Sentimental Education

It takes some time to recognize the startling fact that education--even education in so-called dramatic writing--begins with mere rote before transferring to the express line, where connecting dots, any dots, is the crux and the fast ride to understanding.

For the longest while, I successively blamed the culture in which I lived, the University of California, and, later, the Republican Party, on the paucity of and lack of dimension in my personal education. While all these were indeed contributing factors, the most obvious one was my ow sense of inadequacy at having factoids at my fingertips but no way to connect them, no cosmic equivalent of cat's cradle, no sense of myself being as a star in a galaxy. The drop of water did not yet recognize the ocean from which he lurched.

There are now two factors that define the state of personal education to me, the ageing process and the need to connect dots, any dots. We each of us, according to age and number of dots of experience, go about with inchoate information, data points waiting to be connected. In our blood streams and genomes run the bundles of data we not only are but have collected from observation, memory, and intuition. Timidly at first, we connect obvious dots, power point most of our forbears and contemporaries have already connected, a fact that gives us a status called Common Sense or Conventional Wisdom. We begin to shine, give off our own light, just as stars do, when we begin to connect daring, improbable things, making sense and art of them; what we turn ourselves into then is a spinning combination of art and sense, each tidal, perhaps even conflicting. The more seemingly disparate things about us we connect within ourselves, the more we distance ourselves from Common Sense or Conventional Wisdom. The farther we get from these two faux pole stars, the more attractive our radiant light becomes, drawing to us the duality inherent in everything. In this case the duality is attractiveness and voice with which to communicate, the obverse of the coin is an increased distance from our common roots. Accordingly we must never forget to shine, take chances and grow, nor must we forget the absolute need to do what most writers learn at great cost--to avoid patronizing Common Sense and Common Wisdom. It is just as much an error to make fun of these conditions as it is not to have them.

One of the earliest inscriptions in a contemporary language to be found on this continent--North America--is a Spanish inscription on an enormous rock along a well-traveled east-west wagon trail Paso por aqui. The inscribers came this way, letting perhaps friends or relatives who followed that they were on the right track, but taking on the subtext for us of these years that there were others who connected dots before we were even in the picture. Words to remember and live by.

Writers want to produce words they, their characters, and imagined readers can live by; they want to show those who come later that someone was here, telling them the way was safe, the wisdom of the road. We want our wisdom to last and to instruct others while at the same time wanting them to see the things we missed or did not connect.

We want our words to last and to instruct and disturb and entertain and remove the pompous and tyrannical from their pompous and tyrannical pedestals. I am no different in this regard and my desire for such immortality brought me to connect dots I had not previously considered when I was charged with the task of putting together the combination of words to be incised on the granite slab marking my mother's grave site. I, who wanted some shot at my fifty years of lasting beyond my own life, was trumped my my desire for this remarkable woman to be known. And to whom? More than likely, only to those who came to pay respects to the embalmed husks of family or friends. I had five or six words to go under her name and dates, five or six words to carry her essence, her individual Paso por aqui.

In engaging the task, I learned as much about writing as I may be likely to learn: put the individual ahead of the writer. Thus I wrote and caused to be incised, Ann Lowenkopf 1905--1997/ All were welcomed at her table

The reward of having such a mother is being able to speak of her beyond me, allowing her to have passed through here on her way to that place we may think of as Destiny.

We are shaped by what we learn and what we connect that takes us beyond the Common Sense and Conventional Wisdom of our time and into the destiny of words that shape as running streams shape rocks.

We are rocks awaiting the forces that will give us our true shape.

Lares and Penates:

Casting a weather eye about my desk and bookshelves lately, I came to recognize a connection I have with archaeologists

For the dedicated archaeologist, artifacts may be difficult to come by, particularly if they are made of something less durable than stone or fired ceramic. Wood, unless petrified, has a finite and risky shelf life; basketry and blankets often reach the stage where they must be kept in nitrogen- or oxygen-filled enclosures.

What I was noticing on my desk and shelves, with an edgy mixture of enjoyment and apprehension, were artifacts of the archaeology of my youth. These artifacts include Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books, Whitman Big-Little Books, (including a pretty fair copy of a Terry and the Pirates) first-generation massmarket paperbacks (including some of the old Dell mysteries with maps of the crime area on the back cover), a copy or two of what have been variously referred to as sleaze fiction, pulp fiction, and exploitation fiction, the old Kozy Books (from which, under a variety of pseudonyms, I paid many a rent tab), some cigarette package trading cards (including litographs of rugs, airplanes, and fish) a few cereal box toys, a tin container that will still hold--if I allowed it--fifty cigarettes (emblazoned with the pre-War Lucky Strike green logo, as in "Lucky Strike green nas gone to war!" There are a few die-cast metal miniature cars , a Pogo doll, several bottle caps, an authentic glass Coca-Cola bottle,and a squirt gun.

The paper in all these artifacts is on its way to the dustier climes, and in recent times I have begun protecting the more fragile with cellophane wrap. The wooden artifacts are still holding up, and the die-cast metal or glass objects are showing few traces of their real age.

Every age has a special fondness for its own artifacts. Moving about as my family did when I was between the ages of five and thirteen, I was limited to things that could be kept in cigar boxes, not the classy cedar ones in which I keep my fountain pens but the sturdy cardboard ones which not only reflected my father's taste in cigars--Creamo, Roi-Tan, Garcia Vega, Phillies, Marsh Wheeler--but my own fondness for the florid art on the inner cover. These became storehouses for marbles, bottle caps, bubblegum cards, playing cards, toy soldiers, and mini-model airplanes. In my generation, if you were a male, you were beneath contempt if you did not have a shelf of Big-Little Books, a Little Orphan Annie Shake-up Mug, a Captain Midnight Decoder Ring, and a Jack Armstrong Magic Answer Box. You were also well down on the social ladder if you did not have a Ralston/Tom Mix Morse Code sender, a Gene Autry cap gun, stacks of Batman Comics, a Buck Roger Space Rocket, and a Lone Ranger Code Matrix. Never mind that the code messages given forth by the Lone Ranger were such vital communiques as Clean your fingernails, or Volunteer to do the dishes once a week, they were in code, which is more than you got from your mother.

Moving frequently meant saying good-bye with aching frequency to collections of Wheaties cereal boxes, the exotic labels of tin cans purchased in ethnic groceries, empty tins of coffee (Chock Full 'o Nuts),aircraft propelled by rubberband power, and gliders.

The smaller the artifact, the more possible to carry it in one's pocket, where it mixed with other artifacts and gave one a sense of having a tool kit that could support survival in adult-dominated situations.

While these are the Lares and Penates of childhood, there is yet a comfort in them; it is the comfort of the retro art, the orotund borders, lithograph-level colors. A return to childhood would be an excruciatingly frustrating return, retro-fitting the hard-won independence or illusions of same we exacted against what seemed an unforgiving reality.

Equally true, these are artifacts only in the most egregious stretch; a real artifact is a burin or a Clovis point or a fluted spear blade or a shard of a Toltec doll. A real artifact is a place outside Sikyatki, on the eastern side of First Mesa, where a Hopi elder who had befriended me once warned me not to walk down a particular road until it dead-ended, thereupon to look for foot holes with which to scramble up eight or ten feet, and having not arrived there, I was to be careful not to pick up any of the pottery shards I might see there because people who did so were interfering with the return to earth of elements that had come from earth in the first place and I didn't want to be thought an interferer did I?

In yet another sense, however, collecting the artifacts of my generation preserves a sense of connection with the tribal elders who have variously taught me, inspired me, lied to me, deceived me, loaned me lunch money, books, and the lore of the history from which I arose in order to be here, attempting to find artifacts of another sort in the sediment of the Internet.

Archaeologists are historical junk dealers, Brian Fagan has opined. It takes a man who has worked with Leaky to know. Not having worked with Leaky but, in fact, having scouted for the Lone Ranger and Red Ryder, and Prince Valliant, I am on the alert for a prime dig site.

Mugged and Booked

In many ways, a new book represents a danger.

The danger is of the sort that comes with the almost daily emails describing acts of violence or near violence enacted around the campus in Los Angeles where I have been teaching for lo these many years. Thanks to the emails and attendant warnings, I more or less adjust my behavior patterns so that the likelihood of actual physical danger to me is minimal , leaving me with the general sense of being mugged or robbed rather than the cold, frightening details of an actual event and my actual response.

The new book is like the safety precautions I'd take when leaving campus on foot or wandering about the borders of campus alone late at night. Be wary as opposed to being innocent. Be suspicious instead of being naive or trusting or, better yet, being oblivious to the cold, frightening details of an actual event and my actual response.

Being mugged is a trauma. Reading some books can be a trauma because these books may overwhelm previous notions or senses of defense; they have the power to frighten me, bore me, disturb me, entertain me, anger me. They have the power to cause me to, as the warning emails describe the mugging situations, demand property.

I don't know what I'd do when confronted combatively, threateningly with gun or knife or no weapon at all except the stealth and strength of my assailant. I have no advance sense of the weapon or guile or stealth of the author of a book I am about to read, the images he or she will inflict on my psyche.

A number of bookstores and publishing ventures send me catalogs, newsletters, news releases. Publishers Weekly sends me news of new titles to come. And the to of magazines and journals, with their review sections, and my frequent visits to the web pages of Washington Post Book World and the home delivery of The New York Times give me ongoing hints of the mugging and hold-up and outrage awaiting as I go about naive, unsuspicious in spite of the suspicion I have when hefting new books at a book store.

I believe I have worked my way past the point where I think it possible that a single book will transform me to the point where it causes me to be a better writer, editor, teacher, thinker. Alas, I have to learn to do all those things by myself. There is nothing for it but to risk the dangers that await from the challenge.

I can see the incident in a University Incident Report: Victim was approached by book that demanded he turn over attitudes and other properties. When victim refused, book dropped on his toe, inflicting pain.

It is never a good time to be mugged nor to play it safe with books. For that matter, it is never a good time to play it safe with writing, editing, or teaching, much less thinking. The risk of not being vulnerable is that your defenses will keep out any thought that has a chance of helping transform you from what you are now to what you wish to be then, in the future, which is to say that time after you have read and coped with something that was by all accounts a threat to you.

Boundaries and Surprises

There is a line of boundary beyond which a character will not go; it is up to us as writers to discover this line, then use our wits and whiles to push the character over that line, at which point we may safely begin to think we have set story in motion. We all have boundaries and it is up to the writer to recognize how this fact applies to writers as well. But to be truly effective, the writer, at least on the page, must give up boundaries. Neither writers or actors can avoid characters who seem unpleasant.

There is a pattern of familiarity within which a character lives, fantasying an unfamiliar or taboo variation of pattern. It is up to us to understand the character to the point where we understand what that variation is and, if possible, what it means to the character. Once we understand this aspect, our character is up and running. If we follow closely, we may even see how that fantasy becomes a pole star, a stella maris which informs that character's navigation. At all costs, we must respect that fantasy, neither patronize the character for having it nor look down upon that character, mindful of "You! hypocrite lecteur! --mon semblance, --mon frere!"

Boundaries and surprises become key elements to constructing a narrative that goes beyond fable or teaching device, entering the realm of true cultural examination--the story. The surprise should seem plausible and yet come like the snap of a wet towel in a locker room, playful but with a teasing sting.

And of course the writer needs to be surprised before the reader can be. In fact, if the writer isn't surprised, how can the reader be? This is no formulaic contrivance.

Stay off the main, well-traveled highways. Ask unlikely persons for directions.

Foragers

Fresh from a constructive argument with archaeologist-writer Brian Fagan over a nuance of wording in his new work in progress about our brothers and sisters, the Cro-Magnons, I am directed to make my way along the unmarked highway called Change, a highway rife with switchbacks, cut-offs, dips, knobs, and harrowing escarpments. There are few if any markers or warnings about the distance to the next services, nor are there any Burma-Shave signs to lighten the burden of travel.

The point I was arguing with Fagan was that his new text should not refer to Hunters and Gatherers; rather these stalwarts should be called Foragers because in essence that's what they did. The foraging life, while by no means an easy one, is largely what most of us do now. There are, to be sure, some coupon clippers in our midst, some politicians with campaign war chests, some so-called developers who convert unusable land or farm land into housing tracts and malls. Mostly we still forage.

One of the more challenging choices to face the early Foragers was the decision to stay put, tend to the plants and seeds, keep an eye on the herds, cut back on ambitious travel plans. Once the Foragers gave over to Agriculture, they were screwed.

Another similar fork in the road came when someone figured out you could do more with, say, horses than eat them, use them for drayage or plowing: you could ride them. Riding a horse led to being able to herd more animals than you could on foot with a dog or two. Riding a horse led to a class distinction between those who had horses and those who walked. Chivalry was a code of behavior derived from those who owed and rode horses. Indeed, cavalier spoke of a more affluent and trouble free life of the propertied as opposed to--shades of Marxism--those who worked.

Writers are essentially Foragers, tracking through the traits of humanity for subject matter, finding history a fascinating enough preoccupation, pouncing on the stray tidbit of sex, religion, and politics for a feast, romping through the suction and pull of class distinction and behavior. The leisure of the theoried class, as it were. There are those of us who have settled into the literary equivalent of agriculture, which is to say the commerce of television and the made-to-order celebrity biography. I can recall a time when, working as a California-based editor, it was my job to canvass those "agriculturalists" in search of any stray literary project they may be essaying. On a number of occasions, I'd found a project worth pursuing and, following protocol, was given the go-ahead to initiate a contract, only to be told that the paltry $50,000 advance I could offer was not enough to maintain rent or lease payments on house and car, much less tuition for private schools. Come back with a realistic offer, man. Alas, that was about as reasonable as I could get. These agriculturalists, eager to return to the foraging ways of the book writer, were tied to their rented earth and could not escape.

In a sense the writer does resort to a non-subsidized form of agriculture, the crop being change, a record of what happens as a culture collides with change, who the victims are and who emerge as victors. It is invariably an unexpected collision, the bug against the windshield. We watch it as it affects our life, our goals, our attitudes; we watch it as it seals off previously accessible escape routes, reverses fortunes, backhands us with a swipe of our own attitude. In the process of collision, writers and agriculturalists have forged a strange kind of relationship that nearly defies understanding, each of us set in ways that seem unvaried since pen was first set to parchment or harrow blade to earth. Each of us is romanticized beyond belief, patronized, condescended to. Each of us is occasionally given a subsidy, perhaps even listened to, but the pressures for change in both areas is overwhelming. Our best hope is to do the work and hope to which ever fetish, god, or relevant force to which we attach some degree of fealty, hope for an abundant crop.

Redemption Center

For most of my early years, I grew up thinking redemption referred to a transaction in which you were given money at markets when you returned bottles. Some of my early forays into the economics of acquiring beyond the parameters of my allowance the essentials--books and licorice cigarettes--of life involved collecting neighborhood bottles which I then delivered with entrepreneurial eclat to Weiner's Market at Sixth and Fairfax, there to receive the five- ad ten-cent pieces necessary to fulfill my longings. It also fell to my lot to discover another form of redemption: Earl, of Earl's Cleaners (Let Us Do Your Laundry) was good for one cent for every two unbent wire coat hangers I could provide.

In the culture into which I was born, there was no question of my being the agent of redemption; an older brother who died in infancy took care of that, obviating the need for pidyon HaBen, a ritual in which I'd theoretically have to be redeemed from an agent of the temple, a Kohen or Cohen, to allow me a life not in service of The Temple. No question because we were at least a generation away from orthodoxy.

I don't know how many generations I am away from redemption; I do know that the subject or concept did not again occur to me until I was seventeen, pursuing a study of journalism at Los Angeles City College, beginning to think myself unsuited for that craft because of its dogged insistence on established fact as opposed to my established imagination. The pull of literature and the English Department at UCLA had already begun to exert a pull when, in anticipation of that pull, I met another watershed influence, the son of variously a glove maker and wine merchant, fellow name Geoffrey Chaucer. In The Prioress' Tale was reference to a prayer, O Alma Redemptoris Mater, popular in the England of the time and relevant to the meaning and outcome of the Chaucerian trope. From it and Chaucer, I carried away a notion of the wry narrative voice and a phrase that delights me every time I hear it, Stella Mare, Portal of the Sky, Star of the Sea. Redemption meant asking for and being granted a refund on actions of which one was not entirely pleased or which upon reflection were revealed to have been counterproductive in a moral sense.

A number of containers pass through the house now, all bearing some reminder of how much I might acquire if I were to redeem them at specific redemption spots, itself an interesting concept. In my walkabouts at the university campus, I see the interesting aspects of entrepreneurship at work with the homeless or near homeless moving efficiently from trash receptacle to trash receptacle, removing containers which will be redeemed somewhere for something.

Thus I am culturally and environmentally programmed to think of redemption as something you get for something you have done or prepaid for. I look for redemption in my relationships with people, with pages of paper on which I have written, on hard drives on which I have caused words to be stored, on books I have read, on views I have taken, on views I will take.

I spoke earlier today in a note to a friend of ghosts. Probably the most famous ghost in Western culture is the one of Hamlet's father, who had come forth bidding his son to exact revenge for having been murdered. I can understand and relate to the elder Hamlet's being pissed off; I love this cranky, notional sense of self called life and would be mightily wroth if someone were to remove me from it. The ghost of which I wrote earlier was the one I've been chasing for some time, Mr. Mark Twain, whom I have had occasion to think I saw hanging around the entrance to Piper's Opera House in Virginia City, Nevada. But perhaps it was not his ghost at all, perhaps it was mine, and I was seeking to catch up with it, pockets filled now with hard cash, trying to redeem it with today's currency.

A stolen Ferris Wheel and Thou

The arrival in the mail of three indulgences, ancient paperback mystery novels from Dell, each containing a stylized map on the back cover, brought you the unanticipated answer to a personal enigma.

A helpful clue turned out to be the fact that all three of the ancient paperbacks were by Dashiell Hammett, a writer you've  never distanced myself from. 

You'd ordered the books from a dealer in Staten Island out of affection and nostalgia for the Dell map mystery series, a series you unsuccessfully tried to revive when you was in their employ. "We want our books to reflect the future," I was told archly "not the past."

Nevertheless.

Browsing through the Continental Op stories, you were transported back to the past in which you came across an article by Hammett appearing in a writers' guide book. The article was a series of numbered sentences, perhaps twelve or fourteen of them, in which Hammett told of his experiences as an operative or op for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. 

 "I was once sent," Hammett wrote, "to track down a man who had stolen a Ferris wheel." The other sentences, approximately as short and enigmatic, were not held together by the glue of any logic or story arc, appearing merely as autobiographical facts. 

As much as anything you'd read to that point, that article spoke to you, promised insights and understandings to the psyche of writing; it offered a codex, a key, an instant understanding of what would guide me to the discovery of your own voice, your own enigmas, your own process as a writer. Had you been informed enough at the time, you'd have also factored indoor belief that by means of this very piece, Hammett had foreseen postmodernism.

Somehow the magazine with the piece got away from me. For years, you've looked patiently in used book stores, in collections of the works of Hammett, in Google citations, Yahoo, and ask dot com, ever more convinced that were you to find it and take it in properly, your career as a writer would flourish in ways you'd never dreamed.

Segue to approximately February of this year when Liz Kuball asked me when you were going to stop numbering the paragraphs of blog entries. Segue to last night when, at a university function in Town and Gown, a number of colleagues variously inquired if I were using a formatting feature, attaching some numerological meaning to my blog essays, speaking in some kabbalistic code, or what.

The answer is to be found in the missing Hammett piece, which all these years later has helped me in ways youdidn't realize. So taken with the piece were you and so energized, that it became a way to improvise on themes, reaffirming not only the sound of your internal voice but finding a favored medium, somewhere between a poem, a short story, and. a dramatic monologue.

You've yet to find the Hammett piece, but you've found a form to appreciate that allows spatial and attitudinal leaps, interlardings of a wild and spontaneous whim, and a sense of adventure. It is your narrative sonnet which you call the Hammett Sonnet in his honor. 

 At the risk of boring Liz Kuball when you resort to the format, you'll not stop searching for the original Hammett piece. You'll  continue tweaking this thing of form you've created until it surrenders and gives up the essence of a sentient and boisterous epression of writerly joy, a narrative equivalent of a fugue.