Writing the Big Novel

Hmmm...about 571 pages into the Big Novel. Probably end up around a thousand. The interesting thing about the Big Novel is that it keeps growing out like an atomic mushroom cloud and instead of retracting as most novels do when you pass the halfway point, it just keeps growing. That is because the Big Novel does not play by the usual rules. Most novels just start and have a middle and an end. Very egg like. And you usually roll in around four hundred pages or so. And you can almost feel the arc and where it will end. The Big Novel follows none of these rules.

And so you are constantly stoking the fire and you have to put all your fears aside that naturally kick in. What if this thing just keeps going? Much like fission the fear is not that it will go off but that it won't stop going off. Then the second fear hits you which is: who the hell is going to want to read something this big? But of course that is ridiculous because predicting reading tastes has never been the purview of novelists.

So you roll along and watch the Big Novel grow. Eventually you figure it will run out of steam and start to close down. Because really, what goes up, must, eventually, come down. At least you hope it works that way.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Is The Big Book Dead?

On vacation with the inlaws in Florida and stumble over Don DeLillos Underworld in the library of a gated community center where some white guy is singing Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World and the Greatest Generation is applauding like mad and there is DeLillos monster novel among all the John LeCarre/Grisham debris and my thought is well at least it is some literature with a capital L among the slickies and the mystery novels the Greatest Generation prefers along with their Phantom of the Opera (which is what the one man show is ending up with) and so I grab it and head out into the warm night.

I had read White Noise a while back and couldn't stay with it. It felt dated and sort of turgid like a heavy car trying to get up a hill. But I wanted to take a crack at Underworld because I was writing a Big Novel myself and this was a Big Novel and my thought was there should be something here for one Big Novel man to instruct another Big Novel man fifteen years later. So I read the first chapter and it was entertaining and sprawling and big and had everything but the kitchen sink and of course DeLillo is a good writer and this is a big swipe at American life...but it felt, ultimately, like a big old building that had seen better days and better times.

And part of this is I am not a fan of post modern fiction ala DeLillo. It is just too big. Too... look how much I can write and how well I can write. I don't find this with Franzen novels. They are big but they don't feel like they take up a city block. Don DeLillo is the appointed great writer so you can see him writing like a great writer and building these monstrous novels, but I guess my question is do we care about Big Novels anymore? I mean do we really want to invest all this time in this Titanic that lumbers across the sea when in fact we could probably get across in a smaller sleeker boat?

I like to think the Big Novel is still relevant and Franzen gives me heart because his novels don't feel like a big lumbering whale although they are long. But there is something very immediate and and that saves them from the DeLillo big novel fate. And maybe this is unfair because Don's novel  is fifteen years old and it does feel like one of those books you find in the attic and you stare at the wall of prose like...wow...people read this...all of this! Or maybe it is  just the Mailer big foot white male writer time has passed.

I dunno...but I think I'm going to put Don back in the Community Center because I am only here a week and that is not enough for a Big Novel. Maybe Louis will be playing again and maybe I can find something shorter among the literature of the Greatest Generation. Probably not.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Television and Books

Bill O'Reilly is bringing out a sequel to Killing Lincoln aptly named Killing Kennedy. Henry Holt the publisher says that due to vigorous sales the second book should be well received. Billy uses a co writer and I would bet he is the writer seeing the big mans schedule. Popular history requires some research and this takes time and the writing takes time and thought and Billy (pardon to all O'reilly disciples) does not seem like the kind of guy who sits around and writes historical books. What Holt really loves of course is having his name on the book, they could care less if he pens one word.

Television has become the instrument of book selling. Every cable pundit has multiple books. Chris Matthews even hawks his own book on his show in a third person commercial "And it would make an excellent Christmas gift" You  could just see the publishers asking him for that plug. So it doesn't matter really who writes these books as long as the television personality can say it is theirs and plug it on their show. With publishing undergoing the equivalent of the Titanic going down (unsinkable) you cannot blame them for grabbing onto any piece of flotsam in the e-market sea.

Glenn Beck is a novelist and he sells well. Many Beck followers will plunk down the price of a hardcover and so we can expect a long line of Beck fiction. What does this say? Just that advertising is expensive and doesn't work and if you can use a television personality who is on the air night after night then there is a lot more bang for the book. To the victor belongs the spoils and certainly for the modern author one sure road to bestsellerdom is to have your own show.

Or at least stick your name on someones book who has a show. You will probably be doing the writing, but there are worse ways  to get on a bestseller list. I just don't know what they are.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

It's called Fiction Folks

That question.You get it on the tip of the tongue. So what do you do supplement your incom? It is asked as the innocent probe sandwiched in there with how are the kids. And you treat it the same way. Oh, a little of this and that because what they are really asking is how do you keep writing? Why are  you not working a job like I am? And they are pleasant. You still have your house? My last novel was about a man who was losing his house and a financial wreck. Rocket Man It's called fiction.

But in the reality of our reality age there is no line anymore. Of course you are writing about yourself otherwise why would you write? So I get the looks, the side glances. Does your wife work? No. That throws them off but they keep coming. Well I hope you are still with her and she can put up with someone like you. Where do you go with that one.. But the last novel also had a crappy marriage at the center. Again, you surely are not writing about someone else!

Writers get this kind of stuff  all the time. It goes with the territory. So is your dad really that much of an asshole. Did you really blast off all those rockets? Did you really cut down the sign to your subdivision? Oh your poor wife. So when are you moving? Do you really hate the suburbs that much? And what other jobs do you work?

It called fiction folks. Remember. Suspension of disbelief. You make it up. Right. Sure you do.

www.billhazelgrove.com

The Stigma of Self Publishing

You bet there is a stigma to self publishing. Get over it. If you are a writer then you have a commitment and that is to the work. Publishing may go into deep freeze or they may be burning the house down to bring out your next work. Either way the work is what drives you to get it out there in whatever form you can. Art is never greeted with open arms and neither will your book. There may be a million reasons why reviewers and publishers and agents and everyone else view a self published novel as something less than standard. You cannot worry about that.

Your first responsibility is to write the book. Your second is to get it out there where people can read it. If you only want to see your name in print then that is not going to take you far. If you truly believe in your work then you will do what is necessary. That is why you only want to put out your best work because you will have to stand by it through thick and thin. This is not for the I want to publish a book before I die crowd. This is for the I want to give the world something new crowd.

In Our Time. Hemingway's small chap book of stories was self published by Ezra Pound in Paris on a rotary press. No one would publish the fellow with the strange stories. My first book was brought out by a printer in Chicago who had never published a book before. Hemingway went on as we all know and the very people who turned my book down bought it on auction years later. The point is you are part of the big struggle and you may well be trampled underfoot anyway, but use every tool at your disposal and then make up some along the way.

Being a writer is not for the feint of heart, but who knows, you might just buck the odds. Either way, it is the work that matters. Only the work.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Hemingways Attic...surviving as a writer

The Millionaire Troll Author

By now you have heard of the girl in Minnesota who couldn't get published or considered by agents and so she shot her troll based novels out on Kindle and made a cool million dollars then got a big contract with a publisher and made even more and now her books are being made into movies and life is good for the twenty something (barely) who took a chance on herself and hit the lottery of new technology and sidestepped publishing and essentially hit the lottery of mass entertainment. So what does all that mean to authors and publishers?

Well nothing new under the sun. We have heard of these stories of the unrecognized author who is dug out of the slush pile or self publishes and the world is introduced to a book that would have suffered the fate of most rejected manuscripts: the moldy box in the basement. But what backs this story into something new is the ease in which this author broke the back of main stream publishing. She simply uploaded her books and people started to read them and  more people started to read them and then more people started to read them. The digital bestseller is a bit like an atom bomb. Fission is possible.

But of course for most of us this does not occurs. The atoms do not bang up against each other in the proper sequence and the uploaded book takes it lonely place in cyberspace, unreviewed, unread, a little catalog of bits and bytes. But here it worked fabulously. Expect troll books up the ying yang. YA will be seen as even more of a gold mine than it already is. Expect more ebook success stories. Expect publishers not to change. Expect authors to remain frustrated.

Publishers cannot recognize the gold in front of them because they don't know what it is anymore. Especially now. Large conglomerates push down hard on editors and the bottom line long ago pushed over literary merit. The divining rod has clearly bent to commerce if it ever bent away in the first place. Weird things happen. People get struck by lighting, win the lottery, publish books about trolls that make millions of dollars. Does this matter to the writer? Yeah and no. It is good to know it is possible, but you view it the same way you hear about someone who gets the catastrophic disease or writes a hit song. How does that happen? What must it be like to be that person.

Ultimately though, you pick up the pen and start again. Hmm...lets see.  Ok. I got it. A boy wizard who turns into a troll! What?  It might work....I was seriously thinking of a troll book even before Mrs. Minnesota. No, really. You don't think I would follow a trend for money. Please.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Hemingways Attic...surviving as a writer
Rocket Man...keeping your house shouldnt be this hard

The Best Guess of the Novelist

You know what your best guess is. It is the book you have not undertaken because it might be great or it might be a colossal failure of years and time and money. The modern novelist is stuck between selling and fame and artistic merit if not immortality. You could out Franzen Franzen but if you fail then you will have used up precious ideas not acted upon and the fact is you literally only have so much time to write so many novels before you earn yourself a slab in a cold dark cemetery.

These are the thoughts novelist deal with every day. Write something containable and marketable and safe or throw it all to the wind like that first novel you were never sure you could finish or even what the name of it was going to be. You settle down with novel two and three and four is the beginning of something new but you have not knocked the roofs off for a while if ever and you are wondering if your best guess as a novelist might really be your best.

And so there you stand at your crossroads. Take a shot at the prize or keep drinking the swill that might pay off with repetition and various ideas if not various genres. The stakes have become very high now. Only one novel gets the prize of the New York literary establishment lining up to ensure success. This years winner was The Art of Fielding. A wide ranging baseball novel that was pretty milk toast when it came to the end, but no matter, it had won the prize and publishing lined up and swung the big bat and the ball did sail out of the park.

So there you have it. The prize or settle into your comfortable mediocrity and produce good novels that hopefully lots and lots of people will read. Or take your best guess... and go for it.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Hemingways Attic...a writers survival guide

The Dream of Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen's film Midnight in Paris is  A Moveable Feast. Most of us who write or read seriously know about the Left Bank crowd of writers and painters who set the bar in the twenties for all to follow for the next hundred years. It was an amazing amalgam of creative talent centered in post WWI Paris and more centered in the bars and bistros where the writers and painters cross pollinated and created literature and art that is probably unparalleled since the Renaissance. Who hasn't become a writer or a painter and think about going to Paris to live the life less certain?

I did and so did the Owen Wilson character who is struggling between art and commerce and a wife who wants the finer things. In his fantasy or Woody Allen's we meet Hemingway and Fitzgerald Dali Gertrude Stein Picasso Zelda Mcleish and are mindful of the lingering presence of Joyce and Faulkner and the many others who came to the heart of the world of art and writing to make history and live  the artist life in a world where art is preeminent.

This is the assumption and the dream and Fitzgerald is refined and Hemingway is coarse and hilarious and Gertrude Stein is the Grande Dam of writing and Picasso is conflicted and Zelda is brilliant and heading toward insanity. This is the world we dance through and of course Paris is the magical background that makes us want it all the more. And Owen Wilson wants it and when he finally throws over security for a life in Paris we say but of course.

And then the movie ends and leaves us with the dream of the Left Bank fantasy intact. And why not? Those people took a chance and went to Paris to be artists and live a life apart. Undoubtedly there was hardship and people starved and did not find literary fame. But Paris is not a dream, it is a real city, and as Owen Wilson says, just walking in the rain in Paris at night is enough. One can  only imagine.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Hemingways Attic-- surviving as a writer

How Most Writers End Up

We like to think famous writers have some sense of how they will eventually end up. That becoming rich and famous is a continuing movement that puts writers into mansions with retirement funds or a least a fat bank account. But the truth is most writers end up broke at the end of their life with their works out of print or they just plain fall into obscurity. Fitzgerald is a famous writer that comes to mind who ended up with his work out of print and in debt. He died with barely enough money to bury him.

Another write is Paul Nelson who wrote for Rolling Stone and was one of the premier music scribes of the rock and roll world of the seventies. A recent review (today) in the NY Times of a book on his life: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson by Ken Avery chronicled his life from the high times of the seventies to his fall in the eighties and nineties. What struck me was a quote that said "it was terrible that Avery had ended up as a clerk in a video store at the end of his life and died sick and broke The quote went on to say here was the best  writer of his time being a clerk in a video store.

What most people don't understand is that writers have very little control over what happens to them and what happens is that they lose the ability to make money. Broke. Most writers end up broke if they ever rose above this baseline in the first place. And what follows this is illness and obscurity, and meaningless jobs to just make ends meet...like being a clerk in a video store. The truth is there are brilliant writers all over the world being clerks in a stores and working as starving real estate agents, janitors, waiters. And they do this until they die. 

That's how most writers begin and that's how most writers end up. A hard truth.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Why Are Books Sales Up?

According to the New York Times books sales are up after Black Friday and I'm not talking about Ebooks. We are talking about the old pulp and cover books. Booksellers were surprised to find people reaching for the Desotas of publishing when everyone had written off the old paper and ink behemoths as DOA. But people have a funny way of surprising you and readers surprise everybody. Like writers, readers do not follow trends.

Speaking for myself I have becomes less enchanted with the ebook. I had thought this would be my preferred way of reading with the quick download of yet another book right after finishing one. But I missed the physicality of a book. I missed looking at the cover and knowing how much more I had to read and getting jelly and coffee all over the pages. I missed turning down the pages and throwing it in my backpack to whip out at a coffee house.

Of course the thought is that the IPOD will be the format for the IBook and the kindle will spread like wildfire and of course it has. But books are not songs. There is a difference and reading Virginia Woolf will not be the same on a small lit up screen. It just isn't. But of course economics dictate the day eventually, but readers are not to be corralled so easily. They might just buck the trend of the buck. As Mr. Fezziwick said in A Christmas Carol...there are more important things than making money sir.

So there is.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Getting Stupid

Whenever I finish a book I turn into a man of physical tasks and quit reading and writing and doing anything that smacks of literary life. I am a man cleaning his garage or his closet or fixing the smoke detectors or cutting the grass or raking leaves or shuttling kids or doing the million and one things that never get done. And then I start watching all the crappy television in the world. The Gold Rush. Every MSNBC show I can find, overdosing on hours of political melodrama. Then I swing to every old movie I can find and some not so old movies...How many times can a man watch Uncle Buck or Karate Kid? Too many times. Die Hard II comes in a close second.

And then I sit around and wait. Wait for the world to do something. It is this I find most boring. And yet I don't pick up a book but read the NY TIMES cover to cover and try and find authors writing about authors and take samples of Bukowski but don't finish them. I am at sea as all writers are between books. And so I float along and decide for the hundredth time to move and change my life. Or not to move and stay the same and isn't day light savings time strange the way it gets dark so early?

And then I pick up an old book. Something I would never read. I have The Marriage Plot on the Kindle but I want some relief from the mainstream fiction for a little bit and so I plunge into A.S. Byatts Passion of the Mind. That's when it happens. I realize I have become stupid again. The writing is dense and involved and I have to try and enter a world where Browning and Kipling and Russians and all those writers I should ahve read but didnt reside. I pu the book down and figure it is no longer relevant anyway. Who cares about essays on Dostoevsky or an essay on Proust or whatever A.S. Byatt decides is relevant to the world.

So I leave it and go do more physical tasks and go look for more smoke detectors without batteries or stuff more laundry into the washer or go buy salt for the softener or get the oil changed and get a brake job or  I can go read A.S. Byatt. I throw the book in my backpack...

Just in case I get tired of being stupid.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Points For Reading the Nutty Books

When I was learning to write fiction I felt I had to read all the books that made no sense. I started with Ulysses and then went to Finnegan's Wake and then finished with The Sound and the Fury and then to really confuse myself I read Infinite Jest. Quite certain I had completed my literary education by not understanding the prose of these very established writers I sat down and wrote my own very plain and simple novels. A bit like learning classical to play rock and roll.

And now I am reading the review of 1Q84, Murakamis's new novel and the review of the book makes no sense and I am quite sure the book makes less. Still I think, I should read this. And even the reviewer had a hard time getting over the fact that this nine hundred plus book made less sense than a mad hatter in a mad house still he felt it was a worthy book. And of course this begs the question of who is left to tackle these type of nutty books now.

Well writers  for one. They will read just about anything set in front of them that is deemed literary and cutting edge even if it make absolutely no sense. And of course this begs the question of does this type of reading help the writer. Yes and no. It did help me read Ulysses. It did not help me to read Finnegan's Wake. The Sound and the Fury maybe. Infinite Jest, sadly, no. I just didn't get the necessary kickback for me, but of course others might just find these books incredibly rewarding. And I am a slave to the dictum that writers should read the difficult books.

And what about the reading public. No. For the main these books will find few mainstream readers and maybe they shouldn't. They were not written for the mainstream anyway.  But then who is reading them and do you get points for attempting them? Saul Bellow once said there is no place in heaven for men who read boring books. Hmmm. I wouldn't say boring, but certainly nutty would fit Murakami's book that people will buy even if they don't understand it.

Maybe it is just that another human wrote something like Naked Lunch or Finnegan's Wake and you are really curious as to what the hell they are up too...even if you have no idea.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Vapidity of Modern Fiction

Why is it I can go read a bad F. Scott Fitzgerald short story from the Saturday Evening Post, one of his uncollected stories, that he himself disparaged and critics overlooked at just mainstream tripe of his day, and that story has more heart, more soul, than the  modern novels of our day. I try and read all the big books out and like many I am excited to launch on a new journey into the literary fiction of our day but after all the spun gold of New Yorker prose, I find something lacking. In short...where's the beef?

The beef would be heart and that does not exist in our modern writers. At least the ones I read and I read a lot of bestsellers. Now I dont' read everyone but there is this qualitative difference between the old writers of fiction and the new ones. The new writers write stories that read like long magazine pieces that don't seem to lower themselves to the soul of pathos or bathos. They may even call it sentimentality. But there is a curious lack of warmth in a lot of these writers that the writers of old seemed to possess.

If you read  something like the Baby Party which is a story of Fitzgerald's about two men who get in a fist fight on a suburban lawn then you might think this is lightweight fare but in fact it is a dead on treatment of the absurdity of bourgeois life but also the devotion to children. It is so alive, so breathing with life that we know these people and feel their pain and sorrow. When I finish a novel of today it is a bit like skating on ice and just about as cold.

So I go back to where is the beef? Is it television and the Internet? Maybe so. But those old writers are softening we need to go back too after our revved up Kindle reading where the emotion flat lines in the long highway of over educated prose and we yearn for those humanist values stripped out of our smart fiction that can be shattered like so much over spun glass.

\My prose bitterly proves the point.  

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Books Most People Don't Read

I was going through my library and had to write down the books that influenced me as a writer. As I went through the books I realized I would never read them now. I simply don't have the time. It is a sad fact that if a writer doesn't read these books early on he or she will probably never read them. How many people would pick up Ulysses or The Sound and The Fury, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, Light in August, or Finnegan's Wake and read it now? Most would not. Sanctuary, Under the Volcano, Dr Sax, On the Road. These are just a few of the books but the point is that if I had not read them when I was trying to learn how to write fiction, I probably wouldn't.

Work will knock out reading time. Kids, family, the Internet. I am amazed that I took the time to read a lot of these musty novels but it made me realize that if I had a different life where I would have had kids or a real job or taken a different road then I would have never read these books. But reading is the backbone of a writer and those books skipped are skipped for good. There is really a very short window to explore the old writers and that is really true today

Who knows how many writers are lost because they simply didn't have the time or read and develop their craft. It takes years of reading and experimenting before a style develops. Most people simply don't have the time and now of course I can barely keep up with reading current fiction. And I think about the books I didn't read and never will now. I can only take solace that at least, for a while, I took a stab at the the books most people don't read.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

NPR Interview in Hemingways Attic

Political Correctness in Novels

I was reading Chad Harbach's novel The Art of Fielding and cruising along and then I just stopped. I had tripped over a word and at first I thought it was a typo, something that slipped through the proof reader if there is such a person anymore. But then I realized the word was intentional and that the novel had fallen victim to the dictates of political correctness. The word I had known for many years and seen millions of times in other novels and is still used in current vernacular. So why then had the editors of Harbach's novel deferred to some silly twenty first century that someone was being offended?

Now this word does not easily slip off the tongue. The novelist must always write by ear and that means if it sounds right then it is right. African American is clunky in prose. It just stops the flow because of it's amped up meaning. This is not the word Harbach bowed to by the way. But this is the first of the clunky words that  novelists have to deal with. I have written several novels about the South where I used black or blacks to describe some of the characters. And of course in speaking I had to use the famed Nword as well. But to have put African American in the prose would have violated the connotation of the word I chose.

Now Harbachs word wasn't even that loaded. If you had to rate it for political correctness it was down on the scale at about a five out of ten. So what was this word. Are you ready? Freshpersons. Right. Freshpersons for freshmen. So obviously the group that would be offended by freshmen is women. But the word freshpersons was so jarring it stopped the fictional dream cold. We all know freshmen describes men and women, but the long reach of political correctness demanded this silly exercise in semantics.

So I started thinking about the pressure of political correctness in novels. We all heard about the washing out of Huckleberry Finn with the removal of the Nword. This kind of tinkering or mindfulness of present day sensibilities is not the purview of the novelist. He or she is not writing for the current day but for all time and to have the hand of political correctness intrude on the pallate of the artist violates the vision for the work. It is a bit like opening a door to bright sunlight while watching a movie. You really don't want that reality in your story.

But everyone has to deal with the times they live in and Chad might have written this way anyway. So maybe it is just me. Maybe freshmen is anachronistic and not really the wore anymore to describe the first year of college. Maybe freshpersons is the twenty first century word now. Freshpersons. Sounds like something you could eat. Or throw away.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man
"Rocket Man is a hilarious, well written novel about one man's search for the New American Dream." James Frey, author A Million Little Pieces and Bright Shiny Morning


"The funniest serious novel since Richard Russo's Straight Man, rich with the epic levity of John Irving and salted with the perversion of Updike." Chicago Sun Times

Selling Fiction

You start off just wanting to get published. No small feat. This can go on for years. For me it went on seven years. Ridiculous you think. Seven years trying to break into print, but then you finally do and that first goal of just getting into print is quickly supplanted with the second goal: you want to sell. Why this should be when you were so satisfied, so happy to just see your name on a book cover that you should suddenly up your goal to this much heavier weight to bear. But you do.

And now the writer is confronted with the marketplace. Strange amorphous beast who seems to not give a damn about you or your book. You have in your mind a great populace passing on your book with a whispered, read this, it's great. But you have no proof this is occurring just your own faith in what you have written. Shouldn't that be enough? A man who self published a book never misses a chance to ask me if I have seen the reviews on Amazon. I assure him I have. In his mind those reviews will push his book along unit the world has seen the reviews and read his book.

But of course the other million books are also crying our with their reviews. And those dismal Amazon rankings tell the writer of fiction he must do more. And so you do. You tweet, write, post, talk, push, review, you do what you have to do to get the word out. If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it did it really fall? Probably not. And this comes to the writers basic fear: obscurity. That you will pass along and your books will not be read.

In nonfiction the hook is easier. You can tie it to what is happening right now. Fiction is trickier. The story has to be tied to something current and that is tough. Because the times are always changing, but your book is not. Your story is a constant. So you have to break it down to who will read your story. You hope everyone, but the truth is certain people will buy your books. Maybe women, maybe men, maybe kids. And you have to go find them.

Giant publishers confront this daunting task every day and only succeed with a few of their books. The rest of their titles are lottery tickets they hope will be a winner. But we know the odds on the lottery. So the best thing the writer of fiction can do at the end of the day is write a really great story. That you can control. Chasing the market is a futile gesture and bound to failure. But you can impact that basic law of selling fiction: books are still sold by word of mouth. To have someone say at the end, that was a great book! Is the ultimate marketing plan. 

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man 

Rocket Man is a hilarious, well written novel about one man's search for the New American Dream." James Frey, author A Million Little Pieces and Bright Shiny Morning

Reading on My Kindle...the Big Change is here

Yeah I have a library of books. Old yellowed dog-eared guys who taught me how to read and write when I was hacking it out in Chicago and starving above Thai restaurants in one room hovels that were sprayed by a maniac with a silver can like a gunfighter who shouted EXTERMINATOR and the roaches just laughed man. They just laughed and the exterminator never even saw the guy laying on his yellowed mattress with the book over his face reading  Kerouac, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, Salinger...anybody he could get his hands on, tearing up those books with fingers smudged with coffee cake and staining pages with brown coffee and jelly and then they ended up in my shelf of books that are like touchstones next to my second Editions of Tales of the Jazz Age and Huckleberry Finn. Hard to believe that is all historical now.

But it is. Grabbed up the Kindle and have been reading it for about a week. Strange at first because I didn't have a book to mutilate and mark and scribble on and get eggs and coffee all over and throw in my backpack and then my car and then lose it under my bed or leave outside. Strange not to flip the pages and hear the sound and feel the texture and stare at the physical print. But reading THE HELP at a snails pace which is the way I read anyone I want to really see what they are doing, I started to forget about books. Which is weird because I never thought I would ever forget about my buddies I carried around on CTA buses and trains and plopped down on bakery floors and  security desks and shoved inside my leather coat.

But it is happening.

First of all I can always find the Kindle. It just sits on the kitchen counter and I pick it up and read in the morning before I write like I always do. And it just hangs around and I take it with me to the coffee shop and it is small in the backpack. I had been lugging Fitzgerald's uncollected stories around. A brick. I even carried around Twain's Autobiography for a while. A cannon ball. But the Kindle weighs nothing. And the book is there. I even downloaded music into it for when I get bored of reading.

But how is it really reading on this thing? It just is. You read and forget about it. The vehicle is here and the links are in the books and so reading will never be the same. I am a gadget freak and yeah I probably have rushed to judgement, but the brave new world of digitized books is here and aint no turning back. And the thing is you don't want too. It's all about the word right? The word is still there and even looks like the printed word. I just need to get a light which I skimped on so I can read in bed while the world sleeps.

And as for my friends in my library. They are still there and always will be. I will still read books. I might even lose the Kindle in the back of a bus or a taxi or maybe it will get rained on or just die. Who knows. But here is the deal, books are a part of you, be they digital or pulp. It's the story, right?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man Kindle  

Art Alone Endures

We were doing the Chicago thing with the train and the kids and the rushing to the water taxi to Michigan Avenue to seeing Marilyn Monroe with her dress blowing up in front of the NBC building and then down to Billy Goats Tavern for some burgers that would kill a Tri Athlete then up and across the river toward Millennium Park to see the Bean. It was  a beautiful August night, one of those nights so rare in Chicago that feels more like Florida in Spring. We had just about reached the park when we heard music.

My wife said it looked like a concert in the park and so we drifted up to the fence and and there was a symphony. And then we heard a voice. It was an opera and the singers voice rose up across the city like a God. We just stopped and listened and all our worries and hurries fell away. We were transfixed by this man singing and the beautiful music. The park was filled as far as the eye could see with people quietly listening on a warm night on the end of summer.

And I looked around and I saw young and old just staring. No one moved. Everyone just listened and they were transfixed. And that is when I thought about our world with it's horrible problems and our cartoon culture and our grotesque politicians and the zealots who have take over our lives and I realized then the only thing that trumped all that was Art. It moved at a different speed and a different level and all these people will pass on, but Art will survive.

And they can't touch it. They can try and ban books. Wash out an opera with Rap or noise or sex or violence or whatever they can come up with, but Art survives. I saw it in the people who didn't speak, didn't move. They were mesmerized like I was. And even my seven year old who could barely see over the fence wanted to just stay and listen. It simply soothed the soul.

And then of course we left and hurried on to catch the water taxi to catch the train to get to our car to get home to go to bed to start all over the next day. But there was that interlude. It only lasted fifteen minutes but the world was in order. All was right. There is an engraved saying in the Fine Arts Theatre of Chicago. "All Passes, Art Alone Endures." Amen.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man Kindle

Allen Ginsberg's HOWL Fifty Years Later

In our time of crushing. In our time of crushing middle class lifelessness. In our time of struggle as we look at the madness of our world now with the incessant wars and incessant poverty and incessant intolerance among ourselves, we have Ginsbergs HOWL from 1957. A poem written over fifty years ago and made into a movie that if you have or have not read the poem, you should see. Because Ginsberg was right on and he reminds us that there is nothing new under our megalopolis sun.

And as a writer I am reminded that truth should win out. You write in the confines of the internet mega world now and you think of yourself no longer apart. HOWL is about the man apart from his world and how the world crushes the individual and drives the individual mad.  If you are an artist or a thinking person then you can only marvel at the heinous quality of our everyday life. The slavery of our everyday life.

And Ginsberg reminds us it was always so. Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy and Allen Ginsberg were early pioneers who gave birth to our later rock stars who sold out so fast we cant even count Gene Simmons five thousand women because he is a businessman as all rockers are now. But not those guys. They all died for their sins and Ginsberg saw the crushing totality of our society and he zoomed over the rooftops and wrote it as he flew. If you have read any Kerouac or Howl then you know what I am talking about.

Maybe they were the last modernists. Maybe they were the last bridge between the thinking individual and the mega wired mass consciousness of today where nobody thinks anymore. Maybe Ginsberg saw it coming and like the rest of the Beats left his message, his warning that we were at a crossroad and night was on the way and here was our last cry of humanity, our last cry of literature for a people losing all sight of anything literary.

They are all gone but you can read HOWL  and get a glimmer of the world as it was and is now. Ginsberg spoke of a hideous night of the soul that would crush him. And us. What we have now is something worse. Eternal empty daylight without the poetry. A church of conformity without the drugs. Ginsberg would have appreciated that.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out July 26th

The Problem with Writing at Home

Lets face it if you are at home then the assumption is you aren't working. A lot of us grew up with fathers who marched off to an office. They conveniently disappeared with a wave of their fedora and vanished into the early morning sun not to reappear until dinner was on the table and would return with the scent of the world on their suits, something vaguely like the smell of sharpened pencils. Father would then ask everyone how their day went and hit the tube for an hour before going to bed to start all over again. This is how a a lot of people grew up.

The writer violates the first principal of Father Knows Best. He doesn't leave! BZZZZZZ. Im sorry you cannot play Provider Daddy. The writer stays in his house and watches everyone else leave. Clearly something is wrong here. Men go off to work. Women go off to work. Kids go off to school. Writers make a pot of coffee and sluff down to their computer in their slippers. WHOA! This is clearly way out of the dad paradyme. What the hell is he doing in the house all day? Surely not working.  Working is going out to the workplace which entails planes, trains, and automobiles. A egress and ingress. A leaving and a return. The writer simply fills up his mug again.

This creates dissension in the home. For one thing the suspicion is that nobody really works who works at home. Even in the age of the AT HOME OFFICE, the common view is that he or she is not really working. They are doing something at home that is not work. Getting a job or having a job is still associated with going to a central point of neutrality where adults gather to break bread in the bigger world endeavour of making buckos. There is a ritual here and it is not a place for kids, infants or dogs. It is where big people go to be big people and clearly the real world is out there while the home is sanctuary, a respite, a fort against the spinning world of people, stress, and too many things to get done. So who is that guy in the robe at his computer?

Ralph Ellisson endured these same views in 1940's Harlem. People assumed he was a sponge living off his wife while he wrote Invisible Man. He didn't even bother telling people he was a writer. They wouldn't have believed him. He was at home doing nothing. There is that view. I actually leave my home and go to a different place to write, but a lot of times I don't. I'll just sit down in my office over the garage or perch on the table on the patio, the kitchen table. Inevitably I begin to feel like I'm not working. Something about going somewhere else. The separation of church and state maybe. Maybe I should buy a Fedora and wave goodbye just to see how it feels.

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