That’s my honeysuckle in the last ice storm. In the meantime, the San Antonio symphony at the new Tobin center, more cold weather, a lot of reading, a lot of internet searching for good book blogs and singing. Riding this Wednesday, some of us going up to the Mill Creek area. Read Howey’s Sand which was good except for the prostitute mother, which I found not a believable plot device, and am also reading The Black Sheep, a history of the Marine fighter squadron in the Solomon Islands, WW2, led by Pappy Boyington.

Could any of us ever live through anything like that again, and still keep fighting? This question comes up when reading any WW2 history. They just seem like a different subspecies of homo sapiens sapiens. Their photographs look different; they were thinner and they looked back at the camera lens in a different way. They knew more. Their clothes were stronger cloth and thicker. Their hair was different.

Greg ‘Pappy’ Boyington was stopped by his flight controller one morning as he scrambled out of his tent for a dawn patrol. Boyington was running across the coral-based airstrip on one of the Solomons. His flight controller pointed out he didn’t have any shoes on. Boyington said, ‘I can fly an airplane with no shoes’. (He was hungover, badly) and the flight controller said. ‘Yes, but you’ll need them if you go down’.

I suppose everybody falls behind on their posts at this time of year. Include me. Singing with the Methodist choir, the bluegrass group, the Christmas all-choir cantata, and finally tomorrow Christmas eve services. There’s always a need for an alto. The cantata was a terrific success, and then the flash mob all over this little town from the restaurant to the bank was great fun.

Every time I re-read this book I am amazed all over again. At the contemporary feel of the Martians and their evil stuff, the detailed observations that Wells makes, things like laser rays frying everybody, the intense scenes of the evacuation of London and so on. Also at the rational and deeply observant tone of the narrative. He’s not mean; his characters aren’t haughty or cynical. That in itself is refreshing but the amazing part is the technical imagination and the fact of the great unscrewing of the cylinder while people sit and watch in carriages. Everybody is on horseback or in horse-drawn carriages, there are no telephones, no television, and only the people n the area where the Martians first start devastating everything know it’s happening! Because word doesn’t spread, because there’s no TV, no phones, and well, the newspapers didn’t get the reports because they were written by hand and delivered by post or railway. This was written in, I think, 1897. No bug-eyed monsters here, no ET, just sloppy leathery things that use immensely tall stalking thin things like radio towers, what today we would compare to radio towers. It is all completely believeable, nothing improbable in the least. So, I am in admiration. It is really an outstanding and unusual piece of writing. ‘Far ahead of his time’ ain’t in it. that’s why I love re-reading it. The details surprise me every time. So I am writing a dystopia where there is almost no technology for the common people, they’re back to kerosene lanterns, things move by rail, and only the elite have remnants of our technology, the old technology. I was thinking that the comparison of people with kerosene lanterns as opposed to the upper crust with advanced computers would be confusing but maybe not. Be confused. What the hell.

so every post has to have a picture and that is me and Rita going down the kid’s slide.

Re-reading Great Expectations with a feeling of disappointment in the limp-celery I-forgot-it-in-the-back-of-the-refrigerator main character Pip. He never does anything when all sorts of doable options lie about him. He never makes anything happen. Everything he tries elegantly fails.

What makes all of Dickens’ books for me are the secondary characters and GE has a good plenty of them but Pip drags the narrative behind him carelessly and limply like a trailing raincoat. I never noticed it before. The book is an object lesson in the awfulness of class snobbery which is awful of course but Pip seems to have an infinite capacity to endure boring people. Dickens wants us to see how flattened these people are. Okay, okay. He should have made Trabb’s boy the central character and we could have understood the Awfulness Of Class Snobbery by giving one chapter to Pip. Miss Havisham is BORING, Estella has no redeeming qualities and is equally as boring, and I wished somebody would shoot Pumblechook or send him to the Hulks.

What saves it is the atmosphere of the marshes, that of London, the details of things, the shipping in the Thames, their journey down the Thames . An alive world.

Read an article by Thomas Frank in Salon on the MacArthur Genius grants that had me laughing out loud. He points out the winners as ‘prize magnets’ and listed the buzzwords of admiration and approbation with which the awarders describe the work of the awardees; ‘contemporary’ — ‘experimental’ — ‘original’ — ‘innovative’ — ‘insight’ — alternative’ — ‘vibrant’ — ‘rooted’. The awardees ‘redefine’ and ‘reinvent’.

Different takes on the Hero’s Tale; it seems the Eastern tradition begins with the young hero’s apprenticeship to some sort of fight Master, the Sensei — the Sensei’s wisdom, skills, the young apprentice’s bumbling, discoveries of self under discipline—etc.

In the West the stories concentrate more on the Band Of Brothers theme. Both are probably tens of thousands of years old. Band of Brothers, from Ulysses to Saving Private Ryan.

There are always exceptions but in general I am talking.

The Eastern tradition is in full flower on YouTube. So many young filmmakers or would-be filmmakers doing action shorts wherein fighters fling themselves at one another in the best Shinobi tradition and many of them have to do with the apprentice/master plot. Variations are endless. The apprentice who is talented, the one who appears to be a bumbler, the young man from a humble background, the apprentice who wants to use his skills for evil ends; a harsh master, a silent one; the variations are without number. There always seems to be the required scene of reverence for the Sensei, obedience to some strange requirement or task that turns out later to make sense.

In this Eastern aspect tradition is vital; the Shinobi Sensei has of course at one time been an apprentice himself, learning from a master, who learned from a master…going back centuries, perhaps millennia. Using the Band Of Brothers construction, the band of young warriors seem always to have sprung up w/o antecedents. The Band Of Brothers theme has a lot of energy to it.

In the Eastern take, deep respect for tradition. The Brothers in the Band, on the other hand, are irreverent and out to break rules. Much of the plot of the Young Apprentice revolves around a harsh master who seems to impose arbitrary and impossible tasks; young apprentice obediently takes them on, much hilarity ensues, finally triumphs.

The Shinobi Sensei also uses surprising methods to teach the young apprentice. Much depends on the Sensei’s ability to understand his students, to pay keen attention to their skills, failings, etc. In other words in the Eastern tradition a Good Parent we have, although often disguised as a martinet.

So in the Eastern tradition these tales have a two-part plot; apprenticeship, harsh master, then out into the world to involve oneself in revenge dramas or the destruction of thuggish persons etc. The Western tradition is far more individualistic. Both are interesting.

This is my grandmother’s first cousin, Stanley Speece. He and his brother Denver and my grandfather decided, when they were about 19, to leave Missouri and go out to Oklahoma and try to find work as cowboys for a while. But before they went, in case they didn’t get hired on, Denver and Stanley had pictures taken of themselves in cowboy gear so they could say at least they looked like cowboys. Apparently the three of them never stopped laughing and were terrible for practical jokes.

My grandmother was very close to her first cousins; her mother died and her aunts’ families raised them. When my grandfather was courting her, he got to know Denver and Stanley who were by all accounts Type A personalities (described as ‘monkeys’) and they cooked up this scheme to go to Oklahoma.

Denver’s picture (which I have here somewhere) is in exactly the same clothes. Evidently Stanley had his picture taken and then went back and gave all the gear to Denver who then had his picture taken. Same chaps, same white turtleneck, same pose, same rope. At any rate, they did go out to Oklahoma and got hired on and spent a year hustling cattle around and repairing windmills etc. etc. They had a great time. My grandfather told me about it and I wrote it all down. When he came back he and my grandmother got married.   This is my grandmother and her half-brother Alonzo King. Probably taken near New Lebanon Missouri about 1910. She was always this slim, this beautiful, even in her seventies.

Irony; it’s going over the edge and on its way down the falls but how will we live without it? David Foster Wallace, from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never do Again: “so then how have irony, irreverence and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tries to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominate mode of hip expression. It is not a rhetorical mode that wears well…entertaining as it is, it serves an almost exclusively negative function. ..persistent irony is tiresome. It is unmeaty.”

(Me; And so on and so on but what to replace it with? We have no larger cultural context to help us avoid sticky sentimentality as the only alternative.)

DFW: “Who knows? Today’s most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line’s end’s end. I guess this means we all get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased.”

That was 22 years ago. Still, at present, in order to keep the reader’s interest these constructions called “characters” do head-bangingly stupid things in order that they might involve themselves in desperate situations. I think there is some unknown program running on every author’s computer which if words like loyalty, courage, love or honor come up the entire manuscript is killed.

Thus, fiction continues to slide and people flock to Guardians Of The Galaxy, which is actually a fun film. Sardonic heroes but heroes, great dialogue, action. Fights. Evil crushed by rough men and raccoons standing ready in the night.

Movie quote; African Queen. German colonial official; But you can’t have come through those swamps!

Filthy ragged Katherine Hepburn; Nevertheless.

So I put it down after getting halfway through and am giving it away. I don’t think there was one likeable character. It became exhausting and in a way a kind of incessant nattering monotone. I read this repeatedly in Amazon reviews; ‘All the characters were unlikeable’ and ‘I couldn’t relate to the major figures in this book’.

And so after all this, finally, I realize that it is the present fashion. It’s not that the writer has no ability (I think) to construct interesting people-on-the-page, it is that unlikeable characters are presently stylish.

This book takes place in a place called New Carthage, Missouri so women are either Steel Magnolias chewing gum or swoshy clods with Keds and multiple chins. But then the people in New York are all awful as well.  This gets monotonous, as in monotone, as in one single note played over and over, a Guantanamo torture.

So these are the present rules for stylish contemporary literary novels in case you are thinking of writing one, which I would sternly discourage unless you have the capacity to sustain a mean-spirited irony for about 300 pages:

—construct shallow, haughty main characters.

—-have them make stupid, nay, witless ‘choices’

—lots of random sex graphically described; afterwards participants more or less forget about each other and might even at some point say, Now what was your name again? Are we married?

—make some off-hand reference to the evilness of George Bush

And there you about have it.

A good thriller, takes place on the Texas Gulf coast, which ain’t all that fancy a place, the authors are actually three guys who’ve known each other for years, one is a lawyer, another an engineer and I forgot the third. Have been at a couple of author’s festivals with them and they are a comedy team. Very funny. the book is great, they have a website.

I was never really able to get a handle on my character Adair in Enemy Women until I found the right image for her. Then she just jumped out at me and was herself. It’s not really a photo from the Civil War era, I found it in a book about women’s clothing, styles, fashions during the 19th century. The woman and era were unidentified but my best guess is that she is from a Mediterranean or Greek ethnic group and the photo is of a quality that would put it in the late 19th century. But it would serve; for Adair, from the Ozarks, 1861. it fired my imagination and I had my character. There you are, where have you been?