A curmudgeon’s guide to erudition.

             I read an engagingly relevant article by Nick Hornby in Lit Hub, by way of McSweeny’s, about how his reading habits had changed as he’s aged.  Lamenting almost turning 60 (which made me yearn earnestly for this dubious misfortune) he went on to write about loads of obscure books, that all sounded great, and also reminded me there are far more well-read people in the world than I will ever be.

            But his greater point resonated – that ones tolerance for bad books wanes considerably as our allotted time on earth narrows.  I once felt a moral obligation to read a book I’m not enjoying to the end, especially works others had praised, assuming those judgments would prove out in the end.  They rarely did.  Now I drop a stinker faster than a hot skillet without a potholder, swifter than Usain Bolt on amphetamines, speedier than the electro-chemical arc between a pair of synapses, quicker than a guy caught in bed with his boss’s wife can make it to the window. 

            I did the same with a very well-written book, by an acclaimed author I like, not because it was bad, but because the story was just too dreary.  I looked at the remaining 200-plus pages of sadness and tragedy and said to myself, nah. 

 

            I also occasionally reread a book I know I’m going to like.  This is the equivalent of eating comfort food, say my wife’s chicken piccata, or turkey stuffing with homemade gravy or a cheese steak from Vito’s in Gulph Mills, Pennsylvania.  Though I do resist this urge, since there is likely another promising unread book waiting in the wings, specifically on my nightstand, that might add to my preferred canon.

            I read as many articles and commentaries as books these days, and apply the same rules.  If it’s poorly written, I move on immediately.  If it’s a bit clunky, but teaching me something, I hang in there, though only for so long.  Enjoying fine writing, while simultaneously learning something and feeling validated in ones own opinion, is a marvelous pleasure. 

            Hornby also noted that contemporary nonfiction can elicit the same joy and fulfillment as any splendid novel or short story.  Again, I agree whole-heartedly.  With the advent of New Journalism back in the 60s and 70s, nonfiction writers are now much better story tellers, and the reading public has rewarded them with strong enough sales to encourage the practice. 

          Though if you want to learn more about their progenitors, I recommend Winston Churchill, Freud, De Tocqueville and even Charles Darwin, who often got a bit in the weeds, but had a gift for narrative.  More recently, Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver Sacks, (Simon Winchester, Walter Issacson and Bill Bryson, still with us), Norman Mailer (Armies of the Night – his fiction stinks), Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe.

             If you’re a young person trying to understand the vaunted world of great fiction, you might read things like Gravity’s Rainbow or Finnegan’s Wake.  These are books that make little sense to anyone but the authors, and for me, not worth the precious time to prove otherwise.  You can read The Crying of Lot 49, or Ulysses, and be better for it.  It’s a matter of wise curation.  I read all of Faulkner, and am glad about it, though I feel no irresistible urge to reread Absalom, Absalom! The time is better spent with Lee Child or Gillian Flynn.  Or Amor Towles.

            As with the depressing book by the fine nonfiction author, I just don’t want to slog through giant, dense tomes by towering heroes of Western literature.  I’m too old for that stuff.  Though I’m glad I did when I was still able to swim miles in open water, carry a full keg across a bar room floor and split two cord of wood in a few hours.

            I’m still very much in the market for enthralling books by people I’ve never heard of.  My hope is they’ll appear before me without too much searching, since I need to meter out my discretionary vitality.  Let me know if you have any suggestions.  If I don’t want to read the book, please don't hold it against me, and I'll return the favor.  You might even like Norman Mailer’s fiction, and that is your prerogative.  I might be fussier about books as I age, but my tolerance for other’s tastes has only become more expansive.  I’ve learned it’s a more pleasant attitude. 

Though at this point, I’ll politely acknowledge your enthusiasm for stuff I don’t like, and just move on.  Youth may be wasted on the young, but neither should one squander old age.   

           

Wanna read a mystery-romance-literary-sci-fi-cozy-thriller?

             I have a whole stable full of hobby horses, and probably the one with the most mileage is the question of genre.  A writer friend of mine had reviewed the opening chapter of a novel I’d just started, and asked, “What is this?  Mystery?  Romance? Mystery-Romance?”

            My first response, unspoken, was “What freakin’ difference does it make?”

            This writer friend is a published novelist, and he was right to ask, and I’m sorry but it’s a legitimate question.  The need to classify everything is an irresistible human impulse.  Probably a survival instinct.  We obviously need to impose some level of order on a chaotic, confusing existence.  It makes us feel more in control, less threatened by our rambunctious day-to-day reality.  It also provides a common language, a sort of spread sheet where individual objects can be compared to others, fit into a reasonable set of descriptions that are best understood by similarities and deviations.  Science and linguistics are utterly reliant on taxonomy and philology.  It all makes sense, making sense of the world.

            But there is a dark side.  Classification has a tendency to leave out the oddballs, which is not that bad in biology or chemistry, but when it affects people, the downsides are manifold.  No one wants to be stereotyped, or pigeon-holed. Even classified.  Put in a box. The same can be said about writing, both fiction and non-fiction.

            I understand why bookstores want to know where to slot a new book.  They have shelves with labels, and have to keep things organized and customer friendly.  People search for books according to their likes and dislikes, usually defined for them by genre.  If they can’t easily find the type of book they usually enjoy they’ll leave the store, as will most others, and the store will eventually go out of business.  Consequently, booksellers are diligent in describing their offerings according to genre, and sub-genre, better to align with publishers and not disturb customers. 

           

            So we’re stuck with this, us writers, who may occasionally want to drift outside our assigned paddocks.  Publishers hate this, by the way, and usually try to discourage these impulses, giving in only when a successful novelist is such a hot property they can afford to play around a little with YA, or sci-fi, or write a cookbook (John Irving's 101 Ways To Grill a Bear).  

It doesn’t seem to matter that many detective novels are now considered great literature, and established literary works are filled with intrigue and gunfights.  Critics get to play in this sandbox, as do Ph. D candidates proffering theses on the poetry of John La Carré or “Frankenstein – Horror Novel or Towering Critique on the Social Consequences of Rampant Industrialisation?” But publishers and booksellers have to sell books, and these nuances are lost on the genre-focused public.

            My beef, and yes I have a beef, is that too many of us humans only know how to think about something in relation to how it fits into a belief system, which is all a genre is.  You might call it dogma, or ideology, or simply a set of preferences and biases that conforms to an organized array of convictions.  In its simplest form, think of a Catholic who believes all of the church’s doctrine.  Alternative views, say by a Presbyterian or Jew, are inadmissible.  If you are a behavioral psychologist, you have a body of scholarly work that you cleave to, and by definition, reject the beliefs of a competing gang of scholars, say those anachronistic Freudians.  You can call it group think, or kin selection, or tribal loyalty.  You’re a Mets fan or you root for the Yankees, and that’s all you have to think about.

            And that’s the point.  You don’t have to think.  You just have to check those pre-existing boxes. 

            This is not a wise life strategy if you want to understand as much about the world as you possible can.  Unless you own a bookstore or hawk paperbacks out of the back of your van, genre matters not a wit.  What matters is the quality of the work, judged by that ineffable emotional response to an artistic expression, of any sort, from any source. 

The ineluctable modality of the memorable.

            I just came back from a trip to my hometown, King of Prussia, PA, a suburban ring city about fifteen miles outside Philadelphia.         

When we moved there in 1958, it was a somnambulant country town, with cow fields, a couple of gas stations and a single supermarket, now a misnomer, since that A&P could fit into the produce department of an average Whole Foods.  Two buildings held K- 6, and junior and senior high schools.  Now there’re a half dozen elementary schools, and the high school looks like Stanford University, after it opened a satellite campus on Mars.  There’s also a shopping center, purportedly the third largest in the country, and the kind of sprawl William Gibson might have imagined after consuming a handful of magic mushrooms.    

            Though that’s not the point of the essay.  It’s more about memory.  I hadn’t seen the place in a few decades and the transformation was so complete I kept getting lost.  The roadways had changed, as had the route numbers, many of my familiar landmarks were gone, and while place and street names were mostly the same, they were lined with alien structures with strange logos and grotesque encroachments on adjacent properties.  I’d gone forward in the Time Machine, and the Morlocks had learned to live in the sun and taken over. 

            My wife says I have the directional sense of a carrier pigeon.  Before GPS we traveled all over Europe and parts of Asia and Australia with only maps and dead reckoning.  But in this situation, I was constantly befuddled.  Surprisingly, knowing a little is worse than knowing nothing.  Throw in a twenty-plus-year absence, and I was done for, so systemically disoriented I even had trouble finding our hotel room.  My wife asked, “Who are you and what have you done with my husband?” 

            Anyone who quibbles over factual errors in a memoir knows nothing about brain science.  Aside from outright fabrication a la George Santos or James Fry, and some argue William Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley” (one of my favorite books), if the author is earnestly trying to recall what they experienced, they’re only recounting what they think happened, what they sincerely believe is true, with little chance of getting it right.

               I’ve made peace with this.  I’m simply happy that I remember anything at all, however illusory.  If my brain has put a nicer polish on the experience, that’s fine.  Why not.  The insight that matters for writers is that the line between fiction and non-fiction is pretty fuzzy.  My admiration for the work of historians is boundless, but earnest research won’t make what they're citing less flawed, incomplete, and often wildly inaccurate. 

            What was the best of times for one guy was the worst of times for the guy in the next apartment, or office cubicle, or bunk bed. 

            If you want to take this to the logical extreme, you can invoke quantum mechanics.  Physicists will tell you with a straight face that reality is all just an approximation, a frothy admixture of probabilities determined only by the perspective of the observer, which may conflict with other observations, none of which describe any objective truth.  Heisenberg proved you’ll never know anything with absolute certainty, and no one has yet proven him wrong, even Albert Einstein, though he sure tried (it turns out God does play dice). 

            We’re told to write what we know, which is basically good advice.  All works of fiction are semi-autobiographical, since we mine our own lives for material.  Yet those experiences may or may not have happened.  Your brain has played tricks on you, having you believe things that are distortions at best, and very likely contrivances made in whole cloth without your awareness or approval. 

            So what?  What matters is the quality of the story, the skill with the language and the effect it has on the reader, who has permission to distort all of it to their own liking. 

True to type.

             I only write in Palatino Linotype, which is a more attractive cousin of Times Roman.  Most people can’t tell the difference, which is good, since publications often require their superannuated relative, which I find cramped, fussy and inelegant, compared to my first love. 

                I prefer to indent my paragraphs, and dislike putting spaces between them (even though I’ve occasionally done it here, when laziness trumped principle, or the blog app forces it upon me).  Nearly every book you’ve ever read throughout history follows this practice. I don’t think there’s any reason to change it now, despite the insistence of word processors and trendy digital formats. 

           Serifs are like little brush strokes at the end of straight or slightly tapered lines, flourishes that suggest a certain panache, elan, a bit of dash to the characters.  I was once told that medieval scribes saw them as tiny angels.  I’ve found no evidence of this, but the notion is enchanting.

            Times Roman can also look dated, like your grandmother’s Victorian furniture.  If disturbed by this you might select Bodoni, or Century, or my favorite Palatino Linotype, efforts to freshen up the form.  I’m fine with this as well.  All are preferrable to the execrable sans serif.     

I have no affection for any version of san serif, particularly Helvetica, which has no social charm, only narcissistic, declarative impudence.  It doesn’t care what you think, it only wants you to follow its commands.  Bold san serif is even worse:  a lout with a megaphone yelling over polite discourse. 

Or simply boring and commercial. All those straight up and down, and horizontal, lines have no personality.  It’s just a flat, soulless delivery of the words.  Serif faces have lots of smiles, frowns, intelligent observations and witty asides.  These are the Cary Grant and Noel Coward of typefaces.  The Shirley McClain and Katherine Hepburn.   Sans serifs are just pronouncements.  Demands.  Directives.  Humorless and colorless.  Bureaucratic. 
            

        You might note that sans serif faces are defined by what they lack.  Serifs.  It reminds me of Baus Haus or Brutalist architecture, which boldly erases all decorative or artistic detail, stripping everything down to right angles and plain boxes, like the ones that deliver goods to you from Amazon.  I don’t see this as an achievement.  Anyone can build a box.  Few can shape crown moldings, cornices, curvilinear arches and hip roofs. 

Digital content is often in Calibri, the slightly less school-marmish version of Helvetica.  Another cousin is Aptos, which is even worse than the other two.  Helvetica’s sadistic, stunted little sister. 

 Most of the typeface choices in Microsoft Word are novelties and nothing more.  Fun, silly and usually inappropriate comedians only useful to children and unserious designers.  Cheap invitations to the gala event, or hyperventilating car ads given to starbursts and excessive exclamation points.  The typographical equivalent of a drunken huckster screaming over the crowd noise.   

You might think that a type face shouldn’t affect your understanding of the words on the page, but that’s not true.  I spent a long career in partnership with art directors and graphic designers who brilliantly captured the essence of a headline with a deft choice of type face.  They knew the emotion the writer was trying to convey, presenting it in the precisely appropriate visual style.  (Most of the art directors I worked with were also quite capable writers.)

Art at its best conveys feelings.  Typefaces are the rare art form that bring intrinsic emotional interpretation to the meaning of the words they’re representing.  A true integration of purpose.  Digital media has the capacity for delivering an endless assortment of faces, with no sense of the mission these shapes and miniature diagrams are charged with achieving, but we can intercede and pick the face that suits our mood. 

What you are saying, of course, matters the most.  Though how you are saying it can make all the difference in the rendering. 

Goin’ places that I’ve never been, seein’ things I may never see again

 I heard a philosophy professor on the radio, Agnes Callard, who famously wrote a piece for The New Yorker called “Against Travel”.  Her basic premise is that the actual, long-lasting benefits of travel are delusional.  All you’re doing is disturbing the lives of people who speak another language, spoiling the very places you profess to admire, while retaining nothing of any enduring value.  That discussing your travels is a type of virtue-signaling that pleases your ego and bores your listeners

Rarely have I disagreed with a person more than Professor Callard.   She has the right to her

opinion, and her feelings, which are hers and fairly held.  One of my best friends hates traveling.  He’s a brilliant, erudite, accomplished man.  We just don’t share the same convictions on this matter, just as I hated the original “Top Gun”, which he loved, and he heaps scorn on my cherished “Independence Day”. 

Callard maintains that “tourist” is a term you use to describe other people with suitcases who go running around the world, but not yourself.  Fair enough, since tourist is clearly a pejorative, often for good reason.  The assumption is these are people who travel badly: dress like slobs, hog scenic overlooks, yell at shopkeepers as if volume will overcome a language gap, gorge on unhealthy snacks and cheap tchotchkes, and fall off cliffs trying to take shareable selfies.  They clump together in their tour group, rarely mingle with the natives, pine for hometown meals and remain blissfully unaffected by the foreign country’s physical and cultural charms.  They’re dumb jerks over there, which means they’re likely dumb jerks over here, too. 

Asked if she’d give a pass to creative people, such as Gauguin in Tahiti, or Picasso in Paris, Professor Callard grudgingly gave an inch.  The thing is, the question itself is fraught with a certain elitist presumption.   A professional accountant, not encouraged to be overly creative, can be utterly entranced and enriched by visiting a new place.  I know this because my brother-in-law was a partner at Deloitte and Touche and was positively glowing after returning the other day from a cruise around Scandinavia.  He doesn’t have to be transformed into a different person, nor would he expect to be, but he now has a mind that’s fuller and more aware than before he hopped on that boat.

My wife spent a few weeks in Africa on safari in four different countries.  She thinks about it every day, and is always moved by the recollections.  Is she a different person?  Not exactly, but she would say she is more of a person, an expanded version.

Entranced, expanded and intellectually refreshed is how I’ve felt after visiting strange new lands.  Notably Japan, Australia, Alaska and Budapest.  You can only really grasp these places, however superficially, by going there.  Driving around the Australian state  of Victoria, I felt like I’d been dropped onto a different planet.  Vast grasslands punctuated by gigantic Eucalyptus, waves of Kangaroo streaming through the grass at startling speeds, a mountainous rainforest where you half expected a Tyrannosaurus to burst out of the tangled tree limbs and vines. 

You might not care to know that on one side of the River Danube is the city of Buda, and on the other side Pest.  By I do.

My wife and I always make a point of talking to people wherever we go, which mostly means conversations with bartenders, waiters and waitresses, cab drivers, bell hops and store clerks.  But these are people who live in their places, and they have a lot to tell you if you ask.  You don’t have to move in with a family to get the basic lay of the land.  People love talking about their lives and their homes.  You just have to engage. 

For creative people, the benefits of travel are self-evident.  James Joyce moved to Paris (along with Picasso, Dali, Hemingway, Stein, Pound, etc., etc.).  Orwell, John Singer Sargent, Joyce Cary, D.H. Lawrence and artists you’ve never heard of journeyed and lived all over the place.  Critics agree that their art was hugely influenced by the changes in venue.

Brain science can explain some of this.  When you’re in familiar surroundings, your mind can sort of relax and shove many basic mental functions down and away from the most cognitive, and energy consuming, portions of the brain, like the pre-frontal cortex.  When you’re in an entirely new environment, your survival instincts kick in, and you become hypervigilant.  Your brain literally gets extra busy.  You also instinctively compare your immediate experience with the well-known, which has the effect of bringing perspective to your life back home.  This is why James Joyce sat in a room in Paris and wrote about Dublin, why Lawrence wrote about English people in Italian villages and an adobe hut in Mexico. 

I love writing in places where I don’t speak much of the language. I’m in the midst of people having a pleasant time with no danger of being distracted by neighboring conversations.  All I have to say is café Americano et croque monsieur, or cervesa y patatas bravas, and I’m good to go.  I once wrote half a book over less than a week in joints hanging off the cliffsides of Positano.  It just gushed right out of me. 

Faulkner muddled through rarely leaving Oxford, Mississippi, my favorite philosopher Immanuel Kant barely budged from Königsberg, and Emily Dickinson basically never left her room, and they all did fine, though I still think those smart folks should have travelled more.  Dickinson’s poetry might have taken a different trajectory had she consumed a Philly cheese steak or punted on the Cam.  Kant’s belief in the tenuousness of objective reality might have been bolstered by meeting a platypus. 

As with all literary pursuits, there are prosaic travel writers who can recommend great hotels and ticketing hacks, and geniuses who happen to like a good amble.  For that, you can’t do better than Bill Bryson.  Or Paul Theroux, who I think went everywhere on the planet without ever relaxing his keen eye or joie de vivre.  Even Mark Twain, the Innocent Abroad who was anything but. 

Sorry, Professor Callard.  I’m sure you have other fine qualities, but on this issue you’re just dead wrong. 

Every story paints a picture, don’t it

Mary and I went to this year’s Bouchercon in Nashville.  Aside from the venue, which was undoubtedly the weirdest place I’ve ever been (Harlan Coben said it felt like being trapped in the world’s biggest terrarium), it was a pretty good program.  A writer friend asked me what I took away from the experience, so when thinking about it, in that moment, I realized it was all about the story.

There’s so much advice, good and bad, so much bullshit and blather about writing mysteries, that one tends to forget the core mission:  To tell a good story. 

I grew up walking our big collie at night with my older brother.  He kept it interesting by

telling stories, novel-length narratives he conjured in real time and strung together like a radio series.   During the day, he fed me books, mostly from the stacks collected by our father and grandfather, early 20^th century adventure books and tales of Victorian derring-do.  Most of my family were also big readers, and story tellers, even fabulists, often concocting imaginary tales rendered as indisputable fact.  So I was awash in a storytelling environment.

This is the point of the whole enterprise. 

The plot is naturally at the center of this, though plot is nothing without believable characters, voice, setting, brisk dialogue, etc., all the scaffolding that holds the thing together.  The vegetables in the beef stew.  Pick your metaphor.  It’s not one thing, it’s everything.  

One thing you don’t need is a Ph.D. in English literature, though Robert B. Parker had one.  As does David Morrell, who gave us Rambo.  Though Mick Herron, who invented Slow Horses, told us at Bouchercon that he knew exactly nothing about the British Secret Service, which he feels served him well.  All he had to do was tell a good story. 

To wit:  Right after graduating from college, a friend and I thought it would be an excellent idea to drive from Pennsylvania to the West Coast in my ’65 MGB.  We travelled light, with only the essentials:  two sleeping bags, a guitar, beer cooler and about $80 in hard cash.  Somewhere in Arizona we were driving through 100 degree air down RT. 66 at about eighty miles an hour, since any slower would reduce airflow to the MG’s engine, causing it to overheat.  We kept seeing signs for “Arroyo Ahead.”  I figured that meant a taco stand, or Native American trading post, so pressed on at the same velocity. 

Arroyo actually means a big ditch in the middle of the road to allow for very occasional flash floods to pass through unabated.  So when we got there, the MG basically became airborne, hit the bottom of the ditch, then shot up in the air on the other side.  My friend, asleep at the time, spent most of the zero-gravity pinned under the top of the car, when he wasn’t bouncing off the seat.  The entire exhaust system, never more than a few inches above the road, was scraped clean and scattered into the desert. 

Civilization was only about a hundred miles in either direction, but down the road we could see a maintenance crew at work on the white-hot pavement. 

So after piling up all the exhaust components we could find, we hiked down there, hoping they had some thoughts on next steps.  Though before we got there, I found a spool of mechanic’s wire lying off to the side of the road.  Exactly what we needed.  So using the aluminum beer cans and C-clamps I always kept on hand (if you’ve ever owned an MG, you know why), and the mechanic’s wire to suspend the whole jerry-rigged apparatus under the car, I had a serviceable exhaust system.  Actually sounded pretty cool, since the resonator and several feet of tailpipe were lost to the scheme, resulting in a pleasing, guttural purr. 

We made it to the Pacific Ocean, up to Oregon, across the big sky states, then down to New Orleans by way of North Dakota, then back up to home.  About another 10,000 miles. The exhaust worked fine.   

And that’s the story. 

 

 

Say what?

            

            Much of writing you have to make up.  

            This is hard work, taxing for the mind and body, which has to input the effort on a keyboard.  But I find dialogue much easier, since it usually just comes to you over the airwaves – on the sidewalk, at the cash register, in friendly conversations with close friends and strangers. 

            I live in both Connecticut and New York, so there are regional nuances, but all fertile territory. 

            One day I was walking my dog past an outdoor restaurant and there was a clutch of late middle-aged New Yorkers more or less in the way.  As my dog and I negotiated the tight space, one of them said, “Cute dog.”

            I thanked her. 

            “How much?” asked one of the guys.  “For the dog.”

            “I don’t know,” I said. “Make me an offer.”

            “How old is he?” the woman asked.

            “About ten.”

            “Oh,” said another guy, “So we get depreciation.”

            Several years ago, a local paper in Connecticut had an article on my novel writing.  It included a photo.  I went into the hardware store I’d been frequenting for about twenty years, staffed by dour Yankees who only knew how to say, “It’s over there,” and “Thank you,” when you bought something.  That day, the granite-faced clerk looked at me and said, “You’re Knopf.”

            I admitted I was.

            “I knew it.”

            Just recently I picked up an O ring I’d special ordered from a tool repair shop in New York.  The tab was about $1.75.  When the woman behind the counter rang me up, I said, “Big sale for you folks.”

            “Yeah, I’m locking up and we’re heading out to the bar.”

            I was at Walmart buying a pile of stuffed animals for a Christmas toy drive.  One of the toys was a little dog in a seated position.  When I put it on the conveyor, I said, “Sit.  Stay.” The cashier looked over and said, “Now there’s good boy.”

            I was having some hardwood milled at a lumber yard.  I was standing there with a friend while the old, bearded mill worker in a flannel shirt with gnarly hands was feeding the material through various machines.  For this one piece, I asked the guy to rip it. 

            My friend said, “Rip it good.”

            Without looking up, the guy responded, “Into shape.  Shape it up. Get straight.  Go forward.  Move ahead.  You gotta rip it.  Rip it good.”

           I was listening on the radio to a couple of scientists talk about the difficulty of designing a Mars rover given the extreme conditions on the planet.  One of them said, “It can get up to well over two hundred degrees during the day.”

The other guy said, ”But it’s a dry heat.”

I was late for a meeting in New York, held up by a huge traffic jam only a few blocks away from the meeting place, a midtown hotel.  When I got there, literally hot and bothered, the guy at the front desk, a native African of some sort, lamented that the cause of the problem was a state visit by an African dignitary who decided to spend the afternoon visiting the department stores along Fifth Avenue.  He apologized on behalf of the hotel and the entire African continent.  At that moment, the doorman, a burly white guy clearly from Brooklyn, dressed in his John Sousa uniform, volunteered, “I think it’s the king of fuckin’ Somalia.”

The desk manager nodded at that, and said, “Can’t feed his own people and what is he doing?  Shopping at Bergdorf’s.”

The two of them smiled at each other in solidarity.

It’s too much to say that I live for these moments, but obviously they’re unforgettable.  It’s not just the humor, but the timing of the delivery, the spontaneity of the response.  It’s a type of improvisational music.  A volley and serve poetry.  And it’s an elevated example of how people naturally speak.  All you have to do is remember the rhythm to fit the content to your story.

It’s the soundtrack of our lives if you take the trouble to listen. 

Who knows?

            All sorts of interesting philosophical constructs have emerged from Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, one of the pillars of Quantum Mechanics.  It mandates that an observer can never simultaneously know the exact velocity and position of a subatomic particle, that is, how fast it’s going and where it’s at, both at the same time.  You have to choose.  One or the other.  This is probably the most famous scientific axiom to delineate what we can never know, undermining our abiding belief in science, which is that we can know everything if we just stick to the problem and develop better instruments of measure.

            Einstein worked for decades to prove Heisenberg wrong.  He never did.  After that, physicists stopped trying.  Instead, they built not-knowing into their calculations, yielding formulas that have given us digital computers, smartphones, lasers, electron microscopes, LEDs, MRIs, etc.   

            So not-knowing can yield all sorts of benefits. 

I suffer from a condition I’ve self-diagnosed as infomania.  I’m eager to learn things, so I read obsessively about nearly everything I can get my hands on.  I’ve absorbed a lot of information, but I’m mostly struck by how much I don’t know, and never will.  I’m at peace with this, because there are actually a lot of things I don’t want to know, like the date of my demise, the potential carcinogens in my quarter pounder with cheese, or the political rivalries consuming my local planning and zoning committees. 

            Artists and musicians are well aware of the value of empty spaces between brush strokes and notes.  As are fine writers.  Which gets me to my point.  I think one of the highest forms of literary craft is the unreliable narrator.  A protagonist who is either ignorant of the events surrounding them, or has willfully decided not to be aware, or is simply lying to you, the reader.  This last version takes exquisite management of the narrative to give room for both the chronicler rendering the story and evidence that there’s something fishy in the telling. 

            The art of the unreliable narrator relies on us not really knowing what the hell is going on. 

            Given the difficulty of the effort, there aren’t a lot of good examples, though Humbert Humbert in Lolita comes to mind.  He’s not exactly lying to the reader, though he wants us to accept, even endorse, his elaborate philosophical, intellectual and aesthetic rationalizations for what is ultimately an ugly act of pedophilia.  As his obsession becomes more obvious, we start doubting more and more of his account, so while the story holds its logic, the actual description of events becomes, well, unreliable.

            In the world of mysteries and thrillers, I’d argue one can never rely on anything expressed by Patricia Highsmith’s protagonists.  Humbert-style rationalizations are at the center of every story, though often overwhelmed by outright deceit and sociopathology.  Ripley only wants a world that is the way he wants it to be.  Getting at the empirical truth is the farthest notion from his mind.  And with all the ambiguities and possible interpretations swirling around, the reader will never really know what is true and what isn’t. 

            Another triumph for Werner Heisenberg. 

            I can’t remotely claim to have made a comprehensive study of unreliable narrators (I willfully choose not to know everything about the subject), but for my money, nothing comes close to Gone Girl.  It’s a tour de force.  I feel this way partly because I was completely snowed by each of the book’s unreliable narrators, their stories told so convincingly, with lavish detail and nuance, lies and misdirections at industrial scale. 

            What makes the novel more than a clever hall of mirrors are the characters – their full realization, like Highsmith’s, people you might know, or have the misfortune to encounter in your regular lives.  In this way the crime novel leaks into the horror genre, the kind of horror you could actually experience, with no need for monsters or creatures from the beyond.  Because we recognize that the human mind is capable of almost anything.  Deceiving itself, deceiving others, weaving its own truths, denying, justifying, rationalizing its way into the unspeakable.  

            And unknowable. 

Ode to the blank page.

           It doesn’t frighten me.  I like looking at it.  All naked, pure and brimming with possibility.  A flat field covered in snow, untrammeled.  A white void, unlike the black version whose magic is threatening and malevolent.  You’re invited to disfigure the nothingness with words, which in the age of electronic pages, you can easily wipe clean again.  You can have a conversation, first with yourself, then with a possible reader, if the words start sounding like something you’d want to share. 

There is nothing about a blank page you need to dread.  It will accept anything you wish to contribute.  There are an infinite number of blank pages waiting for you to trundle across, clumsily or with easy grace.  They don’t care.  Like your devoted Labrador, a blank page will forgive your every transgression and never love you the less. 

Nothing feels more perfect than the communion between two beings.  You and the blank page are one-on-one, a fundamental relationship that produces a third thing, nourishing the world.  And like all successful unions, the more you put into it, the better it gets.  The richness is limitless, the possibilities beyond counting. 

The blank page is the ultimate renewable resource.  Consume all you wish.  There will always be another blank page, and another after that. 

Assuming the continuation of the species, the product is eternal.  It will outlive you and other material things.  It will be reborn with every new edition, or preserved as an artifact for future observers to unearth. 

            All it asks of you is to join in the process, to convert its blankness into something real.  To shape the whiteness into a new form, unique unto itself, that allows the void to exist as a tangible thing and not just a potential. 

           When the blank page is no longer blank, it becomes something else.  Its purity has been compromised, never to be perfect again.  It can never be perfect because no two readers will ever agree on what is written there.  Including the writer, who likely has the least ability to judge the result.  Even a sonnet that wins the Pulitzer Prize will whisper possible revisions, hint at blemishes, betray compromises.  Though what should be celebrated is the almost-perfect.  Or perfect in its own way.  Perfect for me, if not for thee. 

The more the fleshed-out pages, the greater the possibility for imperfection.  Irritating for the writer, though often endearing to the reader, who may savor the nicks, scuffs and scars as evidence of the work’s unique allure, its true claim to originality.  As with any object prone to the capriciousness of time, the planned purpose, that first proof of brilliance, may dim, while the less intended, the rough shavings that litter the words, sentences and paragraphs, begin to glow. 

You don’t know, the writer, the maker of footprints across the drifts of snow.  You probably never will.  But this is no reason not to make the attempt, over and over again, as long as the hands, or voice, or blinking eyes have the ability to convey.  It’s why the act of writing is always justified, the blank page an everlasting invitation.

 What’s not to love?