“I am sorry to be the baron of bad news, but you seem buttered, so allow me to play doubles advocate here for a moment. For all intensive purposes I think you are wrong. In an age where false morals are a diamond dozen, true virtues are a blessing in the skies, and are more than just ice king on the cake. We often put our false morality on a petal stool like a bunch of pre-Madonnas, but you all seem to be taking something very valuable for granite.

So I ask of you to mustard up all the strength you can because it is a doggy dog world out there. Although there is some merit to what you are saying it seems like you have a huge ship on your shoulder. In your argument you seem to throw everything in but the kids Nsync, and even though you are having a feel day with this I am here to bring you back into reality.

I have a sick sense when it comes to these types of things. It is almost spooky, because I cannot turn a blonde eye to these glaring flaws in your rhetoric. I have zero taller ants when it comes to people spouting out hate in the name of moral righteousness. You just need to remember what comes around is all around, and when supply and command fails you will be the first to go.

Make my words, when you get down to brass stacks it doesn’t take rocket appliances to get two birds stoned at once. It’s clear who makes the pants in this relationship, and sometimes you just have to swallow your prize and accept the fax, instead of making a half-harded effort. You might have to come to this conclusion through denial and error but I swear on my mother’s mating name that when you put the petal to the medal you will pass with flying carpets like it’s a peach of cake.” Read more »

Henri’s ennui is much worse than yours.

Much like life, Write or Die gives you two options: Write, or Die. The main difference between Write or Die and real life is that in real life your two options are “write, then die” or “then die” so if you think about it, Write or Die actually is a bit generous.

I’m not a big believer in magical rituals for writing. Thinking about writing is where I get the sudden ideas that I want instantly to turn into words and the best places for this are showers, drives, cooking, and reading, but if I’m sitting in front of a blank screen I feel like I should be outputting words at an incredible velocity, turning all those ideas real. What I actually do, however, is look at animated gifs of cats posted on twitter.

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I have more than a minor crush on Scott. (He prefers Scott—no one calls him Francis, hence the initial.) We are two peas in a pod, and I suspect if I had lived in the glorious Jazz Age, it would have been me running around and getting plastered with him in New York and Paris instead of Zelda. He was arrogant, selfish, hopelessly idealistic, notoriously careless with his money, and he desperately wanted to be loved—everything I look for in a man.

I read The Great Gatsby after I got tired of people bringing it up when no one had made me read it in high school. A year later, I bought The Beautiful and Damned for three Euros in Amsterdam, a beat-up old copy with yellow pages and dramatically posed figures on the cover and a note on the back that says “For copyright reasons this edition is not for sale in the U.S.A.”  Then I read This Side of Paradise and then a biography of him and then I got his collected letters. He’s the only man I could ever love who’s a terrible speller. Nowhere is his self-centeredness more obvious than in the letters, but I’ve also found them hilarious and tender and full of moments of genius. I can’t get enough. I’m just plain fascinated by him—the man and the myth.

Sometimes we just stare deeply into each other's eyes.

Maybe it’s his arcane language that I find so delightful: “tight” (aka drunk) and “soda-jerker” and all the sentences that start with “Why” (as in, “Why, I think that’s outrageous” which I can only hear spoken in Cary Grant’s voice). Maybe it’s his shrewd analysis of people, probably the best I’ve ever read. Maybe it’s his hair parted down the center and combed back in silly waves on both sides of his head. Or maybe I feel a kinship with Fitzgerald because he desperately wanted fame, wealth, and lasting idolization in return for his writing, and there is a small, shamed part of me that hopes for the same things. Read more »

Are you mindful of the other driver?

Between home and work, those huge digital matrix signs loom over the interstate, the ones intended to keep you abreast of traffic situations. But, except during snowstorms, there are no real traffic situations between home and work. It’s not that kind of town. So, instead, the signs display helpful messages and driving tips. Usually somewhere between self-righteously bossy (“Texting and Driving Don’t Mix”) and winkingly practical (“DUI Patrols Tonight”), lately the DOT has turned more philosophical. The other day, all over the state, the signs asked, “Are You Mindful of the Other Driver?”

It is the word “mindful” that seems out of place in square letters above the interstate. I am used to the DOT being concerned about my driving habits and even about the more physiological aspects of my mental state (who doesn’t like rest stops with free coffee?), but this seems to enter another kind of territory, a territory that is normally the domain of poets and pastors (and—on a side note—of Dinty W. Moore’s new book). I’m not used to hearing about such existential stuff from the lower levels of state bureaucracy. Not that I mind. In fact, I kind of like the idea that they might have more to say than “Merge Left in 1500 Feet.”

But that “mindful” and the abstract “other.” The word choice suggests authorship in a venue that is normally dominated by anonymity. This is not, I think, language that could be produced by machine or by government committee. This language was created, composed. So, reading it, driving beneath this message, I imagine the DOT copywriter in his cubicle, the perfunctory fabric walls, the smell of canned air. Read more »

I’m nervous about writing, and perhaps I should be.

Growing up I never liked to read.  Neither of my parents went to college.  Neither of them took the time to peruse much more than a copy of Popular Mechanics, or maybe, the Readers Digest abridged version of Alex Haley’s Roots, which they would watch on television anyway… But I can’t blame my anxiety about reading and writing well on them.

All I can say is that I love the capacity of words to inject emotional energy into a Tuesday afternoon with the drive-through traffic at Starbucks swirling around me.  I grew to love novels, short stories and poems, but first and foremost, I was impressed with the miracle of a well-chosen word.  And sometimes, even an poorly-chosen word would suffice and set me off.  Just the sheer effort of an individual to articulate his or her experience–that’s enough to make my hair stand on end.  Hence:  my apprehension!

What if I fuck it up?

Today I heard on National Public Radio a segment with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.   It dealt with “Roots Envy,” or the inability of some folks to trace their family ancestry back generation after generation like the legendary figure of the 1970′s best-seller.  Gates, around that time, became enamored with the possibility and discovered some things about his mother and father that were remarkable.  For example, evidently one of Gates’ kin had marshaled in and out of a Revolutionary War militia between the years 1777 and 1784.  For an African-American that’s especially intriguing.  Also, during the broadcast, Neil Conan asked the author of the Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader to revisit what he had written about his mother’s funeral.   (The audio of this reading, available today at 6 p.m., is worth listening to.)  He actually didn’t appreciate the stale, blue-blood service that they had back in 1997.  And so, with nothing more than a few words, he described the rowdy sermon and the swaying hymn-sings and the falling-down-in-the-aisle catharsis that would have been preferred.  It would have been a funeral like they had had for this uncle or for that aunt.  It would have been hot.  It would have gone on for hours.  It would have included those paper-fans, by which the mourners move the air about in vain…

I tell you, when I heard Gates read about this re-cast episode of his life, I wept like she were my own mother.  While driving through road construction barriers on I-90, I nearly couldn’t see that I’d be losing the left lane.  And I realized, while putting my foot on the brake, that I don’t have to be so nervous, that I’m not so much searching for that perfect word as I am searching for that intuitive trigger or that trap door that allows me to plunge into humanity’s collective subconscious.  Is there such a thing… such an ocean of dreams?
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A Brave New Book

I can understand why some Germans would like it if the rest of the world’s fascination with Hitler, the Holocaust, and the rise of the Nazis would dissipate. One German woman told me the Germans find talk of all of this “boring.” I was supposed to be helping her with her English so I probably should have helped her determine if boring was the word she really meant. Another German woman told me that what happened in WWII wasn’t the fault of her generation and she wishes people could stop talking about it.

At the same time, some people are engaging with and adding to our knowledge of this particular part of history impressively. One such project is a book written by a German historian called, Mein Großvater im Krieg 1939-1945: Erinnerung und Fakten im Vergleich (My Grandfather in the War: 1939-1945: Memory and Facts Compared). In the book, Moritz Pfeiffer, who is a historian, interviews his grandfather who was in the Wehrmacht infantry. Read more »

The Millions posted an interesting essay this morning called “In Defense of Autobiography” by fiction writer Jennifer Miller. She writes:

This is perhaps the the greatest hang-up of the modern novelist — that fiction is somehow unsophisticated or inherently cliché if it is rooted in the writer’s own life, and that writers should be creative enough to invent entirely new worlds and find drama only in the unfamiliar.

This may be a familiar topic of conversation for you. It’s come up in form & theory courses or  dinner conversations or late-night debates at the bar. It’s something I find fascinating: there seems to be a prevailing attitude that knowing a work of fiction is rooted in autobiography makes it lesser than. People argue that knowing it’s autobiographical distracts the reader, prevents them from suspending disbelief and embracing the world of the novel. Knowing it’s autobiographical means it was less finely crafted, that the author has less skill, imagination, or both, and (my favorite) must mean that it was therapy for the writer.

But wait, we might say. Didn’t Hemingway advise to write what you know? Isn’t all fiction, to a degree, autobiographical? Isn’t writing fiction about exploring what it means to be human? Aren’t all fiction writers like crows, picking up the shiny, unusual things we come across in our own lives, taking them back to our nest and hoarding them until we decide what to do with them?

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Yesterday, the soccer team I coach lost eight to one. It might have been nine to one; to be honest, I stopped keeping count at six. It was a tough game, and my team looked off from warmups. I don’t really know why. I don’t think I’m a fantastic coach. Not bad, just not awesome.

The team I coach is fifth grade girls. Most of them are eleven now, but a few are still ten. We have one sixth grader. Our league has tryouts, but we cut only two girls this year. It’s really a rec league. I work hard to make sure the girls get equal playing time, and while I usually let them play the positions they like, I make them try out new ones as well.

We were in first place and undefeated before our game today. My girls may be ten, but they aren’t stupid. They know that the score matters, no matter how much I sometimes wish it didn’t. They were ashamed and sad, and each goal made it worse. After the game, after we shook hands, the other team made a tunnel for my girls to run through, and they chanted B-R-A-V-O bravo! at them. My girls couldn’t meet their eyes. They were embarrassed. Not just because they lost, but because the other team pretended like it didn’t matter, when they all knew it did. If it didn’t, the other coach wouldn’t have screamed at the ref when one of my girls got too free with her elbows (and we got scored on anyway). If it didn’t matter, he wouldn’t have kept his star player in for all but five minutes of the hour-long game. Read more »

Oh, hey.

And wherein, instead of writing an intelligent and/or introspective review of the film, I answer the vital question: “What book would I buy each of them for their birthday?”

Steve Rogers (aka Captain America)

After a long day of leading an underprivileged troupe of boy scouts through the Catskill Mountains, which included him fighting off a cougar with his bare hands and quoting FDR, the Captain and I would enjoy a romantic birthday dinner at Mel’s Diner. We would then attend a drive-in movie. Always a perfect gentlemen, the Captain would only be comfortable going to first base (and maybe a little over-the-sweater action). Regardless, I would still end the evening thinking “God bless America.”

The book would need to be classic American. It should reflect boyish adventure.
The book I’d give Captain America for his birthday: “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” by Mark Twain. Read more »