More Book Feedback

So the lady at the literary agency who's been reading my manuscript finally sent her detailed comments on the manuscript. All in all, it's about as good as I could hope for--my head is still chewing and digesting, and there's a lot I'll have to talk about with her, but it sounds like I'm finally moving the ball down the field a little more, which is always a nice feeling. Anyway, here's what she had to say, minus the preambles and what-not:

I finished RESISTANCE and I wanted to share some thoughts with you. First of all, you’re really an excellent writer. You are obviously incredibly knowledgeable about the time period and your subject. I felt like I learned so much! And I kept going back to Wikipedia because there were things I wanted to learn even more about! The manuscript is exciting, dramatic, epic, and thought-provoking. Going in, I knew almost nothing about the Czech resistance (and that’s probably giving myself too much credit), and now I feel like an expert. The facts are so ensconced within the action, though, that it doesn’t feel like a history lesson. It’s just compelling drama. The dialogue is natural and the characters are vivid. You should be very proud of what you’ve created!


My overall concern right now is that, while the individual sections are compelling on their own, the manuscript as a whole feels inconsistent. The manuscript is very long, as I am sure you know. It stands at about 200,000 words now. There are parts that can be tightened and others that can be excised – I’ll get to specifics in a moment – but it’s going to be a long novel no matter what. In order for a reader to invest all that time in the book, he needs to feel invested in the characters and the story, and the sections are so disparate right now, that that’s hard to achieve. For example, Moravec is our hero in Part I. Our emotions rise and fall with Moravec. We like him. He’s exciting and his story is pretty thrilling. His story is not close to being over by the time Part I comes to a close, but our connection with him severs then and there. When he reappears in Part II, he is a minor character, and I wasn’t sure whether to root for him, sympathize with him, or detest him. So I felt nothing at all – nothing for the character who carried the previous 50,000 words. The same notion is true for Kubic in the transition from Part II to Part III. I think there needs to be much more of a connection between the three parts, even if there are changing perspectives.

That ties in to the next note I have. In Part II, the shifting perspectives can be jarring, and also make the novel feel inconsistent. It’s okay that the narrator changes from Part I, but it is not a full shift from Moravec to Kubic. You alternate between first person (Kubic), first person omniscient (Kubic reports personally about events he could have no knowledge of), and third person. This gives the manuscript a confused, unpolished feel. My suggestion would be to stick with a first-person p.o.v. in Part II because that would be consistent with the parts that bookend it. Since there is so much ground to cover, and since this section is the longest, I feel like you can have two first-person narrators. Kubic, and possibly Heydrich, or even circle back to Moravec. I’d LOVE to have his perspective and understand his motivations for turning his back on the Czechs and the Masaryk legacy. The German explanation sounds dubious (even if it’s true) for the simple fact that the Germans are the villains!

Another note about perspective in Part II is that Kubic, as a character, is much too silent. When he is involved in conversations, he barely opens his mouth. I understand that he is known for being taciturn, but I kept forgetting he was in certain scenes. He seems to have trouble double-tasking – narrating a scene and participating in it. There are definitely scenes where you can give him lines you are now giving the Josefs, or other characters.

I also suggest exaggerating the romance between Kubic and Anna. This is an epic work. That romance should contrast his mission and be just as emotionally powerful. See if there are places where you can insert some chemistry, passion, longing. A little something for the ladies ;)

As for tightening the manuscript, you’ll probably find the most to cut in Part II. Digressions here and there. Stories and anecdotes inserted for comic value. Use your discretion, though. If there are certain anecdotes that you help feel develop character, then leave them. But anytime you can see a place to trim down, go for it.

Part III is giving me the most pause of the three sections. It is very different in tone and pacing. Again, it feels very disconnected to the other parts, which I found distracting. For all the complexity and layered drama of the book, there needs to be some continuity, and some payoff at the end, where everything comes together. There is no clear hero in this part. Our narrator is a traitor, a coward, and rarely evokes sympathy. So it’s hard to feel satisfied at the end. The many digressions are distracting and take the reader too far outside the story itself. I’d suggest cutting down on those. You don’t want the reader’s attention wandering – you want the reader just as sucked into Part III as he was (as I was!) in Parts I and II. I’d go back to this section and really rethink about the impressions you want to leave the reader with. If the climax comes in Part II with the attack on Heydrich, you don’t want all of Part III to be the wrap-up. You want an equal amount of power/emotion running through all three parts. I don’t think Part III is there just yet.

Anyway, those are my initial thoughts. I realize I’ve given you a lot to think about. I thoroughly enjoyed Resistance and I’d love to work with you to take it to the next level. My gut feeling is that it’s not there quite as it is, but that it has the potential to get there. If you are interested in discussing any of these points more in-depth, please feel free to write or call anytime. And if you’d like to go back and take another look at the manuscript and make any edits, I’m happy to read another draft.

I look forward to talking to you soon!

Cloud 9,000

I got perhaps the best news of my writing career this afternoon.


About a month ago—it seems far longer!—I got in touch with a reputable literary agency in New York. A friend of a friend worked there, and I sent them my query letter, and they responded with enthusiasm. (Which pretty much on its own put me into a manic state.) I sent them the manuscript.

And I waited.

And I waited.

And I waited.

It’s hard for me to be patient or realistic with such things; I had sent them a manuscript that was about the same length as Moby Dick, and I was in near-suicidal despair when they hadn’t responded after a week. (OK, maybe it wasn’t that bad, but it wasn’t far off; I was checking my email pretty regularly, and checking the spam filters too, just to be safe.) I completely lost track of how much time had elapsed; if it weren’t for the time stamps on the emails, I wouldn’t believe it has been under a month.

But there was an email in my inbox today; after the salutations, it read:

"I want you to know that I’m almost finished with Part 3 of Resistance and will surely be finished by the time I get back from the Thanksgiving holiday. I am really enjoying the manuscript! I have some notes that I’m writing up and will, again, share those with you as soon as I’m back from the holiday. Please hold tight and thank you for your patience!

Have a very happy Thanksgiving!"

Now, I’ve never gotten to the point of having a respectable agent read and like my manuscript, and have serious notes and comments in the works. So I dashed off a quick reply thanking her, and telling her that her email had made my day, my week and my month. I then updated my facebook status to indicate that I was “on Cloud 9,000.”

I did stick to my evening routine, which felt good; I’m even making a point of writing this, just to do some writing today, because that habit—aping a lot of far more successful writers who have gone before me—is what’s even allowed me to get to this point. I’m trying to stay present, rather than scripting scenarios of and talk show appearances and book tours, and book tour groupies piling in to the back of the Resistance tour bus. There’s a lot that has to happen before I get to that point.

But right now, things are going as well as possible. Happy Thanksgiving, indeed!

Fun Indie Rock

So I've had this song in my head after seeing Tell Your Friends at U.S. Beer Company last night. They're a great little indie rock band with wierd catchy melodies and an angsty-but-exciting lead singer. Rabbit Children played too; they also rocked.

A Slice of Corporate America

OK, I've been trying to keep posting stuff, but I'm a little lazy, so it may all be good but it won't all be fresh. Anyway, this site's been up a while, but it still rocks, especially if you've ever, like, used a computer at work, which should be all of you. The first two episodes are the funniest, but the new ones are worth watching, too.

LSD and MLB

Mixing drugs and sports is always a bad idea, right? Maybe not, as this fun little video suggests.

School's In

Last Friday, I caught a great comedy show called “Mrs. Gruber’s Ding-Dong School” at the Gorilla Tango Theater.


Now, it seems I can’t swing a dead cat these days in Chicago without hitting a friend or co-worker who is studying improv and aspiring to be a comedian of some sort. (Believe you me, I’ve tried. And I have plenty of funny friends with claw-marks on their face to prove it.) Their shows are usually decently entertaining. Still, they tend to be improv-based, and/or rely heavily on sex humor and things of that sort. Not that I mind sex humor per se—but it does get less-than-shocking after a while, and a certain amount of the comedy/titillation comes from that thought of “Oh my God! There’s my friend/colleague/co-worker/boss/spiritual advisor simulating a sex act on stage for laughs, and/or joking about Cleveland Steamers! I’ll never be able to look at them the same way again!”

ANYWAY, I went to this particular show because a co-worker of mine is a co-founder of a comedy troupe called Robot vs. Dinosaur. They’d staged this show, and I went expecting the standard stuff. But I got a lot more.

“Mrs. Gruber’s” is really delightful—and, most importantly, incredibly well-written. It presents a series of vignettes that deftly skewers the utopian cartoon B.S. we were all shoveled in our youth. Mrs. Gruber is of a type we’ve grown to love, and then to despise—the wise Mary Poppins type, kindly and innocent, eager to shepherd young children though various life lessons with a wink and a smile and a kindly pat on the head. Only here, the lessons are more realistic, and a lot funnier. Instead of being told “Feed the birds, twopence a bag,” we get a harangue from a schizophrenic homeless man—sung to the same tune—about how fish have lasers. We see the “Diversity Chicken” imploring the children that they don’t have to actually like minorities, or make them part of their lives; they just have to tolerate them. A young cloud gets an important lesson on racism from a gun-toting hillbilly. And, in the show’s best sequence, the “Reality Fairy” shows up to give the kids a little perspective on what they can realistically expect from their lives.

Unfortunately, it’ll only be around for another week. But catch it if you can! I’m seriously considering schlepping back up to 1919 N. Milwaukee, shilling out another $15 bucks, and giving it another go. Even if I don’t, though, I’ll be keeping my eyes on this group and looking forward to whatever they put together next.

Facebook

I realized very shortly after setting up my facebook account that I’d gotten myself into deep trouble.


It was September, a little over a year ago. I found my thoughts racing, and usually heading straight back to my friend list. I obsessed over my profile even when I was doing other things; I remember going running by the lake and wondering almost the whole while which Elliott Smith quote defined me as a person. I learned to love chatting with three people at a time—when I’d see the little red message indicators start popping up in rapid succession, it felt like human Whack-a-Mole. I felt plugged into the lives of everyone I knew, and vice versa, in a way that I hadn’t felt in a while; every accepted friend request felt like a little shot of self-esteem delivered right into my ego. All the parties I’d missed because the invites had been online—I would miss them no more! All the girls I hadn’t asked out because I didn’t know if they were in relationships or not—I’d ask them out! (Or I would get asked out, because I’d write my profile so convincingly that one of them would realize they were my soul mate.) At any rate, the problems I had would no longer be problems. I had arrived.

The only problem was that, based on these symptoms, it was pretty obvious I was addicted. I’d pop in to facebook in much the same way that I used to peek in to the neighborhood bar—as if it held the key to relieving my unhappiness. And deprivation anxiety—the fear of not getting your next fix—I felt that, too.

But some of the symptoms of my trouble were even subtler, and weren’t evident in those first few days. I went to those parties I hadn’t known about in my dreary pre-facebook days—only I spent a lot more time taking pictures. And I’d get home late afterwards and, rather than putting on some music or a movie, I’d go online, just to see who was up and available for chatting. And these were often people I’d been hanging out with—at least in the physical sense—just minutes before, at the party I’d just left! And I’d post my pictures, and tag them, and enthusiastically read their comments, and enthusiastically comment on their pictures, and spend far more time doing these things than I spent actually, you know, hanging out with them.

Also, I came to notice a curious phenomenon—facebook lesbianism. I was initially depressed to see that a fair amount of women with whom I’d been interested were, themselves, apparently interested in women. Eventually, I realized it was often just a means to ward off unwanted advances by unfriendly friends; still, it left me back where I started—having to actually put in the work to actually, you know, get to know them and find out what was going on in their life.

Granted, there have obviously been some clear-cut benefits of being on facebook—I’ve been able to send birthday greetings to a lot of friends without wasting paper and stamps, and I’ve been able to share my vacation photos with anyone who cares to see them, rather than taking anyone hostage. And I’ve been able to reconnect with a lot of people I hadn’t seen in years, and keep up with their lives and keep them posted on my life in a way that wouldn’t have been possible—at least not with so many people—back in the phone days, or even the email days. But it was one of these very friends, a girl from high school that I’d had a huge crush on back in the day, that articulated the problem with all of this. “I HATE facebook,” she’d said—on facebook chat, of course. Then she added: “No one is ever PRESENT any more!”

Those words definitely hit home; I thought of them today when I was walking home from the gym. It was a beautiful fall afternoon, but I had a little way to walk—two or three blocks—and rather than just be alone with my thoughts in that brief time, my first impulse was to check facebook on my cell phone and see if anything was going on. I’ve heard it said that one will always be uncomfortable if one’s head and body are in different places, and it seemed this was one of those times where my head wanted to go somewhere my body couldn’t even follow, somewhere where it seemed that all my friends had congregated and I could talk to and hear from all of them, but not in a meaningful way—for, as one writer pointed out, facebook is just icons of people interacting with icons of other people, an imaginary village of facades that one can’t even look behind.

I’ve tried to keep it real by posting funny and risque stuff, regardless of whether or not it might be read by family members. (One that seemed to get a good virtual laugh involved my discomfort at standing behind an elderly Frenchwoman in the Walgreens line and hearing her ask for herpes medicine.) And a few of my friends have me beat in the fun-status-updates department; one male friend, for instance, recently proclaimed that he “loves all you guys—but in a totally hot, man-on-man action sort of way.” My dad—a Catholic deacon, and somewhat straitlaced on social matters—seemed a little put off by this type of thing when he finally got his own facebook account, but then said he could see why I did it, because otherwise it was just an endless boredom-inducing procession of “I’m tired” and “I’m hungry” and “I’m eating dinner.”

But even the fun status updates can get lost in between the ever-worsening layout changes and the endless Farmville/Mafia Wars/Vampire Wars postings. (And I do my share of Mafia Wars, so I can’t even pretend to be above it! I am addicted to it, unable to stay away for more than a couple days from a game that basically just consists of clicking on buttons until you can’t click on them any more.) Mafia Wars is more primitive than many games I was playing 15 years ago, and probably more primitive than some of those lab-rats-with-levers experiments they use to model addictive behavior. So what’s the allure? Is it the fact that it’s open-ended? Is it the subject matter? Perhaps it is because, every time a member of my Mafia “assists” me in a fight, or gives me a gift, it gives me impression that they’re actually involved and interested in my life.

So is this what we—and by we, I mean I—have been reduced to? Going online to connect with people, and finding most of my interactions to be fake interactions with automated proxies?

Well—and maybe this is just an addict trying to rationalize—it isn’t entirely that bad. I have had real visits with real people that were only possible because someone mentioned they were in town, or because I said something that someone commented on, and so on, and so forth. And I’ve moved around a lot and have a lot of friends in places I never get to visit, so it is nice keeping them in my life, even if only at the fringes. And now I’m still going to the parties I get invited to on facebook—except now, rather than using the camera as yet another barrier between myself and the people around me, I’m actually taking the time to have conversations and enjoy myself. So perhaps facebook can be useful, but only as a sort of Platonic ideal, an imaginary model for my social life. Here is your hypothetical universe of friends, it is saying—now it is up to you to keep these friendships real.

Album Review - Eminem's "Relapse"

I posted a review on Amazon of Eminem's recent album, "Relapse."

Some Thoughts on Creativity

I finally got my book in the hands of a reputable agency this week.


I’ve been writing fiction for the 8 years since I left grad school, and I’ve never had an agent to help me sell it; I’ve written three-and-a-half books, four screenplays, dozens of poems, at least one short story, and 99 product reviews. The product reviews are on Amazon, and I sold or gave away somewhere south of 200 copies of the second book (which I self-published through a publish-on-demand company), so the writing’s never come remotely close to paying the bills. But this has the potential to change all that, or so I tell myself. Anyway, I’m pretty excited to at least be getting it out there.

I’m not sure if the bookselling tribulations are my fault or the industry’s fault, or if they’re a bad thing, even; since I haven’t had any deadline pressures in all that time, I’ve had the freedom to spend as long as I’ve wanted on my various projects. (I started writing Resistance, for instance, in January of 2006; at first I wrote it as two screenplays, and I spent a little time on some other screenplays that year, but then I started on the manuscript in November of that year, and I worked on it for about the next two-and-a-half years.) At any rate, I’ve been free to revise and do additional research at my leisure.

The problem with that is that it’s easy to get to this point where you’re not actually getting the writing in front of readers. (I generally love writing for its own sake, but unless someone reads it and reacts to it, I am not sure there’s a point; it becomes one of those “What’s the sound of one hand clapping” things. But that’s not the fault of the would-be-readers—I sometimes spend an overly long time revising and polishing stuff rather than just getting it out there. Friends and family have asked me about the latest book, but I haven’t let any of them read it yet.)

Creativity’s a bitch these days. (Assuming I’m creative; I sometimes wonder.) On one hand, it’s easier to be creative and get the products of your labor out there for other people to check out; on the other hand, there’s such a glut of creative products on the market that it’s probably harder than ever to get noticed. And that, I’ve come to realize, is the real test; as Greg Kot pointed out in Ripped, his excellent chronicle of the demise of the music industry, the true test isn’t getting people to buy stuff—it’s getting them to listen to it or pay attention to it in the first place. The bands that are illegally downloaded most frequently are also the ones whose music sells the most; the ones that can’t sell their music can’t give it away, either. So I’m another bit player in an oversaturated market; sometimes when I go to Borders, I wonder if I will ever be able to get something on those shelves and keep it there for any length of time; I feel overwhelmed at the number of excellent books already on the market, and curious as to whether I can carve out a niche in that large enough to live in.

I can’t really complain, though; again, I really enjoy writing, and my day job’s paying the bills, so it’s not like I’m a starving artist. And more importantly, I’m hardly alone in this situation. Indeed, a rather large number of my friends have creative side projects—improv shows and bands and photography collections and sculpture exhibitions and things of that sort. I almost wonder if it’s one of the hallmarks of my generation that we’re starry-eyed dreamers, perpetually working on our side projects and dreaming of the day they’ll pay off rather than just doing what our parents did, buckling down and starting families and finding contentment (or resentment) in the normal Cat’s-in-the-Cradle progression of human life instead of the creative process.

(Actually, it’s kind of egotistical to say that; starting a family is a creative process, in the most literal sense. Like the intellectual creative process, people embark on it for both selfish and selfless reasons, but it is obviously far more necessary for the world-at-large. And yet, people are embarking on it—at least in the Western world—later on average than at any time in human history. Is that because a lot of us prefer the type of creativity where we can be perfect, at least in our own minds? I don’t know.)

I digress. It’s the artistic creative process that I’m involved in, and I owe it to myself to at least see it through. I’m excited about my book, but I’ve been working on it so long that it’s hard to tell whether or not it’s any good; like a parent with a child, it’s impossible for me to see it with unbiased eyes. If it’s good, and if it deserves a place on the shelves at Borders, I have to trust that it will find its way there one way or another, in God’s time. And if it’s not good, I need to find that out, too, so I can at least get on with my life, and perhaps move on to the other type of creativity rather than spending my time writing alone in coffee shops, as I’m doing now.

And I need to remind myself that can’t do this process alone any more than I would be able to have children on my own. (I thought I could do it all myself when I wrote Pottersville; I did the publish-on-demand thing in the hopes that I’d get the book out there and it would become this huge viral hit and eventually sell itself. I think I just didn’t want to do the work or face the rejection, though; I’d queried a lot of agencies without luck while writing the previous book, and so I didn’t even bother doing that with Pottersville until I’d already published it, at which point no self-respecting agency was willing to touch it. Anyway, I eventually got tired of giving my book pitch at every social function I went to, tired of deciding whether or not I felt like being a salesman that day or not. My brother-in-law actually ended up selling a lot more copies than I did. Granted, he’s a far better salesman than I’ve ever been, the type that could, as Jay-Z said, sell water to a whale, or fire in hell.)

ANYWAY, I digress, again. I need help selling the book, and hopefully I’m finding it at last, so I need to wait patiently and see what happens, and look for happiness not in the imagined outcome, but in the simple process of taking constructive action and leaving the results in God’s hands.

Book Review - "The Dude Abides"

Here's a review of "The Dude Abides," a new book about the Coen Brothers' movies.

The National

Granted, the website's in Norwegian, but this is a badass concert performance by The National, one of the best bands in America these days. My birthday present to you. (Formerly Nick B's birthday present to me!)

Strategic Book Publishing

I was briefly excited about selling the book last week.


Usually I haven’t been excited about selling it; usually when I’m home, I’m a lot more likely to be hiding from it, and hiding from the rest of my life, on facebook.

Then, somewhere in between all the commenting and the relentless rounds of Mafia Wars, I noticed an ad on facebook from a literary agency that was accepting submissions.

“Perfect,” I thought. “I will barely have to do anything.”

I clicked on the link and completed a submission form outlining the project, making sure to correct an earlier error, where, ironically enough, I’d left out the apostrophe in “Master’s Degree in Journalism.” My bio and descriptions of the project were tight, and they felt right. As for the agency, its website announced it as the “Strategic Book Publishing.” The site wasn’t super-high-gloss, but it had three things going for it: author testimonials, an emphatic declaration that this was not a self-publishing company, and promised results, including the Holy Grail: placement on bookstore shelves nationwide. It felt like cosmic validation of my laziness and reluctance to query literary agents. “You were right not to send out query letters,” the universe was saying. “That reeks of desperation. Let the agents come to you.”

I clicked on the “Submit” button and awaited their reply.

“Please be patient,” the site had advised. “We receive a high volume of submissions, but we are committed to answering all of them promptly, so we will get back to you within 48 to 72 hours.”

That’s lightning-quick in publishing terms, one of those Jimmy John’s So-Fast-You’ll-Freak things. But sure enough, they answered; moreover, they were interested in forwarding me on to an affiliated publishing group, which, they said, would most likely want to take a look at my manuscript.

This seemed a little odd; I would have thought they’d want to shop it around and try and get the best deal first. But I again awaited their reply, and I was again rewarded with a response within the promised timeframe.

This sounded delightful, and so much better than any agency I’d ever dealt with. “Screw you, established literary agencies,” I found myself thinking. “You’re gatekeepers of a dying kingdom. Strategic Book Publishing and I are going to ride roughshod over you, and conquer the world! Their promptness and attentiveness have won them the right to represent my manuscript. And it will sell so many copies that you will all weep; meanwhile I will sleep on a massive stack of money for the rest of my life.”

I got an email from them asking for the manuscript.

Here I did get a little nervous. “Are they big enough?” I found myself asking. “Can they handle a manuscript this awesome?” They promised that they did not pick up authors unless there was a clear path to selling 5,000 books; that didn’t sound like a lot, compared to my ambitions. But it was about 20 times as many as my previous (admittedly, self-published) book, Pottersville. (I’d had massive ambitions for that book. People liked it, but it didn’t sell well, and at this point, I would cheerfully accept if someone offered to pay me minimum wage for all the hours I spent working on it; that might, if I was charitable about my time estimates, net me in the high four figures.) Anyway, that was that book, though, and this was this. And given the confidence I’ve occasionally had in this manuscript, I figured it’s bound to sell a lot more. “This book is about Nazis,” I told myself. “Books about Nazis sell.”

Again, I asked myself, “Are they big enough?”

“Fuck it,” I thought. “This book will MAKE THEM big enough.”

Just to be on the safe side, I put my real name on the cover, and I included a copyright notice. And then I sent it off.

Only then did I remember that I’d meant to do some independent research on this company. Being a graduate of one of the most prestigious journalism schools in the country, I figured I’d better put my investigative skills to use.

I typed “Strategic Book Publishing” in the Google search bar. The FIRST result that came up was “strategic book publishing scam.” (Even before plain ol’ “strategic book publishing.”)

A few quick link clicks and I was enlightened as to their M.O., which you can read about at the bottom of the page here, and about its owner's current legal troubles here. (If you’re lazier than I am, suffice it to say that Strategic Book Publishing seems to be a front for an octopus-like conglomeration of relatively phony agencies and publishers controlled by some scammer dude down in Florida. Basically, it seems they’re one of those pseudo-agencies that charges people for copyediting and reading fees and what-not and then never actually, you know, sells your book.)

Anyway, it’s back to the drawing board, older and wiser and what-not. And if I ever get lonely during the next round of queries, I can always re-read their latest email and remind myself that someone wants me.

Book Review - A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

I've posted a review on Amazon of A Fiery Peace in a Cold War. (It's the new book by Neil Sheehan, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of A Bright Shining Lie.)

A Poem About the Most Significant Relationship in my Life

This morning, you are loud and insistent

I roll over, frustrated; my fingers scan the contours of your hard little body

Practiced motions, but today I get it wrong; you emit strange and unpleasant noises while I seek the spot I know so well that will send us back to contented oblivion

And at last I am there; I apply gentle insistent pressure; you are satisfied and quiet down at last, but I say nothing

I just roll over and try to fall asleep, hating your unrelenting insistent demands and everything else you represent, and thinking: Why is it so hard to find the snooze button?

An Open Letter to Jeff Tweedy of Wilco

Dear Mr. Tweedy:


I really wish I liked Wilco (The Album) as much as I like Wilco (The Band).

Wilco (The Song) starts off promising, with a charging wall of bluesy guitar sound. But the lyrics, a tongue-in-cheek love letter from your band to its fans, feel flat and uninspired, a lazy victory lap rather than an exploration of new territory.

I’m sorry, Mr. Tweedy, if I’m hating on you for loving on me. There are some great moments here, to be sure; the next two songs rank among your band’s best work. But all in all, the album has a slightly generic feel. There’s a taste of almost everything your band’s done—the pastoral melodies of Sky Blue Sky and the pleasant pop of Summerteeth and the guitar workouts of A Ghost is Born and the countrified psychedelia of Being There and the experimentalism of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. But so many tastes end up making for a relatively bland album, at least by your band’s standards. It’s almost as if you put your discography in a blender and hit “Puree.” A little bit of everything ends up being a whole lot of nothing.

Well, maybe that’s a little harsh, but I do mean it, or something like it. You sound content and philosophical and meditative—on “Solitaire,” you mention how it “took too long for me to see I was wrong to believe in me only,” and that sounds like a statement from a healthy and happy and well-adjusted individual. But is that what we want? I kinda miss the alienation of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and elsewhere, the angsty Jeff Tweedy that sang “I am so out of tune with you” on Being There’s “Sunken Treasure.” Granted, you can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again, and I don’t necessarily want that. But I do want something with a solid thematic feel, something that feels like itself, rather than a mix of other things. In some ways, your previous album, though it had fewer rough edges, was a bolder statement, in that it was at least a solid and consistent and thematically whole piece of work. That one, and every other album since A.M. felt like an artistic statement, a “This is what Wilco is” kind of gesture that somehow also expanded the definition of what Wilco was. This one feels like a question in response to a question, as if someone asked “What is Wilco?” and you replied, “Well, what do you want us to be, baby?”

I’m sorry if I was harsh. This isn’t goodbye; it’s still a see-you-later. Look around for me the next hometown gig; I’ll be the one wearing a party hat.

Love,

Alfonso

Album Review - "Bryter Later" by Nick Drake

People love to talk about their proverbial perfect desert-island albums. Quality-wise, Nick Drake’s Bryter Later could easily be on my list, but that description doesn’t sound quite right.


I imagine desert islands as being dry and bright and isolated places; this album’s much more suitable for rainy afternoons holed up in the condo. “Stay indoors beneath the floors, talk with neighbors only; the games you play make people say you’re either weird or lonely,” Drake sings on “At the Chime of a City Clock.” The music, too, amplifies the urban cabin fever vibe; the arrangements are jazzy but melancholy, with a wonderful blend of wise guitar and playful piano and sad strings and resigned horns. (The horns are crucial; they help make Bryter Later that rarest of things—an excellent album that doesn’t quite sound like anything that came before.) Drake’s voice, soothing and hushed and cool, complements the songs perfectly, but there are great instrumental pieces, too, bisecting and bookending the album.

Five Leaves Left was my first—and first favorite—Nick Drake album, but now I find myself listening to this one far more frequently. There’s still plenty of melancholy here; on Hazey Jane I, for instance, Drake asks: “Do you like what you’re doing? Would you do it some more? Only to stop once and wonder what you’re doing it for?” But all in all, the relentless depression’s been tempered quite a bit. That first album’s vibe is I-want-to-kill-myself-because-life’s-pointless-and-I-won’t-be-noticed-otherwise; this is more like I-don’t-quite-feel-like-going-to-the-grocery-store-today.

And that resignation’s leavened, too, with a cautious optimism—today may be shot, but tomorrow’s at least worth sticking around for. “Please give me a second grace; please give me a second face,” Drake sings on “Fly.” And then on “Northern Sky,” he asks: “Would you love me for my money? Would you love me for my mind? Would you love me through the winter? Would you love me until I die? If you would and you could, then come blow your horn for me.” It’s a lovely song, but the pronouns alone are significant; on both this and “Five Leaves Left” there are times when the “you” refers to Drake himself, and the songs become mere mirrors, places for tortured artistic sensitivity and introspection, but on this, there are far more moments where the “you” is someone else. So Drake is at least spending less time gazing into mirrors and more time looking out windows, looking out from the darkened apartment at the faces in the city, and searching for a connection with someone who can end the isolation.

A Regular Guy

I’ve recently started taking Metamucil, at the ripe old age of 31. I’m hoping to take it for the rest of my life.


Jerry Seinfeld once said that, “Since men can’t have babies, they’re automatically proud of everything else that comes out of their body.” Truer words have never been spoken; indeed, I’ve recently become aware that a circle of my friends have taken advantage of the unholy potentialities afforded by male scatology and camera phone ubiquity and started texting one another—how can I put this delicately?—pictures of their poo.

Now, the gentlemanly thing to do when one hears about such activities would probably be to politely nod, while tactfully declining to take part, and speaking no more of them.

I, of course, decided to participate.

It can be hard to resist such temptations; when one hasn’t done much in a day, one must seek the pride of accomplishment wherever one can find it, and it can indeed feel like an artistic triumph when one can produce, say, something shaped like a perfectly formed treble clef from the depths of one’s colon.

My “pieces” soon won accolades from friends, and I felt they compared favorably with the “artwork” I saw posted on ratemypoo.com—work that, frankly speaking, looked rather amateurish and derivative. But for a while, I felt like—how shall I say it?—a tortured artist. Sculpture’s not just about shape and form, but texture, and in these situations, part of the problem was that my productions often came out as—how should I describe it?—sticky baby poo. Also, my creations often simply took an inconveniently long time; once I had to take a cab to a first date because I spent a full twenty minute to bring my efforts to full fruition. When constipation starts to feel like writer’s block, something, literally, has to give.

For a while, I thought about colon cleanses, or enemas. The latter seemed a little invasive; still, I once heard a story where someone underwent one that brought forth a penny they’d swallowed as a child that had somehow gotten stuck in one of the folds of their large intestine. Though I never mustered up the moxie to undergo the procedure myself, this made it seem incredibly intriguing and strangely healthy. As for the first option, I eventually followed the suggestion of one of my friends and walked down the dark road of googling “colon cleanse” and clicking the “Images” link. I was intrigued by the volume and consistency of the productions I saw showcased there. Some seemed like reverse sculptures of the entire inside of a colon; they were incredibly long, and surprisingly stringy, and my friend suggested that these cleanses could remove, literally, pounds of impacted material that had spent decades inside one’s body. But most of these cleanses involved doing strange things like consuming nothing but maple syrup mixed with lemonade for weeks on end, and, frankly, people, I like to eat.

Then one day, another friend came and described how he’d embarked on a course of action that, he said, “changed his life forever.” He’d started taking Metamucil. In tones of hushed reverence, he related to me the incredible volume of material he’d been producing—a literal torrent of brown creativity. And he offered visual proof—a camera-phone photo of an early work he’d entitled “Alabama Black Snake.”

Needless to say, I couldn’t resist.

Within days, I was at Walgreens, making my initial purchase. (Orange-flavored Metamucil being, in case you didn’t know, the brainchild of Donald Rumsfeld, a legacy of his time heading G.D. Searle. This might seem strange, unless you think about the fact that he basically spent a large portion of his career helping people produce shitty messes. I digress.) Anyway, since I’ve tended towards overconsumption of various substances at different parts of my life, I, of course, indulged in these habits here as well. So I started consuming Metamucil the way I once consumed, say, Miller High Life or, once in a blue moon, Nyquil—with a liberal attitude towards normal amounts and recommended dosages and things of that sort.

And my artwork has flourished. (You’ll have to take my word for it, because I’m not posting pictures; blogging about it is fun, but even I have my limits.) I’ve produced creations such as “Dead Alien Baby” and “The Revolting Blob” and “Mother with Child” that, frankly, rank among my best work.

There are drawbacks; Metamucil gets thick and goey if you don’t drink it quickly enough, and it leaves chunks of residue in your drinking glasses. And you end up with enough mass moving through your digestive tract that you often can’t take in more without having to get rid of some shortly thereafter.

Still, I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon. Even though I’m basically using Metamucil for recreational purposes—for shits and giggles, as it were—it feels like a healthy indulgence. In recovery programs for other substances, one has to admit powerlessness and unmanageability. But with this, I feel powerful, and this area of my life has become very manageable indeed—more regular, and more pleasant, than it has been in quite some time.

Printing the Book

So I’m nearing the point where I’m finally willing to unclench my fingers from the massive book manuscript I just finished and actually hand the whole thing to another human being to read.

I finally saw it in the flesh at Kinko’s last night. (OK, it’s FedEx Office now, but I’m always going to call it Kinko’s, you mindless good-trademark-ruining corporate bastards.) I’d dropped it off to print up a few copies; since I was getting four copies bound so as to ship it off and enter it into some contests—a $167 print job—I figured I’d see a proof first.

No sooner had the words “I’m here to pick up a proof” cleared my lips than the girl behind the counter—and her associate—looked at me with a mix of awe and disbelief. “You must be Alfonso,” she said. “That’s a big book. We couldn’t bind it.”

She motioned over her shoulder to a massive pile of letter-sized paper. It looked like it was 8 inches high.

I tried not to panic. One thought crossed my mind: holy shit, what the fuck have I just done with the past few years of my life?

I’d already known it was a good-sized manuscript—200,000 words, give or take; nowhere near War and Peace, but not far from Moby Dick. More importantly, I knew it was certainly long enough to make a lot of literary agents pass on it on that basis alone. Still, 200,000 was just a number, and this—this massive cube of dead tree that looked hefty enough to collapse the Kinko’s counter, or at least give the girl behind it a hernia—this was tangible, physical proof that I am a lunatic.

Strong words, you might say, but who else but a crazy man would spend such an obscene length of time on such a project without a clear idea as to how to sell it? Here’s a brief—by my standards, ha ha!!—history of the project:

Since approximately 1994, I’ve been more or less obsessed by the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the “hidden pivot” of Nazi Germany. I went to Prague during summer leave in 1998 in part because I wanted to see the spot where he was ambushed by Czech parachutists. Then I thought about the project for a while, wrote a different book-length manuscript, did some intermittent research (and actually wrote a single unsatisfactory page) before deciding to write Pottersville instead, then finally started writing in earnest in early 2006 when I had a chance to go back to Prague. I first wrote a screenplay based on the assassination. I realized it was too long, so I split it into two screenplays. Then I went to Hollywood for a “screenwriter’s pitchfest,” where one gets a chance to meet with real life producers and try and sell them on your movie idea. (Basically, it’s like speed-dating, except you do all the talking, and they do all the rejecting.) Of course, I’d imagined everyone would love it; instead, I was told that expensive period pieces are one of the toughest things to sell. So I came back to Chicago and figured I’d just turn it into a book, because at least I could get that done by myself. Should be a jiff, I figured—I’d already imagined most of the scenes, right? I thought it would take me six months, tops.

Three years later, here I am.

The book’s in three parts, with three first-person narrators; I wrote the first part on the laptop, then—to differentiate the voices, I told myself—composed the first few drafts of the second part using a typewriter, and wrote the third third by hand in composition books. (The handwriting part was kind of fun; it’s good to be forced to rewrite stuff. But don’t ever write anything on a typewriter, people. There’s a reason they barely sell them any more: they suck.)

ANYWAY, I wrote it, and transferred the typewritten and handwritten parts to a computer, and revised the hell out of it, and re-read it and polished it many more times. And I’ve relearned a valuable lesson—the longer you spend on such a project, and the more emotional energy you have invested in it, the less willing you will be to actually stop work completely and say it’s done. (At least for me—it’s all too easy for the sharp needle of another human being’s disapproval to puncture the fragile, overinflated balloon that is my ego.) Rather than getting it in the hands of other people, it’s so much easier to just imagine it is perfect and not do anything that will dispel that illusion.

But, of course, you lose perspective on anything the closer you are to it and the bigger it is, and I’ve long since passed the point where I can objectively judge this particular piece of work. So I need to get it out there and put it up for some contests—hence the trip to Kinko’s.

ANYWAY, it turned out that they hadn’t printed the pages double-sided. And I’d made it double-spaced to comply with various contest guidelines, so that stretched it out a bit, too. The Kinko’s people still had to split it into its three component parts, but the new proof they hurriedly put together last night at least looked semi-manageable. (I tried to resist the temptation to page through it and try and figure out whether I actually, you know, still liked it.) I’m excited to pick it up this weekend, and excited to get some feedback at long last.

But I’m still scared shitless, too.

Fitness For Fanatics

So I've restarted this blog, but I've been some combination of lazy and busy, so I haven't written as much new content yet. So I'm going to post something I wrote about the Crossfit fitness program, which many of you may or may not have heard me speak about at length. Anyway, here goes:

Crossfit is not like most fitness programs. It’s more like a cult.


A friend in the military—one of the few who is not yet drinking the Kool-Aid on a daily basis, it seems!!—described it to me as such, and the comparison’s hard to avoid, for it has all the necessary ingredients. You have an enigmatic but charismatic leader (known, most commonly, as “Coach”) whose minions post workouts every day on the Crossfit website. (It’s at www.crossfit.com, if you’re feeling masochistic.) You have glimpses of the fantastic rewards that await if you are willing to fully submit to this lifestyle—not just in the site’s pictures and short video clips, which show chiselled, beautiful people doing things that defy the laws of biology and gravity, but also in the movie posters for the movie 300, whose actors, you will find yourself explaining to people, got in that shape by using Crossfit. And you have scores of devoted followers—among them yours truly—hanging off every pronouncement from Coach (whose title is always capitalized on every Crossfit discussion board, it seems), copying down His pronouncements and bringing them to the gym, and most importantly, engaging in bizarre physical routines that seem tailor-made to push body and mind and soul to the breaking point and beyond, often leaving said follower prone and gasping on the gym floor in a pool of his or her sweat.

And do these followers leave the cult? No! Despite the ongoing sense of physical inadequacy and occasional humiliation, they keep coming back! They (we, actually) return day after day to this website, and attempt the workouts, and track their—I mean our—progress; many find it hard to even contemplate a return to the old routines.

And why? Because Crossfit is awesome.

Crossfit’s very capriciousness is part of its appeal. It’s all too easy to fall into boring routines at the gym, doing the same exercises over and over until you almost want to drop a dumbbell on your head to break the monotony. However, with Crossfit, you don’t know what tomorrow will bring—at least, not until about 10:00 p.m. or so the night before, when the W.O.D. (Workout-Of-the-Day) is posted. (You do know beforehand what your rest days will be. Every fourth day is a day off. It’s a brilliant schedule—you’re not always working out on the same days of the week.) Some W.O.D.s are stupefyingly straightforward, like doing seven single-rep sets of the Deadlift for max weight. Some of them are astonishingly complicated, with strange sequences of jumping and throwing and running and lifting. Some of them will take close to an hour, but many can be knocked out in less than twenty minutes, and a few are even closer to ten. But all of them are challenging. They’re based on the principle that, rather than isolate individual muscle groups or work on single elements of physical fitness in isolation, you should work out in a way that integrates your muscles, because that’s what happens in the real world, and you should work out in ways that tax both, say, muscular strength and cardiovascular fitness, because, again, that’s what happens in the real world. And everything is done for either max time or max weight or max reps, so if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll always be pushing yourself.

Many of the workouts are named after people, so you’ll read strange comments on the discussion boards, like “I made Melissa my bitch today” or “Fran really kicked my ass” or “I did Michael and didn’t have to stop and poop halfway through.” (OK, I made that last one up, but I did almost use it as a facebook status update once. Some devotees brag about “meeting Pukey,” which basically means what it sounds like—if you do some of the workouts with sufficient intensity, there’s a fair chance you’ll vomit. For me, though, “Poopey” is a bigger problem, especially in the mornings, and especially in the workouts like “Michael” that mix treadmill time with other exercises. I will get up and go to the bathroom, and then go to the gym and get on the treadmill to try and fake my colon into thinking that I’ve started my workout, and I’ll go to the bathroom again, and then I will come back and finally press “Start” on my watch and make it through a couple rounds of whatever craziness Coach has cooked up, and my colon will say, “Haha! I’ve got you!” and I will scamper off to the bathroom yet again, lest I soil the treadmill in what I can only assume will be a spectacularly messy and spatter-y fashion. My colon is a crafty foe.)

I digress. Crossfit isn’t perfect. Coach really has a jones for pull-ups, to the point that (if you work out gloveless, like me) you will get crazy calluses on your hands that will sometimes tear off and bleed and heal and tear off again. Also, there are perhaps too many of the exercises that require gymnastics rings and climbing ropes, and not enough of the strange asymmetrical ones that can be done with normal gym equipment. (Examples include “Virtual Shovelling,” which involves putting a 45 lb plate on only one side of a standard bench press bar and lifting it back and forth over a barrier, and “The Turkish Get-up, which involves lying on your back with a loaded bench press bar held in front of your chest with one arm, then getting up and standing while keeping the bar above you at all times—which, it turns out, is a great conversation starter.) You will have to learn the meaning of the word “pood.” (OK, I’ll save you time on that one. Surprisingly, it has nothing to do with meeting Poopey; it’s a unit of weight approximately equal to 34 lbs that’s apparently only been used in Imperial Russia and on the kettlebells in the Crossfit gym.) And, perhaps most importantly, if you don’t dial back some of the W.O.D.s that have specific weight requirements the first time you do them, you may tear something—I did something to my right inner thigh while front-squatting months ago, and it still doesn’t feel quite right.

Still, I’m not looking for any other fitness routine any time soon. Crossfit gets results, and you don’t plateau as quickly as you do with other routines, so the results keep coming. I feel like I’m on the verge of being able to do the vaunted handstand pushup unassisted, for instance. Also, my time on the dreaded “Filthy Fifty” has dropped by over four minutes since I last did it, even though this time I was still sore from doing 120 pullups and 120 dips two days before. And even though I’ve only been at it for six months, if some sequel-crazed Hollywood-type decides to make 301 any time soon, I’ll at least have an outside shot—if I cut out the milkshakes and deep-dish pizza—at being the crazy ripped Spartan staring out at you from the movie poster.

I’m ready for my close-up, Coach.

Shopping Fiction: A Primer

So I’m resuming this blog, which I left for dead some time ago, because it will give me something to write while I shop around my new book, Resistance. What’s more, it will give me something to write other than the book, and I desperately need something else to write.

The problem with writing books isn’t writing books—it’s selling them afterwards. So I’d rather do the first and avoid the second. I’ve spent plenty of time (I think) working on this book, and my natural tendency is to keep polishing and polishing, all the while shying away from the part that will actually get it sold—namely, shipping query letters and manuscripts off to people who might be willing to represent me or buy my manuscript.

I know I have to shop it around. I have a hard time getting myself to do this. The following story should help illustrate why.

I have, so far, queried exactly one (1) agency about this book.

A year and a half ago, or so, I was working as a waiter at a restaurant in downtown Chicago, having been fired from a lucrative corporate job some time before.

Now, this restaurant was a stressful, demanding place, run by Greeks who had a ridiculously long set of rules, which frequently led to diminished tips and general unpleasantness amongst customers and wait staff alike. (Indeed, the first day I showed up there looking for work was the first day I’d set foot in there for three years—thanks to an unpleasant incident the last time I’d tried to be a customer there, it was the one restaurant in Chicago that I absolutely refused to patronize.) Granted, I had come to love these Greeks, like one would love a crazy aunt or uncle—they’d given me a job when I was a desperate unemployed nobody with little experience in food service who needed cash, pronto; also, I probably learned more life lessons in a year and a half there than I had in five years in a cubicle. Still, it was not my dream job.

So when I found out there was a literary agency upstairs, I—budding unpublished author that I was—figured I’d miraculously found an escape ladder.

Now, I’d sent queries to literary agents before, for a couple different book-length projects, but this promised to be different. Those had been blind queries to people I had never and would never meet; this was an opportunity to personally speak to a literary agent and win them over with my suave charisma and roguish good looks as well as my eloquent prose. Everything—my loss of a well-paying job, the strange turn of events that had led to me waiting tables in a restaurant at which I’d once refused to eat—seemed designed to get me in touch with these people. Clearly this was all preordained by God.

I went up there and introduced myself one slow February afternoon, and it went well enough. The only problem was that I didn’t have anything to offer right then. The previous book had already been published through a publish-on-demand company; they told me it was not worth anyone’s time trying to sell something that already had a publishing history. And the current book was only 2/3rds finished; they told me it was a waste of time to try and sell fiction without a completed manuscript. Come back when you have something finished, they said; they also admonished me to study their submission guidelines, which were posted on the Internet. (Apparently, some authors neglected to take such simple precautions.)

So I went home. I had more research to do to finish the book, so I left struggling America and went to Europe for research, and returned to somehow land back in corporate America. I finished the book. I polished the book. Seasons changed. Presidents changed. I read their submission guidelines. I wrote a query letter. I polished the query letter. I wrote a synopsis. I polished the synopsis. I polished the book again, just for good measure.

Then finally came the fateful day, the golden blue glorious morning when it was all done and I had no more reason to dilly-dally. So I printed out a query letter and patiently wrote out my address on a self-addressed stamped envelope, and put the whole bundle together, and went to have breakfast with a buddy at my favorite breakfast spot (Not the restaurant where I used to work, ha ha!) and then went to the restaurant where I used to work, and told them of my grand plans, and walked upstairs to deliver my query letter.

I spoke to the receptionist and explained my purpose. Mid-explanation, the agent came out, and I explained myself to her, and introduced myself. She used hand sanitizer on herself immediately after shaking my hand.

Still, I was cautiously optimistic. Surely the query letter would win them over.

That was on a Friday. I got their rejection letter in my mailbox on Saturday.