2009: The Year in Stuff, Part 1

This end-of-year post isn't late, just well thought-out. What follows are synopses of books and graphic novels read and TV shows discovered in 2009. (Stay tuned for part 2: music and movies, and stuff that made me go Meh.)

Books

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Many of the comic and gaming culture references leaped over my head, but Junot Diaz' story of a depressed, bull-headed, outcast who finds love with the very woman he should run from, is a sumptuous, heady look at one of the most unusual but vivid characters introduced in the aughts.

Mohawk. Richard Russo's tender, tough, surprising first novel vivisects the underpinnings and undoings of a small upper New York town at the end of its industrial era. A fading town, seething secrets, longing, and lust. Half-way through Russo tosses his characters in a cup, shakes them up, then jumps them a couple years ahead. I never knew what was coming, and that's all you can ask of a good read. The prose sometimes smacks of mid-80s work shopping, but is never dull.

Lost City Radio. A thinly-veiled look at contemporary Peru filtered through the story of an unnamed South American city. Daniel Alarcon's odyssey follows Norma, host of a radio program called Lost City Radio, who helps citizens find their relatives lost to jungle wars and political unrest. When her own husband goes missing, boy comes into her life who she thinks can help her uncover the truth. Harrowing, tender, and unforgettable.

2666. The paperback came out in 2009, although I already had the boxed set from 2008. I’m only partially through book four of six, the part about the crimes, but already 2666 is the opus that everyone claims. Richer and looser than The Savage Detectives, Bolano, in his final written work, leads the reader through hundreds of vignettes to shape a tapestry of yearning, forward motion, and loss.


The bravado of the prose is so grounded it keeps you reading even through descriptions of dozens of murders of women in the fictional northern Mexican city of Santa Teresa. And who is this mysterious writer named Archimboldi that a passel of critics are trying to track down? And why does his trail lead them to Santa Teresa?

Revolutionary Road. Stark, honest, naked, vicious. With this portrait of a young couple in the New York suburbs, Richard Yates rewrote the rules for how married characters think and act in literature. A glorious achievement that I will probably reread every few years to remind myself what writers are capable of. A template for how to construct a novel, and how to reveal layers.

Last Night at the Lobster. Stewart O'Nan's portrait of a snow-bound Red Lobster franchise during its last shift before shutting down. The day evolves in crisp detail through the point of view of Manny, the 35 year old restaurant manager. It's a novella, so there's no time for back story or flashbacks. This book doesn't need them. O'Nan clearly presents Manny's longing for a coworker while he simultaneously struggles to buy the perfect Christmas gift for his girlfriend. Quietly hopeful, and full of longing, small betrayals, and loves, this little Lobster delivers big (pull-quote of the year folks! I got a million of 'em).

Graphic Novels
Noir. An anthology of illustrated crime stories in stark but effective black and white, Noir brings together many wonderful contemporary storytellers working different angles of noir. Contributors include Ed Brubaker, Kano, David Lapham, Ken Lizzi, and novelist Chris Offutt. Here we have straight up crime stories of hitmen, kidnappings, robberies, and other shady dealings. Entertaining and thrilling, Noir packs small, lethal punches.


Filthy Rich. Set in 1960s New Jersey and Manhattan, Filthy Rich is a story of how an ex high school football star nicknamed Junk becomes the bodyguard/chaperone to the daughter of a powerful Jersey used car dealer. An assignment for which nothing good can come. Written by Brian Azzarello (also a contributor to Noir) with art by Victor Santos, Filthy Rich is a frenetic, sometimes elliptical tale supported by stylized black and white illustrations of tough brutes with square jaws, hot dames with soft lines, hard hearts, and big boobs. Nice retro feel to the dialogue and characterizations. One hitch to full enjoyment is how Santos' busy frames and fussy lines make many of the male characters look confusingly similar, and the smaller trade paperback-sized format hinders a full appreciation of each panel.

TV
I finally allowed myself to get sucked into the wonderful world of Mad Men, that retro look at the workplace of mid-town Manhattan in the early 60s. Where men were encouraged to smoke, drink, and treat women like objects. And women were only beginning to find ways out of this trap. Mad Men avoids repetition with strong characterization, writing, and stories that never stray far from the strong atmosphere of an advertising company.



Something happened on Wednesday nights that I can’t quite explain: I became a fan of Cougar Town starring Courtney Cox as randy, goofy, selfish, charming real estate agent Jules. It’s a breezy show; each week the story lines concern nothing more than Jules worrying about crow's feet, looking younger, and hanging with her neighbors in a cozy Florida cul-de-sac where everybody has a swimming pool and it’s always sunny! Always! Courtney is gloriously game, and her comic timing, honed from years on Friends, runs circles around the rest of the very funny and believable cast.

What are some of the books you discovered last year? What TV shows can't you live without?

Stay tuned for Part 2!

Editing Blues

My first draft is almost done with me. It’s towed me around since January and now it’s cutting me loose. Which is strange, because now that I’m almost free I plan on turning around and kicking its ass.

The second draft will be unrecognizable to the first with new characters added, old characters cut, locations switched, backstory enhanced, tone tweaked and torqued, and tense changed. Hopefully the new third act will crackle with intensity and purpose, instead of shiver in disgust and turn over to snore louder. I’m crawling/getting dragged to the finish; I’m mere pages from typing The End for no other purpose than to ensure that I don’t keep working on it. All so that I can start planning for the second draft in earnest.

When I’m done with the second draft, what then? Then I’ll be ready to give it to my readers. Writers need good readers. All writing needs the careful eye of an interested second party. If you don’t have a reader, or if your readers blow smoke up your ass, then you need to devise ways of reading, or otherwise approaching your work, in new ways.

The weary eye of an uninterested reader:

One method is to read pages aloud. Better yet, have somebody else read them to you. Another’s cadence, reflecting their sensibility and injecting some subjectivity, will amaze and confound you. Your dialogue will sound flat. Your segues will make no sense. You’ll realize where you forgot character tags. You'll get lost in your own story, and not in a good way. You can see where the blemishes in the skin of your prose are breaking out. Phrases that you thought were adequate or passable become embarrassing pustules. You‘ll want to stop reading and make spot revisions. This is a good thing, a necessary procedure. One of many in the process of revising your pages.

I’m lazy when it comes to revision. But I’m learning to like it more. It’s all in the attitude. I used to get off on writing the first draft. But joining writing groups and taking workshops forced me to rewrite more. When I knew that I was writing for a particular audience, I’d revise the pages enough so that I wasn’t embarrassed to show them. I found myself writing for the readers, and cutting and adding sentences keeping in mind what these people would and would not cotton to. It's the immediate effect of an audience you never knew existed for your work. If you don’t have a writing group, reading pages aloud to yourself can achieve the same effect: you become your audience. You eventually train yourself be the hardest critic of all.

I took a workshop with Chris Offutt a few years ago at the Wesleyan Writers Conference. His M.O. for revising stories stuck with me. He leaves single pages of a story-in-progress around his house. So that when he’s doing something like preparing coffee or making dinner, he can read over a page here and there, coming at familiar work from another angle. He can test each word, each sentence, each paragraph on its own merits, not just within the construct of the story. (Like, I imagine, a surgeon approaches cutting a patient—with a lack of emotional contact.) Offutt’s idea is that all the parts need to be as strong as the whole.

I write on my PC and find that printing out my pages gives me an immediate shift in proximity to my work. My work becomes more than a scroll of text on an endless background, but a topographical region of words constructed to be experienced in a specific way. I get a better sense of how my work flows and can see structure flaws and organization problems earlier and from farther away. It’s another way of reading aloud my work.

A helpful book that’s all about editing your own work is The Artful Edit, by Susan Bell. She includes truckloads of tips about self editing, with examples and advice from other authors who outline methods, both strange and basic, that work for them. And that may work for you.

What are some of the self-editing methods that you use when revising your writing?

Define the Phrase

Kudos to those who took a stab at the definition of the latest phrase (well, word) Blunderbuss:

Cynthia said: An old fashioned gun or amunition of some sort?

Robin said: A blundering person (maybe me stumbling around my house in the wee hours!).

Muriel said: blunderbuss-ancient short gun with large bore firing many balls. (I looked it up in the dictionary).

Well, it's a three-way tie. Each of the entries had some variation of the answer I was looking for. Which is: A short gun, with a wide bore, for carrying slugs: also, a stupid, blundering fellow. Congratulations. You're all winners. How often does that happen? Never. Never never never. Enjoy your hard won win.

Coming soon: the most unusual, difficult phrase to guess. In the world. Ever.