Archives for October 2007

I don’t have a problem with writer’s block, but sometimes I do have a problem with laziness. Yesterday I traveled from a fancy hotel room in Chicago to an empty apartment in New York. (Mrs. T is still up in Connecticut–the doctor ordered her to stay in bed and take antibiotics.) I dropped off my bags, checked my e-mail, grabbed a sandwich, picked up nine packages and a bag of laundry, and returned home to finish writing a Wall Street Journal drama column about the two shows I saw in Chicago on Sunday…only I couldn’t make myself write another word. Which is, of course, an evasive way of saying that I didn’t want to write another word, having already cranked out two pieces in Chicago and part of a third on the plane yesterday. I love what I do, but that doesn’t mean I want to do it all the time, or even any more than I can help.

I suppose I could have squeezed out the rest of the column, but I told myself that it wouldn’t be as good if I forced it, and decided instead to get up first thing Tuesday morning and polish it off. Having successfully talked myself out of working, I heated up a can of soup, settled myself on the couch, and watched American Splendor for the first time since I saw it in the theater four years ago. It turned out to be ideal for a temporary bachelor looking to kill a little time: clever, slightly depressing, not too challenging. Afterward I looked up my 2003 review and decided that I’d hit the nail on the head:

American Splendor is a quirkily affecting screen version of the long series of autobiographical comic books that tells the story of Harvey Pekar’s uneventful life as a clerk in a Cleveland VA hospital….

Aside from Hope Davis, what makes American Splendor so good is not its postmodern shifting between “Harvey Pekar” the character (perfectly played in the film by Paul Giamatti) and Harvey Pekar the bonafide on-screen weirdo himself (Pekar’s intermittent presence in the film borders at times on the cutesy), but the clarity and humor with which writer-directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini show us the grubby melancholy of lower-middle-class urban life….

I should point out, however, that the “Harvey Pekar” of American Splendor is a semi-fictional character, and that a movie about the real Harvey Pekar might well have been even more interesting, if less touching. Yes, Harvey the celebrated author of autobiographical comic books and “Harvey” the fictional author of autobiographical comic books both spent a quarter-century working at numbingly dull jobs, survived cancer, razzed David Letterman on camera, found love, and started a family. But the real Harvey Pekar is not simply a hapless record-collecting schlub from Cleveland who decided one day to write comic books about his working-class life. He is also a full-fledged left-wing intellectual–homemade, to be sure, but the shoe still fits–who reviews books for the Village Voice and does regular commentaries on NPR.

While all this information has been carefully scissored out of American Splendor, its absence does not invalidate the movie, which has its own expressive validity independent of the man whose story it purports to tell. Still, it should be kept firmly in mind that in creating “Harvey Pekar,” the makers of American Splendor–not to mention Pekar himself–deliberately omitted inconvenient details whose inclusion would doubtless have caused the film to make a radically different impression on many viewers. “Harvey” is a weird but nonetheless convincingly common man whose plight really does come across as more or less universal. Harvey is…well, something else again. To put it mildly. And then some.

That’s another thing writers do to avoid working: they sit around and read their old pieces.

Sooner or later, though, there comes a moment when further delay is impossible. For me that moment will be six-thirty Tuesday morning, when the alarm clock will ring and I’ll descend grumpily from the loft, boot up my MacBook, and finish the damn review. Then I’ll take a cab up to Columbia Journalism School, where I’m to spend three hours working with a half-dozen NEA Arts Journalism Institute fellows. At four I depart for Minneapolis and a Wednesday matinee of The Home Place, Brian Friel’s new play, at the Guthrie Theatre.

Would all this go more smoothly if I’d finished writing my review on Monday night? Obviously. So why did I choose instead to write about why I didn’t feel like writing? Benchley’s Law, of course.

Are all writers crazy? Probably.

“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.”
Paul Theroux (quoted in the Observer, Oct. 7, 1979)

We’re off to a murky gray morning here in the mountains. Last night my book club met, and we had a special guest, Katherine Min, author of Secondhand World. Katherine was inveigled to join us for the evening by one of our members who teaches with her at UNCA. As Tingle Alley readers will already know, my book club’s been meeting about eight years and in that time we’ve grown a little loose and informal in our approach: Currently there’s seven of us, and we meet at each other’s houses every month or so to drink, eat, gossip, and sometimes (but not always) discuss the assigned novel. We’ve never once assayed the questions for reading groups provided by publishers at the end of books; and we sometimes skip reading a book altogether in favor of an article or short story, and there is nothing satiric you can say about any of this that we haven’t already noted.
With Katherine as our guest, however, we mustered a slightly more on-point discussion, while also eating stew, crusty bread and plum crisp, and putting away serious amounts of red wine. I need to get some work done this morning, but wanted to point your attention to an excellent interview with Katherine at The Mumpsimus. She’ll be reading at Malaprop’s on Saturday, November 3rd — and if you live in Asheville, you should attend.

I’m sitting in a departure lounge at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, about which the best can be said is that if there is a hell, it will look much like this place, only somewhat nicer. Fortunately, my trusty MacBook makes it possible for me to work pretty much anywhere, so I’m clicking away industriously, surfing the Web and catching up with my e-mail.
I have much to tell about the past couple of weeks, and I’m looking forward to telling it, but I’ll have to do so in dribs and drabs, rather than in the nice tight chronological narrative I’d originally planned to post. The truth is that for the moment, I simply don’t have any spare time. I’m so busy that I had to write two pieces in my Chicago hotel room yesterday, one of which has already been posted, and I spent this morning’s hour-long cab ride to O’Hare skimming today’s Journal and going over a medium-sized pile of accumulated snail mail.
Later in the week I’ll be telling you about:
• My honeymoon visit to Fallingwater.
• The opening night of William Bailey’s new show at Betty Cuningham Gallery.
• Anthony Minghella’s Metropolitan Opera production of Madama Butterfly, which I finally got around to seeing last Friday.
• A new addition to the Teachout Museum.
• My latest videoblog, which will be posted in the next day or two.
• The Letter, which is coming along very nicely.
All this and more…but now I have to catch a plane!

I’m in Chicago–but not for long. I’ll be returning to New York this afternoon, and once I make it back to my office, presumably in one piece, I’ll check in with you at greater length.
Later.

“Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O’Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.”
Russell Baker, introduction to The Norton Book of Light Verse

The fourth season of Project Runway premieres Nov. 14. In the meanwhile, episodes of Project Runway Canada are surfacing for brief intervals online. Before its sure evanescence, watch Episode 2 here. So far the show’s been excellent, with stronger production than the British Project Catwalk, which had an improvised-on-a-shoestring feel to its first two seasons. (Link courtesy of Project Rungay.)
In this episode: Lincoln will break your heart Malan style, you’ll be relieved Megan can’t make fleurchons, and Kendra throws a few Wendy Pepper shadows of insecurity against the wall, a shame because, unlike Wendy Pepper, she makes beautiful clothes. And that Iman, fierce queen of the runway, eh?