Star Wars has struck my house. I'm to blame, of course, but I never thought it would become this intense. We've been playing with the action figures for a while now and I'm particularly fond of Han Solo because of his versatility. If you're short a villain, for example, you could always have your existing team of bad guys, like the Joker and Storm Shadow, approach Han with an offer. Because I think we all know that Han would switch sides for the right price. He's a smuggler. Despite what George Lucas wants us all to believe, Han blasted Greedo in that Mos Eisley bar before the alien got the jump on him. Han shot first, and no amount of CGI editing will convince me otherwise.
After the toys came the movies. Episode IV first, then the prequels, because that's good parenting. Those first three are pretty funny as an adult. My favorite scene now is when Obi-Wan tries to worm his way out of his past lies to Luke. The young Skywalker confronts him in Return of the Jedi, pointing out that Obi-Wan said his father was dead. The old Jedi kind of sighs and goes into this rambling discourse, admitting that he was lying without actually owning up to it, and finishing with, "So what I told you was true...from a certain point of view."
Mind tricks aside, that scene kind of got me thinking that Jedis would make good lawyers. Imagine Obi-Wan going up against Colonel Nathan Jessup in A Few Good Men? He would have smoked him.
The one big disappointment of this whole Star Wars obsession is the books. Much of the stuff that's out there for early readers right now is TERRIBLE. The early DK Readers are really abysmal. I can't believe that Lucasfilm let them produce those things. They don't read as though they were written for first graders. They read as though they were written by first graders. And the real tragedy is that these books are popular. Immensely popular. You see them everywhere, and it would have been so easy for Lucasfilm to collaborate with real writers capable of turning out out good books.
This past
Tuesday, on my way to a microbiology conference, I spotted a man on the train
wearing a t-shirt with the word “mentor” printed in large letters across the
back. His pants had fallen down below his waist. The view was unpleasant, and I
felt sad for his mentee.
Some
takeaways from the conference: harmful bacteria can hang around on airplane
tray tables, arm rests, and window shades for days; despite early evidence to the contrary, the microscopic bugs that can cause
Legionnaire’s disease survive in windshield wiper fluid; we all need to open our windows
more; there’s no difference in the fungal population of men’s vs. women’s
public restrooms; never schedule phone interviews about quantum computing
during microbiology meetings.
These past
few weeks I’ve been interviewing experts on wearable medical technology, smart
cars, snakes, and urban sensors, and mostly writing fiction. Here are a few recent
articles:
This is an
older one, about
a Dalek builder, that I never got around to posting. My favorite anecdote,
which did not fit in the final article: At meetings, Dalek builders sometimes
sit inside their creations, drive around, and mingle with each other as alien
robots. They even speak in Dalek screech.
In between
the writing and the talking, I helped my kids put together a pretty sick ninja turtle
zip line in the backyard. Then we got to show it off to a friend of mine who was visiting Boston for the night on business.
He was impressed, I think. My mental or intellectual relationship with this
individual is kind of strange. When I lift my car keys to a subway turnstile or
try to swipe a card to enter my house, I think of him. And when I write to him about one of
these incidents, and the fact that he popped into my head after it happened, he
agrees that he was the right person to tell.
A personal record last week: Ten separate talks, plus eight revision workshops, spread between seven different schools and the lovely Massachusetts Reading Association conference. At the latter I spoke about engaging boys as readers. One of the five or six tricks or techniques I discussed: Never ever, ever, ever talk about your feelings. If the narrator discusses matters of the heart too openly and frequently, the book risks losing the boys. Or most of them, anyway. I don't mean to imply that a great book for boys should be without heart or feeling. On the contrary. Any great book must have heart. But with boys I think it has to be subtle. For instance, here's a little passage from the wonderful Jerry Spinelli novel Maniac Magee: "Maniac
just stood there a minute. There was
something that he felt like doing, and maybe he would have, but the lady turned
and went back inside her house and shut the door. So he walked away.”
He wanted to thank her or hug her. But he'd never admit it. Oh no. And here's another, from Rodman Philbrick's classic, Freak the Mighty: "It’s time to go home, Gram gets nervous if I’m not
back before dark. Everything seems
really great, just like Gwen says, except when I lie down on my bed it hits me,
boom, and I’m crying like a baby. And
the really weird thing is, I’m happy." The emotion comes upon him inexplicably. As a reader, you've probably already guessed that he's happy, since he's made a new friend, but he sure doesn't know, or does not want to admit it, until he's forced to confess, since he's crying and all. Finally, I found the classic My Side of the Mountainin my father-in-law's collection. This novel follows a boy who runs away from his overcrowded NYC apartment to live in the woods of the Catskills. When the main character writes about his first night in the woods, he very reluctantly admits how he felt: "So I sat tight, and shivered and shook - and now I am able to say - I cried a little bit." Much later in the novel, at a happy moment, when the season changes, we get this:
Am I done with the new novel? Yes! Absolutely. I'm done. Or at least I'm probably...sort of done. I mean, I think the characters are all there. The story moves. But the ending might need a little work, and there's a chapter in the middle that's probably a little too long, and I still don't know if I'm quite comfortable with the opening and...no, I'm not done. But I will be. Someday.
And I'll have these pages on the left to thank. The notebook was a gift. It's large and floppy, with a kind of faux leather cover, light brown, and newsprint-like paper inside. For a year I didn't write much in it because of the paper. I'm fairly particular about my paper. When I'm writing fiction by hand, I have to use either a legal pad, because my father writes on legal pads, or the thick, bumpy, really nice paper that comes in really nice notebooks. This one on the left was not up to par. Or so I thought. Then, a few weeks ago, I had the chance to see a rare first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass stashed away in the Providence Athenaeum. The paper was very similar to the stuff in my disrespected newsprint. There's a character in the novel who is found of Whitman, and a turtle named after the poet, too, so I took these little connections as signs, and put away the legal pad in favor of the floppy notebook. Plus, the paper is made in Japan and this novel is all about ninjas.
This week I spoke with engineers and scientists about cloud storage and the technological alternatives to testing new cosmetics and drugs on animals. These stories are not related. But they've got me thinking about sheep with too much lipstick and rouge grazing on the tops of clouds or maybe storing their excess makeup in these clouds so that their shepherd does not find them and use them himself. Or maybe they store their makeup in the clouds because they're afraid that if the shepherd finds them then he will realize they are smarter and more image-conscious than he thinks. He'll sit there under the stars and think, "Forget sheep-herding. There's no money in it. What I'll do is take these image-conscious sheep and go on the road. Start a song-and-dance show. With sheep!" Meanwhile, all the poor sheep want to do is hang out and graze and wear their makeup.
No, that's not right. I'll keep those stories separate.
Now for something completely different. Here's an NFL analyst and former quarterback, Trent Dilfer, talking about another quarterback, Terrell Pryor:
"He's putting in the lonely work that it takes to be successful at any position in this league."
The lonely work. I love that idea. And I think there's an element of lonely work to any pursuit or passion. The guy who plays quarterback in front of 80,000 people or the musician who sings before a packed stadium - they put in the solitary work to get to that crazy, crowded point. Unfortunately it appears that Pryor needs to put in quite a bit more lonely work, since he's not having a very good season.
"There's always discovery in the making...the making has to be loose enough and open-ended enough for there to be a place for discovery."
And:
"In the work that I do there's a lot of place for not the unconscious but the non-planned to have a place and to lead to ideas...that's where the art comes from."
A minor revelation this week. I realized I’m not one of
those people who’s going two hundred miles an hour with his head down all the
time and needs to slow down and stop for a while to smell the flowers. My
problem is that I’m always stopping to smell the flowers. Not literally. I’m
allergic to most flowers, so if I stopped to smell them all the time, I’d spend
half my life sneezing. I’m speaking generally. Trees, faces, clouds, a peculiar
stain in a rug or cool old rusted spiral staircase outside a building – these kinds
of things are always grabbing me, making me stop and think. Often they send me
off on some strange, high-speed train of thought that rips along and drops me off somewhere in, I
don’t know, the Crimea. Surrounded by unicorns. And people drinking tea brewed in samovars. I dream up whole new stories, start writing them in my head, then
remind myself, 'No, no, no. You have to focus.'
A case in point: This week, I visited the Boston Museum of
Fine Arts to do some research. They’re running an amazing exhibit on samurai,
and those legendary warriors are part of the focus of my next novel for kids.
So this is not exactly work, or not in the way most people think of work, but
for me, this was serious business. I was there to learn. On my way to learn, though, I cut through the courtyard and spotted this unintentional exhibit on the brick walls. A tapestry
of ivy waving in the wind like the glassy surface of the ocean brushed by the
first hints of wind. Here’s my little video of the scene:
I was transfixed for a while. I don’t know how long. And
then I reminded myself: Stop smelling the flowers! Back to work!
Eventually I recovered my focus, but the day kept trying to distract
me. Walking home from the train station, I passed by a local construction
worker, a big man who lives around the corner from me and walks with great
heavy strides in big, worn old boots. He was sitting outside a small house that
looked like it doubled as a day care center. His shirt was off. He was sitting
in a lawn chair and seemed to be sunning himself. I believe he was eating a
brownie and there was a plastic kiddie pool at his feet. “The Bruins are on
tonight!” he called out to me. We’ve chatted before, but he was entirely out of
context there on the lawn. I didn’t expect him to speak. So I stuttered a
response. “Yes!” I said. “Go!”
He wasn’t supposed to speak; he was supposed to act like the exhibits I'd just seen at the museum. He was supposed to sit there
quietly and let me walk off and conjure some kind of short story.
A few hours later I passed a man sitting on a bench outside a bank. He, too, was entirely out of place. He looked French, and people don’t
ever look French in my town. He wore a jacket with thin lapels. He sat
straight-backed, wearing stylish glasses. A funny little canvas pouch lay beside
him on the bench. I averted my eyes and headed for the ATM. When I came back
out he was smoking a pipe. A pipe! Who smokes a pipe? On a bench in the middle
of a suburban town where you’re always supposed to be going somewhere?
I'll tell you. Here’s my theory. He’s a French physicist. Maybe from the
future. He was running a little experiment in his lab and everyone told him he should really wait for human trials but he had so much confidence in himself and his theories that he figured he'd give it a try and so he activated his machine and stepped through a
wormhole and popped out on the other side in suburban Massachusetts in 2013. Stumped,
and perhaps stuck, he decided the only thing to do would be to stop and enjoy a
pipe while devising a strategy for returning to the France of the future.
There was also a sunburned little man with curly red hair
trying to open the doors of several neighborhood banks. They were all locked. He
looked desperate, ready to rob one.
The samurai exhibit was amazing, by the way. Absolutely
stunning. They wore bear fur on their boots. Yes, bear fur.
This week I wrote about vegan crisps, quantum cryptography,
child psychology, submarines, and samurai. Not all at once, though. And I read. Randomly and widely and incompletely. In reading about the new Hopper exhibit at the Whitney
Museum in NY, I was excited to learn that he created many, many studies for his
masterworks. I guess I never thought about painters creating drafts, but it
makes perfect sense. A writer can’t be perfect on the first attempt. Why would
a painter be any different? The exhibit includes 52 studies for "New York
Movie" and 19 for "Nighthawks." That’s quite a few drafts!
Some quotes from the random readings this week:
“Chickens are categorized as birds by zoologists, as Sunday
dinner by families, as a commodity by investors, and as a source of salmonella
infection by pathophysiologists. Each categorization has a useful purpose.” - Jerome
Kagan
“The measure of value of a hypothesis...is not its
plausibility or compatibility with a subset of facts, or its presumed validity,
but its heurestic potential - how much it suggests for the next stage of
investigation.” - Theodore Bullock
I’m sure there’s context to this next quote, but I’m not
aware of it. Following the Emersonian model of reading, I picked the memoirs
Ulysses S. Grant off the shelf at the local library, opened to a random page,
and read this:
“I am not aware of ever having used a profane expression in
my life; but I would have the charity to excuse those who may have done so, if
they were in charge of a train of Mexican pack mules at the time.” – Ulysses S.
Grant
After reading that delightful line I put the book back on
the shelf. What more could General Grant possibly teach me?
When I realized that my Friday afternoon talk at Bigelow Middle School was the last thing standing between 200 kids and their winter vacation, I was a little nervous. I was counting on a full scale revolt. Or at least a round of restless twitching in the audience. After a few stories about dinosaurs, fast furniture, flying cars and brain surgery, though, the students settled in just fine.
There were more than a few young writers in the crowd, and in case they're reading, I'd like to follow up with several of them:
To the two boys who were about to show me your funny story: I'd love to read it. As I told you, that's how I started out as a writer. My friends and I spun together ridiculous little tales in between class.
To the girl who wanted me to complete her story: We talked about this already, but that's your story, and you should finish it! I'm sure you'll do a better job of it than I could.
To the amateur ninja expert: Thanks for asking about my still-in-the-works ninja book. As we both know, ninjas were known as shinobi, and they didn't always dress in the black costumes we see today. They disguised themselves as farmers, merchants, and other everyday folk. In truth ninjas were more like spies than warriors. All these kinds of historical details will be part of the book, so check back here for updates, and thanks for coming up to say hello.
Finally, Mr. Mogenson, I think you should wear that jacket every day. And thanks for inviting me in to your wonderful school!
