Gerard Jones's Blog, page 2

Whirlwinds and work

It's been a crazy stretch: London and Chicago, friends in from out of town, a film festival and more travel coming, a book coming out, multiple projects to juggle. In times like these, especially when I'm traveling, my mind seems to jump to a new level of nimbleness. I've had a series of insights into this book that I'm sure will make it better, that make me impatient to finish this thing so the world can see how brilliant it is.

But hardly any writing gets done. And in the calmer stretches where the writing does get done, my emotions settle and my brain narrows its focus. The book becomes once again a series of truculent sentences that refuse to work quite the way I want and long narrative stretches that I already have well enough in mind that bright insights and new directions would be only distractions. In those times I'll settle for a paragraph that makes sense and don't ask any more of the book than that it be coherent and reasonably interesting.

This is the constant paradox of this work, and I think much of the reason that books can take so much longer to write than I expected and so often seem in danger of not being finished at all. When I'm most in love with the book I don't actually move it forward. And the act of moving it forward is automatically a let down. It's so much easier to stay in the whirlwind, reveling in my epiphanies and looking forward to this book that will be so good when it's written someday.

There are those times, of course, when the laying down of sentences is in itself exciting, when the discovery of solutions to small narrative problems is nearly as much fun as those flashes of inspiration and quickly scribbled notes on the London tube. Those are nice times, but they don't show up on command. Mostly I just have to keep a bit of that fire of inspiration burning like a little pilot light as I push forward, remember that there will come a point, after enough hard work, when the words on the page will actually live up to the excitement of those insights snatched from the whirlwind.

Paper

Getting interviewed can be very educational, especially when it's an interview about a work in progress. Before I read a piece of this book at the Monthly Rumpus (see video below), Sona Avakian of the San Francisco Examiner interviewed me by email and asked some questions that got my thoughts turning in new directions: thoughts about the book, somewhat, but mostly thoughts about my relationship to the book. The whole interview is here, complete with fun excursions into other topics (the internet, Joseph Pulitzer, superhero comics). But I like looking at what poured out of me about the book itself.

I told Sona I was going to be reading a passage of the book "about how mass publishing swept over American culture like a flood—or a scourge—in the mid-19th century, and how we're still sort of playing out the culture wars that started in response...specifically about how sexual information was the most alarming part of the flood, and who rose up to fight back against the tide of intimate revelation." And she asked, "How did you get interested in publishing history?" Which I'd never quite asked myself. But I found myself saying this:

"It's kind of a weird route. I spent my thirties as a comic book writer, writing superheroes for Marvel and DC and creating my own odd comics for small publishers, but also writing history and criticism about comics. I'd been a huge comics geek in my teens and into my twenties, and a lot of my work in comics was about seeking my creative roots in old pulp. Marvel Comics basically saved me from depression and despair when I was 13, and for decades I was still intoxicated by the smell of the pulp and the look and feel of that cheap, yellowing paper. Most of the founding fathers of comic books were still around then, and I could go into an almost out-of-body state sitting and listening to their stories of the old days.”

Writing about old comics and pulps always seems to make my prose turn purple, because I followed that with: “I learned my dad had been nursed on the milk of wood pulp too—The Shadow gave him an island in a brutal '30s childhood. And then I ended up writing Shadow comic books, and I had this feeling of a river of four-color ink running down through the 20th century, pumping through the veins of generations of wounded kids.” (My friend Rachel said, "I can't work out whether this is poetical or pretentious." She was being polite.)

“So when I got out of writing comics I wrote a book called Men of Tomorrow, about the roots of comics in geekdom and sad adolescence and the violence of American life in the immigrant waves and the economic churnings of the past century. But writing that I caught on that comics were just white caps on a bigger wave—cheap paper and ink were a primary carrier of new ideas, information, values, and driving personal fantasies from before the Civil War to the TV era, and still to a great extent up until the Internet took over. Especially for the poor, the young, immigrants, and the adventurously socially mobile, magazines and newspapers both expressed and shaped people's expectations and self-descriptions.

"And there were wars fought over them: circulation wars where people got their heads bashed in and culture wars where people were driven to ruin and suicide or swept from obscurity to power.”

Sona asked what I meant by that last sentence, which is course is what I was hoping for. One thing you learn in comics is how to write hooks. “The first part's simple: In the early 20th Century, battles over newspaper distribution routes and control of corner newsstands were fought by local thugs who killed quite a few of their rivals. The newspapers played a huge role in the formation of organized crime in this country—Lucky Luciano and Dion O'Bannion got their start doing circulation for Hearst before Prohibition made them rich.

“Second part, I'm thinking mainly of two of the big figures in my book: Anthony Comstock, an obscure dry-goods salesman who became one of the most powerful men in American culture—the chief censor of both the federal and New York state governments—through his unrelenting battle against indecent publications in the late 19th century; and Bernarr Macfadden, a professional wrestler and bodybuilder from the Ozarks who became the most successful magazine publisher of the 1920s, and one whose influence is still being felt in mass culture, by fighting back against Comstock with health publications, sex-education books, and finally the genre of confessional and 'true story' magazines, which he basically created."

Then back to the main thread: “I started trying to get my head around that, to understand just how big this subterranean paper ocean had been, and then these past few years it's really been coming home to me that the age of paper is ending, or at least it's changing fundamentally. So I wanted to write a paean to it, and try to open up some partial revelation of what it had been—because, you know, you can't really see how your family's affecting you until you move out, and you can't really get what publishing meant until it's fading away—by looking hard at one part of it that hadn't been looked at very much. But one part that I discovered was really powerful, the way magazines drove this whole culture of talking about our private selves and talking about other people's private selves that we're still moving through."

At that point Sona asked me something that made a light go on: "Do you think paper publishing has hit rock bottom yet? Can we expect a resurgence soon?" I said, "I don't think paper has hit bottom by any means, but I also don't think it will be a quick or simple fall. There will be bumps and twists and surprises on the road down. Print on paper will never go away, because some people will love it and be willing to go to the effort and expense of keeping it alive. I mean, horses aren't extinct, right? But I'm not holding my breath for them to retake their position at the forefront of transportation, either."

She asked what I thought of the Panorama newspaper that McSweeney's published, and I said that I thought "it was really fun. It's exactly the kind of thing that subcultures produce when they're fading out of the mainstream—expensive, resplendent, nostalgic. Festive, not quotidian. Rodeos became show biz and an art form when the horse culture ended."

It hit me then that that's a large part of why I've opened the book wider and have become so energized to write it now: it's the book under the book. It's the story of some of the people in the era of mass print and their impact on the world. But the writing of it is also kind of a private celebration of an era that's now fading enough that we can start to see and describe the whole thing.

Rebirths

Part of me thinks it's cheesy to be applying Easter metaphors to my life just because it's Easter. Especially since this is the most un-Eastery Easter in my experience. It's the first year my kid's been totally uninterested in egg-dying and chocolate rabbits (he's just eager to get the comic book convention in town), so his mom and I decided just to do our separate things. She's at a bead and gem show, and I'm contemplating the dandelion plants shooting up out of the lawn and wondering if I really have the strength to fight with them today. And it's gray. And drizzly. In my bones it just doesn't feel like Easter. Not California Easter, anyway.

But maybe that's why the metaphor keeps coming to mind, in a muted way. And since I'm thinking about writing in order to avoid thinking about the lawn (which is a nice reversal of my usual avoidance, I have to say), I'm looking at how this book died twice and both times came back. Not that it ever truly died, not to the extent that I'd decided I couldn't write it and was planning how to pay back my advance, although both times I seriously considered that. But twice the original idea proved to be untenable, and I found myself unable to work on it or figure out what to do about it.

The first rebirth was a narrowing-down: within the broad story of Bernarr Macfadden's life and magazine empire, what I found I really cared about telling was the specific story of True Story magazine and the creation of confessional media. That's when I changed the title from whatever it used to be to The Undressing of America, got my first massive contract extension (thank you, Eric), and launched the draft that I was wrestling with when I started this blog. That version didn't die as dramatically as the first one, but it was dragging and limping and refusing to tell me what was wrong, and then during the summer, early in the period I stopped updating this blog, it just ceased to move. I walked away from it for a few weeks, talked to some friends at the Writers Grotto about it, and then turned around to look at it from a distance.

The second rebirth was an opening up: because the thing I suddenly noticed was the title, which I liked, but it occurred to me that I wasn't really writing to that title. I was writing about a tiny piece of the undressing of America, but there was a lot more I wanted to say about the battles between censors and publishers in those years, about the emergence of this whole "culture of undressing" that we've been exploring for the last century. I wanted to talk about how America got itself so overdressed in the first place and what happened in the early 20th Century to change it. Bernarr Macfadden, I found, was still in the center of the story I wanted to tell, but there were other people who had to be in there, especially the nemesis of his early years, the grand high censor of American culture, Anthony Comstock. Then the book started to roll. And so far it's still rolling, faster and further than it did either time before.

I'm very well aware, sitting here alone on a holiday with a terribly gloomy sky staring back at me through the windows, that this version may die too. I don't think so, but I have to allow it to be. But it dawns on me that I've gotten a lot out of these deaths and rebirths. A better book, better skills, a couple of personal anecdotes I can use in the class I teach on "Finding the Story." And it's actually been kind of fun, when it wasn't horrific. So that's my cheesy metaphor for today: don't fear death, because things come back, usually better. Books can, anyway.

Happy Easter. My kid just called and I've got to go pick him up at the convention center.

What it sounds like

I had the chance to read a chunk of this book in front of a live and, thank God, largely inebriated audience in San Francisco a few weeks ago. I could feel myself being a bit nervous and uncertain, because this whole approach to the book really hadn't been released from the confines of my own head yet. But I liked what I heard, mostly. This felt like a story I want to tell about and can do a good job telling. And I liked the fact that the story I'm telling is largely about the age of mass print, but I'm telling it out loud to a web-generation crowd in a city at the vanguard of the post-print era. Bobbing on the white caps of history.

Tell me if this is neurotic

I've been blogging less lately about the trouble I'm having writing this book because I'm having a lot less trouble writing the book. But I feel guilty about neglecting my blog so I keep thinking I should make myself put the book down so I can blog about having trouble writing it. And even if I don't actually put the book down my anxiety about neglecting the blog makes it harder to write the book. So here I am now, blogging about my guilt and anxiety about not blogging. Because I'm writing my book.

Maybe I should just start posting excerpts.

The Hard Road

My son just finished his sophomore year of high school. Something for any kid to feel pleased about, but for Nicky it was a triumph: for nearly the entire year, starting in October, he's been hammered by severe migraines. He wakes up with them, usually two bad ones a week, usually another one or two not quite as bad. The bad ones come with intense nausea, dizziness, agonizing sensitivity to light and sound, sometimes blurred vision and stomach cramps. Not to forget about the headache that feels like a spike being driven through his skull. Nearly all of them are during the school week—stress seems to be his main trigger, and he goes to a demanding school. It's also a school that puts a tremendous emphasis on showing up for class. It's built around two-hour seminar classes with ten or fewer kids in the room, so there's not much room for just doing work at home and dropping it off. He could be getting straight As in schoolwork but if he missed too many classes he wouldn't get credit for the course.

But he made it. He dragged himself in white as a sheet with big opaque shades protecting him from the light. He got to classes propping himself on the walls with one hand so the dizziness didn't knock him down in the hall. He pushed through the embarrassment and anxiety of being a kid with an unusual impairment at an age when the last you want to be is unusual or impaired. He kissed off everything but schoolwork for weeks. There were small disasters, too, like the homeopathic remedy that made him sicker than usual (the doctor said it should make him better after it made him worse, but after a week of worse he was about to get kicked out of the math class he'd been fighting so hard to pass, so we never found out).

But he made it. With little drama and almost no self-pity, with just a stubborn determination to do it and some unspoken faith in himself that he could make himself succeed, he passed his classes and finished the year. Somehow he even managed to act in the school drama festival in May. He showed courage and discipline at 16 that I'm still struggling for at 51.

My Fathers Day present was just seeing him happy and relaxed, doing his own thing, enjoying the summer moment and not dwelling either on what he'd just accomplished or what he'd suffered for months. He has an instinctive steadiness and humility that I remember seeing in my father. (They do say these things skip a generation.) He didn't do anything but make me an e-card, and I don't care. He gives me more just by talking about the song he's recording or the stupid video he just found on YouTube than any card ever could.

I will admit I had a role to play in his success. So did Jennie, although because she's the 8-to-5er and I'm the one with the flexible schedule, it was mostly my job. For eight months I would wake him up, would reach into his befogged brain and have to drag his consciousness up from the relative bliss of sleep into the stabbing light of awareness. I'd talk to him through his mumbling and moanings and try to figure out how sick he was, whether it was a day he could be left to get himself up mostly on his own or one when I'd have to prop him up and help lift him out of bed or one when we'd have to give up and let him lie there in misery while another absence got added to his school ledger. I kept the symptoms log and supervised the endless and futile medical investigations. I ran some interference with the school administration. But it was a supporting role. I wasn't the one with the pain.

I'll admit that my writing slowed down during those months. I'd like to think I had the courage and discipline (see above) to sit right down and start cranking out my book after two hours of helping Nicky fight through his misery and finally getting him to school, but I learned I didn't. Sometimes it was hard not to just sit there staring out the window wondering how he was doing, or go back to all those online migraine sites, or just go back to bed, until it was nearly time to pick him up. (Maybe it's a measure of my wavering discipline and courage that I rarely made him take the bus when he'd gone to school sick and dizzy. Or maybe that's just what being a parent means.) I know it wasn't just the election and financial issues that kept me from doing much of anything on this book from October until a couple of months ago. But that's not a productive line of thought. Once I was whining about how hard it was to be fully functional and optimistic with a sick kid when my friend Ethan Watters said, "You not only can be functional and optimistic when you have a sick kid—that's when you have to be." I need to reflect back to him the strength he's showing me, and I need to apply that strength not just to the hours I'm helping him get to school but to the rest of my life.

I keep thinking about M. Scott Peck's opening line in The Road Less Traveled: "Life is difficult." Peck reminds me that that's one of life's great truths, although it's one we don't like to embrace. He reminds me that the road through life's difficulty is discipline, and that discipline springs from love. Love of others, love of self, love of growth, love of the world, love of this hard life itself. It's what my son has been learning. Nicky's learning it earlier than I wish he had to, but I believe it will serve him well. And it's what he's been teaching me.

Changing light

When I woke up this morning the gray sky sat low and heavy on my neighborhood, and I felt sluggish and depressed and headachy and unable to stir up the energy to write. Email weather, that's what it was. Then in the afternoon the sun broke through. The stucco gleamed, the windows flashed‚ Frisco wore her finery. Instantly I was inspired: to go to the Post Office, to go the bank, to buy an iced coffee and sit in the sun. I ran into my neighbor Kevin and talked to him about this exciting book I'm writing. My friend Molly walked by and I told her that Kevin and I were talking about my new book. On the actual book I did squat.

Then came the magic hour. The light turned deep saffron, the shadows stretched long, and my imagination awoke. It's always been that way for me, as if daylight is a translucent wall blocking me off from dimly glimpsed ideas and enthusiasm, and as dusk comes the wall thins and thins until it vanishes. Suddenly I was eager to write. Too bad I had to make dinner.

I did actually get some work done, after dinner, as the sky turned dark. I had a good time with the passage where Bernarr and Mary Macfadden cross the Atlantic on the Lusitania, fleeing war in Europe and dreaming of conquests in America. But after a little more than an hour I'm already hearing bed time's gentle nag. I remember those days before parenthood when my nighttime inspirations would sweep me along for hours. That's how my best work days were, kicking in near sunset, rolling right through a primitive dinner and for hours after, sometimes nearly 'til dawn. Not a schedule you can stick to when you've got to start waking your kid up at 6:30.

Is there some way to reset biorhythms? Or some way to make professional discipline stronger than nature? You'd think by now I'd have figured out how to bring writing and real life into concert, but maybe the work itself is so opposed to daylight reality that it just can't happen.

Ionized!

The black clouds mounted high and the wind howled in from the west and I wanted to write. Does anyone else know this, the weather that fills us like a muse? It's the negative ions, I'm told, some phenomenon associated with the approach of a precipitous front, but it feels more romantic in the moment. Yesterday, on the other hand, I could not write and could not think. Yesterday we were in San Francisco's "summer fog pattern," a state as bleak and boring as the name. Gray sky pressing down, unmoving air, a wet chill in your shirtsleeves that somehow becomes a muggy sweat as soon as you put on a jacket. And then there are the sunny days that are so rare in this town: pale blue with a snapping wind most often, but sometimes bright and hot. Those days fill me with inspiration as surely as the black clouds, though unfortunately not inspiration to sit and pour out words. They take me outside and fill me with remembrance of things I absolutely must get done before I can write.

When I was a young writer I was mysteriously drawn to the North Sea, and would picture myself holing up for a year in someplace like the north of Scotland or the Shetland Islands to write my books. I finally understand why: it was the weather. Since I've chosen to live in San Francisco I'm grateful for having at least a shred of discipline. If I depended on my rainstorm muse, and her negative ions, I'd only work about twelve days a year.

The Romance of Paper

The San Francisco Chronicle just finished a 144-day retrospective of its first 144 years. It was fascinating and fun, but it also begged a question: why celebrate 144 years? Why not wait for 150? Is there some special, local significance to 144?

No. It's just that the Chronicle may not survive to 150. It's not even guaranteed to make 145.

The death of print surely isn't as imminent as many people are expecting. Cultural phenomena never really die quite as quickly or completely as they're predicted to (with the possible exception of harem pants). But the fact that the Chronicle, one of the dozen or so biggest newspapers in the country, the newspaper I grew up on, is essentially running its own obituary has driven home to me that an era really is passing. The transmission of urgent information via ink and pulp was just a step, just a bridge, just a moment in history.

That hadn't quite sunk in when I started working on this book, but it's coming clear now that one thing I'm writing about is the zenith of paper media, the top of the parabola when newspapers and magazines were the most powerful sources of knowledge, ideas, and change in this country. The story of the newspaper moguls—Hearst, Pulitzer, McCormick, Patterson—has been told many times. A lot's been written about the shiny-paged magazines that set the intellectual and cultural tone of modern America, and ever more is being written about the cheap, fat fiction magazines known as "pulps." I get to touch on those stories, but I also get to plunge into terrain that's rarely been explored—the strange and sometimes heroic story of a group of publishers who drove a wedge into the edifice of old American culture and pried until it cracked wide open.

In 1920, when the first tabloid and the first "true story" magazine were beginning to take off, radio was still experimental and the young movies still mostly played it safe. New ideas about politics, sex, religion, health, and ways of life had to be disseminated on paper. Old distribution monopolies were breaking down, maverick distributors were opening the market to wild experimentation, and the newsstands that popped up like mushrooms on the street corners and in the smoke shops and candy stores of American cities became bazaars of new images and stories and social movements. Things we take for granted now, like movie-star gossip and pop psychology and inspiring tales of personal courage and pictures of women in swimsuits, were created then, nearly all at once. And they changed the way people saw the world. The way they connected with one another. Magazines were the cutting edge of modern culture.

All of which I get to write about. Right now, standing at the brink of the ink-and-paper era, looking back over decades-deep piles of pulp. Another reason that procrastinating on this book may be turning out to be the best thing I could have done, because when I started the thing I hadn't realized yet how close to that brink we were.

It's unnerving to watch the Age of Print fading. But there is a sweet, sad joy to looking back on those forms that seemed like they would last forever.

Brave new story

From the spring of 1973, when I was not quite sixteen and got it in my head that I wanted to make my living as a writer, until just about a year ago I functioned within the same basic story of how you make it in this business: You write or propose a book, send it to your agent in New York who sends it to editors, get an advance, revise or finish the thing, wait a while, hope for prestigious reviews, go on your book tour and move on from there.

I lived that story from the time I started sending immature novels to agents in 1976 through that day in August 1981 when an agent—a real New York agent!—consented to represent The Beaver Papers, and that day eight months later when an editor—a real New York editor!—decided to buy it, and on through my sale of The Undressing of America to FSG a couple of years ago. There were times I couldn't make that story work for me, and times my frustration with trying to please those New York gatekeepers nearly made me want to give up on books. But the story always brought me back. It had been the defining narrative of the writer's life since before I'd come along—in my twenties I liked anecdotes about Scott Fitzgerald's dealings with Harold Ober and Maxwell Perkins—and I assumed it would go on being so for the rest of my career and beyond. Even when I got into the National Lampoon and comic books and screenplays because I couldn't crash those gates in New York, I was still always trying to come up with book ideas that would interest agents and editors. And when I started to sell books more regularly, I said to myself, "This is it. I can live the story now."

Now, in just the last year, I've seen that story coming unraveled. It's still common, of course, and it may still be the story I live by for a while. When Undressing is done I'll send my agent a proposal for my next book and hope she sells it too to FSG, or some other big New York house. But it's becoming increasingly clear that it's not the way. The book business is shrinking, probably faster than anyone wants to admit yet. The latest scuttlebutt is that Borders Books is running on debt and when its current loan comes due next April it will, unless there's some drastic upturn in retail book sales in the next few months, have to close its doors. The loss of an outlet that big will take more than a few publishers down with it. Meanwhile, purchases of electronic books are skyrocketing, and channels for distributing those are taking forms that look more iTunes or YouTube than any book publisher.

I've been hearing more writer friends than ever before talking about how unhappy they are with their agents and how badly they want to find an agent who knows how to sell them, and bit by bit we're all starting to piece together that it isn't the agents that are the problem, it's the market. Lately the hallway conversations at the Writers Grotto, where I share office space with about thirty other practitioners of the same trade, are less and less about how to find the right agent or publisher, and more and more about whether it makes sense to look into BookSource or Lulu or Scribd or the many other variants on what used to be the scorned netherworld of self publishing.

There's a part of me that likes the adventure of finding new ways to get my words read and new ways to make a living, a part of me that likes the idea of being free of the usual New York gatekeepers. And there's a part of me that's glad I still have irons in other fires, in case books don't turn out to be the main work of my autumn years after all. But there's a part of me that just grieves for the story. As infuriating as the tastes and whims and arbitrary demands of agents and editors could be, as much as I resented their control of the writer's life and wished there were other ways to sell my words, I guess I took more comfort than I ever knew from the continuity of the business, its rituals and rules, its punishments and triumphs. That continuity linked me to my younger self with his wild ideas of "being a writer" and to the long-gone writers who filled my imagination. Print-on-demand and digital downloads may well prove to be lucrative and liberating. They're just not the story I set out to tell with my life.