I've tried to write fiction, which has been mostly a joke, of course, but nonetheless anybody who wants to write fiction should be entitled to his or her own fictitious world. Mine is "Johnstown, Indiana." Nothing much arcane about that: my name is John and this is my town. (Actually, I am this town's native son.) And there is no real Johnstown in Indiana, as far as my consultations of atlases, geographical dictionaries, gazetteers, etc. show.
William Faulkner has his "Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi" and Wendell Berry of Port Royal, Kentucky has his "Port William," which I don't think he has ever explicated in his fiction is in the state of Kentucky, but there is little doubt of the setting. It turns out that Port William was actually the name of Carrollton (a few hills and hollers away from Port Royal) long ago.
And "Jefferson" down the big river is a big, ugly town, burdened with a power plant in Wendell's fiction. (It is burdened with a power plant, true.) Wendell's Jefferson, which is my Johnstown, is certainly no uglier than his Port William, power plant or not. I drove there once (while I was on my employers' clock but that's another story) and it was like a thousand "quaint, rustic" Kentucky hamlets, nothing distinguishing it that I could detect. Gossipy grocery store, hound dogs lying in the middle of the street. Bucolic charm, to be sure.
I've diddled with a number of stories, which are thinly disguised reminiscences of incidents in my youth. They're pretty much all about ME. Can you imagine that? Sure you can. Writers, even obscure ones, have big egos.
And I'm a "literary stylist" (rather than a "storyteller," one taxonomy of fiction writers). Which means I love the sound of my words and as a rule am sedulous in crafting sentences. (I confess it also means that I'm not worth a dang at making up a page-turning tale with an interesting plot.)
For example, I love to use ten-dollar words like "sedulous," as in the sentence above. I hope I'm not being condescending to my highly literate readers in defining the word: it just means "painstaking." Occasionally you might read a synonym, "assiduous," which is slightly more common. In learning to write, Robert Louis Stevenson said that he "played the sedulous ape" to writers he admired, emulating their work until he found a voice of his own.
I've read a lot of treatises on how to write, by E.B. White and Henry James and E.M. Forster and John Gardner. I took them all, like the nuts at Fisher take the nut: very seriously. Other than a couple of my stories getting read aloud at the O-K-I Writers' Roundtable one October, they haven't seen the light of day.
One of the things I've enjoyed about trying to make up stories is thinking up names for towns and characters: Johnstown is in Clifty County, the county to its north is Muscatatuck County. And so forth. I once thought of calling the fictitious town modeled on Madison by the name of "Harrison Bluff." It was meant in a non-flattering way.
Benjamin Harrison was the only U.S. president from Indiana. A surprisingly good one! He of course didn't have much time to mess up, but he was more concerned with true governance than politickin'; intelligent; a reformer; incorruptible; and he did one or two good things during his tragically short tenure -- I read it on the internet!). "Bluff" is a wordplay, meaning (a) a cliff or steep hill (of which there are many along the Ohio River) and (b) a deliberate deception by a show of self-confidence ("all blow and no show").
The "Johnstown" I came up with is less damning. The town it more or less depicts doesn't deserve being accused of bluster. And Harrison, it turns out, was a pretty decent president. Bluff should be reserved for the likes of Chicago or even Columbus, Indiana, although neither municipality varies in elevation more than fifty feet.
No, "Forlorn River," a ripoff of Gary Keillor's Lake Wobegon, better suits "little ol' Madison." The other, truly legitimate eponymous John associated with this burg is its 1809 founder, John Paul, he a genuine three-holer for the ages, not a little ol' port-a-potty like me. So Johnstown it is.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Monday, February 5, 2007
We Call Football "Soccer"
My cousin Joe who lives in Nap Town said he'd watch the Colts-Bears game but would turn it off if the Colts started to do poorly. Wonder what his reaction was when the Bears ran the game kickoff all the way back for a touchdown? Not even a first down. I was doing things and didn't see the Colts make their first TD but I did see them fail to kick the extra point. Then, next I knew, dah Bearss were up 14-6. Wondered if Joe had given up by then.
Next it was halftime and the Colts were leading 16-14, and the music show was on. (I was very attentive to the dancing girls in their black outfits.) Missed those award-winning commercials they all talk about afterwards. I think the Gene Kelly elephant was one of them last year, and they continued to show it throughout the year. Switched over to Cinema Paradiso on Turner and watched it off and on and last I checked Colts were ahead 29-something, and finally at ten I heard firecrackers outside, which I figured meant the Colts had kept their lead to the end.
Sure enough. Saw and heard the fabled Tony Dungy and Peyton Manning accepting the trophy afterwards. Have little patience with the chatty announcers (axiom: you don't like traits in others you don't like in yourself), find it hard to listen to them while the game is played but can't follow the plays without their explanations so it is an uneasy alliance. Went to an IU football game once long ago and never knew where the ball was. Never fond of a game that made me feel stupid. Watched a pro football game with a once college roommate who always made it a point to make me feel stupid: never again.
Recall playing tackle football without equipment when I was about thirteen, fourteen and, miraculously, wasn't hurt -- I do recall a clothesline tackle by a gangly gorilla -- that's catching me by the chin from behind, stopping its motion entirely but having my feet fly out in front of me and gravity doing the rest.
I suppose that was comical to see, the kind of stuff that Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton were geniuses for, although I don't remember anyone laughing, including the tackler, and I recall my friend Pee Wee counseling me that yes, it's a rough game, and the tackle was fair, and I just needed to go on with the game. And by golly, I did.
The gorilla -- I'll call him Yogi Yates -- actually had an insidious-onset, degenerative neural disease similar to Huntington's chorea that caused him to gradually lose his coordination and finally took his life. At that stage of early adolescence he was strong, one of the better baseball hitters, and hard to stop when he was running in a base path or down a football field.
Yogi joined the Navy and was soon discharged when his affliction was discovered, and he spent the rest of his ambulatory days trying to get a girl -- any girl -- to pay attention to him, and then he died young. He was amiable and I had no malice toward him for that tackle. May he r.i.p.
I never cared for "touch football" but I liked the tackle games we played Sunday afternoons on the long rectangular yard that was part of the property of the water-pumping station for the insane asylum on the hilltop and the house of the station's caretaker. Seems that man, with thinning sandy hair, wire-rimmed glasses and khaki twill uniform, was congenial enough and took no issue with a bunch of rowdy, scuffling, potty-mouthed boys spending a couple of hours on that lawn on those autumn and winter afternoons.
Didn't see much of him or the missus, with her tightly permed, gray-tinged hair, spectacles, in her no-nonsense print housedress, black lace-up oxfords and white ankle socks. They probably watched Omnibus or whatever was on TV on those certain-slant-of-light days and didn't mind the good-natured donnybrook outside.
Or maybe they enjoyed hearing it, as I enjoy hearing the Franks Drive Irregulars on their bikes, trikes, skateboards, jumping on trampolines. And yelling, always yelling. Their hollering -- and in the case of the girls, shrieking -- is always as welcome as sweet birdsong.
Next it was halftime and the Colts were leading 16-14, and the music show was on. (I was very attentive to the dancing girls in their black outfits.) Missed those award-winning commercials they all talk about afterwards. I think the Gene Kelly elephant was one of them last year, and they continued to show it throughout the year. Switched over to Cinema Paradiso on Turner and watched it off and on and last I checked Colts were ahead 29-something, and finally at ten I heard firecrackers outside, which I figured meant the Colts had kept their lead to the end.
Sure enough. Saw and heard the fabled Tony Dungy and Peyton Manning accepting the trophy afterwards. Have little patience with the chatty announcers (axiom: you don't like traits in others you don't like in yourself), find it hard to listen to them while the game is played but can't follow the plays without their explanations so it is an uneasy alliance. Went to an IU football game once long ago and never knew where the ball was. Never fond of a game that made me feel stupid. Watched a pro football game with a once college roommate who always made it a point to make me feel stupid: never again.
Recall playing tackle football without equipment when I was about thirteen, fourteen and, miraculously, wasn't hurt -- I do recall a clothesline tackle by a gangly gorilla -- that's catching me by the chin from behind, stopping its motion entirely but having my feet fly out in front of me and gravity doing the rest.
I suppose that was comical to see, the kind of stuff that Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton were geniuses for, although I don't remember anyone laughing, including the tackler, and I recall my friend Pee Wee counseling me that yes, it's a rough game, and the tackle was fair, and I just needed to go on with the game. And by golly, I did.
The gorilla -- I'll call him Yogi Yates -- actually had an insidious-onset, degenerative neural disease similar to Huntington's chorea that caused him to gradually lose his coordination and finally took his life. At that stage of early adolescence he was strong, one of the better baseball hitters, and hard to stop when he was running in a base path or down a football field.
Yogi joined the Navy and was soon discharged when his affliction was discovered, and he spent the rest of his ambulatory days trying to get a girl -- any girl -- to pay attention to him, and then he died young. He was amiable and I had no malice toward him for that tackle. May he r.i.p.
I never cared for "touch football" but I liked the tackle games we played Sunday afternoons on the long rectangular yard that was part of the property of the water-pumping station for the insane asylum on the hilltop and the house of the station's caretaker. Seems that man, with thinning sandy hair, wire-rimmed glasses and khaki twill uniform, was congenial enough and took no issue with a bunch of rowdy, scuffling, potty-mouthed boys spending a couple of hours on that lawn on those autumn and winter afternoons.
Didn't see much of him or the missus, with her tightly permed, gray-tinged hair, spectacles, in her no-nonsense print housedress, black lace-up oxfords and white ankle socks. They probably watched Omnibus or whatever was on TV on those certain-slant-of-light days and didn't mind the good-natured donnybrook outside.
Or maybe they enjoyed hearing it, as I enjoy hearing the Franks Drive Irregulars on their bikes, trikes, skateboards, jumping on trampolines. And yelling, always yelling. Their hollering -- and in the case of the girls, shrieking -- is always as welcome as sweet birdsong.
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