About the speech last night (The Washington Post) ...
LOSERS
The truth
Trump is no stranger to hyperbole and straight-up false claims, and his first State of the Union was no exception. He said the United States is “now an exporter of energy to the world.” Wrong. He said Congress passed and he signed “the biggest tax cuts and reform in American history.” Wrong. He said,“We have eliminated more regulations in our first year than any administration in history.” That might be true, but because available records don't go back beyond a few decades, we simply don't know. Trump even claimed that his tax cuts were leading to bonuses — many of which were “thousands and thousands of dollars per worker.” The most publicized bonuses, though, were generally $1,000. These are part of Trump's everyday talking points, so hearing them in this speech wasn't jarring. But it is notable that the White House uses bogus and unproven claims even on this stage.
It's very scary to be accused of something of which you are innocent. You are made to feel guilty from the get-go. I experienced a minor instance of this while living in the retirement center. (And have had worse experiences in the past.)
A friend's dog got loose while I was walking Sketch, and a dog fight ensued. Later I saw her in the hallway and we had a blowout verbal altercation.
An hour later the manager of the center took me aside and said I've been accused of swinging at the lady, trying to punch her out. There were two witnesses. The manager behaved as if I were guilty. I was pissed by this assumption.
Fortunately the lady in question told the truth, I had not swung at her, we'd just raised the roof in our very energetic confrontation. We made up and life went on. Except for a bad taste in my mouth, the manager assuming I would do such a thing.
And two false witnesses! I think they were bored and glad to see some action and got carried away.
But the bottom line is, You are guilty until proven innocent.
This BBC series, made into a film, with its themes of race and false witness, is very contemporary in the Age of Trump. Thought-provoking, in its non-pejorative meaning. Very well acted.
Woody Allen is my friend and I continue to believe him. It might be of interest to take a look at the 60 Minute interview from 1992 and see what you think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPs5TAO8Hj4 …
I have no idea if Allen is guilty or not. He denies the allegations and would if he were guilty. Keaton believes him because he is "my friend." I admire this. In today's climate, it may be heroic for her to defend him.
I also know that, despite the epidemic of revealed sexual abuse and harassment, about which there should be little argument, at times like this, with the media exploiting every accusation, the truth can suffer. Victims can get carried away and exaggerate, or they can believe a false memory.
False memory! The entire field of memory is far more complex than many understand, which came out clearly during another avalanche of accusations, against the child care workers some years ago, only in this instance the child memories proved to be false, many encouraged by investigators. The belated truth didn't help the workers much, whose lives were already ruined. (Most cases now, however, involve adults sharing relatively recent experience.)
Guilty until proven innocent. That's the new paradigm, driven by a media hungry for juicy stories. It is shameful, with regard to the search for truth.
So it is good and necessary that there now is a movement of women coming out to share what happened to them but this does not assure that the innocent won't get swept along in the rush for justice, particularly when childhood memories are concerned.
Ran into two residents from the retirement center at the store, the woman part of my readers theater group. Nice to see them. Shocking news: D, an asst mgr who was my favorite staff, got fired without notice and without reason. Stunned her and everybody else. Some corporate issue or other, no doubt. Harriet says probably because she was too nice to the residents.
An unseasonably warm day, decided to take a ride, ended up having lunch at an old haunt, a brew pub on Main St in Tigard, where we went frequently when we owned our house in the area. Best chicken burritos on the planet. Which is still the case.
A nice getaway. And, showing our age, we were delighted to return home to just hang out!
Yet another major change in opening of novel ... each change in the direction of doing the same thing with fewer characters. Once a minimalist, always a minimalist.
But this one has another advantage, a change of focus which I should have understood earlier, and a new character whom I like a lot, a literary novelist with early dementia, put in the retirement center by his daughter. I met several folks who were "prisoners" there at insistence of children, who had power of attorney after stroke. CJ will help him escape.
Best, I actually feel a bit excited about this. I haven't felt excited about this novel for a spell. Hope it sticks.
All my life I've been a "big picture" kind of guy, which I don't recommend, but in my old age this big picture has become more negative, and stressful, than ever, so I try to replace it with a stronger focus on the small picture. Making coffee, taking out the dog, cooking, writing, reading, TV, email, blogging, the daily routines of existence, one foot after the other. I try to forget the big picture. When it works, it helps my disposition considerably.
I think this is what "hangin' in like Gunga Din" means.
Every day I search for "Bill Deemer obituary" to see if his widow has posted anything. Nothing. Nor have I learned of any services, though I doubt if she'd invite me if there were any, which actually is unlikely. It's like he just disappeared. Kidnapped by aliens. Now you see him, now you don't. Not a great way to leave this world, in my opinion.
What ever happened to good manners? I wrote a new business in town, venturing into an area I know something about, wished them the best and didn't even get acknowledgement.
Now and again I stumble upon an author who blows me away, s/he writes so powerfully for my sensibilities. I believe the latest, maybe ten years ago, was Josephine Hart, the novelist. I read Damage. And more after that, of course.
A reward after some good early morn work on the novel, a 9 a.m. UConn basketball game, the women of course, it's a superior game now because dunking and showboating have pretty much disappeared, making the game more like it used to be. The men need to raise the basket a foot to get there.
UConn defense is especially impressive, but they always have great offense, too, and remarkable long shooters, like Samuelson this year. So much fun to watch, so skilled, so much teamwork.
Early in my career I was influenced by three writers whose gigantic egos were widely misread: William Saroyan, E. E. Cummings and Norman Mailer. What seemed to be "ego," I later realized, was really a profound confidence in one's work, not because it was "better" than everyone else's but because it was successful as expression of a personal vision of existence.
This confidence was most directly expressed in self-interviews by Saroyan and Cummings and in the author's commentary in Mailer's Advertisements for Myself, an early collection of his writing. The self-interviews especially interested me because such a "genre" had never occurred to me before. Later in my career I did the same thing myself. I might do it again soon. If nothing else, they are great fun to write.
Confidence is hard to come by early on because there is no concrete reason to have it. It's a leap of faith. I was fortunate to have early success with "Roll of Honor" stories in the Best American Short Stories collection (three times), which was national validation that I was, in fact, "a writer." Validation is exactly what young writers need. They crave to be taken seriously. As "writers."
Confidence has a dark side. I have had writer friends who had confidence far beyond their talent and their accomplishments. They were blind to their faults. To a degree, maybe all writers are, but the best tool a young writer can develop is a critical eye on his own work, finally becoming one's own toughest critic. But this, too, can go too far, so far that it paralyzes work because a draft is not "good enough." I've known writers like this as well.
One needs to locate one's place in the literary landscape. This done, I was able to have confidence in my achievements and also be aware of my neighboring heroes, the writers I looked up to. The first keeps the work flowing, the second keeps one humble.
My best students have not gone on to become writers. They couldn't hang in during the validation process, they were impatient, they found other ways to use their talents with quicker success and remuneration. As Paul Schrader said, "The only reason to be an artist is that you're incapable of being anything else."
When we moved into our new apartment, we gave ourselves an apt-warming present: a good coffee maker. We'd never had one, making a cup at a time. We purchased a Krups, up to 12 cups, and it is just what we wanted. No complaints. Good coffee, brews quickly, easy to maintain.
I'd been drinking iced coffee mostly but this has gotten me drinking hot coffee again.
All morning I study rain: solemn on the shingled roof, bubbly in the puddle!
Preliminary finding: many kinds of rain to hear, many shades of gray to see.
The yin & yang of rain: filling up the sparrows' basin, knocking down the apple blossoms.
* * *
"On Rain" from Variations, Longhouse. Copyrighht 1999 by Bill Deemer. Reprinted with permission of the author.
Whenever my arthritis gets worse, as this morning, and I'm tempted to moan and groan before I do anything else, I remember my recent nine months in a retirement center, where I was surrounded by folks far worse off than I am, and the temptation reduces to useless whining, and guilty whining at that, and I brace up and go about my business.
One of our culture's errors is to assume what is new is better, which is at the foundation of our notion of progress. I have a vivid memory of how this played out in literature.
My first office mate at Portland State University was a retiring professor emeritus and American Literature scholar. His specialty was John Dos Passos.
He was a bitter, unhappy man. Dos Passos was no longer required in the Amer Lit curriculum. I felt for him because I agreed with him that the USA Trilogy was "the Great American Novel." Dos Passos should not be forgotten, though he was (in part, I think, because he became a conservative in old age, out of fashion with the liberal academy).
I’m not sure that any writer today is writing fiction as contemporary in substance as that which John Dos Passos was writing in the 1920’s and 30’s. Precarious, exploited youth; economic catastrophes; senseless warmongering; cynical self-promoters; feckless media beholden to entrepreneurial myths: the U.S.A. trilogy has it all. Dos Passos died in 1970, but behind his prose a reader can sense the presence of an intelligence that somehow, anachronistically, understands our maddening yet hopeful times. Unfortunately, U.S.A. has suffered its share of high-profile detractors, and the reputation of the novelist that Jean-Paul Sartre called “the greatest writer of our time” isn’t what it once was.
And so it goes, in literature and everything else, the new replacing the old, which is natural, and an assumption that this is progress, which is not natural and often wrong.
The music I listen to today is by and large the same music I listened to in high school and all the years since, west coast jazz, and I listen to it because in all these decades I have not heard anything that I like better. Q.E.D.
In moving the clock 30 seconds closer to the hour of the apocalypse, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists cited “the failure of President Trump and other world leaders to deal with looming threats of nuclear war and climate change.”
The organization now believes “the world is not only more dangerous now than it was a year ago; it is as threatening as it has been since World War II,” Bulletin officials Lawrence M. Krauss and Robert Rosner wrote in an op-ed published Thursday by The Washington Post. “In fact, the Doomsday Clock is as close to midnight today as it was in 1953, when Cold War fears perhaps reached their highest levels.”
Writers, unless they hide their work in a trunk, desire an audience. In my case, the audience never had to be large but I wanted it to be attentive. Fortunately -- and I say this because many "serious" writers don't receive this luxury -- I've had moments when my audience gets revealed to me. One of the more satisfying moments has been expressed this way (by G. Sirc):
"One of the Composition-specific articles in this genre of radical sixties pedagogy, one which I have never been able to forget since the day I first read it in the dimly-lit stacks of my university's library, was written in 1967 by a young graduate teaching assistant at the University of Oregon, Charles Deemer. His article, "English Composition as a Happening," did what many of these articles did, but did it in a formally compelling way (the article is a collage of brief sound-bite snippets, alternating between Deemer's own poetic reflections-as-manifesto and quotations from Sontag, McLuhan, Dewey, Goodman, and others), and Deemer's ideas seemed to catalyze my own discontent with what passed for Composition during the 1980s."
My ideas "seemed to catalyze my own discontent", he says ...he was "never able to forget" them ... this is an ideal audience, as far as I'm concerned. And it happened twenty years after the essay was written! In other words, one never knows when the audience will reveal itself. But the work has to be available, even if only in "dimly-lit stacks" of a university library.
Yes, I really cherish this moment, as satisfying as writing gets with regard to having an audience. For me, much more special than "popularity" because it is very clear that Sirc "got" what I was writing.
The last play I wrote is a one act called THE OLD BEATNIK. It opens this way:
AT RISE: focus on LOLA-20 in coffeehouse, reading
a poem. Dressed in black. It is 1954.
LOLA-20
O America / if Paris had kept his cock in his pants /
would a thousand ships never have launched?
CROSSFADE to Starbucks. EVELYN alone at a table,
on her cell phone. Her attire reveals wealth. It
is 2015.
And later:
LOLA-20
O America / if you had kept your cock in your pants /
would you have built your city not on a hill but in the
valley? / If you had kept your cock in your pants, /
would you have settled for a destiny less than
manifest?
Given the recent climate of revealed male aggressive sexuality, there is a topicality here that was not on my mind as I wrote.
Doubt if I'll see a production of this before I pass but I sure would love to.
LOLA-30
America, here are your divorce papers / I can’t live
with you any more / We are too different // You get
noisier every year / with your ad campaigns / with your
patriotic speeches / and I cherish silence / for
reflection and self-discovery // You think change is
progress / and I think change also kills what does not
need changing / rituals and cycles lost forever // You
are forever buying things / a hoarder of possessions /
and my mantra is Less Is More / my essentials on my
back // You worship the dollar / and I worship the
blade of grass / breaking through the sidewalk // You
want to save the world / and I want to save myself //
America, here are your divorce papers / I don’t want
your City on a Hill / I don’t want your Manifest
Destiny / I sing the music of the universe / My soul is
dancing to Mulligan and Miles / and my spirit soars
like a bird
Morning has always been a favorite part of the day. Everything before about 10 or 11 a.m., beginning around 5 a.m. Taking the dog out, the first cup of coffee, planning breakfast and lunch and dinner, considering the day''s writing goal, maybe a trip to the market or other chores.
By afternoon I am sinking and starting to run at less than full speed.
One of those days when I feel like I'm on the wrong planet. Went to movie everyone is raving about, thought it was simplistic, predictable, boring (The Shape of Water). Wrote a letter, expecting reply and got none. Ran into more than the usual number of obstacles as I hobbled through the day.
I grew up on scrapple, my folks being from Pennsylvania Dutch country. When we moved to Virginia and Texas, scrapple was available in the market. But in Southern California, it was hard to find.
I didn't rediscover scrapple until young adulthood, and I soon started making my own. I did this infrequently, not an easy chore. I'll never forget the day in grad school I came home to find a pig's head in a box on my porch. Gift from a pig farmer friend for my scrapple!
In old age I abandoned traditional scrapple for a much easier clone, very easy and surprisingly close to the real thing. Then I just started buying it off the Internet.
I was very excited when a Seattle company started West Coast Scrapple, but their quality control has been uneven, especially in texture. Too much liquid. I finally settled on buying the brand most available in stores in my youth, Rapa Scrapple, and I had some this morning, which tasted as good as ever. Scrapple remains a breakfast favorite and staple.
Fixing the novel fixed my attitude, which lately had been pretty funky. The reworking definitely feels better. Lost a lot of pages, gained some good energy. Good trade.
Half-empty: Only a violent revolution, as in the past, can remove the corporate power brokers and lead to a genuine redistribution of wealth, to equality, opportunity and freedom. The two party system is impotent. History suggests that there is no genuine systemic revolution that is peaceful, though skirmishes may be.
Half-full: Women, by their biological differences, are perfectly placed to create and lead a revolution not driven by testosterone and warrior myths, which might lead to methods and results never seen before. They are the last peaceful alternative and hope.
About 30 pages into my novel I make a poor story choice. I am going to fix it, discarding most of what follows. This may be what has been bothering me and impeding progress. Will get to that today. Glad I found this sooner rather than later.
Howard Zinn's classic A People's History of the United States. For 3rd or 4th time. Feels more shameful with each reading. Our mythology excuses nothing. What would happen if we taught children our true history?
Dare it be said? We deserve Donald Trump. Well, that's not fair, he did lose the popular vote and good folks are everywhere. But our failure, the failure of our education system, to create citizens not so easily duped is tragic.
Mencken saw this coming. Others did, very very early on. Of course, they were intellectuals. Eggheads. Bad capitalists. Who would believe them?
Interesting observation from book early on: Indians captured by whites and kept in white culture for a prolonged stay when released rushed home. Whites captured by Indians for a prolonged time when released ... the majority chose to stay with the Indians!
I don't have a strong sense of family. It's the way I was raised. My mother's family was small, one sister, but my dad had a large family, brothers and sisters and cousins everywhere, all in New Jersey. The only time of my life I had a sense of family was when my dad convinced his brothers and sisters to move to Southern California in the early 1950s. For a year there were big Deemer family gatherings. Then a big earthquake struck, and all but one family raced back to New Jersey.
In my old age, it seems a close, large family would be nice. I think this was an issue with my parents. Mom didn't really like all the Deemers, a little too redneck for her, I think, and she was often the butt of Deemer men practical jokes. She wanted to live in Oregon, Dad in New Jersey, and so they moved often. It looked comic at the time. It reflected a real issue about family.
I've connected with my first cousin Robin in LA and enjoy this. She visits about once a year. And that's the extent of my family connections.
Five people I very much care about -- my parents, my two best friends, my brother -- requested that after their passing there be no formal funeral or memorial service. These requests were granted.
For most of my life, I agreed with them, a protest of the commercialization of dying, with outrageous expenses and manipulative advertising, yet another institution ruined by greed. But I since have realized that funerals and memorial services have little to do with the dead and everything to do with the living.
These decisions, as a result, are selfish, taking away the best environment for expressing grief and memory by the living left behind. As a result, there is no solid closure after these deaths. There is no formal acceptance, no sharing of memories, no moving on. It's as if one day a person is here, the next they are gone, a disappearing act, now you see him, now you don't, and that's that. For all their gaudy commercialization, funerals still help the living make an important transition.
So my brother's recent death feels surreal. Not quite real. He was here, and then he was not here. End of story. Supposedly.
Here are some thoughts expressed in poetry as I've wrestled with this over the years.
My brother passed away. He is the real poet of the family. A prodigy, publishing in Poetry Magazine as a teenager, a high school dropout. Younger by six years. Heart failure. Married to Toby for 53 years. Soul mates.
A simplistic story on Portland tonight. Relied too much on the TV show Portlandia, which never was about the "real" Portland, but at least the mayor said some accurate things about the city's racist past and present lack of diversity.
But no mention whatever of the city's Golden Age, the 1980s, when 2 theater directors and a composer were full time city employees (Parks & Rec) and the city in essence subsidized two theater companies (Theatre Workshop and Firehouse Theatre), when the city had such a European feel.
I learned that our rent for a 2 BR apartment in Milwaukie is the average for a studio in Portland now. And we're only 15 minutes away. The high rents surely will creep this way, alas.
Glad to have loved Portland in the 1980s. Ecstatic not to live there now.
We cut the cord a few years back and haven't regretted it, despite lack of consistency in getting local stations with an antenna. Mostly I use Kindle Fire TV and Sling TV, streaming shows.
Of local stations, we watch local CBS more than others and Amazon just started a CBS channel for streaming past shows which includes a live feed to local station. This is great for us.
Good film and an important one in the era of Trump. A small matinee audience burst into spontaneous applause at the end, a reaction with encouraging political implications.
Most of my writing has been "inside out," serious artistic writing, as opposed to commercial "outside in" writing. Nonetheless, I have dabbled in commercial fiction, writing two mystery novels, and one was received especially well, being a finalist for Mystery of the Year at a magazine. This is Dead Body In A Small Room, republished as the Kindle ebook Murder at the Black Cat B&B. Here's what some readers had to say about it.
What a different venue for a story! Small town in Nevada where prostitution is legal and a brothel is the main place of action. Plus the guy telling the story is a regular customer. Yes, there's a murder or was it a suicide? Yes, he's not a cop but a former Hollywood screenwriter (Love the new script he's working on) and yes, it's set back in the 80's. A few spots to make you chuckle, a few spots that grab your attention and until close to the end you won't guess the truth of what happened.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The ending was a total surprise as it seemed so many other avenues of solution were involved. Where else but in total recovery from cancer can a writer from Hollywood find excitement and adventure in a small Northern Nevada town. Made me want to go there and see if it really existed. I'll read more of this guys work. If you love a good mystery you'll love this one!
I really enjoyed this book. It was easy to read in the sense that it flowed really well, with realistic dialogue that swept the action along and plenty of twists and turns to keep your mind working. A genuinely entertaining book.
This is truly a great story. Many twists and turns, all plausible. Occam' s razor is at work and the simplest solution is the correct one.
Thoroughly enjoyed the style of the writer and the structure of the story. Have already looked for other books by this author to read.
Enjoyed this book so much read in 2 days- I wished it was longer- The writer knows how to pull you in.
Not too shabby. Often it is assumed that serious writers are esoteric because they don't have the craft to be otherwise. This isn't always true. Maybe not usually true. How one writes is an individual choice. Most of the time, I write not to bore myself, without concern about an audience. I want to satisfy personal standards, nothing otherwise.
My career went about the way it should have gone, given my talents and tastes.
Some nice appreciative feedback on the birthday reading I gave at Vineyard Place. In retrospect, it was a different, even strange, environment for such an undertaking. But after listening to it again this morning, I am pleased with how it turned out, and I chose selections that put my body of work in its best light. I don't expect to give a reading again, so it was personally a big deal.
The Screenwriting Q&A site is doing well, writers are asking questions with some regularity so far. I hope I can help them with my responses. So many real world things about screenwriting are in the shadows. Saves time and frustration to know reality as early as possible.
This laptop is nice. It is a buyer's market for computers. Ebay is full of great deals.
One of those mornings when I'm really counting my blessings. Retirement finally is shaping up the way I had hoped it would be, after all the stress and complexity of selling the house, moving to a retirement community, and the rest. I feel we now are in a space where we can enjoy our remaining healthy years. I'm ahead of Harriet on this curve but she will get there.
Been a while since I uploaded anything to my archive but I brought it up to date tonight, after a learning curve and finding software, passwords, and remembering protocol. But I did it!
Ends up they were out of the laptop I ordered, so they gave me a "free upgrade," more than I had ordered. Not sure of the difference but this one looks good, works good, more power than I need, and so far all is very well, I am working at my corner desk, and feeling productive as a result. Put the novel pages here, will start the page one rewrite soon. This is great.
Well well well. Here I am.. I've been trying to get here, to blog, for half an hour on this crippled netbook. Half a dozen crashes. Might crash before posting. Likely.
Laptop should arrive tomorrow and get me back on track.
Blogging energy dissipated in getting here. Ha ha. Way it goes. I had thoughts about retirement communities, thoughts about my career in present tense. All gone.
So I'll post this and maybe try again when the energy returns. If it does.
Watching TV last night, a scene at a dinner party, I asked Harriet if she could remember the last time she went to a dinner party. She couldn't. Neither could I. More than old age at work here.
In the 60s and 70s, I hosted or went to a dinner party every weekend, more or less. Very active social life. Even after my divorce and bachelorhood in Portland, 80s, I had an active social life in two regular bars, Nobby's and Seafood Mama's, friends with the owners, tabs at each, the whole shot. I cooked for holidays, when the owners hosted dinners for those with nowhere else to go. Homes away from home, where I spent more time than in my apartment, except for mornings when I wrote.
All this ended when I stopped drinking. Rediscovered the recluse I was in high school. End of my social life, really. I never really fit in with Harriet's friends after we got together. Didn't see my old barroom friends with any regularity. My closest two friends died in the 90s. My best friend became our dog.
Not complaining. Observing. I have fond memories of a social life, actually, but I don't need or want one now and don't have a sense of missing it after I left it. That was then, and then there was later and now there is now. I like the variety of my personal history. Good for material, too.
Of course, it's all material. Heard that first from William Goldman. It's true. It's perhaps the best benefit of the writing life.
Been tracking my laptop and it seems to be heading west on the milk run. Yesterday, Kansas City. Today, in Nebraska. Scheduled for Wednesday. Since it left the east coast on Friday, I was hoping for an early delivery. Doesn't look like it.
Chomping on the bit for a page one rewrite at my desk. I could do it in the kitchen, on this laptop. Maybe I should. Cook and write all day. Hmm.
Playing music has been an important part of my life since I received a Gene Autry guitar for Christmas when I was in 5th or 6th grade.
I taught myself, then in high school took up the 5-string banjo, using Pete Seeger's new instruction book. Banjo was my instrument of choice through the Army and early grad school, playing in the Seeger style.
Then I discovered the 12-string guitar, got a deal on one from a faculty colleague, and for decades thereafter, the instrument was an appendage, going everywhere with me. I sang for my dinner, I sang at parties, I sang in classrooms, I was as much folksinger as writer.
I stopped taking the guitar everywhere after my divorce and return to the northwest in the late 70s. But I still played regularly. I put together RAMBLIN', my appreciation of Woody Guthrie, in 1979, got great grant support through the 80s, toured everywhere from Seattle to LA, revived it with a second musician, the late Jim Wylie, and continued playing into the 21st century.
In retirement I went back to the banjo. But this time I was determined to learn clawhammer, not play in the Seeger style. I had failed to teach myself the method so now took lessons. I cam out, after taking Clawhammer I and II, a decent low end player.
When I heard gut strings on a banjo, I switched immediately. Then I heard someone play clawhammer ukulele. This was my sound in old age! I bought a decent instrument made by a classical guitar company in Portugal. I expected to play clawhammer ukulele, then, for the rest of my days.
This was not to be. Arthritis in my hands, especially the left one, brought my ukulele playing days to an end. I saw this coming and recorded my three favorite tunes while I still could.
I still wanted music in my life. I had played diatonic harmonica on a rack for years. Now I went to the chromatic, to play the great American songbook. And that's where I am today. Not learning new songs as regularly as I should but this is my instrument. Theoretically if I can breathe, I can play! We'll see ha ha.
I just started this book but am engrossed and expecting to remain so, it's so nicely written. I'm not alone in liking it.
“I love the way Lawrence thinks, I love the way he writes. Playing with Fire is him at his best — this is a thriller-like, propulsive tour through 1968, told by a man who is in love with American politics and who knows how all the dots connect. Brilliant and totally engrossing.” ―Rachel Maddow
“A breathtaking, “buckle your seatbelt” ride through what might be the most dramatic and brutally consequential presidential election in modern U.S. history. Lawrence O’Donnell leaves no detail and no key historical player unexamined as he maps out the often treacherous route to America becoming its modern political self. Playing with Fire is a brilliant and necessary read for everyone who cares about politics, and loves history.” ―Joy-Ann Reid
“If ever there was a bygone presidential campaign crying out for the Game Change treatment, it’s the one that convulsed America in 1968—and Lawrence O’Donnell delivers the goods in Playing With Fire. Wars at home and abroad, secret plots and assassinations, riots in the streets and punches thrown on the convention floor, poets and protestors, movie stars and Kennedys, hippies, Yippies, and Black Panthers: 1968 had it all and then some. And now it has a chronicler in O’Donnell who brings coherence to the chaos, rendering the story with the crackle and flow of a dynamite Hollywood screenplay.” ―John Heilemann
O'Donnell, former West Wing writer turned political commentator, knows how to tell a story.
If I were in my 20s, or even 30s, a creative writer, there are two new ways of storytelling that invite development and the opportunity to get in on something potentially big on the ground floor: 1. developing novellas based on the vertical writing aesthetics of the screenplay, for easier reading on electronic devices; and 2. developing a permanent theater home for hyperdrama, creating a season and growing an audience. Neither of these forms is totally new. Each already has established significant audience interest. But each demands more development to become established as a new storytelling form.
I did an experiment, which I called Stories In Overdrive, to test the former, and the experiment was a success. There indeed is an audience for short, sparsely written stories, longer than a short story, shorter than a novel, screenplay length, a novella. Perfect length to read on an airplane flight, for example. The idea is so good that pop giant Jame Patterson has entered the arena with "BookShots." There's still much more for more writers and new marketing ideas. This is a natural for a screenwriter with piles of scripts that never reached the screen/ A new market awaits your stories.
The second opportunity requires more work. Hyperdrama has a proven audience but the problem is that to date productions have been "events" rather than plays of a season in a permanent home. I suggested one design for a hyperdrama theater in my video about the nuts and bolts of the form. I'm sure there are others. But I am convinced, and have been for a long time, that this is an extraordinary form of theater that audiences will flock to if given the opportunity. This is theater for a quantum universe. Unfortunately I haven't found "a disciple" who agrees with me but one day a young theater artist will see the potential here and run with it. Traditional theater is just a special case of hyperdrama, and the new form demands development and expansion -- and most of all, respect. A Hyperdrama Theater Company will be the wave of the future. (He said for the 100th time.)
Are any ambitious young creative writers out there, who are more interested in developing art than trying to get rich in pop culture? Two big opportunities await you.
For the past decade or two, my last tradition has been to make a pot of blackeyed peas for the Army-Navy game. But I missed it this year, doing readers theater at the time of the game. Alas! I decided to revise the tradition and make my pot on New Year's Day, which I am doing now. Hope to keep it going. Everybody needs a tradition to honor.
