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What's with the Lifeguard? |
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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Alexander Portnoy! It’s hard to believe, but
Portnoy’s Complaint is now 40 years
old. That makes its protagonist a ripe old 77. How old’s that make
you, mamelah? I first read Portnoy
when
it came out, when Philip Roth was a young and rising star. That was,
uh, 40 years ago. I next read it just last month. Checked it out of
my local library for airplane reading. Lite, whimsical, Mem’ry Lane,
airplane reading. Tom Lazarus, screenwriter and author of SECRETS OF FILM WRITING, asks, “What’s with the Lifeguard?” It’s a tribute to my favorite
union-organizing song, Miner’s Lifeguard. Here are some of
the lyrics:
Miner's life
is like a sailor's.
CHORUS:
You've been
docked and docked, my boys,
In conclusion,
bear in memory, If you want it reverberating through your brain as it has been through mine since forever, drop 99 cents on iTunes, and you'll be singing it too. And while I still don’t exactly know what “cans for rockers” means, I love the song… and I see parallels between miners’ lives and writers’. No, we aren't faced with falling rocks, just falling incomes. Like miners in the years before unions, we produce the goods and others profit from them. Who's to blame? Rapacious publishers? Heartless capitalism? Nah. I blame us. Our poverty is our own fault; with the rare exception of the striking screenwriters, writers rarely have the patience to organize, the solidarity to cooperate or the spine to negotiate. Stagehands are better at getting paid for their labor. So are nurses. So are miners. Occasionally, writer’s lives and miner’s lives actually do intersect. That photo is of me at the entrance to a lead mine in northern Idaho. Once inside that dark dungeon, I wasn't the least tempted to trade in my iMac for a pick and shovel. Returning to the world aboveground (in a way) and the subject of ML2, Portnoy’s Complaint, here's a note from Michel Beaudry, of Whistler, British Columbia. Michel’s a ski writer who has spent the past many years trying to build a mountain-dwellers’ community based on shared stories. He writes: “I loved Portnoy. I loved his mid-century angst. But for me, my top three are Camus' The Plague, Kesey's Sometimes A Great Notion and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. (Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky comes a very close fourth.) These four writers truly taught me what it meant to tell a story. And they weren't afraid to take risks.” Write on, brothers and sisters, write on.
Am I pleased? Oh, verily. I am writer, hear me gloat. After all, this is a guy who goes swanning around in his Rolls, who takes the corporate jet to vacation on Bora Bora, who lives like a royal — who is a royal, having got himself a seat in the House of Lords — and who pays his ink-stained journos shit. Who prides himself on paying his journos shit. I mean, Black’s an old-style press baron. Among the many others, he owns or owned: the London Daily Telegraph, Jerusalem Post and hundreds of smaller papers across Canada and the US. He is/was worth roughly $300 million, and he is/was starving his writers. So, yes, yes, I am pleased to see Lord Black eating a bit of shit, himself; that I yam. Ah, but do I blame him for the
lousy pay and awful contracts he foisted on the journalists he's
treated as his personal serfs? In the last WRITER’S LIFEGUARD, I spoke of the similarities between the lives of writers and miners. Maybe it seemed a stretch when you read it. But substitute ‘copper baron’ or ‘coal baron’ for ‘press baron’ and you'll see there ain't much difference. So this Christmas, drink a toast to Lord Black. And this New Year’s Eve, make a resolution not to impoverish your family by signing pauper’s contracts. Remember Older's Law #37. Which reads:
Even when
it's nicely engraved, jules A PERFECT SET-UP IT MATTERS NOT IF you're a poet or a playwright, whether you write fiction or faction, kiddy lit or TV scripts — whatever you write, you know about setups. Whether it’s a clue or a club, a worm or a pistol, a half-told joke or a half-sung song, you've left something dangling in the lede, in the opening graph, in the first stanza/first act/Chapter One that you're gonna capitalize on later on. It’s one of the privileges of writerhood. Comes with your Poetic License. And you know you do it oh-so-well. I've just found somebody who does it better. She's PAULA KAMEN, and the book she does it in is IT’S ALL IN MY HEAD.
For 224 pages, I can't remember her once saying ‘damn’ or ‘hell.’ For 224 pages, she’s a nice Jewish girl describing a horrible, unending headache that, despite all her smarts and perseverance and despite all that medicine and alternative medicine have to offer, she just cannot shake. Never once during all these pages, during endless encounters with medical specialists, acupuncturists, spiritual healers, quacks, charlatans, money grubbers, True Believers and highly trained idiots does she lose her cool. Which, as a writer, made me admire this line on page 225 all the more: “AFTER ALMOST A DECADE OF THE HEADACHE, the time of reckoning had come. Despite the power of my growing management skills, and after my exhaustive search for a cure, I finally realized the worst had come true: I had done all I could to get rid of that motherfucker, and I'd lost.” 224 pages of restraint, followed by one (1) quiet “motherfucker.” Now that’s what I call a setup! jules “ARE YOU KIDDING? IT’S ‘CAUSE WE’RE SCUM!” “That must be it.
Otherwise, I can't for the life of me figure out why more writers don’t
become travel writers.” jules I am
Shiva, the God of Death
At least
when it comes to airlines, I am. I write for airlines. When you pull the
inflight magazineout of the seat a quarter-inch from your knee, odds
aren't too bad that my byline will be in it. Airline writing been the
source of some income, some pride and considerable pleasure.
Making the Bastards Pay I'm not one who regards editors as bastards. I yam an editor. I try not to be a bastard. Sometimes I even succeed. Ditto publishers. They're the ones who feed my family, and I don’t go around biting the hand that feeds. But. But the ones who don’t pay… ah, now yer talkin’ bastards. And if there's one thing I hate worse than bastards who rip off writers, it’s the impotent rage writers feel when we can't get our money from said bastards. OK, that’s the last time I’ll refer to illegitimate offspring today. From here on out, it’s about how to collect what's owed. My ski-writer friend Steve, who has four or five brothers, swears that his solution is to visit the editorial office with his brothers in tow. They conspicuously look around for a while; then the biggest brother quietly says, “You got a lot of expensive equipment here. We wouldn't want to see any of it damaged, y’understand? Please pay my brother what you owe him. Now.” That might not be for everyone. Multi-purpose writer David Goodman pulled one of my all-time favorite tricks when he was living in Boston. The publisher — one of the few Black publishers in Boston — wasn't paying his writers but was throwing a party for advertisers. By mistake, he'd somehow sent David the guest list. David sent him a five-word message; it read: “Guess who’s coming to dinner?” The checks were delivered before the party began. When a magazine publisher said he couldn't pay me the couple of thou he owed, I knew he was nearly broke. So I put him on a schedule. And to his credit, he stuck to it, paying me a couple of hundred each month until the debt was very nearly paid off. By then, he was broke, and I figured we were close enough to even anyway. There was one debt — a big one — I could not collect. I'd been promised an advance on an outdoors book, but when I delivered the ms, the publisher decided that the words they'd originally loved, they now hated… and were thus under no obligation to pay me a brass farthing. Then they stopped answering my letters. And calls. Can you spell impotent rage? So I contacted the National Writers Union, that at the time was a righteous organization of which I was a paid-up member. It took the NWU’s Phil Mattera, may his tribe increase, less than 24 hours to get them to pay up. I donated 10% on the spot to the union; without them I'd still be stuck in wrath and dearth. But the best revenge is success. A year or two later, I re-sold the book… and thus collected that advance not once, but twice. I'm no longer a member of the union, so these days I have to be even wilier on my own. Here's what I recommend you do when you're Payless in Peoria: 1. Always, always chase down that money. If you have to, threaten to kill the publisher’s dog, but never let him disappear with your hard-earned cash. 2. Your best protection is prevention. Don’t let yourself fall into debt to a publisher. Stop that before it starts. Go on strike until the check arrives… and doesn't bounce. 3. If you can't get the, uh, gentleperson to pay, your best strategy is to threaten to tell all and sundry, with a 24-hour deadline. That means advertisers, printers, warehousers, everyone vaguely associated with the rag. Inform the publisher that if the check isn't hand delivered to your doorstep in 24 hours, at 24 hours and 1 minute, the email blast goes out. 4 At 24 hours and 10 minutes, the press release goes out — to the media. And, being a media person, yourself, you have a long, long reach and a big, fat Rolodex. See you in print, playah. 5 If you're still not paid, make certain they do go out. Here's what it comes down to. Our best weapon isn't wealth or lawyers or guys in dark alleys. Our best weapon is our writerly skills. When you can't get paid for your honest work, this is the time to use 'em.
Love to hear your experience and wisdom in this
pain-filled part of the writer’s life. FIRST THINGS FIRST, STAY CALM I've just read what could be the most innovative, paradigm-shifting novel ever.
It’s The Raw Shark Texts by English author Steven Hall. It’s his
first novel. What’s it like? Moby Dick, The Magus, Snow Crash and the film Memento, all in one. Oh, and Jaws — note the title. Plus techniques and ideas not found in any of them, and, as far as I know, not anywhere else, either. The genre? Mix sci-fi, cyberpunk, character-driven, action-driven and what I'd call barrier-breaker — this may be a new genre, and it may just be a genre of one. Man oh man — it’s big! The protagonist — and don’t worry, I don’t spoil plots and endings — is Eric Sanderson, a guy who wakes up one day with no memory of his life before that moment. He finds a note. Here's the note: First things first, stay calm. If you are reading this, I’m not around anymore. Take the phone and speed dial 1. Tell the woman who answers that you are Eric Sanderson. The woman is Dr Randle. She’ll understand what has happened and you will be able to see her straight away. Take the car keys and drive the yellow Jeep to Dr. Randle’s house. If you haven’t found it yet, there’s a map in the envelope – it isn’t too far and it’s not hard to find. Dr Randle will be able to answer all your questions. It’s very important that you go straight away. Do not pass go. Do not explore. Do not collect two hundred pounds. The house keys are hanging from a nail on the banister at the bottom of the stairs, don’t forget them. With regret and also hope, The First Eric Sanderson Thus begins the tale… In telling it, along with powerful writing, Hall uses computer-generated images, templates of keyboards and — boldly, bravely, audaciously — blank pages. This ain't artsy-fartsy or showing how out-there he is; every bold technique he employs advances the story. Some story — some book! There are many ways to judge the power of a book. Here's mineL If a book is so engrossing that you sneak in daytime reads, the you miss your subway stop, that you shamelessly like to your spouse who's trying desperately to sleep, that, "I'll just finish this chapter," you have yourself a winner. The Raw Shark Texts passed all these tests plus the test of awe. I was awestruck. Let me know if you are, too. jules
Jules rants from New Zealand, 2008
In New Zealand, one of my rants on
one of my least favorite subjects has hit the blogways. If you love or
hate
"Cultural Appropriation,"
read on:
http://beattiesbookblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/bad-words-bad-art-bad-bad-bad-by-jules.html
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thought of liver is virtually unknown to
today’s 30-somethings. (That’s Alex’s age in the book.) 
IT LOOKS LIKE CONRAD “Call
me Connie” Black is on his way to jail. The poster child for press
lord/robber baron/reverse Robin Hood/litigious sonofabitch/journalists’
nemesis has finally been convicted of swindling shareholders out of
millions and is, theoretically at least, headin’ for the hoosegow.
For six-and-a-half years.
Kamen writes in the persona of the
smart Jewish girl who got better grades than you in college. I think
it’s her real-life persona. She's witty but restrained, erudite but
polite, and endlessly, endlessly patient. 
of the dainty lamb chop the waitress had handed
me. At this gathering for travel writers in the penthouse of a swanky
San Francisco hotel, I'd just been invited to tour a few swanky Colorado
hotels during ski season. “Hmmm,” I said. “Then let’s do everything we
can to keep it that way.”
