OU writer"s memoir plays with politics, pop culture & penguins
By Jim Phillips
Athens NEWS Senior Writer
March 6, 2008
In one chapter of his new memoir “Between Panic and Desire,” author Dinty Moore imagines a conversation with a phone psychic who also happens to be Tricia Nixon, daughter of the former president.
(“You work for a psychic hotline?” Moore asks. “Times are tough,” Tricia responds. “Chuck and I have kids in college.”)
Tricia keeps telling Moore occult truths about his life: He came from a troubled home. He watched too much TV as a kid and felt his life didn’t measure up to the sitcoms. He was traumatized by the JFK assassination.
Moore keeps telling Tricia she’s not much of a psychic.
“Um, no offense, Tricia,” he observes. “But you’re basically describing 90 percent of everyone born in the 1950s or ‘60s, at least everyone with a TV set in the living room.”
That’s one of the strengths of this public/private memoir, in which Moore – who now teaches creative writing at Ohio University – weaves personal memories, pop culture, political figures, fantasy, and various bits of flotsam and jetsam into a pattern that’s sometimes funny, sometimes painful.
One theme, he explained, is how experiences we have in youth create a kind of lens that shapes everything we see from then on.
“I don’t think we necessarily are aware of it, but I think we react to the current war, and the protests against the war, through the lens of what happened in the Vietnam era,” he said. “We react to current political scandals through the lens of Watergate. And I think we certainly react to what we expect a family to be like through the lens of ‘Leave it to Beaver’ or ‘Brady Bunch’ or ‘Roseanne.’”
In intertwined, wildly inventive essays – ranging in form from a coroner’s report to a multiple-choice quiz – Moore conjures up his, and our, past from a grab-bag of elements. These include his alcoholic father and depressed mom; his own lifelong diplopia (double vision); TV sitcom father figures like Hugh Beaumont of “Leave it to Beaver”; way too much dope-smoking; the reproductive behavior of penguins; Richard Nixon; the 9-11 terrorist attack; and more.
He doesn’t work through this crazy salad so much as play with it, using individual motifs as shiny mosaic stones to arrange in funny, intriguing shapes.
Along the way, he tells how a confused kid with no direction in life eventually turns into some semblance of a balanced, even happy adult with a wife and offspring.
“I’m getting there,” Moore admitted Tuesday. “I’m 52 years old, and I’m beginning to think things are starting to work out, but I was floundering into my mid-30s… I have a lot better grip in my 50s than I did in my 30s, and I was an absolute mess in my 20s.”
In telling how he went from perpetually stoned outsider to sober, successful writer and teacher, Moore offers no great spiritual insights, just the humble truth that everyone has to find out for himself.
As he puts it in his book, you just keep kicking the can of life down the road. “All of a sudden, you’re down the road, you know?” he said. And at some point, you figure out that the answer is, there is no answer. And you’re OK with that.
“The older I get, the more I think that the truth of just about everything – family life, politics, whatever – is in the contradictions,” Moore acknowledged.
While the book has its poignant moments, funny predominates. One high point is Moore’s recounting of how he was stunned to find his name – alongside NPR interview goddess Terry Gross and novelist Louise Erdrich – in a rant by essayist Curtis White in Harper’s magazine. White was venting about something he called “Middle Mind,” a sort of creeping mental goo that dumbs down Americans with “pragmatic, plainspoken, populist” prattle.
Top offenders included Gross with her “Fresh Air” show, Erdrich with her book “Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse,” and Moore, with his presumably lowbrow book on Buddhism, “The Accidental Buddhist.”
“The biggest surprise was, I don’t have anywhere near the name recognition of Terry Gross of NPR, or the novelist Louise Erdrich,” Moore recalled. “I was just flattered that he thought I was important enough to do any damage.”
Moore gets his licks in, however, with a “made-for-TV-docudrama” script featuring White as a crazed gunman driven mad by wide-screen TV sets; Gross and former Kiss lead singer Gene Simmons as hostages; Moore as a brave hostage negotiator; and Maggie, a character from the old comic strip “Bringing Up Father,” as herself. (You should know here that Simmons was once a very rude guest on Gross’s show, and that Moore was named after the bartender in the cartoon.)
It’s probably impossible to accurately describe the contents of “Between Panic and Desire,” other than to warn you that, as Moore puts it, “I like to play with structure,” that it’s got some very funny stuff in it, and that it is also quite educational. Did you know, for example, that Hugh Beaumont was actually a Methodist minister who hated kids?
Moore will be signing copies of “Between Panic and Desire” today from 4-6 p.m. at the Little Professor Bookstore in Athens.
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