Michael Gruber's Blog, page 3

Pyramid of writers

In order of increasing population:

Good writers who don't sell books.Good writers who sell lots of books.Bad writers who sell lots of books.Bad writers who don't sell books.

If it happens that you area professional fiction writer who sells relatively few books, and you think you're a good writer, then the central question of your life is: are you in Class 1 or Class 4? Class 1 is rare company, and includes Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, and Emily Dickinson. In order to write at all, you have to put that question aside, but it always comes back, often at 3 a.m. It may be that some (perhaps many) writers never have these questions and believe that their lack of recognition is due to the stupidity of editors or that they are all in the pay of the Illuminati. That way lies madness.

Anyway, what is a good writer? What I mean by good is people who write what George Orwell once called a “good bad book.”This comprises popular fiction without pretensions to modernity or post-modernity, with reasonably fresh language, a plot that makes sense, the relative absence of melodrama or sentimentality, and an indication that the author has considered the human condition and said something interesting about it. This is a pretty low bar, and it’s remarkable that so few people can consistently clear it.  Of these, some sell a lot of books and have films made of them, while others don’t. What’s the difference between Class 1 and 2?  Here the sages are silent. William Goldman, the screenwriter, once summed up Hollywood by saying, “Nobody know anything.” It’s true of publishing too.

Of course, now we have self-publishing, so writers who don’t get picked by the Illuminati can do all the things that publishers once did—editing, design, printing, distribution and publicity—which requires writers to stop thinking about writing a good deal of the time and start thinking about what makes books sell. This jangles the writerly brain, or at least it does mine. I was raised in a tradition that said that the writer’s life was of no interest; the sole legitimate consideration was the text itself, and it still weirds me out when I find readers interested in my process, history or personality. Maybe we’re moving toward a world in which the actualbook is an afterthought, like the souvenirs that rock stars toss out to their crowds, and writers are mere celebrities rather than carriers of the culture. Some 70 years ago, Cyril Connolly wrote, “It is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.” He was defending the idea that we should be interested only in the book, but that battle seems to have been lost, at least down in the mid-list.

Now we’re all outside the garden, on the cruel streets, with our folding tables full of words, yelling to attract attention from the passers-by. I have to say the quality of my despair is pretty good, although my solitude is not nearly as resonant as it used to be. But, mustn’t complain. The model by which writers have earned a living for the last few centuries is in flux, and writers seem to be following the musicians into the unknown. It remains the case that someone has to produce the content, at least until the robots get better, but it’s not as much fun as it used to be. Maybe we’ll all post first chapters on a Kickstarter-like platform and see if anyone bites, and only when we’ve created a public do we approach a real publisher.  

But Connolly also wrote, “Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self,” and what an antique sentiment that seems now that many writers seem to live on likes and stars. And yet so many people seem to want to be writers, nearly all of them just widening the base of the pyramid. Becoming a writer nowadays seems to be like what they say about divorced people marrying, the triumph of hope over experience. I have stopped trying to understand it.

Let's hear it for the FSB!

Did the Trump campaign collide with the Russians? Who cares? That’s not the story. The story is that for the first time in history a hostile power has installed a president of the United States in office. I’m not talking about theDossier or the fake social media attack or even the hacking before the election, and I think that the media frenzy to catch Trump or his campaign in some specific malfeasance is not on point. The point is that President Trump is acting as if he were an agent of the Kremlin. What, after all, would be on the short list of things Putin would like to see happen? The US divided into warring camps? Check. The US government—especially the State Department— crippled by incompetence? Check. The US separated from its allies and trading partners? Check. Russian aggression off the national security agenda? Check.  A nuclear exchange between North Korea and the US or its allies? Icing on the cake, and all of it down to Donald.         

That’s what gives the story its terrible punch. We can imagine Putin’s people eying Trump in Moscow in 2013 and scratching their heads. Can this guy, a failing businessman kept afloat by Russian money laundering, really be as naive and stupid as he seems?  In Moscow he gets charmed and flattered and compromised and placed on the ready rack with the other useful idiots. I don’t think they ever imagined he would be president, but you never can tell what can happen in American politics, a famous arena of long-shot success. 

Of course, when he does win the nomination, they go all out with the hacking and the information wars. Trump wins, and they break out the Champagne in the Lubianka. The press is a little reluctant to claim that the Russians made a difference in the 2016 totals, but when you compare the tens of millions of views of the fake FB pages with the extreme slimness of the margin that threw the three midwestern states to the Trump column (the oft-quoted 77K), you have to wonder. Nailing this down is a feasible analysis and I’m sure someone is already at work on it.

Did they have help targeting the ads and agitprop?  Maybe, maybe not. The idiomatic mistakes made in those ads should not mislead us. The FSB-GRU probably has the political targeting skills required, and it’s not impossible that Russians have American experts who are not inferior to our best political analysts. The Russians are very good at this sort of thing. a lot better than we are, because spying and secret police work in general is what Russia has instead of Silicon Valley and Wall Street. For generations, under czar and commissar, the brightest young people were recruited into state security and espionage, and their work shows it. That Russia is now ruled by a chekhist (as such people are known, after the original Soviet secret police) is scary, but not surprising, no more than an America dominated by finance or technology people. It a wonderful irony here that Putin is everything Trump aspires to, but can never obtain, not because of American civil traditions and the rule of law, but because he’s simply not in the same class as a leader. To observe the head of a mediocre real estate company going up against a man who’s run a world power for over twenty years, crushed a Islamic insurrection, stole half a nation with impunity, and strangled Russian democracy in its cradle is to weep for American prospects.

Whether Trump is a conscious Russian agent is hard to know, since Trump seems barely conscious of anything except ratings and criticism. I doubt that he was brought into the whole plot, since he’s famously a man who can’t keep his mouth shut. He must know, however, that Putin could destroy him in an afternoon, which must concentrate his mind on advancing no policies whatever that would anger the Kremlin—and he has not. It’s true that it would be impossible now to adopt policies seen as favoring Russia, but that’s not a big deal. Trump in the White House being Trump is coup enough. Well played, FSB, well played!

My Sad Sports Story

We just had the NFL kneeling thing and the baseball season is heading to the playoffs and again I feel like an alien in my own country. Sports bars seem like Scientology centers or Christian Science Reading Rooms, places I am unlikely ever to go. I flip through the sports pages every morning (why? I have no idea, maybe a tic engendered by male DNA?) and names and games without meaning briefly occupy my gaze. I’m interested mainly in the scandals; those I can just about understand. It’s certainly not that have contempt for sports or their fans. I have a friend who says that sports are one of the big human things, as significant to the species as art or technology or politics, and I agree. And like anyone else, I appreciate and admire humans who can do remarkable physical things. 

It’s just that I can’t get myself to care which team wins. I am not a fan.

This puts me in a weird place, because the rooting gene seems to have been excised. It’s like a version of autism. People are laughing or expressing feelings and the poor guy doesn’t get it, he can’t join in. I happened to be in Chicago the night the Cubs won the pennant for the first time since the Pleistocene era, in a sports bar no less, and even I could feel the crackling energy and the ecstasy that resulted and I felt like a fish bowl guppy in a room where a party’s going strong, a chilly non-participant of the wrong speciesI thought at the time: I will never have these feelings.

This was not always the case. From the age of about eight to age fourteen I was a fanatic of a team that no longer exists, the Brooklyn Dodgers. Yes, a team with the same name still plays baseball in Los Angeles, but I believe no one who ever rooted for Brooklyn thinks it is the same thing.  In 1972 Roger Kahn wrote a book called The Boys of Summer about this particular team, the Dodgers in the period from the late forties of the last century to the mid fifties, a book that was quite successful and which I did not read. It seems stupid to say so, but the shock and horror remain too keen to this day.

I was probably about fourteen or so, when the news came. I was sleeping and I awakened to the sound of my red clock radio, a technological wonder of the time. (The radio could turn itself on!) As I came up from dreamland, it took me a few moments to register what the man was saying, and my first thought was that it was the set-up of a joke. The Dodgers were leaving Brooklyn for Los Angeles? The moment remains burned into memory still, after sixty years.

Which is sort of dumb, if you think about it. Who cares where a team plays? This is not how I felt back then, however. Back then it was like a death in the family. It had never occurred to me that Walter O’Malley, the team’s owner,  who I had always regarded as a kind of hero for his role in breaking the color bar in baseball, would steal the Dodgers from Brooklyn. It had never occurred to me that my team was a property, like a house or a car, that could be sold to make a profit. I thought it was like my mother.

Endless are the reminiscences of what baseball was like before television, “when it was a game,” as the saying goes, and of course baseball more or less is reminiscence. I am disinclined to add to them, except to recall that it was once possible for a solitary ten-year-old kid to ride public transit to a major league ball park, buy a ticket for the bleachers and a hot dog, see the game, ride home and have change from a two-dollar bill. I did this all the time at Ebbets Field, just the kind of comfy ball park that Camden Yards tries to imitate.

From time to time I get the opportunity to see a live baseball game, and I find I still enjoy the actual experience. I can’t watch it on TV, with all that information clogging the screen and the camera zooming around. Baseball is the only team sport I really understand, because I was raised in an era where baseball was the only team sport that counted and the only way you could see a game was by being in the stands.  I’m not entirely sure why I never got back into fandom. Maybe it’s If you’re away from a sport for a while, you don’t know the players, there’s a gap in the history, something particularly important when the game is baseball.

 There are people who fall in love at seventeen and have their hearts broken and for them, ever after, that kind of love never comes again and they turn their lives onto a different path. A couple of years ago I was coming back to Seattle on the Mulkiteo ferry and it was a game Sunday for the Seahawks football team, and the boat was full of Seahawks fans, with their jackets, jerseys, whistles, and banners. Some of them had their faces painted green and blue, and it was clear that this was a big event for them.  At first I was a little envious—how great to be consumed by a collective, to be transformed by vicarious victory, to experience the joy of victory without anyone necessarily getting killed! Then, after a while, I thought of Brooklyn, and I wasn’t anymore.

 

Déjà Vu in the Outer Boroughs

President Trump and I were both born in the outer boroughs of New York, I in Brooklyn, he in Queens, in approximately the same era. In those days, Brooklyn was low, compared to Manhattan, or The City, as it was called, and Queens lower still.  (This was, of course, way before Brooklyn became a hipster Mecca; for me and my peers, it was a place to leave.) Mr Trump retains his thick outer boroughs accent. I am still identifiable as a New Yorker, more, I think because of velocity than vowels, but I don’t speak like Mr Trump, even though I am somewhat older than he is. Essentially, when I hear the president speak, I think of my dad’s generation, and I wonder why. Why should a man five years younger than me speak like someone a generation older

When I hear that voice I’m transported back to my dad’s fruit and produce warehouse, where as a child I spent many a Sunday afternoon, while my dad was on the phone ordering carloads of celery. Produce never sleeps, as you know. Like most little boys, I was fascinated by big trucks and so I spent a good deal of time out on the loading docks, where the drivers hung out, waiting for their trucks to be unloaded. 

In those days, male adults more or less ignored children unless they got underfoot, so I had the freedom of the place, and it was easy to climb into the niches that occurred transiently in the stacks of melon or orange crates and observe.  The guys would smoke incessantly and talk; in cold weather they would pass a flat pint around and light a fire-barrel. 

They wore cloth caps and leather jackets, with union buttons on the caps; the World War II vets, of whom there were many, often added the little gold eagle in a circle that for some reason was universally called a ruptured duck.  Their talk consisted of baseball and boxing, betting on same, grievance, and insults. They complained about their wives, their relatives, their bookies, politicians, the boss, and how both the city and America were going to hell. I enjoyed the insults, which demonstrated that these big tough guys were not much different from my grade school peers. This is what men did in groups was my take-away: they boasted, taunted, jockeyed for advantage, were raucous and obscene. Looking back, I can see that much of their conversation, or arguments I should say, about public events was bullshit derived from the opinion columns of one or another of the New York tabloids.  They were all for the little guy, but doted on the rich. They were casual, cheerful bigots. Many or their grievances involved the deplorable behavior of some non-Euro-American eth, invariably referred to by one of the colorful epithets so characteristic of American speech. The one thing they positively hated was anyone from their own milieu putting on airs. The details of this talk have fled, of course, but I have an almost visceral memory of their tone. The elongated vowels (Pawkway, Yuuuge.); the self-testimonials (believe you me; I’ll be honest with you; I guarantee you); the invective tossed at anyone in public life, sports especially: “that bum!,” “that miserable character!” 

In fact, my dad talked that way too, a somewhat more refined version of the same style. When I moved away from the city to lose myself in America I thought I had heard the last of that argot. I didn’t speak that way and neither did my peers. It was a generational thing. We had gone to upscale colleges and we now spoke like our professors or like people on television, the hip American demotic of our generation. Then there came “Yu-ehh fie-id” on my tv set. I guess I had lost touch with Mr Trump, having been out of town, but apparently he had made a bigger splash in the city than I had, my dad unaccountably having failed to leave me a quarter of a billion dollars, and now he was adding a reality show to his successes as a wrestling and beauty contest mogul. The rest is history, but the question remains: why does Mr Trump talk like a member of the previous generation?  

Many observers have commented on how Mr Trump’s speech has changed over the last few decades, and this is true. He used to speak in sentences, like regular people, and express coherent thought. He was crass, people in the city thought, but charming and occasionally funny. He did not then refer to himself in the third person. More significant though, is the fact that he talks like my truck drivers of sixty years ago. It’s a little freaky, because when Mr Trump speaks I hear not an urban baby boomer but his father. People used to say that the Republicans were the Daddy party, but I don’t think they meant this. Some evil alchemy, it seems to me, has given us not Donald but Fred Trump as our president. Quite apart from any content, this makes it impossible for me to listen to him talking without the skin-crawling sensation that I am in contact with the dead.

 

 

 

Venting--A Time Capsule

I wrote this the day after the 2016 presidential election and for some reason it never got posted, and when I discovered it while returning to this blog I thought it was sort of interesting. It was my take on a worst-case scenario, given GOP control of Congress and the White House. After eight months, some of it turns out prescient, some of it hysterical. Presented as a public service.

My girlfriend, before whom I exhibited a screaming, drunken, hysterical, and utterly humiliating breakdown last night, suggested this morning that I write down my paranoid fantasies so that they don't keep running through my head.  A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post that laid out what I thought would happen in the event of a total GOP victory--Congress, White House, SCOTUS, all in the hands of the right.  Obviously, the Senate Democrats still have the filibuster, but that's a weapon that can't be used all the time, and besides it is a quality of Democrats that they think government is supposed to work, whatever party is in power.  So, assuming for a moment that the Trump administration is a regular presidency, we should expect a federal law banning abortion and one banning same-sex marriage. Prayer in schools might come back as well.  There will be a massive tax cut for the wealthy and a subsequent diminution in the ability of the federal government to run programs that help people. The ACA will be repealed as well as other programs that can be construed as helping the undeserving poor.  (The one bright spot: the poor saps who voted for him are going to get it in the neck.) So far, so Republican.  Beyond that, however, given the personality of the new president and the new prominence of naked fascism as a factor in the American political scene, things could get a lot darker.

Over the past decade, aided by the growth of new media, the right has been able to largely destroy actual journalism, of the type that has constrained political malfeasance throughout our history. This destruction has been greatly abetted by the failure of the traditional media to understand the election. In fact, Trump was right: the traditional media was biased in its view of America, which is why the NYT was predicting an 85% chance of a Democratic victory right up to the eve of the election.  A vast mass of the country was ignored, with contempt, by the coastal elites.  Our bad, and aren't we paying for it now?  An interesting side note to the results: counties that had Starbucks were for Hillary, those without were GOP landslides. Hillary took the popular vote, but that's not how presidential elections work.

As many have noted, the election was a contest between urban America and the non-urban counties--and the cities lost. Liberals talk about the right-wing info-bubble with disdain, but there's one on the other side  too. The question now is what will become of it.  Trump famously has a thin skin and is in the habit of striking back at those who treat him as a clown.  We may see, therefore, a concerted attack against the so-called mainstream media.  Yes, there's the first amendment, but with the SCOTUS in hand this is not insurmountable. The libel laws could be changed.  Liberal media could be stifled or destroyed.  That done, the administration, as Karl Rove once boasted, could create its own reality.  Social media could be strangled, as in China or Russia.  We would no longer see those videos of police brutality. The results of climate change would no longer be reported, and speaking of that, we could expect to see denialists placed in positions of power at NOAA and other science agencies, the Paris accords will be abrogated and the slow catastrophe will continue at an accelerating rate. We just won't learn much about it until it is far to late to take any effective action.

A friend of mine suggested that this will be just like Reagan or Bush 2, a pain in the ass, but just politics as usual. I hope so, but we have never had a leader quite like Trump before. There is the possibility that he intends a Putinization of our country. By this I mean not only suppression of media but actual political vengeance. We might see prominent liberals jailed on phony charges. We might see the imposition of even more of a security state than we now have. Reportedly Putin was able to seize absolute control by engineering faked terror attacks, carried out by the FSB and blamed on Muslims. Is this kind of thing beyond Trump?  Maybe, but how would we ever know, journalism being dead? 

Which brings us to foreign policy.  Here I think that even the Senate Republicans will push back if Trump tries to back out of the alliances.  The left typically deplores American hegemony and the casualties associated with it, but there are a lot worse things than American hegemony. We could be looking at 1940 again, except with a nuclear Japan and Germany in the mix.

It is inherent in democracies that they can commit suicide. In fact, political science was agreed until quite recently that democracies were inevitably doomed to descend into dictatorship. Democracy takes a lot of work, and people are lazy. It takes an educated and aware populace, and most people are happy in their fallacies and prejudices. People have nothing but contempt for Congress and yet they continue to elect the same fools at every election.It doesn't make sense and here we are at this nonsensical election of an ignorant,  megalomaniac with the attention span of a chicken, and a Congress ready to do his bidding.

The best case, I suppose is a Bush 2 administration--feckless, stupid, venal, deeply corrupt.  The worst case is a 2020 election in which Trump gets 99% of the vote, and after he dies (having served four terms because of the National Emergency) we'll have Donald, Jr. and then Eric and then  Ivanka running the country, just like in North Korea. Yeah, it can't happen here. But the first act just did.

Many educated people wonder what they would have done had they lived during the Stalin terror or in Nazi Germany, and came under the terrible pressure that such regimes use to make such people acquiesce to horror, to be complicit in torture, incarceration of the innocent, murder.  I fear there's a good chance we may all find out.

This Happened to Me

I am starting to use this blog again after some three years and I thought it might be of interest to bring it up to date with an account of what happened during that time. It isn’t easy, because they were busy years and I have some issues with memory—not the senile kind but the kind where you just can’t recall much that happened. Really, it’s a blur, and I envy memoirists when I am not suspicious that they are making it all up. Anyway, I wrote a book called The Return somewhere back then. The book I wrote before that was called The Good Son and it was about a mother and her son, and I thought I would work with a father daughter thing in The Return (a dumb title, by the way; publisher’s choice.) In The Good Son, the mother gets kidnapped and the son rescues her, but in The Return, the daughter gets kidnapped too, but rescues herself. The father is busy saving other people. That difference may be significant if English majors ever mine my work, but I don’t recall giving it much thought. The books are thrillers and there’s nothing more thrilling than a kidnap.

Around this time, my publishing company got sold to a conglomerate and the guy they moved in to replace my publisher did not care for my work. He told my editor that he was not going to support The Return at all, after which he fired my editor.  I have had a number of editors in my time, but I never had one like Marjorie. She loved my work and I loved hers and we became very close friends. Even after she got fired I used to call her and have long talks about stuff, as friends do. She was suffering from stage four cancer at the time, but was not particularly bitter about being fired and losing health insurance and all that. She actually put energy into cheering me up.  

The my wife, Elizabeth, fell ill and after telling ourselves for a couple of months that it was just a bad flu, we went in for an examination and it was cancer, also stage four. This was the summer of 2015, and she died from then until December, 2014, in and out of hospitals and nursing homes, but largely at home. It was a Jacobean sort of death, fluids and filth, and she quickly retreated in horror to a place deep inside her (there was brain involvement too) and we never had a chance to say good-bye. Our children behaved heroically, taking care of her for those months, while I got sick myself and was hospitalized for a week and when I got home she was in the terminal coma, from which she left this earth on the mnemonically apt 12.13.14.

During all this and afterward I tried to drown my grief in workahol, and finished the historical novel I had started in 2012. I can’t quite recall why I had chosen to switch from thrillers. I was bored with them, probably, and I had enjoyed writing the historical segments of Book of Air and Shadows and Forgery of Venus. It came in at over six hundred pages and nobody liked it. I worked on it for over a year until my editor and my agent were satisfied and we sent it out, and now people liked it but wouldn’t buy it. It’s about the revolution of 1848 in Prague. What’s not to like? Then I wrote a conventional thriller about a rich guy whose wife gets killed by a maniac and then gets ripped off by a gang fronted by a grifter who pretends to love him and to be a psychic, except it turns out she really is psychic and really does love him. I thought it was a charming story, but so far no one at a publishing company agrees.

Another thing that happened is that I started email corresponding with a fan of my work on the advice of another fan who looked me up in Seattle. My correspondent arranged for me to give a set of lectures in Hawaii, where she lived, and then in the following year a writing workshop at her place on Oahu. Long story short, we got married a couple of weeks ago. Aliceanne is a professional psychic, so she probably knew all this, but it came as a vast surprise to me. 

I find I am reluctant to start another fiction project without a sale of the books I’ve already written. I’m advised to self-publish, but I haven’t decided to go that route. I’ve been professionally published for my entire career and even though self-publishing is entirely respectable nowadays, I still have qualms. I guess I’m yesterday’s man in that respect. On the other hand, I never expected the things that happened over the last three years, so maybe something interesting and unexpected will happen going forward. 

Meanwhile, I will tend this blog, both to keep in touch with readers and because I get itchy and depressed if I don’t write something. It’s a curse, really. I don’t see why so many people want to be writers.

Dear Readers,Michael Gruber's official blog has moved ove...

Dear Readers,

Michael Gruber's official blog has moved over to his new website. His Blogger blog is scheduled to be taken down at some point in the future.

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Yours,

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On the advice of counsel I have taken up Twitter as part of my effort to expand my name recognition, or some such, in preparation for the publication of the next novel, THE RETURN, due out in late August. The counsel is the PR firm (February Partners) I've hired to help with the book marketing my publisher declines to do.  I have to say that before I became a published author it had never occurred to me that books were marketed like toothpaste or autos.  I guess I thought that publishers shipped books to bookstores and the bookstore people put them on the shelf and that was it.  I realized that some books got reviewed and others were neglected but I thought this decision was made over drinks at the sort of New York luncheons and parties to which I was not invited.

Was I wrong!  Book marketing is a big deal and an art. I am told I must put out content via blog (I'm doing it!) Twitter & Facebook so as to build a  public wider than the people who already buy my books. No one can say I am not a good soldier and I have been tweeting like mad, nearly a thousand pithy apothegms so far.  But I have to say tweeting is strange, or strange to me, although I know there are many people to whom its environment is as familiar as my driveway is to me. They are practitioners of a new art, that of forming communities around tiny squibs of language or references to other media.  I expect some infant Mozart is already at work on forging something quite new in the world out of this material. It will not be me, however.  I don't much like to talk about my work while it's in progress or read reviews or give encouragement to people trying to enter a profession I know to be a miserable way to make a living, with a premature death rate that compares unfavorably to coal mining.

Twitter has many mansions and I am mainly in the one devoted to writing, or writers talking about writing.  Although some quite famous writers tweet (Margaret Atwood being legendary here) the vast majority are not famous, and, of course, almost all of these never will be.  On first being exposed to this zone I confess to unattractive feelings of irritation verging on anger, rather like a person happy in a woodland cabin who finds that they're putting in a golf course community next door. Why so many writers? What do all these people want?  And why do they want to talk ceaselessly to one another? Narcissism gone mad?  What? 

After a while I calmed down and overcame the urge to flood the twitterverse with acerbic, discouraging comments.  Some of the people pushing their books on Twitter are, when you take the trouble to look at the work on amazon, frankly illiterate in the sense that they don't really know the meaning of the words they use and cannot reliably write coherent sentences in English. This is sort of funny and might be the subject of cruel humor, but I have discovered none of it on Twitter so far.  There might indeed be a # devoted to scarifying commentary on lame digital-only fiction, but the atmosphere I've observed so far is universally supportive. 

And this too is new--and odd. Writers have had on occasion mentors and protégés, but envy and rivalry were more typical of writers in the past. If one is a writer, why would one wish to encourage a rival?  It doesn't make sense, but there it is.  I don't think it has anything to do with producing real or better writers--only stringent editing and criticism do that--but it can't ever be a bad thing to be nice.  And perhaps in time this community will develop into a kind of sandlot baseball--playground basketball sort of thing, a place where lots of people can safely try out the game, and which occasionally produces a genius.

Speaking of sports, perhaps a more important phenomenon is at work. Professional sports leagues depend for their survival on fan interest in them, and that largely depends on a huge base of people playing the sport at an amateur level.  Can anyone imagine golf being a televised sport watched by millions if millions did not play golf?  And don't sports decline when they lose their amateur base? Horse racing, especially harness racing, was far more popular when people rode and drive horses and the same with boxing.  Pro soccer has come to America largely as a result of millions playing it in schools and amateur leagues. So maybe what we are seeing in writing's bush leagues is similar. I suspect that the majority of the writers I observe on Twitter (judging only from the work) are people who have read a thousand mysteries, or vampire novels, or thrillers and have said to themselves, "Why, I could do as well!"  Maybe, maybe not, but they sure must read a lot of books; a person (me) who earns a living selling books cannot but approve!

So what may be happening here is the birth of a novel and parallel system of generating writing talent, quite different from the former one in which writers submitted directly to agents and publishers, something much more like golf, with a huge fan base of duffers and a scattering of stars. I hope this is true because I sort of like the idea of talent emerging from an anonymous mass without elite filtering, even though I'm personally a beneficiary of the former system.

The down side of this, however, is the requirement for each participant of the new order to generate an on-line persona attractive to potential readers.  Yet good writers may not have attractive personalities, in which case the attractive persona is a lie, and in any case persona-building may blur the necessary focus on the quality of the work. We shall see. Meanwhile, there is Cyril Connoly's dire warning from six decades ago, which seems even more remarkably prescient in the age of Twitter:
"It is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair."  And his Twitter feeds?

Writing and Terrorism

I was just meditating on one of my favorite quotations, Jacob Burckhardt's "Terrorism is essentially the rage of the literati in its last stages." (Burckhardt was an art historian of singular talent; he essentially invented our concept of the Rennaissance in Italy.)  This seems so valid to me.  For while people will fight for resources or to prevent aggression, we understand these guys are not blowing things up and sacrificing their lives because they're hungry and oppressed, but because somewhere someone wrote something down, and they read it and it changed their lives, it made them into terrorists.   There may be illiterate terrorists, but in every instance they are directed by someone who is well up on the justification for their violent acts, invariably embodied in a document of some sort, or in writings synthesized by some charismatic individual.  

The intellectual histories of our great monsters--HitlerMaoStalin etc--have been elaborately studied, and we can often tease out the birth of the rationale for mass murder.  This seems also to hold as well for the pettier mass killing of the current terror boom (so to speak).  Why do the literati rage?  Because they have looked at the world and found it wanting.  They devise some improvement, which they then argue for passionately, which eventuates in a book. Perhaps the authorities kill them or torture them, lending the validity of blood to the argument.  The book survives, however, is read by other literati, who carry on the fight. And they are opposed by people who think terror is wrong, and killing innocent people can have no excuse (us), which belief they too learned from books, in some cases the very same books. Isn't this a puzzle? Writers really are the legislators of mankind, in which case we have a lot to answer for.

This was borne powerfully home to me when I was a speechwriter in Washington.  To understand what this means you need to know that some political speeches are not merely hot air.  They are a way for the boss to set policy and give marching orders to the troops, to share the vison which, if pressed strongly enough, will inspire the various cliques and warring factions that comprise any instrumentality of power, public or private into pulling together in some particular direction.

The person I was serving happened to be one of the few non-Reaganite senior officials in Reagan's administration.This was a tremendously impressive famous guy, charismatic, brilliant, deeply experienced, full of ideas, and he was in addition a terrific extemporaneous speaker. So why did he need a speechwriter?  This is why.  We would be in his office talking about a coming speech, tossing out ideas, converging on how to focus on the core of the policy he wanted to advance, and I could see that he knew what he wanted to do, it was just there in the room, but inchoate ; and then I would say something like, "Why don't you just say....?"  And almost all the time he would go, "Yeah, that's right," and then we'd fuss over the exact wording a little, and that would be it: national policy. Of the USA.  Billions of dollars, millions of people affected.  And that is going on in every single government agency and every single large corporation, some guy is talking to a writer and the writer is actually saying what the policy is going to be.  Yeah, I always found it a little weird too.

At any big agency, the speechwriter occupies an odd position. He's resented because, needless to say, everyone knows about how policy gets made, and everyone is suspicious that the speechwriter is putting his own ideas, Svengali-like, into the process.  On the other hand, the speechwriter is everyone's best pal. Everyone wants to do a favor for the speechwriter because this will involve an opportunity to pitch their own programs to someone who spends a lot of one-on-one time with the supremo.  Your effective speechwriter should therefore be someone with not a lot of ego, who is not overly fond of schmoozing.

Getting back to terror, we see that the terrorist have a narrative, reinforced in books, pamphlets, and speeches, all products of writers.  Videos are significant, but they too must be fitted into a narrative, and that requires an argument written by someone and articulated. This and not that was the case, innocent civilians were murdered, it's a good thing to kill girls who want to go to school, and so on. Against this narrative is ours: we are innocent victims of senseless violence justly resisting it by waging war on terror.  And they hate our freedoms. Is this the right narrative?  It hasn't worked all that well, it seems to me.  We need a new narrative or the present mess will go on indefinitely, yet our own literati seem curiously unable to legislate one into existence.  Perhaps a little more rage?

Alas, Babylon

Writing a historical novel requires thinking seriously about history, of course, and it occurred to me recently that I am old enough to be historical myself.  In the Smithsonian Institution museum in Washington, for example, there are dioramas of student protests, a mid-20th-century schoolroom, and the kitchen of an immigrant's apartment in New York, ca. 1910.   It is passing strange looking at these because I have direct memories of the protests, and the schoolrooms I sat in, with wooden chair-desks bolted to the floor in rows, and the blackboard up front, with the American flag and the roller maps, and the Gilbert Stuart George Washington, were exactly like the one behind the glass.  My grandmother's place was essentially unchanged from the time she got married around 1910 and I spent a good deal of time in a room like the one shown when I was a little kid.

This sense of being an historical relic hit me strongly during a recent visit to New York, a city where I was born and raised and for which I still have a sentimental attachment.   It's a commonplace now that for most American urban dwellers, the cities they remember are gone, their populations changed, their industries vanished, but even in this regard, New York is a remarkable example.  When I was a kid, New York was one of the largest manufacturing cities in the country and the greatest port.  I started traveling around the city by subway from my home in Brooklyn (a borough void of hip at the time) and exploring Manhattan, which we referred to always as "the city."  Manhattan was then divided into districts characterized by various forms of trade and manufacture, and these districts were huge.  Electronics, books, printing, plumbing, kitchen supplies, spices, feathers, leathers, clothing, buttons and zippers for clothing, and many others all had particular streets and rows of streets devoted to them and to associated things.  The diamond district survives from this era and a shadow of the garment district, but everything else has been buried by the one industry that now dominates the city, which is the real estate industry, and the stacks of condos and offices it has generated over the past four or five decades.

And, of course, media and finance, which are fine, but of less interest, I suppose to the average child.  And the port is gone, as are the many communities that serviced it.   The meatpacking district is a clubland now, not an improvement, although the smell is somewhat less offensive  There is no longer a street over on the west side where the odor of tons of cinnamon or coffee would hit you when you emerged from the subway.  You can't get a decent bagel either.

Well, grump, grump;  everyone of a certain age can tell stories like this and experience similar nostalgia.  Times change, but I think that a city that seems increasingly devoted to providing hidey-holes for foreign billionaires or uncertain morality to stash their loot in the form of penthouses, and which handles almost nothing but digits, can compare with the lost city as a place to educate a child in the arts of civilization on the street.  Jane Jacobs, who did as much as anyone to preserve this lost city, wrote a book about how the arts of civilization could be lost, presaging a new dark age.  I don't know if she was right about us, but I do think that there's something about stuff and the making of useful objects that is not replaceable by anything in the virtual world.