bookfraud

I was at a wedding party Saturday night when the sweet aroma of cigar smoke wafted to my table. It was a lovely bouquet, a wonderful call to smoke. (I know, others find cigar smoke a skanky, nasty odor that could make a Siberian Husky lose his Alpo.) Having a full meal and, being that it was a celebratory event, I thought that a stogie was in order.

Bloodhound that I am, I followed the smell and procured a fine cigar from the party’s host. I sat down and puffed away. I hadn’t been drinking, but since I am not a smoker, this cigar produced a fine and satisfying buzz, however light, and I felt rather good with the world once the final embers were extinguished.

The next morning, at about 7 a.m., I awoke with a rather vicious headache. Worse, it felt like someone was mixing industrial chemicals in the stomach. I popped a couple of aspirin, went back to bed, awoke again with a headache, stomach ache, and a general malaise that even the thought of sex could not alleviate.

Instead, I lay prostrate on the couch all day, watching Posh Spice cheer on David Beckham, watching Beckham Bend it Like Beckham, then the epic Portugal-Netherlands battle, in which the referee handed out more cards than a manic salesman at a trade convention.

Time to write!

Wife, who is out of town, pointed out that Saturday also marked the sixth anniversary of our own wedding reception (though not the wedding itself — long story). “You haven’t smoked a cigar since then?” she asked. Nope, I replied.

“You’re getting too old for that,” she said.

If this remark did not plummet me into despair—oh, the thought that a few leaves of tobacco becoming a minor case of the D.T.s the following morning—it made me aware, in a way, of my own mortality. I am barely over 40 and can’t handle more than a few drinks, any red wine, and even a single cigar.

It was only the thought of writing a blog about the despair of aging that got me going; the idea of revising the novel or other endeavors in the Art of Fiction is enough to make me ill. I find this distressing in several ways.

Youth is wasted on the young, George Bernard Shaw said, and as my fiction writing has improved immeasurably since I was 25 or 30, my health has not. Not that I am a Proust in the making, but there is nothing more discouraging than having one’s body break down even as the mind reaches full bloom.

(I was telling one of the guests of honor at the party about my blog, and how I don’t like to write about myself, my health, or my neuroses, and here I am writing about myself, my health, and my neuroses. I just hope he doesn’t read this. In fact, I hope nobody I know reads this.)

But as a writer, I wonder, with no real reason, how many more times I will have cigar-borne hangovers, or other ailments that would have been easy to overcome in my 20s.

The worst thing about feeling like crap—vomiting, diarrhea, head pounding, hungover, death chills, Brittney Spears on TV—is that you’re probably going to feel that way at least 50 additional times in your life; live long enough, and you’ll make it to 100 years and 100 instances in which you’d wish you had kicked at least a quarter-century earlier.

Former novelist

If you don’t have energy, you’re not going to write, and gone are the days when I could come home from work, fire up the computer, and write for two or three hours straight. Instead, I end up “unwinding,” reading, watching tube, doing Sudoku, and, two or three hours later, end up trying to construct two or three feeble sentences before I collapse. (And we don’t even have children).

It is rare for the writer to produce great works of art after age 75 or 80, but it has been done and certainly should be undertaken. Should I worry that I’m going to die before I get my work done?

Oh, I’ll say it again: don’t answer that. But it does make me wish for one thing: that I could have been 40 when I was 20.

If I were smarter, I would draw a link between the world and the world of cup, or I should say the World Cup, that quadrennial tournament of soccer madness now taking place in Germany.

The United States squad made a splendid exit today, losing a match it certainly could have won. Americans, feel free to now ignore the rest of the World Cup.

Instead of commenting on our nation’s soccer ignorance and why it is bad for Cooperation Between Nations, I could write about the precision of the German side, the stylish domination of Brazil, France’s tendencies to choke, or the surprising coherence so far of Spain or Argentina. But since I haven’t been a sportswriter for in 20 years, I’ll let those pass.

And I will also let pass the temptation to write about the poetics of soccer, of its intellectual and philosophical dimensions. Somewhere, there’s an egghead with a one-word name doing a much better job in a foreign language bloviating on aesthetics and soccer, writing about “the beautiful game” as if it were hanging on the wall of the Louvre.

Randy returns to Bookfraud!

Do you know what I’m talking about? I’m not really sure myself—I haven’t read such treatises about soccer. However, I have read many books about America’s national pastime (or at least, I’ve read the reviews). These are the books that have titles like “Why Baseball Is Life,” “The Art of the Sacrifice Bunt,” or “Perfection Is a Nolan Ryan Fastball.”

These are, in a word, stupid books. This is not to say I don’t enjoy baseball, for on several occasions, I have contemplated impaling myself on a spear after the Cubs found yet brand-new way to lose in the playoffs.

But these books are a different matter. The people being written about—baseball players—would never be caught dead reading them. In fact, given the choice between spending $20 for a George Will book on baseball or another lap dance at Club Cheetah, you know two sawbucks are going to end up in a g-string of a lady named “Porsche.”

It’s interesting how little by comparison is written about, say, Football as Metaphor or Basketball as Life. That’s because baseball is a game that overeducated, uncoordinated weenies (yeah, me too) love to write about because the game holds the illusion that just about anybody can play it.

Meet your favorite athlete here

Sure, most baseball players are taller than your standard American male, and thanks to advances in pharmaceutical science, have more beef on them than cattle on the Steroid Ranch. But sportswriters and intellectuals (not one and the same, trust me) still harbor the fantasy of being able to stand in against Randy Johnson and knock one over the fence. It’s the same dream they’ve had since they were kids.

Instead of actually playing, these university professors and public thinkers write books about the “glory of the game.” The interesting thing about all of these books is that they’re written almost exclusively by white men for white men.

Even though I’m a white man, I’m not really taken with kind of thing, because it elevates sports to something that it’s not, which is something one should spend time contemplating. Of all the philosophers in the world, sports philosophers are the least deserving of our attention.

For instance, I played soccer in high school. The coach put me in goal the first day of freshman practice. But being of average height, slow reflex, and lousy vision, my goalkeeping skills were less advanced than my skills with teenage girls, and my only real athletic talent (I was fast, and could stop on a dime) went to waste.

Now, I could go into some serious soul searching, contemplating what all this meant to my long-term mental health, but why? It was just a stupid game, and though it pains me still to remember any goal I surrendered (and believe me, I remember them all), there was little about the experience that taught Life Lessons or any crap like that. Sure, I had to “learn” about teamwork and disclipline, the things sports “teaches” us. But I had teammates who were selfish and arrogant, who weren’t less selfish and arrogant when the season ended. They got the red card for life.

If I were to attach any philosophical element to baseball or soccer, it would be no different than for any other sport. Since we no longer attach glory to the battlefield or the hunt, men play sports to establish their genetic bona fides, prove their mettle on the battlefield, and grab babes. Pretty much comes down to that. Baseball, soccer, hockey, football, it doesn’t matter. (Women’s motivation for playing sports, well, that’s for another blog).

I’m so bored with the U.S.A.

This evolutionary psychology point of view de-romanticizes sports to the point where nobody should be writing books about the beauty of the free kick or the perfection of nine innings. These kind of non-fiction books celebrate men who are particularly successful on the athletic battlefield and gain reproductive advantages on the battlefield of life, and generally, are dudes with whom you would have a fairly hard time carrying on a conversation.

Ah, male displays to proclaim reproductive fitness—nothing like a little sports to ease the mind.

And now, a word in defense of literary journals.

This might seem like the most unlikely of places to defend these magazines, given my splendid history with them (also, see here). They reject me pretty much at every turn, do not send tenderly written notes of praise, and often leave me insane with anger wondering how, just how, some pieces of inferior quality get happy acceptance but not mine.

The literary journal is one of our favorite targets, though such animals are often weak, defenseless creatures, usually with a reader base of less than 500, at least half of which are libraries. They serve as a platform for emerging voices and unrecognized brilliance, and more often than not, are a labor of love. You don’t get wealthy by publishing a lit magazine. You can’t make much of a living at it, either.

We love to hate them, of course, because in our minds, they love to hate us. Any writer who has spent ages crafting a story, sent it to something along the lines of Pigathon, The Literary Journal of the University of North Plattsville State Community College, and receives a form rejection letter knows the feeling. We page through Pigathon and say, “I can write better than this shit,” and when our stories are not accepted, it serves a double rejection – no publishing, but also no validation that our writing is any good.

Oh, yeah?

Worse are those journals—you fucks know who you are—who have the chutzpah to send a subscription card with the form rejection letter.

You’re not good enough to make it into Pigathon, your hours of toil mean nothing to us, and in fact, we’re having a good laugh right now at your expense. To think you had any talent!

Also, send us $10 for two issues of Pigathon, the literary journal that the online magazine Bloody Hell Snot called “interesting.”

For some of us, an encouraging word is all we ask for, a molecule of kindness, and the indignity of rejection along with a request to take my money…hell, it’s like being turned down for Senior Prom and then having the girl demand you to pay for her dress. (She’s going with the quarterback instead.)

But in the spirit of fairness, as well as my sanity, I will say that even those magazines that send you the mimeographed note are not necessarily evil by force of their actions. It’s a numbers game: some literary journals get hundreds of submissions a month; others get that many in a week. It’s amazing that anything gets read at all.

Many of these submissions are actually pretty good, I am told. Probably 1 percent are extraordinary, 10 percent excellent, 50 percent are good or very good, and the rest are fair, poor, or wretchedly, pathetically awful. (The top-tier have this thing called “agented fiction,” and while it is possible to get published over the transom at The New Yorker or The Paris Review, it’s more likely that a literary unknown will run into a famous writer on the street, start up a conversation, and suddenly have a new mentor named John Updike.)

In addition, most lit mags are staffed by unpaid volunteers, some who are actually quite intelligent and are above 19 years of age, and who take their work very seriously. They don’t reject you out of spite.

Why, you ask, am I doing this? Heaping tender praise upon what has been a Bookfraud bogeyman, a beast characterized as more evil than the hypothetical spawn of George W. Bush and Ann Coulter (an offspring so scary that young Damien the 666th would hide under the covers at the mere mention of its name?).

My “conversion” began when I ran into an acquaintance at a party about a week ago. This person also happens to be an editor of a pretty well-known lit magazine. The editor (who has rejected one of my stories) told me that the pub was getting about 100 to 200 manuscripts a week. Surprisingly, most of them aren’t total garbage–half or more were average or not bad, a much smaller percentage were merely good, and very good, yet fewer still are truly excellent.

Not this year

The editor also related a story of working with a writer for weeks on a story, giving the writer detailed help on rewrites, only to have him pull the story at the end. Bad behavior works both ways.

In a way, that conversation crystallized a thought buried deep inside the soul, something I knew to be true but didn’t want to admit. The competition for many of these literary journals is extraordinarily high, and sometimes, the numbers just don’t work. You just have to take your rejections, drink a Scotch, and move on.

If you’re the editor of Pigathon, however, remember this. You have one of my stories, but I have your Social Security number. So if your credit rating suddenly tanks, you have no one but yourself to blame.

“Rewriting is writing,” according to the old saw, but in a sense, rewriting is dewriting, undoing all the wonderful stuff one has spent oh-so-many-hours crafting.

As I rework my novel once again, so my agent can send the all-new and improved book out to the pit bull ring of rejection, I have spent all of my creative juices of late on rewriting. So I dewrite a beautifully crafted scene that just doesn’t work in context. Or I dewrite some hilarious dialog that works better in a Farrelly Brothers movie than my work.

Then I make the most painful dewriting decision of all: eliminating an entire character whose place in the book makes no sense whatsoever, erasing them like they never existed, like in an old Soviet history book.

Dewriting is different than simply rewriting in that it entails you completely ditching stuff or tearing it up so much that it is unrecognizable from the first draft. You destroy your previous work. You devalue what you’ve written. And find yourself devoid of your sanity.

You’ve heard the stories, felt the pain. Writers ditching dozens or hundreds of pages of their work, or tossing the whole damn draft out and starting from scratch. (Nabokov threw his working copy of “Lolita” into a fire; wife Vera rescued it). Dewriting is filicide of the novelist’s art: one may ditch a piece from a collection or trim pages or even rewrite a short story 35 times, but such work is done with a scalpel, not an axe.

So as I cut through the rainforest of verbal badness as part of my effort to get the book (back) into fighting shape, it is worth pondering (on my part, at least) of just what it means to dewrite a novel, in terms of one’s own abilities.

A published acquaintance of Wife(apparently) does not do any rewriting. Perfection flows from the first draft, which may in of itself be a rewrite. If a story isn’t working, she simply ditches it.

And I can’t hate this person, because she is unconscionably decent, besides being preternaturally talented.

Those of us mortals less gifted have to content ourselves with hour after hour at the workbench, refining and refining, but often dewriting. To wit: the first draft of my novel was based upon the narrator’s childhood talent of being able to identify the brand of soft drink from the sound of its carbonation. Scenes were based on this characteristic; dialog crafted to show it; plot points defined because of it.

When it became apparent that this supposedly integral part of character and plot was really nothing more than a wacky jumping off point, out it went. Dewritten it was, as were dozens of pages following it, as I lost and gained characters, hacked out scene after scene.

This looks like fun

Flannery O’Connor supposedly said that genius is the ability to edit one’s own work, and though she also supposedly said, “Those Krystal burgers are some serious good eatin’,” I must agree with the late Ms. O’Connor. Most people are the best editors in the world until they pick up their own stories.

I’m not talking about fear, writer’s block, or otherwise. No, this is the inability to see what others find obvious. It’s almost impossible to consider your own story objectively, which is why it’s good to have a handful of trusted readers (as opposed to an MFA workshop, where for every person actually trying to help, there’s two stupidheads just trying to make a point).

If art is essentially about making choices, dewriting is the hardest type of rewriting of all, because it means you made some seriously wrong choices in the first place. It can lead to serious self-doubt, novelist’s greatest enemy. I should know. You have to kill the bastard.

D.H. Lawrence would write a novel, throw out the manuscript, and then start again—on the same book. After seven or eight tries, he’d have a book. He was a nutjob, but also a genius. If he can make a 100,000 word mistake eight times, I can dewrite half that many.

A long time ago, in a blog entry far, far away, I fell prey to what was a blogging trend at the time, and posted a column featuring lists. Besides being easy and rather humorous to write, it allowed me to give some information about myself without revealing my top-secret identity.

One of the lists was “Top 5 Famous Works of Fiction that I Hate or Can’t Finish.” Number 3 on the hit list: Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.”

Close followers of the literary zeitgeist will realize that not only did Beloved make my list, but was named the “best” American novel of the past quarter-century in a New York Times Book Review poll.

The problem is that I can’t finish “Beloved,” much less say I love it, for reasons that go well beyond my abilities of expression (”I thought it sucked,” “the language was all emoting,” “I thought it sucked.”). Literature that is all emotion and no brain (or conversely) grates on my nerves, and while Beloved is certainly a brainy book, in a way, it often reads more like a Harlequin Romance parody than, say, William Gass or Thomas Pynchon.

One can couch it in terms such as effective use of anaphora and synecdoche, but to put it in blunter terms, “Beloved” made my brain hurt. I read it until I couldn’t stand it.

I don’t get it

But apparently “Beloved” has touched a great many writers and readers, so I am left to wonder just what I’m missing. Where I went to grad school, criticizing Toni Morrison was a foolish idea, like dissing your brand new, 6-6, 300 pound, sex-deprived cellmate at Attica—do it at your own risk. Everybody at school just loved the book, and, in the one smart thing I did as MFA student, I shut my mouth while the copious praise of Ms. Morrison’s masterwork floated around my ears in class like clouds of silver.

I’ve only read one other Morrison novel, “The Bluest Eye,” her first book, and rather liked it, so I can’t chalk up my disdain for “Beloved” to a general animus I hold against the author, and I don’t fancy myself as a racist, despite one grad school professor’s characterization of all white folk (and she was a honkie, just like me).

The panel of “experts” for choosing the best book of the last quarter-century was a who’s who of American letters young and old, and who the hell am I, an unpublished novelist with a bitter streak, to question their wisdom? Perhaps it is the best work of fiction this great nation of ours has had to offer since 1981 and since I haven’t read “Mating,” “Winter’s Tale,” “Blood Meridian,” “Housekeeping,” or (gasp) any of the Rabbit Angstrom books, I probably am not really qualified to pass judgment.

My remaining 20 digits are not enough to count the “classic” works of literature that I didn’t “get,” enjoy, or quit in frustration. Most of these misbegotten ventures were forced down my throat in high school, college, and beyond. In part, my disdain of any book is correlated to my disdain of the person assigning it; a yukky high school teacher assigned “Ethan Frome” and I didn’t get over my Edith Wharton trauma until I read “The House of Mirth” years later.

I could tell you how “Middlemarch” made me doze, “Mrs. Dalloway” left me cold, and how Milton made my eyes bleed. I could tell you how I never got Dylan Thomas, how Ben Jonson made me cry with boredom, and “Moby-Dick” just made me cry.

At least these were school assignments. I know we’ve all be victims of a literary proselytizer, those folks who wave a book in your face and tell you that if you don’t read this—and love it more than anything ever written—you will be consigned to the lowest level of the literary afterlife. I’m one of those annoying characters, as are all passionate readers, and so when I don’t like a book that a friend pushes on me, I just blame the friend, not the book.

Me write now

But when you have institutional imprimatur for a book from other writers, a la “Beloved,” when you’re not a fan, it seems particularly grating. Everybody loves something, you don’t, and what the hell am I missing? Am I stupid, ignorant, or just a pro-wrestling lovin’, beer-swillin’, troglodyte?

Don’t answer that.

It’s funny what you see out there, in the dark, deep catacombs of cyberspace.

There are those who have an abject terror of writing that, on the Internet, makes itself physically tangible; blogs endlessly chronicle their authors’ fiction-writing output but more often their authors’ lack of output. Call it writer’s block, the fish-market stare at the computer (unblinking eyes, slack jaw, the appearance of a dead aquatic creature), and the terror of committing one’s words to posterity on the computer.

It’s easier to blog about not writing than actually writing. Considered another way, there’s a lot of writing on not writing.

Being that my health has been on the dark side of “shit” lately, and I had to take a rather melancholy trip involving family, and that I’ve been getting my periodic “Sure, I’ll take heroin, just make the pain stop” headaches the last month, I don’t feel much sympathy for such diatribes or their authors, although I should.

There is a cottage industry of books on How to Write, and not just publishing and career how-tos (the information that you won’t get for your $50,000 MFA). No, I speak of the psyche of writing, the courage to be an artist. Whether they’re in the “Writing” section of Barnes & Noble or the “12-Step and Self Help” aisle, there are a pantheon of volumes that can free you of your self-loathing and become a writer.

Though I have my spells, it’s rare when a blank computer screen or piece of paper intimidates me. In fact, the blank screen is wonderful, because I have yet to fuck anything up, and it is amazing that I just don’t leave the damn thing blank, perfect creation that it is.

Down write happy

There seem to be tons of reasons people don’t write though they may bubble over with ideas and brilliant turns of phrases. Dr. Freud I am not, and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but in any case, I dare say that people’s greatest holdup is the fact they fear failure, the dread that what they write will suck ass so bad that the Dear Leader of the Writing World will come and flay them from head to toe, take their pen and paper away, and force them to work in accounting or engineering or telemarketing, and chain them to the cubicle farm of Dilbertville, U.S.A. for eternity.

But I have the answers for such cases. Listen to me, and you’ll be writing once again, freed of blocks and hang-ups. I’m not talking about all this touchy-feely-crunchy hippie-dippie-trippie-chickie Natalie Goldberg shit. Not on my watch, you pot-smoking, sushi-eating, New York Times-reading Vermont freakshow!

No, these are hardcore, practical things one can do today, at no charge.

Write away:

Quit Your Job. Fuck bills, just write. As I have related before, I once had a professor who just said not to worry about money, it would just drop from the heavens. Turns out he had a sugar momma, bastard.

Alternate strategy: Live with your parents until your novel gets published.

Get a Job. Need motivation? Get a mind-numbing, soul-destroying corporate position (see above) in which the figurative sands in the hourglass become so literal that they weigh on you, making you ill, and you realize that every second is precious, and you can’t fuck around anymore.

Alternate strategy: Inject yourself with cancer cells or spend the day with Ann Coulter.

Have the Patience of Job. If you just sit and write, eventually, something good will come out of it. It’s served me well for two decades, though I’m not sure what good has come out of it.

Alternate strategy: Go insane.

Copy someone else’s work. When you’re stuck, unable to write something original, open up your favorite volume and copy from it. Word for word, to get a feel for the author’s rhythms and style. It’s amazing how this helps get the “juices flowing,” especially the juicy juices, au jus and the like.

Alternate strategy: Plagiarize.

Don’t break anything

Write the first thing on your mind. Here are some first lines from these “free writing” exercises, which have been as helpful to me as “free love,” “free beer,” and “free ipod!!!!!!”; meaning, they never existed in the first place:

“Carol took an ounce of flour and arranged it into short, parallel lines atop the kitchen table. They looked like an unformed Roman numeral III, lacking feet and heads.”

“Or the fleeting intonations of a drunk hare krishna, chanting the Beatles’ “Tommorrow Never Knows” while pulling up on his ponytail.”

“Kick up a notch, said the ringmaster. He threw his whip at the television set, left the tent and looked for someone to bum a cigarette off of.”

See how well this has done me.

Alternate strategy: Get a job at the zoo.

So if this sounds all nihilistic and grim, like an unending hamster wheel of futility or (my favorite metaphor) like being rotated on a George Foreman Rotisserie Oven in Hell, you would be correct. Don’t get mad at me, get even, and write that novel.

…in about a week. Some personal business and travel are seriously inhibiting my ability, inclination, and general motivation to write anything, and I will be leaving town for several days, where I will be closer to voting for Pat Robertson than I will be to a computer.

More later. About a week later.