The fascinating history ...

... of "Waltzing Matilda".

Chamber opera

Today John sent me the 153-page score (in draft) for "The Love of Long Ago," the first of three short chamber opera works based on short stories by Maupassant. 3 voices, 2 violins, viola, cello -- more easily performed than the full-scale opera Dark Mission, our first operatic collaboration. John has the libretto for the 2nd story and I'm at work on the 3rd. When the full work is done, John will hope to get interest from the Center for Contemporary Opera.

A first listen has me pleased. Will listen more carefully and take notes that may be helpful to him. This also is incentive to finish the final libretto.

Picked up and am reading Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction, which looks quite excellent early on. I'm sure I'll have more to say about it later.

Something of a lazy day. Practiced piano in the morning a tad. Reading. Errands. No writing, but I'm brooding again over the direction of the novel. I stopped last session in the middle of action, which I can easily pick up. I'm brooding about various options for the middle section of the book, act two as it were. I think my story board needs more legs.

Another landmark bites the dust

There aren't many places left in Portland that remind me of "the golden age" of the 70s and 80s. The Virginia Cafe is one of them, a dark downtown bar famous for its happy hour and stiff drinks, an institution during all the time I've lived in Portland. Well, it's on a block being leveled for another high rise, so its days are numbered.

I didn't hang out at VC all that often, my stomping grounds at the time being NW rather than downtown, but I'd stop by a time or two a month, usually in late afternoon to take advantage of their generous happy hour. When I was downtown, I usually preferred the Vat & Tonsur, another landmark long gone for redevelopment (which recently relocated but I heard it's not the same).

• 
  My Favorite Virginia Cafe stories from The Portland Freelancer Blog.
  

Devil's Dictionary

MISFORTUNE, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.

MONDAY, n. In Christian countries, the day after the baseball game.

MONUMENT, n. A structure intended to commemorate something which either needs no commemoration or cannot be commemorated.

MORAL, adj. Conforming to a local and mutable standard of right. Having the quality of general expediency.

NEIGHBOR, n. One whom we are commanded to love as ourselves, and who does all he knows how to make us disobedient.

NIHILIST, n. A Russian who denies the existence of anything but Tolstoi. The leader of the school is Tolstoi.

NOISE, n. A stench in the ear.

NON-COMBATANT, n. A dead Quaker.

NONSENSE, n. The objections that are urged against this excellent dictionary.

NOVEL, n. A short story padded.

NOVEMBER, n. The eleventh twelfth of a weariness.

Ambrose Bierce

Bellini's Norma

I enjoyed the opera last night. It's not an opera I'd go out of my way to see again but much of the music is beautiful. I'd certainly listen to it again.

At root Norma is a love triangle story. A Druid priestess (Norma) has been having a long, secret love affair with a Roman soldier (the enemy), bearing him two kids. But he's switched his affections to a younger model, who confesses her own crisis of heart to Norma, who in turn releases her from her vows. Then Norma discovers it's her guy who's the love interest -- and, of course, all hell breaks loose.

There's a moment near the end of this story when the soldier, witnessing Norma's sacrifice, comes to his senses and realizes how much he has lost: and many in the audience laughed. This is not the intended response but does suggest how difficult it is to sell an extreme melodramatic story today -- though audiences lap up this sort of thing on TV "news" all the time (and especially recently).

The highlights of this production were the two women, and the several scenes in which they sing together stole the show. The one word I'd use to describe this opera is "pretty."

• Annotated bibliography
• Libretto

Media gone mad

The frenzy over the various tidbits following the death of this Marilyn Monroe wannabe -- who gets the body? who gets the money? who fathered the kid? ad nauseam -- brings out the worst in American pop culture. I'm reminded of the Blake takeoff an Army buddy used to recite as often as circumstances warranted, which was damn often: what the hammer? what the anvil? WHAT THE FUCK?

My personal tastes are so far adrift from the mainstream that I didn't consider Marilyn Monroe "sexy," let alone an imitation. Give me Kate Winslet or Nicole Kidman any day.

However, I admit it is tempting to call a news conference and announce that, in fact, I am the father of the baby, conceived during a secret meeting we had in which I gave the dear lady writerly advice since her secret passion was not to be Marilyn Monroe but Virginia Woolf, the details of which will be revealed in my upcoming memoir. Secretly, at the time of her death, she was working on a novel in the tradition of To the Lighthouse, which had the working title of To the Bank.

Drafting and revising

As I move through the first draft of my Cold War novel, I find areas that need to be tweaked or changed, places the story board is not as strong as at first glance, revisions that need to be done -- but unless they are major, I make a note of them but keep moving forward. The key to a first draft, I think, is to finish it as quickly as possible. All the "real writing" happens later, after the draft, when one can stare at a paragraph for as long as it takes to get it right. You do that in the rush of a draft and you can lose your train of thought and stop moving forward. With the draft, the movement of the story is sketched. Indeed, a draft is like an artistic sketch before a painting. First the sketch, then the painting; first the draft, then the novel. First drafts are mostly a pain in the butt for me but this one is more fun than usual because it is so autobiographical about a pleasant, unusual time of my life, my experiences as a Russian linguist in the Army Security Agency. It's just fun to revisit this time of my life, three years, when I was 20, 21 and 22. At the same time, I can't wait to finish the damn draft -- hopefully before summer -- so I can slow down the frantic rush of writing (get it down before it leaves your head!) and stare at words for a while, thinking of better ones to replace them with. The slow meticulous process of rewriting, which is the real joy of being a writer as far as I'm concerned.

Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor

I love the work of the directing-writing team Payne & Taylor. I teach Sideways, and what I love about teaching it is that the screenplay is very different from the novel, all the changes improvements, and that there are many cuts from screenplay to film, all of them improvements -- so the film and script provide an excellent insight into the process of story revision and how, in film, "less is more" is a recurring and powerful theme. Especially looking at the scenes in the script that did not make it to screen, the student hopefully learns to appreciate the poetic efficiency of film storytelling, how there's never a wasted moment. (If it's wasted, it goes.) The script, of course, won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. The novel, by the way, is terrible. It truly is. It's another lesson to read it and understand how a bad novel can become a very good film.

Payne-Taylor's other films include Citizen Ruth, Election and About Schmidt, all first rate.

At any rate, today is our dissection of Sideways day, which I always look forward to. Yesterday my reading load was less than it should have been because a significant number of students did not turn in their work on time. I suppose I'll get scripts today for more weekend reading than I prefer.

I go in early for an appointment, wearing my suit for the opera and all. One of those crazy hectic days, lots of places to be at certain times. I do look forward to the opera, though I've done no preparation for it this time. Focusing on Mahagonny, not Norma, but it will be instructive, perhaps, to see the Portland and L.A. opera companies so close together.

Maybe I can get some more work done on the novel during my office hours today.

Mailer on Miller

Check out Today In Literature, which focuses on Henry Miller today. Miller is a rare one in American letters, hugely influential, his book
Henry Miller on Writing an inspirational credo for young writers, a book that favors an existential approach to literary arts, favoring private vision over public fame.


I believe the best introduction to Miller is the journey through his major works edited by Norman Mailer in the 1970s, Genius and Lust. Mailer is a champion and a fine guide.

Personally I find Miller overwhelming and repetitive, which means I appreciate him in excerpts more than in entire works. I should look at his work again and see if my response as a young man has changed. It's as if I've admired the man more than the writer, though of course he would insist they are the same.

Natural Valentines

Or Photoshop at work. Hard to say these days.

Helen Mirren on the Oscar

"Win or lose, the bubble bursts and you're back to the nitty gritty of working," she told Reuters in an interview last month. "I'm honestly at my happiest in a cold rehearsal room with my polystyrene cup of tea."

Spoken like an artistic heavyweight.

Maupassant progress

An exciting note from John Nugent, the wonderful composer I work with, that he's almost done with the draft of the first of three short chamber opera pieces based on Maupassant short stories. The first is "The Love of Long Ago."

LOVER & GRANDMOTHER
Love is the only good thing in life
As fleeting a thing as love can be
It burns like a flame – and goes out the same
Something to cherish as long as you can

Love is the only good thing in life
It comes like a storm and leaves like a hawk
That carries away your heart and your soul
Love is the only good thing in life

Here is the libretto.

It's always a real high to hear how John has applied his musical magic to the words.

Progress

Made it to 16,000 words, the next plateau, leaving off where I can pick it up easily again, probably tomorrow. Feel like I'm back in the groove. Famous last words.

Busy day

Didn't get an early start on this busy Valentine's Day. Planted two valentines around the house for H to discover. She stays in bed a few hours more than I do.

Last night I finally finished the CD-ROM. I just started over. Earlier I'd been trying to "revise" it and had many problems. So I deleted the damn thing and started over and was done in a jiff.

Here are some interesting links I stumbled across:

• Cooking Debauchery, a blog about food that has eye and word appeal.
• Paying for Prestige, an article from today's PSU paper about the scams to be listed in Who's Who directories. God, how many offers have I received over the years? Dozens and dozens. We'll list you as a famous person, then sell you the book for $300. What a deal.
• Mahagonny preview, a video preview of what awaits me in L.A. (thanks, David).

At the end of office hours yesterday I managed to write about 100 words on the novel, which should be enough to get me into gear this morning. I'll go find out.

Trouble, trouble, trouble

Redoing this CD-ROM is taking far more time than I expected, primarily because the web is so slow today. Argh. Still not done and not sure I'll be done before class.

Summer issue

Primus stopped by the office full of excitement about what he has upcoming in the summer poetry section of the review: some posthumous poems by Richard Hugo and others from the Univ. of Montana; a Copper Canyon poets selection; a chapter from a novel upcoming from Viking; and he's still after W.S. Merwin. Looking good!

Blame me

Made an incredibly stupid mistake preparing the CD-ROMs of the review with which to apply for a grant. Is the mind starting to go? At any rate, have to do them again.

So close and yet ...

I'm damn close to being able to play this piano piece I've been working on (not the classwork, which is still pretty easy for me) ... I make a few mistakes along the way but I'm close. Nice to be doing something when you know when you're wrong. That's also what I liked about mathematics, my first discipline and love as a teenager. No opinions here, you either play the thing right or you don't -- of course, "interpretation" enters the piano picture later but at this stage, it's a matter of getting the right notes in the right order at the right time, right or wrong. I like the clarity of that very much, as frustrating as it is when you're so close and yet so far away. But I'll keep at it -- and I already know the next piece I want to work on, all this apart from the class assignments. More challenging stuff.

Working with a former student via writing & conference and read her new script. She has a great talent for characters but overwrites action, too literary, which is easy enough to fix. She needs to take a more practical approach to the craft, as so many do. Otherwise they shoot themselves in the foot, trying to turn screenwriting into something it isn't, certainly not at the level of the spec script in a very crowded marketplace. Everybody wants the screenplay to be robustly literary -- except the harried readers who read them for a living.

Caught up in school stuff, watch a movie today.

Behind on the novel, brooding about the next movement. Something in my story board isn't right after all, I think.

Preparing for Mahagonny

This morning I watched the video of the 1998 Salzburg Festival production of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, one of three things I'm doing to prepare for the trip to L.A. to see it in two weeks. I have the W.H. Auden translation to read again, and the CD-set of the famous Lotte Lenya production of years ago. (Photo by Julie Madsen.)

I was introduced to Mahagonny in the 1960s and instantly it became my favorite work of dramatic art. This has not changed. In fact, I would say that it's place at the top of my list is more secure than ever. Watching it today was a very emotional experience, as the opera always is for me. Why does it move me so much? Because it strikes me as so true, and true with great dramatic beauty, about our essential condition and situation as humans in a political world. Indeed, watching it today, I was astounded how contemporary and relevant it felt -- the threat of Nature, the hurricane, is global warming today; "is here no telephone?", if in reference to cell phones, is right on the mark. The images, the metaphors, all contemporary, still. There is no greater human crime than to be without money: a major human theme, still. "Nothing you can do can help a dead man." In my view, a profound truth -- and the reason I call myself an existentialist, however out of fashion that's become.

I imagine I'll be weeping in the audience in L.A., but that's fine. But I don't find Mahagonny depressing. How can the truth be depressing? Yes, it has a lot to say about Greed, Gluttony, and the rest of our sins; it does not paint a very cheery picture of human activity. But the play is no worse than today's newscast, or yesterday's, or tomorrow's. What is uplifting in the play is we have a martyr who speaks truly, the lumberjack Jimmy, and we have a moment of human connection between Jimmy and the whore, Jenny.

The Salzburg production was very energetic, erotic and busy. Lots of street theater moments and crowd scenes. In fact, it was too busy for my tastes, but that's a minor dissatisfaction. There was lot of nudity -- I wonder if L.A. will do the same? I think it's distracting if made too blatant but can work if dramatically realistic. I think they showed off the nice female bodies too much in Salzburg. I thought the visit to Mahagonny by God was a little too campy and cute (he rode a bicycle). Salzburg was not an ideal production to my tastes -- but the singers were there, and it's still Mahagonny, after all. If you can sing it, you can't screw it up too badly.

But I'm naturally curious about the L.A. production. I was sorry to learn it will be sung in English, though if they use the Auden translation, that would be convenient for me since that's the one I'm studying.

I never believed I'd get to see this live, it's done so seldom in the U.S. About five or six years ago I announced to my wife that if Mahagonny ever plays in the continental U.S. while I'm alive and mobile, I will pay any price to see it. Hence our L.A. trip, more convenient and sooner than I imagined. And on Oscar night, no less! When we get out of the matinee, maybe the traffic jam will be beginning to watch the stars arrive. At any rate, we'll be spending Sunday eve with good L.A. friends, so I'll catch the Oscars the next day (taping it).

I'm still emotionally drained. What a work of art. Leaves me breathless and in awe. And it keeps me humble -- I'd be happy to write something that reached Mahagonny's knee caps.

Devil's Dictionary

LOVE, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder.

LYRE, n. An ancient instrument of torture.

MAD, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that themselves are sane.

MAGIC, n. An art of converting superstition into coin.

MAGNET, n. Something acted upon by magnetism. MAGNETISM, n. Something acting upon a magnet. The two definitions immediately foregoing are condensed from the works of one thousand eminent scientists, who have illuminated the subject with a great white light, to the inexpressible advancement of human knowledge.

MALE, n. A member of the unconsidered, or negligible sex. The male of the human race is commonly known (to the female) as Mere Man. The genus has two varieties: good providers and bad providers.

MALEFACTOR, n. The chief factor in the progress of the human race.

MAMMON, n. The god of the world's leading religion.

MAN, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be.

Ambrose Bierce

The week ahead

Looks like a busy week. The toughest day will be Wednesday with a pile of first draft scripts to evaluate. Thursday, discussing same in class, follows. Tuesday we watch most of Sideways in class, an easy day, and I have only a few scripts to read this afternoon. Thursday night is the opera, Norma ... and I realized our LA matinee opera is on Oscar night, so coming out maybe we'll be in traffic with some movie stars.

I'm at a new plateau in my piano studies, on the verge of getting down something that actually sounds pretty good, even though it is a simplified version of Pachelbel's "Canon in D" -- the authentic version is being studied at the moment by third-year students, as it turns out. But this simple version in C sounds better than anything else I've yet played, so I'm excited about mastering it. I downloaded this off a music professor's excellent website. A wealth of material to learn is there.



Piano Lessons: Music, Love & True Adventures by Noah Adams (of NPR fame) is a delightful memoir about his own adventures learning the piano as an adult. Full of great piano stories, history and fine personal sentiment.

Another fascinating book is
Love from Gracie. Sinclair Lewis: 1912-25., a memoir by Lewis' first wife, Grace Hegger Lewis. Full of insights into his character and writing methods, and the ex has a frank yet loving tone that makes her believable.

The wild west

I've met folks in NYC and other eastern urban centers who consider Oregon to be out in "the wild west." Still. I wonder why.

Shades of the Old West: Two Ore. ranchers dead in cattle dispute

By TERRENCE PETTY

The Associated Press

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Four cows that had gone missing from their spread in Eastern Oregon led cattlemen Dennis Beach and his son, Travis, to a cousin's ranch about eight miles away.

What happened next was like a scene out of the Old West -- a tragedy of cousin against cousin, a man shot off his horse by a lever-action rifle, and two dead ranchers. It's a tale as tangled as tumbleweeds in barbed wire.


Read the story.

A new "old" play

We went to the premiere of a new play this afternoon. Several surprising things about the experience:

• Set in a French chateau right after WWII, it was a "comedy of manners" of the old school, the sort of thing Coward or Wilde excelled at, but here as often dull and slow as witty, with no characters I actually cared about.
• So I asked myself, Why one earth would someone go to all the trouble in 2007 to write a play like this? I don't know the answer. I made use of the time by practicing the fingering of a piano piece I'm trying to learn. Progress, too! Dull plays have their uses.
• I had decided midway through act one to leave at intermission, as I am wont to do, and so started preparing my excuse to my wife, who frowns on this sort of thing.
• At intermission my wife leaned over and asked if we could go. My wife! Never in my experience has she done this unless I dragged her out with me. She apparently disliked it more than I.
• We were met on the street as we strolled to freedom by a gentleman who apparently noticed us in the audience and now asked us if we knew it was only intermission. Caught in the act. We kept walking.

In all fairness, this was a competent play and there are people who get off on this sort of thing but it requires very high wit and cleverness to work with me, none of which was here. I still don't know why a contemporary playwright would write a play without a clue in it that it hadn't been written in the 1940s. Well, as the cliche reminds us, "there's no accounting for taste."

It was so delightful to have my wife on my side in such matters that we walked to a nearby cafe and celebrated with coffee and cake. This was in my old neighborhood in northwest Portland. In the cafe it occurred to me that when this neighborhood was my stomping ground, most of the patrons in the cafe hadn't been born yet. Oh, my.

Spikes

In the last two days, over 120 accesses of my essay Liquor and Lit. Spikes like this make me curious while knowing at the same time I'll seldom know what they actually mean. Now and again I learn a professor somewhere has made an assignment, which explains it. This term my play about Moliere (Sad Laughter) is being used in a course at the University of Mary Washington (Virginia) with the delicious title "Cold Case: History and Mystery in the Theatre." Hope it goes well.

Elizabeth Siddal

An extraordinary story:

On this day in 1862 Elizabeth Siddal died at the age of thirty-two, almost certainly a suicide by drug overdose. Husband Dante Gabriel Rossetti discovered her body -- and, the conjecture goes, destroyed her suicide note -- after returning home from an evening out. Several days later, he was stirred by grief, guilt and his romantic temperament to the last-minute gesture of placing the only manuscript copies of many of his poems in his wife's coffin, nestled beside her cheek; seven years later, in one of the most notorious second-thoughts of love and literature, Rossetti retrieved and published the poems.

Read the story in Today in Literature.

I hadn't realized a stage play has been written about this, which I was able to track down on the university-book-exchange program. Certainly dramatic material! Also has opera possibilities. Need to make sure John knows about this.

The cost of living

Rec'd a venting email from a former student whose kid has reached schooling age about the cost of same. Indeed, it's frightening. When I reached college age in the late 1950s, tuition at a public institution like the University of California system was practically given away. A summer job would earn you a year's expenses at college. Not any more. Young families not only can't afford to buy a home as easily as in the past, they face real strains in providing a good education for their kids.

Here's a graph tracking the rising cost of college tuition, for example:

Tuition at the University of Toronto tracked close to inflation rates during the entire period. [4] The University of Iowa had rapid increases in tuition during the 1950s and then tracked close to inflation rates since that time.[5] The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), among the most expensive of the private U.S. educational institutions throughout the 20th century,[6] had continual large tuition increases, dipping slightly below inflation rates only during the World War II years.[7] [8]

Over the 60-year period charted, the inflation-adjusted, long term, annual increases in tuition at these institutions were 0.4 percent for the University of Toronto, 1.4 percent for the University of Iowa, and 2.1 percent for MIT.[9] Other institutions in the same categories differ in details but not in general patterns.[10] The results of the trends are that over the 60 years shown, adjusted for inflation, the tuition at the University of Iowa increased by a factor of 2.3 and that at MIT by a factor of 3.6, while tuition at the University of Toronto rose only about 30 percent.[11]

I don't buy these comparative analyses for the simple reason that I lived in both eras and the dramatic difference is not reduced by economic jargon. In 1950, a couple with an average male-breadwinner income could buy a house. Period. Not today. You don't erase this fact with mumbo-jumbo about cost of living, 2000-dollars, and so on. This is not progress but its opposite. The middle class is not better off today but worse off. The rich are richer, yes, and that's the real economic trend in this country. CEOs make many times more than their company's average wage earner than in the past. We've created a class society, an aristocracy of the wealthy.

How an average family buys a house and sends the kid to school is a greater and greater financial burden. This is not progress by any definition I understand.

Woosh

Today flew by. Lots of time on piano, lots of time on the review. Video arts editor Julie put together a great package of support material around Phillip Van's movie. This will be a first rate presentation of a talented young filmmaker.

Looked in on the endings of two basketball games, both my alma maters (matera?) getting upset, UCLA by West Virginia (a very big deal there) and Oregon by Arizona (at Mac Court, surprisingly).

A play in the afternoon tomorrow.

The whore parade

From Baumholder, 1961 in draft:

The arrival of the first train changed everything. Bass did not have to watch the parade of girls long to realize this was no snipe hunt, here was an event even more surreal and dreamlike than the descriptions of his colleagues suggested. Several hundred girls spilled off the first train, marching in disorder into the train station, women varying in age from teens to forties, women of all size and description, fat and skinny and in between, pretty and plain, hardened and innocent-looking. What struck Bass first was that so many of them were younger than he was.

“They look so young,” he said to Sullivan at the table beside him.

“The youngest are escapees from East Germany,” Sullivan explained. “They think they’re taking a job as a server in a gasthaus or a waitress in a restaurant, but it’s the syndicate bringing them into their fold. Once they’re captured, it’s hard to get away. They arrive broke, often without family or friends. They risk everything for freedom and end up here. It’s a tragedy really.”

Only Sullivan’s tone didn’t suggest tragedy. His voice had the hardened neutrality of a doctor working the midnight shift in an emergency room, who has seen every bodily disaster many times over. Neutrality, lack of concern, was the best defense mechanism.

“Jesus, they’re young,” Bass said again. “The one in the bluejeans can’t be over fourteen or fifteen.”

“I think there’s a law they have to be sixteen,” said Sullivan.

“Young enough.”

Some of the girls flirted as they passed but most looked tired and travel-weary. How far had they traveled to get to Baumholder just ahead of the Animals’ weekend pass? Some from as far away as Berlin, the Netherlands, even London, according to Sullivan.

No sooner had the several hundred women passed through the station than the train pulled away to make room for another behind it, and the parade of prostitutes began all over again. As the second group marched through the station, Bass heard someone shouting and turned to find a small group of young German men holding up placards in protest, though he didn’t know enough German to read them. But their manner was clear: their shouts at the women clearly meant disapproval.
Sullivan leaned close to Bass.

“See the guy waving his sign? That’s Karl, son of the proprietor of the gasthaus at the bottom of the hill.”

“Are they a religious group or what?”

“Nazis.”

“What?”

Bass stared at Sullivan in disbelief.

“Well, it’s illegal, so they have to be underground and pretend they’re something else. That D.P. on their caps stands for Patriots of the Homeland. Something like that. I forget the German exactly. Buddy would know. The thing is, this is so hypocritical because Konrad has a stake in the Family Club, yet his son is one of them. The Germans bitch about American immorality and then turn around and put the women in their clubs at starvation wages, which means they’re forced to put out on the side just to survive.”

“This is hard to handle,” said Bass. He stood up.

“Where you going?”

“To the can.”

In the men’s room he splashed cold water on his face. On the counter was a stack of neatly folded cloth hand towels, and he took one to dry himself.

So this was the infamous whore parade he’d heard so much about. The descriptions of what awaited him were too extreme to be believed – and yet they fell short of capturing the grotesque unreality of what he had witnessed. Bass had expected to be titillated but instead had escaped to the men’s room feeling light-headed and almost sick in his stomach. It wasn’t that some of the women weren’t attractive, many were – but there were too many of them, too extreme and blatant a display of commercial sex parading in front of him, he felt overwhelmed from the sensual overload of it all. This was more like a scene from a Fellini movie than an afternoon in the once-lazy farm village of Baumholder.

When he left the men’s room, he found a young woman standing outside the adjacent ladies’ room. She was crying. Bass stopped, wanting to comfort her, at least to ask if he might help, but he knew almost no German.

All the same, he asked, “Are you all right?”

She looked up, and Bass saw she was one of the younger ones, sixteen he supposed, a pretty girl, despite the swollen red eyes and grimace through which she sputtered choking words he couldn’t understand. Then suddenly she was embracing him and weeping on his shoulder.

Bass stiffened in something close to terror. He could feel the soft sensual bulge of her breasts pushing against his chest. He could feel her warm breath on his neck. He was getting excited and hating himself for it.

“Marta! Here you are!”

The deep voice belonged to a German wearing a business suit. Hearing it, the girl tightened her grip on Bass, who now tried to slip away from her grip.

“I think she is homesick,” said the German. His English was almost without accent. “Marta, come on now.”

The German pried her grip free of Bass, who quickly stepped back.

“Is she going to be all right?” he asked.

The German smiled.

“Of course, of course.”

He had his arm around her and already was leading the girl away. He spoke to her in German now, which Bass could not understand.

When they were out of sight, Bass took a deep breath. He realized he was shaking. He didn’t return to the table to watch the rest of the parade. Bass walked through town and up the hill to the kaserne. By the time Sullivan and the others found him in the E. M. Club over an hour later, Bass was pretty wasted.

Maupassant

Ready to begin the third and final libretto of our chamber opera trilogy, this one based on his short story "Forewell!" Somewhat a companion piece to the first, here the male point of view rather than the female. Once John gets the music done, want to publish this.

Music drama

Awoke with music in my head and an eagerness to begin my experiments in music drama. But I don't think I'm technically prepared yet. Hopefully I can begin the musical fiddling this summer. So much to do, so little time! I'll never, never understand writers who get blocked. I've always had more ideas and energy than I know what to do with.

Doing a writing & conference with a former student, a damn good one, and she just sent me act one of her new screenplay, which I'm eager to look at.

Devil's Dictionary

LIFE, n. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay. We live in daily apprehension of its loss; yet when lost it is not missed.

LIGHTHOUSE, n. A tall building on the seashore in which the government maintains a lamp and the friend of a politician.

LITIGATION, n. A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.

LOCK-AND-KEY, n. The distinguishing device of civilization and enlightenment.

LOGIC, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

LOQUACITY, n. A disorder which renders the sufferer unable to curb his tongue when you wish to talk.

Ambrose Bierce

Persistence

I've often said that my former students who "make it" in the film industry are seldom the ones with the most talent and skills but always are the ones with the most persistence, the ones who don't give up. Today I received an email from a woman who hands down is the most persistent student I've ever had.

This woman wanted to write sitcoms. Everything was going against her. She was a woman over fifty in a business full of ageism and sexism. She was living hand-to-mouth, so without funds for marketing blitzes and the other things a newcomer does to get attention. She was an average student.

But she was determined. Once she learned you should be in LA to launch a TV writing career, she left for Calif. For weeks she slept in her car down there, making the rounds, bugging folks, not taking no for an answer. Weeks turned into months. Then she'd been there a year, still down and out, still without a door cracking open.

Then slowly things began to turn her way. She was an eccentric familiar face by now, this strange "old lady" who wanted to write sitcoms. A producer took her under his wing as his Girl Friday, so she finally had a job. She was writing TV pilots all the while and through the producer found an agent willing to peddle them. She met lots of folks, make a lot of contacts. Still old, still eccentric, but she's down there and slowly she's getting her shot at it. She's writing pilots and she's got an agent to handle them.

This is an amazing story. She is the very definition of persistent. I'd love to see her sell something. She might be the oldest "newbie" writer down there.

TGIF

This was a tough week, for some reason, and I'm glad it's over (the week being defined as my teaching duties). Next week we watch Sideways, so it should be an easier one. I did make some good progress on the novel this week. Story really cranking up now, at the moment (a true one) when all the linguists know is that the Russian army is heading for Berlin. Looks like an invasion. No one guessed it was to protect a bunch of bricklayers while they built a wall.

I'm so glad I finally got this material right. Some of my best personal experiences, in terms of dramatic storytelling potential, comes from the army but I never quite got the handle on it in earlier tries over the past forty years. So far it looks like I have the right take on the materially. We'll hope this notion lasts.

Old timey music

Lots of piano to practice tomorrow morning. Also going to haul out the banjo and put together songs for a CD of old timey stuff, to give to friends for Christmas.

Thursday is my Friday, and I'm glad it's here.

Onward

Up to 14,000 words during office hours today. Moving right along.

Oregon Literary Arts: 2007 guidelines available

Application links begin here for grants & awards to publishers and writers.

We'll be applying for operating expenses, such as they are, for Oregon Literary Review. Plus I have a couple things eligible for Oregon Book Award consideration. Let the crap shoot begin.

We don't choose our parents

On the wire:

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) -- A mother and her teenage son have been accused of second-degree murder, with police saying the mother gave him a gun after he lost a fight and told him to take revenge.


PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania (AP) -- The father of a young girl who died of exposure had knocked her unconscious because he was angry she wouldn't go to bed, then took her outside in freezing temperatures and left her there, police said before the man's arraignment Thursday.

Morning quota

A good morning, finishing chapter 4 and starting 5, 1000 words more or less.

Now lots of school prep before I leave.

Prehistoric lovers?

ROME, Italy (AP) -- It could be humanity's oldest story of doomed love.

Archaeologists have unearthed two skeletons from the Neolithic period locked in a tender embrace and buried outside Mantua, just 25 miles south of Verona, the romantic city where Shakespeare set the star-crossed tale of "Romeo and Juliet."

Buried between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago, the prehistoric pair are believed to have been a man and a woman and are thought to have died young, as their teeth were found intact, said Elena Menotti, the archaeologist who led the dig.

"As far as we know, it's unique," Menotti told The Associated Press by telephone from Milan. "Double burials from the Neolithic are unheard of, and these are even hugging."


Read the story.

Many a sweet yet tragic story can be imagined from this image.

Death and genetics

Each of my parents dropped dead on the spot. That this should happen to both of them is so improbable as to defy the calculation of odds.

With mother, it happened in the lobby of a hospital while she was being checked out for a minor operation unrelated to her death. Dad was writing a check, and she was waiting nearby. Suddenly she dropped the floor, dead. I was living on Maryland's Eastern Shore and was shocked by the news. Everyone assumed Dad would die first.

Dad's death was even more shocking since I was there. I've written about this in my essay, The Weight of My Father's Soul. The short of it is that he, too, dropped dead on the spot, at a New Jersey friend's house on the eve of our departure together to resettle him in Oregon so he could be closer to his two sons.

Neither parent had complaints or symptoms before they dropped dead. Indeed, each expressed well-being, mom to be getting out of the hospital, dad to getting his affairs in N.J. settled. Then, boom. On the floor, dead.

What are the odds of this happening to both parents? Naturally it brings to mind the possibility of some jinxed DNA configuration, some family curse, something to explain the unexplainable.

So I wonder if I, too, will drop dead on the spot. Although there are far worse ways to die, and this mode is worse for the living than the dead, I would hate to die before I finish the Cold War novel, and the Sally novel after that, and the rest home stories after that, and my experiments in music drama after that ... in other words, I'm probably going to die, however it goes, while in the middle of something I'd prefer to finish. Comes with the territory of being a writer, at least a prolific one.

The worst deaths are the long, bed-ridden, drawn-out ones. Ideally, I would like to be diagnosed with an incurable, inoperable disease with only months to live. Time to do some things and think about some things and write some things and see some people to say some things. But we seldom get what we wish for in this particular arena of life. There's only one way to choose our death, which always is an option though not one of interest to me as long as I am "in the middle of something." If I dry up into a senile vegetable, maybe it's time to look at the option again.

If it's so highly improbably that both parents drop dead, it's even more improbable that three in the same family do so. So I probably won't drop dead. That's fine by me. I have things to write, read, do. Onward.

Meeting Nicole Kidman

He will meet her in the reception line. There will have been earlier opportunities but he’ll have missed them. There especially would have been an opportunity for a quick introduction before the film began had he been available but with lingering weakness from the recent flu, and the special honor this year of having the festival named after him, so that he too is a star of the occasion (in his own less glamorous way, as befits a professor emeritus), he will have his wife drive him to the university auditorium only moments before the film starts, letting him join the audience anonymously as people are taking their seats and saving his own dramatic introduction for later in the evening during the awards ceremony. Sandwiched between the film and the dinner, at the insistence of the student group that has done most of the festival’s grunt work, there will be a reception line at which Miss Kidman can be greeted and touched by her many adoring student fans, and it is then when he finally will meet her.

Of course, he will wait at the end of the line, the last to approach her, which suits both his position and his age. He will look her straight in the eye, eyes (he has been told) that can thrust directly to a person’s soul, eyes that have been his most attractive physical asset for as long as he can remember, as long as women have told him about such things, yes, he will look into the eyes of Miss Kidman and tell her in a voice low enough to be private:


“Miss Kidman, without question you are the most accomplished actor of your generation. The nuances of character you find in your many and varied roles continue to amaze and impress me, and for ever more I cannot think of Virginia Woolf without seeing your very face, false nose and all, as the icon of her genius. You are a great treasure not only for film lovers but for the entire world.”

As he speaks he will have taken her hand, his right grasping her right, a gentle handshake, but then his left hand will reach forward as he turns her hand horizontally so his own can spread over her small hand like a blanket, and he will have enclosed her hand in both of his, handshake becoming embrace, and he will release her only after he has finished praising her, all the while looking deeply into her eyes, locked on her very soul. It will be a moment he will remember for the rest of his life.

And that will be about it.

But wait. There appears to be more.

After the reception line everyone walks across campus to the dining hall for a sit-down dinner, after which the various awards are made that always highlight the annual student film festival, and this year there is the special achievement award to Nicole Kidman and also a special honor to the professor emeritus, which includes renaming the festival after him for all its future incarnations. And this is when Nicole Kidman will take notice of him.

Clearly she is unable to get him out of her mind, those powerful eyes of his having done their work, and she will go out of her way to corner him at the reception that ends the evening to congratulate him on his honor and ask about his work, though of course he is too modest to say much of anything about his professional life, which seems so long ago at any rate, and Miss Kidman will look into his eyes with an intensity just short of his own, and he will feel the shiver of a special bonding taking place between them, which will cut his breath short, and it will be all he can do to find his wife in the noisy, mingling crowd, she the social butterfly of the family, and he will beg her to get him out of there and home before he passes out from the sheer wonder of the evening and causes a scene.

Then, finally alone in bed while his wife stays up to see the weather report on the late night news (the third time she has watched the weather report today), he will slip into slumber while thinking of Miss Kidman. And this at last will be the end of it. Or should be.

But a miracle happens.

Not quite a year later, Miss Kidman is on location less than a hundred miles away and during a free day she gets a chauffeur to drive her to campus. She is looking for him. What an extraordinary development! Miss Kidman hasn’t forgotten him. It must be his eyes. She has come to campus to ask him to lunch and to invite him to watch her work on location tomorrow.

Of course, he seldom uses his office on campus any more, even though the university retains it for him. She is given directions to his home on the hill behind campus, a location that permits the professor emeritus to look down from his deck upon the terrain of his former pedagogical and intellectual fame.

She climbs the steps to the front porch alone, her chauffeur waiting with the vehicle at the curb. She rings the doorbell. She knocks.

As it happens, he is alone in the house. His wife, in fact, is out of town, burying her mother, who did not last in the nursing home till her hundredth birthday after all. He is alone and hears the bell and ignores it, figuring someone wants to sell him something. But the gentle knock suggests someone with a different motive. He begins a slow cross over hardwood floors to the entrance.

He opens the door. Miss Kidman is astonishingly shy and astonishingly beautiful. Also astonishingly attracted to him. Such attraction is new to her, so much sexual energy directed at a man old enough to be her father. Or even her grandfather.

He, of course, is astounded to see her. But he immediately regards her in a context even more charged than their first meeting, regarding her more personally, more intimately, because it is obvious she is there only to see him, no other motive for her appearance on his front porch making sense, which means she cannot keep herself away from him, a conclusion reinforced by the thin film of tears forming over her eyes. And his own welling eyes lock with hers with enough intensity to tilt the galaxy.

No words get exchanged between them. The moment is too radiant with sexual energy for words. He hasn’t felt anything like this for longer than he can remember. He feels half a century younger. If he had the strength and stamina of his younger self, he would lift her in his arms at this very moment and carry her off like a bride to the guest bedroom. As it turns out, he suddenly feels light-headed, and it’s all he can do to stumble to his walking cane, which leans like a shotgun in the corner behind the door, all he can do to grasp it to steady himself before he faints.

Miss Kidman understands the situation completely. She quickly takes control. She lets him lean against her, bearing his weight with her incredible body, and her breath is warm and wet when she whispers in his ear, asking directions to the bedroom. As she guides him down the hallway, he feels stirrings in parts of his anatomy long dismissed, long in slumber, and he leans comfortably against Miss Kidman knowing the situation now is entirely in her capable hands, which is a good thing, she could be the nurse who more than anyone knows what he needs, what is ailing him, what medicine will cure the ailment. Miss Kidman plays this role with all the nuances of character she has brought to every theatrical challenge of her career, the most accomplished actor of her generation, who clearly must be in love with the professor emeritus and who is leading him to intimate places that will be profoundly wondrous to them both, into experiences that will redefine what it means to be human, nothing less than this, certainly nothing less.

A large dark silhouette appears on the shower curtain. Is it Miss Kidman whose voice he hears, “I have never met a man who really gets me, who can see straight through me to the very essence of my soul, the way you can. Even Tom couldn’t.”

But no, the voice is too dissonant for Miss Kidman’s, too hoarse, too weathered, sounding too much like a distant fog horn belching over the waves in an effort to save lost ships from crashing against rocks that wait like mines under the raging sea. It is, in fact, the voice of his wife.

“Are you all right in there? You’re going to shrivel up into a prune. You don’t want to be late, Henry, not tonight of all nights. This is your special moment, dear. And to think we get to meet Nicole Kidman!”

Charles Deemer, 2004

Sinclair Lewis

One of our American Nobel Prize winners but I wonder how much he's read today out of Amer Lit classes. At any rate, he's the subject of Wednesday's Today In Literature. The memoir by his first wife sounds fascinating. I'm getting it through Orbis, the wonderful inter-college loan service.

My favorite Lewis has been Elmer Gantry but I haven't read all his novels. So much to read, so little time -- and that's just considering dead authors! Currently I'm reading the 1948 novel about the black G.I. experience in Berlin and thinking, This would make such a good film.

Devil's Dictionary

LABOR, n. One of the processes by which A acquires property for B.

LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.

LAWFUL, adj. Compatible with the will of a judge having jurisdiction.

LAWYER, n. One skilled in circumvention of the law.

LECTURER, n. One with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience.

LEXICOGRAPHER, n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods.

LIAR, n. A lawyer with a roving commission.

LIBERTY, n. One of Imagination's most precious possessions.

Ambrose Bierce

Office hours

Did about 700 words so far in the office today. About an hour left before class.

An exercise in class today, "The Movie Game." I give them a situation: in this case, a homeless man discovers a dead body and steals its identity. First working alone, and following questions on a worksheet, they structure a story from this. Then I put them into groups of four, and they have to come up with a collaborative story. Always an interesting exercise and a taste of working collaboratively as a screenwriter, which is an important skill in the real world.

So my day in class is supervising, which means sitting and reading while they work -- or perhaps grading their midterms if I'm practical, which I usually am not.

Yahoo! mail having problems today. I'd hoped to catch up on some email this last hour.

Almost spring weather outside. Across the country in one direction, arctic cold, in another, a heat wave. I heard LA was almost 90 yesterday!

p.s. at 3:52 ... 1000 word quota reached.

Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler

Ross Macdonald

On this day in 1939, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep was published. Chandler was fifty-one, an ex-oil company executive who had taken up writing at the age of forty-five, after being fired for alcohol-inspired absenteeism.


Read the story in Today In Literature

Hmm, been a while since I read Chandler. Or Ross Macdonald, my favorite L.A.-set detective writer. All that wonderful wise-cracking and bleak view of the species.

What shocks me is that some folks are still shocked and surprised by human behavior. Like the astronaut lady in today's news, gone bonkers because of a love triangle, drives hundreds of miles to confront her rival -- and, the gem of the story, wears an astronaut diaper so she doesn't have to stop to pee, she's in that much of a hurry. Nothing like the personal application of skills learned in your profession.

Writers can't think of more bizarre behavior than our neighbors are perfectly capable of.

The Promise

A big thumbs up for this German film about star-crossed lovers separated by the Berlin Wall, one escaping to the West in 1961 but the guy not making it. The movie follows their different lives in East and West Germany, their love, their facing the reality of separation -- and their final reunion when the wall comes down. A real dramatic treatment without Hollywood exaggeration or a pat happy ending. A possible ending -- ambiguous, complex. A fine film.

Who says I never win anything?

In March, the local bluegrass group Zach Driscoll and Three-Quarter Time is recording a live concert in Mt. Angel, and we expect to be there. They had a contest to suggest songs for the CD. If your song was chosen, you'd get a free copy. Well, I suggested six songs and was just informed I'm a winner. They don't know which song they'll put on the CD set yet but one for sure. The six songs I suggested were (some of which are rarely treated in the bluegrass idiom):

• Footprints in the snow
  
• Buddy, can you spare a dime?
  
• Pretty Polly
  
• Tonight the barroom let me down
  
• Nobody loves you when you're down and out
  
• All my rowdy friends are dead and gone
  

Meanwhile, to school early to see if I can get some writing done. Yesterday I didn't write a thing: nonestop editorial chores for the review, catching up, well, almost catching up on what is shaping up to be another fine issue. We even have a musical based on Beowulf.

Zappa

Billie August


This fine Danish film by Billie August is the prequel to Twist and Shout, which I noted earlier. Here the kids are in school, and we have a bad-kid-influences-good-kid drama, in which petty crime leads to more serious activity. An ordinary plot but the richness of character and subtext sets this drama apart from most in the genre. This may be even better than its companion piece. Thanks to a Danish friend for turning me on to these.

"The MFA is the new MBA."

Nurse Fusion quotes an article that has this line, which I find terrifying. The notion is that the culture is becoming more art-friendly, more sensitive, more humane. I believe this is wishful thinking. To bring more and more MFA people into the corporate marketplace is more usurpation and a redefining of the degree's purpose than a great stride for humanity. Using high art to sell peanuts is still selling peanuts. It's like bringing Faulkner to Hollywood to write commercial movies, which had nothing to do with literature and everything to do with Hollywood trying to make a buck.

The MFA used to be an odd degree with which writers could get teaching jobs and thereby support their art. If it now becomes a business degree, this is good only to those wishing to have a business career and make a lot of money but it has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the "health" of art in this country. The artist should be like Plato's gadfly, forever poking a finger into the ribs of the culture to force admission of its failings and secrets. Socrates in his own defense said:

"I am a sort of gadfly, given to the State by the gods; and the State is a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which the gods have attached to the State, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. . . . You think that you might easily strike me dead . . . but then you would sleep on for the remainder of your lives, unless the gods in their care of you sent you another gadfly."

Artists are in charge of the spiritual life of the culture. Artists don't accept a culture's safe and easy notions about the nature of beauty, art, meaning. Artists are forever stirring the pot. This kind of individual eccentricity, this kind of private vision, does not lend itself to the mass-produced parameters of the corporate marketplace. If MFAs become the new MBAs, an old story will add another chapter: the ability of corporations to swallow up its most dangerous threats. Artists, of course, will be as dangerous as ever but they may not be adding MFA to their names so readily and they may be even more in the margins of culture than they are today. But they'll be there, and the good ones will be listening to themselves, not the culture, as deeply as ever.

Devil's Dictionary

KILL, v.t. To create a vacancy without nominating a successor.

KILT, n. A costume sometimes worn by Scotchmen in America and Americans in Scotland.

KING, n. A male person commonly known in America as a "crowned head," although he never wears a crown and has usually no head to speak of.

KLEPTOMANIAC, n. A rich thief.

KORAN, n. A book which the Mohammedans foolishly believe to have been written by divine inspiration, but which Christians know to be a wicked imposture, contradictory to the Holy Scriptures.

Ambrose Bierce

Guy day

H is no football fan (only once in my life have I been with a woman who liked football and she was a gambling addict), so is off to spend the day with her daughter. I think they plan to see Dreamgirls, which you couldn't drag me to.

I got 900 words written this morning, not quite a quota day but good enough for Super Bowl Sunday. Now I've decided to do two major cooking projects: a deluxe version of my blackeyed peas, adding cajun sausage; and a Greek lemon potatoes casserole with feta melted on top. Tatters now marinading. Not sure these two go together but they're what I feel like cooking!

Only mid-morning. A long haul till kickoff, maybe I'll try to get in another writing session.

Last night we went to the a large art show sponsored by the Beaverton Arts Commission. I didn't even know such an organization existed. Apparently B. goes out of its way to show the world it's not a bedroom community for Pdx. At any rate, the show was in two conference rooms at the wonderful Beaverton library, about 100 artists represented, and five times that many admiring their work in a standing-room only environment. What a turnout! The catered goodies were first rate, too.

H plans to try and get into this juried affair next year. She's being more aggressive about getting her work out there. Reminds me of myself forty years ago, when everything seemed possible. I have a more cynical view of the world of the arts now. Having been a judge myself, I claim special knowledge unrelated to sour grapes, which is the usual reason for dismissing such a view. I know from the inside how art/literary competitions work. On the positive side, at least it's a process that gets a lot of work in front of an audience. I just think there must be a better way to do this, in an environment less commercial and competitive and more utilitarian, art as spiritually useful, even essential. Well, I've been on this particular soapbox too often lately.

Beaverton was fun. I was very impressed by the huge turnout. I even saw a few things I liked.

Devil's Dictionary

INFLUENCE, n. In politics, a visionary _quo_ given in exchange for a substantial _quid_.

INJUSTICE, n. A burden which of all those that we load upon others and carry ourselves is lightest in the hands and heaviest upon the back.

INSURANCE, n. An ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.

INTERPRETER, n. One who enables two persons of different languages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the interpreter's advantage for the other to have said.

INTIMACY, n. A relation into which fools are providentially drawn for their mutual destruction.

INVENTOR, n. A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.

IRRELIGION, n. The principal one of the great faiths of the world.

Ambrose Bierce

Super Bowl

The Super Bowl is not high on my list of sporting events. Not close to March Madness, the Summer Olympics, the Triple Crown, the Army-Navy game, the World Series. Too much surrounding the Super Bowl has little to do with football, especially the halftime show, a pop culture extravaganza that lasts way too long. Too much hype, too much bullshit, for me. Now and again there's a game worth watching like today, but at halftime I'll be doing something else. I'll begin the countdown to March Madness, perhaps the best sporting tournament of all. First, of course, comes the wonderful trip to L.A. for the opera. Can't wait.

Technophobia

Had lunch with "Zeena", after which I tried to show her how to use her new email account to send and receive mail. She hates computers and has no instincts about how to use one. Nothing makes sense to her, and she's terrified to try anything, so she has to memorize everything but as soon as something changes, she's lost. Quite fascinating to witness. Only reason she's trying to do email is to communicate less expensively with her son in Bali.

Ran into our former "whoop! whoop! mayor Bud Clark. Always good to see him. For about the third time he took down my email address and threatened to send me some photo or other. I forget now what it was, it's been so long ago.

Out to dinner tonight, H's bribe to get me to accompany her to an art opening in Beaverton. I'm in the mood for going out actually. Getting my 1000 words done so early this morning put me in a good mood for the rest of the day.

Looking forward to the game tomorrow. It starts late afternoon, so I should be able to get writing done first. The book draft is going so well at the moment, want to keep the energy going.

Quota

Wrote my thousand words for the morning.

Fat chance

On the wire:

Author Cussler sues over film treatment of book

Fri Feb 2, 6:50 PM ET

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Action-novel hero Dirk Pitt has overcome myriad obstacles on his way to finding buried treasures and shipwrecks but his career and that of his creator -- novelist Clive Cussler -- was nearly destroyed by a bad script, a court was told on Friday.

Best-selling writer Cussler, who has featured Pitt in 19 of his 32 books, is suing Crusader Entertainment, owned by Denver billionaire Phil Anschutz, for making so many script and plot changes to the film version of his book "Sahara" that it was doomed to box-office failure.

Cussler's lawyer Bert Fields told a Los Angeles Superior Court jury that because of the poor adaptation of the work, it was now impossible for author Cussler to get future film deals.

"This was not the dramatic, gripping story Clive Cussler told. As a result, the audience just didn't care," Fields said in his opening statement. He added that the movie "Sahara" released in 2005 with
Matthew McConaughey and
Penelope Cruz lost between $60 million and $70 million.

Lawyers for Crusader Entertainment were to give their opening statement later on Friday.

Cussler said in his lawsuit that Crusader altered his screenplay without his consent and changed the character of Dirk Pitt from a hero into a treasure-hunting rogue.

In a countersuit, Crusader said Cussler had overstated by tens of millions the number of books he had sold to induce them to enter the agreement.

Cussler is seeking millions of dollars in damages.

How this shakes out, of course, depends on the particular working of the contract between the parties but if it's a standard contract, I don't think the author has a legal leg to stand on. It's not as if he's the first novelist to be shocked by the film adaptation.

Progress report

This morning I put corrections into the Baumholder file, cleaning up the first three chapters. At 10,500 words and looking good.

Sprinkled through the narrative are moments that actually happened. One, for example, was a friend's habitual, drunken recitation of the Blake poem, "Tiger, Tiger," always worth watching:

Sullivan disliked sentiment and sloppy thinking and sometimes performed a routine that demonstrated as much. With a few drinks in him, he was known to recite a portion of a poem by William Blake to much delight and hoopla from his inebriated colleagues: “Tiger, tiger, burning bright,” Sullivan would begin, his blonde hair short but long enough to comb, which really meant long enough to look uncombed because Sullivan always had the shaggy look of an absent-minded professor, and as he began the poem, his hand would sweep the hair from his forehead in a theatrical gesture, “in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry?” Here Sullivan would look positively baffled by the question, as if it had cosmic significance. “What the hammer?” he asked next. “What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil?” – and at this precise moment Sullivan would scrunch his ruddy face into an expression of speechless horror and bewilderment, as if the questions were too great for the contemplation of mere mortals, hanging in the air like painful reminders of human ignorance and insignificance – and after holding the moment for all it was worth, and perhaps making yet another theatrical sweep of his hand to brush hair from his forehead, Sullivan would shout with an exuberance that never failed to set the first-time listener aback, “What the fuck!? WHAT THE FUCK!?”

This was how we Russian linguists amused ourselves at the height of the Cold War.

Discovery

Today I discovered how much free sheet music is available on the web. Extraordinary really, though I shouldn't be surprised, the web itself being so extraordinary. My favorite site is hosted by music teacher Gilbert DeBenedetti: Free Piano Music! because it's arranged by difficulty and each piece also has audio.

Also today I made contact with Phillip Van, who gave us permission to use his wonderful film High Maintenance in the next issue of the review with an interview by Julie Mae Madsen, our Video Arts editor. This should be hot stuff.

I printed out the 40 pages of Baumholder to read carefully, checking voice, tone, cadences, make sure I'm in the ballpark where I want to play. I also had a thought-invasion, a nice twist on my "facts" that I may incorporate into the story. We'll see how it settles with me.

Looking forward to a productive Saturday. Of course, I won't miss the Super Bowl, two class coaches on the field, and I'll be rooting for the Colts but mostly want a competitive well-played game.

Research

More Cold War / Berlin Wall research this morning, this time in the archives of the New Yorker (I own the complete set). Found about a dozen articles I should look at for possible odds and ends I might incorporate. Interestingly enough, a search for Baumholder turned up nothing. This surprised me, given its reputation in Europe as a major Sin City at the time.

Finito

Done with conferences, almost an hour to recover before class. Probably will have a short class tonight. Have a script to read, a story to brainstorm. After that, it's up to them what we do.

Email from my new agent, requesting loglines & synopses of scripts in an email, so they don't have to rekeyboard the hard copies I sent. No biggie. I make the same request as an editor. Why rekeyboard when you can copy and paste?

Today just flew by, as these days always do. I'm eager to get home actually. Hope they don't want to do more than what I want to do tonight -- but it's their buck, we'll do whatever they want.

I did get a little writing done on Baumholder today but not much ... about 500 words. To me a day isn't a day of writing unless it's four digits.

Haven't eaten since breakfast, so dinner will be nice, too.

Catching a breath

The day of one-on-one student conferences always zips by. Can't believe it's noon already. 15 min breather till my next student.

Home to Oregon at UCLA basketball game, ought to be a good one, what with Oregon beating them here. UCLA should be ready for revenge. I guess I don't care who wins, undergrad v grad alma mater.

Lynne's Paris photos

Click photo for larger image.

Morning booze

Coming to school early, I dropped by the campus sports bar just after 7 for breakfast. Already some drinkers were in gear: a guy at the bar with a pitcher of beer, who could've been yours truly 25 years ago; a table of guys in hospital blues, presumably celebrating after the midnight shift and not juicing up before work; scattered solo drinkers with Bloody Marys or beer. And another half of the customers with coffee, many there for breakfast like me.

I liked morning drinking in my wild days, though my schedule didn't often permit it. But sometimes morning drinking was perfect for me. When I was living on a grant, for example, I might write from 4 to 7 or 8 in the morning, then call it a day and hit a bar. Or I might have just turned in a project at deadline and have a few weeks before my next gig.

I liked morning drinking mainly because of the people you met. Their stories were more interesting to me. There were no "social drinkers" around at 7 in the morning! The drinking was serious, addictive, escapist, and many other things, but the drinkers more often than not had fascinating stories to share. Interestingly enough, you also found fewer out-of-control drunks in the morning than at night. These were pros. They handled booze better than the amateurs or weekend bar-warriors. When it was time to pass out, most of them left to do it at home. Bartenders also knew them well and knew when to cut whom off.

It also was fascinating to see the "respectable folks" who slid into a bar at 7 to have a few quick belts. At Kelly's, a downtown bar that opened at 7, you always saw judges, government workers, politicians, the people who got their photos in the paper, having a shot or two before work. On any morning they'd be two or three faces at the bar you recognized. Secret lives.

At The Gypsy, in my neighborhood of NW Portland, a typical 7:30 a.m. found no vacant seats along the bar and a full lineup behind, several dozen regulars there for opening time. It was always a party at 7 at The Gypsy. All this changed later when California property managers bought up all the apartments in the neighborhood and doubled rents, driving out everyone on a fixed income, as most of the regulars were. Retired folks, disability checks, lots of vets (most from the Vietnam era) -- this was the clientele.

My schedule didn't often permit morning drinking but when I could kiss off the day, it was my favorite time to party. No amateur drinkers to be found.

Devil's Dictionary

INCOME, n. The natural and rational gauge and measure of respectability, the commonly accepted standards being artificial, arbitrary and fallacious...

INCOMPATIBILITY, n. In matrimony a similarity of tastes, particularly the taste for domination.

INCUMBENT, n. A person of the liveliest interest to the outcumbents.

INDECISION, n. The chief element of success...

INDIGESTION, n. A disease which the patient and his friends frequently mistake for deep religious conviction and concern for the salvation of mankind.

INFANCY, n. The period of our lives when, according to Wordsworth, "Heaven lies about us." The world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.

INFIDEL, n. In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does.

Ambrose Bierce

Since I'm up, might as well fix breakfast and get to school early. Give me a chance to settle in before my first student conference. These conferences work out well but they are long, draining days. Do two a term, one at the beginning, one at the end.