Great speech. Lousy bedside manner.

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The late William Safire drafted a speech for President Nixon to read in case the Apollo 11 Astronauts became stranded on the moon. It’s a great speech.

Truly great.

But in Safire’s directive to the President at the end of the speech, he wrote about widows-to-be and described a ceremony that was to take place “After the President’s statement, at the point when NASA ends communication with the men.”

Does this mean that NASA was planning on cutting off communication with Armstrong and Aldrin prior to their death? Mission Control decided that they couldn’t stay on the line while our first extraterrestrial astronauts died?

“Good luck with the asphyxiation, men. Over and out.”

Strikes me as a tad insensitive.

In the presence of Nicholson Baker

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On Friday night I went to RJ Julia Booksellers to listen to Nicholson Baker, one of my favorite authors, speak about his new book, THE ANTHOLOGIST.  Baker became one of my favorite authors when my agent recommended his work to me a couple years ago, suggesting that we share similarities in style.

While this may be true, it’s sort of like comparing a mountain to a molehill.  We may have a similar shape, but the comparison ends there. 

He’s truly a literary giant. 

Despite the esteem in which I hold the man, it was odd watching one of my heroes stand in the same room, in front of a similarly sized audience, and do what I had done just a month or so before.

For a moment, I almost felt as if I were Baker’s peer. 

Adding to the diminishment in his grandiosity was the fact that he was almost an hour late, trapped in horrendous traffic coming out of New York.

“Traffic?” I thought.  “Why aren’t the state police escorting him to Madison?  Don’t they know that we have Nicholson Baker on our state highway!  Why isn’t a man like Nicholson Baker immune to traffic?  He doesn’t have time to waste sitting inside a car!  He needs to be writing!”  

As the minutes ticked by, he began to seem more and more human to me.  “If traffic can slow this master storyteller down, perhaps he’s not so special after all.”  So when he finally walked in, flustered and apologetic, struggling to find the button on his jacket as he began to speak, I had started to think of myself as a fellow writer, a comrade in arms, just another one of the guys.

Nicholson Baker and me.  Two guys doing the same job. 

Then he began speaking, reading from THE ANTHOLOGIST and explaining the process by which he wrote the novel, which began by sitting in a white, plastic chair in the middle of a stream and videotaping hour upon hour as he dictated the first draft aloud.  And as he spoke, describing this intricate process and the amount of re-speaking and revising that went into the creation of the book, his stature increased exponentially until I once again felt like that molehill nestled in the valley of his Everest.

Damn that man is smart.  And committed.  And creative.  

By the time it came for him to sign my copy, I was awestruck once again.  In fact, when he asked to whom he should address his signature, I said myself, forgetting my justifiably annoyed wife who was sitting two feet away.  Sure, he was a little late, and yes, he spoke in the same venue as me, to about the same number of people, but that is where the extend of his ordinariness ended. 

Nicholson Baker my peer?  What could I have been thinking?

I am little more than a scribbler.  He is a writer. 

In the course of his discussion, I asked him about how people often associate qualities of a protagonist with an author, and how that might have come into play when writing THE FERMATA, the story of a man who can stop time in order to undress women.  It’s a book that my agent recommended, but when doing so, she asked that I don;t think of her as a pervert for enjoying it. 

It’s quite raunchy. 

He was honest about the issue, explaining that the story originated with his adolescent fantasy of doing just what his protagonist could do, and that his wife found the story interesting and amusing, though she also felt that the protagonist should have been punished for his indiscretions in the end.     

I guess that even the great Nicholson Baker can’t please them all. 

RJ Julia appearance

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Last night’s appearance at RJ Julia Booksellers was delightful. A warm and engaging audience, interesting questions, gracious and charming hosts, and an opportunity to speak about my book and the writing process in general, which I simply adore.

And I love that bookstore a great deal. Before publishing my book, I appreciated RJ Julia for its atmosphere, selection and location, but now that I’ve gotten to know the people who work there, I’ve come to realize that they could be selling their books from a Radio Flyer on some street corner and still be fine. It’s not the building or the shelves or even the books that make a great bookstore. It’s the people working there who make all the difference.

Thanks to all who came out and supported me and the bookstore last night.

I also had a chance to tour the behind-the-scenes world of RJ Julia, which is much larger than I could have ever imagined. Offices, lunch rooms, and stockrooms galore, along with the dreaded “Return Hallway,” where unwanted books go to die. As an author, walking past the thankfully small stack of books that were awaiting their death sentences was sad indeed, reminding me of The Island of Misfit Toys. My editor once told me that “even writers like Patterson have returns,” but it’s still a very sad thought and one I like to pretend will never happen to me.

I closed my talk with a few book recommendations, which I’d like to repeat here.

In the children’s book category, my daughter’s favorite book, based upon her chewing patterns and desire to consume the book, is NIGHT-NIGHT LITTLE POOKIE by Sandra Boynton. It’s cute as hell, and listening to my wife say the word Pookie just about breaks my heart every time.

If you prefer nonfiction, I recommend CLOSE TO SHORE, an account of the shark attacks off the coast of New Jersey in the 1920s that went on to inspire Peter Benchley’s JAWS. It may actually be scarier than the fictionalized version of the story because… well… it really happened. Wonderfully written and a great snapshot of the period as well.

In fiction, I recommended BILLY BOYLE by Jim Benn, a local author who works in the same school district as me. This is the first in a series of books about the title character, and his newest book (the fourth in the series) will be out in just a few weeks. They are classic World War II mystery stories, and when I read them, I can’t help but envision the action in black-and-white, Casablanca-like. The historical components of the books are fascinating, and the stories themselves are fast-paced and fun.

And oddly enough, I even recommended a cookbook, though I never actually cook. THE EX-BOYFRIEND’S COOKBOOK, by Thisbe Nissen and Erin Ergenbright, is a collection of recipes assembled from the authors’ many ex-boyfriends. One side of the page describes the boyfriend and the relationship and the other offers a recipe from the former beau. I’ve never actually attempted any of these recipes, but I love reading the author’s interpretation of the guys and the relationships a great deal. The book is fun and witty and exceptionally well designed.

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Forgotten Bookmarks (and a new book idea)

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I can’t remember who to credit for pointing me to this, but Forgotten Bookmarks is a website where the owner of a used and rare bookshop posts the “personal, funny, heartbreaking and weird things” that he finds in the books that she buys.

It’s one of those sites where you can spend an hour in what feels like ten minutes. This is one of my favorites. 

And this led me to think of an idea for a book:

A protagonist who purposely leaves items of perceived sentiment, import and meaning for others to find. 

Perhaps a trickster who leaves falsified documents detailing an international spy ring in order to provoke a reaction from a neighbor or relative.

 Or an elderly woman who relives her pervious romances by faking love letters and leaving them in library books for others to find, or a writer who places innocent bystanders in fantastic, imagined scenarios through the placement of counterfeit letters and other forms of evidence and then documents their reaction to these scenarios.

I like all three ideas a lot. 

I have too many ideas for novels and not enough time to write them all.  

Republican or Democrat, it’s bad, bad writing

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I have no intention of becoming political on this blog, but just in terms of writing, did you see or hear Sarah Palin’s farewell speech from yesterday? In terms of the writing, which is what I typically deal with here, take a look at these two paragraphs, the second and third from her ten minute address:

“And getting up here I say it is the best road trip in America soaring through nature’s finest show. Denali, the great one, soaring under the midnight sun. And then the extremes. In the winter time it’s the frozen road that is competing with the view of ice fogged frigid beauty, the cold though, doesn’t it split the Cheechakos from the Sourdoughs?

And then in the summertime such extreme summertime about a hundred and fifty degrees hotter than just some months ago, than just some months from now, with fireweed blooming along the frost heaves and merciless rivers that are rushing and carving and reminding us that here, Mother Nature wins. It is as throughout all Alaska that big wild good life teeming along the road that is north to the future.”
— Sarah Palin

They are nearly incomprehensible. Seriously. How is this even possible?     

Try reading the paragraphs aloud. It’s even more shocking. 

New Yorker insider

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Dan Baum has been twittering about his brief career as a staff writer at the New Yorker, and it is fascinating for anyone interested in the literary world and learning more about how freelance writers earn a living. In addition to my job as an elementary school teacher, a mobile DJ, a secular minister, a life coach, and a novelist, it has been my dream, as it probably is for almost every writer, to write for New Yorker, despite Baum’s less than austere description of the job.

A couple years ago, I submitted a very short story entitled Drama Queens to The New Yorker, foolishly hoping that my first attempt would lead to instant success.

I am still waiting to hear back from them.

In good company

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A while ago, I wrote about TIMEQUAKE, the last novel by Kurt Vonnegut that I have yet to finish. I’ve been purposely reading the novel at a snail’s pace for the past few years, in fear that I might one day finish and not have anything new to read by my favorite author.

In terms of this unusual approach to reading, it appears that I am in good company. Last night my wife and I were watching Battlestar Galactica, a show that we are both enjoying very much. In the episode, Admiral Adama takes a seat beside the hospital bed of the President of the Colonies, who is dying from cancer, with the intent on reading to her. Just before he begins, the President asks Adama if he likes the ending of the book, an apparent classic in their world, and he tells her that he does not know how it ends. He loves the book so much that he has never finished it, he explains. He doesn’t want it to ever end.

I realize that I’m in good company with a fictional character, but this is Admiral William Adama, call sign Husker and savior of the human race. Even if he is fictional, he’s still a great man, and I felt a little bit of pride in knowing that he feels the same about our favorite books.

And this is nothing new for me. I once dated Jaye Tyler, the fictional protagonist from the short-lived television series, Wonderfalls. Perhaps I’ll write about it sometime.

More from Vonnegut

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Apologies, dear readers, for the lengthy departure.  But attempts to complete final revisions to MILO (now tentatively titled UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO), combined with the need to complete report cards for my students and a Border's Book of the Month Club questionnaire kept me quite busy for the last two weeks. 

But with all of those projects firmly behind me, I have a plethora of subjects upon which to write. 

Allow me to begin with some great news. 

For the past four years, I have been reading TIMEQUAKE, a novel by the late Kurt Vonnegut.  Vonnegut is probably my favorite writer, and when I began reading TIMEQUAKE, it occurred to me that this was the last Vonnegut novel that I had yet to read, and by all accounts, he had no plans to write any others.  This meant that I would have no more new Vonnegut novels to read, and as such, I made a vow to make this one last.

After his death in 2007, the assumption that TIMEQUAKE would be his last new novel for me became a certainty. 

I only allow myself to read a page or two of the book each week, permitting myself to re-read earlier sections of the text as much as I want, and I approach the five year mark with this book, I have yet to finish.  I'm about three-quarters of the way through, and though part of me yearns to finish reading it, I force myself to refrain.  Though I plan on re-reading many of Vonnegut's novels throughout my lifetime, these are the last of his words that I will read for the first time.

Or so I thought. 

This week I learned that Kurt Vonnegut’s longtime publisher, Delacorte Press, will issue 14 never-before published short stories by the author in a new collection entitled LOOK AT BIRDIE.  "Other original forthcoming titles will include a second collection of Vonnegut’s unpublished writings as well as a book of letters sent to and from the author over the course of his life."

I couldn't be more excited.

But now I am left wondering:  Should I go ahead and finish TIMEQUAKE and discover the fate of often-used, Vonnegut character Kilgore Trout or continue my snail's pace through the book?

Tournament of Books

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The fifth annual Tournament of Books began a couple weeks ago, pitting the sixteen best novels of the year against one another in order to determine a champion. The first round match-ups were thus:

  1. 2666 vs. Steer Toward Rock
  2. Netherland vs. A Partisan’s Daughter
  3. The White Tiger vs. Harry, Revisited
  4. Unaccustomed Earth vs. City of Refuge
  5. Shadow Country vs. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
  6. The Northern Clemency vs. The Lazarus Project
  7. A Mercy vs. The Dart League King
  8. Home vs. My Revolution

Sadly, the only book I read was Netherland, which I thought was good. Not great.

Is it normal for writers to miss so many good novels in a year? I’d love to read more, but between teaching and writing, I don’t know where to find the time. When I have the time to read, I find myself writing.

Also, I read a great deal on the Web, as well as magazines that I never seem able to get through. The Economist and Wired are my subscriptions, but others sneak in off the magazine rack all the time.

I’d love to think that I could get through sixteen novels in a year, but that’s more than one a month. Even with audiobooks, that seems like a tall order.

The tournament is currently in round two. Unfortunately, Netherland was knocked off in round one, leaving me with no horses in the race.

Lies

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A recent survey of British readers found that a "George Orwell’s 1984 tops the list of books that people pretend they have read, in a survey carried out for World Book Day 2009. Of the 65% who claimed to have read a book which in truth they haven’t, 42% admit to having said they had read modern classic 1984."

Those who lied have claimed to have read:

1. 1984 by George Orwell (42%)
2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (31%)
3. Ulysses by James Joyce (25%)
4. The Bible (24%)
5. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (16%)
6. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (15%)
7. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (14%)
8. In Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (9%)
9. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama (6%)
10. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (6%)

I'm curious about what the list would look like if American readers were surveyed. 

As for me, I have read 1984 and The Bible and have attempted to read War and Peace and Ulysses without success.

John Updike, 1932-2009

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In case you didn't hear, we lost John Updike this week.  I haven't read much of his work in years, and regrettably, I have yet to read any of his Rabbit books, but I read Couples, The Witches of Eastwick, and most of his short stories and poetry in college and liked them very much. 

In fact, I adore his short stories.  They were, for the most part, simply brilliant.

Losing a writer like Updike is always a tragedy.  When Kurt Vonnegut died a couple years ago, I cried.  I can still remember reading the story of his death as the sun was rising and streaming through my living window on an early April morning.  Never before had a sunrise seemed so cold. 

While I didn't have the same emotional reaction to Updike's death, I was saddened by the loss.  I can't help but think of all the potential stories that were still within him, now lost forever.     

Can I suggest you take ten minutes and read his short story, A&P?  It's one of my favorites.      

Strunk, White and the placenta

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Last night Elysha and I attended our final birth class. Though the first two classes were highly informative and well worth my time, this was the class that included the breathing exercises and the dreaded videos.

Not a night to remember.

It turns out that the breathing exercises are merely a diversion from the pain. I was under the impression that this rhythmic breathing somehow assisted in the actual labor and delivery of the baby, but not so. These exercises are designed to provide a focal point for a mother in labor pain. A distraction, if you will. While this may work with some women, I tried to explain to the instructor (without much success) that I have a multitude of ways to divert Elysha’s attention without the assistance of the Hee-Hee-Hoos (the actual name for one of these breathing techniques).

Play her a hitherto unheard song by an obscure singer who is performing with a new band and ask her to identify the singer and lead guitarist.

Ask her to name a dozen films in which Corey Haim, Corey Feldman, or both, starred.

Place knitting needles and some yarn in her hands.

Sit her down in front of Photoshop.

These activities can concume Elysha for hours.  

And speaking of alternative diversions, could you imagine the diversions that men would have invented had we been the ones to experience labor pain and give birth? I promise you that the Hee-Hee-Hoos would not be included in the arsenal of distractions.

I also learned that labor pain is very similar to passing a kidney stone, meaning that some unlucky men are capable of experiencing a pain quite similar to childbirth, without the benefits of an epidural, of course.

This is not a fact that women seem to be anxious to publicize to the world.

But I digress. There is a point to all this, and it relates to writing. I promise.

The class ended with video footage of three different deliveries, filmed in documentary form. Why we needed to watch women in agony, babies crowning and abdomens sliced open for a cesarean sections is beyond me, but uncertain if I will be able to remain standing and conscious during the birth of my own child, I opted not to watch the suffering of others. Among the many books and magazines that I carry in my bag is The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and EB White. Though I’ve read this book a dozen times or more, I am constantly reviewing it, finding the authors’ words (and especially Strunk’s) absolutely brilliant.

So in lieu of watching these awful, bloody, heart-wrenching videos. I merely raised The Elements of Style in front of my face and ignored the television completely.

Strunk, the author of much of the book, is especially amusing. I adore his blunt, straightforward approach to advice. As I was reading, I came across a few of his remarks that made me giggle, including this one, that apparently struck me at a less than apropos moment based upon the horrified look on one of my classmate’s faces:

Prestigious. Often an adjective of last resort. It’s in the dictionary, but that doesn’t mean you have to use it.

The Elements of Style. A perfect diversion from the bodily fluids and hypodermic needles associated with child birth.