Unkefer, the Bird Refuge, and an Art Gallery in Carpinteria

The large pond just below East Beach on Cabrillo Blvd. is known as The Bird Refuge. It is ar least two acres of a murky, algae-filled water that attracts birds, particularly ducks. Across the road from The Bird Refuge are two entirely different restaurants, the northernmost being Stella Mare, The Star of the Sea, a refurbished old mansion with a whimsical complement of rooms in which meals are presented as elegant and are close to being so. Next to it is the more laid back Casa del Sol, switching from an Italian name to the Spanish House of the Sun.

You have dined comfortably at each. If you were interested in a more ambitious meal, you would chose the Stella Mare, but today, having just come from a rather lackluster clam chowder at The Montecito Coffee Shop, your regular Monday venue for lunch with Barnaby Conrad, you were pleased that Duane Unkefer had suggested Casa del Sol for coffee and the business of settling your choices as judges for a short story contest sponsored by The Santa Barbara Arts Fund.

Here we are, you observed, two middle-aged men, seated at a patio built around the concept of watching ducks which neither of us intend to hunt and for which we are probably being charged at least an extra two dollars for the privilege.

This observation is nothing you consider funny. Borderline ironic, perhaps. Nevertheless it caused Unkefer, who had already been served his coffee, to spew a mouthful of it onto his jacket, then rush for repairs to the men's room, reminding you as he took his leave of the last time you met for coffee at the Carpinteria Coffee Bean, where his spew of coffee at something you'd said landed on no particular target. Rather, it seemed to just vaporize. This is not meant to suggest that Unkefer is a frequent spewer of coffee. It is another matter altogether. One of the prime ingredients of your long-term friendship is the chemistry it provides for each of you finding the other disturbingly funny.

You could, if you saw fit, observe that there is something inherently funny whenever two middle-age writers sit to catch up on events in the other's life, books read, projects being worked upon, and the still seemingly incomprehensible fact of Unkefer, who draws and paints as well as write, being a major partner in an art gallery. This in itself is not funny until you reckon with the fact of the gallery being in Carpinteria, next door to a restaurant called The Busy Bee, which is a trove of ceramic replicas of beehives, bees, and honey pots. It gets funnier when you reckon with the fact that a number of things in the window of Unkefer's gallery look as though they belong next door, or that when Unkefer observes his hours in the gallery, strange individuals and tourists seem to descend upon him to confide in him their troubles

You both approach the subject of the judging with practiced caution because one of the entrants in the contest is a former student of Unkefer's who happens also to be quite a dear friend of yours. You begin when a refreshed Unkefer returns from the rest room, speaking of individuals neither of you is fond of, at which point, even though there is a matter of a health problem attached to one person, Unkefer says something you find funny. Fortunately, you had not taken on a sip of coffee.

For the better part of an hour, the transaction between the two of you is not to discuss the individual findings you have achieved as judges but instead to cause each other to laugh.

There are worse reasons for acquaintances and friendships. Indeed, yours and Unk's began when, before you'd met in person, he called to thank you for a review you'd written of his novel, Gray Eagles. Things did not begin to get funny between you until he called, eager to show off his bargain of a used car, purchased for a mere $60 from the mechanic you'd given the car in frustration because it seemed completely uninterested in running for more than a mile or two before stopping.

Things have been funny ever since, in one way or another, including your prediction that Unkefer's decision to move to Portland would not last six months. How could you know, he wondered when he returned five months later, almost to the day. Because of snow, you said. In places where there is snow, women do not wear the kinds of clothing, particularly shoes, you are accustomed to seeing women wear on a year-round basis. Come to think about it, he did spew coffee when you told him Alaska was another place he wanted to avoid.

The contest, you say? Ah, the contest.

What are the odds that you had the identical first place and the two runners-up?

Funny you should ask.

Way to go

Genre or category fiction is looked upon by its fans and to a degree by air travelers as a necessity, by many teachers as a necessary evil, and by literary writers as "that other stuff." Never mind that some established literary writers pseudonym their way into genre fiction, writing as it were from the closet, while others still jump right in with full frontal nudity. Joyce Carol Oates comes particularly to mind in this context, but A(ntonia). S. Byatt has also broken forth; so too have Cynthia Ozick, John Updyke, John Gregory Dune, Wilfrid Sheed, John Steinbeck, to name a few.

The overwhelming choice in category is the mystery, in some small part because of the long held belief that life is a mystery, but also because the format of the mystery, whether police procedural or private investigator or the more Hitchcockian innocent man/woman whom no one will believe, caught up in the eye of a crime storm, having to prove innocence without help. Well enough; the better mystery (say Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, or Ross Macdonald's The Underground Man) are in construction a splendid template for a longform narrative, any longform narrative.

Look at the elements. A crime has been committed. Some individual or team of individuals is set forth to discover who the perpetrator(s) is (are), attempt to bring them to justice, encounter reversal, then through persistence and ingenuity solve the puzzle of the crime, effect some satisfactory resolution. In a lovely bit of irony, Aristotle, in his Poetics, described the mystery novel even before it was invented (and brought to such a timeless finish by the likes of Wilkie Collins in The Moonstone and The Woman in White, just as in hos own way, Nathaniel Hawthorne could be argued to have not only "invented" the short story but solidified its form for some time to come when his Twice Told Tales inspired Poe to write his famous review of it which in turn described what a short story should do.

A mystery novel, broken into its component parts, is a series of interviews conducted by the protagonist force. All who may have seen or had involvement in the crime are questioned, their stories matched. Via subtext, the interviewee may reveal hidden agendas or other relevant clues.

The concatenation of events in a literary novel may be reduced to the equation, Something happens and somebody changes, a clear link between it and the mystery format. Of course each narrative, literary and mystery, has interstitial materials, narrative equivalents of the musical soloist's arpeggio or riff. Were you to deconstruct any given literary novel, say Henry James's The Ambassadors, simply because it happened to pop into my mind, and compare that deconstruction with a mystery novel, say Raymond Chandler's creditable The Little Sister, you'd find a theme of a protagonist set out on a quest. In the James, a character is enlisted in a mission to travel to Europe, seek the son of the "client," and urge him to return to America to join and ultimately run the family business. In the Chandler, a private investigator is retained by a client to find a missing relative.

There are delicious layers of irony, reversal, temptation, false leads, discoveries, and moral choices in each story. In each one, the principal player becomes compromised to a larger sense of human accountability.

In addition to the mysteries mentioned, the following have helpful information for writers: Frobisher's Savage by Leonard Tourney, (a mystery set in Elizabethan England), The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, Ride the Pink Horse by Dorothy B. Hughes, any Inspector Wexford mystery by Ruth Rendell, Slip of the Knife by Denise Mina.

Not to forget, however, the so-called Alternate Universe novel, a splendid sub-genre of fantasy. Perhaps the most notable of all AU stories is Alice in Wonderland, wherein a young girl is "transported" to another universe through the portal of a rabbit hole. Dorothy Gale is literally transported from Kansas to Oz via the portal or funnel of a cyclone. The AU novel reminds those of us who persist in telling stories that our own vision is seen differently by others, by readers, for instance. There are parallel as well as alternating universes, occupying portions of the present reality, but having slight differences in outcome and the stakes of the game.

I will not soon forget a young woman I've watched grow up in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, series of AU novels, beginning with The Golden Compass, which has its start at a university (Oxford) and is almost like the current Oxford except for the presence of Jordan College, which does not exist in my Oxford (or yours either) but does that stop me from being caught up in the world of Lyra Belacqua? Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time is yet another AU novel in which characters are sent through a portal to another world to assist in tasks where there are risks, stakes, and satisfying results. If Wrinkle is your wrinkle, you'll be pleased to know that there are satisfying sequels.

If I were to set a novel in some agreeable (in the provocative, literary sense) city, it would be an alternate universe to your city, your Los Angeles or San Francisco or Austin or Portland, allowing you to experience and re-experience your city through my vision. What fun to write a novel about Los Angeles in which none of the characters had anything to do with the entertainment industry, or of San Francisco without a mention of the corkscrew of Lombard or Coit Tower. In Austin, I might very well invent a street crossing Ed Bluestein Blvd, just above or below the intersect with MLK, a street named after, well, Lowenkopf Rd. And right next to Jake's in Portland, or perhaps next to Powell's Books, a small taco stand. And wait till you see what I'd do with Salmon Street in the Mt. Tabor neighborhood.

The mystery and the alternate universe, both better role models or paradigms to have downloaded on the hard drive of our writer memory than any formula or outline, both signposts to guide us as we look for things, clues, suspects, solutions, in the landscape of our imaginative self. Or is that selves?

A Man for All Susans

You reach a certain age--or perhaps it is more of an uncertain age--where hair no longer grows where it once did and persists in growing where it didn't used to. It was always difficult getting up early but now it is increasingly likely that you will have been up and about for some time--at least one cup of coffee worth--before feeling truly awake. Going to bed at a reasonable time seems increasingly like a good idea but one that is proportionately more difficult to arrange.

You are more likely to be called upon to write valedictories for departed friends, colleagues, and others with whom your life has formed some relationship, real to you or potential to others. None of this strikes you as particularly morbid, as LK suggests it does, much less does it cause you to think carpe diem thoughts anymore now than you did when you were first setting forth to amass a useful store of experiences from which to fund a writing life.

The comings and goings of things and people in your life begin to seem as an analogy for the hundreds of millions of sensations that fall on your sensor plates, thereupon to register physical and/or emotional responses. You begin in some inchoate way to understand why particular plants, shrubs, flowers are the color they are so as to better attract particular insects, birds, and reptiles. You also see with some--if not articulate--clarity the two-sides-of-the coin aspect in which the very color of a plant that attracts the appropriate insects who will broadcast its pollen and/or receive the appropriate pollen of another plant will also attract various acts and forms of predation. (And we think our own sex life is complex!)

You still find yourself, for instance, looking in the interstices of the back seat of the Camry for the tortoise-shell Sailor fountain pen which you could very well have mislaid in any of a hundred other venues.

You are still in a sense of disbelief mixed with grief and frustration over the fact of having for the moment placed a five-page table of contents and description of a book on writing fiction you plan to do with J.F. "Jerry" Freedman on the roof of said Camry, anchored them with your Panasonic Lumix FX-30, then poured the two containers of water you'd lugged from the kitchen to the place where your pet avocado tree lives. 

Late for a meeting with Jerry, after watering the tree, you'd entered the Camry, scattering the outline and Lumix to the winds and although you have found the outline easily enough, the Lumix defies detection.

Well and good for inanimate objects, now comes the message in an email that Unk, your friend of at least twenty-five years, Duane D. Unkefer, to be more specific, has decided he has had a bellyfull of Santa Barbara and is about to venture to Portland where, with all due respect to a city I admire, his nether regions will be chilled as though a chardonnay.

Which gets us down to the need for a philosophy that will get us through the existential night with a lilt to our step, a smile to a stranger, and on-going niceness to dogs and cats. You are increasingly drawn to the writings and influence of Giambattista Vico. (1688-1744) Now here was a purposefully reasoned approach to the notion of events and how events played forth, observable, capable of replication in the laboratory or the bedroom. Note how Vico leads to hermeneutics, the investigation of speech, social institutions, and ritual behaviours (such as religious ceremonies, political rallies, football matches, rock concerts, etc.). Hermeneutics interprets or inquires into the meaning and relative value of these phenomena. Once you got Vico and hermeneutics down, Finnegan's Wake became less obscure and, as a result, less boring.

By a lovely cycle of chance, Unk came to own a car that so frustrated and demoralized you that gave it to an auto mechanic named Chuck, whose wife supported the two of them by selling elaborately decorated cakes. You were indeed given a white cake with berry jam filling, a relic from a wedding that had been precipitously cancelled. It was a sway-backed Volkswagen that was largely white or perhaps primer-coat gray and where it was neither of these, it was indifferent. You met Unk having reviewed his break-through novel, Gray Eagles.

No particular effort is needed to wish him well and watch him set forth on his way. You have come to the point where enough coffee and philosophy and a fountain pen that works most of the time and a comforting dog can get you places where you have never been before.

There was a time, for instance, when you were in center field, a position you enjoyed too much to concentrate on all the nuances of center field. You dealt with a particularly troublesome line drive by short-hopping it and relaying it with, you thought, considerable dispatch to second base, only to be addressed by the pitcher with "Hey, schmuck! What's wrong with home plate?"

Some years later, playing in the same position, and in a similar fielding situation, the pitcher called, "Home, sir. Throw it home, sir!" Thus had you gone from schmuck to sir.

Experience gives you the opportunity to engage situations with optimal grace and perhaps even a touch of panache.

You'll freeze your nether regions, Unk, but you'll have Powell's Books on Burnside, and Jake's Famous Crawfish.