The protagonist is Maisie, a ninth grader whose three best friends in elementary and middle school were boys. Maisie moves away for a year to see if life with her mom and stepdad is better than it is with her dad and stepmom; it’s not. So she comes back home for high school, and finds that her gang-of-four friendship has changed. The main reason is that Maisie developed a woman’s body while she was away.

You may be able to guess from the title that an incident follows, and Maisie has to figure out how to move on from it–how much was her fault, whether they can still be friends, how to cooperate with the investigation spearheaded by her stepmother. What the book made me think about, though, is the nature of adult male-female friendships, and how women sometimes have to make similar choices after similar incidents.

Touch also reminded me of a journalistic book by Seattle writer Emily White. It’s Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut. I remember when White was researching the book. She put ads in The Stranger that asked readers to contact her if they were called “slut” in their school days. The girls who responded had a lot in common, including early physical development, and relative poverty compared to classmates. I recommend that book to anyone who remembers girls who were tagged with that label. You will surely remember them more charitably after you read Fast Girls.

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

On the latest Art Zone with Nancy and Lyall, I show off Damali Ayo’s How to Rent a Negro. If you thought blackpeopleloveus.com was funny, this book is for you. As the title suggests, it’s a (satirical) manual for renters (whites) and rentals (blacks), complete with invoices and pricing guides for transactions that, until now, have been free–like the ones I list above.

Ayo is an author and artist from Portland whose other projects have included panhandling for reparations. She says that inappropriate requests to touch one’s hair (or touching it without asking) are based in a legacy of slavery–and a false and unjust sense of ownership. So she encourages blacks to bill for actions based in that legacy.

An author even closer to home releases her book this month on winning that workplace battle while pleasing the people you need to work for. Shannea Patterson’s Why I Wag My Tail is memoir, how-to, self-help, and humor all in one. She says if you’re a brown person working in corporate America, the book is for you. It’s peppered with anecdotes from real Seattle-area workplaces–pick it up and see if you recognize your colleagues!

-Phyllis

And that is where a story comes from: a friend’s anecdote. Or maybe better: from a friend’s anecdote but only after a years of storytelling apprenticeship. Or, better yet: from a friend’s anecdote but only after years of apprenticeship mixed with a now mature sense of how to do an MRI on the world you know really well, which in this case is money. The story about money invokes thoughts of greed — a deadly sin — and greed suggests, in that flickering twilight of the imagination, overflow: “one guy opens his envelope and gets nothing and he goes crazy.” Yes. Even in telling us this, Frey shows us how he writes. For three sentences it is all what his friend told him. Then in the last sentence he turns to the world of his imagination: “And in this scene,” it begins. So where did the story come from? From the writer’s sensibility, his interest in seeing a thought experiment played out, his own pursuit of career, ambition, desire for success. Oh, and this thing his friend said about a pretty horrible-sounding dinner.