Still Undressing (After All These Years)

I had a great year in 2013: rich and sane and productive, full of wonderful people, good work, and just enough adventure. But there’s one part of my life that didn’t go the way I hoped. I really, really, really thought that ’13 would be the year I finally finished The Undressing of America. And yet, here I am, even as I’m already starting my next book, still adding to it.

       This wasn’t due to a lack of work, nor to throwing it out and starting over (as I did more than once before). I wrote a good draft of a good book. But it became very clear at a certain point, as I was trying very hard to convince myself that it was good enough, that it had the potential to be a much better book. And having glimpsed that other book, I just couldn’t bear to let it never happen.

       I’m not usually a proponent of this kind of thinking. Clearly this kind of thing can lead straight into the treacherous bogs of perfectionism. There’s a saying going around out there, “Done is better than perfect.” I haven’t been able to find out who came up with it. Some have said Mark Zuckerberg, others Sheryl Sandberg; give it a while and, the internet being what it is, I’m sure we’ll see it attributed to Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, and Nelson Mandela. But wherever it came from, I like it. Because I firmly believe, as another quote has it, that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” (Which I’m pretty sure was Voltaire. Or Abe Lincoln. Or Bill Gates.)

       But there’s a spectrum here, surely. Holding something up for months in order to finesse the last few details is neurotic, but banging something out overnight even though it’s a pile of junk isn’t a sane alternative. I presented the world with several piles of junk in my comics-writing days, when I took on too much work and not only didn’t have time to worry about perfection but didn’t have enough even to worry about coherence or originality. One of the hardest parts of any job in which we have to make our own calls about whether something’s done or not is finding that magical balance point where we’re neither excessively driven by a hunger to get it over with nor a mania to make it just right. 

       In the case of this current book, I’ve finally decided that I haven’t reached that point yet. There are downsides to that, professionally, financially, and psychologically. But the downsides to stopping now look bigger to me. Because I may never write about quite this subject again, and the pragmatic realities of my life may never give me this much flexibility again, and I believe there might be real value in the not-finished book I’m seeing.

       Basically, the deal is this: the book tells the story of America’s moral and legal wars over issues of the body, sex, and privacy as they helped shape our culture from the 19th century into the 20th. As conceived up ’til now, it began with Anthony Comstock’s ferocious assault on public discussions of private matters in art, literature, politics, and public health, starting at the end of the Civil War. But what became increasingly clear to me (with some editorial prodding) is that Comstock’s war doesn’t make enough sense without understanding the men who inspired and supported him, and their evangelical crusade to reform the nation in the decades leading up to the Civil War—especially given how deeply entwined that crusade was with abolitionism and the birth of feminism. Nor did the story of his opponents make enough sense without understanding the origins of the free-thinkers and free-speechers from whom they descended, and the way their crusade got all tangled up with the early days of vaudeville and pornography. And after a while it all became just too much to cover in quick backstory.

       So now the book begins at its proper beginning: in 1827, with the arrival of the first ballerina to New York and Samuel F. B. Morse’s public denunciation of her, with Fanny Wright’s flight from her collapsing interracial free-love commune in Nashoba, with the wildfire of Charles Finney’s revolutionary evangelism, and with Elijah Pierson’s mad, doomed mission to save the souls of prostitutes. It will be a long book, and it will be an even later book than it already is. But I believe it will be a good book. Anyway, I owe it the chance to find out. 
       (As for the next book, Lost Hero, about Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson and the secret origin of comic books...that one I promise to finish on time. Because on that one I have a collaborator, and she’s not going to let me get away with anything else.)

The Twelve DVDs of Christmas

Because my son was in Japan until December 24th, I thought we might have to skip our ritual holiday-DVD viewing; instead, he suggested we do it over the traditional Twelve Days of Christmas, starting on the 25th and running to January 5. We won't really be watching one per night, because he's off with friends part of the time and some of them are way too short to fill an evening anyway, but we've agreed on twelve that we'll definitely watch, and without which the season wouldn't feel quite complete.

A Charlie Brown Christmas
At barely over 20 minutes, this still says more about the experience of Christmas in modern America than anything else I've seen. Not just the overt message about commercialization, but the melancholy, the alienation, the desperate pursuit of getting Christmas "right," the manic participation in rituals that no one really cares about, the sudden eruptions of religious seriousness that seem like they should be important but never actually make sense with the rest of it...and then that weird way in which it all seems to come out fine in the end. Plus Vince Guaraldi, who only seems to grow more ubiquitous with the passing decades. Sometimes I wonder if this thing didn't create modern Christmas as much as it reflected it.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
This is one of those works of art that's simply perfect for what it is. At the same time, the question of just what it is remains slightly elusive. Epic fantasy? Sly satire? Juvenile cute-animal fest? In some way it transcends them all. I never get bored with it, despite having it all perfectly impressed on my memory. It's also the one show that takes me back most completely to what Christmas felt like when I was seven or eight—bright, plastic, mysterious, surprising, and ultimately safe—and it seems to do the same for Nicky, as different as the world of our childhoods were.

 Pee Wee's Playhouse Christmas Special

This is pretty much a satire of Christmas specials, but it's so colorful and the humor is so bent that it captures the eternal, dorky weirdness of TV, Christmas, and modern childhood better than whatever it's satirizing. A lot of it is devoted to '80s camp, with guest appearances by faded celebrities my son could never have heard of—Grace Jones, K. D. Laing, Annette Funicello, Frankie Avalon, Little Richard, Magic Johnson, Dinah Shore—which I thought would be boring for him. But somehow the utter weirdness of them all (and his initial assumption that they were all just actors playing invented characters) only made them funnier to him. Frankie Avalon, a talking cow, and Santa Claus...all just the stuff of Christmas media madness.

"Hearth's Warming Eve" from
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic 
What? It's good! Nicky was the one who discovered this (no surprise), but I've adopted it as one of my own. It actually has very little to do with Christmas—the ponies' holiday pageant celebrates a national origin myth, not the birth of any equestrian savior—but it has some gorgeous evocations of winter wind and frost, the story is unlike anything I've seen in a cartoon, it's pictorially delightful, the characters are charmingly ridiculous, and it maintains that delicate balance the show strikes so well between spoofery and earnestness.

A Christmas Story
Not many movies stand up to multiple viewings for me, but this one's so rich, not just in event and character but in detail and texture, that I always find something to enjoy even when I know exactly what's coming. What impresses me most, though, is the way Ralphie and Randy are portrayed; I usually hate Hollywood's idea of kids, but these two are unlike anything else I've seen in movies, somehow more ludicrously cartoony and more humanly believable at the same time. We never call the movie by its title. It's always, "Do you want to watch Ralphie?"

Remember the Night

I asked for this one, and Nicky's going to give it a chance based on my assurance that it's got a very different tone from most Hollywood Christmas movies. In fact, it's from before there was really such a thing as a "Christmas movie," from 1941, when a comedic melodrama could make good use the holidays without having to go all preachy, cloying, and self-important. It stars Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, three years before they generated an equally intense but very different chemistry in Double Indemnity. Here too, Stanwyck is a bad girl who leads the too-straight MacMurray into crime, but this time they don't end up dead, thanks to MacMurray's oddball Indiana home folks and the bounty and limitations of a rural Christmas. It was written by Preston Sturges, who would very soon be writing and directing Stanwyck in The Lady Eve. Like everything else by Sturges, it's a unique blend of elements.

Babes in Toyland
(aka March of the Wooden Soldiers)

My father introduced me to this one, and it was the movie I waited to see every year on TV from the time I was four or five years old. It's an oddity, a sentimental musical from the end of the Victorian era mashed up with Laurel and Hardy's vaguely sadistic Depression-era comedy, an oddness that I think I sensed at some level even then. Or, at least, I was haunted by some of its bizarre and even frightening elements: that Mickey Mouse imitation that could be a marionette or a monkey in a suit or God knows what; Ollie being nearly drowned in public torture; the Bogie Men with their goggling eyes and zippered backs; the wooden soldier marching with its head knocked off, a terrified child wrapped around its chest. Apparently they were images that haunted my son, too, because although he has little interest in Laurel and Hardy or their brand of comedy, he always wants to see this one.

The Little Drummer Boy  
Books 1 & 2
The two parts were made years apart, and the second isn't as good, and yet together they're very pleasing. The original is a pretty and affecting little thing, managing to blend High Church solemnity with the Rankin-Bass style of silly animal humor. It's quite complete in itself, but at the end we like knowing that there's more to come with the same drummer boy and the same goofy beasts. And a lot more room for slapstick in the sequel.

 

Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol

I was fascinated with this as a kid, I think largely because cartoons of this length and seriousness were nearly unknown on TV then. But after a few years I got bored and thought I'd never need to see it again...until my friend Joe sent it to me on a VHS tape, I showed it to Nicky for the heck of it, and he liked it. I still find a lot of it dull, but I do like those ghosts. There are moments when they're genuinely eerie, which isn't easy when they're playing off a character like Magoo. 
 

Scrooge  

This is the Alistair Sim version from 1951, the Christmas Carol I kept liking after I got tired of Mr. Magoo. Nicky likes this one less than me, but he hangs in for the scariest and moodiest moments. the horror-at-Christmas tradition is one Americans never really went for but the British can still do well. This one makes nearly all the ghosts, even those miscellaneous shades whirling through the air, as scary as the spirit of Christmas future. And Sim often makes Scrooge himself the spookiest character of all. 

 Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey
This one snuck up on us both. What happened was: back when Gene Autry had his huge hit with Rudolph, he and his people decided to cobble up another Christmas song to exploit the market. They substituted a donkey for the reindeer, big ears for the red nose, and baby Jesus for Santa Claus. It was a pretty lousy song, but by the mid-'70s, when the Rankin-Bass people were running out of ideas to sustain their TV-special business, they saw something they could work with. And indeed they did: Romeo Muller turned in one of his most charming stories, the animals were funny, and Roger Miller's narrative sold it all with a strange conviction. It's not Rudolph, but it feels like a visit to his universe.

It's a Wonderful Life

I used to have this movie on in the background every Christmas Eve, when I'd be up until 2:00 AM wrapping presents. Now that the present-giving has gotten a lot lighter, I almost want to let it slip away, but I can't bring myself. Every time I see it, it impresses me again with its intensity, its darkness, its raw agony, its honesty about the cruel tricks life can play. Although we don't like to look at it in our smiley-face culture, there is a frightening darkness around the edges of the Christmas story: the terror of the Imperial tax, the freezing night, the slaughter of the innocents, and the foreboding gift of the one of the Magi (Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume / Breathes a life of gathering gloom. / Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, / Sealed in the stone-cold tomb. / O Star of wonder, star of night...). And, of course, for any convincing story of a soul's redemption, or any myth of light emerging from darkness, the night has to grow very deep before the brightness of the star begins to shine. Capra, Stewart, and company make me feel the deep darkness more than just about any movie, and then they make its frantic redemption very nearly believable. This year I want to use it to close off the sacred season.

Which brings us to January 5th, the Twelfth Day. But then there's the Epiphany...which doesn't mean I've just had a sudden realization, it means we usually do some final Christmas rituals on January 6, the Epiphany, the celebration of the manifestation of God on earth, to seal off the holy days. That's likely to include one last movie before I put the holiday DVD box on that shelf in the corner of the basement, where it must go untouched until the day after Thanksgiving. Nicky's likely to push for The Nightmare Before Christmas or How the Grinch Stole Christmas (the Chuck Jones version, of course), but I feel like wallowing a little longer in old Hollywood. My two candidates are:

Miracle on 34th Street

Yeah, it gets a bit tiresome with repeated viewings, but I'll always have a fascination for the era of American holidays shaped around the Macy's parade, department store Santas, New York bustle, and moanings about the commercialization of Christmas when people actually seemed to care (before that itself became just another Yuletide custom). That era was still alive when I was a kid, or at least it seemed to be everyone's assumption of how the season should be, although I saw a mostly diluted and suburban-mallified version. Nicky seems to find it all interesting too, as exotica, probably the way I like movies from before 1920. And, of course, Natalie Wood is endearing, slightly troubling, and unfailingly compelling.

Holiday Affair

Not a great movie, but sweet. And Mitchum for Christmas? What could be more weirdly perfect?

Goodbye, Candlestick

I'm writing this as the 49ers take the field to play what will most likely be their last game ever at Candlestick Park, where they've played football since 1971, where the Giants played baseball from 1960 through 1999. And I'm starting to miss it.
       Well, I'm not really missing it. It's a horrible stadium. Grim, bleak, ugly. Hard to get to. No matter where you sit, you're too far from the field. Cold, wet, and windy all summer long. The wind used to screw up baseball games and the boggy field mucked up football games. Not enough restrooms, terrible food. The Giants almost moved to Florida just to get away from the place, and it took a new stadium to keep them in town. The 49ers have been pushing for a new stadium for twenty years, and now they're finally getting one—but not in San Francisco.
       And it's not like the 49ers playing 50 miles further away makes any difference to me. I haven't gone to Candlestick in fifteen years and I haven't felt much desire to. Frankly, I'm more likely to want to spend the time and money to check out the team's spiffy new home in Santa Clara than I ever would have been to go back to Candlestick. 
       I do have some memories around the place. In the first half of the '80s, when I was fairly new in S.F., working part time, with some baseball-crazy friends, I became a passionate Giants fan and spent a lot of chilly days and frigid nights in the bleachers. It was a pretty forgettable team I was following—Jeff Leonard, Chili Davis, Bill Laskey—but the ritual was fun. My time got shorter after that, but I still managed to get to several Giants games over the next few years, when they were actually good. I was there for an All-Star Game and one playoff; I still remember Joe Price pitching great innings of long relief and Jose Uribe putting the Giants ahead with a clutch single down the line.

       Football games were a bigger deal. I took my brother a few times, my father once, with a sense of doing something meaningful, a sort of offering to the family cult of 49ers fandom. They all had happy endings except one, one that that was by far, to my mind, the unhappiest 49er game of all: their 15-13 loss to New York in the NFC Championship after the 1990 season, when they fumbled away a trip to their third Super Bowl in a row and Joe Montana broke his hand. Miserable as it was, I still take a certain pride in having been there that day. (If nothing else, it was a chance to watch 68,000 people vacate a building so quickly it was as if a gale had blown us all away.)
       And, of course, there are the memories of the things that happened there, that I watched on TV but will always associate with the place. I remember how alive I felt, how electric everything seemed to be, after that Dallas game in January, 1982. I remember the glow I felt for days, even though my real life was pretty crappy at the time, after they beat the Bears to reach their second Super Bowl. I remember the pizza-and-TV parties Jennie and I would throw for every playoff game, baseball and football both. I remember my friend Joe coming up from San Diego to watch Will Clark put the Giants in the World Series with an eighth-inning single up the middle. And even though the teams will continue to play inside my television set the way they always have, knowing that the place is different—that I'll never again see those shots of the Goodyear blimp over San Francisco Bay on an autumn afternoon—is a loss of some kind.
      None of that is what I'm really missing, though. As I've been writing this, I've realized that I'm mourning something that isn't the place and it isn't even the memories. What I'm missing is just how much it all used to matter to me. 

       I started to pull away from baseball sometime in the early '90s. I had a baby son, I had a lot of interesting work to do (and a lot of deadlines), and it just became impossible to follow a team for 162 games a year. I got in the habit of tuning in for pennant races and playoffs but not really engaging with the rest of the year, and inevitably the passion faded. I still follow the 49ers, but they stay in a much smaller compartment in my heart. After Nicky was old enough to go out and do things, I wanted to spend my Sunday afternoons with my family, and so I start watching football games on my VCR. Gradually I started fast-forwarding through more and more plays. Then the players I'd been so in love with started moving on, and I just didn't connect as well with the new ones. I still watch most 49er games, but fast-forwarding; I still arrange either to host or visit friends for playoffs, but I spend more time sitting and talking and eating, and less time standing and pacing and staring and screaming and jumping and dropping to my knees.
      Which is healthy, really. After the last Super Bowl I felt downhearted for about fifteen minutes, and I thought ruefully about that final, dreadful set of downs at the goal line maybe a dozen times during the next few days. In decades past, I would be depressed about a playoff loss for weeks. I would wake up thinking about that Roger Craig fumble or go to bed writhing over that ball Candy Maldonado lost in the lights. All over games that didn't really affect anything, played by a bunch of guys who didn't know I existed. 
       Of course, that coin had another side. There was an ecstasy, a feeling of everything being right with the world, that that same bunch of guys could give me with a victory, and it could last for days, for weeks. I enjoy watching Colin Kaepernick and Vernon Davis and Justin Smith, and sometimes they even make me vocalize suddenly and loudly, but I don't feel that exquisite, world-transforming joy I used to. No matter what happens in the end zone at Candlestick Park, I remain solidly, happily, healthily in my real life.
       I would never want the whole emotional package of sports mania back again, with all the lost time, the vast brain space given to statistics, the pointless funks. But I do miss that ecstasy, a little bit. And even that strangely sweet agony that made the ecstasy possible. I miss the feeling I used to be able to get driving past Candlestick on Highway 101, even on a Tuesday in February, long past the Super Bowl and well before Opening Day, when the stadium just sat there slumbering, ugly as hell—a feeling almost as if I were passing some boyhood home, all longing and joy and almost painfully rich memory. I'll miss that, at least a little, when I drive past the place next time and know that its life as a stadium is over. And I'll miss it when I drive by, sometime in the next year or two, and realize that it's gone.
       For now, though, it's still here, and Frank Gore just ground out ten yards on the spongy turf, and I'm going to watch it.
    


       

Village, Pueblo, Dorf

I was sitting and reading at Martha & Bros, a just-under-the-radar San Francisco institution, a handful of coffee shops (exactly five), entirely as family owned as the name suggests. Martha is from Central America—Nicaragua, I think—and she staffs her shops mainly with a seemingly endless supply of nieces, friends of nieces, and cousins of friends of nieces from the old country. The walls are painted with murals of hillside plantations with macaws in the trees, the back-counter gossip is in Spanish. Sometimes the music is Latin too, although just as often it's unobtrusive coffee-joint music, "smooth jazz" or soul/pop or grown-up rock.

      Today it was a variant of the last, Ingrid Michaelson and Jason Mraz and people like them whose names I don't know. It's a common sound in S.F. cafes, one I tune out easily. The only note that nearly caught my attention was an announcer's voice—this wasn't the usual Pandora but apparently a radio station, probably KFOG, which every white person in the Bay Area between 30 and 60 seems to listen to while driving to work. It's harder for me to tune out speech than music, especially caffeined-up rock-FM speech, so it kept forcing its way through my book and into my consciousness. But even as it forced itself, I never fully understood what was being said. Gradually, in fact, that's what brought me to full awareness: the refusal of the words ever to coalescence into any sort of sense. 
       Which is when I paused and listened and realized there were some words I knew, just not words I'd been looking for. Jetzt. Ihre. Neue. Fünf. The radio was speaking German. And as I listened longer, I discovered that about every third song, although its sound was never incongruous with the rest, was in German too.
       The explanation wasn't difficult to imagine. An employee chooses a station off some selection of streaming music options (iTunes used to offer this, someone must still) and either doesn't bother to read too closely or doesn't know enough non-Spanish to pick out the nuances of Rock Radio Hitwelle. Even so, it struck me as a little bit miraculous.
       This is globalization, certainly, but not how we would think of it if we heard an American station in Managua, or even in Berlin, where guilty worries about cultural colonialism would start creeping up. Yes, it was American music, but looped back to us and varied subtly by another nation—not a downtrodden nation by any means, but not one with any imperial authority in the arts or popular culture. After all, Germany failed in its last effort to impose its culture on the rest of us, to have us listening to Wagner and watching movies about bright-eyed young goatherds in the Alps. Failed quite badly, actually. Its musical intrusion into a Nicaraguan-American coffee shop was not only not fraught with significance but was quite wonderfully, randomly insignificant.
       The online version of that German station no doubt exists mainly for Landsmänner sent far from home and missing not only their home-cooked culture but their familiar, everyday reworking of American culture: the tired department manager at the Volkswagen plant in Puebla, the sweaty staff at the Deutsches Generalkonsulat in Lagos. But because the internet is the internet, it leaks out. It finds the wormhole through space and appears, uncomprehended, barely noticed, but welcome and amusing and vouching momentarily for the bigness and strangeness of things, in California, in Nicaragua, in anywhere.


      

Beaver Papers: The Sequel

So it's turning out to be simply too big a job to pull together an "expanded edition" for The Beaver Papers' 30th anniversary ebook reissue, as we were originally planning. Just proofing the original and doing the whole ebook-format learning curve is going to make it hard enough just to bring the original bookout next month as planned. Given that, we've decided that the 30th Anniversary Edition will consist only of the original book, with two new scripts, a new introduction, and some corrections of fact (or what passes for "fact" in the reality of The Beaver Papers), sold for a lower-than-planned $2.99.

      Which means we'll be saving the unpublished scripts we were gathering for the "expanded" edition—and coming up with a whole bunch more—for The Beaver Papers 2. Thirty years ago, when The Beaver Papers was new and doing well in the stores, we talked about writing a sequel...but life moved on and we never got to it. Now, almost by accident, we're finally doing it. 

       So far we know it'll include faux Leave It to Beaver script treatments by Ayn Rand, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jim Thompson, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Wright, Flannery O'Connor, W. Somerset Maugham, J. G. Ballard, John Updike, Jorge Luis Borges, and at least 15 others. Along with the story of what happened during "the Autumn of the Beaver," when the cast and crew fought to bring the show back to life after the heart-rending cancellation described at the end of the original book. It should be out in less than a year.
       Oh, and there will be a sneak preview of two of the scripts from the sequel in the Anniversary Edition next month: Beaver in the Rye by J. D. Salinger and Do Beavers Dreams of Electric Creeps? by Philip K. Dick. That'll give you a chance to see if we've gotten better or worse at this parody thing in the past three decades.

       Better or worse, we've had a great time going back to that long-ago idea and bringing it back to life for our current selves. I really wasn't sure we'd have it in us when we started, but whatever drove us to write the thing in the first place is apparently still alive in us. I guess sometimes you can go home again.

        (Actually, that's someone we haven't parodied yet: Thomas Wolfe. Look Homeward, Beaver?)

Technology Addiction

I've been asked to deliver a keynote address at the International Congress on Technology Addiction in Istanbul in a few weeks. I didn't hesitate to accept. I've been to Istanbul twice, and both times wanted to get back as quickly as I could. The last time was over twenty years ago, so this was a very welcome invitation. It was an unexpected invitation, too...because I've never written or spoken publicly on addiction of any kind. But I've been wanting to, wondering if I was ready and what a good entree would be. And suddenly, out of the blue, comes this email from a group I've never heard of asking me to speak.
       I'm assuming the reason I was on their list of desirable speakers is that I've written and spoken a fair amount about video games. My topic, though, has always been their content, especially violent fantasy, growing out of that book I wrote called Killing Monsters. I've fielded a few questions about game addiction during the Q&A period of talks and during press interviews, but it's never been my focus. Not my professional focus, I mean. Because privately I've thought a lot about it. Mainly because I struggle with the damned thing myself.
       It's not games with me. I don't play video games unless there's some compelling research reason, and I've gotten good at avoiding such reasons. But Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Google News, Blogger...at one time or another I've had to set strict rules and bring in a support network to stay off every damned one of them. Which is part of a larger complex of addictive, obsessive, compulsive, habitual, and God knows what else behaviors I've been wrestling with and exploring and slowly coming to understand for a long time.
       I've had a feeling for a while now that I have in me a good book about addiction and recovery. But I haven't known how even to start thinking about it. Now this conference in Istanbul is forcing me to pull at least some of my thoughts and knowledge together and to bring them to other people. I'm expecting it to open the door to more—and I don't mean to more invitations, although that could happen. I mean it'll open some doors in my head.
        Something people in spiritual recovery programs talk about are "higher power moments." A lot of people see signs in the events around them from the universe or God or some other guiding power. I've always figured signs were where we wanted to find them. The universe is constantly throwing unexpected twists at us, and if, deep down, we want to read one as pointing us in the right direction, then we'll do that. If we're not inclined to see it as a sign, then we probably won't. 
       This invitation out of nowhere definitely has "God moment" written all over it. Which is how I choose to take it. I've wanted to open the door to writing and talking publicly about addiction and recovery, but I've been uncertain about how and timid about whether I should. I'm choosing to take this as a sign from the universe that it's time to plunge in. Where it takes me from there, I'll find out when I get there. 

Into E-Publishing

So after years of watching this whole “electronic publishing” thing develop and wondering if it might be good for me as a writer, I’m finally plunging in. Will Jacobs and I are hard at work on the “Expanded 30th Anniversary Edition” of our first book, The Beaver Papers.

       The publisher is Atomic Drop Press. They’re a very new outfit—they’ve only brought one book out before, a peculiar thing called The Max Kleinman Reader—but they’ve got a snazzy look and a lot of ambition. They’ve gotten themselves onto Amazon and a nearly every other e-book vendor by way of Smashwords, and they’ll be adding print-on-demand soon. And they’ve promised us that after Beaver they’ll want to work with us on more: probably bringing back our comic book The Trouble with Girls and launching at least one new project.
       I know I’ve described the conceit of the book before: what if the world’s great writers had written episodes of Leave It to Beaver? With summaries of episodes of the most wholesome of old-style sitcoms as if written by William Faulkner, Yukio Mishima, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Franz Kafka, and twenty other people. We’ll be adding at least ten more scripts to this one, probably more. So far we definitely have Philip Dick, Jim Thompson, Richard Wright, J. G. Ballard, Flannery O’Connor, and the US Office of Civil Defense. That last one is called “Duck and Cleaver.”
       It’s been strange and fun to go back to something I did 32 years ago and do more in the same vein. The gulf from one’s early 20s to one’s mid 50s can seem huge, but I've been astonished at how quickly that gulf can be leaped back over. Apparently that goofy, know-nothing, 23-year old is still very much alive in me, for good or ill. Which I’m glad of. He was an idiot in a lot of ways, but he had an energy and optimism and willingness to throw himself into something just because it excited him that I’m glad I haven’t lost. When this job’s done I’ll be curious to see, not only how the new scripts stack up to the old, but how this unexpected loop-back through my past his affected my current work. (Because I’m pretty sure it will, somehow or other.)
       It’s also been strange and fun to discover a whole new way of getting books to an audience. Where it will lead me or whether it will make me any money almost doesn't matter now. I’ve been doing the published-on-paper-by-a-big company-in-New-York thing for more than half my life, so I like learning what else the word “book” can mean. If nothing else, this e-publishing thing is fast: Will and I are still writing new material in September, but we still expect to get the book out before 2013 ends and it becomes a 31st Anniversary Edition.
       I’ll keep you posted on what I learn.

The Beaver of Wrath

Today is almost exactly, as well as I can remember, the 30th anniversary of the day my first published book appeared in bookstores. 
       Will Jacobs and I wrote The Summer of the Beaver in a six-week fever from the end of May to the beginning of July, 1981. He was twenty-six, I was not quite twenty-four. Things change fast when you're young; at the start of those six weeks we were just tossing off parodies to make each other laugh, at the end of it we were revising a book with editors in mind and strategizing how to pitch it to them. 
       I think we kind of knew that this was the first publishable thing either of us had written, but we weren't about to give up on our vain dreams of selling novels that quickly...and so we ended up birthing a monster of a query letter in which we pitched nine (yes, nine) books at once. A few years ago I read that letter out loud at a Writers Grotto event called Regretature, to the great amusement of people who were not only older and wiser but would have been smart enough not to do anything like that even in their twenties. Here's the video. 
       We sent off over 100 of those letters, and with them caught the interest of one one agent, Martha Millard, and one editor, Peter Cannon at Crown Publishing. We weren't surprised, deep down, when they both asked to see only the Beaver book.
      We were worried that a genuine, professional, New York editor would insist on messing with our idiosyncratic inventions—like asking us to substitute better-known authors for personal fascinations like William Saroyan and Alain Robbe-Grillet—but we had nothing to fear. Peter was a new editor, no older or wiser than we were, and he loved the book's peculiarity as much as we did. The 25 parodies and the bizarre historical narrative that holds them together saw print almost exactly as we'd written them, except that Peter (wisely) made us ditch the absurd first-person narrator we'd created, Starchy McGregor, a supposed stunt double for Jerry Mathers. He then made us cut (to our momentary horror but ultimate agreement) a ton of absurd narrative from the end of the book, including our synopsis for a politically-charged movie called Beaver Now. And he suggested a better title: The Beaver Papers: The Story of the Lost Season.
       A writer had to wait a long, long time in those pre-computerized days of publishing for his book to come out. We did our revisions through the summer of 1982 and publication was scheduled for a year later. But finally the day came when our beloved publicist, Sally Berk, called to tell us that our book was on the counter of a real bookstore in New York City. From that day on, although nothing quite went the way I'd fantasized it, nothing was quite the same either. 
       Let's pick up where we left off last time, with the fall-out from the arrival of Jack Kerouac's Dharma Beaver at the Leave It to Beaver production offices...
 

May 5-10, 1963

Mosher and Connelly were frankly perplexed by this submission. Although horrified at Kerouac's new interpretation of Eddie and Wally's morality, they were nonetheless flattered that such a literary giant would contribute to their show. Having nothing to lose, they presented the script to ABC executives. While they did not recognize Kerouac's name, the executives did seem tentatively interested in this new direction.

       Mosher and Connelly then showed the script to the cast. Hugh Beaumont, who brought Ward Cleaver to life on the show, commented, "I like the idea of Wally wanting to be a writer. I did a little writing myself when I was a young man." Stanley Fafara, who played Beaver's little friend Whitey Whitney, praised to the references to Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, whose works he greatly admired.
       Mosher and Connelly telegraphed Kerouac, asking if he would care to work with Roland MacLane and Dick Conway on future episodes should ABC reverse its decision to cancel the show. While they waiting for a response, the second submission arrived.
       The Gomalco Productions offices were rocked by the arrival in the mail of The Beaver of Wrath by Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. In this script, the aging Steinbeck seeks out the essential kinship between the migrants of the depression, whom he eulogized, and the Cleaver family, who epitomize for him the fulfillment of the promise of the Joads.



    

THE BEAVER OF WRATH

John Steinbeck


The gray soil of Metzger's Field turns to white and the red tanbark of the schoolyard is burned a pale pink by the sun. The people of Mayfield, the people of the land from Camelback Cutoff down to Bell Port, watch Miller's Pond dry into its own mud.
       Beaver walks down the road toward home, just released from Saturday school detention for punching Larry Mondello in the stomach. He finds the people of Mayfield streaming out of town in their station wagons. Eddie Haskell wanders by, philosophizing humbly. Beaver says, "Creep! Creep! Creep!" Eddie shakes his head. "Nope, I used to be a creep. But I asked myself, What is it a man can be a creep about? and I knew it was only hisself. I heard you punched a squirt." Beaver says, "Yeah, and I'd do it again if I had to."
       They find Ward, in golf sweater, tie, and overalls, squatting in the front yard, drawing patterns in the dust with his newspaper. Wally squats beside him, saying, "Gee, Pa, it's Satiddy afternoon and thar ain't no water in the pond. The fambly ain't got a chancet of a good picnic now." June says, "I seen in the picture books oncet how they's water up to Friend's Lake. I'd like to get me one o' them little picnic tables with trees all around." She spies Beaver and says, "Praise Gawd for vittory! Now I got my whole Cleaver fambly about me again! And if it ain't the old creep!"
       Eddie says, "Good afternoon, Mrs. Cleaver, but I ain't a creep no more. No man's got business bein' more of a creep than any other." June loads the station wagon with pork bones and baloney sandwiches. Gilbert, Richard, Whitey, Larry, and Violet Rutherford pile on the luggage rack. Wally leads Lumpy to join them. Lumpy says, "Gosh, will there be rabbits we're going, Wally?" "Sure, Lump, you'll have lots of rabbits." "Oh, boy, Wally, and can I eat the rabbits, Wally, huh?"

       On the way out of town they meet Gus Chong, the old Chinese fireman and crooked merchant. Wally buys Ward a dog and Beaver beats Wally to a pulp. They find work selling frogs at demeaning wages. In moral outrage, Eddie becomes a creep again and is beaten up by Richard and Gilbert. Beaver is bruised and knows he must go. 
       June struggles to keep her fambly together, but Beaver says, "Don't be thinkin' about me bein' gone, Ma. Wherever there's kids in trouble, I'll be there. Wherever there's a creep givin' the business to a squirt, Ma, I'll be there." June dries her tears on the dusty sleeve of her old gingham dress.

    
TAG: At night, Wally is doing his 'lectronics homework at his desk. Beaver is packing peaches into a crate. He says, "Hey, Wally, are there any brothers in the Bible with the initials W and B?" Wally says, "Gosh, Beav, I don't know. I ain't no preacher. I'm just a man o' the land." They collapse exhausted into bed and turn out the meager light, but the room goes on glowing warmly. 

Dharma Beaver

Thirty years ago this month, my first book was published... and in the process served up one of the more amusing ironies of my life. 
       Before we wrote The Beaver Papers, Will Jacobs and I had worked constantly, furiously, and obsessively to become published novelists. Nothing else had mattered to either of us since our teens except "becoming a writer," and to us, like most young lit-heads, that meant novels. I'd dropped out of college to write novels; Will had refused to go in the first place. We met at a used bookstore, where we'd both taken jobs in order not to have to think about anything but books. We'd each written a few of the things, every one of them completely dismissed by every agent and editor we sent them to. Then we wrote one together—in multiple Faulknerian first person voices—which garnered no greater worldly success than the comment by our boss at the bookstore that "it's actually not as bad as I thought it would be." Ultimately we even compromised our literary purity just so we could jam a foot into the doorway of publishing: Will wrote a hard-boiled mystery and I wrote a kids' book. Those didn't work any better than the Faulkner homage had.
       During those years of frustration, we would blow off steam by writing nonsense to make each other laugh. We discovered that parody enabled us both to try on the clothes of the writers we loved and to make fun of the crap that we saw other (luckier, less deserving) writers getting away with. We wrote intentionally bad poetry and mock scholarly reviews. And we wrote summaries of episodes of Leave It to Beaver as if they'd been written by all our favorite authors. None of it intended for anyone's eyes but our own...and sometimes those of a long-suffering roommate.
       But when those roommates—Jim Zook for me, Chip Kabrich for Will—started laughing out loud at our Beaver parodies, we experienced, for the first time in our lives, what it was like to write for an audience that actually wanted to hear us. It was a heady feeling, enough to make us write twenty-five of those parodies and read them to anyone who would sit still. At some point, I don't remember when or how, we realized that we might be able to get a book out of them, and maybe even sell it to a publisher...and if we could get any book into print, even this silly thing, then surely that would open the door to getting our novels published!
       We were almost right about that. Every sale we've made since then—humor articles, comic books, nonfiction books, screenplays—has happened, directly or indirectly, because of this book that we knocked off to distract ourselves from the frustration of not being able to sell any of the books that we were determined to build our careers on. But one thing still hasn't happened: after thirty years, neither of us has gotten a novel published. God, as they say, has a good sense of humor. 
       Now, on to the second excerpt and the first parody...
      

May 5, 1963

Jack Kerouac, leading voice of the Beat Generation, often wrote about the search for America. Here, on the heels of his Big Sur, he brings to light the search theme that was always latent in Leave It to Beaver. 

DHARMA BEAVER

Jack Kerouac

Eddie steals a bike and passes Mary Ellen Rogers' house on the way to Wally's. Mary Ellen, on the porch with her friend Elma, nudges her and says, "There goes Eddie Haskell. I wonder where he's going to?" Elma looks mystified and says, "I wonder where he's coming from?"
       At Wally's, Eddie says, "Hey, Sam, what state are we in?" Wally, at his desk in his bedroom, typing on a huge roll of paper, says, "Aw, go on, Eddie. I don't have time to think about things like that. I'm writing a novel." Eddie says, "Oh, yeah? Do you have time to notice that?" He points to the bike out the window. "Gee, where'd you get the new wheels?" asks Wally. Beaver, reading A Coney Island of the Mind, says, "Aw, he probably swiped it." Eddie says, "Shut up, squirt. You don't know the meaning of Beat."
       Beaver asks, "Hey, Wally, what direction is San Francisco from here?" Wally looks mystified: "Gee, I dunno, Beav. In geography class they told us it was on the West Coast, but...." Eddie says, "Come on, Gertrude, don't be such a square. Why do you think I swiped the wheels? These old-timers don't know any more about where we are than we do. We've got to found out for ourselves." "Gosh, I don't know, Eddie," says Wally. But Eddie insists and Wally agrees. Eddie says, "All we've got to do is make tracks until we get to some city we've heard of. Then we'll know what state we're in."   

       On the way out of Mayfield they pass the Rutherfords', where Lumpy is sitting in a Lotus position on the front lawn. When the boys ask him what he's doing, Lumpy responds, "I'm getting ready for my trip to Japan." Wally says, "Gee, you mean your dad's letting you go? What are you gonna do there?" Lumpy says, "I'm gonna be a Buddhist monk and write poetry." "A Buddhist monk, Sam?" says Eddie. "Those old Chinamen won't let you eat!" Lumpy says, "Really? Gosh, Daddy didn't tell me that." Wally asks, "By the way, Lumpy, what direction is Japan from here?"
       They pass a road sign reading, BELL PORT, 5 MILES. Wally says, "Gee, Eddie, it's like we're in search of America." Eddie says, "To hell with that, Sam. I just want to know where in America we are."
       They arrive in Bell Port, buy a bottle of whiskey, drink themselves blind, and recite Ginsberg's Howl in chorus. They accost strangers and ask where they are. Unanimously, the strangers answer, "In Bell Port." They ask, "But where's Bell Port?" The strangers look at them, mystified, and walk away.
       They awake among empty bottles in a sleazy hotel. Suddenly Ward enters to take them home. At home, in the den, Ward says, "When I was your age, Wally, I went looking for America too. But then I realized that this was America, right here in Mayfield." Wally says, "Sure, Dad. But what part of America?" Ward looks mystified. 

TAG: Beaver bursts into the boys' bedroom waving an envelope. "Hey, Wally! Hey, Wally! Look, you got a letter from Viking Press." Wally opens the envelope and says, "Holy cow, Beav. They're publishing my novel." Beaver teases him good-naturedly in his screeching falsetto: "Bookworm! Bookworm!" Wally good-naturedly hits him with a pillow.


Next week: John Steinbeck's The Beaver of Wrath.