Mr. Twain Sucking the Life Out of a Defenseless Stogie

One of the intrigues about being an enthusiast about a subject or person is that once you start poking about, there seems to be a bottomless rabbit hole of information. And that hole can be well off the main road of what’s normally shared among the broad population. Now I’m not talking about true obsession, where perhaps you know more about the Morpho butterfly than its mother did, where you skip lunch then dinner sitting on the floor of a bookstore a continent away from your home because you’d heard they had a dusty tome by the premiere 18-century entomologist who also skipped most meals in favor of studying the Morphos. Not that kind of obsession, my pretties.

No, I’m referring to something more than the mere fan, but less than the stalker. As an aside, there are the rare polyglots who are able to tiptoe close to obsession’s stage while still staying out of its brightest footlights, and yet own another stage all their own. For example, going back to our fluttery friends, when Vladimir Nabokov wasn’t writing one of his remarkably layered, seriocomic novels, he spent serious time researching butterflies, publishing many monographs that professional lepidopterists recognized as authoritative. He once commented, “The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru. It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.”

Looking at Layers Leads to More Layers
This is a hide-and-seek way of getting to my main topic: how people and things are multilayered, and once you start pulling at the onionskin of a topic or character, there’s always another skin underneath. Case in point: one of the books I’m reading is titled, Twain’s Feast: Searching for America’s Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens. Now, were this work “… in the footsteps of Mamie Eisenhower,” I probably—and no insult to Mamie—would have picked it up with mild amusement and then let it flit from memory forever.

But because it’s Mark Twain, and I am more than a simple fan (though not obsessed, no, that’s not the beating of my hideous heart!), I’m reading it with great pleasure, for the author Andrew Beahrs combines his careful and light-hearted research into Twain’s writings on American food with Bearhs’ travels around the country trying to locate and eat that very food, which in the case of the prairie hens of Illinois proves ecologically difficult, and that of stomaching the ideal stewed raccoon a mite unpalatable.

From the Grubby to the Gracious
But it’s the flavor of Twain’s voice that comes through with spice, particularly when he lavishes angel-winged admiration on an American dish and contemptuous skewering on an insipid counterpart found elsewhere. His hilarious railings against spineless European coffee and expoundings on the glories of a stout cup of good American coffee do make one wonder what happened between Twain’s time and our parent’s days with the Folgers. Twain was uniquely suited to comment on the breadth of American food, for he palavered with the powerful in the boardrooms of the Eastern Seaboard, grubbed among the grubs in the grubbiest makeshift mining towns in dead-dry Nevada, and of course moved through the shoals and the high waters of foodstuffs up and down the mighty Mississippi, both in his boyhood and as a steamboat pilot.

I want to return to my original spiraling rabbit hole, for it’s in the reading of the table tastes of a famous person that you consider how layered a life is, how layered all our lives are. Twain could be, in turn, a kitten-loving sentimentalist, a flinger of flaming arrows against the establishment, a provocateur who spoke truth to power, and yet one who cultivated the company of barons of industry. A man of spectacular fame, yet of multiple spectacular failures and deeply public sorrows. His onion had many skins, and reading this off-center book tells me there are skins I’ll never know, on him and so many other subjects.

Yeah, Well, I Invented the Crossbow
Today I heard my girlfriend Alice tell one of my old friends on the phone that she had spent time a long while back to learn how to play the harmonica. Really! Who knew? Good instruction that, a reminder that thinking we know all that a person is about is a kind of blindness, because there are always layers unseen.

One thing though: Twain sang the praises of the 19-century oysters and mussels of the San Francisco Bay. That’s going much too far: I vigorously object. Oysters and mussels, gut-tugging expressions of some bronchial character, a kind of simpering slime. Though on the subject of maple syrup, I share his every sentiment.

One of my pals from Triiibes, Seth Godin’s fantastically fertile social network, is Bob Poole. Bob is a salesperson with a whole lotta soul, a fine and funny man, and the author of the recommended book, Listen First, Sell Later. His blog, called the Daily Doughnut, gives bite-sized advice and perspectives on selling, but selling from a framework of two-way communication, mutual gain, and being a human being. Imagine that.

Bob gives over the Sunday version of the Daily Doughnut to guests. I hacked into his blog and replaced today’s post from Richard Branson with my own. Check it out: “Galileo and Leonardo da Vinci Walk Into A Bar …”

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.

Yeah, you're right—they were a vaudeville act in the 30s

I like to show off my smarty-pants friends now and then, and this occasion brings a half-dozen ways to do it: my estimable colleague, Joel D Canfield, is hosting a book-release party on the eleventh of November in Philadelphia. Joel (who besides making wicked pancakes) dabbles in necromancy and other dark arts, so he has scheduled his publishing party on 11-11-11, a day when normally steadfast digits and the earth itself both tilt on their axes. In order to cause numerologists to scramble to their interpretive books all the quicker, Joel has folded two other units into the numeral batter: 6/6.

Those dancing digits herald a titanic feat: he’s published six books in the last six months! And he rarely sweats! Though, as you might imagine from that kind of output, he does expound.

Four of the works are from the apocalyptic potato cellar of his own imagination, one is an immortal act of co-authorship with the stirring soul of Renaissance Man/poetic social theorist/quasi-historian/tooth-tugger Richard Wilson and one is co-authored with Change Catalyst Shanna Mann. Behold the list:

Through the Fog—An Irish Mystery

The Time is Now 11:59—Heretical Thinking for Tomorrow’s Business (with a foreword by Rick Wilson)

Getting Your Book Out of the “Someday” Box

Hits or Niches: Why Marketing is Boring, Obnoxious, & Annoying, & What You Can Do About It (with Rick Wilson)

Permission Granted: Create Something Remarkable. Start Now.

Why We Lead—Conversations on the Scarcity of Confidence and the Nature of Leadership (with Shanna Mann)

The works are available both in print form and from the aether, from the usual electronic suspects. The publishing party will be held at Cafe Nola, a New–Orleans style venue where the Bananas Foster is said to reign supreme. Along with flaming confectionary dishes, Joel will be attempting to eat full print versions of all the books. It’s unclear if famed hot-dog competitive eating champion Joey Chestnut will be vying for this literary-comestibles crown.

There’s a Facebook page trumpeting the occasion and Joel’s Someday Box page has links to buy these and his other books as well. On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia that day, but I won’t be able to make it. Save me a banana, boys. (On second thought, just save me the cognac.)

I still remember the clackety-clack of the high keys of my Mac Plus

This is a cobbling of a couple of things I wrote a while back, wrapped in the unfurled flag of Steve Jobs’ stepping down from Apple yesterday. As a writer with handwriting so tortured it screams in unintelligibility, any medium that offered the least friction between getting the words from brain to screen was a welcome one. For more than 25 years, my medium has been a Mac.

In 1986, I was hired by Borland, then a fairly big player in the software industry, to be a copyeditor. They plunked me down in front of what I was told was a smoking machine, a new, zippy IBM XT. Not having much computer experience, I plinked and poked my way around DOS, getting used to command-line instructions to open, save and find files. Some geekasauri from other departments came around, whinging because our department had given an upscale machine to the new doofus copyeditor, who didn’t know just how glorious 640k of internal memory was. I didn’t know memory from moonbeams, so I could only shrug.

Then my Mac Plus arrived. Lookee here—a mouse to move that cursor across the screen! A program you can draw with. A selection of typefaces. A graphical interface that quickly communicated the notion of file storage and retrieval. And something else: a sparkle, a design distinction, that holy integration of form and function. This was something else again, and I liked it, immediately.

The Contagion Spreads
A new copyeditor was hired. She was given a new Mac Plus. She’d only used PCs until then—revelation. A tribe of two. Our direct boss, who worked out of the office, got one too. Once a tribe, twice a tribe, thrice a tribe. Then, a goodly portion of the marketing department got them too. PageMaker 1.0 on the Mac—wow. People succumbed to the ease, the allure of the new, and again, that somewhat intangible design/desire glimmer.

But Borland’s bottom line was based on selling inexpensive (revolutionary, at the time) development tools for programmers. The geeks did not speak Mac, and in the office the machines were often derided as toys. But of course, that scorn only enhanced the “we’re unique, we use Macs” sense of narrow community within the tribe, which unfortunately could come off as “we’re better.” To my mind then, both machines got your letters written, your sheets spread, your data based, and your computations computed, but only one machine did all that with something extra—personality expressed through design. And a sense of play. (And anyway, whoever really thought a toy was a bad thing?)

Serious Play
I won’t cite boring statistical studies of the creative aspects of play, and the means by which this kind of play leads to discovery and tangible insight, but the studies are there. The Macintosh provided for millions of people the pleasurable pursuit of their own empowerment; and so many surfable waves followed, from the rising tide of desktop publishing to multimedia breakers to floods of creative connectivity today. Sure, Macs, PCs, Linux machines, just tools after all, but how Macs work has always made more sense to me. It’s personal—not like the zealot fanboy who flames any questioner of the Macintosh Creed—but personal in the sense that I do get where the fanatics are coming from.

Thus, I felt a pang yesterday after the Jobs announcement, because creative geniuses that make a real-world impact are few and far between. His and Apple’s work had a lasting impact on me and on my writing.

Godspeed, Mr. Jobs.