Professional Wrestling And Life Writing

Yet another fun file find here!  Back in 2007, I wrote a proposal for a Modern Language Association (MLA) conference paper.  I wasn't surprised that the proposal didn't get accepted, as many MLA panels seem to be prefabricated, but the panel organizer did ask me to write the paper and submit it to a journal that he edited.  Alas, I never followed up on it since I had other scholarly projects in process then and didn't have time to add another project.  It would have been fun to work on.  If someone hasn't written a similar paper yet (and I do recall hearing one that was in the same ballpark, er, wrestling ring that focused on inconsistencies between two different biographies by the same wrestler a year or two ago at the Popular Culture Association conference), then please feel free to have a go at it.  I doubt that I will ever get around to doing this project.

"Grappling With The Past:  The Genre Of Professional Wrestling Biography"

Since 1999, when professional wrestler Mick Foley's first autobiography, Have A Nice Day:  A Tale Of Blood And Sweatsocks, achieved the number one slot for hardcover nonfiction on The New York Times Best Sellers booklist, dozens of professional wrestling biographies have been published.  Though most of the biographies are ghostwritten, some wrestlers become more involved than others in crafting the narratives of their life stories, particularly Foley, who writes his books himself, having published three autobiographies to date.  But, regardless of the level of the involvement of the wrestler with the book, the interest of fans of professional wrestling in such books has caused the professional wrestler biography to emerge as a genre within celebrity life writing.  Why has professional wrestling, a form of popular culture often held in low esteem by nonaficionados, turned so literate in recent years?  Part of the attraction of such books for wrestling fans is learning about the world of professional wrestling beyond the ring.  For, despite the knowledge that it is typically scripted, professional wrestling continues to thrive on mixing fantasy with reality, or what in wrestling terminology is known as a "shoot" (real) and a "work" (fake).  Fans, especially the hardcore vocal minority who participate in Internet forums and likely purchase many of the books, often seem to delight in analyzing storylines, attempting to distinguish artifice from reality.  However, though the dedication to keeping trade secrets, known as "kayfabe" within the wrestling industry, has lessened with wrestling's recasting of itself as "sports entertainment," even the supposed tell-all professional wrestling biography may not be as forthcoming as it appears to be.  Indeed, the construction of the identity behind the wrestling character in the biography may be just another mask to hide behind.  In this paper, I examine several representative wrestling biographies in an attempt to, pardon the pun, pin down notable aspects of the genre.

Robert Cormier Interview

I found some more interesting stuff in the old files.  This one is definitely worth sharing.  It's a 1988 interview with Robert Cormier, who was a popular novelist for young adults at the time. 

"My worst nightmare is a reader closing one of my books and yawning.  I want to shake people up a little.  I want them to react to what I write," declared awardwinning author Robert Cormier during a press conference with area high school students Wednesday at the tenth annual Youngstown State University English Festival.  Cormier was the featured lecturer at the English Festival and four of his books, including The Chocolate War, are on this year's festival booklist.

Cormier's writing career has spanned four decades.  He started writing as a journalist and won the Associated Press Best News Story Award twice, in 1959 and in 1973.  He wrote fiction in his spare time for many years before he decided to write it fulltime in 1978.  Cormier has won numerous awards for his fiction, including the New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year Award three times for his novels The Chocolate War, I Am the Cheese, and After the First Death.

A friendly man in his sixties, Cormier looked relaxed as he fielded questions about his writing, answering them in his New England accent.  Cormier denounced the adolescent literature label on much of his work by saying, "I don't think I write young adult books.  I write books about young adults.  When I sit down at the typewriter and begin creating a story, I don't write with a sixteen-year-old in mind.  I write for an intelligent reader regardless of age."

Cormier also stated that he feels a great kinship with teenagers, and their problems and lives are of general interest to him.  That is the reason much of his writing concerns teenagers.  He claims to have total recall of his teenage years, and he became interested in writing about young adults when his three children reached adolescence.  Despite his strong affinity with teens, Cormier exclaimed, "I wouldn't be a teenager again for a million dollars.  It's the most turbulent, lacerating, total, terrific time of life, which is what makes it so fascinating."

Cormier said that his writing stems from emotions.  He claims to need a strong emotional catalyst to start writing, and he has a great emotional involvement with his characters.  He described himself as a storyteller who possess a "third eye," which picks up nuances and, then, feelings of people that he can use in his writing.  He keeps his writing style sharp by every night recording his impressions of the day.

Cormier always thought of himself as "a writer disguised as a newspaperman," and, when he had the chance, he became a fulltime writer.  He compared his relationship with the typewriter to the relationship between an artist and an easel or a pianist and a piano.  He wants to have readers react to his work, and he is very pleased when he gets feedback from readers on his work.  He even placed his phone number in I Am the Cheese when Adam tries to contact his girlfriend, Amy.  Sometimes readers call.

As long as he keeps writing, they probably will keep reading as well.

The Day I Met Marjane Satrapi

I was going through some old files recently and stumbled across an old cartoon.  It looks as if I spent all of five minutes on it, but it's amusing enough.  It's a true story also.  You probably will need to click on it in order for it to be legible.  It is fun to draw a comic from time to time.

Freelance Season

Freelance season is beginning a tad earlier this year than usual, so I am advertising it a bit.  If you, or anyone you know, need any editing, proofreading, or writing done, then please feel free to get in touch for more details (wredfright AT yahoo.com).

What Wred's Reading: The Sunny Spaces

New Castle, Pennsylvania USA has a bit of a literary bent.  Maybe most small towns do if one digs around enough, but I have always been a bit surprised at the amount of literature that the little place has produced, not that most people there notice, since they tend to be most interested in fireworks, food, and football (and if pharmaceuticals were spelled with an "f" at the beginning, then I would have thrown that on the list as well).

True, the town's most famous literary creation is the stretchable sleuth from the comic books known as Plastic Man, courtesy of hometown boy Jack Cole, and some literati would sniff about that, but I got a thrill as a kid reading that Plas hailed from the same town that I did (though the book that contained that fact, Secret Origins Of The Super Heroes, thought "New Castle" was one word like its English counterpart).

A little closer to mainstream literature, though still someone that snobby literati would scoff about, is Edmond Hamilton, a pulp science fiction writer who, like Cole, worked in comic books but, unlike Cole, also wrote for Weird Tales and whatnot.  As a teenager, I read his Starwolf novels and enjoyed them, but I never read anything else by him since I was gravitating out of science fiction and more into mystery.  Eventually, I would move through mystery into literature with a capital L.

A few years later, I would stumble upon a fantasy novel by a local named Susan Dexter.  It was enjoyable, but, having moved past fantasy about the same time I stopped reading science fiction regularly, I didn't read more.  Since then, one of my high school classmates, Diana Joseph, wrote two books, both of which I enjoyed.  She specializes in humorous memoir.

I am sure that there are also some fine local fiction writers, playwrights, and poets, whom I do not know of, since I do like to keep up with literature produced elsewhere as well, and it is a big world.  Still, I do have an interest in literature from that small town and, indeed, that general area of Western Pennsylvania.  New Castle is located in Lawrence County, so I also get a big kick out of Ellwood City poet Ron Androla's work, though he has lived in Erie for so long that it is probably more accurate to call him an Erie poet.  Or an eerie poet?  Androla would enjoy that description!

In any case, I was delighted to get a copy of Ann Antognoli's novel, The Sunny Spaces, for Christmas.  Not only is Antognoli from New Castle, but also her novel is partly set there.  It's a middleaged love story where two wounded souls find solace in one another.  It has lots of literary references as well, with the title coming from Moby Dick, for example. It is an enjoyable read, reminiscent of the work of Richard Russo.  It also reminds me of Lawrence Richette's work a bit.  All three writers tend to focus on straight-up storytelling in a realistic mode.  Ann is a retired high school English teacher, so she has clearly learned well from studying the great works of literature!  I believe that I had Antognoli as a substitute teacher a couple of times, but I know her husband better since he taught a great creative writing class that I took at the Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts.  Having met with both Antognolis recently, I know that Ann is thinking about another novel, so the literary heritage of New Castle should only continue to grow!

Christmas Wish Lists

Apparently, Ohio Governor John Kasich wants a balanced budget amendment in the U.S. Constitution.  Well, that may indeed be on his Christmas Wish List, but I suspect it's mainly just an opening gambit as he jockeys for position in the 2016 Republican primaries for President of the United States of America.  I found it a bit ironic.  Here's a dude who spends 25 grand of taxpayer money to stick his name on highway signs, and yet he tries to pretend to be a frugal public servant.  Well, if he were smart, then he'd ditch the names on the highway signs before some rival for the Republican nomination calls him on it.  Stopping that waste of taxpayer money would be grand.  I would love to not see those stupid overlay signs with the governor's and lieutenant governor's names on the "Welcome to Ohio" signs next year.  That's on my Christmas Wish List!

Wishing You A Cool Yule!

People Still Believe Hemingway Wrote A Story He Didn't

Despite the efforts of myself and others, people still want to claim that Ernest Hemingway wrote a six-word short story that he probably didn't (credit should likely go to playwright John De Groot who has Hemingway say the "story" in a play, thus the confusion).  Quotation expert Ralph Keyes alerted me to the latest bit of nonsense, which unfortunately comes from The New York Times.  The Times does give a tad bit of a fig leaf of cover in relation to reality by writing that Hemingway is "said to have managed to tell" instead of writing "wrote" or "composed" in reference to the story, but the article is undoubtedly sure to spread this nonsense further.  At this point, this story, which isn't really a story and which Hemingway probably never wrote, is probably his most famous literary work.  Well, the Modernists did love irony, so maybe Papa would have gotten a kick out of it anyway, but it would be nice if people, especially when writing for The New York Times, did some research to avoid making false claims.