Scott Sparling

Reading the War Dead

Posted on Oct 16th, 2011.

When I was seventeen, I did something that still makes me proud when I think of it today. Nixon was in his first term back then. Protests against the Vietnam War were spreading across the country, but Jackson, the small Michigan town where I lived, remained untouched by the demonstrations. The town had always been a cold-bed of conservatism, as my dad used to say. It was also the birthplace of the Republican Party. The KKK and the John Birch Society, which believed Eisenhower was a communist stooge, were active in Jackson as well.

But of course, it was the 60s, and things were changing. Even in Jackson, there were many of us who did not support the war. That included my high school friend, Phil Anderson. Together, Phil and I decided to do something about how we felt, and so we founded the Jackson Moratorium Coalition.

My family had already traveled to Washington D.C. to take part in the national moratorium in October 1969. Ann Arbor – thirty miles east of Jackson – was home to the SDS and numerous protests. The good town of Jackson, however, did not look favorably on dissent, or any type of nonconformity, for that matter.

A small example: my father was a Realtor and had a reputation for honesty, established over many decades. That reputation allowed him to secure a bank loan with a handshake. But when he grew a beard in the late 60s and chaired the Open Housing committee to prevent redlining, one of the three banks refused to do any further business with him.

___

Against that unwelcoming backdrop, Phil and I set about organizing the Jackson Moratorium Coalition, deciding to hold a reading of the war dead. It would be the first major demonstration against the war our town had seen. More than 40,000 US soldiers had died in the war by that point and we intended to read every single name. We got a list from the national moratorium organization. We ordered buttons and printed up bumperstickers. I quit marching band so I’d have time to help organize.

For a couple weeks, we went from church to church, looking for a place to hold our reading. Predictably, they all turned us down. Except one: the First Congregational Church, prominently located downtown with a park-like courtyard by the main entrance, granted us permission. I didn’t realize it at the time, but in retrospect I see that it was the most visible location we could have chosen.

The church’s reverend – Robert M. Rymph – supported the president and the war. But he met with us, and in the end he agreed to let us use entranceway and courtyard because, as he told his congregation the following Sunday, “I was convinced they were very highly idealistic and sincere in their point of view. They recognize war as dirty business and conclude that it would be far better if the killing and war would cease. They want their lives to count for something big, something worthwhile. The fact that you and I might think they are naïve in what brings peace, or is necessary for peace, does not eliminate the conviction that they now hold.” I had no idea how brave a decision Rev. Rymph was making, until much later.  

The reading itself would take 32 hours. Phil and I recruited volunteers (included Laurie Kaufman, whom Phil would later marry, and Marty Kaser, my girlfriend for a while) but as the event neared, it became clear that our "coalition" would be small.  Many parents forbid their kids from taking part.

        

___

Then, the day before we began, the newspaper in town – the Jackson Citizen-Patriot  – ran an inflammatory front-page story about the event, characterizing it in the worst possible terms. This was before talk radio, but Jackson didn’t need Glenn Beck to tell them what was right and what was wrong. The Cit-Pat, as everyone called it without the slightest trace of irony, served the purpose.

“It didn’t require much imagination,” Reverend Rymph said later, “to believe that the most swinging slumber party ever held in the city of Jackson was going to take place on Friday night right here in the First Congregational Church of Jackson.”

An emergency board of trustees meeting was called on the morning of the reading. After “agonizing consideration” the trustees voted to support Reverend Rymph and allow the reading to go forward. I understood later that it wasn’t just a vote about our protest – it was a decision about whether Reverend Rymph would keep his job. What's clear about Reverend Rymph in my memory is that he was a leader, not afraid of his convictions, and he prevailed.

To be clear, he disagreed with us about the war. But he believed that the spirit which motivated us was precious, something to be respected and in fact, nourished.

That Friday night after school – in the cold Michigan winter – Phil and I and a few others set up a single microphone stand and an amp in the doorway of the church. A handful of us stayed all night, reading all 40,000 names, minus the soldiers from Jackson. Many families in Jackson had asked that their sons’ names not be included, so whenever we came to a deceased soldier from Jackson, we omitted his name.

When it was over, we were exhausted. But the event, from our point, was a tremendous success. We brought the war home to Jackson. We read the names. We stayed awake all night and all the next day. Though it was November in Michigan, we didn’t freeze. Despite the intrusion of a few drunks, the event was peaceful.

Did it stop the war? Did it, together with hundreds of similar readings across the country, contribute in some small way to the momentum that eventually brought our troops home? Maybe, but if so, the effect on national affairs was miniscule, much too small to be measured.

___

The effect on me was large, though – large enough to still move me decades later. What impresses me most now is the strength and commitment of a man I hardly knew, Reverend Rymph. I wasn’t a member of his church. I never heard him preach, though I knew he continued to support the war that I opposed. But I see now that his belief in a better future was as strong as ours.

He ended his sermon, the Sunday after our reading, with a statement of faith in young people, and by saying he wished he’d gotten to know us better. All these years later, I feel the exactly the same way about him.

__________

This week, I was proud to be able to join with more than two hundred other writers in supporting the Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement worldwide. The statement of support, at occupywriters.com, has been signed by Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Lethem, Jennifer Egan, Michael Cunningham, Gloria Steinem and many more. The effort was organized by author and journalist Jeff Sharlet and journalist Kiera Feldman and supported by the editors of Tin House, among many others.

In conversations I’ve had this week, I’ve heard as many concerns and disagreements about the Occupy Movement as I did about our reading of the war dead. Are the tactics right? What are the goals? Will it accomplish something or just invite backlash?

But the bigger issue is this: our current economic system rewards greed. Short-term shareholder gain trumps everything. The disparity between the richest and the rest of us has never been greater, and the value created by this system has never been more ephemeral.

Corporate wealth and the general prosperity used to be linked – or at least we used to perceive they were linked. Healthy businesses provided jobs and benefits. Now we perceive an inverse relationship. Lay off workers or cancel retirement benefits and share prices rise. Corporations and CEOs perpetuate the inequities simply by playing by the rules and making logical decisions – because the rules and logic are rigged against most of us.

Is it any wonder we’ve fallen in love, lately, with stories about robots attacking their creators? The metaphor is obvious: we created corporations and now they rule us.

I have some of the same concerns about tactics that others share. Occupation, it seems to me, is frequently a play-until-you-lose scenario, like Space Invaders. Is the agenda anti-corporate or pro-reform? Similar types of concerns were raised about the antiwar movement, of course. Movements, by definition, are big and hard to pin down. 

But the underlying point is this:  the economic discontent we feel is clearly widespread and why wouldn’t it be? The greed that drives too much of Wall Street nearly wrecked the economy and we continue to pay for the repairs – during a jobless recovery to boot.

The Occupy Movement, like the antiwar movement, has a chance to become a prism for that discontent and to focus it where it might do some good. Forget goals, tactics, and disputes about the rules for public spaces for a while; the Occupy Movement is a huge sign that the water temperature has changed, is changing. And that alone is good, and it’s why I was proud to add my name.

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In my blog post on Powells.com, Burning Down the House, I wrote that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with money and sex. Both forces make our lives more comfortable – more delicious – when they’re under control. But like the forces of fire and water, when they jump their channels, they flood us out or burn the place down. To those who have complained that Wire to Wire is too raw, too much about lowlifes, I point to the sex- and money-scandal of the week. What’s going on in Wolverine is nothing compared to the financial and sexual misconduct we see in Washington and Wall Street. Cue Bernie Madoff and Representative Wiener.

But it’s deeper than that. The scandal of the week is just about headlines, and the focus is always on a particular miscreant. – a good man, maybe, who grasped for too much, etc. etc. That misses the point. There might be bad guys on Wall Street, but the problem isn’t the players. It’s that the game is rigged.

In 1968, a year before Phil and I and others read the names of the dead in Jackson, I heard a song that shaped my thinking – not just on the war but on that issue of having your life count for something.  

The song is 2+2=? by Bob Seger. It still means a lot to me. You can listen to it on the music page of this site, and I recommend you do. In it, Seger sings, “It’s the rules, not the soldiers, that are my real enemy.”

From Vietnam to Wall Street, it’s a line that still rings true.

Harp Maitland is a loner type – I’m not entirely sure he’d join a protest. But if there were protesters in Wolverine, the fictional town of Wire to Wire, he’d definitely be on their side.

Here’s Harp, as he returns to Wolverine from one of his freight trips, walking through the abandoned freight yard that he loves, which is slated to become the site of some new condominiums.

The [caboose] now looked out onto the half-built frame of the Whispering Sands. The work of downstate investors, men who didn’t give a slippery shit about anything, as long as their return on investment was high.

It was pretty clear how things were going, he thought. What used to be the world was becoming the marketplace. Anyone could see it wasn’t square…

In the old days, the land behind the Sawhorse ran to weeds and rusty rails all the way to Wolverine Bay. The emptiness was part of the town and seemed to be fine with everyone. But then money took over, and money didn’t like emptiness. The land behind the Sawhorse wasn’t earning any income, and that attracted bulldozers.

Someday when it’s too late, Harp thought, we’ll all be sorry we didn’t tell money to go to hell.

My take on the Occupy Movement is that it's not too late. In fact, it's time to start.

__________

Think it's time we got together and declared. The Bob Seger System, “Highway Child.” Play it loud.

Sex and Commas

Posted on Oct 1st, 2011.

The good news: I’ve been asked to speak at Wordstock. The bad news: my panel is opposite Steve Almond, Cheryl Strayed, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Viva Las Vegas. This hardly seems fair – kinda like going up against Hendrix on Max Yasgur's farm.

Wordstock, in case you don't know, is Portland’s legendary book festival. Speaking there, for me, is the attainment of a dream. Tragically, I’ve been assigned to a grim panel discussion on the serial comma (“Red, White, and Blue: Is the Oxford Comma Un-American?”). (Worse, I'll be speaking on the Borders stage, which at this point is a park bench outside the Convention Center. I'll be sharing the stage with a bum and a steampunk girl re-reading Morlock Night.) Meanwhile, Almond et al will be inside delighting the masses with something far sexier. Namely, sex.

Indeed, Almond, Strayed, Yuknavitch, and Las Vegas (ASYL henceforth) will be probing “America’s Sexual/Literary Hang-Up,” stroking the nuances and subtextual pleasure-points of character-revealing sex. Their presentation will feature “dwarfs and giants, fat people and beanpoles, hermaphrodites and transvestites, some grotesquely painted or costumed, some deformed by nature or choice,” unless I’m accidentally reading from Roger Ebert’s review of Fellini’s Satyricon rather than the Wordstock progam.

No matter. The panel assignments are clearly unjust and a misallocation of resources to boot. ASYL are the ones who should be talking about commas. Almond, for one, is publicly conflicted. His memoir, “Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life,” (“Exuberant…deft…hilarious” – Publishers Weekly. “Honors Seger by Excluding Him” – Segerfile.com), is an Oxford orgy. His book of essays, “Not That You Asked,” abstains. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Either way, something is eating him about commas, and he needs to talk it out.

As for Lidia Yuknavitch, I heard her at a Portland wine bar just last week. The excerpt she read from “The Chronology of Water” was gut-wrenching, wise, funny, and moving all at the same time. Maybe I lost focus, but I didn’t hear a single comma. At one point I thought I heard a semi-colon, but it may have been coming from next door. And I have no idea where Strayed and Las Vegas come down on the comma vis a vis its usefulness in aiding prosody, which is precisely why such a discussion would be so scintillating.

___________

                     

This weekend at Wordstock: Almond, Yuknavitch, Strayed, and Las Vegas.

___________

More to the point, I’m the one who should be talking sex. I’m the one whose book says, right on the cover, “Like being in a stolen car with no brakes in a world of train-hopping, character-revealing sex, violence, and drugs.” (Italics mine.)

Want more proof? My 83-year-old aunt refuses to read Wire to Wire. She didn’t come right out and say it was the character-revealing sex she objected to, but her silence merely underscores the point.

But alas, as Iago says, there’s no remedy, short of hatching some convoluted plot involving handkerchiefs and irrational jealousy in which ASYL all stab each other, and even that would be more interesting than the punctuation discussion at the Little Kids Table, which apparently is my due. (Do? Deux?)

Yet even though I’m not on the Sex Panel, I’m not going down without a fight (a statement which, without even trying, doubles as character-revealing sex). To honor my aunt’s sacrifice, I’m tempted to challenge the ASYL panel to a F**k-Off. A cockfight of sorts. Go ahead, name your categories. Best sex scene referencing a character’s pride in the Motor City? Best use of train signals during sex? The most character-revealing sex scene involving only the thumb? (cf. W2W, p. 29.) Whatever you got, I’ll match it.

Or maybe I’ll just skip my panel and attend theirs.

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Truth in Blogging Disclosure: There is no panel on the serial comma, although it would probably draw a good crowd. At 11:00 am on Sunday, October 9, I’ll be on a panel entitled “When Was Your First Time?” with the marvelous debut authors Ellen Meeropol (House Arrest) and Jason Skipper (Hustle), moderated by the highly successful book publicist and marketing consultant, Mary Bisbee-Beek.

              

Debut novels by Ellen Meeropol, Jason Skipper, and Johnny Shaw.

The name of panel sounds sexy in a Cosmo, non-character-revealing way, but I’m told the discussion is always very well attended. Get there early.

Immediately following the panel, at noon, I’m reading with screenwriter, teacher, and novelist Johnny Shaw, author of Dove Season. Don’t miss it.

Schedule information is here. 

Blog music: What happens when writers talk sex and commas? It “Gets Ya Pumpin.’”

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Bonus: Wire to Wire’s sex scenes as a word cloud.

W2W Into the Wild

Posted on Sep 25th, 2011.

When life gets a little too lifelike for Michael Slater in Wire to Wire, he opens a drawer in his video editing suite and takes another Smiling O – an amphetamine that keeps him going through the night.

As far as I know, there is no drug called a Smiling O in the real world; it’s a name I made up. I’m actually a little surprised that no one’s ever asked me what the O stands for, though that’s probably for the best. (No, it’s not orgasm. Or Oreo.)

I almost didn't use the name. At the end of the editing process – with the manuscript due to be released for galleys – an issue concerning punctuation arose. I’d always written the plural as “Smiling O’s,” but that’s incorrect. It should be rendered “Smiling Os” without the apostrophe. Correct or not, that looked wrong to me. The O was clearly a problem. Maybe it needed to be replaced.

With the deadline looming, I spent an evening trying out every gerund/letter combination that seemed remotely plausable. My son, Zane, nixed everything I came up with, and he was right. Somehow, they all sounded like bluegrass groups. The Spinning Gs. Finally, I ended up back where I started, with Smiling O. I just rewrote a bunch of lines so the usage was singular.

____________

That’s what writing a novel does for you. It lets you be a control freak. While the manuscript’s on your desk, you're in charge. You can obsess over every little thing, and in most cases, you get to call the shots.

But there comes a time to let go. So this week, I’m releasing four free copies of Wire to Wire into the wild. I won't be obsessing over their welfare from now on. They’ll have to fend for themselves.

The free copies are marked on the front and there’s a note inside asking the finder to read the book and pass it on. My email address is there too. The four copies are starting out in Portland, OR, but I hope they make it to Michigan and beyond. There’s a lot of great country out there to see.

I’m dropping the four books this Thursday in places related to the story: a bar, a coffeeshop, a strip club, and a freight yard or train station. I’m open to ideas as to exactly where to release the books, so if you have a suggestion, let me know.

All I ask is this: If you see a copy running around loose, give it a home for a while. Say hi for me. And don’t let it take too many Smiling Os.

_______________

"Rolling fast down I-45, bending time, feeling fine." The Black Angels, "Entrance Song." 

Learn to Forget

Posted on Sep 3rd, 2011.

I was still in school when I first heard “Soul Kitchen,” the sex-infused track off The Doors’ first album. In the decades that have passed, the song has been overshadowed by others on that album – “Light My Fire,” “Break on Through,” and “The End.” But in the second verse of “Soul Kitchen,” The Doors gave us a line that got deep into my brain and has stayed there ever since: “Learn to forget.”

I was young and the whole world was new the first time I played that song. Like all kids that age, I was desperate to take it all in, remember everything. The idea that forgetting might be good – or even liberating – and that you had to learn how to do it, was intriguing all by itself. Delivered in Morrison’s voice, it was absolutely intoxicating.

Yet as time has passed, it’s clear I haven’t taken his advice. In fact, to be a little too clever about it, I’ve always remembered Morrison’s admonition to forget.

________

In the past couple weeks, I’ve had two opportunities to remember the process of writing Wire to Wire. Jeff Baker, book editor for The Oregonian, sat with me here – in my treehouse – one afternoon as part of his “Where I Write” series. And writer Laura Stanfill invited me to be part of her Seven Questions interview series.

Talking about Wire to Wire gave me a chance to notice something I had missed before: Mainly, that being alone up here in the treehouse is different from being alone in a room. It’s further away, up here in the pine. Lonelier. I’ve always said that I built this place for my son, Zane, and that’s true – but seeing it through others’ eyes, it no longer seems like a particularly fun place for a kid. I’m beginning to wonder if what I really built is something more like Michael Slater’s editing suite – a place where the past is always close at hand.

That same idea runs through the music I associate with Wire to Wire. The night plays tricks on Dylan; he tries to be so quiet, but the ghosts of electricity haunt him with Visions of Johanna. Thunder wakes up Seger in the night; he starts humming a song from 1962, and – in another song – wishes he didn’t know now what he didn’t know then. Joni Mitchell remembers a long-ago high school dance when “with just a touch of our fingertips, we could make our circuitry explode.”

All this got me wondering recently if I’ve been answering one of the most-asked questions about Wire to Wire the wrong way. In every interview, people eventually ask, “How much of it is true?” And I always start talking about freights I’ve hopped and places I’ve been in Northern Michigan.

But last week – after Zane went off to college, after I sat up here replaying the things we used to do, things we won’t do again  – a different answer struck me. The truest thing about Wire to Wire? Maybe it’s all about being in the grip of the past. About having trouble letting go.

Maybe the most autobiographical sentence is this one: “At midnight, the past, present, and future circled round like a train on a circular track, and you could end up anywhere.”

_________

Without a doubt, it’s been a great summer. Wire to Wire came out in June, and I’ve had a chance to read from it and talk about it in bookstores and bars across Michigan, Oregon, and Washington. You can’t beat something like that.

But now it’s Labor Day – time to go back to work on book number two. The main character is a guy named Ray, and as you might expect, he’s got some problems with the past.

As summer turns to fall, the two of us are gonna be up in this tree a lot, working things out. Maybe even learning to forget.

_______

 

 

 

Speak in secret alphabets: Good advice from a dead guy. The Doors' “Soul Kitchen.”

 

For more music that inspired Wire to Wire, check this post on the terrific Largehearted Boy site.

Start with Yes

Posted on Aug 1st, 2011.

The Michigan book tour for Wire to Wire covered 2,700 miles over 16 days and was full of amazing moments. I got the rental car stuck in the sand at the edge of the Big Lake. Around midnight in Lansing, I watched a bartendress leap in the air and catch a firefly. And I spent every day with fans (of Wire to Wire and of Seger), friends, and family. Except for the skunk I hit in the last hour of the trip, it couldn’t have been better.

One memorable moment occurred early on at Horizon Books in Traverse City. Given how long I worked on the book, someone asked if the first draft had anything in common with the last. I happened to have grabbed a very early chapter while I was packing, but I hadn’t really looked at it much.

When I opened the folder, I was stunned by the date: 7/15/85 – exactly 26 years and one day prior to the Horizon reading. The chapter is labeled “Comments from Stone Workshop,” because it’s the version I took to the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference. Along with 12 other writers, I was in a weeklong workshop with Robert Stone that year.

Obviously, as a beginning writer, I focused on rhythm and didn’t worry much about meaning. I wanted to get the sound right. The writing is loud—hewn through time kinda makes me cringe, and who knows what that line about the president means. It's all pretty dramatic. But it’s the beat, not the words, that the two versions have in common. The cadence of the long second paragraph is very close to the feel of Harp’s long, poetic freight rap on page 69 of the finished book.

Fittingly, the only phrase that’s word-for-word the same is “the top of the middle.” In the manuscript and in the book, it refers (rather obliquely) to the upper Midwest states—the top of the middle of the map. But it’s really the name of an Elvin Jones album. In those early days, I used to listen to The Top of the Middle before and while I wrote. To Jones, I think the phrase referred to a place in the beat that he liked the best. In any case, I was clearly more interested in how the syllables fell than in telling a story.

My note at the top of the page records Robert Stone’s reaction: “With this style, never cut loose of precision. The more poetic, the greater the need to be precise, so that every syllable of poetry pays off in meaning.”

It took me a long time to learn how to do that—to the extent that I have—but the Pt. Townsend workshop was the beginning.

The other life lesson I learned at that conference was the old saying, “Beer before whiskey, pretty risky.” After the Horizon reading, I put that wisdom to good use and went straight to the harder stuff. The table was crowded with friends, and the dinner and drinking was as good as it gets.

_______

 

 

 

Drunk on words or just drunk at the Comet Tavern in Seattle, circa 1985: I got a dream, do you wanna be in my dream? Alejandro Escovedo's "Tender Heart." 

Posted in Wire to Wire