Man vs. Wild

I've often remarked to my wife that the Discovery Channel show "Man Vs. Wild," which sends Katie and I'm sure at least five other females (as in hundred thousand) ooohing and aaaahing every week, could be just as effectively filmed in our backyard.

With a few well-placed grunts, and dizzying camera angles, and a day's growth of beard (facelifts and six-month fitness binges aside), your average Joe couch husband could do a pretty passing impression of survival hunk Bear Grylls caught in a Congolese cave pit, or tromping over shards of volcanic rock.

Our backyard has a wicked gopher holl in the far right corner -- I could spend ten minutes or so vamping my way over it. There's this weird silver grass sprouting up along the back fenceline -- I could spend a night talking about its dietary benefits and rip into it with gusto, a few strands provocatively poking through my teeth. I can mimic thirst, hunger, exhaustion. I'm a pretty good sweater, too, if it came to that. And I can rig up all the Boy Scout lean-to fires you could ask for.

Done with an Australian accent, I could have the Discovery film crew over here in a second. Or at least public access.

Ah, but my point. And I do have one.

Nothing makes me go all survivor guy like the recent dumping of snow we endured in the "Greater Chicagoland Area." Several powdered doughnut dustings nearly every day in the early part of last week, then the prodigious eight inch dumping Thursday, followed by the Super Bowl whiteout Sunday.

I'm normally a neighborly guy, but I reserve the right to pound my chest and act like the King Gorilla when I've spent an hour and longer digging out of our driveway and doing all the sidewalks on our corner lot besides. C'mon, across-the-street dude with the snowblower -- I'm up and leaning into it by 7, can't you pull the ripcord on your cakewalk device before the mail comes in the afternoon?

Probably dangerously, this attitude can extend to the roads. Me and my more-or-less family-man sedan, riding the bumpers of the SUVs and grumbling about "If you can't drive in it, there are perfectly good buses... short ones." Not really fair, I know. (I'm good at the personal guilt.) How can SUVs win in this weather? On the one hand, they're built for getting through it, so why the hell are they dragging ass? On the other, they're built for getting through it, so why ride MY slip-sliding-sedan ass -- gimme a break, gas guzzler!

See? They can't win. I can't win. Bear Grylls can't win (read about he and his crew faking their "authentic" survival shoots here: investigation). The only victor in all this is Mother Nature, who laughs at the trenches I dig to allow nonexistant walkers a place to cool their heels, and happily heaps on the wet and heavy stuff when the piles around my mailbox are approaching shoulder height (youch, says my back), then turns around and hits us with 45 degrees hours after my latest feat of shoveling, producing fog and receding piles.

Ah, but anyway -- it's a great workout, right? If you pull something major, and end up in traction for all of February, take heart: that scapegoat Groundhog says we won't see sun until March, anyway.

The view from our driveway Friday, half done:

This May Be Getting Out of Hand

More Books to Burn a Hole in my Wallet

Just slalomed home from another trek to the bookstore.

Went out specifically to buy books for my classes; came back with a bag a bit heavier than planned.

Ah, hell. I don't feel guilty, precisely. Just aware that I'm fairly stocked up for now. At least on new books. They'll eat the lining right out of the old wallet if you're not watching. And by you, I mean me. My sin, however venial.

Anyway, here's today's haul:

Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence

The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982

Both picked up for classes. The Lawrence for Advanced Fiction; Oates's journal for Dreams & Fiction Writing. Haven't read much Lawrence, so I'm into that, especially since it comes in place of reading Lolita for the fifth time. (Nothing against Vladdy the Great; you can't beat the "killer prose style" of maybe my favorite book; but stack of haven't-reads is growing tipsy on the shelves here, might as well dive in.) You can't swing a cat in a bookstore without hitting Oates. (I know, Katie: but why would you swing a cat?) And her journal is a great example of how that form feeds process. Hell, is process.

The Best American Short Stories 2007

Tales from Margaritaville, by Jimmy Buffett

What can I say? Borders, you have foiled me again with your Buy 1, Get 1 Half Price table. I probably own too many Best American collections for my own good, but they're always a great read. Katrina Kennison, when she was series editor, probably populated a quarter of my bookshelves with her picks for the annual: Rick Bass, Robert Olen Butler, Sherman Alexie, Corey Doctorow, Alice Munro, Philip Roth are among those I read first in these pages. And I slowed down long enough at the bargain dumps to see Stephen King guest-edited this year's edition -- pretty interesting -- and that after 16 years, Kennison had moved on in favor of Heidi Pitlor. All right. The Buffett book was suggested by my Parrot Head bro, Jake. And it was half price. So I took the bait. Short stories by the Bard of Key West? Well, it ought to be a good antidote, to say the least, for Munro and Oates.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

The Martian Chronicles

Dandelion Wine

All by Ray Bradbury, natch. I'd only intended to come home with Martian Chronicles, but... . These are the books I read and reread as a kid, checked out over and over from the library. It's a shame Borders didn't stock better, hardback editions, because for keepsakes like these, I would have bought them. But I've always been more about substance than style when it comes to stocking my shelves (hence the trail of broken spines marking my favorites), and I'm looking forward much more to owning these editions and having them at my fingertips whenever I want than helping the Borders cashier make like a Vegas day-tripper dinging the bell in slot row. When you can come home with three Bradbury classics for around twenty bucks, there's no reason to moan.

Not a bad day's haul, all in all.

We got a Live One Here...

... literally. And fortunately for him.

I was humming along on the treadmill this morning -- not literally humming, mind you, but approximating that humming in the sizzle and burn in my thighs as the belt rolled along about 4.3 mph -- trying to block out the conversations of the women elbowing along in place next to me, talking about how their husbands are the ones who usually "initiate things" and how when they lose the next 14 lbs. maybe they'd be the ones to "get things going," if you know what I mean, when the whole tiring sharade was pleasantly interrputed.

A sweaty slab of a guy, we'll call him Hank, happily wheezing, and sweating there in place beneath the glow of Oprah and Regis broadcast on the health club televisions, blahd something de-blah de-blah blah blah, and the women stopped chirping, and grinned at him familiarly, and I paused in turning the page of the book (in this case, The Name of the World, by Denis Johnson) I cart around protectively in these situations, and I listened for a moment.

He said:

"Guy I know says he keeps fit doing one sit-up a day. (The women were positively rapturous in their attention at this point.) Half in the morning, when he gets out of bed; the other half at night, when he goes to sleep."

The women broke up laughing; I smirked my sort-of puzzled smirk; and Hank ambled down the line, wheezing and sweating.

Well, if that's what it takes to remind you the old heart muscle is still clenching, the blood's still coursing and the body still bends, well, OK.

I'd much rather get myself all worked up in a fierce froth and pile crunches atop running atop a healthy bedtime tussle atop the large bowl of tortilla soup iced by the extra cupcake besides and then hit the pillow in a pleasant snore only vaguely undercut by remorse and then wake to the alarm bell to do it all again.

But I do know from now on I'll give myself credit for at least one sit-up. Nice to know that if you just make it through the day breathing you can count yourself in the plus column on that.

Fortune Smiles on the Barter-minded

Fortune Smiles on ME



:-D


Barter-minded. Did I really use that in a subject line?

OK. Here's the poop. Purveyors of fine oriental cuisine have never been stingy with the fortune cookies, and in a household with two adults and one baby more prone to SMASHING said fortune cookies to dusty bits rather than eating them (though just give him the chance to gum that strip of paper), we often have an excess of good mojo (or the Chinese equivalent) to go around.

You, too, I'm betting.

So how to decide who gets which fortune? Can't you just feel the heavy gears of fate hinging on our decision?

Well, not exactly.

I made an executive move the other night over sweet and sour chicken and General Tso's and swapped my fortune, from a cookie already opened and almost devoured, with my wife's. I can't remember what my original fortune said, but hers was:

OPPORTUNITY AWAITS YOU NEXT MONDAY.

Which, assuming your average Wok Hut doesn't follow Associated Press style, and seeing as this was Friday, I took to mean Jan. 28, my first day of classes for the spring semester. I figured -- I can use all the "opportunity" I can get.

Which is funny, because we read so much into those inch-high strips, don't we? Opportunity means... what, excatly? Opportunity to be an asshole? Opportunity to cross the street? Opportunity to drive a sensible family sedan with a sometimes-kicking V-6 under the hood? Opportunity to eat the extra cupcake?

Well... check (shamefully... but we're talking ONCE all day here -- what's your record?), check to the checked power, check and check, and check (Mmmmmm... Hostess from the freezer).
I'm not about to take my on-duty Wok Hut representative to Vegas or anything, but not bad for $20 on a snowy Friday night.

And excess fortune cookies mean you can get another glimpse at the fates on the reheat. Mine was:

JUST BE YOURSELF; YOU ARE WONDERFUL.

Ah, Wok Hut. Flattery will get you everywhere! And for the sake of ancient fast-food tradition, I will agree with you.

Putting the Sag in my Bookshelves

Trips to the bookstore are probably for me what some deep-sea diving expedition is like for someone in the Jacque Cousteau mode.

I know my way around the stacks and the dumps (those bins at the ends and in between aisles for which publishers pay big, big Benjamins), but I allow myself to get lost a little, to forget the names of authors or titles I may have scribbled on my memory, for later use (this isn’t the grocery store, after all; my intellectual life is not likely to suffer in the same way, say, my diet will if I forget the weekly supply of roughage), and get entranced by the glossy spines all lined up, the intoxicating scent of ink on paper.

I know that whatever I discover and pull off the shelves to take home is likely to occupy me for a few weeks, in the manner a queer shell or monstrous mollusk means work for the marine biologist. Books are one thing in my life I don’t get neurotic about, needlessly piling on the pressure of what I will do with the knowledge I acquire from them. I look at books as transportative for the sake of motion, little more. As a writer, most of what I absorb from reading is by osmosis. I don’t want to think about it too hard. I want to cherish the state of mind a good read puts me in, the natural and incremental way savored pages tip me toward my own filling of the blank space on the screen, the netting of phrases and sentences I’ll send marching along in my own due time.

It’s an easy way of becoming inspired, of acknowledging what I read as a corner of my writing process – a cozy one, warmly-lit and waiting for me to return, but a corner only.

It’s like the innocent joy you used to take in learning. The way you could eyeball a syllabus and come to a later week in the semester, a week in which a 30-page practicum were due, say, or a completed story draft, and rather than getting sweaty-palmed and wigged-out about it, you got a charge instead, thinking, “hey, by then I’ll have written a full story” or “wonder what the story will be like.” Not – hey, can I do it? Or, God, only eight weeks until the nightmare assignment is due. As acceptance and confidence that if it’s called for, you’ll deliver. You’ll learn how to along the way.

I shop for books now the way I used to buy music in the days of cheap cassette tape stockpiling at the local Hills and Hecks and K-Mart. Back then, I’d pluck five or seven albums at a time from the bargain rack, unearthing the rare and the weird and the influential: obscure Harry Nilsson, Jack Johnson, Joe Walsh and The James Gang, used Jackson Browne, solo Sonny Bono, vaguely battered Pixies, and dropping maybe a week’s allowance for the privilege of popping them in the tape deck of my VW Rabbit – or whatever friend happened to be driving – for the ride home. There was a joy in discovering the clumsily orchestrated or puzzlingly recorded tracks, and also the gems that could stump music school audiences later, when I did that gig, or at least serve as Happy Hour trivia. “Hey, does anybody know the B-side to the original release of this?” My wife, then merely a work buddy, would always chime in, “YOU know.”

It’s different now, filling out the – ahem – CD collection, which with the switch to the portable digital of the I-Pod generation is already obsolete. For me, books have the definite advantage over fingernail-picking the cellophane wrap and making three or four tries to peel away the damn sticker gluing the top of the case together. Who wants to cradle a plastic rectangle, anyway? Nothing beats the feel of a brand new book spine, the pages crisp as you finger them, the back unbroken as you flip to the opening pages for the first time, allow the opening sentences to beam the voice of that writer into your brain.

Or maybe this is all a long-winded excuse for why I come home to my wife every season having dropped around a hundred bucks on books at Borders or Barnes & Noble, or why when we came across a leaning wooden sign pointing down an alley to a used bookstore in Lahaina, Maui during our fifth-anniversary, she knew what happiness I’d experience weighing how many finds I could cram in our luggage for the return trip.

And hey, didn’t I sound this rhapsody only a few weeks ago in this very space?

So… what I came home with yesterday:

A lot of short story collections. Even though I’m digging into novel projects on my own work desk at the moment, I have a backlog of short fiction I want to get back into in revision. As I mentioned above, I didn’t go hunting for more short stories as a means of assigning myself work in that form, because my reading and writing are connected in a more intuitive way. Or at least I’d like to think so. It’s more of getting the music in my head for later, I guess. And more importantly, tunes I haven’t heard before.

So, along those lines:

The Toughest Indian in the World – Sherman Alexie
Runaway – Alice Munro
Drown – Junot Diaz
Interpreter of Maladies – Jhumpa Lahiri
The Whore’s Child – Richard Russo

I’ve liked just about everything of Alexie that I’ve read, but never picked up a full collection. I’ve read one story from the Diaz and Lahiri collections elsewhere, and both of these collections were debuts – and greatly acclaimed. As for Munro, hell, everything she publishes ends up in The New Yorker; might as well check it out in a forum other than the “Best of” collections. I loved Russo’s Empire Falls, and thought I’d give his short stuff a try.

I also picked up:

Tender as Hellfire – Joe Meno
Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir – Joe Meno, again
The Name of the World – Denis Johnson
Lyra’s Oxford – Philip Pullman

This is where the short story binge begins to break down. I picked up Meno because, again, what I’ve read I’ve liked, and I wanted to get some of his short stuff. But I hadn’t read Hellfire yet, a novel about adolescent guys growing up together, a bit like the platform for my Hell’s Darling Boys, but maybe too close to the bone as I get into that novel? I thought about putting it back, but didn’t. Johnson’s book is a novella, and I love his work in the “longer” short form. (It was also cheaper than paying the full hardcover price of his recent National Book Award-winning novel. Funny, Borders, how Tree of Smoke was 25 percent off before the award announcement!) And the Pullman rounded out my recent circuit of the His Dark Materials trilogy; something short, and something to stash away for my own kids someday. If Jonah is able to move from The Golden Compass, etc., to shorter stuff by uncovering the 40-odd-pages Lyra’s Oxford, well, that’s great. I’ll take it.

All this should keep me busy, polishing mollusks so to speak, as the new semester gets underway Monday. And I haven’t even bothered checking what I’ll be buying for classes.

Good thing, then, when I came home to my wife, I also came home with groceries.

Who Do You Write For?

AUDIENCE

Who do you write for?

(and you are writing for somebody, aren't you?)

"Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I'll tell you a story."

--- F. Scott Fitzgerald

In my writing, I find audience to be such a fundamental motivator of process and fuel for voice, I don't know how anyone could write seriously without it. Or a sense of it.

Audience gets your hand moving, your fingers twirling. "What do you have to say?" is very closely entwined with "who are you saying it to?" It very much guides "how do you want to say it?"

Reading William Zinsser, like, the first week in my undergrad Journalism I course, helped me identify something I'd always instinctively guessed about audience: the stories you choose to tell, the words you pluck from the ether to tell them, are very much influenced by the imaginary people just off the page you're addressing. Or in the case of a high school Speech class, where everything written is read aloud that period, or the following day, or later that week, you're writing for your very real classmates, and the teacher, an audience of your peers, essentially.

Tickling my teacher and my classmates was always fuel for process, got me bending over the paper and going for the jugular, as it were. At the newspaper, and in my fiction, the audience is broader, perhaps, but I still aim for that sophisticated reader with a sense of humor and heart. Maybe that reflects me, but it's a bit different than writing to myself. It's presenting myself, as I am, in a persuasive way to bring people around to my way of viewing the world. It's a bit of voyeurism, of channeling another's thoughts, made easy by the lyrical voice that carries them there. At least that's how I see it. It's making love, in a way: swapping sweat, and fluids, and intense groans and glances, without mussing the bed so much.

An obstacle I've had to identify and work to get around in teaching is the idea of me as audience. Of course, I am a part of my students' audience. I see and hear how their stories are constructed in our sessions, and I read the drafts and rewrites they turn in. But are they writing for me, to me? I hope not. Because there I see the danger of writing to meet their idea of an ideal they think I'm looking for, or worse, to fulfill the assignment and just do the work for the exercise's sake.

Sure, sometimes you have to do that. But if in the process of doing the work you're not awakening something deeper, something more focused, something more tangible and living from the center of you that yearns to write, needs to write, then we really are just killing time in the cubicle, and in the classroom, and the prospect of students gaining something deeper from the writing, or learning something useful from their process, is cut off from the start.

Engagement, right? That's what an audience, or an idea of an audience in the writing process, brings to what's on the page. It's a mutual gut check: if the writer is invested in the material, we at least give them the benefit of the doubt and read on. If not, here comes the blessing and curse of the medium being so portable, able to held in the hands – it can always be put down, cast aside.

We're looking for the compelling story, the one that's never been told, or told in this way, before. Unless the writer has lived it, breathed it, smelled it, tasted it – or seen and believed in it enough to bring forth a singular vision – what the sophisticated reader is getting is merely a facsimile of experience. (Which all writing is, of a fashion, though we sophisticated readers demand that it stand up and dance a jig or take a bullet and writhe on the floor a bit for us. So damn picky, readers.)

Voice, and its awareness of audience, really sells a writer's commitment to the story, and how well we are engaged as readers. It doesn't have to be some mystical, fleeting thing. It's about identifying the material that is working, reading it aloud, directing and placing the demand on students to notice and comment on what is working in their writing, and to talk about why, and then to carry forth those insights in active rewrites of the material, going for and working toward an ever-more sustained passage of effective, engaging writing. To know who you write for, to feel around for the words and images and places and sights that get the story to where it is directed and most effectively get across what you have to say.

Going "Below the Gumline"

Or: The Most Candid Dental Appointment... EVER

Unlike approximately 87 percent of Americans (according to my pulling a random number from my ass), I've never approached dates with the dentist as something out of The Marathon Man.

My grandfather and great-grandfather were both dentists, and my mom a hygienist, so I've been brushing like a good boy my entire life. I don't know, maybe Dustin Hoffman just never got rewarded with a coupon for a free ice cream cone at the end of his appointments.

Yeah, I did braces, and got the old wisdom teeth yanked, had a spot of sealant slapped on once or twice. But generally, my good habits have won out. There was a strange moment during an appointment last year where three dental equipment salespeople were sitting in as the tartar was scraped away and the enamel was polished and they were all, like, praising me for my alignment, gum depth, tongue grooves and saliva production in turn. Freaks, right? I went and treated myself to a large Dairy Queen blizzard after that, extra peanut butter and cold fudge.

Like most other changes associated with the onset of awful adulthood, my glittering youth has lately taken a hit, even in the dentist's chair. The daily coffee-drinking habit, my freaky work-at-home schedule (which often involves diving straight from bed into the writing, and saving the shower and... yes, Mom... morning brushing for sometime after lunch... ach and ich and yech), and even my branding as an "aggressive brusher" have contributed to a little more attention from the dentist than I would like. Still, very mild. But I'm no longer getting the fluoride star, or the floss-embossed bauble, or whatever trinket they're handing out lately. Certainly no Goshen Dairy coupon.

So, at the end of my appointment Monday, I found myself filling out a card for a return date next week, when my unholy cavities will be filled and my conscience cleansed.

I hope the appointment is as entertaining as this last one.

There are certain people you appreciate candidness from. Your spouse, for starters. Your M.D. Your banker. Probably dentist isn't that high on the list. I mean, how often are we going to draw on our knowledge of gum depth, or bite-wing X-rays? But I gotta say, the things I picked up from a chatty spin in the chair on Monday stuck with me.

Take my dentist's experience as an intern. She worked in an office that was attempting to mandate 20-minute appointments, and expected its staff to follow through. As a student, my dentist was hesitant. "What's the matter?" her boss said. "You only clean above the gumline anyway, right?"

The attitude was typical money-grubbing b.s. when it coms to health care in this country. Saving time to make more money and thus probably compromise a patient's care. To my dental office's credit, I always leave feeling overinformed and glad that I got my money's worth in every appoiontment. I wouldn't want it another way. For instance, I've learned that I'm too aggressive as a brusher: I'm slowly wearing away my gums with how avidly I go at it. And now I know that my dentist is paying attention to the gunk below my gumline. I even know that she's not particularly confident in her ability to floss patients -- all those crooked nooks and crannies; "they know their own teeth better than I do," she said.

Well, that's true to a point. I also learned during this appointment that I have a certain freaky trait in one of my molars called a Cusp of Carabelli. Wikipedia tells us: (it) is a small additional cusp at the mesiolingual line angle of maxillary first molars. This cusp is entirely absent in some individuals and present in others in a variety of forms. In some cases, Carabelli's cusp may rival the main cusps in size. ... (T)he development of this trait is affected by multiple genes. Carabelli's cusp is most common among Europeans (75-85% of individuals) and rarest in Pacific Islands (35-45%).

OK! So I'm a freak, and it's probably going to affect my kids. But in a good way, as also evidenced by my X-treme saliva production. Anybody who used to suffer the wrath of my trumpet spit valves in band, eat it: saliva helps keep the teeth clean and free of bacteria, and is one reason why when adults teeter past middle age, and are popping all number of meds, of which the common side effect is drymouth, their teeth start to go all British Isles wonky. So there.

But there are freaks worse off than I. Take the story the presiding dentist treated me to when she popped in to confirm my cavity-free streak was busted.

Apparently, there was this optometrist's assistant in Evanston, Ill., who was examining a patient. He first asked her to place a strip over her eyes, and keep it on for five to ten minutes. "Don't look," he said. "No matter what." FIRST CLUE FOR THE EYE PATIENT GET THE HECK OUT OF THERE.

Dude was also wearing full medical scrubs, which my dentists, consumate professionals that they are, gleefully derided. "We need to wear scrubs," they insisted, "with all the stuff flying around here. He was an optometrist's assistant? But whatever. He was living the dream, acting the part." SECOND CLUE FOR HER TO RUN FOR THE EXITS.

The assistant next dimmed the lights. I assume there was no music, but I'm picking up a certain Barry White vibe here. Next thing the patient heard was her shoes falling to the floor as the assistant removed them. THIRD CLUE

"What are you doing?" she asked, as he took off her socks. "Don't remove that strip," the assistant reminded her.

Next, he proceeded to suck her toes.

Still, the patient asks, "What are you doing?"

"Checking your blood sugar," the guy said. Hey, it's an answer.

She then got the heck out of Dodge and landed herself and said scrub-wearing toe-sucker in the newspaper. Haven't confirmed where yet, and don't exactly care, because hey, this is a dental office that delivers: the cleaning, the toothcare advice, the quirky insights into the self, even the uncommon health industry gossip.

As it stands, I'm much more wigged out by my trips to the optometrist. The lights do eventually go out, the lens-analyzing contraptions are pushed up against your face (think of the number of noses that have rested there before yours), and the doctor is usually hovering about an inch from you, shining a light in your eyes while his own are strapped to some saucer-looking contraption, all the while breathing through his nose.

My eye appointment is Feb. 4. Probably I should wear lace-up hiking boots, just in case.