THIS WEEK IN LITERARY HISTORY Thomas Hardy gets wasted, sells his wife and child, and thinks, "This is an awesome idea for a novel." |
28 July 2007  I had written 800 brilliant, scabrous words on the rise of Harry Potter — and how adults have co-opted the franchise — but I inadvertently erased them for reasons not worth elaborating upon. Such absentminded mistakes on my part are common these days, but that’s another story.
In lieu of my Harry Hate, here’s a sampling of the chronic data stream uploading in my head, which I know readers are just dying to hear about.
•In the “How the Fuck Haven’t I Read Everything This Person Has Written Yet?” Department, I’m reading Orhan Pamuk’s “My Name Is Red.” While the novel can be slow going, it is also absolutely brilliant. I don’t know how I’ve managed to avoid Mr. Pamuk until now (though I’m not exactly well-schooled in modern Turkish writers. Mediaeval ones, either). Pamuk is a genius, a word I don’t throw around lightly with writers, and even in translation, it’s obvious why this dude won the Nobel Prize. Read this, not “Harry Potter and the Sphincter of Fire.” (More on Harry later.)
•The Chicago Cubs have decided that playing baseball was more fun than beating the snot out of each other, and have the best record in the majors since manager Lou Pinella’s head exploded in June. This is a bad thing. The Cubs are three games out of first place, and as a result, I am a stupid, love-struck teenager once more, following their every pitch and swing of the bat. They will ultimately break my heart, and yet I still watch them with blind affection. Call me stupid; call me a sports fan.
•Media Mania Over Drug Addled, DUI Hollywood Hos! I just wanted to say that.
•I am coming down with yet another cold. My throat feels like a morbidly obese union carpenter is using a power sander where my tonsils used to reside.
•Baby won’t abide his crib, despite his parents’ unstilted efforts to get him to do otherwise. We’ll put him down, asleep, and in the time it takes the pee to hit the urinal (as I have been holding it in for about 73 minutes as I hold the little bugger), his cries echo through our home; first, flaccid and weak, then increasing in volume until The End of the World is nigh. My solution for this is just let Baby cry until he loses his voice, permanently. He’ll eventually fall asleep and we won’t ever have to hear his rotten screaming ever again.
Wrigley: scene of the crime
•The number of comments on my blog as ground into a number smaller than functioning brain cells in Dick Cheney’s diseased mind. There is a fair amount of blogrolling (you comment on my blog, I’ll comment on yours) in cyberspace, and as I struggle to keep up with others’ blogs, nobody visits here, unless you count the turds who want to know if a certain violinist is gay and you know who you are and if this is how you spend your time, asking if this man is gay, then you live an impoverished intellectual and spiritual life indeed. Learn how to drink or something.
•I changed the layout, added polls, and some bizzare rating systemf at the bottom of each post, and one can see the overwhelming response. It would probably do me more good if, like, I actually wrote something more than once a fortnight.
•Speaking of viewership, I have a friend who runs a terriffic baseball blog that gets several thousand page views a day. Yes, his blog gets more page views in a month than Bookfraud has in its two-plus-years of existence. He was kind enough to have linked my rant on the Cubs’ impending sale, and, viola! there were suddenly hundreds of hits to Bookfraud. Just about nobody commented, unfortunately, and few visitors have returned, but since they were largely St. Louis Cardinals fans, it makes sense, since Cardinals fans are largely illiterate.
•Don’t send hate mail, Cardinals fans. Just a silly joke there from a pitiful Cubs follower. You suck, that’s all.
• Media Mania Over Drug Addled, DUI Hollywood Hos! Man, I love saying that.
Kids fare; for adults, fair
•“Dogfights” is the coolest guy show in the world. The show recreates classic air battles using computer animation, interviews some of the pilots involved, and analyzes tactics and strategy. Incredibly cool. If it only didn’t deal with extreme violence, and if it didn’t (essentially) celebrate young men’s deaths, it would be perfect.
•My Take on Harry: Of the 8.3 million copies of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” that flew off the shelves last weekend, my empirical observation posits that 4.15 million are being read by adults. I see people over the age of 18 reading it on buses, in parks. I see patients reading it while awaiting surgery and hookers standing around trying to pick up johns. Please, adults, read something else, too. Like Orhan Pamuk, or anything but “Harry Potter and the Boner Factory” or whatever it. It’s a book for children.
•Now let the hate mail flow.
18 July 2007  Yes, observant reader, I’ve changed the header and layout, and if I can decipher the HTML code for my template, I might actually make the page look half decent, in about six years.
But enjoy the all-new photo of myself at rest, and take the poll!
In the era before the Internet, PDAs, cell phones, and iPods, I bought a Filofax in one of my many futile attempts to “get organized.” The chunk of plastic and paper collected dust following my few attempts to actually use it.
It was then that I’ve had my life’s major epiphany: in order to be organized, you have to be organized.
I had hoped that the Filofax would magically transform the mess then known as my life. The Filofax would help me with appointments, phone numbers, birthdays, and the other assorted minutiae that make up the grist of living.
It did not do much good, since I never entered my appointments and friends’ birthdays, while I barely consulted it for telephone numbers and addresses. In order for the Filofax to transform my life into a streamlined, efficient machine, I would have to do the things that would make my life into a streamlined, efficient machine – whether I owned a stupid $30 phonebook-calendar or not.
Party time
Several electronic devices and computer calendars later, I still struggle to keep appointments, remember birthdays, and generally keep organized. My desk is a testament to mounds of paper needing to be filed. Unfinished and un-started projects litter the roadway of my literary endeavors. Things are so bad that when everything is “organized,” I grow suspicious, for it means that I have spent my time in cleaning up rather than actually doing the tasks for which being organized would make such a snap.
Now, comes my worst nightmare.
I have about eight writing projects somewhere between larval and butterfly. They range from the “novel” to short stories to a non-fiction book to a magazine piece on outsourcing. Some of these projects are smashingly good ideas, if I say so myself, while others are limper than month-old lettuce. But deciding which ones I should pursue has proven more difficult than a chick-lit heroine deciding between a pair of Jimmy Choos and Malono Blahniks (or the uber-dick-lit hero choosing between Honey Ryder and Pussy Galore).
In the past, this would not have been an issue — I would have simply done all of them with various degrees of enthusiasm (and success). Things would have panned themselves out: I would drop one or two things completely, aggressively pursue one or two others, and hold the rest in limbo. Then, once I finished a story, I would try to get it published, contemplate suicide as the rejection notes piled up, then brush the dirt off my jacket and start anew.
You know what I’m going to say next: since Baby arrived, I have no time to engage in such narcissistic dallying, though dally I do. This is an organizational crisis for me, as I can’t decide what I should pursue in the limited minutes allotted to me when I’m not changing Baby, burping Baby, bathing Baby, taking Baby off Wife’s hands, wiping Baby’s spit off my face, etc.
Now, I know of Super Moms and Dads who manage to take care of their children’s (plural) basic needs, plus teach them Mandarin, cook vegan coc au vin, spend all their free time enriching their children’s lives, and then turn around and write 1,000 perfectly formed words a day. That is not going to be me. I am basically a zombie with about enough motivation to turn on the computer, and that’s it.
Unaware of his surroundings, he was then hit by a bus
I take it that success in this arena is a matter of prioritization. Define one’s goals. Create a plan. Conceptualize action steps. Move forward.
Or, to put it another way, stop wasting my time on stupid shit. Such as writing circular, self-pitying blog entries like the one you’ve just read, or changing the layout of a blog, such as the one you’re currently not enjoying. To thine own self be true.
10 July 2007 
This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:
• gay (17x)
• hell (9x)
• ass (8x)
• crap (7x)
• pain (6x)
• steal (5x)
• dead (3x)
• hurt (2x)
• limbs (1x)
I don’t know why “gay” constitutes an adult rating for my blog — after all, “gay” means “having or showing a merry, lively mood.”
“Hell” is mentioned in great literature. So is “ass,” “pain,” “steal,” “dead,” “hurt,” and “limbs.” (“Limbs” is a dirty word?) “Crap” I have no excuse for.
Perhaps it was when I called Thomas the Tank Engine a “fuck ass, suck ass piece of shit.”
9 July 2007  I’ve just heard back from the editor of a literary journal, and she actually liked the book review I wrote for them. Unless the editor has been inhaling at a Phish concert or is less honest than the Bush Administration, this is all very good. It also is a great burden off my chest, more symbolic than physical.
Because while I was flattered to be asked to write a book review, I was also terrified — terrified that I wouldn’t have anything to say, or what I turned in was about as profound as a Coors Light commercial.
(It was also fortunate that the editor, after giving me the assignment, didn’t wake up the next morning and say, "You know, I really want to read that Bookfraud to see what kind of writer he really is.")
It’s not that I lacked the discipline, talent, or intellectual bones to complete the assignment. It’s not that I couldn’t be bothered while Baby’s diapers were soiled. Nor is it that I was scared I’d make a fool out of myself — I’ve done that plenty of times already, and will have ample opportunity to humiliate my son by the mere fact of being myself.
It’s that I dreaded I won’t have anything original to say.
Kentucky Fried Critic
I didn’t have much trouble coming up with an angle for my review, but I feared it would come across as lightweight, or, much worse, banal. The book in question has gotten tons of publicity already, and I figured my thoughts would be as interesting as what adventures awaited me at my local KFC.
I was asked in part because of my background, and the nature of the book I’m reviewing falls squarely into the territory (figuratively and literally) that I’ve written about in my fiction. And in working on the review, I noticed how much I actually drew upon my experience as a "novelist" to inform what I wrote.
So, unlike real life, things actually went to plan. I have to credit the journal’s editors, who only made two demands of my work: 1)keep it under 1,500 words; and 2) no plot summary. The former removed my wont for verbal logorrhea, while the latter removed my wont to be lazy.
Not to imply that most book reviewers are lazy, but plot summary makes up about 87 percent of all the verbiage in The New York Times Book Review, for example. I used to think that TNYTBR (as us aficionados call it) was the pinnacle of American literary criticism — the weekly magazine representing the most prominent voices in literature — but now I know better.
In TNYTBR, friends review friends’ books, while enemies settle scores. People are incendiary to establish a reputation; others kiss ass to make contacts. It’s not that there isn’t objective and perceptive criticism in the Times, but you gotta take much of what’s written there with a grain of salt (which is why, despite her many shortcomings, Michiko Kakutani sets such a high standard — she doesn’t do the literary crowd thing and doesn’t befriend writers. Smart woman that way.)
There was no danger of a conflict of interest in the review I wrote, which was of a novel by a writer living high in the fiction stratosphere. No, yours truly has not crossed paths with this person, and, given my low status in the literary caste, it’s more likely that I will become bosom buddies with your local Klan Grand Wizard than with this person.
I guess this means that in some ways, being a loser is excellent. I’ve tried mightily to cultivate my loser-dom, so it’s good to see my hard work pay off. Only in America, my son, only in America.
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My Favorite BF Posts; Probably Not Yours
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I had written 800 brilliant, scabrous words on the rise of Harry Potter — and how adults have co-opted the franchise — but I inadvertently erased them for reasons not worth elaborating upon. Such absentminded mistakes on my part are common these days, but that’s another story.
That’s What You Said