Constant

Whether the times are of woe or weal, one constant is there for you as a life preserver, bobbing within reach in the existential sea.  Depending on who the swimmer is, the one constant has a number of possible identities, including such tropes as God, faith, friends, even science.  You have no intention of giving bad reviews to any of these, in some ways recognizing them as useful presences in life.  You would not have listed them if any of them were, in fact, the thrust of your observation; you have had too much experience trying to build some degree of suspense or notion of intrigue into your opening paragraphs to pay off as though your intent here were nothing more than a simple declarative sentence.

The more you think about it, the more you realize the appropriateness of your choice for support and such agreeable side effects as solace, comfort, pleasure, and energetic infusions, allowing you to move through the woe without becoming further bogged or distracted by self-pity or, even worse, despair.  And of course your favored constant keeps you buoyant in times of ease and excited connection with what appears sometimes to be the entire universe in all its manifestations of beauty, challenge, and personality of apparent order.  In such times, even more so than in times of woe, it is vital for you to know that although you are of It, It is not about you; you are along as a tourist, a sightseer, an adventurer in some cases, perhaps even a docent or tour guide in others.  You are along as a friend, with some good fortune as a lover, perhaps a student, perhaps a teacher.  Your choice of path is to write about experiences real and imagined, braiding the two so that whoever reads the one or the other gets some stunning awareness of the opposite braid, thus sharing your vision, even adding to its texture.

In each of these extreme modes, you are apt to stumble into the vision that It is about you, that your actions have provoked the causes of your woe or your celebrations of success to a degree not supported by the actual outcomes themselves.  It is true that you participate, deliberate, attempt to change the directions of certain forces about you.  In equal truth, you pay some prices or reap some consequences for your actions as well as benefiting from the results or consequences of other activities.

The Universe is on occasion a matter of quid pro quo for you, but never on the exact terms you were taught to believe or had come to hope were in effect.  Sometimes there is justice, other times not.  The Universe has a grand and gifted ability to surprise you, but the Universe has seen your like before and is under no obligation to notice you much less be surprised by you.

All right; you have held off long enough before revealing your favorite constant, your life preserver, your Kon-Tiki that will transport you from woe, if not to weal, at least to some state of awareness that emphasizes the creative aspects of the human condition.

Why, of course:  curiosity--the intense, immediate desire to know something you do not yet know or to know better something you believe you already know.  Curiosity--the thing that makes you wonder about yourself until you think it, do it, imagine it, or experience it in actuality.  Curiosity--the thing that leads you from the past, into the present, eyes cast ahead on the future, where problems exist in ways curiosity can assist you in discovering circumventions, avoidance, feints, strategies.  Curiosity--the thing that can leave you with the necessary energy to move toward the next step.

Time in--Time out

For much of your life as a reader of books, reading has been important to you, in no small measure because of the information you could discover, glean, investigate.  In your early teens, this importance became more focused as it began to become clear to you that you wished to spend as much of your working and waking lives connected somehow to the publishing industry, the writing craft, and the furtherance of your education.  By these means, so your reasoning went, you would be able to earn sufficient income to tend your basic needs while developing both your ability to tell story and your ability to improve the workings and functions of your mind.

You did not then nor still do not now comprehend the full implications of your association with books and the materials often contained in them any more than you understand the implications of a puppy, getting loose to make her way somewhere as dictated by her nose.

As a student, you took for granted the notion of your hours spent being immersed in the reading of books, to absorb story and information.  Left on your own, you'd be apt today to attach equal weight to the information you took in, more its champion than its challenger, only offended or skeptical in egregious moments of overstatement and/or abject disagreement with a particular book or story, but of equal likelihood willing to take a though for biblical granted everything on face value that came from your reading.  How fortunate for you that you were not left on your own or that your reading had a cumulative effect on your critical abilities.

Individuals who live as you do find it easy to take possession of internal landscapes, retreating from such metaphorical guard rails as critical thinking, questioning, judging attributions and, most obvious of all, developing and living within your own parameters of understanding, curiosity, and practicality.  Although you like to think of yourself as one who listens to a multitude of points of view,tries to understand the sympathy of scattered and diverse visions, the actual percentage of your adherence to such standards is bare in its minimalism.

Reading, that universal goal among literate and scholarly cultures, can be addictive, pulling the individual reader deeper within the framework of self to the point where the self becomes absent from discussions, literally too preoccupied to venture out for new experience, information, and point of view.  You could, in fact, become trapped within the limitations of your own reading preferences, which may not include materials chosen for their antagonism to your own visions, interests, and hopes.

Imagine being trapped inside your own imagination, subject to the rigorous suspicions of your own doubts and cynicism.  Imagine your own vision is the only vision available to you.

The writer and artist strive to spend time within their inner "studio," by feel the requirement to come out from time to time, checking in with the reality outside.  Whenever a person slams the door behind, so that the spring lock clicks into place, that person has entered the locked ward area, where bigotry, hatred, and various afflictions known as various insanities abide.

Process

Which is worse, the fear of not having anything to say or the fear that what you had to say was somehow lacking either depth or significance, possibly even nuance?

It is not so much that a writer ought to at any given moment have an opinion or idea or even response that drives the fear as it is the fear that opinion and design and ideation and making connections are processes that must be exercised with regularity lest you fall out of the habit of using the appropriate muscles and they atrophy.

A resident fear in so many of these notations has you browsing them for hints and ideas that will inform your writing, take you off on a flight of ideation and invention that will energize and focus you, then discover the reading of them has the opposite feeling, the bald wondering how you could have sounded so ineffective, passive, unconvincing even to yourself.

During such times, the thing you often miss is the awareness some slapdash application has given you not to make that mistake again, where- and whenever you compose, but you the pleasure comes orbiting around when you find yourself composing something, a letter, a memo, a story, during which you find yourself making some mistake you decry or lapsing into some trope you've come to dislike.

It devolves into a sentence-by-sentence approach to your use of the language.  There is at this stage of your life a fifty percent probability that you will, when you re-consult something written earlier believe it to have held up, to at least maintain an acceptable level of interest.  Sentences and paragraphs are your version of the artist's sketches, the musician's running of scales or the play at harmonic inventions.  You are thus pleased to discover yourself having failed with such profundity at some description or advancement of what you supposed is logic so that you can adjust the gaffe, then use it again soon with panache.

In order to learn from your mistakes and misconstructions, you need to produce memorable mistakes and constructions in the first place.  Always willing to learn.  Always willing to fail.  Always willing to experiment.  After these years, it is still a tingle of fun and mischief: you are the young boy, his pockets filled with note pads, the stubs of Dixon Ticonderoga pencils, and a half packet of licorice cigarettes, waiting, waiting for the time when you will begin setting things down on the page. much as the man you are waits for their arrival, lest you spend all your time staring at the blank page or the computer screen, which is not a sensible process for you at all.

Hooked

Some readers, quite serious in their affections and afflictions for reading, are able to recall favorite plots, which is to say organized patterns of agenda and incident, from stories they read years ago.  Even though you've been reviewing books for various publications for the better part of forty years, you are least able to remember the plot of a given story unless it is something as focused, say, as Jack London's "To Build a Fire," or Poe's "A Cask of Amontillado."

This inability might be one reason why you are not the plotter you'd hoped to become; on the other hand this might be why your stories are inclined to be more a matter of circumstance than the design that inheres in plot.  What you appear to be telling yourself here is that there is small wonder the tool of plotting is so low on your personal set of preferences.  As the United States Supreme Court Associate Justice said in reference to pornography, he cannot describe it but he knows it when he sees it, you say in relationship to plot.  You do understand the need for the quest or the discovery, the sudden awareness of an unauthorized corpse, the cute meeting between heroine and Mr. Right, the bandits who threaten the peaceful farmers, etc.  You've had actual experience editing some tolerable plotters.

Simply put, plot does not rank high for you.

In addition to such things as character, voice, dialogue, you are more taken by the hooker, the beginning presentation of intrigue that serves as the metaphor for the famous personality serving as an official greeter in a gaming casino or up-market restaurant.  An engaging hooker is your preference, your magnet for getting you into the swirl and eddy of story.  Think of it this way:  You are invited to a party or gathering with the full awareness that you will know no one else there except the host.  Accepting the invitation means you will at some point find yourself in an unfamiliar surrounding, struggling to remember the names of strangers to whom you have been introduced, struggling with even more might to think of some gambit with which to enter a conversation.

The hooker takes you past all of that in story; the host should and often does do that in social life.  The hooker causes you to care, overcoming distractions and timidity.  You are in, signed on, bound to a journey that will take you somewhere strange, unanticipated, perhaps even uncomfortable. But you will not care.  Not any longer.  You are neither argued aboard or complaining about the service; you are in.

This Is Where I Came in

By the time you met him, several million copies of his books had sold.  Since that time, hundreds of millions of copies of his books have sold.  A prolific author as well as a legendary best-seller, he has by your reckoning ninety novels and numerous collections of short stories, at least ten.  The margin of error in your figures is at the low end of the curve, let's say + or - one percent.  His death in 1980, yet additional hundreds of millions of copies of his books have been purchased.

He was by any account a story teller as opposed to a stylist who had a way with story; his narratives had shape rather than elegance of structure.  No one you know of has ever listed him in any kind of stylistic elegance hierarchy, no one you know has ever quoted a line of Louis L'Amour dialogue nor recalled a particular scene.  Even the earlier analog of Louis L'Amour, that dentist-turned frontier-writer, Zane Grey, dead since 1939, is more often quoted or cited for some particular scene.  Of the two writers,  L'Amour held the edge in elegance, although that is not saying much.

L'Amour knew story, understood it, in his way seemed to have treated it in a manner suggesting the stock trope of many frontier and country novels, the horse breaker, man or woman who understood and were able to convince wild horses to accept the civilization of bridle, saddle, and rider.

Your paycheck at the time of meeting L'Amour was from Dell, the massmarket paperback imprint of the Delacorte family.  In New York, when you'd call in at 750 Third Avenue, you'd hear the receptionist say, "Dial, Dell, Delacorte," although the receptionist would not miss a beat if you asked to speak to someone in the Yearling or young reader segment of the empire.  L'Amour drew enormous royalty checks from the most significant rival of Dell, Bantam Books.

Your mission was to convince L'Amour to leave Bantam for Dell.  Although you were not authorized to offer terms such as advances or royalty percentages, you were aware of the enormity of the coup, were you able to bring this great treasure to Dell.  In practical terms, had the plan worked, you'd have earned yourself four or five years of remarkable influence in massmarket publishing.  Should your balance sheet radiate health after those years, your editorial future could have extended your time spent in the part of the United States then believed to be the hub of American book publishing.

You had brought about the meeting by calling in favors from a few friends, and with a pitch you thought might at least cause L'Amour to consider.  Any given paperback title of an Agatha Christie mystery had appeared already as a Dell edition and a Bantam edition.  You even had one title--thanks to your passion for browsing used book stores--that had started Dell, gone to Bantam, then returned to Dell.  Surely, your proposed argument went, Louis L'Amour readers were even more likely to collect L'Amour titles than Christie fans were to care one galloping hoot who'd published her work.

But you never got beyond the first sentence of your pitch because Mr. L'Amour, among other things, was a man of considerable loyalty.  What was then accomplished at that up-scale Italian restaurant on the Sunset Strip was a leisurely lunch of shop talk, talk about writing and books and history that Mr. L'Amour without doubt forgot in its entirety, but which has remained with you to this day for the bit of information he set forth, assuming you already knew it.  You may well have known it, but you could not have articulated it as well as he did.  "You've served your time as an editor,"  this amiable man noted as fact.  "I'm sure you've had any number of opportunities to observe that most writers begin their story too soon--even before there is story."

With judicious eclat, you broke a breadstick, then dipped it into some olive oil and balsamic vinegar.  "Every editor goes through that,"  you managed to say with some aplomb because you were already floating.  This casual assumption had lift-off force for you; you were flying.  You wanted to get out of that restaurant and back to your red Olivetti portable because this taken-for-granted truth for L'Amour was pure, vivid revelation, and what do you do with revelation but put it into a story, several stories, all stories.

The closest you ever came to meeting Graham Greene was when you were stopped at a traffic light in Beverly Hills and he, lurching in slight tipsiness with the splendid actor, Trevor Howard, crossed in front of you.  This meeting was some time after your meeting with L'Amour.  You'd found a quotation from Graham Greene in his novel, The End of the Affair:  "A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead."

You were tempted to roll down your window, thereupon to call forth, "Mr. Greene, I agree with you." And for emphasis, you'd even throw in the unnecessary adverb, "completely."  But he would have no idea what in the world you were talking about.

Wherever we are--yes, even in Beverly Hills--we make sense to ourself, often using a rib or two from another person, another thing, another work.  The sense is our property, to repress, squander, yes, even to write about--if we choose.  We run the risk of our sources and our readers not having the faintest inkling of what we mean unless we supply some context.  And even then, there is no guarantee they will care.  Enlightenment or its second cousin, understanding, is something we strive to achieve, but in an analogy with the enormous information about whales and whaling in Moby-Dick, the reader may well decide to pass on the offert desert.

Certain Restrictions Apply

  Few things are as unsettling as certainty.

  For a long time, when you were younger, you were certain about the world around you, certain you had powers to change or fix things or that those you knew had those powers.  In any case, you were certain they could be fixed.  

Then you reached a stage where certainty was lost, but you thought it was innocence.  There were more things at the time you were certain about than you were innocent of, thus the irony of you mistaking the one for the other.

  Your father, who was neither a cruel man nor notable for being not generous, once played a prank on you that he spent some considerable time trying to atone for.  The prank was taking you to the convex window of a jewelry shop in Beverly Hills, then telling you to reach into the display for one of the wristwatches on display.  

You were innocent of experience with concavities and convexities, causing you to take your father at his word.  Bingo, lost innocence.  Frustration,  Infantile rage at the betrayal if the certainty afforded you by a faulty vision of reality.  Although the event still rankles, it is in memory of the frustration that you experience emotion rather than emotion against your father.  An enduring series of baseball games, time spent talking, playing, or merely spending time together brought you back to the certainty that he loved you and you returned the depth of regard.

  Now that you are well along toward the outer reaches of middle-age, you have had experiences coping with uncertainty and with certainty.  Of the two,you vastly prefer uncertainty because there is a kind of comfort in the awareness that there are few things of which you are certain, in simple measure because things are so mutable, because in fact you are mutable.  

There is a kind of responsibility inherent in certainty that you are no longer willing to accept as your due.  Certainty breeds pomposity while uncertainty leads you to audacity, the audacity of knowing you are either going to have to look "it" up or find someone to explain "it" to you, possibly both.

  Uncertainty surrounds you with the drama of possible knowledge and understanding or the deep, existential darkness of not knowing and wondering if you will ever come upon a solution.  To be certain deprives you of some of life's most inspirational moments, times when, out of the creative despair of artistry, you compose something you hope will stand some test of time with you and perhaps even for the rest of humanity.  

A writer who strides into story with certainty is bound to come against the brick wall of formula.  A writer who is certain of gloom and despair is taking certainty off on another tangent of pomposity, a vehicle that will surely deposit him in the same, overcrowded parking lot of vehicles each looking pretty much like the other.

The Montecito Transaction

        You are suspicious of titles with names in them, in significant degree because they remind you of writers whose work is more a construction than a story, a string-like mesh of enough elements, tucked and folded, and woven to cause a pattern to appear.  The Eiger Sanction.  The Bourne Identity.  The Ambler Warning.

     You didn't mind A Coffin for Dimitrios,(difficult yet to mind anything written by Eric Ambler) which in probability influenced these others.  Nor do you mind the suggestion that The Bourne Identity remains one of the most famous--read copies sold--spy novels; you do not read such fiction to dissect formula but rather for the kind of pleasure that should fit under the category of travel writing because of the way it invariably takes you someplace you had not expected to go.

     This becomes prologue to a title that presented itself to you during the course of an email you wrote to an old chum who, hot having heard from you for a considerable time, had left a phone message for you, wondering if you were all right and would you contact your old pal, Digby.

     More of the prologue:  Until recently, and since 1976, you have lived in Montecito, a nine-plus square-mile community just west of Santa Barbara, arguably one of the wealthiest areas in the state.  A literal translation of its Spanish name is Little Mountain.  One famed resident was a classmate of yours at UCLA,another still teaches at a university where you once taught, yet another is not someone you know on a personal basis, rather by reputation for the vigor and fervid nature of his political opinions.  In recent months, Montecito has noted with a mixture of pride and alarm the residence of the former wife of a former vice-president of the United States.

     Montecito also publishes a weekly newspaper for which you have been the principal book reviewer since 2005; it is a newspaper referred to by some as "that fascist rag," because of the often expressed political views of its principals,although their views are nothing resembling fascist.  They are instead libertarian, which is more endearing in some of its attitudes.

     The title you unintentionally invented was The Montecito Transaction, thus the potential for suspecting you of willful neglect of your own standards by coining it.  You will have to see; it is still spinning about, a pinball not quite sure which hole it will allow itself to sink into.  Montecito is a hive of, among other things, illegal rentals, some extended to individuals under the most altruistic of circumstances, others yet under the more venal.  Montecito is a place of excess and of entitlement to the point of outright whimsy as in the case of a Rolls-Royce and Bentley, each vying for the same parking space at the Von's Market (called Von's of the Stars by locals) inflicting considerable damage each upon the other.  "I naturally assumed,"  the owner of the RR said after the fact, "that you would cede the privilege to me because mine is the more expensive car."

     There are large numbers of pleasant individuals resident in Montecito, many who have gone out of their way to be affable, cordial, even friendly toward you; they are not being overlooked in this brief visit to this remarkable enclave any more than your obvious edge toward the community has been allowed to make its way into these vagrant paragraphs.  Yet there is a visible daily exchange of Montecito Transactions taking place in the various stores, restaurants, banks, even the library (where one outraged resident was heard by you to say, "You'll have to talk to my lawyer about that." in reference to a twenty-three-dollar overdue book fee) and not to forget the Y, where, in the hot tub you heard teen-age girls complaining that they were limited to one spa manicure per month.

     Montecito Transactions may morph into something stand-alone, a euphemism for some form of betrayal or of riding a sense of entitlement to some form of social impasse if not outright collision.  It may come to nothing more than the reason you no longer hold the Saturday writing workshop in the Community Room of the Montecito Library (which has over the years you have rented said room a tendency to double book); half way through the ultimate Saturday, we were beset by a group who were advocates or perhaps even acolytes of a particular form of yoga, demanding we vacate the premises so that they could begin their session.  You nodded with what you felt was sympathy before telling the yoga leader that you had booked the room and paid for it.  She tried to trump you by claiming also to have paid for the room, then, when she saw that was not going to get her anywhere, maintained that she had booked the room earlier than you.  When that gambit failed, she pulled out her last hope.  Looking at your motley group of writers, she announced, "I surely paid more than you did."

     Montecito Transaction.  Pictures at eleven.