Random Thoughts, July 2, 2010

I'm all over the place today, so today's post is going to be a grab bag.

1) Today's Ghana vs. Uruguay game was heartbreaking.  For those who didn't watch, Ghana and Uruguay were tied 1-1 going into the last minute of stoppage time during the second and final overtime period.  Ghana took a free kick on the right side of the start of the offensive third, and played it into the box.  The ball eluded the goalie, was cleared off the goal line by a Uruguayan player, and fell onto the head of a Ghanian player, who then headed it on net.  The two Uruguayan players on the goal line could not clear it with their heads, feet, or torsos, so they decided to play volleyball; Diego Suarez threw the ball away with his hands.

He got a red card, of course, but Ghana did not receive a goal.  Instead, they received a penalty shot that Gyan promptly missed.  The game went to penalties and Uruguay won, 4-2.

As I said: heartbreaking.  Still, it was great to see the Black Stars show such heart, grit, and determination even in defeat.  Here's hoping that they'll learn from this experience and come back even stronger in four years.

2) It's always surprising to learn the details of people's lives.  Someone I never pegged as an athlete turns out to have played soccer quite a bit when she was younger.  This makes sense now that I know, but I never would have guessed before.  Another friend is taking up piano lessons as an adult.  Since he's an artist with good taste in music, I always assumed he played at least one instrument.  Silly me.

3) Last thought of the day, due to emotional exhaustion from today's games: I need to restring my guitar.  Only one string is broken (the high E) but now nothing sounds right.

Oh, details.

Pictures. Books.

My favorite coffee shop in Israel (sorry Ba'cafe) is The Coffee Mill in Jerusalem.  It has decent food, a great selection of coffee, and a relaxed atmosphere.  The right-hand wall is filled with bins of different coffee beans, imbuing the small building with a warm, earthy scent.  The rest of the walls are covered with old New Yorker covers spanning at least a couple decades.

I spent many days there whiling away the hours with friends, glancing at the wonderful illustrations constantly.  Each captures the mood of a moment in history, from Bill Clinton's mug during the Lewinsky scandal to the iconic New Yorker monocled man.

A recent cover summed up the unfathomable nature of the disaster in the Gulf.  The reference to Escher is brilliant; like his work, the oil spilling into the ocean tricks our minds.  We cannot comprehend it rationally.  Despite my best efforts, I cannot imagine millions of gallons of oil worming their way through deep waters and onto shores hundreds of miles away.  I cannot fully understand the true extent of the damage wrought on the ecosystem.  All I do when I see pictures of birds covered in brown goo is say, "Wow, that sucks."

The cover is brilliant because it is not didactic; it doesn't leap off the page and smack you on the nose for being an oblivious dolt.  Instead, it blends the timeless with the present to remind us of the limits of our mammalian brains.  Our brains are fantastic pattern-recognition machines provided patterns conform to the scale of our humanity.  But there are events in the world that defy our sensibilities, rendering our efforts to shape them mockeries of competence and comprehension.

In a strange way, the illustrations in "The Goblin Prince" and "The Fox and the Shadow" are wonderful because they work similarly and also at cross purposes as that New Yorker cover.  They work similarly because they combine the classic with the contemporary in exciting ways.  Hetsi and Agorot are green-skinned humanoids (like most mythological goblins) but have expressive ears and body language (Anne's idea, a unique feature).  The Fox and his world start brightly colored and cheerful (classic fable material) but slowly darken as the story twists into something decidedly un-childlike.

However, their intention is to take ideas larger than any individual such as the duty of the parent to a child and the relationship of humanity to the natural world, and make them bite-sized.  That is the great gift any great illustrator gives her writer.  Even if you never read a word of either book, you can understand almost everything through the illustrations.  You can know how much Agorot idolizes Hetsi and how Hetsi adores his son.  You can understand the monstrosity of the Fox's actions toward his shadow.  As "The Fox and the Shadow" moves toward completion, the interplay between the words and images invigorate me like a warm summer afternoon scented by freshly ground coffee.

Writing, Rewriting, Rewriting, Rewriting

"Reckoning" is changing, both the planet and the story.  It was overly long at points, short on description at others.  Its new flaws will reveal themselves with revision and re-reading.  They will emerge like knots appears under the carver's hands.

Writing is an immensely enjoyable process.  I put down words and watch stories unfurl.  My problems forgotten, I revel in the joy of creation.  But it impossible to write something worth reading on the first pass.  For every moment spent writing, I spend dozens revising.  That is not an exaggeration.  It took about twenty minutes to write "Adam and the Misshapen Log".  It is now on its twentieth version (I track them, oddly enough) with each full edit taking a few hours or more.

It can be disheartening, this endless process of revision.  Happily, I have quotes from greater writers that promise a payoff in the end.

"I have rewritten- often several times- every word I have ever written.  My pencils outlast their erasers." Vladimir Nabokov

"The difference between the right and the nearly right word is the same as that between lightning and the lightning bug."  Mark Twain

So let me know, dear readers, if I have gotten at least one word right, if I have captured a little lightning in the latest revision and expansion of "Reckoning".  And then, next week, you'll watch the battle continue.

As for when it ends?  Well, I'll leave you with this:

"Books are never finished, they are merely abandoned."  Oscar Wilde

Why Sports Matter

It is easy to criticize sports and athletes.  Many spoiled stars prove that, for all their exploits on the field, they are flawed, sad people off it.  Ticket prices and athletes' salaries soar ever higher while unemployment ravages our economy.  And we, the fans, pay more attention to March Madness than the madness in Darfur.

But for all this, sports do matter.  Sports can be a force for good.  Take Manut Bol.  At one point the tallest basketball player ever, he donated most of his money to help the people of Sudan, his homeland.  He worked tirelessly to raise awareness about the suffering there and to raise money for schools.  He did anything and everything he could for his people.

He participated in Celebrity Boxing on Fox so they would televise the phone number of his charity, the Ring True Foundation (he won in the third round).  Unable to ice-skate, he nonetheless signed a one day contract with the Indianapolis Ice of the Central Hockey League to raise money.  He even worked as a jockey!

Manut Bol died last Saturday from acute kidney failure and complications from Stevens-Johnson syndrome.  At the time of his death, the first of his schools is being built in his childhood village.  His dream was to build 41 schools.  Only 40 to go.

This goal is achievable; as Nicholas Kristof wrote in today's New York Times, "If each admirer chipped in the cost of a ticket to just one game, if each of his former teams agreed to match donations, if a few current and former N.B.A. stars agreed to stand in for Bol at fund-raisers, why then schools would sprout all across Sudan."

I bet it will happen.  And it will all be because of a tall former cattle-herder learned to play basketball.

Just in this week alone, there have been other examples of the power of sports at work.  The U.S. men's national soccer team persevered through two horrendous calls that disallowed goals and won its group, displaying tenacity and resolve at a moment when American leadership often lacks either.  Lightly regarded teams like Japan played inspired soccer while traditional powers like Italy dissolved from cynicism while exiting early.  Time and time again, hardworking teams overcame more talented squads that spent more time sniping at each other than scoring.  Desire and determination beat arrogance and narcissism.

That is why sports matter.  In our athletes and in our athletic events, we see the best and worst of humanity.  For every Italian team that crashes out ignobly, there is an American team that wins brilliantly.  For every Ben Roethlisberger, there is also a Manut Bol.  And if you want to help, head to SudanSunrise.org.  While we cannot all be stars, we can all do our part.

When Do Writers Peak?

The June 14th edition of the New Yorker contains a list of "20 Under 40"; that is, 20 authors under 40 years old handpicked by their editors exemplifying the best the world has to offer.  If you have time, give it a read.  The stories are a mixed lot.  Some are stand-alone works, others are excerpts from larger pieces.  All are worth your attention.

My initial reaction to the stories was jealousy tinged with admiration.  They all write far better than I, and now they bear the New Yorker stamp of approval.  How I wish to have made such a list, to have produced something of such worth!  But time is on my side, for I only recently celebrated my 26th birthday.  Writers take a while to peak.  Right?

Wrong, says Sam Tanehaus of the New York Times.  His article brings up a depressingly large number of authors who wrote their masterpieces while they were under 40:

 "Unsurprisingly, in youth-obsessed America, writers have often done their best work early. Melville was 32 when “Moby-Dick” was published (after the successes of “Typee” and “Omoo”). The writers of the lost generation found their voices when they were very young: Fitz­gerald (28, “The Great Gatsby”), Hemingway (27, “The Sun Also Rises”). Faulkner lagged slightly behind. He had just turned 32 when “The Sound and the Fury” was published. Then again, it was his fourth novel.

The celebrated post-World War II generation was just as precocious. Norman Mailer was only 25 when “The Naked and the Dead,” his classic, and enormous, war novel came out. And James Jones’s even longer work, “From Here to Eternity,” was published when he was 29. The indefatigable warhorses who grew up in the 1950s were also good very young: Joyce Carol Oates (31, “Them,” her fifth novel); Philip Roth (26, “Goodbye Columbus”); John Updike (28, “Rabbit, Run”); Thomas Pynchon (26, “V.”)."

  

I have no illusions of being the next Roth, or Updike, or Pynchon.  Still, one of the reasons I left the music industry is its relentless focus on youth.  I envy my girlfriend her slow development as a fine artist; she is not likely to produce masterworks in her twenties.  Instead, her early years are supposed to be full of struggle as she searches for her voice and vision.  Only later, after mastering her craft, will she produce her greatest work.

Perhaps this is another boneheaded bit of conventional wisdom; perhaps all our flames burn faster than we would prefer.

Still, I am heartened by Tanehaus' following list of writers who found their genius late.

"Joseph Conrad didn’t become a major writer until his 40s (after long years at sea). Katherine Anne Porter was 40 when her first short-story collection was published. Virginia Woolf entered her prime in her 40s. Norman Rush’s first novel wasn’t published until he was in his 50s. Nor is it to say that brilliant young novelists don’t mature into greater ones. Henry James peaked at about 60. Roth reached an extraordinary phase in his 60s. The Bellow of “Herzog” (49) is a greater artist than the Bellow of “The Adventures of Augie March” (38), which itself introduced a wholly new aesthetic to the English-language novel. And the Don DeLillo of “Underworld” (60) far surpasses the DeLillo of “End Zone” (35)."

I would be honored to be part of that list.  Perhaps my late turn to writing prevented me from blossoming into the next Normal Mailer.  But maybe it gifted me with a wealth of experiences to become the next Virginia Woolf.

The turmoil of my late teenage years and early 20s have left me with less prose but more memories than many writers my age.  I have walked in many shoes in many cities around the world.  With diligence, this straw can become gold.  Because, as Tanehaus closes, "Now, as then, the most meaningful 'fight' waged by literary artists is interior. Their principal adversary is not a noisy culture or inattentive readers. It is themselves."

That's a fight I can win, no matter what my age.