his father silently

Waves break across the rocky beach, left to right with the current, and he rolls his neck, his shoulders, ready to fight them too. The Old Man always said nobody wins a fight—not that it ever stopped him from starting one.

Say it now, that nobody wins. Say it, I dare you. He spits in the sand.

From the glove box: the Old Man’s hand-carved duck call and pewter flask, the wrinkled photo of Mother (God rest her), her rosary dull with disuse. On the beach the keeled hull already wet with rising tide. When he shuts the truck’s door, beer cans rattle in the bed. He finds one unopened and warm, cracks it high.

To you, he says. Tough old bastard, I’ll give you that. More than you ever gave. Sips timidly, all raw mouth, fat lip, exposed nerves. Blood on the rim of the can.

A tern bobs out past the wave-breaks, dives under and disappears. Squinting, staring, he waits for it to resurface but can’t find it again. Gone forever just like that.

Into the Old Man’s pockets the flask and duck call, the photo. Rosary around his wrist. Don’t look at the face or at the bloody shirt. Don’t you look, he tells himself, and tastes beer already sour when he does anyway. Then carries him to the boat heavy with the years of whiskey and anger, with petrified disappointment, with the weight of his own sin. Lays him on the blanket in the scuffed bilge. Piles rocks atop him.

Finds one mottled with a white scar—quartz, maybe, or mica. Any smaller and he’d keep it to remember him by, the Old Man. But it’s big enough to help weigh him down, so he lays it with the others, folds the blanket around them and ties it closed.

The sun still cold in the sky, night a memory. Someone else’s, maybe. He drags the boat into the churning water, cold in his boots, cold on his legs. Climbs in beside the Old Man. Grips the battered oars, one fight still ahead of him, one fight still behind. Begins the long, lonely trip out to sea.

support the arts

Improbably, my post "Lucky" has been nominated--along with 78 others--for the 2010 "3 Quarks Daily" Prize in Arts and Literature. This year the contest is being judged by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, who coincidentally was a judge for the Kathryn Irene Glascock Poetry Prize in 1993, the year I was invited.

The full list of nominees is here, along with an opportunity to vote.

If you read "Lucky" and like it, consider voting, or read some of the other nominated posts and vote for the one you like best. The important thing is not who you vote for, but that you visit the site and vote for someone. 3 Quarks Daily is a good site that works hard to do good things for the literary world. We all need to support organizations like that.

rules

The other day I mentioned the discussion about rules for writing, and I said writers like to talk shop. It's true. But here's something--Laura Miller, over at Salon, has weighed in, giving it right back to writers.

What she gives us are rules for writers formulated by readers--or, if you will, our customers--rather than other writers. Which is bloody brilliant.

3. The components of a novel that readers care about most are, in order: story, characters, theme, atmosphere/setting. Of course all these elements are interlinked, and in the best fiction they all contribute to and enhance each other. But if you were to eliminate these elements, starting at the end of the list and moving toward the beginning, you could still end up with a novel that lots of people wanted to read; the average mass-market thriller is nothing but story. If you sacrifice these elements starting from the beginning of the list, you will instead wind up with a sliver of arty experimentation that, if you're very, very good, a handful of other people might someday read and admire. There's honor in that, but it's daft to write something with the deliberate intention of denying readers what they love and want and then to be heartbroken when they aren't interested. If you want to engage with more than a tiny coterie, take storytelling seriously; if you think that's incompatible with art, you are in the wrong line of work.

Sure, you could have the debate about whether readers truly know what good writing is, and I'm sure some of you will. Maybe it's like they say about human rights, that we shouldn't be allowed to vote on them. But hell--if we don't give the readers what they want, they won't stay readers long, will they?

Which is not to say you should just blindly write a book meant to please an audience. Don't--you shouldn't. But it wouldn't hurt any book to keep Miller's comments in mind.

titles

The AP is reporting the short list for The Bookseller's Diagram Prize for oddest book title:

• "Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter"
  
• "Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich"
  
• "Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots"
  
• "The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease"
  
• "Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes"
  
• "What Kind of Bean is This Chihuahua?"

According to the AP, "the shortlist, announced Friday, was narrowed down from 90 entries, including 'The Origin of Feces' and 'Bacon: A Love Story.' The Diagram Prize was founded in 1978 and is run by trade magazine The Bookseller. The winner, decided by public vote, will be announced March 26. Previous champions include 'Bombproof Your Horse' and 'Living With Crazy Buttocks.'"

hope floats

Go ahead and stare deeply into the eyes of some celebrated literary drunks and addicts in LIFE's odd gallery. Some of the pictures are interesting, or curious, some a little frightening. None of them, however, is particularly enlightening--it seems an odd choice for a photo spread.

Still, like all good train wrecks, I can't look away. My favorite photo might be John Berryman, the bearded Everyman--trending toward the Unabomber--talking with fellow drinkers at a neighborhood bar. I've had a similar photo hanging over every writing desk I've ever had. Don't ask me why.

Two quotes of note. Brendan Behan says, "I only take a drink on two occasions: when I'm thirsty and when I'm not." And Kerouac, "I'm catholic and I can't commit suicide, so I plan to drink myself to death." The caption helpfully notes, "And so he did."

Under each image, we get the writer's addiction of choice. Alcohol, Amphetamines, Herioin. Under Hunter S. Thompson, we get the wonderfully apt Everything.

Anyone else find this photo of Faulkner odd? For some reason, when I picture him at work, I get a very different image than this one, shirtless, in shorts, socks and shoes, with aviator sunglasses and a military haircut, typing on an ottoman.

books

A good post at the LA Times blog about the recent "scandal" involving books at the White House.

When conservative Rob Port took a tour of the White House this week, he was scandalized by the books he found on shelves in the White House library. "Photo Evidence: Michelle Obama Keeps Socialist Books in the White House Library," he blogged. He took a photo of the books in question, which includes "The American Socialist Movement 1897-1912" by Ira Kipnis (1952) and "The Social Basis of American Communism" by Nathan Glazer (1961).

Well, it was a first lady who put those books there, the Washington Post reports, but it wasn't Michelle Obama. It was Jacqueline Kennedy, who was known for the care and attention she gave to outfitting the White House; she hired Yale's librarian to stock it for her.The books Port photographed have been sitting in the library since 1963. The library came into being during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. In 1961, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy asked Yale University librarian James T. Babb to oversee a committee that would select books for the library. In 1963, 1,780 were placed on the shelves.

About the library Babb once wrote, "It is intended to contain books which best represent the history and culture of the United States, works most essential for an understanding of our national experience."

That kind of understanding seems to be lacking these days, and Port's manufactured uproar is the perfect poster child for the situation. The LA Times refers to comments on Port's blog post, including one which lays it out clearly: "These are history books, not how-to books."

Which is the point that's being missed: owning a book means an intellectual curiosity, not blind allegiance to what's inside it. We have a history of reading to understand and learn.

That, right there, is a great sentiment. It's also the LA Times' lead in to reprint the American Library Association's statement on the "Freedom to Read":

The freedom to read is essential to our democracy. It is continuously under attack. Private groups and public authorities in various parts of the country are working to remove or limit access to reading materials, to censor content in schools, to label "controversial" views, to distribute lists of "objectionable" books or authors, and to purge libraries. These actions apparently rise from a view that our national tradition of free expression is no longer valid; that censorship and suppression are needed to counter threats to safety or national security, as well as to avoid the subversion of politics and the corruption of morals. We, as individuals devoted to reading and as librarians and publishers responsible for disseminating ideas, wish to assert the public interest in the preservation of the freedom to read.

That statement, the Times says, was written during the height of McCarthyism in the 1950s. Maybe we haven't come as far as we like to think. Need more proof? Read Port's defense of his outrage in response to this revelation.

buckets

As I've mentioned, Gray's Sporting Journal has published a piece of my fiction in its current issue, available on newsstands now. Here's something of interest--at least to me. The story is set in an unnamed town in Southeast Alaska, more or less modeled on Sitka, where I lived for a few years. To illustrate the story, the magazine ran a photo by Eberhard Brunner.It's a great photo, and it captures Alaska well. The curious thing, though, is that Brunner shot this photo in Homer, the town I moved to when I left Sitka--a happy coincidence. How can I be sure? For one thing, that's Mt. Iliamna on the horizon. For another, a friend of mine in Homer, the science fiction novelist Michael Armstrong, sent me his own photo after seeing my story in GSJ.


Look familiar? They were taken from the same location--one popular with local photographers. Just goes to show you, Alaska's a big state, sure, but it exists in a small world.

da

I've been a little grumpy here lately, so I'd like to offer this up as a gift. It's impossible to overstate how beautiful I found Claire Keegan's story, "Foster," in last week's New Yorker. The language, the Irish-inflected dialog, the narrative, the reserved emotions of the characters who, to a one, are in pain--all of it.

Just impeccably written, and impossibly lovely. Thank you, Claire Keegan, and thank you New Yorker.

stop thief: or, crime pays

Holy Kaavya Viswanathan, it's happened again. A German writer whose debut novel is up for a major award has been caught plagiarizing. Same old story? Not quite. The much-praised writer is 17, for one thing. Also, the judges of the major award were aware of the plagiarism before they shortlisted her, and don't seem to care about it.

Her excuse? "There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity." She blames a generational culture of sampling, mixing and appropriating, although "blames" is the wrong word. Attributes, maybe? No, too ironic, considering she failed to credit the novelist, Airen, whose writing she liberated.

Oh, by the way? Not just a few lines. Not just a metaphor here or there. Full pages.

Ms. Hegemann finds herself in the middle of a collision — if not road kill exactly — between the staid, literary establishment in a country that venerates writers from Goethe to Mann to Grass, and the Berlin youth culture of D.J.’s and artists that sample freely and thereby breathe creativity into old forms. Or as one character, Edmond, puts it in the book, “Berlin is here to mix everything with everything.”

A powerful statement, but the line originally was written by Airen, on his blog. The plot thickens, however, and shows that perhaps more than simple cribbing is at work. When another character asks Edmond if he came up with that line himself, he replies, “I help myself everywhere I find inspiration.” (NY Times)

Man. That's brazen.

the book you're not reading

I already told you the best book you're not reading is John Dufresne's "Love Warps the Mind a Little." Have you read it yet? Get on it. All his books are great, including the more recent "Requiem, Mass."

And while you're at the store, pick up a few of Castle Freeman's books. This guy can write. His books are so good, you'll wish you're written them. I sure as hell do. His books are deceptive--the stories are so tight, so compact, the dialogue so natural, the pacing so perfect that Freeman makes it look easy. It's not.

"Go With Me," "All That I Have," "Judgment Hill" and "My Life and Adventures" all are worth reading. More than that, actually--they're must reads.

So, Dufresne and Freeman. Any questions?

present, past

The actor Rip Torn was arrested in Connecticut yesterday.

State police responded to an alarm at the Litchfield Bancorp building in Salisbury, CT, at 9:40 PM last night. Police say they found Torn "with a loaded revolver" and "highly intoxicated." Law enforcement sources tell us Torn gained access through a broken window, which they believe Torn broke himself.

How is this literary news? Well, it's not--not really. But Rip Torn has an awesomely literary name, doesn't he?

And he made literary headlines a couple times. Once when he famously fought Norman Mailer with a hammer. And once when he played the aging logger Noel Lord in the film adaptation of Howard Frank Mosher's phenomenal novella "Where the Rivers Flow North."

I can't speak for Mosher, but being a huge fan of that book, I was thrilled when the movie came out and saw that Torn completely inhabited the character. He played him exactly as I'd imagined him. (Actually, I had a landlord once when my buddy Dan and I lived in Burlington, VT, who more or less was Noel Lord, but Torn came in a close second.) It's among my favorite books, and it's a great film, with Tantoo Cardinal and Michael J. Fox--who is actually quite good in it.

If you haven't read "Where the Rivers Flow North," do. And if you're not familiar with Mosher, you're missing out. I've enjoyed all his books.

As for Rip Torn, well, like I said, it's not really literary news. But who could pass up a chance to post this mugshot (which isn't even from his most recent arrest)?

learn from the dog

I was running with my dog when we came upon something half-frozen to the ground, just a piece of foil flapping in the breeze. A French fry wrapper, or a Doritos bag. The dog tensed up when he saw it twitching. He approached it tentatively, barked at it, batted it with a paw and sniffed it. Then he lifted a leg and peed on it. This whole routine took less than 10 seconds. And with that, he was ready to move on.

It took me a minute to process what he’d done, but as we ran, I realized the genius of it. As soon as he saw it, he challenged it—when he determined it didn’t pose a threat, he swatted it. When it didn’t run away, he sniffed it. It didn’t smell like food.

Just like that, he’d assessed and identified it as something worthless to him. So he marked it and moved on. He didn’t care what it was—only what it wasn’t. And he wasn’t about to waste any more time with it.

Why can’t I recognize opportunities and threats that efficiently? Why can’t I move on from useless encounters just as quickly? I seem to get bogged down in what ifs and regrets, when clearly I should be putting more things behind me.

Or pissing on them.

rip

And just like that, this week's rule of threes is complete. On the heels of Louis Auchincloss goes first Howard Zinn, then J.D. Salinger.

J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91. (N.Y. Times)

Salinger's short stories thrilled me growing up, and some still do. "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" is, to me, one of the best of the genre. Though he's not published for years--and it will be interesting to see what happens to his estate--he'll be missed.

Ever see Field of Dreams? In the book on which it was based, "Shoeless Joe," the writer Kinsella kidnaps is actually Salinger, not the imagined Terence Mann. Check it out, it's a fun story, and who wouldn't want to take J.D. Salinger to a game at Fenway? That's a way to spend a day.

story

I'm pleased to announce that Gray's Sporting Journal has published my short story, "Buckets," in the February/March issue, available on newsstands now. Described by Writers Market as "The New Yorker meets Field and Stream," GSJ is one of the remaining markets to treat short fiction with respect. It's a beautifully photographed and illustrated magazine that's not afraid of white space. I appreciate that.

(Not the current issue)

Over the years GSJ has published a number of my favorite writers. I'm honored to be included in their company.

In an interview with the Paris Review, Annie Proulx talks about how GSJ published her first stories:

So when Gray’s came along everybody who was even faintly literate and involved in outdoor stuff was thrilled. It was beautifully produced, the illustrations were top-notch, and there was good writing in it. After the magazine first appeared I bought an issue or two and finally subscribed to it. One of the writers that I knew suggested that this was something I could do. I wrote something, sent it to them, and they published it.

For the late eighties they paid magnificent sums of money. They paid a thousand dollars for a short story, which was big bucks then. But there was a group of us who wrote for them and hardly ever got paid because they kept running out of money. I swapped a story for a canoe at one point. It was a three-way deal where Gray’s ran an ad for Mad River Canoes, I got a canoe, and they erased the cost of one story. It worked out pretty well—I think the canoe was eleven hundred dollars. I named it Stone City after one of the stories Gray’s published.

Please pick up the February/March issue to show your support for fiction, and let me know what you think of "Buckets."

momentum

Interesting story on James Patterson in the Times Magazine.

"There are many different ways to catalog Patterson’s staggering success. Here are just a few: Since 2006, one out of every 17 novels bought in the United States was written by James Patterson. He is listed in the latest edition of “Guinness World Records,” published last fall, as the author with the most New York Times best sellers, 45, but that number is already out of date: he now has 51 — 35 of which went to No. 1."

The guy's not so much a writer as he is a business. It's an entirely different publishing model, created and adapted just for him--and his team of "co-authors." Seems so different than what I do, waking up early and laboring in obscurity in the dark, cold mornings of my leaky Maine house existence.

duty

If you've ever said "Think Snow" or anything remotely similar, romanticizing the Devil's Dandruff that falls onto the shoulders of the civilized world, report to my driveway for duty at five a.m. tomorrow, and bring your own shovel.


Seriously. Other writers apply for grants to fund living expenses, studio space, childcare, research. I'm going to apply for a grant to hire a snowplow. Between my sick, older neighbors' driveway and walk and my own, I could have finished the novel were it not for the time I've spent shoveling since I moved to this wintry hell.

Does the NEA award snowblowers?

More than fourteen inches yesterday. Seven today. Seven called for tomorrow. This is the time when you're forced to make decisions about where you throw the shoveled snow, because it's there until June, and if you don't carry it far enough, your driveway and walkway grow a little narrower with each storm until one day you can't get out of your truck.

Snow.

fiction is dead, long live fiction

VQR editor Ted Genoways wrote "The Death of Fiction?" for Mother Jones, and it's an interesting piece--whether you agree with him or not. Based on the cage-match beatdown taking place in the comments section, not everyone does.

"Louisiana State University cut more than 20 percent of Southern Review's budget. Middlebury College has given New England Review two years to break even or face elimination. Most catastrophic thus far, Northwestern University is moving TriQuarterly online and terminating the current editors—including poet Susan Hahn, who has been with the magazine for 30 of its 45 years. The TriQuarterly has consistently published seminal writers in almost every genre, yet that track record was not enough to save it from the ax."

Genoways is right that markets are diminishing quickly and tragically. He also talks about the preponderance of MFA programs in the country, and how they're fast becoming like puppy mills for writers.

"Back in the 1930s, magazines like the Yale Review or VQR saw maybe 500 submissions in a year; today, we receive more like 15,000. This is due partly to a shift in our culture from a society that believed in hierarchy to one that believes in a level playing field. This is good—to a point. The reality is that not everyone can be a doctor, not everyone can be a professional athlete, and not everyone can be a writer. You may be a precious snowflake, but if you can't express your individuality in sterling prose, I don't want to read about it."

Check out the article, then check out the comments. Then close your browser and go back to writing.

diabetes sucks

Close friend Haidee Merritt, a phenomenal artist, recently self-published a book of comic strips about living with diabetes. It's a sharply funny book with a dark sense of humor--much like Haidee herself. That's what you'd expect, since she gathered her material over a lifetime living with Type 1 diabetes, including the year in her twenties she spent blind.

Stop for a minute and think about that--how terrifying it must have been for an artist to lose her vision. Rather than complain, Haidee developed a sense of perspective--and a sense of humor--both of which are wonderfully and refreshingly evident on every page of her book.


She's not always happy about it, and it shows. And that's only fair. But when she writes about them, her displeasure with diabetes--which ranges from its small annoyances to the more significant miseries with which it has inflicted her--will make you laugh. She doesn't want your pity. She wants you to laugh, and more importantly, she wants other diabetics to remember they're not alone.

If you're diabetic, if you know someone who's diabetic, or if you're just looking for a life-based laugh, please check out "One Lump or Two: Things that Suck about Being Diabetic." And check out the wonderful Haidee Merritt in this video clip from a New Hampshire TV news program (skip the article--it's a poorly written rehash of what's in the video clip, and you get to hear it in Haidee's own words).

stone

Robert Stone's new book is out. I can't wait to read it. If you're not familiar with him, brace yourself--he's not light reading, nor is he the upbeat type. His characters redefine "flawed," and starting from there find ways to make relentlessly bad decisions that worsen their situations (and often the situation of those around them).

The short story collection "Bear and his Daughter" was brutal. I couldn't read it straight through and after the first few stories needed to take a break and read something else. My bruised soul needed time to heal. The book has the emotional impact of repeated kicks to the groin. I recommend it heartily. But if you're at a low point in your life, take note--while there's a chance it could improve your mood by giving you perspective and showing you just how low bottom can be, it may also give you something to aim for.

His novel, "Bay of Souls," is a similar journey that begins with a man whose life is poised to topple in one direction, and ends with it toppling in another direction entirely. See? We even have options for failure, endless possibilities for toxicity.


The first chapter of "Bay of Souls" ran as the short story "Dominon" in The New Yorker in 2000, and earned Stone a National Magazine Award. It's among my favorite pieces of short fiction of all time. He won the National Book Award for 1974's "Dog Soldiers," and the PEN/Faulkner for 1981's "A Flag for Sunrise."

No less than Ken Kesey said Stone, according to a Salon interview, was "a professional paranoid, someone who sees sinister forces behind every Oreo cookie." That's an accolade, a divine knighting.

"Fun With Problems," his newest, sounds every bit as good. I'm traveling next week with Book Widow and hope to pick up a copy for the flight.

spell check

A designer of considerable talents, and an odd sense of humor, is selling a poster of the "10 Words You Need to Stop Misspelling."

An example? Effect vs. Affect. "Most of the time effect is a noun and affect is a verb. If you're unsure, try substituting a different verb and see if it works. 'As a child, he was affected/eaten by his parents.' A verb works here so you should use affect."

Another? "Alot is not a word. You don't write alittle, abunch, acantaloupe, aporkchop, so don't write alot."

The poster is available on his Web site, www.theoatmeal.com, along with the similarly grammatical "How to Use an Apostrophe," and such other items as "Five Reasons Pigs Are More Awesome Than You," "The Nine Types of Crappy Handshakes," and "Why We Should be Eating Horses Rather than Riding Them."

I'm not endorsing his site per se. But I do think the misspelled words poster would be a good gift for a college dorm room, the copy desk at my local newspaper, or anywhere else such mistakes are perpetrated with frequency. I'm just saying.

purpose

The real benefit of a cast-iron skillet over lightweight non-stick or aluminum cookware is that you can use it as a weapon in an "I Am Legend" or similar zombie situation.

lowered expectations

This morning my alarm went off ridiculously early, as usual, and I got up to write. A few hours later, when Book Widow got up, she asked me how I was.

"Exhausted," I said.

"You say that every day."

"Well, I'm exhausted every day."

She asked me why I got up so early then. It's a good question, but one for which there's no good answer. I work for myself. I don't have to be anywhere at any given time. Most days I don't even put pants on until after lunch. So why rise when it's still dark and cold and quiet?

That's when I write best. Before the rest of the world is awake. I have to make that time for myself, I think, because if I try to steal it during the day--from other obligations--I'll come up short, distracted at best, or make excuses to not do it at all.

And then my agent posted this E.B. White quote today: "A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without ever putting a word on paper."

So, there you go. Barring ideal conditions, which White says are not forthcoming, I lower my expectations and set my alarm to meet them head-on.

Of course, the downside to that is that I wake up at an ungodly hour and spent most days exhausted. But hey.

the books you're not reading

• "Love Warps the Mind a Little Bit," by John DuFresne
• "Daughters of the North," by Sarah Hall
• "How All This Started," by Pete Fromm
• "Death and the Penguin," by Andrey Kurkov

So, what's your excuse? Get cracking. And I want a report on my desk by Monday.

rejection

Back when I started out, still young and dewy-eyed--now I'm old and jaded as hell--I used to send stories off in the U.S. Mail with a stamp and all the optimism I could muster. Boundless hope. Hope was the horse I rode. Every day I'd check the mailbox--sometimes two, three times a day, even after the mail had already come--until that SASE boomeranged back to me.

There was something to the ritual, something comforting in the heft of the printed pages and the way the text lined up on them. The officialness of the manilla envelope. Something about seeing the name of the magazine written on it in my block letters.

The SASE stopped my heart every time. I'd hold my breath and lift it from the mailbox like a bomb jockey field-checking an IED. Most of the time, of course, it was a rejection--I could tell right away because the envelope was heavy enough to contain my manuscript, returned. But even then, the printed rejection with the magazine's letterhead seemed a totem of sorts. Something tangible, collectible. I still have all of them, great heaving folders of them. I could wallpaper an airplane hangar.

Sometimes they brought good news. If they didn't, why would I still send them out? Hope is a living animal. You feed it with possibility. You feed it with occasional success. The editor might call to tell me she wanted to buy my story. Or I might get a letter with the good news, and I could tell immediately because my manuscript wasn't in the envelope.

Editors' responses still come, of course. But now they come they way they go out--by email.

Sure, it's convenient. But let me tell you, there's even less pleasure to be had in a plain text, computer-generated email rejection than there was in those typed-and-signed notes. What I've lost is the sense of closure--no circle completing. No pomp, no circumstance. Just rejection.

universal truths

No matter how many people try to convince me it's just as good in the oven or the microwave, I will never cook bacon any way other than in a cast-iron skillet, slowly. Maybe it's as much ritual as result, sort of a guys' equivalent of the Japanese tea ceremony. Siphon off the grease into a can for the freezer. Keep it next to the one filled with duck fat. Cook with it at every opportunity. Celebrate life.

no comment

“A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it."

— The Economist, forwarded along by my agent.

really

Much talk these days about the future of publishing--sometimes referred to as "the death of publishing"--and what it will be. The industry scrambles to rearrange itself, reconfigure itself. Two trends rise out of the chaos.

The first is celebrity publishing. It's not really new, although, the advances houses are paying for these books seem to be breaking new ground. I'm not talking about books about celebrities--I'm talking about books by celebrities. Or at least nominally by celebrities, since I think most of them are ghostwritten.

The second, and by far the more infuriating, is blog publishing. Not blogging, but paying significant book deals to turn blogs into print. LOLcats, Hot Girls with Douchebags, Stuff White People Like--the list is endless, because every day brings a new one. Just today, GalleyCat announced that "My Parents were Awesome" earned a book deal.

The reason these things succeeded in the first place is because they were on the interwebs. No one had to buy them, no one had to pay to see them. Are they really going to reach a significantly new audience by being brought to print? I'm guessing--and I'm no industry expert--that they've already saturated their potential market. But that's just me.

No hard feelings against the bloggers. And sure, I get it. Publishers don't like risk--these blogs are already somewhat proven. They've already got an audience.

But come on, publishers.

No, I mean it. Seriously. Knock it off.

glacial

It's no secret that the publishing world moves slowly. But this, posted on Literary Rejections on Display, must be a record:

"A guy I know who gave up on his writing career about 5 years ago got a call the other day from a small press; they found his short-story manuscript in the office, read it, and want to publish it. (Sorry for the five year delay.) He'd forgotten he'd ever sent the damn thing there. How about that?"

brave

The writer Marian Keyes posted a letter to her readers recently. This takes guts and remarkable honesty--both with the world at large, and with yourself, the latter of which is perhaps the more difficult. It's heartbreaking.

An excerpt:

"My dear amigos, happy new year to you all and I hope your festive season was not too unpleasant. I’m very sorry but this is going to be a very short piece because I am laid low with crippling depression. Regular readers know that I’ve been prone to depression on and off over the years but this is in a totally different league. This is much much worse. ...

"All I will say is that I’m aware that these are terrible times and that there are people out there who have been so ruined by the current economic climate that they’ve lost the roof over their heads and every day is a battle for basic survival and I wish I could make their pain go away. But although I’m blessed enough to have a roof over my head, I still feel like I’m living in hell. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I can’t write, I can’t read, I can’t talk to people. The worst thing is that I feel it will never end. I know lots of people don’t believe it, but depression is an illness, but unlike say, a broken leg, you don’t know when it’ll get better. ...

"So amigos, I’m sorry to abandon you for the moment. Full service will be restored at some stage, I hope. Thank you in advance for your kindness because you’ve always been so lovely to me and once again Happy New Year. I hope it’s a nice one for you."

I'm not familiar with her or her work, but I hope she finds some peace.

emerging

Ever check out the Emerging Writers Network? The group's own copy says it was "created to develop a community of emerging writers, established writers deserving of wider recognition, and readers of literary writing, in order to develop as large an audience as possible for those writers."

Dan Wickett began the group a decade ago. He's a good guy doing good things for the world. If you ever have the opportunity to tell him so, please do.

Also, visit the site--here's a good link to start. It's an incomplete list of members with recent and upcoming publications. For readers looking to expand their horizons a bit, this is a fantastic opportunity to explore some of the links and discover new writers.

Full disclosure: I'm in there. So is Anthony Doerr, whose novel "About Grace" is among my all-time favorites. Seriously, if you haven't read "About Grace," I want you to log off right now and go buy a copy.

There are a lot of other great writers in there, too. But the one most worth pointing out? Someone named Ashley Owens. No idea who she is, but according to EWN, she's "been published for the very first time. A single poem in a book titled Inspired."

Way to go, Ashley. That's worth celebrating. Tonight I'll raise a glass to you and hope many more publications come your way.

the free in freelance

This is an excellent article that just depressed the crap out of me.

Freelance writing's unfortunate new model - latimes.com

Line up behind me, fellow wrters. Those using the noose and chair, head left; the gun, to the right; the sleeping pills, straight ahead. Thank you very much.

literary gladiators

The Morning News' 2010 "Tournament of Books " is queued up. For the first time, check out the longlist here. It's a good list. I'm excited. Yep, this kind of thing excites me. I was real popular growing up.

jetsons

Seen this yet?It's an 11.5-inch flexible Skiff Reader that uses "the next-generation of e-paper display – one based on a thin, flexible sheet of stainless-steel foil," according to a company statement. It comes with 4GB of memory, a full touchscreen display and connectivity via 3G and Wi-Fi.

My feelings on eReaders are mixed, and still very much nascent. I've never tried one, but I'm theoretically opposed to them--at least as a replacement for books. I can think of uses for them as a supplement to paper-bound books, but I'd never give books up for one of these.

Still, it's pretty cool. I want one.

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/108483-skiff-launches-115inch-flexible-reader.html

thrill

Just received a magazine contract for a short story. Signed it, mailed it back. They'll cut me a check and mail it to me. Pretty simple stuff, really.

It just feels momentous. And no matter how many times I do it, it never gets old.

dominion

There's a held theory that giving a name to something also gives you power over it. That's why bullies coin nicknames. It's why some people troubled by their relationship with their parents change their names legally as soon as they're able. The proper thing to do when someone introduces themselves as James, for example, is to call him James--not Jim, not Jimmy, and not Jimbo.

Currently, there's some debate about what to call this new year. Is it "twenty-ten?" Or maybe "two-thousand ten?" Well, I'm hell-bent on making this year better than the last. I'm making this year mine, dammit. I want to own this year. If the theory's right, I need to name it.

Which is why from here on out, I'll be referring to it as "two-hundred-and-one zero." Bring it on, two-hundred-and-one zero. Let's see what you've got.





(Seriously, though, bravado aside--2010, please show us some mercy, hey?)

tomorrow's monday

"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats." -- H.L. Mencken

80 percent chance of cliches

Cliches continue to abound in the media--or at least one in particular. Is this the price we pay for the wholesale newsroom staff reductions forced upon the industry? Forwarded by my friend Scott:

"Winter storm blankets area, at least 6 inches possible. I expect we'll be 'digging out' by Sunday's paper."

rejection

(Swiped from Literary Rejections on Display)

what i'm reading

Old John LeCarre (Little Drummer Girl). Needed some mindless page-turning entertainment, but forgot how smart LeCarrre's writing can actually be.

The inside cover has a two-page spread of an artist's rendition of what some of the characters and scenes might look like, and though the book was published in 1983, the illustrations have a decidedly 1970's feel to them--there are swarthy bad guys with gold chains, car-bombing terrorists that look like they stepped out of Castro's closet, and a military leader who looks like Christopher Plummer. All the women wear their hair feathered. Despite the novel being set in Germany and Israel, and the characters being decidedly Middle Eastern and Arab, the illustrations look like the story board for a telenovela. Awesome.

Recently read Elizabeth McCracken's "The Giant's House," which I found to be exquisitely written but sort of boring--I got to the end, and was still sort of waiting for something to happen. I liked it though.

Just finished Pete Fromm's "How This All Started," which I liked quite a bit. It's not a baseball novel, but it's got baseball in it. Fromm tells the story of a brother's love for his bipolar sister, and the way her illness ravages the family as well as her own ability to live the life she wants to live, with such tender, simple grace that he makes it look easy. It's not. The brother and sister are both pitchers, fireballers, and the dad's an ex-ballplayer, and baseball serves both as metaphor and as a sort of means of communication, a shorthand, a dialog, among family members. Beautiful.

(From the department of self-promotion, Pete Fromm writes regularly for Gray's Sporting Journal--my story, "Buckets," will run in the February/March issue. I'm thrilled at the idea of being in the same issue of a magazine as him.)

Why do I read so many older books when so many new ones are coming out every day? Good question. I'm trying to catch up, believe me. I hate to admit it, but I'm financially motivated, too--new books are expensive. Especially hardcover. I wish I could buy every one that way, both for my own collection and for the authors' sake, but I can't. I'm a writer, and get paid like one.

What are you reading these days? What should I read next?

could be my biography

“[A] writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.” -- Junot Diaz

vic chestnutt

Just learned that Vic Chestnutt died Christmas day at age 45. How did I miss that news? He'd been in a coma from an apparent muscle relaxer overdose. A suicide attempt? Maybe. Kristin Hersh, late of Throwing Muses and a brilliant musician herself, says it was.

Just a month or two ago, Terry Gross had him on Fresh Air, and talking about his new song "Flirted With You All My Life," he said he'd attempted before, but it "didn't take." The L.A. Times quotes him as saying, "I've been a suicidal person all my life, and that song is me finally being 'Screw you, death.'"

His most recent album, "At the Cut," with Guy Piccioto of FUGAZI fame, is excellent. Pick it up if you haven't yet.

Wheelchair-bound since a car accident at 18, Chestnutt released 17 albums in 27 years. That's an impressive track record. He was a hell of a songwriter, and a hell of a musician. He'll be missed.

applied symbolism

A decade ago the world cringed as Y2K approached. Remember the panic, the fear? It’s difficult to grasp, in retrospect, just how fully people braced against such unlikely possibility. Global computer network failure. I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.

I spent New Years Y2K on the Monkeyfist, my boat at the time, anchored somewhere dark, cold and remote in the Gulf of Alaska. My buddy Mike brought tracer rounds. We drank too much and fired them off into the sky at midnight. It would be nice to think that those brilliant, fiery trails were leading me to something—that they marked the way forward to a better, happier path. The truth is, they seemed the physical manifestations of something leaving me, some part of myself that I’d spend the next few years trying to recover.

Later that night, with Mike passed out uselessly in the main cabin bunks, the shallow water alarm on my depthfinder woke me. In just the few hours we’d been asleep, a fierce storm kicked up and the wind pushed us with enough force to drag anchor. We were in real danger of running aground.

I’ll never forget the panic, the sheer and complete chaos. I stood exposed on the narrow bow pulpit in nothing but a pair of boxer shorts during a freezing cold Alaska winter storm, pulling anchor chain—backbreaking work—while the shrill and unrelenting alarm bleated into the wind and sleet whipping around me. I could barely see the shore through the night, through the weather, but it loomed like a threatening presence. The trick was to pull the anchor so we could run, but the anchor—even as it dragged—was the only thing keeping us off the rocks. Clearly a two man job, that was about the time Mike started vomiting. Hey, he brought the whiskey. He’d put a lot of it back while we played cribbage earlier that night.

I don’t need to tell you that we made it. I felt, after that moment, like a capable man. Turning up the diesel stove for more heat. Drying myself off and dropping anchor again in a more secure location. Curling safely up back in the fo’c’sle in my sleeping bag to weather the storm safely, although I didn’t go back to sleep that night. A capable man. An Alaskan. I’d saved us. Of course, a capable man wouldn’t have put us in jeopardy like that.

And a hell of a metaphor for your life when you kick off the first few hours of a new year, a new decade, a new millennium that way.

A few years later I’d spend a New Years alone in my back yard on a frigid Alaska night, burning a gasoline-doused Christmas tree beneath the northern lights, half drunk, half mad, and completely unhappy. I’d hoped the act might be symbolic of a new start for me.

Well, hope in one hand and shit in the other and see which makes the garden grow faster.

More recently I’ve passed a few genuinely enjoyable New Years Eves in Montreal, in Portsmouth, NH, and in Portland—both Oregon and Maine. Book Widow attaches the weight of significance to the night, and I suppose in my own way I always have too. Together we try to find a way to mark them so they begin with us surrounded by the things we’d like to see more of in the coming year.

Last night we passed it quietly, alone together, with a good meal. Content. Not a bad way to ring in a decade. Maybe there’s hope for me yet.

palin in comparison

Jonathan Raban has a phenomenal piece on Sarah Palin in the New York Review of Books. I'd planned to make bringing Sarah's reign of terror to an end one of my New Year's resolutions, but maybe I'll just leave it to the experts.

"Alaska, the particular reality from which Palin hails, is so little known by most Americans that she was able to freely mythicize her state as the utopian last refuge of the "hard work ethic," "unpretentious living," and proud self-sufficiency. Her anti-tax rhetoric (private citizens spend their money more wisely than government does) and disdain for "federal dollars" were unembarrassed by the fact that Alaska tops the tables of both per capita federal expenditure, on which one in three jobs in the state depends, and congressional earmarks, or "pork." So, too, she mythicized the straggling eyesore of Wasilla (described by a current councilwoman there as "like a big ugly strip mall from one end to the other") as the bucolic small town of sentimental American memory."

Raban's right, Wasilla's an armpit. And Alaska's no utopia. I lived there just five years or so, long enough to learn it's not the place you think it is. Don't get me wrong, I miss it every day. But come on, Sarah.

By far my favorite part, and perhaps the most telling, is Raban's account of Palin's adventures on Twitter:

"Baffling/nonsensical: Obama's talk of yet another debt-ridden 'stimulus' pkg. Fight this 1, America, bc after last 1 unemployment rose, debt grew."

And, "Quik msg b4 book event: Prez pls pay down massive, obscene U.S debt &/or give 'stimulus' $ back to Americans b4 propose spending more of our $."

With such a brilliant mastery of the English language, it's no wonder she's down on the East Coast Elite and the "Lamestream" media.

But what the hell do I know? I've got an agent shopping around a novel. She's got a bestselling book.