The Milkman of Gumption

I was afraid this would happen. I haven't been reading fast enough to keep up with the blog. I thought I could do it, and I probably could, if it weren't for those dang Nintendo games.

I got distracted. Lost sight of the ball for a minute. Just ran out of moxie. Here it is, too late on a Thursday night, and I just know you're waiting for six A.M. Mountain Time to roll around so you can get your full-sized, packed with jokes Friday blog and here I am just not having the gumption. I'm all out, folks. It's an empty glass bottle and I don't think the milkman of gumption is scheduled to come within the next 8 hours.

It was a good run, though, right? Longer than I thought I had in me. It's tough to send blog posts out into the internet, knowing how big it is. Well. Having an idea of how big it is but really probably not even grasping that. Knowing, in fact, that there are hundreds, maybe thousands of people like me blogging about books. What makes ol' Howie's unique?

Truth is? I don't know.

But here's the thing. I got ahold of a couple of original Nintendo Entertainment Systems and spent a lot of time kind of wallowing in nostalgia. That's one of the reasons I haven't been reading fast enough. Another? Watching that new Daredevil show. Another? Reading Avengers comics from the library.

Here's a thing about those:

So Nintendo cartridges didn't hold a lot of information, see? To make the game worth your $50 (which is, adjusted for inflation, more like $1900 give or take), it had to last more than an afternoon. To last more than an afternoon, the games had to be really hard. Contra hard. Ghosts & Goblins hard. Battletoads hard. You had to beat your little head against these things. They hated you and you hated them but also you loved them because at school you weren't sure anyone cared about you as much as the little guys in the NES cared about rescuing the girl.

So you got back up. Little Mac gets back up. Even when he's tired. Even when he's pink.

Think of poor Hawkeye. He's just a dude. His coworkers are virtual and literal gods. They fight against gods. They fight against indestructible foes with the power to destroy planets. Hawkeye probably has to fight rashes sometimes. Yet there he is, just shooting those arrows like he belongs. "Hey there goes Hawkeye," Thor the mighty god of thunder says. "Look how cute he is when he tries."

"SO CUTE," Hulk says before punching Thor. It's funny every time.

That's a theme in the new Daredevil show, too. He just keeps getting back up. He learned that from his dad, a boxer. There's a scene at the end of the second episode where he gets back up and does what he needs to do. The stakes are high and he delivers.

You know who else delivers? Summer. Oh. That's the name of the girl in The Thing About Luck by Cynthia Kadohata. This is going to be hard. I know that my descriptions of books rarely get you a'runnin' to the bookstore or library. I have yet to hear from a single soul, in fact, that they read and enjoyed one of the books I've recommended. And this one may be the hardest sell yet.

OK, so Summer is a 13-year-old girl. Her family is going through some really bad luck. Her parents have gone back to Japan to take care of her mother's parents. That leaves her with her grandparents on her father's side. They're coming out of retirement to finish the harvest. It's in Iowa or whatever. Some place like Iowa. There are a lot of places like Iowa, I think.

Anyway, Summer helps her grandmother cook for the whole harvest crew while her grandpa drives the big tractor thing. Her grandparents are immigrants from Japan and are sweet and hilarious. Her brother is autistic. Summer is a very lovely, responsible person who doubts herself a lot. She realizes, at some point, that it's up to her to change her family's luck. She's a tough girl, and I just like her so much.

“I felt like I didn't understand a single thing in the whole world. I didn't understand a single person. I didn't even understand myself.”

Do you remember being 13? I think it was when I felt like the most insignificant thing in the whole world. What could I do to change the world? To help my family? To figure life out? Who knows. Whatever it was, I didn't do it. I remember feeling like Summer did, though. Maybe all I needed to do was keep getting up.

Nothing under my skin

It seems only yesterday I used to believe

there was nothing under my skin but light.

If you cut me I could shine

-Billy Collins

Good Buys, Bad Bouys

For a good decade or so I would have said that my favorite genre of fiction was some pretentious thing called "Black Mask Detective." I've probably tried to get into the definition in the past, probably on this very web site. It's also called stuff like "noir" or "hard-boiled" or just "really cool." It gets its name from the pulp magazine Black Mask, where guys like Dashiell Hammett got his start. He wrote The Maltese Falcon, among many others, but that's the one you've probably heard of.

Anyway, of all those authors my favorite is probably Raymond Chandler, whose manipulation of the English language is an amazing mix of Hemingway and a high-school lit student with a bit too much confidence in the simile department. He created Phillip Marlowe, who you may remember being played by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. Marlowe likes chess, whiskey, hats, and blondes.

“From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.”

“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”

“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”

You get the picture. This is the kind of writing that is best read in a dark office with light shining through black-out blinds, painting a pattern across your weathered face like a half-finished chessboard dangit now I'm doing it. It's infectious.


I don't know if I have a favorite genre of fiction nowadays. One of my goals is to eventually render human conversation completely unbearable. By not having a favorite of anything, I'm able to stop many conversations before they even start! This is all in the name of efficiency and not having to buy birthday presents.


Anyway, speaking of books, I just read The Long Goodbye. It was the last Chandler novel I had left. It's considered by some to be his best, so I saved it. I left it on my shelf and kind of cherished it, knowing that it would be the only time again in my life that I could read a Phillip Marlowe book for the first time. It was like the last bite of a chocolate rabbit. The solid chocolate, mind you. It's in your drawer in a plastic bag and you know it's there. As long as you know it's there you know that you have something. A little treat for when it gets really bad. Just knowing that treat is there, well, sometimes that's enough.


One day Kristin and I decided it would be fun to read a chapter of a book to each other every night, and this was the first one we tried. It was fun. It's a good book to read aloud. It's also a little iffy on the sexual politics which leads to Kristin's adorable feminist frown sometimes.

Marlowe is that typical male character in a book written by a man who has women throw themselves at him for generally no reason at all. Sure, he's cool. He doesn't fawn over them. He's tough. He's got that hat. OK, so maybe there are reasons. I don't know. He talks about how there are some types of blondes you want to slug, and others who are alcoholic and "soft and willing." We both made a frown at that.

Listen, though. It's the 2010s, or whatever we're calling them. We all talk different now but still want some love. Do you need help? Well pull up a chair, I have some advice. You, too, need a lovely woman (or man) to frown at misogyny in 1930's literature, and here are some fool proof tips:

• When you're in the diner, flip the script. Look meaningfully at your date while asking your waiter, "Garcon! The lady and I would like two milkshakes, but one straw." Wink knowingly. 
• This has never happened to me personally, but I see it all of the time on your better 90's sitcoms: If a woman approaches you and asks if you believe in love at first sight, play it cool, Marlowe-style. Finish your beverage. I don't care how much is left in the cup. Just drain that thing. Then, when you're down to the ice and it's just that horrible slurpy sound, just keep at it for way too long. Then look up at her, smile, and say "Nope." 
• Make impressive claims that are completely unverifiable. Like say, "I was the first person to say 'It is what it is." Or "You know I named the Pokemon Hitmonlee?" 
• Show confidence: at a conference recently our break snack was a tray of fresh-baked cookies. There were as many oatmeal raisin as there were chocolate chip. That takes some moxie, my friend. Insane, naive, optimistic-in-the-face-of-all-evidence moxie. I want to see that out there. *smacks your butt* GO GET EM. 

• Find a girl who was home-schooled. As Disney Princess movies have told us, home-schooled girls are extremely well-adjusted, even though they have sometimes been held against their will in a tower or lived their live as a slave. They've been lied to by authority figures, and told that the outside world is a threat, but trust doesn't seem to be an issue. Also they'll marry the first man who they meet. 

This last one may take some work, as she never learned many of the rules you learned on the schoolyard.


Here's a sample conversation with your home-schooled girlfriend:

You: Sweety, I love you so much.

Her: I love you infinity.

You: See, this is what I'm talking about, you don't go straight to "infinity."

You and her together: I'm sorry.

Her: Personal jinx

You: YOU DON'T GO STRAIGHT TO PERSONAL JINX


Persevere, though, and there may be some smooching in it for you. Just be sure to call it smooching when you go in there.

What bird are you calling?

“A single note, held in an amber suspension of time, like a charcoal drawing of Icarus falling. It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity. It went on and on, until my own lungs were burning.
“What bird are you calling?” I asked finally, when I couldn’t stand it any longer.
The Bird Man stopped whistling. He grinned, so that I could see all his pebbly teeth.

“You.” 
-Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

the real me

"Was I good or bad or mixed or what? And was the way I acted every day the real me, or was the real me somewhere so deep that I would never even know it?"
-Cynthia Kadohata, The Thing About Luck