Xark!

On writing, and other forms of bullshit

Once upon a time, maybe as recently as 2006, I loved writing. I'd always hoped to earn my living by putting words together, and to be a professional writer and editor, in a community of professional writers and editors, thrilled me. Sometimes it thrilled me several times a week.

For instance, in 2000 I helped launch an anonymous newspaper column called Good Morning Lowcountry, which ran half a page, seven days a week, in The (Charleston) Post and Courier. GMLc was the work of no single writer in its early years, so several of us shared the duties, churning through local topics and mild obsessions and odd bits of Lowcountry trivia like a pack of raccoons rooting through trailer park garbage cans. Every now and then we'd even pause between deadlines to talk about the experience and its process, prompting me once to write a GMLc with the self-absorbed subhead "This Writing Life," in which I attempted to share the good-humored, arty, third-person-objective camaraderie of it all.

Now, of course, I just wish everyone would shut up and get on with it.

There is no more thoroughly boring topic than writing, and if you doubt this, listen to a public radio interviewer ask a Famous Author to talk about his or her process, or even worse, his or her deeper thoughts on language or storytelling..

Review of Gibson's 'Zero History'

...as submitted today to The (Charleston) Post and Courier, which re-numerates me for reviews by giving me books...

ZERO HISTORY by William Gibson. G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York. 404 pages. $26.95

It's stunning to think about all that's changed in our world during the eight years since science fiction novelist William Gibson stepped out of the future and into the present with “Pattern Recognition,” a spooky travelogue of the emerging post-geographic landscape of a wired planet.

That “Pattern Recognition” is today described as the first of Gibson's Blue Ant novels, and that Gibson has just delivered us “Zero History,” his third book in that series, is ample reason to reflect. If ever there was an unintentional mirror of the failed promise of our age, of the dissolution of networked culture's sublime mysteries into the sodden mess of flatline digital static that drones in the background of our lives today, it is this series.

Books I own (that I've actually read)

On vacation last week I went looking for a book and never found it. As I rummaged through the various eddies where books tend to collect in this house, I started wondering what percentage of the books in his building I've actually read -- either cover-to-cover, or in the case of some reference books, at least substantially engaged.

This doesn't include most of our coffee table or picture books, nor does it include the multiple "For Dummies" books we've collected over the years.  It includes some collections (The Portable Curmudgeon, for example) but not others (Idiots in Charge or Things A Man Should Never Do Past 30). And this list reveals that I've lost track of an alarming number of quality, first-edition books over the years.

If I'm right in assuming that I've read about 15 to 20 percent of the books that we own then... well, it's pretty clear why we're running out of house...

The Never Ending Trail

On the recommendation of friend and fellow distance runner, Cara Finnegan, I recently read Pam Reed’s The Extra Mile.  Finnegan and I have individually played around with the idea of trying a few ultamarathon events at some point in the future and Reed’s book, subtitled One Woman’s Personal Journey to Ultrarunning Greatness, seemed to be a great place to start thinking a bit more seriously about it. 

Ultramarathons are loosely defined as any race going beyond the normal 26.2 (and change) miles required by a marathon.  When distance is the defining characteristic, normal ultramarathons are 50 and 100 miles (although there are odd numbers and some are much longer).  When time is the defining characteristic, ultramarathons are normally set at 24 or 48 hours with the “winner” being the person who covers the most distance during that time period. 

There are a number of aspects of an ultramarathon which make it interesting, especially as you get a bit older.  For one, my times in half-marathons and marathons are going down rather than up.  I see no feasible personal records in my future.  As a result, an ultra would give me a different way of judging myself.  Given that there are so many of them of so many different lengths and on so many different terrains, I imagine I would never have a personal standard against which to judge. 

Secondly, there’s just something romantic about the idea of such long distances.  I find myself particularly attracted by the idea of the “timed” race, even if it means going around and around on a track.  I can imagine the brain working in extraordinarily odd ways in such a race, and I can imagine a very strong sense of community between those who finish such a run. 

It was with a mind like this that I approached Reed’s book, then. While I expected that her words would only add to the romanticism with which I was approaching ultras, there are ways in which Reed’s book—and subsequent reading--work against such romanticism. 

The Seduction of Identity

I came relatively late to Jim Webb’s Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America.  Indeed, I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that I knew very little of Webb at all until I watched him from time to time during the 2006 Senatorial campaign in Virginia.  From the first time I saw him speak, however, I was hooked.  There was something about the gritty, plain spoken demeanor that was comfortably familiar to me. 

After hearing me talk about Webb ceaselessly after his election, and after watching me do endless imitations of him, Bonnie threw her hands up and bought me a copy of Born Fighting, hoping, I think, to either get me over my fascination or to not have to listen to me during the times when I was reading.  It didn’t work.  Each night I read the book and would shout out lines in an almost giddy fashion.  For one born and raised in the South, especially close to the highlands in North Carolina, this book did so much to affirm me—perhaps to a fault—that I’ve only gotten louder.

The Look of Betrayal

Sometimes you really only grasp the meaning of a situation—in a human, emotional sense—when you hear a story in person, when you watch the body and face of the subject of the story, when you feel its impact on the body rather than in the abstract.

Thus was the case for me last week when I attended a talk to Valerie Plame Wilson, author of Fair Game:  My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House.  There’s little need here to introduce the author—she’s the former CIA agent famously outed by Scooter Libby and the White House in retaliation for her husband, Joe’s, editorial in which he accused the White House of lying in their rhetorical case for the Iraq War.   In Wilson's talk, drawing from the book, she tells the story of her love of country, her life in the CIA, the public outing, and her family's life in New Mexico.

As a result of being provided with “dignitary” seating in the front row (this simply because I know someone who knows a student in the organizing committee for the speech), I had a very close up view of Wilson as she told her story.  To be honest, while I’ve always felt for her in the past, and while I’ve always been angry at the Bush White House for their part in outing her, it’s always been somewhat “theoretical” to me.  That is, I knew that what was done to her was wrong, but I didn’t feel it: I wasn’t emotionally shaken by it.  This is where the body comes in.

Books in the Belly

On Sunday morning, while reading The Tennessean and having a pleasant time of it, I was reminded of one of those odd articulations between “gender” and “activity” that frustrates the dickens out of me.  There, in the Living section, was a rather lengthy article about book clubs and what amazing communities they help women build.  Could someone please explain why “book clubs” have become so closely articulated to women and why it’s so difficult to break this articulation?

A few months ago, my Bonnie and I were at one of our local bars, having a drink when we ran into a couple we know.  Bonnie and her female counterpart engaged in a conversation about the next book their club was reading.  A light bulb goes off, so I turn to her husband, a guy I’ve gotten to know through conversations over beer now and again, and I say, “Why don’t we start a book club for men in the neighborhood?”  I swear: the guy’s face turned white, and he acted as if I had asked him on a date.

Something is amiss when you ask a guy about reading books, and a moment of homosexual panic breaks out.  And it’s not just this one guy.  Regardless of how I approach the topic, men don’t simply act uninterested; they act as if there is something horribly amiss about the idea.  Guys, we need book clubs; we need them now:

Sean Penn and the Better Story

Ten years ago, like a lot of the rest of the country, I found myself intrigued by the story of Chris McCandless as depicted in Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild.”  My reactions to it were perhaps predictably conflicted.  On the one hand, I’m one of the large multitude of people who, especially as a young man, was very attracted to the idea of doing something extreme—hiking the AT straight through, walking across the U.S., that sorta thing.  I loved to think about how long I would have lasted had I been one of the guys on Stephen King’s Long Walk, or how far I could have run with Forest Gump. While not attracted to the idea of trying to live “in the wild” for any period of time, there was something about the romance of McCandless’s quest that I did find compelling.

On the other hand, I couldn’t help but picture the guy as being a member of the arrogant- self-righteous-mystical-I-walk-alone-but-want-you-to-know-it tribe.  As one of my friends (who was reading the book at the same time) remarked, “I knew tons of guys like this in high school.  Always so self-righteous, always so full of themselves.  I didn’t like them then, and I don’t want to read about them now.”  I knew what she was talking about.  In a way similar to the old equation I used to hear in the late 1970s--“I like the Doors; I just don’t like the people I have to hang out with to listen to them”--I liked the romance of extreme self-reliance, but I didn’t like the people I had to hang out with to dream about it. 

My primary problem with Krakauer’s account, however, wasn’t with the representation of McCandless so much as with Krakauer’s over romanticism of it.  If you’ve read the book, you’ll probably know what I mean:  Krakauer not only writes an apologia for McCandless by telling a story about his own youthful extremism that makes both their acts seem like reasonable masculine rites of passage, but he also creates elaborate explanations to explain McCandless’s ultimate demise.  Krakauer’s explanations—which now demand a great deal of scrutiny—ultimately work to suggest that McCandless’s journey was a remarkable masculine adventure, one only foiled by a few very unfortunate bad turns.  In my mind, Krakauer’s account went way too far to make McCandless’s “great Alaskan adventure” appear admirable with no inkling that it might have been simultaneously reckless and damaging to others.

Reading Douglas Coupland

From The Gum Thief, writing as Bethany, a 20-something Staples employee:

Days like today get me thinking more about the end of the world. I look back on when I was younger, back in the 1990s, and how naive and goofy everything was back then, but it was like this happy bubble, a time snack, a little patch of bliss before the shitstorm.

There's such a difference between the world I grew up expecting and the one I got, but everyone my age has probably felt the same since the dawn of man. I didn't expect a world full of jetliners impregnating office towers, or viruses jumping species or, shit, according to Yahoo!, pigs that now glow in the dark. The modern world is devoted to vanishing species, vanishing weather and vanishing capacity for wonder. The few animals that remain here with us -- when they look at me, or when I hear them cheep or bleat or meow -- they're not animals anymore, they're the voices of the dead trying to warn us of what's coming. According to government statistics, I'm supposed to leave the world in 2062, but I can't even see 2032 in my head.

(emphasis added)

When Silence Isn't Golden

In Speechless: The Erosion of Free Speech in the American Workplace (Berrett Koehler, 2007), Bruce Barry has written a book that should be required reading for citizens, regardless of their political orientation.  Simultaneously clever and conversational, Barry takes the reader on a journey through workplace free speech cases that leaves one angry and confused about the practical meaning of, and limits to, free speech. 

While the rules are different for “public” and “private” workplaces, the news Barry delivers is the same:  while there are historic moments for optimism, in the most general sense, workplace free speech is not only more limited than you might imagine, but the constraints are getting tighter, and more and more confusing.  As Barry notes after looking at multiple court cases concerning free speech in “public” workspaces:  “To sum it up in one sentence:  as a public employee you have rights to free expression except when you don’t” (p. 74).   The difference between the things you can and can’t say are so confusing that silence becomes the ruling norm. 

The same is true in different ways in public workplaces.  A fairly recent example cited by Barry:  Lynne Gobbell, a factory worker drove to work with a John Kerry bumper sticker on her car.  Her boss—who had put pro Bush inserts in employee pay envelopes--demanded that Gobbell remove the sticker or lose her job.  She lost her job.