I finally got to watch Walk The Line this past weekend. I had had ambivalent feelings about watching it because I have so many memories, growing up, of Johnny Cash.

When I was a kid in California it wasn’t the cutting edge place it seems to have since become. It was, even where I lived in Manhattan Beach, a pretty sleepy place. And almost everyone we knew was from somewhere else (well, that hasn’t changed), mostly from the south or the dust bowl. Many of them were dirt poor. A lot of them had picked all the cotton they ever wanted to (my dad among them). They came to California usually before WWII and afterwards they stuck around.

So I grew up on country western music. When we watched tv when I was a kid we watched country music shows like Cliffie Stone and Spade Cooley and, above all, Town Hall Party. I used to go to my grandparents’ house every other weekend and spend Saturday nights there (to give my parents a break, I suppose — or to give me a break, which is the way I saw it) and every time I was there, we watched Town Hall Party.

If you never got to see it, you missed out on watching a whole generation of country music and early ‘rock and roll’ stars grow up: Marty Robbins, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Jim Reeves, Patsy Cline. And Johnny Cash was right there among them.

Some of the shows, in grainy black-and-white made from a film of a television showing the live broadcast, are now available on DVD. I have three of them. And I get goose bumps when I watch them because I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember the ‘real’ Johnny Cash before he became an icon. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to see anyone try to portray that man and those years.

But this past weekend I did — and I was blown away. I couldn’t believe how authentic it felt. Couldn’t believe that Joaquin Phoenix could hit those low notes. Couldn’t imagine he could walk the walk and get the body language so right at times that I had to blink to be sure I was watching a movie instead of seeing the man as I remembered him.

The film did such a good job of recalling those days and those people that I came away with this huge grin on my face. And the next night I watched the commentary. It was wonderful, too. Obviously Walk The Line was a labor of love for director James Mangold. It showed.

As a writer I appreciated a lot of the balance he put in — the echoes that appeared later which recalled early dialogue and early scenes. I appreciated what he (and his actors) could do with a glance, with a reaction, with an aversion of their eyes.

I am sure Philip Seymour Hoffman did a brilliant job in Capote, but I can’t believe Joaquin Phoenix didn’t win the Oscar for his portrayal of Johnny Cash. He had to cover such a range of emotions — such highs and such lows, such angst and such promise, such joy and such bewilderment. Maybe Hoffman did, too. I didn’t see the film. But he didn’t have to sing.

For that alone Joaquin Phoenix should have got the award.

This is not a great deal different than the Dead End Approach.

Basically, it assumes you’ve painted yourself into a corner with a window in it. If you didn’t, you have some serious hacking to do, and the wrecking ball might be easier. But if you have a window, you’re in luck.

While you’re waiting for the paint to dry, hop through the window and do some research.

Very often when one of my books stalls, it’s because I have nowhere to go (hence, the painted into the corner feeling). What I need is more information, more ideas (as in, where do you get your . . .?), more nitty-gritty first hand stuff.

When I was writing The Eight Second Wedding, I needed to know a lot about the rodeo circuit and the life of the professional rodeo cowboy, in this case a bull rider. While I grew up watching rodeos, and I had an uncle who competed in a few, I didn’t know much about the whole lifestyle. And reading books and articles helped, but it didn’t give me the detail that I wanted. Not the real life sort of stuff that would get me out of the corner and make the characters come alive.

So . . . I jumped out the window and found myself a bull rider who was willing to talk. Actually he was retired, but he taught bull-riding at that point, so he was a great resource. We talked. And then he had to go to the doctor — an occupational hazard — and I was supposed to call him back the next day.

Only the next day he was in Texas and I talked to his wife. And the week after that he was in Arizona and I talked to his father. And a week or so after that I talked to his mother, and to his wife again, and finally, as the deadline grew closer and I was still hemmed in that corner, I called back one last time and he was in Washington, I think.

So I asked the nice young man who had answered the phone that time, “Do you ride bulls?” and he said, “Yes, ma’am.” And I said, “Will you talk to me?” And he said, “Yes, ma’am.”

And he did.

And he was wonderful. A spectacular resource. So good, in fact, that he not only gave me lots of information about bull riding and the rodeo circuit, he went through the calendar and mapped me out a schedule of exactly which rodeos Chan would compete at during the Memorial Day to end of July time frame I had for that part of the book. He even called me once at 1 in the morning when he was fogged in at LAX so we could go over some details.

When the phone rang — and we woke up from a sound sleep — The Prof rolled over and said, “Huh?” and then lay there, basically lifeless, while I got up and went to listen to the answering machine to make sure one of the kids had killed, bloodied or maimed themselves.

When I heard the voice, I smiled and went back to bed. “Whozat?” The Prof mumbled. “My rodeo cowboy,” I said. The Prof sighed. “Right.” And went back to sleep.

Suffice to say, “my” rodeo cowboy was a great help. And when we finished talking the several times we talked, he invited me to bull-riding school the next time he taught near me. How could I pass that up? I went and got a whole new book out of it. That book, The Cowboy and the Kid, was a great example of a book with LOTS of detail and, because of the detail I had command of, there were no painted-into-the-corner feelings at all.

Just lately I’ve been thinking Spence is a painted-into-the-corner sort of book. While I got him from Montana to New York all right, and got Sadie there after him, it’s the next bit I’m a little fuzzy on. What I know about private islands in the South Pacific is a whole heck of a lot less than I knew about bull riders.

But recently I hopped out the window and — bless the internet — I’m learning. The paint is almost dry now. We’re ready to go back to work. I think Spence and Sadie — and I — are going to enjoy that island.

If not, I remembered to pack the wrecking ball.

The map cabinet has moved.

It took over the living room to such an extent that we decided it would be better off elsewhere (or we would be). So it replaced a desk in the dining room. The desk, of course, is now busy over-powering the living room, but I have promised to refinish it for one of our sons who, bless him, agreed to give it a home.

Anyway, The Map Cabinet At Home ( I feel like it should get visitors who leave calling cards) . . .

At Kate Walker’s request I have provided a subject for size comparison. This is Gunnar, a 70 lb flatcoat retriever (and possibly something else). If you’ve never met a flatcoat, he’s sort of a finer-boned golden retriever in size. NOT, I hasten to add, in personality. Or, of course, in color. Enough said.

Gunnar is there to make the map cabinet look handsome. And, of course, to look handsome himself. (Disregard the food bowl, which Micah, one of the goldens, moves around the house as the mood hits him, and the crumpled rug in the bottom right corner — ditto)