Something I missed, that I wouldn’t have been able to attend even if I’d known about it, was a screening of the documentary Good Ol’ Charles Schulz, with director David Van Taylor in attendance, at a place I’ve mentioned before, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Here is the part of the film I liked, and I was pleased to later learn that Monte Schulz felt the same.
[flv:/Video/2008/JUN/CoffeeLane.flv 440 330]
I have talker already. Sideshow talker, etc. I just need confirmation on “pitchman” for the guy at the front gate. Also, I chose “Cyrus the Great” for the song in the big top. It was a march and written in 1921, so it worked.
I worked for a traveling carnival — One night only! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! — when I was fifteen, and I made fifty bucks ($250 today) helping to take down the rides. Are you thinking of the “talker”? The only music I can think of at the moment is “Entrance of the Gladiators”.
Thanks for your support. I promise you’ll be impressed with what I did in that book. It took years and years. No overnight success. And Dad won’t see it hit daylight, but I wrote it for him and his influences in my reading are everywhere throughout. The bound galley arrived today, so it was interesting to read this for once off my computer and bound like a real book. My own editing continues. You wouldn’t happen to know what the barker outside of a circus at the main gate is called, do you? An old friend told me to use “pitchman.” Also, I need to look up some old circus music, the name of something, to use for the lion tamer. I used “Bring “em Back Alive,” but I’m not sure that’s correct for the period.
Your staying with the novel for seventeen years is proof of its worth. If you didn’t believe in it, you wouldn’t have stuck with it. I’ve pre-ordered my copy on Amazon. I’m looking forward to reading it, Monte!
I agree with you about that. I’m also feeling the added pressure of knowing that this novel has been waiting seventeen years for this moment, and I want it to be right. They tell me the bound galley will arrive tomorrow morning. That should be fun to see.
Yes, it’s a shame your father can’t share the satisfaction of seeing “This Side of Jordan” published. When he died I was going through a hellish recovery from a detached retina, and being in a fragile condition myself, I had a really hard time coming to grips with seeing him with Al Roker on the Today Show, because it was obvious his end was coming.
Your comment about completing the final draft touches upon something I’ve thought about many times — how little a difference there is, in a way, between computer programming and writing.
The tedium you’re going through to get everything as perfect as you can is close, if not identical, to the mental process during final debugging of an application program. But there will be, of course, some errors that slip through. There always are. The difference is that in a novel the interpretation of the text is done by a person who can mentally correct the mistake. Computers, however, cannot overlook any bugs, when evaluating code.
Yes, I graduated from UCSB in 1983 with my M.A. in American Studies and wrote my thesis on Small Town America. As for This Side Of Jordan, I’m just correcting the final draft, due a week from now. Lots of details to check. I’m basically looking up every fact in the book and making sure everything’s correct — that means every tree, bush, flower, car, etc. Also, I’m examining the punctuation and syntax of every sentence in the novel to be sure it’s correct and what I want. Very tedious. My responsibility, though. It’s amazing to see the book on Amazon and at Fantagraphics, at last. I wish Dad were alive to see this.
Hi, Monte. I see Fantagraphics has a September publication date for your new book, This Side of Jordan. Go to the end of this PDF:
http://www.fantagraphics.com/images/stories/previews/norton_fall09-lowres_08-13.pdf
Being Fantagraphics, they make a point of saying it’s a “Prose Novel.” I didn’t know you have a Masters degree.
The screening of Good Ol’ Charles Schulz was back on March 26. I’ve been to that museum of a couple of times, but I haven’t put myself on their mailing list. I found out about the screening from a Google Alert for your father’s name.
When was that screening? How did you hear about it? We don’t seem to have any further contact with the film makers, which is too bad because I liked them, even if their film didn’t thrill me.