American Writers Museum

Literature’s Lineage: Descendants of Writers Share Family Stories – American Writers Museum – September 26, 2019

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I came for the daughter of the man who created Superman, that is Laura Siegel Larson, daughter of Jerry Siegel, not Friedrich Nietzsche or George Bernard Shaw, and stayed for Steve Soboroff, the man who lent more than a dozen typewriters for the American Writers Museum’s current exhibit, Tools of the Trade.

Soboroff, a Los Angeles Police commissioner, among a wide variety of other things, could have held the audience’s attention all night with his stories about how he acquired his collection and how he goes about verifying the authenticity of the typewriters, but he shared the stage with Larson, Gwendolyn Brooks’ daughter Nora Brooks Blakely, Hugh Hefner’s daughter Christie, and Maya Angelou’s grandson Colin Johnson, as they shared memories of typewriters as the focal point of their households.

While their stories were interesting, I have to believe that a tools of the trade exhibit at Amsterdam’s Museum of Prostitution would elicit tales about more stimulating, though possibly illicit, activities.

Nevertheless, writers’ quotes concerning typewriters abound. Graham Greene, for example, wasn’t a fan. “My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.” Perhaps he should have tried using more than two fingers, not that I do.

Elmore Leonard was a little less archaic. “It took me 20 years to buy an electric typewriter, because I was afraid it would be too sensitive. I like to bang the keys. I’m doing action stories, so that’s the way I like to do it.” Different typewriters for different kinds of writing? A novel thought.

And finally, more from Leonard, though not about typewriters. “I try to leave out the parts readers skip.” And so I end.

Boston Typewriter Orchestra – ONWORD – American Writers Museum Annual Benefit – Four Seasons Hotel – April 9, 2019

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The ONWORD event featured, on display, eight typewriters from the forthcoming Tools of the Trade exhibit, opening in June at the American Writers Museum. There were typewriters that had been used by Ernest Hemingway, Ray Bradbury, and Hugh Hefner, among others.

Working off the theme of the exhibit, the entertainment was the Boston Typewriter Orchestra. I’m not sure what makes the Boston Typewriter Orchestra an orchestra, which is normally thought of as consisting of instruments from different families, such as strings and woodwinds, as opposed to an ensemble of, in this case, only percussion instruments. My guess is that it’s because the name sounds more pretentious.

Nevertheless, the idea of a typewriter orchestra sounded interesting, as it turned out, more interesting than the orchestra sounded. Keep in mind, I’m not talking about someone playing Leroy Anderson’s famous Typewriter on a typewriter with The Brandenburg Symphony Orchestra. That’s two minutes of fun.

I think the all-typewriter Boston group should have combined their music with a literary theme. For example, with a nod to the earth’s monkey population, they could have read whatever they typed as a result of their “music” to see if their compositions resulted in Shakespeare.

Or, they could have taken a piece of written work and tunefully typed it out in a manner that reflected the substance of the work. Maybe, even make it a name that tune, or rather book, game. Listen to the typewriters and try to guess what book they’re typing. That would have kept everyone’s attention longer than the 15 seconds that the actual performance did.

I wonder what the museum will do next year.  Perhaps they’ll bring in the Chicago Metamorphosis Orchestra Project and its Paper Orchestra.  Or, what about a fountain pen orchestra, making different sounds with different colors of ink? Too subtle?

John Scalzi – The Consuming Fire – American Writers Museum – October 22, 2018

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John Scalzi is one sharp, wacky dude.

He’s won two Hugo awards, and even his cat has a blog, which Scalzi says has 14,000 followers. Another 13,961 and I’ll catch up.

Scalzi rolls a ten-sided die at the beginning of each speaking engagement to decide what to talk about, so that it’s not the same every time and he doesn’t get bored.

Number 1 came up – “Read from an upcoming work.” He read from School for Hostages.

Number 5 came up -“Speak authoritatively and persuasively for several moments on a topic chosen by the audience (even if I don’t know anything about that topic).” Scalzi refers to this as improv mansplaining. Audience members raise their hands as soon as they decide that he’s full of BS. When a majority of the audience has their hands raised, he stops. However, the audience loved his BS so much that they kept their hands down long after he had lost all credibility discussing wombats.

Number 8 came up – “Give a Mini-Clinic on how to write a novel in just (mumble mumble) weeks!” Scalzi wrote The Consuming Fire (80,000 words) in two weeks (though the story was floating around in his head before that), necessitated by his mistake about the manuscript’s due date. He said he locked himself in a room, put a block on social media and the internet, and asked his wife to slip food under the door, but relented to his wife’s demand that he leave the room to use the bathroom when he needed to relieve himself.

Scalzi didn’t say whether the room had a window, but downplayed the saying that a writer is working when he’s staring out the window. He suggested that sometimes he’s just looking at squirrels.

I was hoping zero would come up – “Reveal the Meaning of Life.” I may have to follow his book tour around the country to get that insight.

Mystery Writer – American Writers Museum – October 15, 2018

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I was working for free, again, but the investigation was important.

I bogarted my way past the first floor security desk and climbed the stairs to the second floor to avoid getting cornered in an elevator.

I waved as I hurried past the museum staff, trying to look as if I were on an important mission, but not as if I were trying to avoid their attention. My father used to tell me that you could get in anywhere if you wore a suit and carried a clipboard. Now you can do it with blue jeans and an iPad.

I captured my usual seat, which had been left vacant out of good fortune, or perhaps out of some acknowledgement that it was my seat, based upon prior events. While in law school, a friend and I braved sitting in the university president’s box at football games enough times that we became fast friends with the president’s wife and the security guards thought we belonged, kicking others out of the seats when they saw us coming.

Upon entry, the author immediately began reading passages from her latest book. I didn’t find them particularly compelling, which had been my opinion regarding one of her earlier books, but as I seem to be in the minority in this regard, I may need to try another.

She then launched into a Q and A that revealed what brought her to Chicago from Kansas; a PhD in History; her early employment by an insurance company as fodder for her first book; what authors she reads; her morning routine that leads to a theoretical, often ignored, starting time of her writing day; her coffee addiction; and that her husband was a protege of Enrico Fermi.

If Sara Paretsky is a judge again next year at the Printers Row Lit Fest Mystery Writers of America Flash Fiction Contest, I now have lots of tidbits about her personal life to throw into my story to grab her attention.

1,000 Books to Read Before You Die – James Mustich – American Writers Museum – October 4, 2018

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At the end of the 1960 version of the movie The Time Machine, Mrs. Watchett, the housekeeper of H.G. Wells’s alter ego George, discovers three empty spaces on the book shelves. George’s friend Filby asks what three books Watchett would have taken (to aid the Eloi in the year 802,701 A.D.), a question that goes unanswered.

Also unanswered, at least for me, is whether The Time Machine, or any other Wells work, is included in 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. I didn’t think to ask Musitch and the alphabetical by author excerpt on Amazon doesn’t make it to W. Perhaps I should travel back in time and ask Musitch, or, I could buy the book.

Interestingly, Wells’s book doesn’t pose the question about what books to take. And the 2002 movie remake starring Guy Pearce circumvents it by including a photonic librarian in the future who has the knowledge contained in all the books ever published. That’s more memory than my iPhone.

Pearce also plays a character in the movie Memento, suffering from anterograde amnesia, who has short term memory loss approximately every five minutes, so really no point in reading any books. And, while it seems like that would make learning lines difficult, as Marlon Brando demonstrated, memorization is unnecessary as long as you have a fellow actor like Robert Duvall in the Godfather holding up cue cards against his body for your benefit.

Brando said it helped with his spontaneity.  I wonder if I could have used that excuse in order to bring a cheat sheet to an exam. I recall that Woody Allen said he was thrown out of college for cheating on a metaphysics exam when he looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to him.

Musitch demonstrated a healthy memory, rattling off knowledge and opinion about books and authors I’ve never heard of, but I bet I know more about Seinfeld, Law and Order, and The Big Bang Theory episodes than he does.

 

David L. Carlson, Landis Blair, Charlie Rizzo – The Hunting Accident: A True Story of Crime and Poetry – American Writers Museum – September 6, 2018

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I arrived, and departed, confused by the term graphic novel, relieved only by the fact that, according to Wikipedia, author Daniel Raeburn wrote “I snicker at the neologism first for its insecure pretension—the literary equivalent of calling a garbage man a ‘sanitation engineer’—and second because a ‘graphic novel’ is in fact the very thing it is ashamed to admit: a comic book, rather than a comic pamphlet or comic magazine.”

This program had two distinct aspects to it, the discussion of the process of putting together the graphic novel (written by Carlson and illustrated by Blair), and the substance of the story (about Rizzo’s father). Listening to the discussion of the process was not quite as interesting as watching cheese age, which I had occasion to do in 2007 on cheddarvision.tv.

Carlson was overly fond of referencing John Keats’s concept of truth of imagination, as stated by Keats, in an 1817 letter to Benjamin Bailey (whoever he was), as “What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not.”

According to Carlson, he used this philosophy when taking liberties to fill in the story of Rizzo’s father. I always thought we just called that poetic license. Thinking about poetic license led me to a short item on Druid Life comparing it to fake news.

In any event, poetic license would have been a more appropriate reference in this case since the story is about a man who became a poet after being blinded while committing a robbery, and being taught braille by his cellmate, the infamous Nathan Leopold (whom, although long dead, you can friend on Facebook), at Stateville Prison, which the book compares to Dante’s nine circles of hell. Now doesn’t that grab you more than cheese aging?

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong – American Writers Museum – June 19, 2018

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I saw, maybe, two episodes, of Sex and the City, but I wasn’t oblivious to its popularity. Jennifer Armstrong has written books about The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Seinfeld (she says she writes cultural histories and has been called a tv anthropologist), so I figured she’s probably got a sense of humor, which is why I went to see her discuss her new book, Sex and the City and Us.

For better or worse, I learned a few things (that everyone else in the audience seemed to know already based on the constant head nodding). I generally knew about the impact of the show on the consumption of cosmopolitans and a heightened awareness of shoes (Armstrong suggested that the Carrie Bradshaw character proved that you could be dark and twisty and still like shoes), but now I know about the show’s effect on the world of cupcakes (the museum provided some bite-size cupcakes for us).

Armstrong also delved deeply into the adult education provided by the show, rattling off a series of sex terms that the show introduced to its viewers (sorry, I didn’t write them down).

According to Armstrong, all the sex in the show was based upon true stories that happened either to a writer of the show or someone a writer knew first hand. Carrie Bradshaw wondered about a lot of things (see “Everything Carrie Ever Wondered About on Sex and the City”). I wonder which came first, having a lot of sex stories, which qualified you to be one of the writers, or getting hired as a writer and then having to go out and have weird sexual encounters.

And, I wonder, is it really true that Mr. Big was so named because of his “status as a ‘major tycoon, major dreamboat, and majorly out of [Carrie’s] league,'” rather than, well, you know? And, was he the same Mr. Big who was Boris Badenov’s superior on Rocky and Bullwinkle?

 

The Thrill of the Grass: Celebrating Baseball Writing for the Ages – American Writers Museum – April 17, 2018

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When I was young, I read a lot about baseball. I knew all the stories. So I couldn’t pass up this program featuring baseball authors Dan Epstein, Josh Wilker, and Joe Bonomo.

Among other selections, the program included readings by Epstein from his book, Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of 76 and by Wilker from his book, Cardboard Gods: An All American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards. And Bonomo read Roger Angell excerpts to promote Bonomo’s forthcoming book, No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell, a Writer’s Life in Baseball.

What did these books (and the program itself) have in common besides baseball? Colons. Remember when book titles didn’t have colons followed by a descriptive phrase? It was War and Peace, not War and Peace: A Russian Tale of Five Families in the Time of Napoleon.

This led me to look for and discover an article about the trend toward “colonization” in book titles, thus proving that there’s an article somewhere online about anything you can imagine.

My examination of colons (colonoscopy?) aside, this was yet another of the American Writers Museum fine programs. But remember when you went to bookstores (remember bookstores?) to hear writers, and celebrities pretending to be writers, talk about their books? For example, I remember seeing Gene Hackman discuss his book (for which he had a cowriter) Wake of the Perdido Star: A Novel (good thing his publisher included the colon and that explanation, otherwise I might have thought it was a painting) in 1999 at the Michigan Avenue Borders (RIP).

Despite my nostalgia for brick and mortar bookstores, I have come to prefer reading ebooks. And here I am writing a blog, for which, it now occurs to me, I may need an expanded title that includes a colon, and phrase to follow, if I want to expand my reach.   I’m thinking about Art Gets Out: A Blog That Has Nothing To Do with Hotels or Facebook (by far the two most searched for keywords according to PageTraffic.

 

Lilibet Snellings – American Writers Museum (AWM) – April 19, 2018

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It doesn’t have the ring of great literature, a compelling who-done-it, or timely historical fiction, but how could I not go to a program about a book entitled Box Girl: My Part Time Job As An Art Installation (not to be confused with either Girl in the Box, the serious, made-for-tv movie based on a true story about a kidnapping, or Million Dollar Baby, a movie about a boxing girl).

Snellings read passages from her book about her Los Angeles life as a twenty-something self-described “slash” (writer/waitress/actress/model/Box Girl) trying to eke out a living. While the inclusion in the book of the Standard Hotel, Hollywood’s Box Girl rules didn’t demonstrate Snelling’s writing skills, her observations about the rules regarding things like the wearing of underwear in the box were amusing. There were several times during her time at the podium, while reading or answering questions, when she delightfully made herself, and then the audience with her, laugh.  I also recommend looking at the hotel’s own Inside the Box webpage.  Very odd.

One of the questions to Snellings had to do with the possibility of a movie based on her book. It made me wonder whether a movie about a box girl would be good box office (sorry about that).

The program was a fundraiser put on by the Chicago Council of the AWM for the educational programs of the AWM, which meant that there was good cheese and wine, although sadly no red wine out of fears of spillage according to the bartender (I suggest that the museum check out the Good Housekeeping website for cleaning tips so I can have my red wine next time.

 

The Nerdologues Presents: Your Stories: Cast Away Edition – American Writers Museum – March 30, 2018

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We missed some of the Nerdologues program out of fair-weather fan loyalty to the Loyola basketball team, watching the entirety of their defeat at the hands of Michigan. I didn’t mind showing up late, as the Nerdologues program was scheduled to last three hours, which seems like too much of anything, except Lawrence of Arabia, which flawlessly clocks in at 3 hours and 48 minutes. (How did Peter O’Toole not win the Best Actor Oscar?)

We got to the program at intermission, which was perfect timing. It gave us a chance to have a conversation with Kevin Turk, one of the founders of International Tom Hanks Day (ITHD), which was being celebrated by the Nerdologues in this special edition of their weekly podcasts.

Kevin gave us the history of ITHD, how it started as a college keggger, an excuse to drink and watch movies all night. Four years in, Hanks found out about it and the rest is history, as the event has turned into an annual charity fundraiser. The night’s raffle prize was a DVD of Saving Mr. Banks, which the Nerdologues made fun of, but I admit I liked, which must put me on the extreme edge of nerdom.

Attendance was sparse, probably due to the mystical convergence of Holy Saturday, Passover, and the Final Four. Instead of hearing serious stories handed down from generation to generation for thousands of years (or in the Loyola Ramblers’ case, 55 years), we heard four storytellers, three of whom were very funny as they related first-hand experiences of ramblin’ man road trips and raunchy parties (the fourth merely rambled on incoherently).

We also heard a few songs, including one that included a nice Roy Orbison impression, and one that featured someone playing a melodica, a wind-powered portable keyboard instrument that looked like a tricked-up hookah (see picture).