Book Review: Tough Guy Tourism Presents...

If you have the time and are patient enough, nosing around the shelves and boxes at a used bookstore can yield some unexpected treasures. Any given day I could sift through mangled paperbacks, second draft screenplays, magazines from Saturday Evening Post to Cat Fancy, and those all-time fun faves, pulp fiction paperbacks. It's an overview of American pop culture that's amusing, fascinating, and discouraging all at the same time.

Pulps enjoyed a golden age in publishing from the 1930s to the mid 1960s, providing grateful writers with an income source and eager readers with hot stories about naughty bits and crazy folk. Of course, most of it was hype--the headlines, blurbs, and glorious cover art carried most of the story in a few punchy words and images. The prose stylings of pulp fiction were sometimes florid in the Poe tradition, sometimes Hemmingway terse, and covered dark city nights behind sunny suburban days.

So it was a pretty cool find when I recently came across a book unique within the genre, a pulp fiction travel guide published in 1950, entitled The Big City After Dark: The Lowdown on Its Bright Life by Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer.

Yeah, pally, put on your fedora and start humming Sinatra. Tough Guy Tours take you where the action is! The minute you get off the bus, the dames will all say, "Welcome to Noo Yawk! Hey! Whaddaya lookin' at?" Look, this guide isn't for chumps and namby-pambys, no sirree! We'll tell you where to go--and where not to go, see. Strictly confidential information, see.

Lait and Mortimer were editors at the New York Daily Mirror, and wriggle out the worm on the Big Apple in classic clench-jaw tough guy prose that practically gives you TMJ just to read it. But behind the Damyon Runyan dialogue, they gave their young readers a comprehensive guide to midcentury New York. They describe neighborhoods, dispense dating tips, how to deal with high society and mobsters, and for the really motivated, how to speak hipster and the names of the headwaiters at the major restaurants.

Consider, for example, a tip on flirting: "If you flirt on the street, you're apt to be arrested and in the subway, killed." Woah! The cover dude ought to look out. She's actually a lady police officer with wicked fashion sense.

The book also displays a map of Manhattan on the back cover. (I've seen the map-on-the-back motif on other pulps and always liked the graphic art):

I can see this nice young fella from the midwest walking down Fifth Avenue, staring at this map, busting his conk to be hep. Then sitting down on the subway, trembling, and not looking at anyone.

Postwar pulps acted as popular guides for a society coming to terms with changes in the economy, crime, urbanization, gender roles, and race, both reveling in and fearful of the changes. The Big City captures that superego/id thing that the 1950s had going on, a delicate balance between idealizing the pure and fantasizing about the raw. Magazines painted happy pictures of suburban idylls while the pulps reminded readers of the city they left behind.

Book Review: Love Me

Garrison Keillor wanders out of Lake Wobegon in this tale of Larry Wyler, a sadsack Minnesota writer who finds commercial success, becomes estranged from his do-gooding wife, and moves to New York City to write for The New Yorker. You know, standard writing career trajectory and all that.

But then Wyler enters a twenty year desert of writers' block, unable to write those Great American Short Stories. Despite hobnobbing with John Updike, S.J. Perelman, Thurber, and J.D. Salinger, he can't make with the literary fiction. Even heart-to-heart conversations with the tough, golf-swingin', hard-drinkin' editor Shawn Wallace can't break the spell.

In order to earn some income while the Muse is out to lunch, he instead writes an advice column under the name "Mr. Blue," responding to the lovelorn, befuddled, and downright addle-pated, chastising them with a mixture of tough love and sympathy. Along the way, he has a string of unfulfilling affairs, attempts another schlockbuster novel, gets entangled with the Mob, and maybe learns a little about himself and his place in the writing world and the losses and revelations of middle age.

Keillor's in good form here, with his patented mix of down-home and smart-alecky humor (which gets saucier and more adult outside Lake Wobegon). He delights in poking fun at writing and writers with a mixture of goodwill and cynicism. The letters are witty and the prose is above average: "People mate in choir all the time in Minnesota. We are a choral state." Or on the sign of a writer now panhandling carries: "Will reminiscence for food." Ouch.

Fun with Five Dollar Words

Being the writerly type, I like words. Words are to writers what paint is to artists, clay is to potters, and crayons to toddlers: the medium of expression and communication, and the means by which we cover our inner and outer walls with barbaric yawps. Or, uh, something like that.

Anyway, even though the most effective writing is plain and to the point, the obscure, multi-syllabic, fancy five dollar words amuse me. I like to collect 'em like costume jewelry and then gaudy up a paragraph once a while.

Take, f'rintance, "balanoid"(courtesy of Phrontistery), meaning "acorn-shaped." So how would you use that?

"Blast!" he shouted. "A pox on your thick, obstinate balanoidal head! These TPS reports are all wrong!"

The box, balanoid and baleful, fashioned by the fanged squirrel of Yugoth, contained the hideous correspondence of the dread Cthulhu.

Or how 'bout "stultiloquence," foolish or senseless talk?

"Hey, you guys?" she said. "Could you like, keep down the stultiloquence over there? Thaaaanks."

Obscure and old words are so grand, like putting on your regal Renaissance best and strutting down the boulevard. Using these words in modern times can bring either the purple or the snark to prose, but they're still fun. Pretty soon, one of my characters might say, "Dude, I'm majoring in zymurgy."

Hit the Scroll, Jack: The Kerouac First Draft Method

Writers employ all manners of tricks to invoke and keep the muse at their side, especially through the first draft when it's time to pour all of those pent-up ideas. One of the more interesting ways of first-drafting I've come across is Jack Kerouac's approach to writing the Beat classic On the Road.

Legend has it he inserted a foot scroll into his typewriter and then banged out the manuscript in some kind of speed-induced, Dionysian frenzy while Snyder played the bongos and chain-smoking Beat kiddos snapped their fingers in glum glee.

Well, not quite.

Kerouac took painstaking notes in a series of notebooks for the novel, laying down the ground work for several years. But he did tape together sheets of tracing paper into a 120 foot scroll which he fed into the typewriter and typed and typed and typed, fueled only by coffee and a desire to render his own coast to coast ethnography.

I admire his focus, because sometimes it's too, too easy to get distracted while picking up another sheet of paper or opening another Word document. Thoughts like, eh, time to check the stocks or should I clean out the fridge? dart in and before you know it, you're tossing out cruddy old salad dressing bottles and sweating over Bear Stearns. And off the muse goes, back to Olympus or the bowling alley or Shangri-La because it's a lot more peaceful in those places.

Treating a Word document like a scroll is a brilliant way to beat those first draft blues—just bang it out, baby. Of course, no first draft, even Kerouac's, is ever that great, so he revised On the Road—up to six drafts. But at least he had something to revise in their first place. You can fix something that's written but you can't fix a blank page.

Since 2004, the On the Road scroll has been on tour and might be coming to a library near you.

Romancing the Red Planet

A few years ago, I went to see author Ray Bradbury speak, a real treat because he was the writing hero and inspiration of my childhood. His novel-in-short-stories The Martian Chronicles sparked my own desire to paint worlds with words and subtle wisdom.

In his Martian stories, the red planet is a place of unfolding dreams and nightmares, a reflection of human hopes and fears and the home of an ancient civilization of shape-shifters bewildered by humans and their chaotic emotions. The romance of Mars as symbol and real land draws humans out, inspiring them, challenging them, changing them. And the collection ends on an elegiac note with "There Will Comes Soft Rains" and "The Million Year Picnic" in which the dark side of human nature has taken over Earth and Mars becomes a refuge. I think this closing section lifts The Martian Chronicles from science fiction/fantasy to a work of vision and poetry.

As a symbol, Mars touches the human need for something beautiful, strange, or inspiring to believe in, to ignite passion, something that draws us outside our mundane worries into a bigger perspective where ideas flash like sparking comets and our spirits are tested for their mettle.

And Bradbury, as a speaker, doesn't disappoint. If you don't leave one of his talks in love with writing and the necessary passion it takes to be a good writer, than you weren't listening.

"Write from your passions, what feeds your imagination," he said. "When I was a kid, I loved dinosaurs! And King Tut! So I write about dinosaurs! And King Tut! If you're not writing about your passions, you're not writing! Use the library! Best resource ever! Read good books! And when you don't feel like writing, then stop and go swimming! Writing isn't a chore, it's something you love, damnit!"

Bless that shouting man, he's right.

As I noted in a previous post, passion is the fuel that keeps creativity and the desire to solve problems burning steadily. I thought about passion again while watching the news reports last night about the Phoenix Mars Lander. The engineers were enthusiastic, crowding around to talk to the reporters about the years of planning, working, and testing. In this age of disinterest, it's refreshing to see people who love their work and are motivated by imagination and passion to accomplish a huge project.

I like to think of the re-emergence of space exploration in the news was a small but potent rebirth of imagination, a desire to dream beyond the mundane and to engage in big projects that move us forward. The red planet as a symbol romances us again, asking us to explore our possibilities, our challenges, and our future.

photo: wikimedia/NASA

Idea vs. Story

In the course of my writing practice, I've come to understand the difference between idea and story.

At first, it seems like there isn't a difference. Stories are built on ideas, right? Of course they are and ideas can come from all kinds of sources--our thoughts, the news, overheard conversations.

But fleshing an idea out into story isn't that straightforward. A great idea can seem brilliant while we think about it but then lie there inert on the page. A story, however, can come from humbler ideas but then develop on its own, creating an infectious energy that takes the writer from a modest beginning to a strong finish.

I've found that stories that develop on their own, that grow organically, that move forward with a purpose of their own, are more fun, interesting, and satisfying to write than starting with an idea and then trying to force words and sentences to support an idea.

I think the way to a happy writing experience is to get in touch with our intuitive storytelling abilities and to let stories tell themselves, getting out of our own ways.