Kaze: Buena Suerte, Terps!

This is a great shot, isn’t it? That’s me, looking about as happy as I’ll ever get, at a University of Maryland basketball game two weeks ago, getting my picture taken with Ivis Rodriguez and Gregorio Vasquez. They are the parents of Greivis Vasquez, the star point guard for the University of Maryland Terrapins, known to their fans as the Terps. I’ve never actually met Greivis, which may be just as well, since I habitually refer to him as the son I never had. This could, conceivably, lead to an embarrassing moment for all concerned.

But I certainly am fond of that young man. Four years ago, Ras and I went up to a little gym in Towson, Maryland, to see a high school all-star game. There we first saw Greivis, recently recruited by Maryland, a gangly kid from Venezuela with black hair and a flattened nose who spoke hardly any English but carried himself with a certain cockiness and made a lot of shots from outside the 3-point arc. Ras and I looked at each other with a wild surmise. This kid could be good.

When fall came around, word was that on the first day of practice, Greivis appeared in the door of Coach Gary Williams’s office and saluted. “Reporting for duty, sir,” he is supposed to have said. Who knows if it’s true, but it sure sounds true. The Greivis we’ve come to know is as guileless as a puppy. Coach Williams, for whom sports adjectives like intense and focused don’t begin to tell the story, must have looked up from his desk in wonderment.

But the kid really was good. Admittedly, there were quirks in his game. He played sometimes with a certain irrational exuberance. He believed utterly that his next shot would go in, even if the bunch of shots he just took did not. So he took more. He believed that the fans—both his and his opponents’—were participants in the game. He played to them. He mugged, he returned their insults, he tugged on his jersey when he made a big shot and, later in his career, developed a special shimmy of the shoulders as he ran back on defense that would have driven you crazy if he were on the other team. Ah, but you smiled.

For awhile the Terps’ own fans divided into factions—those who loved him like the son they’d never had and those who thought his high spirits, his zest for taking chances—untimely shots from great distances, risky no-look passes that flew past his teammates’ ears—made him a detriment to the team. Meanwhile, he became—simply put—the beating heart of the Terps. He led them last year—his third—in scoring, rebounding, and assists. Learning as he went along, he became not just a showman but a leader. I must add, though, that the showman part is great fun.

Greivis is a heart-on-his-sleeve kind of guy. “First of all,” he’ll say, if the Terps have won, “I wanna thank God.” If they’ve lost, he’ll take the blame. He adores Gary Williams (here's a wonderful feature on the two of them), he adores Maryland, he praises and mentors his teammates and he never—I can attest to this, having sat by his folks and his friends during the last game of the season—forgets the people he loves. Not for a moment.

Long ago, in 1966, I got to love Maryland basketball in my first year at the school. The point guard back then was—yes, indeed—Gary Williams. Now he’s 65 years old and has coached a thousand college basketball games and I’m still watching him and his team. He and Greivis are part of a game that gets into people and becomes part of the happy saga of their lives. I’ve never been sure whether Williams knows this. But I think that, instinctively, Greivis does. He’s a senior now. In two days he’ll lead his teammates into the NCAA Mens Basketball Tournament for the last time. As usual, Ras and I and our buddies Skelly and Curtis will be watching together. As I told Greivis’s folks, who came up from Caracas to watch him and who speak only Spanish, “Buena suerte, Terps!”

That’s Gary Williams in the middle photo and Greivis, of course, in the lower one. Squint and you can see me in the stands behind him, with my daughters Tory and Elizabeth to my right. Crazy old coot.

Blog of Week: Steven Pressfield

Steven Pressfield is an ex-Marine who approaches writing as if he were a warrior. See his 2002 book The War of Art for the fullest account of this philosophy and the story of how it took him 17 years to get his first paycheck as a writer.

Pressfield long ago hit the big time, though, as a novelist and screenwriter. His historical novel Gates of Fire, about the 300 Spartans holding that pass at Thermopylae, has become a classic, taught in military colleges everywhere. His 1995 novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, turned into a hit Hollywood movie.

Pressfield’s blog is mainly about Afghanistan, but the part we really like is "Writing Wednesdays." Once a week Pressfield brings to bear all his experience on a writing problem. As a blogger, he’s savvy, clear, and, as you might expect, forceful. His latest post on “Writing for a Star” exemplifies his virtues.

And here’s vintage Pressfield on that vital quality he calls “Depth of Work”:

“You have to be a little crazy to be a writer or an artist or an entrepreneur. A certain breed of insanity is required to chase a dream or to seek to bring into manifestation something that only you see or hear. …

“How do you know how crazy you are? By how genuinely nuts you get when you’re NOT doing (or not being allowed to do) what being crazy makes you want to do in the first place.

“But this state of mind isn’t really crazy. It comes from the gods. It’s a species of divine madness. Socrates called the poetic variety of this condition ‘possession by the Muses’ (and rated it superior to technical mastery), though he could have referred with equal accuracy to seizure by any Olympian deity. When this kind of nuttiness grabs us, we are possessed by forces we can’t name and can’t see, can’t measure or quantify, and whose very existence is doubted by much of the conventional world.

“But this state of possession is real, as anyone who has experienced it will testify–and so are the forces that inflict it on us. What do these forces demand? First and foremost, they want depth. They require of us passion, authenticity, courage, stubbornness and commitment over time. They want us. They want everything we’ve got.”

Kaze: Keats, Tim Buckley, and the Thrush's Song

I heard it said once that an artist is a young man who gives up the quest for wealth, fame, and beautiful women to pursue his art, whereby he hopes to gain wealth, fame, and beautiful women.

I wrote a few weeks ago about John Keats, who at 19 gave up everything for poetry. Keats was born in 1795. When he was in his teens, the most famous man in Europe—next to Napoleon—was a poet: George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron. A sensitive young man with the creative spark and a yearning after fame had Byron as his model. He picked up a pen.

When I was in my teens, Byron was, of course, long dead, and poetry—as a meaningful part of popular culture—was all but defunct. A sensitive young man with the creative spark and a yearning after fame had Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly, and, soon enough, the Beatles and Bob Dylan as his models. He picked up a guitar.

So, I’ve always wondered: If Keats had been born in my generation, would he have formed the Kinks?

Which leads me to wondering about someone else—one of the many singer-songwriters who emerged after Dylan in the 1960s: Tim Buckley. A beautiful curly-headed boy with a tenor of incredible range. He played a Martin 12-string. Because I encountered him and Keats at about the same time, and each as a rapturous discovery, they’re often paired in my thoughts to this day.



They were both so young. They were freakishly gifted, and they developed startlingly fast, and while one could have chosen to write poems, and the other to record albums, that were more likely to fetch a living and make them popular, they chose instead to search for the art that was uniquely theirs. I’m sure they yearned for wealth, fame, and beautiful women, but the art is what fired them.

They died obscure: Keats, never famous while he lived, of tuberculosis, at 25. Buckley, popular at first but punished for his musical innovations, of drugs, at 28.

John Keats: 1795-1821. Tim Buckley: 1947-1975.

Why the big deal over these two—I mean, why the big deal for me? Because we long for a voice, especially when we are young. And when we are young, the artist who has the voice we would have, if only we’d been so blessed, is the next best thing. I think it was the naturalist/essayist Loren Eiseley who wrote of the need the thrush has to sing in the trees: “Thrush here!” That’s what we want to do on our own, and what is done on our behalf, sometimes, by particular artists. In our gratitude we love them.

I’m going to assume that the appreciation of those who sing on our behalf has always been a part of humankind, though the poem or the song that sounds like our own voice has differed with the culture and the era. If John Keats were somehow able to listen to Tim Buckley, would it sound like music to him, or mere noise? What are the odds that Tim Buckley would have read “Ode on Melancholy” and said, “I can dig that?”

I’ll also assume that you, today, have artists of your own, whether on a yellowing page of a book or in the original vinyl or in your mind’s eye from that matinee performance of years ago, who produce the song you would sing if only you could. Who are they?

Before too long, I’ll tell you more about Tim Buckley’s career. In the meantime, you can watch the video of an early song of his called "Happy Time," from 1968.

Ras: Good Reads

You Say You Want a Revolution

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields – a plaint that mainstream realistic fiction has reached a dead end and needs to be replaced by memoirs, essays, and other reality-based forms – is causing quite a stir in the literary world. A few weeks back Good Reads linked to Shields’s interview in The Rumpus, but only recently have the heavyweight literati weighed in.

Luc Sante in the New York Times Book Review rather likes Shields and his determined upending of the novel’s fruit cart: “His book may not presage sweeping changes in the immediate future, but it probably heralds what will be the dominant modes in years and decades to come. The essay will come into its own and cease being viewed as the stepchild of literature. Some version of the novel will endure as long as gossip and daydreaming do, but maybe it will become more aerated and less controlling.”

The New Yorker’s magisterial book reviewer James Wood has his doubts: “His complaints about the tediousness and terminality of current fictional convention are well-taken: it is always a good time to shred formulas. But the other half of his manifesto, his unexamined promotion of what he insists on calling ‘reality’ over fiction, is highly problematic.”

Laura Miller in Salon points out that Shields is quite taken with his own bomb-throwing tactics: “The novel is dead to him, but so what? Can't he just go off and write whatever he wants to write without climbing up on a soapbox to make a speech about it? How does this offbeat preference of his merit a book-length manifesto? Why does this book exist?”

Well! There’s nothing more exciting than a good literary scrap. We’ve reserved Reality Hunger at the local library and will soon enough see for ourselves.

The Art of Dialogue
Back in the 1960s and ‘70s Frederic Raphael wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for Darling and “Glittering Prizes” – still one of the top 10 British TV series ever – so when he talks about masters of dialogue it’s worth listening. Here’s his top 10 list from Petronius to John O’Hara and Ivy Compton-Burnett. "Dialogue in a novel is like stained glass,” Raphael writes. “The surrounding prose is there to frame and support it.”
The Guardian

Politically Incorrect Fiction

We maintain a big-tent approach to story telling here at 317am, so the title above grabbed our attention. It’s a piece by David Forsmark on novels that challenge the mainstream media about many things, but mainly guns. Exhibit A is I, Sniper, the latest tale of ex-Vietnam sniper Bob Lee Swagger written by Stephen Hunter, an ex-Washington Post film critic who can crank colorful prose with the best. Back in Clint Eastwood’s youth, Dirty Harry spoke for this crowd and it’s well to remember the macho men have some powerful stories to tell.
Front Page

Confessions of a Hack
“To become a successful hack, a writer must have a basic enthusiasm for the genre,” said Stacey Jay one night not so long ago at the University of Central Arkansas. Jay, a local writer who specializes in erotic romance novels and young adult fiction (different pen names, of course), makes her living by writing, according to the student reporter’s account of her talk. When we said big tent, we meant it.

The Echo

China’s First Twitter Novel

OK, it’s a worldwide tent. Lian Yue, a Chinese blogger and social critic, plans to write a novel in 120-character bursts. The protagonist of 2020 will be a middle-aged bureaucrat who becomes head of the Communist Party’s propaganda department in one city. Yue is not discouraged by the fact that Twitter is banned in China and that the authorities will certainly dislike his book.
The Wall Street Journal (Digital)

Writers on Writing: Ian McEwan

"I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive. But comedy in a more general sense, yes. It lets you play round at the edges of realism. You can be a little more breezy, slightly push the boat out on plot, be slightly less sober in evaluations of the possible."

From a recent Guardian interview with Ian McEwan

(Thanks to Annnalena McAfee for use of the photo.)

Ras: My Dark Data - Screenplay Titles

You can learn a lot from an experiment with negative results – one that doesn’t support the theory that generated it. Because these results seldom get published, scientists call them “dark data.” In last week’s post I talked about three elements of a good title. This week I’d like to dissect one of my many disasters in writing for what it can tell us about titles.

Some years back a writing partner (not Kaze) and I tried our hands at a screenplay. Our idea was to analyze the elements of Hollywood thrillers and then cold-bloodedly craft a screenplay that fit the bill. Forget art, we swore. We’ll learn to write screenplays by attempting the most commercial one we can possibly imagine. May as well have something saleable, we thought.

In the end we did get that screenplay on paper and my partner did attempt to peddle it to Hollywood. It was the tale of a streetwise good guy, who would ideally be played by Denzel Washington, up against an evil-genius madman – a Hannibal Lector-type sicko with a yen for mass murder. The climactic moment is a duel between our hero piloting a blimp and the villain flying an ultralight over a rally on the Mall in Washington, DC, with the intention of spraying the crowds below with weaponized smallpox.

Writers on Writing: Zadie Smith

1 When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

2 When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

3 Don't romanticise your "vocation". You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no "writer's lifestyle". All that matters is what you leave on the page.

Zadie Smith, from a recent Guardian article, "10 Rules for Writing Fiction"

Kaze: James Salter, Burning the Days

Tomorrow night, Narrative is holding a fundraiser in San Francisco. If you haven’t read Narrative online, you really must. Anne Beattie and a younger, emerging writer, Anthony Marra, will be two of the attractions. But James Salter will also be there. If you haven’t read James Salter, stop right now. Click here and read “Last Night.”

Aren’t you glad you did? Wasn’t that a thunder clap of a story? I feel about Salter the way 10-year-olds once felt about Mickey Mantle.

He writes terrific short stories. But I prefer his novels, which as novels are not perfect but contain magic. By which I mean that James Salter, drawing on the same vocabulary available to the rest of us, somehow manages to select and configure words so that each particular one feels as if it's finally found its proper place. Give him the pages of a novel to work with, to fill with physical detail, with charged moments, and he’ll awe you. Read the description of a train ride out of Paris that opens A Sport and a Pastime: You’ll see.

That said, it turns out that my most cherished work of his is not a novel, but a memoir. He calls it Burning the Days: Recollection. And yes, it is clearly selective, a picking and choosing among the stuff of a single life, his own—West Point, indelible friends, the flying, officers’ wives, the hotels in Paris and Rome and New York, movie people, the nights—remade through his particular gift into something magnified, fully lived.

As it happens, I first read Burning the Days in Paris, and later I took it to Rome and reread it there, and I’ve reread it three other times. Are you beginning to get the picture?

A few years ago, Salter was here in Washington DC for a reading. I’m not much for these things, but this time I went early, determined to get a seat up close. It was good that I did. By the time James Salter was introduced, the bookstore was full, standing-room only, the front door propped open so that the overflow could hear him from the sidewalk. I felt the giddy relief that obsessives will experience when surrounded by other obsessives of the same ilk.

Salter charmed us all.  He read a story of his. He's an old guy, but he's holding up just fine. Sparking blue eyes. He was a fighter pilot in Korea, the dashing officer, then years on the Continent in the company of writers, filmmakers, elegant women—always somehow living well. More than well. It shows in his demeanor, the worldliness.

None of which would matter that much to me if he could not write the way he does.

Question time came: my opportunity. I said, “What if you looked at Burning the Days like a novel, with this Salter fellow as the protagonist? Would you say as the author that you ‘got’ him, that you nailed him?”

He gave a startled smile. He said he hadn’t thought about it.  But he liked the question and gave me a considered response. “All in all, I think I came close.”

He remembered me a little while later when I went up to have him sign a book.  He asked, “Are you a writer?”

And I...well, I am a grown man. But it was just like—and I mean just like—I was 10 years old and Mickey Mantle was autographing my glove and asking, “You play ball, kid?”

And all I can think of to say right now is, "Nothing like I wish.  But I could watch you play all day.”

Here’s an interview about Burning the Days that Salter did in 1997 with Charlie Rose.

Kaze: Time to Write

In 1974, Doris Betts was fortyish, a handsome southern woman with dark hair pulled into a pony tail and sparkling eyes. She used a black cigarette holder to dramatic effect. Doris was a real writer—prolific, humane, a wrestler with the big questions. She taught creative writing at Chapel Hill and headed the freshman English program. I was a graduate teaching assistant at the time and was attempting to impart my vast knowledge to freshmen. I was terrible. But I had showed Doris a short story of mine and she’d liked it, so I felt toward her very much like a duckling toward its mother.

One day I went in to tell Doris that I’d be leaving.

“Why would you do that?” she said.

I had been in college since, oh, puberty. At 24, it had finally dawned on me that if I hung around a couple of more years and got my PhD in English, I could look forward to maybe editing copy at Popular Mechanics or teaching business writing in a community college somewhere along that river where they filmed Deliverance.

I had bigger dreams. So I told her this:

“I need more time to write.”

Doris shook her head, her eyes full of motherly understanding. She got up and hugged me.

“Honey,” she said. “There’s never time to write.”

I left school anyway, but of course Doris was utterly, entirely, completely, inarguably correct. Thirty-five years have gone by and I still haven’t had the time to write.

But what I didn’t know—and I think Doris may have known but couldn’t convey to someone so young and feckless as I—was that “time to write” is not measured by the clock or the calendar. I’ve since been married and raised three children to adulthood and had a responsible job or two, but there have always been hours available if I wanted to grab ’em and squeeze ’em. “Time to write” is merely time during which you decide that writing, not something else, is what you’re going to do.

I’ve wondered for a long time whether there isn’t a direct proportional relationship between novels finished and divorces finalized. But in fact, I know that you don’t have to wreck your marriage or neglect your kids to write a book. You might not even need to sleep less. All you have to do is write when you can. You know that other stuff you're always doing?  Write instead.

Here’s what:  If you’re going to watch the NCAA Tournament next week, don’t bemoan your lack of time to write. If you’re growing your own tomatoes this year from seed, after hours spent reading catalogues about heirloom varieties, don’t bemoan your lack of time to write. If you’re browsing through the New Yorker or (uh-oh) surfing for online divertissements like 317am.net, don’t bemoan your lack of time to write.

There’s discretionary income—a lot of which, in my case, seems to disappear as if gobbled up by gremlins. And there’s discretionary time—which can pretty much go the same route if you let it. Don’t let it.

Doris knew this, I’m sure: There is always time to write if you’ll just use the hours you’ve got.

So, take that as gospel and get it done. I’m certainly going to. I’ve got this story I’m dying to do. Right after the NCAA Tournament.

Ras: Good Reads

The Late Style in Literature
Do writers decline as they age? The 60-year-old British novelist Martin Amis recently said yes and named names. Tim Martin cites 73-year-old Don DeLillo’s new novel Point Omega as evidence to the contrary and speculates entertainingly about the success of the current over-70 brigade of authors. The short answer: Some do, some don’t.
Telegraph.co.uk

Are Books Becoming “Fringe Media”?
That’s the phrase Kevin Kelleher, a writer with the tech news site GigaOm, uses to describe the reading habits of his generation. “Books are facing tough competition from updates, posts, and a blizzard of free, brief and ephemeral writings that distract eyeballs from the task of digesting 300 pages of text,” Kelleher writes. So true. But Kelleher also points out that fiction sales rose three percent last year and that it is nonfiction books – most of which are “1,000-word pamphlets puffed out to book length with heroic amounts of filler” – that will have to adapt.

GigaOm

Barry Hannah, RIP
Another great but relatively obscure writer died too young this past week - Barry Hannah of Oxford, Mississippi. Naturally, he was compared to Faulkner, Twain, and Flannery O’Connor. But Hannah was a writer’s writer whose peers also said things like “…his celestial-quality literary sentences and constructions…could've come from no other brain but his...” Richard Ford. Or, he was a writer “brilliantly drunk with words [who] could at gunpoint write a life story of a telephone pole.” Jim Harrison. For a taste of the true, inimitable Hannah, listen to his interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air.”
Vanity Fair

The Incredible Story of the Dundee Footballer Who Whipped Billy Wilder
In the glory days of Hollywood, before film schools were invented, screenwriters came from anywhere and that was all to the good. Fifty years ago Neil Paterson’s Room at the Top beat out Wilder’s screenplay for Some Like It Hot to win the Oscar. In this charming profile James Moncur tells the story of how an ex-soccer great became a big-time screenwriter. Best of all, Paterson – like a true Scot – refused to leave his home in Perthshire and move LA.
The Daily Record

Selected Shorts

Isaiah Sheffer came up with a cool idea years back – actors reading short stories aloud in front of audiences – and turned it into reality. In this interview he tells how it evolved into a public-radio series and how he settled on the 80-new-20-classic formula of selection.
Chronogram

The Wisdom of Pop Songs
British short story writer Lee Ee Leen points out that Bruce Springsteen once sang that you can learn more in a three-minute song than in school. She tosses out her top 10 list of the most theme-laden pop songs and invites more.

Writ Lit Drip

Novelist to Novelist
The historian and historical novelist Steven Pressfield interviews Tim O’Brien, author of the Vietnam stories The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato. This is great inside-writing talk. Here’s O’Brien answering Pressfield’s question on how a writer overcomes “Resistance.” “As Joseph Conrad wrote, or said, somewhere: ‘. . . the sitting down is all.’ I take that to mean – even if Conrad didn’t – that creative resistance can only be overcome, or artfully evaded, by the repetitive act of making oneself present. A writer must be there – at work – and not at a bowling alley.”
Steven Pressfield’s Blog