On Hiding My Book From My Teen-Aged Children

I'm on a lot of medicine to keep my blood pressure down and I think it might be making my brain even more sluggish than it usually is. In any case I haven't been able to come up with anything that I particularly want to write about. But then last weekend it came out that my older children were aware that I had once written a book, after a fashion; and though neither of them are great readers, the idea of this seemed to interest them, perhaps because they have never seen me engaging much with the world of serious adults, even within my immediate family, and probably are hazy as to what function I am supposed to serve within it. I had a copy of it printed and bound some years back, in two volumes as it was too long for the vanity press I employed to make a single volume of it. A few years after acquiring these copies I grew embarrassed by them and hid them away in a linen closet lest any adults who happened to come to the house should espy them on the shelves and make sport of them; however my wife found them one day while re-arranging the closet and returned them to the shelves, by which time I realized no one besides me who was likely to come to the house ever looked over bookshelves anymore anyway. So when my sons inquired whether the story that I had once written a book was true and asked if they could see it, I took these copies down and showed them to them, having no anticipation what they would make of it.


They were impressed to see my name on an actual printed book, not being able to distinguish it from something published by an esteemed commercial house, and they were amused by the black square on the back of the dust jacket where the author photo was supposed to be, as I neglected to include one, thinking it unlikely to help boost interest in my work. They were very curious about the website link I provided next to the blank picture--which was to this very blog--and I assured them that the site referred to was long inactive. They also opened to some random pages, none of them fortunately among the most potentially embarrassing ones, but they still read examples of my overwrought narrative aloud with great mirth. My second son then expressed an interest in reading the whole thing "someday", though I don't think he will--even my wife was only able to get through a few pages of it--but as I remembered more of the kinds of things that were in it, I felt that I didn't want them, at that time, even taking the book down periodically and reading random pages. Perhaps I won't mind it once they have had some college or are adults, but I don't think they have the background yet to appreciate that many of the more unsettling or depressing aspects that they might come across in it or intended to some extent as jokes, or are referencing other literature. Much of the book concerns a young man who may or may not be like me who is a complete failure at everything--sex, education, work, physical prowess, personality development, who in the end due to his inability to be competitive economically and socially has to move away from his native Mid-Atlantic region to a less strenuous part of the country, though this latter at least is the story of a lot of people in my generation and even more so in the one following. There is supposed to be some ludicrous humor in the idea of a man who nominally has some advantages in life growing up to find himself so utterly inferior and dominated in almost every situation in which he finds himself, but I don't know that teen-agers who haven't read very much will get that. I definitely don't want them yet to read about the various sexual problems of my protagonist, hilarious as I imagined they must be to the generations of brilliant young lovers of literature I regarded as the audience for my writing.




In truth who did I think I was writing for (indeed who do I think I am writing for now?) Doubtless at the time I imagined it would be younger people who would find the travails and longings expressed in the book relatable and who would form a smart and interesting enough group to make it culturally significant. One of my main motivations for trying to write after all was that it seemed one of the few possible avenues open to me to try to win the respect and interest of attractive women (in which case it might be posited that in the annals of human endeavor few have failed more spectacularly in pursuit of a goal, when the time put into it, etc, is factored in). I expected that the Baby Boomer cultural elite, who in my general view never demonstrated great literary sensibility, would not find my writing to their liking and dismiss it, which would have the added effect of cutting off any budding competition for the public's attention I might have hoped to get in on at the knees, but I held out hope that the older generations, who at that time still had a good deal of influence and power, would recognize my book as a necessary work of its era and firmly in the great mainstream American tradition. I spent a ridiculous amount of time arguing with myself whether I should accept a university faculty position if one were offered to me or maintain my artistic respectability by remaining outside of the academy. I thought I would go to a lot more drinking parties and be friends with a lot more alcoholic geniuses than has proven to be the case.


I had an odd, I won't say experience but sensation today that I wanted to write down. As part of my recovery from my heart incident I am taking a rehab/exercise class with people who had similar episodes. I am the youngest person in the class by about 20 years. While at first I took most of these older people for run of the mill lifelong New Hampshirites, and indeed almost all of them have lived here for decades, it seems like about half of them are originally from New York City and grew up there in the 1940s and 50s. One person mentioned having grown up in Brooklyn a few blocks from Ebbetts Field. I was really struck by this. In my childhood Ebbetts Field, which was knocked down around 1960, belonged to a past as mythical and irretrievably lost to my mind as the times of Alexander the Great or Charlemagne. I had also read recently that there are only fifteen men left alive who ever played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, which further emphasized the great distance in time we are from that period. So the idea that I was sitting in a room with a person who once walked down the street to attend games there, and with a number of people who passed some of the vital years of their lives in that city known to me mainly from black and white movies and books and stories by dead and fading authors that seem so hopelessly old in the online environment even I largely inhabit now really hit me. I had imagined there could not be that many of such people left, yet apparently they are still all around me.

Year in Review

I only managed to get done 35 posts in 2015 on this blog (though I did put up 27 on the spinoff Vacation blog) and readership was not so hot either. Quality, though never near as high as I anticipated when I took up this pursuit, I suspect is down even from what it was formerly. So I am in a bit of a down cycle. However, maybe this past year marked the bottom in some ways and I will be able to come back somewhat.  Become calmer, more comfortable, less distracted and rushed, or at least approaching somewhat the level I formerly had. I feel like I must be close to peak distractedness or jumpiness; well, what I really feel is that it must be impossible that I will never regain my ability to think and write somewhat coherently. In any case, here were my top-viewed posts from the last year:

1. Mid-Winter Music and Videos on this blog got 174 page views, making it by far my most popular post of 2015.

2. Author List Volume VIII from the Vacation blog, a dry catalog of writers' birthplaces, burial sites, museums and other monuments, was the runner-up of all my postings this year with 73 views.

3. The Battle of the Broadcasting Erins, a consideration of the merits of Generation-X TV newscaster babes Erin Burnett and Erin Fehlau, took the bronze medal for this year with 58 page views.

4. A movie review post with the eclectic-sounding title of Luis Bunuel/John Huston/James Joyce/Andy Williams was checked out by 44 people.

5. My recount of my experiences reading An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser on the other blog attracted 39 visits.

6. Addendum to Edward Bok post (Vacation)--28

7-8. Tie between the original post on The Americanization of Edward Bok on the Vacation Blog and my account of taking my children to see the movie Tomorrowland, both with 25 views.

9. Author List Volume VII (Vacation)--24

10. Report on All's Well that Ends Well (Vacation)--23.

The least viewed post I had this year was my June reading update on the Vacation blog, which drew only 7 visitors. In general those monthly reading updates are not popular, but I started doing them to give that blog a somewhat more frequent consistent source of content, so I think I will keep it up for now. The least viewed posts for this blog were the last two I put up in December, which have both drawn 8 views. 8 seems to be about the baseline number of regular readers I have. Most of my posts get to eight views within a week and then other visitors will trickle in periodically after that.

The rather groovy early 70s video for 'Uncle Albert" on my #1 post for this year seems to have been taken down. We'll try and see if this one is any good.

Videos featuring the beautiful Mirielle from the 1980s "French in Action" TV series (one was on that prize-earning post) never stay up for long, but it is usually worthwhile to find more.

I have had a good Christmas season, of course one always has to work too much in my line of employment this time of year, but I think my children will have pleasant memories of it in their later life. Hoping my brain recovers some of its elasticity and stamina, however modest these were even at their peaks, in the New Year, and I can produce some worthy as well as more frequent posts in 2016.

Three Brothers (1980)

Do you like this movie? Yes.

What Do You Like About It? It has the expansive, deliberate, unfrenetic, realist, novelistic style that reached its zenith in the 1970s, particularly in Europe. This depiction of consciousness, character, etc, was akin to how I used to experience life myself until I was around twenty-seven or so.

What Do You Dislike About It? Nothing stands out. It is a little unusual in that it sets out a group of characters with very serious problems or crises happening in their lives and kind of leaves it at that, as if to say, these are the pertinent facts of life, and there is no resolution for them, until you grow old and die (or are killed). But when you think about it you realize how foolish you are, not so much to want, but to expect a resolution such that a character will never be troubled by his great problem ever again.

What Do You Love About it? Nothing to that extreme. I like seeing something of the Europe of my childhood and youth that I could still get a little sense of in 1990, but as one of the themes is about how soul-crushing the modern urban lifestyle and economy were even at that time, I was not indulging in the nostalgia too much.

Who is the director? Francesco Rosi. This is the first of his films I have seen. I would say that on the whole he definitely belongs to the old camp (he was born in 1922, and began directing on his own in the 50s) that reached a kind of maturity by the late 60s and 70s. The films of this school are extremely well-made, both technically and in terms the overall coherence of story or theme. They know what they mean to say and want to show, and how they want to say and show it.

What is important about this movie? This movie is interesting because it comes near the end of an era that, unlike similar transitional periods, I don't think as many people on the creative side of the field realized was the end of an era. Or even if they had some sense of this, I don't think they grasped how different even intelligent people's attitudes towards art and artworks, and the manner by which they consumed and related to them would become. For it seems to me in this regard we are a long way from 1980. In Italian film no less than the other major national cinemas the period beginning around 1980 was a watershed time, as the older masters (Fellini, De Sica, Visconti, etc) retired, and the generation that only knew the postwar world rose to prominence. Rosi does address the theme, so prominent especially in this more recent generation, of the native but poor village one has had to leave behind to contribute economically and socially in the modern world, feeble as that contribution is. He does not fully romanticize it, and it is clear that for the most part it is hopeless for any young person to try to make a life there in 1980, but it is also clear that something serious has been lost with this breaking from tradition.

Anything Else. The sophisticated Euro-sex is kept pretty much to a minimum. There is only one of the brothers who is a threat to get it on with anybody. He does, mysteriously to me, have sex with his rather cold ex-wife (though I thought her attractive enough) after a conversation in which I could not detect any hint that she felt anything towards him other than contempt and security in her total superiority. I don't get how we are supposed to know that she still wanted it, or at least was willing to have it. And the beauty of it is, I never will. But you know why, superior reader. You have been there. And you will never forget it.

A Confession. When I was in college I would get a letter every year, or at least twice I got one, from the financial aid office or admissions office or alumni office or some other office informing me that my aid that year was in some part made possible by a very generous gift to the College from a Mr Whitebread Mayonnaise or other from the class of 1929, who was at the time still living in Baltimore, and that it would be appreciated if I would write him a letter of thanks and say something about my studies and my plans for the future and so on. Needless to say I never got around to writing any of these letters. At the time I no doubt forgot about them within fifteen minutes of leaving the mailbox, and I had thought about it once in all of the years since then, until a few weeks ago, when I remembered that I had been asked to do this one polite little thing in return for ten of thousands of money I was being given, and I had completely ignored it, as if it were beneath my contempt even to acknowledge it all. It's something I should have done, and emblematic of all the reasons why my life relative to the greater world amounted to so little as it did.

My wife has a blog now. She is a natural. Her site is for her Greek and Latin classes (substantial and purposeful) and is wholly devoid of narcissism. I can only marvel at the seriousness and restraint, two qualities I have always longed for and never come close to attaining.

No picture with tonight's posting because my computer situation is still a joke. I have two in the room, one of which is crashing every time I log onto the site, the other of which is loading pictures at 1998 speed. I will probably edit one in in a few days, when I can get something working again.

Anatomy of a Failed Dinner

So tonight I went to the Olive Garden--why is not important, but it was a combination of not being dressed properly to go somewhere else, wanting to eat a meal the rhythms of which resembled that of a real dinner but without requiring me to do a lot of thinking, and laziness.

It did not go as I had hoped.

Most of this was my fault, though in most of the offending incidents I could twist the facts enough to cast some of the blame on the establishment.

My main problem was that I was not prepared to concentrate on what I was doing and be 'in the moment' to the extent that it was necessary for me to be until it was too late, and my good time was irretrievably lost. Granted, I went to the Olive Garden largely because I wanted to think about other things and not have to pay close attention to the progress of my meal, but that is beside the point.

I was alone, which is unusual for me. My family went to Vermont for the weekend but I stayed behind because I had to work. This may, as it turned out, have thrown me off, because I have become unaccustomed to going out alone. My first disappointment, albeit it a mild one, came when I was given a cocky male server instead of the attractive, or at least young, lady I had been subconsciously expecting, and which is (admittedly sadly) one of the main reasons one goes to such places. I would have gotten over this disappointment easily enough, but the guy immediately began trying to manipulate me to buy a more expensive wine than I had been planning to do.

Being the kind of person who spends a lot of time getting in a stew over my various failures to broach the realm of high level drinking, the thought of getting worked over or embarrassed in wine etiquette and knowledge on the floor of the Olive Garden caused my ego to circle every wagon at its disposal (which unfortunately was not many). Immediately after dropping the menu he whips out a bottle of some cabernet and asks me if I would like a sample. I should have cut it off right there, because my intention was, as it always is, to order the house wine, as I am foremost a quantity-oriented drinker, and require at least two glasses to properly enjoy myself, preferably three. However, I agreed to try the sample, still imagining I would easily be able to control the exchange to my satisfaction. A glass was set before me and a small portion of wine was poured into it, I imagine approximately like they do in a real restaurant, though it has been so long since I have been to one that I forget. As I do not remember all the parts of the wine-tasting ritual exactly, I merely took it up and emptied it in a draught, which is anyway my impression of how Samuel Johnson and company dealt with their wine in the 18th century. It was tasty enough to me, enough that I made my first big mistake, which was to distract myself by trying to scan the menu to see what the price of it was.

It was $8.25 a glass, so I was not having it, and I thanked the man for the sample and said I would stick with the house wine.

He was uncertain about whether I would like the house wine--many people found it strong, even overpowering--and strongly encouraged me to try a sample of that before I committed to ordering.

I should definitely have refused the sample here but I still felt myself to be in command of the situation and regarded the offer as an opportunity to steal an extra mouthful of drink at no charge. Yes, I said, bring it on. He had to step away for a moment to fetch the bottle, which time I used to make a cursory examination of the menu.

At his return with the other bottle I had to confess that it was not very good in comparison with the wine that was $8.25 a glass, and my eyes began to flit over the menu again in search of a possible substitute, though I refused to succumb to the product he was pushing on me. I felt myself becoming more and more uncomfortable however and said, probably in an irritable voice, that I was going to stick with the house wine. I was now distracted however, and, though I did not realize it at the time, I became careless. I ordered fettucine alfredo when I actually wanted, and meant to ask for, chicken alfredo. Though there were four soup choices, I did not bother to inquire about what they consisted of, and quickly ordered minestrone, and when asked if I wanted a bowl of some sauce or other to dip my breadsticks in, said yes without thinking about it.

All of these distracted orders led to mild but frustrating little incidents which accrued to the point that I could not repair my mood and ability to enjoy the meal.

Campbell's minestrone soup, I believe, is made up of little chunks of beef, the little white noodle-like things that share a common shape with Sugar Crisps cereal, small carrots and pieces of potatoes and beans, etc. Anyway, a heartier version of that was what I was expecting. What I got was a meatless stew filled with enormous quantities of vegetables, such as crunchy beans and zucchini, that I don't like. This was not the fault of the restaurant of course, but as it represented an anticipated pleasure that failed to achieve fruition, it had the effect of lowering my mood, as well as my ability to resist further disappointments, the next of which came when the fettucine alfredo I had ordered arrived without chicken in it as I had expected. My inward overreaction to this disappointment was no doubt the result of its being the second dish within ten minutes to arrive which I had anticipated to contain meat which turned out to contain none, on top of the sting with which I was already agitated after my blundering during the ceremony with the wine.

At this point, especially as I knew that if I ate the meal before me without the chicken I was craving that the whole enterprise would be irretrievably ruined, I know I should have explained my situation to the waiter and requested a change in my order. However, I knew that technically I had ordered the plate they had brought me, it was a busy Saturday night, I did not want to come across as a dick when I was the one who had made the mistake, and so on. So I ate my plate of noodles, rather miserably, out of all proportion to what the circumstances called for, and though I had intended to have a full dining experience with dessert and coffee, decided before I had finished to just give up after the main course and get out of there.

When the check came there was a $3.50 charge on it for the bowl of sauce that had been brought me to dip my bread sticks in.

This was the breaking point. I knew that if I did not offer some official protest that I would have no inner peace for the next week. My immediate thought was to deduct the sauce charge from the tip, which would have reduced that sum to a quarter. It occurred to me that my waiter would likely have no idea why I was stiffing him in this way, so I thought to write a note on the blank side of the check approximating the substance of this post in explanation. But as that not only would have taken too long, but seemed weaselly, I resigned myself to having to declare my intentions, and the reasons for them, aloud upon the man's return.

I commenced by informing him solemnly, as I handed him the settlement of my account, that I would not be able to leave him a tip.

He was practically enthusiastic at the reception of this news and assured me it was no problem at all.

I asked him if he did not want to know my reasons for taking what seemed to me this rather momentous decision.

Not at all, he said, it did not matter, whatever I wanted to do was fine with him.

This obfuscation of my gravity and its intended effect annoyed me and I stated directly that I wished to tell him my reasons, at which he consented to hear them.

It was at this point that my most egregious failure was realized. No, they did not laugh at me--indeed, the $3.50 charge for the dipping sauce which I felt I should have been informed of was immediately struck from the bill, though the spirit was much more "please don't come back and shoot me, O.K." than submission to my overpowering will. Midway through my retracing of my various complaints with the entire evening's progression, I became incoherent and I could feel my voice quavering. I am in my 40s. And I cannot dress down, let alone dominate, the staff at an Olive Garden in New Hampshire without faltering. I had once imagined by this point of my life to be able to enter any establishment or social setting in the world and be able to hold my own with anyone present. This was ridiculous, obviously, but not being able to take control over my dinner at Olive Garden represents a serious failure of development, that at this point probably cannot be corrected. As I wrote in my novel when I was 25 years old: "He had sunk his head and asked how his parents, his schools, his country could have allowed such a boy as he to have drifted into that degree of useless and cowardly adulthood under its auspices." If anything, I have only gotten worse since then, though I acknowledge that that is my own fault, as anybody over a fairly young age--fourteen maybe--is responsible for directing his own further development.

I view this as a snapshot illustration of why our country is in such a mess. People like me who are reasonably intelligent and in the prime of life who should be helping to resolve some of the problems besetting us cannot command a simple situation in a forking fifth rate restaurant. It's very frustrating.

People Must Love a Good Blog

But as with everything else, producing one even halfway good is not as easy as it ought to be. What a truly odd exercise this whole business of existence is.

Political Update. My understanding of the current crisis in the economic situation, if not the crisis itself, is very slow-developing and perhaps obvious, but I don't like the drift of things. Among anybody who still has anything, their entire focus seems to be on preserving what they've got at all costs, without much thought for the millions who are facing impoverishment and ruin, which I don't think can be a sustainable approach. I am disappointed by the lack of wisdom and leadership being displayed on this issue by the most able classes, those who perhaps alone still have a relatively strong future to anticipate. The near 20% real unemployment rate, with bankrupt governments and no recovery of real jobs to live on any kind of mass scale anywhere on the horizon, is a problem that somebody is going to have to own, and come up with some kind of better vision for its resolution than widespread homelessness, squalor and general societal breakdown. Is nobody on the side of the increasing large portion of the populace without any real promising prospects?

Literary Update. On a positive note, somebody bought one of my books. This marks a real milestone for me, as it is the first time anybody has paid for a piece of my writing. I hope to God whoever it was bought the download for $5.95 rather than the $45+ book. I have been meaning to organize and make available a paperback version, which would be cheaper. In any event I am very moved at having sold a book, though...oh, I will let it go at that. I do really need to write another one though, before I lose whatever knack I have for it altogether.

Literary Update II. For about the last six months I have been occupied with reading really long, earnest, hyperrealistic and exhaustingly overstuffed Edwardian novels. First there was H.G. Wells's Tono-Bungay (460 pages), then Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale (640 pages), and, last but decidedly not least, Dorothy Richardson's 13 volume monument to extreme navel-gazing, Pilgrimage (2,110 pages, of which I am approximately on page 1,752). The first two of these books weren't bad, though of Bennett I preferred the thinner Anna of the Five Towns, which I read sometime back around 2003, and there is a really good 250-300 page novel that could be hammered out of the Richardson, I think. Over the course of the winter I could feel this endless reading combined with other tiresome aspects of day to day existence wearing me down. So I decided not to take Pilgrimage to Florida with me, opting instead for the somewhat famous account of 1970s Hollywood, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, (or How the Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll Generation Saved Hollywood). Hollywood books are an odd genre to come upon after you've been devoting yourself to self-consciously serious literature, history, etc, for a number of years. For one thing there is more speculation and conjecture than there is even in Plutarch ("it was observed by several people that her mother spent an unusually long time in the casting director's office the day she got her big break"), and anonymous sources are relied upon liberally. That said, I was rather burned out on high seriousness and the relentless Sturm und Drang of contemporary politics and economics, so I enjoyed much of the book, especially the parts set in the late 60s and early 70s before the era started to play itself out.

I have never considered myself an especially big fan of the movies of the 70s, though I realize that that is in part because I haven't seen that many of them. Most of the ones I've seen that they talk about in the book I guess I do like, though none of them are favorites, nor did I ever especially like most of the famous stars or directors featured in the book, though I did find myself interested in all the sex and power games, all which was more or less rawly expressed and experienced. One might wonder why I have become interested lately in the culture of (old) Hollywood rather than that of the army, or the biotechnology world, or Wall Street, or politics, or even art and music, which I seem to have written about more a couple of years ago. Maybe the sense that America, at least as I knew it, is collapsing, is making me nostalgic for a time when ordinary red-blooded middle-class Americans--which is the background from which most of the figures in this book emerged--were interested in things like sex and art as participants and not merely as theorists or consumers, and who actually managed to make some things happen in those directions. Though it is a little late for me to be studying this, I am always interested in how people manage to become successful in the arts. Having bought into the notion as a young man that being an artist is a good calling for morose and senstive people, I underestimated the amounts of energy and hustle that are desirable both to animate your work, but also to establish the relationships you need to get yourself into a position where people are willing to pay you. Even Warren Beatty, who seems to have more of both of these qualities than almost anyone who ever lived, in addition to other advantages, needed to employ them pretty much relentlessly to ensure himself of a career. At the same time filmmaking, as it is presented in this book, seems in comparison with playing in an orchestra, or opera singing, or ballet, or even acting in high level live theater, not to require an especially extraordinary amount of education or training to be successful. Steven Spielberg's background before getting hired by a studio for TV work at age 21 seems to have consisted of watching a lot of television and largely teaching himself how to use a movie camera, which wouldn't get you a sniff of the stage at Beyreuth. The process of filmmaking also appears to be far more messy and unpredictable than would be possible in most of the traditional high arts. The final form of most films that end up being regarded as classic often seem to be wholly unanticipated even by the filmmakers themselves until they are very deep into the process.

A few observations on the book:

Peter Bogdanovich seems to be the 70s director most like myself both in temperament and approach. He had a good sense of what movies ought to look, and perhaps more significantly, feel like, but was openly derivative and not a great generator of original ideas and material. His two best movies, The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon, both of which I like, were atmospheric period pieces he was basically assigned to. He would probably have had a better career in the system of the 30s and 40s which he was obviously perhaps over enamored of. He seems to have been well-matched with his first wife, who appears to have been smart and had some artistic talent as well, doing the set design on his more successful earlier movies, but having been a nerd in his youth he threw her over for a bimbo when the opportunity presented itself, his infatuation with whom is certainly presented in the book as contributing to the premature fizzling out of his talent, which sounds like something I might have stumbled into if I had suddenly made it in Hollywood at age 32 or whatever. There is a story in the book where the very young Victoria Principal came up to the at that time still geeky but rising Spielberg in the Universal cafeteria, thrust her breasts in his face and said "I'd like to get to know you better." I mean, Victoria Principal is the kind of person who doesn't excite me at all at a distance, but I have a feeling six inches away it would have been a somewhat different matter (obviously I mean in 1974, not now). Bogdanovich apparently also became really obnoxious and arrogant during the years when he was at the height of his success, which I could easily see myself becoming if I were ever to attain any status whatsoever anywhere.

The part where a completely drugged out and raving Dennis Hopper was excoriating the audiences that stayed away from his (apparently unwatchable) The Last Movie as not wanting to do a lot of thinking reminded me that the whole book has a kind of early baby boomer mindset wherein one can recount an anecdote such as this as if it were not in fact entirely absurd.

Another instance of this ur-baby boomer mindset are the general low level of regard for the mainstream culture, Hollywood in particular, of the 1940s and 50s. At one point the author (Peter Biskind is his name, by the way), in describing the new generation of cinephiles that emerged in the 60s, singles out as one of their characteristics that "they knew John Ford was better than William Wyler, and why." I have never actually understood why this is obviously so, though almost every reputable film scholar considers the matter to be beyond doubt. I haven't seen a lot of John Ford, but what I have seen (The Quiet Man and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon) has not blown me away, while obviously I think highly of many of Wyler's films, including some of the lesser known ones like Counsellor at Law, which I wrote about last fall and which I was really impressed with.

Maybe executives at multi million dollar companies still take tons of drugs at work like Hollywood people did in the 70s but somehow I doubt it.

The sexual hysterics among people in their 30s and even older in this era, married or not, is also like reading something out of science fiction. Maybe I need to be taken out and shown more, but the people of my generation just hit 25 or maybe 30 and basically threw in the towel as far as developing any kind of sensual side of themselves went. I mean, God, the French and other international playboy types are just getting started at that age, and the Americans are packing it in with 40, 50 years to live.

Margot Kidder slept with almost everybody who came to her party house, yet I still came out of the book with a mild crush on her. As with my Victoria Prinicpal repsonse, this is not a good instinct on my part, given my personality and so on.

My opinions on some of the films in the book:

Harold and Maude: I wrote about this in one my old Faerie Queene posts about 2 years ago. Call me conventional and unimaginative, but I didn't get the appeal.

Being There: This didn't excite me either. It's been a long time since I saw it though.

The Last Picture Show: I liked it. It's my kind of thing.

Paper Moon: Also liked it. The 30s were a popular setting for films at the time, being the childhood of many of the directors I suppose. I like the music, the attitudes, the aesthetics, etc of that time period myself.

The Godfathers: They are what they are. I haven't seen them in years.

The Conversation: I should see it again, I suppose. I remember it was well-written.

Apocalypse Now: I have the same problems with it as everyone else (too long, last third is a mess, etc)

American Graffiti: Who doesn't like this? Whatever becomes of America, they can't take our moment in the sun away from us now.

Star Wars: Just saw it with my sons for the first time. I was actually surprised at how not good it was. They loved it of course.

Taxi Driver: I'm glad it was made, because I remember how nasty everything looked in the late 70s and how gross so many of the people were and nobody would believe it if it wasn't on film, and it is in that sense an iconic movie, but let's face it, it's a pretty depressing portrait of humanity.

Raging Bull: Very good. Love the evocation of 40s New York too, though I know that wasn't the point.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: I have to admit I kind of like this.

Bonnie and Clyde: Definitely worthy of its praise. Another 30s movie. But is the feel really a 30s feel, or is it the 30s movie feel, because all the good 30s movies made long after the 30s have pretty much the same feel.

Economics Update

Most astute Republicans, and all Libertarians, will tell you that one of the biggest problems with people like me is that we lack the brainpower to get our heads around the tenets even of basic economic theory. As fun as it must be to sit back and make sport of such absolute and colossal ignorance, it unfortunately is the kind that, according to these rational, rigorous thinkers, has consequences, not least among them the destruction of the very foundations which have undergirded the superior way of life the people of this country have always heretorfore enjoyed.

I have to own that I was wholly ignorant of economics, and its centrality to every aspect and detail of all our lives, until I was well into my 20s. When I was a child in Pennsylvania even as late as the 1970s there were still plenty of people who had jobs like working in coal mines, steel mills and factories. Among the many confusions which the existence of these occupations caused me was the circumstance that almost everybody I knew viewed the main object of a young person to be to avoid getting stuck having to work having to do this kind of job while at the same time seeming to believe that most people who had white-collar jobs were paper-pushers who were essentially getting off easy in life; certainly it could not be said of them that they worked, in the sense that a coal miner worked, regardless of how much each got paid. Nowadays of course these horrible industrial jobs, even coal mining, that were presented as a kind of cruel punishment for people who couldn't figure out how to get away and do anything else, are lamented almost hourly in some depressed, meth-ridden corner or other of the once proud and mighty Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. This was an outcome that no one seems to have seen coming. The existence of these jobs, and especially their in retrospect relatively decent levels of pay and security, were taken for granted, as the kind of permanent bottom, or last refuge, of the male employment ladder, but a floor at least beneath which anybody willing to make the effort of turning up every mind-numbing day for 40 years was guaranteed not to fall. This was a rather foolish assumption--I excuse myself because of my status as a child--but the point is that the existence of even these living wage jobs tended to make money and career-savviness themselves much less of a consideration to me growing up than they are to this generation. I knew there were certain people around who were considered by my parents to be well off to the point of occupying a stratum of society where the likes of us were unwelcome, but I didn't have any very good sense of what that had to do with me, or that the acquisition of money really was a serious matter that one was supposed to spend one's formative years preparing to spend one's adulthood doing, until I was pushing 30.
As if this wasn't bad enough, I find as I get older and require ever more money, that I feel I deserve it, based on what I am doing to receive it, less and less, which is probably the worst attitude for embarking on midlife in this country that it is possible to have. In the arrogance of youth I at least considered my time to be highly valuable, and even in situations where I was a poor or indifferent worker, felt myself entitled to be well compensated for having to sacrifice some of it. I could have been doing so many other things, after all, most of which centered around socializing or missed opportunities to get girls, though I suppose if I could ever have gotten any girls at work like other people did that would have made all the lost Saturday nights a little less painful to endure. Now however I have lost the sense that my time in itself is particularly valuable, especially as employers know that at my age and in my situation I have to pimp it out to one of them, and calling out forever because I wake up and feel like going to the beach with my friends is no longer a choice which I can flaunt before them. When I calculate how much money the company is paying me each day to show up, sit in their offices for eight hours, and basically make sure that various forms are organized and in order and procedures followed, it seems an excessive sum, though in fact it is not very much by the standards of contemporary society; however, since I do not have such much in excess to pay to someone else, the thought of doing so strikes me as rather astounding. Also I have the old vestiges of that Pennsylvania attitude towards paper-pushers, a term by the way I have not used derogatively, and which applied to lawyers, accountants, and all kinds of people viewed as respectable and necessary professionals today, since around the time Reagan became president, as well as guilt about people with 'real jobs', and consider that people who pick fruit or stack shelves at Wal-Mart all day do a great deal more work than I do and usually for quite a bit less compensation.

Before I start wondering how I can live with myself, however, I take note of the attitudes of the people one reads about in August publications like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Us Magazine, where all that matters is the number of dollars one can extract from what one does, not its relative actual value either in itself or in comparison to other forms of work. Getting one's head around this and accepting this, that the value the market sets and that you can get from the market, is the only and absolute value, as well as that what one personally does merits an especially high level of compensation, is the key to breaking through every barrier of class that is thrown up before one until one attains the top. I was very much struck by this in reading not merely about bankers and top businessmen but in the next level, or next but one level, that of the people who cater to their peculiar requirements. Many of the crowd involved in the Tiger Woods scandal for example seemed to me to be awfully well-compensated for such tasks as organizing exclusive parties, keeping secrets, finding and providing numerous available women of the high roller's preferred type, all of which people have to be paid, but in such a manner as to somehow insist that a level of respectability and even gentility is being maintained. The market dictates that such specialized skills are in much higher demand than those of ordinary shelf-stocking, or clerking, and therefore one ought never have any guilt or shame about how came upon one's money. I remember coming upon an episode of Sex and the City, which I thought a satire on modern civilizational decline, but apparently this is not obviously the intent, in which the lead character is taken to bed in a posh hotel by a rich man, who rises early the next day while our heroine is still sleeping in the luxurious bed, leaving behind an envelope with $2000 or something in it. The heroine is briefly--very briefly--insulted by the gesture, which we are to understand is a blow to her ego more than anything else. I think she proceeds to buy some shoes and treat her friends to lunch at the Ritz or something like that. It is no secret, of course, that this program is written by male homosexuals of a particularly narcissistic strain, a group which unfortunately a lot of intelligent young women seem to look up to, amusing though they may be in (very) small doses.

There is an exercise I have seen going around the internet where you are supposed to turn to page 56 of the nearest book to hand and write down the 5th sentence on the page. In the name of self-promotion I decided to look at the volumes of my own novel and see what this experiment turned up:

Volume 1: A few of the harsher women had stood in the shadows to the side by a row of berry bushes and ridiculed her, but she had known nothing of that.

Volume 2: I feel sorry for him, but am I going to break into tears about it?

Not bad. I have one baby crying and a three old banging on my keyboard as I desperately try to finish this post. I may have to give up this blog soon. It's getting to the point where it's really hopeless to write anything, and the articles that get done aren't well-written nor even make any sense. Someday, I have to believe, I will get my old semi-clear, semi-placid mind back again, but that is looking like years away at this point.

Excerpt

I am not going to do this very often, but I think the site needs a little more stylized, fictive content on it.

"I had an unusual day today," Erlsegaard said. "At moments it was among the happiest I have ever known, though nothing that happened is uncommon in normal human experience. I felt a distance between myself and the mundanities of ordinary existence. I felt elevated. I felt distinguished. I felt our city was as important and beautiful as any in the world when one had the time to go about and look at it calmly. It is hard for me to understand why we can't become one of those cities by which outsiders are humbled and awed. Why our minds are not more often concentrated to those finest points at which human life is only ever worth living, as they seem to be, or have been, in those other places."

"All this occurred to you this morning walking through the back alleys of Fairmount?"

"Some of it only occurred to me just now." Erlsegaard rose to a sitting position, with his back against the bathtub and his knees up. "You remember that old lady who spoke at school about St Petersburg and the beauties and profundities one's mind absorbed as a child there, the sensibilities bespoke in the placement of the stones in the walls and the layout and activity of the streets? And of course how we in our lives are ever cut off from this subtle, essential--and yes, sometimes dark humanity, because its presence has been eradicated, sanitized if you will, from our experience?"

"I do. Though I haven't thought about it since around the time we started drinking that night. I remember thinking that even if she had a point, it doesn't seem to be doing her much good. The old bag. What were we supposed to do exactly, be ashamed? You and I, Erlsegaard? I know other people were duly ashamed and suicidal; but the masses and big business and all that, which is all all these people are ever really talking about, all they care about, will never be tormented by how puny and ignorant they are the way these old intellectuals want them to. It's only you who believe it, Erlsegaard. It's only you who thinks art and philosophy and cathedrals and great cities and beautiful girls don't belong to you as much as anybody else. That you don't deserve to show your face around them. Old Germans and Russians, they'll never give you credit for understanding anything. Oh, and those Austro-Hungarians, they're the worst. That's the only satisfaction they have in this country, finding suckers like us, who give them the benefit of the doubt they've got something to tell us. I wouldn't take them all that seriously."

"I am skeptical you know about anybody who believes the last golden age happened to take place wherever it was they happened to be when they were twenty-two. Who ever recognized a golden age, in philosophy anyway, to have risen up when he was in his fifties? And suddenly all that essential humanity these places had, dies the moment it comes among us, can have no meaninful influence whatsoever? I want to know, if Petersburg and Berlin were such fruitful soil for men's brains, how could they have become so unbearable and impossible to live in? Of course, that is probably the whole secret, the necessity of ideological and personal tension that is only good so far as it is a matter of life and death. The pattern does seem to repeat itself in all the most genius-crossed societies. Nonetheless I am sure I have had glimpses of all these tantalizing possibilities and truths here. I'm sure I have had one today. Why wouldn't our winter air and light direct the mind's eye to those possibilities just as much as the beating sun and desert winds do for the Mediterranean peoples?"

"Perhaps. But then again, it's taken you twenty-five--what are you now, twenty-six? Jesus, Erlsegaard, you're getting old!--twenty-six years of looking and how many dozens of people whom you want to be like telling you what to look for just to get to this point of thinking you see what they knew they were seeing as children. They were just smart children who happened to live in a world more casually literate and replete with the conviction that the greatest existential dramas and advancements of the day were emanating from it alone than ours is, all of which no doubt makes a heavy impression on children. And now they've ended up somewhere comparatively peaceful and uninterested in philosophy, so they wince at all our pursuits, only no one except a few earnest students and social outcasts are impressed. I think that even if we have no secrets of our own to discover, future high civilizations will be mining us for material like crazy. I do wish I knew what they will find of importance. All will not be lost, anyway. But for ourselves, we can start by learning not to become impotent at the slightest suggestion that Genius might be in the room."

Blog Gossip

One of my periodic State of the Blog updates.

Name Change? Even I admit that we have an awful name. I happened to be in despair at the time I started this page, and I succumbed to overdramatics I'm not sure if I can change it without starting a whole other page (not that that is not an overdue move itself). I had a dream the other night where I received correspondence from a (completely fictitious) female fan of the site who addressed me as 'Bishop Orgasm', which now that I am reasonably coherent I realize would not be a good name for a man of my age and station, though it is still better than "Bourgeois Surrender". The novel I was toying with that had the working title of "Bourgeois Surrender" I have momentarily changed to "The Benchwarmer", but there are already many blogs by that name out there. I could write under my real name of course. For some reason I don't want to do that yet, because I still consider this as a sidelight to my actual career, which I don't actually have. There is still a symbolic hurdle there.

The second volume of my novel is available now. I have not received my own copy of it yet so no photos. I will write about this more when I do get the book. I was overcome today by the desire to make this announcement somewhere. As you can imagine when I started writing this book many years ago I had very grand visions of the drinking and flirting and condescending I would be doing when it was published--I had an idea of going on an incredible bender, rendered allowable by my genius--how so many plans end in such sexless whimpers. I am also working on getting a paperback edition ready, which would offer my less well-off fans a more reasonable price if they are too shy to ask me to send them a free copy. Hopefully this will be ready soon. There are I think some pretty good episodes in the second volume. The denouement is drawn out a little longer than I would like--it is one of the harder things in novel-writing of course to control all your various storylines and try to tie them up in some way at the end, and I was not entirely successful in doing this--I can't say that one volume is definitely superior to the other however. The second is maybe slightly less conventional. (Do not feel imposed upon, reader. We authors have to talk about our work somewhere even if no one has asked us to. There is no lonelier career than that of the unsuccessful author).

I Guess the Blog Will Go On For Now. I hope that the final publication of this first book will free my mind up to go ahead and pound out another novel now, or perhaps a small volume of stories, which is an item lacking from my oeuvre. I haven't done much fiction writing over the last year or two, and I have been feeling the urge to try to work in that vein again. My hope is that that will help the blog too. The blog overall has been a disappointment, a much bigger disappointment than my novel, which I still think is decent in places. I have never been satisfied with what has come out on the blog. I just need too much time, and too many rewrites to ever have an effective blog, because I cannot overcome the insistent nature of the form that requires regular posting. Obviously I still like the idea of the blog, and I think I am getting better at it. I still think I could make it amount to something that would be of interest to a certain sliver of the potentially worldwide audience within its reach.

In Which I Hawk My Book (Half of It, Anyway)

Self-promotion is vulgar, but no one else seems to be announcing or covering the release, so I feel the urge to make a gesture of doing so myself. Anyway I have put out the first half of my novel, available either in hardcover book or downloadable form. Of course I would have liked to publish the whole thing together in one volume but the final draft came to 765 pages and the press had a limit of 700 pages to make me a book. Here it is.
I am very happy with the product as a physical object. It looks like a serious, real book, it is bound nicely, has good-quality paper. In these it is really almost indistinguishable from a new hardcover release by a real author from a major house.

The cover and spine. It reminds me of library binding, but that is not a negative, because I love library binding. It makes for a very solid volume. I own many copies of Great Books that have library binding, such as Thucydides and William James's Psychology, that actually seem more substantial when read this way.

I don't expect anyone to pay the listed price for the hardcover book, which is absurd (and especially as there will be another volume coming as soon as I can format it and get it together), though I suppose I could try to promote it as an opportunity to get a rare first edition of a future classic. As I didn't anticipate huge sales in any event, and having worked on the book for eight years and had it sitting in various places in my house with the possibility either of fire or my premature death weighing on my mind for six more, I decided to indulge in satisyfing my own longstanding dream by getting the hardcover. I am happy I did. If you would like a copy, and your request is reasonable (I'm not sending 100 copies to somebody I don't know with a mailing address in Russia or anything like that), e-mail me and I will send you one (gratis, of course).

My decision to print this was because I was finding that having it exist nowhere in a book form even though I was finished with it was preventing me from being able to devote my full concentration on other literary projects, which I really want to do, because that is what I devoted my youth to the study and practice of, and it is sort of the only, if not skill, serious discipline that I have. Seeing the book exist and on the shelf is exciting, and does make me enthusiastic to write and have printed up other things. I know that I am not an English or French gentleman to be indulging in these personal eccentricities and pleasures by having my writings bound as if I am in any way descended from that tradition of competent and interesting amateurism, but it is a tradition that I like.

Obviously I am printing the book also because I do feel that it is worthy of publication. It probably could have benefited from a certain amount of professional editing, but doing it all myself I was unable to determine what more absolutely had to or ought to go, and so left it as it was. I still need a lot of work with naturalistic dialogue. There is dialogue that I think is good, but it is not naturalistic, and vice versa. As the main frame of the book's action was constructed in 1995-1996, a lot of it will seem dated now; people do not have cell phones or the internet in it on one hand, and on another hand, the level of interaction between social "winners" and "losers", people who are quite wealthy and people who are middle class, the comparatively humble lifestyles even of the better off young people compared to the extreme character of these things we have become accustomed to in the years since may not ring true from a contemporary viewpoint. However the way they are written about in the book is the way I perceived them at that time. I think if the book had come out in 1999, which was the original goal, one could have said it was a promising debut. That promise has probably dissipated--there is a lot of stuff in this book, especially the humor, that I just couldn't do now. I've lost it. I'm also not sure that I am smarter now than I was then. I know more, and understand more, I suppose, but I find that this knowledge tends to paralyze my thought and capacity for experience, because of all the doubt and conflicting ideas that it produces on every occasion, so that I do not really have anything even nominally to offer most of the time.

You can enjoy a preview of the book here. My back cover blurb is a little over the top. It was not quite real to me when I was doing it, and I figured no one was likely to ever read it anyway, which so far has been true. Here is if you want to buy it. I guess you can get the preview by going here too.

Referencing an earlier post in which I confessed my lack of acquaintance with most the oeuvre of Walt Whitman, I was reminded of it again when I was in Philadelphia recently and was confronted with the product listed below at a barbeque I attended (the host, knowing of my literary interests, had very thoughtfully purchased this beer just for me). Walt Whitman ale is, for reasons that I think are explained on the bottle but which are forgotten, a kind of blond hefeweizen type drink. It was good, I'd give it a 7.5-8 rating. I wanted to pour it into a glass and show my audience its beautiful color but my wife drank the last remaining bottle (I brought some home with me) before I could do this.

Necessary Periodic Self-Indulgence Post: Serious People You Have Been Warned

Most of the time the circumstance that my blog seems to have no, or virtually no, readership does not bother me that much. For whatever reason it amuses me to keep at it, always in the hope of course that something I put up will resonate, or connect, with somebody at some point, but usually content to consider that that point may not come until some time in the future, or that such demands on other people are not reasonable to expect. Occasionally however my mood is a little more despairing and I become for a day or two despondent of the whole enterprise, not merely of writing but of all forms of mental exertion. It is of course not any help to the greater project of life to have such thoughts, let alone specific and peculiar activities of it, but they will insinuate themselves nonetheless. One had thought of writing about an article he saw about a wedding, or a suspicious series of events in the world of professional chess, or about a dream he had (it is boring to read about people's dreams, but in this one I was supposed to be in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a place I have never been, at a sort of writer's conference but with a gift shop cashier I know and the young mother of a kid at my son's kindergarten and they were miffed at me because I found a paper in a library book saying that I had won $35 and was trying to claim it, which was considered gauche) but it occurs to him, on this particular occasion only, that no one is interested to hear his thoughts on such matters, that everyone he might tell it to knows everything he is inclined to think, and is capable of thinking, about them already. Not being habituated to or proficient in other activities, and unable to get away at the moment for a jaunt, one seeks consolation in drink. It would be fun to smoke a few cigarettes too, but that sort of thing really isn't done in the circles to which the subject is currently relegated, for reasons beyond just his personal wimpiness (though some commentators, who apparently don't adhere to any belief in the context of a situation beyond the will or failure of will of each individual actor, will not accept this--they will insist that you must direct all relevant context in your life to serve your personal ends). Perhaps he will find a welcome distraction in various forms of audio-visual media (the sight of any print or "text"--I have always hated that word--making him, temporarily, nauseous); but none of these is any solution to his real dilemma, which is that he cannot really stop himself from writing on his blog, or trying to write his stories, though they consume great portions of his life to no evident or necessary purpose.

What is really setting me off lately is that I have been thinking of publishing my novel, which I finished about 5 years ago and which has been languishing on old hard disks and in a cabinet while multiple advancements in word processing technology have since occurred, on one of the POD sites. I don't have any illusions that anyone in the world is going to buy or read the book this way, but the fact of its still being in my sole possession and not bound or anything seems to be weighing on my ability to move forward, and I like to imagine that if I were able to say it, or a handful of copies of it which, I don't know, I'll dump in the bins of cast-off books they have sometimes at grocery stores or something, exists out in the world, or on the internet, that I will be able to say, "I am done with it", and try to complete something else. It is 773 pages long, all stored on separate files on outmoded disks, and though I have managed to transfer it for the most part onto my new computer, which has OpenOffice, there are a number of things I cannot fix, like getting the page numbers in the proper places, and there are instances of small letters that should be capitalized and paragraph in 10-point instead of the desired 12-point type that I cannot get to change in the saved file no matter how many times I do it. Things like this send people like me very near to the line between being functional and being committed to an asylum. Then the cheap self-publishing sites want you to upload everything on PDFs and set your own margins and all of that--I have a terrible time with these computer things. In short, this process is something that should take a couple of hours and I have been trying to figure out how to do it now for almost a year, and I really don't know what I am going to do at this point. It is quite discouraging. The book anyway is, like most books are, ultimately a failure, but there are some parts in it obviously that I think are good, and worthy of publication, and it is the work--the only work that ever will be, now--of my youth, on which I toiled for many years, and obviously it is very hard for me to let it go.

To anybody who did read this I thank you for bearing with me. After this, the blog should go back to only being mildly despondent. I do feel somewhat better, though I liked the first paragraph better than the second, mostly because I lack the language to write coherently about computers, and this annoys me too.

In Case You Were Wondering
Yes, that is my house on the cover of this month's CountryHome magazine. I'm not kidding, it really is. There is an even better picture of the picket fence my wife built on the table of contents page. It stops there, though, there is no spread on the interior. The photographer happened to be scouting our neighborhood in search of Halloweenish-looking Victorian houses (i.e. not too cutely or sparklingly maintained) and liked what she saw with our house, I guess. The pictures were taken in May, I think. The leaves and pumpkins and so on are all their props. The photoshoot crew were evidently straight from the New York magazine world, or were familiar with its culture. They projected great artistic confidence and authority, which I assume comes from being paid well, or at least consistently, or maybe they just knew they were super good. I don't know. It seems like kind of a silly magazine really. Also I don't exactly live in the country, but on the outskirts of a small city of 40,000 or so people, though I know that especially for purposes of selling books and magazines everything north of Boston is considered to be rural and salty. We did not actually know they had chosen the pictures of our house to be in the magazine until my wife, past whom I am increasingly convinced it is impossible to get anything, spotted it in the checkout aisle at the grocery store.

Nor is this entirely the first instance of our casually finding ourselves connected with a mass market publication. In the edition of the Yale Guide to Baby and Child Care or something like that (it's a big reference book) that came out around 2002, Mrs S and I are depicted in the illustration on page 38 looking in a store window at baby toys (we are supposed to represent the as yet childless but idealistic and dreamy young couple--which I think we still were at the time). I am actually shown as having three hands in this drawing, but that is not the case, it was an error on the part of the artist and the editors that the mistake made it into the book. The illustrator lived in the area, and, like Norman Rockwell, though not quite as memorably, liked to use his neighbors as models.