6° of Aberration

Signs of the Times

2004-12-13T15:02:00.000-08:00

I'm still insanely jealous of that clever pun by one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters posted on a sign outside his ranch, so I've been drafting a few signs of my own:

Pest control truck parked outside church:

LET US SPRAY

Outside Traffic Court:

PROSECUTORS WILL BE VIOLATED

Delivery Ward:

LABORING IN OBSCURITY

Chiropractor's Office:

MAY WE HELP WHOSE NECKS?

Clear sign you should look for another restaurant:

WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO SERVE REFUSE TO ANYONE

Inviting Arnold to Dinner

2004-12-09T10:34:00.000-08:00

Last Halloween we joined several other families so our children could go Trick-or-Treating together. The hosts first served a kid-friendly dinner to the eager, costumed kids. The plan was to allow the adults to eat a more leisurely meal in two shifts, taking turns shepherding the kids through the neighborhood. The women decided to take the children for the first shift, leaving the men behind to eat, talk, smoke cigars (not), sip Scotch (just kidding), and watch football.

I have no recollection of which teams played that night. What I do recall is how stimulating I found the conversation among the men. For once the discussion was not repeatedly interrupted by children and I was able to enjoy the conversation of intelligent, well educated men from a variety of professions (surgeon, venture capitalist, entrepreneur, etc.). I found myself stimulated by the conversation and the intelligence with which various points of view were expressed and different complex topics explained.

It reminded me not only of the best moments of college (well, you know what I mean), but also of a goal I've occasionally articulated about raising children. Essentially, it's my dream to raise my sons in an intellectually stimulating environment where they are surrounded by successful adults from many disciplines. I have this image of them sitting at the dinner table across from astronauts, politicians, pro ballplayers, architects, CEO's, teachers, ministers, musicians, travelers, writers, journalists, directors, doctors, investors, entrepreneurs, volunteers, and even attorneys. (I know: I need a much bigger table.)

And you know what? It occurs to me that I am capable of providing them that environment since we know someone from nearly all of those occupations. So why not bring the talk show into the dining room and play the Bill Moyers role to a range of interesting and enjoyable dinner guests? It'll be like dinner at Barbara Walters' or Walter Cronkite's house...except for the chicken nuggets and paper napkins.

Even when the boys become teenagers and want nothing more than to escape the house and race off with their friends, how preferable is it to envision the scene they are racing from being one so enriching, rather than one of perpetual domestic drudgery and embittered family disputes? Besides, as the conversation the other night reminded me, I myself am starved for intellectual discourse and debate with adults who have something intelligent to say and the ability to express it well.

For several days following that Halloween dinner, I contemplated the part of the discussion when several men spoke of which journals, magazines, and periodicals they read regularly. One dad lamented that he no longer had time to read anything but the most technical journals in his field and missed reading Science, Discover, and Natural History. Thinking about that, it occurred to me that I also don't have time to scan Scientific American, Wired, Popular Science and others every month. I know from experience that such subscriptions will just result in a pile of unread magazines and wasted money.

But that's when I had my epiphany: Why not let someone else do the work of reading dozens of periodicals and culling only the best articles for my edification? I'd still miss a lot of fascinating and important articles, but I'd be reading far more technical and educational material than I am now. So I sauntered over to the bookstore, and although I wanted to buy every essay anthology on display, I limited myself to two from The Best American Series®.

I purchased The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 and The Best American Essays 2004. They make terrific bedside reading. It was there that I found both Peggy Orenstein's article on baby names and Susan Orlean's terrific essay on the 2003 World Taxidermy Championships. I also read interesting articles on neuroethics, high school pranks, multiverses, and The Matrix.

I'm one step closer to my goal of creating a stimulating and intellectual (and arguably eccentric) environment for me and my family.

Now I just need to invite a few poets, astronauts, and governors to dinner.

Much Too Much

2004-12-07T01:10:00.000-08:00

Ever have that experience where a familiar word one day suddenly sounds foreign? Not only strange and alien, but actually ludicrous and implausible?

For me that word is "much."

"Much?"

Just listen to it: How much? Not much. So much. That's too much. Does that hurt much? Pretty much. Thank you very much. I ate too much. Do you ski much? Not as much. How much is that? Not too much. Oh no, that's way too much. How much did you expect? You can never have too much.

Much!!! It's too much! Do you hear it? I thought as much. Doesn't it sound absurd? What the hell is "much" anyway? Does every language have a much equivalent? Could we live without much? Could we go a whole day without saying it?

Try expressing sincere gratitude. "Thanks a lot," sounds sarcastic. You almost have to say "Thank you very much." What else could you say?

How do you get rid of much? You're pouring coffee and you want to know when to stop. Or someone is cutting you a slice of cake and they are slicing it too thick. How much? That's too much. Not so much. It's endless!!

How much is much anyway? When does something go from being enough to becoming much?

What the hell does much even mean? (No, I am not going to give you Webster's definition; any time you read a column that begins, "Webster's defines the word 'citizen' as..." trust me, you are reading a lazy, cliched writer who hasn't given much thought to being creative. Argh! That drives me nuts, too!)

At bedtime the other night, Kevin asked me, "Daddy who first invented words?" While I was mulling over this latest imponderable, he added, "And what was the first word they invented?" We talked about this second question, and came up with several ideas. I especially liked his suggestion of "Look." So now my imponderable as everybody, myself included, is muching away all day long is, "Who the hell coined the word, much? And what are the alternatives?" Cause I'm all muched out.

Don't even get me started on "such."

Postscript: I know you'll ask, so I'll answer you: "much" occurred 54 times during the first one hundred entries of this blog. Is that too much?

(Yes, I know, it also appeared 40 more times in this 400 word post alone.)

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

2004-12-06T23:57:00.000-08:00

We bought our tree this weekend and I brought the boxes of ornaments in from the garage. The boys were eager to decorate the tree right away, but Kathy and I had dinner plans so we only had time to string the lights. When we returned around 10 o'clock the boys were asleep and the living room was beautifully decorated.

Valley Girl was sitting in front of the TV folding laundry. She told us the boys had done all the decorating completely on their own. What about the top ornaments? we wondered.

"They got the stool."

Who set up the manger?

"They did."

What about Dickens' village?

"They did that, too. Did you see the snowbank they made?"

You didn't have to help at all?

"No, they did it all by themselves."

The next day they brought in Frosty from the garage. "Mom says it's our job to set him up with you," they informed me. Frosty was a gift from grandma and Uncle Harold last year. We weren't too eager for an eight-foot inflatable snowman on our front lawn, but the boys were in a mood to decorate, so up he went.

They still have gingerbread houses to make and they want me to string lights outside the house which would be another first. It seems like they are determined not to let Dad play the role of grumpy ole Scrooge.

Kathy reminded me I have another responsibility due. It's time for the annual Christmas poem which has become a tradition in our Christmas card. I am not a poet. Hell, I'm not even a writer, but every year we somehow manage to collaborate on a Christmas poem expressing our gratitude for friends and family and celebrating the things we are thankful for.

Some of the poems have been admitted clunkers, but the intention is always heartfelt, and the picture of the boys is always adorable no matter how candid and unprofessional. My best poem, I always thought, was the one Kathy would never be willing to choose. It expresses what happens when software engineers by training make a feeble attempt at creativity:

When programmers write poetry, the words don't always rhyme
The tenses may change; it may not sound sublime.
/* It may have lines that are commented out */
OR IN ALL UPPERCASE WHEN TRYING TO SHOUT
But the message is still heartfelt; the intention sincere
Such as wishing you Joy at Christmas each year.

And when programming poets take marketing wives
Expect artistic conflict the rest of their lives.
And if the pair should happen to breed
Pity the poor offspring the lives they will lead.
For with programming dads and marketing moms
Its "impact" from her and from him its all ROM's.

And if family talents together combine
On a simple verse, a Christmas rhyme,
You may get a message of Peace on Earth,
It might sound convoluted, but for what it's worth
When programmers write poetry, it may croak like a toad,
But it's still less of a disaster than if poets wrote code.

I Sleep Both Ways

2004-12-03T23:55:00.000-08:00

Kevin woke up, but Justin did not.

It was one a.m. when I heard "a sound like someone trying not to make a sound." I found Kevin washing his hands in the bathroom and after confirming that he was fine, I walked him back to his room, gave him a hug, and tucked him in. Before leaving, I also checked on Andrew and Justin—they sleep in the same room, side by side like the three bears—and covered them again as well.

Ten minutes later I went back to check on Kevin and found him asleep. Andrew, however, had flipped off his covers and was sleeping the way I so often discover him, with his head toward the foot of the bed. I considered covering him in that position, then decided to flip him back with his head on his pillow. As I lifted his heavy, still form, I whispered, "Andrew, you're sleeping upside down again."

I never expected a reply, but he gave me a reassuring smile and said, "It's okay, Dad. I sleep both ways."

He's right, of course, he does kick off his covers and flop around in bed. He likes to sleep with his body pushed up against the wood frame and often with one limb draped over it. He tends to run warm and quickly kicks off his covers. He's the last to fall asleep and the first to wake up. We don't even set an alarm clock on school days; we let Andrew wake us up when it's time.

When the boys were infants, the NICU nurses taught us to wrap them up like little burritos while they slept. We learned to calm them by holding their arms pressed against their chests so they couldn't flail about and get over-stimulated.

Yet even as babies they slept differently, but it wasn't until they were out of cribs that I discovered Andrew's magic formula for putting himself to sleep: he thrashes. I instinctively tried covering him, but it seemed to frustrate him. So I watched him fall asleep several nights in a row while I cuddled beside him. And sure enough, he thrashed. He'd flop from position to position, then eventually end up face down with one leg kicking. I watched as he repeatedly kicked his foot, gradually slowing down, and eventually his foot paused in the air, then settled down one last time and he was asleep. It's not a technique that works well with covers tightly wrapped around you, but I could see it worked for Andrew. In fact, in later weeks if he claimed he couldn't fall asleep, I'd just tell him to lie on his belly and kick his foot. Sure enough, he'd be asleep in five minutes.

I know the boys' sleeping styles pretty well—I should after ten thousand bed checks—but I still marvel at the differences. Kevin sleeps on his back, often with his hands beside his head on the pillow, looking for all the world as if he's in Hollywood lying on a beach chair by the pool as the starlets parade by wondering if he's someone famous. He looks as if he's having great dreams about playing sports and scoring points. He prefers to sleep inside a sleeping bag on top of his covers. I still don't know whether that's because it keeps his thin frame warmer or whether he's just trying to make less work for himself every morning when making his bed.

Justin could give a class on sleeping. He's a cuddle bug and he wraps the blankets up tightly over his shoulder and sleeps on his side. He has a ritual of arranging his pillows and favorite stuffed animals by his head. His two greatest comfort items are his lambies. He puts one on top of his pillow, lays his head upon it, and then drapes the other on top of his face, and he is instantly out. I've watched him make himself into a lambie sandwich at night and teased him about it. "You never have to count sheep, Justin," I've observed. "You just have to count lambies: one, two, and then poof, you're asleep."

But Andrew will always be the squirming, flopping, wiggly boy I'll find in a heap at the bottom of the bed, occasionally sleeping beside his bed, sometimes collapsed amidst an absurd pile of stuffed animals, and other times with his feet in his pillow case. Maybe one day he will outgrow it. But for now, he continues to sleep both ways...and every other way imaginable under the moon.

You'll Find Out

2004-12-02T22:50:00.000-08:00

I found it intriguing when, of all the topics I've written about, I received an anonymous comment about my (re)discovery of Ish Kabibble. I at first assumed that it must be a practical joke by a close friend, but the usual supsects have not owned up to it.

The reader mentioned watching "a movie with Ish Kabibble, Kay Kaiser, Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff." For a moment I thought the giveaway was the inclusion of the name Kay Kaiser, whom I momentarily mistook for Keyser Soze, who indeed was one of The Usual Suspects. That would certainly have pointed the finger at my brother, one of the unusual suspects and a fan of that movie. But Kay Kaiser, who the reader correctly identified, was the band leader of the orchestra that included the mop-topped cornet player, Ish Kabibble.

Serious movie trivia buffs would more likely have been suspicious, not of Kay Kaiser and Ish Kabibble, but of the group appearance by the three veteran stars of classic Hollywood horror movies, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Peter Lorre. It turns out that those three only appeared in one picture together, a forgettable 1940 horror comedy called You'll Find Out.

How's that for a clue?

It's unlikely, of course, that I'll discover that the identity of the reader is anyone I know. But having been led so directly to such an intriguing movie, I figured the least I can do is watch it. Easier said than done, as it turns out. Neither Blockbuster nor Netflix has it in their 25,000+ movie rental lists. (But if I can wait until 4:30 a.m. on December 17, I can catch it on the Turner Classic Movie channel—which is my duty as a blogger, don't you think?)

Hmmm. How did that reader just happen to have watched that movie and to have conveniently found my posting on Ish Kabibble?

As soon as I learn anything, you'll find out.

Corpus Blogus

2004-11-30T14:45:00.000-08:00

What began as a small experiment in blogging has lasted far longer than I ever expected. Yesterday's entry was my 100th post to this weblog (excluding the original, "Shirley, You Jest," test case) and it concludes nearly six months of writing.

You might now expect me to editorialize upon what I've learned, or look back and reflect upon what I've written, or speculate upon what, if anything, comes next. Not so. This ain't your momma's weblog, baby. Instead, I chose to commemorate this inexplicable pastime with a similarly irrelevant and inconclusive analysis.

I wondered what one might discover by running a word count utility against the first 100 entries. I'm sure you've all been wondering the same. Fear not, I have the data.

Those 100 entries exceed 53,000 words, the equivalent of a short novel. English grammar being what it is, much of that word count consists of only a few common words. In fact, the top five words alone account for 15% of the total word count:

the (2664) and (1451) to (1417) of (1310) a (1264)

Nearly one third of the word count can be attributed to a mere 30 of the approximately 8,600 unique words tabulated. Rounding out the top 30 words then are:

I (1059) in (694) that (664) it (627) for (518)

was (481) is (392) my (361) with (358) but (340)

as (322) on (318) one (312) you (299) at (269)

he (269) his (228) so (228) me (224) this (224)

from (223) have (221) not (219) by (216) first (214)

I have a list I've made of approximately 300 words—articles, conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions, contractions, etc.—that are the connective tissue of English sentences.

I ran the utility with instructions to strip out those words and it deflated the total word count by 50% to roughly 27,000 words. Nearly 8,300 unique words remained, but these were the more interesting nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. that reveal to the psycholinguistically astute and the numerologically obsessed, clues about the hidden semantic mysteries of a passage.

Here are the top 30 words once the file had been deflated by 50%:

first (214) more (147) read (131) time (128) boys (109)

2004 (105) book (105) years (91) get (90) books (86)

Justin (77) two (75) day (73) know (72) line (71)

movie (71) back (69) year (65) Andrew (64) reading (64)

John (63) Kevin (63) three (63) last (60) good (58)

little (58) story (58) made (57) make (57) novel (57)

Anyone following this blog is unlikely to see any surprises in that list. Perhaps something can be learned by examining groups of words that have the same number of appearances. For example, here are the 30 words which each appear exactly 15 times in the 100 entries of this blog to date:

call class com consider entry
especially expected fans feel final
free friend including internet June
keep leave letter looked material
Michael minutes mom note rejection
script stranger trying turn weeks

One begins to feel like the John Nash character in A Beautiful Mind trying to make sense of the cryptological messages he believes to be hidden in the newspapers. Speaking of mathematicians, that reminds me: numbers, too, are counted by this utility. Perhaps something can be divined from the following:

1 (29) 2 (18) 3 (27) 4 (17) 5 (17) 6 (20) 7 (20) 8 (12) 9 (18) 10 (21)
11 (12) 12 (23) 13 (14) 14 (16) 15 (19) 16 (11) 17 (11) 18 (10) 19 (12) 20 (18)
21 (6) 22 (11) 23 ( 6) 24 (7) 25 ( 9) 26 ( 6) 27 ( 2) 28 ( 4) 29 (5) 30 (12)

I'll leave that as an exercise for the avid reader. You may also need to know:

one (312) two (75) three (63) four (21) five (31)
six (18) seven (22) eight (7) nine (7) ten (17)
eleven (2) twelve (6) thirteen (1) fourteen (2) fifteen (5)
sixteen (3) seventeen (1) eighteen (2) nineteen (20) twenty (21)
won (7) to (1,417) too (45) for (518) ate (4)

Maybe scholars dedicated to analyzing this site will be better served by a complete concordance. (Don't worry: I'm not going to post the damn thing.)

Since we've determined that 19 is a mystical number, let's choose one word with 19 occurrences and see what that might yield. For illustrative purposes, let's choose the word, "point" since (22) you (299) all (196) are (194) beginning (20) to (1,417) wonder (13) what (112) mine (8) might (21) conceivably (0) be (200):

physical linkage to a fellow mammal seems a plus at this point. Damien is a friend.

My words begin plucking at threads nervously, seeking purchase, a weak point,

And don't even get me started on all the random point awarding by the professors.

unfamiliar dispute or the conclusion to a negotiation point that I had not yet

haul them back by their hind legs to the starting point. Ribbons would be awarded

Marx Brothers faking a mirrored reflection in a doorway, at which point we would

the hints; or 1 point for each correct title or author when you got only one right.

entwined with circular references, let me point out that the writer called Terrance

hundred times at least I've had someone point at Andrew and ask, "Is he the oldest?"

goes out of his way to point out Mersault’s use of the child’s word “Maman” when

writer alive who can match [Irving's] control of the omniscient point of view."

Drop City, maybe even The Tipping Point or Fast Food Nation is scheduled to appear

what woke them up." At one point Justin said, "This is starting to get scary,"

neither parent appears in the book and that at one point Tom apparently ventures

Anglo-Saxon hero myth of Beowulf from the point of view of the monster the hero

killed, rather than from the hero's vantage point. In so doing, he scored numerous

worse than use those twenty authors as the starting point for creating a reading list

But that would be missing the point. It's hard for any Red Sox fan who has lived

waving their "I believe" placards, a turning point to forever remember in a dream

Whatever is revealed in hindsight by reviewing my first one hundred blog entries depends, finally, upon the reader. I've written far more than I ever planned or expected, often on topics I never intended. What began as a whim, grew into a pleasant diversion. Public omphaloskepsis. Was it ever supposed to be relevant?

Now with this, the 101st entry, I've proven that every word counts, or at least, that every word can be counted.

Nineteen More Sentences

2004-11-29T13:33:00.000-08:00

I paid a second visit to 826 Valencia today. This time I wasn't there to purchase any piratey things, although I did purchase Issue 12 of McSweeney's Quarterly.

My specific purpose in returning to 826 Valencia was to leave behind the anonymous calling card I once mentioned. While browsing among the spy glasses and pirate dice, I spotted what I was looking for: a pile of unopened mail. I waited until the cashier's attention was diverted and then as inconspicuously as possible (which was not very), I dropped atop the stack of mail a standard business envelope with a single folded sheet of paper inside. On that page, in the form of one long, unindented paragraph, were the following nineteen unrelated sentences:

It all started with one simple question. Enoch drew his rifle and held it. It was the first time he beat his father at anything. Some stories are better left untold. Scat. Call me Ish Kabibble. Finding a parking place that morning should have been the least of her worries. I never did understand “reality TV” and that right there was half my problem. You look at any picture of Charles Manson and what do you see? Not again. Think of it as the next Great American Novel, the best whaling novel since "Moby Dick"—except much shorter, only one hundred and forty pages, and set in West Texas, and there isn't any whale. The first time Jason spotted her she was walking her dog backwards through the snow. If you really wanna know what happened, I’ll tell you the whole freakin’ story, even the part about getting kicked out of "Exit-Here Academy" and what happened after JayDee tried swallowing half a bottle of pills, but if you start giving me any of that Holden Freakin’ Caulfield crap, then I’m outta here and you’ll never know why they both had to die. Harrison first showed it to her in the front seat of her father’s black Lincoln Continental. Could I possibly be any more charming? Arguing with her in a crowded bar, that was my first mistake; following her home in my green VW was my second; but killing her, that was no mistake. What my sister lacks in talent, she more than makes up for in enthusiasm. I never should have gone through that door. You come to me at night while I am sleeping.

Whether that sheet of paper ends up in the hands of Dave Eggers, a student prodigy, tutor, or clerk, or merely gets tossed unread into a waste basket, I have no way of knowing. My role in the fate of that sheet of paper began with an idea and included weeks of thoughtful revisions, right down to the precision of the sixty-three words of sentence 13. But my role in the fate of that sheet of paper also ended with its delivery (and its authorship is our little secret).

Whether the eventual recipient considers it an exercise in experimental writing or some "dadaesque joke" hardly matters. What's important is its potential. If fate chooses, then perhaps someone will discover it and conclude, like Philip Roth once claimed, "that if ever a unifying principle were to be discernable in the paragraph it would have to be imposed from without rather than unearthed from within."

I admitted nearly two months ago that the notion of literary creativity springing from such a serendipitous event as the one Philip Roth claimed as inspiration for his first nineteen books (see the Afterword to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of "Portnoy's Complaint") gave me two really great ideas. Now you know the first. It's just possible that you can guess the second.

Rose by Any Other Name

2004-11-26T09:10:00.000-08:00

I wrote previously of how Kathy and I assigned each name to our boys after their birth, but I omitted the details of how we selected the names in the first place. It didn't happen the way I would have expected it.

Naming one's child is a serious matter. Every couple gives it a great deal of thought. Baby naming books are consistently strong sellers. A name is the first gift you give your child and in most instances it lasts a lifetime. Who wouldn't agonize over it?

Names are evocative. They remind us of close friends, former classmates, colleagues, movie characters, even people we despise. Many couples decide not to reveal the baby names they are considering, even to close friends and family, because they have learned that any name may provoke a strong reaction, and not always a polite or favorable one.

I once assumed I would choose names fraught with personal meaning, perhaps the name of a great author, or a public figure, or a character from a favorite novel brimming with personal significance. But where does that leave you? With Herman? Theodore? Atticus? One's spouse will surely have an opinion on such choices. And likely as not, she reads different authors and admires different celebrities and actors. Was I willing to risk Fritzwilliam? Pierce? Bra-aad??

(I have a friend who did exactly that, though, naming her son Atticus, and I asked him once after he'd graduated from college how he felt about it. He was pleased with it, I'm happy to say. I now wonder what he'll name his children.)

When I was a perennial bachelor, I suggested absurd options as potential names of future offspring; I claimed facetiously that it was a litmus test for compatible spousal material. "I'd like to name my daughter, Mirth," I might say (and poorly, with my accent). "Or maybe, Blight Louise—it will build character." While others were still shuddering, I'd propose for boy/girl twins the names Vermin and Virus. It was all a big joke designed to get a shocked response and played by a man who never seriously expected to be naming a child. (Although I do still expect Mirth to show up in one of my stories; I may not be as unrestrained as Jonathan Lethem, but the name still charms me.)

The joke on me, of course, is that I did eventually marry, and then had triplets, not twins. My friends were quick to offer suggestions. We repeatedly heard the names, Moe, Larry & Curly, or Huey, Dewey & Louie. One literate friend proposed Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. Baseball companions suggested Matty, Felipe & Jesus, or Tinkers, Evers & Chance. (I liked "Chance.") The triplet naming game was irresistible.

Upon hearing the news that Kathy was pregnant with triplets and that her suggestions for names were welcome, Kathy's five-year-old goddaughter, Molly, went off to think and came back shortly with a 3x5 index card with the names Emily, Kate, and Julia printed carefully in red ink. "That's terrific, Molly," Kathy said, "but what if they are boys?" Molly looked momentarily shocked and betrayed, but returned again later with three more names printed on the card: Justin, Tom, and Scott. We actually liked all three of those and Justin Thomas now owes partial thanks to Molly for his name. I cannot recall as precisely when Andrew and Kevin became candidate names for the other two.

The boys were three years old before I first heard one high school friend of Kathy's explaining to another how cool she thought it was that Kathy had named one of her sons after a high school boyfriend. Can you imagine? It would take real chutzpah to name a child after one's ex. I sometimes wonder how many others still believe this fiction. (Knowing as I do that I had been the one to suggest the name and having heard Kathy's own response to the rumor, I'm not concerned. "But what if you're wrong?" you ask, rudely. Big deal. I admire the man.)

The anticlimactic truth is that we did what many couples do. We sat up at night feeling the babies jockeying for position in the womb and discussed potential names. We made lists of possibilities. We consulted baby naming books. But in the end, we navigated purely by instinct and chose names that just sounded agreeable to both of us.

The middle names were almost easier. We wanted to attach a degree of family legacy to them so we chose unused names that would honor our two oldest brothers, Thomas and Michael; and with some irony, Patrick signified both Kathy's Irish heritage and my Portuguese father who was born on St. Patrick's Day (and may or may not have once had the middle name, Patrick). I paired the middle names with candidates for the first until I was satisfied, and showed them to Kathy. Happily, she concurred.

End of story.

Except...

One can now wonder, How well did we really do? Did we give the boys names that would honor them, that were not absurdly trendy or commonplace? Did we burden them with names better suited for a character in a Jonathan Lethem novel? How will their names sound thirty, fifty, seventy years from now?

The best article I've read on the topic of baby names is called, "Where Have All the Lisas Gone?" by Peggy Orenstein, appearing in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 essay collection.

In trying to select a name that is not going to become the next trendy name, she sets out to determine what really influences the popularity of various baby names. Along the way she discovers the official Popular Baby Names web site hosted by the Social Security Administration. It's a site that "ranks the 1,000 most common boys' and girls' names since 1900. You can also look up a specific name and track its status over time," an activity that Orenstein warns and I echo, "is an Internet addict's sinkhole." Sure enough, I downloaded the data, organized it into a spreadsheet, and began charting and graphing the progress of my siblings' and children's names.

Andrew seems pretty safe: his name has remained in the top 100 boys' names for an entire century, hovering in the top 10 for the last 14 years. He may resent growing up and working alongside so many other Andrews, but he is unlikely to one day find himself burdened with a middle-aged name, like girls named Barbara, Nancy, Karen, Susan, and yes, Peggy. "Those sound like the names of middle-aged women because—guess what?—they are," writes Orenstein.

The name Kevin, on the other hand, surprised me. It didn't even make an appearance in the top 1,000 male names until it placed 830 in the 1920's. How is that possible? In the 1900's Rudolph ranked 129th. There was also Hyman (265), Barney (269), Solomon and Moses in the top 300, Aloysius for goddsakes (no offense) at 381, Hoyt (595) and Casper (608), but the name Kevin couldn't even break into the top 1,000? Fortunately, it took off like a bullet once it made the chart, and has remained in the top 30 or so for nearly 50 years. Kevin, also, should age without fear of becoming the Chauncey of his generation.

Then there is Justin. My poor little guy has not one, not two, but three "Justin H's" as classmates. No wonder the name already shows evidence of having peaked at 9. Worse yet, it only really began to rise in popularity in the 70's. Thanks a lot, Molly (102). If he weren't such a funning pool ("Hey, I'm Justin Time!"), I'd fear he might one day begrudge us his trendy name, as one day he still might.

Luckily for me, my naming days are over—blessedly before I found the SSA's Popular Baby Name web sinkhole. But for those of you still naming babies, whether you're considering Roses (358), Moses (503) or Beauses (423); Dylans (19) or Villains (as if); Destiny (37) or Chance (246), you'll get thoroughly dazed and confused on this site.

Good luck.

The Search for Plupreme

2004-11-24T16:47:00.000-08:00

Right from the outset I expected rejections from publishers when I submitted my manuscript for the picture book, The Search for Plupreme. Two more familiar SASE's arrived yesterday.

From Cartwheel Books, I received the following form letter:

Dear Author,

A sincere thanks for allowing us to consider your manuscript. We are sorry to write that we do not see a place for it on the Cartwheel list, but as each publishing list has its own needs, we encourage you to submit your manuscript elsewhere.

We apologize for the impersonal nature of this reply, but we are hoping that this form letter will enable us to respond to authors in a timely fashion.

We wish you the best of luck in placing your manuscript.

Sincerely,
The Editors
Cartwheel Books

Even less personal was this 4" x 6" Authorgram from Boyds Mills Press:

Many thanks for your submission.
Unfortunately, this one didn't work for us.

We are returning your manuscript because
_X_ It's not suited to our present needs.
___ Its language or concept is too mature for
our audience.
___ We seldom buy rhyming picture books.
___ It needs more character/plot development.
___ We have a very limited nonfiction line.

Sincerely,
The Editors

These rejection notices, while expected, are hardly instructive. I originally hoped that recording them here might be helpful for others with similar aspirations. Instead, they have become redundant and illustrative of what I said all along, that it is an against-all-odds proposition to break into the children's literature market as an unknown. (Notice I don't entertain for a moment the notion that my manuscript is flawed or undeserving. I hope I get credit for that much, at least.)

But Ashley's quest to discover a new color now seems an apt metaphor for my attempts at gaining the favor of one editor. Like my little heroine, it is time now after 10 rejections to consider a completely new strategy. (Although I should be honest: this step too, was predictable.)

So this January I will take a more active role in getting the manuscript seriously considered. There are several local children's literature networks I have yet to pursue, and friends-of-friends in the business who might at least be able to make some calls on my behalf. And maybe it's time to seek an agent. At the very least, failure at any of these strategies will allow me to offer more practical advice to others.

And once I'm published and Ashley helps some unsung illustrator earn a Caldecott Award, I'm a member of the writer's fraternity and subsequent manuscript submissions will be welcomed, if not solicited, right?

Well the fantasy, at least, is Plupreme.

Lonely Dumptruck

2004-11-23T15:30:00.000-08:00

What do the following names have in common?

Conrad Metcalf Everett Moon Pella Marsh Philip Engstrand
Effram Nugent Lionel Essrog Dylan Ebdus Mingus Rude

Would you choose any of these names for your child?

Orton Pansy Ilford Ralfrew Marilla Runyon Euclid Moira

These are not names you hear everyday—unless you spend your days reading Jonathan Lethem. The first set of names are of lead characters in six of Lethem's novels. The second set appear as minor characters.

Even when Lethem selects a common name—unlike those that seem more anagram than name—you can almost bet he'll pair it with an outrageous surname:

Danny Phoneblum Timothy Vandertooth Paul Pflug Danny Fantl

He also seems as likely to scan the dictionary as the phonebook for inspiration. No noun or verb is too insignificant to be considered a potential name:

Maurice Gospels Walter Surface Harriman Crash Abigail Ponders

Lethem clearly enjoys giving his characters original, often bizarre, names. Here are several others from The Fortress of Solitude:

Aaron X. Doiley Erlan Hagopian OJJJ Zelmo Swift

With the publication in 1998 of the science fiction novel, "Girl, In Landscape," Jonathan Lethem really hit his creative stride in imaginative naming. The novel envisions an alien species that speaks hundreds of languages, but becomes fascinated with English as a language of "enchanting limitations," giving themselves inscrutable names formed from English words:

Hiding Kneel Truth Renowned Gelatinous Stand
Specious Axiomatic Grinning Contrivance Notable Beast
Somber Fluid Lonely Dumptruck

Lethem spoke the other night of Tourette's syndrome, a logical topic because Motherless Brooklyn is his unforgettably original novel about a detective afflicted with Tourette's. But while claiming no clinical manifestations of having Tourette's himself, Lethem admitted that he empathizes with some of the compulsions, and he spoke of how he distractedly plays with words and names and revealed that he keeps a notebook of potential character names, currently filled with over seven hundred entries.

That struck me as a pretty remarkable statement when one considers the names he has selected for the characters in his published novels. It would be a fascinating opportunity to flip through the notebook with Lethem and hear him comment on the names.

Lionel Essrog, the Tourettic detective of Motherless Brooklyn, often manifests his condition with verbal tics. His explosive outbursts give Lethem an opportunity to dazzle with jewels of creative wordplay, like these examples of Lionel butchering a name, often his own:

Criminal Fishrug Viable Guessfrog Lionel Deathclam
Lefthand Moonprose Lullaby Gueststar Licorice Smellahole

Of course, aliens and Tourette's syndrome give a novelist like Lethem a convenient landscape for demonstrating his verbal pyrotechnics. But after reading The Fortress of Solitude and hearing Lethem speak, I'm now convinced that he has no intention of ever populating any of his novels, regardless of genre, with characters with such quotidian names as Jack Ryan, Alex Cross, Robert Kincaid, or Jack Torrance.

Lessons from Disneyland

2004-11-22T10:35:00.000-08:00

We were fortunate enough to find the means to take the boys on their first trip to Disneyland last week. We decided to make the seven hour drive and chose to combine the adventure with a visit to their cousins in southern California.

The big surprise was the reaction by Val and three other former nannies, now all approximately 23-24 years old. They couldn't imagine missing out on the boys' first trip to Disneyland, so they pooled their resources and five girls planned a road trip of their own to coincide with ours and to join us at the park for one day to experience it with the boys. Of course, their evening plans were far wilder than ours and details of their 3 a.m. exploits would undoubtedly make far more interesting reading.

Nevertheless, we had a terrific time and it was fun to witness both the boys' delighted reactions to Disneyland and the girls' eagerness to make sure no thrill was overlooked. I observed also that the boys had no problem pairing off with a partner for each ride. I'm not sure what to make of that, but I'm sure it's preparing them for some socialization experience I'd rather not contemplate.

There's no easy way to summarize such an eventful trip, but I can share a few lessons learned along the way, giving a sense of the adventure in the process:

Read The Unofficial Guide® to Disneyland 2005 beforehand.
Look into AAA or similar clubs for savings packages. We got great discounts and invaluable FASTPASS privileges to multiple attractions.
If you're driving, consider getting audio books. I have three boys who are patient travelers and I'm philosophically opposed to filling one's driving time with prepackaged entertainment (especially DVD's), but still we borrowed the audio book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Unabridged, it delivers over 8 hours of distraction which provide a convenient break from time to time.
Pay attention to the road. We got so busy talking we missed a key exit and by the time we discovered our error, it cost us nearly an extra hour driving time to correct.
Use the FASTPASS system. Why wait in 30 to 90 minute lines?
Go on a weekday—preferably a school day (shhh!). Lines on Thursday were appreciably shorter, no more than 10-15 minutes. By Friday we were starting to see crowds and waiting times of 45 minutes or more (and this was not a peak weekend).
Get lanyards early. We saved time by arranging them through AAA and picking them up at Downtown Disney the night before. Strangers repeatedly stopped us and asked us where we got ours. Tip: on crazier rides, tuck them into the kids' shirts.
Seven is a great age for Disneyland. We didn't have to tend with strollers or complaints about walking; we met most height requirements and the kids were still far from being jaded. Most parents will opt to take their kids at a younger age, but we don't regret waiting.
Prepare to walk. I can't imagine how many miles those boys covered without a single complaint.
Instill the "Stick-Together Rule." We never once felt like we were at risk of losing the boys in the crowds.
Carry water and snacks. Most of the food in and around the park is too expensive and only marginally palatable.
Don't start with Indiana Jones Adventure. Dumb, dumb, dumb. We were so concerned the line would be excessive later we dashed to this attraction before the boys had even begun to get their bearings. We exited the ride with two unprepared little fellas in tears.
Splash Mountain and Pirates of the Caribbean are hits. We rode these several times each.
48 is not too old to try your first 360 degree looping roller coaster. I chuckled to myself when Samantha casually suggested I read the medical requirements—I never found out whether she was more worried about Andrew and Kevin or me.
There's more to consider at Autopia than the 52" height requirement. Andrew met the requirement, but had difficulty reaching and maintaining pressure on the gas pedal by himself. By the end of the ride he was slowing to a snail's pace.
In Disney's California Adventure (new for us), It's Tough to Be a Bug, a 3-D Bug's Life multisensory experience, and Soarin' over California, an IMAX-quality hang glider simulation, were big hits, Dad included. (The former may be too intense for many young ones.)
Peter Pan's Flight is way too short after a 30 minute wait. It's magical for kids, but lasts only two minutes. After rides of 7 minutes at the Haunted Mansion and 14 minutes at Pirates of the Caribbean, Peter Pan felt like it ended just as it was getting started.
Try the Rainforest Cafe. It was one of the few dining experiences that didn't feel like a waste of money. We were able to combine orders and escape for a fair price. Better still, the kids ate the food and enjoyed the surroundings.
Take a break at the hotel. We found taking turns watching the kids in the pool gave us time to recharge our batteries and get ready for evening rides and parades.
Avoid the shops. Do you really need to be tempted to buy expensive Disney-themed items?
Give the kids their own spending money. This saved us a lot of "I want that" conversations. Our boys saved for a year and spent their money wisely, mostly:
Beware the expensive enticements. We made Andrew wait several hours to reconsider purchasing the picture of his face superimposed on Anakin Skywalker's image. But Justin looked at the colorful printing of himself as Obi-Wan Kenobi, agreed to purchase it, and no further than thirty yards past the exit burst into tears of regret over wasting his money, asking repeatedly whether he could return it or somehow earn his money back.
ESPN Zone is addictive, but way too expensive. Kevin and I could have spent a weekend there: it offered rock climbing walls, air hockey, simulated pitching to Barry Bonds, hockey booths, football tossing games, and more. I was lucky to get out for only $10. On the other hand, Val and company returned for Top Shelf Margaritas and who knows what else.
48 is too old to try The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. Hey, we had young women on hand to introduce the boys to that kind of lunacy—and now Kevin has bragging rights that he went on one ride that Dad chose to skip.
There is still magic in Disneyland.

That last comment is the real lesson of our trip. It's always easy to find ways to be cynical, especially for a former amusement park employee, but Disney still has the right formula and everyone had a great time.

Still Life with Pigeons

2004-11-15T17:32:00.000-08:00

Justin's ongoing amusement with all things punderful has extended to the visual. We were driving past the car wash today when he announced from the back seat, "Warning: Pigeon Alert." It has been a running gag with the boys that the pigeons sit atop the street lights outside the car wash waiting deliberately to use pristine vehicles for target practice. But today, as Justin pointed out, they were not only on the light posts, they had gathered on one roof, that of a medical center. Several dozen pigeons perched between two tumbling figures bookending the words, "Active Life."

When I read that phrase to Justin, he burst into a fit of contagious giggles, his scrunched-up eyes filling with tears. "Are you kidding me?" he asked in apparent disbelief at the oxymoronic unlikelihood of the scene. "Why would pigeons that just like to sit around and sleep and poop sit on a building that says, 'Active Life?' "

He continued to giggle in delight, eager to share this absurdity with his mother, while I pondered the amazing little guy who daily blesses me with his sense of humor.

Obsession

2004-11-12T19:34:00.000-08:00

I believe Susan Orlean and I would get along fabulously. We would while away the hours talking about an endless array of topics: New England eccentricities, monomaniacal collectors, underwear models, blogging compulsives, you name it. In fact, Susan, if you're reading this, I encourage you to give me a call the next time you're in town on a book tour.

(It's a damned shame I missed her on Oct. 7; she was promoting her new book, My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere, at Kepler's, my favorite local bookstore.)

Who else but Susan Orlean could get me to read an entire book on white orchids (The Orchid Thief)? Really, it not only isn't the type of book I'd ordinarily read, it isn't even the type of book I'd generally pick up. But I found it sitting on an acquaintance's coffee table a couple of years ago, scanned it, and became intrigued. So I went out, bought it, and found it fascinating and engrossing.

In the person of John Laroche, Susan found the embodiment of obsession, a man whose passions become all-consuming, until they one day disappear as suddenly as they began. As a ten-year-old boy, Laroche obsessively collected turtles, determined to collect one of every species. "Then, out of the blue, he fell out of love with turtles and fell madly in love with Ice Age fossils. He collected them, sold them, declared that he lived for them, then abandoned them for something else." So it went with lapidary (hey, I missed that one), old mirrors, orchids, and tropical fish:

At its peak, he had more than sixty fish tanks in his house and went skin-diving regularly to collect fish. Then the end came. He didn't gradually lose interest: he renounced fish and vowed he would never again collect them and, for that matter, he would never set foot in the ocean again. That was seventeen years ago. He has lived his whole life only a couple of feet west of the Atlantic, but he has not dipped a toe in it since then.

—"The Orchid Thief," Susan Orlean (1998)

Those of you who haven't read the book may have seen Charlie Kaufman's movie adaptation starring Nicholas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Chris Cooper, called—what else?—Adaptation. But don't let the movie deter you from reading the book. Charlie went off on a drug-addled tangent of one sort or another. The movie resembles the book not at all (but Susan loved it, so you can see she has a terrific sense of humor, one more reason we'd get along).

Most recently, I read Susan's essay in The Best American Essays 2004, about a taxidermist convention. I was hooked from the opening sentence:

As soon as the 2003 World Taxidermy Championships opened, the heads came rolling in the door.
—"Lifelike," The New Yorker (2003)

Susan Orlean is consistently funny, observant, and unconventional. And whatever catches her interest, she observes with clarity and discusses with wry intelligence and infectious enthusiasm.

That bit of vanity at the outset about becoming friends with Susan and discussing everything and anything, from the Red Sox and stuffed quahogs to pet rocks and dog show blogs, is not just a private fantasy. Just listen to how Susan begins one article on a typical ten-year-old boy:

If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. We would wear shorts, big sneakers, and long, baggy T-shirts depicting famous athletes every single day, even in winter. We would sleep in our clothes. We would both be good at Nintendo Street Fighter II, but Colin would be better than me... We wouldn't have sex, but we would have crushes on each other and, magically, babies would appear in our home... We would hang out a lot with Colin's dad. For fun, we would load a slingshot with dog food and shoot it at my butt. We would have a very good life.
—"The American Man, Age Ten," Esquire (1992)

Surprising as it may seem for Susan to envision her marriage to her ten-year-old subject, she takes an even greater leap of imagination in an article about a championship show dog:

If I were a bitch, I'd be in love with Biff Truesdale.
—"Show Dog," The New Yorker (1995)

By the time you finish the essay, you may or may not be in love with Biff too.

But you will certainly be in love with Susan Orlean.

Not Cute Enough

2004-11-11T08:58:00.000-08:00

How much rejection can one man take?

Actually, when I set out to document my pursuit of a publisher for The Search for Plupreme, I expected it was a Sisyphean task without the benefit of an agent. But I thought it might still be instructive to record and post the rejections as they accumulated, sharing the sense of anonymity one feels and offering any lessons worth sharing along the way. (Yes, and privately maintaining a sliver of hope that I might one day get to post a note of encouragement, if not an actual acceptance letter.)

Yesterday, I learned that Kathy had intercepted one of the rejection letters that had arrived the same day I'd learned I had been turned down for a job by a company I was enthusiastic about. A charitable gesture, to be sure, but unnecessary as it turns out, as this particular rejection was from a publisher that declines to read unsolicited manuscripts. (Hey, at only 750 words, I'd figured it was worth a try.)

So here is the response from Candlewick:

Dear Author:

Thank you for submitting your work to Candlewick Press. Sadly, we must return the material unread, per our stated submissions policy of accepting only agented or solicited material. Please note that we have increased our attendance at writer's conferences and SCBWI meetings to mitigate the effects of this policy and to maintain a strong level of involvement with the writing community.

We thank you for your interest in Candlewick Press, and offer our best wishes for finding the right home for your work.

Sincerely,
The Editors
Candlewick Press

Sounds like it was written by attorneys, doesn't it?

Then this week I received the following from Houghton Mifflin:

Dear John,

Many thanks for sending me the manuscript for "The Search for Plupreme." Please pardon my delay in responding.

Your story is cute. However, I am not inclined to pursue this project at this time. I am returning your manuscript herewith.

With best wishes,
Andrea D. Pinkney

"Cute???"

Instead of the "Thanks" (T), "No Thanks" (NT), or "Thanks, But No Thanks" (TBNT) varieties of form rejection letters, am I to believe that Houghton Mifflin employs "Cute" (C), "Too Cute" (TC), and "Cute, But Not Cute Enough" (CBNCE) distinctions?

I mean, really: "Cute?"

"Amateur," perhaps. "Discordant," maybe. "Sweet," even. But, "Cute?"

Hey, her letter was more personal than attorneyspeak, so I'll take Andrea's rejection as an intended kindness. And I'll excuse her the one dissonant "herewith."

Buy This Book

2004-11-10T09:32:00.000-08:00

On the drive to and from the city Monday night to hear Jonathan Lethem, Rachel and I discussed books. Precocious and well-read, but not yet 17, she has yet to discover authors like John Barth, Robert Coover, and T. C. Boyle. On the other hand, she has taken a workshop with Dave Eggers and Michael Chabon at 826 Valencia, is helping select entries for Dave's next volume of The Best American Nonrequired Reading series, and regularly peruses McSweeney's and The Believer, and is thereby able to introduce me to many younger writers and unfamiliar literary publications. So despite the generational difference, our book discussion was anything but one-sided. (I hope.)

As we spoke, it occurred to me that I had one book to recommend to her above all others, a book which conveniently enough I've also been meaning to champion here. So while it is still in print, treat yourself to a copy of The salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors, edited by Laura Miller. It is an indispensable reference guide every bibliophile should own and my favorite guide to modern American novelists. The only reason to think twice about recommending it is that it is now four years out-of-date (so add your voice to mine in begging for a new edition).

Nonetheless, this is a passionate volume crammed with useful and entertaining information on 225 authors with contributions by nearly 100 authors and reviewers (Eggers and Lethem among them). Each entry includes a complete (and invaluable) bibliography of the author's novels, along with the critic's opinion of the best material (including the one novel to choose if you plan to only read one), and suggestions of similar authors to consider.

These are zealous, opinionated entries incidentally, unlike the typical dispassionate bibliographical summaries available elsewhere. A few are scathing (like Kate Moses's dismissal of Edwidge Danticat's first novel as reading like "a high school student wrote it," along with her accusation of critics being guilty of "race pandering" and Danticat's career being "built wholly of atmosphere"... yikes!), while most entries, suggested as they were by critics who were passionate about an author, read like Lethem's description of Philip K. Dick as "a bohemian autodidact, who stumbled through genius and madness" and produced a "genre all his own."

The salon.com Reader's Guide is written for lovers of books and, by editorial design, reads as though it were written by intelligent, literate friends answering your questions about an unfamiliar author. If my library contained only the novels discussed and recommended in this guide, I would be set for life. In fact, about a third of the authors in this guide are already on my shelves and that undoubtedly contributes to making this volume so personally relevant and appealing. Just consider the following sampling of included authors, each of whom has at least two volumes in my library:

Martin Amis, Nicholson Baker, John Barth, T. C. Boyle
Charles Bukowski, Anthony Burgess, Caleb Carr, Angela Carter
Michael Chabon, Tom Clancy, Robert Coover, Michael Crichton
Samuel R. Delany, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Joan Didion
John Fowles, John Gardner, William Gibson, John Hawkes
Joseph Heller, Carl Hiaasen, John Irving, Ken Kesey
Jerzy Kosinski, Ursula K. Le Guin, Elmore Leonard, Jonathan Lethem
Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry
Walter Mosley, Joyce Carol Oates, Walter Percy, Thomas Pynchon
Tom Robbins, Philip Roth, Terry Southern, Paul Theroux
J. R. R. Tolkien, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Tom Wolfe

Just entering that list makes me want to lock all the doors, unplug the TV, and take the phones off the hooks, then start a roaring fire in the fireplace, make myself a big thermos of tea, and read non-stop for days without interruption.

You should do the same. Let this volume get you started.

"Context is Everything."

2004-11-09T11:32:00.000-08:00

Monday night I was fortunate enough to spend a terrific evening listening to Jonathan Lethem interviewed by Daniel "Lemony Snicket" Handler at a lecture series in San Francisco benefiting a scholarship program for 826 Valencia. Lethem was outstanding and his passion for writing and reading was electric. He considered every question from Handler and the audience and whether it was original, trite, or controversial he gave long, articulate answers that made you admire his devotion to fiction and the care he weaves into the structure, language, metaphors, and emotional fabric of every novel.

What made it especially personal for me was how he kept referencing many of my favorite authors and speaking about their work passionately and often showing how it had influenced his own. He spoke about Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick of course (everyone who reads Gun, With Occasional Music must); but also about Borges, Kafka, Pynchon, DeLillo, Dickens, Vonnegut, Bradbury; even Robert Coover and Italo Calvino; plus Graham Greene, Shirley Jackson, Donald Barthelme, J. G. Ballard, Thomas Berger...the list goes on and on. It felt as if he were sitting before my library, thumbing through my favorite books and sharing his insights and their personal significance to him.

He spoke at length about the difficult choices he made when writing The Fortress of Solitude and how Motherless Brooklyn was a warm-up to attacking the autobiographical material in Fortress. He fielded questions about gender biases and race, music and film influences, genre blending and pop culture. He told a terrific anecdote about the proprietor of a used bookstore in Berkeley, and revealed that he prefers having background music or listening to a ballgame while he writes, explaining that he is most productive from May to September during the daily three hour baseball broadcasts.

I was thrilled when I discovered The Fortress of Solitude several months ago and read the recommendation from Michael Chabon. The novel then became a guilty pleasure for the next several weeks. But it all came together Monday night and will now probably send me back for a second, more careful reading. I'd also love to hear Lethem again, and the good news for all of us is that the event was recorded for later broadcast (perhaps on NPR?) so we may get that chance.

Further good news occurred to me when Lethem discussed how in his youth he would discover an author and then, like many of us, quickly devour every book in succession. That's when it dawned on me that Lethem has three novels (Amnesia Moon, As She Climbed Across the Table, and Girl in Landscape) and two story collections ("The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye" and now "Men and Cartoons") that I have yet to read.

But not for long. I tracked down three of those at the library today.

The First Line

2004-11-08T15:30:00.000-08:00

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to this blogger...

You may recall my post about the Bulwer-Lytton contest for the best of the worst opening lines for hypothetical novels and, later, my favorites from this year's winning entries. That inspired me to create several first line quizzes: one for novels, another for children's literature. (And just for good measure, a corresponding last line quiz.)

Those first line threads triggered a series of complementary posts: Longest first lines. Shortest first lines. Other first line quiz and database web sites. The new translation of the first line to The Stranger. Philip Roth's bizarre claim of origin of the opening sentences to his first 19 books. The excellent first line to John Irving's first children's book.

So how much more can one man write about the first lines of novels? I thought you would never ask. I'm afraid this well is not yet dry.

How could I not tell you that today marks the first day of a writing contest at a web site known as, you guessed it: The First Line? The contest is simple: they give you the first sentence and you use it to create a story of 300 to 3,000 words.

Here is the first line for the current contest:

Life would be so much easier if I was a cartoon character.

You have three months; the submission deadline for the next contest is February 1, 2005. Winning entries will be published in their magazine. The prize is $10 (that's right: one Alexander Hamilton) plus a free copy of the magazine in which your story appears.

The first line to the previous contest was, "The inside was dark." I contemplated that sentence for two months, considering a variety of alternatives, none satisfactory until the last day for submissions. Then an idea struck me that was so abhorrent and bone-chilling, yet based upon an actual incident that had horrified me as a parent, that I shuddered to consider it. It's too bad it occurred to me so late, although I'm still not sure whether I would have had the courage to craft it as fiction, except perhaps to exorcise that particular demon.

So we all missed the last contest, but three months is plenty of time to give this next one a try. I'm considering posting my entry here. I have no idea what it's about yet, but I can tell you how it begins:

Life would be so much easier if I was a cartoon character.

Once a Pun a Time

2004-11-04T11:13:00.000-08:00

How many of you can recall the first pun you ever heard and appreciated? You'll argue that I could not possibly remember such an insignificant and bygone incident, but whether it was actually the first or not, I nevertheless recall the day an uncle amused me with this riddle:

Q. Why do Eskimos wash in Tide?

A. Because it's too cold to wash out-Tide.

That awakened in me a penchant for wordplay that by high school must have been torturous to bear. During an anatomy lesson in biology I would distract my classmates by holding up signs reading "Liver Alone" or "Aorta Know Better." Dick Cavett was my idol and he could toss off a play on words without missing a beat. Incessant punning doesn't win the girl or make you the most popular; but it's a habit that's hard to break.

In our household today, it's Justin who shows signs of becoming quite the punster. He's always had a great sense of humor; even he recognizes it, selecting, for example, a jester's costume for himself at Halloween three years ago. It was probably about that same age when one night during story time after there was an unmistakable sound from his brother's bed that he quipped, "Andrew, what do you think this is? A gas station?"

Justin continues to surprise and amuse me with his wordplay, now occasionally striving for the multi-lingual:

Before one meal he raised his glass and said, "Bon appe-drink!"

Giving me a hug at bedtime he once said, "Sleep de resistance."

Watching the playoffs he announced, "I call him Derek Cheater."

Like most anyone else, I have difficulty remembering jokes and I've certainly forgotten several books' worth of bad puns. But a few favorite, albeit no longer contextually interesting, groaners still linger:

I envied the writer of the one paragraph review of the movie, Mommy Dearest, who chose the caption, "Old actresses never die; they're just Faye Dunaway."

I once took a film course and had to suffer through back-to-back viewings of "Pierrot le Fou" by Jean-Luc Godard and "Lola Montes" by Max Ophuls. Afterwards, my single line film journal entry read simply, "Two of the most Godard-Ophul films I've ever seen."

And one of my all time favorites, from "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," is the sign that one of the Merry Pranksters posted on a winding road through the hills of La Honda to help revelers locate Ken Kesey's ranch for an LSD party:

No Left Turn Unstoned

The Results Are In

2004-11-03T10:57:00.000-08:00

I said this was not a political blog and I was sincere. But it would seem an egregious oversight to completely ignore yesterday's presidential election to discuss cheeseburgers, esoteric internet searches, movie trivia, or first lines from twenty year old novels.

So, whether you feel Bushwhacked or Kerried-away, the results are in and we have four more years of President Bush. No hanging chads or drawn out legal battles to get caught up in this time, at least not in any way that will change the outcome.

In our household, the results also seemed to be split as close to 51% to 49% as five individuals can possibly come (I'll leave the math as an exercise for the reader). What surprised me was how interested the boys suddenly became in the election on November 2, after barely any discussion before that. I'm still not sure what was said at school, especially during their library visit, but they came home eager to discuss the election and willing to debate the merits of each candidate.

I discussed this with several other parents last night whose elementary school kids were also coming home with pronouncements like "Bush is a murderer" or "John Kerry doesn't care about protecting our soldiers." One wonders exactly what transpired in the classrooms and on the playgrounds.

The biggest family surprise for me was Kevin who was willing to forego Cartoon Network yesterday to watch the election coverage. He sat cross-legged on the sofa with his arms folded behind his head and periodically called out the results from another state. I believe it was the arithmetic, the statistics, that most appealed to him, and also the competition. But it was odd to see him as engaged as he was watching the baseball playoffs. (Gotta get that boy a baseball stats software package soon.)

Justin was eager to talk about the election, and seemed especially interested in knowing how mommy and daddy had voted. No surprise there.

Then there's Andrew. He was so wrapped up in needing to know the election results that he wandered into our room at 4 a.m. He wasn't as worried about Bush vs. Kerry though. He was more concerned about the class election to determine a cartoon character president from a four candidate run-off among Oscar from Shark Tale, Scooby Doo, Hubble from Good Boy, and the big fat chicken from his buddy Matthew's latest story. (Remember the boy I inspired? Still writing.) Eventually Andrew returned to his bed and this morning was the last to wake up. It was easy to get him ready on time though: we just had to remind him about his class election.

Those results, however, are not yet in.

Sleeveless in Seattle

2004-11-02T07:45:00.000-08:00

"In order to support one of Starbucks's guiding principles and protect our environment we will provide sleeves for beverages on request only."

I have decided to boycott Starbucks. This was no easy decision to make. A non-coffee drinker, I had to make a special effort to become addicted to extra hot grande mochas (with whip). Developing a taste for the chocolate cream cheese muffin or chocolate croissant I frequently choose to accompany the mocha required no extra effort at all.

But imagine you are my physician. Imagine you are aware that 40 million Americans are pre-diabetic and diabetes is about to become the largest health risk to lethargic Americans in decades, indeed that we are the first generation ever to have worse health than our parents. Then I come to you with cholesterol numbers off the chart, in excess of 250. The little issue of a daily mocha is broached.

"Careful, the beverage you're about to enjoy is extremely hot."

Let's bring this dirty little addiction out into the light. The grande mocha alone contains 400 calories (200 from fat), 22 fat grams and 33 grams of sugar. Combined with the pastry, we're talking about a total of 850 calories, 46 grams of fat, and 64 grams of sugar. Daily. For breakfast. That's before the cheeseburger and fries for lunch at McDonald's.

Now is your advice to cut back? Switch to non-fat milk? Try "no whip?" Order a tall instead of a grande? Skip the pastry? Cut back to every other day?

Or do you advise me to never ever ever set foot in a Starbucks or McDonald's again as long as I live which if I am lucky will be a week beyond next Thursday?

"This insulating sleeve is made from 60% post-consumer recycled fiber and uses approximately 45% less material than a second paper cup. Intended for single use only."

Do you suppose I am the only customer at Starbucks making unwise beverage and pastry selections? Or do you imagine that millions of other customers like myself are surrendering to death by espresso?

I have my own theories about how Starbucks is changing the future of our country. They have become so ubiquitous—another one pops up in our neighborhood every six months at least—that like McDonald's before them they are making permanent changes to our lifestyles. One can research the rise and fall of various convenience food markets in this country—smoothies, gourmet cookies, frozen yogurts, ice cream, etc.—but Starbucks, I am convinced, is here to stay. Just watch how the clientele gets younger and younger: first high schoolers, then middle schoolers, youngsters accompanying their parents; hell, every one of my boys knows where to find at least five Starbucks locations and they each have their favorite beverage. That's pretty damned frightening, I think.

And who are the baristas? There was barely such a job twenty years ago; yet one day soon we'll hear the statistic telling us that by the year 20XX, one in every ten Americans will have worked at one time at Starbucks. We are creating a generation of educated espresso snobs. These kids will never go back to a cup of black coffee from a diner, 7-11, or a vending machine for godsakes. They will have the skill for creating espresso drinks, the desire to have their drinks suited to their taste, and the expectation that an espresso drink is a necessary part of their lifestyle.

I think it's great that Starbucks is "committed to a role of environmental leadership in all facets of (their) business." And if that means, among other things, eliminating beverage sleeves except upon request, then fine. But the ways they are effecting us is not only environmental. Watch what happens to our health and that of our children as we continue to consume their high calorie, sugar-laden products over the next decade.

Except for me. Because I already had my wakeup call and have decided to forego my daily trip to Starbucks.

...hmmm, except maybe on Sundays?

Piratey Things

2004-11-01T16:00:00.000-08:00

"Not long ago—just two years ago, in fact—San Francisco was a city without a pirate store. Itinerant pirates, having landed upon these shores, could wander the streets for weeks without finding a source for replacement mop heads, boots, rope, bottles, lard, quill pens, black hats, glass eyes (or eye patches, for the more modest)...
No longer."
—Julie Orringer,
Foreword to "The 826 Quarterly, Volume III"

"Definitely one of the top five pirate stores I've been to recently."
—David Byrne

"Hey! That's right! We're supposed to sing about piratey things."
—VeggieTales

I made my first visit to the pirate store at 826 Valencia in the Mission District of San Francisco last week. My time was limited; I was running late, out of gas, lacking coins for the meter, and thoroughly lost. But I was as least as impressed as David Byrne, and I plan to return soon for lard, quills, and other "piratey things."

Of course, as most anyone who has been there will tell you, the pirate store is merely a front for the more interesting enterprise in back, a non-profit writing and tutoring center for students aged 8-18. That is the real promise and wonder of 826 Valencia. Founded by Dave Eggers and others two years ago, 826 is staffed by hundreds of volunteers. There they teach writing skills through individual tutoring sessions, workshops, homework assistance, and class field trips offering custom curriculum or popular programs such as the bookmaking workshop where students can write, illustrate, print and bind their own books in two hours. The response to 826 has been so overwhelmingly favorable that volunteers in New York have now opened an 826NYC.

There are several publications at 826 featuring the students' work. While there, I snapped up a copy of Volume III of The 826 Quarterly ["Published twice yearly at least"] so I could sample the student writing at my leisure. It includes stories and poems by authors aged 8 to 18 and includes some impressive writing.

As I was settling in to sample their work, I discovered a story from one of Dave Eggers's writing workshops on "revealing character and developing tension through dialog" called "And They Both Suspect That Somehow This Is All Completely Irrelevant." What quickly caught my eye was that it was written by my 16 year old buddy, Rachel. What a treat! I read and enjoyed it; it's really quite clever, well written, and amusing. I'm about to email her my kudos. For the rest of you, I quote the first paragraph:

Here is inevitability, here is conversation. These are the words which he says. Here is what she replies. Mathematically, Matt takes up approximately 78 percent of the conversation. She, called Lea for short, takes up another 9 percent. The rest we leave to awkward silences.

I plan to return to 826 one day this week when I have more time. I not only want to learn more about their writing workshops and the adult seminars, but I have a calling card of sorts to leave behind...but more on that another time.

CumulaTest—The Solution

2004-10-29T14:11:00.000-07:00

Here are the answers to last Friday's quiz:

Archtophile: teddy bears
Bestiarist: medieval books on animals
Bibliophile: books
Deltiologist: postcards
Discophile: phonograph records

Gnomologist: aphorisms, proverbs & short poems
Labeorphile: beer bottles
Lepidopterist: butterflies
Notaphilist: bank notes or checks
Numismatist: coins

Philatelist: stamps
Phillumenist: matchbook covers or matchboxes
Philographer: autographs
Vecturist: subway tokens
Vexillologist: flags or banners

Let's face it, that one was pretty damn tough. Even I could only score ten correct today and I researched the damn quiz. So score yourself thusly:

0-3: Discarder: You throw everything away.
4-6: Collector: Terrific job! You must live on eBay.
7-10: OmniGatherer: There's nothing you won't save.
11-15: Websterer: You must live with your nose in the dictionary.

For the record, I found many other unusual terms that I could have included, but most of them were copies of one another's trivia terms. To make it in this quiz I had to be able to locate at least two credible sources. (This ain't no amateur blog, baby!)

Having said that, I decided to have some fun and coin a few new terms of my own. The following list contains fifteen new or redefined terms for collectors with the objects they collect. Here then are my neolgisms for collectors of the world:

Barbierian: dolls
Soilsport: dirt
Onomatapianist: word sounds
Pathologist: mental disorders
Digicuticlist: fingernail clippings

Scatinarian: animal droppings
Memoirist: recovered memories
Dominatrix: victims
Omphaloskepticist: dubious navels
Agememnonist: troyfuls

Omniprocurer: everything
Notathingman: nothing
INM8: license plates
Judithsistist: popsicle® sticks
Oneliner: first sentences

Congratulations, Red Sox!

2004-10-28T09:54:00.000-07:00

Was that a wicked unbelievable postseason or what?

I thought it was a miracle when the Red Sox returned after the 19-8 pounding by the Yankees in Game 3 of the ALCS to come within three outs of an inglorious end to their season, yet somehow win a twelve-inning, five-hour marathon game. And it took real guts to come back and prevail in an even longer fourteen-inning showdown the next day.

But who could have imagined that when they got up off the mat after that massacre, that they would also have the moxie to take all four straight against their Yankee nemesis, winning the final two battles in Yankee Stadium? That feat alone guaranteed them a place in Red Sox legend and baseball record books, but no one could have anticipated that they would also go on to sweep the Cardinals in four games, becoming the only major league team ever to win eight consecutive games in the postseason. Fan-tastic!

I was heartbroken in 1967 when my heroes lost game seven to the Cardinals. I was stunned in 1975 when after that amazing game six ending with the memorable Carlton Fisk home run, they again lost game seven. I watched in shocked disbelief with my future wife in 1986 when they booted the Series. But I was thrilled nearly twenty years later to watch the 2004 World Series with her children and to hoot and holler like fools when the Red Sox took the Series in four straight.

Kevin commented during the Division Series that he wanted the Twins to defeat the Yankees so the Red Sox wouldn't have to face them again. Pretty intuitive for a seven-year-old. But I wanted the Red Sox/Yankees matchup just as I wanted a Red Sox/Cardinals rematch. If 2004 was to become the year they finally went the distance, I wanted no doubts from anyone that they had beaten the two best teams in baseball to do it.

And to my extreme delight, they did.

Congratulations Red Sox players and fans everywhere!

The Improbable Dream

2004-10-26T16:59:00.000-07:00

Twenty-odd years ago, as a sort of experiment, I kept a dream log for a month. Dream journals can be fascinating...at least to the dreamer. (Sort of like this blog.)

I haven't recorded my dreams in years, but last night's dream is worth recounting.

I won't bore you with the early details: the barbeque, the banter, the funnel cloud, the geeky reactions to watching leaves falling from an odd looking tree. Let's skip right to the end when I was sitting under a large pine tree and was startled by the sight and sound of a large red bird landing in its highest branches.

"Watch out for that one," the man closest to me commented.

I barely had a chance to reply when the cardinal flew down, landed on the back of my right hand and bit me. Hard. Then it grabbed a piece of lettuce I was holding (this is a dream, remember?) and flew off.

My subconsciousness must have disapproved of that scene and began editing it and replaying it, the cardinal returning again and again while I grabbed at it, swatted, swung, fought back. When the dream became more violent I awoke with a start. A few moments later while replaying the dream sequence, I was startled by its unlikelihood.

The neuroses of a native New Englander run pretty deep, I guess.

When I told the boys about the dream at breakfast, Andrew was easily able to interpret it for me. "What do you think it was about?" I asked.

"Defeating the Cardinals," he answered.

Go Red Sox!

TBNT

2004-10-25T16:26:00.000-07:00

One of the recent small publishers in New York was very quick to reply:

Thank you for sending us your manuscript, The Search for Plupreme.

Though it is interesting, it is not quite what we seek. Therefore we are returning it to you with wishes for success in placing it elsewhere.

Sincerely,
[unsigned]
Children's Book Department

Theirs was the first to actually include the title of my work in their form letter. Nice also of them to address me by name, describe my work as "interesting," and to take the time for properly entering my name and address into the letter (and presumably their database).

In my software publishing days I sent out many form rejection letters. We even had a key for different letter types, such as "NT" for "No thanks," and "TBNT" for "Thanks, But No Thanks," a slightly more encouraging rejection. Now I cannot help automatically coding each rejection I get as the publisher's version of an NT or TBNT reply.

Meanwhile I continue to hope for the WCWTPY ("We Can't Wait to Publish You") letter.

Birthdaze

2004-10-24T11:24:00.000-07:00

Justin, Kevin, and Andrew turned seven today, but I mark the time in "parent years." I figure one parent raising one child for one year equals one parent year, so a couple raising three kids over seven years has logged 42 parent years. That seems a better measure of the energy expenditure over the last seven years and could help explain why silvering temples have so quickly extended to cover far more geography than any customary definition of temple.

I asked the boys what they remembered of this special occasion seven years ago, and their answer roughly translates to "not much." Of course, I suspect that would be close to an accurate answer for Kathy as well. She admittedly had a lot going on that day; she can be forgiven for being less exacting in her recollection than I.

We have replayed the day together many times, no doubt rewriting the events, misrecalling many critical details (were there eighteen people in the delivery room or more?), overemphasizing others, and for damn sure forgetting the amount of fear that was stirred into the emotional cocktail of suddenly becoming the parents of three premature babies in intensive care.

But our collective memory—altered and repeated over the years, and now including the boys' reactions as they look at their infant photos and repeat parts of the experience they've heard about and ask questions about details they've only recently become curious about—is a valuable trust and the family mythology that evolves is fascinating, evolutionary, and invaluable.

One detail that Kathy and I agree upon, and that the boys have begun to understand (yet one day will re-examine with philosophical urgency), is their naming. We had three pairs of first and middle names selected (luckily we knew their gender early so we hadn't had to agree upon twelve names), but we still had the task of matching the names with the babies. You can only look at the Baby A, Baby B, and Baby C labels on their isolettes for so long before you are eager to give them the gift of their own identity.

But it was at least three hours after their birth before Kathy could be wheeled into the NICU on her gurney to get her first look at her babies. It's an emotional moment to become the first time mother of one baby, more so of a tiny preemie you can't even hold, lying in an isolette with all manner of tubes and leads attached to him; who can say how it feels to experience that for the first time in triplicate while drugged, exhausted, and recovering from surgery? It was not an ideal moment for naming them.

The nurses had kindly snapped three Polaroid shots of the boys, so later I was able to bring those back to Kathy in her hospital room while able to freely return to the NICU myself as often as I liked. When the naming topic first came up that day I told Kathy I thought I knew which boy was Kevin (I did not tell her that it was in part because he looked most Irish to me and hence the name Kevin Patrick seemed a good fit; ironic now because he is such a little John clone that he's never described as favoring her side of the family). Kathy agreed, held up one Polaroid, and said she thought this baby was Kevin. We had made the same choice.

It took longer to name the other two. I returned to the NICU and made my selections, but expected that this time Kathy would suggest the opposite. But when she had more time to think about it and to see them again she made the exact selection I had. We concluded that the boys were named properly and were meant to grow up with the names we'd given them.

I've asked them whether they want to swap names and the answer is always a resounding NO from all three. So we'll consider it unanimous.

Seven years ago our boys were born; but it has been worth every moment of forty-two parent years.

Happy Birthday, Boys!

Cumulatist Quiz

2004-10-22T11:09:00.000-07:00

Several months ago I mentioned that people collect all kinds of things. That reminded me that there are some terrific words for different types of collectors.

Here are fifteen of them:

Archtophile
Bestiarist
Bibliophile
Deltiologist
Discophile

Gnomologist
Labeorphile
Lepidopterist
Notaphilist
Numismatist

Philatelist
Phillumenist
Philographer
Vecturist
Vexillologist

Now that list makes for an especially challenging quiz, so here are thirty collectable items to match with the above list (twice as many as you'll need):

aphorisms autographs bank notes baseball cards beer bottles
beer coasters bookmarks books bottle caps butterflies
cigar boxes cigarette lighters coins dirt dolls flags jokes
license plates matchbook covers medieval books on animals
phonograph records pornography postcards recipes shells
stamps strings subway tokens teddy bears trivia

We'll see how well you did next week. (No fair consulting a dictionary or eBay.)

Dust Bunnies

2004-10-21T09:28:00.000-07:00

My goals when I first began writing children's stories were modest.

My first goal was to finish. I decided I didn't want to leave a few incomplete stories on some forgotten computer files before I lost interest and moved on to some other project. I reasoned that, "if nothing else, I want to be able to print three copies of a finished book, put them in a drawer, and give them to the boys when they are old enough to read them."

My second goal was to write a story that touched one child. I didn't care about bestsellers, or even about publication. I wanted only to succeed at delighting one child with something I had written.

Last week Kathy signed us up for volunteer duties in the boys' classrooms. This included a few half hour reading slots. She suggested I read one of my stories, "Dust Bunnies," about a little boy who is afraid of the dark. "It's too long," I warned her, "nearly 6,000 words, as long as a whole Jack & Annie book." But she thought I could do it. She reread it to the boys and their friend Ashley and had them illustrate it. She proved to herself that it could be read in the allotted thirty minutes.

So yesterday I went to Andrew and Justin's first grade class to read. Right up until I left for their school I was still editing Dust Bunnies, trimming words wherever I could and improving the ending. I timed myself and discovered that if I read at an uninterrupted 183 word-per-minute clip and asked the children to hold their questions and screams of terror until the end, I could finish in time.

Mrs. Doolin had Justin and Andrew introduce me. They were very proud, as was Ashley who had drawn some marvelous illustrations for my story. Twenty kids gathered around and I glanced nervously at my watch only to discover that we were beginning five minutes late: already I was three and a third pages behind schedule. I wasn't nervous any longer, but I was anxious. I wanted to read with enthusiasm, but I had to trim words and ad lib as I read.

I kept looking into the eyes of twenty children who gave me their rapt attention for thirty minutes as I speed-read my story to them. They giggled at times, missed the more sophisticated jokes at others, and grew wide-eyed when I tried teasingly to spook them. I reached the climax, little Timmy's moment of heroism, and turned to Justin to allow him to recite Timmy's line. He declined, but Ashley eagerly pinch-hit and shouted the line gleefully.

I finished the story and the class ended. Mrs. Doolin led the class in polite applause and choruses of thanks. One girl in the class, whom I'd only met once before, proudly boasted that she knew me from visiting our house on a play-date and she hovered near me like a groupie. But there was no time for feedback or questions. The kids had to empty their cubbies and line up for dismissal.

Of course the question I keep getting is, "Did the kids like it?" And the honest answer is: I think so. After all, they sat still and listened for thirty minutes. They giggled. Their eyes got big. But at the pace I read, it wasn't as though I had them all mesmerized. Still, I'm satisfied. It was fun. Plus I had the relief of having a Red Sox game to go home to.

After school I ran into one mom outside the classroom. She asked how the reading went and I said I thought it went okay. "I'd like to read it some time if you don't mind," she said.

"Here," I said, thrusting my binder at her with relief. "I'm finished."

This morning she emailed Kathy, who forwarded her note so I could read the following:

Matthew talked of nothing else last night except the story John read to the class. He spent the entire evening creating his own book and talking about how Mr. Cardozo had actually written the book he read to the class. I heard about each character in great detail, how funny certain parts were and how the boys did all the pictures. This from a boy who rarely speaks about what happens in his classroom. Please give John this feedback for me. He should feel wonderful about the effect his writing had on Matthew!

So except for the fact that Matthew should have been watching Game Seven of the Red Sox/Yankees playoffs, I couldn't be more pleased.

Come Back, Baby, Come Back

2004-10-20T14:35:00.000-07:00

Who'd've thunk it after that 19-8 drubbing on Saturday? The Red Sox coming back to win two back-to-back extra inning marathons and tonight putting a stitched-together pitcher on the mound and getting two unheard of umpire reversals in their favor to take the playoffs to a seventh game? Incredible!

I went ballistic in the bottom of the eighth when on an easy come-backer, Arroyo failed to get A-Rod out at first and Jeter scored. "You cannot blow that play! You practice and practice until you can make that play every time even in Little League!" I complained (okay, I was shouting), while the boys looked on with concern. "A major league ballplayer cannot mess up that play!"

Oops, not the best object lesson in sportsmanship and fine parenting. Then I saw the replay again and again, showing not only that Rodriquez had swiped at Arroyo's glove, knocking the ball from his hand, but that the first base umpire was waving him fair when he hadn't come close to touching first base.

Unbelievably, the umpire crew reversed the call, sent Jeter back to first, and called A-Rod out. I was flabbergasted. I had never seen the umpires make a reversal like that. Like millions of Red Sox fans, I expected that play to be the beginning of the Red Sox predestined unraveling. I had seen it too many times before.

I explained it all to the boys. They looked relieved to see Dad not only calming down, but approximating the father they know. Well, at least until the Red Sox won and we all started screaming and dancing and giving high fives while Justin chanted, "Reverse the curse!" and mooned the Yankees.

Also not our greatest display of sportsmanship.

But mighty satisfying, nevertheless.

How Do You Spell TiVo?

2004-10-18T11:52:00.000-07:00

One of the unavoidable detractions to viewing televised sporting events with young children is the commercials. So far during the playoffs I haven't seen too many gruesome ads for CSI and their ilk, or previews for frightening R-rated slasher flicks, but the boys are getting inundated with gratuitous advertising messages, no doubt about it.

After the third viewing of a commercial promoting the upcoming reality series, "My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss," Justin expressed his frustration, "That's just mean. How would you like it if you thought you got a job and then were humiliated on TV while millions of people were watching?"

Jumping on the Bandwagon

2004-10-17T09:27:00.000-07:00

I'll always remember being in Fenway Park for Game 6 of the 1975 World Series when Carlton Fisk launched that memorable game winning home run during the bottom of the twelfth inning, the one he dramatically waved at in a desperate attempt to will it from going foul.

Okay, okay, I was actually with a bunch of friends screaming up a storm in my parents' living room at 12:30 a.m. while my father attempted to sleep two rooms away. I just thought I'd lie since everyone else claims to have been there—even Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting during a dramatic exchange with Robin Williams seems to be recalling a game that occurred before he was born...one more bit of evidence of the genetic memory of all Red Sox fans.

(On the other hand, I honestly was in the upper deck of Candlestick Park exactly 15 years ago during the Loma Prieta earthquake that preceded Game 3 of the Giants/A's Bay Bridge Series, but that's another story...)

Tonight's twelfth inning game-winning home run in Game 4 of the playoffs, this time by David Ortiz, keeps the Red Sox chances alive, at least for a few more hours. When Ortiz came to bat, I briefly considered waking Kevin, who has shown extra interest in the games, and bringing him out to watch. But it was nearly 10:30 already—and that was on the West Coast. I can't imagine the problems faced by parents of loyal Red Sox fans on the East Coast where it was nearly 1:30 a.m.

I watched the faces of the fans in Fenway—the television producers kept returning to dozens of reaction shots of pained Red Sox fans during the waning moments of the game—and saw myself and my friends. Of course, you could make a good case that watching the Red Sox playoffs and cheering for them now after not catching a single inning of play during the regular season is jumping on the bandwagon. But that would be missing the point. It's hard for any Red Sox fan who has lived through the heartbreak of previous seasons, even if only last year's dismal postseason defeat by the Yankees, to resist the call to witness their October struggles. I see on those faces all the hope and pain I remember so well.

David Ortiz kept that hope alive at least for fifteen more hours. Most likely it will just increase the bittersweet pain that awaits the Fenway faithful. But you hope against all reason that it will give those true believers, the fans who followed the entire season and who last night could be seen braving the forty degree temperatures at 1 a.m. while still waving their "I believe" placards, a turning point to forever remember in a dream they cling to against all odds.

No Author Left Behind

2004-10-15T13:20:00.000-07:00

This is not a political blog. You can find plenty of those elsewhere.
But with the presidential election less than three weeks away, the competition for one's vote is getting louder and the lobbying from special interest groups more frequent.

One ad in particular caught my eye. It's a poster of "a child’s face behind hundreds of author and illustrator names... [and] headlined 'We Create Children’s Books Because We Care About Children—That’s Why We’re Voting For John Kerry.'"

With a list of over 360 published children's authors and illustrators, you know you're going to discover many of your own favorites, and I did. I quickly recognized the following twenty from my own bookshelves or recent library visits:

Avi Judy Blume Susan Cooper Bruce Coville
Tomie dePaola Kate DiCamillo Jeanne DuPrau Sid Fleischman
Jack Gantos Dan Greenberg James Howe Gail Carson Levine
Jane Langton Linda Sue Park Katherine Paterson Tamora Pierce
Louis Sachar Maurice Sendak Jane Yolen Laurence Yep

I've already mentioned about a third of those in previous posts and I hope I'll get the chance to discuss at least a third more. You could do worse than use those twenty authors as the starting point for creating a reading list for your child (Ella Enchanted, Holes, Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key, Dragonwings, The Tale of Despereaux, etc.)—unless, of course, you now decide to boycott them.

I also noticed the conspicuous absence of Lynne Cheney, author of America: A Patriotic Primer and A is for Abigail,—an oversight, no doubt.

(For the record, scanning the list was worth it just to discover the unfamiliar name, Crescent Dragonwagon.)

"Who's Your Daddy?"

2004-10-14T13:04:00.000-07:00

The late Bart Giamatti had it right when he said of baseball:

"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone."

No one knows this better than Red Sox fans.

I first learned it as an eleven-year-old during the "Impossible Dream" pennant race of 1967. I stubbornly—indeed, naively—followed my team's storybook drive from their ninth-place finish in 1966 to the nail-biting four team race that wasn't decided until the final day of the season when the Red Sox became the American League Champions. I recorded every Carl Yastrzemski home run on one sneaker that summer and every Jim Lonborg win on the other. I sat faithfully by my radio even when the Sox were down 8-0, believing they might still rally and win, as indeed they did.

But then came the World Series against the Cardinals and when it came down to game seven, I watched in stunned disbelief as my hero, Jim Lonborg, pitching on two days rest, finally proved to be mortal and my team lost and taught me what an older generation of Red Sox fans already knew: Baseball will break your heart.

Red Sox fans learn this lesson time and time again. There's the heartbreak of 1975 when—despite Carlton Fisk's dramatic game winning home run in the twelfth inning of game six of the World Series (still considered one of the best ballgames in major league history)—the Red Sox choked and lost game seven to the Cincinnati Reds. And there's 1986 when four times the Red Sox were one strike from winning the World Series, only to self-destruct, forever immortalizing the names Bob Stanley and Bill Buckner, and eventually losing the Series again, this time to the New York Mets. One could go on and on, but it's depressing and it's all too often replayed in postseason summaries anyway. (However, if you insist upon recalling each year of heartbreak it is well documented at www.soxsuck.com.)

You would expect that by moving to the West Coast and raising Giants fans I could free my sons of The Curse and the annual disappointment of cheering for the Red Sox. Not so. It is their birthright, after all, and so they know all about the decades of disappointment that follow the Red Sox. Last year, we picked four teams to root for in the post-season, and watched as they got picked off one by one. This year when the Giants folded and fell one game shy of making the post-season, we had only the Red Sox to cheer for.

Kevin gets it. He wisely expressed his hope that the Yankees would lose to the Twins so the Red Sox wouldn't have to play them again this year. Pretty intuitive from a seven-year-old who hasn't known the October frustration of growing up in New England.

But the ACLS is underway. The boys are fully engaged. They ask in private whether Eric, a soccer teammate, is really a Yankees fan. And they were irate, as I knew they would be, when they had to listen to the mocking jeers of "Who's your Daddy?" issued as taunts to Pedro Martinez. They would like payback, but they are anything but cocky. During one inning, Kevin literally stuck his head behind a sofa cushion when the Yankees had the bases loaded and told me to let him know when he could look again.

The way things usually go, that may not be until next April.

First Line Quiz—Kid Stuff: The Solution

2004-10-13T13:22:00.000-07:00

OK, here are the answers to last Friday's quiz:

I am Sam.
--Dr. Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham
Kidnapping children is not a good idea.
--Eva Ibbotson, Island of the Aunts
I went to sleep with gum in my mouth and now there’s gum in my hair and when I got out of bed this morning I tripped on the skateboard and by mistake I dropped my sweater in the sink while the water was running and I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
--Judith Viorst, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.
--Louis Sachar, Holes
I am commanded to write an account of my days: I am bit by fleas and plagued by family.
--Karen Cushman, Catherine, Called Birdy
Now, the Star-Belly Sneetches had bellies with stars.
--Dr. Seuss, The Sneetches
The day she was born was the happiest day in her parents’ lives.
--Kevin Henkes, Chrysanthemum
At school they say I'm wired bad, or wired mad, or wired sad, or wired glad, depending on my mood and what teacher has ended up with me.
--Jack Gantos, Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key
That fool of a fairy Lucinda did not intend to lay a curse on me.
--Gail Carson Levine, Ella Enchanted
Before Julius was born, Lilly was the best big sister in the world.
--Kevin Henkes, Julius, the Baby of the World
It was a dark and stormy night.
--Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
Tom woke up, but Tim did not.
--John Irving, A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound
Not every thirteen-year-old girl is accused of murder, brought to trial, and found guilty.
--Avi, The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle
I never had a brain until Freak came along and let me borrow his for a while, and that's the truth, the whole truth.
--Rodman Philbrick, Freak the Mighty
If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.
--Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning
Officer Buckle knew more safety tips than anyone else in Napville.
--Peggy Rathman, Officer Buckle and Gloria
The week before Mr. and Mrs. Anderson were to leave Tenderly, Ohio, for the somewhat more bustling metropolis of Paris, their baby-sitter, who had just returned from far-off climes herself; came down with a mild case of bubonic plague and called tearfully to say she didn't want to spread the buboes around.
--Polly Horvath, The Trolls
If you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for a glass of milk.
--Laura Joffe Numeroff, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another his mother called him “WILD THING!” and Max said, “I’LL EAT YOU UP!” so he was sent to bed without eating anything.
--Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are
They murdered him.
--Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

Once again, we need a highly scientific scoring system:

0-4: You've never met a child.
5-8: You've read to a child.
9-12: You had the help of a child.
13-16: You're a child at heart.
17-20: You're a children's librarian.

Movie Links

2004-10-12T11:02:00.000-07:00

I'd add a Links section to this site if I could find a tasteful and convenient way to do so. Since I haven't yet, here are my indispensable web sites for movie buffs; I recommend bookmarking these links:

All Movie Guide: www.allmovie.com Great movie database with terrific plot synopses and reviews. It's just hard to link to specific pages or I would.

Internet Movie Database: www.imdb.com Equally indispensable movie database. (They've added a Pro version for a monthly fee--not sure what that's all about.)

Yahoo Movies: http://movies.yahoo.com/ The one place I go to look up show times for movies playing locally. I'm not sure why I rarely search their database for movie facts.

Fandango: www.fandango.com I've tried it. It works. And when I have a giggle of boys dying to see Lilo and Stitch or Finding Nemo on opening day, I take no chances.

Rotten Tomatoes: www.rottentomatoes.com My favorite source of movie reviews—after I've seen the movie. They conveniently summarize and link to the reviews from major newspapers, so before I consider a movie I can see what percentage of the reviews are favorable. Currently, First Daughter is garnering only 11% favorable reviews, while Shuan of the Dead, "the biggest zombie comedy in British history", scores a remarkable 92% approval on the fresh Tomatometer. The trailer for Shuan of the Dead was funny, but that rating is the kind of surprise that might persuade me to catch it in the theater.

Netflix: www.netflix.com For a small monthly fee, you queue up a list of DVD's to rent and they pay postage both ways. Say good-bye to late fees: you keep the movies as long as you like and can have several out at a time. When you finish one, drop it in the mailbox and in a few days the next one in your queue arrives.

Blockbuster: www.blockbuster.com I used to use them as a second source of DVD rental ideas for Netflix (to pay them back for all the late fees). Now it looks like they are going after Netflix directly with a mail-order DVD rental program of their own.

Coming Attractions: http://www.comingsoon.net/trailers/ You'll want a high-speed internet connection and up-to-date media player software, but after that you'll be downloading trailers like this one before you know it.

Screenplays: www.moviescriptsandscreenplays.com Here's where I start now when I'm looking for the script to download.

Book List: http://www.westmount.ci.yrdsb.edu.on.ca/moviesa-z.html The information is buried in other movie databases, but I found myself wanting a single easy-to-browse list of books that had been made into movies. This is an amateur site, with obvious gaps and numerous typos, but it has about 600 titles listed and it's the best of its kind I've located so far.

(Note: I was able to construct a suitable "Power Search" at IMDb: by restricting the Country of Origin to USA, Language to English, Year range from 1960-2005, Keyword to "based-on-novel," and excluding TV movies, TV series, and "Direct to video" releases, I was able to generate a manageable and interesting list of about 2000 titles. Regrettably, I couldn't find a way to save the search and post the link here.)

Movies Based on Books

2004-10-11T19:17:00.000-07:00

The surprising observation that several books I read recently had been made into movies sent me searching for a comprehensive web site listing novels and stories that have made it to the screen. I'm still searching, but so far one amateur site with about six hundred titles is as close as I've been able to come.

Browsing their database, and my records, inspired me to put together a few lists:

10 Movies to Add to My Rental List:

This is a list of books I've read (or started) that were made into movies in the past 10 years. I probably had a good reason for missing most of these, but curiosity keeps them on my rental list.

The 13th Warrior (1999) (from Eaters of the Dead)
Bastard Out of Carolina (1996)
Children of Dune (2003) (from the TV miniseries)
The Door in the Floor (2004)
The Human Stain (2003)

A Map of the World (1999)
The Mighty (1998) (from Freak the Mighty)
The Postman (1997)
Timeline (2003) (I'm a third of the way through the book.)
The Virgin Suicides (1999)

My expectations are low, especially after the recent disappointment of Wonder Boys, A Thousand Acres, and The Shipping News. (Going back much farther than ten years, I hope one day to see The Collector, Last Summer, and Nickel Mountain, among other old favorites.)

10 Books to Add to My Library List:

A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nasar
Blood Work, Michael Connelly
The Bone Collector, Jeffery Deaver
Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier
The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje

Mystic River, Dennis Lehane
A River Runs Through It, Norman MacLean
Rocket Boys, Homer Hickam (released as October Sky)
Searching for Bobby Fischer, Fred Waitzkin
The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith

20 Books-to-Movies You May Have Missed:
And maybe you should have, but as I went back into the vaults, I rediscovered this crop of stories that I've both read and watched (usually in that order).

A Boy and His Dog, Harlan Ellison
After Dark, My Sweet, Jim Thompson (overshadowed by The Grifters, that same year, this was the better adaptation)
Devil in a Blue Dress, Walter Mosley
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Tom Robbins
First Blood, David Morrell (the birth of Rambo)

The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
Heaven's Prisoners, James Lee Burke
The Man Who Fell to Earth, Walter Tevis
The Milagro Beanfield War, John Nichols

The Mosquito Coast, Paul Theroux
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
The Natural, Bernard Malamud
Red Dragon, Thomas Harris (the debut of Dr. Hannibal Lecter; so good they made it into a movie twice...first as Manhunter)
The Road to Wellville, T. C. Boyle

Smilla's Sense of Snow, Peter Høeg
The Strawberry Statement, James S. Kunen
The Tin Drum, Günter Grass
Tough Guys Don't Dance, Norman Mailer
The Witches of Eastwick, John Updike

Note: They're reading the same books in L.A. that I am, obviously. That television preview I kept ignoring all week—the scary-looking one starring Kirstie Alley—turned out to be based on the Sue Miller novel, "While I Was Gone," that I read and forgot about from two summers ago. Maybe it was a blessing that I missed it.

First Line Quiz—Kid Stuff

2004-10-08T13:10:00.000-07:00

Naturally, what you want to know is: If Irving's first line was so terrific—if it's possible that "there was no better beginning to any story than the first sentence of The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls,"—then what other children's stories have memorable first lines?

Time then for another First Line Quiz. I threw in several lobs, so you should be able to get five correct without breaking a sweat.

I am Sam.
Kidnapping children is not a good idea.
I went to sleep with gum in my mouth and now there’s gum in my hair and when I got out of bed this morning I tripped on the skateboard and by mistake I dropped my sweater in the sink while the water was running and I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.
I am commanded to write an account of my days: I am bit by fleas and plagued by family.
Now, the Star-Belly Sneetches had bellies with stars.
The day she was born was the happiest day in her parents’ lives.
At school they say I'm wired bad, or wired mad, or wired sad, or wired glad, depending on my mood and what teacher has ended up with me.
That fool of a fairy Lucinda did not intend to lay a curse on me.
Before Julius was born, Lilly was the best big sister in the world.
It was a dark and stormy night.
Tom woke up, but Tim did not.
Not every thirteen-year-old girl is accused of murder, brought to trial, and found guilty.
I never had a brain until Freak came along and let me borrow his for a while, and that's the truth, the whole truth.
If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.
Officer Buckle knew more safety tips than anyone else in Napville.
The week before Mr. and Mrs. Anderson were to leave Tenderly, Ohio, for the somewhat more bustling metropolis of Paris, their baby-sitter, who had just returned from far-off climes herself; came down with a mild case of bubonic plague and called tearfully to say she didn't want to spread the buboes around.
If you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for a glass of milk.
The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another his mother called him “WILD THING!” and Max said, “I’LL EAT YOU UP!” so he was sent to bed without eating anything.
They murdered him.

The books range from picture books to young adult (YA) novels. If you need a hint, ask the nearest four to fourteen-year-old.

Multiple Submissions

2004-10-07T14:19:00.000-07:00

The 18th time's a charm, right?

Having given the first ten publishers ten weeks, and having received five rejections so far, I just submitted The Search for Plupreme to eight more publishers. This time it's wending its way locally to Berkeley and San Francisco, and farther afield to New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania.

I'm curious whether an unknown, unagented writer will have better luck at the smaller publishing houses. Time will tell.

It takes "The Village"

2004-10-07T11:20:00.000-07:00

Like many, I eagerly await each new M. Night Shyamalan film since The Sixth Sense, which I thought was outstanding. His work has been decent since then—Unbreakable was my favorite—but he'll never catch us so unguarded again and so each subsequent movie struggles to measure up.

I recently saw The Village, and there were moments when it was terrific. I don't think I have ever heard a woman in the audience moan with such audible anguish as I did during one scene of The Village. But by the time the movie had run its course and unraveled the mystery one couldn't help feeling disappointed, especially by revelations that in hind-sight rendered earlier scenes illogical.

The Sixth Sense, on the other hand, I can watch time and again. I recently discovered it on television and even with the commercial interruptions and edited-for-TV censorship, I was still struck by the outstanding craftsmanship, brilliant screenplay (every single line perfect!), and spot-on performance (I almost typed "dead-on") by young Haley Joel Osment.

Seeing it again after all these years reminded me of the first time...and of an email I wrote at the time capturing my reaction. So here is something from the vaults. It captures a hint of my sensibilities when the boys were two and dad was brain-fried and exhausted, albeit employed:

*****

Sent: October, 1999
Subject: I see dead people

...I first saw The Sixth Sense with a friend, Steve, while on vacation at Lake Tahoe this summer. Steve was vacationing with his wife, Caroline—a college classmate of Kathy's—the same weeks we were in Tahoe. We took several long hikes together during that week and we discussed the movie at least half a dozen times before the obvious struck me.

We were at the top of a scenic outlook with a gorgeous view of the Nevada valley and the Lake Tahoe basin when I experienced a series of flashbacks that usually only happen in the movies. Flash: discussing the movie while Kathy and Caroline pretended not to hear. Flash: feeling lightheaded while struggling to keep up with Steve on our hikes. Flash: our babysitters complaining how cold it was in our rental home in the middle of August. Flash: Caroline visiting Kathy each morning and the two of them chatting while completely ignoring me. Flash: calling to check my voicemail, but not having any messages even though I didn't leave a "while I'm on vacation message." Flash: Kathy pulling away from my cold feet at night which I could never seem to get warm. Flash: Kathy recently telling me about a friend whose husband died of a bike accident over a year ago. Flash: half my work team relocating their cubicles to another floor while mine alone remained in a sixteen cubicle section. Flash: Kathy making plans while at Tahoe to start consulting with Palm when she got back, but nobody from Palm ever talking to me about it. Flash: driving Steve to the movie and drifting across the double yellow line when I was trying to change a radio channel. Flash: lifting Kevin from his crib while he reached for Kathy and whispered what I swore sounded like, "I see dead people." Flash: returning again and again to the same cubicle, the same bedroom, the same commute, the same meetings, but never noticing even the slightest reaction to my ideas or suggestions or complaints.

And you thought you were surprised by the ending of the movie. How would you like to have seen it and later discovered a much more personal message, but still not have any idea what unfinished business you need to take care of...

--John

...it's okay, you don't need to adjust the thermostat; I have meetings to go sit in on now.

Spontaneous Publicity

2004-10-06T09:12:00.000-07:00

Oh my God! The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here! ...

Page 73, Johnson, Navin, R.!

I'm somebody now! Millions of people look at this book every day! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity--your name in print--that makes people. I'm in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.

--Steve Martin, "The Jerk"

Several days ago, while searching to discover the truth behind Philip Roth's claim to have discovered a piece of paper with nineteen sentences that he subsequently turned into the opening lines of his first nineteen books, I repeatedly hit dead ends until I Googled:

"philip roth" "nineteen sentences"

and found this erudite link:

6° of Aberration
... nineteen sentences that taken together make no sense at all." An unattributed exercise by one or more authors (who knows ... The Human Stain, by Philip Roth. ...
sixdegreesofaberration.blogspot.com/ - 101k

Google had found my little oasis in cyberspace...okay, admittedly with a gentle nudge from yours truly—one can submit one's URL to their web crawler, Googlebot, and out of curiosity I had. But it was surprising nonetheless to see my recent posting turn up as a result of my own search term.

It also seems that Google, the owner of Blogger, the tool I use to author this blog, has not yet fully integrated their search and blogging technologies. It appears that Googlebot crawled and indexed only the top-level page of my URL http://sixdegreesofaberration.blogspot.com/ even though they claim that providing the top-level page is sufficient for their bots to crawl the entire site.

The template I use creates individual pages for every post, making it possible for me to provide convenient links back to earlier threads of discussion. To be properly indexed and searchable, Googlebot needs to crawl every page.

How else are things going to start happening to me now?

Based on the Novel

2004-10-05T13:45:00.000-07:00

The topic of taking books I've enjoyed and making them into movies had me curious: how many of the 20 books from my First Line Quiz (a random collection of sorts, right?) ever made it to the screen? I was certain of at least ten; I was surprised to discover fourteen, a high percentage, I think.

In order of release then, here are the novels from that list that were made into movies:

Moby Dick: (1930) Starring John Barrymore; followed by John Huston's version with Gregory Peck as Ahab (1956); an animated version (1977); and a four hour TV miniseries featuring Patrick Stewart (1998).

The Stranger: (1967) Released in Italy as Lo Straniero (1967) and starring Marcello Mastroianni; later released in France as L'Etranger.

Catch-22: (1970) The book was a best-seller, but the movie flopped: it got trumped that same year by Robert Altman's M*A*S*H, but what an unbelievable ensemble cast appeared in Catch-22: Alan Arkin, Martin Balsam, Richard Benjamin, Art Garfunkel, Jack Gilford, Buck Henry, Bob Newhart, Anthony Perkins, Paula Prentiss, Martin Sheen, Jon Voigt, Orson Welles, Bob Balaban, Charles Grodin, and Alan Alda as an extra.

End of the Road: (1970) Originally rated X; starred Stacey Keach as Jacob Horner and James Earl Jones as the doctor. I rented it years ago and it was nothing like I envisioned the novel, but similar to other gritty, realistic, Vietnam-era movies like Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, Little Big Man, and Straw Dogs.

A Clockwork Orange: (1971) A cult classic; also X-rated when it was released—although the violence is unremarkable, literally cartoonish, by today's standards; directed by the remarkable Stanley Kubrick; starring Malcolm McDowell.

Slaughter-House Five: (1972) "Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." The movie may have permanently imprinted that line for thousands of viewers, but as delightful as it is, that is not the first line of the novel.

Portnoy's Complaint: (1972) This one surprised me, although maybe I saw it in a campus theater decades ago. It starred Richard Benjamin and Karen Black. Benjamin, incidentally, also starred in another Philip Roth effort, Goodbye Columbus (1969), with Ali McGraw one year before she gained stardom for Love Story.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: (1975) Directed by Milos Forman and starring Jack Nicholson. A terrific movie, although I recall being moderately disappointed as I left the theater after the first viewing, having made the mistake of finishing the novel the week before—never a good idea.

The Hobbit: (1978) Animated. I wonder whether the boys would enjoy it.

Grendel: (1981) Surprise, surprise! "Grendel, Grendel, Grendel," was an animation out of Australia featuring the voice of Peter Ustinov. The plot synopsis at www.allmovie.com cracks me up:

In the late 1970s, Grendel by John Gardner was a highbrow best-seller that everyone with pretensions to intellectual sophistication was reading. In it, the author retold the epic Anglo-Saxon hero myth of Beowulf from the point of view of the monster the hero killed, rather than from the hero's vantage point. In so doing, he scored numerous points about the violence and intolerance of human beings and raised more profound philosophical issues. This animated feature was adapted from Gardner's book and never quite found its audience; too simplified for the literati, it was definitely not a children's feature and was not aimed at mainstream audiences.

Gorky Park: (1983) Starring William Hurt, Lee Marvin, and Brian Dennehy; I still can't understand why nothing else from Martin Cruz Smith has made it to the screen except for Nightwing (1979).

The Princess Bride: (1987) Well, William Goldman is a renowned screenwriter and novelist, after all. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Great Waldo Pepper, the original version of The Stepford Wives, Marathon Man, All the President's Men, and The Right Stuff, among others, all preceded The Princess Bride, which many (Goldman included) think is terrific, but which I still consider disappointing.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: (1998) Directed by Terry Gilliam; starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Torro; see also Where the Buffalo Roam (1981) with Bill Murray and Peter Boyle playing Hunter S. Thompson and his attorney.

A Scanner Darkly: (2005) In production, as previously discussed.

As near as I can tell, none of the others from that list of twenty have yet been made into an American movie:

M/F: If it hasn't reached the screen by now, I seriously doubt it ever will.

One Hundred Years of Solitude: Hasn't made it to American screens, but there was one movie, Eréndira (1983), that was made from a Gabriel Garcia Marquez story. For magic realism fans, try The House of the Spirits (1993) from the Isabel Allende novel.

The Tiger Bride: Most of Angela Carter's outstanding writing, many of them dark and symbolic derivatives of classic fables, are short stories, not novels; I know of one movie, The Company of Wolves (1984), that was loosely based on her examination of the Little Red Riding Hood tale.

The 158-Pound Marriage: Not surprising that this one never made it, but The World According to Garp (1982), The Hotel New Hampshire (1984), Simon Birch (from A Prayer for Owen Meany) (1998), The Cider House Rules (1999), and Door in the Floor (2004) (from A Widow for One Year) all came from other John Irving novels.

Rendezvous With Rama: Surprisingly, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the sequel, 2010 (1984) are the only Arthur C. Clarke novels to my knowledge to make it to the screen. I don't know how that is possible: ever since I first read Rendezvous With Rama in college I began imagining how I would make it into a movie.

Neuromancer: The rights have been optioned, and at least one old screenplay is circulating in Hollywood, but so far only Gibson's stories Johnny Mnemonic (1995), and something called New Rose Hotel (1998), have made it to film.

Five More Sentences, Plus One

2004-10-04T09:21:00.000-07:00

[Warning: contains profanity.]

Postscript to Friday: For those of you who wonder—and there are always some of us—I collected the first lines of Philip Roth’s five subsequent novels. Perhaps one day, Roth will also claim a mysterious origin to these sentences:

Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over. [20] The Swede. [21] Ira Ringold's older brother, Murray, was my first high school English teacher, and it was through him that I hooked up with Ira. [22] It was in the summer of 1998 that my neighbor Coleman Silk—who, before retiring two years earlier, had been a classics professor at nearby Athena College for some twenty-odd years as well as serving for sixteen more as the dean of faculty—confided to me that, at the age of seventy-one, he was having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman who worked down at the college. [23] I knew her eight years ago. [24]

20. Sabbath’s Theater
21. American Pastoral
22. I Married a Communist
23. The Human Stain
24. The Dying Animal

It's pretty hard to keep up with a writer as prolific as Philip Roth. His twenty-fifth book, a novel that imagines what the world may have been like had an anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh defeated FDR in the 1940 presidential election, was released in the past few days (and at the time of this posting ranked #2 on Amazon's sales list). It begins:

Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. [25]

25. The Plot Against America

I find myself repeatedly mulling over Roth's so-called "myth of origin" [Professor Shostak] regarding the first sentences of his first nineteen books...as well as my ready gullibility at the suggestion.

It is an intriguing scenario to imagine. What if Philip Roth's creative output had been driven by such a serendipitous act? And how different would the world of literature be if Roth had found a piece of paper containing the first nineteen sentences of what is now John Updike’s body of work or Saul Bellow's? Or what if instead of Roth, Thomas Pynchon or Chaim Potok had found that sheet of paper and had a compulsion similar to the one described by Philip Roth?

Hmmm. That gives me two really great ideas.

Nineteen Sentences, Explained

2004-10-01T17:11:00.000-07:00

Recall from Wednesday the unusual paragraph containing nineteen sentences that turned out to be the first line from each of Philip Roth's first nineteen books.

The story behind the page containing those sentences is told by Philip Roth in the Afterword to the 25th anniversary publication of Portnoy’s Complaint (1994). According to Roth, he was eating at a favorite diner nearly fifty years ago when he discovered a single typewritten sheet of paper, revealing "in the form of a long single-spaced unindented paragraph... [those] nineteen sentences that taken together make no sense at all."

Regarding the fate of that sheet of paper during the next year, Roth says, "Though I could never bring myself to discard it, I did nothing not to lose it." The page would turn up time and again until:

I saw that these sentences, as written, had nothing to do with one another. I saw that if ever a unifying principle were to be discernable in the paragraph it would have to be imposed from without rather than unearthed from within.

What I eventually understood was that these were the first lines of the books that it had fallen to me to write.

...Please don't ask me to defend the notion that I carried away from that piece of paper at the age of twenty-three...I am even willing to concede that my conclusion was completely mistaken and my whole career has been grounded in a baseless premise. An idiotic premise. An insane premise.

...Well, whether it was or wasn't my job to do, the job is now completed. For better or for worse, wisely or stupidly, I did it. The books that, according to my lights, had necessarily to follow from each of those sentences are finished and done with. There is now a little red checkmark beside every single sentence on that piece of paper whose existence I have never before disclosed to anyone and which I have kept securely hidden all these years in a safe deposit box in my bank.

...Free at last. Or that's what I would probably be tempted to think if I were either starting out all over again or dead.

--Philip Roth, March 1994

Unbelievable. Imagine my amazement at happening upon that essay precisely when I did, after weeks of writing on and off about first lines and selecting one of Philip Roth's own for inclusion in my First Line Quiz.

Naturally I wanted to know more and, if need be, to expose the entire Afterword as some literary practical joke on the part of Philip Roth. But it had been ten years since its original publication in both The New York Times Book Review and as the essay, "Juice or Gravy?" I found as an Afterword to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Portnoy's Complaint. The trail had grown cold.

There are Roth scholars and well-educated literature junkies who could surely shed some light on the whole affair, I believed. But after following dozens of useless links, I was unable to locate a single essayist, blogger, student or reviewer who could debunk Roth's anecdote.

Until today.

I was finally able to locate one essayist who wrote of Roth's "alleged discovery, in a cafeteria in the late 1950's, of an anonymous, abandoned sheet of paper covered with a paragraph of nineteen unrelated sentences." The essayist considered Roth's "myth of origin" as a "directive to the reader concerning the folly of trying to find coherence in Roth's career."

From there, it took only a bit more sleuthing to identify the essayist as Debra Shostak, Professor of English at the College of Wooster, and author of "Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives," (published, coincidentally, the same month I posted my First Line Quiz). Those credentials are good enough for me, thank you very much.

Free at last.

"Don't say we didn't warn you!"

2004-09-30T15:03:00.000-07:00

If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle. This is because not very many happy things happened in the lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire were intelligent children, and they were charming, and resourceful, and had pleasant facial features, but they were extremely unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was rife with misfortune, misery, and despair. I'm sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes.

The Bad Beginning
A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the First
--Lemony Snicket

So begins the first volume of the most successful (to my knowledge) children's book series since Harry Potter.

This Christmas ("Coming Too Soon!"), Jim Carrey ("Bad actor. Worse villain.") will star as the evil Count Olaf, Jude Law as the series narrator, and Meryl Streep as Aunt Josephine when the movie version is released.

The movie is apparently based on the first three books in the series: The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, and The Wide Window. I tracked down at least one trailer and it looked impressive: faithfully preserving the bleak atmosphere and the morbid, tongue-in-cheek humor of the series.

I personally cannot stand Jim Carrey in almost any incarnation, but I suspect he was a shoe-in for the role of Count Olaf. I hope Daniel Handler (writing as Lemony Snicket) approves, because as of Christmas, Jim Carrey's portrayal of Count Olaf will become indelibly preserved as the character we all imagine.

It is my sad duty to attend and report on the movie, but there is nothing preventing you from watching something more cheerful this holiday season, if that’s sort of thing that entertains you.

Nineteen Sentences, Cross-Referenced

2004-09-29T09:20:00.000-07:00

Last week I wrote of a piece of paper with nineteen disconnected, interesting sounding sentences upon it. If you read closely, you may have recognized the fourth sentence which appeared in my First Line Quiz several weeks ago. It is the opening sentence to “Portnoy’s Complaint,” first published in 1969 by Philip Roth. If you’re a Roth fan, you may have noticed that several of the other sentences also sound like his writing, at least the Zuckerman reference may have triggered something for you.

The sentences are, in fact, the first lines of each of Roth’s first nineteen published books taken in order and this time, cross-referenced below:

The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses. [1] Dear Gabe, The drugs help me bend my fingers around a pen. [2] Not to be rich, not to be famous, not to be mighty, not even to be happy, but to be civilized—that was the dream of his life. [3] She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise. [4] Sir, I want to congratulate you for coming out on April 3 for the sanctity of human life, including the life of the yet unborn. [5] It began oddly. [6] Call me Smitty. [7] Far from being the classic period of explosion and tempestuous growth, my adolescence was more or less a period of suspended animation. [8] Temptation comes to me first in the conspicuous personage of Herbie Bratasky, social director, bandleader, crooner, comic, and m.c. of my family’s mountainside resort hotel. [9] First, foremost, the puppyish, protected upbringing above his father’s shoe store in Camden. [10] It was the last daylight hour of a December afternoon more than twenty years ago—I was twenty-three, writing and publishing my first short stories, and like many a Bildungsroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman—when I arrived at his hideaway to meet the great man. [11] “What the hell are you doing on a bus, with your dough?” [12] When he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she’s not around, other women must do. [13] “Your novel,” he says, “is absolutely one of the five or six books of my life.” [14] Ever since the family doctor, during a routine checkup, discovered an abnormality on his EKG and he went in overnight for the coronary catheterization that revealed the dimensions of the disease, Henry’s condition had been successfully treated with drugs, enabling him to work and carry on his life at home exactly as before. [15] Dear Zuckerman, In the past, as you know, the facts have always been notebook jottings, my way of springing into fiction. [16] “I’ll write them down. You begin.” [17] My father had lost most of the sight in his right eye by the time he’d reached eighty-six, but otherwise he seemed in phenomenal health for a man his age when he came down with what the Florida doctor diagnosed, incorrectly, as Bell’s palsy, a viral infection that causes paralysis, usually temporary, to one side of the face. [18] For legal reasons, I have had to alter a number of facts in this book. [19]

1. Goodbye, Columbus
2. Letting Go
3. When She Was Good
4. Portnoy’s Complaint
5. Our Gang

6. The Breast
7. The Great American Novel
8. My Life as a Man
9. Reading Myself and Others
10. The Professor of Desire

11. The Ghost Writer
12. Zuckerman Unbound
13. The Anatomy Lesson
14. The Prague Orgy
15. The Counterlife

16. The Facts
17. Deception
18. Patrimony
19. Operation Shylock

It took several library visits and repeated web searches for me to create that cross-indexed list of opening lines to Philip Roth's first nineteen books. But the idea of assembling those sentences into a single, unattributed paragraph was not mine. That's a story in itself and on Friday I'll post Philip Roth's unbelievable explanation.

A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound

2004-09-28T19:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I expressed hyperbolic admiration for the beginning of The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls, John Irving's story-within-a-story from A Widow for One Year.

Today, for the first time, you can purchase the hardcover version of that children's story, retitled, "A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound," for $15.95 (three cents a word) at your local bookstore.

It is a word-for-word reproduction (yes, I checked) of the story The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls. There is only the title change and the addition of the single sentence, "It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound."

Confused? Whether you read A Widow for One Year or not, you should be. But let me explain. Irving included three of Ted Cole's children's stories in his novel:

The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls: This is the book now available in print. It's about a little boy who hears a frightening sound in the middle of the night. It begins with the wonderful sentence I applauded yesterday:

Tom woke up, but Tim did not.

A Door in the Floor: This is the dark tale of a "little boy who didn't know if he wanted to be born," because of his awareness of the evil that awaits him. Even Irving terms it, "creepy," and "the darkest of Ted Cole's stories for children." Just to make it more confusing, it is also the title of the movie version of A Widow for One Year.

A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound: This is the third Ted Cole story to appear in A Widow for One Year. It is about a moleman who captures little girls. It is wholly unpleasant—which is why I was shocked when I originally thought that this was the story now published by Doubleday. To magnify its terror in the novel, Irving carefully waits to recount it until a moment when Ruthie, now an adult, faces a scene of true horror.

In the introduction to his just-published story, Irving says, "I am not a children's book author." (I predict that many bristle at that careful distinction.) He claims to have:

"...created a character named Ted Cole, a most unsympathetic writer of stories for children. Years of reading children's books to my own three sons has given me a low opinion of the kind of children's literature that is intent on frightening the very young; there is a long, stubborn tradition of it. In creating Ted Cole (one of the more willful villains in my novels), I was conscious of taking such an author to task."

If that's the case, then I contend he fails. As much as I loved the opening sentence, the story itself is flawed and the ending ambiguous rather than comforting. I specifically doubt that the explanation for the sound of a monster being only a mouse crawling between the walls is reassuring to most children. It still leaves the very real concerns of the mouse getting into the room with them, scurrying beneath their beds, and crawling between the sheets rather than the walls.

I read the story to the boys yesterday. "Tom woke up, but Tim did not," I began. But they didn't know about the ghosts of Thomas and Timothy. They didn't gasp in appreciation. The consonance I admired only confused them. "Which is Tom?" they asked. "Which one is Tim?" "Why is he in a crib?" "Oh, I think I know what woke them up." At one point Justin said, "This is starting to get scary," but at the conclusion—the disappointingly phrased, "And that is the end of the story."—he pronounced it only "so-so" (in Spanish).

I am scheduled to be a guest reader in the boys' classroom next month. I'm considering soliciting additional opinions.

I should comment on the illustrations by Tatjana Hauptmann, though I am hardly a qualified art critic. I enjoyed her muted, moonlit blues and grays, and the teddy bear that accompanies Tom on his search of the house, as well as the long-shadowed mouse and the expressions on Tom's face. She does a great job creating a creepy atmosphere with shadows and by animating ordinary objects like dresses and pillows rather than depicting, "an armless, legless monster dragging its thick, wet fur." The boys commented on the illustrations, but failed to mention, I noticed, that neither parent appears in the book and that at one point Tom apparently ventures outside the house alone (I certainly expected the latter to draw comment from Kevin).

Illustrators have their own set of inside jokes. In Hauptmann's case, I spotted in the background of one illustration, a small photograph of a man in a wrestling outfit: undoubtedly intended to be John Irving.

Sentences That Go Bump in the Night

2004-09-27T14:04:00.000-07:00

Last month I mentioned reading the John Irving novel, A Widow for One Year, which features a somewhat villainous author of children's books. Of Ted Cole's first terrifying yet successful book for children, Cole's assistant, Eddie O'Hare, believes "there was no better beginning to any story than the first sentence of The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls."

At the time I read that, I presumed Irving had painted himself into the proverbial corner. Besides Eddie's admiration, we are told that Ted Cole's daughter, Ruth, who grows up to become a better novelist than her father, "would always envy that sentence." The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls, we learn, had "frightened about nine or ten million children, in more than thirty languages, around the world."

How could Irving possibly craft the first sentence to that fictional children's book after so much buildup? Well, not only does he reveal the sentence by page thirteen, he includes the entire text of Ted Cole's story by page twenty. It is classic John Irving at the top of his game.

So how does he accomplish it? Through a series of brilliant brush strokes that foreshadow the story and cleverly manipulate the reader. A Widow for One Year begins with four-year-old Ruth waking to an unfamiliar sound in the night. As Ruth investigates, we learn that her parents once had teenage boys, Thomas and Timothy, who are dead. Ruth never knew her brothers, but she knows a great deal about them, having heard numerous stories about the dozens of photographs of them that hang throughout the Cole's household. Ruth believes she sees the ghost of one of her dead brothers and she screams.

That scene ends with typical Irving dark humor, but he moves quickly to another scene, another time when four-year-old Ruth wakes up frightened by "a sound like someone trying not to make a sound." And that's a sound that is terrifying even for an adult. A sound that prompts her father to tell her a story, "One night, Ruthie, when Thomas was your age—Timothy was still in diapers—Thomas heard a sound."

"Did they both wake up?" Ruth asks, prompting Ted Cole to begin the recitation of his famous novel:

Tom woke up, but Tim did not.

Ruth shivers in her father's arms. I shivered with Irving's book in my hands.

Seven words. Twenty-one letters. Nicknames of poetic consonance, subtly revealed. A sentence of haiku-like precision, the conjunction perfectly balancing three syllables of nine letters on either side. I believe I may have gasped audibly when I read it.

Of course, I have read other Irving novels. I know his penchant for black comedy and tragic loss and imperiling children. And now I read him for the first time as a father. And the thought of what he might do with a beginning like that made me shudder.

Tom woke up, but Tim did not.

I had been expertly manipulated. The ghosts of the dead brothers, Thomas and Timothy, were already haunting the novel. The terror of Ted Cole's first children's book had been well established. Because of the clever setup, one infers so much more from that single foreboding sentence than seven monosyllabic words alone can convey.

It is a brilliant beginning—and after weeks of discussing favorite first lines—one that took my breath away.

Nineteen Sentences

2004-09-24T08:26:00.000-07:00

Imagine being a twenty-three year old aspiring author, returning weekly to the same diner, and one day discovering a single typewritten sheet of paper, revealing "in the form of a long single-spaced unindented paragraph... nineteen sentences that taken together make no sense at all." An unattributed exercise by one or more authors (who knows?) that reads as follows:

The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses. Dear Gabe, The drugs help me bend my fingers around a pen. Not to be rich, not to be famous, not to be mighty, not even to be happy, but to be civilized—that was the dream of his life. She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise. Sir, I want to congratulate you for coming out on April 3 for the sanctity of human life, including the life of the yet unborn. It began oddly. Call me Smitty. Far from being the classic period of explosion and tempestuous growth, my adolescence was more or less a period of suspended animation. Temptation comes to me first in the conspicuous personage of Herbie Bratasky, social director, bandleader, crooner, comic, and m.c. of my family’s mountainside resort hotel. First, foremost, the puppyish, protected upbringing above his father’s shoe store in Camden. It was the last daylight hour of a December afternoon more than twenty years ago—I was twenty-three, writing and publishing my first short stories, and like many a Bildungsroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman—when I arrived at his hideaway to meet the great man. “What the hell are you doing on a bus, with your dough?” When he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she’s not around, other women must do. “Your novel,” he says, “is absolutely one of the five or six books of my life.” Ever since the family doctor, during a routine checkup, discovered an abnormality on his EKG and he went in overnight for the coronary catheterization that revealed the dimensions of the disease, Henry’s condition had been successfully treated with drugs, enabling him to work and carry on his life at home exactly as before. Dear Zuckerman, In the past, as you know, the facts have always been notebook jottings, my way of springing into fiction. “I’ll write them down. You begin.” My father had lost most of the sight in his right eye by the time he’d reached eighty-six, but otherwise he seemed in phenomenal health for a man his age when he came down with what the Florida doctor diagnosed, incorrectly, as Bell’s palsy, a viral infection that causes paralysis, usually temporary, to one side of the face. For legal reasons, I have had to alter a number of facts in this book.

I recently heard the incredible story of that sheet of paper and I will share it next week, after giving those sentences a chance to marinate with you over the weekend.

You Read It Here First

2004-09-23T11:28:00.000-07:00

Every so often you read a book that entertains you and holds a quiet place of private pleasure on your bookshelf and in your memory. You may speak of it to others, but more often than not it remains obscure and personal, just another jigsaw piece in the never-finished puzzle that represents your own eclectic taste in literature.

That is, until someone options it and transforms it into a blockbuster movie and suddenly everybody is raving about what was once your unheralded and private treasure.

That happened for me when W. P. Kinsella's little gem of a baseball novel, Shoeless Joe, was transformed into the wildly successful Field of Dreams starring Kevin Costner, and when the oddly titled Philip K. Dick pulp fiction novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? became the cult classic Blade Runner with Harrison Ford.

There was a time when I would purchase The Princess Bride and give it as a gift--often with the suggestion, "Read this aloud at night to your pregnant wife. She'll love it."--confident that I was introducing the reader to something new and wonderful. But that was before the 1987 movie assured that a much wider audience knew of the story and now had their images of Buttercup and Westley, Fezzik and Vizzini, permanently linked to the performances of Robin Wright Penn and Cary Elwes, Andre the Giant and Wallace Shawn.

It continues to happen, this adaptation of lesser-known books from one's library to the screen, but not always with the same degree of success. Smilla's Sense of Snow, for example, and Snow Falling on Cedars were hardly theatrical blockbusters.

Recently, I have been surprised at several of my reading choices that were made into movies. One expects books like The Notebook and Cold Mountain, and one day, Prey, to make it to the screen. Even adaptations of more literary endeavors such as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay come as no surprise--it won the Pulitzer Prize after all, so it easy to imagine someone having the vision to snap it up.

But I confess genuine surprise that the following books, each on my nightstand during the past two years, made it to the screen:

A Widow for One Year, by John Irving. OK, Irving knows his way around Hollywood and several of his novels have made it to the screen. And admittedly, by the time I got around to reading this novel in paperback, it was evident from the packaging that it had already been made into a movie called The Door in the Floor starring Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger. It's when you read it that you find yourself pondering how well it translates to the screen--so much of it is about writers and writing, and after the first third it jumps ahead over thirty years. I tried unsuccessfully chasing it down during its limited theatrical release, even contemplating driving seventy miles out of my way while on vacation, but surrendered and have decided to settle upon watching it on DVD.

The Orchid Thief, by Susan Orlean. It's a non-fiction account about a man who is arrested for breaking into a preserve in the Florida swamps and stealing rare orchids, for goodness sake. Only the rare talent of Susan Orlean could spot it as a magazine piece, develop it into a book, and discover a unique and fascinating goldmine in the theme of obsession. Who would ever consider optioning such a book as a potential movie? Whoever it was landed the unconventional Charlie Kaufman as screenwriter and made the spot-on casting choices of Nicholas Cage, Chris Cooper, and Meryll Streep. But when the bizarre self-absorbed Adaptation begins truly spinning out of control into a tale of sex and drugs one is left amazed that Susan Orlean admitted any attachment to the resultant mess at all, let alone terming it "brilliant."

House of Sand and Fog, by Andres Dubus III. I selected the book on a whim, enjoyed the writing, found the plot intense, and appreciated the local settings. It didn't remain in first run theaters for long, but I managed to slip off one night and catch it with Val who cried (I had tissues), but offered several interesting insights as I had expected.

The Human Stain, by Philip Roth. Who makes Philip Roth's books into movies any more? Who even saw this one? Who had the audacity to cast Anthony Hopkins as Coleman Silk? Even the additional star power of Nicole Kidman couldn't rescue this movie. I read the book--indeed, I slogged my way through it--my first Roth novel in over a decade, but I never expected it to be filmed. Missed it in the theater, but intending to catch it on DVD.

Ella Enchanted, by Gail Carson Levine. It's a children's novel, and a good one, but heck there are hundreds to choose from and most children's movies come from Disney and Pixar properties or well-tested formulas like Spy Kids. Occasionally someone will get Holes or Tuck Everlasting made into a movie, but few children's authors are going to get rich off the movie rights to their novels. Ella Enchanted benefited from the recent star power of The Princess Diaries' Anne Hathaway (who is about to shatter her good girl image with the upcoming Havoc), but it only fared so-so in its initial release. We didn't catch it until the DVD came out, but the boys were curious--having recalled when I was reading it--and it turned out the entire family enjoyed watching it. (Justin did ask me at bedtime, though, why they thought it was necessary to include so much potty humor, which he then faithfully enumerated for me.)

I continue reading; others continue adapting; and so, should I learn that The Life of Pi or Crooked Little Heart, or perhaps You Will Know Our Velocity or Drop City, maybe even The Tipping Point or Fast Food Nation is scheduled to appear on-screen, I'll be sure to let you know.

A Little Monkey Business

2004-09-22T08:54:00.000-07:00

I've occasionally spoken with parents, teachers, and librarians who are disenchanted with Barbara Park's Junie B. Jones series. After all, Junie B. struggles with irregular verbs and she is often unkind and insulting. But her books remain popular and many parents overlook their initial reservations, happy just to have their child reading something.

I'm always interested in what makes any given series successful. We've plowed through many of the Magic Tree House and the A to Z Mystery series in our house. It doesn't take more than a few books to see the formula (not that that guarantees success: there are countless imitators of the popular series who cannot find their way into print).

Raising boys, I never expected the Junie B. Jones series to become popular at our house. Boys, so we are told, quickly develop a gender bias and soon begin refusing to read stories featuring girl protagonists. (This is especially frustrating for the authors of "middle readers" who hear, "Great concept. Can you rework it and change the main character from a girl to a boy?")

So when the boys brought home their first book from the school library this year it surprised me how excited Kevin was to have selected Junie B. Jones and a Little Monkey Business. He skipped right over the Dr. Seuss and Frog and Toad and Little Bear "early readers" and insisted that Junie B. was the book he wanted to read aloud to me (he reads a few pages and then I take over).

Kevin is unlikely to admit it, but I think he enjoys Junie B.'s mischievous behavior and willingness to talk back to her parents and teachers. He grins with delight at her verbal assaults and he asks me to reread the funnier passages:

I made a big fist at him. "HOW WOULD YOU LIKE THIS UP YOUR NOSE, YOU BIG DUMB JIM?" I hollered.

Then Principal frowned at me. And so I smiled.

"I hate that guy," I said nicely.

No problem with the irregular verbs, either: the boys have almost made a competition out of being first to detect and shout out corrections to Junie B.'s faulty grammar. And they react with shock at the inappropriate behavior, even the more subtle and sneaky variety--and it still makes me feel good to see how finely tuned their moral compasses remain.

And the Junie B. series is funny, make no mistake about it. As bored as I am with the A to Z Mysteries and the Magic Tree House series, I have to confess that even I found myself laughing while taking my turn reading Junie B. aloud the other night.

Because her Grandma refers to her new baby brother as the "cutest little monkey" she ever saw, Junie B. concludes he is an actual monkey which causes all sorts of conflict at school when she insists upon it. Eventually the Principal explains that adults sometimes use expressions like lucky duck and busy bee that can be confusing to children. Junie B. and her classmates quickly get the concept:

"Hey! I just thought of another one!" I said very excited. "A dumb bunny isn't a real alive bunny, either! It's just a plain old dumb guy!"

Then my friend Lucille raised her hand.

"I've got one, too," she said. "Sometimes my nanna calls my daddy a couch potato. Only he's not a real potato. He's just a lazy bum."

"Yeah, and I'm not a big pig," said my new boyfriend Ricardo. "But my mom says I eat like one."

[The lesson quickly ends...] Then I gave Lucille back her red chair. She was very nice to me.

"I'm sorry that your brother isn't a real monkey, Junie B.," she said.

"Thank you, Lucille," I said. "I'm sorry that your daddy isn't a real potato, too."

After this great example of fine literature, it came as no surprise to me when I saw the books the boys brought home from the library yesterday: Justin had Junie B. Jones Has a Monster Under Her Bed and Kevin had Junie B. Jones and her Big Fat Mouth.

One Minute Book Reviews

2004-09-21T10:05:00.000-07:00

I have been remiss in commenting upon the books I've read the past few months. To wit:

The Fortress of Solitude, by Jonathan Lethem. Thoroughly enjoyed this. Swore as I read it that Lethem and Michael Chabon must have worked in adjacent cubicles while the latter finished Kavalier and Clay. (It turns out they are friends, along with Dave Eggers, and travel in similar circles...more on that some other time.) Fortress nails the seventies: the music, the culture, the changing times. The language is terrific; the characters compelling; and the pace unhurried (I did not say boring). And honestly, it is a great bookend alongside The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay--one day some careful reader will undoubtedly compose a thesis comparing the two; some are already making the comparison.

A Widow for One Year, by John Irving. Irving's best since The World According to Garp. It is clear to me now that it was the excesses of A Prayer for Owen Meany that put me off Irving for so many years. But Widow has fewer of those excesses while preserving many of Irving's hallmark traits including black comedy, Dickensian characters, metafictional conceits, uncommon sexual obsessions, undercurrents of grief, and as one Washington Post reviewer points out, "there's hardly a writer alive who can match [Irving's] control of the omniscient point of view." (Which odd as it may seem to select that quote, it should resonate with any reader and would-be author of children's literature.)

Under the Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer. Krakauer follows Into the Wild (a man's ill-fated pilgrimage into the Alaskan wilderness) and Into Thin Air (a tragic ascent of Mt. Everest) with this disturbing tale of Mormon Fundamentalism and an examination of the 1984 murder of a woman and her baby by brothers who insisted they were acting upon a commandment from God. I found the book ill-organized and repetitive, often difficult to follow, but I couldn't put it down or get it out of my mind. I know of careless-thinking readers who finished it with a condemning view of all Mormons, but it's the still flourishing Morman Fundamentalist sects of which Krakauer is most concerned, and what he reveals is both sad and chilling, and frankly, morally repugnant. I found myself haunted by and sickened at the fate of many unprotected and ignored teenage girls in America who even today are being brain-washed and abused.

Prey, by Michael Crichton. Michael Crichton still knows the formula for creating a page turner. I ripped through this one in three days, just like Jurassic Park and Congo, and as I have all the way back to The Andromeda Strain which I read in high school. Once again Crichton combines technology, plot, and pacing to create a thriller that has you up late, reading long after your self-prescribed chapter limit. It's an enjoyable diversion--one that ends too quickly as is often the case with this genre--and it doesn't take much imagination to envision the blockbuster movie to follow: in fact, there are one or two blatant examples of artistic license that Crichton arguably employs because he foresees how compelling the special effects will be on a large movie screen. But, hey, the man is a master entertainer, wildly successful with novels, movies, and television shows (notably ER). Who am I to quibble with his formulas for success?

Cosmic Accidents

2004-09-20T17:30:00.000-07:00

"Time for me to get back to my day job, which means that it’s time for me to stop blogging."
--William Gibson Friday, September 12, 2003

One thing leads to another. While searching for a screenplay, I discover hundreds of downloadable scripts and among them, several unproduced screenplays including a few of my favorite novels.

I wrote about finding an abandoned script for A Scanner Darkly. About that same time, I found another unproduced screenplay that caught my eye: "Neuromancer," from the seminal William Gibson sci-fi novel of 1984 that arguably ushered in cyberpunk.

Alas, like the Charlie Kaufman screenplay for A Scanner Darkly, the alleged Neuromancer script also remains a work of questionable authenticity. Although his name appears on the title page, Gibson denies authorship and the script remains in circulation, but quickly loses its appeal once one learns that Gibson disavows any authorial relationship to it.

But all is not lost. It was while researching the authenticity of the Neuromancer screenplay that I was lead to the official William Gibson web site. And it was there that I discovered the artifacts of his nine month experiment in blogging from a year ago.

I’ve found blogging to be a low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial, but the thing I’ve most enjoyed about it is how it never fails to underline the fact that if I’m doing this I’m definitely not writing a novel – that is, if I’m still blogging, I’m definitely still on vacation. I’ve always known, somehow, that it would get in the way of writing fiction, and that I wouldn’t want to be trying to do both at once. The image that comes most readily to mind is that of a kettle failing to boil because the lid’s been left off.

This has already proven to be a terrific discovery. Among the tidbits I've already gleaned:

He disavows the Neuromancer script (crediting Chuck Russell instead...and discrediting the "shabby Dickensian script-floggers" who forged his name to it).
He claims not to have been influenced by Philip K. Dick; in fact he admits to having read only The Man in the High Castle.
On the other hand, he readily admits to having been influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, William S. Burroughs, Timothy Leary and Dashiell Hammett (but not Raymond Chandler). --How reassuring that all but Leary claim shelf space in my library.
He enjoyed The Matrix; expected to dislike it, was dragged to it by a friend, enjoyed it, and went back to see it again.
He mentions a shoe store, Huf, in San Francisco that Cayce, the brand-allergic heroine of Pattern Recognition would love.
There are countless great quotes, including several that follow.

Re the compulsion to blog:

In spite of (or perhaps because of) my reputation as a reclusive quasi-Pynchonian luddite shunning the net (or word-processors, depending on what you Google) I hope to be here on a more or less daily basis.

Re the perfect book:

The Borgesian meta-library contains a copy of every book ever written, but my dream-artifact is already, and always, every book every written (sic), on demand -- yet feels, looks, and even smells exactly like an ordinary hardcover book. Only the content is protean. That simple. The end of the world as we know it, and a good read every single night.

Metaphysics:

But I regard my being me, ultimately, as a sort of cosmic accident.

Re Timothy Leary's funeral:

His very last call consisted of him inviting me to his wake, and assuring me that I’d be “on the A-list”. I told him I’d be there, though I knew I wouldn’t. I had an abscessed tooth, was scheduled for a root canal, and, besides, I knew he wasn’t going to be there. He wouldn’t miss me, and I didn’t want to go all the way down there just to miss him even more.

All of which has yet again whet my appetite for things Gibson. Thankfully I have both his nine month blog experiment to peruse and, thanks to my brother, a DVD of No Maps for These Territories, a documentary about Gibson's life, work and influences.

Lost in Translation

2004-09-17T08:23:00.000-07:00

"Mother died today."

That's the way I quoted Albert Camus's famous opening line to "The Stranger" in my First Line Quiz. But I knew even as I included it that what had always made it wonderful to me was not the first line alone, but the unforgettable existential combination of the first two lines together:

"Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure."

Those are the sentences that have resonated with me and for many Americans for decades. But of course, the novel Camus wrote was in French and for forty-some years we have been reading a British translation, that of Stuart Gilbert.

Now after all these years a new translation by Matthew Ward has appeared. In his Translator's Note he describes Gilbert's version as employing a "certain paraphrastic earnestness" in an "effort to make the text intelligible, to help the English-speaking reader understand what Camus meant." He then suggests that in his own translation he has "attempted to venture farther into the letter of Camus's novel, to capture what he said and how he said it, not what he meant."

He gives a few instances before dropping the bomb:

"No sentence in French literature in English translation is better known than the opening sentence of The Stranger. It has become a sacred cow of sorts, and I have changed it. In his notebooks Camus recorded the observation that “the curious feeling the son has for his mother constitutes all his sensibility.” And Sartre, in his “Explication de L’Etranger,” goes out of his way to point out Mersault’s use of the child’s word “Maman” when speaking of his mother. To use the more removed, adult “Mother” is, I believe, to change the nature of Mersault’s curious feeling for her. It is to change his very sensibility." (Note: the emphasis is mine.)

So how does the new and improved opening to "The Stranger" read in the hands of Matthew Ward? Here it is:

"Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know."

Wow! How does that sound?

Admittedly, I am not bilingual, although French is the only language I ever studied. And the mere existence of a new translation forces me to consider for once that what I have read and loved in "The Stranger" is both Camus's and Gilbert's creation. The entire subject of translations I can see is a rich one and beyond the scope of one passing entry here.

But what about that first sentence? "Maman died today??" I find it fascinating that Ward dared to challenge a sacred cow, and then altered it by employing a word that is not even English--not only doesn't "Maman" have an entry in my dictionary, I never hear English speaking children use it, ever.

I hear "Mama" certainly, or "Mamma." And of course, go to any playground and you'll hear "Mommy" over and over again. So why didn't Ward elect to change the sentence to "Mama died today," or "Mommy died today," if he is so convinced of the sensibility of Mersault's feeling for his mother?

I looked up the French:

"Aujourd 'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas."

That doesn't seem so difficult to translate, does it? In fact I fed it to my computer (Babel Fish) and it gave me this:

"Today, mom died. Or perhaps yesterday, I do not know."

After all these versions, I may as well contribute my own suggestion, right?

"Mom died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know."

That's got to be an improvement over Ward's "Maman" don't you think?

Which translation will endure, I wonder. Which will be the version read by thousands of high school and college students? And will they read Ward's translation and upon closing it treasure it and recall it for as long as many of us have recalled the Gilbert version we know so well?

Postscript: Ward, incidentally, changed other sacred cows as well. The final sentence, one I also admired and found memorable, once read:

For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.

That's also the version I chose to include in my Last Line Quiz (it took visits to over a dozen bookstores and libraries to locate the once ubiquitous Gilbert translation--my copy currently residing in storage somewhere). But now "howls of execration" is gone--and here let's admit no one actually uses that phrase, as wonderful as it is. So perhaps many will prefer Ward's new closing:

For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.

More rejection

2004-09-16T16:16:00.000-07:00

This time from Peachtree:

Dear Mr. --- (write author's name here),

Thank you for offering your work to Peachtree Publishers. Regrettably, we are unable to accept your manuscript for publication. Of the 20,000 queries and manuscripts we receive each year, we can only publish about 20 titles per year.

Our decision to decline your work does not reflect on its quality or on the ability that you bring to it. As you know, publishing is a very subjective business and another editor may feel differently about your work.

We would like to give you a more personalized response but time and the volume of submittals does not permit this; please know, however that your manuscript received a thorough reading and full consideration by our editorial staff.

Best of luck in your publishing endeavors, and thank you again for considering Peachtree.

Cordially,
Helen Harriss
Editorial Department

Just as I said at the outset, a one in a thousand chance is pretty poor odds. I'll give the other five major publishers I submitted to (shhh!) a few more weeks to polish their cover letters and then move on to the smaller publishing houses.

A Browser Darkly

2004-09-15T09:17:00.000-07:00

I have been reading Philip K. Dick since high school. I still recall the oral book report I gave of Ubik. It's such a convoluted and paranoid vision and I was so tired of my classmates' closing line, "And if you want to know how it ends, you'll have to read the book...," that I concluded my book report by pronouncing, "If you want to know how it all turns out, I dare you to read the book."

I continued reading Dick over the years, met other fans, exchanged stories about his paranoid drug-distorted life, and even tracked down biographical material where I could. Although he labored in pulp fiction obscurity his entire career, his fiction is now hot material in Hollywood and at least six of his books and stories have made it posthumously to the screen and many others are under option.

If you enjoy science fiction movies, you've probably seen several that came from original material by Philip K. Dick: Blade Runner (from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), Total Recall (We Can Remember It for You Wholesale), Minority Report, and Paycheck among them. As Wired magazine noted in a terrific article from last year: two decades after his death, Philip K. Dick is "one of the most sought-after writers in Hollywood."

Even I have dreamed about optioning the rights to Philip K. Dick material ever since I first read A Scanner Darkly while living in Austin about 1980. It is a twisted and hyper-paranoid Dick tale about drug culture that alternates between laugh-aloud humor and lump-in-the-throat poignancy. When I finished it the first time, I sighed and thought, "I want to be the one who makes the movie version." As special effects improved over the years, especially when Terminator 2 style morphing technology became perfected, I concluded the conditions were finally right to bring A Scanner Darkly to the screen.

Clearly I'm not the only one who concluded this. Steven Soderbergh (sex, lies, and videotape) optioned the rights years ago. Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) wrote the screenplay.

Rights changed hands. Now Kaufman's screenplay is out; Richard Linklater's (School of Rock, Waking Life, Dazed and Confused, Slacker) version is in. Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey Jr., and Winona Ryder(1) star. Filming is underway in Austin (where Linklater shot many of his earlier films.)

At first I thought I couldn't imagine a better set of talents to tackle this project. Then I read the word, "animation." Shudder. But I haven't seen Waking Life and so I don't know Linklater's approach of filming live action and then layering on animation. I do know they have to try some kind of special F/X magic to create the constantly morphing scramble suits Dick envisioned. So I'll hope for the best.

Back to the Charlie Kaufman screenplay: I was originally intrigued by the thought of the writer of Being John Malkovich tackling A Scanner Darkly. On the other hand, I thought Kaufman destroyed The Orchid Thief, a brilliant book about obsession (Susan Orlean would love bloggers) with his self-indulgent wacky Adaptation.

But Kaufman, too, has his devotees and it was while following links to screenplays that I first discovered the link to his fan site, and was thrilled to find the unproduced script for A Scanner Darkly! Now how cool is that? I momentarily reveled in my discovery. It was at least a day before I learned Kaufman's script had been abandoned. So far, I have yet to read it. (But for those of you wonder, the first words spoken are, "Lately, Jerry Fabin stands all day shaking bugs from his hair." I'm willing to bet that Linklater's screenplay begins somewhere else entirely.)

But it was the discovery of an unproduced screenplay of a favorite novel, believe it or not, that was the original intention of this posting, viz., a follow-up to Monday's discussion of movie script sites with the bonus discovery that not only are there hundreds of screenplays available for free download, but that among them there are many still unproduced screenplays.

There's gold in them thar hills, I tell you.

In fact, in addition to my discovery of Kaufman's script for A Scanner Darkly, I also found screenplays for Spiderman 3, and Star Wars Episode 3--each of dubious authenticity, however.

I also uncovered one other nugget--but it, too, deserves a separate posting.

Stay tuned.

-----
(1) Look ma, a blog entry with a footnote! A decade ago during the world-wide web stone ages--back when you could count the number of interesting web sites in four digits--I used to receive a daily link at work to a site the company webmaster deemed interesting. He once linked to a Winona Ryder fan shrine and that was the first actress I'd heard of who had a whole site maintained by loyal fans (now there are dozens for Winona alone). If you've read any Philip K. Dick at all, you know that his prototypical female protagonist returns again and again under various guises and will inevitably break your heart. I think given the obvious affection and long-held weakness many have for Winona Ryder, she is an excellent choice to play Donna.

Reading Movies

2004-09-13T21:23:00.000-07:00

My library includes a small selection of published screenplays--too small, in my opinion. I have The French Lieutenant's Woman, L. A. Confidential, three Quentin Tarantino screenplays, sex, lies, and videotape, and several others. I also have a few oddities including the screenplay for the obscure 1972 television movie, Between Time and Timbuktu, based on a compilation of Vonnegut material (worth having if only for the vintage Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding skits) and a production copy of the original Blade Runner script that a friend smuggled out of Hollywood several decades ago.

Other than that, I don't have nearly the selection I'd like. For one thing, the scripts for most movies never make it into print. Those that do, often include pages of movie stills which generally contributes to unreasonable price tags. Years ago one could occasionally track down rare screenplays in small specialty bookstores--I used to drive into San Francisco just to browse the collection at a great little shop called Drama Books.

All of this has changed with the growth of the internet. Now one can easily find dozens of web sites with downloadable text, Word, and PDF versions of hundreds of screenplays. And best of all is the price tag: you can find the screenplay for almost any movie you can think of available for free download.

After browsing through many of these sites, I recommend one in particular: the Movie Scripts and Screenplays web site not only includes direct links to hundreds of screenplays, but it also has a handy search engine and a well organized link section that linked back to each of the other sites I had already bookmarked.

What began as a search for a specific screenplay I was curious about soon turned into a shopping spree. Before I realized how greedy I had become for free copies of terrific writing by Robert Towne, Harold Pinter, William Goldman, Peter Shaffer, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian Helgeland, Tom Stoppard, M. Night Shyamalan, Joel & Ethan Coen, Cameron Crowe, Anthony Minghella, and myriad others I had downloaded and organized over three dozen screenplays--all for free.

The first dozen titles alone are all five star movies and scripts I've always coveted (which probably explains why it turns out I already owned copies of three of them). Nevertheless, here are the first dozen screenplays I downloaded.

Amadeus
Blade Runner
Chinatown
A Clockwork Orange

The Godfather
Good Will Hunting
Jaws
L.A. Confidential

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Shakespeare in Love
The Silence of the Lambs
The Sixth Sense

I have to admit that what you get online for free is not always the highest quality. In several cases I could only find copies of dialog transcripts. In other cases, I only found early drafts that weren't as close as I desired to the final shooting script. If you're willing to pay, you might try The Script Shack; each script is listed for an average of $15 (but I can't vouch for the quality).

But I'm content to still browse and download. Before long I'll have a CD with a hundred favorite movie scripts for my library. Or I'll dump them onto an SD Card or memory stick so I can always have a movie to read while I'm out and about. And if I really get insane I'll invest in a ream of paper, some extra ink cartridges, and Kinko binders and I'll fill a shelf at home with some bound copies of favorite scripts--finally filling one gap in my library that's bothered me over the years.

Last Line Quiz--Post Script

2004-09-10T09:33:00.000-07:00

[Spoiler warning: last lines of several novels are revealed in this posting.]

Last week's quiz had a few entries that troubled me. There were several instances when it felt unfair--arbitrary, really--to post only the very last sentence when I knew that the artistry of the novel's closing occured in the last sentence or two.

I've already published the quiz results, so I can now restore one or two of the entries to the longer, more enjoyable closings I would like to have posted:

So [said the doctor]. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?
--Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint

But, I also have to say, for the umpty-umpth time, that life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.
--William Goldman, The Princess Bride

"Poor Grendel's had an accident," I whisper. "So may you all."
--John Gardner, Grendel

There is one other quiz entry that I should amend. I included the unforgettable concusion to A Clockwork Orange as follows:

I was cured all right.
--Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

Unforgettable, that is, to American audiences of my generation as well as fans of Stanley Kubrick's 1971 cinematic adaptation of the novel. If you buy the version widely available today you will discover that the novel includes a final chapter that was excluded from the original American version for years, much to the dissatisfaction of Anthony Burgess, though he was powerless to prevent it at the time.

The novel as he'd intended it was divided into three parts, each consisting of seven chapters. The version published in the U.S. ended with Chapter 6 of Part Three and the memorable moment with Alex in the hospital listening once again to Beethoven and remarking ironically, "I was cured all right." That was good enough for the American publishers who concluded that their audiences wouldn't appreciate Burgess's final plot twist and moral statement so they excised it.

But now the novel is complete as Burgess intended it--though it is still a burden to him, believing as he does that though it is one of his lesser works, it is the one he is destined to be remembered for. And as the novel has been restored, so must my last line entry. Here then, is the line as I should have included it in my quiz:

And all that cal.
--Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

Out of context, it is not nearly as satisfying, is it?

The Class of 2020

2004-09-09T09:17:00.000-07:00

Justin told me last night that the years are starting to go by faster. I marvel at such an observation from a not-quite-seven-year-old. I remember how long school years felt during elementary school. And how short summers felt by high school. But for Justin to notice this phenomenon of accelerating time at his age stuns me.

The boys began first grade this week. They will be seven in late October. When I entered first grade I was five, did not turn six until nearly Christmas, and had never attended a single day of pre-school, "pre-primary school," or kindergarten.

I find it remarkable when I compare the boys' first schooling experiences with my own. By the beginning of first grade my sons were fourteen months older than me, had five more years of school experience (a local co-op, a nursery school, two years of the PBS Early Learning Center, and a year of kindergarten), and had run up individual tuition bills rivaling my Ivy League education.

If they finish school in twelve years and college in four--and I know few California students who do these days--they will be graduates of the Class of 2020. I can't think of a better year to graduate.

This year's college freshman are members of the Class of 2008. Each fall I enjoy reading Beloit College's annual Mindset List, a compilation of cultural milestones that "distinguish this generation from those that preceded it." Each year the list holds a few surprises, and several mysteries.

Samples from this year's Mindset List for the Class of 2008:

Baby Jessica could be a classmate.
The Energizer bunny has always been going, and going, and going.
There has always been a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
There have never been any Playboy Clubs.
Mike Tyson has always been a contender.

You can read the rest at Beloit's web site which also includes links to the lists for the previous six years.

The item that most caught my attention this year--the one that sent me to the internet to verify it--was the statement that for the Class of 2008, there have always been night games at Wrigley Field. Technically correct, I suppose, assuming two-year-olds weren't cognizant of a tradition of daytime baseball in Chicago: the first night game was on August 8, 1988 (and shortened by rain). I would have guessed that game was no more than ten years ago.

Justin's observation that the years pass more quickly is truer than ever.

Last Line Quiz--The Solution

2004-09-08T08:34:00.000-07:00

[Spoiler warning: last lines of several novels are revealed in this posting.]

OK, here are the answers to last Friday's quiz:

I enjoy the movement of life—kids falling in love, performing birds (there was an article on Aderyn the Blind Bird Queen in a popular periodical just after she died), new gelato flavors, ceremonies, anthills, poetry, loins, lions, the music of the eight tuned Chinese pipes suspended from an economically carved and highly stylized owl head at our window facing the lake maddened into the sweetest cacophony by a tramontana that will not abate in its passion, the woman below calling her son in (his name is Orlando and she says his father will be furioso), the ombrellone on our roof terrace blown out of its metal plinth, the spitted faraone for dinner tonight with a bottle of Menicocci, anything in fact that’s unincestuous.
--Anthony Burgess, M/F
Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.
--Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.
--Albert Camus, The Stranger
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
--Herman Melville, Moby Dick
He thrilled as each cage door opened and the wild sables made their leap and broke for the snow—black on white, black on white, black on white, and then gone.
--Martin Cruz Smith, Gorky Park
I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger…a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.
--Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
A present for my friends, he thought, and looked forward inside his mind, where no one could see, to Thanksgiving.
--Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.
--Angela Carter, The Tiger Bride
If cuckolds catch a second wind, I am eagerly waiting for mine.
--John Irving, The 158-Pound Marriage
The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.
--Joseph Heller, Catch 22
“Thank goodness!” said Bilbo laughing, and handed him the tobacco-jar.
--J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
It’s just fairer than death, that’s all.
--William Goldman, The Princess Bride
One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, “Poo-tee-weet?”
--Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughter-House Five
I been away a long time.
--Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The Ramans do everything in threes.
--Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous With Rama
He never saw Molly again.
--William Gibson, Neuromancer
I was cured all right.
--Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
“So may you all.”
--John Gardner, Grendel
“Terminal.”
--John Barth, The End of the Road
Yes?
--Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint

OK, what fun's a quiz without a clever scoring system?

0-2: Fear and Loathing (Poor)
3-6: The Strangers (Fair)
7-10: Scanners Darkly (Good)
11-15: Good Reading Hobbits (Excellent)
16-20: The End of the Read (Superior)

Lettuce pray

2004-09-07T08:30:00.000-07:00

I left a meeting at noon a few days ago and found myself near an In-N-Out Burger so I decided to grab a quick lunch. They have only about three menu options (though I have since learned about their “Secret Menu”--check the web site), so before long I was eating my cheeseburger and fries and naturally comparing them to McDonald’s. The fries just don’t measure up, I thought, realizing just how addicted I had become to IFF’s so-called “natural ingredients” like ethyl butyrate and gamma dodecalactone or whatever.

As I ate I watched a worker slicing endless potatoes one after another. Wow, they are fresh, not frozen like McDonald’s, so why am I complaining? Then I noticed my cheeseburger wrapper and read their freshness claims: fresh beef that’s never frozen, buns without preservatives, hand-leafed lettuce, and fries peeled and sliced daily and cooked in 100% cholesterol free oil.

Fresh, not manufactured. I guess I shouldn’t complain.

But In-N-Out Burger did have one surprise for me just as I was about to dump my trash.

I noticed tucked down on the corner of the cheeseburger wrapper in small caps the notation, “REVELATION 3:20.”

It couldn’t be, I thought. So when I got home, I looked it up in the Bible and read, “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will dine with him, and he with me.”

Subtle, you have to give them that.

And as an exercise for the reader, and fast food diner, you can search for JOHN 3:16, PROVERBS 3:5, and NAHUM 1:7 (“Nahum?”--I had to confirm that one.) on other In-N-Out Burger packaging.

Would you like fries with that?

2004-09-06T23:14:00.000-07:00

Ignorance, they say, is bliss. So I have studiously avoided reading Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation” for several years now despite the pressure of several close friends. I know I eat too much fast food and that the truth about the fast food industry, ingredients, processes, and practices would shock, even disgust me. So I have chosen to remain in the dark and have continued conveniently patronizing McDonald’s, Taco Bell, KFC, and others, returning most often to McDonald’s when the boys insist upon the latest Happy Meal give-away (which multiplied by three boys and five or more pieces per promotion makes for bushels of disposable tchotchkes getting under foot).

Recently though, I picked up “The Best American Non-Required Reading 2002” volume edited by Dave “A-Heartbreaking-Work-of-Staggering-Genius” Eggers. One entry is an excerpt from Schlosser’s book and is titled, “Why McDonald’s Fries Taste So Good.” Sigh. OK, I’m not sure total ignorance is bliss, so I read it.

That night at dinner with the boys we discussed what I had read. I asked them why they thought McDonald’s french fries tasted so good. They had many great theories including the potato, the cooking oil, salt, and how the fries are cooked. All great answers, but none of those actually explain why McDonald’s fries taste the way they do.

McDonald’s buys, slices, cooks and freezes millions of pounds of potatoes daily. Americans live on processed food, but unfortunately the freezing, dehydrating, and packaging techniques destroy most of the food’s flavors. So what is McDonald’s secret?

Enter IFF--International Flavors and Fragrances--the world’s largest manufacturer of natural and artificial flavors. It is a multi-billion dollar a year industry shrouded in secrecy with few of us knowing the names of any of the leading companies. Sure, we know the fragrances: Estee Lauder, Clinique, Lancome, Calvin Klein, but we don’t know who creates them or how they are developed. And we eat the flavored foods, but IFF and others have no interest in revealing their clients because it is important to their success, to the success of the fast food industry, as well as the success of the manufacturers of 90% of the products sitting in our cupboards, that we believe the tastes come from the cooking process and ingredients, not a laboratory in New Jersey.

According to Schlosser, “Distinctions between artificial and natural flavors can be arbitrary and somewhat absurd, based more on how the flavor has been made than on what it actually contains…Natural flavors and artificial flavors sometimes contain exactly the same chemicals, produced through different methods.” Schlosser reveals that the wizards at IFF can manufacture the taste of popcorn (by adding methyl-2-pyridyl ketone), marshmallow (ethyl-3-hydroxy butanoate), even, if they chose, the aromas of freshly cut grass (hexanal) or body odor (3-methyl butanoic acid). Makes you wonder why so many processed foods taste so bad, doesn’t it?

Want to know how Burger King creates the taste of its strawberry milk shake? I read the ingredient list to the boys, first challenging them to try to memorize it, and then quoting:

amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate, cognac essential oil, diacetyl, dipropyl ketone, ethyl acetate, ethyl amyl ketone, ethyl butyrate, ethyl cinnamate, ethyl heptanoate, ethyl heptylate, ethyl lactate, ethyl methylphenylglycidate, ethyl nitrate, ethyl propionate, ethyl valerate, heliotropin, hydroxyphenyl-2-butanone (10 percent solution in alcohol), α-ionone, isobutyl anthranilate, isobutyl butyrate, lemon essential oil, maltol, 4-methylacetophenone, methyl anthranilate, methyl benzoate, methyl cinnamate, methyl heptine carbonate, methyl naphthyl ketone, methyl salicylate, mint essential oil, neroli essential oil, nerolin, neryl isobutyrate, orris butter, phenethyl alcohol, rose, rum ether, γ-undecalactone, vanillin, and solvent.

When I finished the list, Andrew let his jaw drop in mock surprise and said, “Daddy, I am just dumbstruck.”

After reading the article, and discussing artificial and natural flavors with the boys (wouldn’t it be funny, we thought, if the french fry and hamburger flavors got mixed up?—when in fact, McDonald’s fries are designed to taste like the beef tallow they were once cooked in), I went to IFF’s web site. It’s all there. The products, the ingredients, the chemical formulas, the industry overview, the annual report. Not the names of specific food industry clients, of course. But confirmation of much of what Schlosser reported and overwhelming evidence that the flavors and aromas of most of the foods I enjoy daily are carefully manufactured by chemists.

Like Andrew, I am dumbstruck.

Last Line Quiz

2004-09-03T08:20:00.000-07:00

[Spoiler warning: last lines of several novels are revealed in this posting.]

Several weeks ago I posted a First Line Quiz. I thought it might be interesting to see how easy it would be to now match the last lines from those same 20 selections with the authors and titles.

I'm not sure whether anyone actually collects last lines. I don't. They may contain spoilers, for one reason. But there are many novels and stories that end with a satisfying closing sentence or two. I'm sure we've all read a great story and come to the final few words, read them, sighed in appreciation, and closed the book with a sense of satisfaction, even regret at the journey's end.

In this case, several of these lines similarly impressed me; all were fun to rediscover. And one or two of them have an interesting story behind them.

So here are the twenty last lines in decreasing word count:

I enjoy the movement of life—kids falling in love, performing birds (there was an article on Aderyn the Blind Bird Queen in a popular periodical just after she died), new gelato flavors, ceremonies, anthills, poetry, loins, lions, the music of the eight tuned Chinese pipes suspended from an economically carved and highly stylized owl head at our window facing the lake maddened into the sweetest cacophony by a tramontana that will not abate in its passion, the woman below calling her son in (his name is Orlando and she says his father will be furioso), the ombrellone on our roof terrace blown out of its metal plinth, the spitted faraone for dinner tonight with a bottle of Menicocci, anything in fact that’s unincestuous.
Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.
For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
He thrilled as each cage door opened and the wild sables made their leap and broke for the snow—black on white, black on white, black on white, and then gone.
I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger…a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.
A present for my friends, he thought, and looked forward inside his mind, where no one could see, to Thanksgiving.
My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.
If cuckolds catch a second wind, I am eagerly waiting for mine.
The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.
“Thank goodness!” said Bilbo laughing, and handed him the tobacco-jar.
It’s just fairer than death, that’s all.
One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, “Poo-tee-weet?”
I been away a long time.
The Ramans do everything in threes.
He never saw Molly again.
I was cured all right.
“So may you all.”
“Terminal.”
Yes?

Now, here are the sources of the twenty lines, as previously published in the answers to the first quiz:

--John Barth, The End of the Road
--Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
--Anthony Burgess, M/F
--Albert Camus, The Stranger
--Angela Carter, The Tiger Bride

--Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous With Rama
--Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
--John Gardner, Grendel
--William Gibson, Neuromancer
--William Goldman, The Princess Bride

--Joseph Heller, Catch 22
--John Irving, The 158-Pound Marriage
--Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
--Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
--Herman Melville, Moby Dick

--Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint
--Martin Cruz Smith, Gorky Park
--Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
--J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
--Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughter-House Five

Good luck matching the lines with their sources. Through careful reading and a process of elimination it shouldn't be difficult to get a half dozen correct; readers who share my taste in fiction should score over half right. Any score above 12 is excellent in my opinion.

And you thought it was just me...

2004-08-30T10:37:00.000-07:00

But in fact, I'm not the only collector of first lines. I have bookmarked several web sites with larger collections, my favorite being the First Line Literacy Test from Cornell. It features hundreds of first lines categorized by decade, genre, age level (children's books and high school classics), and other themes. Each category is presented as a quiz. Some lines are teasingly familiar, others frustratingly obscure, but the answers are always a mouse click away.

There is even a category showcasing some of the longest first lines, including this record shattering 212 word entry by Joyce Carol Oates (almost as long as some of her shorter novels):

It was many years ago in that dark, chaotic, unfathomable pool of time before Germaine's birth (nearly twelve months before her birth), on a night in late September stirred by innumerable frenzied winds, like spirits contending with one another--now plaintively, now angrily, now with a subtle cellolike delicacy capable of making the flesh rise on one's arms and neck--a night so sulfurous, so restless, so swollen with inarticulate longing that Leah and Gideon Bellefleur in their enormous bed quarreled once again, brought to tears because their love was too ravenous to be contained by their mere mortal bodies; and their groping, careless, anguished words were like strips of raw silk rubbed violently together (for each was convinced the other did not, could not, be equal to his love--Leah doubted that any man was capable of a love so profound it could be silent, like a forest pond; Gideon doubted that any woman was capable of comprehending the nature of a man's passion, which might tear through him, rendering him broken and exhausted, as vulnerable as a small child): it was on this tumultuous rain-lashed night that Mahalaleel came to Bellefleur Manor on the western shore of the great Lake Noir, where he was to stay for nearly five years.

--Joyce Carol Oates, "Bellefleur"

There is also a brief multiple choice quiz on an Encarta site. I got 11 correct out of 13; I expect readers of this blog to score no lower than 7.

I got a perfect score on a second, easier quiz; the designer states that the average result is 12 out of 15 correct.

Lastly, if you're up for more obscure openers than those two sites, here is another place to try.

There are many other links to be found, I'm sure--just try a Google search on "first lines of novels" or something similar. If you find anything as good as the first link above (as if anyone cares), be sure to let me know.

Measuring Up

2004-08-26T12:02:00.000-07:00

At birth, now almost seven years ago, Andrew, Justin, and Kevin were all less than five pounds and within a few ounces of one another: Andrew weighed 4' 15", Kevin 4' 10", and Justin 4' 7".

It is amazing how much weight kids gain during the first two years and then how their growth patterns evolve differently over time. Now nearly seven years old, the boys look less and less alike and their different body types are readily apparent.

Today's doctor visit confirmed what is obvious to everyone: the physical differences among them are becoming more pronounced. By the time they reach puberty--and it won't surprise me if they begin eighteen months or more apart (and won't that be a challenge for the late bloomer to understand?)--they probably won't even look the same age and there could easily be a thirty pound weight difference.

Here's how they compared today:

Andrew: 50 1/4 inches; 61 pounds (95th percentile)

Kevin: 49 inches; 45 1/2 pounds (90%; 50%)

Justin: 45 3/4 inches; 46 pounds (25%; 50%)

That's a whopping 4.5 inch and 15 pound difference between Andrew and Justin.

It's easy to assume that Andrew or Kevin will be the tallest. But I keep recalling Kathy's claim that she was one of the tallest kids in her class through second grade when she just stopped growing, and how I was one of the shortest boys even through high school until I sprouted several inches in college. So time will tell.

To this day one of the most common questions we get when strangers meet the boys and learn they are triplets is, "Which one is the oldest?" and a hundred times at least I've had someone point at Andrew and ask, "Is he the oldest?"

I have never understood that question.

Yes, I know that there are habitual questions people ask without giving them much thought, but it still baffles me. (I have a friend with boy/girl twins who is often asked, "Are they identical?" and she sometimes shrugs and answers, "Yes, except that one has a penis.")

Do people assume it will explain one child's ten pound and four inch size difference over his brother if we answer that he was born sixty seconds earlier? Or do they think triplets can be born months apart?

It's a mystery to me.

Put'n'm Down

2004-08-25T10:15:00.000-07:00

The latest rejection of The Search for Plupreme comes from G. P. Putnam's Sons (i.e., Penguin):

We have read and discussed your proposal and regret to say we will not be making a publishing offer for it. This decision is based on our own judgment of its sales potential with us and the needs for our current list.

Thank you for thinking of Putnam and best of luck placing your book with another publisher.

--The Editorial Department

They discussed my proposal? Wouldn't that be wonderful? If I could only believe it to be true. I envision the day some brave junior editor shows up at the weekly editorial meeting and during her five minutes pitches Ashley's quest to discover a new color--my vision resting on the courage, confidence, and persuasiveness of some overworked and underpaid assistant hoping to one day to discover the next Laura Joffe Numeroff or Peggy Rathman. (Should I remind them that Bill Martin, Jr., Paula Danziger, and several other luminaries have all recently passed away, creating a vacuum I'm willing to fill?)

This time the form letter also included the suggestion:

Be sure to follow the guidelines below for future submissions.

Oops, had I committed some egregious infraction of editorial policy (aside from omitting any mention of my multiple submissions to ten publishers...shhh!)? But no, I read the guidelines and I had followed them precisely.

They also reminded me:

If you would like to receive a catalog, please send a 9x12 envelope with the appropriate postage.

Well of course I agree that reviewing a catalog of a publisher's most recent list is a great way to learn what they are looking for and what they have recently published. It's the "appropriate postage" ambiguity that frustrates me: how the hell am I supposed to know how large or heavy their catalog is and how much postage is required if the publisher won't say?

Their parting comment was:

A great resource for children's book writers is the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (www.scbwi.org).

OK, so next time I better find a way to remind them of my membership in my cover letter. Maybe it would help if I held a prestigious position in a local chapter. Hmmm.

Shortest First Lines

2004-08-24T13:00:00.000-07:00

Preparing my First Line Quiz reminded me how many excellent beginning lines have fewer than ten words.* A few of those appeared in the quiz:

My father lost me to The Beast at cards. [9]
--Angela Carter, The Tiger Bride

Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. [8]
--Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous With Rama

What's it going to be then, eh? [7]
--Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. [7]
--John Barth, The End of the Road

All this happened, more or less. [6]
--Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughter-House Five

It was love at first sight. [6]
--Joseph Heller, Catch-22

--Totally naked, for God's sake? [5]
--Anthony Burgess, M/F

I even included three examples of opening lines of only three words:

Call me Ishmael.
--Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Mother died today.
--Albert Camus, The Stranger

They're out there.
--Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

The first two are arguably among the most well known opening lines ever written. The third, Kesey's, could easily have been four words, but the abbreviation and resulting homonym pairing give it both a poetic balance and a paranoid foreshadowing of the novel's plot.

I have several other short favorites, some well known, others obscure, that I still enjoy for one reason or another:

It was there when I woke up, I swear. [9]
--Jonathan Letham, Gun, With Occasional Music

Once there was a man named John. [7]
--Robert Coover, John’s Wife

I write of what has just occurred. [7]
--Gene Wolfe, Soldier of the Mist

I have always been a quitter. [6]
--T. C. Boyle, Budding Prospects

It was a pleasure to burn. [6]
--Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Her gynecologist recommended him to me. [6]
--John Irving, The Water-Method Man

A screaming comes across the sky. [6]
--Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Context is everything. [3]
--Jonathan Letham, Motherless Brooklyn

It began oddly. [3]
--Philip Roth, The Breast

And, yes, I did find an opening line on my bookshelf of a single word, from John Hawkes:

Dad?
--John Hawkes, Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade

-----

* I discussed the longest first lines last month.

0 for 3

2004-08-23T08:11:00.000-07:00

Back from vacation to discover two more telltale 9 x 12" self-addressed manila envelopes (the ubiquitous SASE's) signaling two more publishers passing on The Search for Plupreme. The form rejection letters are getting interesting to compare, though.

First, from Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, Inc.:

Dear Author/Illustrator:

We deeply regret having to use this form letter; however, the volume of manuscripts and artwork we receive precludes our writing to you personally. Please be assured that your work was given serious attention by one of our editors, but unfortunately was considered inappropriate for our list.

We are grateful to you for thinking of us and wish you the best of luck in placing your work elsewhere.

Sincerely,
[Unsigned]
Editorial Staff
Books for Young Readers

This was only slightly less anonymous than the Greenwillow postcard. The "author/illustrator" ambiguity, in particular, suggests a lack of interest in even bothering to create two unique "Thanks, But No Thanks" form letters, but at least they claimed my work "was given serious attention."

Next, Gulliver Books (Harcourt) followed with the most personal rejection to date:

Dear Author,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript for my consideration and for your interest in Gulliver Books.

I have reviewed your work carefully, but I’m afraid I cannot offer to take the project on. We receive numerous submissions each year, including many of considerable merit. Because our list is small and selective, we are able to publish only a very few of these. I wish I could comment more specifically on your project, but the large number of submissions make such a reply impossible.

I’m sorry I cannot give a more encouraging response. I am returning your material with my thanks for thinking of me. I wish you luck in your publishing pursuits.

Best wishes,
Elizabeth Van Doren
Editorial Director of Gulliver Books

Kudos to Elizabeth for signing her form rejection and for making it more personal, even referring to herself a number of times.

So, three down and seven to go.

But, hey, it only takes two to start a bidding war.

Conquering a Fear

2004-08-14T08:23:00.000-07:00

The second hike up Shakespeare Rock was with Justin. This was the climb I was most worried about, partially because I expected Justin to be more likely to slip on the dusty trail or the sharp boulders, but mostly because I knew that Justin has a fear of heights.

We made the ascent in about forty-five minutes largely due to the fact that I had left trail markers during my hike with Andrew. So this trip we wasted no time wandering in the woods searching for the main and auxiliary trails. Justin also hiked without complaint and took few breaks for water. He seemed eager just to get to the top. He had no idea that I was worried that once he made it, the view from the rocky summit might trigger his fear of heights.

To my private surprise Justin climbed the last few yards over the large craggy boulders with little difficulty and then quickly began admiring the breathtaking view and pointing out the many landmarks he recognized. We called Kathy who was surprised we were already at the peak. She took the golf cart down to the pier to wave to Justin and to tell his brothers who were crawdad fishing with a neighbor beneath the dock.

While we had lunch and waited for Kathy to call back Justin announced to me, "Dad, guess what? Today I conquered another fear."

So he had thought about it, I mused, saying, "Really, Justin, what fear was that?"

His explanation delighted me. "Well, you know how sometimes when I climb steep stairs or I'm standing in high places I get afraid I'm going to fall? I get a feeling like there's a cool breeze blowing on my tummy. Well, today I didn't get that feeling. I just love it up here. I didn't even get scared."

Perfect. I couldn't have been more proud.

Kathy called back and Justin told her about the hike. I could hear his brothers in the background shouting their hellos. Kathy told Justin what a good job he'd done. Justin told her about conquering his fear and thanked her for her comments.

We hung up and finished our lunch while Justin told me more about his excitement. Then he asked me, "Is it okay if I try to make my voice echo?"

"Sure," I answered hesitantly. I was afraid he might resurrect our private joke from the movie Brother Bear and imitate the rams who keep shouting "Shut up!" to their own echoes. I didn't particularly want Justin shouting "Shut up!" and "No, you shut up!" from the top of Shakespeare Rock.

But Justin stood up, turned and faced the lake, and shouted, "Hello! I love you! Thanks for all the compliments!"

Keeping a New Year's Resolution

2004-08-10T13:58:00.000-07:00

Andrew couldn't be more proud. He hiked up Shakespeare's Rock alone with his Daddy for his first time.

All three boys have thought about this trip for several years, with good reason. Each summer we vacation at Lake Tahoe and the sheer granite surface of Shakespeare's Rock looms above us visible from the driveway, the beach, and most of the grounds. Every year I lead one group or another of adults and occasionally older children on the hike.

So naturally every year the boys ask when they will be old enough to go. But this year Andrew surprised and charmed me when he made it his New Year's Resolution at school. We didn't even know the school had discussed resolutions. But the boys came home talking about theirs and that's when I learned that Andrew's was "to climb Shakespeare's Rock with my Daddy." (Justin's was to get better at chess and Kevin's was to do more math and play more basketball.)

I knew it would be a challenge to get Kevin and Justin to accept that Andrew would get to hike alone with me, but I also believed that it was important to give Andrew that chance. (Why was he even thinking about Shakespeare's Rock in January?) We had eight months to get them comfortable with the idea, but all along I knew that on the day of the hike they might get emotional about being left behind. But they had accepted it: they drove Andrew and me to the trailhead and wished Andrew good luck.

The hike itself was a great time. We lost the trail at least three times, but Andrew remained calm. He hiked happily and without complaint. He had great balance on the slippery trails, used his hands when he should, clambered over rocks without fear, showed surprising instincts for navigating in the woods, and pointed out things I had never noticed. And of course he talked the whole way.

When we reached the summit (I'm guessing it is only about a 400 foot elevation gain) he scrambled over the rocks, found a shady picnic spot with a terrific view and joyfully ate his PB&J (they never taste so good as they do after a long hike, do they?), and posed proudly to have his picture taken. His brothers called from the house and then walked out on the pier to try to spot us waving our hats (impossible to do, though we could make out three specks moving along the dock).

On the hike down Andrew discovered the arched opening in the vertical rock face where serious climbers with full gear practice their climbing. He wanted to get up close and inspect it and I foolishly agreed. It's about a forty yard climb over loose rocks with precarious footholds. About two thirds of the way up I realized there was no way we could descend the way we had climbed. Andrew knew I was concerned and kept apologizing, but I explained that it was my bad judgment and we'd find a safer way back down which we fortunately did.

The round trip took us about three hours and when we emerged from the woods we were filthy and happy. Andrew found a way to tell his brothers about the trip without boasting and most of the time they were excited for him and looking forward to a turn.

Three days later if you ask Andrew abut his favorite part of his vacation he'll still answer "climbing Shakespeare's Rock." His second favorite is having built a tower of cards five levels high without help.

Two nights ago at bedtime, cuddling with Justin, he smiled sleepily and asked in a whisper whether I would play chess with him the next day. I eagerly agreed, while privately thinking: another boy keeping his resolution.

"Chrysanthemum" It Ain't

2004-08-06T13:40:00.000-07:00

I got my first official "Thanks, But No Thanks" form letter--postcard, actually--from Greenwillow Books, the publishers of many of Kevin Henkes outstanding picture books. Their web site was quite clear about not currently accepting unsolicited or unagented material, but it was worth a shot.

There is no way to tell whether anyone so much as glanced at the manuscript, not even an errant ink mark or coffee stain. Just the following:

Thank you for submitting your work.
We are sorry that it is not right for our list.
We appreciate your letting us consider it, and
we wish you success in placing it elsewhere.

So, one down and nine to go.

That is, until I submit Ashley and Shadow, and begin resubmitting The Search for Plupreme to smaller publishing houses.

How does my brother do it?

2004-08-02T21:28:00.000-07:00

Here I am posting away about children's books, discussing first lines of novels, admitting to submitting a manuscript to children's book publishers, and referring to John Irving as one of my favorite authors, when Tom refers me to "A Widow for One Year," the only John Irving novel I don't actually own and one of only two that I haven't read (the other being, "A Son of the Circus," and that one already on my bookshelf).

So naturally, "A Widow for One Year" turns out to be about a writer; specifically, a writer of children's books; and one who has written--we learn within fifteen pages--a children's book entitled, "The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls," that according to just about everyone in the novel has a terrific first sentence.

In fact, so much is made of that first sentence--we are told that one character (another writer) will always envy it and that the main character holds the opinion that "there was no better beginning to any story than the first sentence of The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls"--that one begins to doubt whether Irving would ever dare to attempt crafting it.

It's a pretty bold setup and one Irving addresses quickly. And when he does, frankly, he knocks one out of the park. I'll come back to that sentence later, and have more to say about Irving's successes and excesses, but for now I'm still shaking my head trying to figure out how I missed this book so conveniently for Tom to have the chance to recommend it.

It was the best of lines, it was the worst of lines.

2004-07-30T22:30:00.000-07:00

One seldom encounters a single sentence of over one hundred words, but having previously discussed the first lines to Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (“It was a dark and stormy night…”) and A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”), that weighed in at 58 and 119 words respectively, and having proved to myself that it is not as difficult as I first thought to produce such a lengthy sentence (though arguably ill-advised), I became curious about the longest first lines from modern novels familiar to me, believing without much doubt that Coover or Eco, Roth or Gardner, any of them really, could dash off a sentence of that length without even breaking a sweat and of course it turns out I was correct and was easily able to find the following three examples of opening sentences over one hundred words long. [154]

First, though, let’s look back at Bulwer-Lytton’s purple prose and that overwrought continuation by Dickens to what could well have been one of the best first lines had he known when to stop:

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness." [58]

--Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, "Paul Clifford"

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. [119]

--Charles Dickens, "A Tale of Two Cities"

On my shelves I found many examples of first lines exceeding fifty, sixty, even seventy words, some fairly familiar ones, too, including Holden Caulfield’s rant to open The Catcher in the Rye:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. [63]

--J. D. Salinger, “The Catcher in the Rye”

Sixty-plus words is not common, certainly, but exceeding one hundred words is extreme, yet I was able to find examples from both John Gardner and Robert Coover:

Sometimes the sordidness of his present existence, not to mention the stifling, clammy heat of the apartment his finances has forced him to take, on the third floor of an ugly old house on Binghamton’s West Side—“the nice part of town,” everybody said (God have mercy on those who had to live in the bad parts)—made Peter Mickelsson clench his square yellow teeth in anger and once, in a moment of rage and frustration greater than usual, bring down the heel of his fist on the heavy old Goodwill oak table where his typewriter, papers, and books were laid out, or rather strewn. [105]

--John Gardner, “Mickelsson’s Ghosts”

On a winter evening of the year 19--, after arduous travels across two continents and as many centuries, pursued by harsh weather and threatened with worse, an aging emeritus professor from an American university, burdened with illness, jet lag, great misgivings, and an excess of luggage, eases himself and his encumbrances down from his carriage onto a railway platform in what many hold to be the most magical city in the world, experiencing not so much that hot terror which initiates are said to suffer when their eyes first light on an image of eternal beauty, as rather that cold chill that strikes lonely travelers who find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. [117]

--Robert Coover, “Pinocchio in Venice”

But the surprise winner of my brief search was W. P. Kinsella in a novel called “Box Socials” which was his undistinguished follow-up to the outstanding “Shoeless Joe,” a novel too few have read, but almost everyone knows from the cinematic version, Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner. So until I spot something longer, here’s my current first place entry by Kinsella:

This is the story of how Truckbox Al McClintock almost got a tryout with the genuine St. Louis Cardinals of the National Baseball League, but instead ended up batting against Bob Feller, of Cleveland Indian fame, in Renfrew Park, down on the river flats, in Edmonton, Alberta, summer of 1945 or ’46, no one can remember which, though the date in question has brought on more than one disagreement, which turned first to a shoving match, then to an altercation, and finally a fist fight, though not a brouhaha, the general consensus in the Six Towns area being that it takes more than two people to staff a brouhaha, the fist fight though, usually resulting in bent cartilage of someone’s proboscis, and blood spots on a Sunday shirt. [128]

--W. P. Kinsella, “Box Socials”

Just to give Mr. Kinsella his due, however, here is the much more praiseworthy opening line from Shoeless Joe:

My father said he saw him years later playing in a tenth-rate commercial league in a textile town in Carolina, wearing shoes and an assumed name.

--W. P. Kinsella, “Shoeless Joe”

[Note: to make this whole exercise nice and tidy and entwined with circular references, let me point out that the writer called Terrance Mann (a nod to Thomas, perhaps?) and played by James Earl Jones in the movie, in the novel is none other than “The Catcher in the Rye” author, J. D. Salinger.

And Ray Kinsella, the character played by Costner in the movie, was also the character name from a short story by Salinger called, “A Young Girl From 1941 With No Waist At All.” And Ray’s fictional brother Richard Kinsella, appears in “The Catcher in the Rye” on pages 183-4 as the student who is always guilty of digressions in his Oral Expression course, and isn’t there poetic justice in noting that?]

Courting Rejection

2004-07-29T08:05:00.000-07:00

I just mailed my revised version of The Search for Plupreme to ten children’s book publishers. I know, I know, they frown on multiple submissions, but the thought of successive submittals with three to four months between form letter rejections is more than I can bear.

An unpublished writer of children’s picture books is lucky to have a junior editor or summer intern, wading through the slush pile of thousands of unsolicited manuscripts, bother to even open, let alone read a few paragraphs of their work, so I seriously doubt anyone is going to care about my multiple submissions.

A writing instructor once told us, “Poems are never finished. Eventually you need to submit your latest version and move on to writing something else.”

Good advice. I have revised and rewritten and messed with the approximately 750 word Plupreme manuscript for so long, I was struggling to make it sound fresh and finding myself reintroducing flaws I had corrected months ago. So I sent the umpty-umpth revision on its merry way. As the form letter rejections come in, I will post them here, not out of a sense of defeatism, but as a mark of progress.

After all the discussion of great first lines, I confess that I remain dissatisfied with the first line to The Search for Plupreme:

Ashley finished her rainbow painting and smiled.

It’s not Kevin Henkes, but it’s serviceable. Time to heed the poet’s advice.

I’m not through with plucky little Ashley, however. Her second tale is well underway, and this time I hope to have the completed manuscript, tentatively titled, Ashley and Shadow, submitted in a few weeks.

Here’s the working first line:

“Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?” Ashley’s father asked one night as he loaded the dishwasher.

Odds are it won’t even closely resemble that a week from now. Stay tuned.

Ish Kabbible

2004-07-28T21:31:00.000-07:00

[From the Pointless Internet Search Files, Case #26118.]

I suppose we all have our Ish Kabibbles.

They are different for each of us, of course. Maybe yours is Foghorn Leghorn. Or Clem Kadiddlehopper. Clyde Crashcup. Fatty Arbuckle. Or Felix Mantilla. I've already mentioned another: Joe Blow from Kokomo.

Ish Kabibbles. They seem to turn up in the most unlikely places and when you least expect them. I recently encountered mine at McDonald's.

I was there with the boys when I noticed a man who was acting just strangely enough for me to keep an eye on him. He was loud, disheveled, and borderline disruptive; I overheard him attempting to initiate conversations with strangers several tables away. The boys didn't seem to pay any attention to him and eventually he settled down with his meal and a book.

Nosey guy that I am, I was curious what book this guy was reading so as I rose to toss our trash I stood where I might glimpse the title. And that's when it struck me like an arrow from the past: "Ish Kabibble."

Ish Kabbibble?

Ish Forgodsakes Kabibble?

It echoed with familiarity while sounding both ludicrous and unlikely. Surely if I'd ever heard of an Ish Kabibble I'd still know who he was. But I didn't. I kept turning the name over in my head, reciting it like a mantra, one moment thinking I had it and the next losing it again.

So I used my cell phone to call home and leave myself a message on the answering machine. Ish Kabibble was too good to let slip back into the dim recesses of my brain. Sure enough, when I got home I Googled Ish (so to speak) and within moments I'd found him:

Ish Kabibble, it turns out, was the stage name for a cornet player named Merwyn Bogue who played for a band named Kay Kyser in the 40's. He derived his name from an old Yiddish song, "Isch Ga Bibble" which supposedly translates to "I should worry?" (It sounds like something from Afred E. Newkabibbleman, doesn't it?)

Of course none of this explains why I should ever have heard of Ish Kabibble in the first place (another question for mom). Or why some character in McDonald's (third generation Kabibble, maybe?) was reading an obscure book about him.

But thanks to the internet, at least I didn't have to stay up all night wondering who the heck he was.

Although I did ponder for a while which bit players from my past will become the Ish Kabibbles of my sons' future.

"Out of my league!"

2004-07-26T21:50:00.000-07:00

OK, we've all heard that Microsoft hiring managers like to ask ponderous questions during interviews like: Why are manhole covers round? Is Dos dead? How many engineers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

But who really wants to work for Microsoft anyway? (OK, thousands do. I get it.)

Now Google, on the other hand. Don't we all wish we had gotten in there pre-IPO?

Well Google, I have confirmed, has a set of challenging questions of their own to help them find the best and brightest engineers. They love brainiacs and their halls are crawling with PhD's...screwing in light bulbs for all I know.

So the first question is on a billboard on Highway 101. The correct answer will lead you to a web site. Here's the puzzle:

{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com

Get that answer correct, go to the appropriate web site, and you will find--another question, naturally.

Continue on from there solving their programming challenges and eventually, I'm told, you'll get to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow: they'll ask you for your resume and you'll be light years ahead of all the other mere mortals hoping to get hired by Google.

From Google's own web site:

Last week we unveiled a billboard that's a bit unusual in that it promotes Google only to one very narrow constituency: engineers who are geeky enough to be annoyed at the very existence of a math problem they haven't solved, and smart enough to rectify the situation.

In other words, the billboard (which offers problem-solvers the URL to, sorry, a page containing an even harder problem), is a recruiting campaign. We've always worked hard to hire the smartest engineers we can find, and we thought this would be a cool way to find a few more. Perhaps including you. If you're a math or computer whiz who doesn't happen to live within shouting distance of Palo Alto -- good luck, and we're looking forward to hearing from you.

So give it a try. (It's beyond my rusty skills.) Let's have someone identify another question or two on the path to gainful employment at Google.

First Line Quiz--The Solution

2004-07-21T12:12:00.000-07:00

OK, here are the results from last Friday's quiz:

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
--William Gibson, Neuromancer
Sooner or later, it was bound to happen.
--Arthur C.Clarke, Rendezvous With Rama
My wife, Utchka (whose name I some time ago shortened to Utch), could teach patience to a time bomb.
--John Irving, The 158-Pound Marriage
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
--Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
The old ram stands looking down over rockslides, stupidly triumphant.
--John Gardner, Grendel
What's it going to be then, eh?
--Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
All this happened, more or less.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughter-House Five
Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair.
--Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
It was love at first sight.
--Joseph Heller, Catch 22
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
--Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
--Totally naked, for God’s sake?
--Anthony Burgess, M/F
They’re out there.
--Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.
--Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
--J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
My father lost me to The Beast at cards.
--Angela Carter, The Tiger Bride
Call me Ishmael.
--Herman Melville, Moby Dick
All nights should be so dark, all winter’s so warm, all headlights so dazzling.
--Martin Cruz Smith, Gorky Park
This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.
--William Goldman, The Princess Bride
In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.
--John Barth, The End of the Road
Mother died today.
--Albert Camus, The Stranger

Here's how to score yourself:

5 points for each correct title/author combination guessed without hints; or
3 points for each correct title/author combination after the hints; or
1 point for each correct title or author when you got only one right.

The maximum score = 100 points.

So how did you do?

<=10 points: These are my favorite books in all the world, though you have never read them.
11-20: We've read a few of the same books.
21-40: We've got some interesting connections.
41-60: Whoa, you've been pilfering my library.
61-80: OK, you're either my brother or my shrink.
81-90: Were we separated at birth?
91-100: In a sense, we are Jacob Horner.

"Juan's up on a dime."

2004-07-20T22:15:00.000-07:00

That was to be my winning entry in this year's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, barring three minor problems: namely, you have to actually send in your entry to win; I'd probably have to substantiate that "dime" is indeed prison slang for, among other things, a ten-year prison sentence; and enough people would have to share that knowledge for the pun to work.

Sounds a tad strained, I admit.

No matter, though, as the results are now in and you can read for yourself the entries from this year's winners and runners-up at the Bulwer-Lytton web site.

For those too busy to surf, here's the winning entry:

She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight . . . summarily, like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp's tail . . . though the term "love affair" now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism . . . not unlike "sand vein," which is after all an intestine, not a vein . . . and that tarry substance inside certainly isn't sand . . . and that brought her back to Ramon.

--Dave Zobel, Manhattan Beach, CA

They seem to consistently favor the entries with the parenthetically tongue-in-cheek elaborations. I imagine that as long as those entries keep winning, many contestants will continue entering them.

Here are a few of my other favorites from this year's list:

The legend about Padre Castillo's gold being buried deep in the Blackwolf Hills had lain untold for centuries and will continue to do so for this story is not about hidden treasure, nor is it set in any mountainous terrain whatsoever.

--Siew-Fong Yiap, Kowloon, Hong Kong

Detective Micky Blarke arrived on the scene at 2:14 am, and gave his cigarette such a severe pull that rookie Paul Simmons swore the insides of the detective's cheeks touched, but the judge indicated that that amount of detail was not necessary in his testimony, and instructed the jury to disregard that statement.

--Joe Polvino, Webster, NY

She was a tough one, all right, as tough as a marshmallow--not one of those soft sticky ones used in s'mores, cooked to a turn over a good campfire, or even like the stale chewy type covered in yellow sugar and found at the bottom of a three-week-old Easter basket--no, she was tough like a freeze-dried marshmallow in kid's cereal that despite being shaped like a little balloon and colored a friendly pink are so rock solid that they are responsible for the loss of more baby teeth than most older siblings.

--Bridget Lyle, Walworth, NY

I first saw her from across the crowded dance floor, cedar I think, (as if I can reference a specie of wood planks at a glance) I just know it wasn't that yellowish basketball court wood, the type with the glossy veneer (now THAT, I could recognize), anyway, she had the refined elegance and demure fragility of a really old Princess Leia.

--Scott McIlhany, Bellingham, WA

Hans sipped from his bottle of German Bru-hoff beer and idly read the label: "Bruhoff, a heady-nosed Rhine beer has a slightly briny pose, and if you've ever drawn it, you would like the way it flows, but all of the other Rhine beers, Dusen lagers, and thick ales, they never beat our Bru-hoff in the yearly Rhine beer games."

--Roger J. McNichols, Pearland, TX [Now, that's a punster.]

The day dawned much like any other day, except that the date was different.

--Geoff Blackwell, Bundaberg , Queensland Australia

The thing that goes back and forth inside the old grandfather clock swung like a pendulum.

--John Brugliera, W. Lebanon, NH

Kaitlynn looked like a woman who'd been used by more guys than a porta potty at a burrito festival yet I loved her madly even if she wasn't the kind of girl you'd take home to meet mom unless mom was at her monthly garden club meeting and dad was home alone mowing the lawn or cleaning out the garage.

--Robert Salsbury, Spokane Valley, WA

Stamp, stack, stamp, stack, stamp, stack, Rodney was going insane from the monotony of the job and the cruel irony of being guest of the New Hampshire penal system forced to read the words over and over: "Live Free or Die," "Live Free or Die," "Live Free or Die."

--Denise Hendsbee, Santa Cruz, CA

Maynard Fimble was told that "you can't compare apples and oranges," but, he thought, they are both eatable, grow on trees, are about the same size, are good for you, have a peel, come in many varieties, and are approximately round in shape, thus, to his horror and guilt, he realized that he was comparing them and wondered what punishment awaited him and on whose order.

--Charles Jaworski, North Pole, AK

As Amy reached for the envelope her heart fluttered in anticipation like the wings of a fruit bat that has eaten a fermented peach, and even though she knew the statistic that you are more likely to be hit by a meteorite than to win the lottery, she was still quite surprised when opening the envelope to be hit by a meteorite.

--Tim Lafferty, HorsellWoking, U.K.

Keith's popularity as the first openly gay daredevil was rising quickly; in fact, it was said he ate danger for breakfast, followed by a light brunch of lemon scones, quiche, and the occasional Mimosa, and then he was back to eating danger.

--Nathan Murray, San Diego, CA

I woke up in Shirley's father's dog's house -- or at least most of me did, because the house was ranch style as near as I could figure it and Shirley's father's dog Tracey was one of those little terrier types with the sardonic overbite and the haunted eyes of a Flamenco dancer.

--Jim Waples, Wauwatosa, WI

I will tell you a tale of great adventure like in "Treasure Island," with some smiles and some tears like in "Lassie Come Home," some treachery and some heroism, again, like in "Treasure Island," some romance and some betrayal like in lots of Shakespeare ("Romeo and Juliet," for example), and even -- if the reader doesn't mind -- some philosophy, but like the Chicken Soup books not like Spinoza or Plato or anything.

--David Wyman, Goffstown, NH

Are you still reading? It goes to show, among other things, that one can only stand so much of a bad thing.

Which leaves me to wonder how mind-numbingly tiresome it must quickly become to be one of the judges in this contest.

As well it may for almost any contest, now that I think about it. Who'd want to sit around for days judging heifers at a 4-H club or talent competitions at a beauty pageant? Or vice versa?

First Line Quiz--Multiple Choice

2004-07-19T11:44:00.000-07:00

On Friday I gave a list of twenty great first lines from several of my favorite novels (and one short story--I cheated). Keep track of your original guesses as more points will be awarded for unassisted correct answers.

Here again are the first lines:

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Sooner or later, it was bound to happen.
My wife, Utchka (whose name I some time ago shortened to Utch), could teach patience to a time bomb.
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
The old ram stands looking down over rockslides, stupidly triumphant.
What's it going to be then, eh?
All this happened, more or less.
Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair.
It was love at first sight.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
--Totally naked, for God’s sake?
They’re out there.
She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
My father lost me to The Beast at cards.
Call me Ishmael.
All nights should be so dark, all winter’s so warm, all headlights so dazzling.
This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.
In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.
Mother died today.

Now, here is a list of book titles to help you out. (Note that not all titles are used.):

The 158-Pound Marriage
All the Pretty Horses
The Black Dahlia
Catch 22
A Clockwork Orange
The End of the Road
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Gerald’s Party
Gorky Park
Grendel
The Hobbit
M/F
Moby Dick
Motherless Brooklyn
Neuromancer
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Portnoy's Complaint
The Princess Bride
Rendezvous With Rama
A Scanner Darkly
The Shadow of the Torturer
Slaughter-House Five
The Stranger
The Tiger Bride

Next, here is a list of authors:

Barth, John
Boyle, T. C.
Burgess, Anthony
Camus, Albert
Carter, Angela
Clarke, Arthur C.
Coover, Robert
Dick, Philip K.
Ellroy, James
Gardner, John
Gibson, William
Goldman, William
Heller, Joseph
Irving, John
Kesey, Ken
Letham, Jonathan
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia
McCarthy, Cormac
Melville, Herman
Roth, Philip
Smith, Martin Cruz
Thompson, Hunter S.
Tolkien, J. R. R.
Vonnegut, Kurt
Wolfe, Gene

Now see how well you do matching first lines with the correct titles and authors. (Remember: not all titles and authors will be needed.)

I'll give the solution and scoring system later this week. Good luck.

First Line Quiz

2004-07-16T01:27:00.000-07:00

People collect all kinds of things: some collect coins or stamps; some collect autographs or vintage Barbie dolls. I once cleaned the house of a woman who collected jars of dirt from every place she'd ever traveled. As a child, my sister collected discarded Popsicle® sticks: go figure.

I collect first lines of books.

Not just any book nor any old first line will do. I collect those memorable first lines that once entranced me and placed me under a novelist's spell, those lines that still echo hauntingly in my head decades later.

Now with the internet it's easy to find sites that collect and enumerate first lines from the classics and many modern novels. They are fun to browse, but they don't mean as much to me as first lines from books I have read and treasured. So I leave those for others to collect.

Not all of my favorite novels begin with a harmonious opening line, by the way. Some begin with real clunkers (hell, some of my favorite novels took fifty pages or more before I felt comfortable in their company).

I've written about the Bulwer-Lytton Contest for terrible opening lines for imagined bad novels. Now here's a contest of my own: twenty terrific first lines from some of my favorite novels.

Scoring well on this quiz doesn't make you a genius and doing poorly doesn't mark you as illiterate. It's more of a compatibility test. If you do well, we undoubtedly have a lot in common and would have a great deal to talk about. If not, there's always baseball or band camp.

Here are the first lines without any hints:

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Sooner or later, it was bound to happen.
My wife, Utchka (whose name I some time ago shortened to Utch), could teach patience to a time bomb.
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
The old ram stands looking down over rockslides, stupidly triumphant.
What's it going to be then, eh?
All this happened, more or less.
Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair.
It was love at first sight.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
--Totally naked, for God’s sake?
They’re out there.
She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
My father lost me to The Beast at cards.
Call me Ishmael.
All nights should be so dark, all winter’s so warm, all headlights so dazzling.
This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.
In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.
Mother died today.

So for how many of those opening lines can you identify both the author and the title? No cheating by using the internet or pulling books off your shelves.

On Monday I'll give a few hints, and later in the week I'll give the answers as well my distinctly unconventional scoring system.

Random BS

2004-07-15T07:11:00.000-07:00

[From the Pointless Internet Search Files, Case #25913

Warning: contains vulgarity and racial epithets, as well as silly and rare adjectival expressions. If you are offended by such language, please skip this posting.]

One day in 1974 a friend and I were wandering the mall bored out of our minds and decided to see a movie, any movie, whatever was playing. "Oh, look: a western." "Fine. Why not? Let's go." We didn't read the poster, notice who was in it, care about who directed it, or bother to watch the opening credits.

Moments later we were in painful tears of laughter. Welcome to Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles." To this day I believe that it was the unexpectedness of the experience as much as it was Brooks' scatological grade school humor appealing to our teenage sensibilities that made the movie so painfully funny to us. Whatever it was the movie became, for a time, a personal favorite and one I saw again and again.

Soon I knew and could imitate almost every line in the movie, save one. Somewhere early on there was a nonsensical line that I was certain I was mishearing--something about a chicken getting caught in a tractor's nuts.

Years later, welcome to the internet and another pointless use of technology. I went in search of the Blazing Saddles screenplay, but what I found was so much more. I did discover to my delight that many of the screenplays to my all-time favorite movies are available for free downloading; that, to a bibliophile and a movie fan, is pure gold. But I also found the answer to my question. The quote that had puzzled me for so many years is, in fact:

"We'll make Rock Ridge think it’s a chicken that got caught in a tractor’s nuts."

So what the heck is that gobbledygook supposed to mean?

Luckily, the site I serendipitously navigated to explained it. In fact, it went through the entire screenplay line by line and decoded every joke, colloquialism, and racial slur. I had found a site maintained by an ESL (English as a Second Language) instructor who had devoted his energies to contextualizing American screenplays to individuals for whom English was a second language and who might be confused by dialog in American movies as well as by day-to-day conversational English.

What a novel idea. But "Blazing Saddles," for heaven's sake?? It certainly resulted in a few hilarious moments for me, reading exactly how this individual chose to explain American slang, idioms, and mores.

Here are a few of my favorites:

"We’ll make Rock Ridge think it’s a chicken that got caught in a tractor’s nuts."

A “tractor” is a truck with huge wheels that is used for pulling farm equipment across a field. “Nuts” is a slang word for testicles (or balls), and thus this sentence is totally ridiculous and makes no sense. --So now I know.

"What in the wide world of sports is going on here?"

“The Wide World of Sports” was a popular TV show in the 1970s. This sentence is ridiculous, though people do ask “What in the world is going on here?” when they want to add emotion to this basic question.

"Sheriff murdered, crops burned, stores looted, people stampeded and cattle raped."

“Crops” are the foods that farmers grow, such as wheat and corn. A store that has been “looted” has been attacked by a violent group of people that steal everything in it. A “stampede” is a large group of running animals, such as “cattle,” which is a plural word for cows.

"No sidewinder, bushwhacking, hornswoggling cracker crocker is going to ruin my biscuit cutter."

More useless nonsense words, though you should know that “to ruin” means to destroy and that a “biscuit” is a type of cookie or cracker. --Actually, you should just use this quote whenever possible, like PTA meetings and in-law gatherings.

"This is 1874; You’ll be able to sue her."

“To sue” a person is to file a legal claim against them in a court of law, usually for money. Suing people is a popular American hobby. --I think he's editorializing here.

"We’ve got to protect our phony-baloney jobs."

“Phony” means fake or not real, and “baloney” is a type of processed meat. A silly and rare adjectival expression.

"Excuse me, while I slip into something a little more comfortable."

A classic line that women say when they want to put on clothes that men would consider very sexy. --Now he's providing helpful dating information regarding the elusive American female.

"I want rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggers, bushwhackers, hornswagglers, train robbers, shit kickers and Methodists."

Perhaps the greatest list of bad people in the history of film! Among those that you should know:
Rustlers...People who steals cows
Cut throats...People who are willing to do anything to win.
Bounty hunters...People who try to capture wanted criminals.
Mugs, pugs, thugs...Aggressive and dangerous people.
Nitwits, halfwits, dimwits...Stupid people.
Vipers...Snakes.
Con men...People who trick others in order to get their money.
Muggers...People who physically attack others to get money.
Methodists...A denomination (or division) in the Christian church.

"Ah prairie shit, everybody..."

“Prairie shit” is an interesting variation of horseshit or bullshit.

"Somebody has got to go back and get a shitload of dimes."

A “shitload” is a huge amount, and “dimes” are ten cent coins. --Right; another useful line to know when dealing with confusing American barter systems.

"Blazing Saddles" is not the only screenplay this fellow has kindly synopsized. Check out his site and you'll see he also has synopses for "American Pie," "Animal House," "Dumb and Dumber," "Legally Blonde," "Shrek," "When Harry Met Sally" (which I certainly found inscrutable), and dozens more.

Educating Justin

2004-07-14T08:07:00.000-07:00

Last week at the rodeo Justin handed me the program and, showing me a cartoon, asked me, "Daddy what does this say?"

I was distracted, so I didn't look closely at the picture, but at some unconscious level it registered that it was Tonto and The Lone Ranger. I read Tonto's words to Justin, "Kemosabe, Silver has Yellow Tail."

"What does that mean?"

I looked more closely at the drawing of Tonto displaying Silver's tail for The Lone Ranger's inspection and discovered that Justin had found an ad for Hi-Ho Silver, a product intended to address the problem of mares getting urine-stained tails, a problem, I dare say, that until that moment neither Justin nor I had ever considered before.

Then last weekend Justin went shopping with his mom. Among their stops was a trip to the lawn and garden supply store to see whether they could find any products to get rid of the moles that are tearing up the lawn. (I hadn't suggested calling Dog-Gone.) They found Shake Away Powder, which, it turns out, is a granular form of fox and bobcat urine, the notion being that moles will be driven off effectively by the scent of their natural predators.

It's not clear why Kathy didn't buy any Shake-Away Powder, but when she got home and again saw the mole holes she had another idea. She must have assumed that Justin was also a natural predator to moles because she offered to let him relieve himself on the mole hole.

Of course, he giggled with delight at the thought, but doubted her sincerity. But sure enough, she told him to go right ahead, and with a little bit of reassurance he did. Kevin discovered something unusual was going on so he went out to discover what it was and Justin eagerly explained it to him. So of course Kevin had to join in. And before long Andrew as well.

I don't think my family's little experiment worked, but I did warn the boys not to be surprised if the moles retaliated by urinating on their soccer and basketballs if they leave them out.

Three Degrees of Separation

2004-07-13T15:09:00.000-07:00

I don't know anyone who can find the shortest path of acquaintances separating her from a stranger as quickly as Kathy can. It's a work of art. It's like watching a safe-cracker in action; I observe in amazement as Kathy fires off questions that seem random and bizarre to me: "Do you have an older brother who went to school in Pomona? Did you have a sister on swim team who once tried out for the Olympics? Did you ever work for a startup that made software for obstetricians? Did you used to go to the hair stylist in Madrid across the street from the parrot shop?"

Who would even think to ask such questions? But sure enough the tumblers click into place and before long she and the stranger have found a connection and begun chatting like former sorority sisters. But her most recent example yielded a surprise connection even Kathy didn't see coming.

It began with a woman who works at a company Kathy had just begun consulting for. It's a small company so Kathy is quickly getting to know the employees. The other day she got chatting with a well dressed African-American woman she sees daily who reminded her of a close friend. The woman seemed distracted about something and Kathy learned she was working on a church brochure and was getting increasingly frustrated by the changing amateur requests from the various volunteer groups. Kathy empathized and eventually asked which church.

"Oh, I know some people who belong to that church..." Kathy said, tumblers already beginning to click. "Do you know a woman named Dee?" I can see Kathy searching for the last name, the dial spinning on the combination lock. "She worked for us for years. In fact, her niece Jeanne was our nanny for a while, and so was Jeanne's daughter, Shirlyn."

"Wait a minute...do you have triplets?" the woman asked.

And then she made the connection: but not, "I know Dee," or "I know Jeanne," or "Shirlyn." Instead:

"I've been to your house. I know your boys!"

What??

"Your boys are so cute. They are adorable. And so friendly. They'd let anybody hold them. I used to see them at Bible study all the time."

Remarkable! Even when they were toddlers our boys were making friends we didn't know about.

I couldn't resist teasing Kathy, "Unbelievable! This time when you found the shortest connection to someone you just met, it turned out to be your own sons."

Badgers? We don't need no stinkin' badgers!

2004-07-12T15:49:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I heard a strange news piece about a man who had a vision that he could catch prairie dogs by vacuuming them out of their burrows. According to the story, he converted sewer trucks into an ingenious device for sucking prairie dogs right out of their burrows and into a padded truck to be safely relocated. Ri-ight! It was just the kind of nutty story that gets media coverage and eventually is revealed to be an Urban Legend.

I was reminded of the story recently when moles began ripping up our back lawn. Alas, our standup Oreck vacuum cleaner isn't even the model advertised to pick up bowling balls and it certainly seems insufficient for sucking up burrowing lawn vermin, although I'm confident the sight of me attempting to do so would greatly amuse the neighbors.

It got me wondering, though, whether the prairie dog control folks were still in business. Once again, time for another pointless yet entertaining web search, which shortly yielded some very dated hits about a company called Dog-Gone, including the unforgettable video clip that I recalled from years ago.

OK, so am I the only one who, upon hearing about entrepreneurs who use converted sewer trucks to "humanely" suck prairie dogs, gophers, and other burrowing undesirables from their holes, wonders about their business model?

Maybe that's because I recently saw my boys in a Pied Piper of Hamlin performance at school, and it isn't much of a stretch of the imagination to envision the good folks at Dog-Gone ridding one community of their gopher problem, collecting favorable referrals, then moving on to the next town for a humane release of the relocated critters, and soon beginning an effective advertising campaign with sincere testimonials.

Or maybe I just think too much like The Fix-it-Up Chappie in "The Sneetches," by Dr. Seuss who uses his Star-On and Star-Off machines until he cleans out the town. I can easily envision the Fix-it-Up Chappie with an elaborate Rube Goldberg device for shuttling gophers back and forth between two towns.

I never did find a current web site for the folks at Dog-Gone, so I figured they were long gone themselves, only the data lingering on in cyberspace.

But hey, not so: I tracked down their new phone number and called them. They don't have any trucks servicing California, and they specialize, I was told, in removing "pocket gophers," not moles. They regretted they couldn't help me, but they recommended that I try using those high-frequency, battery-operated devices that emit sounds that might drive the moles away (presumably to some neighbor's yard where they could watch old Hogan's Heroes reruns). They said that method was effective at one of their most recent client sites, a federal penitentiary.

I forgot to ask whether they were called out to vacuum pocket gophers or tunneling inmates.

[Note: for those who see no humor in promoting the gopher-sucking bastards at Dog-Gone, be assured no animals were harmed during the writing and editing of this weblog.]

"You look just like your Daddy."

2004-07-09T15:10:00.000-07:00

The debate continues. Since birth friends, family, acquaintances, hell, even strangers on the street, have enjoyed pronouncing which parent each of our boys most resembles.

There is seldom disagreement about Andrew: his deep brown eyes are inarguably his mother's; his hair is also dark like hers (though less noticeably during the summer); and he has her brothers' sturdy build and solid limbs. He also has tremendous bear paws that I covet; they remind me of my dad's, but they could be like his maternal uncles', who knows? No one draws any conclusions about who he resembles based upon his hands, of course; I just happen to admire those salmon-snatching, baseball-dwarfing cather's mitts when comparing them to my own slender, pianist hands.

Then there is Kevin. More often than not, people look at Kevin and beam, "Oh, he looks just like his Daddy." Especially as he has gotten older. And that's how it feels to me, too. But it's deceptive for me because I still feel blonde, blue-eyed, and slim when I'm with Kevin and I am none of the above (let's admit to being gray-eyed, silver-haired, and carrying a spare tire). But the resemblance I feel is as much an intangible, indescribable connection as it is our appearance. It's a wave-length thing. Kevin often feels like he is tuned to the same station, like he reads my mind. Even back to infancy, I can recall those "sixth sense" moments such as holding him propped on my right hip, leaning towards Justin's crib to fetch something, and sensing Kevin echoing my movements, and then turning slowly, simultaneously to face one another like two Marx Brothers faking a mirrored reflection in a doorway, at which point we would burst into simultaneous grins then giggles. I can't explain it other than to claim it goes beyond looks, so that if I am honest, when I stand beside him facing the mirror, I can deny that he "looks just like his Daddy," but still feel there is some unseen similarity that people intuitively detect.

It's when you throw Justin into the mix that things get most interesting. Here on the west coast, almost everyone says he favors Kathy. But my family on the east coast is not so quick to concur. They have said he resembles me as a child (unlike Kevin presumably, who others believe resembles me now). So how do I explain the times when we're all out and people who've never met me, but grew up with Kathy's family, take one look at Justin and exclaim, "Oh my goodness, it's Danny!"--her brother.

Until recently I only had handy one picture of me as a child to use for comparison purposes. It's a sepia-toned 8x11 of me sitting on Santa's lap as a two-year-old. Apparently I don't look like Kevin in that photo. I have even had close friends go so far as to challenge the veracity of my Mom's authority and insist it has to be my brother Bill, even when faced with the inarguable date on the back of the photo!

But now Uncle Tom has added further documentation to fuel the debate. He sent me a CD with jpeg images made from old family slides. Now we can pull up images of me as a baby, a two-year-old, and a five-year-old and compare them to pictures of the boys at the same age.

And guess what? The consensus so far, and I'm still soliciting opinions, is that you wouldn't mistake my baby pictures for Kevin's, but many see a resemblance to Justin.

And I don't think any of the boys hope to resemble my twenty-year-old photo. Andrew said if my shirt were green, I'd look just like Shaggy.

Who the hell is Joe Blow from Kokomo, anyway?

2004-07-08T13:09:00.000-07:00

[From the Pointless Internet Search Files, Case #25615]

When we were kids, if the kitchen door happened to swing open on its own, Mom always said it was "Joe Blow from Kokomo."

[When we left our closet door open, on the other hand, Dad chastised us for "letting a draft in," which I misheard as "letting a giraffe in," and the fear of some eighteen-foot ungulate extricating itself from my closet while I slept was nightmare-inducing.]

I recently caught myself tempted to pass the "Joe Blow from Kokomo" reference along to my boys when I wondered, for once, just who was Joe Blow anyway and how had Mom heard of him? I suppose I could just ask Mom, but with the worldwide web ever at my fingertips, I thought I'd do some quick and pointless research.

After many frustrating misses I discovered, thanks to a William Safire article, that terms for the average person have evolved over time, often as John (notably "John Doe," "John Hancock," and "John Q. Public"), but also as Joe:

The average Joe appeared as Joe Blow (1867), Joe Doakes (1926), Joe College (1932), GI Joe (1943) and, in Britain, Joe Bloggs (1969). Though Joe Zilch (1925, probably a play on zero) and Joe Schmo (1950, rhyming with hometown Kokomo) are derisive, Joe Cool (1949) gets respect.

Joe Everyman continues to evolve, now making more frequent appearances as "Joe Six-Pack."

But in our house, in the interest of preserving meaningless and inscrutable mystery, I now attribute self-opening doors to Joe Blow from Kokomo, a memetic nod to my mother, and a taunting bit of trivia for my grandchildren should the name successfully propagate to yet another generation.