Bar Talk and Tall Tales

For years I’d heard stories about the stories of Ray Wheeler, so I was very happy to get a copy of Bar Talk and Tall Tales, a collection of eight of his originals, recently published by Buffalo Commons Press, so I could see for myself if the hype matches the reality. I can say, without reservation, that it does.

Ray’s narrative voice, whether he’s speaking or writing, has an absurdist quality to it that captures very well the absurdity of living in western North Dakota, where winter temperatures can plunge, seemingly within minutes, to -24 and you can freeze to death if you get lost in the sudden whiteout of a blizzard. Where the wind blows so hard that it seems like you should be able to “retract” your legs and then “ride a wave of it to another country.” Where talking bison—perhaps imaginary, perhaps not—wander through open spaces and suggest quietly that you let the prairie revert back to a “buffalo commons.”

Ray might originally be from Kansas City, but he’s been in western North Dakota long enough (going on 50 years) that he’s seen the oil booms and busts come and go. In one of his stories, “A Kind of Texas,” he spins the tale of Eddie and Lee, two locals who spend most of their time at a bar lamenting the influx of Texans into their community during the latest boom. These Texans, the only folks able to afford the skyrocketing rents, steal their women and cheat them at pool. Eddie, however, is something of a poet (like Ray himself), and so he gets his revenge with a bit of filthy doggerel, but then he pays the price, both in physical and in existential pain.

In fact, in many of these stories there is a price to be paid. In one of my favorites, “How They Spend the Cold Nights Up There,” a writer of western fiction, talking with a washed-up cowboy, Shorty, on a winter’s night at the bar, silently prays that a woman—any woman, so long as she has a warm body and most of her real teeth—will come into the bar. A kind-hearted God answers his prayer, and a woman with luscious lips, calling herself “Belle Starr,” strides into the bar and says that she wants a shot of Scotch and a story. Unfortunately, though, she loses interest in the writer, and in his story about a heroic cowboy named “Dallas Gates,” when she gets drunk and thinks that Shorty, bow legs and all, is the real Dallas Gates. At closing time, she leaves the bar with Shorty, and the writer, whose story doesn’t have an ending, finds himself without an ending, too, as he walks home through the early morning arctic air.

Ray had a bit of a reputation as a playwright back in the 1980s, and if you ask him, he’ll tell you that he greatly admires the work of Sam Shepard. One of the stories in this collection, “The Dakota Kid,” reminds me of Shepard’s plays, such as True West, in that we have a narrative, composed mostly of laconic dialogue, about two desperados who stop off at a bar in Amidon, population 14, to swap their getaway car for a clean car. Adding a note of gothic absurdity to this suspense is the bar owner’s retarded son, who perches on a stool, eating sunflower seeds (as efficiently as a chickadee) and saying nothing except “The world is everything there is.” Nothing good can come from a situation such as this one, and nothing does.

I certainly hope that you’ll pick up this collection of stories, for I think that you’ll find reading them the next best thing to actually drinking some beer with Ray at the local watering hole as he tells you stories that will make you laugh until you cry.

The book is $15 from Buffalo Commons Press, PO Box 15, St. Peter, MN 56082.

How many novelists in the United States?

Dominic Smith estimates that the United States has more than a million novelists, but that number pales on a per capita basis with Iceland, where approximately 10% of the population publishes a novel. Smith uses a number of intriguing statics to reach his estimate.

If only there were enough readers!

Crossing the Heart of Africa

Since I’d rather someone else risk his life so that I can then live vicariously in my armchair while I sip tea, I’m a sucker for adventure travel books. Consequently, I happily downloaded Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Love and Adventure, by Julian Smith, and soon found myself in South Africa contemplating the challenges of traveling through some of the most dangerous territory in the world.

The book is divided into two parts, with chapters alternating between an account of Ewart Grogan’s attempt in 1898 to be the first person to transect Africa length-wise, from Cape Town to Cairo, and Smith’s attempt a few years ago to recreate the feat. Both attempts were inspired by love.

After dropping out of Cambridge University and then fighting in one of the many colonial wars of South Africa, Grogan decided to recuperate in New Zealand, where he soon met and fell in love with Gertrude Watt. She was from a wealthy background, however, and her protective stepfather didn’t have much use for this soldier of fortune from a middle-class background. Grogan said that would earn the stepdaughter’s hand by doing something magnificent, which ended up being an offer to the Royal Geographical Society to survey previously uncharted territory in central Africa, which would necessitate traveling, by foot mainly but by canoe on occasion, from South Africa to Egypt.

Accompanied part of the way by Gertrude’s uncle and large party of porters to carry equipment, Grogan encountered monumental obstacles, including fierce wildlife, disease, and warring tribes. The uncle, severely afflicted by malaria and dysentery, soon quit, as did most of the porters, but Grogan struggled on with just a few native guides until he completed the journey and won his future wife. After a triumphant lecture tour around England, the two then settled in Kenya, where Grogan became an influential plantation owner.

Flash forward to 2007, a little more than hundred years after Grogan’s successful trip, and Julian Smith, a struggling writer who’s afraid to commit to the woman he loves, reads about the feat and resolves to duplicate it. He offers a marriage proposal on the condition that his girlfriend will allow him to make the trip, which will be approximately 4,500 miles long and take a few months by train, car, and boat. She agrees.

These autobiographical chapters, which alternate with chapters describing Grogan’s trip, describe Smith’s adventures as he travels through modern-day South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, and Egypt (he skips Sudan because of its constant warfare). Although he faced few of the genuine dangers that Grogan faced, Smith has a few heart-stopping escapades along the way.

If, like me, you prefer to read about adventure travel instead of actually doing adventure travel, then Crossing the Heart of Africa is for you.

Why you should major in English

Gerald Howard, writing in the Times, makes a convincing argument for majoring in English. After convincing his bosses at Penguin to pay an advance to Alice Adams to publish two of her novels, he has an epiphany:

However, as I went back to my office I experienced an instance of what the French call “stair wit.” I thought, wait a minute, I am putting that $7,500 to work. It’s an investment. The chain of activity I am putting in motion will give work to printers and shippers. It will provide bookstores (there were still bookstores) with tangible goods to sell at a profit. The revenue from those sales will help to pay my salary, my colleagues’ salaries, even our C.F.O.’s salary. Alice Adams will have some thousands of dollars in her pocket — maybe to invest in a C.D. All this and a few thousand people fewer than I put down on the P. & L. (I’d lied, of course) will have bought and enjoyed two excellent novels that deserved to be in print.

Whereas if we’d just put that money in the hands of a bank, they would just ... well, I was pretty hazy on what a bank would actually do with that money, but my general sense was that it would sit there in a vault microbially propagating itself and what good would that do anybody? Economically I was putting my shoulder — or Penguin’s shoulder — to the wheel! I came away with the conviction that I wasn’t useless anymore.

Art makes you smart!

As this article in the Times reminds us, viewing and thinking about art will make you a better person:

Clearly, however, we can conclude that visiting an art museum exposes students to a diversity of ideas that challenge them with different perspectives on the human condition. Expanding access to art, whether through programs in schools or through visits to area museums and galleries, should be a central part of any school’s curriculum.

Ambrose Bierce in the Civil War

My most recent essay for the New York Times just came out. You can read about Ambrose Bierce and his service in the Civil War.

So you want to be a writer?

Are you ready to chuck your staid career to embark on a life as a novelist? Ready to switch your major from accounting to creative writing? Vanessa Barbara, writing in the Times, suggests that you understand what you're getting into:

Let me give you some personal numbers. I wrote a book in 2008 that won a literary prize and recently sold its 3,000th copy. The book retails for around $15, the author’s royalty rate is 5 percent, so I earned $0.75 from each copy. So for the book that took me one year to write and four more years to sell, I earned a total of around $2,250 (and a bout of depression). I’d have done better donating my body to science.

Although she is specifically describing her experience as a writer in Brazil, I can attest that circumstances are not much better for writers in America, so know what you're getting into if you'd like to be a writer!

Unfamiliar Fishes

Sarah Vowell is my kind of woman: sharp-witted and on the left politically, with a deadpan sense of humor and a possessor of a large vocabulary. I'm not much of a radio listener so I've rarely heard her commentaries on NPR, but I've enjoyed her appearances on The Daily Show and have found three of her books to be well-written and thoughtful critiques of America and its citizens.

For example, in The Wordy Shipmates (2008), which is about the Pilgrims and their Massachusetts Bay Colony, Vowell analyzes the irony implicit in a group of people fleeing England because of repression but then being so intolerant toward the natives of the New World and any Europeans who didn't believe what they believed. Similarly, in Assassination Vacation (2005), an eccentric sort of travelogue, Vowell visits sites associated with the presidents who have been killed while in office (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy), which leads her to speculate about what makes America such a country of violence.

Vowell’s most recent book, Unfamiliar Fishes (2011), describes a trip to Hawaii for a vacation. While there, she tours the royal palace, and, on that same day in December 2003, U.S. troops capture Saddam Hussein in Iraq. This coincidence makes her realize that America has always been in the business of "regime change." Her new book, as she says in her introduction, tells the story about how the U.S. spent seventy-eight years "Americanizing" Hawaii—from sending the first missionaries to "civilize" the islands in 1820 to formal annexation in 1898. (The latter year, of course, also represents the peak of American imperialism as the U.S. declared war on Spain and ended up seizing Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and Guam.) It's not a story that makes you proud to be an American.

Most of Unfamiliar Fishes is a detailed history of the American missionaries and whalers who began visiting the Sandwich Islands, as they were known until the 1850s, for religious and commercial reasons. These two groups, however, were rivals for the islands as the missionaries sought to convert the natives and the whalers sought some R&R while on shore leave. "Imagine, Vowell says, "if the Hawaii Convention Center in Waikiki hosted The Value Voters Summit and the Adult Entertainment Expo simultaneously—for forty years." As one could imagine, the two cannot possibly co-exist in harmony, and the only reason the conflict between them ended was the discovery, in the mid 19th century, that petroleum was a much cheaper alternative to whale oil, which led to the collapse of the whaling industry (the only reason, indeed, that the whales weren't hunted to extinction) and the triumph of missionary culture in Hawaii.

Although most Hawaiians appreciated how the missionaries contributed to a higher standard of living (particularly with their emphasis on public schools), they lamented the loss of independence that came with American annexation in 1898. Vowell, in fact, takes her title from a metaphor used by one 19^th-century Hawaiian writer to describe the situation of his native land: “If a big wave comes in, large and unfamiliar fishes will come in from the dark ocean, and when they see the small fishes of the shallows they will eat them up.”

Like her earlier books, Unfamiliar Fishes shines a light on a part of American history that is worth exploring, and, as such, I recommend Vowell’s book.

Stephen Fry

If you've never watched A Bit of Fry and Laurie or Jeeves & Wooster, then I don't know what to say. It's a crime if you're only familiar with Hugh Laurie from the American show House.

Unfortunately, Stephen Fry hasn't gotten quite the same recognition in the States as has his pal, Hugh. That's a shame. His movie Wilde is a quiet masterpiece, and his British television shows Last Chance to See and Stephen Fry in America are witty, urbane travel documentaries. His podcasts are among the most popular in Britain.

Here is one of Fry's podcasts, in which he expresses his irritation at overly punctilious grammarians.

This Town

Don't read This Town if you already have high blood pressure because, if you do, your head will start pounding and your eyes will start bulging. You've been warned!

You can't really call Mark Leibovich's book a political exposé because it simply confirms what most of us have already suspected, which is that Washington D.C. is a cesspool that exists simply to perpetuate itself. For example, while most of us want bipartisanship, Washington prefers gridlock because that's what pays. In fact, as Leibovich documents, again and again, today's status quo is perfect as senators and representatives go from being elected officials to lobbyists in order to "monetize" their public service.

Particular scorn is heaped upon those who claimed to be anti-Establishment while in office but are quick to jump on the gravy train after leaving. North Dakota's own Byron Dorgan is one such ex-Senator who was "contemptuously righteous" about lobbyists but then was quick to cash in. In fact, Dorgan didn't even delay the two-year period that office holders are supposed to wait before lobbying their former colleagues. Instead, he flouted that regulation by not officially registering as a "lobbyist" and joining a Washington law firm as a "senior policy adviser," one who just happens to oversee a staff of lobbyists.

Although the book is about Washington culture in general, much of it focuses on specific personalities—such as "super lawyer" Bob Barnett, Senators Harry Reid and Tom Coburn, the late Meet the Press host Tim Russert, and lobbyist Jack Quinn—to show just how morally bankrupt the current national political system is. Other individuals who come in for particular scrutiny are Darrell Issa, Dick Gephardt, Haley Barbour, and Richard Holbrooke, as well as dozens of staffers and assorted hangers on that you haven't heard of before. Even though This Town discusses literally hundred of people, there are no heroes in this story.

Washington media, usually more concerned about its own "branding" opportunities than about truly covering the news, also comes in for some scathing criticism. Leibovich cites, for example, how, in April 2010 after Justice John Paul Stevens retired, the website Politico asked why Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hadn't been mentioned as a possible replacement for the Supreme Court, which then started a frenzy of "trending" discussions on other websites before the White House, less than 24 hours later, announced that Clinton would not be nominated. In the meantime, page views of Politico multiplied, which undoubtedly pleased its advertisers and likely allowed Politico to increase its ad rates.

This Town is a thoroughly depressing and dispiriting book, and as such, it should be read by everybody, for only by understanding how far off the rails our political system has gone will we be able to reform it.

Unless, of course, you read the book and then just throw up your hands in despair, which was my reaction.

Writing for money

Samuel Johnson, the great critic and lexicographer, once argued, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money."

I generally adhere to that idea (by declining to write for the local newspaper, for example), but I'm obviously violating Johnson's principle right now on this blog. Tim Kreider, writing in the Times, agrees with Johnson, too:

Practicalities aside, money is also how our culture defines value, and being told that what you do is of no ($0.00) value to the society you live in is, frankly, demoralizing. Even sort of insulting. And of course when you live in a culture that treats your work as frivolous you can’t help but internalize some of that devaluation and think of yourself as something less than a bona fide grown-up.

So I’m writing this not only in the hope that everyone will cross me off the list of writers to hit up for free content but, more important, to make a plea to my younger colleagues. As an older, more accomplished, equally unsuccessful artist, I beseech you, don’t give it away. As a matter of principle. Do it for your colleagues, your fellow artists, because if we all consistently say no they might, eventually, take the hint. It shouldn’t be professionally or socially acceptable — it isn’t right — for people to tell us, over and over, that our vocation is worthless.

How we write

According to the Times, neuroscientists are trying to understand how the brains of writers and readers work. How, exactly, does the reader feel an emotional reaction to the death of a character, for example? And is it the same emotional reaction that the writer felt in creating the scene?

How, you ask, do scientists measure these reactions?

Hook up the writer and (later) his readers:

They have asked Mr. Grunberg to try to keep each chunk of text limited to one dominant emotion, and have tracked where his cursor was at various points in each writing session, to match his words with the physiological data. The 50 readers will read the novella on an e-reader, to allow similar tracking.

Think positive!

Bob Garfield of NPR, who I had the pleasure of hearing in person in Deadwood earlier this year, has some comments about BuzzFeed's recent decision to ban negative book reviews. He's all for it!

To my way of thinking, BuzzFeed’s heroic initiative will succeed even if it merely eradicates the depressing negativity that has for so long kept literary criticism from becoming a full-fledged economic sector, like agriculture, transport and erectile dysfunction.

It also brings us one step closer to my two lifelong dreams: first, a newspaper that delivers only good news; and second, diet bacon.