Curtis Armstrong's Blog

Not much. You?

Over a year since my last post? I guess there may have been some issues that have prevented me from indulging in the old blog. (Personal, professional, familial, good, bad, horrible...) I'll try to catch up a little on a few bookish things here...

I find that as the darkness closes in, books and reading (and re-reading) become my medication. Fortunately, I'm someone who buys books--many and often. And it's usually a decade or so before I can summon up the the fortitude to take them somewhere--a library or charity shop--to pass them on to another worthy home. So there are always more than enough worlds at hand to lose myself in, if necessary. And I'm certain that I've talked before about the deep need I've had over the years for certain authors to carry me through whatever it is that is making life in general so horribly gleek and stresticarious. (I just made up those words to describe how I feel about life during a sort of general malaise or depression. I always whine about my general malaise and depression, so using made up words to describe itmakes a nice change.) They are not copywrited so you may use those words if you like or feel free to make up better ones. This is Liberty Hall.

How about re-reading? Not just as a cure for what ails you, but in general for pleasure, since unless it's been assigned for some reason, or for research you can't get out of, I can't imagine re-reading things that that don't give you some sort of thrill or joy. I've talked about it a lot. Sherlock Holmes, obviously, has been a favorite since practically infancy. P.G. Wodehouse for almost as long, so much so that I actually co-wrote a book with Elliott Milstein on the subject of Wodehouse and his world that came out last year. Washington Irving, Vincent Starrett, Christopher Morley, Charles Dickens, Patrick O'Brian are all writers I return to constantly. They, in a manner of speaking, feed me when I'm hungry and clothe me when I'm naked, and tuck me into bed when it's time to go to sleep.

What about you? Who are your go to re-reads? I'm curious.

And Now For My Next Trick

Last July, after about four years of digging through old journals and diaries and generally rummaging about in my brain attic, I released my first book, a memoir called "Revenge of the Nerd, or The Singular Adventures of the Man who Would be Booger." (Well, I didn't personally release it. Technically, St Martins Press released it, a process which appeared to consist of taking a few thousand copies, throwing them as far as they could in all directions and hoping for the best.)

I then went on a book tour to promote it. When I came out from under the ether, it was November. It had been an adventure, but there were times during the process when I was pretty sure this was one I would probably never repeat. I'm an actor, not a writer, and while it had been enlightening and gratifying and educational to actually write a book and see it being bought and read by people who weren't old friends or related to me by blood, no one would've been surprised to learn that I considered my writing career to have ended. One and done. Thank you and we now return to our regularly scheduled program.

Funny how things work out though. It turns out I've written another one after all, and it's one of a very different type indeed. It's called "A Plum Assignment: Discourses on P.G. Wodehouse and His World." There are definitely some memoir-y elements to the book, but primarily it is much as advertised: a non-fictional, whimsical and eccentric collection of essays on the life of the 20th Century's greatest comic writer, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, or as he was known, Plum.

Friends and regular readers are probably familiar with my Wodehouse obsession. It goes back, very nearly to the egg. I mentioned him repeatedly in my first book as a favorite author and lifesaver through difficult times. I was not the only person who regarded him that way. Another was the co-author of this book, Elliott Milstein. That's right, there's a co-author. I brought someone else along to share the pain.

Elliott and I have been writing light-hearted, though scholarly essays and talks on Wodehouse over many years, for publication in Wodehouse journals and as talks at Wodehouse conventions around the world. We decided to collect these morceaux together for the first time and present them for Wodehouse fans and general bibliophiles everywhere and to wrap them in a narrative of friendship.

You see, Elliott and I have known each other since we were beardless boys, and what brought us together was our mutual love of Wodehouse. So for "A Plum Assignment", we introduce each other's articles, through recollection and anecdote, scholarly yet humorous, and all of it guaranteed not to raise the hackles of any thin-skinned celebrities out there.

And Elliott and I were smart enough to trick Ashley Polasek, PhD, FRSA to edit the thing, and when I say she edited it, I mean she jumped in feet first and got her hands dirty. By the time she was done with was, we knew we had been well and truly edited. She practically qualifies as another co-author.

So if you are a Wodehouse fan, or a lover of books in general, or if you're someone who understands the healing and joyful effects of a mutual love of literature with others, this may be the book for you. As John Lennon said on the release of his second book, "It's the usual rubbish but it won't cost much. That's the deal we're going to strike up!"

"A Plum Assignment: Discourses on P.G.Wodehouse and His World" was released April 18th and is available at Amazon and B&N.com, and B&N.uk.

Revenge Of The Nerd Tour

The process of selling a book once it is published was pretty much unknown to me except from romantic lore handed down from a now-distant time, when favorite old journeymen authors like Chris Morley, would go from smoking car to hotel room to book shop to chop house and then back to smoking car for weeks on end. The hours of genial, off the cuff chats on bookish matters delivered to mixed groups or lectures at "women's clubs"; always with fountain pen poised, ready to swoop onto a half-title page, leaving an effortlessly elegant "With the author's warm best wishes" in its wake.

I'm currently on a bit of a break from my book tour, promoting the publication of my memoir, "The Revenge of the Nerd, Or, The Singular Adventures of the Man Who Would Be Booger." The break was occasioned by the the college graduation of my beloved daughter Lily, who is leaving King's College, London, and moving on to Oxford University in the autumn. This is an occasion of mingled pride and fear and joy and melancholy which naturally and rightly overwhelms any mercantile adventures in bookselling, no matter how important or engaging.

But this morning, waking early on my second day in London, I find myself looking back, irresistibly, to the last couple of months and marveling a bit.

The first time I read an excerpt from my book in public--aside from a friendly gathering of kinsprits at my house in L.A.---was at Atlanta's 221-B Con last May. This was, as you may imagine, a Sherlock Holmes convention and the nerd quotient was plentiful. They were wonderfully supportive and generous, as nerds tend to be, and started this process off with waves of sweet encouragement. Then, appropriately, I went to the city of my birth--Detroit, Michigan. The occasion for this appearance was a two-day benefit for the historic Redford Theatre, which was including Revenge of the Nerds in its summer schedule of films. The book was not yet available for purchase, but friends known and never met before, bought bookplates signed on the spot to be glued into their pre-ordered copies.

The official tour began on publication day, July 11th, in Manhattan at the Barnes and Noble in Tribeca. Friends from my Sherlockian community, from Revenge of the Nerds (1984), Moonlighting, and from our TV show, King of the Nerds were all in attendance. This was an unforgettable night, for reasons obvious and inexpressible. The next night, Boston, at Brookline Booksmith, attended not only by Sherlockian and Wodehousian friends, but by my wife Elaine, dear friends of my wife's and family members, too. Then Portland, OR., and the world famous Powell's bookstore, where once again members of the lamented King of the Nerds show were among those in attendance. Finally, a few days later, Los Angeles: Vroman's, where an even larger contingent of nerds, from large screen and small, joined with many smiling strangers to celebrate the nerd community with one of its very fortunate members.

There are more dates to come, and I will post them here separately. In closing, I can only say thank you to those who ventured out over these last few months to lend their support and to the many more who I wish I had been able to meet and hope to in the future. It is common for authors, and actors, to say on occasions like this that the reception of their work has left them grateful and humbled. They may mean it, or they may not mean it.
I mean it.

love,

Curtis

A Disruption In The Force

There is probably no better sign of a disruption in the force than when one's carefully organized order of reading becomes disordered. Those of us for whom reading is an essential and consistent part of daily life know what I mean. We have our stack of books at our bedside; a few more by the reading chair somewhere else in the house; one tucked into the bag you take with you everywhere if you live in a city like Los Angeles and you know that it may be hours and hours before you can get back to the books at home; even something at the kitchen table, to read during solitary meals. We are the people who keep extra glasses in any room in which we are likely to do some reading.

There can also be a ritual in the order of our reading. The choice of which books we slip into at any given time can be dictated by different impulses. Certain authors seem to work better in specific seasons, for some reason. Or the ritual can be more specific: Nothing too exciting for bedtime, for example. For months at one point in life, my bed time ritual was Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, and I found it such a potent soporific that I never finished it. At the same time, a massive historical novel or a book of philosophy or anything by James Joyce I find inappropriate for early morning reading. We have to be up and moving around before we can attempt something on that scale.

Sometimes around cocktail time I enjoy pouring a drink and mixing music with literature. Listening to Louis Armstrong? I like browsing through Satchmo's New Orleans memoirs. Bix Beiderbek? Maybe something by Wodehouse like, well, "Cocktail Time," to name just one out of ninety some possible titles. I also like reading The Beatles Anthology while listening to The Beatles Anthology.

If it's a dark and stormy night (admittedly infrequent here in light-polluted, perpetually mild Los Angeles) then something nice in the horror line: for years I collected Herbert Van Thal's Pan Books of Horror Stories, which never failed. Or the Weavers' and Brunas' Universal Horrors, their controversial history of the Universal Horror cycles of the 30's and 40's. The list goes ever on...

There are many of our favorite authors who are as much of our daily rituals as eating and drinking. For the true bibliophiles among us, there are times we can forego the eating and drinking and just stick with the books.

And it isn't just reading that is essential to our well-being. For some of us, re-reading loved books and authors is a critical part of our reading regimen therapy. The books we return to for succor in dark times can be our armor in battle. They give us support when we're stumbling; they guide us when we don't know which way to turn. They can remind us of the importance of holding fast to the values that make us human. They can bring order out of chaos. When others try to break us, they make us whole. Books kindle a light that can illuminate shadowy corners in ourselves than we have become too comfortable leaving shrouded in darkness.

I have been in a state like that lately, and sometimes when that happens, I find that the old reliables can fail me. Even life-long friends like Doyle or Irving or Dickens fail to grip. When that happens, there's nothing for it but, like a drowning person, to grasp for the nearest floating object and hope it can support your weight. When that moment happens, you head to the library or the bookshop.

While in my personal Slough of Despond, I had chosen Skylight Books in L.A. for my lifeboat. I went in and started thrashing around. I don't read that many novels these days, so I just submerged myself in recent fiction. By the time I washed up some half an hour later, I was gripping four books: La Farge's "Midnight Ocean", Gaiman's "Norse Mythology" and Steven Jarvis's "Death and Mr Pickwick." A friend whose taste is impeccable suggested Christopher Hitchen's "Hitch 22", so that went into the pile as well.

Jarvis's sweeping, discursive, epic historical novel about the creation of Dicken's "The Pickwick Papers" was the first I cracked and it could not have been a better choice. I am now approaching the end of this 800 page Kraken of a book and have been delighted, amused, intrigued, fascinated or horrified every step of the way. Any bibliophile, Dicken's addict, 19th Century freak, pre-Victorian social history fan or reader fascinated by the drama of the process of creation and the importance of novel reading, would be well advised to give it a try.

Not just a great book, it opened my head to the possibilities of love and the power of sympathetic imagination. Hitchens seems like the perfect chaser after Jarvis's book, though I'll see what strikes me at the moment. In the meantime, while the disruption in the force continues unabated, now there is light at the end of the tunnel. I just hope it isn't a train.

A Nerd's Reality

It's moments like these that make the prospect of publishing your first book seem real. Most of the time "real" doesn't enter into it. Years go by, during which you research and write and edit and then re-write and re-edit; and try to come up with appropriate titles, (or inappropriate titles, for that matter) and then re-title and re-write and re-edit some more. Then the lawyers get ahold of it and the next thing you know, there's more editing, more re-writing....

And then, there's the polishing. If you thought the writing took a long time, the polishing just goes on indefinitely. Actually, the polishing never ends at all, I understand. Authors tell me that every time they open their books at any random page, they see something that could've been more felicitously expressed. Something that could've been a little better polished. Everywhere one looks, as a published author, there's a mot not precisely juste, as the French would say.

Eventually the polishing must end, though, or the book would never come out at all. I am close to the point where I must finally, as it were, put away the cloth and the Brasso, and let them publish. But before we do that, there is now a giveaway of a limited number of advance reader's copies (that's copies given to readers in advance of publication, not copies sent to advanced readers. I like to think we're all advanced readers here!) There is something about this that makes the whole thing seem real again. After all this time of functioning in an alternate reality, for a moment at least everything shifts back to a world in which I am actually approaching the publication of a book with my name on it. And to make matters worse, my face, too.

I'm talking about my book, here. That is, that corporeal object chock full of stories and embarrassing revelations that you can read on a long plane trip, or give as a last minute gift to someone who isn't particular in their literature or keep by your chair so you have something on which to rest your drink. This is actually happening now. It's real! And thanks to the good people at Goodreads, you can now be a part of my reality! You can even be more a part of my reality by actually pre-ordering the thing, but these advanced readers copies are a good start. It's all of the actual text PLUS typographical errors that won't be in the released edition, so you can see how hopeless I was at spelling or punctuation before friends started pointing out my mistakes to me.

So, there we are. Take advantage of this limited-time offer and be the first on your block to have the early uncorrected proof of Revenge of The Nerd, or, The Singular Adventures of the Man Who Would Be Booger.

Jump right in! The reality's fine!!

smarturl.it/NerdGoodreads1

To My Faithful Sidekick, Tippa.

When I graduated from high school, my father gave me a portable typewriter to take with me to college in the autumn. It was an Adler Tippa portable, made in Western Germany. It was manual, not electric; solid, heavy for its size, but not all that larger than the sort of PCs they were making up till a few years ago. When I took it with me to Western Michigan University, it was a practical and reliable part of my student's kit.

It was also kind of prosaic. Almost shy. It didn't draw attention to itself as it sat there on the desk; lidded, silent, at rest. It was small and unglamorous enough that it could be easily overlooked. Kind of like its owner, frankly. Other students wouldn't come into my dorm room, see it and exclaim, "Oh, man! You've got the new Adler Tippa! Is it great?! I was going to get it, but I hear they're putting out the new one in six months, so I'm holding off." There was nothing remarkable about it. It was my typewriter. I took it a little for granted, as you do with tools. The only time you thought about it was when you needed a new ribbon, or ran out of carbon paper.

It was a workhorse, though, the Tippa was. It was a small typewriter, but when I wrote on it, it was exceptionally vocal about it. There was the *thud* as the shift key went down, the CRASH as the carriage slammed back into place. The keys were white and perfect and snapped like snare drums when hit. The bell rang out joyously at the end of every line, followed by the slow grind of the carriage sliding back again, like the creative process itself made audible. SnapCRASHding!Kachug!chatterThud! When I was writing in those days, people knew about it. When I was in the groove, that little bastard could drown out my Leon Russell records.

I wrote a lot of letters on it and my father just recently gave me a box of them that I had sent to my mother and him, who were living in London at the time. Long letters, with some news, but mainly spouting a lot of pretentious philosophical twaddle, as students do. The letters to my friends tended to be more interesting. My friend Elliott got most of them. We would talk books and films and theatre and, naturally, women. He was eagerly awaiting the letter I would send him when I *finally* lost my virginity. He had insisted that I write and tell him the second I had got my ticket punched and when the day finally came, I wrote a letter so filled with confusion, grief and guilt that I find it almost impossible to read now with out weeping. On the bright side, I realize that an event in life which was treated cavalierly by many boys I knew, affected me more deeply than I could ever have imagined.

I expressed that signal change on my Tippa portable.

I wrote papers for college on it too, of course. I wrote one on Richard II for my Shakespeare class. It was callow and thoughtless. I got a D on it, which I deserved. I wrote final for an English Lit class in which (even then in the thrall of the Baker Street Irregulars) I proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson were real people, and Arthur Conan Doyle was just Watson's literary agent. Weeks after I handed it in, I got a message from from the teacher of the course asking me to get in touch with her, because she was worried about me. I wrote another paper for the Shakespeare class in which I did a comparative study of Romeo and Bingo Little, the often-in-love friend of Bertie Wooster's, in P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves stories. That was the final straw for the Shakespeare class by the way. I failed it. But I failed it on my Tippa portable. It never judged me.

A good thing, too, because I also wrote poetry on it. Love poetry, unsurprisingly. Also short stories. I wrote my first play on it. I wrote my first attempt at a screenplay on it. It was a fictionalized life of the 15th Century French poet Francois Villon, which would've been a tough sell, even in 1973.

I still have the Tippa. Took it out a while back. I opened the lid, and smelled its instantly identifiable scent, distant and familiar: a mix of plastic, oil, ink, dreams and me. The keys are yellowed now, like an old man's teeth. I took it to the one place I knew in Los Angeles to have it cleaned and get a fresh ribbon installed. It came back to me looking young, revitalized and ready for anything. I wrote some of the corrections for "Revenge of the Nerd" on it. And I've started writing letters on it again.

And its clatter can still be heard from two floors away. "Western Germany" doesn't even exist as such anymore. But some things never die. Like its Adler Tippa portable typewriter.

Booger Speaks!

This morning a package arrived containing the galleys of "Revenge of the Nerd", the memoir I've written to be published on July 11th. There was nothing shocking about it; I was expecting them. The cover was the same cover I've seen since approving it months ago. It was a first draft, so I instantly saw some things that have subsequently been fixed or corrected or cut altogether. The pictures have yet to be included. My book, but in little ways, not yet my book. Like a new house that looks perfect on the outside, but when you walk in the walls aren't finished. You automatically lower your voice as it echoes alarmingly because the carpets haven't been installed.

But there it was. Almost three years of work, which seems like a lot when you consider this is a memoir and I didn't even have to make any of it up. I have friends who write complex and multilayered novels in less time. Still, though, it is a first book. The one thing about the process so far that is exactly as I expected was how I felt at the moment I took the galley out of the box. The slightly bewildered sense of accomplishment that must accompany the act of any first-time author opening up a copy of his own book for the first time.

As I've said, my little Nerd Narrative escapes into print July 11th, 2017. I'm using this blog post--my first, ever!--to announce its' impending arrival. I will be making numerous appearances at various book stores and Nerd Cons to promote the little chap, reading a bit from one chapter or other--Revenge of the Nerds one day, Supernatural the next, Better Off Dead from time to time---and also answering questions from anyone kind enough to show up and interested enough to ask. The details of these appearances are still evolving, and will be posted on this very page the moment they are confirmed.

But sending out a helpless little memoir into this bleak and uncertain world gives me a feeling similar to the one I felt the time my wife and I put our daughter Lily on an airplane for the first time alone. She was totally fine with it. I was a fucking mess. I held it together long enough for the woman to walk her down the jetway until she vanished from sight and then I cried for about four hours.

Okay, the book release isn't THAT traumatic, but you can understand my concern. The thing about sending my daughter on a plane was, I knew that when she got to Detroit, my parents would be there to bundle her up in their arms and take her home. Feed her, tuck her up into bed. I'd know she was okay.

So basically, I'm asking you, dear reader, to do for me what my parents did. It would be a great relief to me to know that as I send "Revenge of the Nerd" out to an uncertain future, that there are some of you who will be, metaphorically, waiting at the end of the jetway with arms spread wide and big smiles on your faces. And then you can pick him up and take him home. He requires, unlike my daughter, almost no care. Just curl up with him somewhere in your house and let him babble at you. He loves to tell stories: indulge him.

And the thing is, while he doesn't actually arrive in your town until July 11th, he can be pre-ordered! Just like my parents did with my daughter!
www.curtisarmstrongbook.com is where you go for him and the sooner the better, or so the good folks at Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Press inform me.

Future blogs will feature less overt schilling and more actual reminiscence. But thanks for reading. More anon!