Burnin’

Darby and I have been intently viewing seasons one through four of HBO’s The Wire (care of Netflix), which leaves just season five to go. I’m afraid we’re already dreading the end of the series. We don’t want it to end, the way you don’t want a great novel to end. But end it must.

In preparation for this coming conclusion of what one critic calls the “greatest TV show ever made,” I’ve begun searching for and processing the criticism.

Mark Bowden of The Atlantic called the show’s co-creator, David Simon, “the angriest man in television.” In an interview with Bill Moyers on PBS, Simon says he doesn’t mind “being called that” and asks rhetorically if there’s a better response to the America of the last decade.

Bowden also makes note of the literary form advanced by The Wire.

Some years ago, Tom Wolfe called on novelists to abandon the cul-de-sac of modern “literary” fiction, which he saw as self-absorbed, thumb-sucking gamesmanship, and instead to revive social realism, to take up as a subject the colossal, astonishing, and terrible pageant of contemporary America. I doubt he imagined that one of the best responses to this call would be a TV program, but the boxed sets blend nicely on a bookshelf with the great novels of American history.

It’s a point well taken. I’ve often thought that Shakespeare, were he alive today, would be successful in Hollywood. It’s also interesting to understand Simon’s background as a reporter at The Baltimore Sun. For 12 years the man told detailed, well researched, fact-filled stories, but those stories didn’t change policy in City Hall, Annapolis or Washington, DC. Simon isn’t holding his breath to see these changes come as a result of his TV show either. He sees the problems in America (like the failed War on Drugs that his show dramatizes) as systemic, and argues that conditions will have to become much worse before they get better.

Here, let’s listen to the man:

Simon says our economy doesn’t need the underclass, and that’s why these urban black communities have been pushed completely from the frame of American life. He’s right about the extreme marginalization, but I would counter that this nation does need the underclass and that poor, under-educated workers can become productive and change their station in life and possibly the country’s future in the process.

President Obama is conducting a “jobs summit” this week to help spur jobs training and jobs creation. In my opinion, we need to get off our collective ass now and institute a 1930s-style public works program. It doesn’t take a genius to see how much work there is to do. The nation’s roads and bridges need repairs and we must build high speed rail from Seattle to San Diego and from Miami to Boston. Moving to energy, the nation’s entire electrical grid needs to be refitted to store and conduct DC current produced by solar and wind. And the list goes on. Meanwhile, little progress is made.

In one episode of The Wire, “Bunny,” of Baltimore city police, says he doesn’t know what the answer is to getting kids off the corner and returning the streets to the citizens of Baltimore, only that it can’t be a lie. That’s correct, and it can’t be a lie in real life. Yet, empire is a lie. The wars to maintain it are a lie. The war on drugs is a lie. Saying we don’t have the resources nor the will to house the homeless, feed the hungry and care for the uninsured is a lie.

It’s easy to get fired up by The Wire, and that art’s role in society—to challenge us, to make us think, and help us to care. On these fronts, HBO’s gritty crime drama is a huge success.

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald

Law professor William J. Quirk, writing in The American Scholar, examined F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tax returns from 1919–1940 and came away with a detailed portrait of a rich man–perhaps unexpectedly, for Fitzgerald portrayed the rich from close physical proximity, but with (mostly devastating) emotional distance.

Quirk’s direct examination of the writer’s records indicate:

• Until 1937 he kept a ledger—as if he were a grocer—a meticulous record of his earnings from each short story, play, and novel he sold. The 1929 ledger recorded items as small as royalties of $5.10 from the American edition of The Great Gatsby and $0.34 from the English edition.
• The publication of This Side of Paradise when he was 23 immediately put Fitzgerald’s income in the top 2 percent of American taxpayers. Thereafter, for most of his working life, he earned about $24,000 a year, which put him in the top 1 percent of those filing returns. Today, a taxpayer would have to earn at least $500,000 to be in the top 1 percent.
• His best novels, The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934), did not produce much income. Royalties from The Great Gatsby totaled only $8,397 during Fitzgerald’s lifetime.

Fitzgerald wrote short stories for magazines to earn money which provided him the freedom to pursue less well paying but artistically significant works. He also moved to Los Angeles and wrote scripts for the studios. During his Hollywood years, he was never paid less than $1,000 a week. By contrast, Warner Bros., in the 1940s, paid William Faulkner $300 a week.

Also by comparison, I received a check in the mail from Google today for $100.73. According to Technorati, I’m among the 28% of bloggers, a.k.a. writers, who make some amount of cash from their efforts today. That’s a lot of people making a little bit of money, when the trick–one clearly mastered by Fitzgerald–is to be one of the few writers making lots of money.

Books are like babies. They take time to conceive, develop and eventually stand on their own.

According to The New York Times, a star of the print media business–now deep into her first big digital project–thinks she can speed the incubation process up considerably.

In a joint venture with Perseus Books Group, The Daily Beast is forming a new imprint, Beast Books, that will focus on publishing timely titles by Daily Beast writers — first as e-books, and then as paperbacks on a much shorter schedule than traditional books.

“There is a real window of interest when people want to know something,” Ms. Brown said. “And that window slams shut pretty quickly in the media cycle.”

Perseus is paying The Daily Beast a five-figure management advance to cover the costs of editing and designing the books, and Perseus will distribute the titles through its existing sales force. The writers will receive low five-figure advances from Perseus, then split profits from the sale of both the e-books and paperbacks with Perseus and The Daily Beast.

The imprint’s first book, scheduled to be published as an e-book in December and a paperback in January, is “Attack of the Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America,” by John P. Avlon.

“The Raconteurs of Madison County” is a title I came up with one day, after encountering the Web site Name Your Tale.

Name Your Tale asks for a title and if they like it, one of the site’s writers creates “a very short story, in fact, exactly 100 words.” Jenny Nicholson, who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and works in advertising by day, “while plotting world domination at night,” was kind enough to write to my title idea.

Name Your Tale was started by Nick Faber. Jeremy Griffin is also part of the project.

On other micro fiction fronts, we have Two Sentence Stories, Fifty Word Stories and Six Word Stories.

I just submitted three “six word stories” for consideration. They are:

• Will work for mansion in Wilmette.
• It takes beer to make wine.
• Before Twitter she did not type.

Maybe these bits will be digitally elevated on Six Word Stories. Or maybe I need to work harder to get away from bumper sticker copy. Either way, it’s a fun exercise and I appreciate the efforts of those involved.

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff’ goes on sale June 2, 2009. In the meantime, here’s a trailer for the book to pique our interest:

I like that “create your own currency” idea. Sounds like Rushkoff has some radical, but right on, advice.

Here’s how the book begins:

Commerce is good. It’s the way people create and exchange value.

Corporatism is something else entirely. Though not completely distinct from commerce or the free market, the corporation is a very specific entity, first chartered by monarchs for reasons that have very little to do with helping people carry out transactions with one another. Its purpose, from the beginning, was to suppress lateral interactions between people or small companies and instead redirect any and all value they created to a select group of investors.

This agenda was so well embedded into the philosophy, structure, and practice of the earliest chartered corporations that it still characterizes the activity of both corporations and real people today. The only difference today is that most of us, corporate chiefs included, have no idea of these underlying biases, or how automatically we are compelled by them. That’s why we have to go back to the birth of the corporation itself to understand how the tenets of corporatism established themselves as the default social principles of our age.

Rushkoff is the author of ten books on media, technology, and society. He also made the PBS Frontline documentaries Merchants of Cool, The Persuaders, and the upcoming Digital Nation.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve long dreamed of an escape from cubicle nation. Yet, it’s a long, dark passage from here to there. Thankfully, there’s a new book to help show the way—Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur by Pamela Slim.

Guy Kawasaki spoke to Slim about some of the challenges of starting a new business. American Express’ Open Forum has the interview in its entirety, but here’s an important segment:

Question: How do you decide which business to start?

Answer: Business ideas are a dime a dozen. From my perspective, which is firmly rooted in the idea that the purpose of a business is to allow you to live the kind of life that makes you happy, healthy, wise, and wealthy—or at least well-fed, a good business idea has four components. First, it is rooted in something you are passionate about and which energizes you. Entrepreneurship is too darn hard to manufacture enthusiasm. Second, you have the skill and competence to make it happen—or at least a really great contact list of smart and enthusiastic friends to help you figure it out. Third, you need to do enough business planning to know whom you are trying to serve, and how you are going to make money. Finally, you want a business model that you have the resources to support and that delivers the life you want to live.

In my own experience, the “how you are going to make money” part is absolutely critical. Without that, you end up with a time consuming hobby, not a business.

I like to meet other writers, particularly writers that have scaled the book mountain.

image courtesy of Dharma Communications

Tom Crum, the writer I picked up at PDX on Thursday, has scaled said mountain three times and he tells me it’s all about having a deadline and the discipline to meet it.

Crum has lived in Aspen for 40 years. He taught mathematics to Hunter S. Thompson’s kid, worked in business, established a Martial Arts school, co-founded the Windstar Foundation with singer John Denver, and founded Aiki Works, a company which provides motivational speaking, workshops, publications and other services to aid people in their becoming more effective, happier, more centered humans.

His first book, The Magic of Conflict: Turning a Life of Work into a Work of Art was a best seller. Crum is also the author of Journey to Center: Lessons in Unifying Body, Mind, and Spirit and Three Deep Breaths: Finding Power and Purpose in a Stressed-Out World.

He was in Portland to give a keynote at Living Future ‘09 put on by Cascadia Region Green Building Council, Darby’s employer and the group responsible for the “Living Building” designation, which pushes green building standards beyond LEED Platinum.

The Wall Street Journal is offering a little lifestyle essay from novelist and short story writer, Thomas McGuane.

McGuane in many ways is a close literary relative of Jim Harrison. Interestingly, both hail from Michigan, where hunting and fishing are practically a religion. Maybe the fact that I hail from Nebraska—where hunting and fishing is absolutely a religion, along with football—makes me a prime candidate to be a big fan of these unabashedly western writers.

In the Journal piece, McGuane speaks eloquently about his two dogs, Abby and Daisy, the Pointer Sisters.

Bird dogs plead with you to imagine the great things you could be doing together. Their delight is a lesson in the bliss of living. As Bob Dylan says, “You’ve got to serve somebody.” I serve my dogs and in return, they glom the sofa. Too many hunting dogs live depressing lives in kennels with automatic feeders and waterers, exercised only enough to keep them ready for work.

This last bit makes me happy, as Darby and I have a new bird crazy dog and she’s logging some pretty solid “on the bed” time, something my two grandfathers would never have allowed. Their dogs were “strictly for hunting” although they were fed manually, run daily and well cared for.

[BONUS LINK FRIM THE GOOGLE] Here’s a 1984 interview with McGuane in Key West.

Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.

I like seeing the open source concept made popular by hackers applied in this way by an Ivy League institution. It’s democratic, which is good for the community. It’s also a subtle form of “tryvertising” for high school students considering Yale, which is good for Yale and its prospects.

The nine stories in Livability by Jon Raymond are jangling around in my head, like chimes after the wind has come.

For me Raymond is a discovery, a new writer to follow and a local one at that. His book of short stories released just before Christmas has already garnered reviews from The Denver Post, San Francisco Chronicle and LA Times. Raymond also did an interview with Seattle Times art critic, Michael Upchurch.

Upchurch asks Raymond about his priorities, since he also the Editor of Plazm, an art mag, writes screenplays—two of Raymond’s stories in this collection have already been made into films—and has a novel under his belt.

Writing fiction is the “job” I try to keep at the center of things. The movie stuff has been a wonderful accident, though not entirely bizarre, either, as I have done some work in film before, and even directed a ridiculous, cable-access feature back in my 20s. As far as paying the bills, though, I’ve had the pleasure of falling into an odd series of freelance jobs over the years, mainly in advertising, or para-advertising capacities. I also teach from time to time and review books and art. So far it’s worked out all right, but long-term survival remains kind of mysterious to me. The father’s artistic/financial anxiety in “New Shoes” is definitely something I relate to, and something I think a lot of other artists probably would, too.

In the story “New Shoes” the screenwriter at the heart of the story learns to not get his hopes up. Here’s a sample of Raymond’s prose:

Along the way, dozens of people had proclaimed their love the project before ultimately, grudgingly, with great regret, etc., passing. In the movie industry’s spectrum of affection, Dan had come to find, loving something didn’t actually mean that much. It was all hyperbole. If something was “good,” it was generally terrible. If something was “great,” it was not embarrassing. Merely to love something was a form of neutrality at best. It implied fear that someone else might see potential there, and thus it might be worthwhile to buy the author a few lunches, but it foretold no commitment of any kind. In a world of delicate egos, Dan could see how hyperbole was useful. Loving ensured no one’s feelings got hurt. But he was not deceived by the word anymore either.

The only word that mean anything was “special.” “Special” was the highest praise. He never got “special.” (p.185)

There’s a deep yearning in Raymond’s characters. In “New Shoes” Dan the writer-director longs for the approval of distant producers and money men. His longing is palpable, but it doesn’t compare to the needs of other characters in Raymond’s book. In “The Suckling Pig” every character the reader meets has some sort of hole to fill with work, recognition, respect, and of course, love. The story “Benny” is another classic. Benny’s family needs to know their junkie son is safe. Benny’s childhood friend (and narrator of the story) needs to prevent himself from drifting too far away from his roots. Benny himself is desperate for his next fix. In the story “Young Bodies” a teen-aged immigrant from Russia is tough on the outside, but she’s desperate for the intimacy she’s never know. And so on.

What the reader is left with is a sort of melancholy. The kind one might find in a certain brand of indie rock songs, say by The Decemberists. That is to say, it’s a charming and welcome state of mind, even when it’s not joyous. I also get the sense that these stories are a 21st century update on the pioneer’s dream. All the stories are set in Oregon, which is a grand stage, however you look at it. Raymond intentionally showcases urban and suburban Portland, along with The Cascades and the coast. It’s complex, this dream we dream in Pacific Wonderland. And like it’s always been, the dream comes true for some while others’ have their hopes crushed and possibilities continually minimized.

The last story in the book, “Train Choir” is rib aching sad. It’s been made into a film by director Kelly Reichardt. It’s called Wendy and Lucy and stars Michelle Williams. You can see in the trailer the sense of living on the edge that’s inherent in Raymond’s work. You can also see the Western themes played out cinematically, the pace is slowed and one’s struggles are made to seem almost picturesque.

If Jeremiah Johnson (as depicted by Robert Redford in the 1972 film) were alive today and living in Oregon, I’m confident Jon Raymond would capture him in a narrative framework.

Sean McCann, a professor of English at Wesleyan University, writes in The Wall Street Journal that we may see a new batch of American writers emerge from the chaos of our times.

He recalls how Sherwood Anderson, James Agee, Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos and Louis Adamic travelled the back roads of America in the fall of 1933 hoping to discover how economic disaster had affected the common people.

Like many of his peers, Anderson had anticipated anger and radicalism among the poor and unemployed. Instead, he discovered a people stunned by the collapse of their most cherished beliefs. Puzzled America, the title of the book he composed out of his journeys, said it all.

McCann also notes that “never in American history had the vision of social mobility been more forcefully asserted than in the 1920s,” when interestingly enough, The Republican Party ruled and Herbert Hoover remarked, that ours is “a fluid classless society…unique in the world.”

That rhetoric was redoubled by a booming new advertising industry which promised that consumers might vault up the ladder of social status through carefully chosen purchases (often with consumer credit, a recent invention).

McCann says the term “social mobility” was coined in 1925 by the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, who used the phrase to identify a phenomenon in apparent decline.

The conflict between the American myth of a classless society and the reality of the nation’s deepening caste divisions was the irony at the core of some of the greatest literary works of the 1920s, including Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. But it was not until the Great Depression that the traditional vision of social mobility imploded.

It did implode. And plenty of writers since have described a hardscrabble America, where dreams vanish. Yet, just as many have worked to keep the vision of upward mobility alive. I can tell you from my own experience, having done both, it pays much better to cleverly say Coors or Camel will make you a desirable person, than it does to critique the very premise of a commercial society.

“It is impossible to imagine a less complacent major writer.” -Thomas McGuane

Charles McGrath, former editor of the New York Times Book Review, wrote a lovely piece in honor of John Updike. It ran in Sunday’s edition.

McGrath points to an outpouring of tributes from writers, including Gish Jen, Julian Barnes, John Irving, Jeffrey Eugenides, Richard Ford, Paul Theroux, T. C. Boyle, Antonya Nelson, George Saunders, ZZ Packer, Thomas McGuane, Lorrie Moore and Joyce Carol Oates. In his own tribute, he notes:

What other writers, young and old, prized most about Mr. Updike was his prose — that amazing instrument, like a jeweler’s loupe; so precise, exquisitely attentive and seemingly effortless. If there were a pill you could take to write like that, who wouldn’t swallow a handful? Equally inspiring was his faith in the writing itself. He toyed once or twice with magic realism, but the experiment never really worked and he gave it up. Though he loved Jorge Luis Borges, he didn’t in his own work go in for Borgesian mirror games, and he was free from the postmodern anxiety about the fictiveness of fiction, the unreliability of language. He was an old-fashioned realist, with an unswerving belief in the power of words to faithfully record experience and to enhance it. If other writers, younger ones especially, couldn’t quite subscribe to that belief, still it was reassuring to know that there was someone who did.

And other writers surely admired — and maybe envied a little — Mr. Updike’s success, his ability to make a living just from the fashioning of sentences, without selling out himself or others. He seldom took an advance and he never tailored his work to suit the fashion. The literary life as he led it seemed a higher calling, not a grubby one.

One of the things I admire in Updike’s approach is the wide net he cast. We think of him as a novelist, but he also wrote letters, essays, journalism, poems, reviews, and short stories.

President Obama is a published author and a man who considers himself a writer. So, expectations were high today when he delivered his inaugural address.

Time Magazine has the speech in its entirety. It’s well worth reading several times over.

Here’s one of the best parts, IMO:

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.

On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

I love how President Obama calls out “the risk takers, the doers, the makers of things” and says they are directly responsible for our nation’s “prosperity and freedom.” What a celebration of American ingenuity and a call to arms for entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes. The nation needs us to risk, to do, to make—now more than ever.