HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Alexander Portnoy!
It's hard to believe, but
Portnoy's Complaint is now 40 years
old. That makes its protagonist a ripe old 77. How old's that make
you, mamelah?
Here's something else hard to believe. The book that changed the way
an entire generation
 thought of liver is virtually unknown to
today's 30-somethings. (That's Alex's age in the book.)
I first read Portnoy
when
it came out, when Philip Roth was a young and rising star. That was,
uh, 40 years ago. I next read it just last month. Checked it out of
my local library for airplane reading. Lite, whimsical, Mem'ry Lane,
airplane reading.
Nononono. On the plane, by the bottom of page 2, I was ready to
stand and salute. It is brilliant. Bold. Ballsy. Astonishing. Around
page 70, Roth does a three-page riff on what it's like to be a
center fielder. How you walk. How you call for the ball. How you
casually pound your mitt. How you make the tough look easy. Halfway
through it, I realized that this was exactly what he was doing with
writing. Making the impossible look easy and somehow sustaining it
for 274 pages. As a writer, I worship at his temple.
Portnoy is, to me, one of the big four: hugely important
novels with a huge sexy component. The other three? What's your
pick?
OK, here's mine.
Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lolita and Fear of Flying.
Great stuff. Changed culture. Advanced literature. I wanna re-read
them all. If you're tempted, I suggest you, too, start with Portnoy. Roth holds nothing back, goes for the jugular, makes
the strings behind what purports to be a stream-of-consciousness
rant to a shrink as invisible as a moonless night.
If you were civilians, not writers, I'd add that it's not for the
easily offended. He's hard on Jews. Christians don't come off too
well either. Blacks and whites don't exactly shine. There's a lot
of sex. And there is that liver...
Enjoy, mamelah. God knows, I did. I worship at his temple.
jules
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Tom Lazarus, screenwriter and author of
SECRETS OF FILM WRITING,
asks,
"What's with the Lifeguard?"
It's a tribute to my favorite
union-organizing song, Miner's Lifeguard. Here are some of
the lyrics:
Miner's life
is like a sailor's.
'Board a ship to cross the waves.
Ev'ry day his life's in danger,
Still he ventures being brave.
Watch the rocks, they're falling daily.
Careless miners always fail.
Keep your hand upon the dollar
And your eye upon the scale.
CHORUS:
Union miners stand together,
Heed no operator's tale,
Keep your hand upon the dollar,
And your eye upon the scale.
You've been
docked and docked, my boys,
You've been loading two to one;
What have you to show for working
Since this mining has begun?
Overalls and cans for rockers,
In your shanties, sleep on rails.
Keep your hand upon the dollar
And your eye upon the scale.
In conclusion,
bear in memory,
Keep the password in your mind:
God provides for every nation
When in union they combine.
Stand like men and linked together,
Victory for you'll prevail,
Keep your hand upon the dollar
And your eye upon the scale.
If you want it reverberating through your brain as it has been
through mine since forever, drop 99 cents on iTunes, and you'll be
singing it too. And while I still don't exactly know what "cans for
rockers" means, I love the song... and I see parallels between miners'
lives and writers'.
No, we aren't faced with falling
rocks, just falling incomes. Like miners in the years before unions,
we produce the goods and others profit from them. Who's to blame?
Rapacious publishers? Heartless capitalism? Nah. I blame us.
Our poverty is our own fault; with
the rare exception of the striking screenwriters, writers rarely
have the patience to organize, the solidarity to cooperate or the
spine to negotiate. Stagehands are better at getting paid for their
labor. So are nurses. So are miners.
Occasionally, writer's lives and
miner's lives actually do intersect. That photo is of me at the
entrance to a lead mine in northern Idaho. Once inside that dark
dungeon, I wasn't the least tempted to trade in my iMac for a pick
and shovel.
Returning to the world aboveground
(in a way) and the subject of ML2, Portnoy's Complaint,
here's a note from Michel Beaudry, of Whistler, British Columbia.
Michel's a ski writer who has spent the past many years trying to
build a mountain-dwellers' community based on shared stories. He
writes: "I loved Portnoy. I loved his mid-century angst. But for me,
my top three are Camus' The Plague, Kesey's Sometimes A
Great Notion and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. (Paul
Bowles' The Sheltering Sky comes a very close fourth.) These
four writers truly taught me what it meant to tell a story. And they
weren't afraid to take risks."
Write on, brothers and sisters,
write on.
jules
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 IT LOOKS LIKE CONRAD
"Call
me Connie" Black is on his way to jail. The poster child for press
lord/robber baron/reverse Robin Hood/litigious sonofabitch/journalists'
nemesis has finally been convicted of swindling shareholders out of
millions and is, theoretically at least, headin' for the hoosegow.
For six-and-a-half years.
Am I pleased? Oh, verily. I am
writer, hear me gloat. After all, this is a guy who goes swanning
around in his Rolls, who takes the corporate jet to vacation on Bora
Bora, who lives like a royal -- who is a royal, having got
himself a seat in the House of Lords -- and who pays his ink-stained journos shit. Who prides himself on paying his journos shit.
I mean, Black's an old-style press
baron. Among the many others, he owns or owned: the London Daily Telegraph,
Jerusalem Post and hundreds of smaller
papers across Canada and the US. He is/was worth roughly $300
million, and he is/was starving his writers.
So, yes, yes, I am pleased to see
Lord Black eating a bit of shit, himself; that I yam.
Ah, but do I blame him for the
lousy pay and awful contracts he foisted on the journalists he's
treated as his personal serfs?
Oh, no. For that, I blame us. If they handed out jail sentences for
self-destruction, there wouldn't be room in prison for Connie. The
cells would be overflowing with writers who couldn't wait to sign
contracts that would consign their families to poverty while
building Lord Black his Palm Beach mansion.
In the last WRITER'S LIFEGUARD, I
spoke of the similarities between the lives of writers and miners.
Maybe it seemed a stretch when you read it. But substitute 'copper
baron' or 'coal baron' for 'press baron and you'll see there ain't
much difference.
So this Christmas, drink a toast
to Lord Black. And this New Year's Eve, make a resolution not to
impoverish your family by signing pauper's contracts.
Remember
Older's Law #37.
Which reads:
Even when
it's nicely engraved,
decline any invitation
to participate in your own funeral.
jules
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A PERFECT SET-UP
IT MATTERS NOT IF you're a poet or
a playwright, whether you write fiction or faction, kiddy lit or TV
scripts -- whatever you write, you know about setups.
Whether it's a clue or a club, a
worm or a pistol, a half-told joke or a half-sung song, you've left
something dangling in the lede, in the opening graph, in the first
stanza/first act/Chapter One that you're gonna capitalize on later
on. It's one of the privileges of writerhood. Comes with your Poetic
License.
And you know you do it oh-so-well.
I've just found somebody who does
it better.
She's PAULA KAMEN, and the book
she does it in is IT'S ALL IN MY HEAD.
 Kamen writes in the persona of the
smart Jewish girl who got better grades than you in college. I think
it's her real-life persona. She's witty but restrained, erudite but
polite, and endlessly, endlessly patient.
For 224 pages, I can't remember
her once saying 'damn' or 'hell.' For 224 pages, she's a nice Jewish
girl describing a horrible, unending headache that, despite all her
smarts and perseverance and despite all that medicine and
alternative medicine have to offer, she just cannot shake. Never
once during all these pages, during endless encounters with medical
specialists, acupuncturists, spiritual healers, quacks, charlatans,
money grubbers, True Believers and highly trained idiots does she
lose her cool.
Which, as a writer, made me admire
this line on page 225 all the more:
"AFTER ALMOST A DECADE OF THE
HEADACHE, the time of reckoning had come. Despite the power of my
growing management skills, and after my exhaustive search for a
cure, I finally realized the worst had come true: I had done all I
could to get rid of that motherfucker, and I'd lost."
224 pages of restraint, followed
by one (1) quiet "motherfucker."
Now that's what I call a
setup!
jules
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"ARE
YOU KIDDING? IT'S 'CAUSE WE'RE SCUM!"
"That
must be it. Otherwise, I can't for the life of me figure out why more
writers don't become travel writers."
"Jules, what planet are you from? Travel writers are seen as the scum of
the journalism world. We're lowlifes. Sellouts. Losers, Jules, losers.
We're seen as losers!"
I pondered this news as I sipped the very nice New Zealand pinot noir
and took another nibble  of the dainty lamb chop the waitress had handed
me. At this gathering for travel writers in the penthouse of a swanky
San Francisco hotel, I'd just been invited to tour a few swanky Colorado
hotels during ski season. "Hmmm," I said. "Then let's do everything we
can to keep it that way."
Ah, but not completely.
For I had one other thing going for me (and when I say "I" and "me" I
really mean "we" and "us:" my writer-photographer wife Effin jumped on
this ship right beside me.) The name of the ship: the SS Travel Writer.
Travel writing is what allows us to live, however briefly, like princes
of the realm on pauper's wages. Travel writing lets us jet around like
movie stars without the hangers-on, like billionaires without the
lawyers.
Travel writing has introduced me to all kinds of folks I'd never have
met on my own, some of whom I've stayed friends decades later. Folks
like...
...the Newfoundland guide who got us wilderness-lost on skis (and who,
despite that, is still a buddy), the Tokyo woman who makes her living
curling eyelashes, the Maori hunting guide turned wild-food forager.
Then there's the English noble who owns a Caribbean island (hated him on
sight), the Hawaiian artist turned academic, the San Francisco Italian
restaurateur who turned out to be the cousin of the Vermont Italian
restaurateur...
And then there are the moments. Kayaking with humpback whales in
Newfoundland. Birding on an island preserve in New Zealand. Swimming
with rays in the Virgin Islands. Exploring an ancient Hawaiian cave, a
hidden Vermont pond, a struggling Florida town, the most gorgeous beach
in the Caribbean.
And the events. The Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, the Tennessee Williams
Festival in New Orleans, the Shellfish Festival on Prince Edward Island,
the gloriously musical Winter Festival in Newfoundland. Even the Maple
Festival, the Apple Pie Festival and the Granite Festival in small
Vermont towns.
If that's the punishment for being the scum of writerhood, I say, bring
on the scum! And could I have just one more of those delightful lamb
chops, m'dear?
jules
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I am
Shiva, the God of Death
At least
when it comes to airlines, I am. I write for airlines. When you pull the
inflight magazine out of the seat a quarter-inch from your knee, odds
aren't too bad that my byline will be in it. Airline writing been the
source of some income, some pride and considerable pleasure.
Except for one thing. Airlines I write for have the unfortunate habit of
plunging into the sea. Not literally. I'm not literally Shiva, the God
of Death. I may be Shiva, the God of Chapter 11.
My most recent victim is -- was -- Aloha Airlines, which on Friday
accepted an article of mine and on Sunday went belly up.
I feel terrible for the 1,900 employees who are out of work. I feel
awful for the editor who kindly -- some might say, foolishly -- accepted
my piece. But of course, I feel worst for me. That article was designed
specifically for Aloha, and there's probably not another outlet on the
planet that would buy it. What about my needs?
If only it were the first time. Or the second. But no, I have a history
of sinking the hand that feeds me. For -- now it can be revealed -- it was
I, not Carl Icahn, who put TWA down. Sure, he systematically stripped
them of their assets for his own profit, but that began in 1985. The
airline didn't fold until 2001, one short year after I was hired as
their inflight humor columnist.
Not so funny now, is it, boys?
Since then, I've killed off airlines, or the contracts of the custom
publishers who publish the airline magazines, with some regularity.
Aloha is my latest victim, but not my greatest.
Tower Air was my great triumph. I'm pretty sure it was Tower -- time has
passed, and it was kind of a rush assignment anyway. The inflight's
publishers called: "Can you and Effin get down to Puerto Rico next week?
We need a photo essay on the Karst Country.”
"Absolutely."
"You know what Karst Country is?"
"Absolutely." (BEAT) "No, not a clue."
"Limestone caves, etc. Look it up."
"I already am."
We flew to New York, jumped on Tower Air (or whatever airline it
actually was), and flew to San Juan. I wrote a pretty good story, if I
do say so. Effin took spectacular shots. Raced back to San Juan.
Returned rental car. Went to boarding gate. Guess what happened next.
Right. While we were in the cave, the airline folded. They had to fly us
back on American. Took me eight long years to re-sell that story. But to
Shiva, the God of Chapter 11, time means nothing. Nothing!
jules
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Making the Bastards Pay
I'm not one who regards
editors as bastards. I yam an editor. I try not to be a bastard.
Sometimes I even succeed.
Ditto publishers.
They're the ones who feed my family, and I don't go around biting the
hand that feeds.
But. But the ones who
don't pay... ah, now yer talkin' bastards. And if there's one thing I hate
worse than bastards who rip off writers, it's the impotent rage writers
feel when we can't get our money from said bastards.
OK, that's the last
time I'll refer to illegitimate offspring today. From here on out, it's
about how to collect what's owed.
My ski-writer friend
Steve, who has four or five brothers, swears that his solution is to
visit the editorial office with his brothers in tow. They conspicuously
look around for a while; then the biggest brother quietly says, "You got
a lot of expensive equipment here. We wouldn't want to see any of it
damaged, y'understand? Please pay my brother what you owe him. Now."
That might not be for
everyone. Multi-purpose writer David Goodman pulled one of my all-time
favorite tricks when he was living in Boston. The publisher -- one of the
few Black publishers in Boston -- wasn't paying his writers but was
throwing a party for advertisers. By mistake, he'd somehow sent
David the guest list. David sent him a five-word message; it read:
"Guess who's coming to dinner?"
The checks were
delivered before the party began.
When a magazine
publisher said he couldn't pay me the couple of thou he owed, I knew he
was nearly broke. So I put him on a schedule. And to his credit, he
stuck to it, paying me a couple of hundred each month until the debt was
very nearly paid off. By then, he was broke, and I figured we
were close enough to even anyway.
There was one debt -- a
big one -- I could not collect. I'd been promised an advance on an
outdoors book, but when I delivered the ms, the publisher decided that
the words they'd originally loved, they now hated... and were thus under
no obligation to pay me a brass farthing. Then they stopped answering my
letters. And calls. Can you spell impotent rage?
So I contacted the
National Writers Union, that at the time was a righteous organization of
which I was a paid-up member. It took the NWU's Phil Mattera, may his
tribe increase, less than 24 hours to get them to pay up. I donated 10%
on the spot to the union; without them I'd still be stuck in wrath and
dearth.
But the best revenge is
success. A year or two later, I re-sold the book... and thus collected
that advance not once, but twice.
I'm no longer a member
of the union, so these days I have to be even wilier on my own. Here's
what I recommend you do when you're Payless in Peoria:
1.
Always, always chase down that money. If you have to, threaten to
kill the publisher's dog, but never let him disappear with your
hard-earned cash.
2.
Your best protection is prevention. Don't let yourself fall into
debt to a publisher. Stop that before it starts. Go on strike until the
check arrives... and doesn't bounce.
3.
If you can't get the, uh, gentleperson to pay, your best strategy
is to threaten to tell all and sundry, with a 24-hour deadline. That
means advertisers, printers, warehousers, everyone vaguely associated
with the rag. Inform the publisher that if the check isn't hand
delivered to your doorstep in 24 hours, at 24 hours and 1 minute, the
email blast goes out.
4
At 24 hours and 10 minutes, the press release goes
out ... to the media. And, being a media person, yourself, you have a
long, long reach and a big, fat Rolodex. See you in print, playah.
5
If you're still not paid, make certain they do go out.
Here's what it comes down to. Our best weapon isn't
wealth or lawyers or guys in dark alleys. Our best weapon is our
writerly skills. When you can't get paid for your honest work, this is
the time to use 'em.
Love to hear your experience and wisdom in this
pain-filled part of the writer's life.
jules
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FIRST
THINGS FIRST, STAY CALM
I've just read what could be the most innovative, paradigm-shifting
novel ever.
It''s The Raw Shark Texts by English author Steven Hall. It's his
first novel.
What's it like? Moby Dick, The Magus, Snow Crash and the film
Memento, all in one. Oh, and Jaws -- note the title.
Plus techniques and ideas not found in any of them, and, as far as I
know, not anywhere else, either.
The genre? Mix sci-fi, cyberpunk, character-driven, action-driven and
what I'd call barrier-breaker -- this may be a new genre, and it may just
be a genre of one. Man oh man -- it's big!
The protagonist -- and don't worry, I don't spoil plots and endings -- is
Eric Sanderson, a guy who wakes up one day with no memory of his life
before that moment. He finds a note. Here's the note:
First things first,
stay calm.
If you are reading
this, I'm not around anymore. Take the phone and speed dial 1. Tell the
woman who answers that you are Eric Sanderson. The woman is Dr Randle.
She'll understand what has happened and you will be able to see her
straight away. Take the car keys and drive the yellow Jeep to Dr.
Randle's house. If you haven't found it yet, there's a map in the
envelope – it isn't too far and it's not hard to find.
Dr Randle will be
able to answer all your questions. It's very important that you go
straight away. Do not pass go. Do not explore. Do not collect two
hundred pounds. The house keys are hanging from a nail on the banister
at the bottom of the stairs, don't forget them.
With regret and also
hope,
The First Eric
Sanderson
Thus begins the tale…
In telling it, along with powerful writing, Hall uses computer-generated
images, templates of keyboards and -- boldly, bravely, audaciously --
blank pages. This ain't artsy-fartsy or showing how out-there he is;
every bold technique he employs advances the story. Some story -- some
book!
There are many ways to judge the power of a book. Here's mineL
If a book is so engrossing that you sneak in daytime reads, the you miss
your subway stop, that you shamelessly like to your spouse who's trying
desperately to sleep, that, "I'll just finish this chapter," you have
yourself a winner.
The Raw Shark Texts passed all these tests plus the test of awe.
I was awestruck. Let me know if you are, too.
jules
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Jules rants from New Zealand, 2008
In New Zealand, one of my rants on
one of my least favorite subjects has hit the blogways. If you love or
hate
"Cultural Appropriation,"
read on:
http://beattiesbookblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/bad-words-bad-art-bad-bad-bad-by-jules.html
Jules' Twitter page (novelcrimes):
(Scroll using the blue oval.)
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