Is it weakness of intellect, Birdie, I cried...

The fact of you agreeing to be one of the two judges in a fiction contest--short stories and stand-alone segments of novels--reminds you once again of the notional climate inherent in any contest and/or submissions landscape. There is, for instance, the fact of you with a work of your own in submission for two months with a publisher whose books you have published two reviews. Speaking of which, there is the persistent campaign being waged by the author of a self-published book to have you review his project, despite your assurances that anything you might think to say about the work would hardly encourage anyone to read it, much less to buy it. There is also the incest of you living in a city with a larger-than-median percentage of writers, both published and aspiring, and, speaking of the nooks and crannies of interconnectedness, the other judge in this latest writing contest is not only a friend but someone who became a friend as a direct consequence of a published review of his last major novel.

There were also times when the writers' conference with which you are associated, in concert with the local daily newspaper, had a yearly contest, the awards being full and partial scholarships to the conference. As a judge in this contest, you frequently gave the highest marks to those submissions you thought had the least to recommend them, your theory being that they most richly needed the writers' conference.

Let us take a number, say one hundred, representing the number of times you have served as a judge in a contest. This is separate from the approximately one thousand book reviews you have written and at least ten thousand full manuscripts or manuscript proposals you have had a say on in your capacity at various editorial venues. Is there some terse, cogent philosophy you can articulate to describe the process by which you cast your lot for or against? If such terse, cogent philosophy existed, it might be this: If something aroused the adrenaline of your interest to the point where you felt invested in the outcome, you stood for it. If not, not.

What causes the adrenaline to flow in a genre you think you hate or at least have no interest in? What causes the adrenaline not to flow when the work is in a landscape you admire, written by an author whose work you admire? You would think a man with your experience would be able to give Power Point answers, the slides already on the screen of your mind, but the added fact is that you are vastly impatient with Power Point presentations, thinking them a gross sham.

The simplest answer--pace William of Occam--is that you like what you like on the basis of external chemistry. Same is so with individual persons; you like something in their manner or stature or posture or tone of voice or a combination of these and no doubt reflecting sexual, intellectual, and artistic considerations in the summary. You do not, accordingly, apply a cookie-cutter set of standards so much as you apply a chemical response which you then begin to break down into more component parts such as potential readership, artistic and intellectual challenges inherent.

Do you, in effect, say or think to another person, Thanks for letting us see you, but unfortunately...you are not right for us? No doubt you do.

How many manuscripts have you accepted without any thought of editorial suggestion?

How many friends and acquaintances have you accepted without any thought at all of wishing to tweak some large or small mischief?

Added to this calculus, how many novels or short stories, even by your own reckoning, even novels or short stories by Louise Erdrich, are perfect?

Is Conrad perfect? Wolfe? Fagan? Cook?

You know from intimate association and those tumultuous teen years when intimate association was put on hold that you least of all are in any way perfect and you are well able to live with that, just as you are able to live with the utter anarchy of unfinished business and clangorous coincidence in fiction.

Accordingly, even though you are hired, or in this recent case enlisted to judge, you do so by the one reliable standard you have encountered so far, the utter anarchy of chemistry.

The Electronic Forum

Much as you admire biographies, particularly if wrought by such splendid historians as Doris Kearns Goodwin or Robert Caro, when it comes to writers' lives, you grow leery, bordering on stubborn. To the extent that something about craft can be learned from an author's autobiography--see for instance Graham Greene or some of the notebooks and reminiscences of Somerset Maugham--even these rarely find a permanent place on your keep shelves.

The best way to get some inner vision of the writers whose works move you is to stumble upon a well-edited collection of their correspondence and, in recent years, to sped some time on a writer's blog, home page, or both.

A visit with archaeologist/lecturer, professor emeritus.author Brian Fagan, (see my list at the right of the screen and down just a tad)for instance, produces an account of what it was like to appear as a guest on the John Stewart show. 

 A stopover at Sue Grafton's site contains valuable information for writers of all stripes, and coincidentally brings me into contact with her webmaster, Barbara Touhy, whom in another life you served as acquisitions editor and content editor for a book she'd coauthored. A visit with Jerry Freedman serves as an introduction to a no-nonsense pro who has eight titles on The New York Times Best-Seller List.

In your opinion, the more proficient among writers tend on their blogs or home pages to sound much as they do in real life; there is a notable conflation of the manner in which they talk and the manner in which they write. You can almost hear Sue Grafton's wry tinge of Kentucky as you read through the features on her page, the east coast of England still very much resident in Brian Fagan's prose even after nearly forty years in this country; the no nonsense Baltimore slap-down from Jerry Freedman even after his years in the film industry in Southern California and his long-term residence in Santa Barbara.

Some writers, particularly older ones, still approach the Internet, the blog, the public appearance with a certain rectitude, as if fearful of volunteering much less revealing too much of themselves, but the electronic forum has become increasingly a means of achieving what many writers yearn for--selling books in sufficient quantity that they are able to secure a living from their writing. 

 Electronically, we who set our own courses of navigation by books, publication, commentary about writing, and to some degree teaching about writing are better able to keep in touch, with the conventional markets, with publication sources, and with our scattered friends who fish the same waters as we do.

Writers are frequently drawn at various times in their life to loci such as New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other venues thought to be friendly to them. More for consequences of climate, than publishing houses, schools, motion picture or dramatic facilities, Santa Barbara has also become a hub of writerly activity. 

 There are a few good book stores, a world class writers' conference, and some reasonable dramatic sites, but it is mostly the way of life and the convenience to Los Angeles and San Francisco that account for the draw. Writers also like to be at some remove from these places and make their homes in the likes of LaConner, Washington (Tom Robbins); Archer City, Texas( Larry McMurtry); Portland, Oregon(Charles D'Ambrosio), and in the case of Clive Cussler, Reno, Nevada.

Other still, such as Don DeLilo and Thomas Pynchon, tend to move about in cautious secrecy, and Richard Russo takes refuge in the upper reaches of New York State.

The contemporary unifying theme is an extended version of the infamous Algonquin Hotel Round Table, the Internet, The Electronic Forum, where there is something to be said by them and/or about them. Google is a good place to start, a friendly url is another help. Writers may of fear, necessity, or idiosyncrasy choose to hide, but not for long. You can escape a number of things, but not Google.

Rejection Slips Redux

I was getting back to the subject of these and others like them, and others still to come, indeed from things not even remotely considered. In fact, a story I had lost some years ago with the suicidal crash of a long-forgotten computer is very much back in mind thanks to my having embarked on the editing of Brian Fagan's latest project, The Cro-Magnon: Portrait of an Ice Age People. No great stretch there, my characters are all Cro-Magnon. It is easy to imagine some editor somewhere tearing open the submission envelope, looking at the first page, and calling over his or her editorial shoulder, "Hey, you wanna check this out. Some guy in California, I think it's a guy, he's got a story about a band of cavemen. Says right here on the author info, Califuckingfornia. First they give us Arnie Whatzisname, then they give us Paris Hilton, and now it's a band of Cro-Magnon. And we're supposed to go like Wow! Cutting edge stuff. California!" Given my past experiences, I might do better on the third or fourth submission. In fact, I'm guilty of a slight deception because, if you enlarge that letter on the top of the pile, it says they'd like to publish a particular story, I think it was the one I call "Talk Radio." Moral: not all rejection letters are rejections.


But I became distracted. My distraction took me to one of my two favored locales in this remarkable and fractured city. I would call the area Middle Milpas because it is just about midway between the beginning on the Cabrillo Boulevard beach front and the ending, where it doglegs left past the Santa Barbara Bowl and becomes a street named after a venerable Chumash elder, Anapamu.

I in fact became distracted by this, which caught my eye, sent me careening around the block, and into an illegal park, whereupon I got fortunate.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a photographer would have made more of this, just as it is true that good stories are not accepted because of factors that have nothing whatsoever to do with what you sent in. It is lovely to have your work published but it is lovelier to have done the work and then sent it forth. If you need validation from someone, let that person be you.

One is wired to receive images from outside, and from other people. If these images translate into an idea that generates energy, you're on your way, reaching for the means to transform that vision. At that stage, you are as happy as you will ever be, pursuing a vision that came from within you. Even if you execute the idea beyond your wildest expectations, that is transitory. The real pleasure is acknowledging the insistent presence of the idea, then committing yourself to trying to get it. Only people who don't understand the process want perfection, and even they cannot tell you what perfection means. The real goal is to effect beautiful errors and accidents.

Three collateral observations:
1. No one you know admits to being a bad driver.
2. No one you know admits to being a poor lover.
3. No Ph.D. you know believes his or her thesis is unremarkable or does not deserve to be published.

Go figure.

The Things You and You and You Carry

Sometime back, during the editing process on one of Brian Fagan's archaeological adventures, we thought it interesting to make special note, a kind of pre-historic take on Tim O'Brien's fine novel, The Things They Carried. This may turn out to be O'Brien's most iconic work, having as its dramatic spine a laundry list of what some of the American soldiers involved in the Viet Nam War, carried about with them in addition to the military ordinance with which they had been issued.

In the Fagan work, it came to me that we could get a better sense of the life and times of our forbears if we knew something about the things they carried with them, or as Fagan put it, what was in their tool kit. At one point, in the stone age, a major item was called a burrin, a chunk of flinty rock from which chips could be struck for use either in starting fires, as a projectile point, and even as a knife or scraping tool.

The notion came to me that we were discussing the precursor of The Swiss Army knife, a designation that found its way into not only Fagan's text but, over the years, several other studies of what life was like, way back then.

As Brian produces text on his new venture, a comprehensive portrait of the so-called Cro-Magnon people, it came to mne that we were at another comparison point, a garment made from sheep or some other shaggy-coated animal. Voila, the precursor of the Ugg boot, which comparison Fagan's new publisher has already slathered over.

And these paragraphs become prologue to my wonderment and speculation about the things writers carry about with them. For my part, there is one or more fountain pens, selected at whim from a cigar box repository of favorites, including a Mark Twain model from the American penmaker, Conklin; a Sailor from Japan,with one of the most deliciously flexible nibs ever; an Italian Ancora, which is hefty in a reassuring way, enhanced by mother-of-pearl side panels, a gift from ENK; another Italian pen, the Montegrappa; an impulsively given Mount Blanc from Steve Cook; as well as another choice Aurora which also has a nice heft if a bit of a scratchy nib. With these tools is a pocket-sized Moleskine note book and two smaller pocket-sized books purchased in a magazine stand at Heathrow, plus untold piles of plain index cards as well as those with enough information printed on them to qualify as super-large business cards. Not to forget a pocket knife.

This intrigues me to the point where I will start asking writers what they carry with them as a matter of course because it has already come to me to begin pestering people for permission to take photos of the insides of their refrigerators. I know Fagan has an inordinate number of carrots in his 'frige because of his wife's dealings with rescue rabbits, and true Brit that he is, he has confessed to vegemite and Patum Peperium, that somewhat salty anchovy relish,well-known as "The Gentleman's Relish."

What grand mysteries one can learn of one's friends from seeing the insides of their refrigerators.

None of this would, I think, have occurred to me if I had not come by a camera, which in fact produces entirely new levels of curiosity about the world and its denizens.

Connecting the Dots

Sitting at the outside patio of the Xanadu Bakery & Coffee shop yesterday afternoon with two long-term pals, Brian Fagan, and Steve Cook, I experienced one of those introspective flashes of wonderment in which I simultaneously celebrated our friendship and experienced the great curiosity at how we became friends.

The Xanadu has long been a venue for coffee even though the coffee there is worse even than Starbucks. I would walk with my then dog Molly from our condo on Danielson Road, along Coast Village Road to the shopping mall we locals came to think of as the mall of Von's of the Stars, in honor of the glitzy market, Von's, where so many carpetbagger residents from down below--Los Angeles--came to shop.
My morning group then consisted of Louie Dula and Phil Preston, actors; Ben Frank, a sculptor; and Jack, the butcher from Von's. Long before we were properly introduced and before I knew him to profess English Lit at the nearby Westmont College, I'd see Cook, often with a group of young people, holding forth on some aspect of literature. Once, on my way inside for a coffee refill, I heard Cook making an observation about Nathaniel West, an observation I could not let go unchallenged.

Cook challenged my challenge. "How do you know that?" he asked.

"Because John Sanford told me so and John was sharing a cabin with West that summer and was there while it was happening."

"You know Sanford?"

"Drives an old model Jaguar, loves Sara Lee coffee cake, hates Republicans."

"Listen," Cook said, "maybe we could talk later."

We have been talking ever since.

Until he recently went emeritus at UCSB, Brian Fagan professed archaeology. Now he merely gives private lectures, revises his text books, and turns out what I will call scientific mysteries and curiosities at the rate of one book every eighteen months. My memory of how we met is less clear than my memory of the beginnings with Cook. Suffice it to say that some years past while editing The Santa Barbara Review, I acquired a splendid Fagan rumination on camel saddles, and have edited at least five of his books, including the most recently published, Fish on Friday, and the most recently finished, The Elephant in the Living Room: A Global History of Drought.

Cook, Fagan, and I have stood one another glasses of the local ale in the downtown section of Fagan's birthplace, Lyme Regis, most recently famous for being the site where the film version of The French Lieutenant's Woman was filmed, and not too far from a spot where Fagan gently took my arm to deter my progress: "Mind! You're stepping on Jane Austen."

At a party simultaneously celebrating Cook's fiftieth birthday and his having been granted tenure at Westmont (an evangelical Christian liberal arts and science college), when it came my turn to say a few commemorative words, I gave the blessing for wine in Hebrew, then offered a l'chayim--good health.

Cook's wife, Terri, once observed to me that there seemed to be no power point in the tri-partite friendship, we seemed somehow to admire, respect, be amused by, and not be overly impressed by each other.

Before meeting these two worthies, I'd lunched at Joe's with Barnaby Conrad, which may in fact have caused the speculation I indulged with Fagan and Cook. Conrad began his academic career at Chapel Hill, then moved to New Haven to get his B.A. from Yale before going on to various art institutes in Mexico and Spain. I'd read all his earlier works on bullfighting as a younger man. When I arrived in Santa Barbara to step onto the tenure track at a scholarly publisher, I was recruited for a career day program on writing-publishing at Cate, the local prep school where Conrad taught art. This was an opportunity to thank the man for the joys I'd had from reading his books.

Some months later, I saw Conrad at a party of the sort where, because of the boredom factor, it was easy--too easy--to take advantage of the plentiful display of red wine. And yet again, at a boring party, our paths crossed to the point where Conrad invited me to try my hand at a workshop at his writers' conference, the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference.

We are not at all alike, which is perhaps the draw. In addition to his close friendship with Herb Caen, the journalist who put San Francisco on the map and even after his death has kept it there, Conrad knows a seemingly endless stream of men and women I grew up on, either in admiration or in a kind of at-a-distance opposition. William F. Buckley, Jr. comes to mind in that context, although his son, Chris, with whom I shared a splendid turkey salad at Conrad's, fits the "other" side.

Conrad and I meet at least twice a week for lunch, which is an on-going exchange of books, things torn from newspapers and magazines, gossip, speculation. In the process, Conrad is fond of saying that he writes the books I suggest but which I am too lazy to write. Santa Barbara, being the small, smarmy place it has become, enlivens the possibility of contact with familiar faces, and although I have my share of recognized acquaintances, my share is dwarfed, overwhelmed, by those who approach him with a greeting. Thus my great joy for the one time I was able to trump him: We were seated at our usual table at the Montecito Pharmacy Coffee Shop when a pleasant-looking woman, actually a neighbor of his, greeted him by name. Ever the gentleman, Conrad sought to introduce me, but I waved his attempt off. "No need," I said. "I've probably known Sylvia longer than you. Providence, Rhode Island. John Howland Elementary School, right, Sylvia?"

"Right, Shelly," She said.

"Well, I'll be--" Conrad said. Because among his other qualities, Conrad is never damned, and darned simply doesn't suit him.

Why me? I sometimes find myself thinking. There is no answer, really, and so I go on, setting things aside to bring for our lunches, things I believe will interest him because they somehow catch a vision of the world, not through a lens, but through a prism.

Well, that leaves him who is in Canberra at the moment and who, for reasons I shall probably never learn to my satisfaction. We have exchanged confidences and ambitions over many a plate of pasta, Digby Wolfe and I have ; we have shared classes and advised each the other on unshared classes.

Why me? I think from time to time, enjoying the seemingly unexplainable riches of confidences, confidence, and comfort that has come upon me . Somewhere within this maze of friendly pole stars is a map of the heavens--my heavens--that will help me navigate through this succession of events we call days.