First Spine-Chill of the New Year

I’m generally out of the loop regarding home (US) politics, but this piece over at Town Hall gives me a real shiver. The one about John Kerry supposedly positioning himself to run in 2008.



Well. My hope is that this is just idle and incompetent speculation. *Rant begins here.*



I actually like Kerry all right, just as I liked in a much bigger way Gore before him. They’re smart guys who, in positions of power, tend to weigh facts in order to formulate solutions, rather than force facts to fit their prearranged solutions. I remember those Gore/Bush Jr debates as an exercise in futility, one man going through detailed and highly erudite arguments, while the other grinned and said something along the lines of “Gotta get some real leadership in here, gotta not be lib’ral.”



That stated, the Gore/Bush Jr campaign made one thing painfully clear: the public doesn’t give a rat’s ass about well thought-out political arguments. It’s not the economy, stupid, it’s about which person makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside. Someone who speaks with the clarity of a Harvard lecturer makes no one feel warm & fuzzy, though an cocaine-addled funboy who’s found God and likes his ranch does.



So with 4 years to dwell on this lesson, the Democrats pulled in John Kerry, a Massachusetts nor’easter, who calmly tried to explain to Americans the complexities of the contemporary political world. And again, no one felt warm & fuzzy. Complexities are interpreted as contradictions and “backsliding”, not as complexities.



I have friends who shout a lot about elections being stolen. Arguably, the Gore one was, but despite their protests I can’t believe the same about Kerry’s. Fact is, coming off the arguable prosperity of the Clinton years, Gore should’ve been a massive shoe-in. His failure is really the failure of the Democratic campaign. And then, with so many blatant missteps and so much transparent back-scratching during Bush’s first term, Kerry should’ve swept up the votes.



But he didn’t. And no matter how out of the loop I was, I knew from the beginning of the campaign that Kerry would not sweep the election. And if I knew this, then…



The lesson for the Democrats? No more candidates who speak like public intellectuals. Please. They can think like intellectuals—no argument there—but please, find someone who’s worked with his hands, who doesn’t hang with Kennedys, who has a regional accent that doesn’t derive from New England—the rest of America (that is, the big blank part on the map between New York and Los Angeles that votes in your presidents) despises people who talk that way.



Please.

(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)

Boldog Uj Evet!

I assume, given the date, we all know what this means, right? In Hungarian, of course.



I hope everyone’s woken with stable heads and positive omens for 2006. I woke with a surprisingly clear head, sharpened more by some reading from Bret Easton Ellis’s stellar Lunar Park, remembering moments from the previous night, which culminated in a lovely, vaguely intoxicated walk with my girlfriend, her sister and brother-in-law, along the snowy Danube River, looking up through light fog at the orange-tinted lights of the Castle District in Buda.



It didn’t matter that the fireworks display in Vorosmarty Square was shockingly lame for such a grandiose city (turned out we were in the wrong place to see the “real” display elsewhere), or that the party we briefly visited made me quickly self-conscious: an all-Serb affair, I stepped into the crowded kitchen where 6-foot-tall men were singing raucous Serb songs until I said, “Excuse me.” At that point silence descended and I was the focal point of the staring (at least that’s how it seemed to me). I smiled, nodded, and then slowly and demurely backed up.



But none of this mattered; we were out and about, drinks were flowing, and I remembered again just how deeply gorgeous these old Habsburg lanes are, the Castle District and the wide, historic river—particularly when draped in snow.



And this is where I live my life. At that moment this was all that mattered. Sometimes life is right-on.

(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)

The Growing Needs of Our Customers

A disturbing news item from USA Today via Yahoo News:



As Americans grow heftier, automakers are making seats wider, adding more space to interiors and using bigger virtual mannequins to help design vehicles. Domestic automakers say they already had seats for increasingly rotund motorists. Now foreign brands are catching up.



Perhaps, instead, we should be pumping out cars that run on pedal or foot-power, like the fine model pictured here.

(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)

"Boldog Karacsonyt!"

…as they say here in Hungary.



And for an immediate post-Xmas (no, there’s no war on Christmas here, I just ignore half of it, which I replace with an X) bit of literary chatter, return to David Terrenoire’s house for an interesting subject: Gender, Market, and getting into the other sex’s head. It deserves some talk.

(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)

apologia

Back in the day, I worked as an intern for Mercury House, a brilliant independent publishing house in San Francisco. It was a great experience, if only (and it was great for many other reasons to boot) because I got to see a cross-section of what people were putting on paper and sending in unsolicited. The vast unpublished “peer group”. Sometimes very encouraging, sometimes not.



Anyway, I was bouncing around their site today, and found that the lovely and wise Kirsten Janene-Nelson—once my direct “boss” as assistant editor, and now Directorial Consultant—has started an art project called apologia.

Soliciting Submissions of anonymous letters of apology to be displayed in an art installation in San Francisco…For those things you wanted to say but didn’t—send ANONYMOUS letters of apology, typed or handwritten.


Postsecret



How Fast?

calendarOver at the home of Tribe, a little talk arose because of George Simenon’s Three Bedrooms, which I haven’t read, but Tribe seems to be enjoying a lot. Sadly, I’ve only read one Simenon, one of the Maigret books, the name of which escapes me now, but I remember enjoying it quite a lot. But being a writer, the thing that most fascinates me about Simenon is his work habits, which I occasionally cite in backblogs, as I did at Tribe’s.



Simenon worked like a maniac, but a very gentlemanly maniac. First his doctor gave him a once-over, then he shut himself in his office and worked continually for 12 days, a chapter a day (his books were nearly always 12 chapters), took a day off, then edited for 3 days. He did not outline beforehand (other than occasional notes on the back of an envelope) and claims that he didn’t even think about a novel except during the hours of composition. (For more on him, see the Paris Review interview, from which I’ve taken the picture of his calendar—clicking should give you a bigger picture.)



Now, as someone who labors a year or more on a book, this just stuns me. Partly inspired by his example, I tried a “quick” novel with pretty good results—my agent likes it, and it’s now being looked at by the People in Power. Even so, it took a good 3 months to work through and edit, with a pause somewhere in between so I could view it coolly. Like Simenon’s, it was short, only 35,000 words.



Why should I obsess over this? Simple: practicality. I, like many, am a mid-list writer. My books are published, my advances moderate, and unless something explodes along the way, my finances will remain as they have been—fair to middlin, and sometimes quite poor. So what’s the answer? I don’t want a day job—writing full-time is job enough. So perhaps the answer is to produce more, thus earning more advances, thus maybe earning enough to buy, say, a car.



Al Guthrie brought up another stellar example of the fleshy writing machine, Harry Whittington. Troll the back lots of Hollywood and you’ll find numerous screenwriting versions of the same thing. And NaNoWriMo is of course a public example of the possibilities of speedy composition.



But on the other hand, it’s kind of a scary option to become like this, to produce produce! Because one wonders if one can maintain any sort of quality, develop ideas of any depth, or write that Great [insert country] Novel. Does speed lead to formula without content? Or do the paychecks—if they sell regularly—make one not give a damn either way? And how long does it take you to write a novel—one you’re proud of?

(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)

Good Enough?

Ms Weinman and the Literary Saloon are revisiting that perennial subject in crime fiction—How come we get no respect from the lit establishment? And more specifically, How come crime novels are never considered for the Man Booker?



It’s a subject that’s both divisive and immensely tiresome. The Saloon has a nicely functional explanation for the Booker question: It’s because of the way prizes are set up—each publisher can only submit 2 books, and there’s no way they’re going to send in, say, an Ian Rankin thriller when he doesn’t need the sales boost; they’ll send in a lit novel that needs more attention/sales.



At my old blog I made some forays into this general subject, with mixed results. My impression, though, is that the Booker committee, as well as judges for most literary prizes, view art not utterly differently from myself. That is, there’s good art, and bad art, and art that confuses, but in the end can be judged in some way.



Of course, there’s subjectivity in this. So much so that people like to say the quality of art can’t be judged at all. But I don’t think that’s true. I think there’s a real divide between entertainment, which is wonderful on its own terms, and truly fine art, which has entertainment as its first principal, but then achieves so much more.



In crime fiction it gets muddy. Because you have entertainment mixed with social commentary. And that’s good. Those are two things that look a lot like literature. But there are more things—language, for instance. The actual writing in the book. Words, sentences, paragraphs, the music of language and the toughness of it. That is, the poetry of it.



And there’s character. Not the easy characters built of catchphrases and visual tics. Characters with so much depth that they leap off the page and introduce themselves to you. And not just the main character, but, like with Flaubert, all of them.



I just don’t feel like most crime fiction achieves all of this, and that’s why it’s not even considered. Not because its writers don’t have the ability, but because of many other things. Time, for instance. The book-a-year treadmill is tough to maintain, and a lot of writers—I’m one of these—could do with a 6-month break after the “final draft” to go through and make another final draft. But I can’t. I need the paychecks. I need to eat, and I eat a lot.



If I look at my published books honestly—the three that are out—I know they don’t measure up to a Booker or any other substantial literary prize out there. They’re good, and I’m very proud of them, but another year of editing would have helped them all.



In the end, though, I don’t see any reason to fret about the lit prizes. Let them go to people whose books don’t have a built-in market, who spend 4 years laboring in the dark, who could use the extra food.



The only reason to dwell on the situation, in my opinion, is to look again at what we’re writing, and ask what it deserves. If it doesn’t deserve a Booker, maybe it’s time to hunker down and work on it until it is that good. We’ll know we’ve done our jobs well when the winners of the Edgar or the Daggers are just as powerful and transformative as the winners of the Booker—the really good ones, at least.

(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)

Go See It (Syriana)

Syriana, that is. I finally saw it last night.Stephen Gaghan, who already earned his spurs by writing Traffic, is this time also in the director’s chair, taking to heart the lessons learned from his experiences with Soderbergh. The film is tight—a little too tight for my tastes, as I wanted to see a little more of the characters—but extremely intelligent. There will be many naysayers, and according to Gaghan in an interview with Charlie Rose, during some of the DC screenings, some more conservative audience members got up and walked out.It’s no surprise. Syriana doesn’t pull punches.There’s a scene of note, wherein Clooney’s Bob Barnes is in a car in Beirut, the car is stopped by armed men, and Barnes is taken out, a hood thrown over his head, and he’s taken to speak with the spiritual head of Hamas. The scene has a great quality to it, and in the interview I learned why—the exact same thing happened to Gaghan when he went to Beirut for research. In the airport, just arriving, he got an anonymous call from a “friend of a friend” of Robert Baer, who said he should get into a car waiting outside. Some mix of stupidity and artistic curiosity convinced him to accept the stranger’s invitation, and what followed was pretty much what he wrote for Clooney’s character—he too ended up in a room with the spiritual leader of Hamas.As expected, given the roster of actors, the performances are, really without exception, superb. In particular, there’s the storyline of the young Pakistani who slowly becomes a suicide bomber. This could easily have been the Achilles heel of the movie, but astute writing and impeccable acting give it great power.Just see it. I’m obviously a little gaga about it right now, and I’ll need to watch it a couple more times before I can speak with much sense about it. All I know is, Syriana’s my favorite film of the year. No question about it.

(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)