Gridley Fires

Real life Made Personal

 

Creative Nonfiction, Summer 2012 Issue

 

This isn’t a writer’s magazine, but then it is. First and foremost it’s a doorway to publication for writers in the genre of personalized, real-life subjects. Creative Nonfiction publishes experienced writers, writers with the ubiquitous MFAs and people who just happen to have a story to tell from their lives.

This particular issue (Lee Gutkind, the editor, usually assigns a theme to each issue and advertises it several months ahead) deals with the subject of true crime, even with the ethics of writing about crime. Why ethics, you ask? The issue’s roundtable discussion on the subject deals with that circuitously, but a lot of the concern has to do with romanticizing criminal acts. 

But this issue’s stories?

They’re all riveting, and most use Gutkind’s favored technique of weaving supporting facts into a personal account of crime. Among my favorites are:

AC Fraser tells of prison’s manner of having one submit to regimentation and rather demeaning life there, something she calls Identity Folding. 

Steven Church writes about one of the Tyson-Holyfield fights, in which Mike Tyson bit off a piece of one of Evander Holyfield’s ears.

Joyce Marcel’s account of robbing ancient graves in Peru of historical artifacts blends that derring-do with her sexual exploits.

The common thread through these stories is the ultra-personal, almost psychological approach to the persons involved in the various violations and violences. This isn’t reportage - it’s much more than that.

Again, editing such magazines in a Herculean task, and sometimes the approach taken doesn’t work. Gutkind’s approach for Creative Nonfiction does work in this issue, and it works well.

 

 

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 Big Embarrassment that is Modern Texas

As Texas Goes - How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda, by Gail Collins

image via salon.com 

 

All right, this is a political book that leans to port if you’re a sailor - to the left if you’re not. Still, Collins is an excellent journalist, and this book, while a bit opinionated in tone, is as even-handed as the subject matter could be. I have friends, colleagues, and relatives living in Texas, you see, and through them I’ve been able to track the changes Collins writes about here. So I can testify - as much as a non-Texan can - that her view of the Lone Star State is pretty dad-gummed accurate.

Essentially, she has two statements to make about Texas, and I agree with both: first, probably because of the state’s outlandish size, Texans feel they live in the wide open spaces; thus they need little law that they can’t provide for themselves (harsh phrase coming:) at the point of a gun. While this is patently untrue - most Texans live in the state’s urban megalopolis - they need, even demand, a lot of the public services they tend to eschew. So let’s color these folks proud of their state, but victims of the cognitive dissonance of living in a bubble where few outside perspectives are noticed, if allowed in at all.

Second: Texas has less-than-quietly become Republican over the past three decades, and the current leaders of the state are seeking to export their free-wheeling view of how life should be to the rest of the country. Examples: NO TAXES! Minimal investment in education! Don’t handcuff business with regulations and unions!  No healthcare laws! Pay only minimal salaries! Stop me if you’ve heard this in your home state, because Texas really is trying to import this mindset. 

The dangers in this are obvious: a poorer standard of living for all but the rich, including poorer health all around. A diminishing middle class. Poorer educated citizens with little opportunity to grow into the U.S.'s formerly vaunted meritocracy. 

My view of the WHY?? of this is that with the turn of the millennium, the U.S. has many competitors worldwide. Over the decades, the business class has grown rather complacent (read: inefficient) in its practices, and rather than provide bottom-up incentives to innovate, to provide better products and services, the trend Texas wants to push is business as usual -without being “handcuffed” by the social, educational, and governmental evolution  that created the U.S. as a boom country in the first place. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

Collins’ writing is often humorous, non-inflammatory, and she does give both sides of these issues, based in tons of interviews and journalistic research. In fact ,the book is about 40% documentation of sources. I keep saying this about such books, but hers is an important one if you want to understand the hows and whys of the current state of life in the U.S., and where we’re going - if Texas has its way.

 

My rating: 17 of 20 stars

See Bob'sWeb Site here

 

The Rockies' Future?

The missus surprised me this week with an offer to treat me to an Asheville Tourists game, versus the Charleston Riverdogs, and so off we went tonight, primed for pulled pork sandwiches, steak fries and a tall drink. Oh, and maybe some decent baseball - which doesn't always happen at the high "A" minor league level. But tonight brought another surprise.

image via rockiesanalyst.com

 

A tall, lanky pitcher, Ben Alsup, recently of LSU (yes, they play something other than football down there) pitched a gem of a game - nine complete innings and only one seventh-inning broken bat single short of a no hitter. What kind of a pitcher is he? Think Tom Glavine or Greg Maddux  - - pinpoint pitches (until he tired in the eighth) that led to ground balls and virtually no strikeouts or fly balls. His speeds varied from the high 60s to the low 90s. 

 

image via espn.go.com

But that sort of pitching performance often goes unrewarded - not so tonight. Jordan Ribera, a stocky, cocky 24 year- old from Fresno, California, knocked the hide off the ball and accounted for six of the Tourists' seven runs. 

I see both in triple-A ball next year, and the Colorado Rockies the following year. Unless one or both become notorious head cases. But, gee, I hope not. I wanna say I saw them when.

See Bob's Web Site here.

 

The Metaphors of Mikulik

Let me introduce you to Joe Mikulik, manager of the South Atlantic (baseball) League's Asheville Tourists, the minor league Billy Martin (may he rest in peace).

It's June, 2006, and Roger Clemens' kid, Koby, of the Lexington Legends, has just been proclaimed safe at second on an oh, so tight call. Mikulik's eyes bug as if on cartoon-esque pipestems. He charges from the mound and begans explaining to the uber-taciturn ump that his call was as bit overprotective of the pedigreed Clemens kid. The ump then performs baseball's age-old heave-ho gesture, with plenty of body english. 

That's all Mikulik needs to take his own act up several notches. I won't describe it here; instead you can watch:

 

 

Flash ahead six years and a month to July 2012. Up-and-coming Cito Culver of the Charleston River Dogs, is signaled safe at third following a run-down attempt. Color Mikulik livid. Again the attempt to explain to taciturn ump that his bifocals were fogged. Again the heave-ho. Again the Mikulik act:

 

 

The press has, even prior to 2006, portrayed Miulik as a loaded gun, cocked, and ready to fire. I'm going to ignore all the supporting evidence (much of it compelling) and declare my own opinion: Mikulik is baseball's premier metaphorist.

Notice in the film clips that he doesn't merely try to explain to the umps that they need seeing-eye dogs, he re-enacts the play at second, then at third (where Culver must have run outside the base path if he really evaded the tag), as if he's been studying them for a while on stop-action replay film.

His core metaphor? The bases, of course. He detaches them, shows them to the umps, so he can be sure they know one when they see one. He kicks dirt over home plate, then spritzes it clean. It's all about the bases - the defense protects 'em, the offense has to reach 'em safely, and the ump has to be on top of 'em like the CIA with a spy satellite. Everything else in baseball centers on 'em. The bases. I mean, what's the point of hitting and fielding without the bases?

You ain't doing your job, Mikulik seems to be saying in 2006, so what the bleep, we might as well not have bases at all - he tosses second base into short right field. And just to prove this is all theater, in 2012 he hands third base to a Lexington fan - one who has been riding Joe for years, as it turns out. Joe even knows the loose-lipped guy's name. And finally, just to assure us that this is more than managerial petulance, Joe doffs his cap and takes a bow before retiring to the clubhouse. 

There are other metaphorical nuances here, and you can pore over the films yourself to find them.

But one thing Joe knows for sure about today's baseball - fans want action, not strategy. Emotion, not cagey coolness between the foul lines. So he picks his moments, and (think here of kerfuffles in the faux-professional sports of wrestling and hockey) he launches himself like a grenade onto the field.

The result?

For one brief and shining moment, all eyes are on baseball - not the ridiculous, furry mascots, or singing Y-M-C-A, or slingshotting t-shirts, or a last glance about for the peanut and beer vendor. It's all about the haphazardly coreographed drama that is minor league baseball. 

Revisiting Texas Football

After Friday Night Lights, by Buzz Bissinger

image via hollywoodreporter.com

 

On a hot afternoon visit to Starbuck’s for a Frappuccino, I picked up one of their Apple gimmes, this time for a free e-book – Bissinger’s.

First: this sort of freebie is a good marketing tool; I picked it up because it’s a book and was free. After reading it, I’ll no doubt read Friday Night Lights, Bissinger’s most famous work, the source of a movie and a TV series. For those in the dark regarding Texas high school football and/or completely indifferent, FNL was something of an expose on the inordinate emphasis football has in the lives of Texans. Consequently it made Bissinger, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, persona non grata for many Texans. 

 

A central part of the story of FNL was a supremely talented black player, Boobie Miles. At one point during Miles’ high school career, he blew out a knee, was discouraged from surgery, and was replaced on the team by another player. Consequently, Boobie’s gridiron dreams fell to ashes. The aftermath of this personal bring-down is Bissinger’s story in After Friday Night Lights. 

Written some quarter century after the original, Bissinger resumes an acquaintance with Miles, Miles' post-football life a matrix of problems. Bissinger bails out Boobie where possible, but the ex-football phenom makes life difficult for all around him, including Bissinger. 

Bissinger’s writing here is tough, unsparing, yet sympathetic. You get a strong sense of his empathy for Boobie, yet his frustration with him. The e-book is short – hardly more than an overlong short story, but it’s as compelling a piece of journalism as you’ll read. 

 

I’d check it out – even if you have to pay for it – the writing and the story are both worth it.

 

My rating: 18 of 20 stars

 

 

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

 

If You Escape

image via metroparent.com

 

Tarbaby families, that's what I call it, that's the thing we despise most in life, if we take the time to think about it. They won't let you go, won't let you be who you are, and even when you're older and maybe a little more removed, you still can't let it go. I know one Southern Baptist man who married a Catholic woman and couldn't face converting to her religion until both his parents died.

You can probably ignore the gold rings your kids put through lip and lobe, a stud in the tongue, maybe even have a laugh at their expense, say it's a phase, fashion, it'll pass. And ever wonder at the long vines of tats growing on their arms and legs? It's semaphore, telling you they're imprisoned, read the ink, mom, dad. I gotta go. Escape. Somehow. Let me go.

So let 'em.

Now, if you're one of the allegedly lucky ones who think you've untangled the Gordian knot of family, you have something to write about. With writing you can force it - every bit of it - to make sense, even if it really doesn't.

Just don't make it worse by crying on your keyboard.

 

Visit Bob's web site here

Rejection and Fate

Sometimes insight hits me when I least expect it. Like last night, tired from not sleeping the night before and finishing my read of Creative Nonfiction, Spring 2012 edition. I've posted on this publication before - it's a good one, and open to N/F writers of all persuasions and reputations. 

image via creativenonfiction.org

But one thing I realized from the reading: the essays they seem to like are written in disparate modules, subjects seemingly unconnected, but drawn together by writers' insights and skill in writing. But the editors seem to conceptualize each edition, drawing together essays in similar fashion -  seemingly unconnected. 

My insight: If you're a writer and aspiring to be published in CNF magazine, or any other, the writer's reality is that it's not enough to write in the mag's accepted style, or to write exceptionally well. You're subject to the whims of fate, because CNF - or any other mag - will have enough submittals for any edition to establish at least a tenuous concept for the issue. Such is always out of the writer's control or ability to anticipate.

Advice: For this reason, don't take rejection personally, and keep submitting to a variety of publications. Soon you'll hit the writer's lottery and submit a piece exactly along the lines a given mag is looking for in an issue.