Literature Is Not Dead

Yeah, maybe. Melissa said it, she said “I think you’re a little detached in your blog,” and though she didn’t say it in those words, yeah, she’s right.

I am.

Which is on purpose, see? I have this voice for reasons, top secret reasons I keep inscribed on a stone tablet in a safe in a cave guarded by robots. Killer robots.

This is not turning out to be the essay Melissa wanted. She wanted me to talk about my writing, or about myself, and above all I was supposed to make it pretty. I write pretty stuff sometimes. Do it again! We want pretty!

But beauty doesn’t play that game. It doesn’t come when you call. Butterfly wings, cut diamonds, running gazelles, Pacific sunsets, beauty lives in those things the way bacteria lives inside us, inseparable from us, an infestation that is us, a kind of symbiotic beauty that, even though it makes some wrinkle their noses, can compete with the rose any day.

And I find I don’t have anything to say about me. Despite eating out by myself the last few nights, despite running and sitting in parks and staring at my ceiling for hours, I don’t have anything to add to your daily load of brain baggage. I’ve been thinking, but thought needs specificity to matter. You have to think about something for the thought to congeal enough for it to survive outside the brain. Talking about the size of man’s steps make no damn difference if you ain’t on the moon. Talking about caves and shadows doesn’t clear anything up unless you’re relating it to a specific trait of humankind (and you happen to be Plato).

And when I do have something to say… well, why isn’t it here? Why don’t I weave pretty spells around my ideas, set them in words like stones set in platinum and place them here, where words are really free, to spread?

Because if I have something important to say I will say it in my fiction. I like fiction. It is a tool. I could tell you what I think about young men and women in today’s society, but it’s in Flying Wingman already, and it’s in there better. Fiction isn’t a way for me to avoid taking a stance. I use it to take a stance. You have to take a stance to write fiction, because it’s built of make-believe. Without a backbone of purpose it will never walk.

Oh yes, I’m stating an argument in every line, and I love that you don’t know it. If rhetoric is the science of convincing others, fiction is it’s most insidious branch, the dark, covert art of argument. Fiction is the ninjitsu of rhetoric.

Which makes all of us fiction writers ninjas, a thought that is cool as hell, flattering to my ego, and weirdly appropriate. Like ninjitsu, real writing is a process (the word “writing” is a noun formed from the gerund of the verb, to write. [a gerund is the ‘ing’ form of a verb, the form we use to talk about ongoing action] So writing is, lexicographically, inherently a process. Boy I butchered some shit in that one), a process which requires years of training, learning first from a master and then on our own, but mostly through constant, repetitive practice. Like ninjas, writers are poorly understood. We are not popular. We are often hired to make other people’s projects work. A job well done can slay people, end their life or, in the case of good fiction, change it forever. Great fiction doesn’t carry signs of it’s author. Great fiction writers are silent, sneaky, efficient.

Most of all, like the secret Japanese warriors we call the ninja, writers are always, ultimately, alone.

Superhero movies are huge these days, so the next step is obvious: An Aquaman movie. I know Entourage tossed the idea out there originally, but trust me, I can one up them, because my Aquaman movie would star Michael Phelps.

It would make millions. It would be horrible, of course, but it would make millions. And as my friend Josh pointed out, Phelps could do all his own stunts. That scene of Aquaman chasing down a dolphin? Phelps actually chased down the dolphin.

I’m a genius.

No doubt those involved in the court case are a little too busy to appreciate the irony. A book about how economic destitution and inequality became the moving forces of social change is now being fought over as a money making device.

Steinbeck, now deader than his characters, obviously doesn’t care much about where the remains of his royalties go, though his progeny do. Some ex-wife (the third?) and some kids are fighting over the ownership. Here’s some legalese from the case, if you care. (I’d skip it):

…ruled that Penguin, along with the estate of Steinbeck’s third wife Elaine, hold the rights on the grounds that a 1938 notice purporting to terminate publication rights was superceded by a 1994 agreement. “Because the termination right provided by section 304(d) pursuant to which the 2004 termination notice was issued applies only to pre-1978 grants of transfers or licenses of copyright, and because the 1994 agreement left intact no pre-1978 grant for the works in question, we conclude that the 2004 notice of termination is ineffective. The 1994 agreement remains in effect … (from Publisher’s Lunch)

Why should anyone own it? The brain that birthed it is dead. I personally think the creative contributions of an author should revert to the public commons after the author’s death. Just about everyone else disagrees.

Current intellectual property (IP) law grants copyright protection to a work for life plus 75. That means that Grapes of Wrath is protected 75 years after the end of the life of Steinbeck. Don’t expect any Tom Joad action figures unless whoever wins the above court mess signs off on it. (Because you were really expecting Tom Joad action figures, right?)

This also means that, since there are rights existing, and someone is still selling copies of Grapes of Wrath, whoever owns those rights “deserves” some cash for the sale. Hence the bickering. Art deserves better.

Rather than explain in detail why the current system limits artistic exploration and what system would better replace it, I will instead comment on the one thing I can confidently take from this. If you have more than one ex-wife, do not expect peace, dead or alive.

I’ve had the opportunity now to write for various different editors, and there’s one thing I just don’t get; when an editor rewrites my stuff. I consider myself a professional and will gladly write and rewrite a piece until it sounds right. AK and MG at Metromix do things right. If they think my stuff sounds stupid, they tell me. Then it’s on me to fix it.

Brass has finally gotten around to publishing two of the pieces I’ve done for them:

http://www.brassmagazine.com/articles/stry_temp.asp?aid=290

http://www.brassmagazine.com/articles/stry_temp.asp?aid=292

The pieces actually look pretty sweet and I’m proud of them because financial writing is outside my normal realm. Keeping Em Honest is pretty solid, and as one of my very first pieces of financial writing I’m quite pleased with it. The Global Travel one fared a little worse. It seems choppy to me now. The phenomenal sources Brass was so adamant that I get aren’t mentioned in the articles, and both articles are considerably shorter. Editing for length is fine, but I try to pay a lot of attention to rhythm while writing, sometimes even reading my work aloud to myself, so when an editor axes a sentence, it often interrupts the flow.

Jeez, man, if you hate it so much, why don’t you stop doing it? Actually, I don’t hate it. I love writing and I love working with editors since they’ve almost always got the exact same goal I do: make me sound witty and smart. Brass provides multi-paged detailed assignment requirements for each piece, though (often longer than the piece I eventually turn in), and then they end up editing so much, so I’m just curious: why use me at all? Save yourselves the work! No, I’m glad you use me; a chance to write is always a good thing, but maybe some of my editor friends out there can clarify this. Why hire writers at all when you end up doing most of the work yourself?

Hope my editors at Brass don’t hate me now.

Reading about writing is like reading about sex. It just makes you jealous of those that have succeeded at doing it recently.

Tons more pics, including some of my future motorcycles, wives and ex-wives at Baltimore.metromix.com/throttles

I have no problem with Amazon. Just because a company is large and makes lots of money doesn’t mean it’s evil. Still, I don’t understand why  a book lover would want to sell kitchen blenders, purses, garden chairs, and backpacks.

It just makes more sense if book lovers want to do stuff like fund literacy programs and book drives. Which is why Better World Books makes so much sense to me, and has become my new best friend. The company is an amalgam of an online used and new bookseller not too different from Amazon and a book drive organizing, literacy funding do-good organization. Actually they sponsor so many social initiatives and do-good crap I lost track. It’s really ridiculous.

But there’s two solid reasons to be friends with Better World Books that have nothing to do with the social guilt that seems to drive much of our eco and socially conscious shopping. The first is that the company is just cool, with a great blog that makes me laugh. People who can both organize a book store and make me laugh deserve praise. The second is that shipping anywhere in the U.S. is free. FREE!

Free shipping is awesome. Literacy is awesome. Books are awesome. Better World Books is pretty awesome.

In case you haven’t been stalking me like you should be, I just wanted to let you all know that I still write pretty frequently for Metromix. My latest mission was to tackle Fort Avenue. All of it. Pray for my liver. Here’s the link: Baltimore.metromix.com/fortave

“Finishing a book is like ending a long relationship,” my friend Angie said last night. We were both in our respective beds, spending time with our loved ones. In her case, A Million Little Pieces, in mine, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.

Maybe you’re one of those people who spends their evenings in bed with another person, but if you’ve ever fallen for a book before, you know what we mean. Putting down a good book is as hard as walking away from a long relationship. You don’t want to do it, but you have to. You can’t linger too long in a book or you spoil it.

There are right and wrong places to finish a book, just as there are right and wrong places to break up. Public is no good, and at work on your lunch break won’t make anyone happy. It’s best at home, on the couch or in bed, or maybe, if the park is empty, on a park bench where you can sit afterwards and reflect.

A good book, like a relationship, deserves time. It’s best to sit alone and think about it before it fades. You don’t want to talk about it right afterwards. All those questions people ask: “How’d it end? Was it good? Do you recommend it?” You don’t want to have to critique it. Not yet. You don’t want to start reading anything else right away. That wouldn’t be fair to you or your rebound book. Maybe you even carry the book around with you for a day or two, hoping in vain to recapture some of the experience, the same way you meet your ex for lunch after it’s all over.

But a reread, like a re-romancing, is never the same. The world of the book, like your former romance, has to fade away. There’s only one first time.

Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. I think to the same extent the unexamined book is not worth reading. I’ve been bamboozled (happily) into a book club, and it’s a nice experience to discuss a book that I’ve read. One of the greatest joys of reading for me has always been sharing. It’s particularly fun to find someone who loves an obscure book as much as you do.

This is distinctly different from criticism, though. I don’t think determining whether a book is bad or good makes much sense, except when a book is really bad. Studying a book for the thoughts it forces us to think, however, is really the whole point. There’s plenty of books on my shelf I never stopped to think about once I finished them, and as I look at them now I sadly cannot recall a thing about them.

Right now I’m examining Eaters of the Dead, which is a rare reread for me. In this case I’m studying a modern narrative approach to medieval storytelling, since that will be my mission in an upcoming project. Speaking of which, if anyone reading this knows a lot about graphic novels, particularly the business side of them, do please let me know.