Suburban Tale of Woe #69

There was a man named Rooney in my neighborhood who had a Hummer and a pool and a big house. He was one of those assholes with a tattoo and always walked around with his shirt off and everyone hated him even before the age of mass consumption ended because he consumed more than even mass consumers. He drove around in his black Hummer and never seemed to work and that pissed everybody off too. His wife was some beauty queen built like a Destroyer and that pissed off everyone especially the men. And he wore these clothes that a fifteen year old would wear. Maybe

Anyway the crash came and a sign popped up in front of his house FOR SALE BY OWNER. Then it fell down and someone put another sign up in black magic marker FOR SALE BY OWNER. That one fell down too but lay in his yard for a month. Then a realtor sign appeared with the picture of a June Cleever woman saying SPECIAL REDUCED PRICE. Then that sign fell and nobody picked that up. Then it snowed and the old sign in magic marker popped up. This went on through the spring.

Then one morning two white trucks appeared and Rooney disappeared. Nobody saw him again. Then the trucks disappeared and his lawn grew all sorts of weeds that started to breathe again when the herbicide wore off. Trash blew around. Someone threw a can of GOOD TIMES beer on his front lawn. Then when the weeds got waist high someone cut them down and some Indians appeared. They were from Pakistan and seemed pretty nice. Nobody knew what happened to Rooney

So then I'm sitting in the parking lot of Starbucks. I'm just sitting there and I see a guy pull up in one of those little trucks shaped like a house. ROONEY REMODELING is on the side. I'm staring at the truck when a guy in a leisure suit or a sweat suit that looks  like a leisure suit gets out with a long white stripe from his shoulder to his foot like a convict. He has gray hair and goes inside looking around like someone might shoot him. It was ROONEY alright. Someone said he was living on the other side of town. In a house. Amazing.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Going from third to first person

Mind twisting. Going from third person to first person will really twist you around like a pretzel. Basically you have to write a new novel and you can use a couple scenes from the old one but those don't even work the way they are supposed too so really all you have is an elaborate outline to guide you. It really stinks. But that's what happens when you realize the point of view for your novel is wrong and what started out as a third person narration ended up in first and that wouldn't be a big deal except you finished the four hundred page monster.

The point of view ties it together or doesn't and mine didn't. That's when I realized I had to go the other way go with a first person narrator. Yuck. The voice comes to you but like a meat grinder you have to grind up all that old third person stilted garbage and bring it out again in your new voice. And it is a bitch. Forget that the whole novel has to change to accommodate the new point of view you really have to consider that you are just starting over and there is nothing you can do about. Here is the million dollar question. Does the new point of view make it better. Yes? Then get to work. May you never get stuck in this kind of rewrite.

But  voice makes a book. And if you think the book is good then you have no choice. You you you. That's the voice you choose. It is the difference between something that will never see the light of day and something that has a chance.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket man will blast off in April

The Bushwhacking of NPR

You should be concerned about this one if you go to movies, plays, the ballet, poetry readings, book readings, galleries, enjoy fine wine, a good book, a symphony on the lawn, Mozart, the Beatles, just about anything to do with culture. Because let's say the bad guys have a point in busting up the unions and cutting every social program they can get their hands on. You could almost say that they are doing some of this out of true fiscal concern or at the very least ideology. But trying to destroy National Public Radio is attacking what is left of culture in this country and every single Sesame Street watching child and Ken Burns devotee should really say enough is enough.

What? We want to cement Sarah Palins bet that America is truly a stupid country? That in fact the lowest common denominator should rule the land? That some short sighted ideologue who was probably the weird guy in the class who entertained Timothy McVeigh fantasies and saw the government as evil but then veered into fame as a better way to satisfy his tortured loner geek soul could now score points by trying to take down the wine drinking cheese crowd by getting an NPR executive to spill  his guts so he could prove what a left leaning organization NPR really is, is really pathetic and a true low point in what American society is capable of producing.

Let's say we get rid of NPR. Let's say we get rid of culture. Let's say the stupid men rule the land. Now what? Without culture you do not have a country. You have no collective national consciousness to balance the insidious vapidity of crass commercialism which rolls along F. Scotts Fitzgerald's definition of cheap entertainment as simply heroin of the soul. Even rabid conservatives  want to go see a fine play or enjoy a night at the symphony after a long day of taking bottles from children and cutting out funding for the education, women, infants, and poor  people. But alas, they cut out culture too and instead of Stravinsky  they are stuck with Die Hard 6.

So this is not about scoring points. NPR is part of America. America needs something elevated to balance the natural crassness of a country founded on the almighty dollar as it's guiding light after paying lip service to liberty and freedom. We need it if only to keep the creeps in the corners and our own hope alive that one day we will get beyond the infancy of  the mega commercial state. We can only hope NPR is still around when the dust settles after the conservative slash and burn orgy of 2011.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off April 26th

Writing is a Job

I have a friend who I see in coffee shops. He works above the coffee shop in a small ramshackle office. When I am done writing I go to the coffee house to read and research. Writing is a process of filling up and emptying out. It is very accordion that way. I fill up in the afternoons after the attic and let it all fly the next day and start over. When I see my friend who used to be an architect and still is an architect but got wiped out in the crash, he always says, don't you have a family? Why don't you get a job? He says this with a smile and we both laugh, but I know he means it.

Middle class people have always defined an office as a job. They have always defined working set hours as a job. Writers have neither of these although I have both but not in the way most people have them. People don't understand jobs that don't have a shingle or don't have a haggard eight hour repetition cycle built in. My friend has neither of these  but he wants both but prefers his office above the coffee house to not having an office. He likes to think I don't have a job and in that middle class way it makes him feel better about himself. All rats chomp on each other.

So I guess I have to say writing is a job. A very serious and hard one. And if you get paid for it it is even harder because you cannot cheat. You have to write at your very top and that is exhausting. At times I think an office job wouldn't be bad. Just go and sit at a desk like my friend and wait for the checks to roll in. But of course then I wouldn't be a writer. I'd be a man with a desk who could say to other people: why don't  you get a job? That would be fun for about a day.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off April 26th

All Those Manuscripts in a box

You have them if you write. Manuscripts in a musty box in a basement. Apologies to all those writers who hit it every time with their books and their box is empty or nonexistent. But for everybody else you know what I am talking about. They are the books that just didn't work for whatever reason. A lot of times it takes years to figure that out. Sometimes you see very early on the book is not there and give it up for another project, but usually it is during the third or fourth or fifth or twentieth rewrite the pottery reveals it's cracks and you sigh a collective, oh shit.

The first novel a lot of times makes it. Maybe it's just fresh, but that second book is in danger right away. There is a inclination to try and duplicate what worked before or go way out on a limb and try something extremely different. Both attempts usually fail. For myself I tried a stock thriller that after diagramming and interviewing people and countless drafts just sort of gave itself up as a really bad idea that led to a really bad book. Then the title changed five times and it was just dead.

I followed that with a novel about early yuppies who give it all up to find meaning. Hmmm...Dated before it was even done. Really really bad. That one imploded early and only cost me a year. Then there was the logging book that dragged on for years and then a series of starts that never saw the light of day. What can you say? Writing is like a gun and there are are a lot of misfires. But, occasionally, it comes together and makes every bad novel just a stepping stone along the way. That' what you tell yourself anyway.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off April 26th

The Lady Waiting for the Train

Mondays are cruel. I didn't know how cruel until I saw the lady waiting for the train. We were all waiting to go to Chicago with nowhere to go until the lady appeared. She gave us somewhere to go with our IPODS and phones and cold cold cold breath. Chicago had given up the ghost on spring and decided to torment all of us some more in our scarfs and synthetic leather jackets and no gloves. Gloves are for winter and it was March. So no gloves. That's the way I thought anyway.

So the lady waiting for the train was on the opposite platform. Trains come and go to Chicago. We were going. The other train was coming from. Usually we were on the opposite platform waiting for the train to Chicago. But not today on this cold grey windswept Monday that looked like snow. There had been an announcement. INBOUND TRAIN ARRIVING ON THE SOUTH PLATFORM TO CHICAGO. We all heard it and trudged across the crossing and stood with our backpacks and lunches and briefcases and handbags and purses old and young and middle alike. Except for the lady.

The lady stood on the opposite platform looking West away from Chicago. She smoked a cigarette and stared at all of us staring back at her. We had a group staring contest. The lady had a hood on and a scarf wrapped around her forehead and smoked a brown cigarette that might have been a cigarillo. Nobody knew. Nobody cared. We were all busy freezing and waiting for the train. So was the lady. But we knew. We knew she was on the wrong side. Somebody could have yelled across the tracks, HEY ARE YOU GOING TO CHICAGO? THE TRAIN IS COMING ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF THE TRACKS. We could have  done that, but nobody did.

Instead we took silent bets on how stupid was the lady. Was she really stupid or just a little stupid. She looked like she had already had children. The child years were over for this lady. She wore high boots a little out of fashion. She had on leopard something around her shoulders. Otherwise she looked Midwestern all browns and heavy makeup. She stared at us and smoked. We stared at her and waited. The lady looked down the tracks. We waited. Did she know? Maybe she wasn't even waiting for the train. Then the lady stubbed out her cigarette on the wall of the station and stepped inside a bar. She stood in the door like a pasty manikin. We waited. Maybe she wasn't going to Chicago. We heard the train.

The train came around the bend and got larger and larger. We watched the lady who watched us. We waited. We knew there was a point of no return for the lady. Once the train was in the station it would block the crosswalk. The lady would be stuck. Still, we weren't sure she was even going to Chicago. She looked very composed in her warm bar while we froze our asses off. But then she looked and saw the train rolling into the station and we knew the lady was going to Chicago.

She tried to get out of the door and run to the crossing. But the train rumbled ahead and screeched to a halt and became a wall between us and the station. We all got on the warm train and I found a seat and began eating my hot dog I had been saving. I looked out the window and saw the lady. She was staring at the train while it pulled out and it's too bad nobody told her the train was leaving on the South platform. But it was Monday and nobody cares about Mondays. 

http://www.billhazelgrove/.
Rocket Man will blast off April 26th

Cormak McCarthy's The Road

I put off reading this book because it seemed so depressing, a son and his father wandering post apocalypse America, but I bought it and read the novel by the author of No Country For Old Men and All The Pretty Horses. McCarthy is certainly a Faulknerian writer of great skill. A great writer no doubt and his book is resonant especially in the world we see now with so many things up for grabs. The genius of The Road is the entire emotional center is between the father and son and all things are evaluated in this world complete because it is a good thing since there is no world.

The chapters are short. Many episodes just a paragraph. This brings up the chiseled rocks of his McCarthy prose like diamonds on the shore. Each episode is complete and unto itself. Almost like poetry. But one cannot help reading this book and thinking there will not be many more like it. McCarthy writes in old vein that seems largely disappearing from the literary landscape. The short chiseled prose of another era pops up over and over and at times it feels like Faulkner. And yes it is good writing but it is strangely limiting also. And no one but Cormak McCarthy could get away with it.

I went through a McCarthy phase where I tried to ape his style to dismal results. It is not near as easy as it would seem. The spare sentences are constructed in a way that only a man who has a very deep knowledge of what he is writing about could get away with. The proverbial iceberg just above the water. A very good novel.

http://www.billhazelgrove/
Rocket Man will blast off April 26th

Poor Oscar

Could they have just let Bob Hope do the Oscars as a hologram or three D figure? Seriously. He would have been better than the Hathaway Franco combo that set a new low for the most uninteresting Oscar night probably in history. Even the F bomb didn't help the Oscars that seemed like a bad made for TV night of reality show proportions. Was it me or did it all just seem like CG filler? Where was Oscar? Where was the soul?

Even old Kirk Douglas could not resuscitate the moribund production values of filling in with all sorts of backgrounds in the round screen arena. Thankfully the right movie won, but there was something about even the King's Speech that got a little squashed in the amped up twenty something cathedral of beautiful people without talent. I mean Hathaway has talent and maybe Franco does, but that quality called humility was sorely lacking and it seemed the children were running the show and not adults. No surprise they ended the show with kids from Stanton Island singing Somewhere over the Rainbow...a high point at last.

Adults are able to laugh at themselves and don't expect others to laugh because they are just too cute for words. Again where were the individuals? Oscar seemed so stiff  he was in danger of breaking in two. Speeches were carefully devoid of just about anything political or social except for Best Documentary where the filmmaker was able to point out nobody had gone to jail for the great Collapse,but then it was on with the show or on with the faces and CG.

Billy Crystal came in and reminded us that real people entertain us and not computers. Did you hear a computer won Jeopardy? Well that would be an exciting show watching computers try and beat each  other for a prize. The most memorable moment was probably Celine Dion singing over the lost souls of Hollywood and that is probably the bar we were looking for:  a dead show eclipsed by someone singing over the departed.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off April 26th

Obama walking the Wisconsin line

Brats outside of bait shops. Cheese and really crappy Wisconsin wine.  Curds from the men who sit in the bars. Oh hey there. Lakes and lakes and lakes. Bars on every corner. Journey and Reo Speedwagon blasting out of a T Top. Shiny union jackets and women who eat too many BRAAATS and drink too many of Milwaukee's Best. Welcome to Wisconsin just a hop skip and a jump away from Chicago where we all escape to swim and putter around in boats and get some RR among the cornfields and small lost Germanic towns.

Chances are Obama shot up there when he was hanging out in Hyde Park. Maybe he saw it the way we all see it and the way it is. The Land Before Time. At least the land in the seventies where facial hair is still cool and guys wear their hair like Steve Perry still and woman still layout to get that orange glow. Good times. Meat and potatoes baby. Except now the land before time is getting caught up in our twenty first century mess and the President is trying to walk the Wisconsin line. Fiscal responsibility, but leave the Unions alone. He can't seem to make up his mind.

Tough line to walk. Like the Chicagoans the Wisconsinites tolerate but need their tourist dollars, he is conflicted. Unions are big supporters but the political winds are deficit driven and the states are broke broke broke. Now the Teaparty is descending. To have a brat or not have a brat. Maybe a little ice fishing. Maybe a little water skiing. Pick up some leaches and head out. But something has to give and the President is trying to figure out which way to go.

All eyes on the Cheese heads who kicked our Bears butt. It had not been a happy season for anyone North of Chicago except for the Packers. So it will be interesting to see if the President decides to partake of Wisconsin hospitality or be that guy who says the seventies are over and Trans Ams really are gas hogs and Journey broke up a long time ago and Unions are kaput. Brats and beer or sushi. Hmmm. Hard choice.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off in April

Seniors Watching Kid Movies

 Come in here watch this...Watch this. Yeah sure. Ok. Here it is...the cat just turned into a dog and is snapping pictures of documents with a spy camera. Isn't that hilarious....funny right? Right? This is a great movie. Ah...no. But that is the way it is with seniors. They dig kid movies. More and more my dad likes to sit down and watch animated movies with my kids. My in laws have been watching Mickey Mouse for years in rapt attention. Like they never saw it before. Totally entertained. Something is up.

I have kids and so I am bombarded with kid movies. Same super loud music dog and cat based animals talking like people we know and doing all sorts of wild CG stunts. The moral imperative thrown in at the end as the rogue penguin is vansihed by the puppy with super dog powers. Pop music. Known actors voices. Usually a smart ass African American who is really street smart. I can snooze through just about any kid movie in perfect synchronicity, waking up as the credits roll.

But my dad. He digs them. You got to see this one? Did you see this one? Ah...no. In laws watching Mickey kick butt for the hundredth time. Fantasia rolling in Dolby sound. No Alzheimer's here. Just a slow dulling of the old critical intelligence until kid movies become once again just fascinating. But maybe that is the cycle here. We all grew up on kid movies with the clear plot lines of good guys and bad guys and animals taking the reins that humans cannot. While the new round of CG kid movies are more innovative, the plot lines remain unchanged. Some human value, honesty, devotion, love, perseverance, triumphs and all the talking animals rejoice and a great theme song kicks in. So maybe that is what we all want at the end. Clear lines. Good guys win. Theme song kicks up. Fade to credits. Scary huh.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man will blast off in April

Waiting For Superman

Go see this movie. Go see it for your children, go see it for your school, go see  it for your country. Because if we believe American is in decline then we should at least know why the last great chapter of this country is closing down on us in the beginning of the twenty first century. You cannot escape that feeling anymore. And you wonder where it all began. Why do our towns look like burned out rust belt towns with no commerce except for some river boat pulled in for a last gasp of economic resuscitation? Why is our culture bankrupt and vapid?Why are we trailing the world now ? It had to start with our kids.

This documentary should not be political. Waiting for Superman should not make teachers coil up and dig in and say no way. The union should not say this is the Antichrist of all film making because it suggests that tenure is not a good thing for our children and that charter schools are not anomalies. Wisconsin is unfortunate because it casts a political light on the question of what is wrong with our schools? Why will we have only 53 million skilled workers for 130 million high tech jobs in 2020? Why do our tech companies go halfway around the world right now to find the engineers they need. Why are we almost last in math and science in the Industrialized nations?

Our schools are in decline because they are incapable of change. As a parent I get this. I have seen this. I have seen good and bad teachers, but the thought they are on equal footing is unacceptable. It is not a matter of economics anymore. It would be nice if we could assume this only exists in parts of the country, but our entire country did not test up to the proficiency standards in math and science for eight graders. Now why is that? Could it be, as the film so eloquently points out, it has become all about the adults and not the kids.

The film ends with a challenge. Do something. Do something to make our schools better. I hope I can do more, but the best I can do right now is to tell you to watch this movie and pass it on. Maybe then we can figure out what to do next.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in April

The Writers Factotum

When you are a writer you do anything. Anything. Bukowski's second novel, Factotum, proves the point beautifully and the movie does the same. You accept right away that every job you ever have is temporary. You accept that every job is just a means to an end and the end is writing. You evaluate the job in how much time it gives you to write. That's it. Nothing else matters. Not the money. Not the job itself. Just how much time it gives you to plow away at your craft.

Best factotum job I ever had was security guard. Pile up the books in the Wrigley building on Michigan Avenue and watch the hours dribble away. Midnight to eight AM. Nothing to do but make the rounds of the building from the coal chutes in the basement to the little room up in the clock tower. Scribble in the log. 1300 Saw a bug. 1400 Squashed a bug. 1500 No bugs. Sometimes they got on me about the log so I wrote more. 1300Saw a bug. Roach. Big. Moving south down the hallway. 1400 Followed roach into men's room. 1500 Smashed roach into a brown smear. That usually did the trick. Mostly I just read. Eight hours of reading literature. Great job.

Then there was the janitor job. Custodian. Stationary engineer. My boss laid it down for me. Just stay lost. Here is your broom. Just stay lost and make sure no one runs out of toilet paper. I read in the bathroom stalls. Stopped the freight elevator between floors and read whole novels. Kept the toilet paper up. Took rolls home for my own use. Pushed around the same dust for hours. Read Read and Read some more. Lost the job when they said someone was stealing rolls of toilet paper. How low can you go.

After that there was construction cleanup, the railroad, waitering, mortgages, renting apartments, teaching. Teaching was the worst factotum job. They wanted you to work and know the students name and read their work. I didn't know anybodies name and didn't read anybodies work. The bakery. Working the night shift at the bakery. Great factotum job. Take orders all night long until about two AM. Then just sit in the shipping office with the loaves going around conveyor belts all night long. The smell of the long loaves was amazing. The Italians with the flour all over their faces screaming what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck. Then I got to take hot bread home in my jacket on my motorcycle. Blasting through the streets of Chicago with a nights worth of literature and hot bread against my stomach.  Nothing better than the factotum life man.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off in April

Every writer wants to be a teacher

I don't know when it happened man but everybody I know wants to be a teacher now. Especially writers. The down turn turned every vocation into something that could vanish overnight and that includes writing. Teaching used to be regarded as the sort of thing you would do if nothing else worked out. Oh yeah I couldn't make it in the private sector so I'll go teach. Nothing against teachers it was just sort of those that cant do teach you know. Not anymore.

Teaching is one cool gig now. Benefits with a capitol B. Health care man, pension, great hours, summers off, get to learn something and you can not be fired. Take that last one and it is worth everything else. Tenure baby. You can not get axed no matter how bad things get and when you retire you still get your salary. And you get to hang out with other cool people who are doing something other than scratching for the all  mighty buck.

I taught for a while as an adjunct at a Community college and we all wanted a permanent position. But there were only a few and so we all scratched and clawed and tried to win favor with the powers that be. But there were twenty adjuncts and five full time. No way. I washed out like a lot of writers do with teaching because I couldn't stop writing. But I had this fantasy about being the cool teacher writer you know. And now it's all going down in Wisconsin. They will go after the teacher gig because it is sweet. All good things come to an end in this recession man, even for the teachers.

www.billhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man will blast off in April

How Americans Age

They don't age well. They talk about aging. They worry about aging. They age and look used up before their time and act old and feel old and they are old. Forget demographics Americans are old because they can't feel young forever and that makes them older. The youth culture has bit everyone in the collective ass and we have now become a nation of aging whiners. Here is one for you: how many times are you out with people who talk about how old they are? If you are over thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, then the number is increasing. Sounds like fun huh.

Now why is that? Why don't Americans just shut up and age. It's almost like someone told they would not age. Would that be our culture? You know those ageless rock stars who still sing songs about being young. Hmm. Some sort of disconnect. Or our movies and our television shows where everyone looks more and more like highschoolers and less like adults. Or maybe it is the plastic surgery industry that tries to make everyone look younger but really makes everyone look like martians except Joan Rivers who looks like someone froze her twenty years ago in a cake of soap.

So the collective message is this: you should not age. In fact you should feel guilty you did get older. And worse you should whine about it like a kid who was not told he would in fact grow up. The problem is not aging but the self consciousness of it. Somewhere Americans thought they were bionic. Guess what? We're not. We age and die. Whoops. Sorry about that. The best thing Americans can do is raise a  drink and have a good time and shut up. No one wants to party with a whiner

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off soon

Do A Little Dance, Make A Little Love...

I went to essentially a very large party at the Auto Show in Chicago and the strangest thing of the night was not the cars or the pretty woman or the food that was out there with every manufacturer or the booze which was plentiful or the guys in monkey suits or the woman in the long dresses some of them beautiful some of them not so beautiful, the strangest thing of the night was the band. They had been billing KC and the Sunshine band all night as entertainment where everyone could Get  Down. So I went to GET DOWN.

My wife and I made our way to the front of the stage where some very competent musicians were doing sort of an intro. I thought this was a seventies band my wife said looking at the twenty something musicians. Obviously they swapped a lot of people out I said, watching some very nubile women come on and start doing some really strenuous hip hop. Is KC on the stage my wife wanted to know. Soon. Very soon. Although I did scour the ten musicians to see if he was up there among the lights. But no. No KC

And so waited while the music rose and the crowd swayed and everyone waited for the man. And then just when you thought the music could not get any louder, more intense, just when you thought maybe this was KC and the Sunshine Band. This fat man falls out from the corner in a black shirt and black pants with a head set on. My first thought was someone crashed the stage. Surely, this was not the vaunted KC. This really fat guy who was bald and jumped around in tennis shoes with his black shirt hanging out and worse his stomach hanging out. Surely, this is not the man who penned those now famous disco lines: do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight. To which I have to confess, when I first heard those lines I had no idea what he meant.

But this was KC the man! He jumped around, dancing with the girls, sweating profusely, hanging onto the microphone at the break. He tried to catch his breath and I was not alone in hoping he could make it through the show. Wow! Look at all these people at the auto show! KC shook his head. Wow, I  just turned sixty and quit smoking. Breathing heavy again. And I have to tell you, my only thought is What the Hell Happened?

And maybe that was the line of the night. Maybe when you look around and see how age just tears people to pieces you feel like old KC up there, sweating, hanging on his microphone to take refuge, staring out at the bright lights and woman standing by new cars, thinking wow... what the hell happened?

www.billhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man due out in April

Sex in Novels

I remember reading novels up in an attic with a friend of mine looking for the dirty passages. His parents had tossed tons of paperbacks in a large box and Tommy and I rooted through them in the dim light of the attic looking for every explicit scene we could find. Mostly we looked for trigger words, throbbing, member, ecstasy, moaning, pleasure, orgasm, groping, hotly, lustily, hungered... and then we read in the dim light until his mother asked what the hell we were doing up there.

Now of course novels have taken a back seat to cinema and television and everything else that puts sex front and center and yet novels can still get steamy in their muted pulp and print fashion or the more esoteric e reader. I have been reading Jonathan Troppers novel This is Where I Leave You and it is amazing but he crams sex into every other page. I don't mean a little sex but a lot and graphic. Take this scene. A man having sex with the main characters wife with her hand up her lovers ass. Our hero discovers the fornication couple and he shoves a birthday cake (meant for his wife) up the ass of the male lover who already has a hand up there. The candles ignite the lovers scrotum because he used lube.

That's in the first ten pages. Now even for people who the sexually jaded this scene is pretty loaded. But the book doesn't give us a breath as people fornicate in basements, apartments, groping, sucking, tonguing in graphic descriptions leaving just about nothing to the imagination. This book is not pornography but mainstream fiction. Which brings along an interesting question...how much sex is too much sex in a novel. For Tropper a little doesn't go a long way.

I remember a friend of mine had some actual pornography. The books were small and thin with silly titles and covers. And they were all sex. No plot. Just sex upon sex. I ran a writing group once where a man brought in very pornographic chapters from his novel in progress. He would read the excerpts and the woman in the group tried to climb under their chairs as the lovemaking went on for pages and pages. The men in the group cheered for more. When the critique started we had to address the sex scenes that basically were pornography. But the question is where is that line? Taste? Intent? Terminology?

I suppose all novels eventually make it into the sex box as Tommy and I used to call it. If I had gotten hold of a Tropper novel I would have felt like a miner hitting the mother lode. If I had gotten hold of real pornography I would have thrown Tropper aside. I guess it is all the lines we draw or don't draw.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Our Sputnik Children

You can feel the desperation in American Education now. Tenure is under attack by the states. Pensions are getting busted. Nobody has the money to fund them and all those people skating along under the education umbrella are in danger of getting rained on with the rest of us. The teachers figured they would never fear the pain of the recession and now the clouds are gathering. You think of this as you talk to teachers about your kid and realize how little teaching goes on and how the ability to get a grade now passes for education. Robotic kids able to follow specific directions flourish while children who take time to think drown in the sorrow of failure. And America is behind the rest of the world.

Ramp up math and science. Then we will beat the Chinese. Forget about the ability to speak or think, lets be more linear. Engineers will certainly save American Education. Much the same for the Sputnick generation as that tin cat slingshots around the earth beep beeping way. We will bury you. We will bury you. We will bury you. The Chinese surround us with their low level hum, we own you we own we own you. Teachers put into overdrive to catch up. The kids must meet a higher standard. Download more lessons. Fill more time with more work with more computer time with more Blackboard.

But America never won the day by following rules. How did we win? As Steven Ambrose pointed out in Citizen Solider we won because the individual soldier, the grunt was given permission, nay, he was taught at a very early age to think for himself. To improvise, to create on the spot. So when he came up against his German counter part on the beaches of Normandy the soldier, the citizen solider figured out a way to get himself and his platoon off the beach. And that was good because the Germans waited for orders. They waited for someone who was hell on wheels in science and math to give them exact coordinates while a GI snuck up with a a flamethrower and incinerated their pillbox.

So out Sputnik children are on the line once again. At a booster event for the baseball team I brought up the movie Race to the Bottom to a man whose kids are on military footing in school and athletics. Outstanding achievers. Race to the Bottom is a  documentary that catalogs the stress kids are under now to achieve and how suicide and depression is on the rise among high school students. The man waved the movie away and scoffed. They don't like it then they should drop out he muttered. Wimps.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man wil blast off in March

Driving Through the Blizzard of 2011

The blizzard in Chicago assures you that you will be going nowhere. But you push it anyway and end up being the last man out of the coffee house that every sensible person left hours ago. Didn't you hear? Sixteen inches! Worst storm in history! Yeah Yeah Yeah. Let me finish this scene and I'll be along. But you do notice you can't see out the windows anymore and even the toothless guy in the zip up suit guys at Jiffy Lube wear looks concerned. She's going to be a doozie he says nodding. You wonder where he has to go because you can't stay in Starbucks forever. Mr. Starbucks the revolutionary studying theology goes out the door and comes back in giving up on the smoke. It's getting bad he declares to the toothless guy in the zoot suit and the writer in the scarf balancing the laptop. Morons I'm sure.

So head it home. The SUV can handle this. But where are all the cars and why are the only cars out off the road? Why is the guy in the middle of the road with his flashers on the hill? Could it be he cant get up the hill occurs to you as you rumble past. But now things are getting bad. You just cant see. The world has turned white like one of those car washes that freaks you out with blankets of suds and the claustrophobia grabs you by the throat making you consider driving through the car wash door to get the hell out of there. But there is no door to drive through because you cant tell up from down or right from left. You instantly win the Sarah Palin award for pushing everything once again to the limit. DUMMMMMMMMB

But like a pilot flying through clouds you guess where the road should be. You have driven it a million times and there are dim lights pulsing through the white haze that must be a car in front of you so you key on that. Keep the nose on the dim lights. You are now a sailor aiming for a lighthouse in the far distance. The light pulses and moves away and you push down on the accelerator. Lose that light and you really are doomed. So you inch along passing more cars off the road with misty figures standing by the side. You cant stop. If you stop the guy behind you who is also blind will ram right into you. Oh and by the way, you didn't fill up and your CHECK GAUGE light has just come on.

Now you are risking your life for coffee in Starbucks and reading an extra article in the New York Times. Run out of gas on this desolate road and you are just done. Oh and the cellphone needs charging too. Perfect. The complete moron. You really should call up to Alaska and ask if they need a campaign manager because you have out Palined the Palinator. Now that the road has vanished and the wheel is vibrating in your hand because there is just as much as snow on the road as off the road you consider your fate. Snowbank death. Turned over vehicle death. Frozen death. The wheels do not like the snow pushing back and of course you have no idea where you are and the gas gauge is screaming you are on fumes. You simply don't have any landmarks anymore and so you don't know how far you have to go.

You pick up the cellphone blinking BATTERY LOW. You dial the wife. Might as well do a Scott and Amundsen thing with a final I love you. They will bring that up at your funeral. If only he left the Starbucks earlier. Every one will shake their head: moron. You press send and the phone shuts down. No final epistle: I believe I could have made it if I put another mile behind me. So you are alone in your folly. Moron Moron Moron. The blinding howling wind taunts you in your capsule. You give in to the inevitable sputtering engine that is making strange noises. Then...like Shackleton's sighting of the whaling station after being lost for two years...the light appears.

That is the light on the corner of the road to your neighborhood. LAND HO! You knew you could do it! You turn in and glide down toward your home, cheating death, cheating the great blizzard of 2011. Sarah Palin will have to find another man. You pull into your garage and wait until the door is safely down and you sit contemplating the cosmos and your small place in it. Moron you mutter.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off soon

The Writer's Birthday

You wake and you aren't sure what day it is much less that it is your birthday, but then it sneaks up on you and you go oh yeah its my birthday. So what. Another flip of the almighty digits that long ago lost all meaning like a speedometer rolling faster and faster. So what. So you go through your day. Do your bike. Have your shower. Roll through your breakfast go head up over the garage and keep that first draft going along. A scene finished in an hour or so and then it's time to head for the train. Snowing hard now.

Stop in the station and yak with the lady at the grill facing the backside of the bar. Sure you'll take a hot dog with everything on it. It's my birthday dammit so pile on the chips and give me a Mountain Dew and out the door as that big snowy Metra rolls in. Into the second car and grab the seat flipped down. The big window is your television while you eat the best damn hot dog in the world with onions relish ketchup mustard tomatoes and a big pickel as the snow swept Midwest rolls by. Farm houses and vacant fields fly by until the swollen Midwestern towns asleep in their winter slumber, Rustbelt towns nobody cares about, but you get to watch it all with your books and your paper and your warm lunch. About now you realize again it is your birthday and you are having a hell of a time.

Off at the station and into the coffee house. The same old lady is there. Doesn't she work? Of course she doesn't. Shoot some emails to the agent, the publisher. Are they ever going to get that book out there? Start reading but of course you have read it all before. Off to the bookstore. Search and search. Something good. Something timely. It's my birthday dammit. I deserve a good book. Tropper and McCarthy. Might work. You have been on a streak buying bad books lately. Back to the coffee house where the old lady gives you dirty looks because you knocked down her umbrella. Who carries an umbrella in January?

Order the big caramel roll and a lattee. Birthday remember? Slam it down and start the Tropper book. Not bad, might make it through this one. Already time to grab the train back home and the cake and ice cream with the kids and a dinner and a warm fire. Watch that Phillip Hoffman movie on Netflicks. Amazing Tormay can do those things with her body. Birthday, remember?

Movie ends and the house is dark. Another day has begun as you hit the sheets with the snow bright outside. Your daughter breathes lightly in the bed and you, you have gotten another year older. Close your eyes. Happy birthday you murmur.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out soon

That Old Cape Magic has none of the Russo magic

Harsh title for this review, but I did read Russo's Cape Magic recently and I am a huge fan but I just fell off the bus. Richard Russo gave all writers permission to write about middleaged life with broken down white males in the throes of crisis. Failed White Men novels let's call then and Russo was a pioneer with Straight Man, Nobodies Fool, and Empire Falls which were superb books of men who lost their way and find redemption through the familial relationships they had previously trashed. But more than that these books were funny and dead on.

When I first read Russo I felt like I had found a missing puzzle piece to the young writers I had grown up on, McInerny, Franzen, Wallace, and the older writers like Ford and McCormack. Then I read Russo and he was writing about men who did the wrong thing and could still be redeemed as characters and as people. And he was a very good writer during these comical journeys. So I read his earlier books Mohawk and The Risk Pool. Good, but he hadn't moved into what I considered the Russo vein of his Failed White Man novels.

I did not make it though Bridge of Sighs. To me the book just died with the flashbacks and at the same time the flashbacks had the only Russo magic. But the narrative seemed thin and not substantial. So I grabbed the paperback of That Old Cape Magic. It is a Failed White Man novel but unfortunately it is a retread. It is Grady Tripp of Straight Man and Sully of Nobodies Fool, but his main character Griffin doesn't hold a candle to those earlier characters in depth or complexity. Griffin is a man in trouble in his marriage attending his daughters weddings with the ashes of his parents in his trunk. All very Russoesque.

But there it ends. Griffins convolutions are told like a grandfather might tell a story. There is restraint and I understand why. Russo's daughters did get married and it seemed  the marriage problems and concommitent problems have been sanitized. There was something lacking and that is, strangely; originality. That Old Cape Magic it turns out is  just warmed over Russo.

I admire the writer and I will always reach for Russo's latest. But leftovers have never tasted as good as the original dish.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off in April