28 October 2010

What We Say When We Have Nothing Much to Say

Tomorrow I’m due at Mendocino High School to (quote) “talk about the process you go through to develop your pieces.”

You caught me at a good time, I’ll say, because it’s a good day to write. It’s raining outside, the Giants’ game hasn’t started, and the computer’s working again.

Blank screen, nothing particular to say. It’s a universal problem for writers. In my case, I have to be interesting for five minutes and about 600 words.

When I’m truly at a loss, I look at the online news, where the GoogleNet tirelessly searches on my behalf for the word “books,” wherever it may be found.

I get news of library BOOK sales in small towns. In Zurich, “Swedish-Swiss engineering giant ABB on Thursday posted a 25 percent drop in third quarter net profit although order BOOKS grew strongly.” The Omaha Fire Department BOOKS are inadequate. GM is moving to clean up the BOOKS before its highly anticipated public stock offering.

It’s depressing how many journalists or headline writers use the term “one for the BOOKS” when describing a Music Hall of Fame induction, dissension in the world of social networking, or the hundreds of people who showed up for one entry level librarian’s assistant job opening in Tacoma, Washington. That, too, was “one for the BOOKS.”

At this stage, kids, I peek at the bottom margin. Hey, we’re 80% of the way to the bottom of the page. Things are looking up, and that’s certainly one for the BOOKS.

When I’m in this nothing-to-write-about mood, something small will get me started. When the mood strikes I can rant for two full pages and often do. Note to aspiring writers: Rants write faster than almost anything else. Book reviews take time. Research takes lots of time. Coming up with one new thought? You don’t want to know how long that takes.

The odd thing is, people respond. I’m startled when something that didn’t take long to write elicits praise. All I did was open the door and watch what straggled through. You enjoyed standing there with me? Fantastic.

Looking over past scripts, I can spot the ones that began with nothing. They started with a news item, or a couple of news items. Something someone said touched me off. I passed on some stuff someone else had the wit to write first (always with attribution, of course).

Once in a while writer’s despair drives me to delve into personal history. It’s interesting to describe what life was like before some of you were born, before Ronald Reagan, before Bush One for that matter. Back when movies were shown in palaces, tomb-like fastnesses where your sneakers stuck to yesterday’s candy. Back when radios were furniture. When it was a big thing to have mom take you by the hand and walk you to the local library. One’s own story is inexhaustible, and sometimes it interests others, too.

There. I’ve filled two pages with today’s version of nothing much to say.

Then there was the story in the current Publishers Weekly about two guys who have developed “A New Model for Fiction” through their start-up publishing company Electric Literature.

“For hundreds of years,” one of them writes, “the best way to transmit complex information was to cut down a tree, pulp it, stain symbols onto the flattened pulp, bind it together, and distribute it. Industries grew to support that process...

“Text, on the other hand, only becomes more useful with technology. After all, digital text is easily searchable, linkable, and shareable... Memoir can include home movies, photo albums, and perfect copies of diaries and letters.”

I feel a rant coming on. Except we’ve already got five minutes in the can, and, well, there’s always next week.


NOTES:

Wow – 727 words an hour? Sorry I went over the speed limit, occifer.

Electric Literature was launched in 2009 by Scott Lindenbaum and Andy Hunter.

21 October 2010

All Pledge Drive All the Time

When this edition of Words on Books first hits the airwaves, on Sunday morning, sandwiched between Oak & Thorn and This American Life, you will have experienced nine days of our Fall Pledge Drive.

We’ve been barking at you, pleading, joking, and otherwise encouraging you to make a move on your wallet and give us a call. At this point maybe it’s time to step back and consider why we go through this exercise two or more times a year.

KZYX runs on a model first successfully used by the listener-supported Pacifica Foundation in the years following World War II. It worked then, and it works now.

Pacifica’s goals have always been “to encourage and provide outlets for the creative skills and energies of the community,” “to contribute to a lasting understanding between nations and between the individuals of all nations, races, creeds and colors” and “to promote the full distribution of public information.”

It’s startling to many listeners to discover a radio station that is owned, administered and paid for by the listeners themselves. That is what Pacifica does, and that’s what we do here. It’s true democracy in action, and that always has been our goal – to free at least one radio frequency from the almighty advertising dollar by depending instead on the free will donations of people who find freedom of the airwaves important in their lives, and important for their community.

KZYX has a different history from Pacifica – we’re much younger, for one thing. This station began to take shape more than 20 years ago when community radio enthusiast Sean Donovan arrived here to beat the Mendocino bushes for the earliest supporters of Mendocino Public Radio.

Pacifica began in 1946 when Lewis Hill, a conscientious objector, and his like-minded friends founded that educational, non-profit organization. Three years later they went live and Berkeley station KPFA hit the air. That single station, not without many difficulties, grew and the idea spread. Right now, there are about 100 stations affiliated with Pacifica, and many more that broadcast Pacifica-based productions including such great ones as Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now.

Excellent as Pacifica is, we do things differently here. On our web site you can find this: “We are a hybrid of sorts... we are not just community radio (radio that encourages volunteer programmers and focuses almost singularly on locally relevant news and information) nor are we just public radio (professionally produced commercial free radio). Instead we are a combination of the two: we feature some of the finest Public Radio programs available and we have over 100 local volunteer programmers.”

That unusual combination – Pacifica style and National Public Radio style – sets this station apart from most others; certainly apart from Jefferson Public Radio to the north, which steers away from controversy, offers no local news and minimal local programming. To top that off, they repeat many shows rather than use available hours for additional programming.

In light of commercial radio, and unsatisfactory Public Radio, we have managed to create something here that is precious, and like many precious things, something fragile, too. We don’t depend on grants, although government money helps. We pay the bills the same way you pay yours – by digging deep, asking for help when we really need it, and economizing everywhere.

The physical plant is a joke – in the sense that pros from larger stations can’t help but chuckle when they contemplate how we work with aging equipment, tangled wires and a distinct lack of sleek offices to impress — who?

Yet you know we make it work. We succeed because you give a damn about radio in general, and this station in particular.

Finally, let me tell you a true story. I have a friend who doesn’t listen to us much any more because the radio in her car broke several months ago and she can’t afford to replace it.

She told me this week she is giving KZYX a donation to help us carry on. I don’t know how to characterize that kind of generosity, but I sure know how to appreciate it.

As the Fall Pledge Drive comes to a conclusion, and afterward, it’s a very good time for you to add something to what you’ve already given. If you haven’t joined and pledged yet, this is your moment. Let us hear from you.


NOTES:
The Pacifica mission statement.

troth [trawth, trohth] -noun 1. faithfulness, fidelity, or loyalty: by my troth. 2. truth or verity: in troth. 3. one's word or promise, esp. in engaging oneself to marry.

15 October 2010

Plugging Friends

Today we are NOT going to discuss Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s new book of essays “The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist,” based on the author’s 2009 Charles Eliot Norton lectures. We are not going to discuss this book because this reviewer, like the proverbial book worm, is in the middle of it, chewing through close-packed ideas, a few pages at a time; contemplating, not for the first time, what it means to read novels and to write them.

“The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist” will interest serious writers, and anyone who reads full-length fiction. Pamuk derives his title from a famous essay by the 18th century philosopher Friedrich Schiller, where the terms “naive” and “sentimental” were used to describe opposing points of perception.

But today we are NOT going to discuss the work of Orhan Pamuk. We are instead going to plug our friends – not shoot them, pleasurable as that might be, but plug them as in give these writers some well-deserved mentions.

First there is the inestimable British writer John Biggins, who with “The Surgeon’s Apprentice” has shifted his attention from historical novels set during the First World War to “The twenty-fifth day of December in the year of Our Lord sixteen hundred and ten: the Feast of our Blessed Saviour’s Nativity.” “The Surgeon’s Apprentice” is available in electronic form from the author, and printed on-demand, if you demand it. I’ve read the first few chapters, and “The Surgeon’s Apprentice is first rate: as amusing and intriguing as his previous novels starring Otto Prohaska, lieutenant in the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Submarine Service (yes, this once actually existed).

Then there is “El Sereno” by local poet and author Jay Frankston. This is a full length, well-researched novel set in Spain. With “an authentic background of strife, epidemic, civil war and dictatorship” “El Sereno” tells the story of those dedicated and somehow mysterious men “who walked the streets at night in the old sections of all the major cities of Spain.”

Then there is “In the Last Days of the Empire: Watching the Sixties Go By on Greenwich Village Time, A Bartender’s Tale” by Sam P. Edwards. For anyone seeking a vision that absolutely reeks authenticity, especially if you lived through the 1960s in the United States, this book brings alive the era through poetic visions and stories. It reads like this: “to invitation-only volleyball games on campus/with academic poets/punctuating their aspirations with deft spiking of ambiguity/while ‘On the Road’ put ambition in perspective/ at least of the ordinary kind, teaching me to savor the experience of back alleys without pretence...” The book also is available as an audio production with jazz music from the era and selected famous voices from those times.

Then there is Boonville writer Bruce Patterson, author of “Walking Tractor & Other Country Tales” a memoir of farming and logging in the Anderson Valley. This month he returns with the sequel, “Turned Round in my Boots, a Memoir.” Both books are published by California’s highly esteemed Heyday Books.

Then there is the new young adult novel “Steinbeck’s Ghost” by Lewis Buzbee. I met Lewis some years ago when he would arrive in Mendocino to flog the latest titles from Chronicle Books. Lewis was writing on the side and published his first novel, “Fliegelman’s Desire,” while still a sales representative. A few years later he wrote “The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop” which featured a precious few pages set in Mendocino’s Gallery Bookshop.

Buzbee’s most recent novel is “Steinbeck’s Ghost,” written for young adults. “What will Travis do,” the cover asks, “when characters from books start appearing in his real life?”

I don’t know what Travis will do, but I have the opposite dilemma – not characters from books, but books from a great number of characters. The mailbox is bulging and it’s all a bit overwhelming, but also I am grateful to all these heroic wretches tapping out new sentences on old computers. I admire all of you, and hope I’ve helped find you a few new readers for your remarkable books.


NOTES:

“The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist” by Orhan Pamuk. Harvard University Press hard cover $22.95. ISBN 9780674050761.

“The Surgeon’s Apprentice” by John Biggins published by John Biggins Fiction. Paperback $23.99 ISBN 9780956542328. Ordering information on John’s website.

“El Sereno” by Jay Frankston. Whole Loaf Publications paperback $19.99. ISBN  9781450050715.

“In the Last Days of the Empire: Watching the Sixties Go By on Greenwich Village Time, A Bartender’s Tale” by Sam P. Edwards. Eureka Productions paperback $14.94 ISBN 9780557485680. Also available as a download through Lulu.

“Turned Round in my Boots, a Memoir” by Bruce Patterson. Heyday Books paperback $18.95. ISBN  9781597141444. More information on “Walking Tractor” and “Turned Round in my Boots.”

“The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop” by Lewis Buzbee. Graywolf Press paperback (out of print but available online) ISBN 9781555975104.

“Steinbeck’s Ghost” by Lewis Buzbee. Square Fish (Macmillan) paperback $7.99. ISBN 9780312602116. “It’s been two months since Travis’s family moved from their shabby old house to a development so new that it seems totally unreal. There’s one place, though, where Travis can still connect with his old life: the Salinas Library...”

07 October 2010

Joe Louis

That’s quite a book, I said to my wife Joselyn as I finished “Joe Louis” by Randy Roberts. Not a great book, I corrected myself, but a great story.

Joe Louis reigned, and that is the right word, as heavyweight boxing champion of the world from 1937 to 1949. Roberts writes, “He had come up from desperate poverty, made millions of dollars, walked down the avenues of America like a god, and heard his name praised from New York to California. Joe Louis, the champion of the world. He had been the most written about and talked about athlete in America, maybe anyone in America. There could be no encore, not even a second act, to his life in the ring.”

Yet Joe Louis lived another thirty-two years, dying in 1981 of a heart attack the morning after watching Larry Holmes outpoint Trevor Berbick at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

Saying little, protected from scrutiny both by the press and his own handlers, Louis became a symbol like no other for people of color. One black editorialist said early in Louis’ career, “What he is doing as a fighter will do more to show up the fallacy of ‘inherent inferiority’ of Negroes than could be done by all the anthropologists in the nation – so far as the ears and eyes of the white masses are concerned. One flash of his mighty brown arm is a better argument than a book... He will be felt where no sermon ever would be heard.”

White sportswriters in the 1930's painted Louis in the grossest racial stereotypes. The black press saw him as a symbol of the fight against oppression, and as an oppressed man himself, despite the success and the money.

The story of great black fighter Jack Johnson still resounded when Joe Louis began his run of victories. Jack Johnson kayoed all comers, “great white hopes” included. He flaunted his white girlfriends and wealth. “In victory, Johnson had probed the live nerve of American racism,” Roberts says. A unanimous white establishment then disbarred, discredited and discouraged Johnson and his supporters.

When it came to Joe Louis, from the start his handlers carefully crafted a largely silent, heroic figure, the very image of a bold fighter who said little and never* lost, a piece of clay Americans could shape into whatever statue they needed.

Louis’s career was chronicled exhaustively in the press, and Rogers relies mostly on press reports to create his story. Perhaps the author was unable or unwilling to interview people who knew the champion. The result is a book crammed with incident but set oddly at a distance from Joe Louis himself, the largely unknown person behind the persona.

Even as told from ringside rather than inside, Roberts has a magnificent story to tell, one deserving to be pondered and contemplated. Why was Joe Louis so important to so many people? How did he survive the virtually unanimous racism and become at last a hero to all Americans?

Roberts suggests the answer: “More than any man, any force, of the generation, Louis confirmed full black equality – even, some asserted superiority. In the ring he did not ask for respect or equality; with his fists he demanded and received it... Louis exerted a powerful appeal, symbolically expressing African Americans’ struggle for equality and deep-seated yearning for a settlement of past injustices...”

Jackie Robinson, setting out to be the first black player in white professional baseball, said “I’ll try to do as good a job as Joe Louis has done...”

Joe Louis defended his title more than 25 times, 22 by knockout. “No heavyweight (had) defended his title more often. Louis had defended it seven times more than the previous eight champions combined.”

At the funeral, held in a ring at the Sports Pavilion of Caesars Palace, the Reverend Jesse Jackson said, “We are honoring a giant who saved us in a troubled time... With Joe Louis we had made it from the guttermost to the uttermost; from the slave ship to the championship. Usually the champion rides on the shoulders of the nation and its people, but in this case, the nation rode on the shoulders of the hero, Joe.”




NOTES:

“The reverend Jesse Louis Jackson (named Jessie for Jessie Owens and Louis for Joe Louis) continued: God sent Joe from the black race to represent the human race. He was the answer to the sincere prayers of the disinherited and dispossessed. Joe made everybody somebody... Joe, we love your name... We all feel bigger today because Joe came this way. He was in the slum, but the slum was not in him. Ghetto boy to man, Alabama sharecropper to champion. Let’s give Joe a big hand clap. This is a celebration. Let’s hear it for the champ. Let’s hear it for the champ! Joe, we love your name. Let’s give the champ a big hand.”

From the book: “In a fitting irony,Joe Louis’ carefully manicured, noncontroversial image became the centerpiece for the loudest cry for racial justice and set the tone for the later civil rights movement.”

“Joe Louis” by Randy Roberts. Yale University Press hard cover $30. ISBN 9780300122220. Published October, 2010.

Google “images for Joe Louis” to see Google’s very large collection of images of Joe Louis; or try this address.

Wikipedia’s Joe Louis entry.

* During his heyday, Louis lost to German Max Schmeling by knockout (1936) in the 12th round; in the return match Louis KO’d Schmeling (to the great chagrin of Nazi Germany) in 2:04 of the first round (1938). Overall, Joe Louis lost three professional fights: Schmeling (1936); Ezzard Charles (1950) and Rocky Marciano (1951). Louis “retired” and relinquished his title in 1949. The Charles fight was for the title he had given up; the Marciano fight was the last of nine non-title fights of which Louis won all but the last. His final record: 65 Wins (51 knockouts, 13 decisions, 1 disqualification); 3 Losses (2 knockouts, 1 decision).