bookfraud

When one is stuck in a vortex, unable to prevail upon the better senses of creativity to create this thing called fiction, the tendency of all writers is to retreat toward the familiar, the comforting, the reliable works of art that transport us to a different place. The sonnet that inspired you to write, a viewing of the Bruegel that makes you want to paint, or watching a Welles or Fellini masterpiece: these are the things that inspire us, make us want to be better.

Me, I listen to PINK FLOYD. All the way up to 11. And it is TOTALLY AWESOME.

I’ve been quite the Floyd tear of late, indulging in particularly in Wish You Were Here. Wife recently got me a Christmaskah present of a Talking Heads box set, which is awesome, and I am listening to with great fervor. But I keep coming back to the Floyd, the quartet of Brits who gave us such classic LPs as Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall, and Ummagumma. (You know Ummagumma, don’t you? Come on, it has “Careful With That Axe, Eugene,” which is about Eugene cutting off one or another limb, and “Astronomy Domine,” which is best served with copious amounts of Orange Sunshine.)

The thing about Pink Floyd was their mystique. The band possessed an essential weirdness and ambiguous, psychedelic intentions, which a 16-year-old could only marvel at – what, exactly, was Dark Side of the Moon about? There were no dumb love songs or Def Leppard paeans to rock and roll that were popular among my high school classmates.

Hey, you

Pink Floyd made a 30-minute song, split into nine parts! They put a song that filled the entire back of an album! Plus, the band kept a low profile, only adding to their mystery: you can’t explain what you can’t see. Their bombast and pretense, obvious now with the passing of years, fit perfectly into the bombast and pretense of being a misunderstood teenager who thought he was smarter than everyone else, at least those in his English classes.

I mean, didn’t these lunkheads realize that “Mother” and “Comfortably Numb” were poetry?

For a nerdy, loser teenager who sought solace in music, Pink Floyd was the perfect soundtrack to hanging out on Saturday nights, driving around the suburbs, nothing to do. (Of course, we were stoned out of our minds. And the guitar solos rocked!).

But instead of keeping this essential aura around them, they had to ruin things. Pink Floyd went back into the studio a few years ago without bassist Roger Waters, which is kind of like making a Rolling Stones record without Mick or Keith, or having sex without a penis (wait, that didn’t sound like I intended. Never mind.). The band put out a forgettable album and went on tour for about $200 a ticket at football stadiums and made about a trillion dollars. Waters sniped in public with other band members, all the dirty laundry was aired, etc.

(Now, apparently, Waters will play a concert with the rest of the band for something called Live8, in Hyde Park. Hopefully, they’ll fight on stage).

I can’t really say that this ruined the band for me, but the ugliness both in and outside the studio yet trashed another cherished memory. It makes me long for a simpler time, a happier time, a more innocent time. If that doesn’t want to make me relive the past – on paper, of course – nothing will.

Next (and related): How Another Floyd Ruined Halloween

There are several things particular to the writing life that engender disdain and unbounded cynicism: snotty grad (and undergrad) students dissing your submissions to their crappy literary journals, the continued success of fourth-rate trash mongers, publishers’ marketing departments, and literary agents.

A literary agent can be a force for good or an indecipherable nitwit who, if you allow it to happen, can flush your career down the toilet with their incompetence.

I can’t say that my literary agent is in the latter category. He’s with an old, established agency, and has contacts at all the major publishing houses. He’s dutifully sent out my novel to several editors, who have rejected it with varying degrees of interest. This author-to-agent-to-editor-to-agent-to-author feedback loop has been going on for over a year now. I’ve asked him on several occasions if I should rewrite certain sections of the book, but he advises me otherwise.

Looking for a publisher

So while the novel awaits an enlightened soul to see its many merits, my agent does what it appears most other such types do in a similar situation.

Goddamn nothing.

A friend of mine complained about editors thus: “Editors are stupider than agents,” which tells you about his love of both.

I may be in middle age, but I have approached the publishing process with a unacceptable degree of naiveté. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I had a semi-romantic notion of a literary agent when this all started.

Oh, they would fall in love with your writing, they would fall in love with your novel, they would fall in love with you. Tough love, all in all: an agent would have the spine to tell you that this part of the book needed trimming or that the title you thought was perfect beyond poetry actually was landfill-level putrid. (Kind of like Dr. Phil).

Better yet, the agent would be a one-person cheerleading squad, helping you through the inevitable peaks and troughs of getting the book to print. They wouldn’t let you get depressed. They’d keep your head above water.

And when it came to business, they’d be a Rotweiler, barking mad at the idiot publisher who tried to insult your talent with an advance just in the low six figures. The nerve!

These notions were formulated through a few random encounters. When in my early 20s, I knew someone who worked for a big shot New York literary agent, whose clients included several Pulizer Prize winner and one Nobel laureate. What did this agent do to earn her keep? Virtual therapy sessions with neurotic, insane writers, and doing battle with editors who possessed the intelligence of a small acquatic creature. The agent fought the system, and always won.

Fast forward about 15 years. Wife has contracted with an up-and-coming talent at an established, well-regarded literary agency who is shopping her book to different publishing houses. After a year or so of this, and, not having heard from the agent in several months, Wife e-mails the agent for an update. No response. Then, by chance, she finds out that the dude is no longer a literary agent, has renounced worldly goods and moved to Tibet or Texas or somewhere, and just forgot to call her.

Then there’s the tale of a writer whose novel was taken on by another established agent with enough contacts around town to get a free meal just about anywhere. Over the course of a year, the writer asks the agent how many publishers have seen it, what kind of responses they’re getting, etc. I’m sending it all over, the agent says, and getting good feedback but no deals.

My acquaintance finally gets tired of this kind of thing, and contacts another agent. The new agent calls some of the houses the first one said he’d sent the novel to. The editors reply, “What the fuck are you talking about? The other guy never sent us anything.” The first agent was too busy to, you know, do his job.

The truth is that they’re busy. Really bloody busy, and if one seriously thinks that they’re sitting around, contemplating the Next Move in Your Career, you were probably raised on a commune, along with Wife’s agent. Like a realtor, a literary agent is working on commission, and the more listing he or she gets, the more likely it is he or she will make a killing. And the less likely it is that you’ll get a prompt return to phone calls.

I’m not bitter, just realistic. Some people get a guardian angel to steer their literary careers (yes, such writers are usually preternaturally talented), but most of us see our best career guide staring us in the mirror, and we usually aren’t thrilled with what we see.

Besotted (yet itinerant) sports watcher that I am, I have two obsessions of the pitch: the Chicago Cubs and University of Michigan football. The rest, as it is said, are commentary.

One of the rest is the Chicago Bears, a team that I have followed with various degrees of fervor since the mid-1970s, when my family moved to the Chicago suburbs. The late, great Walter Payton is my favorite athlete (along with Muhammad Ali), I’ve watched them through highs and lows, and I went to the 1984 NFC Championship Game. That was the year of the Bears Super Bowl win and the Super Bowl Shuffle. (It was, all in all, so 1980s.)

Though my passion for the Bears has dimmed over the years, this year’s squad has rekindled my interest. The Monsters o’ Midway have nine wins against a mere three losses, and, after a long stretch of futility, yesterday they vanquished the hated Green Bay Packers in typical Bears fashion.

By typical, I mean through a strong defense. You know, a good “D,” as beleaguered headline writers have noted through the decades.

In my lexicon, however, “D” has another meaning, one that has abetted my lack of productivity the past two months. Astute readers know that I mean “depression,” a state of being that occasionally pays a visit and has the unpleasant effect of making me an uncaring, unintellible slug.

I am not the type of blogger who revels in detailing the personal aspects of my life. Simply putting admission this on the record gives me a queasy feeling in the gut. I enjoy writing about how Wife is a Good Egg and my novel isn’t getting picked up, but you won’t get entries on my sex life, diet, or the size and shape of my turds.

Brett feels my pain

Let’s just say that all the romantic notions about depression are about as true as a Dick Cheney press conference. Art does not come pouring out of the big black hole — no, your work sucks, your outlook sucks, and your life generally just sucks.

How is this different than how I usually am?, you ask. Actually, I have a hard time answering that question. The year of 2005 has not been pleasant for me, filled with medical problems, stress at work, and the death of my father. The past couple of months have been particularly difficult, and — again, without going into detail — the last thing on this dude’s mind has been writing.

Which is a bad thing. Depression has different effects on people (you sleep all the time, you don’t sleep at all), but in my case, it saps all desire to, to…well it just saps all desire, period. Don’t wanna write. Don’t wanna read. Don’t wanna do anything but channel surf and do puzzles and fuck around doing nothing.

Some people find solace from the ills of the mind in writing in journals or blogs, pouring out their souls on paper; I find this about as helpful as hemorrhoids. Because when I’m depressed, everything I write feels inadequate and amateurish, no matter how good it might be. Which has the wonderful outcome of making me more depressed

This goes double with writing fiction, a personal endeavor if there ever was one. I don’t know if visual artists’ self-esteem comes crashing down when they produce something less-than-perfect, but writers of fiction seem to descend into the depths when their work isn’t flowing. (This isn’t true with poets. In my experience, they’ll go out and smoke weed and drink bourbon instead).

If this sounds like a complicated mea culpa for abandoning my faithful readership of about six people, it is. I have ridden the excuse-making gravy train throughout my writing career, blaming this problem or that for my failures. Not a pretty picture, but it does have the salubrious effect of keeping my ego from resembling an exploded light bulb.

Depression is far different than simply feeling blue, and as excuses go, it’s a pretty damn good one. But I feel the weight of cement clouds lifting from my shoulders, and the mere fact that I’m writing this is a big improvement over my previous escapades, which is following football, sudoku, and obsessing about what’s going to happen when every man, woman, and child in India and China owns an SUV. The Bears beat the Pack, I still gotta job, and Wife is still a Good Egg. Now I type.