Well, that’s not quite accurate. I actually did commune with some condors the other day, and they have better manners than you might imagine. I wrote a piece published in this past Sunday’s Los Angeles Times about an historic event: the first nesting condors at Pinnacles National Monument in 100 years! (Note powerful exclamation point, nudging you to feel the electricity of the moment.)

What actually got chewed up a bit was the article, which was edited by about one-third, so my lilting lyricism (and gut-busting jokes) didn’t make the final print. But what the heck, I’m happy to get a travel piece in a fine newspaper, even one that has had a bunch of its staff edited away in the past couple of years as well.

By the way, you might think condors are a pretty unsightly bird, but when they are dressed up? Oooh, baby…

I get a daily email from Shelf Awareness (its tagline is “Daily enlightenment for the book trade”) that’s a compendium of publishing/bookstore/author news and literary tidbits of all flavors. One of my favorite sections is called Book Brahmin, where they interview authors, publishers and scruffy roustabouts of the book trade with a series of questions about what books they are currently reading and the like. Since it might be a while before Shelf Awareness gets around to me with their penetrating, nosy literary interrogation, I thought I’d prepare a little something in advance. Here are the things they ask their trembling interlocutors:

On your nightstand now:
I’m a stacker, so there’s always a tower of tomes, some of which I nibble at, some of which I doggedly hike through, and some of which I devour. There’s Muriel Barbery’s Elegance of the Hedgehog, juicy literary stuff. There’s Monterey Bay and Beyond, kind of like a historical tour guide of points of interest and attractions on California’s central coast. Also, Haunted Baseball, a sort of silly nonfiction work on ghosts and haints frequenting major and minor league stadiums—I’m a sucker for baseball books.

Providing weighty dignity to the mix is The Workshop, Seven Decades of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, which is a collection of essays, stories and mismatched oddments from graduates of the country’s most prestigious academic writing program. Great stuff, but at nearly 800 pages, a wrestling match. And my newest (and oldest): Plain Facts: For Young Women on Marijuana, Narcotics, Liquor and Tobacco. It’s a 1938 publication (with chapter titles like “Maybelle the Doper” and “Are Smoking Women Attractive”) that seeks to keep our womanhood pure and simpleheaded. Er, simple hearted. Well, wholesome. (By the way, on that “Smoking Women” issue: smoking women should be extinguished, not excoriated.)

Lastly, the good ol’ Webster’s Collegiate, 11th edition. Check it out sometime: you won’t believe how many ding-dang words are in there!

Favorite book when you were a child

I was nutzoid for dinosaur books as a kid, and graduated to baseball books, but one of the books that made an early impression on me for its bookish qualities was The Phantom Tollbooth. The author, Norton Juster, really let readers know just how durn fun it is to play with words, twist ‘em, poke ‘em and plead with them for mercy.



Your top five authors


One of those answers that might change with the lunch menu, but: Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, Kurt Vonnegut



Book you’ve faked reading


I was one of those kids who brought paperbacks to school to tuck into my textbook while other classes were going on. Thus, every math book I was ever given, I’ve faked reading. (Two plus two? Don’t even ask.)



Book you’re an evangelist for


Well, books: Plainsong, by Kent Haruf and Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. Exquisite use of language and pinpoint characterizations. Several of Annie Dillard’s works also invite you to drink in the intoxications of language (and remarkable word-clusterings in a syntactical sense too).


Book you’ve bought for the cover
Probably Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth. It’s a graphic novel whose cover displays Ware’s remarkably intricate mastery of perspective and detail in a unique style. The book is beautifully rendered (and terribly sad).

Book that changed your life


There are many (I’m fickle), but one early influence was Hesse’s Siddhartha, which made a spiritual, contemplative life very appealing to a 15-year-old boy, which is something of a miracle. Even now, I admire the rhythms of its simply stated philosophical persuasions.



Favorite line from a book
Again, impossible to pin down, but this one sticks with me: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Fitzgerald’s last line from Gatsby. It’s a lot like Faulkner’s, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” in its sense that our selves of the present are indelibly etched by the selves of our past.
 


Book you most want to read again for the first time
Huck Finn. That book gave me indescribable pleasure when I first read it (and still does, but being a virgin to it again sounds like a tantalizing joy). The richness of the language, the laugh-out-loud characters, the development of Huck and Jim’s bond, the lyrical movement down the river, rich with sensuous detail and meaningful metaphor—wow!

So, now you know. Shelf Awareness, call me anytime. Anybody else, feel free to tell me what’s on your nightstand (or hidden in your nightshirt…).

Two anniversaries: one a few days ago, one today, both recognizing the magnetic power of words. The first, this past Sunday, the 60th anniversary of Vin Scully’s first broadcast of a Dodgers game. Baseball might be meaningless to you, but if words are the current that galvanizes your soul, you should know his artistry. Scully is a painter, a light-footed boxer, a moralist, a clarifier, someone who opens the picnic basket on a Sunday and lights up when he sees that the potato salad is perfect—and then invites you to share. Most of all he is a storyteller. Baseball is stitched with stories.

How did Vin Scully recognize his 60th anniversary? He broadcast a Sunday ballgame, between the Dodgers and the Giants. One of the things I miss since moving to Northern California is that I only hear Vin on rare occasions. Since I’ve been listening to him since the early 1960s, I’m familiar with his phrasings, his pauses, his mulling aloud, the ease with which he inserts a fact or anecdote about the current batter or pitcher without missing the electric ebb and flow of the game. Watching baseball for many is a total bore, filled with dead spots, flatness and languor; Scully walks you up the small hills you don’t even see, extends his hand to point out a subtle feature, reads the clouds and when a thrashing squall strikes, invites you to feel the heat of the lightning.

The point I want to emphasize is that he has been doing this for 60 years. Sixty. And he never phones it in. Always the same high level of engagement, always the understated appreciation for the game’s subtleties, always the regard for the audience’s intelligence, always the celebration of language and forever the reflexes to rise to the moment. That is sustained fire, that is mastery; in no uncertain terms, it is love. Any writer would do well to study and savor the arc of such a career, and to try to work with the same attention, the same quality of applied effort, the same sidestepping of the easy or the mediocre.

Who’s That Hanging on Halley’s Comet’s Tail?
The other anniversary of note is today’s: Mark Twain died 100 years ago today. The sad part of that is that there’s no Mark Twain to come up with a quote about his 100th anniversary. Instead, here’s Twain on his own comings and goings:

I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: “Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.”

Indeed, he was prescient: he went out the day after Halley’s whipped its cosmic tail over his head. His only surviving child, Clara, placed next to his grave a monument that was 12 feet long, or two fathoms deep—the depth at which it’s safe for an average steamboat to pass. Many folks already know that “Mark Twain” is a riverboat expression for that depth sounding, Samuel Clemens chose his famed pen name. Of course, the man was much deeper than 12 feet. Twain had that long, meteoric career that too embodied prodigious output over extended time. At 16, he was contributing articles and humorous sketches to his brother’s newspaper, where he was a typesetter. He then set about scribbling for more than 50 years, putting together an astonishing body of work as remarkable for its eclecticism as for the razor of its wit. To call the man a mere humorist is to say that Einstein was rather clever.

So, Scully and Twain, giants both. But the unimaginable reach of their careers, their legacies, couldn’t have even been suggested to them as a feeble joke back when they began their first stumbling efforts at shaping sound around a microphone, or trying to liven up a story with an errant turn of phrase. They didn’t begin with a legacy in mind, but just with the notion of doing the work, putting in the hard time, seeing which words worked and which died aborning—a solid lesson for writers of every stripe.

Vin Scully, Mark Twain, unaccountable freaks: Happy anniversary!

Channeling emotion to drive your creative writing can be a two-way street: Writing fueled by emotion can pulse with the power of realness, show broken skin or broken heart; it’s where you write from being in the game, rather than watching it. But writing from a personal current can also produce florid overwriting, work that’s colored by mawkish hues, or even blindly inaccurate prose that freezes on a fixed point of view. I think focused, emotional writing can smack a ringing bell, but that misdirected emotion in writing can dilute its strengths, making it merely personal.

I was thinking these things because I’m down in my Southern California home town, staying with my parents for a bit. In the last year, my 92-year-old father has fallen deeper into his advanced Alzheimer’s, and is now mostly confined to a bed, only “rising” by means of a hoist that has to be operated by two people to maneuver him into a wheelchair. But he’s still at home, still sloppily able to feed himself, still brightening when people enter his room and greet him, though he’s likely as not to not recognize the greeter.

I’ve written about his condition before, when his diminished capacity wasn’t as advanced, but lately he’s turned a corner, and even if his body lingers, his mind is becoming more ghostly, his world a small, small corner, with dimming light. I again want to write about my father, want to write again about how I never truly knew what he wanted, what his aspirations were, whether he judged his life a good one, if he even did pause to judge it.

Fathers and Sons, Arms Linked, Arm’s Length
I’ve previously touched upon how my father’s manner resembles mine in some ways: a person quick to make a joke, but in the joking also perhaps making a space between himself and others, perhaps more comfortable with a certain distance. I know that is true of myself, but I don’t absolutely know if it’s true of my father, because I never felt intimate enough with him to probe. I know he’s always been a warm man, a reliable caretaker of my siblings and mom, a war veteran, a guy who taught me, to my great pleasure, to play baseball and basketball. But those are thrown-off evaluations, resume-writing; the core of the man is elusive to me.

So, my father, diapered, his country now a small bed, the tv on to keep him “company,” attended by my valiant, near-blind mother, at 87, herself slowing to time’s great watch. And I want to write about it, with emotion, but accurately, with the precision my father is entitled to, not to force anyone (or myself) to feel my discomfort, but just to write with the deserved passion that testifying about someone’s life requires, without twisting the words to torque feelings.

An aside: I’ve been reading my friend Jule Kucera’s blog, where she is recounting the early days with her husband Trent, some years before his untimely death. Her writing is frank, revelatory, vivid and sometimes embarrassing. And undoubtedly painful for her; I can feel its emotional power—and yet there’s still a writerly sensibility and restraint. I appreciate Jule’s model.

Here’s to writing that’s real.

A few days ago on Tribes, Seth Godin’s social network of entrepreneurs, marketers, thinkers and distinguished weirdos, a friend of mine, email-marketing maven, John Furst, posted about a post he’d read. (Danger: many “posts about posts” ahead!) John was referring to a post by Leo Bottary, who mentioned a Wired article citing a five-year study of student writing conducted at Stanford University by Dr. Andrea Lunsford.

Here’s what Mr. Bottary wrote:

“I hear people lament the demise of the English language all the time. They speak to how texting, tweeting, and other such practices are contributing to poor grammar, marginal spelling, and an inability to express oneself ‘properly’ in the written form. Lunsford disagrees. She claims, ‘I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.’ And as Thompson points out, ’For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.’

Among other things, Lunsford’s study shows they are highly attuned to their audiences and write with a sense of purpose and persuasion that is actually at a higher level when compared with previous generations. The fact that today’s young people write so frequently across so many different platforms may not make them better writers in the classic sense, but the evidence suggests they may be stronger communicators than their parents. Rather than criticizing and judging our young people, this is an area where we should learn from them.”

Forgive me for quoting people quoting people that are quoting people, but I found it an intriguing topic: with more means of communication than ever, and ever more people exercising those means, how does that affect the quality of communication? Do Twitterers that tweet every 22 minutes hone their writing (and even thinking) ability over time, or are they just twits? Is there even a basis—or need—to consider “quality” of communications when much of what is being discussed here is transient information? Though, as shown repeatedly, nothing is truly transient on the Web.

Anyway, my take (among many other Triber’s responses):

Snotty “Professional” Writer Weighs In
John, fun, interesting post. It did make me wonder if in days to come, there will some tweets that will be revered like Shakespearean sonnets and worthy of reviews, i.e., “140 characters of apocalyptic chill, melded with childlike sing-song innocence. Ranks with Eliot’s Wasteland for audacity, scope and cultural indictment.” New York Times Review of Tweets.

I’m an old crustacean, not a texter, but I do think there’s language skill-building in the rising incidence of communication outreach, whether blogging, tweeting or arranging the letters in the alphabet soup of your lunch partner. And it’s reasonable to be questioning the value of high-flown scholastic language requirements in academic settings, when the value of an assignment is based on old patterns of regurgitating leaden information in the same stilted phrasings. There is something attractive in the vivid, short bursts of thought you see everywhere online—and there’s something electric in seeing people interested in connecting through new forms.

But man, there’s a lot of crap writing out there, and I don’t mean just of the “U R Sweet” or hair-on-fire political polemic. I read a lot of stuff produced by people trying to persuade, but they don’t have any tools of persuasion. Sure, you might be able to build a lean-to of sorts with just a hammer, but not a house. And a house with working plumbing and a view? If someone is trying to shape an argument or point of view, they need more rhetorical tools than “You suck!”

The Sentence Chiropractor
Sometimes you want a sentence to bend, sometimes you want it to snap. Some word-journeys can’t be made unless you can roll the words down language hills, stall them at a cliffside, pick a metaphorical flower in the meadow and set some verbal pitons to clamber back up those hills. I’m with Randell in that I think your thought processes improve the more you work with the abstractions of language—its elasticity works well with your brain’s plasticity. Having the tools means you can build a more complex structure—maybe even a cathedral, rather than a mere house with working plumbing.

Of course, if you want to just order a sandwich, that doesn’t have to be done in iambic pentameter. But it’s a shame to settle for limited expression when there’s so much sex in deeper language, so many bright strawberries, so many dank, dangerous corners and beguiling fragrances.

Then again, in some situations, a good old Anglo-Saxon “Fuck that!” is sometimes the most eloquent response.

If a Question Falls in the Forest...
Of course, maybe there isn’t even a question to answer here. To go musical metaphor on you, from every Elvis Presley hip-waggling that presaged the decline of civilization to the Stones to the Sex Pistols to Nirvana to Marilyn Manson to Lady Gaga, there have been people outraged and startled by the new. There is movement and jostling and crudity amid new styles of expression, but there is still much quality writing about, whether 300-word blog post or David Foster Wallace’s 1088-page Infinite Jest.

I must confess, though, I do believe in the thrill, drama and risk of skillful punctuation (be still, my beating apostrophe!) and pungent writing, now and forever, one and inseparable.

[Note to prospective clients: I will never include any "Fuck thats" in content I provide, unless by request. A well-placed "Dear Me!" can sometimes convey the essence.]