Writing About People, Places, and Things

Foreword

This is a collection of blogs written since 2008 under the heading of Epiphanettes, which, as everyone knows, are small epiphanies. There are also epiphanots, which are false epiphanettes; epiphanuts; and epihanotsomuch. The latter two are self-explanatory.

All told, I have written some 500 blogs since I started, and the ones included here are, I hope, the best of the lot. I was prompted to gather them in one place partly because of unrepentant ego, and partly because 18 months ago I was diagnosed with cancer and have no idea where the disease is likely to take me.

I hope I have offended the few people I meant to offend, and prompted a smile from all others.

The book’s title is somewhat misleading, since I deal not only with people, places and things, but with thoughts, notions, an occasional suggestion or two, memories, and the often confused view of the world acquired upon reaching one’s mid-sixties.

Thierry Sagnier

Falls Church, Virginia

February 1, 2013

thierry@sagnier.com

Writing

Plain English

"If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me." H.L. Mencken

This is one of my favorite quotes. It’s totally silly, and yet somewhere in the contiguous 48, there’s a Bible-thumper who will read those words and rejoice.

English, some believe, is the second most complex language after Cantonese. I can’t vouch for that, since my linguistic abilities—other than this adopted language—are limited to French, a smattering of Spanish, and about a hundred words of Japanese I learned in martial arts. Nevertheless, I am a passionate believer in learning the tongue of your adopted home. One of my most notable pet peeves is this country’s willingness to bend over backwards, language-wise.

I do not understand why, in the past 20-or-so years, the US has gone out of its way to weaken its language base, to become a nation of idiots incapable of using an ATM unless the instructions are in Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese or Portuguese. I do not understand why speaking English is not a requirement of citizenship. I am tired of dealing with store clerks and fast food employees who are incapable of filling the simplest order or providing the most basic of information. I don’t understand why we’re willing to sacrifice a brilliant, vibrant language and get nothing in return.

Europeans have long known that a nation’s language is one of its primary sources of strength, pride and unity. This is why breakaway nationalist movements, be they Basque, Tamil, Breton, Flemish, or any one of a hundred others, always rally around their own tongues.

The French, who truly love their mother tongue and consider it the most beautiful in the world, have an Académie that everyone not French finds risible. The Académie comprises France’s most notable writers, poets, playwrights and journalists. It works to protect the French language from accepting too many foreign terms at work and in the arts and entertainment. This is not an easy job, and the Academie has not always been successful. It has managed, however, to maintain French as the official language of France (fancy that!). It may be fighting a losing battle in the information age, but it will see that French does not become Franglais. Are you ready for Spanglish?

On Writing—Part I

I’ve always wanted to be a writer. For me, there is no higher calling.

When I was a child in Paris, kids my age played cowboys and Indians, small Gallic Roy Rogers and Gene Autrys. I copied the poems of Minou Drouet and claimed them as my own.

You probably haven’t heard of Minou Drouet. In 1955, she astounded France—and a good part of Europe—by writing charmingly adult poems. A brouhaha followed. Was she for real? Were the verses penned by adults?

Charles Templeton, a CBS reporter, recalls: "Minou Drouet’s mother was a prostitute and her father a field hand. As an infant she was taken into the home of a middle-aged woman, whose ambition to write well exceeded her talent. She adopted the child and raised her with love, surrounding her with music in a home dedicated to literature. It appeared that Minou was retarded. At six she hadn’t spoken a word. The judgment of four doctors was that she would never be normal.

"One day, her mother played a recording of a Brahms symphony for her. Minou swooned. When she was revived, she spoke perfect French in complex sentences. Shortly thereafter she began to write poetry. Some of the poems were published and immediately provoked debate. It was said that no child of six could possibly have such thoughts, much less express them so profoundly. It was argued that, unlike music, poetry demands an experience of life, experience that no child so young could have had. It was charged that her adoptive mother - a poet herself who aspired to recognition but had been judged second-rate - was the author of the verses.

The controversy became a cause celebre. The French Academy of Arts and Sciences decided on an experiment to validate or to dismiss the claims made for the child. Minou was placed in a room behind one-way glass. She was provided with paper and pencil, and after she was alone and incommunicado, given three subjects to write about. She did as she was instructed and the results were scrutinized. There could be no question; the poems were the product of a prodigious talent. Jean Cocteau, the eminent writer and film-maker, commented: She’s not an eight-year-old child, she’s an eight-year-old dwarf."

I was about five years old when I copied some of Minou’s lesser poems in longhand onto my cahier d’ ecole and showed them to my mother who, herself an author, thought she too had a genius on her hands. She called her friends, who called their friends. Could there be another Minou Drouet in the Sagnier household?

Things were getting out of hand. I confessed the truth. It was possibly the hardest thing I ever had to do in my very brief life, and I decided there and then that, no matter what, whatever I wrote would be my own from then on.

On Writing—Part II

According to surveys, the average income of a fiction writer—if you include the Internet folks and the superstars like Stephen King—is $512 a year. That’s not even fried-egg-sandwich money... My writer friend David Robins, author of The War of the Rats and many other excellent novels, likes to say there are fewer fiction writers making a full-time living at their craft than there are professional football players in the game. So it’s a rarefied atmosphere. It’s also, I believe, the most fun you can have with your pants on.

I love fiction. I am not, however, an informed writer. I never read writing magazines. I don’t subscribe to the New York Times Book Review. I frankly don’t give much of a hoot what a reviewer may think of a particular novel and generally distrust reviewers anyway. Write your own stuff—don’t criticize others’. Up until a short time ago, I neither wrote nor read short stories, and I don’t spend a lot of time on the Internet looking at the fiction that’s there. I go to one workshop annually, run by a group call the Red Dog Writers. It’s fun, intense, friendly and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the craft.

I write fiction because creating and peopling my own worlds with characters I have brought to life is, by and large, more fun than dealing with the one I’m in. When I finished writing the IFO book, my characters held a party for me. Now admittedly, I was drunk at the time, a not uncommon state back then, but still, there they were, all the lead players of my opus, telling me exactly what they thought of me and my work, and how I could have done better by them. I like the people I invent. After a while, they become my friends and, as any writer who has gone through the process will tell you, they take on a life of their own. You get to be be a god, or a somewhat smaller version of deity. Can there be anything cooler than that?

Writing Is the Art of....

applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. Mary Heaton Vorse, a labor reporter in the 20s, said that. It’s my favorite writing quote—simple, succinct, impossible to misinterpret. Writing—or for that fact any form of expression (notice I did not use the word art)—is not a question of genius, talent, or gift. Rather, it is a dogged pursuit, a hunt for the right word, the right sentence, the right paragraph.

Not that long ago, I was told by a writer friend to strike any word that ends with the letters ly. I got rid of all the adverbs on my page and found it to be remarkable and cleansing, a true freeing exercise. The scene I was working on didn’t suffer a bit—in fact, it became easier for the reader to travel there. This led me to understand that a word needing an adverb to make it work is probably the wrong word. Words, in and of themselves, rarely need qualifiers.

Another time, a reporter and fiction writer explained that he never bothered to read and parse. He compared this to eating a meal and trying to identify all the ingredients in the dishes being served. That made sense to me as well. To me, trying to deconstruct a work is the equivalent of tearing a fine watch apart. I have big, ungainly fingers that do not handle small parts well. I will be left with a bunch of tiny pieces, and will not know how to put them together again to have a working mechanism. Guaranteed, the watch will never work again.

I remember as a kid in class being told to write papers on the symbolism of this and the meaning of that in the work of so and so. This wasn’t difficult. A little bit of imagination impressed the hell out of the English teacher. How difficult is it to see metaphors in the life of butterflies?

If you want to write, write. Write about what you know, and if not, write about something so totally outrageous that you create a universe. But whatever you do, write.

All Writing Is Fiction

You read it here first, and it’s pithy enough to be remembered. Writing, by being interpretive, can’t be anything but an invention, not matter how well-researched or objective.

I came by this realization recently at a used book store in Philadelphia. More than ten thousand books, many with obsessive footnoting and references to other, earlier works. Now certainly, had I been willing to do some research, I could have found the referenced works and inspected their footnotes, which would have led me to more fanatical and neurotic explorations... ad nauseam. But every single word written by all the authors and their sources were their words, the ones they thought best described the situation. And no two writers will ever see the exact same thing and describe it in the same manner. What is a bright fall day for me is the beginning of a dismal winter for you. So it’s all fiction.

And think of this: What, if the research assumed to be correct is wrong? More fiction. So what we have is a basic fact: every biography, investigative or history book, every scientific tome and learned volume purporting to tell us anything at all, is basically a work of fiction. We cannot write, or paint or sculpt absolutes.

To me, this is magnificently entertaining because I like subjectivity. I am much more interested in how things are perceived than how they really are, and anyway, I have a pretty strong suspicion that no one has a clue as to what really is. We just like to think we do...

How amazing. Rene Magritte was right. It wasn’t a pipe at all, just one man’s idea of what a pipe is supposed to look like. That makes my day.

Too Much Information

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of reading on Suzanne Valadon and Maurice Utrillo. Both were highly talented artists whose works are found in the best museums and beyond purchase by anyone but the wealthiest collectors. They lived in Montmartre, a Parisian neighborhood known for it’s Bohemian allure, almost all their lives. Both were drunks, which is neither here nor there, and Suzanne was Maurice’s mother. She died in 1938; he died in 1953 and they had what can only be described as a strange and unsettling relationship, but that’s not what I want to write about. All relationships are strange in one way or another.

No, what I’m interested in is the critics’ fashion of parsing an artist’s work—and by artist I mean a writer, dancer, musician, sculptor, the whole gamut of people who cannot but be creative—into meaninglessness.

Look at a painting; read a book. What happens? Your imagination, and the writer or painter’s creation, work together to form an alliance. This pact moves you in a way—you feel joy, sadness, revulsion on occasion, pity perhaps, even lust or envy. You and the artist form a symbiotic entente cordiale. He or she presents their work for your consideration, with the understanding that the artist is powerless over the audience. You, the audience, are willing to make a gift of time to the work. You read, you listen, you watch. In the end, both parties are affected by each other’s willingness to devote a small period of life to pleasuring the other. An artist without an audience ceases to exist, and with no art there are no spectators.

The critics want to take this process over by dictating their views—which are assuredly more learned and educated than yours or mine ever will be. An author, critiquing Valadon’s Nude Girl Sitting on a Cushion, writes: ...Valadon’s intense characterization is translated through the deliberate distortion of certain forms, the importance of which is enhanced by their unexpected size... Most of the time the children’s alienation is expressed through reductive images whose effectiveness is enhanced through their simplicity.

I have no idea what this means. Obviously the critic and I are not looking at the same work. I see a small pencil and chalk drawing of a young dispirited nude. It’s an evocative work, and I suppose I resent the critic’s muddying of what is, all in all, a very basic piece of art.

For the past few years I’ve spent a lot of time reading autobiographies of some noted painters, and I have yet to find one describing his or her work in the same language as that of the critics. I wish those who write or broadcast opinions on the quality of things such as art, literary works, and society as a whole would do their own thing instead of parsing the works of others. That seems like a waste of time, a second-hand way of relating to creativity without adding any creativity of one’s own. Maybe it’s just that I don’t like critics.

Off With Their Head(lines)

Newspapers are dying. We have, for better or for worse, decided that McNews is better, more digestible and easier on the soul in the form of Fox broadcasts, USA Today, or blogs and websites. The impending demise of the daily could also stem from readers becoming tired of bad news and papers failing to realize there is—even among we-are-doomed junkies—a failsafe point. We can only tolerate so much war, so much financial and intellectual decline, so many stories depicting the frailness of the human condition and the vulnerability of human flesh. We are burned out on sadness, meaningless crime, governmental stupidity or insensitivity. We’re sick of it and we’re not gonna pay for it anymore.

And yet... I worked for the Washington Post for years. I’m a print guy, even if I no longer really care for the Post. I like getting up in the morning, rain or shine, and reaching for my paper deep under the azalea bush where the delivery man unerringly tosses it. I no longer read the business section—why get depressed when you don’t have to—and wonder where a lot of Post reporters got their training. I decry the loss of objectivity. I wonder when mainline editors decided readers wanted a reporter’s opinions more than they want facts. I mourn the passing of such elegant writers as Sarah Booth Conroy and the wise editors of Gene Patterson’s school; the end of the book review section; the melding of social and art pages into an incomprehensible miasma of critique, humor that is not droll, unfunny comics, and bad writing.

I will miss the shorts buried in the A section—the French and British nuclear submarines bristling with enough fissionables to destroy the earth three times over. They collided in the English Channel (how can such a thing happen and what does that tell us about the end of the world?). I will miss the gossip section telling me all about people I neither do—nor want to—know. I like the daily crossword puzzles that will never, ever, be as friendly on a computer screen. I enjoy the corrections, those little boxes buried beneath the fold on page three that say, Oops, we blew it. I particularly like them when they recognize that the photo in yesterday’s late edition was not Mrs. Crosley Boyd-Smith but Mr. Crosley Boyd-Smith who always wore a kilt. And they regret the error.

Plus, let’s face it, what else will you wrap fish in?

Appearance & Attitude

A few decades ago, I was convinced being a writer was largely a matter of appearance and attitude. Tweed jackets, briar pipes, alcohol, a vaguely supercilious manner that, it was obvious, barely dissimulated my great pain and anguish. I smoked a sulfurous pipe, worked on an aged Royal manual typewriter bought at a pawnshop, was convinced of my genius and talent, and, best of all, owned a complete set of Harvard Classics. Back then (I’ve since sold them) the books, trimmed with gold leaf and bound in leather, were my proudest possessions.

The Harvard Classics, 51 volumes in all, were known as Dr. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf. Eliot was the President of Harvard University when the collection was first published in 1909, and he believed a well-bred gentleman could achieve a respectable education by reading this compendium of every major literary figure, philosophy, religion, folklore, and historical subject through the twentieth century. A few years later, Eliot created a separate 20-volume selection entitled the Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction. I owned that as well.

What’s interesting about Eliot’s 51-volumes of disparate selections is that many of them, slightly more than a century later, have sunken into whatever Stygian obscurity ill-fated writing goes to when it dies. Who nowadays has read Volume 18, Modern English Drama, featuring Sheridan’s School for Scandal, and All For Love by Dryden? Personally, I never got through Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists by George Berkeley. Nor did I read the second volume of Elizabethan Drama, which includes The Shoemaker’s Holiday (Thomas Dekker), Philaster (Beaumont and Fletcher), The Alchemist (Ben Jonson), or A New Way to Pay Old Debts (Philip Massinger).

In all fairness, there were of course important works in both collections, books every one should read, or at least skim—Aristotle to Dickens, Maupassant to Herodotus. Thousands of non-Harvard students read the Classics in their entirety and were the better for it. In time, Eliot’s idea spawned other collections. After the Classics came Great Books of the Western World in 1952, and since then a host of other collected works have promised instant erudition for the common man.

I remember trying my luck with the 20 volumes of fiction, where I found—among other works—such deathless titles as Pepita Jimenez by Juan Valera, A Happy Boy by Bjornstjerne Bjornson and Skipper Worse by Alexander Kielland.

I mention all this because it’s my belief that the majority of writing, like any other endeavor, is merely the product of its time. Some may survive, most does not.

A few years ago, a young man by the name of David Foster Wallace committed suicide at his home in California. Wallace, 46 at the time of his death, was the Great White Hope of modern American Lit. His work found its way into the New Yorker, Harpers, Atlantic and a host of other publications. Reporting on his death, the New York Times said, the world of contemporary American fiction [has] lost its most intellectually ambitious writer.

When it first came out in 1996, I remember picking up what would become his best known work, Infinite Jest, with both hands—literally. It is a very heavy volume, 1,079 pages, footnote-filled, complex and, to me, eminently unreadable. Proust by way of Joyce with here and there some Kerouac and ee cummings; a touch of Howl and a whiff of Hunter Thompson.

Recently, The New Yorker published a vastly over-long article on Wallace’s career, followed by one of his short stories, Wiggle Room. The piece opens with a 400-line-long paragraph. For the second time, I gave up trying to read Wallace’s prose.

So I wondered, who decided this guy was great? I canvased my friends. Some had heard of Wallace, most had not. One had gotten to page 27 of Infinite Jest and dropped the book back into the library bin. Not one person I spoke with had actually read the work in its entirety.

So it stands to reason that one of two things is true, and both possibilities are frightening: either the New York publishing world is putting one over on us, or all my friends are dolts.

The End of Journalism

I was working in the newsroom of the Washington Post during Watergate and if Watergate is not a familiar term, please stop reading now; you’ll only get confused. I did nothing to contribute to the adventure save, once or twice, field three a.m. phone calls from Martha Mitchell, the deranged wife of the equally deranged Attorney General, John Mitchell. Mrs. Mitchell believed her husband was trying to poison her because she knew too much about Nixon’s misbehaviors in the White House. The newsroom operators had no patience for Martha and would switch her call to the lowest person on the totem poll, me. I would listen, take notes, and thank her for the information. Then I would type a memo on my IBM Selectric and pass it on to the night editor of the national desk, who would glance at it and put it in the circular file, also known as the wastebasket.

Watergate was the beginning of an interesting era in American reporting. Investigative journalism soon became the preferred field of study for hundreds of would-be Bernsteins and Woodwards and blanketyblank-gate stories proliferated. Some were important, others not. The Pentagon papers, Contra-gate, Iran-gate, NAFTA-gate, all were events of significant historical import. Others were minor, but all served a purpose.

Now, we seem to have abandoned investigative reporting. It is overly expensive, makes enemies among advertisers at a time when papers are barely surviving, and it lacks a public following. Dedicating a team of reporters, editors, checkers and support staff to the pursuit of a single story is hopelessly dated. The media’s main job nowadays is to rewrite press releases and entertain, rather than inform. Readers, by an large, are not really interested in news. A none-too-subtle indicator that investigative journalism is dead is hammering us today. Not one single mainstream newspaper—not the Times, Globe, Post, WSJ or Chronicle unearthed Bernard Madoff’s pyramid schemes. No one questioned his profits, investigated his background. No one in the media blew the whistle until it was far too late. Rather, financial—and other—reporters were writing puff pieces about the future of China’s finances, the future of GM, and the economy’s rosy outlook for the coming decade.

News, said England’s Lord Norfthcliffe in 1896, is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising. Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe, was a powerful British newspaper and publishing magnate. During his lifetime, he exercised vast influence over British popular opinion, buying stolid, unprofitable newspapers and transforming them to make them lively and entertaining for the mass market. His interest in news was marginal, except when it entertained the reader. He would feel right at home today.

Au Revoir Dédé

I killed off a character today, wrote him right out of life and I and am sad.

This was not a person of great meaning. I needed him to reflect the attributes and defects of other, more important player in the book I’m writing, but still, I liked him. I honestly don’t know where he came from; he just appeared almost whole one late evening, a small boy named Dédé Bourillot, son of a largely inept journalistist, born innocent, neither bright nor dumb, an inveterate trouble-maker of middling cleverness who just wants to get along. Dédé’s most endearing—or troubling—trait was that he believed eating raw onions would make him smart and healthy. It did neither. If I had to have an image of what Dédé looked like, I would be that of Dil, the smallest kid in Richard Thompson’s charming strip, Cul de Sac.

I now have to make his death count. There will be ramifications. His passing will be the stone thrown in the pond, creating ripples. The fact that right now I have no idea how all this will work is beside the point—Dédé will not have died in vain. That would be too cruel, too insensitive even for fiction, because here is the thing: once a character is created, he is no longer fictional. If he’s done well, he’ll have breath, life, thoughts, ambitions. He will engage others, meddle in their lives, become a power in and of himself. That’s how good fiction works, I believe—by creating people we find endearing, and placing them in situations we understand and feel a part of.

It’s not always easy. Dédé didn’t have much of a chance to develop. He’s in about 25 pages of what will be a 400-page novel but I’m hoping his brief life will be remembered. He will be resurrected a few times in the thoughts and memories of other characters.

I hope I do him justice.

Trash

I’ve only willfully thrown out two books in my entire life. The first was sometimes in the early 80’s, a paperback novel the rights to which had been purchased by a man for whom I worked, in the hopes of making a blockbuster independent film.

Basically, the plot was set somewhere in the Bahamas. It involved jewel thieves, spies, a man and a woman having an affair, a drug deal and—if I remember correctly—a kidnapping. It wasn’t a long