A Quick Political Note

While it has been noted that John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate undercuts his argument that Sen. Obama lacks the experience to be President, what I have not seen noted is that it also undercuts the notion that his vaunted experience is necessary.  By making a foolish, publicity-stuntish choice, John McCain has torpedoed what small chance he had of winning this election.  He’s the Walter Mondale of the Republicans, destined to go down in history as one of the most successful failures of Presidential politics.

The Play’s the Thing

In yesterday’s post, I talked about my experiences as a lad in organized sports and my feeling that playing in leagues actually sucked the fun out of it for me.  In the comments, thanks to a dissenting and very legitimate response, I revealed that, more often than not, I got bounced from the various teams because I skipped practices and sometimes, even, games.  And this got me to thinking.

The activity that I got most immediately embroiled in after my love affair with sports waned was theater.  Between the ages of 15 and 23, I was involved in something like 35 productions, mostly as an actor, sometimes working tech, and often doing both.  And in that entire time and in all those shows, I don’t think I ever had an unexcused absence.  In fact, I don’t think I was ever even late.  Rehearsal or performance, I had an unblemished record.

That’s quite a contrast.

So I had to ask myself “Why?”  The two activities involve similar disciplines and routines.  Both certainly involved adhering to schedules and working at the direction of others.  Both required me to obtain someone’s approval and recognition of my ability before I could participate.  Why did I rebel in one and acquiesce in the other?

Perhaps it had to do with talent, because I was certainly a better actor (or prop master or stage manager for that matter) than I was an athlete.  Perhaps it was some less-well-defined sense of comfort, since I never felt as at ease on a gridiron or a diamond as I did on a stage.

It’s also just a matter of personal preference, isn’t it?  There’s really no accounting for these things, these differences.  It’s just how people are, it’s their nature.  And this is something that can’t be put down to genetics, either, I don’t think.  Neither of my parents were theatrical nor their parents before them.  In fact, if anything, on my father’s side I come from a line of natural athletes.

And yet there is never an empty stage that I am not tempted to climb.  How deep is the stage?  How deep are the wings?  How much room is there on the apron?  What’s the lighting board like?  How many Lekos have they hung and how many Fresnels?  Is there a booth in the back of the house or does some poor sap have to throw huge levers on some out-of-date board just offstage?

Although my experiences with organized sports were less than endearing, my infatuation with playing sports was doomed the first time I got cast in a play in high school.  And it all comes down to the same thing:  fun.  Cavorting about on stage was fun for me, and I was good at it, better than most.  In fact, I continued acting until, after two straight years of dinner theater, it stopped being fun.  Again, it was no longer worth doing when it was no longer fun.

I’ve performed on occasion over the years since, but never again with that youthful enthusiasm and commitment.  Perhaps I stopped performing, in part, because while I was good–very good, in fact–by 23 I was as good as I was ever going to be, and I knew it.  I could have continued working at the same high level, but there was nowhere left to go, no new areas of growth and development.  It was right about the time that my father died that I just stopped.

But still, right up to the gruesome end, I always showed up.

Play Ball

There was an op-ed blog piece this morning on The New York Times website that I think raises interesting issues for not just parents, but society.  Written by Buzz Bissinger, who brought us Friday Night Lights, “Bench the Parents” details the effect on youth sports by overeager parents, each obsessed with the idea that their little darling might grow up to be a professional athelete.  He brings up the usual litany of complaints, including violence among and between parents, the pressure to perform that is loaded on young shoulders, and the injuries that inevitably follow a child’s overuse as a funnel for a parent’s abandoned dreams and hopes.

This is a subject of particular interest for me, because it was my brushes with organized sports as a youth that drove me away from sports almost entirely.  Whether it was basketball in a Catholic school league or Little League or Pop Warner football, being involved in organized sports always took what was my greatest joy in childhood–playing sports–and turned it into misery.  And I didn’t really have too many problems with overeager adults.  (One time, really, but that’s another story.)  It was the thing itself that made sports suddenly joyless, the structure, the practices, the long periods of not playing.

For that was the wonderful thing about sports to the young boy who grew up to become me:  It was play.  And there were always pick-up games in whatever sport happened to be in season.  And if there weren’t enough kids for an actual game (and we played one-on-one football, basketball, and hockey), there was always a variation:  rundown or muckle or something.  And while I’m sure we all had occasional fantasies of making it as a professional athlete, I don’t think anybody really expected that to come true.

We played sports because we were boys and it was a great outlet for our exuberance.  And don’t be deceived by these folks who believe in the myth of innocence.  We wanted to win.  Every damn time.  And there’s a reason for this.  It’s because winning is more fun than losing, and there’s no way of getting around that.

And that is why I’m against organized sports for children.  It isn’t because of the competition and the winning and losing.  It’s because when sports become organized they stop being fun.

We’ve made a fetish in my lifetime out of removing all aspects of fun from childhood.  Kids stopped just playing and started having activities.  Everything seems to involve a registration fee and a form to fill out.  And a schedule.  God forbid that we don’t anchor our kids to a schedule.  Can you imagine the result if we didn’t?  They might enjoy themselves!  Without permission!

Let’s let them go, let them play, let them pick the teams and make up the rules.  If memory serves, being a kid is a hard enough occupation without turning the best part of it into a job.

Such Is Life

Have I blogged at all about the novel I am currently working on?  And I mean as a writer, not a reader.  I don’t think I have, really.  There’s just been the passing comment here and there.  Right?

Well, I don’t care if I’ve run the entire subject into the ground and am suffering from some sort of mid-term memory loss.  I’m writing about it today.

The working (and probable final) title is Such Is Life, and it concerns a lawsuit and the people involved in it.  It is also about love, in all its variety and nuance, and how it hides itself and how it emerges when needed.  And not just romantic love, either, although there is certainly some of that.  It also touches on the process of finding the proper profession, which is, in itself, a labor of love.

I found the monograph for the book years ago in Lin Yutang’s translation of the Tao Teh Ching, in which he uses extracts from the Chuang Tse as commentary on the older text.  In one of the later chapters of the the Tao Teh Ching, I found the phrase “Heaven arms with love those it would not see destroyed.”  And that’s really what it’s about.

I started writing it about 20 years ago, first as a stage play ( a version that went to about page two before dying) and then as what I called a novel for television.  I’ve never written a complete draft of it yet.  In my most sustained effort at it before, I wrote three-and-a-half half-hour episodes before crumping out or getting distracted or something.

I also tried writing it as a novel before, in the fall of 2001, which wasn’t a good time for much of anybody.

And now I’m at it again.  Some people never learn.

It’s going well so far.  I’ver written drafts of a prologue and two complete chapters.  I’ve been working on Chapter Three for about a week and have gone through at least three false starts before actually writing something worth keeping today.  It’ll come along over time.

This is a project that has been extremely popular with people who have read earlier versions.  So far, so good on the new one.  All I can do now is to keep plugging away at it.  And write occassional posts about my progress.  That’s just how I operate.

Reading Project Update

One down and 24 to go.

I finished rereading Travels with Charley, which was just as rewarding as always.  (My review of it can be seen at Baby Got Books.)  I then proceeded directly to White Noise, the first book on the shelf I plan on working my way through.

Unfortunately, I have had to put White Noise aside, and I think that the problem is that I’ve read it before.  My wife put it best when she said, “It’s very readable; it’s just not rereadable.”  Because the thing about it is this:  White Noise is definitely a post-modern novel, and while that’s all well and fine, it also means that, instead of Don DeLillo telling me about life, he’s telling me what he thinks about life.  Which is like being stuck at a party with that acquaintance who has one interest in life and never stops flogging it.  The first time you hear the diatribe, it’s fine.  It might even be extremely interesting.  However, the next time, it is less so, and it will never get better no matter how many times you are so exposed.

Now, the argument might be made that this is true of any novel, but it most certainly is not.  Books that are written in a less intellectualized way, books that are less related to lectures, have an almost endless set of meanings.  The meaning comes from that particular reader intersecting with that particular text, and each reader will come away from a book with a different experience and therefore interpretation of it.  Post modernism wants nothing of that, however.  Just like some political hack on a Sunday morning “news” program, the point is to control the message.  We see this when we attend installation type art shows.  In some cases, small light blue cards appended to the exhibit tell us what it means.  In other cases, the message is spelled out quite plainly in words in the work itself just so the artist can be assured that no viewer has the temerity to think for themselves or to have their own experience of the work.

And I found myself feeling the same way about White Noise.  Throughout the first part, I kept saying to myself, “I get it.  Jack’s a phony.  I get it.  There’s always a TV on or an announcement at a store or some kind of white noise in the background of modern lives.  I get it.”  I had gotten to a point, rather early on, in which the main character, Jack, has a conversation with his son, Heinrich, that no one has ever had or will ever have.  It was all too thought out, too intellectual.  It was that guy with the jabbing finger making the same point that he made that time at the barbecue.  I got it then, I get it now, and I’m not going to get it any more tomorrow.

Because there is no more to get.  It’s all made plain because there is no faith in my ability to interpret and no interest in the subtle game that less insistent authors play with readers.  I look in a mirror and instead of seeing myself, I see Don DeLillo.

Now, I say all this not to insult Mr DeLillo.  He is a great writer, and I’m glad I read White Noise.  Once.  I’m even more glad that I read Libra, which I think was a phenomenal performance.  I wish him nothing but the best.  Really.  I’m just losing whatever interest I once had in post modernism and am ready for post post modernism to begin, whatever that might be.

I have moved on to The Bean Trees and will replace White Noise with Straight Man by Richard Russo, which my wife is currently reading and which seems to be just up my street.

My Job Gets in the Way of My Career

As time permits, and sometimes in an effort to reclaim my sanity, I write during the workday.  At least, I try to.  It’s not always easy, though.

The problem is that I work with other people, and they talk.  Now, admittedly, much of the conversation is necessary to the transaction of the business of the workday.   I’m not trying to tell tales out of school about people standing around and gossiping.  And, for my purposes, the content doesn’t matter.  Because it is not the  content that bothers me, it is the sound.

Now, I almost called it noise, which it is from my perspective, but that’s not completely fair.  People aren’t just standing outside my door and making indiscriminate grunts and shrieks.  But they might as well, because it is often difficult for me to concentrate when there’s a conversation going on.  Two people quietly discussing the budget might just as well be giant chimpanzees playing tambourines and shooting off fireworks.

And so, it gets difficult to work and frustrating.

Just for the record, this also applies to my real work as well as my writing.  And since a lot of my real work involves writing, I’m truly screwed both ways.  The tapping of fingers on keyboards drives me crazy.  A fan droning on endlessly makes me tense.  The myriad types of white noise that infest modern society produce tension along the length of my spinal cord.  Right now, in fact, I’m working on one of my last few nerves.

I’m not quite sure how to deal with this.  It seems to be getting worse rather than better as I grow older, which is the way with so many things in life.

But it’s all better at home.  I can get quiet there and am more productive.  Now if I can just find a way to make as much working there as I do here….