Consternatio

Being told by my agent that I’m more or less blacklisted among editors because my first novel didn’t sell well enough to give me a second chance. This is like sending a rookie up to the plate and taking him out of the game after he fouls off the first pitch. In publishing, there’s no such thing as three strikes you’re out. Now it’s one strike and you’re finished -- for good.

I’m livid. It flies in the face of the perseverance instinct every writer is supposed to have. I’d never have gotten the first book published if I’d been inclined to give up after a hundred rejections. Make that a thousand. And so my inclination now is to fight this apparent fact of life and keep going. All of us who have struggled at any kind of serious art don’t like to think that there’s no point in carrying on, and yet, the older I get, the more obvious it is that editors don’t judge a work on its merits. They judge the writer. A seven-year-old “track record” is more meaningful to them than the quality of the book in front of them and whatever potential it might have.

I’m thinking a lot of that old Woody Allen movie, The Front, lately. He plays the public face of some blacklisted writers in the 1950s, during the McCarthy purges, helping them continue to write and earn their livings. It might be time for something like that for me. If I have to outsmart the publishing industry in order to persevere (as I’ve been taught and encouraged to do all my writing life), then, what the hell, I’ll do it. And I’m not thinking of a pseudonym either, because, for one thing, my agent seems cool to the idea. For another, there’s something ironically pathetic about assuming a fictional identity to publish fiction.

No, instead I’m thinking about my wife as my front. She’d be terrific. She’s my best editor and my best reader. She gets my slant, my approach, my style, and my intentions. And to be completely honest about it, she’d be a much better public persona than I am (was). I hated readings and appearances, radio interviews, the constant BS of marketing. She was an aspiring actress when she was younger. Now’s her chance.

I suppose there are potential legal issues that could get me in trouble. I don’t care at this point. It’s the make-or-break moment when I either dig a way around the system’s obstacles or I quit. I’m not quite ready to quit.

In fact, there’s a new idea I want to start writing notes for today...

Consternatio

Holy Humbaba, I think my dear old friend might be a Tenther!

You know the Tenthers, right? They’re the Tea Party types (shit, he’s probably a Tea Partier too!) who think that the tenth amendment to the Constitution essentially nullifies most if not all federal programs. Usually they point to programs like Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage, and the EPA, claiming that these tyrannical mandates are beyond the scope of federal power as described in the amendment. The amendment says just this: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Without doing volumes of research, I’ve learned that the Supreme Court has generally not swallowed the conceit that only powers named in the Constitution are due the federal government. There have been tenth amendment movements in the past, but seldom has the Court found in favor of the argument, instead landing on the strength of the Commerce Clause to justify the constitutionality of the challenged laws.

My friend -- the evangelical -- has been making Tea Party noises lately, which doesn’t surprise me, since he’s always been archly conservative. What does surprise, and trouble, me now is that this remarkably smart man is using the remarkably unsmart arguments of the TP, the Tenthers, and for all I know the Birthers to defend his positions. When I questioned his interpretation of the tenth amendment, though, he claimed he didn’t intend to imply that Social Security and Medicare were illegitimate; his beef, he said, is strictly with the new health care bill’s individual mandate. If that were the case, however, he should also be against the employer’s share of Social Security, a mandate that covers all states and all businesses.

If I had any faith in the Supreme Court’s respect for stare decisis, I wouldn’t worry about a tenth amendment challenge to the health care bill. But the Tenthers have introduced a meme, and if my friend is beaming the meme, I’m sure the Court (I mean the five conservatives) is tuned into it as well. It would provide cover for a decision that would open the door toward ending the landmark social programs of the 20th century, which, against their best interests, a large portion of the U.S. population would applaud. As I pointed out to my friend, without Social Security and Medicare millions of elderly folks would be living with their adult children and relying on them to pay for their medical needs. That would sure cramp the style of our consumer economy, wouldn’t it?

It seems to me that the Tenthers are in search of a single button to push that would relieve all their frustrations with our political system, first and foremost of which is the fact that the country is something of a democracy. They’re angry that things aren’t the way they want them, and I say, Join the frickin’ club! But what they want is capitulation of all our institutions, by means of the tenth amendment, so that we become nothing but a conglomeration of states with independent societies and fifty different sets of standards.

It’s unworkable. And I hope my friend doesn’t really see things the way those twerps in the tri-cornered hats at the Tea Party rallies do.

Consternatio

In another perfect metaphor for our times, I learn today that The Beatles Complete on Ukulele has come to an abrupt end. Son of a bitch!

Oh, it was an ambitious project, to be sure, to write about and perform (on ukulele and other assorted lo-fi gear) every Beatles' tune in time for the Summer Olympics in London, '012. Roger Greenawalt and Dave Barratt, the inspired ones, have been making my Tuesdays special ever since I read about them on Boing Boing.

Israel and the Palestinians will never achieve peace in our time. Barack Obama will never fill the suit we imagined him in. The Cubs will never win the World Series, but please, boys, R & D, give me something to hope for in this wasteland of a century we're slogging through!

You know what they say: "Life is very short, and there's not ti-i-i-i-ime for fussing and fighting, my friend."

Consternatio

A disturbing sight last weekend, while we were hiking in the Sunol Wilderness, near Pleasanton. On the busy trail heading back to park HQ from what they call Little Yosemite, we spotted a dog with a Safeway bag of his own poop hanging around his neck.

My God, what kind of sadistic creep would do that to a pup? We all know that a dog’s sense of smell is something like 400 times stronger than a human’s. Can you imagine having to walk a few miles with your own feces hanging in a pouch a couple inches from your nose? Worse, it was a hot day...

It’s almost cute when people put bandannas and sunglasses on their pooches. I like when I see a dog carrying his own leash in his mouth too, but for the love of God, making a creature as noble as the family dog wear a shit sachet is just plain vile.

Consternatio

This age needs rather men like Shakespeare, or Milton, or Pope; men who are filled with the strength of their cultures and do not transcend the limits of their age, but, working within the times, bring what is peculiar to the moment to glory. We need great artists who are willing to accept restrictions, and who love their environments with such vitality that they can produce an epic out of the Protestant ethic ... Whatever the many failings of my work, let it stand as a manifesto of my love for the time in which I was born. -- John Updike

What consternates me is that this is Mr. Updike, at age 19, writing to his parents. Doesn't sound much like a chap I could identify with.

Consternatio

Yesterday, while walking the dog in town, I was across the street from our old post office building -- a nice 20’s era Carnegie-type edifice -- when I spotted a petition table in front. The first words on the poster I glimpsed were “Impeach Obama,” and only after I registered that did I see the photograph that accompanied the caption above: Barack Obama with a Hitler mustache. At that point, one of the young pea-brained, neo-fascist dudes manning the table looked over and gave me a shit-eating grin -- proud of himself and full of adolescent, testosteronical voltage -- and all I could think to do was flip him the bird. Which I did.

His reaction was to take offense. Imagine that.

What I did, in retrospect, was immature and even stupid -- who knows, he might have chased me down and beaten the crap out of me with a bike chain hidden in his camouflage cargo pants -- but it was instinctual and reflexive. What he did was equally offensive but backed by intention and forethought. He meant to offend. He thought he was cute as hell with his Hitler photo and his barely concealed racism (I want to know where these turds were when Bush was up late every night shredding the Constitution). He’d downloaded the petition from some Larouchian web site, no doubt, and picked the day to set up in front of the post office -- and in a dominantly liberal part of our little town, too. He wanted to provoke, and he provoked me into acting like a moron.

I’m not proud of it, but that I offended him for a split second gave me a burst of adrenaline and, maybe too, testosterone, though I realize that this kind of reaction is exactly what, on a larger scale, makes violent conflict the human mode of attacking disputes.

We see how well that goes. The Israeli raid on that humanitarian flotilla is just one recent example.

Consternatio

Now and then I get curious about people I used to know. I Google them. Nine times out of ten there’s no reference whatsoever to their names, or anybody sharing their names (there are dozens of guys out there with my name), and I always find that hard to believe. How can the interwebs fail to locate some minute mention of nearly every living American? Or dead, for that matter. You’d think that all of us have done something, written something, participated in some generic event, or had our names listed on some roster that would pop up (in pdf form, no doubt) in a broad search.

Recently I finally got results for a woman I worked with long ago. I’d always been curious about her, since we were both fiction writers and we’d become pretty good friends in our three-and-a-half years together in a cramped La Jolla office. When I moved to San Francisco and she moved to Long Island, we lost touch -- a few letters exchanged of the newsy sort, announcing the births of her daughters and more pack-up-and-moves. Her husband is a neuroscientist with a lengthy resume; they’ve moved a lot. The truth is, though, that along the way I got tired of her lack of interest in me, so I stopped writing back, and that is why I’ve felt a little bit guilty over the intervening years. I know I could have kept our friendship going if I really wanted to. I could have let her go through her phases, even while I managed my usual enthusiasm. I always expected to hear that she had won some fiction award or had had a novel published, but no. Instead I was the one who published a novel, but I never heard from her about it. Maybe she was never moved to Google me.

This time, after I typed in her name -- her husband’s actually -- some links popped up that guided me to her. She had moved again, thanks to her husband’s career. Briefly, a couple of years ago, she had a blog. About knitting.

I wasn’t sure it was her, once I popped in on the blog. This woman didn’t sound anything like my old friend. She sounded, somehow, wounded, tragic, lost. She’d found God somewhere in there, her idiosyncratic version of Christianity, anyway. She was doing good works, though: collecting people’s unwanted knittings -- blankets and things -- for the homeless. I had to admire that. I often think about doing such good works, but the quotidian always seems to interfere or distract, or, more likely, provide a ready excuse. She was actually doing something.

But in her voice was a tone of emptiness. It was the voice of someone who had been searching for herself or her rightful role in life and was surprised not to have found it in motherhood. She’s been in therapy, in Al Anon, deep in church activities, and I’m sure she’s been a terrific mother too. Yet she hadn’t found it. The one thing. Now she’s doing another blog with her sister -- a very personal back-and-forth that I’m not sure they mean to be public -- and her slow-burning desperation is coming through there too. She revealed that her husband is a year out from a cancer diagnosis. There is a worried edge to her writing, but an elder sister’s confidence too, an “I’ve been there” message between the lines. It’s obvious that she loves her family and her church, she’s fearful for her husband, and she’s trying to keep a fun face on the outside. But I’m stunned at how needy and damaged she seems now, when twenty years ago she was a bright, light-hearted, talented, hilarious young woman who had a chance to do big things with her writing.

It seems to me, from this huge distance, that something went wrong for her. On the inside. But I’ll never know, and I’ll never try to find out either, because she has moved too far from my reach (Christ isn’t in my bag of tricks, I’m afraid). We’re nearly opposites now.

Strange, how two people in their early thirties have taken such different paths to fifty.

Consternatio

It's raining in mid-May. That's unusual for this part of the world. It scares me.

Then there's this giant X that appeared over my house a while back. It scares me too. There a many things out
there that scare me.

Consternatio

The candidates have resorted to using coded language to reach their bases. Huckabee refers to "vertical thinking," which is apparently a fundamentalist Christian idea meaning to think like God would. Meanwhile, Obama yesterday said, mocking himself, "The time to come has changed."

A slip of the tongue? Or is he reaching out to millions of sex addicts to put him over the top...

Consternatio

I wonder why it is that people look to the new year with optimism. There's no reason to think the new year will be any better than the old (see Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, subprime mortgage crisis, sinking dollar, health insurance crisis, Bush administration, etc.), yet we never fail to hope -- no, not hope, believe -- that relief, even bliss, is right around the corner. It's a little like the way everyone thinks they're going to heaven.

I've learned that new years are just that. New. And new isn't necessarily better. However, a new year is full of new days, and if you can grab a piece of bliss through the course of each day you'll likely be all right.

Consternatio

For me, as a struggling novelist (what other kind is there?), two items in the recent NY Times “Year In Ideas” feature caught my eye. One said that hopelessness might be better than hope, when it comes to well-being. Apparently, for example, prison inmates who were sentenced to life without the possibility of parole fare better than those who are always thinking that the liberating phone call is right around the corner. Makes sense, really. The other said that perseverance might be bad for you. People who kept trying to achieve a difficult or impossible goal, in this study, had elevated levels of C-reactive protein (bad) compared with those who bailed out on the goal.

Persevering with hopefulness in the face of unbelievably bad odds pretty much describes what I do. Oy.

Consternatio

If Iran suspended its nuclear development in 2003, as has been reported today, can we stop threatening to "take out" its nuclear sites? I for one would like to spend this Christmas season free of anxiety that WWIII is coming upon a midnight clear.

If we persist, it would have to be on the basis of Iran's hypothetical interference in Iraq (training tarists, importing IEDs, fomenting hatred of Americans -- as if Iraqis needed help on that front). I don't think that'll fly in the absence of the dreaded Nuclear Threat.

Then again, UN inspectors were on the ground in Iraq just before the war started. They were trying to tell us that there were no WMDs.

In these times, anything's possible.

Consternatio

If the hype is wrong, and the world at large is not craving freedom and democracy, are we guilty of force-feeding?

As some modern philosophers are saying, there is no such thing as "humanity" or "civilization." There is only a world of billions of individuals ebbing and flowing into patterns that work, or don't.

Consternatio

Richard Bruce Cheney is in the hospital with an irregular heartbeat. I don't like the feeling of ambiguity that comes when I imagine his silent passing. As I always tell one who is dear to me as she waits for an inheritance, It's bad karma to root for someone to die, you know.

Her answer: "Is it?"