Waffle Men

There is a picture of my dad in his twenties holding a spatula. He had three kids at the time and lived in a small house. He is in his robe and fixing the proverbial weekend breakfast of waffles. So I see this tradition of waffles  fixed by the dad of the house has deep roots. On vacations the waffle men appear and will do a victory run for the whole week of waffles. This is in celebration of the days of leisure.

And all over America this goes on. I don't know about other countries but here fathers fire up the griddle and mix the batter and make sure the syrup is out they start serving up the waffles. The waffle is a classic food because it is so simple. Once the griddle is hot all that is left is to mix up the batter and pour and wait. And while you wait you call out "WHO WANTS WAFFLES?"  Inevitably the sleepy eyes appear.

And then you cant give away enough waffles. You go through a couple bowls of batter and finally everyone is full of dough and syrup. And then the waffle man sits down with his cup of coffee and has his waffles. It is a meal well deserved and the waffle man only sees clear skies.

At least until Monday where cereal returns.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

The PItcher

Why The Internet Wont Save You

If you have tried to get a job then you already know. Your resume goes out into cyberspace and nothing comes back. Worse you have to fill out three forms just to send your resume to a company and that wont even get you through their firewall. The truth is no one even looks at your resume. The same way no one looks at all those pictures on your hard drive or all those songs in your phone. The internet or digital tech has simply reached its level of  incompetency and is now cancelling itself out.

Lets say you want to publish a book. Boom. Done. You upload your file create a cover with Amazons dummy creator and there you go. Published. You are an author. Or you want to be a rocker. You upload your music and start selling on ITunes. You want to have your own movie. Shoot it and upload to Youtube. Of course the problem is that there a million other people doing exactly the same thing and when you go to tweet blog or facebook about your book song or movie then those people will too.

The internet then cancels itself out. Like the emails you never look at you simply cant get to what is offered nor do you want to. Think of a million hotdog stands along the road. You want one hotdog but which one do you pull into. You pick someone you heard of maybe a long time ago and ignore all those start ups. Or you just randomly pick. But what if someone flagged you down?

Lets say a real  person came out behind all those digital billboards and said come on in and try my hot dog. You would pull your car off the road and eat there. Why because you are human and so are they. You are not silicone and you are not bits and bytes. The truth is we have come full circle. The internet Yulp is now one of noise cancellation.

Better go hit the pavement.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

 

Justin Bieber Blues

I don't really follow Justin Bieber. My daughter has a JB pillow and posters and perfume and her presents come in JB wrapping paper. He is the teen idol of my kids  and I get that. But we are confronted once again how the juggernaut of media has planted other peoples lives in ours. I know now that Justin was busted for drinking and drag racing. I know this because people I see know it and the topic comes up much the way politics floats up.

And it isn't a few people. I have hit this several times with the ensuing discussion something like this: Well he's a good kid I think he will straighten himself out. I think he just made some bad choices. Justin Bieber travails fall off the lips with the same type of concern a parent might have for an errant child. And yet we have this "kid" who is a multimillionaire and who got caught drinking and drag racing in his Lamborghini with a super model. My heart bleeds.

But of course the real question is why is this now a topic of conversation? Certainly the speed of our culture doesn't give us much time to swim through the informational overload and make our choices. Mostly we are now spoon fed from our phones or our televisions whatever the media Gods deem important  and then we find ourselves discussing over dinner weather the Bieber man is going to straighten himself out or will he go down the dark path of sex and drugs and rock and roll.

We furrow our brows and pray the Bieber will drive his Lamborghini sensibly and not drink and drive with his super model date. We should all be so debauched. Pass the ketchup honey.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have
 

This is It...Call it a Year

For writers this is it. You have written what you will write in 2013. Squeak one more in the door but really it is times up. The holidays are beginning and the year is ending and you either did it or you didn't and all you can do is tally up the year and live with it. I snuck in one more rough draft before the year ended and gave it a rewrite and then realized today was it. There will be no more writing in 2013. At least serious writing.

I have burned through gallons and gallons of coffee and exhausted my body with sugar and trashed out my insulin and my eyes and everything else to produce fiction. And it is over and let the chips fall. The books are out there or they are not out there and the world will turn on and maybe there were things I could have done that I didn't but it just doesn't matter now.  Sweep the floor and break the pencil and ride to the New Years.

And you do that look back thing and did you move along the bar and did the books you wanted to write come out and the ones you didn't write are they still there. But for now it is all water over the dam and all you can do is let the dead dogs lie and  uncork on the bubbly.

2013 is already a ghost.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher
 

The Things Writers Do

Some of the things I have done make me cringe. Take the time I barged into the winner of the National Book Awards home on a cold day in November with a copy of my small press novel to have him give me a blurb. Where did I get that kind of nerve? He came to the door after his wife stared at the guy in cowboy boots and a long coat and I told him I seen him in the Chicago Tribune and that I was a writer and I wondered if he would give me some pointers or comment on my book.

Yeeeesh. I cringe thinking about what he must have thought. But he invited me in and we sat in his study while he told me the plot of his second novel for the next hour. I sat there with a half smile and listened to him talk about literature and about reading the bible and then it was time to go. I left him my book and I think he said he would look at it. I think I even called him back and he said something like good luck with the book and that was that.

Fast  forward three years later after my second book and a good bit of publicity and a three book deal with Random House. I am sitting in the basement of a library at a kids table in a kids chair with my knees up and and there is another man sitting there. He does not recognize me. We both took the hundred dollar stipend for talking to children about our process of writing. After a few moments he picked up my book and stared at the name and then turned to me.

I owe you an apology he said. I shook my head. No you don't. I owe you one for barging in like that. We talked a little and then after the library thing ended he shook my hand. I hope you make a million dollars he said.  And that was that. I saw him one more time on the streets of Chicago outside Columbia University where I was teaching. He walked by and stared at me...but my name had escaped him by then.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher....Sometimes a dream is all you have
 

Shooting a Book Trailer with a Drone

Since Amazon is hyping drones I thought I would tell my drone story. We shot the first book trailer for my novel Rocket Man with a camera mounted on a drone. My friend is a filmmaker and he procured the use of the drone and since the book involves rockets I brought the model rockets to a field in Oak Park Illinois just west of Chicago. The drone we were using was worth thousands and the digital camera was worth more. Ok. Keep that in the back of your mind.

He set up the drone and I set up the rockets. It was cold and our fingers numbed out fast but we got to the point where I was holding the ignition switch and he was holding his laptop for the drone. His drone looks just like the ones we are now seeing in Amazon commericals and news footage. A spider with a bunch of propellers. So he lifted the drone off and got it above the trees and I hit the ignition switch and whoosh. The rocket blasted off.

We watched the footage in his laptop as the drone hovered and followed the rocket until the parachute popped out. We did this over and over. On about the tenth time we decided to put a bigger engine in the rocket and so we took the drone really high. We were staring up when the drone suddenly took off for Chicago. My friend jammed the keys on his laptop but the drone had slipped out of range and was now cruising for the West side.

We jumped into his car and started chasing the drone. It sends out a wifi signal he explained and I grabbed the laptop and started searching for the DRONE2 signal. We drove into residential neighborhoods. The drone had a fail safe where once it lost contact it was supposed to set itself down and send out its signal. That is if it didn't just crash into a tree or lose power and smash into the ground. We drove and drove looking for the thousands of dollars that would be lost if we didn't find the drone and the camera.

We were about to give up when we turned a corner and I picked up the drone signal DRONE2 searching wifi signals with my phone. We pulled over and looked up and down the street. It could be anywhere my friend muttered as we got out of the car. I turned and saw twinkling green diodes on a slanted roof. The drone. One in a million we would find it, but we were able to bring it down with the laptop.

So when Amazon talks about delivering your packages with a drone... know that it might get there or it might just take off and fly over Chicago and go land on someone's roof.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man Book Trailer
 

I Will Do a Book Club Anytime and Anywhere

For authors a book club can not be beat. First of all you are in  a room of people who have read your book. Does it get any better than that? And they have all bought your book which is also amazing. And usually it is a group of ten people or more so that means a real nice spike in sales for you. I am always asked if I will speak at the book club...YOU BET. Why not if it is within a hundred miles I am there. It is the least I can do for people who have bought my books.

So then you go there and not only has everyone read your book there is usually dinner first and drinks. Bonus. So now you are being fed and having some glasses of wine or a drink and good conversation with people who want to talk about what you just wrote. Ok. So if there is an author heaven then it has to be a book club of about thirty people who just want to talk to you about what you do. Do any of us get this in this life?

And then the discussion begins. You get to listen to not only peoples view on your book but also far ranging discussions on theme and relevancy and what they liked and didn't like. It is mostly a stacked deck and pretty much everyone likes your book. And the booze continues and sometimes these things go pretty late and then you drive home feeling very good about being an author.

So I say it loud and clear. You want me to do your book club then email me. bhazelgrove@gmail.com
I'll be there with bells on.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

Now you See Me

Now you don't. And you don't want to see Now You See Me. The latest movie proving the point that movies are no longer responsible to anyone for being a movie. They are fast becoming an experience much like a ride at a carnival. Take Spielberg or Lucas's insistence that movies will become interactive or a virtual reality ride given for the price of a ticket. Like the movie about illusion that Now You See Me paints we are entering the land of smoke and mirrors. Lets face it ever since HD and flat plasmas we have been speeding into the land of novelty and away from the staid old world of drama.

And as far as Now You See Me proving the point that every action film does there is no story. Not really. There are the tricks performed and then explained for the audience and then totally forgotten. You will remember nothing from this movie when you walk out of the theatre because you saw nothing. You had sensory overload for an hour and a half and some thrills but like a roller coaster when it is over it is over. There is nothing movie about this movie. No lingering humanity to mull over. Nothing.

The characters do not matter. In fact besides Woody Harrelson and Mark Ruffalo you don't really know anyone and you only know these two because they play themselves. But this is our entry into the next generation of film. A carnival ride that leaves us empty and twelve bucks lighter but no better for having watched it. And as far as they old entertainment thing goes you might as well head for an amusement park and take a ride on the roller coaster.

At least you can be outside and enjoy a little reality.

Rocket Man...The Graduate for the Recession Generation

Tats for Dads

Went to the pool the other day with my daughters and saw lots of dads with tattoos. But of course the James Dean type of tats don't seem to be in evidence anymore. The swollen biceps sticking out of a rolled shirt with a cigarette have been replaced by sagging guts and rounded shoulders and man boobs and the elasticity of skin under siege from one burger too many and certainly ten beers too many. The generation that embraced tats has entered their thirties and forties and some in their fifties and the blue smudged ink now resembles party streamers that got wet and soggy and the ink ran out all over the floor...except you can throw the streamers away. Tats are here for good.

And then as you watch these dads of flabby arms and protruding abdomens with their barbed wire tats now resembling deflated donuts you wonder where did this come from? Why did suburban college educated white young men and women go under the ink gun and come out with tattoos that were once relegated to men who worked in gas stations and lifers in the marines. True it was exported out first to rock and roll stars and part and parcel of the total fuck you persona and then Dennis Rodman did for tats in sports what Obama did for politics...he took it one step further and said you could be cool and be your own person and still be the best.

But this doesn't change the basic question...why did the white middle class suburban corporate warriors get tattoos that now make them look like Ward Cleavers gone bad? These are men and women who are now the mainstream of middle class conservative moms and dads and yet this little spurt of rebellion...this ink. And so then it sort of hits. It is the button down mans way to rebel. It is a safe statement against mass culture without the risk. They do not have to go out and throw the dice and be a writer or a rock star or an actress and risk starvation or homelessness and live the starving artist life. No. They can get a tattoo and declare I am different and my daring do to stapled ink under my skin proves it.

But of course those days are over. The statement is still there but it has been maligned by the fact that just about everyone has a tattoo. Conservative men in suits sport Mickey Mouse on their ankles or a hiding four leaf clover on their ass. And what does it mean now? Nothing. Like the wild fling that goes back into the memory banks and never spoken of the tattoo is something from another time. Another life.

And so the ink is there now. Sheening under the sun and pool water. Badges of honor for a recklessness never really taken on. A rebellion never embraced. Just a glimmer of ink for a time when the road less traveled was at least acknowledged. After that there is always laser surgery.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man...the American Dream upside Down

One Milllion Gigabytes

A  million gigs is what the human brain has. And yet we give ourselves over to these paltry computers with their one  hundred gigs or even worse some GPS that is barely functioning with the slowed time of civilian map questing. It is amazing that we always assume computers know better when many times they steer us wrong. How many times have you ended up in some cornfield looking for that festival that was supposed to be right there but the computer mixed up Canal Street with Canal Avenue. It happens.

Or just in our day to day. My son spilled some paint and I told him he had to clean it up. He googled how to clean paint off a cement floor thinking the answer lay there. When the answer didn't come he looked at me and I said well how would you clean it up. The blank stare. Making it up as you go is not a logarithm he is familiar with. Finally though some experimentation with shovels and drop cloths and gasoline he cleaned it up.

But we give ourselves over too easily to the plastic machine. I saw a man whose job was to hold up a placard saying five dollar special to join a health club. He had his sign under his arm and his phone up looking for that next text or email to bail him out of the fact he was working for less than minimum wage by the highway. Sadly, he should know his salvation is not in the little device in his hand that a million other people hold looking for the same answers.

It is in his head. In that million gigabytes God gave him. The only real super computer.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The PItcher...Sometimes a Dream is all you have

Printers Row Author Show

You get there and you are incognito. Wander Wander Wander. Who else is there you know. Absolutely no one. Signing in one hour. Make the most of your one hour. So many books and so many authors. How the hell can anyone sell anything? The thriller authors seem very organized. They have their palm cards and their publicist there. They wear a suit. They look like their books...clean, cheap, businesslike, rich. But of course they are not rich or they would not be at printers row hawking their books. It is the OK corral of the networking author and it is daunting.

A hotdog. A coke. You do bash into somebody you know and they offer you a beer in the poets tent. Salvation. Then you see someone you asked to blurb your book. He says he will do it from his table. Better. And now your hour is ticking down and you are hanging around your tent. This is where you will sit like a prisoner behind your books. This is where the authors who precede you are sitting with the look of a bored toll booth attendant. Almost done.

And then they are packing up and it is now or never. You walk around the table and are accosted by authors who think you are a book buyer never suspecting you are one of their own. You circle the tent and pop out the other side and now the table is clear and it is your turn. You pull the books out of your backpack and slink down. A woman to your right introduces herself. She is a radio personality and is immediately mobbed. You turn to the guy to your right who has his people talking to him. You are the only one who has no fans.

You look at your watch. Sigh. One hour and fifty five minutes to go. You sell a couple books and chat with the radio personality woman. She is on the backside of her career in radio and looking for publishing as salvation. The dude on the other side has a book about Camps. You talk between then and pass the time and exchange cards and pitch each other on future projects and then it is time to go. You have sold maybe half the books you bought. You are pitched out and networked out. But you did it.

You participated in the Printers Row Author Show and there is satisfaction in that. Humility is a badge after all.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

All The Presidents Men

Is Snowden a patriot or a traitor? Was FDR Hitlerian in putting the Japanese in concentration camps or was he a Commander in Chief in War doing what he had to do to keep the country safe. Is the Patriot Act an intrusion on our liberty or is it necessary in the post 9/11 age. Historically our freedoms have always contracted in times of crisis. During WWII there were all sorts of freedoms redacted the most brazen was clearly Roosevelt's shipping the Japanese to the desert. But in WWI there was the same treatment of German Americans with deportations and surveillance against German Americans with the most famous hangover being the Lindbergh case where Bruno Hauptmann was put do death with questions that persist to this day.

But now we have mass surveillance on a scale we cannot fathom. Really it depends on how powerful Prism is.  The computer running though our phone records is looking for triggers and hopefully we are not in the sweep. But we might be and that would bring up the question is the leaker a man of conscience doing what is best for the country or a leaker who has done irreparable damage. Democracy hangs in the balance as we debate the modern state under constant suspicion.

In All The Presidents Men Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post tells Woodward and Bernstein in the final scene that they need to get back to work because the future of the country hangs in the balance. Nixon resigned later that year and of course the rest is history. Are we not at a crossroads that will determine if a Big Brother state is the SOP or if we have somehow veered very close to the type of Police State monitoring one would only find in the old Soviet Union.

And we are in the shadows. Interestingly enough the world was calling for Woodward and Bernstein's head right before they realized they were right and Nixon had obstructed justice and had been running covert ops from the White House against political enemies. Where is Ben Bradley when you need him?

Rocket Man...the Upside Down American Dream

America the New Pottersville

We have heard about big surges in home sales. Hmmm. But there are all those For Sale signs and people are still upside down . So what is going on. Well. Like the stock market, the one percent is making a play and what they are doing is creating a new Pottersville. Lets go back to the movie It's A Wonderful Life. It was wonderful because George kept the Building and Loan going and they made loans to middle class people nobody else would lend to. In other words they developed a middle class.

But Pottersville owned by Mr. Potter were all renters. Nobody owned. Everyone "kept paying the rent in Potters slums" and that's why the Building and Loan drove Potter crazy because it  cut into his business. Potters renters became Georges buyers. Now. Lets take today. We have an incredibly depressed housing market (sans LA) with prices scraping bottom. Now a lot of middle class people cannot get a loan still. Bad Ficos. Homes upside down. But yet houses are being bought. They are being pot by our modern Potter.

Big companies. Investors from other countries are buying up homes at the clip of three hundred a day. Why? Because they are going to create  a vast rental market for  Americas beaten down middle class. People have to live somewhere and they will rent. And large conglomerates will rent them the  homes until the market moves up and they decide to sell or maybe they will just keep renting. Maybe the new normal is a Potterville where no one can buy but they rent.

A new twist on the American Dream turned upside down. Remember in the movie when George gets his wish and the world has turned into Pottersville? At least he could wake up and return to the old world before Potter. We are not so lucky

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Living in our phones

So you are rolling along and the lady with the STOP sign holds up her hand. And so you sit there and wait and while you wait you check your phone. And there is nothing there but there might be and it is better than just sitting there because existence has become boring. And while you are waiting you see a woman who looks like she could kick your ass and she is wearing a bandanna in the smoky light of just paved hot tar and she is looking at her hand and you realize that in the middle of the hot sun breathing in the heavy petroleum wafting on that steaming asphalt she too is checking her phone. And it hits you...nobody lives in this world anymore.

Because there might be something in that phone that will take her out of this world. She might be taken away from getting cooked on a street and sucking up all sorts of toxins while hot spewing tar and asphalt is laid down by a giant machine with then guys hanging off it and suddenly you see that all these guys are staring at their hands too. They too are looking for the magic life that screen provides. Take me away. Take me to Oz. It might you know and there might be a wizard and a rainbow...anything is better than this crappy existence.

And if no one is living in this life anymore where are we living. Some sort of cyber world where a promise of something greater is just a text or an email or a tweet or a picture away. Something than this grinding malaise of the every day that is existence. And so we see cops and firemen and construction workers and soldiers and sailors and painters and sculptors...the world squinting at their hands because that little world holds so much promise.

So you check your phone one more time as the lady turns her sign from STOP to SLOW. And you proceed on and pass through the crappy world of the every day. But cheer up. There is a text or an email quivering on the horizon. Bailing us out once again.

www.williamhazelgrove.com


 

Lampooning The American Dad

The new sport in satire is the American Dad. Take the show American Dad. Or South Park. Or The Simpsons. The patriarch is the buffoon who is a caricature of authority. Seth Johnson's South Park makes out dads to be stupid, perverted, hideous, comical. Anything but respectable. And what can American dads do but role. Lets face it. Being the heavy is always going to be lampooned. But where did this lets roast dad genre come from?

Certainly Ward Cleaver didn't start it. Dad was cool. He came home from work and kissed June and handled the Beave and never lost his shit. He was the man in charge who never broke a sweat even as The Beave raised hell. And from there we go to Father Knows Best  or Family Affair or Gidget or Happy Days or Dick Van Dyke. Dad did progress. Pick up on Bill Cosbys dad. He was pretty cool and kind of a hard ass. He would crack the whip but he knew the score. So dad went from the distanced Ward Cleaver to a hipster dad.

And then...then dad went sideways. He became not respectable at all. In fact dad became the guy to be disparaged. Or he became the totem pole for all that is wrong with bourgeois living. The magnet for every crappy thing that can be attached to living in a suburb and raising a family. Ted Bundy was the precursor of this animated dad who garners no respect and only derision. Like metafiction we doubt not only the man but the institution. No one can win because the whole paradigm of having a family in America is suspect. Dad being the easiest target

And why not? Suburban sprawl brings no respect. It is a lifestyle choice of the man predicated on raising kids in bland safe surroundings. So the blanding applies to moms and dads but dads are the blandest of all. Totems left over from the Greatest Generation they are respected by neither their wives or kids and left to hide in garages or in basements or to leer at young women.

So what to do. Nothing. You are either a dad or you are not. And the people who are lampooning are now dads too. They know there is little to be done to escape their fate. Of course you could always not watch I suppose.

Rocket Man...the American Dream Turned upside Down

Working Alone

There is a service in New York and maybe other places that allows people who work alone to hang with other people. We are fast becoming a nation of people who work from home with the Internet hubbing out to our work pods like the spider it is and people interacting less and less telephonically if at all until there is only the soft pitter patter of fingers on keys and the ticking clock and the distant airplane and the dust motes falling all around. This then is the modern office environment of the twenty first century. A nation of Bob Cratchets in their cells. Please sir another lump of coal.

But at least Cratchet had Scrooge to interact with. He could ask him for coal or another candle or listen to Scrooge bitch about giving him off for Christmas. We twenty first century office workers are entirely solitary. We have no interaction except for the proton beams shooting out at us from our screens and the occasional call from a mother or father or telemarketer. Other than that we are united unto ourselves and now that the halcyon cool of working at home has worn off we are really a nation of lonely disconnected workers.

Gone is the interaction of The Office. The goofy weird guy hanging out by the copier or the anal retentive office manager who everyone rips on nonstop. Gone is Jerry the old guy who still trudges in or Suzy the loose secretary who everyone secretly leers at and talks about her husband Hank who is a Harley dude and works in a body shop. The whole low level drama of office politics does not exist and so that leaves us with just our work. What a drag. No distraction except surfing which can be as boring and depressing as watching television.

So we go to Starbucks. We go to the store. We go anywhere to break it up. We hang in the kitchen and talk to our spouse. We go for a run. A bike. Anything to break up the thin gruel of being a self motivator and sitting down to our daily drudgery. Yeah. Its cool. You can wear your pajamas. You can work in your underwear. You can sleep in. But the work is still there and it is just you  and you will have to do it eventually.

All by yourself.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man...the American Dream turned upside down

Five Things you Should know about The Great Gatsby

If you read The Great Gatsby or did not read The Great Gatsby here are five things you should know.

1. The green light at the end of Daisy's dock. Pivotal symbol of the book. This is the light Gatsby holds his hands out to as if embracing God. This represents (so literary interp profs tell us) the future, the dream Gatsby does not yet possess because he doesn't possess the golden girl yet. The green light across the bay from his mansion represents his impossible desire  (ironically) to repeat the past and it represents the American Dream in all it's promise. How is that for a  dock light?

2. Famous line number one of The Great Gatsby. "Can't repeat the past, of course you can repeat the past!" This Gatsby's response to Nick Caraway when he says you cannot repeat the past. He is referring to Gatsby's affair with Daisy when he was young and that he cannot duplicate. This line then sums up Gatsby's credo. Of course he can repeat the past and he will do it. He will remake his life and grab the beauty he had once before. But of course he is doomed.

3. The famous shirt throwing scene. Gatsby throws brand new shirts into the air for Daisy who breaks down because she has never seen such beautiful shirts before. Interpret this one as you will but the critics hold this scene up as a metaphor for Gatsby's dream and his doom. Daisy loves the shirts at the same time she knows noone can possesses such beauty. She and Gatsby are doomed but she loves the dream. She will never leave Tom and marry Gatsby. She knows this even if he doesn't. There are also interps on this scene as to sex. The shirts represent the sexual ecstasy she can have with Gatsby. Also it shows Gatsby believes his dream can be bought.

4.Famous line two and three. "The man wears a pink suit!" Tom Buchanan throwing dispersion on Gatsby. He is already pointing out that Gatsby is a charlatan,  a bootlegger, and that he will never stand up to the light of day. Or at least to Daisy. Famous line three. "So I drove on toward death." Nick Carroway line presaging the demise of Gatsby and Toms girlfriend Myrtle and his own mortality. He has just realized he turned thirty.

5. Famous Ending. "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." This is the final sentence of the novel. And what Fitzgerald is doing is summing up America. The lines before run..."No matter, tomorrow we will run faster, jump higher until...so we beat on..." That we are doomed. That we are chained by our own ghosts even as reach for what we cannot see. That the America Dream of always wanting more will never make us happy because our happiness is behind us.

There. Now go talk about the book.

Rocket Man...the upside down American Dream

Every Ghost Story is a Love Story: The life of David Foster Wallace

Just finished this biography of David Foster Wallace but it was strange since his death still seems very recent. I had tried Infinite Jest before he died and fell off the wagon around page 200. I should say it was too difficult for me at the time. I did read A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again his book of essays. Very good. So I had not given the either of these books much thought and then I read his biography and started reading Infinite Jest again. But to the biography.

Wallace is a fascinating character and as a writer just about the top of the mountain .There are few writers who can make Franzen seem like easy reading but Wallace does. This is hard because Wallace had such a crippling disease so wrapped up with his writing. His genius and his virulent depression seemed to occupy the same room. And when the depression overtook him there was little he could do but wait for the drugs or electroshock back it off.

But the story of his life between all this and his brilliant fiction he wrote while he wrestled with the beast is illuminating. And like Wallace and his writing this review will not sum up the writer or his work because he is too complex. The biography does seem to skim though his life at times and it does end very abruptly with his suicide. Shocking in a way.

And so really all one is left with is Infinite Jest. Which is the way it should be. I think he is all in there and so really it is the book that has to be read. I am making my way through it slowly and with respect. If not awe.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Why Gatsby Will Always Elude Film

We all saw Coppola's effort to capture The Great Gatsby with Redford and Mia Farrow mooning after each other in seventies grandeur. Great clothing. Great cars. Great music. Terrible movie. And yet here was Fitzgerald's masterpiece, but of course Coppola's problem was he was too in love with the novel. He tried to interject Fitzgerald's prose wherever he could and it was like laying silk on charcoal. "Cant repeat the past, of course you can old sport!' Redford choked on that one.

And if the characters didn't choke on the prose then the narrator did. "I have been turning over some advice my father gave me once...." The stertorous Nick Caraway years before he was a TD Waterhouse mouthpiece just couldn't handle those lines without dropping them like lead into the Long Island Sound. And why shouldn't he? Voice overs are tricky anyway and literary voice overs feel like syrup dribbled all over perfectly good scenes. Scream when the metaphors become too much.

But metaphor was Fitzgerald's gift and that elegiac elegant prose does not translate to the eye or the ear. It was meant to be read. Sadly for DiCaprio and everyone else involved in the new attempt to bring Gatsby to the twenty first century they will only succeed in sending people to find the book. And even if they update the story will not translate. The intelligence of Fitzgerald and any first rate novelist is they understand the keening of a read line of prose and its impress on human consciousness. No amount of CG will ever bail out a visual medium in this area.

And so we will be left with the plot without the fine linen. And so, we will beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaseless to the novel. And not the film.

Rocket Man...The American dream turned upside down
 

Gatsby's American Dream

With the new movie almost out it is fitting to reflect on the American Dream once again as put forth by Jay Gatsby. I assume you read the book and know Gatsby's story of bootlegger turned landed gentry and ready to secure the girl of his dreams Daisy Buchanan. Ah the green light at the end of the dock that means so much. Gatsby's dream. The American dream. That beacon in the Long Island night that represents all we want but cannot obtain.

And of course Gatsby is done in by the darkness of the American Dream. It is the price right? We know now the high price of the dream because we have been living it for the last five years. Only a few can hit such heights and those that do usually lose some part of themselves as Gatsby did. Fitzgerald put forth the idea that this dream comes with too high a price and in fact it can kill you which of course it did with Gatsby.

And we are  now at a point where the American dream has turned upside down. Our houses worth less than we owe, jobs still scarce, money not abundant. And we are looking now for something we might have missed and left behind us. And of course there is nothing new as Fitzgerald says at the end of Gatsby in the most eloquent line in American literature. "So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past."

Still so true.

Rocket Man...the American Dream upside down