A friend wrote “What is this frenzy of activity?” Answer: I made a deal with myself that all posts drafted over 1000 words had to be considered as possible essays and finished as such and sent out to magazines and sites.

This has created something of a backlog in my life, but in any case, that’s what’s happening. It doesn’t feel like a frenzy, though. More like the I Love Lucy episode where the candies keep coming faster but there’s no time, writer’s edition. I think this is just life though. In the meantime, I am reading September 28th at How I Learned To Survive in New York at the Happy Ending, and at Penina Roth’s Franklin Park on October 10th. The Franklin Park event will be fun, and I’ll preview the novel I’m finishing.

2.

Other things you may wonder about: the novel I am finishing, perhaps. In any case, I’m working toward finishing this draft by Oct. 3rd and sending it to her. Some of you who are regulars here leave me great messages of encouragement, asking where it is sometimes. Thank you for this. This is helpful.

Do not lose hope, I will tell you, though, I nearly did, but around the time that I did, it was James Baldwin’s birthday, and I thought of all he wrote while the world was so terrible back then, and I realized it was lazy to use the idea of a terrible world as a reason to stop making things. Thre’s a word for this, accedia, also known as the sin of despair. It would only make the world more terrible to be someone who gives in to it, because, why be one more person who is like that? Why put even one more person on that team?

3.

This is of course also the topic of an essay I’ve been writing off and on for years, and have never finished thus far because each time I think about despair, it is, well, difficult.

Yes, irony.

4.

In the meantime, I direct you to this beautiful trailer for Paul Hornschmeier’s new book, Life with Mr. Dangerous. He is a genius, and you should get this book.

5.

Other things outside of writing: For two weekends this month, I went to weddings. The first in Buffalo, the second in the Catskills. Both left me deeply moved. An essay idea I gave up on came back to me while on one of them, and I thought of a story for a story cycle also on another (now we are back in the I Love Lucy episode). I took notes and moved on back to the other commitments. But more importantly, congratulations to Jeb and Janice, and Keith and Chris, and long may love reign over you, your lives, your loved ones and all of us who know you.

6.

Something I discovered to the side of both weddings: If you wonder what will happen in New York state if a disaster hits, the answer is, terrible things, for now. New York is not remotely prepared. On our drive to Buffalo earlier this month the levee outside Binghamton broke and flooded the town. We were caught in the evacuation traffic. The method of getting road information that was most successful involved standing in convenience marts and listening in while 17 volunteer EMT guys tried to give directions to one attractive young woman. No one else had any information whatsoever. Not on the radio, not on the web. A friend recounted calling the Sheriff’s office and listening as they yelled at each other about roads that were closed.

Worse, the information we got this way turned out to be wrong. Only by second-guessing the volunteer EMTs did we get around the flooded roads on the way back and avoid massive delays that would have come from taking their bad advice. But this, of course, was just part of the Republican fantasia that exists now, it seemed to me, something turning us into a people wandering across a crumbling infrastructure trying to escape dangerous waters released by melting ice caps that are now in the storm cycles, with no public services due to austerity cuts, all while these right wingers make us argue gay marriage as the world burns. This is why, for example, the volunteer EMTs were the one offering directions. There were almost no policemen on the road, and the ones we saw were directing traffic silently, and looked impatient to get away themselves. They said nothing to us as we passed them slowly on the highway.

7.

Other things on the surface of my mind: Troy Davis would be alive if he was a white man. I can only hope his death brings with it real change in our country for the better, because his death happening as it did, with him waiting strapped to a gurney for hours while the Supreme Court met on his emergency appeal, dishonors us all. My heart goes out to his family. Gary Trudeau’s review of the Palin biography is genius. I’ve long known that Homophobia turns all boys against each other, for the way they fear being gay, whether they are or not, but here’s a study proving how this crushes their relationships with each other, friendships they desperately need. If you were thinking meanwhile “How can I get an ebook edition of that study from an indie bookstore?” here is a list of indies that sell Google editions. And if you want to escape the Republican fantasia with me tonight (the debates are on, and they’ll likely applaud the death of Troy Davis like, oh, I don’t know, Orcs?), I’ll be at Pete’s Candy Store, watching Emma Straub read with her idol, Jennifer Egan, who is a hero to me also.

It was always my theory that industrialists have been trying to break the back of the American middle class so they could then bring the factories back and pay people nothing once again to work in them, only of course after having discredited and destroyed the unions. We’ve watched as the factories first went to China, then to India, Bangladesh, Mexico, and we’ve watched as in each of those countries, labor standards were eventually enacted to at least some degree, raising wages to, say, a dollar an hour, and each time, of course, some of the manufacturing would leave, for some other place.

This morning, I walked into my mother’s living room and heard this from Erin Burnett, of CNBC, a guest on the Tim Russert show:

“One advantage of the weak dollar is exports! 12% of our economy is exports and it’s booming. American goods are very cheap overseas, so people want them. Also, with the weak dollar, companies like BMW are opening plants here, creating jobs.”

So, good-bye, Take Your Kids To Work Day, hello, Send Your Kids To Work Day.

• Ben Stein of Ben Stein’s Money (and, who normally drives me crazy) points out that in the Elliot Spitzer case, a few Federal officials with new surveillance powers have subverted the electoral will of the people of New York. He predicts a terrifying new trend.
• Bob Novak simultaneously says Yes, Ben Stein, you are right. Fingers anti-Clinton GOP operative who predicted Spitzer’s fall three months ago.
• Bear Stearns implodes. Arrogant money men who began last week laughing at Elliott Spitzer’s fall fall themselves due to corruption Spitzer was unable to contain.
• Bear Stearns chief played bridge while company tumbled.
• War In Iraq Over …as a news story. Until, of course, our ability as a country to borrow more money to wage it falls apart as foriegn countries consider us a bad investment bet.
• Foriegn Investors Veto US Fed Housing Bailout. What I’ve long said on this and other blogs, that borrowing money from abroad meant that soon we’d be unable to set our domestic and international agendas, has come true. So, whereas earlier this year I said “The Dollar Is The New Peso”, I’m revising that to “America Is The New Venezuela”. Get ready to riot at your bank for your money.
• Newspapers now vaguely aware that they are becoming giant blogs with reporters; may need to rehire fired editors and reporters as web producers, as bloggers rarely do their own reporting.

Okay. Well, I’ll see you guys at the water riots.

Many, including me, see a lot of positives in the digitization of art, don’t have a lot of sympathy for the RIAA when it complains about its dwindling bottom line—and laugh out loud at folks like Richard Parsons, CEO of Time Warner, who presumably had a straight face when he said “If we fail to protect and preserve our intellectual property system, the culture will atrophy. And the corporations won’t be the only ones hurt. Artists will have no incentive to create.” As if money was the reason artists create. But many writers, including Alexander Chee, see the digital paradigm shift as directly linked to other, direr developments.

“In the last 20 years, we’ve seen the rise of Limewire, the Napster thing, that ‘code revolution’ for DVDs that unlocked their content. But did anyone bother to mention how in the same time period, the richest 5% of the country became much richer than the rest of the country? Millionaires in America now still have to have dayjobs. Vietnam doesn’t even want US treasury bonds. We’re not a good investment for Vietnam. We need to wake up.”

I was ranting about how the code revolution was misplaced class rage, which I still think it is. Instead of being angry at the people who took all the money, so the average American can no longer afford to buy DVDs and still eat and get gas for the car, and then doing something about it, this person ‘revolts’ by stealing content. It feels like revolution, but it’s not the same as being aware of what’s wrong with the country and the structure of the conglomerates economy, and taking action there politically.

Because it feels like revolution, the thief celebrates by using the content, and forgets to go change the world. Thus playing into the hands of the people they hate.

The next time you have the urge to steal content, pause. Do something else. Sign a petition, write to the FCC, your congressman, your senator. Don’t take your feeling of political and economic disenfranchisement out on an artists.

]]> http://koreanish.com/2008/03/08/the-money-quote/feed/ 0 koreanish http://koreanish.com/2008/03/05/your-questions-answered-why-dont-the-fake-memoir-writers-write-novels/ http://koreanish.com/2008/03/05/your-questions-answered-why-dont-the-fake-memoir-writers-write-novels/#comments Wed, 05 Mar 2008 17:46:20 +0000 koreanish http://koreanish.wordpress.com/?p=347 Continue reading →]]> Q: Why would someone like Margaret Seltzer try to publish a fictional story as a memoir?

A: The novel in the West owes a great deal to the fake memoir, dating back to such classics as Moll Flanders. It was long held in disrepute, for that reason. However…

Nonfiction today makes more money than fiction. It also sells more copies. Plus, nonfiction, memoir in particular, appeals to the mystique of “getting a true story”. Someone said to me a while ago, and I think it was the writer J. S. Marcus, Americans always want their narrators to be their best friends, in describing why the untrustworthy narrator was more of a European tradition than not. People buying memoirs like “A Million Little Pieces” are buying “into” it, they’re buying friends, basically, and looking to lose a little loneliness. There’s nothing really wrong with that, but it puts publishing houses in the awkward position of finding readers lots of wacky, funny, people who’ve gone through untold hardship and have landed right-side up. Lots of new friends, in other words.

In an economy where increasingly all we can afford is to watch life instead of be in it, memoirs and reality tv are the “cheap seats” to life. We’ve long ago moved to a sort of entertainment culture where people are encouraged to perform themselves, display themselves, and market themselves as product, and what is useful to life is what allows this, and what does not allow this is considered a new evil, and harmful. And so it is made invisible, and the visible becomes the surface of the story and is thought of as the truth, at the cost of what is hidden. If this is familiar, it’s because it is a recipe for narcissism. It’s also, though, something that says content doesn’t matter as much as the “authenticity” brand. Whatever’s inside is great because it’s “authentic”. And it makes authorship into a puppet show.

That these memoirs are so often faked or that reality tv is written and scripted at below-market rates for writers’ work, this, under the “authentic” brand, becomes not immaterial, but rather, very material, if also beside the point. In doing so, it points simply to the difference between what people say they want (true stories) and what they want (a story about a world they prefer to this one).

The funniest or saddest part, and it might be both, is that the same people who will accuse a novelist of basically writing what happened to them and then making up the names, will turn right around on a memoirist and ask, “How did you remember all of those conversations?” We would be right to corner these people and just ask them what they’re really getting at by playing both sides of the issue. But I think the answer is, they ask that question when they are near waking up.

Also, as Edward P. Jones said, Fame doesn’t change you. It unmasks you. Margaret Seltzer somehow really believed she was going to pull this off.

YOU would have to crack open “The Landmark Herodotus” and get as far as Page 41 to discover this oo-la-la piece of a lecture given by the sage Sandanis to Croesus, the king of Lydia: “You are preparing for war against the sort of men who wear leather trousers and leather for all their other garments as well.”

But the book looks so smart sitting there on your shelf. It would be a pity to actually read it.

The 954-pager seems destined to end up under quite a few trees on Tuesday. Whether anyone opens it is another story. In the season of gift-giving, the ratio of books bought to books read tilts heavily toward the bought.

Translation: “I had to read 40 pages to find the first sex scene.”

That’s partly because as shopping becomes more frantic, books are the refuge of the desperate. Don’t know what to give your father? How about Alan Greenspan’s “Age of Turbulence.” For your child’s teacher, try one of the new translations of “War and Peace.” The literary climber on your list? Check out “Tree of Smoke,” the garlanded novel by Denis Johnson.

Such gifts carry with them a whiff of self-congratulation, as well as flattery. They say: I’m smart, and I think you are, too. People also often buy themselves these books in the hopes of stocking their shelves — or these days, their Facebook or MySpace profiles — with titles that tell the world “who I am,” even if all they can really say is, “I bought it.”

Translation: “I did all of this and went into a shame spiral that I haven’t come out of, and I’m not even sure there’s sex scenes in any of those books, because. . .wait for it. . .I haven’t read them!”

Editor’s note: Who is the loser who puts a book on his or her Facebook as a favorite that they haven’t yet read? Also, war with men who wear all leather= hot. . .

Part of this kind of book buying, of course, is good intentions. “You imagine yourself as being better read than you are, and you especially imagine that in the future you’re going to be better read than you are,” said Michael Kinsley, a columnist for Time magazine. “You think over Christmas things will slow down and I will have all this time to do the reading I didn’t have time to do during the year. There are half a dozen delusions like that that the book industry thrives on.”

Translation: “I, like yourself and Michael Kinsley, am bitter about working in the white-collar sweatshop we call America.”

That we are what we read isn’t precisely one of those delusions. Prospective friends and partners talk about favorite books to see whether their tastes are compatible. And paeans to the way books can shape personality abound.

Translation: “I think this guy looked through my book shelf while I went to the bathroom and then broke up with me afterwards, thinking that I’d read all of those books. He was hot and dumb and I’m so, so sorry, if you’re reading this, though I know you don’t read. Also, if I read another teacher thank you by a famous writer I’ll pass out.”

But sometimes a title becomes an It book or a best seller even though most people never make it past Page 9. A famous example is Stephen Hawking’s “Brief History of Time,” a book that promised to turn theoretical physics into easy reading. It spent more than two years on the New York Times best-seller list in hardcover and in the 20 years since it was first published has sold 3.5 million copies in North America, according to Bantam Dell Publishing Group. That’s a number that most likely far exceeds the number of people who actually managed to slog through the slim volume. “The happy thing is we don’t demand a book report of every consumer,” said Irwyn Applebaum, publisher of Bantam.

Translation: “He was basically telling me not to screw his future sales up but . . .I’m going to run this quote anyway.”

Mr. Kinsley, when he was editor of The New Republic, once famously set out to prove that people weren’t reading books they were buying. He and a colleague slipped coupons worth $5 into the backs of copies of titles like “Deadly Gambits” by Strobe Talbott and “The Good News Is the Bad News Is Wrong” by Ben J. Wattenberg. Nobody redeemed the coupons.

Editor’s note: 8 Billion dollars in gift cards went unclaimed last year. This doesn’t actually prove anything except that people who bought these books didn’t need the 5 bucks.

Translation: “Science!”

Generally, the phenomenon of buying without reading is difficult to quantify. But in Britain this year, a survey by the Museums, Libraries and Archive Council found that 33 percent of adults confessed to lying about reading a book to appear more intelligent.

Translations: “More science!” Also: “67% did not. But don’t look that way. Look this way! Trends piece! Hi!”

To be fair, by most accounts, many of the biggest sellers of the year, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales, are books that are probably actually read: “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” the second novel by Khaled Hosseini, “Eat, Pray, Love,” the memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert, and three titles by the thriller writer James Patterson.

Translation: “I read these books.”

But booksellers and others in the industry agree that there are always books that are more honored in the buying than in the reading. “We call them G.U.B.’s,” said Elaine Petrocelli, co-owner of Book Passage in Corte Madera, Calif., for “Great Unread Books.” Ms. Petrocelli said she heard a publishing sales representative coin the phrase nearly 20 years ago when she was trying to get extra copies of Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses.” A good dinner-party book, but she doubted people actually read it.

Translation: “Nothing says trends like a retread!”

Too many people give books for the wrong reasons, the best-selling Mr. Patterson said. There are those who select for snob appeal, buying books that critics have deemed worthy (not that these can’t be great books that people love to read). “Then you have the ‘I’m going to change you for the better with this book’ kind of giver,” Mr. Patterson said. “And then the ‘I know one thing about you’ giver, people who think ‘you like sports, so I’ll give you a book about sports.’ ”

Sometimes it’s simply that givers make buying decisions based on limited information. Sarah Baum, a mother of four in Mission Hills, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City, said she recently heard Helen Thomas speak at a bookstore and decided to buy several copies of Ms. Thomas’s “Watchdogs of Democracy? The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public” and give them as gifts.

“I haven’t read it,” Ms. Baum admitted. “I am a little concerned that I am giving a book that people will say, ‘Oh, that’s great,’ and a year from now it will show up at the school book sale.”

Editor’s note: I’m losing the will to finish this.

Roundups of the best books of the year can also drive people to bookstores. Thom Geier, a senior editor at Entertainment Weekly who oversees the magazine’s books section, suggested that “Tree of Smoke,” which has appeared on a number of “Best of” lists (including that of The New York Times) and won the National Book Award for fiction, might spend a lot of time gathering dust on the nightstand. “Unsuspecting readers may think that it’s one of these fictional romps through history,” Mr. Geier said. “They may be surprised to discover that Denis Johnson is a purveyor of rather dense prose that can be as thorny and complicated as a Laotian jungle.”

Translation: “Did I mention already that ‘Tree of Smoke’ was not as easy to read as internet porn?” Also: “Americans like lists!”

Sometimes the idea of the book — and its physical presence — is as important as content. “I think they become features in the intellectual landscape,” said Alberto Manguel, author of “A History of Reading” and “Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey: A Biography,” out this month. “You don’t need to climb it or visit it, you just need to know it’s there.”

Translation: “Smart people who don’t believe this are happy to speculate that it could be true.”

Oh God. Okay, I think I’m done. Merry merry, and I’m coming back shortly with my attempt at a year-end round-up.

I watch the show on the internet, for the record.

via Fishbowl LA

I recently read a study that showed that there was no difference in the amount of money you made, whether you were smart or stupid, and that in fact, if you were very smart, chances are you took too many risks and didn’t have very much money as a result, and you might even have more debt. I’ve always thought that if I were dumber I’d be richer, but it was amazing to see it all spelled out in a scientific study. I just know that the Dow and the S&P are down, down, down.

My brother, the richest person I know, and one of the smartest, is of course unconcerned. Stocks are for punks, he said a while back, the last time I asked him about investing, and told me it was safer to stay out of the market than to get in–to invest in other ways. This was before his company had a public offering. But I think he still feels this way. As he gets richer, his perspective changes, because he has access to even more information about wealth, and it’s been interesting to listen to him about it. I have noticed that some rich people tend to think you’re slow, or sort of childlike, if you’re not rich, even though they’re the one on a Blackberry the entire time during the meal, and so perhaps I’ll keep a copy of this study in my bag to whip out from time to time.

Meanwhile, back in Bohemia, my friend T Cooper has a story in the New Yorker this week, dated August 20th, and it’s bittersweet and funny with a bit of tragedy running through it–sort of like her. Susie Bright writes that this is her last year editing the Best American Erotica series for S&S, and that she’s moving on to other projects, to be announced.

I’m blurbing two novels so far for the coming year: Electricity by Ray Robinson, and Wendy Lee’s Happy Family — both are Grove titles but that’s a coincidence of a kind. Ray and Wendy are both exciting new talents in fiction.

In other news, I’m off to Breadloaf for the weekend, to teach a craft class, but not before unpacking my exciting new desk chair at home.