Ephemeral Firmament

I Learned How to Make an Animated GIF for This

That's right, it's the best way to remember how to vote for me on Twitter for the Jeopardy! Battle of the Decades: put Tom and #JeopardyVote in any tweet you'd like, once a day through October 20.

And the other two places to vote, once a day:

• Facebook: Vote on Jeopardy!'s Battle of the Decades Facebook page.
• Jeopardy!: Vote on Jeopardy!'s own Battle of the Decades '00s page.

And in both places, you can watch, once again, the source for the compelling (or disturbing) image above (in which no endorsement of my candidacy by Jeopardy! rival Ken Jennings is implied!):

Thanks for voting and forwarding! It's only Day Two!

How to Vote for Me for the Jeopardy! Battle of the Decades: Short Version

Since I'm apparently unable to open a Typepad window without digressing into a two-thousand-word epic, I'm posting a tl;dr (that's "too long; didn't read", for those of you, like me, not on Reddit) version of my Jeopardy! campaign announcement. If you want the full, chatty, meandering version, go here. But if you just want the facts, here they are:

Jeopardy! is having a 30th anniversary Battle of the Decades tournament early next year, with 45 of the top players in the show's history playing for a million-dollar prize. The last three spots, one for each decade, are being determined by a Fan Favorite online vote, and starting today, I'm one of the five candidates for the '00s spot. You can vote for me three times a day for seven days. Here's how:

1. Facebook: Vote for me on Jeopardy!'s Battle of the Decades Facebook page. (You have to be registered on Facebook to vote.)
2. Twitter: Post a tweet that includes the word "Tom" and the hashtag "#JeopardyVote" (make sure there's a space between "Tom" and the hashtag, and no space in the hashtag). Sample tweet: "Tom #JeopardyVote". Or: "Tom Nissley's wife makes beautiful and practical sparkly, vinyl handbags. #JeopardyVote". (It's true.)
3. Jeopardy!: Vote for me on Jeopardy!'s own Battle of the Decades '00s page.
4. Share!: Please spread my campaign any way you can. I'll be grateful.

And here's my campaign platform:

1. I'm the third-leading money-winner in regular Jeopardy! history. Really!
2. I want revenge for this.
3. I'm the Phil Mickelson of game shows.
4. There's a funny joke (not mine) at the end of my Battle of the Decades video.
5. I'm Seattle's top Jeopardy! champ (by a technicality).
6. I really, really, really want to play Wimbledon one more time.

I'd Like to Be in the Jeopardy! Battle of the Decades, and You Can Help

My political career peaked early. As a suburban D.C. kid, I spent much of my childhood training for the local industry, holding regular elections with my sister for our stuffed-animal government. (See photo to the right, which, to be honest, reveals evidence of irregularities that, if I were Sniky or Horsey, would have made me question the legitimacy of the process.) And in sixth grade I put that experience into practice, canvassing the playground asphalt with Tom Newby for votes to become president and vice president of Wyngate Elementary. Our ticket won, and although actually being president of the school was an anti-climax--especially after our principal, Mrs. Wire, introduced me at an assembly as "Tommy Nissley"--I wasn't done with politics. The next fall I started junior high as any humble public servant should, by running for class representative in Mr. Wynkoop's geography class. My resumé, I assumed, would make me a shoo-in for such a lowly post, but instead I lost in a landslide, to one of the Nafis twins. As I remember it, I only got one vote, from Jay Richmond (I'm still grateful, Jay). One of my best friends didn't even vote for me: being president, he later explained, had "gone to my head."

I should probably be grateful for that too, since it put a quick stop to my political pretensions. I never even considered running for anything again. Until now.

Jeopardy! is celebrating its thirtieth year with Alex Trebek as the host this season with the "Battle of the Decades": a tournament, spread throughout next winter and spring, that brings back forty-five of the best (or most interesting) players in the history of the show to play for a million-dollar prize. The producers of the show have already named forty-two of those players, but the last three, one from each decade, are being chosen in a "Fan Favorite" vote that works pretty much exactly the way baseball fills its last All-Star Game slot these days. And, to extend the metaphor, I want to be your Freddie Freeman. For the past two weeks the show has held voting for the first two decades, and this week, starting today, it's time for the last near-decade, 2004-2012, which means it's time to vote for me.

I haven't been able to say anything about it until today, but I'm one of the five candidates for the last '00s spot, along with Kara Spak, Erin McLean, Ryan Chaffee, and Joey Beachum. Kara and Erin were in my Tournament of Champions, and they are lovely people, smart players, and good friends; Ryan was one of the most entertaining players I've seen on the show; and Joey, the college champ before Erin, is I'm sure a fine person and an excellent player too. But you should vote for me, and as often as you can.

How can you do that? And how often? It's a little complicated, so I'll lay it out for easy access here. The voting is open for a week, from today, October 14, through Sunday, October 20 (actually, until 6:59 am Pacific time on the 21st), and you can vote three times a day, once on Facebook, once on Twitter, and once on the Jeopardy! site. Here's how:

1. Facebook: Go to Jeopardy!'s Battle of the Decades Facebook page and vote for me. (You have to be registered on Facebook to vote.) If for whatever reason you end up on the main Jeopardy! Facebook page, you can get to the voting page by clicking on the Battle of the Decades link near the top of the page.
2. Twitter: All you have to do (once you have a Twitter account) is post a tweet that includes the word "Tom" and the hashtag "#JeopardyVote" (make sure there's a space between "Tom" and the hashtag, and no space in the hashtag). Sample tweet: "Tom #JeopardyVote". Or: "Tom Nissley is the #3 Jeopardy! champ of all time (or #5, or #9, depending on how you count it). Let him play again! #JeopardyVote". Or, if you want to pay tribute to the excellent five-time champ Tom Kunzen (of the famed solo FJ), feel free to tweet "Tom Kunzen should be in the Battle of the Decades #JeopardyVote"; I'll humbly accept credit for that vote too.
3. Jeopardy!: And of course you can go to Jeopardy!'s own Battle of the Decades '00s page to vote, where you can also watch Alex's not-unfunny Battle of the Decades video and see a nice Tournament of Champions yearbook, with photos of every ToC player since 1985, including Reader's Book of Days copyeditor India Cooper, who's already been chosen for the '80s part of the tournament.
4. Share!: And the fourth step each day, for an above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty campaign volunteer, is to spread these links wherever you can: email, Facebook, Twitter, posters on telephone poles. I'll be embarrassed and grateful for any way you can help.

So that's how you do it, and you can do it every day through next Sunday. I'll be sending out daily reminders, if I can find a way to do it without being totally annoying.

But here I've asked you to vote for me without telling you what I stand for. What's my campaign platform, you say? Here you go:

1. I'm the third-leading money-winner in regular games in the history of Jeopardy!, and then I finished second out of fifteen in a tough Tournament of Champions, which included six of the top twenty-five all-time winners. Whether that means I'm actually one of the best Jeopardy! players ever, I don't know, but I think I've earned the right to be among the forty-five players fighting it out.
2. Speaking of finishing second, the historic (and downright gleeful) Double True Daily Double stomping Roger Craig put on me and Buddy Wright in the ToC finals has been watched 1.8 million times and counting on YouTube (probably a few hundred of those were by me, plus a hundred more times more in my nightmares). Time for a little Brontë-sisters payback!
3. Chris Jones of Esquire once compared my "seriously calculated recklessness" to Phil Mickelson's. I know, I think it's a stretch too, but it sounded great.
4. There is a very funny joke at the end of my Jeopardy! video, which you can see on the Jeopardy! site and on the J! Facebook page. It's true that I didn't make the joke, but it's in my video.
5. I'm Seattle's all-time top Jeopardy! champ. (Thank goodness Ken Jennings lives five miles north of the city line.)
6. I really, really, really want to play Jeopardy! one last time. I know that's true of absolutely everyone who has played Jeopardy!, and certainly of everyone else who has wanted to be on the show and hasn't gotten the call. I've had a happy and lucky life, and Jeopardy! has been a very lucky part of that, but it's strange: it's like finding out in the middle of your life that you're about as good a tennis player as anyone else out there, getting one shot at Wimbledon, and then you're done. And that's really why I want to play again. A million dollars? Well, of course, but there are lots of smart people between me and what seems like Monopoly money at this point. But getting the chance to do something I only recently found out I'm really good at? Whether I get to play again or not (and no matter how well I fare if I do), I'll move on from the game-show part of my life to other things I love. But before I do, I really, really, really would like to write my name on the screen and pick up the signaling device one more time.

Thanks for your help. I apologize in advance, but you'll be hearing more from me all week.

But How Do You Pronounce "Firmament"?

I feel obligated to share this helpful guide. Don't watch late at night or you might not like your dreams.

"Harlem Nocturne," Another Dome Built in Air

Nobody really wants to hear about your dreams, unless they were in them.

I guess Coleridge is the exception, since people have been reading "Kubla Khan" for nearly two centuries now and mostly buying, or at least enjoying, his claim that he was merely transcribing its unfinished lines from what he could recall of his hop-headed dream of the night before. Part of the pleasure of his tale is the same one we take in marveling at our own dreams: how does our unconscious mind construct its narratives of sublimely bizarre invention all on its own? And convince us, for a time, that they are the truth?

How does a dream achieve that convincing fictional technique of placing you in a story that has already begun? The other night, while sleeping in a cabin, I imagined--it felt like I remembered--that I had won some sort of notice for a story I had written. Not a big prize, just the kind of schoolboy recognition that includes dozens of similar honorees. (The schoolboy part should have been the first tipoff, since I haven't been in school for a dozen years.) There was going to be a ceremony at which those honored would read their work, an event that might well go on for hours or days, Nature Theater of Oklahoma-style--long enough, at least, that the program was printed in a sizable perfect-bound book.

It wasn't that big of a deal to me within the dream--I was mildly proud of the honor, but almost took it as my due, for something I had written years before and had long moved past. And of course I had nearly forgotten about the ceremony and had the usual dreamland trouble in finding a bus to get to the building where it was held, and in finding the room (room 913, I remember) once I got there, in a building where they were shutting down the lights on all the floors but the one I was headed to. And of course I had hardly looked at the piece itself, which was included in full in the program. All I knew was its name: "Harlem Nocturne," about which I was a little embarrassed. I was sure it was a relic of some earlier naive presumption that I could speak in fiction, a la Van Vechten, for the idea, and the people, of "Harlem." But I gamely opened the program as I sat waiting for the bus and read the story to prepare a little before having to read it aloud.

To my surprise, it was better than I had expected (at least to my dream-judgment). And also to my surprise, I had no memory of having written it. But there it was on the page, and it seemed to bring up a feeling, vague but tied to the specific images and language of the story, that it had indeed come from the same mind I now inhabited. It was a short vignette, which did presume to speak for someone in Harlem: a musician who lived on the edges of society and was in some way held back from practicing his craft. The one specific image I can recall is of the main character, who bore a resemblance to the writer Charles W. Chesnutt--mustached and light-complected enough to pass--reaching through a streetcar window from the outside to take a newspaper from a seat and having his hand swatted and cursed by a woman who well may have been the mother from "Everything That Rises Must Converge." I also recall that the musician railed against Elvis Presley--anachronistically, since the rest of the story seemed to take place in the '20s, or earlier. Within the dream I thought of the story as a sort of pastiche of Nella Larsen and Ralph Ellison; outside the dream I might add James Weldon Johnson.

In many ways it was an unexceptional dream: an event I had forgotten that I must attend, a place in a city I can't find. But the element that I marveled at as I woke up--and I think even grasped in some sense while within the dream--was that while I have never written such a story, in the dream I really had. The words were actually there, visible on the page before me, or at least seemed to be if I only could have slowed down the dream to read them, and in the moments after I woke I tried to chase after the text even as it receded from me, like Coleridge but with less success and no man from Porlock to blame.

I'd like to believe that somewhere in my brain, like a deleted file that still survives hidden on your hard drive, the story exists, intact and coherent and actually better than I would have thought myself capable of. I'd like to believe it, but I don't, in part because even in the dream its coherence began to fall apart. Toward the end of the story (and of the dream), as I zoomed in on the text, I saw in a haze of text a proper noun, a character's name. A familiar one, but familiar because it's from the novel I'm writing, a novel that takes place nowhere near Harlem and that (at least as I've conceived it) has nothing to do with the story in the dream.

I think that eruption of one story in another caused a tear in my dream logic. Susceptible as my dreaming mind was, I knew even then that the name didn't belong there, and I started to lose my belief in the fictional web I'd created--and I think soon after, I woke, with the story for the most part lost. But I did bring a few small shards across the border into consciousness: those words, "Harlem Nocturne," and the man reaching into the streetcar. Maybe I can find a place for them in my novel.

P.S. An exception to my opening sentence: I enjoyed Levi Stahl's recent dream-memory miscellany (as I enjoy every one of his posts), especially the punch line in #6: "Yourcenar!"

Fortnightly Firmament #6: Meandering Drives

It's been a few fortnights since the last Firmament, and since I spent most of that time driving (5,400 miles worth), it's only natural for my first post-road-trip list to stay on the road. As we confirmed on this trip, I like to drive more than my wife does, which helps explain why, through our entire relationship, whenever we've driven the same route in separate cars she has always beaten me. (Until this year, when, oddly, I always win--we can't explain it.) One reason (besides that she's just a better driver than me and also in a bit more of a rush in general) is that I try to enjoy the drive, while she wants to get it over with. She'll focus like a laser on the most efficient route, while I'll drift toward one that is a little prettier, often involving curves, views, and lower speed limits: the scenic route.

In most places I've lived, I've developed a deep affection for a few such meandering routes, usually leading to or from my house. The love affair started in high school in the Maryland suburbs, when my friends and I would drive out into the country in the middle of the night, driving and talking and getting lost until we hit a road we knew. And then it really took hold when I moved back home a year after college, when I got to know the endless diagonal avenues and drives snaking through the District of Columbia.

The ideal meandering drive has two lanes, few traffic lights, and curve after curve after curve, and it carries you through a variety of neighborhoods, through commercial and residential territory as well as parkland. It doesn't only meander--it does get you someplace useful, but it's almost never the fastest way to get there. It's often best driven at night, but even during the day it has some of the solitary pleasure of night driving. And what are those pleasures? I think they lie in the balance between variety and single-mindedness. You don't have to think or decide--you just keep your headlights on the right side of the yellow line--but you float in a constant state of reactive awareness, with each turn presenting a new prospect. It's a lovely time for thinking, or for reflecting somewhere just under the surface of thought, which is why the meandering drive is best taken at the end of an evening, when the events of the day can fizz and flicker in your mind.

Summer Schedule: Gone Drivin'

Just a notice that it may be a little quiet here over the next couple of months (in fact, it's already gotten so). We've taken the family on a perhaps overly ambitious car trip around the east: 41 days on the road, I think I counted, though not every day will be the long haul today was (Smokemont campground in Great Smoky Mountains N.P. to Memphis). And no RV, Albert Brooks-style, just my folks' Taurus wagon with a Sears Ex-Cargo on top. I may yet make some reports from the road, though they are likely to be less bookish than usual (though Oxford, Miss.--and Square Books and Rowan Oak--are just a couple of days away). And if I concoct a Firmament this fortnight, it might be with the assistance of my children. We'll see, but stay tuned, on whatever summer schedule you're on. Most likely, I'll be seeing most of the readers of this blog in person along the way...

P.S. Seattle burglars take note: we have a house sitter!

My Emphemera Become a Little Less So

I guess you have to pick which online outfit you write little humor pieces for wisely. It's heartening to know that the website wing of a literary magazine that was all just a year or two old when I managed to slip a couple of pieces past their gatekeepers in 2000 has done well enough in the following decade that they not only can still pay their server fees but have done a major site upgrade, one result of which is that every contributor now has their own url. Mine is http://www.mcsweeneys.net/authors/tom-nissley.

You'll only find two pieces linked there, both written when I was contracting for Microsoft Encarta and McSweeney's Internet Tendency was my daily, makes-every-day-a-little-more-worth-looking-forward-to fix in a way that I guess Some Came Running or Paris Review Daily are today. It was one of the great thrills of my writing life to get a note from one of the guys who had recently been included in their staff photograph in the New Yorker saying they'd publish my list, 13 Fraudulent Martyrs. (I think my original title was "The Book of Fraudulent Martyrs.") And then six months or so later, they wrote again, saying they'd like to post my mournful, pre-9/11 Reader's Digest goof, Humor in Uniform, too. (I can't remember if I originally sent them in together, or separately.)

Needless to say, I was at the time such a wise husband of my literary career that I took advantage of this rare opening by never submitting another thing to them. Why? Did I think I had proved myself and could move on? Move on to where? I still have no idea.

Neither piece lends itself to excerpting, but I will say that among the topics covered in the two items are squirrels, big cats, rhesus monkeys, plastic reindeer, and William Friedkin. And that, to be quite immodest, there's nothing I've written that I like better than the 13 Martyrs: I'd keep it ahead of just about anything--certainly my dissertation, and maybe even the 140 pages or so of a novel I keep tacking microscopic layers onto most days. I hope you enjoy it (although if there's anyone reading this blog who hasn't seen it already I'll be surprised).

Self-Portrait in Someone Else's Past

I am very thankful that not many people were taking pictures of me in the mid-'80s, but those that do exist look pretty much exactly like this, right down to the Sox painter's cap with the nicknames ("DEWEY," "JIM ED," "BIG FOOT") stacked around the sides (and to the nonexistent bicep).

This photo, though, is of the sports nut of my cohort who made good, young Bill Simmons, circa 1985, from Jonathan Mahler's profile in this weekend's Times Magazine, which I have to say didn't really add much more to my understanding of the man than reading one of his columns would have, much as I loved Mahler's book on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, The Challenge. (The curious can check out my interview with Mahler and one of the heroes of his book, Lt. Comm. Charles Swift. It's one of my favorites, and it also set a never-to-be-broken record for most bodies crammed into our old, tiny "studio" space at Amazon.)

How will Simmons's new Grantland project at ESPN turn out? It launches tomorrow, but the early sample articles they've had up for a while, well, point out to me how hard it is to extend the Simmons brand when Bill Simmons is not doing the writing, although Katie Baker's Knicks piece gets pretty close. Worth noting, meanwhile, that they decided to lead the preview with two pieces by women, despite (or because of) Simmons's proud gender Neanderthalism.

Diary of a Complacent Voluptuary: The Deleted Scenes

If by some chance you came here by some route other than my Paris Review Culture Diary (which is hard to imagine), you should know that last week I had the privilege of keeping a record of the culture I consumed for the excellent Paris Review Daily blog, the results of which appear this week in two parts.

"Diary of a Complacent Voluptuary": that's what I thought when I reread my entries just after sending them off to Thessaly, the proprietor of the blog, on Monday. (I also thought, hey, Complacent Voluptuary: that's a pretty good name for a blog. Too bad I'm already committed to the Firmament.) But really, that's what I did all week, just idly consume and reflect upon these tidbits of culture, like so many bon-bons? I guess that's what the format leads you to, but it looks even more frivolous when placed next to yesterday's interview on the blog with Chris Adrian, who not only is a fellow in pediatric hematology-oncology but is driven to write (by all accounts excellent) novels by the pain he sees his patients and families go through. And I write, 'cause why? Nothing so articulable or defensible, but I guess out of the faith that I'll get to a place that means as much to me. Or that I'll get some laughs.

Nevertheless, those diary entries are indeed more or less how I spent last week, though you'll notice from the time stamps that there are plenty of gaps between entries, which I spent, among other things, eating bad pizza and good pizza; sleeping (too little) at night and nodding off (too often and too publicly) during the day; trying to make pretend people do pretend things 97 years ago; calling Little Leaguers out at first; folding laundry and washing dishes; drinking Manhattans (or, rather, one giant Manhattan--thanks, Dave) with old colleagues; reading stuff online that wasn't interesting enough to write about; reading funny emails from friends that were too insider-y to write about; and, of course, writing up my day's activities for the diary.

There were also a few entries that I ended up cutting to meet the diary's suggested length. The diary benefited from the tightening, but what's the point of having a blog of your own if you can't spill whatever mess you please all over it? So here are the deleted scenes, as it were, from the final cut (which, as any DVD watcher knows, are never quite as good as the undeleted ones):

DAY ONE

8:30 A.M. Now that I don't, in theory, spend all day (and much of the night) online anymore, I try to cram email and the Web into the corners of the day, e.g. over my breakfast, which used to be magazine time. Today, after flurries of email freakout from my scattered hometown friends about the University of Maryland basketball coaching vacancy, I have just enough time to watch Kristen Wiig as Michele Bachmann--"America, I challenge you to a staring contest, and it begins ... now"--steal the show in the SNL GOP debate clip from this weekend, before walking my son to school.

11:30 A.M. Catch up with Malcolm Gladwell's NYer review of Ugly Beauty, Ruth Brandon's dual biography of Helena Rubinstein and Eugene Schueller, the founder of L'Oreal. I know nothing about these people or their business, but I'm drawn in. Why aren't there more dual biographies, to loosen the straightjacket of the traditional single life? I think (not for the first time) about pitching a triple bio of my own on obsessive, mop-headed competitors from the '70s: Bobby Fischer, Pete Maravich, and Jimmy Connors.

DAY TWO

9:50 A.M. Read (via Mark Athitakis, a favorite source for well-curated literary links) a Rumpus interview with Edward P. Jones, whose reluctant stories about himself are as much as source of wonder as his fiction. He lives so intensely within his own head and his senses of the past and of the streets of Washington, D.C., and he could care less about the literary life of publicity and competition. Of most practical interest: the way he talks about working out his stories in his head for years before he puts them on paper (if he ever does). I work (so far at least) in an entirely different way: my characters hardly exist until they speak and act on the page (and even then...).

2:47 P.M. My former colleague and dear friend Brad emails some advance page spreads from the front matter for his upcoming book, Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All, including a photographic dedication page to his dad that may be the most endearing I've seen since Franny and Zooey. I've been in the book business for a while, but this is the first I've really seen of the pre-publication process for a book from the author's side. One of many reasons to look forward to the final product is a rumored drink recipe called the "Tipsy Nissley."

DAY FOUR

12:45 A.M. On the recommendation of my architect/printmaker sister, who listens to a lot more podcasts than I do while she works, I stream Bill Simmons's recent chat with ex-BYU/Celtics player Michael Smith. Good stuff on everything from Mormonism to Simmons's freakish recall of Celts games from 20 years ago (Smith: "I can't believe you remember all this stuff about us!") to Smith's legendary status (who knew?) as perhaps the greatest HORSE player of all time, and how pissed off Larry Bird was when he got beat by Smith as a rookie. I'm proud, though, that I am able to turn this 77-minute (!) interview off halfway through and go to bed.

DAY SEVEN

9:30 A.M. I don't sit down with the Sunday Times. Having grown up with a full-on crush on my hometown Washington Post, I would never have expected this, but I haven't taken a paper at home for almost 20 years, which dates back even before the news started to come in through my data implants. But this spring I tried to make the Pavlovian response to the new NYT paywall and subscribe to the Sunday print edition, only to find that the algorithm back at Times HQ has determined that my zip code is only eligible for Weekend Only, not Sunday Only delivery. Back to the laptop...

8:30 P.M. Back in the Jukebox. I try to dig up some background on Silas Leachman, who has another version of "All Goin' Out and Nothin' Comin' In" in the Jukebox, and who the archive says was a "Chicago politician" who "specialized in what were called 'coon songs.'" (What a career combination.) To be honest, to my untutored ears in turn-of-the-century ethnicity his attempted black accent sounds more Irish or Yiddish (as if you could pin any of those down exactly anyway), but that's part of what's so crazy about these records, like the guy who trills his R's while carefully enunciating the "dems" of a black dialect song. I can't find much more on Leachman, but I do end up at a smart music-history blog called Locust St. that looks like it petered out last year and has no apparent information about the writer. Who is this mysterious person? (Further investigation reveals at least that the writer is Chris O'Leary and that he (or she) is now fully immersed in the land of David Bowie at Pushing Ahead of the Dame). 

P.S. I keep wanting to credit my sister Elinor for the photo above, but in truth I was the photographer, by the usual definition at least. But the camera, as well as the forearm tendons, are hers. As a few patient folks are very familiar with by now, the viewfinder of her Hasselblad is pretty much my favorite photographic subject (or medium) on the planet.