Paula Morris interview

At long last! Pour a cup of tea, grab a blanket, and cuddle up to the warm glow of your screen. The incomparable, the illustrious, the mischievous, the droll, the sparkling Paula Morris -- New Zealand/Orleans novelist, ex-record company maven, English professor, intermittent radio personality who keeps the censor's finger near the red button, widely bookmarked blogger, wearer-of-track-suit-bottoms, intrepid international woman of intrigue, and now short-story-collection-haver (Forbidden Cities, Penguin NZ, which **UPDATE** has been shortlisted for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize) -- sat down at a slightly seedy rest stop bench along the information superhighwebs for a chat:

The stories take place all over the world: New Orleans, Shanghai, London, New Zealand, Hungary, New York. You've obviously been a lot of places and have in fact lived in a lot of places. How has travel shaped your writing? Do you decide locale first and then research, or do you sort of soak up the vibe and let the stories come out of the places?

I’m restless, as you know, and find myself tremendously energized by visiting or moving to new places – especially cities. I used to harbor naïve ideas about moving somewhere serene and semi-pastoral to write in peace. Two years in Iowa City helped me come to my senses.

Going to Shanghai for the first time was thrilling. I loved the overwhelming, exhausting confusion of it. The first time I was there to do research for Hibiscus Coast; on the second visit, at the Shanghai Literary Festival, a woman in the audience told me I should look into the other side of things – that is, the ‘wronged wife’ side. I started thinking about it then, and took lots of pictures in the Temple of the City God, because I thought that might be a useful setting. Two years later I wrote the story.

Place is often a starting point for me in fiction, as you deduce. But aside from that first trip to Shanghai, I’m usually traveling on business or for a vacation, not with a specific research-a-story goal. There are a number of places I’ve been that I’ve never written about, apart from on my blog – like Paris, say. And considering I lived in England for eight years, very little of my work is set there. That will change very soon: the novel I’m working on now is largely set there, albeit in the nineteenth-century, and recently I’ve developed an urge to go back to Manchester – where I lived in the summer of 1989 – and revisit some ideas I had back then for a story.

You know, I’ve also set things in places I’ve never been at all. Some of the Shanghai sections in Hibiscus Coast were written before I went there, and they didn’t change. Recently I ghostwrote a novel set in a particular European town, using lots of real-life locations. I haven’t been to this place, and relied largely on my two close friends, the Internet, and the Imagination.

Another aspect of setting, time, also interests me a great deal. I need to know exactly when a story is taking place, even if that’s not really an issue for the reader. So, for example, “Like a Mexican” is set largely in 2003, because it’s about the end of things – including a certain era in the record business, as well as certain relationships. Also, El Teddy’s, one of the story’s key settings, closed early in 2004. “The Party” needed to take place exactly a year after Katrina; “Mon Desir” needed to take place in early 1976 because, for the purposes of the story, Jaws had to be a relatively new paperback. Messing around with all this explains why it took ten years to get a collection together.

My research is never diligent, I’m afraid. It’s very fragmentary and impressionistic, and I lean a lot on photographs and random scribblings.

The title Forbidden Cities comes from the last story, "Chain Bridge," in which Anna, a New Yorker, visits a friend in Budapest. She recalls cities she had visited with her former married lover and thinks of them as "forbidden," as in she doesn't ever want to go back there. How does this idea of places becoming saturated by people work in the book as a whole?

It’s all point of view, innit … in life, as in fiction. We have good and bad memories of places based on what happened to us there, who we were with, the time in our lives, the people we were. This is why I’m more ambivalent about New York than London, say, or why I’m fond of Frankfurt but have no desire to go back to Munich any time soon. Traveling around Laura Ingalls Wilder-related sites in Kansas, Missouri, South Dakota, and Minnesota with my friend Julia (ten years ago) instilled an incredible affection for the Midwest, much to the mystification of my friends in New York.

In a lot of the stories, characters are somewhere new, or somewhere far from home, and/or somewhere they shouldn’t be. Often the reason for this is another person. One of my friends back in the Manchester days told me a story about a guy he knew, also from Lancashire, who met “a bit of a girl” who was Polish. She didn’t speak much English, and he spoke no Polish at all, of course. She went home, and he decided to go after her. But he didn’t have much money, so he was off to catch the bus. (Many buses, I suspect.) He was going to catch the bus from England to Poland. A month earlier, before he met this girl, he wouldn’t have dreamed of doing any such thing.

I don’t know what happened to him – whether he got to Poland, whether things worked out for him and the bit of a girl. He’s probably around forty now. Maybe he’s still in Poland. But even if he’s back in Lancashire, or somewhere else altogether, Poland will mean something to him – love, foolishness, disappointment, adventure, promise, escape, confusion – forever.

Sometimes I also wonder if this guy is still known by his nickname, which is too strange and distinctive to mention here.

This is your fourth book of fiction but your first story collection. How was this one different in terms of writing and publishing?

The stories span more than a decade. The oldest one, “Many Mansions,” precedes my first novel. The first draft of that story was written in 1997, when I was going to classes at the West Side Y in New York. The most recent stories, like “Testing” and “The City God,” were written early last year, pretty much at the eleventh hour. My novels take a while, but not ten years – not yet, anyway. Though the process is similar, perhaps, in a certain way. With Hibiscus Coast, for example, I obsessed over the first ten thousand words for over a year, and wrote the rest at blazing speed.

Playwrights often have opportunities to revise their work, and I like the way stories, pre-collection, offer a similar freedom. Many of the stories have had different versions, different lives. The original version of “The Party” was set in the Hamptons, but I changed the setting to New Zealand for a magazine there. For the collection, I restored it to its original setting, but moved the timeframe to a year after Hurricane Katrina: the main character, Olivia, now has ties to New Orleans and Pass Christian, Mississippi. “Many Mansions” was another story re-written to give it a New Zealand setting and then restored to its original English location. “Bright” was broadcast on Iowa Public Radio as an American story and on Radio New Zealand with a South Pacific setting: that, too, I restored, though I was irritated to see I’d missed a crucial word change in the revision. Alert American readers will notice it, I suspect.

All of the stories were revised and re-written in some way for the collection. Assembling it, and seeing how the stories worked together, was both satisfying and nerve-wracking. In terms of publishing, I was surprised that Penguin was interested in bringing the book out at all. I mentioned it in passing – probably trying to buy myself some time between novels – to Geoff Walker, the editorial director at Penguin New Zealand, and he was keen.

They spent a long time working on the right cover. I knew I wanted a black-and-white photo for this, but it was hard to get one that didn’t read too ‘travel book’ (or too ‘article in Marie Claire about relationships’) The designer is based in Switzerland; I’m in New Orleans; the publisher is in Auckland, New Zealand; the cover photo is of London.

You get pretty deep inside your characters. Where do you get your ideas for characters, and what types of people fascinate you most?

Right now I’m in Chicago, trying to flee the AWP conference, so I could reel off a list of the people who DO NOT fascinate me at all, starting with men who wear corduroy shirts.

I’m nosy and an eavesdropper; I make notes, and make things up; I remember and forget. Last year I read a very annoying interview in the newspaper, and I gave a character in one of the stories that person’s name and nationality.

You are part Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand. A lot of "ethnic" writers get pigeon-holed into writing exclusively about their particular group and its struggles. But you seem to have managed to straddle the worlds -- you write about Western cultures and locales as much as or more than you do about the Maori. Is that hard? Is it different when you write about one or the other?

After a workshop (at Iowa) of “Red Christmas,” one classmate earnestly asked: “Where do Maoris live?” He was thinking in terms of “ghetto” or “project” or “reservation,” I guess. It flustered me at the time, though later I realized the answer was “In Iowa City.” That is, Maori live everywhere. We live in poor neighborhoods and wealthy neighborhoods, and places in between (like the suburb where I grew up, in West Auckland). We live in New Zealand and in other countries all over the world. A large number of us live in Australia, to the irritation of some Australians. Often people don’t realize we’re Maori, because they have certain preconceptions. We’re too pale, perhaps, or we have an English last name. (A note on this: Maori didn’t have last names. My grandmother’s last name, Brown, was selected by her uncle, allegedly because it was the name of an admirable local family. This name was sometimes rendered as Paraone, its invented Maori equivalent.)

I grew up in Auckland. Some of my Maori relatives were farmers, north of the city; some were teachers and lawyers. Two cousins of my father’s generation work for a government department. Two cousins of my generation are doctors. Some Maori people are unemployed; some are in gangs, or in prison. Some are politicians, or accountants, or professors, or dancers. Some are very wealthy rugby players or opera singers. There is no single indigenous experience. In Hibiscus Coast, Emma – who is Maori and Chinese – grew up in relative affluence, and is able to pursue her art studies in London and Shanghai. Her cousin, Ani, comes from a poor and unstable home, and her brothers have been taken into care, though, with help from an aunt, she’s still able to attend university. Derek, her employer, owns a successful café in downtown Auckland. Tai, the guy Ani’s in love with, vandalizes Emma’s apartment and steals a painting by Gauguin. All these characters are Maori.

When Hibiscus Coast came out, someone at my publishing company told me it was not “as Maori” as my first novel [Queen of Beauty]. Maybe because the names weren’t Maori enough, or the characters didn’t speak like the people in Once Were Warriors! In New Zealand, as elsewhere, some people assume Maori can’t be middle-class – or intelligent, or sophisticated, or complex. Or art students, perhaps.

Sticking with the pigeon-holing for a moment: You come from New Zealand, but you recently achieved American citizenship. Do you consider yourself a Kiwi writer, or an American writer, or a "global" writer? Does coming from New Zealand make it hard to find American publishers?

I’m a New Zealand writer. Though if anyone wants to give me the Pulitzer, then I’m American. (I’m as American as Zsa Zsa Gabor, at least.) And yes, US publishers are not lining up to publish books with New Zealand settings. I think they regard New Zealand as unknown and uneventful. It’s not exotic, troubled, dangerous, and/or in the Northern hemisphere. The New Zealand books people tend to know were first encountered as movies, like Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors, and Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider. Or there’s a Booker Prize connection, like Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, which won in 1985, or Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip, which was a finalist in 2007.

Several of the stories deal with troubled relationships – flawed ones that end painfully. Yet you are married to perhaps the most noble and pleasant gentleman many of us have ever had the pleasure to encounter. How can this be?

I was talking to a book club in Alexandria, LA, about Hibiscus Coast, and they asked me a similar question. “We’ve heard your family is so nice,” they said. “Why is this family so mean?” I like making things up, and flaws are interesting. By the way, I read this question aloud to Tom Moody, and he asked me to repeat the “noble and pleasant gentleman” bit. He nodded, in a sort of indignant and vindicated way. “That’s right,” he said, as though it was about time someone pointed these things out to me.

Your prose style strikes me as coolly spare, and sharply, wonderfully to the point, with a wicked vein of humor running under it all. It creates honest scenes and people with little ornamentation and zero sentimentality. Where did your style come from? Who are some of the writers you admire?

William Trevor I love, maybe a little too much. Colin Thubron and Bruce Chatwin. Ian McEwan. Evelyn Waugh. I really like Peter Ho Davies, too. The book I could happily re-read every year is Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis.

In the collection, I think some of my influences are pretty transparent: depending on the story, you can see that I’ve been reading Alice Munro, Ellen Gilchrist, George Saunders, Lorrie Moore, Katherine Mansfield. You probably can’t see, at all, the influence of other people I like to read, like Salman Rushdie and Junot Diaz. And there are some brilliant stories I absolutely love, but can only hope to emulate in the smallest way – I’m thinking of “Heavy Water” by Martin Amis, and Daniel Mason’s “A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth.”

You also teach at Tulane. How do you like teaching there, in post-Katrina New Orleans? There must be stories everywhere you look, but also a lot of sorrow and lingering resentment? How has New Orleans changed in the past few years?

New Orleans is almost 300 years old, and has survived numerous floods, fires, and pestilences. It’s a shape-shifter, accustomed to re-forming and re-inventing itself – after the huge influx from Haiti in the early nineteenth century, say, or in the years around the Civil War, when modern-day Mardi Gras was devised. There’s a strong will to recover from the beating we took after Katrina – and here I must give a shout-out to the US Army Corps of Engineers, whose negligence made the great flood an inevitability.

The older parts of the city which didn’t flood (the French Quarter, the Garden District, etc.) look fine, and tourists can come to town and never realize that much of the city is still very messed up. But progress is slow: too many people in officialdom are corrupt or ineffective, not dynamic and visionary enough to oversee the social change we need.

Tulane is a great place, and very resilient. Community service is now required of all incoming students. Next year the Katrina class will graduate, and then there’ll be no undergraduates with a memory of the storm – odd. We received an amazing gift for creative writing after Katrina, and we’ve used it to bring major writers to campus: Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Louise Gluck, and (this year) Joan Didion and Billy Collins. These events are all free and open to the public, and we do a lot of school outreach as well, taking books and information to public high school students and trying to lure them onto campus for readings, lectures, and symposia. I now teach a class on Literary Event Management, which draws on my background in PR and marketing, to make sure we’re promoting all our events and activities throughout the city.

I’ve only written two stories that refer to Katrina. There’s a kind of story profusion here that’s almost too much. Sometimes we need to write things, but not always to publish. Everyone seems to want a publishing deal, to make their claim to survivor status. Some of them, I think, just want to be first, sensing that the publishing moment will soon pass.

People get competitive about how much damage they sustained. (It’s hard not to get drawn into this. When someone makes some breezy “you-were-fine” comment, I can’t help playing the “we had five-and-a-half feet of water!” card. I’m sure everyone was like this after the bombing of Dresden, too.) The YA novel I’ve written (see below) is set in post-Katrina New Orleans, but the mystery driving the story is from 1853, during one of the yellow fever epidemics.

Could you tell us about The Scudder Road Circus and Literary Journal?

Tom Moody’s family live in St Louis. On one of my first trips there, I noticed a highway exit sign for "Natural Bridge" and realized where that literary journal got its name. Immediately I grew envious and conniving, wanting my own literary journal named after a highway sign in St Louis. When I saw "Scudder Road," it seemed the obvious candidate.

But there are too many literary journals, as you know, so I thought a good point of difference would be to run it as a circus as well. TM was appointed animal trainer and commissioned with finding suitable circus acts. He soon lost interest, and has totally neglected this duty. Also, he was demoted to adjunct animal trainer when I remembered he only has a BA.

As a circus and literary journal, Scudder Road is yet to find either content or audience, or indeed publish any work or mount any performances. But I’m sure this is only a temporary state of affairs. It recently celebrated its fifth anniversary, which is quite a landmark for literary journals (and circuses) in these difficult times.

Favorite memories/stories about your time at the Workshop in Iowa City? You also did another writing program, an MA at Victoria University’s the Institute of International Letters in Wellington. How were the programs different?

When I was a student in Victoria in 2001, there were only ten students in the program, and we all met as a group – poets, fiction writers, a playwright – twice a week. Now it’s much larger, with separate classes for poetry, fiction, and screenplays/plays. Still, there’s more of an intimate feeling, perhaps, than at a big program like Iowa. To me, it felt less competitive, as well, perhaps because differences in financial aid/funding are not an issue. Peer criticism was more muted, too, because of the convivial atmosphere of the program, and because of something in the national character, which leans more towards self-deprecating than assertive/outgoing. This has its pros and cons, of course.

I made good friends at Victoria and at Iowa, and I’m really, really glad that I was able to study in both places. At Victoria I wrote Queen of Beauty, my first novel; at Iowa I wrote large parts of Hibiscus Coast and Trendy But Casual, plus a number of the stories that appear in Forbidden Cities.

One of my favorite memories of the Workshop is of Frank and the Only Eight Pages incident. Many of my other memories involve being summoned into Connie’s office, after which a variation on the following would happen:

Connie: Just sit there for a minute – I have to take this call/speak to this person/run out of the office for a while/get Frank to sign something.
Me (hoping I’m not in trouble for anything): OK.
Connie (returning some time later, and looking startled to see me sitting there): So, what do you want?
Me: You said you wanted to see me.
Connie: Well, there’s no time for that now. You’ll have to come back another day.

You worked at Virgin, Polygram, and BMG, and RCA. What was it like working in the record industry?

If I were to write about my record business experiences in London and New York now, it would be an historic novel filled with perplexing archaic references. I left 11 years ago, when people still bought CDs – in record stores. Virgin was taken over by EMI; BMG merged with Sony. When I worked at Polygram (now Universal) Classics, there were three labels: DG, Decca and Philips. Philips is gone; Decca is about to close up shop in London and merge its international office with DG in Hamburg. Things aren’t looking any better in NYC.

It was an incredibly chaotic, pressured, hysterical, interesting, and absurd time in my life. I made good friends at all the places I worked; I went to the Grammys three times, and got to travel a lot. I still love records, though my enthusiasm for attending live events received a near-fatal bashing. (It will never recover, I suspect.)

What's next for Paula Morris?

Too much, as ever. Last year was a big travel year, and there’s more in the near-future – to the UK over spring break, and home to NZ in May for the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival. My nephew is back in Mexico this semester, so we’re planning to go somewhere with him over Easter.

I’ve just finished guest-editing an issue of Landfall, New Zealand’s oldest literary journal, which comes out in May. Later this year another major editing project, The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories, will be published. The reading involved in both these projects was overwhelming – months of work. And then I managed to turn writing the anthology intro into a multi-week nightmare.

In late summer, Scholastic here in the US is bringing out my YA novel, Ruined, a mystery/ghost story set in New Orleans. I hope to have finished the novel based on my short story, “Rangatira,” by then. It’s set in New Zealand and England, hence the research-related trips early this year. This is the nineteenth-century novel I’ve been working on for some time.

In the past four years, I’ve ghostwritten six novels [!!!!??? -- Ed.] and done fixing jobs on two others. I’m trying to cut back on this work so I have more time for sanity. I have a few other irons in the fire, but sometimes the fire feels as though it’s too wild and ferocious, and may overwhelm me at any moment.

We need a new WPA

Why aren't writers included in the stimulus bill? As this NPR report reminds us, during the last Depression da gub-mint used to pay writers to run around the country capturing the "stories of America." So why not now? What, we've run out of them?

Apparently 4 out of the first 10 winners of the National Book Award were connected to the WPA project, which ran from 1935-1939, when conservatives managed to kill it, claiming it was infested with Commies. Hey, at least writers are good at coming up with new ideas -- unlike some automakers I could mention.

New Tarantino Nazi-killing bloodfest coming this summer

Oh dear, oh dear oh dear oh dear...

Self-Reliance and all that

I found this interesting, if mostly as an exercise in selective interpretation. More generally, I could see how many of traditional elements of popular storytelling--foremost the always compelling arc of anexceptional and heroic individual triumphing against seemingly insurmountable odds--would, in the grossest sense, affirm a conservative sensibility.

Then again, what makes a good story isn't necessarily always the same as what happens in reality. In reality, seemingly insurmountable odds are often actually insurmountable and the arc of any given individual is alternately circumscribed and enhanced by countless factors, many unseen and difficult to compellingly dramatize and many more having nothing to do with a person's own actions and attitudes. Thinking on this makes me miss "The Wire" terribly--not just because it affirms my politics (which it does) but because it managed to evoke the gears and pistons of reality in a way that many fictions don't even bother trying to do.

Isn't it interesting, then, to think in the broader sense how the stories we tell over and over again become a sort of reality all their own, where our expectations of them are informed not by our experience of life but our experience of how we talk about and represent it.

Come to this

Look for me at AWP- I'm probably lighter and hairier than you remember. Or maybe not. Your memory is your own. But I do hope particularly to see you all at this.

Yes!

I was just catching up on Naomi Alderman's blog and saw this about novel writing, which struck me as very true.

Animal Farm

The creatures outside looked from pig to dog, and from dog to pig, and from pig to dog again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Wing suit base jumping

This is absolutely amazing.

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

In praise of the long sentence

One of my favorite things is to happen upon a really long sentence in a book. If I like it I always reread it, out loud if alone and sometimes if not, and maybe more than once. It's exciting finding one of those. It's like when someone in a band takes a really long solo, but the band lets it happen because they sense it needs to happen, and often the band seems to get more excited, even laughing with joy while the solo is going on. When a solo is boring, the band usually shows it on their faces and will sternly force the wandering noodler back inside the fence. A good long solo does not get boring -- the musician is not just noodling, but going somewhere with it, and it can be the most thrilling thing in music when it happens.

When I find a good long sentence -- after rereading it aloud and getting excited and folding down the bottom of the page so I know where to find it again -- I wonder why the author chose to do it, whether it was something deliberately done for some effect or whether it just rolled off that way in a moment of fulsome inspiration.

I don't like ones that are done just to show off. You can smell those a mile away. And I don't like it if you've gone 100 pages without one and then suddenly there it is -- it sticks out as an anomaly, which disqualifies it from success, in my view. You have to show you're capable of long sentences fairly early on in order for them to fit comfortably into your book. Not that many authors can get away with it, and that's probably a good thing, because there's nothing as pretentious as trying it out and failing -- you end up trying the reader's patience. Also, stringing dozens of clauses together with "and" doesn't cut it. It has to be a real, complex, shapely sentence.

What is a long sentence? I would say a sentence is long if it goes on for ten or more lines. Average line in an average book is maybe ten words, so in most cases we're talking about 100-300-word sentences. Beyond that is going too far, I think. I'm going to look at three examples I've found that I think work.

Here's the first one, exactly 100 words long. An old man is reminiscing:

It took maybe nine or ten years more of westward drift, over the rolling prairie, through the cheatgrass, the sage grouse exploding skyward, the dread silences when skies grow black in the middle of all that country, outracing cyclones and rangefires, switchbacking up the eastern slope of the Rockies through meadows of mule-ear and sneezeweed, on over the great torn crestline, to be delivered at last into these unholy mountains Webb grew to manhood in and had not left since, into whose depths he had ventured after silver and gold, up on whose heights he had struggled, always, for breath.

That is a sentence that is also a paragraph. It's like the author said, "Well, I'm going to say all this and this much only, and it all fits together, so why not have it be one thing." With a topic as big as the West itself it hardly feels like a stretch to give it a 100-word sentence. Also great, of course, is the syncopated rhythms of the phrasing and the neat-o plant names like "mule-ear" and "sneezeweed," that are so charming they create little pauses in my own reading of it, because I want to pronounce them clearly and add a little flair to their utterance in my head. This author also added a lot of commas, to slow things down even more. I end up savoring things like that. And the end is nice because it echoes, like a preacher (I'm sure there's a rhetorical technical term for this) "into whose depths" and "up on whose heights" before forcing a final screetching stall ("..., always,...') right before the last word "breath," which is naturally on the reader's mind after a sentence like that. This is a writer playing with rhythm like a poet.

Here's the second, clocking in at 237 words: It's in the third paragraph of a chapter a third of the way through a book, and it doesn't comprise, nor does it start, nor does it finish its paragraph. A faculty member at a tennis academy, Charles Tavis, has just awakened and we know he's facing a hectic day:

He stands in leather slippers at the living-room window, looking southeast past West and Center courts at the array of A-team players assembling stiffly in the gray glow, carrying gear with their heads down and some still asleep on their feet, the first bit of snout of the sun protruding through the city's little skyline far beyond them, the aluminum glints of river and sea, east, Tavis's hands working nervously around the cup of hazelnut decaf that steams upward into his face as he holds it, hair unarranged and one side hanging, high forehead up against the window's glass so he can feel the mean chill of the dawn just outside, his lips moving slightly and without sound, the thing it's not entirely impossible he may have fathered asleep up next to the sound system with its claws on its chest and four pillows for bradyapnea-afflicted breathing that sounds like soft repetitions of the words sky or ski, making no unnecessary sound, not eager to wake it and have to interface with it and have it look up at him with a terrible calm and accepting knowledge it's quite possible is nothing but Tavis's imagination, so lips moving w/o sound but breath and cup's steam spreading on the glass, and little icicles from the rainy melt of yesterday's snow hanging from the anodized gutters just above the window and seen by Tavis as a distant skyline upside-down.

I like that because it's so smooth that I really didn't notice it was so long until I got near the end of it. It is basically a zoomed-out, omniscient, characterizing description -- of the character, and what the character is looking at, along with some interior thoughts snuggled into the middle. The end, I think helpfully, restates where you were earlier ("..., so lips moving w/o sound...") in case you forgot that -- that this guy is moving his lips probably unconsciously as he's gazing at the scene he's going to have to deal with very soon this morning. And decaf -- why in the world decaf at a moment like this? Characterization. In fact the whole sentence is nothing but characterization. And this guy is about to have a hectic morning, right, so the length of the sentence reinforces the endless on-piling of crap he's starting to get ready for. The steaming cup he's holding is his only paltry defense against the large cold morning of tasks that awaits him. Sneaking in the truly important stuff about the child he may have fathered in the middle there is a cool trick. Keep the reader on her toes -- defy expectations.

The third example begins a book, setting up the possibility of more -- like brattily choosing the hugest canvas at the art supply shop. It's risky. Some will roll their eyes and never pick up the book again. But if you can make it work, your vistas open for the rest of the story:

From a little after two o'clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that -- a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shown fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.

Stunning, arresting imagery -- pure description that manages to evoke what kind of people these are. You can almost see the people, can't you? Even though none of them is described? And it fits thematically as well, as the other two examples did: we have here a most miserable, long afternoon befitting such a description. And note: one measly comma in the whole thing, yet it doesn't sound rushed or overblown.

Anyway, although best used sparingly, the long sentence is one of my favorite things about writing. I don't run into enough of them. An interesting thing would be to nose through a story or a chapter of yours and find the longest sentence. How long is it? Why is it that long? Did you do it on purpose or did it just happen? My suspicion is they are usually products of the fire in the mind that must come out in one long burst, likely for subconscious reasons, which is almost always good in writing. If you write a good long sentence, leave it alone. Don't chop it into pieces. The reader will thank you for it.

1. From Against the Day
2. From Infinite Jest
3. From Absolom, Absolom!

The governor and the glove

Received photo and following email from Ted Ganchiff, a friend in Chicago:

Yes. That is now ex-Governor Blagojevich holding my glove. I took the photo myself.

I took a train back from a physical in the north suburbs. On the train, I read that the now-Unhonorable Rod Blagojevich would be holding his final news conference outside his home, just an hour after the first impeachment in Illinois history and months of global head-shaking at how this man could have behaved so immorally.

Having lazily waved off the opportunity to experience the inspiration and hope of Obama’s recent acceptance speech just minutes from my home, I decided I would certainly not miss out on the grand finale of the soul-crushing Gubernatorial tragedy. Where I had missed serving witness to the culmination of a bold dream, I would avenge the mistake by serving witness to the death of a twisted and sad nightmare. A fair trade.

I walked from the train stop to his home, and found it besieged by news vans and klieg lights through which I soon delivered myself within arm’s reach of the man. It reminded me of sneaking to the front row of a general admission concert. I took off my right glove, and began snapping photos with my iPhone.

As the conference progressed through its predictable blather, a surprising thing happened. Rod Blagojevich began shaking hands, coming into the crowd as if campaigning for a position, instead of being voted out of one.

I would not participate in the banality. I would not shake the criminal’s hand, though my own hand was gloveless and shake-ready. So I backed off, evading him like a running back evades a linebacker, but in slow motion.

And in the process, I unknowingly dropped my damn glove.

He bent down, then stood as if addressing the citizens who had once been his to lead. “Did someone drop a glove?” I took a picture of him, holding up the glove, because it seemed such a hypocritical thing for him to do – as if he was the sort of civil person who just goes around picking up people’s gloves, out of the kindness of his heart.

My hand was really cold, so I started patting my coat pocket for my glove, and had the paralyzing thought: “Damn – that might be my glove.” I went up to him – his arm was relaxed now, at his side, but he had the glove tight, holding it as if it were his own. I knew he had stolen before – the Senate seat, medical care from needy children – so I was very much on guard. I bought that glove in Manhattan from a street vendor, perhaps a thief as well. Replacement was not a likely option.

Certain as I was about the identity of the glove, I felt, too, a creeping sense of uncertainty. As the now ex-Governor has said before the state Senate just hours before, “Have you proven a crime? Have you truly PROVEN a crime?” This man had fallen so low, and I was faced with accusing him yet again of wanting to possess that which was not his. But my glove was an icon of his civility – was it impossible to envision him in front of the court, testifying, “Would a man who returns the glove of a stranger steal so much from so many?” Could I play a part in his acquittal, by leaving him with evidence of his benevolence?

I had read on the train that his security detail had been stripped away with his governorship. I am a small man, but he is too, and I wondered if the physical struggle would go my way. But so many cameras! I would not be able to escape cleanly. And I could not say with absolute certainty that the glove was mine.

Be calm, I told myself. Convict, then punish. I taxed myself to play judge and jury all at once. I had heard him say, “Did someone drop a glove?” which suggested that he had found it. But perhaps this was a figure of speech? Like him, I work at home, and am not always quick on the uptake of new turns of phrases. A joke, perhaps it was a joke that I failed to understand? The setup had happened too fast, the klieg lights and media crush had been too disorienting. I could not hold court in this place.

Court, I thought, clawing my way through the logic. Evidence. OJ Simpson. The glove itself! Exhibit A was right before me – and it was more incriminating than any wiretap.

I took a step towards him, stood just off his right cheek, so close we could have embraced. I stooped, dropping my head, my eyes closing in to meet the glove, looking like a man trying to read a street address in the dark, if the address were a few inches from an indicted ex-governor’s crotch.

I rose. I have never felt the satisfaction of identifying a lost glove clutched by a global villain during a major press event. But I can tell you it was powerful.

We were now face to face, and our eyes met. He, who had fallen so far and stood as an example of the greed of our times, had become a worldwide whipping boy, had schemed to sell the soul of the nation. Me, a man who had suddenly found himself with only one glove. In a way, and for a moment, we were equals.

I raised my hand, but not in anger. I had learned a lifetime’s worth of lessons in an instant. There would be no violence, no accusations. There had been enough suffering.

I tapped his shoulder.

“I think that’s my glove.”

He squared his shoulders to mine. He, too, was learning from this moment. But would it be enough?

“Is this yours?”

I knew the answer to his question, and so did he, but we both knew a much larger question had been asked. And while I could not be his teacher for what was to come, I could give him one answer, one answer of which I was absolutely and completely certain.

“Yes.”

This was the first time I had ever felt that I did not take a glove – but instead, that a glove was given.

I didn’t turn to look back, as I walked away, but I knew. I knew he was watching, this man who had said too much, and only now, too late, was throttling his speech. “Wait!” he wanted to cry out. “Please, wait!”

But he and I had come too far, and, perhaps, had come together too late. He did not speak. I stayed my course.

In China, a glove might symbolize hope and renewal, but this was not China – this was Ravenswood. The night was cold, but my hand and heart were warm.

Congrats to Danielle Trussoni

Wow.

RIP John Updike

Here he discusses "A & P."

The sheer, possibly suspicious abundance of his output conspired with my indifference toward adultery in New England to prevent me from investigating much of his work while he lived, but I never would have described him, as someone once claimed his friends did, as "a penis with a thesaurus," because that's just cruel. That work of his which did manage to attract my interest was solid, even masterful ("A & P") -- or highly entertaining (Witches of Eastwick). The Rabbit books and The Centaur have been nagging me for years. Maybe I'll put aside my prejudice and tackle at least one of those. Or maybe one of his fans could enlighten me on what I've been missing. Clearly a lot of folks were ga-ga over him.

I'm sorry for his death, but if there's a silver lining, it's that this sad event should approximately double the available annual slots for publishing stories and poems.

It took 20 seasons, but...

...the Workshop was finally mentioned on The Simpsons. Thanks to the eagled-eyed T-Bone for catching this. It must have been a real slow day at the Press-Citizen. This incident joins 24's suspiciously named character "Ethan Kanin" as the Fox Network's second recent 'shop reference (note that link there, written by the lovely Lila Byock). Dunno what's up with that. Is Rupert Murdoch writing a novel?

Experiment in free beauty

I had never seen this story before, but it's apparently famous and the writer won a Pulitzer for it. What would happen if you took one of the world's greatest violinists, dressed him like a street musician, and had him play a D.C. Metro station at rush hour, on a $3.5 million Stradivarius, for 45 minutes? Probably not what you think.

101 Sub-genres?

Writers often have technique in mind when browsing for new books. Still, it's odd to come across a book-market where different literary techniques are browsable. It seems somehow respectful of literature that with a click the shelves will re-arrange themselves to bring together Time's Arrow, First Light, and Being Dead. At the same time, thematic pigeonholes such as:

Family & Friendship : family, general
Family & Friendship : sisters
Human Qualities & Behavior : loneliness
Literary Genres & Types of Novels : psychological realism

seem unlikely to lead to the purchase of Easter Parade.

I guess I'm intrigued because I like to imagine a very eccentric bookstore with all manner of odd shelves, some helpful, like an idiosyncratic seminar on novels that take place in 24 hours or in Hollywood; other shelves not so helpful, such as one that collected together various fictions that take place primarily or completely in the dark.

Hypergrammatical myth mars history

In wry NYT op-ed called "Oaf of Office," psychologist Steve Pinker identifies and chides Chief Justice Roberts' fussy split-verb copy editing of the U.S. Constitution.

In his legal opinions, Chief Justice Roberts has altered quotations to conform to his notions of grammaticality, as when he excised the “ain’t” from Bob Dylan’s line “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” On Tuesday his inner copy editor overrode any instincts toward strict constructionism and unilaterally amended the Constitution by moving the adverb “faithfully” away from the verb.

Coupla warmups

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

President hearts Marilynne Robinson

The Plunge alerted me to this article on Obama and the books he admires -- one of which is Gilead.

Inaugural Metaphors

I've been thinking about this US Airways thing as a timely metaphor. Over the last eight years we've gotten used to tough situations yielding inevitably horrible results. Here was yer another all but inevitably horrible situation--something so ready to grimly punctuate all the other economy economy economy economy fuck fuck fuck news reporting--and it turned out about as well as it could have. Turns out this Captain Sullenberger is a serious badass.

Competence is a wonderful thing. We'd forgotten that and now we all remember. But this is also what Tolkien called a eucatastrophe-- a sudden turn of events for the better, or really, the best. A piece that has been in the story all along has come to the fore, and it will save us.

I hope. I've adjusted my expectations of the future so that now I'd be happy just to have grandchildren living life in the relative comfort I've so far been afforded. I want them to have decent schools, a physically safe environment, readily available drinking water. It seems like such a low bar, doesn't it? I want to wish them more than that.

I worry by my nature. What I need to worry about and what I don't is a taxonomy subject to a constant negotiation in my mind. It goes between two parts of me, one willing to be the rube and the other not. Each argues its case to a fault. But I'm ready for the rube to be right more often.

Earth Goat turns four

I just realized that this blog turned four years old on January 12. That's pretty old for a blog, no?

Thanks to all the contributors and commenters over the years. A lot of hilarious and inspiring stuff has been written here. It's been a real pleasure to have a place where we can all stay in touch when the spirit moves us. And how about a shout out to the Blogfather -- Pete -- whose terrific Babies Are Fireproof was the template and inspiration.

Things have quieted down. The election warped our focus, and summers bring us close to flatlining. Lots of people have their own blogs now, and Facebooking has replaced a lot of the stuff we used to do here, but many workshop blogs have come and gone, and we're still kicking. Not to get all sentimental, but that says something really good about the IWW classes of 2003 and 2004.

Some stats:

* 976 original posts, one of which cracked 100 comments
* Several blips in the media early on
* 203,076 visits
* 109 visits per day average

We are now preparing for our descent into Year 5. Please return your tray tables and chairs to their former upright, locked positions. I know you have a choice in blogs, and I'd like to thank you for choosing Earth Goat. I hope to see you again in the future.

Art where you least expect it

My friend Dave Kendall is an artist from my hometown in Indiana. When I say artist, I mean almost everything he does somehow relates to art, even, in this case, getting a haircut. The man literally lives inside his artistic vision. He's a real inspiration. He's also a painter, photographer, and filmmaker. You can see more of his work at the eydart gallery in Indianapolis.

Here's a drawing:

More Than Half of American Adults Read Fiction

When is the parade?

I feel like this story comes out every few months. Well, here's some good news for a change.

Now how long before Grendel posts some dispiriting link about how 90% of Dutch adults read fiction and 10% publish?

Chimpanzee ridin' on a Segway

Chimpanzee ridin' on a Segway.

(Safety helmet tip to gwarbot.)

Our superhero president

As if we needed more proof... The issue "Amazing Spider-Man #583" qualifies as a guaranteed future collector's item if anything ever did. On sale Jan. 14.

By the way, anyone ever read Alan Moore's Watchmen? It was my X-mas gift to myself -- it arrived two days ago. So far I'm just trying to sort out the dramatis personae, who have surprisingly been introduced sort of textually, and not through character-driven action as expected...

Wait for it

I was wondering when this piece would get written.

Good thing Boog does such a great job of getting past the inevitably recurrent "but seriously, publishing is fucked and this time we really mean it" trope. He navigates pretty quickly to the more interesting question: who might benefit from a genuine shakeup of the industry? He suggests--rightly, I think--that it will be independents working from a model of low advances, high royalties and modest print runs.

That's not to say the road is clear for the indies. Just last summer the knell was ringing for them, what with the PGW bankruptcy and the postal hike. But I hope he's right. Every time I hear news of a humongous advance--for Joe the Plumber or whoever-- my imagination is drowned in a quantity of quantities: next year's backrooms and the stacked returns (and/or remainders), the money itself and, most personally, the legions of more worthy writers who could have been buoyed by some small fraction of it.

Millionth word on its way

The Economist is skeptical about calculations that English is about to become the first million-word language, because nobody agrees on the criteria. But there seems to be little doubt that it is the world's biggest language, partly due to its complete lack of regulation. So be sure to use it for Good, not Evil.

(Aside: Having the Oxford American College Dictionary and American Thesaurus of Current English ($14.99) on the iPhone is, to this word-worker, itself worth the ridiculous toy's price. No more being all eh, fuck it, I don't really need to know what cunctation and prognathous mean because I can't be arsed to haul out one of the many cumbersome dead-pressed-tree volumes that clutter house and weigh down backpack. Takes me five seconds to look up a word, anywhere I am, and it's totally speeding up my trip through Infinite Jest. (The complete OED is not yet available as an app. Emphasis on yet.))

Top Ten Dutch Grocery Store Items of 2008

10. "Vla." Vla is pudding you can drink, make no mistake about that. Another fine product from the folks at Stabilac. You'll want to go ahead and finish both liters.


9. "6 Hot Dogs American Style." Because jars of pickled "Würstchen Vom Lande" are the biggest sellers at baseball stadiums and carnivals across the USA.


8. "Schmackos." Pictured are the Four Schmackos of the Apocalypse, coming to either smite or Rapture this dog. Let's hope for Rapturing because he looks like a good dog.


7. "Havermout." It makes Cream of Wheat look like oatmeal. Perfect for camping in grain fields.


6. "Rijstwafels met Zeezout." Kids here don't scream for ice cream. They scream for rice waffles with sea salt.


5. "Elmex." After all that grazing, you're gonna want to brush your teeth with Elmex ... if you're a monkey between the ages of 0 and 4, that is -- or between 0 and 5.


4. "American Style Big Pizza Texas Pepperoni - Salami." You can't go anywhere in Texas without stumbling over fluffy-based pepperoni-salami pizzas.


3. "Smac." What your lips do when you see it.


2. "Choco Choco's." Hold on, aren't dogs allergic to chocolate? Maybe not cartoon dogs.


1. "Nutrilon." Made from polar bear cubs and "Immunofortis" shields, Nutrilon doesn't sound like something you want to feed your baby. It sounds like something you want to feed an alien cyborg baby. ("And what about the Nutrilon tanks?" "19% and dropping, sir. Nearest resupply station appears to be ... Arcturus 14." "Set a course for Arcturus 14.")

60 Minutes: Obama's Road to the White house

This is for those like me, who didn't or couldn't watch it but want to at some point. I feel myself already taking it all for granted, and this is a reminder of how improbable it was. (Note "60 Minutes" is actually just over 43 minutes.)


Watch CBS Videos Online

Happy holidays

I snapped this photo last night as Haarlem ushered in Hannukah, with the burgermeester introducing a rabbi who lit the shamash (thanks, Wikipedia!). I indicate the different layers of religious imagery in this single photo, spanning paganism/shamanism's World Tree that stretches back into pre-history, to Judaism's commemoration of the rededication of the Holy Temple in the 2nd century BC, to the St. Bavo's church which started life as a Catholic cathedral in 1559 but was seized and converted to a Protestant church 20 years later (by basically destroying stained glass and statues). Who says God is dead? Quite the contrary, He just seems to get more complicated, even here in secular Europe. When the Islamic Caliphate of Europe is established, I will grab a shot of the new big gold onion dome.

Elizabeth Alexander to compose, recite inaugural poem

Anyone know her work? She's professor of African-American Studies at Yale. I had been wondering who would be "Obama's poet." Here's a little background on her selection. She seems to have won plenty of prizes and honors, but after a quick scan of these poems on her Web site I'm a little underwhelmed. However, there's no accounting for taste, and she has to be a better choice than the one made for the invocation.

Robert Frost delivered the first inaugural poem in 1961, Miller Williams the last in 1997. Dubya, whose favorite poems are almost certainly limericks, dropped the idea -- one imagines him crinkling his nose and cracking frat-boy wise when the possibility was brought up in a meeting. For my money, this is the bar, set in 1993, that any inaugural poet needs to clear:

Yes, Virginia

There are 200 Santa Clauses.

Anyone Watch Californication?

Supposedly, some of the students decided to start referring to me as Runkel, from the show, Californication.

In an effort to find out how much vengeance this requires, I searched around and found out the character is an agent, completely bald, and was fired for masturbating, but that's all I can come up with.

Since I have long, Fabio-like locks, I figure it can't be the bald thing, I have never been an agent -- so that leaves the masturbating, which I of course limit to public rest areas and the bathrooms of friends, so that can't be it either.

Any of you television junkies have some helpful insight? Should I be upset or amused?

136 years of Popular Science free online

Wow. Every issue, going back to 1872. The ads alone... the designs alone... This is why I love/hate the Internet. Like I need another perfect way to spend time on it? Click the pic here, then choose your decade, choose your issue, and click the mag cover that pops up top.

Filming Revolutionary Road

With Yates' masterpiece being released for the screen in two weeks, I thought it was time to revisit this little gem in Salon that delves into a bit of the history behind the film, which has been "trying" to be made for 37 years. Winslet and DiCaprio together again for the first time since Titanic ... and they choose this film, which surely is the very antithesis? Can it be done well for the screen? Thinking back to American Beauty makes me think: just maybe.

Workshop TV series

We may have lost Live from Prairie Lights, but this might prove almost as cool. From the EG sheriff's inbox:

"Conversations from the Iowa Writers' Workshop," a new series produced by the University of Iowa Center for Media Production, will debut on the Big Ten Network Thursday, Dec. 11, at 3 p.m. with additional cablecasts Monday, Dec. 15 at 3 a.m. and Wednesday, Dec. 17 at 9 a.m.

Hosted by Kecia Lynn -- up first: Curtis Sittenfeld. There's a preview clip on YouTube, and that link will also have online versions of the show as it develops. I'm adding the link permanently to the "Things to look at" area in the right sidebar.

MFA Wars

Hey, you stole my poet!

Killing Joke

Three's a trend, right? So who knew it was so easy to prank world leaders?

Timothy Egan states the obvious

But does it matter?

Regarding Joe the Plumber's upcoming book and Sarah Palin's rumored advance:

"Publishers: with all the grim news of layoffs and staff cuts at the venerable houses of American letters, can we set some ground rules for these hard times? Anyone who abuses the English language on such a regular basis should not be paid to put words in print."

Lila in NYer

The lovely Lila Byock has a piece in the current NYer.

Your Neighborhood Bibliographer Wants to Know

What do you consider the best instructional texts in creative writing (particularly in poetry and creative non-fiction)?

News item

Oldest stash ever found

789 grams with "relatively high THC content" was found in a 2,700-year-old shaman's tomb in China. At 7 euros per gram (average at the shop down the street), that's around 5500 euros -- $7000 worth of herb to help the feller get through the afterlife.

100 notable books of 2008

have been listed by the NYT. Among them books by Marilynne Robinson, Nam Le, Curtis Sittenfeld, Elizabeth McCracken, and Chris Adrian -- plus a sequel to The Witches of Eastwick and story collections by Tobias Wolff, Cynthia Ozick, and Annie Proulx. And new novels from Jim Harrison, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and Aleksander Hemon. Lots of gift ideas here.

What did you read from this year that was notable?

A new voice in poetry

Via Andrew Sullivan, Julian Gough celebrates Sarah Palin, poet.

The Other Democracy that matters in 2008

I'm on my second listen and I think I like enough of these songs to say the album is a success. But ultimately the "how" of this album is important enough that it might very well overshadow the "what."

Aside from this ruining the premise of my serial-noir (which, you know, is fine with me) I recognize that this album is art of a sort that rarely exists in the mainstream anymore: obsessively conceived and produced in epic toil. Fifteen years, people. It's like he's some sort of a novelist!

The time signature on that is just lusciously alien in 2008, when instant gratification (and disposal) are the default means of consumption. Add to that the fact that Axl--perhaps in another anachronism--seems in middle age to be every bit as incapable of irony, self-deprecating or otherwise, as he was in his brash youth, and you have a work of such pure earnest that I can't help but think of it as heroic. That a good number of you will scoff at such overstatement is part of what makes it real. This isn't just about greatness but also grandeur.

Maybe that makes it sound better.

City of Literature

Yesterday, the director-general of UNESCO approved Iowa City's application to the Creative Cities network:

"The panel of experts that evaluated the application of Iowa City recognized this University (sic) town’s unique profile as a creative writing and reading centre with impressive history of literary accomplishments. The community’s strategic commitment to literary culture through the diversity of grassroots initiatives, such as the Iowa’s Writers Workshop (sic) and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, was highly regarded as an instructional model and inspiration for other small cities to promote local economic and socio-cultural development through creative industries."

Bring on Dublin!

Doty, Matthiessen collect NBAs

Marilynne was a finalist, but alas no cigar. Interesting that Matthiessen's two NBAs were three decades apart! Now that's a career.

Writers on our writer-president-elect

An AP story from shortly after the election. I read and liked The Audacity of Hope -- it was a tad weaselly in parts, but I think that's understandable from someone running for national office. However, it was clearly written very well, by someone who knows the power and beauty of the well-chosen word. The better book it seems is Dreams from my Father, which I haven't read. I'd like to get hold of some of his poems that were supposedly praised by Harold Bloom.

A Real Pushover for Memory

Derrcules reminded me this morning via email of his favorite passage from Please Kill Me:

"Leee Childers: The Heartbreakers and I were at Caroline Coon's house for Christmas dinner. She was a journalist and she had money. And we were rock performers and we had none. On Christmas Day in London, everything shuts down. There are no buses, there are no subways. How are poor people supposed to go visit their relatives? It really is cruel. There's only taxis, and they're double fare. So we scraped our pences together and got a taxi to Caroline Coon's house because then she would at least feed us.

But once we were there, we were trapped. Along with every other punk rock band in London at the time. The Clash were all there, the Damned were all there, the Sex Pistols were all there. Everyone was at Caroline Coon's house. She was trying to make herself the queen of punk. She was an awful woman.

The whole Christmas dinner was set up to seduce Paul Simonon from the Clash. Which she got away with. She got laid. So that's fine. I've done worse.

Oh, everyone was very well behaved. They literally behaved just the same as other people all over England were behaving on Christmas. They just looked weird, that's all. Caroline was having the Christmas pudding in her basement, the ground floor in her language, and so they had just set it on fire and everyone was standing around waiting for it to burn before they served it. And I heard Jim Reeves drifting down through the stairwell singing...Jim Reeves' songs.

Who's Jim Reeves? Oh you little rock & rolll neophytes! Jim Reeves was one of the great country singers of all time, killed in a plane crash in 1964. He sang, 'Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone./Tell your friend you've got there with you, you've got to go.'

And I began to cry, like I'm crying now, because I'm a real pushover for memory. So I walk up the stairs to the second floor, which is the third floor in American language, and there was this little guy, just sitting there crying. So I sat down opposite him. And I cried too.

And when the song was over, I said, 'I can't tell you what that meant to me, because I'm from Kentucky, and I know my family is listening to Jim Reeves right now. Hi. I'm Leee Childers.'

And he said, 'Hi, I'm Sid Vicious.'"

It really might be the best book ever.

What if They Tie?

From Fivethirtyeight.com:

Using the Daily Kos estimate that 52.5% of recounted ballots will go to Franken (after dropping votes for third parties), we estimate a net gain of 206 votes for him, which is almost exactly the margin by which he presently trails Norm Coleman. (The margin is in fact exactly 206 votes as of this writing).

Possible tiebreakers: guessing the total points scored in the next Monday Night Football game, paper-rock-scissors (two out of three), cage match, runoff.

It's scary and fun when every vote matters.

Obama is bad for comedy

Not funny.

No more "Live from Prairie Lights"

Iowa Public Radio gives the show the heave-ho.

The Chicago White House

Here's Obama's likely new press secretary, Robert Gibbs, an Alabama native turned Chicagoan:



Oh, didn't some people worry that Obama would prove too conciliatory and deferential and accommodating, too namby-pamby, too lofty and ethereal and weak and hesitant and appeasing and cowering and effete and prissy? Didn't they claim that because he knows how to craft powerful language he would naturally allow the White House to be helplessly overrun by prancing pink unicorns snorting liberal fairy dust? And didn't the Republicans hope those things were true?

Ha ha ha ha ha! Add this cool customer Gibbs to David Axelrod as the Good Karl Rove of the North, and the pitbull Rahm "Dead! Dead! Dead!" Emanuel (whom we have to thank for a Democratic Congress) running the White House ... and it looks like open season on unicorns as well as Republicans. The Onion begins to resonate: "THE ADULTS HAVE COME BACK! WE ARE NOT HOME ALONE ANYMORE!"

These are seasoned power brokers ... from Chicago ... these are people that have nearly run the Republican party out of Illinois. They are cutthroat characters, ruthless, smart, merciless about getting things done. They just finished dispatching Clinton and McCain -- the two most powerful politicians in America -- and they are just getting warmed up. I am starting to think they'll make Rove and Cheney look like Laurel and Hardy. But what about bipartisanship? the Republicans are already whining. Well! It will be bipartisanship from a solid position of strength, it looks like. Meanwhile, Obama will be providing the overall leadership and be out there making with the soaring rhetoric that the country is now addicted to. I think it's about to dawn on people what a very, very good thing it is that we have done in making this unusual choice at the ballot box.

That said, it's awfully white and male so far (okay, make it two Jews and a Southerner). I want a lot of women and minorities in that cabinet and on the Supreme Court.

A man of few words

Even Bob Dylan is getting a little verklempt over this change thing:

"I was born in 1941," he said, a wavering sentimentality in his scratchy voice. "That was the year they bombed Pearl Harbor. I've been living in darkness ever since. It looks like things are going to change now."

Change.gov

Visit the Office of the President-Elect online. You can even apply for jobs!

Election renders Morissey song outdated

His song "America Is Not the World" from the surprisingly good You Are the Quarry album contains these lines:

In America, the land of the free, they said,
And of opportunity, in a just and a truthful way.
But where the president is never black, female or gay,
and until that day,
you've got nothing to say to me, to help me believe.

Also these:

Steely blue eyes with no love in them, scan the world,
And a humourless smile, with no warmth within, greets the world.
And I, I have got nothing, to offer you
No-no-no-no-no, just this heart deep and true, which you say you don't need.

My favorite lines:

... America, it brought you the hamburger.
Well, America, you know where you can shove your hamburger.

To be fair, it ends like this:

And I love you,
I love you,
I love you.
And I love you,
I love you,
I love you.

High Grade Crack

The Newsweek Election Project, out now.

Were the Bush years worth this?

I just caught myself saying this is so great it almost makes eight years of Bush worth it. Like Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction talking about someone keying his car: "It'd almost be worth him doing it, just so I could catch him doing it. " I asked myself, "Self, if you could go back and control election night, 2000 and be offered the proposition that if you let Bush barely win two terms, you will be rewarded with a solid and decisive win in 2008 by a brilliant, liberal, biracial writer -- would you do it?" My instinct is to say hell yes.

But if I knew what I know now, there's no way I could accept the suffering of so many innocent people around the world, especially the millions of refugees in Iraq and Afghanistan. So I would have to say no -- give it to Gore, who would probably have been a damned good president. Obama would still be out there ready to run a little later in life.

Not knowing what I know now, however, I might have to say yes. Bush back then seemed okay, not my cup of tea but certainly not evil or anything. I'd think: He couldn't screw things up too bad, and I think I'd take the bargain.

Goats for Obama

So chad and I braved the rally downtown last night. There were probably 100K digital cameras going, everyone trying to capture something of the spirit of the night. Impossible, really. They're saying 250K people, but it felt so much larger than that. When the newscasts called the election for Obama, the roar that rose from Grant Park must have rolled across the empty darkness of Lake Michigan and woken up people on the far shore. Astonishing. So much good will. So many good people. So much joy and hope. And for this flood to march afterward into the giant boulevards of Chicago was incredible. It was a perfect and beautiful night in a lot of ways.

Here are a few photos I took. (I have no idea who those goat people are but that's cool, eh?)

Champaign, IL

Walking to the election party, listening to results.



1230ish am-it's over

A surprisingly moving thing about this...

...was spending part of the morning scrolling through the international front pages at the Newseum. I find it strange but mostly wonderful that as these catastrophic last eight years come to an end, the rest of the planet - which in that time we've systematically beshitted, scorned, and generally treated like uninvited guests who are taking too long to leave - would be so moved and hopeful about what happened yesterday. (Amsterdammers, I don't know which way Het Parool leans most of the time, but its cover this morning was particularly lovely.) People still care about this place - or better yet, we're still capable of doing things worth praising:

They did it. They really did it. So often crudely caricatured by others, the American people yesterday stood in the eye of history and made an emphatic choice for change for themselves and the world.

Election night Amsterdam

President Obama

I Voted for Kodos

Anyone else see that hologram thing on CNN? It's like they're finally admitting they broadcast from a space ship.

Investors love likely Obama win

Stock market stages biggest election day rally in 24 years.

Exit polling

Remember how excited we all were in 2004 when the exit polls leaked?  Nate Silver from 538(translating the info from Pollster.com) gives us the lowdown on why not to pay attention to them this year.  Interesting stuff.  (And 538 is a great site, for those of you who haven't yet discovered it.)

Regardless of what the exit polls say, I am excited and hopeful.  NPR says statewide turnout in CA is expected to be 85%.  NO ON 8!

Revere, MA

My friend Berto recounts his experience voting this morning.

Write-in for DFW

It's going to be a long day at Holy Cross Church, my polling place. Already at 6:15 AM there was a line out the door, and it took about three lines and 50 minutes just to get a ballot. Says the man with bleary eyes and a cell phone holstered to his hip, "Shit, If I'd known it was going to be like this, I'd be selling hot dogs."

After the first line, there was some confusion over which line one should next join. An old man in a janitor's uniform and an FDNY hat got upset about this, and the election judge, in true bureaucratic fashion, calmly claimed to understand. Of course she wasn't telling him which line he should be in, probably because she didn't know, nor was she making any effort to find out. So one could make the case that she did not understand at all. Which the old man did. "I'm confused, and I don't think I'm the only one, but I'm man enough to admit it." A got him in the right line.

One woman Adrienne saw ("middle aged, bad sweater, bespectacled," she reports) was complaining about the DEMO ballot. "I want a ballot with republicans on it," she indignantly complained to the same judge. "This only has democrats." The demo ballot included elections for "Best Celebrity Basketball Coach" and "Best Champaign-Urbana Native," for which George Will, I noticed, had been nominated, along with Alison Krouse, Bonnie Blair, and Roger Ebert. DFW was notably absent.

"I want an official ballot," the woman said. "This one is democrats only."

"You can't have an official ballot until you get to the end of the next line," said the judge.

"I want an official ballot! You have to give me one!"

A, foreseeing the later call to Rush Limbaugh, explained what the judge refused to. "These aren't democrats, they're celebrities. The only point of the demo ballot is to show you how to fill in the bubble. You'll get a real one before you go into the booth."

Anyway, things seemed to be going a little smoother by the time we were leaving. I don't know if they reset those counters at any point during the day, but my ballot was 170 something just after 7 am.

Let's get it done, folks. Yes we can, yes we will, yes we did.

Happy Election Day!

Bonus points for anyone who can tell me what Biden's image stands for.

I'm sorry to bump traca's and Pete's posts, but I hope there are a lot more posts today and tonight, and lots of photos of this truly historic day. Local thoughts this morning: Last night here, as Obama's grandmother headed toward glory, Leonard Cohen, 74, sailed through a 2.5-hour show that would shame folks 1/3 his age. "What an honor it is to be back in Rotterdam," he said. "It's been fifteen years since I was last here. I was sixty back then, just a kid with a crazy dream."

When he sang "Hallelujah" I was abruptly lifted by the angels, and sobbed uncontrollably in my chair, overcome by the realization that these years of wandering in the desert are finally over, that we are approaching the promised land where we can begin to rebuild all we've destroyed and lost and squandered. As if reading my mind he then played, as I had hoped, "Democracy," which he said was his "love letter to the USA." Some lovely person at the Swedish show caught these two songs together, and it is amazing. The old poet has actually gotten better at singing since his years on Mt. Baldy.



Many may know this version of "Hallelujah" better, or Bow Jenkins'.

Here are the lyrics to "Democracy" -- let them lift your heart this day!

It's coming through a hole in the air,
from those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It's coming from the feel
that this ain't exactly real,
or it's real, but it ain't exactly there.
From the war against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming through a crack in the wall;
on a visionary flood of alcohol;
from the staggering account
of the Sermon on the Mount
which I don't pretend to understand at all.
It's coming from the silence
on the dock of the bay,
from the brave, the bold, the battered
heart of Chevrolet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming from the sorrow in the street,
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin'
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
From the wells of disappointment
where the women kneel to pray
for the grace of God in the desert here
and the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on.

It's coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It's here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it's here they got the spiritual thirst.
It's here the family's broken
and it's here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming from the women and the men.
O baby, we'll be making love again.
We'll be going down so deep
the river's going to weep,
and the mountain's going to shout Amen!
It's coming like the tidal flood
beneath the lunar sway,
imperial, mysterious,
in amorous array:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on ...

I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can't stand the scene.
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay,
I'm junk but I'm still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

The world has spoken

This is the first election eve that's found me giddy in a long time (helps that I'm going to a Leonard Cohen show). I feel increasingly sure of getting what I want, which is pretty amazing as it is the biggest political wish I've ever had. And I look forward to it almost as I looked forward to learning how being married felt -- I know it will be great, but I really can’t be more specific than that until it happens. But here's a taste: For the last several months, 'The Economist' has been hosting a global electoral college in which readers from 195 countries participated. The results are not surprising but are still extremely uplifting: of the 55,000 votes cast, Obama took 44,000. Ninety percent in favour of Obama. He nabbed 9,115 delegates to McCain’s shoddy 203. (For the curious, McCain won Cuba, Algeria, the Congo, and Iraq. I’m thinking they’d just like to fight with him.) Enjoy your election day -- it’s going to be amazing.

Over your shoulder

That Studs Terkel thing I found got me thinking: who will be over my shoulder when I'm in the booth voting in this historic election? It's a personal question, I think, and it would probably be cheapened were I to answer it out loud, or at least cheapened by my self-consciousness at answering it out loud. But wondering out loud-- that's another thing altogether.

The truth is there are a lot of people. Family; historic figures; and yes, fictional characters. Maybe it's silly, but I'm making a list and I will be reciting it to myself in the booth before I cast my vote.

Who will be over your shoulder? You can answer if you're inclined to. Or maybe just think about it.

Somebody's gotta remember

Studs Terkel less than two weeks ago:

The important thing is memory. You know in this country, we all have Alzheimer's. Obama has got to remember his days as an organizer. It all comes back to the neighborhood. Well I hope the election is a landslide for Obama.

A good note for going into Tuesday. I'm kind of sad that he didn't make it to Wednesday- get to see it. So let's all see it for him then.