Gridley Fires

Properly Fortified...

...and then back to editing that novel......

 

Much Ado About Some Things

The Atlantic, September 2012

 

This is as close to a themed issue as I’ve seen from The Atlantic, and as you might expect, the focus is on this year’s Presidential election. For someone who follows politics, there’s little new here, despite James Fallows’ gaming of the Romney/Obama showdown, a bit on the Latino Vote, and the most talked about article of some time , Ta-Nehisi Coates’ critical evaluation of race in America from the standpoint of the U.S.’s first black president. But back to that in a minute.

One other article sure to put letters in the editor’s box is Hanna Rosin’s sex on campus article. Here, Rosin speaks rather cautiously of the rise of feminist sexual romps on campus, how women are focusing on careers and independence (and that includes sexual) instead of the old saws about catching a husband during those halcyon four years.

An there are two other quirky ones: how tequila does or doesn’t make you crazy and, how the millennial generation is ignoring the old values of home and car ownership - and how that generation’s turn of values might save our economy.

Now to Coates:

Much has been said for years about a need for a national conversation on race, and Coates does his damnedest to begin one, centering on the Obama Presidency. Ignoring the 2008 hype about the U.S. as a post-racial society, Coates also all but ignores the insane charges by his political opponents and centers on Obama’s reaction to all of that. Obama, says Coates, has been more than reticent to amp up race talk, because he (Obama) fully understands the nation hasn’t come very far since Emancipation, even since the racial liberties granted in the ‘sixties. Coates’ object here isn’t to condemn Obama, but to explain his racial reticence in light of the nation’s stalled experiments in equality. And to wish Obama had ventured more bravely into this social and political arena.

Atlantic Fiction:

Emma Donoghue has written a present tense, third person story, that has a first person feel, “Onward.” It’s a pretty ho-hum story until you either realize (if your’e a student of literary history) that it’s about a woman, Caroline Thompson, who was befriended by Charles Dickens,  or are told so by an editorial footnote. Actually, I find the editorial footnote much more interesting than the story, but then that’s me. 

There are other pieces of interest here in you’re a fan of The Atlantic. But I’m becoming a bit dismayed with this mag. Why? For years it’s been one I could look to, not only to set the table when it comes to controversial social and political issues, but to suggest a way to answers and solutions. As much as I admire Coates‘ article, I don’t see a way out of the political darkness in it, nor in Rosin’s sex expose (it’s hardly an expose). Perhaps I’ll have to rely on the millennial article for that and hope for better things in the next issue.

 

Magazine Time - - Comin' Up!

I started to dig into my backlog of magazines and will let you know what I think of them over the next couple of weeks. 

image via zappablamma.com

 

The trouble with opinions on magazines (and I'm always full of opinions) is that they're edited with the general public in mind. Thus, you might find only an article or two in each to address your concerns or push your buttons. In fact, having done a little of this sort of editing in the dimly lighted past, I have to take my hat off to anyone who edits periodicals - its a mighty task!

Having said that, I may sound cranky in some of my opinions on opinionated periodicals, but what will underlie this alleged crankiness of mine will be how I view the substance of what I read.

As always, I value your opinions of my opinions.

See Bob's Web Site here.

The Writemuch Blog

image via 852cmd.com

 

It's great to have writer friends - when he or she puts the emotional dross (or otherwise) into words as well as Susan Rountree does here, it just gives you the warm fuzzies, y'know?

 

Visit Bob mustin's Web Site here - - - btw, this is my 900th post at Gridley Fires.

Fitzgerald Inventing His Way Toward Perfection

This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  image via sc.edu

 

Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise was given a tentative thumbs-down by the literati of the day, most not understanding what Fitzgerald was trying to accomplish. And even today it’s not a particularly easy read. From the standpoint of early twenty-first century, though, the book seems a precursor to postmodern literature, with its disjointed narrative, its social and political references, and above all, its overwhelming self-awareness. The book has been called a critique of humanity’s attraction to glamour, but that hardly seems the complete story.

Amory Blaine is a well-to-do, bratty WASP – egoistic, handsome, with a glib mouth. Underlying all this is an insecurity that begins to show its teeth during Amory’s Princeton days, as his mum dies and leaves him with nothing of value. He turns to girls for succor, but he quickly discovers, in the way of early twentieth-century life in the U.S., that his looks, his disarming way, have little truck without a serious jingle in his pocket. 

Thus Amory enters into a series of promising but ultimately unfulfilling romances, joins the army during World War I, and returns to life as a menial ad copy writer. His conscience during this time is personified in a Catholic priest, Thayer Darcy, who has had a dalliance with Amory’s mum in days past. But Amory can’t be corralled by faith and religion. He does, though, offer to sacrifice himself before the law in order to save a friend’s reputation. Still, even this turns to spoiled milk. 

In the book’s final pages, Fitzgerald offers a clumsy, summarizing motif: Amory is given a ride by two well-off, conservative men, and they enter into an argument concerning what today would be Milton Friedman’s argument for capitalism. I was stunned as I read these pages – how appropriate that argument seems to today’s bare-knuckled conflicts over the same ideological ground!

Fitzgerald’s writing here is brilliant in places, but his structure seems of the ad hoc variety.  As with the argument mentioned above, many of the book’s themes and situations are handled clumsily or are dropped unfinished as the author moves on to other ideas. At its core it’s a bildungsroman. But there’s also Amory’s fall from grace, which establishes his reinvention, something that was a religio-literary staple of the day. In the end, Fitzgerald leaves Amory disillusioned but hopeful. In the final paragraphs, Amory sums up thusly:

“It’s all a poor substitute at best,” he said sadly.

And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed….

He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky.

“I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.”

 

Still, that ending is a good start for a literary career as this supremely talented writer began his slow, awkward climb toward a never-achieved literary perfection.

 

My rating: 15 of 20 stars

 See Bob's web site here

 

The Millions : 47 Endings Can’t Ruin A Great Novel: Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms

You'll have to be a BIG! Hemingway fan to want to read this one. Still, it might help you writers out there to feel more at home with your own false starts and, um, bleepy titles.

Whenever I work on a piece of writing more than a few days, I create a “dump file” where I can store my many false starts, failed scenes, and tin-eared snatches of dialogue in case I change my mind and decide to use them anyway. On longer projects, I also create a fresh file each month so I can track the progress of the project and raid old drafts for bits I wrote better the first time. This digital version of the overstuffed file cabinet has saved me more times than I care to count, but it is increasingly clear to me that if I ever have the misfortune to get famous, I will need to delete all these old files and throw my hard drive in a lake somewhere. If I don’t, and a work of mine achieves lasting value, then my children and grandchildren, abetted by scholars and editors with dollar signs in their eyes, may well spend the decades after my death boring the hell out of my readers with all my failed early drafts.

via www.themillions.com

 

 See Bob's web site here

Family Redux

image via myspace.com

Okay, why write such a hardboiled post concerning family? Tolstoy said it best, in Anna Karenina: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Still, this insightful and broadly applied commentary on family is overly simplistic. There are happy moments for unhappy families, but they don't last; instead, they're the past, hopefully the future, and they go almost unnoticed in the present, because they're all but drowned out by the loneliness of the past, the fear of the future. 

Here's an example: Three generations back in an imagined family, a great-grandfather is an abusive drunk. As a result, the children join the American Temperance Union, and no one drinks from that moment forward. But the behavior handed down from great-grandpa at the business end of a fist, the sting of a belt, or simply the bite of words, persists in the hands of grandparents and parents. Or the children of succeeding generations are pummeled by religious threats of eternal damnation. 

What's a family to do?

What can they do?

This is the dilemma Tolstoy intended, I think. That is, there are no common answers; each person in each family has to work such things out for themselves, probably alone. 

Does this sound bleak?

I don't mean it to. 

But do you begin to see how many stories there are  here? How many possibilities are wrapped up in Tolstoy's fourteen-word summation of family reality?

Can you write some - from imagination, or experience - without victimizing? Without writing off hope and happiness?

Then write. 

People Like Us - The Movie

image via imdb.com

 

The missus and I had a date afternoon/evening for the Fourth, foregoing the usual neighborhood bash at the pool, the only point of interest there being to watch the older set get pathetically hammered. So off we went, to see People Like Us, and then dinner at Applebees. 

The story begins as a deceptively Hollywood one: a cash strapped young sales guy named Sam learns his father has died, only to receive a toilet case holding $150 large with a note from his father's lawyer requesting Sam take care of a woman and her child - Pop's daughter and grandchild from an over-the-fence affair. The movie then preoccupies itself with Sam's efforts to learn whether his half-sister deserves the money, and then fessing up that they're siblings.

I'm already going long, so here's my bottom line: the dialogue sparkles (along with the rest of the script writing), the plot is byzantine but believable, and the end result is heartwarming without being maudlin. On our way to Applebees afterwards, we weighed People Like Us against last year's heavyweight flick, The Descendants. Our judgment? People Like Us is way better. If it doesn't get quite a few nods come Oscar time, you have my permission to diss the awards process. 

Celebrating July

Canada Day is on July first, and the U.S.'s Independence Day is July 4th. And don't forget Mexico's Independence Day - September 16th. They're all something to celebrate, so hoist a glass (or two) between now and the first day of fall to the three great republics of North America.

Like your beer warm or cold? With jalapeños, por favor?

I Need Your Help With This Story

image via missnowmrs.com

 

A story of mine is in contention for a prize, and you can read and comment on it here. I won't comment on it here myself, other than to say it's written in a style in which the reader is "eavesdropping" on a conversation, and certain things must be inferred. It should be fun to figure these things out.

I hope you like it, and please leave comments - they may nudge the judges.