Professor Hex: 12/01/2005

Well, Weirdwriter threw down the gauntlet. I have picked it up and . . . uh . . . typed about it.

My father was a tremendous reader. I grew up around books and reading. There's a baby picture of me sitting on the floor with the newspaper spread out in front of me. My father's sitting in a chair behind me, reading the paper. I was imitating my father.

I remember very clearly when I learned to read. I was playing school in our garage on a rainy summer's day and an older neighborhood girl was trying to teach me and some other kids. All at once, the words on the board made sense. It all dropped into place. I ran upstairs and proudly told my mom, "I can read!" I was five. My mom says I never read any early reading children's books and that the first book I read was "Jonathan Livingston Seagull."

When I was a kid there was a comic book shop not far from my house and my dad would take me there to buy comics. It was part comic book store and part used book store and what I remember more than anything was the wonderful smell of old paper. To this day, nothing smells like my childhood as much as an old comic book. I saw my first pulp magazine at this store, as well as my first Shadow and Doc Savage paperback reprint. Marked for life. I also met my first real author at this store - Carl Sherrell. He was just buying books and the owner introduced me to him. He gave me a signed copy of his paperback. My first signing.

I read a lot of Encyclopedia Brown books. I also remember reading Alfred Hitchcock's Three Investigators, the Mad Scientist's Club, and every Scholastic book about UFOs, Bigfoot, lake monsters, vampires, werewolves, psychics, and witches I could get my hands on.

My father always let me read his Playboys. Even when I was a kid. I was probably the only ten year old in the country that had read John Updike and Hunter S. Thompson. I had no idea what most of it meant, but I read it.

When I was in the fourth grade I read Trevanian's The Loo Sanction for a book report and the teacher called my father to tell him that she didn't think it was appropriate reading material. My dad told her to get stuffed.

I was a creative writing major in school but I couldn't figure out what I wanted to write. I'm still not sure. I've read hundreds of books on writing and I still haven't found my voice. Part of it is laziness, but part of it is I don't think I'm very good. I'm trying to write stories that move and have a tangible, visceral feel to them - insightful genre fiction - but I don't know how. It's like spinning the dial on a safe waiting for the cylinders to drop. I always get bogged down in the second act. Perhaps my characters aren't real enough to live by themselves. Probably.

When my father died we had donations go to his favorite library with the stipulation being that they spend the money on new fiction because that was his favorite. When they bought the books they were nice enough to send them all over to my mother's house. We lined them up on the fireplace and had about ten feet of books, all with a "Donated by" bookplate and my father's name. That felt nice.

I'm completely anal about the condition of my books. I treat them with reverence. Almost all my paperbacks look unread, even if I've read them twice or more. I am completely non-anal about anything else.

When I lived in Portland I found a series of 50's Lesbian Nurse novels at the Salvation Army for a quarter a piece. When I left Portland I sold them to Powell's for big money.

I read fast. I think it's an outgrowth of learning with flashcards. I usually read several books a week, both fiction and nonfiction. I go through phases. I read a lot of short stories because I like to read before I go to sleep. I used to collect how-to books.

I like meeting writers. I've shared a joint with Allan Ginsburg, got drunk with P.J. O'Rourke, filmed William Burroughs, smoked a cigarette with Andrew Vachss, learned from Lawrence Block, kissed Alice Joanou, and spent a wonderful afternoon with Hugh Cave a year before he died. I've found writers to be very approachable. But no, talent doesn't rub off.

I got Hugh Cave's name out of the phonebook and asked if I could come over. He said sure. He was 92 at the time. I brought a six foot tall Greek girl and a stack of paperbacks from a bookstore in West Palm Beach. He flirted with Anthonia and showed me his office. A desk, a chair, a computer. A handful of reference books. A room for writing.

I've worked in a variety of bookstores. In college, I worked at the Raven Bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas. When I lived in San Francisco, I worked at Forever After Books at Haight and Ashbury. My friends Will and Tom own Prospero's Books in Kansas City and I helped renovate their current space, a former hardware store.

I can't think of a book that "changed my life" but two come very close. In college I read Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger and and Colin Wilson's The Occult virtually back to back. It was as if someone stuck a crowbar in my head and cracked open my brain. I've never looked at things the same way.

posted by Prof. Hex at 8:13 PM

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