Good writing advice

Writing should be a process of surprising oneself. If I had a plan, down to the last detail, of what my story will be, what would be the point of writing it? I mean, what is in it for me if I know precisely what is going to happen and what my characters are going to think and say and do? It would simply be a matter of typing.

-- Richard Gwyn, in his "Ricardo Blanco" blog

That's how I know I'm writing well: when something happens in my book that I don't expect, as I'm writing it. As in my first novel Make Nice, in which a major character came busting through a door without warning in the 4th chapter, someone whom I had not planned on or dreamed of, and who insisted on insinuating herself deeply not only in the life of the protagonist but in the themes of the book itself.

Speaking of Make Nice, which is set in 1960 and is about the Rat Pack, the local PBS station showed Ocean's 11 last night. As I was watching it I thought of a series of annotations you could make. Like the conversation between Sinatra, Martin and Davis where they joke about going into politics -- a reflection of Sinatra's strong interest in the candidacy of JFK and his poorly hidden hope that JFK would appoint him to an ambassadorship or government post. Or the running joke about the mother of Peter Lawford's character, which is also an inside joke about Peter Lawford's own domineering mother. And so on -- there is inside joke after inside joke, and probably nobody knows them all anymore.

Apropos, here's a cool page on the interiors seen in the film, including the Vegas casino-resorts which have now all been torn down and replaced by more modern ones, along with an explanation that:

Ocean's 11 preserves some important aspects of the place, like the multiple showrooms in each of the hotels. (Frank) Sinatra, Jr. was most impassioned [on the DVD commentary] when discussing how the casinos used to operate, "when they were owned by individuals, not corporations." He explained that these intimate music lounges existed to "feed live music into the casino," and give gamblers a place to eat and revive themselves for some more gambling. ...

The new corporate owners that took over in the late 1960s figured -- according to Sinatra, Jr. -- "that people should only have to walk as far as the elevator to spend their money," which is when the concept of separate buildings was jettisoned in favor of a a gargantuan hotel that could allow you to never set foot outside of it. ... Sinatra, Jr. was also very detailed about the death of quality entertainment in Vegas, explaining that the number of private lounges were reduced by new corporate owners who felt they were wasting their money with duplications of musicians throughout a casino. The disappearance of the small music lounges that were free-of-charge to gamblers did not seem to affect the flow of people coming through the doors, so the rest of the lounges were torn out, replaced by grand concert halls with high-dollar tickets that could lure in even the non-gamblers.

Some cultural things just go on and on and on

When I was a little kid in the early 1960s -- 6, 7, 8 years old -- the hip electronic item for the home was the hi-fi. This was a large wooden cabinet six or seven feet long, containing a turntable, an amplifier and radio, and large cabinet speakers. (See this image, where an example sits in the center.) And to play on their hi-fis, middle-class people bought LPs. If they were educated, or just culturally aspiring, they might buy opera and symphony records; if they were only lightly-educated, and staid middle class people like my parents, they bought Broadway cast LPs and a series of curious recordings called Sing Along With Mitch.

(Just as a reference, while my parents bought those dubious pop records, my wife's parents, who were immigrants but understood what culture was in a way my own parents never did, bought opera and symphony records, and my wife sings arias around the house to this day.)

On each Mitch Miller recording was a dozen or so standards sung by a male chorus accompanied by a sprightly orchestra. Mostly folk songs or songs from the turn of the century, like "Peg O' My Heart," "The Sidewalks of New York," "Sweet Rosie O'Grady," "Makin' Whoopie," and so on. I was a little kid and liked to sing, and the whole point of these records was that you were supposed to sing along, so they contained full lyric sheets, and that way I learned these moldy songs by heart. They struck me even then as utterly of the past, because even when I was 8 (C.E. 1964) I was listening almost literally religiously to Top 40 radio and memorizing those songs too ("I Want to Hold Your Hand," "Satisfaction," "House of the Rising Sun" and so on), and the difference was obvious, even to a little kid.

At that time "The Lawrence Welk Show" was not a syndicated museum piece as it is now, but still a regularly broadcast television program on a major network, ABC. My grandmother would simply not miss this show, with its happy-faced Barbie-and-Ken-doll cast singing mostly the same ancient songs (e.g. on YouTube: "The Beer Barrel Polka;" "Big Rock Candy Mountain"). This show, which drew from more or less the same songbook as Mitch Miller, seemed even stranger -- not just a similarly weird, old-fashioned indulgence, but an actively sinister force -- if you watched it, I felt, you would find yourself growing elderly by the minute.

Thirty-five years later, my wife's mother landed in an Alzheimer's care home, where one of the social activities was listening to live music. The music consisted of a person with an accordion playing those same old songs -- literally the same old songs, "Sidewalks of New York" and so on. Now if that was nostalgic music to my grandmother, who was maybe 10 years old in 1900, what was it supposed to represent to people 40 years younger than her, people who were, say, 70 in 2000? Why weren't they playing the Big Band music of the 1940s, which would be to those folks what the Lawrence Welk songbook would have been to my grandmother? Why, in fact, weren't they playing the classical music my wife's mother had chosen to buy and listen to when she had the choice?

Even more mind-bendingly, this year I visited the Assisted Living facility where my own mother was living. And they had a man playing accordion, and he still played the same songs, including "Sidewalks of New York" and "Sweet Rosie O'Grady." WTF. Is there like a Nursing Home Songbook, with the same 25 numbers in it? I am really concerned about this. When I wind up in a freaking Assisted Living Facility in 20 or 30 years, they still better not be playing those same fucking songs; they better be playing some Beatles and Rolling Stones, or some accordion player is going to get bopped by my walker. Of course by then the accordion player will be robotic.

All this came to mind when I saw this jaw-dropping bit on Mediaite: On his own television program on his own network, ancient Pat Robertson hosted Condaleeza Rice, and when she suggested that "mac and cheese" was a wonderful holiday food, Robertson blurted out:

What is this "Mac and Cheese," is that a black thing?

And I thought, how the hell does this thing that is the 700 Club, and the Trinity Broadcast Network, survive? It's not like it's in syndication like the Welk show. (And for the record, at least on the Welk show they sang numbers from the 1940s and 50s and even contemporary numbers like -- God help us, I'm not kidding -- "One Toke Over the Line.") Who in the hell is giving money to this ancient fraud Robertson and the desperately out-of-touch worldview espoused on his network?

Then I realized -- things that somehow contain and epitomize cultural moments and worldviews, even if they do it terribly, just go on and on. It's like the culture as a whole needs these things as ballast, to balance out emanations like "TMZ" and the CW. Not that I claim to know the mechanism of how that works.

R.I.P. Joey Bishop

Joey Bishop, last surviving core member of the Rat Pack and eternal symbol of the fifth wheel, finally died Wednesday at age 89.

My first novel Make Nice was largely about a fictionalized Joey Bishop, a man who became a huge star in the early 60s on Frank Sinatra's coat tails but who failed to make the transition to the cool comedy of the late 60s and 1970s. He was known as a very decent person, a teetotaler, someone who stayed married to the same woman for decades. I can't think of a Hollywood figure who is today's Joey Bishop. I don't think there's a place for one.

Uneasiness

Today's New York Times has one of their regular, pleasantly voyeuristic articles about a bizarre medical condition -- this time Capgras Syndrome, a form of psychosis in which the sufferer becomes convinced that their family and regular acquaintances have been replaced by doppelgängers -- inexact copies of the genuine people, sinister duplicates who, while resembling their real loved ones, somehow are not them. It's as if the sufferers have been dropped into the first half hour of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," where a Chinese laundryman insists to Donald Sutherland, "That not my wife!"

Sometimes I have that feeling about our country. In many ways it looks like the country I grew up in, feverishly rushing into the future while constantly evoking nostalgia for its past -- now that the 1940s and the late 1960s have been thoroughly mined for nostalgia, it's the early 1960s that are being polished and put on display, what with AMC's "Mad Men" and the hoopla around the 50th anniversary of "On the Road." We continue being willing to sell anything to anybody, stopping only when the evidence that it's killing them is incontrovertible. We continue filling the earth with tons of shiny crap and living like there's no tomorrow. That sure hasn't changed.

But in many sinister ways, this country has changed. When I was a kid, there were one or two things we thought set our country apart from our enemies -- special characteristics that were reinforced in the movies over and over again. We treated prisoners of war humanely -- better than ours were treated. We didn't torture people. And most of all, we didn't invade another country for purely cynical reasons.

Of course, to varying degrees, those myths were false, even in the 1960s when I was a kid. But it was still possible to believe them. Who today can even pretend those things are still true?

I also grew up with the idea that the Constitution, with its protections against any branch of the government becoming too powerful and against invasions of privacy, was inviolate. During the last six years the President and his administration have acted as if those protections did not exist. We don't even yet know all the ways the shadowy men like Addington have quietly knocked the props from beneath the Bill of Rights. We will only find out in the years to come. (Read the July 3, 2007 New Yorker piece on Addington, called the force behind the administration's most egregious assaults on the Constitution and this country's reputation around the world.)

And why is it that none of the Democratic candidates for President have spoken out about the assaults on the Constitution by the Bush administration? Why haven't any of them detailed the ways they will, in their first days in office, roll back these changes? Because they, too, want to take advantage of them. They aren't stupid. They realize how much easier their job will be -- if by "their job" you mean protecting the privileges of companies and corporations over those of individual people -- if they hang onto these expanded powers.

That's why I am suffering a bit from Capgras Syndrome today, the 6th anniversary of the plane crashes of 2001. My country looks somewhat the same. But in many fundamental ways, it is not my country anymore.

technorati: Constitution, Bill of Rights, nostalgia, David Addington, 9/11, privacy

In tune with the zeitgeist

Have you seen "Man Men," the television series on the cable channel AMC? It's the big new thang this summer. The entire staff of the New York Times' Arts and Culture department is creaming over it; now that "The Sopranos" is over, they have to have something to lionize, and naturally the focus of their fandom is something as close as possible to the culture of the New York Times itself: white, waspy, privileged, and set in Manhattan. Yesterday's article-of-the-week, A Return To That Drop-Dead Year, 1960, beatifies the show's attention to period detail.

None of this is lost on me, as my (unpublished) novel Make Nice is also set in 1960. As Cris as I were watching last night's "Mad Men" episode, I muttered, "If my novel had been published this year, I would have looked like a fucking genius" for anticipating the interest in that watershed year. Oh well.

technorati: 1960, Mad Men, New York Times