Kaze: DROID!

Were it not for the unexpected appearance of a stink bug on my keyboard a few weekends ago, I’d have written a piece for you on the meaning and rewards of solitude. I was at the cabin; that’s where I go for it. Have been for 15 years. But the stink bug invasion—and that’s what he was, the harbinger of an invasion—broke solitude’s delicate spell and saved us all (whew!) from that particular exercise.

A few days later, back home, my new Droid X arrived. So much for solitude’s delicate spell.

I used to have a simple cell phone. I’d drive up to the cabin for the weekend, where there’s no internet access, and once in awhile that phone would ring. But mostly it was just me and the woods—along with the woodland creatures, and an occasional local teen roaring past on a dirt bike, and my thoughts.

But when they sold me the Droid X,  the latest thing in smart phones, they sold me access to the internet no matter where I am. So that now, even at the cabin, I’m connected.

You remember 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Remember how quiet it was in deep space, as the crew of the spaceship sailed out toward "Jupiter, and beyond the infinite"? The only thing sound was the velvet-voiced HAL 9000, the computer who ran the ship. It’s kind of like that at the cabin now, though the Droid X is anything but velvet-voiced. It announces itself with a jarring, reverberating, “DROID!”  And when it does, you jump.

I remember in 1968, when 2001 came out, I was so taken with it that I pressured my father into a rare trip to the movies. “So, Dad,” I asked him afterward, “what do you think it means?” And he surprised me. He said: “The meaning of this story is that no matter where you go, you take yourself along.”

That’s what I was going to write about when the stink bug showed up. Drive out to the cabin by yourself, with a weekend’s provisions and some books and your laptop, and though you may have left the world behind, you’ve taken yourself along. And that self of yours has been absolutely dying for the opportunity to spend a little time with you. Just you and yourself, BFFs.

But now as I sit on the deck at the cabin, or inside on the couch or at the computer—there’s this Droid X. The experience is very different now. I don't just take myself along; I take everybody.

In the silence the Droid X erupts—“DROID!”—and I know that a text message has arrived, or an e-mail, or that one of my facebook friends has messaged me or posted something on my wall.

No one’s making me answer, but the odd thing is: I want to. I want to hear from Deborah Rey and Piglet. I want to hear from Carroll in Chicago and Desmond in Malaysia and Fiona in the UK and Francesca in Italy and Wheels in Rhode Island and Mike in Hagerstown. I want Cathy in Connecticut to post a photo and Kelly in California to tell me how her writing’s going. I want to hear from my family and all my other friends and I don’t want to wait till Monday.

Who knew how fast I’d succumb? Is solitude not as precious as I made it out to be? Was it a pose? I used to run away for silence. Now they’ve run Broadway right through the center of my silence, with all manner of seductive and entertaining people dancing down the avenue, and I’m there. I’m so, as they say, there.

It’s downright Pavlovian when the Droid X calls out to me. I’ll drop everything—remember, I'm the guy who'll talk to a stink bug if one lands on my keyboard—and, without a thought, cast aside all that stuff about the value of communing with my consciousness, etc., etc. I'm beginning to think it might be best to just turn the damned thing off.

But then I also remember what happened when they tried to turn HAL off. And I also see certain unsettling similarities in the appearances of HAL and the Droid X.  They could be related.  I’m staring at my Droid X right now . . . and I swear it’s staring back.

Ras: Ripping Yarns - The Story of Facebook

Aaron Sorkin's Zuckerberg as played by Jesse Eisenberg

“Accuracy is now a secondary issue." David Denby on The Social Network

In the 2009 film Young Victoria, basically a romance between Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert, Albert demonstrates his unconditional love for his wife by jumping in front of her to block an assassin’s bullet during a parade. Only one problem: a quick look at Wikipedia after the movie reveals that this never happened. There was an assassination attempt on the young queen by a deranged man, but Albert never took a bullet for her. My wife was shocked and appalled by this bit of screenwriter’s license. She wanted to think that Albert loved Victoria so very much and, more to the point, that the film was in some sense true.

Hollywood's young Queen Victoria and Prince albert

That’s the essence of the problem with any biopic such as The Social Network, the current box-office hit about Mark Zuckerberg and the origins of Facebook. The TV Tropes Web site nicely defines “ biopic”:

It takes a real person's life and tries to create drama from the things that the person experienced, to a varying degree of success…. This genre's been around for decades, and it's changed and adapted with time. While some films might heavily whitewash their subjects and their times if the intent is to show them in a positive light, it's now more common to explore the many facets, good and bad, of a protagonist's personality

Kaze: Ted the Cat on Juliet

Juliet, aka Ratface

Ted’s blogs posts have earned him some modest celebrity lately and I have to say that, to his credit, it’s hardly affected his day-today demeanor. He is not stand-offish in the least and actually seems to enjoy being photographed. Still, I've wondered if he might not be hogging the limelight. “Ted,” I said the other day, “we do have two cats. It wouldn’t kill you to mention Juliet sometime.” Ted looked at me as if to say, “You’re the one who calls her Ratface.” Later, however, I found the following on the monitor.

i can’t get over this juliet
she’s a skulker she’s got the personality of a sofa cushion
actually not so
sofa cushions are more interactive
sofa cushions are soft and plush and if you nuzzle into them
and shed on them and get them so they smell just right
the bigs won’t even use them anymore
and then they’re your sofa cushions
sweet
but you can’t teach juliet anything
she’s prickly and she frets
you’d think cats were menu items here at the bigs
kick back dog this is a plush set-up we’ve got here
learn some people skills
but no not this juliet she’s way too smart for that
nine years at the bigs motel and still thinks
they’re from animal control
nine years and she hasn’t sat on the couch
nine years and she hasn’t watched a show on cable
she missed the wire and now she’s missing mad men
nine years and she hasn’t snuck into the kitchen and
licked off a dinner plate
not that I’m eager to share but c’mon
listen ratface
at night i sleep in the bed next to ms big and you sleep
under the bed
huddled and fearful waiting on
all manner of unnamed disasters
what could be worse than fear?
personally i don’t know the meaning of the word
i’d have to look it up on dictionary.com
listen i’d be willing to write about you but
you gotta give me something to work with you know?
help me out dog

Ras: Notes on Our Rookie Year

The plunge

“Montaigne did not have a firm plan when he set about writing his essays. His book and aims changed and grew as he changed and grew in wisdom.” M.A. Screech

Tomorrow is the anniversary of our 317am blog. Little did Kaze and I realize a year ago when we talked each other into launching a blog over pulled pork in Capital Q BBQ what we had committed to. We jumped into blogging on creative writing without much more thought than a couple of boys daring each other to plunge off a quarry cliff into a swimming hole. Two hundred seventy-three posts and nearly 24,000 page views later we’ve learned a lot.

Birthplace of 317am

First, we’d like to thank you, our readers, all of you, the faithful souls who stop by every day or two and our occasional visitors. We cherish you all. I’ll name no names here because to recognize individuals is inevitably to overlook some important people. Plus we like to think that the reward for reading 317am is the extra firing of a few synapses, a pleasurable event in itself. It’s a simple fact of life that writers need readers. In an age of mass authorship on Facebook and Twitter and whatever the latest buzz happens to be, we’re delighted to have any readers at all.

Ras’s Web Gems: Letters of Note

John Irving

As you may have noticed, we got a little carried away with Banned Books Week here at 317am, so much so that I vowed no more posting on banned books till next year. But then a Facebook friend passed along a letter the novelist John Irving had written to a librarian at New Hampshire high school. Pam Harland, the librarian, had managed to keep his novel The Hotel New Hampshire available in the face of a parent’s protest. Irving wrote Harland this letter about the audience for his work:

I know that you already know this, because you read my novels, but in my stories there is often a young person at risk, or taken advantage of; many of my stories are about how innocence fares in the adult world. I take the side of young people, but I am also a realist; it is especially offensive to me when an uptight adult suggests that my stories are "inappropriate" for young readers. I imagine, when I write, that I am writing for young readers—not for uptight adults.

The Irving letter appears on a truly cool Web site called Letters of Note, a clever conjunction of the art of found objects and the Wikileaks school of journalism. Letters of Note is run by a British freelance writer named Shaun Usher who likes to call himself a “curator of correspondence.” People send him actual letters, faxes, and memos of all sorts - some contemporary, many historical - and Usher chooses one to post each day.

Harold Pinter

It’s hard to choose among the fascinating trove of content available here, but another friend pointed out a favorite: Harold Pinter’s response to a class of students asking him about the symbolism in his play The Caretaker. Is Pinter’s sarcasm unkind or merited? You decide.

That’s the glory of this site. If only I had but world enough and time, I could spend days scrolling the treasures here.

Kaze: A Love Goddess or a Grande Cappuccino?

I’ve been hunting around the web the past few days for arresting images with which to brighten up 317am. Ras and I are working on a redesign of the site, and later this fall we ought to have something new and interesting for you to look at every day. So of course I thought of Lana Turner.


Put old movie fans together long enough and one of them will always pose the question of who was the most beautiful actress—ever—in Hollywood. Grace Kelly? Elizabeth Taylor? Marilyn Monroe? It’s a tantalizing discussion for men in particular, because there’s that subtext of, well, you know.

Yet when it comes to these women—women of Hollywood’s glory days—encountered by the run of everyday men only in make-believe, and mostly in glowing black-and-white, and up on a movie screen in a movie theater, and in grander dimensions than any mortal woman, and viewed from below, from the darkness, as if looking up at the stars—they were, after all, called “stars”—there had to be more going on than just sex.

And there was, at least when I think about Lana Turner and Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth—my three choices for the most dream-inducing women who ever lived. When I fell for them, I was under the age of ten. I loved them with a chaste fervor, with a heart unsullied by puberty.  The hormones eventually arrived but the spell never lifted; I grew up a hopeless—no, make that a practically demented—romantic.

Which brings me to Artie Shaw. Shaw got what I didn’t even know at the time I was after. The greatest big-band jazz clarinetist in the world—when being a big-band jazz clarinetist could make you rich and famous—Shaw had eight wives, and among them were Lana Turner and Ava Gardner. He also knew in that special way—but happened not to marry—Rita Hayworth. All this must have been something to write home about. The story goes that when Shaw reached old age, he was asked, in the end, to reflect on the experience. What is it like—tell us, please, what can it be like—to wake up next to a love goddess?

His answer went something like this: You wake up in the morning and what you want is a cup of coffee. But is she going to get up and fix the coffee? No, sir. You’ve got to get up and do it yourself. That’s because she’s a love goddess.

I call that the voice of experience. A kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is still a sigh, but sometimes all you really want is Starbucks.

 
From top to bottom:  Lana Turner; Rita Hayworth; Ava Gardner on the town with Artie Shaw; and the old guy, looking somewhat dour, some 30 years later.

Ras: Bicycle Thieves and the Miracle of Authenticity



Son and father searching for a bicycle

 “The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.” Walter Benjamin



Steelworker turned actor, Lamberto Maggiorani

 When he was casting his 1948 masterpiece Bicycle Thieves, the Italian director Vittorio De Sica had a lot of trouble finding a suitable child actor for the key part of a young boy. One day De Sica noticed a hesitant, anxious-looking working man standing in the line of parents and children waiting to audition. He’d brought his son to try out. The man’s name was Lamberto Maggiorani. The workman’s kid didn’t get a part, but the workman did. De Sica knew that he’d found the right actor for his film's protagonist Antonio Ricci – the family bread-winner whose bicycle gets stolen. The bicycle, by the way, is crucial to this seemingly simple story because Antonio must have it to get a much-sought-after job as a poster paster on the walls of Rome. No bike means no job and no food for his family.

But even though De Sica auditioned hundreds of children, he still could not find the right boy for the part of Bruno, the son in the movie family. So he started shooting the scenes that did not require the child, and one day on location he noticed among the bystanders the perfect kid, the little boy who was to become the film’s immortal Bruno.

Kaze: Ted Gets an Alarming Surprise

We took Ted to the vet last week. Nothing unusual, it's just that we have to monitor his thyroid medication because if we don’t, he gets skinny and his hair falls out. Right now, he looks just great. But I guess there’s no such thing as a routine medical visit when you hit Ted’s time of life, and reading the computer monitor the next morning I realized this visit had him a little rattled.


so off we go to the vet, me and mr and ms big
and it’s not that bad i’m used to it at my age
it’s what passes for kicks you get to ride in the car
and fake trying to escape or at least make gagging
noises so they’ll think you’re getting carsick and panic
this vet she’s a pretty thing who strokes me
like i was a real pussycat
which is fine but she’s also palpating my thyroid
i’ve learned there’s no dignity in medical matters
yet who can complain at my age which is ahem
almost 16 which in human years is 80
or so says mr big who’s no spring chicken himself
anyway i’m feeling pretty perky and the vet
declares i’m doing great for my age
and then she announces that my teeth look just fine
which is nice to hear
whereupon she says what’s left of them
and i’m thinking whoa what’s that mean
and mr big’s wondering the same so the vet tells him
ted’s got about half his teeth
well knock me down
where did his teeth go asks mr big
don’t be alarmed says the vet he probably swallowed them
cats lose their teeth when they get old says the vet she's
seen cats who’ve got no teeth left at all but they do fine
meanwhile i am experiencing strange abdominal sensations
and wondering how i missed the experience of
swallowing and then passing my own teeth
and no sooner does the thought take shape than i realize
that soon they’ll be filling my bowl with jell-o for cats
i was quiet on the way home

If you're on Facebook, so's Ted.  Look him up at Ted the Cat.

Ras: Six Subversive Novels

A failure to communicate?

As Banned Books Week comes to a close, I wonder which books the censors would proscribe if they did their homework intelligently. Here’s what I mean.

Generally speaking, governments everywhere – it doesn’t matter whether they're left- or right-wing, socialist or capitalist, democratic or dictatorial – like to encourage certain attitudes among the populace: obedience to the authorities, stable marriages and families, plenty of hard work, a belief in hierarchy and the present order, and a reverence toward the conventional pieties. Governments prefer to see the world as hunky dory.

Writers, however, are the sort who just cannot help probing the complexity beneath the platitudes. Problems are drama, and drama is a writer’s life’s blood. “What we got here,” as the prison captain tells Cool Hand Luke, “is failure to communicate.” In that failure, art is born.

So which books are the most ban-worthy – that is, which are the most truly, deeply, madly subversive? Naturally, everyone will have her own list. Here are my top six:

Crime and Punishment (1866) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Nobody was better than Dostoyevsky at exploring what Poe called the “Imp of the Perverse” – the irresistible states of mind that psychology would call aberrant but which are all too human. The protagonist Raskolnikov, a former student, concocts a plan to murder a repulsive pawnbroker. Why? In large part because he thinks of himself as a superior being who can get away with it. We as readers never sympathize with his point of view, but we understand why he does it. In the course of a long, complicated plot Raskolnikov finds redemption, but what stays with the reader is the logic of his craziness and the way reason carries within it the seeds of destruction.

Ras's Web Gems: Every Day Fiction



The rich neuronal connections of a poetry reader

For a long time I’ve had the notion that reading a poem a day is good for the brain cells and the psyche. It’s not difficult to find short poems to satisfy this urge in five minutes a day. But thanks to a friend who just got a story published I’ve just learned there’s a way to apply this daily devotional exercise to short fiction.

Every Day Fiction is an online magazine that publishes a story each day in the genre called “flash fiction” – 1,000 words or less. There’s wonderful stuff here spread across nine genres – everything from the literary to the surreal and all suitable for that spare couple of minutes at lunch time. Try Howard Cincotta’s “Negative Space” or Lyn Brown’s “A Paleolithic Day” for starters.

Much has been written about the drying up of short story markets and the tough times for literary magazines. Maybe Every Day Fiction is one Internet answer to the eternal human need to tell stories. Money isn’t the game here. Begun in 2007 and run by a group of Canadian and American editors and aspiring writers, the magazine pays contributors $3.00 for each story, and its slush pile accepts submissions from anyone.