bookfraud

Now that my Internet-holiday weekend — really a function of Baby than me not wanting to go online — I thought I would take up Fringes‘ permission to whine as loudly and pointlessly as my son. Who was doing said whining at 3 a.m. last night. And the night before.

In the penultimate shot of Martin Scorcese’s "Goodfellas," Ray Liotta, as mobster-turned-informant Henry Hill, is picking up a newspaper from the porch of his ranch-style house, barefoot and wearing a bathrobe. Hill is in witness protection. He’s living in an anonymous suburb with brick bungaloes and station wagons with wood paneling in the driveway.

His worst fears have come to pass. Not that he ratted out his Mafia cohorts, or that he had to serve time, or even that he got caught. It’s that he’s just another nobody in the ‘burbs.

"I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook," he says.

Though I am not going to testify in a Gotti trial and have no plans to enter witness protection, Wife and I are considering a move to the suburbs, as we have decided that our carbon footprint was not large enough. It’s a situation both Wife and I once swore would never happen. I’ve got a good but unglamorous job, a mortgage, and a one-year-old boy. Though I lack a car, once we trek to suburbia, that will inevitably follow. So will a slow death.

When I read other blogs, it occurs to me how little of the literary life I am living. I’m not writing fiction, attending readings, going to conferences and workshops, or following the latest-and-greatest in literature. Everything seems subservient to Baby, or my job, or cleaning the apartment after months of bed bug hell.

But it’s not like before Baby blessed us with his nocturnal yelps that I was tearing up the literary landscape. My novel was stuck in agent-editory purgatory; my attempts to write a non-fiction book were stalled on the first page; and my 10,000-line epic poem in Dutch about the migrating habits of Canadian geese…oh, never mind.

Oh, I know, there are plenty of people (some who are reading this) living in a suburb and who are writers, probably more productive than I am, and probably a lot more talented as well. It’s not that I want to castigate suburban living, but in my stilted, myopic worldview, it’s a surrender to a way of life I though I’d never live.

I live in the red one

I might as well face the truth: I’m 43, have high cholesterol, two bad knees and one bad shoulder, and the doctor is telling me to lose 15 pounds. I don’t have the time nor the energy to do these "literary" things (though I do, curiously, have time to write this blog and comment on others’ blogs). When I was much younger, like 23 or so, I imagined that by this age, I’d be established as a novelist (stop laughing). Not only would I have time to live the literary life, it would be my life.

But then, as I was sitting here, complaining in my head, I came to a stark and sudden realization. Do I write because I enjoy writing, or am I writing so that I can live a certain way, or to be a certain person?

It’s not an academic question. Great art has been forged by the desire to seduce, to flatter, to become famous, to gain riches. That the motives may seem skewered does not make it any less artistic. In fact, there are those who argue that is the main reason we create, to attain this intangible thing called "status."

Or, put another way, does one want to be a Writer, or do the things that writers do?

Right now, I’d settle for some sleep. Writers are allowed to sleep, I believe. It’s in the contract.

I’ve tried writing. I’ve tried to visit other blogs and comment. I’ve tried, I swear.

I’ve been trying to post something that would address writing and the writing life. Something that would be interesting. Something that wouldn’t repeat the same sentence structure three times in a row.

But I failed. Each time, the words would disintegrate into dust. Worse, they would disintegrate into whiny self-pity, which is pretty typical of this space, I realize.

I can blame many things, but I will point to the fact that Baby has been teething, which means he has awoken the past four nights at 4:15 a.m., 5:05 a.m., 5:18 a.m., and, last night, at 3:54 a.m., a new record. Did I mention he was screaming? Loudly? For an hour each night, despite his parents’ entreaties? And that I really did’t get any additional sleep?

This has reduced me to a drooling, incoherent fool. I need energy. I need Brawndo. It’s got electrolytes. Which are EXTREMELY AWESOME. It’s got super extra caffeine, and five types of sugar, making it EXTRA DELICIOUS and I can WIN at things I’m not supposed to WIN at like YELLING.

I feel better already.

"I now have 70 friends on Facebook," Wife chirped on what had previously been a nice Sunday morning.

I mumbled something back about how I had perhaps 30, and left the room. For if April is the cruelest month, Wife was making May a close second, rubbing her Facebook in my face.

Facebook, the greatest threat to writers since the invention of distilled whiskey, is, fortunately, summarily ignorable. However, it seems that a lot of people are worried about the number of "friends" they have on Facebook, like your typical blogger obsess on the number of comments on his or her blog.

I tried to like Facebook, I really did. On my Facebook page, you can see a photo of a smiling, ugly fellow (me) holding a smiling, beautiful boy (Baby). It was taken several months ago, and Baby’s toothless grin is so adorable that I’ve been tempted to enter it into a contest, so he can perhaps make a little scratch, considering how much the little brat has already cost me.

Unfortunately, it’s a cute enough picture that I’ve been assaulted by friends, family, and even strangers who want to add me as a "friend." A few weeks ago, I received an e-mail from a stranger who wanted to become "friends," being that she was new to Facebook, and, being a parent herself, thought a dude with a cute kid would be a safe place to start.

I thought it was safe, for me, too. Until the "quizzes" started. And the tidal wave of e-mail, and "sexy applications" that I was asked to "join."

I know some of these people well, some not-so-well, and some, not at all; this latter condition, however, has not stopped these Facebook folk from sending me the following "requests:"

Erik Pervert invites you to the Butt-Sniffing Test!

Suzie Narcissist is giving you FuckedUP Karma!

Terry Strangertoyou wants you to see If You’ll Enjoy Toejam!

Most of these "applications" are far less noxious than the ones above, but I am bombarded with every single change someone makes on their Facebook page (I know, you can change these settings, but still).

I realize that Facebook and MySpace and its ilk were really not designed for 43-year-old curmudgeons, which would be me. But the largest demographic group joining Facebook is — sit down, please — people over 30, making it the MySpace for the generation Mick Jagger said he couldn’t trust (long before the Rolling Stones’ tours were sponsored by Depends).

This makes Facebook an excuse for us older folk to pretend that we’re 16 again. Or to gratify those older folk who enjoy sharing news of every urinary tract infection or enlarged prostate with relative strangers and strange relatives.

Zuckerberg points the way to destruction

I’m sure some of you love Facebook, and that it serves as a convenient way to keep current with friends and family. And I have actually reconnected with a couple of people through Facebook who I had not talked to in years. It’s not that Facebook is inherently evil, like the Yankees, Barnes & Noble, or light beer enthusiasts.

No, Facebook is most like television. In and of itself, there’s nothing wrong with it. But it can become a monster that destroys one’s free time like fate crushes Oedipus (once and crushingly) or like Godzilla destroys Tokyo (repeatedly and often). For a writer, this makes Facebook a dangerous thing indeed.

From the rafters, I can hear the calls: You’re slamming Facebook as a time-wasting activity — and you’re a blogger? How can you condemn it? You’re a hypocrite!

Fair enough. So let’s compare:

This obsession with "friends" is as real as the huge number of horndogs who tried getting this curvy lass back her camera. In fact, as far as I can tell, this might be the main purpose of Facebook. Once you pass 10 or 20 friends, there’s no way to keep up with all the crapola on everybody else’s Facebook page, so getting "friends" becomes a thing onto itself.

Of course, that Wife has 70 such contacts I have less than half that that isn’t surprising, since she’s beautiful, outgoing, and social, whereas I am hatchet-faced, shy, and anti-social. And most of my "friends" are members of her extended family.

But honey, the Barcalounger isn’t just the world’s most comfortable chair, it’s a way of life

But Wife’s sly dig at me soon boomeranged on her — an hour later, she got an e-mail from a long-lost contact who found her on Facebook. Too bad it’s a shrill neurotic Wife’s been avoiding for years.

Popularity, it seems, comes with a price tag.

"You get what you deserve," I said, and for once, she had to agree. Now only if I could get her to agree to that Barcalounger.

Finally, the end of the three straight post of 300 words, a triumverate as deep as The Lord of the Rings, as entertaining as the Deptford Trilogy, and as offensive as a joke I once made about the Holy Trinity.

No more silly penis jokes, no longer questioning my sanity, I finally get to what has been bothering me the last three decades, which has a nice circularity to it, with all the threes and shit.

REGRETS, I’VE HAD A FEW, BUT THEN AGAIN, MOSTLY ONE ABOVE ALL OTHERS

The person who says he or she has lived a life with no regrets is either lying or delusional.

In terms of pure selfishness, I wish I’d bet the farm on Buster Douglas and had actually asked out a certain gal in college (who, it turns out, had the hots for me), but most of all, I wish I had never hurt myself in eighth grade.

In an empty gym before P.E. class, I climbed a chair and dunked a volleyball. I hung on the rim a few seconds, and when I landed, I blew out my knee.

That was 29 years, two operations, and a parade of orthopedic surgeons ago.

I spend an inordinate amount of time wondering what my life would be like had I not committed that act of profound juvenile idiocy. The typical fantasy is that I would have been able to play football in high school, become a star, and instead of being a total Nerd-Gantua, I would have been popular. Or at least I would have kissed a girl before I turned 30.

That this particular notion is pathetic doesn’t obscure the fact that it is persistent and occupies a portion of my brain far greater than the likelihood it would have happened. It also assumes that I could travel back to that eighth-grade gymnasium and relive the last three decades with the knowledge and wisdom I have accumulated since then. (I mean, think of all the money I would have made on gambling, or all the fumbling around in bed and bad sex I wouldn’t have had to endure until I got, like mediocre at sex).

But despite its stupid pedigree and flimsy degree of pleasure it provides, this idea — that there is a singular event that defines us in ways physical, mental, and spiritual — informs my writing in ways I don’t even understand, much less want to admit.

Do you have similar life-changing events caused by a seemingly simple act that you wish you could take back? How did it change your life?

And, most of all, does that event shape your writing?

The three days is now officially over. Like you or anyone else was counting.

I’ve promised to write three pithy, witty, brilliant blog posts over three days, none more than 300 words. Yesterday, I proved once and for all that there is no such thing as intelligent design. Today, I prove that spectator sports are bad for you. Tomorrow, I write 300 unrelated profanities having no relation to one another.

WATCHING SPORTS IS BAD FOR YOU, OR AT LEAST ME

I thought I had seen it all, after being a Cubs fan these many years. After all, the Cubs have choked in the most bizarre, unimaginable ways ever seen on a diamond.

Then I watched the NCAA men’s basketball championship a few weeks ago, which featured my Memphis Tigers against the Kansas Jayhawks.

With a couple of minutes left, Memphis had a nine-point lead, but lost in historic, operatic fashion, a choke for the ages. This led to the following behaviors on my part:

1. Anger of the most toxic, extreme sort.

2. Uttering profanities.

3. Slamming the remote against the comfy chair in which I sat, uttering profanities.

4. Kicking the ottoman, uttering profanities.

I became, in short, a raving lunatic, like those you seen restrained in straitjackets or yelling incomprehensible profanities on your local street corner.

If the game had been close and Memphis lost, it would have been heartbreaking. If they had been blown out, that’s just the nature of the beast. But to be this goddamn close to victory only to have it snatched away…well, a circumstance such as that demands a brief descent into insanity.

Watching sports is not supposed to do this. It is supposed to be a form of fantasy, escapism. But I sweat bullets for the entire game, never felt comfortable, and by the end, resembled a brain-eating zombie from George Romero film.

In short, if sports are a respite from the quotidian woes of a depraved world, why are sports fans generally such a miserable, complaining, depressed lot? Your team might win a lot of games, or even most of them, but nearly always, your team will not win the championship and your season ends in disappointment. You don’t even have to be a Cubs fan to understand this.

Thus, hundreds of hours spent watching television, reading box scores, following the torrent of opinions online — wasted.

And the reason we watch sports, is?

Wife, who doesn’t read this space, claims that my posts are too long. And I don’t post enough.

"Why, my readers are sophisticated, literate thinkers who appreciate a long, reasoned sober argument," I replied. "In addition, whenever I try speaking at length at home, you cut me off."

But, as many things Wife has said, this got under my skin. So I’m going to try something completely different. For the next three days, I’m going to post three times, with each entry clocking in at about 300. The "333" plan will commence today (see below). They’re less "posts" than a buncha brain farts, but if I don’t write about them here, Wife will be forced to listen to me expostulate on these ideas for the next 40 years.

Bookfraud cubed. QED.

INTELLIGENT DESIGNED DISPROVED IN 300 WORDS

The great debate over so-called "intelligent design" as a competing theory to the theory of evolution by natural selection ends right here, right now.

Intelligent design posits that life is so complicated that only a higher power could have "designed" our natural world. (If you’re not laughing, it’s because unlike me, you don’t have two bum knees that seem to have been designed by a gas-station attendant high on OxyContin.)

Here’s the proof, or disproof of this so-called "theory." Humans — all mammals, in fact — have two eyes. In fact, we have two hands, arms, legs, ears, breasts, and nostrils. We have but one mouth, but it is graced by two lips, and we all know from which one’s excess food is excreted, making the anus having at least some duality with the orifice from which food entered the body.

But we only have one sexual organ. And it’s used for two things.

If this doesn’t disprove intelligent design, I don’t know what does.

If there were truly intelligent design, Our Maker in all of His/Her wisdom would have given men at least three schlongs: one for peein’, one for sinnin’, and one from which to hang ornaments.

If we have ten digits on our hands and feet, you’d think we’d at least have five penises. You could count with them, wear your wedding band on one, use one as a pointer, or give new meaning to "giving someone the finger." It could be "giving someone a boner."

(As for women having mutiple vaginas, I’m not going there. Thought it would be totally cool, if done tastefully).

So all of you vigilantes stalking out school board meetings, your argument is toast. Nobody "designed" us, but we evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. And you actually listened to biologists or read "The Origin of Species," you might learn something.

But you don’t have the balls. 

Leave it to Baby to have his first birthday on a week in which I had to travel, am forced to clean the apartment for hours on end, and have to complete a time-depleting, soul-sucking, brain-melting project at work (suffice it to say that involves acronyms, numbers, and acronyms with numbers).

My son is just a talented fellow, what can I say?

In addition to lacking any time to reflect upon this momentous occasion, I’ve been about as visible in the blogosphere as Hillary Clinton at a Barack Obama rally.

In a way, this past fortnight, in which my life resembled the intersection of a Figure-8 race, has been emblematic of the last 12 months. It’s more apropos of life itself that Baby’s first birthday happened to fall at a time when his father was more ectoplasm than human.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned in Baby’s first year is that…um…uh…I’m just too tired to remember it.

Oh, yes. It’s entirely true that you will take a bullet for the kid. It’s also true that, at least once, you will seriously consider killing him.

Also, as a writer, you have a wealth of new experiences, all of which can be turned into writing material of the highest order.

For instance, the other night, at about 1:30 in the morning, Baby was crying, and crying, and crying. We had put him to bed at about 7, and after he had awoken at 10, he had gone immediately back to sleep. But for the third night in a row, he woke up after midnight and was wailing. And kept wailing. In a test of immature wills — I was not going to fucking get up and indulge the brat! — he was winning.

Finally, more frustrated than angry, I got up, and stomped out to his room. Any anger I had disappated immediately when I turned on the light and saw him standing in his crib, terrified (because while Baby is now quite adept and pulling himself up in his crib, he hasn’t yet mastered the art of letting himself down). I went from anger to shame to nearly crying, all in the space of about 30 seconds. 

Parenthood is an emotional experience

Having a child exposes one to love, terror, fear, exhilaration, and panic in depths likely to overwhelm most humans, and it is only because, as a parent, you feel a protection of your newborn too strong to properly express, one doesn’t drown. It is like a pallet of the richest, deepest emotional colorings, and as a writer, I’m fortunate to have access to them.

Unfortunately, I’m too exhausted to actually write.

As in "write fiction." The usual inspirational tricks — reading great fiction to inspire me, reading awful fiction to inspire me, burning a couple of Harold Robbins paperbacks — have left me cold. 

The screen is fallow before my eyes. The longer I stare, the blanker it stays. It becomes a endless tunnel, and the harder I try to escape, the longer the end appears. Then, when I’m done not writing, I’ll tend to Baby, scrub the floor (a necessary evil because of the nasty pesticides, because of the bed bugs, damn them), or I’ll simply fall asleep.

She’s my sister. She’s my daughter. She’s my sister. She’s my…oh, I’m just so damn tired that I’m babbling like an idiot at this point

It’s enough to make you feel 90 years old and living in a nursing home, where the biggest challenges of the day are taking that afternoon nap and getting an extra fruit cup on Taco Tuesdays. 

I had something else semi-interesting to say on this subject, but it’s been lost in the miasma once known as my memory. I’ll remember it soon, I’m sure.

Let me sleep on it, and I’ll get back to you.

The Internet demands frequently updated content, and lists and rankings are incredibly easy to put together and require no original thought. There’s no need to come up with a new idea every week. — Neal Pollack in Slate

MY TOP 37 LISTS OF LITERARY STUFF

1. Top 3 Books Written by Writers Who Were Not Drunks, Insane, Drunk and Insane, or Otherwise Impaired

2. Top 809 Literary Blogs That Are Actually About Literature

        2a) Top 56,237 Literary Blogs That Are Actually Not About Literature

3. Top 42 Sentences That Have More Than Six Pronouns Not Written by Henry James

4. Top 344,249 Bad Sex Scenes by Otherwise Competent Writers

    4a) Top 4 Good Sex Scenes by Competent Writers

5. Top 286 Stories Written Between 1990 and 1999 That Are All "Dude" Voice, But Have No Plot, Good Writing, or Other Redeeming Quality

6. Top 87 Raymond Carver Stories That Influenced MFA Students in a Really, Really Bad Way

7. Top 41,338,270 Chick Lit Books That Will Sell Better Than My Book, If It Were Ever Published

8. Top 156 Bad Ways to Say "Said"

9. Top 44 Suicide Notes by Sylvia Plath

10. Top 0 Best Selling Paperback Novels You Really Should Read Now

11. Top 1,000 Truly Great Poems

      11a) Top 592,344,109 Truly Putrid Poems

      11b) Top 592,341,861 Truly Putrid Poems Whose Author Thought It a Work of Genius, Before They Sobered Up

12.  Top 1,603,419 Bars in Which to Drink After Not Selling Your Novel 

Bad trip

13. Top 253 Top Excuses for Not Reading Milton, Cervantes, or the Anonymous Dude Who Wrote "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," That Moron Who Wrote Such Excrement That Was Fucking Torture to Read and Worse to Write a Paper About

14. Top 4,982 Meals Eaten by Balzac When Writing "Old Goriot"

15. Top 587 Barfight Scenes in a Poem in Which a Stool Is Actually Broken Over Someone’s Head

16. Top 26 Made Up Words by James Joyce That Mean Absolutely Nothing to Anybody But James Joyce

17. Top 112,907 Times I’ve Sworn While Writing

18. Top 19 Marrying Cousins in Jane Austen Novels

19. Top 4 Fake Memoirs

        19a) Top 4 Fake Memoirs Not Written by James Frey

20. Top 3,140 Jokes Involving Sex in Philip Roth Novels

21. Top 66 Fictional Political Scenes That Do Not Involve Penises or Cigars

22. Top 3 Novels by Samuel Beckett

        22a) Top 0 Novels by Samuel Beckett That Anyone Has Actually Read

23. Top 3 Sophocles Plays About Incest or Such

24. Top 1,448,937 Plays I Will Never See

25. Top 84,701 Rejections of My Stories

26. Top 112 Incidents of Ultra-Violence in The Illiad and The Odyssey That Involve Human Entrails Hoisted on Swords

27. Top 748 18th Century English Novels That Feature at Least 10 Exploding Corsets

28. Top 186 Great Books I Have Not Read

       28a) Top 1,041 Sucky Ones I Have Read

29. Top 1,435 Publishing Houses Whose CEOs Are Certifiably Nuts 

30. Top 14 Suicides Attributable to Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther

       30a) Top 1,846 Top Suicides Attributable to Students Being Forced to Read Goethe’s Faust

31. Top 2 Novelists Named Bronte

My kind of Liszt

32. Top 374 Literary Agents

       32a) Top 0 Literary Agents Who Will Actually Sell My Novel

33. Top 8 Scenes in a Novel Involving Heroin, Froot Loops, and the All-New 2008 Toyota Tundra

34. Top 25 Sightings of Bigfoot in Shakespeare

35. Top 2,068 Times Hemmingway Got Wasted and Said or Did Something He Later Regretted

       35a) Top 6 Times Hemmingway Got Wasted and Said or Did Something He Later Regretted in Which He Did Not Punch Somebody

36. Top 50 U.S. States in Which to Set a Novel

37. Top 37 Excuses for Not Writing

(I’m writing from an undisclosed location far from home. You might even call this attempts to write about events as the occur "live blogging." As opposed to the dead kind I usually engage in.)

It’s been a difficult week.

Last Monday, my Memphis Tigers pulled one of the greatest chokes in the history of sports, managing to lose the NCAA men’s basketball national championship game when they had victory well in hand. The loss filled me with undulating waves of despair and anger, which stopped only after I nearly destroyed a piece of furniture whose only crime was to be sitting in my path.

A work assignment then crashed on my head like a bag of wet cement, which tied me to the computer for 14 hours a day. On Saturday, Wife and I had to clean up the house all day on account of a canine inspection for bed bugs (more on that later); Sunday, I spent the greater part of the morning on my hands and knees, scrubbing excess caulk off the floor. (I had caulked the 3.3 million cracks in the floor because of, yes, bed bugs.)

I awoke at 5:30 a.m. yesterday morning feeling as if two semi-tractor trailers full of mucus had driven into my sinus cavities and collided. I trudged off to work, then boarded a plane in the afternoon to attend a conference at which, at least on paper, I am expected to actually work .

But all that I could handle. What I couldn’t handle was at the conference, I had to attend a "networking" reception at which I had to "schmooze."

Now, if there is one skill essential to a writer of modest talent like myself, it should be knowing the right people. It’s hard enough to get noticed, nearly impossible over the transom, and having connections, however small, are important.

Of course, this essential talent is so antithetical to my core that just considering it creates a walnut-sized tumor in my gut that is likely to expand to the size of a Barca-lounger by the time I am finished writing this sentence.

Write this, Candace

If Hell is other people, my idea of the Ninth Ring of Hades is a reception at which one is forced to wear a nametag and make small talk with strangers, in which the inevitable awkward pauses when one runs out of things to say lasts for all eternity.

It turns out that the reception went fine, full of forced bonoomie, free-flowing booze, and canapes as cold and lifeless as Dick Cheney’s heart. By the end, I had accomplished my three goals. First, I had managed to speak to more than one person without looking like a complete and utter fool. Second, I passed out my business card to several people. Third, I didn’t pass out in the clam dip.

(An aside: why is it that the cliched dip to pass out in is always clam dip? What’s wrong with the bearnaise sauce at the roast beef station? Or the Russian dressing next to the crudites?)

On this very topic of networking I have spoken eloquently, or, to be more precise, I’ve screamed about it like a raving maniac. Drop me into a room full of literary types who would love to talk shop or solicit stories for their publications, and I turn into the 15-year-old nerd trying to work up the courage to ask out the head cheerleader on a date. I don’t exactly turn into the Sphinx, but I don’t turn into a politician, either.

The paradox of this state of affairs is that the same qualities that inevitably kill my pathetic attempts at networking — a tendency to blend into the background, not wanting to talk about oneself, my inability to fake sincerity — are the same qualities that all good writers need. If you are an outgoing person, you may be an excellent scribe, but you have to train yourself to listen to what others say; you have to learn how to observe.

Perhaps I overstate the need to make connections; after all, many a writing career was started in the slush pile. And no matter how many asses one has puckered up to, if one can’t write well or at least write something that’s marketable, you won’t get published (imagine Candace Bushnell writing a novel about the mating habits of the Vancouver Island marmot — no talent, no subject, no sale).

Fido says: Bookfraud is bug free

So, enough moaning and groaning. I promised myself I would end this on a positive note. The dog came in to check for bed bugs, sniffed and sniffed, but could not detect a single one. It’s the second "clean sweep" we’ve had in a month, meaning, we’re finally done with the scourge.

Fuck yeah!

Now, I really don’t have any more excuses for not writing.

But I’m going to be positive about it.

As a writer, when your strength is your weakness, it’s a curse no amount of voodoo or exorcism can lift.

Some writers can ink great dialog, and hollow, two-dimensional characters to say it. I know writers who activate the senses as deftly as any poet, but, like a painter, it comes in a static, self-contained package; I know writers who can write a dynamite beginning, a wonderful middle, but can’t figure out a decent end to their story if their life (or book contract) depended on it.

My enduring strength and fatal downfall is that I arrive at great ideas, but am guilty of lousy execution. Like a cook who invents the peanut butter and beer-fried bacon taco salad, my ideas sound great in theory but are inedible in practice.

Story "ideas" are simply setups that need a punchline. Invariably when I write a short story, the idea — not the characters, sense of place, or other intrinsic element of a fictional world — becomes the story, not the fulcrum upon which it rests.

In the same spirit of the Curse of Ideas is the Curse of the First Line. I’ve seen it in many stories, both published and not: they have great first lines or first paragraphs, but such stories don’t fulfill the great promise of their birth. (In my extremely humble opinion, the the two greatest opening lines in American literature are from "Moby Dick" and "Lolita": the former of "Call me Ishmael" and the latter of  "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins." But only one of them did I read beyond the first page.)

I had a great opening line to a novel, which I repeated to a friend of mine, himself a published novelist. "That’s a great opening line," he said. "It’s so good that you should just repeat it over and over again, for the whole book."

That struck me as pretty good advice.

In any case, late last evening I was inexplicably inspired, and repaired to my study to write down the following: 

They lined the highway like an unbroken chain of smoke, up hills, through valleys, along rock crevices and next to abandoned farms — by 10 p.m., it took two hours to get to the checkpoint; by midnight, three hours, and by 2 a.m., when the roads were jammed to the limit, one might as well give up and hope to get back to the tent.

I’m not making claims to greatness with the above; far from it.

But I have something specific in mind for this story beyond the first sentence, and I’m curious how other people would handle the same setup.

Ajmtf Cthraaraqu?

Since we’re all creative here — creative writers, artists, accountants — what would you do with the sentence above? In the comments section, try writing a second line; write a second, third, and fourth, if you’re so motivated. It doesn’t have to be profound, poetic or even good, but reflect how the opening sentence formed your expectations as a reader.

Don’t worry, I don’t want to steal your ideas (not from here, at least).

And this isn’t a contest and I offer no prizes.

However, if I like your lines in particular, I’ll encourage you to buy something nice for yourself.

This is the fourth attempt at writing this blog entry, which is ostensibly about race relations in the United States, and how it afffects writers.

The first time I sat down to write was after Barack Obama’s transcendent speech on his controversial minister, Jeremiah Wright and more generally race relations; the second, after fellow blogger Fringes wrote a great post on the matter; the third, the 40th anniversary of the asassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on Friday.

The problem is writing about the State of Race Relations in the United States makes one sound either sanctimonious or bigoted, pretentious or banal. Either your message is pointlessly anodyne or gratuitously provacative. Trying to say something new about this topic is like trying to describe a sunny day or a pair of beautiful eyes: no matter what you write, it’s been done before.

The only way I can write about this, then, is from my own experience.

So it took a University of Memphis basketball game to get my off my fat white ass, so to speak.

You see, I spent the first dozen years of my life in Memphis, where King was killed, where poverty is endemic and overwhelming, and the state of relations between African-Americans and whites has been, to be charitable, awful. Historically, Blacks and whites in Memphis can agree on exactly two things: 1) they don’t like each other very much; and 2) they have an unbiding love of the University of Memphis Tigers men’s basketball team.

Growing up, the Tigers (then, the Memphis State Tigers) was about the only thing that could bridge the chasm between Blacks and whites. There was no major professional sports teams in Memphis, and Memphis State basketball — whose roster was largely African-American — was the only thing in the city that everyone embraced with something resembling color-blindedness.

When Memphis State reached the finals of the NCAA tournament in 1973, it was one of the only times of that era I can remember white people actually expressing admiration for Black people in public.

Where the hell is Memphis?

Now, having won their showdown with UCLA on Saturday night, Memphis is playing in tonight’s final versus something called "Jayhawks." I’m pulling for Memphis not just because I’m a fan, but for some much-needed (however temporary) reconcilliation and love in a town that — despite being home of the National Civil Rights Museum — still pretty much has its head up its ass in terms of how people treat each other based on the color of their skin.

But that’s the whole problem, the whole reason I wanted to write. It’s not as if I can sit here and point fingers. Both as a person and a writer, I’ve got my own demons that need to be called into account.

Growing up, I knew people who used the word "nigger," and not infrequently. My parents are two of the most open-minded, tolerant people I have ever known, and taught me to be the same. Talk of denigrating black people — and where I lived, you could drop into any white neighborhood and hear it — always made me uncomfortable.

But not uncomfortable enough to protest when I heard the n-word; I went along with the crowd. Granted, I was a child, and it isn’t exactly the equivalent of a Nazi concentration camp guard just following orders. Still, I should have known better.

Like my father. He was not the civil rights-marching type, but at least had the courage of his convictions. When he was in high school, told his classmates he didn’t see why his school should remain segregated. This was when he was 16. In 1948. In the rural South, in a town of about 2,000 people.  My father was called "nigger-lover" and the like.  But he didn’t back down. It couldn’t have been easy for him, either, being one of six Jews in his neck of the woods, all of whom lived under the same roof.

As a writer, my scorecard is less-than-impressive. My (unpublished) novel is set in Memphis, whose entire cultural self-esteem is based on music, in the hardcore blues of the Mississippi Delta, the gritty soul of Stax Studios (where Blacks and whites played music side-by-side), or, as everybody knows, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and other musicians who ripped off Blacks, combined the music with hillbilly and gospel, and made rock-and-roll safe for white people.  

Try as I might, I’m no soul man

Music figures large in my novel, and it is set in a city with a majority black population. Yet not one major character is African-American; they appear as factory workers, musicians in a club, workers at a cotton brokerage (both as high-income traders and as waiters), and as a subject of debate and conversation. I don’t think this is racism as much as writing about what one knows, but what does it say about someone who spent so much time in a majority-Black city that he doesn’t know enough Black people to write of them?

I am curious about other writers’ (and readers’) thoughts on this. Do you avoid writing about people who don’t look like you? Do you feel, as the song goes, that everybody is just a little bit racist, or maybe that one shouldn’t try to write about those whose experiences have little to do with your own?

I’ve got way too much to blather on about here, including the bizarre trend I noticed in the 1980s in which suburban white kids who knew absolutely zero Black people but wanted to "be" Black. I’ll have to write more on this later; too bad for you.

For now, go Tigers.

As I struggle with posting a blog entry that is about writing or is actually good, I submit this, yet another token of my love of Canadian public-service announcements, an admiration that has no limit.

The following, which I recently discovered, has quickly become one of my favorites. It looks like an outtake from SCTV (another great Canadian product). I urge you to watch it before reading on:

You say it’s not funny? You say that I’m a sick puppy for laughing? So I am.

Why do they do this? It’s not that this poor construction worker is blown up real good (SCTV! again!), they have to show him falling off the building and hitting a truck. You would think just getting blown up and thrown off a building would be bad enough. The message is clear: make sure you’re safe on a construction site.

But nooooooooo. They had to take it one step further. What is wrong with you people? Do you realize you are turning a serious annoucement into a point of public ridicule, obscuring the VERY SERIOUS message? Because of this, people probably have died because they forgot about safety.

Please, please someone from the Great White North explain why Canadian PSAs are so unintentionally funny. It’s a blot on Canadian culture. I mean, we’re not talking Stephen Leacock, Robertson Davies, the Group of Seven, or Martin Short here. How can I take CanLit seriously when your country is producing these PSAs?

Wife, a born and bred Canuck, has no clue, perhaps because she grew up unbiased with such earnestness. Or maybe because she’s sick of me asking.

Have a super-duper weekend.

Unless you avoid the news or human contact of any kind, you know that our nation’s leading investment bankers, ensconced in their wainscoted offices high above Manhattan, are having a bit of trouble in the liquidity department.

These Masters of the Universe made billions upon billions with investments like asset-backed securities and CDOs and currency swaps and interest rate options and hedging "swaptions" and other exotica that mere plebes like you and me will never truly understand. And then they basically fucked everything up.

Without going into too much detail, bankers become so arrogant that they forgot that investments entail this weird concept called "risk." They made tons of money investing in those subprime mortgage thingees everyone seems to be talking about, while forgetting that a big-payoff investment means big risk.

(If this sounds like a buncha mumbo jumbo, think of it this way. Bear Stearns and other investment banks shot up pure heroin, and got, really, really, really shitfaced. They loved getting high so much, they overdosed. Then the drug dealer came a-callin’ with an Uzi and six well-muscled friends, and made Bear Stearns an offer it couldn’t refuse.)

While skewering venal, bloated plutocrats is fun, there is actually a reason for it within the context of this blog. The greatest writers are like great investment bankers: they go for broke, they don’t hold back, and they score big or not at all.

Somebody’s screwed; it’s not the bank

In one way or another, my favorite novels and short stories throw caution to the wind. The writing itself may be restrained; the actual story may or may not be plausible; the dialog or characterizations will smack of the truth. However, in emotional or intellectual terms these writers take chances others couldn’t stomach. A great work of fiction does not fear risk but embraces it.

Think of just about any life-changing book that you’ve read, or look at the list of books on the right: one thing they all have in common is fearlessness. If Salman Rushdie hadn’t had the cajones to go over the top, "Midnight’s Children" would have been a snooze. If Thomas Pynchon hadn’t dared to be so ridiculously intellectual and hopelessly sophomoric, there would have never been "V.," much less "Gravity’s Rainbow." And if Margaret Atwood had not peered into the dark caverns of the soul, "Cat’s Eye" would have been a schlockfest.

But all of them bet the bank on a roll of the literary dice, and created great works of art. Timidity gets you nowhere.

Or consider this: before Rushdie wrote "Midnight’s Children," John Irving wrote "The World According to Garp," and Saul Bellow gave us "The Adventures of Augie March" (risky, messy and glorious all), they wrote books that are considered competitent, tightly written, and blandly cerebral. But you probably can’t name them. 

Risk-taking — and ambition, it’s close cousin — are all-too-often in short supply these days. You see plenty of well-written, "small" works of fiction with small aims and small results. These are all fine and good, for what they’re worth. There’s a place for them on the bookshelf. But nobody ever wrote something that could change a reader’s life without swinging for the fences, throwing deep, shooting three-pointers, or whatever clichéd sports metaphor you choose.

You can even extend the metaphor to book publishing, and not in a good way. The wacko economics of publishing puts a premium on best sellers. That’s why publishing houses are happy to spend six- and seven-figure advances on first-time writers in hopes of bagging a bolt of lightening rather than publishing numerous authors (in investment terms, that would be called  "portfolio diversification").  

 
Took a risk

Of course, the parallels to investment bankers pretty much end at this point. If you write something crappy, it may never see print, and if it does, you may wish it had not.

Unlike an investment banker who basically loses Other People’s Money. Or one who "advises" a company on a merger that goes bad, but still gets 7 percent of the $329 billion price tag. Or a hedge fund manager who runs his hedge fund into the ground while taking a 2 percent management fee and 20 percent of the profits. Maybe a private equity honcho who borrows billions, takes a public company private, skims off fees, lays off thousands, and takes the company public again for a multi-billion dollar profit.

Which makes me seriously wonder about my sanity with this writing thing. So I’m going to become an investment bank. Bookfraud Investment Corp. is now open for business, damn the economy, damn the credit crisis! I promise a 30 percent annual return on your money. Send your cash today! I’ll also take money orders or credit cards, but no personal checks, sorry.

I just did something really, really stupid (in addition to even publishing this).

Earlier this evening, I was finding reasons not to finish a difficult blog entry regarding race relations and writing fiction, an entry spurred by Barack Obama’s now-famous March 18 speech. Instead, I cleared out some old e-mail and found the name of a person who used to be in a writing group with me.

This person had alienated everyone in the group by sending out an e-mail announcing the publication in a major lit magazine — her first published story — and how this validated her ambition; "Since I’m getting published in a magazine, I feel like a real writer!" Since publication credits were basically nil among the other members of our group, you might imagine this pronouncement was greeted with all the enthusiasm of Jeremiah Wright presiding over Rush Limbaugh’s sixth marriage.

This was all about four or five years ago. Like an idiot, I Googled this person. I knew the result could be toxic, and so it was: she has a Website that lists credits for numerous major literary publications, and she has a novel coming out soon. When I took all of this in, I calmly closed the door to my room, gently put a towel in my mouth, and screamed "FUCK!!!!" at a volume that threatened to seriously damage my vocal chords.

Now, I remember reading just two stories from this writer, one kinda bad and one pretty good, which could hardly be considered a representative sample. That she’d achieved such success in so little time — she really only started writing fiction a few years ago — is the kind of thing that makes other less-successful writers, shall we say, insane with jealous rage. 

Published novel count: This man 2, Bookfraud 0

To give an accurate description of my emotions and thoughts at this moment would be giving entree into a dark, ugly place where one has nightmares. Let’s just call it a case of sputtering, impotent rage.

It was about 7:30 p.m. when I saw this, and I knew I was in for a sleepless night of teeth-grinding, heart-racing depression. Have I just wasted the last 20-plus years of my life? What the hell does this person got that I don’t, besides talent? I feel extreme extentential nausea, panic, dread. I feel like I’ve done all the "wrong" things to further my writing career — I lack connections, I don’t submit to the right publications, I didn’t listen to advice when I was younger — and that I lack talent. Ridiculous to indulge such thoughts, but there’s no denying that these feelings exist.

It’s not that I hate this person (though I kinda do), and she certainly has done nothing to deserve any hate. OK, her Website and blog are smarmy and self-congratulatory, but if I had not known her, her success would have evoked the same emotions as when one misses the question on Final Jeopardy.

And it’s not that I’m looking for sympathy or stroking, as I already wallow in enough self-pity to drown the U.S. Olympic Swim Team, and whine enough to make Baby look like a modicum of patience (for instance, see previous entry).

Still, my anger bothers me, and not only because indulging such behavior is toxic and self-defeating; also, this is hardly the way to act as a role model for my son. Given my bitching about the ages of other novelists, I’m sounding like an insane homeless man screaming on a street corner. No, what truly bothers me because I’m 43 and altogether too old for such silliness, and, worse, I don’t know what to do next.

In the past — like 15 years ago — I would have sat down at the computer, fueled by anger, and furiously bang out fiction of dubious quality but of intense meaning (intense in my mind, at least). I would have doubled and re-doubled my efforts. I would have sent out stories to everybody and everyone that hadn’t already rejected me, and to those who had. I would get a whole new set of agents to query, or even started working on a new novel. What the fuck is the matter with these people? I’m going to fucking show them!

The Young and the Bilious

I really don’t have any short fiction to submit (it’s far too late in the year to submit for the fall, in any case), my novel is in a state of suspended animation, and I’m confused as to how to find a new agent, if that is even an option. 

Maybe I should just check in on Baby, make sure I didn’t wake him up, look upon his face, let myself be awash with love and the undeniable urge to cradle him in my arms, and realize I’m the luckiest guy in the world.

Then, I leave the room and break something. Outside. Something that can grow back. Suggestions?

Jascha Heifetz, the greatest violinist of the 20th Century, once granted an audience with an admirer, himself a famous entertainer. The entertainer mentioned he had worked in vaudeville at a young age, prompting Heifetz, who was not known to lack modesty, to say that he’d played violin professionally since age eight.

"And I suppose before that," Groucho Marx replied, "you were just a bum."

This came to mind following a story in the New York Times magazine about Charles Bock, a novelist whose first book, "Beautiful Children," has generated a good amount of publicity. The author of the article, Charles McGrath, noted that Bock is 38, which is "a little old for a first novelist."

Us yet-to-be-published novelists (and some already published) grumbled mightily about this slight, which McGrath probably intended to be a throwaway line. It’s true that most "novelists," meaning those fortunate enough to earn real coin for their literary endeavors, usually publish their first book when they’re 25, or, at most, age 30. The current career path of your typical American novelist seems to follow one of three paths:

• They graduate college, publish a novel to great acclaim, make buttloads of money, get their book optioned, make buttloads of more money, then publish a disappointing second book. They rebound with their third ("a return to form" the critics will opine), and establish themselves as Literary Voices of a Generation. See Foer, Jonathan Safran; Smith, Zadie; Shteyngart, Gary; Mitchell, David.

• They publish one totally awesome, totally amazing, totally righteous book, often before the age of 30, then disappear from public view, either publishing in hiding, semi-seclusion, or insanity. Almost always an intellectual 10 times smarter than their readers. See Pynchon, Thomas; Salinger, J.D.; Powers, RIchard; Wallace, David Foster.

• They graduate college, get an M.F.A. at the Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop or such, then publish a collection of well-received short stories. Because everybody knows short story writers make about as much as a flutist busker in the subway, they eventually write a novel that sells fairly well, gets a good amount of critical acclaim, and end up living the next several years in writer’s colonies and retreats (Ma