Newly published: Lucky Man, by Shawn Inmon

February 3, 2013 jkkblog Leave a comment

My most recent editing project was Shawn Inmon’s spanking new short story, Lucky Man. The Kindle version is available as we speak. While I categorized this with book reviews, that’s just for organizational purposes, since obviously no one can purport to present a review of a book on which he worked.

Upon my initial read, I liked Shawn’s story concept. One thing that really gripes me in fiction is predictability, and the story remained unpredictable all along. Shawn is growing rapidly in the craft of writing, because this is my second go-round with him on a project, and I didn’t have to deal with any of the stuff I caught last time. We were on to new, subtler changes and storyline considerations. Most writers just don’t absorb things as fast. It’s like a baseball coach teaching someone the virtues of opposite-field hitting, and the hitter starts knocking doubles off the opposite field wall. Well, yes, in fact, yes, that will do nicely.

If you don’t have a Kindle, Amazon will happily let you download emulation software for your machine. Thus, if you can read this post, you can read Lucky Man. I think you will find it of value well out of proportion to the $0.99 Shawn wants for it.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Current read: Sisterhood of Dune…and a bit on how not to write

January 31, 2013 jkkblog Leave a comment

Being one of the only people who liked all of Herbert’s Dune books, it was natural to try his kid’s prequel series with Kevin J. Anderson.

Of course, we didn’t expect it to be Frank Herbert. To his credit, the son did not try to pretend to be the father. There’s only one problem: the writing now is…very flawed. The story is okay, and I’ll read it to finish the story just because I’m nine books in, but seriously, these guys need help. A couple of examples, quoted for fair use review purposes:

—From p. 10, paperback version—

Looking down, breathing heavily, she said, “Back at the Swordmaster School of Ginaz, I slew hundreds of these things. The school still has a standing order for functional combat meks, so trainees can practice destroying them.”

The very thought soured Manford’s mood. “Ginaz has too many functional meks, in my opinion–it makes me uneasy. Thinking machines should not be kept as pets. There is no useful purpose for any sophisticated machine.”

Anari was hurt that he had criticized her fond recollection. Her voice was small. “It’s how we learned to fight them, sir.”

—

So what’s wrong with this picture? The red part (color added). Do not ever, please, tell me the feelings. Show them through action. This is lazy writing. It was too much work to make her sound wistful when she said the first part. It was too much work to put her second part in a hurt tone. Instead, we were simply told. This is what mediocre writing looks like. This should be shorter, more fluid and subtler. It should not insult the reader’s intelligence. It should let the reader infer and gather emotions through skillful word use in dialogue and narrative.

Here’s another ‘how to do it wrong’:

—From pp. 29-30, paperback version—

“You are going to tell me where those captives are being taken,” Vor said.

The man groaned again and gurgled something that sounded like a curse. Vor didn’t consider it an acceptable answer. He glanced up, saw the fire spreading along the roofs of the houses. “You don’t have much time to answer.”

Receiving no cooperation from the man, Vor knew what he would have to do next, and he wasn’t proud of it, but this slaver was far down on the last of people for whom he felt sympathy. He drew his long skinning knife. “You are going to tell me.”

—

Like it wasn’t already obvious that a gurgled curse wasn’t the answer Vor wanted. Why tell us that, as if we are stupid? And obviously, anything but an answer was continued non-cooperation. No one is so slow in the uptake that this needs to be spelled out so. Wasted words, the kind that push the covers of a book too far apart. I guess it’s easier than writing…

Okay, that was waspish, but I dislike this immensely. It is lazy, it radiates ‘phoning it in.’ If you are trying to improve your writing, this is one of the best and most important lessons you can absorb. Where humanly possible, show rather than tell. It will read smoother, cleaner and your reader will not be jarred, nor have her intelligence insulted. ‘Like your reader’ includes ‘respect your reader.’ This means that you write clean stuff that doesn’t waste her time or treat her like she isn’t smart enough to figure out a cue.

Anyone who considers him or herself in the intermediate phases of developing writing skill is welcome to rewrite either passage in comments, and I’ll be glad to make some observations. Show me how it should have been done.

Married life

Making the dog sick

January 28, 2013 jkkblog 2 Comments

This morning, Deb and I were having a discussion about dogs and logistics. It wandered, much like Fabius’s mind. Fabius is the elder of her two dogs (black Lab). Leonidas, the junior, is a miniature Schnauzer. I’m not a dog person, though I accept my obligation to assure that they have humane conditions and care as needed.

Anyway, the original understanding was that she would take care of all dog needs wherever humanly possible, and with her being laid off from work for some months, clearly this has been humanly possible. Unfortunately, Fabius has settled upon some very inconvenient latrine areas of late. One definition of an inconvenient latrine area is ‘anyplace I [J.K.] like to be in the yard.’

I decided that it was time to bring this issue up, especially after some unfortunate footwear events last week when I happened to be walking around in the yard. In fact, I was drawing something of a line in the grass, complaining about the issue and asking her to stop promising and start picking up. Fabius was farrowing on the floor (his favorite posture looks very much like that of a sow with new piglets, on his side, legs out), while Leonidas sat on a folded blanket, on the ottoman in front of Deb, following this dog-related discussion with interest.

Just as I articulated to her that I would determinedly resist any notion of getting any more dogs if the situation did not improve, Leonidas assumed the vomiting posture. Before I could complete my little rant, he indicated his dissent by throwing up on the blanket. The look on Deb’s face was priceless.

While the issue will not simply vanish in a small pile of slightly used dog food, that at least tabled it for the time being. For one thing, I couldn’t stop laughing.

Editing/writing life

Bloggings will continue until morale improves

January 25, 2013 jkkblog 6 Comments

When you are a ‘lancer, you write for anyone who will fork over, presuming it doesn’t violate your basic life principles (hope you have some). When it’s slow, you have to get creative.

With that in mind, this winter I turned my pen to technical writing on contract. No, it is not la vie litteraire. I honestly don’t think much of said vie, with all its pretense, pomposity and poseurs (and frequently poseuses). It is my belief that there is no such thing as writer’s block; there are people who want to write, and they do that. There are people who don’t want to write, and they do not do that. Right now I want to write, and I am obviously doing it. Well, to be a ‘lancer, you have to ‘want to write’ because you’ll get paid, if for no other reason.

Which explains why I spent the morning assembling a document concerning specifications for cable plants. (No, you goof, you cannot grow them in your garden. Silly gardeners.) Would I prefer to be approached by a major publisher to write a balanced history of the United States, one that would thus piss off everyone with a political filter and earn me hate mail calling me a Commie pinko and a Fascist pig in the same day? Moot point, for I will not be so approached. In the meantime, should I be expanding the ways I can present my ‘lancing résumé? If I don’t, I evidently don’t want to write that badly.

So, I’m writing about cabling. There are some benefits to this besides the money. While my engineer boss is a very good writer as engineers go, it’s fun to be engaged because of the perception that I know more than him about my trade. I realized that when I had to explain to him some of the proofreading marks and issues with punctuation. Mine to present the knowledge, his (as owner of the firm) to say how he likes it and wants it done, and mine in turn to do as all good ‘lancers do: produce quality content to spec on time with a diligent work ethic and a positive attitude.

Here’s the interesting revelation from the process of application. He had quite a few applicants, most of them fresh out of college with liberal arts degrees. I did not expect my nearing-fifty age to be an advantage, but it was. He found his applicants not mature enough for what he wanted in his workplace, which was someone who would show up on time, work without texting every few minutes, observe the recognized protocols of workplace dress, demeanor and focus, and in the end, do as asked without making some excuse. As I was working on my first assignment on my first day, he took a call from one applicant that pretty much said it all. The guy was checking on the status of his application, which had not received a response because he had misspelled his own e-mail address on his résumé. Let’s see. I’m applying to work for an engineer. Should I assure that my presentation demonstrates some attention to detail? Why, yes. Yes, I should. If I cannot manage that, should I pretty much fold the tent and find a new line of work? One thinks so. In any case, my new boss was urbane and courteous to the caller, but within my hearing, advised him that the position was filled. I smiled to myself and kept picking apart the proofreading I had been assigned. I perforated that sucker.

It’s not full time, and it’s not as many hours as I’d like to get, but that’s ‘lancing. You saddle up, you find out what is asked of you, and you do.

It is better training for your own writing work than you might think. It’ll expand your knowledge (I’ve learned a lot about how telecomm cables are organized, and why). It’ll give you the happy glow of cashing checks.

Most of all, it will teach you to write whether you are in the mood or not, whether you have a headache or not, because it’s time you did some writing. That’s how this blog post came about. It was time to do a blog post. I did not grant myself the option to just go upstairs and read my S.M. Stirling book, which was my personal whim–at least, not until I finished this post. Enough people have shown that they will visit here regularly that it is incumbent on me to continue supplying content I think will please at least some of the readership. Do that, and unless you have no idea what people like, that readership expands. Decide that you are in a blah mood and don’t want to write, a little too often, they forget about you soon–as good ol’ Stroker Ace taught us. “Blow their doors off, Stroker.” Just listen to that banjo work.

When in doubt, remember that bloggings will continue until morale improves. This one improved mine, at any rate.

Homeownership, Religion

Burying a thrush

January 18, 2013 jkkblog 4 Comments

Just a small story about a thing I do now and then.

For whatever reason–and it isn’t poisons, as I use those sparingly on the property–birds come to our place to die. Some, sadly, hit glass despite my efforts to reduce that incidence. Others, it seems, simply come here to pass on.

The varied thrush, a slate-and-old gold-colored bird, winters in our area. Most winters, at some point, I find that one has not survived the winter. Today was such a day. I came home from work (I do some technical writing) and spotted the little body, claws up, clearly deceased.

I have always liked birds. My wife refers to me as her Raven Man, based on Alaskan legends of Raven as a trickster and protector. And interestingly, wherever she travels in Washington or nearby, she finds ravens watching her. Sometimes they are flying along with her, like a combat air patrol. But I was an avid bird enthusiast as far back as my single-digit years. I want this place to be popular with birds, and to be visited by many. So when a bird dies, it is a bit hard for me. There is only one thing I can do: a dignified little funeral.

For reasons of health precaution, I get a shovel and a big maple leaf, which I use to push the fallen avian onto the shovel as gently as possible. Then I take him or her around to where the hollyhocks sprout in the late summer, lay the body on something, and dig a small hole. When it’s over a foot deep, I nudge the deceased onto the shovel and lay him or her in the grave as gently as I can arrange. I then say a few words, making a holy gesture and bidding the bird farewell. I tell him or her that I hope that the passing was of old age, and that he or she had a good mate, many chicks, plenty to eat and lots of happy days flying and singing. I hope that the bird is now in a place where migrations are short and not painful, where predators do not exist and where there are sunny days to flock, make music and hunt for delicious fruit. I usually tear up.

And then, for there is nothing else to do, as gently as possible, I fill in the little grave, pat it down firmly, make a holy gesture once again, and walk away.

Farewell, little thrush.

Adventures, Married life

Freezing to death

January 12, 2013 jkkblog 2 Comments

As I write, it’s 21º F (-6.1º C) outside, not cold by my standards. For various reasons I understand, and some I do not, I have a bizarre natural cold resistance that welcomes the feel of -5 F on my face, and ice forming in my facial hair. But I’m resistant, not immune. I know this because I’m a great rarity: a survivor of third-stage hypothermia. And since some of what I’ve read about ‘what it’s like’ was obviously authored by someone who never felt it, maybe this is a good story for a cold night where I can feel ice in the air. I’ve told it enough times to friends that, maybe, it is time I wrote it down.

This happened at Ft. Lewis, WA, when I was in ROTC. I was young, in my second year, brash, opinionated, mouthy, motivated and clueless. I participated with a sub-group of the battalion known as the Ranger Company. It was purely voluntary, but among its numbers you could generally find the best of the battalion. They were tough, highly motivated, brave and dedicated to the military art. They respected the NCOs’ knowledge and soaked it up as fast as the latter would dole it out. They did extra futtockses (FTXes, ‘field training exercises’) involving long nights running around in the rain and cold at Lewis, being tired and miserable. They were in excellent condition, feared nothing, and were dedicated to winning or dying. They were not fanatics; they were rationally brave and intelligent. Had war come to NATO in the late 1980s, a number of Warsaw Pact formations would have been hurt far worse than they expected, thanks to some young men and women who had once worn a shoulder patch of purple and gold, and suffered in frigid misery patrolling in heavy fog and rain at 3 AM, and been expected to perform well anyway.

There I met some of the best people I’ve ever known. I didn’t complete the program in the end, for reasons which were about 90% the fault of my own immaturity, but I don’t regret my association with it. And one night, aged eighteen, it came so close to killing me that I could feel my life leaking out into the frosty night.

It was the usual FTX scenario: a night assault on a position with M16s firing blanks. (I hated that goddamn rifle so much that you couldn’t get me to buy a civilian assault rifle version for a buck. In fact, you’d have to pay me to take it away. Yes, I know they fixed some of its flaws. Still hate it and anything that looks like it.) A newly commissioned second lieutenant led us toward the pre-assault position. The idea was that a parachute flare would signal the ‘attack.’ We were supported by a psyops reserve unit, which had brought loudspeakers to heckle the opposition. They had a little camp area in the woods, where we had marshaled for the operation.

The night was cold but not seriously so, perhaps in the mid-twenties F, starry and moonless. The always-moist air of the western side of Washington, which can so greedily drain body heat, felt and tasted of ice. The lieutenant positioned us to await the signal, laying prone in the deep frosty grass, surrounded by forests. I don’t remember how long it took, but I was underdressed for a long laydown on icy ground. I hadn’t put the liner into my field jacket, and for whatever reason, the cold went straight into me.

The first stage of hypothermia involves convulsive shivering. This is not your ‘letting the dogs out to do their business for a couple of winter minutes’ shivering. I mean wracking shivering that you cannot suppress. That began for me at some point in the grass–I don’t recall how long it took, but the only other time I’ve felt shivers of that magnitude involved surgical anesthesia wearing off. At that point, I was at least somewhat mentally impaired and disoriented. It felt like it lasted an hour, though I doubt that’s possible. Time grew distorted as I lay there shuddering, miserable and unsure what I was supposed to do.

The second stage can involve hallucinations and an ebb in the shivering, though I promise you it still feels cold. I began to see strange hexagonal light patterns in the night sky, obscuring the winter constellations I knew so well from my teenage astronomy fixation. I also saw an aurora borealis, but not a real one. My mind conjured it from photos I’d seen, all of which were in static black and white. Thus, that’s how I saw it, not the authentic shimmery, changing, polychromatic Northern Lights of my wife’s Alaskan memories. For some reason, I noticed the starlight playing off the frost crystals on my field jacket sleeve. Some time during that stage, I saw some light explode in the sky and heard some noises in the distance. Only later did I realize that those were the signals for the ‘attack’ I was supposed to join in. I was confused and indecisive, and there I lay, awaiting some more definitive signal, or so I thought.

I was too young and dumb to realize my mortal danger during the second stage. It took the third for me to get the message.

After a while–and I’ll never know the actual amount of time–the last of the shudders faded away. Those who tell you that you feel warm in the third stage, certainly never lived through it. However, there is a sense of insulation from the cold as your body begins to mothball systems it deems non-essential: legs, arms, etc. You still know it’s cold, but it just isn’t quite penetrating the way it was when you thought you’d tear a tendon shivering. Evidently the lieutenant had failed to count up his people, and no one had registered that I was missing, because I later learned that no one was out looking for me. I’d heard a lot about how useless second lieutenants were, and how useless I too would be when I was (theoretically) commissioned one, but this was my first good look at the reality.

The hardest part, the hardest thing, about the third stage was the seductive reassurance of sleep. The brain rationalizes: you’ve finally gotten acclimated to the cold, now why not just give in to the fatigue and have a nap until morning? I tell the story through all the fogged memory of a mind impaired by my condition, but some memories are clearer than others, and one of them is why I live today. I had a moment of clarity that said: if you go to sleep now, you will die, out here on 11th Division Prairie or whatever the hell division prairie it is. I could feel life fading away, seeping out like sweat drains body moisture on a hot day. The cold had bitten, drank and was ready to sate itself. If I fell asleep, that’s where I’d be found eventually, dead at eighteen.

For some reason, for whatever reason, it registered with me that I had the choice to walk or die, and not much time to decide. I can’t explain why I made the choice I did, but I forced myself to my feet and started walking. Gods only know how I found the reservists’ bivouac, but somehow I wandered into it. No one checked me out, or seemed to realize that I’d been missing, and I didn’t say anything–I was both rummy and embarrassed that I hadn’t taken part in what I was supposed to do. In any case, they had coffee and stuff, and a fire of some sort, and there was ample opportunity to get warm. I didn’t tell anyone about my situation, so in the darkness and general banter of post-operation socializing, it went unknown and untended. Didn’t really matter; I wasn’t frostbitten and was no longer freezing to death.

Now as I look back on that night thirty years gone, I wonder how many other people have lived through that stage of hypothermia without some form of active rescue. I rarely read other survivors’ accounts. I wonder what others who died experienced, whether they saw the odd things I saw, why they fell asleep. Did it sneak up on them? Was there nowhere to walk to, probably true of most cases? What was it like for them? They felt the final ebb of life from their systems, the final fading, which I never did. And it’s too late for them to describe it, so I am as close as you can probably get.

The last time temperature had endangered my life, it had been sunstroke, and I’d been seven. The last thing I remember is them lowering me into a bathtub full of ice cubes. Before I was old enough to take a legal drink of beer, I had felt both extremes reach for my life, and come back denied.

I don’t fear the cold. Last year, when we got a rare cold snap down to -5º F, I couldn’t wait to go walking. I wore only rubber boots, sweats, t-shirt, windbreaker and a toque. I had gloves, which I removed early, and soon took my hands out of my pockets. I unzipped my windbreaker partway; it was getting hot in there. I took a twenty-minute neighborhood walk in the ice and snow, not long, just enough to feel it. It was so quiet, snowy, reflective, muffly, lovely. As usual with me, it was like an internal heater fired up (one whose pilot light had evidently been out that night at Ft. Lewis). When I came into the house afterward, I went straight to Deb and laid both my bare hands on her arm. They were hot, not cold, on her skin. She called me a freak, exactly as custom requires.

No, I don’t fear the cold. But I by the gods respect it. When I go out in it now, I feel it kiss me. Well, I know what it feels like when it gets to third base.

I think I’ll stick to the necking part from here on out.

Book reviews

Books: The Last Lion Vol. 3, Defender of the Realm

January 3, 2013 jkkblog Leave a comment

If you ever sought to research Winston Churchill, you at least examined William Manchester’s The Last Lion Vol. 1 (Visions of Glory) and Vol. 2 (Alone). Authors have an interesting time writing biographies of Churchill, because the old bulldog offered his own version. Whether you can believe Winston gives you the whole truth and nothing but the truth, which you should at least question, he could out-prose almost anyone. Truest words he ever said: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”

There was to be a Vol. 3 (Defender of the Realm) in the early 2000s, but Manchester’s health failed before he could complete the work. He passed in 2004, a tremendous loss to the art of historical biography. During his final illness, Manchester asked journalist and friend Paul Reid to complete the work. Interesting choice: Reid was a newspaper reporter who had never authored a book. He had all Manchester’s notes to work with, but that’s much like a pretty good college baseball player yanked from alma mater’s dugout and marched up to the plate in a major league playoff game with men on base.

Having waited for this for ten years, you might say I was ardent to start reading.

I’m about halfway through, just after the start of Barbarossa (Hitler’s June 1941 invasion of the USSR) and Operation Crusader (Auchinleck’s Western Desert offensive). While I like most of it, I see some weaknesses. Manchester chose Reid for his writing talent rather than his historical immersion, and it shows. I’ve noted a few side stories worthy of exploration, not generally known to most non-historians and WWII buffs, which Reid does not mention–yet which were directly pertinent to Churchill’s life and prime ministry. Manchester got what he wanted, though, for Reid is a capable writer and doesn’t shield us from his subject’s weaknesses.

The word on why it took this long is the combination of Manchester’s semi-legible scrawled notes, the sheer volume of the work undertaken, and Reid’s non-historical orientation. Considering what he went through in order to do this, I have to respect what Reid accomplished. I find that article fair in that Reid did not hew slavishly to all Manchester’s decidedly pro-Churchill stances, and despite discovering the depth of the sea only through repeated dives into it, kept at it until he finished the job.

Definitely good biography. I think those who insisted on having the first two books in hardcover will be happy.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life, Human relations, Married life

Professor Willis Konick

January 1, 2013 jkkblog 8 Comments

Let us begin 2013 on the ‘Lancer with something joyous and uplifting. [This text is superceded in mood by the final para, but let it stand as set for what it meant while Willis was with us.]

It has been a quarter century since I last saw him in person, he has since retired; and still when I see a friend post about Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy, I think of Willis Konick.

To call him ‘Professor’ was unthinkable, as Willis would advise the entire class on the first day. An alumnus of and longtime professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, his entire life was bound up with the Russian language, Russian literature and UW. He taught Comparative Literature and Russian Literature there for so long it became hard to imagine UW without him. If I were to call him ‘Professor Konick’ in this blog post, someone would find out about it, and one of two things might happen. That person might call me out in comments as a complete fake, because anyone who ever actually attended a Willis lecture knew good and well that no one used his last name. Or that person might send the blog link to Willis, who would not only recognize my name and remember me, but who would write to me asking how I was doing, suggesting we have coffee any time I was in Seattle, and politely reminding me that his name was ‘Willis.’

I am not making any of this up, nor am I exaggerating. Willis did his best to have coffee with as many of his students as possible, and had an amazing memory for faces and names.

Willis’s class was the one no one skipped. It was always in a lecture hall with at least 200 seats, usually more like 300, purely because of demand. Yes. A literature professor so entertaining and appealing that the school was forced to schedule his classes in large lecture halls. People scrambled to get into a literature class. Whole decades of UW undergrads filled up their humanities distribution requirements with English 111 plus whatever Willis classes they could squeeze into. Except for a few hundred math and tech wonks from other countries who spoke such minimal English that a literature class was out of the question, at UW all 35,000 students learned of ‘Willis’ in the first week on campus.

While an excellent lecturer and student of the genre (he speaks and reads fluent Russian, and each year would read War & Peace or Anna Karenina, alternating), neither that nor his obvious love of everything about teaching accounted for all of his popularity. Much of that stemmed from his famous impromptu in-class skits to dramatize a character or concept. Willis would reach into the mass of 250 students, and without error, pick out the perfect individual as his foil. Didn’t matter whether it was a nervous young lady in a sorority sweatshirt, a blowhard, a future engineer, or one of his groupies. No one ever refused, even when he chose someone deliberately for shyness. He was known to dump buckets of water on his head on stage, strip to his underwear, open his shirt and claw at his pale chest, and so much more.

I too had my day, and the best way to convey Willis is to tell the story.

I can’t even remember whether it was a Comp Lit or Russian Lit class, not that the distinction ever made a difference with Willis. De facto always outshone de jure. He was teaching Anna, and as I recall, the class was in Gowen Hall on the Quad. Willis was explaining the nuances of Vronsky, and then his bespectacled eyes got that wild look which told us something was coming. He scanned the classroom like a confident quarterback whose pocket is just barely holding, quick head movements and a smile repressed only by force of professional will. The eyes achieved lock-on when they hit me. “JOHN! YES, YOU! JOHN! COME DOWN HERE, PLEASE, I’D LIKE A WORD WITH YOU!”

You know you are about to be had, but you go anyway. You know you are going to be embarrassed, but you also know you’ll remember it when you are twice as old as the day it happens. As I made my way to the aisle and descended the steps, I saw Willis do as he so often did, turning toward the stage and bounding onto it. Anything to do with acting or performance subtracted decades from his sixtyish physical age. He awaited me with sparkling eyes but as solemn a countenance as he could enforce. There was a sturdy wooden table up there, for some reason, and he encouraged me to have a seat.

“So, John, you were in my class last quarter,” began Willis.

“Yes, Willis, I was.”

“And you turned in your final paper.”

“Yep.”

“How do you feel about it?

Something in his tone cued me. I can’t explain it any other way. He had given me 4.0, and still I gave the right answer. “Not too good, Willis,” I responded glumly.

“No,” he answered gravely, making sure to pitch his voice so they could hear him in the back rows (he had an effect like Epidaurus that way). “I hate to say this, John, but that was the worst paper of the quarter.”

I waited, doing the despondent face as best I could.

“In fact, your paper was so terrible, it was the worst paper of the year. I’m confident that nothing that will come will be worse. Your paper was so awful, I have given you a 0.0 for the quarter. I trust you understand.”

Still I sat in mock glumness.

“Sadly, John, your paper was such a disgrace that I felt compelled to bring it to the attention of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He agreed with me that it was the worst paper he too had ever seen. It was so disappointing that, harsh as it may seem, you are being expelled from the University.”

I looked miserable.

“You know how Reagan calls the astronauts to congratulate them? President Reagan is calling your parents to chastise them for your paper!”

I heard the first giggles from the audience, but I held back my own.

His tone went almost sympathetic. “Now, John, it’s obvious you can’t stay here. You must go, as you must leave the University. But is there anything you’d like to say before you depart in complete disgrace? What would you like to say to the class, and to me? Would you like, for example, to ask for another chance?”

“Doesn’t seem right, Willis. It was a pretty poor effort.”

“Yes, it was,” he answered sternly. “Nor would you receive one. Would you like to plead that you tried your best?”

“That’d be lying. I didn’t try at all.”

“That much was obvious,” he said, voice mournful. “Would you like to tell them that in spite of all of this, you’re still a nice guy?”

He’d thrown a switch. Nothing in his tone signaled anything; it was all in the genius of his having chosen me for this specific skit. For the first time since he’d initially addressed me, my head snapped around to him. “YES!” I said, raising my voice a tad in indignation.

Willis smiled, stood up in his most professorial stance, actor’s posture discarded faster than you could think. He raised a finger. “I MAY BE A COMPLETE SCREW-UP, BUT AT LEAST I’M STILL A NICE GUY. And that is what Vronsky is trying to tell us here. John, thank you,” he added. I made my way back to my seat, as I had seen so many other students do. None of it had been rehearsed or planned. In a few seconds he could read precisely the type of person he needed, to react in the precise ways necessary to demonstrate his point, picking him or her out of nearly three hundred people.

Fifteen years later, when I was authoring my (as yet unpublished) Irish travel narrative, my wife encouraged me to write to Willis and ask him to author an introduction. I thought she was nuts, but I did it. He asked me to send him the ms, in print, and I did. He pointed out what was missing from it, and encouraged me to read a couple of other travel books that would demonstrate the qualities my ms needed in order to become publishable. You always take all personal career counseling given you by your most admired figures, or you’re an idiot. When I’d finished the rewrite, I sent him the portion he wanted to see. He praised my remedying of the flaws and agreed to write an introduction if I wished. While no one ended up publishing the book–which I still may do on my own–one more time, I learned a lot from Willis about writing.

He retired in 2007, aged 77. And if you think anything you just read is far-fetched at all, I have the Seattle Times to back me up.

Thanks, Willis, for everything on every level. Oh, and I’m re-reading Brothers. Maybe this time I’ll get at least half of it.

P.S., December 16, 2016: Willis passed away November 30, 2016. I feel so fortunate to have known him.

Married life

Don’ts for husbands

December 26, 2012 jkkblog 4 Comments

I’ve thought of this a lot over the years. While I won’t say that this can’t apply to husbands who have husbands, or to many other partnership situations and perspectives, I’m only speaking in particular to my own experience: as a husband who has a wife. Thus, for me, the other person is ‘her.’ I figured most of this out by talking to women, who shared with me both positive and negative examples. I tend to believe they know what they’re talking about. I tend to doubt they would mislead me. Thus:

Don’t ever suppress or insult her efforts to be creative. That is counterproductive and stupid.
Don’t criticize her cooking or cleaning, lest she shove the obvious rejoinder up your behind: “You know, honey, you are absolutely right. You are so right. So right, in fact, that in the future, I’m going to let you do it, and show me how I should have been doing it.”
Don’t be too big a jerk over rearranging furniture. Yes, it’s already in the logical places, and yeah, moving it around seems counterproductive. She probably likes change, and her life is naturally more attuned to it than a man’s. Got to go along with some of this.
Don’t get a complex if she out-achieves you in work. Instead, make plans for both your early retirement in greater comfort. Only a weak man wants a weak woman, or is threatened by her success. A strong man wants a strong woman he can brag about, a real partner with many abilities. It does not make you any less. If you are strong enough to be proud of what she achieves, it makes you more.
Don’t make unfounded paranoid accusations. For one thing, it’s not a loving act. For another, she may well decide that if she is going to hang for the crime, she might as well deserve it, which would mean that paranoia just created unfaithfulness that would never otherwise have come.
Don’t let your family abuse her. Ever. Be man enough to make clear to them that they can either treat her with kindness and respect, or they can be excluded from your life, yes, even your uncle that the whole family knows is a dick and tolerates anyway. No man worth a damn is comfortable seeing people be mean to his woman. Same for your friends–if they don’t show her courtesy and respect, then you hang around with the wrong people.
Don’t bring in the physical dimension. Don’t yell, threaten or gods forbid, lay a hand on her in anger. As long as she can absolutely trust you never to do this, your relationship has at least one great quality even if it has other problems. The day she no longer has reason to extend that trust, you broke something that’ll be hard to come back from.
Don’t call her names. Here’s a rule I find useful: if you’re about to call her something that, if it were true, there’s no reason you’d want to be with her, that name is potentially fatal to a relationship, and you had best never call her that.
Don’t just let her suffer without stepping up. This can mean a lot of things, but what underlies it is this: most of the time, she doesn’t really need someone else. It’s that 5% of the time, when she falters and needs to feel support and strength and all those good manly things, where she learns what you’re made of, and if you step up, reminds her why you’re good to have around. Shine when it is your time.
Don’t be a loose cannon with money. Too many men airily think it should be they who look after the finances, and then don’t use common sense. If you suck at money management, let her do it unless she sucks worse (in which case you two have some real serious potential problems).
Don’t be emotionally or physically bullied yourself. Happens especially with women coming out of abusive relationships. Does it suck to get punished because, basically, some other guy was a scumbag? It very much does suck, but the law won’t let you shoot him, so this is all you can do. Stand your ground on basic self-respect, and be patient, because the recovery process takes time even if she works hard at it and wants it badly. Abuse hammers her self-respect. By showing her that you respect yourself–and her–you give her a better vision.
When she’s with her gal friends, don’t screw up their fun. Simple. Don’t screw up the women’s fun. To women, children are the people that do not understand that other people are sometimes the priority. They already have access to children. They don’t want an overgrown adult one who can’t be left alone for three hours without having some need or want. If you wander into the gathering, say hello to them, be polite for a minute or two, then let them do their thing with good grace. What you need to understand is that when you do this with good grace, after you leave, the other women tell her what a nice man you are, and she gets to bask in that. Just be an adult, live your life without messing up their fun for the evening, and do that knowing you made her happy.
Don’t be a crappy listener. Stop thinking of how to win the debate, stop thinking of your next comeback. You can’t expect her to care how you feel if you don’t stop and listen to her tell you how she feels.
Don’t react to anything until you have a good idea how much effort or expense she invested in it, whether it’s her hair or her manuscript or her new epiphany. Because the more she put into it, the more crushing it is to hear something negative. A good percentage of my own married life has involved the struggle to shut up and think before I open my trap.
Don’t die on too many hills. It is true that it’s good to choose your hills to die on. Here’s the problem with choosing those hills: you do die on them. Most of us would rather not die any more often than we can avoid.
Don’t expect to buy your way out of big errors with a credit card. It may seem to work on the outside, but if you really screwed up, money and material stuff is just a patch, not a fix. A fix is when you resolve not to make that mistake again, face the music, and do what can be done to make it right. I ask myself “Am I sorry enough not to do it again, or just sorry she’s mad about it?” Plus, if your finances are even remotely joined, you’re also spending her money by way of apology.
Don’t play on her insecurities to manipulate her. Maybe she has none, but most of us do, and with good reason, because we have both real and imagined/exaggerated flaws. Every time you jab at an insecurity, it’s like a kick in the balls. I’m going to take a gamble here and assume that you have at least once been hit right in the sack, and that you did not enjoy it. (I’ve taken slapshots, sinkers and bad hops there myself. I could have done without those.)
Don’t expect her to echo all your religious and political views. Who wants a partner too dumb or fearful to challenge his thinking? Who is so shallow and insecure that he’s afraid of that? Who is really so sure he has everything figured out and that any other view is just stupid? A true idiot, that’s who.
Don’t try to get her to just think and be like a man about things. She isn’t one, and no matter how we arrange the world, she still probably will see the world differently than you. (Don’t believe me? Okay. Are you afraid to go walking at night by yourself? Probably not. She may not be afraid, but she has to think about stuff you don’t, unless she is naturally fearless or is not sane.) If you want a partner who acts like a man, well, it might be you have some questions to consider. Go far enough to accept that her logic, which on the surface may seem illogical to you, may be quite logical when the world is viewed through her eyes. Stop. Try to see it through her eyes.
Don’t destroy stuff in the process of ‘fixing’ it. Yeah, we mostly like to show off our handiness, but know when you’re out of your depth. A good friend and a wise husband once said: “From here, I will plumb no more forever.”
Don’t do too many things with bad grace. If you hate it, truly hate it, you’ve got a choice. Either decide you just can’t do it–and accept what that means–or do it anyway, as an act of love, with good grace because (I presume) it’ll make her happy. She doesn’t like much of anything you do with bad grace.
Don’t go silent without some explanation of the reason, but by the same token, don’t be stampeded or pressured into a discussion you haven’t really considered. It’s fine to say, “Look, I really haven’t worked out what I think about this. Can we talk about it when I have?” Of course, if you do that, and you just never take the initiative to restart the conversation, she will have good reason to think you’re just dodging discussions in the future. You can ask for a recess if you need it, but that puts it on you to decide when you’re ready to be back in session.
Don’t follow any rule off a cliff. True in writing, true in wedding.

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