Tag Archives: books

A Full Life: James Connolly, The Irish Rebel

Posted on by
Reply

jamesconnollycover

***

It’s always exciting for me when I can learn, in a fun and interesting way, more about something that I know very little of. I’ve probably learned more about the revolutionary James Connolly and the Irish Easter Rebellion in my one hour’s pleasurable reading of writer and artist Tom Keough’s new graphic remembrance than in all my previous decades of schooling. In A Full Life: James Connolly, The Irish Rebel, Keough tells the story of a truly remarkable man, and puts Connolly’s life into its historical, political, economic, and philosophical context.

Connolly was born into poverty in the slums of Scotland; he devoted his life to improving the lot of working people and to freeing Ireland from British rule. For someone with little formal education, Connolly was amazingly prescient—and persuasive— in his views about socialism, feminism, and internationalism. With the 100th anniversary of the Connolly-led Easter Rebellion upon us this Easter,  it would do well to make acquaintance with this man and his ideas. You can get it here at popular prices. I bought three!—one for myself, one for my wife, and one for my son.

Note:  The ordering website has been updated and should be working for most now.

Book Nook (4)

Posted on by
2

721ee658366641450325249e0ae5342f

***

And here’s another installment of books I’ve been reading in the last few weeks, all recommended.

Impossible Vacation by Spalding Gray: Monologist Spalding Gray for years went around performing a one-man show called Monster-In-A-Box, his attempt to wrestle his unwieldy manuscript into a novel. The result was Impossible Vacation. I’d been in a period of non-reading recently, but I picked this up in a used bookstore, and it got me reading again. It’s a first person account of the life of a narcissistic and badly depressed actor/performer (a thinly disguised Gray), and while the language is not distinguished, this portrait of a would-be artist in the 1970s rang a lot of bells for me.  You can see Gray trying to wrestle meaning out of this, and it ends fairly arbitrarily as if he needed to stop somewhere, but I found the book to be truly affecting in parts and often funny.

Trouping With Dante by Marion S. Trikosko: In this memoir, a teen-age boy gets to troupe with the great magician Dante’s large illusion show throughout the country, while learning the inside story about show business and magic. It’s a difficult life, but he seems to have a lot of fun along the way. Decades later, Trikosko’s account confirms that Dante was a generous but exacting taskmaster, and Marion’s enthusiasm allowed him to gain, in a relatively short period of time, more and more responsibility in assisting the show. The author does a great job of setting up the context of the rigors of touring a large illusion show at a time when that way of performing life was starting to come to an end, and for magician readers there’s lots of inside information about the workings of the show. If you’ve ever wanted to run away and join the circus, or become Blackstone’s assistant, you’ll be charmed by this book.

The Commitments by Roddy Doyle: I can’t think of an author whose work I enjoy reading more.  Doyle, like most of the authors I admire most. has a wonderful ear for dialogue, and the language is vivid and memorable. While it’s a slight story—the limited rise and limited fall of a thrown-together Dublin bar band—the characters are humorous, sympathetic, and fun to read about. The short novel is a very quick, well-paced read, and I don’t even fault it’s feel-good ending. It feels like a film treatment, and of course it was made into a film, which I will immediately put onto my Netflix cue.

Williamson’s Wonders by Richard Kaufman: David Williamson is one of my favorite magicians, and here he tips some of his best routines, including “51 Cards to Pocket,” “Torn and Restored  Transposition,” and the real work on “The Striking Vanish.” Kaufman’s written descriptions and illustrations are very good, and while these are not beginner’s tricks, most of them seem to be attainable by the average magician after some work—at least the mechanics. Kaufman does a good job of laying out the nuts and bolts, but to really get the full potential of these items, it really pays to look up some of Williamson’s performances;  not to copy him, but to get an idea of the entertainment that can be wrung out of these items.

Humans of New York: Stories by Brandon Stanton: This is a follow up to Stanton’s Human of New York. This time the portraits of New York City street life are accompanied by descriptions of the people photographed, accompanied by the subjects’ own words. They present a fascinating and sometimes moving collage of the life of the city.

The Writing Blues Cure

Posted on by
Reply

dilbert

***

The good folks at The Virtual Academic have a one stop solution to your dissertation and disquisition distress: a random sentence generator. Your academic jargon word count targets are now a breeze to fulfill, the heavy lifting done by the wizardry of some clever computer programming and a keen eye for the structure of nonsense.

You have two options: the first option (link above) has the program making all the choices for you; not only will it generate impressive word salad thoughts, but on Fridays it will also generate jargon-laden critiques of the newly-created sentences. Here is a screenshot of some the sentences that it captured for me last night:

VA

For those who wish for more personal input into their scribblings, there is another option here which allows you to select key phrases and to edit post-facto. So, have fun with this, because, after all, the fiction of praxis gestures toward the discourse of print culture.

Mix and Match

Posted on by
2

screen_1

Sometimes when I tell people that I’m writing a novel they ask, where do you get your characters from?  Is character X in your story actually person Y in your (somewhat more) real life? Did this really happen? Which character is supposed to be you?  Am I in it? And so on.

So I thought I’d talk a little bit about character. As always, I’m only speaking for myself. I’m sure there are many writers who don’t do what I do at all.

First off, I want to be able to recognize the characters I read and write about. Now, I grant that this is just a personal preference; but I don’t think I would ever want to write a book that takes place on the planet Zaurus and concerns the Great War between the Alliots and the Beloggotians. The advice about writing that I have taken to heart the most is this, by Grace Paley: write about what you don’t know about what you do know.

Now this is very different from: write about what you know. That charge may be fine for non-fiction, but for a novel I feel that if I know everything about it beforehand, and I’m not discovering anything new as I go along, then there’s a good chance that the reader will also find it predictable, and that’s not interesting at all.

On the other hand, my charge is not just to write some random nonsense, a string of words put together. If I’m going to bring some kind of revelation to the reader, then what I hope for most is that in the act of writing, my conscious plan will become subverted, and the beak of my unconscious will crack through the egg of my surprised will.

An example. A while back, I was slogging through my day’s idea for my current novel, and it was really tough. But then it turned out that one of my characters was going to bed, falling sleeping in the same room as his brother, and all of a sudden, a whole flood of memories of sharing a bedroom with my brother came rushing through me: I realized that this was a whole section of my life that I had never really explored before, but something of the truth of my life. The relationship of the brothers in the novel could be revealed in that one little scene. Those night time experiences had been incredibly important to me, but I had never really looked hard at them before. All of a sudden, I began to ask: What was it like, really, to go to sleep in the same room as my brother, night after night? What was it like for my brother? What was the importance of that relationship at night? How did it form who we were? More concretely, what were the sounds, words, rituals, shadows?

Now I am not saying that my brother or I am in this novel. We’re not at all— that would be uninteresting. I’m a very boring person. That’s not the way it works. What I’m doing instead, on a primarily unconscious level, is taking different parts of relationships  and pieces of my life and putting them together, like those mix and match flip flap books I had when I was a child. Do you remember them? They had five or six faces that were cut horizontally in thirds and then you could flip the separate sections so that you could create a new face with one person’s hair, another’s eyes and nose, and another’s mouth and chin. Composites. You take different truths and pieces of imagination and then mix them up in new and compelling ways.

What’s interesting about the truth in fiction or acting is that you don’t have to have the complete truth to establish the reality of a character or a scene. A drop of cream in the coffee, as Lee Strasberg once said, is enough to change the nature of the coffee. In acting, as in writing, you pour out different drops of yourself and other people which you know to be true, and then you stir and combine those aspects in new ways. In that sense, every character is unique, but every character is also one’s self. So each brother in the example above contains parts of myself and others, but where the characters truly come alive is when I put them into a situation and watch how they handle it.  I rarely know beforehand what will happen, but I try to focus on what I don’t know about what I do know about the situation and the characters. That’s where the juicy part is.

So, yes, you’re all in it, and no, none of the characters are you.

 

Book Nook (3)

Posted on by
Reply

twilightzone2big

This month’s Book Nook covers one book that’s taken me ages to finish, and then a few other quick short books.

First off is The Marxists by C. Wright Mills. Sociologist Mills is probably best known for his seminal work, The Power Elite, about the role of the rich in the formation of US policy and their usurpation of the democratic process. The Marxists, however,  is much less well known and not always easy to find.

Mills was a lapsed Marxist when he wrote it, but I think his project here is very useful, even today. His idea was to make a readable survey of the different varieties of Marxism that have evolved since the Russian Revolution. So here you’ll find descriptions of the myriad forms of socialism and communism variously championed by  Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, the Social Democrats, Tito, and Che Guevara, among others. Mills has an opening essay where he details what specifically belongs to Marx, and then, largely through primary source material quotation, he allows the various tendencies to speak for themselves.

I found it tough sledding, but worth it. By contrasting the different strains of communism, I was able to get a real grasp on what the key features of Marx’s philosophy were, and the subtleties of his thought. It also helped to explain for me the sometimes bewildering alliances and betrayals within the history of the left. Definitely recommended for those who want to get a further grasp on what Marxism means or could mean.

Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry is a series of essays by famous and not-so-famous authors concerning their brothers. The book opens with David Kaczynski talking about how he idolized his brilliant older brother while growing up, only to realize later on that the handwriting of the Unabomber’s letters was that of his brother, Ted. Gutwrenching. Other entries are touching and humorous, with Frank McCourt’s introductory essay about his brothers at a long postponed Christmas get-together a comic gem.

I’ve been attracted lately to short books! To that end, I recently completed Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano. In 1988, Modiano came across a small 1941 French newspaper notice which reported that a young girl, 15, named Dora Bruder had gone missing. Modiano attempts to find out who Dora was, and in so doing leads himself through a trail of memory of both the horrific French Occupation and his own childhood memories.  In this seemingly artless book made of scraps of information, Modiano weaves a fascinating tale of the ephemeral nature of historical experience.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates is an eloquent recounting  of Coates’s realization that as a Black man, his entire life has been spent worrying, literally, about the safety of his Black body. As he explores this theme under the guise of a letter to his teen-age son, he recounts both his personal experiences and the larger role of White Supremacy’s need to subjugate Black bodies as the central fact of United States history. Though some have seen Coates’s work as nihilistic, I don’t agree with that. He is suspicious of alliances with whites and insists that whites of goodwill will have to find their own path; he wants to spend his time relating to the wide spectrum of Black life he encountered once he was able to leave the confines of his Baltimore streets. My biggest issue with the book is that there is not much of a class analysis, but Coates’s point is that, in the US at least, notions of race are even more constricting than that of class. I think it’s arguable, but his own story provides strong testimony.

I had read Albert Camus’ The Stranger when I was in high school, but picked it up again because my wife was recently reading it in French. I’m probably an outlier here, but what struck me most about the book was how funny it was. Yes, there are all kinds of issues about personal responsibility and colonialism, but I couldn’t help but fixate on the notion that it was a story about a man whose actions were subject to the ridiculous interpretations of everyone around him for their own ends, while the man himself was erased. For me, the key scene is Meursault in the courtroom, on trial. Both the defense and prosecuting attorneys come up with all kinds of clever explanations for Meursault’s actions, explanations meant to bolster the strength of each side, respectively; but, instead, what both sides showed they had in common with each other was the complete irrelevance of their ingenious theories to the actual truth of the man standing before them. I laughed out loud at times.

Next time: Life in wartime France in Trains of Thought by Victor Brombert; Stephen Stern’s novel of Jewish life in a fantastical surreal Memphis, The Pinch; and When Strangers Cooperate by David Brown, an investigation into how social conventions are formed. And, for magic related items there will be a separate post soon where I cover some interesting magic videos and ebooks.

 

 

 

Thanksgiving

Posted on by
2

3240.thank-you

Family

Friends

WBAI radio

Audacity Open Source Software

Shakespeare

Iced Green Tea

Genii Magazine

Buster Keaton

The Commons Cafe

Sony PCM Recorder

The New Yorker cartoons

Summer Fruits

Spring, Summer, and Fall

An open window

Holly, Gordon, Parker, Avery, Amy, and the rest of my fictional family

Retirement

Laundry pick-up

Canon Elph cameras

The Catskills

WordPress

Snail Mail

International High School

Fresh decks of Phoenix Playing Cards

iCal

Ella Fitzgerald

KenKen

Amazon Prime

The Magic Cafe: Not Very Magical, Still forum

A good poem

Books

Charlie Parker

Low-stakes acting

Talking crap

 

 

 

The Road to Hell…and Back

Posted on by
6

 

hell

***

It’s been about a month since I spent any substantial time working on Novel #2. Lots of excuses—dental surgery, friend died, working on some interviews, the book sucks, worried about Novel #1—but none of them are any good. My schedule for this book was three days a week, 800 words a day. Seems innocent enough. Here’s a little outline of the road to hell.

  1. It starts with me feeling lousy in the morning. For a few days I procrastinate and finally do my scheduled writing in the evening.
  2. Next, I miss a day entirely and make it up the next day, on the day I’m supposed to have the day off entirely from writing.
  3. Next, I miss a day and don’t make it up, feeling very guilty about it.
  4. Next, I miss another day and don’t make it up, but now I don’t feel so guilty about it.
  5. Next, remorselessly, I miss another and another and another day. Soon, it’s almost a month since I’ve written any of my 800 words a day.

And back:

  1. Friend calls, says she can’t write, the muse isn’t visiting.  I tell her to hell with the Muse visiting, you have to visit the Muse.
  2. Today is approaching, and I know I want to write this particular post about getting back on the wagon. I’ll feel like a terrible phony if I write about getting back to writing without getting back to writing.
  3. I open the file for the novel, and start reading, and realize I have no idea where I am in the plot.
  4. I write anyway, not caring whether it has any coherence or not. It’s more important to get the 800 words in.
  5. I do it, and it’s still pretty awful.
  6. I know it’s awful, but allow that there just might be some little thing that will make it into the next draft. That’s reward enough right now.
  7. I write this post, so that I can remember the arc of what happened.

For the future:

  1. Stick to my schedule whether I feel like it or not. It’s like what those money gurus tell you about saving money from your paycheck—pay yourself first; writing that book is my first obligation.
  2. It doesn’t matter whether it’s good or bad. What matters is 800 words.
  3. If I don’t do it, it won’t be done by anyone else. My years on this planet as a functioning human being are quite finite.
  4. If it doesn’t seem worthwhile, maybe it’s not. But it’s not like I’m doing anything better with the time.
  5.  Okay, maybe I’m fooling myself, it’s all worthless. True, but there’s nothing wrong with fooling myself, if it helps me keep going.
  6.  Whether I write or not, time is going to pass anyway. I can let it pass with a book, or without it. I’ll be happier if I have a book—even if it sucks.
  7. I remind myself about the magic of revision. I can’t revise unless there’s something to revise.
  8. When I see myself slipping down the ladder, get back to the very first rung again, back to the original schedule.

Hope this is helpful to someone out there—but selfishly, I hope this is useful to me!

Magic, Wide and Deep

Posted on by
7

taschen***

When I saw the UPS man stooped over as he was delivering the package to my mailbox, I knew that it had finally arrived. I’m talking about Taschen’s Magic 1400s-1950s, an amazing book of posters and essays that is hands down the most magnificent book of any kind that I own.

It seems impossible to believe, but what I ordered from Amazon is actually the abridged edition. Abridged in this case means 540 pages instead of 650 pages, 2 inches shorter in length, and 1 1/2 inches narrower; but the book is still massive, two inches thick, measuring 16″ x 11″, weighing twelve pounds.

You can open this tome at any point and you will be greeted by the most wonderful historical magic posters and photos in beautiful color. And every once in a while you will also be greeted by the most lovely of two-page spreads. The illustrations on the posters are truly delicious, and many of them have not been in print in book form before. In the centuries before social media, the variety arts were advertised through posters that promised the most extraordinary of delights, and the wonders of Kellar, Thurston, Houdini, and countless others were communicated in large part through this medium.

But, you say, you are one of those people that buys Playboy for the articles and doesn’t care about the pictures. In that case, you are still in luck. The book is also filled with fascinating essays by the great Jim Steinmeyer, Ricky Jay, and Mike Caveney, all Godfathers of magical knowledge, both historical and practical. The essays (and picture captions) are all in three languages: English, French, and German. But the nice thing about this is that though the text is repeated, there are different pictorial elements for each, so the 540 pages is really a full 540 pages of content, not just repetition. It seems incredible to me, that when you consider that the original edition cost $250, that Amazon can currently sell this for under $50. Oh, and did I mention that for that price, the book is also provided with a handsome slip cover as well?

As my wife says, this is the kind of book that makes you want to run out and buy a coffee table, it’s that good. I highly, highly recommend this book to anyone who has the slightest interest in the magical or the illustrative arts. I guarantee you will spend many delightful times with this book.

***

EverythingIOwnHasAHandleOrWheels***

The other book that I’ve been reading this week is also a magic history book, but at the other end of the spectrum. Where the Taschen book covers 500 years of history and spans multiple countries and genres of magic, Dick Oslund’s self-published Road Scholar is quite the opposite. It is highly specific, and covers a very narrow, but deep, slice of American magical history. To wit, the good-natured Oslund spent forty-plus years on the road as a performer touring the “knowledge boxes,” that is, the school Lyceum circuit. Oslund made a career of performing his 45-minute show in up to four different schools a day as he traveled an average 500 miles a week, through the tiniest towns of Michigan, South Dakota, Kansas and parts West. If the definition of success is to find a niche and to fill it, then Oslund was successful in spades. He tells literally hundreds of stories of his visits to schools around the country, and by the end, you are exhausted, but feel that he must have encountered every possible situation that could ever be encountered by a school performer.

The production values here are, as I said before, on the opposite spectrum of the Taschen book, but in its own way, it is no less comprehensive. There’s not a whole lot in the way of editing, and the photos are all in glorious black and white, but in the chatty conversation here, there’s a lot of wisdom born of hard experience. The casual magician will be most interested in the latter half of the book, what Oslund calls “The Book Within a Book.” In this section, which follows the anecdotal section (and 82-year-old Oslund must have kept the most amazing notes or have the most amazing memory!), Oslund talks about his trick set list and magic philosophy, while also including his road-tested scripts and precious bits of business. This section begins with Oslund’s nine sacred rules for choosing effects for a school audience, and it’s advice that can be followed by all who want to make sure that their platform show can be performed under any condition.

There will probably be some who feel that Oslund could have just published the latter half of the book, and I can’t say that I totally disagree; the opening material while interesting does start to get repetitious. There’s also lots of  biographical information about all the other school performers he met along the way; while this is important to document for historical reasons, for the casual reader it probably holds less interest.

But… but…

In a way there’s a method to Oslund’s madness. In his insistence to document just about every school in which he ever performed, and every performer that he ever met, he creates the context for the second part of his book. Because in a way, you can’t really understand the full value of the trick part of the book without understanding that, subliminally, Oslund has been telling you all along the real secret: all those folks he met along the way, all those home-cooked meals given to him by comrades, some newly met, all those “jackpots” and stories swapped convivially, were the real secret of his success. Without ever explicitly saying so, Oslund makes you understand that he was actually in the people business, and that he was a success in his field because he loved people and had a genius for friendship. He knew what people wanted, and could give it to them. I can’t say that this is a book for everyone, but Oslund paints a little seen portrait of the vast network and isolation of the rural school systems across America, hungry for outside input. I can truly say I learned a lot about both American magic history and American education from this Road Scholar.

The Speed of Thought

Posted on by
Reply

rosa

I just finished reading Red Rosa, a graphic biography of the revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg. (The novel is graphic in both senses of the word.) You probably never read about her in high school, and maybe not in college either, unless you followed things Marxist, but she was an incredibly influential figure in the period leading up to and during World War I. At a time when women’s roles were severely constricted in Western society, Rosa was living the life of a free, committed revolutionary woman. She traveled from Poland (where as a child, she wrote, for a school contest that was supposed to praise him, an essay excoriating the Kaiser ) and on to Germany where she became a key figure in the Social Democratic Party of Germany. She forged her own political views, and produced some trenchant analyses of capitalism. She was suspicious of the anti-democratic line of the Soviet Marxists, but also contemptuous of the socialist-in-name-only leaders of the Social Democratic Party who led the party into war and the arms of the bourgeoisie on the eve of World War One.

The author and illustrator Kate Evans does a very good job of packing in a large life in 179 pages, and one gets a sense of what an extraordinary woman Rosa was. But I’m not really here to talk about politics but rather to fixate on one particular aspect of the times that Rosa lived in. And it is this. The Speed of Thought. How was it that revolutionary thought spread so quickly, and so far in that time? The whole of Russia, England, and Germany were in an uproar, and revolutionaries like Rosa spread Marx’s ideas across large swaths of land with little but words: smuggled in handbills, street corner lectures, and newspapers laboriously set in type in secret.  It seems in today’s world an almost impossible feat. No Facebook, Twitter, Internet, Social Media, cellphones. And I don’t mean this in a jocular way. It just seems amazing to me that ideas could have spread so quickly.

I suppose one can say, look at the rapid spread of Darwin and Freud’s ideas in roughly the same period; true, but those were ideas that were circulating in small scientific and psychoanalytic communities, specialized formations. But ideas that actually resulted in  the material re-organization of society—well, that seems more impressive to me.

My wife is doing a literacy training, and the teacher said something very interesting to her class: People who can’t read have trouble listening. If you want to teach people to read, you must teach them to listen first. And the flip side of that is that writing is talking. In order to write you must find your voice.

Simple and remarkable I think. And one step more. How do you get people who don’t listen to listen? This: By listening to them. When people feel heard, they can in turn start listening to others. and then they can begin to understand what reading is all about. And after that, they can find their own voices.

Revolutionaries like Rosa arise at certain times in history. They have listened to themselves and the masses who at key moments in history desperately need to be heard. The masses in turn are ready to listen because they have been listened to. The sound of a book is about unchaining oneself. How fast from seeing the words on the page to the lips? How quick is it from the thought to the action?  How far from a book to a new society?

These are the questions that came up for me when I thought about the vast stretches of the Earth that were on fire in 1917. I wonder if there could be a comparable experience again today. Because with social media, that experience of worldwide sharing has become both common but also commodified as the most banal mass culture, and hence, unremarkable, and certainly not revolutionary.  Can we still be moved in a deep, societal-changing way by a few profound ideas?

A One-Year Anniversary Celebration and The Top 30 Under-The-Radar Posts

Posted on by
Reply

anniversary

***

When I started this blog exactly one year ago, 365 consecutive posts ago, I never thought that it would bring the fun and opportunities that I’ve experienced over the past year. I started it mainly as an exercise and a way to document for myself where my life was going. But I’ve met so many nice people and enjoyed myself in so many ways directly due to this blog.

So I want to thank all of you who have ever visited this site for your support. It’s really gratifying to think that there are others who have some of the same strange interests that I do, and that I’m not just writing into the wind.

To celebrate, I’m listing my favorite posts from the last year. They may not all have garnered a lot of hits, but I think you’ll enjoy catching up with them. Sometimes people don’t have the time at first to read a long essay, follow the links, or listen to an audio clip when it’s first posted, so now is the time to sit back, relax, and catch up with what you’ve missed. Here, grouped by category, but in no particular order otherwise, are my top 30 favorite interviews, stories, poems, essays, and photos of the past year.

If you like this blog, the one single way you can best help spread the word is to please click on the Facebook or Twitter share buttons at the bottom of each post each time you see something that you enjoy. It’s incredible what a difference it makes in the number of views a particular post gets, and it gives me encouragement. Again thanks for a great year, and  Music will be back tomorrow!

Interviews

Rodney King, the Interview: http://jackshalom.net/2014/12/20/923/

Tales of Highdini: Magician Steve Spill Spills the Beans: http://jackshalom.net/2015/04/03/tales-of-highdini-and-more-magician-steve-spill-spills-the-beans/

The Outsider Artist, Don Porcella: http://jackshalom.net/2015/08/06/the-outsider-as-artist/

My Son the Waiter: A Jewish Tragedy: http://jackshalom.net/2014/11/08/my-most-unforgettable-theatre-performance/

To Infinity and Beyond: The Buzz Aldrin Interview: http://jackshalom.net/2015/09/25/to-infinity-and-beyond-the-buzz-aldrin-interview/

They Shoot Black People, Don’t They: Cartoonist Keith Knight: http://jackshalom.net/2014/11/26/a-room-with-a-view-wagering-it-all-on-one-scene/

A Little Sparrow Told Me, Activist Poet and Holy Fool, Sparrow:  http://jackshalom.net/2015/09/11/a-little-sparrow-told-me/

Stories and Poems

Michael Potato: http://jackshalom.net/2015/01/16/michael-potato/

Marcie At Work: http://jackshalom.net/2015/04/24/marcie-at-work/

Poem: Autumn: http://jackshalom.net/2014/11/20/poem-autumn/

Poem: Adornments: http://jackshalom.net/2014/12/02/poem-adornments/

Poem: Paths: https://wordpress.com/post/78159920/1268/

Essays on Writing, Theatre, Education, and Magic

A Matter of Taste: http://jackshalom.net/2015/09/08/a-matter-of-taste/

The Actor Who Made Me Gasp: http://jackshalom.net/2014/11/08/my-most-unforgettable-theatre-performance/

Reflections on a Year of Teaching: http://jackshalom.net/2015/05/06/reflections-on-a-year-of-teaching/

On Patience: http://jackshalom.net/2014/12/06/patience/

Fumbling, Failing, Falling: http://jackshalom.net/2014/11/19/fumbling-failing-falling-wild-mind-living-the-writers-life/

Breathing Room: http://jackshalom.net/2015/01/28/take-a-deep-breath/

A Room with a View: Wagering It All On One Scene: http://jackshalom.net/2014/11/26/a-room-with-a-view-wagering-it-all-on-one-scene/

A Warning: http://jackshalom.net/2015/08/12/a-warning/

Time For Enlightenment: http://jackshalom.net/2015/08/29/time-for-enlightenment/

Morley: “If You’re Feeling Helpless”: http://jackshalom.net/2014/11/22/morley-make-a-mess-then-find-a-way-to-make-it-beautiful/

Photos

Face the Music: http://jackshalom.net/2015/01/31/face-the-music/

Joy Ride: http://jackshalom.net/2014/11/16/joy-ride/

State Police/Police State:  http://jackshalom.net/2014/11/30/state-police-police-state/

The New World: http://jackshalom.net/2015/10/02/the-new-world/

God Bless America: http://jackshalom.net/2015/03/29/god-bless-america/

Clean-O-Rama: http://jackshalom.net/2015/04/22/clean-o-rama/

Milk Chocolate Overlords:  http://jackshalom.net/2015/09/06/i-for-one-welcome-our-milk-chocolate-overlords/

Snow Tree: http://jackshalom.net/2015/03/22/snow-tree/

Brief Chronicles: A Book Lover’s Elegy

Posted on by
2

diary

I’m looking at all these books on my bookshelves, and wondering about how they have followed me all these years. There are other books, too, books I once thought indispensable which are now sitting in a basement, books that have now not been touched in over two decades. I always thought I would have them. They are still there, as far as I know.

There were more, the books that I grew up with, before my marriage, that I stored in my parents’ house. When my parents remodeled the house, they packed them up, and eventually the boxes of books were moved to the garage. Years later, they told us they were selling the house. We went to the garage to scavenge and sort through the books, eagerly anticipating the reunion of old acquaintances, but on opening the boxes it became clear that there would be no homecoming for these books—they were filled with mold, little bugs, covers were stained, pages were crumbling. I left my friends behind.

When I was in my twenties, I would move from apartment to apartment, roommate to roommate, as one does at that age, and I’d always leave something behind—an old coat in the closet, a sweater in some bottom drawer, a throw rug underneath a piece of furniture. But never, never, ever did I leave behind so much as one book, they traveled with me, as if they were my children.

I remember once in those days, when I was a college student, walking along Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan, near where I lived. I saw a pile of books on the sidewalk,  and they stopped me. They looked interesting—the sort that appealed to a geek like me—vintage mathematics books, some science, some history. Never too proud when it came to books, I rummaged through them until I saw the nameplates inside them; I was stopped in my tracks when I realized that they were the books of the professor who had just died in my girlfriend’s apartment house. I didn’t know then, you see, that that’s what happens. It’s not like the books get adopted by the ASPCA. When all is said and done, the contents of the apartment gets dumped once the family has gone through the belongings, while the rest ends up on the sidewalk waiting for the garbage truck. At the time, this was a horrible revelation to me. That a person’s life—for what else, I thought, could you call the books that a person has owned?—would just be dumped on the sidewalk unceremoniously when he or she dies, was just too sad for me to contemplate.

So I look around at all my books now, and I wonder how many of them are going to get dumped on the street when I go. I’ve got a fair amount of magic-related items that, let’s face it, nobody normal is going to want. I’m in generally good health, but I’m at the age where I’m wondering what to do about this. I suppose they could be sold for some money for my family, but the truth is, my wife and surviving relatives wouldn’t know what to do with them, nor would they know how to evaluate and value each item. And yet I think it would be a shame were they to end up on the street or in the dump. So what I’m thinking about now is, to whom could I give them before I go? I guess this is a morbid thought, but if there’s anything that gets me going, it’s the thought of my limited time on this planet. It’s probably the thing that has kept me at the writing keyboard these past few years—knowing that if I don’t do it now, it’s not likely to get done later.  And if I don’t figure out now what to do with these books, they’ll end up on the sidewalk. So I’m trying to get to know some young magicians who one day might appreciate such a collection.

The Players, Shakespeare said, are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time. What is it that we who are the brief chroniclers do in this brief time? Artists hope that what they’ve made is forever, or at least has a lasting impact. It never seems consciously that what I do is a fight against the dying of the light, but the closer I get, the more I understand. Do not ask for whom the sanitation worker comes. S/he comes for thee.

Book Nook (2)

Posted on by
Reply

Time Enough at Last***

A little catching up with some books I’ve been reading lately is in order. Here are some brief reviews:

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin is a sweet novel of a curmudgeonly widower who owns a bookstore on an isolated island but still manages to find love. There’s not a lot that’s new here, and the language is fairly plain, but the premise is amusing and the story is relaxing to read. There’s a bit of a tearjerker ending, not unexpected with a storyline that includes a foundling orphan.

I read Mission to Mars by Buzz Aldrin as part of my research for my interview with Aldrin ( which you can listen to here), and I have to say that as someone who was pretty skeptical about the whole idea of space travel, I fell under the book’s sway. The arguments for a manned mission to Mars in the near future are hypnotic. Looking back, I realize I was entranced by an illusion, but the book is a very good read. Lots of information about the moon landing, Aldrin’s experiences with his fellow astronauts, his tangling with politicians and NASA, and above all his detailed plan about how he thinks the United States government should go about preparing a mission to Mars. He’s a highly unorthodox guy, but that’s part of what makes this so much fun to read.

Moving onto magic-related items, Paralies by Joshua Quinn is a book of original mentalism effects, all with a powerful impact. Quinn is a very clever creator of effects which simulate mind-reading, and this book shows off some of his most powerful ideas. Quinn’s hallmark is in the synergistic layering of different methods, making backtracking by the spectator very difficult indeed. He also has some really excellent work on equivoque, including a full-deck equivoque to one card. Whether you use his exact scripting or not, the lessons drawn in creating such a sequence are valuable. This book also outlines Quinn’s propless “Thought Chunneling,” an effect which allows a spectator to just think of a word—nothing written down—and even after the spectator changes the word several times, the performer can still reveal what the word is. I have no idea how well this plays, as it requires quite a bit of practice on the performer’s part, but perhaps sometime in the future I’ll give this the practice it needs in order to road test it. Warning: the book is quite pricey, but there are lots of solid ideas here for the informal performer.

I’m a great fan of the comedians of the silent film era, so I was naturally attracted to Patrick Page’s Book of Visual Comedy. Page was a well-known British entertainer, and among the magic community, he was applauded as a kind of all-round utility man, as comfortable as performing with a deck of cards close-up as he was onstage with the Linking Rings. In this book, illustrated with humorous cartoon drawings, Page describes some of the classic bits of physical humor that stage performers have used for eons. Gags with hats, chairs, microphone stands, eyeglasses, neckties, fingers in bottles, pratfalls, and so on make for delightful reading, and I felt as if there were more than a few ideas that I would enjoy taking out for an onstage spin. Very enjoyable quick read.

Out on the Wire, written and illustrated by Jessica Abel, is a cartoon graphic narrative of “The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio.” By “Masters of Radio” she is referring to NPR storytellers like Ira Glass of This American Life and Chana Joffe-Walt of Planet Money. There’s lots of very good information here about how such radio programs are created from scratch, and the book consciously tries to guide would-be radio storytellers through the process. The tone of the book, however, I found annoying, with its constant lionization of All Things NPR.  In particular, the privileging of radio technique over actual critical thinking about ideas is pervasive in the book and on the station. We get very detailed panels, for example, explaining the laborious collaborative editing process that brings a segment of Planet Money to the air, but unfortunately, that process does not include real critical examination of the economic ideas presented. The ideas are all pre-digested mainstream dogmas that upset no capitalist applecarts, even while great thought is given to producing an entertaining story.  So what we end up with (and Ira Glass is quoted as saying that radio is basically a didactic medium) is a formula for making slick propaganda. Decide what the story is first, even before you go out to do the interviews; then meticulously edit it to arrive at a pleasing form. But I would be misleading you if I said that there wasn’t some useful (to use an awful NPR-ish word) “takeaway.” I just think it’s advice much more applicable to fiction storytelling than actual non-fiction reporting.

Still in the queue for next time: Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven by Steve Stern, a set of short stories; Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora; The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander on the continuing racism faced by African-Americans in the United States; The Marxists, a classic survey of the major trends in Marxist thought by C. Wright Mills; and The Paper Engine, Aaron Fisher’s careful dissection of how to perform some of the most important sleights in card magic.

Cheating at Magic, Mindreading, and Writing

Posted on by
2

Cheat 1

While most people understand that the performance of magic requires deception, they generally have no idea of the range of deceptions possible. Mirrors, sleight-of-hand, threads, trapdoors, yes, these are known, of course. But, really, these are only a small number of the methods—not that they can’t still fool even those who know of them.

But the performance of magic actually entails a very large collection of often interlocking discrete methods, and even magicians can be fooled by another magician. Each time I learned about a branch of magic different from those with which I was already familiar, I would be surprised at the new tools brought to bear—“Oh, they’re really doing that!—I had no idea!” Sometimes ideas and methods from one branch of magic are carried over to another branch, but cleverly adapted to the limitations and possibilities of the other field; on the other hand, some methods really are unique to one particular branch of magic. For a magician it’s kind of a thrill to learn that the method was not method a, b, or c, or even method x, y, or z , but the unconceived Ψ, Ω, and Σ. (Most spectators on the other hand, as previously discussed, do not feel delighted at all when told of a method. They generally just feel stupid and suckered. Contrary to magic ads of the 50s and 60s, it’s not “Fun to be fooled!”)

I have in mind, for example, the mentalist practice of miscalling. Now I’m not at liberty to explain what that is here, but it absolutely shocked me when I first came across it. It filled me with surprise, disbelief, scorn, and then ultimately admiration. Probably not many in the general public know of the use of the technique. But what I can tell you is that that class of methods was totally off my radar.

Now writers deceive all the time, too, but not much attention is paid by the general public to the methods of deception used. Unlike in a magic performance, with writing the deceptions are not the main course, but the means to a different end. You can take lots of literature courses in college, intensively studying a work, but the facts of deception are almost always glossed over in favor of focusing on matters like theme, plot, character, and so on: the deceptions fade into the background and become invisibly transparent.

I know this, though: I feel more of a cheat as a writer than as a magician. At least most people understand that a magician is using deception even if they don’t understand the means. On the other hand, I don’t think that many readers understand the range of deceptions that the writer brings to the table. Perhaps the deceptive technique that slides by readers the most is that of revision. It’s a huge cheat. Readers see the final artifact of a novel as if it were created at once in a coherent linear manner. But that’s almost never the case. It’s not even true of this essay; I’m writing this now on Tuesday, September 15, 2015. But I have no intention of publishing it now. I know that by the time that I do publish this essay, I will have revised it, and it will be very different. In fact, I have no idea what this essay will look like ultimately when I do finally publish it. I am trusting right now that despite my first incoherent draft, somehow, sometime later, I’ll be able to pull something out of it. It really is an act of faith, but the reader will never know what this piece once was. I have all the time in the world to make this be just what I want it to be. So, I’ll be seeing you sometime later—who knows how much later?—just don’t tell anybody when I really wrote this (wink).

Demian, Herman Hesse, The Banal, and The True

Posted on by
Reply

demian

When I was a teen-ager, most of my friends were reading something by Hermann Hesse—the most popular titles then were Steppenwolf and Siddhartha. The books appealed to the dreamy, druggy adolescent sense of self-involvement that naturally arose at that age. Later, in my twenties, looking back, I thought of them as silly and somewhat banal. From time to time I would eye the thick pages of Magister Ludi, but I would always demur, not ready to deal with that much woo-woo at once.

The other day, I saw Demian sitting on my bookshelf, one of Hesse’s shorter novels, which I hadn’t read since I was a teen, but which I remembered as being my favorite of Hesse’s novels. I was in the mood for reading something short, and I thought I would look at it again for a few reasons: 1) to see whether the book held up as a novel;  2) to see if I held up as a reader, and 3) to look at it from a writer’s point of view to see how it was constructed. Would I still think it was worthwhile, but for different reasons from when I was a teen, or would I, as I did in my twenties, see it as New Age-y nonsense? Okay, so I’m being impolite.

I was surprised by my reactions to reading it this time. The first surprise was that I found the book absolutely compelling. From the first pages, I was drawn in to the story of a youth who was trying to understand the darker forces of his own and others’ natures. And though at times I had to put the book down for awhile, I was eager to pick it up again. I wasn’t putting it down because it was boring, but on the contrary because it was too interesting, and I felt I needed time to digest it as I went along. At the same time, the book’s shortcomings were very clear to me—the lack of any political analysis, the Jungian simplifications of life that teeter on the edge of, and sometimes fall into, the well of banality, the repressed homoeroticism that is never really addressed, the stubborn refusal to ground sexual feeling into sexual action, the German Romanticism of the period which today seems hopelessly sappy, all these are glaring, and my getting older didn’t make them go away.

But here’s the thing. I was still compelled to read. And I was compelled by the kernel of truth that the novel contains, so deep and so important that it stays and lingers as a feeling not able to be articulated, but a feeling that something of life that was known yet previously unsaid or pushed out of consciousness was brought back into view again. Exactly like a drug trip or an a-ha moment of meditative or otherwise enlightenment.

And now with my being older, and being interested in the writing process itself, I wanted to know how Hesse was doing this. The thing is so simple—about forty thousand words, and yet its impact is considerable. I wanted to pull it apart like a child pulls apart a favorite toy, and yet when I did that with this novel I felt like I was pulling apart a dandelion, for there doesn’t seem to be anything to see.

The book is, for all its apparent mysticism and near banality, transparent. There is no hiding behind words and sentences. As a writer, over the years I have become so much more conscious of word selection and the crafting of sentences and paragraphs, and yet here, it seems like nothing. There is no memorable vocabulary or phrase; no structuring of sentences or elements that seems to be writerly. It is seemingly just a story, that is all. A story that a boy might tell. There doesn’t seem to be any art in it. And yet it is as compelling as someone sitting across the table from you telling you this extraordinary thing that has happened to them. There is no apparent sense of craft.

And yet at the same time, there is no clumsiness of craft that distracts from the story, either, and that causes the reader to stumble.  It is writing that is decidedly (at least in the English translation that I read) pure; it never calls attention to itself, it never shines, but like an ordinary staircase it leads you along. When Hesse first published the book, he published it under the name of the storytelling youth of the book. It’s a craft of apparently no craft.

The particular lesson I take as a writer from this book is this: for all the attention we pay to words, sentences, paragraphs, the kernel of real truth about life is what ultimately determines the true power of a story. There is not only one way to do it, there are many; but in reading Demian I was forced to confront how powerful words can be when there is strong truth and revelation underneath them, and they are put out in plain view.

The Way of the Storyteller

Posted on by
Reply

sawyer

A few days ago I came across a used copy of The Way of the Storyteller by Ruth Sawyer. I had never heard of this 1942 publication before, but as I read the first few paragraphs in passing, I was hooked by its old-fashioned sense of wisdom, practicality, and humanity. There was something about reading this book that made me feel that I was in the presence of a true artist, a master teacher, for the message that runs through the book stands undiluted, even after all these years. I went to look up the book on Wikipedia later, and my instinct was confirmed—I was not the only one so captured by the book. It turns out that The Way of the Storyteller is an enormously influential book in the field, and Ruth Sawyer is the patron saint of storytelling.

The storytelling that Sawyer is talking about here is mainly the storyteller of the oral tradition. And though there has been a resurgence of the modern day griot in some quarters recently, this book from 75 years ago reminds us of just what an integral part of everyday life oral storytelling used to be, intimately woven into the social and educational fabric of the day. Sawyer talks about her storytelling in elementary schools, libraries, reform schools, and prisons all across the country. She talks also about the restorative power of folk tales, and how by telling the myths and folk tales of a culture, one generation raises another.

Sawyer takes her art very seriously and has the aura of a tough taskmaster with no time for foolishness. She warns would-be storytellers that there are no shortcuts available and that telling stories requires lots of hard work. The tale must be chosen with the audience in mind, and the storyteller must be absolutely familiar with the folk tradition of the tale, she warns, otherwise there is no chance of getting to the heart of the story.

And the heart of the story is what is always important. She never lets go of that. She believes deeply in the need for, and nourishment of, folk stories for all children. She believes that if children are told such stories when they are younger, that then they can learn to be full adults. But, she warns, the stories are not for the sake of teaching lessons or morals, but for the sake of imagination, for the sake of inner freedom, for the sake of the sacred bond formed between storyteller and listener.

When I read such a unapologetic humanistic view of education and art, it makes me sad and happy at the same time. Sad, because when I look at the educational system at this point in the US, it is so far from what Ruth Sawyer envisioned. She doesn’t talk about “achievement” or “college readiness” or “testing” or “assessment.” Instead, she talks about how to lead children through delight onward to wisdom by telling stories. On the other hand, I am happy to have stumbled across this classic, because the knowledge that in all times and in all countries there have always been those who have championed the message of true relation, communication, and the importance of art, gives courage and permission for one to be courageous as well. There’s so much nonsense all around us that it’s a blessing to hear from someone who reminds us what it’s all about.

It’s a flashlight beam cutting through the dark, illuminating a pathway. This is a classic book with classic wisdom.

Kick-Ass Reading

Posted on by
Reply

IMG_1102

(Click to enlarge)

With a tip of the hat to The Golden Notebook Bookstore in Woodstock, NY, where this cartoon resides in the store window. Wish I knew who the artist was!

Celebrating Sentences

Posted on by
1

building

A first look at Building Great Sentences by Brooks Landon might make you think that it’s as dry as an organic chemistry manual, and in some ways you would be right. This book of sentence building, sentence making, sentence improving is simultaneously a taxonomy and textbook of the humble sentence. And if that seems like an off-putting combination, it sometimes is—but that doesn’t make it any less valuable.

The special case that Building Great Sentences pleads runs counter to much of the advice about writing one finds in many modern manuals—or at least the advice I’ve been reading. These books revel in the celebration of Hemingway-like simplicity, the ruthless eradication of the extraneous word, the superfluous modifier, the unnecessary adjective and adverb—prune them, sentence surgeon!—and let the verbs and nouns do the brunt of your heavy lifting. Indeed, when I first took that simplification advice to heart, I believe that it improved my writing immensely. So what to do with a book that takes precisely the opposite tack: a book that tells you that good writing is about complicating things, about moving the basic clause forwards and backwards, about explaining, about explaining again in more detail, about adding modifying phrase on top of modifying phrase, about culminating in some final periodic unforeseen conclusion, or, finally, to allow for the scope of thought to find its way, to take pleasure in the very movement of thought, as in this moment, this sentence?

Yes, this was new to me.

And yet reading through the book’s example sentences, sentences that I wanted to rail out against, argue against, defend against, even as I had to admit their power, because what, I screamed to myself, could a sentence possibly mean outside of the context of a paragraph, a page, a story, a novel? How could you devote a whole book to the sentence? The particularity of words I understand. But sentences? The whole project was foreign to me.

It reads like this: anaphora, epistrophe (at last, I knew where that Thelonious Monk tune got its name!), polysyndeton; if this was the stuff of writing then perhaps I should be studying Linnaeus.

But. But.

Taxonomy is not necessarily a bad thing. Taxonomy, naming things, allows one to see better, more, differently: a bird’s call is heard because that was a Northern Cardinal; sounds that were unheard are heard; the seed-eating bill is not the insect-eating bill; beaks I had never thought to look at before, beaks I had never seen before, sentence structures I had never seen before, I now see.

There’s a ton of interesting, useful information here. I especially liked the section that talked about binary structures and serial structures. We all have a rhythmic sense of these things if we do any of it at all, but the explicit statement of forms here is eye-opening. Landon quotes Winston Weather’s theory of the rhetorical effects of serial constructions: the balanced binary form speaks of authority and expertise—“on the one hand, on the other”—it’s a commanding structure. A triple series, however, “has connotations of the reasonable, the believable, and even the logical.” But the four-part series rhythm is indicative of “the human, emotional, diffuse, and inexplicable.”

Writing is, in a sense, looking through one side of the telescope and building things up by accretion, one little thing on top of another little thing. This book is an excellent guide to the accumulation of such effects. Like most advice of this kind, it has to be absorbed, forgotten, and made to dwell wherever such knowledge lives unconsciously and automatically. Otherwise, like the centipede who tried to verbalize his process of walking, there is the danger of getting entangled in explanations and losing the ability of taking action.

Manifesto

Posted on by
Reply

IMG_0967

(Click to enlarge)

***

Outside a bookstore

Woodstock, NY

A Warning

Posted on by
Reply

chinese-finger-puzzle

See I went into this under false pretenses. Well, partly false pretenses. I had heard the stuff about writing being a calling, and I thought, well that’s not me, it had never called to me, I was never one of those people who as a teen wrote by flashlight under his bed covers in small scrawly pencil in a locked-with-a-key diary, one of those who just had to write; nope, not me.

And neither was I the kid whose imagination was so capacious that he had written seventeen science fiction novels by age fourteen that detailed the lust and ligaments of a planet existing but not existing at exactly the same time as this one, but in a parallel universe at right angles in a direction that we here on Earth could not even begin to fathom.

Nor was my memory so eidetic that I was compelled, as some of my high school contemporaries were, to give a scene by scene description of the latest Italian spaghetti western movie watched, down to the camera pans and the dialogue of the characters played by Strother Martin and L. Q. Jones dying in the desert. That wasn’t me. No, nor did I carry a memo book at all times on my person, the better to record all the wonderful observations to be made every day as I wandered through the vast, immense, carnival and wheel of life, The Great Mandela, making sure I missed nothing, the follies and foibles of my fellow human beings chronicled in the unblotted scribblings of my quill.

No. Not me. I understood that. I was more wary. I entered with fewer stars in my eyes, or so I liked to think.

Writing a novel was, I thought, just a challenge. Not an earth-shaking one, but a mild challenge to myself. Something interesting, something to occupy myself in a somewhat worthwhile way, I thought. I had some time, why not? You understand? That’s all it was. And, um, no, not poetry or short stories, I figured a novel would keep me more engaged for a longer amount of time.  I was intrigued by the sheer length of the thing, the need to sustain. Heck, a poem, a short story, anyone could toss that off—right?—that was no challenge. That was like learning to play the tuba or do the shot put. You heaved a bit, put forth some effort, and boom you made your mark on the world. Seemed much too easy.

So the siren call was this: not as a calling or a sacred duty, but as a task. That I could understand. The length was the point of it. I understood it as I could understand the lure of the marathon. A sprint told of your speed, but a marathon spoke to something else. And then, too, I could understand that maybe it’s not the final product, the ten pounds of paper in my hand when I finish the thing that was important, but the journey. All those little steps accumulating into distance covered, pages written, miles tracked, chapters completed. Oh, Kumbaya, Oh, the journey. Who will I meet on the way?— the process, not the product, the opportunities for self-discovery and enlightenment. The promise (by whom?) that by writing I will access sides of myself that I had never looked at before. I would learn discipline as well. Who cares what the final outcome is, I will have traveled the road, pilgrim, I will have Machado-ed a path of my own, and I will be able to look back to see the gentle grasses tamped down by my insistent nudging through the brush. It is good, even of itself.

No, no, no, no, no. it’s a trick, it’s all a trick. I’m putting up the warning sign now. Disregard at your own peril. It’s like those bamboo finger traps, don’t you see? You put your fingers in, and the harder you try to pull them out, the more stuck you get.

After eight drafts of one yet unfinished novel, and 90,000 words of another novel that’s still in first draft, I can see what they’ve done. If you think it’s like running the marathon—here’s what they didn’t tell you: this marathon isn’t twenty-six miles. You get to what you thought was the end, and now you have to turn around and run back for another twenty-six miles. And the worst part is that there’s really no choice—you’ve come this far, and you’re stuck. You’re stuck with these thousands and thousands of words, and dozens of incomplete characters who haven’t a way out, no chance, and if you abandon them, if you dump them in a pile by your side, there’s no one to help them. So, you’ve got to throw them on your back and carry them across your shoulders, without even the benefit of Gatorade, and really at this point you’re the last person in the world who should be doing this, because frankly, you’re exhausted, and sick of the world, and certainly sick of the very ones whom you’ve been carrying. It’s not fair, and you want to drop them off right now, let them roll down onto the ground, but the problem is this: if you do, you will have nightmares every single night and even in the day, but worse than that, without them, there’s no way you can find your way back. Yes, I forgot to mention this: that place you ended up at, when you thought you had reached the finish line, turns out it was the middle of the freakin’ desert, and all memory of how you got there has been erased. It’s as if you were blindfolded, herded onto a bus, and then thrown out the back door without food or water in some insane survivalist experiment. So there are no markers back. The only thing you know is this: if there is to be any chance at all of you getting back alive, it’s only because somehow the movements of the bodies you’re carrying across your back will guide you there.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here. The only cure for a novel is another one. It doesn’t say anywhere in the myth that Sisyphus was a would-be novelist. But then again, it doesn’t say anywhere that he wasn’t. You’ve been warned.

Book Nook

Posted on by
Reply

burgess_meredith_the_twilight_zone_1961-the-obsolete-man.jpg?w=490&h=651

(Remember that Twilight Zone episode with Burgess Meredith?)

I thought it would be fun to talk a little—but not too much!—about what I’ve been reading in the last few months. I seem to go in four month cycles with reading—four months on avidly reading, and then four months off when I don’t want to read at all. Since this seems to be my four months on…

A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle–a very fine writer in my opinion. This is the first novel in a trilogy about the life of Dublin-born Henry Smart, IRA gun runner, explosives expert, and lover. Doyle writes with great lyricism and imagination, and each scene is brought vividly to life, both visually and aurally. The fictional character Henry Smart has interactions with the real-life Irish Republican Army figures of Michael Collins, James Connelly, and Ernst O’Malley, and Doyle describes the passion, cynicism, and double-dealing that goes into the making of a revolution and a revolutionary.

Last year I read Doyle’s second book in the trilogy, Oh Play That Thing! and also greatly enjoyed that book. It  has the disillusioned Henry jumping ship to the United States where he manages to land a job working as the bodyguard of Louis Armstrong. It sounds improbable, but somehow Doyle makes it all sing, and the book itself is a jazzy improvisation of plot and character that Doyle brings to a stunning conclusion.

The Secret Miracle, edited by Daniel Alarcon, is an excellent set of interviews with contemporary authors, focusing on the writers’ work strategies. The book is organized by question, so that all the interviewees’ answers are recorded as if they were in conversation with each other. The authors interviewed include Stephen King, Jennifer Egan, Paul Auster, Michael Chabon, Edwidge Danticat, Roddy Doyle, Allegra Goodman, Jonathan Letham, Haruki Murakami, and many others, so you expect an absorbing read, and it is. They answer questions about their influences, how they prepare to write a novel, their work habits, how they go about revision, how long it takes them to write a draft, whether they draw on real life for their characters or not, who they allow to read their drafts, how they know when they’ve reached a final draft, and so on.

It’s the kind of book about the arts that I really enjoy reading—experts at their craft talking about what they really do. The most comforting part for anyone hoping to learn more about writing from such a book is the wide diversity of habits, styles, and practices that are described. Each author, Machado-like, has carved out his or her own path.

No Applause—Just Throw Money by Trav S. D. (Yes!) is a chatty, informative book about the creation and evolution of vaudeville. The author neatly explains the rise of vaudeville as the standardization and rehabilitation of the other forms of variety entertainments that had played across America at one time or another since the country’s inception. The lecture hall, the dime museum, the circus, the minstrel show, the medicine show were the sometimes measly but ubiquitous entertainments criss-crossing the country. After women got the right to vote, the theater entrepreneurs understood that they could make more money by sanitizing the previously primarily male enclaves of variety entertainment. So vaudeville provided entertainment to men, women, and children, and at the same time provided a venue for the audience to see themselves on stage in the form of immigrant singers and comedians.

The formula of variety family entertainment made huge stars of many, and the same formula was put to work with the advent of television, which catered to the same audience. The new medium eventually killed off vaudeville. The likes of Ed Sullivan and Saturday Night Live were the direct descendants of that format. The book also does a nice job talking about some of the well-known vaudevillians—George M. Cohan, Eddie Cantor, Sophie Tucker—and some of the lesser known personalities, such as comedians Weber and Fields, and tap dancer Joe Frisco who were also huge stars in their time. Some great insight here on what it is to take an act, hone it to perfection, and perform it hundreds or even thousands (six a day!) of times a year.

And in the Magic Department we have The Chicago Surprise by Whit (“Pop”) Haydn. I first read Whit’s monograph detailing his unique handling of the classic card routine “Chicago Opener” quite a while ago, but it’s a booklet that I keep going back to. First of all, it’s a damn good trick, and as my skill at card magic improves, I want to make sure I’ve got it right. But even more importantly, it details a whole theory of performance magic

Briefly, the plot is this: a spectator chooses any card from an ordinary red-backed deck and it turns out to be the one card in the pack with a blue back. The blue-backed card is placed face down on the table.  The magician then gives the spectator another choice of cards—offering the spectator a chance to change to another card if so desired. The card is lost in the deck, but when the spectator names the chosen card, the face-down blue-backed card is turned over to reveal that it is the same one that the spectator chose.

What is so valuable about Whit’s booklet is that it’s not just a description of a trick, but the outlining of a whole philosophy of magic, his now famous “dilemma” theory. Haydn holds nothing back, and the routine is there with a complete script, and with some great tips about the use of the major sleights involved: the palm, the DL and the CF. But in addition, Whit tells you why he constructed the routine the way he did, and his explanation yields great insight into audience perception and psychology. What with an included bonus routine for the Brainwave Deck, this is a must for any card worker.

And in progress: Arthur Phillips’s first novel, Prague; C. Wright Mills’s survey and critique of marxisms, The Marxists; The inventive Swedish magician Tomas Blomberg’s compilation of eclectic conjuring effects, Blomberg Laboratories; Michelle Alexander’s  description of the new era of oppression for African-Americans through the criminal injustice system, The New Jim Crow; and a very interesting nuts and bolts book about writing, Building Great Sentences by Brooks Landon. I hope to report on all of these at another time. Until then, happy reading!

A Questionnaire

Posted on by
4

rupert-pupkin-basement1

I was nominated by Catie Robbins at Catie Robbins’ Writing to complete this Reading Questionnaire. Thanks, Catie! My Rupert Pupkin-like fantasies have finally come to fruition!

Do you have a certain place at home for reading? 

Nope. Everywhere and anywhere. I try to have an inside book (for reading at home), an outside book (for the subway and waiting in line), and a bathroom book. (Uhhh…self explanatory!)

Bookmark or random piece of paper?

Anything. Lots of those advertising cards and jokers from the various decks of playing cards strewn around the house. Also electric bills. Note to Con Ed—how come you didn’t send me a bill this month? Oops—never mind: page 183 of The Goldfinch.

Can you just stop reading or do you have to stop after a chapter/a certain number of pages?

Given my lousy bookmarking system (see above), I try to stop at a chapter or at least at the top of a page. But usually the bookmark falls out and I end up re-reading the same fifty pages over and over. As I’m in training for my coming dementia, I feel like it’s a good use of my time.

Do you eat or drink while reading? Multitasking: Music or TV while reading?  

Magazines, yes; books, no. Also, I’ve tried to have particular mood music play while writing, but so far that experiment’s been a disaster. It just distracts me.

One book at a time or several at once? 

See above. Usually lots going on at once. Then I buckle down and concentrate on one at a time.

Reading at home or everywhere?

When I can just leave my damn smartphone at home, I surprise myself by how much reading I can get done on the subway, or waiting for a license renewal at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Reading out loud or silently in your head? 

Mostly in my head, but when I’m reading my own stuff for revision, reading out loud is a must. It used to be, in the old days, that if you were seen talking to yourself in public, you were considered a crazy paranoid schizophrenic. Now people just think you’re talking on your Bluetooth.

Ha! The laugh’s on them. I’m a paranoid schizophrenic.

Do you read ahead or even skip pages? 

No, never. I’ll abandon a book first, if I feel as if I want to skip parts. Maybe I’m not ready for it, or it isn’t the time for it. I’ll give it another try some other time in my life. (Yeah, right. I’m looking at you, In Search of Lost Time.)

Breaking the spine or keeping it like new? 

“Books are your friends,” said my mother. We don’t break the spines of those we love. Except if you’re a professional wrestler and your name is The Crusher. Then it’s okay.

Do you write in your books? 

I underline and mark off passages in the margin so that a few decades later I can go back and ask, “What kind of idiot marked up this book?”

And now my nominations for this exciting chain letter-like project that will annoy and flatter the nominees into answering:

Asylum

O at the Edges

Scribblings