Rewards

Among the rewards of completing a crossword puzzle, say The New York Times Sunday puzzle

The sense of having restored a workable order to a small slab of Universe,
The sense of having competed with a designing intelligence,
The sense of having for a change made use of some arcane squib of knowledge,
The sense of having filled vacant spaces

Among the rewards of completing a short story:

The sense of understanding a tad more about your relationship to the Universe,
The sense of understanding what some of your feelings mean,
The sense of having been able to dramatize the way you feel,
The sense of having solved a puzzle,
The sense of having, for a moment or two understood time,
The sense of having been able to experience a feeling you didn't think you knew


Among the rewards of being surprised

The knowledge that you are neither so blase nor cynical as you had supposed,
The knowledge that there are things out there you hadn't anticipated,
The idea that you are a thing out there that has potential to surprise others
The awareness that surprises may be covered in surprising wrapping

Among the rewards of listening to music:

The sense of being suspended in time,
The sense of being suspended in feelings,
The sense of everything in the universe having a voice
The sense of you having a voice

Among the rewards of hanging out with cats or dogs:

The sense of having a self,
The sense of having a friend
The appreciation of instincts
The awareness of communication with another being
The value of another being

Among the rewards of a glass of cold ale

Ah!

Where Will It All End?

Among the many technical and emotional joys to be found reading and rereading Richard Price's earlier novel, Clockers, and his most recent, Lush Life, there is the tacit agreement that the good guys don't always win, the bad guys don't always lose. The surprise comes not so much from seeing justice triumphing as an abstract condition but rather to see how much justice will be done at a particular time and how much is held over for later.

Short stories used to be more perfervid in their allocation of justice. Lately they have become more advocates for a force almost as forceful as justice. I speak of ambiguity.

We have moved, I observe, from living dangerously to living ambiguously. Living ambiguously may be more dangerous than living dangerously because of the uncertainty, the tension of wondering when things will become more dangerous--all this rather than the creeping boredom of ceaseless danger.

I believe there are reasons why short stories end on more ambiguous notes than, say, A Cask of Amontillado or An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, or even To Build a Fire. We have grown as a result of those stories, grown more cynical and sophisticated. As they did with so any other things of style and technique, the short stories of Ernest Hemingway added to the ambiguity syndrome, particularly some of the Nick Adams stories, say Big Two-Hearted River, or Hills Like White Elephants. In more recent years, in this century, the ambiguity is more deliberate than ambiguity merely for the sake of not being specific it is put in place to draw the reader artfully into visualizing a conclusion. Often this conclusion is a bundle of emotion, as well-orhestrated and sensual as a bouquet of flowers.

Do not, therefore, do the reader's work for him. Show the reader the direction you have in mind, then end with a good shove. To my mind and senses, the best ending seems at first blush a bit abrupt. You mean, That's it? Then, like an Altoid aftertaste, the other shoe drops and the ambiguity coalesces--off the page.

They all lived happily ever after is more ambiguous than it sounds because it raises questions that at the present time make you
question such things as what happiness is, and because of certain liberties taken with logic and semantics by a former president of the United States, oh, you know, that one, William Jefferson Clinton, it is fair to ask how long you mean when you say ever after.

I remember still the instant wisdom I got some years back when Barry Spacks called to invite me to one of his classes at UCSB to hear a presentation by an author he knew I admired greatly. I asked Bobbie Ann Mason to talk about why she'd seen fit to end her remarkable and memorable story, Shiloh, at what seemed to be an up-in-the-air moment. It was her answer that helped me forge my vision about ambiguity. "I ended it there," she said, "because that's where all the energy ran out."

I found it impossible to let that remark fade down the hallways of my memory, and I have thought long and hard since about where to end a story, and learned from countless attempts at trying to tack endings onto stories I did not realize were already done, the defensive sound staying on too long brings to the story.

Mark Twain actually said, "Put all your eggs in one basket--and watch that basket." I'm taking liberties by suggesting Bobbie Ann Mason's contribution as being, "Put all the available energy into a story situation--and watch that energy."

The Devil in the Details and Interstices

Being brought face to face with your own quotation--something you have said or written or both--is not always comfortable. Particularly since I have come to regard blogging as a form of practice, a run up to essay, which extends even beyond practice. It becomes a way of testing out how I feel about what I do and how it is best for me to do so. Thus the possibility that I will change views or grow more certainly into a position.

I am reminded of this most recently thanks to having been asked by The Writer Magazine to do something about dialogue, which I did. They liked it well enough to schedule it for October. Now I am haunted by a sentence: "If we want actual speech, we can consult trial transcripts and depositions. If we want dialogue, we go to characters, listening to the words and the spaces between them."

In and out of context, I'll stand on the sentence, will not at this juncture in my life turn away from it as, say, the Senator from Arizona has turned away from some of his sentences and protestations and assertions of information he considers to be fact. I am haunted by the implications of "words and the spaces between them." This haunting leads to being haunted by the concept of connective tissue, the substance that holds separate things in some kind of relationship.

Thinking as I have for the past few days about putting a book or two together during the approaching summer, I look at some of these evidences of practice and essay. The space between notes, the space between words, the implications of a paragraph indent or a two-line space break--the connective tissue between ideas and concepts. In my way of seeing things, the connective tissue is the agenda and attitude of individuals, characters, humans. Whether these characters are based on real individuals doing things the real individuals did or did not do in real life, or whether they are complete fabrications, the reader must be convinced that such people were/are real and what they do is plausible.

How to achieve this goal? Connect dots, use convincing connective tissue, which is to say vital details as opposed to arguments. When a reader says I don't believe it, the writer needs to listen and not grow argumentative or defensive. The writer needs to learn how to use connective tissue to link things. The way to accomplish this is to write with clarity about things you believe are true, choosing words and the spaces between them with the greatest of care. But it really happened that way! Doesn't matter. What matters is the sense of implicit truth in the interstices.

Write only what you believe. Test. Essay. If you do not believe every line of your story, how can you expect your reader to do so?

Go Figure

The Montecito Journal is a weekly newspaper, printed with three-and-four color illustrations and advertisements as well as black-and-white text and occasional photo. With a tightly certified distribution/circulation figure, it has a circulation of 20,000 plus. It is in some ways like Kleenex in that it is mostly used (read) only once before being thrown away, although there are cases of an issue here and there being read by between one and three individuals.

Montecito, which is unincorporated territory within Santa Barbara County, bordering on Santa Barbara to the west, Summerland to the southwest, and Carpinteria more or less due south is an extraordinary tax base, filled with mansions, estates, luxury condos, and the occasional landmark cottage, estate, or office building that is a legacy from some significant architect. Accordingly, there is a demographic of considerable old money, which is to say inherited wealth, which tends to reflect fiscal and political conservatism. As well, there are full- and part-time residents who have spun away from Los Angeles, reflecting a more liberal or progressive political configuration. No on in either basic group relies on The Montecito Journal for its entire intake of local or statewide news, many still opting for the bottom feeding daily, The News-Press, known variously to locals as The News-Surpress or The Snooze-Press. You might expect a rather property rights. zoning ordinance, real estate prices approach to the such-as-they-are local stories, an you'd not be far from the defining sentiments as well as politics.

You could say with some accuracy that The Journal is unlike any other community newspaper; in any given issue you will find articles on wealth management, the tyranny of local zoning regulations, the haughtiness of Hillary Clinton, the dangers to property values of allowing low-cost housing within Montecito, the dangers inherent in widening Highway 101, the agendas of book reading clubs, and an acrimonious debate on whether Montecito's own Westmont College, a four-year evangelical Christian establishment with an enrollment capped at 1200 students should be allowed to update its facilities. These are sandwiched between three humor columns and advertisements for estates for sale at prices over ten million dollars.

Since February of 2005, I have been reviewing books for this newspaper, alternating newly published books with Golden Oldies or Classics or Forgotten Works of Merit from the Past, a comfortable and comforting routine in which I am able to vary the new and, accordingly, the more or less completely unpredictable with the well-worn relics from other times, including a genre I refer to as Guilt Literature, books I feel pangs of guilt for never having read, or books I feel some pangs for continuing to like after having reached supposed plateaus of taste and discernment.

There are any number of new books I enjoy because of their energy and vibrant voice, projecting beyond mere story, imparting a sense of realism and plausibility that does not seem possible here in Montecito, books such as Richard Price's estimable Lush Life or Richard Powers' The Gold Bug Variations or, for that matter, is The Echo Maker. There is also Louise Erdrich's splendid The Plague of Doves to enthuse about and enjoy as some might enjoy a well-crafted champagne or pinot noir.

The real pleasure comes in reconsidering works already published, things I may even have looked at as a boy with a sense of smugness and daring at this unauthorized peek into the world of adults. There is a lovely challenge to writing about a book which has been out in the world long enough for bookish people to have some idea of it, some notion of the issues and risks that inhere within its pages. To be able to write of such a book without offering the bane of readers of book reviews, the spoiler, is every bit as much the intellectual and emotional challenge as The New York Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle.

It has come to me that although I have lived here for over thirty years, I am by no means of this place any more than I am of the Santa Monica of my birth; all places change as do the individuals who work or live in them. Unlike many individuals who came here by accident--the late lamented publisher Noel Young, for instance, arrived here because his car broke down here and he needed to find work in order to effect repairs--I came here by design. Liking it here and largely feeling comfortable with life here does not necessarily mean being of here or of what here connotes. Living here, I have come to terms with the nature and range of attitude. The Montecito Journal is in many ways not the local medium I'd have thought to be such a regular contributor to, in part because of its politics, but on the other hand, the freedom I am accorded is thrilling. So long as I get my 12-1500 words in sometime before midnight on Sundays, my contact is the financial one of a check arriving the following Friday and of an occasional call-out in Von's Market or the Summerland Post Office, or the Y parking lot.

If The Journal is not the local medium I'd have thought to be a contributor to, where then? The answer is part of the calculus in the occasional call-outs. Never would have thought you'd work for them. Who'd a thought you'd display your work there. They must censor you a lot, huh? Nothing is what it seems, which is one of my favored refuges of thought. Montecito is not what it seems, nor the Journal, nor the world, nor the universe, least of all am I what I seem, set adrift as Ahab after the whale, looking for a book, the book that will change my life, impart an immediately effective vision or philosophy, transform my writing goals from inchoate premise to a shelf of work that doubles or trebles the shelf of my work.

I am thinking down the line toward September or October of a book of reviews of the Guilt Literature, the older works that have already entered the world and had some effect on it, works that the act of writing about in review form flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Who would wish to read a book that contains reviews of Golden Oldies, even though said reviews considerately contain no spoilers? And how would I introduce such a book to a reader?

Maybe with an essay such as this.

June 3, 2008

In some ways, it has nothing at all to do with writing, but in other ways, it has everything to do with it:

One individual gave a long speech that sounded as though it had been written sometime during the early hours of this morning, bracketed to add a thanks to the voters of South Dakota who stood for her in the face of a storm of delegates opting in public for her opponent.

One individual, standing before a Jell-o green background, stammered, huffed, and chuckled through what was meant to be a rebuttal to a rather elegant speech that rose on harmonies of hope and enthusiasm and potentials for a fresh start.

Three speeches, three points of view, one history. In this sense it is all about the power of stories we must tell ourselves.

I am of an age where I can recall hearing the outrage of FDR coming through the radio, telling the world that December 7, 1941 was a day that will live in infamy, playing in counterpoint with a voice I heard coming forth from the radio when a young politician from Illinois took the title of presumptive nominee of his party for the Presidency of the United States. Before long, there was the opportunity to check in on newspapers throughout the world, each in its own way and point of view remarking on the fact that a milestone had been reached on this very day. You could feel the cogs slipping a bit as the United States found its gear for a few moments.

Of course the individual from the Jell-o green background will continue to speak of the naivete and foolishness of this instrument of new format and a better definition of story. His own story is the political equivalent of a James Frey memoir, fabricated, fantastic, and ill-formed.

We have those precious moments before us when we have an aggregate choice of a new kind of story. There are those who will resist new stories and new genera and new endings. We may indeed be catapulted as F. Scott Fitzgerald observed at the end of Gatsby, "ceaselessly back into the past."

But on the other hand Things will never be the same.

Speaking of newspapers, we may get some high comedy from tomorrow's edition of The Onion, being told "Hillary Declares Self President Anyway, Invites McCain to Be Running Mate" However gracious her real-time speech this evening, it was still in the spirit of declaring June 3, 2008 as being about her. It wasn't. June 3, 2008 was about a new kind of story, yet to be written.

So Much Depends

Early on in The White Album, Joan Didion makes the observation "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." A spare and unrelenting stylist, Didion could well have added the adjective precarious to the noun of stories; her narratives, whether of herself or of others, are precarious, making her regular readers all too aware of the quirky, risky aspects of life, causing those of us in her reader midst to understand one facet of the attraction her work hold for us. It is the same attraction we hope to extend to such readers as we may have. Persons who want a mannered, good-newsy narrative are better off with Hallmark Cards than with Didion. Reading her, we expect to be taken to the outskirts of real places, shown the duct tape covering the broken window panes, the imperfect reweaving of furniture worn thin or burned by a careless cigarette.

If we think Joyce Carol Oates is dark, gloomy, given to fatalism and the need for her individuals to suck it up and get on with it, we have the ultimate knowledge that much of her work is fiction and thus built from imagination. we also have the wry satisfaction that much of her nonfiction is about boxing, the fighting ring, in which, however graceful her prose, the outcome is blood, stunning one's opponent, inflicting a systematic punishment. Following Didion's observation, we may venture to conclude that Oates has to tell herself these stories in order to live and to connect in yet darker ways with the punishment she sees inflicted on the human species.

Both are prolific, versatile, effective, each in her way matching the prolific output and need to tell stories of Graham Greene, another story teller who followed his characters to the edges of civilization, civility, guilt, and betrayal. All three writers produced complex individuals to freight their narratives forth to us who read them and respond. Because each was/is so successful in rendering their particular mise en scene, we scarcely give thought to the effort each has devoted to finding a character or characters through who to render their stories we simply assume the characters spoke to them and they, consummate as they are, listened.

It is no easy thing to decide who carries the story, whether that individual speak in the first or third person or if that individual is first conceived of as naive, reliable, duplicitous, or merely an individual trying to make sense of the heavens and hells in Horatio's philosophy.

Of the three, I think Greene has a better handle on the naive or innocent narrator who, when all is said and done, wreaks great confusion, havoc, and an irrevocable breach of the cosmic innocence. Of the three, Greene appears more to be driven by ethics and philosophies associated with formal religion, which in many of his works keeps me off at a distance, unable to get as close as I would like. Accordingly my absolute favorite of Greene is the little known The Confidential Agent and one of his great moral comedies, Our Man in Havana, followed at some distance by The Quiet American.

When I have choices to make such as first person or third, naive versus reliable, I return to Greene for a few pages, which invariably pull me along like a boy pulling a wagon, for a few chapters.

All three, Didion, Oates, and Greene have styles and voices I admire, even though of the three Oates is quite my least favorite because of her unrelenting squint and lack of humor. It is for this reason that I turn to her, a reminder to light the candle of humor and leave it burning in the window.

Oates is close to humor but is not in it. Didion comes closer, particularly when she turns the gun of pain on herself.

Greene, who wrote one of the great all-time stories of betrayal in the short story, The Fallen Idol, grew from that remarkable story to the point where there often is some humor rampant in his work. It is generally agreed among critics that Our Man in Havana is his most humorous, the irony in that being that it is in other ways quite a wrench of pain of various sorts. My own choice for his funniest with no strings attached is Monseigneur Quixote, in which a simple parish priest accidentally becomes the host of a cardinal whose car has suffered a flat tire. The priest serves the cardinal horse meat, but presents it as steak. And thus, weeks later, when he is elevated to the position of monseigneur by the cardinal, he is left to the ultimate Greene resort, the pangs of conscience.

So much depends on who tells the story, what his or her subtext is, and how we either keep them on the hook or, splendid individuals that we are, let them off.

On Defensiveness

It is a truth not universally acknowledged, in fact completely overlooked, that within the rant and venom of the despot is a large grain of self-inflicted defensiveness. To express the matter less formally, Harold Ickes, in his protestations yesterday that the presidential election was being hijacked, took aim at a target and shot himself in the foot. While it was and is clear to many observers and indeed (to build toward a metaphor) passengers, The Titanic of Hillary's presidential bid had struck a gigantic iceberg, sprung a rupture, and was taking on water, Mr. Ickes insisted in his way of the splendid engineering of The Titanic, augmenting his rhetoric with the notion that The Titanic was better able to stay afloat than, say, The Pequod.

Mr. Ickes was, of course, being defensive.

Politicians can afford to be defensive. Writers cannot.

Writers must stand behind their visions as sincere believers, bordering more on dithyramb than choler, more on satire than cynicism, more on rigorous observation than the self-justification of explanation.

Typical writer defenses:

It gets better in the next chapter.

But it really happened that way.

Everyone in my writing group liked it.

Tom Woolf does it that way all the time.

People of my generation will understand.

I'm a writer because I love words.

There are others of course, What I particularly like about the last defense is the implicit notion that musicians don't like notes, dancers don't like steps, artists don't like pictures.

Of course they all do like their various platforms but do not use them as excuses to parade techniques so much as the platforms are considered tools to convey a feeling, a meaning, a choice that must be made.

We may portray defensive characters and in fact frequently seize upon such individuals with great tantivy thanks to the dramatic trampoline they present us, but we ourselves must have a vision which we pursue without thought of defense, with no excuse for the honesty of our vision it will reveal.

We are all of us equipped with survival devices that we listen to (on occasion) or ignore completely. It is no easy thing to set forth among our characters with such nudity, our scars and wrinkles, our foibles and hair growing in all the wrong places glaringly visible. Nevertheless, we go, alert to the settings we invent and the denizens of these settings with which we populate our own alternate universe, hopeful and alert for those moments where we are no longer aware of our nudity or foibles, having for the moment transformed ourselves into pure story as we engage our craft. In those moments, there is no room for defensiveness. Then, whatever our age, we are at another age, the writer's age, where there is all the drama and interpretation we can possibly accommodate.