Sunday, June 2, 2013

Sunday Reading

Going to Extremes — Leonard Pitts, Jr. on profiling the dangerous ones among us.

“I know this sounds racist, but . . . ”

So goes the subject line on last week’s email from Bill, a reader. It seems Bill has an idea. Given that “all of the radical terrorists have been Muslims,” he wants the government to mount a program to surveil every follower of Islam who immigrates to these shores. We are, claims reader Bill, “faced with a population who swears an oath to God to kill Americans — not Canadians, not Mexicans, but Americans.” It is, he says, “time we protect ourselves.”

Well.

For our purposes today, we will ignore the fact that Islam is not a race, so animus toward Muslims is not, strictly speaking, “racist.” Bill’s point is clear enough. And his anger is understandable, coming as it does after the Boston Marathon bombing and the savage butchering of a British soldier by Islamic extremists. Predictably, the UK has suffered a rash of right-wing demonstrations and attacks on mosques ever since Lee Rigby’s death. One suspects there’d be no shortage of sympathy for Bill’s suggestion — and for measures even more draconian — both there and here.

But I find myself thinking about white boys.

Consider: This nation’s recent history is stained by repeated acts of school violence. From Newtown, Conn., to West Paducah, Ky., to Santee, Calif., to Eugene, Ore., to Conyers, Ga., to Pearl, Miss., to Jonesboro, Ark. to DeKalb, Ill., to Littleton, Colo., we have seen scores of people killed and injured. The violence has been random, large scale and indiscriminate, identical to terrorism except that it has no political motive. And the profile of the assailants is virtually always the same: white boys and young men from suburban, small town or rural communities.

Small wonder Chris Rock got such a huge laugh when he joked about diving off the elevator when two high school age white kids got on. “I am scared of young white boys,” cracked Rock in 1999.

Writing on Teaching Writing — Jon Reiner: All of a sudden, everyone’s taking or teaching a class on writing.

There have long been three kinds of writers: writers who write for readers (novelists, poets, memoirists, essayists, journalists, etc.); writers who write for other writers (students); and writers who write for themselves (diarists, shipwreck survivors). The digital age has screwed with the dynamics of that trilogy by turning writing from a solitary, exclusive, private act into a collaborative, inclusive, public one. Anyone with a WordPress account can write for readers, and the mushrooming of the number and type of writing programs has been a field crop for that revolution. If you’re going to be a writer, you might as well know something about how to do it, right?

This all crystallized for me when I saw the reaction to an essay I wrote for TheAtlantic.com last month. In it, I used the case of a student writer placing an unexceptionally written but promising piece in The New Yorker online to exemplify the movement of publishers and readers privileging “story” over the craft of writing. That cultural shift has felt like a door blown open to people bursting with tales to tell, and a freshly dug grave for writers who tear at their flesh trying to sculpt perfect sentences (to invoke Truman Capote) while the digital world zips by.

Part of the essay focused on my dissenting view of the University of Michigan’s MFA “Zellowships,” annual $26k stipends that fund students for a year after graduation, endowed by a historic $50 million dollar gift from Helen Zell. I thought the students would be better served getting out of the academy and into the world, and that the money would be better spent supporting publications that paid writers for work that would be read by real readers. In response, Michael Byers, the director of the Michigan program, blasted me online and, impressively, recruited an army of Wolverines to bare their claws. Byers called me “witless” and my writing “horse puckey.” One of his students, in an online magazine essay, referred to me and my ideas as “stupid.” Other readers, however, replied more thoughtfully—agreeing, disagreeing, even apologizing for the Michigan robohate, and sharing their personal stories about why they study writing and what led them to it. Many of the writers were people years beyond the age of traditional writing students, with mortgages and dependents. Why were they moonlighting from or quitting their day jobs to pay someone else to teach them to write?

All writing, all creative work, on some level, is about confirmation. (I still send new work to my old teachers.) The sprouting of writing programs indicates that the lure of having people read and applaud your work still outweighs the fears student writers may have about the pain and aggravation of being called “witless” in a public forum. What’s changed now is the payoff. The monetary rewards for writing are smaller than in the pre-Internet age. Even if every writing program in the country had a Zell grant to float the post-grads, there’s no way that number of writers could enter the profession and sustain the day-to-day of eating and staying dry. But the psychic rewards, the seduction of an audience discovering you right now, have never been greater. Writing classes, which operate with the collaborative-inclusive-public M.O. of Internet writing, are the first step.

Not-So-Ancient History — Frank Rich on the recent past and the future of gay rights, woven into his own past.

In a new century dominated by terrorism and recession, few would deny two big bright spots: the election of an African-American president and the expansion of gay civil rights. The first arrived nearly 150 years after the Civil War. The second happened with the speed of a fever dream. The modern gay-rights movement only got going in 1969, after the Stonewall riots. Now a dozen states have legalized same-sex marriage, a concept unknown in political discourse a mere quarter-century ago. More astounding is the likelihood that a conservative-leaning Supreme Court will expand those marital rights, however incompletely, next month—it took more than a century after the Emancipation Proclamation to end all bans on interracial marriage.

As we just learned, a man can still be murdered for being gay a few blocks away from the Stonewall Inn. But the rapidity of change has been stunning. The world only spins forward, as Tony Kushner wrote. And yet as we celebrate the forward velocity of gay rights, I think we must glance backward as well. History is being lost in this shuffle—that of those gay men and women who experienced little or none of today’s freedoms. Whatever the other distinctions between the struggles of black Americans and gay Americans for equality under the law—starting with the overarching horror of slavery—one difference is intrinsic. Black people couldn’t (for the most part) hide their identity in an America that treated them cruelly. Gay people could hide and, out of self-protection, often did. That’s why their stories were cloaked in silence and are at risk of being forgotten.

This history is not ancient. My own concern about its preservation comes not from some abstract sense of social justice but from my personal experience. I grew up in the Washington, D.C., of the sixties, where the impact of racism was visible everywhere, front and center in my political education. But gays—what gays? No one I knew ever saw them or mentioned them. Not until the eighties—when, like many Americans of that time, I was finally forced by the rampaging AIDS crisis to think seriously about gay people—did I fully recognize that a gay man had been my surrogate parent in high school, when I needed one most. Not that I ever thought to thank him for it.

For younger Americans, straight and gay, the old amnesia gene, the most durable in our national DNA, has already kicked in. Larry Kramer was driven to hand out flyers at the 2011 revival of The Normal Heart, his 1986 play about the AIDS epidemic, to remind theatergoers that everything onstage actually happened. Similar handbills may soon be required for The Laramie Project, the play about the 1998 murder of the gay college student Matthew Shepard. A new Broadway drama, The Nance, excavates an even older chapter in this chronicle: Nathan Lane plays a gay burlesque comic of 1937 who is hounded and imprisoned by Fiorello La Guardia’s vice cops. Douglas Carter Beane, its 53-year-old gay author, is flabbergasted by how many young gay theatergoers have no idea “it was ever that way.”

Clayton Coots, the gay man who changed my life, fell somewhere between The Nance and The Normal Heart on this time line. He was one of countless gay people who were hiding back then, sometimes in plain sight, from their friends, neighbors, relatives, students, and colleagues. In historical terms, back then was only yesterday. Yet much as we might want to reclaim these invisible men and women from the shadows, they continue to slip away. It’s one thing to retrieve the story of a gay American from the pre-AIDS era who was famous or notorious. It’s quite another to track down a closeted gay American of no renown who lived shortly before the gay-rights revolution took hold. I have spent more than twenty years off and on trying to piece together Clayton’s life. Even in death he is still in hiding.

Doonesbury — Make room for Daddy.

Saturday, May 25, 2013

On This Date

In fiction, on Sunday, May 25, 1980, Richard Barlow met Bobby Cramer for the first time. It was at the country club Memorial Day tea dance.

I’ll let you know what happens as soon as I finish writing the story.

Monday, April 29, 2013

Quote of the Day

Ernest Hemingway in his 1954 Nobel Prize speech:

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

You got that right, Papa.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Monday, March 11, 2013

Catching Up

I’ve spent some time this morning catching up on some of the news I’ve missed while I’ve been a little out of it, what with this little cold that I had that kept me away from work on Thursday and having Friday as one of my scheduled vacation days. (Can’t wait to get to the office and see what’s stacked up there….) I also spent most of yesterday at a car show in Coconut Grove. That makes three car show weekends in three weeks.

I’ve also been invited to join an informal writing group that meets once a week to share their work. My first meeting with them is tonight, so I’ll be sharing some of my non-blog/non-theatre writing with them. Then this coming Saturday in Fort Lauderdale there will be a coffee house at the World and Eye Art Center. I’ve been asked to contribute works to that, so two of my short plays — Here’s Your Sandwich and Last Exit — will be staged with the help of some very good friends, Bill and Terri. Oh, and I’m also working on getting ready for the 31st annual Inge Festival in May celebrating the 100th birthday of William Inge, and looking forward to the premiere of my short play Ask Me Anything at Short Cuts 3 at the Lake Worth Playhouse on May 4.

I’m really looking forward to spring break in two weeks.

Sunday, January 27, 2013

But I’m Not a Recluse

Julie sent me this fun new toy that analyzes a paragraph or two of your writing and tells you what famous author you write like. So I plugged in a couple of paragraphs of Bobby Cramer and came up with…

I write like
J. D. Salinger

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

On my first attempt with another paragraph from another chapter, I came up with Cory Doctorow.

Give it a shot and see how you do.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

The Poem

Richard Blanco, son of Cuban exiles (as the Miami Herald is noting), read a poem at the inauguration yesterday.

The tradition of reading a poem at the inauguration goes back at least to Robert Frost in 1961 at the ceremony for John F. Kennedy. As a creative writer, it is nice to see that the tradition is continued, giving the words of the poet the same stage as the prayers, the music, and the official oration.

Here is the poem in its entirety.

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Sunday Reading

Maybe Baby — Lauren Collins comments on where babies come from.

Ross Douthat’s column lamenting the declining American birthrate struck me as creepy when I read it, but I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps as a childless thirty-two-year-old woman—not only an evolutionary dead end, but also a moral zero, in Douthat’s eyes—I failed to produce a response, as I have failed to produce a baby, as result of “late-modern exhaustion—a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies across the globe.” I wanted to tell Ross Douthat that there are many reasons that American women of my generation lag in both time and space, giving birth to fewer children than both our foremothers and our peers in countries such as France and the United Kingdom. Douthat is right that our government’s lack of interest in developing an infrastructure to help working mothers is a large part of the problem, if it is a problem. But so is the moralization of motherhood, which, as writers from Élisabeth Badinter to Pamela Druckerman and Katie Roiphe have recently pointed out, is rife in American society. As Badinter explains in “The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines Women,” people have more babies in France, where breast-feeding is a fifty-fifty proposition and ninety-nine per cent of young children are enrolled in free, state-run daycare, precisely because having a baby in France is not such a freighted ordeal. (By the way, Douthat’s notion that the declining birthrate is linked to “a broader cultural shift away from a child-centric understanding of romance and marriage” is undermined by the fertile, cohabiting French.)

That’s what I wanted to tell Ross Douthat, but I had just gone for a walk, sapping myself of energy that probably would have been better used in childbearing.

The next day, I read that the Duchess of Cambridge was expecting a child, and that she had been admitted to the hospital with hyperemesis gravidarum. She was very early in her pregnancy, and it felt invasive, hearing such intimate news. The way that commentators felt entitled to have an opinion about her womb, and the way they were rooting for her to reproduce, in the name of God and country, gave me a queasy feeling. Douthat wrote that a sagging population is the result of a society that “embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity,” but might not women also be hesitating to have children, or struggling to find a way to do so, in a culture whose conception of family life is so primitive?

Carl Hiaasen has some advice for the GOP.

Based on the grim exit polls, you’d think Republican leaders would comprehend the futility of sucking up to the beet-faced Limbaugh fringe and pushing an agenda that most Americans viewed as extreme, exclusive and intrusive.

That tone had been set in the primaries by the lamest, flakiest set of candidates in modern memory. The only one who ever stood a chance was Romney, who veered so hard to the right that he couldn’t ever find his way back.

Want a sure-fire recipe for blowing another national election?

1. Keep badmouthing the poor, and bowing to the rich. This is an especially clever strategy while the country is clawing out of a recession.

2. To drive away as many women voters as possible, keep talking about banning abortions and cutting off funds for birth control.

3. Another brilliant campaign topic: Outlawing gay marriage. Keep that one on the front burner if you’re keen on alienating millions of highly motivated voters.

4. Don’t forget to bash big government every chance you get — just pray that a major hurricane doesn’t hit, and the whole country doesn’t get reminded of the importance of FEMA, the National Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers and other tax-gobbling slackers.

5. Finally, keeping pushing for laws that would allow anyone who looks vaguely Hispanic to be pulled over in their cars and frisked for citizenship documents. This is how you keep your “base electorate” fired up, your base being angry, white, old and dwindling by the day.

Marco Rubio can’t avoid Iowa with its freakishly homogenous demographics (91 percent white), but he can certainly avoid coming off like a jabbering loon. He’s already separated himself from the likes of Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann by stating that he actually believes in science.

Now we’ll see if the GOP can evolve enough to let him lead the party out of its cave.

An Unexpected Party — Jon Michaud on why he thinks The Hobbit is a better book than its sequel.

With the imminent release of the first of Peter Jackson’s three-part adaptation of “The Hobbit,” I revisited J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1937 novel, which I had not opened since I was a teen-ager. Re-reading “The Hobbit” turned out to be something of a revelation. Formerly, I’d seen it as nothing more than an appetizer for the big feast of “The Lord of the Rings.” Now, I realized, it was a perfecly balanced meal of its own—one that left you feeling sated rather than gorged. A good case can be made that “The Hobbit” is a better and more satisfying read than its gargantuan successor. Herewith, some arguments in the little book’s favor:

1. Only one hobbit.

There’s a reason Tolkien begins both novels by getting his hobbit protagonists out of the Shire. Hobbits, though possessed of many admirable traits, can be kind of a drag, especially in large numbers. One is plenty. Four is too many. After twelve hundred pages of “The Lord of the Rings,” I’d had just about enough of the hobbits’ endless pining for home and their tiresome whingeing about not having a second breakfast. Particularly grating is Sam Gamgee, the loyal, kind-hearted servant who accompanies Frodo all the way to Mt. Doom—and insists on calling him “Mr. Frodo” the entire time. Mindlessly devoted and masochistically self-denying, he is held up as the truest expression of hobbithood. No thanks. I find Bilbo, the hero of the earlier book, a far more engaging character. While he does yearn for the comforts of the Shire during his journey to the Lonely Mountain, he is no straight arrow. He’s an opportunist, willing to fudge the rules when it suits him. He outwits Gollum with a not-quite-kosher riddle. He steals the Arkenstone from Smaug’s hoard and uses it as a bargaining chip; and he hides the magic ring from his companions as long as he can. Next time I re-read “The Lord of the Rings,” I am sure to ask myself, What would Bilbo do?

2. Lots of dwarves.

I propose a rule: the ratio of dwarves to hobbits is directly proportional to the quality of the tale. Wagner and Walt Disney understood this. Pompous and irritable, industrious yet bumbling, dwarves are much more enjoyable to read about than hobbits. Though motivated always by gold, they are makers as well as takers. Skilled blacksmiths, miners, and engineers, they are responsible for many of the wonders of Middle Earth. Moria is to a hobbit hole as the Pyramids are to a thatched-roof cottage. There is just one dwarf in “The Lord of the Rings”: Gimli. He is the son of Gloin, one of Bilbo’s companions in “The Hobbit.” (Gloin does make a brief appearance at the Council of Elrond, but that hardly counts.) Having one dwarf in your epic fantasy novel is like having one acrobat in a circus. You need a troupe! Poor Gimli is charged not only with protecting the ringbearer, but also with providing much of the comic relief in the trilogy. By contrast, “The Hobbit” features a dozen dwarves and is the richer for it. Who can’t sympathize with a group of grumpy, bearded refugees who have been evicted from their homeland by a greedy despot? The fact that they squabble, refuse to listen to directions, and end up starting a war only makes them more fun to read about.

Doonesbury — Then what?

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Sunday Reading

Putting Down the Pen — Philip Roth retires from fiction writing.

On the computer in Philip Roth’s Upper West Side apartment these days is a Post-it note that reads, “The struggle with writing is over.” It’s a reminder to himself that Mr. Roth,who will be 80 in March and who has enjoyed one of the longest and most celebrated careers in American letters, has retired from writing fiction — 31 books since he started in 1959. “I look at that note every morning,” he said the other day, “and it gives me such strength.”

To his friends the notion of Mr. Roth not writing is like Mr. Roth not breathing. It sometimes seemed as if writing were all he did. He worked alone for weeks at a time at his house in Connecticut, reporting every morning to a nearby studio where he wrote standing up, and often going back there in the evening. At an age when most novelists slow down, he got a second wind and wrote some of his best books: “Sabbath’s Theater,”“American Pastoral,”“The Human Stain” and “The Plot Against America.”Well into his 70s, the books, though shorter, came uninterruptedly, practically one a year.But over the course of a three-hour interview — his last, he said — Mr. Roth seemed cheerful, relaxed and at peace with himself and his decision, which was first announced last month in the French magazine Les InRocks. He joked and reminisced, talked about writers and writing, and looked back at his career with apparent satisfaction and few regrets. Last spring he appointed Blake Bailey as his biographer and has been working closely with him ever since.

Mr. Roth said he actually made the decision to stop writing in 2010, a few months after finishing his novel “Nemesis,” about a 1944 polio epidemic in his hometown, Newark.

“I didn’t say anything about it because I wanted to be sure it was true,” he said. “I thought, ‘Wait a minute, don’t announce your retirement and then come out of it.’ I’m not Frank Sinatra. So I didn’t say anything to anyone, just to see if it was so.”

On a table in his living room was a stack of photographs he had just been sent by a cousin: his mother in her bridal gown, the veil trailing down a flight of stairs; a very young Mr. Roth with his parents and his older brother, Sandy, outside their home in Newark; a handsome teenage Roth sitting on a sofa with his first serious girlfriend; Private P. Roth in his Army uniform and helmet.

Nearby was an iPhone he had bought recently. “Why?” he said. “Because I’m free. Every morning I study a chapter in ‘iPhone for Dummies,’ and now I’m proficient. I haven’t read a word for two months. I pull this thing out and play with it.”

Then he corrected himself: “I haven’t read during the day. At night I read. I read for two hours. I just finished a marvelous book by Louise Erdrich, ‘The Round House.’ But mostly I read 20th-century history and biography. I lived then. I was either a child or at school or at work. It’s time I caught up.”

Free Stuff — Ta-Nehisi Coates on what everyone wants.

There was a great deal of talk after the election of the “fever” breaking around the GOP, and the party coming to their senses. Perhaps Bobby Jindal’s aggressive rebuttal evidences some of this.

At any rate, I think it’s worth noting that all political parties organize around their interests, around pay-outs, as Romney calls them. Mitt Romney, for instance, represented a coalition whose stated interests lay in expanding the policies of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, outlawing national protection for abortion, doing nothing about climate change, and decreasing the tax burden on the “makers.”

This is interest-group politics. It is not a nefarious evil. It is the practice of American democracy. At least that’s what it is when taken up by interest groups who are predominantly white, predominantly male, and rooted, electorally, in the old Confederacy. When the practice is taken up by a coalition of women, gays, the young and people of color, many of them tax-payers, it is suddenly deemed a “pay-out” or “stuff,” as it was so recently put.

But they too want “stuff.” They want the right to discriminate against gay families. They want the right to enact poll-taxing. They want the law to force all pregnant women into labor. That many Americans disagree can only be the result of Chicago-style bribery. I win or you cheated.

Who Killed the Twinkie? — James Surowiecki on the struggle for labor and management to adapt.

Hostess’s management certainly bears some of the blame for its failure to successfully adapt, though the company made numerous (and failed) attempts to introduce healthier products. But the simple truth is that this kind of failure is endemic to the system—there are always going to be companies that are unable to change in response to the marketplace. And those companies are supposed to go out of business. Not to be too clichéd about it, but this is what creative destruction is all about.

The problem, of course, is that that destruction is going to upend the lives of thousands of workers. And to the extent, then, that Hostess’s demise shows us something important about the plight of organized labor today, it’s not that greedy workers have precipitated their own demise. It’s rather that one of organized labor’s biggest challenges over the past four decades has been that union strength was concentrated in industries and among companies that, though once dominant players in the postwar American economy, have often ended up in a slow slide to obsolescence, employing fewer and fewer workers and having less and less money to pay them with. In theory, unions could have made up for this by organizing those companies and industries that have become ascendant since the nineteen-seventies, but for a variety of reasons (including a tougher corporate approach to union-busting, a less friendly legal climate, the difficulty of organizing many small enterprises as opposed to a few big factories, and a tendency to protect existing members rather than put real money into organizing) they haven’t. And the paradox is that as unions have gotten smaller and less influential, they’ve also gotten less popular. That’s why it’s so easy for Hostess’s management to spin the anti-union narrative.

The real issue here is that people’s image of unions, and their sense that doing something like going on strike is legitimate, seems to depend quite a bit, in the U.S., on how common unions are in the workforce. When organized labor represented more than a third of American workers, it was easy for unions to send the message that in agitating for their own interests, union members were also helping improve conditions for workers in general. But as unions have shrunk, and have become increasingly concentrated in the public sector, it’s become easier for people to dismiss them as just another special interest, looking to hold onto perks that no one else gets. Perhaps the most striking response to the Hostess news, in that sense, was the tweet from conservative John Nolte, who wrote “Hostess strikers had pension. PENSIONS! What is this 1962?” It was once taken for granted that an industrial worker who worked for a big company for many years would get a solid middle-class lifestyle, and would be taken care of in retirement. Today, that concept seems to many like a relic. Just as Wonder Bread does.

Doonesbury — Invisible Men.

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Now You Know

One of the questions I get asked every so often is where the nickname “Mustang Bobby” came from.

An excerpt from my novel-in-progress Bobby Cramer answers the question.

It is May 17, 1980, graduation day for Bobby from Winchester Academy in North Andover, Massachusetts. His parents are there, along with his friends Jill, Josh, and Garrett.

They got to the front of the dorm where Dr. Cramer had parked. “Well, Bobby, we’re going to head back to the inn for a little nap, and then we’ve been invited to dinner with Don and Stephen, so you’re on your own tonight. But I think Josh and Jill have something planned for you, isn’t that right?”

“Last night at Sully’s,” said Jill. “Pizza with everything and it’s all on us. Garrett, you’re coming, too,” she demanded, “even if you have to drive back from Wellesley Hills or wherever the hell it is you live.”

“So we’ll see you first thing in the morning,” his father said. He turned to leave, and stopped. “Oh, just a minute…. I knew I was forgetting something.” He looked out over the parked cars and waved. There was a rumble as an engine started, and then out of the row of parked cars came Mr. Odenkirk driving his red 1966 Mustang GT. It was freshly waxed, the chrome was shining, and the top was down. He pulled up in front of them, got out of the car, and gave the keys to Dr. Cramer.

“Congratulations,” his father said.

“What?” replied Bobby.

“It’s your Mustang, Bobby,” said his father, handing him the keys.

“Ha,” Jill laughed. “That’s what I’m going to call you from now on: ‘Mustang Bobby.’ It’s perfect.”

“You mean…” Bobby stammered, “it’s mine?”

“All yours. Mr. Odenkirk and I had a little chat last fall. He loves the car, but he can’t drive it much.”

“And it should be back with its original owner,” interjected Mr. Odenkirk. “My dad and I have just been taking care of it all these years until it could come back home.”

“Get in,” insisted Jill. Bobby did, and Jill took several more pictures. “I am so calling you ‘Mustang Bobby’ for the rest of your life.”

“All right,” his father said. “I hope you weren’t counting on a Porsche or a BMW.”

“No, Dad, it’s…. Thank you.” He hugged his parents again.

“Oh, as much as I’m sure you’d love to start out life with it on a road trip, I’ve arranged for a carrier to pick it up on Monday. It should be back in Toledo by the end of the week.”

After they left, Jill said, “Okay, Sully’s at six. Be there.”

“I will.”

“All right. Yip yah, Mustang Bobby,” she called as she went to her car.

“You know that’s your name from now on, don’tcha?” said Garrett.

“Yeah,” said Bobby. “I kinda like it.”

So now you know.

Friday, October 19, 2012

Stop The Presses

Newsweek goes all digital.

From the start, it was an unwieldy melding of two newsrooms: a legacy print magazine, Newsweek, combined with an irreverent digital news site, The Daily Beast. It had high-profile ownership, first in Sidney Harman and then in Barry Diller, and it was held together by the experienced magazine editor Tina Brown, looking for one more big hit on her résumé.

But on Thursday, Newsweek buckled under the pressure afflicting the magazine industry in general and newsweeklies in particular, with their outdated print cycles that have been overtaken by the Internet.

In a message posted on The Daily Beast, Ms. Brown announced that Newsweek would cease print publication at the end of the year and move to an all-digital format. The transition, she wrote, would include layoffs, and at a staff meeting Thursday morning, she grew teary-eyed when she told employees that she didn’t know how many people would be let go.

The staff remaining will publish a digital magazine called Newsweek Global. Readers will continue to pay for Newsweek, Ms. Brown said, and some Newsweek articles will appear on The Daily Beast, which will continue as a free Web site. The end of the print edition will help stem Newsweek’s estimated $40 million in annual losses.

I used to have a subscription to Newsweek, but I let it lapse about five years ago when it became a thin shadow of its former self and when the editorial content went from hard news coverage to fluff and cover stories like “Heaven Is Real.” It was becoming the National Enquirer on better paper.

Ironically, I had switched to Newsweek from Time because that magazine had gone through the same transition; it was People without the pictures, and its editorials were toady pieces for the Reagan and Bush administrations.

I don’t know if this is the end of weekly magazine journalism as we know it. I still get The New Yorker and I still read it, so there’s a place and a market — albeit much smaller now — for journalism that honors the art of writing. I think what killed Newsweek in print is that they stopped writing about the news in a way that readers would want to keep their work rather than just scan it and click on the next link.

Friday, October 12, 2012

Short Takes

Turkey says the Syrian plane they stopped was carrying ammo.

Secretary of Defense Panetta says cyber intruders have already arrived in the U.S.

Jobless claims fall to lowest level since 2008.

Chinese writer Mo Yan wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Tropical Update: TS Patty is heading west across the Bahamas.

The Tigers shut out the A’s 6-0; they are on their way to the American League championship series.

Monday, September 3, 2012

Labor Day

If you have the day off, take just a moment to remember why we get the day off in the first place, then enjoy it. I certainly will. I plan to work on something that is a labor of love… my long and as-yet unfinished novel.

Last year I posted a reply to a discussion over at SFDB in defense of organized labor. It still resonates today, especially with the beating unions are taking from all sides.

Having grown up in a union town that was near a large city that relied on union labor, I’ve come to the conclusion that most of the people who most hate unions are folks who think that it is unconscionable that workers should have the same rights as the managers and the owners of the company. How dare they demand a living wage and safe working conditions. Who do they think they are?

Yeah, yeah; in every large group there are bad apples and examples of bad faith and extremism. Welcome to the human race. The Republicans hold the unions up as the boogeyman of the Western world and label them as thugs… and give tax breaks to the corporations because they know that if they don’t, the corporations will kneecap them. Not literally; they’ll just stop giving them money, which, in corporate circles, is thuggery. The people who whine about “class warfare” always turn out to be the ones who are winning the war.

Perhaps one of the reasons that union membership is down is that unions have accomplished a lot of what they set out to do 100 years ago. Factories are safer, working hours are reasonable, wages are better than the minimum, and pensions provide some security. The unions have learned, however awkwardly, to accept that they have been successful, but they also know that if some people had their way in the world, they would turn back to clock to 1911, put children to work, take away the healthcare, and demand more production. After all, it works for the Chinese, and look how they’re doing.

By the way, not all union workers are Democrats; they certainly weren’t were I grew up. A lot of them are hardcore Republicans or conservatives — including police officers — who don’t care about the politics; they just want to be treated fairly. And a lot of people who are not union members are working under union contracts; in most places there is no requirement to join a union to benefit from their efforts. So while actual union membership may be down to 15%, the number of people who are part of the union is far greater. That includes public sector jobs as well as private. So the next time someone feels the urge to union-bash, be sure you’re not peeing in your own campfire.

Full disclosure: I am a dues-paying member of a union of sorts; I belong to the Dramatists Guild. It provides services for writers and lyricists and makes sure that when our works are produced, we have a fair contract and get paid our royalties. The joke among us is that we don’t go on strike; we just get writers’ block.

Happy Labor Day.

Labor Day

Last year I posted a reply to a discussion over at SFDB in defense of organized labor. It still resonates today, especially with the beating unions are taking from all sides.

Having grown up in a union town that was near a large city that relied on union labor, I’ve come to the conclusion that most of the people who most hate unions are folks who think that it is unconscionable that workers should have the same rights as the managers and the owners of the company. How dare they demand a living wage and safe working conditions. Who do they think they are?

Yeah, yeah; in every large group there are bad apples and examples of bad faith and extremism. Welcome to the human race. The Republicans hold the unions up as the boogeyman of the Western world and label them as thugs… and give tax breaks to the corporations because they know that if they don’t, the corporations will kneecap them. Not literally; they’ll just stop giving them money, which, in corporate circles, is thuggery. The people who whine about “class warfare” always turn out to be the ones who are winning the war.

Perhaps one of the reasons that union membership is down is that unions have accomplished a lot of what they set out to do 100 years ago. Factories are safer, working hours are reasonable, wages are better than the minimum, and pensions provide some security. The unions have learned, however awkwardly, to accept that they have been successful, but they also know that if some people had their way in the world, they would turn back to clock to 1911, put children to work, take away the healthcare, and demand more production. After all, it works for the Chinese, and look how they’re doing.

By the way, not all union workers are Democrats; they certainly weren’t were I grew up. A lot of them are hardcore Republicans or conservatives — including police officers — who don’t care about the politics; they just want to be treated fairly. And a lot of people who are not union members are working under union contracts; in most places there is no requirement to join a union to benefit from their efforts. So while actual union membership may be down to 15%, the number of people who are part of the union is far greater. That includes public sector jobs as well as private. So the next time someone feels the urge to union-bash, be sure you’re not peeing in your own campfire.

Full disclosure: I am a dues-paying member of a union of sorts; I belong to the Dramatists Guild. It provides services for writers and lyricists and makes sure that when our works are produced, we have a fair contract and get paid our royalties. The joke among us is that we don’t go on strike; we just get writers’ block.

Happy Labor Day.

Friday, June 15, 2012

Blogging Note

Today is the start of the CityWrights playwriting symposium here in Miami, and I’ll be taking part in it all weekend, so blogging will be light and variable through Sunday.

Meanwhile I’ll be hanging out with some fellow playwrights and producers from here in South Florida and around the country. Last night we got it started with a little launch party high atop a bank building in downtown Miami with a spectacular view of Biscayne Bay and meeting up the guest speakers including Christopher Durang, whom I had met at the Inge Festival in 2008.

Anyway, that’s what’s on the agenda for the next couple of days.

Blogging Note

Today is the start of the CityWrights playwriting symposium here in Miami, and I’ll be taking part in it all weekend, so blogging will be light and variable through Sunday.

Anyway, that’s what’s on the agenda for the next couple of days.

Friday, May 25, 2012

Pay to Play

I’ve been invited to attend CityWrights, a weekend gathering of playwrights here in Miami in June. It’s going to be a busy few days of seminars and workshops, and it will be a chance to connect — and re-connect — with a lot of important people in the business. I’ll also get a chance to submit one of my short plays to the City Theatre that puts on the Summer Shorts series every year. I am really looking forward to it.

The registration fee is $275 (I don’t need to book a hotel room; I live here) and it gets me into all of the events during the day. That’s a pretty steep price; that’s more than what I pay to attend the Inge Festival (not including airfare), but then, they’re doing it at a very nice venue and bringing in some great people. It also goes to support a worthy cause: local theatre and local playwrights here in South Florida.

So, I am humbly offering you the chance to support a worthy cause; namely, help me with the registration fee. If you are so inclined, click on the Donate button on the right sidebar under “Shameless Begging” and give whatever you want.

I am willing to offer something in exchange other than just a series of blog posts about theatre next month. For a donation of $30 or more, I will send you a copy of my play Can’t Live Without You in acting edition form, neatly bound. Just drop me an e-mail with your mailing address once you’ve made your donation.

I realize that this is the first time I’ve ever asked for direct donations (my hints in the past were too subtle, I guess), and I’m aware of the fact I am asking a large favor. If you can help, thank you. If not, thank you anyway.

Pay to Play

Friday, April 20, 2012

Inge Festival — Day 1

From the William Inge Festival: I spent most of the day (Thursday) participating in discussions on such things as playwriting, diversity in theatre, and just generally basking in the glow of being with other people who love to write as much as I do.

I could give you a detailed run-down of all the topics we covered, but actually, you had to be there, so I won’t do that. (And I hear a collective “Whew!” from the readership.) Just suffice it to say that I had a great time; it’s the four days of the year that I get to eat, drink, and breathe theatre, and it’s a great deal of fun.

The best times are the times I spend just sitting around and talking to people. I had a long and meaningful conversation with Barbara Dana over lunch where she gave me some wonderful insight to a role in a play that I’m working on. (I told her to not be surprised, then, if the role ends up sounding a lot like her.) I also spent some time talking to a student who is determined to become a director, which means he was taking copious notes as we talked about the writing process. The takeaway from all of this seems to be that the best things that happen here are the things that we’re inspired to do once we go home and get back to work on our dreams and visions.

Last night we had a concert reading of The Most Deserving, a new play by Catherine Trieschmann, who is the New Voices playwright this year. New Voices is the Inge Festival’s way of seeking out new plays and playwrights and showcasing their work, and this play, a comedy about a small-town arts council giving away grant funds, was a funny and interesting story.

Today we’ll have a conversation with David Henry Hwang, this year’s honoree, and tonight will be a big gala dinner with singing and skits and a lot of fun and chat in between.

PS: Sales of my script seem to be doing well; they had to replace the supply that was out on the table because they’d sold some.

Inge Festival — Day 1

Today we’ll have a conversation with David Henry Hwang, this year’s honoree, and tonight will be a big gala dinner with singing and skits and a lot of fun and chat in between.

PS: Sales of my script seem to be doing well; they had to replace the supply that was out on the table because they’d sold some.

Friday, March 2, 2012

In Passing

There’s been a lot of reaction in the blogosphere about the sudden death yesterday of Andrew Breitbart, who made his name and reputation as an outspoken and combative conservative writer.

I’m sorry for his family, but I wonder if I would like to live the kind of life so that when I died a large number of people who didn’t know me were glad to hear that I was dead.