Stringers Attached

It's an instant conversation killer, saying that you're a freelance writer. Usually I get a noncommittal--nonetheless nice--smile. Other times I get nothing. After all, that can't possibly be a career. No one makes money writing little "stories" right?

The Journalist's weapon of choice circa 1949

Well, not enough, I have to clarify. I do this other things, too. A job that is more of a "job" in said person's mind, and their attitude changes from one of incredulity to one of general approval.

In truth, I would probably feel the same way had I not met the nicest freelance writer in the world when I was at Wayne State University. He took a writing class with me. His writing was solid, though he confessed a fear of writing from imagination, which complicated things since it was a fiction writing class.

Afterward, when we had gone our separate ways, I ran into him in the library. I was researching medieval castles for a novel I had been working on for two years, and am yet to finish! He was looking up possible jobs.

"You seriously find work this way?"

"Yep. This is how I have always been paid."

It seemed incredulous then, too. Then I never entertained the idea of being a journalist. I was yet to read "Fear and Loathing: on the Campaign Trail '72" or "In Cold Blood" or "Travels with Charlie" or Hemingway's work with the Toronto Star.

That was years ago. Now there is the karmic simplicity of having to explain myself to those who don't understand, who do not see my job as a real job.

And I revel in knowing that I can now find myself on Google. Then feel sad, thinking that I hold that as some kind of standard of existing.

That's all from Elliott at the Kitchen Table, getting ready to bust out the Cranberry and Goat Cheese. Happy Thanksgiving.

Papa Returns

It was announced that there is going to be another movie next year starring ole Papa--Ernest Hemingway. Not another magical bout into the past a la Midnight in Paris or an adaptation of one of his books, which has always been very close to memoir rather than outright fiction, Papa is a tale of a time in Hemingway's life when he had befriended a young journalist in Cuba. The entire movie is being shot in Cuba, which is a fact that seems to have eclipsed the very basics of the movie itself.

I remain ambivalent about movies about writers. Capote was an excellent look at the man during some of the most interesting years of his career as a novelist and reporter.  On the other hand, The Rum Diary was a messy (at times indulgent) farce, hiding Hunter S. Thompson and his beliefs behind a supposed work of "fiction" and said little or nothing by the time the credits rolled.

My problem is that sometimes the writers tend to not be nearly as interesting as their personas lead us to believe. In the case of Truman Capote, he was an icon, whose social candor was second to none, and whose life was as interesting as he wrote it to be. In Thompson's case--and I am a big fan of his work--he was by-in-large an overly exposed drug addict, and his work suffered for it. His landmark book, Fear and Loathing: on the Campaign Trail '72, chronicled his drug addiction as much as it followed Nixon and Humphrey. And as great as it was to read the insights he had on the candidates of '72, it was equally sad to see his work fall apart because of his numerous addictions. His life, unlike Capote's, can be largely summed up as a man who wrote well for a while but was very inconsistent.


Whether Papa Hemingway is interesting enough to warrant a movie dedicated, not to his life, but to a specific moment closer to the end than the beginning remains to be seen. I suppose that 2015 is just around the corner now anyway.

That's all from Elliott at the Kitchen Table, getting ready to "pen" the next great American novel--then maybe a bar fight.

Reading and Watching Thompson

I like Hunter S. Thompson.  It always give me hope to see a writer of the modern age who is revered, respected, and (oh, hell) known.  He was an uncompromising idealist, who didn't care about making you like him or being nice about the truth.  If you didn't like him, or couldn't take it, well--any ready of Thompson knows where they can go and what they can do.

But I don't get Thompson.  I don't understand idealism, even though I am an idealist.  At his best, he was a knife to the social fabric of American.  At his worst, Hunter looked like a child, stomping his feet for not getting his way.

All or nothing thinking can drive you mad.  If nothing else, it leaves us gridlocked.

Looking around, I can't see how anyone could look at the USA and maintain a state of belligerent idealism as Hunter did before he died.  The 2000's have been an patent rip off of the 60's and 70's.  Our military is essentially dictating foreign and domestic policy.  We are fighting wars, not out of necessity or moral compulsion, but because we're scared.  

There is an idea we don't understand, lurking in that mysterious place beyond our colorful borders, and we will bankrupt this country searching for the bomb that can finally annihilate thought--kill mind, not state.  Until then, all liberties--except the right to mow down unarmed civilians as fast as you can per second--is up for the chopping block.  It's like being at GM on bailout day.

It's all so eerie just how similar Iraq and Afghanistan are to Korea and Vietnam, apart of how most Americans cannot find them on a map.  They were wars against the idea of Communism.  We were scared that the thought might spread if we didn't shoot as many people as possible.  There was no real goal, then or now.  Stop Communism?  Defeat Terrorism?  You might as well wage war on Osmosis.

Vietnam, like Iraq, was a set up from the beginning.  We were lied to by our leaders, and dragged into a cowboy's wet dream.  It took years to wake up and realize that there were no WMD's--another Tet Offensive.  The end for both has been only negative.  Saigon fell without us to prop it up.  Iraq is always threatening to fall into Civil War...again.

Hunter may have wanted to be the catalyst or fuse in the powder drum, but 30 years and countless wars later the world is much the same.  Things might move a little faster.  Cars burn less fuel.  Facts are still facts, even if leaders are still all about keeping them under wraps.

All that changes are the faces.  Congress got a bit browner.  The White House is a lot blacker.  That doesn't change our policies of undeclared wars, spying on Americans, detention of innocent civilians, war crimes to never be accounted for.

My greatest fear is that out entire political system has gone Gonzo.  It's an easy things to imagine when he you see Tea Party Repulicans wishing to tear down our social safety nets, pour guns out on the streets.  Libertarians, like Ran Paul--a pale shadow compared to his better qualified father--as they try to choke out our economy with shutdowns and sensationalism.  It's as though it is all being filtered through a pill, vodka, and peyote fever dream.


I guess what I really would have liked is for Thompson to have grown more as a writer, so that he could have broke out of his persona--his Gonzo character.  We might have gotten the most insightful work of the 2000's out of him.  Who knows, maybe it could have been the format for the next 30 years of politico in the USA.  The thoughts of a wiser, aged man, whose mind has been form through tumultuous times and an IBM Selectric.