Thursday, October 23, 2008
Toiling in Obscurity IV
The next Toiling in Obscurity reading will be held on Friday, December 5, at 7pm at The Dive.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
The Single Greatest Literary Conversation of My Life
I had just finished the first page of “Imagine Kissing Pete” from John O’Hara’s Sermons and Soda Water when a sweaty, middle-aged man missing his two front teeth peered around the pole.
"IS THAT A GOOD BOOK?" he asked.
"I'm only on page two." I tried to go back to the reading.
"You know how you can tell if a book is really good? If it grabs you from the first page."
"Yep."
"You know who's a good author? You probably saw the movie. Tom Clancy?"
"I haven't actually seen that one."
"Oh you should. He's good. And Dean Koontz. Stephen King writes some good books, too. Dark Tower, all of that stuff. And man, the books are even better than the movies!"
"They usually are."
"Man, The Godfather? That book was EVEN BETTER."
“Well, The Godfather was a pretty good movie.”*
"And Star Wars? That book was great. William Shatner is a great author!"
He proceeded to tell me about how I should go to Borders and read the books there**, so that I don't have to pay for them. He balked when I mentioned the Library.
*I’ve read The Godfather, and while it made me really, really hungry, I think that the first two Godfather movies are better than the book.
**I actually did that in high school, when I spent my Friday nights as a really cool person at the bookstore, hoping someone I vaguely knew would show up so that I could impress them*** with the fact that I could read an entire book in two hours.
***This never actually worked.
Thursday, October 9, 2008
I Deny This Reality
I should preface this with a few facts. Despite years of threats, I have never seen Star Wars, or any of its subsequent sequels, prequels, or whatever George Lucas is calling “movies” these days. Aside from a handful of classic dystopian tales that have been assigned over the years, I have never been a big reader science fiction. I find the actual world hard enough to believe as it is. The last time I was likely to indulge in any sort of fantasy world was between 1989 and 91, when I was particularly enamored with The Little Mermaid. This isn’t to say that I lack imagination, or to deny that my childhood was spent buried in books, barely dodging insults. I only offer this as contrast.
Last October I was the secretary to an alarmingly inept young lawyer who looked like a khaki-clad (Hangin’ with) Mr. Cooper, and had the patience and intellectual capacity of a hungry toddler. I was unhappy, but that was to be expected. It was, after all, my first job out of college. I wasn’t supposed to like it. I was supposed to phone it in while I wrote my novel on lunch breaks. I wasn’t supposed to take it personally, but it was getting more and more difficult to leave work in that tiny, windowless office, where I was left alone with the abstract expressionist Ikea painting to field phone calls from my boss, asking me how to be a lawyer. I do not respond well to the sorts of demands that were lobbed at me; I was told in the beginning that my $10 and hour under-the-table job consisted of copies, answering the phone, and taking things to the courthouse, but it became clear within a month that my boss expected me to shoulder the burden of his responsibilities as an attorney. He wasn’t qualified to do it, so how could I be?
One drunken Saturday, after a couple of movies, the evening’s companion lurched forward with a VHS copy of Logopolis. “Just one episode, I swear.” I didn’t have a good argument, and he was bigger than me, so I allowed it. Maybe it was the wine, but with every chime of the cloister bell, I suspended a little more disbelief. By the time the Watcher faded into Peter Davison, something clicked.
I should now take the time to explain to the uninitiated, that I am talking about Doctor Who, the longest running science fiction television series in the world. Without going too much into history, the show is about The Doctor, who is a Time Lord, which is a kind of time and space traveling alien from the planet Gallifrey. During the 9th Doctor’s tenure, it’s explained that he is the last of the Time Lords, and Gallifrey was destroyed during the time war. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. All you really need to know is that he’s an alien from a race with the ability to regenerate —that is, instead of dying (most of the time) they become a completely different person in a different body. The Doctor retains his memories with each new incarnation, but has had several different personalities. There have been ten Doctors since the Kennedy Assassination. From the first episode, the Doctor has traveled in what appears to be a 1960’s police telephone box, but is actually his spaceship, the TARDIS, which is an acronym for time and relative dimensions in space, which translates to “It’s bigger on the inside.” All of this is probably news to you, unless you are British, or watched the show on PBS at some point in your childhood. I fit into neither category, so it was very difficult for me to explain to my friends, or even myself how such a thing had come to pass.
Like anyone with basic cable in the 1990’s, I’ve seen Back to the Future, and its sequels a hundred times, and therefore, have a casual interest in fictional time travel and young Michael J. Fox. My interest in space travel extends only as far as the 1970’s, and really only for Ziggy Stardust and Logan’s Run-style set pieces. I spent most of college proclaiming, “I have no suspension of disbelief!” as the stock answer to why I hated The Matrix and Lord of the Rings and your fantasy short story with the nowhere plot and several made up words that meant “dragon,” and “sword” that was somehow also about your ex-girlfriend. I was put off aliens almost entirely at the age of three by the movie E.T., not because of the scary government interference parts, but because E.T. looked as though he smelled awful. That was enough for me. Nothing in my intellectual makeup allowed for my almost autistic interest in the continuing adventures of the Doctor and his companions. But, in the past year alone, I’ve had six jobs, which is twice as many as I’d ever had before. Since quitting my secretary job in late November, I have been a temp, a linguistic annotator, a production assistant for an educational publishing company, an advertising copywriter, and am now, for the time being, a barista again. I have not settled into a single position, either because it was temporary, or because my sanity was too important to me.
We define ourselves by our goals, our jobs and incomes and relationships. When none of them give even the illusion of certainty, without a clear station or direction, it’s easy to lose track of things. It’s not any easier creatively, especially if your end point seems further away than health insurance. To be young now is to sit amongst the intangible, to be thoroughly separate from comfort and safety. It’s why our cultural and social milestones are so tied to our interests, why we update our MySpace and Facebook profiles – because they’re safe, and offer immediate, though shallow connections, and because, in some ways, they give a faint impression of a fully formed person with those few improperly punctuated lists. Man is not the sum of his interests, but without clear markers for growth or success, we’re limited to bullet points of our capabilities, lines on our resumes, and detailed explanations of extracurricular activities.
The Doctor has been ten different people. It’s not just a convenient plot device – it allows the audience to see consistency through change. We are born and become and remain ourselves. It’s not a simple or pleasant process, and it goes wrong as often as it goes right, but it’s what makes us human. He has been young and old and silly and serious. He has been an egomaniac, an asshole, the inspiration for (and salvation from) an evil computer bent on eugenics experiments in the outer reaches of space. It’s not real, and we know that, but it reflects some part of reality that’s hard to contain within television plotlines. Change is not something that happens in easy arcs with clear midpoints, step by cinematic step before our very eyes. It is often something that happens out of necessity which we accustom ourselves to later. The Doctor hasn’t our human luxury, and so all of his differences and similarities are physical, played out for all of us to see. Whether or not we agree with each casting, he’s the same character the audience accepted forty-five years ago. And I like that. I respect that.
With all that’s changed and changed and changed in my last year, it feels good to have some constant, an escape from thinking about how, at the rate I’m going, I’ll never finish this book or have health insurance or a savings account, or get anywhere close to touching what I’ve worked my whole life toward. Because while the world is not fair or kind, I know that the Doctor will always come back in the end with the answer that, might not be a solution, but does the least harm. It's a comfort to imagine some sense of kindness in the world, even if it’s by way of a fictional alien traveler with a soft spot for planet Earth. I’m only human, but there’s no one on earth with more faith in humanity than the Doctor.
Last October I was the secretary to an alarmingly inept young lawyer who looked like a khaki-clad (Hangin’ with) Mr. Cooper, and had the patience and intellectual capacity of a hungry toddler. I was unhappy, but that was to be expected. It was, after all, my first job out of college. I wasn’t supposed to like it. I was supposed to phone it in while I wrote my novel on lunch breaks. I wasn’t supposed to take it personally, but it was getting more and more difficult to leave work in that tiny, windowless office, where I was left alone with the abstract expressionist Ikea painting to field phone calls from my boss, asking me how to be a lawyer. I do not respond well to the sorts of demands that were lobbed at me; I was told in the beginning that my $10 and hour under-the-table job consisted of copies, answering the phone, and taking things to the courthouse, but it became clear within a month that my boss expected me to shoulder the burden of his responsibilities as an attorney. He wasn’t qualified to do it, so how could I be?
One drunken Saturday, after a couple of movies, the evening’s companion lurched forward with a VHS copy of Logopolis. “Just one episode, I swear.” I didn’t have a good argument, and he was bigger than me, so I allowed it. Maybe it was the wine, but with every chime of the cloister bell, I suspended a little more disbelief. By the time the Watcher faded into Peter Davison, something clicked.
I should now take the time to explain to the uninitiated, that I am talking about Doctor Who, the longest running science fiction television series in the world. Without going too much into history, the show is about The Doctor, who is a Time Lord, which is a kind of time and space traveling alien from the planet Gallifrey. During the 9th Doctor’s tenure, it’s explained that he is the last of the Time Lords, and Gallifrey was destroyed during the time war. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. All you really need to know is that he’s an alien from a race with the ability to regenerate —that is, instead of dying (most of the time) they become a completely different person in a different body. The Doctor retains his memories with each new incarnation, but has had several different personalities. There have been ten Doctors since the Kennedy Assassination. From the first episode, the Doctor has traveled in what appears to be a 1960’s police telephone box, but is actually his spaceship, the TARDIS, which is an acronym for time and relative dimensions in space, which translates to “It’s bigger on the inside.” All of this is probably news to you, unless you are British, or watched the show on PBS at some point in your childhood. I fit into neither category, so it was very difficult for me to explain to my friends, or even myself how such a thing had come to pass.
Like anyone with basic cable in the 1990’s, I’ve seen Back to the Future, and its sequels a hundred times, and therefore, have a casual interest in fictional time travel and young Michael J. Fox. My interest in space travel extends only as far as the 1970’s, and really only for Ziggy Stardust and Logan’s Run-style set pieces. I spent most of college proclaiming, “I have no suspension of disbelief!” as the stock answer to why I hated The Matrix and Lord of the Rings and your fantasy short story with the nowhere plot and several made up words that meant “dragon,” and “sword” that was somehow also about your ex-girlfriend. I was put off aliens almost entirely at the age of three by the movie E.T., not because of the scary government interference parts, but because E.T. looked as though he smelled awful. That was enough for me. Nothing in my intellectual makeup allowed for my almost autistic interest in the continuing adventures of the Doctor and his companions. But, in the past year alone, I’ve had six jobs, which is twice as many as I’d ever had before. Since quitting my secretary job in late November, I have been a temp, a linguistic annotator, a production assistant for an educational publishing company, an advertising copywriter, and am now, for the time being, a barista again. I have not settled into a single position, either because it was temporary, or because my sanity was too important to me.
We define ourselves by our goals, our jobs and incomes and relationships. When none of them give even the illusion of certainty, without a clear station or direction, it’s easy to lose track of things. It’s not any easier creatively, especially if your end point seems further away than health insurance. To be young now is to sit amongst the intangible, to be thoroughly separate from comfort and safety. It’s why our cultural and social milestones are so tied to our interests, why we update our MySpace and Facebook profiles – because they’re safe, and offer immediate, though shallow connections, and because, in some ways, they give a faint impression of a fully formed person with those few improperly punctuated lists. Man is not the sum of his interests, but without clear markers for growth or success, we’re limited to bullet points of our capabilities, lines on our resumes, and detailed explanations of extracurricular activities.
The Doctor has been ten different people. It’s not just a convenient plot device – it allows the audience to see consistency through change. We are born and become and remain ourselves. It’s not a simple or pleasant process, and it goes wrong as often as it goes right, but it’s what makes us human. He has been young and old and silly and serious. He has been an egomaniac, an asshole, the inspiration for (and salvation from) an evil computer bent on eugenics experiments in the outer reaches of space. It’s not real, and we know that, but it reflects some part of reality that’s hard to contain within television plotlines. Change is not something that happens in easy arcs with clear midpoints, step by cinematic step before our very eyes. It is often something that happens out of necessity which we accustom ourselves to later. The Doctor hasn’t our human luxury, and so all of his differences and similarities are physical, played out for all of us to see. Whether or not we agree with each casting, he’s the same character the audience accepted forty-five years ago. And I like that. I respect that.
With all that’s changed and changed and changed in my last year, it feels good to have some constant, an escape from thinking about how, at the rate I’m going, I’ll never finish this book or have health insurance or a savings account, or get anywhere close to touching what I’ve worked my whole life toward. Because while the world is not fair or kind, I know that the Doctor will always come back in the end with the answer that, might not be a solution, but does the least harm. It's a comfort to imagine some sense of kindness in the world, even if it’s by way of a fictional alien traveler with a soft spot for planet Earth. I’m only human, but there’s no one on earth with more faith in humanity than the Doctor.
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