The Observer

Observation has been a large part of your life for as long as you can recall.  Well before the notion of spending your life trying to acquire the skills that would make you a writer, you were advised to watch various individuals and their mastery of such things as how to hold a fork, how to tie your shoes, how to comb your hair with its riot of cowlicks.  

You had an ensemble cast of your parents' friends' children to observe and dislike because of their skills and techniques.  There was some solace in learning from some of your cousins that they were tasked with observing you, but for the longest time, you were made aware with some regularity of a notable and admirable trait of one or more contemporaries of yours.  From such background propaganda comes a useful profile of persons to avoid or associate with.

Last Saturday evening, while you were settling in to watch the performance of a play, some of your past came back to haunt you.  The man sitting directly in front of you settled a long, narrow, spiral-bound-at-the-top notebook on his knee.  From years of experience, you knew this was a reporter's notebook.  With scant logic, you understood this man would be taking notes for the review of the play he would right.

You couldn't help observing the man, wondering each time he wrote something if you and he had experienced the same or different observations.  The only thing you could do was wait until the review appeared.

Of course you also began entertaining notions of the man not being a reviewer at all, instead taking notes for another project altogether.  And yes, this thought caused you to consider tapping the man on the shoulder to ask if he'd caught a particular nuance you'd seen.  Additional of course; this was a warning to you that, once again, you were being distracted by your own imagination, all because you were observing yourself in the act of observing someone else.

At about the time you began making your own notebooks, you began carrying them about in case you had notes to make from something you'd witnessed or observed.  The operant word here is observed.  When you were at this starting-out time in your career of observation, you were probably invisible.  Who would notice a small boy unless he were doing something noteworthy? 

To put the matter in another perspective, What would a small boy have to do to in order to be noticed?  You were frequently unnoticed when standing at the serving counter of the delicatessen on Wilshire you were sent to for such items as "A loaf of rye, sliced, please."  Sometimes, in the frustration of being passed over for adults, you'd raise your voice.  "A roaf of lye, please."  This brought immediate embarrassment and the felt need to move to another area of the counter for a fresh start.

More likely than not, if anyone questioned what it was you were observing, it would be your mother.  In retrospect, you can read her curiosity at your behavior as wondering if you were displaying any learning or development issues.  

Given your reading habits and the additional factor of your mother liking you to read things to her when she was ironing or cooking, your retrospective take was secure knowledge she did not think you slow or not engaged with the contents of whatever printed page.  Different, but not slow.  You have recollections of her saying in a tone uncluttered with disapproval, "You are a very moody boy."  And your reply was bound to be "Not moody, observant."  Which led to one of your favorite conversations with your mother, beginning, "What are you observing?"

You were not yet at the place where you could tell her you were observing yourself in the act of observing.  Nor could you speak to the embarrassment of being caught with a notebook and pencil at the ready, yet with nothing to put in it.  Thus began a series of what you would later learn were improvisations, phenomena made up in haste.

With the passing of time, you'd begun to read about writers whose work was thought to be based on their ability to observe.  "X grew up on a farm, thus his ability to draw convincing portraits of animals."  "Y's mother raised show Collies, thus her ability to portray a plausible portrait of canine behavior."  At the time, your parents had a pleasant enough dog, a Pekingese, fobbed off on them by your mother's younger brother.  You spent time observing that dog, but could never seem to put your observations to any use, thus your decision not to write about animals unless it was necessary.

For what seemed like a required slice of your early life, you made a Herculean effort to observe and keep up with the statistical implications of sports events, your closets filled with pitch-by-pitch accounts of Pacific Coast League baseball games, of the outcomes of horse races at the major California race tracks, of USC and UCLA football games, and to the exploits of the Dodgers before they came to Los Angeles.

You observed the Dodgers when they first arrived, seeing in person the men who were only statistics in your mind, looking at the ugliness of the right field fence erected in the Coliseum before the Dodgers moved to their new permanent home.

This effort to observe sports did not erode, it seems to have stopped completely one day, when you sat in a friend's home, watching the televised football game played by a group of individuals who were well on their way to becoming multimillionaires.  Some inner voice--you aren't sure which because there are so many--told you in so many words that you would rather participate than be a passive observer.

"Where are you going?" your friend called out after you.  "There's the whole second half to watch."

You were tempted to quote the last line from Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man:  “Welcome, O life! I go forth to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”  It was a last line you knew well, having thought of its implications.  At the time, such an opportunity would have suited you.  Instead, you thanked your friend and said you were going home to create some Reality of your own.

Through a Glass Darkly

The Interview has remained one of your favorite sources of gaining information.  Whether the venue is in print media such as newspapers, journals, on-line sites, or the yet more visual televised or in-person, you find yourself applying many of the standards to the interview you'd apply to a work of art or, for that matter, a reputable reference guide.

Given you interest in creating characters and categorizing those you read in fiction or see in dramatic presentations, the Interview has also helped you with direct and indirect contributions to your own writing.  

Over the years, you've conducted interviews for newspapers and magazines,  in which your subjects have been ballerinas, the conductor of a symphony orchestra, a politician, a famed basketball coach,several mystery writers, the actor Lily Tomlin;  a cosmetic plastic surgeon, and the owner of a detective agency.

You also have experience as a moderator of panel discussion, which is in effect interviewing four or five individuals at the same time, or, to extend the metaphor, juggling a number of objects without dropping any of them.  The key in all these activities is to remember the importance of the individual being interviewed rather than using the opportunity to lecture from the equivalent of a script based on your views,

To complete the picture, you've been interviewed numerous times for newspapers, live and filmed television, wherein your opinions or activities were the reason for you being interviewed.  This seems more obvious than it really is; there have been times when you have seen the subject become so determined to control the conversation that the Interview turned into a shouting match.  

One Interviewer of your acquaintance had to give up a regular job because her reputation of a conversation hog caught up with her and worthwhile subjects for being interviewed began to refuse invitations to appear on her program.

With those details and standards established, you have undertaken what is arguably the most difficult interview you've ever had to conduct.  Your subject here is many things, proverbial being one attribution often given it.  The reference is to the glass of water, hereinafter referred to as GW, who is often introduced with the rhetorical question, "Is it half empty or half full?"

YOU:  Good evening.  Thank you for taking the time to join us.  Will you begin by telling us a little about yourself--things you think might be of interest.

GW: I am a twelve-ounce, crystal based drinking glass with fluted sides, a half-inch bottom for ballast and lower center of gravity.  

YOU:  Is there anything in your appearance that particularly pleases you?

GW:  Thank you for asking that.  Glasses do have vanity.  I am proud of my gradual taper and the elegance of my fluted sides, which by no means are all about vanity.  They allow someone to get a secure grip on me.

YOU:  Any secrets you'd like to share?

GW:  When I'm filled with iced tea, I sweat.  The fluted sides allow me to sweat with confidence.

YOU:  Okay, let's get right into it.  I see you have some water.

GW:  Yes.  San Pelegrino.  Just a tad of carbonation.

YOU:  Can you tell us if you're half full or--

GW:  I knew it.  

YOU:  Knew?

GW:I knew you'd ask that.  Probably the only reason you brought me here in the first place.  Let me turn the tables on you.  You read the subtext in that questions of yours, right?  You want to know if I'm a pessimist, an optimist, or a middle-of-the-roader.  

YOU:  People want to know.

GW:  People.  You can't wait to categorize me.  Then, depending on my answer, all glasses of water will be pessimists, optimists, or declines-to-state.  But what about you?  Does anyone ever ask you if you're half-full or half-empty?  And don't give me that crap about objectivity or science.  What difference does it make how much or how little water is in the glass?  Is that all you guys can think of?  You ever wonder how I got to be a glass in the first place?  And like, am I recycled or first time out?  Am I part of a set?  And what about, do I like being hand washed or machine washed, or how do I feel about being refilled?  How about, What was the most remarkable thing I was filled with, and did it in any way change my life?  You guys.  You think I'm like some wine glass, people dip their finger in the wine, then use the moisture to run around the rim and get a hum.  Big deal, humming wine glasses.  I would like it if, for once, you'd look at me as what I am, one of the more remarkable utensils in the world.  You got any idea what people were drinking out of before glass came along?  You ever hear anyone wonder of a pewter beer stein or a pottery mug was half-empty or half-full?  Some of my relatives, they go back to the freaking Stone Age.  You ever think about things like that?  

YOU:  I'll have to get back to you on this.

Measure for Measure. No, Wait; That's Been Taken

Because you did not appear to inherit your parents' traits of patience or wait-and-see attitudes, you not only became impatient regarding your height, you flat out did something about keeping a record.  "What," your mother asked you one morning in a tone suggesting confrontation rather than mere curiosity, "are these marks on the wall next to the closet?"

"My progress,"  you said.

"What kind of progress?"

"Growing progress."

"Well, you don't seem to have progressed much, have you?  But if you happen to be worried, the men in your father's side of the family are all over six feet, and I don't think you'd call either of my brothers short."

All true.  But at the point you were making pencil markings to track any potential growth you might have achieved without noticing it, the tendency among your schoolyard associates was to call you Shorty.  Your first driver's license listed your height at five feet, six inches.  In a move of sympathy, your sister tried to ease your concerns with the information that there were more men  under your height than those taller.

In this and so many other ways, your parents were right; while you were still in high school, your nickname underwent the change from shorty to the Yiddish expression meaning long noodle--lange lux. (Pronounced "lang-e lucksh."

At about the same time as you were undergoing your name change, you were busy in your attempts to achieve the status of being well read.  Such was your vanity on that point that your idealized vision of yourself was to have the judgment of being well read as apparent as, well, there is no gainsaying it, lange lux.

This time around, it was not so much your parents who got you past this incipient Narcism as it was your first semester after high school  You were better able to cope with this than you were about your height.  Since the day you stood deep in the bowels of the Lawrence Clark Powell Library at UCLA, looking about you, and deciding you would never be as well-read as you would like, things have gone a great deal easier for you. For one of those "things," admitting this kind of defeat was your way of waving good bye to Narcism; it no longer mattered if people were impressed with the quantity of your reading or lack thereof.

Another "thing" was the awareness that you did not have to read a thing you did not like, provided you took the time to articulate to yourself why you were bailing on a particular title. But most significant was the awareness that books gave you a more accurate metric by which to measure the most difficult to define of all growth plateaus, the one called "How Things Are Going."

When the late, lamented Irwin Blacker, founder of the graduate-level program at which you taught for thirty-four years at USC took you on, he said or asked, asked or said, "You will of course want to use E.M.Forester's Aspects of the Novel as your text"  Or perhaps ?  And you said, "Of course."  Difficult to get the exact total of novels you'd written at that point.  Not difficult to say you'd never heard of Aspects of the Novel.  By the end of the day, you had heard of it.  And as you began to read it, you wished you'd long since heard of it.

There is no telling how many times you've consulted Aspects of the Novel or, indeed, had to replace your present copy because you'd loaned it to a student without noting which student, a small matter overall because even wealthy students do not have enough money for books.  You can--and do--say how significant a voice Aspects continues to be as you forge your own novel-writing bill of particulars.  

You will doubtless read it again, discovering some "aspect" you'd missed all these years, because for you, the conversion from knowledge to wisdom comes from being the late bloomer, the one who sees much--but by no means all--of his prior naivete fall away in a blast of insight.

Your old pal and University chum, Larry Swindell, for whom you reviewed books when he was at the Inquirer in Philadelphia, and the Star-Telegram in Ft. Worth-Dallas, telephoned to ask if he might send you the new Maxwell collection.  You did not know at the time what the "new Maxwell collection" was, much less who Maxwell was. Now you know it to have been Billie Dyer; you also know Maxwell to have been the fiction editor for The New Yorker, and author of a stunning array of novels, short stories, essays, and autobiography.  You were shrewd enough to have told SwindellBeen , "Thank you for thinking of me with this," for it was well worth the thanks to gain sudden introduction to a man who had filtered the works of Vladimir Nabokov, Eudora Welty, Mavis Gallant, John Cheever, Frank O'Hara, John O'Hara, Shirley Hazard, and John Updike into the pages of his journal and into the subsequent pages of most lasting anthologies.

These two books stand out as the beginning of the revelation; the more you reread significant works over the years, the more you understand them and their place in the world and your years.  You can measure that.

Pawing the Ground in Search of Plots

For the longest time, you believed the way to write a story of any length, but particularly of novel length, was to begin with a detailed outline.  You believed this to be so because one of the early books designed to show how to write stories said, in unequivocal terms, that an outline was a part of the process.

Your mother, an excellent cook and superb baker, impressed on you through example the value of process, in her case the process of recipe.  You were left to draw the naive conclusion you did.

This belief on your part demonstrated a number of things about you in addition to the one at the top of the pyramid, your naivete. Here was abundant proof that you were an outlaw, because you persisted in writing stories that had not been outlined.  

The thing that had a simultaneous excitement and fear for you was the fact that the results were unlike anything you were reading.  This caused you to waver between feeling original and, in effect, like one of your mother's cakes with some primary ingredient gone missing.  

Interesting to note how that polarity exists today with the things you write.  Sometimes each feeling washes over you like a wave.  How enjoyable it was when the excitement came, drawing for a time the awareness that you didn't outline.

Your belief then--as well as now--convinces you that knowing the outcome of a story before you even began writing it was the equivalent of a one-way ticket to boredom.  Each time you wrote a story without first constructing an outline, you told yourself in a stage whisper, "We'll let this be our little secret."

Your approach couldn't have been much of a secret.  Anyone reading one of your early stories would know you were improvising, constructing as you went along.  However satisfied you were with the stories you were producing, it was no secret that you couldn't write a novel, not only because you hadn't yet done so, but because you couldn't bring yourself to outline one.

One more burden you carried about was the knowledge held deep within that you were lacking any ability to plot.  The more you sought advice in books, journals, and instructors, the more you encountered direct references to the need for a story to have a plot.  To make matters worse, a great many stories you read had tangible plots you could mark on their pages with colored pencils.

The you of now has had, when he thinks of it, covered a great deal of ground in search of discovering how to get by without outlines for stories, and what ingredients will, if added early enough, will produce not merely a plot but a freaking story arc.


Much of this ground relates to the trust of outcomes even before they have arrived.  Some of this covered ground means to not settle for quick fix recipes, and to learn to live the times when outcomes show no sign whatever of arriving.

Burn Ratio: Number of Drafts Burned before Story Comes Forth

When the technology for capturing visual images for story and documentary presentations changed from film to digital, a notable metric was lost in the transition.  Good riddance, in a way, but not so fast for relevance to writers, actors, or, for that matter, any performance artist.

Some film directors were notorious for running over budget, to the immense displeasure of the producers and backers.  The cost of film was as much a factor for film makers as the cost of paper for publishers.  

True, the director of a well-reviewed and well-attended film could get away with budgetary overrun.  Of equal truth, when a five- or six-hundred-page book earned back its start-up costs in the first twelve or eighteen months of its life, the acquisitions editor could expect a bonus.

When film was the medium for capturing the story or documentary, the basic dramatic unit was the scene.  Sound equipment recorded scenes on a frame-by-frame basis, the most common frame size at thirty-five millimeters. In the rare possibility of an entire film being completed in first takes, the cost of raw film and its ultimate processing would be significantly less that a film where some scenes required upward of twenty takes in order to merit the director's and actors' satisfaction.  

Producers began using the term "burn ratio" to categorize a director's performance on a financial basis.  A director who needed a number of shots for a scene was thought to have a high or unhealthy burn ratio.  Such a director had better produce a final product that earned out if said director expected to be assigned more work.  

A director with a high burn ration, good reviews, and a healthy audience balance sheet was seldom seen in the unemployment lines.  As a general rule, a director with a low burn rate was in a stronger position for new assignments and pay scales.

Back in the days where manuscripts were handwritten and often filled line-outs and flurries of corrections, little thought was given to presentation; the standard relied on legibility. The shift in technology to the typewritten manuscript (first typewritten manuscript was Huckleberry Finn) focused considerable attention on manuscript preparation. 

You, being an innovative rather than speedy typist and, in the bargain, a poor speller, developed the plan of at least one more-or-less spontaneous draft, which you would then correct by hand for content, consistency of use, and spelling.  Then onto a slow, deliberate draft, which was as close to accurate as you could manage.  

Under those circumstances, the floor near your desk was often a sea of balled-up pages, torn from the typewriter in some fit of dudgeon over one or more aspects leading to the way the story was working, responses to your inner editor (You call that a story?), or the arrival of some new insight, transforming the work at hand to a new, conceptual landscape.

There was something of immense satisfaction and fun to be had in ripping a sheet of paper from a typewriter, balling it into a wad, then dispatching it toward the waste basket, already filled to the brim with previous missiles.  This physical activity and the clutter added to the romance of writing.  

Never mind the waste of paper.  If you did mind the waste, you could try your hand at doing at least the first draft with a fountain pen, then typing out a later draft on yellow foolscap, then moving on to the manuscript paper you knew your stories deserved, Eaton's "Corrasible" bond, a rag-content paper that made erasures of typing error close to easy.

The switch in technology from typewriter to computer has removed some of the physicality of writing.  Entire pages and drafts may now be dispatched with the tap of a delete key.   Although many of the composition frustrations remain the same as those back in the days of paper, you feel distanced from your personal burn ratio, which is in fact the number of drafts necessary to get a story or essay or review to your liking.   

Watching a friend act tonight in a play, you were made aware of the efforts of preparation for any significant performance, and how easy it is to forget about the practice, hard work, mountain goat leaps of improvisation, and the energy of blind luck necessary to mount a specific work.  Even with all the preparation, the performance might not resonate with that tingle of excitement and emotional resonance we expect from art.

How easy it has become to think all successful art was an act of immediate spontaneity, lacking in plan, countless effort, countless wadded-up balls of paper adjacent the wastebasket.

How easy it is to think of all the works that turn you on, regardless of their genre, being spun off in a matter of moments or, worst case, a day or two.  And as a consequence of such thoughts, we see the gap between those with talent and those more like--ourself.

Somewhere, you read the statement, "Only work removes the traces of work."  Those words are a considerable relief to you.  They make it possible for you to press on in the spirit of enjoyment rather than the constraining squeeze of desperation.  A basic formula for story is, an interesting character struggles against great odds to achieve a goal she or he thinks worthwhile.  Those words remind you the project is nothing without two factors, the immediate potential of failure and the even more immediate potential for discovering the fun in what you're doing.

Your burn ratio is high, your chances for failure extreme.  Each time you see a volunteer flower, clinging to life with a bright smile in some interstice of sidewalk slab, you stop for a moment, to salute it and.or take its picture.

Achilles Heel, Meet Ahab's Heel

In your exquisite rush to grow up,you resorted to what many a young man and woman of your sensitivities did; you carted home armsful of books.  Your ambitious plan was far from original, but  the numerous venues of your youth did not seem at the time to be ripe with opportunities for experience. 

Persons your age in novels seemed to do a good deal better than you.  They were plunged into greater misfortunes, historical causes, and life-changing adventures. Some of your boyhood favorites were being asked to step up, to take command, to deliver messages, to put on disguises in order to sneak through enemy lines.

True enough, your father took you aside at one point to tell you that you were the man of the house before he went east on what seemed a remarkable project.  For some months, your dwelling was filled with mannequins and a wide variety of interchangeable heads for these mannequins.

While being delegated man of the house did mean you got to carry his Waltham pocket watch, you got no noticeable raise in status pay grade from your mother or sister, nobody asked you to deliver messages, nor creep through enemy lines.  

The notes and picture postcards your father sent you from remote parts of New England and New York, while cheery and optimistic, mentioned the mannequins and heads less and less, leaving you time to contemplate the mystery of their future, then to prepare you for other remarkable turns in your father's ventures, including a scientific plan to determine outcome in speed contests among thoroughbred race horses.

While you were being turned on the lathe of experience, you turned to reading the experiences of others, doing your best to work within the causes and times of characters.  At the time you were aware of how literal-minded you were.  At the same time, you were aware of how reading an ever widening selection of adventure stories was in a real sense Shanghai-ing you from your literal mindedness.

Somewhere in this process, you became immersed in the reading of myths and heroes' tales, the phrase "Achilles' heel," scurrying into your imagination to the point where, one afternoon, when your father noticed you limping, he became convinced you'd outgrown a pair of shoes.  

You assured him your shoes were fine.  Your explanation:  You'd heard the best way to judge a man was to walk a mile in his shoes.  Since Achilles was long gone, you were left wondering what it was like to be Achilles, and would he, with that heel of his, have to walk in a different manner.  That night at dinner, your father told your mother, "The acorn does not fall far from the oak."  At the time, you took that literally, but you knew it meant something else as well.

Achilles was one of your earliest introductions to flawed characters, to such an extent that you were sure to mention him in literature classes, where the subject of the flawed hero and the anti-hero came up for discussion.

You knew you were fast leaving literal-mindedness behind you when you began speaking up for the concept of the anti-hero, with whom, as a general rule, you had no trouble identifying with, following such men and women into the darker sides of experience.  You could do so with complete comfort, thanks to your belief that most anti-heroes were seeking meaningful--your term--redemption rather then storybook redemption.  By then, you'd moved from Achilles to Gatsby as an example.  In your vision, Gatsby was at once an anti-hero because of the way he'd amassed his wealth, and a flawed hero because of his naive belief that Daisy's love would lead to a meaningful redemption.

And now, to put this into yet another perspective, you have begun to wonder about the outcome and dynamics of giving a darker character, say Ahab, arguably not a hero, some Achilles heel of empathy or generosity to temper his egregious sense of Free Will run amok.  You are beginning to like the sound of it.  The Ahab's heel.

Hearing Voices

Over the course of your life, wisdom, information, insights, and, sad to say, propaganda, have come rushing at you in a tsunami  of words.  Through these words and the voices in which they were spoken or written, you were able to patch together the semblance of an education.

Voice was important all the while, reaching the point about midway through your teaching activities at USC where you recognized voice to be your candidate for the single most important thing about communication in general and writing in particular.

For the longest time, the predominant voices you heard were from the middle middle and upper middle classes, reflecting family background and your father's career achievements.  Although you were born into the beginnings of what is still called The Great Depression and you arrived at about the time the family fortunes were in decline, you were for the most part hearing middle class voices when you were out in the world.

Words, information, real and invalid;  and lore beyond middle class came, as most such things come, from schoolyard and your then equivalent of independent studies.  Two words you knew enough not to say at home were Spanish.  Even though you did not grasp the full implications for some considerable time, you treasured them for their otherness and their foreignness, knowing you wished to learn other such words in Spanish and other languages.

There you are then, eight or nine, asking two gardeners who cared for properties on your block if they would give you more such words as pinche and carbon.  To their credit, Luis and Arturo did not laugh you away; they treated you with gravity, clearly concerned about your readiness to be initiated to such esoterica.

When Luis asked if you truly understood what pinche meant, you told the truth so far as you knew it.  "It has something to do with fuck."


"And you understand what that means?"

Only that it was not a word to be used at home or, thanks to the person you learned it from, girls.  "Of course."

"Much wisdom for a young fellow,"  Luis said.

You had about the same results with carbon.  "A fellow of-- of--"

"Are you sure you want to be the one who puts these things on him?"  Arturo asked.

"--a fellow with no family."

"You mean orphan?"

"No."

"Then what?"

More than likely, Luis and Arturo were more considerate of you than you realized at the time.  They left you with two new words of Spanish, cucaracha and tonto, allowing you to think they were naughty and, thus influencing forever after your reaction to the Lone Ranger.  Cockroach and crazy.  Pretty good for starters.   

Not long after, by pestering a mailman, you gained entrance to the slang words of drug use, thanks to a popular song of the time, "Kicking the Gong Around."  Melvin, the mailman, told you, "See here now.  The gong is something like a bell, true enough, but you see some folks, theys like to smoke a pipe.  Not like you daddy, you know, but filled with opium.  It make them feel something fine, all right."

"So kicking the gong--"

"You see, little man.  I think you see."

Not only did you see, you were able to connect.  When you heard Hoagy Carmichael singing a song about "a very unfortunate colored man, who got 'rested down in old Hong Kong/ He got twenty years privilege taken away from him, when he kicked old Buddha's gong," you knew what was up and why, thanks to a line in the song, "Each time I try, sweet opium won't let me fly away."

And of course you'd come to be aware of a song, "La Cucuracha,"  in which someone had smoked so much marijuana, he was unable to walk.

This was kinderspeil, German for child's play, because you not only had a better idea of what fuck meant, you also had learned how to say it in German.    But this was child's play for another reason, more related to actual child's play, but to a stunning awareness of voice and some of its implications.

"'Tom!'

"No answer.

"'Tom!'

"No answer.

"'What's gone with that boy, I wonder?'  YOU, Tom!'"

You were yanked right out of your middle class bubble with its few working class exceptions from maids, tradespersons in and about your neighborhood, Mr. Pope, the janitor at your grammar school, and Mr. Slater, the owner of a gas station on Third Street, who let you charge Bierley's orange soda drinks on your way home from school.  You were exposed to Twain's ear for voice and for what you'd come to think of as identity markers, ways by which you could tell who the author was without seeing the cover of the book or the running heads with the author's name.

Voice was so important to you, at this point subject to hand-me-down clothing from your maternal cousin, Eddie, that your early narratives caused teachers to ask you how many times you'd been to England.  You were often tempted to say, "One loses count," but to your credit, you never did.

You could not have said this until recent years; your wish for the voice you set down on the page is the inter-cultural, mingling voice of social and cultural classes coming together as such individuals do in story.  It pleases you not to describe the ethnicity or class of a character, rather to let her or him reveal such notes of individuality as you hear in your head as they strive to make their way, however wobbly, to their goals.

Today, in preparation for a forthcoming class, you are revisiting another voice so pellucid and haunting that once again, you experience what this valuable narrative filter does for you.

"My Uncle Daniel's just like your uncle, if you've got one--only he has one weakness.  He loves society and he gets carried away.  If he hears our voices, he'll come right down those stairs, supper ready or no.  When he sees you sitting in the lobby of the Beulah, he'll take the other end of the sofa and then move closer up to see what you've got to say for yourself; and then he's liable to give you a little hug and start trying to give you something.  Don't do you any good to be bashful.  He won't let you refuse.  All he might do is forget tomorrow what he gave you today, and give it to you all over again.  Sweetest disposition in the world.  That's his big gray Stetson hanging on the rack right over your head--see what a large head size he wears?"

That is unquestionable Eudora Welty, setting off on The Ponder Heart, as much in command of the voice she grew up into as a person could have without carrying a recorder around.  

All right, it is true; the Southern voices grab hold of you.  Welty.  Twain.  Burke.  Faulkner.  Woodrell.  But you must admit Elmore Leonard has caught that lightening in a bottle as well, and served it up in ways you can't get out of your head, like some old song you heard somewhere, back in the times when you were a little boy, setting out in quest of adventure, a notebook in your back pocket, and as complete a pack of licorice cigarettes as you could manage in your front pocket, where you could get right at it, in case you wanted to offer one to a friend, real or imagined.