The First Two Pages

A few months ago, my wife, who has a BA in English, joined a book club, and each month, as the next title to be read was announced, I journeyed to Amazon and read the first two pages of the proposed book.  And I have been able to tell, within that short span and without fail, how both my wife and the majority of the book club would react to the title proposed.

For example, they decided, a month or two ago, to read The Help.  By the bottom of page two, the verdict was obvious.  This was a good book and a good read and would be enjoyed by all.  And so it was.

However, everyone loves The Help, so perhaps that wasn’t much of a test.  Things were trickier when they read The Art of Racing in the Rain, a literary book about a race car driver and his dog which is told from the dog’s point-of-view.  Within the the first few paragraphs, my verdict was in.  The Art of Racing in the Rain was destined, despite the decent prose, to be crushed under the weight of its own pretensions.

Easiest, perhaps, was the first book my wife was treated to, Darkly Dreaming Dexter, ostensibly a mystery and the basis for a TV show on Showtime that has attracted something of a cult following.   By the end of the first sentence, I knew that this was a book that needed to be incinerated.  And after reading only the first two pages, I can argue, at some depth and length, exactly why Dexter is not only a dreadful book but an evil one.

I write this because I don’t get why some agents insist on receiving synopses of books.  (That mine is particularly difficult to synopsize might account for some of my acrimony concerning this requirement.)  I’ve started sending them the first two pages on the the theory that the proof is in the pudding, as they say, and they’ll either want to read page three or won’t.  For in choosing books, once we get beyond readability, all else is dross.

Publicly Private but Privately Public

In a post I wrote last week, I mentioned, in passing, that this blog is actually my writing journal, a thing that used to be private that now is, or can be, public.  And that got me to thinking, which is always a dangerous thing.  I started thinking about how mutable the concept of privacy is and how radically that conception has changed not only in my lifetime, but in the lifetime of my son, who is only eleven.

Yes, a writer’s journal was formerly a private affair, an artifact intended by the author to be found posthumously by scholars seeking insight into his or her peculiar genius.  (This is all hearsay, not a report of personal experience.)  It was a conversation with one’s self (and posterity for the terminally vain, such as your truly), not one’s public.  This is also true of diaries, which were the real precursor to the blog.  Intimate thoughts and records of experiences were noted in a book well hidden and carefully tended.

Suddenly, for some reason, some time in the early part of this century, it became the fashion for people to confide in the great anonymous public online rather than in a blank book or a diary with a lock on it.  Blogs were very suddenly the rage, and people from all around the world would share more than they ought to about their lives as often as possible.  And readers would get the voyeuristic thrill of experiencing someone else’s tawdry adventures several times a day.  Of course, it didn’t take long for the blog to calm down a bit, for subcategories of bloggers to split off, and for the blog post to develop, more and more often, into multi-paragraph essays concerned with matters other than the titillating thrill of exhibitionism.  That briefer, hundred-posts-per-day kind of blogging then moved to Twitter and Facebook, each of which takes a slightly different spin on the old blog model.

Celebrity culture is an assault on the notion of privacy, and the rise of reality shows that have nothing to do with reality are a symptom of it.   The idea, again and again, is for average people to attain some small measure of fame, whether from spilling the beans on the most intimate areas of their lives or allowing TV producers to reduce them to the status of object so that some network or other can sell more Corn Flakes.  Most pitiful of all are the sex tapes of minor celebrities, jerryrigged leaks of which are designed to extend some poor wretch’s 15th minute of fame to a 16th or 17th.

Of course, even this minor blog has the quest for fame hidden somewhere in its creator’s psyche.  I will take every page view and trackback that I can get and will gladly sign autographs when asked.  And yet, that is not this blog’s main purpose.  And yet again, the possibility of being read, of being able to sidestep the publishing industry to get my writing direct to you, the consumer, is an inducement to write and provides a small tinge of a thrill on its own.

I never did well with maintaining a journal back in the good old days.  The private nature of journaling made me prone to only keep one when I was feeling sorry for myself, and the journals of my youth are soppy, terrible things.  Having to write in public combined with my native instinct for privacy helps me maintain a better balance here as it does or did on any of my other or previous blogs. What I reveal of myself is more than tempered by what I withhold.

Which leaves me where?  Probably drifting in circles.  Thinking out loud, hoping to learn something about myself and the world, most likely by accident.  Doodling in the margins of literature.

Of course, there’s also this.  A friend mentioned last week that he wondered whether Facebook had gotten in the way of my blogging, but that’s not the case.  I blogged less for a number months than I have in the last week or so mostly because creative writing was getting in the way.  I’ve revised one book manuscript and started a second and written and revised a long short story and adapted another from a radio play I had written a few years ago.  I didn’t blog because I have a regular job and blogging got in the way of me making time to pursue my true craft.  Also, by the time I’d get around to trying to draft an idea I had for a post, all the thoughts that I had thought up in the car and in the shower had disappeared like the dew on the grass and the look of optimism that once lurked at the back of my eyes.  You should see the list of “drafts” I have piled up back here.

Only I’m not going to let you.  That would be an invasion of privacy.

Yr Obt Svt

Thanks to an article in the London Times concerning an attempt to set up an Academy of English to serve as the final arbiter of the language, a bit a firestorm has erupted on Twitter. At least it has on the pages of the British authors, comedians, and all-around good guys, Stephen Fry (@StephenFry) and Charlie Higson (@monstroso).  Both Messrs Fry and Higson have come out against such a notion, which is right and just.  In fact, I think so little of the notion of establishing an academy that I didn’t even bother to read all of the article.  The first two or three sentences were sufficient.  Simply hanging on to the notion that a language–especially that world-engulfing monster, English–can be somehow fixed and confined is absurd.  It will be contorted and expanded and used in every which way imaginable whether there is a panel of experts involved or not.  English is a living language, and one cannot embalm a living thing.  Or, rather, one can make the attempt, but will only kill the thing he loves in the process.

Much of the fiasco seems to have been inspired by the various abbreviations that people use while texting or tweeting.  “You” becomes “u.”  “To” and “too” become “2.”  (We will assume that “two” becoming “2″ is acceptable to all.)  Now, I am speaking as someone who quite purposely avoids such abbreviations.  I also avoid using emoticons in the hope that the person on the other end of the communication can understand when I intend to be humorous or something of a scamp simply from the way that I string words together.  Perhaps I am deluding myself or overestimating my abilities, but I am willing to live with the consequences involved.

Of course, the making of abbreviations is nothing new.  As Stephen Fry pointed out at some time some place* (I can’t remember where; it could have been on his blog, on something I watched on YouTube, on QI, on Twitter, in a column, or perhaps in some stray graffito, the one medium I can’t be certain that he hasn’t conquered), during the 18th century, when paper was what bandwidth is now, people abbreviated all the time.  Of course, having made this bald assertion, I couldn’t find any handy examples on the Internet,

but probably will some time in the future when I search for something like “French-Canadian bowling leagues” or “imbecility in 50-year-old fat men.”

Of course, the most famous of these abbreviations is “yr obt svt,” which stood for “your obedient servant” and was used at the end of letters the way that “sincerely” or “This is an attempt to collect a debt” are today.  As Twitterspeak, “yr obt svt” is elegant and mostly useless, a phrase which could be used to describe most of the best tweets posted on a random day.  In fact, I like it so much that I may never tweet anything else but “yr obt svt” ever again.  Excluding my researches into the life and works of Justin Bieber.

So, until the English Academy Police, Online Unit, hunts me down (or “hunt me down” if you are British), I’ll B talkin 2 ya or u or whtevr.

*Update:  It turned out to be in an episode of The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.  Stephen’s comparison of text abbreviations and 18th century abbreviations begins at about 5:16 into the following video and continues through 5:40.

I Don’t Follow

Yesterday morning, I needed to give myself a bit of a boost, so I googled “Joseph Campbell crisis quote.” (I had finally, at long last, identified my recent malaise as what Homer Simpson referred to as a “crisitunity.”) The first page listed turned out to have the material I needed.  It also featured Campbell’s disquisitions on the pursuit of bliss, a drop in the ocean of his wisdom that has somehow been seized upon and made into its own self-help industry.  What Campbell actually said all those years ago on The Power of Myth was

Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat, Chit, Ananda. The word “Sat” means being. “Chit” means consciousness. “Ananda” means bliss or rapture. I thought, “I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.” I think it worked.

I had always taken this pretty much at face value and had spent years thinking of writing as being my bliss. And yesterday, it occurred to me that, no, writing was not bliss or rapture for me. It is something that I am compelled to do from some source very deep inside me and it has many profound satisfactions for me, but it rarely provides what I would call bliss or rapture. And the more I thought about it, the more I came to realize that bliss and rapture are not, in my experience, things that you can hang your hat on. They are ephemeral and passing experiences, the stuff of moments rather than lifetimes.  And I have gotten far more rapture from my wife and son over the years than I have from writing.

Watching movies–great films–is a source of bliss to me, but it is not my vocation.  Even though I would love to have the opportunity to make a film some day, it is not something that I feel called to or compelled to pursue.  Watching a great film has the effect for me of rapture or bliss, that step out of time into the realm of the eternal, but it is not something, perhaps because of its blissful aspect, that I want sullied with the grime of money.

And I’m not trying to diss Joe here. As I said above, I got the information that I needed, it’s just that the stuff about bliss wasn’t it.  And rethinking the stuff about bliss got me thinking about my previous identification of writing with bliss and my disappointment that following a writer’s path didn’t automatically open unknown doors and reveal unseen paths.  Perhaps diving more into the bliss of watching films may be the sustenance that my writing needs to grow.  I’ve reentered that world in fits and starts in recent weeks, perhaps I need to allow myself more time to it.

Sometimes in life it becomes necessary to make adjustments to one’s worldview, and this situation has given me the opportunity to get the mental and spiritual screwdrivers out for some work.

Thinking Out Loud Except Quietly in Print

One of the pleasures of having a blog that is rarely visited or noticed is that I can, from time-to-time, start working out some thoughts that I’ve been having that I hope might find their way into some work of fiction.  In this way, blogging should not be confused with real writing.  At least not in my case; I make no rules for the world.  My blog posts are usually dashed off in a single session, whereas my real writing develops slowly and carefully.  Sentences are worried over and changed and shaped.  Blog posts tend to come out in a tumble, and the prose, while sometimes quite good, generally doesn’t shine.  And it doesn’t have to because this is, at the end of the day, a public version of what used to be a private thing:  a writer’s journal.

Which brings me back to where I began, thoughts.

Today’s thoughts came from reading part of an essay that John Updike wrote 21 years ago for Commentary in which he reflects on his views concerning the Vietnam War and his support of the Johnson and Nixon administrations in prosecuting that war, even after he had come to see the war as a benighted mistake.  (I will not be assessing this opinion of his.  I don’t see the point in arguing with a dead man over his opinions about a war that ended when I was 15.)  A few paragraphs in, he starting listing prominent figures in the antiwar movement, writing

One source of my sense of grievance against the peace movement when it came was that I hadn’t voted for any of its figures—not for Abbie Hoffman or Father Daniel Berrigan or Reverend William Sloane Coffin or Jonathan Schell or Lillian Hellman or Joan Baez or Jane Fonda or Jerry Rubin or Doctor Spock or Eugene McCarthy.

Now, I will forgo disassembling the speciousness of his argument that he needed to vote for people before they became endowed with the right of free speech. That’s not what interests me for the moment. The thought that occurred to me–a thought that resonated on seeing the names Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin most–had to do with the role that rampant egotism had to do with so much of the activism of the Baby Boom generation throughout its career, both on left and right. (The number of ’60s lefties who became right-wingers in the ’80s is astonishing.) And the habit of the loudest on both ends at both times was and is to spend most of their energy not in developing better policy, not in the nuts-and-bolts work in the communities, but in jumping up-and-down and yelling “Look at me! Look at me!” It struck me that Abbie Hoffman and Rush Limbaugh are not enemies, but colleagues, and brothers under the skin. Their ethic is the same, their approach is the same, their method is the same. They just represent opposing points-of-view. And they don’t really represent those points-of-view as much as they use them as shields and as stages on which to stand.

They are both clowns, and I mean that in the comic sense and not as a put down. They joke. They use humor. Humor is what makes them attractive and enjoyable. They are also callous and harmful. The thought that there might be an actual living, breathing human at the end of their barbs is irrelevant. All that matters to them is the attention.

Which is their right. And long may they exercise it. While Abbie’s audience has long since dried up, Rush’s is huge, and I do not begrudge him a one of them. He makes few if any converts and spends his days preaching to the choir while hawking beds and vacuum cleaners. That a lot of liberals work themselves into a lather over Rush is their weakness rather than his strength. Personally, I couldn’t care less what he says or does.

None of which is really my point. Because I don’t really have a point. I have a thought. A small thought about the force of rampant egotism on the politics of the Baby Boom generation. Not much, when you come down to it. One step in a long path.