daniel prazer

As far as I can tell, I’ve seen nothing but father-son relationships for the past year and a half.

They appear in books, movies — even television shows, and I’m not much of a TV watcher.

And I know why. My relationship with my own father, from the time I turned twelve, went downhill. That’s the age he was when he watched his own dad keel over from a heart attack at the breakfast table while he got ready for his day. My grandfather, as my dad told it, was dead before he hit the floor.

He only told me this because, around that time, he was yelling at my brother for not picking up a candy wrapper, and I stepped in between them. He told me to mind my own business. I grabbed him by the shirt and slammed him into the wall and said, “Why should I listen to you? You’re nothing but a fucking drunk.” He had a few inches on me, the body of an All American football player and wrestler softened by middle age, but in that moment, I stood eye-to-eye with him; I had him back on his heels for once. He called me a loser, though he apologized the next day.

The next day he tearfully apologized to me and admitted he was a drunk. He never uttered the word alcoholic, as far as I know.

I’ll skip a few years, a divorce, a few arrests for drunken driving, a distancing in our relationship to the point where we didn’t talk for a few years. But the truth of the matter is that he was a raging alcoholic, and nobody knew extent of it — he started seriously drinking when he took a job sweeping up at a bar when he was fifteen.

Of course, I didn’t know about this until after he shot himself in the side of the head on June 2, 2009.

That’s when I started noticing fathers in nearly everything, and in hindsight, everything I’d ever read. The image of Quoyle’s fatherhood in Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News breaks my heart now, where it once inspired me. The distance between Frank Wheeler and his sons in Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road seems eerily prescient now. I ache for Ballinger, the father who learns his pregnant daughter will marry one of her college professors in Richard Bausch’s amazing short story “Aren’t You Happy For Me?” I could go through my bookshelves and list you example after example, and do the same with my DVD collection.

In that one moment of despair that followed infinite others, when Dad squeezed the trigger of that .32, my view of life began to change. I truly believe fiction is a mirror of life, but I know — not just understand on an intellectual level, but know it in my core now — that that compact between reader and writer, director and viewer, is a two-way street, though not one that the writer or director has any control over.

I’ll be the last person to urge restraint upon writers; self-censorship makes for crap fiction on the page or on the screen, and stories of happy families don’t make good stories. Neither, though, do laziness or easy exits from plots. Every single example I mentioned does the hard thing and puts the audience through the wringer.

And as someone who’s been through the wringer of life lately, I’m damn glad they did.

Or even a text from last night (language not safe for work). Turns out, according to the Guardian UK, that drunken book-buying is so much easier with an e-reader.

The number of books I buy while sober is, I have noticed, inversely proportional to the number I buy while drunk. It’s a zero-sum game, as Proust once observed of wet dreams: when all the resources are consumed in the night, none are left for waking life.

Counting free samples and e-books from the pre-1923 copyrightless domain, the total number of books I “purchase” per month has actually gone up by about 200%, while the number of books I purchase while sober has dwindled to about 5% of the total. You used to be able to say that someone’s library looked like it had been assembled by a drunk person. Now, for me, the metaphor has become a reality.

It’s an absolutely brilliant piece, if not for the content, for the writing. Turns out if I ever end up with an e-reader (or an iPad), I may be drunkenly downloading some Elif Bautman.

I’ve seen a three people on the train in the last two weeks reading Kindles. Which is fine, if you’re just into consuming words instead of truly diving into them, turning pages with a pencil in your hand, marking passages that move you. You know, trying to make yourself a better reader or writer.

Well, now you can put your e-reader inside a case that makes your e-reader look like a book.

Based on my experience, the Pad and Quill cases are the toughest of all the gadget cases which imitate Moleskine notebooks. And now there are finally Kindle 3 and Nook versions.

Really? Really?

Ignoring the fact that Snooki has a book deal for a novel, I saw this awful news on the Poets & Writer’s daily news roundup:

A new study from Scholastic has found that 25 percent of the more than one thousand six-to-seventeen-year-olds surveyed count texting with friends as reading, 28 percent count catching up on Facebook as reading, and 39 percent said that information they found online “is always correct.”

Effing seriously? Reading your texts counts as reading nowadays? I guess this just makes me feel awfully old, because I have problems coming out of bookstores empty-handed, while the undergraduates of late seem to be wrapped in a bubble of technology at all times. I can’t tell you how many elevator rides I’ve taken at Columbia College Chicago with undergrads who are texting and listening to blaring music through their over-ear headphones. I just wish young people would pay more attention to the world around them, especially people who are at an art school. Consuming media does not prepare you to create media. The world around you does.

Okay, there was this silver lining:

In brighter news, 66 percent of the group said they will always want to read print books despite the increasing prevalence of e-books.

Now I fully understand the hypocrisy of being heartened by this factoid one post away from finally getting the e-reader for periodicals. But there’s a huge difference between periodicals and books. Magazines—and I’m a huge fan of magazine journalism—still have the advertising revenue coming in when they release digital versions, and that’s a good thing; their job is to make money for the publisher. As do books, but books, especially fiction, require an artist to create them.

Of course, they aren’t all necessarily good artists. Some books, like Snooki’s magnum opus, just piggyback on a fad. Somehow, I don’t expect A Death in the Family or The Sound and the Fury from her.

You feel crazy when you write, fraught with doubt and remorse at not being able to do it well. More on that later.

So I felt pretty good when I found this Scientific American Podcast/article through Poet & Writers Daily News feed. It’s fascinating stuff.

Here is what scientists found:  The number of ideas expressed in those autobiographies had a inverse association with the severity of dementia later in life. For instance in the sentence, “I was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on May 24, 1913 and was baptized in a church,” has seven ideas according to the researchers. Phrases like “I was born” and “I was baptized in church” all count toward what they call a measurement of “idea density.”

So I suppose that bodes well for fiction writers, particularly, who write entire works from the ether of their imagination. I’d like to think these researchers would place the “idea density” of solid novels (and even well-written narrative creative nonfiction) damn high.

As for the insanity of writing, the amazing Richard Bausch once told me—and I’m paraphrasing—that the self-doubt you feel is your talent; bad writers don’t have that voice telling you “it’s not quite right yet.”

Gizmodo had a post this afternoon about an art installation in Bologna called Scanner by a Slovakian artist. And it’s made of thousands of books.

Oh, this is awesome.