bookfraud

Two anecdotes on the physical nature of writing:

Picture the novelist Paul Auster a child in the 1950s, at a New York Giants’ game. After the game is over, he gets introduced to his hero, Willie Mays. Auster asks for an autograph, and while Mays is amenable, young Paul has no pen nor paper, and the transaction cannot be completed.

A crushed Auster said that henceforth, he always carried paper and a pen. When you have a pen and paper around, of course you’re going to start to write. (Auster has told this story so many times, you wonder if it’s apocryphal).

I am also haunted by the story of a young writer/comedian in Chicago. He was in a taxi when the driver lost it, and went barreling off a pier into Lake Michigan, killing both driver and passenger.

When they retrieved the writer’s body, they also found a notebook, in which he had written ideas for stories, stand-up routines, and scripts. He had categorized things, like “wacky band names” and “titles and dialog.”

This story bothers me because it points to things unrealized, art never consummated. I don’t know how talented this writer was, but besides the sadness of a life extinguished for no reason, it is painful to think that here was a person who had ideas that he took the time to store away and categorize, ideas for which he had hopes and dreams, ideas that died with the man.

Where ideas go to die

If I were to suffer an untimely death, with my list of hundreds of ideas unfulfilled, no one will find a notebook with them in there. They’ll find them littered about like the flotsam and jetsam of my life.

As everybody knows, True Writers always carry a pen and pad, so they’ll have it if the moment strikes, be it while working, commuting, or drinking. The tools of the trade should be with you, always, and never shall anything else interfere with taking notes. If so moved, you have to write when having a romantic dinner with Charlize Theron, doing the Big Nasty, or tossing a loaf; you have to write when you’re sleeping or undergoing a heart transplant.

Because I am as organized as Ken Lay is honest, often I am without my pad, though my pen is always there, trusty and sure, except when it’s not. (Then I steal one from strangers).

I’ve written down notes on the back of ATM slips, and torn scraps of newspaper. Yes, I’ve even written them on my arm. I’ve punched them into a PDA, made voice memos on my cell phone, and told Wife to remember things when we are out, such as remembering a phrase like “Flaubert, Proust, and Sartre walk into a bar.”

However, while this scattershot approach does well in storing ideas, it has been rather poor in terms of efficiency. Because my time management has eroded to the point where these ideas really never are given fair treatment, I broke down and bought a notebook in which to store them all, to go along with the 10 or so already lying about my home. The first thing I wrote in the notebook was, “Do a blog on notebooks.”

Writers’ work habits are relatively well known, as chronicled in literary journals, magazines, and book. A Famous Writer gets up every morning at 9:15, has a double espresso, clears off her desk, reads the paper, procrastinates some more, and finally gets to work for 2 hours before lunch, and so on. Every writer has his or her rituals or schedule, to give structure to what is ultimately a disorganized, messy enterprise.

I ain’t got time for that now

But what about the proto-writing phase, the primordial ooze of braingrowth from which we generate the raw materials for our work? There are hundreds of books on How to Write, and they all say carry a notebook to write down ideas, write every day, don’t fear failure and or the reaper. But few books tell you how to store, organize, and turn those ideas written on ATM slips and the insides of matchbooks into coherent narrative.

My “system” is to scribble down an idea, then transfer it to the computer later on. If the idea has to do with a particular story, just insert it directly; if not, put it into a computer file of shit that will probably never be opened until the next time I have something to type into it. That’s the problem once filed away, any brilliance dies a bureaucratic death.

What I’m trying to say is that if you have such a system that shepherds thoughts into stories, you could make a lot of money writing a book about it.

Now there’s an idea.

With its anonymity, formlessness, and deficit of fact checkers, the Internet can make liars out of us all, or at least it allows us to hide inconvenient truths about ourselves.

Some take the opposite tack, telling anything and all about themselves—that anonymity again—but not this cowboy. I’m more likely to embellish, like going into chatrooms as an 18-year-old blonde lesbian ready for some hot cyber action, likely with some other middle-aged guy who is pretending to be an 18-year-old blonde lesbian dying for hot cyber action.

Thus, it is with some hesitance that I reveal the following:

I have done air guitar and white man’s overbite over the age of 40.

And I am a TV addict.

I have not addressed this latter issue, the most evil, nefarious, awful threat to my writing career, because I steadfastly have believed it is not a problem, like a junkie saying he doesn’t have a problem while shooting up, like a family member pretending Junior doesn’t have a heroin problem, or like a drug dealer pretending that he’s doing a public service.

Graphic evidence

I am addicted to television, but to be more truthful, I’m addicted to distraction. These days, most distractions are related to the computer: games, burning CDs, surfing. Or air guitar. But as grew up far before the Dawn of the Internet, television is my original, brain-wasting exercise and why I have not written more than I have, or that my writing isn’t better.

(I guess I could say to myself, “Maybe my writing is not more voluminous or of a higher quality because I just have nothing to say and I have no talent,” but that, as we all know, is simply an excuse to quit, and the coward’s way out. I’d rather blame something else.)

As I grew up before there was e-mail and PlayStation, I wasted prodigious hours before our family’s warm blue glow. Cartoons, game shows, dramas, comedies, pro wrestling, “Wide World of Sports,” just about anything but soap operas. The “ABC Movie of the Week,” I was there. “The Price Is Right,” I was there with Bob Barker. “The Six-Million Dollar Man,” “Star Trek,” and hell, even “Barnaby Jones.”

In a way, it’s amazing that I ever became a writer, or am not illiterate.

My purpose is not to give those of us old enough to reminisce that we can rebuild Steve Austin—better, faster, stronger—but that television has rotted my brain from a very early age and can take up inordinate amounts of time if I let it.

I knew better. So worried was I that yours truly did not own a television until my mid-30s. I didn’t get cable until 2002. Far from being a Luddite or a snob, I feared that once I got TV, I would never write again.

Wife and I got a set when we started playing house, and if it has not been fatal to my writing, it now plays the role of constant temptation.

Even though there’s really very little to watch. Save for “The Sopranos,” there isn’t a show that I make a point of watching every week. But there’s always Law & Order repeats, all the time. We’re talking the regular show and two spinoffs, of course, but there’s always a murder, rape, or robbery for New York’s finest to solve.

Not to mention “Seinfeld” reruns, “South Park,” “WWE Raw,” and a whole panoply of fine family programming.

It’s odd how, when I’m stuck on a piece of fiction, feeling jumpy and unsure of myself, my inclination is to watch television, to park myself in front of that radiating box of ultimate acceptance—no TV set, star, or show ever rejected one of my stories.

Hello, my name is Bookfraud, and I’m a TV addict

A wise teacher of Wife’s said that television had corroded a generation of writers, and that all of one’s free time should be spent in a book. Sound advice, if followed. This older gentleman came of age long before cable, never mind the Internet, so it was easier for him to avoid the four channels of crap available back then, instead of the 500 channels of crap available to us now.

On several occasions, Wife has lauded my discipline, my ability to come home from work and launch right into composing the written word. But she also notes that I am not one to unwind, and this probably leaves me less productive, for about twenty minutes after setting off for my adventures in the Land of Fiction Writing, I feel the siren call of television.

Perhaps I should start a new book. Reading or writing one. Help me.

If you tell people you’re “between jobs,” it means you probably got shitcanned for incompetence or diddling the boss’s wife.

Say you’re between girlfriends, and it means you are a loser who was caught diddling your girlfriend’s best friend.

If you’re between books on the reading list, it means you are watching quality televised fare which, in my case, usually involves exploding cars, martial arts, and silicone implants.

And if you’re a writer between novels, you’re simply in limbo.

The lucky lad (or lass) between books has actually published his first novel, and it was successful enough that he’s been asked to write a follow-up; the miserable sod has not published the novel and is the process of rewriting it, or, worse, has published a novel, and is rewriting the follow-up, again and again.

The interregnum between books should just be outlawed. At least it should involve debauchery. I’d rather picture a writer, flush with success, blowing it all on the worthy accumulation of consumer goods. Screw the next book, live for today! (George Best, the soccer star who died late last year, uncorked one of my all-time favorite quotes when said that he blew all his money on “booze, birds, and fast cars—the rest I squandered.”)

George: the best

That there have been famously successful writers who drank more liquor than the annual collective output of Seagram’s, Anheuser-Busch, and several well-known wineries in Bordeaux just adds to my romantic notion of the literary life, even though most drunks are assholes who write one good thing (Frederick Exley, to cite an example I’ve recently read) and can’t be counted on to pay the heating bill in the middle of the worst winter on record.

I am not here to sing the praises of demon alcohol, but to ponder in my circular, rambling manner just what happens when you finish a novel, collection, play, or otherwise, and do not have something else to work on. You know, when you have nothing to justify your existence.

Famous actors get to say that they’re “between projects,” implying that they have a pile of scripts stacked higher than the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. They get to pick what they do, when they do it, and for how much money. Us mad typists have no such luxury.

Even those of fame and fortune. Balzac, bless him, would finish a novel, put it aside, and immediately start working on another, like he had finished his coq au vin and was starting dessert. I don’t know what Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates do once they finish a book, but it’s obvious that they’re not taking two weeks in Disneyworld.

As I am “between” projects, this question quite bedevils me. I am rewriting my novel, so that the new, improved version can again betwitch my agent and depress publishers, and as the inevitable rejection letters for my better than average, but not really excellent short stories that I write only because I think it’s the “thing to do,” I am at quite the loss.

I have several ideas for another novel, but feel quite the loser for starting another book while seeing my first rot unpublished. Revising is a noble and time-consuming task indeed, but it is bereft of novelty, interest, excitement. Rewriting a story or novel for what seems like the 40th time is more depressing than one’s 40th birthday, and you don’t get cake and, unlike turning 40, in rewriting a novel one doesn’t have an excuse to go all daft and blow your money on booze, birds, and fast cars.

Non-stop writing action

Revisions can be debilitating after a few rounds. You can chart the demise of the book by the number of times rewritten:

First rewrite: Writing is fresh, new, interesting; characters are as funny, evil, or crazy as you remember; things look pretty good, save for a bad sentence here and there.

Fifth rewrite: Time to start a fire.

You tend to slip into a walking coma in which nothing sparkles, nothing reads well, and everything seems like you repeat the same words over and over and realize that your own mother, the woman who gave you life and loves you more than anything, would read the novel and say, “This is the worst whaleshit ever put on paper.”

So I’m between books, rewriting furiously while contemplating my next project. If Wife or someone else would wrest the remote from my hands, I might actually get something written.

Our heroes are in the habit of disappointing us, and my most recent experience in this vein starts with a curious but quite engaging Web site, bloggingheads.tv, where the major issues of our day are argued passionately, insightfully, humorously, and at length by two complete, total nerds.

Being a nerd myself, I do not use this word pejoratively, but rather to illuminate the beauty of our wired world, in which a nerd like myself has an audience who would otherwise see me and cross the street for fear of being nerd-infected. Nerds are not the same as “losers,” though I have been called both in the same sentence.

These two gentlemen, Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus, score extremely high on the Nerd Meter. Wright is a science geek, Kaus is a policy wonk, and between the two of them, there is enough dorkiness in their virtual room to fill M.I.T. and the Kennedy School of Government.

Perhaps I sound harsh in my assessment, which is no reflection on the quality of their program. With the magic of modern technology, Blogginheads pits Wright and Kaus, side by side, in a “diavlog” (you know, combine “dialog,” “video,” and “blog”), where the two protagonists debate the issues of the day.

Kaus, former writer for The New Republic and Newsweek, is now best known for “kausfiles,” a feature on Slate.com which at its best exposes conventional wisdom and at its worse is a dull micro-parsing of the New York Times.

On the other hand, I’ve been an unabashed fan of Wright’s wonderful prose since reading “Three Scientists and Their Gods,” and will force “The Moral Animal” on unsuspecting friends. I love the man’s written work. But on Blogginheads, Wright doesn’t come off as gracefully.

He’s always interrupting poor Mickey, and framing everything like a debate. “Here is why your argument is intellectually and morally inferior,” is a common refrain of Wright’s. And while I almost always agree with Wright and he is wholly eloquent, it bugs me he can be kinda rude and long-winded.

But the problem, ultimately, was the contest. Wright and Kaus asked viewers to send in suggested slogans for Bloggingheads, which they would paste on T-shirts, mugs, and temporary tattoos for sale. As a fan, I eagerly e-mailed suggestions. And Wright dissed me, on air.

Wright and Kaus: They bloviate so you don’t have to

Sure, he didn’t mention me by name, and his dismissal was so innocuous that it couldn’t even be called “mild,” but still. Bookfraud does not take an insult to his honor lightly!

My slogan entries included the following, which, to be honest, suck complete, total ass:

“Two talking heads. One serious throwdown”
“Cyberspace Meets Cybergenius”
“Where MickBob and Friends debate the world”
“Intelligent discussion by scary disembodied heads”
“No girls allowed”

Merely ignoring me wasn’t enough. No. On air, Wright mentioned my favorite entry: “Bloggingheads.tv: Where we bloviate so you don’t have to.” But he wasn’t approving, just dismissive. He didn’t even bother to print it out! And the winners were totally lame, that’s all I’ll say about that.

(To see the clip, click here. If it doesn’t play the right part, click on the “Viewer e-mail…” link. It doesn’t work well with Macs).

When you see your idols fall, it’s usually best done at a distance. There’s been lots and lots of fallen literary “heroes” of late, from the sublimely fraudulent (James Frey) to the ridiculously plagiaristic (Kaavya Viswanathan).

Nothing has really hit me personally. Oh, I’ve heard stories, witnessed very good writers acting very poorly, and seen people crushed in numerous ways: an MFA student sees his story taken to shreds by the man who inspired him to write. Conferences are a veritable cornucopia of Writers Behaving Badly, with married people engaging in misbegotten hookups, and vomit strategically pooled all over campus, and those same hung-over writers trashing anyone and anything in class just because they were wasted and didn’t get any the night before or perhaps because they did get some, trashing them worse, even, than if they saw “veritable cornucopia” in a story.

Maybe because I expect fiction writers to act like this, when something particularly awful comes to light, it doesn’t bother me.

History is replete with besotten, cruel, terrible people who happen to write (that’s for a whole other blog). You usually just don’t find out about it until the writer is dead. Unlike the drug-inhaling, wife-beating jock or the prostitute-patronizing, bribe-taking politician, writers are usually discreet, and if they’re famous enough, they get the “monstrous artist” get out jail card.

I mean, I don’t think Wright is any of these. I will still read anything he slaps his byline on. He really didn’t do anything wrong. But he dissed me, anonymously, granted, and perhaps I just have a delicate constitution these days. O.K., enough already! I got some rejections this weekend! I admit it. It’s my right to be pissed and act in stupid, immature ways unbecoming for a middle-aged man, writing blog entries with no singular theme, idea, or decent ending. So I’ll repeat my favorite kicker.

Feh.

The most extreme proselytizing ever visited upon me was not from a religious nut asking if Jesus was my personal lord and savior, or a Birkenstock-wearing dumbass hippy saying that I should vote for Nader, but from a friend who insisted I read one of her favorite books.

During a visit, my friend expressed her amazement that I had not read any Paul Auster. About a week after she left, I got a package in the mail, a copy of Auster’s “Moon Palace.”

One of the greatest pleasures of reading is the sense of discovery. You read a novel from an unknown or unread author, and, bowled over by her faculty with language and storytelling, you feel as if have discovered a new continent, brand of fabric softener, or sex position.

You want to devour everything else the writer has ever put to paper, but you also start telling the world that you’ve made a Great Literary Discovery. Soon, you are breathing fire and brimstone with such force it would make Elmer Gantry proud.

Anybody who reads fiction knows of this excitement and need to proseltytize; if you’re unfamiliar with these emotions, you might be better served by hanging out at BeerBongFratBoys4Bush.com or such.

If there was ever a desire that writer’s share, it would be that their work engender that kind of devotion. The proselytizer does not recommend a book, but forces it on you, like a militant vegan trying to force feed a tofu burger to a meat-eating major of the 101th Airborne.

(Not that writers expect such adulation. Perhaps Henry James wasn’t thinking that when he wrote “The Turn of the Screw,” which has turned off generations of high school students to his work, but James wanted to be famous, without compromising his art, of course.)

I’ll lend you my copy

This kind of love is often contagious. After reading “Moon Palace” — a book I read at home, on the train, and at work — I told anybody who would listen that you absolutely have to read this guy. And while my affection for Auster has waxed and waned since (especially after he dissed me at a reading of his when I asked him a question he didn’t like), that particular emotion upon reading him recalls nice, warm memories, like of the family gathered around the Christmas tree, though we didn’t celebrate Christmas and my father, God bless him, would have set the house on fire before allowing a Chanukah Bush inside.

Sometimes, the authors who I will rant and rave about are in no need of promotion: I couldn’t shut up about “Midnight’s Children,” “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” “Portnoy’s Complaint,” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” the first time I read them. (I still can’t shut up about them, in fact.)

But often, the author is a bit more obscure than Rushdie or Atwood or Roth. More than any other novel, “Invisible Man” made me want to write fiction. But most people would assume I meant H.G. Wells’ “The Invisible Man” instead of Ralph Ellison’s book written a half-century later. (You chunkheads! You have to read “Invisible Man.” Or else jump into a vat of cheese fondue.)

I’ve found this to be true of other writers, such as Robertson Davies, for whom I carried an embarrassing enthusiasm after reading “Fifth Business.” I was convincing enough that I actually got several people to read the whole Deptford triology.

I think the last book I felt so strongly that I recommended it to people without prompting was David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas.” You mean you haven’t read it? You bloody wanker!

As my friend can attest, I am not the only reader on this earth who finds something so amazing that their subsequent yakking to any poor sot who will listen makes them a potential murder victim.

You MUST read this. NOW. I mean it

So here it is, the first reader poll I have conducted:

What writers or books made you so excited that you insisted your friends, family, and strangers read them?

Post your answers in the comments section. Vote early, vote often. And remember, there are no wrong answers, unless I say so.

Being that I am of limited imagination, I don’t have anything interesting to say about fiction at this moment, not that I ever did. But, unfortunately for the souls who have wandered here in search of “entertainment” or “enlightenment,” I have something else to say.

It’s about the media. Specifically, so-called “liberal media bias.” And why, to a limited extent, for perhaps the only time in my life, I agree with Rush Limbaugh. (That druggie.)

I agree with Rush and his conservative cohorts Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly on one thing. Most journalists are liberal.

There. I said it. I need to go shower with tomato juice.

If you were to poll every scribe in America, from the New York Times to the Podunk Tribune, from The Nation to The National Review, from Vogue to Hustler, I’d bet that over 75 percent voted for John Kerry.

As someone who has dabbled in the dark arts of the Fourth Estate, I can say with 100 percent certainty that there is a simple reason for why most media types are indeed liberal, a reason that is so damn obvious that nobody seems to have picked up on it:

Journalism is a crappy way to make a living.

The vast majority of jobs in journalism offer lousy pay, no security, and just about no glory. To generalize in the crudest sense, those market conditions aren’t amenable to attracting Republicans.

Or think of it this way: you’re a recent college grad, a campus conservative, you wrote for the college paper, and have some good clips. You get two job offers.

Dig the threads

Job Offer A, from the 46,000-circulation Daily ButtNut-Observer Journal, gives you the opportunity to cover the county water reclamation board at $16,500 a year, which rises to $18,000 after finishing a six-month probationary period. Job Offer B, from Big Corporation, gives you an opportunity to move your way up the corporate ladder, starting at $44,500 per annum, with much more later on. Plus benefits, stock options, and a 401(k) that would make your parents cry.

This is what those who rail against the liberal media don’t talk about, because they probably don’t want to admit that conservatives won’t work for bupkus simply to have his or her voice heard. The vast majority of entry-level journalism jobs are for the Daily Butt-Nut-Observer Journal or smaller. Even if you went to J-school at Medill or Mizzou or Columbia, you’d be thrilled to start out at a medium-sized daily, say in Miami, Seattle, or Dallas. And you’re still going to start out covering those water reclamation boards.

Of course, this pits the vision of a brash, idealistic liberal taking the job where she “thinks she can make a difference” against a greedy, mean-spirited conservative taking the job where she thinks she can make a pile of cash. They’re stereotypes, of course, but while there are arch-conservatives toiling away at tiny media outlets and hyper-liberals who lust for investment banking bucks, it’s mostly the reverse.

If the end goal of journalists was to become rich, I promise you that the New York Times would read like it was written by Fox News.

Yeah, I know the usual counter-argument: an express elevator runs from Harvard and Yale to the halls of power, and that the “media elites” are a self-perpetuating group of pointy-headed liberals that keeps out conservatives. There is some truth to this, particularly at opinion magazines.

To which this unbiased observer says, “Who the hell cares?”

You see, the journalists who count the most are the rank-and-file reporters who are the primary media prism through which we view political and cultural events. They’re the national White House correspondents and the local Joes covering the local VFW. A reporter at any level is concerned with three things: getting the facts right; scooping the competition and not getting scooped; and making deadline. That’s it.

Now, the fact that most journalists lean to the left doesn’t mean that there’s a massive liberal media conspiracy or that journalists are inherently biased against Great American Conservative Values.

Sure, a reporter may let bias creep into a story. But most ink-stained wretches are extremely scrupulous — they are aware of their bias, and try to cover both sides of an issue. Sometimes an editor will have a liberal bent, evidenced through assignments, heavy-handed editing, or even headlines and photo captions. Still, editors who let their political leanings influence coverage too much usually find themselves out of a job or on the op-ed pages.

Deep in the heart of Texas

Then there’s the oft-repeated charge that TV talking heads are paid plenty good but are still holdout Marxists. But consider the career paths of the three most recent network anchors who have left their posts.

The late Peter Jennings started his career at a radio station in Brockville, Ontario. Tom Brokaw was a college radio reporter in South Dakota, then worked in Sioux City, Iowa. And Mr. Dan Rather, the target of much conservative ire, began his career with the AP in Huntsville, Texas.

Brockville, Ontario, Sioux City, Iowa, Huntsville, Texas: these are not what I would call glamorous places to start one’s career, and I doubt Dan Rather was summering in Martha’s Vineyard back then.

What I find doubly humorous is that in the old days, the media was really unbalanced. Col. McCormick’s Chicago Tribune and the pre-Otis Chandler days of the L.A. Times, for instance, based their news coverage largely on the whims of their conservative owners. William Randolph Hearst, after all, basically started the Spanish-American War.

Maybe that’s the point. Rush and Sean and Bill O’ want the good old days to come back, when media bias was everywhere and obvious. It just happened to be conservative bias.

Whew. There. I’ve said it. I’m done.

Care for an after dinner mint? No? It is waf-er thin. Just one, monsieur. Just one.

Between a nagging cold and a mini-vacation more exciting than even MiniKiss, I disappeared from the blogosphere the past two weeks, reading little online and writing less. Apparently, a lot happened in my absence. It’s amazing that the world can function without my bitter cup of tea.

Though I want to devote many words to this, I am not going to devote this entire entry to Kaayva Viswanathan, the Harvard coed who is looking at a serious Oprah-spanking following the discovery that sections of her young adult novel, “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got A Life,” were mysteriously found in other books, or at least bore a closer resemblance to each other than, say, the Olsen twins.

Viswanathan has already been written about to death. But I have to get one thing off my congested chest: what the hell did these publishers, agents, and “book packagers” expect? Give a child $500,000, deadline pressures that make the most seasoned of writers insane, a pre-fab outline, and pre-fab cardboard characters, well, of course she’s going to crib from other books. Unlike the situation of Mr. James Frey, I feel genuinely bad for this girl, despite the fact what she did was inexcusable and her “I’ve got photographic memory” defense is as implausible as it is pathetic.

Accessing the deep catacombs of my memory for “What was it like being 17?”, and if somebody gave me tons of money to write a teen chick-lit book, I would have probably copied a Jackie Collins novel word-for-word.

(Also, I have purely gratuitous question to the publishers of “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed.” How else could have Opal been kissed but by another mouth?)

Why they gave Viswanathan half a million is beyond me, except perhaps that they could market a young adult novel as actually being written by a young adult. But a young adult is still not an adult, and Ivy League pedigree aside, a child is going to act like one.

But I said I wasn’t going to write about this brouhaha. Wife and I skipped town the past few days, attempting to recharge our batteries and trying to recuperate from illnesses. Unfortunately, I had given mine to Wife, and in the spirit of sharing that comes with marriage, she did not threaten to decapitate me, though I thought I heard her say “kill you” and “I’m going to” several times during the course of conversation.

Copy chief

Although germs flew faster than “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed” flew off bookshelves following its recall, since all of my out-of-town jaunts the past 12 months have been related to family matters, it was good to take a few days off without having to think about my father’s death, at least think about it constantly.

We hiked, we ate, we sat on our asses. I reread “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which was as amazing the second time as the first time, which was about 14 years ago. Coincidentally, that was the first time I realized that the word “shit” is unnaturally close to the hearts of Romance speakers.

What was more interesting was what we did not do: write. Neither of us sat down at a computer, scribbled in our notebooks, or spoke into a tape recorder. Granted, had I remained at home, I still would have been slave to television and nasal decongestant. But the out-of-town element doubled my commitment not to work.

And the best part was that I didn’t feel bad about it.

I remember reading an article about Graham Greene in which it was said he wrote 500 words a day. Every single day of his life. And it was 500 words, not 499 or 501, determined by an arcane formula of Greene’s devising, showing that when it comes to being anal-retentive, the British will always kick our American anuses.

But now that I have returned to the worlds of the semi-comatose and work (yes, often one and the same), there is no reason to avoid the inevitable, slaving away at the computer. Somehow, I could get used to vacation.

Somebody is missing

Oh, one thing. Wife is still out of town for a few days. She wants me to tape tonight’s episode of “Love Monkey,” a short-lived network series that has found new life on VH1. Is Wife taken with Tom Cavanagh, a hatchet-faced Canadian who plays the series’ protagonist, or a shockingly pudgy Jason Priestley, far removed from 90120? Is she interested in the sympathetic portrayal of women or the Love Monkey’s interesting life as music talent scout in New York?

No, of course not. Bloody Joshua Bell, that violinist who defines “chick celebrity crush,” is going to guest star in tonight’s episode, for about all of 38 seconds. He may even speak a line. I am tempted not to record this for Wife, just to try to shake her out of her Bellhead addition.

But you know the above joke about Wife not decapitating me? Fail this mission, and I wouldn’t put it past her.