This morning, you are loud and insistent
I roll over, frustrated; my fingers scan the contours of your hard little body
Practiced motions, but today I get it wrong; you emit strange and unpleasant noises while I seek the spot I know so well that will send us back to contented oblivion
And at last I am there; I apply gentle insistent pressure; you are satisfied and quiet down at last, but I say nothing
I just roll over and try to fall asleep, hating your unrelenting insistent demands and everything else you represent, and thinking: Why is it so hard to find the snooze button?
Monday, September 28, 2009
Sunday, September 27, 2009
An Open Letter to Jeff Tweedy of Wilco
Dear Mr. Tweedy:
I really wish I liked Wilco (The Album) as much as I like Wilco (The Band).
Wilco (The Song) starts off promising, with a charging wall of bluesy guitar sound. But the lyrics, a tongue-in-cheek love letter from your band to its fans, feel flat and uninspired, a lazy victory lap rather than an exploration of new territory.
I’m sorry, Mr. Tweedy, if I’m hating on you for loving on me. There are some great moments here, to be sure; the next two songs rank among your band’s best work. But all in all, the album has a slightly generic feel. There’s a taste of almost everything your band’s done—the pastoral melodies of Sky Blue Sky and the pleasant pop of Summerteeth and the guitar workouts of A Ghost is Born and the countrified psychedelia of Being There and the experimentalism of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. But so many tastes end up making for a relatively bland album, at least by your band’s standards. It’s almost as if you put your discography in a blender and hit “Puree.” A little bit of everything ends up being a whole lot of nothing.
Well, maybe that’s a little harsh, but I do mean it, or something like it. You sound content and philosophical and meditative—on “Solitaire,” you mention how it “took too long for me to see I was wrong to believe in me only,” and that sounds like a statement from a healthy and happy and well-adjusted individual. But is that what we want? I kinda miss the alienation of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and elsewhere, the angsty Jeff Tweedy that sang “I am so out of tune with you” on Being There’s “Sunken Treasure.” Granted, you can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again, and I don’t necessarily want that. But I do want something with a solid thematic feel, something that feels like itself, rather than a mix of other things. In some ways, your previous album, though it had fewer rough edges, was a bolder statement, in that it was at least a solid and consistent and thematically whole piece of work. That one, and every other album since A.M. felt like an artistic statement, a “This is what Wilco is” kind of gesture that somehow also expanded the definition of what Wilco was. This one feels like a question in response to a question, as if someone asked “What is Wilco?” and you replied, “Well, what do you want us to be, baby?”
I’m sorry if I was harsh. This isn’t goodbye; it’s still a see-you-later. Look around for me the next hometown gig; I’ll be the one wearing a party hat.
Love,
Alfonso
I really wish I liked Wilco (The Album) as much as I like Wilco (The Band).
Wilco (The Song) starts off promising, with a charging wall of bluesy guitar sound. But the lyrics, a tongue-in-cheek love letter from your band to its fans, feel flat and uninspired, a lazy victory lap rather than an exploration of new territory.
I’m sorry, Mr. Tweedy, if I’m hating on you for loving on me. There are some great moments here, to be sure; the next two songs rank among your band’s best work. But all in all, the album has a slightly generic feel. There’s a taste of almost everything your band’s done—the pastoral melodies of Sky Blue Sky and the pleasant pop of Summerteeth and the guitar workouts of A Ghost is Born and the countrified psychedelia of Being There and the experimentalism of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. But so many tastes end up making for a relatively bland album, at least by your band’s standards. It’s almost as if you put your discography in a blender and hit “Puree.” A little bit of everything ends up being a whole lot of nothing.
Well, maybe that’s a little harsh, but I do mean it, or something like it. You sound content and philosophical and meditative—on “Solitaire,” you mention how it “took too long for me to see I was wrong to believe in me only,” and that sounds like a statement from a healthy and happy and well-adjusted individual. But is that what we want? I kinda miss the alienation of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and elsewhere, the angsty Jeff Tweedy that sang “I am so out of tune with you” on Being There’s “Sunken Treasure.” Granted, you can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again, and I don’t necessarily want that. But I do want something with a solid thematic feel, something that feels like itself, rather than a mix of other things. In some ways, your previous album, though it had fewer rough edges, was a bolder statement, in that it was at least a solid and consistent and thematically whole piece of work. That one, and every other album since A.M. felt like an artistic statement, a “This is what Wilco is” kind of gesture that somehow also expanded the definition of what Wilco was. This one feels like a question in response to a question, as if someone asked “What is Wilco?” and you replied, “Well, what do you want us to be, baby?”
I’m sorry if I was harsh. This isn’t goodbye; it’s still a see-you-later. Look around for me the next hometown gig; I’ll be the one wearing a party hat.
Love,
Alfonso
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Album Review - "Bryter Later" by Nick Drake
People love to talk about their proverbial perfect desert-island albums. Quality-wise, Nick Drake’s Bryter Later could easily be on my list, but that description doesn’t sound quite right.
I imagine desert islands as being dry and bright and isolated places; this album’s much more suitable for rainy afternoons holed up in the condo. “Stay indoors beneath the floors, talk with neighbors only; the games you play make people say you’re either weird or lonely,” Drake sings on “At the Chime of a City Clock.” The music, too, amplifies the urban cabin fever vibe; the arrangements are jazzy but melancholy, with a wonderful blend of wise guitar and playful piano and sad strings and resigned horns. (The horns are crucial; they help make Bryter Later that rarest of things—an excellent album that doesn’t quite sound like anything that came before.) Drake’s voice, soothing and hushed and cool, complements the songs perfectly, but there are great instrumental pieces, too, bisecting and bookending the album.
Five Leaves Left was my first—and first favorite—Nick Drake album, but now I find myself listening to this one far more frequently. There’s still plenty of melancholy here; on Hazey Jane I, for instance, Drake asks: “Do you like what you’re doing? Would you do it some more? Only to stop once and wonder what you’re doing it for?” But all in all, the relentless depression’s been tempered quite a bit. That first album’s vibe is I-want-to-kill-myself-because-life’s-pointless-and-I-won’t-be-noticed-otherwise; this is more like I-don’t-quite-feel-like-going-to-the-grocery-store-today.
And that resignation’s leavened, too, with a cautious optimism—today may be shot, but tomorrow’s at least worth sticking around for. “Please give me a second grace; please give me a second face,” Drake sings on “Fly.” And then on “Northern Sky,” he asks: “Would you love me for my money? Would you love me for my mind? Would you love me through the winter? Would you love me until I die? If you would and you could, then come blow your horn for me.” It’s a lovely song, but the pronouns alone are significant; on both this and “Five Leaves Left” there are times when the “you” refers to Drake himself, and the songs become mere mirrors, places for tortured artistic sensitivity and introspection, but on this, there are far more moments where the “you” is someone else. So Drake is at least spending less time gazing into mirrors and more time looking out windows, looking out from the darkened apartment at the faces in the city, and searching for a connection with someone who can end the isolation.
I imagine desert islands as being dry and bright and isolated places; this album’s much more suitable for rainy afternoons holed up in the condo. “Stay indoors beneath the floors, talk with neighbors only; the games you play make people say you’re either weird or lonely,” Drake sings on “At the Chime of a City Clock.” The music, too, amplifies the urban cabin fever vibe; the arrangements are jazzy but melancholy, with a wonderful blend of wise guitar and playful piano and sad strings and resigned horns. (The horns are crucial; they help make Bryter Later that rarest of things—an excellent album that doesn’t quite sound like anything that came before.) Drake’s voice, soothing and hushed and cool, complements the songs perfectly, but there are great instrumental pieces, too, bisecting and bookending the album.
Five Leaves Left was my first—and first favorite—Nick Drake album, but now I find myself listening to this one far more frequently. There’s still plenty of melancholy here; on Hazey Jane I, for instance, Drake asks: “Do you like what you’re doing? Would you do it some more? Only to stop once and wonder what you’re doing it for?” But all in all, the relentless depression’s been tempered quite a bit. That first album’s vibe is I-want-to-kill-myself-because-life’s-pointless-and-I-won’t-be-noticed-otherwise; this is more like I-don’t-quite-feel-like-going-to-the-grocery-store-today.
And that resignation’s leavened, too, with a cautious optimism—today may be shot, but tomorrow’s at least worth sticking around for. “Please give me a second grace; please give me a second face,” Drake sings on “Fly.” And then on “Northern Sky,” he asks: “Would you love me for my money? Would you love me for my mind? Would you love me through the winter? Would you love me until I die? If you would and you could, then come blow your horn for me.” It’s a lovely song, but the pronouns alone are significant; on both this and “Five Leaves Left” there are times when the “you” refers to Drake himself, and the songs become mere mirrors, places for tortured artistic sensitivity and introspection, but on this, there are far more moments where the “you” is someone else. So Drake is at least spending less time gazing into mirrors and more time looking out windows, looking out from the darkened apartment at the faces in the city, and searching for a connection with someone who can end the isolation.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
A Regular Guy
I’ve recently started taking Metamucil, at the ripe old age of 31. I’m hoping to take it for the rest of my life.
Jerry Seinfeld once said that, “Since men can’t have babies, they’re automatically proud of everything else that comes out of their body.” Truer words have never been spoken; indeed, I’ve recently become aware that a circle of my friends have taken advantage of the unholy potentialities afforded by male scatology and camera phone ubiquity and started texting one another—how can I put this delicately?—pictures of their poo.
Now, the gentlemanly thing to do when one hears about such activities would probably be to politely nod, while tactfully declining to take part, and speaking no more of them.
I, of course, decided to participate.
It can be hard to resist such temptations; when one hasn’t done much in a day, one must seek the pride of accomplishment wherever one can find it, and it can indeed feel like an artistic triumph when one can produce, say, something shaped like a perfectly formed treble clef from the depths of one’s colon.
My “pieces” soon won accolades from friends, and I felt they compared favorably with the “artwork” I saw posted on ratemypoo.com—work that, frankly speaking, looked rather amateurish and derivative. But for a while, I felt like—how shall I say it?—a tortured artist. Sculpture’s not just about shape and form, but texture, and in these situations, part of the problem was that my productions often came out as—how should I describe it?—sticky baby poo. Also, my creations often simply took an inconveniently long time; once I had to take a cab to a first date because I spent a full twenty minute to bring my efforts to full fruition. When constipation starts to feel like writer’s block, something, literally, has to give.
For a while, I thought about colon cleanses, or enemas. The latter seemed a little invasive; still, I once heard a story where someone underwent one that brought forth a penny they’d swallowed as a child that had somehow gotten stuck in one of the folds of their large intestine. Though I never mustered up the moxie to undergo the procedure myself, this made it seem incredibly intriguing and strangely healthy. As for the first option, I eventually followed the suggestion of one of my friends and walked down the dark road of googling “colon cleanse” and clicking the “Images” link. I was intrigued by the volume and consistency of the productions I saw showcased there. Some seemed like reverse sculptures of the entire inside of a colon; they were incredibly long, and surprisingly stringy, and my friend suggested that these cleanses could remove, literally, pounds of impacted material that had spent decades inside one’s body. But most of these cleanses involved doing strange things like consuming nothing but maple syrup mixed with lemonade for weeks on end, and, frankly, people, I like to eat.
Then one day, another friend came and described how he’d embarked on a course of action that, he said, “changed his life forever.” He’d started taking Metamucil. In tones of hushed reverence, he related to me the incredible volume of material he’d been producing—a literal torrent of brown creativity. And he offered visual proof—a camera-phone photo of an early work he’d entitled “Alabama Black Snake.”
Needless to say, I couldn’t resist.
Within days, I was at Walgreens, making my initial purchase. (Orange-flavored Metamucil being, in case you didn’t know, the brainchild of Donald Rumsfeld, a legacy of his time heading G.D. Searle. This might seem strange, unless you think about the fact that he basically spent a large portion of his career helping people produce shitty messes. I digress.) Anyway, since I’ve tended towards overconsumption of various substances at different parts of my life, I, of course, indulged in these habits here as well. So I started consuming Metamucil the way I once consumed, say, Miller High Life or, once in a blue moon, Nyquil—with a liberal attitude towards normal amounts and recommended dosages and things of that sort.
And my artwork has flourished. (You’ll have to take my word for it, because I’m not posting pictures; blogging about it is fun, but even I have my limits.) I’ve produced creations such as “Dead Alien Baby” and “The Revolting Blob” and “Mother with Child” that, frankly, rank among my best work.
There are drawbacks; Metamucil gets thick and goey if you don’t drink it quickly enough, and it leaves chunks of residue in your drinking glasses. And you end up with enough mass moving through your digestive tract that you often can’t take in more without having to get rid of some shortly thereafter.
Still, I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon. Even though I’m basically using Metamucil for recreational purposes—for shits and giggles, as it were—it feels like a healthy indulgence. In recovery programs for other substances, one has to admit powerlessness and unmanageability. But with this, I feel powerful, and this area of my life has become very manageable indeed—more regular, and more pleasant, than it has been in quite some time.
Jerry Seinfeld once said that, “Since men can’t have babies, they’re automatically proud of everything else that comes out of their body.” Truer words have never been spoken; indeed, I’ve recently become aware that a circle of my friends have taken advantage of the unholy potentialities afforded by male scatology and camera phone ubiquity and started texting one another—how can I put this delicately?—pictures of their poo.
Now, the gentlemanly thing to do when one hears about such activities would probably be to politely nod, while tactfully declining to take part, and speaking no more of them.
I, of course, decided to participate.
It can be hard to resist such temptations; when one hasn’t done much in a day, one must seek the pride of accomplishment wherever one can find it, and it can indeed feel like an artistic triumph when one can produce, say, something shaped like a perfectly formed treble clef from the depths of one’s colon.
My “pieces” soon won accolades from friends, and I felt they compared favorably with the “artwork” I saw posted on ratemypoo.com—work that, frankly speaking, looked rather amateurish and derivative. But for a while, I felt like—how shall I say it?—a tortured artist. Sculpture’s not just about shape and form, but texture, and in these situations, part of the problem was that my productions often came out as—how should I describe it?—sticky baby poo. Also, my creations often simply took an inconveniently long time; once I had to take a cab to a first date because I spent a full twenty minute to bring my efforts to full fruition. When constipation starts to feel like writer’s block, something, literally, has to give.
For a while, I thought about colon cleanses, or enemas. The latter seemed a little invasive; still, I once heard a story where someone underwent one that brought forth a penny they’d swallowed as a child that had somehow gotten stuck in one of the folds of their large intestine. Though I never mustered up the moxie to undergo the procedure myself, this made it seem incredibly intriguing and strangely healthy. As for the first option, I eventually followed the suggestion of one of my friends and walked down the dark road of googling “colon cleanse” and clicking the “Images” link. I was intrigued by the volume and consistency of the productions I saw showcased there. Some seemed like reverse sculptures of the entire inside of a colon; they were incredibly long, and surprisingly stringy, and my friend suggested that these cleanses could remove, literally, pounds of impacted material that had spent decades inside one’s body. But most of these cleanses involved doing strange things like consuming nothing but maple syrup mixed with lemonade for weeks on end, and, frankly, people, I like to eat.
Then one day, another friend came and described how he’d embarked on a course of action that, he said, “changed his life forever.” He’d started taking Metamucil. In tones of hushed reverence, he related to me the incredible volume of material he’d been producing—a literal torrent of brown creativity. And he offered visual proof—a camera-phone photo of an early work he’d entitled “Alabama Black Snake.”
Needless to say, I couldn’t resist.
Within days, I was at Walgreens, making my initial purchase. (Orange-flavored Metamucil being, in case you didn’t know, the brainchild of Donald Rumsfeld, a legacy of his time heading G.D. Searle. This might seem strange, unless you think about the fact that he basically spent a large portion of his career helping people produce shitty messes. I digress.) Anyway, since I’ve tended towards overconsumption of various substances at different parts of my life, I, of course, indulged in these habits here as well. So I started consuming Metamucil the way I once consumed, say, Miller High Life or, once in a blue moon, Nyquil—with a liberal attitude towards normal amounts and recommended dosages and things of that sort.
And my artwork has flourished. (You’ll have to take my word for it, because I’m not posting pictures; blogging about it is fun, but even I have my limits.) I’ve produced creations such as “Dead Alien Baby” and “The Revolting Blob” and “Mother with Child” that, frankly, rank among my best work.
There are drawbacks; Metamucil gets thick and goey if you don’t drink it quickly enough, and it leaves chunks of residue in your drinking glasses. And you end up with enough mass moving through your digestive tract that you often can’t take in more without having to get rid of some shortly thereafter.
Still, I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon. Even though I’m basically using Metamucil for recreational purposes—for shits and giggles, as it were—it feels like a healthy indulgence. In recovery programs for other substances, one has to admit powerlessness and unmanageability. But with this, I feel powerful, and this area of my life has become very manageable indeed—more regular, and more pleasant, than it has been in quite some time.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Printing the Book
So I’m nearing the point where I’m finally willing to unclench my fingers from the massive book manuscript I just finished and actually hand the whole thing to another human being to read.
I finally saw it in the flesh at Kinko’s last night. (OK, it’s FedEx Office now, but I’m always going to call it Kinko’s, you mindless good-trademark-ruining corporate bastards.) I’d dropped it off to print up a few copies; since I was getting four copies bound so as to ship it off and enter it into some contests—a $167 print job—I figured I’d see a proof first.
No sooner had the words “I’m here to pick up a proof” cleared my lips than the girl behind the counter—and her associate—looked at me with a mix of awe and disbelief. “You must be Alfonso,” she said. “That’s a big book. We couldn’t bind it.”
She motioned over her shoulder to a massive pile of letter-sized paper. It looked like it was 8 inches high.
I tried not to panic. One thought crossed my mind: holy shit, what the fuck have I just done with the past few years of my life?
I’d already known it was a good-sized manuscript—200,000 words, give or take; nowhere near War and Peace, but not far from Moby Dick. More importantly, I knew it was certainly long enough to make a lot of literary agents pass on it on that basis alone. Still, 200,000 was just a number, and this—this massive cube of dead tree that looked hefty enough to collapse the Kinko’s counter, or at least give the girl behind it a hernia—this was tangible, physical proof that I am a lunatic.
Strong words, you might say, but who else but a crazy man would spend such an obscene length of time on such a project without a clear idea as to how to sell it? Here’s a brief—by my standards, ha ha!!—history of the project:
Since approximately 1994, I’ve been more or less obsessed by the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the “hidden pivot” of Nazi Germany. I went to Prague during summer leave in 1998 in part because I wanted to see the spot where he was ambushed by Czech parachutists. Then I thought about the project for a while, wrote a different book-length manuscript, did some intermittent research (and actually wrote a single unsatisfactory page) before deciding to write Pottersville instead, then finally started writing in earnest in early 2006 when I had a chance to go back to Prague. I first wrote a screenplay based on the assassination. I realized it was too long, so I split it into two screenplays. Then I went to Hollywood for a “screenwriter’s pitchfest,” where one gets a chance to meet with real life producers and try and sell them on your movie idea. (Basically, it’s like speed-dating, except you do all the talking, and they do all the rejecting.) Of course, I’d imagined everyone would love it; instead, I was told that expensive period pieces are one of the toughest things to sell. So I came back to Chicago and figured I’d just turn it into a book, because at least I could get that done by myself. Should be a jiff, I figured—I’d already imagined most of the scenes, right? I thought it would take me six months, tops.
Three years later, here I am.
The book’s in three parts, with three first-person narrators; I wrote the first part on the laptop, then—to differentiate the voices, I told myself—composed the first few drafts of the second part using a typewriter, and wrote the third third by hand in composition books. (The handwriting part was kind of fun; it’s good to be forced to rewrite stuff. But don’t ever write anything on a typewriter, people. There’s a reason they barely sell them any more: they suck.)
ANYWAY, I wrote it, and transferred the typewritten and handwritten parts to a computer, and revised the hell out of it, and re-read it and polished it many more times. And I’ve relearned a valuable lesson—the longer you spend on such a project, and the more emotional energy you have invested in it, the less willing you will be to actually stop work completely and say it’s done. (At least for me—it’s all too easy for the sharp needle of another human being’s disapproval to puncture the fragile, overinflated balloon that is my ego.) Rather than getting it in the hands of other people, it’s so much easier to just imagine it is perfect and not do anything that will dispel that illusion.
But, of course, you lose perspective on anything the closer you are to it and the bigger it is, and I’ve long since passed the point where I can objectively judge this particular piece of work. So I need to get it out there and put it up for some contests—hence the trip to Kinko’s.
ANYWAY, it turned out that they hadn’t printed the pages double-sided. And I’d made it double-spaced to comply with various contest guidelines, so that stretched it out a bit, too. The Kinko’s people still had to split it into its three component parts, but the new proof they hurriedly put together last night at least looked semi-manageable. (I tried to resist the temptation to page through it and try and figure out whether I actually, you know, still liked it.) I’m excited to pick it up this weekend, and excited to get some feedback at long last.
But I’m still scared shitless, too.
I finally saw it in the flesh at Kinko’s last night. (OK, it’s FedEx Office now, but I’m always going to call it Kinko’s, you mindless good-trademark-ruining corporate bastards.) I’d dropped it off to print up a few copies; since I was getting four copies bound so as to ship it off and enter it into some contests—a $167 print job—I figured I’d see a proof first.
No sooner had the words “I’m here to pick up a proof” cleared my lips than the girl behind the counter—and her associate—looked at me with a mix of awe and disbelief. “You must be Alfonso,” she said. “That’s a big book. We couldn’t bind it.”
She motioned over her shoulder to a massive pile of letter-sized paper. It looked like it was 8 inches high.
I tried not to panic. One thought crossed my mind: holy shit, what the fuck have I just done with the past few years of my life?
I’d already known it was a good-sized manuscript—200,000 words, give or take; nowhere near War and Peace, but not far from Moby Dick. More importantly, I knew it was certainly long enough to make a lot of literary agents pass on it on that basis alone. Still, 200,000 was just a number, and this—this massive cube of dead tree that looked hefty enough to collapse the Kinko’s counter, or at least give the girl behind it a hernia—this was tangible, physical proof that I am a lunatic.
Strong words, you might say, but who else but a crazy man would spend such an obscene length of time on such a project without a clear idea as to how to sell it? Here’s a brief—by my standards, ha ha!!—history of the project:
Since approximately 1994, I’ve been more or less obsessed by the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the “hidden pivot” of Nazi Germany. I went to Prague during summer leave in 1998 in part because I wanted to see the spot where he was ambushed by Czech parachutists. Then I thought about the project for a while, wrote a different book-length manuscript, did some intermittent research (and actually wrote a single unsatisfactory page) before deciding to write Pottersville instead, then finally started writing in earnest in early 2006 when I had a chance to go back to Prague. I first wrote a screenplay based on the assassination. I realized it was too long, so I split it into two screenplays. Then I went to Hollywood for a “screenwriter’s pitchfest,” where one gets a chance to meet with real life producers and try and sell them on your movie idea. (Basically, it’s like speed-dating, except you do all the talking, and they do all the rejecting.) Of course, I’d imagined everyone would love it; instead, I was told that expensive period pieces are one of the toughest things to sell. So I came back to Chicago and figured I’d just turn it into a book, because at least I could get that done by myself. Should be a jiff, I figured—I’d already imagined most of the scenes, right? I thought it would take me six months, tops.
Three years later, here I am.
The book’s in three parts, with three first-person narrators; I wrote the first part on the laptop, then—to differentiate the voices, I told myself—composed the first few drafts of the second part using a typewriter, and wrote the third third by hand in composition books. (The handwriting part was kind of fun; it’s good to be forced to rewrite stuff. But don’t ever write anything on a typewriter, people. There’s a reason they barely sell them any more: they suck.)
ANYWAY, I wrote it, and transferred the typewritten and handwritten parts to a computer, and revised the hell out of it, and re-read it and polished it many more times. And I’ve relearned a valuable lesson—the longer you spend on such a project, and the more emotional energy you have invested in it, the less willing you will be to actually stop work completely and say it’s done. (At least for me—it’s all too easy for the sharp needle of another human being’s disapproval to puncture the fragile, overinflated balloon that is my ego.) Rather than getting it in the hands of other people, it’s so much easier to just imagine it is perfect and not do anything that will dispel that illusion.
But, of course, you lose perspective on anything the closer you are to it and the bigger it is, and I’ve long since passed the point where I can objectively judge this particular piece of work. So I need to get it out there and put it up for some contests—hence the trip to Kinko’s.
ANYWAY, it turned out that they hadn’t printed the pages double-sided. And I’d made it double-spaced to comply with various contest guidelines, so that stretched it out a bit, too. The Kinko’s people still had to split it into its three component parts, but the new proof they hurriedly put together last night at least looked semi-manageable. (I tried to resist the temptation to page through it and try and figure out whether I actually, you know, still liked it.) I’m excited to pick it up this weekend, and excited to get some feedback at long last.
But I’m still scared shitless, too.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Fitness For Fanatics
So I've restarted this blog, but I've been some combination of lazy and busy, so I haven't written as much new content yet. So I'm going to post something I wrote about the Crossfit fitness program, which many of you may or may not have heard me speak about at length. Anyway, here goes:
Crossfit is not like most fitness programs. It’s more like a cult.
A friend in the military—one of the few who is not yet drinking the Kool-Aid on a daily basis, it seems!!—described it to me as such, and the comparison’s hard to avoid, for it has all the necessary ingredients. You have an enigmatic but charismatic leader (known, most commonly, as “Coach”) whose minions post workouts every day on the Crossfit website. (It’s at www.crossfit.com, if you’re feeling masochistic.) You have glimpses of the fantastic rewards that await if you are willing to fully submit to this lifestyle—not just in the site’s pictures and short video clips, which show chiselled, beautiful people doing things that defy the laws of biology and gravity, but also in the movie posters for the movie 300, whose actors, you will find yourself explaining to people, got in that shape by using Crossfit. And you have scores of devoted followers—among them yours truly—hanging off every pronouncement from Coach (whose title is always capitalized on every Crossfit discussion board, it seems), copying down His pronouncements and bringing them to the gym, and most importantly, engaging in bizarre physical routines that seem tailor-made to push body and mind and soul to the breaking point and beyond, often leaving said follower prone and gasping on the gym floor in a pool of his or her sweat.
And do these followers leave the cult? No! Despite the ongoing sense of physical inadequacy and occasional humiliation, they keep coming back! They (we, actually) return day after day to this website, and attempt the workouts, and track their—I mean our—progress; many find it hard to even contemplate a return to the old routines.
And why? Because Crossfit is awesome.
Crossfit’s very capriciousness is part of its appeal. It’s all too easy to fall into boring routines at the gym, doing the same exercises over and over until you almost want to drop a dumbbell on your head to break the monotony. However, with Crossfit, you don’t know what tomorrow will bring—at least, not until about 10:00 p.m. or so the night before, when the W.O.D. (Workout-Of-the-Day) is posted. (You do know beforehand what your rest days will be. Every fourth day is a day off. It’s a brilliant schedule—you’re not always working out on the same days of the week.) Some W.O.D.s are stupefyingly straightforward, like doing seven single-rep sets of the Deadlift for max weight. Some of them are astonishingly complicated, with strange sequences of jumping and throwing and running and lifting. Some of them will take close to an hour, but many can be knocked out in less than twenty minutes, and a few are even closer to ten. But all of them are challenging. They’re based on the principle that, rather than isolate individual muscle groups or work on single elements of physical fitness in isolation, you should work out in a way that integrates your muscles, because that’s what happens in the real world, and you should work out in ways that tax both, say, muscular strength and cardiovascular fitness, because, again, that’s what happens in the real world. And everything is done for either max time or max weight or max reps, so if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll always be pushing yourself.
Many of the workouts are named after people, so you’ll read strange comments on the discussion boards, like “I made Melissa my bitch today” or “Fran really kicked my ass” or “I did Michael and didn’t have to stop and poop halfway through.” (OK, I made that last one up, but I did almost use it as a facebook status update once. Some devotees brag about “meeting Pukey,” which basically means what it sounds like—if you do some of the workouts with sufficient intensity, there’s a fair chance you’ll vomit. For me, though, “Poopey” is a bigger problem, especially in the mornings, and especially in the workouts like “Michael” that mix treadmill time with other exercises. I will get up and go to the bathroom, and then go to the gym and get on the treadmill to try and fake my colon into thinking that I’ve started my workout, and I’ll go to the bathroom again, and then I will come back and finally press “Start” on my watch and make it through a couple rounds of whatever craziness Coach has cooked up, and my colon will say, “Haha! I’ve got you!” and I will scamper off to the bathroom yet again, lest I soil the treadmill in what I can only assume will be a spectacularly messy and spatter-y fashion. My colon is a crafty foe.)
I digress. Crossfit isn’t perfect. Coach really has a jones for pull-ups, to the point that (if you work out gloveless, like me) you will get crazy calluses on your hands that will sometimes tear off and bleed and heal and tear off again. Also, there are perhaps too many of the exercises that require gymnastics rings and climbing ropes, and not enough of the strange asymmetrical ones that can be done with normal gym equipment. (Examples include “Virtual Shovelling,” which involves putting a 45 lb plate on only one side of a standard bench press bar and lifting it back and forth over a barrier, and “The Turkish Get-up, which involves lying on your back with a loaded bench press bar held in front of your chest with one arm, then getting up and standing while keeping the bar above you at all times—which, it turns out, is a great conversation starter.) You will have to learn the meaning of the word “pood.” (OK, I’ll save you time on that one. Surprisingly, it has nothing to do with meeting Poopey; it’s a unit of weight approximately equal to 34 lbs that’s apparently only been used in Imperial Russia and on the kettlebells in the Crossfit gym.) And, perhaps most importantly, if you don’t dial back some of the W.O.D.s that have specific weight requirements the first time you do them, you may tear something—I did something to my right inner thigh while front-squatting months ago, and it still doesn’t feel quite right.
Still, I’m not looking for any other fitness routine any time soon. Crossfit gets results, and you don’t plateau as quickly as you do with other routines, so the results keep coming. I feel like I’m on the verge of being able to do the vaunted handstand pushup unassisted, for instance. Also, my time on the dreaded “Filthy Fifty” has dropped by over four minutes since I last did it, even though this time I was still sore from doing 120 pullups and 120 dips two days before. And even though I’ve only been at it for six months, if some sequel-crazed Hollywood-type decides to make 301 any time soon, I’ll at least have an outside shot—if I cut out the milkshakes and deep-dish pizza—at being the crazy ripped Spartan staring out at you from the movie poster.
I’m ready for my close-up, Coach.
Crossfit is not like most fitness programs. It’s more like a cult.
A friend in the military—one of the few who is not yet drinking the Kool-Aid on a daily basis, it seems!!—described it to me as such, and the comparison’s hard to avoid, for it has all the necessary ingredients. You have an enigmatic but charismatic leader (known, most commonly, as “Coach”) whose minions post workouts every day on the Crossfit website. (It’s at www.crossfit.com, if you’re feeling masochistic.) You have glimpses of the fantastic rewards that await if you are willing to fully submit to this lifestyle—not just in the site’s pictures and short video clips, which show chiselled, beautiful people doing things that defy the laws of biology and gravity, but also in the movie posters for the movie 300, whose actors, you will find yourself explaining to people, got in that shape by using Crossfit. And you have scores of devoted followers—among them yours truly—hanging off every pronouncement from Coach (whose title is always capitalized on every Crossfit discussion board, it seems), copying down His pronouncements and bringing them to the gym, and most importantly, engaging in bizarre physical routines that seem tailor-made to push body and mind and soul to the breaking point and beyond, often leaving said follower prone and gasping on the gym floor in a pool of his or her sweat.
And do these followers leave the cult? No! Despite the ongoing sense of physical inadequacy and occasional humiliation, they keep coming back! They (we, actually) return day after day to this website, and attempt the workouts, and track their—I mean our—progress; many find it hard to even contemplate a return to the old routines.
And why? Because Crossfit is awesome.
Crossfit’s very capriciousness is part of its appeal. It’s all too easy to fall into boring routines at the gym, doing the same exercises over and over until you almost want to drop a dumbbell on your head to break the monotony. However, with Crossfit, you don’t know what tomorrow will bring—at least, not until about 10:00 p.m. or so the night before, when the W.O.D. (Workout-Of-the-Day) is posted. (You do know beforehand what your rest days will be. Every fourth day is a day off. It’s a brilliant schedule—you’re not always working out on the same days of the week.) Some W.O.D.s are stupefyingly straightforward, like doing seven single-rep sets of the Deadlift for max weight. Some of them are astonishingly complicated, with strange sequences of jumping and throwing and running and lifting. Some of them will take close to an hour, but many can be knocked out in less than twenty minutes, and a few are even closer to ten. But all of them are challenging. They’re based on the principle that, rather than isolate individual muscle groups or work on single elements of physical fitness in isolation, you should work out in a way that integrates your muscles, because that’s what happens in the real world, and you should work out in ways that tax both, say, muscular strength and cardiovascular fitness, because, again, that’s what happens in the real world. And everything is done for either max time or max weight or max reps, so if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll always be pushing yourself.
Many of the workouts are named after people, so you’ll read strange comments on the discussion boards, like “I made Melissa my bitch today” or “Fran really kicked my ass” or “I did Michael and didn’t have to stop and poop halfway through.” (OK, I made that last one up, but I did almost use it as a facebook status update once. Some devotees brag about “meeting Pukey,” which basically means what it sounds like—if you do some of the workouts with sufficient intensity, there’s a fair chance you’ll vomit. For me, though, “Poopey” is a bigger problem, especially in the mornings, and especially in the workouts like “Michael” that mix treadmill time with other exercises. I will get up and go to the bathroom, and then go to the gym and get on the treadmill to try and fake my colon into thinking that I’ve started my workout, and I’ll go to the bathroom again, and then I will come back and finally press “Start” on my watch and make it through a couple rounds of whatever craziness Coach has cooked up, and my colon will say, “Haha! I’ve got you!” and I will scamper off to the bathroom yet again, lest I soil the treadmill in what I can only assume will be a spectacularly messy and spatter-y fashion. My colon is a crafty foe.)
I digress. Crossfit isn’t perfect. Coach really has a jones for pull-ups, to the point that (if you work out gloveless, like me) you will get crazy calluses on your hands that will sometimes tear off and bleed and heal and tear off again. Also, there are perhaps too many of the exercises that require gymnastics rings and climbing ropes, and not enough of the strange asymmetrical ones that can be done with normal gym equipment. (Examples include “Virtual Shovelling,” which involves putting a 45 lb plate on only one side of a standard bench press bar and lifting it back and forth over a barrier, and “The Turkish Get-up, which involves lying on your back with a loaded bench press bar held in front of your chest with one arm, then getting up and standing while keeping the bar above you at all times—which, it turns out, is a great conversation starter.) You will have to learn the meaning of the word “pood.” (OK, I’ll save you time on that one. Surprisingly, it has nothing to do with meeting Poopey; it’s a unit of weight approximately equal to 34 lbs that’s apparently only been used in Imperial Russia and on the kettlebells in the Crossfit gym.) And, perhaps most importantly, if you don’t dial back some of the W.O.D.s that have specific weight requirements the first time you do them, you may tear something—I did something to my right inner thigh while front-squatting months ago, and it still doesn’t feel quite right.
Still, I’m not looking for any other fitness routine any time soon. Crossfit gets results, and you don’t plateau as quickly as you do with other routines, so the results keep coming. I feel like I’m on the verge of being able to do the vaunted handstand pushup unassisted, for instance. Also, my time on the dreaded “Filthy Fifty” has dropped by over four minutes since I last did it, even though this time I was still sore from doing 120 pullups and 120 dips two days before. And even though I’ve only been at it for six months, if some sequel-crazed Hollywood-type decides to make 301 any time soon, I’ll at least have an outside shot—if I cut out the milkshakes and deep-dish pizza—at being the crazy ripped Spartan staring out at you from the movie poster.
I’m ready for my close-up, Coach.
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Shopping Fiction: A Primer
So I’m resuming this blog, which I left for dead some time ago, because it will give me something to write while I shop around my new book, Resistance. What’s more, it will give me something to write other than the book, and I desperately need something else to write.
The problem with writing books isn’t writing books—it’s selling them afterwards. So I’d rather do the first and avoid the second. I’ve spent plenty of time (I think) working on this book, and my natural tendency is to keep polishing and polishing, all the while shying away from the part that will actually get it sold—namely, shipping query letters and manuscripts off to people who might be willing to represent me or buy my manuscript.
I know I have to shop it around. I have a hard time getting myself to do this. The following story should help illustrate why.
I have, so far, queried exactly one (1) agency about this book.
A year and a half ago, or so, I was working as a waiter at a restaurant in downtown Chicago, having been fired from a lucrative corporate job some time before.
Now, this restaurant was a stressful, demanding place, run by Greeks who had a ridiculously long set of rules, which frequently led to diminished tips and general unpleasantness amongst customers and wait staff alike. (Indeed, the first day I showed up there looking for work was the first day I’d set foot in there for three years—thanks to an unpleasant incident the last time I’d tried to be a customer there, it was the one restaurant in Chicago that I absolutely refused to patronize.) Granted, I had come to love these Greeks, like one would love a crazy aunt or uncle—they’d given me a job when I was a desperate unemployed nobody with little experience in food service who needed cash, pronto; also, I probably learned more life lessons in a year and a half there than I had in five years in a cubicle. Still, it was not my dream job.
So when I found out there was a literary agency upstairs, I—budding unpublished author that I was—figured I’d miraculously found an escape ladder.
Now, I’d sent queries to literary agents before, for a couple different book-length projects, but this promised to be different. Those had been blind queries to people I had never and would never meet; this was an opportunity to personally speak to a literary agent and win them over with my suave charisma and roguish good looks as well as my eloquent prose. Everything—my loss of a well-paying job, the strange turn of events that had led to me waiting tables in a restaurant at which I’d once refused to eat—seemed designed to get me in touch with these people. Clearly this was all preordained by God.
I went up there and introduced myself one slow February afternoon, and it went well enough. The only problem was that I didn’t have anything to offer right then. The previous book had already been published through a publish-on-demand company; they told me it was not worth anyone’s time trying to sell something that already had a publishing history. And the current book was only 2/3rds finished; they told me it was a waste of time to try and sell fiction without a completed manuscript. Come back when you have something finished, they said; they also admonished me to study their submission guidelines, which were posted on the Internet. (Apparently, some authors neglected to take such simple precautions.)
So I went home. I had more research to do to finish the book, so I left struggling America and went to Europe for research, and returned to somehow land back in corporate America. I finished the book. I polished the book. Seasons changed. Presidents changed. I read their submission guidelines. I wrote a query letter. I polished the query letter. I wrote a synopsis. I polished the synopsis. I polished the book again, just for good measure.
Then finally came the fateful day, the golden blue glorious morning when it was all done and I had no more reason to dilly-dally. So I printed out a query letter and patiently wrote out my address on a self-addressed stamped envelope, and put the whole bundle together, and went to have breakfast with a buddy at my favorite breakfast spot (Not the restaurant where I used to work, ha ha!) and then went to the restaurant where I used to work, and told them of my grand plans, and walked upstairs to deliver my query letter.
I spoke to the receptionist and explained my purpose. Mid-explanation, the agent came out, and I explained myself to her, and introduced myself. She used hand sanitizer on herself immediately after shaking my hand.
Still, I was cautiously optimistic. Surely the query letter would win them over.
That was on a Friday. I got their rejection letter in my mailbox on Saturday.
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