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.

Yeah, thought I'd put my novel onscreen. Sneaky, eh?

Books, ugh, repellent things. The fluttering of pages, the implicit mockery of cold text, the muscle- and mind-straining weight of ideas. Better to corral all those meandering words and their unseemly punctuation into an electron pool, where you can sip from modest, reduced-page cups of their content, where you can make type sizes wiggle to your wishes, where you can search and highlight and transfer and connect and criss-cross and cannibalize and—whew! [Daubs fevered brow.]

Actually, I love books, those creaky old antiques. If you drop hardcover books on eggs, they make a satisfying squish. If you argue with their authors, you can fling them across the room with a cascade of curses and get a resounding “bang!” from the wall opposite. But the reason I’m even blithering about books is that before I left for a recent two-month stint in the Bahamas, I was given a first-generation Kindle, a discard from a fellow who now is proudly armed with an iPad.

The Salt Slime of the Ancient Reader
Taking a pile of books to the Bahamas was a no-no, mostly for weight issues. And because, having lived in the tropics before, I knew that all things material are subject to the insidious insistence from nature that solids return to goo. For instance, my host in the tropics had vast shelves of great books, which I eagerly scanned. But picking one (and another and another) to leaf through—ahhgggh! All covered with that strange salt-slime that adheres to anything that is stationary for a period in the humid climes. Most unpleasant.

Thus, I Kindleized my reading, and I admit to the pleasure of summoning up multiple books for chunky savoring in one reading session. All those good free Domino Project works, Poke the Box, Do the Work, Self-Reliance and more. And because I am a dweeb, Grammatically Correct and Portable MFA in Creative Writing (even more portable on a Kindle). And a mystery story collection. And my own novel, pictured so promotionally in the image above.

The Palm V—Looking Back Through Time’s Cracked Screen
But I’ve never been the Luddite sort regardless, railing about ereaders being the death of the printed word. Publishing is evolving in crazy, lurching ways, but I think it’s mostly to the good. I’ll frequent (and buy in) bookstores till the day I go blind, happy with the serendipity of the shelves, the sense of discovery and promise the stores afford, and the fine feelings I actually get from the fluttering of pages. But I wrote a newspaper piece, sometime around the Ice Age of 1999, about having jolly fun reading Mark Twain on an airplane with my Palm V. Petrol-based ink, soy ink or e-ink—it’s the ideas therein that make one think.

One disclaimer on this particular model of Kindle: Steve Jobs would have had the designer drawn and quartered. You can barely hold the damn thing without accidentally turning pages, backwards and forwards. Set it down at an angle, set it down on something soft, lift it to move it—your place is whisked to the next electronic edge. I know the newer models have corrected this egregious inelegance, but I can’t callously throw this thing against the wall like I might the printed Portable MFA.

One small coda: today, we renewed our subscription to the Sunday paper. I read a lot of news online (discounting whatever mind rot news-noodling provokes), but no matter the readily available onscreen/Kindle/iPad/ version of the paper, there’s still something about flipping through the physical sections of the newspaper, in bed with a second cup of Sunday coffee …

My migrant seemed to be of the spiritual sort

My New Year’s day was truly hallucinatory, and not from any absinthe I’d bathed in the night before. I don’t know if the first full day of a bad cold is like this for most people, but for me, it’s a sharp-taloned grip of flaring headache, lead-gravity fatigue, eye and ear impairment, and consciousness without focus. So, when I found out—when I’d finally been able to pull myself out of bed to leave San Francisco—that my girlfriend’s Alice’s car had a dead battery, I could only numbly nod.

We waited at the car for a tow truck to give us a jump, me lolling in the front seat with my head in my hands. I glanced up every few minutes, and despite being half-witted, noticed that a man standing across the street was staring directly at the car, or at me. Every time I looked, his gaze was fixed on the car, his stance, held up on one side by a cane, rigid. I got out of the car to get some air, turned away from the man, but when I turned back he—or rather she—was standing almost next to me, staring with a sharp ferocity.

A Migrant of the Spirit
I hadn’t realized it was a woman until she was close, because she was wearing big sunglasses, the bright sun was from her direction, and she was nearly shapeless, a tall, skinny, wraithlike creature. She looked somewhat like the migrant worker in the Dorothea Lange photograph above, but with a thinner, more angular face and nose, and an even sharper-though-faraway gaze. Having walked up Market Street every workday back in my San Francisco days brought me into contact with many a street person, and though not particularly ill-dressed, she had the overall look. Except for the piercing stare.

My wobbly consciousness had me slow on the uptake, staring back at her for a bit before I could ask “Can I help you?” But she didn’t answer, just returning my question with the caverns of those dark eyes. When I asked her again, she finally just mumbled something, a few mixed words, looking into the back of my head. But I was feeling so ill I was in no real condition to create a conversation. When I leaned back against the car, she leaned back against it too, both of us looking into the street. The tow truck didn’t arrive for about 20 minutes, and during that time, I moved to the curb to sit, and she sat down next to me. I was able to make her laugh a little with some remark, but mostly we just sat in silence, she staring fixedly off.

Back to the Future
Just before the tow truck showed up, she stood, and started to move very slowly back across the street. She’d left her cane behind, but I picked it up and showed it to her and she took it. I asked if she wanted some help across the street, and she said yes, so lightly touching her shoulder, I led her across. Then she assumed the position in which I’d first seen her, standing rigidly erect, staring expressionless toward us and the car. After the tow truck drivers arrived, I looked back toward her and she was gone.

Sometimes we connect with people in the weirdest of ways, and for the briefest of times. For me, that stark, inarticulate homeless woman was a brief companion angel, there to be a presence for me when I was barely capable of words myself. I felt an odd connection. Transient, it’s true, but connection nonetheless.

A Wave to Sarge Bentley, a Year (and a Dimension) Away
New Year’s day was the first anniversary of my father’s death. Dad, I miss you. Maybe you sent that strange street person to say hello from the other world. Hello back.

A while back, I wrote The Write Word Easy Editing and Spiffy Style Guide,the charming creature just a bit below and off to your right in the sidebar. Thousands of energetic, elvish electrons rushed out to peddle my modestly priced guide, feverish in their quest to lop off dangling participles (dang them) and comma splices (much worse than comatose spices) and make the world safe for the semicolon.

But this being Christmas Eve and all, it’s a time for giving. Since I don’t want to give away my only other prized possession, a basketball signed by Elgin Baylor, I’m making the easy, spiffy guide a gift to the world. Just click on that beaming baby in the sidebar, give me your email address (no Sir Spamalot am I), and it’s yours. Find a typo in there and I will make you a perfect Manhattan the next time you venture to my doorstep. (We can drink them inside, though.)

Don’t Pick These People Up If You See Them Hitchhiking
The other item with which I want to scorch your eyeballs is my novel, All Roads Are Circles, pictured above. I recently released it as an ebook on Amazon. Of course it is the Great American Novel, which is why I set it in Canada in the 1970s. Picture two post—high school best friends on a lunatic hitchhiking trip, picked up by the crazed, the cuckoo and the calamitous. It’s kind of like On the Road meets Huck Finn, but I don’t have those guys’ press agents. Oh, the two leads fall in love with the same gal on their odyssey, and they get a bit testy. And messy.

If you don’t feel you can risk the .99, think of it this way: you can download the free editing guide, use its pointed prescriptives to detect any places in my novel where the plot’s socks get soggy, and we can rewrite the thing together, and with the second edition’s proceeds, I will have enough money to make you another Manhattan. Your call.

PS I will make you three Manhattans (with brandied cherries, not those crappy Maraschinos) if you review the durn thing on Amazon.

I’ve been spending time on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera for the past 7 weeks or so. “Spending time”—such a peculiar expression, as though time could be counted like pennies or pomegranates. Time is much more like taffy, in that in some instances it can seem to stretch and stretch, and in others, break off or shatter. My time here has had many shattered moments, some where the blindingly sharp sun and brilliant blues of the ocean have been more like make-believe metaphors than the cloth that clothes my days.

Let’s skip past wrestling with the quirks and questions of time and move more toward its standard December measure: Christmas. Alice and I will not be on Eleuthera at Christmas, instead stealing away from here just a few days before the date. At some level, I regret that, because Christmas in a foreign country, especially on an island, is just that: foreign. And that foreignness is a good reminder that customs and traditions are just arbitrary, where cultures that might share a holiday like Christmas, don’t share it in quite the same way.

In that spirit, I recently wrote a piece on an island Christmas I did experience some years ago, when we lived on a little stretch of land in Micronesia. Courtesy of Squidoo; look for the Santa wearing flip-flops.

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 …”

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.

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.)

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.