Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends

I once was on a panel—I think it was at Bouchercon—discussing authors who rose from the ashes of miserable failure to regenerate their writing careers. Janet Reid, famous agent, was in the audience. I was talking with her later. She found it annoying that the cessation of a series of projects, or the leaving of a certain publisher, or even a certain agent, should be referred to as “failure.” This is the normal course of a writer’s career, she said. It’s not failure.

It didn’t occur to me to mind being branded a former failure, since I come from a race of cold-blooded, slow-witted northern Europeans who take five or six months to realize they’ve been insulted. Writing careers do tend to wax and wane, and mine certainly has. My first book—did I ever tell you about that?—was reviewed in the New York Times, favorably, I might add, and earned out its advance plus a thousand dollars more in royalties. It was a quirky detective story called Unbalanced Accounts.

Jonathan Kellerman’s first book was written up in the same review. His writing career from that point on did better than mine. It may have been that he was more diligent about promoting himself. It may have been that he worked harder at writing and had fewer distractions. It may be that he is simply a better and more entertaining writer than I am, or scarier, or less quirky, or more firmly plugged into the zeitgeist. In any case I’d be willing to bet that nobody ever put him on a failure panel.

So time went on. A number of publishers took me up and put me down again. The detective series reached a logical end. Time for something completely different. I wrote Bury the Bishop, the first in a series of traditional clerical mysteries. A Dell paperback, Bury the Bishop is the most successful thing I’ve written so far in terms of copies sold. After four more in that series my publisher let me go and my agent quit the business. They all said, “I hope you won't stop writing.” Why would I do that?

At the time of the aforementioned Bouchercon rising-from-failure panel I had a new agent who had just sold The Edge of Ruin, a historical murder mystery about the early days of the movie industry, as well as its sequel, The Brink of Fame, to St. Martin’s Press. The day after I accepted a prize for The Edge of Ruin from the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance it was remaindered. Come to find out I was supposed to sell it myself. Who knew?

I thought, if that’s the way things are done these days I might as well self-publish. So I wrote a little fantasy set in Lambertville and called it Monkeystorm. It had a video game in it and a couple of grisly murders. The protagonist was mental, in a charming sort of way. But the title didn’t really work. Nor did the cover, which was too scary for the book. A good publisher would have fixed those things, maybe even promoted the book. But, alas, you see. So nobody bought that one either. My friend Mark liked it. He’s a Terry Pratchett fan, which gives you some idea.

Still I refuse to stop writing. Once again it’s time for something completely different, and this time I’m going to undertake to write a spy thriller set in New York in 1915. Animals will be killed. It’s not a cozy. There was a war on, for Pete’s sake. Bad things happened.

So here goes. Wish me luck. You know what they say: if you never try anything, you’ll never fail, but then you’ll never succeed, either.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

The Man Who Spoke Out-of-Turn

I never thought he’d have the cojones to show his bare face in print again. I was wrong, he did and bad-mouthed the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus, as he did in 2011, the last time the Circus came to Albany.

He’s Steve Barnes, the former restaurant reviewer for the Albany Times-Union newspaper, a man whose sharp tongue earned him a pasting in a restaurant parking lot by two men allegedly hired by the owner of another restaurant he’d been unkind to in print. The men were arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault in Albany Police Court but acquitted at a trial. Apparently, the jury thought Barnes had deserved his ‘review’ in the parking lot.

At the Times-Union Center show most recently, Barnes reaffirmed being bored by the nine tigers: “…much less fun than even the laziest house cat; they sit on trapezoidal platforms, snarling and swatting at the trainer’s stick before rolling over on their backs or putting paws the size of snowshoes onto a pylon. One of them defecated in the middle of the act. That was my verdict, too.

“The sad fact is,” Barnes continues, “that tigers and elephants and their wild brethren simply aren’t entertaining. The elephants—big, sad lumberers—are as placid as a pond and about as interesting to watch. Ponies, donkeys and llamas trot in circles. Some jump over things. It’s stupefyingly retro.”

Sadly, this man doesn’t get that it’s a wonder, a delight, to simply witness these magnificent creatures close-up—the tigers as they leap, snarl and slap their great paws in the air; the elephants as they trumpet loudly, lumber and queue up in a Conga line, front legs up on the backs of their sisters. The poet nailed it:

“Breathes there the man,
With soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said:
“Look, daddy, the tigers!!!
Mommy, the elephants!!!”

In a spirit of Reconciliation (Mr. Barnes does write a decent theatre review and he said he likes dogs), a word of caution, friend. Elephants have historically long memories so if you notice a big lumbering one in your parking lot, stay indoors.

Robert Knightly

Dave and Mom

David Letterman aired his last show Wednesday night. My mother would have been sad to see him go. Mom had insomnia and watched a lot of late night television.

I remember waking up in the early mornings when I was a child and hearing my parents discussing what Johnny Carson had said the night before. Mom watched Johnny until the very last show. But after he left The Tonight Show, Mom felt no loyalty to his successor.

Jay Leno got The Tonight Show. Dave Letterman got my mom.

Mom was an avid fan. When I would visit she would regale me with bits from the Letterman monologues, Top 10 Lists, and interviews. At times it seemed Mom was keeping me posted on the doings of a zany relative whom I rarely got to see.

Mom always wanted me to stay up and watch Dave when I visited her, but I’m one of those annoying morning people and by the time Dave appeared I was deeply asleep. During these visits, I slept on a futon in front of the T.V. She tried a time or two to wake me up when he started his monologue, but she was unsuccessful.

“Whaaat?” I would ask.

“Oh, never mind. You’re asleep.”

As my mother got older, she developed health problems and we all decided that she could no longer live alone or at least not so far away. We moved her from Maryland to New Jersey and my very generous mother-in-law invited my mother to live with her for a time.

Alas, my mother-in-law believed in an early bedtime.

My husband and I took my mother and mother-in-law to breakfast every Saturday. One Saturday, as my husband and mother-in-law went to pay the check, I chatted with my mom.

“So, how’s it going?” I asked.

“I haven’t seen David Letterman once since I moved in with Aida. She shoos me off to bed.”

I had a word with my husband and Mom and Dave were keeping company again.

Below you’ll find a clip from the final show. I think Mom would have liked it.

Stephanie Patterson

Nostalgia

My nephew Ryan has been feeling his oats lately. And eating them also, as at 15-years-old he is six-feet-tall and weighs 185 pounds, all of it muscle. He wanted to know how much I could bench press so I changed the subject, baiting him about how shallow his 2015 youth culture is compared to mine, circa 1975. Seeing that I wasn’t going to take the bait about bench-pressing, he went back to texting his girlfriend. I tried again. Yes, I told him, your culture is insipid and vapid and unappealing, vulgar and base and lacking in any meaning, or even in any desire for meaning.

He yawned. Still, accustomed to blindly blundering ahead, especially when I could see no alternative, I continued to harangue him on how he was more concerned with buying $200 sneakers than Guantanamo Bay, implying that I had been concerned with Watergate (only when it interfered with prime time programming, I’m afraid to say) forty years ago, and that I was satisfied with the canvas Converse All Star high tops I purchased for $9.95 at a store called THE GREAT OUTDOORS on South Ocean Avenue in Patchogue (I wasn’t, but they were all I could afford).

He sat there texting, and I cringed to think of how base and crude his romancing of his young sweetheart might be, having role models like Fifty Cent and Justin Timberlake (or are they passé already, I wondered), and congratulated myself for never having texted, equating it as I do in my mind with other pointlessly absurd activities like playing hacky sack or Grand Theft Auto, and watching reality TV Shows about bitchy, catty housewives or women who turn into extraordinary shrews as their weddings approach.

I hoped for something trenchant to say that would regain his attention (there was a time when his attention would focus so intensely on his Uncle Mikey that it overjoyed and frightened me all at once). I pointed out that when my brother and I went on vacation with my parents to Vermont for a week of camping in the summertime, it was a twelve hour car ride, and we had no smart phones, or IPADs or lap tops to watch movies on. We might read a book (I always got car sick when I tried, and I don’t know why it never occurred to anyone to give me Dramamine), or we might have to talk to each other. It was torture, twelve hours of hell, and this did command his attention for a second.

But then his girl must have texted something really sweet or funny (or provocative) and I lost him again. I went on about how music today has no lyrics, and all the movies are silly action hero adventures or computer animated dreck that the studios put out so they won’t have to pay any real actors to actually act. Then I started in on how SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE really sucks now, and segued into how “suck” used to be a verboten word, and finally started in on books. In the 70s, you still had some crappy books, sure, but you might also find Philip Roth or Saul Bellow or Kurt Vonnegut or John Irving on the best seller list. Now you get pap like THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN, or tame porn for the masses like 50 SHADES OF GREY, or right wing conservative propaganda like Bill O’Reilly’s KILLING JESUS, wherein he reveals that Jesus was a libertarian tax rebel who was dead set against redistributing wealth to the poor. Jesus said the meek shall inherit the earth, but apparently it is actually being left to rabble rousing idiots who manage to appeal to rabble, who nowadays seem to be easily roused. He yawned, and I told him I was going to write about all this in a blog I appeared in called “The Crime Writer’s Chronicle.”

“But it’s not about crime,” he said.

“I know,” I told him, “but my stuff about crime books and movies is getting pretty stale anyway.”

“Do you get paid?” he said, now genuinely interested.

“No.” Lost him again.

Still, I thought, it is a topic that interests me. The word nostalgia was coined in the 17th century by a scholar writing about a yearning for home so intense it could be thought of as pathological. He felt it was suffered by the Swiss particularly badly (who the hell knows why). It is a rendering of the German heimweh (home woe) and is a joining of the Greek algos (pain, grief, distress) and nostos (homecoming).

A lot of people experience grief at never being able to go home again. Of course, for others, the most painful thing is going home. Thomas Wolfe said you can never go home again, and I think he was right, in a way. I can go to the house I grew up in, but I will never be young and growing up in it again, doing for the first thrilling time all those things that have gotten stale to me now, getting hair on my face instead of on my back, looking forward to all the women I was going to meet instead of wondering if I was ever going to meet one again. And there is something golden about youth, even if that is a cliché. You can’t ever be 16 again, Ryan, so don’t waste a day of it (by listening to Justin Timberlake and Beyonce, I wanted to say, but I kept my mouth shut, knowing that I didn’t listen to anybody over 30 then, and he wasn’t going to listen to me now).

Of course, just as with childbirth, or monster truck pulls, you can forget the pain of the past, and imagine it was better than it was. I remember Bruce Springsteen and Pink Floyd, and have conveniently forgotten Leo Sayer and The Captain and Tenille. So is it only my silly nostalgia that makes me think my teenaged years occurred at a much more interesting and important time than the era Ryan’s are occurring in now? How could I make such a judgment? I decided I would attempt to objectively explore the question by addressing some of the most popular books, movies, music and other examples of pop culture of the two eras. No fool worse than an old fool, as they say, and I didn’t want to remount my attack without some powerful arguments in my arsenal. Then I would show the callow youth something for sure.

I just don’t want to be a silly and irrelevant old fart! I imagine that when my Dad was fifteen in 1951 and Alan Freed coined the term “rock and roll,” there were old farts going on about how Rudy Vallee had these silly teenagers beat seven ways from Sunday. And I can remember how my Dad would kid about how when he was a teen they didn’t slap each other five, but gave each other “some skin.” I thought the notion of giving somebody some skin was terribly quaint and a little silly, kind of like being a beatnik or getting your kicks on Route 66. Kids today, youth is wasted on the young, all those old bromides—and then there is the bromide about how every generation is wrong to think that the one coming along after it has got it all wrong.

I can’t shake the feeling that things are presently really going to hell in a handbasket, and fast, or even that we have already gotten to hell and no one has made the announcement yet (only those of us not busy texting have noticed). My Dad thought that my favorite movie of that long ago era, THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, was a poor excuse for entertainment. Not that he minded satire, parody, and lampooning old movie forms (he loved Monty Python and the Holy Grail), but he was disturbed by what he saw as ROCKY HORROR’S shallowness, its banal attempt to lampoon the banality of sci-fi flicks and conventional morality, sexual and otherwise.

I begged to differ. I thought it was pretty sophisticated stuff, in its way, and was funny, (easily as good as KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE and THE GROOVE TUBE), which was just as important. But he just went on about SHOWBOAT and Ava Gardner, and I couldn’t make him see my point. And when I pointed out that THE DEER HUNTER was an important movie, a serious and important movie, like NETWORK and NASHVILLE, he just scoffed, even though he had seen neither one. He did give credit to Jack Nicholson for his performance in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST. Still, he insisted my culture was vapid, banal and insipid, certainly more so than his, even though the 50’s had Ike and THE BLOB (not to be confused with one another).

He also thought that Rocky Marciano would have cleaned Muhammad Ali’s clock, calling Ali a sideshow, a man that was more style than substance, and not even an original, but a poor imitation of the wrestler known as Gorgeous George. This seemed to be a surrendering of reason to emotion on his part, but I didn’t know how to counter his arguments, and I realized that it’s very hard to argue about preferences, or things that can never be tested. How do you defend chocolate against vanilla, or resolve those knotty hypotheticals?

But it is still my strong feeling that 2015 is a much shallower and less interesting and important time than 1975. And I am going to prove it, even if it doesn’t get my nephew’s attention (score one for me—if my uncle had crapped on 1975 I would have come to its defense, even if my girlfriend was on the phone). Next week—popular entertainment Now and Then, and why Ryan’s Now sucks in comparison to my Then, or any Then, for that matter.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Caitlyn

Christine Jorgensen

The big flurry this week was all about the erstwhile Bruce Jenner, and how he has fulfilled his lifelong ambition by transforming himself into a woman. That's nice. We all have lifelong ambitions, and it's a rare soul who is able to achieve such things. Personally I fail to see why it's such a big deal, since I'm out of touch with modern life; I think the story might have something to do with Kim Kardashian's bottom.

Changing one's sex is nothing new. Christine Jorgensen did it long ago, when I was a kid. For a week or so afterward we all made jokes about going to Denmark and then forgot about it.

The process is horrendously expensive, as I understand it. Yet another thing that only people with Big Money can manage to do. I heard a story once about a man who married a woman with Big Money and then nagged her to buy him a sex change operation. The wife gave in to her husband's incessant demands at last, only to find herself married to another woman. I mean, now what? Everyone at the family weddings and funerals was embarrassed to death for her.

What we non-rich people do when we get the urge to become men, or women, or dogs, or movie directors, or peers of the realm, or any other thing that we aren't, is to become novelists. You can write an entire book from the perspective of the world's sexiest woman, for example, dressing yourself up in size six designer gowns and four-inch heels that would cripple your actual feet, and then spend the night in bed with George Clooney or whoever, all from the comfort of your dining room table, without losing a pound or going near a single surgeon. Hell, this is why we write.

Or one of the reasons. Your wild fantasy will sell better if it has a compelling plot, of course, but that's an issue for another day.

© 2015 Kate Gallison