Monday, December 15th, 2008
Why don’t more women play the electric guitar?
I’m the proud owner–and player–of several Strats, but female electric guitarists are such a rarity that when it came time to create my heroine in Sweet Man Is Gone, I went with the stereotype and made her a singer.
But why is the chick always the singer, never the lead guitarist? I’ve decided it’s rooted in profound differences between men and women–a topic for the sociobiologists. But I’m going to take a stab at it.
Most people who play the electric guitar start in their teens. The electric guitar has everything to recommend it to teenage boys and almost nothing to recommend it to teenage girls. And by the time the teen years are past, it’s hard to catch up. I started playing as an adult. I’ve now been at it for fifteen years and play like a fair-to-middling teenage boy.
Guys love gear and girls don’t. Girls are put off by an instrument that seems to require a mastery of electronics.
Playing the electric guitar requires physical exertion, speed, dexterity, and endurance—the very qualities teenage boys would cultivate whether electric guitars existed or not.
Most styles played on the electric guitar require loads of time to master, much of it spent in solitude. It’s a stereotype that women talk more than men and depend on verbal interaction to relate to those around them. But stereotypes are based on fact. I’m not sure most women can cut themselves off from society and devote themselves to hours and hours of practice the way guys do. And women who are introspective loners are more likely to spend their time reading–immersing themselves in words rather than sounds. That’s certainly what I did as a teenager.
And finally, most styles played on the electric guitar stem ultimately from the blues. The archetypal blues guitarist is male. His persona is that of a virile seducer who can get any woman he wants, a virtuosic player who can outplay any other guitarist. I had a lot of tongue-in-cheek fun with that in Sweet Man Is Gone.
But it’s significant that males start playing the guitar at puberty. It’s a great way to celebrate their developing manhood, and the competitive factor dovetails nicely with the way teenage boys interact with their peers. They compete with each other in everything, and they admire the guys who star—whether at skateboarding, on the football field, or in the band.
Teenage girls interact with each other not by competing, but by cooperating and sharing. Teenage girls who take up the guitar could of course find boys to compete with, but the last thing most girls that age want to do is scare boys away.
Furthermore, for all that teenage girls want to attract the opposite sex, they want to be courted. With rare exceptions they’d be uncomfortable displaying themselves as the blatantly sexual aggressor that the guitar hero tradition demands.
So it’s not surprising that so few women play the electric guitar. The wonder is that any do.
Peggy Ehrhart is a former English professor who now writes mysteries and plays blues guitar. She is the author of Sweet Man Is Gone, featuring sexy blues-singer sleuth Maxx Maxwell, and published by Five Star/Gale/Cengage. Visit her at www.PeggyEhrhart.com . This first appeared in Cats and Crime and Rock and Roll–August 27, 2008.
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Monday, December 15th, 2008
Psychologist Sam Gosling could teach Sherlock Holmes a thing or two. In his book Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, Gosling lays out the principles of snoopology. Its premise is that our possessions, and their arrangement, offer a window to our souls.
Gosling demonstrates his powers of deduction when he concludes from a tube of skin cream, a hairbrush, a CD, and a photo of a bathroom sink that the bathroom in question belongs to a young, gay Asian man.
But what really got my interest was Gosling’s discussion of personality types. After all, if we’re to understand how snooping can illuminate personality, we have to understand what constitutes a personality. So Gosling introduces the “Big Five”–key traits that blend to make us what we are: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
The first two interested me particularly because they seem opposites–though Gosling insists that none of the traits cancels another out. But people who score high on openness tend toward liberal politics, are suspicious of absolutes, and question convention, while people who score high on conscientiousness tend toward conservative politics, value order, and have a strong sense of moral obligation.
It struck me that just as one’s stuff can reveal personality, so can one’s writing—-not a revolutionary idea, I know, but since I’m high on the openness scale and like to play with ideas, please bear with me.
Since mysteries celebrate the triumph of order, one might expect mystery writers to score high on conscientiousness. In its simplest form, a mystery pits a sleuth who’s a paragon of goodness against a villain who’s a paragon of evil, and goodness conquers.
Arthur Conan Doyle borrowed a page from nineteenth-century melodrama to give Holmes a nemesis so completely evil as to strike us, now, as laughable. And remember Dick Tracy? We might call the strip a graphic novel these days–a police procedural with a straight-arrow hero and villains whose grotesqueness signals their moral depravity. Even modern mysteries–police procedurals and thrillers especially come to mind–show us worlds in which good and evil seem absolute. And I suspect the writers who create these worlds score high on the conscientiousness scale.
But when mystery edges further toward the literary, things become less black and white. Sam Spade, the ur-sleuth in the noir tradition, reveals considerable moral ambiguity, and Hammett’s bad guys, while not exactly well-rounded, are so entertaining that it’s hard to see them as evil incarnate. John Le Carré’s villain, Karla, ultimately proves to be as complex and human as Smiley. Then there’s John Harvey’s excellent police procedural series–which I’ve just discovered. His sleuth, Charlie Resnick, is a square peg in a round hole. He’s an overweight divorced jazz-lover who is insensitive to the needs of the women in his life and keeps his flat tidy by waiting till the balls of dust and cat hair get large enough to be picked up and deposited in the trash. And Harvey’s villains aren’t people who set out to do evil, but rather people pushed into evil acts by thwarted love.
Thus we come around to something we might already have suspected. Maybe mystery writers don’t have to rank high on the conscientiousness scale–or if they do, it’s counterbalanced by high openness. Openness correlates not only with distrust of absolutes but also with imagination and creativity, qualities possessed by all writers.
Just like great novels, the best mysteries don’t paint the world in black and white terms. Rather, they show us people struggling with their humanity, trying to do what’s right but sometimes doing wrong. And the most admirable sleuths are those who empathize with the fallen humanity in the evil-doers they unmask. There but for the grace of
God . . .
Subjecting my own writing to this analysis, I realized that my villains are just what one might expect from somebody with a high openness quotient, somebody who finds it hard to see the world in terms of absolutes.
Only one of my Maxx Maxwell mysteries, Sweet Man Is Gone, is out so far, but the sequel is sitting on a shelf in my study, and several prequels are lurking there too–most in need of major surgery but with plots worth salvaging. In looking back at them, I see that often the murderer is a person with the ability to love intensely but whose love turned to hate when it was rebuffed. Thus my villains tend to be people pushed to the extreme of murder by desperation–people who, given different circumstances, might have been heroes.
Peggy Ehrhart is a former English professor who now writes mysteries and plays blues guitar. She is the author of Sweet Man Is Gone, featuring sexy blues-singer sleuth Maxx Maxwell, and published by Five Star/Gale/Cengage. Visit her at www.PeggyEhrhart.com . This first appeared in Poe’s Deadly Daughters–August 23, 2008.
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Monday, December 15th, 2008
Agatha Christie was in her thirties when she hatched Miss Marple. But other than Christie, I doubt whether any female mystery writer has created a female sleuth who is older than the writer herself. My sleuth is thinner, blonder, and younger than I am, and I like it that way.
Sure, writing can be an exercise in vicarious living–and genre fiction more than most. Robin Hathaway once said that she loves writing her Jo Banks novels because when else can she be a thirty-something again, and a motorcycle-rider at that?
My sleuth, Maxx Maxwell, is a thirty-five-year old singer in a blues band. She lives in a funky apartment in Hackensack, New Jersey, modeled on my first apartment, one room and a kitchen in San Francisco. She rehearses and plays gigs with her band in scruffy rehearsal studios and sleazy bars in New York City. And she has a hopeless weakness for guitar players, especially her unfaithful ex, Sandy.
I wouldn’t trade my comfortable house in suburban New Jersey or my sweet, loyal husband for anything–not even to be thirty-five again. And I certainly wouldn’t want to be the broken-hearted relic of a failed romance. So what, aside from the vicarious thrill of feeling young again, leads us to lop decades off the ages of our sleuths?
Young people are at a stage of life when the big questions are still to be answered, the questions about love and work, and the all-important “Who am I?” Questions like this can provide rich and interesting subplots in our stories–and even explain how our sleuths happen to find themselves in crime-solving situations in the first place.
One of my favorite movies of all time is Desperately Seeking Susan. I think I had it in mind subliminally as I wrote Sweet Man Is Gone.
The NPR program “What’s the Word?” featured an interesting commentary on Desperately Seeking Susan the other night. The speaker, a professor of film studies, pointed to the contrasting worlds in the film: stodgy northern New Jersey and hip lower Manhattan. And she saw desperation as a key theme. But, she said, there’s desperation and then there’s desperation. The desperation of the Rosanna Arquette character, the New Jersey housewife, was the desperation that comes from fearing one has made all the choices one is going to make in life. The result might be settled middle-class comfort, but if something seems missing, it may be too late to rectify the lack.
The desperation experienced by the young is a different kind, no less painful, in fact maybe more so. It’s the desperation of knowing one is in the very act of making the choices that will shape one’s future, the sense that one is standing at a crossroads; once one path is chosen the other will forever be left behind. Sometimes the necessity of making crucial choices like this results in paralysis–or a frantic and even self-destructive lifestyle designed to distract one from the ever-present nagging voice that demands commitment to something.
But all this is great fodder for the novelist–and a good reason to ignore the passing of time and keep one’s sleuth young forever.
Peggy Ehrhart is a former English professor who now writes mysteries and plays blues guitar. She is the author of Sweet Man Is Gone, featuring sexy blues-singer sleuth Maxx Maxwell, and published by Five Star/Gale/Cengage. Visit her at www.PeggyEhrhart.com . This first appeared in The Stiletto Gang–August 15, 2008.
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Monday, December 15th, 2008
She was a trophy wife, in a way.
He was a classics professor in his seventies, with stern eyes behind rimless glasses and a heavy German accent. She was a graceful dark-haired woman in her early thirties. They were fixtures on the University of Illinois campus when I was in grad school–and they were the focus of considerable mirth. She had been his student and was now a professor in her own right. “She vass damn smart,” he would say of the days she was in his seminars, and she would glow at the compliment.
How did they get together? It started with a crush, I’m sure. A Humbert Humbert figure pursuing the little nymphet who conjugated Greek verbs so appealingly? I doubt it. I’m convinced the crush was on her part, an irresistible attraction to the brilliant man who cut such a dashing, if chunky, figure at the head of the seminar table.
Women get crushes on men who are teachers.
My first crush on a teacher developed when I was in high school. Mr. Poirion was the only male we saw all day–the other teachers were nuns, so in a sense he had the field to himself. He wasn’t especially good looking, but I remember experiencing the classic symptoms of love sickness as we waited for his arrival: pounding heart, breathlessness, trembling hands.
I had crushes on professors all through college and graduate school too. There was more choice here–lots of choice in fact, because this was back before it became common for a woman to teach at the college level. The human heart can only accommodate so much longing and despair, so I couldn’t have crushes on them all. Generally I selected the more attractive ones, the dark, thin, sensitive ones who taught literature and talked about books as if they had personally experienced every possible literary sorrow. But they didn’t have to be attractive. I remember trembling in the presence of a pot-bellied drama teacher with a gray crewcut who was never without a cigarette in his hand. As his mind darted from one brilliant insight to another, the ash on the cigarette would grow so long that it fell off of its own accord, landing, often, on his lapel.
Why do we get these crushes? Here’s my theory. Nature predisposes women to seek out men who seem tender and caring, men who will stick around long after the excitement of romance has given way to child-rearing. I read somewhere that men first check out a woman’s body, particularly the ratio between waist and hips, because it provides a good index of childbearing capability. But women look first at a man’s face, seeking clues to his sensitivity.
Lots of men hide their emotions in a one-to-one situation. Maybe they fear the outpouring of affection that they’ll elicit if they let women know they have feelings. And certainly many men believe it’s not manly to be sensitive.
But standing in front of a classroom is a different story. It’s a chance to show off, to exercise power, to mesmerize by using every tool at one’s disposal–even one’s ability to empathize. And I fell for it every time.
And maybe too I was longing to possess some of that power. Maybe we believe (wrongly) that if we can win the heart of this magical being, we’ll have sensitivity at our beck and call forever after. More likely we’ll be making beds and washing dishes while he woos another batch of impressionable young ladies.
I managed to exorcise this demon though, and I did it by becoming a professor myself. As soon as I got my own Ph.D., I stopped getting crushes on professors. I was their colleague now. It was as if the lights had come up in the theater and the magic was gone.
I was still getting crushes though. They just weren’t on professors. Now they were on guitar players. I’d rediscovered my love for the blues in mid-life and started making regular pilgrimages to the blues clubs of Manhattan. I’d stare at the guitar players, glamorous beings whose arched backs and furrowed foreheads revealed their ability to feel deeply, to empathize and care.
It was bad enough when they merely played their guitars. But when they sang the blues too. . .oh my God.
As I said, the human heart can only accommodate so much longing and despair. There was only one thing to do. . . This picture tells it all.
[Note: the picture that accompanied the blog was of me playing my guitar.]
Peggy Ehrhart is a former English professor who now writes mysteries and plays blues guitar. She is the author of Sweet Man Is Gone, featuring sexy blues-singer sleuth Maxx Maxwell, and published by Five Star/Gale/Cengage. Visit her at www.PeggyEhrhart.com . This first appeared in Jungle Red–August 13, 2008.
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Monday, December 15th, 2008
“I don’t feel any feeling.”
That was *Betty’s mantra every time I read scenes from my work in progress to my writers’ group.
People often ask me now if I’m in a writers’ group, or if I got feedback from friends or relatives while writing Sweet Man Is Gone. No, I say with a shudder. No writers’ groups and no in-progress feedback. Never again.
This is what happened.
Betty wore me down with her complaints about the lack of feeling in my project.
No feeling, I would brood unhappily as I drove home. If there’s no feeling, no one will care what happens to my heroine. No editor will want my book. In my darkest moments, I was convinced I’d never be published because I myself had a horrible flaw–no feeling. It’s true that I don’t often show emotion in public, but it had never occurred to me before Betty that maybe I was truly incomplete when it came to emotional development.
I resolved to remedy the problem—at least as it manifested itself in my writing. I went through the manuscript and tried to imagine what a feeling person would feel in the situations my heroine encountered.
So my heroine started to cry. She cried a lot. I challenged my descriptive abilities to come up with different ways to talk about crying: gulping sobs alternated with trickles of tears, or moist-eyed howls of misery.
Betty warmed to my project. My heroine became even more emotional.
Around that time I made a new friend at a summer guitar workshop, *Carrie. Carrie had recently retired from a job in publishing and had decided to devote herself to music. We started practicing together and inevitably I mentioned that I was writing a mystery.
“Oh, I’d love to read it,” she said.
I gave her the first several chapters and looked forward eagerly to what I was sure would be lavish praise—for one thing, the mystery was about music.
But her reaction wasn’t what I expected. “I wouldn’t want to read a book like this,” she said after she’d had my chapters for a week.
“No?” I felt my throat clutch the way it does when I’m nervous.
“No one would. Your sleuth isn’t a good heroine at all.”
“She’s not? What’s the problem?” I said, trying to control my distress and make my voice sound merely conversational, rather than devastated.
“I couldn’t stand her.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Well,” Carrie said, shuffling my pages back into their folder. “She’s much too emotional. She cries all the time.”
*Names have been changed.
Peggy Ehrhart is a former English professor who now writes mysteries and plays blues guitar. She is the author of Sweet Man Is Gone, featuring sexy blues-singer sleuth Maxx Maxwell, and published by Five Star/Gale/Cengage. Visit her at www.PeggyEhrhart.com . This first appeared in Another Writer’s Life–August 10, 2008.
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Monday, December 15th, 2008
If you’re not already a writer, here’s news: you have a book in you. Maybe several. Everybody does.
Story-writing is myth-making. We create stories that help us understand our own experience, shape our own lives.
I know this because it was the case with my first mystery. It’s why first books often rush out as if they can’t wait to see the light of day, and why they’re often very powerful, even if flawed by an insufficient grasp of things like plotting.
I’d been wanting to write a mystery for twenty years–ever since I started reading them in grad school as a welcome break from things like Paradise Lost. The idea simmered inside me until 1989 when, after years of spending my vacations on my scholarly writing, I decided I deserved a break.
I sat down at the computer on January 2. I’ve since become a very methodical outliner, but I didn’t outline that project. I didn’t have to. It came pouring out as if it was writing itself. One day as I was going at it full tilt, I hurried down to the kitchen to refill my coffee cup and slipped on the stairs, the back of my head thumping each step all the way to the bottom. I was so excited about what I was writing that I scarcely felt any pain. I just jumped up, refilled my cup, and returned to the computer. Three weeks later my first mystery was finished.
And what was it about–the book so eager to be born that I could scarcely move my fingers fast enough to key it in?
It was set in the world that I inhabited at the time, the academic world. And like many first mysteries, it aimed to settle old scores. I murdered a self-absorbed colleague, and I lampooned two department chairs, one–a male–from my first teaching job and the other–a female–from my current school. In my fictional world they were as repellent as in real life, but now they were yoked together in marriage. The male, who was the titular department chair in my story, was a henpecked nonentity. He spent his days dozing in an armchair while the female, who outweighed him by a hundred pounds, ran the department with a heavy hand and loads of favoritism.
But in retrospect I realize that the book was really about the fact that I wanted to write a book. Not literally, but the subplot involved a romantic triangle that played out as an allegory of self-discovery.
My sleuth was me, an earnest young female professor trying to make her way in a demanding job. Into her life came a new colleague, a brilliant scholar, as charming and genuine as he was good looking. He was totally smitten by my sleuth, and she was attracted to him, flattered by the attentions of such a luminary.
But she’d been conscripted by the department chair’s wife to offer a private tutorial to the campus problem child–a young man who’d been dropping and failing classes for years. He was only allowed to keep enrolling because his father was a campus benefactor. The problem child was slender and graceful, with unruly black hair, and he wore a tiny dangling jackknife as an earring. He looked like Aidan Quinn in Desperately Seeking Susan.
Much to my sleuth’s dismay, she was attracted to this unsuitable character, her heart pounding with excitement as she made her way up the stairs to the seminar room where they had their tutorial sessions. And he seemed attracted to her, unlikely as such a scenario might be in real life, where more likely he’d be chasing a Madonna-clone around the East Village. But in my story, their mutual attraction became irresistible one day. And the fact that the tutorial room had a long table rather than rows of little desks enabled me to write a rather breathless sex scene. (Well, it was a first novel.)
But then the problem child dropped out of sight for the whole second half of the book, leaving my sleuth with a broken heart. He reappeared for the dramatic climax in which the mystery was solved–but only after the department chair’s evil wife came within an inch of being dismembered by a chain saw.
Once the police had come and gone, three people remained, my sleuth, the handsome scholar, and the problem child. Each man gazed at her, begging without words for her to choose between them. Finally the problem child spoke, asking, “Wanta go somewhere and talk?”
The book’s last line shamelessly plagiarized James Joyce, the moment when Molly Bloom reaches the climax of her orgasm: “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I will. Yes.”
Analyzing my book now, I realize that with the romantic triangle my psyche was asking me to make a choice of lives, like the myth of Hercules at the crossroads. Would I continue as a responsible, respectable teacher whose writing projects were destined to wind up only on the shelves of other scholars? Or would I gamble on writing fiction–though the rewards were much less certain?
Postscript: that mystery got an agent, quite a reputable one, who worked at selling it for a year, though she never succeeded. She told me she couldn’t understand why my sleuth turned down that eminently suitable scholar boyfriend to go off with a disreputable weirdo.
Peggy Ehrhart is a former English professor who now writes mysteries and plays blues guitar. She is the author of Sweet Man Is Gone, featuring sexy blues-singer sleuth Maxx Maxwell, and published by Five Star/Gale/Cengage. Visit her at www.PeggyEhrhart.com . This first appeared in Writers Plot–August 2, 2008.
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Sunday, December 14th, 2008
My son is a man now. The navigation gene has taken hold.
Boys do slightly better than girls on geometry tests, I recently read. Is the edge in geometry a legacy of our evolutionary past? The guys whose grasp of spatial relationships made them more apt at tracking game won the women too–and passed on huge batches of the navigation gene. Does the navigation gene make guys cocky? You bet.
My husband calls it zen navigation, giving a transcendental gloss to what I suspect is overconfidence. Waving off maps and rebuffing my offers to jump out and ask directions, he careens around corners mumbling that if he could see the sun, we’d already be there.
Like father, like son.
I considered it research, something I could use in my mystery writing. The guy piloting the U-Haul van through the streets of Brooklyn was much closer to my sleuth’s age than I am, and he was moving into his new apartment, a low-budget affair like my sleuth’s Hackensack place.
He was also my son. I was trading several hours of back-wrenching labor for the chance to recapture the days when he was a kid, when driving together gave us a chance to talk. Except now he was driving.
Delivering his possessions to his new digs in the Greenpoint neighborhood went fine. Then things got hairy. We had to pick up the stuff he left at the apartment where he house-sat while looking for his new place.
“I’m pretty sure I can find it,” he said, as we bounced through the industrial neighborhood that flanks Greenpoint. “But last week I was going back and forth on my bike. Some of the streets might be one-way streets so it’ll be different in this van.”
“How about a map?”
“It’s under control, Mom.”
It was different. At last we emerged from a narrow street onto the roundabout that circles Grand Army Plaza. He navigated the roundabout quite skillfully. The sole glitch came at the end, with a hair-raising left turn across a few lanes of cars bent on heading straight ahead.
That errand accomplished, it was time to pick up the sofa he had located on Craig’s List. “It’s in Fort Greene,” he said. “On Carlton.”
“We’re on Carlton now,” I said, thrilled that this part seemed easy.
Then Carlton ended.
“It must start up again,” he said. “I recognize this from riding my bike.” We bounced over potholes for several minutes. “This doesn’t look like what I remember—in fact it looks like…”
“Like we’re headed back to the house-sitting place.” Indeed, we were on the roundabout again.
“No problem. I know which lane to use for the turn now.”
He poked a number into his cellphone. “What’s your cross street?” he said. A staticky female voice answered. He turned to me. “We just need to find Fulton.”
We circled around until we found it.
“Now I just have to figure out which way to turn,” he said.
“Why didn’t you ask her?”
“Chill, Mom.”
We turned right, merging with rush-hour traffic heading east. Twenty minutes later, we’d gone eight blocks, none of which was Carlton.
“Why don’t we ask someone?” I said.
“I can figure this out.”
“Maybe there’s a map in the van.”
“What do I need a map for?”
We eventually found the place—we should have turned left at Fulton. But my son’s delight with the sofa suggested that, despite the navigation gene, his maturity had brought certain improvements.
His college apartment featured an overturned armchair oozing stuffing from a gash in the upholstery, and the rest of the décor enhanced the impression made by the chair. After seeing the place once, my husband refused to return.
The sofa is pretty nice—and a sign that the Brooklyn apartment is destined to be a place my husband will be happy to visit. As long as his navigation mojo is working and the sun is out.
Peggy Ehrhart is a former English professor who now writes mysteries and plays blues guitar. She is the author of Sweet Man Is Gone, featuring sexy blues-singer sleuth Maxx Maxwell, and published by Five Star/Gale/Cengage. Visit her at www.PeggyEhrhart.com . This first appeared in Cozy Chicks—July 26, 2008.
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