Absolute Gentleman

A man walks into the restaurant looking haggard. He’s been driving all night, and he’s exhausted – nearly drove off Interstate 90 twice on his way to Chicago. Good thing those vibrating, ribbed thingies were there on the side of the road to wake him, give him that cold shiver only terrorizing fear can give a man, or else: who knows? Who knows.

He finds a spot at the counter. There are old men there asking for pie. They get no pie. He suspects that if he asks, he might get pie. But does he even want pie? No, he won’t chance being a pie reject in this place.

He watches that dessert glass cabinet thing rotate. He’s mesmerized and doesn’t see the waitress. What’ll you have? she asks him.

He turns his head away from the dessert merry-go-round to meet her own tired eyes. God, she’s not beautiful.

He says, I’ll have the oggs.

When McSweeney’s Publishing released Nick Hornby’s Songbook, a collection of essays written to, from, or about songs, it did something brilliant. On its website McSweeneys.net, it invited its readership to submit personal essays on songs that had a lasting effect on them. It was brilliant because it allowed individuals to actively participate in the release and promotion of the book by asking them to write something personal and genuine. They published probably fifty of these essays, so they must have received at least a thousand entries. Songbook is beautiful looking, resembling one of those multi-track tapes from a recording studio (I have no idea what it’s called.), but there’s really nothing special about the essays. Nick Hornby’s brilliance wasn’t in how he wrote the essays (although he is a remarkable writer) but that he thought of this idea and the creativity it inspired. It’s no coincidence that this book is almost impossible to find in its original, hardcover form.

Not every McSweeney’s website venture actually works. Here are some that do:

INTERVIEWS WITH PEOPLE WHO HAVE INTERESTING OR UNUSUAL JOBS

OPEN LETTERS TO PEOPLE OR ENTITIES WHO ARE UNLIKELY TO RESPOND

BEN GREENMAN’S FAKE CELEBRITY MUSICALS

TEDDY WAYNE’S UNPOPULAR PROVERBS

McSWEENEY’S RECOMMENDS

The ones that don’t? How about every single one with the word “Dispatches” in it. I couldn’t stomach these at all, because they all thought they had to be so jokie, and all they ended up being was a bunch of self-promoting (by the writer) slobber and very little that was interesting about the places these people wrote from. Also:

MICHAEL IAN BLACK IS A VERY FAMOUS CELEBRITY

Could someone give me half a break with this guy?

One of the Dispatches is written by my friend and writing mentor, Robin Hemley, who just released a book called Do-Over! In which a forty-eight-year-old father of three returns to kindergarten, summer camp, the prom, and other embarrassments. I love the book so far, mostly because it’s about way more than the reactions of those who bore witness to Robin’s do-overs, but what Robin was thinking and the conclusions he came to while he went through this all over again.

I also love it because, like Songbook, it is making me reflect on the things I would do-over if I could. Robin has a really nice website: http://robinhemley.com/, and he gave away copies of his book to some of those who submitted their own do-over stories. The promotion is over, but he needs to do it over again, so the book is continuously in people’s thoughts. He needs to McSweeney’s this thing.

So you know what’s coming next. Here are six of the things I would Do-Over! if I could:

The Buff Puff Disaster

My father was always very sensitive about my acne problem during my teenage years, so at a particularly pimply time during my senior year of high school, he went to the store and bought me Buff Puff, a soap and scouring pad combination that was to cure my acne problem. What actually happened was that when I used Buff Puff, it broke open every pimple on my face and spread the disease all over my face to such an extent, that I actually had zits on top of zits. Honestly: I would lean over the bathroom sink to pop my zits in the mirror, and I felt a popping within one of the giant pimples on my chin. Yeah. It was so bad that the guy with the whitest teeth and worst acne in my English class that year, Joey-something, was like, “Jesus Christ, dude. What happened to your face?” I did not attend my senior prom.

Paul, Theresa, and Pearl Jam

When Pearl Jam came to New York City for the first time, they played a concert at the Limelight with The Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Smashing Pumpkins. I had a ten-dollar ticket to this show, but gave it up so I could hang out with Theresa, my girlfriend at the time, in her bedroom. It was totally my choice, as Theresa kept telling me to go – probably wanted me to go – but all I wanted to do in life was to be with her. I called my friend Paul, who had my ticket, and told him to sell it for me. He was incredulous, but sold it – probably very easily, too.

I saw Nirvana during In Utero, though.

Chuck Markey

There was this traumatic snowball-throwing incident, where my little brother Jeff ended up pegging a van that passed by our house when we were kids. The van contained every slime ball, dirtbag, drug-user (it seemed) in our neighborhood, and they got out of the van and held us hostage in our own house until my mother came home from work. It was terrifying. Later, the drug-dealing henchmen sent a kid named Chuck Markey after me in the halls of Connetquot High School. He confronted me and landed two punches to my face, knocking my glasses off. He walked away without my having retaliated, and Vinny Colandrea, who was at the locker right next to the face-punching, said to me, “How could you just stand there and let him hit you?” I walked into Shydo’s empty classroom, closed the door behind me, and cried like a baby in the dark. I used to be friends with Chuck Markey, and I remember the day his little sister was born. We were in Mrs. Haude’s (pronounced HOWDY) homeroom in seventh grade, and Chuck came in with chocolate cigars for all of us. Today if I saw Chuck Markey lying in the middle of the road, I would make road kill out of him. I still might go and find him someday.

Kicking Billy

I used to work at an independent home improvement center called Long Island Paneling in Centereach, New York. I loved it and hated it there, but mostly loved bolting a homemade basketball hoop and backboard to a pallet, then lifting the pallet with the forklift, and playing in one of the aisles while the customers looked for one of us to help them. We played every day until we were sopping wet with sweat and we couldn’t find any more oxygen. During one of these games, my brother Billy started ripping apart the reputation of yet another one of my girlfriends. He always had this strange jealousy whenever I had a girlfriend. He used to knock the books out of Lisa Ciavatta’s hands in the hallways almost weekly. He hated Maureen Horn and he hated Theresa. I had had enough of the shit about Theresa, so I attacked him. My best friend, Dave, who also worked there and whom my second son is named for, stepped in and tried to pry me off of Billy. Before he was able to pull me away, I kicked Billy in the face, opening up a gash on his forehead that rained blood everywhere. It is the most significant regret I have and will ever have in my life and I will not forget it until the day I die.

Brian’s Wedding

I have been the Best Man at two weddings in my life. One of them was Brian’s, and I drank so much that night that I rested my face in my plate of food at the dais. I was a complete and utter embarrassment, and I lost Danielle Gallagher because of it.

Batters Hitting Left-Handed Off Me

My father used to think, falsely, that I was the best baseball player on any of the teams I was on. He coached my teams for most of my life, and he always made me pitch, because he wanted me to be the best. One of the leagues he coached me in was a fall league that featured really great players I had only heard of in playground legends. My father put me on the mound against the Lassen’s team, and they batted me around so thoroughly, that they began to hit left-handed (their off hand) the next time through the order. I pretended that I thought it was funny, because I was insecure and always beating myself up back then, but it has always bothered me that I let them do that to me. If I could face those douchebags one more time, there would be broken ribs.

I’m a used book junkie, so whenever I’m in a town that has such an establishment, not overrun with shelves upon shelves of romance paperbacks, although I didn’t seem so averse to them when I was reading them aloud to two classmates in high school after computer science class, and I swear it ended up getting them together for senior prom and who knows what else, I have to check in, wander for a couple of hours, and spend at least twenty-five dollars.

The same holds true for libraries and their book sales. I was recently turned off to library book sales because they’re hawked and plundered by ravenous used bookstore owners who buy the “Friends of the ________ Library” membership, something like twenty bucks, and then gain the right to bum rush the library before anyone else can, setting aside piles and piles of tarpaulin-covered choice titles that everyone has to step over but no one can touch. They walk around with this digital ISBN machine that tells them, somehow, how valuable these books are. I hate these people. Wait, to put it in a more mature way: I severely dislike these assholes. Somehow, I think it’s taking away from the spirit of what these book sales are all about. If you have a child looking for that next Captain Underpants book, don’t go to a library sale. The used bookstore vultures will grab your child with the book, take them to a remote corner of the basement in the library, and feed on their entrails until 4PM, when the sale ends on Sunday.

If you’re a teacher, though, YOU can be the vulture before the vultures. I worked at a school with an incredible library and librarian, and whenever she pruned the shelves, she’d email the teachers and let us have at the stacks before she turned them over to the local library, who’d sell them at their book sale. Seems like a cycling food chain of scavengers, but it’s always nice to be at the top once in a while. School libraries are always evaluating themselves, and one of the ways they decide which books to discard is by copyright date. Every librarian probably knows the average copyright date of her or his library. In order to be a library known for currency, it has to maintain a good average copyright date. I forget the average year, but an average copyright year of 1979 is better than an average of 1955, according to those who evaluate libraries. Really good librarians, and I’ve worked with a few of them, will take the statistics into consideration, but will more often turn to human beings before making the final decisions.

I’ve always thought that old books were somehow better, less commercialized, so to speak, and more academic – more to the point – less fluff, more instructional. Today’s books on writing are a bit too chit-chatty, cutesy, and roundabout. I picked up a book entitled The Art of Modern Fiction, edited by Ray B. West, Jr., Professor of English at Iowa State and Robert Wooster Stallman, Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. I was excited. It’s exactly the type of book I salivate over, even if I don’t read all of it – even if all I do with it is take it into the bathroom for a session to thumb through the contents looking for a paragraph of sage advice. Plus, it took TWO professors to edit this thing; PLUS, it was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston; AND the book is 463 pages. All of these are ingredients for a fantastic read on the examination of the short story.

The book consisted of an introductory section called “A Note to the Reader,” which was two and one-quarter pages in length and written by both professors and 460 pages of short stories. Sure, there were stories by all the greats: Joyce, Hemingway, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Katherine Anne Porter, but that’s it: no explanation, no annotation, no analysis. There were no parenthetical exclamations, no italicized editor’s notes before each story, no editorial presence whatsoever. It was a complete disappointment and a rip-off.

My first thought was It took two professors to put this book together? My next was: How many professors does it take to create a farce of a book on the art of the short story? Two: One to write it and the other to fight over who’s written the greater number of words for the lame intro and thus can have first billing on the by-line.

I paid zero for it, so there wasn’t any kind of financial loss. But, my god, what a waste of paper – what a thinly disguised Let’s-publish-a-worthless-book-so-we-can-make-our-introductory-lit-students-buy-something-with-our-names-on-it-and-make-some-money-at-their-expense.

This publishing fraudulence isn’t reserved for books in 1949, either. This month’s Poets & Writers weighs in with its own condescendence. On the cover, in generously-sized black lettering, appears “William T. Vollmann’s impressive and, let’s be honest, slightly disturbing body of work.” It’s listed as a “Feature” in the Table of Contents, despite it being nothing more than a one-paragraph introduction to a listing of the titles, page-counts, and summaries of his nineteen books. Oh, there’s also a picture of Vollmann carrying some of these books. Other than that, Anthony Miller, “a writer and critic” from Los Angeles, offers absolutely nothing else. Again: rip-off. What a cheap-ass way not only to get a publishing credit, but for a reputable writer’s magazine to fill its pages. Apparently, all you have to do to publish in Poets & Writers is have a favorite writer, find out how many pages each of his or her books has, and write a paragraph-long book report for each. It’s a summer reading assignment for a seventh grader.

One of my flaws in character, and that sounds a little harsh, but I’m not sure what else to call it, is the way I rebut — the way I disagree with people when I think they’re making an incorrect statement or assessment, or when there’s some kind of action I deem an injustice.

This entry is an exercise in disagreeing like a normal person.

I like to blame this disease on the fact that I was raised on Long Island, a place, along with Florida, that could break away from its tectonic-freaking-plate, float to Greenland, Europe, Africa, whatever, and would not be missed at all.

Of course I’d want most of my family off the Island, but I’d probably leave Billy. Mostly because Billy is delusional, and doesn’t think he needs anybody.

My disagreement is with a writer who posted, on a social networking site, that he was just accepted for publication in a literary magazine. To set the scene clearly, so you don’t have to read my mind, he is also the director of a rather excellent publisher, and this literary magazine is a bit of a third or fourth-tier publication, assuming, as I do, the first tier is Paris Review, Granta, Ploughshares, and The New Yorker; second tier, or first tier A, is something like McSweeney’s, Fence, Tin House, Zoetrope All-Story, Virginia Quarterly Review; and third are magazines like Post Road (awful type, horrible arrangement, terrible layout, good writing) and the 1500 other literary magazines in the Boston area, Ninth Letter (who spend all their grant money on website development, apparently), The Cottahatchie Review or whatever you call it, Florida Review, Georgia Review, Your Mom Review, etcetera.

The one I’m talking about is a third tier.

So this writer/publisher, who I respect a lot (‘whom’ I know, but ‘who’ is how I’m saying it), because he does wonderful things for the publishing world, for writers, and for kids, makes it known that he was published in this third-tier magazine. It’s an exciting time, to be sure. How awesome is it when someone acknowledges your diction and syntax and chooses to have it representative of the vision they have for their magazine. I do not disagree with his excitement at all. He deserves to be excited and to let those who admire him know about it.

But then he started saying things like, “I can’t believe they accepted that piece…” “I threw that thing together in, like, one day…” and so on (These are not direct quotes, but are the root of my discomfort.)

This really bothered me for two reasons.

One: On behalf of all of us who (not ‘whom’ but ‘who’ this time) write, and on behalf of all those who work endlessly on their writing with little acknowledgment because their submission ends up on a slush pile that is not even read, I’d like to say that writers do not want to know if a published writer just threw a doodle together and submitted it. They really don’t, even if it’s true. It cheapens the work, makes the writer look like a jerk, despite the fact that he is not, and it reflects poorly on the publication in question (he named the publication in his jottings), even if it is a third-tier literary magazine.

Two: The writer in question publishes books. He publishes very good books. The literary community is about knowing one of the editors or being a famous writer, and it is rarely about being published as an unknown. Every editor and publisher has a backlog of favors to grant to friends that will last him two or three years. My point is that he can’t think, can’t even remotely think, that his thrown-together story/poem was accepted on the merits of its brilliance, that his being an editor didn’t play a significant role in the decision, that this wasn’t the initiation of a not-so-inconspicuous back-scratching exercise, that will be cashed in sometime in the future, when enough time passes that the writer in question wouldn’t suspect such distastefulness.

These literary publishers are the same ones that whine about how The New Yorker only publishes John Updike and Alice Munro, and what they are not realizing is that they are, in essence, doing the same thing and perpetuating the problem by doing so at the ground level, at the seedling stage, where promising young writers are supposed to get their break, where we should be reading the freshest, most innovative material.

My only hope is that he doesn’t reach up to scratch their backs.

Consider the following sentence that I’m considering:

Human beings desire the dramatic.

Then consider

Human beings desire drama.

In the interest of brevity and conciseness, which is something I demand from my students, the latter wins by a nose. However, in the interest in rhythm, the former is the obvious choice. John Gardner discusses this in The Art of Fiction extensively. In demonstrating different rhythmic possibilities, he places accent marks over the syllables in the spots he might tap his foot if he were keeping time. I don’t know if I’m explaining this clearly enough, but anyway. Here’s how the second sentence can be accented, demonstrated by the bold, capitalized letters:

HUman BEings desIre drAma.

He might say that the sentence is too rhythmically stunted, that there isn’t enough play in between the accented marks. The first sentence seems to be stretched out more:

HUman BEings desIre the draMAtic.

Admittedly, there’s a slight variance, but this sentence features words with 2, 2, 3, 1, and 3 syllables, respectively. Since the first sentence contains words with 2, 2, 3, and 2 syllables, there might be too much syllabic repetition (what I’m calling it).