Category Archives: real life

What’s That I Hear Now

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Ringing in my ears? I’ve heard that sound before . . .

It’s the sound of studio musicians and, for so many of them, all we ever do is hear them. We don’t see (much of) them or know much about them, because they labor in near-anonymity. Still, one hopes the days are gone when Phil Spector would release a song recorded by one of his most talented backup singers and slap the name of a better-known group on the label.

Jo Lawry, Judith Hill, and Lisa Fischer

Yes, I finally saw 20 Feet from Stardom yesterday, and it was pure pleasure (trailer). Full house at the theater, too—rare for a documentary. Mick Jagger looking every day of  his 70 years. Springsteen. Sting. White guys talking about how important these uncelebrated black women were to their music and their success. Hmm. And now I know why “Gimme Shelter” was such an unforgettable moment during the Rolling Stones concert in Central Park. Lisa Fischer. Hit that link to the tune and fall in love.

Oh, and does Darlene Love bear Spector any malice for subverting and derailing her singing career for decades? “Where he is, right now? I’ve got closure,” she said in the July 1 New Yorker. Where he is right now, of course, is prison. And her career is back in gear, touring this summer, though in general, backup singers have had a rocky road traveling solo. Their sublime sound together almost makes you wish they wouldn’t try.

Music industry rapaciousness and the exploitation of artists who just want to sing (or play) their music may be an old story, but it makes for good movies. Another is Standing in the Shadows of Motown (2002) about the almost-invisible Funk Brothers, Berry Gordy’s house band of super-musicians. The Rotten Tomatoes summary calls them, “unsung heroes”—tongue-in-cheek, presumably, since that’s exactly what they were not. Singing to their music created the Motown canon.

Then there’s The Wrecking Crew, one of the most prolific studio bands of all time. The list of the songs they played is amazing—everything from the Mission Impossible theme to Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” to The Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” to the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody.” Wow. They created a lot of the riffs that immediately identify classics by the Beach Boys, Tijuana Brass, Sam Cooke . . .

Distribution of a 2008 documentary about their work (trailer) has been held up for years because the music industry (big surprise!) wanted millions in fees (later reduced, but still hefty) for the snippets of songs used in the film. The controversy has received solid coverage, and the producers have tried to raise the money to pay off the companies, but the DVD is still not out. (You can Donate Here.) Beware of Amazon’s “The Wrecking Crew DVD” link. It will show you the book the docu is based on and some other stuff, but the item with the black cover you think might be the DVD is not, say two angry reviewers!

Labor in obscurity no more, o talented people!

What We Know

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@ Death Valley, July 2012

My writers’ group—eight to twelve of us who get together every month to provide critiques, commiseration, celebration, and snacks—tried a storytelling exercise this week. (This was after a brief mental warm-up: describing an eighth dwarf for Snow White. “Sleazy” cheated at poker and was always trying to get Snow White alone.) Our main challenge for the evening was to briefly describe “the strangest thing that has ever happened to us or the oddest thing we have ever seen.”

Two hours in, we were still going strong. One hitchhiking escapade with a dodgy driver that ended in Death Valley could have been recorded almost verbatim as a complete short story. Others were pieces of narrative that might launch a whole symphony or be used in some work as incidental music: People and things that disappeared mysteriously. Ghost stories. Clairvoyants. A whole subcategory of jaw-dropping pet shenanigans.

The point of all this was to show ourselves that we have amazing, interesting stuff inside. We’ve had experiences. We’ve had emotional peaks and troughs. And we can draw on these in our own writing, much like the most uxorious actor, if he were cast as Othello, might seek out and magnify into mountainous proportions one minor wifely flaw. One member of our group could reconstruct her terror when locked in a room with a noisy ghost; another might recreate the merriment of family misadventures in Olde England; one has given the fear she felt when being stalked to her fictional character in a related situation.

This, I think, is how the often misunderstood dictum, “write what you know” should be interpreted. When it is taken too literally, it is patently absurd. Not to mention boring. “Another fascinating day in front of the computer, interrupted by a run to the grocery store. A literal milk run! Received 72 emails. Decided not to order FiOS.”

Writers can and should ground their writing in the emotions they know, distilling and intensifying them to the right pitch. We don’t have to write dully about emotions, we can write with them. Ready-to-tap, in full array, they are buried in the experiences that have amazed, amused, shocked, warmed, and frightened each of us. Two hours of round-robin storytelling proved the point. While none of the anecdotes we told each other this week will ever appear as a complete story—except perhaps the one about the wayward hitchhiker—we can filter the feelings these events inspired through new fictional situations and watch them emerge in emotionally compelling new guises.

Want to try it yourself?

Summer Fun!

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butterflies hatched 004Two weeks ago, I wrote about the Belmont Stakes, the June jewel of Triple Crown races, last weekend I was in Washington, D.C.—a fine day in the nation’s capital—coming off several nights at the beautiful Chesapeake Bay, and today, a friend has organized a boat trip around Manhattan for her 90th birthday. What a way to celebrate summer!

Up early this morning to write this, I was treated with the sight of a deer with six-point antlers picking his way across twenty feet of grassy back yard and disappearing into the woods. My glance flew to my hostas (intact) and deck planters (ditto), so the pleasure in seeing him remained intact. I haven’t been to the other side of the house yet to see whether he’s eaten all the buds off my daylily collection. One year I had no flowers at all, thanks to this unauthorized snacking.

Early summer is the season for black bear sightings in Princeton. This year, one even scouted the campus. Cubs or young bears, usually. Since New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the country, when bears go walkabout, it usually ends badly. A town councilman explained, “They come down from New York,” a statement that raised more questions than it answered. How does he know? Why?

It’s firefly season! The woods in the back of the house are full of them. I like to watch them testing their batteries for the night, down in the grass and slowly rising. PS – this neighborhood has no cicadas at all so far, while the town up the road a piece is dense with their noise.

A frog is in the pond, croaking noisily all night. I reassure myself that little frogs can have big voices. Still, I count the fish in the morning when I go out to feed them. A heron ate ten fish—and a couple of frogs, too—a few years ago, so the net remains on the pond all the time. Diminishes the effect, but the fish are safe. Fellow pond-owners describe the huge heron colony nearby in apocalyptic terms.

These days, my fish-feeding and desultory weeding are supervised by a catbird that must have built a nest in the shrubbery near the pond. She misses nothing. A wren established herself in the birdhouse out back. Every spring, the chickadees bounce among the branches, checking it out, but they are lookers, and she’s a buyer.

Enjoy this too-short season!

Summer Soundtrack

A Day at the Races

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Into the Starting Gate

Into the Starting Gate

When longshot Palace Malice flew past the finish pole at yesterday’s Belmont Stakes (me in terrific grandstand seats rethinking my bets), it was yet another big race with a big-heart story behind it. Racing is full of them, and the New York Times coverage of yesterday’s race (see the slideshow) provides the current tale. NBC regularly milks viewers emotions with these stories, and you can’t watch its replays of Secretariat’s 1973 runs without feeling you’re watching the hero of an age.

Yesterday’s finish was an exciting validation of the Triple Crown, with three equine princes in the top slots: Palace Malice’s first place was followed by Preakness winner Oxbow in second, and Kentucky Derby winner Orb in third.

If you want to indulge your interest in horses and racing from your favorite chair, you can’t do better than:

1. Luck, the star-filled cast of this star-crossed David Milch HBO drama showed the people behind the two minutes on the track. (This is the only demonstration of how claiming races work that I’ve ever actually understood.) I’m still mourning the misguided cancellation of this series, but have to let it go.

2. Seabiscuit, the book by Laura Hillenbrand; or the movie, starring Toby Maguire, Jeff Bridges, and Chris Cooper. Seabiscuit was an unlikely horse-racing winner, and his real-life rags-to-riches story fit Americans’ late Depression mood like a glove.The camera-work in the movie, which gives you a jockey’s eye view of the race, shows once and for all what a dangerous adrenaline rush this sport is.

3. Horse Heaven, a novel by Jane Smiley. She won the Pulitzer for A Thousand Acres, but I enjoyed this book infinitely more. Huge cast of characters, including several horses, whose personalities, I have it on good authority, are portrayed with precision.

4. Lord of Misrule, a novel by Jaimy Gordon. While Horse Heaven describes the path to the high end of horse-racing, National Book Award winner Lord of Misrule describes the other direction: small tracks, low stakes, iffy horses, iffier players. Characters who really are characters.

5. The Eighty-Dollar Champion, by Elizabeth Letts. If the heart-pounding action of thoroughbred racing seems a little too much, this book tells the true and unlikely story of Snowman, a former plowhorse and his farmer-rider who became national champions in the incredibly demanding sport of show jumping (a favorite Olympic event!). Another heart-warmer.

Not recommended: Secretariat, the 2010 Disney-produced movie, starring Diane Lane and John Malkovich. Every cliché imaginable and appallingly unrealistic. Ick.

The Real British Princesses

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I discovered Jerrold Packard’s book, Queen Victoria’s Daughters, at a library book sale and couldn’t pass it up. Five of Victoria and Albert’s children were girls, and she doted on several of them, particularly her eldest and possibly brightest child, Vicky. By contrast, she never warmed to her oldest son, Bertie, even though he was destined to be King Edward VII. Cozy domestic life is associated with the Victorian era, but the Queen wasn’t a terribly involved or nurturing mother. Later, when her girls were married, she provided bad political advice—to Vicky especially, whom she persuaded to maintain her Englishness after marriage to her Prussian husband, Fritz. This alienated his parents (the emperor and empress), the stifling Prussian court, and, worst, estranged her from her three oldest children, including the future Kaiser Wilhelm II, England’s great enemy in World War I.

Victoria searched for appropriate royal husbands for the girls among the minor and now bygone German royal houses. Compassionate Alice, second oldest, married Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, plain Helena married Christian, Prince of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, and the youngest, Beatrice, married Henry, Prince of Battenberg. All the girls made royal marriages except Louise, the artistic fourth daughter and reportedly the most beautiful, who married John, future 9th Duke of Argyll. Although John’s father headed the Highland clan of Campbells, one of Britain’s oldest and most prominent families, the lack of royal blood created controversy across Europe.

Ironically, the issue of royal blood was no minor matter. Queen Victoria was a carrier of the hemophilia gene. Statistically, half her sons were likely to be afflicted, and any minor injury could bring on a fatal hemorrhage. Son Leopold inherited this damaged gene and died at age 30 after a fall. Of Victoria’s daughters, Louise and Beatrice were carriers. The disease had devastating effects on a number of Victoria’s 40 grandchildren in several royal families.

In addition to Vicky’s marriage to one German emperor and motherhood of another, her daughter Sophie married Constantine, king of Greece; Alice’s daughter Alexandra married Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia, both of them murdered by Bolsheviks in 1918, along with their four daughters and son (a hemophiliac); Beatrice’s daughter Victoria Eugenie became queen of Spain.

English royalty’s multigenerational affiliations with German families—the Hanovers, Victoria’s marriage to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and her children’s marriages—created political problems after the Great War. The wartime king, George V, renamed the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family after the longtime home of the British monarchy, Windsor. Members of the Battenberg family, into which Princess Beatrice married, Anglicized its name to Mountbatten.

Victoria’s reign seems both long ago, in terms of the massive intervening cultural changes, and quite recent historically. Her last daughter, Beatrice, died in 1944, and her last grandchild, the unhappy queen of Spain, in 1969. Meanwhile, Victoria will be the great-great-great-great-great grandmother of William and Kate’s baby (baby-William-Charles-Elizabeth-George VI-George V-Edward VII-Victoria).

I recommend this highly readable and fascinating book for anyone interested in British history, women’s history, or the intricacies and political shenanigans of 19th c. royal households.

Paris: The Early Detectives (Updated)

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Paris in the 19th and early 20th century was in creative ferment and in love with modernism—and the scandalous. In areas like Montmarte, “people went to abandon their inhibitions”; low-rent neighborhoods attracted people on the brittle edge of society; guillotinings were held at odd hours in the vain hope of reducing the crowds of spectators; crime stories were insanely popular; and real-life criminals and anarchists were hailed as heroes.

The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection, by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler describes this world and the ongoing war between the criminals and the Sureté detectives intent on stopping them. They anchor their story with the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa and loop backward from there to trace the increasingly scientific methods used to identify malefactors. One of the most successful was a system of measuring and classifying facial and other physical features created by Alphonse Bertillon. By 1900, detectives throughout Europe and the United States used “bertillonage” to identify criminals until the system was replaced by fingerprinting. A reference to Bertillon even appears in The Hound of the Baskervilles, as a rival to Sherlock Holmes.

History, in its tendency to repeat itself, is reviving Bertillon’s concept as biometrics; in today’s incarnation, computers much more accurately measure facial data points. The Mona Lisa was recovered in 1913, and the Hooblers present several plausible “who, how, and why” scenarios, but it’s clear that if the man who possessed it hadn’t turned it over to art experts in Florence, the skills of the detectives of a hundred years ago would never have found it!

Genealogical footnote: When the Mona Lisa went missing, the authorities stopped all ships leaving France and notified destination ports of ships recently departed. When the German liner Kaiser Wilhelm II steamed into New York harbor some days later, U.S. authorities searched the ship and passengers thoroughly. The Kaiser Wilhelm II was the boat on which my grandfather emigrated from Hungary in October 1906. Alfred Stieglitz’s famous photograph below, The Steerage, suggests what his voyage would have been like.

 

 June 2013 Update: a remarkable show of drawings and prints by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec appears this summer at the Allentown Art Museum of the Lehigh Valley, and is one of the first museum’s outside Europe to host this large collection. The show includes some recently found print of famous works that have retained their color–looking as fresh now as they were when pulled from the presses 120 years ago!  Lautrec captured the world of Montmartre the Hooblers describe–the singers and dancers, the whores, the denizens of the bars and cafes–to a greater degree than most artists would, because he was as attentive to depicting members of the audience as the was a black-gloved chanteuse. If you can’t visit in person (exhibit available until September 1), you can read about it here.

The Sufferer in the Mirror

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Memoir-writers would appear to have it easy. After all, whom do they know best, in theory, but themselves? The key to this question is “in theory.” Hollywood and sports stars can sail by with superficial “and then this bad thing happened, but I learned a lot” memoirs, because they are, well, stars, and in some misguided sense, we already feel we know them. The rest of us have to dig way deeper.

Aspiring memoirists may be encouraged to expose their most “gut-wrenching secrets” right up front. Chapter one. Even page one. But parading a set of difficult experiences—drug addiction, infidelity, abuse—across the literary stage like cardboard scenery is not sufficient. We’ve all read that. Seen the movie. More than once. The writer’s unique persona and individual reaction to these stock situations are what makes a new version of this play worth mounting. It may take a few—even quite a few—pages to create the character for whom these traumatic experiences have meaning. Writers who merely put their emotional debris on display treat readers like voyeurs. Less experienced writers, encouraged to reveal their darkest moments, may not have the self-understanding that is as much a part of the story as the drug-addled sex in the seedy hotel room.

Author and writing teacher Susan Shapiro in her recent essay, “Make Me Worry You’re Not O.K.,” supports the idea of immediately sharing emotional traumas, of hooking readers early in order to make readers care. Another memoir teacher and literary agent—Brooke Warner—responded to Shapiro with her own essay, “Memoir Is Not the Trauma Olympics.” Warner counters that “real misery memoir works when you drip in the painful stuff little by little.”

Following these two essays, journalism teacher Katie Roiphe wrote “This Is How Your Write a Memoir” for Slate. Her common-sense advice ends with the observation that “expressing yourself is not enough.” Just because an event is true, doesn’t mean it can be written about without the care and attention to salient detail of any other literary endeavor. In other words, it’s hard work after all.

In their words: The recent essays by Susan Shapiro, Brooke Warner, and Katie Roiphe.

The Reading Challenge

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Books I read 002

Here’s a resolution for 2013 that I haven’t broken yet: to read all the books in the pile on the left. The pile on the right comprises books read in 2012—not counting more than a dozen audio books and Mr. X, courtesy of the West Windsor Library. The number of notable books from last year near the top of the unread pile (holiday gifts) suggests I’m way behind. And some of the books near the bottom are carryovers from 2012. I hadn’t counted on needing to read 2000 pages of Dickens for my class last fall! If you’re wondering which were my favorites, they were Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies—those Tudors are irresistible—and two nonfiction volumes: Counterstrike and In the Garden of Beasts. (The latter, by Erik Larson, startlingly echoed the plot and characters in Herman Wouk’s 1971 novel, The Winds of War, which I happened to be listening to at the same time, all 46 hours of it. Although the novel begins shortly before the Nazi invasion of Poland—six years after the period covered in Larson’s book—they are probably hopelessly muddled in my mind. It would be interesting to learn whether the diplomatic family Larson portrays figured into Wouk’s planning, even if fictional daughter Madeline did not go as seriously off the rails as real-life Martha Dodd.) These favorites aside, audio books provided my most enjoyable “reading” experiences this year: The Lotus Eaters, State of Wonder, The Submission, and the truly thrilling Macbeth: A Novel. I’ve recommended that last one endlessly. Despite all the words that have passed through my brain via eyes and ears, picking up a new book is still exciting. It may hold a character to love or despise; it may offer a memorable phrase or insight or image, whose creativity I can strive to emulate. My stack of 29 books is paltry beside the average goal of 61 books that participants in the Goodreads 2013 Reading Challenge have resolved to read. I note that 32 challenge participants have already met their reading goal for the year, which must have been one book or, possibly, none. That may be an easy resolution for them to keep. Not for me.

It’s the Chills that Count!

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Two weeks ago, this blog started a discussion of the differences between mysteries and thrillers. As reader David Ludlum pointed out, there can be elements of mystery in thrillers and vice-versa, since both contain suspense. Here are a few items from Carolyn Wheat’s handy list of the differences: mystery is a puzzle, suspense is a nightmare; in a mystery, the detective has skills, and in a thriller, the hero learns skills; mysteries have clues, while thrillers have surprises; and a mystery offers red herrings, whereas a thriller contains “cycles of betrayal.” John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy comes immediately to mind.

This week, I’m reading a mystery—Maze in Blue, by fellow U. of Michigan alumna Debra Goldstein—and the pages are littered with clues, potential clues, and red herrings. The fun is sorting them out, not to mention the familiarity of the Ann Arbor setting!

Coincidentally, the book mentions a real-life murder I was familiar with, one in a serial killer spree that began shortly after I graduated. A law student was murdered and her body draped over a tombstone in a local cemetery. Reading about the case several months after I moved away, I had a horrible flashback. On a warm spring evening in my senior year, I was pacing my second-floor apartment in a chopped up Victorian house, talking on the phone to a friend. I noticed a man standing across the street looking up into my tall second-floor windows, open to the fresh air. I didn’t pay much attention until he crossed the street, headed toward my house. The back of my neck tingled. “I think he’s coming over to look at my mailbox,” I said, slightly embarrassed to sound so paranoid. My friend and I talked a little longer, and the man recrossed the street, disappearing into the apartment building opposite. As soon as we hung up, my phone rang. “You don’t know me, but . . .” and he gave me his name. Yes, he had read my name on my mailbox, and he asked me out. “I don’t think this is a very good way to meet people,” I said and hung up, shaking, even though in those days such a casual meet-up was common. I called my friend back. “If I’m not in class tomorrow, here’s the name he gave”—the same name written in the calendar of the murdered law student on the day she disappeared. So Goldstein’s book has some resonance with me.

The most recent thriller I’ve read is Alan Furst’s latest, Mission to Paris, and while I don’t have the same kind of personal connection with pre-World War II Europe, Furst’s evocation of the era through his wonderful series of books immediately puts me there. In this one, Hollywood actor Fredric Stahl find himself enmeshed deeper and deeper in the snares of opposing spy machines and Carolyn Wheat’s “cycles of betrayal.”

Another superb read this year in the pre-war thriller mode is Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts, with one big difference: it’s all true.

In their Words: Interviews with Carolyn Wheat, Alan Furst, and Erik Larson on the books mentioned here.