Bill Steigerwald's Blog, page 8
July 1, 2013
Talking & Pitching ‘Dogging Steinbeck’
My debut solo speaking performance on behalf of my book “Dogging Steinbeck” occurred without a hitch or a lawsuit Wednesday night in the lovely Toledo suburb of Perrysburg. Thanks to the promotional efforts of Richard Baranowski of the Way Library, I was written up nicely beforehand by Arielle Stambler and in a local paper by Baranowski. About 60 multi-diverse humans attended, all lovely, all eager to learn about how I discovered that “Travels With Charley” was a literary fraud. No one threw anything or even booed. And 12 people forked over real money for my book.
June 23, 2013
Old praise from an English professor
In the fall 2011 issue of the Steinbeck Review, Tom Barden, a smart and sensible English professor and dean at the University of Toledo, reviewed two 2010 “Travels With Charley”-centric books. Barden, the quarterly’s editor and the editor of the 2012 book “Steinbeck in Vietnam: Dispatches from the War,” looked at “Long Way Home: On the Trail of Steinbeck’s America” by Bill Barich and “Travels with Max: In Search of Steinbeck’s America Fifty Years Later by Gregory Zeigler. First, however, professor Barden validated my discoveries about the veracity and honesty of “Charley,” as I reported them in the April 2011 Reason magazine article, “Sorry, Charley.” He also said that Steinbeck’s serial inventions were no surprise to anyone, since he was a novelist. Here’s what Barden wrote in the Review: I was not particularly drawn to the premise of Barich’s and Zeigler’s books. Delving into 21st century America’s soul via Steinbeck’s 1961 Travels with Charley struck me as too contrived. But readers of Steinbeck Review deserve an appraisal of the resulting volumes, especially in light of Bill Steigerwald’s “Sorry, Charley” essay in the April 2011 issue of Reason magazine, so here goes. First, I should weigh in on Steigerwald. His research into motel bills, restaurant checks, and private letters made what I found to be a thoroughly convincing case that Steinbeck’s narrative in Travels with Charley in Search of America did not reflect anything close to his actual trip. Steigerwald presented ample documentation that Steinbeck spent most of his time in posh motor hotels eating good dinners with his wife Elaine, who was with him much more than he let on. The responses to Steigerwald’s revelations varied from incensed (Steinbeck’s daughter-in-law), to defensive (Steinbeck scholars Jay Parini and Susan Shillinglaw), to sympathetic toward Steinbeck (travel writer Paul Theroux). My response was basically–so what? I was reminded of John Steinbeck IV’s comment about his father’s book in The Other Side of Eden: Life with John Steinbeck. Speaking for his brother Thom and himself, he wrote “we were convinced that he never talked to any of those people in Travels with Charley. He just sat in his camper and wrote all that shit. He was too shy. He was really frightened of people who saw through him. He couldn’t have handled that amount of interaction. So the book is actually a great novel.” (p. 151) Exactly. Oh my, he invented most of the content of Travels with Charley…zoot alors! Not only that, people, he paid for stories from Mexicans when he worked at the Spraekel’s Sugar factory in Salinas as a teenager and used them later—like that one about a nursing mother who saves a starving old man by breastfeeding him. To me, the most interesting aspect of Steigerwald’s research and the ensuing controversy was the clear assumption by everybody concerned that Steinbeck’s book is still worth discussing after fifty years. I think Travels with Charley does still matter. But I don’t think it matters because of its veracity (or lack thereof), or its ideas, or its insights about American culture. To me, it still matters because it is packed from beginning to end with terrific and terrifically idiosyncratic writing at the sentence level. Pick it up and start reading randomly and you’ll see what I mean. You’ll run into passages like this one about the giant [...]
June 20, 2013
‘Dogging Steinbeck’ hits Toledo
April 9, 2013
A perfect review of “Dogging Steinbeck”
The 27th review of my book on Amazon.com — by a woman named Judy who grew up in Montana — is perfect. Nicely written, smart and sensible, it’s a fair and balanced assessment by a Steinbeck fan who wasn’t blinded by her love of “Travels With Charley.” Valuable Addition to American Road Trip Literature, April 8, 2013 Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?) This review is from: Dogging Steinbeck: How I went in search of John Steinbeck’s America, found my own America, and exposed the truth about ‘Travels With Charley’ (Paperback) I read just about every American travelogue and “Travels with Charley” was my first and favorite. I was a believer through the first couple of readings, but after decades of long road trips I began to be suspicious. Dogging Steinbeck confirmed my doubts. I never learned much during days spent just rocketing over highways except that this is a vast country sparsely populated with mostly kind, helpful people. The best conversations, comparable to the ones Steinbeck apparently enjoyed daily, generally occur only in hostels or while soaking nude in remote hot springs. I believe Steinbeck did not set out to perpetrate a fraud. He could not have known that he couldn’t learn much in his mode of travel over just 11 weeks. Finding knowledge, adventure, and joy in a road trip takes skill and a propensity to dawdle. Just as Steinbeck’s fraudulent account was not premeditated, Bill Steigerwald’s book was not motivated by the desire to unmask Steinbeck. No experienced road-tripper could miss the fictional aspects, especially armed with Steinbeck documents detailing the actual trip as was Steigerwald. One critical reviewer who obviously has not read Dogging Steinbeck called it a hatchet job. It is most certainly not. The author’s respect for both the truth and Steinbeck is obvious. I wish John Steinbeck had been healthy and free enough to apply his wonderful literary skill to the kind of trip he needed to take to write the book that he initially envisioned. But if the book we got was the only one he could write, I forgive him. Because of Travels with Charley my life has been richer, happier, and, while travelling, I have attended Sunday services from cathedrals to adobe missions to inner-city converted store fronts. Still, Charley is the only fictionalized travelogue I will forgive. A travel book is only one perspective of one journey, and Steigerwald is right to insist that readers are owed a true account. I felt that Steigerwald’s account of his trip and his research was as honest as he could make it. His political opinions do not detract from the book: although he did not make his book about himself, he did tell us who he is and that can only help readers to understand his perspective. I recommend this book to all who enjoy American road trip literature.
March 4, 2013
C-SPAN takes “Dogging Steinbeck” to top of Amazon’s charts
Ah, the great power of C-SPAN. After my hour-long interview with Brian Lamb on his March 3 “Q&A” program, sales of “Dogging Steinbeck” surged nicely. I’m not ready to retire yet. But before my C-SPAN appearance, my ranking on Amazon’s various Journalism and Travel categories was never higher than No. 4 (which it hit briefly after a rave Weekly Standard review by Sean Macomber). Brian Lamb and C-SPAN took me to these dizzy heights Monday morning. Staying up there will be tough without help from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and Charlie Rose, but being No. 1 in something for even just a little while is kind of fun. Dogging Steinbeck, March 4, 2013 Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,672 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store) #1 in Books > Education & Reference > Writing, Research & Publishing Guides > Writing > Journalism & Nonfiction #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Reference > Writing, Research & Publishing Guides > Journalism #3 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Travel > Essays & Travelogues
March 2, 2013
Dogging Steinbeck and I meet Brian Lamb
My journalism career is complete. Brian Lamb, founding father of CSPAN, American hero and fellow journalist, has interviewed me. Not that I can remember anything he asked me about my book “Dogging Steinbeck” or what I answered when we met in CSPAN’s beautiful DC studios three weeks ago. My interview with the man I like to call “St. Brian” will be displayed for the whole world to see on Lamb’s Sunday night “Q&A” program on CSPAN March 3 at 8 and 11 p.m. ET. I dread watching my “performance” almost as much as I dreaded doing the one-on-one interview. I’m a radio Steigerwald Brother, not a TV Steigerwald Brother, as should be obvious Sunday night. But my pain and dread were worth the thrill. Brian Lamb and I go way back — or at least I do. I first spoke to him in 1980 not long after the cable channel was born and began providing American TV watchers with their first taste of real ideological diversity. I had called CSPAN from my apartment in Hollywood USA to talk to 1980 Libertarian Party presidential candidate Ed Clark, a guy who couldn’t even buy network TV-news time in those bad old oligopolistic days when the lefty liberals at CBS, ABC, NBC called the shots and set the national political agenda. A year or two later I met Lamb for about two seconds at a party in L.A. thrown by the L.A. Times’ cable TV reporter. In 2004 I turned the tables on Lamb and interviewed him for my weekly Q&A at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. A year later, on New Year’s Eve, if I recall, I called him on the air during CSPAN’s 25th anniversary show to congratulate him and remind him that we had a history together. Lamb, who’s known for his laconic interviewing style and unflappable demeanor, was one of the nicest celebrity guys I ever interviewed, and I’ve interviewed hundreds of famous/important people over the years. Here’s my Q&A with Lamb, which occurred in December of 2004 and shed light on his motives for starting CSPAN and his deliberate effort to open up America’s cablewaves to more diverse and strident political voices: God Bless, Brian Lamb Talk about your fair-and-balanced TV. Thanks to saintly cable pioneer Brian Lamb, C-SPAN has been providing the country with a serious, unbiased and unfiltered look at the widest possible spectrum of political ideas and information for 25 years. Operating on a puny $45 million annual budget provided by the cable industry, the multimedia empire that Lamb founded and has carefully fathered covers government, the political process, party conventions, debates, seminars and author appearances across the country and now includes three C-SPAN cable-satellite channels, a C-SPAN radio channel and the Web site c-span.org. After 15 years and reading 801 books, Lamb recently disappointed many faithful C-SPAN viewers by recently ending “Booknotes,” his popular hour-long Sunday program which featured his gentle, quirky interviews with top nonfiction writers. I talked to him from his offices in Washington, D.C. Q: Any regrets yet about deciding to end “Booknotes”? A: Sure. The regrets that you have are tied to the fact that so many people seemed to value the information. You hate to give something like that up, because it meant so much to enough people that it kept me going over the [...]
February 25, 2013
Dogging Steinbeck: Love notes / hate mail and BS
I’ve gotten many thoughtful comments on and off the record about “Dogging Steinbeck” from readers in China and Minnesota and Belgium. Travel master Paul Theroux sent me a nice note saying how much he liked “Dogging Steinbeck.” He’s publicly endorsed my expose of the fictions and lies that John Steinbeck and his truth-challenged editors/publishers passed off as a work of nonfiction in “Travels With Charley.” Brian Lamb of CSPAN liked “Dogging Steinbeck” so much he invited me on his show to make a tongue-tied fool of myself (my global debut is Sunday, March 3, at 8 p.m. on CSPAN’s “Q&A”). But then I also get nasty ad hominem attacks like this one from a disturbed person named Heidi: “It would appear that you are bitter hack who is spending your retirement trying to justify your failures by breaking down the successes of those who came before you. Attempting to expose the fraudulence of other authors is a testament to the truth of your character. You are a man who is wasting the opportunity to write on far reaching criticism of books whose meaning are out of your reach. Even if your assertions are true, it matters not as Steinbeck and Capote were gifted writers. You, Sir, are a fraud and you spend your days running from that truth. I’ll take Steinbeck’s lies over your bullshit any day.” If turnabout is fair play, I get to make some wild-assed assumptions about Heidi’s troubled psyche. I’d guess that Heidi, who clearly doesn’t understand the difference between journalism and fiction, apparently was so unhappy to learn that one of her favorite childhood books was full of shit that she decided to take out her unhappiness on little old me. I’m sure she didn’t read my book or take the time to find out how I came to discover Steinbeck’s literary fraud. But, as I like to do when I get these kinds of irrational attacks, I hereby offer Heidi a free ebook copy of “Dogging Steinbeck” so that she find out how wrong she is about me, my motives and why I spent three years and a lot of my own money writing my book.
February 17, 2013
The truth shall make you cry
I don’t get too many emails about my expose of Steinbeck and my debunking of “Travels With Charley,” but most of them are pretty smart and supportive. Then I get really silly/dumb emails like this one: “You sad, sad man. Why couldn’t you leave it alone AND us with our reading pleasure ? What’s next, the REAL invasion of Poland or the TRUE story of the Omaha Beach landing? It’s history and doesn’t need the bones laid bare.” I hope this is from a 12-year-old, but if not, here’s my annoyed response. “Perhaps you don’t mind if famous writers make up books and pass them off as true accounts; perhaps you don’t think there’s anything wrong about a major publisher, Viking Press, making tens of millions of dollars selling a book under false pretenses; perhaps you would rather remain ignorant of the truth about “Charley” so that you can continue to believe your romantic notions about a book that is not only full of fictions and lies but is not a very good book; I’m a journalist who set out on a mission to faithfully retrace Steinbeck’s route but quickly learned that his book was mostly fiction and a lot of carefully crafted lies. There’s nothing sad about what I did or who I am. In the real world, this is what honest journalists do — follow the facts as they find them/see them and report the results honestly. If you can’t take the truth on this silly book like a man/woman, what do you do when you find out the truth about things that matter. Unless you’re about 12, I’d say it’s time to grow up.”
February 16, 2013
‘Blue Highways’ gets its butt kicked again
I have an obvious interest in reading what Amazon’s readers have thought of “Blue Highways” and “Travels With Charley.” Most people liked “Blue Highways.” I thought it was pretty good — much better than “Charley” — though the first time I picked it up 20 years ago I couldn’t get through more than 30 pages. After I forced myself to read “BH” in 2010 as prep for my road trip, however, I changed my tune. William Least Heat-Moon, who is really English prof William Trogdon and is only about 1/16th more Indian than I am, is a fine writer and good journalist with superior descriptive abilities and the ability to meet regular people and capture their charms. Trogdon, naturally, given his profession, carried the usual East Coast left-liberal baggage with him on his late 1970s road trip — America was too commercialized, homogenized, franchised, etc., etc. If his book wasn’t excerpted in the New Yorker, it should have been. Overall, I’d give “Blue Highways” four stars on Amazon’s rating scale. But my favorite review is this great hatchet job from 2000 by “A Customer”: 12 of 74 people found the following review helpful 1.0 out of 5 stars WORST BOOK EVER WRITTEN!!!, September 3, 2000 By A Customer This review is from: Blue Highways: A Journey into America (Paperback) (Make that star rating up there NEGATIVE 5 stars) I can’t believe I’m actually taking the time to write this for such an awful book, but I read all of the other reviews here and I can’t understand why everyone thinks this book is so incredible. I thought it was the most uninteresting, torturous book I have ever read. If this book is any indication of what Heat-Moon’s personality and his English classes were like, I understand why he was laid off (and why his wife cheated on him!). 400-something pages of grueling, thick, unconnected text ruined my entire summer and destroyed any previous desire that I might have had to travel cross-country. I would not recommend this book to anyone; I think it should be destroyed. I hope “A Customer” has died by now so he doesn’t get a chance to take his axe to “Dogging Steinbeck.”
February 14, 2013
‘Dogging Steinbeck’ gets a critical read from China
Getting emails from smart, satisfied but critical readers of “Dogging Steinbeck” — whether it’s travel master Paul Theroux or an Everyreader — is gratifying. This one, from a Missouri man who’s teaching English somewhere in the vastness of China, is one of the best-written pieces of correspondence I’ve received in my journalism career — and I’ve gotten probably a thousand of them. I’ve deleted his last name at his request. Dear Mr. Steigerwald, My name is Randy and I am writing concerning your book, Dogging Steinbeck. I will begin by telling you that I enjoyed it very much and admire you for your effort and your reporting. Your book came to my attention as I was browsing and downloading books for my Kindle. Although I had not read “Travels With Charley” for many years, I remembered enjoying it as a kid — I am now 63 years old — and was intrigued by your concept. I hope you don’t mind if I raise three points which came to mind after reading your book. Perhaps it would be relevant to tell you at this point that, since 2004, I have been living in China, working as an English teacher in a strange combination of semi-retirement and self-exile. However, most of my life was spent in a much more conventional setting of a small town in central Missouri. Now, except for brief trips each summer back to visit my parents in Missouri, all of my knowledge of current events and trends in America comes via the Internet — principally from Yahoo news when I go online to check email. That leads to my first point… One of the great pleasures in reading your book is that you found so many friendly and interesting people in your travels. Certainly the mass media does not spend much time talking about nice people; the weirdos, extremists, instant celebrities, and truly dangerous are far more likely to be in the news that I see. It was nice to be told that the vast majority of average Americans were still pleasant and helpful to a traveling stranger. I was also very pleased to be repeatedly reminded by you of the many ways that our daily lives have vastly improved over the past five decades. It happens that my small town in Missouri is on old Route 66 so I have personal knowledge of just how dangerous those highways were 50 years ago. Likewise, our medical technology, self-educational opportunities, and personal comfort today are incomparably superior to that of our youth. Do you recall that old saying, “Don’t go looking for trouble… for you will surely find it.”? It seems to me that most people, most days go through life in a responsive mode. If we approach them in a friendly and respectful manner, they will respond in kind. (If, on the other hand, you act like a jerk, you will quickly encounter obstacles and reciprocation.) Perhaps your book is like another more famous volume, Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden,” in that the book also tells us a great deal about the writer. If you encountered many nice people, maybe it is because you expected them to be nice and that you impressed them as being a nice guy yourself. Still, compared to the shallow, ungrammatical characters that Steinbeck wrote about in his book, [...]
