bookfraud

Lo, for he shall not prove productive at the keyboard, so sayeth the Lord, for Bookfraud hath turned his back on his embrace of the Lord (of Writing) by incessant worship of the false gods of television and Sudoku, and it will be with a mighty hand that I shall deliver literary plagues upon his house. Bookfraud shall never publish, lo, for he hath been lazy under the guise of Baby taking up all his time.

Go forth, ye Bookfraud, and face the woe that has befallen your wicked house. For thou shall reap what thou has sowed, and yea, let word of your sloth spread forth throughout the world, and you shall be marked with “666,” the Number of the Beast, which also happens to be the total number of words you have written in the past year.

No, my Lord, forgive me, for I have seen the light. I have been saved. All because of Tina Brown.

Brown is no savior, but she is an inspiration. For I have been despairing that I would never be productive again — not that I would never write, but what emerged from my word processor would be unintelligible, unreadable slop. (Even worse than what I normally write.)

It’s been a rough couple of months. I can blame Baby and the intermittent sleep he bestows upon me. I can blame diaper duty, burping duty, clean up the spit duty. I can blame my job and the commute. There’s a lot of stuff I can blame.

There are some who might argue this would be no change, but having read reviews of Brown’s new “book,” I feel better. If Tina Brown can get her whaleturd of a book published, I have hope.

Not that I’ve actually read Brown’s account of Princess Diana and her days in (and out of) Buckingham Palace. Not that I actually intend to buy it. Not that I intend to even pick it up at Borders and run to the bathroom to wash my hands.

Tina Brown: Literary necrophiliac

It’s that I canceled The New Yorker and because of Diana — or, rather, Tina Brown and Diana.

When the Princess of Wales was killed in a car accident, the last place I had expected her to appear was in The New Yorker, that bastion of sophistication, wit, and great writers and reporters. But there she was, a drawing of the unfortunate un-Royal on the cover.

Inside, the accompanying story started (to the effect) “The last time I saw Diana, she was wearing a lime-green outfit with chiffon stuff…”

Of course, the author was New Yorker editor and all-around starfucker Tina Brown.

The same day I received that issue, I canceled my subscription.

Brown had taken the helm of the creaky old magazine a few years earlier, and injected some life into it with celebrity reportage and other types of features that really had no business being in The New Yorker. She did some good things, no doubt, notably getting rid of the deadwood in the place who hadn’t written for (sometimes) decades, and no longer paying for pieces by the word, which would result in 30,000-word stories about pothole repair or canned tuna.

But Brown generally ruined the magazine for me, and the Diana cover was the last straw. It wasn’t until David Remnick (he of the amazing access and pen) that I started reading it again.

Now, a decade later, Brown has a book on Diana that has definite “buzz” but is about as appealing to me as eating ketchup-drenched olives.

Angry (self-appointed) God

But she has inspired me, lo, for I hath written my first blog entry in a fortnight, and it was good.

It is quite stunning what will get a writer going. Anger and jealously are often near the top of the list — such fetid emotions have actually produced great works of art.

I can’t say that I’m angry at Tina Brown, or even jealous of her publishing a book of
dubious achievement and subject matter. (Honestly, given her connections, she could have crapped on some typing paper and found someone to publish it).

Whatever motivates me to write, I will take it, so long as it doesn’t involve Madonna or Dick Cheney.

And the Lord said, “Yea, Bookfraud, for now you are of the righteous. You have obeyed me and have been washed of your sins. Be fruitful and multiply your blog entries.”

And the Lord also said, “I read your last piece on your inability to write. I command thee: for God’s sakes, stop writing about yourself.”

Little One is about to turn eight weeks old, and I’m still waiting for things to get easier.

I’m awaiting the time when I can leave him unattended in his crib for more than five minutes; I await the time when his shrill cries last less than 30 minutes at a time. I await the time when I have enough energy to actually write.

I knew that having a baby would entail vast amounts of time. What I wasn’t counting on was how much of that time would be spent simply holding the bugger.

Wait. I can’t remember what I’m going to say next. Baby is gassy. Needs to be burped. Needs to throw up dinner on my new dress shirt.

Oh, yes, now I remember.

A baby is a helpless, insecure little person with a neediness that has no bottom (which sounds perilously close to the description of a writer). They need to be changed, fed, put to sleep, and held (if necessary) for hours on end, until that slight numbness grows into a pain that resembles a heated iron ingot implanted into the shoulder.

Now it’s time to write

This is nothing new to any one of you who is a parent, and is probably creating some well-deserved laughter amongst you. “Bookfraud, you fool. Did you really think you would be able to be a parent, hold down a job, and write, blog, or otherwise express yourself save for the quiet sobbing (that you hide from Baby) at 2:26 a.m. when he wakes up yet again for reasons unbeknownst to anyone save for a God that may or may not exist?”

Yes, dear reader, I did believe I could have it all: Baby, sleep, writing, a life. O fatal blow! O fatal ambition!

My son is not yet two months old, and it feels as if I have spent more time cleaning up baby faeces than writing. (Guess what? I felt correctly!) I knew that Baby would wreck my sleep and suck up free hours. What I wasn’t counting on was that it would suck up all of my free hours.

Now, all this bitching and moaning has a point, though I’m having trouble with what it might be. Baby just woke up from his nap. He’s crying louder than I did when the Cubs blew the 2003 playoffs.

Yes, the blog. I was asked to write a book review, and while I accepted (it’s always good to get your name in print, even if you don’t know what you’re talking about), it sucked away any and all time to write for blog or my own fiction, for that matter. I haven’t read nor commented on just about any other blog, for that matter.

Must be a pediatrician

(In fact, I just learned that the most excellent blog of Miss Snark, she of the wicked pen and opinion, went dark. Like, a month ago.)

OK. What was I saying. Baby was projectile crapping. Watch out, Wife, you’ll step in Lake Shit, where previously resided a bedroom floor. Oh, what. Yes. Blog.

Is it a blog if you only write twice a month, only to complain, and nobody sees it?

Just asking.

The television was blaring a program of no great import, and I had Baby slung across one shoulder, trying desperately to ameliorate his gaseous tears — rocking him, bouncing him, singing to him, promising him a Camaro.

With my free hand, I changed the channel. A golf tournament appeared. And this made me think of Cho Seung-Hui.

Remember him?

I bet it took a second. He’s the nutjob who shot and killed 32 innocents at Virginia Tech, less than two months ago. But you won’t find much new stuff about him. Nor will you see anything about calls for gun control, a debate that lasted about 8 seconds after Cho’s last bullet was fired.

But this is not a call for reflection or remembrance, as our cumulative memories have been wiped clean by Lindsay Lohan’s latest stint in rehab or A-Rod’s latest stint with his P-Rod.

To be honest, I had forgotten about Cho, until I saw some boring white guy (except for Tiger Woods, golfers all look the same) hit a 7-iron from about 150 yards, the ball landing five feet from the cup. Naturally, this made me think of a horrific mass killing.

You see, when I was in college, I wrote a poem in which the narrator kills someone with a golf ball.

Workshop: obsessions on parade

The poem’s narrator describes a a well-struck shot, done intentionally, as well as anonymous White Guy I had seen on television. In this poem, however, it was 5-iron, and instead of setting up a birdie putt, the ball lodged into the back of the victim’s skull. The narrator, you see, had gotten tired of all the anti-Semitic ranting the other fellow had been doing on the links.

You might say it was a revenge fantasy, laid bare for the inspection of the first creative writing class I had ever taken. Revenge for all the slights I had ever received for being Jewish, slights real or imagined, verbal or physical. But the class was not horrified — most were amused, and the teacher thought it a clever poem, if not fully formed.

Nobody thought I was going to stalk around campus with a golf club and Titleists, wreaking havoc.

You probably remember Cho was an English major, and that some of his anger was manifest in two short plays he wrote for a creative writing class. If you haven’t read them, it’s pretty disturbing stuff.

Cho’s teachers and fellow students were not blind to his demons, and in one class, the poet Nikki Giovanni had him removed from the class entirely. His writing pointed to a twisted mind, and he was referred to counseling, which obviously didn’t take.

Now, of all the creative writing classes I have taken, from my undergraduate days through the splendid waste known as an M.F.A. program, I’ve met some strange fellows, male and female.

Some were obsessed with sex (mostly men). Some were obsessed with unfaithful boyfriends (mostly women). Yet others wrote incessantly about angry protagonists in which violence often boiled under the surface (both men and women). Yet others were obsessed with sex, unfaithful boyfriends, and violence. If you are honest, one’s obsessions will be on parade.

None of this particularly bothered me, but only if it wasn’t repeated. My rule of thumb was if someone wrote a story about a disturbing subject and shared it with the class, the person was not disturbed unless a) the story sucked and b) he handed in another badly written story encompassing the same themes. Write a story about killing your parents, fine, but do it twice, and you’ve got larger issues.

Which is what Cho did. Not only did he pen “Richard McBeef,” a whacked-out revenge fantasy about an abusive stepfather, but the equally insane “Mr. Brownstone,” which is not something I expect to be performed on Broadway.

Murder weapon?

I guess my point is this — it’s a fine line between stupid and clever, and a finer line between insane and normal, and I imagine that at least one person, for one second, thought I was, at the least “weird” for writing a poem about killing someone with a golf ball.

I wonder if students in creative writing classes are afraid to write about violence, or feel it is indicative of a warped mind.

That golf-ball poem was half my life ago. I wonder if, in this day and age, I would have been referred to counseling. Perhaps. And I don’t think I would have been offended.