Seattle Sean & Robyn Stopped Traffic and Stood Almost Twenty Feet Tall

I Gave Away All the Good Costumes and was Left as Methy the Clown

Gave Away All My Good Costumes and was Left as Methy the Clown

Elf Rutledge is Hiding Near the Center

With the Help of Santa Levi, It Took Six Hours to Inflate 400 Balloons

Portland’s Famous UniPiper

Santas Galore Courtesy of Elf Rutledge

A Visit from Santa Vixen

Santas Storm the Escalators

Saturday is Santaday

August 8th will be the last day of business for the venerable Lloyd Center in Portland, Oregon. A half dozen chaotic events — including Lloyderpalooza — will fill the dead mall for the first time in a decade. Amidst the hubbub, members of the Cacophony Society (and their friends) will make a long-delayed appearance at the mall. In 1996 a mob of 200+ Santas tried to enter the mall to summon the spirit of Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding, who started her ice career there as a child. Thirty years ago police thwarted the Santas, but this Saturday the Red Tide will make a comeback.

The meet-up is at the Broadway Pub at 1:00 in the afternoon. The crowd will gather until a 2:00 short two-block walk to the mall. If you come early, around noon, you can help me inflate some of the hundreds of balloons we’ll be giving away. Age, race and gender will be abolished, and everyone will enter the Utopian mall world as a Santa Claus. You know you want to do this. It’s called closure. #RedTideLloydCenter.

How Could You Cheat Yourself?

A friend sent me this link about recent book deals scotched by suspected A.I. use.

In addition, the popular novel Shy Girl has also been withdrawn, linked here. As Frankie’s Shelf describes the book, the protagonist eventually delivers a stillborn half-human, half-dog baby… then smears the birthing blood all over the house… and eventually confronts the dead infant’s father by consuming the dead dog/baby. (Did you not notice that this endeavor is called Plot Spoiler?)

I ask you, Why use A.I. to write that scene?? Why cheat yourself out of the joy of tackling such a jump-the-shark climax? Are we not writing for the joy and challenge of it anymore? If you want to be “transgressive” you need to get some skin in the game. Decades ago, in his first drafts of In the City of Shy Hunters, my teacher Tom Spanbauer had a character fight the 80s AIDS crisis by raping New York’s Cardinal Cooke, and infecting Cooke with HIV. It wasn’t subtle, but Tom labored forever to make the scene vivid and engaging (despite, you know, raping someone to give them AIDS). Of course his publisher refused to allow that to happen in the eventual book, but at least Tom learned to become a better writer. It was the Challenge, okay?

Where’s the joy and challenge in asking A.I. to write your cannibal/dog/baby scene?

Sheesh.

My Soft Spot for Contrarians

As a lifelong lily-livered coward I’ve always harbored a soft spot for people who deliberately put themselves into opposition with others. Among these folks is Andrew Sullivan who once told me that, due to his parents’ constant fighting, he was addicted to conflict. As the editor of The New Republic his knee jerk reaction was always to oppose his staff. Another nod goes to Bret Ellis, who’s never shied away from a fight. The writer Joy Williams — who once said “You don’t write to make friends” — is another fighter.

A quarter-century ago I used to take my first dog to a Pug Play Day where I met the writer Jim Goad, his wife Amy, and their pug. By then Jim was already notorious for beating his girlfriend and doing time in prison. My long-time editor Gerry Howard was interested in publishing Goad’s The Redneck Manifest but finally lost interest. However, Goad’s writing about his murdered older brother, Bucky, always made me suspect that his outward dick-ness masked the messed-up agony of his childhood.

Whatever the case, Jim Goad has been dead since June 22nd. Whether his death was from cancer or suicide, he joins his brother and his pug dog now. A small world… his ex-wife, Amy, is now married to my barber. This is, indeed, a very small world. At this point my best wishes go out to Goad’s young son. You poor kid.

My eternal thanks to Bruce for letting me know via The Cult. Life is short, come give out balloons to kids on Saturday. I’m toting three cylinders of helium in my little car.

Who are your favorite Contrarians?

August 8th the Santas Retake the Shopping Mall

• Meet-Up Location: The Broadway Pub where kids and Santas and elves and Grinches are all welcome. A scant two blocks from the mall we’ll visit.

• Meet-Up Time: Saturday August 8th, from 1:00 until 2:00 PM. After two, the Red Tide will flood toward the mall.

• The Attire: Don’t limit yourself. Think elf, Santa, dreidel, sexy elf, sexy dreidel, Elf-On-A-Shelf, Toy Soldier, Nutcracker, Grinch, Krampus, Christmas Tree, anything that gives the holiday season. Hell, come as the Sugar Plume Fairy.

Alas, this will be the last day of operation for one of the oldest malls in America. Despite being sixty-six years old, it will soon be leveled. The mall, Lloyd Center, contains the skating rink where Tonya Harding got her start. After a massive renovation it reopened in August 1991, with a black-tie soiree for very wealthy people who donated money toward AIDS research. They ate a multi-course meal in a candle-lit department store (Meier & Frank) while Natalie Cole sang a private concert from a stage in the center of festivities. At that point so many people where dead/dying of AIDS that when Cole sang Miss You Like Crazy the swanky crowd erupted in uncontrolled sobbing. I only know because — despite being hillbilly poor — I was dating a hanger-on of the very rich, who got me a seat and a tux to attend. Spooky, to see five hundred Reagan-era rich people suddenly all sobbing over dead loved-ones.

In 1996, at the second SantaCon ever held, my friends and I planned to invade this same mall. Plainclothes Santas smuggled their costumes in within shopping bags and tried to change in public restrooms and fitting rooms, but every effort was thwarted by the police. At the time, in the travel guide Fugitives & Refugees, I joked, “It was the thin blue line vs. the fat red one.” What takes place August 8th will — or will not be — a stunt thirty years in the making. Come early — Trina? Leaux? Colton? — and you can help me inflate flashy balloons to hand out to kids.

Come join us. Even if it all goes sideways it will still make a good story to tell. Or good content for your whatever. Influencers, come influence. Imagine this as the last Burning Man.

If you’re not already in possession of holiday apparel, locally, Lippman’s Novelties has a vast inventory of cheap & pricey Santawear. Here’s a chance to erase gender and race and create a short-lived world where every Santa is equal.

Thank You, Cheap & Crass

I will treasure it always.

If anyone’s in Spain next week, I’ll be at Celsius 232.

Cheap & Crass, your Jesus Hat goes in the mail tomorrow.

The Following Caught Me Off Guard

This came in through the messaging:

I’ve unsubscribed and am nervous about the 5g threat. I, also, do not trust Substack since paid subscriptions have appeared on my paid list that I definitely would not knowingly subscribe to. If you blocked me would that most definitely prevent any “accidental” 5000$ subscription coming out of my e…

Rest assured, I would never jack up the rate like this. What’s more important is that I don’t want to waste your time with trivial crap… or spend my own time hunting down trivial crap to foist on you. We, all of us, want to be producing work that shocks the reading world. For the time being, my ‘Stack is sort-of suspended. You’re not being charged anything, but I can still post when I find something worthwhile. It also looks as if we’ll be able to communicate via the Comments. You’re saving money and time.

Speaking of Gossip

At a party this weekend I ran into the agent and executor for the Tom Robbins estate. He and I both grew up loving the batshit, zany, surrealistic worlds of Robbins, and he tells me that Random House is going to repackage and market the Robbins books to a new generation of readers. They, Random House and Robbins estate, see today’s chaos as the perfect setting for novels such as Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. These types of literary yarns — think of Big Fish and Like Water for Chocolate — are the likely successor to horror. If magical realism is your passion, Random House is betting on it.

But, No I Would Not Ding You For $5000

A Story Involving Beards

Twenty-five years ago I asked Ira Levin about his writing process, and he told me a story:

There once lived a man with a very long beard. Someone, a stranger, asked him if he slept with the beard atop the bed covers or beneath them. The man had never considered the matter, so that night he tried to pay attention. He placed his beard atop the covers but couldn’t sleep. He placed his beard under them and still could not sleep. In the end he became too aware of the issue and never again slept.

Meaning: Ira Levin would not discuss his writing process for fear of becoming too self-conscious. That said, I’ve not written any fiction in six months and now wonder if the burden of Substack might be the problem. Substack offers no way to block paid subscribers from subscribing, but they have advised me to raise my rate to $5000. That would kill off paid subscribers, and I could continue to post free content — only content I thought would be useful, like more about rhetoric — BUT it could mean unaware people getting dinged for $5000. Ouch.

August is the month in which most of my subscribers are billed for their yearly subscriptions, so I want to address this now. And to address it repeatedly.

An aside? I see so many complaints about advertisements everywhere — even popping up in Ebooks — and complaints about subscriptions (the BMW heated seat subscriptions were the last straw for many). As physical media comes back into style — no ads, no on-going subscriptions — I look forward to beautiful, beautiful books making a resurgence. The movie production company A24 is moving into publishing and is already assembling a lux anthology, to date to include my story Guts and the Aimee Bender classic Marzipan. In addition, the book club Night Worms is creating a special edition of our very own Silent Nightmares for its members. This all bodes well for old-fashioned book books.

It’s Not You, It’s Me

I feel enormous remorse accepting subscription money unless I provide regular content. But focusing on Substack is choking off my fiction writing… and I suspect this goes the same for many of you. My impulse is to increase the paid rate to $5000 in August — as recommended by Substack — but to post frequent beforehand warnings so people aren’t caught by surprise. I’ll continue to post free content, but only when I’ve got something useful to offer.

This Gives Us a Month to Discuss the Matter

Please let me know your experience. Does too much talking about writing kill your actual writing? Lately, the House Calls have been a complete joy for me to do, but even those have kept my mind too occupied to pursue my own ideas.

Just know that I will address this several more times. Please let me know about your own relationships with Substack and your readers.

See You at Celsius 232 in Asturias, Spain

Look for me at the Celsius 232 convention July 17th and 18th. I’ve not been given my marching orders, but the organizers will keep me busy. I’ll post my itinerary when it comes through, but I’m confirmed to be there.

House Call #21 & Being Unstoppable

Barbara Brand has taken on a giant task with her story A Guided Meditation. In the Spirit of Tom Spanbauer, the story is going to be visceral, funny, and ultimately heartbreaking and uplifting. This week Barbara and I have been tossing ideas back and forth, and we’ve taken House Calls to a new level. As much as I might’ve fumbled this one, Barbara was patient and honest and fully committed to a vision. With her coaching, I’ll be able to approach future House Calls with less clumsiness.

As an afterthought, I would nudge Barbara to take out the subtitle, or change it to not include the A-word. The story opens with a medical procedure, and it might better seduce the reader if he or she didn’t initially know the nature of that operation. Of course, ultimately, clarity is paramount, but let’s get a few paragraphs deep before we confirm anything for certain. Your smart readers will grasp the situation, and that internal Ah-ha! will give them a rush. Barbara is too good a writer to give so much away in a subtitle.

Thank you to Barbara. Please check out the story, and leave your feedback in the Comments. If you’ve got a writing sample to submit, please post a link Here.

A Heads Up: A Special Super-Secret Santa Event

Is being planned to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the 1996 SantaCon (pictured above). This must take place before August 8th, so most likely it will be a Christmas-in-July event in a vast, doomed Portland, Oregon shopping center. To take part, get your hands on a cheap Santa suit and await further orders. As planned, it will include a toy making workshop — whatever that involves…

Kids, adults, all are welcome to rampage, but you can expect a more sober spectacle than SantaCons of the past. Further details as I get them.

Yes, This is a Hat

Consider that every time you state something, you imply its opposite. That’s why when a character says, “You know I love you, don’t you?” it creates a shudder of fear. Just as does, “You know I’d never hurt you.” Thus, this cap suggests that Jesus has slipped from first-ness.

You Can Use This

To avoid saying something painful or vulnerable, say the opposite. Thus the insistence of this song suggests, “Yeah, we are petty ordinary, you and me, and all the torch singing in the world won’t fix that.”

Just as this song, implies, “I will stalk you until you die.”

As a rhetorical device, this is antiphrasis. And it’s not in Elements of Eloquence. Imagine writing an entire story or book in this tone? How the depths of denial would allow you to suggest the greatness of the opposite?

What Follows Doesn’t Work, Or Does It?

Sent to The Cult recently:

Hello Chuck I'm 12 years old my name is Davon I was wondering if you could send me my dream phone they are the Samsung Galaxy z flip 7 or z-fold 7 I really want one of the two because I really like the designs and stuff and my mom really likes my phone so I'm willing to give her my old phone cuz she really seems to enjoy it. God bless if you're not part of a Christian religion that I'm sorry if you're an atheist I'm sorry I haven't been made to say that sorry so then I guess I can just substitute God bless for have a good day sir.

According to Lewis Hyde

In his book, The Gift, Hyde writes that a gift usually needs a third-party to mediate the exchange. If it’s just a request fulfilled, well, Hyde tells the Woody Allen story:

Woody Allen (lifting his arm) “You like my wristwatch? It belonged to my grandfather. (a beat) He sold it to me on his deathbed.”

An exchange that consists of an ask and a giving, Hyde defines that as transactional. There’s no magic in a transaction. There is no magic in getting what you ask for.

But as an example of Burnt Tongue… Davon has given us all a fantastic gift.

Thank You, Davon!

Making the Invisible Visible. Bringing the Inside Out.

You’ve hit this impasse: The master plan is chugging along, the characters seem fated to their predictable destiny, tension lags… and you’re only twenty-five pages into the first draft. What to do? What would Charlotte Bronte do? Well, in 1847 she took her male lead — Edward Rochester, the master of Thornfield Hall, a hulking brute of a man’s man who made Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff (also 1847) look pussy-fied in comparison — Charlotte took her virile alpha male, and she put him in a dress, and she put him in a wig and a lady’s hat. Charlotte blacked his face and made Rochester speak in a funny voice and pretend to be a female gypsy fortuneteller.

I’ll let Jane Eyre tell it:

… and the Sybil — if Sybil she were, was seated snugly enough in an easy chair at the chimney-corner. She had on a red cloak and a black bonnet; or rather, a broad-brimmed gipsy hat, tied down with a striped handkerchief under her chin… her hat-brim partially shaded her face, yet I could see, as she raised it, that it was a strange one. It looked all brown and black: elf-locks bristled out from beneath a white band which passed under her chin, and came half over her cheeks or rather jaws; her eyes confronted me at once, with a bold and direct gaze.

‘Well, and you want your fortune told?’ she said in a voice as decided as her glance, as harsh as her features.

Yeah, this is the lord of Thornfield Hall. During a party in his country manse he pretends to be called away on business. His pretty-but-aloof fiance is in attendance, as is Jane Eyre and a passel of gentlefolk. Things look pretty mapped-out at this point — page 195 of a 460-page novel. Rochester is to marry snotty Miss Ingram, and Jane Eyre dreams of banking enough governess money to open a girls school and die a spinster. Dolled up as a woman of color1 Rochester first asks to tell the fortune of his fiance, Miss Ingram. She emerges from the private palm reading… Again, I’ll let Jane tell it:

Miss Ingram took a book, leant back in her chair, and so declined further conversation. I watched her for nearly half an hour: during all that time she never turned a page, and her face grew momently darker, more dissatisfied, and more sourly expressive of disappointment. She had obviously not heard anything to her advantage; and it seemed to me, from her prolonged fit of gloom and taciturnity, that she herself, notwithstanding her professed indifference, attached undue importance to whatever revelations had been made to her.

What Charlotte Bronte gives us is a Truth-Teller character. Dressed up, Rochester tells his would-be fiance that she’s a stuck-up phony whom no man is going to marry (talking about himself in the third-person, always a great trick). The gypsy knows everything about each guest because they’re all his life-long friends. Eventually he’s alone with Jane Eyre and tells her that she’s a ninny for wanting to settle for running a girls school, and that true love is within her grasp if only she’d see that. Of course he means himself, and that she should recognize his love for her, but Jane is slow on the pick-up. What’s important is that the reader recognizes his declaration of love, well, and that snotty Miss Ingram is no longer a threat.

Consider the Three Kinds of Truth-Teller Characters

One is the impostor. Rochester is such an imposter. In Fight Club as Marla is being dragged away from her apartment, she pretends to be a bystander. As such, she can tell the emergency responders the “truth” about herself. That she used to be a lovely and talented person, but that she’s lost faith in herself. She’s infectious human waste, and there’s no saving her now. Thus, the imposter can state the truth about another character… or herself. Making the invisible visible.

Another Kind of Truth-Teller is the Skeptic

A great example is Thelma Ritter’s character, Birdie, in All About Eve. Birdie is a Cassandra, who tries to warn everyone away from toxic Eve Harrington, but whose skepticism goes ignored.

If you want another example, think of Helen Ripley from Alien. She’s the skeptic everyone ignores. Lately I’ve been applying my martyr-murder-witness template to Alien. Tom Skerritt is clearly the by-the-book Good Boy who follows orders and goes on a suicide mission. “Close all the hatches behind me. I’m moving on.” Such a Nathan Hale! The robot science officer Ash is the rebel who must be murdered. As the skeptic and the witness, Ripley escapes.

The Third Type of Truth-Teller is the Psychic

Or, anyone with special powers of foresight. Think of the character Helga Ten Dorp in the Ira Levin play/film Death Trap. She speaks broken English, dresses oddly, she’s comic relief, and as such she can tell the truth and foresee all the big plot points.

When things are running too smoothly, Helga barges in with her predictions. She creates tension. She creates foreshadowing. She get a low-comedy laugh.

In my own books, consider the character Fertility from Survivor. She’s psychic so she can stoke the plot and keep it moving. With her special powers, Fertility can steer the protagonist, Tender Branson, to fame and finally to peace. She knows exactly where to be when his plane eventually crashes.

Likewise, the character War Dog from Shock Induction. War Dog knows the entire book is a drug-induced state, so War Dog knows all the plot points and can sleepwalk through the story until the current protagonist, whoever thinks they’re Samantha Deel, chooses to veer off course. War Dog can act as a road map, calling up small plot points, but the story really happens when War Dog is ignored… or Birdie is ignored… or Lt. Ripley is ignored. Or Cassandra.

If Jane Eyre hadn’t been so slow on the uptake, her book would only have been two hundred pages.

Use a truth-teller to goose the plot, to foreshadow events that no one wants to recognize (Beware of Greeks bearing gifts), or to plant seeds of doubt in the reader’s mind.

Which Brings Us to…

I’ve got three copies of this Japanese edition to give away. The usual rules apply. If you’re within the United States I’ll inscribe and ship you a copy. First three to call “dibs” in the Comments below get one. The tattoos, however, are not translated.

As for truth-tellers, name a favorite of yours from literature or film.

In July I was supposed to attend the Celsius232 festival in Spain. The organizers have been very generous, providing for travel and accommodations. The ugly truth is that my finances are still in tatters from the 2019 embezzlement, so I can’t afford the travel expenses at my end. If you do attend Celsius232, I wish you a wonderful time.

Before I Knew It Was “Big Voice” I Liked It

The first time I recognized the “Big Voice” effect was in the movie Reds. On the face of it, here was just another narrative film with Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson playing famous dead people, famous beautiful dead people falling in love and overthrowing governments. What caught and held me was the documentary-style aside. Between the yelling and kissing scenes, Beatty would cut to an aside: an elderly person who’d face the camera and break the fourth wall to comment on the people and the action we’d just witnessed.

In a cool Brechtian way it broke the spell of the “real” story, but it worked. One, it reminded us that we were seeing a “true” story about “real” people. So it gave an otherwise long, somewhat sappy romance a grounding in authority. Oh, it’s kissing but it’s also history… Second, it created natural breaks where the author could suggest elapsed time. Third, it helped resolve previous scenes and to set up the up-coming scene. Mechanically, this intermittent faux-documentary texture worked great.

Fourth, the device seemed fresh and new — at least it did to me at the age of nineteen. The trick was still fresh and new when I was thirty-three and saw it reinvented in To Die For. In both films, small sequences interrupt the main dramatized story: They suggest elapsed time, they allow for comment on the action, they make the overall experience seem more real by layering something “fake” against something “real,” and they allow a smoother transition into the next scene. Suffice to say I loved the effect.

It Wasn’t Until Tom Spanbauer and Gordon Lish

That I had words to discuss what I loved: Big Voice. That’s the “confessional booth” I knew as a Catholic. It’s the “Diary Booth” used in reality shows. By now you’ve seen it in so many movies — did you catch the Susan Sontag cameo at 01:00? Sure, we all love talking heads when they’re dropped into actual documentaries — it’s the moment in Paris is Burning when Fran Lebowitz disses everything as “institutionalized showing off.”

Big Voice is a way of undercutting or reinforcing the story you’re telling. Per the ghost of Tom, the key is to keep it short. Don’t cut away from the action for too long or people lose the thread. Which brings us to the 1994 book shown above, Mapplethorpe, Assault with a Deadly Camera. If you want a biography of the rags-to-riches photographer, this book is not it. The author has managed to take a couple decent anecdotes about Mapplethorpe — one a dinner that ends in violence, in the other anecdote an editor demands an author read a short story while he (the editor) jerks off to test the story’s erotic power (long gone are those days when authors were routinely asked to read their manuscripts aloud while editors masturbated, enough said.) — but the author pads out these spare anecdotes with three hundred pages of Big Voice.

Plus, in the jerking-off anecdote Mapplethorpe is merely sitting to one side, observing.

At first, the Big Voice overload effect is maddening: An ongoing cascade of single-sentence paragraphs that float theories and pass judgements, they chew up and digest ideas without a single physical scene that would illustrate the author’s point. But then…

On occasion, the author drops in a weird fact:

“Jacqueline Bouvier’s father took one look at her college graduation photos and told her to schedule a second sitting. He reportedly told her, “You look too available.”

As late as the Sixties, middle-class Americans did not show their teeth in formal photographs.”

This struck me as bullshit, but it checks out. Until the year 1900 people had to strike the pose so long that holding a smile for that long was impossible. For centuries before that, in painting, artists used a smile to communicate that the sitter was drunken or a slut or a lunatic or an idiot. Apparently, that’s why the Mona Lisa’s smile was such a signal: Even a little smile told the world you were “too available.” Smiles showing your teeth would imply terrible things about you.

Later in the Mapplethorpe book, the author, Jack Fritschler, tells us:

“John Lennon was gunned down in 1980 (the night of the afternoon Annie Lebovitz shot the duo of the naked Lennon curled fetally onto his reclining wife/muse). Later, Robert (Mapplethorpe) shot Yoko Ono alone, the world’s second-most-famous widow-by-gun.”

Again, I couldn’t accept that such an iconic photo — shot for the cover of Rolling Stone — was taken the day the subject would be assassinated. But, it’s true. As annoying and tedious as the author’s Big Voice rants became, they were tempered by the Head Authority of such unexpected SuperFacts. I kept reading, and while I didn’t learn very much about Robert Mapplethorpe — the author repeats and circles back to the same anecdotes and facts, again and again — I am hooked by the authority of his little factoids. That said, my taste is not a common one. Best to keep the Big Voice to snippets like this.

The Mapplethorpe book reads as a slight contrast to the last book I read: CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. In this earlier book, the author intrudes constantly, making the book as much about his quest as about the murders. Thank you to Kyle Mc for sending it. Both CHAOS and the Mapplethorpe book were written by gay men, which leaves me wondering if a gay author can ever just take the backseat and allow the facts and characters to drive.

Enough About Big Voice

This week Anthony Ledger has given us Cut to dissection. This is only a small part of something larger. The first portion impresses me as a “system” story, a story that describes an existing coping method. The latter part of the sample introduces us to a foil that Anthony has invented so that his narrator can confess his impulses — so, yes, a kind of Big Voice device like Cole Porter periodically talking to Death (00:17) in the film De-Lovely. Or it’s Annette Benning interacting with her long-dead acting coach in Being Julia. Such segments suggest flashbacks — because they touch on the past — but really they reinforce the emotional plot point we’re currently struggling with.

In effect, Anthony has created a foil so his narrator isn’t always breaking the fourth wall. It seems to work, and I’d love to see more of it. So far, I’ve not seen foils from you guys, and I’m impressed. Bravo Anthony!

Please check out Cuts here. Add your two cents worth. Praise and feedback.

If you’d like to submit a writing sample for the next House Call, please post the link Here.

Gratuitous Puppy Picture

Did you grow up with the sayings “Pretty in the cradle, ugly at the table” and “Ugly in the cradle, pretty at the table”? It looks as if “Tick” is going to be a late bloomer, but she’s almost housebroken, and she sleeps through the night. Pretty good for ten weeks old.

Innocent as she looks, when wound up she’s like one of those docile chimpanzees that suddenly rips off people’s entire faces.

This Goes to the Core of Why I Love Storytelling

Over the course of this week’s House Call, I came across a clip I first saw a decade back. It’s still as brutally good now. Watch it Here.

Like the Whoopi Goldberg clip we’ve discussed, the Silverman clip moves from cute to comic to shocking… in only a few minutes. This is typical of the one-person Broadway shows that thrived during the heyday of Gordon Lish’s Minimalism: First-person, Minimal setting, Few props made for immediate, fast engagement and acceleration. Maximum effect from minimal elements — including time.

It doesn’t escape me that the best of these storytellers were female: Goldberg, Sandra Bernhard, Lily Tomlin, Gilda Radner, while Spalding Gray comes to mind as the only man doing such a show. Each performer had to create a “voice” specific to her character, and voice is such a large priority in Minimalism. You could argue that Oh, Mary! is the latest iteration of such shows.

Whatever your politics, watch the Silverman clip. Note her fetal position, her distracted silences, her evasive eye movements and rapid blinking, All of her physical actions undermine the brittle happiness of what she says. It’s a master class in the physical vs. the dialog. Again, watch it Here.

Now, back to house training the dog.

As Seen In People Magazine Right Now…

Here we go again.

Note the blue edge to the pages. It’s an old sci-fi popular fiction detail and hearkens back decades. Everything old…

Every So Often One of These Comes in Via The Cult

Subject: Re: I’m a little bit offended

I’m currently living in my minivan in Laval Quebec, that’s what I had to do lately,live like that during summer and rent it room in winter . I’m a Lebanese immigrant to Canada, Canadian citizen since2018...left back to Lebanon in 2021...spent alli had there and came back here to Laval a year ago......since ( lol) since Im free from rent expenses these months, maybe you could pay me the ticket price for a weekend trip to wherever you are in the states.... I’ll leave my minivan at the Canada postes parking as I’m an on call delivery agent there...what do you think????????????????

how come you never reply to me when I'm as smart and interesting as I am 😿😥

Substack Added a Messenger Feature Similar to Discord

And frankly, Substack doesn’t pay enough for me to field questions and requests from free subscribers. Most of my content is already free. Only the participation and contests require a paid membership.

As of late, the Messages are piled up by the hundreds, the vast majority from free subscribers. But rather than buy a subscription from me, I’d prefer that you buy and study the books that will greatly improve your work. Buy a used copy of Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun. Buy a used copy of anything by Tobias Wolff. Buy Mark Forsyth’s marvelous The Elements of Eloquence. These are books a serious writer should read and have on the shelf — or in the minivan.

I’m in no situation to buy anyone international plane tickets.

If I was smart I’d find a way for A.I. to respond to everyone’s messages, but would that be an improvement? For now, buy the books I suggest. Buy The Ice at the Bottom of the World by Mark Richard, and commit it to memory.

The Ghost of Tom Will Always Tell You

Write about the moment after which everything was different. Whether the reveal is good news or bad. A lottery ticket or a car accident. Tom said good fiction begins at those moments where you have to reevaluate everything, recalibrate and make a course correction for your entire life going forward. These past few months have been loaded with such moments.

Where to begin?

Why Is It That You Can Sing Songs You Haven’t Heard in Years

But you can’t quote a single line from a novel you read yesterday? And, yes, I feel you. Talking about writing gets boring. Talking about writing isn’t actually writing, but it’s worth stepping back a little and looking at what we tend to do by intuition.

For years I’ve been obsessed with short-term seemingly spontaneous events. What people might now call “Pop-Up” events. My interest started with the Cacophony Society and how entire cities — Burning Man — could spring into existence overnight. It’s this fascination that led me to dream up Fight Clubs and Party Crashing, and I was a decade deep into these themes before a friend put me onto Victor Turner and his anthropological work around liminal and liminoid events. In the case of Fight Clubs and Party Crashing, both are liminoid events because they can occur at any time, but they still have the general “communitas” of liminal events, the acceptance that all people present are of equal status.

Much of success comes from sniffing out what was popular in the past but has not yet seen a resurgence. In the 90s David Foster Wallace wanted to write work that hearkened back to the rich, dense novels of Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis and John Barth. In the Minimalism dirty realistic world of Raymond Carver, Wallace’s work grabbed people’s attention. It struck readers as fresh, compared to the pared down work then on the shelves.

With much less intention, I almost by accident found success by stuffing Fight Club with rhetorical devices. As beautifully unpacked in the Mark Forsyth book Elements of Eloquence, shown above, rhetorical tricks work best in speeches… song lyrics… plays… jokes… sermons. In short, in forms that are meant to be read aloud. Or sung. That’s why you can recall those songs from long, long ago. All the rhetorical qualities built into them — cadence, alliteration, rhythm, paradox — make them so quotable.

“Scarlett O’Hara wasn’t beautiful, but men seldom noticed…” thus begins the massively selling novel Gone With the Wind — with a paradox.

“The things you own end up owning you,” is an example of Chiasmus, or a neatly symmetrical sentence. As is “If you don’t know what you want, you end up with a lot of stuff you don’t.” Those sticky sentences that double back on themselves are “flowers of rhetoric” as Forsyth puts it.

The Forsyth book unpacks almost forty tricks of rhetoric, even citing Fight Club. And finding his book is like discovering Victor Turner: At last I know what I’ve always intuitively sought to create. Again, rhetoric works at its sticky best when it’s used aloud. Just think of all of those Oscar Wilde quotes made famous by actors speaking them on stage. That’s why I’ll always push you to include a least one “soap box” scene wherein a character can pontificate and you can blast out ideas and rhetoric. So Big Voice or speeches — the equivalent of voiceover in a film — seems like the best place to showcase rhetoric.

Another trick that Forsyth unpacks is “Catachresis,” in effect using a bit of intuitive gibberish that can be understood by context. His first example is from Hamlet, “I will speak daggers to her, but use none.” He also cites the first line from the Roxette song, “Lay a whisper on my pillow.” To that I’d add the song lyric “the shadow of your smile.” Each acts like a zen koan to engage and disable the reasoning mind and thus hypnotically induce the reader into the dream of the story. The reader is tipped slightly off balance.

Gordon Lish might call Catachresis “Burnt Tongue” because it serves the same function: again, to give the reader the sense of learning to read for the first time, thus increasing the reader’s participation. Writing Invisible Monsters I’d had the narrator say, “I’d pay snakes to bite her.” It’s absurd, but a week later Tom Spanbauer told me he’d already heard people using the phrase at a party… in Seattle. Workshop students had used the saying, and it had caught on. Isn’t that what all writers want? To shape the culture?

So, look up The Elements of Eloquence and check out a good interview with the author, Here. If David Foster Wallace can relaunch the thick post-modern novel, maybe Fight Club and Mark Forsyth can launch a wave of work written in the rhetorical “flowers of eloquence.”

On Another Topic

My thanks to everyone who attended the two showings of Fight Club at the Bagdad Theater, April 22nd and 23rd. This from the organizer:

I wanted to send a note to genuinely thank you so much for bringing us two sold-out nights of FIGHT CLUB. I’ve heard only great things from our audience and we raised $11,000 for the Film District! We are so happy with how it all turned out.

That’s another $11,000 toward renovating the century-old Hollywood Theater.

A Lesson in Heroism

In 1991 I went to dinner with several people, most of them wealthy, most of them strangers to me. One, a man named Oliver, was the regional book rep for the publisher W.W. Norton — the house that would publish Fight Club five years later. That night, however, I kept my writing a secret. I was unpublished and saw no signs I’d ever be. The sales rep, Oliver, held forth about some upcoming novel, a crime against humanity, he called the book. A heinous story, the book should never have gotten a contract according to Oliver, and he cursed Vintage for bringing it to market. The good news, Oliver assured us, was that he’d convinced all of his bookselling accounts not to order the novel. He told us that all the booksellers had agreed to kill the novel in its cradle by ignoring it, not ordering it, not selling it. The book would simply disappear. Poof!

I know it was 1991 because the novel was American Psycho. Oliver was beloved by many, including by fellow W.W. Norton author Diana Abu- Jaber, and he has since died. The novel he worked so very, very hard to kill, has not.

Fast forward to 2005 or thereabouts. I’d been asked to read at the KGB Bar in Manhattan, where a twiggy, stylish, older woman introduced herself. Kit Reed was the creator of trans-genre fiction, a writer on a par with Ursula LeGuin. Reed wrote brilliant speculative novels and short stories, some of which would eventually include me as a character, my name misspelled comically in each iteration.

Over beers, Reed told me how she’d been one of the three judges who’d eventually given Fight Club the 1997 Oregon Book Award for best novel. Now called the Ken Kesey Award, Reed described the backstage battle she’d had to wage on my behalf. The other two judges had agreed that Fight Club was the strongest book nominated that year, but they refused to give it the award on the grounds that it might offend… someone. Reed persevered, threatening to report the situation to the media if the judges or the sponsors denied me the award.

This was quite something to hear from a stranger in a bar in New York. Of course Reed won out. Until that moment I’d held that storytelling was a meritocracy: The best books got the awards and backing. The consolation is that it only takes one champion to help a book break out. In many ways it was Joan Didion who rescued American Psycho, and it was unquestionably Kit Reed who came to my rescue.

Kit Reed’s birthday is June 7th, she would be 94 years old. Alive or dead, she has my eternal gratitude.

Which Brings Us to House Call #19

Walk the Night is the first chunk of something amazing by Bernadette Francis. We’ve spent a week debating the objects — a cake, a cat, cocaine — and Bernadette has been a peach about feedback. Sex and transgressions abound, and something else that brings it to magic. Please give Walk the Night a read, and leave your praise and feedback. As writers, we live for that shit.

Which Brings Us to

I hate to close on a sad note, but Cheryl Strayed’s husband died yesterday. Brian Lindstrom elected to travel to Switzerland and end his life following his diagnosis with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, a progressive neurological disorder. The Portland writing community has been following his tragic story since Strayed announced her husband’s intentions this past Monday. The plan was to die peacefully in a forest surrounded by nature and family.

Cheryl was a member of our writers group while finishing her memoir, Wild, and graciously mentions both me and Suzy Vitello as well as Chelsea Cain in the acknowledgements. Among Brian’s early work as a filmmaker was a biography about legendary Portland poet Walt Curtis. The first time I met Brian — at a Chelsea Cain party — he told a hilarious story about that documentary. The filmmaker needed someone to splash naked into a freezing cold river, and Brian took a bullet for the team. If I’m not mistaken, Salmon Poet is the documentary. Walt was a renown lech, and Brian had his work cut out for him. Ah, back before everything, when we were so young and reckless.

Let’s all our thoughts and prayers go out to Cheryl tonight. Now and for always, write about the moment after which everything was different.

A Favorite Example of Big Voice

To distinguish Big Voice from Little Voice (which is also called Recording Angel), Big Voice allows you to rise above the action and make big philosophical statements. From the novel and film Heartburn…

“… And then the dream dies. And the dream breaks into a million tiny little pieces; which leaves you with a choice: You can either stick with it — which is unbearable — or you can just go off and dream another dream.”

Note: This scene from Heartburn is the “murder” portion of the classic martyr/murder/witness formula. It’s the most clever interpretation of the “murder” that I’m aware of.

Every story is an experiment. Every story is a dream. Yes, this is a new dog. No, she does not have a name yet.

In San Diego: Me lunching with a group that includes Dr. Bill Nericcio and his students

And at the Castle Ivar in the Hollywood Hills

In the Ivar Castle, Chelsea Cain Gave Everyone Differently Colored Painters Tape

And asked us to create messages on the walls. Can you recognize where my message comes from? Yes, that suit of armor stood in a niche in my bedroom.

Weird, yes, but not as unsettling as the Museum of Death. I killed an afternoon there; which seemed fitting because in next year’s book I set a scene there. The place seems to ramble on forever, including gallery after gallery about snipers, serial killers, car wrecks, suicides, capital punishment, cannibals, NAZI atrocities, taxidermied house pets, the works. Not the place to microdose — which I did not. Numerous screens play high-def videos of autopsies, and a surprising number of families with young kids wander the rooms, slack-jawed. The overall impression is of vastness and sadness and sex.

At one point Chelsea sent workshoppers to find the last apartment occupied by the writer Nathanael West, and they happened across the current occupant putting out the garbage. The man gave them a tour of a small, unremarkable studio apartment. A shock when you consider how large West’s work continues to loom in the culture.

Likewise, in the Museum of Death, Jay Sebring… who’d always seemed so stylish and dashing… photographed at the Tate murders, his corpse looked like a small boy wearing 60s Mod clothes, trussed in ropes and splashed with blood. The truth of everything seems so much smaller in real life.

They Say “Not Open to the Public”

But the sponsor said we should push the limits.

For Years The Joke Was…

That Fran Lebowitz was the writer who went from ready-to-wear to Haute Couture. Meaning she started her career with funny, snarky magazine essays, then published two collections of said essays — Metropolitan Life and Social Studies — then became so famous as a wit and raconteur that she became the perennial party guest of the rich and famous. Lebowitz practically lived on David Geffen’s private jet where she kept everyone laughing with her sardonic take on everything. For decades, she made a life by telling what the British call “stories you dine out on.” The writers equivalent of the pop artists hired by oligarchs to jazz up the party.

Now thanks to the Netflix series, Pretend It’s a City, she’s being rediscovered by a new generation. Call her racist. Call her transphobic. Call her antisemitic. She can be all of these by turns. Here, what’s important is that you call “dibs” first in the Comments to get the above book — a very classy British edition.

Which Brings Us to This Week’s House Call

My congratulations to Matt Smythe for the beginning of what’s bound to be a meticulously written thriller. And romance. A romantic thriller, peopled by characters with the scariest motives. Read his sample, Red Flags, Here.

Matt has been a peach about tossing ideas back and forth. Matching wits has been a joy all week. I won’t spoil anything by summing it up here, but please pay Matt and Red Flags a visit and offer up some praise and feedback.

Thank you, Matt, for being so excited about the process. You brought a lot of fun to my life, especially on Friday while I was stuck at the tire place getting a flat tire fixed.

If you’d like to submit a writing sample for a House Call, please post a link Here.

The First Week of May

I’ll be co-teaching with Chelsea Cain in a rented castle where she’s organized several retreats in the past. By coincidence the place is mentioned in today’s New York Post.

Called “Castle Ivar,” it looks like the evil step-sister to Disney’s Sleeping Beauty Castle.