On The Writer's Credo

Earlier this semester in the memoir class I’m leading, one of the students was reading her essay for the week aloud. Something she’d written prompted a second or two of my furious highlighting. I saw a teachable moment there, and as anybody who stands in front of a classroom will tell you, when you have the good fortune to spot a teachable moment, you’ll furiously blow the horns, summon the hounds, and haul out the spears and bows, and like courtiers from the medieval Hunt for the Unicorn tapestry, chase breathlessly after it.

The assignment had been to focus in on an important conversation that took place at some point along the students’ personal timelines. I like the assignment—though I really should move it earlier in my teaching plan—because it’s general enough that it allows writers to write about nearly anything they choose (everyone’s had a conversation at some point, is my theory), but it also challenges them to employ dialogue in their writing, and also to zero in upon the small slice of time in which the conversation took place. For writers unused to writing with such focus, it’s valuable to encourage them to gaze narrow and think deep.

My student’s written sentiment wasn’t uncommon. A lot of us have similar thoughts. In the conversation she recorded having with a boyfriend, she voiced the phrase: I think it’s truly better to collect rich experiences than material things.

After she finished reading her essay, I went back to that paragraph and read the sentence aloud. “This is something you really believe?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” she replied, nodding.

“Something that’s really, really important to you?” She nodded again. “Is it something that’s in your writer’s credo?”

“Oh,” she replied. I knew her answer was going to be No. But at the same time, I could see the gears turning in her mind as she thought it over and realized, It could be. It should be.

Credo. I believe. The writer’s credo is an assignment I give at the beginning of whatever writing classes I’m teaching. The idea of a credo isn’t mine; it’s not unique to my writing, certainly, or even to the field of writing in general. National Public Radio ran, a few years back, a four-year series with the title “This I Believe” in which writers and other types of celebrities discussed the core beliefs that have defined their lives and careers. The first time I heard the idea of the writer’s credo articulated was in college, when I was taking playwriting classes from Louis E. Catron.

Lou’s class revolved around the concept of the writer’s credo. He’d written an influential textbook that used the credo as its cornerstone—Playwriting: Writing, Producing, and Selling Your Play. Catron thought of the writer’s credo as a recorded statement of personal conviction:

A credo is the writer’s beliefs concerning topics he or she feels are highly important. It is focused most especially upon those portions of life that concern the writer most. It addresses topics about which the author has a deep emotional attitude—a burning anger, a scorn, an affection. It is, then, “This I believe. . . .”

It is uniquely your own.

Lou’s philosophy was that once a writer put into written words those convictions that mattered most, and once he or she had expanded upon and written, personally and privately, about each and every point of importance, it would provide a fertile ground from which art could grow and flourish. He believed the credo inspired students to write with passion and conviction—two qualities that differentiated good, rigorous work from tepid wheel-spinning.

To Lou, a writer’s credo was more than a mere list made into short essays. It was the burning spear of the valiant champion, the holy writ from which began a playwright’s righteous crusade. Taking time to write a credo taught his students to value the self as a source of material; it forced them to evaluate, often for the first time, their own moral compasses. The act of writing down thoughts and beliefs they may never have before examined would lead to stimulating deeper thought. And most of all, the credo was intended to teach students that their convictions had artistic and intellectual worth.

The assignment itself, as he set it forth in the first class of every semester in playwriting, was generous and simple. We were to write down those things we truly believed, the elements of our writer’s credo, and throughout the semester, in our own time, we were to expand on them little by little. He’d never ask to see our credo. It wasn’t graded. He didn’t specify a minimum number of pages. He simply sold the concept to us during that first week of classes and strongly suggested it would make a big difference. Then he left us to our own devices.

Of course, when you give students an assignment that the professor is never going to read or evaluate or ask about again, nine out of ten of them will never do the damned thing. I didn’t, my first semester in the class. I thought it was the kind of bullshit busywork that I could easily get away with not ever doing. In theory, I was right. I wrote and revised three plays that semester without ever having to think about what I really believed. They were okay student plays. Maybe even pretty good student plays.

Over the holiday break that year, though, I had some kind of minor crisis of faith. Maybe I had too much time on my hands, or maybe I was lonely and bored away from campus and my friends. Whatever the reason, I found myself writing in my journals quite a bit as I tried to find solace and inspiration. One night, I happened back upon Lou Catron’s grand and glorious credo. Suddenly I found the idea compelling. I ended up poring through past entries of my journal—in what, a diary that was about three years old by that point?—and compiling them into preliminary statements of belief. Item by item, over the next couple of weeks I went through and expanded each into a short essay that was more personal and heartfelt.

The next semester, my plays were a lot better. I mean, none of them were produced on Broadway with me highlighted as some kind of hitherto-unknown Southern wunderkind. But even at their most bonkers (I seem to recall writing a play that semester in which a clairvoyant housewife directed an amateur Shakespearean repertory company using as actors the ghosts from the local graveyard), I knew from where in my belief system each of those plays was coming. I could sense how much more confident my writing had become. Best of all, I always knew what I wanted to write about next.

Lou made me a convert. Over the years I’ve kept a credo in some form or another. It’s changed over the years, as Lou predicted it would. The concerns of a young man are not those of one in the um, middle-to-mid-late-summer-but-really-still-oodles-of-warm-weather-to-go-of-his-life old geezer like me. I keep it, and I keep revising it, because having a credo has made a difference in my writing. I keep a credo because it matters.

I want my students to have something that matters. So I assign the credo in the first class. I tell them how it will challenge them to confront and examine parts of themselves they might not have contemplated before. I tell them it will give their writing passion, depth, and that it will convince them that their intellectual property is valuable and worthy of attention. I inform them that throughout the semester we’ll continue talking about the development of their credos, and the challenges they encounter in doing so—but that I won’t ask to see it. It won’t be graded or evaluated.

Of course, predictably, nine out of ten students never do a thing about the assignment.

But oh, when they do, I can tell. Last semester I had a student in my memoir writing class—let’s call her Francine—who had a voice so distinct that, had you mixed an unread essay of hers with those of a hundred other students, I could without hesitation have picked it out. I knew what Francine believed. When she read one of her essays, I knew that Francine placed family above all else. I knew that Francine insisted upon the concepts of personal and familial loyalty, and that she had nothing but scorn for people who didn’t hold those as their highest moral absolutes. Francine wasn’t the most experienced writer, but every paragraph she wrote might as well have had I AM FRANCINE DAMMIT! stamped as the background watermark.

“You wrote your credo, didn’t you?” I asked her, one evening. “I mean, you really worked on it.”

Francine blinked at me in surprise. “Well yes,” she said. “You can tell?”

Yes. You can tell.

I think my young student from this semester was surprised when I asked picked that sentence from her essay and asked about the credo. She’s a very strong beginning writer; she has a good sense of purpose and a neat, insightful choice of detail. She writes with courage, and writes from the heart—two qualities that developing a credo encourages. But she hadn’t actually written anything as her writer’s credo, I suspect. She hadn’t yet made the connection that a credo isn’t woven from big, bombastic concepts, but from the little truths and self-realizations that make up our everyday lives. Truths like, I think it’s truly better to collect rich experiences than material things.

I hadn’t communicated myself well. I was teaching the credo all wrong. And I had a new class starting in just a few days.

When my Writing Calisthenics class had its first meeting later that week, I once again devoted a portion of the first class to the idea of the writer’s credo. Normally I would’ve launched into my usual talk about what a credo was, how I’d first encountered it, and why I thought it was important. In other words, what I’d always done that students yawned through while they wait for the first real assignment.

This time, though, I simply handed around a sheet of paper printed with statements. They included:

1. A stranger is a friend I just haven't yet met.
2. Everyone has only one true love in his or her life.
3. Arguing about matters of faith is a waste of time, as the only life we’ll have is the here and now.
4. Life is most honorable when lived without depending upon anyone for help.
5. My stories deserve to be heard.
6. The past is the past and shouldn't be revisited or dwelled upon.
7. Everything in the world is impermanent; we should not attach ourselves to things or to people.
8. Money does more good than harm.
9. I would and should sacrifice everything for my family.
10. Every adversity can be seen as a gift in disguise. The greater the adversity, the greater the gift.
11. I am responsible for my own happiness.
12. Anyone who doesn’t have a five-year personal/career plan is asking for trouble.
13. No one is truly complete until they have raised children.
14. In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.
15. I believe that when fate or the universe offers us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, it's our obligation to pursue it.

Without any other preface, I told them that what they held in their hands were statements of belief. They might not all be your beliefs. But you probably know someone who subscribes to each and every one of them. Two of them were my strong beliefs, I said, but for the moment it didn’t matter which. I gave them a moment to read them over, then suggested that they start at the top of the list and read them again.

This time, I told them, put a checkmark by those with which you strongly agree—on a scale where 1 represents extreme disagreement and 10 is strong agreement, check those that would get an 8 or above. Put large X marks by those that might get a mere 1 or 2—the items you find utterly distasteful and just plain wrong. It was okay, I told them, if in the end they didn’t mark any of them. In that case, at least pick out one or two that inspired a mild amount of agreement or disagreement.

I could see all the students found something to mark. After a moment, I told them that I wanted them to take five minutes and tweak two of the statements until they really represented what the student believed. If you’d put an X by one, I said, you should rewrite the affirmation until it reflected something that really and truly reflected what you think. Money does more good than harm might make them twitch, but perhaps Money is the root of all evil might suit you better. Maybe As a society, we must defeat economic inequity—soon is how you really feel. If that’s the case, fix it.

If there’s something you believe strongly, but you could express it better with a little adjustment . . . do it. Maybe you don’t want to condemn the innocent with No one is truly complete until they have raised children, but you really believe in My children are the center of my life. Great. Do it.

Pick two. Fix them up a little. Rewrite them from scratch. Renovate them in whatever way it takes to make them feel lived in—to make them feel like they’re yours.

Then I left the room.

When I came back a few minutes later, we sat down and discussed the changes they’d made. I was a little surprised that nearly everybody in the classroom had X’ed out and rewritten the third statement, the one about faith. (Maybe it was the contentious phrasing. I’ll have to remember that, next time around.) A couple of them rewrote the affirmation into a more traditional credence about needing religion in their lives, but one of them transformed it into something with a more agnostic bent that emphasized a need for communication. Some people rewrote the statements about career plans; others picked out the beliefs concerning family and amended those. Everyone had at least two statements they’d tinkered with until they were uniquely their own, though. A couple of the more ambitious had scrawled short paragraphs at the bottoms of their pages.

These two statements, these two beliefs that you’ve renovated and rehabilitated for yourself, I told them—they’re the start of your writer’s credo. Then I launched into my lecture about how stating This I believe followed by single strong conviction can be and should be the foundation for any number of stories and poems and plays and memoirs. They each had two. Think how much art they could weave from them both, alone or combination. They’d come up with two beliefs in less than ten minutes.

What if they had eight statements? They could do that in less than an hour on their own. Eight statements of belief were a solid cornerstone for a writer’s credo and they were already a quarter of the way there.

Did the exercise work as I hoped? Did it make writing the credo into a less daunting task? I don’t know. Maybe to most of them it seemed like the bullshit kind of assignment that they’d never have to turn in, that would never have evaluated, and that they would never contemplate or create.

For a couple of people in the class, though, I expect the assignment will resonate. They’ll think about their convictions and consider from what and where they arose. They’ll think about why their beliefs matter. Those students will have a certainty of what moral issues excite and inspire them. The art they create will be all the more heartfelt.

Then I’ll know who worked on their credo. I’ll be able to see that passion. Everyone will.

Exquisite Corpse

Last May, I visited my father just as my spring teaching semester was ending. I’d had a quick meeting with the nice people of the Greenwich school system the night before my trip down; they wanted to know if I had any ideas for a second writing class for the fall of this year. I didn’t, at that moment, but I told them I’d think about it and let them know by week’s end.

The idea came for a class as I sweated in my dad’s back yard. Where now stand a lot of overgrown shrubberies used to stand an apple tree. It was a marvelous thing to have as a kid. We loved its sweet blossoms in the spring. We played in its sturdy branches during the summer. Come fall, when Golden Delicious fruits would hang heavy from the branches, we’d have all kinds of pies and cobblers and apple butters and applesauces. There was an awkward week or two when winter would melt into early spring, and we’d find our toes squishing in the rotted brown carcasses of fruit fallen to the ground months before, but the rest of the year, we loved that apple tree.

My sister and I especially enjoyed it when we were young because beneath its canopy was a sandbox, a leftover from the previous tenants. My parents would fill it with sand, come spring. We’d spend hours at a time in there making dunes, building castles, burying toys, and playing endless games of let’s-pretend. Both the tree and the box disappeared decades ago. It was while I was digging up things in its vicinity that I started thinking about this new class I was supposed to plan.

Several of my former students had told me they wished for some kind of class to attend that didn’t necessarily repeat the lectures and assignments of what they’d already taken, but allowed them to bring in their continuing work for critique. Something repeatable, for which they could sign up during the semesters they were actively working on longer projects. But I also seized on this idea of a sandbox for writers to play in, where they could work out their imaginations and try new in-class exercises.

I really wanted there to be a sense of play in this nascent class. So many writers treat their craft with deadly seriousness. They suck the fun right out of it. I’ve been in critique groups that were terrifying in their viciousness and sheer intensity. Now, there are absolutely times when a sober approach is necessary in writing.

But most writers initially found themselves attracted to storytelling not because of the hours of mental toil and the prospect of sitting in a chair staring at a laptop screen until their eyes cross. They write because it’s fun. They write because there was a moment in their lives when they started putting words together into sentences, and sentences into stories, and because they discovered a knack for making up things in their mind that inspired and delighted them. Sure, writing can be hard work. But we do it because we delight in it. We should, anyway.

Ultimately the sandbox idea became the class I started teaching last week called Creative Writing Calisthenics. We begin with some warm-up exercises—short, fun games and assignments that can be completed within five or ten minutes and shared with other class participants. As I envision them, the exercises will have some larger point, whether about creating character, or learning about storytelling, or paying attention to the ways in which small matters of word choice and emphasis can affect the tone and impact of the stories we tell. They’re modular, so one doesn’t depend on another. From semester to semester, I’ll change them—but I might repeat the more popular ones, if there’s a desire there.

Then the rest of the class, the bulk of the two hours, is a mentored critique group. Class participants will bring in whatever projects on which they’re working—whether it’s short fiction, chapters from a longer novel, memoirs or other creative non-fiction. It’s open to everyone.

In last week’s class we played the game known as Exquisite Corpse. Wikipedia ascribes the game to the Surrealists of the early twentieth century, which certainly gives an elegant spin to what is essentially a children’s party game. Exquisite Corpse is an exercise in group storytelling in which one person starts a story, then passes it to the person to his side. They take up the baton and keep the tale running until they pass it off to the next storyteller. In my version of the game, I had the students keep several plates spinning at once.

I created packets of note cards for them. The first card in the packet had a story premise. (I came up with all the premises, which I gave a loose unifying theme involving sharing or dividing things.) A mother and a daughter are alone in the kitchen after Thanksgiving dinner, dividing up the leftovers, when the daughter asks the mother the one question the mother hopes she'd never hear was one. On the day of an especially large Powerball jackpot, an office worker announces at the day's end that she's leaving early to get some lottery tickets on the way home. Her boss gives her a five-dollar bill to buy some tickets for him, as well. That night, she discovers among her tickets that she has a winning number was another. I slipped in numbered note cards, one for each member of the class, behind the premise. I let students draw packets randomly and open them up. Then the game began.

The students knew from the start that they’d have approximately eight cards on which to tell an entire story. They knew that because multiple stories were circulating at the same time, they’d be responsible for managing all the various parts of each story; one time they’d launch it, most of the time they’d have to keep the action moving forward, and once they’d have to tie all the strings together and bring a story to an end.

I was in suspense the entire time. The inaugural class for this experiment is diverse in age and background. There are students barely out of high school, and others who have matured well, shall we say. One woman has written her first novel and is contemplating moving on to a second, while an older woman has never written anything at all and wanted to see if she could try. While the students were letting their pens fly across the index cards, I kept thinking of all the ways in which these particular corpses could turn out to be, well, not so exquisite.

But you know what? The results delighted me. The story about the mother and daughter turned into a saga about parentage, in which the daughter doubted that her father had sired her and attempted to sneak a DNA sample from him to prove it. The Powerball jackpot saga became a devious Mamet-esque thriller of deception and double-crosses, as more and more people became involved in the woman’s scheme to keep any money from her boss. One of the premises had been about a professor debating whether or not to share credit on an important scientific discovery with the graduate student who’d done the bulk of the actual work. It jetted from the pristine laboratories of an academic setting to the muddy banks of the Amazon River, where the scientist and a journalist from Smithsonian Magazine engaged in life-or-death combat that emerged with only one bloody victor.

I mean, I would’ve paid to read that book.

One of the most effective stories was the simplest. The premise: Two adult brothers are doing their mother a favor by cleaning out her garage. In a neglected corner, they discover a box marked with the name of the father who abandoned their family twenty-five years before. On top is an envelope in their father's handwriting, addressed to their mother. The envelope is unopened. The writers in my little sandbox didn’t lob the story off into a violent path. They didn’t make the story a melodrama of revenge and recrimination. They kept it simple. The envelope contained a goodbye letter and a sum of money, which the brothers disagreed over. The note and the money unearthed some long-simmering resentments against their father and each other, over which they battled until the mother finds out about the discovery and steps in with a quiet resolution; she tells them to leave the past in the past, and to recognize that their father’s legacy wasn’t one of pain and heartbreak, but of two sons who’d managed to overcome abandonment to grow up into responsible adults.

By keeping it domestic, and by giving the brothers a graceful arc that included a sweet, but not overly sentimental ending, the class all crafted a story together that was surprisingly effective. It felt right. It felt whole. I was the one reading aloud that particular set of cards, and I was surprised how my throat started to choke up as I read the ending. In my head, I could just about see the movie version. (Meryl Streep starred. Bradley Cooper and Matthew McConaughey were the brothers.)

We weren’t finished, though, once the stories had been read. I was hoping I could prove a larger point. I started with the person to my right and asked, Did the story turn out how you thought it would? In some cases, yes, the scenario had developed along predictable lines. For others, the twists and turns were nothing like they’d originally envisioned. Which of the cards was most difficult for you to write? The easiest? I asked. Everyone agreed on the answer to this question: the very first card was the most difficult. Each one of the storylines had so many raw possibilities right at the start. Yet each additional written card whittled down the range of practical ways to continue the plot, so that two-thirds of the way through, what had to happen next seemed almost pre-ordained. The stories took on a life of their own. The concluding card came a close second in difficulty. Some of the scenarios had gotten so exciting that bringing them to an end was a challenge. But that first card. That nearly-blank canvas, that moment of nearly infinite possibility. That was the toughest.

Where did your story really change? I wanted to know. The students thought about it. Without fail, one by one, they pointed to the person opposite them. Where was the climax? Again, the students knew where that had fallen . . . either on the next-to-last or last card.

So this is what I learned from this exercise, I pointed out to them. Every single one of us in that classroom knew how to write stories—even the simplest ones, described in bare outline on notecards. We knew instinctively, without being told, that a story needs a premise. It needs characters in conflict. They need some development. Then there’s a twist, something that takes the story in a completely different direction. Complications heap upon complications until there’s a climax near or at the end. Then there’s resolution—of some sort, at least.

You know how to tell a story, I pointed out to them. Every single one of you rose to a pretty formidable challenge. These characters weren’t yours. You didn’t think up the original ideas—those were something I’d dreamed up at three-thirty in the morning, one night. But each and every one of them knew the raw elements of storytelling, from the woman who’d struggled through her first novel to the high school graduate who hadn’t written much on her own to the curious writer who mostly had written in journals. That older woman who had never written before and just wanted to try? She turned out to write some wicked cliffhangers on her cards, and she supplied the ending to the story of the brothers—the ending that made me tear up as I read it aloud in front of a roomful of near-strangers. She knew storytelling. She knew how to control it.

You know how to do this, I told them. You just showed me. Think of how amazing it’s going to get when you’re writing stories of your own.

Of course, that’s where the work of writing comes in.

But don’t tell them that. Not yet.

Surface Streets

My father’s eyesight, uncorrectable and in no way good, has never legally prevented him from driving. It doesn’t, however, exactly inspire confidence in anyone who’s a passenger in whatever rickety old vehicle he happens to be steering at any particular moment. Curiously, because of the nature of the ailment that afflicts his visual cortex, his sight has actually improved with age. He might have amassed the world’s largest collection of magnifying glasses, all so he’ll have one at hand whenever he has to read or peer closely at something. But hey. I also startle people on the days I’m not wearing my contact lenses, and have to hold a piece of paper two inches from my nose in order to read what it says.

When I was a kid, though, my father needed incredibly thick horn-rimmed spectacles in order to see anything. They were less the thickness of Coke bottles and closer to the density and weight of that industrial-grade glass Toronto’s CN tower uses for its see-through floor, a thousand feet in the air. Even with them, his vision wasn’t sharp. The world to my father has always been, more or less, an impressionistic vista of blurs and indistinct colorful motions. Such a shortcoming meant, though, that whenever he’d drive anywhere, the rest of the family had to do the seeing for him.

A typical drive to the movies would find my mother riding shotgun calling out the status of lights, blocks ahead. My usual backseat duty had to do with spotting cars coming in either direction when we had to make a right or left turn—and often I’d find myself craning my head around to peer out the rear or side windows looking for vehicles in the blind spot when we had to make a quick lane change. If my sister happened to be in the car, she was responsible for spotting pedestrians, bicycles, bouncing balls, and suicidal squirrels that might suddenly dash out in front of us. It was quite an organized operation, really. With my father commanding the wheel and his three subordinates manning the periscopes, turrets, and hatch, we were as well-oiled as a World War I army tank. (And probably about as slow.)

I grew up accepting our family compromise as unremarkable. When I finally went for a license after college, it was something of a cold shock to discover that one driver all by himself was really supposed to be doing all of that navigating and lane changing and squirrel-spotting. The old habit dies hard, too. To this day I’ll automatically bark out “Light’s red” from a distance of roughly a block and a half away whenever I’m in someone’s car. It’s a constant struggle not to stick my neck out the window, then inform the driver that it’s safe to change lanes. I’ve found, over the years, that most people with reasonably good eyesight tend to be annoyed by my ingrained habits. Especially since they have no idea why I’ve appointed myself the seeing-eye dog of the front passenger seat.

Because of my father’s vision problems when I was growing up, our family quite naturally, without thought or discussion, minimized the amount of driving we actually had to do. My parents lived within a mile and a half of the university where they taught. Our schools were relatively close by, our church within walking distance. Our doctors and dentists and piano teachers, our favorite restaurants and movie theaters, all tended to be within two miles or less. More importantly, they were all reachable by surface streets.

We never, ever took the interstates to go from one end of town to the other. Save for either heading down to Atlanta to visit my mom’s family, or up to Baltimore to visit my dad’s, I can’t recall a single time we lightheartedly hopped onto I-95 in Richmond—despite that there’s an on-ramp a mere block and a half from my father’s house. The only time my parents would nervously inch onto I-64 would be for one of our family excursions to Colonial Williamsburg. (As historians, my parents thought it important to maintain yearly passes . . . and use them, occasionally.) Highways were the great forbidden, when I was a kid and later when I learned to drive. They were fast, wild, unpredictable. Even a crowded clown car of lane-change specialists and squirrel-spotters couldn’t have kept up with the insane demands of highway driving, in my parents’ world view.

So we stuck to the surface streets. Over the years, my dad learned where were all the traffic lights and dangerous spots on Northside Richmond’s thoroughfares. He could maintain an accurate mental register of all the places where it wasn’t easy, or expedient, to make a left-hand turn. He knew that some intersections of a busy street like Broad, for example, could be tricky to navigate solo, so he’d track down the less-traveled places to duck off the road.

In my youth I never found it unusual that my father’s conception of the shortest distance between his house and, say, our eye doctor, happened to be through our leafy neighborhood, past the vocational high school, up and over the railroad tracks, under the I-95 overpass, through a maze of one-way twists and turns in an industrial belt, until we emerged by the Krispy Kreme, down Broad Street for two blocks, then in and out through a commercial district, across a vast parking lot, and finally down the long and sparsely-populated winding back road that eventually led to the ophthalmologist.

Dozens of my parents’ routes involved driving by the Lakeside apartment where they originally lived when they moved to Virginia in the early nineteen-sixties. To this day, my father will give me directions to places that are laden with personal landmarks: “Okay, drive down the Boulevard past the Shrine where you saw your puppet shows, past the old office of your pediatrician—remember Dr. Rahal?—until you get to the house of you’re the woman who babysat you until you were four. . . .” Or with the inscrutable incantation, “We’re going to make a U-turn by the store where I bought that pudding your mother used to like before they stopped making it in 1969.” Sometimes it feels as if my father can only get to new places by retracing to those where he began.

Nowadays when I visit, of course, I’ll use the GPS on my phone if I need to travel somewhere unfamiliar in Richmond. Siri will consider my request for directions, laugh lightly at the notion of staying on Richmond’s pleasant two-lane boulevards any longer than necessary, and immediately intone, In five hundred feet, take the exit for I-95 South.

“Can't you tell her to take the surface roads?” my father will ask, trying to suppress his nervous laughter as if Siri can actually hear him. But no, Siri will decree that the freeways are the fastest, shortest, and most logical route available. My father will then go through an elaborate physical charade of bracing himself for impact as I merge onto one of Richmond’s gentle and lightly-traveled highways, using the dash and ceiling and as his anchor. He’s polite, though. He’ll manage to keep himself from saying, “Vance! You're driving like a wild Indian!” more than twice. Once he sees I've somehow managed to steer, accelerate, keep an eye on the cars next to the merge lane, and simultaneously not mow down any squirrels, he'll relax and spend the rest of the ten minutes it takes to get between any two points in Richmond by telling me the route we should have taken.

I became comfortable with freeways during my Michigan years. Detroit’s flat, swampy metro area is largely set up in a simple grid system. If traffic’s heavy along one north-south road, a driver can be assured that there’s just another north-south road a mere block to the east or west. The freeways there act as arteries that let one quickly—outside of rush hour—bypass big sections of the grid to get to a section further away. And since everyday routes in the metro Detroit area can be thirty or more miles in each direction, those freeways come in handy. I kind of miss them.

I say I miss them because, in my dotage, I’ve become something of a reluctant user primarily of surface streets. I-95 sits a half-mile away. A vaguely parallel freeway, the Merritt, runs through this portion of the state alongside 95 to the north. I’m wary, however, about having to travel anywhere on I-95, because between the hours of, oh, five a.m. to midnight, it’s basically an existential parking lot where lost souls languish on their sojourn to an exhaust-filled purgatory. And though it’s just as crowded much of the time, the Merritt fancies itself a ‘parkway’: a verdant green belt through which well-behaved cars are grudgingly allowed to pass. However, I find the Merritt more than a little tense to drive along, because in Connecticut, parkway seems to be the state’s code for when a tree falls on your car on a windy, snowy, or vaguely windy day while you drive along this thing, it sure as hell ain’t our fault.

So that leaves the surface streets. If you were to look at a map of my fair county, you’d notice immediately that due to the state’s rocky and irregular geography, its streets are in no way laid out in anything resembling a grid. No, this region’s streets seem to have been fashioned after the whims of centuries-old Puritans with a grudge against anyone determined to use the Devil’s conveyances instead of their God-given two good feet. Roads amble in the shape of curlicues, or paisleys, or will appear to be going along the north-south axis only suddenly to wrench in a hairpin, two-hundred-and-seventy-degree turn. Broad avenues that seem as if they’d take you to the place you’d really like to go will suddenly peter out. Dead ends abound.

Toward the end of the summer I was driving up the street to the Walgreen’s closest to me when I discovered that the one traffic light between me and my destination was inoperable. No cops were there directing the rush-hour flow of cars. The drivers zooming down the Boston Post Road weren’t paying attention to the malfunctioning light, nor did most of them stop for it as they ought. It took fifteen tense minutes, and one near-accident, for me to make my way from one side of the street to the other. I wasn’t going to drive back through that again, I promised myself once I’d picked up my prescription. I’d simply drive up the side street north, find a side street that would take me to the north-south street a block over, and get home through that intersection, where the light was okay.

Well. It sounded simple, anyway. I headed north for a good half-mile, then three-quarters of a mile, then a mile, fruitlessly looking for a street—any street—that would let me make a right turn. I toured through a section of large estates, traveled across a merrily-bubbling brook, spied some deer, and took a nice circuitous tour around the perimeter of the entire golf course. After a long while I began wondering if I’d yet driven into some other, far-flung state like Vermont. Then finally, roughly twenty-five minutes after I’d left the Walgreen’s parking lot, I eventually emerged exactly one block west of where I’d started.

I considered myself lucky to get there.

As a symptom of my gradual, inevitable metamorphosis into my father, an affinity for surface streets is probably one of the more benign. I try to appreciate it for what it represents: a feeling of knowing one’s place in the community, of so long-lived a familiarity with a locale that its every landmark has a personal story. It’s a symbol of contentment with self and situation, of having no true desire to roam.

Or at least, that’s the quaint fiction I tell myself, as I steel my nerves to drive along sadistically-laid-out streets for a half hour, in order simply to get to a destination a mere mile away.

The Gap in the Wall

Near the home in the metro Detroit area where we used to live is a major intersection. A man sits there at the street corner in his wheelchair, day after day. There he rocks, to and fro, muttering to himself an incomprehensible litany of gibberish. He arrives some time in the morning. Back and forth he rocks until dusk.

The intersection lies along Detroit’s Woodward Avenue, the broad boulevard that shoots north from the river and divides the city into its east and west sides. Competing drugs stores perch like waiting vultures on the corners of the big intersections. It’s at one of these chain pharmacies that the man in the wheelchair spends his days. Summer, winter, good weather, bad. He’s such a permanent fixture there that to most locals he’s merely a landmark on their route somewhere else. Like any landmark along a familiar road, he’s important only for the few seconds it takes to approach him. Once past, a driver’s mind moves forward to the next point in the journey. The man becomes invisible once more. Unremarkable.

When first we moved into the neighborhood, the man’s chair would rest in a distinct basin of dirt his chair had carved into the grassy hummock between the sidewalk and the drug store’s parking lot. Soon after, the store got a renovation. The exterior became brighter and more modern; the parking lot got repaved. Day after day the man in the wheelchair sat there, seeming unaware of the construction as he rocked and stammered to himself.

Then the contractors started to build a wall—a four-foot high wall of red brick that started at the driveway along Woodward and curved gently around the corner onto the mile road intersecting it. With alarm we watched over the course of a couple of weeks the wall’s construction as it approached the man’s spot, unable to imagine what they planned to do.

The next time we drove past, the wall was finished. The drug store had lengthened it all the way to their other driveway; they’d simply left a gap at the spot the man’s wheels had worn their deep and barren grooves. Where before there’d been a man sitting in a wheelchair beside the road was now a long wall of shiny brick that appeared to be propped up in the middle, Atlas-like, by the shoulders of a muttering man in a wheelchair.

Perhaps building a wall with a gap to accommodate a raving man in a wheelchair isn’t the most obvious solution. Then again, in Detroit, my experience is that perhaps it is.

Back in the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties, the city’s most popular slogan was Say nice things about Detroit! The implication being, of course, that nice things were usually the absolute last thing out of anyone’s mouth when it came to Michigan’s most beleaguered city. When I moved there in the mid-eighties, the bad rap was justified. Detroit then had the highest murder rate in the country. Its neighborhoods were unpatrolled and, when it came to city services, underserved. Despite the fact that where I first lived had a large population of students and long-term residents, that area and other large sections of the city were what we now call food deserts. The crime—my God, the crime. Muggings, arsons, carjackings, the reduction of entire residential neighborhoods to crack house after crack house. None of that lay far from my doorstep.

Every new assault against humanity seemed to originate from Detroit and was duly reported in the national news. I grew to expect the worried calls from family after every fresh offense. The city had a rough-and-tumble charm to it, though. When I moved there, it was politically much more liberal than the stodgy South. I carved out a spot for myself and made it my home for twenty-five years, determined for a long time to see the good behind the disheveled exterior, and to say nice things.

I returned to Detroit for a few days this last summer—my first visit since I left Michigan in 2011 for the East Coast. It took a lot of convincing to get me to return. We visited in the days before the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision. The state had made a U-turn in its politics during my years there—one of the primary reasons we wanted to get the hell out. More recently, Michigan was one of the states most determined to dig in its heels against the inevitable and make its gay citizens as miserable as possible in the process. I’d known people who’d had to postpone wedding plans more than once simply because the state wouldn’t quit its vindictive and petty retributions against its gay population.

I was reluctant to take another bath, for however brief a stay, in the state’s bottomless pool of crazy. Shedding myself of its political stink after leaving had taken long enough. When Virginia is a progressive state in comparison, you know you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere.

But to Detroit for a visit I went. The suburbs where we stayed seemed fairly unchanged, close to where we’d lived during our last dozen years there. The wheelchair man, to our astonishment, still rocked and muttered from between his narrow brick enclosure. Some new storefronts had popped up. Others had closed. Some landmarks had been erased from my memories. Enough remained for me to navigate—both through the city’s streets and through my own memories as I calculated the changes around me.

On our first full day back, we went to visit the first house we bought as a couple. We’d originally chosen a tidy little colonial in what used to be a pleasant and green neighborhood just within the city of Detroit’s borders. At the time, it was heavily populated with police and fire fighters who lived there to fulfill city residence requirement. By Detroit standards, it was as safe as it gets—far enough from the city’s core that then the neighborhood seemed immune to the decay spreading through the downtown area.

We lived in that house for only five or six years. During that short time, the fire fighters and police moved away in search of greener pastures. The neatly-trimmed lawns became a little unkempt. Our neighbors grew a little older, got a little poorer. Then, almost overnight, the zip code south of us went toxic; we too moved farther out, but not before our home had been broken into and ransacked several times.

We’d looked in on the old home several times after escaping to the suburbs. The neighborhood always seemed a little shabbier every year. My god, though. This visit. We drove from Woodward across Eight Mile Road, while I looked at the window at the never-ending expanse of ugly just on the other side of the glass. Block after block and mile after mile of pawn shops, of strip clubs, hubcap dealers, shuttered businesses, empty lots, barbed wire fence, of concrete and asphalt and rust. There was greenery—though most of that was either weeds pushing up between cracks turned canyons in the long-neglected sidewalks, or spilling from the gutters of ruined and overgrown buildings. Mostly, though, I was seeing unending dilapidation of a sort I hadn’t witnessed since my departure east. Only worse.

Eventually we turned from Eight Mile down a commercial strip that had housed cute eateries and trusted family businesses when we lived in the area. Now it was mostly shuttered doors, broken windows, and curled, chipped paint for block after block. One bakery was trying to hold on. From the iron security bars covering its plate glass and its doorway, I suspected it wouldn’t be making the attempt for much longer.

Finally, we drove slowly down the broad avenue that had connected our residential street with the place my husband had been working at the time. This was the section that once had been among the safest in the city, where the neighborhood watch had been the active hobby of many a retiree and off-duty cop, where residents had taken pride in their abundant gardens and in the lawns trimmed and edged to a neat finish. Looking down the first street, I could see maybe ten or twelve houses on both sides of the street as we passed. Two were burnt-out shells, blackened and hollow remains of brick and timber, bad teeth in a sickly grin. A couple more of the lots were simply overgrown with waist-high weeds. Houses had been there not long before, but had been burned or demolished. A couple more of the houses had been boarded up and left vacant.

The next two streets proved that the first hadn’t been an anomaly. Visible from our car were more burnt-out homes, more abandoned homesteads, more wild growth, more neglect. The houses that hadn’t succumbed to the rot huddled to themselves on their narrow plots; they seemed drawn-in, cautious, afraid and embarrassed to acknowledge what was happening around them. The houses left whole were the aberrations. Their shabbiness made the ruins seem even more obscene to the eye. As we drove, I kept my hands pressed against the windows. “Good God,” I kept saying, numb at what I was seeing. “It’s a war zone. Good God.”

The street where we had lived during our earliest years as a couple hadn’t been hit quite as hard as the others. There were ruined buildings, and garages that had caught fire and never been replaced. There were broken windows, and abandoned homes, and several where nature had gone feral, but there were also multiple stretches of whole homes in a row. Ours was one of them. The old house had no summer flowers, no plantings, no decorations at all. The iron security bars over the window and doors hadn’t been there during our occupancy. The grass was overgrown, the paint battered and worn and probably untouched since we’d touched it up two decades ago. The house appeared to be hunched up and trying desperately not to attract notice. But it was hanging on.

I was shaken as we drove away in search of less depressing ways to spend our vacation time. All throughout that trip, when we’d encounter old friends I’d attempt to articulate how extensive was the devastation we’d witnessed. I tried to ask what, beyond the obvious ills of economic downturn and of a poverty that spread like cancer, had caused such rapid and near-complete ruin. They didn’t know, of course. They lived in areas far out from the crumbling wreckage—just as we’d thought we lived far enough away to avoid it, in those first years.

I don’t know the history of the man in the wheelchair. I don’t know what, if anything, area social workers and mental health professionals have tried to do for him. Another city faced with his problem would have solved it by building the wall anyway, consequences be damned, even if (maybe even preferably if) it drove the poor guy away from a place he’d called home. A small price to pay for a pretty new drug store, right? Still another might forcibly have put him into an institution. When I think of the man in his wheelchair, and of the gapped brick wall the drug store built around him, it occurs to me that the solution the arrived at here is very much the Detroit solution to things.

It seems kind, to let him have his space. It seems nice. But it doesn’t solve the problem at all. The man still sits there without supervision or proper care in all kinds of weather. And the drug store has a weird-looking wall with a huge gap in an odd place by night, and a sick man scaring away customers during the day. It’s a compromise that benefits no one. A side-stepping of responsibility that allows everything to continue, without helping anybody to progress.

Detroiters tend to get upset when outsiders concentrate so much on its images of ruin. A lot of Detroiters want those outsiders to avert their eyes, to focus upon the city’s nice parts—the new stadiums, the lights on the Fox Theater, the handful of acclaimed downtown restaurants, the very narrow section of downtown that isn’t falling apart at the seams. They want their own to say nice things about the city, so that the rest of the world has nice things to say as well. Nice words, though, don’t solve the very real problems the city has in the vast crumbling expanses that nobody wants to talk about.

There’s a reason outsiders are fascinated by those many images of Detroit’s ruined buildings: such disintegration doesn’t happen elsewhere in this country. Certainly in any city there are dilapidated structures, even run-down neighborhoods. None of that, though, compares to what has happened in Detroit in the last several decades. Nothing. Not in the epidemic size of it. Not in the severity. The fact that a number residents of the metro Detroit area assume the cancer has gotten just as bad everywhere else only confirms how willfully blind they are to the decay spiraling around them.

Many of my friends in Detroit know the issues their city faces. Many of them fight the good fight and work daily to combat them. But there’s a significant population whose automatic response is to limit themselves to nice places, limit their talk to nice things. They build a wall that solves no one’s problems, they side-step a little further away. And the deterioration continues.

Conversations with My Father: Gotcha Siri Edition

ME: Now, unlike your old iPad, this iPad has Siri.
MY FATHER: Re-ally now!
ME: Yes. I know you have longed for Siri.
MY FATHER (grabbing for the iPad): Let me try to stump Siri.
ME (grabbing the iPad back): The goal here is not to stump Siri. It’s that Siri can help you out with a few little tasks that ordinarily you’d have to open up apps to do, thus saving you a few steps and—
MY FATHER (grabbing for the iPad): Oh, I’ve got questions for Siri.
ME: God, you’re like a child. Just wait. Please. Okay?
MY FATHER: Fine.
ME: Okay. Now, to use Siri, you have to hold down the button until it makes this noise. . . .
IPAD: Buh-boop!
ME: Then you ask your question in a loud, clear voice. And that’s it. Got it?
MY FATHER (grabbing for the iPad): Got it. Now—
ME: There are certain things you can ask Siri. You can ask Siri about the weather. You can ask Siri questions about what time movies are playing. You can ask Siri to set an alarm for you. You can ask Siri for directions. All of these things are things you’d ordinarily do. So let’s try—
MY FATHER: I said I’ve already got some questions for Siri.
ME: SO LET’S TRY SOMETHING SIMPLE. Okay? SIMPLE. Let’s do this.
IPAD: Buh-boop!
ME: What’s the temperature outside?
SIRI: The temperature outside is seventy-two degrees.
ME: See? Easy, and I didn’t have to open up an app to—
MY FATHER: Ask her the temperature inside.
ME: What? Why? No, your iPad isn’t actually monitoring the temperature. It’s retrieving information from the National Weather Service. It’s not going to know the temperature inside your house.
MY FATHER: Let me try.
ME: I’m not sure you’ve grasped the—
MY FATHER: It’s my iPad.
ME: Fine. It’s your iPad. Go ahead. You remember what to do?
MY FATHER: How could I not? You go into exhaustive detail about everything.
ME: Fine. All yours. Go for it. Push the button until it beeps, and ask your question.
MY FATHER: Excellent.
IPAD: Buh-boop!
MY FATHER: (stares at the iPad silently)
ME (after a long moment): And ask your question.
SIRI: I’m sorry, I don’t know and ask your question.
MY FATHER: That was it?
ME: After the beep, you need to ask your question.
MY FATHER: Ohhhhh. Okay.
ME: Try it again.
IPAD: Buh-boop!
MY FATHER: (stares at the iPad silently)
ME (after a long moment): Did you hear the beep?
SIRI: I’m sorry, I don’t know about hear the beep.
ME: When you hear the beep, ask your question. You told me you had questions.
MY FATHER: Oh, I’ve got questions!
ME (suspicious): Wait, what question are you going to ask?
MY FATHER: I’m going to ask how many—
ME: No. You are going to ask, What’s the weather forecast for tomorrow.
MY FATHER: That’s boring.
ME: You are going to ask, What’s the weather forecast for tomorrow. What are you going to ask?
MY FATHER (begrudgingly): What’s the weather forecast for tomorrow.
ME: Right.
IPAD: Buh-boop!
MY FATHER (in a mincing voice): What’s the weather forecast for tomorrow?
ME: HEY.
SIRI: Tomorrow looks like a beautiful day—sunny and 76 degrees!
ME: See? Now you’ve got it.
IPAD: Buh-boop!
MY FATHER: Hey Siri, how many goals did the U.S. men’s lacrosse team score during the 2012 season?
SIRI: I’m sorry, Alicia. I don’t know anything about Lacrosse.
MY FATHER: Hah!!
ME: Siri’s not going to know—hey, why is it calling you Alicia instead of Alan?
IPAD: Buh-boop!
MY FATHER: Siri, I bet you can’t tell me how many witnesses were present at the signing of the Treaty of Appomattox.
SIRI: Sorry, Alicia. I don’t know about the Treaty of Appomattox.
MY FATHER: Hah!!
ME: You can’t—why is it calling you by my sister’s—
IPAD: Buh-boop!
MY FATHER: Siri, who took over leadership of Bacon’s Rebellion after Nathaniel Bacon died, and what did Bacon die of?
SIRI: I’m sorry, I can’t answer that question.
MY FATHER: Hah!! Gotcha Siri!
ME: I think you’ve got an overinflated idea of what Siri—
IPAD: Buh-boop!
MY FATHER: Okay, Siri, a brewery was connected with the Baltimore Orioles during the 1964-65 season. What was the name of the brewery and how was it connected?
SIRI: I’m sorry, Alicia. I don’t know about a brewery was connected with the Baltimore.
MY FATHER: HAH!! GOTCHA!!
ME: Why don’t I just go watch some television while you amuse yourself.

Conversations with My Father: Button-Pushing Edition

ME: Okay. We are going to set up your new iPad so that you can keep it secure and unlock it with your thumbprint.
MY FATHER: How long does the thumbprint last?
ME: What?
MY FATHER: If I give it my thumbprint, how long does the thumbprint last?
ME: How long does your thumbprint last? The iPad will store information about your thumbprint in its memory, so that when you place your thumb on the sensor, it will compare what it sees to what’s it has on record. If it recognizes what it senses as your thumbprint, it will unlock. . . .
MY FATHER: What if there’s a thief. . . ?
ME: He won’t be able to unlock your iPad.
MY FATHER: Because my thumbprint will have faded?
ME: No, because the thief’s thumbprint won’t match yours. Your thumbprint won’t fade. It’s stored away. The iPad will ask for his thumbprint, he’ll put his thumb on the sensor, and since it won’t match yours, he won’t be able to get your sensitive information inside.
MY FATHER: Like my clouds?
ME: You mean your information stored in the cloud? Yes, like that.
MY FATHER: Is my thumbprint in the cloud?
ME: No. Your thumbprint is in the processor inside the iPad.
MY FATHER: So how long does my thumbprint last?
ME (sighing): Your thumbprint will last forever. As long as the planets spin eternally around distant suns, so shall last your thumbprints.
MY FATHER: What if the thief has the same fingerprints as I?
ME: How many of those CSI shows have you watched?
MY FATHER: There are only four of them.
ME: And all four are all dreadful.
MY FATHER: I have learned a lot from CSI.
ME: Apparently not about fingerprints.
MY FATHER: Can thieves steal my fingerprints from my iPad on the dark web?
ME: Your iPad is not connected to the dark web. I’m pretty sure that the dark web is something that your CSI: Cyber show made up to scare people.
MY FATHER: That’s what hackers using the dark web would like you to think.
ME: Do you really think it’s likely that a thief would have the same fingerprints as you?
MY FATHER: In one episode, thieves stole the victim’s fingerprints by. . . .
ME: No thief is that desperate to get your iPad. So I want you to put your right thumb over the button. You’re going to lower it down and touch the button and lift it again, but don’t press—
MY FATHER: (presses the button)
IPAD: Beep!
ME: No, don’t press—
MY FATHER: (presses the button)
IPAD: Beep!
ME: No, I said don’t press the—
MY FATHER: (presses the button)
IPAD: Beep!
ME: DON’T PRESS THE BUTTON. God.
MY FATHER: Well you said—
ME: I said Don’t. Press. The. Button. Christ! Don’t press the button! Don’t press the button!
MY FATHER: You don’t have to get so worked up.
ME: Now listen. When I tell you, you are going to lower your finger onto the sensor. Just rest it there. Don’t push it. Then you will lift it up and put it down again. Okay? Do we understand what we’re doing?
MY FATHER (stiffly): I believe you’ve made yourself adequately clear.
ME: Okay then. Now. Lower your finger.
MY FATHER: (presses the button)
IPAD: Beep!
ME: I swear to god. I am going to take this ffffff. . . so-and-so iPad and just give it to the thieves.

Book Review Roundup

Back in my grade school days, writing book reports always seemed like a grim and tedious task. Perhaps it was the way we were taught to write them as dry summaries of the plots, devoid of any real opinions of our own.

Nowadays, of course, it sometimes seem that sitting down and writing the report afterward is the best part. Particularly when the book is dull (hello, How to be a Victorian) or downright offensive (I'm looking at you, William Goldman and The Season. I knew there was a reason I never liked The Princess Bride).


Cured: How the Berlin Patients Defeated HIV and Forever Changed Medical Science
by Nathalia Holt
4 of 5 stars
The ability to explain complex scientific issues in layman's terms is a rare enough gift. Nathalia Holt's ability to explicate the intricacies of the HIV virus and its workings without condescending to the reader is nothing short of astonishing. In her assay of the various clinical attempts to analyze and develop strategies to rid the virus from the human body—or at least to effect a 'functional cure' for those affected by it—Holt manages to shed light into areas of medicine and biology normally murky to those of us with little exposure to the science of HIV and AIDS. In doing so, she has created a comprehensive and readable survey of current approaches to treatment—and identifies areas in which attention and funding is lacking.

Holt's book is also the only scientific work I've read in which a researcher is romanced by an Arab prince on a white horse. Thumbs up for that alone!

Miss Pym Disposes
by Josephine Tey
4 of 5 stars
Miss Pym Disposes is a curiously tough nut to classify among Josephine Tey's crime stories. There's no face-to-face murder, so it's not really a murder mystery. Miss Pym herself is a self-taught psychologist, so the novel's not a detective story per se (nor does it delve with much clinical rigor into psychology). No crime actually occurs until the eighty-percent point, by which juncture many readers might have forgotten that they were reading a mystery at all. There's no arrest, no confession from the murderer. Very few of the hallmarks of the actual murder mystery can be found in this one-off story.

Yet the novel, set in a young women's physical training college in post-war Britain, reads almost as if Tey was attempting in some abstract manner to subtract as many traditional elements of the cozy detective novel as possible and still come up with something identifiably of that genre. It's a wry comment on her readers' determination to make an amateur detective out of the most unlikely character, even as the author digs in her sensible heels and absolutely refuses to give them what they expect. Tey's unique readability shines through in the volume, though, and as in Brat Farrar, her many memorable characters give the narrative a timeless charm.

How Music Works
by David Byrne
4 of 5 stars
There's a little bit of something for everyone in this book by the former lead singer of Talking Heads. For music theorists and historians, there are chapters devoted to the how and why music takes the forms with which we're familiar, based on the prevailing modes of performance, the technology, and the ways in which people have listened to music during any given historical period. For fans of the celebrity biography, there's background and an exceedingly brief and glossy account of the rise of Talking Heads. Composers may be fascinated by the detailed accounts of how Byrne writes his lyrics. Aspiring musicians interested in how bands make money should read the comprehensive discussion of how the music industry has changed over the last century, and the current types of contracts available to those who want to make a living through song creation. Hipsters get a chapter of their own on how to make a 'scene' popular. And anyone vitally interested in Byrne's income from his last few albums—his accountants, perhaps—will find down-to-the-penny descriptions.

Ultimately Byrne's choice of title is telling; his book isn't so much about what music is, or can be, as it is a collection of essays on the business of music from creation to recording to distribution and beyond. Its episodic nature might cause a reader's attention to flag in some sections, but there's almost certain to be something of interest in Byrne's interesting and literate book that's half analysis and half autobiography.

Turnabout
by Thorne Smith
5 of 5 stars
Just as one doesn't turn to Wodehouse for deep thought or characterization, one doesn't pick up a Thorne Smith novel hoping for trenchant realism. From the former author we expect a merry cavalcade of simpletons, wise butlers, tart aunts, and cow creamers; from Smith you get bootleg gin, hip flasks brimming with rye, supernatural antics, courtroom scenes with crabby old judges, and, inevitably, women's step-ins.

The premise of Turnabout involves a husband and wife body switch, executed by means so trivial that even the author barely spends any time justifying it. The comic results, however, are snicker-out-loud funny, as the pair stretch and snap their gender roles to lengths greater than Silly Putty itself could bear. Sure, the effort is lightweight, but who really cares when Smith's effortless style elicits so many belly laughs?

The Illusionists
by Rosie Thomas
4 of 5 stars
Rosie Thomas' The Illusionists is a satisfying tale of late nineteenth-century stage magicians at the romantic height peak of the Victorian stage. The illusionists of the title are a theatrical troupe formed out of motley backgrounds—a flashy show-off with a humble background, a young woman desiring independence and modern freedoms, a dwarf with significant skills in legerdemain, a German maker of complicated automata, a technician with a broken heart, and a stage hand with an uncanny gift for mimicry. The illusionists' individual desires for fame and fortune often at odds with their intersecting love triangles, and their struggles for power over the theater and its audiences cause constant conflict among the group, yet Thomas manages to keep the tale afloat like a particularly gripping old-fashioned stage show—a literary light entertainment with thrilling interludes of danger.

Although it's not anywhere nearly as lavish with period detail as a Sarah Waters novel, and although there aren't really any twists or turns that a sharp-eyed audience member couldn't spot coming from the back of the mezzanine, The Illusionists is still a fun and more than occasionally touching read. For those who are, like myself, a sucker for either novels of the Victorian era or for tales about magicians and actors, it's a sure-fire bet.

Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal (Faber Finds)
by Roy Horniman
4 of 5 stars
Roy Horniman's 1907 novel Israel Rank is better known as the inspiration for the 1949 Alec Guinness film Kind Hearts & Coronets, as well as the 2013 Best Musical A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder. All three entertainments share the similar high concept, in which a low-ranking aspirant to a high-profile estate and title faces the gallows after concocting a series of comic murders designed to make him the sole inheritor.

Black comedy, indeed. What might be interesting to modern readers, however, is how much more thoroughly dark and nasty the novel is in comparison to the giddier pleasures of the film and musical. Horniman's creation is hornier as well, for while the heirs in the adaptations both juggle the sexual attentions of two women, Israel Rank manages to keep on the hook no less than three. Also, Horniman's titular hero is as unreliable and criminally self-deluded a character as his literary serial-murderer cousin, the narrator of James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner—and the results are undeniably comic. Still, the murders in Kind Hearts and Gentleman's Guide both tend to be bloodless—and Israel Rank never lets the reader forget that murder is a dirty, foul business with actual consequences.

In Israel Rank the main character's mother is expelled from the noble Gascoyne family for marrying a Jew; its adaptations graciously avoid the sticky issue and rather genteelly look down upon their protagonist's late father for being . . . shudder! . . . a musician. Horniman's approach, however, is a more aggressive means of challenging not only the gentry's abundant prejudices, but as well the assumptions of his contemporary readers as well. While it's not as lightweight a confection as either Kind Hearts or Gentleman's Guide, for lovers of visceral, dark period literature, this little-known novel might prove a gem.

The Magician's Land
by Lev Grossman
5 of 5 stars
Lev Grossman's Brakebills novels have always seemed a bit like multi-headed hydras. The first entry in the series, The Magicians, was a little bit Harry Potter, a little bit Narnia, and a little bit any of those novels from the nineteen-nineties featuring disaffected youths in big cities with too much money, time, and drugs on their hands. The Magician's Land is no different, really. It's story is part caper, part fairy tale, and a whole mess of Narnia.

It's a good read, though. The characters it reunites for one final go-round in the magical land of Fillory have softened considerably since their introduction—the main character of Quentin, in particular, is no longer as unlikable as he once was. The novel's many action sequences are as exciting as ever, and the stakes for this last entry in the trilogy have increased exponentially. It's something of a feat that Grossman manages to tie up as many loose ends here as he does, while still bringing the series to a satisfying and tender conclusion. Highly recommended—especially for readers who feel they're too cool for old-fashioned fantasies even as they have a secret sentimental soft spot for them.

Timeline
by Michael Crichton
3 of 5 stars
I'd forgotten there was a recipe for a Michael Crichton thriller: one part brief boilerplate character sketches, two parts regurgitation of science voodoo to get the premise across, followed by three parts of competently-written action sequences. Literature it's not, but it gets the pages turning in a hurry.

The Marvelous Land of Oz
by L. Frank Baum
5 of 5 stars
The Marvelous Land of Oz is certainly the queerest of all the Baum Oz books. It would take nearly twenty-five years for another novel to be published—Virginia Woolf's Orlando—that would so prominently feature another transgender main character. Thrown in some explicit witch-on-princess lip wrestling and some Scarecrow-on-the-metrosexual-Tin-Man action in John R. Neil illustrations, and you've got yourself quite an interesting list of stereotype-refuting sexualities for a book published in 1904.

May I take a moment, though, to mention General Jinjur, leader of the women's revolutionary army against the Emerald City? Easily the most progressive and the coolest of all of Baum's characters—not to mention the most fashion-forward—she gets a bit of a short shaft here. After Jinjur uproots and remolds gender roles in Emerald City households to assert the equality of women fifteen years before they got the vote in the backwards U.S., she's deposed somewhat abruptly by the totalitarian forces of Glinda the "Good." And for what? Kicking back and enjoying a few caramels after her coup? Poppycock. Jinjur deserved a book of her own, if not a whole series.

The Paying Guests
by Sarah Waters
4 of 5 stars
With its obsession over the minutiae of housekeeping, its decidedly middle-class focus, and its nearly camp levels of stiff-upper-lip British earnestness, Sarah Waters' The Paying Guests is very much a pastiche—if not an outright parody—of the middlebrow feminine novel of the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties. The genre, typified by such writers as Nancy Mitford or Elizabeth Taylor or Stella Gibbons, saw its writers straddling the fine line between modernity and conservatism as well as the vast divide between high ideals and so-called 'low' topics involving violence and sexuality. Particularly female sexuality.

Throughout its domestic first half, The Paying Guests remains true to the genre's breezy, chipper spirit as its protagonist, Frances Wray, faces social and economic change in post-World War I London—a world in which her household has been stripped of patriarchy and servants and in which she and her mother are forced to take boarders in order to make ends meet. But it's also a world in which Frances has almost unlimited opportunity to embrace the upheaval, particularly when it comes to her own lesbianism, which Waters and her heroine both present with unapologetic frankness.

That the second half of The Paying Guests appropriates many of the tropes of an equally popular form of literature of the period—the British murder mysteries of writers like Agatha Christie or Josephine Tey—should surprise none of Waters' fans. Most of the author's books focus on criminals, from the grand schemes of hardened pickpockets and thieves in the Dickensian pastiche Fingersmith, to the lurid deceptions of Affinity, to the almost too-subtle-for-most-readers manipulations of the narrator in the du Maurier-flavored The Little Stranger. The tension resulting from the unlikely amalgam of the two genres is inexorable as the gears of justice grind slowly away. Waters' novel may not have the dark twists of plot that characterize her other novels, but its sense of impending doom, and the questions it raises of whether the protagonist's seeming dismal fate can ever be overcome, are just as pungent . . . if not even more so.

Read as a literary novel commenting upon, and occasionally mocking, its genre forebears, The Paying Guests is actually something of a gem. I question, however, whether the feminine middlebrow novel is something with which most readers today are familiar, or even know exists. Without that context, to the casual reader Frances might easily come off as some unlikely tiresome creature who, despite proclaiming herself a lesbian, sticks doggedly and without much reason to a traditional middle-class morality. The crimes to which she is witness might be viewed as so much police procedure without payoff. The novel is still a great read—yet it admittedly lacks the intricate plotting and serpentine delights that have epitomized Waters' other ventures into playing with literary genres.

The Sundial
by Shirley Jackson
4 of 5 stars
Shirley Jackson's 1958 novel The Sundial would be a hard sell to today's publishers, none of whom would want to touch a misanthropical allegory involving the residents of a single estate, each more thoroughly dislikable than the last, awaiting a destruction of the world as revealed in a oracular epiphany. Jackson's claustrophobic setting, which rarely ventures beyond the front gates of her Halloran House, foreshadows her next work, the classic The Haunting of Hill House—yet it's deliberately neither as atmospheric or as chilling in construction.

What The Sundial happens to have working in its favor is Jackson's abundant and subtle dry humor. It leavens the cynical proceedings, rendering them more wry than sour. Whether the Halloran family's prophesied utopian future comes to pass may be doubtful, but the workings of its insular and dystopian present are laid bare in Jackson's unique, deadpan style.

A Plague of Angels
by Sheri S. Tepper
4 of 5 stars
Sheri S. Tepper's 1993 outing is a bit of an oddity. Fairytale villages complete with creatures from fable mingle freely in its pages with gang-ruled dystopian post-apocalyptic cities seemingly straight out of a nineteen-eighties Pat Benatar music video extravaganza. The author takes the then-current topical hot buttons of sexually-transmitted diseases, women as sexual commodities, and the dangers of technological development gone wild, mixes in some of her favorite eco-feminist concerns, and finally throws in some talking animals and saintly former Native Americans with a what-the-hell authorial vim.

The recipe sounds like a bit of a mess. Although A Plague of Angels is one of Tepper's most sprawling novels—almost sometimes to the point of seeming unfocused—two decades on it still holds together quite well, thanks to its vigorous storytelling. As science fiction, it's nothing like anything anyone else has written. As always, however, Tepper's oracular urgency comes through loud and clear.

The Waters Rising
by Sheri S. Tepper
4 of 5 stars
I confess: in 2012 when I first read The Waters Rising, Sheri S. Tepper's sequel to A Plague of Angels, I thought it was the pokiest, most incredibly dull entry of all the author's novels. I found it slow-paced, confusing, pointless, and downright weird.

I'm a little surprised with myself, frankly, because when approaching the book again (with mighty low expectations), I found it engrossing. The parts I found sluggish now seemed paced with fine, deliberate intrigue. Sections that originally had seemed torpid now seemed subtle. Tepper's world-building is always weird, but that's one of the reasons I tend to like her.

Readers expecting a fast-paced Tepper novel like Raising the Stones or even one of her more hectic creations like A Plague of Angels will feel ill-served by The Waters Rising. Readers willing to accept the books intricacies and measured pace, however, will find it a rewarding investment of time.

Fish Tails
by Sheri S. Tepper
4 of 5 stars
It's fitting—and a little weird—that Fish Tails, Sheri S. Tepper's thirty-fifth novel, features a handful of major characters from her very first novels published over thirty years ago. Weird, because the connection between her The True Game series and the books in her most recent Plague of Angels trilogy seems tenuous at best. Fitting, because the interplay between the two knits together both ends of Tepper's career as a writer, and highlights the fact that for most of her career she's shown an unflagging passion for one central theme: bringing mindfulness to the human race's relationship to the planet and the diverse ecosystems of which it's a part.

Fish Tails is a picaresque escapade of sorts that follows the protagonists of The Waters Rising as they travel through their world to spread warnings of an impending watery apocalypse. Read as an exercise in world-building, it's an impressive feat; Tepper can go on at considerable length about the aerodynamic makeup of a griffin wing, for example, or the intimate details and mating habits of extra-planetary cultures. (And she does.) The book's garrulous characters spend so much time explaining their cultures, however, or acting as the orators of Tepper's ecofeminist brand, that the book is actually fairly free of Tepper's multi-threaded plots. Readers looking for a tense read with strong antagonists, as in Raising the Stones or her Marianne series, or any of the books from the height of her career, are likely to remain unmoved.

It's rare to encounter authors who, over the course of several decades, remain uncompromising and so focused upon a single message. Tepper's often faulted for being preachy. It's tough, however, to claim she's not right.

How to Be a Victorian
by Ruth Goodman
2 of 5 stars
Ruth Goodman's cross-class survey of life during the Victorian age is designed for the most casual of readers. Structured to follow the typical day of a British citizen during the era, it begins at dawn with the daily ablutions and breakfast, and ends after sunset with bed. And by bed, Goodman means with sex, which apparently she couldn't wedge anywhere else.

None of the information Goodman presents is unavailable elsewhere, and her survey format has been done before—and better, including in Daniel Pool's What Jane Austen Ate & Charles Dickens Knew The author, a social historian who has been a presenter on historical re-enactment television programs for the BBC, doesn't bring anything particularly special or insightful to the table here. In fact, I find her hyperbolic assertions, such as that a diet of bland Victorian fare with no seasonings stronger than an onion awakened her palate to a sensory rainbow of subtleties, to be absolute hogswallop. Take How to Be a Victorian for the light social history it is—but you'd do better to get your information elsewhere.

The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway
by William Goldman
2 of 5 stars
There's a moment every gay man dreads—the split second when the topic of sexuality arises and somebody's smile turns into a snarl. It might happen when a relative unknowingly drops some sexual slur; it might come when a friend makes a cutting aside about gays, or a stranger on the street letting an epithet fly. Or for gay readers, it might be the moment that a book turns sour when the author makes his prejudices known. Even though a particular insult might not be directed at us—especially when we're merely a reader—it still stings like a slap across the face. And for gay readers of a certain age, we remember well a time when we were expected to shut up, take the slaps, and keep our opinions to ourselves.

William Goldman's The Season, a nonfictional play-by-play account of the 1967-68 Broadway theatrical season, is a relic of that age. Hoo boy, does it show. The first hard slap arrives barely before the first paragraph's conclusion, when the author sneers at 'a flutter of fags' who've arrived to see Judy Garland in performance—then, for readers who didn't quite get the jargon, adds that they're 'obvious homosexuals.' A scant couple of paragraphs later, he has someone opine that it was a pity they didn't get all the fags at Auschwitz.

It's the kind of opening that, forty-five years after its publication, makes one grateful for all the progress since.

Because it really doesn't get any better, as the book progresses. Goldman asserts once that there's "nothing remotely wrong with liking plays that have homosexual themes, productions, or performances", except "when homosexual taste becomes distorting to the play itself"—but just about everything he dislikes about the theater—heck, about the entire world—boils down to what he imagines as distorted homosexual taste. He's worried when an actor "swishes too much." He's upset at plays in which women change their minds and switch from one love interest to another—because switching partners for novelty is what the fags do, he explains. He gets into a lather about a spate of plays that examine the institution of marriage as fundamentally unsound, because that's what the sneaky homosexuals want it to be.

Goldman's angry that the New York Times has features of "no real news value" that are included because homosexuals like them. He spends several pages scribbling angrily about pop culture ukulele sensation Tiny Tim, whose high falsetto and stringy hair obviously reveal him to be a blatant and unapologetic homosexual. (Was he? I don't know.) He's thoroughly flummoxed by the fact that in a Cosmopolitan article talking about Jacqueline Onassis' friends, "at least four of the men listed are internationally famous homosexuals." (When I start a rock band, by the way, Internationally Famous Homosexuals will be the name.) Even a manly man's man like writer Ernest Hemingway isn't masculine enough for Goldman. Hemingway, in his autobiography, said something or other that proved him to be, and I quote, "a bitch."

By the time the book nears its conclusion, Goldman is frothing at the mouth at how Hair is an utter failure primarily, as he explains in exquisite detail for three pages, because it actually and relentlessly forces him to endure, at face level, actor's penises. Goldman doesn't want or need to see those! But it's fairly clear that he has other targets as well. He's not particularly fond of women—he has little to say of noted theatrical females except that a few of them "really need to lose some weight." He loathes intellectuals, and goes out of his way to present some pretentious twaddle that he passes off as dialogue from a lauded play with snob appeal, invites his readers to sneer at it, and then reveals that he wrote it himself—as if to prove that any ol' regular Joe could be a playwright. And most of all he dislikes critics, giving them a vicious savaging (especially if they work at Newsweek, which in 1970 was apparently flush with internationally famous homosexuals) that seems less the work of Goldman the dispassionate journalist, and more an act of Goldman, novelist and screenwriter with a few grudges against critics under his belt.

When Goldman takes the time to examine what makes a play work or not work, he makes a compelling case—as he does in the outstanding chapter on the musical Golden Rainbow, in which he dissects all the ways a musical involving Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme went terribly wrong. When he squanders his opportunities, it's disappointing. In a chapter ostensibly about the classic play, Loot, he notes in the space of a single sentence that Loot opened and on Broadway and that it was authored by Joe Orton, then proceeds to write a couple of dozen unrelated pages about corruption in the box office in which Loot is never again mentioned. When he's supposed to be writing about Edward Albee, he instead carps for an entire chapter about the depravities of internationally famous homosexuals. As interesting the topic and as readable the prose, I found The Season too full of slaps to retain appeal.

Perhaps at the time of the book's publication it might've been argued that Goldman was fairly progressive in his stance. He does, after all, refer to gays as a "persecuted minority group." But then he'll turn around and administer a backhanded rebuke, like making the grandiloquent generalization, "If homosexuals have an enemy, it is age."

No, Mr. Goldman. If homosexuals have an enemy, it's guys like you and your buddy who wanted Auschwitz to finish the job.

Time and Time Again
by Ben Elton
3 of 5 stars
Aside from some subtle comedic flourishes, there's precious little in Ben Elton's time-travel extravaganza, Time and Time Again, to betray the author's substantial fame as a humorist of both stage and many a screenplay. What Elton has produced, however, is a fast-moving science fiction adventure that, while competently told, isn't really much more.

Most time-travel tales fall flat for me in the initial set-up; it takes a delicate balance of explication and believable motivation. In Stephen King's 11/22/63, for example, I never really bought into the reasons why an ordinary Joe would travel back to the Kennedy era merely on the say-so of a stranger in a restaurant. King managed, however, to wrangle a touching ending from a weak foundation. Elton, on the other hand, grapples with the opposite problem: though his book provides a rock-solid reason and basis for its hero to take the leap from 2024 to 1914 in order to prevent World War I, he fails to make much of anything that happens afterward. Along the way to his vague and unsatisfactory conclusion, Elton does manage to bring up one or two interesting alternate-history mind-distortions, but it's not really enough.

It's a shame when a book has a ripping first and second act, but fizzles completely in the third. Although it's eminently skippable, for curiosity seekers or for fans of the most lightweight of alternate history sagas, Time and Time Again is at least a quick and easy read.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
by Alan Bradley
5 of 5 stars
The juvenile heroine of Alan Bradley's not-at-all juvenile mystery series reads like a hybrid of the naively charming Cassandra Mortmain of I Capture the Castle and of the poison-obsessed Merricat Blackwood of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. And that's just fine with me.

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag
by Alan Bradley
3 of 5 stars
Eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, expert both in the chemical analysis of poisons and the art of detection, is as sharp and charming as ever in her second outing as amateur sleuth.

The book suffers, however, from a problem in pacing; the murder itself doesn't take place until near the midway point, leaving Flavia for much of the volume a fairly passive observer to the fairly dull antics of the adults around her. The real charm to the first book in the series was watching the girl detective's mind at work as she puzzled, connived, and charmed her way to the solution. Having the good stuff all confined to the rushed chapters in the book's second half is a bit like having to eat a heck of a lot of undesirable veg in order to have a few bites of pudding.

A Darker Shade of Magic
by V.E. Schwab
4 of 5 stars
A Darker Shade of Magic is a rip-roaring fantasy adventure set in a series of parallel-universe Londons—apocalypse-torn Black London, magic-hungry White London, magic-rich Red London, and the magicless Gray London.

As compelling and relentless as the writing is here, however, and as richly-described the various Londons, I'm more than a little baffled at how little a sense of period and time Schwab lends to the book. The year is supposed to be 1819, and even Gray London—the equivalent of our world—seems barely to be of that decade, much less of the nineteenth century. Little inconsistencies abound; even given the flexibility afforded a totally different parallel universe, I seriously doubt any monarch of any world's 1819 London would utter as banal a sentence as "Everything going to be okay."
Nitpicking aside, the novel's a swift-moving and vividly-imagined gem.

Vicious
by V.E. Schwab, Victoria Schwab
4 of 5 stars
V. E. Schwab's take on college students granted superpowers after a lab hypothesis gone terribly wrong is chock-full of unlikable and deeply unsympathetic characters. That's perfectly fine, given that the novel is one of the most tense, most fun-to-read page-turners I've had in my hands for years. Intensely blinkered as her super-villains are, and as impure their every motive, Vicious progresses at such a pace that it's nearly impossible to put down.