The Death of Tommy Cooper

Yesterday, I came across a video on YouTube of the death of the British magician and comedian Tommy Cooper.  (I’m neither going to link directly to the video or embed it due to the subject matter.  If anyone wants to view it, it is easy enough to find.  There are several versions of it, all essentially the same, it appears, on YouTube. )  Cooper died while performing on a live TV show called “Live from Her Majesty’s,” and perhaps it was a fitting end and perhaps not.  Morbid curiosity was only a small part of why I watched it.  The more compelling reason is that I am 50 now, and he died at 63, a point that is not that far away for me in time.

The odd thing about Tommy Cooper’s death was that people kept laughing at him while he was dying.  Cooper’s act was to effect being an incompetent magician (which he wasn’t).  He would tell jokes while putting off the inevitable failure of the trick he was performing and there would be mistakes and interruptions.  So, when he faltered a bit and fell to a sitting position on the floor, the members of the audience thought it was just part of the act.  And they laughed.  And as he sat slumped and breathing laboriously, they laughed.  And when he fell back dead on the floor, they laughed again.  Because each discreet action was believable as part of his act and each happened, quite amazingly, with the same timing that he used in pacing his gags.

I wonder how it felt for him to die with laughter in his ears.  I would like to think that it was pleasant.  He had spent his career making people laugh, and what more fitting way to go?  But as he sat slumped dying, did he not most likely think, “I’m dying, you bastards!  Don’t fucking laugh!  Call me a doctor.  Help me!”?

It is a mysterious thing, this passage from life that we call death.  I think that what is compelling about that video is that while most of us are familiar with the before and the after, it is rare for us to see the transition.

Still the important thing about Tommy Cooper, from our perspective, is not that he died, but that he lived.  He was, I think, a wonderful comedian who makes me laugh quite a bit.  So that’s why I decided to embed a clip of him quite alive and quite funny.  Enjoy.

When Illiterates Try to Read Between the Lines

I tried twice yesterday to get comments on a New York Times blog called “Moral of the Story” by a fellow named Randy Cohen.  The blog purports to be dedicated to looking at stories from the news through the lens of ethics. (Never mind that ethics and morals are two distinct things and that people who are ethical aren’t always perceived as moral while folks who are moral are oftentimes not ethical.) As of this writing, neither comment has made it through the censors, which, for the purposes of this post, is neither here nor there. The blog post in question concerns the recent public relations tug-of-war between David Letterman and Sarah Palin.

First, let me say that the whole thing is a tempest in a teapot. I can’t really imagine a less important news story. The situation is essentially this: Letterman told a joke–in some eyes a rotten joke–poorly, and Palin reacted in an absurd manner. There is no winner in this tiff, especially not the great American public.

Sprinkled amongst the comments generated by this post were a number that berated Letterman for joking about Willow Palin being raped, a thing which he did not do. Being a lover of the English language and of reasoning as an avocation, I wrote the following as my second comment (the first comment is lost to history):

There is not only a semantic but a legal difference between rape and statutory rape. In the one case, one participant in an allegedly sexual act is unwilling. The act is forced upon that person without their consent, whether they have the legal authority to give consent or not. In the other case, a person is engaged in a sexual act at an age that the legislature has determined is below the age at which informed consent can be given. The person’s willingness to engage in the act is irrelevant. They are deemed too young to be trusted to knowingly consent to such an act.

Conflating the two does no one any good. In fact, it cheapens the harm done and the injury felt by the victims of rape, those who were unwillingly violated by another.  However, in this matter and for the sake of making a few third-rate political points, it is convenient for Governor Palin and her acolytes to muddy the two very distinct terms into one so as to misstate the intent and effect of the joke. And if anyone actually thought that Letterman was referring to Willow Palin when he made that joke, you should be ashamed of yourself. You’ve got a dirty mind.

Finally, it is hypocritical to worry about protecting the children when both Willow and Bristol Palin have been repeatedly used as props and weapons by their parents. If the folks who are so worried about them are true to their word, they would find these kids a foster home.

(I have slightly revised this comment to remove spelling and other such errors and to amplify the argument in a couple of places.)

As I’ve trudged through life, I’ve been subjected to a long stream of numbskulls and dimwits who disparaged “book learning” in favor of “street smarts” and who decried the need for a large vocabulary (originally called the use of “twenty-five cent words,” inflation has them valued at somewhere around five dollars these days) and the subtle use of language. And yet the entire line of thinking that goes into jumping to the conclusion that Letterman was joking about anyone being raped shows exactly why book learning and a varied vocabulary and a subtle sense of language are virtues, not vices. For without understanding how words work, without understanding the difference between reasoning and believing, a demagogue can mislead and citizens are reduced to the status of cattle. (I made a similar point in an earlier post.)

Despite what is believed in some quarters, this nation was not founded by men who had faith in religious belief.  They had faith in the ability of humans to reason their way through problems.  They understood that reason elevated the member of a mob to be a functioning citizen.  Reason allowed them to be governed rather than ruled.

The Elements of Style, Not Steel

In reading an article in The Times this morning concerning the 50th anniversary edition of The Elements of Style, I reflected on a blog post I wrote a little over a year ago in which I discussed the effect the so-called “little book” had on me as a writer.  It was a small stroll down memory lane inspired, at the time, by a slight detour.  I had read a blog post by Paul Krugman in which he danced a piroette on the wonders of George Orwell’s essay about clarity in writing, “Politics and the English Language,” and I ventured the opinion that not only might Orwell’s essay perhaps not have been “the best essay on writing ever written,” but was, at least in my case, one of the best sleep aids I had ever encountered.  Some days later, I noticed on the dashboard for this blog that there was a link incoming to that post.  It connected to some website devoted to Orwell, and the author of the link added one of the “rules” from The Elements of Style in which E.B. White enjoined the nascent writer to not “affect a breezy manner.”  Apparently my lack of enthusiasm had struck a nerve, and someone who lacked the courage to identify himself had constructed what he thought was a witty rejoinder to my slander against his hero.  That’s how things are done in the digital world.

Unfortunately for our Orwell-loving sniper, my piece, while playful in spots, was not written in a breezy manner, and he (or she; idiocy is not gender-specific) missed the point of a section that White referred to in the book as a selection of reminders.  This point was also missed in a recent article published in The Chronicle of Higher Learning by a professor from the University of Edinburgh called Geoffery Pullum, although, in fairness, Professor Pullum has more reasonable, compelling, and useful ideas to put forth.  Both seem (although I might be misinterpreting Professor Pullum) to be under the misapprehension that The Elements of Style is anything other than a collection of guidelines for the beginner and is not–especially after E.B. White got through with it–a polemic or manifesto.  Of course, they are not alone.  Too many thousands, including the folks who created the grammar wizard in Microsoft Word, have taken the Little Book too seriously.  They treat it as if it were holy writ, not merely some quick ideas that put forth the notion–the same one as put forth by Orwell, by the way–that clarity in the writing of English prose is a virtue.

Because Professor Strunk followed his own advice concerning the making of definite assertions, the early sections of the book do read like an extension of the Ten Commandments, but this can be overcome.  And the second section, the one dominated by White, is far less proscriptive, although, I guess, by the time that people get that far, they have been conditioned enough to jump when commanded that they unconsciously omit White’s advice to season one’s taste of his reminders with a pinch or two of salt.  It is long past time for everyone to relax a little and to remember that The Elements of Style is not a sacred text.  It began its life as a guidebook for college freshmen and not as a learned disquisition on the English language in all its complexity.  It is a style guide, and a decent one, I think, and entertaining to boot.

Now, two more things before I go.

First, I want to make it clear that I am not anti-Orwell.  1984 and Animal Farm are two of the best novels I’ve ever read, extraordinary in every way.  What I failed to make clear previously was that it was that one essay that put me to sleep.  If it is truly as great as Professor Krugman had it, then the fault is mine.

Second, Professor Pullum’s essay should be read by anyone who is infatuated with The Elements of Style and his words heeded.  I think he is right in just about everything he says except in his insistence on taking the book sooooo seriously.  It also seems to me that some of his notions, such as that “[t]he students who know which words are needless don’t need the instruction,” are logically flawed and detract from his overall argument.   (Not that he’s arguing with overalls.  Whoops!  There’s that breezy side of me rearing its ugly head again.  For shame!  For shame!)  I think it would be great to see his essay published with the standard text as an afterword or something.  Everyone would benefit from a bit of scoffing, for there is no animal duller than a sacred cow.

I Get the Picture

Despite checking it relentlessly throughout the day, I don’t always get a lot of value out of Facebook.  I look at my homepage, shrug, and move on.  There’s something about both it and Twitter that I have trouble with.  As egocentric as I am, I still can’t be persuaded that anybody needs to know the excruciating minutiae of my daily life.  Does it really matter what I’m doing at any given moment, as long as it’s reasonably legal and only involves consenting adults?

However, I have just had an interesting experience on Facebook.  The niece of one of my “friends” (he and I were true friends during high school, but are, in reality, something less than  acquaintances now) posted a series of pictures taken at some family event.  Now, of course, there’s a very human tendency to remember people as they were rather than as how they are.  This was brought into sharp focus for me when I came across, among these photos, a shot of my friend’s parents.  I remember them as they were 30 or more years ago, probably about the age I am now.  And here I saw them, aged appropriately, still easily recognizable for who they were, who they had been.  And yet it was still a shock.

The smiles were still the same, hers open and friendly, his more wry and knowing.  He looks at her with love, as he always did, and I am transported.  I am young and callow, thin as a straw and riddled with acne and insecurity.  We are in their kitchen in the sturdy yellow house on a quiet small street.  My friend’s mother is cooking or cleaning or waiting on someone.  His father sits at the table at the wall by the door, reading the paper which is spread flat before him.  He sips a beer in tall, slender beer glass at patient intervals, spicing it with a taste of salt taken from a supply he keeps in the crook at the base of his thumb.

This is a happy memory for me.  More than that, it is a memory content.  This is a home for me, a second home, not in opposition to my real home as is so often the case, but an extension of it.  Another haven of acceptance and accord.

To see these people again, the mother, the father, the brother, the sisters, to see the person who was once the friend of the person who was once me is a pleasure, a welcome wave of sentiment and remembrance.  Many years have passed and all of these lives, mine and theirs, have gone in ways discrete and different.  I am, such as I am now, mostly unknown to them and they to me.  And yet in  my memory, so many years ago, I feel their presence and their being.  And amongst the strains and trials of life, amongst the difficult people and the slights and troubles that refuse to be forgotten, I still have that haven.

Reading (The Activity, Not the Railroad)

A while back, I announced a rather ambitious project in these–not pages, exactly, perhaps–pixels.  I had intended to make a reading pilgrammage across a shelf of one of our bookshelves of fiction in an attempt to educate myself better about current writing and the state of fiction.  In other words, I was attempting to carve away a tiny chip from the great block of ignorance that I call a brain.  Now, I started out in good faith.  I was rereading Travels with Charley then, and I did just fine with that book.  The reading project started to fall to pieces when I set myself to reread the next book, Don DeLillo’s White Noise.  Everything that had delighted me on my first reading grated on me the second time, so I put it aside. Next, I picked up The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver, which I had never read before.  By the end of Chapter Three, I had set it aside as well.

At that point I began to suspect that the problem lay more with me than with the texts.  And the problem was that I now, being a novelist myself, approached the works of other living novelists as competitors, almost as enemies.  I couldn’t read a sentence without recasting it in my mind, without searching it for flaws, without scoffing at its techniques and meanings.  All of which is patently unfair to these authors and their works.  What a dreadful world it would be if everyone wrote the way that I did, and how much harder still would it be for me to progress in my chosen profession if my works were no more unique than a paperclip or a house in a subdivision.

And so, I have decided to lay off living authors.  They’ve got a right, and reading somebody’s work in that way does me no good either.  There’s just no percentage in it at all.

All of which has led me to come up with a new plan.  I will, from now on, concentrate on the works of the dead.  The classics.  All those books that I should have read and, with depressing frequency, haven’t.  I’ve begun by rereading another book of Steinbeck’s, Of Mice and Men.  In part, I am reading it because my son just finished it.  In part, I am reading it because I haven’t read it since I was 14, and I wanted to make its acquaintance again.  He’s currently reading The Red Badge of Courage, which I’ve never read, so that will be next on the list.  Beyond that, I’m not sure.  We’ve picked out some of the shorter classics for him, so I may just continue, as the suckerfish to his shark, to shadow his reading and survive on his crumbs.

But we’ll see.  Plans have a strange way of evolving.

Apprentice Work, Part 2

My twenties were a fallow time for me as a writer.  From the time that I moved out of my parents’ home in 1983 until I started working for Ernst & Young when I lived in the DC area in 1988, as I recall it, my total output was three short stories, each quirky and experimental in its own way.  The most conventional of them was a story I wrote in 1986 called “Dreg of the Wildebeest.”  The story of a Neanderthal who has a midlife crisis, it was inspired by my reading of about a page-and-a-half of the second book of Jean Auel’s Earth’s Children series, Valley of the Horses.  The scene in question featured the heroine of the piece, a young and beautiful (they’re always young and beautiful in melodrama) Cro Magnon, who is about to be deflowered by a Neanderthal whose band she has fallen in with.  (And don’t chicks, even paolithic ones, always go for guys in bands?)  Now, this ever-expanding pool of absurdity was instantaneously metastasized when the Neanderthal’s thoughts were presented for our viewing pleasure.  It turned out that not only was getting it on with a hot chick–possibly of a related yet still different species–not his only concern, but it wasn’t even near the top.  His main concern, an absurdity written with such a straight face that my mind reeled when I read it in the file room at Fannie Mae, was that he be gentle with her since it was her first time.  In the 23 years that have elapsed since I read this revelation, I have still not been able to wrap my head around the idea of your average Neanderthal being a sort of neolithic Cary Grant, suavely seducing the ladies and always making sure that they finished first.

And so I wrote the story, almost in a fever.  And here it is, in pdf format that shows edits I made in pencil for a subsequent draft.

(Click on the link below and then click on the link on that page in order to get the pdf.  Thanks for making it so damn easy, WordPress.)

Dreg of the Wildebeest

Chrysalis, Part III

Furthermore.

Yesterday evening while I was driving to get the kid from the afterschool program, I realized what the real problem is with holding down a regular job while trying to create art.  And this speaks to a counterargument that I get, and I’m pretty sure most people who identify themselves as being artists get, whenever the subject of why I hate having to work for a living comes up.  The most popular counterargument runs along the lines of “Can’t you just pursue it as a hobby?  On the side?  Aren’t the ultimate satisfactions involved in the doing rather than in succeeding?”  And that can be something of a poser, because it is true that the satisfaction resides in the making rather than the selling.  I write because something very deep in my being impels me to rather than because of a pursuit of riches or fame.  In fact, if riches or fame were in any way the point, I would have switched to making crappy works long ago.  As H.L. Mencken said, “Nobody ever went broke from underestimating the American public.”

And this is where the paradox comes in.  In order to survive in as fiercely economic a society as this one, you have to have income.  In order to have income, most of us have to work.  In my particular case, I am limited by my uselessness as a student.  Had I had more facility as a student, I could have taken the more accepted modern route for an artist and collected degrees, grants, and fellowships instead of an ever-lengthening resume.  However, in the words of Felix Unger, “we are what we are,” and no amount of wishing or griping is going to change that.  The classroom brings out the rebel in me, and usually ends with both me and the teacher frustrated beyond reckoning.

And so, I’ve had to work for a living.

I always thought that the main problem involved with this system was that the forty hours or more given over to an employer each week were simply hours of labor misdirected.  And that is true.  However, the far more profound problem, as I realized last evening, is that it takes away from the time available for thinking about whatever it is that I am writing at any given time.  My employers quite rightly assume that my mind will be taken up mostly with competently completing my assigned tasks, and I do try to do at least a marginal job in whatever position I’ve found myself in over the years.  And the problem is this:  In order to do the best job possible of writing a story or a novel or a play or anything, for that matter, I have to immerse myself in it.  In my ideal working conditions, I try to live the characters and to exist inside the situations.  I picture the locations and productions in my mind’s eye and lose myself inside the project.  It’s hard to do that while composing emails or meeting with coworkers or clients.  It’s hard to do while fighting traffic.

Now, there might be those who advocate taking the time needed away from my time with my family, but the problem there is that my family life actually nourishes my art.  It keeps alive those emotions–love, empathy, and compassion–that make my art possible.  Whatever the weaknesses in my work, my life with my wife and son makes it stronger, more supple, more alive.

No.  It’s the job that must go.  Unfortunately, the only way I can do that is by replacing the income my job brings in with income from writing.  In order to do that, I need to achieve some level of success.  And I’m trying.  I have some things out now and have decided to try to market more of what I have in stock.  I’m asking the universe to help me make the transition in as seemless and painless a way as possible.  Prayers and good wishes from others accepted and encouraged.  I just need to get there.

We Interrupt This Series of Posts

Okay, I was checking out Baby Got Books this morning, and the current post, which concerned a book of photographs of country music stars at a variety of open concerts during the ’60s.  It’s called Pure Country, and it looks to be very interesting.  As part of the post, Tim, who runs BGB and very well at that, added some streaming audio of Hank williams, the Carter Family, Dolly Parton, and George Jones singing “He Stopped Loving Her Today” on Austin City Limits.

Well, it just so happens that I saw that Austin City Limits, or at least most of it.  And old George was sensational.  I hadn’t really paid him the mind that he deserved before that night, but I’ve done my best to not continue that mistake in its wake.  You can’t understand what country music is and ought to be without understanding George Jones and others of his generation, especially Johnny Cash (whose version of Soundgarden’s Rusty Cage I just heard last weekend and am still recovering from).

My favorite bit of George Jones on Austin City Limits was him singing a song called “The King Is Gone.”  Here it is for your enjoyment:

And what the hell, here’s Johnny’s video for “Rusty Cage”:

Enjoy.

Chrysalis, Part II

So anyway.

It is not the artist’s job to assess; his (or hers or its, let us, after all, be inclusive) is only to create.

There are many ways to create, but not everyone wants to see that.  There’s no money in it.  And the idea that The Iowa School for Famous Writers and other bastions of academia that try to turn a calling into a profession exist on is that artistry can be deconstructed, dissected, analyzed, and understood by the mind.  They rely on the misconception that creativity can be distilled into a method, into something that can be taught.  However, they are wrong.  Artistry cannot be learned.  It must be discovered.

I am not an expert on the work methods of great artists.  There are a few that I know about, and what the work methods of these few have in common is not method as much as a reliance on instinct and serendipity.  Index cards never seem to play a role.  Which is not to say that it is impossible for index cards to play a role; we are securely in “to each his own” territory here.

Throughout my creative life, my method has evolved haphazardly into no method at all.  I blunder forward and suddenly stop.  I step back and rewrite and revise.  I look for places where the writing is skimpy and try to fill it out, fatten it up.  And then I go forward a bit, and look back and write anew and revise and blunder forward again in blindness.  I look for the happy accidents, which are all markers, and try to follow their lead.  I try to keep in mind the Taoist wisdom that says that he who makes breaks.

I look, again and again, for the unnecessary word in order to remove it.

This approach is now infecting the way that I write essays.  I started out blogging some four years ago.  I started out relying on the traditional five-paragraph form of essay, and everything proceeded in a linear, sequential, logical fashion.  However, as the years have worn on and worn me down, I’ve found myself writing, more-and-more, in a nonlinear way.  Instead of following one idea, instead of writing from a proposition to a conclusion, I’m combining thoughts and letting the essay tell me how to get written rather than me imposing a structure on it.

This post and the previous one are steps in that direction.  I wonder how the next one will turn out.

Chrysalis, Part I

Back in the mid-90s, I hit hard times.  A job disappeared suddenly, and I found myself having to break the lease on my apartment and stay with some friends because I could no longer pay the rent.  Things had been hardscrabble for some time, and I had suffered some bad luck and made some bad choices, endured heartache and once again tasted of disappointment.  The night before I was going to shove my belongings into a U-Haul and end a chapter of my life, I lay on my futon in the bedroom dark and tried to sleep.  Anxiety, however, trumped sleep, and I struggled for a way to quiet my brain and calm my nerves.   As I lay there, I formed the image of me hanging from a rope over a gaping abyss.  And then some words of Joseph Campbell’s came to me from his interview with Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth:  “You know the rule.  If you’re falling, dive.”

And in my mind, I let go of the rope.

In the years since, I have gotten more jobs, paid rent again, gotten married, and fathered a son.  I’ve grown, deepened, and learned.  I have been slandered and praised, been wronged and wronged others.  I’m a different person than I was then, older and wiser in the sense that I now understand a smidgen of how much I don’t understand.  I’m wiser because I now know that I am not wise.

Like everyone else, I have been on a journey, part of which has been artistic.  In fact a huge part of it has.  I suppose that this makes me, in these years at least, a journeyman.  That’s fine.  I can accept that.  Perhaps it’s all just a journey, and most artists are only ever journeymen.  The further along I’ve gotten, the less that mastery seems possible, which is not to say that I think that I’m a lousy artist who produces lousy works.  I have no idea how good I am or what the value of the works I create are.  I don’t think that’s my function.  I just put the pieces together as best I can and hope it works out.