Baby arose from sleep this morning bearing a cold. I use "arose" in a figurative sense, since he basically woke up five times during the night. Poor thing. Poor me.
No more politics in this space, I promise. No more extended comments (ignorant or otherwise) regarding the economy, either. Those will be deleted. I’m trying to tell a narrative here, OK?
Those who know me will see the obvious irony in the following.
The louder someone is, the less he usually has to say.
For instance, the quality of Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity’s argument is in inverse proportion to the number of times they interrupt guests and the volume of their voice, meaning they have nothing at all worth saying.
I learned this lesson in the fall of 1986, during my senior year of the large Midwestern university I attended.
My career as a scribbler started in college, where I wrote for the school paper. The school had many students who hailed from in and around New York City. Now, for those of you who are baseball fans, you may remember 1986 as the season the New York Mets won the World Series after a fair ball went through Bill Buckner’s legs (see the picture to the right), he of the then-cursed (and now un-cursed) Boston Red Sox.
When the Mets closed out the Series, the obnoxious ventings of Mets fans filled the crisp fall air like non-stop air raid sirens. Some kids took to the streets. They filled dorm hallways with noxious cheering. They whooped it up as their Mets proved (once again) that New York City Is The Greatest City in The World, not a hick wannabe city like Chicago. One New Yorker even got in a car, turned on "New York, New York" on his stereo at full blast, and drove around campus.
It was quite nauseating for the rest of us.
Now if they could just stop talking about themselves
Two days following the Mets’ triumph, I wrote a column in the paper: "Mets Win World Series, ‘U’ Must Live With the Fans." In said column, I daresay that I evicerated each and every New Yorker attending our great university. If memory serves me well, here are a few of the bon mots I unloaded:
- "The Mets have won the World Series, and the New Yorkers around us are celebrating. There are two reasons you may not have noticed this: 1. You are tone deaf. 2. You are completely deaf."
- "The Mets’ marketing motto is ‘Baseball as it oughta be.’ I’m sure they read Shakespeare between innings, too."
- "I would suggest that frontal lobotomies would help reduce the volume of the obnoxious New Yorkers who we must hear every day, but medicine suggests that New Yorkers’ tongues work independently of their brains, and their brains aren’t as big as they would like you to believe."
It was a nice throwdown, painting a picture of New Yorkers who came to the Midwest and spent the next four years complaining that it wasn’t New York.
People — New Yorkers — were predictably incensed. They called my house all day and into the evening. They came to the paper’s offices to protest. They wrote bilious letters en masse. Generally, they said I was ignorant, stupid, a southern redneck, bigoted (I was accused of being anti-Semetic!), and overall moron with a stunted world outlook.
The louder they got, the less they had to say.
And of course, I loved every second of it.
New York said the same to me
For about three days, I was a campus celebrity. It was my 15 minutes of fame, collegiate style, and the effect was intoxicating. People were talking about my article. People were talking about me.
To a writer of modest talent like myself, wanting fame is a fatal flaw. In the deepest grottoes of my troubled soul, I realize that I would do anything to relive that heady, three-day buzz of 22 years ago. And I concede the following from a less-troubled perspective: wishing for notoriety is one reason that I write, which probably affects my writing in ways I would never care to admit.
Of course, if you want to be famous, there are better ways than writing novels, such as becoming an actor or robbing banks. These days, all it takes is a reality TV show or some online angle. Even the best, most-well-known novelists can’t hold a candle to the fourth-place finisher on Survivor, the hooker with the blog, and the Paris Hiltons of the world, famous for being famous.
Oh, fatal ambition.
It’s worse than Mets fans.
I don’t want attention, myself…mostly. But I must confess, a small part of me kinda wants a bit of public attention. But only a little. I really do hate lots of focused attention. Not really big on crowds or public speaking, either.
Attention is a tricky one – I think most writers want some because it means they can keep writing. (I don’t mean that it gives permission to write, I just mean that if I actually made 500 bucks on a novel I wrote, I would feel slightly more qualified to try my hand at another…its a beautiful notion and all, the writer who holes up in their room and writes for themself, but I would get sick of having to write all those glowing reviews on my own, you know))
But I think it would also be difficult, my own inner critic is harsh enough, once you publish and let the work out there, suddenly everyone is able to comment. That must be hard to negotiate as you continue to develop and experiment.
So, you learned one of the author’s lessons very early in your career. They either love you or hate you when they talk about you. There’s rarely anything in between because the in-betweeners don’t talk.
I really can’t add to Anti-Wife’s comment–so true.
i figure we only write cause we love our thought and words and cradft
burt not the mets lol
So true…you know you have really made it when you have an angry mob running after you. Attention, whether it be positive or negative is still attention. I prefer to hide from the masses myself. You never know when they might be carrying actual pitchforks and torches.
Mediocrity is my biggest writing fear…I would rather someone flat out hated my books than thought they were merely okay.