The Best of Bonds, The Worst of Bonds

I see the James Bond movies are finally being sold individually. The monster packages were never a temptation for me -- life's too short and money's too tight for a boxed set that includes Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, George Lazenby and Pierce Brosnan. If there'd been a Sean Connery set, I might have reached for the plastic. Maybe.

I haven't bought any of them, yet, but if they're cheap enough I expect there may be one or two future Amazon orders that get a little Bond padding in order to score the free shipping. My inclination is to get the very best and the very worst Bond movie from my childhood Bonds, Connery and Moore. The best Connery Bond is, without question, From Russia With Love. Worst? Hmm. Diamonds Are Forever is pretty limpid, and themesong aside I've never really been a fan of Goldfinger (my favorite Goldfinger line actually comes from MAD Magazine, referring to Oddjob's statue-decapitating hat: "That's nothing. You should see what he does with his underwear.") But I'd say the movie that qualifies as most endearingly awful is You Only Live Twice. The towering Connery, being made up to look like a Japanese peasant fisherman, or posing as an industrial chemist and ordering barrels of monosodium glutimate ... rich, rich material that. And all this is just a lead-up to Donald Pleasance.

Roger Moore -- now there's a horse of a different colour. Nearly all of them were stinkers, but there are several that really stand out: A View To A Kill, Moonraker, The Spy Who Loved Me ... all bad, but in a boring way. Live And Let Die is closer to the classically bad ideal, but I think the film that tops it is The Man With The Golden Gun, which achieves a giddy surreality with its sumo wrestlers, little person villains and phony third nipples.

Best Moore? How about For Your Eyes Only (if only for the poster)?

My Bicycle

There she is: my 1987 Fisher Hoo-koo-e-koo.*



It's a wonder she's lasted 20 years. In the summer of 1988, after a full year of riding her the way a mountain bike is meant to be ridden, I decided the proper thing to do was give her a complete overhaul. I was unemployed, I'd read Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and I figured, “How hard could this be?” I purchased a few specialty tools, then spent an afternoon taking her apart. Four hours later, the pieces were neatly arranged on my apartment floor, and I was carefully cleaning every last ballbearing with an old toothbrush dipped in kerosene.

Four hours after that, she was reassembled ... sort of. Everything was where it belonged, but it wasn't quite fitting together the way it should, particularly in the bottom bracket. I wasn't able to fully reinstall the two cups that held the bearings and crank axle — I experienced a great deal more resistance putting them back in than I had removing them. So I called my local bicycle shop and asked if they had any advice. “Better wheel her in,” said the gear-head.

I did, and explained the situation all over again to the guy who met me at the door. He listened to me without interrupting. When I was done, he cleared his throat and said, “Well, for starters, you've put the cups in the wrong mounts. If you reefed on 'em hard enough, you've probably stripped the threads in your bottom bracket.”

D'oh!

And that's been my history with this lovely bike: I'm a gentle rider who reserves his most abusive treatment for those down-times in the shop.

Two more photos, highlighting some of my accessories. Note the Kellogg's Rooster reflector — a bitter inspiration of covetousness for my daughters:



Still, my younger daughter saw fit to award me this nifty handlebar decoration three years ago:



With the arrival of spring, I decided it was time to replace my brake shoes. I purchased two pairs, came home and dismantled the brakes. Midway through reassembly, I realized I'd lost track of what went where. I collected everything, threw it into the trunk of our car and headed back to the shop — 20 years older, and none the wiser.

*I couldn't tell you what the name means, except that it was “borrowed” from Indian history, specifically a tribe that resided in Northern California.

Bicycle Helmets

I came across the receipt for my bicycle. Hard to believe, but it's 20 years old. Coincidentally, so is my helmet.



If I listened to the gear-heads at the local bicycle shop, I'd have replaced my helmet fifteen years ago, and I'd have done it twice more in the interim. I'm skeptical about helmet safety claims, though. A friend of mine was killed on his bicycle, and he was wearing a helmet. Still, I make a point of wearing one whenever I ride: the only traffic accident I suffered on my bicycle happened the day I decided I didn't feel like wearing a helmet. Besides, I want to be a good example to my kids, who are required by law to wear one.

Anyway, my old helmet's perch was getting shakier and shakier as the foam became ever more compact, so I finally dropped $30 on a new helmet. It looks like this:



First impression: holy cow, my head is cold!! It seems ventilation science has made mighty strides in the last 20 years. Take another look at my old helmet. Boy, could that piece of Tupperware ever trap in the heat.

It also made me look like an incredible dork. The only "dork factor" my new helmet provides is by contrast. Here we have a sleek, new helmet sitting atop a not-so-sleek, not-so-new rider. Ah well. When it comes to aesthetics, I didn't care when I bought the first helmet and I'm not going to start caring now.

The gear-heads wagged their finger at my helmet, but pointedly admired the longevity of my bike. Tomorrow I'll post a picture of my vehicle of choice, and maybe do a little reminiscing.

"Writin'" Books

Earlier this month I came back from the post office and tore open my Amazon package to find: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, and Narrative Design by Madison Smartt Bell. Ah, just in the nick of time! I’ve been working on The Novel. And I’ve stopped having fun.

I read Pressfield first. It’s a slender book, similar in build (if not substance) to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Chapters can be as long as three pages. More likely they’ll be shorter. To wit, here’s one entitled What I Know, in its entirety:

There’s a secret real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.

What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.

Such sentiments have a very limited currency with me, alas: I simply don’t find sitting down that difficult. I sat down five times to write this blog entry. I took five separate stabs at it, too. In those five attempts I wrote a pile of words that shall remain blessedly unseen by others, so I think I can say with some authority that sitting down and writing isn’t the difficulty for me. Writing something worthy of posting, however, has been a bit of a trick lately.

Pressfield has written some books I very much enjoy: Gates of Fire and Tides of War are terrifically compelling historical novels. The man is no stranger to research, but unlike other novelists who’ve tried their hand at historical fiction, Pressfield makes a keen distinction between the baby and the bathwater, and if these two novels are the norm for him, he consistently delivers the former to his readers.

The War of Art, however, does not deal with issues of discernment, nor does it mean to; it is a motivational piece. The copy I have has been blessed by Jay McInerney and (hello!) Robert McKee, and Esquire magazine calls it, “A vital gem ... a kick in the ass.” Though Pressfield dutifully addresses the writer as “she” in one chapter, then “he” in the next, I suspect men are more likely to buy it.

There must be writers who respond well to a kick in the ass. Me? Not so much. I wish I'd found a copy in a bookstore and perused it before buying. The book can be read from cover to cover in less than an hour, and to my eyes it’s not that far removed from The Artist’s Way — which I’ve read and followed, by the way, and find modestly helpful. But since I’ve raised the specter of The Artist’s Way, here’s a question that niggles at me: what is it about Hollywood that gets writers talkin' religion when they talk craft? Do they have baskets of money that verbally prompt these people to use language that's, well, just a tad flaky?

Julia Cameron and Steven Pressfield wax philosophic-lite when they reach out to uncork their would-be proteges. Reading them both, I get a little itchy and scratchy: “Hm. Sounds vaguely pagan,” I’ll think after reading Cameron (“Our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity”). Or, “Oh, that there's Pantheism,” after reading Pressfield (“Everything that is, is God in one form or another”). Feel free to attribute my distancing to the well-honed knee-jerk reaction of an orthodox acolyte. But let me just state for the record: nothing raises my hackles faster than a Christian artist invoking God this, Jesus that and the Holy Spirit over all. Neo-Pagans can inspire my curiosity, and as for Pantheism I'll admit that most days leave me wondering if that’s not really The Way It Is. But when it comes to artistic instruction, I'd prefer it if my teachers considered me an atheist. Hard to say why that is, exactly; I guess religious talk of any sort is freighted with considerable proprietary emotion. Call this Resistance if you must, but is there any reason why we can’t avoid altogether the topic of religion when we’re figuring out how best to flex the artistic impulse?

Getting back to Resistance — I spent four years resisting Resistance: sitting down, turning on the computer and typing my way to the next stage in my novel. Most of that was not "happy" time, and once my first working draft was finished I vowed to leave it alone until I discovered some way to enjoy myself, dammit. I publicly read a selection from the first draft recently, and the generous response I received encouraged me to pick it up again. So I did. And I stopped having fun. Just what, exactly, is my problem?

Here’s Madison Smartt Bell:

Anyone who’s ever grappled with a longer narrative, something approaching the length of a novel, say, will have discovered (quite painfully, perhaps) that sheer intuition won’t carry the project all the way through ... Some writers can tolerate a very high level of detailed advance planning for a long work without losing their own interest and sense of discovery in actually writing it. Others are so differently constituted that they cannot tolerate any abstract advance planning at all and must proceed through novels as intuitively as they would through short stories (with the result that they suffer more and have to write a lot more drafts).

BINGO!! Yes, that was, and still is, me: limping along on my Achilles' heel, sheer intuition. Michael Ondaatje claims to work in this mode, and I suspect Jim Harrison is of similar temperament. But if I’m going to take another worthy stab at this project of mine, some planning and coloring within the lines is desperately in order.

At this point it might be reasonable of me to finally break down and purchase one or two books from Writer’s Digest. So far I’ve avoided them, not out of snobbery but of fiscal thrift: the few I’ve browsed through struck me as articles padded into book-length form. Thankfully, there are hosts of worthy articles available on the web. And, even more impressive, there’s a true professional who, on her blog, offers her own advice from considerable personal experience: Lynne Viehl. "36 novels in five genres"!? I'm paying attention, and I'm taking notes. Here Ms. Viehl provides 10 links of varying potential (I'll pass on the freeware, but the articles are certainly worth consideration). And here's an excellent interview with Ms. Viehl by the sadly-no-longer-blogging Mad Max Perkins. One nice exchange: Q: "I have to say: of all the people who responded to my 'Call to Authors,' questionnaire, your story struck me as the most upbeat. You seemed not to have met the same level of disappointment and frustration that a lot of the other authors spoke about. Were you sugar-coating?" A: "I've had my disappointments, but not many, and they made me work harder. I didn't know anything about the industry and I never met another writer until after I was published, so that may have something to do with it. My only expectation was simply to see my name on the cover of a book, and I've done that twenty-six times in five years."

Between Viehl’s professional picks and Bell’s articulate observations (mastering a blues scale on guitar is terrific decompression advice for anyone, by the way) my joy has returned, as has my energy for the project. And that’s how it shall remain ... (*cough*) God willing.

Paging Mr. T.

Could someone explain to me what just happened at Terry Teachout's website? Where, in all of this, is Mr. T?

Some Lit-Links

I wasn't aware, until this morning, that humorist David Sedaris was receiving a public scolding for being a bullshit artist. My original response was, "As if we didn't know!" Then the Rodney Rothman affair was raised, and I remembered my own finger-wagging re: Frey and Chabon. Are there distinctions to be made?

Yes, there are. Chabon was straight-facedly telling his audience that his neighbor was a Nazi posing as a Holocaust survivor. The man he referred to was real, but was never a Nazi, a survivor or even Chabon's neighbor: simply an American veteran who had actually fought the Nazis. When I'm generous, I call that ill-advised tom-foolery on Chabon's part; in a less generous mood, I call that malign deceit. Frey walked in with his tattoos and prosaic bravado, asking one and all, "Who's a tough guy?" I call that leading with your chin. Sedaris walks in and says, "Listen to this: isn't it crazy?" I'd call it a crock, if I weren't laughing so hard. As for Rothman, if you scroll to the comments, it looks like he's got a perspective on it all that's worth consideration.

*****

Print On Demand vis-a-vis Lulu is an oh-so-nifty innovation that has relieved me of the burden of wondering if my fiction might ever see the light of day. The burden of cultivating a larger audience, however, is still there. Mary Scriver outlines the challenges facing POD author here.

*****

Fifteen years ago I picked up a bizarre little novel called Strong Motion. It had a conceptual energy that I rather liked. Four years later I noticed its author was featured on the cover of Harper's Magazine, with the proposal: "In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels." Jonathan Franzen's quest was personal, and the answer he finally lit upon was personal. I thought it was terrific.

Since then Franzen's manifesto has come to haunt the pages of Harper's the way Tom Wolfe's did before him. Brainy types are weighing in, trying to put Franzen in his place (somewhere other than post-Oprah best-sellerdom, I assume), proposing we look elsewhere for answers to ailments that beleaguer "serious" fiction. I don't know what Harper's pays per word, but even at rock-bottom prices Ben Marcus made off like a bandit with what was meant to be a high-falutin' broadside of Franzen. Jess Row lamented this sort of pissing-match and wondered if a woman mightn't have a better perspective on it all.

Well, be careful what you wish for: here's Cynthia Ozick giving both lads a maternal pat on the head, telling us they're both a little right, both a little wrong. What our novels really need to survive, she says, is critics. Preferably critics like James Wood.

I think what this patient really needs, if it wants to survive, is yet another doctor. Sheesh. Neither of these Poindexters give more than passing consideration to the genuine issues Franzen raises, namely the demonstrable unrelenting decline in the sales of fiction. Franzen's question was what's the point of devoting three (plus) years of your life writing a novel if only a dozen people read it? He answered it, and so far as I'm concerned, I'd love him to tease apart the point of writing yet another novel after everyone on the continent has bought, read and publically weighed in on the merits of your last one. Franzen was pertinent then; he'd be just as pertinent now.

*****

It's the end of the novel as we know it, and I feel fine. Michael Blowhard throws out three possible publishing scenarios facing the "literary novel" here. He uses a 300 year timeframe, and taken with a grain of salt, they all strike me as entirely possible assuming humanity is still around to play with such concepts.

I've never considered the eBook to be an attractive option, until I read this bit, via ALD. By golly, if those puppies came equipped with a "search" feature, I just might climb on board. But then I read this bit, via Boing Boing, and now I'm not so sure....

Three hundred years, if things keep developing at the current rate, is a Sagan-like "BILL-YUNNS AND BILL-YUNNS" for technology. Still, it's the printed word that fuels well over 90% of the world's education programs. I think this means that print and paper will likely remain an attractive medium for people to aspire to for many, many years to come.

Whether the North American publishing industry will survive is another matter. Beyond the textbook industry, I just don't see how it can. Back in the 90s, when I talked shop with the publishers, sellers and buyers of books, people looked at publishing's return policy, which basically allows stores to stock as many copies and titles as they wish then send them back for free, and figured it was doomed. The store I worked in, when I first came on board, had a publisher return rate that approached nearly 40%. We worked to get that below 20% (I'm proud to say that as a buyer I averaged 12%, and had a trimester that dipped to 9% thanks to strong sales on the floor. No-one got rich from it, but then no-one went broke, either).

Since then, there's been one single Big Box Behemoth that's taken over the Canadian bookselling landscape, and publishers are facing return rates that are wildly beyond anything I encountered. That's just Canada, which is a very small part of the American publishing scene. In the States we've got more box stores, more publishers, more money getting sent through the pulper. Yes, the sky is falling, but at least we've got an engaging history of it.

Quoth the Sundance Kid:

“You just keep thinkin' Butch. That's what you're good at.”


It looks like Cowtown Pattie has awarded/tagged me with The Thinking Blogger Award — no small honor, considering not just the source, but her four other choices as well.

With the prize comes a heavy obligation: naming five bloggers who make me think. Rather than pick the five friskiest from my litter of cobbers I could, of course, just encourage you to check out any of the links on my sidebar. But I do think there is some merit in exploring the people who don't just provoke me with ideas and concepts, but actually get me steeping, so here goes (with apologies for ground that's already been covered):

First props go to the Multiple Blowhards at 2Blowards.com, and particularly to Michael, the considerate, irreverent and endearingly lascivious ringmaster of the whole enterprise. I admire and try to emulate his “Why not? / And yet...” rhetorical approach, because it's the surest way to get me entertaining ideas I would normally ignore, or dismiss out of hand. We're all (I hope) conflicted individuals, with more than one personality at our core. Consider politics: if I had to sum myself up, I'd say I'm a knee-jerk liberal with a conservative's fretful conscience. Due consideration of both impulses should, I would think, have tremendous potential. So why insist on Ockham-like clarity when a little tender exploration of complexities might yield the more rewarding insight?

The example of 2blowhards is what got me blogging: that, and my e-mail exchanges with Scott — a friend who is a thoughtful, giddy, deft and genuine steeper of ideas. Many times I've wondered if we shouldn't just publically post our back-and-forths. It's probably just as well we don't: A) it might degenerate into an all-out nerdicon (our last exchange covered the relative merits of Dr. Who over the current Galactica) and B) sooner or later his entourage of admirers would descend and leave my self-esteem in tatters. Here is one rather weighty exchange that did, finally, go public. When I initially saw it, I wondered if both of us hadn't somehow missed the point. Gradually, I couldn't help but wonder if the world mightn't be better off if more people made the effort to miss the point like we did! So here's a prize for you, Scott, with my thanks for making me think.

If you read that last link (or much of what I post here) you have discovered I'm a religious sod. In the words of Darth Vader, it is my destiny. There was no escaping it: my father is a Mennonite pastor, my mother is the daughter of a Mennonite pastor. I went and married a pastor's daughter, too, because I didn't want a lifetime of explaining every strange little tic in my character (the fact that she was the most desirable woman I'd ever met helped, too). With the exception of a few friends (again, on the sidebar) I tend to avoid religious blogs as if they were the not-so-proverbial plague. Most religious blogs are recognizable for the tone they immediately strike: “Here is further confirmation (as if I needed it) that what I believe is in fact the Truth.” Of course, one needn't be religious to voice that sentiment, but it seems to help. The only thought this approach inspires in me is, “Where's the exit?”

The people who nurtured me experienced and did great and wonderful things through their faith, so theirs is not a punchbowl I aim to piss in — if you want my statement of faith, buy and read my book. But if there is one defining problem I have with my heritage, it is that the theory always — always — came before the art. People, you can't make art like that!! You just can't. Trust me, you'll wind up with church buildings that look shabbier than the local arena.

In my childhood there existed one shining beacon of aesthetic hope, and that was a bunch of earnestly dotty hippies called JPUSA: Jesus People USA. (If you think I'm being cruel, I'm not: “fools for Christ” and all that.) These folks believe the Church is called to be counter-cultural, and is hardwired into the Holy Spirit, and should be producing sounds and visions that testify to this arrangement. You are free to debate the intent and quality of their output, but there is no denying it is prodigious and boisterous. And I happen to think some of it is great, 'cos that's just what you get when you open up the floor the way they do.

More to the point, the theory follows the art: here's JPUSA's Mike Hertenstein explaining why The Zombie Crawl is the Liturgical Dance of Cornerstone Festival. Rather kewl in a Burning Man Reclaimed sorta way. Now, it could be someone entered the Cornerstone planning room and said, “How best to illustrate 'To live is Christ, to die is gain?' I know: Zombie Crawl!” More likely it was, (rubbing hands and chortling) “Where do we introduce the Zombie Crawl?” I love it! So for this, and other surprises, I make a monthly habit of checking out what Hertenstein pulls into his Imaginarium because it gets me giggling ... and it gets me thinkin'. (h/t to JT for the introduction).

As with Scott, my e-mail exchanges with Mary Scriver have provoked a great deal of thought — but that would hardly come as news to anyone who reads her blogs, Prairie Mary and Merry Scribbler. I'm particularly fond of whatever she posts on the latter, so that's the one I'll “award” the prize to.

And finally, I must return to another ringmaster, albeit one who flits in and out of the shadows: DarkoV at Verging On Pertinence. Lots of thoughtful material on his blog, but what really gets me steeping are his frequent comments and musical recomendations. Take a Sunday morning to tune in here, and you might just catch him at his calling: DJ of extraordinary pertinence.

Alright: I'm washing my hands of all this gray matter. Let's see what the rest of you have.