Patriotism Among The Ruins

A recent survey reported that Americans are 37th among industrialized countries in education and Number One in self-confidence.

Obviously it would be better if it were the other way around. Especially since everywhere you turn in the good ole USA you hear about "our institutions" being broken. All the politicians will tell you Washington is broken. They do not go on to explain what they will do (or even if they will do anything) to fix it, but vote for them anyway. Politics itself (themselves?) is/are broken. The Pentagon is broken. The V.A. is broken. Our cities are broken. Our infrastructure is broken. Our public transportation systems are broken. Likewise our public education system, to say nothing of our system of higher education. The book publishing world is broken. So is the art world. Likewise the music world. Hollywood is broken. Our journalism is broken. The NFL and Major League Baseball are broken. Our economy is broken. The free enterprise system is broken.  The oceans, the climate, yea, the environment itself is broken.

All this, as well as all the other broken things too numerous to continue mentioning, goes to support the survey's finding that we are 37th among industrialized countries in education. Educated people with good old American knowhow would not only know how to repair things; they would repair or rebuild them. And then they would make sure to maintain them.

But, given all this unabated breakage, why should we be Number One in self confidence?

Perhaps it is the new practice of rewarding our children for everything. Run a race, come in last and win a trophy anyway. Or could it be all those people who chant "USA, USA, USA!" and assure us this is the greatest country on earth though how would they know since most of them have never even owned a passport? Or maybe it's the citizens of Lake Woebegone where every child is above average.

Whatever the cause or causes-- and it's fun in a pseudo-sociological kind of way to speculate -- our national narcissism is a serious delusion. And patriotism among the ruins is surely not the cure.

Meet Actor, Novelist, Singer, Playwright, Former Producer, Broadcasting

Meet Actor, Novelist, Singer, Playwright, Former Producer, Broadcasting

Between Renaissances

Long Day's Journey Into Sunshine

My "new" novel is called David Sunshine and it was inspired by my early experiences in the television industry.  It includes incidents that are completely true, down to the dialogue, that were so funny I have been dining out on them for years. At the time I took David Sunshine directly to a publisher who signed me up and gave me what in those days was a princely advance. Then backed out of the deal (as they will). At this point, literary agents descended on me but none could get a nibble elsewhere (as they won't).

The book was a roman de clef and word came back that publishers were afraid of being sued. ("This is a dangerous book," one anonymous editor had penciled in a margin.)  Since all the stories in it were true, I thought we were pretty safe, but no one wanted to chance it. So I put the manuscript away, dusted it off a few months ago and thought that kid who had written it way back then (me) was pretty good. So, because of that and some recent popular interest in 1960s things like “Mad Men” I decided to have it published myself, though a piece of contemporary fiction had now aged into a piece of historical fiction.

As to why I decided it was worthwhile even though it is no longer the expose it once was (all those potential litigants are gone and none of their progeny have even hinted at litigation) is that it is serious literature with a light touch, not unlike Dickens or Mark Twain, and that it concerns itself with the on-going drama of the pursuit of the American Dream which has been with us in novels from The Great Gatsby to The Day of the Locust to All the King’s Men.

Specifically, television at that time seemed at a crossroads. To oversimplify, it could be a force for enlightenment or a craven money machine. David Sunshine is about a fraud and admitted con man who masqueraded as a Philosopher King. At the time, the character upon whom he  was based was a media darling, Thus the fear of being sued but, much more likely, I think, the fear of going against the common wisdom – by which I mean the trendy snobbery of the season. It was not the usual kind of sordid expose – it simply exposed him to ridicule. Kiss and tell without much of a kiss.

There is more to the book, of course; primarily about what it was like in those days to be a part of the television industry as the sun had set on its Golden Age and the dawn was beginning to come up over the Vast Wasteland. There was a human cost and many a well-intentioned kid would be ground into bite-sized pieces. However, for all that, the most memorable moments in the book are probably still the funniest ones.

Red Ribbons

If, about three quarters through the last century, had you bet me that there would come such things as 80-page faxes, four-and-a-half inch cell phones that would show wide-screen movies,140 character standard messages, that photography paper would become as rare as the canvas stretched for oil paintings, you would of course have won every time.

I would have lost every time.

I would have said something like there are not that many superficial self-important people in the world to make industries, let alone alter our very culture, with such nonsensical ideas.

It is, I think, no coincidence that, with the rise of these and other similar machines, we began to hear about a Lack of Civility.

But with the coming of the office e-mail, there had seemed to be one democratizing development. And that was that bosses no longer got to dictate letters to their secretaries; bosses had to type their own letters. Or so it seemed. Initially. Innocent me again.

The first shadow of what was really going to happen fell across my path in 1961 and was cast by J. Edgar Hoover. At the time I was working for what was then thought of as a rather second-class mass medium. (Fred Allen had said, "Television is being entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your living room.") I leave it to you to number its class today, but in those pre-PBS times there were only a few of us trying to create what was referred to as "quality" television. I was working on a program called OPEN END which, at its best, brought the viewing public interviews with the likes of Nikita Khrushchev and Harry Truman and Edward Kennedy. And I wanted more such luminaries. The Director of the FBI had  never given a television interview and I wrote to invite him to do so.

In those days no letter went unanswered. You could write the subscription manager of LIFE Magazine to order a toaster and you would receive a polite response from that worthy explaining that LIFE was not in that business and suggesting Sears or Montgomery Ward were more likely bets. So, of course, I got a response. Only it was not from Mr. Hoover. It was from a special agent explaining that Mr. Hoover was turning me down.

And that, gentle reader, is what has replaced the boss dictating a letter. Today, again and again, I find that when I write or email or in some way communicate with someone with whom I wish to do quite legitimate business and who has an assistant, it is that assistant, a person I have never met, who tells me that the person I need to talk to will not talk to me.

Remember when they used to ask, "Why settle for second best?"

I'm afraid our age of answering machines, unpaid interns and incivility -- in short, our communication age -- is why.

Clock-Watching

We are told we all have within us a "sidereal clock" and usually the people who tell us that say we should live by it. What they mean is that we should wake sometime near daybreak and go to bed sometime near nightfall. And that so doing is good for us. Really good for us. Countless studies. Past, present and future. Many on-going.

The most famous short poem supporting this argument is, of course,  by Dr. Benjamin Franklin:

Early to bed and early to rise

Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

The most famous use of the concept as a political slogan belongs to Ronald  Reagan, whose "It's Morning in America"  will no doubt keep stone-cutters busy for the rest of this century.

In fact, if you look up sidereal (yes, I looked it up) it really is a sort of time-keeping devise based on the stars. But, like your grandmother or a farmer you knew growing up or Doctor Somebody Else, guest on The Dr. Somebody Show, I too believe in the sidereal clock -- well, at least the clock part.

That is to say, I know there are morning people. However, I also know the early to rise business  can be carried too far. For instance, I know that getting up to do the TODAY show has caused ringing in the ears among NBC employees that lasted till they were reassigned.

But I also know that many people have slept late and become even wealthier than the wage slaves who follow Franklin's schedule -- stage stars, concert pianists and rock stars are examples.

I also recently discovered what, for lack of a better term, I can only call a sidereal calendar, those days of the year during which, seemingly inexplicably, you find yourself feeling very sad or very happy, and there is no reason for it till you realize that something very important happened on this date last year or five years ago or sometime in your past. It makes you know why people celebrate anniversaries, I think.

Three related matters: (1) I don't believe history records Benjamin Franklin as much of an early-riser himself and he seemed to do all right. And, (2) if getting up early is so good for you, why do I always feel better and more relaxed when I wake up after sleeping late? And (3) and finally, why do those morning people have to be so cheerful about everything -- and so damn loud? It cuts into my sleep.

AFRAID OF THE DARK: a brief introduction to Nancy Christie’s Short Stories

The short story ain’t what it used to be. Neither is being a writer. The pride that literary lights used to take in being writers is gone with the Internet, Reality TV, 140 character communication, the well-documented short attention span, the well-recognized dumbing down of our culture. A sort of Song of Roland is heard in the literary land. (And if that reference escapes you, Google it.)
I should say immediately that I am a serious admirer of Nancy Christie’s work. She is by no means a new writer. (Like so many wordsmiths most of her work over the years has been journeyman stuff; she has led the freelance writer/teacher life that so many literary folk are forced to live in these post-literary days.) But if she is not a new writer, her short stories are new writing. Exciting new writing.

The short story, like the poem, is a tough buck. And much as some of us may long for the cultures and days of living, breathing O. Henrys, Guy de Maupassants, Katherine Mansfields and Ernest Hemingways, this sort of literary endeavor, this art form, is pretty much the creature of obscure and non-descript periodicals whose names end in “Quarterly” or “Review” (The Past) or in very, very strange names (apparently from The Future). And therefore, all praise to Pixel Hall Press for publishing this amazing new collection, Traveling Left of Center & Other Stories.

For Nancy Christie’s stories are amazing. The world she shows us is a terrifying world of deluded, demented people. The sort of people who never get a second look or a second thought from you and me. But whose lives are nightmares. These nondescript, unbearably fragile people are, she makes us discover, everywhere, either fearing danger where none exists or failing to see the shadow of the doom that falls across their paths. Often their most ardent wish is a death wish. And what is more terrifying, often when they get their wish, they welcome it.

The world of Nancy Christie’s short stories is a world of both the sudden gratuitous cruelty as well as the prolonged torture that human beings inflict upon each other and upon themselves.

It is a world peopled primarily by desperate, helpless women, sinking into their own deadly quicksand (though there is an occasional feckless man in there somewhere). These short stories are the chronicles of these people’s inevitable individual defeats.

And if all of this sounds dreadful, why praise the writer? Because her world has been so well hidden from us that when she reveals it, we catch our breath as the first readers of Poe or Kafka or the darker passages of Mark Twain’s later works surely must have gasped.

Her world is so real! And just when you think — by which I mean desperately try to escape it through disbelief — “This can’t be!” — a sudden, strange and surprising detail pops up in a strange and surprising place and you are pulled back into facing the truth.

There are writers who are wonderful because they make you say to yourself, “Yes, that’s how it is!” Then there is Nancy Christie, whose writing makes you say, “So — that’s how it is…” You say it with the wonder and dismay of a reader discovering proof of what life is for the secret few — and, you realize with new-found terror, what life can be for all of us.

That is why Nancy Christie is a wonderful writer.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Traveling Left of Center & Other Stories will be published in August of this year.

Please, sir, may I have some more?

On my very first interview for my new novel, David Sunshine, my goodly hostess asked me, "What is the most difficult question you, as a writer, are asked?"

That is an easy question to answer. The most difficult question is: Will you give me a copy of your book and inscribe it to me?

The reason the question is difficult is that you want to say yes, but you must discipline yourself to say no. Buy it. Then I'll inscribe it.

This insight came to me as I finished inscribing a copy of David Sunshine to my dentist. Good fellow. Well read. Proud to have a novelist as a patient. I handed him the book and both of us, all smiles, went out to the reception room where the friendly lady behind the desk removed $400 from my plastic vault.

It was then and there I realized that next time my friend the dentist asked for a free book, I was bound to reply, "Sure, if you don't charge me for this appointment."

It would be a fair trade, after all. He spent years in dental school and subsequent practice which allowed him to unblushingly charge a fast four hundred for a filling. I spent a very long time in school and longer writing and getting my novel published. He has expenses of course, but then so do I. Having expenses is really nothing more than a vital sign.

George Bernard Shaw, in his incarnation as a music critic, pointed out that the Arts are like no other profession. An audience, pleased with a performer, thinks nothing of shouting "Encore!" And expecting more. If they were pleased by their butcher's most recent sirloin would they expect a free pot roast next time they visited his shop?

I once sat at table with a well-known and popular visual artist who did quick sketches of everyone there to our delight and never did any of us even think of paying him (though we have all saved and still treasure our little napkin art as we would a small jewel.

Some years ago, in my incarnation as a producer, a colleague and I did all the pre-production work on a Broadway show, built around a particularly beloved entertainer who backed out at the last minute. My right hand man and I huddled together over a cognac bottle and asked ourselves if there is any other business, this side of swindling, where so much money is laid out, so much work done, so much time spent to no avail? If we had chosen to open a bakery, say, we would have gone out on a limb all right, but surely neither of us would have strayed quite so far out.

(Certainly, there is legal recourse to be had in certain cases -- very few-- but every work of creative and/or performing art requires a commitment so heavy and work so long and hard that only the disappointment when it goes wrong can have the same weight and heft.)

A musical arranger friend of mine (a Grammy-winner) has exactly the same problem when he is asked to give and sign his latest CD. He thinks people just think that players play. After all, what fun it is to dance. And sing. And tell stories. And draw. And sculpt. And paint. And recite. And to pretend to be someone else.

Some years ago the actor Laurence Luckinbill scandalized the Sunday Times Arts Section readership by suggesting that the American Theatre is subsidized, all right. By actors. His audacity in suggesting that artists were entitled to houses and cars and children was more than the New York brunch bunch could bear. And the outrage they expressed in their letters to the editor was white hot.

And here's where liberals get mighty Tea Partyish. People in the arts have to paddle their own canoes, damn them. Hell, Robert Redford gets 21 million a picture. Peter Max and Stephen King are rich, aren't they? If you want to gamble, you had better be prepared to lose. After all, many are called, but few are chosen.

Do these erstwhile liberals have a point?

 How many rich poets do you know?