My parents’ musical tastes crystalized sometime right around 1960. Folk music filled the metal rack that held their portable record player—and by ‘portable’ I mean that if you wrapped both your paws around the handle and really put your back into it, you could probably move the device a few inches without needing a furniture dolly. (Do it twice and you wouldn’t have to work out the rest of the week.) Odetta and the Kingston Trio knocked boots with the Limeliters, and they all cowered before the mighty typhoon that was Harry Belafonte.
But they also had a great appreciation for show tunes. If earnest folk music took up half their collection of LPs, what they called ‘soundtracks’ filled the rest. “Original cast recordingsssss,” I can hear some Broadway queen hiss, anxious to show both his fangs and his 45th Street cred. Whatever. To my parents they were soundtracks, and the soundtrack of my youth was equal parts songs about holes in a bucket and hammering in the evening all over the land as well as considering yourself part of the furniture and blossoms of snow blessing my homeland forever.
When the cast album of 1776 came out, it intersected so neatly with my parents’ profession as history professors that they wore out the vinyl. We were the first household I knew to own the concept album of Jesus Christ Superstar; when it came out the recording was regarded as blasphemous in traditional circles, but it was fairly de rigueur among a certain type of academic intellectuals. My mother had a soft spot for My Fair Lady. My dad was more of a South Pacific kind of guy. Both of them, however, regarded The Music Man as a high point in the American musical theater. When the first cast album I ever bought with my own money turned out to be the original Broadway version of Evita, my mother sniffed a little and said it was all right but no Fantasticks.
There was one show, however, that was absolutely forbidden from my parents’ household. Cast album, soundtrack, or symphonic interpretation—they were all banned. In fact, so thorough and effective was the prohibition that it wasn’t until I was thirteen I knew the show even existed. My seventh-grade language arts teacher was a weedy little man with a wispy Benjamin Franklin ‘do who’d wanted to be a professional poet in his youth. Sadly for him, his only backup career was teaching literature to ungrateful little public school kids. His big bid for ‘relevance’ was to have us read first Romeo and Juliet over the course of two weeks, and then compare it in the next two to West Side Story.
And I was all like, West Side Whaaaaat?
I honestly hadn’t ever heard of it. Leonard Bernstein I knew. We’d played the Candide overture in citywide band. But while a couple of the girls in my class instantly were able to warble out strains from “Tonight” and “Maria” when they heard about what we’d be doing, I was totally in the dark. The teacher, when he wasn’t grabbing remnants of the lank long blond hair that still clung stubbornly to either side of his otherwise bald skull and saying private prayers to a stone-faced God who’d condemned him to harsh penance at Henderson Middle School, seemed to assume that we all knew the gist of West Side Story. And he was probably correct to do so. A good twenty-one years after its premier, the musical certainly wasn’t as current or hip as he seemed to assume, but just about everyone had seen the movie on TV at some point and knew it had that lady from The Electric Company in it. West Side Story was simply a part of the culture at the time.
Except my culture, of course. I went home and looked to see if my parents happened to have a copy of it among their soundtracks. No such luck. On my own initiative, I took the bus to the Richmond Public Library and checked out the original cast album from the music library. I’d just put the needle into the overture and pulled out my paperback combining Romeo and Juliet with the screenplay of West Side Story when my mother came home.
She gave me the coldest stare I’d ever gotten. “What,” she intoned frostily, “is that.”
I told her it was West Side Story.
“I know what it is!” she barked. “Don’t you know that’s banned from this house?!”
With astonishment, I had to tell her that I didn’t even know West Side Story was a thing until that week, so how could I know it was banned? She told me not to be mouthy. Once I’d convinced her that I wasn’t trying to be all teenaged-defiant on her by bringing proscribed Broadway tunes into our Presbyterian household and that I genuinely had a curiosity to know what the songs sounded like that we were discussing in language arts class, she set her lips into an unamused line, marched over to the file cabinet where we stored miscellaneous items, and returned with a pair of over-the-ear headphones.
It was the nineteen-seventies. The headphones were more cumbersome than the biggest gem-bedecked headdress ever donned by a showgirl at the Ziegfeld Follies. They were so heavy that if I didn’t sit up perfectly straight and keep my neck rigid, I’d find myself thrown off-balance and sent sprawling down to the floor. Once she’d planted them over my ears, I saw her lips moving with warning.
I had to remove the headphones to hear what she’d said. “What?”
She glared at me. “Don’t let your father find out.”
I found out later that the ban wasn’t for political reasons, like our family’s boycott of Volkswagen. Nor was it like the family ban on tuna because of the high mercury content and what the fishing industry did to those poor dolphins. My parents simply didn’t want West Side Story in the house because during their early twenties, the album was so heavily played, and its songs so relentlessly covered by every popular artist imaginable and on every radio and television channel, they reached a point of saturation from which they still hadn’t recovered. My mother said listening to “Maria” made her sick to her stomach. Which, considering her Crohn’s Disease, probably wasn’t hyperbole. She really would hug her midsection and stumble from the room, feeling unwell.
And it’s a reaction I understand as an adult, since I have my own West Side Story. It’s Godspell. Please. Never play any of its songs in front of me. Not unless you want to see me clutch my tum-tum and run for the bathroom with a sour face, while I pass copious amounts of gas. Seriously.
My distaste for Godspell arises from the period in the early nineteen-seventies when Biblical stories suddenly became fodder for mainstream musicals. Jesus Christ Superstar hit like an earthquake, but its counterculture leanings and anti-government undertones were too dark in texture for any of it to be included in church services. Even its gentler songs, like “Everything’s All Right” or “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” would have had the older and crankier members of our church banging their canes on the sanctuary floor and grumping about demon rock-and-roll. A couple of years later, though, my church youth choir was romping singing the softer, playground rock of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and more especially, Godspell.
The church I attended was down the street from both the Union Theological Seminary and the Presbyterian School for Christian Education. The first was the more serious school for aspiring ministers; the latter was the more laid-back institution for full-time future Sunday school teachers who loved construction paper craft projects and the scent of paste glue. Both, in the early nineteen-seventies, were havens for post-college youth with long frizzy hair, conscientious objections to the Vietnam War, and unreasonably optimistic upbeat visions for a Coca-Cola future in which children of all races clasped hands and sang about wanting teach the world to sing in perfect har-moh-nee.
Because we were the closest Presbyterian church to these two Presbyterian educational institutions, our Sunday school classrooms overflowed with these stinky hippies. To a one, every single seminary kid came in convinced that with-it new approaches like folk-rock services would keep us kids interested in that cool cat Christ, so hey, let’s do the lotus position on some bean bag chairs and rap about The Big Guy. Jesus Christ Superstar was too dangerous to bring into the sanctuary, for several years Godspell was the pablum we were fed multiple times a week.
Oh, it was dreadful. I shudder when I think about how many Sundays we youth pranced around our sanctuary with false smiles painted wide, hands extended into jazz fingers that Bob Fosse would’ve envied, chanting endless choruses of “Day by Day.” I am quite certain that the nursing home citizens upon whom we inflicted the fake enthusiasm of our “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord”, though they pretended to nod along, were in reality praying for a swift and merciful death. Every semester, when a new batch of the permed and denimed seminary students would invade the hallways of our education wing, they’d arrive with Big Ideals and Bright Ideas and construction paper and a copy of that god-damned LP of Godspell under their hairy, stinky armpits. The first thing they’d want to do would be to tell us to join hands, close our eyes, and sway back and forth while we sang a few rounds of “Bless the Lord” together. And I would want to throw up all over again.
I honestly can’t listen to Godspell today. I reached the saturation point during the Nixon Administration and forty years hasn’t erased the stench. Just hearing a few bars of that crap sends me instantly back to a place where all the bean bag chairs were of a particular shade of orange I’ve never seen since (thank The Big Guy) and where even the most well-ventilated room couldn’t eradicate the funk of stinky hippie sandal feet. I had to sit through a high school production of the show a few years back and my stomach was in such turmoil that by the time the kids were beseeching me to learn my lessons well, I was convinced I had appendicitis.
Christ, I can’t even see a Superman T-shirt without foaming at the mouth.
You might be wondering what’s prompted me to reminisce about Godspell. It’s simply that recently we went to see the revival of Pippin on Broadway. You might’ve heard about this production. Basically it landed at the Music Box and immediately began crapping out Tony and Drama Desk awards for itself. Everyone kept telling me it was the best Pippin ever. And my reaction to that statement was to recoil in horror and turn up my nose, much as if someone had offered me a big banquet plate of liver and onions and assured me it was the most scrumptious urine sponge I would ever put in my mouth.
Because basically I equate Pippin with Godspell, Stephen Schwartz’s other score doomed to countless bad college and community theater productions. (Perversely, I like The Baker’s Wife.) Both are earnest as hell. Both are relics of the hippie era. Both employ jazz fingers.
But when I got cheap tickets to the current production, I went with an open mind. You know what? It probably is the best Pippin I’ve ever seen. It’s colorfully staged, and energetically performed, and peppered with great performances. I loved Rachel Bay Jones as Catherine. The sets are eye-popping.
Yet I still dislike the musical itself, and it all boils down to the character of Pippin. My personal tolerance is low for watching a young hero whine—through hummable Stephen Schwartz songs—for three hours that a meaningful life hasn’t simply been handed to him on a velvet pillow. To Bob Fosse and anyone under the emotional age of fourteen back in the day, all that adolescent angst might’ve been fascinating. I simply find Pippin’s never-ending dissatisfaction to be a drag. The show might as well have been entitled White Male Entitlement: The Musical!
Pretty as this new production was, it still left me wanting to stand up in my seat and shout STFU, PIPPIN! Quitcher bellyaching, PIPPIN. Rivers might belong where they can ramble and eagles might belong where they can fly, but assholes belong in a pair of Hanes, PIPPIN. And the damned show still has jazz fingers.
Then the circus performers would come out again and do some fire-breathing tricks and distract my irritation at the source material. That’s probably the way I like my Pippin: with as much diversion as possible to keep me from remembering what show I’m watching.
Still. At least it isn’t Godspell.
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Beware of Falling Objects
Because I am definitely going to discuss this particular plot point, by gum. God knows the only thing more annoying than someone who insists you insert **SPOILER ALERT** in front of statements concerning age-old plot twists like **SPOILER ALERT** “…and then they hung Jesus on a cross” or **SPOILER ALERT** “Who knew Rosebud was a sled?” is someone who has no actual intention of reading the book, seeing the movie, or watching the play, but loves castigating people for not typing **SPOILER ALERT**.
Anyway.
So I went to see this play. I enjoyed the play. It was a perfectly decent play. I laughed. I cried. I tapped my little toe to the musical numbers. I held my breath during the big-name star’s climactic monologue. I realized the final scene was coming, and I set aside my Playbill so that I could break into applause at the appropriate moment. I was ready.
Then it happened. The last five seconds of the show. Because, after the big-name star took center stage and uttered his last line—well, I can only really describe it by reconstructing the play’s final stage direction, which apparently read:
(OUR HERO looks up into the fly space. Then a stage light drops on his head and kills him. Curtain. THE END)
Everyone around me was applauding. Me, I was on my feet shouting, “WTF, MISTER PLAYWRIGHT?!”
Because it really was that bad an ending. Could it be argued that beaning your star with a falling object is a trenchant way of expressing the absurdity of his very existence? Mmmmmaybe. By some pretentious grad school student, that is. I’m more likely to argue that the guy who wrote the damned thing is probably so scary as a personality and considers himself so much above criticism at this point in his career that everyone associated with the play and its production was probably terrified to approach him and say, “Um, hey, did you know that this ending would get you a raised eyebrow and a D+ in a freshman playwriting class?”
For me, the sheer stupidity of the ending negated all the good things that had gone before. I had two whole hours of good will erased by the play’s final half-dozen seconds. I mean, it’s months later and I’m still grinding my teeth over it.
The ending reminds me, in a way, of the days when I used to love reading Anne McCaffrey’s science fiction novels. They weren’t good, mind you. I just loved reading them. McCaffrey had a canny way of hooking you into her unlikely settings through relatable characters, and for a good twenty years she was at the top of both her game and the bestseller charts. Then the books started to decline in quality as she aged. The good guys seemed a little too much like fuzzy carbons of good guys she’d previously written; the bad guys got a little too mustache-twiddly and one-dimensional. They were bad because . . . well, not because of anything real that had happened to them, but simply because McCaffrey needed someone to work the protagonist’s last nerve.
Then came the book that ended it all for me. I think it was one of the late Pern novels. All the protagonists—because McCaffrey never settled for one good guy when she could have twelve or thirteen of them—were terribly stymied for dozens of pointless chapters because of one bad egg. He’d show up, yell at the good guys, then stomp off in a fit. Right at the book’s end, when absolutely nothing has happened and you’re wondering how in the world McCaffrey’s going to resolve everything in the remaining four pages, a meteorite drops out of the sky and hits the antagonist in the head. Then he’s suddenly no longer a threat any more, being, you know, headless and all. THE END.
It was at that point I kind of wanted to hunt down McCaffrey, gently stroke her hand, and say, Anne, honey. You’ve made a few bucks. Why not retire and enjoy them a little, hon? Bless your heart.
So I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that as a general rule, ending your work by beaning your characters, sympathetic or un-, with precipitating objects is not a good idea. Want to start out the action that way? Go for it. A random house on the noggin did wonders for The Wizard of Oz. But as a resolution for all your fiction’s ills, it’s not going to work.
As a matter of fact, I’ve spent most of the morning wondering if there are any works that might improved by doing a Gallagher smash on the protagonist’s head. “Though sisters, and living almost within sight of each other, they could live without disagreement between themselves, or producing coolness between their husbands—not until a metallic rock hurtling from without the earthly planes reduced both their worldly estates to ash and cinders!” doesn’t seem to work in Sense and Sensibility. It might be tempting to see the Republic of Gilead brought to its knees by a meteorite shower in The Handmaid’s Tale, but it wouldn’t be likely, and it wouldn’t do any justice to Margaret Atwood’s meticulously-imagined world. And I don’t think that even in Avenue Q, a stray stage lamp killing a faux-Muppet could be played for laughs.
Just beware of falling objects, folks. They might bring your drama to an end, but they don’t solve its issues.
Monday, July 22, 2013
Detroit Broke My Heart
A lot lately has appeared in the press on the subject of Detroit. It hasn’t been confined to last week, when the city filed for bankruptcy. Over the last few years, journalists anxious to have a byline attached to a story of depth have descended upon the Motor City to pound out paint-by-numbers profiles of the decline of an ailing post-industrial municipality.
They make identical references—the Opera House, the Heidelberg Project, obligatory mentions of Cass Corridor, Eight Mile Road, and the Delray neighborhood. They all trot out the ruined beaux-arts grandeur of the Michigan Central Station. They round things out with facile comments about returning blocks upon blocks of former neighborhoods to urban farmland, and then top off the article with a shot of a house in ruins (and there are many) in silhouette against the silvery, Emerald City-like GM world headquarters in the background. Carpetbaggers, I think of them.
Most descend upon the city like birds on carrion, feast on its misery, then quickly fly home to their comfortable homes in cities that aren’t Detroit. There they dole out delicious morsels of schadenfreude to an audience that also isn’t in Detroit. And those readers have the luxury of comforting themselves from afar, no matter what their circumstances, with the notion that at least they aren’t wallowing in a blue-collar hellhole. I find such reporting a cheap and easy form of misery porn, a swift way to cash in on the hardship of others while thwacking heartstrings of faux-sincerity and solemn melancholy that just might, in the journalist’s imagination, attract the notice of a Pulitzer committee.
Not, mind you, that Detroit’s population sometimes acquits itself much better. The city’s residents can be obdurate in their insistence that nothing’s wrong, even as they avert their gazes from chunks of the urban landscape falling to pieces around them. Residents of the extensive southeastern Michigan suburbs also turn blind eyes to the woes of the city’s core, either making vague noises of renaissance as they occasionally visit the city’s sports stadiums, or carrying out lives that never require them to tiptoe an inch south of Eight Mile.
I lived in Michigan for twenty-one years. For more than half that, I lived within the city limits. I chose Detroit as a young man. I relocated feeling excited at the notion of living in a large, diverse, and gritty urban area. I was anxious to contribute, in my own small way, at a time when the city was desperate to shed its image as the country’s crime and murder capital; I wanted to be one of its many advocates of all races and stripes who lived and shopped and labored within its limits. I went to school there. I worked and taught there. I bought my first house within the city boundaries.
And over the years, little by little by little, Detroit broke my heart.
People have a hard time believing some of my Detroit stories. When I relate the tale of my first Devil’s Night in the city, back in the dark days of the nineteen-eighties when it was popular sport for vandals to commit arson on abandoned structures, I speak of looking out from my fourteenth-story apartment across a black landscape where flames roared unchecked in every direction. Everywhere I looked seemed like a city on fire. It’s an image more appropriate for a post-apocalyptic movie than for anyone living in downtown areas that aren’t Detroit.
When I talk about how on the Fourth of July and New Year’s, for over a decade, we cowered sleepless on the floor after midnight while Detroit residents—our neighbors—shot endless rounds of ammunition from their guns into the air for hour after long hour, it sounds to outsiders like the stuff of fiction. But it happened. Not once. Not two unconnected times. It happened every year, as did the resulting damage and injuries and even deaths from the falling bullets.
Residents of the city itself considered these things commonplace. Some assume that every city is a maelstrom of raining lead and hellfire on national holidays. They would be wrong.
Detroit broke my heart. I moved into the city as an enthusiastic kid who pretended not to be unnerved when, within mere hours of arriving in my new home, I watched a squadron of police shake a rain of shoplifted knives and illegal guns from the coat of an adjacent shopper in a local market. I lived there as a young adult who accepted everyday vandalism and even sexual assault as part of the norm; I talked to friends and family about the importance of supporting local businesses though as I found them increasingly scarce, or was persuaded to abandon those left because of crime in their parking lots. I carried in my head a mental map of the most recent car-jacking spots so I could avoid them; I knew exactly which homes in the university district were crack houses, or likely to become so in the near future.
As a home owner in one of the nicer neighborhoods within Detroit’s borders—so called because city cops and firemen lived there in abundance—I watched as week after week, month after month, more homes barricaded themselves behind grilles of iron bars over the ground floor windows and doors. The cops and firemen moved out. I saw bungalows around mine start out painted and cheerful, and how over the course of a handful of years they became shabby and peeling from neglect. I saw their windows broken; I watched them become abandoned.
I learned I couldn’t put out Halloween pumpkins or Christmas decorations. I’d wake up to find the former smashed in the streets, and the latter stolen. If I planted perennials for the spring, I’d walk out into the front yard and find not just the flowers plucked, but the entire bulb uprooted and taken. Annuals would disappear, nothing left behind save for empty depressions. No one would take the weeds.
Anything not locked in my house or in the garage was likely to vanish, even those things I’d though safe behind the metal fence surrounding my back yard. I got to the point at which I was more irritated by, than chilled to the bone from, strange footprints in the freshly-fallen snow that marked a trail of someone poking around of my back yard and looking through my rear windows. I learned how to steel myself, upon coming home from work, to the sight of screens and storm panels removed and tossed into the yard so that a would-be intruder could test my windows. My home was broken into multiple times—once while I was sleeping, by a gang of a half-dozen.
Detroit broke my heart because it made me confront my constant failures. It made me feel weak when I thought I couldn’t endure for another year the thefts, the bullets, the unending crime. It made me feel ungrateful when I looked at the landscape and found little but ruin and decay and ugliness. I had to watch as the administration of the university in which I’d poured my enthusiasm became overrun with career carpetbaggers of a suburban sort—mostly white men and women who would orate hollow support of a city for which they didn’t care and in which they never tarried as they hurried back to their Grosse Pointes and Bloomfields and their Novis—while its minorities and city-dwellers were passed over for long-deserved promotions. And that made me feel I’d wasted years of effort.
The city made me feel like a battered spouse for defending it to outsiders—which I would, for a long time, before I realized that its only response to my so-called loyalty was to smack me hard in the face yet again, as soon as anyone’s head was turned. When I was bowed and beaten by too many home invasions and exited to the suburbs, it reproached me both for my former youthful idealism, for abandoning it. When I left Michigan altogether, and felt my head clear of all kinds of ugliness I’d taken for granted over the decades, I felt as if I’d made a poor investment of twenty-one years of my life.
That’s how Detroit broke my heart.
My experience is my own. It doesn’t generalize to anyone else.
There’s enough Detroiter in me still that when I see these news stories online capitalizing upon the city’s woes, I automatically click. I feel compelled to tsk at both the assumptions and shortcuts the carpetbagger journalists take and at the dreadful realities the stories still expose. There’s enough Detroiter in me still that I become angry at the ignorant and judgmental conclusions to which outsiders leap when they’re confronted by the city’s conundrums. Three days of Detroit might make fodder for some blogger’s earnest condescension or for some photographer’s Flickr account. But to me it’s mere catastrophe tourism—a roller-coaster tour of decay on automatic tracks. Those insights aren’t merited. Just experienced at their most shallow level.
Not that my insights are much better, I grant you. But I earned ‘em. I’m still trying to grapple with the lessons of my Detroit decades. It’s a place where I came into my own, even as the city and its economics and the ignorance of those within and without the city limits all attempted to thwart me at every turn. It proved my strengths and endurance even as it exposed my naiveté and weakness. I find I resent Detroit while still remembering a young man’s love for it.
Speedy journalistic fly-bys intended to increase page visits will never capture the quixotic essence of issues that have been decades in the making. Covering Detroit as a disaster zone panders to the quick haunted house chill, the flash of reassurance we feel upon glimpsing a poverty and desperation we hope never to experience.
It’s easy to toss up an image of Detroit’s most abject ruin against a shiny skyscraper meant to embody hope. It’s an obvious contrast. However, these cookie-cutter photographs capture neither the hopes and dreams of the people who live and work within these buildings, nor the contradictory stubbornness that makes Detroit’s population reluctant to change. They ignore the many harsher juxtapositions that Detroiters endure and take for granted day by day and year by year, as they dwell surrounded by a past in shambles and look forward to a future that’s at best uncertain.
They make identical references—the Opera House, the Heidelberg Project, obligatory mentions of Cass Corridor, Eight Mile Road, and the Delray neighborhood. They all trot out the ruined beaux-arts grandeur of the Michigan Central Station. They round things out with facile comments about returning blocks upon blocks of former neighborhoods to urban farmland, and then top off the article with a shot of a house in ruins (and there are many) in silhouette against the silvery, Emerald City-like GM world headquarters in the background. Carpetbaggers, I think of them.
Most descend upon the city like birds on carrion, feast on its misery, then quickly fly home to their comfortable homes in cities that aren’t Detroit. There they dole out delicious morsels of schadenfreude to an audience that also isn’t in Detroit. And those readers have the luxury of comforting themselves from afar, no matter what their circumstances, with the notion that at least they aren’t wallowing in a blue-collar hellhole. I find such reporting a cheap and easy form of misery porn, a swift way to cash in on the hardship of others while thwacking heartstrings of faux-sincerity and solemn melancholy that just might, in the journalist’s imagination, attract the notice of a Pulitzer committee.
Not, mind you, that Detroit’s population sometimes acquits itself much better. The city’s residents can be obdurate in their insistence that nothing’s wrong, even as they avert their gazes from chunks of the urban landscape falling to pieces around them. Residents of the extensive southeastern Michigan suburbs also turn blind eyes to the woes of the city’s core, either making vague noises of renaissance as they occasionally visit the city’s sports stadiums, or carrying out lives that never require them to tiptoe an inch south of Eight Mile.
I lived in Michigan for twenty-one years. For more than half that, I lived within the city limits. I chose Detroit as a young man. I relocated feeling excited at the notion of living in a large, diverse, and gritty urban area. I was anxious to contribute, in my own small way, at a time when the city was desperate to shed its image as the country’s crime and murder capital; I wanted to be one of its many advocates of all races and stripes who lived and shopped and labored within its limits. I went to school there. I worked and taught there. I bought my first house within the city boundaries.
And over the years, little by little by little, Detroit broke my heart.
People have a hard time believing some of my Detroit stories. When I relate the tale of my first Devil’s Night in the city, back in the dark days of the nineteen-eighties when it was popular sport for vandals to commit arson on abandoned structures, I speak of looking out from my fourteenth-story apartment across a black landscape where flames roared unchecked in every direction. Everywhere I looked seemed like a city on fire. It’s an image more appropriate for a post-apocalyptic movie than for anyone living in downtown areas that aren’t Detroit.
When I talk about how on the Fourth of July and New Year’s, for over a decade, we cowered sleepless on the floor after midnight while Detroit residents—our neighbors—shot endless rounds of ammunition from their guns into the air for hour after long hour, it sounds to outsiders like the stuff of fiction. But it happened. Not once. Not two unconnected times. It happened every year, as did the resulting damage and injuries and even deaths from the falling bullets.
Residents of the city itself considered these things commonplace. Some assume that every city is a maelstrom of raining lead and hellfire on national holidays. They would be wrong.
Detroit broke my heart. I moved into the city as an enthusiastic kid who pretended not to be unnerved when, within mere hours of arriving in my new home, I watched a squadron of police shake a rain of shoplifted knives and illegal guns from the coat of an adjacent shopper in a local market. I lived there as a young adult who accepted everyday vandalism and even sexual assault as part of the norm; I talked to friends and family about the importance of supporting local businesses though as I found them increasingly scarce, or was persuaded to abandon those left because of crime in their parking lots. I carried in my head a mental map of the most recent car-jacking spots so I could avoid them; I knew exactly which homes in the university district were crack houses, or likely to become so in the near future.
As a home owner in one of the nicer neighborhoods within Detroit’s borders—so called because city cops and firemen lived there in abundance—I watched as week after week, month after month, more homes barricaded themselves behind grilles of iron bars over the ground floor windows and doors. The cops and firemen moved out. I saw bungalows around mine start out painted and cheerful, and how over the course of a handful of years they became shabby and peeling from neglect. I saw their windows broken; I watched them become abandoned.
I learned I couldn’t put out Halloween pumpkins or Christmas decorations. I’d wake up to find the former smashed in the streets, and the latter stolen. If I planted perennials for the spring, I’d walk out into the front yard and find not just the flowers plucked, but the entire bulb uprooted and taken. Annuals would disappear, nothing left behind save for empty depressions. No one would take the weeds.
Anything not locked in my house or in the garage was likely to vanish, even those things I’d though safe behind the metal fence surrounding my back yard. I got to the point at which I was more irritated by, than chilled to the bone from, strange footprints in the freshly-fallen snow that marked a trail of someone poking around of my back yard and looking through my rear windows. I learned how to steel myself, upon coming home from work, to the sight of screens and storm panels removed and tossed into the yard so that a would-be intruder could test my windows. My home was broken into multiple times—once while I was sleeping, by a gang of a half-dozen.
Detroit broke my heart because it made me confront my constant failures. It made me feel weak when I thought I couldn’t endure for another year the thefts, the bullets, the unending crime. It made me feel ungrateful when I looked at the landscape and found little but ruin and decay and ugliness. I had to watch as the administration of the university in which I’d poured my enthusiasm became overrun with career carpetbaggers of a suburban sort—mostly white men and women who would orate hollow support of a city for which they didn’t care and in which they never tarried as they hurried back to their Grosse Pointes and Bloomfields and their Novis—while its minorities and city-dwellers were passed over for long-deserved promotions. And that made me feel I’d wasted years of effort.
The city made me feel like a battered spouse for defending it to outsiders—which I would, for a long time, before I realized that its only response to my so-called loyalty was to smack me hard in the face yet again, as soon as anyone’s head was turned. When I was bowed and beaten by too many home invasions and exited to the suburbs, it reproached me both for my former youthful idealism, for abandoning it. When I left Michigan altogether, and felt my head clear of all kinds of ugliness I’d taken for granted over the decades, I felt as if I’d made a poor investment of twenty-one years of my life.
That’s how Detroit broke my heart.
My experience is my own. It doesn’t generalize to anyone else.
There’s enough Detroiter in me still that when I see these news stories online capitalizing upon the city’s woes, I automatically click. I feel compelled to tsk at both the assumptions and shortcuts the carpetbagger journalists take and at the dreadful realities the stories still expose. There’s enough Detroiter in me still that I become angry at the ignorant and judgmental conclusions to which outsiders leap when they’re confronted by the city’s conundrums. Three days of Detroit might make fodder for some blogger’s earnest condescension or for some photographer’s Flickr account. But to me it’s mere catastrophe tourism—a roller-coaster tour of decay on automatic tracks. Those insights aren’t merited. Just experienced at their most shallow level.
Not that my insights are much better, I grant you. But I earned ‘em. I’m still trying to grapple with the lessons of my Detroit decades. It’s a place where I came into my own, even as the city and its economics and the ignorance of those within and without the city limits all attempted to thwart me at every turn. It proved my strengths and endurance even as it exposed my naiveté and weakness. I find I resent Detroit while still remembering a young man’s love for it.
Speedy journalistic fly-bys intended to increase page visits will never capture the quixotic essence of issues that have been decades in the making. Covering Detroit as a disaster zone panders to the quick haunted house chill, the flash of reassurance we feel upon glimpsing a poverty and desperation we hope never to experience.
It’s easy to toss up an image of Detroit’s most abject ruin against a shiny skyscraper meant to embody hope. It’s an obvious contrast. However, these cookie-cutter photographs capture neither the hopes and dreams of the people who live and work within these buildings, nor the contradictory stubbornness that makes Detroit’s population reluctant to change. They ignore the many harsher juxtapositions that Detroiters endure and take for granted day by day and year by year, as they dwell surrounded by a past in shambles and look forward to a future that’s at best uncertain.
Monday, July 15, 2013
On Writing and Envy
The day my first novel hit booksellers everywhere, my life changed. Not in that banal, dewy-eyed way that happens only in Woody Allen movies about a writer who types THE END at the bottom of a sheet of paper, rips it out of his old manual typewriter, adds it to a neat stack on his desk, and then treats himself to a Cuban cigar or pops the cork of that rare and expensive vintage he’s been saving for a very special occasion. Inevitably in the next scene, the guy’s having a three-cocktail lunch with his editor at a swanky Manhattan lunch spot while discussing what his next mega-blockbuster chart-topping best-seller should be.
I know you’ve seen this movie. It’s the same one in which the first-time author sits in the boardroom of Random House loftily naysaying potential book covers, each rendered on four-foot foam core stand-ups.
Alas, my life change was entirely devoid of both free lunches and foam core, though it was just as banal. I discovered that when you sign that first publishing contract, there are endless numbers of aspiring writers anxious to indulge in one-upmanship at your expense.
The very first encounter I had with the phenomenon came mere days after You Are SO Cursed! shipped. I had a friend—very quickly after this experience to become an ex-friend—who had ordered the book and after skimming through it wanted to present me with his ‘notes and course corrections.’ I was genuinely baffled at the announcement. His notes and corrections about what?, I wondered, thinking that perhaps he had some small collection of typographical errata that either I, the editor, or the proofreader had overlooked.
But no. He’d gone through the book and taken ten pages of reaction intended to point out my flaws as a writer, from characterization and dialogue all the way through to plotting and storyline. “You can take these to your editor and sit down and fix things now,” he told me, very sincerely.
I was even more baffled. The guy seemed to think the finished product had been a rough draft. That was it in his hands, though. The completed thing. I couldn’t have gone to the house and said, Hey, you guys don’t mind recalling thirty thousand volumes so I can do a rewrite, do you? My buddy gave me notes!, not even if I’d wanted.
Not that I wanted. I could tell that the suggestions the guy was attempting to make were the views of someone who hadn’t even read any contemporary young adult literature, yet had fixed ideas about what it should and shouldn’t be. I tactfully told him I wouldn’t be needing the notes. “WELL.” His reply was stiff and offended. “If you don’t want to BENEFIT from the EXPERT OPINION of someone who is THREE QUARTERS OF THE WAY through a Bachelor’s in English Literature, SO BE IT.”
As I said, former friend.
But there are too many aspiring writers out in the world willing to tell the successful how they should’ve done things. Some of them are at a nascent stage in which they’ve thought they’d have a good book in them if they sat down to work on it, though they haven’t actually scribed anything more than the occasional LOL!!! as a comment on a friend’s reposting of a funny cat video. Qualifications don’t matter. In their heads, they are experts on good writing. Definitely way more expert on what professional authors ought to have written instead of the hot mess that made it to the bookshelves or the TV or movie screen. If you’re published and have managed to insinuate yourself within their sights, they have absolutely no qualms about pulling the trigger and letting you have it.
Sometimes the treatment I get is of a passive-aggressive sort. This variety is usually prefaced by a milquetoast preface like, I may not be a published author, but . . . . that delivers its deadly payload in the second half of the sentence. (I may not be a fancy published author, but at least I know that it’s I before E except after C! I guess it’s true that editors are the real talent behind a novel!) It’s a popular way for total strangers and old college chums anxious to score a point to correct stray spelling and syntax errors when I post a casual blog entry, or update my Facebook status—and a cheap and easy way for someone to take an uppity published writer down a notch.
Often the treatment’s more contentious, as when someone will dismiss me with a Oh, what do you know, you and your silly little children’s books? (Hey. Fully eight of my sixteen published novels are silly little books for grown-ups, thank you.) Or as when a friend with no fiction credits to his name recently posted all over his social media accounts messages to the effect that it seemed like anyone and everyone was shitting out another crappy young adult novel nowadays and that he hoped he’d never stoop so low to such cheap, lousy, trendy way of selling out.
Listen. I understand being frustrated as a writer. I wasn’t an overnight success. I struggled for years—decades—to get an agent to look at my manuscripts, much less a publishing house. It’s tempting to lash out, to vent, to exercise those dissatisfactions upon others. Working a job you dislike and writing in your spare time while hoping to make your dream career a reality is a hard road to trod. There’s no guaranteed payoff. Slamming established writers is a quick and dirty way of getting out all those resentments.
However, my brothers and sisters, I am here to tell you that it is not the way to happiness. Lashing out is not the route to accomplishment. Let me clue you in on something that I think most published wordsmiths discover, but that many would-be authors have not yet assimilated.
Your success as a writer is entirely independent from anyone else’s. Belittling someone’s accomplishment does not accelerate or enhance your own success.
Repeat that to yourself. In times of stress, let it sink in.
The world of publishing is not the tiny circle of the Supreme Court. If you were a judge disappointed that Elena Kagan got the last open slot that you more amply deserved, it’s understandable that you might be a little miffed at having to wait around for one of the other eight Justices to retire or kick the bucket before you get a vanishingly small chance at advancement.
But publishing’s not like that. The fact that J. K. Rowling managed to get into print before you doesn’t in the least imply you’ll never be published; her runaway sales have absolutely no bearing on how well your book would or wouldn’t do in the marketplace. You may be offended that Fifty Shades of Grey managed to hit the bestseller list while your vastly superior manuscript is still making the rounds of agents—or is sitting in a drawer somewhere, or is only half-written or even still only in your head. But as a success story, Fifty Shades has absolutely no direct impact upon your chances of finding an agent and a publisher—or upon you sending that manuscript out, or finally sitting down to finish it.
Why? Because your success as a writer is entirely independent from anyone else’s.
If your manuscript is facing constant rejection, it’s not because some sadistic author is sitting around at the publishing house, blackmailing editors to reject your awesome query and setting fire to story proposals that might rival her own and expose her for the pathetic sham she fears she is. (That’d be a fun book to write though, wouldn’t it?) Even if you have a finished work that you feel is your very best effort, its rejection is usually for more mundane reasons. It’s honestly not a good fit for the publisher, for example. It might be too different from the kind of thing they usually put on the bookshelves. You may have disregarded the publisher’s specific request for one chapter and sent them three. It may be that while your chapters are rip-roaring stuff, your synopsis and cover letter aren’t selling it the way they should.
It may even be—and this is very often the case with aspiring writers—that the basic hurdle is one of not completing the manuscript at all. It’s infinitely easier (and definitely more fun) to pick apart others than it is to sit down and write every day. Aspiring authors sometimes find posting on the internet the OUTRAGEOUS and GASP-WORTHY oversights they’ve encountered in a FAMOUS AUTHOR’S novel or screenplay much more appealing a way to spend an afternoon than firing up Microsoft Word and trying to pound out another page and a half in what seems like an absolute mountain of verbiage. Bad-mouthing a writer’s efforts on reddit or Television Without Pity while pretending to uphold the tenets of Good Writing elicits immediate reactions. It makes one feel good. It’s a hell of a lot more tempting than the truly arduous, solitary process of creating something original.
Envy’s the root cause here. It’s a seemingly swift and fleeting impulse, that snatching out to grasp something just out of reach, that stab and pang of It should be mine! Envy’s a deadly sin for a reason, though. The problem is that after a while, indulging in lazy pot-shots becomes its own pursuit. Envy doesn’t enhance one’s own writing. It’s an obstacle that keeps one from writing at all.
Belittling someone’s accomplishment does not accelerate or enhance your own success.
No matter how we justify it to ourselves under the name of philosophy, chasing after envious impulses races a writer down the wrong path. No matter how light-heartedly we disguise our contempt, insult as its own pursuit is no more than distraction.
Mean-spirited words aren’t magical totems that, once unleashed, edge the wielder closer to perfection. An eighth-grade girl can start a vicious campaign of whispers against a classmate, saying he’s a fat and pimply loser, but the slander won’t erase her own flaws—it won’t clear her own complexion, make her thinner or more beautiful. She doesn’t become the winner.
Likewise, slamming a writer as ‘trendy’ does not make anyone more of a rebel, nor any more original. Maligning an entire genre as kid stuff does not make anyone more literary, or superior in taste. Accusing others of shitting out books for quick royalty checks does not magically transform one's own efforts into hard-worked achievement. Implying that other authors are hacks does not mystically elevate one's own work into masterpiece status.
Insinuating that others are bad writers does not make you a better one. It’s a waste of your time, and of energies that could and should be creative instead.
What will make you a better writer? Sitting down and writing will make you a better writer. Focusing your creative drive to build and construct and imagine, and not to tear down or disparage. Finishing a short story or a novel, all of it, from beginning to end. Taking the time to approach the completed project with a critical eye and to rewrite as much of it as necessary, as many times as necessary. Learning to listen to the honest criticisms of select readers and agents and editors. And most importantly, picking up the pen or opening the word processor once you’re done, and starting something completely new.
All the boring old truisms you’ve heard time and time again—these are the things that will make you a better writer.
What will make you a published writer? Constantly improving and challenging your own craft. Learning to write eye-catching queries and synopses. Consistently and methodically sending out and promoting your work to agents and publishers. Repeating the entire process with another completed project, and then another after that—these are the things that will make you a published writer.
Carping about the successes of others isn’t even on the list.
When you read in an alumni magazine that an old college acquaintance had a book published by a respected house, don’t grimace. Don’t grind your teeth and curse her beneath your breath. The two of you aren’t engaged in any race; if there’s a rivalry, it’s probably all in your own head. (If it’s not, isn’t it really time you set aside all that past foolishness?) Your success as a writer is entirely independent from hers.
Be genuinely glad that after so much time and effort, her discipline and hard work paid off. The fact she was successful should inspire you to see a similar future for yourself—one in which your dedication to your story and your persistence leads to you holding a copy of your first novel, or a magazine with your first published short fiction. Belittling someone’s achievements will never accelerate or enhance your own success. Learning that you can celebrate the accomplishments of your peers while pointing yourself in a similar direction will make you a happier writer.
And more importantly in the long run, any strategy that makes you a happier writer will encourage you to become a more productive and effective creative artist. There’s plenty of room out here for those.
I know you’ve seen this movie. It’s the same one in which the first-time author sits in the boardroom of Random House loftily naysaying potential book covers, each rendered on four-foot foam core stand-ups.
Alas, my life change was entirely devoid of both free lunches and foam core, though it was just as banal. I discovered that when you sign that first publishing contract, there are endless numbers of aspiring writers anxious to indulge in one-upmanship at your expense.
The very first encounter I had with the phenomenon came mere days after You Are SO Cursed! shipped. I had a friend—very quickly after this experience to become an ex-friend—who had ordered the book and after skimming through it wanted to present me with his ‘notes and course corrections.’ I was genuinely baffled at the announcement. His notes and corrections about what?, I wondered, thinking that perhaps he had some small collection of typographical errata that either I, the editor, or the proofreader had overlooked.
But no. He’d gone through the book and taken ten pages of reaction intended to point out my flaws as a writer, from characterization and dialogue all the way through to plotting and storyline. “You can take these to your editor and sit down and fix things now,” he told me, very sincerely.
I was even more baffled. The guy seemed to think the finished product had been a rough draft. That was it in his hands, though. The completed thing. I couldn’t have gone to the house and said, Hey, you guys don’t mind recalling thirty thousand volumes so I can do a rewrite, do you? My buddy gave me notes!, not even if I’d wanted.
Not that I wanted. I could tell that the suggestions the guy was attempting to make were the views of someone who hadn’t even read any contemporary young adult literature, yet had fixed ideas about what it should and shouldn’t be. I tactfully told him I wouldn’t be needing the notes. “WELL.” His reply was stiff and offended. “If you don’t want to BENEFIT from the EXPERT OPINION of someone who is THREE QUARTERS OF THE WAY through a Bachelor’s in English Literature, SO BE IT.”
As I said, former friend.
But there are too many aspiring writers out in the world willing to tell the successful how they should’ve done things. Some of them are at a nascent stage in which they’ve thought they’d have a good book in them if they sat down to work on it, though they haven’t actually scribed anything more than the occasional LOL!!! as a comment on a friend’s reposting of a funny cat video. Qualifications don’t matter. In their heads, they are experts on good writing. Definitely way more expert on what professional authors ought to have written instead of the hot mess that made it to the bookshelves or the TV or movie screen. If you’re published and have managed to insinuate yourself within their sights, they have absolutely no qualms about pulling the trigger and letting you have it.
Sometimes the treatment I get is of a passive-aggressive sort. This variety is usually prefaced by a milquetoast preface like, I may not be a published author, but . . . . that delivers its deadly payload in the second half of the sentence. (I may not be a fancy published author, but at least I know that it’s I before E except after C! I guess it’s true that editors are the real talent behind a novel!) It’s a popular way for total strangers and old college chums anxious to score a point to correct stray spelling and syntax errors when I post a casual blog entry, or update my Facebook status—and a cheap and easy way for someone to take an uppity published writer down a notch.
Often the treatment’s more contentious, as when someone will dismiss me with a Oh, what do you know, you and your silly little children’s books? (Hey. Fully eight of my sixteen published novels are silly little books for grown-ups, thank you.) Or as when a friend with no fiction credits to his name recently posted all over his social media accounts messages to the effect that it seemed like anyone and everyone was shitting out another crappy young adult novel nowadays and that he hoped he’d never stoop so low to such cheap, lousy, trendy way of selling out.
Listen. I understand being frustrated as a writer. I wasn’t an overnight success. I struggled for years—decades—to get an agent to look at my manuscripts, much less a publishing house. It’s tempting to lash out, to vent, to exercise those dissatisfactions upon others. Working a job you dislike and writing in your spare time while hoping to make your dream career a reality is a hard road to trod. There’s no guaranteed payoff. Slamming established writers is a quick and dirty way of getting out all those resentments.
However, my brothers and sisters, I am here to tell you that it is not the way to happiness. Lashing out is not the route to accomplishment. Let me clue you in on something that I think most published wordsmiths discover, but that many would-be authors have not yet assimilated.
Your success as a writer is entirely independent from anyone else’s. Belittling someone’s accomplishment does not accelerate or enhance your own success.
Repeat that to yourself. In times of stress, let it sink in.
The world of publishing is not the tiny circle of the Supreme Court. If you were a judge disappointed that Elena Kagan got the last open slot that you more amply deserved, it’s understandable that you might be a little miffed at having to wait around for one of the other eight Justices to retire or kick the bucket before you get a vanishingly small chance at advancement.
But publishing’s not like that. The fact that J. K. Rowling managed to get into print before you doesn’t in the least imply you’ll never be published; her runaway sales have absolutely no bearing on how well your book would or wouldn’t do in the marketplace. You may be offended that Fifty Shades of Grey managed to hit the bestseller list while your vastly superior manuscript is still making the rounds of agents—or is sitting in a drawer somewhere, or is only half-written or even still only in your head. But as a success story, Fifty Shades has absolutely no direct impact upon your chances of finding an agent and a publisher—or upon you sending that manuscript out, or finally sitting down to finish it.
Why? Because your success as a writer is entirely independent from anyone else’s.
If your manuscript is facing constant rejection, it’s not because some sadistic author is sitting around at the publishing house, blackmailing editors to reject your awesome query and setting fire to story proposals that might rival her own and expose her for the pathetic sham she fears she is. (That’d be a fun book to write though, wouldn’t it?) Even if you have a finished work that you feel is your very best effort, its rejection is usually for more mundane reasons. It’s honestly not a good fit for the publisher, for example. It might be too different from the kind of thing they usually put on the bookshelves. You may have disregarded the publisher’s specific request for one chapter and sent them three. It may be that while your chapters are rip-roaring stuff, your synopsis and cover letter aren’t selling it the way they should.
It may even be—and this is very often the case with aspiring writers—that the basic hurdle is one of not completing the manuscript at all. It’s infinitely easier (and definitely more fun) to pick apart others than it is to sit down and write every day. Aspiring authors sometimes find posting on the internet the OUTRAGEOUS and GASP-WORTHY oversights they’ve encountered in a FAMOUS AUTHOR’S novel or screenplay much more appealing a way to spend an afternoon than firing up Microsoft Word and trying to pound out another page and a half in what seems like an absolute mountain of verbiage. Bad-mouthing a writer’s efforts on reddit or Television Without Pity while pretending to uphold the tenets of Good Writing elicits immediate reactions. It makes one feel good. It’s a hell of a lot more tempting than the truly arduous, solitary process of creating something original.
Envy’s the root cause here. It’s a seemingly swift and fleeting impulse, that snatching out to grasp something just out of reach, that stab and pang of It should be mine! Envy’s a deadly sin for a reason, though. The problem is that after a while, indulging in lazy pot-shots becomes its own pursuit. Envy doesn’t enhance one’s own writing. It’s an obstacle that keeps one from writing at all.
Belittling someone’s accomplishment does not accelerate or enhance your own success.
No matter how we justify it to ourselves under the name of philosophy, chasing after envious impulses races a writer down the wrong path. No matter how light-heartedly we disguise our contempt, insult as its own pursuit is no more than distraction.
Mean-spirited words aren’t magical totems that, once unleashed, edge the wielder closer to perfection. An eighth-grade girl can start a vicious campaign of whispers against a classmate, saying he’s a fat and pimply loser, but the slander won’t erase her own flaws—it won’t clear her own complexion, make her thinner or more beautiful. She doesn’t become the winner.
Likewise, slamming a writer as ‘trendy’ does not make anyone more of a rebel, nor any more original. Maligning an entire genre as kid stuff does not make anyone more literary, or superior in taste. Accusing others of shitting out books for quick royalty checks does not magically transform one's own efforts into hard-worked achievement. Implying that other authors are hacks does not mystically elevate one's own work into masterpiece status.
Insinuating that others are bad writers does not make you a better one. It’s a waste of your time, and of energies that could and should be creative instead.
What will make you a better writer? Sitting down and writing will make you a better writer. Focusing your creative drive to build and construct and imagine, and not to tear down or disparage. Finishing a short story or a novel, all of it, from beginning to end. Taking the time to approach the completed project with a critical eye and to rewrite as much of it as necessary, as many times as necessary. Learning to listen to the honest criticisms of select readers and agents and editors. And most importantly, picking up the pen or opening the word processor once you’re done, and starting something completely new.
All the boring old truisms you’ve heard time and time again—these are the things that will make you a better writer.
What will make you a published writer? Constantly improving and challenging your own craft. Learning to write eye-catching queries and synopses. Consistently and methodically sending out and promoting your work to agents and publishers. Repeating the entire process with another completed project, and then another after that—these are the things that will make you a published writer.
Carping about the successes of others isn’t even on the list.
When you read in an alumni magazine that an old college acquaintance had a book published by a respected house, don’t grimace. Don’t grind your teeth and curse her beneath your breath. The two of you aren’t engaged in any race; if there’s a rivalry, it’s probably all in your own head. (If it’s not, isn’t it really time you set aside all that past foolishness?) Your success as a writer is entirely independent from hers.
Be genuinely glad that after so much time and effort, her discipline and hard work paid off. The fact she was successful should inspire you to see a similar future for yourself—one in which your dedication to your story and your persistence leads to you holding a copy of your first novel, or a magazine with your first published short fiction. Belittling someone’s achievements will never accelerate or enhance your own success. Learning that you can celebrate the accomplishments of your peers while pointing yourself in a similar direction will make you a happier writer.
And more importantly in the long run, any strategy that makes you a happier writer will encourage you to become a more productive and effective creative artist. There’s plenty of room out here for those.
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Book Review Roundup
The House of Arden
3 of 5 stars
Harding’s Luck
4 of 5 stars
by E. Nesbit
American mid-twentieth-century author Edward Eager was so smitten by Edwardian British fabulist E. Nesbit that, in middle of his classic magical adventures, he would stop the action and encourage his young readers to investigate her books. It was from Nesbit's interlocking tales of time-travel, The House of Arden and Harding's Luck, that he paid homage to Nesbit by playing around with the central premise of the two works, when the adventures of one of his sets of protagonists dovetail with the adventures of children who would become the focus of later, as yet unwritten novels.
It was The House of Arden that had inspired this timey-wimey twist that wouldn't have been inappropriate in a Doctor Who serial. Edred and Elfrida's adventures into their household's past brush up against the adventures of 'Cousin Dick,' another time traveler like themselves, whose tale and whose contrasting perspectives on some of the same events were told in the later-published Harding's Luck.
It's something of a shame that The House of Arden is much the lesser of the novels. It's difficult not to contrast the two. Edred and Elfrida come from decidedly posher circumstances, while Dick is a vagrant. Dick has control of his magic, in his story; Edred and Elfrida are reduced to composing effete stanzas of verse and hoping their magic warden, the Mouldiwarp, is in a good enough mood to transport them into the past or back to the future. Dick's search for a place to call home is touching and noble; it makes Edred and Elfrida's grubbing about the past for a cash gain look self-serving and greedy.
Most annoyingly, while Cousin Dick is adventurous and resourceful, Edred and Elfrida are simps in comparison, and too much of The House of Arden and its magic depends on them minding their manners and resolving not to quarrel—reducing the Mouldiwarp to a tetchy nanny not half as engaging as as any that P. L. Travers penned.
It's still a good romp, though, especially when taken as the lead-in to a much-superior sequel from which it can't fully be separated.
The Twelve (The Passage, #2)
by Justin Cronin
3 of 5 stars
One of the literary techniques that most irritated me about Justin Cronin's tale of bioengineered vampires, The Passage, had to do with his seeming defensiveness of tone; every page reeked with his desperation to let readers know that yes, while he might've sold out for a big horror genre paycheck, he still had an MFA in creative writing and was determined to show it off, dang it. Thus we had endless multi-page scenes of internal narrative about scarlet ribbons undulating across the billows and curves of a carmine ocean speckled with craters of inky night that reflected a galaxy of cold and unfeeling stars. I think they were supposed to represent blood-sucking sequences, but since Cronin often shunned genre norms like using names or pronouns to let you figure out which of his several hundred characters was actually involved in a scene, it was sometimes awfully difficult to tell.
The good news in The Twelve is that the series’ first book was enough of a bestseller that Cronin could apparently pay off his grad school debts and write a fat check to his old program to assuage any guilt he might be feeling for slumming in the mass market paperback section. Those high-falutin' scenes are long-gone from the new installment—and gone too are the pages and pages of internal monologue, replaced by snappy dialogue-driven chapters that were totally absent from the first novel. The pacing in The Twelve is brisk and relentless, which makes it a page-turner.
Mind you, exciting writing isn't necessarily the same thing as great writing. For his sequel to The Passage, Justin Cronin has managed to cut down his literary crib sheet to two primary sources—Stephen King's The Stand being the first and most obvious. I'm not really a King fan, but it's plain that Cronin feels piling narrative upon narrative across dozens of characters is the best way to create a Stand-like blockbuster. Yet I found his characterizations lifeless and paper-thin, and his style a mere aping of King. The protagonists from the first book are ciphers here—the central couple of Peter and Amy especially. New characters get an even shorter shrift. Giving gruff military men a sudden appreciation of poetry before their deaths in the book (not just once, but twice!) isn't a convincing way of showing the humanity behind a martial mind, for example; it's a cheap shortcut that's akin to literary semaphore.
Cronin's approach to foreshadowing disaster is as equally ham-handed as the first installment. When a character smiles winsomely into the sweet summer sun and says, "Hey, I've got a great idea! Let's take all the innocent kiddies of the colony out into the countryside for a picnic! What could possibly go wrong?!", or looks off into the horizon, spits, and sighs, "Driving this tanker truck full of highly flammable fuel sure is boring work. At least nothing bad can possibly happen!” it's painfully obvious that disaster is in the works. The payoffs aren't enough to justify the clumsy foreshadowing, either.
Still, the book gets intriguing when it delves into Margaret Atwood territory, taking a spin on the totalitarian regimes similar to The Handmaid's Tale and its examination of the culture of rebellion. The scenes with Sara and the queen of the virals are both disturbing and ultimately touching; it's a pity they're buried beneath and burdened by a an abundance of opaque dream sequences, repetitious replayings of discoveries that Cronin wants to hammer home, and too many characters it's difficult to care much about.
While Cronin might be hewing more true to his genre's form by ditching the hip-lit pretensions of The Passage, it hasn't really improved the sequel any. On the other hand, it hasn't made it any the less compulsively readable, either.
Nerd Do Well
by Simon Pegg
4 of 5 stars
Simon Pegg's autobiography—of sorts—is a non-linear read written in a digressive and wandering fashion. It's perfectly obvious that there’s no opportunity for self-indulgence to which the entertainer won’t succumb . . . even if it means that entire chapters of this allegedly non-fictional work are patent fabrication. (The robot butler should be the tip-off, for skimmers.)
Yet I mean none of these observations as complaint. I scarcely expect less from the co-author of the quirky and equally surreal classic, Spaced. It's a fun, funny, and amiable take on celebrity biographies that any fan of Pegg and his multiple movie and television projects will easily appreciate. Readers accustomed to a more straightforward and personality-free approach to autobiography might want to skip this fun volume, however.
Redoubt (Valdemar: Collegium Chronicles, #4)
by Mercedes Lackey
1 of 5 stars
I am afraid that in my less-than-enthusiastic review of Changes: Valdemar: Collegium Chronicles #3—the prequel to the volume Redoubt: Valdemar: Collegium Chronicles #4, I was sternly taken to task by a defender of Mercedes Lackey. The reader took umbrage at the fact that I compared Lackey's invented game of Kirball to the invented game of Quidditch in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books. Actually, in my painful, childlike ignorance, I called it a 'blatant Quidditch ripoff.'
Did I say taken to task? Nay! I was upbraided, chided, and roundly scolded for daring to compare the two!
It seemed to me that the endless Kirball passages that have been bloating the Valdemar: Collegium Chronicles series more and more had some definite parallels to the sport Rowling invented. A casual reader might understand my error. After all, the Harry Potter books are about an outcast teenaged youth discovering magical powers he never knew he had at a school for wizards, just as the Collegium Chronicles are about an outcast teenaged youth exploring his own newly-discovered magical capabilities at a school for mystics. Both series feature a violent and overcomplicated school sport involving balls and goals, the minutiae of which take up entirely too many chapters across too many books.
I would also posit that in both cases, nobody among the readership really gives a rip which house team wins any of these games, but that might be going a Snitch too far.
You can understand my confusion in assuming that Kirball, the later-on-arrival of the two, might have been inspired by Quidditch. Kind of in the same degree that hundreds of student papers appearing before college honor courts on plagiarism charges across the country have been 'inspired by' uncited Wikipedia articles.
But no. My chastiser laid my doubts to rest by pointing out that Kirball has a single goal and a single ball, while Quidditch has four balls and three goals. Obviously the two are nothing alike whatsoever.
Any gripes I had about the previous book—its sluggish pacing, its horrendous appropriation of bad dialect, and the endless and dull Kirball passages—are thus rendered moot by my ignorance. I stand corrected, and must beg any reader's pardon for putting them off reading Ms. Lackey's godawful prose through my egregious errors in comparative imaginary recreational exercises at training facilities for the fictionally occult-inclined. Mea culpa.
(P.S. As for this book, there are fifty pages of actual action at the end that in no way justify the two hundred pages of pure crap and Kirball I had to slog through to get there.)
Convergence (The Blending, #1)
by Sharon Green
4 of 5 stars
Let's first talk about the elephant in the room. Sharon Green's Blendings books, of which Convergence is the first, are about as eptly written as the average internet slash fan fiction.
She has five main characters—one representing each of the four elements of the natural world, and a 'spirit' element thrown in as a wild card—all of whom are hot and beautiful and in their mid-twenties and yet about as emotionally mature as a slow twelve year old. Green's Blending books follow the same pattern throughout, so that each character encounters from his or her perspective exactly the same obstacles as his comrades. The fire protagonist will have an argument with her parents, for example. Then the water protagonist will do the same in the next chapter, followed in the following three installments by spirit, air, and earth.
Then the earth protagonist will face a trial. So will the fire protagonist. Next, the spirit protagonist will have her trial. So will water and earth.
The fire lady will take a bath. Then in the next chapter, the earth fellow will take a bath. Then the spirit lady will take a bath. Then the air and water dudes take a bath. Next up—five chapters in which they all have a cup of tea and ruminate about the trials, the arguments, and the baths.
Green uses this unremitting template for five books. FIVE BOOKS, PEOPLE. Plus three sequels after that! That's a lot of repeated conversations and situations.
Her characters have absolutely no subtleties whatsoever. Her protagonists are either extremely noble and good and perfect, save for one fatal flaw at which she'll hammer again and again. Her villains are ridiculously, sublimely, mustache-twiddlingly evil that her protagonists have no qualms whatsoever about assaulting these lowlifes with insults and attacks upon the slightest acquaintance (and then wondering later on why they're so friendless).
The sex scenes are so awkward and unerotic that one has to wonder if the author has ever indeed had sex, read about sex elsewhere, or perhaps actually been acquainted with anyone who's engaged in it.
Finally—and perhaps most damningly—the author has a tendency, when inspiration flags, to have her protagonists drink tea. There's a lot of tea flowing in these books. Apparently the magical capabilities of her protagonists is matched only by the vast retention and capacity of their bladders.
And yet. . . .
The repetitiveness and goofy artificiality of the Convergence series has won it a place of affection in my heart; it's one of my favorite fantasy series to re-reread. Though it's very much the worst kind of excess given an unchecked hand, there's a lush sumptuousness to it that's difficult to ignore. Green's sadism has a zest that's great fun to watch develop over the course of the series. And her obvious enjoyment of her glacial plotting (by the end of the first volume, a mere three days and several hundred pots of tea have passed) reveals depths of self-indulgence so remarkably bottomless that it's like a literary first visit to the Grand Canyon. All one can do is gawp, and marvel at the sheer majesty.
Are the books of The Blending exquisite writing? Good lord, no. Are they fun? Amazingly so, when approached by readers who can relish the unintentional camp comedy of their overwrought drama. I've reread these books a half-dozen times, and they'll always have a fond spot in my heart.
Competitions (The Blending, #2)
by Sharon Green
4 of 5 stars
In Convergence, the first book of The Blending series, protagonists representing the elements of Air, Water, Fire, Earth, and Spirit narrated every tiny plot event from each of their own perspectives. Between the natural sluggishness of this artificial device, and the oceans of tea the protagonists insist upon sipping as they discuss and re-discuss every turn of event, the advance and retreat of glaciers looks positively zippy in comparison.
In this second volume, Competitions, Green rotates in another five character perspectives—the Evil Blending whom our protagonists must eventually overcome.
So readers can tell these ten (!) narrators apart, here's a scorecard. The five members of the Evil Blending are sexually promiscuous, mocking of their superiors and outright rude and condescending to their inferiors, murderous, paranoid, eager to cheat their way to the top, are quick to anger, and slow to forgive. They experience great delight in the misfortunes of others, spend great amounts of time bemoaning how the world is against them, and plot endlessly to overthrow those in power.
On the other hand, our five flawless heroes and heroines are sexually promiscuous, mocking of their superiors and outright rude and condescending to their inferiors, murderous, paranoid, eager to cheat their way to the top, are quick to anger, and slow to forgive. They experience great delight in the misfortunes of others, spend great amounts of time bemoaning how the world is against them, and plot endlessly to . . . hey, wait a minute!
Whatever. Bad genre fiction doesn't get any more compulsively readable than The Blending. Like a name-brand potato chip, you can't have just one.
Oh, What A Wonderful Wedding
by Patrick Dennis (written as Virginia Rowans)
4 of 5 stars
Two years before the publication of the Patrick Dennis best-seller Auntie Mame, Edward Everett Tanner III had his first novel published, under his feminine, other pseudonym of Virginia Rowans. It's a little obvious that Oh, What A Wonderful Wedding is a first novel; Tanner chose to use an omniscient narrator in the present tense, for one thing. He might have justified to himself by thinking it lent a journalistic immediacy to this chronicle of a wedding from the moment the groom asks the bride's parents for their blessings, through the months to a fateful reception after the ceremony. But the perspective is an awkward literary device in his hands, and his discomfort shows. By the end of the episodic and loosely-plotted novel, he's not even using it very consistently.
Still, it's fascinating to see how Tanner hit the ground running with some of his favorite objects of satire. Deftly he skewers the Madison Avenue advertising men of the nineteen-fifties, the nouveau riche, and suburbanite bridge-and-tunnel set. As he would in later books, he makes comic fodder of both Long Island and Connecticut matrons, Manhattan society, Southern belles, and those who climb socially for sport. The book's wedding begins a loose thematic trilogy of marriage stories that would be followed by the best-selling The Loving Couple (picturing a married couple in the throes of disintegration) and The Joyous Season (which features a frank look at the comic side of a bitter divorce)—but it's not as experimental as the former, nor as sincerely touching as the latter. There's not even a sympathetic character to be seen in Oh, What A Wonderful Wedding until the late entrance of bridesmaid Pussy Pemberton, one of Tanner's stock salt-of-the-earth dames with a heart of gold.
Also astonishing is how enduring are the tropes Tanner treads through in his story. There's not a consumer of entertainment alive who's not already read a novel or seen a movie or reality TV show featuring the first awkward meeting of future in-laws, or manipulative mothers transforming small weddings into gargantuan affairs, or wacky bridesmaids, or silly wedding planners. We're all familiar with the horror shows of inappropriate wedding presents, of last-minute wedding disasters. Tanner explores them as if they're new territory, however—and I suspect his prescient satirist's eye was capturing an era in which all these elements were cohering and becoming codified into the commercial wedding extravaganzas we love (or loathe) today.
Oh, What A Wonderful Wedding is easily the slightest of Tanner's sixteen novels. It's fun, though, and light-hearted in a way that his later novels are not. It's the work of an author for whom writing was still clearly a joy, and who was still discovering the claws behind the light touch of his comic prose.
Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell
2 of 5 stars
It's impossible to talk about Cloud Atlas without addressing the book's structure. Mitchell's novel is composed of six longish pastiche short stories of wildly varying quality and tone that fit together, as so many have pointed out, like nesting dolls—though whether that analogy is truly accurate, I doubt. It's just that when I've opened up a nesting doll, I've found an intact entire object within. Not an amputated half of a doll, with the promise of finding its missing part at some later juncture.
I prefer the analogy the author employs in the book of 'interrupted solos'—six voices whose narratives are broken off by the insinuation of new stories at a further point in a timeline, who resume their tales sequentially when the last of the solos completes. Without this highly artificial device, all we really have are a half-dozen short stories (again, of varying quality and readability and with wildly shifting tones that range from the somber and elegiac to rinky-dink Yakkity Sax Keystone Kops capers) that are tied together with some kind of inconsequential mumbo-jumbo about a birthmark and reincarnation. Yawn.
The fact that so many people get excited enough about the book because of its structure strikes me as the result of the author attempting to pander to his readers' ability finally to exercise some of the ham-handed literary criticism techniques they half-remember from their middle- and high-school language arts classes.
Because really, the way the stories interconnect is often nonsensical. That the first installment of Cloud Atlas is a journal read by the narrator of the second story is fine. But the letters written by the second narrator are supposed to be the property of an old man in the third story—who is a minor character in a fictional book (and a most torturous-to-read work of overwrought fiction it is, too). How the letters make that transition from the world of the actual to the world of the fictional I can't even begin to wrap my brain around. Nor do I understand how the narrator of the fifth story manages to see a movie version of the fourth that somehow preserves its narrator's quirky voice. That the final narrator can't even understand the language of the fifth narrative is believable, because I couldn't be understandin' or makin' no sense o' it's much-apostrophied end-o'-civilization (but oh-so-writerly) Huck Finn common-folkses colloquialisms.
Also irritating is how the author constantly has his narrators comment derisively upon the narratives previous to their own. When the 1930s musician of the second narrative declares the Pacific journals of his predecessor unreadable (and yes, they are), or when Timothy Cavendish nearly tosses aside the Luisa Rey mystery because he finds it 'artsy-fartsy' (sorry, Mr. Cavendish, it's not good enough to be artsy-fartsy—but it is equally as unreadable), there are probably dozens of English literature grad students rejoicing at finding fodder for a post-modernist dissertations. I see an author desperately attempting to mitigate his readers' negative responses to his own writing, though—which is another form of reader pandering.
One of the book's stories—that of Sonmi, a clone in a future dystopia—I found both moving and interesting. Two of them—the letters of Robert Frobisher and the adventures of Timothy Cavendish—were mildly engaging. The rest I found a chore. However, were it not for the author's insistence that I admire the structure of his work and marvel at his handiwork . . . while ignoring the faults that make parts of it unreadable . . . I might have come away from a simple collection of short stories with something more than a bad taste in my mouth.
His Majesty's Dragon (Temeraire, #1)
by Naomi Novik (Goodreads Author)
5 of 5 stars
I bought this book because it appeared on a list of recommended fantasy series, and because I was intrigued by the idea of dragons appearing in fiction about the Napoleonic wars. Though it took me forever actually to pick up the novel and begin it, I was hooked from the first two pages not only by Novik's smooth period-lite pastiche, but by the vigor and imaginativeness of her conception. Two days later, I was weeping—actually weeping!—as I approached the book's conclusion.
On public transit, no less.
His Majesty's Dragon is a fun read that hits a genre sweet spot vacated by Anne McCaffrey's Pern books and Mercedes Lackey's enjoyable early Valdemar novels. It's been a long while since I read the first novel of a series that left me anxious to get my hands on the next installment.
Miss Buncle's Book
by D.E. Stevenson
5 of 5 stars
D. E. Stevenson's Miss Buncle's Book, published in 1936, shares much in common with the E. F. Benson novel Secret Lives, which preceded it by four years. Both novels explore the comic potential of a secret author—not an scribe of good fiction in either case, mind you, but of popular books—who upsets the lives of the tightly-knit upper-middle-class English community in which she lives, inadvertently exposing all manner of hypocrisy and disingenuous behavior.
The title character of Miss Buncle's Book does so by penning a tale called Disturber of the Peace, in which she anonymously chronicles the frailties and follies of her neighbors in a gentle roman à clef. Miss Buncle's previously-placid village reads the novel, and is consumed by the certainty that it has been written by one of their own.
Like the Pan-like ‘Golden Boy’ who floats through Miss Buncle's Disturber of the Peace and upends an entire fictional rural village with a tune from his pipes, Miss Buncle herself is an irresistible (if unwitting) catalyst for change. The high-and-mighty with the most to lose by Miss Buncle's revelations threaten lawsuits, and seek to track down the mysterious author in order to give him a horsewhipping. The deserving few of the village find themselves for the first time moved by the novel-within-a-novel to to seek happiness and love . . . giving Miss Buncle ample material for a sequel to her bestseller in the process.
The book's a hoot. It's not as vicious as Benson at his most sharp-fanged, nor are any of the plot's twists truly surprising. The characters are sweet, however, and Stevenson's conceit of books within books is playfully executed. For fans of Benson or other literature of the period such as Cold Comfort Farm, Miss Buncle's Book will prove a light-hearted gem.
The Far West (Frontier Magic, #3)
and Across the Great Barrier (Frontier Magic, #2)
by Patricia C. Wrede
4 of 5 stars
Every few months, an Internet controversy arises that requires no more of its participants than to leap upon some minor perceived slight, fan the flames of controversy, and then bask in the blazing hot fires of self-righteous fervor. It doesn't matter if the popular flavor of the month is whether a Disney princess appears in a too-feminine dress on the company's website that none of the shrieking masses visit, or whether a satire site said something unkind about a public figure whose movie almost no one saw.
If the controversy can make a lazy average person feel like an indignant activist between Facebook status updates--without any actual activism beyond foaming at the mouth and pounding on the laptop--everybody wants to dogpile on, say the most unkind things imaginable, and congratulate themselves for 'raising awareness' until the next meaningless auto-da-fé.
Such was the unfortunate fate of Patricia Wrede's The Thirteenth Child, the first novel in the author's trilogy of books best described as Laura Ingalls Wilder meets YA fantasy. Wrede's careful world building in her alternate-universe mid-nineteenth-century America envisioned a continent in which the first inhabitants of the continent were not our American natives, but settlers from both Europe and Africa. Irate Internet dogpilers, in high dudgeon (few of whom had read or intended to read the book) accused her of actual genocide of Native Americans.
It's a shame that the hurtful and irresponsible internet fury obscured the commencement of a series that is highly readable and really a fun amalgam of magical youth and frontier narrative. Watching Wrede's heroine Eff mature and come into her own across the series' three installments made me race through the books at a fast clip.
My only complaint about the series as a whole is that I wish the sense of place had been even stronger throughout. One of the joys of the Little House books is that so many of the foods the Ingalls eat, the games they played, and even the toys they made for themselves were so commonplace, yet made exotic; even the most magical landscapes of Wrede's Columbia are rendered almost too matter-of-factly.
Skip the controversy and pick up the books. They're a highly readable commentary on the resilience of the human spirit of exploration, and a gentle affirmation of human dignity, regardless of race.
Rita Moreno: A Memoir
by Rita Moreno
3 of 5 stars
In her memoir, multiple award-winning performer Rita Moreno shares a story about spending a weekend at a wealthy party in the Hamptons, early in her career. Invited as arm candy along with Ann Miller, another studio stalwart who was attempting to make a name for herself, the pair gleefully proceed to neglect their duties as showcase Hollywood glamor girls, knock back a few drinks, and then mischievously traipse from bathroom to bathroom in the mansion, so that they can peek in all of the host's medicine cabinets.
Reading Rita Moreno: A Memoir is a little bit like opening up a few medicine cabinets in the actor's own home. Behind some doors are deliciously dishy stories, like the Miller escapade. Behind others, there are glimpses at genuine heartache, such as Moreno's forced separation from much of her family when her mother chose to flee from Puerto Rico to the Bronx, or the actor's messy romance with Marlon Brando. Moreno and her co-writer, Laura Shaine Cunningham, do a serviceable job of conveying how much sheer work, effort, and luck it takes to hammer out a career as enduring as Moreno's has turned out to be, and manage to do so by finding just the right anecdote for the occasion.
Still, Cunningham does Moreno a disservice in the early chapters on life in Puerto Rico, which are heavily laden with awkward, florid, purple prose. It's a relief when finally Moreno's career starts and the pair settle into a more workmanlike style.
Tallulah!
by Joel Lobenthal
3 of 5 stars
Few biographies can rival the sheer comprehensiveness of Tallulah! Unlike the too many celebrity tell-alls that skimp on career to get to the juicy affairs and gossip, Lobenthal has extensively researched and documented every production with which the giant of the stage was involved, from her first obscure appearances as an ingenue to her late-career camp roles. There's abundant information on the rehearsal process for just about every play in which Bankhead appeared. Lobenthal does a terrific job of accounting for how Bankhead's larger-than-life personality—and the lifelong audience cult it inspired—made her career in its formative years by drawing media attention to an unknown, and yet ruined it later in her life when audiences refused to accept her dramatic roles as anything other than Bankhead drollery.
Bankhead was an actor whose persona was largely founded on not seeming to give a damn what anyone thought of her, either as a public figure or as a dramatic artist. It's a pity, therefore, that her biographer is abnormally protective of her throughout his research. Lobenthal seems determined to promote Bankhead as an Overlooked Legend to such an extent that he promotes any positive reviews of Bankhead's productions as gospel; he waxes rhapsodically about her film and radio and television performances in a manner that would have one believe that Bankhead's late-life appearance as a camp villain on the Adam West Batman series was a turn on par with any of Meryl Streep's Oscar-winning performances.
Woe to any actor or reviewer who has dared to disagree with the notion that Bankhead was the ultimate performer of her generation, however. Lobenthal has a distinct tendency to undermine his darling Tallulah’s negative reviews by questioning the credentials of the critics, and by using academic pejoratives (negative reviewers are always 'alleging' or 'carping') to undermine their authority. He goes out of his way to discredit the motives (and even the acting skills) of co-stars who stooped to suggest that working with Tallulah was perhaps something of a pain in the butt. He even glosses over the star's family's repeated complaints about Tallulah's many fictions about her upbringing, and manages to make the extended Bankhead family sound like a bunch of entitled ingrates envious of her wild success.
Although Tallulah! probably can't be beat for its thoroughness, it's a shame that Lobenthal didn't follow Bankhead's example and let the facts of her life fall where they might, consequences be damned. His overindulgence of the star long after her death has an unfortunate echo of the uncritical fans who showed up in droves to whoop for and laugh at their acid-tongued Tallulah, no matter what role she happened to be playing.
3 of 5 stars
Harding’s Luck
4 of 5 stars
by E. Nesbit
American mid-twentieth-century author Edward Eager was so smitten by Edwardian British fabulist E. Nesbit that, in middle of his classic magical adventures, he would stop the action and encourage his young readers to investigate her books. It was from Nesbit's interlocking tales of time-travel, The House of Arden and Harding's Luck, that he paid homage to Nesbit by playing around with the central premise of the two works, when the adventures of one of his sets of protagonists dovetail with the adventures of children who would become the focus of later, as yet unwritten novels.
It was The House of Arden that had inspired this timey-wimey twist that wouldn't have been inappropriate in a Doctor Who serial. Edred and Elfrida's adventures into their household's past brush up against the adventures of 'Cousin Dick,' another time traveler like themselves, whose tale and whose contrasting perspectives on some of the same events were told in the later-published Harding's Luck.
It's something of a shame that The House of Arden is much the lesser of the novels. It's difficult not to contrast the two. Edred and Elfrida come from decidedly posher circumstances, while Dick is a vagrant. Dick has control of his magic, in his story; Edred and Elfrida are reduced to composing effete stanzas of verse and hoping their magic warden, the Mouldiwarp, is in a good enough mood to transport them into the past or back to the future. Dick's search for a place to call home is touching and noble; it makes Edred and Elfrida's grubbing about the past for a cash gain look self-serving and greedy.
Most annoyingly, while Cousin Dick is adventurous and resourceful, Edred and Elfrida are simps in comparison, and too much of The House of Arden and its magic depends on them minding their manners and resolving not to quarrel—reducing the Mouldiwarp to a tetchy nanny not half as engaging as as any that P. L. Travers penned.
It's still a good romp, though, especially when taken as the lead-in to a much-superior sequel from which it can't fully be separated.
The Twelve (The Passage, #2)
by Justin Cronin
3 of 5 stars
One of the literary techniques that most irritated me about Justin Cronin's tale of bioengineered vampires, The Passage, had to do with his seeming defensiveness of tone; every page reeked with his desperation to let readers know that yes, while he might've sold out for a big horror genre paycheck, he still had an MFA in creative writing and was determined to show it off, dang it. Thus we had endless multi-page scenes of internal narrative about scarlet ribbons undulating across the billows and curves of a carmine ocean speckled with craters of inky night that reflected a galaxy of cold and unfeeling stars. I think they were supposed to represent blood-sucking sequences, but since Cronin often shunned genre norms like using names or pronouns to let you figure out which of his several hundred characters was actually involved in a scene, it was sometimes awfully difficult to tell.
The good news in The Twelve is that the series’ first book was enough of a bestseller that Cronin could apparently pay off his grad school debts and write a fat check to his old program to assuage any guilt he might be feeling for slumming in the mass market paperback section. Those high-falutin' scenes are long-gone from the new installment—and gone too are the pages and pages of internal monologue, replaced by snappy dialogue-driven chapters that were totally absent from the first novel. The pacing in The Twelve is brisk and relentless, which makes it a page-turner.
Mind you, exciting writing isn't necessarily the same thing as great writing. For his sequel to The Passage, Justin Cronin has managed to cut down his literary crib sheet to two primary sources—Stephen King's The Stand being the first and most obvious. I'm not really a King fan, but it's plain that Cronin feels piling narrative upon narrative across dozens of characters is the best way to create a Stand-like blockbuster. Yet I found his characterizations lifeless and paper-thin, and his style a mere aping of King. The protagonists from the first book are ciphers here—the central couple of Peter and Amy especially. New characters get an even shorter shrift. Giving gruff military men a sudden appreciation of poetry before their deaths in the book (not just once, but twice!) isn't a convincing way of showing the humanity behind a martial mind, for example; it's a cheap shortcut that's akin to literary semaphore.
Cronin's approach to foreshadowing disaster is as equally ham-handed as the first installment. When a character smiles winsomely into the sweet summer sun and says, "Hey, I've got a great idea! Let's take all the innocent kiddies of the colony out into the countryside for a picnic! What could possibly go wrong?!", or looks off into the horizon, spits, and sighs, "Driving this tanker truck full of highly flammable fuel sure is boring work. At least nothing bad can possibly happen!” it's painfully obvious that disaster is in the works. The payoffs aren't enough to justify the clumsy foreshadowing, either.
Still, the book gets intriguing when it delves into Margaret Atwood territory, taking a spin on the totalitarian regimes similar to The Handmaid's Tale and its examination of the culture of rebellion. The scenes with Sara and the queen of the virals are both disturbing and ultimately touching; it's a pity they're buried beneath and burdened by a an abundance of opaque dream sequences, repetitious replayings of discoveries that Cronin wants to hammer home, and too many characters it's difficult to care much about.
While Cronin might be hewing more true to his genre's form by ditching the hip-lit pretensions of The Passage, it hasn't really improved the sequel any. On the other hand, it hasn't made it any the less compulsively readable, either.
Nerd Do Well
by Simon Pegg
4 of 5 stars
Simon Pegg's autobiography—of sorts—is a non-linear read written in a digressive and wandering fashion. It's perfectly obvious that there’s no opportunity for self-indulgence to which the entertainer won’t succumb . . . even if it means that entire chapters of this allegedly non-fictional work are patent fabrication. (The robot butler should be the tip-off, for skimmers.)
Yet I mean none of these observations as complaint. I scarcely expect less from the co-author of the quirky and equally surreal classic, Spaced. It's a fun, funny, and amiable take on celebrity biographies that any fan of Pegg and his multiple movie and television projects will easily appreciate. Readers accustomed to a more straightforward and personality-free approach to autobiography might want to skip this fun volume, however.
Redoubt (Valdemar: Collegium Chronicles, #4)
by Mercedes Lackey
1 of 5 stars
I am afraid that in my less-than-enthusiastic review of Changes: Valdemar: Collegium Chronicles #3—the prequel to the volume Redoubt: Valdemar: Collegium Chronicles #4, I was sternly taken to task by a defender of Mercedes Lackey. The reader took umbrage at the fact that I compared Lackey's invented game of Kirball to the invented game of Quidditch in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books. Actually, in my painful, childlike ignorance, I called it a 'blatant Quidditch ripoff.'
Did I say taken to task? Nay! I was upbraided, chided, and roundly scolded for daring to compare the two!
It seemed to me that the endless Kirball passages that have been bloating the Valdemar: Collegium Chronicles series more and more had some definite parallels to the sport Rowling invented. A casual reader might understand my error. After all, the Harry Potter books are about an outcast teenaged youth discovering magical powers he never knew he had at a school for wizards, just as the Collegium Chronicles are about an outcast teenaged youth exploring his own newly-discovered magical capabilities at a school for mystics. Both series feature a violent and overcomplicated school sport involving balls and goals, the minutiae of which take up entirely too many chapters across too many books.
I would also posit that in both cases, nobody among the readership really gives a rip which house team wins any of these games, but that might be going a Snitch too far.
You can understand my confusion in assuming that Kirball, the later-on-arrival of the two, might have been inspired by Quidditch. Kind of in the same degree that hundreds of student papers appearing before college honor courts on plagiarism charges across the country have been 'inspired by' uncited Wikipedia articles.
But no. My chastiser laid my doubts to rest by pointing out that Kirball has a single goal and a single ball, while Quidditch has four balls and three goals. Obviously the two are nothing alike whatsoever.
Any gripes I had about the previous book—its sluggish pacing, its horrendous appropriation of bad dialect, and the endless and dull Kirball passages—are thus rendered moot by my ignorance. I stand corrected, and must beg any reader's pardon for putting them off reading Ms. Lackey's godawful prose through my egregious errors in comparative imaginary recreational exercises at training facilities for the fictionally occult-inclined. Mea culpa.
(P.S. As for this book, there are fifty pages of actual action at the end that in no way justify the two hundred pages of pure crap and Kirball I had to slog through to get there.)
Convergence (The Blending, #1)
by Sharon Green
4 of 5 stars
Let's first talk about the elephant in the room. Sharon Green's Blendings books, of which Convergence is the first, are about as eptly written as the average internet slash fan fiction.
She has five main characters—one representing each of the four elements of the natural world, and a 'spirit' element thrown in as a wild card—all of whom are hot and beautiful and in their mid-twenties and yet about as emotionally mature as a slow twelve year old. Green's Blending books follow the same pattern throughout, so that each character encounters from his or her perspective exactly the same obstacles as his comrades. The fire protagonist will have an argument with her parents, for example. Then the water protagonist will do the same in the next chapter, followed in the following three installments by spirit, air, and earth.
Then the earth protagonist will face a trial. So will the fire protagonist. Next, the spirit protagonist will have her trial. So will water and earth.
The fire lady will take a bath. Then in the next chapter, the earth fellow will take a bath. Then the spirit lady will take a bath. Then the air and water dudes take a bath. Next up—five chapters in which they all have a cup of tea and ruminate about the trials, the arguments, and the baths.
Green uses this unremitting template for five books. FIVE BOOKS, PEOPLE. Plus three sequels after that! That's a lot of repeated conversations and situations.
Her characters have absolutely no subtleties whatsoever. Her protagonists are either extremely noble and good and perfect, save for one fatal flaw at which she'll hammer again and again. Her villains are ridiculously, sublimely, mustache-twiddlingly evil that her protagonists have no qualms whatsoever about assaulting these lowlifes with insults and attacks upon the slightest acquaintance (and then wondering later on why they're so friendless).
The sex scenes are so awkward and unerotic that one has to wonder if the author has ever indeed had sex, read about sex elsewhere, or perhaps actually been acquainted with anyone who's engaged in it.
Finally—and perhaps most damningly—the author has a tendency, when inspiration flags, to have her protagonists drink tea. There's a lot of tea flowing in these books. Apparently the magical capabilities of her protagonists is matched only by the vast retention and capacity of their bladders.
And yet. . . .
The repetitiveness and goofy artificiality of the Convergence series has won it a place of affection in my heart; it's one of my favorite fantasy series to re-reread. Though it's very much the worst kind of excess given an unchecked hand, there's a lush sumptuousness to it that's difficult to ignore. Green's sadism has a zest that's great fun to watch develop over the course of the series. And her obvious enjoyment of her glacial plotting (by the end of the first volume, a mere three days and several hundred pots of tea have passed) reveals depths of self-indulgence so remarkably bottomless that it's like a literary first visit to the Grand Canyon. All one can do is gawp, and marvel at the sheer majesty.
Are the books of The Blending exquisite writing? Good lord, no. Are they fun? Amazingly so, when approached by readers who can relish the unintentional camp comedy of their overwrought drama. I've reread these books a half-dozen times, and they'll always have a fond spot in my heart.
Competitions (The Blending, #2)
by Sharon Green
4 of 5 stars
In Convergence, the first book of The Blending series, protagonists representing the elements of Air, Water, Fire, Earth, and Spirit narrated every tiny plot event from each of their own perspectives. Between the natural sluggishness of this artificial device, and the oceans of tea the protagonists insist upon sipping as they discuss and re-discuss every turn of event, the advance and retreat of glaciers looks positively zippy in comparison.
In this second volume, Competitions, Green rotates in another five character perspectives—the Evil Blending whom our protagonists must eventually overcome.
So readers can tell these ten (!) narrators apart, here's a scorecard. The five members of the Evil Blending are sexually promiscuous, mocking of their superiors and outright rude and condescending to their inferiors, murderous, paranoid, eager to cheat their way to the top, are quick to anger, and slow to forgive. They experience great delight in the misfortunes of others, spend great amounts of time bemoaning how the world is against them, and plot endlessly to overthrow those in power.
On the other hand, our five flawless heroes and heroines are sexually promiscuous, mocking of their superiors and outright rude and condescending to their inferiors, murderous, paranoid, eager to cheat their way to the top, are quick to anger, and slow to forgive. They experience great delight in the misfortunes of others, spend great amounts of time bemoaning how the world is against them, and plot endlessly to . . . hey, wait a minute!
Whatever. Bad genre fiction doesn't get any more compulsively readable than The Blending. Like a name-brand potato chip, you can't have just one.
Oh, What A Wonderful Wedding
by Patrick Dennis (written as Virginia Rowans)
4 of 5 stars
Two years before the publication of the Patrick Dennis best-seller Auntie Mame, Edward Everett Tanner III had his first novel published, under his feminine, other pseudonym of Virginia Rowans. It's a little obvious that Oh, What A Wonderful Wedding is a first novel; Tanner chose to use an omniscient narrator in the present tense, for one thing. He might have justified to himself by thinking it lent a journalistic immediacy to this chronicle of a wedding from the moment the groom asks the bride's parents for their blessings, through the months to a fateful reception after the ceremony. But the perspective is an awkward literary device in his hands, and his discomfort shows. By the end of the episodic and loosely-plotted novel, he's not even using it very consistently.
Still, it's fascinating to see how Tanner hit the ground running with some of his favorite objects of satire. Deftly he skewers the Madison Avenue advertising men of the nineteen-fifties, the nouveau riche, and suburbanite bridge-and-tunnel set. As he would in later books, he makes comic fodder of both Long Island and Connecticut matrons, Manhattan society, Southern belles, and those who climb socially for sport. The book's wedding begins a loose thematic trilogy of marriage stories that would be followed by the best-selling The Loving Couple (picturing a married couple in the throes of disintegration) and The Joyous Season (which features a frank look at the comic side of a bitter divorce)—but it's not as experimental as the former, nor as sincerely touching as the latter. There's not even a sympathetic character to be seen in Oh, What A Wonderful Wedding until the late entrance of bridesmaid Pussy Pemberton, one of Tanner's stock salt-of-the-earth dames with a heart of gold.
Also astonishing is how enduring are the tropes Tanner treads through in his story. There's not a consumer of entertainment alive who's not already read a novel or seen a movie or reality TV show featuring the first awkward meeting of future in-laws, or manipulative mothers transforming small weddings into gargantuan affairs, or wacky bridesmaids, or silly wedding planners. We're all familiar with the horror shows of inappropriate wedding presents, of last-minute wedding disasters. Tanner explores them as if they're new territory, however—and I suspect his prescient satirist's eye was capturing an era in which all these elements were cohering and becoming codified into the commercial wedding extravaganzas we love (or loathe) today.
Oh, What A Wonderful Wedding is easily the slightest of Tanner's sixteen novels. It's fun, though, and light-hearted in a way that his later novels are not. It's the work of an author for whom writing was still clearly a joy, and who was still discovering the claws behind the light touch of his comic prose.
Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell
2 of 5 stars
It's impossible to talk about Cloud Atlas without addressing the book's structure. Mitchell's novel is composed of six longish pastiche short stories of wildly varying quality and tone that fit together, as so many have pointed out, like nesting dolls—though whether that analogy is truly accurate, I doubt. It's just that when I've opened up a nesting doll, I've found an intact entire object within. Not an amputated half of a doll, with the promise of finding its missing part at some later juncture.
I prefer the analogy the author employs in the book of 'interrupted solos'—six voices whose narratives are broken off by the insinuation of new stories at a further point in a timeline, who resume their tales sequentially when the last of the solos completes. Without this highly artificial device, all we really have are a half-dozen short stories (again, of varying quality and readability and with wildly shifting tones that range from the somber and elegiac to rinky-dink Yakkity Sax Keystone Kops capers) that are tied together with some kind of inconsequential mumbo-jumbo about a birthmark and reincarnation. Yawn.
The fact that so many people get excited enough about the book because of its structure strikes me as the result of the author attempting to pander to his readers' ability finally to exercise some of the ham-handed literary criticism techniques they half-remember from their middle- and high-school language arts classes.
Because really, the way the stories interconnect is often nonsensical. That the first installment of Cloud Atlas is a journal read by the narrator of the second story is fine. But the letters written by the second narrator are supposed to be the property of an old man in the third story—who is a minor character in a fictional book (and a most torturous-to-read work of overwrought fiction it is, too). How the letters make that transition from the world of the actual to the world of the fictional I can't even begin to wrap my brain around. Nor do I understand how the narrator of the fifth story manages to see a movie version of the fourth that somehow preserves its narrator's quirky voice. That the final narrator can't even understand the language of the fifth narrative is believable, because I couldn't be understandin' or makin' no sense o' it's much-apostrophied end-o'-civilization (but oh-so-writerly) Huck Finn common-folkses colloquialisms.
Also irritating is how the author constantly has his narrators comment derisively upon the narratives previous to their own. When the 1930s musician of the second narrative declares the Pacific journals of his predecessor unreadable (and yes, they are), or when Timothy Cavendish nearly tosses aside the Luisa Rey mystery because he finds it 'artsy-fartsy' (sorry, Mr. Cavendish, it's not good enough to be artsy-fartsy—but it is equally as unreadable), there are probably dozens of English literature grad students rejoicing at finding fodder for a post-modernist dissertations. I see an author desperately attempting to mitigate his readers' negative responses to his own writing, though—which is another form of reader pandering.
One of the book's stories—that of Sonmi, a clone in a future dystopia—I found both moving and interesting. Two of them—the letters of Robert Frobisher and the adventures of Timothy Cavendish—were mildly engaging. The rest I found a chore. However, were it not for the author's insistence that I admire the structure of his work and marvel at his handiwork . . . while ignoring the faults that make parts of it unreadable . . . I might have come away from a simple collection of short stories with something more than a bad taste in my mouth.
His Majesty's Dragon (Temeraire, #1)
by Naomi Novik (Goodreads Author)
5 of 5 stars
I bought this book because it appeared on a list of recommended fantasy series, and because I was intrigued by the idea of dragons appearing in fiction about the Napoleonic wars. Though it took me forever actually to pick up the novel and begin it, I was hooked from the first two pages not only by Novik's smooth period-lite pastiche, but by the vigor and imaginativeness of her conception. Two days later, I was weeping—actually weeping!—as I approached the book's conclusion.
On public transit, no less.
His Majesty's Dragon is a fun read that hits a genre sweet spot vacated by Anne McCaffrey's Pern books and Mercedes Lackey's enjoyable early Valdemar novels. It's been a long while since I read the first novel of a series that left me anxious to get my hands on the next installment.
Miss Buncle's Book
by D.E. Stevenson
5 of 5 stars
D. E. Stevenson's Miss Buncle's Book, published in 1936, shares much in common with the E. F. Benson novel Secret Lives, which preceded it by four years. Both novels explore the comic potential of a secret author—not an scribe of good fiction in either case, mind you, but of popular books—who upsets the lives of the tightly-knit upper-middle-class English community in which she lives, inadvertently exposing all manner of hypocrisy and disingenuous behavior.
The title character of Miss Buncle's Book does so by penning a tale called Disturber of the Peace, in which she anonymously chronicles the frailties and follies of her neighbors in a gentle roman à clef. Miss Buncle's previously-placid village reads the novel, and is consumed by the certainty that it has been written by one of their own.
Like the Pan-like ‘Golden Boy’ who floats through Miss Buncle's Disturber of the Peace and upends an entire fictional rural village with a tune from his pipes, Miss Buncle herself is an irresistible (if unwitting) catalyst for change. The high-and-mighty with the most to lose by Miss Buncle's revelations threaten lawsuits, and seek to track down the mysterious author in order to give him a horsewhipping. The deserving few of the village find themselves for the first time moved by the novel-within-a-novel to to seek happiness and love . . . giving Miss Buncle ample material for a sequel to her bestseller in the process.
The book's a hoot. It's not as vicious as Benson at his most sharp-fanged, nor are any of the plot's twists truly surprising. The characters are sweet, however, and Stevenson's conceit of books within books is playfully executed. For fans of Benson or other literature of the period such as Cold Comfort Farm, Miss Buncle's Book will prove a light-hearted gem.
The Far West (Frontier Magic, #3)
and Across the Great Barrier (Frontier Magic, #2)
by Patricia C. Wrede
4 of 5 stars
Every few months, an Internet controversy arises that requires no more of its participants than to leap upon some minor perceived slight, fan the flames of controversy, and then bask in the blazing hot fires of self-righteous fervor. It doesn't matter if the popular flavor of the month is whether a Disney princess appears in a too-feminine dress on the company's website that none of the shrieking masses visit, or whether a satire site said something unkind about a public figure whose movie almost no one saw.
If the controversy can make a lazy average person feel like an indignant activist between Facebook status updates--without any actual activism beyond foaming at the mouth and pounding on the laptop--everybody wants to dogpile on, say the most unkind things imaginable, and congratulate themselves for 'raising awareness' until the next meaningless auto-da-fé.
Such was the unfortunate fate of Patricia Wrede's The Thirteenth Child, the first novel in the author's trilogy of books best described as Laura Ingalls Wilder meets YA fantasy. Wrede's careful world building in her alternate-universe mid-nineteenth-century America envisioned a continent in which the first inhabitants of the continent were not our American natives, but settlers from both Europe and Africa. Irate Internet dogpilers, in high dudgeon (few of whom had read or intended to read the book) accused her of actual genocide of Native Americans.
It's a shame that the hurtful and irresponsible internet fury obscured the commencement of a series that is highly readable and really a fun amalgam of magical youth and frontier narrative. Watching Wrede's heroine Eff mature and come into her own across the series' three installments made me race through the books at a fast clip.
My only complaint about the series as a whole is that I wish the sense of place had been even stronger throughout. One of the joys of the Little House books is that so many of the foods the Ingalls eat, the games they played, and even the toys they made for themselves were so commonplace, yet made exotic; even the most magical landscapes of Wrede's Columbia are rendered almost too matter-of-factly.
Skip the controversy and pick up the books. They're a highly readable commentary on the resilience of the human spirit of exploration, and a gentle affirmation of human dignity, regardless of race.
Rita Moreno: A Memoir
by Rita Moreno
3 of 5 stars
In her memoir, multiple award-winning performer Rita Moreno shares a story about spending a weekend at a wealthy party in the Hamptons, early in her career. Invited as arm candy along with Ann Miller, another studio stalwart who was attempting to make a name for herself, the pair gleefully proceed to neglect their duties as showcase Hollywood glamor girls, knock back a few drinks, and then mischievously traipse from bathroom to bathroom in the mansion, so that they can peek in all of the host's medicine cabinets.
Reading Rita Moreno: A Memoir is a little bit like opening up a few medicine cabinets in the actor's own home. Behind some doors are deliciously dishy stories, like the Miller escapade. Behind others, there are glimpses at genuine heartache, such as Moreno's forced separation from much of her family when her mother chose to flee from Puerto Rico to the Bronx, or the actor's messy romance with Marlon Brando. Moreno and her co-writer, Laura Shaine Cunningham, do a serviceable job of conveying how much sheer work, effort, and luck it takes to hammer out a career as enduring as Moreno's has turned out to be, and manage to do so by finding just the right anecdote for the occasion.
Still, Cunningham does Moreno a disservice in the early chapters on life in Puerto Rico, which are heavily laden with awkward, florid, purple prose. It's a relief when finally Moreno's career starts and the pair settle into a more workmanlike style.
Tallulah!
by Joel Lobenthal
3 of 5 stars
Few biographies can rival the sheer comprehensiveness of Tallulah! Unlike the too many celebrity tell-alls that skimp on career to get to the juicy affairs and gossip, Lobenthal has extensively researched and documented every production with which the giant of the stage was involved, from her first obscure appearances as an ingenue to her late-career camp roles. There's abundant information on the rehearsal process for just about every play in which Bankhead appeared. Lobenthal does a terrific job of accounting for how Bankhead's larger-than-life personality—and the lifelong audience cult it inspired—made her career in its formative years by drawing media attention to an unknown, and yet ruined it later in her life when audiences refused to accept her dramatic roles as anything other than Bankhead drollery.
Bankhead was an actor whose persona was largely founded on not seeming to give a damn what anyone thought of her, either as a public figure or as a dramatic artist. It's a pity, therefore, that her biographer is abnormally protective of her throughout his research. Lobenthal seems determined to promote Bankhead as an Overlooked Legend to such an extent that he promotes any positive reviews of Bankhead's productions as gospel; he waxes rhapsodically about her film and radio and television performances in a manner that would have one believe that Bankhead's late-life appearance as a camp villain on the Adam West Batman series was a turn on par with any of Meryl Streep's Oscar-winning performances.
Woe to any actor or reviewer who has dared to disagree with the notion that Bankhead was the ultimate performer of her generation, however. Lobenthal has a distinct tendency to undermine his darling Tallulah’s negative reviews by questioning the credentials of the critics, and by using academic pejoratives (negative reviewers are always 'alleging' or 'carping') to undermine their authority. He goes out of his way to discredit the motives (and even the acting skills) of co-stars who stooped to suggest that working with Tallulah was perhaps something of a pain in the butt. He even glosses over the star's family's repeated complaints about Tallulah's many fictions about her upbringing, and manages to make the extended Bankhead family sound like a bunch of entitled ingrates envious of her wild success.
Although Tallulah! probably can't be beat for its thoroughness, it's a shame that Lobenthal didn't follow Bankhead's example and let the facts of her life fall where they might, consequences be damned. His overindulgence of the star long after her death has an unfortunate echo of the uncritical fans who showed up in droves to whoop for and laugh at their acid-tongued Tallulah, no matter what role she happened to be playing.
Monday, July 8, 2013
From You to We
Over the years in the public version of my journal, I’ve written several times about grappling with issues related to my sexual orientation during my college years. While I wasn’t confused whatsoever about myself, quite often coming of age in a small Southern college town during the early Reagan years felt like trying to butt my head through a series of brick walls without a helmet.
I wrote a personal essay last week about being released from a campus tour guide position that I loved dearly, merely because it was suspected that I was gay. The amount of response I received was more than I ever expected. I was actually overwhelmed not only by the number of people who passed along the essay to other people, but by the sheer outpouring of concern and love from friends and strangers alike. College people I hadn’t talked to since my graduation in 1985 came out of the woodwork to say they appreciated what I’d written. People I had talked to many times since then offered me hugs and sympathy. Lots of folk started using words to describe me that ordinarily I wouldn’t be so bold as to pick for myself. Words like brave, or courageous.
Yet facing a memory I’d successfully choked down for nearly thirty years wasn’t particularly brave. It was, for a period of time after I allowed it to surface, pretty raw. Definitely painful. Talking about the incident on record for the university archivist hurt, but I pushed through. Writing about it publicly was cathartic. But brave? Nah, not really.
If you want to know what was brave in the aftermath of sharing that particular incident, look no further than when I spoke to my father about it a few days later. That took courage.
My father was also a graduate of William and Mary. I ended up attending the college in no small part because of the idyllic memories of his own college days. It really wasn’t like my father to wax rhapsodic over . . . well, anything. If one got him started on his undergraduate experience, however, the reminiscences rapidly turned into a rosy, glowing chronicle of misty dawns over the Sunken Garden, stolen kisses from apple-cheeked girls in Crim Dell, and challenging intellectual inquisitions from crusty old professors with hearts of gold that (I think) might have been pilfered somewhat from The Paper Chase.
Oh, and keggers. Lots of keggers.
The reasons I’ve never really talked with my father about the incidents of head-butting I encountered during my college years are multiple. For one thing, my family has always erred on the side of over-sharing when it comes to topics related to sex and sexuality. My mom and dad were the people, after all, who decided to illustrate the principles of the Old Testament covenant in a more modern and up-to-date way by informing my entire eighth-grade Sunday school class that I’d been circumcised near birth, prompting my peers to call me ‘Circumcision Boy’ for the rest of the year. My dad was the man who decades ago welcomed my husband to the family during our first visit South by perching on the edge of the sofa bed in his underwear and quizzing a horrified Craig in depth about his sexual history. In other words, my dad is already enough all up in my bidness that I really can’t be blamed for wanting a little distance and decorum over some parts of my life.
My parents knew that I had issues with a couple of my roommates; they didn’t know that largely they’d arisen as a result of homophobia, both internalized and institutional. They didn’t know about the tricky relationships I’d had during my college years, or the struggles I faced because of cruel and untrue rumors that people spread about me. They didn’t know the college had looked me in the face and told me it didn’t particularly care for my kind. Even in the many years after I was out to them I never spoke of these things because I didn’t want to befoul my father’s golden-tinted nostalgia when it came to his alma mater. William and Mary might not have been an ideal fit for me on some levels, but I very much respect and appreciate that my dad had a good time there. (At the keggers.)
In large part, though, I didn’t talk about many of the problems I’d faced in college because I didn’t want my dad to worry. Good parents fret about their children, even when they know they’re safe and whole. Ever since I came out, my father’s always agonized that he might have said something inadvertent when I was growing up that I might have interpreted retroactively as unloving or unsupportive. (He didn’t.) To share stories of adversity would have confirmed his fear that he hadn’t done everything humanly possible to shelter me from misfortune.
So I never shared the more grim tales of my past. Both of our instincts are to protect the other.
After I spoke to the archivist last month, however, I realized that I needed to tell these same stories to my dad. So I called him, and told him about the Stephens Project. Then I took a breath and launched into what I needed to say. I revisited the bad experiences I had with my sophomore and junior year roommates. I talked about my right-wing boyfriend. I told him the story that got so much attention last week, about my confrontation with Admissions.
The last part was the hardest of all; one of the things my father had done during his college years was, along with a handful of others, was to institute the campus tours that I so dearly had loved giving. The university had never held them before my dad and a few others from Circle K began offering them on their own to prospective students. Later on, Admissions subsumed the Circle K program as their own. My dad had been so proud of me for carrying on the family tradition that I don’t even think I’d ever admitted to him that I’d been let go as a tour guide, my senior year.
As I feared, my dad was distressed at the news. He apologized to me. He spoke carefully and regretfully, as if I were some kind of wounded veteran who was an unavoidable reminder of the nation’s pain. I told him to drop that. Here’s the thing—and I would say the very same to anyone who’s tempted to regard me as some kind of battle-scarred invalid still quivering from my injuries of three decades ago. Bad stuff happened to me in college. (Bad stuff has happened to me since, and will no doubt happen in the future.) I wish it hadn’t, but we’re all dealt certain cards in life, and all we can do is play them. Even if it were possible to make all my adversity vanish with a single wish, I wouldn’t dare do so. All kinds of experiences, good and bad, have gone into shaping me into the person I am today. I’m really fond of that person.
I think that person is pretty awesome, in fact. I see that guy in the mirror and I want to wink at him and shoot finger-guns in his direction and say, Lookin’ foxy, stallion! just because I like him that much.
So hell, if a couple of bad years is part of the price it took to get to that level of self-acceptance, I’m actually pretty okay with it. I don’t want my father fretting and fussing that he wasn’t able to shelter me from problems he didn’t know existed. He shouldn’t convince himself that my college life was one of fear and suffering. That’s not how I’d characterize it at all. Neither should he.
“I’m glad you did this,” he said, when I explained all that to him. “Talked to the people in the archives, I mean. And talked to me.”
“I’m glad I did, too,” I told him.
“We need to be sharing stories like this,” he told me. “It’s important that we share them, that we speak out, that we let others know about our experiences so that we get the message out.”
And in the end, here is why I love my dad: because in those considerate, generous sentences, he used the word we. My struggle becomes our struggle. My albatross, unasked, he automatically shoulders. He doesn’t need to; I never asked him. But he does, with gallantry. That’s why.
That’s why I especially love those friends of mine who, over the past couple of weeks, have reached out to offer similar expressions of support and concern. My past hurts aren’t their fault; there’s little they could have done to back then to remedy them. But in recognizing and acknowledging my struggles, and kneeling down to assume their share of the weight of them, they manage both to humble me and give me even more hope for the future.
They remind me that you can and should always be we.
I wrote a personal essay last week about being released from a campus tour guide position that I loved dearly, merely because it was suspected that I was gay. The amount of response I received was more than I ever expected. I was actually overwhelmed not only by the number of people who passed along the essay to other people, but by the sheer outpouring of concern and love from friends and strangers alike. College people I hadn’t talked to since my graduation in 1985 came out of the woodwork to say they appreciated what I’d written. People I had talked to many times since then offered me hugs and sympathy. Lots of folk started using words to describe me that ordinarily I wouldn’t be so bold as to pick for myself. Words like brave, or courageous.
Yet facing a memory I’d successfully choked down for nearly thirty years wasn’t particularly brave. It was, for a period of time after I allowed it to surface, pretty raw. Definitely painful. Talking about the incident on record for the university archivist hurt, but I pushed through. Writing about it publicly was cathartic. But brave? Nah, not really.
If you want to know what was brave in the aftermath of sharing that particular incident, look no further than when I spoke to my father about it a few days later. That took courage.
My father was also a graduate of William and Mary. I ended up attending the college in no small part because of the idyllic memories of his own college days. It really wasn’t like my father to wax rhapsodic over . . . well, anything. If one got him started on his undergraduate experience, however, the reminiscences rapidly turned into a rosy, glowing chronicle of misty dawns over the Sunken Garden, stolen kisses from apple-cheeked girls in Crim Dell, and challenging intellectual inquisitions from crusty old professors with hearts of gold that (I think) might have been pilfered somewhat from The Paper Chase.
Oh, and keggers. Lots of keggers.
The reasons I’ve never really talked with my father about the incidents of head-butting I encountered during my college years are multiple. For one thing, my family has always erred on the side of over-sharing when it comes to topics related to sex and sexuality. My mom and dad were the people, after all, who decided to illustrate the principles of the Old Testament covenant in a more modern and up-to-date way by informing my entire eighth-grade Sunday school class that I’d been circumcised near birth, prompting my peers to call me ‘Circumcision Boy’ for the rest of the year. My dad was the man who decades ago welcomed my husband to the family during our first visit South by perching on the edge of the sofa bed in his underwear and quizzing a horrified Craig in depth about his sexual history. In other words, my dad is already enough all up in my bidness that I really can’t be blamed for wanting a little distance and decorum over some parts of my life.
My parents knew that I had issues with a couple of my roommates; they didn’t know that largely they’d arisen as a result of homophobia, both internalized and institutional. They didn’t know about the tricky relationships I’d had during my college years, or the struggles I faced because of cruel and untrue rumors that people spread about me. They didn’t know the college had looked me in the face and told me it didn’t particularly care for my kind. Even in the many years after I was out to them I never spoke of these things because I didn’t want to befoul my father’s golden-tinted nostalgia when it came to his alma mater. William and Mary might not have been an ideal fit for me on some levels, but I very much respect and appreciate that my dad had a good time there. (At the keggers.)
In large part, though, I didn’t talk about many of the problems I’d faced in college because I didn’t want my dad to worry. Good parents fret about their children, even when they know they’re safe and whole. Ever since I came out, my father’s always agonized that he might have said something inadvertent when I was growing up that I might have interpreted retroactively as unloving or unsupportive. (He didn’t.) To share stories of adversity would have confirmed his fear that he hadn’t done everything humanly possible to shelter me from misfortune.
So I never shared the more grim tales of my past. Both of our instincts are to protect the other.
After I spoke to the archivist last month, however, I realized that I needed to tell these same stories to my dad. So I called him, and told him about the Stephens Project. Then I took a breath and launched into what I needed to say. I revisited the bad experiences I had with my sophomore and junior year roommates. I talked about my right-wing boyfriend. I told him the story that got so much attention last week, about my confrontation with Admissions.
The last part was the hardest of all; one of the things my father had done during his college years was, along with a handful of others, was to institute the campus tours that I so dearly had loved giving. The university had never held them before my dad and a few others from Circle K began offering them on their own to prospective students. Later on, Admissions subsumed the Circle K program as their own. My dad had been so proud of me for carrying on the family tradition that I don’t even think I’d ever admitted to him that I’d been let go as a tour guide, my senior year.
As I feared, my dad was distressed at the news. He apologized to me. He spoke carefully and regretfully, as if I were some kind of wounded veteran who was an unavoidable reminder of the nation’s pain. I told him to drop that. Here’s the thing—and I would say the very same to anyone who’s tempted to regard me as some kind of battle-scarred invalid still quivering from my injuries of three decades ago. Bad stuff happened to me in college. (Bad stuff has happened to me since, and will no doubt happen in the future.) I wish it hadn’t, but we’re all dealt certain cards in life, and all we can do is play them. Even if it were possible to make all my adversity vanish with a single wish, I wouldn’t dare do so. All kinds of experiences, good and bad, have gone into shaping me into the person I am today. I’m really fond of that person.
I think that person is pretty awesome, in fact. I see that guy in the mirror and I want to wink at him and shoot finger-guns in his direction and say, Lookin’ foxy, stallion! just because I like him that much.
So hell, if a couple of bad years is part of the price it took to get to that level of self-acceptance, I’m actually pretty okay with it. I don’t want my father fretting and fussing that he wasn’t able to shelter me from problems he didn’t know existed. He shouldn’t convince himself that my college life was one of fear and suffering. That’s not how I’d characterize it at all. Neither should he.
“I’m glad you did this,” he said, when I explained all that to him. “Talked to the people in the archives, I mean. And talked to me.”
“I’m glad I did, too,” I told him.
“We need to be sharing stories like this,” he told me. “It’s important that we share them, that we speak out, that we let others know about our experiences so that we get the message out.”
And in the end, here is why I love my dad: because in those considerate, generous sentences, he used the word we. My struggle becomes our struggle. My albatross, unasked, he automatically shoulders. He doesn’t need to; I never asked him. But he does, with gallantry. That’s why.
That’s why I especially love those friends of mine who, over the past couple of weeks, have reached out to offer similar expressions of support and concern. My past hurts aren’t their fault; there’s little they could have done to back then to remedy them. But in recognizing and acknowledging my struggles, and kneeling down to assume their share of the weight of them, they manage both to humble me and give me even more hope for the future.
They remind me that you can and should always be we.
Friday, June 28, 2013
Institutional Disapproval
Although I’d made pretty much straight As across the board in high school, during my freshman and sophomore years in college I found myself grappling with the reality of pulling a mixed bag of Bs and Cs, with the occasional A in subjects where I could evince a little more enthusiasm. Mostly I dealt with my academic slippage by not confronting it at all. Professors would hand back a marked paper in class, and if I was pretty sure I hadn’t done as well as I wanted, I’d slip it, unlooked-at, into my notebook. I wouldn’t pull it out again until I was alone and I could steel myself in private for the disappointment. I didn’t want anyone else to see my expressions of rue.
It was a bad habit. I’m not proud. Once I finally found my academic groove, I was glad to be rid of that behavior.
Only I really wasn’t, because during this last month I uncovered something else I’d put aside during my college days. Something I planned to examine again when I had my composure and my dignity, in private, at a time when it couldn’t hurt me any longer. It wasn’t an essay or a blue exam booklet, but a memory. Even though I’d locked it away and mentally forbade myself ever to appraise it, when I unpacked it and removed it from the airless container in which it had mummified for thirty years, it hadn’t lost any of its potency. It still has sharp, painful edges that cut when I handle them. It still hurts.
My friend and old college roommate Eric earlier this month asked if I’d considered giving an oral history to the Stephens Project—an initiative by William and Mary’s Swem Library to collect and document the stories and experiences of gay and lesbian alumni, staff, and faculty about our time at the college, and the impact the college had on our sexualities.
I try to keep myself at arm’s length from any alumni activity, so my initial internal reaction was a hearty hell no! I could see that the project was worthy, though, and knew it was the kind of thing that would be a good outlet for me. Plus the grad student collecting the oral histories was already conducting a spate of them in Manhattan this week. It would be convenient not only for me to schedule an appointment while he was here, but for him as well.
Loath as I was to talk about my awful college days at length, I knew that enough decades had passed that it really was time to scrutinize the string of mostly negative events that made my college years a trial. And moreover, it seemed time to examine them as a continuous narrative, set in the context of both a socially conservative Southern college setting, and the repressed early nineteen-eighties when I was entombed there.
So I decided that I’d talk about how I’d entered college fairly at peace with my sexuality, thanks to my super-liberal parents—though I had absolutely no intentions of ever coming out during my life. I’d already patterned my future adulthood on the “confirmed bachelors” among my parents’ academic friends—a lonely life of antiques, an appreciation of Bette Davis movies, and furtive sexual trysts of which I’d never speak again.
I suspected I’d talk about how I had problems assimilating my freshmen year, but my issue was more how to pass as a white boy, than how to pass as a straight one. I’d been a racial non-minority minority in my all African-American high school. Landing feet-first in the preppy, lily-white freshman class of 1981 was more culture shock than anything I’d ever experienced.
I knew I’d talk about my sophomore year, when my first roommate sexually harassed me for months before moving out and then starting a completely false whisper campaign on campus that I’d raped him. That reputation haunted me the rest of the time I was at William and Mary. It was an impeachment I couldn’t refute or counter because it was never formally leveled against me. And in those days, the gayness of it all was even more horrifying to people than the actual crime of rape—so I was always whispered about, and always supect.
I knew I’d talk about the boyfriend I had during my junior year who made me walk fifteen feet behind him on campus and who would only have conversations with me at the campus cafeteria if we sat at adjacent tables, facing the same direction. I knew I’d talk about “The Plan” that he had, the ridiculous and totally un-ironic notion that he and I would graduate, get nice conservative jobs in Richmond, buy adjacent houses, marry pretty William and Mary grads for wives, and that on weekends we’d consummate our unholy homosexual desires in the garage while our wives gossiped over the back fence.
I figured I’d have to address my junior year roommate, who unbeknownst to me was grappling with his own sexuality and his heavily-religious background. He decided shortly before we were supposed to move into our senior dorm together that he wouldn’t be rooming with me our final year, because I was interfering with his personal relationship to God . . . which I interpreted as meaning that he’d somehow found out I was gay, and didn’t approve. And then I started to think about that first weeks of my senior year when that roommate showed up and moved into the room we’d chosen anyway, and how intolerable the time was that we lived silently side by side, not exchanging a single word.
It was while I was thinking about this painful month that I tripped some mental wire that exposed the memory I’d been trying to hide from myself for three decades. At first I recoiled. I tried to pack it away again; it shouldn’t have seen the light of day. But then I edged around the loathsome thing, kicked it a little, and decided to pull it out. Painful or not, it was the crowning summation of all the indignities I experienced at William and Mary. It went on to define my relationship to the college—or lack thereof—ever after.
So, on the day after the Supreme Court repealed DOMA, I shared the following story with a total stranger for the very first time.
I’ve had precious few moments of absolute clarity in my life, but during the summer between my sophomore and junior years I realized that I wanted to be a campus tour guide for prospective students. I don’t know what gave me the idea I’d be perfect for it, but I knew I had all the qualifications. That is, an enthusiasm for talking at length, a broad knowledge of the college and its activities, a knack for public speaking, and most importantly, the ability to lecture a group of unfamiliar high school students and their parents while walking backwards.
I’d never really manifested such college spirit as when I decided I wanted to lead campus tours. I’d never before really set myself an independent goal with no concept of how to make it come to fruition. I was not accustomed to making bold decisions and taking chances with unknown experiences. But I marched into the college admissions office, asked how one became a tour guide, and filled out a form. The secretary at the desk asked if I had an adult reference. I thought a moment, and decided to go straight to the top. I threw out the name of Mrs. Thomas Graves, wife of the college president.
I’d become acquainted with Mrs. Graves in the first month of my freshman year when she and Mr. Graves had extended an invitation to my freshman roommate—and his roommate—to dinner at the President’s House. My roommate had been a graduate of (and had a father who taught at) the Phillips Exeter Academy, a prep school in New Hampshire, where the Graves were seeking admission for one of their sons. It was supposed to be a bit of a schmoozefest and my roommate obviously did not want me there. He’d invited me only grudgingly, and because he had to. He was a bit of a Neanderthal during the entire evening. I don’t recall that he actually picked up his plate and licked off the gravy, but if I were writing a screenplay of the night, that’s what I’d have him do. It was pretty close. But I was charming and the highlight of the evening was when Mrs. Graves heard I was taking piano lessons and invited me to play Flo Ziegfield’s historic piano for her. I sat down and whipped off the “Moonlight Sonata,” which happened to be her favorite composition. She was my advocate for the rest of our mutual tenure at the college. I could do no wrong, in Mrs. Graves’ eyes.
And what was the admissions office to do, when they had the college president’s wife pressuring them into taking me on as a volunteer? They caved. So all during that summer, my junior year, and the summer following, I worked for Admissions. Once or twice a week I’d meet a group of prospective students and their parents in a room of the historic Wren building. I’d play them a promotional slide show filled with inspirational images of happy students crowded around stacks of books (in my memory the photographs always showed one white female student, one black male, an Asian female, and a Latin guy, which was totally unlike any group of undergrads I ever saw at the school), or playing lacrosse, or strolling in front of gauzy, out-of-focus Colonial Williamsburg landmarks. Then I’d turn on the lights, introduce myself, and corral the group on a one-hour loop around the campus.
I loved being a campus tour guide. I never before felt so much in my element as I did when I was conveying my enthusiasm and affection for the college on those tours. I should have had a shaky period when I was still trying to anticipate what the parents and kids wanted to hear the most, or what questions they might ask throughout the tour—but I honestly don’t remember having one. I launched into that role with a confidence that I’d never once known. I was informative. I was on point. More importantly, I was entertaining. I learned how to spice a narrative with dashes of humor. I had a fantastic time.
And my enthusiasm showed. At the end of each trip around campus I had families linger to tell me how very much they’d enjoyed the tours, and how much better they had been than visits they’d made to other institutions. Parents wrote letters of praise about me to the Admissions Office—a fat file folder full. That position was the very first job I loved. It was a volunteer job, to be sure, but I found it fulfilling in a way that no other activity during my college years ever, ever approached. I don’t know what instinct had told me that I’d be a perfect match for this responsibility. But I’d been right on the target.
My senior year came around. I was stuck in a dorm room with someone clinging desperately to his religion and who’d told me he wouldn’t be rooming with me, but appeared to be rooming with (but not speaking to) me anyway. I’d auditioned for a one-act play in the theater department and gotten a good role, only to lose it again because one of the women who’d also been cast didn’t want to have to go onstage with a gay rapist. Then, one day after one of my campus tours, one of the higher-ups in the Admissions Office asked me to come to his desk to have a little talk.
He was one of those Good Old Boys that populate the staff of Southern colleges—stuffed into a too-tight button-down, always perspiring, florid of complexion, narrow-minded, a hearty conservative fellow who’d probably been a frat boy and a William and Mary grad himself, who’d probably gotten his job through cronyism and intended to cling onto it for dear life until retirement. He was not, in other words, the kind of man I entirely trusted. But I was riding a high from giving my tour, so I was open and friendly with him as he asked me about the kinds of extracurricular activities in which I participated.
I told him about the plays in which I’d appeared, and the fun I’d been having in the school’s craft workshop. I jawed on about the writing I was doing, about the college radio. I was in the middle of explaining the work that I was doing in forming a new local chapter of Parents Anonymous when he interrupted me and said, “So . . . most of your extracurriculars are . . . artistic?”
I blinked a couple of times and started to say that a self-help group for abusive or potentially abusive parents wasn’t really considered the fine arts.
He interrupted me again, though. “But most of your activities . . . would you say they were. . . .” He lifted his head, gave me a sidelong look, and then repeated himself. “. . . artistic?”
There was something in the man’s tone that arrested my volubility. Insinuation poisoned the word. He said it as if he were saying syphilitic. I hadn’t really thought about the reasons this particular staff member might have for wanting to talk to me. But suddenly I was wary, and very much alive to the possibility that it wasn’t something good. “I suppose,” I conceded.
“You don’t play in intramural sports?” I shook my head. “No? Not even tag football? Lacrosse? Basketball? Soccer? No? You don’t belong to a fraternity?”
No, I hadn’t done any of those things. Privately, I thought they sounded deeply unappealing.
“This brings me to something we want to say, then,” said the man, leaning forward. He clutched one fist with his hand, and smiled in a falsely convivial, chummy manner. “We’ve decided this year that we need to go in a . . . new direction . . . with our campus tour guides. We really don’t find that someone artistic is a good representation of what William and Mary is all about.” I sat there, stunned, and didn’t say a word. He repeated himself in different ways. “You see, a fellow who’s artistic like yourself just isn’t a positive representative for the campus. The college doesn’t really want anyone artistic to represent it. It’s embarrassing for the college if prospects think all our students are artistic.”
I looked dead into the eyes of this man, and realized exactly what he was telling me: You’re obviously a god-damned queer. We don’t want a queer representing the College of William and Mary. My awakening to his true meaning froze me. This man, who represented everything I disliked about about smug, self-satisfied, white, male, heterosexual, small-town, Southern America was not only letting me go from a job into which I’d poured hours of volunteer time and outright passion, but he was enjoying every moment. He licked his lips and did it with relish.
So I sat there, and stared at him, and kept my exterior perfectly composed and unruffled while inside, every emergency siren blared at full blast. Never before in my life had I been called out and derided for my sexuality. Never before had I been denied anything because of who I was. This is the way things are, son, I understood the man was telling me. I get to make the rules, and I’ll kick disgusting lowlife homosexshuls like you straight to the curb. Every damn chance I get. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
It was a shock that, to this day, still feels like a knife to the chest.
When the noise in my head cleared, I heard the man trying to make the blow sound like he was doing me a favor. “It’s your senior year, anyway,” he was saying. “You don’t want to be doing something like working for the admissions office. You’ve got plans to make. Things to do.” Things that don’t include dirtying up my office, faggot, I understood him to mean, very clearly.
I stood up, smiled, nodded, and walked out of Admissions. I hadn’t even reached the front stoop before I had taken the experience, packed it away in a heavily-insulated box, and stored it in a dark place. I’d examine it later, I told myself. Later, when it didn’t hurt as much, I’d think about it.
I didn’t know it would take me twenty-nine years.
Nor did I know that even at that distance, when it was just me and a voice recorder and a friendly, listening stranger, in a silent room on a sunny summer’s afternoon in Manhattan, the memory still would slice and throb.
Even though I absolutely refused to examine my dismissal, or even acknowledge to myself why it had happened, the meeting still had consequences. I went home that afternoon to my inhospitable dorm room, looked around, and marched right out again to the student life office to request that I be transferred to a single. Once I moved, I withdrew for the rest of the year—withdrew from boundaries of the college itself to a remote off-campus dorm where I could shut the door to my single room and no one would have to see me. I withdrew from the theater department and dropped my double major. I basically dropped all my extracurriculars. One month into my senior year, I was already making plans to disengage and depart.
If someone from William and Mary’s Alumni House were to ask me why I’ve never attended a homecoming or a class reunion, I’d have a glib answer—it just wasn’t really my thing. I lived too far away. If someone asked me why I’d never once contributed to any of the college’s capital campaigns or fundraising efforts, I’d tell them that I’d worked too closely with a university development office for years to see the campaigns as anything more than shaking down the alumni . . . or that I’m cheap. If they’d asked why I didn’t submit updates to the class notes of the alumni magazine, or why I hadn’t attended any of the regional alumni auction events or meetings, I’d have replied that I simply wasn’t a joiner.
But the fact of the matter is this: I’ve never done any of those things because I had been told—at an institutional level—that the College of William and Mary wanted no truck with my kind. The college had looked into my eyes, licked its lips, and informed me that under no circumstances did I represent what they stood for. Even though I refused to examine or revisit that encounter in the admissions office, all my knee-jerk instincts to keep the college at arm’s length, to disassociate myself from my classmates and my fellow alumni, date back to that afternoon. They date back to the moment that a university official told me that I could no longer do something I loved, simply because he suspected I was gay, and simply because he didn’t like gays.
I know the college these days would have absolutely no problem taking my gay dollars. But I’m sorry—my resentment is still too strong.
Sometimes it seems one learns more about a thing in its absence, than when it’s up close and present. Detroit was like that. I understood more about Detroit and the midwest and its toxic, insular small-mindedness upon moving away than I did during the twenty-five years I was there. Likewise, when I left college, I realized how very narrow-minded and suffocated was Williamsburg, and that there was a vast world out there that didn’t share its ultra-conservative values. As Eric remarked to me, William and Mary was saltpeter to the soul; I discovered that leaving it and discovering new perspectives was the antidote.
The point I really wanted to make in my oral history was that when I left William and Mary, feeling beaten down and dispirited in a way I hadn’t when I’d entered it, I could never have imagined for myself the life that I’ve had since. I couldn’t have envisioned meeting within a mere five years the man with whom I’ve spent the last nearly quarter-century. I couldn’t have predicted how smoothly I’d come out. I would never have even fantasized about the then-unimaginable prospect that I’d be legally married or have the ability to file a joint federal income tax return. When I left college, it was with a conviction that if anything good happened to me in my life, it would be in spite of my sexuality—not alongside it, or because of it.
If anything, I’ve lived the last three decades so fully just to spite my alma mater. But damn. What rich and colorful and wonderful decades they’ve been.
It was a bad habit. I’m not proud. Once I finally found my academic groove, I was glad to be rid of that behavior.
Only I really wasn’t, because during this last month I uncovered something else I’d put aside during my college days. Something I planned to examine again when I had my composure and my dignity, in private, at a time when it couldn’t hurt me any longer. It wasn’t an essay or a blue exam booklet, but a memory. Even though I’d locked it away and mentally forbade myself ever to appraise it, when I unpacked it and removed it from the airless container in which it had mummified for thirty years, it hadn’t lost any of its potency. It still has sharp, painful edges that cut when I handle them. It still hurts.
My friend and old college roommate Eric earlier this month asked if I’d considered giving an oral history to the Stephens Project—an initiative by William and Mary’s Swem Library to collect and document the stories and experiences of gay and lesbian alumni, staff, and faculty about our time at the college, and the impact the college had on our sexualities.
I try to keep myself at arm’s length from any alumni activity, so my initial internal reaction was a hearty hell no! I could see that the project was worthy, though, and knew it was the kind of thing that would be a good outlet for me. Plus the grad student collecting the oral histories was already conducting a spate of them in Manhattan this week. It would be convenient not only for me to schedule an appointment while he was here, but for him as well.
Loath as I was to talk about my awful college days at length, I knew that enough decades had passed that it really was time to scrutinize the string of mostly negative events that made my college years a trial. And moreover, it seemed time to examine them as a continuous narrative, set in the context of both a socially conservative Southern college setting, and the repressed early nineteen-eighties when I was entombed there.
So I decided that I’d talk about how I’d entered college fairly at peace with my sexuality, thanks to my super-liberal parents—though I had absolutely no intentions of ever coming out during my life. I’d already patterned my future adulthood on the “confirmed bachelors” among my parents’ academic friends—a lonely life of antiques, an appreciation of Bette Davis movies, and furtive sexual trysts of which I’d never speak again.
I suspected I’d talk about how I had problems assimilating my freshmen year, but my issue was more how to pass as a white boy, than how to pass as a straight one. I’d been a racial non-minority minority in my all African-American high school. Landing feet-first in the preppy, lily-white freshman class of 1981 was more culture shock than anything I’d ever experienced.
I knew I’d talk about my sophomore year, when my first roommate sexually harassed me for months before moving out and then starting a completely false whisper campaign on campus that I’d raped him. That reputation haunted me the rest of the time I was at William and Mary. It was an impeachment I couldn’t refute or counter because it was never formally leveled against me. And in those days, the gayness of it all was even more horrifying to people than the actual crime of rape—so I was always whispered about, and always supect.
I knew I’d talk about the boyfriend I had during my junior year who made me walk fifteen feet behind him on campus and who would only have conversations with me at the campus cafeteria if we sat at adjacent tables, facing the same direction. I knew I’d talk about “The Plan” that he had, the ridiculous and totally un-ironic notion that he and I would graduate, get nice conservative jobs in Richmond, buy adjacent houses, marry pretty William and Mary grads for wives, and that on weekends we’d consummate our unholy homosexual desires in the garage while our wives gossiped over the back fence.
I figured I’d have to address my junior year roommate, who unbeknownst to me was grappling with his own sexuality and his heavily-religious background. He decided shortly before we were supposed to move into our senior dorm together that he wouldn’t be rooming with me our final year, because I was interfering with his personal relationship to God . . . which I interpreted as meaning that he’d somehow found out I was gay, and didn’t approve. And then I started to think about that first weeks of my senior year when that roommate showed up and moved into the room we’d chosen anyway, and how intolerable the time was that we lived silently side by side, not exchanging a single word.
It was while I was thinking about this painful month that I tripped some mental wire that exposed the memory I’d been trying to hide from myself for three decades. At first I recoiled. I tried to pack it away again; it shouldn’t have seen the light of day. But then I edged around the loathsome thing, kicked it a little, and decided to pull it out. Painful or not, it was the crowning summation of all the indignities I experienced at William and Mary. It went on to define my relationship to the college—or lack thereof—ever after.
So, on the day after the Supreme Court repealed DOMA, I shared the following story with a total stranger for the very first time.
I’ve had precious few moments of absolute clarity in my life, but during the summer between my sophomore and junior years I realized that I wanted to be a campus tour guide for prospective students. I don’t know what gave me the idea I’d be perfect for it, but I knew I had all the qualifications. That is, an enthusiasm for talking at length, a broad knowledge of the college and its activities, a knack for public speaking, and most importantly, the ability to lecture a group of unfamiliar high school students and their parents while walking backwards.
I’d never really manifested such college spirit as when I decided I wanted to lead campus tours. I’d never before really set myself an independent goal with no concept of how to make it come to fruition. I was not accustomed to making bold decisions and taking chances with unknown experiences. But I marched into the college admissions office, asked how one became a tour guide, and filled out a form. The secretary at the desk asked if I had an adult reference. I thought a moment, and decided to go straight to the top. I threw out the name of Mrs. Thomas Graves, wife of the college president.
I’d become acquainted with Mrs. Graves in the first month of my freshman year when she and Mr. Graves had extended an invitation to my freshman roommate—and his roommate—to dinner at the President’s House. My roommate had been a graduate of (and had a father who taught at) the Phillips Exeter Academy, a prep school in New Hampshire, where the Graves were seeking admission for one of their sons. It was supposed to be a bit of a schmoozefest and my roommate obviously did not want me there. He’d invited me only grudgingly, and because he had to. He was a bit of a Neanderthal during the entire evening. I don’t recall that he actually picked up his plate and licked off the gravy, but if I were writing a screenplay of the night, that’s what I’d have him do. It was pretty close. But I was charming and the highlight of the evening was when Mrs. Graves heard I was taking piano lessons and invited me to play Flo Ziegfield’s historic piano for her. I sat down and whipped off the “Moonlight Sonata,” which happened to be her favorite composition. She was my advocate for the rest of our mutual tenure at the college. I could do no wrong, in Mrs. Graves’ eyes.
And what was the admissions office to do, when they had the college president’s wife pressuring them into taking me on as a volunteer? They caved. So all during that summer, my junior year, and the summer following, I worked for Admissions. Once or twice a week I’d meet a group of prospective students and their parents in a room of the historic Wren building. I’d play them a promotional slide show filled with inspirational images of happy students crowded around stacks of books (in my memory the photographs always showed one white female student, one black male, an Asian female, and a Latin guy, which was totally unlike any group of undergrads I ever saw at the school), or playing lacrosse, or strolling in front of gauzy, out-of-focus Colonial Williamsburg landmarks. Then I’d turn on the lights, introduce myself, and corral the group on a one-hour loop around the campus.
I loved being a campus tour guide. I never before felt so much in my element as I did when I was conveying my enthusiasm and affection for the college on those tours. I should have had a shaky period when I was still trying to anticipate what the parents and kids wanted to hear the most, or what questions they might ask throughout the tour—but I honestly don’t remember having one. I launched into that role with a confidence that I’d never once known. I was informative. I was on point. More importantly, I was entertaining. I learned how to spice a narrative with dashes of humor. I had a fantastic time.
And my enthusiasm showed. At the end of each trip around campus I had families linger to tell me how very much they’d enjoyed the tours, and how much better they had been than visits they’d made to other institutions. Parents wrote letters of praise about me to the Admissions Office—a fat file folder full. That position was the very first job I loved. It was a volunteer job, to be sure, but I found it fulfilling in a way that no other activity during my college years ever, ever approached. I don’t know what instinct had told me that I’d be a perfect match for this responsibility. But I’d been right on the target.
My senior year came around. I was stuck in a dorm room with someone clinging desperately to his religion and who’d told me he wouldn’t be rooming with me, but appeared to be rooming with (but not speaking to) me anyway. I’d auditioned for a one-act play in the theater department and gotten a good role, only to lose it again because one of the women who’d also been cast didn’t want to have to go onstage with a gay rapist. Then, one day after one of my campus tours, one of the higher-ups in the Admissions Office asked me to come to his desk to have a little talk.
He was one of those Good Old Boys that populate the staff of Southern colleges—stuffed into a too-tight button-down, always perspiring, florid of complexion, narrow-minded, a hearty conservative fellow who’d probably been a frat boy and a William and Mary grad himself, who’d probably gotten his job through cronyism and intended to cling onto it for dear life until retirement. He was not, in other words, the kind of man I entirely trusted. But I was riding a high from giving my tour, so I was open and friendly with him as he asked me about the kinds of extracurricular activities in which I participated.
I told him about the plays in which I’d appeared, and the fun I’d been having in the school’s craft workshop. I jawed on about the writing I was doing, about the college radio. I was in the middle of explaining the work that I was doing in forming a new local chapter of Parents Anonymous when he interrupted me and said, “So . . . most of your extracurriculars are . . . artistic?”
I blinked a couple of times and started to say that a self-help group for abusive or potentially abusive parents wasn’t really considered the fine arts.
He interrupted me again, though. “But most of your activities . . . would you say they were. . . .” He lifted his head, gave me a sidelong look, and then repeated himself. “. . . artistic?”
There was something in the man’s tone that arrested my volubility. Insinuation poisoned the word. He said it as if he were saying syphilitic. I hadn’t really thought about the reasons this particular staff member might have for wanting to talk to me. But suddenly I was wary, and very much alive to the possibility that it wasn’t something good. “I suppose,” I conceded.
“You don’t play in intramural sports?” I shook my head. “No? Not even tag football? Lacrosse? Basketball? Soccer? No? You don’t belong to a fraternity?”
No, I hadn’t done any of those things. Privately, I thought they sounded deeply unappealing.
“This brings me to something we want to say, then,” said the man, leaning forward. He clutched one fist with his hand, and smiled in a falsely convivial, chummy manner. “We’ve decided this year that we need to go in a . . . new direction . . . with our campus tour guides. We really don’t find that someone artistic is a good representation of what William and Mary is all about.” I sat there, stunned, and didn’t say a word. He repeated himself in different ways. “You see, a fellow who’s artistic like yourself just isn’t a positive representative for the campus. The college doesn’t really want anyone artistic to represent it. It’s embarrassing for the college if prospects think all our students are artistic.”
I looked dead into the eyes of this man, and realized exactly what he was telling me: You’re obviously a god-damned queer. We don’t want a queer representing the College of William and Mary. My awakening to his true meaning froze me. This man, who represented everything I disliked about about smug, self-satisfied, white, male, heterosexual, small-town, Southern America was not only letting me go from a job into which I’d poured hours of volunteer time and outright passion, but he was enjoying every moment. He licked his lips and did it with relish.
So I sat there, and stared at him, and kept my exterior perfectly composed and unruffled while inside, every emergency siren blared at full blast. Never before in my life had I been called out and derided for my sexuality. Never before had I been denied anything because of who I was. This is the way things are, son, I understood the man was telling me. I get to make the rules, and I’ll kick disgusting lowlife homosexshuls like you straight to the curb. Every damn chance I get. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
It was a shock that, to this day, still feels like a knife to the chest.
When the noise in my head cleared, I heard the man trying to make the blow sound like he was doing me a favor. “It’s your senior year, anyway,” he was saying. “You don’t want to be doing something like working for the admissions office. You’ve got plans to make. Things to do.” Things that don’t include dirtying up my office, faggot, I understood him to mean, very clearly.
I stood up, smiled, nodded, and walked out of Admissions. I hadn’t even reached the front stoop before I had taken the experience, packed it away in a heavily-insulated box, and stored it in a dark place. I’d examine it later, I told myself. Later, when it didn’t hurt as much, I’d think about it.
I didn’t know it would take me twenty-nine years.
Nor did I know that even at that distance, when it was just me and a voice recorder and a friendly, listening stranger, in a silent room on a sunny summer’s afternoon in Manhattan, the memory still would slice and throb.
Even though I absolutely refused to examine my dismissal, or even acknowledge to myself why it had happened, the meeting still had consequences. I went home that afternoon to my inhospitable dorm room, looked around, and marched right out again to the student life office to request that I be transferred to a single. Once I moved, I withdrew for the rest of the year—withdrew from boundaries of the college itself to a remote off-campus dorm where I could shut the door to my single room and no one would have to see me. I withdrew from the theater department and dropped my double major. I basically dropped all my extracurriculars. One month into my senior year, I was already making plans to disengage and depart.
If someone from William and Mary’s Alumni House were to ask me why I’ve never attended a homecoming or a class reunion, I’d have a glib answer—it just wasn’t really my thing. I lived too far away. If someone asked me why I’d never once contributed to any of the college’s capital campaigns or fundraising efforts, I’d tell them that I’d worked too closely with a university development office for years to see the campaigns as anything more than shaking down the alumni . . . or that I’m cheap. If they’d asked why I didn’t submit updates to the class notes of the alumni magazine, or why I hadn’t attended any of the regional alumni auction events or meetings, I’d have replied that I simply wasn’t a joiner.
But the fact of the matter is this: I’ve never done any of those things because I had been told—at an institutional level—that the College of William and Mary wanted no truck with my kind. The college had looked into my eyes, licked its lips, and informed me that under no circumstances did I represent what they stood for. Even though I refused to examine or revisit that encounter in the admissions office, all my knee-jerk instincts to keep the college at arm’s length, to disassociate myself from my classmates and my fellow alumni, date back to that afternoon. They date back to the moment that a university official told me that I could no longer do something I loved, simply because he suspected I was gay, and simply because he didn’t like gays.
I know the college these days would have absolutely no problem taking my gay dollars. But I’m sorry—my resentment is still too strong.
Sometimes it seems one learns more about a thing in its absence, than when it’s up close and present. Detroit was like that. I understood more about Detroit and the midwest and its toxic, insular small-mindedness upon moving away than I did during the twenty-five years I was there. Likewise, when I left college, I realized how very narrow-minded and suffocated was Williamsburg, and that there was a vast world out there that didn’t share its ultra-conservative values. As Eric remarked to me, William and Mary was saltpeter to the soul; I discovered that leaving it and discovering new perspectives was the antidote.
The point I really wanted to make in my oral history was that when I left William and Mary, feeling beaten down and dispirited in a way I hadn’t when I’d entered it, I could never have imagined for myself the life that I’ve had since. I couldn’t have envisioned meeting within a mere five years the man with whom I’ve spent the last nearly quarter-century. I couldn’t have predicted how smoothly I’d come out. I would never have even fantasized about the then-unimaginable prospect that I’d be legally married or have the ability to file a joint federal income tax return. When I left college, it was with a conviction that if anything good happened to me in my life, it would be in spite of my sexuality—not alongside it, or because of it.
If anything, I’ve lived the last three decades so fully just to spite my alma mater. But damn. What rich and colorful and wonderful decades they’ve been.
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