When Writers Run Out of Gas

Watching Downton Abbey. Self proclaimed junkie after Breaking Bad. Season finale fizzles like a wet balloon sputtering around the room and then falling on a bare light bulb...sizzling in flaccid relief. Such over burndened metaphors would have been a relief to the turgid soap opera Downton became at the end. It would seem Julian Fellows lost his way but probably after five seasons he probably just ran out of gas.

Lets face it it happens. After the early seasons built around the verisimilitude of the era and the characters drawn so handsomely to the early twentieth century standards of gentlemen and their servents we were destined to drift aftter Matthew Crawley left the series and we lost our great love story. But more than that Julian burned through his material after World War I ended. This gave the series natural drama and we remained focused on the main characters.

But then history paused and we were left with flappers and F. Scott Fitzgerald besotment done badly by the upper class and worse by Rose wannabe flapper who goes for African American jazzmen and then forgets about him after matriarch in training Mary's wrath. The point is the soap opera moves in when the writer moves  out because then we just have drama for dramas sake with no underpinning.

Alas Julian probably should just shut it all down instead of ending the season on the beach with the servants and strange little sublots that wither and die like vines in a toripid heat. If this overwritten it is only because Downton was so underwritten and I wanted to right the apple cart.

I still have some gas left.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...


 

On the Other Side of a Book Signing

I was  making my way down the North Shore of Chicago with my new book hitting the Independent bookstores. I do this to make sure that the book is there and show support and it's just really good PR. I bumped into a friend of mine at The Book Stall and he told me there was a signing with George Pelecanos that evening and I had to stay. Ok. Sure.. So I went to Starbucks to kill a few hours and came back for the signing.

I sat in the back row as the place filled. George has eighteen books out and wrote for HBO on The Wire. I talked with a man in the back row when a dapper bearded man poked his head out between the books. He talked with the other man and I put it together this was George. Sitting on the other side of a book signing you are in awe of the author. I watched him field questions about writing and his books and working on The Wire and I thought...wow...it would be pretty cool to be an author.

And I listened to George talk about his method and his rigid work schedule and working in Hollywood and again I was like wow...this dude how does he do it? And I found myself wanting to ask a question but there is a code. Let the author be the dude. Not that I would upstage him...you just don want to interfere with the careful dynamic between author and reader.

And then it was over and George signed a book to me and thanked me for coming. I walked out and drove home thinking...man, some day I should write a book. Maybe I will.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher
 

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

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

How I flunked Comp 101

Bitter to say it but I flunked comp 101 in college. I was that freshman who had no clue about anything and was barely hanging on at the State College I barely got into. I was struggling through my first semester of about sixteen hours and figured I could  hang my hat on English. In high school I had been told that I had a hankering toward writing and wrote a few short stories a few teachers thought were mildly impressive. Besides,I came from a family of readers and our house was jammed with books. Comp 101 I figured would be where I made my mark.

But I didn't count on the TA (Teachers Assistant) with the Art Garfunkel hair who was teaching the class. He slouched in with his glasses and Afro and gave us our first assignment. Write about our summer vacation. A knock down. I had been out East so I wrote all about the beach and Baltimore and handed in the assignment. The man with the high hair handed it back with a big fat D and red scrawl: You did not follow the assignment. I went up to him and asked where I had not violated the assignment and he said that I was supposed to write an essay with conflict. My story did not have the proper conflict in the first third of the first page. So I got a D.

Then followed a series of writing assignments. Each time I wrote to what I thought the assignment was. Write about your best friend. Your worst experience. Write about college. Write about a political event. Write about a girlfriend or a boyfriend. Each time I got back my paper there was either a D or an F. The red scrawl pointed out that I did not follow the instructions. My final grade for the semester was a D. I would have to take the course over in summer school.

Summer school arrived and I went to my course makeup. It was a hot day in June and the old creaky English building was empty and smelled of moldy wood. I waited in a small conference room. A man in a bow tie came in and introduced himself. He asked me a few questions about my composition grade then asked me to write a story on anything I wanted. Then he left. A friend of mine had recently gotten married so I wrote about that for the next half hour while summer played out the window.

Forty five minutes later the teacher with the bow tie returned and read my story. He frowned, then looked up at me. Why are you here? Because I got a D in composition I told him. He looked back at my story. You have your own sense of style and you know how to tell a story. He shrugged. I'll give you an A. You passed. I looked at him. That's it? He stood up. Do you want more?

Thats how I passed Comp 101.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man will blast off in April

Maybe We Should All Rent Now

Go to Zillow.com and check out your home value. Shoot down some whiskey or gin first. Ok now go to ziillow and pump in your address. Now sit back and wait for it. Here it comes...there. That's how much your home is worth. Zillow is strangely accurate. It is strictly comparison based and renders what the market will bring today for your home. In the Chicagoland area where I live we are approaching forty percent. That is forty percent of the value gone. Poof!

So you hear about renters all the time now. The people who dump their homes and go rent. Well they had to. They lost their homes. They lost the privilege of home ownership. Right. Well we still have the privilege of home ownership and you have to wonder who is zooming who. The equity is largely gone. For most Americans they are back at 1996 levels. Over a decade of appreciation has been wiped out. So, that means you are just living in your home and if you sell you hope you can cover what you owe.

So what is the difference between a renter and a homeowner now. Well, let's see, tax deduction for interest on the mortgage. Renters don't get that. A tax bill. Renters don't get that either. Maintenance. Homeowners get to pay for that. Renters just show up and live and then they just leave. Shoveling the walk, mowing the grass, homeowner association dues. Renters don't do that. Utilities. Some renters get that some don't. Homeowners pay all utilities. Equity. Nobody gets that right now. Flexibility. Renters move at will. Homeowners are stuck. Size of payment. Mortgages are generally higher because of taxes. Upside down in their house. Renters are not upside down. Twenty five percent of homeowners are.

I guess you might say we are all renters now. Or we want to be renters. Middle class people were told that buying a house was the ultimate investment. Not so much anymore.

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


http://www.freado.com/read/4738/rocket-man

Times Editorial Suggests Huck go to College

An Editorial in the New York Times written  by a  novelist suggests that Huckleberry Finn with it's Nword pedagogy hit the road and go to college. Her rational is one that African American students could not decipher the onslaught of NWord idioms and that the racism of the nineteenth century to the IPhone hip hop generation just simply would not compute nor should it. African American students should wait until they get older and by the time they are in college they will be able to decipher literary intent from out and out racism or at least they would understand verisimilitude and all it's connotations. This is idiocy.

Surprising to hear a writer sign on to this kind of have it your way literature. I would like my Huck Finn sans Nword and hold the mayo and any other characters that smack of prejudice. I hope her novels are as ubiquitous in their appeal as cable television where there is a channel for every viewer. It would seem the essence of literature must again bow to the fatuous demands of Twain scholars and novelists who write politically correct essays for the Times. What is more PC than saying yes this is offensive, lets hold off until the laboratory of college where the adults can dissect this ante-bellum sickness.

This is exactly the type of thinking that got the scholar revved up enough to think that because we run around with smart phones and IPADs that we can just delete the offensive material from literature and serve it up in the same way we download a tune for ninety nine cents. The novelist brings up the fact that African Americans hearing the same NWord spoken in their music will not be offended as much by the silent printed word of Mr. Twain. That it is quite fine for their contemporaries to sing the Nword, rap it, because this has been sanctioned, but the repetitive hurtful rants of Huckleberry Finn is just really a burlesque show of racist minstrels and white people whooping it up. Rubbish.

To the novelist who wrote this editorial, I would simply say this. Literature stands. Period. If thy book offends thee pluck it out does not apply to art. You should know this. If a high school decides not to teach Huckleberry Finn then so be it, but that is a disservice to the student. Literature is not about our time. It is not about our twenty first sensibility. It is about saying what cannot be said otherwise. Literature defines things we cannot and brings it down to us through the ages. It is an intellectual exercise that informs the same way a painting or watching a great ballet performance or music does. There is something there we cannot lay our finger on, yet it speaks to us.

To say that African American High school Students cannot handle Huckleberry Finn or until college is demeaning to them. Worse, it cheats the students from the literary experience of reading the first modern American novel. Literature should not be held hostage to the winds of contemporary taste.

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

On Starting a New Novel

You begin with a tepid step. Those first words are hard fought and that first paragraph is something to hang onto because you are just beginning and the mountain does look tall. But each word, each sentence, each paragraph is a grappling hook to pull yourself higher and you build it just  like that-- one page at a time. I just started a new novel and it is amazing that no matter how many times you do it it is always like starting over. Will this one work? Will this idea carry me through? The same questions every time.

 It is the moment of sitting down. You set your coffee to the right, kick off your slippers, your shoes, curl your toes, take a breath and jump off the cliff. You have disconnected for a while and the world is behind you and all that lies ahead is open space. That is what is exhilarating and scary. You can go anywhere you want because there is nothing there. Just the void and it is up to you to create a world out of that void so your reader can follow. So you start building your ladder.

And each day it does become a bit easier because what you did the day before guides you. A tone is quickly set, a character fleshed out, a momentum established, point of view set. You are now getting confident as you sit in the pilots chair and by the third day you have something that is beginning to look like the start of a good novel. You have a long long way to go but you are after one thing and that is to get that first draft finished. So you don't look back, you plunge on, climb on, take off, you push, bully, grapple, claw your way to the end. And then you start back again.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man should blast off in February

Borders and the Thirty Four Dollar Book

Times are hard. On this we can agree. Bankruptcies, foreclosures, Borders. Borders has gone bankrupt and many point to this that the publishing industry is going through massive change. The ebook is threatening to upend the industry the way the IPOD did to the music biz with a Kindle for every home and those downloads streaming in leaving empty stores and libraries in their wake. But then through all this comes the thirty four dollar book.

Of course I am talking about the Twain Autobiography. The small bookstore I ordered the book from and had to rush into get it lest someone else grab it still has back orders and no books. There are people who are waiting all over America to pay thirty four dollars for a book only a little smaller than a tombstone. What does this say in our current woes me climate? That Twain still sells. That people will plunk down a hell of a lot of money for a book. That people must be really suckers. That reading a paper book is still something people want to do?

What I take from it is that people want to read what they want to read and they don't care who delivers it to them. That the musings of a man who wrote over a hundred years ago holds up is a very good thing. That people will stand in line to pay thirty four dollars for a book that is not a thriller, tell all, celeb book is even better. So it would seem to say something about human nature. That just when we thought that the publishing industry had gone kaput, there is this monster book that is a rambling discourse of one thing or another. Very Twain. Very unconventional. Very human.

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

How To Read Twain's Massive Autobiography

Ok. So you bought the monster book for the monster price (34 smackers). The book is so physically big I can't put it in my back pack, but carry it like the old testament under my arm. So you transport this big bastard from coffee house to train to bus to wherever you are going. It is so big I let it ride in the back seat of my car as an extra passenger. Strapped in of course so it doesn't kill me if I can get in accident by knocking off my head. When I pull up to a coffee house I reach in the back like I am bringing in a toddler and carry the book cradled to my breast. Well, you get the picture.

Then you sit down and open the tome of tomes and wade through the editor's explanations that Twain started and stopped his autobiography over a period of twenty years and this is how they stitched it together from notes and typists and essays and secretaries who listened to the great man ramble and that if you put manuscript 56A and connect it to manuscript 100C from 1901 then you get a continuity that Twain really wanted and that was why this version is the authentic Twain biography and....By now you have lost your scholarly interest in the process and really want to read some Twain.

So it begins. It is interesting historically to hear the thoughts of a nineteenth century man who is witty and observant and who rambles on about all sorts of things but then you find yourself reading about his thoughts about a typesetting machine or his servants or the taxi in London or Grants stoic manner when dealing with publishers and you start to....drift....zzzzzz. Now being Mark Twain you rally again and that is when you begin to find a method...you, well, you...skim.

Now skimming is an art. You want to find the real nuggets of gold and maybe it is all gold but it is the twenty first century and you really don't have all this time to read about making a bust of General Grant and how the good general posed for the artist and, and....zzzzz...skim! Now you are to a section on Twain's thoughts on writing. Interesting. Very interesting. You read that and hope for more and read on and on and now you are in Europe and Twain is ruminating on the difference between Europe and the United States and you start to slow down...down...down...and so you...skim!

Blasphemous. I know. But the book has a lot of gold and maybe if you read every word you would be a better man or woman, but for me, I am after the Twain nuggets,so, I....SKIM!

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

For the Little Girl Who Died

I have a nine year old daughter who believes in  Santa Claus and doesn't raise her voice and who plays with dolls occasionally and just got an IPOD and rides a scooter and believes in this world of ours. She is not aware of the political world and doesn't know about what happened in Tuscon.  That is her luxury and I won't tell her. I will let her roll along and have her world. But for the little girl who died in Arizona she cannot. Her world was taken by people who she never knew.

I wish I knew her. She and my daughter could have played together. She seemed bright and interested in the world. There is nothing we can do or say here that will come close to this one. Lets hear it for the sheriff in Tuscon who is telling it like it is. We hope that something will good will come out of this, but our disease is deep and we don't have much hope that the hatemongers will take more than a holiday. But I will not forget this little girl and neither should you.

She is ours now. We have inherited her. If we don't make something good come out of this then we are complicit. Do not rest. Do not let it go. Raise hell. The hatemongers have to go. You should say  to yourself what can I do in the wake of this tragedy. Don't do it for the country. Don't do it for the politicians. Don't even do it for yourself. Do it for the little girl who died. It is a higher calling.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
http://www.williamhazelgrove.blogspot.com/

3/5ths OF A Person, SLAVE, or that darn NWORD!

Seems the 'publicans don't like the word SLAVE that darn Twain scholar used for the NWORD and they don't like 3/5ths OF A PERSON neither. They just read the Constitution in the Senate and conveniently skated right over the part about a slave being 3/5 of a person which is exactly what that Twain scholar decided the NWORD in Huck Finn should be replaced with: SLAVE. Good thing that Twain scholar studied up because I'm sure he wouldnt' want to use a whole person when he can use three fifths. I wonder how much of a person an NWORD is? Makes you think don't it.

But the 'publicans don't believe there were SLAVES no how. Seems they forgot the part in the Constitution that said if a slave escaped up north to a free state then they were not automatically free. In fact Dred Scott proved they could be sent back down South. So I guess they were still 3/5ths, NWORD, or SLAVE. Seems we just don't like to think a-tall about our history and we can't decide what word we like. We would just assume it didn't happen except them pesky books keep laying around with those bad words that we sure don't want our highschool kiddies to read with their IPODS of Kanye and the boys. Lord knows they are virgin ears that might be scorched by them 3/5 people.

You know come to think of it maybe we should just get rid of the NWORD altogether and go with 3/5. Kind of has a ring to it and not as clumsy as NWORD. Course now the 'publicans don't seem to like 3/5 neither so that won't work. And SLAVE dont' work. And the NWORD don't work. How about we just call em 7/8? Its a little higher than 3/5 and don't have none of them slave connotations that the Twain scholar likes to use for everybody. We could just put 7/8 where ever an NWORD existed and we could maybe put that in the Constitution to show our liberality. Then 'publicans could read that and say if a 7/8 person escaped to a free state and picked up an 1/8 then they could become a whole.  Just to show they are forward thinking group of people. Huh. Wonder if that makes em' free?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man should blast off in February

You Can't take the N-WORD out of the Huckleberry

No sir. You cant. Cant do it. The N-WORD is as much a part of Huckleberry Finn as the Mississippi or Jim or Huck or the Duke or the King or the Widow or his drunken no good father. You can not take a piece out of the painting just because you don't like the color. Nor can you take a word from the book because you don't like the word. You just can't do it because you happen to be a Twain scholar (so called) in the year of our Lord 2011 and think that you have the right to tinker with someone else's book because you want high school students to read it. You dont' own that right and the faster you are dust the better.

Mr. Twain did not prefer the word slave over his colloquialism. It is not a matter of offence. Literature or art or books do not bow to the latest PC movement. If it did we would have no art, no books, no music. For literature cannot be made to bow to some man's idea he knows more than the author. He don't. He never did. He never will. The author made the book and it is stone for better or worse. Forget that the offending word now comes out nine year olds IPOD. It does. I have heard it more than once. Or that our most famous rappers broadcast that word the way you would say hello now. Forget all that. You do not tinker with a man's book who is not around to defend it.

But if Mr. Twain were here he would surely laugh and then he would be angry as hell. He cared about his words so much that in his autobiography he took out the commas and exclamation marks and little inflections his typist had put in for flow. In my second novel Tobacco Sticks I too used the NWORD. A man who listened to one of my readings with repetitive NWORDS came up to me at the end. I was very nervous as he was an African American. He nodded to me and said I liked your reading.  Now would he have liked it more if I had taken out the offending words? Should I care that he liked it? Or should a book stand as written regardless of the consequences?

Sad to say we will pass on and Huckleberry Finn will persevere. Our all important ultra self conscious sensibilities will pass on too. And mabye some boy or girl somewhere will pick up Mr. Twain's book or some adult and he or she will read it and laugh and be entertained and maybe offended and maybe cry and maybe throw the book down in disgust. But he or she should not be restricted from reading the book as it was written. Censorship of any kind is an insult to all and the gravest of insults to Mr. Twain's book. You just can't have your cake and eat it too. The man whose biography is selling so many copies the press cannot keep up would not condone such a bastardization. You just can't take the NWORD out of the Huckleberry and still have Huckleberry Finn. It just don't work that-a-way.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man should roll out this month

Second Novels Can be Hard--Review of Joshua Ferris The Unnamed

I don't know. Why is it you hit it with one novel and then lose it in the next? That might be harsh in describing Joshua Ferris second novel The Unnamed but I don't think so. It is a very big compliment to his first novel And Then We Came to the The End. Which I read several times. He really nailed the absurdity of the workaday world and more than that he nailed middle class working life with all its strangely disconnected moments that in the end of a career mean nothing. And after that it was just good writing. So I read The Unnamed even after reading a review that panned the book. I liked his first novel that much.

So. It is just different. Might have been a different writer. The Unnamed should have been his first novel and Then We Came To the End his second. The Unnamed is written by a writer telegraphing every sentence and then just laying it there like literature to order. It is not badly written of course, Ferris is much too good a writer to write badly, it is just not that level that made his first novel sing. And then we come to the plot. I am not a big man on plot,  but in the The Unnamed I really wanted something to plunk out of the darkness by the end so I could say, yeah, I get it.

A lawyer who starts walking and can't stop and a love affair. That does not do this book justice but it just never catches fire the way a plot or lack thereof has to at some point. And Then We Came To the End did not have a plot. Much less of a plot than this novel, but it kept you reading like a murder mystery. The real question is what happens to novelist from one book to another? The answer is it is part of being a novelist. I have boxes of novels that did not work. Sometimes books just misfire and by the end it is only through publication that we see the book just didn't work. It happens. I look forward to Ferris's next novel.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man should be out in January

The Forgotten Generation--the 1964 baby

We are seeing all sorts of articles now about the Boomers turning sixty five and what this means and how aging will be redefined and by the way we are talking about a group of people born in the range of 1946 to 1964! Ok. So, someone who was born in 1964 has the same generational characteristics as someone born in 1946. I don't think so. Someone born in 1946 grew up in the fifties and came came of age in 1964. They were ready to go to college and rebel and burn their draft card and listen to Bob Dylan and watch Kennedy, King, Wallace, then Kennedy again get assassinated. They were all set to watch man walk on the moon after seeing the Beatles hit the Ed Sullivan show four years earlier. They went to Woodstock and maybe participated in the Democratic Convention riots in Chicago and tried every drug under the son and actually bought the albums of Hendrix, Joplin and the Doors while they were alive! Then they watched themselves twenty years later in The Big Chill.

 Lets take our 1964 baby. While the Beatles played on Ed Sullivan he stuck his toe in his mouth. While Dylan sang Change is Blowin in the Wind, he worked on trying to walk. When the men walked on the moon he watched the fuzzy images and wondered what happened to Mickey Mouse. He heard the Beatles played by his big brother and didn't even know what Woodstock was until he saw the double album in his brothers room with the couple in the blanket. When he bought his first album Jim Morrison, Jimmy Hendrix, and Janis Joplin were dead and the Beatles had broken up. He heard about the Kennedy's and confused them with Ted Kennedy. He thought everyone was pretty mellow in the seventies but Madonna, U2, and the Go Gos were better than Zepplin, Kansas and Areo Speedwagon. He joined a fraternity because Animal House was hilarious. The Vietnam war was settled when he was eleven and he didn't know anything about the draft. He remembers going up to his older brothers room in the attic with the black lights and the posters and large boots and the mattress on the floor. His only  thought of the sixties was a puzzlement that people were so upset. He became a yuppie after college and still had the Apple IIC he bought in highschool.

In my novel Rocket Man I paint the picture of this 1964  man. He is now overwhelmed in debt, kids, too much house, no job and he is forty six. He is a Blackberry toting man who is going down fast and who never bothered to rebel, but bought into the American dream hook line and sinker. He never believed the world would pass into a Utopian bliss and was much more worried about making a million dollars and having a great time. He is of the forgotten generation, that baby of 1964.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man Paper Back or Kindle

True Grit Proves a Novel Trumps a Movie

The Cohen brothers remake of True Grit proved something I have suspected all along and that is that in the final analysis a novel trumps a movie. The film makers might have been at a disadvantage with someone like myself who has read Charles Portis novel several times and seen the original movie with John Wayne. But I am also a Cohen brothers devotee who rushes out every time to see their latest movie and I seriously believe they are among the great film makers with movies such as Fargo, Raising Arizona, Blood Simple and Millers Crossing. But I do believe their egos got the better of them when they took on True Grit. They were fighting against a legend in John Wayne's portrayal of Rooster Cogburn and Charles Portis dead on novel.

Still I went to see the movie and knowing every scene as I did from the novel I knew immediately when the Cohen brothers parted from the book. The problem was every time they left the novel with some inserted scenes or dialogue the movie sagged. The sparking prose so faithfully preserved in the Wayne film and used probably in seventy five percent of the Cohen Brothers film is what makes the film. The audience  laughed most as the bandying of Mattie with Stockwell the horse trader and the dialogue between Rooster (Jeff Bridges) and the Texas ranger Labeef (Matt Damon) It was damn interesting to hear people chuckling over scenes that mirrored the Wayne film and of course originated in the book. But when the brothers veered the film became still born and strangely silent.

The problem was that all the Cohen brothers could bring to their movie was a sort of Ken Burns Verisimilitude and at times the movie had a documentary feel. Even the music was Burnsian with the piano plunking along and the realism of the people and the time was amazing. But the story moved only when Portis lines were faithfully delivered and some were thrown away as when Rooster gave his background on horseback instead of by the campfire as it was in the book. The problem for the Cohen Brothers is what can you bring to something that is damn near a perfect novel and a very good movie adaptation thirty years before. The answer is not much.

Even the Cohen ending tacked on did nothing to really make the story mythical. I knew before that scene even came on what the Cohen brothers were up too. All they could do was place the novel in historical significance and try and add what the Wayne film had left out, but it just fell flat. They did not have Rooster return as in the movie with the famous scene of Wayne jumping his horse. Jeff  Bridges character just did not stand up to John Wayne's portrayal. How could he? Wayne was mythical by the time he played Rooster Cogburn and he did the role justice. But again, the Bible was the book and if you read the novel and then go and see the Cohen Brothers 2010 take on this very good story, you are left with just one question at the end. Why did they ever take it on?

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

The Dark Side of Facebook

When I first got out of college I got a job selling WATS lines for the phone company in Chicago and one of the perks was I could go up to the "Switch" at all hours of the night and walk past the tech guys and put on headphones and plug into a million conversations. I would even take dates (what a loser right) up to the switch and give them a pair of headphones and we would listen to the million voices talking into the analog void. It was amazing to think that each voice intertwined with the other represented a human,but it was also scary in a way because it trivialized each voice until it no longer represented a human, just a sound wave zooming through a huge trunk line.

Fast forward to Facebook with it's strange access into the million voices of our creation and after you get past the hype and the pictures then you end up with the obnoxious guy oin the train or the coffee house who won't stop his conversation about his kids, his family , his sex life and you are part of it. Facebook pledges to give us all a new way of interacting (so says Newsweek) and maybe it will or is it just that weird social network thing taken it's logical movie fueled zenith that will eventually end up like Myspace as a feeding ground for child molesters and porn stars--another footnote to the early days of the Internet.

But Facebook's dark side is it makes something out of nothing and by contrast knocks everyone else down to nothing. Take the couple who crashed the White House all under the guise of getting their pictures on Facebook with the President. Their ten nanoseconds of fame came and went and was cataloged into the cyberstream along with everyone out crying out for attention. Zuckerberg's prototype was rating girls on a primitive site that preceded Facebook. Then Facebook became the domain of colleges and one could make a case maybe it should have stayed there. Is Facebook really that different from the primitive girl rating site and arent we all rating each other by the life we paint in cyberland?

 We have already been privy to conversations we never wanted to know where people complained about their husbands or wives only to find out they were sharing it with the world. The Social Network is a great movie in the story of the creation of Facebook and we know that it resulted in a twenty six year old becoming a billionaire. Isnt that really what Facebook is all about? A billion dollars to hear the million voices at the switch?

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

That Holiday Hangover

It has nothing to do with alcohol, but that could be part of it. It would be easy to ascribe the fuzziness, wooziness, utter exhaustion of the holiday hangover to making merry a bit much and once the alcohol filters out then the world would return to it's everyday equilibrium. But this hangover is a combination of money spent, days lost, family insulted, visibility lost, vocations nonexistent, while dancing with the ghost of Christmas past present and future. Because it is during the very holidays we celebrate our childhood that we glimmer mortality from drinking and eating horribly for weeks.

So it is part food coma as we trudge back to some semblance of reality and it really is a good thing we only see our relatives once a year lest we shoot them dead. What is is about siblings that become so horribly dysfunctional one can scarcely believe you occupied the same house for all those years? And parents lord in as part parent, friend, confidant, boss, irritant, until you just want to run back to your job or your office or your bedroom and repeat, I have grown up, I have grown I have grown up.

And while this rolls on you are Christmas in a very real sense and it is for the children beats in your head as you stay up until four AM and then stagger out a bleary eyed Santa ready to put it all on for the children who see only the glory of the season. And so you suck it up, drink some more coffee, inhale some more bad coffee cake and plow through the day before heading to the relatives. And isn't it amazing that Uncle Dick is still unemployed after twenty four years? And how long is Jennifer going to hang out in Hollywood as a waitress? And how did your brother marry such an idiot? Doesn't your sister see her husbands been screwing around on her for ten years!

But all this is swept under as you exchange gifts and drink champagne and Baileys and Vodka and beer and eat all the salty ham your poor blood pressure could ever manage and all the dry bland turkey you could ever stuff into your mouth and then the sweets the sweets the sweets! Is chocolate poisoning possible? You wonder as you sit straight up a three AM with your heart beating like a tom tom. Never never again you swear. I will never eat again! I will never drink again! I will never have my sister and brothers kids over to dismantle my house again and throw my cellphone into a cup of Diet Coke!

And so you emerge for a few days. Struggle to work with little sleep and all sorts of chemicals doing all sorts of things to your brain. You pass other fellow eye-creased revelers stumbling through their routines. And then, just about the time your colon adjusts, your credit card barks that it is still alive, and you begin to get your feet on the ground, it's time for....NEW YEARS!

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

The Populism of It's A Wonderful Life

It's A Wonderful Life would fit right in with our times. The story of George Bailey is essentially a working mans story or rather a populist tale. George's quest to go to college is rooted in the fact that there will be a bigger world open to him once he has an education under his belt. Harry his brother goes and comes back the man moving into the bigger white collar world of his wife, but George stays behind in penny anne world of the Building and Loan to sweat it out in the small town of Bedford Falls.

The populism of the story is found in the ancillary characters of the town and George's family of his mother who runs the Bailey boarding home and his father the patriarch of old.  We are drawn to Ernie the cab driver, Bert the cop, Violet Biggs the harlot, Mary Hatch the small town girl who goes to college, but returns to the small town provincial world of Bedford Falls. Sam Wainright is the exception who comes from a rich family and moves in the bigger world of New York. Sam will bail George out but he is juxtaposed against George 's provincialness, his small town virtues that keep him in the town while others go on to find fortune and fame.

Henry Potter is the the arch type villain of the one percent. The man of the upper crust who is incurably corrupt, but holds all the power strings and is eternally trying to get the Building and Loan and bring down George. Again it is George's everyman qualities against the powerful banking interests of the privileged class with the final showdown when Potter accuses George of losing the eight thousand dollars. In the final scene of the movie George is rescued by the populace, Annie the housekeeper, Mr. MGower the druggist, Bert the cop, Ernie the cab driver, and finally Sam Wainright is given redemption by wiring him the money as Harry Bailey eschews the bigger world of a military ceremony to rush back and help his brother.

The movie resonates still because we respond to populist sensibilities. We inherently distrust the Potters of the world or the powers that be. We are now in an age where people rail against bonuses and the one percent getting all the wealth. This is why Its A Wonderful Life is still relevant. We are, after all, in the year 2010, a populace that still yearns for the small town life where good trumps evil and the rich guys lose in the end.

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

The Confessions of an Ex Cable News Junkie

Hello my name is Bill, I am a cable news junkie. Recovering. I fell off the wagon a year ago and started watching hours and hours of cable news beginning with Keith Olbermann, then Rachel Maddow, then Chris Matthews, then Lawrence O'Donnell. Some nights I watched three hours of straight talk with the same topics regurgitated on every show but I didn't care. Hell, I was such a junkie I switched to Fox and watched The Factor and Sean Hannity during commercial breaks. Talk about addicted.

But I am back on the wagon and I have gone cold turkey. I have to say it has not been hard this time around. I don't know what happened, but suddenly I just didnt' care. I just couldn't buy off on Rachel's impassioned carefully researched, fully felt, emphatically delivered diatribes on why don't ask don't tell should be abolished and why it wasnt' happening. Maybe it is because it did happen and when she announced it on her show in a town hall meeting everyone clapped FOR HER like she was the President who had just accomplished getting rid of the policy!

Or maybe it was Keith Olbermann who I really dug and would watch sometimes two or three times a night! I just couldnt' get enough. But then I started to realize there were never any guests from the other side. And how many times can he have Eugene on from the Washington Post in his super hip glasses? Or the little guy from The Nation who stands in for him? Or Howard from Newsweek then the Huffington Post in his scarf and hipster long hair? It just began to feel regurgitated with his question at the beginning: How many of these stories will you be talking about tomorrow? Um, really none of them.

Or  Chris Matthews yelling at everyone and letting no one finish. Or Lawrence O'Donnell with his quirky sense of humor and his government experience allowing himself to get the last word. Or even Anderson Cooper keeping them honest with his white hair and dwarfish good looks. Don't get me wrong. I could easily fall off the wagon and go back to my old ways of watching three straight hours a night, but I think what is different this time is I started to wonder what else I could be doing with that time! And that's what really got me. Forget that it is really entertainment, that there are millions of people watching the guys on the other side, that it doesn't really matter at all because these are talk show hosts. Forget all that, here is what really got me back on the wagon and why I will never return to the cable news wasteland.

I could have probably written another novel with all the time I wasted in front of the boob tube getting riled up all night. Ouch. Now that hurts.

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