Category Archives: Creativity

RT. 66

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Not the highway. Not the song. (Yes, there is a song.) Rather, the long winding path that leads to the Social Security office where I visited last week

This was a funny birthday. Not ha, ha funny. Odd, really. The day came and went without sturm und drang, included a nice dinner out with Sue and Jake, and a sweet telephone call from my older son Matt and his wife Alyssa. Unlike last year when I fell into a funk about mortality (mine), this year seemed smooth sailing. Even after I left the Social Security building there was still no depression.

It was something else entirely, and it hit a couple days later, actually on my music night. I totally sucked. Really sucked. So bad that when I began my lesson, I had trouble playing without squeaking and squawking.

It wasn’t the horn.

I made it through the lesson despite doing everything wrong. Then came time for playing with the ensemble (Polar Vortex). In general, I have difficulty playing at a fast tempo (even a medium tempo to be honest). That night I could barely get my fingers to move at all. It got so bad that for the last 20 minutes of our session, I just stopped playing, sat down, and wondered what I was even doing in the group. I had long before come to terms with being its worst player, but never felt so defeated. Often, exactly the opposite. When I struggled, it usually gave me greater determination to try harder. Not that night.

Much later, lying in bed watching Pawn Star re-runs, I tried to figure things out. Somewhere between a reproduction Gatling gun and a signed first-edition Edgar Allen Poe, I started to get it. There simply isn’t enough of my life left to become a decent musician. The night at music school had been a metaphor for decisions taken and, more importantly, not taken. Despite having always wanted to play an instrument, why hadn’t I first started to learn music long before? Why hadn’t I begun lessons, something where I don’t have natural talent at the time when I began to write—where I do have natural talent? It could have, should have (?) been reversed.

I guess “what ifs” and “if onlys” smack everyone upside the head some time or another. Sue teaches at a “low residency” MFA at Lesley University and, frankly, I’ve been pretty jealous. I’ve helped people with their writing, but working with students on a regular basis would have given me great pleasure. But if you only have one diploma (8th grade) despite attending high school, some college, part of a master’s program, and creating a school for high-school dropouts in Chicago, the end result is strikingly clear.

No teaching for me.

Other decisions also steered me in directions that precluded others. During that long, television-lit night, I reviewed every single one of them. Why did I leave Chicago’s People’s School? Why did I stop my counseling practice in Boston when I knew I was really good at it? Why did I fight my agent, editor, publisher about what they wanted, when I had a critically acclaimed set of novels under my belt. Why did I just stop writing?

Why did I choose serial careerism instead of becoming really, really good at one thing?

Sleep, wonderful restorative sleep. Next morning (after my usual growling, semi-hostile, coffee-deprived wake up) I reconsidered. Sure I’d made decisions that offed alternatives. Everyone does. And, I’ll make book that everyone has regrets similar to what I’d been feeling.

Three cups of coffee and I finally saw daylight. Understood what had immobilized me the night before and saw my way out from under. Blood under the bridge is indeed, blood under the bridge. I have a wife I love and who loves me, children and a daughter–in-law I adore, and oncoming granddaughters. I’ve worked and continue to work with people I respect and who respect me, friends who have my back, and more than just food on the table. Truth is, I can turn my head 180, look at the decisions I did make and feel satisfied.

Bottom line: I got it good and that ain’t bad. Better get my ass back to practicing the sax.

Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

SEASON 3 EPISODE 10

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I never jumped on the Breaking Bad bandwagon when it first turned up on television. After the first season was released on DVD, however, Sue borrowed it from a friend but said it made her too tense to watch. Since I still hadn’t gotten into it, I was fine about her returning the set.

Then the series began coming to its conclusion and it seemed as if the only interviews on radio and TV were of the cast, director, and creator. Even Charlie Rose did his annoying gushing about the program, but what caught my attention was the focus creator/writer/producer Vince Gilligan received. Sure, there was an avalanche of accolades heaped on Bryan Cranston, who played Walter White the main character, Anna Gunn, Water’s wife Skyler, and Aaron Paul as his youthful sidekick Jessie Pinkman, but the amount of consideration given to Gilligan surprised me. Few people in his position garner the raves he received as the show’s end drew near. He was the creative force and wrote many of the scripts (and oversaw the others) like David Chase of The Sopranos.

About the same time my son Jake gave me Apple TV as a present and I decided to spring for  Netflix Streaming and give Breaking Bad another shot. Well, I’m very glad I did. It is a damn good series with exceptional acting and writing, though I don’t believe it in any way, shape, or form surpasses The Sopranos or even the best years of The Wire. Still, it’s certainly a “contendah.” In an age where you have 180 channels and still find nothing to watch, that’s an impressive do.

But I’m not writing this column to compare television series, or even to analyze Breaking Bad as a whole. I’m writing about Season 3, Episode 10 called Fly. I don’t know if Fly more closely resembles a short story or a one act play, but I do know it was 47 minutes that could easily stand alone outside the series.

The plot revolved around catching or killing a fly that threatened to contaminate Walter’s meth lab. As a play (which is how I think of the episode) the actual plot had very little importance. It was just a vehicle to shine a light on the mostly contentious relationship between Walter, the older mentor, and Jessie his much younger, often sleazy, partner and mentee.

In an act of desperation, but mostly kindness, Jessie slipped some drugs into Walter’s coffee hoping to make him sleep after Walt’s continuous 24 hour obsessive hunt for that fly. But what the drugs actually did was allow Walter to talk about who he’d been, what he had become, and why. He talked about the importance “family” in his life and how it dictated many of his choices, despite a bushel full of regrets. And within the course of his confessions and conversation, his underlying affection for his mentee became increasingly clear.

Although Jessie didn’t verbalize his emotional reactions to Walter’s intimacy, his behavior (risking his neck to kill the fly, despite believing the entire effort completely idiotic) indicated his real concern for Walt, despite their relentless arguments and on and off again partnership. As the frantic fly hunt continues, layers of top skin are stripped from both participants. Although Walt and Jessie’s relationship has a much more complicated history, in many ways this episode reminded me of Mamet’s Duck Variations. In that play, two strangers sit on a bench and these old men start making assumptions about the ducks swimming nearby. Even though they know nothing about ducks or each other, their comments reveal more and more about who each of them are and an intimate connection develops before they go their separate ways.

And, of course, by the conclusion of Season 3, Episode 10, the fly has been killed, Walter has slept off the pills and, as they get into their cars, their tenderness has receded into the typical antagonisms.

Just a great 47 minutes and well worth trying to find whether you’re interested in the show as a whole or not. It’s not often an ongoing series produces a one act play as in depth as this episode.

Flipping through other channels:

Homeland, which I’ve written about before, has regained its footing this season. The acting has been strong (Claire Danes isn’t always crying or about to) but what has really been fun are the plot twists. Back in the day, I read a lot of spy novels, mostly favoring the intricate betrayals John Le Carrie wove through his early books. (I still believe both the novel and the movie of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold are classics.) This season’s plotting of Homeland is very reminiscent of those early works. Folks who have cable television and On Demand might want to consider watching this season from the start.

And, of course, it was baseball’s play-offs, which meant hours upon hours glued to the set. Given the outcome, all those late nights and tired days were more than worth it. The Red Sox won! The Red Sox won!

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. C.G. Jung

MR. MAILER CONTINUES

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NormanIPortrait

Titina Chalmatz

Last week’s Interview with the Dead concluded with Norman being frustrated by our lack of literary conversation. Actually, he was frustrated that we hadn’t yet discussed his literary accomplishments. So in this installment I turn my attention to his prodigious and often controversial work. I do admit a bottle of bourbon helped keep our interaction from being too contentious.

ME: You won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and the National Book Award for Armies of the Night. Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968 was brilliant, and Of a Fire On The Moon might be the definitive work about the beginning days of NASA.Yet you once said, “If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.” Why did you do so much of what you didn’t value?

MAILER: You disappoint me, Klein. If you had done your homework, in The Armies of the Night, I describe my conversation with Robert…

MY macho flared and I interrupted him.

ME:…Lowell. I think I remember the words exactly, “You know, Norman,” said Lowell in his fondest voice, “Elizabeth and I really think you’re the finest journalist in America.”

MAILER: Good jab, but you forgot the counterpunch…my response to him. “Well, Cal, there are days when I think of myself as being the best writer in America.”

ME: When was a hierarchy of writing established?

MAILER: Since people used stones on cave walls. Actually, long before. Storytelling.

ME: Aren’t you creating a false distinction? Storytelling was as much about history as make-believe and the same could be said about cave paintings.

MAILER: The difficulty I have is not with journalism per se—despite what I said. The problem has been—was, now that I’m dead—the attempt to define the books you mentioned as simply journalism when so much more creativity went into them. Every one of my books killed me a little more, yet too many people made them sound as if readers were going to read a digest of newspaper accounts. As you well know, that’s not what they found.

ME: Yes those works were written in a highly subjectivized style and used techniques that were thought to be the sole domain of fiction at that time, but you were, in fact, reporting.

MAILER: I think it’s impossible to tease out reporting from what you termed “highly subjectivized.”

Mr. Mailer grinned mischievously.

MAILER: Did you just make up that word?

ME: Nah, I ran across it preparing for our interview.

MAILER: I always found it more fun to write about something I didn’t completely know but would discover on route. A friend once told me that “The only time I know anything is when it comes to me at the point of my pen.” I hope our interview manages to replicate that.

A stuffy answer, I thought, and smiled at his ever present ego.

ME: So do I, but I’m still stuck on the journalism issue. I’ll never understand why The Executioner’s Song (Mailer’s book about the life and death of murderer Gary Gilmore) won the Pulitzer for fiction.

MAILER, pouring both of us another drink despite the morning hour: Perhaps we’re both too concerned about categories. It’s true I much prefer, preferred, to be thought of as a novelist, but that might have been shortsighted on my part. In thinking back to my response to Cal Lowell, I used the term “writer.”

Mr. Mailer broke into laughter.

MAILER: I probably should have touted myself more as the best living writer than argue about being a novelist rather than a journalist. Truth was, I sifted through thousands of documents before writing Gilmore’s story.

ME: I’ll be honest with you, I thought the first two-thirds were genius. Each paragraph seemed to be in the voice of the person you were writing about…”

MAILER: You have a good ear, Klein.

ME: But, the last third when your attention turned to the press and, frankly, yourself, just wasn’t as compelling.

MAILER: Reporters’ voices shouldn’t grab you the way main characters do; it’s the nature of their craft. But I’ll take “two-thirds genius.” It goes well with bourbon.

ME: One last question about Song. You’ve been quoted as saying, “The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.” Doesn’t The Executioner’s Song follow in the steps of In Cold Blood?.

MAILER, shaking his head: I’m dead and still being asked that question. Yes, there are similarities, but remember an entire movement called New Journalism was rearing its head. Capote, Tom Wolfe, later Hunter Thompson. And me, of course, right up there in the vanguard. Hell, we created The Village Voice to encourage a meld of fiction and non-fiction. So while I understand the question, I believe the notion that Capote set a “precedent” is a stretch.

Mailer raised his bushy eyebrows.

MAILER: And you certainly wouldn’t call The Executioner’s Song mediocre, would you?

ME: Another phenomena jumped at me while preparing for our talk…

MAILER: Pretty confident that I’d talk to you, eh?

ME: I figgered if I pounded on your gravesite shouting GORE VIDAL long and loud enough you wouldn’t be able to help yourself.

Mailer chuckled in a surprisingly wholehearted way.

MAILER: Funny, but that’s not why I’m here. I’ve read your books and you too are trying to redefine a category. Hard boiled detective fiction where instead of just plot, plot, plot and, shoot, shoot, shoot, the focus is on the inner life of your main character and interpersonal relationships.

Me: Well, thank you. That’s a hell of a compliment coming from you.

MAILER: I said “trying.” I didn’t say succeeding.

ME: You took “two-thirds genius,” I’ll take “trying.”

MAILER: Just stay at it. Perhaps you’ll actually succeed where I didn’t in Tough Guys Don’t Dance.

Mailer refreshed our glasses.

ME: Here you are encouraging another author, but during your lifetime it seemed as though you were always at war with other writers. I’m not just talking about Vidal. But even your friends like James Baldwin who liked you and wrote “you strode through the soft Paris nights like a gladiator.” In Advertisements For Myself you wrote, “he was “incapable of saying ‘F— you’ to the reader.”

MAILER, shrugging: Is it an insult if it’s true—at least at the time? Anyway, he eventually got his punch in with, and I quote, “The Negro jazz musicians among whom we sometimes found ourselves, who really liked Norman, did not for an instant consider him as being even remotely ‘hip’. Now that was an insult.

ME: And I quote,“Is it an insult if it’s true”—at least to them at the time?” But it wasn’t just Baldwin. According to you, Styron had “compromised himself;” Bellow wrote “in a style I find self-willed … I cannot take him seriously;” Kerouac lacked “discipline, intelligence, honesty.” “There were no talented women writers at all.” You can’t really believe that about women, can you?

MAILER: Again, one needs to look at the context of the times. I was savaged by virtually every notable woman, writer or not, after I published Prisoner Of Sex.

ME: Excuse me, Norman, I quoted you from 1959 and you didn’t publish Prisoner until 1971. What context are you talking about? Please! You called your cock “The Retaliator” in Prisoner.

MAILER: I was pretty angry when I wrote Prisoner.

ME: You think? Whatever year we’re talking about, you have an across-the-board reputation of being “psychologically, creatively, empathetically tone-deaf when it came to women, his female characters a creamy mélange of angel-whores whose lipstick was ripe for smearing…” Perhaps that’s why your novels don’t receive the acclaim your other writing does. In fact, your last wife (Norris Church Mailer) wrote that she begged you to eliminate the meanderings that made Harlot’s Ghosts, The Gospel According To The Son, and The Castle In The Forest critical failures.

MAILER: She might have been right, but no writer can afford to pay much attention to criticism. Then who the hell are you?  And those fucking literary critics, I hate, excuse me, hated them most of all. They still don’t understand the importance of Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery.

ME: Let’s take a break and stretch our legs. When we return, I’d like to begin with Oswald’s Tale. It’s a perfect segue into your political activism and writings.

Norman Boxing

theguardian

 

“They are men’s men. Rocky Marciano was one of them. Oscar Bonavena and Jerry Quarry and George Chuvalo and Gene Fullmer and Carmen Basilio, to name a few, have faces which would give a Marine sergeant pause in a bar fight. They look like they could take you out with the knob of bone they have left for a nose.” — Norman Mailer

TIME TO REBOOT

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Last week I fired off an angry screed about our species and the horrors we perpetrate upon each other. It was an accurate reflection of at least some ways I think about human history and our present state of affairs. Problem is, how the hell do I follow up something like that?

While I might not know exactly what I’m going to write the next day when I work on my Matt Jacob novels, there are at least general parameters, an ongoing storyline and characters. So sitting down to write isn’t entering a dark tunnel bereft of ideas. In fact, (and I may have mentioned this before) I use a Hemingway device to help me along. Never stop writing at the end of a chapter, paragraph, or sentence. Makes it easier to get back into the flow. I also start each day editing from the very first sentence to the middle of the unfinished one. Takes a lot longer to write the book, but helps keep consistency of plot and tone as well as making certain that every single word has a purpose.

When I first began these posts, I discovered that my usual writing approach was useless since each of the columns were of a piece. And every piece was a stand-alone with rare exceptions. This was a totally new type of writing for me.

So when I opened the website and the Just sayin’ section, I made a conscious effort to think of subjects I could do justice to in about 800-1000 words. In the beginning there were a barrel full of ideas and issues I wanted to pursue. A couple of years later, ideas are not nearly as plentiful. This led to mixing in some fictional conversations and arguments and eventually creating my Interviews With The Dead.

I gotta tell you, I love working on that series. I know it isn’t feasible or even desirable to limit Just sayin’ to the Interviews With The Dead series, but doing them is really a lot of fun. I think about expanding the ones I’ve published and writing enough of them to turn them into an eBook. That’ll be a cool project, but the fourth Matt Jacob will come first.

Originally, I had planned to hit the publicity mill at full steam when the first three were up and for sale. Instead, I decided to wait until TIES THAT BLIND went up as well. The first three Matt Jacob novels had all been published in hard and softcover before they became eBooks, but TTB had never seen the light of day because I pulled it from the house when I left the legacy world. And it’s been waiting for a long time while I worked as a jury and litigation consultant.

It waits no more. Although I think it is the best of my novels, in order to bridge the time gap I’ve been making some significant revisions, one reason it has taken so long to publish as an eBook. And while I hope to have it up in a couple of months, a book (like any construction process) often has missed deadlines. Especially true for those that are self-imposed.

I’m enjoying the work but dread the day I have to turn my attention to slicing through the cacophony of the internet in the hope that the books will be bought and read. Not my strong suit but I will have some great help.

So what is this post really about other than sharing some tradecraft and future plans?

Honestly, it’s become a bridge to create some distance from last weeks’ column. It seemed ridiculous to simply find a story to write about, a book, movie, or play to review. (Though I have to admit that some of last weeks’ intensity had to do with watching an outstanding one man show of The Iliad. As one reviewer put it, not only were the Troy wars focused upon, but rather how wars in general just seem to be inevitable.)

I could have asked a guest columnist to stand in for me this week but I had to build this particular bridge since my mad has dissipated and I intend to reboot and begin fresh with next week’s post.

Who knows? I might even get summoned to interview another dead person.

How do I work? I grope. ~Albert Einstein

DECONSTRUCTION OF A POST

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I’d been having such a blast writing my INTERVIEWS WITH THE DEAD that I had begun considering using this space almost exclusively to develop and extend the form. Problem is, if I go by the number of readers who view Mondays’ posts, too many interviews too often, get boring. And the idea of boring is a writer’s worst nightmare. So I couldn’t put an interview on the docket for this week’s column.

Then what? This question usually pops up about twenty minutes after I’ve published my last post. I’m used to it and push the anxiety aside. I need the mind space to work on the fourth Matt Jacob book, TIES THAT BLIND. Also, if Mondays are publishing days, Tuesdays are music days. It takes me a fair amount of time to practice the sax, and prepare for my lesson and ensemble hours at MusicMakerStudios. That “performance” comes fully equipped with its own anxiety; what I lack in talent I try to make up for with work—which often isn’t terribly successful.

But Tuesdays are always fun days and nights, which is very much the calm before the storm. Wednesday morning, my Monday worries are in full bloom. This past week I struggled to engage, to find myself interested enough in a topic to write about. I thought about reviewing Hugo Chavez’s legacy, but everywhere I looked interesting articles about him–pro or con–were everywhere. I couldn’t imagine writing anything that could conceivably change anyone’s mind, so why bother? Felt like I’d be talking to myself.

I return to the newspaper and go through three days of ink but nothing jumps so I reconsider another interview. Desperation move, I think. Like I said, too much repetition makes for a drag. I tell myself I have plenty of time and that worrying won’t help my subconscious churn something out. After all, if an idea doesn’t come from current events, the arts, or other externals, it’s got to rise up from the deep. I’ve always believed that consciousness is the last stop for information, not the first—let’s hope it’s true this week.

Another two days pass and it’s Friday. The Northeast gets whacked with yet another snowstorm, while I pour over my copy of Baseball Prospectus, hungry for the season to begin. Ahh, an idea, perhaps? PLAY BALL!! A review of my Arizona trips to Spring Training? An analysis of the Red Sox? Uhh, I think not. Can’t imagine anyone interested in baseball after shoveling their cars out from another foot of snow. Even if the post is three days away. Around here, three days just means you’re no longer allowed to save your parking space with chairs or trash barrels.

Not a good idea to eliminate all my northeast readership. I just can’t count on Wyoming to flesh out the numbers.

Late Friday afternoon and head-banging time. The walls are moving closer and closer together and I’m scrambling to find a way out. I got to find a way to chill.

Break out the bourbon.

I’d like to say that one swallow opened the door but it didn’t. Two swallows though, cleared my mind enough to begin thinking. I considered a piece on Benedict’s abdication and the upcoming conclave. But we all know why Benedict really resigned and can only suspect which definition of damage control and conserving Empire the conclave will send up along with their white smoke.

It’s Saturday morning and too early for more alcohol.

Okay, Klein, you’ve been doing this for a couple of years now. You’re either all dried up or you ain’t thinking. I prefer the latter so I’m gonna either stare at a blank computer screen or beat this horse into talking. (Before animal advocates get too angry, the horse I’m talking about is me.)

The horse finally talked. “Write about the struggle you’re having this week with the column, but make it interesting!”

Damn horse sounded like Captain Pickard: “Make it so!” But in truth, the idea caught my fancy. Why shouldn’t you share my tsouris? Or, more writerly put, why not share my weekly process? This was an idea I could get behind. Just recount the truth. Write about the mishigas I go through every time I sit down to write my post. On top of which, this week was perfect since it was an “I got nothing” five days, a day of writing, then Sunday to turn this into a coherent article.

So here it is, my friends. A look inside my past week of writing—or nonwriting, as it were. I suppose I could finish by reciting various “Win one for the Gipper” homilies, but truth is, I’m left with only one head-scratcher: People want to know why writers drink?

You’re not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.— Dean Martin