What's Elizabeth Reading? ...Alan Alda

I've entered a new phase in my reading: I'm reading autobiographies.

I don't think younger me would be impressed. Actually, that depends on which age of younger me you're asking. Some of those ages might have been in awe of my sheer adultness. Because boring adults read autobiographies, right?

I'm not so sure about that anymore.

I am reading autobiographies as research for Stories from the Hearth, the personal histories company I am starting, because I figured I should be more familiar with the genre of real stories, and I chose to start with Alan Alda's Never Have Your Dog Stuffed for three reasons:

1) The length was reasonable for the overworked person I am becoming (272 pages in paperback).
2) I wanted to know why I shouldn't have my dog stuffed, should I ever get one.
3) It's Alan Alda. M*A*S*H was an amazing TV show.

The first thing to be noticed about this book is that it is broken down into three sections, or "acts," that follow the structure laid out in the book's epigraph (quote that kicks it off): "Act one: Get your hero up a tree. Act two: Throw rocks at him. Act three: Get him down again." (Attributed to George Abbott)

So the first section is about how Alan Alda got involved in acting (in short, his father), the second is about how hard he worked to be successful (this included working as a clown on street corners, among other interesting stories), and the third is about success and his later life.

Beneath that overarching structure, stories are mostly given according to chronology. He does jump back and forth a bit, to serve his main topics and sense of drama, I think, and it's a little disorienting. The main topics he sticks to in the autobiography are his parents -- unstable mother, famous actor father -- and his acting. He bounces between these topics, trying to give his life a traditional story arc. I'm not sure I'm a fan of that, but since this book seemed to have, at its heart, the object of entertaining, I'll give it a pass.

I could tell Alda was out to entertain from the moment I read the first sentence: "My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that."

I mean, what person starts out an autobiography that way? Not David Copperfield, for sure. Usually people follow the king of Wonderland's advice and start at the beginning. This was not the beginning; it was a hook.

Not necessarily a bad thing, just different.

Alan Alda

My main problem with it being an entertainment autobiography is that I came away feeling like I did not know Alda well. I know almost nothing about his marriage or his children, for instance. I know their names, and I know how he met his wife (it included him going AWOL from the military multiple times in efforts to visit her a couple states over, amusingly enough). There are moments here and there when they show up, but this is mainly about Alda. Somehow, the man wrote an autobiography while keeping his privacy intact.

Useful for a famous actor, but not really what my clients will be going for.

HOWEVER. This book would be, I think, useful to someone pursuing a career in acting. Besides the pick-me-up of, "Wow, he had to work really hard to get where he did, even with all that talent," there are nuggets of wisdom sprinkled throughout the book that would serve an actor well. For instance, he talks about how he learned to cry real tears on command. He also discusses empathy at some length.

For those who are interested, some fun facts about Alan Alda:

• Alan Alda is not the name he was born with. That was Alphonso D'Abruzzo. He actually hated the name "Alan Alda" when it was first proposed.
• He was beat up in school for trying to entertain the "crowd" during recess.
• Spent some time doing a film in a prison in Salt Lake City, UT (cool for me because it's near my hometown)
• He wasn't sure he was going to be able to pull off being Hawkeye Pierce until the first moment the camera was actually rolling.
• He grew up in the world of burlesque, and so was surrounded by comedians and exotic dancers.
• He once had polio.
• He had his dog stuffed.

It seemed like every day, I was turning to the people next to me and saying, "Did you know, Alan Alda ..." I'm sure it would have gotten on their nerves more if the man didn't have such interesting stories to tell.

Captain Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce

Yes, he does dedicate some time in the book to M*A*S*H, as well as some time to Scientific American Frontiers, which I found out ran for even longer than M*A*S*H (14 years. He was Hawkeye for 11). It kind of feels like he includes these sections as crowd pleasers, the "We all know why you picked up this book today," chapters, but he's right. I wanted to hear about them. Nothing wrong with knowing your audience.

After finishing the book, I went to the library and borrowed the first and last season of M*A*S*H, just to see how I would feel about it now.

But you know what? I didn't see Alan Alda acting. I saw Hawkeye.

So no, this is not the autobiography of the man who played Hawkeye, because Hawkeye was so real he wasn't really played by anyone. This is the autobiography of the man who became Hawkeye.

Why keep taking language arts classes once you're literate?

My brother found a summer job with the company I am working for, and we live in the same city, so we carpool to and from work each day. It's been great for sibling bonding time -- we've talked TV shows, meditation, politics, you name it. On one day this week, the topic became language arts classes. His question: Why does the school system ask students to continue in language arts after they already know how to read and write?

I thought it was worth discussing here, too, so here are my thoughts.

My brother. Except he isn't Leo, obviously.

In elementary school, people are taught the basics of how to read and form letters. By the fifth grade, I was being taught how to write essays. In middle school, classes read books together and learn more about literary devices such as similes, alliteration and rhyming. I was also introduced to reading and writing poetry in middle school. By high school, students are focusing on essay writing and book analyzation (I wrote another post about analyzing books a while back. Read it here). We are told that writing essays teaches us how to form arguments. It is also an avenue for teachers to help improve writing skills -- grammar, sentence fluency, that sort of thing.

Along the way, teachers select books for their students to read. Sometimes, these books are part of a bigger, government-dictated curriculum. Other times, teachers choose books they think will interest their students or help them through a particular stage in life. This is why so many middle schoolers find themselves reading coming of age books like Bridge to Terabithia or The Outsiders. Some teachers will also select books they loved themselves and want to share with the students, since the books are age appropriate (if your child's teacher has them reading Harry Potter, this is what happened). The other three factors I can think of that would affect book selection would be current or recent events, genre introduction and cultural aptitude (this is the main reason for all the Shakespeare, I'm sure of it).

Teachers guide youths' reading up until they are set free by the school system and either re-enter by going to college or go off on their merry way into the work force. Recreational reading outside of the assigned books is encouraged, of course, but you have to admit that teachers do a lot of book introducing for youth.

As for college, those language arts classes teach specific aspects of the language or writing in it. After all, even though you know how to read and write, you can still improve. This is why we continue taking language arts classes.

Note: Philosophy can be taught using
literature and film, too.

However, language arts classes should also teach more forms of writing than essays. Philosophy classes (in high school) can take over on the essay front, since one major purpose of the discipline is argument formation and presentation. A philosophy class, or at least a language arts class with a strong philosophy component, would produce deeper thinkers and people who can express themselves well.

As for what else people would be writing in those language arts classes, the only times in real life when essays are used are in the justice system, book introductions and academics, so far as I can tell. Adults write in other formats: blog posts, articles, press releases, business correspondence, letters (cover letters, query letters, others), creative writing, memoirs, reports (which aren't written in MLA format!), speeches, contracts, and more things I can't think of right now. Imagine how much better these communications would be if we had classes in how to write them well!

The main problem with this is we don't have teachers trained to teach all these various forms of writing.

But alas, I am not a teacher and would be scolded for telling other people how to do their jobs. So I'll step off my soapbox with one last sentence: Brother, language arts classes should continue, but with a stronger philosophy component and varied writing instruction.

Doubting my story beginning

The following is the beginning of the first chapter of the novel I have been working on for some time now (think years; I'm a slow writer).

Elke had never liked porridge, but his dislike for the bland mush that filled his wooden bowl this morning was dwarfed by his dislike for the look on his mother’s face. He had seen it way too many times this past week, and he knew his best bet was to quietly force himself to swallow his breakfast and disappear for a few hours—but not so far that he couldn’t hear her call his name.

He averted his eyes from hers, sure that her uncanny ability to read them would only spell more trouble for him, and then he wouldn’t be allowed to disappear but instead would be stuck chopping wood, even though winter was a long ways off. He stared at a knot in the table instead and did his best to eat quietly.

Mother was sitting in a chair near the open front door, hand over her eyes and head tilted back against the frame. She usually would have been sitting across from Elke, swatting at his hand if he held the spoon incorrectly, but the head pains always rendered her more quiet and still, and she craved the fresh air without the sounds of Nostos. She looked up now and then to see if he was eating, but that was all.

When he was finished, he did his best to quietly stand up. He winced when his chair squeaked and mother flinched, then carefully rinsed out the bowl using the bucket of water mother kept for that purpose. He kissed her cheek on his way out the door, whispered that he would be back to check on her, then crept away from the house, breaking into a run once he was out of earshot.

“Arato! Get up, you slug! Can’t let Sakuunu see you in bed at this hour!” He slapped on the wood wall of his friend’s home, aiming for the spot where his bed met the wall. Elke paused to listen, then slapped the wooden planks a couple more times for good measure, moving to the front door when he was sure he heard Arato get up.

He bounced a little in his deer-hide shoes while he waited, then opened the door to peek inside just as Arato came scrambling out. “Welcome to the morning, brother!”

“Oh, go eat a pine cone,” Arato said, still adjusting his apprentice necklace, a leather strap ornamented with a metal hoop similar to those that held barrels together.

“I’d rather not be seen eating the ancestors, thanks,” Elke said. He instinctively checked to make sure he hadn’t forgotten to wear his own apprentice necklace with its accompanying miniature cloth stachel, meant to represent the full-sized ones carrying seed. He, however, was carrying a couple coins in his -- something his mother would kill him for if she were to find out.

“So do it at night, when the sane people of this world are asleep.”

“I sleep!”

They had been walking, but at this, Arato stopped and turned toward him, an incredulous look on his face.

“Most of the time,” Elke said, grabbing his friend’s arm to get him going again. “We’re going to miss it. Come on.”

They had just managed to climb into one of the trees when the first girl walked through the meadow. This one was Pylliah, who was too young to have a woman’s figure but too old to bathe with the children. She had carefully wrapped herself in her towel but was walking with a slight cower just the same, hiding herself from the world at large until she could put on her proper clothing. Elke and Arato didn’t waste more than a glance in her direction, instead fixing their gaze on the path to the river, waiting for the next female to emerge.

It turned out Arato’s early wakeup had paid off, because Sakuunu was in the small group of women who followed Pylliah out from the bathing place. Elke had little interest in her, though he could appreciate how her long black hair waved slightly as she walked and the way her towel hung from her figure to reveal its perfection. He knew her to be a tad self-centered and she had mocked him one too many times to earn his desire. Arato was another story; he had been smitten since the day he had first seen her ride one of the village’s horses through the street. Arato had walked into Elke’s home with a glazed look on his face and had stayed that way until Elke had thrown a handful of fish guts at him.

Sakuunu was one of the few to wear her apprentice necklace, ornamented with a miniature horse, to the bathing place. Some of the women were too old to have them and instead wore the armband of their trade, and others, like Pylliah, were as yet too young. Elke and Arato had only received theirs the month before, and Elke was still having a hard time remembering to wear it some days.

Arato scooted forward on the branch he was lying down on, legs holding it tightly beneath him and arms propping his shoulders and head up slightly. The movement caused the tree to shake a little, but it seemed none of the women noticed. There were four of them in Sakuunu’s group, one of whom was her mother. All were wrapped in their towels, feet clad in wooden bathing shoes. They were laughing about something.

Arato scooted forward again, bringing himself to the edge of the leaves, where even one more inch would expose their hiding place. Elke was tempted to either push him off or haul him back in, but indecision about which would be better kept him from doing anything. Besides, there were more women bathing and one may bring him to the edge of his branch, too. He didn’t have his eye on anyone, but he knew that could change any day.

Sakuunu paused before leaving the clearing, gesturing her companions onward and turning back.So she had noticed, then. This ended Elke’s moment of indecision and he leaned forward, shoving Arato to the side. His friend had been too entranced to hold on properly, and the shove sent him crashing to the ground at Sakuunu’s feet.

I like this beginning, because I think it is fun and well-written. It introduces some of my main characters in a personable way and gives each a foundation to stand on. My problem with my beginning (it is longer than this) is that it doesn't really take the story anywhere.

So this week, I had the thought to open it in a very dramatic way: a self-defense killing. I wrote it the next day, about 380 words, and am not as impressed with it as with my original beginning. Perhaps I stick my self-defense killing elsewhere in the story?

Truth be told, my main problem is I want to get the story moving but don't feel like a good enough writer to do it justice. I have a basic outline for it in my head and love it, but I feel like except for a few bright spots, like this scene, it's not all that great yet.

Maybe this post is a pep talk, a reminder that I can write well and all writers start somewhere. I defer to Ira Glass to make the motivational point:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it's normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”