Charles Degelman
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Lying, thieving writers — part two

8/31/2014

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Most of our planet is straightjacketed by ownership — nations, corporations, tribes, families, individuals, all own property. Property causes problems. If you march in and grab someone else's sovereign territory, you’re considered a thief; invasion means war. Plenty of land-grabbing going on these days.

Feuding families and feudal tribes attack each other because they hate each other’s miniscule differences and they want more territory. Do horse thieves still get hung? I dunno. Normally meek and mellow individuals sue the folks next door over boundaries, and corporations devour each other’s assets in the womb.

Recently, technology has allowed us to weave a tangled web of proprietary do’s and don’ts via the power to electronically share information. Who knew data, little — 0's and I's — could be so ludicrously valuable? Everyone from Warner Brothers and Google, to the local patent-crazy inventor to the CIA and the Supreme Court has weighed in on intellectual property and the difference between stealing, sharing and disseminating.

Over too much of our planet, women and girls, men and boys are still considered to be property to be stolen, bought, sold. Misery. Land, oil, people, people, places, even events are up for grabs.

Given its consequences, I suggest that the ownership of property sucks.

Context is everything but why not follow Marx’s dream: ‘To each according to his [or her] need; from each according to his [or her] abilities.” Sure, Marx’s 1848 rumination lost a little in the translation, but I suggest we either give it all away, the way many utopian anarchists tried in the 1960s or…

We figure out a better way to interpret 20th Century American poet Robert Frost's observation that 'good fences make good neighbors.'

Which leads me to another element of property and thievery. Frost didn't invent this good fence homily. It's been around forever. A century and a half before Frost, Benjamin Franklin wrote 'Love your neighbor; yet don’t pull down your hedge' in Poor Richard's Almanack.

Property theft can lead to all kinds of hassles and enormous efforts to determine who owns what nation, farm, man, woman, or idea. We've briefly explored a few efforts to soften the archaic, Neolithic notion of 'mine.' Moving on...

What about ownership and thievery in the creative process? Yeah, I like copyrights and I don’t want my words stolen, but what about thievery as an asset?

Frost stole from Franklin. Or did he build on another writers idea? Musicians 'steal' each others stuff all the time… Or do they pull rhythms and melodies from a timeless musical tradition that extends from the shaman’s drum to tribal story telling to Mozart learning from Haydn to hip hop adopting jazz?

Bob Dylan 'stole' from traditional folk music. Mozart 'stole' from Haydn. Of course it isn't thievery. Mark Twain calls it ‘borrowing.’ Stealing, thievery, borrowing, call it what you may it’s part of the creative process.

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Lying, thieving writers — part one

8/26/2014

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Every writer is a liar.  Journalists, scientists and historians are the worst, because they must present a front claiming to be accurate, supported by research, objectified and authentic in their search for 'the truth.' Biographers should be thrown in with the above-mentioned liars. 

Lying is also part of a Great American story-telling tradition, celebrated by Mark Twain and plenty of other American writers. Think of all the great lying that spices up Huckleberry Finn. In older cultures, lying as a method of making a point or making life more interesting was accepted as part everyday communication. It made life better, like color tv heightened the experience of staring at the black-and-white dots of our first cathode ray-driven trances. 

In simpler days, literary lying was laughed over as much as it was vilified. In the 1920s, my grandfather, a journalist, managed to convince the entire staff of San Diego's Scripps-Howard newspaper and the population at large that their city had been built on a labyrinth of salt caves that might collapse at any moment, dragging San Diego and its residents into a briny apocalypse. The article ran on the front page on New Year's Day and when my grandfather revealed that the whole story had been a hoax, residents, editors, and publishers alike forgave the brash young journalist with a chorus of relieved guffaws. 

Pre-historical lying y is a little more difficult to judge, because the ancient lies were passed down verbally, leaving us no evidence. Regardless of the pride story tellers took in orally reproducing exacting tales that helped communicate behaviors ethical and nasty, heroic and cowardly, they also wanted to create an effect as writers do today. Therefore they probably added a little color, a little spice to the mix, for the benefit of their audiences and to better their chances of eating a decent stew and sleeping someplace warm. They can be forgiven, because facts don't always captivate and besides... We know that the mind is really nothing more than a drawer of mis-matched socks, and regardless of our efforts, we're going to distort reality. 

Scientists are the first to confess that their objectivity is warped by variables that begin with their measurements and end with the unreliable disciplines of logic and communication. Historians are usually a bit more steadfast about the accuracy of their recording, but plenty of them have also admitted that they are screening reality that they have no connection to beyond the cerebrum.  Journalists have developed an elaborate set of ethics that work for some of the people some of the time, but aren't they still lying through their teeth? It's not always a bad thing. It's just that they're trying to represent reality with their blurred senses, cluttered brains, and frantic fingers. Meanwhile, reality floats serenely by on the time-space continuum, beyond the writer's reach, refusing to be reproduced. 

Author John Rechy maintains that the only writers who are not liars are fiction writers because they begin by saying, I'm gonna make up a story and, if you're interested in my lies, you'll read and perhaps even enjoy them. Okay, so perhaps fiction writers aren't liars because they are sneaky — they avoid getting boxed in by any quantifiable truth, regardless of how truthful you find their tales. I lied plenty in my first two novels, even though they were naturalistic and even prize winners as fictions about historical people, places and events (Gates of Eden)  and the wobbling nature of my own recollections (A Bowl Full of Nails). 

I plan to lie in my next novel. I also plan to steal. 





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Robin Williams et al

8/25/2014

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The loss of Robin Williams brought a glittering jangle of recollections back to me. Because he was a San Francisco lad, I can remember playing jazz on Union Street and skittering a couple of doors down to watch Robin spin his frenetic,  seemingly nonsequitous routines. He would ricochet from person to fact to time to space until he brought his audience to the level of a dervish dance. He always brought them home, to where he began, regardless of how far away he had spun himself and us. He came at the performing community, the clowns of the Pickle Circus, the overwrought mimes of the Embarcadero from a different direction but we all collided, identifying with his perfect and universal madness. 

I missed most of Mork and Mindy, television wasn't in my life then. After our shared time in the clubs, I remember  him best in Terry Gillian's "The Fisher King" where he played a traumatized and grief-stricken homeless man obsessed with the legend of A Fisher King, the Holy Grail, and his own wife's tragic and violent end.

Williams diverse talents took him far — in his career, around the planet, but he always seemed to be a part of San Francisco. His final home was on Tiburon, a peninsula jutting into the bay, giving him a view of both bridges, Angel island, the hills of Berkeley, the fog fingers of summer creeping in from the Pacific, over the built up hills of the city, through the Gate. He was there, he was visible, although not necessarily accessible. 

Many of my San Francisco friends spoke of Robin from this place of community that is so predominant in the Bay Area. He seemed of them, and they wanted to speak out. Few were judgmental, but many longed for there have been another way, another way out for Robin, if only he had sat still a little longer, ridden that horse a little bit harder. 

I understand the authenticity of that longing, of an urgent wish that circumstances had been 'other' for Williams, that he had somehow  in that place where he found himself alone, with his own worse enemy. To those who so beautifully expressed their feelings, those who Robin left behind, I do want to offer a single observation of my own...

Some times, when a person has struggled a lifetime to stay in the saddle, there is no inner or outer 'we' to offer perspective or even a strong, loving, but coercive arm. Sometimes ideas, however wise and authentic, turn gray. At times like that, the end may come as an accident; the alternative so urgently pointed out, the path not taken can hurtle past the rider, all options out of reach and it's over in a moment, final, no turning back,  leaving the living to grapple with the questions, the consequences, and some restless modicum of acceptance. Perhaps someday, Robin Williams will be bringing it all back home, some other way. Here's hoping'...    




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