Zombies Ate My Brain

Not literally of course, but I have to say that I've had zombies on the mind for the last couple weeks.

I can't remember what triggered it, but if I had to take a guess I would say it started when I read The Road. There are no zombies in the book, but it put me in a post-apocalyptic mood. I recently read World War Z, which I enjoyed. I asked my Librarything compatriots for suggestions along those lines and someone said I should read Cell. I hate to say it, but it was the most unsatisfying read I've had in as long as I can remember; psychic, floating, pseudo-zombies "infected" by cell phones? Not exactly what I was looking for.

A book I read shortly after it came out was Everything Is Illuminated (about an entirely different kind of apocalypse). When I met Jonathan Safran Foer he said he'd merely written a book he wanted to read. That's the best advice I've ever heard about writing.

So here's my plan. I'm going to write my own zombie story, in serial form. I'll post it here and to my website as I finish each chapter. I have no timeline and only the vaguest idea of a story. I only know that the infestation has begun and is in full swing and the first-person narrator is a journalist housed inside a concentration camp, not as punishment but for his own protection, along with a number (hundreds? thousands?) of other refugees.

Wrrrrgghh!

More Cormac

I found this interesting link. Wes Morgan apparently walked around Knoxville taking pictures of settings from Suttree.

If you want to know with what frequency and on what page a particular word occurs, John Sepich has put together a concordance for Suttree.

If yyou're really interested in such things, you can find a concordance for each of McCarthy's novels.

Cool.

At Home Without The Man

It's been said of Cormac McCarthy that he is such a reclusive writer that he's not even famous for it. Well, that's all changed.

Maybe it was the Oprah Effect, or maybe the great mass of people have caught up with the writer, but it seems these days you can't step out of your house without hearing or seeing his name. I guess winning a Pulitzer, having your book picked by Oprah (or is it 'blessed' by her?), and having a recent novel turned into one of the most universally praised films in a decade will get your name out there.

With all the exposure (hell, people even know where he hangs out), there's still a lot about the man most people don't know.

The Knoxville News Sentinel has apparently been trying, unsuccessfully, to get an interview with their hometown hero for a while. Even without his input they decided to run an interesting piece, including some old photos of him and the houses he lived in.

Top 10 of 2007

Time Magazine has released its list of the top 10 books of 2007. Sadly, I am not on it. Just as sadly I haven't read any of these books. (I'm so embarrassed.)

1. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao By Junot Diaz.
2. Then We Came to the End: A Novel By Joshua Ferris.
3. A Thousand Splendid Suns By Khaled Hosseini.
4. Out Stealing Horses: A Novel By Per Petterson.
5. Tree of Smoke: A Novel By Denis Johnson.
6. House of Meetings By Martin Amis.
7. No One Belongs Here More Than You By Miranda July.
8. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows By J.K. Rowling.
9. Like You'd Understand, Anyway By Jim Shepard.
10. The Post-Birthday World By Lionel Shriver.

8

Things can get a little, uh, boring at work.

Other than paying my bills (and some measure of social interaction) my job is a humongous waste of time. Sure, I get a lot of reading done during my daily 90 minute commute (which the CTA has kindly extended to two hours on occasion...you know, to allow me more time to read), but other than that, it is essentially a giant pain in my ass.

My biggest decision is usually what time to eat lunch.

But today was productive. Hell, by my usual standard today was a red-letter day. I decided I'm going to change the way I write the number eight.

I've always made my eights as two small circles, one above the other like a tiny, headless snowman. But today I decided that was too sloppy and inefficient. From now on my eights will be made with one stroke of the pen, a small, upright infinity symbol.

Who says a day at work can't be productive?

Coming Soon

Dating Courtney. March 27-30, 2008. La Costa Theatre Company
A coming of age story about a girl learning to find her way in the world of relationships.

These are a couple of very (very) rough draft mock ups for postcards and the poster. The idea is the pics would be of the five different dresses Courtney wears during the course of the show. This is just a dress Penny pulled out of her closet so I could play with the layouts.

America The Ignorant

A teacher in Texas (does the city really matter?) has been suspended for the unforgivable crime of allowing a student to read a book.

Kaleb Tierce "is being investigated for allegedly distributing harmful material to a minor after the student selected Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy's "Child of God" off the list and read it."

Tierce, an assistant football coach, is a third-year teacher at a place named Jim Ned High School and is apparently popular with the students. But that's beside the point.

Coincidentally I recently re-read Child Of God.

Now that I have a son people ask me if I would allow him to do this or that, often these questions are directed at things that I have done, not books I've read. Would I let my son read a book about a necrophiliac murderer who lives in a cave where he stores his victims?

The answer is unequivocally yes. I will let him read anything he is capable of. If he wants to read Child of God I will not only allow it, I will encourage it (after all, McCarthy is my favorite author). Here's my question for the idiot parents of this poor kid - is Child of God anymore violent than the book allegedly handed down by God? A book loaded from front to back with infanticide, genocide, fratricide, war, incest and more miscellaneous murder and mayhem than anything else written since the advent of language?

Are these people afraid their son will start murdering people and having sex with the dead bodies? If that's the case they need to look a lot deeper into their lives (and their son's) than a high school reading list.

The Nobel Prize

Doris Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature.

What does it take to win the Nobel? Here's a list of Lessing's works in English:

The Grass is Singing. 1950
This was the Old Chief's Country. 1952
Martha Quest. 1952. – (Children of Violence; 1)
Five : Short Novels. 1953
A Proper Marriage. 1954. – (Children of Violence; 2)
A Retreat to Innocence. 1956
The Habit of Loving. 1957
Going Home. 1957
A Ripple from the Storm. 1958 (Children of Violence; 3)
Fourteen Poems. 1959
In Pursuit of the English : a Documentary. 1960
Play with a Tiger : a Play in Three Acts. 1962
The Golden Notebook. 1962
A Man and Two Women. 1963
Martha Quest and A Proper Marriage. 1964
African Stories. 1964
Landlocked. 1965 (Children of Violence; 4)
A Ripple from the Storm and Landlocked. 1966
The Black Madonna. 1966
Winter in July. 1966
Particularly Cats. 1967
The Four-Gated City. 1969 (Children of Violence; 5)
Briefing for a Descent into Hell. 1971
The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories. 1972.
Collected African stories. Vol. 1, This was the Old Chief's Country. 1973
Collected African stories. Vol. 2, The Sun Between Their Feet. 1973
The Summer Before the Dark. 1973
The Memoirs of a Survivor. 1974
Stories. 1978
To Room Nineteen : Collected Stories Volume One. 1978
The Temptation of Jack Orkney : Collected Stories Volume Two. 1978
Shikasta : Re: Colonised Planet 5. 1979 (Canopus in Argos: Archives; 1)
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five. 1980 (Canopus in Argos: Archives; 2)
The Sirian Experiments. 1981 (Canopus in Argos: Archives; 3)
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. 1982 (Canopus in Argos: Archives; 4)
Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire. 1983 (Canopus in Argos: Archives; 5)
The Diary of a Good Neighbour. 1983
If the Old Could ... 1984
The Diaries of Jane Somers. 1984
The Good Terrorist. 1985
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. 1987
The Wind Blows Away Our Words. 1987
The Fifth Child. 1988
The Real Thing : Stories and Sketches. 1992
African Laughter : Four Visits to Zimbabwe. 1992
Shadows on the Wall of the Cave : a talk by Doris Lessing delivered 19 January 1994
Conversations / edited by Earl G. Ingersol. – Princeton, N.J. : Ontario Review Press, 1994
A Small Personal Voice : Essays, Reviews, Interviews 1994
Under My Skin : Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949. 1994
Spies I Have Known and Other Stories. 1995
Playing the Game. 1995
Love, Again. 1996
Play with a Tiger, and Other Plays. 1996
Walking in the Shade : Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949-1962. 1997
Mara and Dann : an Adventure. 1999
Ben, in the World. 2000
The Sweetest Dream. 2001
On Cats. 2002
The Grandmothers : Four Short Novels. 2003
Time Bites : Views and Reviews. 2004
The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog. 2005
The Cleft. 2007

Dig in.

Process

When I was in grad school there was much heated debate about the process of writing. Or, more succinctly, Process.


These self-important and masturbatory conversations usually centered around the physical process of placing words on paper.


Keyboard, pen, pencil, tape recorder, hammer and chisel, crayon...


Computer monitor, legal pad, lined white paper, cocktail napkins...


While I wanted to discuss mental and emotional aspects of Process everyone else seemed caught up in the minutiae (and pretense) of what mechanical tools were being used, as if somehow the 'magic' was not in your head but in the material objects used to record it.

I often wondered (and still do) whether this avoidance was due to a serious interest in the physical act of writing or a serious lack of consideration about motivation.

People would tell me the more they thought about writing the more they became blocked.

Blocked?

What are these people? Toilets?

That's like saying the more they thought about food the less hungry they'd become Or the more they thought about sex the more impotent they became.

The old saying goes that writers write. I believe that writing is not so much a physical act as it is a form of thinking out loud. When people think of writers (and of course I'm speaking in general terms) they don't think of someone who is physically capable, they think of someone who is "smart" (and boy is that a mistake).

So while others discuss pen vs laptop or PC vs. Mac (as if the brand actually matters) I'll turn my attention inward. And see what I can dig up from the deep (and maybe not so deep) recesses of my consciousness.

20 Books

The 50th Anniversary issue of GQ (they've been making men feel bad about themselves for 50 years?) includes their list of "20 Books that Changed Men's Lives."
What men they are talking about I can't say, but here's the list:
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
Moneyball by Michael Lewis
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs
The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort
Trump: The Art of the Deal by Donald J. Trump
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Universal Baseball Association Inc. by Robert Coover
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
Roots by Alex Haley
The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
The Boys on the Bus by Timothy Crouse
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller
The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

The Greatest Living American Writer

Dissapointment

Very few things promote creation like disappointment, depression and drugs.

Fortunately for me I've experienced very little of the first two of these and generally shied away from the last one (at least lately).


By most objective measurements I have a pretty good life (though, admittedly, even the most objective measurements of "quality of life" are very subjective). Is my life perfect? Far from it; I'm overworked, underpaid and generally unappreciated (though, thankfully, not by my family).


If my first statement is true (that the 3 Ds are good for creativity), and you couple that with my second statement (I'm a generally happy dude) then, by extension, I must not be very creative lately.


Happily I think I can say that this is a case where 1+1 does not equal 2. (I've never been good at math anyway...I hate all that linear thinking and certitude.)


Disappointment, depression and drugs may promote creativity, but they sure as shit don't do a damn thing for productivity.

Self Portrait #14

Management

I came home tonight and these 1,001 words are what came out of me. (It's not hard to find my motivation.)

This is my first draft of the scene complete with syntax errors, tense disagreements, and questions about where, exactly, to place it in the manuscript. Numerous typos habe been corrected by the grace of Microsoft.

[George used to manage a big corporately owned bar or restaurant, some Lettuce-type place. A themed “restaubar” – loud and bustling]

They had studied the “art” of ahm-bee-ahnss (or at least they hired someone who claimed to study it) and had combined it with precise mathematics and had created a place where sound bounced and echoed. The music was up-tempo jazz, a seemingly innocuous music that in its cadence occasionally flirted with frenzy, causing all around it conversations to accelerate, personal volumes to rise and all manner of pacing to hasten whether it be those of the diners (table turnover is how you make your money, baby) or the bussers who flitted from table to table like nectar-ingesting birds.

They had counted the tables and chairs in their most symmetrical arrangement and had realized seven servers and three bussers could run the place with incredible efficiency. So they zigzagged the tables and nightly scheduled six servers and two bussers, They hired managers who drove them all like dog-track greyhounds – front of the house managers aggressive as pit bosses and kitchen managers angry as put bulls. And like those infamous dogs, they were castoff if deemed incapable or unwilling to perform.

Why would you go back to waiting tables after being a manager? Isn’t that going backwards?

You don’t step down from restaurant management; you step away from it.

Management in the restaurant industry is not like managing in the real world. It’s not anything like people’s perceptions of what it means to be in charge. It bears no resemblance to being a manager in a large bank, or a headge-fund manager, and nothing at all like managing a baseball team. In a restaurant you’re not in charge of anything – at best you’re a shepherd, nothing more than a wrangler of people, people who are often insecure or egomaniacal (very few restaurant people are in anyway moderate) and sometimes both.

Waiters are generally not much more than transients, and like transients they are often aloof or indifferent to the ways of the larger world; they seek no more than a modicum of stability in the most basic necessities – housing, food, love. And how do you motivate a person with so little too lose and only a pocketful (at best) of cash to gain? Often they are incompetent, unable to keep anything resembling a regular job and even less competent at keeping regular hours…regularly going to sleep when most people are getting to work.

Why would I quit? The place was a cave.

How do you mean?

It was a loud, unhealthy and generally dangerous place to work. The place could kill you. Second hand smoke, easy access to alcohol and attractive, insecure females were among the most obvious of the dangers. He often wondered why they gave helmets to miners. If a cave, located sometimes hundreds of feet underground, collapses, the only thing a helmet is going to do is provide a convenient place to store what’s left of your head when they eventually dig you about, assuming they even bother.

Every night the rattle and crash of seven or eight or even ten hours would stow away in him, hiding until he eventually laid his head down on a pillow or the armrest of the couch, remerging as a constant high-pitched ringing in his ears like the chirping-whine of late-summer crickets nesting in his head. It was slowly making him deaf as he monthly lost a tiny bit of hearing capacity in his upper register.

Most nights he would lay in bed, thumbs jammed into his ears, fingers splayed across his scalp as if he was keeping his cranium from lifting off, and he would listen as the ringing was eventually replaced by the hollow, bellowy rasp of his own breathing. After a bit he hears the blood coursing through skull. Eventually the rising and falling of his chest fall into sync with his steadily beating heart. He falls asleep that way most nights, on his back, elbow bent, hands loosely cupped around his ears as his fingers slowly release his scalp from its trembling, white-knuckle grip.

But the place worked in even more insidious ways, luring with cash and rich foods and friendships with too many people as neurotic and unstable as yourself, a veritable circle jerk of co-dependency. What was at first exciting became frustrating, then depressing, then mind numbing and the numbness eventually becomes comfortable. There’s a reason so many people take anti-depressants…it’s just plain easier.

It’s a trap. You learn to love it or you get the fuck out early. You love it, if for no other reason, than it’s different. It’s only marginally different…after all, most people work for the profit of someone else, usually many someone elses. He didn’t have weekends off, but at least he didn’t have to wake up early.

Manage? Never again. He’d done the math. If you made an average of $150 a night, and worked 260 days you cleared 40 grand a year, and you still got to take off over a 100 days a year…that’s like taking three months off work. If you worked at a nice enough place (or at least busy enough) and averaged over $200 that was over 50 grand a year. What’s a manager make? Forty thousand. What’s that after taxes? Not even twenty-seven grand. Fuck that. I’d rather do without the responsibility and have the flexibility if having a shift covered if I don’t feel like working. Or the flexibility if being able to tell someone to fuck off. In Chicago there are over ten-thousand restaurants. Whey deal with the bullshit when it’s a buyers market?

In the restaurant business you’re really nothing more than a day laborer, and he knew it. At least as a manager he received his money in the form of a paycheck. And no one he knew could save a dollar to save their life. In the hands of most servers cash was as good as gone the second it was earned.

My Mind...

...
...
...
...
...wanders.

Swearing Redux

Three different people have openly called me out.

Shit, piss, fuck, cunt...these are the words with which the the road to disappointing your friends and family is paved.

I have no intention of teaching my son to swear. I don't think it's cute or funny when a three-year old says shit.

He's going to hear bad words, probably sooner than I did - and I learned so early I don't even remember how old I was when I first heard someone say fuck. (It's all uncle Eddie's fault...he's 6 years older, so when I was only 10 I was regularly exposed to the world of a 16 year-old in the late 1970s...and that's all I'm gonna say about that.)

What I was trying to say (apparently I was unconvincing) was that of all the concerns I have about Jack's future, swearing is way down the list.

I'm not sure what, exactly, bothers people so much about potty language. It's not like swearing is the kind of thing that can keep a kid out of college (unless, of course, he swears at someone). Hell, swearing got Joel Goodson into Princeton. (There I go, defending swearing again.)

Seriously, I'm not condoning swearing amongst toddlers. Or even pre-teens. But teenagers, in any country in the world, are going to hear swear words. What's a parent to do? I accept it, and I plan to be an active participant in my son's life. When he says those words I won't over-react and wash his mouth out with soap (does anyone actually still do this?), or yell at him. I plan on helping him understand what's meant when people say these things, that words are almost never to be taken lightly, that you should mean what you say.

I can pretty much guarantee that even prince William has heard his share of people use unprincely language. In England, swearing is almost the national pastime...and unlike the U.S. they have a seriously long past time...they invented that damn language and they swear like, well, drunken Englishman.

Dog Days

It’s the middle of July and the only thing I want to see in the high 90’s are fastballs, but the warm summer is hitting its stride (just like the Cubs ) as we approach the All-Star game and the temperature is a near-record 96 degrees.

I’ve started reading three different books in the last week and I’ve put them all down. Between Jack, work, and day-to-day distractions (it’s amazing how quickly laundry, mail and un-returned phone calls can pile up) I don’t seem to be able to focus on anything for more than ten seconds – books, movies, conversations, even sleep exist in a world of fits and starts and seemingly endless beginnings without a single conclusion (it’s a near-miracle I can finish this sentence).

I still have an uncanny ability to amass scraps of paper with notes for current and future projects. Receipts, envelopes, the corners of newspapers are scrawled in barely-legible pen scratchings, occasionally disintegrating in the pockets of jeans tossed into the hamper and jackets hung in closets months ago.

The summer makes me lazy. I know I’m supposed to love it. As a Chicagoan I’m almost obligated to look forward to these balmy (muggy, sticky, sultry) days and nights as if they only come once a decade like some constantly deferred birthday party. But I don’t. I prefer it cooler, rainier, greyer; maybe it’s my eastern European lineage. Not all the time. But if I had my way it would be 58 degrees with passing fronts of enormous clouds, clouds as big as entire states stacked like plumes of chimney smoke.

Tomorrow it’s supposed to “cool off” to 89 degrees.

October can’t get here soon enough.

My First-Born Son

26 Letters

Language.

Foul language, foreign language, body language.

"Communication of thoughts and feelings through a system of arbitrary signals, such as voice sounds, gestures, or written symbols."

Whatever the fuck that means.

It's all inadequate; feeble, really, when you think about it. In English we have 26 characters mashed together into combinations that are supposed to represent everything - every object, every distance, every thought - every emotion, sensation, color, sound - every vein of every leaf, every crest of every wave, every sea creature, mammal, alien creature imagined or real. EVERYTHING that ever was, is and will be.

That's a lot to ask from 26 letters. But it's what we have, so it's what we use.

As for what we will teach Jack the one topic that seems to come up most often is swearing. I have to admit I'm torn. As anyone who knows me can imagine, I believe words have massive power (for both good and evil) so they must be wielded with caution and as much precision as possible.

At the same time, I'm not particularly enamored of the parochial and hypocritically pious nature of American society and am just as inclined as anyone (more inclined) to say fuck-all in front of anyone I goddamn well please.

I'm not going to encourage it, but I don't plan on making a big deal out of it the first time Jack says 'shit' in front of grandma or 'fuck' in front of the neighbors. If he's a perceptive kid he'll learn how and when to use it, just like you and me and millions of other verbally responsible adults.

Crossover post.

Writing Is Re-writing

Keep saying it to yourself. Writing is rewriting.

When the inspiration seems to have drifted away, or to another idea, remember: Writing IS rewriting.

Pick an inspirational font, put a fancy border around the page, and in 120-point letters type it and print: Writing ... is rewriting.

Put it on a bracelet: W I R

Whatever you do...don't forget it.

Writing. Is. Rewriting.

The End Is Very Fucking Nigh*

Thanks to Cormac McCarthy (the greatest living American writer) I’ve been on a bit of a post-apocalyptic bender lately.

I’m reading The Road for the third time in the last two months. I’ve never read a novel more than once, though I’ve re-read parts of books, namely Walden. I’ve re-read short stories and poems, I’ve watched a handful of movies multiple times, but the time investment for a novel is so massive and there are so many books I’ve never read that the impulse to go back to a novel I’ve read simply isn’t that strong compared to the impulse to read one of the thousands of great books I haven’t gotten to yet.

28 Days Later (which I loved) was recently on television in anticipation of the release of the sequel, 28 Weeks Later (which I can’t wait to see).

Though I’m a (relatively) firm believer that there’s an impending global catastrophe on the way, I can’t say that I’ve been doing much planning for it. I’m not hording water, I haven’t collected a cache of weapons, I don’t even own one of those batteryless, hand-cranked flashlights.

The impending apocalypse has not dimmed my enthusiasm for the future, as evidenced by the fact that we recently got a puppy and we’re having a baby. Babies and puppies have a way of softening the blows of harsh reality.

What would I do if hordes of marauding cannibals or troops of zombies began shambling through the streets of the world?

Frankly, I have no fucking clue.

But I have some great fiction to offer me some suggestion.

*Graffiti on a church wall from 28 Days Later

I have an idea...

...for this novel. Maybe it would work better as a screenplay, or a stage play.

There's probably only enough material for a short story.

Now that I think about it, maybe I should just write some notes and see how I feel in a couple of days.

Now if I can just find a pen, and some paper.