One a them Desert Island Quiz Thingies..

Can I Take Her Too?

Another excuse to show Marilyn amid the Books. Excellent!

Well Eli sent these questions along and I figure, hey, why not? What a nice guy, Eli is. I fact, once he gets through “thanking” all the “Sarah Connor’s” in the vicinity, my emmisary will be along to thank Eli too :-)


You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. ‘Cause all the Kafka was taken, and Russian hurts my tongue...and choosing Fahrenheit 451 is too cutesy, po-mo-self-referential.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Oh God yes. Every Heinlein heroine, esp. “Friday”. Ripley from “Alien”. During my misspent youth, Dagney Taggart from Atlas Shrugged (but I think I just wanted to see if I could erotically tease her to a point of unbearability so extreme that she'd scream,“Fuck Me Karl Marx”!)

Most of my ex-girlfriends…

The last book you bought is:

Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel.
and
Nonzero: The logic of human destiny by Robert Wright.
(Jesus, who buys one book at a time?)

The last book you read:

When the Women Came Out to Dance by Elmore Leonard.

Mr. Leonard is simply the very, very best at character exposition through dialogue. And his stories burn like happy fire. Here are his Ten Rules (trimmed way down, so go check out the full text…which I break regularly and at my peril.

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1. Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2. Avoid prologues.
They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword...
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . .
. . . he admonished gravely...
5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use “suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” what do the “American and the girl with him” look like? “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things...
And finally:
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

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If Elmore Leonard spilled a can of Alphabet Soup on my kitchen floor, I’d stop what I was doing and read it.

What are you currently reading?

Re-reading, actually. I pulled Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From off the shelf. I take Carver in little sips, since he’s really brutal, but he was also one of the finest masters of the short story in the last 50 years. One of those people I morph into a bad mimic of if I read too much of him. And man, even long-gone, he can teach a wordy bastard like me when to trim, when to chop and when to STFU.

Five books you would take to a deserted island:

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Yes, I cheated. I don’t believe in the “No Win” scenario. I got a commendation for original thinking.)
Lincoln on Democracy. Lincoln’s own words edited by Mario Cuomo and Harold Holzer.
The Bible plus Apocrypha: Best, bloodiest fiction ever, and I can “look for loopholes” as W.C. Fields said. Also I will hollow out “Leviticus” through "Second Chronicles” and use the space to smuggle in some top-shelf porn.
The Green Beret’s Guide to Outdoor Survival…’cause driftglass gotta eat.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons)? And Why?

Steve Gilliard, because he’s always got interesting opinions, and it’ll probably piss him off, and I’d like to get some military/historical reading recommendations from him.

James Wolcott, because he's plain brilliant and his writing is Required Reading for me, and why the hell not?

Maureen Dowd, because what’s the worst that could happen?