Stephen Dunn, my undergrad writing teacher, told me, “Suspense is cheap.” I knew what he meant — that providing insight into human lives and poking at the fabric of existence is a higher literary calling, and is what separates Tolstoy from Louis L’Amour. But I also thought it was an easy thing for a poet to say. Suspense isn’t a weapon that is kept in the poetical armory.

Dramatists have a greater eye for suspense — and for where storylines are going. For most of my life, I’ve known where most stories are going, so for me suspense has been cheap and insight more highly valued. I had little doubt where “Anna Karenina” was headed, the novel or the eponymous heroine, especially because I’d heard in advance about the final meeting with a train. That never mattered because every page signaled the miracle of creation. I was enrapt by Levin’s struggle to understand himself and his place on his land and in the cosmos, and sick over Anna’s dreadful mistake in following her heart and losing everything else. The suspense, such as it was, didn’t matter.

Last year after he gave a talk, Brad Meltzer handed out copies of some of his books, provided gratis by his publisher in what I thought was a nice gesture. I decided to read “The Millionaires.” Was it entertaining? Plenty; it was the reading equivalent of a cocaine rush. Was it suspenseful? To a degree — although again, I could see where all of it was going (and that, in true Agatha Christie fashion, the secret villain was someone who had already falsified his own death). Has it left any footprints on my thinking? Let’s just say that although I gobbled down all 547 pages of the book, a week later I couldn’t remember one iota of it. Whereas I still can’t drum out of my head Chaucer’s cook with the ulcerating knee who happens to stir up a wonderful blancmange, and I read that once 25 years ago.

Last week when we were watching “The Wire,” I said to my son, “Omar isn’t going to make it out of this season.” Omar is the character we like the best, and I could see his demise coming. On tonight’s episode, Omar was hobbling around the streets of inner-city Baltimore taking out Marlo’s muscle. Once I noticed that there were two such scenes, I knew tonight was Omar’s night. (Because the third such scene would complete the movement.) “Tonight’s when he gets it,” I said. Lex said, “NO!” Then Omar stepped into a liquor store to buy a pack of smokes and I said, “This is the scene,” and then he got it in the head from behind. Another smoking-related death.

“WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS RIGHT?!?!?!!?” Lex screamed.

Because suspense is cheap: It’s easily unpacked and solved. Forecasting Omar’s death didn’t ruin the drama because the best drama isn’t about suspense. Suspense is just the vehicle.

Nice piece on Slate.com on the late, great comic-book writer Steve Gerber. But writer Grady Hendrix gets one thing wrong when writing, “[Gerber] delighted in sneaky juvenile wordplay—for part of his run on Man-Thing the book was called Giant Size Man-Thing.”

Yes, great line, and no, Hendrix is not the first to point this out. But Marvel had an entire line of “Giant-Size” something-or-others, including Giant-Size Avengers and Giant-Size Defenders — indeed, there were no fewer than 29 in all (each, you’ll note, with a hyphen between “Giant” and “Size,” which pleases me greatly). So this wasn’t any wordplay on Gerber’s part; this was the result of the regular title selling well enough to merit a quarterly edition as well. But I doubt that would explain the existence of “Giant-Size Kid Colt,” and my algebra skills aren’t up to the task of solving “Giant-Size Marvel Triple Action.”

By the way, the issue above was the one most prized in my collection. I have a letter published inside. I was 14. Ironically I now relate to it even more, but in a completely different way — most nights, I am The Winky Man, wandering around my bedroom creating chaos in my sleep.

If this piece in the New York Times is true and Hillary is this downcast, dejected, and defeated, then I’m gladder than that ever she’s losing the nomination. If she and her hand-picked team can’t tough out a nomination process, what would they do when real trouble strikes? (Assuming, as always, that we actually do get to have an election.) Saying “it’s been an honor” sure doesn’t equate with, say, “We shall never, never, never surrender.”

I just got in from the memorial service for my writing teacher, Bill Idelson, whom I talked about here. The service was held at the Writer’s Guild Theatre, and let me say that even in death Bill continues to be a great teacher. Here’s advice we all should heed in thinking about the service we would want:

1. Get Carl Reiner to emcee. (You may recall that Bill wrote for “The Dick van Dyke Show” and played a recurring role. Hence the connection to Carl Reiner.) Mr. Reiner is warm, humane, slyly funny and wonderfully off-the-cuff. He didn’t miss one opportunity. Perhaps my favorite bit was the suggestion of specific edits after viewing the tribute film.
2. In every photo of you, make it look like you were having the time of your life. Apparently, every day was the time of Bill’s life.
3. Pose an attractive spouse with you in those photos, and enjoy her company in every shot.
4. Surround yourself with interesting and amusing people like Norman Corwin and Ray Bradbury and various successful former students and performers like Ann Guilbert who will show up and tell funny stories about you.
5. Turn out to have been a World War II flying ace, someone determined to fight even though the Navy has given you a p.r. job so you can keep working as an actor. Pay for private flying lessons yourself so they can’t deny you. Then fly night fighter missions over Japan and get awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and four Air Medals. Then don’t tell people, so that even longtime friends learn this only from reading your obit.
6. If you’re going to have children, do a good job with them so that they say things like “I won the Dad lottery,” a claim that will be supported by all the photos and the video.

In summation: great service, impressive life.

It was a pleasure watching clips from “The Andy Griffith Show,” which Bill also wrote for, with a large audience. It’s easy to forget just how wonderful Don Knotts was — as well as the material he had to work with. Much was made of Bill’s writing advice to students over the years. Last night in class I was talking about “verisimilitude” — a word that puzzled my students and that Bill would have winced at — but really I was echoing Bill said: “Keep it real.” (Or, more literally, “make a simulation of the truth.”) One of his other bits of advice repeated tonight was this: Never mortgage your story for a joke. The story is more important, and the joke won’t be that funny. That’s exactly right. If you want more of this, you might click here and order Bill’s book — the core of his workshop, captured on paper.

These seem to be our choices for the next president.

(And, for the record, I’m an ENTJ, a type never mentioned in this piece.)

Halle Berry’s quote to the Philadelphia Daily News:  “I’ll do whatever he says to do.”

Mrowr.

There’s great wisdom in this piece by Marsha Norman (writer of “‘night, Mother,” which, coincidentally, I’m teaching from tonight). I especially like Ms. Norman’s insight that smart playwrights are smarter than critics about where fault lies. I still read the critics — sometimes — but no, I don’t heed them, not really. Playwrights can often hear the play that poor direction has muffled, but critics, who often have limited working knowledge of the theatre, can’t knowledgeably separate these creative roles.

Thanks to EM Lewis for bringing this piece to my attention.

Yesterday I wound up discussing politics long-distance with my elderly mother, something I believe I’ve done only once before. (And that would be only if abortion is truly a political issue, and not a personal or moral one.)

Here’s how I think we got on this subject: I asked her if she had voted in the recent primary in New Jersey. This was my clever way of checking in on her health. It took my father’s death to keep him from voting (and if he had lived in Chicago, I guess he’d still be voting). It’s the same with me and with my mother. And lately things have gone so bad that even my 15-year-older brother Ray started to vote — but that was for Kerry, and it didn’t wind up helping. So if I heard that Mom didn’t go out to vote, I’d figure I should make some plane reservations pronto.

Me: So, Mom, did you go out and vote?

Mom: Yep.

Me: (Fishing for followup, after a suppressed sigh of relief.) Um… so… who’d you vote for?

Mom: Hey! I don’t have to tell you! That’s for me to know!

She was stern on this point, much as she’s been stern on most points the entire time I’ve known her. Stern, but somehow giving, like the Mormon mother in “Angels in America” who miraculously transforms into the personified haven for distressed gay people. But eventually after piecing together various contextual clues, I wheedled out of her this, to me, astonishing revelation:

Me: So you voted for Hillary Clinton?!?!

Mom: Yes I did! I want to see a woman president while I’m alive. Don’t think I’m gonna get to, but I want to.

Somehow I couldn’t imagine my mother voting for Hillary Clinton, the often snide and snotty attorney in the power suit who as First Lady had turned up her nose at baking cookies. On further thought, though, my mother represents the last crumbling bastion of Hillary support: the older white female. Mom continued.

Mom: Hey, I’m a Democrat. Your grandparents were Republicans.

Me: Dad’s parents?

Mom: (snapping at me because I seem stupid) Yes, Dad’s parents! My parents didn’t vote! They were German!

(I believe they were U.S. citizens, though, but I left that aside. I also left aside the point that Dad’s parents were German, or at least German-American.)

Mom: I’m a Democrat. Democrats side with the working man. They were Republicans. My vote always canceled out at least one of ’em!

My father, by the way, was a registered Democrat who always voted Republican. But then, he was also a guy who expressed a strong dislike for every possible group or subgroup of people, including the ones he belonged to. At the same time, he was probably the friendliest guy you ever met; any place you went, Dad would wind up making friends with strangers. He said he didn’t like “the negroes,” for example, but he’d make friends of every one he came across. In his personal habits he was always open and friendly with people of all types. When I would ask him about this, posing a variation of, “Dad, I thought you didn’t like black people,” or “Dad, I thought you didn’t like hippies,” or so on, he’d say, “Oh, yeah, but not that guy. He’s all right.” This is the sort of logic that kept my father, a man who loathed unions, in the union. In retrospect, I prefer the actions of a person who welcomes individuals who seem to belong to groups he rejects, over the hypocrisy of people who profess to love all mankind but can’t even be nice to a waiter.

I think my father would have liked John McCain. In fact, I’m sure of it. Part of me likes John McCain. I respect his service and I respect his (previous) stands on principle. But I won’t vote for McCain. I disagree with him on almost every issue, but more importantly, just seeing him in that photo where he’s groping George W. Bush conjures the expression about what happens when you lie down with swine. Once upon a time, McCain was a guy who wouldn’t have done that; that guy I would have taken a closer look at.

Of the candidates still remaining, I’m sure that Clinton and McCain and Obama all have supporters among my family back in New Jersey. (And that Huckabee has none.) Whatever happens, it’s looking less likely that Mom will get her wish to see a woman in the White House. Clinton lost at least one more primary today, and by a whopping margin. She could still turn that around, but she’d better hurry. Mom is 83.

Above you see an artist’s representation of what the prehistoric Devil Frog, freshly discovered in fossil form, may have looked like. In the foreground is its smaller cousin, the Malagasy frog.

What I like so much about this rendering isn’t the impressive size of the Devil Frog, although I’m sure that if I ever came up against a frog the size of a basketball I would take notice. No, it’s the human psychology underlying this illustration. Good art always tells a story, knowingly or not. Bad art just sits there. One of the games I play with my students is to ask, “What happened just before this scene?” Because scenes are extensions of character, and these characters did something before this scene. In the above illustration, it looks to me like the smaller frog has just rounded a corner and screeched to a halt before colliding with serious trouble. The Devil Frog, or Beelzebufo ampinga, meanwhile, wears a sanguine expression, the sort recognizable by every littler guy all over the world. From the brow ridge to the faint jowly smile, that is an anthropomorphosized expression. Did the artist put it there intentionally, or was it discovered after creation? In my experience of my own writing and that of my students, I don’t know any more. Did Kafka intentionally set out to illuminate in his body of work the 20th century’s bureaucracy of death and degradation, or is it the fortunate byproduct of what he happened to be writing anyway? No matter what the adherents of formalism thought, there’s no separating the creator from the creation, the subtext from the context, or the figment of fossilized frog from the artist rendering it.

I don’t know what to do about the genocide in Darfur, but I would like it to stop. So I’m glad at least one of the presidential candidates has a close advisor who literally wrote the book on genocide. (That candidate would be Barack Obama.)

Here’s an interview with that advisor, Samantha Power. Read it and tell me again whether or not it would be an interesting change of pace to have a president who is intellectually curious. Obama read her book in 2005, then requested a one-hour meeting; it lasted four hours. Gee, an interest in learning things. How old-fashioned.

My favorite line from this piece:

“The idea that [Obama] doesn’t have experience is nuts to me. He’s a constitutional law professor. I happen to miss the Constitution; I thought it was a good document”