A real bookstore

I dropped into Powell's Bookstore in downtown Portland and in the space of ten minutes found $50 worth of books I wanted.  Powell's carries both new and used volumes, side by side, so I went to the Irish history section and there were three titles I just had to buy, including one written by a Protestant Brit with "The murderous history of Ulster's Catholics" in the sub-title.  It was written in 2000 so should prove interesting.  The other two I bought were published in 1972.

Man, I could have spent all day in that place and probably broken my budget, big-time, before I was done. I really miss stores like this.  Borders and Barnes&Noble never took over, and with Amazon it's hard as hell to find anything interesting unless you know exactly what you're looking for and they happen to offer something else like it as a suggestion.  Some of the crap that came up through that method...well, let's just say there was nothing to link them except a single word in the title.

But a store like Powell's...you can dig through new books and find old ones right beside them that are all on the same subject.  It hurts that this is vanishing.

It's funny, but my whole life has been tied up in books, even when I had my eyes on the film prize.  I haunted bookstores before I returned to college and then began working in them.  And I've been most at ease in that environment.  So now I'm finally writing novels and sometimes wonder if I've wasted my life and the opportunities given me, but I can't say that I have (not any longer).   It's where I was meant to be, and as much as I like to think things might have been different had I followed this path instead of that trail...I don't think anything would have turned out differently.

I am what I am...a bookworm devouring stories.  Right now I feel a bit fat and happy, because I'm still dealing with books, albeit in a roundabout way.  Won't keep me from whining, every so often, but then again, what could?

Portland is pretty

From what I've seen.  Neat homes.  Green hills.  Mount Hood standing grandly in the background under a semi-overcast sky.  But it's got some weirdness going on here -- like the 5 freeway, which goes from San Diego up to the Canadian border.  It has a drawbridge between Oregon and Washington.  Man, I knew they weren't crazy about each other but to use the Columbia River as a sort of moat with a way to cut off the flow of traffic is a bit much, I think.  But what's worse?  They misidentify their signs.

I was heading down the 5 from Vancouver, Washington and a sign said my exit was 306B.  So I'm looking for 306B but all that comes up is 306 and it doesn't have my street's name on it, just the name of the racetrack near my hotel, and the exit after that is 1.5 miles down the road.  So I had to go down and turn around.  Seems the 306 exit is only referred to as 306B going north, because there's a 306A that goes nowhere and has no exit off the freeway on the southbound side.  Nice of them to say so.  There were others...but that was the most fun.

My plane ride was over 6 hours long, but I had a movie to watch and listened to some music till my laptop's battery gave out.  I don't know what it is about this trip, but I've been losing things.  I left my work cell phone on the plane and had to go get it, then today I left my jacket at the warehouse I was working in.  I think.  It's not in the car and I don't remember taking it anywhere else.  I'll check in the morning.

I'm too tired to continue.  It was a long day and I'm three hours out of sorts.

JetBlue is not cool

They do not have AC adaptors on their long distance planes, so my laptop will be juiceless before I get to Portland, and vise verse (and I always think of how Billie Holiday pronounced that little phrase in "Born Yesterday" -- "VICE-ah VOICE-ah").  BUT...they do offer free TV and music if you bring your own headphones.  NOT the same thing...but does cut down on my superficial grumbles.

I'll also be done with "Ghosts of Belfast" before I'm halfway there.  Stuart Neville's a good novelist.  The book's following the typical path for a thriller, but he's inventive enough with it to where I don't care.  Hell, even though the second this one character named Marie was introduced I knew exactly where it would head, I'm letting it lead me.  And despite myself, I like Gerry, his hit-man-hero-psycho-wanna-be-decent-guy.  But to be honest, had I not already bought the book before I read his short story in "Requiems for the Departed," I wouldn't have even considered digging into more of his work.  It wasn't bad; it just was so typical and lazy a piece of work, I didn't have very high hopes.

However, it's got Brendan and me talking, again...which is a weird thing for me to say, since in "Ghosts..." Gerry is haunted by the 12 people he killed until he kills the men who brought about their deaths, and he's the only person who can see them.  But it fits in with Irish manner and mythology, I suppose.  The past and the dead mean more to so many than do the living and the future.  Of course that's not just in Ireland.  Look at Israel and the Palestinians and the whole damned area around them; insults from five centuries ago are still cause enough to kill and destroy.  It's too damn typical of the human race.

But he's shown me the way to get him and Joanna together and off to Grianan Aileach circle fort.  I have the five reasons I need for it to work.

That's something people never understood about my screenplays, even when I told them -- everything in them has five reasons to be part of the story, and they would interlink.  If I removed one or tried to change it, everything else would have to be redone, as well.  I think the people rewriting "Lavender Curse" and "Bugzters" are finding that out the hard way...but too late; all their rewriting is doing is destroying the scripts' prospects.  And I'm sure they'll think they did their best to make them work right and will just never see they shot themselves in the foot.  But they're not my stories, anymore, so I have no say in them.  That still pisses me off...even if reality has to be allowed to assert its dominance every now and then.

I sound arrogant.  Good.  I used to be this way about my artwork but I never felt I was good enough to be like that about my writing.  Not until the last few years.  Too bad I didn't feel this way 30 years ago; who knows what I could have accomplished.

So...mo' snow, don't ya know?

Close to an inch fell while I was working, today, spread over the course of a few hours.  It's hard to believe there's still the ability for it to fall this late in the season, but I remember when I went to Yosemite in June (many MANY years ago) and found snow still on the ground.  It was so freaky.

I went with my folks just after graduating from college.  It was blistering hot when we left Texas (my father had a red and white 1975 Chrysler Cordoba with "fine Corinthian leather" seats and a so-so AC), and it stayed hot as we drove through New Mexico and Arizona...until we got up to Flagstaff, where it was nice and cool.  Then came my first trip to the Grand Canyon (warm), across the Hoover Dam (hot) and stopping at a Deli in Las Vegas (DAMNED hot).  I tried borscht for the first time, played the slots at Ceasar's and wound up leaving that town with $45 more than I'd started with (haven't done that since).  Then we trekked up to Yosemite (and nearly burned up the brakes on the car coming down the mountain) and stayed a night in San Francisco.  My first time there, too.  Driving down to LA, we took PCH as far as we could, stayed the night in LA and wound up driving to San Diego to visit my sister and brother.  It was nice.

I have the photos in one of my albums.  I should scan them, sometime, before they fade too badly.

I guess I'm remembering that trip of firsts because this is my first trip to Portland, and it's a city I'd always intended to visit, someday.  I'm told it's lovely and livable.

An online friend of mine has just decided it's time to begin AA classes.  I told him he's being strong, taking this path.  He doesn't really believe me.  But I've seen how hard it is for people in his situation and I can only wish him the best...but I've learned the hard way that this is a journey he has to walk on his own.  He has to determine the direction and he has to want to stick to it.  I will give him any support and reinforcement I can, but I will not push.  That doesn't work.

It amazes me how many people will force members of their family into rehab and attending AA meetings, thinking that will sober them up.  It won't.  Invariably those who are forced to get clean...be it through emotional blackmail or threats or legal action...will not stay clean.  Because deep down they really don't want it.  I've seen it proven over and over with family and friends, not to mention these celebrity junkies who get ordered by a judge to $1000 a minute clinics...and still wind up in a crash and burn.

But I think this guy does want it.  And I'm sending him all the positive thoughts I can.  He IS strong...because it takes a strong man to change his life, like this.  And if he wants to succeed, he will.

Rolling the dice, as it were

I just sent "The Lyons' Den" off to another publisher who's willing to look at it.  It'll be interesting to see if they finally take it since it's really a post-queer novel.  The closest this book comes to making a big deal about being gay in the USA is pointing out that Tad is one of those "Okay, I'm a fag, so what?" kind of guys...and Daniel's psycho mother and sister use his homosexuality against him for their own means.  Important to be sure, but beyond that no one else gives a damn.  Which is how it should be.

The first publisher I sent it to was willing to look at it because they bought my novella, "Perfection", to put in their anthology.  In fact, they'd liked that story so much they agreed to take it even though it's twice as long as they normally accept...and they paid me double their usual rate.  The big drawback to them is, the book wouldn't come out for a year.  The big plus to that is, a lot of their list is carried in mainstream stores like Barnes & Noble.  They'll get back to me in a couple of months so we'll see how that goes.

I halfway wish I'd approached them for "Bobby Carapisi" but I was heavy into my current publisher at the time and he did get the books out there very quickly.  The fact is, I really appreciate him being willing to let me do my thing with the titles and suggestions on the cover art.  The only complaint I have is that he can't pay me what he owes me...well that and he started handing me the same nonsense he hands his other authors, even though he knows I know better.  It's like he can't help himself -- he's got to put out his spin on things, even when it flies in the face of things he told me only the week before.  He says he used to be in politics; I believe him. But enough about that.

Man, I love Kurosawa's films.  Something I realized about them long ago is, even when he's making a simple police-procedural story (like we get constantly from US TV and movies) he gets you so invested in the characters you get lost in them.  "Stray Dog" is a case in point.  In 1949 Tokyo, a rookie cop's pistol is stolen and he goes looking for it.  He pairs up with an experienced cop and as they search, they find it's being used in ever more violent crimes.  Sounds like an episode of CSI or Law and Order, right?  Except the rookie's growing sense of guilt and desperation as his pistol is used to steal and then to kill takes this out of the realm of the simple and puts it into the existential. Parallels emerge between the cop's and the suspect's lives, showing how easily each could have wound up like the other.  He even goes nearly mad towards the end...until given a chance at redemption.

The same thing happened with "High and Low."  A simple kidnapping and recovery story turned into a meditation on honor and evil, on how one keeps one's decency intact in an uncaring world.  And "Rashomon" took a rape and murder and questioned just how honest we can be about ourselves, even when we're dead.  Questioned if the truth was ever truly knowable.  He was a phenomenal storyteller.

Today it snowed in Buffalo.  The middle of April, Palm Sunday...and snow.  Amazing.

Wars begun and based on stupidity

More of Walt Whitman and his times, especially in dealing with him first hearing about the firing on Fort Sumter.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/how-manhattan-drum-taps-led/

It was the beginning of the end for the South, though you could never have convinced them of that at the time.  They won.  They beat down a Yankee presence in their genteel little world.  They were on the road to saving their way of life -- owning slaves -- and the slave owners were doing it with the help of huge numbers of white sharecroppers and shopkeepers, almost none of whom even thought about possessing another human being.

Today, you still hear from the right wing how the Civil War was about states' rights.  That is a flat out lie, and a foul one, too.  In another part of the "Disunion" blog, Jamie Malanowski writes, "Six hundred thousand Americans did not die for anything as nebulous as states rights or tariffs. They died because slaveholders wanted to preserve their human property and expand their slaveholding empire, and they were willing to demolish the union and bring tragedy to nearly every family in this land in order to protect their right to own human beings."

We have the same thing happening today, with the same scum leading the charge.  The GOP(which doesn't give a damn about the deficit, not really) will happily destroy the country to gain power and put blacks, queers, Mexicans and liberals back in their places -- allowing rich white men to run the US like it's their personal corporation.  You really should read "Disunion" on a daily basis and get the full idea of how little things have changed in the last 150 years.  It's spooky.

I was just remembering an argument I got into with my step-father about Vietnam.  We were living in Honolulu, which was an R&R station for servicemen fighting in that war, because he was stationed at Hickham AFB.  During a trip to Waikiki's Fort Derussy Beach, we got caught in one of the city's nasty traffic jams.  It was hot, nasty hot and even more humid than usual.  And just behind us, to the right of our borrowed car, were two bus loads of young airmen being ferried to that same beach.  Young?  Hell, most of them were boys of 18 and 19 years...in body (which I can see from hindsight; I was only fifteen at the time so they were all "men" to me).,,but what's stayed with me ever since was how their eyes were a hundred years old.  And how their bodies were almost limp from weariness.  And how their faces trailed sweat and sorrow, made ten times worse because the busses were not air conditioned.  That didn't feel right, to me.  They were off fighting in a hideous war; they should have been treated like kings when they came here for a couple weeks of rest from death and destruction.

As if to mock my thought, we heard sirens screaming behind us.  Traffic was forced to crowd tight to the right so a motorcade could whip by, headed for one of the finer hotels on the island.  In that procession's limousine was the crown prince of Japan and his wife, royalty treated with kid gloves.  I watched them whip past then glanced at the boys in the busses...and nothing registered in their expressions.  Until I saw one startlingly lovely kid with sun-reddened skin, who was resting his chin on his left hand as his left arm leaned out the window, shift three of his fingers oh-so-slightly down his left cheek so the middle finger was just visibly standing alone, sending that oh-so-elegant couple a salute of complete contempt as they whipped on, unaware of the life around them.

I started laughing.  He noticed and shifted his eyes down to look at me, and half a smile came to his face.  And I nodded.  Then one finger shifted to make his signal into the "Peace" sign, still pressing against his cheek.  I sent it back to him...just as my step-father looked around to ask me what I was laughing at.  He saw it and saw it was aimed at the busload of servicemen...and he blew up.  How dare I insult those poor boys who were fighting for our freedom by sending that vile signal to them?  In answer, I shifted its focus to him...and he damn near hit me.

The rest of the argument was typical teenager-against-parental-authority crap.  But I seriously think that was the beginning of my trek to liberal-land, because the way those two people of no consequence except by birth were being treated with such honor and respect while these kids who were being killed and maimed and shattered for life over something that proved to be based on a politician's lie were being ignored...it was just plain wrong.  Completely disrespectful of the meaning of humanity.

I've never blamed soldiers for being sent to fight wars.  I blame the men of power and consequence to initiate them.  It wasn't the sharecroppers who fired on Fort Sumter, it was Jefferson Davis and his cabinet who issued the order.  It wasn't the farm boys and factory workers who began WW1, it was the Kings and Kaisers and Tsars who let a family spat escalate into a human calamity.  It wasn't the airmen and marines and grunts and sailors who got us into Vietnam; it was Johnson putting over a lie about an attack in the Gulf of Tonkin.  It wasn't America that wanted to invade Iraq after 9/11; it was Bush and his administration who terrorized most people into thinking there was a need for it.  (I exempt WW2 from this because Hitler was evil, incarnate, and had to be stopped...but neither do I completely absolve the German people for letting themselves be led into war and the holocaust; it was too damned obvious what the man was doing, and too damned few of them even tried to stop it.)

 I don't know what this ramble is about.  I've spent most of the day doing nothing.  But it just bubbled up and I wrote it...and now I'm going to watch "Stray Dog", again.  One of Kurosawa's early gems with a heartbreaking performance by a young Toshiro Mifune.

Avoidance is a sneaky devil

The whole situation that occurred last night was nothing but my dancing around the fact that I now need to settle down and get back to work on "Place of Safety."  The fact is, it's probably a good idea to get it done before the end of the world...which, with all the disasters and absolute assholiness (and I deliberately spelled it this way) going on everywhere right now, may come sooner than later.  It seems even Hamas, a terrorist group that now runs the Gaza Strip, has been called too moderate by some Islamic freaks, who then brutally murdered an Italian man who was trying to help the Palestinian people.

That's something radicals never seem to understand -- there will always be someone more radical than they are, be it to the left or right.  And once a person or group is radicalized, you cannot stop them or control them.  Which the GOP is finding out about the Tea Partiers.  They fed them lies and half-truths and all sorts of snake oil, thinking they could control them, and now the little pinheads have their minds made up.  Now the Tea Party idiots would happily let the US government shut down and default on its debts just to get their own way, all lead by their figurehead-bitches, Sarah and Michelle.  They've taken "No Surrender" to its logical conclusion and don't care if it means the end of life as we know it...and the Republicans have become their attack dogs, whether they want to be or not, because one wrong step and they get banished from the pack.

This is also how the Unionists were in Northern Ireland...how Ian Paisley used to be before he finally realized he was achieving nothing with his brand of absolute hatred.  It was like that for hundreds of years throughout Ireland, with Protestants' hatred of Catholics used to excuse all sorts of abuses, and it became even more vicious after partition.  That's when anti-Catholicism and hate were codified into law.  But you could not get any Protestant at that time to admit they were even being unfair, let alone unreasonable.  It was all the Catholics' fault for being Catholic.

So now that Paisley and Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein are working together to build peace, they're faced with the specter of radicals within their own ranks who will bomb and kill just to make themselves a name.  A young Catholic PSNI cop was killed recently and people on both sides of the divide got together to protest it.  But no one's been caught or turned in, yet...so there are even some who will still protect those who want nothing but chaos.

And that is what it boils down to -- those who want chaos instead of order.  There are a myriad of reasons for people to try and bring that about, and  you cannot stop it with reason or pleading or even imprisonment.  I'm reminded of how the world used to be 2000 years ago.  To illustrate it, I'll paraphrase an old saying, "The more I see of men, the more I understand why armies used to just wipe out cities they conquered."  It cut down on problems of revenge that would crop up later if they didn't do that.

Which leads me back to my avoidance.  I know I'll be dealing with this in the book, to an extent.  So maybe it's best I have a job and these travels I must take, since they keep me from getting lost in the narrative of anger and hate.  Man, while writing the third draft of "The Lyons' Den" I started getting just as crazy as Daniel.  So I identify deeply with my characters and their trials, travails and tribulations. (And I know according to "Strunk & White" I'm supposed to put a comma after "travails," but I just can't; it just does not look right to me.)

ANY-way...sometimes chaos is good for an artist.  To use another quote -- "Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."  (Hat tip to "Harry Lime" in "The Third Man.")

What more could I add to that?

I can't do it

I just about convinced myself I could re-write KAZN, an action-suspense script I wrote years ago about a young soldier seeking vengeance on the man he believes had his family killed, only to start falling for the man's daughter.  In every way it was a very commercial script -- a hero who speaks little but does one hell of a lot, a love interest, a point in the script where I've been told by readers they honestly thought I was going to kill the guy off, intrigue, some major fight sequences and a finale where four different groups are going at each other in a closed space.  Commercial in every way except the lead was Russian.

Well...I thought for some wild and crazy reason I could shift this story to one following an American soldier instead of the Russian.  And tried to, this evening.  And it was a struggle from the first moment.  I finally tried to approach it as a new story...but that only made things a little better.  So now, after hours working at it, I can see the script is what it is.  It came to me correct and ready and for me to change its characters just in the hope of making a buck would be a violation of the story's integrity.

So...I'm dropping it.  Learning, yet again, that once the story and characters are set, they're set right.  And I mess with that at my own peril.  Maybe the lesson will finally engrave itself in my psyche.

I have a number of scripts where things weren't quite right so messing with them made a huge difference and let them become right.  Like "Still Life."  For years I had it set in Houston and it worked all right, but I was never completely comfortable with it.  Then I shifted it to Dublin and it fell into place.  And now I can't even think of it being in Houston, anymore.  Same for "Coby O' and the Pink Palace of Texas".  Making Coby gay and the guy he's interested in straight-but-not-narrow with the whole thing being about gay rights being cynically used to cover up a crime gave the story life and heart and soul instead of just action.  Now I know what it's about.

I have a couple other scripts that never settled down, so I may revisit them later on and see what we come up with.

Portland bound

Off to Portland, after all.  Just a whirlwind trip of two days and heading back on a red-eye flight that gets into JFK at 5:30 am, but it'll be interesting.  I've never been to Portland.

Post writing mush has entered my brain.  This happens whenever I get focused in on a story to the point I'm thinking of nothing else (when not at work) and then it's done and my mind takes its time winding down.  I wind up piddling time away and sort of catching up on paperwork and errands and crap like that.  I tried to hurry it along by reading but my inner critic kicked in and nothing much happened except I wished I hadn't bothered with some of the stories.  They didn't take my mind off of anything.

So now what?I have a movie from Netflix I could watch, but it's Visconti and I get the feeling it's a tragedy and I don't feel like that, right now.  I have other books to read...which might be the best thing to do, right now.  That or I could shift my much to another rewrite of a script and see what happens there.  I dunno.

I think I'll just go wandering, mentally, for a while and see where it takes me.  After all, not all who wander are lost.

I didn't listen to Obama's speech because I knew he was going to kiss more GOP ass...and he did in some ways but not in others, so I'm unsure how to react.  I like the "tax the rich" part because many of them are getting away with paying nothing while the people who can least afford it get plundered.  But he's still doing massive cuts and using accounting tricks to make them seem less threatening than they are.  And this is just the beginning of the negotiations, so by the time it's done, the GOP will be killing people because they slashed Medicare and Medicaid and Planned Parenthood while scum like Donald trump, the Koch brothers and GE will keep getting money back from the IRS even if they never paid a dime.  We're back in the age of the Robber Barons.

Mark Twin's letter to Walt Whitman

This shows just how great a writer Mark Twain was, a simple letter written to Walt Whitman on the occasion of his 70th birthday.  Wow.
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Hartford, May 24/89

To Walt Whitman:

You have lived just the seventy years which are greatest in the world’s history & richest in benefit & advancement to its peoples. These seventy years have done much more to widen the interval between man & the other animals than was accomplished by any five centuries which preceded them.

What great births you have witnessed! The steam press, the steamship, the steel ship, the railroad, the perfected cotton-gin, the telegraph, the phonograph, the photograph, photo-gravure, the electrotype, the gaslight, the electric light, the sewing machine, & the amazing, infinitely varied & innumerable products of coal tar, those latest & strangest marvels of a marvelous age. And you have seen even greater births than these; for you have seen the application of anesthesia to surgery-practice, whereby the ancient dominion of pain, which began with the first created life, came to an end in this earth forever; you have seen the slave set free, you have seen the monarchy banished from France, & reduced in England to a machine which makes an imposing show of diligence & attention to business, but isn’t connected with the works. Yes, you have indeed seen much — but tarry yet a while, for the greatest is yet to come. Wait thirty years, & then look out over the earth! You shall see marvels upon marvels added to these whose nativity you have witnessed; & conspicuous above them you shall see their formidable Result — Man at almost his full stature at last! — & still growing, visibly growing while you look. In that day, who that hath a throne, or a gilded privilege not attainable by his neighbor, let him procure his slippers & get ready to dance, for there is going to be music. Abide, & see these things! Thirty of us who honor & love you, offer the opportunity. We have among us 600 years, good & sound, left in the bank of life. Take 30 of them — the richest birth-day gift ever offered to poet in this world — & sit down & wait. Wait till you see that great figure appear, & catch the far glint of the sun upon his banner; then you may depart satisfied, as knowing you have seen him for whom the earth was made, & that he will proclaim that human wheat is more than human tares, & proceed to organize human values on that basis.

Mark Twain

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I haven't much else to say, since this was a rough couple of days and I'm still recovering.  But I do want to note -- I've finished the stories in "Requiem for the Departed" and, aside from one that works the legend of Selkies into its heartbreaking tale of revenge and justice in 6th Century Hibernia ("The Sea Is Not Full", which also offers a hint at the beginnings of St. Patrick) none of them impressed.  In fact, a few of them seemed more like outlines for novels than short-stories, especially the last one -- "The Life Business", that tells its story rather than lets it unfold and jams in WAY too much for a short -- while the rest were just bland and not really believable, even within their own worlds.  These writers would never get a letter like that from Mark Twain.

Unfortunately, Whitman only took a bit less than three of the years offered so generously my Mark Twain.  More's the pity.