Shaking the Foundations of Decent Writing

Sugar Creek, which is the mobile home community (read: trailer park) in which I reside, has a salutary rule that the nether regions of one’s trailer, like the nether regions of one’s person, be modestly obscured by some appropriate skirting, which for this trailer park means white bricks measuring 4 inches square by 16 inches long, laid in a pattern that resembles an open basket-weave having congress with a checkerboard, but that rule is so old that no one sells the requisite bricks anymore; so those of us neurotic enough to want to obey the rule must either glue together crumbling old bricks or scrounge not-too-badly-used bricks from some other trailer park whose management has been struck by more modern ideas, which is the strategy I adopted when I recently undertook to fill a sizable gap in my modesty skirting that opened up when I removed an elderly and misshapen oak tree that had grown too close to the trailer, but the leftover stump got in the way and, being made out of oak, could not be removed using conventional tools such as axes or dynamite, so I leveled the area as best I could using a trowel and a bucket of sweat and purchased a couple of long aluminum angle irons – if angle irons can be made of aluminum – and used them to bridge the affected area, allowing me to complete the visually attractive brick-weave that fits in so well with the neighborhood and has helped me create the longest sentence I have written so far this week, although I would appreciate it if you did not tell this to the guy who writes Shaking the Writing Tree.

Newt

When Blogging Infects the Ego

Sitting at a computer blogging about whatever I happen to be thinking this morning is undeniably an exercise of ego, an electronic form of mental masturbation -- fun to do but not much fun to watch.  Personally, I like it.  Blogging, I mean.  I have decided to do it more, even if I go blind.

Each opening day of a certain law school class in Connecticut, a learned professor  began with the question: "How many of you intend to pursue a career in professional writing?"  Thirty fresh faces, as yet unscarred by the horror of what they were proposing to do for the rest of their lives, routinely came up blank.  The still-human folks behind the faces no doubt wondered whether they had signed up for the wrong course. Silence begets fear of grade deflation, so the wise professor sat silent, waiting.  Tick-tock.

After enough tick-tocks, one student, reliably and timorously, always raised a hand.  About shoulder high.  Emboldened, others followed, until the whole class finally tumbled to the idea that all of them were in fact planning a career in professional writing.  Lawyers write.  They get paid to write.  Some think before they write; others do not.  Some write well, others do not.  The ones who do not write well beget lawyer jokes and deservedly so.

So, yes, I'm a lawyer (DISCLAIMER ALERT - whoop, whoop, whoop!) but not here in Florida.  I practice law in Connecticut.  Ask me for legal advice here in the sunshine state and plan on being politely brushed off.  The local bar casts interloper lawyers into dungeons and chains.  So I don't interlope.  Even my Connecticut practice is becoming an occasional thing, ever since I came to my senses and bagged it for this sunnier clime.

But I arrived with a lifetime of writing prejudices and nowhere to park them.  Well, technically, it's not a lifetime yet.  Just a little hyperbole there; so sue me.  Anyway, I used to teach baby lawyers how to write like professionals.  Short, simple declarative sentences, strong verbs, active voice, that sort of thing.  Some got it; others will write about the party of the first part, being subrogated to the rights of the party of the second part, for the rest of their regrettable lives.  These issues are no longer my concern.

But I come here with a few firmly held beliefs:

• "Legal writing" is a euphemism for "crappy, unintelligible writing."   My friend Mark Dubois, who still teaches baby lawyers in Connecticut, will steal this line for his next class.  I hope.

• Good writing is universal.  It is sufficient to writing about the law, about what I did on my summer vacation, about an old man and the sea.

What I have been doing here in Eye of Newt has mostly fallen into the "summer vacation" essay genus.  Somewhere in another venue, I am writing about old men and the sea.  And Lord knows I have written enough about the law, although, like Vicodin, that last is hard to put down entirely.  Still there remains, what to do with the teaching gene that has so disrupted my life.

Enter Shaking the Writing Tree.  Yup, another blog tossed upon the blog-o-heap.  SWT differs from my earlier teaching experiences in that it does not seek to tell others what to do.  I admit to a little regret in this regard.  Teaching law students was sweet in that, if students failed to do what I told them, I flunked their asses and ruined their pathetic little lives.  My readers - if I ever develop any - will be made of tougher stuff.  I hope.

Instead, SWT discusses why I do what I do.  The subjects will range from "Arrant Pedantry Up With Which I Do Not Put" to "Why Adverbs Stink."  Responsible opposing viewpoints will be encouraged.  I hope you enjoy it.  There are links to Shaking the Writing Tree elsewhere in this blog, and here's another one:  www.shakingthewritingtree.blogspot.com

Newt

Will Write for Beer

Some months ago, I wrote lovingly about The Cajun Cafe on the Bayou (see Best Eatery Ever, July 2009). After one of my recent weekly visits, I emailed the Cafe to comment on its new website design (http://www.cajuncafeonthebayou.com) and mentioned that I had slobbered over the restaurant and watering hole in an old blog item. By God, didn't Paul and Rebecca Unwin - the owners with the New Orleans roots, at least on Rebecca's side - didn't they comp me tickets to last weekend's beerfest at the Cafe. Yesss! If I had known that was going to happen, I would have plugged them even more shamelessly.

Anyway, Judy and I beerfested for a couple of hours on Saturday night to a pretty good Cajun brass quartet - tuba, trombone, cornet-looking horn and keyboard. The beer selection was outstanding, as near as I could tell. I am not entirely sure about the breadth of the selections because the headline beer of the fest was a keg of Dogfish Head 120 Minute Ale. This wonderful beer is so malty and hoppy you could eat it with a spoon. And oh, what hops! Not only did the 120 come equipped with outrageous hops in the first place, but towards the end of the keg the kegmeisters began pumping the product through an outrigger hopback, a container jammed with fresh hops designed to supercharge the beer with hop aroma. I am a hop whore, make no mistake, and this was the pinnacle of hop whoredom.

Not incidentally, the 120 is also alcoholic enough that you need to imbibe on your knees if you're at all afraid of falling down. I kept bringing my little 3-ounce cup back to the well, passing by the other 100 or so selections, some of which would have been the stars of any show that the 120 did not attend. It was like serving lobster at a shrimp fest. I was powerless to resist. That's why my sweet, beer-averse spouse attended - to squeegee me back into the car at the end of the night.

But wait! There's more! The Cafe served sample portions of its fabulous jambalaya, red beans & rice, sausage and gator bites. The always-friendly and knowledgeable staff outdid themselves serving a never-ending line of moderately inebriated Cajun foodies. Designated drivers, thankfully, attended for a nominal fee, and there were lots of them in the room, recognizable by their bewildered look, for the most part, as their designated drivees reveled in beer heaven. But don't feel too bad for Judy - I was charged with bringing back something succulent every time I went for something hoppy. Far better than anything my mama - or Judy's mama - used to cook.

I have given short shrift to all the great non-120 beers in attendance, and the truth is that I did taste a bunch of them. Widmer brought an excellent IPA, hoppier than I expected from a house that makes such a wonderful trademark hefeweizen. Sierra Nevada had its spectacular Harvest Ale, among a dozen or so other choices to which I could not begin to do justice. (Sierra Nevada has recently gone into collaboration with the Dogfish Head folks to make a huge 10-percent dark beer they call Life & Limb. O frabjous joy! Unfortunately, not yet available here.) Unibroue brought a big selection of its ass-kicking modern Belgian ales, but I opted for a nice Corsendonk Brown Ale triple from the booth next door to the Belgian powerhouse.

Also notable was Mike's Homebrew. Mike is a friend - and apparently a very devoted and slightly demented friend - of the Unwins who brought along a half-dozen Corny kegs of his prodigious array of homebrews. I drank his Kolsch - close as I could get to a pale ale - and it was right on the mark for this beer, light, hoppy and refreshing - as best I could tell after the 120 ransacked my so-called palate. I have brewed for 20 years and have never considered giving away 30 or 40 gallons of my best. Paul and Rebecca, take good care of this guy!

Well, there were a lot more beers, but they disappeared into the alcoholic haze that characterized the end of the evening, and I can't say much about them. I met the nice folks from the Dunedin Homebrew Club, who claim that it is indeed possible to brew in this heat, and I may attend a meeting soon to see if they tell the truth.

Paul and Rebecca, thanks for the free ride. I would have said all these nice things even if I had to pay to get in.

Newt

On Being a Main Dish

Now that I am a Writer, I suddenly need many things I never knew existed. Not just a computer and a bookshelf full of thesauri and synonymicons, but organic things, support groups and lobbying organizations, maybe a ticket to the odd book fair or writers’ conference. I look differently now at the First Amendment, even though I try to write things besides dirty books. I joined the Tampa Writers Alliance and PINAWOR, which stands for something literary that I cannot at the moment recall. I might join the Florida Writers Association so I will have Florida writers to associate with. (Perhaps they can teach me not to end a sentence with a preposition.) I retired to Florida to write and avoid meetings. Now I go to writing meetings. Life is one big irony contest.

Let’s face it, writers as a group are no more socially stable than engineers or lawyers or people who do bra fittings for Macy’s. In groups of two or more, they flail away at small talk, then retreat into shop talk when they discover that all they have in common is a passion for – or against – dangling participles. “Did you hear that Juan got an expression of interest from an agent at the conference last week? Lucky bastard. I didn’t think his stuff was all that good, quite honestly.” Don’t try to tell me that the people in your profession don’t do the same thing – I’m a Writer now; I understand the Human Condition.

Writers have evolved a social construct that does not appear elsewhere – the Critique Group. Every writers’ organization has one or two of these tucked away in its sub-basement. CG members’ sole purpose is to gather in a room and tell each other what’s wrong with the last thing they wrote. CGs range from ineffectual grammar police (“You split two infinitives in that opening paragraph”) to plot Nazis (“Come now, there were no such things as 'Letters of Transit'" or "Edsels were never manufactured in hot pink.”) Attending one of these sessions can be like going to a cowboy barbecue and volunteering to be a main dish. You can be flayed and filleted before your manuscript hits the table.

In principle – a greatly overvalued commodity, by the way – CGs are dedicated to improving the product of their members, whatever that product may be. In one recent CG, a member was writing nonfiction about the reasoning powers of marmosets, while another had written a space opera set in the nineteenth dimension, where everyone spoke a dialect that scanned a lot like Sarah Palin on a bender. I looked in a while back – oh so briefly – on a CG whose members were all writing bodice-rippers and Dreams of the Everyday Housewife.

Recently, I have been invited to join a CG that exists as a shadowy splinter group schismed off its parent mainstream CG. I take this as a signal that either I have Arrived as a Writer or that the group was down a quart on live bait. This CG within a CG is like a secret society, likely peopled by misfits and pseudonyms wrapped in enigmas, Dan Brown stuff. I haven’t gone to a meeting yet but am hoping they cast spells and runes. They meet over dinner. I’m bringing a nice grouper ceviche. Fava beans and a nice Chianti may be more fitting. We’ll see.

Newt

Practicing My New Craft

Cards and letters have been pouring in complaining that I have not been posting new items often enough. Well, the truth is I have been busy writing good fiction instead of these fact-intensive essays. For the curious, I am enclosing the opening page or so from my new novel. I hope you like it.

Newt

Incident at a Motel

Police Sergeant Richard J. Pickles, feared throughout the community of criminals as “Big Dick Pickles,” was glad he had worn his Blackjack StormTrooper™ boots today. He had bought them for stomping protesters when he worked in Chicago, but now they complemented the Tampa uniform rather nicely and helped him feel better about washing out of MPS, Florida’s famed Motorcycle Patrol School. The boots made short work of the flimsy motel door. Inside, the room looked like someone had dropped a cherry bomb into a punchbowl full of cherry Jello™. Congealing red globs dripped lazily from every surface. But this was no Jello™ explosion, he sensed instantly from the familiar iron tang filling the air and the headless corpse still sitting on the bed.

He saw no perp in the room, but the bathroom door was closed, and he intuited that more trouble may lie within. Drawing his Smith & Wesson Thugstopper™ .45, he splashed quickly across the room and laid waste to another door. Even Big Dick was taken aback to find yet another headless corpse sitting in the tiny room filled with entirely too much blood. Clearly someone had declared open season on heads. Big Dick meant to find out who and, as was his sworn duty, put a stop to it.

He quickly checked both bodies for a pulse and determined that first aid would be messy and probably fruitless. From the more advanced stage of clotting, he could tell that the corpse on the bed was the first to become deceased. Holstering the old Thugstopper, Big Dick considered calling for backup but decided he could handle this one himself. He had recently passed the civil service Forensics III certification and, like a teenager with a new driver’s license, was anxious to test his skills. The carpet squished softly as he strode back across the room.

Heading for his Crown Vic™ Copolator™ squad car, he stepped gingerly around the broken door, which now dangled from a single hinge. The number on the door electrified him: 104! The radio report, he remembered now, had directed him to room 401. Damn. He had discovered the wrong crime.

To be continued ….

Peek-a-Boo Salvation

Contrary to misguided Yankee opinion, the Deep South has many people who are entirely literate, and we have libraries chock-a-block with books, just like the North. I was a talented reader before I came south, and I have carefully nurtured and maintained my reading skills in the face of invidious assaults on literacy by twitterers, txters, Sarah Palin and other idiots.

The Deep South also has religion in glorious excess, with churches outnumbered only by bars and strip joints. At the intersection of libraries and religion there dwells a phenomenon I have not observed in other civilized places - and that's saying a lot, since I have been to both Paris and Provincetown.

You will recall from your last library excursion that library books routinely bear little taped-on labels on their spine for those of us who lack the time to judge a book by its entire cover. (Some other time I will get to libeling library minions with hyperactive labeling glands who plaster over the book title or author's name. It is my thesis that compulsive labeling is a trait of the recently literate.) These spine labels drop books into convenient slots - B for biography, F for fiction, 793.734 for palindromes. Unless you're from around these parts, you probably didn't see a CF label last time you visited the New Books rack. I have concluded, based on a short sample, that CF stands for Christian Fiction. If this news does not set off little alarm bells in your head, this is probably not your blog and you ought to stop reading. There are swarms of places on the Internet labeled CB.

In the Largo Public Library, fully ten percent of the New Fiction section is labeled CF, much more than is devoted to, say, Danielle Steele bodice-rippers or Stephen King flesh-rippers. Heathen that I am, I like the CF label for the same reason I appreciate signs reading "Keep Out - Cholera." It hastens decision-making quite nicely. That brings me, however circuitously, to the topic of the day. CF folks have figured out that they are proselytizing to the pious, which is no way to pump up the population of paradise. To solve that problem, the pious are introducing a fresh new genre to the bookshelves: Stealth CF.

Stealth CF works like this:

Spine label: F

Title: "Deadly Target"

Author: Someone you never heard of

Book jacket synopsis: In 2015, world power has been seized by a fanatical religious cult bent on a return to the dark ages. To save civilization from intellectual dehydration, Jake Savage must penetrate a corrupt organization that . . ." Et cetera.

This is hackneyed socio-political thriller stuff for which I am a bit of a sucker.

Sure enough, as the story unfolds, the promised malevolent cult emerges. Hero Savage is a meat-and-potatoes Robert Langdon, laughing in the face of entrenched evil. Incensed at the malicious onslaught of the hyper-religious, hyper-hypocritical - if there can be such a thing - Church of the Apocalypse Now, Savage launches his one-man crusade to tame the excesses of the foul new regime and restore traditional morality - uh-oh - to the country, making it safe for every born-again Christian - uh-oh, uh-oh - to live a life in Christ and be baptized, not in the water but in the blood. A-a-r-r-g-h! Here I am 100 pages into a reasonably well-plotted page-burner when the Stealth CF alarm light finally flickers on. I am about to be saved against my will by a submarine Bible tract.

Several times now I have nearly been saved, but in each case have preserved my march to eternal damnation only by hurling the holy book into the flames of the library's all-night book drop. But the flesh is weak, and I will continue to read too much socio-political crap. From now on, though, I will read the last page first to make sure there are no legions of formerly heathen Newts marching triumphantly through the pearly gates.

Newt