Category: Media

OK, you’re in love, but can you sell my novel?

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

An editor friend just called to apologize, he hasn’t had time to read my new manuscript because he’s having his roof replaced and can’t hear himself think. I said hey, no hurry, it will still be there when you find time, unless I rewrite it.

I was kidding. I’m done with the novel until I find an agent for it. I’m doing my research again.

Most literary agents seem to be young women looking for Young Adult and Romance and Queer and so on. (What is it with the YA craze in publishing? Do you know any teenagers who put down their phones and video games long enough to read?)

A lot of agents post descriptions of the sort of manuscripts they prefer. A surprising number say they won’t represent a writer unless they “fall in love” with his/her manuscript. As if falling in love weren’t a highly overrated reason for doing something, especially something business-related.

Some say they’re looking for either literary fiction or genre fiction, as if those categories are always separate and mutually exclusive.

Some are enormously successful. Recently I visited the website of an agent who represents a formidable posse of first-class writers. I pictured them in her stable, being fed and groomed in luxury stalls. I could go for that.

Yes, it’s delusional to think an A-list agent will look at my manuscript and phone me, even if my unsolicited query letter indicates I’m witty and self-effacing, in exactly the right proportions, and a joy to work with, and in the vanguard of writers who are inventing The Next Big Thing.

But one never knows, do one?

Just this morning I looked at my ringing phone and saw the call was from New York City, and my pulse quickened. Could this be love? It was a recorded message from someone trying to sell me something. I don’t know what the product was because she was speaking Chinese.

Long ago, I reluctantly concluded the best way to get an agent’s attention is through referrals. This time, lucky for me, I know a friend of a friend of a friend who knows a friend of a big-name agent in Manhattan. I’ll let you know when I make the connection.

Running out of gas with Steppenwolf

~ odd man out

So I was on the highway, on my way to a sales job near Allentown with my stomach in a knot because I knew the job would suck. It was Throwback Thursday on the college radio station and the DJ was playing songs that, way back in the day, were mainstays on the big commercial stations. The Steve Miller Band’s “Living In the USA” came on. I hear you, Steve, we’re living in a plastic land, somebody give me a cheeseburger, how are your royalties doing?

And then Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild,” an anthem of the road if there ever was one. The guitar churns like glass in a garbage disposal. The keyboard clings like wet cement. The overall effect is dark and dirty, like exhaust fumes from a sixteen-wheeler, but energizing, like good meth.

I cranked up the volume and pushed the rented Ford to 90 mph and remembered “Born To Be Wild” playing long ago when I climbed a high fence to get to my impounded car – I’d parked in a loading zone — and then tried to drive the car through the car lot’s locked gate in order to avoid paying the parking ticket. Bad idea.

The verses triggered more ancient memories, one after another, and a brief feeling of nostalgic transcendence.

Get your motor running/Head out on the highway/Looking for adventure/In whatever comes our way…

But the Ford’s gas gauge had a glitch. It said I had enough fuel for forty more miles but then, within a mile, the figure dropped to four miles. I was thirty miles from my destination, so I pulled off the highway to search for a service station before I ran out of gas.

Too late. The car chugged to a halt soon after “Born To Be Wild” faded out. I found myself stuck in a semi-rural scene with old houses and vast backyards. It was 6 pm, still plenty of light. I knocked on the doors of several houses and looked around for man-eating dogs.

A bearded man opened the fifth door I knocked on. I paid him ten bucks to drive me to the nearest service station. I filled a gas can, but when we got back I couldn’t pour the gas into the tank because the car had a built-in anti-syphon valve. It took me a half-hour to force-feed the gas tank.

I felt exhausted and marooned, and battered by the big existential questions. Who am I? How did I get here? Where can I get a macchiato in the middle of nowhere, or even a decent cup of coffee?

I got back on the road, smelling of gasoline, with the radio off. “Born To Be Wild” played in my head, mocking me, reminding me that most of my adventures these days are misadventures. They pull me out of the elaborate routines I’ve established to make enough money to support my writing habit. They pull me out of my safety zone and wake me up. Who needs that?

‘Disinvited’ Eagles weren’t going anyway

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

Swamp Rabbit was getting on my case for not being a football fan.

I’m a fan of the players,” I said. “It’s the NFL I hate — the overpaid commissioner and the spoiled rotten billionaires who own the teams. I hate the way they suck up to the U.S. military and bow down to Donald Trump when he waves the American flag at them.”

Swamp Rabbit wasn’t listening. “You live in Philly and you don’t even like the Eagles. I saw what you wrote about them.”

“Au contraire, rabbit. I wrote that Eagles fans get carried away when the Eagles win. They act like holy rollers at a revival meeting.”

I added, “But I like the Eagles, especially since Trump disinvited them to the White House because he knew only a handful of them would show up.”

Swamp Rabbit dissed me some more. I shouldn’t get sports mixed up with politics, he said. Sports-watching should be an activity that brings people together instead of dividing them along political lines.

“Tell it to Trump,” I said. “He said players who knelt during the playing of the national anthem were unpatriotic, even after the players explained they were taking a knee to protest police brutality and meant no disrespect to the country. Trump made an issue of it because 70 percent of NFL players are black, and he knew calling them unpatriotic would play well with his racist supporters.”

Swamp Rabbit scowled at me. “Football ain’t politics. It should be a place you go to escape politics.”

“There’s no escaping Trump,” I said. “He seeps into everything.”

I told Swamp Rabbit about the airborne toxic event in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise. A big black cloud descends on a small town, causing fear and suspicion. People exposed to the cloud develop symptoms — sweaty palms, deja vu, etc. — but it’s unclear whether the symptoms are caused by actual exposure to the cloud, or by exposure to news reports about the cloud.

“Trump is like an airborne toxic event,” I said. “Thanks to the media he’s everywhere, spreading fear and suspicion, even when there’s no reason for people to feel those things. Even when the subject matter is only football.”

“The media should ignore the guy,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Maybe he’d just go away.”

“I don’t think so, rabbit, but dream on.”

Trump claims the right of kings. Anyone surprised?

~ odd man out ~ 3 Comments

Who would have thought Donald Trump, not even half-way through his term, would claim he can pardon himself for crimes committed while running for and serving as president? (Not that he would do anything wrong, of course.)

I asked my friend Swamp Rabbit and he said, “Anyone who knows Trump’s history and isn’t a total dumb-ass would have thought it.”

Trump’s tweet was a wake-up call to all the peeps who think our much-lauded system of checks and balances is a guarantee that a dictator type like Trump will never defy the law in order to hold onto power.

And it was a warning to special counsel Robert Mueller and his posse as they strengthen their case regarding the Trump team’s possible collusion with Russian hackers who helped him win the 2016 presidential election. (Actually, he lost by about 2.9 million votes, but that’s another story.)

We’re likely to hear the word “self-pardon” fairly often as Mueller gets closer to nailing Trump.

Just the other day constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley wrote that Trump can indeed pardon himself, even though “a self-pardon would be [an] ignoble and self-defeating act.”

Some scholars disagree with Turley, but the fact that Trump has made the idea of self-pardon a point of debate is evidence of flaws in the laws governing the executive branch.

The flaws were always there. How ironic that it took a third-rate Mussolini to bring them to light.

Torturer shatters glass ceiling at CIA

~ odd man out ~ 2 Comments

Yesterday Gina Haspel overcame all the obstacles — job segregation by gender, the old-boy network, lax enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, attempts to present evidence that she was a torturer — to become the first woman director of the CIA. A round of applause, please.

On the day before the Senate vote, Jeremy Scahill noted

…Haspel has refused to renounce torture, her role in its use or to condemn the practice of waterboarding. In fact, under questioning from Sen. Kamala Harris during her confirmation hearing, Haspel explicitly refused to say that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” she oversaw at a secret CIA prison in Thailand were immoral.

For a while it seemed the good old boys in the Senate might not go for her, but most of them put aside their gender biases, not to mention their sense of decency, and gave her a big thumbs-up.

It was a landmark decision and a signal that women in government can and will be rewarded for despicable behavior just as readily as men. More to the point, it proved we’ve entered an era when depraved old white women can wield as much power to fuck up the world as depraved old white men.

Who would have thought that a torturer would strike such an important blow for gender equality?

Tom Wolfe’s works will live on! Really!!!

~ odd man out

After hearing Tom Wolfe had died, I thought of that scene in The Bonfire of the Vanities where master of the universe Sherman McCoy, under arrest, is paraded past reporters with Styrofoam peanuts clinging to his expensive suit.

…They were all over his shirt and pants. The rain was streaming down his forehead and his cheeks. He started to wipe his face, but then he realized he would have to raise both hands and his jacket to do it, and he didn’t want them to see his handcuffs. So the water just rolled down…

No writer was better at using the third-person narrator to get inside the heads of his characters, at using specific details to show their states of mind, at dissecting their passions and pretensions. The fictional Sherman McCoy was no less vividly drawn than the real-life Leonard Bernstein in “Radical Chic,” and the real-life Ken Kesey in The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test.

I was working for a daily newspaper when Bonfire came out. The reporters and editors who actually read books — there were more than a few of us — were only mildly surprised by Wolfe’s seamless transition from nonfiction to fiction. In his nonfiction he combined first-rate reporting with cutting humor, a hyperactive prose style and a talent for socio-historical analysis. In his fiction, he used the same elements.

A lot of journalists back then wanted to write like Wolfe, just like folk musicians in the 1960s wanted to write like Bob Dylan, and short-story writers in the 1990s wanted to write like Denis Johnson.

And so what if Wolfe’s style was inimitable? He inspired a lot of us to find our own paths, to put our era in perspective, and he’s still influencing young writers who aspire to write something more ambitious than nuts-and-bolts journalism.

Footnote: Wolfe once told Rolling Stone: “I’ve taken what I think of as the ‘man from Mars approach’: I’ve just arrived from Mars, I have no idea what you’re doing, but I’m very interested.” Nowhere is this approach more successfully realized than in Acid Test, an amazing piece of journalism-sociology-history that’s still as exciting and insightful as it was when it was first published, fifty years ago.

For news without context, tune into NPR

~ odd man out ~ 2 Comments

I fell asleep with the radio on and woke Monday to what I thought was the sound of my friend Swamp Rabbit pleading for a drink. But no, it was the squeaky little voice of Ivanka Trump’s Ken doll, Jared Kushner, who was telling the world via National Public Radio how terrific it was to be present in Israel for an event celebrating the movement of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, not many miles from the celebration, Israeli soldiers at the Gaza border were shooting Palestinians, who had responded to the embassy move — a strong signal that peace talks were dead — by burning tires and trying to breach the border fence. By day’s end, 58 had been killed and well over a thousand wounded.

NPR mentioned the slaughter a few times as they reported on the dignitaries at the new embassy site — Barbie and Ken, Trump toady Steve Mnuchin, mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, and so on — but the network made no mention of the web of corruption that binds Republican big shots to thugs like Israeli Prime Minister “Bibi” Netanyahu.

For context regarding the embassy move — for instance, why is it happening? — Twitter was a better place to start than NPR.

NPR is almost as useless as it is ubiquitous. It has some good reporters and covers a lot of territory, but its news directors were neutered years ago when the Breitbarts of the world began accusing the network of liberal bias.

Footnote: I’ll bet Robert Mueller wasn’t following the fete in Jerusalem. More likely, he was sifting through evidence of how Kushner has been manipulated by Israel and other foreign powers.

A fictionalized Trump? Too cliche

~ odd man out

Does anyone doubt that Donald Trump, if elected president of a country with no democratic traditions, would have quickly muzzled any news organizations that didn’t suck up to him the same way Mike Pence does?

I asked my friend Swamp Rabbit, only because the answer is so obvious. Trump’s tweets remind us that the leader of the so-called free world has no sense of irony, no self-awareness, no tolerance for viewpoints that challenge his delusions of grandeur.

Trump’s favorite put-down is “fake news,” but he can’t get through a public statement without telling a lie, or a series of lies, depending on how long he talks. He accuses reporters of being negative but built his whole campaign on the (correct) assumption that he could win by exploiting the fears and resentments of working-class whites.

“Blah, blah,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Let it go, dude. Get on with your miserable life.”

He was right. Bitching about the malicious fraud in the White House won’t change anything. It might not even be therapeutic.

The problem is I write fiction and consider Trump an affront to good fiction, just as he is to good government. I take it personally. He’s an insult to countless fiction writers who labor to make their characters come alive on the page.

“That don’t make no sense,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Just ’cause you don’t like him don’t mean he ain’t alive.”

I tried to explain: Fictional characters don’t have to be likable, but they do have to seem genuine and show some glimmer of inner life. They needn’t evolve into full-fledged heroes or villains, but they must change, or at least learn something new about themselves, in order to fully engage smart readers.

Trump seems neither genuine nor capable of change. He’s a villain, but a predictable villain, greedy, vulgar and vain. Incapable of self-examination. The presidential Trump is as mean and contemptible as the pre-presidential Trump. He’s a cartoon villain — a character drawn from reality TV, not from reality.

“What you sayin’?” Swamp Rabbit said. “What’s wrong with Trump being a cartoon? Most people like cartoons.”

I like cartoons,” I replied. “I just don’t like cartoons that become President of the United States.”

Clarification: Trump would fail as a primary character in realistic fiction, but he’s a good fit for satiric fiction, or for the theater of the absurd. He’s a dead ringer for the cartoonish title character in Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi.