O Fortuna!

And so ...

As of April 6, I am back among the unemployed – mostly. My teaching gigs still stand. I could use a few more now.

And I’ve also been struggling to write a post about it all. I’ve started four or five times and pitched each one.

O fortuna!

Velut luna

Statu variabilis.

The Wheel of Fortune turns.

I will not be paying off my debts as quickly as I had anticipated.

I will not have a little bit salted away for something that resembles “retirement” – whatever that is.

I will not be attending the next Leo Burnett Christmas Breakfast.

Yeah, well ... I can’t bad mouth Leo. It was a good place to work. The best pay I ever received, decent benefits, free coffee. Nice building. Nice people.

My years in the newspaper business trained my senses never to lose guard – any time, any day, you may get the word to clean out your desk.

My supervisor tried to assure me that it wouldn’t be true at the agency: copy editing would always be essential to the process. She had been at it for fifteen years.

And who was I to doubt?

The moment I lost my guard, it seems, was the moment the hammer came down.

Oh well.

Here are the good things.

I’ll have more time to write. I’ve already finished the collection of saur stories. It’s called (for now) One Big Place: the Book of Saurs. People have been waiting for this thing, and it’s done.

I can get back to work on the novel, The Va-va-va VOOM! My agent hates the title, but that’s the title I’ll keep until I have to change it.

I hope to have more time to teach – and to do a better job of it now. One of the things that most troubled me about my agency employment is that it took away from my teaching time.

I’m not knocking the ad agency, or the job – they were great. But when I did that work I knew I was doing work – a means to earning a paycheck.

When I write, I feel alive. I feel that what I’m doing and what I am are the same thing. It’s the same when I teach. I am not a person filling in a slot for which I’ll eventually be remunerated, and that slot is one that anyone with the same qualifications can fill.

One doesn’t spend a lifetime developing and/or creating a self – whatever a “self” is – just to fit in a category.

Most of us try to become a category of one.

Okay, maybe not most. And maybe it isn’t an intrinsic quality of humanity, or sentience, or intelligence, whatever those things are. But once you’ve discovered you are able to distinguish yourself – this idea of self – from the rest of the surrounding world, it’s difficult to go back. You have an identity, whether those around you recognize it or not.

I don’t want to say that there’s anything providential about my getting laid off. It’s Fortune’s wheel I’ve used to illustrate this post. Fortune, by definition, is indiscriminate. The wealthy person wakes up a pauper. The one stricken with illness is miraculously cured. The flood destroys the house next door. The piano falls just when you’re under it. It’s the way of the world. You can lose everything – in fact, you will, eventually.

But for me, not this time. Not yet.

I’ve only lost a job.

I get to keep myself. And it may not be a bad self to keep, at least for now, until Fortune’s wheel turns again.

Well Hey, It's Been Only Fifteen Months ...

I’m back.

Yes, it’s been a while.

I got a “day job.”

And I had to finish writing a novella – one that I really had to finish before I could move on to anything else.

And even with a day job, I wasn’t about to give up teaching. And teaching wasn’t about to give me up, either.

But every time I thought about writing another blog entry, I got blocked.

Seriously blocked.

There was one more entry I wanted to write, or assemble, concerning exercises I use in short story writing classes. I wanted to go back over the past twenty-five-plus years and look over the exercises, scan a few of my handouts – put it together in a comprehensive way, which meant searching through stacks and stacks of old papers.

A lot of work – but not a lot of time. And I kept telling myself that I needed to finish that last piece of the puzzle and then I could move on.

But I couldn’t finish that last puzzle piece.

It’s taken me until now to get past it. I’ll write about exercises – later.

For now, I just want to get back.

Yes, I have a “day job” – at big advertising agency, one of the biggest and most prestigious agencies in the world. And a place that even has a kind of philosophy – one that I can even relate to and sort of believe in.

But it’s been a strange, awkward transition for me. Partly because I feel like an interloper, walking into a world I don’t want to throw off-balance by my presence.

In one respect, I came in highly knowledgeable. In another, I am dumber than dirt.

Writers are usually people who can feel two different ways about things simultaneously, if not more ways. That’s how we can work out conflicts in stories. We play chess from both sides of the board.

So I could feel at once like I had superpowers (though I couldn’t use them without betraying myself) and like I was a complete incompetent, out of my league and out of my depth. At some point, I believed, I would be discovered (either for incompetency or for possessing superpowers) and summarily dismissed.

In the mornings, I would sit in a little fast food place on the first floor of the building where I work – for an hour before starting time. I would order a small coffee and write. I’d write in my legal pad, in my spiral-bound notebook, until both were filled. I wrote every scene I thought I needed for my novella, many of which were cut or altered by the “final” edit (I know I’ll probably edit more at some point). I wrote and wrote and wrote. On Saturdays I typed up what I’d written in longhand.

I hadn’t written so much in longhand in ages – much of it crap, but it felt very different to write in longhand again, crap or otherwise.

Except for those days when I needed the time to read and comment upon student assignments, I remained devoted to finishing the novella in a very disciplined way. And for those months, between eight and nine in the morning, I became something of a fixture in that fast food place.

That was my superpower – not that I was writing anything good, but that I was writing, period.

Eventually, my energies shifted from writing longhand to revising my printed-out pages – turning a mess of papers into a manuscript of about 180 pages, then paring it down about thirty pages to something that resembled a novella.

In a new job, in a new world, it’s important to find some sort of “center” for yourself – something that helps define you when it seems that everything else seems to be trying to define you in a score of alien ways.

I’m supposed to be a copy editor, whatever that is, for a good part of the week.

When I’m not doing that, whatever it is, I’m supposed to be a teacher – whatever that is. And I read a lot of work in that capacity as well as reading a lot more work for workshops, writers’ group and the like.

It’s easy to forget what got you started in this direction in the first place.

I hope I’ve remembered it now. Because even when you’re trudging at a death march pace through a scene you can’t see an end to, it feels like there’s nowhere else you’d rather be; nothing else you’d rather be doing, no one else you want to be.

More about this later.

Night of the Thirty Dollar Martinis

For Delphyne Joan Hanke-Woods (November 11, 1945 – September 2013)

 

We were in Anaheim. It was 2006. I was staying at the Marriott, near the convention center. The bar had a little patio alongside the pool. I’d been out there several times already in that past week. I was in town for the worldcon (the World Science Fiction Convention, L.A. Con IV, if you’re not familiar with the lingo), and had a chance to catch up with random gossip with Janis Ian, and later got to meet David Latham, with whom I had been corresponding for a number of years (he was encouraging me to write a screenplay of “Bronte’s Egg,” and he wanted to help me in that task any way possible).

The patio was a good spot. The weather had been warm and humid, but not oppressively so (not that I remember). You could catch a good view of the moon, but not too many stars and planets – hey, it’s Anaheim. The last time I was there it took four days before I caught a glimpse of the Santa Anas.

The con was pretty much over. Delphyne – Joan, I keep calling her Joan because that was her name when I first met her – and I had been to dinner with Chris Barkley, who was celebrating his birthday.

A good night, but the con was winding down. Joan had been a day short on her hotel booking at the Hilton next door. She needed a room for a night before she caught her flight back to Chicago. Of course I told her it was okay to share my room for the night.

We were friends – not lovers. When we shared rooms at cons we shared rooms. End of that story – except for me to mention that she snored aggressively and couldn’t sleep unless the TV was on (forgive me, Joan, but an honest writer has to get these little details out sometimes).

After the birthday dinner, Joan and I had moved onto the patio. She had picked up a taste for vodka martinis from me (I am an evil man, as she was fond of reminding me), and so we ordered a couple – good ones. Straight up. We picked out the brand. The first round came to about thirty bucks apiece. It was insane – thirty dollar martinis? I mean, we were both still “working” then, but, but – thirty dollar martinis?

The waiter brought them. And they tasted like they were worth every penny.

We took advantage of the booze as the booze took advantage of us. We talked and talked and talked. We both got in about two lifetimes worth of stories. All we needed was for a psychotherapist to be sitting at the next table taking notes.

I can’t remember the details of what we said to each other. One of the benefits to drinking and baring your soul is that afterward you don’t remember which parts of your soul you bared, or which parts of your friends’ souls were bared to you. You experience all the benefits of catharsis with none of the burdens of memory.

I think we did make some discoveries. One thing I discovered was that Joan was the person who designed the Screaming Yellow Zonkers package.

Screaming Yellow Zonkers – look it up. It was a candy-coated popcorn snack. It made design history by being one of the very first food packages to have a black background. I know about this because my dad had designed an orange juice container with a black background and the clients rejected it on the grounds that consumers wouldn’t buy food in black containers (they later relented). Joan’s foreground was filled with little surreal Peter-Max-type characters. It was distinctive and direct. And even if the product didn’t catch on, the name was referenced in the local monster-movie-extravaganza Saturday night show, Screaming Yellow Theater, hosted by a guy (the late Jerry G. Bishop) who called himself Svengoolie.

“No way! You worked on the Screaming Yellow Zonkers design?”

“I didn’t work on it. It was me. I designed it.”

“Jesus! You should be in the Hall of Fame!”

Another discovery we made was that childhood, for many, was a train wreck you spend the rest of your life extricating yourself from.

The other discoveries, more or less, orbited around that one overbearing fact. Folks who tell me, “You’ve got to get over that,” or “I live for the moment,” misunderstand how time – and “getting over,” and “living for the moment” – really works. There are no moments in isolation, not in reality. We can isolate moments in art, but that’s another thing. And even when we isolate them, the strings that connect this moment to another moment still show. If they don’t, the artwork is usually empty and meaningless – or it calls attention to other moments by the sheer act of denying them.

My dad lived to 2005, changed continents, changed a lot of things, but he never escaped Poland in 1939. My mother is still living like a refugee even though she hasn’t changed addresses since 1954. Time is a sequence, but not a simple one. And anyone who tells you they’re living in the moment is telling you a lie, though they’re not lying to you. 

And then we ordered two more martinis.

It put a brighter spin on things.

Even when you started out life in a train wreck, it’s a funny train wreck – we laughed.

We laughed and laughed.

The sky above us was dark (the moon had set by then, or disappeared, or had moved on to another party) but we were bright. Not illuminated (except by the vodka), but illuminating. We were like a couple of sea-dwelling denizens who brought our own light with us wherever we went. We had expunged and expiated and come out the other side, laughing. We had allowed our raw emotions to dictate what we said, and we discovered that much of what we were saying was about pain. And anger – at least in my case (Joan was always lecturing me about my anger, especially when I was driving). Most human beings spend so much energy holding themselves together, there’s little of themselves left afterward to do anything with.

“Captain, we’ve used all our power to maintain the shields. There’s nothing left for the proton torpedoes!”

So we stopped holding ourselves together. And it wasn’t like the pain went away, but it felt much lighter, much more bearable. And rather than live for the present it was conceivable to live for tomorrow – a tomorrow that wasn’t just another version of today, but a real tomorrow. A future.

Not to underplay the peril ahead. It was 2006 but we could see what was coming. Not just the lousy economy. Not just the wars. Not just the lousy politics (though both of us were Chicagoans, and had great hopes for that local guy, the new senator, Obama – wouldn’t it be just crazy-beautiful if he could win a presidential election?). We weren’t as fast as we once were. Health would be harder to maintain. Time must have a stop. But that was still some time away. We were good for a few more decades – and they would be our best decades.

By then the martinis ran out. The hour was late. Joan had to catch a plane the next morning. I had to go to Disneyland or Los Feliz … I can’t remember the order of my progress.

I do remember the great sense of elation – and illumination, and relief. And confirmation – a confirmation of our own reality. We weren’t people playing the parts of an artist and writer. We were those people.

I do believe we were happy. Late night wanderers down the hallways and through the concourse might have mistaken us for the rising sun.

Happier moments we may have had together, out of many happy moments (like this one I just recalled: she told me that when we were on our way to Madison once, to Wiscon, on Route 14, me driving, the windows open on the warm day, just rolling past miles and miles of farmland, was one of the happiest moments she’d had in years), but that one, that night, that bar and those martinis …

What Made Valerie Furious?

One of my former students recently posted on his Facebook update: “Advertising/marketing is the art of mind control. It creates the illusion of choice where there is none.”

Well, one can dicker. “Manipulation” over “control,” maybe. “Suggestion” might be substituted – especially by those who work in the industry. Or “increase visibility.” Then there’s “con game,” “scam,” “flim-flam,” “misrepresentation” … These terms can be thrown around – and they are. It’s been some years since I took advertising classes. Yes, I did. And guess what? I got A-plus all the way through. When my advertising instructor at Northwestern heard I was planning to get a degree in English, he looked at me as if I had just set fire to a Dumpster loaded with money.

The words that come to mind, though, when I think of some aspects of advertising and marketing (some aspects – hey, I know people who work in the field, I save my broad brushes for the folks in politics) are “condition” and “train.”

Yeah. “Training.” We hear about training all the time these days. Training is good, right? Training is supposed to be what we’re doing in the schools.

Advertising and marketing people, since the days of Edward Bernays, have been training consumers (by their labels ye shall know them) to, well … to consume.

And they’ve been doing a damn fine job of it, don’t you think? Americans can consume like nobody’s business (and the business of America, after all, is business). We have built mighty cathedrals of consumption, on the ground and in the air – out of brick and out of electrons. Math skills, science skills, language skills, thinking skills – hey, who needs that? Only insofar as they permit us to make more money to consume more stuff.

Oh, yeah – there’s the problem. Consumption needs fuel, and the fuel is money, and recently, outside of a narrow, narrow margin of our more affluent citizens, we don’t have as much scratch to go consuming with anymore.

Fear not: somewhere, brainy people are being grossly underpaid to work out the problem of how to get millions of people to consume more without paying them more, if not by paying them even less. There’s gotta be an algorithm for that.

If you’re old enough to remember the old Mentor Books’ series on the history of Philosophy, you’ll remember we had an Age of Belief, an Age of Adventure, an Age of Reason, an Age of Ideology and, bringing up the rear of the twentieth century, an Age of Analysis (by thy labels ye shall know them).

Well, simpler minds at simpler tasks have managed to cast our current world as an Information Age.

 

So, what do you do in an Information Age?

You gather information. And gather information. And gather more information, to gather even more information. Our answer to everything is to gather more information. The culture has become an intellectual one-trick pony.

Powerful people are spending countless dollars trying to gather information on what you consume in order to get you to consume more of it.

So why the hell do I care? I’m just a writer. An impoverished writer, who don’t know nothing about no things no way, right? I just write about flashy ray guns and flying cars and starships and giant battling robots.

I don’t care. There are plenty of social commentators and critics who’ve got all of this down solid. They can write this whole tirade five days a week, fifty weeks a year. The same damn critique, over and over and over.

And some of them do.

So, why is this under my skin at the moment?

Remember that kid in my story, the one I quoted from in the last post? Val? She sounds furious. Passionately furious.

And part of my job as a science fiction writer is to depict what she’s furious about – to try to capture it in an instant or two, and to do it without too much coaching from the sidelines by the author/narrative voice.

I do so – mostly miserably, at least at first. I hammer and hammer away at the scene until I think I’ve got it as good as I can possibly make it, which I know is probably not good enough.

Before that impassioned scream, that barbaric yawp Valerie made in that French bakery, I wrote a scene inspired by something I noticed in Union Station back in the summer, while I was waiting for a friend who was crossing the country by Amtrak.

I waited, and I heard this strange chattering in my ear. It sounded like a hundred manufactured “human” voices – versions of the same voice – all speaking at once.

They were coming from each of the platform entrances. It was an aid for the visually impaired: a voice, electronically neutral-sounding, tells you what platform you’re standing in front of. I assume the visually impaired person’s hearing ability is keen enough to distinguish Platform Twelve from Platform Fourteen, but to me it sounded like a hive of indistinguishable voices, all going at once – this audio-ocean of words and numbers repeated endlessly.

My first thought was that it sounded like a sound installation from a clever conceptual artist.

My second thought was that this is sort of what it sounds like now, everwhere, all the time. And that in the future it will sound like this, but louder. And the voices won’t be coming from the speakers over the platforms in Union Station, but they’ll be inside our heads.

On the train home I wrote this scene, where Charlotte Weber, the story’s protagonist, takes the escalator up to the mezzanine, where the Water Tower Place atrium space begins:

 

As Charlotte rode the escalators to the mezzanine, a wall of giant screen advertisements greeted (or assailed) her, each one with a well-dressed, physically “perfect” spokesperson, coiffed and made up with painstaking (or painful) artistry, and each one with a professionally-modulated voice, speaking from scripts that teams of “content specialists” (there were no writers anymore) slaved upon for months, telling her the wondrous benefits of some company’s product or service – or whatever it was they were trying to sell. Charlotte couldn’t tell. No one could tell. All the faces, all the voices, tried for the same sincerity, the same directness, the same familiarity – as if these professional strangers had known her for years. All the voices on all the screens blended into an empty cacophony and no one message could be heard over another.

Not that it made a difference.

And not that it was any better on the mezzanine. Every shop, every boutique, sported big screens, 3-D and holograms of unnaturally “real” people looking straight at you as they told you what great things to buy.

And so it was on Level Three. And Level Four. All the way up to Level Seven. A hundred shops with a hundred displays that spoke intimately, plaintively, admonishingly to you –

– But never saw you – could never see you.

And that was the way of the world, if you occupied a place high enough in the social scale, in that country, at that time.

Once, if you heard a hundred voices in your head, calling to you, it was conventional practice to seek out help, counseling, medication. In another age, it may have meant you were a prophetess, or were possessed. Now, if you heard all those voices, all it meant was that you were shopping, in real or virtual space.

The only voice Charlotte had trouble hearing was her own.

 

Is it accurate? Does it reflect the world Charlotte occupies, and does her world reflect our own? I honestly don’t know.

This is what I’ve come up with and until I can come up with something better it will have to stand.

All I can say is, later on in this story, Charlotte and her friends visit a little shop on Level Six, a place that sells these little bioengineered “toys,” shaped like dinosaurs, who are supposed to smile and greet you and sing, “Yar-wooo! Yar-woooo!”

Except for the gray, grimacing stegosaur who says, “G’wan! Beat it! Scram! Smelly humans! Keep your hands to yourself!”

It’s not a ray gun. It’s not a flying car. It’s not a starship. It’s not a giant, battling robot.

But it’s what I work with.

 

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

- Kurt Vonnegut