Don Quixote, No Broadway Tears

[WARNING: SPOILERS ABOUND IN THE FOLLOWING MOST EXCELLENT AND HONORABLE EXEGESIS!]

My New Year’s resolution for 2008 was to start reading one great classic novel a year. Reading and writing genre fiction is no excuse not to seek insight and inspiration from writers in different worlds than mine. Done wrong, of course, this can lead to creative paralysis (“Oh God, I’m never gonna write Moby Dick!”) or a warped and pompous ambition (“I’ll show the bastards! I’ll be the next Herman Melville!”). But done right, it may make me a better writer, maybe a more interesting person at certain cocktail parties.

And so I’ve read my Great Book for 2008: Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes. Like so many old canon classics, this novel is more remembered than read. Our image of it these days seems mostly to derive from the 1965 Broadway musical Man of La Mancha by Dale Wasserman, Joe Darion, and Mitch Leigh, a celebration of the romantic liberal idealistic knight errant tilting at the windmill, which represents the unjust, corrupt, cynical and ignorant world. The song "The Impossible Dream" is now an annoying standard. The musical is stapled on the marquees of community theaters across the United States. I saw the 1972 movie starring Peter O’Toole, James Coco and Sophia Loren. Even as a love-struck college student, my heart remained unmelted, except for the scenes where Ms. Loren bends over.

Nevertheless my lazy memory of the musical and lazier assumptions about the book were more or less one: the novel would be a long-winded exercise in gauzy gooey bathos. Then a couple of years ago, a New Yorker review of the most recent translation (by Edith Grossman, Ecco, 2003) strongly indicated that this opinion might be like the old Don’s vision of the windmills that are the book’s central metaphor—a delusion.

The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha was first published in Spain in 1605. A contemporary of Shakespeare’s, Miguel Cervantes (1547—1616) was a frustrated playwright and poet, a soldier who lost an arm fighting real battles for the Spanish Armada and then later became a POW. Late in the 1500s, he became a tax collector for the Spanish crown and was jailed for apparent discrepancies in his accounts. It was while in jail that he first conjured the idea for what would be both his masterpiece and a founding work of modern western literature.

Judging from his life and this novel, Cervantes appears to have a been a man who knew how the world worked. Don Quixote is called the first “modern” novel: Among other innovations, it overthrew the traditional novels of its day, which were chivalric novels: romantic, heroic and non-realistic tales of dashing medieval knights and their loyal assistants (or squires) battling dragons and rescuing damsels. L’Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory is a most illustrious example. Chivalric novels are still very much with us in such volumes as The Mists of Avalon. (You could write a decent essay about the link between novels of chivalry and the modern hard-boiled detective novel, too). By the time Cervantes, soldier and prisoner, came along, the genre had crumbles into piles of cliché.

So Don Quixote, on its surface, is a spoof and is considered to be the first “comic novel.” Its humor and satire rips the armor off the chivalric novel and shows people as they actually are, not as we wish them to be. The errant knight is not a selfless hero, but a vain, egotistical, hypocritical fool. In one episode, he saves a young peasant from a savage beating by his master, only to blithely gallop away leaving the young man to suffer an even worse beating from his boss. It’s like watching The Lone Ranger and Tonto break up a bank robbery, only to neglect to jail the robbers, leaving them free to burn down the rest of the town. Not strong on follow through.

Here's another signal that this is a “modern novel”: More than one author is employed in the telling of this “history” and they’re a mysterious and slippery gang, grossly impressed with their own sagacity rather than the Don’s fruitless sacrifices, another sure sign that we are in modern literature's world of often unreliable narrators. Cervantes also inserts novels within the novel: One is a fairly straightforward and exciting fictionalized account of his own adventure as a POW.

Still, the experience of actually reading Don Quixote doesn't always feel modern. This is sixteenth-century Spain, after all. The literate class of that time was also a leisure class with more time on their hands and fewer distractions (they must also have been shocked to find themselves drawn into a world so earthy, gritty and boisterous). Like other works of its time, this is a long book. Twenty-first century readers with two-second attention spans may still find it long-winded and extremely dense. If there’s a way for a character to say something more than once—especially if it’s Sancho Panza—then it shall be said. The Don delivers many lectures on points of chivalry—some of which actually do contain wisdom. Meanwhile, Sancho Panza (who might be a distant ancestor of Gabby Hayes') speaks a delightful stew of old folk wisdom, much of it irrelevant, much of which has found its way into our modern vernacular.

On the other hand, the book's many chapters are all short. And Don Quixote is packed with as much violent slapstick as a Road Runner cartoon. No matter how often the old Don and his squire are splattered over the plains of Spain, they always peel themselves off the ground (or the floor, or the rock, or a wall) like Wile E. Coyote to fight on. In the gallery of great comic archetypes, Don Quixote (like Stephen Colbert) is the Man Who’s Completely Confident . . . and (Almost) Completely Wrong.

At the same time, though, this big, baggy novel, is as arch, witty and pointed as anything written by Noel Coward. It’s observations of the broken society through which the Don and Sancho ride ring true and are extremely pointed. Don Quixote not only satirizes romantic novels, but skewers the whole idea of romantic love. Like the bones of the dead, broken hearts litter this landscape, many done in by violence and death. A stark episode, near the beginning, tells the tale of a lovesick shepherd who dies of longing for a beautiful, but allegedly heartless, shepherd girl. At his funeral, she appears and rises to her own eloquent defense:

. . .but I cannot grasp why, because it is loved, the thing loved for its beauty is obliged to love the one that loves it. . . . . Why do you want to force me to surrender my will, obliged to do so simply because you say you love me?

Episode after episode, brings to mind that J. Geils song: “Love Stinks.” And with it comes the whiff of tragicomedy.

Vladimir Nabokov, who published a whole series of lectures on the novel, believed Don Quixote to be a “crude old book full of peculiarly Spanish cruelty.” I know relatively little of Spain, but I agree on this: Cervantes’ novel really is full of peculiar cruelty. Four hundred years cannot hide the sense that there’s hardly a sentimental bone in its dense body. Reality, not only in the sense of the physical world, but of the people—peasants and lords, priests and criminals alike—beats hell out of Don Quixote and his squire. Even Sancho’s minor victory, when he’s fraudulently given the governorship he spends most of the novel yearning for, ends in farcical heartbreak.

The odd thing though, that while treating his characters with such mind-boggling cruelty, Cervantes' comic wizardry creates an alchemy that ends up making the poor foolish Don sympathetic. In a bitter ironic sense, he does become heroic even when he finally surrenders to reality. In the end, we understand that he was one with his dreams. Without them, he’s forced to renounce Chivalry. And without that faith—and I think faith is an important idea here—he dies. I was left with the feeling that a life without faith, in a fallen world, just might be impossible to live for many, if not all of us.

In its bland reassurances, the Broadway musical drains all this away, leaving marshmallow. No wonder I don't like the damned thing.

Them Thar Hills! Thoughts of Trails, Trails of Thoughts

More pictures than words this week.

Elizabeth and I have made an arrangement: Because she has sculpture class on Saturday in Walnut Creek, on Friday I get the car and some badly needed exercise and fresh air. A few weeks ago, I commenced exploring the north-south string of parks that make up the East Bay Municipal Park District. Covering 91,000 acres, the district runs through the hills above East Bay cities from Richmond and unincorporated El Sobrante (“the leftovers”), through Oakland, to Hayward, Fremont, and San Jose.

We’d already explored much of the area north above the Caldicott tunnel through which Highway 24 runs into Contra Costa County. I decided to wander south. Last summer I explored around Sibley Volcanic Preserve a couple of times, but this year, I decided to start out with the Huckleberry Botanic Regional Preserve, located about two miles south of the intersection with Grizzly Peak Boulevard and Claremont Avenue. (From the west, this is best reached by taking Highway 24 through the Caldicott Tunnel than fanning immediately right up Fish Ranch Road. At the top you make a left onto Grizzly Peak Boulevard. There’s also an exit onto Fish Ranch Road from Highway 24 west.)

The Huckleberry Preserve is smaller than the other parks in the system and is all oak woodland. It was rather a dull hazy day as you can tell from the photo below, taken on March 7.



The trail was pleasant—what trail isn’t?—and only hikers are permitted. But I craved a wider range of environments and greater vistas. The next week, I drove a few more miles south, hooked up with Skyline Boulevard and found greater satisfaction.


Unfortunately, this was the day your correspondent forgot to recharge the batteries on the Canon, so I turned the hike into a workout that turned into an exercise in getting lost—not Dead-Man-Crawling-Lost, but lost as in making a wrong turn and walking all the way to the south end of the park before awaking to my mistake. (Sometimes I’m hiking through the woods; often, like many artist-types, I’m hiking through my thoughts. This was one of those days.) I totaled up six miles and wasn’t that sorry about any of it, especially after that first beer. No sore muscles the next day, either.

The next week, I returned, fully cameraed.

Redwood Regional Park is a 400-foot-or-so-deep canyon—thought no one calls it that--whose ridges are circled by two main trails. The environment is a mix of mostly oak and chaparral at higher elevations, with hushed groves of second growth coast redwoods towering from below. A century ago, this was a major logging site whose wood was major source of building materials. The Bay Area Ridge Trail, whose construction is still in progress, runs through here.

The second Friday, I took the east ridge trail, facing toward Contra Costa County. It was a long, mostly easy, walk, pleasantly uneventful. As you can see, spring was coiled and ready to . . . .

Possibly monkeyflower, though I'm not sure

Baby Blue Eyes? I doubt it . . . .

One remarkable feature is the park’s comparative sense of remoteness. At certain angles, you can fool yourself into thinking you’re seeing things as they were hundreds of years ago, when only the Ohlone people lived in these hills with their low-tech way of life.

The Big City's Not That Far Away

Unfortunately, the hum of the city and the roar of jets overhead from Oakland International Airport are there to remind you otherwise. As are a few signs of civilization like these:

Proof that Little People Exist

The cross, I’m guessing, makes humble reference to Iraq war casualties. Stonehenge . . . ? Yes, little people do live in parks! Why . . . ?

Two weeks later, I took the south ridge. By this time, spring was in full bloom.

Blue-eyed grass; not a grass, but a member of the iris family

Beautiful . . . and unknown

I enjoy taking photos of flowers. It’s more challenging than you think. Digital cameras become unstable when taking close-ups. You’re only seeing the good ones and there aren’t many.

So far, I’ve made my way south of the Chabot Space and Science Center to Roberts Recreation Area.

Chabot Space Center

Roberts Recreation Area is actually a separate park. The second growth redwoods that grow here are descendants of the ones used as reference points by early sailing ships to safely navigate their way into San Francisco Bay.

In Roberts Recreation Area

There’s much ground left to cover. In the meantime, my weight’s down to 175 lbs and my psoriasis has eased somewhat. I'd post pictures, but somehow, sadly, the camera batteries died . . . .

[Reedited 5/5/08; 5/8/08]

What the World Should do

I voted for Hilary Clinton in the California primary.

The reasons for this are likely similar to those of her other supporters. I won’t recite all of them here. I’m not mad that things aren’t working out for her—the way she’s been running her campaign of late, it’s not too surprising things are going a little south. And then there’s the success of the amazing, formidable, intelligent, and eloquent Barack Obama. I don’t blame her one bit for being mad about that, too . . .

. . . but I’m still not mad. In fact, barring any weird last-minute twist, after the final primary is over, she should gracefully hang it up and, along with Mr. Hilary, give everything she’s got for the fall campaign (Right. Should, but won’t.)

No, I’m not mad, but I’m still anxious. Barack Obama may need all the support he can get from here on out, especially if he takes the oath of office in January 2009. A guy can only skate so far on the charismatic ghost of JFK.

Whoever of these two we like, the real chore lies ahead: pushing the Republican Party in its currently dangerous and pathetic state, out of government into the woods for a nice long rainy camping trip. Yes, lots of rain!

Unfortunately, I don’t have the Big Mic to say “call it!” and make it stick. And if I were, say, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, CNN et al., I might not make that call. After all, this Three Stooges-minus-Larry act, though its abuse is mild by historical standards, would be my bread and butter. “We love it!” I’ve heard one pundit say (i.e., “What fate of our country? Fate shmate! This is fun!” But so is drug-dealing to the pathetic thugs in HBO’s The Wire.)

I’ve watched little actual network news since Cronkite signed off. One hour a day of punditry is all my nerves can stand. That hour I spend with Olbermann on MSNBC because he’s the closest thing to a traditional anchor; and he’s an excellent interviewer, a sharp wit and, importantly, knows when to admit he’s wrong and apologize.

I hate the horse race aspects of politics. Give me a day at a real race track. I’m not a political junkie-—though policy, especially environmental and foreign policy, does hold my concern and interest. I want to watch some governing! But when it comes to the process of getting there, like Al Gore, I’d rather punch a brick wall with my bare knuckles. (My new slogan: “Run away Al! Run away!”).

Politicking is the nasty pursuit and tedious smelly craft of power in human civilization. A purely saintless church. Politicians have to act friendly to strangers, get in fights with their friends and make the kind of allies a dog wouldn’t sniff. The lying and the pandering; the Orwellian obfuscations; the whoring and pimping for money; the pitifully few opportunities to command honorably without calculation or opportunism.Even in the careers of the most patriotic, successful politicians, the chance to make decisions based on honest patriotism, a genuine sense of justice, and concern for the nation don’t come often.

Example: my favorite U.S. President is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But as I dab away my tears thinking about FDR’s courage in the face of polio and his nimble-minded, pragmatic, clear-eyed governance of this country through the storms of the Great Depression and World War II, I’m obliged to recall his many failures—his disastrous try at forcing the Army to deliver the U.S. Mail; his attempts to pack the Supreme Court (as ruthless as the Cheney Administration’s manipulations, but less successful); his cut off of Depression-era aid to New York City in a petty personal feud with the city’s mayor; his surrender on legislation that would have made lynching a federal crime; and while I reject the paranoid-nihilist claim that FDR deliberately allowed the attack on Pearl Harbor, it was a tragic blunder that included the scapegoating of a two admirals who only shared a small part of the blame.

And then finally, of course, the rounding up and internment of Japanese-American citizens in concentration camps during the war. Inexcusable. On these issues, FDR has it coming.

Still, we were terribly lucky to have him. I really miss him now, wheels of clay and all.

Back to anxiety: I am a concerned citizen. I should decorate that noun with “scare quotes.” Not as a statement of wink-wink-I’m-only-kidding, post-modern abuse of irony, but out of a sense of detachment created to help me cope with deep anxiety.

Right now, I am anxious about Senator Obama. I hope he’s fooling just himself and he stops doing that soon. No candidate will ever come up with the alchemy that turns politics into backgammon. There’s no trail back to Eden in this world, nor a utopia in the future.

Hey, look at the opposition! They not only don’t believe in his vision of the New Politics, they’re actively, passionately sincerely opposed to it. Rush Limbaugh, the psycho bullhorn for the 30% Dead-Enders who still love the Cheney Administration, is out inciting riots. Maybe we are all Americans . . . but the Dead-Enders scream to disagree. "American" means only them and their decadent elite.

Sooner or later, someone, if not Senator Obama, then his supporters, will have to throw hard dirt and the sharpest rocks they can find—preferably not at each other.

But will the Democrats take this sound advice from this tiny voice? O, how I fear not! A couple nights ago, I saw that great clip of Bill Clinton throwing Chris Wallace around the room on Fox News awhile back. Yo, Bill! Why aren’t you doing more of that to them instead of your own team? Whoa! Where the hell was the rest of his party? If I’m not mistaken, around that time, we were also treated to the spectacle of Democrat Majority Leader Harry Reid folding like a lawn chair: “Ooooo! Don’t want to get the Republicans mad! Ooooooo! President Cheney might veto our bill! Filibuster!? Ooooooo! I might have to spend the night on a cot next to Trent Lott and he smells bad! Ooooooo!”

(Pssst! Harry? Harrr-rrry! Dude, it’s OK to lose some votes! Just lose big, loud and brave and then hang it on them! Even us pragmatists like it when you guys stand up and fight! What? You're afraid of a guy with a 30% approval rating?)

It’s never dirty politics to tell the facts and present them with hard-bitten tough-ass, moral fighting passion. And, after what this nation has been through the last eight years, it’s not like the Democrats have to lie or contrive anything. Repeated ads of McCain saying “100 more years”, hugging Cheney’s Chief Aide, and defending the Reverend Hagee are just the start of the Wikipedia of All-True-Facts they have to throw. Tie ‘em all up in a nice big bundle and drop ‘em in the lake.

You don’t even have to go near swift-boating McCain’s war record; that, the good and brave gentleman from Arizona can run on till he wears his feet out.

. . . though I wouldn’t be above sneaking in a clip or two of him snoozing in public . . . hey, somebody get me Democratic Headquarters!

Photos from Star-Pulse, Flickr & FDR Library

Shop Talk#6: The Passion of the Bureaucracy

Novels are big clerical morasses.
--Richard Ford, author of Independence Day

Once upon a time, before becoming an editor, I was a legal clerk, then a government bureaucrat. Most of you probably know what that entails, unless I have readers in some remote Himalayan valley who have managed to achieve Internet access (good God, are you that bored? And do you have a spare room for a weary urban refugee and his wife?)

Whatever your ice-creamy ideas about the writer’s life and the sweeping glories of novel-writing, know this: I’m reliving my days as a bureaucrat now. O the nostalgia!

The reason can be distilled down to one simple word: detail. And lots of it.

Maybe more than most other art forms—and I’d like to hear from those who can cite where I might be wrong—writing novels is about capturing details. And listing them and keeping track of them. And staying painfully aware of them as I go through the last draft of my book, Dragon’s Ark, line by line, paragraph by paragraph, page by page, and chapter by chapter.

Any of you who write novels may know about this. But except for Richard Ford’s quote above (from The 2006 Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market; Writer’s Digest Books), I’ve never read any accounts of this in interviews conducted by writers, nor in any of their autobiographical accounts. Even the late Norman Mailer, in one of my favorite books on the subject, The Spooky Art, seems never to have suffered from paper cuts or jabbed himself with a paper clip. (It was Mailer who kindly pointed out that it was perfectly OK to bungle three or four novels before writing one suitable for publishing. Too bad it took me thirty years to find that out.)

Office work . . . now I get it! That’s why I avoided writing a novel for so many years!

When I was professional paper-pusher, I never discussed the details of my labors to anyone. It was more than those promises of confidentiality, more than a pseudo-Bohemian’s shame that he wasn’t romantically starving to death in some nihilistic garret. Even in those circumstances where I played an essential role—say in medicine or law enforcement—the hundreds of dry little steps I took each day to make sure that the details were available in a comprehensive and comprehensible fashion for immediate access for my superiors, I spoke not a word about them. In fact, I could hardly conceive of a language to talk about it. “This bit of paper with that subset of that information over there, goes in this folder with this color tab, not that color tab”--

--no no don’t go to the Brittany Spears site just yet, stay with me, please.

I keep the dozens of details that make up the narrative of Dragon’s Ark in lists and the lists are kept in files—oh-oh your eyelids are fluttering. WAKE UP! You’re learning something, dammit!—on my computer. I have a large folder, called “Ancillary Files.” This folder contains exactly 30 documents listed by type of information. There are notes transcribed from four beat-up inked-up notebooks; a file of deleted passages that may find their way back to the final draft (but not likely—in fact, I haven’t dumped much in there since the second draft). There are drafts of verbal pitches to agents and query letters; lists of readers and people I want to mention in the acknowledgments (yeah yeah, Hilary, don’t worry, you’re in there . . . sheesh, politicians . . . .); lists of contacts, and research questions.

Then there are the two most important files of all—what, you want more sweet dopey cat pictures? No, please, don’t go! It really gets exciting!

The two most important docs are “Character List” and “Event Calendar.” The first list also contains a list and description of important locations. The main purpose of these are to help me maintain consistency of characters and settings and make sure all the events in the book time out and dovetail correctly. I refer mostly to the events calendar (I used a 2006 calendar as my base, though the actual year of the novel’s events are left vague). As time goes on, I update each file with deletions and additions of details.

They’re sloppy lists now, but after I type “The End” I’m going to have to go back and finalize both of them so they match up with what’s in the finished novel. Why? Because somewhere down the line, either I or (hopefully) the publisher will have to hire a copy editor—a bean counter of words like me—to make a final pass to catch whatever I or my editor will have missed. And believe me, details will be missed, hopefully minor ones. Even the masters miss details. The Lighthouse an excellent mystery by P.D. James that I’m now reading, muffs a geographical detail. It’s small and perfectly forgivable, but still, we always strive for perfection, even as we know we can never reach it. Care must be taken.

In order to draw near to that perfection, the copy editor will need those two lists and they will have to cross reference the details of character, plot and setting; for example, to make sure that all the changes I made from draft one—say of a place name—have been completely worked into the final draft.

Oh my! Have I really completely murdered your desire to ever tackle writing a novel?

Swell! That’s less competition for me!

Now for that link to a video of hair falling out.


EXTRA FUN NOTE:

“All Things Considered” on NPR broadcast an amusing piece on Friday on what kind of Hollywood movie could be produced based on the 2008 Presidential election and who would play whom (Meryl Streep as Hilary Clinton; Richard Dreyfuss as John McCain and Denzel Washington as Barack Obama, etc.).

Your correspondent’s evil nimble mind immediately leapt to one of his (and, allegedly, Nobel Prize-winner Jimmy Carter’s) favorite movies: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly with the following cast:

Clint Eastwood as Barack Obama . . . Lee Van Cleef as John McCain . . . and (drum roll) Eli Wallach in the role of Hilary!

Now, if we can just CG the candidates into clips from the movie . . . if you know anyone with those skills, send ‘em to me! We may have a YouTube hit on our hands! Let's get this meme rolling!

(The object on the left of the photo above is a walking stick I bought in the Lake Tahoe area; the one on the right is a Basque carving I picked up in Monterey; the photo in the middle was taken in Bill Arney's apartment in San Francisco; it was there that Dashiell Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon.)

SHOP TALK #5: HACK CUT CARVE, SLICE TRIM CHOP

I finished draft #3 of the formerly-titled The Vampire of Alpine Canyon (now called Dragon’s Ark )on February 28, 2001 and have finally grown the stones to—just kidding, it was 2008, like you remember. I didn’t shamefully hide it away like I did Mazola Party Platter that mega-hardcore porn video I produced in the 1990s—Oh! I never told that story!? Never mind!

I last discussed this book in “The Back Trails of Research” (9/16/07). This time, I have the following facts to report:

1) Draft #3 came in at 582 pages, down a pitiful 36 pages from draft #2 to around 161,000 words. Not even within cannonball distance of my goal. Am I a failure? Only if I quit.

2) My writing skills are now at the level of Harold Robbins’ Late Period (say, The Betsy). Don’t break out those ABAs yet. I keep clearing away webs of plot, story and awful writing. For example, the “vampire hunter,” still lacks forward momentum and takes too long wandering in and out of too many box canyons and dead-end trails. Until recently, I mushed around about the name of a significant geographical feature, but I think it’s settled now.

As with draft #2, once finished, I immediately set #3 aside to simmer and to fantasize about my guaranteed great success: I saw numbers so high that, to steal one from David Mamet, “dogs can’t hear it.”

But, before floating into my fantasy of how you’re all gonna buy this book or be struck blind, I made seven copies (with the assistance of my Wife’s Sister and Brother-in-Law) and gave each copy to seven selected readers (including Wife and Wife’s Sister). Some of them know each other, but others are mutual strangers. Some readers are also writers, while some are readers only: These minds are open to sheer pleasure, free from the technical worries that clutter the heads of all writers. The only thing the readers all have in common for sure is that they—I hope—read these postings.

I gave them three weeks to pound through it—no agonizing over every line and page—and asked them to focus on the book’s entertainment value: What bored them? What confused them? We like praise, yes—in fact, we need it--but learning what’s wrong is the path to keeping this one out of Border’s pulping pile.

Sometimes, “This part bored me to diarrhea, this part nearly gave me a heart attack and why don’t your characters stop changing clothes in the middle of every scene?” is all I need. Sometimes I’m only looking for confirmation of my sense that something isn’t working and maybe I’ll stumble on the reason why and—most important—how to fix it! For these issues, non-writing readers work best.

Best of all, non-writers don’t try to righteously rewrite your book the way they’d write it, a painful experience, especially when dealing with someone who’s prone to bellowing: “Fuck Shakespeare! I’m a Dean Koontz man!”

So, why aren’t I in a writer’s group?

For years, I was. In fact, I joined too many.

Once, I briefly joined a writer’s group who claimed that they read the fiction they produced solely from the point of view of “real everyday readers.”

“But that, of course, is bullshit,” as Charles Willeford so eloquently puts it.

Readers do not read like writers do, as noted above and no way can writers read like non-writers. For example, I study Elmore Leonard as closely as I read Cervantes, though I read each book in a very different manner, as I’ve lectured elsewhere. Whether it’s Ulysses or Butcher’s Moon, I’m always a writer reading. We writers process our reading in very different ways. We study the nails, the glue, the wood, and how it's cut, rather than pouring it into our heads, letting the words gush through ours souls. For us, even the most pleasurable reading is still work.

The writing group I speak of looked at my admittedly not-good-yet hit man yarn and then fell into bitter rage, as though I’d murdered their children before their eyes and then ate them in bite-sized uncooked pieces with an olive fork like Oscar Wilde, my pinkie waving arrogantly in the air.

Some of their critique may have been useful, but they yelled so loud, I couldn’t hear them . . . and I can’t hear you when you yell.

Look, Al Gore can scream at me about climate change. This here’s a fucking vampire novel fer chrissakes! Yeah, I’m striving to create the best darn one since Dracula, but trying to make me feel dumb as Dick Cheney’s gofer has never improved my work. Maybe the lazy and the deluded blossom under abuse, but my back pain and CRT-stung eyes put Yours Truly in a different class. Abuse only makes me want to quit and become a thought-starved bureaucrat again.

Another point: At best, I find writer’s groups are overrated; at worst they produce nothing but workshoppy writing that tastes like old gravy. Regarding the ones I’ve joined, I plead guilty to often trying to rewrite the other guy’s book. Most often, I got insecure and nervously wrote to avoid punishment. (“Put more of that literary stuff in. They love it! Cut that literary bullshit out. They hate it! I know! I’ll write the phone book! Nobody’ll get mad then!”) Then I’d stop writing period.

One more thing: I also found myself in trouble for liking—or not liking—another writer’s work. One group hinted that I wasn’t contributing enough to the discussion. When I started speaking up more, they hinted I should leave. Maybe I do lack guts and conviction. Maybe I was playing to the wrong crowd.

I’ve heard back from most of the readers by now. Comments are mostly positive, but, even better, some are pointed and incisive, while delivered in a thoughtful tone, as if I were a real grownup serious about making his humble piece something that readers will really enjoy. Most all agree that the early chapters are mostly a dreary info dump of too many characters, plot elements and story lines at once that eats up too many pages. One excellent point: I treated too many minor characters like major characters and that will trip up readers. An essential chapter was revealed as a major frustration that will take hours of frowning, pacing and rewriting to get right. One reader found entertaining a chapter I thought dull as C-Span. All of you said something helpful. I know you can't wait to read the acknowledgments.

Happily no one has screamed yet . . . exCEPT IN TERROR BWA-HA-HA . . . !

The comments continue to trickle in, but the three weeks are up. I’ve tossed the last gold coin into the treasure box of dreams and I’m back at it. I rework each chapter: hack, cut, carve, slice, trim, chop. A little razor work here, a roaring chainsaw there. I sit down with Patient Wife and read it out loud, search for errors and gauge her reaction. Then polish, trim cut. One reader recommended going through every page and cutting two sentences. Not as easy as it sounds, but it makes you look.

Before too long, I will type THE END. Then Dragon’s Ark will sail alone into the stormy seas of the marketplace. I'll shed a tear . . . and then start the next one.

Them Thar Hills!#4: Chemical Desert

When I wake up in Emeryville, I stay under the blankets as long as I can. In the mountains, I rise with dawn’s first light.

On the morning after we arrived in Lone Pine, California, I spent a couple of hours trying to capture the special light on the Canon before awaking Elizabeth. The town’s back streets seemed populated by wary dogs and horses that grazed in rough little ranchettes on the outskirts.

Around ten, we drove south down 395 for a mile, then turned east on 190, the northwest road into Death Valley National Park. I took photos all along the way, but was too slow on the draw to nail a wandering coyote (canis latrans).(Would this be a post-modern vacation, experienced entirely through a camera lens?)

We drove down the northeast shore of Owens Lake, a body of water once sixty feet deep that nourished Owens Valley, one of the most productive agricultural regions in California a hundred years ago, before Los Angeles—via visionary William Mulholland—pronounced it theirs. Even now, though, pools of water remain along its impoverished bottom, glistening like forgotten tailings of silver.

The sun rose, the air grew hotter. In the distance, down parched slopes of brush, scattered forest of Joshua Trees (Yucca brevifolia) grew widely spaced to keep a frail pact over sparse water supplies, a defiant miracle in a world that looks too impoverished to support anything but scrub. Desert tree still sounds like an oxymoron.



We entered the park and reached Crowley Point around noon, at the top of the first of two long descents to reach Death Valley. Ravens greeted us, seeking handouts, but you don’t ever feed the wild animals, not on purpose. The salt flats of the Saline Valley spread out below looking like sterile ice. The great distances below were unnerving.

Hold out your hand, please, thank you . . . .

Crowley Point was named after Father John Crowley. A plaque christens him “The Padre of the Desert.” Further research tells the story of a Catholic priest who devoted his ministry (and finally sacrificed his life) to raising Owens Valley and Inyo County from the dead after L.A. had sucked its lifeblood away. He helped turn the area into a major tourist destination for outdoor enthusiasts. Maybe he liked the ravens, too.



Stark beauty all around, enough to make me dizzy. But what about the pioneers who first struggled through here in 1849--1850? There’s what we see now and there’s what they saw then. Sure, they were astounded all right: maybe astounded by despair. To them, this land was just one great wall to struggle over after another, rising from hell hot to hell freezing and back down again, almost like Prometheus, but for them the stone rolled down the other side instead. Even after making it through Death Valley to the south, cruel Mojave Desert lay in wait up ahead. Who among them would see beauty in this arid vastness? Who of us now wouldn’t shrink from the car-less journey they made?

After Panamint Springs (a brief white flash of RVs, huddling behind desert trees), we crossed the Saline Valley. On the steep climb up the Panamint Range on other side, we made encouraging noises to the struggling Toyota—if it were a horse or mule, it would’ve stared at us like we were loco before collapsing. We crossed over Towne Pass then down the barren slopes on the other side and stopped at Stovepipe Wells. Death Valley finally sprawled before our eyes. Spring tourists wandered everywhere, but this world is so radical, no one–not me in cowboy khaki, either--looked like they belong here.

The name “Death Valley” sticks for good reason: to this day, tenderfoots, city- and suburb-bred, still occasionally go a-wandering and don’t make it back. Maybe this happens from lack of attention, education or maybe they’d become inured from seeing deserts only on TV sets or movies in air-conditioned rooms (Maybe all desert-set movies should be watched in temperatures of plus-100ºF, no concession stand, either). Their fates hover around my mind. I did learn one useful thing from
watching those westerns, A and B, alike: Don’t screw around out here. In this world, water is the only gold, so carry plenty and keep help close by.

Still, once our awe had simmered a little, it was time to steer the car onto a few shoulders and down some side-roads. Seems we were a bit late for the wild flowers: Only scattered yellow patches of desert sunflowers (Geraea canescens) remained. Outside Stovepipe, past the sand dunes, we wandered apiece through the Devil’s Cornfield, a bleak garden of Arrowweed (Pluchea sericea) plants that struggled up through crusty sand that crumbled under our shoes (apparently this indicates a
shallow water table of about 5 feet).

Some miles on, we turned onto a washboard road. A shuddering couple-mile drive ended at a low little canyon they call Salt Creek. Salt Creek runs year-round through the Death Valley’s furnace heart and so brings life to a rich marsh oasis.

The most visible animal in this narrow-gauge environment is the endangered Salt Creek pupfish (Cyprinodon salinus salinus), a tiny Piscean about half the size of my pinkie. There seemed to be hundreds of them swimming in the clear shallow stream along the mile walkway. I put the Canon to work, taking dozens of photos. (Stop by the house some time. I’ll force you to sit through a slide show of all of them.)



Fascinated, we closely watched the creatures battle through their mating rituals. A thin skin of life in an edgy environment like this is bound to focus you—there’s sure no tin-ass neon around to distract. It’s miraculous how these rare tiny fish are both vulnerable and profoundly tough enough to thrive in this hellscape.

Elizabeth figured out that if she drove a little up on the shoulder, the car wouldn’t shake so much on the way out. Some miles on, riding above the white salt pans stretching below, we made another right into the Harmony Borax Works. Some of you may remember Death Valley Days, a 558-episode TV western once hosted by Ronald Reagan (among others) and sponsored by The Pacific Borax Company. This was one of the mining sites for borax. Though not mined in the valley for years, it’s still a common component in many products. (The orange cliffs in the photo are borax sources.)



The Harmony Borax Works only stayed business for five years in the 1880s. The remote location required them to process the borax for use onsite. The workers were Chinese laborers, exploited for a pittance. Most of them lived onsite, too—like in many “company towns,” the money they earned, they spent at the company store. On that score at least, the company likely wound up losing nothing, which was what the workers got when the works closed down. The huge wagons of borax, dragging a 1,500 gallon water tank, really did require a 20-animal team to ship the finished
product to market (actually 18 mules and two horses). Again, it looks like a grim life, lived by people likely unmoved by nature’s beauty.



A mile on, we came to our last stop: tamed and overbuilt Furnace Creek, Death Valley’s urban center, pop. 31. We checked out the Death Valley Visitor’s Center and learned this: Life only takes hold in areas where sodium makes up no more than 6% of the soil and water. Past 6%, nothing lives. It becomes a true lifeless desert, a chemical desert. Take away Earth’s egg-shell of atmosphere, the whole world would be the Death Valley salt flats.

Badwater, the lowest point in the U.S., lay ahead, but our shadows were long and gas was low. We needed another day we didn’t have. We drove out of the Valley, back to Lone Pine, emerging from the park right at the golden hour: long shadows and clear soft light burnished the land, while up ahead, the blue wall of the Sierras beckoned us yonder.



If it sounds like I didn’t love Death Valley, believe me I did. But it’s the kind of love seen through narrow, wary eyes.

Them Thar Hills #3: Ride the High Desert

Mt. Whitney from Lone Pine

One of marriage's many benefits is travel. At least with my marriage. (Other marriages I’ve seen, mmmmm not so much, which may be why I waited so long.) Since Elizabeth and I hitched our wagon, I’ve seen places I’ve only dreamed about, places I thought existed only in flickering shadows on forty-foot walls or from TV tubes.

Places like Lone Pine, California, which we used as a base for a journey to Death Valley we took last weekend. It turned out to be one of the best too-short vacations I’ve ever taken.

After a night in Bishop—a town with a “Move Here!” pull—we arrived in Lone Pine, a remote community of around 2,500 souls that lounges in the high windswept eastern desert about four hours northeast of Los Angeles by car and ten miles of raven-flight from Mt. Whitney, which is the highest point in both the 400-mile wall of mountains called the Sierra Nevadas and the continental U.S. (I’ve touched before on this spectacular world in essays concerning that guaranteed best seller of mine whose progress I’ll be catching you up on, soon).

Lone Pine has a mite less of that “Move Here!” pull. The one-stop town seems a tad poor—a couple of good restaurants, but the bars aren’t much for elbow-bending and the nearest real bookstores are aways back in Bishop. It seems to serve mostly as a way station for Death Valley and the Mt. Whitney Summit.

But, unlike so many small American towns these days, you can take in a movie on the weekend. Better yet, attend the annual Lone Pine Film Festival. Each year thousands of film buffs make the trip to this faraway town to celebrate the movies. Sounds like a dumb thing to do. Why waste gas and risk a nosebleed and acrophobia for a movie? If you want to get sick, there’s always American Idol.

Here are some of the reasons: Gunga Din, The Charge of the Light Brigade, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Bad Day at Black Rock, Ride Lonesome, The Tall T, Tremors, Gladiator, Star Trek V, Comanche Station, most of the 66 movies that make up the Hopalong Cassidy westerns, plus enough B-westerns to give the Lone Ranger saddle sores. All of these Hollywood productions, and more, were filmed over a period of eighty years in the rugged, haunting hills of round red boulders and rocks that make up the Alabama Hills that rise west of town, under Mt. Whitney. Hollywood loved these hills, along with other locations in the area, professionally, artistically and personally—Barbara Stanwyck (The Violent Men) had her ashes scattered in the wind that blows through this lonely desert when she passed away in 1990.

The Alabama Hills

They say that in outdoor movies, especially Westerns, the land also plays a character in the story. If true, Lone Pine has played such roles as Afghanistan, Texas, New Mexico, Old Mexico, Peru, Argentina, even Kansas. Lone Pine’s performances were as steady and sterling as Morgan Freeman’s and more than once galloped off like The Wild Bunch with whole movies. No Oscars for that kind of acting, though. No Oscars to God for sets and lighting, either.

This Western fan grew to know those weird jumbles of stones and tremendous granite walls like a backyard, but I knew them only through the keyhole of movie theaters and TV screens. Those mediums truly mediate. They fail to prepare you for the experience. The light that filters through movie cameras and film is only a pale stream of the light that’s really there, especially at morning and dusk. (I’ll bet my Canon that Galen Rowell is rolling around on Heaven’s Floor, laughing and pointing at my humble efforts here: “Off to Land Camera Hell with you, Burchfield! Tee hee hee!”)

We rode into town on a perfectly cloudless early Friday afternoon, and headed right into the
Alabama Hills with only the late Dave Holland’s enthusiastic, well-meaning, but thinly-budgeted On Location in Lone Pine to guide us to some of the locations for some of Hollywood’s best productions. Didn’t get far. Except for Movie Road itself, also marked by a plaque dedicated by Roy Rogers, nothing is signed (though I swear on stacks of Luke Short and Larry McMurtry I know that setting below from some movie somewhere). Spot after spot tugged and nagged at me like a stubborn mule, but the memories refused to gel. Wonder had me in its grasp.

Mr. Scott, C'mon Outta There, Now. . . .

We failed to find the unbelievably named Gene Autry Rock (described with polite tasteful modesty as looking like a cucumber; go back to that link to the film festival . . . at the top . . . yes, that's what it looks like, doesn't it!?). We hiked a nature trail to a small but elegant sandstone arch, took some pictures (I eventually took over 350 in all) and then high-tailed it back to town to explore the recently opened Lone Pine Museum of Film History, set right on Highway 395.

Keyhole to Eternity

Deer in the Alabama Hills

With its narrow focus on one sub-subgenre of Hollywood history, the museum can’t throw a saddle on the Autry National Center in Los Angeles, but the love is there with its big collection of bright shiny pop culture artifacts. Separate exhibits that covered many eras in Lone Pine’s history from silent movies and the singing cowboys to Gladiator and—Elizabeth’s all-time favorite--Tremors. For me, Randolph Scott didn’t get the dedicated exhibit he deserved while Zane Grey seemed to get more than he needed (Arizona, Nevada, and Utah were the famed author's actual hunting grounds) and I was surprised not to find DVDs of Lone Pine movies for sale in the gift store. An old 1941 Buick and some of the other cars, all drove in Lone Pine movies, were very cool.

"No, dear, sorry, we can't take It home . . . stop crying, will you!?"

For fans of well-kept vintage hotels, Lone Pine has one of the best I’ve seen: The Dow Villa went
up in 1924 as Lone Pine’s movie business boomed and has done well ever since as the main bunkhouse for film crews, though nowadays, they don’t come by like they used to. The hotel has since swapped its Hispanic façade for pine shingles, but the interior is warm and elegant. The front desk clerk told me that, unfortunately, no records remain of who stayed in what room before the late 1940s. A plaque outside assures that John Wayne stayed in Room 20 of the newer attached motel—he was here to film a Great Western Bank commercial no less--just before the grass started waving over him in 1977. A mosey by Room 20 brought no tall, drawling ghost to the window—though I spent the next two days walking with a tilted swagger and calling everyone—even Elizabeth—“pilgrim.”

Still, it was fun to guess just who might’ve slept in our small, cozy room: Errol Flynn (busting the bed with every gal in town)? Mr. Grant? Randy? Hoppy? Or even Lee Van Cleef? I can see just him, lying on the bed, grinning like a weasel at the henhouse door, chuckling like a rattler as he plotted the next day’s evil before sinking into the sound sleep of bad guys everywhere.

I slept well, too, heh-heh-heh . . . .

(Changed 4/1/08)