The Bookmarks of My Life

            This past weekend I read a mystery novel, as usual, but it was a Kindle book on my iPad so I didn’t need a bookmark. If I had been reading a book of the dead-tree variety, however, it’s good to know that I would have had a wide range of bookmarks to choose from. Boy, would it have been a wide range.

            A lot of readers, I know, don’t bother with formal bookmarks. They use grocery receipts, business cards, dollar bills — whatever is at hand. I’ve heard stories of people buying a book at a secondhand bookstore and finding, when they opened it, a large bill inside that had been used as a bookmark. You don’t get that on Kindle.

            I, on the other hand, belong to the group of people who collect bookmarks and who look at them as part and parcel of their reading history. Toward that end, I recently took an inventory of my bookmark collection.

Memories of Bookstores Past

            The great majority of my bookmarks come from bookstores that give them away as advertising when a customer buys a book. As might be expected, I have a ton of bookmarks from the local bookstores where I regularly shop. That includes Bookshop Santa Cruz, the recently closed Crossroads Books in Watsonville, and River House Books in Carmel.

            A few of my bookmarks aren’t from bookstores at all. I have one my sister sent me for a literary magazine that published one of her poems and another from some sort of online organization that claims to connect writers and independent bookstores. And I have a bookmark from Gayle’s Bakery in Capitola, where I have never bought or read a book, but have purchased far more breakfast treats than are probably good for me.

            And I have a few bookmarks from stores I’ve visited in the past that no longer exist. There’s one from The Book Keeper in West Yellowstone MT (which I last visited in 1989) Toyon Books in Healdsburg CA, Phileas Fogg’s Travel Books in Palo Alto, and Borders, which failed to outlast the local bookstores that were so terrified of it.

Ah, The Places I’ve Been!

            I even have a couple of bookmarks from stores I’ve never been to, including City Lights in San Francisco and Stinson Beach Books, just north of the City. Those turned up in secondhand books I bought elsewhere. Not as good a find as a $20 bill, but a find nevertheless.

            Of the bookmarks that reflect my travels (and purchases), I come across the following: Ravenna Third Place Books in Seattle, Bart’s Books in Ojai CA, Point Reyes Books, The Book Den in Santa Barbara, Gallery Books in Mendocino Twice Told Books in Guerneville CA, and Upper Case Books in Snohomish WA.

            And I’m sure if I did a thorough search of the house, I could come up with a dozen more.

            Finally, there’s a special class of bookmarks: the two I paid for. One was purchased at the Oxford University bookstore in 1990 and shows an image of the college, with no additional information. The other was bought at a stationery store in Venice in 2009. Not bad souvenirs, when you come to think of it. They cost almost nothing and last a really long time if only you can manage to avoid losing them.

Subaru Accuracy

            No author ever sets out to make a mistake, and no author ever writes a perfect book. That’s the case with fiction and nonfiction books, both of which I’ve written. A book is simply too big a project to be bug-free.

            In a work of nonfiction, many mistakes are indisputable. The author spells someone’s name wrong or gets a date wrong. The author’s interpretations of the facts can also be wrong, but these are subject to endless debate and need not concern us at the moment.

            The question of accuracy in fiction similarly involves considerable ambiguity and openness to interpretation. The author wants to get details right, obviously, but if she has a certain type of pistol ejecting its shell casings when that type of pistol in fact doesn’t, how important is the mistake? I’d argue (and some would argue otherwise) that as long as she’s not writing a forensic-investigation novel and plays fair with the reader about the clue of the shell casings, it’s a pretty minor error.

The Intentional ‘Mistake’

            Fiction being fiction, authors are free to imagine things that don’t exist. Suppose a mystery writer was setting a story in a clearly identified national park, using many of its real elements as part of the tale. Then suppose said author gave said park a fictitious old lodge that the real park doesn’t have, in order to provide a place for suspects, victims and more ambiguous characters to mingle. Would that be a mistake?

            Of course not. It’s fiction, and as long as the author acknowledges that it was done intentionally for the sake of the story, where’s the harm? The important thing in a piece of fiction is that the imaginary world is true to itself and in the larger sense reflective of the real world in some way.

            I got to thinking along these lines last week, as I was working on my fourth mystery novel. I’ve gotten into the habit of showing the new book to Linda piece by piece as I write it. She often catches typos and raises points about characters and facts. It’s very helpful, really.

The Mistake That Wasn’t

            Looking over a recent passage, she came to a scene where I had one of the characters driving a certain type of Subaru station wagon and promptly told me Subaru didn’t make such a wagon. Trying to get it right, I had looked that up on Wikipedia beforehand and found that they did make such a wagon in the early to mid 1990s, and that since the story was set in 1997, the character could indeed have quite plausibly been driving one.

            And then I got to thinking. Suppose I hadn’t looked it up, had been wrong about the model, and the mistake had made it into the book. If someone had pointed out the mistake to me, I would have been annoyed at having made it and made a note to myself to be more careful the next time.

            If, on the other hand, someone had made the criticism that the character in question didn’t seem to be the sort of person who would drive a Subaru, I’d have been gobsmacked because I would stand accused of not being true within my fictional world.

            I raised the point with Linda a couple of days later, and she got what I was saying. She also reassured me on the point I considered important, saying of the character in my book, “She’s definitely the sort of person who’d be driving a Subaru.”

            We’re good.

I Remember Them Well

            The death of Joe Garagiola last month, brings us closer to the end of the era of iconic baseball players. Not that Garagiola was a great player himself (though he was better than he pretended to be later on), but he belonged to the last generation of ball players who played when baseball was the national pastime and its practitioners were the princes of the sports world.

            As a member of what may be the last generation to widely and seriously collect baseball cards, I feel the passage of that time. The first ten years of my life, baseball was the American sport. Ten years later it was supplanted by football. Baseball still does well as a niche sport, but it probably will never be the national game again.

            Probably the turning point came in 1959, the year after the famous NFL championship game (no Super Bowls back then) in which Johnny Unitas led the Baltimore Colts to a comeback win over the New York Giants. That game drove the NFL forward, and it never looked back.

Growing Up In Between

            In 1959, I was nine years old and beginning to seriously follow baseball for the first time. The great players of that era, nearly all gone now, are the ones I remember fondly. Ted Williams and Stan Musial were nearing the end of their careers, as were two of my Dodger heroes, Duke Snider and Gil Hodges. Willie Mays and Hank Aaron were in their prime. It was in 1959 that Sandy Koufax struck out 18 San Francisco Giants on Aug. 31 and gave us a glimpse of what was to come.

            My father took me to Dodger games in Los Angeles, but he liked football more. Probably that had something to do with growing up in the South. In 1959 there might be one college football game on TV each Saturday and a pro game on Sunday. It was a condition today’s sports fan can barely comprehend.

            Radio broadcasts of baseball held more sway then than they do now. When the Dodgers came to Los Angeles, they were on KMPC radio the first couple of years. They then moved to KFI, a 50,000-watt clear-channel station with a signal so strong we once picked it up after dark in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and caught the tail end of Koufax’s first no-hitter.

Last Man Standing

            Think of the Hall of Famers who were stars in 1959, and you realize that few are still alive. Mays and Aaron, for sure, and Frank Robinson. Among pitchers, only Whitey Ford comes to mind, unless you count Koufax, who hadn’t really hit his stride yet.

            Whenever I see an obituary of one of the great ball players of that era, a piece of me dies along with it. Those passings are still big news because there are a lot of people who remembered seeing them play at a time when Major League Baseball was the big thing in sports. We mourn not only the players, but the primacy of the sport they played as well.

            When the Hall of Famers from the 1970s onward begin to die in significant numbers, they will no doubt get decent obituaries in The New York Times (assuming the Times is still around), but it won’t feel the same. They’ll be mourned as the superb athletes they were, but not as American icons. They played the wrong game at the wrong time for that.

The Unending Money Chase

            In the past week my email inbox has been brimming with correspondence from a number of old friends.

            I’ve heard from Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Joe Biden, Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton, Kristen Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, Chelsea Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Wendy Davis, James Carville, Barney Frank, Barbara Mikulski, Barbara Boxer, and Congressman Pete Aguilar.

            And those are just the individuals staying in touch. I’m also hearing from organizations like the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, End Citizens United and EMILY’s List.

            What can I tell you? I’m a popular guy with a lot of famous friends who all love me for one thing.

            They want my money.

The Mother’s Milk of Politics

            It’s getting to be tiresome. I understand that it takes money to run a political campaign, and that, as former California Assembly Speaker Jess Unruh used to say, “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.” Thus has it always been and always will be.

            But if my experience is any indication, it has been accelerating out of control lately.

            It seems as if almost every day, there’s a deadline of some sort for raising X number of dollars to keep Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, or some other Republican villain du jour from destroying America as we know it. All I have to do to stop that is give a dollar or two or three.

            Of course, no sooner have the funds been raised to stave off the crisis at hand than there’s a new crisis and a new deadline the following week. It never ends.

            It’s a technological problem, in some ways. In the old days, they’d have had to send a letter and pay for paper, envelopes and postage. That had the effect of imposing some restraint. A blast email costs nothing but the expense of having some hack write it, so there’s no reason to hold back from sending as many as possible — to the point of ridiculousness.

Can’t Smell the Ordure

Now I realize Democrats feel they have to target smaller donors to offset some of the bigger contributors the Republicans get. But even so: Do the people who send all these emails have any idea how obnoxious and offensive the ordinary citizen finds them? How truly sickened most people are that our political system has become an endless pursuit of dollars?

Probably not. I think today’s political operatives have been living in the outhouse for so long it smells like a rose to them. I’m reminded of the story of former California Governor Gray Davis, who was asked by Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters what politician he most admired and why?

            I forget who the politician was, but I’ll never forget the why. Davis said he admired the individual he named because no matter how busy a day he’d had, the man always found time to make 100 fund-raising calls each night.

            That’s not exactly what you’d call a profile in courage.

            Years ago, I saw Louis Malle’s film Phantom India, and a scene that has stuck with me ever since was the image of a swarm of beggars approaching the camera with their hands out. These days I feel as if I’m revisiting that image every time I check my inbox. Our politics has become a beggar’s opera, and we’re all worse off for it.

Easing Out of the Fast Lane

            For the past year, I’ve been phasing out my business. In February, I turned 66, and while my health is pretty good and I enjoy what I’ve done for a living the past quarter century, I want to spend more time on my mystery novels and do more traveling with Linda, now that she’s retired.

            At the same time, I don’t want to give it up entirely. Not yet, anyway. So I’ve been trying to figure out exactly how to cut back while keeping a hand in it. My recent experience with emergency surgery only served to remind me of the uncertainty of life and the importance of taking steps to make sure I’m doing what I want to for the rest of it.

            In retiring, but not really, I have one advantage. I’ve been a consultant with a number of clients, which gives me some leeway in terms of cutting back to just a few and working for them until they or I decide not to do it anymore.

50 Ways to Leave Your Business

            The scaling-down process began at the end of 2014, when I decided to stop looking for new clients. If someone specifically sought me out (and, to my surprise, that actually happened a few times), I’d consider it, but I wasn’t going to do any more selling and would concentrate on existing clients.

            Within that group, there were a few who were probably on the way out, whether from change in personnel, selling a business, or simply moving in a direction where my services weren’t going to be that important anymore. In a few instances like that, I decided to take the initiative and break it off myself, letting them know I was moving into retirement. I sense that a couple of them seemed relieved that I’d spared them an impending awkwardness.

            Finally, I gave some thought to the question of the qualities of a client I’d still like to work for, given that I don’t really need the money, but still want to do a little bit of what I think I’ve done well for a number of years. I came up with three qualities for a retirement, or semi-retirement client.

It Has to Be Interesting

            The first is that the work has to be interesting and not unduly stressful. Being of a curious disposition anyway, I’ve found all my work interesting to one degree or another, but clients who have long-term need for someone available at the drop of a hat, who have jobs with short deadlines and a lot of people to work with, are clients I can do without these days.

            Second, the people have to be good to work with. I’ve never had clients who were total jerks because I don’t put up with that. But people who can’t make up their minds, who don’t reply to emails or return phone calls, who make a job too cumbersome are people I can do without these days.

            And finally, they have to be clients who pay on time. Chasing down unpaid bills is probably the number one drawback of having your own business, and I’m over it. If you can’t get me a check within three weeks of my sending an invoice, find someone else to do your work.

            And looking over those last three paragraphs, it just dawned on me. This is how it should have been all along.

Taking a Detour from the Story

            In the recent Steven Spielberg film Bridge of Spies there’s an early scene in which Tom Hanks talks about insurance. He’s having a civil debate over drinks with another attorney about whether an accident that kills several people should be counted as several occurrences, with the insurance company liable for each one, or as one occurrence, with the insurance for the accident covering the maximum amount per occurrence, regardless of the number of deaths and injuries.

            I’m assuming the scene was put in to show — prior to Hanks defending a Soviet spy and later negotiating the release of an American spy pilot — that the character had a keen legal mind, which would come into play as the drama progressed.

            But even so: Talking about insurance law? That’s a pretty gutsy thing to do in a big-budget movie aimed at a wide popular audience. After all, what if the insurance debate put people to sleep?

He Believed in Himself

            Now I’m guessing again, but I suspect Spielberg had enough faith in himself, Hanks, and the Coen brothers (who wrote the dialogue) to feel that he could put that scene in the movie and not lose his audience. In fact, by developing the character, he might have pulled at least some viewers deeper into the film. It certainly made a positive impression on me.

            Spielberg is a master story teller, and job one for a story teller is to make it interesting. An awful lot of terrific story ideas have never become good books or movies because the artists couldn’t get the details of story telling right. It has a lot to do with pacing, weaving together the threads of the story, and imparting information at the right time in an effective way. Not many people can do it.

            Adding detailed information that doesn’t immediately move the story forward is even harder. It can be worth doing because character development and creating a sense of mood or place can make a story richer and more memorable. Think, for example, of Dickens taking two pages to describe the howling storm that rages on the night Magwitch returns to London to see Pip again in Great Expectations.

I’ll Take the Details

            It’s hard to say how typical I am, but I’m one of the readers who wants a bit of detail. If a murder takes place during a bird-watching expedition, I want the author to tell me something about bird watching and why it exerts a spell on its followers. If characters are regularly meeting in their favorite bar, I want the author to tell me a bit about the bar, because in doing so, the author is telling me more about the characters.

            These days I read a lot of books where detail of that sort is missing. And at one level I can understand the reasons. An author or filmmaker understandably wants to keep the story going and the pace as fast as possible, and, let’s face it, a lot of times the extra details are laid out in a way that doesn’t work. So why pause to admire the scenery when it’s so easy to have more action?

            A good story teller, and one with a sense of depth and breadth, is more likely, however, to say something along these lines: I find it interesting, and if it’s interesting to me, I think I can make it interesting for everybody else.  And then does just that. Is it a skill that can be taught? I rather doubt it.

Get Me Rewrite

            They still had a functioning linotype machine in the composing room when I started work at the newspaper in 1972. It was gradually being overtaken by early versions of computerized typesetting (CompuGraphic was the brand name), and eventually the linotype machine was painted over and put by the front door as a sort of freestanding sculpture that would have scared the entrails out of any competent liability attorney.

            We didn’t have computers in the newsroom. What we had were typewriters, and some pretty ancient ones at that. Most were Underwoods, with a couple of Royals thrown in. We used them to type our stories on cheap paper that still had chunks of wood floating in it.

            When the stories were complete, we didn’t hit a “send” button, we took the paper out of the typewriter, arranged the pages in order, and pushed the corners of them over a sharp metal spike on the managing editor’s desk. A couple of people perforated their thumbs trying to do that.

Composing a Story on the Fly

            There were reporters at the county seat in Santa Cruz, and there were other times when reporters were out in the field and had to get a story in under deadline. Today, they’d write them on a laptop and email them in. Back then, the stories had to be dictated.

            What that meant was that the reporter would call in to the office, sometimes from a pay phone, and dictate a story to another reporter, who was cradling a phone receiver on one shoulder and typing the story. I’ve always felt that the ability to dictate a story cleanly was one of the great journalistic skills of the time. Not many people could do it well back then, and I suspect hardly anyone could do it now if forced to.

            It’s hard enough to keep a story straight when you have it in front of you and can check it. When you can’t see the story and have to remember exactly what you said — well, let’s just say that takes an awful lot of concentration. An almost inhuman amount, really.

One of the Best There Was

            I got to thinking about dictation recently when I saw one of our former reporters, Lee Quarnstrom, a couple of months back. He was in Santa Cruz, plugging When I Was a Dynamiter, his memoir, which had a large focus on the time he spent with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in the 1960s.

            That’s not the sort of background you’d expect to produce a mind so clear and focused that its owner could almost seamlessly dictate a 750-word story, on a tight deadline, complete with paragraphing and punctuation. Lee did it all the time. Other reporters needed a lot of help from the news staffer typing the story, but with Lee, you could just type what he was saying and make only the slightest of changes later.

            Years later, when he was working for the San Jose Mercury, Lee described how a computer guru came to the Santa Cruz news office and explained the benefits of the new computer system, especially how it allowed you to move paragraphs and rewrite things easily. Lee said he didn’t need all that because he just sat down and wrote the story from beginning to end.

            “Oh,” sniffed the computer guru condescendingly. “You must have learned to write on a typewriter.”

            Damn straight, and he and the rest of us who did were better writers for the experience. It’s one clear case of how an improvement in technology isn’t entirely an improvement.