October 2003 Archives

It's Halloween and I'm scared.

Well, not really scared, but perhaps... apprehensive.

I'm preparing to do something that will be rather demanding, and I'm not sure that I'm mentally or physically prepared to do it, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway.

I'm writing a novel in November.

Yes, that's right, I'm participating in National Novel Writing Month, better known by the melodious abbreviation Nanowrimo. The goal of participants is to write a 50,000-word novel in the period between midnight tonight and midnight on November 30th. At 1667 words per day, one must maintain a fairly quick pace, and stopping to edit or rework or worry about phrasing is pretty much out. No, this is about pure output--not so much writing as typing.

I'm also cheating.

Nanowrimo's rules, such as they are, demand that you start fresh, with a new idea. In theory, this will free you to focus on the new book and quit worrying about ruining that great idea for a book you had five years ago. I'm ignoring that rule and instead using an idea that I first had in 1990 and have been trying to beat into shape ever since--the one that forms the core of a novel whose working title is "Moving Day." I don't want to say too much about that core, or about the bits of novel I've written so far; let's just say that over the past decade, I've taken the basic idea and worked it into approximately two dozen different forms with two dozen different characters, sometimes as a short story, sometimes as a novella, sometimes as a novel, using every point of view from first to third, from limited to omniscient. I've never written more than a few thousand words of it before getting stuck, so my hope is that I can use the pressure-cooker of Nanowrimo to get me past the blocks that have inevitably appeared. Whether I use any of the old stuff isn't the question--it's whether I can get another 50,000 words down this month.

I'm a pretty fast worker--when I have time to work. The hard part will be finding that time between classes, debate tournaments, dorm duties, exams, and grading. I'm going to try to get up early every morning and hit the word processor with everything I've got, but I may end up cranking out longer stretches on weekends to give myself room for a few short days.

One good thing: Kelly's joining me in the madness, so we'll be able to pressure each other a bit. She doesn't like to use the computer to compose, so I shouldn't have any problems getting access to the keyboard, but it'll be nice to have someone prod me out of bed in the mornings. She did Nanowrimo last year and bogged down on her book (working title: "Licking Melvin.") after about 15,000 words, but it was a good experience for her; she wrote the single biggest chunk of prose she's ever written, and when she looked over the manuscript last month, she discovered that it was, despite having been composed in a rush over the course of one month, pretty good. I hope I can get as much out of the experience.

Because of the novel's demands, I may not be writing that much in this journal during the next few weeks, but given how irregular my performance here has been since school started, I don't know that anyone will notice. I'll be making periodic updates here, though, so you can follow along at home. Otherwise, I'll see you circa December 1st--be ready.

(Hey, that was just over 600 words in around a half-hour... all right!)

6:50 PM

I sit here, smugly typing, as Number One Son sits in the living room, trying to forget that (at his own urging) we've just watched one of the scariest movies ever made: Alien. He's been quivering since well before John Hurt got his very close examination of the title critter, so I think he'd agree that the movie, made in 1979, still has potency.

Nonetheless, he felt compelled to express disbelief that such a good film could be made in the Seventies, even after I told him that most film critics regard it as the best decade American film ever had. I think it's because the decade of the Seventies has undeservedly become a joke, and that joke was told largely by Baby Boomers who wanted the decade of their adolescence to loom larger in the popular culture.

I'm 40, born in 1963, which makes me a Boomer to some misguided demographers, but I've never considered myself that way. Moreover, having had a chance to view a good chunk of the Sixties and all of the Seventies, I'm here to provide the latter decade with a little impromptu but long-overdue support.

40 Reasons Why the Seventies Were Better than the Sixties

1) Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Funniest movie ever made.
2) Who's Next and Quadrophenia, both better Who albums than Tommy.
3) Saturday night on CBS: All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, The Carol Burnett Show. I defy anyone to find a better night of television in any decade.
4) Star Wars--waaaaaaaay better than Lost in Space.
5) First publication of The Silmarillion
6) Hank Aaron hits #715.
7) The Ramones. Nuff said.
8) Elvis Costello records My Aim Is True, This Year's Model, and Armed Forces. Far better than anything Elvis Presley did in the Sixties.
9) Phil Ford shows the world how the point guard position is meant to be played.
10) Nixon gets the boot. And there was much rejoicing.
11) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Next takes five Oscars.
12) Dave Sim begins publication of Cerebus the Aardvark.
13) Saturday Night Live debuts and is actually funny for a few years.
14) The heyday of National Lampoon, featuring brilliant pieces by P.J. O'Rourke, Henry Beard, Doug Kenney, Matty Simmons, Shary Flenniken, B.K. Taylor, and more.
15) Talking Heads record '77, More Songs About Buildings and Food, and Fear of Music.
16) Ms. Magazine debuts.
17) The Miami Dolphins go a perfect 17-0 for the only undefeated season in NFL history.
18) The 26th Amendment lowers the voting age to 18.
19) Television releases Marquee Moon and rewrites the rules of guitar rock.
20) Tiny Chaminade upsets the University of Virginia and its Goliath, center Ralph Sampson
21) Ursula K. LeGuin publishes Very Far Away from Anywhere Else, my favorite of her many wonderful books.
22) No U.S. Presidents are shot, though one is shot at.
23) Doonesbury wins a Pulitzer Prize.
24) Bob Dylan releases Blood on the Tracks--arguably better than anything he did in the Sixties, certainly as good.
25) John Varley publishes Titan, the first book in his Gaean Trilogy.
26) John Huston directs The Man Who Would Be King, possibly his finest film.
27) Monday Night Football debuts.
28) Big Star, the best Seventies band no one knows about, releases both #1 Record and Radio City.
29) Raquel Welch is at her most babelicious.
30) Coppola releases The Godfather Parts I & II.
31) Warren Zevon records Excitable Boy.
32) Roger Zelazny publishes The Chronicles of Amber.
33) Jaws scares people out of the water.
34) Barry Sadler does not top the charts with "The Ballad of the Green Berets" in this decade.
35) Bird (and Indiana State) vs. Magic (and Michigan State) for the NCAA title
36) Len Wein, Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, and John Byrne remake the X-Men.
37) Richard Lester's The Three Musketeers buckles the finest swash ever.
38) For every prog-rock excess (Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Works, Yes's Tales from Topographic Oceans), there's a corresponding prog-rock gem: Genesis's Selling England by the Pound and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Yes's Fragile, Jethro Tull's Aqualung, Pink Floyd's Meddle, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and Animals, you name it.
39) XTC, the Soft Boys, the Cars, the Modern Lovers, and Joe Jackson release their debut recordings.
40) On March 2, 1974, with only 17 seconds remaining, the UNC Tar Heels engineer the greatest comeback in college basketball history by scoring eight points to force overtime and eventually defeat Duke.

3:32 AM

Disappointment is the word of the day, I'm afraid.

I'm disappointed because it's Tuesday, and there's no Tuesday Morning Quarterback column at ESPN.com. And therein lies a tale.

TMQ was a funny, literate column for people who enjoy pro football. Its author, Gregg Easterbrook, is also an editor at The New Republic, so he was qualified to talk about more than just football, but he took to the subjects of the gridiron with an informed and irreverent glee. He criticized coaches for calling stupid pass plays in the red zone, or for blitzing in inappropriate situations, but if a coach made a gutsy call--Dom Capers' sending David Carr on a quarterback sneak to win the game as the clock ran down, for example--Easterbrook would praise him and announce that the Football Gods would look favorably on such an individual.

If the NFL did something illogical or absurd, Easterbrook would jump on it like a lion on a wounded gnu and roar across the veldt. Thus, the two New York franchises, the Giants and the Jets, neither of which plays in New York, became "Jersey/A" and "Jersey/B," while the Seahawks ("Blue Men Group"), Bengals ("Fudgsicles"), and Titans ("Flaming Thumbtacks") were mocked for their uniforms and/or logos. The Washington Redskins were subject to special mockery because they a) are not located in Washington, and b) use an ethnic slur for a nickname; TMQ took obvious delight in referring to them as the "Potomac Drainage Basin Indigenous Persons," and announced that he would not use the team's name unless they changed their mascot from an Indian to a redskin potato.

It's thus more than a little ironic that TMQ has vanished from ESPN.com because of an ethnic slur. Well, "slur" may not be precisely the word, but certainly because of an offensive stereotype. In his online blog, an unedited spur-of-the-moment journal much like the one you're reading now, Easterbrook took to task the makers of the new film Kill Bill. Offended by the film's bloody and incessant violence (I haven't seen it, so I'm taking the reviewers' word for this), he criticized not only director Quentin Tarantino, but the CEOs of Miramax studios and Disney, Miramax's parent company. To Easterbrook's way of thinking, putting such material in front of the public was irresponsible and wrong, and he concluded that the only reasons Miramax and Disney would do so would be to make money.

I personally don't doubt that money is a motivator for everyone in Hollywood, but that fact alone doesn't make me want to publicly dress down executives. Easterbrook, however, feels rather more strongly about the matter, and his fury led him to do something which I can only describe as stupid: he noted that both Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, and Miramax's chief, Harvey Weinstein, are Jewish; he criticized them for being greedy; and he noted that of all people, Jews should dislike entertainment that suggests violence as a solution to one's problems.

Well.

If you want to critize someone for being greedy, by all means jump in. I've done it myself from time to time. What I don't understand is why Easterbrook felt that Eisner and Weinstein's faith was relevant to the discussion of their greed. Surely any sensible writer would recognize that using "greedy" and "Jewish" in the same sentence calls up an old and reprehensible stereotype, right? (Wouldn't a writer hesitate before linking "lazy" with "black," "murderous" with "Italian," or "drunken" with "Irish"?) Unfortunately, by bringing up the two executives' religion in a discussion about movie violence, Easterbrook looked as if he were trying to connect Judaism with greediness, and that is, I'm sorry, stupid. Illogical. No better than the ownership of the P.D.B.I.P.s. It's disappointing, to say the least, to see such foolishness from a writer whose work you respect.

The good news is that Easterbrook recognized this; almost immediately after his blog hit the web, he issued an apology (you can read it by clicking here) in which he took reponsibility for writing something so stupid. He didn't back off the criticism of Kill Bill, but he did apologize for bringing up a thousand-year-old stereotype, even if it was unintentional. His apology was written with the skill and good sense I'd gotten used to seeing in his work, and I have no reason to doubt its sincerity. I don't think he meant to slur Jews in general--just the two men who green-lighted Kill Bill, both of whom happen to be Jewish. But he didn't need to bring this last fact up.

The bad news is that ESPN, which is owned by Disney, apparently did not take kindly to the criticism of its CEO and/or his faith. By Saturday evening, every TMQ column in ESPN.com's archives was gone, replaced by an error message, and Easterbrook's name and face were gone from the site's masthead.

And that leads me to my second disappointment. If ESPN feels Easterbrook's comments were offensive, they certainly have the right to fire him; heck, if they simply think he has no business criticizing the boss, they have the right to fire him. What disappoints me is that they have made no public statement. Today, the following brief note appeared on the site's Page 2: "To our readers: Tuesday Morning Quarterback will no longer be available on ESPN.com." That strikes me as too little information, too late in coming.

When Rush Limbaugh made a fool of himself on ESPN's pre-game show, the network spent a good deal of airtime making sure the public knew what had happened and why. But with Easterbrook, whose comments hadn't even been made on ESPN, the network not only didn't explain its actions, but seemed to be trying to erase any evidence that Easterbrook had ever existed. I'm sure I'm not the only reader to feel as if ESPN is giving TMQ the Trotsky treatment, removing him from the official photographic record in order to better fit current political dogma.

It's one thing to fire a man. It's something very different to pretend you never hired him.

So now I'm left disappointed on all fronts. I'm disappointed in Easterbrook, but I can accept his apology. He at least showed courtesy to his readers by making a public statement about his actions. Problem is, I'm disappointed in ESPN, too, and I'm likely to stay that way. After all, how can I accept an apology that hasn't been made?



7:48 PM

It's rare that I feel like tooting my own horn--OK, OK, it's rare that I'll admit to feeling like tooting my own horn--but I must confess I was pleased with a recent effort of mine.

Over in Readerville, my friend and Loose Canons partner Paul Clark made a joke connecting Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde album and the classic Chic Young-created comic strip Blondie. The strip is now being done by Chic's son Dean and an artist named LeBrun with whom I'm not familiar; it's actually not bad, but I have a long-standing distaste for comic strips that still lurch about, zombie-like, after their creators have retired or died. It's grotesque to me that Shoe still appears on the comics page without the grace or timing of its creator, Jeff MacNelly, and though Mort Walker and Dik Browne have passed their family businesses (Beetle Bailey, Hi and Lois, and Hagar the Horrible) on to their children, the younger generation simply doesn't have the artistic gifts of the elder. I'd rather see the son demonstrate his own talents, not simply ape those of his father. I don't need to hear Jakob Dylan re-recording "Lay Lady Lay." In fact, since it's about his mom, that would be creepy as all get-out.

Not that I have strong opinions on the subject or anything.

In any case, Paul's mind is a fertile ground for humor, and I found this particular pile of compost extremely nourishing, which is how I came to rewrite one of Bob Dylan's tunes thus:

"Suburban Homesick Blues"

Blondie's in the back room
Mixin' up the dim sum
Tootsie's got the canapés
Set up on the deli trays
Cute gals tryin' to make
Paté, shrimp mousse,
Tryin' to shake some cash loose
Dag an' Herb are no use
Look out, kids
It's a caterin' biz
Take a strip that's ancient
Tryin' to make it relevant
You better duck down the strip mall
Get yourself a new pen
The man at the syndicate
Called you again
Wants eleven hundred papers
You only got ten

Dag runs fleet foot
Headin' off to work but
Woodley's on the sidewalk
Tryin' to set a chop block
Dag runs the straight track
Blondie hears the impact
Letters in the driveway
He'll be back the next day
Look out, Dag
It's a runnin' gag
Gotta hit the mailman
Do it without fail, man
Gotta do the same joke
Make sure you don't choke
And get the strip revoked
Hide the fire with black smoke
You don't need a eulogy
To know that Chic Young's croaked

Chic Young? Dean Young!
(Who the hell is LeBrun?)
Names on the strip run
But we don't see the first one
He's lost, we've lost
What's a new strip cost?
A rollin' strip's got moss:
Dithers's still the big boss
Look out, kid
Ain't like it's hid
Editors, cheaters
Big-time predators
Are pig-trough feeders
Keepin' up a classic
Although it's jurassic
Placate the readers
Just hire repeaters

Ah get drawn, big yawn
Short nap, old crap, shut your yap
Get paid, don't fade
Copy 'cause you're a-fraid
Daisy, Alex, Cookie,
Same faces, lookie!
Years and years of drawin'
And you're still like a rookie
Come on, kid
Do what your dad did
Better be your own man, switch
And draw what you can, which
Ain't just fillin' your dad's niche
Create a new plan, pitch
A strip of your own
Try to make it alone
Not the same damn thing
Where Dagwood eats the sandwich.

Is this just another form of procrastination when grades are due? You decide...


4:31 PM

It's October at the Forest, which means my life is one long series of panic attacks: classes... papers to grade... directing the Black Box play... but one of these days I'm going to get to write something again.

One piece of news in the meantime: I'll be appearing at Cape May, NJ, the Birder's Mecca, on Saturday, May 22, 2004, as part of the Cape May Spring Weekend. I'm planning to have scads o'fun there--maybe even pick up another lifer or two...

3:11 PM

In a little less than an hour's time, The Verb 'To Bird' will stop being a Barnes & Noble Discover selection and go back to being a regular old-fashioned book. I'm hopeful that it will remain on the shelf at your local B&N (check under "Nature") even after it's been taken down from the special Discover shelf near the front of the store and has its little placard removed. Still, there's no question that the book will be a bit less visible tomorrow than it's been over the past six months, and for that, I think I'd better thank a few people:

Paul Dry Books alone has to get an enormous load of gratitude, both for the way they've handled their end of the contract and for their willingness to gamble on an unknown writer in the first place. The individuals of the company, however, have made contributions well worth setting down here: publicist Will Schofield, whose tirelessness in connecting me with reporters and reviewers is matched only by his outstanding taste in quirky pop music; designer Adrianne Onderdonk Dudden, who gave the book its graceful lines, distinctive colors, and overall tactile appeal; John Corenswet, whose editing showed me that my manuscript contained a much better book if only I would just go in and dig it out; and of course Paul Dry himself, whose enthusiasm makes a writer feel as though he's going to have the wind at his back for the entire voyage.

The illustrations of Grant Silverstein have been an enormous part of the book's success, and try as I might, I still don't feel I've given him adequate credit for his work. He invites the eye of the casual observer to come in and explore the book, but every time you let your vision linger on one of his drawings, you find new riches. I was very lucky that Paul Dry discovered Grant's work.

Photographer Rebekah Lingo took the author portrait for the cover, but as her name was accidentally left off of the first printing, some of you may not know that yet. Anyone who can make me look halfway decent deserves to have her skills recognized by the public, and her patience and good humor are most commendable as well.

Without the boost provided by Barnes & Noble's Discover Program, I don't know that the book would have had a second printing, let alone a fourth--many thanks to B&N. It was always a great ego boost to walk into one of their stores and see my book right up front. (Interestingly, it was always on the same shelf as Tom Groneberg's The Secret Life of Cowboys; since I know Tom from Readerville.com, I always viewed this as some sort of web-based synchronicity.) And if Michelle Alair of the Charlottesville store isn't running the company inside of ten years, I will be surprised.

The Virginia Festival of the Book allowed me to read from The Verb before it was even officially available, which got me off on the right foot--thank you, Nancy Damon, for that opportunity.

Thanks for the good press: Bella Stander at Albemarle, Salem Macknee at the Charlotte Observer, all the people whose names I've forgotten at the Raleigh News & Observer, C-Ville Weekly, The Hook, The Free-Lance Star, the Orange Review, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Living Bird, and the UNC Alumni Review.

Thanks to Frank Stacio and Keith Weston for the warm welcome at WUNC, and for introducing me to Cynthia Fox. Thanks to Cynthia for introducing me to Tom Driscoll, and thanks to Tom for finding me a Yellow-Breasted Chat--the birding chain grows ever longer.

Thanks to everyone at Martha Stewart Living Television for the greatest publicity windfall an author could ever ask for, and thanks to Katharine Weber for directing the wind my way.

Thanks to everyone who's written me here at petercashwell.com--I'm hoping to answer you all at some point.

Thanks once more to the community of Readerville.com and its proprietor, Karen Templer, without whom. You all helped me get into this, and you all helped me through it.

Thanks to everyone who's dined with me, given me a ride, or put me up somewhere during the Cheap-Ass Book Tour '03. Everyone should share a car with Anne Ursu and Laura Ruby at least once.

Thanks to Woodberry Forest School for the time off.

And of course, thanks to my family for their love, support, and patience while I got this thing researched, written, revised, mailed, re-revised, re-mailed, re-re-revised, edited, published, reviewed, and publicized.

On April 1st, 2003, six months ago tomorrow, my book was published. I've spent most of the last half-year learning to live with The Verb 'To Bird'. It's almost been like having a new family member, one whose demands sometimes caught me off-guard, and whose needs often caused me to neglect those of my family and friends. But now that it's six months old, and I've gotten used to having it around, I think I can finally bear to quit nursing it.

Happy October, everyone, and thanks again. Time for solid food at last.

3:55 AM