I Hate Blogging

I have to be honest—I hate blogging.

It’s an intriguing medium, and its best practitioners—Andrew Sullivan, say—keep it pretty lively, to the point that there’s a lot of interaction between writer and audience, which is part of the point of this whole writing thing.

Given the current state of the publishing industry, I feel like I’m expected to be that lively with my own blogging—it feels like a classic Catch-22 situation, where you’re supposed to prove you have an audience before anyone will put the effort into helping your books find an audience. But truth be told, between working a full non-writing workday, working out, working on a relationship, and keeping up with other need-to-do-stuff, I don’t think I have the time. And with the time I DO have, I’d rather be writing books. Rather than shooting from the hip every day, hitting sometimes and missing others, I prefer taking the time to revise and edit and polish, to come up with something solid and coherent and well put-together. (I also kind of like the process of envisioning scenes and dialogue. It’s like working out, in that there’s a certain fear of the effort that can keep you dilly-dallying and doing other things. But once you dig in and the terror wears off, a certain euphoria settles in, not unlike a runner’s high, and that sticks around for a few minutes, at least, once you stop writing.) Even when I do write things that are more immediate and interactive than fiction—Amazon product reviews, facebook status updates, blog posts—I spend a lot of time mentally revising what I say and, if time allows, editing. (Even this blog post has taken at least six days to write. Granted, in that time I’ve also put a lot of effort into my latest manuscript, Messiah, but still, I ain’t exactly doing this in real time.)

Despite my best efforts, I’m still Catholic enough that I engage in an unhealthy amount of self-flagellation. (Figuratively speaking, for now.) I’m particularly good at this when it comes to things I “should have” done, such as channeling my creative energies into something a little less lonely, like, say, being a musician. The level of artist-audience interaction, and its immediacy, is way higher for musicians than novelists; the sheer length of time it takes to consume a book guarantees this. Even those books that are quick reads and thoroughly enjoyable and thought-provoking/memorable (Camus’ The Stranger or The Fall, say, or Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground, or even Bukowski’s Ham on Rye or Factotum) will, in the absence of vacation time, take a few days to rip through. And plenty of books that I’ve really enjoyed, or at least that I like to TELL people I’ve really enjoyed (The Brothers Karamazov, or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest) have been multi-month ordeals, with plenty of great moments, but also a substantial amount of time spent gazing longingly at the other books on my shelf, wishing I were reading them instead.

And that’s a hard thing to remember when I’m at the stage I’m at with my novel, where I have a few manuscript copies out there in the hands of (hopefully) eager friends, and a few emailed query letters sitting in the Inboxes of (presumably) overworked agents. I think and I hope Resistance is the type of book I’d like on my shelf—thoughtful and well-researched, but lively and insightful; arty without being pretentious or inaccessible, even (dare I hope) something that will hold up to multiple readings and still be around in a couple hundred years. That’s the vision I have, at least, but obviously beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the creator can’t ever be an objective beholder. So I’m awaiting feedback from the friends and activity from the agents, a state of being that usually lends itself to still more self-flagellation.

I had the good fortune of meeting Gary Shteyngart a few weeks ago, at a book reading for Columbia alumni in Chicago. Prior to this reading, I’d never read any of his books, but he has attained the level of literary success I tell myself I’d like as the end state of all this punishment—a comfortable level, where one wouldn’t get mobbed on the street or shot by deranged loners, but where one could get a book out there every few years and have total strangers willing to pay for it, read it, and respond to it. (Granted, when they asked for a show of hands to see who’d read his latest, 98% of us hadn’t. But we knew who he was, at least!) I asked him a couple questions about publishing during the Q&A session, and we got to chat a little afterwards. In between chitchat and jokes (I got a laugh out of him by comparing Gogol’s Dead Souls, with all its skips and gaps, to a bad Netflix disc), he gave me his take on the literary world.

Hunter S. Thompson famously said that T.V. was a “cruel and shallow money trench…a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.” And Shteyngart’s view of writing seems even bleaker, a nonstop merry-go-round of psychoanalysis and self-recrimination and Herculean effort towards an uncertain end. Success (in my recollection of his estimation) sets you on a book treadmill where you have to keep churning out books regardless of whether or not you actually like them, but lack of success—or a decline in success from one book to the next—is far worse, and sends you into a deep funk. So authors, even at his level, have to put a tremendous amount of energy into marketing themselves. To promote his latest work, Super Sad True Love Story, he had to enlist the help of his M.F.A. students to film a movie for the YouTubes. “We had to make a movie so we could publish the book,” he said. “That should tell you everything you need to know about publishing these days.”

So my fears are confirmed: you need to get an audience before you can get an audience. It seems absurd, but (this is the last time I’ll name-drop, I SWEAR) as Shteyngart told me, we can long for those days of all-expenses-paid book tours and superstar literary authors, but they aren’t coming back, so that’s just the way it is. And like it or not, I HAVE to do it, because I don’t know how to not write. (Others have said they don’t know how to do anything else, but I can’t exactly say that—I do make a decent living at my Clark Kent job, and I’m earning something close to what I’m told is the annual income level that corresponds to the optimum amount of personal happiness.) And, for as much as I hate blogging, I can still put something out there, which means it still seems far superior to querying agents, a prospect about which I’m slowly acquiring an unmitigated and pure hatred, far more substantial than the pretend hatred I have for blogging. (I’ve had two agencies request my full manuscript. One of them seemed excited and went through a round of revisions with me but abruptly stopped returning my phone calls or responding to my emails, and a subsequent agent never got back to me after requesting the full manuscript. And BOTH were friend-of-friend situations; blind query letters have gotten me exactly nowhere, which is why I’m reluctant to continue sending them out.)

In fact, I’m considering self-publishing (again), but perhaps doing a little more pre-publication work this time and possibly even establishing my own imprint for other self-published authors, so we can all project the image of having passed through the tough judgment of the tastemakers and gatekeepers. Of course, if I do that, it’ll be a LOT more of what I hate—blogging and tweeting, counting my followers and my page hits—and that’ll suck up still more of my virtually nonexistent free time.

I believe in my book enough that I’m willing to do these things for its sake—or at least, I want to get it out there and see what the marketplace says about it, because, frankly, as much as they like to pretend otherwise, agents and publishers don’t know what will or won’t sell until it sells or doesn’t sell. Still, the thought of doing still more of what I hate for the sake of what I love left me with a fair amount of fear about all the effort that entails. So I asked a good friend for his advice about being crushed by this self-imposed crisis. And he responded with a question: “What would you expect of yourself if you were humane?”

It’s obviously an absurd question—if I were humane, I wouldn’t put myself through all this trouble. So here I am in Catch-22 land, or embracing the paradox, at least—disconnecting from my life to connect with yours, doing something I hate, in the hopes you’ll like it, at least.

Best Crime Songs - Arson

"April 29, 1992," Sublime. I was a skinny white kid living in suburban Canada during the Rodney King riots, and was only in 9^th grade, so participating in them wouldn’t exactly have been feasible, but when I first heard this song, their knowing taunt about how “You were sittin’ home watching your T.V. while we were participating in some anarchy” amplified my sense of suburban geekiness and made me feel like I’d missed out on something really really awesome. “Red lights flashing, time to retire, and then we turned that liquor store into a structure fire” makes the arson seem both completely unnecessary and gleefully cool. (This song could have also won in the Riot and Robbery categories, but I wanted to give someone else a shot.)

Best Crime Songs - Murder

So I wrote a column for The Deadline, my friend's resolutely non-online newspaper, about the best crime songs ever written. And since I want to keep the blog going without writing new stuff just yet, I'm gonna go back through and post them all, one by one. First up: murder.

Best Crime Song - Murder

There was a time I would have said “Folsom Prison Blues” hands down; “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die” is pretty hard to top, lyrically. But this song has a sleeping flaw. Namely, even though said homicide apparently took place in Nevada, Johnny’s narrator’s singing from Folsom Prison, which is, of course, in California. So there are clear jurisdictional issues here, which lead me to question the narrator’s veracity. Not that I believe a lot of other narrators—as much as I love staples of gangsta rap like Ice Cube and Dr. Dre’s “Natural Born Killers” (and Cash-esque murder ballads like Nick Cave’s “Mercy Seat”), they’re more like cartoons than documentaries. And while Eminem can get every bit as far over the top, he at least convinced me in “‘97 Bonnie & Clyde” that he’d thought long and hard about the murder in question. Key to this is that he’s sick enough to actually imagine his cutesy explanations of everything to his young daughter. “Maybe when you’re old enough to understand it better I’ll explain it to you. But for now let’s say mama was real real bad, was being mean to dad and made him real real mad. But I still feel sad that I put her on time-out,” he raps to her before making a series of googoo baby noises to distract her, and then dumping her mother’s corpse off the end of a dock. It almost doesn't matter whether or not you like the song—you believe it, and that's much more important.

Who Owns History?

This article on history and copyright is interesting. (Probably more so for me than for you, since I've written a book of historical fiction that used a lot of research from a lot of other history books, but still.)

Query Shark

One other thing I've got to read: the archives from this awesome blog I've somehow only now discovered, Query Shark.

I've gotten so used to the current No-Response-means-No state of the industry that this agent's level of author (and public) interaction seems downright saintly. Although I think my query letter's damn near perfect, and my manuscript's not far behind, I'm still going to put the former through the Query Shark wringer.

Wait, no, that's mixing metaphors. Damn! I'm going to feed it to the Query Shark and see if it gets chewed up, digested, or excreted. There. Much better!

Criticism of "Criticism of Criticism"

I lied.

I realized it pretty soon after I posted my "Criticism of Criticism" post. (I just updated this with a hyperlink, in case you're too lazy to scroll two posts down.)

I like to think I'm a pretty honest online reviewer, and generally I do my best to write my honest opinion of everything I review. But there have been a few instances where I've reviewed books for friends, or family of friends, or people who have tracked me down based on my Amazon reviews, and in some of those cases, I'm sure I've skewed my reviews a little, for predictable reasons--wanting to make a friend happy, wanting to make a stranger feel like they'd written a crappy book, wanting to encourage a stranger, wanting to make a friend feel crappy, whatever. And I also didn't always do the standard journalist full-disclosure-disclaimer. That isn't to say that those reviews were wholly inaccurate, but they were also probably not the same reviews I'd have written if I'd just plucked the same book off the shelf.

Why am I telling you this? Two words: Catholic Guilt. I'm pretty sure my main point's still pretty valid, though--online reviews supposedly indicate quality, but it's hard to gauge the quality of the reviews themselves. And nothing is ever really objective, anyway.

OK, this post has gotten way too meta-, or existential, or something. I'm going to go read Irrationality, by Stuart Sutherland, which discusses the formation of opinions with far more wit and knowledge and research than I ever could muster. Or maybe I'll read A Dog About Town, which, despite the corny cover art, is really a well-written and fun book. And I'm not just saying that because I'm friends with the author. Or am I?

(I'm not. Honest!)

Steal Like an Artist

I don't think I posted this the last time I came across it, but I came across it again. So read it!

Criticism of Criticism

This is a pretty fascinating piece about what seems to be a growing problem--the fake online review.

As for me...hmm. I've been writing Amazon reviews for some time now; I don't quite have the sheer focus and productivity necessary to climb into the top ranks, but I did get to the point where they started sending me free stuff (through their Vine program) as long as I reviewed it. And think I wrote fewer positive reviews of that stuff, and I eventually kinda stopped reading their newsletter of new free stuff they sent (and are still sending) out every month.

Why? Frankly, I'm usually writing reviews because I'm passionate about something. (Sometimes it's because it's new and I want to sound off early, but not often.) I don't care if 721 other people are giving their take on Goodfellas, it's a movie that meant a lot to me, so if I can articulate that in a semi-interesting way, I'm gonna have my say, too. So when I'm writing reviews for me, I end up giving a lot of positive reviews, because I generally review things I love. (Granted, there are some exceptions.)

Anyway, when they were sending me stuff and I had to review it, even though I got to pick what they were sending me, some irrational and unknown combination of factors (frustration about my sense of obligation, willful refusal to see what other people were writing about those products) led me to write reviews that were probably slightly more negative, on the whole. And they still kept sending me emails to get new free stuff, so I totally respected them all the more. (Full disclosure: I did recently apply for a book editor job there. No word yet, but, hey, it could still happen.) But my interest in the Vine program withered.

Anyway, I can honestly say I was never tempted to try and contact someone to get paid for a good review, or turn in a review that didn't represent my actual opinion of a product that I had consumed in its entirety. But can I honestly say my reviews were accurate, and unbiased by emotion? Probably not, as this book and this book make clear.

Long story short, there are plenty of great and relatively trustworthy reviewers online, but they have a host of biases of which they're not even aware. And there are an even greater number of mediocre reviewers, and an unknown (but possibly even greater) number of paid review whores/hitmen/man-whores/hitwomen. (Like how I balanced out all the sexism in that analogy?) So we need people to do a better job of reviewing these reviewers, so we can sort out the wheat from the chaff. Criticism of criticism, people, that's the next frontier. Let's get crackin'!

Haight And Ashbury, 2011

Out on the road today
I saw a Deadhead sticker
On a 1936 Mercedes roadster
California License Plate:
ACQUIRE
Up on Ashbury and Haight
Owner smoking a cigar
Don Henley wouldn’t dare
To write something so bizarre
Dirty hippies still wandering around Golden Gate Park
In the dark
About how tattered and filthy and worn
Their dreams have become
Looking all deranged
Head stores are legal now
But the world hasn't changed
The kids are not allright
They're still dropping out of schools
And singing in vestibules
Guitar case hungry for the dollars
They’ve also got CDs
And a website
I might look down my nose
But I’m buyin’, too
Into the whole scene
Selling projects of mine
Online
Posting pictures of their signs
And the paintings in store windows
Trolling for Twitter hits
Obama and McCain, lighting up with green
Doing bong rips, high on money
Is this art
Or a construction project?
Are we all working
Here on Haight and Ashbury
Trying to bury the things in us we hate
And to not be ordinary
Unless it sells?
Looking at these scruffy kids
Turning my nose up at their smells
Dirty patchouli hair, my head is just as much a mess
Inside, I just hide it better
With a shaved head and a sweater
What the shit?
Maybe I can relate
To the guy with the Mercedes, too, more than I care to admit
I can see
Maybe I hate
That he’s more honest than me

"The Winds of War" Blows

My scathing takedown of Herman Wouk's Winds of War can be found here, in case anyone cares...

Tree of Life

If you kind of liked Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line but thought, “Gee, this would really be better if they got rid of all the boring war stuff and expanded the flashbacks into a movie of their own,” then, boy, have I got a movie for you.

In Tree of Life, one of our best directors gives free rein to many of his worst impulses. It’s not devoid of merit—the individual scenes are, in fact, quite lyrical and beautiful—yet collectively it feels like yet another falling off from the tightness and precision of his first, best feature. (Badlands. If you’re too lazy to IMDB it, please, for the love of God, at least Netflix it. Here, I’ll even give you a link, you lazy bastard.) Malick grew up in Texas at about the same time as the boys whose story forms the dramatic arc—if one could call it that—of the film. He also had a brother who played guitar and committed suicide overseas, which is presumably what happens here, although he gives us few enough details that virtually any explanation of the brother’s death is plausible—Vietnam, car accident, whatever. Perhaps that’s by design—it’s certainly understandable to be reticent on such an intense personal tragedy, even decades after the fact, and leaving it open makes it feel more like everyone's movie. But it also feels more like a movie that can’t make up its mind, one that starts with personal roots but branches off in myriad impersonal directions, for Malick mashes in literally just about everything, with sequences depicting the Big Bang, the formation of galaxies, the evolution of life. There’s even a shot of a wounded sea dinosaur (an Elasmosaursus, according to Wikipedia) flopping about on a beach. Why is he wounded? What will happen to him? And, most importantly, what the hell does he have to do with the coming-of-age of three Texas boys with an overbearing father and a gracious mother? It feels churlish to ask such questions of a movie that’s so beautiful and mesmerizing, for the imagery in the movie is so compelling that one almost doesn’t care about the normal niceties of moviemaking, like “plot” and “storyline.” Almost.

There are plenty of precedents, and not just in the auteur’s own work. (A common commentary on his films is that they’re more like visual poems than movies, and this seems designed to cement that perception.) Indeed, Tree of Life feels like 2001 in 2011, as if Malick’s channeling Kubrick. Both movies have a relatively small amount of dialogue compared to their long running time, with lots of effects-laden eye candy in there as a sort of padding, taking up all the empty space, keeping all the narrative from rattling about in all that running time like a BB in a tin can. Both even have the same special effects wizard—Douglas Trumbull, who was apparently lured away from thirty-odd years of exile from Hollywood to supervise the work on this film, because Malick (and here I really can’t fault the guy) reportedly hates the look of modern-day CGI. So there’s some stunning imagery; if this had been made and screened in the 60s, I’m sure it would have been a magnet for hippies on hallucinogens looking to heighten their highs, as was reportedly the case with 2001. (While we’re on the topic of drugs, this movie is trippy even in its depictions of the personal. I heard a comedian—I’m not sure who it was, and a cursory Google search gave me lots of fun-looking links, but nothing that seems like it has an answer to my question—talk about how babies and toddlers basically act like they’re on ecstasy all the time. There’s a druggy sense of amazement and wonder to early life, as we figure out how the world works, all those fun little real-world brain lessons on topics like gravity and object permanence, and Malick captures that wonder perhaps better than any filmmaker I’ve ever seen.) But is it necessary? Does a coming-of-age movie have to include birth, and the birth of the universe, just to make sure we don’t miss anything?

Granted, there is a theme of sorts tying it all together. (Pardon me while I think out loud to try and figure out this glorious mess of a film.) As was the case in The Thin Red Line, there’s early narration discussing the countervailing forces one sees in the world at large. But rather than seeing everything as a simple struggle between good and evil, or as creation vs. destruction, Malick’s talking about a subtler conflict, between nature and grace. (I say Malick because he’s unfortunately become indistinguishable from many of his narrators; nearly gone are the arm’s-length characters of his earlier films, replaced by navel-gazing notebook dumps into a variety of vessels.) Nature here is the father-force, the harsh glory of Old Testament capital-G God, the one who created the heavens and the earth but remained insecure enough to smite people for sacrificing to other Gods, the one who got all pissy with Job when he dared to ask for an explanation for all his tribulations. And grace is a mother’s unearned love, soft and gentle yet no less powerful, the supple cement that fills in the cracks and hides the sharp edges of rough nature.

These dueling themes tie everything together, more or less, and provide vastly more nourishing intellectual fodder than is normally found in the Hollywood trough. And even if Malick is unwilling or unable to show us a clearer picture of the tragedy that sets up these themes, he's probably given us a perfect movie somewhere in Tree of Life's miles of footage. Unfortunately, the difference between the length of that movie and the length of the movie Malick actually did deliver has been growing at an exponential pace throughout his career. In other words, it may not have been healthy for him to dig up the roots, but I wish he’d at least pruned this tree.

Pwned by Bukowski

Damn, Bukowski, I feel like a chump after listening to this. (Courtesy of Roger Ebert.)

R.I.P. Jimmy Lerner

A few years back, good fortune (or Providence) led me to read You Got Nothing Coming, a thoroughly enjoyable memoir from an alcoholic ex-con named Jimmy Lerner. And a scary thing happened when I read how he'd ended up in the Nevada prison system on a manslaughter beef: I could relate to it, far more than I would have liked. A lot happened to me in 2004, and it's anyone's guess what would have happened had I not read that book in that personally tumultuous year. But I am inclined to think that Jimmy's book helped save my life.

A while after that, I'd written and self-published a book of my own called Pottersville, and in the process of marketing it, I solicited reviews from a lot of authors whose books I'd really enjoyed. Jimmy was one of the few to respond; he graciously reviewed it and had a lot of wonderful things to say about it.

Everything everyone does can be interpreted harshly or charitably. In retrospect, Jimmy may well have had other motives for what he said and did, and after our initial discussions, I learned that he was perhaps a more complicated person than I'd first realized. Still, he helped me out immensely at two key junctures in my life--one time inadvertently, and one time consciously--and for that, I'm eternally grateful. So it was with some sadness that I found out, after attempting to contact him during a late-night Internet bender a couple weeks ago, that he'd passed on in 2008. (I know this isn't exactly rigorous sourcing here, but the information on the discussion page sounded credible, and I haven't seen anything to contradict it.) I've been meaning to post something about it, and now--a rainy Saturday here in Chicago--seems as good a time as any.

R.I.P., Jimmy. And thanks again.

J-School

I’m in New York for my 10-year J-School reunion. (J-School, as I’ve had to explain to every girlfriend I’ve ever had, is Journalism School. Or “Columbia University in New York,” as I used to say in one pretentious breath to my fellow Chicagoans, lest they think for a fraction of a second that I’d gone to Columbia College, the lesser Columbia, the non-Ivy League Columbia.)

ANYWAY, Friday seemed to be “the book day” of Alumni events, most of which were chaired by Sam Freedman, a noted faculty professor and author whose book-writing seminar is generally regarded as something of an author factory, the closest thing to a sure thing in the publishing world—which, granted, is somewhat akin to saying that the pass line on the craps table is the closest thing to a sure thing in the casino. Still, I have more than a little resentment and self-pity about the fact that I DIDN’T take said seminar; rather, I took a variety of other classes, none of which shot me onto the rocket-like arc I’d imagined for my writing career. I didn’t go overseas and become a dashing foreign correspondent covering a decade of war in the desert sands of Araby; I didn’t become a local municipal good-government crusader; I didn’t win fame or renown or Pulitzers. (A side note—one thing you learn very quickly at the J-School, whose staff, of course, awards the Pulitzers, is that it is, in fact, pronounced PULL-it-zer, not PEW-lit-zer, as the non-cognoscenti are inclined to do.) No, I sold out to The Man, spent the next decade working in cubicles (with a now-brief-seeming two-year interlude as a barista and waiter), and wrote a few book-type things in the meantime, none of which have yet gotten anywhere.

I probably don’t seem grateful for my time at the J-School, but it was very valuable—I learned far more than the proper pronunciation of an award I’ll never earn. In fact, for pure squeezing-a-lot-of-life-into-a-year-or-less, it was tough to beat. I met Caribbean festival organizers and Hasidic Jews and N.Y.P.D. officers and Al Gore and truant school kids and aging John Lennon pilgrims and drug dealers and the families of murder victims; the high, the low, and the in-between, as Townes Van Zandt might have said. My only regret is that I didn’t do more there, make more contacts, lose myself in the work, and really enjoy myself, but to do that I would have had to be a different person, the person I am now rather than the person I was then. (Granted, that’s a big regret; to wish I’d stayed on that path is to deny the value of the path I did take over the past ten years. I’ve written a book that I’m happy with, and several poems that I really like, and I’ve helped my friends put out a newspaper—and more importantly, I’ve found a little peace of mind, something I never had when I was on J-School sitting on the launch pad waiting for the rocket engine to ignite.)

I'd hoped that the book day would be the magical day I’ve been waiting for, the day I’d hook up with someone who would hook me up with someone who would be the agent of my dreams; I'd hoped to get my book out there and find the level of literary success that I sometimes imagine will bring me true happiness. And I think a lot of other people were hoping that, too; there was a book proposal class, and a panel discussion where a bunch of published authors talked about their post J-School careers, and a later event that basically boiled down to a bunch of fellow J-School alums asking book industry types if their book ideas had merit. I’d gone to the microphone and asked an earlier panel if they had any advice for someone like me, someone who has had some nibbles but has yet to find a way to actually, you know, get manuscripts published by something other than a publish-on-demand website. And I'd heard advice I’d already heard—find agents who represent books you like, and stay persistent. (It was probably something I needed to hear, but I had expected something more, something mind-blowing and yet simple, some magical thing that I’d somehow been ignoring and ignorant of for all these years.)

I'd held out some hope for the alumni book fair that night in the Low Library, but it turned out to be relatively sedate; I had some really pleasant conversations with some other grads whose books I then bought, and some somewhat more awkward conversations with other grads whose books I didn’t buy. And there was one guy in particular who had self-published a novel he was trying to sell there, which was exactly the same position I’d been in five years ago with Pottersville; I didn’t envy him; I know I had felt trapped and impotent behind that table, thinking something along the lines of: “Man, if I can’t sell every copy of my book here, I won’t be able to sell it ANYWHERE.” Still, there were no novelists there last night that had written anything I wanted to buy, so I didn’t get my schmooze on and find myself an agent as I’d imagined myself doing.

Being on the other side of the table at least let me see that most of these other authors didn’t really sell that many copies of their books there, either. Still, I think the best conversation of the day took place earlier on, after one of the seminars; another J-Schooler had tapped me on the shoulder and said that he HAD taken Professor Freedman’s book course, and that he’d still failed to find representation with his first five or six proposals. Someone had even told him in no uncertain terms that he had no business being a writer. And now he had a few books under his belt. Granted, this was good to hear, but I really liked the reminder that the path not taken has its own stumbling blocks and frustrations and difficulties.

Yesterday was gray and drab, and few places are as depressing as Gotham on such a cloudy day; today’s been blue and sunny, the type of day that makes the other days worthwhile. And the lesson I’m taking home with me is this—take each day for what it is, enjoy it for what it is, and don’t think about how things would be any different if you’d taken a different path, for even if it is true, thinking it won’t make any difference. I’m sitting in a corner deli with a laptop in front of me and a cup of coffee beside me; I’m writing; I’m enjoying myself. Regardless of whether or not I’ve sold a book, I’m doing these things, things I’d probably be doing right now anyway even if I was an established author. So what’s there to complain about?

An Open Letter to Radiohead's Thom Yorke

Dear Mr. Yorke:

I’m going to go out on a limb here—hardy har har, you might say, but this is no laughing matter—and say your most recent album is your most disappointing yet.¹

Speaking of laughing, there’s a joke I once heard that seems apropos here, a joke which does admittedly deal in national stereotypes, but it’s about white people, so it’s OK. Anyway, in this joke, a man visited heaven and hell, then came back. Someone asked him what heaven was like, and he said, “Great! The cooks are all French, the mechanics are all German, the lovers are Italian, the police are British, and everything’s organized by the Swiss.” When asked what hell was like, he said, “Not too much different, actually. Except the cooks are all British, the mechanics are all French, the lovers are all Swiss, the police are German, and everything’s organized by the Italians.”

ANYWAY, heaven, when it comes to late-period Radiohead, would probably be an album as warm and accessible as The Bends, as consistent and cool as OK Computer, as adventurous as Kid A and Amnesiac, and as energetic as the peaks of Hail to the Thief. In short, In Rainbows. Whereas this is as cool as Pablo Honey, as warm as OK Computer, as adventurous as The Bends,² as consistent as Hail to the Thief, as energetic as Amnesiac, and as accessible as Kid A. Admittedly, that doesn’t quite get us to hell, but it does feel like a purgatory or limbo of some sort—a waiting period in a place where paradise is visible, but not quite attainable. (This might be worse, though; someone in purgatory at least has heaven to look forward to, whereas we’re stuck wondering if it’s behind us.) In fact, The King of Limbs might be the strongest piece of evidence yet in favor of the bizarre “1s and 0s” theory, which states that OK Computer and In Rainbows were written at the same time and conceived as a single work, then released 10 years apart purely for showmanship purposes, and to make some sort of statement about our enslavement to the digital world of binary code. In Rainbows now feels like an outlier, quality-wise, unless one organizes your discography by apparent date of conception, in which case it fits perfectly, and The King of Limbs also makes sense, fitting as it does onto a downward trajectory suggested by your underwhelming solo album, The Eraser.³

I’ve been told you’re a huge fan of the late Miles Davis, and perhaps this is part of the problem. (Wait, hear me out.) Neither Miles nor yourself was content to put out a handful of albums whose excellence put most competitors to shame. Nor were either of you satisfied to create an album that made even words like “excellent” seem inadequate; he had Kind of Blue, and you and your bandmates made OK Computer. But you’ve both seemed to relish using your later years spending—some might say squandering—your artistic capital searching for musical adventure, and in the process losing sight of much of what made you great in the first place.

Perhaps that’s a little harsh. There are, to be sure, some great songs on here, songs that take a few plays to wrap one’s head around—or rather, songs that take a few spins to sink into one’s head, but that stay there afterwards. “Bloom,” with its bright horns and swelling strings and adventurous electronics, is actually quite stunning, once one gets used to it. “Little by Little” is built on a wonderful riff that is somehow both angular and accessible. And your vocal work on “Lotus Flower” ranks up there with your best. But the memorable song: forgettable song ratio here’s far below the desired infinity, and even below the dreaded 1; by my reckoning, for every awesome song here, there are about 1 2/3 that are somewhat subpar, at least by your standards—or rather, the standards I’ve set for you, which, granted, may be a little stringent. (But, hey, I also do it to myself, I do, and that’s what really hurts.)

OK, OK. All kidding aside, it seems no coincidence that In Rainbows had a revolutionary pay-what-you-want pricing structure, whereas this one had a fixed price; it’s like you knew that people would be happy with that album on first listen and would enthusiastically recommend it, thereby driving up its market value,⁴ whereas this one couldn’t count on such goodwill. After all, Track 2, for instance, is just not that great. “You’ve stolen all the magic to my melody,” you croon to some Mr. Magpie, and given the magic of your previous melodies, I want to find Mr. Magpie and beat him until he gives it back. “Feral” is underdeveloped. And, frankly, the last three songs are borderline boring. I wanted to like them—I really did! I took a week to write this review, and I tried to stay away from other critical interpretations of this album, in the hopes that I could just give it time and make up my own mind about it and not be swayed by YouTube videos made by haterade-drinking hipsters. But the fact remains that I’m just not loving its general drabness and off-putting taste, and after listening to it one last time while finishing up this letter, I now feel compelled to cleanse my palate and color my palette with Rainbows.

I sometimes read a lot into your album covers; the sharp snowy computer-generated peaks on the front of Kid A, for instance, implied (to me, anyway) that you were wandering in some sort of icy Arctic artistic wasteland, and that at any moment you might be buried by an avalanche of your own pretentiousness, but that there was a lot of epic grandeur to take in all the while. OK Computer’s album cover had an arty sterility evocative of airplane emergency-exit placards, and this perfectly encapsulated the album’s deft evocation of our attempts to paint an overly comforting veneer over the panic and the vomit of postmodern life. In Rainbows’ cover had computerized words, colors, and an explosion suggesting a new energy and warmth to your exploration of these same themes. But this, with its high-school computer-art quality image of neon ghosts in front of a dark forest, sort of suggests that you are lost in the artistic woods, somehow haunted by your own past.⁵

I have noticed that you have a tendency to act like you’re going off on some strange tangent, waiting until we think you’re finally off your rocker before launching back into some mind-blowing performance that highlights your awesome skills.⁶ Indeed, toying with our expectations has become a strange part of your artistry. And with that in mind, I should mention that there’s a new theory floating about, a theory that this is but the first half of a monumental work whose second half will be dropping sometime in the next few months.⁷ I hope so; even if I have to hear eight Radiohead songs to get three good ones nowadays, that’s better than nothing. But more importantly, I hate to think that three good songs are all we have to show for our three-and-a-third years of waiting.

                                                                    Respectfully Yours,

                                                                    Alfonso Mangione

¹ FYI, I know footnotes in a letter probably seem ridiculous and pretentious, but I’ve been reading a lot of David Foster Wallace lately, so I’m on a big footnote kick, and I’m gonna ride it ‘till the wheels fall off. And in response to the obvious objections this statement might prompt: Pablo Honey doesn’t count, for we had no expectations of you then. Kid A may have been shockingly different from its predecessors, but it at least proved you weren’t going to rest on your laurels. Amnesiac may be uneven, but it arrived so unexpectedly soon after its predecessor that we were willing to forgive that and concentrate on the high points. And Hail to the Thief was also uneven, but packed an incredible energy into its high points—plus the live shows supporting it absolutely rocked.

² Which is still pretty adventurous, I guess.

³ Sorry! I just didn’t like it that much.

⁴ If you’re concerned with such unabashedly capitalist ideas, which, granted, you may not be.

⁵ “I’m moving out of all this,” you croon on the opener, which certainly lends credence to my theory. (A side note: is “croon” the right word? “Wail” seems harsh, and “sing” is always a little inadequate, even in your lesser moments.) ANYWAY, it’s a scary sentiment, if one takes it out of context and applies it to something to which it may not relate, which I, like most aspiring music journalists, am wont to do—I know that as an artist, you have to keep moving and all, but we do kinda like “all this.”

⁶ As evidence, I cite the first few seconds of Hail to the Thief, which, as one reviewer pointed out, sounds like an electronic squelch, but is really apparently the sound of a guitar being plugged in. And there is, of course, the electronic-ish sounding beginning of In Rainbows’ “15 Step,” which somehow then magically resolves into something both more conventional and more awesome. And there was a concert I saw here in Chicago at the Auditorium Theater back in 2006, a concert where you acted like you were going to play “Spinning Plates” for a closer—a song which, by that point, had become a somewhat overused closer for you—and you proceeded to do so in a very distorted and unsatisfying fashion before stopping abruptly and segueing into the most awesome version of “Everything in its Right Place” that I have ever heard. Obviously you can probably think of far more examples than I can.

⁷ Advocates of this theory point out that, on the last song, you advise us that “If you think this is over, then you’re wrong.” They also make note of the fact that the track’s called “Separator,” implying that it could be a division between the first and second halves of a large-ish work. Also, either the file or the link which we had to use to download it ended with “01,” implying that there will be an “02.” And lastly, but perhaps most importantly, the descriptors for the upcoming physical release of this album mention two vinyl discs of this album, something that seems entirely unnecessary given the sub-40-minute running time of these 8 tracks, unless there’s either a second disc or a remix that is already in the can.

Tom Robbins = Tom Clancy?

OK, he may have a slightly better sense of humor, but after reading Skinny Legs and All, I'm of a mind that Tom Robbins and Tom Clancy have more in common than either would care to admit. Full review here.

A Poem about Columbia and Challenger

OK, I meant to post this on Friday for the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster, but I didn't make it home in time, so I'm posting it today on the 8th anniversary of Columbia. I wrote it that day, pretty much, and I'm not sure as to its merits as a poem, but it did seem apropos, so here goes...

seventeen years ago:
you can still remember the day, the minute, the second
the scene, the sound: the principal’s voice on the p.a.
unlike you’d ever heard it, hesitant, tentative
bearing unbearable news, an explosion in the florida sky
you couldn’t understand, and maybe he couldn’t either
why God would kill a teacher

your young eyes watched compulsively the implausible disintegration, the ugly twisted cloud
and even though you’ve seen so much since then
war, revolution, airplanes
tearing holes in buildings
all soon made antiseptic by a glass tube
saturday morning reminds you how it felt when your world was first upended

columbia
first looks like a typo next to the word tragedy
but the pictures seem familiar
smiling astronauts waving, optimistic
you know what they couldn’t

so you take your disbelief
and soundtrack it with the saddest song you know
thom yorke wailing
i’m not here
this isn’t happening

as you watch, over and over
the images, so different than that old ugly cloud
of a silent meteor, brightening and splintering
as it arcs across blue texas sky
so beautiful it breaks your heart

Bloggus Interruptus Againus

OK, this blogging stream has had more stops and starts than a geriatric with an enlarged prostate, but I'm done, or done-ish, with the latest round of revisions on the book, so hopefully I'll post something new soon for the four of you who are still hopefully following me. In the meantime, read this, about why blogging may be bad. (WHOA! The fact that I'm posting this is so meta. Or something.)