bookfraud

I’m trying to get back into things. I only have eight more installments of the "Why I Really Write" epic series left. All of them laughably bad.

Imagine a library.

It contains the greatest works of Western literature, from the Bible to Shakespeare to the present day. There are volumes from some of the planet’s greatest philosophers — from Plato to Nietzsche, Aristotle to Hegel. The library also has a compendium of LPs featuring music by Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, Mozart, Chopin, Brahms, and Wagner. On the walls hang reproductions of da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Monet, among others. 

Now imagine a group of men who partake of this library’s treasures. They read the books, listen to the music, and study the paintings. They discuss with each other the meaning of these works of art, what each writer or musician or painter was trying to say, and what their work reveals about human nature.

They take all of these discussions very seriously, as it represents one of their few opportunities for leisure.

So I ask you, as Mr. Wicklund, my high school AP English teacher, asked our class 25 years ago, does all this reading and listening and studying and thinking make these people better human beings? Are they more evolved? More sophisticated or smarter? Think hard before you answer, my teacher warned us. This place actually existed.

We might have been 18 and stupid, but my classmates and I were smart enough to know that it was a trick question. And it’s a good thing we didn’t answer. This library, our teacher told us, was for the commanding officers at Auschwitz. 

I don’t know if the Auschwitz library actually existed, but Mr. Wicklund’s aim certainly hit the mark. I’ve been semi-obsessed with the place ever since, as it turns on its head the very idea of civilized society. 

Library or not, there were certainly Nazis who were well read, who were musicians, artists, and philosophers. How could people partake of great art and debate the nature of humanity while committing one of the most barbarous acts in the history of humanity? Talking about dialectical materialism and the Brandenburg Concertos as human carcasses burned. As Eisenhower said when his troops liberated Dachau, it beggars explanation.

You can make a straightforward argument of actions trumping thoughts, but remember, the Nazis had developed philosophical rationalizations for their actions.

I’m not mentally equipped to get too far in depth about this (I’m just not PhD. material, boys and girls) but the fact that supposedly evolved people can be animals permeates my thinking. It makes me want to write about them.

And if I don’t write about monsters disguised as college-educated aesthetes, I can’t stop creating characters who are not what they seem, who hide behind facades, who justify their actions with rococo rationalizations.

Does living the literary life make one a better person? Think hard before you answer.

I’ve been bad.

My son has been really bad.

And my job has been really, really, stinkingly, ridiculously bad. As in, working at nights, early in the mornings, during lunch, and, through the miracle of wireless fidelity, also known as "WiFi," just about any wonderful place I can carry my computer.

The precious little downtime I’ve had has been spent in slothful pursuit (reading, television, and other forms of brain wanking), and my little baby boy has discovered the magic power of the full-throated yell when he is ignored for more than three seconds. But it’s really been the job — due to a computer system malfunction making it run as if designed by a team of Chilean sea bass, one essential part of my work is taking about four times as long as normal. Until the programmers/sea bass fix the problem, I’m basically screwed.

I’ll try to do better. I’ll try to visit all the blogs I know and love. I’ll try to post something more than once a fortnight. I’ll try not to slowly lose my sanity in the fiery caldron of my job.

 But I can’t promise.

And now, for something pretty much the same as everything else. Yet another entry in listing the reasons I’m a masochist writer.

I was all of 19, home in Memphis for the summer in an unpleasant 1984, and in a perpetually bad mood. For “home” was a city where I hadn’t lived for seven years, knew not a soul, and had to take two jobs to pay off my freshman-year debt. That entailed about 80 hours or more of work a week, which left very little time for fun. Bookfraud was a dull boy indeed.

One of those two jobs was a government “internship” with the county government. My job was to sit an a car and help catalog tax-lien properties. It paid minimum wage, offered nothing in the way of personal fulfillment or actual experience to help in the job market, and entailed driving into parts of town that were less-than-savory.

My partner in crime was an older man, a man whose name I will not reveal here except that it is so perfect for a character, it’s a shame I can’t use it. I will allow that he had been a colonel in the Air Force, his nickname was “Bubba,” and that Col. Bubba was so over-the-top that if I were to make him up as a character, you would never find him plausible.

He was about 65, stood about 6-5, and would have weighed 650 pounds if he’d had his beloved pork barbeque sandwiches every day for lunch. Suffice to say he probably tipped the scales at 250. He wore houndstooth jackets and fine leather shoes, shiny silk ties that looked like they’d served time since the 1960s, and his combed-back hair looked like he’d cleaned out the local Walgreen’s of Grecian Formula.

Col. Bubba sounded like a stereotypical southern sherif: “Boy…” he would start sentences when addressing me, managing to stretch “boy” into three syllables.

He loved to give me a hard time about my attendance at a college north of the Mason-Dixon line — “This here boy goes to a Yankee school, but we’ll forgive him for it” he’s say by way of introduction to others, not to mention my relative ignorance of the ways of the opposite sex.

“Boy, lemme tell you, when I was runnin’ my own oil company, I had all the poontang thrown at me I could shake a stick at. But most of them was married women, and I never do it with a married woman. I’d rather beat the meat than do it with a married woman” — which, in Colonel Bubba’s world, was worse than dying a virgin.

His favorite (actually, his only) topics of conversations were sex, his adventures in the Korean War, his life in business, and the 1942 University of Tennessee Volunteers football team, “coached by the great General Neyland, undefeated, untied, and unscored upon,” on which he played defensive end.

There was plenty of time to talk. We would usually catalog three or four properties by noon, finding them on unnamed and deserted streets, and drive around for the rest of the day. I can still hear him reproaching me, saying, “Boy, we’ve already done three for the day. If we do five or six, bossman will expect us to do that every day.”

He occasionally used the word “nigger” in these conversations, as in “There’s a nigger on Lamar Avenue that makes some fine barbeque.” I would tell him it was wrong to use that word, and he was genuinely surprised — “I don’t mean anything bad,” he would say, and he was as perplexed at my protests as I was of his use.

Don’t pick a fight with the Colonel

But he seemed to know a lot of black people — in the office, at restaurants, at the stores and shops we’d frequent while wasting time. He would embrace them, figuratively and literally, treating them with dignity, and if he didn’t think of them as his equals, he didn’t act like it.

I daresay he was an oddly complicated fellow ("three-dimentional," as they say in workshop) and far more intelligent than he let on. One minute, he would tell me ribald tales of encounters with Korean prostitutes, and the next, he’d be quoting A.E. Houseman. He was funny and witty, but bitter as well, twice having lost money, once in oil, the other in his own airline company. Or so he said, which was why he had to suffer the humiliation of working at a government job when he should have been retired.

There is a reason for reavealing all this, and it’s not to explain away Col. Bubba’s use of the n-word or his casual sexism. It’s that perhaps you get to know perhaps two or three real-life people like him in your lifetime. They’re burned into your brain as if you were cauterizing a wound. No matter how you feel about them, there is no getting rid of them.

In the end, all one can do is immortalize them. And if you don’t or don’t want to, you probably have better things to do than sit before a keyboard and summon the muses.

After ignoring the obvious, I tackle it with brutal honesty below.

I’ll just get right to the point. One reason I became a writer is that I thought it might help me get laid.

I didn’t consciously plan it that way, of course, because doing so would make me a very stupid person indeed: there are about 10 billion better ways to chase girls other than sitting before a typewriter, alone, unshaven, undressed, and depressed.

I could have tried making a lot of money. Or learned to play the guitar. Or bothered to actually ask someone out once in a while.

But men aren’t the brightest bulbs in the world when it comes to Little Elvis, in more ways than one. Without going into deep, ill-informed flights of Darwinian fancy, let’s just say that I, like 100 percent of the rest of the male population, have sought status in one form or another, and one of the main byproducts of status has been access to more than one ladyfriend, so to speak. And for me, status-seeking comes in the form of the written word.

The most popular scribes among us — those who are male, that is — have often found themselves surrounded by groupies, lit bimbos, and other ladies caught in the swoon of genius. A fellow Chicagoan and novelist once said Saul Bellow had "two hobbies. Philosophy and fucking."

Bellow was an extremely famous writer. There appeared to be no shortage of willing victims.

Or take Salman Rushdie. OK, he’s witty, brilliant, charming, a fantastic novelist, a would-be jihad victim, and one of my favorite writers, but he isn’t going to be modeling anytime soon. I don’t think he would have gotten Padma Lakshmi had he been less than famous, or merely an adequate novelist.

There are lots of ways to get status, of course, but I never fancied myself a financier, was never going to be a successful jock, and as far as guitar playing is concerned, I sound like Andre the Giant picking at a ukelele.

I never really thought of myself as handsome, for that matter. If I was going to get attention from the ladies, it would have to be through some other means, and though I can be accused of being a mite charming, demonstrative I am not. It’s not as if  I could hang a sign outside my house that said, "Ladies, Line Up Here for a Good Time With a Hot Guy" and expect any action save for a dog taking a crap on the doorstep.

It was rather pathetic, to be honest: like the a pizza-faced teen nerd that I had been, I secretly harbored a fantasy that my writing would show the world and the beautiful ladies inhabiting it the real me, which was funny, smart, brilliant, and worth a shag or two.

Once in a great while, my lust for words and my lust actually intersected. Once, I met an older lady at a party — I was 22, she was 33, and when she walked up to me, she threaded a finger through a ringlet of my hair and twisted it lightly, so I imagine she had other ideas than just debating the merits of Camus versus Sartre.

Sex? Yes, please

However, before the festivities began, I was forced to enter into conversation in which I revealed that although I had a boring job at a boring company, I was actually working on a novel. Which seemed to suit her just fine, though it was not a topic of post-coital conversation (which was as awkward as the sex was bad).

I dated another lady who, if not enthralled with my writing jones, demanded some form of creative expression from her men, which seemed to fuel her jets. 

And then there’s Wife. If I had not been a writer, I would have never met her, though it had nothing to do with my actual skill or status as a writer other than the mere fact that I wrote, since we met through graduate school, even if they were different graduate schools (long story).

But I imagine that it didn’t count as sex, since we got married.

I mean, that it didn’t count as merely sex. Sex and marriage. It’s a beautiful thing.

Below is the second of the much-anticipated, highly debated 13-part series of why I decided to write. Picking up where I left off, I continue on the music theme. Though Three Dog Night is nowhere to be found.

There is probably as much Beethoven apocrypha as there are famous compositions by him: his meeting with Goethe when he dissed the local royalty, giving a 12-year-old Franz Liszt a kiss of approval, famously ripping out the dedication page of the "Eroica" symphony after Napoleon crowned himself emperor, proclaiming, "So he is no more than a common mortal!"

My favorite Beethoven story is a true anecdote that has nothing to do with the man at all. One Saturday afternoon when I was in my early 20s, I was riding in a car with some friends, when the driver, tooling around with the radio, landed upon a piano and violin piece of almost painful beauty.

We wondered who wrote it: one ignoramus, trying to sound cultured, quickly said, "Well, I know it’s not Beethoven." It was an opinion the other passengers quickly validated; for, if we knew anything at all about classical music, Beethoven was all thunder and bombast. He didn’t have a exuberant or joyous note in him.

The piece ended on a note that was filled with such happiness you could have sworn it was written by an eight-year-old, and the announcer said, "That Beethoven’s sonata for violin and piano number 5…"

This was shocking to me, since I was the one who so confidently proclaimed that a Beethoven work was far too radiant to have actually been composed by Ludwig van Beethoven. After that embarrassment, I set upon learning about him. And the more I learned about Beethoven, the more amazing he became, as both a person and composer — which has made me want to write.

My admiration for his work has few equals. There was no classical form that Beethoven could not master: sonatas, quartets, contertos, and the symphony, which he basically invented as we know it. The comparison is unfair at any level, but it’s as if Shakespeare, in addition to being the greatest playwright and poet of the English language, wrote groundbreaking novels and short stories. 

Though I’m no musicologist, and somebody is bound to disagree with my opinion (especially one of the snotrag, self-styled aesthetes who review classical CDs on Amazon), it’s hard to disagree that Beethoven was one of the giants. And, as discovered in my wrong initial opinion, he wrote music that is in equal measure joyous and beautiful as it is loud and bombastic.

That Beethoven wrote all this while being famously depressive and cranky to a fault is part of his attraction. He’s probably the quintessential tortured artist; he never married, his only love being his never-identified Immortal Beloved. He was also unwavering in his beliefs, politically and morally, and was a true believer in freedom when such an idea was still forming on the Continent.

OK, there’s a point to all this hero worship. It’s not only that such a person as Beethoven existed — that one person could master so many forms is mind-boggling to begin with — but that he was able to create despite his disdain for himself and the world. Everybody knows Beethoven went deaf, and that he went into an extended depression that lasted the rest of his life.

After he started to lose his hearing, he composed some of the most ground-breaking works in the history of music. It doesn’t only amaze me he did it while deaf, but that he did it while he was basically bummed out 24/7.

Time to rock

I complain too much about my problems, minimize others’, and will find a reason to procrastinate in the air. Beethoven had more talent in one day’s nail clippings than I will ever have in my entire being, but what truly made him special was he did not surrender, he did not quit, he never stopped making music though he had a million legit reasons to do so.

Listening to Beethoven puts me in the mood to write, but the idea of Beethoven makes me want to write, and though I will never write a work of fiction as remotely sublime and inspiring as the Triple Concerto, I want to try.

This is the first in a series of short posts revealing the true reasons I took up writing. Or at least the ones I’m gonna tell you.

It was New Year’s Eve, 1973, I was nine years old, and spending the evening with my grandparents.

Improbably, instead of Guy Lombardo and his fuddy duddy Royal Canadians, the television was tuned to the first-ever "Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve," which would become the Guy Lombardo of its time, but upon its inauguration seemed impeccably cool.

On a stage in the foreign land of New York City, Three Dog Night was singing their immemorial (and only) hit, "Joy to the World," resplendent in miles of gnarly hair, gnarly moustaches, bell-bottoms, jean vests, and other post-60s crap clothes.

(If you don’t remember "Joy to the World," you were born after 1965 or have had a successful lobotomy that removed all the annoying, awful, shitty music from your head. You know the song I’m talking about, which had nothing to do with the Christmas carol of the same name:Jeremiah was a bullfrog/Was a good friend of mine/Didn’t understand a word he said/But I helped him drink his wine.)

I really didn’t care about Three Dog Night or the music — I was desperately trying to stay awake until midnight. Then my 70-something grandparents, who were watching with something approaching horror, said something I’ll never forget:

"They’re just a bunch of hippies on drugs," my grandfather said.

"That’s right," my grandmother said. "Hippies on drugs. They’re hippies on drugs."

Their voices creaked with age and resentment, distrust and incomprehension. They all but waived their crooked fists at the television set. Who were these damn kids, with their strange clothes, hair, and music? They were on television! They were taking over! The world was falling apart!

"Oh…just look at them. Hippies on drugs."

"They’re just all hippies on drugs!"

Though I didn’t want to be a hippie on drugs, my grandparents’ utterances made Three Dog Night extremely cool. Better still, I knew that what had happened was meant to be repeated.

When I related the story to my friends, nobody thought it funny or interesting. But wasn’t important — I just had to tell someone, whether because it would raise my status among my peers or that I wanted to share it. I had to tell somebody, it just had to get out, it just had to be told.

Now residing in the "Where are they now?" file

On its surface, it’s not much of a story, but an anecdote: once it’s been read, there’s no reason to read it again. (Many of you probably don’t even find it amusing.) But I couldn’t shake its persistence, nor could I ignore the fact I was dying to tell others.

I discovered that I liked telling stories, but what I really liked was telling stories that illuminated a larger truth — my grandparents’ old-fashioned, square attitudes reflected in their dislike of hippies on drugs, for instance. Or stories that simply entertained others in some way. And though my aptitude as a verbal story-teller was limited, I found that when it came to the written word, I had a few skills, and that I really enjoyed doing it (present barren output notwithstanding).

I still haven’t found a place for this encounter; the closest I came was in my novel, when the narrator, at age 13, sees Kiss and The Ramones on "Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert," much to his grandmother’s horror.

But it’s a story, however small, that I still want to tell, one of many that usually end up on paper. In a way, I’m still nine years old.

It’s hard to watch a hero disintegrate on the page.

Close readers of this blog, all six of you, will know that Ralph Ellison’s "Invisible Man" is perhaps the most influential novel I have read — more than any other book, it made me want to write fiction.

Its brilliantly rendered imagery, the surrealistic dreamworld it creates, and sense of tragedy and comedy make it just about perfect. If I could write the white-man’s version of "Invisible Man," I will have done something amazing, since no white person could actually write such a tale.

I first read "Invisible Man" in high school. Today, I’m plowing through "Ralph Ellison: A Biography," which is as illuminating as it is depressing, and as complex as the title is straightforward. Not surprisingly, the story of a man who published just one novel in his life is a cautionary tale about success. As a fan of Ellison’s work, his life story and personality is difficult to swallow; as a writer, it’s chilling to the bone.

It’s disorienting to find out that Ellison was often calculating with his acquaintances, and would (sometimes) make friends on the basis of how they would help his career. He could be casually cruel with his family, and comes across as a little more than prickly. He did not help or encourage other writers, especially Black writers, who he disdained more than praised.

Not as if that makes Ellison different than most, but I’d always hoped that Ellison just wasn’t any other writer.

"Invisible Man," the tale of a nameless African-American narrator who navigates his way though fantastical adventures in college and New York in the 1930s and ’40s, is loosely based on Ellison himself, who, rising from a dirt-poor childhood in Oklahoma, became a world-famous writer on the basis on his one and only novel.

Ellison, like the narrator, attended a historically black university in the South (Tuskegee University), and migrated to New York before getting his degree. An autodidact of the highest order, Ellison virtually willed himself to become a novelist, in more ways than one: not only did he systematically educate himself in the Western canon (from the Greeks all the way through the present), but he clearly charted a course in which he would be a Writer, hitting each step along the way.

He joined a proto-Communist arts journal when such things were all the rage during the Depression, and got his start writing left-wing propaganda disguised as literary criticism. Slowly, over the years, he learned to think for himself — to think like an artist — and disowned his former sponsors on the left.

The book that changed everything

Upon his arrival in New York, he sought out friendships with Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, one famous writer and one about to become famous. Ellison would break with them, too. Whether it’s because Hughes and Wright, whose importance as writers dimmed in the late 40s, were no longer useful or that he grew apart from them, is not clear.

I’m about half way through "Ralph Ellison." He’s published "Invisible Man" to universal acclaim, won the National Book Award, and spent three disastrous years in Rome with his wife as part of a fellowship. He’s had an affair in Rome, all but blaming his poor wife Fanny for it, and has made no progress on his highly anticipated second novel.

It’s playing out like a horror movie in which the pretty girl is going to get killed. The audience knows it, but she doesn’t. Ellison is never going to finish that second book. You know it, but Ralph doesn’t.

He becomes trapped by his own grandeur, in a sense: so steeped in symbol and allegory is "Invisible Man" that Ellison simply cannot write something else as pedestrian, as, say, Hemmingway and his old man. The second book has to be even more complex than his first, lest the world think that he’s off his game. It’s perfection or nuthin’.

Again, this doesn’t make Ellison unique, but as a Black man trying to thrive in a white world, he probably felt as if his second book had to top his first. He didn’t want to be known as a "Black writer" — he wanted to be considered a Writer, period, a successor to Faulkner, Joyce, Dostoyevsky, and other universalist giants of the page. If he did not consider himself their equal, Ellison became so obsessive and self-absorbed in becoming so that he ruined his literary career.

Another cautionary tale

It’s a Behind the Music tale for writers, minus the booze, drugs, and sex (substitute fame, self-importance, and arrogance). Though he was in his late 30s when "Invisible Man" was published, he really was never the same afterward.

The worst part of this is the book has forced me to examine my own motives for why I write. If Ellison, a true giant, was looking for acceptance more than anything else, where does that put me? Does one’s motives shine a light on one’s art?

Starting later this week, I’m going to answer that question in an irregular 13-part series, "Why I Really Write."

Unfortunately for you, I’m not joking.

See you on the couch. The psychiatrist’s couch, I mean.

Wife has a friend who is generally a good egg, but can’t go too long without taking offense at slights real and (mostly) imagined. The friend also has an unfortunate habit of saying inappropriate things and then acting bewildered when someone else takes offense. 

We all know the type: the friend or family member whose idea of personal interaction is pissing people off or acting aggrieved. Or, more crudely, a drama queen, a "frienemy," a shit disturber, or, as I like to say, "borderline sociopath." If you’re over the age of 30, you’ve probably had at least one of these acquaintances, and if you’re over the age of 35, you’ve probably figured out to ditch the nutjob.

The shit disturber in question has pushed Wife’s buttons just a little too hard this time, and, instead of apologizing for an imagined offense, Wife just ignored it.

To wit, a recent phone conversation: "[Baby's] pictures make him look introverted — you should get a professional photographer. I mean, really. He’s not smiling at all! He looks so unhappy! What? You find that offensive? Hello? Hello?"

I’ve always wondered about the neurosis involved with such people, who can’t seem to live without drama in their life. I’ve known plenty of drama queens — I even dated one for a long, disturbing year in which the sex was as volcanic as her mental health was unstable — and the thing they seem to have in common is a sense of self-righteousness, of never being wrong. They want to confront you rather than their own shortcomings.

What I also wonder is if drama queens make for good writers. I’ve known a few who seemed to be driven by personal strife rather than distracted by it, and how they ever made for decent prose was beyond me. But some managed, and some of it was very good indeed.

Norman Mailer (bottom) works on his latest novel

(Of course, the vast majority of it was unadulterated drek, the worst of which was when said drama queen would subject us unfortunate readers to his or her personal dramas thinly disguised as fiction. Bleech.)

It’s been my opinion that a stable home, friends and job does artistic creation crave, though you can look at plenty of writers who were drama queens — Norman Mailer picked fist fights, Hemmingway picked fist fights, Irwin Shaw picked fist fights, and we’re just talking about macho-man writers born before World War II.

Not that you want to be these people, obviously.

I’ve had special rules to deal with these types in class ("avoid at all costs"), but it does raise a larger question: are these people — who are so in touch with their dramatic sides that they need to create conflict to feel at ease — better writers than those of us who are preternaturally calm and collected? Or are they simply better models for creating characters?

I mean, think of some of the great characters in literature. Emma Bovary. Michael Henchard. Miss Haversham. Heathcliff. All of them memorable, full of life, borderline psycho. They just can’t help but make everybody else’s life miserable by their dramatics. (And that’s just the 19th Century.)

With friends like these…

I mean, could have Heathcliff actually written a novel without killing someone in the process? You can totally see any one of Austen’s heroines knocking off "Sense and Sensibility" without a sweat. But Raskolnikov would pester all of his friends to read "Crime and Punishment," and offend them when he tries killing them when they refuse.

Perhaps you’re such a person and you’re writing a major work of art. If so, how do you do it without faking a suicide?

The French novelist Stendhal said living a bourgeois life allows us to seek drama in our writing. Wife says, "When it comes to drama, leave it on the page," and that sounds about right to me.

More than on his birthday, I miss my father on Father’s Day. It wasn’t as if this Hallmark holiday was special in our household, but now that I’m father myself, the day simply reminds me of things incomplete: I can’t talk to him about what it’s like being a father, what it’s like to worry and fret over things you can’t control or to share the mysterious joys of Baby’s first steps, words, or smiles.

This is ostensibly a literary blog; Dad was not a lover of literature. However, he was a learned man, his tastes veering to math and science, history and politics, and his forays into literature were mostly in genre fiction.

That’s one of many reasons I never told him that I’d gotten a literary agent for my novel, much less let him read it, despite his numerous protests otherwise. It was almost parental in nature: you’re my son, I raised you, I have a right to see your book, even though you don’t want your old man to read it. 

But there was a more cowardly motive behind my reticence. I didn’t want Dad to think that the insanity of the teenage protagonist’s home life — the narrator’s family suffers a massive reversal of finances and social status as he enters adolescence — was based on my own. Of course, we really never had a massive financial position or high status to reverse, but the portrayal might have stung him.

He had a difficult life in many ways, usually due to problems of his own creation. My father did calculus for fun, but never could never really translate his prodigious smarts into a decent living. He chose the wrong jobs, the wrong professions, and usually sabotaged himself with inappropriate displays of temper. 

I spent a good deal of my teens and early adulthood cataloguing my father’s faults, which were not just aligned with his inability to make money, while letting resentment slide towards the scale of "hatred." I promised myself that when I grew up, I wouldn’t be like him.

That point of view changed, thankfully, long before he died. He always supported his children and never criticized us for our failings in school, athletics or otherwise. (The only thing he disdained was when we quit or didn’t try.)

My father liked debate, and insisted no matter what our beliefs, my siblings and I should have a good reason for believing them. But even if he disagreed with what I believed or did, he always stood behind me, be it my choices in careers or significant others, or even how my siblings and I pursued our religious beliefs.

And when the chips were down, he always made things better. When I was a child and first cognizant of death, one night I started crying in my bed, fearing parental abandonment, until Dad came in to my bedroom and calmed me. When I was in college and in despair of a financial matter, Dad was able to help. When I was an adult and slept with someone I shouldn’t have, ultimately leaving me depressed and upset, it didn’t occur to me not to call my father. And he made it better (and didn’t tell my Mother).

When he was in the hospital before he died, he said to me, "You’ve done well for yourself — better than I’ve done," which at once made me proud and broke my heart, and now, in retrospect, I see that it was something that he probably felt compelled to say.

For though my nobody thought his pneumonia would fell him, Dad was hedging his bets. It was his way of saying he was proud of how I’d turned out, and his apology for what had transpired when I was growing up. Perhaps it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear, but it was the best he could do, and I will always be thankful he said it. 

In the last decade of his life, he sought help for his demons, despite a lifelong distrust of psychology. His life improved immeasurably, even if his finances didn’t, and my mother has said many times that the last 10 years of their marriage was the best of their 42 together, most of which were not smooth.

It’s sad that I could never tell him how proud I was that he’d decided to get help for himself, as I was never supposed to have known. 

At this point, the best way I can honor him is to be the best father possible, which is to say, take all the good things I learned from Dad about being a parent and relive them with Baby.

So what I’ve learned is this: when Baby is scared, confused, in need of a hug or support, if I can make it better, my father taught me something rare indeed.

Here’s my latest place to waste time: The Meth Minute.

Combine James Brown, cyborgs, and a touch of Sibelius, and you’ve got genius, of a sort.

I’m going to get back to blogging regularly, and visiting blogs, and writing, just after my son grows up and I retire from this time-sucking job. Someone should pay me to blog, I say.

My late father, bless him, was always trotting out not-so-subtle ways to improve the education of his children. We were voracious readers, and, as any reader knows, this means one is likely to come across an unfamiliar word, especially if said reader is 8 years old.

When I would ask my father for a definition — for "belie" or "derive," for instance — he would always say, "Son, I’m not sure, but I know someone who does — his name is Mr. Webster."

Thus informed, Dad and I would embark upon a 10-minute trudge through the dictionary. He would make me look up the word, pronounce it, read the definition, and, if he was in a particularly didactic mood, force me to use the word in a sentence. "’I belied reading the dictionary,’" I would say.

Though young, I was not stupid. I finally learned to ask my mother for definitions. Or I’d ask while we were in the car, Mr. Webster safely ensconced at home.

I thought of my father when I came across "Best Online Tools for Word Nerds." It claims the old-fashioned, paper dictionary is an artifact, as antiquated as rotary-dial phones and three-piece plaid leisure suits: "When you need a word’s definition, translation, pronunciation, synonym, or antonym, you don’t have to haul an enormous tome from the bookshelf, dust it off, and ruffle through its delicate pages like your grandparents used to do—you can just hop on the [I]nternet."

Though I would be lying if I said I didn’t use sites like dictionary.com with some frequency, the above reads like someone who hasn’t read a book in about four years, when he graduated college.

OED: DOA?

But, as a writer of literary fiction, if you get rid of paper dictionaries, I might as well admit defeat and just write Smurf porn fan fiction. No, the fact that dictionary sales have plummeted does not mean that people are going to stop buying novels, especially the kind that features shoes and clothes like in "Sex in the City" (not to mention that features guys like Mr. Big, who apparently earned this nickname not through the immensity of his manhood but by his financial ability to effortlessly buy $25 million co-ops and transform them into temples of haute couture, if not a brothel).

What I’m saying is that you need serious readers for serious fiction — the kind of fiction that has words one must consult a dictionary to understand.

Now, if any of you are a word nerd as described above, you know that when you look up a single word in the dictionary, it can take 10 minutes — not because your father is forcing you to pronounce "langunious," but because you have spent that time in the endeavor of looking up other words. This is one of the rare pleasures of a dictionary that can be mimicked only by losing oneself in an encyclopedia (or, vast amounts of online p.o-r-n.). 

Admittedly, I’ve already foresaken the encyclopedia in favor of Google. Instead of looking up information that may or may not exist, I can immediately get an always-accurate datapoint via our friends at Wikipedia or elsewhere. Lots of people with bigger brains, larger vocabularies, and less bitterness have waxed eloquently on the demise of research vis a vis the Internet, and I won’t add my opinion here, because it’s really not worth the virtual page it’s written upon.

Language takes a Pound-ing

But online dictionaries are like getting a prostitute versus nurturing a long relationship — one is faster, and you get something approximating pleasure, but the alternative, filled with missteps and hard work, is always far more rewarding. If people aren’t curious about words, they’re not going to care much about language, and le mot juste will remain an untranslated piece of pointless French.

The debasement of language can be directly traced to the decline of literary fiction and poetry (and conversely), and if people aren’t thumbing through their dictionaries, enjoying the langorous pleasures of new words, they rarely will give a damn whether or not your story is well-written or not.

Whew. I can feel my constipation clearing up already.

It’s actually Wife who is on the trip referred in the headline; yours truly is the one scheduled for a long vacation in the fiery pits of Hades.

Four days, to be precise. That is the number of days Wife has abandoned me, in favor of a long-weekend jaunt to parts unknown (actually, a literary event, but the details aren’t important. She might as well be meeting with a crime boss in Colombia, for all I care).

The upshot is that I am in care of Baby, all by myself, for the next four days.

Now, those of you who are caregivers in some capacity, who have faced such trials with nary a whimper or complaint, who have taken care of a child for days, weeks or months at a time, please stop laughing (and looking at me with unveiled contempt). I know things could be worse.

Such knowledge does not make life any easier, however, nor does it make the thought of 80 hours with Baby (four days minus 16 hours for day care on two weekdays) any less scary. This week has been a smackdown at work in which my ass was kicked so bad my boss needs new shoes, and Baby has been ill for most of the past few days, culminated by a newly discovered allergy to egg whites, which manifest itself in vomitus and hives that turned my poor little boy into Linda Blair for several unfortunate minutes.

(This is my excuse why I haven’t visited any blogs, or posted anything except the most narcissistic, whiny, pathetic blog entries.)

So I’ve actually decided to post some "items" that you may wish to "link to" and "comment upon." You can do so with rare insight or angry disdain, because once I post this, Baby will undoubtedly wake up from his Once-Every-Month Nap. Sic transit gloria mundi.

* * *

According to the New York Times, Germany’s biggest selling novel (and biggest seller on Amazon’s global list), "Feuchtgebiete" (roughly translated, "Wetlands"), features pudenda shaving accidents, vivid descriptions of hemerrhoids, and avacado pits as sexual aids. I would pay good money to buy the American rights to this book, and not translate it into English.

* * *

Also in the Times, South Carolina will make vanity license plates featuring crosses and the phrase "I Believe."

Isn’t that special. I’m just waiting for the license plate with a crescent moon, a picture of the Koran, and "Assalamu alaykum."

* * *

As a Democrat, a liberal, and all-around worrywart envisioning eight more years of Republican hemogony, this scares me. It really scares me. I don’t think even Obama could talk this woman into voting for him.

* * *

Finally, before you see "Sex and the City," read this first. I wish I could write with half the wit and charm as Mr. Lane, but in order to do so, one must actually be witty and charming.

I’ll see you on the other side.

When you’re operating on a 4:30 a.m. wake up call via Baby, your eyes tend to grow heavy with the smallest amount of radiation and one’s attention span is about as focused as a broken pair of binoculars. I write whatever I can spew out, you get to read it, and nobody is happy.

Isn’t that how blogs work?

There’s nothing like an open-ended, ambivalent ending to a novel to ruin your day. Take, for instance, the conclusion of Kevin Brockmeier’s "The Brief History of the Dead," which was chosen in this space, American Idol-style, as my next reading choice. (As promised, here’s the review).

It’s one of the more frustrating reads I’ve had in quite some time — a book with a dynamite first chapter (featured in The New Yorker) and brilliant premise that gradually loses its momentum until it wheezes, keels over, and dies. The book just kinda ends with no resolution and no greater understanding of the characters, the world at large, or just why you would even bother. "The Brief History" should have been the unabridged version.

Brockmeier writes extraordinarily well, and that’s part of his problem. He describes the undulations in snowbanks. He rhapsodizes on the curvature of spines. He waxes poetic on the feel of a fork in a woman’s hand. (For those of us weaned on fiction workshop-speak, it’s called "falling in love with your writing.") This kind of stuff is best consumed in small servings, lest the narrative grind to a halt — which, for a novel like this one, just can’t happen.

That’s because if you put a clever conceit at the center of the story, you really have to go all the way with it, and if that doesn’t mean a clear resolution like in a murder mystery, at least don’t leave so many unanswered questions that the reader is genuinelly puzzled rather than enlightened, or is motivated to throw the volume across the living room, where it inevitably will strike an expensive piece of porcelain passed down 10 generations of your wife’s family.

Which is a shame, because "The Brief History of the Dead" starts wondrously. The novel begins in the city of the dead, where those who have left this mortal coil "live" in existences that are similar to the living — they have jobs, they go out to eat, ride bicycles and have affairs, though they age not. The catch: you can only stay in the city of the dead if there are those alive who remember you. Once they pass, you have to leave as well. To where, we do not know.

This state of affairs is threatened by a virus (which has something to do with Coca-Cola. Really.) that is rapidly ridding the earth of human beings and thus emptying out the city of the dead. A research scientist on assignment in Antarctica, Laura Byrd, has not been infected, but as her collegues around her die, she is eventually left alone, the last remaining living human on the planet. 

Brockmeier: Coulda, woulda, shoulda

The book presents these two worlds side-by-side, switching chapters between the City of the Dead, where we are given the perspective of different individuals, and Antarctica, where Laura muses mightily on her life and memories. It’s probably the right gambit, though you wish that Brockmeier had done a little more parallel editing — if not to show a cause-and-effect, at least to give the story the gitty up it sorely lacks.

I don’t know what to make of Brockmeier or his career; I also read several of his short stories and had the same experience: great premise, teriffic writing, three-dimentional characters, and no ending. Maybe that’s just his style, to purposely irritate the crap out of me. I’m not looking for Joycean brilliance here, or some tie-it-all-together-with-all-the-suspects-in-a-room, but an idea, however small, to bookend the brilliance of the first chapter.

To mix sports metaphors, this should have been a contender, but died in the stretch run.

So, those of you who voted on this book, you’re fired. Ironically enough, I’m going to read "Then We Came to the End" next, which, hopefully, will live up to its title.

In light of the hubub regarding same-sex marriage, not to mention the premier of the "Sex and the City" movie, it’s time to address one of the more pernicious linguistic constructions of the last few years: "gay."

No, I do not refer to its common use to mean "homosexual male." Or in the archaic useage of "happy" or a name. Instead, employing it as a pejorative adjective, as in, "That shirt is so gay" or "A capella singing is really gay" or "Watching the ‘Sex and the City’ movie is completely, totally, utterly gay."

It’s got to stop. I’ve been as guilty of it as the next person of saying it, but that doesn’t make it any less forgiveable.

I mean, when was the last time you heard someone say, "That bank is totally Jew," "Basketball is really Black," or "Immigrants are so Hispanic"? Probably not for 20 years, unless you spend your time at bars where the clientele arrives by swimming out of the toilet.

But when was the last time something or someone was called "gay"? Probably a few minutes ago.

Calling something "gay" is another way of calling it emasculated, stupid, and unworthy of one’s time. And by extension, that means that liking any cultural artifact associated with gays is, well, "gay."

Now, I have about as much real insight into gay culture as I do tribal Indonesian theater, but saying that there are some gay men who like to dress well, are active in musical theater, and like certain singer-divas is about as earth-shattering as saying that Imelda Marcos likes shoes.

But I like musicals

But here’s where my problem lies: I like nice clothes (despite my lousy wardrobe), musical theater, and Judy Garland (and Liza, too), and I’m not gay, or at least the last time I checked.

All these stereotypical "gay" things are good, just as most gays and lesbians are regular folk, so if someone "accuses" any thing, person, or trend as "gay," it actually is like saying that it’s good. To wit, a few years ago, a fellow member of tribe of Hebrews told me the perfect comeback when told that she "looked" Jewish: "Thank you."

This is perfect because it addresses two things at once: to say someone looks Jewish is ridiculous, and even if it were true, there’s nothing wrong with it. Sure, the offender may be referring to the size of one’s proboscis, the texture of one’s hair, or how one dresses (i.e. the size of the wallet), but why should it be an insult to be associated with being a member of the oldest religious club out there?

In fact, though you are certain to be branded an anti-Semite if you were to say I "looked Jewish" to my face, for although I am not insulted to look a certain way, it means you are engaging in stereotype: there are African Jews, Asian Jews, Arab Jews, and Jews of other ethnicities, not all that begin with the letter "A."

Now, I don’t know how other persecuted minorities feel about it, but if there’s something that makes me unconfortable, it’s when something is too "Jew-y," a direct reflection of not only my own self-loathing but the desire to assimilate — I have known people who are truly astounded that Jews love wine, women and song, of which ignorance of the last is akin to saying, "Damn — I didn’t know there were Jews in show business."

But not mine

So, starting soon, I will make periodic posts about "gay" things I like — akin to the uber-popular "Stuff White People Like." Hell, if that can generate a book deal with a $300,000 advance, maybe I could string it out.

Which would be super, duper gay.

Addendum: Superblogger Voix has noted that the citizens of the Isle of Lesbos are trying to stop use of "lesbian" to mean "lesbian." This is just so wrong that I can’t begin to imagine the implications if they prevail.

1. All happy families are alike, Bookfraud’s family is unhappy in its own way.

2. My family prefers sibling rivalries over Oedipal dramas.

3. Someone in my family provoked me for watching election results on CNN.

4. Someone in my family provoked me for feeding Baby organic food and milk.

5. Someone in my family provoked me.

6. Even when you stay with relatives for free, you pay a price.

7. Going on vacation with a baby is like going on a vacation with a hernia — you really never can forget it’s there.

8. My mother is a wonderful grandmother; my sibs are wonderful aunts and uncles.

9. When he gets older, Baby will get whatever material possessions he wants from my mother, including my inheritance, which he will spend on strippers and a Corvette.

10. When traveling, traits about your partner that are trivially annoying or even charming in domestic life become unbearable, especially my traits.

11. Getting children to sit still for a family photo is like trying to get flies off a shitstick.

12. While watching cousins under the age of five is like trying to referee a dog fight.

13. It’s a miracle Wife hasn’t left me yet.

14. It’s a miracle Baby hasn’t done the same.

15. The perfect Jewish family gathering consists entirely of food and talk.

16. Calories still count when you’re on vacation.

17. When he wrote "No Exit," Sartre had a major metropolitan airport in mind.

Gate agent Queue, reporting to duty

18. Northwest Airlines is run by buffoons.

19. Though Alitalia makes Northwest look like efficiency incarnate.

20. There are three stages of a flight during which Baby will cry inconsolably: takeoff, landing, and everything in between.

21. I’ve become one of "those people" on airplanes who I once cursed for not being able to control their screaming kid.

22. Despite his wailing, Baby is the most charming scoundrel ever to crawl the face of the earth, charming half the people on the flight by pointing at them and smiling.

23. The other half were sleeping or pretended not to notice.

24. Parenting "style" boils down to two things: what you give your kid to eat and what you let him or her watch on television.

25. My nephews are wonderful little boys, and I’m not a bad uncle, especially in teaching them the finer points of beer.

26. One’s best efforts to engage others who don’t share your interests are doom to failure.

27. "Iron Man" is a pretty cool movie.

28. Without a book, I’m miserable.

29. When I don’t have a book to read or computer to write with, I watch too much television.

30. David Archuletta is the guy who gets stuffed in a high school locker.

31. David Cook is bound for stardom as the world’s hairiest lounge singer.

32. Singing "Imagine" is pointless without a piano accompaniment.

33. The setting for "Grey’s Anatomy" should be moved from Seattle Grace Hospital to Lesbian Hospital Staffed by Hot Nympho Doctors.

34. Nobody’s children are as adorable as your own.

35. When your child has cried for more than 5 minutes, no matter what the situation, only ice cream will get him or her to stop.

36. Baby yelling at 112 decibels in a crib 3 feet from one’s bed is rather unpleasant, especially when it’s at 3 a.m.

37. The next time, I will pay my family to allow Baby to sleep in another room.

38. Given what I saw of energy consumption my hometown, the United States is doomed.

The things you learn watching TV

39. Strip malls are the original meme.

40. I missed my blog, I missed reading others’ blogs, and, most of all, I missed writing.

41. I didn’t miss this nutjob, not that I ever read her in the first place.

42. Family arguments erupt over stupid things; silence abounds for important ones.

43. Don’t bring your baby when visiting your father’s gravesite.

44. Especially don’t bring your baby when he’s hungry or tired, and if he’s hungry and tired, not even heroin will calm him.

45. No matter how much you spend on expensive toys and stuffed animals, your child will always prefer playing with an empty plastic bottle.

46. Kid vomit smells just as vile when it lands on a family heirloom.

47. Underminers at work will double their efforts when you’re out of the office.

48. Rye whiskey is like acid reflux in a bottle.

49. Don’t break out the booze if things are going especially well or poorly.

50. But make an exception for family.

When you disappear for from cyberspace, nobody can hear you scream.

I’ve been off the grid, more or less, as I prepare to take Wife and Baby down to see his grandmother, aunt, uncle, and cousins. It’s his first trip to my hometown, since our battle with bed bugs made travel impossible until now. Sadly, it’s the first time my sister has seen her nephew, and only the second since my mom saw Baby when he was a mere six weeks old.

As a result of the upcoming week, a 24/7 episode of When Bubbies Attack, I’ve been tied to the desk, trying to get ahead at work, and been packing mad crazy. It’s amazing once you have a baby how much extra crap you have to take on trips — an exponential increase, not a geometric one.

Baby is still having nutso wake-up times — give me 4 a.m., we’ve got a bid at 4 a.m., do I hear 3:30 a.m., I got a bid at 3:30 a.m., do I hear 3 a.m.? — so my brain remains the consistency of a vat of gazpacho.

I won’t have a computer for a week. 

I’ll return tanned, rested & ready. 

Ha.

Now that my Internet-holiday weekend — really a function of Baby than me not wanting to go online — I thought I would take up Fringes‘ permission to whine as loudly and pointlessly as my son. Who was doing said whining at 3 a.m. last night. And the night before.

In the penultimate shot of Martin Scorcese’s "Goodfellas," Ray Liotta, as mobster-turned-informant Henry Hill, is picking up a newspaper from the porch of his ranch-style house, barefoot and wearing a bathrobe. Hill is in witness protection. He’s living in an anonymous suburb with brick bungaloes and station wagons with wood paneling in the driveway.

His worst fears have come to pass. Not that he ratted out his Mafia cohorts, or that he had to serve time, or even that he got caught. It’s that he’s just another nobody in the ‘burbs.

"I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook," he says.

Though I am not going to testify in a Gotti trial and have no plans to enter witness protection, Wife and I are considering a move to the suburbs, as we have decided that our carbon footprint was not large enough. It’s a situation both Wife and I once swore would never happen. I’ve got a good but unglamorous job, a mortgage, and a one-year-old boy. Though I lack a car, once we trek to suburbia, that will inevitably follow. So will a slow death.

When I read other blogs, it occurs to me how little of the literary life I am living. I’m not writing fiction, attending readings, going to conferences and workshops, or following the latest-and-greatest in literature. Everything seems subservient to Baby, or my job, or cleaning the apartment after months of bed bug hell.

But it’s not like before Baby blessed us with his nocturnal yelps that I was tearing up the literary landscape. My novel was stuck in agent-editory purgatory; my attempts to write a non-fiction book were stalled on the first page; and my 10,000-line epic poem in Dutch about the migrating habits of Canadian geese…oh, never mind.

Oh, I know, there are plenty of people (some who are reading this) living in a suburb and who are writers, probably more productive than I am, and probably a lot more talented as well. It’s not that I want to castigate suburban living, but in my stilted, myopic worldview, it’s a surrender to a way of life I though I’d never live.

I live in the red one

I might as well face the truth: I’m 43, have high cholesterol, two bad knees and one bad shoulder, and the doctor is telling me to lose 15 pounds. I don’t have the time nor the energy to do these "literary" things (though I do, curiously, have time to write this blog and comment on others’ blogs). When I was much younger, like 23 or so, I imagined that by this age, I’d be established as a novelist (stop laughing). Not only would I have time to live the literary life, it would be my life.

But then, as I was sitting here, complaining in my head, I came to a stark and sudden realization. Do I write because I enjoy writing, or am I writing so that I can live a certain way, or to be a certain person?

It’s not an academic question. Great art has been forged by the desire to seduce, to flatter, to become famous, to gain riches. That the motives may seem skewered does not make it any less artistic. In fact, there are those who argue that is the main reason we create, to attain this intangible thing called "status."

Or, put another way, does one want to be a Writer, or do the things that writers do?

Right now, I’d settle for some sleep. Writers are allowed to sleep, I believe. It’s in the contract.

I’ve tried writing. I’ve tried to visit other blogs and comment. I’ve tried, I swear.

I’ve been trying to post something that would