Interview with Noel Farrell
October 13, 2010
Many thanks to Noel Farrell, a.k.a. Don Booker, for posting an interview with me on his blog, The Writing Life and Other Absurdities. Click on the image above to go there.
In future posts I may try to explain some of the answers I gave him, such as why my favorite writer is Ford Madox Ford (is that still true? I have to figure it out).
Redoing First Grade
October 1, 2010
In my novel The Shame of What We Are, which follows a wimpy kid named Art Dennison from age 5 to 17, the 6-year-old version of Art grumbles about his first-grade teacher:
His new teacher’s rule was stupid, Art thought. Making him print when he had already begun using cursive last year in kindergarten. This was going backwards.
Though I refuse to specify how much of the novel is autobiographical, this part certainly is. Like Art, I learned cursive at a very young age, and I can proudly state that I maintained my expertise until recently.
In fact, despite year
s at a keyboard, I thought I was still adept at cursive until I started signing complimentary copies of Art’s story. Confronted with a pen instead of little black keys, I couldn’t manage to put all the letters in each word, couldn’t keep words from jamming into each other, couldn’t keep them in a facsimile of a straight line, and couldn’t compose a short paragraph without at least three scratch-outs.
This is a painful indignity, and it adds to my other problem, which is finding dedicatory words that don’t sound effusive or insincere to my oversensitive ears. I’m comfortable in being jokey or ironic but not in telling people how much they mean to me.
If any first-grade teacher is willing to coach an adult in cursive, and in writing nice, polite messages, please drop me a note—handwritten, please, to prove you can still do it.
Regards, Sim sAn SAmm
Of Cowboys and Comedies
July 31, 2010
As the advance copies of my novel The Shame of What We Are ship to reviewers, I’m appreciating even more the wonderful illustrations done for the book by Tom Jackson. Here’s one of them, a 1950s TV set with weird images of characters from The Danny Thomas Show, or Make Room for Daddy as it was originally known. In the chapter this picture accompanies, the nerdly young hero, Art Dennison, has horrific associations with that program. On the whole, though, he loves the TV shows of the era, and he’s as mesmerized as that inert hand on the armrest implies.
Me, too—I had a real passion for TV in the old days, nothing I can summon up now, and I’m wondering why that’s the case. Is the difference just a child-adult thing, the magic worn off because I’m older? Then why is old-time TV a cult fascination for so many other people, both older and younger than I am?
Video itself was brand-new then, with a freshness we can’t duplicate today. Too, the shows were feel-good concoctions that tapped into a cultural reservoir of notions about right and wrong, good guys versus bad guys. Even though the real world offered the Red Scare, civil rights struggles, and a nuclear arms race, when you trundled off to bed you could be confident that all was right with the world. Comedians like Danny Thomas made it so, along with Superman, Joe Friday on Dragnet, and all the wonderful cowboys who pranced across the screen.
Now our action shows are ambivalent, our comedies uneasy or cringe-worthy. Our reservoir of agreed truths has sprung a BP-sized leak.
Of course, one of the premises of my novel is that the seeds of our bitter, depressed times were there in the supposedly naive postwar era, not just in the political machinations and social injustices but deeper in the American psyche. We killed off our own innocence, pardner. Plugged him dead. I guess that big white hat was just too much to take.
Props to New Jersey
July 12, 2010
Today my editor at New Door Books informed me that the first advance order for my new novel, The Shame of What We Are, has been received—from a person in New Jersey.
The buyer’s address is appropriate because, after a short Prologue, the book begins in Camden in 1951, where the nerdy five-year-old protagonist, Art Dennison, sets out on his tricycle to discover the world. Already trying to escape his family, he’s going to spend his life pedaling from one disaster to another, though he doesn’t know that yet.
My own memories of New Jersey are somewhat ambivalent. For instance:
- As a young editor working in Manhattan, I took the bus home to our apartment in Jersey. One time, absorbed in reverie, or perhaps in revenge fantasies about my boss, I missed my stop and didn’t get out until the next town over. I had no idea where I was: some other town tucked between cloverleaf intersections.
- My son was born while we lived in Jersey. Leaving wife and son in the hospital, I drove home to get some sleep, and next morning found the car and the roads so iced in I couldn’t get anywhere–an immediate comeuppance for someone determined not to be as “absent” as his own father had been. In retrospect, the ensuing phone conversation must have been funny: the young husband claiming he’d tried his mightiest to be with his wife and child, but the roads were just impassable; the young wife sounding patient but perhaps wondering if this was a sign of things to come; the baby blissfully indifferent.
- Young liberal arts majors, we knew nothing about home maintenance and repair. Thus, when the ceiling of our apartment dripped a bit after a rain, we thought little of it. The next day, half the ceiling fell on us. I think this was after the baby came home. He probably realized right away that his parents’ understanding of the world left much to be desired.
Since settling in Philadelphia, I’ve developed a great respect for the state on the other side of the Delaware River. It is, at the very least, a buffer between us and the Mets. And now, I discover, the state likes my book. Thank you, New Jersey!!
(For those who don’t get the soup-can image: Camden has long been the home of Campbell’s, and in the memory of some old-time residents, large swaths of the city used to smell faintly of tomato soup.)
The News from Gridleyville 