Art Pour L'Art | Art Pour Les Gens

I've been having a lot of conversations lately that go like this:

PERSON: How are you doing?

ME: Oh...good, but things'll be better after [weekend, conference, project, etc.].

PERSON: Yeah, I know it.

ME: It's crazy.

PERSON: Doesn't get any better, just keeps coming at you.

I'm starting to see that it really does. This seems to be one of the clichés that is so fundamentally and basically true that it transcends the status of cliché and becomes something else--a truism, maybe.

Other things in this list of transcendences include: your kids grow up faster than you are ready for them to; time accelerates; and your body just stops moving as quickly and smoothly as it used to.

As a writer who has a surfeit of creative writing education, I have been warned and counseled and browbeaten over the avoidance of cliché. It is the thing, we are told, that will destroy our writing. Cliché is the seed which becomes fully flowered florid prose, which, in turn, becomes the throw-away airplane potboilers that no one ever really acknowledges that they have read, at least not in mixed company or without a certain measure of guilt.

Yet, aren't there a few of these truisms out there that deserve a place in good writing? Isn't this how people connect to a work and want to pay $20.00+ for the book (or at least want to check it out from the library)? How does one balance the cliché with the truism? How does one give the truism a new outfit so it seems like a proper insight into the truth about the human condition without simply being a set of new threads for the emperor?

In my experience in the graduate training centers of creative writing and in the editor's chair at a couple of literary magazines, I've seen that the anxiety over cliché has created a whole lot of work that fails to engage anyone but the author. Or it connects with the other writers in the creative writing workshops who are so afraid of clichés that they would rather read bad prose that seems to be free of cliché than good prose that is, as they might say, tainted by it.

In the attempt to give cliché the slip, many writers have lost the reader well. It is now so hard for readers to find themselves in so much of this new writing that they much prefer "inferior" stories that have the porch light on and a welcome mat out.

And I suppose, who can blame them?

Certainly this is more of the old, art for art's sake argument. I used to think that position had more merit than I do now. Imagine, for example, a chef who says "I only cook food for food's sake." Even the most obscure chef, trafficking in the hautest of haute cuisine, still must acknowledge that somebody is going to have to eat the dumpling. You can't just make it and let it sit on the counter, what is the purpose in that?

It'll just go bad, and you'll have to throw it out. Thus is is with books, I think. A sad state of affairs.

Joining In

Usually I don't do the assignments I give. This week something turned inside, and I felt absolutely compelled to join in. So when handing out plotting assignments to my Intermediate Fiction Writing Workshop, I grabbed a slip for myself.

I grabbed "Day in the Life," a story shape from Jerome Stern's marvelous book, Making Shapely Fiction. The job is to use someone's quotidian existence to make a point.

Here's the plot I came up with. It's tentatively called "The Pacifier." This was really fun for me. I never get the chance to write anymore, and this just came in about thirty minutes.

Wallace Coventry got ketchup on his tie. He's in the bathroom at the shoe store, trying to wash out the spot. His boss, Ned, hassles him about being late for his shift. Wallace thinks of his gym teacher, who used to "dock him" for not wearing a jockstrap. Wallace's mother was widowed and didn't know those kinds of things were necessary. The ketchup is gone, but the spot is too apparent, so Wallace wets the whole tie and presses it between two wads of paper towels.

He goes on the floor, and a mother is attempting to fit some shoes on one child, who is screaming and kicking. The second child, still an infant, is also crying. Wallace offers to help, and the mother hands the screaming child to Wallace, who doesn't know what to do with it. He sets his Brannock tool on the floor and bounces around, trying to calm the child. The woman talks to Wallace and to her child. It is hard to tell who she is addressing, both by the content of her remarks and the direction of her attention. It is clear that her husband has left her for another woman.

After she buys the shoes and leaves, Wallace notices a binkey under one of the chairs, which is still wet. He goes to the register and gets her address off the check and decides to return the binkey. After his shift he rides his bike to a trailer park, and finds her single-wide. It is in shambles. Wallace recalls the fancy home of a girl he took to a dance in high school. She was nice, but Wallace jammed himself up, worrying that she wouldn't like him because his father was a foreman at a window manufacturing plant and his mother was a school nurse for a different school. Wallace leaves without delivering the binkey.

The next day, the mother returns. Wallace is getting dressed down for something. Ned won't stop, even though the mother is standing right there. Both children are crying again. The older one is wearing the new shoes, and is running around the store, knocking things over. Ned asks the mother to get her kids under control. The mother says they need the binkey--it's the only one he'll take, and the store is out of the right ones. Wallace says he hasn't seen the binkey, but he'll keep an eye out. When the mother and kids are gone, Ned completes his dress down and goes in the back. Wallace remembers a time when some guys at his school were talking about "finger banging" a certain girl, just as the girl appeared around the corner with the drama teacher. She is devastated, and Wallace did nothing. The pause is terrible. Wallace opens the till takes all the money and drives 50 miles to buy out all the matching binkies.

When he gets to the trailer park, the woman is sitting on the front porch with a man drinking beers. The woman notices him and says hello. Wallace takes the original binkey from his pocket and presents it to her. She thanks him. Wallace goes to a grocery store and gets a chicken and some cokes and eats them on the hood of his car. When he's done he goes to a pay phone and calls his mother and tells her he's taken a job in New Mexico and he'll be moving.

When she asks him where, he pauses. He says he has to work out the details. She tells him to be careful. He says the work will be dangerous, then he hangs up.

Uncanny America

Click on image for Barbie detail.

I recount the following conversation I had with my daughter as I was getting out of the Jeep to take the above photograph:

Zoë was yelling at me, "What are you doing, Dad?"

I told her I was taking a picture of this truck.

She asked why, and I said, "Because there is a Barbie head in the front seat." She said, "What's a Barbie?"

And I said, "You're a good girl."

This kind of moment (in which I revere my daughter for not recognizing an American icon) is pretty closely related to the fact that I am almost obscenely proud of the fact that I have never been to Disneyland (or world). Neither has my wife.

As far as I am concerned, this bundle of truths makes my family perfect.

The baby doesn't value anything that won't fit into his mouth. The three-year-old doesn't know who Barbie is, calls broccoli her favorite food, and won't sculpt with the colored clay because it's for "babies."

This sounds like something someone must have said once, but we are best defined by those things we reject, or maybe also by the things we secretly love. I love Velveeta and picante sauce, the TV show Scrubs, and comic books.

What do you reject? What do you secretly love and hope no one will ever discover?

A Call To Arms

We've got a nozzle on the garden hose with one of those shower massage rotary dials that lets you select the shape and texture of your spray. It's pretty great, has everything you could ever want except a setting called Filthy Child. I don't know very much about these things, but I think the engineering would be a little difficult to manage. The Filthy Child setting needs wide enough coverage to hit a young torso in a single swipe, but not so much that you're wasting water. It would need enough force to work loose ground in dirt but enough delicacy so you won't take the skin off their thighs.

So, for all the engineers reading this--I'm putting out a call. Get me one of these, now!

Of Mice and Men

With the due date a good two weeks away and the baby shower set for this last Saturday, we figured we had a little time to get our ducks in a row and prepare ourselves for the arrival of baby number two: Isaac Oscar Petersen, a.k.a. "Ike."

But as Robert Burns once wrote, "The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry."

On Friday (April 22nd) after having her membranes stripped and taking a lovely walk up Cold Creek Canyon, Alisa started charting her contractions. By 9:00, during our favorite television show, NUMB3RS Alisa figured we'd better get to the hospital. She was contracting every 2-5 minutes, and by then she'd been doing it for over two hours.

We packed up Zoë and took her to her best friend Indie's house, where the girls and Indie's mother Jill had a girls night planned. While I was buckling Zoë into her car seat she looked at me and said, "Where are you and Mommy going? A meeting?"

I shook my head, and Zoë smiled. "You're going to the hospital."

"That's right," I said.

When I got back, Alisa had her bags fully packed. We did have a checklist, and really, we were impeccably organized about the whole thing. Within 20 minutes we were on the road. Alisa noticed that I we had a headlight out, and we joked that if we got pulled over, we could just say, "We know that officer. Do you know how to deliver a baby?"

The short version of the next two hours was that the nurses sent Alisa home -- her contractions weren't strong enough. So, at around midnight we glided through the Wendy's drive-thru window and got ourselves some cheeseburgers since, the minute they let Alisa back into the hospital they'd cut her off the food.

The nurses told us to get some rest, said we'd need it. So, once we got home. I crashed. Alisa immediately jumped out of bed with a hard contraction. I said, "Good, that means you're making progress." I then made a mental note to put that down in the book of things not to say when your wife is going to have a baby.

Two hours later Alisa stormed into our room and said, "I'm in labor now. This is for real. I'm sorry the bathroom is a mess." It took me a minute or two to orient myself. I was in the middle of a dream about (I am not lying about this) grading papers. Since we were already packed, it was easy to get going.

Alisa had been having skull-shattering contractions for two hours, and she just couldn't stand it anymore. We rang ourselves into the Emergency room and made it to the Labor and Delivery wing of the hospital. The nurses took one look at us and sort of gave us the "Come on, we just told you you're not close" look.

Alisa sort of howled, and then a nurse said, "You can go right into the room you were just in."

They hustled about. One of them checked Alisa's cervix. She was six to seven months pregnant herself, and as she felt around inside my wife's body, her eyebrows lifted. "You're at six and, like, eighty per-cent effaced. Call Dr. Lawrence."

At this point Alisa began truly screaming. Everyone was telling her to breathe. She said that she felt like throwing up, that she was going to split into pieces, that she needed an epidural -- right now! The anesthesiologist came in to the delivery room about 20 minutes later, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. The nurses were running around whispering things. They checked her again and she was at eight centimeters. There was no time for an epidural, and they tried for an intrathecal.After a few valiant tries and variations, the anesthesiologist placed his hand on my wife's shoulder and said, "I'm sorry. I can't do it. You're going to have to do it without the drugs."

Alisa's eyes went full moon. She shreiked and wailed and said over and over again, "I can't have this baby. I can't."

The doctor came in, checked Alisa, and said, "You're going to have this baby in the next ten minutes." Alisa said, "What?" then she asked all the women in the room if they had given birth. The doctor held up three fingers. One nurse said she had 4, the other three. The doctor smiled and said, "So, that makes ten between the three of us."

Alisa looked at each of them in turn and said, "Okay, let's get started."

She only had to push for about five to seven minutes, and Isaac Oscar was born. The doctor set him on Alisa's belly and Alisa said, "You're beautiful. You're gorgeous. We can have another one of these, can't we, Todd? We can do this again...can't we?"

I said, "Let's wait to see if this one runs us a mouth, then we'll decide."

Playland

A couple of days ago, the whole family was out to the Wal-Mart together. It was a snowy Saturday afternoon, and we'd all been cooped up for too long.

After forty-five minutes of cleverly keeping clear of all the Easter candy, we came up to the register, and I drew the short straw. In the grocery story, my wife and I split duties: one of us handles the groceries, and to other takes our kid to playland. Guess which duty I pulled.

The people who put grocery stores together know what they are doing. When one parks a grocery cart in front of a register and begin unloading, one's child is positioned right in front of a rack of candy. Even if the child is full, even if the child is eating two suckers (one in each hand), even if the child has been knocked out, they will reach for this candy...

And then scream if they can't get it.

So my wife and I have come to the point where we must split the chore and take our kid away from the candy. That's right, we are smart; we take our little girl away from the candy and set her up in the playland, which is a little arcade and coin-operated ride section of the Wal-Mart situated right next to the registers.

You see, they are brilliant; they will extract your money one way or another.

As a side note, there is a brilliant and fascinating section in Eric Schlosser's book, Fast Food Nation in which he describes the race between Disney and McDonalds to capture parents' money by enticing children into a fantasy world. Out of that race we get two things I despise: Disneyland and Playlands. This kind of salesmanship is lower than low. In fact, as far as I am concerned it's no longer sales but pure, unadulterated mongering, complete with one of the best diversionary tactics on the planet.

Instead of complaining about the way these corporations have our children shilling their crap, we have had our attentions turned to the problems of media content. The nudity and violence of the R-rated movie (not, of course, intended for children) proves the need for the toy, meal, clothing marketing package. Their content is child-friendly, just the thing a parent needs to keep Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarentino at bay.

My wife and I have been able to navigate this business pretty well, so far. We don't watch a bunch of television. Zoë likes old Felix the Cat cartoons better than whatever the hell they have on the tube these days. We don't know.

That's not entirely true, we have bowed a little to Dora the Explorer, because Dora is a can-do little girl and that's an okay message for now. And in the Wal-Mart playland we've not told our child that the horse, boat, truck, motorcycle actually trot, pitch, rumble, or vroom. Up until last week she thought of these things as play sculptures, like in the park. You use them for pretending.

Saturday, my daughter Zoë and I headed into the playland. To my surprise, and Zoë's amazement, we found a young dad and his eighteen-month old little girl in the Tigger Boat, not still on placid seas as it is when Zoë and I play on it. Saturday it was pitching its way across the bounding main, and Tigger was saying all kinds of Tiggery things about boats and silliness and being good, good friends.

As it will happen when she's amazed, Zoë's mouth went round and she gasped and she lifted her finger to point at the object of her attraction. "Daddy," she eventually gasped. "Daddy, that boat is moving."

"Yes," I said, thinking for some explanation. I couldn't say it was broken or that the little girl had special powers or that, heaven forbid, the girl's father had some skills, abilities, or connections that I lacked.

After a few more seconds of noise and rumbling the boat slowed, Tigger bid his passenger farewell. The little girl and her father debarked. As they left, the other father, damn him, looked down at Zoë and said, "Now it's your turn."

Zoë stared at me with deep and palpable yearning. It was obvious to me that I could not simply redirect her attentions to the still ice cream truck or the horse frozen mid-gallop over by the change machine. And with a "good" father within spitting distance, Zoë would know the difference between me and the preferable parent. She would know that I am the mean father, the parsimonious father, the father who will not unlock the joys of the universe with the small round "money" I have recently begun to allow her to fish out of the couch and put in the bib pocket of her overalls.

So I conceded...

I hoisted her into the boat and told her to grab the wheel. I plucked a quarter from my pocket, let it glint before her eyes, and then thumbed it into to machine, which roared to life, bounding and Tiggering for a minute or two until it slowed and stopped.

Zoë, still clutching the helm, looked up at me, smiling. The expression on her face said, "That's good, Dad. That was a good ride." I smiled back, then she wheeled and pointed her finger at the horse. "Make that one go, too," she said. "Put money in that one."

Thankfully her mother appeared with the groceries bagged. She was folding the long receipt in half and then in half again.

I helped Zoë down, and she ran to my wife. "He make it go. Daddy make it go."

She was so excited about the whole thing, with the ride and with the fact that I did this for her. So how could I help but feel incredible ambivalent about the whole thing. I was able to work magic for my little girl, but now we were trapped. She knew I could bring these inanimate sculptures to life, even for a minute, and in her world, that is power.

She would also know that I could choose not to use that power, and every time I withheld it would be a slight against her. It would be me choosing to love my money more than I loved her. I could see it. My wife could see it. Our lives had changed. We were in the system.

We have become fully-baptized parents, and it will take the rest of our lives to set things right.

Narratology Bibligraphy

Thanks for coming to the panel. A copy of the bibliography in Adobe PDF format is below. Let us know what you think.

Download file

--

Todd

See What You Get

A few months ago, I posted an entry on Alisa and I breaking a wishbone and neither of us getting the central knob that means you get your wish.

Alisa's wish was for a baby boy. Mine was that my Intro to Creative Writing class would make.

Both of those things happened. Isaac "Ike" Oscar Petersen will be born on or around Cinco de Mayo. My Intro to Creative Writing course is MWF at 2:00.

Easy Rider, or maybe not that easy

My father gave Zoë a John Deere tricycle for her second birthday. She thought it was cool, but wouldn't abide the pedal blocks I created for her--much to clunky and unwieldy for a metropolitan two-year-old.

So we had to store the trike away for the past few months.

Well, it's come back out, and Zoë has been practicing, and she's pretty much a holy terror. Please enjoy the video feed on the little chopper princess.

You'll need Quicktime to view the movie, and it might take a few seconds to download.

I Can Eat Fifty Eggs

A while ago a buddy of mine upgraded my classroom policies to reflect a little more of the vigor he assumes I bring to my classes. He might be right.

++++++++++++

By the way, I think a few modifications, Cool Hand Luke style might be in order for some of your policies.

POLICIES

1. I only accept university-excused absences.
2. If you're unreasonably late, that's a night in the box.
3. If it's clear to me that you're not prepared, that's a night in the box.
4. If you fool around in class, that's a night in the box.
5. Each absence after the first three will take two percentage points off your final grade, and a night in the box.
6. Nine absences will equal an F in the course, and a night in the box.
7. If you have perfect attendance, I'll round up a borderline grade.
8. I won't grade late work unless we've made previous arrangements.
9. Ten or more typos in any one typed assignment will get you an F on that assignment, and a night in the box.
10. I won't read messy, disorganized, or neglectful work.

Given the current state of affairs I might have to implement these policies changes soon.