Our Truck Will Be in Your Neighborhood...

Politics have been the essential nature of the larger groups or organizations you have been associated with. You first became aware of this as you considered the politics of your family, both on your mother's and father's side and, indeed, in their reactions to one another. Much of the politics radiated outward from one individual, its effects coming back to haunt you much later in life. Your next significant awareness came when, as an undergraduate, your attention was directed to the generalization in a political science class, from which meetings you strode into the politics of the campus humor magazine of which you were the editor and then, when politics and your writing got the humor magazine on the wrong side of the administration, you tumbled into the politics surrounding the daily student newspaper. From that point onward, you might put the matter into a neat apothegm by appreciating the politics of every relationship.

Politics left the campus with you when your two o'clock class ended and you rode crosstown to the Los Angeles Times building at First and Spring Streets, wherein you took the stairs or elevator depending on your whim to the editorial floor, whereupon you repaired to the night office of The Associated Press. Indeed there were politics.

Even when you opted out of a job with a newspaper in, of all places, Calexico, in order to spend the next several summers working for the Foley and Burke Shows, a carnival that rode the county fair circuit throughout California and Nevada, there were politics and, to a near equal degree, sociology. You, as an agent or manager of a concession booth (baseball throw, dart throw, Guess-Your-Weight, etc) were of a higher status than the ride monkeys, men who assembled and disassembled the rides and admittance shows, not quite as lofty as a concession owner who was your employer, nor as schedule-bound as the food preparation workers.

Politics followed you into unemployment and attempts to make your living as a writer, even when you were living in near hermetic seclusion and your big night out on the town was going to the post office to mail manuscripts or the monthly party at your agent's. A different kind of politics rode the Greyhound Bus with you to Mexico City where, because you had a letter of introduction to someone who knew someone, you were able to earn approximately 100 pesos for short, vaudeville-like skits.

It was political when you went to work for a publisher, more political yet when you moved to being the so-called West Coast editor for a New York publisher, and ever so much more political when you invented your way into a job with a scholarly publisher that resulted in your moving to Santa Barbara, and it was politics that made you decide against the offer that would have returned you to New York to run a publishing venture that was much more to your taste and ability than the scholarly publisher.

You appear to have forgotten the politics that leap-frogged you from mere membership in the Mystery Writers of America to a series of elected offices, a circumstance where your awareness of politics among writers reached an intensity you thought was the absolute acme--until you discovered the politics of the university and the faculty, leading you to the belief you still hold that the politics of a faculty who are unabashed writers--novelists, poets, short-story writers, dramatists--is the most corrosive of all.

Some of these recollections came tumbling forth this morning at the usual Friday coffee gathering, where the more or less regular group contains at least two of your fellow workshop leaders at the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference and upwards of four who have attended the conference for at least five years. Your response to an observation that there was no politics among the workshop leaders began as a mild rumble, growing in intensity to a six or seven on the Richter Scale.

It is the nature of the writer to grow in stature to a point of competence at which publication, thought not guaranteed, is a likely prospect. This state of mind causes an amalgam of emotions including defensiveness and the basic law of drama which states that every character believes he is right. The state may include arrogance or humility or indifference or curiosity; no matter, they are all scooped from the carpet of effort by the vacuum cleaner of compulsive and obsessive behavior. Your own favored ad hominem labels for writers you know and do not care for start with laziness and emphatically include derivative.

Whenever you find in yourself the qualities you see as reprehensible in other writers, you pause to take inventory. Your plan is to set these qualities in perspective and neatly package them so that the next time the telephone rings and someone from Goodwill or The Salvation Army or the Alpha Thrift Store calls to tell you of its truck that will be in your neighborhood, you can invite them to stop by. Some perfectly good hubris here on Hot Springs Road. Hey, I'll leave the derivative material, all those stories with the equivalents of polo players on them, right out front.

You are thinking there is the beginnings of something rumbling around in these remembrances and recollections of yourself engaged in the politics of self, thinking they are about your dealings with writers when, in fact they are the outriders of your awareness of the reasons writers hone themselves into lonely travelers, thinking to protect their growing individuality and vision while wanting at the same time to pay some recognition to the social nature that lurks inside.

The Carnival and the Grotesque: Some Words on Humor

The Russian Formalists working in the early years of last century and, thus, about a hundred years ago, were seeking a way to investigate and interpret poetic language, placing more of a premium on it than, say, the language of psychology. Such critical thinkers as my own favorite,Mikhail Bakhtin (November 17, 1895 – March 7, 1975), were looking for a means of removing the inconsequential and mundane from those very aspects of life, the inconsequential and mundane. They were looking, in other words and, of course in simplistic apercu for the miraculous and extraordinary embedded in the quotidian. These critics in Russia pushed the world of literature into the twentieth century, into modernism, into an investigation of the connection between the writer and the text.

Bakhtin's major work was an explication of Rabelais, a writer misunderstood and denied validity in a manner similar to the very misunderstanding and denial associated with Bakhtin. By dealing with what he called the carnival and the grotesque, and by studiously analyzing portions of Rabelais that had been excised in the interests of good taste, Bakhtin demonstrated how crowds, social classes, and uses of language demonstrated a workable metaphor for The Body Politic, which is to say for the entire range of social classes, where each strata emerged in Rabelais' writings as embodiments of society.

Such musings, beyond the confines of the academy and the peer review help us see how our own work may reflect the very spark, the lightning in a bottle we seek to make it ours and to give it the life of what I will call reflective entertainment, which is to say those things that make us think even while we are enjoying ourselves.

Although I much admire most of the work and purpose of Carl Hiaasen, and have read in him at some length, his novels are not my emotional favorites even though some of his characters have taken up residence in my own imaginative reflections, my own casting of landscape and dramatic terrain. Hiaasen's work approximates the tone and intent of Rabelais.

The grotesque is the term used by Bakhtin to describe the emphasis on bodily changes through eating, evacuation, and sex: it is used as a measuring device for the body politic. The carnival, that glorious pre-Lenten eruption of convivial behavior, represents the activity of the group. As seen by Rabelais and, later, by Hiaasen, these activities give us something to measure. Most of us who read Rabelais or Hiaasen measure them by laughter, which is another subject dear to the literary hard of this amazing critic, so long forgotten, just now beginning to reemerge from the shadows with a focus we can use as we sweep the night skies, looking for our own pole star by which to orient ourselves.

If we chose what seems funny to us, we have begun looking for the miracle of explosiveness in the illusion of the ordinary.

Hunting for Your Inner Ahab, or Toast at the Actors' Studio

Although my motivation for wanting to do so is lost in the dimness of time, suffice it to say that the Dramatics class burned brightly within my middle school mentality.

Even though I was well launched on my hopeful path as a writer, Dramatics seemed to me the most wonderful, splendid goal, an achievement that I would remember the way others would remember first sexual encounter, and others still would remember such academic distinctions as The Dean's List, and yet additional legions would install some artistic triumph.

Mildred Cline stood in my way. She was the teacher of Public Speaking, the gateway through which all who wished to take Dramatics must emerge. To be given anything lower than a grade of B+ in Public Speaking condemned you to a purgatory in you were eternally audience. Mildred Cline and perhaps the added burden of my changing voice emerging more often than not as a squawk, and the burgeoning of my Adam's apple proved a severe firewall, resolved with what seemed like a good deal at the time.
I was guaranteed the grade of B+ in Public Speaking and a chance to appear in a kind of infomercial drama, written, I might add, by a girl on whom I had the vague-but-persistent designs of a thirteen-year-old boy on a fourteen-year-old girl. But no recommendation for Dramatics.

The infomercial play was a bust; I had two lines, for which my only conviction had to do with my inchoate designs on the playwright. In the actual performance,in which I thought to alert all those connected that I was deserving of entry in the Dramatics class, I delivered the last line first. Middle school actors are not as sophisticated as you might hope. In response to my gaffe, one lad, who went on to become student body president, socked me on the arm, one girl began crying, and after the performance, Mildred Cline shook her head.

All of which is lead-up to my being fired from my first job with the Foley & Burke Shows, a large scattering of carnival attractions on the California and Nevada County and State Fair Circuit. The job was being a shill, which is to say I was given a roll of coins from which I was to place bets at a booth in which a large, numbered wheel--think of a roulette wheel mounted sideways--was spun. Bettors were able to bet on numbers and colors. Depending on the number or color on which the wheel stopped--stopped being a euphemism; the wheel was stopped by the croupier, who leaned against or kicked a small lever--the player could win a ham, a pound can of coffee, a six-pack of Coke, a pound of bacon. My job as shill was to win the main prize, which as I indicated was heavily controlled by the croupier. The big prize was a five-pound ham. "You mean I won that ham for a quarter?" "That's right, sir. Try your luck again. See what you win next."

How, you ask, could someone be fired from such a job?

As the owner of the booth informed me, it was due to an apparent lack of conviction. "You can't win ham for shit," she told me, and to this day, when I am thinking of characters in stories, wanting something or being afraid of something, or disagreeing with something, I think of that boss, and inevitably, I think of Mildred Cline.

"I get winos and street bums and fruit pickers can win ham better than you. What the hell they teach you at that UCLA of yours?"

"I can scan poems," I ventured, but, alas, without too much conviction. "I can write compare-and-contrast essays. I can recite The Eve of St. Agnes."

"But you can't--" she began.

I nodded. She didn't have to finish. While she paid me--for half a shift--I noticed two youngish women watching the transaction. I didn't know either one, but knew enough about my environment to know that they were both "with it," which is to say with the show; they were what I longed to be, a recognizable carney, someone who was obviously with the show.

The taller of the two approached, sizing me up with, I thought, the practiced eye of a casting director. "If you're interested," she said, "I might have a spot for you."

"What do I have to win?"

"No, no. You have to lose. You can never win."

"Hey, Joyce," my ex-boss chimed in, "you may have got yourself a candidate here. College boy. Well meaning, but--" with an extended palm, she pantomimed a flip-flopping motion.

And so my new career was born. Joyce and her friend Lynne ran a Guess Your booth, in which the G or gimmick was to not be able to guess the customer's age, weight, profession, place of birth, and the like. You guess a fifty-year-old man's age for, say, thirty-five, and he says, "Hell now, I'm fifty." And you shake your head and say, "Well, you beat me, fair and square. You can chose any prize from the bottom shelf. Of course, you got to give me a chance to get even. Play again and if I don't guess, we move your prize option to the second shelf (where there were bigger plaster dolls and do-dads)." You had a good thing going because, frankly, you were that wonderful combination of a naive narrator and a dumb one. Well meaning, but--

Your next "challenge" was to guess this fifty-year-old, two-hundred-fifty-pound beer belly's weight. "Hmm, let's see. One eighty-five. Now if you'll just step over on this scale, specially calibrated by the good people at Sears--Why, I'll be darned, sir. You weigh an amazing two sixty-eight."

You work this right and you end up "losing" a lamp you could buy at a garage sale for a buck for the better part of twenty-five dollars.

After my first full day, Joyce signed me up. Reno, then Bakersfield, then Modesto. The full tour. Joyce knew vulnerable--and profit--when she saw it. I was a carney. Welcome to the world of marks.

It is no easy thing to move from the world of the carnival and being with it to the real life and not being with it, not, for that matter, being with much of anything except the great white whale all writers seek.

The trick is to recognize that quest and become quite like Ahab or, what the hell, like Melville, in the pursuit of it. Ahab probably couldn't win ham for shit, either, and Melville's later life was a kind of parody of Ishmael, a survivor with memories and impressions no one wanted to believe.

The carnival is surely a metaphor, the great white whale is a metaphor, and Ahab, too, is a metaphor, although the incumbent President of the United States has privatized him, at least for a time.

We must each of us find the mocha dick, the Moby-Dick to pursue and if we catch sight of him, send up a flare.

Quand' arrive, scrive, my father often said, exhausting his knowledge of Italian (no, I think he also understood pepperoni); when you get there, write.