A Few Things

Developing a Sense of Community in a Dystopia

First:  An Apologia

It has been five weeks since I've written anything in here, but I have a good excuse.  After some forty years of trying to write a novel in fits and starts and mostly abject failures, I have finally produced one.  It is 72,000 words long give or take a few hundred, as I am still polishing.  If you want to talk genres, it is a combination of magical realism, coming of age, and comedy of manners.    

Let me tell you about it.  A few years ago, I noticed that knitters always have these little slips of paper with grids of numbers and letters to help them keep track of where they are on their project.  They're called lace patterns, Katherine tells me.  I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if a gung-ho newspaper type--a sophomore because sophomores are always either gung-ho or comatose--came across a series of these mysterious notes.  He would probably concoct some kind of conspiracy, or some kind of visitors from outer space narrative around the little papers.  I had been brooding about that idea for a number of years and even had some failed first attempts at the story.  Finally, almost exactly one year ago, I hit upon the point of view and the voice I wanted to use in this narrative.  Against my better instincts, I decided on third person omniscient because I was uncomfortable with it and I figured it would force me to work harder and concentrate.  I don't want to sound too egomaniacal, but writing in first person comes too easily for me.  My concentration lapses, and I end up being way too breezy.  I also wanted to let dialogue dominate because I want to grow up to write like Richard Price.  That was another decision that forced me to concentrate.  I suck at dialogue, so to make it work I had to figure out how to make it work.  I'm pleased with the results.

It is called MONDAY NIGHT AT THE BLUE GUITAR.  It focuses on a sophomore boy reporter named Nate Merced and his journalism teacher, Charley Sanger.  Nate spends the book investigating a long time legend about runaways and blues music down at an old acoustic music purveyor based roughly on the Denver Folklore Center, one of my haunts when I was a college kid.  Meanwhile, Mr. Sanger watches Nate's progress fondly while also contending with parents who are complaining about his insistence on teaching CATCHER IN THE RYE, and his idiot principal, Dr. Trish.  Sound familiar?  They both undergo mild initiations.  Not earth shattering, but definitely noticeable.  I've noticed over the past 60 years that life lessons are rarely accompanied by lightning strokes.

Now comes the hard part.  I'm looking for an agent and working on a query letter that will hook some unwitting publisher into buying the thing.  I'll let you know what happens.  Whether it gets published or not, I loved the act of writing it.  It did an admirable job of keeping me off the streets.  In fact, I liked the experience so much that I am already 4000 words into my next book.


What's All This About Community?

We were in Arizona with Bud and Janet Simmons for Rockies' spring training.  We had just finished watching a game and stopped off at a new ultra-modern mall close by for pizza at Grimaldi's, an awesome pizza transplant from Brooklyn.  The pizza was great.  I was walking with Janet on our way back to the car when we noticed looming in front of us the biggest Apple store either one of us had ever seen.  It was all tinted glass like the windows on a stretch limo and four stories high.  Through the gray windows on each floor we could see the shadows of hundreds of shoppers queueing up to check out the newest IPads.  Janet and I both looked at each other with the same thing on our minds:  The scene reminded us both of disquieting moments in movie versions of dystopian novels like BRAVE NEW WORLD  or 1984 where the citizenry has been reduced to emotionless automatons mindlessly buying and selling their way through a long, dreary life.

This feeling was, of course, exacerbated by the fact that I was in Arizona with its tough immigration laws and sand blasted neighborhoods with golf carts in every driveway and gates in front of every community.

Important people are always extolling the virtue of patriotism, community, shared responsibility.  But the only time that feeling of community ever happens is when some lunatic or lunatics strike out with automatic weapons, groin guards, and tear gas.  Everybody in Aurora is focused on the theater shooting, just like everybody in Littleton was focused on Columbine.  This is the first day the newspapers have not been exclusively about the crime and the victims and the shooter, busily looking for reasons and explanations that will never adequately explain anything.  Tomorrow, there will be even less coverage and pretty soon we will all forget and that sense of community that comes with  communal sorrow will be history.

You see, I don't think there is any sense of community or country anymore.  We aren't about the good old USA, or our fellow citizens.  We're about Apple, Exxon-Mobile, Microsoft, GM, Dell, investment bankers, and dividends.  Where is patriotism when our first allegiance is to the bottom line?

I know what some of you might be saying.  "He doesn't understand business."  "What's good for GM is good for the country."

Bullshit.  I understand business perfectly.  That's the source of my malaise.  What's good for GM is good for GM.  It has nothing to do with country.