Talking to writer Daniel Pinkwater is a little like watching an Indiana Jones or James Bond movie: If you can put reality and logic aside for a while and just go with the flow, you`ll probably wind up enjoying yourself.
”I usually make it up as I go along,” warned Pinkwater before being interviewed. ”I figure, why tell the truth? It`s just not important. Why give people dry facts when you can give them moist untruths?” A disclaimer worthy of a politician.
Pinkwater, who has written more than 50 children`s books and young adult novels, is virtually a cult favorite among teens. His style is somewhat similar to that of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.; it`s not exactly science fiction, but it sure does twist reality in unusual ways. In Pinkwater`s quirky books, fat men dressed in plaid drop from the sky to consume all of the Earth`s junk food, a blue moose writes a book and becomes a best-selling author and talking lizards worship chickens and Walter Cronkite.
Those who have discovered Pinkwater fervently love his work; his books barely have time to return to the library shelves before they`re checked out again. But some adults aren`t sure what to think of him. Pinkwater recalled one negative review: ”It said, `This book encourages children to think independently. This is the kind of book we don`t want them to see.` That`s a direct quote. Well, at least they know what they`re about.”
Pinkwater`s books are wild, silly and irreverent, with plots that seem to be made up as he goes along. Just a look at some of his titles-”Fat Men From Space,” ”The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death,” ”The Hoboken Chicken Emergency”-and you know you`re going to be reading something a lot more exciting than Silas Marner. But some people just don`t get his brand of humor. ”There are people without a sense of humor,” Pinkwater matter-of-factly said. ”And they cannot, as far as I know, be cured. If you haven`t got a sense of humor, things that are meant to be funny that people laugh at-that you don`t get at all-are certainly going to exasperate you. But these kinds of people are very important to me in a way, because certain ones of them help me know I`m on the right track. If they don`t like (what I`ve written), I`m probably OK.
”I wrote a book called `I Was A Second Grade Werewolf,` and I got a letter from a guy, a superintendent of schools, saying: `Why did you write this book? What gave you the idea, what was the intention? What is the underlying message of this book and who do you see as a reader of this book?` I wrote back to him: `I got the idea for this book while having a roast beef sandwich in a diner in Hyde Park, N.Y., at 1 in the morning with my wife. My intended reader is a kid. My intention in writing the book was that the kid who reads it should laugh. There is no underlying message in this book; it takes a certain kind of mind to see those everywhere, bless your heart. You`re a putz. Yours truly, Daniel Pinkwater.` ”
The name game
Sometimes Pinkwater writes under his middle name, so his books are authored by D. Manus Pinkwater. When asked why he does that, he sighed heavily. ”Let me see, how to answer it this time,” he said. ”It`s to aggravate these two old ladies at the Library of Congress.” He paused and you can almost hear the creative wheels turning in the devious section of this brain. ”Actually,” he continued, ”I acquired my present first name as the result of some foolishness in the `70s, and when I quit the cult, everybody already knew me as Daniel. And I also figured for all the money I gave to that swami, I oughta get something, so I kept the first name. Never told before.” Another pause.
”I`m gonna change my name again,” he said. ”I`m thinking about embracing Islam. And if I do that, of course, I will take a different handle.”
Certain themes appear over and over in Pinkwater`s books: Food, animals, music, food, movies, science fiction/aliens, food, aware people versus mindless people, Chicago and, of course, food. Food appears in Pinkwater`s books so consistently that it`s surprising some enterprising graduate student hasn`t done a doctoral dissertation on ”Food: Its Signifigance and Symbolism in Daniel Pinkwater`s Novels.”
”I`m somewhat preoccupied with food, I`m a fat guy,” admitted Pinkwater. ”But I`ve known people-I have a good friend who used to keep in his glove compartment a map with all the White Castles in New Jersey marked on it. To him, it was a real serious thing. Now, I`ll eat sliders too, but I don`t think about them all day long.”
What Pinkwater is concerned about is maintaining ”the dying cultural treasures of urban life,”-specifically, those found in Chicago, where he grew up. ”I`m interested in giving testimony to cultural artifacts,” he said. ”I find that without too much trouble, through my life, I`ve come upon lots of stuff that`s really quite interesting and nourishing and delightful. And there`s a lot of it, you know? But some of it becomes obscure with time. There are things I`ve seen and experienced that have been very precious and nice, and I feel almost bad that they`re gone now.”
For example, beer gardens. ”Back when I lived in Chicago, I knew at least four or five. But now they`re gone, or at least forgotten. There used to be one on the Northwest Side. You`d go through a door, and you`re in this big place which has an outdoors as big as the inside. Whole families sitting around swilling beer, the kids running around the tables, people eating salami, singing and carrying on. So I`ll put a beer garden in a book just to keep some of those things alive. And the readers respond to that. A lot of them are living in the suburbs and they have an inner craving for some of this stuff. They want to find it. ”So I talk about places in my books-the Bermuda Triangle Chili Parlor in ”Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars,” or Beanbender`s Beer Garden in ”The Snarkout Boys and the Avacado of Death.”
And when you read about these things, you say, `Damn, I`d like to go there tonight!` I enjoy keeping some of this stuff alive.”
Alert readers can pick out thinly-disguised Chicago sites such as New Town, Old Town, Lower Wacker Drive and Lake Michigan. Other old cultural institutions, such as all-night movie theatres, stands that sell red hots and sixties-type coffee houses are also included. Even the Chicken Man appears in a couple of the books-a man who used to wander around Chicago with a performing chicken that would dance and do tricks.
Late night snarking
Many of Pinkwater`s books are based upon his own experiences as a teen when he`d snark out. (According to narrator Walter Galt in ”The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror,” the term ”snarking is the art of sneaking out of the house when your parents are sleeping and having an adventure late at night. The adventure usually includes or consists of going to the movies at the Snark Theater, from which the art of snarking takes its name. The Snark is open all night, 365 days a year and it has a different double bill every 24 hours.”)
”That was the Clark Theater (now defunct),” Pinkwater said. ”It was open all night and had a different double bill every day. Of course, it`s maybe not as safe to snark now as it was years ago. But nothing bad ever happened to me.
”I`m still nocturnal, and I still snark even though it`s a little more difficult now that I`m living out in a rural area. You can snark wherever you are . . . except possibly Downers Grove. When you`re out in a rural place, you`ve got to work harder. The Hudson River at night is very mysterious. It`d be foggy and dark, and I`d make my way through the woods, down to the river. If you sat quietly, you could hear the fish jumping. They had these fish as big as a car. No kidding. Sturgeon. Big fish. You hear this thing leap out of the water, and WHACK! It sounds like an Oldsmobile did that. You can`t see it, you just hear it. That was pretty good.”
An ageless fan club
Pinkwater claims the he doesn`t write his books for any particular age group or audience. ”I don`t differentiate,” he said. ”I`m writing it for a particular kind of reader. It happens to be me. And I`m not a kid.” And although publishers insist of putting age ranges on his books, true Pinkwater fans pay no attention. ”I get letters from older teens who tell me that they read my picture books on the sneak,” he said. ”I get letters from kids in college who read all my stuff, adults.”
Pinkwater`s next book is entitled ”Borgel.” ”It was offered to a publisher as an adult book and to a publisher as a kid`s book and they both made an offer,” he said. ”I took the kid`s book offer-not because it was more, because I think it was less-but I just liked the idea of my regular kid readers, who would read it anyway, knowing that it was intended for them.”
Pinkwater claimed that he can`t remember what the book is about because he`s finished writing it, but later on let slip that ”the crux of this Borgel book is a quest to find this great popsicle that might be God.”
Never an idle moment
His latest projects, in addition to ”Borgel,” have been writing commentaries for National Public Radio and authoring a comic stip called Norb. Pinkwater`s been doing commentaries for NPR`s ”All Things Considered” since 1987. ”I love that job,” he said. This past summer, a collection of 72 of those commentaries were published in a book called ”Fish Whistle:
Commentaries, Uncommentaries, & Vulgar Excesses” (Addison Wesley, $16.95).
”When I started writing the commentaries, I just began cranking them out,” Pinkwater said. ”I`d be doing them in batches of 10. I like doing them because I listen to the program anyway. I always have; I feel very comfortable with that audience. They`re people, if not like me, then as close like me as it`s gonna get. It`s like the home town newspaper.
”And besides, I get to fool with technological equipment. I do my own taping now. I had my closet made into a recording booth.” In his commentary, ”Skivvies Make the Man,” Pinkwater relayed how he records his commentaries: ”All the commentaries so far have been done in warm weather. My office is at the top of the house, and it`s pretty hot even with the windows open. Once I`ve got them closed, the next thing I do is rip off my clothes. . . . It can`t help a serious news and information program for the listeners to know that commentaries are being recorded by a guy in an attic, in his underwear. The exciting part of doing the taping is to try to get it right before I suffocate, and before a big truck rumbles by and the microphone picks it up.”
Next on the agenda
Pinkwater is currently pulling together another collection of his commentaries to be published in book form in 1991. But what he seems most excited about is Norb, the comic strip he co-creates with Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Tony Auth. The off-beat serial consists of a pizza-loving, multi-million year old wooly mammoth named Eugen; a teenage girl named Rat;
and Norb, an eccentric scientist genius.
The strip`s been sold to 70 newpapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Boston Globe. ”I`ve gotten a few requests from the boss saying, `dumb it down,` ” Pinkwater complained. ”It`s a hip comic, but some people don`t get it.”
He then read part of the strip for March 18, when the group discovered a stowaway:
”Rat: `We`ve got a stowaway.` Stowaway: `I am Jay Kennedy, comics editor at King Features, and I`m here to help you. While we respect what you`re trying to do, we feel it`s a tiny bit confusing for today`s reader. A simpler plot, shorter stories, and a joke at the end every time, and you should do fine.`
”Next panel, Rat: `What do you think?` Norb: `Give him a parachute and a life preserver.`
”In the last panel he`s in a parachute: `See, punch lines and visual gags like this will help you keep your readers.` From the blimp, which is departing: `I`m sure he meant well, but we haven`t got time for theory. There`s adventure ahead.`
”Caption: Next week: Adventure ahead.”
Pinkwater chuckled. It`s a typical theme for him: Be crazy and irreverent, ignore what the experts say, and success and adventure will follow. After all, it`s worked for him so far. –
