Book Week #2: "There is no alternative but death and failure."

     I'm on vacation this week. So, hoping to keep you occupied, I'm running brief excerpts from my seven published books and, on the last day, a glimpse at my upcoming book. This is from "Complete & Utter Failure," published by Doubleday in 1994, from the chapter on bad timing. 

     The most unambiguous cases of bad timing are those people brushed aside by what English pundit Clive James has called "the Fonck Factor." Rene Fonck was a French aviator pushing hard int he mid-1920s to be the first person to fly from New York to Paris nonstop, thus claiming a $25,000 prize offered by businessman Raymond Orteig.
      Fonck was confident the prize was his. He convinced aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky to provide a S-35 triple-engine airplane—the most advanced plane at the time and, at $105,000, also the most expensive. Since such an epic flight deserved a certain degree of magnificence, the interior of the plane was beautified by an interior decorator, who added panels of Spanish leather and mahogany walls so that it resembled "a tastefully furnished drawing room." Fonck ignored Sikorsky's plea that the aircraft first be thoroughly stress-tested. With a takeoff weight of 28,000 pounds due to the extra fuel, 10,000 pounds past its design maximum, a stress test might have been a good idea. To make matters worse, the plane was loaded down with all sorts of optimistic tokens, from a bouquet of orchids for the French President's wife to a full-course celebration dinner for six, prepared at a New York hotel and packed in vacuum containers so it would still be hot when consumed at the Crillon in Paris. Moments before the departure from Roosevelt Field, on the cold, gray dawn on September 21, 1926, Fonck was handed yet another gift from a well-wisher. He "lifted it in his hand to test the weight, and with a rueful look placed it aboard the already overloaded plane," according to the New York Times report the next day.....
     Literally burdened with the expectations of success, the plane never became airborne. Its landing gear collapses during take-off, and the plane cartwheeled into a gully at the end of the field and burst into flames. The plane's mechanic and radio operator were killed. Fonck and his navigator survived. Later, Fonck summed up the rash by uttering this wrenching expression of Gallic grief, "It is the fortune of the air," and immediately vowed to make the attempt again.
    Alas for the gallant Fonck, the following spring, on May 20-21, 1927, a 25-year-old former airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh, flying a stripped-down single-engine plane (pilots preferred those two- and three-engine planes in case one of the engines died in the middle of the Atlantic; Lindbergh was thinking of saving fuel), alone without a crew, crossed the Atlantic in 33 hours, 30 minutes. At times holding his eyes open with his thumbs, or hanging his head out the window to be revived by the icy air, Lindbergh also reported that he kept himself awake by repeating "There's no alternative but death and failure" over and over again.
     Lindbergh got the fame and fortune. Fonck got, well, Foncked.

Book Week #2: "Hi, I'm a stranger writing a book on failure..."

     Writers, like people in general, inflate their own significance, so I try to emphasize my complete lack of impact on the culture around me, since it happens to be true. The closest thing I ever did to being an innovator of anything was the "Shiver like rhesus monkeys" chapter of Complete & Utter Failure, which followed a girl through a year of the National Spelling Bee. Myna Goldberg was inspired by it to write "Bee Season," so she says in the book's acknowledgments, which kicked off the whole bee-as-literature genre, with the movies and plays and such that followed, all of which did better than my book, although it was reviewed, well, in the Washington Post, and landed me on "Oprah," so I shouldn't complain either.

     My plan was to pick someone who had competed in the nationals the previous year, on the assumption that she had to be good to have gotten that far once and, having whiffed victory, would redouble her efforts this year.
     I settled on a twelve-year old girl named Sruti Nadimpalli, basically because she lived close to Chicago and her last name did not present the phone book problems implicit in finding Gary Lee, the other local speller who had made it to the nationals the year before.
     Even as I was leaving a message at the Nadimpalli house, I was nervous about explaining precisely what I had in mind. I couldn't lie and say I wanted to track Sruti's triumphant return to the nationals, culminating in victory this time.
    But I couldn't say I wanted to document her second failure on the national stage either, to observe her humiliation and dissect it for my own particular purposes. "Hi! I'm a stranger writing a book on failure, and thought that I'd devote seventy-five pages to your young daughter, provided you give me access to her...."
     What then to tell the mom? In my mind, I had conjured up a wildly protective, fictional mother for Sruti, someone who would share her daughter's bee compulsion. A fearsome image who would probably turn me down cold. And then what?
     Even at the moment we were on the phone together—up to the point when Sruti's mother, in her charming, lilting accent, asked "And what is this book about?"— I wasn't sure what to say. Naturally, I fudged. I said that the book was about "success and failure," then slowly peeled away the success part.
   As always, the reality was more interesting than what I had imagined before the fact. Dr. Nadimpalli didn't need me to soft-pedal at all—she quickly grasped, and even seemed to embrace, the idea of the spelling bee as a failure metaphor, and cheerfully agreed to present my proposal to her daughter. A week later I was at their home.

Photo atop blog: Tom Mansfield, a guard at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, standing before "Homage to Uccello #5" by Boston artist Anna Hepler.

Book Week #1: "I would sooner send my son to hell than send him to Yale."

Carry A. Nation at Yale

      I'm taking a break for the next week. And while my wife would respect me more, I believe, if I just left the blog blank—"'Every goddamn day' doesn't mean you have to post every goddamn day," as she so sensibly puts it—the truth is some tiny handful of people expect something new here every day, and by gum, I don't want to disappoint them. It's a disappointing enough world as it is without my adding to the general swamp of let-down. Besides, I hate to stop now. A foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, as Emerson said, but it's my hobgoblin, and I'm sticking with it. 
     So since I have eight days to fill, and have written eight books, I'm going to run an excerpt each day from each of my books, secure in the knowledge that it'll be new to most people. I thought of tying it in somehow with Banned Books which was last week. But none of my books were ever banned, unfortunately, as that's a boon to sales, something would be censors never get their heads around. I'll include a link where you can buy the book, but as most are out-of-print, it's a pure service, since the money won't go to me, and you can check them out of the library too, if you are interested.
     The first excerpt, from "If At All Possible, Involve a Cow: The Book of College Pranks," which came out in 1992, is perhaps my favorite episode in the book:

     Like most collegians, then and now, Yale students at the turn of the last century liked to drink and have a good time. In fact, students at Yale had a special reputation for living the high life. "I would sooner send my son to hell," a minister's wife said at the time, "than send him to Yale."
     In 1901, a group of eight party-happy friends got together, secured four rooms at Fayerweather Hall—three for study and sleeping and the fourth as a sort of clubhouse—and dubbed themselves the "Jolly Eight."
     A fellow student, a junior not in the Jolly Eight but feeling "a real or fanciful grievance" against one of its members, sat down on February 20, 1902 and typed out a letter to hatchet-wielding saloon-busting temperance crusader Carry A. Nation, describing the club as a "party of Yale men who have banded together to promote the cause of total abstinence," calling itself the Jolly Eight "to show that men may lead consistent and yet cheerful lives." He asked for words of counsel and encouragement from Nation.
     A short time later, the group received a letter and several autographed photographs of Nation, shown standing with an open Bible in one hand an upraised hatchet in the other. The author of the letter was found out and confronted. He confessed his guilt, the Jolly Eight let him off with stern threats. It was assumed the prank had run its course.

   They had seriously underestimated Nation, who was capitalizing on her career breaking apart saloons by lecturing on the carnival circuit and even in burlesque houses, taking donation and hawking her little souvenir hatchets. Her zeal had made her something of a national joke.
     On September 29, 1902, the letter-writing Yalie, whose name has been shielded from posterity, was walking on the campus when a fellow student ran up and informed him that Carry Nation was waiting to see him in the rooms of the Jolly Eight. He assumed the club was getting its revenge for the letter—"It was preposterous," explained an eyewitness narrative of the event, published in 1931 in the Yale Daily News. "Carry Nation had only occasionally been even read of, demolishing some saloon in distant states." But his smugness dissolved into terror when he discovered the somber Nation seated in the center of the Jolly Eight's Fayerweather suite.
      Nation, who was not known for her savvy, suspected nothing. She had spoken several times on campus, years before, and soon was lecturing a hasty gathering of the Jolly Eight and their guests on the vices of drinking and smoking, not to mention short skirts and foreign foods. Her audience was respectful, though many had to bite their lips to force back a smile. 
      "Occasionally a man would as decorously as possible bolt out of the room to explode in laughter in the entry and then return, composed," the Daily News said.
     Those in attendance reported that Nation's smiling face clouded into an angry frown when she noticed a well-filled pipe rack hanging over the fireplace. But some quick-thinking "Eight" explained that the pipes were trophies given up by smokers persuaded to abandon the vice by their organization.
     "It was a reply worthy of a degree in itself," noted the history, and Nation bought it.
     Nation then announced she would speak from the steps of Osborn Hall at 5 p.m. In the meantime, she went to visit friends in New Haven and to harangue a dean for serving champagne sauce in Yale commons.
     If it may seem odd that Nation was not informed by someone that her host on campus was a drinking club, remember that Nation was known for her attacks on saloons. The driving force behind keeping her deluded was a general desire to get her out of town before she could turn on Yale's beloved tap houses.
     "The deception must be continued for should Mrs. Nation learn the truth a hatchet crusade would be inevitable and would probably be directed upon Mory's where near-innocent tobies of ale attended upon surpassing rarebits and English mutton chops," reasoned the narrative. "The newspapers, always eager to distort with sensationalism any unfortunate mention of Yale men, would revel in the story of such an attack and, to the unknowing, make Yale appear to be an inebriate's asylum."
    At 5 p.m., Nation mounted the steps of Osborn Hall, a grandiose structure with soaring archways. she was robustly cheered and members of the glee club, scattered throughout the audience, led the crowd in singing "Good Mornin' Carry."
     It was a wild, stormy encounter, with Nation trying to deliver her temperance message amidst the constant interruptions of cheers and increasingly double-entendre songs from the crowd (such as "Down with King Alcohol," which pleased Nation until the part of the drinking melody where the singers make the down-the-hatch gesture). 
     Finally, after about an hour, during which Nation managed to have some respectful silence by brandishing her bible aloft, the songs grew more blatantly inebriate, the catcalls more unabashed, and she beat a hasty retreat.
     The prank would have just been an amusing episode had it ended there. But it didn't. Invigorated by the day's events, eight students—it is unclear whether these were the Jolly Eight or another group from the Yale Record—grabbed a camera and flash apparatus and headed for Nation's room at the New Haven House.
    Waiting until Nation had finished selling her little hatchets (with DEATH TO RUM emblazoned on the handles) to a crowd in the hall, the men interviewed Nation about her views on prohibition and requested she pose for a photograph. 
     In 1902, taking a photograph after nightfall was a complicated process. It involved extinguishing all the lights, exposing a photographic plate in darkness, igniting flash power, then covering the plate before turning the lights back on.
     Nation was handed a glass of water. It was explained to her that she would be photographed toasting to temperance with life's essential liquid. The eight students took the places around her. One held another glass of water, to toast with, but he others were empty-handed.
     Empty-handed, that is, until the lights went out. In the momentary darkness, the Yalie to Nation's right produced a large beer stein, and the others reached for concealed props and arranged themselves around the temperance leader in a tableau the Daily News compared to a "Bacchanalian orgy." 
     ...Later, [the photographer] doctored the second photograph to add a cigarette in Nation's hand and a foamy head on the beer stein. It looks as if Nation has just blown a trio of perfect smoke rings to the delight of her drinking buddies....
    To rub in the insult, the real Yale Record published the photo on October 1, 1902, adding the caption: 'I have always taken mine straight,' she said, laughing."
      One can't help but wonder if Nation ever caught on to how much she had been ridiculed during her day at Yale. It appears likely she did. In her 1908 autobiography, Nation displays herself as a woman quite aware that she was taken for a fool in New Haven. Her chapter on college life is titled "The Vices of Colleges, Especially Yale."

Stuff happens

 

     Did Jeb Bush really say what the Washington Post reports him saying, in regard to the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon?

     "We're in a difficult time in our country and I don't think that more government is necessarily the answer to this. I think we need to reconnect ourselves with everybody else. It's just, it's very sad to see. But I resist the notion -- and I did, I had this, this challenge as governor, because we have, look, stuff happens, there's always a crisis and the impulse is always to do something and it's not necessarily the right thing to do."

    Stuff happens? Really? Isn't that what his brother said in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005? Oh well, what's a guy to do? It's not as if the president can help or anything. Donald Trump says some crazy, opera buffo stuff, but at least he wants to be president to do things. I expected more of Jeb Bush, as the adult in the room, than shrugging, sorry-not-my-table indifference to the nation's woes. If it were a big business in trouble, he'd suddenly find himself motivated. 

    "Stuff happens" is going to haunt him, during the brief period he is a presidential contender in 2015, assuming it isn't over already.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Okay, Hive. You're so smart. You're so good — win every time, you do. 
     Score: Hive: a bazillion; Neil: zip.
     Okay, smartypants (or should that be "smartypantses"? Hmmm, thoughts? Because "pants" already has an....)
     Sorry, back to the matter at hand. So where's this guy? I'm not going to give you any clues at all. None whatsoever. Somewhere in Chicago. Well, one clue then. Probably not a synagogue, since Jews are forbidden from decorating their sanctuaries with human images, though we don't make the big honking deal about that other religions do, and I will name no names. You know who you are.
     That's two. Two clues. But no more.
     Enough. Time's tight. I've going to be taking a week off at the paper. My wife would respect me more if I left the next eight days blank here, but I'm not going to do that to you. Or me; I do have my reputation to consider. Instead I'm going to kick off "Book Week" tomorrow, featuring excerpts from the seven books I've written and, on the eighth day, a first glimpse at my next book. 
     I was going to loosely tie it into Banned Book Week last week, though none of my books have been banned, alas, because that's great publicity. Not incendiary enough, I guess. And my books, because I have seven published and one on the way.
     Yes, eight days is more than a week, technically, for you sticklers, no need to point out the obvious, though everybody else does. Publishing being what it is, you have to play with the conventions a bit. A little added value.
     Post your guesses below. Winner gets one of my superfine 2015 blog posters, unless you've already won that, and then we'll find something else for you. Have fun, good luck, blah, blah blah, ba blahbitty-blah.
    Boy, I need that vacation.

Humanity lower than ducks

    In Oregon on Thursday, nine people were ...
    You know what? I'm done with parsing shootings. There's nothing else to say about them anymore, and I feel like I'm part of the slaughter process: the killers kill, the victims die, the cops rush in, and then the explainers explain. Count me out. Just because crazy people mow down innocent bystanders to scratch some unfathomable itch doesn't mean I have to dig around in the gore trying to extract a heaping handful of something that feels like sense. 
      Here, one last sentence: People are murdered pointlessly in this country by lunatics using guns that they can get too easily, and nobody is going to do anything about it.
     Did I leave anything out?
     Good. I'll direct your attention to the trio of sleeping ducks above, seen at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Life's a beautiful thing, and should include ducks, and naps, and napping ducks, and naps in general, which are restorative, and good for the inner mental balance. 
     Ducks understand that; people, not so much. 
      The world as I would have it would occupy itself debating exactly how much time a productive person can guiltlessly spend napping. Not the whole day, obviously, the nap would lose its specialness and nothing would get done. But some time must be carved out in a culture that just doesn't emphasize napping enough. If it did, each desk would be a little higher off the floor, and have a foam mattress underneath. "No Burt, 2 p.m. won't work for me—I'll be napping under my desk, burping animal cookie scent. How about three?" 
     Of course, I suppose it's hard to focus on parsing the positive aspects of the midday snooze for humans as well as ducks in a culture where YOUNG PEOPLE ARE KILLED RANDOMLY FOR NO REASON AT ALL AND NOBODY CARES OR DOES ANYTHING....
       Sorry. Ducks, um, use the sun to help maintain body temperature, in between hunting for fish, and ... ah ... never killing each other just for the heck of it, just because they're disturbed and powerful weapons are scattered around by the hundreds of millions. Which makes humanity, I suppose, less evolved than ducks. Lower than ducks, even. despite our vaunted brains or, rather, because of our vaunted brains, which aren't so vaunted, if you ask me.  
      Okay, I'm drifting back into the killing in Oregon, when the truth is, in five days we won't even remember it.  The ducks, however, may stick in mind. They're so cute. And peaceful. 

But how does my Snickers bar FEEL?

      In the marketing biz, clever can drift into cliche in a moment. 
      That moment came, for me, in the checkout at Target last week, when I looked at the tray of Snickers candy bars and noticed that the distinctive "Snickers" logo had been replaced by a variety of mildly negative adjectives—"Impatient," ""Cranky," "Confused"— that tied in with their clever advertising campaign insisting "You're not you when you're hungry."
      It may be be different, but it's also late, maybe even done to death, that fourth partygoer showing up at the Halloween dance dressed as the Internet. An idea isn't creative if it's been done to death. Ideas that are done to death become cliches. And cliches like "done to death" make the audience flinch, not smile.
     Okay, we get it: labels were sacrosanct, so playing with them is, well, playful, or was. 
     But how long as it been? It was back in 1999 that Heinz, desperate to draw in young customers to its flagship product, started offering green and purple ketchup, for children, and tried to lure teens with "Talking Labels," instead of "Tomato Ketchup" they said things like "Psst. Over here" and "Are Your French Fries L0nely?" It must have worked, because in 2001, they expanded the line, with "Not new and improved" and "Desperately Seeking Tater Tots." 

     Clever. Also 14 years ago. I'm sure the strategy goes back even further. For years, 7-Up's  slogan was, "You like it; It likes you." I loved that, the idea that the damn soda likes you, is sitting on the store shelf, pining away for you. It was a bold faux claim, charming for being so patently untrue.
     Last year Coca Cola started putting generic friendly terms its cans. "Star," "Bestie" "BFF," "Legend" and slapping specific names on its small bottles. 

     Maybe the Coke name game started the "Enough already" process. I don't want my soda to say, "Share a Diet Coke with your Dad." I've already given them money. Isn't that enough? 
     At some point, marketers jumped the shark, and for me its those Snickers bars, There's something creepy, almost bi-polar. about them. I want to be able to bite into a Snickers (actually, I don't want to bite into a Snickers, ever, haven't for years and wouldn't start now) without having to wonder whether I've begun to hallucinate or does the label really read, "Confused?"

    I don't want to overreact. Maybe I'm just in a bad mood. But at some point, where Tide is shrieking, "You smell!" and Wrigley's gum labels suddenly coo "Blow me," we're going to want this to stop.  
    Look at this label on a Yasso frozen yogurt bar (excellent, by the way, 100 calories each, if I didn't limit myself to one a meal I'd eat three). As it happened, my mother and I spoke an hour earlier. But what if we hadn't? What if we were quarreling? What is she had just died, and I went to console myself with a frozen treat?
     See, that's the thing. Products are supposed to be mass market items. I don't want Stephanie's personalized soda; I want my generic Coke. Quirk is the opposite of mass market. If I come home from the funeral, I just want a can of Coke. I don't want a can of Coke that says, "Darling" on it. 

     The reason these twists on  labels worked in the past is because labels are expected to be bold but not personal. Lipstick might be bright magenta, but it doesn't say, "Hey liver lips! Show a little self-respect." Once that is no longer generally true, once they start frequently being sly, and all boxes grab you by the lapels and scream in your face, all bets are off, and the slyness loses all value, like all those million bottles of hot sauce all with highly idiosyncratic, risque  names,"SWAMP ASS TIT-KICKER HOT SAUCE," and such. They're so individual, they're dull, and cheap-looking, and you reach with gratitude for good old Tabasco, with its classic, unchanging label.
      At Target, I picked up some Tabasco sauce, and noticed the box seemed to think it was auditioning for Tod Browning's "Freaks" ("One of us! One of us!") Not a huge difference between "Are you one of us" and 7-Up,'s "It likes you." But quirky repetition grinds a consumer down. Find something new.