Tue - August 3, 2004

John J. Miller Interviews Robert Ferrigno on NRO

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August 03, 2004, 8:39 a.m.
Your Wake-Up Call
Read Ferrigno.

Q&A by John J. Miller

When crime novelist Robert Ferrigno's Horse Latitudes was published in 1990, Time hailed it as "the fiction debut of the season." That's certainly a nice way to start a career as a book writer, though, as Ferrigno deadpans, "it was only April."

The author is now in the summer of his content; his brand-new eighth book, The Wake-Up, is one of his best. "Sharp, fast, and slick," says Kirkus Reviews. "Ferrigno can read like Raymond Chandler on speed, with pages turning and adrenaline pretty high throughout."

Thankfully, The Wake-Up is not about an alarm clock going off at some godforsaken hour, but the unintended consequences of a good deed performed by a burned-out special-ops man. A "wake-up," writes Ferrigno, is "what they called it in the shop when you wanted to send a message, a love tap to prod a source, to remind a restless contact of his vulnerability. A hotel receipt placed under a married man's pillow or an 'insufficient funds' hold placed on a Cayman Islands bank account worked wonders. Thorpe just wanted to get the hard charger's attention, to show him how quickly the storm clouds could roll in on his sunny world. Just a little wake-up."

Ferrigno lives in the Seattle area and runs a website dedicated to his fiction. He recently took a few questions from NRO's John J. Miller.

National Review Online: In The Wake-Up, the plot turns on a hard-charging businessman who is cruel to a boy and a bystander's belief that a wrong must be made right. Like your other novels, it feature loads of bad guys and no cops, yet there's a moral sensibility as well. How do you work that in when even the good guys live outside the system?

ROBERT FERRIGNO: I think the highest morality is by definition, personal, and outside any system. As a character in one of my previous books says, "if you need a rule book to tell you the difference between right and wrong, you're f*** ed forever." Consequently, none of my protagonists are cops, and there is little official police presence. This began instinctively and has since become quite deliberate, as a reflection of the moral imperative of my fictional universe. I don't like characters who are required to do the right thing as part of their job descriptions — so no cops, no firefighters, no crusading attorneys. I prefer the individual who is confronted with a moral choice and, out of his own free will, does the right thing. The fact that the consequences of such action are that things are frequently made worse is part of the moral conundrum. (The Wake-Up revolves around an innocent good deed that has terrible consequences, and the "hero" of my last book, Scavenger Hunt, investigates an old crime, a supposedly solved case, and in so doing sets the real killer back killing to cover his tracks) My protagonists, even knowing the risks of moral involvement, always choose to take that risk. The good man is compelled to do good, no matter the consequences. It is the blowback, and how the good man deals with the blowback, that I am most interested in. The hero cleans up his own mess. I take my work very seriously — the dangers of an undergraduate degree in philosophy — but while Nietzsche said he philosophized with a hammer, I prefer a more deft approach, and a funnier one. I spend most of my time at the keyboard laughing at the things my characters say. If the writer isn't having fun, the reader isn't going to get a satisfying ride, and that's my true intention.

NRO: Al Qaeda makes an appearance in The Wake-Up. Could this book have been written before 9/11?

FERRIGNO: The initial notes for the book did precede 9/11, but I'm not psychic, I'm just a writer that reads a lot and has a vivid, and uncensored imagination. If you remember, shortly after 9/11 the government called in a lot of Hollywood honchos and asked them to brainstorm about where a dramatically inclined terrorist group might strike next. The instinct was correct. Creative types really can see the future more clearly than bureaucracies, but of course the government went to the wrong place looking for creativity. It's like hoping to find a racehorse to enter in the Kentucky Derby by walking into a French butcher shop.

NRO: When I your books, I often feel like I'm watching a movie. I understand that you studied filmmaking in school. How does this affect your writing?

FERRIGNO: I think and write very visually, which is one of the reasons I studied filmmaking. Thinking cinematically, thinking in terms of dialogue and movement, is an advantage. It allows me to lie in bed with my eyes closed and "play" different chapters in my head as scenes, reshooting them from different angles and points of view until I get it right. Then I can get up and go to the keyboard with certain problems solved. It's mental storyboarding and keeps things fast and true. If it doesn't look right, it's not going to read right. An extra advantage is that I can reassure my wife that I am still working, even when horizontal.

NRO: Will we ever see The Wake-Up, or one of your other books, on the big screen?

FERRIGNO: Most of my books have been optioned, some more than once, but none have been made. The Wake-Up is currently being considered by a major Hollywood studio.

NRO: You were also a professional gambler. How does someone make a living doing that?

FERRIGNO: It's really a natural job for a writer. To excel at poker you need discipline, a keen eye for observation, an ability to evaluate risk/reward ratios, and the killer instinct. I worked my way through college beating frat boys with a poor grasp of numbers theory, and then played in a variety of pickup games around the country for a few years. It was a great way to get in touch with the wonderful world of little criminals, but the downside was that you sometimes get held up afterwards, particularly if you were a big winner. You have to consider it a tax on earned income and move on.

NRO: And your website says you were a professor, too. Why don't you set one of your novels on a college campus? Imagine the characters!

FERRIGNO: I was a professor for a year and a half. I didn't meet any characters.

NRO: What's the best review you've ever received? What's the worst?

FERRIGNO: I have a letter from Elmore Leonard framed on the wall of my office. It says that I've written "an awfully good book. Wonderful characters and dialogue and sense of place." To me, that's the best review possible. The worst review I ever got was from the Los Angeles Times in which the reviewer attacked the jacket copy which called my fiction "noir," a term which he didn't think it merited, and then he devoted the whole review to explicating the history of the word and what a fraud I was for allowing my publisher to use it to hawk my book. My favorite review was the Washington Post's take on Flinch: "Many writers have presented Southern California as a freak show but perhaps none more convincingly than Robert Ferrigno. His lurid cast of crazed killers, zonked-out porn stars, bottom-dwelling journalists, and connoisseurs of aberrant art ('Gas-chamber photos are a splendid investment') boggles the imagination." This is a fine review, but I love the fact that the Post was amazed at my imagination, while I still think of myself as a reporter. Most of the things the reviewer thought were so bizarre were just my slightly tilted version of the people and places that make up daily life in the Golden State.

NRO: A lot of writers have strange habits. One novelist I know says he eats cereal all day long when he's writing. Do you exhibit any bizarre behavior when you're putting a story on the page?

FERRIGNO: It takes me a year or so to finish a book and I always listen to music when I work. The last three or four months, when I am hitting it 12-14 hours a day, I load the CD-player with five CDs, and that's all I listen to. The Wake-Up was completed listening exclusively to a black gospel compilation from Rhino records, Puccini Highlights by Leontyne Price (for when I write the violent scenes), My Life in the Bush Of Ghosts (Eno/Byrne), Portishead, and Tammy Wynette's Greatest Hits. I'm not sure if that's strange.

NRO: Who are your favorite fellow novelists? In other words, what books would you recommend to NROniks who like crime thrillers?

FERRIGNO: Anything by Elmore Leonard, the master of invisibility. Dennis Lehane has great heart, as does James Lee Burke.

NRO: The epigraph to The Wake-Up is from Jim Thompson: "There is only one basic plot: things aren't what they seem." Is that a good motto for your work? Why?

FERRIGNO: It's an apt motto for several reasons. On the literal level my stories are rife with duplicity and false assumptions, but on the larger level it speaks to the limited viewpoint we all have, just by nature of our egos and experience. In my books this plays out with the various bad guys doing terrible things while being utterly convinced that what they are doing is perfectly justified. The self always trumps reality. Vlad, a Rumanian hit men in The Wake-Up, is the product of some genetic tinkering by Ceausescu's scientists. (This is actually true, like the East Germans, the Rumanians wanted to improve the basic human design.) Having never had a childhood, Vlad suddenly interrupts his torture of an in-debt carnival worker to inquire about the cost of buying a small roller coaster for his personal use. Vlad is quite serious, without a trace of irony. The characters in my books fool themselves as often as they fool other people, and to even more comic and devastating effect.

http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/miller200408030839.asp
 
 
 

Even more good ink for Ferrigno's new book, on sale August 3rd. Ferrigno has a book signing at Seattle's Downtown Barnes & Noble

Posted at 06:06 PM    

Sun - June 27, 2004

Blogger Bill

#1 item in the Blogdex 100 today, from our Seattle Times:

Yes, the world's richest man may start his own blog...



Bill's blog won't be all business, either. He's expected to share personal details such as tidbits from recent vacations, according to tech pundit Mary Jo Foley's Microsoft Watch newsletter. Citing unnamed sources, she reported yesterday that Gates is about to start blogging "real soon now."

Microsoft spokesman Mark Murray would not confirm the story, but left open the possibility, saying, "Bill would love to do his own blog at some point in the future, time permitting."

Murray noted that Gates talked up blogging at gathering of executives in Redmond last month.

Posted at 09:57 AM    

Tue - May 11, 2004

Thu - March 18, 2004

The downward spiral continues

Looks like our bad girl is at it again. Two events in one day. Flashing her boobs on Letterman, then sending a guy to the hospital later that night. The saga continues...

This was reported in multiple places, obviously, but for novelty's sake, I included this one from Xinhuanet. They're reading about Courtney Love's behavior problems in China



Courtney Love arrested on assault charges

LOS ANGELES, March 18 (Xinhuanet) -- US singer-actress Courtney Love was arrested in New York on Thursday after throwing a microphone stand into a nightclub audience and hitting a man on the head, US media reported. A New York police spokesman said Love was charged with assault and reckless endangerment after the early morning incident at an East Village nightclub. A court date for Love was not immediately set. A 24-year-old man was injured in the head in the incident, police said. The name of the man was not released. Love, 39, known for her disruptive behavior, bared her breasts on the CBS "Late Show with David Letterman" hours before the arrest. She jumped on the desk used by Letterman for the late-night talk show and pulled up her shirt. She was not wearing a bra.

(the horror!)

Love, frontwoman for the defunct rock band Hole, appeared in court in Beverly Hills, California, on Tuesday for a hearing to determine if she will be tried on drug charges. The hearing was postponed after she disrupted proceedings and was admonished by the judge to keep quiet...

Posted at 07:26 PM    

Thu - March 11, 2004

Exit, stage left...

Gray, who laid bare his life and mingled performance art with comedy in acclaimed monologues like "Swimming to Cambodia" and "It's a Slippery Slope," was identified Monday through dental records and X-rays.

The cause of his death was still under investigation, said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner. But Gray was known to have been deeply troubled and had attempted suicide before.

His family told police he was last seen Saturday Jan. 10. Throughout his disappearance, his wife, Kathleen Russo, had held out scant hope that he might still be alive.

"Everyone that looks like him from behind, I go up and check to make sure it's not him," Russo said in a phone interview with The Associated Press about a week ago. "If someone calls and hangs up, I always do star-69. You're always thinking, 'maybe."'

Gray's riveting live performances generally featured only a desk and a glass of water as props. Usually wearing his trademark plaid flannel shirt, the performer would never move from the desk as he read in a soft, New England-flecked accent.

In more than a dozen monologues starting in 1979, Gray told audiences about his childhood, "Sex and Death to the Age 14"; his adventures as a young man, "Booze, Cars and College Girls"; and his struggles as an actor, "A Personal History of the American Theater." Many were published in book form and several were made into films.

"The man may be the ultimate WASP neurotic, analyzing his actions with an intensity that would be unpleasantly egomaniacal if it weren't so self-deprecatingly funny," Associated Press Drama Critic Michael Kuchwara wrote in 1996. "He questions everything and ends up more exhausted than satisfied."

Gray's greatest success was his Obie-winning monologue "Swimming to Cambodia," which recounted in part his movie role opposite Sam Waterston in "The Killing Fields." The monologue, developed over two years of performance, became a film directed by Jonathan Demme.

His book "Gray's Anatomy," about his struggles with a serious eye problem, was also made into a film.

Gray turned a midlife crisis into "It's a Slippery Slope," a 1997 monologue that mingled ski stories with tales of his new role as a father.

He also had an active career in Hollywood, with roles in films including David Byrne's "True Stories," "Beaches" and "The Paper" — 38 film appearances in all. In the 1993 Steven Soderbergh film "King of the Hill," he played an eccentric bachelor who kills himself.

On Broadway, he starred as the stage manager in the 1989 revival of "Our Town," a production that won a Tony Award for best revival. In 2000, he was in the less-acclaimed revival of Gore Vidal's 1960 political drama, "The Best Man."

But Gray's life in recent years was marred by tragedy and depression.

A horrific head-on car crash during a 2001 vacation in Ireland left him disheartened and in poor health, and he tried jumping from a bridge near his Long Island home in October 2002.

He was twice hospitalized for depression after the crash, and his suicide attempt canceled the run of a new solo piece, "Black Spot."

Gray, whose mother committed suicide when she was 52, spoke openly about considering the same fate. In a 1997 interview, he even provided an epitaph for his tombstone: "An American Original: Troubled, Inner-Directed and Cannot Type."

Gray was born on June 5, 1941, one of three sons of a WASP couple in Barrington, R.I. His mother suffered a pair of nervous breakdowns, committing suicide in 1967 after the second one.

Prior to her death, Gray began pursuing an acting career at Emerson College in Boston. His first efforts at one-man storytelling began with a select audience: his co-workers when he was a dishwasher. The compulsively self-obsessed Gray would regale the other employees with a blow-by-blow account of his day's events.

He landed his first stage role, playing a psychotic in a summer stock production of "The Curious Savage," when a combination of his dyslexia and nerves produced an all too real audition.

His mother's suicide sent Gray into a lengthy period of depression that ended with his own nervous breakdown. He worked in underground theater in Manhattan, eventually co-founding the Wooster Group in 1979. There, he wrote an autobiographical trilogy of plays about life in Rhode Island.

His first monologue was "Sex and Death to the Age 14," mingling events like the bombing of Hiroshima with the death of childhood pets. Gray was hailed as a new brand of performance artist, working alone on a minimalist set.

In 1983, Gray won the role of an American ambassador's aide in "The Killing Fields," the story of the bond between a New York Times reporter and a Cambodian photographer.

The resulting monologue, "Swimming to Cambodia," was widely hailed, with Washington Post reviewer David Richards observing, "Talking about himself — with candor, humor, imagination and the unfailingly bizarre image — he ends up talking about all of us."

In addition to his writing, Gray enjoyed skiing and drinking; he once told an interviewer that a 6 p.m. bloody Mary was a staple of his routine. But Gray plunged back into despondency following his car accident, a crash during a vacation to mark his 60th birthday.

Gray, who was not wearing a seat belt, suffered head trauma and a broken hip.

Gray is survived by Russo; three children; and a brother, Rockwell Gray, an English professor in St. Louis.

Writer Spalding Gray's Body Found

NEW YORK, March 8, 2004



The body of actor-writer Spalding Gray was pulled from the East River over the weekend, two months after he walked out of his Manhattan apartment and disappeared. He was 62...

Posted at 04:05 AM    

Wed - March 3, 2004

Turner's vision

Turner’s vision has been debated before, but McGill’s diagnosis is a specific one: The painter suffered some color blindness, affecting his reds and blues, and saw the world through cataracts. The latter would have resulted in his perceiving "exactly that effect of dazzling shimmering light we see in the paintings.

When we study impressionist art with insights gained through contemporary science and research, some interesting speculations can surface. A few years ago a theory about Vincent Van Gogh raised questions about a possible visual impairment that may have influenced his painting style. A medical treatment common at the time, derived from the foxglove plant, caused its patients to experience perceptual distortions. What it suggested was that Vincent painted the world as his eyes saw it, rather than voluntarily distorting what he saw. A similar theory has emerged about British impressionist J.M.W. Turner...

From Reason magazine:

Turner’s vision has been debated before, but McGill’s diagnosis is a specific one: The painter suffered some color blindness, affecting his reds and blues, and saw the world through cataracts. The latter would have resulted in his perceiving "exactly that effect of dazzling shimmering light we see in the paintings.

Posted at 11:56 PM    

Sat - February 14, 2004

Barbie, Ken splitsville

Breaking news from the Arizona Republic:

Feb. 14, 2004 12:00 AM

There is no joy in Malibu. After 43 years of dating, Ken and Barbie are going their separate ways.

This is the word from toymaker Mattel, which announced the split this week, on the eve of the 101st annual American International Toy Fair, at which U.S. retailers try to identify toy trends and place orders for the Christmas season.

Rumor at the Manhattan fair has it that Barbie's next boy toy is an Australian surfer dude. Either that or Ashton Kutcher. And Ken? Perhaps he's finally going public with his relationship with Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell G.I. Joe.

By all accounts, the split is amicable, but no doubt dividing their stuff turned out to be the hardest part of saying goodbye.

Dividing the dollhouse

A spy in Ken's palimony lawyer's office tells us the goods will be divided thusly:

Barbie gets:

• Cruisin' in My Ride Convertible Car.

• Bake Shop and Cafe Playset (Ken will get a share of the proceeds).

• Furniture, including Musical Canopy Dream Bed and Throne.

• Dallas the horse, various show ponies and pink-plastic stables.

Ken keeps:

• Ballerina Slumber Bag and Winnebago.

• Volkswagen Microbus.

• Fabulous Fountain Pool Playset.

• Jet and matching Bob Mackie-designed flight-attendant uniform.

The former couple will sell the Dreamhouse and Happy Family Nursery Dream Set and split the proceeds. They will share custody of Skipper. Barbie will, of course, keep her Swan Lake Princess and Ski Queen titles, and Ken will go back to the career he had before becoming professional arm candy: Las Vegas magician.

Posted at 12:40 AM    

Sun - February 1, 2004

I fought the law

Twins Separated at Birth?

Though it looks like they were partying together, facing the same head wind, these two guys were actually arrested separately. James Brown was busted in January 2004, Nick Nolte in September 2002. Do they have the same colorist and hair stylist?



Or were they just on the same exact combination of drugs and alcohol when they got arrested?

Posted at 03:51 PM    

Sun - January 4, 2004

Color images from mars

A partial answer to my question, in today's Seattle Times, via the Associated Press:



...NASA said Spirit's first color images could be transmitted to Earth late Sunday or early Monday, relayed by a second spacecraft in orbit around the Red Planet...

Posted at 05:00 PM    

Wed - December 31, 2003

Name that produce

This is

A. Winter squash

B. An Exotic Flower

C. Squid

D. Lemon

F. Plastic Toy

If you answered D, you are correct. It's in the lemon family. It is a Citron Medica, also called Buddha's Hand, or Fingered Citron. I saw this in a food market yesterday, $7.99 each.

...The hand is supposed to be one of the most ancient citrus known to man, originating in India thousands of years ago. It is cultivated for its fragrant rind, which is used to flavor dishes, is candied or is turned into marmalade...

A woman nearby asked what it was. I read the sign and told her. She replied "If you eat it, do you become enlightened? For that kind of money, I would hope so.

Posted at 01:52 AM    

Thu - December 25, 2003

meat industry panic

A single Holstein cow from a farm in Mabton, Yakima County, has tested positive for mad cow disease. The suspected case, the first in the United States, sparked fears that the disease could decimate the nation's $175 billion beef industry as it did in Europe...




Great, Mad cow disease finally emerges in the U.S., and it's right here in my back yard.

Posted at 04:47 AM    

Wed - December 24, 2003

Halo arrives

Okay, I admit, I'm a complete sucker for this game. I didn't grow up playing Nintendo or Playstation. I developed this interest in middle-age. My wife works at the XBox division of Microsoft, so when the product was in development, we got a box to test and play with. In the summer of 2001, recovering from a broken ankle and temporarily immoblized, Halo was my primary entertainment for a while, as well as my introduction to first-person shooter games. I was instantly hooked. Unlike an average 14-year-old, who could master a game like this in about a week, it took me several months to fully exploit the action-packed features of Halo.




Microsoft bought the company, (Bungie, a Mac game developer) and made Halo its flagship product. Developing Halo for Xbox meant indefinitely shelving plans to release it as a computer game, but it remained Bungie's intentions to do so. It's been a long wait, but it's here. Although I don't plan to get the computer-game version (like I need more stuff loaded on my desktop system) I'm interested in following the response to the game's release. In the meantime, I am anticipating the release of Halo 2 for XBox.

Bensch Blaser reviews Halo:

Posted at 04:27 PM    

Mon - December 22, 2003

aljazeerah weighs in on the Saddam Capture date deception question

...and appears surprisingly neutral on the subject. But aljazeerah reports on it nonetheless.





“The yellowish dates in the picture behind two American soldiers show that Saddam was not present there at this time of the year,” Okaz Arabic daily reported. “The picture shows that the capture of Saddam would have taken place two months ago,” the paper said...

Posted at 08:20 AM    

Fri - December 19, 2003

Green River Killer's apology

"I'm sorry for killing these young ladies. They had their whole life ahead of them," Ridgway said slowly, nearly in monotone as if the words were a struggle. "I am sorry I caused so much pain to so many families."

In writing, he misspelled ladies as "ladys" several times and signed the statement Gary L Ridgway. In court, he occasionally wiped his eyes, sometimes appearing upset and other times gazing straight ahead.

Garrett Mills, whose sister Opal was killed, wanted to believe Ridgway's apology. He said he wanted to hear remorse as he listened in court, but he didn't.

"It sounded like a recording," Mills said. "He sounded like a robot."

Ridgway's attorneys say he does feel badly for murdering so many women. They said that after he met his third wife in 1985, he wanted to stop killing -- though he only succeeded in killing less often.

"He feels horrible about what he had done back when he was a monster," said attorney Mark Prothero, who said that the man expresses his emotions subtly.

"Obviously, you're not normal if you do these things," attorney Tony Savage said. "You can't very well judge his remorse by ordinary standards."

The King County sheriff's detectives who have gotten to know Ridgway through hours of interviews say they've heard something else in his voice when he talked about the women he killed: pride.

They've heard him call the women garbage.

Detective Tom Jensen, who spent nearly 20 years investigating the case, said Ridgway's statement in court was nearly laughable. "Remorse is not something he understands," Jensen said. "He can cry on cue, and he can stop on cue."

Jensen said Ridgway's voice wasn't slow and halting because he was choked with emotion -- it was because he has an intellect that is far below average and has trouble reading.

He said investigators sometimes referred to Ridgway as a "serial killer savant" -- a man who was somewhat stunted intellectually but has an "innate, apparently inborn ability to hunt or kill."

"He tries to imitate people. When they cry, he cries," said Green River Task Force Detective Kevin O'Keefe. "I think he's got all the emotion of a reptile."

Detective Frank Spence wasn't so sure, noting that Ridgway "did have a religious side" and guessed that there "may have been that little bit kicking in."

Some of the relatives of Ridgway's victims didn't care what he had to say and remained unmoved by his words.

"He's a good actor," said Jodi Norman, the mother of Shawnda Summers. "There's no remorse."

Diane Soriano, who has been a friend of victim Patricia Barczak's family for more than 30 years, said simply, "Once again, I think it was all about himself."

From today's Seattle Post Intelligencer

Gary Leon Ridgway offered his first public words about the dozens of women he strangled, shedding tears in the courtroom yesterday and leaving many wondering whether the prolific Green River Killer is truly sorry.




"He feels horrible about what he had done back when he was a monster," said attorney Mark Prothero, who said that the man expresses his emotions subtly.

"Obviously, you're not normal if you do these things," attorney Tony Savage said

Posted at 11:48 AM    

Tue - December 16, 2003