Wonderfully honest posts

 MANHOOD  (12/28/18)

 

Some are great men. Many are average Joes. I'm about the size of half a man, a physical and moral midget. It's a valuable perspective, because the scale and scope of greatness are easily discerned, just as country folk behold an amazingly tall skyscraper and say oooo! As long as I live, I will always marvel at the Bank of China Tower, elegant glass shapes rising like a frozen pillar of crystal, a work of genius. The London Gherkin not so much. In fact there's not a single decent structure anywhere in Blighty. They have a hard time doing four star hotel rooms, too. The Brits are a benighted race. Generous, cheerful, industrious, honest, and talented, but no sense of design. Same thing on the Continent. Adequately heated and utilitarian, always a headache trying to get from point A to point B.

 

America is the only place with good transportation, Australia first runner up, but it's unfair to compare them. There's nowhere to go in Oz. I like The Lucky Country, but they have no great men. They have folklore about highwaymen versus martinets with a royal license to govern.

 

So ... what is a great man?

 

Raw courage certainly seems fundamental, but many men have been courageous. Clever is good, but cleverness is desirable to all men, a way to earn their way in life. Writers have a lot of trouble doing that. The courageous and clever seldom read. Horrible to consider, but radio and television supply what most men enjoy, football and cricket in particular. I find both of them to be intensely boring. Greatness has to be something bigger than golf or tennis.

 

A great man must hold the gift of life in his hands. He could be a neurosurgeon, a commando, or CEO of a major enterprise. Every waking moment is an urgent problem in prospect, another struggle to attack the impossible and chip away at it until it's tamed. On the radio just now, Mark Steyn declaimed that Rush Limbaugh was "the indispensible man." Nope, a talented clown, a creative guy with the common touch, a postmodern Thomas Paine.

 

Popularity cannot be measure of a great man. Jesus is popular, a free Get Out of Sin card, no thought necessary. Negro athletes are popular, no thought possible. Politicians are popular enough to win an election with swing votes and massive media buys, one slogan per cycle. Hope and change. Make America great.

 

Hmm. It occurs to me that the measure of greatness is how much sorrow a man can carry, how great a burden his life becomes, embracing it as a challenge to his character. That was Lincoln in a nutshell. Davy Crockett at the Alamo. One of the most misunderstood men in American history was Jay Gould. He started with nothing, taught himself to be a road surveyor. At the end of his life he was feared, hated, sick, and friendless. Gould's crimes? — creating the Union Pacific lifeline that stretched in all directions, Western Union, the first transatlantic cable, arbiter of a Wall Street panic. Many great men in the Gilded Age — Morgan, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, Firestone, Westinghouse, Edison. Their lives were difficult. They stood strong and lifted millions of penniless immigrants from abject poverty into prosperity. Even the politicians had character. Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, Leland Stanford.

 

Most of the Civil War generals were great men, Union and Confederate. Most of the men who served in World War II were called to greatness and answered to the limit of their endurance, led by Eisenhower, Patton, Nimitz, Marshall. In a historic naval triumph long ago, Admiral Lord Nelson at Trafalgar.

 

Ooo, wait a minute. Stop the presses. There was a great hero who inspired me more than all the others combined. An utterly tragic life, but pivotal in American political history, the First Father of American independence. His name is forgotten, no longer honored. A lawyer. (Who cares about colonial lawyers?) He stood strong and declared something in a Boston Crown court, ejected and clubbed so severely by tax bailiffs that he suffered brain damage, never recovered, had to be replaced by Sam Adams.

"An act against natural equity is void!" (James Otis)

 

 

WHAT IT COSTS  (3/11/19)

 

I guess it was 1989. The managing director had arranged an afternoon seminar for the sales people, and he wanted me to say a few words about what writers did. Not being innately clever, I said what I knew about it: "Writers go naked in public." Got a big laugh. There are other consequences, of course. Wrecked marriages, credit card debt, inability to hold a job, paying assholes to write terrible reviews, and being ignored and dissed for decades are relatively small potatoes. Truly awful consequences are in the work itself. Once glimpsed a story must be told convincingly in its entirety. The language has to be original. It has to sing and frighten and dazzle in believable grit and grandeur. Events in the third act have to be foreshadowed on Page One.

 

Hours and weeks and months fly by. In the 70s and 80s, there were piles of balled paper and spent typewriter ribbons on the floor of an office that doubled as a bedroom, back rent due. Nowadays computers hide how many ideas and sentences get junked. I miss physical paper, never had to worry about software crashes or lightning strikes. I use a USB stick for backup when I get to the end of a chapter, a frantic procedure when I'm nearing a completed final draft, re-reading the whole thing six or seven times to fix a single comma, or alarmed at repetitive use of a word. Worse, finished work is finished work. It would be treason not to publish it. The daily business of life recedes in importance, can't matter and doesn't matter. I could be taken from life any second, and it wouldn't matter. Stories matter. Nothing else.

 

 

SEX  (June 2014)

 

I'm less capable nowadays, which is odd and a little sad, of course. Nor am I terribly eager to help others on this particular subject matter any longer. There was a time — two decades ago — when the topic of sex was interesting and important to me. I felt I had a duty to pass along some wit and wisdom, based on (oh jeez here we go again) 75 affaires d'amour.

 

Apparently, my 1998 book 'The All Purpose Illustrated Guide to Female Women and What To Do With Them' was pivotal, transformative and irreversible. It killed my career as a respectable author; inspired a pen name that became pejorative, blackballed, heavy and humiliating; took me to a world beyond the reach of civilization; and made it possible to finish a serious intellectual task that burdened my heart for 25 years. In mockery of everything just said (which was absolutely truthful) there is another awkward fact. Young men sought me out to express their gratitude for my having written the damn thing. It gave them courage and confidence, although I doubted that any of them actually completed my All Purpose six-week training course, which among other things instructed them to unplug their television sets and leave them unplugged, limit their computer use to one hour a day, rotate all four tires with a jack in the rain, and saw down a tree. "The few, the proud, the tire rotators!" was my slogan for bedroom success.

 

When Abe Lincoln was practicing law on the prairie, he leaned back in his chair at the defense table, told a few jokes to break the ice, then asked a simple question: "Did he do it or didn't he?" Before we attempt anything as straightforward as that, let's have a showbiz joke to break the ice. In the 1950's when TV was broadcast live and nobody cared if you smoked cigars, a woman appeared as a contestant on You Bet Your Life with Groucho Marx. She told him that she had 22 children. "Twenty-two children!" Groucho exclaimed. "I love my husband," she said demurely. "I love my cigar," Groucho laughed, "but I take it out once in a while!"