Here is a taste:

1. Writing is an exercise. You get better and faster with practice. If you were going to run a marathon a year from now, would you wait for months and then run 26 miles cold? No, you would build up slowly, running most days. You might start on the flats and work up to more demanding and difficult terrain. To become a writer, write. Don’t wait for that book manuscript or that monster external-review report to work on your writing.

He fancied himself one of the big thinkers, and most of his ideas were not only bad but appalling; for he lived largely for the body’s pleasures, actual and vicarious, and adopted ideas that serviced those pleasures. T.S. -Eliot remarked that a great writer creates the taste by which he is appreciated; Mailer helped create the moral confusion amid which he was glorified—not quite what Eliot had in mind.

Until he is forgotten, Mailer should be remembered not only in a fool’s cap and bells but also in a scoundrel’s midnight black. For in an age crawling with intellectual folly, he was one of the reigning dunces, even his best works were shot through with adolescent fatuities, while the worst of his words and deeds were stupid and vicious without bottom.

Yeah, what he said.  Although this ran a close second:

By this point, Mailer had jettisoned his first wife, college sweetheart Beatrice Silverman, and clearly traded up in the sexual-allure department by marrying the painter Adele Morales in 1954. With Adele’s all-too-willing complicity, he cultivated the ugliest part of his nature and called it high moral adventure.

High moral adventure.  That’s what you call it when you live a life that is without basis or constraint.  Just ask any sociopath.

I think Holland was trying to draw subtle comparisons between Rome and the United States.  Or maybe I am inferring them.  Stories about Roman generals marching off to pacify the natives in one region or another seem ready made for comparison with similar American exercises.

Holland makes a point that there was an ideological basis to the actions of the Roman demi-gods and I think that another point of comparison is in order.  The Romans tried to see themselves as moral and the supporters of a moral code, even while spreading bribes around to secure judgements at court.  They carefully whittled away until they had a code which could support both honor and whatever self-centered gambit crossed the threshold.

The author’s style wore on me, but it was a good read.

Here is a bit from a letter written by Count Leo Tolstoy to a young lawyer in South Africa in 1910.  The lawyer, who had launched a movement against racism, was named Mohandas K. Gandhi.

Here’s Tolstoy:

The longer I live–especially now when I clearly feel the approach of death–the more I feel moved to express what I feel more strongly than anything else, and what in my opinion is of immense importance, namely, what we call the renunciation of all opposition by force, which really simply means the doctrine of the law of love unperverted by sophistries. Love, or in other words the striving of men’s souls towards unity and the submissive behaviour to one another that results therefrom, represents the highest and indeed the only law of life, as every man knows and feels in the depths of his heart (and as we see most clearly in children), and knows until he becomes involved in the lying net of worldly thoughts. This law was announced by all the philosophies–Indian as well as Chinese, and Jewish, Greek and Roman. Most clearly, I think, was it announced by Christ, who said explicitly that on it hang all the Law and the Prophets. More than that, foreseeing the distortion that has hindered its recognition and may always hinder it, he specially indicated the danger of a misrepresentation that presents itself to men living by worldly interests–namely, that they may claim a right to defend their interests by force or, as he expressed it, to repay blow by blow and recover stolen property by force, etc., etc. He knew, as all reasonable men must do, that any employment of force is incompatible with love as the highest law of life, and that as soon as the use of force appears permissible even in a single case, the law itself is immediately negatived. The whole of Christian civilization, outwardly so splendid, has grown up on this strange and flagrant–partly intentional but chiefly unconscious–misunderstanding and contradiction.

Here’s Scott Horton:

A little more than a century ago, a Russian nobleman who was also one of the greatest novelists of his—or any other—age, took up his pen to write a letter to a young Indian lawyer then living in South Africa who had launched a movement against official racism. A short, powerful correspondence followed, fashioned in an English that is remarkably eloquent considering that it was not the native tongue of either writer. This correspondence can be read in a single sitting, in no more than thirty minutes, and doing so would be a rewarding process for anyone. But who could have imagined the influence that the Tolstoy-Gandhi dialogue would have for the coming century? Who could have imagined that those letters shuttling between Yasnaya Polyana and Johannesburg would ultimately provide moral inspiration and guidance to the American civil rights movement, half a century later? That they would have helped to propel one of the greatest social transformations in human history?

Count Tolstoy is a revered figure today, his works are published in all the languages of the world and inspire popular culture. In the last decades of his life, however, he was seen as a crazed eccentric in his homeland, and even as something of a threat. His advocacy of the renunciation of violence and his support of religious communities that the official Orthodox Church deemed heretical brought him into steady conflict with authority, and the conflict was acute precisely because his own moral authority seemed greater than theirs.

Read the whole thing and check Scott Horton’s blog frequently.

It’s this sense of place that elevates the Twilight films above the best-selling books by Stephenie Meyer, made up of impenetrable blocks of descriptive yet curiously featureless prose.

What she said.

The movie replaces character with plot, and the result lands with a wet flop. It tells the story of Revolutionary Road and makes us see how thin the plot is: Self-identified creative souls must escape suburbia; maybe Paris would be nice; pregnancy is an unwelcome surprise. With the constant emphasis on what happens next, the audience is reduced to being spectators of fights and sex, dreams and dissolution. Interesting stuff, maybe, but it’s their stuff, not ours. We’ll never know these people; they’re not us.

Movies are about plot and plotless movies are boring.  Novels are about internal states and internal states are hard to do in a movie.

But “Revolutionary Road” is book about narcissistic twits who can’t seem to recognize that fact.  Short of parody, that will make for a bad movie.

14 On the topic of dating, my daughter Susanna loues to remind me: ~Jvliet was only thirteen! And I remind her that i) she was Italian, an impulsive race ii), she was actually played by a middle-aged Eunuch named Ned, and iii) she died. That always shvts her right vp.

15 I deteste it when the Low-Comedians improuise the scenes I writ them… becavse they always make them so mvch fvnnier.

Prolific mystery writer Donald Westlake has died at the age of 75.

Westlake’s wife, Abigail, tells The New York Times the author collapsed as he headed to a New Year’s Eve dinner while on vacation in Mexico. His wife says he apparently had a heart attack.

Westlake is considered one of the most successful mystery writers in the United States. He won three Edgar Awards and was nominated for an Academy Award for screenplay writing for “The Grifters.”

Westlake wrote more than 100 books. He used his own name and several pseudonyms, including Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, Samuel Holt and Edwin West.

Westlake continued to write. His next novel, “Get Real,” is scheduled to be released in April 2009.

Donald Westlake broke into the big time with his novels about the big score.  “Hot Rock” brought us the Dortmunder gang.  I loved his crime novels, although they had dropped in quality in later years.  His short story, “The Curious Events Preceding My Execution” was priceless.

Beats:

Richard Thomas is a former LA detective who goes home to take over as interim sheriff for his recently deceasd father. He is a widower and he brings his daughter along. There was estrangement between father and son, and distance between father and daughter. There is the ranch with the wild mustangs and Simon Legree is trying to buy it. Richard Thomas has discovered the cores from a drilling project that no one seems to know about. Nancy McKeon is in this and I think she has become a good actress.
Good:

I like this kind of movie. The general themes of redemption are right there and are waiting for Richard Thomas to be broken on the wheel of his pride. We know it is coming, and how that coming happens determines if we will feel satisfied.

Bad:

This story contains the beats I like to write. These movies only end up on Hallmark, Lifetime, etc. There isn’t a lot of money in it; there are thousands of writers who drum up these stories.

Update:

More bad – the plot is as creaky as a rusty windmill on a lonesome ranch.  Feral wolf imprinting on humans?  Don’t mention it.  Let’s all meet at the abandoned silver mine for the final apocalypse.  feh.

The Captain Underpants books, for those who don’t know them, feature a couple of boys who are actually good kids, but get into trouble at school. The principal is Mr. Krupp, and some other members of the faculty have names like Miss Directed and Mr. Fied. The story line for the books is that the boys had made comics featuring Mr. Krupp as Captain Underpants and distributed them to other kids on the playground. They make the mistake of hypnotizing Mr. Krupp and he believes he is Captain Underpants and continually gets into misadventures.

JMan loves the humor, much of which is based on a variety of bodily excretory functions, the hand drawn comics, and the subvesiveness of it. So he made a comic last night, with me as Mr. Krupp and he and his class as the boys. The Kill Daddy part was accomplished with neuqular weapons (misspelled words are a feature of the comics in the Captain Underpants books) targeting my belly button. And lots of high pitched giggles.

More than once, I have thought to myself that he isn’t afraid of me. For someone who grew up in an authoritarian household where fear of God in the abstract was replaced by fear of Dad in the flesh, raising a boy who does not fear me is a blessing. I think he feels safe with me.