was always an elephants’ graveyard of lesser talents; but even if our work wasn’t lustrous, or audacious, or insightful, it was still professional. There’s no pressing need any more for readers or advertisers to cough up much money. All we veterans can do is wave goodbye, and pull down the blinds.
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