The Greatest Show

Whitehead, remembered

2009-08-25T05:52:00.000-07:00

Had I but world enough and time, I’d leave Baltimore in a couple of weeks and trek to Fayetteville, Arkansas where a little store called Nightbird Books will host “A Celebration of Jim Whitehead: Readings from his Works.”

Jim died in 2003. A fierce, loving man, he was a fine poet and novelist, an offensive lineman, a co-founder of the graduate creative writing program at the University of Arkansas and one of my mentors there. Also, he was a dear friend, and I love him still. This celebration, scheduled for Sept. 9 from 7-9 p.m., marks the release of a book honoring him. For, From, About James T. Whitehead: Poems, Stories, Photographs, and Recollections, is edited by Michael Burns, another former student of Jim’s (there are thousands of us), and is the second book with Jim’s name to be published posthumously. The other, also put together with editing by Michael Burns, is called The Panther: Posthumous Poems. Whitehead was fascinated by the possibility that a Roman Centurion known as Pantera

was the historical father of the historical Jesus, a possibility that has also been studied by the scholar James Tabor, who wrote an introduction for the book.

Jim pushed for work that was both local and universal, and what he saw that combined the two was grace. "All right," he said in an interview a few decades past,

“we do fall apart and then we feel terrible guilt because we fall apart, from time to time. Our bodies and our souls are broken. But we mend, we mend. And I think one of the terrible things about so much contemporary literature is that it’s in this wretched, Freudian bag, with its negative view. It has no place for grace–this is not religious grace in any sense of traditional metaphysics or Christianity, but there is grace in the world. We all know there is grace. And yet, people have tried to convince us that there isn’t.”

Jim made it his life’s work to show readers and students where grace resides. My gratitude continues.

Nightbird Books is at 205 W. Dickson, in Fayetteville.

Kindling the flames of suppression

2009-07-25T09:53:00.000-07:00

So, Jeff Bezos apologized after Amazon sucked copies of 1984 and Animal Farm away from Kindle owners without their permission. So maybe those copies shouldn’t have been available in the first place, but the point remains that

Amazon showed how with Kindle, your library isn’t your library: it belongs to Amazon. Turns out that Kindle's like a super fancy library card.

Slate magazine’s Farhad Manjoo has an insightful and frightening piece about the implications of how our libraries really aren’t our when we sign a terms of service agreement with Amazon for devices such as Kindle. The result is that corporate and government Big Brother-wanna bees get to decide what can stay in what we used to think of as our personal libraries and what can’t.

So let’s conflate time a moment. Here’s a story from a few years back, before Kindle. It was scary then, but it is scarier when considered in context of a Kindle-world.

In the late 1990s, a writer named Susan Perabo published Who I Was Supposed to Be, a short story collection that included a parody in which Batman is a slovenly drunk. Perabo’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, and DC Comics were owned by the same company, and after DC discovered the Batman-as-Drunk story its reps complained to S&S and BAM! POW! ZIP! Perabo’s Batman story disappeared from subsequent editions of the book.

There was no copyright infringement; the Batman parody could easily have been argued as fair use (I know this because of research on this suppression for an article called "Holy Parody, Batman!" that I published in The Writer's Chronicle). This was corporate back-scratching, because a few suits at DC worried that a little short story would harm their brand.

I own a hard copy of what Perabo now calls “The Bat Edition” of her book. But imagine this same thing happening in the Kindle era. What’s different? DC and Simon and Schuster put pressure on Amazon to replace “Bat Editions” with a new Bat-less edition on everyone’s Kindle. Perabo’s story vanishes. You bought the book because you wanted to read the Batman story, but now it’s gone. No trace. Because Amazon and DC said so.

Ironically, Simon & Schuster has published Who I Was Supposed To Be as an e-book.

"The world must be shrink-wrapped."

2009-07-15T16:03:00.000-07:00

That’s what a poet friend wrote me after she learned the details of the following story, which involves dogs in Baltimore (where we live) and traditional Irish music in Montana (which we visit in the summer). It’s a story of serendipity and the awesome smallness of the world. And it’s about one rockin’ button accordion.

We’ll start at Double Rock Park in Parkville, a neighborhood in Baltimore County about a mile from where we live. It’s where we take our dog, Kaimin, most mornings of the week for her run-around-crazy-off-the-leash time. Early on we met a friendly fellow at Double Rock. He was talkative and often wore a little Irish driving cap and his manner suggested that he takes life as it comes. On the back of his car was a bumper sticker about folk music, and he told us where to find some in our neighborhood. We still see him in the park, often say hi, but our dogs don’t get along so swell (Kaimin’s fault) so we don’t chat too often.

Some months later, we’re in Montana planning to attend the National Folk Festival in Butte. This is a big three-day affair that takes over most of uptown Butte and draws acts from all over the country, including (I noted as I read the program) a traditional Irish band called The Pride of New York. And this is not just any traditional Irish band. This is a traditional Irish superband. It’s like the piano player is the Jerry Lee Lewis of Irish piano. And the button accordion player is the Eric Clapton of button accordion players. And they all got together for the first time, for one album.

“We should hear these guys,” I said to my wyf. “The guy from Baltimore plays button accordion. I think I heard him interviewed on the radio one night. The station played his music. It’s good.”

“If he’s in Baltimore,” said the wyf, “we can hear him there.”

Which was a good practical argument, but you see where this is going. At the folk festival I’m perusing the tent where CDs are on sale, and there’s the Pride of New York, and dang … there’s a familiar face holding a button accordion.

“You know that guy who walks his dog at Double Rock?” I said to my wyf.

To make certain, we sat about twenty rows back from the stage.

And yes, it turns out our fellow Double-Rock-Park-in-Parkville-Maryland dog walker is probably the best Irish traditional button accordion player in these United States if not the world.

And we could only learn that by traveling to Butte, Montana.

Awesome smallness. Shrink-wrapped, as my friend says.

We heard half a dozen amazing performances that day, and a few more on the radio the day after. The Pride of New York, featuring Billy McComiskey who walks his dog at Double Rock Park on button accordion, topped them all. “Sian le Maigh,” a mournful tune featuring the penny whistle, drew the first heartfelt standing ovation we’d seen that day. “I hear all of Ireland’s suffering in that song,” said the wyf. This from a Dutch woman! Whose Calvinist people made their kids wear orange on St. Patrick’s Day!

So. Now you also know about The Pride of New York and Billy McComiskey. And you didn’t even have to go to Butte. But you should, anyway. Butte is Evel Knievel’s hometown and has a 1700-feet deep Superfund site that sells postcards. In such places, you might be surprised by the high trill of life’s most serendipitous melodies.

The last word, which was 'honor'

2009-07-03T22:09:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 1992, my wife and I were not yet married but living together in a cabin on the banks of the Delaware River. Each morning, we walked a mile or so on a dirt road to the town of Cochecton, N.Y., to buy a copy of The New York Times. The morning of July 4th was no different. Except that day the Times dedicated a full page to a reprint of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration was not an advertising gimmick, not sponsored, nor did it even boast “brought to you by The New York Times.” It was the Declaration with no trappings. That afternoon, sitting in rocking chairs on the porch of the cabin, Sheri and I read the Declaration out loud. We took turns, a few paragraphs for her, a few for me..

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness …”

“… He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance. …”

“… these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States …”

And by the last word, which was “honor,” we were changed.

On every Independence Day since, we’ve read the Declaration out loud. Sometimes it has just been the two of us. Often it is with friends after a breakfast of pancakes, eggs and bacon.

If you take a moment between the grilling and the fireworks to read the Declaration aloud, particularly if you read it with friends, I hope you will note the vivacity of the prose, the incisiveness of the reasoning, the passion and certainty and confidence of the spirit. Moreover, recognize that you are reading one of the first documents of a people struggling to find a new way of living that moves beyond monarchy and respects the rights of the individual. It is not perfect – its description of American’s Native peoples is shameful, and we must never forget that while declaring independence because all men were equal, some of the signatories owned slaves. Nevertheless, given the standards of the time, the fact of the document is a marvel. Add its evident power and literary grace, and it is no wonder it has become a kind of secular scripture, our Genesis.

You’ll find your own copy to read here.

Who was ours?

2009-06-26T08:28:00.000-07:00

My wife has the sense that famous people die in clumps of three. Nothing proves her idea, but here come Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, and Ed McMahon to suggest again its possibility. Much has been made in the media over Farrah and The King of Pop having been so iconic for my generation, the generation that followed the baby boomers and came of age in the mid-1970s through the 1980s.

Add David Carradine of Kung Fu fame to that bunch, and you have a trio of recently departed celebrities who influenced a generation. What do they have in common? Television. Farrah on Charlie's Angels, Michael Jackson and his Thriller videos. When I realized that TV was the common denominator, I felt a little sad and a little stupid. The generation before mine had lots of literary writers as icons: Sylvia Plath, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac. These writers influenced people's ideas, put phrases and characters into the collective consciousness. So I wondered, which writers truly influenced my generation? Which writers would our generation call iconic?

And none came to mind.

Who influenced my generation's culture? Was it only the producers of movies and TV and music, Spielberg and Lucas and Aaron Spelling and Quincy Jones? Is that how our culture was shaped?

Who did I read? Lot of writers from other generations. I read the writers who influenced the boomers. Also I read comic books. Frank Miller's Dark Knight. And lots of genre writing.

But who did we read? I could come up with only a few names. Stephen King was one. From Carrie through Salem's Lot, he was the most literary popular writer we read. But who else? Jay McInerney got lots of acclaim, but in the end had little influence. Toni Morrison? Doesn't she belong more to the boomers? Raymond Carver?

Readers of this blog, I'd like to hear your answers. In the late 1970s through the 1980s, who did people read? What writers will that generation mourn one day saying, yes, she was ours. Yes, he was ours.

What your T-shirt says about you ...

2009-05-26T09:03:00.000-07:00

... sometimes depends on where you wear it. Yesterday, while visiting a friend in D.C., I noticed a fellow waiting in line to tour Ford's Theatre where John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln in 1864. On the man's T-shirt: "I know violence isn't the answer, but I misunderstood the question."

Ka-pow!

Sun setting

2009-04-30T17:45:00.000-07:00

A fitting metaphor: When I stepped outdoors tonight to bring in our American flag for the evening, I noticed litter on my sidewalk. When I fetched it, I discovered it was the sort of plastic sleeve that usually holds an edition of the morning newspaper. Except this sleeve was empty.

A sad, sad day. The Baltimore Sun management laid of nearly a third of its newsroom staff today in what is already being called a massacre. Early reports suggest that security escorted editors out of the building. The Sun even laid off employees who were out covering an Orioles game.

To think this city once supported three major daily newspapers! If the laid off employees somehow start their own newspaper, I'll sign up for a subscription. Or two. We deserve their good work and they deserve better.

Monty Cook, the editor of the Sun, is a villain for overseeing these layoffs. I agree with David Simon, who created The Wire and used to work for the Sun, who reportedly wrote that Cook should have resigned before overseeing this bloodbath.

As for Sam Zell, the head of the Tribune Co. that owns the Sun, he's worse.

The Tucson Citizen publishes "day-to-day." The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is online only. The Detroit papers have reduced their daily delivery. And the Rocky Mountain News has folded. This grim recitation doesn't count the many other news organizations -- from small-circulation weeklies to the New York Times -- that have reduced operations, laid off jouranlists or closed up shop.

Yes, the news industry is in trouble. Yes, advertising revenue is shrinking. But if greedy fools like Zell hadn't driven up stock prices for newspapers in the 1990s and into the 21st century by taking out loans to pay for the privilege of ownership, many newspapers would be hampered now, but surviving. The Sun's layoffs, and the collapse of daily news journalism in the United States, is less about an industry failing to adequately change its business model to suit new technology than it is the greed of people who believed that newspapers would be cash cows for decades and were willing to overpay for the chance to milk.

What is there to do? Cancel our subscription? That will only hasten the end. But how else does a reader protest that the newspaper isn't offering enough to read?

The best coverage of the Sun massacre is at the blog The Real Muck. Read the details there.

Gumbo and the Maryland Writers' Association

2009-04-30T12:11:00.001-07:00

No, not the soupy food spiced New Orleans style.

I mean the wet, soupy, slippery clay that makes the meaniest, knobbiest, most macho truck tires spin. I'm using that sort of gumbo as a metaphor when I speak Saturday, May 9, at 9 a.m. at the Maryland Writers' Association annual conference in Linthicum Heights, Maryland. The conference is a whole day affair that will include good writing advice from folks as talented as young adult novelist Elissa Brent Weissman and screenwriter David Warfield and general all-around lit-champion Gregg Wilhelm of City Lit in Baltimore.

My talk is called "Four-Wheel Drive Writing: Overcoming Writer's Block."

Excuse me, now, while I go write the thing.

The Sporting Pages

2009-04-25T13:30:00.000-07:00

The newest issue of The Writer's Chronicle includes an essay I wrote about how sports work in literature. My examples range from "The Funeral Games of Patroclus" in The Iliad to the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa, from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to Deirdre McNamer’s lovely novel, One Sweet Quarrel. Here’s an essay excerpt:

"Beauty, danger, stress, action, character revelation. Literature and sports are natural siblings. I’m always troubled that some smart, literary people (readers and writers) don’t see that relationship and disdain sports, whether in real life or on the page. A risk writers face in choosing sports as a subject is that a reader will prejudge such work as silly or slight. Some readers, I’m sure, passed over this article the moment they noticed “sport” in the title. I have met fellow literary travelers who proclaim sports to be confusing, a waste of time, and something to deride; these are often people who resent the adulation associated with sports and the money that follows, who see sports as celebrating body over mind (“Why don’t thousands of cheering fans show up for readings?”). I’m no longer surprised by this attitude, but I still don’t understand it. There exist curious readers and writers who will delight in arcanum gathered from a Paul Theroux travelogue, or in the mysteries of glove making revealed in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, who will immediately turn from a book that has a football on the cover. Don’t they understand, I cry out to the ghosts of Shoeless Joe and Pistol Pete and the Four Horsemen (no, no, the other four horsemen), that the games we play and watch and write about are complicated dramatic works with protagonists, antagonists, rising action, climax and denouement, in which acts are periods or quarters or halves, and in which characters don’t know the script, scripts that are often tragic because athletes fail more often than they succeed?"

The Writer’s Chronicle is difficult to find on newsstands, as it is mostly a benefit of belonging to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, aka AWP. But hey, maybe you should join?

Libby, Mont., and the 27s

2009-04-16T19:47:00.000-07:00

Recently, two fine writers and journalists who studied in classes I taught at the University of Montana have found their way onto National Public Radio Programs. Tristan Scott (Journalism 270, Beginning Reporting) is a reporter for the Missoulian newspaper in Missoula, Mont. He spoke on All Things Considered about a trial he’s covering in which prosecutors seek some form of justice for the people of Libby, Mont. More than a few people in Libby have died or suffered from exposure to asbestos that was a byproduct of a local mining operation run by an out-of-state company (Maryland’s W.R. Grace Co.).

Meanwhile, Eric Segalstad (Graduate Reporting) has co-authored a book about the 27s, the club no one wants to belong to. Its members are all music stars, mostly rockers with a bluesman or two thrown in, who died at age 27. Among the roster: Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison. Segalstad was interviewed on All Things Considered about the book, which also got a mention on the Washington Post’s blog about death, “Post Mortem,” though you have to scroll down to find that one.

HimPlus17 and the Art of Blogging

2009-04-11T04:32:00.000-07:00

Those of you who have read this blog regularly know that there is no such thing as reading this blog regularly. My posts are irregular, sometimes frequent and sometimes not. There's neither rhyme nor reason to what I post here. I just write whatever strikes my fancy whenever my fancy is struck.

It's no way to run a blog. I know this.

I'm doing much better on a new effort over at http:himplus17.blogspot.com

HimPlus17 is a blog I'm writing jointly with my wife, Sheri Venema. She's 17 years older than me. Always has been (except for a couple of months each year when she's only 16 years older). And we've been married nearly 16 years. We're trying to do a much better job with that blog than I've done with The Greatest Show. We post at least once a week, and we try to invite readers to participate now and then as good blogs do.

But mostly, we're writing about the phenomenon of the Older Woman/Younger Man dynamic, the truths and falsehoods behind the Cougar craze, and what it's like for an Older Woman/Younger Man to age together. We're revealing things we sometimes haven't even told each other. Some day, we plan to explore these ideas and scenes and experiences even more fully in essays, and maybe (no promises) put them in a book.

In the meantime, though you're invited to peek into our marriage. Follow us. Leave a message in the comments.

And don't think I'm giving up on The Greatest Show. It will remain the same idiosyncratic mix of information, musings and confusions, posted at irregular intervals ...

Uranium, Diamonds, Tom Zoellner and The Daily Show

2009-03-28T05:02:00.001-07:00

Readers of this blog (both of you; Hi Mom!) might remember that last spring I mentioned a book called The Heartless Stone, by Tom Zoellner, which chronicles the social, geologic and political history of diamonds with plenty of details about marketing, violence, marriage and hip hop. Tom visited a class of mine at Towson University and gave a great reading from his book. He's a helluva reporter and storyteller, and his new book, Uranium, is generating lots of attention.

That attention includes an appearance for Tom on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He's scheduled for this Thursday, April 2. I'll bet he fares better than Jim Cramer did.

Cities as Unreliable Narrators

2009-03-13T06:52:00.000-07:00

What follows is the presentation I made at the 2009 conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs in Chicago. The panel was called "Alive and Coarse and Strong and Cunning" after a line from Carl Sandberg's poem about Chicago, and the panel's subject was how great works of nonfiction have turned cities into characters. For my presentation, I discussed how cities can be considered unreliable narrators, a concept that in fiction usually applies to first-person characters, but in nonfiction can help transform cities into characters. I used Odessa, Texas as depicted in Buzz Bissinger's classic book Friday Night Lights.

Cities tell their own stories. When I lived in Hartford, Conn., my hometown, the story was an Eeyore-like tale: “We’re halfway between Boston and New York, and we’re not as good as either place; nobody loves us.” And that story wasn’t true.

In Missoula, Mont., where I lived for a while, the city’s self-told story could be summed up as “We’re a diverse and tolerant community!” which also wasn’t quite true, except in the kind of diversity that exists in a community that’s 95 percent white (Columbia fleece or North Face?)
In Baltimore, where I now live, there are benches with lovely, dark stained, laquered wood, and each marked along one backslat with white decal letters proclaiming: “Baltimore: The Greatest City in America.”

You know and I know that Baltimore is no such thing. Fun and quirky and violent? Yes. But the Greatest City in America?

Which means, I think, that Baltimore, Missoula, and Hartford can all be understood as unreliable narrators.

Which also means each is a setting behaving in a way we’ve come to expect of characters.
Many years ago, I heard a writer talk about the qualities of a good character in literary nonfiction. Number one, he said, the character has to be a talker. A storyteller. Someone who says interesting things in interesting ways. This made sense to me. When I was a newspaper sports writer, we used to call such people “quote monsters.”

Likewise, when a writer considers whether to treat a city as a character, the writer needs to know whether the city has something interesting to say, and then note whether the city tells its interesting thing – or somehow expresses it – in an interesting way. Oftentimes what a city expresses is a narrative that explains what the city is and who its people are or want to be. That narrative, the story people agree to live to become part of a community, lies at the heart of the city’s character.

This relationship of story, city and character becomes clear reading Buzz Bissinger’s contemporary classic, Friday Night Lights. First published in 1990, the book brought high school football in Texas – and more specifically high school football in the city of Odessa – into the national consciousness. Bissinger examines the story Odessa tells about itself, finds the city’s narrative to be unreliable, then explores the contradictions and tensions inherent in any story that’s told by an unreliable narrator. All the questions that come into play with an unreliable narrator apply to Odessa: What can we believe? What should we doubt? What’s the story the character – the city – knows but keeps secret? What story does the character – the city – fear people will learn? What aspects of its own story is the character unable to see? What parts can’t fit into the narrative, so are ignored?

The story Odessa tells about itself is simple and shows how the city identifies with its scrappy high school football team. “They were a classic bunch of overachievers,” Bissinger writes. “What made those boys great on the football field had made the fans great as well. Just as the boys had produced against all odds, so they” [the people of Odessa] “had produced in the oil field against all odds, not with brains and fancy talk but with brawn and muscle and endurance and self-sacrifice.” (p. 103)

Bissinger, a Pulitzer-Prize winning literary journalist, knows to doubt that story. A character – like a bench in Baltimore – might say “Greatest City in America” but the boarded-up tenement nearby suggests “A city that needs help.” A character – like a real person -- might say, “Yes, we’d love it if you stay,” but mean “for God’s sake go home now,” or a character might say “I love Lolita” and hope that it’s not heard as “I raped an adolescent orphan girl” as Humbert Humbert does in Lolita. And, characters, like real people, sometimes reveal more through body language and actions than they do through words. Likewise, a city has its official narrative – often told by people in power – but the city can’t help itself; it always reveals more than the official line. The nonfiction writer needs to recognize both lines of a city’s story: the one intentionally told and the one told without intention. The conflict between the two, in a work of literary nonfiction, is a helpful source of dramatic tension.

How does a city tell its story?

With great variety. Let’s start with a lesson offered in the Gospels of both Luke and Matthew: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

Money. Few actions reveal the character of a community better than its spending. I’m talking official expenditures made through government agencies, but also what people buy. Tom Wolfe points us toward this, too, encouraging writers to study a character’s “status life,” though his observations are sometimes criticized for applying socio-economic demographics in place of character.

Bissinger doesn’t do that. In Friday Night Lights, he reveals that Odessa’s economy is wounded, perhaps mortally, because west Texas can’t compete against OPEC nations in the oil market. Nevertheless, Odessa’s school district paid twenty thousand dollars for charter flights to send its high school football team to away games. The school district built a $5.6 million stadium “with seating for 19,032, and a full-time caretaker who lived in a house on the premises” (p. 42). Bissinger also tells us that at the high school the cost for boy’s medical supplies “was $6,750.” For teaching materials in the English department, the school spent nearly two grand less. The salary for an English teacher with twenty years experience and a master’s degree was $32,000, while the football coach, who taught no classes, earned $48,000 plus the use of a “new Taurus sedan each year.” (p. 145). As for household purchases, some folk in Odessa bought black toilet seats because the team’s color was black.

What else? Bissinger lets Odessa tell its story through at least five other forms of self-expression:

• its history
• anecdotes about its people
• recorded or observed facts
• statistics other than spending
and
• Testimony and witness

Taken one a time:
ONE -- History: In the city library, the book that records the history of Odessa football is thicker than the one that records the history of Odessa itself. Also, a Wall of Fame in the high school honoring the best school boy football players depicts all white kids but one until 1982. After the Odessa schools were desegregated, the faces of African-American athletes appeared on the wall with greater regularity. Meanwhile, white Odessa worked hard to pretend desegregation never happened.

TWO -- Anecdotes about people: Bissinger tells of a player’s day at school, where he’s confronted with such headscratchers as a question about what should be listed first on a menu: shrimp cocktail or Jell-O salad (p. 130). In another anecdote, Bissinger tells of a former player whose body was never big enough for football, and how years later “he felt it during the mornings when he couldn’t bend over to tie his shoes” (p. 281).

THREE -- Recorded or observed facts: Police escort the team bus to home games with lights flashing so the bus won’t have to stop at stoplights. Another: after a loss, the football coach finds “For Sale” signs punched into his front lawn. (p. 238).

FOUR -- Other statistics: In Friday Night Lights, these include unemployment rates, SAT scores, attendance at games, the numbers of victories each year, soaring rental vacancy rates, plunging oil prices, and population demographics.

FIVE – Testimony and witness: Among those who believe the city’s narrative is a 17-year-old football player who looks around his city and observes, “We got two things in Odessa. Oil and football. And oil’s gone. But we still got football, so fuck the rest of you.” But an Odessa native in exile as a lawyer in Houston, notes that “Odessa has an unspeakable ability to bullshit itself.”
In the end, we’re left with a sense that the story Odessa tells about itself – that it succeeds against all odds, not with brains and fancy talk but with brawn and endurance and self-sacrifice – allows it to ignore its own failings including underperforming students, virulent racism, an inability to judge itself by any standard except football, and a murder rate that for years placed it among the worst cities in America. But Odessa is a character, after all, obsessed, complicated, not easy to pin down, and Bissinger reminds us that the narrative – the myth renewed in the seasonal rituals of football – has been necessary. In the book’s climax, as Odessa’s team is pitted against a more talented team from Dallas in the semifinals of the state playoffs, Bissinger lets the reader in on his understanding of this character called Odessa. Yes, the city has built an elaborate lie about itself and about its football team, and yes, Odessa sacrifices more than seems reasonable for the construction of this lie. But right now, Odessa’s boys can win with a touchdown, and the reader, just like the fans, players and coaches, wants Odessa to score that touchdown. The reader grabs hold of the thing that unites Odessa’s people behind their narrative, the one feeling that enables them to live in a place so terrible and somehow keep on with the business of living. In the stands, Bissinger writes,

Fingers were crossed. Eyes were raised to the dull gray sky. In the cavernous stadium, the cheers seemed distant, tinny. But there was hope, because there had to be.
That was the very point of it all. (p. 326)

Ozark: Requiescat in pace

2009-03-10T18:15:00.001-07:00

Joy. Hope. Renewal.

2009-01-20T06:15:00.000-08:00

BWC 17: The Condor meets Bart Simpson

2008-10-28T05:09:00.000-07:00

This year I'm fortunate to help organize the 17th annual Baltimore Writers' Conference, a daylong gathering where writers who have published and writers who haven't drift around like bees in a garden of words, cross pollinating every which way. This is how amazing the conference can be: We've got the author of Six Days of the Condor, and a novelist who spent four years writing scripts for The Simpsons, and a short story writer who has won two of the major awards given solely to short story collections.

I'm eager to hear Bruce Jacobs, who wrote Race Manners and Race Manners for the 21st Century. In his book, first published in the 1990s, he described ways in which race can be discussed with candor and generosity of spirit. I've heard him speak before, and he's smart and kind. Another highlight will be sitting next to Lia Purpura as we run a panel about creative nonfiction. Lia is a poet and essayist, and she comes at creative nonfiction as a lyricist. As a nonfiction writer with a journalism background, I love reading and listening to the nonfiction writers who approach the genre from a lyrical, poetic stance. The workmanlike moth astonished by the butterfly, that sort of thing.

The whole shebang starts early in the morning on Saturday, Nov. 8, at Towson University. Be you moth or butterfly or bee, if you'd care to register, visit the BWC Web site.

An Apple for Mr. Hall!

2008-10-15T07:15:00.000-07:00

If you read House of Good Hope, you remember Joshua Hall, the young man (pictured right, from his senior high school yearbook) who grew up to live out his promise to live in Hartford and help the city by any means necessary. Joshua, a smart, passionate young man, became Mr. Hall, a smart, passionate social studies teacher at Weaver High School. He's been doing great work at the school, and his efforts are being rewarded by the good women of Iota Phi Lamba sorority, who will honor Joshua at their annual "Apple for the Teacher" award luncheon on November 15 at the Chowder Pot restaurant on Hartford's Brainard Road. Joshua will be among eight teachers recognized for contributions that have been significant to "educating children and making schools better."

You can read more about Joshua since his appearance in House of Good Hope here.

I've seen Joshua at work in the classroom. He is disciplined in his mission to teach students important lessons about America and life. He's a role model in the best sense, and I'm delighted that he is being recognized for his good work.

"It's Really Odd Being the Minister's Wife."

2008-10-10T08:56:00.000-07:00

My students tittered. Some shook their heads as if no words could explain how weird the world is. I’d just told them that I’m an ordained minister and that I was off for a weekend to officiate at a wedding in Montana. Their looks said, “You’re making this up, right?”

I was not. I explained how a friend had asked me to officiate at her Montana wedding; all I’d need, she said, is ordination, which I could get via the Universal Life Church and its Web site, and like water to wine I’d be legal to solemnize the union of Courtney Lowery and Jacob Cowgill. Once I agreed, Courtney made jokes about me being a fake minister, called me “Reverend” and “Rev.” But I knew she was serious, too, and that my responsibility was to be sincere.

The idea of me as Man of God flustered me. I am not devotedly religious. At best, I can be described as a lapsed Roman Catholic. As a teacher, I hesitate to preach so as not to seem too much the scold. As a writer, I explore sin and human failing more than virtue and piousness. Moreover, my heart beats in a medieval, superstitious way. I’ve read Dante, and as a former altar boy who once served the Papists, I understand fully the punishment priests said awaits the blasphemer, the price of worshipping outside the doctrines that accompanied my baptism. When I joked with students about my trepidations, a nice fellow from the back row, with a broad face and an Irish last name, made it clear he understood, too. He said:

“You are so going to Hell.”

Maybe. But first I had plane tickets to Montana.

Courtney and Jacob chose for their wedding a lovely Montana site: an old ranch, with a red-board and stone barn (see picture), half a mile from fenced off black hills of coal and sky-high smoke stacks. Nothing says Montana quite like rural Romanticism mixed with rapacious industry.

Much of my work as minister had already happened, which was to help Courtney and Jacob write and edit the ceremony. We’d met, we’d talked, we’d even discussed how much God to include. Courtney and Jacob aren’t atheists, but their beliefs are perhaps as vague and ill-defined as my own. But, yes, they wanted God. So I took their ideas to my laptop and spent more than a few mornings mulling over marriage, Montana, and the love Courtney and Jacob shared. What I’d written comprised the bulk of the ceremony.

The wedding spot was a little plot of land by Prickly Pear Creek, south of the state capital at Helena, where cottonwoods broke up the sunlight into jewels that alighted on people’s faces. The wedding day started cloudy, but miraculously(!) the clouds gave way just as Courtney began her bridal march, her farmer father alongside in crisp blue jeans, bolo tie and Western vest, an image even more iconic than Clint Eastwood’s cowboys, because Clyde Lowery is the real deal. He walked with his daughter, and she came to Jacob in sunlight, and in sunlight they made their union. Many guests – my wife, Sheri, among them -- filled more than a dozen rows, and I nearly shouted the words so I could be heard in back. Because I shouted, because I concentrated to recite the words correctly and in the right order, I felt less an agent of something numinous than I did an emcee, a movie’s director, an enforcer of decorum and solemnity, whose role was to make certain people stood where they must stand, that the rings were safe, that players knew their roles. Soon, when the ceremony ended, I would become a bureaucrat, gathering the signatures of witnesses to make legal the license.

How I felt, of course, didn’t matter. I had to trust that the love and grace I had known when writing the ceremony still existed in the words, that the words I’d chosen and ordered carried their own spiritual heft, and that Courtney and Jacob, if no one else, would feel their power. I wanted them to have that gift. I hoped they would.

Here is the gift they gave me.

They had written their own vows, which I hadn’t read. They memorized their words, and spoke them, not profaning the words and sentiments by lifting their voices. They spoke clearly, beautifully. Jacob started, and when Courtney cried to hear him it was all I could do to stand in witness. Courtney’s words followed, and as Jacob teared up, so did I. What thing in any church could be more holy. Few guests could hear as Courtney and Jacob spoke, but I hope they felt, as I did, all the grace of love and joy and patience that radiated from the man and woman we’d gathered to celebrate.

That moment cleared away all doubts and confusions about my performing the role of reverend. If now I stand accused in the eyes of any true believer of a blasphemy, let it be so. If by being an accomplice to such joy, I have sinned, I am the happiest of sinners.

At the reception, we ate in the barn from bounty raised by Jacob at the farm where he works. Sheri and I square danced following the directions of a retired school teacher who had taught Courtney in elementary school. We talked with old friends, and with new ones, but mostly we wandered about, a little off balance. Sheri had said to me the night before, at the rehearsal dinner, “It’s odd being the minister’s wife,” and this from a woman who has known Courtney as well and as long as I have. What Sheri meant was that we were participating in a wedding in a way we never had, and that it was strange to be unaligned with family, not to be old college pals in the wedding party, nor casual friends who show for the ceremony, sit in the back, offer congratulations, eat and leave. We -- or I -- had played a necessary and important role, but also stood strangely outside the life of the wedding. Sensing this, we left early each night, quietly stepping into the backround, leaving the hardcore revelry to others, which seems to me the final kindness and final burden of all our solemn celebrants.

Mark Twain might laugh, bitterly ..

2008-09-19T06:37:00.000-07:00

at the news that his house, long an icon in Hartford, is in dire financial trouble and in danger of shutting its doors. Or maybe he wouldn't. It's hard to say, because Twain was such a complicated fellow. He loved the his Victorian Gingerbread Tiffany-filled house with its trick doors and solarium and children's wing where his daughters played. But he also was the keenest American observer of our own human follies and hubris. He nearly bankrupted himself in that house, and he'd appreciate the parallel irony that the house has almost bankrupted other people who love it. The Twain House management apparently overreached a bit in a grand plan to modernize the grounds, adding a lovely gallery and cafeteria and shop, among other things like administrative offices. Read it about it in this article from the New York Times.

Still, Hartford needs the house, and American literary culture needs the house, and if the administrators overreached they did so for the right reasons. That's why authors from throughout the region are gathering this coming week for a reading in support of the house. Please, if you are nearby, go. If you are not and can afford to send a little money, do that, too. Twain was, according to Hemingway, the first true American writer. He was the first writer to put the American vernacular to artistic use in the novel. Let's not wait around for the Federal Reserve to bail out the house and preserve Twain's legacy. Because it won't. It's up to us.

Ralph Nader, Wally Lamb and Moi

2008-08-31T06:49:00.000-07:00

House of Good Hope is a finalist for the Connecticut Book Awards in the Biography and Memoir category. Other finalists are Ralph Nader's memoir about growing up Winsted, Connecticut, and a collection of essays written by women in prison edited by Wally Lamb. I won't be able to attend the awards ceremony to hang out with the likes of Stewart O'Nan, a finalist for his rich gem of a novel Last Night at the Lobster, but I'm missing the ceremony for the very best of reasons. Friends Courtney Lowery and Jacob Cowgill are getting married in Montana, and I've been granted the privilege of officiating at their ceremony and pronouncing them husband and wife.

But if any of y'all would like to go to the Connecticut Book Awards or reception to follow, the good news is you can! Here's the info you need:

When? Sept. 21, 2 p.m.
Where? The atrium of the Hartford Public Library on Main Street in downtown Hartford
How much? FREE!
Free? Really? Well, the awards ceremony is. A reception and book signing to follow is $40. Get tickets by calling 860.695.6320 by September 15.

Truck No. 3915

2008-08-18T11:26:00.000-07:00

Today I finished after two months -- yes, two months -- I finished reading Don DeLillo's book Underworld, which is a tremendous book, a really great American novel, a category of book that is good to have because though there will never be a single great American novel there are many, and because we have the category we can name them and include Roth's American Pastoral and Melville's Moby Dick and Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby and Morrison's Song of Solomon and others I'm forgetting. Underworld is a great book, but what matters today is that as I read the last pages, I heard a roar outside and a clang and there were the City of Baltimore sanitation workers in their orange Tees, one driving and two riding, house by house emptying the cans we'd left out for them all up and down Sefton Ave. They rode Truck No. 3915 and they picked up the garbage that all of us had placed in bags and tied off at the tops and placed the bags in the rubber barrels that we call cans, a holdover from when there were trash cans made of metal, and the men in orange Tees took those bags and threw them all together into the back of a truck with the bags from other streets. Those bags held torn credit card slips and used condoms and weeds pulled out from between rose bushes and DVDs that didn't work anymore, and warrantees for items that didn't work anymore and love letters and religious bulletins from Methodist churches and Catholic churches but not Unitarian churches because those bulletins are placed in the recycling and this was the garbage I'm talking about here, this was our lives and that's why reading Underworld has been a very good thing, and why, even though it seems a coincidence, it is worth mentioning that as I finished the book the City of Baltimore sanitation workers cruised our street, loud and shouting, as if at a party, to take our lives, our histories, away.

High Five in Nonfiction

2008-07-15T09:10:00.000-07:00

Want to know my favorite nonfiction books? Want to know why I like 'em?

Check out the summer issue of JMWW, an exciting online literary journal published out of Baltimore by a writer who also happens to be a grad of Towson University's Professional Writing Program. Many thanks to Jen Michalski for running the site and inviting my contribution.

Featured books:
Hiroshima; The Heartless Stone; The Way to Rainy Mountain; The Year of Magical Thinking; Brothers and Keepers.

Enjoy!

Fire up above

2008-07-15T06:31:00.000-07:00

Something odd about hiking a mountain in the morning, then watching it burn in the evening. That's what happened a few days ago here in Missoula to many, many people, including me. For us, it was a hike Sheri and I took with friends Dave and Grace Kreulen, in from Michigan. We started to the south and east, in a place called Crazy Canyon, then walked until he we were on the front of Mount Sentinel, a grass-covered slope that sits and watches over the city of Missoula. We crossed the front of the mountain along a fire road to the famous white-washed, concrete M, and hiked down from there. All in all, about 2 1/2 hours to log 6 miles and some change.

While walking the fire road, I mentioned to our guests that in a few weeks people wouldn't be hiking Mount Sentinel anymore. Likely the city will close the mountain, I said, because the fire danger will be too high. These grasses dry out, and if you're up here when they're on fire it can be pretty spooky.

We parted for the afternoon, our friends back to their camper and us to our home. They arrived again for dinner around 7 p.m., and I met them at the door.

"The mountain's on fire!" said they.

And it was. We watched with binoculars as fire raced across the mountain, and sometimes just sat there and burned, as a helicopter flew over head dropping water, as men in yellow shirts dug trenches to stop that flames' advance, as the flame itself stopped when it reached the road we had hiked. A few acres less than 400 when it was done.

I wish I could say what strikes me about hiking a mountain, commenting on it burning, then watching it burn. I'm not sure, exactly. What I do know is that I'm disturbed by more than the coincidence of the events. The hike/burn/watch has something to do with the power we all had when we were children, the ability to imagine something, watch it happen, and then feel responsibility for it. "I wish Barry would break a bone" and then he does and you yourself broke the bone! Magical thinking. When the mountain burned, in a strange way, I felt suddenly tapped into a larger universe, even if I didn't understand it, even if I didn't believe in it. It existed despite me, and that's a little scary, a little exhilarating.

Read more about it at New West, my favorite Rocky Mountain news source.

And the war of 1812 was fought when?

2008-07-15T06:18:00.000-07:00

And also, what group of people were kept from coming to the United States by the Chinese Exclusionary Act?

Toughies, yes? The title question is a joke. The opener to this blog entry is a joke, too, but only in the "sad facts of life" category. To wit:

A young friend reported yesterday about a history class he's taking in summer school. A debilitating sickness knocked him out of school last semester, and he needs to get American history credits that he'd dropped.

Turns out the summer history class is less about America's past than it is about passing. The course is self taught along these lines:

1. Read a chapter
2. Complete fill-in-the-blank exercises (while looking at the chapter for the answers)
3. In class, receive a study sheet with those same fill-in-the-blanks and the correct answers (in case you couldn't find them yourself); take a half hour to review
4. Take a sheet of notes as you study the correct fill-in-the-blank answers.
5. Take the test.

This is worse than memorization. And to believe it will fulfill credits in high school American history in any school district in America is a travesty. Moreover, the test itself is my newest "sad fact of life." You might ask, What was the first question on the very first test?

What group of people were kept from coming to the United States by the Chinese Exclusionary Act?

My young friend wrote the question on a separate sheet of paper so he wouldn't forget it. He's smart enough to know that this question, given its context, has more to teach him than the answer.