Trust Me. I'm a Writer.

New New Writing, New Old Writing, and New New New Podcasting

2012-01-29T15:46:00.002-06:00

Time for a quick update:

As you may have heard, on Tuesday Judge Zagel denied Bill Cellini a retrial. I went to the courthouse to hear the decision, and afterwards I did a short interview with a reporter from the Tribune. I thought he captured my thoughts pretty well. Barring another major appeal, it sounds like the next step is sentencing. I have started working on a long essay about my experience on the trial. So far it's pretty murky, but it feels good to work on something brand new. And somewhat time-sensitive. Aiming to have a solid draft by end of March. Hold me to it.
After spinning my wheels for most of 2011, I had a bit of an epiphany on my big Aurora project. The catch is that the epiphany included having to start over. Yep. I'll write a lot more about this later. The good news is that, for the first time in quite some time, I don't hate every single word I write about it.
Another big writing project in the works: My good friend Karen Shimmin and I decided it would be a great idea to make a podcast about writing. Just who in the hell do we think we are? Your guess is as good as ours. The show does not yet have a name or a format or really much of a plan. What we do know is that it will include readings and interviews with some very talented writers. Also it will not be stuffy or boring. Look out for more news about this as we roll into warmer months.

Response to John Kass: Don't Hang the Juror

2011-11-28T18:35:00.002-06:00

By now you’ve probably heard that Bill Cellini might get another trial. About two weeks ago, the Chicago Tribune reported that one of the other jurors concealed her criminal record during the jury selection process. Cellini’s lawyers have since filed for a mistrial.

In the wake of this news, the Angry Readers (i.e., regular people who leave comments) at the Chicago Tribune website have spoken: They’re angry at Judge Zagel for not ordering background checks on the jurors, at the prosecuting attorneys for not running checks themselves, and at defense attorney Dan Webb, whose mock surprise doesn't seem to be fooling anybody.

But the Angry Readers are most angry, by far, at the juror.

Many Angry Readers have settled for calling the juror a "liar," but others have escalated their name-calling to more inflammatory levels, using descriptors such as “crackhead,” “loser,” "asshole," and "scumbag." Many have called for her to be prosecuted and punished. “This lady needs to do some serious time in jail,” reads one comment. “She is corrupt and apparently not capable of giving an honest answer to a simple question.” Others are a little more forceful: "Send her [to prison] on the same bus you put BLAGO on!"

And the Angry Readers have good company in Tribune opinion writer John Kass. Kass's article in last week’s Tribune places most of the blame on Judge Zagel, who he chides for his “arrogance” in not ordering background checks or releasing juror’s names to the media.

But if you read between the lines, it’s clear that, just like the Angry Readers, Kass is also pretty angry with the juror in question. For example, he describes the juror as: "The one who. . . may have screwed up Illinois' most important political corruption case in years."

Kass goes on to describe a visit he made to the juror's apartment. He was met at the door by a man and a young boy, who turned him away. Kass describes his parting words to the boy:

She has nothing to be afraid of, I lied. Don't worry, I told him. Then we left.

Actually, she has reason to be afraid. Perjury is a federal offense, punishable by prison. And she's made some important people look awfully foolish.

She may have cost prosecutors and taxpayers an important conviction, and the expense of an extra trial.

The message is subtle but clear: this juror deserves just as much blame as anyone else. (In fact, she deserves more blame; she is, after all, the only person involved in this fiasco who is at risk of going to jail.) Even though Kass doesn't say that she should be prosecuted and sent to prison, he also doesn't imply that she ought to be spared from such a fate.

And I understand why John Kass and the Angry Readers feel this way. I really do. Here’s how I reacted to the news:

I received a group email from one of the other jurors with a link to the story. I clicked on the link and read the article. Then I read it again. I stood up and paced around my apartment. Then I sat down at my desk and read the article a third, fourth, a fifth time. I tried to work for a few hours, but I couldn’t concentrate, so I turned off my phone, shut my laptop, and took my dog for a long walk. Then I came home and sat on the couch and stared off into space for an indeterminate period of time.

I've had a pretty fortunate life: no major tragedies, no major health issues, a great family and a good education. So this statement may seem both excessive and naive to some, but here it is anyway: I couldn't remember feeling so frustrated and angry about anything, ever.

But I wasn't mad at that juror.

The juror has been accused of lying under oath during her jury selection interview. Let me explain what the jury selection process for this trial was like, from the prospective of a juror: There was a lot of sitting. Nothing happened for a very, very long time, and no one could tell us when anything would or could happen. And then all at once some names got called, and we were led into a smaller room. In that room, our names were called one-by-one. When my name was called, I was led down a narrow hallway to a nondescript door. The door opened and I walked into the courtroom. The first thing I saw when I walked into the room were countless unsmiling faces looking back at me, including the judge, the defendant, two teams of lawyers, the defendant's family, and benches full of reporters, every last one of them ready to scribble down every word I was about to say.

I am a pretty confident person, comfortable with the attention of a room full of people, but my heart was racing when I entered that room. When I sat down and Judge Zagel asked me to state and spell my name, I could hardly gather the breath to respond.

And I don't even have a criminal record. I can’t imagine what must have been going through that juror’s mind when she sat for her interview, but I think I know why she lied. It wasn’t because she was biased. It wasn’t a covert attempt to get on the jury – that’s absurd. She lied because she was afraid to tell a roomful of reporters that she had a DUI and a record of cocaine possession over a decade ago. Because who the hell knows what those reporters are going take to print or put on the air? For all she knew, her statement would be public record in time for the 5 o'clock news. What did she stand to lose by answering those questions truthfully – her career, her family?

And why should she be forced into that situation? Keep in mind jury duty is not something one volunteers for.

Fortunately, for every “Angry Reader” calling for this juror’s head, there is a “Cooler Head” that points out the flaws in the system, who points out the numerous opportunities that were missed to excuse the juror. They point out the irony of those Angry Readers, the ones who call for the juror to be prosecuted and sent to prison and (in the same breath) bemoan the colossal waste of taxpayer dollars on a Cellini retrial. Some Cooler Heads even empathize with the juror; one notes that the point of the jury selection process is to vet for qualified jurors, not to publically embarrass regular citizens.

There is one culprit in this mess at whom no one seems to be pointing the finger: What about the Tribune itself? Or the Sun-Times? Or ABC7 or NBC5 or CBS2? If I recall correctly, first thing I did when I sat down for my interview was state and spell my name. So why would the media outlets wait until after the trial to run their background checks? Those reporters had a whole month to match the names they heard during jury interviews with the faces that sat in the jury box every day. I know for a fact that at least one young reporter, who visited me at my apartment the day our verdict came down, remembered that I had testified about graduating from Northwestern. At some point during the trial, I checked my blog stats and found that a handful of people had discovered my blog by using Google search terms such as “William Nast Chicago.” Only about 20 people read this blog on a regular basis – and not one of them refers to me as “William.” So somebody was checking me out; and all they had to do was piece the information together. Collectively, these media outlets have more resources at their disposal than the judge and either team of lawyers. The fact that all those reporters waited for Judge Zagel to hand our names over to them seems, to be frank, pretty lazy journalism.

But I am less disturbed by the reader reactions, or the possibility of a new trial, or the flaws in the system that led us here, than I am by the thought of what that juror is going through right now. The young boy who met Kass at her apartment told him simply, “she’s scared.” That image truly haunts me.

That feeling sharply contrasts the feeling I had in the days after the trial ended, when I couldn’t help but relate what a positive experience it had been for me, especially deliberation. Every juror in that room conducted themselves with class and integrity, and though I might have less faith in the legal system than I had a few weeks ago, I still have the same respect for those eleven people, including her.

If I could talk to her now, I would tell her this: I understand. And I feel awful for what’s happened to you. And I wish you the best. I know I can’t ease your fears, but I offer this bit of consolation: the Angry Readers often have the louder voices, but the Cooler Heads typically prevail.

The Big Story

2011-11-07T22:00:00.002-06:00

As some of you have already heard or read, I spent the last month serving as a juror on the Bill Cellini trial. The case in a nutshell: Cellini was involved in a conspiracy to extort a Hollywood movie producer named Tom Rosenberg; the objective was to get Rosenberg to pay a political contribution to then-governor Rod Blagojevich. After a three-week trial and three days of deliberation, our verdict was read; we convicted Bill Cellini on two of the four counts related to the conspiracy.

The above paragraph rings hollow. I have so much to say about this experience that I'm not really sure where to start. So I guess I'll begin by answering the question that many of those close to me have asked since the trial ended: will I write about it?

There's certainly enough material to write about: from Stuart Levine giving testimony on his double-life, to the racial undertones of the Allison Davis subplot, to the all-business federal prosecuting attorneys, to the old-school defense team, to the media coverage, to the unsettling feeling of seeing the sketch artist's rendition of my own face, to the three-day deliberation. And all that without even mentioning Bill Cellini.

Jury duty itself is an experience worth writing about. They call it a "duty" for a reason. It is not something one chooses to do, but something one does because it must be done. And carrying out that duty gives one less a sense of accomplishment than a sense of sobriety. One juror described it as one of the few opportunities we will ever have to profoundly affect the life of another human being. It's a responsibility that, on one hand, feels very surreal; and on the other hand feels very, well, real.

And then there's the obvious reason to write about the trial. Bill Cellini was one of the most powerful men in Illinois politics for over thirty years. The fact that I played a minor role in a pivotal moment in the history of this state is not lost on me.

There's a lot to think about and make sense of. I don't know when I'll have something worth posting here or publishing elsewhere. But I will write about it. To put it bluntly, sometimes life drops a Big Story in your lap. If I were to ignore it, I'd have no right to call myself a writer.

Strange Old Pictures of My Family

2011-10-26T22:40:00.004-05:00

Last month, my grandfather passed away. On the day he died, we (my father's five siblings, their spouses, and every one of their twenty mostly-adult children) gathered at my grandfather's home. It wasn't long before one of my cousins had located my grandmother's photo albums, at least two dozen in all. We sat for hours in the living room, passing the photo albums around, laughing at how we all looked. (So many Cosby sweaters. So many mustaches. So many mullets.) Often I would get to the end of an album, and immediately start over from the beginning, sometimes taking more time to look through the album than I did the first time. I could hardly put them down. We stayed for a week, and not a day went by where I did not spend at least one hour looking through the albums.

Photo albums are a dying medium, which is too bad, because there's something intensely personal about them, far more personal than flipping through digital images on a camera or a computer screen. For one thing, most photo albums come from a time before you 1) could take as many pictures as you wanted, 2) could actually see the picture you got right after you took it (which is why so many pictures in photo albums are so weird - see example above - it's a tragedy that we're so quick to delete these kinds of shots from our digital cameras). Plus you had to incur the extra time and cost of getting the pictures developed. And all that came before you even get to the part where you put the pictures in the albums. Photo albums are too inconvenient these days. There are far too many overhead costs and barriers to production.

The albums are the product of my grandmother, who died of Alzheimer's four years ago. I find it difficult to conjure an image of my grandmother in which she did not have a camera in her hands. She snapped pictures as if she had a digital camera, as if she weren't bound by the limitation of only having 24 shots per roll of film. After developing her pictures, she scrupulously cataloged them, inking the names of the people, the location, and the year on the back of each photo in her gentle handwriting. Then she put them into photo albums, one for almost every year ranging from the early 70s through the mid 90s. Add to that number a handful from the 50s and 60s, when her own children were young. The entire library makes for a pretty comprehensive catalog of our lives.

Looking at them spread out on the living room floor, it occurred to me what an impressive task this had been - and a quiet one. My grandfather had an outgoing, engaging personality. He never met a person with whom he couldn't converse, (whether the other party was willing or otherwise). My grandmother had assumed the role of the silent partner in their relationship. These albums were a gentler reminder that she, too, had been here. In a way it felt as though we lost them both that day.

Bear with me for a moment, I'm coming back around to a point: Several weeks after my grandfather died, I read a book called Reality Hunger by a writer named David Shields. Reality Hunger is essentially Shield's philosophy of nonfiction writing, in which he argues that all art, including novels, film, music, architecture, footwear, collage, whatever, is a mode of nonfiction writing (I'm really dumbing it down here but that's the jist). The following passage brought my grandmother's photo albums to mind:

Carpenters restore old homes to their architectural and design period, not knowing the original color of the walls. If restoring a home is like writing a nonfiction narrative, and if choosing the paint for one wall is like imagining one moment in the larger story, shouldn't we acknowledge that the house and its walls were in fact never one particular way? On a single wall, sometimes paintings hung, sometimes wallpaper stared, sometimes children penned their names, sometimes flies sat, sometimes dust settled, sometimes sunlight blazed, sometimes fingerprints shimmered. The lost story the carpenter tries to restore isn't one particular story, but a pool of possible tales, with different perspectives from different characters, told at different times for different reasons. The nonfiction writer who works to revive a lost scene adds one similar story to the collection of stories that ever existed for that moment... I don't seek to tell the best story. I seek to tell a story that once was. I seek to fill a place that once had meaning with meaning again.

The first reason this passage brought the photo albums to my mind is that it essentially explains why my grandmother went to such great lengths to compile these albums, beyond the enjoyment she got from taking pictures. My grandfather's home felt empty and silent without him. The albums gave the living something to reflect on and build meaning (or a narrative) out of. I remember thinking even then, as we sat around my grandfather's living room, passing the albums back and forth, that it was almost as if she had planned for that very moment.

The other reason this passage brought the photo albums to mind is that there was a certain amount of personal guilt that accompanied my grandfather's death. For some time I had kicked around the idea of recording him at length. He had lived through the Great Depression, was a veteran of World War 2, and most importantly, possessed an untapped library of embarrassing tales about my father and his siblings. But first there was college, and then my first real job, and sometimes girlfriends and parties a host of other absolutely trivial bullshit which now leaves me utterly flummoxed as to how I ever believed was immediately more important than driving four measly hours and visiting my last living grandparent. I was not even swayed after my older brother visited him earlier this year and reported to me the words he told him: "I feel like I'm at the end of my show." I put it off to the next month, and the next. Then one day I received a phone call from my parents, saying my grandfather had been taken to the hospital. Two days later my parents arrived in Chicago and we drove together to northern Wisconsin, where he lived. We visited him in the hospital as soon as we arrived, in the middle of the night. He was on a ventilator by then, sedated and unresponsive. He died the following afternoon.

And with him died the stories. And almost as soon as those stories were lost forever, I understood that it wasn't the stories I wanted. How can I explain this? My grandfather was a larger-than-life character. Although I suppose most people feel that way about their grandfathers, when I tell people about him, I feel compelled to add, "But really! He was!" From there I feel impotent to find words that accurately convey the force of his character. I didn't want the stories so I could write about them, or him. I wanted them for the same reasons we keep photo albums - to construct the feeling of being with these people, again, in that precise moment in time. To have failed to create some record like this is what really haunts me, both as a grandson and (less importantly) as a writer.

Fortunately, as I alluded to earlier, I have a copious number of cousins, and I wasn't the only one who had this idea. The day after my grandfather died, my cousin Kate showed us videos she had taken of him during a recent Christmas visit. (I think I speak for my entire family when I say holycrapthankgodforkate.) The videos are short, hardly 15 minutes in total. But viewing them reminds me of looking at a crescent sliver of the moon; though so little is visible to the eye, I can feel, imagine, sense the whole. I could sit here all day and watch these videos and watch them again tomorrow, as if turning the pages of a photo album in my lap, reaching the end, and starting over from the beginning.

The rest of the videos of my grandfather at the following link: http://vimeo.com/album/1728564

My Reading at Storylab Chicago

2011-08-19T18:10:00.001-05:00

A couple nights ago I read at Storylab Chicago. Storylab is held in the back room of The Black Rock Pub - dark wood, fireplace, a few comfortable couches - it's a venue that feels like a place where stories should be told.

The place was packed and the audience was very receptive. I wrote something brand new for this reading and I was pretty pleased with the way it turned out. Click the play button below to hear it:

Hosted by kiwi6.com file hosting.
Download mp3 - Free File Hosting.

Thanks to Scott Whitehair for putting this show together and to the other readers for kicking ass.

Badass Chicago Storyteller Shannon Cason

2011-07-19T13:02:00.000-05:00

You know how there are some athletes or musicians that we marvel at simply because they make everything look so damn easy? Shannon Cason is kind of like that as a writer and storyteller.

Last night, I attended Essay Fiesta. It was my intention to drum up a little inspiration for myself. Next month I'm going to be reading at Storylab Chicago, and I've been hacking away at a meandering, unmitigated disaster of a story that I may as well perform in Swahili. I needed a little direction and guidance, to be reminded of what a good story sounds like. Luckily for me, Shannon was on last night's Essay Fiesta bill.

Anyone who has seen Shannon will tell you that the guy can put on a clinic in storytelling. (Don't take my word for it - he's Moth Storyslam's Grandslam Champion of Chicago.) He has an easy, straightforward style that's observant, thoughtful, and hilarious. Consider the opening from his story last night:

I went to the dentist. Not to the dentist's office, but to the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Dentistry's urgent care clinic... It's where the poor and uninsured can go and get dental care. It's where students - future dentists - can practice. In your mouth. So it's like a beauty or a barber college. Only it's your mouth.

Shannon's story hit particularly close to home for two reasons. First, two weeks ago I had four impacted wisdom teeth pulled, so I was literally wriggling in my seat for most of the story. Second, it made me see the draft of my story for what it was - an overcrowded, overcomplicated mess of twisting plotlines and one-liners. Somewhere in there, there's a story. I just have to find it and tell it straight.

You can (and should) hear the rest of Shannon's story at his podcast. (The story starts about 1/3 of the way into the podcast).

Video: My Reading at Essay Fiesta

2011-06-15T14:19:00.000-05:00

So last month I had the privilege of reading at Essay Fiesta, an awesome monthly non-fiction reading series.

I read a very very abridged version of an essay I've been working on about the name Willy. Let me know what you think!

Special thanks to Pat and/or Melyssa for taking the video (not sure which one of you actually recorded it).

Willy's Essay Fiesta Reading - The Book Cellar May 16, 2011 from Willy Nast on Vimeo.

All Signs Point Toward Home

2011-06-11T14:14:00.005-05:00

On my arrival in San Francisco, I held my GPS device to the steering wheel with one hand, thankful that there were satellites in the sky guiding me. The roads there worked in three dimensions: north-south, east-west, and up-down. I put my trust in technology to keep me from getting lost, took a seemingly random series of turns, and miraculously arrived where I was supposed to go.

For the most part, the memories of my two-day visit in San Francisco blurred together like the cryptic directions on my GPS. I blindly went where I was told to go. But two particular experiences stick out, both of which occurred on public transportation. I should preface these stories by saying that I have grown very accustomed to the unwritten laws of riding public transport in a big city, where getting from one place to another is a serious, silent business. But not so in San Francisco.

During my first bus ride, a young couple boarded with three small children. The father fidgeted and checked his watch frequently, as if willing time to slow. When they got off the bus a few stops later, they left one of their children, no older than five, behind. A young woman sat in the seat next to the child, and without hesitation she picked the child up, set her on her hip, and walked her to her parents on the sidewalk below. Neither the young woman, the parents, the child, nor anyone on board the bus seemed to find this unusual in the slightest. I, of course, was completely flabbergasted.

I was waiting for a bus later that evening when a very old woman touched my shoulder and asked if I knew when the next bus was coming. I told her we had just missed one, but the next should be along in about ten minutes. Thirty minutes later we were still waiting. In that time a small crowd had gathered. The bus finally arrived and the doors swung open, and the woman took two very cautious steps forward, in a direction that was not exactly the direction of the door. I reached for her, but before I could touch her, another man came forward and gently took her elbow. The entire crowd seemed to curl around her, not with impatience, but with some collective empathy, as if they could will her safely in the right direction. No one boarded that bus before she did.

Although these experiences left me feeling a warmth and appreciation for San Francisco, they couldn't fully overcome the weariness that had swept through me. Just outside the window of the room where I was staying, there was a diner called "Home," which at the time seemed less of a funny coincidence and more of a mean-spirited joke. On Saturday I took the bus to Golden Gate Park and visited the botanical garden, where there grew plants native to every continent on earth. It was a walking tour of worldwide forestry, but I just wanted to see the redwood trees native to California. When I found a grove of them, I sat on a bench and looked up at their trunks stretching into the air above. When I got off that bench, in my mind, the trip was over. I had spent months thinking about it and thinking about it and dreaming about it, and now it had reached its conclusion. Everything that came after was merely killing time before I returned.

So eager was I to return that, when I flew home on Sunday, I was actually comforted to see the inside of an airplane. In Chicago I got into a taxi and closed my eyes. I opened them some time later and still knew exactly where I was going. On sliding the key into its lock on the door of my apartment, I felt a burst of energy, an adrenaline. Standing in my own kitchen felt like victory. Two hours later I sank into my bed with deep gratitude, and fell asleep.

Now You Can Say Wow

2011-06-06T12:30:00.002-05:00

Alex Trebek narrated the bus ride to Hearst Castle. He wasn't there in person, of course; his pre-recorded voice played through the bus's PA system. And although it seemed fitting to hire the world's foremost expert on trivia to recite tedious factoids about the size of the hill we were climbing, about the number of years it took to build the road (a seven-mile stretch that is jokingly referred to as Hearst's driveway), about the menagerie on the side of the road that once housed polar bears, it also struck me as touch excessive. (I was the only one who laughed when Trebek reminded us to keep our arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times.) Then again, the construction of Hearst Castle, the one-time residence of late newspaper czar William Randolph Hearst, was a 28-year labor of excess.

After passing through the iron gates at the top of the hill, Alex Trebek reminded us to dispose of our chewing gum in the receptacle at the front of the bus and wished us a happy tour. We were then greeted by our in-person guide, a very eager middle-aged woman named Ruth. She led us up the front steps to a large concrete porch that overlooked a beautiful expanse of the California central coast. On the other side of the porch was a palatial kind of structure that looked like it had been plucked straight from some ancient, wealthy city. I assumed, as everyone else did, that this was Hearst Castle. "By the way," Ruth said, "that's the guest house. The smallest one." She then told us the sqaure-footage of the the guest house, and compared it to the square footage of the main castle, which was greater by a factor about about 12. "Now you can say wow," she said. And some did. She used this phrase no less than a dozen times during the tour, as we approached the swimming pool, as we entered the dining hall, as she pointed out a fuzzy mountain peak in the far distance and explained that that was the end of Hearst's property.

Saying wow is what one is supposed to do at Hearst Castle, if not for the structure itself, then for the details, such as the enormous woven tapestries or the hand-carved ceiling panels - all original, authentic pieces that were sold to Hearst at firesale prices from cash-desperate owners in postwar Europe. (After factoring in the price of the some of these pieces, I'm not even sure someone as wealthy as Bill Gates or Warren Buffet could afford to build a replica with similar original artwork.)

In spite of Ruth's less-than-subtle cues, I felt largely unmoved throughout the tour. It reminded me of how I used to feel when I worked in the banks at the Mohegan Sun Casino, where I often counted and bound one-hundred dollar bills until I had a drawer full. I'd look down at the drawer, an ordinary drawer worth several million dollars, and I'd feel completely indifferent. It was just paper, and it belonged to somebody else. Everyone I knew who worked there was completely unimpressed by money or people who had it. Some celebrity would blow $200,000 in a single hour at blackjack and no one seemed to care. We became numb to these things. We found it boring, maybe even a little stupid.

On the return bus trip down the hill, Alex Trebek encouraged us to consider becoming official "Guardians of Hearst Castle," a prestigious title we could acquire for a modest donation.

I got back into my car and headed north a few miles up Highway 1, where there was a rookery for elephant seals. The seals come to the beach for a few months every year, to lay in the sun and shed their skin. From behind my windshield, it appeared as though thousands of fat, dead fish had washed ashore.

As I reached the boardwalk that overlooked the beach, I realized that these animals were much larger than I originally thought, and very much alive. Although most were sleeping, staying perfectly still, sometimes they did move over the sand, bodies expanding and contracting like giant bags of blubber. Occasionally one would flap its flipper in the air, lazily tossing sand over its silver hide. I spotted two way out in the water, playing. One let out the mightiest belch I have to this day heard.

Near the end of the boardwalk, my shoe scuffled against some sand, which alerted one of the seals, the biggest one I had seen, who was no more than 10 feet from me, and she turned her head to look me square in the eye. Her stare was strangely comforting, but also hit me with an intensity that literally forced me to stop mid-stride. Her face was encrusted in sand, which accentuated the deep, wet brown of her perfectly circular eyes.

When she finally looked away I realized I had been holding my breath, and I immediately reached for my camera. I leaned against the rail and tried to get her attention, clicking my tongue and scraping my foot against the boardwalk, hoping she'd look back. But she never did.

I left feeling a little disappointed, a camera full of pictures of a supposedly beautiful place, but lacking an image of the one moment that really meant something to me. I was worried I wouldn't be able to keep the image in my head. But as I drove further up the coast, all I could think about was that seal's eyes. I thought about it that night when I checked into my hotel, and the next morning as I drove further up the coast, stopping to take more pictures. Now, weeks later, it is the one moment that I can still recall with great clarity. And I find it doesn't matter that I don't have the picture; if I did it would likely lose its meaning, like overplaying a song you love until it turns into background noise. I much prefer to think of it, shake my head, and think wow.

Bonus video of the elephant seals (sorry for the noise, windy day):

Elephant Seals in San Simeon, CA from Willy Nast on Vimeo.

Bonus pics of Pismo Beach/Hearst Castle/Elephant Seal Rookery/Ragged Point:

Pismo Beach from above.

Creeping on this random couple.

The guest house.

The pool.

Ruth called this "the front yard."

The main castle.

A huge book in the sitting room. I was told it was a book of Easter songs.

Dining hall.

Indoor pool.

Elephant seals sunning themselves all across this beach.

Sleepy seal.

Two seals playing in the water.

Ragged Point.

Everything You Need and More

2011-05-24T09:00:00.000-05:00

You will see crazy things there, my friend said. I said that that sounded like fun. I would like to see some crazy things. It was late Tuesday morning, and I only had a couple hours to kill before I needed to start driving north towards San Francisco.

If you read the Wikipedia description for Venice Beach, you might think it sounds like the kind of beach/boardwalk area that only exists in '80s movies with bitchin' soundtracks: "Venice Beach includes the beach, the promenade that runs parallel to the beach ('Ocean Front Walk' or just 'the boardwalk'), Muscle Beach, the handball courts, the paddle tennis courts, Skate Dancing plaza, the numerous beach volleyball courts, the bike trail and the businesses." Skate Dancing? Muscle Beach? Someone hand me my funky neon Ocean Pacific shorts, because I am all over this shit like a Flock of Seagulls.

And maybe that's what it was like, once upon a time. But, fast forwarding three decades, I found that description fell woefully short of reality. And how can one describe such a place, where reality is a relative term? Here's a start: Venice Beach is probably the only place on earth where, in a single visit, one could go surfing, get a prescription for medical marijuana, sit down for a tarot card reading, and purchase a hyper-realistic charcoal pencil drawing of Justin Bieber.

But that, too, is inadequate, only summarizing that which one can do and buy at Venice Beach, and not what one can see. What really makes Venice Beach what it is are the street performers. And I use the term "street performers" loosely, for lack of more fitting nomenclature. They aren't so much street performers as they are very unusual people who do and say very unusual things in a public setting.

I hadn't walked 100 feet from where my friend dropped me off when I saw a very muscular dark-skinned man standing atop a stool, wearing only a wide-brimmed hat (presumably to protect him from the sun) and bright yellow banana hammock (also, presumably, to protect him from the sun). He was giving some sort of sermon to passers-by, something about children and war (from what I could gather, he was in favor of children, and opposed to war). In one hand he held a very large and very living snake. In the other hand he held two. He was only the second-strangest person I saw at Venice Beach.

The strangest person snuck up on me unintentionally. I had just ended a call on my cell phone when we nearly bumped into each other. He was wearing a red bath robe over shorts with pink hearts on them. On his head was a pirate mask, but instead of wearing the mask on his face, he wore it like a hat, so it looked like he had a second, limp face coming out the top of his head. Under his arm he carried something large and white, which I mistook for a very large animal bone. "We have everything you need!" he insisted. It was unclear to me what he was selling.

I walked past the man and slipped into a nearby bookstore. I was browsing books on a display, but I couldn't stop myself from peering through the storefront window and observing him; he was still trying to sell whatever-it-was to the people on the boardwalk. I realized that he was not holding a bone at all, but rather the leg of a mannequin. He set the plastic leg on top of a small plastic table, which had wheels on the bottom, and straddled the leg. "Would you like to ride a leg today?" He asked, demonstrating how one could, in fact, go for a ride on the leg.

My friend nodded as I told her about both men, unmoved, as if I were telling her what I ate for lunch the day before. There are people, she explained, who were just made for Venice Beach. "But they're happy," she said, "which might be more than I can say for myself."

The man with the snakes sometimes stopped to wave and say hello to the locals, mostly joggers, who probably came through every day. He looked comfortable, as though he knew he belonged. Even the man hawking leg rides would sometimes turn to a nearby friend and smirk. There is no doubt in my mind that he wanted to be there that day, and no where else, doing no other thing than demonstrating how one might ride the mannequin's leg.

Vacation had brought me to Venice Beach, vacation from a life in which I spend an overwhelming amount of time in my home office, trying to stay concentrated on conference calls, or making sure my bulleted lists are consistently aligned, thinking how I'd like to be anywhere but there, doing anything but that. Who, I ask, is the crazy one? On whom is the joke being played?

Bonus pics from Joshua Tree/L.A.:

Mastadon Peak at Joshua Tree.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

2011-05-20T09:30:00.013-05:00

This is my friend JJ, who I stayed with while I was in Phoenix. JJ is one of those people with whom, due to circumstances beyond our control, such as geography, I have spent very little time, but no matter how far apart we live or how infrequently we see one another, I still count as one of my closest friends. And I have always suspected that this says more about the quality of person that JJ is than it says about me. My most recent trip to see him only confirmed that point-of-view.

Every single place we went, JJ knew someone. Usually multiple people. The waitstaff at the sportsbar where we watched the Bulls game. Two former roommates at a bar in Tempe - one worked a beer tub and the other DJed. Even at the grocery store, where we had gone to pick up ingredients for the dinner his girlfriend made for us. We were waiting at the checkout when JJ turned to the young woman in line behind us and asked if she worked for the cable company. She did, and recalled that she had helped JJ with a question on his bill one time.

And where he didn't know people, he made friends. We stopped in a dive bar in Scottsdale, and he struck up a friendly conversation with a bartender named Carly after she nearly spilled the contents of a colossal mug of beer all over his brand new iPhone. She then demonstrated to us her "latest invention," a "spill-proof smartphone protection apparatus." She placed an empty plastic cup on the bar and set JJ's iPhone inside. We marveled at the simplicity of this device. (Even in the dive bars in Scottsdale, female bartenders like Carly apparently wear tanktops, short shorts, and thigh-high socks, so, when she was out of earshot, I bet JJ that "Carly" was not her real name, and that she probably spelled it with an "I." Upon further conversation, we discovered that her real name was Karlene, and she grew up in Des Moines, Iowa. At the end of the evening she inscribed a copyright symbol and her name on the bottom of the plastic cup. As we walked out of the bar, JJ looked at the bottom of the cup and confirmed that yes, she did spell her pseudonym with an "I." He chuckled and tossed the cup into a dumpster. ANYWAY...) When we hiked up Camelback Mountain, JJ wasted no time in starting casual conversations with the others at the summit, including a middle-aged couple from Canada and a hiker napping on a flat rock.

To an introvert such as myself, I can never help but observe JJ in these situations with a sense of awe. It is never forced or unnatural, and never once does the other party look uncomfortable or unwilling to engage in the conversations that he initiates. He slips into and out of conversations with friends and strangers with the same ease that invertebrate sea animals curl through the water. It is as natural as breathing. It simply doesn't occur to him not to talk to other people.

On my last evening in Phoenix, it was cool, even chilly. There is a hot tub on the property of the apartment complex where JJ lives, and he suggested that, after our hike up the mountain, it would be a good time for a soak. The pool and hot tub area was silent when we arrived, but when we reached the hot tub, I realized that we were not alone. There were two women in the hot tub, probably in their early forties, who were holding a conversation in sign language.

JJ's mother is deaf, so he is fluent in sign language. He quickly got into the tub and introduced himself. I sat with my head just above the surface of the water and watched. It was a bit like watching a play with no words. And I could sense that JJ was equally as natural, equally as charismatic while conversing in sign language as in spoken word, making the women laugh on several occasions. After a while the conversation became quieter, more focused. I could tell they were working something out, focusing, as if putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

After a few more minutes, JJ explained to me that one of the women was visiting from Wisconsin. She lived in Kenosha, which is where JJ was born. And she knew JJ's mother. It was as though the universe were making some kind of joke.

The next morning I set out on my own toward California. I thought about how it could be years before the next time JJ and I see one another, but I did not feel troubled by this. I suppose most people are magnets, polar, pulling a select few people in as they push others away. But some possess a gentler gravity, one that is less discriminating, and we feel privileged to drift in and out of their orbit, even if only for a short while, before floating back out into space.

Bonus pics of Camelback Mountain:

Near the bottom.

A lizard. I saw many there.

Cacti. I saw many there.

Getting close.

Only gangstas hike mountains in Coach sunglasses.


At the top.

And a video from the summit:

Summit of Camelback Mountain from Willy Nast on Vimeo.

Other Pages

2011-05-18T13:20:00.003-05:00

Whenever I am away on one of these Big Corporate Events, I feel like I have been plucked out of the pages of some book, a book whose characters and landscapes are familiar to me, and dropped into the pages of a completely different book. In this other book I play a character similar to myself, but different in some indefinable way. Sometimes I wonder what the characters from the first book would think of me if they saw the me from this second, unusual book. But I have never feared that kind of collision, because these two books will never intersect. They are kept on shelves away from one another, on separate floors of the library.

Which is why, on the second evening of the Big Corporate Event in Dallas, it takes me a moment to register a familiar face. It is game night. There are a dozen different games, one set up at each station. See how long you can keep three balloons in the air. See how many ping pong balls you can bounce into a bucket attached to your teammate's head. Manning one of these stations is someone who looks very much like someone I knew from the other book, my book. And then I realize that she is, in fact, the character I am thinking of from the other book.

She recognizes me as well. We give each other the same look, the look that says, "What are you doing here, in this book?" I tell her where I am going after the Big Corporate Event is over, to Phoenix, to see an old friend of mine. She and this friend were once romantically involved. (Which makes this meeting an ever odder coincidence.) I have not seen either of them since they parted. We talk for a while about that, the parting. She fills in portions of the story that I have not read. It becomes difficult to keep track of which book I am in.

When I get to Phoenix, I tell my friend about this unlikely encounter with his former girlfriend. He and I talk at greater length about their parting. More portions of the story get filled in, sentence by sentence. He also tells me about his new girlfriend and her son. He tells me about how he met her, through his former roommate, who is the father of his girlfriend's son. I tell him this town doesn't sound big enough, and he laughs.

And what can one do but laugh? Our books are not on shelves at all. They lie open in piles on the ground, kicked about by wondering feet. Pages are torn out of certain books and sewn into others, only to be ripped out again. Eventually their spines disintegrate from overuse, and the pages twist about in the wind. No wonder it is so difficult to keep track of who is who. Or who are you.

The First Morning

2011-05-09T11:02:00.003-05:00

Although I had set my alarm for 3:15 a.m., I awoke before it rang. I stood in my undershorts and shivered, blinking at my unmade bed in the dark. The tangle of pillows and blankets was a gray cloud, inviting me to climb back in and drift off. I pressed the palm of my hand into the mattress, then pulled it away, the last comfort I would have from my own bed for two weeks.

It was too early to hold multiple thoughts in my head, so as the shower water poured over my skin very stupid thoughts came to me at uneven intervals. This morning is unlike other mornings. This shower does not feel like my shower. This body does not feel like my own. Whose shower is this? Why am I awake?

The night before, I had ignored the television as I criss-crossed through my apartment, collecting all the things I needed to keep clean and keep clothed for two weeks. When I was finished packing, I picked up the remote with the intent to turn off the TV for the night, but stopped when I saw the words "Breaking News" at the bottom of the screen. I sat on the couch for the next two hours, watching coverage of the death of a terrorist who once masterminded a plan to kill thousands of people using commercial airplanes as missiles.

You may have heard that I do not like to fly. Receiving this news approximately 8 hours before I was scheduled to board a flight to Dallas did not exactly sit well. The taxi arrived and the trunk popped open as I approached. The driver stepped out of the car, an older gentleman with a gray beard a thin black scarf wrapped about his head. He greeted me with a large smile and I said good morning. "It is a very good morning," he said. "A very good morning." I thought, but did not say, that I hoped he was right.

It was still dark when I retrieved my luggage from the trunk of the taxi. My pulse quickened as the stale airport air touched my nostrils. At the security check I watched a middle aged woman hold her elderly mother's hand and lead her toward the metal detector. The old woman touched her head, seemingly overwhelmed by the people, by the crush. A large man in a blue security uniform approached her and spoke in a pre-recorded manner. "Any metal implants. Hips, knees, other joints." Nearby, someone put a pair of crutches through the x-ray machine and I wondered if I would feel safer if I were made of metal.

I traveled down a long corridor on two moving walkways before reaching an escalator. I looked up as I stepped onto the escalator, and saw a sign at the very top of the moving stairs that read "Security Assured." There was something about this sign that put me at ease - bold, yellow letters on a black background made the message seem simple, yet delivered with confidence. For a moment I believed that my security really could be assured by the honest, professional people looking out for me. And then, just as I reached the apex of the escalator, I realized that it was actually an advertisement for anti-virus software.

I arrived at my gate nearly two hours early. Although there were only a few people scattered about, a man wearing sandals and a spray-on tan sat entirely too close to me and attempted to strike up a conversation. He was heading home from Hawaii and began asking me how I thought he should use the $400 travel voucher he got from giving up his seat on his last flight. "Maybe Australia. How much do you think it costs to fly there right now? $1,000?" He had one of those voices that seems normal volume to him but not to anyone else who is at the airport at 5:30 a.m. I opened my laptop and tried to ignore him until a middle-aged man in a business suit with more tact than I sat near us, and the tanned guy took the cue and struck up a conversation with him instead.

An hour later, just before the initial boarding calls began, the tanned man looked up from his phone and said, to everyone and no one, "Oh my gosh! Did you guys know Osama Bin Laden is dead?" It was all I could do to keep myself from reaching over and strangling him with his own Hollister hoodie.

The plane bounced and shifted as we descended through gray clouds into Dallas, where it was colder than Chicago, and where the rain was pouring down hard. There was a curtain against the far wall of my hotel room, and I pulled one side of it back to reveal a floor-to-ceiling window. Through it I could see a parking garage and, behind that, planes taking off from the airport. I tried to pull back the other side of the curtain, but found that it was locked in place. I peeked behind it; a bare wall stood where I had assumed the floor-to-ceiling window would continue. I adjusted my tie in the mirror and stepped out of the room, on my way to a five-day exercise in being not quite what I really am.

Shakespeare Still pwns You

2011-04-24T14:28:00.001-05:00

Yesterday marked William Shakespeare's 447th birthday. On yesterday's episode of Prairie Home Companion (yes, I am 73-years-old and sometimes I listen to Prairie Home Companion on Saturday afternoons), they celebrated by bringing in actors to recite a number of Shakespeare's sonnets.

An actress named Liz Lark Brown read Sonnet 43. I recommend you listen to it by clicking here and fast-forwarding to the 56:25 mark, because it's the most stupidly beautiful piece of writing I've come across in some time.

How is it possible, four centuries later, that Shakespeare is still kicking all of our asses?

Sonnet 43:
When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And darkly bright are bright in dark directed.
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,
How would thy shadow's form form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay!
All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

Rules for Reading to an Audience

2011-03-26T14:47:00.001-05:00

I really enjoy listening to writers read their work out loud. There are a few really great reading series here in Chicago that consistently feature writers who not only have strong, engaging voices on the page, but also have a knack for giving that voice new life through the spoken word. I try to attend at least one reading each month, more if I can.

What I've taken from attending so many readings is this: there are great readers and poor readers, and the gulf between them is vast.

Now, it's true that some are more naturally predisposed for public performance. I do not count myself in this group. In fact, this is why many writers write instead of acting or playing music; we're not comfortable on the stage. But when I find myself fixating on some of the more irritating, cringe-inducing, or downright disrespectful habits of the poorer readers, I always think: this could have been avoided. The question that always comes to my mind is why? Why are they doing what they are doing?

It occurred to me that there are plenty of guidelines for good writing, but no guidelines for giving readings to an audience. So I was inspired to start this list. This will be a running feature of the blog. I'll add to it as I attend more readings. Think of it as a comprehensive list of to-dos and to-don'ts on the skill and etiquette of reading to an audience.

Rules for Reading to An Audience

Read an actual piece of your writing. You're probably thinking, "No shit, Arthur Conan Doyle." And you're right - it's so obvious it should go without saying, but then I attended this reading and realized that no offense is too obvious to omit from this list.
Your introduction/apology/pre-reading spiel should not be longer than the piece you read.
Don't turn the reading into an extended commercial for you.
Adhere to the rules of the event.

Rules 2, 3, and 4 were inspired not only by the same event, but by the same writer. This happened at a regular reading series that features about a half-dozen writers per event. All the readers came up to the microphone when it was their turn, gave a great reading, and then sat down.

Except for one - the writer with an agenda. He came to the microphone and spent no less than three minutes talking about his novel and the publishing company he had started with some friends, and then spent no less than three additional minutes apologizing for the fact he was reading from his novel, which of course was fictional (this reading series features non-fiction) and setting up the story behind this particular scene in the novel. By the time he began to read (for a total run-time of 5 minutes; fine by me, he was easily the least engaging of the evening's readers) he had sucked every last bit of energy and momentum out of the event, and, probably, pissed off the event coordinators and the other people he was reading with. (On top of all that, he offered to give half the proceeds from the sales of his novel that evening to the really awesome charity that this particular reading series benefits, which may seem like a redeeming gesture on his part, but really just made me feel like a dick for not buying his shitty novel.)

Breaking any one of these rules will alienate you to the audience:

The longer your apologia, the faster the audience's attention wanes.
The more shameless your self-promotion, the more guarded the audience will be toward your work. (The best way to promote yourself at a reading? GIVE A GREAT READING. If people think it's good they'll seek it out. It's kind of like buying a car. The salesman can push and push and push, but it all pretty much comes down to the test-drive.)
If you break the guidelines that the event coordinators give you, then they are less likely to invite you back and the other readers will feel resentment towards you. And, heaven help us, certainly enough people feel enough resentment toward us already.

Breaking all these rules together is a disaster so epic it has the power to inspire some codgy bastard to blog about you.

Thoughts On: Richard Yates (by Tao Lin)

2011-02-20T14:10:00.002-06:00

Whenever someone tells me that something they've seen or read or heard is "the worst" thing that they've ever seen or heard or read, I start to get suspicious. To me, it reveals bigger failures about the reader/listener/viewer than the book/album/movie. And the devil's advocate in me wants to like it simply in spite of their dislike, even if I've already seen/heard/read what they're talking about and agree that it's crap.

I recently read the novel Richard Yates by Tao Lin. By the time I finished the first 100 pages, I found myself thinking, "This is the worst book I have ever read." There was no plot, no character arc, not even an apt simile or metaphor or interesting turn of phrase. I got angrier and angrier as I continued to read, and more and more convinced that I was right about this being the worst book I had ever read.

It wasn't until several days after I came to the completely unsatisfying conclusion to Richard Yates (I'm not exaggerating when I say I nearly flung the fucking thing across the room in frustration) that I began to question my reaction to the book. My own devil's advocate started turning against me. Was there something worthwhile in Richard Yates that I missed? Why did I think it was the worst book I'd ever read?

I'll get this out of the way: I'm not going to discuss Tao Lin the person - or more accurately, the persona. In short, he's young, he's weird, and many people love him passionately and others hate him passionately. (Maybe more of the latter.) I'm not interested in writing a tirade against Tao Lin. Those kinds of blog postings are out there.

After thinking it through for a while, I came to the conclusion that the biggest reason I felt so frustrated with Richard Yates was that I felt duped. I'd never read anything by Tao Lin before, so I had no frame of reference on his work before reading Richard Yates. But a few of his books are always laid out on the featured table at my favorite place in the world, and they always caught my attention in a maybe-someday-I'll-read-one sort of way. So one day I picked up Richard Yates, and read the opening pages. The book begins like so:

"I've only had the opportunity to hold a hamster once," said Dakota Fanning on Gmail chat. "Its paws were so tiny. I think I cried a little."

"I saw a hamster eating its babies," said Haley Joel Osment. "I wanted to give it a high-five. But it didn't know what a high-five is."

"I would eat my babies if I had some. I don't have any babies."

So, at that point, I'm thinking, at least this is different. I'd never seen a Gchat conversation used in a book before, and I was curious about the characters names. (As you can probably glean, the book isn't about the real-life Dakota Fanning or Haley Joel Osment. Those are just the names that Lin gives them.)

I flipped the book over and read the back cover, where one question is framed in a yellow highlighted background: "What constitutes illicit sex for a generation with no rules?" Certainly an attention-grabber. When I initially read this, I took it as a promise of the kind of question the book might take a shot at answering. Having finished the book, I now understand it for what it really is - namely, the publisher's cheap attempt at selling a few more copies. This book is not about illicit sex, nor is it even about "a generation," let alone one presumably "with no rules." Sure, it's a little weird that the 22-year-old Haley Joel Osment is having a relationship with the 16-year-old Dakota Fanning. But this is hardly the central question of the book, if there is such a thing as a central question (or any sort of coherent answer) in Richard Yates.

So what is the book about? Well, that opening passage I quoted for you? That is pretty much how the entire novel reads. What at first seems quirky or stylistically unusual eventually reveals itself for what it is - a cheap gimmick. (Not to mention the overall style of the writing, which I suppose some would call minimalist, but I would call lazy. The phrase "a neutral facial expression," as in "He looked at Dakota Fanning with a neutral facial expression," appears about a half-dozen times.) More than half of the novel plays out in pointless gchat conversations. In the remaining portions, they get together and hang out and do boring things and occasionally argue about nothing. And Lin does little to grant any sort of meaning or subtext to the banal, irritating, circular arguments that Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning get into. Here's an excerpt from one of the novel's most insightful moments:

Dakota Fanning left the room holding a towel. "She left without saying anything," thought Haley Joel Osment and lay on her bed and covered his head with a blanket. "If I don't say something about that we'll be less considerate and have lower expectations. If I do say something I'll be less good at accepting disappointments. I want to be more accepting. But I also want to be more considerate." He thought about never complaining. He thought about complaining about everything. Dakota Fanning came in the room. Haley Joel Osment went in the bathroom and removed his clothes and stood naked in the bathtub sunlight. "I just need to feel good all the time," he thought.

If you're thinking of reading Richard Yates, I encourage you instead to think of the most boring, unhappy couple you know. That couple that you never want to invite to a party, not because they'll make a scene, but because they're always stuck in some quiet argument about something really really stupid, and more or less drag down the cosmic energy in every room they enter. Ask that couple if they will let you read their text messages and Gchat conversations for a couple months. Ask them to list every single mundane thing they do for those same two months. You'd get a much clearer insight into the human condition than you would out of any passage of Richard Yates. Not even my own devil's advocate can convince me otherwise.

A Night at the Fights, a Night at the Opera

2011-02-13T11:21:00.002-06:00

In the past month, I have experienced an unusual pair of personal firsts. A few weeks ago, I attended my first live boxing event; a week later, my first opera. (Anyone who knows me will tell you at which event I felt more at-home.) At the surface, there seems little common ground between the oldest, most primal sport, and what some would argue is the highest form of art. But after attending both events, I couldn't help but draw parallels between them.

Prior to the first bout at Windy City Fight Night - UIC Pavilion, January 28th, 2011

At both events, my attention was immediately transfixed by the attire of the crowd. At the opera, this was not much of a surprise - many are there in order to be seen just as much as they are there to see the opera. Even on one of the coldest, most blustery days of January, the opera veterans were perfectly pressed and manicured, their hair gelled or pinned just so. Some managed to get away with something edgier (including a man in a fur coat and a mullet hair cut who stood in front of me in line for the bathroom during intermission), but in a way that was still somehow befitting of the opera. Whether traditional or edgy, the name of the game was style. It left me reflexively smoothing out the lumps in my argyle sweater-vest for the better part of the evening.

But I was just as struck by the style of the fans at the fight. Collectively, they were easily the best-dressed group of people I had ever seen at a sporting event. These were not the same sweaty, aging frat boys that one would find at Wrigley Field on a summer afternoon. Nor were they, as some might presume, the kind of people that seek out the comforts of windowless bars at 2pm on a Tuesday. To my great surprise, I actually felt more under-dressed at the fights than I did at the opera. Maybe under-dressed isn't the right term. Maybe I simply felt out-cooled. The patrons of the boxing event all seemed to have tapped into a hip, urban sense of fashion that I've apparently been missing. It occurred to me then that this, too, was an event that people attended because it somehow improved their personal credibility. It even feels cool to tell people later - what did I do this weekend? I went to the opera. I went to the fights.

But certainly there is more to it than feeling cool. There are a hundred other things one can do to make himself feel cool. What brought us all to the fights to begin with? What brought us all to the opera? I would suspect there are few casual fans of opera, just as there are few casual fans of boxing. One does not simply buy a ticket to an opera or a boxing event on the same whim that one would buy a ticket for a baseball game or a rock concert. One does not simply do these things to be cool.

For both boxing and opera, there is historical greatness, and to love the opera or to love boxing is not only to try to keep close to that greatness, but also to keep the greatness alive. And those who keep it alive are a small, passionate bunch. I very much doubt the mainstream is lining up to hear music sung in a language other than their own, in a mode that isn't exactly easy to hum along to. There are Broadway musicals, there is cinema - there is even TV. The opera is outmoded. But simply to let it die would mean to let greatness die. To let Mozart and Wagner and Bellini die.

Some, too, say that boxing is dead, and although I disagree with that bit of hyperbole, I will concede that never again will a fight mean so much to so many as the fights between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling. Or even Hagler and Hearns. Or even Tyson and Holyfield. In both cases, there is a longing for what once was. Whether you're a fan of opera or boxing or both, you're hanging on to an old greatness. You're hanging on to something that isn't as great as it once was.

Joe Louis knocks out Max Schmeling on June 28th, 1938.

Nonetheless, it is unfathomable in the mind of either fan how people cannot love it the same way that they do. I must admit that the opera I attended, at times, seemed more than a bit silly to me. The plot unfolded about as gracefully as a Saturday morning cartoon. During a pivotal scene, the soprano mourns over the unconscious body of the man she had recently fallen in love with. "He is the first man I have ever kissed," she moans. "He cannot die." I'm sure some of the poetry is lost in the translation, but I couldn't help from remarking to a friend during intermission, "They aren't exactly subtle, are they?"

But the opera-goers did not come for subtleties. They have come to experience emotions laid raw and basic as the scrawlings in an adolescent girl's diary. When those emotions are coupled with extravagant set pieces, a professional orchestra, and the sheer talent of the performers, it becomes something undeniably beautiful. Opera fans cherish the opera because it serves as an opportunity to revel in the basic things, the primal things - maybe even the immature things - that we are not otherwise allowed. And where else can something so base turn into something so breathtaking?

The basic, the raw, the unsubtle - certainly these drive many fans to the fights. It is why some whistle at the bikini-clad women who walk the ring between rounds, it is why they straighten in their seats for a better look at the sight of trickling blood. And certainly all this seems very silly to outsiders. These things in themselves may not be beautiful, but they are part of an experience that somehow, like the opera, becomes beautiful in spite of itself. The night I went to the fights, an undefeated fighter nearly suffered his first loss in round 4, when his opponent sent him to the canvas with a short, straight right hand. He staggered through the rest of the round, hanging on just long enough to make the bell. In the next round he rallied, knocking his opponent out. An energy had been running through the crowd throughout the course of the fight, and at the moment that the fight was over, the crowd rose to its feet in uninhibited applause. This was not merely "cheering." This was the type of adulation that is inspired by something greater than athletic achievement, by something extraordinary and beautiful.

I heard the echo of this energy a week later at the end of the opera, when the people in the crowd shouted "Bravo!" and applauded with an enthusiasm that betrayed the stuffy aura they had cloaked themselves in, exposing their designer suits and fur coats to be just as much a costume as anything the performers were wearing. There was a desperate gratitude at the core of their applause, as if the performers had given them something more than music. The players took their bows, and it wasn't difficult for me to picture the victorious fighter standing on stage in their place, sweaty, bloody, his trembling arms raised in a V above his head.

Sober October

2010-10-03T17:56:00.001-05:00

The final months of summer have treated me pretty well. The days have been beautiful and the weekends have been full. In August and September alone, I have: driven deep into the untamed wilds of Wisconsin (twice) for family weddings; bid lengthy, photobooth-heavy farewells to two friends who have been lifted from this city on the whimsies of the gods who oversee better-paying job offers and fellowship grants; pulled an exhausting but memorable Cubs-afternoon-game/Bears-night-game doubleheader (and all for free!); and attended my first ever Northwestern tailgate and football game.

Looking ahead, November and December refuse to be outdone, adding an impressive undercard schedule to the typical main event of holiday shenanigans. In mid-November, I'm getting paid to spend 5 days at a resort in Boca Raton. (There will be some work in there, I think.) At the end of the end of that resort stay, I jump back into reality with both feet by driving an hour south to Miami, going to the Thursday night Bears-Dolphins game, and spending the remainder of the weekend exploring the city that Will Smith made famous with my brother. (Word is he has the Kardashians on speed-dial.) I also have a $400 travel voucher on Frontier Airlines burning a hole in my travelin' shoes. To top it off, I have another reading at the Book Cellar lined up.

That leaves October, the attention-deprived middle child of the final festive months of 2010. How will I celebrate October? Well, basically by not celebrating. No beer this month. No alcoholic beverages of any kind. It will be a Sober October.

Age-Progression Technology: What Willy may look like by November 1st, 2010.

Of course, those who know me know that I'm not a heavy drinker by any means, not even when I'm at a ball game or a wedding, not even when I am making a point to drink. So, this month of sobriety is about more than drinking. It's about the lazy weekends and parties and various social obligations that go hand-in-hand with drinking. It's about what drinking doesn't go hand-in-hand with: personal discipline and enough alone time to sit down and scribble some words on a page.

Don't get me wrong - I wouldn't trade the good times I've had over the last two months for anything. But something happened two weekends ago, during family wedding weekend #2, right around the time the waitress at the Green Bay sports bar brought me my second pint of Guiness and a giant "appetizer" basket that included onion rings, fried cheese curds, mozzarella sticks, chicken tenders, and french fries. That something was a reality check: summer was over. I hadn't made anywhere near the progress on my project that I planned at the beginning of the season. I picked at my appetizer basket, the savory juices inside every onion ring spoiled by the aftertaste of regret.

Alright, it wasn't nearly so emo. The onion rings were actually pretty good. But the point is that there are two possible paths. Path 1: I keep moving in the same direction, reach the end of 2010, look back at my writing and wonder how the hell I wasted the entire second half of the year. Path 2: I re-dedicate myself for a strong finish to the year, and get some momentum going into the winter months, which personal history shows is my most productive writing time.

I am willing to sacrifice a few foamy steins of Hefeweizen to get moving along Path 2. In the meantime, have a cold one on me.

The Day I Did Not Die

2010-07-26T21:24:00.002-05:00

I got the idea to write this entry soon after a short, middle-aged man in a sleeveless shirt with an American flag across the chest said to me: "You're not nearly as cute as Marvin." But that's not where this entry starts.

This entry starts in Washington D.C., as I pointed my camera phone between the posts of an iron fence and snapped a picture of the White House. It was my first visit to our nation's capital, and it would be a short visit, less than 24 hours in all. I was there alone, "on business" as they say, helping train a group of consultants - many of whom were a decade older than myself - on better ways to build "mutually beneficial" relaitonships. With all that behind me, I had a one-hour window in which to act like a tourist before I had to return to the airport and catch my flight to Chicago. I walked a few blocks from the obnoxiously trendy hotel where I had spent the night to Pennsylvania Avenue, where I stopped in front of the White House and took the picture.

I looked at my phone's low-resolution projection of the White House, then back at the White House itself. The July sun cooked me inside my black dress pants and dark dress shirt, but I stood looking at the White House for a long time anyway. I could not decide what I thought of it. Was it a sight worth taking a picture of? There are certainly bigger, more majestic houses out there. But others around me seemed to think it was worthwhile. A female chaperone with fanny pack hanging off her pelvis took a picture of 30 boy scouts standing in front of the fence. A group of about twenty African-American teenagers took turns taking pictures of each other in pairs. Others stood in pockets, in the road, on the other side of the street, from as many angles as possible, taking picutres.

What did the White House mean to them? For the boy scouts it may have represented something in the scout code about honor or patriotism. For those black teenagers it probably meant something entirely different than it did three years earlier. For a native midwesterner like me, the White House has always been more concept than place. And by concept, I mean concept unto itself. I talk about "The White House" in the same way that I talk about "outer space." I wasn't so much inspired or humbled or awed by the White House as I was simply surprised that it was actually there at all.

On the other side of the street, facing the White House, a man with a long gray beard stood between two large wooden, yellow signs. One sign was plastered with images of deformed babies and statistics about how depleted uranium had done this to the children of Desert Storm veterans. The man with the beard was speaking to a handful of tourists, explaining that he and a friend had kept this vigil going for over 25 years. He had three red white and blue crucifixes tattooed on his forehead. Looking at them felt like reading his mind.

Standing in front of the vigil, I turned to face the White House again. From this distance, I could see several men standing on the roof, each with his own tripod. At first I assumed these men were also taking pictures, until one of them turned to the side, revealing the barrel of a long thin rifle.

I couldn't help but imagine myself hopping the iron fence. How long it would take for the snipers to take me out? Would I make it to the front steps? The fountain on the lawn? Would I be dead before my feet landed in the grass? The only thing I knew for certain is that I would make the news. I would be spoken of conceptually except by the people that knew me (and, probably, by most of the people that did know me). I decided it was too hot to hop the fence and found a cab instead.

I should explain that I hate to fly. I do not like the idea of being stuck in a giant metal cylander six miles above the earth without any control. At any given moment on any flight I take, I am roughly 55% certain I will not make it to the ground alive. But this time I was comforted by the fact that it only takes 90 minutes to fly from D.C. to Chicago. My flight would leave D.C. at 8, arrive in Chicago before 9 local time, and I'd be walking Elmo before the 10 o'clock news wrapped up.

But that's not how it happened. They loaded us onto the plane a half-hour late, then unloaded us a half-hour later because of bad weather in Chicago. I became 60% certain I wouldn't reach the ground alive. I bought a 9-dollar airport beer. We departed a little before 10, and the captain explained that we would have to take a wider route to avoid the storms, which would double the time of our flight. I became 70% certain that I would not make it to the ground alive. We landed safely. In St. Louis. Where we would have to stay the night. I was 90% certain I would die on the 45-minute flight to Chicago the following morning.

This was also my first visit to St. Louis. It was nearly 1am. After spending a few minutes weighing the pros and cons of finding a hotel room for a few hours of sleep or simply stretching out on the terminal floor, I received a flash of inspiration - my old roommate lived in Edwardsville, Illinois. Which, I was pretty sure, was close to St. Louis. I called her and she came to pick me up.

By that time I was walking in a half-daze from exhaustion. I had gotten only a few short hours of sleep the night before in the obnoxiously trendy hotel, and the world was turning into a half-dream where strange things happen like my old roommate picking me up from the airport in St. Louis. She drove us to a bar in Edwardsville called Dwight's Village Inn, a glorified shack on a county highway. Motorcylces and pick up trucks kicked up the dust of the gravel parking lot. I was still wearing my dress pants and shirt, which I could not help but feel deliriously ashamed of. It was like those dreams where you go to school or work and suddenly realize you're naked. Opposite, but the same feeling.

"Am I going to get my ass kicked?" I asked my old roommate. No, she insisted. But by the way, I often get hit on by strange men here, so I might have to tell a few people that you are my boyfriend. I was 99% certain I would not get back to Chicago alive.

We walked in through the back door. There were two signs on the door, one that prohibited the wearing of "bike gang colors," and the other that prohibited fighting, which carried the punishment of lifetime banishment from Dwight's Village Inn. As far as I could tell, there were no systems in place to enforce these policies. Several sets of eyes looked me up and down immediately upon entering. As an offering of peace, I untucked my shirt.

We met my old roommate's new roommate, a girl I went to high school with, at one of several long plastic tables set up in the bar. The three of us walked to the jukebox, slid a few dollars in the slot, and took turns picking songs. When it was my turn, I almost chose Michael Jackson's Billie Jean, but stopped myself at the last moment, wondering if that would be a damnable offense.

And that's when Marvin walked in. He was short and stout. His head was shaved and he wore jean shorts spotted by patches of dried mud. In the corner of my eye I saw him look my old roommate up and down, amble over, his equally short friend in tow, and ask her if she was here with anyone tonight. Yes, with him, she said, gesturing in my direction. I pretended to be occupied with choosing the next song on the juke box. Marvin walked away, but his friend lingered near. In my peripheral vision, the American flag on his sleeveless t-shirt fluttered in some pretend breeze. He got closer to my ear, almost on his tiptoes, and said just loud enough, "You're not nearly as cute as Marvin." He didn't sound menacing exactly. Just certain.

He stood there for a minute. I thought of saying something. But the only words that went through my mind were "I saw the White House today," and I decided not to say them. Then he walked away.

We ordered beer and headed outside so that my old roommate could smoke a cigarrette and repeated this process several times. We talked to a man outside named Tim. Tim was in a wheelchair. He had a very firm handshake. He was drinking with his friend, Chris. Chris had tied a blue bandana around his head, his oily brown curls sticking out the top. He wore an old green button-up shirt that appeared to be military-issued. He reminded me of what you think of when you think of a Vietnam Vet with severe PTSD, except he was too young to be a Vietnam Vet. My old roommate asked him if he was driving home, as he appeared very, very drunk. He laughed and said Tim was his DD. Tim smiled and held aloft a mostly-empty can of Budweiser. He's drunk, too, my old roommate said.

So what? said Tim. It's not like they can make me walk the line. Wheelchair humor.

My old roommate's new roommate asked if my old roommate would drive behind her because one of her blinkers wasn't working and she didn't want to get pulled over for that. My old rommate responded that was perfect because one of her headlights was going in and out. I wanted to say "Now that's what I call a mutually beneficial relationship," but I didn't because no one else would get it, and also because another unsettling feeling rolls through my gut: that these are narrow rural roads and everyone in this bar has been drinking and will soon drive home and all it takes is one all it takes is one is one.

I was hit by a drunk driver once, and it happened at night in a rural area. I was mostly unhurt, but it could have been worse, if the angle had been just a bit skewed. That could have been the day I died. It wasn't, but it could have been. At any rate I did not sleep for several days. On the way to my old roommate's house I looked left and right at every dark intersection, and followed the projection of every pair of headlights that approached us. My mind said over and over I do not want to die on these dark roads anymore than I want to die in Dwight's Village Inn anymore than I want to die in a plane crash anymore than I want to die on the front lawn of the White House. We pulled into her driveway and she showed me the extra bedroom and I fell asleep almost instantly, satisfied that that day would not be the day I died.

Barely three hours later my old roommate woke me up and drove me to the airport. My flight was still delayed but it finally took off and it was a very short and very bumpy flight but we landed. In Chicago this time. I took the El and then the bus home and walked Elmo around the neighborhood. They said there had been flooding but I didn't see any puddles. Later that night I went to see a movie about a dream within a dream within a dream and just before I fell asleep I looked at the picture of the White House on my phone. The picture was small and blurry and I decided to delete it because you could hardly tell what it was. The next day was Sunday as if nothing ever happened.

Thoughts On: Publish This Book

2010-07-18T17:10:00.001-05:00

(Full disclosure: I know Stephen personally. We're members of the same writer's group. Stephen joined the group around the time he began writing Publish This Book, and I joined last fall, sometime after the book was finished and on it's way through the publisher.)

It's difficult to explain just what Stephen Markley's book Publish This Book is about, so I'll let the author himself do the work. Here's an excerpt from Chapter 1:

Let me try to explain the gist of it: there is no book. This is the book. The book I'm writing right now: that's the book. The entire aim of the book will be to publish the very book where I explain how I published the book.

If I were to trace the plotline of PTB, it would look something like this: Stephen gets the idea to write this book, he joins writer's groups and runs the first chapters through workshops, he sends book proposals to agents, he gets a full-time entry-level writing job writing blog entries for an automobile website and also regular freelance work writing features for the RedEye, he gets interest from and ultimately lands an agent, he receives criticism from two of his college writing professors as well as the other writers in his groups, there are some digressions along the way about his ex-girlfriend and a close friend who is dealing with an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy as well as his time as a sex columnist for his college paper and a extensive road trip he took after graduating. There are a LOT of jokes about penises and various bodily fluids and George Bush being stupid. Then the book gets published.

After listening to that synopsis, you're probably thinking one of two things: a) huh, that sounds like an interesting concept, it would be fun to see him pull that off, or b) that has to be the most self-indulgent fucking idea I have ever heard. In either case, you're right. Stephen says so himself at the end of the first chapter: "This book is an awful idea. It's senseless, it's pointless, it's so profoundly self-indulgent you can barely wrap your head around it, and every time you do, you just want to grab me by the shoulders and shake shake shake me."

But it's not an awful idea, and neither is the book awful. You see, this is a trick that Stephen pulls throughout PTB (and in a lot of his other writing as well). He wants you to think that what he's writing is stupid, pointless, and interested only in pleasing your basest desires - the literary version of a joke you wouldn't tell your mother. And just when he's lulled you into this comfortable space, this we're-all-just-here-for-some-dick-jokes space, he blindsides you. A chapter about high school basketball and a "raging, overzealous, red-faced, short-tempered, two-faced head coach" turns into poignant commentary on why we follow any dream - from basketball to writing to modeling clay. A chapter about a few snarky articles he wrote for the student newspaper and how they rattled the university's right-wingers suddenly turns into an account of our collective indifference that is so frustrating it will make you want to walk up to strangers and slap them. The book's penultimate chapter, appropriately titled "Why We Write," starts with a funny, seemingly harmless anecdote about the time one of his best friends met NBA Hall-of-Famer Larry Bird. The chapters ends - well, without giving too much away, let's just say if it doesn't move you, you're a cold-hearted bastard.

In certain ways, this approach gets Stephen into a lot of trouble. Readers with less patience will undoubtedly be turned off by the crude humor that's always sitting up-front. Kinder critics would compare Stephen's style to Dave Eggers or Chuck Klosterman, but many would also throw him on the same heap as Tucker Max. This is a comparison which irritates the living piss out of Stephen. When asked about Max at one of his recent readings, Stephen referred to him as something to the effect of "the stupidest fucking person in human history."

And that comparison should irritate Stephen, because there is a critical difference between the two: when you're reading Max, there is nothing beyond the words on the page. He is a teller of jokes for an audience with a very particular (not to mention limited) sense of humor. On the other hand, Stephen is a storyteller, and a flat-out good one at that. Whether or not you're a fan of his style, or whether you are intrigued or irritated by the overall concept of PTB, what you can't deny is Stephen's ability to craft a good story. PTB is essentially a character-driven book. Of course, Stephen himself is at the center, but a fully-fleshed-out ensemble cast plays alongside him. Combine those characters with Stephen's keen sense of knowing-when-to-drop-the-hammer-on-you, and what you have is a great story.

In the early chapters, Stephen explains that he's really just a fiction writer. He never intended to get into this non-fiction racket. He just wanted to tell good stories. If that is his metric for success, then PTB is a successful book.

Thoughts On: The Executioner's Song - Part 1

2010-01-03T19:18:00.001-06:00

(A few months ago now) I finally got around to finishing Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, an epic non-fiction book about the crime, trial, and execution of Gary Gilmore. Gilmore was executed in 1977 in the state of Utah, the first man to be executed in the US after a several-year moratorium on the death penalty.

Because this book is so long and there are many things I want to talk about, I've decided to divide these blog entries into two parts. This first part will consist, more or less, of my personal book review of TES. The second part of this entry will deal specifically with how I read this book as a non-fiction writer. The second half of the book deals with the media frenzy that begins with Gilmore's death sentence, and from there, the mad scramble of several writers, journalists, and movie producers vying to win the exclusive rights to Gary Gilmore's life story. In addition to a number of ethical and legal dilemmas that emerge from said scramble, a number of situations regarding the dilemmas specific to writing non-fiction also emerge.

But we begin with my stupid little book review.

The single most impressive aspect of TES is, of course, the sheer hugeness of it. Just to hold the book in your hands and think about reading it is intimidating - it's heavy, it's wide, and the font is small.

And the book isn't just physically enormous - it also contains a cast of characters that gives the Old Testament a run for its money. To accommodate so many characters, the story is told in a roaming third-person. And when I say roaming, I mean roaming.

It would take me several days just to go through TES and list all the different third-person perspectives from which Mailer writes. Right off the top of my head, I can think of Gary; his girlfriend Nicole; relatives Brenda, April, Vern, and Ida; mother Bessie; victims Benny Bushnell and Max Jensen; their wives; Gilmore's first defense lawyers; and the prosecuting attorneys - and that only covers about a third of the characters in the first half of the book.

At the end of my copy of the book, Mailer writes a brief (and I use the term "brief" loosely here) notes section in which he names over 100 people with whom he conducted interviews. Those countless hours of interviews - in addition to the thousands of pages of letters that Gary and Nicole wrote to each other, in addition to what must have been a small library's worth of legal documents, notes, and memos - served as the background material from which Mailer wrote the 1050 pages of TES.

I'll put that into perspective using an example from my own life. To write my thesis, I compiled 15 total hours of interviews with about a half-dozen people and collected a pile of perhaps 20 newspaper articles. I felt overwhelmed by that amount of background material. It took me nine months to carve that material into 50 pages of meaningful, coherent prose. When I think of tackling a project the size of TES, I feel the way a go-kart racer must feel at the thought of piloting a rocketship to the moon. It's simply way beyond the bounds of my capabilities.

But hugeness doesn't necessarily mean good. So, is it good?

As those of you who know me personally are probably aware, my favorite book of all-time is Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, which, like TES, also deals with the inner workings of cold-blooded killers, their crime, their ensuing arrests, trial, and executions. Even though the respective styles of Norman Mailer and Truman Capote are vastly different, I couldn't help but almost constantly compare these two books in my head while reading TES.

This lead me to have some difficulty in enjoying TES. As a reader, on a sentence-level basis, Capote is simply much, much more pleasurable to read than Mailer. Consider the following excerpt from In Cold Blood:

But the big question, and the source of heartache, was what to do with his much-loved memorabilia - the two huge boxes heavy with books and maps, yellowing letters, song lyrics, poems, and unusual souvenirs (suspenders and a belt fabricated from the skins of Nevada rattlers he himself had slain; an erotic netsuke bought in Kyoto; a petrified dwarf tree, also from Japan; the foot of an Alaskan bear). Probably the best solution - at least, the best Perry could devise - was to leave the stuff with "Jesus." The "Jesus" he had in mind tended bar in a cafe across the street from the hotel, and was, Perry thought, muy simpatico, definitely someone he could trust to return the boxes on demand. (He intended to send for them as soon as he had a "fixed address.")

I think this particular quotation displays what's really great about In Cold Blood. Even though this is a somewhat random paragraph from the 125th page of the book, I feel confident quoting it without giving you any background information. You don't need my commentary to understand the character's current dilemma (what to do with a cumbersome, but meaningful box of personal belongings); you don't need me to explain the type of person that this character is (he has traveled to Japan and Alaska, and has the aptitude to slay rattlesnakes); and you don't need me to tell you what he ultimately decides to do with the box.

Now consider a similar excerpt from TES. A lawyer named Amsterdam is making calls to Gary Gilmore's mother and youngest brother:

He had been, he said, considerably affected by that conversation. Bessie Gilmore (Gary's mother) had impressed him as a person of great strength who was in great pain. One had to respect the spiritual and psychic stress of this ungodly situation. He told Mikal that he believed his mother would welcome a little help, but was not yet certain she wanted to assert herself in Gary's case. So she had asked him to discuss it with her youngest son.

Mikal (Gary's brother) knew this disposition was accurate, since Bessie had told him much the same, although with some suspiciousness of strangers calling. In turn, Mikal spoke to Amsterdam of his concern that people interested in abolishing capital punishment might not care about Gary so much as they were looking for an ideological ax to grind.

Guh. If you can explain to me, on first read, just what is going on in these paragraphs, I applaud you. The pages of TES are filled with paragraphs like these, especially the second half, which gives very intricate details regarding the legal maneuvers of the both the people trying to condemn Gary and those trying to save him. Lawyer A makes a phone call to Lawyer B, which leads him to make a meeting with Attorney General C, and together they write Legal Document X to take before Judge Y in Circuit Court Z.

Of course, comparing the two styles of prose is unfair, if for no other reason than, at just over 1,000 pages, TES is nearly three times as long as In Cold Blood. Not only that, but it took Capote almost 8 years to write In Cold Blood, whereas Mailer wrote TES in less than three. I shouldn't expect the same attention to sentence-level writing in TES. So how else can I judge the overall quality of TES?

A friend once argued to me that it isn't the prose that makes In Cold Blood so good. What makes it good is the fact that, right from the opening scene, Capote tells us exactly how the story ends - the Clutter family and (eventually) their two killers all die. Still, we are compelled to read the book from beginning to end. Why? My friend argued that Capote makes us want to know exactly what it was like at the moment of the killing of the Clutter family. Those are the details he withholds from us. The anticipation of that brutal moment is what makes us keep reading (which is rather disturbing to think about).

Mailer wrote TES using a very similar narrative arc. The book was released in 1979, just two years after Gilmore was executed. Gilmore's trial and execution had been major national and international news. Anybody who read TES in 1979 or 1980 already knew the outcome - so why read it?

Consider: TES is split into two halves. The first half begins nine months before Gilmore's execution, when he is released from prison in Marion, Illinois, and goes to live with relatives in Utah. This first half ends after he commits two murders and is sentenced to die. The second half begins just after the sentencing and ends soon after Gary is executed. TES is a great book because Mailer manages to pull off what Capote pulled off, twice.

The first half of TES begins with optimism, as Gary's relatives invite him into their lives. All along, we know their optimism is futile. We know that the disaster will come, and all through those first 500 pages, all we want to know is what the moment is like when Gary goes too far. What makes Mailer's work so spectacular is that when the moment finally arrives, when Gary kills his two victims, it is actually surprising, even though we can see it coming from 500 pages away.

The second half plays out similarly. Gary's legal situation goes back and forth as various groups fight to commute his death sentence while others fight to push it through. When Gary is finally executed, as a reader, I could hardly believe it, even though I knew it would happen all along. And, as horrible as it sounds to say it, the most masterful scene in the whole book - what I'd say is easily the book's "best" moment - is the moment when Gary is finally executed, simply because, as a reader, I could not believe he was dead. We know it's going to happen and it's going to happen and it's going to happen and then it does, and again, it's almost impossible to believe.

So, is it good? Yes, and more. That being said, is this a book for everybody? Absolutely not. In fact, as highly as I think of it, I doubt that I'll ever read it again. On the other hand, I know that I will read In Cold Blood multiple times within the next decade. TES is simply too much work. But I will always be humbled by Mailer's ability to so completely surprise me, twice, by revealing information I already knew.

I Got Published: The Long Room

2009-12-03T13:54:00.000-06:00

Just got a short piece of CNF published at 10,000 Tons of Black Ink. My first "real" publishing credit.

Go here to read it: The Long Room

Holiday Giftbag: 5 Free Writing Tools

2009-11-29T15:55:00.001-06:00

Just in time for the holidays: I decided to make a list of writing programs, tools, and resources that every writer should have.

The best part? Everything on this list is absolutely free. Go ahead. Give and give and give to yourself.

Let's get the good cheer a-rollin'.

1) WriteRoom/Dark Room - Distraction-Free Word Processing

**Update** It has come to my attention that WriteRoom is not free. Mac users can use a free, Java-based program called JDarkRoom instead (there is also Windows version available). Go here to download: http://www.codealchemists.com/jdarkroom/

As word-processing software, WriteRoom (the original, for Mac) and Dark Room (the copycat, for Windows) are pretty worthless. You can't add tables or charts, you can't add a bulleted list, you can't even put the font in bold or italics. The only tasks you can perform in WriteRoom/Dark Room are opening, writing, and saving.

Which is exactly what makes it a perfect tool for creative writing.

What's so special about a word processing program that's so unspecial? If you're anything like me, you spend a lot of your writing time sending emails, G-chatting, and being a creepy Facebook stalker. These programs take all those distractions away. The blank black interface fills the entire screen, even taking away the program toolbar at the top of the screen and the Start Menu toolbar at the bottom of the screen. There's no clock, no minimize button, nothing calling for your attention except your own words.

I've recently become totally dependent on this program. After using it for a little over two weeks, I find it impossible to do any kind of creative writing in Microsoft Word. There's just something mesmerizing about the black screen combined with the 80s-glowy-green font. Not only is this color scheme figuratively easier on the eyes, but literally easier on the eyes as well. If you have no other reason to download this program, the reduction on eye strain is a good selling point.

Dark Room for Windows: http://they.misled.us/dark-room

WriteRoom for Mac: http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom

Special thanks to this lady for sharing these programs with me (and subsequently inspiring the idea for this post). I think she said it best: "Basically, what I'm saying is that I'd like to move my whole life to WriteRoom. Distraction-free living sounds delightful."

2) Visuwords Online Graphical Dictionary

I had a writing teacher in college who encouraged her students to keep a journal in which, once every day, they would record a new word from the dictionary. It was one of those projects that I took on with diligence but abandoned a week later (sorry, Prof. Kinzie). Finding a new, exciting word in a dictionary is actually rather time-consuming. And kind of boring.

Visuwords is a pretty sweet little dictionary/thesaurus hybrid that makes instant word maps. Or as the Visuwords website says, you type in a word, and it produces "diagrams reminiscent of a neural net." Neural net, word map, whatever. It's a nice alternative to the OED. (Which can be pretty bad-ass in its own right. Just not as pretty.)

The only catch: It works much better with shorter words.

Linky: http://www.visuwords.com/

3) WordCounter - Word-Frequency Tracker

Simple but useful little tool that allows you to check which words you use most frequently (and too frequently). Just copy and paste the body of whatever piece of writing you're working on, and it will quickly rank the 25 to the 200 most-used words (grouping variations together - i.e., "run" and running," etc.).

Link: http://www.wordcounter.com/

4) The Character Building Workshop

I'm not totally sold on the idea of the idea of "building" a character by answering a bunch of form questions such as "Does your character find it difficult or easy to schmooze?" or "Would your character enjoy or detest being stranded on a desert island?" Those are just 2 of the 260 questions (spread across three "Character Tests") at The Character Building Workshop.

On the other hand, I am sold on the idea of considering archetypes when building characters, which is the end-result of answering all those mindless questions. In addition to 16 possible character archetype descriptions, The Character Building Workshop provides a "Compatible Personality Disorder" for each archetype, just in case you want to add a little neurosis to your story.

If nothing else, it's worth a shot the next time you're having trouble defining a character. And in my opinion, this tool is not only for writers of fiction. The next time you're having trouble getting to the core of a real-life character in a work of creative non-fiction, give this tool a whirl and maybe you'll see him/her in a new light.

Link: http://www.writeronline.com/character/index01.htm

5) Writing Prompts for the Left-Brain, Writing Prompts for the Right-Brain

The previous four tools are all great for different stages of an in-progress piece of writing. This last tool is designed to help you get started.

What I like most about WritingFix.com's writing prompts is the fact that they acknowledge that different types of prompts are better suited to different types of writers - namely, right-brained and left-brained types.

The Right-Brain prompts are mostly based on wordplay, such as alliteration exercises, and prompts that force writers to start with a sentence that begins with a certain term or phrase. The Left-Brain prompts are more conceptual, such as prompts that encourage writers to write in a certain voice - for example, one prompt asks students to write a recipe for an emotion, another prompt asks students to write an "unlikely" dictionary entry about a person or thing from their personal life.

Left-Brain: http://writingfix.com/left_brain.htm

Right-Brain: http://writingfix.com/right_brain.htm

Do you use any fun/interesting/bizarre writing tools?

The Wonder Years: Great Short Story Writing

2009-09-29T15:28:00.000-05:00

Over the weekend I went to see a friend perform at a local Chicago theater called "The Cornservatory," a very small theater (seats a maximum of about 40) that specializes in off-the-wall comedy. It's also BYOB: The last time I was there, I brought with me a bonafide cuisine of Pabst Blue Ribbon and Snickers. This time I opted for a sixer of Rolling Rock, skipping the candy bar.

Anyway, the show I saw was called "TV Reruns." The concept was simple: Five actors read scripts from actual episodes of campy (mostly 80s) TV shows like Alf, Small Wonder, and Murder, She Wrote, donning various wigs to play multiple roles. An off-stage narrator read the setting at the beginning of each scene (i.e. "in so-and-so's kitchen"), and the actors remained mostly stationary, aside from a few moments where they engaged in over-the-top physical tomfoolery to highlight each script's sublter moments.

A not-too-surprising truth was revealed to me as I listened to the actors read: television writing (especially in the 80s) is just awful. It's formulaic, predictable, and schmaltzy. That, of course, is why a comedic theater troupe decided to put on this show: the unintentional funny is everywhere. "TV Reruns" was engaging and entertaining for the simple fact that watching each reading was like witnessing a literary disaster unfold right before your eyes.

The first reading of the evening came from Doogie Howser, M.D., a show about a whiz kid who became a medical doctor (starring Neil Patrick Harris as Doogie). In the episode, Doogie is assigned by the hospital board to teach a high school sex education course, where he gets in a fight with the school jock (named "Swifty"). Of course, Doogie's mother is horrified when her son comes home with a black eye, while his father takes an unperturbed boys-will-be-boys approach to the matter. In the end, Swifty makes amends with Doogie when he consults Doogie about his too-swift sexual problem.

The second reading came from That 70s Show, which I found disappointing for the simple fact that it was much worse than I recalled. Eric gets suspended from school when he gets caught holding a cigarette that really belongs to his girlfriend Donna, which sets off Eric's father Red and pits him against Donna's father in a case of whose-child-is-a-worse-influence-on-whom. The rest of the episode is fluffed up with random hijinx from the relationship of Kelso and Jackie, as well as an oddball pairing of Hyde and Fez, who wind up on a double blind date with two co-eds.

During both of the above readings, I had little doubt in my mind that the performance I was watching, in which the actors on stage were performing a caricaturization of the original actors, was much funnier than the actual episode of either program. What was funny about each story was not the story itself, but rather the dreadfulness of each story.

But a funny thing happened during the third reading - an episode of The Wonder Years commonly known as the "Square Dancing" episode. About halfway through the reading, I realized that, instead of being engaged with the aforementioned literary disaster, I was engaged with the actual story. I was watching because I was invested in what was going to happen next. I was laughing because the story was actually funny, not because it was too dumb for words. By the end of the reading, I couldn't help but think of this episode of TWY not as a TV show, but as an expertly-crafted short story. (You can watch this almost-complete episode of TWY here, here, and here.) **Update: You can see the complete episode at Pandora. **

Of course, TWY uses an element common to prose storytelling: the first-person narrator. In this case, it is the voice of an older Kevin, looking back on his experiences as a teenager. This episode opens with panning shots of a yearbook as the narrator gives a brief introduction, which sounds not unlike something you'd read at the beginning of a short story or novel:

Kevin's VO: Some people pass through your life and you never think about them again. Some you think about and wonder whatever happened to them. . . Some you think about and wonder if they ever wonder whatever happened to you?

And then there are those you wish you never had to think about again. But you do.

Right away, we are given a sense of the themes that the episode will cover - most notably, friendship, regret, and betrayal.

The opening scene sets up the major complication. Kevin's all-male seventh-grade gym class is informed that they will spend the next week learning to square dance. At first, the boys are incredulous at the idea, but quickly warm up once the girls' PE class is ushered in for pairing. Of course, Kevin's geeky best friend Paul lands the hottie, while Kevin gets stuck with the class weirdo: Margaret Farquhar (FAR-kwar).

This opening complication is little different from an opening scene in any other crappy formulaic sitcom. So why does it work? Part of it is due to the opening narration. We know that Margaret is not just some weird chick who will breeze into Kevin's life and be gone in thirty minutes. At some point, she will have a profound impact on him. The other part is due to the way that the rest of the episode is executed.

First of all, the writing doesn't rely merely on telling us that Margaret is weird ("Some people marched to the beat of a different drummer," Kevin's voiceover says, "Margaret had her own percussion section"), it also wastes no time in showing us exactly how weird she is, both to the other students and to the adults. Immediately after she is paired with Kevin, she begins asking the PE teachers questions in rapid-fire:

Margaret: Are we gonna dosie-do?
Coach: We'll get to that.
Margaret: Why is it called dosie-do?
Coach: Because that's what it's called.
Margaret: Is that clockwise or the other way around?

The next scene (which has unfortunately been edited out of the provided Youtube clip) takes place in the Arnolds' kitchen at dinnertime. After repeated teasings from the bully-older-brother Wayne, Kevin reveals to his family that he has been paired with Margaret for the week of square-dancing. Very cleverly, the writing hints at Margaret's epic reputation for weirdness when Kevin's older sister says, "Judy Farquhar's sister? She's a little different, isn't she?" But it is Kevin's who mom delivers the coup-de-grace. When Kevin, frustrated, says that he'll just find out a way to switch partners or "dump her," his mother intervenes: "Kevin, I expect more of you than that."

So, now we have Kevin being pulled in two different directions. If he is too nice to Margaret, he becomes a social pariah. If he is too mean, he will disappoint his mother. In fact, in subsequent scenes, the "I expected more from you than that" mantra is played in the voiceover, stopping Kevin at the last moment from saying something hurtful or doing something mean to Margaret. And it won't be easy for Kevin to achieve the balance between being nice and being too nice, as we see when Kevin and Margaret meet in the hallway during the following day at school:

Margaret: Miss Billings sent me out here. She says I ask too many questions. Were you in the bathroom?
Kevin's VO: Great. I'd said three words to her, now we were going to have a whole conversation.
Margaret: I have to go a lot, too. When I drink to much water in the morning. Do you like bats?
Kevin: Bats?
Margaret: I have a fruit bat. Do you like the name Mortimer?

Needless to say, we see Kevin's point. She really is weird. The writing doesn't merely rely on cliches (such as a strange voice or an oddball fashion sense - even if she does have a third pigtail) to showcase Margaret's weirdness. Her weirdness is just enough to put off any "normal" person, without being over-the-top or unbelievable. Later, she shows up at Kevin's house, toting a shoebox in which her pet bat Mortimer is hiding:

Kevin's Mom: Is that Margaret?
Kevin's VO: Uh-oh, I could see mom's radar working overtime. In about three seconds, she was going to fall in love.
Kevin: She can't stay, mom.
Kevin's Mom: Now, I'm sure she can stay for a little while, can't you Margaret? Maybe she'd like to sit down.
Kevin's VO: That was it, Margaret was in like Flynn.
Margaret holds the box out to Kevin's mom.
Margaret: This is my bat!
Kevin's VO: But hold on, here.
Kevin's Mom: Bat?
Margaret: He won't go in your hair unless there's bugs there. I would have brought Isabelle, too, but her terrarium is too hard to carry.
Kevin's Mom: Isabelle?
Margaret: My tarantula. I also have a lizard, but he's sick.
Kevin's Mom: Oh. That's too bad. I hope he feels better.
Kevin's Mom exits.
Kevin's VO: Amazing. Mrs. Be-nice-to-everybody had been chased out of her own kitchen.
Margaret: I guess your mother doesn't like bats.
Kevin: No
Magaret: Yeah, neither does mine.

Two interesting things happen in this scene. First, the moral center of the story, Kevin's mom, can't even bring herself to stay in Margaret's presence very long. Second, during the last quick exchange between Margaret and Kevin, we are told something new: Margaret gets it. She knows that people don't like her. This adds a whole new dimension of self-awareness to Margaret's character that we never knew she had.

Shortly thereafter, in a very efficient, effective manner, the writing shows us exactly why Margaret is so weird:

Kevin's VO: And so I spent an hour with the most unpopular girl in school.
Margaret: Do you know where the word "tarantula" comes from?
Kevin: Huh.
Margaret: Well, they had this disease in Europe where if you got it, you would jerk around like you were dancing and they thought it came from spiders.
Kevin's VO: She was weird all right. The funny thing is, she was also interesting. In a weird way.
Margaret: So they named the spider after the dance. Taran-tella. Tarantula.
Kevin's VO: I'd never met anyone like her. Not that I liked her, you understand.
Kevin: So your dad was in the army?
Margaret: We travel a lot. Do you know anyone that's been to twelve schools in eight years?
Kevin: That's a lot of schools.
Margaret: Bats are good travelers. Dogs you have to leave behind.

And that's all you need to know about Margaret. This exchange reveals Margaret's inner-workings without over-explaining or leaving us pining for more information. It's a near-perfect reveal-of-character through dialogue.

So, now that we've covered the friendship, it's time to move on to betrayal. That night, Kevin loses his nerve on a promise he made to come over to Margaret's house and meet Isabelle, her tarantula. The next day at school, Kevin proposes an idea to Margaret: they can still be friends, but they won't talk to each other and no one will know that they are friends. Margaret becomes understandably upset, and a crowd gathers. This time, it is Margaret that delivers the coup-de-grace: "I thought you were different."

The line is ironic because it is essentially the same line that Kevin's mother used earlier ("I expected more out of you"), only phrased a bit differently.

Finally, regret. As Kevin and Margaret are shown engaging in a final day of joyless square-dancing:

Kevin's VO: And so, that last day of square-dancing, I danced alone.

Maybe if I'd been a little braver, I could have been her friend, but the truth is, in seventh grade, who you are is what other seventh-graders say you are.

The funny thing is, it's hard to remember the names of the kids you spent so much time trying to impress. But you don't forget someone like Margaret Farquhar. Professor of Biology. Mother of six. Friend to bats.

Now how many sitcoms - especially in the 80s, of all god-forsaken decades - had all of that in one episode? How many short stories have you read recently that had all of that? Shit, how many novels have you read that had all of that?

Keep Your Awesome To Yourself

2009-09-20T12:53:00.000-05:00

I really enjoy attending readings. Sure, sometimes it can be painful - some (maybe even the majority) of authors are simply not good public speakers. Their lack of a powerful oratory presence is probably one of the reasons they've chosen to be writers in the first place. This is not a finger-pointing criticism; I've given a couple readings before, and believe me - it's hard.

But the reason I really enjoy attending readings is that I always learn something. I might discover the work of an author I wouldn't otherwise have found, or some interesting use of language might catch my attention, or I might just learn how to become a better public reader myself.

Earlier this week, I attended a reading given by four local authors. On this occasion, I learned something from an author who, strangely enough, didn't read anything at all.

(Note: I'll refer to this particular author as "he/him," although this may or may not reflect the actual gender of the author in question.)

The author in question was the evening's feature author, the last of the four local authors to read. His next book (the newest edition of a somewhat popular historical fiction series that I hadn't heard of before) was coming out soon, and he began by explaining that he was so tired of his own words that, in lieu of reading, he would give a brief talk about how he became a working writer.

I was slightly put off by this introduction. After all, all the authors that evening were probably more or less tired of their words, but they read them anyway. Furthermore, his complaint of being exhausted over his own soon-to-be-published novel in the presence of a literary-minded crowd - many of whom were no doubt fledgling writers themselves - made him look more than a little out-of-touch. (The words "let them eat cake" kept echoing in my mind as he spoke.)

But I decided I was being petty: the setting at this particular reading was informal and intimate, so certainly he was not receiving any monetary compensation for appearing, and therefore he retained the right to read or not read whatever he wanted. Also, at any reading, there are a collection of wannabe writers (such as myself) who want to learn more about the publishing industry. Maybe, I thought, he could teach me something I didn't know.

Unfortunately, his story contained few surprises. He began with the all-too familiar you-can-do-it motivational speech for writers: For years, he talked about becoming a writer. He talked and talked and talked about it, told everyone who asked him about his work and interests. Then one day his three-year-old asked him why he always lied to people about being a writer. So that lit a fire under his ass and he wrote and wrote and wrote. The story ended with an oh-shucks-my-first-query-letter-hit success tale. Now, he writes for a living. He achieved the holy grail: living as a gainfully employed, full-time writer.

At its core, I found no particular fault in this little speech. He put in the work and became successful, good for him. I would have been fine with everything if this writer had been reading alone, or if he had read with other writers at the same or greater level of success than his own. But what pushed the whole ordeal into the realm of bad taste was the fact that this writer was reading with people who had been published at small presses, who still worked regular full-time jobs, and at least one writer who had self-published her book. Again, the utter lack of situational awareness certainly didn't win her any new fans that evening.

During the Q&A, one person asked the author who self-published whether or not she'd do it again. Her response began: "Well, I didn't have the magic fairy dust that so-and-so had...." The comment was made in jest, and a good-natured chuckle spread through the room, but I sensed just a bit of uneasiness in the successful writer's smile, as if he finally understood the mistake he had made.

The lesson to be learned: If you're asked to read your work, just read it. Even if you're genuinely impressed with your own success, it's faulty to believe that anyone else will want to hear about it.

An Old Man's Plea

2009-08-02T22:07:00.000-05:00

This past Thursday, I received news that a former Northwestern classmate of mine had been killed by a drunk driver. NU Senior Corrie Lazar was walking along a road in Maine, where she was spending the summer as an arts-and-crafts camp counselor, when she was struck by a SUV that had veered off the road.

I was not close with Corrie. I shared only one class with her, during my last quarter at NU, and I only spoke with her a handful of times. The only interaction that I can recall with clarity was the time she wore a green hoodie to class that read "Ithaca is Gorges." I told her there should be more puns on sweatshirts. She agreed.

Still, I have spent the majority of the weekend feeling unwell, like there's a perfectly round stone lodged in my stomach just above my bellybutton. I won't say that I feel traumatized by what happened - that would be insulting to those who were truly close to Corrie. But there is definitely a deep sadness, to the point where I have found it quite difficult to concentrate on anything over the last few days. I have been somewhat perplexed by this wave of emotion. Corrie is not the first young person with whom I have been personally acquainted who has died in recent years; yet, I do not recall feeling this kind of lasting impact on any of those previous occasions.

I think there are a number of reasons that I have been feeling this way, first and foremost the simple fact that what happened to Corrie is completely unacceptable. It could also have something to do with the fact that all those young acquaintances of mine that have died have been men; Corrie is the first young woman that I have known personally who has died. Maybe I naturally have more empathy for women.

But I think there's another part of it as well, and it has to do with my age. I apologize in advance to those NU friends of mine who have no doubt heard me give more than one "old man" speech in my time. It's a tired spiel, but I ask you to please endure it one more time.

Corrie had just turned 21. She was nearly 5 years younger than myself. The last five years of my life haven't been all roses and sunshine, but I'm certainly happy to have endured it all. It's been far and away the best five-year stretch of my life, largely because of the people I've become friends with at Northwestern. When I first got to Northwestern, you young ambitious kids scared the shit out of me. I really did feel old; but not because I felt any more mature or any wiser. On the contrary, I felt old because, compared to the rest of you, I felt I had wasted a lot of time. I felt I had acted immaturely in comparison. Before I arrived at Northwestern, I didn't think they made 18- and 19-year-olds as bright and hard-working as the lot of you.

So, I'm sure that, for a while, I was bitter and resentful of all of you. But I got over it, thankfully. I found my niche, made some friends, and considered myself lucky to be learning alongside you.

And that's why, as my years at Northwestern went by, my respect for you spawned a keen sense of protectiveness. It literally makes me weak in the knees to think of harm coming to any of you. There's just too much goddamn potential to be lost, certainly more potential than I have ever had or ever will. That's what makes me feel so awful about Corrie's death - that there's somebody that's infinitely smarter, more ambitious, and harder-working than I'll ever be - and she's being cheated out of the five years that I have had, and more.

So to all my friends, but especially to those NU friends who are just now getting out into the "real world," who are now beyond the places where I can keep a watchful eye on you, I say: please, please, be safe. If you are not safe, you will break this old man's heart.

If you would like to make a donation in Corrie's honor to Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), visit http://www.madd.org/Donate.aspx, click on "Memorial," and write "Corrie Lazar" into the text box.

A Life in Odd Jobs

2009-07-07T15:55:00.000-05:00

At the age of 25, after insisting time and again that a lot of people go to college for seven years, I finally graduated a couple weeks ago.

Since then, of course, I've been on the great job hunt. For a guy with a degree in Creative Writing in this economy, I have to say I'm somewhat pleased with my prospects so far. It could be much, much worse.

While working on my resume and cover letters, I've had to spend a lot of time thinking about my old jobs, and how I can work that prior experience into a line of cover-letter-bullshit just clever enough to fool a prospective employer into thinking that I know what I'm doing. It's really the ultimate practical form of creative non-fiction.

The thing is, I've had a lot of jobs. I doubt there's very many people at my age who have held as many jobs as I have. I like to think of it as a mediocre badge of honor. I've had so many jobs now that it's hard to keep track of all of them in my head. In fact, about three jobs ago, I had to undergo a full background check, and part of that was providing them with the phone numbers and addresses of all my previous employers. Simply getting all that information together took a good week.

Anyway, here's a list of the jobs I've had, starting at the age of 16:

1. Stock Clerk, Osco Drug
2. Inventory Dude, RGIS
3. Video Store Clerk/Manager, Moore Movies (mom-and-pop place)
4. Production Assistant, City Channel 4 (Iowa City)
5. Camera Op/Deko Operator, small-market CBS affiliate (Cedar Rapids)
6. Cafe Manager, Borders Books
7. Banker, Mohegan Sun Casino
8. Bartender, Cafe Luciano (small Italian restaurant in Evanston)
9. Content Developer, CognitiveArts

And I still feel like I'm missing something. I've only held two of these jobs for longer than a year (#1, #3), and I've never been fired.

The worst job: DEFINITELY job #2, the inventory specialist gig for RGIS. Let me tell you how this job went. You were given a scanner gun to scan UPC bars, which connected to this giant 1970s calculator-looking thing on your hip. You'd go as a team into a retail store (either before the store opened or after they closed, so the hours were always god-awful), let's say a Kohl's, and you'd go to a rack of clothes, push the clothes to the back of the rack, then pull the first garment forward and scan. Pull the next garment forward and scan. Repeat until every item in the whole damn store was scanned. Just the most god-awful, mind-numbing brain torture you can put yourself through.

An honorable mention goes to the Cafe Manager job at Borders. I only did it for about a month. I basically walked into a chaotic situation. I learned later that the three managers before me had abruptly quit, which caused a certain amount of mayhem, and a failed health inspection shortly before my arrival. I don't even drink coffee, so I sure as hell had no interest in fixing all of their problems.

The easiest job: Store manager of Moore Movies. Man, I did a LOT of reading during my time at Moore Movies. Basically, they just needed someone to be there and man the cash register. During the day, that was usually me. So I'd come in, have about 30 minutes worth of actual managerial work to do, and then sit on my ass the rest of the day. You know when you walk into a store, and see a guy that's doing absolutely nothing, so you say to your friends, "Boy, I'd like to have that guy's job [Possibly not-work-safe]." Well, I was that guy.

The best job: It's a toss-up betweent the Bartender gig and the Content Developer gig. Being a content developer was my first "real" job, so it was nice, on the ninth try, to finally get it right. Plus, it was a writing job, albeit rather boring (at times) corporate writing. But bartending was a lot of fun, and the place was small, so I got to know a lot of regulars. It also paid a lot better than the TV gigs, and didn't crush my soul in the same way that working in TV News did. (For an experiment: watch the same 30-minute news program five times each day for about 6 months, and you will understand why I nearly turned into this.) The only problem was that the restaurant wasn't busy enough, as they ended up closing it down one day without informing me. Bummer.

There's kind of a strange creative non-fiction thing that happens when I think about each one of these jobs individually. I know I did them, but I think about them as if it must have been somebody else doing them. This probably has something to do with the fact that the earliest jobs came as much as a decade ago, but it also has to do with the fact that each one of these jobs brought out a different person in me. They also took place in geographically different places (Aurora, Iowa, Connecticut, Chicago) and at different stages of my early adulthood (high school, community college, I'm-ruining-my-life, and I-decided-to-get-my-act-together-and-go-to-Northwestern). For example, the Osco-Drug me is the high school me who made friends with as many co-workers as he could manage. The Mohegan Sun me is the extremely introverted me who became jaded at the sight of millions of dollars cash every day. The content developer me is the me who really winged it in order to not screw up probably the best professional opportunity I had ever had. And none of them seem like actually me. It's similar to the way you feel about two days after returning home from vacation. You know you did all that fun stuff in a foreign place, but did you really? Or was it someone else?

Perhaps the strangest point of all this, though, is that even though all of these jobs had their own odd quirks and characters, I have never written about any of them - non-fiction, fiction, or poetry - until now in my cover letters. And the only one I really write about in the cover letters is the last one, because that's the most relevant to the jobs I am pursuing.

So my (very long-winded) question is three-parted:

Should I write about my old jobs (in a creative piece)?
Which one(s) would you want to hear about?
Which medium (fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry)?

Alexis Arguello (1952-2009)

2009-07-01T20:22:00.000-05:00

Former featherweight, superfeatherweight, and lightweight champion of the world Alexis Arguello was found dead in his home in Nicaragua this morning, after he apparently shot himself in the chest.

The majority of Arguello's career took place before I was born, and long before I became a fan of boxing only a handful of years ago. Nonetheless, I have watched a number of his fights on video, either on ESPN Classic or on Youtube, and have been a fan of him ever since I watched my first Arguello fight.

When I think of Arguello as he was in the ring, it makes the circumstances of his death (an apparent suicide) extremely hard to comprehend. Inside the boxing ring, there has never been an individual who displayed more professionalism and class than Alexis Arguello, both in the way that he fought and in the way that he carried himself before and after a fight.

Before a fight, Arguello was calm, quiet, and collected, seemingly immune to the nervous, bouncy energy of so many fighters in the moments before the opening bell. During the fight, Arguello never showed emotion, never became rattled when his opponent put pressure on him, never lost his footing, never found himself in a position where he couldn't, at any moment, unload a devastating blow. And after the fight, most of which ended with his opponent on the canvas (65 of his 82 career victories ended in knockouts), he was often the first to his opponent's side, congratulating him and his cornermen on a valiant fight. (For two examples, fast forward to about 3:00 of the first video below.)

His road to stardom was unusual by boxing standards. For starters, he lost his first professional fight in 1968, and then his fifth, before winning 23 of his next 24. In 1974, he had his first fight for a world championship (featherweight), and lost, but came back to win the title nine months later. In 1978, after a number of successful defenses of his title, Arguello moved up to super featherweight and won that world title. In 1981, he moved up again, winning the lightweight world championship. That made Arguello only the sixth man in boxing history to own world championships in three different weight divisions. (On top of everything, he became a political exile of his native Nicaragua after the Sandinistas took power in the late 70s, after a complicated dispute that I won't get into here, but you can feel free to research if you'd like.)

Arguello tested history one more time in 1982, when he tried to become the first man ever to own championships in four different weightclasses by fighting Aaron Pryor, the undefeated light welterweight champion. The fight went down as one of the best epic battles in boxing history (which you can see here, here, here, here, and here). In an all-action fight from the opening bell, Arguello stole the momentum in the middle rounds, scoring one particularly nasty right hand on Pryor, which he later said he expected to end the fight, cocking Pryor's head straight back until he could see the stadium lights. Pryor made it through the round, fighting on, and unleashed a barrage of punches on Arguello in round 14, forcing referree Stanley Christodoulou to stop the fight.

The last significant fight of Arguello's career came a year later, when he again fought Pryor for the light welterweight title, this time losing by stoppage in the tenth round. The younger, faster, bigger Pryor (an all-time great in his own right) simply proved too much for Arguello, a man then past his 80th professional fight.

In his retirement, Arguello faced the kind of demons that many fighters do - namely, alcohol and drugs. At times, he spoke openly of having suicidal thoughts. Recent years had seemingly brought some peace to Arguello. He became mayor of his native city Managua, the capitol city of Nicaragua, in 2004. More recently, he was the honorary Nicaraguan flag-bearer during the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Every time I see a cocky young boxer (or MMA-guy) these days, I think about what would happen if they had to look across the ring at Alexis Arguello. More than likely, they'd absolutely piss themselves. For a nice guy, he must have been downright frightening to face.

As one close friend said about Arguello: "He was one of those champions who acted like one outside the ring. You don't hardly see those kind of fighters around today."

He was a bad, bad man. But a true gentleman at heart.

On Documenting Ourselves

2009-06-10T00:03:00.000-05:00

Last week, I traveled to Upper Michigan for my grandmother's (mother's side) funeral. She was 95 years old. A little over a year ago, my other grandmother died of Alzheimer's; she had lived (I think) to 87 years. There's some long-life genes floating around my family.

My brother, my parents, and I stayed the night at the house of my grandfather (father's side) - now my only livng grandparent - who was not at home because he was being kept at the nursing home for a few weeks following complications in the wake of a bad infection and surgery. It was a tough week for grandparents.

In an extra room of the house, my brother found a few grocery bags full of old photographs and documents from the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. My dad sat with my brother and I late one night and identified the people that he could: uncles, aunts, cousins; his own mother, no older than 8 years old, standing on a forest clearing in front of an old Studebaker or some other old car; himself, at a beach, perhaps five years old, with two of my uncles and our grandfather, probably not much older than myself. There were some old documents in the bag as well, including the high school report cards for both my grandmother and grandfather, and my grandmother's nursing school report card. (One of the comments written on the card said something to the effect of: "Has acne but pleasant personality.")

I couldn't help but think how unbelievably precious all these pictures and documents were; I don't mean precious in the sense of cute, but precious in the sense that most of the items in those bags were the only existing copies, the originals themselves. I felt grateful that someone had thought to keep them, to put them into these bags instead of throwing it all away, if for no other purpose than to be found and looked over on this one evening by my father, brother, and myself. I only wished that it were a more complete record.

Of course, part of the bitterness of the funerals of relatives is that they always serve as a reminder of our own mortality. I couldn't help but think about how our own children and grandchildren will cycle through our own photos from our youths. We document ourselves so thoroughly these days, the records of ourselves exist in electronic data. When our grandchildren want to remember us, will they look through our Facebook profiles, which by then we will have kept updated for decades? The thought of that disgusted me. Won't the glut of documentations of ourselves cheapen the memories of us? Or will our children and grandchildren be grateful that they have such a thorough documentation of us? Will they too, after the endless blog entries and the thousands of pictures and the podcasts and tumblers and twitters and whatever, wish they had more?

I suppose it's better to err on the side of over-documenting ourselves than under-documenting ourselves. Historians never wish that they had less record of an ancient people.

This might seem out of left field, but I recently saw a great documentary about Hurricane Katrina called Trouble the Water. The filmmakers met a couple from the ninth ward of New Orleans - the poor area of town that was hit hardest by the hurricane, and still lies mostly in ruin. This couple had videotaped their experience of making it through the storm itself (they had no car and could not evacuate). The first 15 minutes of Trouble the Water is cut together from this high-8 videotape footage. As I watched this sequence, I couldn't help but think "Thank God someone documented this." As much as I want to err on the side of having too much documentation, there is something wonderful about knowing that you are witnessing the only account of something, that you are holding, in your hand, the only photograph of that moment in time. There is something satisfying about having very little.

On Assignments

2009-05-31T17:50:00.000-05:00

It's been a little over two months since I turned in my BIG ASSIGNMENT, my non-fiction thesis, a project which I worked on for a year. During that year, I did absolutely no other creative writing. When I was finally finished, I was concerned that I would have trouble writing about anything else for a very long time.

In an attempt to fight the blank page, here in my final quarter at Northwestern (which, along with my college career, is very nearly over) I enrolled in one 200-level creative non-fiction course and another 200-level fiction course. Much to my surprise, I've found that I still have a few fresh ideas in my head; more, in fact, than I have ever had before. I've discovered, along the way, another little oddity that I think sets fiction apart from creative non-fiction: the usefulness of short assignments.

For my 200-level non-fiction class, we have written five short essays of about 1000 words, each in response to a designated assignment or prompt. I felt very skeptical about these assignments at the beginning of the quarter. In my mind, I had just finished a 17,000-word piece; why couldn't I be trusted to come up with my own idea for essays? Assignments, I think I thought, were for amateurs without fresh ideas. (Of course, I had used my only good idea on the 17,000-word piece, and had no new ideas at my immediate disposal. Still, I was on my high prosaic horse.)

Our first assignment was to go sit in a public space (but NOT a coffee shop) for thirty minutes, observe, and write about it. Jeebus, I thought, is there any less original non-fiction assignment than this? That Saturday evening I waddled down to a local bar called The Long Room with some friends and completed my "observation." If I have to do this stupid assignment, I thought, I may as well have an icy cold pint of Point Ale in my hand.

And then something funny happened: I walked home, scribbled a few notes down in a journal before bed, got up the next morning, wrote a first draft and... really liked it. What's more, other people read it and liked it. And I never would have written it if it weren't for that assignment.

But maybe it was just a fluke. Surely, the next assignment, in which we were to use a narrative mode that was (for at least a portion of the essay) outside of reality, would prove itself a pointless and uninspired exercise. So I wrote what turned out to be a piece about my relationship with my oldest brother, and, sure as shit, I liked that one, too. Now, at the end of the quarter, I have five short essays, each with at least a bit of potential, and none of which I would have even thought to write if it weren't for an assignment.

On the other hand, in my fiction class, we had to write one short story of anywhere from eight to twenty pages. Other than those very loose page guidelines, there was no assignment or prompt to follow when writing our stories. I had an idea rolling around in my head for a couple weeks, wrote it down, and was surprised to find it didn't suck. I'd say I like that short story draft as much as my first non-fiction assignment.

In the weeks before our short story was due, we were asked to write a few sample scenes. In these cases, there were specific guidelines to follow. In one scene, we had to write a page or two about a character who is doing something that appears villainous, but turns out to be heroic (or vice versa). In another assignment, we were to write a scene and establish some sort of major conflict between two characters as quickly as possible.

I've already forgotten what I wrote for either of these short fiction assignments. What came out on the page was formulaic, boring, uninspired crap.

I've been thinking about this for awhile: why were assignments so useful and inspiring for my creative non-fiction writing, and so distracting and constrictive for my fiction writing? I'm sure that this isn't true for everyone; after all, every instructional writing book I've ever purchased, whether dealing with fiction or non-fiction, is chocked full of assignments to inspire the writer. Some fiction writers must find prompts useful. Still, I think assignments are inherently more useful for non-fiction.

Maybe it has something to do with the way that we find our stories. When I get an idea to write a non-fiction piece, it's usually because I'm looking at something outside of myself. I hear about someone doing something interesting, or something interesting happens to me, and I think, oh, I'll write about that. Non-fiction, for me, is about what comes to me from the external world. When I get an idea to write a fiction piece, it's usually because I've dreamed up some royally fucked-up situation for a character to be in, and then dream up how the fucked-up situation concludes, and then think about connecting the beginning to the end. So fiction, for me, is about what comes from me.

I don't know if any of the above paragraph is actually true.

What are your thoughts?

The Right Way to Tell a Story

2009-03-28T12:05:00.001-05:00

On Tuesday, I picked up a copy of Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song. It has been on my reading list for a while. For those that don't know, TES, which won Mailer the 1980 Pulitzer Prize, tells the story of Gary Gilmore, who was convicted of two homicides in Utah and executed in 1977.

Mailer's approach to the material is truly exhaustive. On the cover of my copy, there is a blurb from Joan Didion: "The big book that no one but Mailer could have dared." It is, indeed, a big book; massive, even. The version I bought is just over 1000 pages - large pages, small font. Mailer wrote the book based entirely from interviews he had done with those involved in Gilmore's life. The level of detail is astounding; I had to wait 200 pages before Gilmore commits his first murder. At this point, I'm about 350 pages in and I have yet to arrive at Gilmore's trial.

Which leads one to think: TES must be the single, definitive account of the Gilmore case. What writer would dare to write another book about Gary Gilmore after Mailer, one of the greatest American writers, has covered every corner, scouted every tiny crevice, squeezed every last drop of literary worth out of this juicy grapefruit of a story?

But another writer has dared. In 1995, Mikal Gilmore, writer and senior contributing editor for Rolling Stone, and perhaps more notably, the younger brother of Gary Gilmore, published Shot in the Heart, his memoir of his life with his dysfunctional Mormon family and his brother's execution. The memoir may not have earned Mikal Gilmore a Pulitzer, but it was widely critically acclaimed, and won the LA Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

I bought TES on the same day that I delivered my Creative Non-Fiction senior thesis to the people that I wrote about, Al and Mary Ann, whose 18-year-old son Jeff was murdered in a random act of violence over six years ago (still unsolved). I was pretty (read: extremely) nervous about handing it over to them. I felt I had done well on my thesis, but I had always doubted my ability to really get to the heart of their story. I didn't know Al and Mary Ann before I met them for our first interview, and since then I've only spent a total of 15-20 hours with them. We've said a lot in that time, and in certain ways I'd say I'm closer to them now than some people I've known for years. But how well can I really know them? I'm a 25-year-old, single dude. What in the hell do I know about being a parent, let alone being the parent of a murdered child?

My own insecurities aside, we had a pretty open talk about their story, and about storytelling in general. It's always hard to explain to someone just what "Creative Non-Fiction" is, so I told them that my thesis was meant to be more than a retelling of facts (which I told them from the outset) that it might not be what they expected when we first started, and that it wasn't necessarily what I had in mind when I began to write about them (which was true).

One of the reasons that it has felt so important to me to get their story "right" is because Al and Mary Ann have had to deal with a number of cases where people have gotten their stories wrong - namely, reporters confusing facts, mistakenly reporting Jeff as a gang member, etc., etc. In fairness, Jeff's case and Al and Mary Ann's subsequent experience is incredibly complicated, including a not-so-happy relationship with local police and politicians. Al himself has told me that he himself once wanted to write a book about their experience (if for no other reason, I think, than to set the record straight on a few things).

At one point during our talk, Mary Ann confided that she has always thought that if anyone was going to tell their story the "right" way, it would be herself and Al (adding, at the same time, that it would be interesting to see an outsider's take on the matter). At that point, I assured them that no matter how I wrote about their story, it in no way meant they couldn't also write it.

From there, our conversation went in a number of different directions regarding other ways that their story had been told, or almost been told, I should say. They told me about an old friend of theirs, a filmmaker who lived in California, who wanted to make a documentary about them. It fell apart, unfortunately, after he asked Al and Mary Ann to storyboard the picture, a rather insensitive request it seems, and something that neither one of them will likely ever be able to do. Some of Mary Ann's friends had also encouraged her to keep a journal in the days after Jeff's death, but she couldn't think of anything she wanted to do less. And Al found that he had a almost limitless number of ideas that he wanted to write about, but couldn't go about figuring how to make them into a book.

But given time, it is likely that one or both of them will find a number of different avenues in which to tell their story, in addition to my own telling. I think that this is one of the most exciting qualities of Creative Non-Fiction that is exclusive to the genre - the ability to tell a story multiple times from a seemingly infinite supply of viewpoints. I can write about Al and Mary Ann, and so can they. So can one of Jeff's friends. Maybe someone with the police or FBI that is involved with the investigation. Or another random writer like myself with a different angle. Maybe someday there will be a documentary. Norman Mailer can write TES and Mikal Gilmore can write Shot in the Heart and they can both have merit.

The same thing isn't as possible with fiction. There are many novels that are written about a single event from various viewpoints (Douglas Coupland's Hey Nostradamus! comes to mind), but not really separate books. I don't have the desire to rewrite Huck Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird or Harry Potter or whatever with a new spin.

Yet, with Creative Non-Fiction, the impulse seems to be to get as much out of a topic as we can, only to find that it's impossible to truly exhaust everything there is to know. Mailer himself couldn't even do it with over 1000 pages. Not only do I find that exciting, but also liberating, because it helps me to realize that there is no "right" way to tell a story.

First Post!

2008-12-01T17:27:00.000-06:00

Hello, my name's Willy, and I'm a writer.

I'm a senior in the Creative Non-Fiction program at Northwestern University, although I also write (some) fiction, and have dabbled in screenwriting since I was about 16 years old. Right now, I'm in the middle of a number of writing projects, and I thought that starting a writing blog might be a good way for me to document some of the issues, struggles, epiphanies, breakthroughs, and hilarity I experience during these endeavors.

But mostly, I'm just blogging for the money.