Picture a frosty gin and tonic here in about an hour and a half

If you’ve seen some recent posts of mine, you might suspect I’ve been having a peculiar time in the Bahamas. I have the unique skill set of being able to turn a stretch of time on this lovely island into a cage of sorts. Nonetheless, this image above shows where Alice and I went snorkeling this morning.

The water was sharply clear. We saw a lovely school of blue tang romping about a big chunk of coral. (They were tangy, indeed.) I appreciated the moments we were there, and that’s what I need to keep uppermost in mind. Appreciating the tangy moments. I’m still working on appreciating those with less tang, but there’s progress there too.

Thus, with gratitude, Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Waiter, can you bring me more ice and a subordinate clause?

Because I am the founder of the Bentley Paranoiac Dystopian Technique (BPDT), I have managed, at the one-month mark, to have made my stay in the beguiling Bahamas a time of substantial anxiety, temper and intolerance. Not only that, there was some bad stuff happening too. It is once again a lesson in attitude IS everything (almost), and that my attitude makes your basic murderous dictator look like the designer of the Princess Phone.

BPDT aside, I have noted in the past the reputation of writers as the self-medicating types. I’m talking about the storied boozy histories of Faulkner and Hemingway and of Dorothy Parker, the quarry of this quote:”Writer, thinker, drinker.”

Thus, I’ve seen that when my interpretations of this beautiful island become baleful, I’ve started longing for my gin-and-tonic bath. That usually happens around 11am. (When Alice and I were shopping in one of the local liquor stores, one of the tourists there told us that the low-alcohol version of the good native beer, Kalik, was fine for morning drinking, and provided a stepping-stone (if you could still step solidly) to the higher-proof noon-time brew.)

Links with Drinks
Well, I haven’t actually succumbed to the morning bottle-feeding routine, preferring to continue my “I’m strong enough to wait until 5″ standard of excellence. Besides, I’ve got work to do, and I don’t have Hemingway’s constitution. But with all that in mind, I thought you’d enjoy my small collection of writerly links about drinks. They prove it is possible to hold a pen in one hand and a cocktail in another, however wobbly both may be.

Top Ten Drunk Writers

11 Drinks to Pair with Your Favorite Books

Greatest Books on Booze

How to Drink Like Your Favorite Authors

A Bar Pretending to be a Bookstore

Mind you, I’m not encouraging a headlong pursuit of boozy debauchery. Intemperate application of alcohol has created many a hell for many a soul. I just apply the stuff as an edge-smoother, and I’ve been edgy lately. I’m much more for the “moderation in all things” mantra rather than “why did I wake up wearing lipstick and heels?” Next time you’re in the islands, you can enroll in the BPDT program, buy me a drink, and I’ll tell you all about it.

There's a cruel jester under the cool cap

This looks like a quart of ordinary ice cream. (Ignore the fact that Haagen-Daz and its European provenance is an illusion from the get-go). No, no ice cream this. This is the price of human folly, the crucible that shows the hollow core of the soul, the stuff that dreams are made of. But how can this glop of eggs, cream and sugar be any of that?

The concept comes from the spirit of Magritte, who painted under his famous image of a pipe, “This is not a pipe.” No, this alleged ice cream is a symbol of my boiling frustration over losing control of my situation. That situation is that Alice and I are house-sitting in the Bahamas, on a 3 ½-acre compound that was a former wilderness school. There’s a main house, some cottages, and a number of dorm buildings, just a long fly ball from the shoreline.

It’s the Bahamas, right? Beautiful beaches, lovely people, umbrella drinks at mid-day. Sure, that Bahamas is here. But Alice and I came here to work and play, and work daily, since we aren’t island jet-setters, and can’t afford not to work. But our work is all Internet-based. Gotta be online, all the time. Only the Internet hasn’t worked properly here since Hurricane Irene. It might be on for 10 minutes, off for 3 hours, on for one minute, off for an hour, off for an entire day. Yesterday, I was supposed to be on a Skype call to my main clients. I was knocked offline at least 10 times, and finally knocked off for good that day. Our homeowners didn’t quite elaborate on just how squirrely the connectivity is.

The Gorge Also Rises
We are both so accustomed to the Net just working that when it doesn’t—and doesn’t in an arbitrary way, the gorge rises. My gorge. We’ve both missed some deadlines and there’s no end in sight. The Bahamian Net providers have been here 5 times in 7 days, and are supposed to be here again today. They can’t figure it out. Better yet, they had a big layoff at their office yesterday—the main tech who comes out here was laid off. Zing!

So, we can’t work. But we can scratch. The no-see-ums and mosquitoes here are murderous. Below is a picture of Alice’s thigh from a couple of days ago. When the dogs that we are taking care of here escape the compound (they have multiple devious ways), we must chase them to retrieve them, but we must chase them through a boggy zone where the mosquito is the dominant species. No applications of Off, Skin-So-Soft or rum can deter them. Speaking of rum, I was so frustrated at all this business the other day that I slapped a nice cool drink of pineapple and rum right off my chair into the bushes, followed by a fusillade of curses. Those who know me know that the day I throw good liquor into the bushes is the day The Beast has risen.

You should see the other leg

Get Back to the Ice Cream Already
What this all says to me is that I’m so used to controlling certain things that when that control is wrested from me, my inadequate coping skills don’t provide much backup. And what does this all have to do with a quart of Haagen-Daz? This: I bought this quart of ice cream out of spite. One factor is that I could control the purchase of this ice cream. The spite part is that this ice cream cost me $14.50. Yes, when I heard the price, I just laughed. These are the only bites on the island I’ve truly enjoyed.

Postscript, Minus the Sting
Last night, when I was washing the dishes, I lifted this little platform above the sink that the dish-scrubbers sit on. Underneath was a little scorpion, tail-flag waving in greeting. He didn’t actually alarm me—he was a beautiful little creature. I didn’t have the hysterical reaction I’ve developed when I roam the mosquito-zones around the house, slapping madly at the air, my face and legs. Instead, I got to study my little friend, and then was able to capture him in a wine glass and put him outside. He was a bit angry at that, stabbing his laden tail against sides of the glass. I’m hoping I made him angry enough to go sting a squadron of mosquitoes or two.

PPS By the way, I do realize that I am a large crybaby. But hey, it passes the time.

My sweet two-tone '62, many moons ago

There are more than a million Priuses in the U.S. And if you live here in the San Francisco Bay Area, it might appear that 995,000 of the quietly efficient hybrids are here, doing their concerted part to combat the carbon demon. I have to applaud the mighty miles-per-gallon, the hearty hybrid powerplant, the eco-engagement of ownership—but frankly, the cars themselves leave me cold.

You see, I am guilty of forbidden love. I love the cars of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, and lament the thought that they are reviled because of their drunken-carburetor consumption. For me, a car must be seasoned; like a good cigar, its oils must be developed. Naturally, in the course of that development, some of those oils might end up in your driveway, but that’s part of the romance of used car ownership: it’s a little like the affection you felt for your first girlfriend because she had a bit of a temper or crooked teeth. You have a relationship with your used car, you must negotiate—this can’t take place with these new robotic machines that go 100,000 miles before they need a tune-up. Where’s the challenge, where’s the evolution of your relationship with your car in that?

So, the flourishing of the Prius, the jolt of the Volt, the turning of the Leaf are all planetary plusses. But I fear the flare of a fin will no longer excite the eye, the capaciousness of a titanic trunk will no longer bewilder and thrill. Gas prices are once again fluctuating near their $4.00-and-climbing crime, and that pulsing of petrol sticks a sharpened fuel needle into the veins of classic car lovers. The carbon footprint of most 8-cylinder behemoths is Godzilla-like. But tally up cookie-cutter hybrids on the cool scale: zip, nada, nuttin’.

Gin-Dripping Rides and Fluid Drive
Some cars were engineered to leave those telltale deposits on your driveway, or so it seems. I had an ‘81 Jaguar that leaked everything: oil, power-steering fluid, transmission fluid, antifreeze—I’m pretty sure it was leaking gin before I sold it. My mechanic seemed to think it was perfectly normal. Of course I’ve had a guilt quiver or ten about the un-ecological consequences of owning these old gas guzzlers and oil drippers, but you have to look at the big picture: sure, I recycle, yes, I ride my bike when I could drive, I admit to once belonging to the Sierra Club and contributing to other Commie organizations—I’ve got to balance that with some forbidden pleasure, the delight of Detroit sin. Even an éminence grise of the environmental movement, Edward Abbey, had an abiding love for old Caddies, the ones that approach the length of the QE2, and he’s practically a saint.

My second car was a ’48 Dodge, a long, black voluptuous thing with suicide doors and a massive steering wheel. In that marvelous marketing vernacular, it possessed something called fluid drive, which allowed you to either drive away from a dead stop in high gear without using the clutch, or manually go clickety-clacking through the three gears on your way to its ponderous but satisfying top speed. That Dodge infused in me a need to find substance in a car, substance of look, of mass. Many of today’s cars seem to drive themselves; they are polite and transparent and subservient under the slight wiggling of your fingers at the wheel. That’s not a car, that’s a trained terrier. Give me a car like the ’62 Caddy I owned, a vast expanse of carchitecture, a car whose rear end was in another time zone.

Edvard Munch Express
Of course, they don’t all have to be as big as a 747 to be intriguing. I owned a ’58 VW bug (with a decayed rendering of Tweety Bird, possibly done by Edvard Munch, on the driver’s-side door) that was a mottled rainbow of colors, a car that wept at the sight of an upcoming hill. It was so small and I am so stringy-legged that I could sit my rear on the top of the driver’s seat and still be able to operate the pedals—with my head and shoulders out of the sunroof—so that summer driving was the pleasure it’s meant to be.

One of the sweetest vehicles I owned was a ’65 Galaxie 500, for which I paid less than $200. After I had some cheap valve work done, the fire-engine red Galaxie became a fire-breather: a charmer with the perfect V-8 purr, something that no computer-tuned lithium-ion-battery-pack buzzer will ever have. OK, OK, so 15 miles to the gallon isn’t truly economizing—knowing that when I leaned on the gas pedal I’d get that soulful sound and satisfying surge wasn’t something I put a price on anyway.

Strippers and Stolen Cars, Oh My!
There are a few other cars I’ve paid less than $300 for—and some of them even moved under their own power. However, one of the more interesting cars I’ve owned didn’t cost me a dime—until later. It was given to me and my Las Vegas housemate on the freeway spot where we picked up its frustrated driver. He’d left it for dead—a serviceable ’65 VW bug that simply had some problem with its coil wire. I was later able to legally register it (under something like an “abandoned vehicle” statute) as mine. Later, I drove it to Northern California, where I began college. I used it there for several months, so that I no longer even considered how oddly it had been acquired; it was my car.

Even when a uniformed police officer came to my English class and asked if there was a Tom Bentley there, I figured that it was my hair that had probably broken some law (my 1976 hairdo was very expressive). No, it seems I was in possession of a stolen car, of all things, and that I’d have to come to the station and straighten it out. It was easily straightened out: the car was owned by a woman in Vegas that had just loaned the car to our freeway cluck, and she’d discovered his poor stewardship upon her return from Japan, where she’d been touring with an entertainment group.

Her particular talent was removing clothing from the profound grounds of her architecture. (I found some black and white glossies of her in/out of costume in the trunk; she might put you in mind of Elly May Clampett after five vodka tonics, wearing a mail-order Lady Godiva wig).

Her name was (and might still be) Angel Blue. Under her name, the tag line on the glossies read: The Heavenly Body. As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up. And neither were the cops, who despite my protestations (and my registrations), took the car and gave it to Ms. Blue’s lawyer, who had tracked me to my academic lair. The real question I wanted answered was this: what was a stripper of Lady Blue’s talents doing with a ‘65 Volkswagen? Ah, America, where Flannery O’Connor could have one of her unforgettable characters, Hazel Motes, say, “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.”

Atomic-Bomb Toasters and Eye-Popping Brassieres
I have to agree with that, and that’s why I once bought a ’64 Studebaker, long years after the company went out of business. Hey, it had a beautiful rear end (yes, absolutely true, every sexual association made about men and their cars), and some lovely instrumentation. And, since Studebaker parts are about as numerous as King Tut’s first digital recordings, I got to meet some of the upholders of the Studebaker’s tradition of independence, the parts suppliers I had to drive an hour and a half to get to. Just a poke to the right of Karl Rove, they provided me with intriguing NRA slogans on every repair receipt.

Of course, Mother Earth cringes a bit when pedals like that hit metal, so that today it’s almost embarrassing to drive some Detroit pride from the Mad Men era. But much as I admire the concept of today’s hybrids and electrics, I just can’t dig the feel. Old cars have such a different texture, being of an era when toasters were shaped like atomic bombs, and brassieres could poke out an eye. I had a ’63 Mercury Monterey that had such a nice heft in the wheel and an appealing “floating roll” when I swung it wide at speed. It had enough chrome on its long, wide bumper to blind drivers behind me, or at least melt their ice cream. The grandmothers of everyone I know could have played bingo in the trunk.

And some old wheels have such distinctive irregularities: My ‘64 Dodge Dart had a perfectly operating 8-track player. (For those of you too callow to remember the 8-track, it was an audio device used by Nero to play back his first recorded efforts on the fiddle.) But who am I kidding? Those cars really are beasts of another, more profligate time. I raise my mad martini to yesterday’s steel, and martini #2 to the Tesla, which at least has some style. The fin is dead; long live the lithium battery.

And who knows—maybe I can convert a ’64 Lincoln to run on vegetable oil….

Yeah, yeah, any excuse to drink bourbon. Since Gary Vaynerchuk just retired his great Wine Library TV and Daily Grape, I had to pay him a little tribute, and also answer the pressing question about whiskey and writers.

I was at a vintage auto concours yesterday, where there was an eyeball-scorching field of gleaming chariots, where the “oohs and ahhs” were many and involuntary. But then I saw this rig pictured above, a BMW Isetta with a teardrop trailer behind. The Isetta took more than 30 seconds to reach 31 mph, topping out at around 50. That the owner of this one had the peculiar cant of mind to hook up a tiny—but usable—trailer behind struck me with its whimsicality.

I don’t know where the quote “Normality is what cuts off your sixth finger and your tail” comes from (I’m sure it’s not Michele Bachmann), but the Isetta is an exemplar of the quote’s creed. So this post is rather a coda to the Katherine Hepburn one that preceded it—sometimes that sixth finger is the only one that can get a grip on an unusual idea, so it’s a shame to cut it off.

I recently read an article in an April 2011 New Yorker about David Eagleman, a professor of neuroscience and his work on how the brain conceives, interprets, and filters its sense of time. The article is wholly fascinating, but one of the tangents discussed in the piece was the “oddball effect,” which at its essence posits that the brain reacts with great focus and avidity to things that are outside the standard pattern, pushing the norm or subverting it, so much so that time itself seems to be dilated as a result of the brain’s attention.

Here’s to the Oddballs
Though I don’t even play a scientist on TV, I can’t address the measures or implications of that phenomenon, so I’ll just turn it to my purpose: The oddball effect is often a sensation of incredulity, mixed with delight. It’s when you pull up next to a car at a stoplight and the driver is wearing a gorilla mask. Good God!

So, like the Apple ad that saluted the crazy ones and the misfits, I want to salute the eccentric writers, who stroke and poke our brains. People like Tom Robbins, who never met a metaphor he couldn’t bend around a shooting comet, or Oscar Wilde, who while studying at Oxford University, would walk through the streets with a lobster on a leash. Or Lord Byron, who when told at Cambridge he couldn’t keep a dog in his room, discovered that there were no rules against bears. So he got one. (Note: Can we draw any conclusions about prestigious English academies and lunacy?)

Bertrand Russell said, “Orthodoxy is the death of intelligence.” Here’s to the guy that owned a truly oddball car, an Isetta, and thought, “A little trailer to go with it, that’s the thing!” He probably would have put a bear in there too, if he’d thought about it long enough.

I love this photo of Kate Hepburn. Even though her both-feet-athwart stance seems to presage a butt-tumble to come, the fact that she’s cranking the angle shows she’s not just rolling a flat-foot-dead-ahead-I’m-terrified skate, but she’s going for it. Maybe it’s the only time Kate skated, maybe it’s just a publicity photo, but implicit in it is the kind of attitude confirmed by Hepburn’s bio: a brash kind of what-the-hell brio that was disarming and refreshing.

That’s what I think writers should do: push the angle a little, crank off some language that’s bolder or brighter, be willing to take a bone bruise to your writer’s elbows. I like to imagine Kate grinding on a curb in the Safeway parking lot, the security guard saying, “Hey lady, give it a rest!” From reading of her history, she rarely gave it a rest: she was opinionated, strong-willed and emotional, and it came out in her acting and her personal life. Whether you write for business, pleasure or both, writing doesn’t have any flavor unless you add some cayenne now and then.

The Long Hangover from a Word-Bender
When I was ten or eleven, I became slap-happy with words. I’d read the dictionary in chunks of pages, getting into the brief etymologies, mouthing the pronunciations. I remember running down to my best friend’s house, having memorized a line about a nice, old Volkswagen bus his highly educated parents had bought, so that I could spring on them something like “Congratulations on purchasing a well-restored vintage mode of transportation,” or some such gobbledygook. My friend’s dad just looked at me and laughed, though in a kindly way.

Despite regularly getting those kind of skeptical responses, I continued being a word-dweeb for years. The editor of my college paper was a guy who liked me and my writing, but one who accurately judged that my polysyllables-per-sentence count was choking many readers. He once titled an article of mine about an unconventional housing design near the college, “A Lot of Big Words About Housing.”

I’ve calmed down some from those days. I’m no longer so insecure about my writing that I have to forcibly lard it with fifty-cent words to make it seem worth something. But I’m still thrilled by language, still rifling through the dictionary, still wanting to goose a sentence with word-grease that makes it jump. So, take some chances with your writing: think of Kate Hepburn shredding in a half-pipe, no knee pads.

Bonus Celebrity “No Way!” Sighting
Agatha Christie was a surfer. I knew that Mark Twain did it in Hawaii (look for his tales of “surf bathing” in the Sandwich Islands), but Dame Agatha? Yes! I am hoping that one of you can find out whether Yogi Berra was a knitter.

It wasn’t your typical spring day today: thrashing rain squalls, gusty, spiraling winds, and wet, wet, wet. I ran around town doing errands, hunched and squinting in my ancient Benz, windows fogged, because the heater blower has given up the ghost. But there was a short break in the rain, so I drove over to Steamer Lane, one of California’s premiere surf spots, to look at the crashing waves. Too blown out for surfers today, but there were a couple of kiteboarders whipping across the scudding waves, digging the wild winds.

It occurred to me that the boarders were writing on the waves, kind of free writing, where you don’t pause to reflect on the course of the narrative, but you just let the pen roll, the words barreling through willy-nilly, one word trampolining higher than the next, or slipping its nose under the surface of those to come. It’s a kind of writing I don’t often do, being the prim walker of my writing dog, usually leashed.

How Do You Tell Stories Without Words?
But the rollicking kiteboarders had me thinking further—it being a rainy day and all, perfect for damp musing—what would it be like to tell your stories without words? The kiteboarders were writing stories on the waves, stories of exuberance and thrill, of experiment and error (and recovery from error), of sheer, spontaneous spunk. There are so many different ways of telling stories, but writers think—and write—in words.

Language has always come easily to me, probably because I loved the play of words from childhood. Since my young punk days, I thought being a writer, a storyteller, was an exalted vocation. Because I couldn’t hit a curve ball (professional ballplayer being my first dream), I chose the curve of words. Now that I’m an old punk, I still think of writing as one of the best approaches to map out your world. But considering how few people work with words on an intimate basis, I wondered if many people, particularly today (where word-worthiness doesn’t seem a premium), perceive not owning the bricks to build up a story structure as an insufficiency or a frustration. But maybe their stories are wrought from different iron.

Lone Cowboy
There are many kinds of storytellers, of course. I was held in thrall by a crusty old mechanic years ago, who, chewing vigorously on an unlit cheap cigar and spitting into the engine recesses of our disabled ’55 Chevy, rattled out a sequence of profane tales. A born word-worker, spitting out stories in a dilapidated old gas station at a dusty crossroads out of Wasco, California. He certainly didn’t need any paper (and maybe didn’t even need an audience).

When you look closely, you can see storytelling everywhere, often wordless; the barista at your local coffee shop might make a perfect cappuccino with a swift succession of rhythmic motions, each musically timed, so that a once-empty cup is filled not with coffee but a warm poem.

Approximately a thousand years ago, I hitchhiked across Canada with my best friend. In one of the little towns we were stuck in, we went to a local park and watched a Little League baseball game in some rickety bleachers. While we were sitting there, we were accosted by a skinny, scruffy old man wearing a droopy cowboy hat and carrying a harmonica. When he asked “Could I play a song for you today?” there was no answer but yes. He got up close to the both of us, and played a series of short songs, none of which I recognized. His face, lined, tired, told a story that didn’t need any musical accompaniment. When he was finished, we thanked him, and he said, “I’m the Lone Cowboy, you know.” He started to leave and turned back, and with a big, rheumy-eyed grin said, “I kissed a pretty girl today. I’m the Lone Cowboy!”

The delighted, crafty and slightly self-astonished look in his eyes told as much of a story as his words. Here’s to the crusty mechanics, slick-serving baristas and Lone Cowboys, storytellers all.

Lovers of words have close cousins—lovers of the letters that comprise the words. And there’s a couple of roads those letter lovers drive: one where they enjoy seeing certain letter arrangements, getting a visual delight from seeing a particular dance of letters. For instance, words like “lagniappe,” “flummoxed,” “bollixed”—I get a kick out of seeing those words. Perhaps it’s their alliterative alliances, the letter twins hopscotching, arms entwined. But it’s not just a double-consonant that charms—”chockablock,” “whisper,” “pendulum”—the list of eye-candy words for me is endless.

There’s also an aural bite that’s chewy: if you’re like me, you hear the words in your head as you read, so particular letter combos ring a brighter bell in the mind’s auditorium. I’m a slow reader anyway, but when I see a word that touches me both visually and aurally, I’ll say it aloud a few times, mouthing its syllabic shape. Hey, there are no horses around to spook, so I’m safe. I even like words about language: diphthong. Yes!

But there’s another angle (and an ascent and a ligature and a stem and on) to this word wrangling: typography, a deep study all its own. Despite (or because of) my own crabbed hand, I’ve always loved to look at nice cursive handwriting, the swirl and swashbuckle of the written word’s flow. More fascinating to me are people who mastered some measure of the calligraphic art, where the letters can be exquisite expressions of both control and whimsy. But higher yet on this communication column is the typographic designer, who combines some elements of painstaking engineer with soulful artist.

Doyald Young, Master Typographer, Beautiful Being
The reason I’m going on about this, other than the matter that I’ve always loved letterforms—and loved strolling through typeface books to ooh and ahh at the myriad ways to work with words as a visual form—is the image above. It’s a still from a movie available free on Lynda.com on the life and work of Doyald Young, master typographer. Young, who died a little over a month ago, comes through in this movie with such a presence: warmth, genuineness, curiosity, and most telling of all, love. Love for the pursuit of his art, its expression, its failures and allures.

I can’t draw a stick man to pet a stick cat, but I can appreciate someone like Doyald Young and the deep well of feeling he draws from to work his lettering magic. He understands that emotion and drama and mirth can be conveyed in those not-so-simple strokes, and as he said in the movie, “I’m still learning to draw.” We all should have such capacity for learning.

I hope whoever letters his tombstone takes a good measure of the man, and makes it right.

Time is a peculiar factor in writers’ lives. For all, there is the time when they are not known, tussling with words in obscurity, anxious of an uncertain fate. Then there might be a corona burst of notoriety’s light, where the author—often whose 20 years of work belies the falsehood of being termed an “overnight success”—enters a heady phase of fame. Think J.K. Rowling, Elizabeth Gilbert after Eat, Pray, Love, Brett Easton Ellis (though in a debut) of Less Than Zero. And for some, fame’s flare is not a comet that returns, but a thing that sputters and is still again.

And then there is the unsteady—and often unpredictable—rise and fall of fame’s tide after an author’s death. I suspect that most authors want to leave a legacy, a body of ideas or characters that live on in the public imagination long after the pen or keyboard is stilled. That’s phenomena that goes in pulses: you’ll have some of Faulkner’s works out of print for years, then there might be a Faulkner resurgence, with universities assigning new classes to pick at the authorial bones anew. It’s happened with Hemingway and Fitzgerald. The reason I’m bringing this up is because I’ve started reading Mark Twain’s autobiography, published in 2010, the 100th anniversary of Twain’s death.

Can’t Get It? It Must Be Good!
Twain was no slouch when it came to marketing. He decreed that his autobiography couldn’t be published until 100 years after he lifted off this earthly plane, because he thought that some of the vinegar and piss with which he inked some of his opinions about politics, politicians, public figures and contemporary writers was just too sour. But setting that time restriction on his work created the scarcity factor in the public imagination—wow, this is a time capsule of thunder, surely worth waiting 100 years for! The University of California Press, the publishers of the work, were somewhat taken aback by the immediate sharp sales of the work, scrambling to meet demand. Or maybe Twain also mandated that the publishers pretend there was a shortage of the volume—that’s a tried-and-true technique that his own days as a publisher would have instructed.

The autobiography is a serious work of scholarship, the result of years of research by the Mark Twain Project at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. The introduction alone is 63 pages, the explanatory notes in the back more than 200, and the body of the book is in small type. The reason it took a team of scholarly horses to draw Twain’s carriage was that the material was like an attic stuffed with oddments, rags, treasures and trifles, and with more works scattered in other literary outbuildings. Twain began his autobiography innumerable times later in life, and as with many of his writings (Huck Finn took more than seven years of on-off writing), dropped the project only to pick it up anew. His first efforts at a more conventional autobiography left him cold. It was only when he came up with the idea of dictating his life story that he moved forward with some vigor. Yet, that capture-the-spoken-word effort too meandered over a course of years, culminating very close to his death.

Fame, Who Needs It? (Did You Quote Me Accurately?)
Meandered spells it well: Twain didn’t settle for a crawling chronology in his dictation, but approached it in the manner of one of his storyteller’s speeches: He chose a subject to speak about, and played it out in his mind and then his mouth, as he lie in bed (where a good deal of the dictation was done). Thus the work is a series of impressions, sketches, anecdotes, and profiles, at kin with the range of his lifetime’s body of works. So the autobiography is a crazy-quilt of stitching and sorting; it would undoubtedly amuse Mr. Clemens to know that it took over 200 pages of annotations to set the story straight (or less crooked, as it were). And this is only volume one! Two more are planned, unless crafty Twain had another trove of scribblings that he deemed so scurrilous that they could only be released 200 years after his death.

A couple of posts back, I wrote about the almost overwrought flailing of despair and delight in the letters between Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg detailing their pre-fame literary efforts and crestfallen declarations over ever being published. I’m deeper in the book now, and it’s just after Ginsberg had his seminal Howl published, and he’s getting the attention that he’d craved. There had been an article in the New York Times that had discussed the poem and the poet, and Ginsberg referenced that article in a letter to Kerouac, saying, “Agh! I’m sick of the whole thing, that’s all I think about, famous authorhood, like a happy empty dream.”

To my mind, a “happy empty dream” seems like an apt description of fame. But maybe I’m tasting grapes gone sour—or something that will taste like wine over time. Oh well, at least I have the Twain tattoo…