The Whole Damn Shooting Match (You, Me, and John Wayne)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8sNeozweTM

"Courage is being scared to death . . . and saddlin' up anyway."  John Wayne

I'm not sure why it took me so long to come to this particular blog day.  I've been toying with the idea of simply skipping it, and perhaps that's what caught my attention.  Why was I avoiding this one?  Because "Demagogue Days" was so political? Ranty?  Leftist?  I think we all know me better than that by now.  So . . .

What's in my craw? 

I found it over my third cup of coffee.  Fear.  Let's have a chat about saddlin' up, shall we?

I'm with Almond, all the way down to the last level of Dante's hell.  Pissed and self-righteous with him, hurt and indignant with him, embarrassed and vindicated with him.  It came as quite a jolt that Canto XXX left the two of us (yes, the two of us) in the dust, so to speak, and horribly grieved at the real fallout.  When do my rants, valid or not, take me away from my intended heroism?  How many times have I been right, had a warrant (and boy, did we cover that one), filed my exquisitely crafted injunctions with the proper authorities and found myself, smoking gun in hand,  so far from my cause?

Just to be clear, I'll provide disparate examples of such shenanigans:

1. Professor X warns me that I am too emotional about my essay subject.  Obviously, Prof X is an Anal, Archaic, Sexless Fart who is part of the great conspiracy to rip the passion out of my writing.  Final essay firmly refuses to examine AASF's alternate take on said well-loved subject (damn skippy!) and lands in a slap of dust and glory on AASF's desk.  Take that.  Flash forward to my first B. 

2. With doctorate firmly in hand, and under sudden and decidedly unwarranted attack from an uptight academe, I (and my little warrant) saddle up and ride into Town.  After all, others like myself need defending.  Freedom of speech and religion and all that.  I think I was feeling a little less John Wayne and a bit more Clint Eastwood, circa High Plains Drifter. (Of course, I completed forgot that Clint was dead, nothing more than a vengeful ghost with a bone to pick.) The rest was all pathos-driven-Facebook-diatribing, cost be damned.  My mother isn't quite over it yet.  

Let's now look at the fallout, shall we?

1. I publish the B paper in a well-respected academic journal.  Accolades all around, self-satisfied grunts, and AASF will still not speak to me in the halls.  Word.

2. I read the end of Almond's essay and drop my gun.  Shit. Tyler.  I had completely forgotten about Tyler.  But there he stands, hair in his eyes, that stray bullet all on me.  My student.  Well, damn.

You know, sometimes "my bad" doesn't quite cut it.  

I guess what I'm saying/asking/posing is something a bit like this: How far can our warrants take us?  Or, how far are we willing to go?  Personally, I don't think we can count the cost when saddling up, mostly because I think it might be too late.  I've asked a lot of you, stuff like honesty and passion, and so I hope it's not too late or too much to ask one more thing: foresight.  Temperance.  Just in those places where we have forgotten a little thing like ethos and we are galloping so fast toward our target that the townfolk get a bit blurry. I think Steve Almond, and I, are a bit trigger happy.  Maybe it's worse to be slow on the draw? Either way, when it comes to our writing (and maybe the rest), qualitative balance couldn't hurt.

One last thing.  Just for my Tyler who came up after class: I really hope the shooting match isn't over.  You were the point, all along.  

Using a Warrant (not the Band)

I'm sitting here thinking of 1984.  I can smell it: hairspray (Gen X was solely responsible for the hole in the ozone layer, I contend), Marlboro cigarettes and other things that have a grassy, smoky aroma, Jordache perfume, diesel fuel.  It is my own warrant to speak of this time, and let me tell you, I do and often.  After reading "Tesla Matters (Dude)" all I can think of is this: what are our warrants?  How do we utilize them in our writing?  Do they put folks off? Draw them in?  When, and in what kind of writing, do we use them?

I would contend nonfiction deems them critical to the power of our message.  Let me prove this: how often have you been reading along, innocently accepting the message (or maybe trepidatiously) when BAM.  There it is.  A cultural misstep.  That is NOT what Reagan said, or Clinton, or Bush--the timeline is totally off--no one would have worn those shoes then . . .

(Yep, I totally just used all of the devices we talked about today.)

A professor I had once upon a time (her name was mentioned in class this afternoon) taught me something like this once.  It went something like: never break the suspension of disbelief with your audience.  You lose them.  Badly.

You know the moment.  You read the book.  And then?  There it is, the popcorn halfway up to your mouth, your feet jauntily hooked onto the chair in front of you, and there it is.  Bastards. Sophie (The Da Vinci Code) has a brother?  What the?  That was not in the book.  You look around, expecting riotous indignation from your fellow moviegoers.  Nothing.  Yet you have psychically left the building.  Over and out.  Suspension?  Nope.  Disbelief?  Yep.  The rest is just, well, garbage. I am personally still bitter about every single Stephen-King-book-turned-movie I have ever seen.  (One of the only screenplays he has written is Maximum Overdrive.  The others were Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. Stellar.)

No warrant.  You can't  come in.  That is our right as readers, though, I believe.  To refuse entry when we call qualitative bullshit.

And yes.  I have cursed more than once in this blog.  Why?  Because I am about to use a warrant, and there is no way you would buy me if I came off as a pretentious, ivy-league prof.

It was 1984 and the Cradle Will Rock tour hit hard, right on the heels of the Back in Black tour (AC/DC, folks).  I had no intention of ever working for "the man" and had even less intention of staying chemically lucid for more than, well, five or ten minutes.  The t-shirt was black and had SEX DRUGS AND ROCK AND ROLL emblazoned across the front, and it was about two years before most of us had even heard the word "aids."  And I was ruuunnning.  (Little Forest Gump for you there.) Smart kid, lost, angry, scared, with a serious Peter Pan complex and no vision of my thirties.  Kids like yourselves made no sense to me.  How did they study and mind and cut their hair and eat their Wheaties? No way, man.  Sunlight hurt my eyes and Walt Disney was blasphemy to my soul.  Purposefully, vehemently, I threw away my childhood when I threw up my lighter to David Lee Rothe in crimson spandex.  Part of me is still back there, waiting for the lights to come up and force me out into the street.  Strangely, all the songs and all the bands and all the beer-soaked nights add up to this one moment in my teenage wasteland:

And when some local kid gets down
They try an' drum him outta town
They say, "Ya coulda least faked it, boy"
Fake it, boy (Ooh, stranger, boy)
At an early age he hits the street
Winds up tied with who he meets
An' he's unemployed--his folks are overjoyed.

But here I am, Dr. PD, thirty years later, talking about warrants.  I suppose I could have just "faked it," but I think I learned the regret of that decades ago.

And so.  I begin sentences with and.  And do a lot of ---- stuff like that.  Proper English?  Um, no.  But it's in line with the signature on my warrant.  I wonder, do we ever know the voice in our heads without examining the paperwork . . .

All Things Steve Almond

Fenway Park at Night

Hello, crew.  We are now popping off these blogs every Friday.  So here goes.


As I read Almond, I am struck with the feeling of two Steves.  I sense an almost expatriate, Vonnegut resignation, but I also find him digging up nostalgic American bones.  How do I, as a reader, balance phrases like: "The peculiar sickness of the American mindset may be located in the peculiar notion that the professional athlete . . . should serve as a moral exemplar" against phrases like: "Sometimes I need to pretend.  Sometimes I need a broken-down old stadium, stinking of beer and mustard, and rain falling like flour before the sodium lights?" (For Frank: this is "Red-Sox Anti-Christ.")  Or: "Our obsession with sport is clearly a symptom of imperial doom.  We must remember: All that held Rome together at the end was spectacle" against: "the chance to surrender my will is not without its sacred pleasures--a language, however primitive, with which to seek the solace of other men."

I think about how we talked, in class, of his self-effacement, his honesty, his outright brutality against a critic followed by his admission of pain, and I wonder: is it more beautiful to admit the ugliness we make?  To lean forward to our readers without our makeup on? It seems to me that the writers I love the most make sacrifice to their own, god-like readers this way.  It seems to me that I trust them more, then, feel more "involved" in their rants, diatribes, or observations than I would otherwise--even if I have been offended.  It's more, well, human. It's the least we can ask of someone who would like a moment of our time.

I shared my story with you all on Wednesday.  It put me at personal risk.  Yet, aren't I asking the same of you?  To write yourselves into being? To put yourselves on the old proverbial line and not hammer out some craptastic five-paragraph essay? I enjoy Almond because he seems to get that I need, as his reader, to feel him present in his craft.  Anything else feels like cheating.

At the very beginning of his book, we have a quote from Vonnegut:

And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been.  But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

And here we have it, don't we?  A writer looking back at American failure, broken ideals, salt marking the spot where a dream had been.  Not because he never had faith, or out of some misguided sense of smug, self-righteous finality, but out of grief.  Humanity.

Personally? I like the bar that high.