Going to the dogs

My Yorkie, Bubba, was one of the stars at "Pet Tales," a recent Marmaduke Writing Factory author event.

       

The Book Promotion That Keeps on Promoting, Forever...

Charlottesville, Downtown Mall

C-SPAN Book TV interview Mar. 18, 2011 VA Festival of the Book

Sunny, early spring day in the Southland. C-SPAN sets up a command post in the Charlottesville-Albemarle Visitor Center at the far eastern end of the Downtown Mall. Hand-held camera, interviewer, producer, author. Visitors strolling back and forth in the background. The antithesis of the studio cave.
It's a wrap, and these 15 minutes will get plugged into time gaps on C-SPAN again and again, forever. 

Chatting with Jeremy Schaap

Just before Super Bowl Sunday, ESPN contacted Knopf to set up an interview of me by Jeremy Schaap. He wanted to talk about NATIVE AMERICAN SON for his radio show, This Sporting Life. We met at the Knopf offices on Broadway, between W. 55th and W. 56th streets. They are in the Random House building, the one with the lobby lined floor to very high ceiling with just about every great American book you've ever heard of. Sacred ground.
Jesse is a self-described track and field guy. His fine book Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics is dutifully listed in the bibliography of my biography of Jim Thorpe. His father, Dick Schaap, endeared himself to me not least because he wondered in 2000 just what Babe Ruth had done in the previous 50 years to put him ahead of Thorpe in some of those end-of-century Greatest Ever polls.

Knopf set us up in a conference room, with the ESPN producer, Jesse Baker, holding the mic between us. Jeremy was direct, thorough, persistent, and thoughtful. A great interviewer who knew his Thorpe. We talked about Carlisle, about the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, the West Point-Carlisle football game several months later. About track and field today.
It struck me that he is just about the best example of Thorpe's legacy. Like so many other American kids in the 20th century, he learned about Thorpe from his father. Of course, not every kid can claim the likes of Dick Schaap, someone who wrote so well about the Olympics and so much else.
But the essential transmission is there. The father, who probably heard the story from his father, recounts the story of the great American Indian athlete to his son. The circle continues unbroken.

Listen to the interview: here, on the right column of my blog page >>>>

Seeing Liz Taylor at JFK

Late afternoon, TWA Terminal, JFK airport, sometime in the late 1980s: I am wandering around this amazing Eero Saarinen-designed landmark, waiting for someone to arrive from somewhere. 

As I stroll along the mezzanine (see photo below), taking in the light, angles, vertiginous ramps, there is a sudden change in the atmosphere. Maybe it is a noise, a rumble. Or an electric charge. Something is traveling through the air, a kind of communication. Something is happening down on the floor of the terminal. It is a phenomenon I have never experienced before or will ever again.

I go to the edge of the mezzanine and look down. People are moving in one direction, to my left. They aren't running, just being drawn as if to something magnetic. I can hear gasps, little cries. It's not a disaster, exactly. These are not noises of fear or horror. 

Suddenly I see the source of the reaction. It's a passenger cart, coming from the left, zipping through the terminal to a gate. The thrill in the air is now beyond intense. It is alive. It is hot. It is focused on the dark-haired woman sitting in the cart, waving to the crowd like a queen.

"Who is it?" I call down to the crowd below. 

"It's Elizabeth Taylor!" they shout back. 

Stars in the sky generate heat. That's why they twinkle from so far away. That crowd in the TWA terminal has just seen one of the greatest movie stars of all and ever. A shooting star that won't come our way again. 

Jim Thorpe: The Greatest Ever?

Jim Thorpe: The Greatest Ever?

The Good Old Days

1924: Thorpe, second from left, with NFL Rock Island Independents

Looks like a Saturday afternoon high school game, right? The NFL is only four years old here. Thorpe is four years away from his last football game.

It's 14 years since football was opened up in 1910, with running plays and the forward pass taking the place of deadly, scrum-like mass momentum attacks that, in 1909, had caused 24 fatalities -- fatalities -- in prep school and collegiate football.

Back then there wasn't any professional football to speak of. The Canton Bulldogs and the Massillon Tigers, teams from towns about ten miles apart in Stark County, Ohio, fought each other for what we can think of as the first Super Bowl championship games. Nobody outside of Ohio, if even, paid much attention. 

Until Thorpe joined the Bulldogs in 1915. The greatest athlete in the world brought desperately-needed attention to the struggling pro game. In recognition of that service and with profound gratitude, Thorpe was unanimously chosen as the first president of the new league in 1920. Ever wonder why the Professional Football Hall of Fame is in Canton? Or why a statue of Thorpe is the only one in the entry hall there?

The Canton Bulldogs and the Rock Island Independents did not survive the 1920s. By the end of that decade the pro game had moved to big cities -- and fan bases -- like Chicago (Bears) and New York (Giants). The Green Bay Packers remain, of course, the exception that proves the rule.  

Today professional football is America's most popular spectator sport by far. This Sunday, when the Green Bay Packers face the Pittsburgh Steelers, just remember that there is no Super Bowl without the NFL. And there would be no NFL without Jim Thorpe.

Controlled Tangents

Editing. The art that separates the kids from the grownups. The skill a writer never feels she's mastered. The task that finds you in your pjs at 5 in the afternoon because you haven't left your desk since you got out of bed at 6 am.

My high school English teacher in California, a Berkeley grad, compared a  piece of expository writing to a piece of string. She drew a vertical line on the blackboard and said, " You see: there is a beginning and an end. A finite line." 

My editor at Knopf takes it one step further. If he drew that line, he would then add another one, curving around the first, that would end up looking like the rod of Asclepius. The second line, the snake, as it were, represents what he calls "controlled tangents." (I tried to explain this once to another writer and he mis-heard me and thought I said, "Controlled tantrums." We laughed 'til we cried.)

My editor is making a couple of important points. One: he does not want, as he put it, a narrative "clothesline" -- a string of facts hung along in a row to dry. That's boring for the reader. Two: especially in non-fiction, the writer has periodically to take little trips -- tangents -- off that narrative line to provide background and context.

But -- and this is the controlled part -- each tangent has also never to lose sight of the subject AND to return in due time to my high school teacher's finite line.  

It's a tricky momentum, as hard to capture as a slithery snake. And you can bet that when the editor says cut, he means trim those tangents in tight and hard.