February, 2012

An interesting thing, this blog business.

I started receiving some snarky comments. One was so bizarre it appeared to be vaguely malevolent computer generated gibberish. Two were just randomly snarky, the sort of generic snarkiness written by people who don’t have enough to do, and I deleted them, or trashed them, or whatever you call it when you don’t post a comment. One attacked another person’s comments for what was either a typo or a spelling error, and that too I deleted or trashed or whatever, partly because I don’t wish to promote warfare, partly because my own typing leaves much to be desired, and partly because I subscribe to the dictum that it’s a damn poor mind indeed that can’t think of at least three ways to spell any word. As Mark Twain pointed out, spelling “cow” with a K is better than spelling it with a C. “It gives the imagination a broader field, a wider scope. It suggests to the mind a grand, vague, impressive, new kind of cow.”

But there was one comment, in response to my criticism of the New York Times’ choice of books, I was about to relegate to the snarky pile, when it occurred to me the author might have a point. A dull point, to be sure, and somewhere off to the side of the target, but a point nonetheless. He or she said, “Hahaha! So anyone without your taste has bad taste, is that it?”

The temptation, of course, was to say, “Yep! That’s it precisely,” but I refrained.

There is a brewery down in San Diego County that makes a beer called Arrogant Bastard Ale, and on the back of the bottle, their description of their ale reads:

“This is an aggressive ale. You probably won’t like it. It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appreciate an ale of this quality and depth. We would suggest that you stick to safer and more familiar territory—maybe something with a multi-million dollar ad campaign aimed at convincing you it’s made in a little brewery, or one that implies that their tasteless fizzy yellow beverage will give you more sex appeal. Perhaps you think multi-million dollar ad campaigns make things taste better. Perhaps you’re mouthing your words as you read this.”

Now that’s my kind of advertising. That’s my kind of humor. The use of irony to express a positive is very much a guy thing. When two men happily insult each other, it means they’re good friends; when they’re carefully polite, it means they despise each other. Think of politicians. When I call my wife my brainless little sex object, it means I think she’s smart (she graduated from college summa cum laude, getting straight As in everything, including algebra—obnoxious show-off) funny, and generally wonderful. And sexy. When I get formal and say, Yes, Dear, or call her Darleen, it means the milk of human kindness in my veins is getting close to its expiration date.

I had thought, when I wrote the last sentence about my readers’ having taste as bad as the New York Times, that I was using irony in its truest, most masculine sense, and doing so on multiple levels, using that particular rhetorical device to express my admiration for the Times, for modern literature, and for my readers all in one fell swoop. Pure genius! Rare subtlety of expression! Devastating humor! Positively kow-like brilliance!

Or maybe not.

I assumed that it was understood by one and all that the writer has yet to be born who wouldn’t cheerfully lop off his left testicle to merit a review in the Times. I had just mentioned three books that all received excellent reviews from the Gray Lady (“To Be Sung Underwater” was reviewed in the other Times, the one on the west coast). But perhaps not everyone appreciates the subtleties of my use of irony. Or, perhaps that comment was itself intended as irony and I was just too thick to get it. In which case…

In which case, I think I’m getting headache.

Darleen gave me a Kindle last year.

This was not a completely altruistic gift on my wife’s part. We are running out of shelf space, and my suggestion that we build more bookshelves in other rooms (the bathrooms, for example) was not greeted with anything like enthusiasm. In fact, it was greeted with a look that reminded me I had a lot of chores to do outside. On the far side of our little ranch. Out of voice range.

I fought like a steer against the Kindle, but I have to admit I’ve grown to like it. It holds a ton of books, literally. It includes an unabridged Oxford English Dictionary, which is a feature I really love; nothing drives me battier than coming across a word I don’t know while I’m stuck somewhere waiting for my truck to be repaired and don’t have a dictionary with me. Most of the books I download are far more affordable as e-books than they would be as either hardbacks or paperbacks. Certain classic books are completely free or almost so. And, perhaps the greatest feature of all, it allows me to download a free sample chapter of any book I wish. That single feature has saved me a small fortune.

I follow various book reviews in various newspapers. Most are traditional sources, primarily “The New York Times” and “The Los Angeles Times,” and some are newer, online sources. Being of a certain age and certain habits, my tendency has been to rely on “The New York Times” first and foremost.

I began to have doubts and concerns about “The New York Times Book Review” several years ago. It was nothing too serious at first, just fledgling doubts, little wobbly-legged precocial concerns, caused by one of their reviewers, herself an esteemed and published novelist. At least, I assume she was esteemed. I had never heard of her, but I can’t imagine the Gray Lady grabbing some unknown wannabe with a BA in Eng. Lit. off the street. I don’t remember her name or the book she was reviewing, but she wrote a sentence that went something like this:

“Having told you [this happened] and [that happened], it should now be redux of me to have to tell you…”

What?

Redux?

At that time I was still so in the thrall to the Gray Lady’s reputation that I actually sat there for several minutes trying to make the sentence work, to uncover some arcane meaning behind her use of that word, but you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit no matter how long you stare at the page. Redux means restored to a state of health (that’s the OED speaking). It bears no relationship of any kind, no matter how you try to stretch it, to redundant, which is what the reviewer meant.

Since then, thanks in part to my Kindle, I have learned that much of what you read in the Times Book Review section is pure, unadulterated bunk. Pre-Kindle, I wouldn’t have discovered this because I couldn’t have afforded to buy all the books whose rave reviews intrigued me. But the free one-chapter sample allows me to stick my toe into what I always hope will be refreshing and entertaining and enriching water, but usually turns out to be a literary La Brea tar pit.

Most of the time I finish the free sample chapter and think, I’d rather be boiled in oil than read any more of this tripe. On the one occasion when I overrode my own instincts and downloaded an entire novel (to be fair, I did so partly because it got a rave in the “LA Times” as well) I had to force myself to finish the damn thing, and when I did, I turned the Kindle off and asked myself, Why did I just waste four or five precious evenings out of the little span of life I have to read this? What did I learn about the human experience? Is my life enriched? Am I wiser? Happier? Was I even distracted for the interminable hours it took to finish the damn thing? To which I replied: I don’t know; nothing; no; no; no; and no.

But, as a certain news organization likes to say, to be fair and balanced, I have to admit I first heard of “The Help,” “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand,” “The Corrections,” and “To Be Sung Underwater” in one Times or the other, and I enjoyed all of them tremendously. And simply because I didn’t like Novel X doesn’t mean you wouldn’t either; after all, your taste may be as bad as the Gray Lady’s.

Have you ever wondered what it might have been like to live in the American West a hundred years ago? Or anywhere in rural America, for that matter? If you could be transported back in time, I think the first and most dramatic difference you would notice would be silence.

I went out to feed the horses on an early Sunday morning recently, and was struck by how quiet the valley was. The world, generally, is always quieter on Sunday mornings. When I lived in New York (which means Manhattan, if you’ve ever been in “The Business”) Sunday mornings were always blessedly quiet. And that word, “blessedly,” is chosen deliberately, because the fact is, I love silence. But this particular Sunday morning was especially quiet. I could see the contrail of a distant jet near the horizon, but it was far enough away that I couldn’t hear it.

I’ve been lucky enough to camp and hunt in lovely lonely places all over the world—North American, South America, Europe, Africa, New Zealand, Alaska (yes, I know that’s part of North America, but it feels different)—but the place I loved the best was the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico, and part of the reason is the absolute silence there.

I read an article once talking about the fact that there are very few places left in the world where you can be out of the range of the sound of some aspect of the modern world, some kind of engine. Even if you’re lucky enough to live in a rural area, as I do, there are distant cars or tractors, or—if nothing else—airplanes. The western slope of the Sierra Madres in Sonora is one of those places where there is not even enough air traffic overhead to impinge on the peace and quiet our great-grandparents must have taken for granted. The only sounds I remember—and I just checked my notes from one of those trips—were the wind in the pines, and the cawing of ravens. The only engine I heard while I was down there was the generator at the line cabin where we slept, and that was only turned on when it got dark; no planes overhead, no diesel trucks, no Jake brakes, no background hum of refrigerator or computer, nothing. Just the world as it sounded for the first several million years. It was heaven.

And couple that lovely silence with the incredible clarity of the dry clean air in Sonora. From the mountaintops it was possible to see for literally hundreds of miles in all directions, and while there might have been other people somewhere in all that space, it was possible to believe there weren’t any. Silence and solitude. Heaven.

Darleen is convinced I’m losing my hearing. She’s also convinced I’m losing my mental faculties, but as she has never considered I had much in that department to begin with she doesn’t worry about it particularly. But she does worry about my hearing. Ageing inevitably involves a certain degree of attrition. I have to work much harder these days to keep my chest where it belongs and not let it slide down to the mezzanine level. And if you make your living in part, as I do, testing firearms, there will always be some effect on your hearing, no matter how careful you are. But as I stood there in the early morning sun on that glorious silent Sunday morning, midway between the house and the barn, hearing nothing but the footfalls of a dancing dog at my side, it occurred to me that maybe Darleen was right. And it didn’t bother me at all. I equate silence with peace, and at that moment I was perfectly at peace.

And then, faintly at first, I could hear the distant whistle of a train. We live about ten miles, as the Condor glides, from the valley where the train climbs over the pass, and there are roughly three-thousand vertical feet of mountain between us and those tracks laid almost one hundred and fifty years ago by nameless Chinese laborers, yet I heard clearly that most evocative and romantic sound from an earlier day. It wasn’t quite as perfect as silence, but it was close, almost an accent to the silence.

I wasted no time feeding the horses so I could go back into the house and tell my wife she was spouting nonsense.

I received an email this morning from a producer, a distant acquaintance whom I met only once at a party six or seven years ago. She has never before had my email address and I was a little surprised to find out she had somehow tracked me down, but you know how hope always springs eternal. Perhaps Universal wants to make one of my novels into a movie and is positively throwing money at me! Perhaps Quentin Tarantino wants me to come out of retirement and star as the murderous psychopath in his new movie! Perhaps, perhaps… Well, who knows what wonderful thing it might be!

Fingers trembling with excitement and anticipation, I opened the message. There was no salutation.

“I am writing this with tear in our eyes. We are here in London, in United Kingdom on vacation, but last night we were mugged in a the park of our hotel. We lost all our cash and credit card and traveling cheques. Fortunately we still have our airline ticket and passport. But the hotel won’t let us leave until we pay our bill and i don’t know how we can do this. Please help us so we can come home. Please send us some money via wire as follows as soon as possible. Thank you my dear good friend.”

Of course I was appalled to hear such a thing could have happened to anybody, let alone to somebody to whom I had once been introduced, but I was very touched to find she remembered me so well and thought so highly of me that she would reach out in her hour of need. I hit the reply button.

Dear ________,

What a horrible experience! My heart goes out to you, mugged and stranded in a foreign land. I know you must be desperate to get home, especially since I happen to know you’re in the middle of working on a movie. It’s extraordinary and shameful how much this type of crime is on the rise. You simply wouldn’t believe how frequently I hear of just this sort of thing.

Fortunately, I am in a position to be of real help to you. My very good friend Elliot Morris is an Inspector with Scotland Yard right there in London! He is a very capable and formidable man with no love or patience for criminals, and of course he has all the resources of the Yard at his disposal. And more good news for you! Maurice Sabatini was a classmate of mine in boarding school and he is now a specialist in computer and internet crimes (internet fraud, hacking, that sort of thing) with Interpol. I have forwarded all your contact information, and this email, to both gentlemen and you can be sure they will move heaven and earth to find you and give you everything you require.

Please fell free to contact me again if I can be of any further assistance.

I concur with Henry Higgins’s assessment of the male of our species, that by and large we are a marvelous sex. However, I will admit there is an unfortunate tendency among some men, a few, a small minority, occasionally, when confined for long periods of time with other men—in the waiting room of an automotive repair place, for example—to solve the problems of the world by pontificating at hapless strangers.

I spent an entire day last week at the Dodge dealer in the city nearest to me, about an hour’s drive away. An engine warning light keeps coming on telling me my highly sophisticated Cummins diesel clean air system isn’t as sophisticated or clean as it should be. This is the fourth time this has happened. The first three times I took the truck to another dealer, closer by, and they did their best, replacing more and more expensive parts of the system until the whole thing is now brand new, flawless, spotless, barely used, in fine working order, up-to-the-minute, spouting sparkling clean air. You could wrap your lips around my exhaust pipe and breathe deeply and cleanly. Except the damned light says you might want to abstain from that otherwise harmless amusement.

Service managers are relentlessly optimistic. They’re happy to rent you a car, if that’s how you choose to squander your money, but their basic attitude is always, “Two or three hours, four at the most.” So the unhappy customer waits and waits and waits and gets led on by empty promises—“I think we’ve got it fixed now. Just one last test to make sure.”—and then waits some more. And this brings out the worst, the nastiest, the most vicious, the most unattractive and unproductive side of the otherwise kind and sensible male of the species.

Instead of sitting quietly and reading his Kindle, or one of the local newspapers and many magazines provided for him by the Dodge dealer, this ugly tendency begins to manifest itself, and one ancient grey-beard male customer holds another, younger male customer, one of three, with his glittering eye, and makes him listen like a three years’ child.

“How about them Lakers?”

What I knew about basketball prior to yesterday could be summarized, in its entirety, with the basic rule that the team with the most points, or goals, or baskets, or whatever, wins. Beyond that, the subtleties of a game I have never played or cared about elude me.

But today, I can confidently tell you—whether you wish to hear it or not—that:

Coach Mike Brown is no Phil Jackson (I don’t think anybody could argue with that statement, no matter what it means)

Kobe Bryant has stopped hogging the ball and become a team player (This shows a fine generosity of spirit on Mr. Bryant’s part)

The whole team used to be made up of a bunch of goddamned prima donnas, but now they are finally working as a team (But if Mike Brown is the coach, wouldn’t that be a positive reflection on his… Oh, never mind)

Someone with the improbable name of Pau Gasol will absolutely, positively, beyond a shadow of a doubt, get traded (And if they can trade him for a truck with warning lights that work, it will be well worth it)

Even though the Lakers rank near the bottom of the league in offense and three-point shooting, they still might make it to the playoffs (Okie dokie; is that a good thing?)

No matter what anybody tells you, no matter what you read in the damn paper, no matter what you see on television, don’t you be fool enough to believe for one little moment that Jonny Flynn would be a good acquisition for the Lakers (I will refute it with every fiber of my being)

And the idea of recruiting point guard Rajon Rondo is…

Speaking of points, I had reached the point by this time where I was willing to buy this grey-beard loon any brand new Chrysler product he wanted when a loudspeaker saved me and he was called to the cashier’s window. A sadder and wiser man, I turned my Kindle back on.

Then a chair creaked next to me.

“How about that Obama?”

My wife has a decorating bug. Don’t hold it against her; she can’t help it. It’s an inherited thing, like alopecia, or flat feet, or eczema, or a tendency toward arthritis, one of those unfortunate traits that just get passed on from generation to generation in certain bloodlines. One of her sisters is an interior decorator by profession, the other by proclivity, and Darleen would be if I didn’t rule our house with an iron fist and iron will. (In case my beloved helpmeet should read this, I’ll also add that her instincts are held in check by an absence of ready cash.)

But, like eczema, every now and then her instinct flares up, despite my best efforts, and I have to be really careful. I have been known to try and sit where I am accustomed to sit, where there has always been something to sit on, only to fall on my ass because Darleen has decided the chair would look better over there.

Apart from the personal physical danger—to me—created by her strange compulsion to constantly change and improve and beautify, the whole thing leaves me a little mystified. I am not particularly aware of my surroundings. I’ll notice a blank space on the wall, and when I tell Darleen we ought to notify the police that we’ve been burglarized, she’ll tell me (with a certain tightening around the lips and eyes that always makes me nervous) the painting in question has been hanging in the bedroom since last September.

Oh.

She shows me two virtually identical paint samples—identical, I swear—and when I tell her I can’t see the slightest difference between them for the very good reason that there is no difference, she gets a look on her face that reminds me of paintings of the early Christian martyrs. Irritable martyrs, martyrs who are not amused by this whole burning-at-the-stake martyring nonsense.

The variation to this is that if I actually can see a difference, or if I lie and say I can, she’ll ask me which one I like better. Every husband knows this is very thin ice, almost as thin as the “Does this dress make me look fat” question. No matter which color sample I prefer, it’s never the one I should have preferred. I’m not entirely sure how this works, or why it works this way, but that’s the rule.

Our house is inundated with paint samples, ten-by-twelve pieces of cardboard balanced on top of paintings, on top of cabinets, on the floor, on countertops, on the backs of sofas, in the bathroom, perched on the handle of the oven, on the tops of toilettes. I tried suggesting she simply paint the whole house, indoors and out, in samples. It was not well received, but I was completely serious. I thought it was a practical and sensible way to solve two problems at once: satisfying her urge to experiment with different colors, and saving us a ton of money by using up all the pint and quart samples crammed onto every shelf and into every cabinet of the laundry room. I even thought it might be the start of a new trend, a sort of Joseph’s House of Many Colors kind of thing. The look she gave me convinced me it was better to treat the suggestion as a mild and unsuccessful joke.

As a small child, when my family was living in Europe, my father took us once to famed caves of Lascaux, back before the place was sealed up. I remember marveling at the extraordinary prehistoric paintings on the walls, and being given the official explanation that these were possibly shamanistic, or perhaps hallucinogenic, or astrological, or an artistic form of recording individual hunting success. It’s all rubbish. Any husband can tell you it was all the result of a wife with a decorating bug. Why do you think poor old homo erectus domesticated the dog? He needed someone to keep him company as he crouched in the corner, occasionally moving large stones around as his wife decided where they would look best.

“No. I was right the first time. Move it back. Excuse me? What was that crack? Do you want to sleep outside with that mangy mutt tonight? I thought not.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I like old things. Of course, I’m something of an old thing myself these days (though it wasn’t kind of you to point it out), but apart from that, I like the comfort of familiarity: old jeans, boots that know the shape of my foot, shirts with frayed collars, tools with shiny places from repeated use, a pocket knife with a blade worn down from decades of sharpening, books that fall open at favorite passages, a saddle that shows years of use and years of care in equal measure, all the old things whose performance and idiosyncrasies you can count on.

I like old houses too, with stairs worn from generations of feet, butcher block tables concave from preparation of countless meals, floors that slope from south to north, wooden newel posts worn smooth and shiny from thousands of touches by hundreds of hands, known and unknown. (Remember Jimmy Stewart in “It’s a Wonderful Life?”)

Don’t misunderstand. I really appreciate my mod. cons.: heating and air conditioning that actually work; water that comes out unstained by rust; roofs that don’t leak; DSL; and radiant heat in the floors would be nice, if I had it. But I like the known, the used, the loved and appreciated, an air of the loved and lived in, and a sense of the character of people who did the living. Darleen regularly comes home from the market with copies of “House Beautiful” or “Architectural Digest,” and while I can admire the beauty of some of those homes (some make me wonder if they were designed by a blind descendent of the Marquis de Sade, or someone with a really distorted sense of humor) I can’t see myself living in any of them.

I have two leather chairs I bought in New York the year of the bicentennial, when the tall ships sailed up the Hudson. After almost four decades of hard and regular use they are now very—pick one—worn (if you’re charitable) or shabby (if you’re less forgiving). I have made necessary repairs to the leather over the years with super-glue, and they should be good to go for at least another decade or so, if I can persuade the cats not to use them for their pedicures. They are my more attractive version of Marty Crane’s hideous Barcalounger on “Frasier.” And like Marty Crane, those chairs hold as many memories for me as they have held bottoms: friends I still occasionally see, friends separated by distance, friends separated by change or choice, friends separated by death.

There will come a day when there is more super-glue than leather and I will have to discard them, but until then, I think I’ll go get comfortable and read a book.