Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Collapsing under pressure...
Just a notification that I've given up on any sort of daily blogging for the rest (and week+ before today that lacks entries) of August. Might make a monthly theme of "Wake Me Up When September Ends" for the quickly approaching 30-dayer, but with no pressure, probably equating to more, shorter posts. In other news, my headache appears to be breaking.
Friday, August 14, 2009
"The Respect in Names"
This is something I've been toying around with since I wrote my book in November. Some guy just got named James Bond. This is an excerpt from what would eventually be a novel or novella about how he went from everyman to Bond-like character that would tightrope the fourth wall like a skirtchaser following your sister.
Apologies to what may end up being self-plagiarism--this post is a return of sorts to the blog and I'm just sort of writing out this fiction without a strong amount of planning. What I'm worried about is that this story could end up similar to another I write here someday, with some character names swapped. Of course, with that typed up I can't see any similarities between the story I'm thinking of in my mind and the one I'm writing now, but there might be, and I thought there were when I turned it a certain way at some point.
And now without further interruption, the feature presentation:
007
People put too much respect into names. I think I'm living testament to that. You introduce yourself as James Bond and people laugh and when they take you seriously, when you show your ID, and then on top of that you've been friends for three and a half weeks, they look at you differently than they do say the Brads or the Phillips, the everyday John Smiths and Does, even though these days those everyman tales of unoriginality draw semi-laughing stares too.
I mean, it's not like I'm mad at anyone, but I think it really lessens the believability of everything I say, everything I've done is endlessly called into question, and the problem I have is gaining any sort of real respect that isn't just formed by the fakeness that comes in my signature. I'm not out here making jokes, not introducing myself last name first, it's always "James..." and a belabored muffled "Bond" to people who keep my gaze, who make it apparent that they know too many Jameses and need me to distinguish more.
I've had reprieves, ten years ago, I moved west under the moniker of James Ballard, a private in-joke for me, that would inevitably bring about the end of my paradise. I'm not looking for pity here, that's not my point, I just mean to put out here the concept that I am telling the truth, not uncoloring and presenting you a G-rated black and white version of my life. If I'm going to actually get into any sort of confession, recollection of what my life has been, I do need to know that it will be believed. I offer this as a way of setting your minds, while I also know that it will inevitably fall through. Like I said, people put too much respect into names, I think it's something we picked up when we invented language, the whole idea that what the name of something tells you has to be true--more contemporarily we see this in radio, print, television, the internet, people like to make assumptions and like to be told things. I'm okay with that.
From that preface, I'd like to move on to what you will see as an unlikely situation, what you will assume is me hiding behind some sort of modesty, putting on the mask of a lesser man. Perhaps what you don't understand is that false respect wears a man down, causes him to eventually question all compliments, all support offered.
Anyway, we get out of the country, across the pond, and I have this odd feeling the entire time that I've forgotten something behind, in my apartment, something important. She's an interesting girl, pushy, and I'm her employee for this little trip, so it goes to say bossy. Asleep on the plane, in a dream, it occurs to me that what I'm leaving behind is not just something semi-important like a suit or a particular brand of cologne, my dress shoes, or anything tangible. What I'm leaving behind is the man I've been all my life, the man who's been forced to be going through the motions, some secret agent man so deceptive he doesn't even know who he really is.
I think the part of me that was gone was the one that at least subscribed to a reasonable facsimilie of some sort of free will. This was a woman who had found me and paid me to come out here and play Sherlock Holmes, something I was unused to. James Bond wasn't known for his paid exploits but rather his comradery. I've at least picked up enough faked stories to keep the water cooler boys happy when we're out on the town playing Bateman. But stories of my skills of detection, I'm especially lacking on those.
In my mind, the memory is fresh, she's opening the box and it's full of Benjamin Franklin, his many crispy faces glimpsing up at me, a man that looks weird in any color other than green. What I warn you to remember about me is that I can be bought, I'm Casey at the bat, easily willing to take a fall if you can give me enough funds.
You don't know what life I've been living, spending more than I have night in, night out, this was an escape route that presented itself to me without any coaxing and now I will have to solve this mystery, put together this puzzle. I didn't ask questions, I don't know what I'm going to be doing, this was a Bobbie Sue course of action, this was just taking the money and run.
Now we're in some luxury hotel listed as a married couple, "undercover," she mouthed to me as we checked in and right now I'm lying on the bed momentarily, before I move myself down to the floor--a transition I plan on making of my own accord--looking up at the fan above me attempting to see one of the blades made distinguishable from the others, but like everything lately, this attempt falls fruitless.
And then I hear her in the shower calling back to me, "Ugh, I can't use this soap, the smell reminds me of my father, a man I'd much rather forget. I have a bar in my bag, could you get it for me?" I get up and walk over to her bag unsure of what to do. "It should be the third flap on the front side," she says. I locate this pocket and pull out exactly, a bar of expensive soap. And I think, do I want to find out more about this woman? Am I coming apart at the seams because of how little consistency my life has had lately?
Suddenly something catches my eye and I look up through the window at the night sky, bar of soap in my hand, and I watch a star shoot quickly across. Normally I'm not one for hocus pocus, but normally I'm not one for business trips out of country with strange women. And so I wish.
2:35AM Wed 8/19/09
Def: 4pp
Apologies to what may end up being self-plagiarism--this post is a return of sorts to the blog and I'm just sort of writing out this fiction without a strong amount of planning. What I'm worried about is that this story could end up similar to another I write here someday, with some character names swapped. Of course, with that typed up I can't see any similarities between the story I'm thinking of in my mind and the one I'm writing now, but there might be, and I thought there were when I turned it a certain way at some point.
And now without further interruption, the feature presentation:
007
People put too much respect into names. I think I'm living testament to that. You introduce yourself as James Bond and people laugh and when they take you seriously, when you show your ID, and then on top of that you've been friends for three and a half weeks, they look at you differently than they do say the Brads or the Phillips, the everyday John Smiths and Does, even though these days those everyman tales of unoriginality draw semi-laughing stares too.
I mean, it's not like I'm mad at anyone, but I think it really lessens the believability of everything I say, everything I've done is endlessly called into question, and the problem I have is gaining any sort of real respect that isn't just formed by the fakeness that comes in my signature. I'm not out here making jokes, not introducing myself last name first, it's always "James..." and a belabored muffled "Bond" to people who keep my gaze, who make it apparent that they know too many Jameses and need me to distinguish more.
I've had reprieves, ten years ago, I moved west under the moniker of James Ballard, a private in-joke for me, that would inevitably bring about the end of my paradise. I'm not looking for pity here, that's not my point, I just mean to put out here the concept that I am telling the truth, not uncoloring and presenting you a G-rated black and white version of my life. If I'm going to actually get into any sort of confession, recollection of what my life has been, I do need to know that it will be believed. I offer this as a way of setting your minds, while I also know that it will inevitably fall through. Like I said, people put too much respect into names, I think it's something we picked up when we invented language, the whole idea that what the name of something tells you has to be true--more contemporarily we see this in radio, print, television, the internet, people like to make assumptions and like to be told things. I'm okay with that.
From that preface, I'd like to move on to what you will see as an unlikely situation, what you will assume is me hiding behind some sort of modesty, putting on the mask of a lesser man. Perhaps what you don't understand is that false respect wears a man down, causes him to eventually question all compliments, all support offered.
Anyway, we get out of the country, across the pond, and I have this odd feeling the entire time that I've forgotten something behind, in my apartment, something important. She's an interesting girl, pushy, and I'm her employee for this little trip, so it goes to say bossy. Asleep on the plane, in a dream, it occurs to me that what I'm leaving behind is not just something semi-important like a suit or a particular brand of cologne, my dress shoes, or anything tangible. What I'm leaving behind is the man I've been all my life, the man who's been forced to be going through the motions, some secret agent man so deceptive he doesn't even know who he really is.
I think the part of me that was gone was the one that at least subscribed to a reasonable facsimilie of some sort of free will. This was a woman who had found me and paid me to come out here and play Sherlock Holmes, something I was unused to. James Bond wasn't known for his paid exploits but rather his comradery. I've at least picked up enough faked stories to keep the water cooler boys happy when we're out on the town playing Bateman. But stories of my skills of detection, I'm especially lacking on those.
In my mind, the memory is fresh, she's opening the box and it's full of Benjamin Franklin, his many crispy faces glimpsing up at me, a man that looks weird in any color other than green. What I warn you to remember about me is that I can be bought, I'm Casey at the bat, easily willing to take a fall if you can give me enough funds.
You don't know what life I've been living, spending more than I have night in, night out, this was an escape route that presented itself to me without any coaxing and now I will have to solve this mystery, put together this puzzle. I didn't ask questions, I don't know what I'm going to be doing, this was a Bobbie Sue course of action, this was just taking the money and run.
Now we're in some luxury hotel listed as a married couple, "undercover," she mouthed to me as we checked in and right now I'm lying on the bed momentarily, before I move myself down to the floor--a transition I plan on making of my own accord--looking up at the fan above me attempting to see one of the blades made distinguishable from the others, but like everything lately, this attempt falls fruitless.
And then I hear her in the shower calling back to me, "Ugh, I can't use this soap, the smell reminds me of my father, a man I'd much rather forget. I have a bar in my bag, could you get it for me?" I get up and walk over to her bag unsure of what to do. "It should be the third flap on the front side," she says. I locate this pocket and pull out exactly, a bar of expensive soap. And I think, do I want to find out more about this woman? Am I coming apart at the seams because of how little consistency my life has had lately?
Suddenly something catches my eye and I look up through the window at the night sky, bar of soap in my hand, and I watch a star shoot quickly across. Normally I'm not one for hocus pocus, but normally I'm not one for business trips out of country with strange women. And so I wish.
2:35AM Wed 8/19/09
Def: 4pp
Thursday, August 13, 2009
"Got Ya"
Psych’s basic set-up is just brilliant to me. The idea of Shawn Spencer, brilliant detective, doubling as a fake psychic allows for near unlimited dramatic irony. It also allows for some four wall slippage, since Shawn and Gus know more than everyone else. Their own continued in-jokes can almost be seen as directly referencing an audience. Couple this with what I’ve mentioned before—USA Network’s solid ad campaigns that take the actors out of the show in semi-character and play little jokes and gags with them.
A few of these ads even go as far as to make light of the show’s subtle way of addressing the fourth wall, with Shawn picking the duo’s theme music in one commercial, and asking Gus if he thinks they might just be the stars of a television show in another.
To me, this is the way fourth wall treatments have to stay. Sure, they’ve been done brilliantly in a pure direct fashion (e.g. Grant Morrison’s Animal Man), but canon is ultimately more important, in my mind, in any sort of non-farcical series. I have issues with the use of the term “the real world,” or “your world” (spoken to an implied audience/reader), in fiction, and when you’ve addressed the viewer, you’ve, to some extent, done just that.
Much of my writing makes light of this fact, since I have writers in the universe that I’ve begun to create who both play characters in it and write it, themselves. But the world they came from is not the real world, just one a lot more like ours than the one that they now inhabit. Psych seems to understand my beef with this and avoids direct references to the audience, but still reaps the benefits of an aside every now and then.
The main problem I have with a show like Psych is how often it deals with murder as a comedy. Along with Monk, I would say that Psych’s main problem has to do with the fact that so many of its laughs have to come around death, albeit fictional death. In less talented hands, this type of show tends to fall on its face quite quickly, as could be noted in CSI’s repeated attempts at episodes based in humor.
Psych is generally able to skirt such issues by avoiding direct macabre humor, the sort of thing that actually makes up a good CSI episode. Where the latter falls flat, is where the former is at its best. CSI is written as a dramedy at best, more often than not it is a straight drama show with some chuckles here and there, while Psych is never unsure of itself as a comedy. CSI seems to be a part of new shows that do not bother themselves with preset rules, and like, let’s say, Scrubs, this program will often times look for experimental new styles. Turning an entire episode into a collection of the macabre humor that is barely visible in one show makes for an uninviting program that laughs at death. Psych can draw its humor from its characters and for the most part avoid that sort of black humor because of this. It is a true benefit of the show’s formatting.
Even when the show deals with dead bodies, which I believe I noted already as being nearly an every episode occurrence, we can watch Shawn and his little joking psychic routines, the knowledge of who his character really is allows the viewer to remember their disbelief perhaps and works well in dealing with the problems caused in laughing at a show that deals with death. A similar course of action can be seen in Case Closed, where the detective’s very appearance adds to the humor of the programming.
What is quite interesting about Psych is how much it depends on its own gimmick, but is not enslaved to it. Characters still interact and relationships still change, the way any active show should be, but without Spencer’s fake psychic gig, the show would become your traditional crime drama, oddly then positioned in a near duplicate status to what might be seen as its child program in The Mentalist, a show that Psych even includes in one of its own in jokes.
This all adds up quite well, but Psych perhaps fizzles once again with the Corbin Bernsen character who is Shawn’s father. Whereas one has an easier time with liking Bernsen’s “semi name actor in a small role” cousin (in his position as actor on show and not in blood), Bruce Campbell who portrays Sam Axe on Burn Notice, my view of the father Henry Spencer is a bit mixed. While the acting from Bernsen is not lacking, the main issue is just an uncertainty over whether or not his character can be liked.
Psych operates commonly through flashbacks to when our hero Shawn was a kid and time and time again we see Henry portrayed as the comical over-bearing father (perhaps that’s the wrong term), and these bits generally leave me with a sick taste in my mouth. Uncertainty creeps into my mind, because Bernsen’s character is almost always portrayed in a dark, dark light.
All in all, though, the show does a good job of working its gimmick premise to the extent that it can, both relying too much on it and being quite independent from it at times. Both James Roday and Dulé Hill (Spencer and Gus, respectively) must be credited with making the show what it is, in the end, since it is their camaraderie that truly pulls everything together.
I guess it must be noted that so far I’ve only written of USA television shows, and I’ll try to steady that out a bit. If you’ve been a true reader of this blog, then you will know that I have written about Fox’s Fringe in the past, and I would just like to add that I plan to move on to other channels’ broadcastings as well at some point. Apologies to anyone upset with my apparent network bias thus far, and as always, for boring you all the way through this post.
A few of these ads even go as far as to make light of the show’s subtle way of addressing the fourth wall, with Shawn picking the duo’s theme music in one commercial, and asking Gus if he thinks they might just be the stars of a television show in another.
To me, this is the way fourth wall treatments have to stay. Sure, they’ve been done brilliantly in a pure direct fashion (e.g. Grant Morrison’s Animal Man), but canon is ultimately more important, in my mind, in any sort of non-farcical series. I have issues with the use of the term “the real world,” or “your world” (spoken to an implied audience/reader), in fiction, and when you’ve addressed the viewer, you’ve, to some extent, done just that.
Much of my writing makes light of this fact, since I have writers in the universe that I’ve begun to create who both play characters in it and write it, themselves. But the world they came from is not the real world, just one a lot more like ours than the one that they now inhabit. Psych seems to understand my beef with this and avoids direct references to the audience, but still reaps the benefits of an aside every now and then.
The main problem I have with a show like Psych is how often it deals with murder as a comedy. Along with Monk, I would say that Psych’s main problem has to do with the fact that so many of its laughs have to come around death, albeit fictional death. In less talented hands, this type of show tends to fall on its face quite quickly, as could be noted in CSI’s repeated attempts at episodes based in humor.
Psych is generally able to skirt such issues by avoiding direct macabre humor, the sort of thing that actually makes up a good CSI episode. Where the latter falls flat, is where the former is at its best. CSI is written as a dramedy at best, more often than not it is a straight drama show with some chuckles here and there, while Psych is never unsure of itself as a comedy. CSI seems to be a part of new shows that do not bother themselves with preset rules, and like, let’s say, Scrubs, this program will often times look for experimental new styles. Turning an entire episode into a collection of the macabre humor that is barely visible in one show makes for an uninviting program that laughs at death. Psych can draw its humor from its characters and for the most part avoid that sort of black humor because of this. It is a true benefit of the show’s formatting.
Even when the show deals with dead bodies, which I believe I noted already as being nearly an every episode occurrence, we can watch Shawn and his little joking psychic routines, the knowledge of who his character really is allows the viewer to remember their disbelief perhaps and works well in dealing with the problems caused in laughing at a show that deals with death. A similar course of action can be seen in Case Closed, where the detective’s very appearance adds to the humor of the programming.
What is quite interesting about Psych is how much it depends on its own gimmick, but is not enslaved to it. Characters still interact and relationships still change, the way any active show should be, but without Spencer’s fake psychic gig, the show would become your traditional crime drama, oddly then positioned in a near duplicate status to what might be seen as its child program in The Mentalist, a show that Psych even includes in one of its own in jokes.
This all adds up quite well, but Psych perhaps fizzles once again with the Corbin Bernsen character who is Shawn’s father. Whereas one has an easier time with liking Bernsen’s “semi name actor in a small role” cousin (in his position as actor on show and not in blood), Bruce Campbell who portrays Sam Axe on Burn Notice, my view of the father Henry Spencer is a bit mixed. While the acting from Bernsen is not lacking, the main issue is just an uncertainty over whether or not his character can be liked.
Psych operates commonly through flashbacks to when our hero Shawn was a kid and time and time again we see Henry portrayed as the comical over-bearing father (perhaps that’s the wrong term), and these bits generally leave me with a sick taste in my mouth. Uncertainty creeps into my mind, because Bernsen’s character is almost always portrayed in a dark, dark light.
All in all, though, the show does a good job of working its gimmick premise to the extent that it can, both relying too much on it and being quite independent from it at times. Both James Roday and Dulé Hill (Spencer and Gus, respectively) must be credited with making the show what it is, in the end, since it is their camaraderie that truly pulls everything together.
I guess it must be noted that so far I’ve only written of USA television shows, and I’ll try to steady that out a bit. If you’ve been a true reader of this blog, then you will know that I have written about Fox’s Fringe in the past, and I would just like to add that I plan to move on to other channels’ broadcastings as well at some point. Apologies to anyone upset with my apparent network bias thus far, and as always, for boring you all the way through this post.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
"The MMP"
The good thing about book clubs that send you books unless you tell them you don’t want them is that you can sample a bit. I started The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb the other day, because it was a very large paperback tome and it interested me to see who this Lamb brother was, writing these big long books and the like. And while the Quality Paperback Book Club’s books are now on their way back to the publisher, I’ve become a reader of our friend Wally.
The first thing I did, after a little interneting around with his name (something I would consider a one-upping of the term “googling”), was to look up what I could find by him at the local Borders. Some people like Barnes & Nobles, most do, these days, it seems (quite a few even annoyingly give it the misnomer Barnes & Nobles, but that is neither here nor there), but I don’t particularly care for their store style, at least the closest one by here.
What I found was quite delightful, actually; it appears that Wally Lamb is quite the popular author (something I picked up from the fact that his first two books have been a part of Oprah’s Book Club, or whatever it’s called and Oprah’s name is, rightly so, synonymous these days with popularity) and he has his first two books out in mass market paperback, an edition that I think more books should be released in.
I mean, the MMP has become the mainstay of the genre market, with old skiffy paperbacks and John D. MacDonald books, but really, this is only a publishing company created doom. Obviously if you only publish a limited number of books in a certain format, then that format is going to be assumed to be fitting in with the rest of the small group published. And it’s a shame, really, because for someone like Wally Lamb, I think this works particularly well.
Even though he has ridden the Oprah Book Club train a few times, I’d say that Wally isn’t a household name, no Stephen King, not even a John D. MacDonald, for that matter. The benefit of writing a book to be published eventually as an MMP is that a prospective reader is shelling out half as much money to decide whether he (or she as the case often is) might be interested in your work.
What’s funny is that in these times there is a somewhat booming business in the publishing business of doing rough, career-spanning anthology books for different popular writers. The idea is to put a little bit of everything they’ve ever done into one place. Now in all actuality, a marketing plan like this could only work completely successfully in my mind, if the company was willing to eat the cost of these books and release them free. Because if the reader actually does like this author, all of the individual books are still to be bought, paid for at rates of ten to fourteen dollars. Now, of course, libraries and used book stores can alleviate this problem for readers, customers, but not for the publisher, itself, in fact quite the opposite occurs.
It would seem, then, that this would not be an overly successful business plan, but I have no way of testing my theories and am going to leave them as just that, theories, thoughts, and blog posts. However, the lack of use of the mass market paperback outside of the airplane novel is something that truly bothers me.
Trade paperbacks are perhaps more for the book fetishist, the kind of person that any book reader will be in, oh, probably the next fifty years, but still, they can be bulky and useless, and just from the heightened price tag, illicit more care from the constant reader. An MMP is the best type of novel for a long walk, for transportation of any kind, really, and in my mind hardcovers are best suited for reading in the home, in that strange place between being completely awake and dreaming that reading allows us to escape to.
And yet, here I am divided, since I feel that I want to try out some sort of self-publishing within the next year or so, and I, myself, are considering the trade paperback above the mass market. But I am no publisher, and I wouldn’t really be going into this with any sort of goal as to make money or anything, but rather to have a product, something to show for what I’ve done, written.
“Quod scripsi, scripsi,” I have quoted Anthony Burgess quoting Pontius Pilate many a time, surprisingly, not in works that have really lived to see the day. But here I am again. “What I have written, I have written.” And it’s a true thing to say, but I think that to some extent, in this day and age, the physical is actually going to mean more than it does now, an idea I don’t think many people share. I’ve written earlier this month about how I felt about the future of the title of “writer,” which I said was not going to vanish, but rather expand and become everyone, to some extent.
What I mean to say here is not so much a revoking of that, but an addition. Because I think less tangible things will be made by most everyone, blogging will continue to grow steadily, podcasting will only rise in popularity, the tangible things like books or radio station broadcasts will find themselves on some sort of pedestal, not because they are the best of what there is now, or even the best of what there is then, but because they are different, and dying away, going extinct. Like how a lost dodo bird showing up in a zoo would receive more care than the usual chimpanzee.
And here comes the hard part, since this post began as a caution to publishers who fear using the mass market paperback edition—the portable half-price version of your favorite book, I say—and has now gone elsewhere. For me, as a nothing writer with very few ears out there, I have to think that I’d rather not be first put into print in an MMP. The trade paperback is snazzier.
But once again, a good thing this time, I’m not running a publishing company.
12:21AM Fri 8/14/09
Def: 0-1pp [depends on how you look at it]
The first thing I did, after a little interneting around with his name (something I would consider a one-upping of the term “googling”), was to look up what I could find by him at the local Borders. Some people like Barnes & Nobles, most do, these days, it seems (quite a few even annoyingly give it the misnomer Barnes & Nobles, but that is neither here nor there), but I don’t particularly care for their store style, at least the closest one by here.
What I found was quite delightful, actually; it appears that Wally Lamb is quite the popular author (something I picked up from the fact that his first two books have been a part of Oprah’s Book Club, or whatever it’s called and Oprah’s name is, rightly so, synonymous these days with popularity) and he has his first two books out in mass market paperback, an edition that I think more books should be released in.
I mean, the MMP has become the mainstay of the genre market, with old skiffy paperbacks and John D. MacDonald books, but really, this is only a publishing company created doom. Obviously if you only publish a limited number of books in a certain format, then that format is going to be assumed to be fitting in with the rest of the small group published. And it’s a shame, really, because for someone like Wally Lamb, I think this works particularly well.
Even though he has ridden the Oprah Book Club train a few times, I’d say that Wally isn’t a household name, no Stephen King, not even a John D. MacDonald, for that matter. The benefit of writing a book to be published eventually as an MMP is that a prospective reader is shelling out half as much money to decide whether he (or she as the case often is) might be interested in your work.
What’s funny is that in these times there is a somewhat booming business in the publishing business of doing rough, career-spanning anthology books for different popular writers. The idea is to put a little bit of everything they’ve ever done into one place. Now in all actuality, a marketing plan like this could only work completely successfully in my mind, if the company was willing to eat the cost of these books and release them free. Because if the reader actually does like this author, all of the individual books are still to be bought, paid for at rates of ten to fourteen dollars. Now, of course, libraries and used book stores can alleviate this problem for readers, customers, but not for the publisher, itself, in fact quite the opposite occurs.
It would seem, then, that this would not be an overly successful business plan, but I have no way of testing my theories and am going to leave them as just that, theories, thoughts, and blog posts. However, the lack of use of the mass market paperback outside of the airplane novel is something that truly bothers me.
Trade paperbacks are perhaps more for the book fetishist, the kind of person that any book reader will be in, oh, probably the next fifty years, but still, they can be bulky and useless, and just from the heightened price tag, illicit more care from the constant reader. An MMP is the best type of novel for a long walk, for transportation of any kind, really, and in my mind hardcovers are best suited for reading in the home, in that strange place between being completely awake and dreaming that reading allows us to escape to.
And yet, here I am divided, since I feel that I want to try out some sort of self-publishing within the next year or so, and I, myself, are considering the trade paperback above the mass market. But I am no publisher, and I wouldn’t really be going into this with any sort of goal as to make money or anything, but rather to have a product, something to show for what I’ve done, written.
“Quod scripsi, scripsi,” I have quoted Anthony Burgess quoting Pontius Pilate many a time, surprisingly, not in works that have really lived to see the day. But here I am again. “What I have written, I have written.” And it’s a true thing to say, but I think that to some extent, in this day and age, the physical is actually going to mean more than it does now, an idea I don’t think many people share. I’ve written earlier this month about how I felt about the future of the title of “writer,” which I said was not going to vanish, but rather expand and become everyone, to some extent.
What I mean to say here is not so much a revoking of that, but an addition. Because I think less tangible things will be made by most everyone, blogging will continue to grow steadily, podcasting will only rise in popularity, the tangible things like books or radio station broadcasts will find themselves on some sort of pedestal, not because they are the best of what there is now, or even the best of what there is then, but because they are different, and dying away, going extinct. Like how a lost dodo bird showing up in a zoo would receive more care than the usual chimpanzee.
And here comes the hard part, since this post began as a caution to publishers who fear using the mass market paperback edition—the portable half-price version of your favorite book, I say—and has now gone elsewhere. For me, as a nothing writer with very few ears out there, I have to think that I’d rather not be first put into print in an MMP. The trade paperback is snazzier.
But once again, a good thing this time, I’m not running a publishing company.
12:21AM Fri 8/14/09
Def: 0-1pp [depends on how you look at it]
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
"All these novels unwritten..."
I’ve written something like this before, I’ll admit, and it had virtually the same title, and I’m going to use it as a guide here, but since I wrote it out, a sort of outline on dead-ended plots, I’ve come up with some new ideas, and these are less tried and killed, but rather more insubstantial and uncertain, like a pitcher who does well in college, but has yet to show any big league talent.
When the last Harry Potter book came out, Rowling read the first two chapters at a sort of opening party for the book…I think it was the first two chapters. My father said that he’d rather she just sort of said, “Okay, here’s how the story goes…” and spewed on about it for a while, which I thought was a preposterous idea then and still think of as a preposterous idea now, but only because of situation. This was a book that was in a series, we knew the theme of it already, the style was nothing new. Now if it was a book she hadn’t finished writing yet or one that was just getting ready to be published, but was a stand alone kind of thing, then it would make more sense.
Not that what I’m doing here makes any sort sense.
“A papier-mâché Mephistopheles”
This is the novel that I’m writing in my head right now. It’s a female narrator and I’m looking at unlikely sources for ideas on how I can approach the concept of male writer writing in female voice—Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone, which has just a brilliant title; so far the first book of Lee Goldberg’s Monk series, original novels based on the characters of the USA show that’s now entering its last season, oddly enough, this book, Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse, has been since adapted into an episode of the show, presenting the sort of continuity issues that I find quite interesting; The Spy Who Loved Me, a book I haven’t gotten yet, Fleming’s only first person Bond novel. The plot of the story concerns a mid-2020s school reunion that reintroduces our heroine with the stock character “one who got away,” which I’ve been developing in my mind as some sort of self-pitying semi-successful novelist, autobiographical, only a better man than I am in virtually all ways. The first part of the story I see as the standard romantic comedy, with our narrator watching the now fifteen to twenty year old films The Holiday and Music and Lyrics among others, actually imagining herself attempting to stop her love from getting married, sort of a smart chick flick, as our narrator, her name being Samantha McGee, I believe (the writer named maybe something along the lines of Brad…something, I don’t know…maybe even three names), evaluating her life as it goes through all the little flutters and flights of such films. Then, after this, I’d liked to move onto a new genre, a sort of novel of ideas, about the two of them teaching each other their contrasting views of the world, learning new things, changing their minds. The backdrop of the last section is the presidential election of 2028, whose leading candidates present our couple with a dilemma, since Sam’s family is related by blood, however murkily, to one candidate, who bares their last name, but she is considering voting the other way. An idea I have, for her mother to be coming out of prison in the first section, for gauging how their relationship is changing, is also evaluated here. And then with a final concluding story that is vastly formless in my mind, but hopefully brings us into a new genre again, something, maybe ten to fifteen years later, and—an idea that occurs to me as I type—that could be built our protagonists looking forward, observing, and thinking about the effect of some future event along the lines of ‘69’s moon landing. Think of it as skiffy written with the style of yesteryear, our characters are older, and think differently, perhaps some juxtaposing sentences thrown in, like the carbon copies that Easton Ellis does in Less Than Zero and American Psycho.
“A Working Class Hero”
An epistolary novel between old friends who have grown out of touch; one is running for president, the other is only trying to make ends meet. A sort of rolling narrative might form, but I’d like to keep it in letters…I don’t think I’ll write this book until after I’ve read Dracula and The Gum Thief, and hopefully I’ll get more ideas about it from there. Eventually, the book would expand, and we’d get more letters written by different people to characters we already know, probably, that’s the idea anyway, when approaching an entire book as fragmentary as one made of letters, I think you can fall to breaking style quite quickly. The last story/letter/whatever would probably end on someone saying they were listening to the John Lennon song the other day and then slowly, mid sentence, our book ends. Maybe it starts out the same way, just half of a letter fragment, to we don’t know, from who knows where. And maybe I’d incorporate little articles from Paul Kuberg, my little fictional journalist into this one. Also, now that I think about it, in “paper-thin” the short hand I’d give to the book listed above (the one for this one would be “hero” or “working” probably depending on what I’m talking about exactly), we’d have a bit of this too, since our narrator would read from the books of the writer, Brad Something. I don’t know how well I could write an entire epistolary novel, though, this seems like something that could truly leak through my hands quickly and surely.
“roadkill”
This one is the most haphazard. I have the title, I have the immediate idea and then it goes haywire. The narrator might be a writer. He’s disconnected from his father, perhaps knows that his father had an affair, but never told his mother, perhaps not. Mother and wife both die in a car crash. What I want to stir up with the title is the same sense of “ick” that I got from first reading about Bag of Bones, and it being about a writer and his dead wife. Now, in King’s book, the bag of bones has nothing to do with his wife, is actually continuously referenced as all even the best characters can be. In mine, roadkill is meant to mean, sickeningly, the narrators lost wife and mother, and perhaps he would characterize their bodies as that in the book at some point. I want to write a book where our narrator begins to become unreliable, his writing goes crazy, and perhaps he becomes haunted by ghosts of his family that the narrative leaves to you to decide if they are real or not. And that’s probably all I’m willing to write about this one in the stone of the internet at the moment.
“All these novels unwritten…”
A placeholder title—This would be a book about a writer named Mike (I’ve started a few of the stories and figured that much out), somewhat my form of Mike Noonan, the main character of Bag of Bones, more so just a name I’ve picked, since I consider myself particularly bad at coming up with character names. The novel would actually be more of a short story collection with perhaps some framing involved, but I’m not too sure on that part. What it would consist of are these little vignettes that vary in style and more so in genre, since I do want to make it all in somewhat the same voice. These would be purposely in haphazard chronological order, and perhaps the full extent of an idea of come up with called “hiding a novel,” which I’m sure is not entirely new and created by me, is probably not even coined this for the first time by me, but is an interest of mine lately. The idea would be that the novel—defined somewhat as a singular work of length that is sometimes broken up into chapters and the like, but is still over all unified by more than just a common characters or setting—calling anything that doesn’t fit this as something akin to the concept album of books, rather than the rock opera, which would be the novel. The lead story to this would be called “The Ghost Story,” and although the rest would probably not have such vague, weak names, they probably all would start in the word “The,” linking them, as these are the specific work in this book, that represents the story with that title. “The Ghost Story” itself, which I’ve started, has a bit of a frame around a campfire and the campers look to Mike for a story, since he’s the novelist with the group. I think this would be a book like Bag of Bones or Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park, not in comparison as to skill, obviously, but as to theme, since neither of those are truly about plot, but more about writing than anything else. My own pseudo-writing-memoir, if I had the talent to write it as such, which I might not. Another story which I’ve started would be “The Great Novel Race,” and it might be a closer to the collection or just one somewhere stuck in the middle, slightly closer to the back. This story would take a look at writing that mirrors Junot Diaz’s speaker, Yunior, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, since there would be some distance between Mike and his subjects who are involved in, obviously, a race to finish writing novels. I would love to be able to capture the sort of commentary on writing that Chabon gets in Wonder Boys here. And then there would probably be at least half a dozen other stories there, each perhaps averaging thirty pages, with maybe thirty pages of frame spliced in.
“A Light in the Dark”
This would be a third person story, one I’ve written once, when I was in fifth grade, but one that derived into an alien invasion story. This, to me, is still a good title for it. Story about Jack Kraloni who’s a detective suffering black-outs and a series of killings going on, and Jack starts to wonder if someone isn’t doing them in his body while he’s decommissioned. Obviously written better than that was. Guest stars would be basically every character I’ve ever written with the thought of them being in more than one story.
And I call this “All these novels unwritten…” with a touch of my general pessimism, since I’ve never written a satisfactory novel, these will probably be forever never written.
8:04PM Wed 8/12/09
Def: 0.5pp
When the last Harry Potter book came out, Rowling read the first two chapters at a sort of opening party for the book…I think it was the first two chapters. My father said that he’d rather she just sort of said, “Okay, here’s how the story goes…” and spewed on about it for a while, which I thought was a preposterous idea then and still think of as a preposterous idea now, but only because of situation. This was a book that was in a series, we knew the theme of it already, the style was nothing new. Now if it was a book she hadn’t finished writing yet or one that was just getting ready to be published, but was a stand alone kind of thing, then it would make more sense.
Not that what I’m doing here makes any sort sense.
“A papier-mâché Mephistopheles”
This is the novel that I’m writing in my head right now. It’s a female narrator and I’m looking at unlikely sources for ideas on how I can approach the concept of male writer writing in female voice—Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone, which has just a brilliant title; so far the first book of Lee Goldberg’s Monk series, original novels based on the characters of the USA show that’s now entering its last season, oddly enough, this book, Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse, has been since adapted into an episode of the show, presenting the sort of continuity issues that I find quite interesting; The Spy Who Loved Me, a book I haven’t gotten yet, Fleming’s only first person Bond novel. The plot of the story concerns a mid-2020s school reunion that reintroduces our heroine with the stock character “one who got away,” which I’ve been developing in my mind as some sort of self-pitying semi-successful novelist, autobiographical, only a better man than I am in virtually all ways. The first part of the story I see as the standard romantic comedy, with our narrator watching the now fifteen to twenty year old films The Holiday and Music and Lyrics among others, actually imagining herself attempting to stop her love from getting married, sort of a smart chick flick, as our narrator, her name being Samantha McGee, I believe (the writer named maybe something along the lines of Brad…something, I don’t know…maybe even three names), evaluating her life as it goes through all the little flutters and flights of such films. Then, after this, I’d liked to move onto a new genre, a sort of novel of ideas, about the two of them teaching each other their contrasting views of the world, learning new things, changing their minds. The backdrop of the last section is the presidential election of 2028, whose leading candidates present our couple with a dilemma, since Sam’s family is related by blood, however murkily, to one candidate, who bares their last name, but she is considering voting the other way. An idea I have, for her mother to be coming out of prison in the first section, for gauging how their relationship is changing, is also evaluated here. And then with a final concluding story that is vastly formless in my mind, but hopefully brings us into a new genre again, something, maybe ten to fifteen years later, and—an idea that occurs to me as I type—that could be built our protagonists looking forward, observing, and thinking about the effect of some future event along the lines of ‘69’s moon landing. Think of it as skiffy written with the style of yesteryear, our characters are older, and think differently, perhaps some juxtaposing sentences thrown in, like the carbon copies that Easton Ellis does in Less Than Zero and American Psycho.
“A Working Class Hero”
An epistolary novel between old friends who have grown out of touch; one is running for president, the other is only trying to make ends meet. A sort of rolling narrative might form, but I’d like to keep it in letters…I don’t think I’ll write this book until after I’ve read Dracula and The Gum Thief, and hopefully I’ll get more ideas about it from there. Eventually, the book would expand, and we’d get more letters written by different people to characters we already know, probably, that’s the idea anyway, when approaching an entire book as fragmentary as one made of letters, I think you can fall to breaking style quite quickly. The last story/letter/whatever would probably end on someone saying they were listening to the John Lennon song the other day and then slowly, mid sentence, our book ends. Maybe it starts out the same way, just half of a letter fragment, to we don’t know, from who knows where. And maybe I’d incorporate little articles from Paul Kuberg, my little fictional journalist into this one. Also, now that I think about it, in “paper-thin” the short hand I’d give to the book listed above (the one for this one would be “hero” or “working” probably depending on what I’m talking about exactly), we’d have a bit of this too, since our narrator would read from the books of the writer, Brad Something. I don’t know how well I could write an entire epistolary novel, though, this seems like something that could truly leak through my hands quickly and surely.
“roadkill”
This one is the most haphazard. I have the title, I have the immediate idea and then it goes haywire. The narrator might be a writer. He’s disconnected from his father, perhaps knows that his father had an affair, but never told his mother, perhaps not. Mother and wife both die in a car crash. What I want to stir up with the title is the same sense of “ick” that I got from first reading about Bag of Bones, and it being about a writer and his dead wife. Now, in King’s book, the bag of bones has nothing to do with his wife, is actually continuously referenced as all even the best characters can be. In mine, roadkill is meant to mean, sickeningly, the narrators lost wife and mother, and perhaps he would characterize their bodies as that in the book at some point. I want to write a book where our narrator begins to become unreliable, his writing goes crazy, and perhaps he becomes haunted by ghosts of his family that the narrative leaves to you to decide if they are real or not. And that’s probably all I’m willing to write about this one in the stone of the internet at the moment.
“All these novels unwritten…”
A placeholder title—This would be a book about a writer named Mike (I’ve started a few of the stories and figured that much out), somewhat my form of Mike Noonan, the main character of Bag of Bones, more so just a name I’ve picked, since I consider myself particularly bad at coming up with character names. The novel would actually be more of a short story collection with perhaps some framing involved, but I’m not too sure on that part. What it would consist of are these little vignettes that vary in style and more so in genre, since I do want to make it all in somewhat the same voice. These would be purposely in haphazard chronological order, and perhaps the full extent of an idea of come up with called “hiding a novel,” which I’m sure is not entirely new and created by me, is probably not even coined this for the first time by me, but is an interest of mine lately. The idea would be that the novel—defined somewhat as a singular work of length that is sometimes broken up into chapters and the like, but is still over all unified by more than just a common characters or setting—calling anything that doesn’t fit this as something akin to the concept album of books, rather than the rock opera, which would be the novel. The lead story to this would be called “The Ghost Story,” and although the rest would probably not have such vague, weak names, they probably all would start in the word “The,” linking them, as these are the specific work in this book, that represents the story with that title. “The Ghost Story” itself, which I’ve started, has a bit of a frame around a campfire and the campers look to Mike for a story, since he’s the novelist with the group. I think this would be a book like Bag of Bones or Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park, not in comparison as to skill, obviously, but as to theme, since neither of those are truly about plot, but more about writing than anything else. My own pseudo-writing-memoir, if I had the talent to write it as such, which I might not. Another story which I’ve started would be “The Great Novel Race,” and it might be a closer to the collection or just one somewhere stuck in the middle, slightly closer to the back. This story would take a look at writing that mirrors Junot Diaz’s speaker, Yunior, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, since there would be some distance between Mike and his subjects who are involved in, obviously, a race to finish writing novels. I would love to be able to capture the sort of commentary on writing that Chabon gets in Wonder Boys here. And then there would probably be at least half a dozen other stories there, each perhaps averaging thirty pages, with maybe thirty pages of frame spliced in.
“A Light in the Dark”
This would be a third person story, one I’ve written once, when I was in fifth grade, but one that derived into an alien invasion story. This, to me, is still a good title for it. Story about Jack Kraloni who’s a detective suffering black-outs and a series of killings going on, and Jack starts to wonder if someone isn’t doing them in his body while he’s decommissioned. Obviously written better than that was. Guest stars would be basically every character I’ve ever written with the thought of them being in more than one story.
And I call this “All these novels unwritten…” with a touch of my general pessimism, since I’ve never written a satisfactory novel, these will probably be forever never written.
8:04PM Wed 8/12/09
Def: 0.5pp
Monday, August 10, 2009
"Somedays aren't yours at all..."
“Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic, and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference.” Kurt Vonnegut
For me, music is a mystery, something I’m never really sure that I’m okay with. By choice—I’ve never pursued any sort of instrument and sing only privately—I’ve never become anything resembling a musician, and so I see it as something magical. Perhaps god-like, as Vonnegut makes the allusion to.
Now for Kurt, I’m sure music did not prove anything. It’s worth saying that this was a man who usually described himself as some sort of atheist or agnostic, and never truly ventured into debates about religion. He was a man who had respect for the things people like Jesus Christ had said, while he might not believe in what they supposedly did. [This would be in contrast to C. S. Lewis’s Trilemma of “Lunatic, Liar, or Lord,” and this suits me fine in my mental picture of Vonnegut. He was often a contradictor, he was probably one of the best at contradicting himself or you, the reader, and he was embarrassingly good at it.] But music might have been a magician’s trick to him as well, something that he kept himself from delving too deep into. I’m not certain of this, the man was a writer, an artist, and, in a very real way, a philosopher, so I would not deny him any titles, but I see his comments on it in this way.
God, in a way, is an answer to the question of “What do we not know?” And it’s a question that plagues creative people, I’d say, since it points towards the origins of their works. “What do we not know?” is answered with where I come up with ideas for stories, for poems, with why you painted that picture that way, or why you think that note is fitting for a song. I think to some extent, any creative person comes to a situation where they do not know why something seems right a certain way to them. This is something Elizabeth Gilbert would like us to re-externalize, call it a muse, call it talent, something that I didn’t make up in my head, but something that a little birdy told me. And that would inevitably take some of the stress off (not to say that anything I’ve written has been good enough to stress me out with the question of where it originated).
Music, then, to me, becomes a question, like god or muses, “Where do your ideas come from?” or “Do you believe yourself to be sane?,” one that I do not answer. And it is, generally, a very beautiful thing. Ranging in its beauty, as it can often be pretty in the fact that there is very little beauty in it. It is an odd thing for me to describe, because I find myself looking at it as art in general, and suddenly instead of an observer, I am a novice, attempting to gain ground, strength, and ideas, and suddenly the way I speak of it is somehow wrong.
Don Delillo said this about novelists, “I don't take it seriously, but being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we're writing against what power represents, and often what government represents, and what the corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to mean. In that sense, if we're bad citizens, we're doing our job.” And while my simplifications are very obvious, I see musicians as not “bad citizens,” so much as the actual people who express what citizenship is, and do so on a more pure level.
As a writer, I am hiding here behind all these words, this language, a concept that humanity thought up purely for communication, and, in so doing, made it much easier for a person like me to do so. A musician, on the other hand, is forced to do the same with sound, not a created concept, but something handed down from somewhere, whether it be science’s big bang giving gifts, or the love of religion’s god or gods.
Now I will admit to being a young, inexperienced, and unbelievably ignorant man, but governments scare me, and when they are failing people, there needs to be that iconoclastic force out there that can make a difference, that can actually change things. This is generally a spot for the arts to insert themselves as necessary for any sort of human society, and when these situations crop up, I fear that what people do not need is another man in a mask, or behind a typewriter, keyboard; a man or a woman, or both, people, with their mouths sealed shut, writing on little pads with pencils.
And I don’t know if this makes sense to anyone other than me, but music appears to be a truer thing than writing. On a bad day, I can use a book as an escape, but it functions only as that, a temporary departure, whereas a song becomes something more, something undefinable. And it seems to me that music is immediately something of culture, whereas novelists, writers, generally have to look back at the past, to issue statements on it, evaluate it, and perhaps explain it.
Music has none of these motives, it is a pure thing, one that, unlike writing, can be produced through a following of certain rules set down, and still be as innovative as when the lyrics and notes were first written. This is perhaps the one thing that I resent about writing—reading is a thing entirely apart from it and so is typing, whereas “playing,” just from its own associations as a word, comes off as somehow more inviting, more necessary. And I guess that’s what music is to me. Not quite as poetically stated as Vonnegut, but I don’t entirely agree with him and I don’t believe that he was being entirely truthful, I would say that he was, in his quote, cheating off a certain way. But I think that’s a post for another day.
6:32PM Wed 8/12/09
Def: 1.5pp
For me, music is a mystery, something I’m never really sure that I’m okay with. By choice—I’ve never pursued any sort of instrument and sing only privately—I’ve never become anything resembling a musician, and so I see it as something magical. Perhaps god-like, as Vonnegut makes the allusion to.
Now for Kurt, I’m sure music did not prove anything. It’s worth saying that this was a man who usually described himself as some sort of atheist or agnostic, and never truly ventured into debates about religion. He was a man who had respect for the things people like Jesus Christ had said, while he might not believe in what they supposedly did. [This would be in contrast to C. S. Lewis’s Trilemma of “Lunatic, Liar, or Lord,” and this suits me fine in my mental picture of Vonnegut. He was often a contradictor, he was probably one of the best at contradicting himself or you, the reader, and he was embarrassingly good at it.] But music might have been a magician’s trick to him as well, something that he kept himself from delving too deep into. I’m not certain of this, the man was a writer, an artist, and, in a very real way, a philosopher, so I would not deny him any titles, but I see his comments on it in this way.
God, in a way, is an answer to the question of “What do we not know?” And it’s a question that plagues creative people, I’d say, since it points towards the origins of their works. “What do we not know?” is answered with where I come up with ideas for stories, for poems, with why you painted that picture that way, or why you think that note is fitting for a song. I think to some extent, any creative person comes to a situation where they do not know why something seems right a certain way to them. This is something Elizabeth Gilbert would like us to re-externalize, call it a muse, call it talent, something that I didn’t make up in my head, but something that a little birdy told me. And that would inevitably take some of the stress off (not to say that anything I’ve written has been good enough to stress me out with the question of where it originated).
Music, then, to me, becomes a question, like god or muses, “Where do your ideas come from?” or “Do you believe yourself to be sane?,” one that I do not answer. And it is, generally, a very beautiful thing. Ranging in its beauty, as it can often be pretty in the fact that there is very little beauty in it. It is an odd thing for me to describe, because I find myself looking at it as art in general, and suddenly instead of an observer, I am a novice, attempting to gain ground, strength, and ideas, and suddenly the way I speak of it is somehow wrong.
Don Delillo said this about novelists, “I don't take it seriously, but being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we're writing against what power represents, and often what government represents, and what the corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to mean. In that sense, if we're bad citizens, we're doing our job.” And while my simplifications are very obvious, I see musicians as not “bad citizens,” so much as the actual people who express what citizenship is, and do so on a more pure level.
As a writer, I am hiding here behind all these words, this language, a concept that humanity thought up purely for communication, and, in so doing, made it much easier for a person like me to do so. A musician, on the other hand, is forced to do the same with sound, not a created concept, but something handed down from somewhere, whether it be science’s big bang giving gifts, or the love of religion’s god or gods.
Now I will admit to being a young, inexperienced, and unbelievably ignorant man, but governments scare me, and when they are failing people, there needs to be that iconoclastic force out there that can make a difference, that can actually change things. This is generally a spot for the arts to insert themselves as necessary for any sort of human society, and when these situations crop up, I fear that what people do not need is another man in a mask, or behind a typewriter, keyboard; a man or a woman, or both, people, with their mouths sealed shut, writing on little pads with pencils.
And I don’t know if this makes sense to anyone other than me, but music appears to be a truer thing than writing. On a bad day, I can use a book as an escape, but it functions only as that, a temporary departure, whereas a song becomes something more, something undefinable. And it seems to me that music is immediately something of culture, whereas novelists, writers, generally have to look back at the past, to issue statements on it, evaluate it, and perhaps explain it.
Music has none of these motives, it is a pure thing, one that, unlike writing, can be produced through a following of certain rules set down, and still be as innovative as when the lyrics and notes were first written. This is perhaps the one thing that I resent about writing—reading is a thing entirely apart from it and so is typing, whereas “playing,” just from its own associations as a word, comes off as somehow more inviting, more necessary. And I guess that’s what music is to me. Not quite as poetically stated as Vonnegut, but I don’t entirely agree with him and I don’t believe that he was being entirely truthful, I would say that he was, in his quote, cheating off a certain way. But I think that’s a post for another day.
6:32PM Wed 8/12/09
Def: 1.5pp
Sunday, August 9, 2009
"You're killing us, Youkilis!"
You know, even though I’ve been a fairly involved Rays fan since last season and a moderate follower since they came to Tampa in 1998 and my father has always been a Yankee fan, I never really had anything against the Red Sox. I rooted for them against the Rockies in ’07 and these days I like them more than any other team in our division, although this spot might be sometimes contested by the Toronto Blue Jays. My last post, “yesterday,” in this fictionally presented “blogaday” (as the label reads), for the month of August, talked about the irrationalities of baseball and how these are all embodied in the intentional hit by pitch.
Now as anyone reading this blog would know, I’ve obviously slacked off to a regularity by this point in the month, but I can somewhat excuse my course of action in this case (that is for this post), and although my excuse doesn’t really amount to much of anything, it is an interesting situation to be in. But before I move on to that discussion, I’d like to add a little color commentary on the blogging itself. Brad Sucks, a one-man band consisting of Brad Turcotte, has invented, to some extent, the persona of being in love with unpopularity. His band name, slogan (“a one man band with no fans”), and even debut album title (I Don’t Know What I’m Doing), all work on this level. This is a sort of style that I’ve tried out in various horrid introductions to even more horrible writings, but usually knowing the fact that no one will in fact read them. If I do pick up the style here, I guess any readers will just have to bear with me.
If this post had been made on Sunday, half a week ago, now, I would not have been able to bring up the current story of Kevin Youkilis’s storming of the mound at Fenway last night. Youkilis has garnered himself a five game suspension and also one for rookie pitcher Rick Porcello of the Detroit Tigers, who is currently high in the standing for AL Rookie of the Year, and may now see his chances quickly diminish, in response to this.
As I cited earlier (on Saturday, August 8th), I’m no fan of pitchers throwing at hitters, but there are way too many misreads in the major leagues. If you are a major league hitter, you should be able to tell if a pitch is thrown intentionally to hit you. Boston fans will, I’m sure, cite Porcello’s inside pitches to Victor Martinez in the previous inning, as Youkilis himself might point out, as proof that Porcello was paying back the BoSox for an earlier Detroit hit batsman.
This sort of comment is comically incorrect, since Porcello’s pitches against Martinez were brilliant examples of what the inside pitch can allow a pitcher to do. Porcello was able to later on in the at bat strike out Martinez on an outside pitch. By backing him off the plate, Rick was able to pick up the k and even more importantly, the out. The Tigers were up three to nothing when Porcello was pitching and this is a team that is very much in the heat of a division race of its own.
The Tigers currently lead what is debatably the worst division in the American League, ahead of the White Sox who have a pitcher in Mark Buerhle who has thrown a perfect game this season and another potential pitching threat in the inevitable return of their trade deadline acquisition, Jake Peavy, and also ahead of the Twins, who have quietly acquired Karl Pavano from Cleveland, a pitcher who has looked better than his former teammate Cliff Lee, at least while the two played together in Cleveland (as Lee is now pitching dominatingly in the National League, another Indian toss-off this season).
In other words, Porcello has every right to be pitching competitively, and when an inside pitch is direct set-up for an outside strike-out, there is no doubt in my mind that the pitch was intentional for that reason, and not to actually hit Martinez. Following his strike-out of Martinez, and returning to the mound in the next inning, Porcello does have a pitch get away from him. And this isn’t my expert opinion, since my opinion is obviously not expert, it’s the opinion of “Wild Thing” Mitch Williams, and various others on the MLB Network staff. And if anyone knows about pitches getting away from you it’s Mitch.
That said, Kevin Youkilis got hit by a pitch, and was in line to collect his tenth HBP awarded base of this season—I think we have to allow him some slack, you’re going to be angry when in two thirds of a season you’ve been hit a number of times in the double digits. But what Youk then did was to throw his helmet towards the mound and storm Porcello. Awkwardly, Rick stepped back, both hands raised, in a “Why are you coming after me?” stance, and continued to retreat, but Kevin wouldn’t run out of steam.
In my opinion, the man on the right side won in this battle, however, when Youk’s attempted tackle of Porcello ended in Rick throwing him to the ground. No matter how much slack you want to give to Kevin Youkilis, the main question I have to ask is “What the hell were you thinking?”
The whole idea of hitting a batter is to diminish the opposing team’s greatest hitter. If I were to think that Porcello had been after Youk and Martinez, this rule of thumb would hold true. Although he might have great respect amongst the Boston crowd, Big Papi, David Ortiz, has not been dependable this year, and a team that at one point had what many say as an “overabundance of pitching,” has been able to blame a lot of its failings on lackluster offense. In fact that is what actually sparked the acquiring of Victor Martinez in the first place. But one person you couldn’t blame for lackluster playing of any sort was Youkilis, who quickly became one of the most feared in this year’s Boston line-up, a position he has been in before. Now, as Boston’s pitching has begun to unravel, their offense is even more needed.
Kevin Youkilis, in running to the mound, tossing his helmet, and just generally acting like a hooligan in some pick up baseball game had to know that he was going to get himself tossed out of the line-up for a while. In fact, I find MLB’s disciplining weak and one-sided. I could see a fine towards Porcello, but he does not need to be suspended, and I don’t think Youkilis should be hitting again until September. In his storming of the mound, he has truly showed himself as a bush league ballplayer. Compare him to Gary Sheffield, who just a few days ago basically asked a pitcher to avoid his head, while accepting the fact that a pitch was coming at him.
No matter what it comes down to, the inside pitch and the intentional HBP (two different things in my opinion) are very much a part of baseball. The Red Sox’s fate during his suspension was apparently not on Youkilis’s mind when he gave in to rage.
[May it be said that the Red Sox would come back from a 3-0 deficit to win this game, mostly due to the play of Mike Lowell, who would replace Youkilis at third base. Boston is a very deep team, and with Youkilis only gone for five games, it is totally possible that they will suffer through his suspension only minimally.]
5:38PM Wed 8/12/09
Def: 2.5 pp
Now as anyone reading this blog would know, I’ve obviously slacked off to a regularity by this point in the month, but I can somewhat excuse my course of action in this case (that is for this post), and although my excuse doesn’t really amount to much of anything, it is an interesting situation to be in. But before I move on to that discussion, I’d like to add a little color commentary on the blogging itself. Brad Sucks, a one-man band consisting of Brad Turcotte, has invented, to some extent, the persona of being in love with unpopularity. His band name, slogan (“a one man band with no fans”), and even debut album title (I Don’t Know What I’m Doing), all work on this level. This is a sort of style that I’ve tried out in various horrid introductions to even more horrible writings, but usually knowing the fact that no one will in fact read them. If I do pick up the style here, I guess any readers will just have to bear with me.
If this post had been made on Sunday, half a week ago, now, I would not have been able to bring up the current story of Kevin Youkilis’s storming of the mound at Fenway last night. Youkilis has garnered himself a five game suspension and also one for rookie pitcher Rick Porcello of the Detroit Tigers, who is currently high in the standing for AL Rookie of the Year, and may now see his chances quickly diminish, in response to this.
As I cited earlier (on Saturday, August 8th), I’m no fan of pitchers throwing at hitters, but there are way too many misreads in the major leagues. If you are a major league hitter, you should be able to tell if a pitch is thrown intentionally to hit you. Boston fans will, I’m sure, cite Porcello’s inside pitches to Victor Martinez in the previous inning, as Youkilis himself might point out, as proof that Porcello was paying back the BoSox for an earlier Detroit hit batsman.
This sort of comment is comically incorrect, since Porcello’s pitches against Martinez were brilliant examples of what the inside pitch can allow a pitcher to do. Porcello was able to later on in the at bat strike out Martinez on an outside pitch. By backing him off the plate, Rick was able to pick up the k and even more importantly, the out. The Tigers were up three to nothing when Porcello was pitching and this is a team that is very much in the heat of a division race of its own.
The Tigers currently lead what is debatably the worst division in the American League, ahead of the White Sox who have a pitcher in Mark Buerhle who has thrown a perfect game this season and another potential pitching threat in the inevitable return of their trade deadline acquisition, Jake Peavy, and also ahead of the Twins, who have quietly acquired Karl Pavano from Cleveland, a pitcher who has looked better than his former teammate Cliff Lee, at least while the two played together in Cleveland (as Lee is now pitching dominatingly in the National League, another Indian toss-off this season).
In other words, Porcello has every right to be pitching competitively, and when an inside pitch is direct set-up for an outside strike-out, there is no doubt in my mind that the pitch was intentional for that reason, and not to actually hit Martinez. Following his strike-out of Martinez, and returning to the mound in the next inning, Porcello does have a pitch get away from him. And this isn’t my expert opinion, since my opinion is obviously not expert, it’s the opinion of “Wild Thing” Mitch Williams, and various others on the MLB Network staff. And if anyone knows about pitches getting away from you it’s Mitch.
That said, Kevin Youkilis got hit by a pitch, and was in line to collect his tenth HBP awarded base of this season—I think we have to allow him some slack, you’re going to be angry when in two thirds of a season you’ve been hit a number of times in the double digits. But what Youk then did was to throw his helmet towards the mound and storm Porcello. Awkwardly, Rick stepped back, both hands raised, in a “Why are you coming after me?” stance, and continued to retreat, but Kevin wouldn’t run out of steam.
In my opinion, the man on the right side won in this battle, however, when Youk’s attempted tackle of Porcello ended in Rick throwing him to the ground. No matter how much slack you want to give to Kevin Youkilis, the main question I have to ask is “What the hell were you thinking?”
The whole idea of hitting a batter is to diminish the opposing team’s greatest hitter. If I were to think that Porcello had been after Youk and Martinez, this rule of thumb would hold true. Although he might have great respect amongst the Boston crowd, Big Papi, David Ortiz, has not been dependable this year, and a team that at one point had what many say as an “overabundance of pitching,” has been able to blame a lot of its failings on lackluster offense. In fact that is what actually sparked the acquiring of Victor Martinez in the first place. But one person you couldn’t blame for lackluster playing of any sort was Youkilis, who quickly became one of the most feared in this year’s Boston line-up, a position he has been in before. Now, as Boston’s pitching has begun to unravel, their offense is even more needed.
Kevin Youkilis, in running to the mound, tossing his helmet, and just generally acting like a hooligan in some pick up baseball game had to know that he was going to get himself tossed out of the line-up for a while. In fact, I find MLB’s disciplining weak and one-sided. I could see a fine towards Porcello, but he does not need to be suspended, and I don’t think Youkilis should be hitting again until September. In his storming of the mound, he has truly showed himself as a bush league ballplayer. Compare him to Gary Sheffield, who just a few days ago basically asked a pitcher to avoid his head, while accepting the fact that a pitch was coming at him.
No matter what it comes down to, the inside pitch and the intentional HBP (two different things in my opinion) are very much a part of baseball. The Red Sox’s fate during his suspension was apparently not on Youkilis’s mind when he gave in to rage.
[May it be said that the Red Sox would come back from a 3-0 deficit to win this game, mostly due to the play of Mike Lowell, who would replace Youkilis at third base. Boston is a very deep team, and with Youkilis only gone for five games, it is totally possible that they will suffer through his suspension only minimally.]
5:38PM Wed 8/12/09
Def: 2.5 pp
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