The Haunting

This is the phase of every book that I call the Haunting. Actually, I've never called it that, I just all of a sudden thought of it. But it fits. It's when everywhere I go, everything I see, reminds me of the book. Even when I'm not writing it, even when I'm strenuously avoiding it, I find myself trying to connect every experience to it. I would say that's a good omen for actually getting it written except I'm afraid of jinxing it.

     What the book's haunting now is Ojai. My son and his mom flew to San Diego to meet me for half of the comic book convention and we spent a few days driving back to SF together. My first visit to Ojai, which Jennie's been wanting me to see for years. It's my kind of place, all right: hill-nestled oak valley, hot dry summer, white stucco, Spanish revival buildings, Arts and Crafts furniture, a main street colonnade, working fountains, outdoor dining, orange groves, ancient pepper trees, old Hollywood connections. My personal heaven, right this moment, would be Ojai with a gift certificate at Hacienda Antiques. But what put me in mind of the book was the role Ojai played in the history of 20th Century spirituality.

      The Theosophical Society was a Victorian "spiritualist" group, one of those séance-and-medium deals, a lot of clairvoyants with huge beards and black-garbed ladies with scary gleams in their eyes, but one that opened up to an interest in Buddhism and Hinduism before such things were fashionable in America and England. They were a weird bunch, mixing valuable scholarship and social work with a cultish belief in the imminent coming of the World Teacher, the new incarnation of the Christ. Then, in 1909, one of their leaders discovered a beautiful, dreamy, gazelle-eyed, 13-year-old Indian boy named Jiddu Krishnamurti and declared that this was Him for whom they waited. The Theosophists persuaded the boy's father to allow them to adopt both him and his younger brother, and for the next thirteen years Jiddu was raised to become the new Christ.

      Part of the job of the World Teacher turned out to be lecture tours. In 1922, needing rest after an exhausting world circuit, concluding with a long voyage from Sydney to Los Angeles in the close company of his Theosophical handlers, Jiddu was allowed a little R&R in a cottage in a secluded California valley—Ojai—owned by one of his followers. His handlers mostly left him alone, and in the company of his brother and some Ojai neighbors and a few lower-level Theosophists more inclined to honor than indoctrinate him, he began to see things in a new way. He experienced the first of a series of spiritual crises that would eventually lead him to break from the Society and deny that he was any sort of Christ. He was no more, he realized, than a man with the opportunity, the knowledge, and the temperament to bring the philosophical insights of Hinduism and Buddhism to Western awareness in a way that was relevant to the modern world. He rejected organized religion as a whole, even the Hindu guru tradition, and gave his life to teaching an ethical and personalized spirituality that he hoped might lead to individual freedom and universal peace. "Truth is a pathless land," he said. The marriage of Eastern philosophy and Western individualism that underlies so much of modern spirituality and psychology was shaped more by him than any other teacher.

      Krishnamurti lived in Ojai until he died in 1986 at the age of 90, and around him the town grew into an artistic and spiritual center. It's still full of spas, art galleries, lecture facilities, and philosophical foundations, not to mention a lot of shops selling those big pink crystals and the rest of what I think of as the goofier accesories of individualized cosmology. Looking at all this in my current haunted state, I started lining up Krishnamurti's story next to the story of The Undressing of America. While the Theosophists were preparing the world for The Coming, a wave of natural-health gurus were seizing the American imagination, and just as young Jiddu was being drafted for his holy role, Bernarr Macfadden reached the first peak of his fame. Krishnamurti began to rethink his destiny during the same years Macfadden rode True Story and its tabloid children to a new kind of power and influence. And as Macfadden began to behave more weirdly, finally throwing away his own empire, Krishnamurti was coming into his own as a teacher.

      Suddenly some patterns started to emerge, and I had another one of those thrilling "So that's what this story's about!" moments. You have the messianic zeal of the early 20th Century, with all these charismatic eccentrics saying, "I have the Truth! Follow me and be saved!" Then the frightened pause of the War, and afterward a huge turn toward individualized, relativistic, experiential journeys, illuminated but not led by teachers who encouraged people to examine their own stories.

      Macfadden had always told his readers that listening to their own bodies and their own experiences was the best way to health, but in his earlier days he always drowned that out with his louder, "But of course what you will discover are the Laws of Nature, which I have already mastered." But with the publication of True Story, and its subsequent overshadowing of his health crusade, he became an intermediary for people to tell their own stories and learn by reading their peers'. Soon enough the true-story industry, the confessional culture, could roll along just fine without him, in the same way that Krishnamurti's message spread far beyond him until even his death was just a historical footnote.

      Then I started seeing the same wide cultural turn all over the place around the same time. Like how Bill Wilson and his fellow drunks seeking a spiritual solution to alcoholism made their slow, painful break from specifically Christian organizations in the early '30s to create the Twelve Step Program, the "higher power," "God as you understand God," a program that just keeps splitting and spreading and rambling along anarchically in the hands of a bunch of addicts with no leaders. Each story reveals the mechanisms, the rewards, and the costs of the same profound shift in our relationship with self and truth.

      I have a lot of those "So that's what this story's about!" moments, to the point that I could probably list twenty things the book is "about." But what starts to happen in this haunted phase is that those abouts all start to hook up and overlap, turning into one big—still probably too big, but at least comprehensible—story. Which reminds me that there may be a real reason to delay and procrastinate on writing the thing. It may still need something I haven't found yet. Like a trip to Ojai.

The Big Con

Tomorrow morning I'm driving to San Diego to attend Comic Con International. This will be my 25th straight year there.

      The first time I was in my mid-20s, my first book had just come out, and I was researching my second, a history of '60s comics. I was also a rabid young comics fan, thrilled at the new directions the medium was taking in the '80s. Over the subsequent years I went back as an upstart comics writer networking like crazy, as one of the most prominent writers in the business locked into one signing or panel after another, as a burned-out comics writer bitching and moaning about the business, as a former comics writer skirting along the edges, and most recently as a comics historian honored by a small core of long-time fans but unknown to all the new fans in the field. And in the last couple of years I've started to meet young writers and artists who wanted to shake my hand because they'd "grown up on your comics, Mr. Jones."

      I've gone there umarried, married but no kid, with a baby, with a little kid who wanted to look at toys, in various states of marital break-up and reconciliation; this year I'll be there with a 15-year-old son. I've been there too broke to buy the comics I wanted, able to buy huge stacks of the things, loaded with cash but not wanting anything, and broke again.

     I've seen the convention change too, from a few thousand fans—mostly actual comics fans, and of the old nerdy school of hard-core collectors before comics got cool—in the dumpy old downtown convention to 120,000 people filling and overfilling the jet-hangar-sized center on the harbor. I've seen comics fans and creators become hipper, slimmer, more attractive, more ethnically varied, and more likely to be female, as I've seen the comics themselves pushed to the edges of the convention by the movies, TV shows, cartoons, video games, and collectible toys that have become the heart of the convention. I've seen the Klingons, Imperial Storm Troopers, superheroes, and other costumed oddballs come back every year but every year vanish deeper into the crowds of families in t-shirts and shorts. I've seen my generation of young turks become middle-aged veterans, seen the middle-aged veterans I admired become old-timers, seen the old-timers of another day become fewer and fewer.

      I can chart the course of half my life by just recalling each of those 25 sets of four days in the summer in San Diego. And this year, as most years, I go there in an interesting place, my career unfixed, opportunities open and closing like Venus fly-trap lips. I'm pushing these on-line humor books, wrestling with the nonfiction book that's given me the most trouble of any project in my life, and talking up the screenplay I've written about the early days of the comics business, which I know is a good piece of work—but which I'll also have to admit is trapped in a legal and financial dispute of the producer's.

      I never know how I'll feel about any of this as I talk to other writers there or as I think about it on the way home. I never know who I'll meet, either, because as the Con grows amoeba-like it slurps up more and more chunks of the culture outside it. I've just learned that several of my "real novelist" acquaintances will be there this year.

      So I'm going to let my Sisyphean obligation roll to the bottom of the hill and sit there for a week. This is no time to let my view of life be blocked by a big rock. I'm going to let my head empty out in the liminal state of the long I-5 drive. Then I'll plunge in, eyes and ears open, and find out who I am this year.

Collaboration

I think one reason I'm having trouble surrendering myself to this book is that I'm just burned out on the loneliness of the writing life. When I was a kid I was really isolated and had a lot of social anxiety, so pulling into myself and making things up was a great comfort. This, obviously, had a great deal to do with my decision to devote my life to writing.

      I climbed out of my hole in my early twenties, and as part of that started collaborating with another young writer, Will Jacobs, on humor books, light mysteries, fan-boy non-fiction and comic books. That was a true joy: We'd spend days at each other's houses, brainstorm and plot together, go off and write separate chunks and pass them back and forth, and read a lot of our stuff to our friends. Books got written, but it seemed to happen through play. And when I began to move back to solo writing, the doors I'd opened with Will led me into other collaborative work: comic books, where most of my artists and editors wanted to be real creative partners, and screenplays for hire, where regular meetings with eager young development execs punctuated the stretches of solitary work.

      At first it was a relief when I started carving out time to write my own books. Days of uninterrupted thought! The freedom to make huge structural changes without having to persuade an editor! I even took some comfort in retreating back to the solitude that had gotten me through anxious times as a kid. And even then there continued to be collaborative efforts. In researching Killing Monsters I did storytelling workshops with kids in classrooms, about as far from a quiet, lonely experience as I could get.

      Then, before I'd even started the writing in earnest, I began getting invitations to speak at conferences on media and child development, and I found myself part of a sprawling international conversation. Men of Tomorrow required a tremendous amount of face-to-face interviewing and regular email conversations with other comics historians. Big parts of that book felt like massive multi-player collaborations.

      But The Undressing of America, set further in the past (the heart of the story is the 1920s, and the principals were nearly all dead by the end of the '50s), allows for a great deal less interviewing. Although there are other students of the tabloids, the confessional magazines, and old health crusades, there is no vibrant subculture constantly arguing the details. There's a lot of library research, and I do like library research—but dear God! To fly to New York and walk through midtown and spend the day in that windowless room with those effing microfilm machines (whrrr—klak—whrrr—klak) when I could be out drinking coffee with my snappy Manhattan friends or looking at the spring light flashing on the Empire State Building? Whose idea was that?

      Fellow writers can be a huge comfort. Being able to talk about all this with my pals at the Writers Grotto has kept me sane and gotten me through some of the worst resistance on the book. But here's a perverse twist: When I'm having trouble with the writing, I find it hard to show up at the Grotto. Or at least be open about what I'm going through. Part of it's that I don't want to be the whiner in the room. And part of it, as my cohort Jennine Lanouette helped me see recently, is that I punish myself by isolating. I get down on myself, feel like other people don't want to hear about this shit, tell myself I'm better off just staying home and working at the kitchen table where at least I have my dog to keep me company, and so I hold myself in that juvenile space where I resent the book and resist entering it. (I'm at my kitchen table, not the Grotto, as I write this.) It's easiest for me to be at the Grotto when I'm washing dishes after a party or leading a meeting of the goal-support group some of us have formed. Collaborative efforts again.

      No shock, then, that I seized on the chance to start collaborating with Will on humor again. Or that I find it easier to blog about writing my book, with the payoff of quick comments from other people, or at least being able to imagine readers out there the instant I hit "Publish Post." And I make comments on other people's blogs, post other writers' humor pieces on our Friends of Will and Gerry blog, and...collaborate with the blogosphere.

      So here's the big thing for me: For 35 years I've been running on the unexamined assumption that I'm basically a loner who should be happiest when he's producing personal work in solitude. In fact, I think I'm a lover of people and a natural collaborator with some moderate social phobias who got set on the wrong path when my mom—in her alcohol-muddied anxieties—pulled me out of the world at a crucial moment. And who has been able to ignore that disconnect because most of my writing career has, in fact, been far from solitary. The idea that I would someday be a Real Writer (which in my mind has meant the generation of work from some lonely internal singularity) has sat there like a vision of manifest destiny. But really: It ain't me.

      This is a good book I'm writing, and I believe that the people I'm writing about deserve to have their stories told. I think it will add something to our understanding of how we as a culture got where we are. And suddenly I realize I'm doing it a disservice by making it "my book." How do I get it out of my head? How do I make it into a collaboration? And with whom?

The Anonymous Writer

I said a few posts ago that most of my professional writing so far has spared me a lot of critical scrutiny as a writer. I've sold my non-fiction mainly on my knowledge of the subject matter, thus taking the spotlight off the writing itself. Writing comic books I can hide behind artists and established characters. But with this book, about subjects that few people are aware of, I'm really forced to present myself as a "writer," to succeed or fail on my ability to capture and hold readers through my narrative. This is the first book I've sold because an editor wanted to work with me and my literary voice as opposed to a subject matter.

      That led me to think that my challenge here was to deliver a powerful enough voice and authorial presence to justify the book. To put me at the center of the process, demanding attention as me and then delivering a strong enough authorial presence to justify the attention. But now I'm starting to wonder if I don't have it backwards.

      My thinking's been shifting since I spent the past weekend at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Friday night I saw Harold Lloyd's The Kid Brother. Saturday it was William Desmond Taylor's Soul of Youth, René Clair's Les Deux Timides, Carl Maria von Dreyer's Mikäel, and Paul Leni's The Man Who Laughs, with Conrad Veidt. Then four more on Sunday: Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Coleen Moore in Her Wild Oat, Teinosuke Kinugasa's Jujiro, and the King Vidor/Marion Davies/Marie Dressler The Patsy. Movies ranging from the good to the incomparable, with superb live music and a Castro Theater full of joyous worshippers. The effect of the whole was transcendent.

      The emphasis of the introductory speeches and the program notes was almost entirely on the directors and actors, with occasional mentions of cinematographers, producers, and studios. Almost never was a writer mentioned, and yet silent movies had writers. Between the desire of Universal Pictures executives to adapt Victor Hugo's L'Homme Qui Rit and the astonishing on-film work of Paul Leni and Conrad Veidt lay a writing process, no doubt hard and chaotic and hair-pullingly fraught, during which at least four scenarists had to chop a sprawling, wordy, twelve-volume novel down to about a hundred pages of visual continuity. Events had to be cut, rearranged, stripped down, and invented. Image and movement had to be substituted for conversations and exposition. Characters had to be sharpened to points of light. And then, to convey the information that only words could carry, a fifth writer was brought in to script the intertitles, in each of which a transition had to be carried or a backstory evoked in a third as many words as a typical Hugo sentence. A great silent movie was also, usually, a writerly triumph.

      But of the five writers on The Man Who Laughs, I'd heard of none of them. And I know a fair amount about old Hollywood, too. Only one of the five, whose name I can't remember now, got credit on screen.

     Sometimes you'll hear a spiritual writer speak of writing not for personal glory but for God. Those silent movie writers were doing that, in a sense, although the gods they were giving expression to were Paul Leni and Conrad Veidt and Olga Baclanova and "Uncle Carl" Laemmle's Universal Picture Corp. Their motives were scarcely holy, of course, but what they asked of their talents was the same: They turned their writing not toward expressing themselves or calling attention to themselves but toward making a larger project work. They directed their art through others because it was through those others, those actors, those crew people, that the story would be revealed.

      All of which puts my own past work in perspective. Whether I was subsumed in a collaboration with cartoonists or serving as the vessel for some non-fiction subject matter to find its way to the readers interested in it, my relative anonymity was a gift to the project. I was far more useful leading the readers attention away from me instead of toward me. So now I'm thinking that even in this book, in which the author and his skills and his voice are so much more important than in past work, I might still do best to make sure that the process is not about me. Maybe the best thing I can do is forget not only about the readers' eyes on me. Let go of both the fear of not living up to critical expectations and the hope of receiving critical accolades. Be just a conduit for the story and for the immortality of the people I write about.

But what's this book ABOUT?

My friend Todd Oppenheimer at the Writers' Grotto asked me that the other day. Todd and I are in a sort of mutual support group that meets every two weeks to set and compare personal writing goals. "You've been talking about this book for a while," he said, "but you always call it just 'the FSG book.' You've never said what it's about."



      I had two reactions to this. My first was, "Screw you, Todd." That's the one I didn't say.

The one I said was, "That's a really good question, Todd. Thanks for asking that." Then I explained that although I was very clear on the subject matter and the central characters of my narrative, I felt I was still in the process of zeroing in on the major points I wanted to make and the specific focus of the story, and so I was still wrestling with issues of timeline, entry point, structure, voice, and point of view. As a result of this, I was still uncertain about my title—I'd gone through True Story, American Madness, and Mad Fortune on the way to The Undressing of America—and so tended to refer to it as simply "the FSG book." But now that Todd led me to think about it, I saw how that vagueness only compounded the problem of writing chapters that I could commit to well enough to send my editor, and how referring to it in terms of the publisher that was waiting for it only kept me locked in thinking of it as an unfulfilled obligation rather than a book unto itself.


      So I made a resolution, right there talking to Todd, that I would settle on The Undressing of America as a working title, at least, and refer to it by that. (It helped that I'd already run it by my editor and he liked it.) That's why I chose the name of the book as the name of this blog, so that every time I came here to write about it I would be engaging with the book itself at least nominatively, instead of some new, separate entity like "It Sure Is Hard to Write a Book" or "The Agony of Being Me" or "Out of Sheer Pique." And I told Todd what I knew for sure about what the book was about. Not so fully or so neatly as this, but in essence:



      In 1919, a husband and wife team named Bernarr and Mary Macfadden published a magazine that transformed American culture. It was called True Story, and although few remember it now, and cultural historians are inclined to give it a passing nod at best, it became the best-selling and most widely imitated magazine of the 1920s, upended publishers' perceptions of what the public wanted to read, shifted the relationship between media "producer" and "consumer" forever, and discovered a vast new market among young women negotiating a changing moral climate. And it accomplished more than any other enterprise to shatter the culture of Victorian concealment and usher us into a "culture of the explicit," a culture that still shapes our public discourse, in which increasingly frank confessions of our private emotional struggles become essential threads in our social fabric: guides to living, subjects for bonding, moral crucibles, self identifiers, class identifiers, entertainment, titillation, grist for outrage, commodities. True Story's immediate descendants were the tabloids, true crime stories, celebrity gossip rags, "women's issues" magazines, and the mainstreaming of soft-core pornography (and the Macfaddens published all of those in their earliest days). Its longer-term descendants include almost everything we lump under "reality media."


      Bernarr and Mary Macfadden themselves had hardly any idea what they were doing. He grew up an abused, neglected, and sickly farm boy in the 19th century Ozarks who discovered body building and turned himself through sheer will and desperation (desperation to be something, to be noticed, to have power over his life, to drive away the illness that take his parents from him as a child) into a paragon of health and strength. He knocked around the carnival circuits of mid-America for years as a strongman and a professional wrestler before he went to the 1893 Chicago world's fair (the "White City" fair) and saw people making a killing on the new "fitness" fad. Over the next decade, Bernarr made a modest success of himself selling exercise gadgets, running health farms for rich hypochondriacs, opening health-food restaurants, and publishing Physical Culture, the first magazine to call attention to body building as a pursuit and a subculture and the first to demonstrate that you could sell a lot of magazines with pictures of nearly naked men and women if you did so to demonstrate exercises. He reached the second tier among health gurus, grinding out book after book on his self-generated ideas for health and happiness, rejecting traditional medicine, and getting himself on the AMA's enemies list
.

      It wasn't the AMA that drove him to the edge of bankruptcy and forced him to flee the country. It was the censors, led by the great "social purifier" himself, Anthony Comstock, who had developed a special enmity for Macfadden. When Physical Culture ran a serialized novel dramatizing the causes and costs of venereal disease, Bernarr was convicted of peddling pornography, and when he fought back he became a cause celebre, an opponent of the early 20th Century equivalent of "abstinence only" sex education, the mad idea that is always held up by cultural conservatives that we would not have any moral or sexual problems if we just never talked about them. In the end, the President himself pardoned him, but the opponents of sexual discussions would not relent, and in 1912 Macfadden fled to England.



      There, at the age of forty-five, he met and pursued and married a nineteen-year-old amateur swimming champion named Mary Williamson. He won her by staging a pageant called "Britain's Perfect Woman," promising a glorious tour of England to the winner, knowing full well that his object was to secure a young bride who would bear him heirs, a "Phyical Culture Family" to promote his program for achieving perfect health. Mary herself was a young woman of simple goals, a carpet-mill worker, a Yorkshire lass who just wanted to swim, enjoy the days, and raise a family. She was lonely, too, having been kept house-bound by illness for much of her childhood, and susceptible to a man who seemed to need her every minute, who told her how to live her life, who spoke of the crusade they would lead to restore mankind to health, who was sexually insatiable, who wanted to be her father and lover at once.



      The Macfaddens had just begun to build their new life in England when the Great War came. They retreated back to America, back to poverty and trouble. Bernarr tried every trick he could to boost the sales of Physical Culture, to launch a new health farm, to invent a new exercise gadget that would make him rich. Everything backfired. Then Mary had her idea.

      Physical Culture published letters from Macfadden's followers in which they described their own struggles with illness and triumphant returns to health. Mary help select and edit the letters, and she knew very well that young women like herself would be most interested in those that veered into moral and marital and emotional issues as well. No other twenty-five year old, lower-middle-class woman in the world was in a position to create a new magazine, and perhaps no one else could have imagined True Story.

       It was an instant success. Within a few years it had turned the Macfaddens into milloinaires and inspired Bernarr to go head-to-head with William Randolph Hearst for mastery of the newsstands.

 Then everything began to change. A new figure entered Bernarr's life, an amateur stage magician and crime novelist named Fulton Oursler who began to whisper things in Bernarr's ear that Mary didn't like. Bernarr came to see himself as man's salvation and diverted his resources to a man run for the presidency. And there was the terrible thing that befell the Macfaddens' baby son, thanks to Bernarr's devotion to his own odd health precepts....



      By the time I'd reached that point in my quick summary of all this to Todd, he was nodding enthusiastically. "It sounds like a great story," he said. "And it sounds like just the sort of thing you'd do well, like it's right in line with your interests and your strengths." I thanked him for that. It did sound like a compelling book when I described it, and the decisions about what to include and how to present them didn't seem so daunting after all. Then Todd asked, "But what's the 'ah-ha' of the book? What is it that's going to make it stand out, that's going to get you the NPR interviews, the reviews, the attention that a book needs to get anywhere these days?"



      And I thought: "Screw you, Todd."

Sisyphus Rocks

A Facebook friend was comparing herself to Sisyphus this morning, which got me thinking about the old stone-roller's dilemma. You know the myth: the arrogant king whom the gods punished by making him roll a huge stone to the top of a hill, only to have it slip away from him right at the crest and roll all the way back to the bottom every time. Anyone who's ever tried to write a book can identify. I've thought about old Sis a few times myself while pushing The Undressing of America toward completion.

      But today something new occurred to me. What turns Sisyphus's task into torture? The disappointment and frustration of seeing the rock roll back down the hills, right? So his problem is the expectation that one of these times, maybe this time, he's actually going to get it to the top. But what if he changes his attitude? What if Sisyphus says to himself, "Okay. This is what I'm doing with my eternal life. This is who I am. I push a rock." Maybe then he could start to enjoy it. You know: fresh air, exercise, the feel of the rough stone against his palms, the smell of the loam as the boulder's weight breaks the soil beneath it, the regular break when the rock rolls back down, the pleasant walk to the bottom to start over again. And no worries about what he's going to do next. After all, it's not the destination that counts, right? It's the journey.
      

      So starting tomorrow, I'm reinterpreting the Sisyphean challenge of writing my book. After all, as Olympian punishments go, this one's pretty sweet. I'm not a bodiless shade drifting through a lightless limbo. I'm not being tantalized by food that's snatched away. I get to wake up every morning and push my rock, and if I don't get all worked up over how it's all supposed to come out, what's not to like? If Sisyphus has learned any wisdom and humility in all those centuries in Tantalus, I'll bet he's pretty grateful to the gods for the assignment. Am I supposed to rage against the job they've given me? What's that but arrogance?

The Glamor of Insanity

There are two ways for me to be as I write my book: I can go to my office at the Writers Grotto, open my laptop, type a sentence, then type another one, then type another one, noticing that some of them are good and some of them of them are bad but remembering that I can go back and make the bad ones better, and keep doing that until I'm exhausted. Then I can do it again for a bunch of other days until I have a book. I can work, in other words. Like a guy with a job. Like my dad.

      Or I can open my laptop and stare at it and slam it closed and get up and pace around and ask myself why the hell I can't come up with a good enough opening sentence. I can take a long walk with my eyes on the sidewalk trying to cut to the theme at the heart of the book. I can screw around on my Facebook page or burn a movie from my DVR to a DVD or try to read a Patricia Highsmith novel without actually comprehending any of the sentences I'm looking at or go back to bed for "just a few minutes" while I wait for more clarity about what I'm going to write today. In short, I can get nothing done for days while I hunger for the moment of galvanic insight or self-loathing fury or shallow-breathed, tunnel-vision terror ("My editor hates me! My career's about to end!") that will force me, just force me, through the walls of my resistance and send me exploding through the book with the unstoppable momentum of passion.

      Which would be my mom's choice. Not that she ever really lived it. She went to work every Monday morning through every Friday afternoon too. But she hated it, and she drank herself to sleep every night until she returned, and she was constantly looking for that new approach, that new specialty, that new way of approaching the whole thing that would inspire her to love it. She wrestled for years with the question of what to do with her life before economic logic and sheer resignation drove her to teach high school. Tried writing for a while, before her insecurities beat her. Always loved artists and their stories of struggle. And never quite trusted the ability of so many people (like my dad) just to keep plugging until the job was done.

      The downside to such madness is pretty obvious: not much work gets done. Oh, but what an upside! Life is so much more entertaining in the throes of artistic agony! When do you think I feel more alive, when I spend the night wrestling with demons and angels or when I'm sitting at a desk typing? When am I more fascinating to others, when I'm pouring out the fear and anger and self-loathing that turns every day on this book into a psychological drama or when I'm closing my door and saying, "I gotta work, I'll be out at five"?

      I'm sure you can understand, then, why I choose the glamor of tormenting myself over my book to the ordinariness of writing it. But there's a problem with that kind of glamor: it looks pretty tawdry once the game's been exposed. I mean, how do I sustain the charisma of the tormented writer after I've outed myself as a drama junkie? What the payoff for all my effort then, except for a few blog entries?

      So the only real reward left is the book. Just showing up and getting it done, like a regular job. Like my dad. God damn it.

Great Expectations

I know exactly when I froze up on The Undressing of America: when the publisher bought it. 

      Through my whole career I've been able to keep a pretty low profile, hiding behind modest expectations. Writing comic books, I could win the approval of my editors and most readers by meeting the expectations of the genre in a fairly workmanlike way; subtleties of technique and depth of character were appreciated by a select few but generally not missed if I didn't deliver. Writing pop-culture oriented humor, I had to be original and funny, but no one was really paying attention to the writing as writing. Writing non-fiction about TV comedy, violent entertainment, and comic books, I had to show that I knew my material, saw it in some unique ways, and could construct a convincing argument; whatever literary virtues I brought were always viewed as an extra, worthy of an "and it's surprisingly well-written, too." 

      But I avoided putting myself in positions where I would be judged on the potency of my sentences, the reality of my characters, the truth of my voice. I was a writer who managed not to be judged on his writing.

      The writing mattered to me. I always much preferred hearing a fan say, "You write the most human characters in superhero comics," or, "I really like this line," than, "Your Green Lantern stories were really true to the classic DC tradition." But what mattered most I kept partly concealed. I found a safe place where my efforts could be noticed if readers wanted to notice them, but if they didn't I wouldn't feel so exposed in my shortfall. I could always say to myself, "Well, the goal is to deliver a solid comic book story, and didn't I do that?" This protected the part of me that felt was most precious from the world's judgment and indifference. 

      Which was swell, except that it also held me back from really writing as well as I could.

Not So Dumb

I continue to respect my fellow voters more than the people who try to "work" us. For all the efforts of geeks, wonks, pundits, insiders, players and cynics to interpret election results as being about images, strategies, symbols, gaffes and gotchas, when times are tough most of us go on making pretty sensible, reality-based decisions. I often catch myself doubting this, especially when the aforementioned pundits try to convince me that trivialities like "Bittergate" could tip the election, but then I'll be reminded of something like Alan J. Lichtman's "13 Keys to the White House." I think I've mentioned this before: Lichtman's model matches up correctly with the popular vote in every presidential election since the Civil War. (The one catch in the model is that it can't predict Electoral College weirdness, so it predicted Gore in 2000. It did, however, forecast a very tight race.) And right now it's pointing toward a solid Obama victory. Lichtman, in other words, is one of my great sources of understanding and reassurance these days. So I was very interested to read this quote from him today:

The Democratic strategists who have expressed skepticism about academic models, including my Keys to the White House, that predict an Obama victory are themselves responsible for the shallow, empty campaigns run by Democrats in recent elections. Nothing changes from one election to the next, because the media, the candidates, the pollsters, and the consultants are co-dependent in the idea that elections are exercises in manipulating voters, and in giving us negative campaigns, bland and scripted lines, and meaningless debates. The Keys have correctly predicted the popular vote results of the past six elections because they reflect the basic truth that presidential elections turn on how well an administration has governed the country, not on how well candidates have performed in the campaign. If Obama could come to realize how elections really work and why he is ahead, he would fire the hucksters and handlers, speak from the heart to the American people, and articulate forthrightly and concretely what we should be accomplishing during the next four years. He could use the campaign to establish a mandate for governing and to build grassroots support for his ideas.

I think Obama's shown moments when he does realize exactly this. His campaign has been refreshing for its relative lack of Republican and Clintonesque stunts. If any candidate in recent memory has both the opportunity and the temperament to change the way the process is run and end the reign of the smarmy insiders, he's the one. The next couple of months will reveal a lot.

I Shall Return

I heard myself saying it to my son as I let myself out of the house: "I shall return." In an arch, mock-stentorian voice. He didn't react. He never does, and I'll bet I've said it a thousand times. I didn't intend to say it, but I know where it came from: My dad used to say it to me when I was a kid, in exactly the same circumstances, when he'd leave me alone in the house and wanted to make sure I noticed but didn't want to make a big deal out of it. I never said it back to him; in fact, for the first forty-some years of my life I may never have said it at all. But from the time my son hit the age when he was conscious of me leaving the house but no longer needed real reassurance that I'd be back soon, I think I've been saying it a lot. I say "think" because I'm sure I don't always notice. I definitely don't plan it. My father's words just appear in the air.

       For my dad the words were an in-joke. Not only a self-consciously wry phrase to cover a slightly awkward social moment, which was always his way, but also a reference to General Douglas MacArthur's pronouncement upon retreating from the Philippines in the face of the Japanese invasion in 1942: "I came through Bataan...and I shall return." Russell Jones was a Marine, stationed on a Navy ship, and the Marines and Navy did not think much of the performance of MacArthur's Far East Army. My father was in the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, and his ship was sunk off Guadalcanal. He lost a lot of friends there, and he knew a lot of Marines who would fight in the horrible island conquests to come. As far as he was concerned, MacArthur's fixation on retaking the Philippines was all posturing. By the time the Army got there, the Philippines had already been cut off by Navy and Marine combat, and the Japanese withdrawal was inevitable. The newsreels of MacArthur wading ashore at Leyte after the shooting was all done and declaring "I have returned" were just showbiz as far as he was concerned, and an expectoration in the faces of the men who'd died.

      Then my dad read somewhere that when MacArthur had first declared, "I shall return," President Roosevelt had asked him to amend the line to, "We shall return." MacArthur refused. That sealed it. From then on, he was going to trivialize "I shall return" by intoning it every time he went to the hardware store or the auto parts store and left his kid watching Bullwinkle on the couch.

      My son knows a bit about World War II. He watched the whole Ken Burns series. He's heard me tell retell a few of my dad's war stories. He can't ask my dad anything directly, because he's pretty much lost in dementia now. He would probably be interested to know about the MacArthur connection if I ever remember to tell him. And if he's ever even been conscious of my "I shall return." But he wouldn't think much about it. He could never feel the pain and indignation that his grandfather somehow managed to convey with that ironic cliché. It would be a bit of family trivia, quickly tossed into whatever half-memory holds such things.

      I wonder, though, if it's in him somewhere, the same way it was in me for decades before it came out again. I wonder if he'll ever find himself saying "I shall return" to his own kid as he lets himself out the door. If, even just once, that phrase, that tone of voice, the veiled satiric stance that's found its way from World War II to the '60s suburbs to San Francisco in 2008 will reach another set of ears, who knows where, who knows whose, carried from one slightly stilted dad to another to another, a century after it was born.

That's Entertainment

The post-mortems for the Clinton campaign still fill the punditverse, most of which fade into one long, annoying drone: hubris...didn't find her voice...no plan after Super Tuesday...underestimated caucuses...generation gap....

      But Dr. G. Clotaire Rapaille, founder of a marketing consultancy called Archetype Studies, brings a new twist that is, if nothing else, more fun than the rest. As Paul Mulshine summarizes this Frenchman's take: "What we demand in our politicians is not competency but entertainment value, a fact that explains the success of Hillary's husband." Quoting Dr. Rapaille himself: "Bill Clinton is a comedian. He is the entertainer-in-chief, with a girl in the Oval Office and a cigar." Hence Clinton's easy reelection in the midst of the Lewinsky mess and the fact that the Republican Congress began to bleed support from the time it chose to impeach him.

      Bush, Rapaille says, was popular as long as he played the dumb, folksy Texan. Now that he "is rigid and boring and is surrounded by people who are boring and rigid," we can't stand him. "The big mistake from Bush was that after 9/11 he thought he had a mission."

      As Rapaille sees it, Hillary Clinton, with her earnest, combative wonkiness, never had a chance against Obama's giant rallies, strutting, gutter balls, gangsta moves, and crazy preacher. And McCain will be making a serious mistake if he tries to choke back his obscene temper tantrums and bizarre outbursts in order to come across as some sort of grimly paternal conservative scold.

      Personally, I find McCain the most entertaining figure in American politics these days...although I don't know if it's in a way that will get him elected.

The Illusion of "Identity"

For all the talk of identity politics in this past Democratic race, what strikes me is how little it really was about that. The press wanted it to be all about "women for Clinton," how resentful they are and how hard it is for them to accept being unable to vote for a female president this year. And yet, millions of men voted for Clinton too. In many states, the male vote broke strongly in her favor. And in many states, Obama did better among women than Clinton did. The polls show that many women started the campaign supporting Clinton and then shifted to Obama; some shifted back later, many didn't.

       As for race: yes, by the end, Obama was polling between 80 and 90% of black people, but not in the beginning. Late last year, Clinton was leading him in the polls among black Democrats. African-Americans didn't flock automatically to him because of some great law of "identity politics"; the Clinton campaign had to alienate them actively. And if Clinton ended up winning among white voters, it was by the slimmest of margins. This was not a race dominated by race and gender, despite the determination of journalists to simplify it and sexy it up for the needs of headlines. It was far more about economics, generations, classes, managerial styles, people's expectations of their government, and ideas than it ever was about such superficial concepts of identity.

       When I started this blog, I quoted my friend Xandra Castleton (writer and producer of the movie Full Grown Men) on some of these issues—or actually kind of misquoted her by editing most of the nuance out of what she'd said. She then gave me a fuller version of what she had said, which I'd like to reproduce here. This is from late February, before the race became a long, angry battle, with the choices still seemed so electric. I had just written about how I wished my mother had lived to see this election, how it would have been such a thrill for her and yet such a difficult decision for a woman had been a feminist and a civil rights activist for decades, and Xandra responded:

When I heard that Oprah had supported Obama, I felt an instinctive initial resentment that in the hierarchy of identity politics, gender always loses. I thought that Oprah was choosing her race over her gender as black women did in the black power movement and as women in every cultural/racial/class struggle seem to constantly be asked to do. But I think I was wrong. I don't know if Obama really represents me so much more than Clinton does, but I'd rather have him representing this country to the rest of the world, and I'd like to have a president for the first time in my life as an eligible voter who is not named either Bush or Clinton. That has been my first and enduring opposition to her candidacy. But if she does become our nominee you can be sure I'll be sharpening my weapons against the Hillary haters and trying to expose the sexism behind the vehemence of that hatred, which I believe is very real and alive. I'm with the hope candidate, yes, so I hope that your mama will be looking down at a future election and smiling down at the female candidate of color sweeping the country off their feet (and I hope she's a lesbian too).

These were the sorts of decisions we had to make over these past few months, the sorts of conflicts we had to balance and negotiate. In the process we all learned a hell of a lot about what matters most to us. This has been a profound process of national self-examination, and I suspect we'll only gradually realize how much it's taught us. To reduce that to the simplest old definitions of "identity" completely misses the point.

      (Oh, but I do have to point out: if we do have a lesbian of color running for president in the near future, it'll probably be Condoleezza Rice. No thanks! There are a lot of old, straight white guys I'd vote for first....)

Train Keep a Rolling

I knew I needed a break from thinking about this election when I went onto one of my favorite left-leaning blog sites this afternoon and found myself reading a furious discussion of the fact that the MSM (that's "mainstream media," the bane of political bloggers) has been reporting Clinton's Pennsylvania victory margin as 10% when in mathematical fact it was only 9.2%! The argument centered mainly on whether this was more evidence of an anti-Obama media conspiracy or just of the criminal sloppiness of modern reporting, followed by many suggestions on how to get the word out to the public that Clinton didn't really win by "double digits" after all.

     Personally, I'm going to get the word out that I'd rather watch old movies for a week or two. Barack Obama's train ride to victory is clearly going to be a local, not an express, stopping everywhere from Kokomo to Raleigh to San Juan...or maybe the problem is that Hillary keeps tying herself to the tracks whenever it starts to pick up speed...pick your own metaphor...and we have plenty of time to think about other things.

      (But no, I'm not just going to "sit there and let Clinton steal Barack's momentum," to quote another blog thread. I'll be making calls to Indiana. I refuse to read any op-eds telling me that Indiana is now a must-win state for Obama, but I'll be making calls.)

      First of all, anyone who is or can soon be anywhere near the San Francisco Bay Area should check out a couple of local film festivals. The Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto—a graceful, perfectly restored, Moorish Deco movie house from 1925, complete with live organ music between shows (with Richard Rodgers's heartrending Isn't It Romantic? for a theme song)—is running an unprecedented tribute to Bette Davis on her 100th birthday, showing every one of her first 36 movies, from her first supporting appearance in The Bad Sister in 1931 (in which she was cast as the good sister—talk about not knowing what they had!) to Jezebel from 1938. Unfortunately, now that I look at the schedule, I see that Jezebel is already past, as is the gloriously twisted Of Human Bondage, but there's some fascinating stuff still to come, many views of Davis as a skinny blonde playing a wide range of good girls and bad. So Big, tonight and tomorrow, is a Wild Bill Wellman movie from 1934 that has her backing up Barbara Stanwyck. Bette is out-acted—no one could touch Stanwyck in the crackling, rackety days of early-'30s shoestring soundies—which is a fascinating thing to watch by itself.

      Coming up are The Rich Are Always with Us (with Ruth Chatterton, always fun to watch do her self-conscious theatrical razzle-dazzle), Jimmy the Gent (Cagney being Cagney), Three on a Match (much of the great Warners' stock company—Joan Blondell, Warren William, Bogart, Lyle Talbot, Ann Dvorak—playing off each other), Fashions of 1934 (a Busby Berkeley musical starring William Powell, with Bette appearing weirdly where you'd expect Ruby Keeler), Dangerous (Davis's truly unsettling embodiment of an alcoholic), Satan Met a Lady (a pre-Bogart, pre-Huston adaptation of The Maltese Falcon), and a bunch more. Then in June, running through the summer, the Stanford is going to show "many but not all" of her movies from 1939 on.

      Oh, and I just looked it up: Jezebel and Of Human Bondage are both on DVD. I'll watch them both soon (and try not to think about the Kentucky primary as I listen to Bette's Southern accent in Jezebel).

      Meanwhile, at the Castro Theatre, right over the hill from my house, the San Francisco International Film Festival is opening tonight with Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress. The program describes the star as "the alluringly vulpine Asia Argento," which is probably exactly how Vin Diesel thought of her in XXX. A lot of very intriguing sounding new movies will follow, but there'll also be some great old stuff mixed in during the two weeks of the festival: tomorrow The Golem from 1920, with funky new music by a guy from the Pixies; later The Sweet Smell of Success, Some Like It Hot, and others; and this Saturday a new 35-millimeter print of Leave Her to Heaven, a most idiosyncratic psychological suspense movie scripted by Jo Swerling (one of my heroes) and also one of the most gorgeous movies you'll ever see, partly because of the throbbing Technicolor and Southwestern locations but mostly because of Gene Tierney.

      Tierney is not an actress I've taken very seriously until quite recently. I knew she was ethereally, almost mystically beautiful, at least when 20th Century Fox wanted her to be. I've loved Laura for decades and couldn't imagine any other actress bringing to life that ghost of everything men imagine women to be. But in Night and the City I thought she was just fine, and in The Shanghai Gesture almost dorky. I lumped her in with Linda Darnell and Hedy Lamarr as just one of those faces that clever cinematographers and erotically complicated directors could play wonderful tricks with. Then a friend of mine told me she was his favorite "screen goddess of yore," and coincidentally I had a chance to catch one of her early comedies, Rings on her Fingers (and she was pretty funny, too), and that got me to rent Leave Her to Heaven, and all of a sudden I saw something opening up behind her otherworldly gaze: she plays a cruel, dissociated bitch posing as a sweet girl next door, and she brings up something truly spooky from her depths in doing so. (And is she ever fascinating to look at.)

      A lot of awful things happened to Gene in her life, including a first child born severely retarded and a decades-long journey through major depression, probably bipolar disorder. She came of age when the mental health establishment was determined to "conquer" depression, but the drugs that might have helped hadn't been found yet. So she spent years in and out of institutions, getting her brains scrambled by electroshock. But she did her best to get through, and to take care of the people in her life as well as she could. Late in her life she wrote a book about it all, Self-Portrait, that I've seen praised for its candor and humanity. I'll be at the Castro on Saturday the 26th to see her on the big screen.

      Meanwhile, Turner Classic Movies, my favorite place to hide when I just can't handle the real world, is showing some fun stuff as usual. Some Hedy Lamarr movies tonight—and after the wonderful essay about Hedy and John Garfield on Self-Styled Siren's blog, I realize I've been probably been too quick to dismiss her, too. And Saturday morning Detour, one of the great, weird, punch-drunk, low-budget noir quickies, starring yet another inconsistent but fascinating actress of the '40s, Ann Savage (whom my pal Will Jacobs and I find so compelling that we're going to be using her in our new novel, Million Dollar Ideas.)

      So there you go. Lots of ways not only to avoid worrying about the election, but to avoid engaging with the present altogether.

Jules Dassin

No politics this time, except a retelling of a political life. Jules Dassin, the director, died last week, and I keep thinking about him. Although it's only been recently that I've really begun to notice or understand him, he's been a presence in my imaginative life since I was a kid.

      My parents loved his movies. My dad especially liked Rififi—nothing gratified him more than a finely wrought heist movie—and explained to me what was great about Topkapi when he took me to see it when I was seven or so. For my mother, the great Dassin movie was Never on Sunday. I had no idea then, but now I understand how that sentimental comedy about a scholar in love with a whore gave voice and image to everything she wanted to believe about her own sexuality and passion for life and hunger for self-acceptance. She would speak Dassin's name with something between a sob and a sigh; although that was partly, I think, because she (like most of the art-house audience) assumed he was French, and so invested his name with wet flourish: Zhool Dah-SANH. She didn't know he was really just Julie Dassin from Morris High in the Bronx—"DASS'n"—son of a Jewish immigrant barber.

      Dassin's journey to the movies was a fairly standard one for a New York Jew of his generation: Yiddish Theater, Group Theater, radio, Broadway, then the invitation from RKO to learn directing by assisting a master (Hitchcock in this case). And like most of the creative kids who came up through that world he got involved in left-wing politics, joining the Communist Party during the "Popular Front" days and leaving it when Stalin signed his pact with Hitler in 1939. If you were a son of Yiddish immigrants in the Depression, that was how you expressed your humanity, your civic responsibility, your essential patriotism. It showed in his movies, too. They were never overtly political, but his inclinations and talents led him to stories of exploitation, alienation, and crime—Brute Force, Naked City, Thieves' Highway—and his brutal focus on the agony of individuals struggling against an indifferent environment turned those stories into indictments of the culture of money and what it did to people.
      He was just becoming an important American artist when America turned on him, as it turned on so many of the idealists who had held up the progressive pillar of our national coalition through the Depression and the War. In the late 1940s the House of Representatives and the mavens of the movie industry teamed up to destroy the careers of left-leaning filmmakers, and the great mass of those filmmakers' coworkers and fellow citizens, even their own labor unions, sat by nervously and let it happen. Never mind that Americans of all political stripes had eaten up the dark images of corruption and conflict that left-wing moviemakers had perfected. Never mind that stories of the little guy battling plutocracy were a staple of the American imagination on the right wing as well as the left. We were in one of our fits of ideological madness when any call to change is heard as a threat to our identity, and the word went out to sacrifice the "Communists" to our terror.

      When Dassin took on Night and the City, he knew he was about to be blacklisted, that it would be his last movie for an American studio, and it showed in the nausea and hysteria, the mad persistence of dreams in the face of hopelessness that shaped every scene. With a good crew, a strong script and one brilliant actor—Richard Widmark, who also just died—he crafted a whole vision of a fear-driven world with its soul out of joint. There was not an explicitly political line in the entire thing, no angry laborers or cruel bosses, only touts and conmen and B-girls and cabbies and wrestlers, and yet without a moment of posturing or cant he made it one of the cinema's most relentless critiques of capitalism, its psychological, spiritual, and social costs, like Brecht without the speeches or surrealism. And then his American career and life were over.

      The blacklisters weren't just cowardly or conciliatory, they were petty and mean-spirited, too: American film distributors passed the word among their European counterparts that no movie in which Jules Dassin was involved would ever be exhibited in the United States. That kept him from landing a movie job even in France for five years, and when one came to him it was nothing special: a low-budget crime flick called Du rififi chez les hommes. But his loving attention to the mechanics of theft made it a nasty delight. It was a huge hit in Europe, and American distributors wanted a piece of that cash. So money became Dassin's savior and the blacklist began to crack. But Dassin never wanted to be an American again. He directed a movie with the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, fell in love with her, fell in love with her country, and became a "first-generation Greek."

      Even in Europe his work was rarely political on the surface. His best movies were sentimental comedies and ingenious crime capers. And yet, through his amused fascination with thieves, prostitutes, and fly-by-nighters he continued to make brisk points about the effect of cash on morality and law. He cast himself in his most personal movie, Never on Sunday, as an American intellectual named Homer who is disappointed when Greece will not reflect back to him his own fantasies of its cultural purity. He falls in love with a Greek prostitute but cannot accept her for what she is, trying to reform her through education until he finds himself sinking into the muck of the modern Greek underworld. In the end he arrives at the essential Dassin understanding: that we and the world are painfully flawed and money is stronger than any of us, that we can save ourselves only through honest acceptance of what we are. Dassin wasn't a very good actor, and that's part of the reason the movie doesn't hold up as well as his Hollywood work, but in his fragility and eagerness to please and sometimes too self-conscious effort we can see his journey out of pain and into love.

      (And it launched my mother on her own version of Homer's journey. For years after seeing that movie she was desperate to see Greece, but when she got there she found no sign of the singing, stomping, glass-tossing gaiety Dassin had promised. My father took her to a taberna to hear bouzouki music, but the music was overamplified and everyone smoked. She hated it.)

      Dassin's interest in movies—and his talent for them—faded as he grew older, and he gave more and more of his energies to helping Mercouri, his wife and moral compass, in her work as a socialist politician and eventual Culture Minister of Greece. After she died in 1994 he devoted himself to her last cause, the return of the British Museum's Elgin Marbles to their original home on the Parthenon. Not a quixotic battle, exactly, because it might yet succeed. But still a heartbreaking one somehow. For over two centuries those marbles have sat there, white and serene in their London tomb, far removed from the passage of time and the turmoil of Greece and the racket of New Oxford Street, and the British are in no hurry to let them go. The corrosive smog of Athens, they say, would damage them. Dassin outlived his wife by fourteen years, but in those years he came no closer to bringing the marbles home. So they stay frozen, those Centaurs and Lapiths and horsemen and basket-bearers, some headless, some handless, but all imperturbed, so far from the building they were meant to glorify.

      There's a trace of the pain of all those early 20th century left-wing patriots in that unrealized dream: the return of a pure, shattered beauty at long last to its rightful home.

(Listen to the) Paisley People

Nothing about America’s future today, only our distant past. Archaeologists from the University of Oregon have just announced the discovery of the oldest known human DNA in the Americas: coprolites—fossilized doo-doo—radiocarbon dated to 14,300 years ago. The petrified dung was uncovered in the Paisley Caves, near the town of Paisley, Oregon (named by a settler after the mill town in Scotland where the famous Persian teardrop pattern was introduced to the West), and so we can hope that the original depositors will become known as the Paisley People.

      For seventy years the oldest known humans in America were the Clovis People, whose 13,000-year-old spear tips and cutting tools were unearthed in Clovis, New Mexico. (When I was a kid I learned about them as Clovis Man, because that’s how they did it then. Java Man, Peking Man, Piltdown Man. Sometime around 1970 archaeologists got reluctantly in touch with their feminine sides and started talking about the Clovis People, making our antecedents sound less noble but more homey.) Some archaeologists have disputed their place as “first known Americans” for years, but no one has been able to provide the hard data to strip them of the title—not until Dennis Jenkins and his UO team found, not stone tools that could be dated only roughly by the stone strata they were buried in, but the perfect, dateable organic relic.

      That in itself is a miracle. Picture it: some guy takes a dump in a cave, a minute later he's forgotten that particular dump forever, but the stuff somehow survives all the dung-eating bugs and molds until it gradually turns to stone so that 14,300 years later it’s thrilling the scientific community and getting written up in our family newspapers. It’s one of those times you really wish people could have a sudden glimpse of the future. “Who are these wondrous beings with their vast villages and miraculous devices? And what are they doing with my crap?!”

      What a symbol of eternity! What a reminder of the continuity of time and life. It’s like the Clock of the Long Now, except instead of a whirring masterwork of perfectly calibrated machinery it’s a pile of turds.

      But here’s the real revelation: the first known Americans were the Paisley People of Oregon. The Paisley People. Of Oregon. Forget your noble savages, man. Forget your bronze-skinned warriors and your blood-stained hunters of the plains. This has always been a hippie nation.