The Missing Tooth

PAPERBACK WRITER.
This is another one of my favorite Beatles songs. It was written in 1966 by Paul McCartney.
I like the combination of the hard, bluesy instrumental backing with the sweet vocal harmonies. They balance each other out like yin and yang.
The lyrics are in the form of a query letter from a struggling author to a publisher. I hear snatches of this song every time I send out a manuscript to an editor.

NORWEGIAN WOOD.
Towards the end of the John Lennon song ‘Norwegian Wood’ the protagonist “crawls off to sleep in the bath…”
With the words of this song in mind I once crept off to sleep in a bath after a party in South London. I’ve tried to sleep in a tent on Dartmoor, and tried to sleep on an Amtrak train from Savannah to New York, but that night in the bath was the coldest, most uncomfortable, and sleepless night of my life.
All together, sleeping in a bath is a very bad idea.

The last time I saw this painting was in the Sunday Times Magazine when I was ten years old. The picture has continued to haunt me over the intervening decades, but I never saw it again, and never knew who painted it. That is until today when I put the picture (from memory) into a scene in a story I’m working on. As I described it in words, I thought, why not google that exact word description. I tried “Woman playing cards,” and the picture didn’t appear. I tried “Woman playing Solitaire.” Still nothing. Then I realized that perhaps it was a British painting, and solitaire is called patience in the UK. I googled “Woman playing patience,” and there it was. I’m glad to say that the picture lived up to my memory. In fact it might even have exceeded expectations.

This painting of Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) as a centaur was used in an episode of the TV show, Parks and Recreation.

In the show the painting was attributed to the ‘schlumpf’ character Jerry. It’s a actually a really great piece of art, or I suppose it would be more accurate to call it illustration. Curiously, the Jerry character is derided for painting it, although he’s pretty much ridiculed for everything he does and says.

The question is, who really created the painting? I’ve checked through the credits on Netflix, and Julie Bolder is credited as the set decorator, but I’m not sure that means she was the artist.

Is it the same artist who created the Pawnee Town Hall murals? Either way it’s great to see illustration surviving on TV. I suppose the burning question is this: if Jerry is capable of creating art this good then what is he doing as a pen-pushing boob in a provincial town hall?

A book by Tim Thornton in what (for me at least) seems to be a innovative format. Straightforward narrative is interspersed with music press interviews, giving the story a mockumentary feel, a little in the style of THE OFFICE or PARKS AND RECREATION.
The interesting aspect of the interviews is that you’re never sure if they’re actually taking place or if they’re just the fantasies of the characters as they dream of success.
A technique Thornton uses to good effect is that he’ll begin a paragraph in present tense, then slip back into past tense, jumping from what’s happening now to flashback, giving the illusion that each episode has just been written a few moments before you start reading.
The central message of the book––while you’re unsuccessful you can just keep going as long as you like, but as soon as you achieve success the clock starts ticking––is one that really resonates.

Just re-reading the Hunger Games in preparation for teaching a class on the book next week, and it occurred to me that the first chapter is a pretty good example of how to write an opening scene.

As it moves through the various settings it provides everything the reader needs: Character, relationships between the characters, a sense of place, voices, a little background information, and most important of all, it provides a significant transformation of the emotional state of Katniss, the main character.

The story opens with Katniss waking up. We see her looking forward to the day of reaping, with a certain amount of anger, but the anger subsides as she thinks about her sister, Prim, and the cat.

Next, Katniss heads out to the woods to go hunting, and her mood picks up. She meets her boyfriend, Gale, and she becomes about as content as she ever gets in the book. They even ponder running away and living off their hunting and trapping skills.

They return to the town with what they’ve managed to catch. As they begin bartering at the Hob Katniss’s mood begins to change. She thinks about how her father was killed in the mine. They meet the relatively privileged, Madge, and Katniss thinks about how unfair the reaping is, with the odds being very much against poor families such as her own.

Her mood picks up as she returns home. Her mother has provided her with a nice dress to wear to the reaping. Katniss heads to the town square. At first she’s bored by the speeches, then embarrassed by the antics of Haymitch and Effie Trinket. Finally she catches sight of Gale in the crowd.

Then without any warning, Katniss is plunged into despair as her little sister, Prim is selected for the reaping.

We have anger, tenderness, contentment, indignation, vanity, bitterness, worry, and finally, hopeless misery. What’s more, it’s all woven together in a little over twenty pages.

Seems like a pretty good template to me.

THE FLYING FORTRESS AND ZERO.
The one part I like is the moment the jets kick in on the backs of my shins. That moment when my feet lift off the ground, and I have to adjust my spine to keep my balance. That moment just makes me tingle all over. Do I have a second-favorite moment? Not really. The rest pretty much sucks from start to finish.
The Flying Fortress slaps the back of my head.
“Ouch,” I say as I waver a foot above the floor of his attic-slash-laboratory. “Is that really necessary?”
“Keep your back straight,” he says, as he draws the cadmium glove back over his hairy hand. “The way you arch your back you look like a yoga instructor.”
“For goodness sakes, Bailey,” I say.
The Flying Fortress ignores me. He slams down the plexiglass visor and waves at Mathers who then winches open the big skylight. As soon as the skylight is open enough, he flexes his knees, leaps up, and with a growl of turbines he shoots through the opening into the moonlit sky.
“Later, Mathers,” I say. I give the old valet a military salute.
“Happy trails, Zero,” he says.
I dive out though the skylight and follow The Flying Fortress’s contrails arching over to the South-West. Good. We are heading for the city. I like working in the city. The city has bagel stores, and the one thing I like after a job is a fresh-out-of-the-oven sesame seed bagel, slathered in peanut butter.
I throttle back after I see the glow of his retro-rockets, and come alongside, slightly above and to his right, just how he likes it.
He just keeps cruising for a moment as if he hasn’t seen me, then eventually he rotates his visor towards me. “Next time you do that yoga thing, I’ll slap you with the glove on. Then you’ll know what hit you.”
“You’ll be needing a new sidekick, in that case, Bailey,” I say. “Unless you feel confident fighting crime with a headless sidekick.”
He waves his cadmium gloved hand at me. “First,” he says. “Stop calling me Bailey when we’re in uniform. Secondly.” He holds up two fingers and pauses.”
“Secondly what?” I say.
“Just a minute, Zero,” he says. “I’m getting a message from Hampshire.”
Hampshire is his crime desk connection at the Daily Cannonball. Fleetwood City’s be-there-or-be-square-must-read newsrag.
“Mother of all that is good and merciful,” he says. He raises his visor and massages his eyes. “Where have all the real villains gone? Whither the days of people merely stealing things that didn’t belong to them?”
“Most of them are in jail, where you put them,” I say. This actually isn’t true, but I reckon a little flattery might help grease the wheels. “Who is it this time?”
The Flying Fortress stops massaging his eyes and turns to me. “The Dentist,” he says with a grimace.
“The Dentist!” I say. A sharp pain shoots through my lower jaw. “I thought he was in the slammer for the next millenium and a half.”
“Exactly,” says The Fortress. “I put him there. Unfortunately I don’t think he cared for the food.” He shakes his head. “Nor did anyone else. There was a mass breakout at Strangemoors Prison earlier this evening. I think we’re going to have a busy couple of weeks ahead of us.”
“But I have a whole slew of tests coming up at school,” I say.
“So use your superpowers to pass them,” says the Fortress.
“But that would be cheating,” I say. “Isn’t the whole point of the exercise that I’m supposed to be using the powers for good?”
“The greater good,” says Fortress, as he banks over to the left.
“So, what you’re saying is that I can do bad things if the end result of those bad actions is good?” I say.
“Keep your back straight, and hold your position,” snarls the Fortress.
The towers of the financial district hove into view below our feet.
“Finlayson Building,” says The Fortress. He yaws, then angles into a shallow dive towards the top of the tallest building.
I notice black-uniformed police with long rifles just below me on the deck of Crabapple Tower. One of them looks up at me and waves. I wave back.
Manic laughter wafts up to me. The Fortress points off the South. “There he is.”
A lone figure stands right on the edge of the ornate parapet of the Finalyson building. He glances up at us, and waves. He seems to be wearing a fur coat of some kind. At his feet is a cage about the size of a twin bed. Some things move behind the bars of the cage.
“Holy crap!?” Oh man. Now I can see what’s in the cage.
“You said it,” grunts The Fortress.
“The cage is full of puppies!” I cry.
“And not just any puppies,” says The Fortress. “Not fancy-schmacy pedigree puppies, but cute-as-all-get-out mongrel puppies from the humane center.”
“And the fur coat!” I cry. “It’s not a coat. He has about twenty kittens duct-taped to himself.”