Real Cutting, Real Pasting

I am cutting and pasting again. I mean, with real scissors and paper. I was writing a story that started with a single, clear through-line, but by the time I had generated 15 pages it had become a mass of pages with, um, not so many paragraph breaks. There were distinct scenes and episodes — definitely a story in all of it — but scrolling through the pages I could see that the beginning, middle and end were spread throughout. (Why the scrambling happened is another story.) I saw that I would need to comb through every page to pool the lines, sentences, and paragraphs that needed to become my first three pages. And I saw that the middle section demanded bits and pieces from page 3, 7, 9, and again on pages 11-13. And so on. The electronic cutting and pasting that I saw in my future came with a dizzying, maze-y feeling. Where to even begin?

And then I remembered what I had done once, many years ago, on the advice of a college professor. He encouraged his students to cut their papers up with scissors to improve them. “Print them out, lay them out, and cut out what doesn’t work,” he had said. “And paste or tape together the rest. You will be able to see how things go together much more clearly if you do.” He told us we would never see text in quite the same way after we had gotten our hands dirty with our own words.

He was right. It always worked. But then I bought a computer and felt such a surge of pleasure at seeing how easy it was to eliminate the physicality of it that 3-D cutting and pasting became historical. Computers created a new paradigm that exchanged dirty for clean: with a computer editing could be as clean as thought itself. Should a paragraph come closer to the top? Not a problem: click, drag, done. It’s how we edit now. But in writing that story the solution had to be dirty, not clean, and I was glad to have the old-school model.

So I printed out the whole text, the way I did so many years ago, and I laid pages out on my kitchen table. I used a Sharpie to write numbers on sections, and then I scissored pages up and taped and stapled them together, in order. I ended up with a new, shredded document in front of me that I re-typed — which had its own effect, something else I’d forgotten: re-situated, each word became once a physical object again, and the finished story felt more hand made.

But you can still ditch the white-out.

Frank’s Son’s Wild Years

On the show last week I recommended the new Tom Waits biography by Barney Hoskyns, Lowside of the Road: a Life of Tom Wait. The book is not a great biography in the tradition of Peter Gay’s biography of Freud or Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce: the writing lacks the music of those great biographies, and Hoskyns did not have access to Waits himself, beyond some interviews he conducted periodically with Waits up to the middle 1980s. But it is well-researched and it is full, tracing Waits’ life from Whittier, California (where Richard Nixon was born and buried) to Waits’ first gigs in coffee houses in San Diego, his first songs, his first time in the recording studio, and on up through his career-change in New York with albums such as swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs. New York meant a new circle of friends, which led to his scoring Frances Ford Coppola’s, One From the Heart, and to his meeting Jim Jarmusch, who cast him in two of his films. A little later he worked with the avant-garde theater producer, Robert Wilson (Einstein on the Beach). Waits now holds a unique, sui generis place in the culture: he is a complex celebrity who has the scruffy respectability of a (Bukowski-esque, anyway) man of letters, the up-all-night air of a torch singer, the wit of a comedian, the allure of a star of the silver screen.

And he has another thing, too, that not many people get: people know that he is a channeler of things in the culture. Waits is, finally, one of the people who are saying things we need to hear, even if they are weird and disturbing, or have the aura of the carny barker. “Did you hear the news about Edward? / On the back of his head / He had another Face,” he sings in “Poor Edward.” And in “What’s He Building In There?” he writes a very funny short story, told from the neighbors’ point of view, with background clanking of pots and ringing of bells, about a man who won’t wave back at them and who is “driving nails” into his floors.

In “Big in Japan,” he writes his own comic, larger-than-life mythology:

I got the powder but not the gun

I got the dog but not the bun

I got the clouds but not the sky

I got the stripes but not the tie

But heh I’m big in Japan I’m big in Japan I’m big in Japan

And so on. The biggest merit of Lowside of the Road, in fact, is that it sends you back to the music — all the way back, in my case, to the first fine record, The Heart of Saturday Night. It was recorded by a 23-year-old who sounded — but we are no longer surprised — somehow 40.

-Lyall