Paradise Is Not So Bad

I once wrote a poem (lost long ago, probably in the move from California to Georgia) about how I wished teaching were more like acting.  Having dabbled in acting (and I have to stress dabbled – community theater, mostly, and some random stuff in college; we’re not talking about anything substantial – although I was hot shit as Huck Finn in 8th grade), I always loved the surge of adrenalin before the curtain rose, hearing the audience reaction during the show, and of course getting that round of applause at the end.  When it comes to instant gratification, acting is about as good as it gets for my attention-starved ego.

It would be swell if teaching were like that: audience in rapt attention, responding to all the right cues, breaking into applause once I dismiss class – and not in relief that it’s over, but in gratitude for how I enriched their lives in the previous two hours.  But it’s not like that, of course. It’s not a job to get into if you need some kind of immediate boost to your self-worth.  In many ways (and in the first couple years, especially) it actually breaks you down, makes you question your ability and dedication.  I remember it feeling like a war of attrition – grinding through the week just to recharge my batteries over the weekend and do it all over again on Monday.

But you stick with it, and the rewards start to come, even if you have to look for them.  The student who starts every day by putting up his hood and putting down his head starts to pay attention; you begin to see slow growth in writing fluency, those hesitant scribbles growing in confidence and competence; the “reading sucks” kid asks you for a book recommendation.  But it takes time, and sometimes the rewards come in forms that are completely unexpected.

Like yesterday.

As I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere on here, I’m currently teaching a class in writing instruction to pre-service English teachers.  Part of the class philosophy is that teachers of writing are writers themselves, so in addition to exploring different ways of incorporating the writing process, discussing English class minutiae like assessment and feedback, and designing meaningful and authentic assignments, we also write a lot.  Many of these writings are ungraded; the students polish their work in writing groups, and then, on the day the work is turned in, we sit in a circle and they take turns reading their pieces for their peers.  This often results in some spectacular writing, and, most days, that’s reward enough.

For the most recent writing (the last of the semester), I asked my students to take at least 30 minutes and go make some observations somewhere outdoors.  It’s called the Walkabout, and the goal is to be inspired by our surroundings.  I got a lot of great stuff: reflections on the changing seasons, clever observations of other students around campus, a very funny poem about the sad sight of a little kid on a leash at the mall.  One student, however, wrote about Little 5 Points – sort of an artsy-fartsy part of Atlanta, with lots of bars and restaurants, one good music venue, and Criminal Records, the closest thing to Amoeba Records in this neck of the woods.  In the course of her writing – a wonderful piece about the area’s eclectic architecture – she wrote a sentence that struck me as one of most simply profound statements I’ve ever heard about teaching.  Here it is:

“The educator in me admires any attempt at brilliance.”

Teacher friends, that really says it all, doesn’t it?  I can’t think of a better summation of why I do what I do – why I endure the grading marathons, the bureaucratic nonsense that seems to be part of education no matter where I go, the occasionally surly students with their unspoken challenges scrawled in body language.  It’s all worth it to witness those tentative stabs at growth, those first halting steps toward a wider horizon.  Even when a student tries and fails, it’s still immensely rewarding to watch them swing and miss.  It’s the swinging that’s important, for all of us.  Without it – giving in to a fear of failure – we cease to grow.

And the best thing – the thing that I actually feared wouldn’t be true when I first made the transition from high school to college teaching – is that it’s situational.  Now, instead of seeing my students become more confident readers and writers, I get to watch them grow as teachers.  I see that moment where they stop thinking like students and start thinking like educators; I see them get a handle on developing the kind of engaging, rigorous materials that complement quality teaching; I watch them as they cease to be my students and start to be my colleagues.  There are still growing pains – for instance, complaints about assignments, no matter how relevant I try to make them, never fully go away – but it’s worth it to revel in those very attempts at brilliance that my student wrote about yesterday.

To be a good teacher means to be invested in the growth our students make.  And that necessarily means we must be, if not more interested in their successes than their failures, then at least dedicated to turning their failures into successes.  We have to learn to look for those attempts at brilliance and marvel at them for what they are: the first exciting steps toward independence.

*****

Current listening:

Pet Shop Boys – The Most Beautiful Thing

Count to Ten and Run for Cover

I’m not an apologist for The Hunger Games, not by any stretch of the imagination.  I liked Suzanne Collins’ series, but it never became more than a diversion for me.  Where Markus Zukak’s The Book Thief and Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother are YA books that more than hold their own with the best literature for adults, The Hunger Games has some flaws (paper-thin characters, for one) that keep it from transcending its genre.  But it’s good entertainment, and the later books have some important things to say about issues that I can sink my teeth into – especially the mistrust of authority and the importance of staying true to oneself.  That it does this while wrapped in the guise of a high-octane adventure tale is all the more impressive. It doesn’t work 100% of the time, but it’s surprisingly deep stuff, especially when you consider its target audience is 13-year-olds.  And it goes without saying that it’s miles ahead of Twilight in the sophistication department.  It’s not the best YA has to offer, but it’s close.

One thing that’s been interesting, though, is watching people’s reactions to news about the movie.  Most of the most rabid criticism comes from die-hard fans of the book who think that Jennifer Lawrence isn’t a good fit for the role of Katniss, the main character who volunteers to take part in the Games in place of her younger sister.

“She’s too old!” they shriek (as though Hollywood has, up to this point, been completely age-appropriate in its casting decisions).

“She’s blond!” they like to remind us (as though hair dye is a foreign concept).

Most of these people clearly haven’t seen Lawrence in Winter’s Bone – an emotionally devastating movie that’s anchored by Lawrence’s brave performance.  It’s powerful stuff, and requires her to do more (emotionally, anyway) than she’ll ever be called on to do in the Hunger Games series.  She wasn’t my first choice for Katniss (as though I had a say in the matter – thanks, Hollywood), but she’ll do just fine, and all the early promotional stuff more than proves that she, at the very least, looks the part.

(My choice, and thanks for asking, is Kaya Scodelario, who plays the scrappy Effy Stonem in the original UK version of Skins.  Lawrence played tough in Winter’s Bone, but I’ve always felt like Scodelario could actually kick my ass.)

The other contingent of whiners is comprised of those who haven’t read the books but who swear up and down that the movie (and the books, I guess?) is a stone-cold rip-off of Battle Royale, the shitty, exploitative Japanese movie (and book that most of them have never read) that also happens to feature teenagers fighting each other to the death.

This kind of stuff is just lazy criticism.  Movie X shares basic plot similarities with Movie Y, therefore Movie X is stupid and dumb.  Congratulations, professor – you just described Western storytelling since the age of the Greeks.  As we all should know by now – and which Roger Ebert is fond of reminding his readers – a movie isn’t what it’s about, it’s how it is about it.  Romantic comedies, heist movies, westerns, virtually every horror movie ever made – they’re all of a type, they all play to certain conventions, and you can count the number of truly original storylines on one hand.*  What matters is how the filmmakers (or authors or playwrights) explore the themes inherent in the plot.  Beyond the surface similarities, there’s very little shared between Hunger Games and Battle Royale, and the fanboys (and girls) would see this if they’d actually put down the manga and crack an actual book.

* May not be an accurate figure.

Anyway.

I imagine most people fall into the other camp, the middle camp, the one I occupy.  We’re casual fans of the books, we hope the movie does the series justice, and we think the new trailer looks absolutely spiffy.  See you back here in March 2012 for a review.

*****

Current listening:

Buck 65 – 20 Odd Years (2011)

Cinema Sunday (11/13/11)

Before any of my other obsessions – before U2 and R.E.M. and shoegaze and guitars that jingle-jangle, before the films of Woody Allen and the Coen Brothers, before Cormac McCarthy and Kurt Vonnegut and Stephen King – there was Greek mythology.  I was eight years old when my parents took me to see the original Clash of the Titans, and it rocked my prepubescent world to its core (not least because it was the first movie in which I saw my first naked boob).

Like most young boys, I was way into stories of adventure.  The Empire Strikes Back had come out the year before, and it couldn’t have been much before I saw Titans that my mom took me to see Raiders of the Lost Ark (which is, to this day, still my favorite movie of all time).  Titans looks antiquated now, with its Ray Harryhausen stop-motion animation, but it was a revelation at the time, a grand adventure that introduced me to the notion of gods and monsters – Zeus and Poseidon and the kraken and Calibos and the Stygian Witches and, of course, snake-haired Medusa.  It was a movie where heroes died and victory was uncertain, and I loved every second of it.  I loved it so much that I devoured Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of the movie half a dozen times and became a connoisseur of books about the myths themselves.  My favorite was D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, a cleverly-illustrated volume that recounted the myths in an accessible, kid-friendly way.  I couldn’t get enough of it.

So, needless to say, it was sort of hard-wired into my DNA that I’d get excited about a movie that purported to tell the story of Theseus (the Greek hero known for, among other things, defeating the minotaur in the labyrinth).  I was even more excited to hear that it would be directed by Tarsem Singh.  I’m one of maybe five people on the planet who’s a huge fan of his 2000 Jennifer Lopez -starring creepfest The Cell, and I think his 2006 film The Fall is one of the very best movies of the last ten years.  Tarsem is known for his striking, sumptuous visuals, and his first two movies make clear that you’re bound to see things in his work that you’ve never seen before.

When it comes to my review of the movie, it’s probably most efficient to begin with a quote from Roger Ebert.  He says Immortals is “the best-looking awful movie you will ever see.” Unfortunately, he’s absolutely right.  But, oh man, the beginning of the movie makes some spectacular promises.  The titans, defeated by Zeus and the other gods, are trapped in a cube buried deep inside Mount Tartarus.  The movie opens with several shots of this cube – it’s small and unassuming from the exterior, but as we see more of it from different angles, we realize that it’s larger inside than it is outside.  Cut to the cube’s interior and we see the captured titans, mud-streaked, yoked in rows with iron rods clamped in their teeth, eyes glazed with anger.  It’s a queasy, discomfiting opening, and the scene sets a bar for the rest of the movie that’s so high it’s no wonder it can’t clear it.

Much of the problem, it has to be said, rests with the screenplay, and it rests with it on two fronts.  As written by Charley and Vlas Parlapanides, Immortals is strangely directionless for at least its first half.  After that dynamite opening (which is probably due more to Tarsem’s extraordinary vision than anything else) we’re cast into a classic quest and revenge story, as Theseus (Henry Cavill) attempts to recover the famed Epirus Bow before the cruel King Hyperion (played by a horrifically miscast Mickey Rourke) does, and then kill the king as revenge for murdering a spoiler-free member of his family.  This is the stuff of high adventure, and I could imagine it as a rocket-powered story borne along in a runalong rush from high point to high point.  Instead we get something weirdly listless, as Theseus and Stavros (Stephen Dorff), accompanied by a couple anonymous buff dudes left over from 300 and the Oracle Phaedra (Slumdog Millionaire‘s Freida Pinto), wander around Greece, doing stuff.  There’s very little forward momentum; something happens, and then something else happens, and the two things may or may not have anything to do with each other, but who knows?  Things don’t really pick up until the halfway point (or what seemed like the halfway point – parts of this movie felt longer than Roots), which is about the point where Theseus faces the Minotaur and the Epirus Bow becomes an active player in the movie.

The larger problem – one that ran through the length of the movie and not just 55 of its 110 minutes – is that the dialogue was miserable: stilted, wooden, awkward, phony – am I leaving anything out? Look: I’m not asking for fine literature (I started out by lauding the original Clash of the Titans, fer chrissake), but the words at least need to be serviceable.  It’s tempting in a case like this to blame the actors, but really – even Daniel Day-Lewis would have trouble selling a line like, “Let’s write history … with blood!”  Cavill and Rourke give it the ol’ college try, but when you’re stuck with characters uttering full-on crapola in a movie that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, not even Tarsem’s impressive arsenal of visual razzle-dazzle can save it.

And it’s a real shame, because that razzle-dazzle is really something else.  Villages on the edge of a cliff, the Oracle and her handmaidens drinking from a clear pool, the Minotaur in a helmet seemingly made of barbed wire, the Epirus Bow and its golden arrows, Mount Tartarus, the gods in Olympus, a handful of beautifully choreographed battle scenes, and that introductory scene of the titans – Tarsem is an astounding visual stylist, and it’s no hyperbole to say that the entire movie is a feast for the eyes.  But it’s also inert and sloppy, a bunch of beautiful images in need of a story that does them justice.

It’s entirely possible to have a movie without a lot of forward momentum that’s also visually dynamic and that features appealing characters speaking clever and engaging dialogue.  I’m thinking specifically of David Gordon Green’s All the Real Girls – one of my all-time faves, which also happens to be a stunningly beautiful film without a conventional plot featuring two of my favorite cinematic characters.  It works precisely because all the pieces mesh in service of Green’s singular vision.  In Immortals, however, Tarsem has to filter his vision through the inferior script, and the result is more a promise of what could have been than what actually is.  38-year-old Monty was a little disappointed; eight-year-old Monty would be crushed.

*****

Current listening:

Boston Spaceships – Let it Beard (2011)

Listening Post (11/12/11)

The last time I missed a day on here I thought I was dying, so it seemed a good idea to not let two days’ worth of radio silence worry people unnecessarily.  There will be much writing to come, but things might be a little sparse around here for the next several days because, for the love of all that’s holy … Skyrim!

I suspect a post in the very near future will deal with the fact that I’m a big video game nerd from way back (to go along with my movie nerddom and music nerddom, making it a perfect hat trick).  Any non-posting activity in the next couple weeks will likely be entirely due to the fact that all my free time is occupied playing the new Elder Scrolls game.  Priorities, you know?  So have some sympathy for WOM, who will lose me for a little while as I go kill some beasties.

For tonight’s Listening Post, considering my home state of Ohio’s important victory this week, voting down SB5 in defense of workers’ rights, it seems appropriate to play a little Billy Bragg.  It would be too easy to give you his signature song, “There Is Power in a Union,” so instead here’s my second-favorite tune from music’s favorite lefty.  It’s called “Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards.”

*****

Last movie seen:

Immortals (2011; Tarsem Singh, dir.)

One Foot in the Grave

I’ve been fairly outspoken about politics since I was old enough to care about them (circa 1989, when I discovered R.E.M. and was finally old enough to understand what U2′s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” was about), but I’ve never really much cared about elections, including the one for president.  Maybe it’s because I was pretty cynical from a young age, but I’ve never really felt like the outcome mattered much.  Politicians on the national stage are, by and large, fairly interchangeable down party lines.  The Republicans are mean and shallow and materialistic and beholden to Big Business.  The Democrats are wishy-washy and shallow and materialistic and beholden to Big Business.  To paraphrase George Carlin, the same shit gets shoveled around every four years; the person holding the shovel is largely irrelevant.

George W. Bush sort of changed all that.  For the first time I saw how one person actually could make a huge difference, not just in the national discourse, but in the laws that shape our society.  As a result, I went all-in for Obama in 2008 and, while I don’t regret it, I’m sort of back to my apathetic self as the 2012 election rolls around.  I will likely vote for Obama again (unless Romney suddenly wakes up one morning and starts pushing for a single-payer health care system at the national level, an instant cessation to oil drilling, and an executive order that all Wall Street bankers have to queue up so the American people can collectively kick them in the nads), but I will do so with little enthusiasm.  His education policy is a disgrace – at once repudiating and doubling down on No Child Left Behind – and there’s no question that the big banks have too much influence on his economic policies.

But I’ll vote for him precisely because of what I’ve seen in the unending series of GOP debates.  The 2012 presidential election is shaping up to be both the most entertaining and the most potentially catastrophic in my lifetime.  It’s sort of shocking to me that any of the current GOP field (except for Romney, who’s as close to a Stepford Candidate as any I’ve ever seen) is being taken seriously by anyone minus the most terminally out to lunch.  Gingrich is a delusional megalomaniac; Bachmann is a religious weirdo who actually makes Sarah Palin seem intelligent; Santorum is so socially conservative he’ll probably ban double beds; Perry (as we’ve seen amply over the last week) is Dubya Revisited – a down-home shitkicker who seems like a swell dude but who can’t string together two coherent thoughts to save his life; and Cain is an ignorant huckster who thinks a memorable catchphrase qualifies him for the job.  I haven’t forgotten about Huntsman or Paul. Huntsman is clearly  the most intelligent candidate in the mix, but that means exactly two Republicans will vote for him, and while I like some of what Paul has to say, the selfishness inherent in libertarianism is something I could never fully get on board with.

I think we all know that Romney will get the nomination, but in this country’s weird political climate I’m not about to rule out anything.  And that’s why – as much as I’ll be gritting my teeth – Obama has to get my vote.  Putting any of these Republican jokers in the White House would be a disaster.  Say goodbye to economic regulations designed to look after the consumer, and say hello to tax policy that will favor the wealthy over the working-class.  And that flawed but well-intentioned health care plan that attempts to equalize access for everyone?  That’ll be out the window in favor of something that resembles those scenes in Civil War movies where the poor folks have to take a swig of whiskey, bite a stick, and try not to black out.

What worries me most about the GOP field is this: I’m not politically savvy, and there’s a hell of a lot I don’t know about economics, foreign policy, or the inner workings of our government, but I get the feeling I could hold my own with any of the current Republican candidates in a debate, and there are a few I could run rings around.  That’s not right.  As a country, whatever our political party is, we should be nominating someone who’s a viable option for doing the job well.  Right now the Republicans have the unenviable task of nominating someone who just isn’t Obama.  And with this field, if Obama loses, we’re all in trouble.

*****

Current listening:

Spotlight Kid – Disaster Tourist (2011)

Elemental Ways of Speaking

The longer I live (and here I am at the ripe old age of 38), the more pop culture seems like a giant hamster wheel.  Forward motion is illusory.  We keep the thing spinning just so we can experience the same old stuff every few months.  And I’m not even talking about the Duggars, whom I consider to be as vile an example of human greed and excess as any of the Wall Street bankers.

I’m talking, of course, about Brett Ratner, and the made up conflict surrounding his recent statement that “rehearsing is for fags.”

I’ll get to the nature of that comment in a moment, but first, some perspective.  We’ve been here before.  The most notorious recent example is Michael Richards, who completely torpedoed his already foundering career with a rant about African-Americans during a standup routine.  And just a few months ago  – demonstrating that this issue isn’t the province of any particular race – we had Tracy Morgan claiming he’d kill his son if it turned out he was gay.  I’d be remiss, too, if I didn’t mention Mel Gibson, who has been accused (with good reason) of being insensitive to gays, Jews, and women, stretching back 15 years or more.  Hell, I remember when GLAAD (the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) made him apologize for the anti-gay characters in Braveheart back in ’95 .  The point is, the pop culture landscape is littered with this sort of thing.  Ratner isn’t the first, and he certainly won’t be the last.

And this is one of the reasons why I’m so annoyed with the way GLAAD has once again handled the situation.  Before I dive into arguments like these, I always feel compelled to state my own beliefs, and they are these:

Bigotry – true bigotry – is one of the most idiotic characteristics a person can display.  Whether we’re talking about hatred for blacks, gays, women, Jews, Muslims, white dudes, or Eskimos, it’s a sure sign of limited intelligence, self-awareness, sophistication, and evolution.  The simple fact is that assholes are everywhere, and attempting to generalize based on skin color, sexual orientation, religion, or any other sort of superficial demographic data is one of the most wrongheaded things a person can do.  As for myself, I try to be accepting of everyone, taking them on their merits until they demonstrate behavior that makes them unworthy of respect.  This doesn’t make me a hero.  It just means I don’t believe in carpet-bombing an entire group of people based on my own fear and ignorance.

However.

I also believe in freedom of speech, and in the certainty that a person can use racist/sexist/homophonic language without actually being a racist/sexist/homophobe.  I don’t, for instance, believe that Michael Richards is racist, despite the absolutely vile things he said.  If you’ve read about the circumstances surrounding his rant, I think it’s likely that he lashed out in the most hurtful way possible to verbally damage the audience members he’d taken offense to.  We can extrapolate from there and wonder about the stability of a man who’d do such a thing, but that’s another issue, based in Richards’ propensity for anger and lack of emotional maturity, not his alleged racism.

Fortunately I think the Brett Ratner case is simpler, which makes the outcry even harder to justify.  Ratner is, by most accounts, a pig.  Around the same time his “rehearing is for fags” soundbite broke, he went on record as saying he’d “banged” Olivia Munn when she “wasn’t Asian.”  So, we’re not exactly dealing with an enlightened gent here (which is well-documented in lots of places, like here), and both of these statements are exactly the kind of juvenile locker room immaturity we should expect from someone of Ratner’s caliber.  I’m not saying it’s right that he said it.  It’s clearly insensitive, and he’s a grade-A moron for uttering it in front of an open microphone.

But does he deserve to be pilloried in the way that Richards and Gibson and Morgan have been?  I don’t think so.  The argument I’d like to put forth is that we’ve grown too sensitive as a society, and rather than use this as an opportunity to talk about the casual cruelty inherent in Ratner’s words (which often works its way into the speech of others, especially adolescent boys), GLAAD made him hop on the apology train.  So now we get a public statement of dubious sincerity where Ratner disavows his statement, thereby making GLAAD look as thin-skinned and reactionary as it really is.  But rather than shaming the speaker, why not focus on the effect such words have on others, especially in light of the “It Gets Better” campaign?  Why not try to turn it into a moment where we can unpack the way people toss around the word gay as a pejorative?  Nope.  Ratner apologizes, and the only thing we’ve gained is that we won’t have to suffer through Eddie Murphy as Oscar host.

The really sad thing is that what GLAAD has done by condemning a juvenile, sophomoric comment (that I truly don’t think had any ill intent behind it) in such an over-the-top way is elevate it to the level of something truly malicious.  It’s important to be able to differentiate between the innocuous and the undeniably harmful, and, by treating them as though they’re one and the same, GLAAD muddies the waters.  A statement like Ratner’s is taken much more seriously than it should be, which means that the genuinely hurtful statement is, by necessity, diminished.

I’m emphatically not defending what Ratner said.  Free speech has consequences, etc., etc., and if you’re going to utter idiotic things in the public eye then you’d better be ready for the fallout.  But by the same token I think we’ve reached a point as a society where the fallout has gotten so disproportionate to what was actually said that we’ve managed to infantilize ourselves into a country of thin-skinned, hyper-sensitive children. GLAAD, like it or not, contributes to this every time they publicly shame people like Ratner or Morgan.  Treating all insensitive comments as equally offensive just means that we lose the ability to have an intelligent conversation about the language that binds us.

*****

Current listening:

David Lowery – The Palace Guards (2011)

Current reading:

Paul Griffin – The Orange Houses (2009)

The Day Our Voices Broke

So here’s the story behind last night’s missing post, as well as my sudden abandonment of National Novel Writing Month.

Spoiler alert: It involved a hospital visit.

Saturday morning, WOM and I hit the gym.  I put in 15 miles on the bike.  Boring, but, you know, a decent workout.  It was the sixth day in a row of fairly intensive exercise after a couple months of sporadic, sore-ankle-inhibited running, but I felt strong each day, and continued to feel strong after the workout.  I’m not an impressive physical specimen, but I’m sort of tenacious when it comes to exercise, mainly because it makes me angry.  I’ll suffer through it just to show it who’s boss.  Long story short: Saturday noonish, I felt fine.

Saturday afternoon we did the young love thing and had a picnic in our favorite local park.  It was a genuinely beautiful day.  Autumn in the South isn’t as good as autumn in Ohio, but it’s a damn sight better than autumn in Santa Barbara, which is more or less like summer in Santa Barbara or spring in Santa Barbara.  This is the park:

And this is graffiti on the table where we ate:

It was a fine old time, with a delicious meal supplied by two of my favorite Writing Project people (thanks, KD and MAS!).  By the time we got home, though, I was starting to notice some weird fluttery feelings in my chest.  My ticker would be humming along nicely, and then it would seemingly skip a beat or else beat several times in rapid succession.  There was no pain, but the whole “I need this organ to live” thing made me hyper-sensitive to what was going on in my chest.

This continued through Saturday night and across the day Sunday.  None of the classic heart attack symptoms (I know, because I checked every website I could find, including several not in English which might have been telling me I was about to die), but the frequency seemed to be picking up into Sunday evening.  I resolved to call my doctor if they didn’t seem better in the morning.  Something you should know: I will freely drop huge sums of money on books, DVDs, and records, but when it comes to my own health I’d rather err on the side of frugality. The fact that I was planning to call my doctor should tell you how seriously I was taking things.

Monday morning, though, seemed better.  The frequency of the palpitations (one of the fancy words I picked up in my Internet travels) had diminished, even with a couple cups of coffee.  I did fine at school, holding a couple meetings, teaching class, and then running some errands with WOM, who’d come to campus with me to get some of her own work finished.  We abstained from the gym, which we knew would be a bad idea if we made the trip, but even so there was little problem marching around campus, walking up and down stairs, projecting my voice in class, sneezing, etc.

But then I finished dinner, and it was like the day had been marshaling its strength for a frontal assault in the evening.  My heart was jumping around in my chest of its own volition, and I started to feel nauseous (which is one of the classic heart attack symptoms).  I also started feeling some anxiety-induced weirdness, like tingling in my left arm, which, as it turns out, was not a sign of heart attack, but rather a sign of my growing panic.  I’m stubborn but not stupid, so it was at this point that I swallowed my pride and asked WOM to drive me to the emergency room.

I think one test of how serious a person is as a writer is the degree to which he looks to his own life for fodder.  By that standard, last night I was Hemingway.  The mantra I kept repeating to myself as my heart jitterbugged its way across my ribcage was this: “At least I’ll have something entertaining to post about tomorrow.”  I was picturing a grotty emergency room complete with blood-streaked floor, funky odors, and drug addicts in various stages of withdrawal suffering from head trauma.

Unfortunately, it’s good for my health but bad for my writing to report that the emergency room staff were friendly, swift, and efficient.  The worst thing I can say about the waiting room is that it  was playing Fox News on the television.  WOM and I sat there for roughly ten minutes (I’ve waited longer for a sandwich at Subway) before I was called back.  The duty nurse took my blood pressure and temperature, and two minutes later I was being wheeled back to the – what do you call it? – the “main hospital area.”  They stuck me on a gurney, hooked me up to a heart monitor, drew some blood, did an EKG, took a couple chest x-rays, and then left me to sit in the hallway until a doctor could talk to me.

It was, in a word, uneventful.  WOM and I felt profoundly out of place; we spent most of our two hours in the belly of the beast cracking jokes – with each other, with the various nurses who attended me, with the woman who was responsible for registering me in the emergency room.  I know part of it was a defense mechanism – a way of masking our nervousness over what the diagnosis would be – but it was also, and I know this sounds weird, perversely fun (I should mention that I’m speaking for myself here; WOM was panicked enough that she might disagree with me).  It was a new frame of reference, one that didn’t involve me bitching about The Big Bang Theory, so I think it was, in some ways, a strangely welcome change of pace.  And it did feel weird because of the solemnity and anxiety usually associated with emergency rooms.  It wasn’t quite like laughing at a funeral, but it was close.

And then the doctor came.  A tall, fit, charcoal-eyed Indian who was, oh yeah, very male.  I don’t use the word smitten lightly, but I think WOM and I would have gladly dropped to the floor and wrestled for the opportunity to give him a huge sloppy kiss.  As soon as he left, I told WOM that I was reminded of this clip from Louis CK (danger: naughty words ahead).

I’m lucky to be married to her for many reasons, but a big one is her sense of humor.  She not only immediately knew which clip I was referring to, she thought it was insanely funny.  But yeah.  The Kinsey scale has never seemed more real.

And the verdict?  Run of the mill palpitations, likely caused by misfiring electricity in the heart muscle itself.  The doc referred me to a cardiologist to find out the specific cause, and I’ll likely make that call in the days to come.  But again, frugality might win out, especially with Skyrim releasing Friday.

So how am I using this as an excuse to bail on NaNoWriMo?  Here’s the superficial reason: It was going to be a stretch to meet my daily word target (what with the NCTE Conference right around the corner in Chicago, followed by the Thanksgiving holiday, when I’ll likely be traveling to Ohio), and getting even one day behind looked like an almost insurmountable obstacle.

Here’s another (less superficial) reason: I sort of missed doing this.  I don’t think I’m especially great at blogging either, but I think I’m better at doing this kind of mildly witty nattering than I am at noveling.  And if I kept devoting two or more hours a night to the novel, Warehouse: Songs and Stories was going to go the way of Kim Kardashian’s marriage.

But here’s the honest truth:

What I was writing wasn’t very good.  I was quite literally making it up as I went along, and I wasn’t altogether satisfied with the direction it was going.  In short, I was bored.  And if I’m bored writing it, it’s a sure bet it’s going to be even more tedious to the reader.  I’m not abandoning the writing entirely.  I managed to churn out 35 pages in a week, and I know there’s some good stuff buried in there.  It wasn’t a complete failure, but it didn’t feel successful enough to warrant the kind of time I was putting into it.  I’ll return to it at some point, rethink its direction, try to focus it more, make sure it’s doing what I want it to do.  But it’s just not the right time.  Or the right writing, really.

I’ll say this about it, though, just so I can’t be accused of completely disregarding the work I did.  I quite like the little interludes I wrote, the ones that backtracked in time.  They have an energy that I think the rest of the novel lacks, and I feel like if I dig around in them a little bit, that might be where the real story lies.  Thanks to those who commented.  It’s not going away forever; it just needs to find a little more purpose.

And, if new readers are interested in checking out what I wrote, excerpts can be found here and here.

*****

Current listening:

The Joy Formidable – The Big Roar (2011)

Current reading:

Jonathan Maberry – Patient Zero (2009)

Listening Post (11/6/11)

If you’re a serious music fan, there’s very little not to like about The Fall.  For a band that completely switches out its lineup every couple years, quality control has remained remarkably high.  Band leader (and only consistent member over the last 30+ years) Mark E. Smith has led the band through multiple personas – venomous post-punk with a rockabilly fixation; streamlined college radio darlings; dance music dabblers; bile-spewing elder statesmen – and there’s only one or two albums that could be considered genuine clunkers.  They’re just about to release their 29th (!) full-length album, Ersatz G.B., and early listening indicates that it’s quite possibly the best thing they’ve done since the turn of the century.

It’s tough to choose only one or two songs from a discography this expansive, but I’ll give it a shot.  Call this one a Listening Post Super-Installment.

First up is a recent appearance (well, 2005) on Jools Holland.  It’s called “Blindness.”

Moving backward through time, “Touch Sensitive” is a standout track from their early 21st Century resurgence.

In the ’80′s the fashion was dodgy; the music was not.  A live performance of “Real Big Prinz” from Granada TV.

And we’ll end up with a very early performance.  From 1981, this is “The Man Whose Head Expanded.”

If you like these, spend some time on YouTube.  There’s a wealth of other Fall-related material on there, including some of Smith’s notoriously tetchy live performances.

I Shall Forever Remain an Amateur

A few readers have requested I post some more of my entry for National Novel Writing Month.  I definitely won’t be sharing the whole thing on here, but since there’s interest, I don’t see the harm in putting up a little more.

A caveat: I’m roughly 7,000 words (25 pages) into the novel, and I’m still not confident that it’s worth much of anything.  This isn’t false modesty.  I’m still figuring it out as I go, and whatever you read on here is, in every way, first draft material, scratched out in fits and starts over a couple hours each evening.  So keep that in mind as you read.  The first few pages can be found here, and this excerpt picks up straightaway.  Hope you enjoy.

*****

The street was as he remembered it, huge oaks on either side whose branches, in the summer, would meet overhead, causing the sun to tessellate on the pavement below, a shifting checkerboard of burnished light.  Even though Russell had never been to France, it reminded him for some reason of a Parisian boulevard.  In high school – to cultivate a sense of sophistication he thought was missing from the neighborhood – he took to lounging around outside his house in a beret, sipping Dr. Pepper from an espresso cup he’d stolen from K-Mart, and biting huge chunks off the end of a baguette.  His dad tolerated this with the resigned air of a parent much used to disappointment.  Cassie, his mom bought the baguettes.

Now, though, the bare branches reached toward one another, their spindly ends stretching and failing to make contact.  As Russell turned the corner at his parents’ – scratch that, parent’s – house, he noticed that the grass was long dead – killed off by the first frost that had surely struck weeks ago – but it was also long.  Like it hadn’t been mown at the end of summer.  It was a yearly tradition, that final mowing in late September or early October, a certain sign that the seasons were changing, the calendar ticking over from summer to fall.  It hadn’t happened this year.  The grass – brittle and brown – stood nearly knee-high.  Russell could picture it blowing in the late summer breeze, forgotten and supplanted by what was happening inside the house.

He turned into the driveway, feeling that old, familiar thud as the tires whacked up and then down over the uneven seam that separated driveway from sidewalk.  He had no sooner thrown the vehicle into park than his sister bounded out the back door.  Russell supposed it was possible that she had coincidentally been doing dishes at the kitchen sink and gazing out the window, but it was more likely that she had been waiting for him to arrive.  Sarah had always been the anxious one of the siblings.  Even as kids, she was the homework-doer, the checklist-maker, the one who insisted on being at band practice fifteen minutes early rather than run the risk of getting there two minutes late.  It was as though watching all of Russell’s mistakes growing up had granted his sister an unusual degree of paranoia.  She never smoked pot as a teen because she was confident it would cause her head to implode like a dying star.

But here she was, smiling at him as she shuffle-skipped toward the pickup, trying to constrain her excitement but only partially succeeding.  In the years that Russell had been in California Sarah had put on weight.  Where she had been too thin as a teen – neurotic about her weight and appearance like most teenage girls are, only amplified in Sarah’s hyper-sensitive case – she now looked, Russell observed, normal.  There was no other word for it.  She looked healthy, looked well-adjusted, looked like he’d hoped she would. [more here] And he could only imagine how he looked in her eyes.  He felt the same as when he’d left home at 26, but he could only imagine how he might look to her.  A little paunchy, a little gray, a little tired.  He wore glasses now, had grown out his beard, and, especially in the last year that he’d been without work, had taken an unhealthy liking to Gardetto’s snack food and beer.  He still felt 26 but imagined he looked like every one of his 34 years.

He swept all that away, though, as Sarah seized him in a hug.

“Assface!” she muttered into his shoulder.

“Hey, Dipshit,” he replied into the top of her head, the old pet name coming to him easily.

She broke the embrace but held onto him by the elbows, appraising him, soaking in the years of absence, the years of silence.

“What took you so long?” she asked, and of course there were multiple layers of meaning to that single question.

Russell didn’t know which layer to excavate first – the seven years in California with only a handful of phone calls, the missed birthdays, the fact that Mom had been sort of sick for three years and then really sick for one year and Russell still hadn’t visited – so he went with the easiest.

“Fucking Indiana cops,” he growled.  “2,500 hundred miles and I get a ticket a hundred from home.”

Sarah held his eyes for a moment longer, deciding whether or not to accept the boundary implied by his answer.  Then, a nod and another smile:

“Pigs,” she swore. “N.W.A. had it right.”

Russell broke away and turned to the bed of his truck, grabbing a navy blue duffel bag by the handle.  His breath plumed in the November air as he hoisted it.

“No no no no,” Sarah said, grabbing his wrist. “Trust me when I say you’re not ready for what’s inside.”

“What’s inside?” Russell asked.

Sarah moved around to the passenger side of the truck and opened the door. “Just … let’s go.”

 **

 “She’s gone.”

“Dad … what?”

“She’s gone, Russ.  She’s gone.”

Brain wheeling, trying to get the synapses to fire.

“Who, Dad?”

“Your mom, Russ.  Who do you think?”

Connection made.

“What do I … what do you need me to do?”

“Come home, Russ.  Now.”

           **

In the late 90’s the town had been taken over by sports bars.  They were in strip malls next to Fashion Bug or TJ Maxx or Payless Shoes. They all bore single-word, two-syllable names like Hummer’s and Joker’s and Cheater’s, and these names were illuminated in neon along with a “clever” logo: a bumblebee for Hummer’s; a harlequin dressed in motley for Joker’s; and – apparently displaying a faulty understanding of the English language – a cheetah for Cheater’s.   But the name on the outside didn’t matter, not really.  Inside, the bars were relentlessly anonymous in their uniformity: wall-mounted TV’s and sports memorabilia and waitresses dressed like referees.  Perhaps not coincidentally, these interchangeable drinking holes became hugely popular with Midwestern sports fans, and the bars’ similarity to each other was comfortable in the same way it’s comfortable that every Wal-Mart is set up on an identical floorplan.

Despite the town’s preference for homogenization, there was still room for the Brass Rail.  Nestled snugly between a jeweler’s and a men’s clothing store on the main drag, the bar was an Edgewood mainstay, and it was here that Sarah directed Russell.  It was, improbably for a small Midwestern town, tastefully decorated: dim lighting, dark wood, photos of pub scenes hanging on the walls.  Even though smoking had been banned in Ohio bars since 2006, the air still smelled strongly of tobacco, as though it had embedded itself in the grain of the mahogany bar that spanned the length of the main room.

Russell had spent many nights here in his early 20’s, drinking alone most of the time.  He would tuck himself away in a corner and try to write, putting away beer after beer until his pen seemed loaded with lead shot and the words on the page shimmered as though in a heat haze.  Sarah, who went away to college at 18 and never really returned, was less familiar with the Rail, but she still knew it was the only decent place in town to grab a drink.  Anyway, it beat trying to talk at Hummer’s while the next table noisily slurped their nuclear-orange buffalo wings and some drunken toolbox slurred his way through a karaoke version of “Don’t Stop Believin’.”

It wasn’t quite 5:00 when Russell and Sarah arrived, and the bar was nearly empty.  They grabbed drinks and settled in at a table away from the action, if any action were eventually to transpire.  Russell took a sip of his Newcastle and cleared his throat.

“So, what’s –“

And Sarah’s face began to melt.  It started with a twitch of the lips, a moistness in the eyes, and suddenly it was as though her features were caught in a landslide, collapsing inward and downward, picked up and carried along in a wave of anguish.  Her shoulders rocked with sobs, but she made no sound.  Sarah had always been the considerate one, too, careful not to make anyone else feel uncomfortable.  Russell pulled his chair around to her side of the table, wincing as it squealed on the floorboards.  He put his arm around her quivering shoulders, unsure what to say.  Comforting people wasn’t his specialty.

“Hey,” he began, awkwardly patting at her shoulder with the palm of his hands.

“Russell, where have you been?” Sarah moaned.  She pulled away from his arm and turned to him, her face blotchy even in the dim light of the bar. “Do you have any idea what it’s been like?”

“I know.  I know I fucked up,” Russell stammered.

“That’s not even it, Russ.”  Sarah leaned in, her voice suddenly intense, grief vanished with the snap of a finger to be replaced by simmering anger. “It goes beyond fucking up.  Fucking up is forgetting Mom’s birthday or dropping your pants in the middle of a job interview.  You’re the older brother and you just walked away.”

“I had a job, Sair,” Russell protested, fighting the urge to put his hands up in defense. “I had to go, and once I was there it was hell to get away.  I wanted to come, especially –“ He faltered, dropping his voice. “Especially when she got sick.”

“So where were you in the last year? You lost your job months ago.  Why didn’t you come sooner?  Why did you leave it up to Dad?”

“How is he?” Russell asked quietly – concerned, but also anxious to change the topic.

“Oh, Russ,” Sarah said, and Russell was mildly concerned to see yet another mood shift: grief to anger to despair. “It’s terrible.  I’ve been helping to coordinate all the funeral arrangements, and he just watches TV.  Court shows, mostly.  I ask him a question and he just tells me I know best.  Like he can’t be bothered.”

Russell took a pull of his beer, digesting the information.  Jerry, their father, had never been a sentimental man.  He had always been involved in his children’s lives, but he was never a hugger, and Russell could scarcely recall any instances when his father had expressed love for him.  As Russell got older and his interests gradually moved toward art and music and film and other pastimes that didn’t involve balls or tackling people, he always had the sense that Jerry wished he could call a mulligan on his oldest son.  He never voiced it out loud, but it was this general feeling of dissatisfaction that had partially driven Russell from Ohio in the first place.  Jerry was the kind to suffer in silence, grimacing instead of shouting, so to hear that his mourning was taking place from a sedentary position was, frankly, not surprising.

“He’s grieving, Sarah,” Russell said.  “It takes different forms.  It’s the, you know, the whatsit.  The stages of loss.”

“Kubler-Ross,” Sarah finished for him, and shook her head.  “I know grieving, Russ.  But this is different.  It’s like he’s just running out the clock.  He sleeps in the chair, and sometimes he forgets to eat.”

“Does he talk about her?  Ever?”

“Mom?  No.  At least not that I’ve heard.  Dan and Spencer – you remember them?  From the office? – they drop by sometimes, so maybe he talks about her with them.  But not with me.  And you know the worst part?”

Russell shook his head, afraid of what would come next.

“I haven’t seen him cry.  Not once.  He just sits there in front of that fucking TV, and it’s like it’s all slipping away from him.”

Russell watched as Sarah slid her rum and Coke across the tabletop, hand to hand to hand to hand.  It left a trail of moisture on the polished wood surface, and Russell suddenly remembered how his mom had always made him use a coaster.  The strength of the memory was a punch to the gut and he swallowed hard.

“So … what?” he asked.  “What can I do?”

Sarah smiled ruefully. “I don’t know, brother.  It’s not like –“ She bit off her words and quickly looked up at Russell through squinted eyes.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said.  “It’s cool.  It’s not like he and I were ever really on speaking terms.”

“Shit,” Sarah said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s cool,” Russell repeated.  Then: “When’s the funeral?”

“Day after tomorrow.  Viewing’s tomorrow night.”

“So what do we do in the next 24 hours?  Shake him from his stupor?  Stage an intervention?  Let him work it out on his own?”

Sarah knocked back the rest of her drink, ice knocking against her teeth.  She looked at Russell evenly. “How much help can I expect?”

“Jesus, Sarah – “

“It’s a fair question, Russ.” The anger was simmering again, just below the surface.  Sarah was stronger than Russell remembered her. “You split seven years ago.  Mom’s been – was – sick for most of that time.  Who do you think helped Dad take care of her in that time?  It sure as shit wasn’t you, big brother.  When Dad was at work I took her to chemo.  I fixed her meals when she was too weak to do it herself.  I was there at the end.  And you –“ She jabbed Russell in the chest with a finger, “weren’t.”

“Okay, okay,” Russell said, and this time he did raise his hands to ward off Sarah’s vitriol. “I’ll make up for lost time.  I will.” A pause.  “I’ll try.”

 **

“Come home, Russ.  Now.”

Fumble the handset back to the table.

Try to sleep, stare at the ceiling instead. A restless, rest-less, night.

Russell up at 6:00. No alarm, no need.

Coffee, toast, juice.  Drawers ransacked, closet raided, clothes haphazardly tossed in a duffel bag.  Time for folding later.

Armloads of CD’s swept into a larger duffel bag.

Downstairs to the pickup.  Palm trees nearly invisible against the mountains.  A faint band of pink just tingeing the black velvet scrim of the sky.

Clothes duffel in truck bed, CD duffel on the seat beside him.

Gun the engine, hit the road.

The 101, south to L.A.  Leg 1.

*****

Current listening:

The Go! Team – Rolling Blackouts (2011)

Pulled Apart by Horses

I’m on the record as being 100% opposed to capital punishment.  I don’t believe it’s the province of a civilized society, and I fail to see how killing someone – regardless of his or her crime – can be justified by anyone with a modicum of compassion.  And of course there’s all kinds of research to demonstrate that the death penalty doesn’t act as a deterrent to further crime the way its proponents claim it does.

However.

I might be willing to make an exception for anyone who seriously and unironically attended the vigil for Kim Kardashian’s wedding.  With the people of Occupy Wall Street doing truly honorable work in the name of abolishing income inequality, it’s inexcusable for anyone in his or her right mind to attend anything involving this talentless, money-grubbing twit.  With all the problems facing us, this is what some people get upset about?

It might not be the end of civilization, but you can see it from here.  Simply disgusting.

*****

Current listening:

Athlete – Vehicles & Animals (2003)

Current reading:

Michael Ondaatje – The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970)

Last movie seen:

50/50 (2011; Jonathan Levine, dir.)