The Human Condition

 During an intense time in your life when you seemed to regard each new story you wrote as a kind of battering ram the police use on crime TV dramas, you were living off your savings from the only kinds of jobs you were able to get.  These were essentially boring jobs, where you were tasked with making a dreary assortment of machine tools and restaurant supplies appear newer and more useful than they were.

Your particular solace, beyond writing new stories and, thus, mounting more emphatic assaults on the doors of publishers, were two neighborhood establishments, somewhere between neighborhood lounges and taverns.  Both were within walking range of where you lived, on Crescent Heights between Olympic and Pico Boulevards.  

Your regard for the need to walk rather than drive was a cumulative one, born of your awareness at your good fortune for not having been the subject of police inquiry into your ability to operate a motor vehicle within the framework of a prudent blood alcohol ratio.

Each venue was close by a movie theater you'd spent considerable hours in as a younger person.  Burke's Lounge was in the same building as the Fox Wilshire, barely in Beverly Hills, run by the no nonsense Mae Burke, who sat in a back booth, drinking black coffee, trying to read novels by Pearl S. Buck in the dim light, and somehow keeping track of when it was time to buy a round for a regular customer.

Your drink there was the unimaginative vodka grapefruit mix called a greyhound. You did not go to Burke's; with the notion of drinking more than you should, rather to absorb what you liked to think of as life without affect.  This mean you were often drawn into discussions and theories in medias res, wherein Art, who sold insurance during the day and had visions of acting, would greet you with an advanced theorem such as, "What kind of person would I be if I allowed a sales manager to intimidate me?" or Neil, an engineer, would frequently remind you, with no preamble, how important it was to keep the formula for the coefficient of linear expansion in mind.

There was also Bill, who was an actor, warning you about losing your focus by working in anything connected with the film or television industries, and there was Sean, also an actor, who was concerned that you did not know the correct way to drink porter or stout.  You were getting on well enough with Estelle to consider asking her about contact outside Burke's, if only to listen to her monologues about her customers in a Beverly Hills hair salon.  Sometimes, she and Ida, a checker at a market in Beverly Hills where you used to be a box boy, would go mano-a-mano about who had the worst customers.

Small wonder your stories had the edge of persons feeling the need to become regulars at a place such as Burke's.  You were there not to let off steam, or so you thought, but to observe what you considered the human condition.  On one memorable evening, Mae Burke made all the men customers put their hands on the bar.  She examined the outstretched hands with an awl eye.  "One of you gents,"  she observed, "has lost it and taken his angst out on the men's room mirror.  The rest of you are in better control."

This was the first time you'd heard the word angst used outside of UCLA.  You were impressed.  You were also glad your knuckles bore no traces of self-loathing or angst.  "I'm going to find out which one of you did this,"  Mae persisted.

Although you suspected the culprit was Sean, a clear matter of another term you learned at UCLA, racial profiling, you felt like confessing, just to see what would happen next, but then
Neil and Bill confessed in unison.  "Hands,"  she said.  "Let me see those hands."  She peered at close range.  "All right,"  she said, "you're sticking up for one another and I appreciate that, but yous are going to be parting your hair behind a cracked mirror for a long time."

The other venue was located in the same block as the Del Mar Theater on Pico, where the main fare was draft or bottled beer, pickled eggs, and packaged pretzels.  The juke box tended toward country Western, which, when you began to think in critical terms about country Western, was another way of demonstrating angst.

Conversations were different, more often oriented to the outcome of sporting events.  It was known that you'd put in some time at the university, but your ability at the shuffleboard deck, particularly your ability to slide the carom in a breaking curve, meant you were accepted for team play.

The demographic here was more working class:  auto mechanics, a delivery man for a dry cleaner, and, of course, Stan, a frustrated writer.  "Real writers write, don"t they?"  He'd ask.  "You're not a real writer until you write, so that makes me a frustrated writer because I don't write.  You wanna know why?  No, I can see you don't wanna know.  You don't wanna know because you prolly write all the time.  You have no idea what it is to be frustrated."

"You wanna like avoid him when he gets like this,"  Vince suggested.  "He could end up taking a swing at you."  Vince was the evening bartender.  Vince always knew when the house owed you one.  If you brought a date, Vince would always assure her not to worry, he was serving you in a freshly washed pitcher.

Was it your own angst or perhaps tipsiness?  Was it one of those Summer Sant'Ana wind evenings in Los Angeles?  Was it your need to learn more about the human condition?  Whatever it was, possibly the reason you used to go to neighborhood bars in the first place, you got into a discussion with Stan one night near closing time.  The topic was, of all things, salami and eggs.  "I don't imagine,"  Stan said, "there's anyone can make better salami and eggs than me."

You ventured an opinion about your mother and both your grandmothers.  You see now, after all these years, your error.  You were challenging him.  The upshot was you and Eric, puttering around Stan's kitchen at 2:30 in the morning, with Stan, trying to slice salami and Eric, following Stan's directions to look in that cabinet over there for the best goddamned cast iron skillet.  The upshot was also the sudden appearance of a woman in a quilted robe, asking, quite calmly, you thought, "What are you doing in my kitchen?"

In many ways, the moment was one of the most painful in your life to that point.  All you had going was a sense of what salami and eqqs should be and a curiosity about the human condition.

Tribal Elders

The magnets of coincidence bring the concept of First Americans tribal elders to the front stage of your brain, beginning with their appearance in the manuscript of a student, followed by their appearance in a television drama.  In both cases, these tribal elders were the sorts you would bring into your own writing.

You've, in fact, been thinking about an other level of tribal elders as the equivalent of a cup of coffee or a pause to read a magazine, vacation from a booklength project that is about fiction but not actual fiction of yours.

The tribal elders of your invention go back in time to the transitional cusp between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon, therefore they cannot, as the tribal elders do in your student's novel, talk about such things as the Golden Gate Bridge or major league baseball nor can they, as in the television drama, have a hankering for gummi bears or be hooked on diet soda.

In a deliberate move to distinguish your tribal elders from any others, yours do have an edge, however, which is to say a strong enough agenda so that they are human as well as the kinds of bi-culturalism you have come to associate with another kind of transitional cusp, more profound yet than the gap between the Neanderthal and Cro-magnon.  This gap is the one between the concrete, close-to-boring world of the ordinary, the day-to-day routine.  

If you were going as far back in time as the cusp between those two remarkable species, the Neanderthal and the Cro-magnon, an exciting event might be the sudden appearance of a stalk of scallion in the evening stew.  The exciting event could in fact be anything at all, much less a stem of scallion.

The concept of there being tribal elders, men and women who are wise from experience of the rational, but every bit as wise from their experience with the terrain of the shaman,is most agreeable to you.  This becomes the ethereal world of woo woo, where an event may be triggered by some catalyst having little or no relationship with any of Newton's Laws or the Periodic Table of Elements or even the laws of gravity, although that's getting back toward Newton, isn't it?

You have gone through a stage of writing what you called magical realism, meaning a terrain where the boundaries are not at all clear, least of all to you. The best you can do is have characters who take such fuzzy boundaries for granted to a greater degree than you do.  It is not that you have foresworn these gray areas as much as it is the case that your experiences over all these years has led you to expect a universe where behavior is relatively more rational than not.

You had a splendid double curve ball that would have revolutionized the game of baseball.  If that seems as young and naive as it was, there were others involving invisibility, the ability to read animals' minds, and a time right after you learned about shape shifting when your imagination prompted you to imagine such abilities as the one of sight possessed by an eagle.  At one point, you were even willing to settle for a crow.

Your fictional tribal elders are able to do things ordinary persons cannot do for one reason or another, and because you have on frequent occasions wished the abilities most if not all persons did not seem to have, you also took the next step of imagining how you would behave if you were a tribal elder.

To become such an individual, you'd have to, as you see the matter, become humble, although the humility would be directed to things of the inner life and spirit rather than to the worlds of business or political acumen. You could be confident because, some how, you'd have some ability to cause reality to change in some way.

For certain, you have one of the requisite characteristics of the tribal elder, which is the chronology.  You may look younger than you are, you may even behave younger than you are.  While admirable, these are no guarantee.

The best you can do at the moment is write an occasional paragraph that renders the known world in a different light, where the powers are distributed differently than they are in this part of the universe.  That will in a sense be you, as tribal elder, writing about reality and thinking, Hey, that's not too bad.  But you have to keep that sort of stuff for the most part hidden, or people will begin thinking your paragraphs have gone to your head.

Tropical Fish and Dialogue

The setting, the address, and the small, invitation-sized envelopes in which he presents his bills to you jump out at you like cliches being called to your attention in your own work by a New York editor, or either of your two favorite waitresses at the two cliche Beverly Hills delicatessens, Nate and Al's  or Linny's.

Bedford Avenue, Beverly Hills, had, at the time, enough psychiatrists to ease the woes of all of Southern California, where there were, now that you think of it, woes similar to your own.  

A block or two away, the psychiatrists had given way to psychologists, or, as the patients would often discuss in any of the amazing small bars or lounges, the respective difference between an M.D. and a Ph.D.

Yours was on Bedford, thus doctor meant M.D., which, for a brief time, put you in good standing with a girl named Mitzi, who said of you, "You must have some serious shit to need an M.D."  This meant for a time she thought you exuded a danger you did not exude and a mystery you seemed to convey to those about you but by no means to yourself.

Mitzi could be counted on to have a half-pint of Hennessey's or Courvoissier in her purse, which you would share at a shady area off Roxbury Park after you'd been to your M.D. and she to her Ph.D., discussing in sweeping rhetoric your reasons for your respective visits to these professionals and pursuing the extent of your chemistry.  "I sit around and brood, can't stand the sons of my parents' friends, read anything but assigned reading for classes, and stay up late, listening to music."  For this, her sessions with the Ph.D. were ninety dollars an hour.

Your symptoms seemed close enough to have you wondering what you were getting for your hundred twenty dollars an hour from the M.D., an issue raised on your next visit to the M.D. on Bedford Avenue.  For his part, he wanted to know if this was something you'd discussed with Mitzi or arrived at by yourself.  At this point, you noticed the M.D. had a considerable tropical fish tank set-up.  

You paused for a moment or two to regard a spectacular display of small fish of various widths and accouterments, parading about in splashes of bright color.  You decided to ask Mitzi if her Ph.D.--you were always polite about that, even though she called your M.D. a shrink--had tropical fish.

"I am looking at,"  you told the M.D, " at list two thousand dollars worth of fish here.  It's not so much that I begrudge you a hobby as it is that I'm wondering if I'm not here because my hobby on display is my difficulty in moving through my teens, into my twenties without a clear sense of where this is taking me."

The M.D. smiled, stood, shook your hand, and gave you another invitation-sized envelope with an invoice in it.  "Good dialogue,"  he said.  "I think we're beginning to get somewhere."

"He told you that?,"  Mitzi said, about forty-five minutes later, under a shady tree in the parking lot of Roxbury Park.

"Listen,"  you said.  "Does your Ph.D. have anything like a fish tank in his office?"

"How could you know that?"  she said. "How could you possibly know that? "

You told her it was part of your danger and mystery, whereupon she began to cry.  You watched her for a moment, wishing she'd get to the part where the Hennessey's or Courvoisier came out, thinking also that there was something vulnerable and attractive about her crying, thinking there was the possibility of something beyond your established plateaus.

"I want you to know I am seeing someone,"  she said, "and while we haven't discussed it yet, I don't think he--his name is Josh--would be comfortable with what you and I--"

"Not Josh from 'The Nineteenth Century American Novel'?  Is he--Is he dangerous and mysterious?"

"He is sensitive.  I like that in a man."

"More than danger and mystery?"

You were reminded of those times, including your growing suspicions that your visits to Bedford Avenue and the tropical fish were drawing to a close by a note you received from your literary agent a few days ago, giving you a URL to click on and a password to type in when prompted.  She was eager for you to see the brief scene between a series character, portrayed by the actor Tom Selleck, whom you find mildly effective, and his character's shrink, portrayed by William Devane, an actor you do admire to a considerable degree.

The agent was right; the dialogue was superb, each character revealing arresting layers of depth and resources.  This reminded you of your time on Bedford, your time with Mitzi, and your sense of how dialogue has changed the way you look at life and narrative.

Focus

How grand and freeing it is to have at your fingertips a preoccupation so inviting and comforting that you can live for it, whether or not you are anything more than moderate in your success at doing it.  You can--and do--become lost in it.  You can--and do--attempt to teach others how to succeed in it, warning them as you do teach them, that they must learn to become lost in it, themselves, if they are to have any lasting satisfaction from it.

You have spent some time today thinking and writing about one of the novels that gave you unexpected courage and awareness, a novel that focuses on something you have only mild interest and almost no ability in.

There is no stretch in your assessment that you have probably played a hundred or so games of chess in your life and cannot recall ever having won one.  You do recall a few times of being close, a few other times where you managed to secure a draw.

Nevertheless, there you were, with Walter Tevis's The Queen's Gambit, caught from the get go by the way his lead character, Beth Harmon, eight years old, is told her parents have been killed in an automobile accident, is given to a child care agency, and rushed along her way to being an orphan who is, with the best of intentions, given tranquilizers to ease her sudden change of status.  

The tranquilizers become a lifelong  problem; so does her relationships with others, her coming-of-age sexuality, and her ability to make a life for herself where she can achieve some degree of comfort and ease.

In a major sense, the character that is Beth is emblematic of a lead character.  She is reserved, not readily trustful, all too aware of her dependence on pills, a dependence that will early on develop into a reliance of alcohol.  Give the lead character a flaw.  Or two.. Or three.  

Walter Tevis does this well enough.  He also allows us to see the gradual evolution of Beth's near genius at the game of chess, taking her from her youthful spying on a scruffy janitor at the orphanage where she now lives, watching him as he performs perhaps the one pleasurable thing in his own life.  He plays chess with himself, rotating the board with each move.

Your take away from this dramatic set-up, and Beth's thrilling awareness of the intricacies of the game of chess is a series of parallel lines, seemingly unrelated at first when you connect the focus of Beth and the janitor on chess with your own interests in writing and the related craft of acting.

You recall an event at least twenty-five years back when you interviewed the mystery writer, William Campbell Gault, so prolific that he needed at least two pseudonyms of which you are aware.  The quote Gault gave you has stayed with you.  "I'd rather," he said, "be the world's worst writer than a good anything else."

Gault was far from the world's worst writer.  He excelled at knowing what he cared about and finding ways to do it.  He was, you believe, able to say such a thing because he was so comfortable in doing what he cared about.  He later gave you another quote having to do with the fact that he made enough money from writing to allow him to do something else he cared about, which was playing golf.  Once again, he had no illusions about his ability, confessing that he likely was the world's worst golfer.

What you're putting together from your free independent associations has to do with having a thing you care about and which, however good or awful you are at that thing, you are able to become one with it.  You are able to focus on it for significant periods of time to the point where you no longer consider how good or awful you are at it.  

Much of the time, when you are involved with that thing, you are aware on some unspoken level of being the person you'd thought about, the sort of person you were in fact growing toward, the person you have in some measure become.

Beth Harmon has that with chess.  When you read about her and her growth as a result of chess, you are scarcely able to understand the practical elements of the game of chess, but you are able to see how much it means to her because you have the standard of your interest in writing to draw upon as a comparison.

You are also aware, because of your interest in writing fiction, how you've come to watch the men and women who portray characters, discerning how important to each of these actors the ability to concentrate is.  Simplistic as your vision here may sound, acting requires enough focus and concentration to allow the actor to become lost in the character she or he wishes to portray.

Longer Than You Think, Not So Long as You Think

You are sitting in a small theater such as the Old Little Theater, next to your class room at the College of Creative Studies.  Or perhaps it is the Plaza Playhouse Theater in downtown Carpinteria.  Or even the small theater atmosphere evoked by the Java Junction Coffee House.  This much is true"  You are part of a small audience in a small theater.  You are waiting for a performance.

The only difference between this time and the times you were at the theater venues you just mentioned is that you had some specific reason for being at these theaters, some play or performance you knew about in advance.  Tonight, there is a difference.

Although you know you are an audience in a theater where the seating capacity is not grand, you have no idea what the performance or occasion is, only that it is scheduled to begin in fifteen minutes.  You settle into a comfortable posture, double check to make sure your cell phone is muted.  You close your eyes for a moment to experience the inner pleasure of anticipation.

At the precise moment you were told the performance would begin, a man appears, carrying a tall, cylindrical drum.  He moves to a seat center stage, sits, places the drum between his knees, nods in recognition to the audience, appears to make eye contact with each person.  Your appetite is whetted.  Will he provide rhythm for one or more dancers?  Will additional musicians appear?

You still have no idea what to expect.  You focus on the man with the drum, waiting for some clue. He is seated in an ordinary folding chair, appearing comfortable, yet alert.  He is, you decide, waiting for your brother and sister audience members to quiet down, settle into a comfortable sitting audience position.

The theater is quiet.  The creaks and noises are the noises of the theater, not from you or the rest of the audience, paying rapt attention to the man with the drum.  After several long moments--at least, they seem long to you--there is a palpable sense of anticipation emanating from the audience.  You are also a contributor to that sense of anticipation.  

By now, the man has been silent and still for at least two minutes.  A concert pianist, in appearance with a symphony orchestra, might take this long before embarking on a piano concerto, say Mozart's, Number 20, or perhaps the Beethoven so-called Emperor Concerto.

The man with the drum has yet to make a move or offer a sign, much less utter so much as a word.  He sits, attentive, alert.  If ever you saw someone more apt to provide a line of music in the next moment or two, that person would be this individual.  But something is clearly wrong.  He does nothing to tune his drum or strike a note on it.  For all you know, this is an elaborate psychological test, wherein you will learn something about your responses or your specific lack of response.

Four minutes.  You peeked at your cell phone.  You have been sitting in the presence of this individual, this drummer, if that's his game, for four minutes.  Well, okay; you're ready to go for whatever comes.  You're primed.

Still no movement from the drummer.  Some of the audience have laughed with a nervous edge.  You begin thinking it would serve this guy right if you zoned out to the point where you fell asleep.  Surely he'd see you from where he sits, the dim lights not occluding the audience.  Surely.

Okay, five goddamn minutes already.  The nervous snickers are coming with greater regularity, as though, after another minute or so, someone is going to come out and tell you that you've just heard the overture, which is given the name, Overture in Silence.

You're relieved to notice the distinct presence of impatience, bouncing in waves from the audience.  Good thing you know how to zone out, to meditate, to focus on the flickering flame of a candle, in your mind's eye causing the flickering to stop.  

You'll be goddamned if you're going to let any career coaching, focusing on your inner professional kind of stuff get its hooks into you.  In fact, you'll give this asshole another minute and then, no music, no drum beats, no you; you'll stand the fuck up and walk down the aisle to the outer lobby.  You have enough on your plate without playing mind games.

Okay, so now, the drummer hits the drum one resounding whack with the butt of his palm, like to have snapped you out of your reverie, had a definite, attention-grabbing effect on the rest of the audience.  So this was it, now, we'll find out where this is going, what it's all about.

But we do not find out.  We are back to waiting again, as enveloped in suspicion and tension as we would be with sweat if this were a hot, muggy day.  It is anything but a hot, muggy day outside.  But outside is no matter, what matters is right here, a demonstration of some of the potential dynamics for the beginning of a story.

Often, we are drawn into story because of the tug of some situation, but there are times when anticipation becomes exquisite and we are caught up by circumstances, waiting for the situation to begin, not aware that it has, from the moment the man with the drum appeared on the stage, then moved to a seat where we could watch him and he could watch us.

The man with the drum knew what he was doing all along, but we did not.  We could only speculate, imagine, grow uncomfortable with waiting, grow impatient.  There is a potential for the tug of curiosity.  Some in the audience would doubtless wait ten or fifteen minutes, taking their cues from the behavior of the audience because they were getting no cues from the man with the drum--except for that one thwack on the drum head with the butt of his palm.

Story is manipulations of expectation, extended, drawn out, until that moment when curiosity becomes boredom, and the delicate frame of webs is broken with indifference.

How long can a man with a drum keep you interested without playing a note?

Free Lunch

For as long as you can recall, you've been intrigued by the voice of the slightly over-the-top sales or pitch person.  This began in the pre-television days and the remarkable-for-its time allure of the Jack Benny Radio Show, which featured an actor with the consummate come-on voice, Sheldon Leonard.

Jack Benny would be walking somewhere in one of his skits, when he would be accosted by Leonard, in character.  "Psst.  Hey, bud."  Oh, what a world of mischief and conspiracy in those words.  The Leonard character was always intent on selling Benny something that was not quite sleazy, also not quite legitimate.

Much as you enjoyed some of the other skits on the Benny show, you waited patiently for those skits, where the Benny character's established cheapness played out against the Leonard character's used-car-salesman ethos.

That same voice was put to serious work years earlier by Mark Twain, first in his break-out book, The Innocents Abroad, followed shortly after by his time in the Nevada gild and silver mine country around Virginia City.  The voice invited conspiracy theories and shady deals into the parlor, where we were given reason to suspect they existed as well.

The after effects of that voice reminds us of the sage conventional wisdom in which two parallel lines are drawn, one being the concept of the free lunch, the other line being those implications and subtexts which remind us of the hidden cost or price of said free lunch.  

You well recall a conversation you instituted in all seriousness with your father about the meaning of the warning about the price tag for the free lunch.

His father and mother, at one time saloon keepers, were particularly free with pickled hardboiled eggs and pickled pig's feet, both of which were salty, inducing the thirst for yet another draw of beer or ale.  

Okay, free lunch does have a price tag, and the used car salesperson--in one of Twain's more memorable stories, "The Mexican Plug Horse," the salesperson was a used horse seller--can, if seen in one light, be an agent of The Trickster.

This attitude toward that Tricksterish voice, also embodied by at least two of the Marx Brothers--Groucho and Chico--is important to you in the highly personal way of its relevance to how you were recruited into the band of scallywag writers, story tellers, and jugglers of dramatic implements ranging from burning torches to ten-pins, and plates.

A real juggler can handle seven or eight items, sometimes adding to his or her panache with a varied list of items.  You have all you can do to juggle two physical items, much less the minimum acceptable number of three.  But somewhere along the way, you heard the equivalent of the Sirens call to the sailors of Odysseus, and you believed them, at least to the extent that here you are, by no means the person you had in mind to become when you set forth, nor indeed the person you'd hoped to have become after having plied the trade for some time, say twenty years.

Today, in some publication, you say an illustrated article depicting the physical uproar that cam come from a life devoted to dancing, featuring an emphasis on those whose dancing required of them to spend time on their toes, to say almost--but not quite--nothing of being required to carry, balance, catch, and otherwise engage what can best be described as flying lady ballerinas.

The juggler and the dancer have a greater likelihood than you of physical injuries.  You seem to have reached your current state, whatever that may be, with any physical problems or anomalies having come from other sources.  You have no idea how long it could take a person who wished to develop skills as a juggler, much less have you any idea what would motivate a person to wish to become a juggler.  

Or a dancer.  Presumably, there were earlier urges to juggle or dance, of equal presumption acted upon in some way or other, just as you can recall the sense of amazement and wonder that you wished to do the same thing the likes of Mark Twain and Guy de Maupassant, and Willa Cather did.

Much of what you can recall about your journey from about age thirteen or so to this point can be summed up by a conversation you had early in your twenties with your mentor, who urged you to get used to dealing with the way you felt about things as a youngster before they get away from you, your furious effort to do so, and the seeming rush of time past your study and office windows as you sat composing or attempting to compose.

You're aware of streaking along on some orbital path, trailing smoke and fire and gas in the chilly reaches of space, all you can see about you thanks to the wisps of fire in your tail.  You are waiting to see where your momentum will take you, into which corners of the universe, and more to the point, if there are any reasons to believe there are any traces of life on you.

Following the Trail of Cookie Crumbs

You are about a quarter of the way through a project you never thought you'd write.  For one thing, you look at anything book length with a mixture of suspicion if it is nonfiction, wonderment if the project settles down to the point where you begin exaggerating in that way you've come to understand as moving over to fiction.

For another, you've begun to understand that both nonfiction and fiction require research, which means you would rather do the research needed for fiction.  

Both types of research involve individuals, incidents, and some specific moments of time, but the individuals of fiction, once they begin to gather complexity and some kind of dramatic orbit, interest you more because you have to think about them as deliberate eccentric rather than actual persons, who interest you more in terms of the eccentricities they could not shake off.

Fictional events are developed to give the impression of being real, real events, particularly if they are being constructed for written commentary, need to have strong suggestions of story.  Your observations confirm your belief that a roman a clef novel is often regarded as being closer to the actual truth than a biography.

The project you never thought you'd write and are now about a quarter of the way through is in fact nonfiction, but it has the saving grace of being about fiction.  Your research involves a combination of the kinds of research you'd do for a nonfiction book as well as the kinds you'd do for a novel or collection of short form.  

From all the novels you've read, you've culled one hundred which you regard as the hundred from which you've gleaned the most tools and techniques.  These techniques are significant to you as tools you've used in in life and in your own attempts at writing and teaching fiction and as editorial tools when you assume that remarkable position of talking interpretation of a text with its author.

Your plan is to write befitted essays of approximately six hundred fifty words or less on each of the hundred novels, discussing what you got in terms of technique, with no room for generalities or glib, attenuated inferences, such as "The dialogue of this novel took me to the time and place of its historical setting."  

The plan is to longer over each of these mini-essays or, as you've come to think of them, entries until they speak to you as you believe they did at first reading, before you became aware of the gift you received from them.

As you move from one mini-essay to the next, writing about your discoveries, you are well into your belief that this project is in effect asking you to reeducate yourself, looking at these old friend novels as you consider your experiences with some of them over as much as a half century.  You note the progressions of your interests and the way a particular title has prepared you for the enjoyment of others that had yet to be written.

At the quarter mark, you note your special feelings for the narrative tone, the voice of your favored novels, and the emotional information you've gleaned from the reading.  Following the cookie crumbs of your curiosity, you've ended by no means in the clutch of the witch, as did Hansel and Gretel, rather in the clutch of a Catch-22 kind of deadpan with satiric overtones and implications.

Checking through some of your old friends, you notice passages and situations that caused you guffaws and the need to stop reading in order to laugh.  One vital thing you've learned thus far is how to take in the humor without breaking into the uncontrollable laughter.

You hope this deadpan has followed you from your reading into your composition.  You have three-quarters of the text left to find out.