Mr. Twain Sucking the Life Out of a Defenseless Stogie

One of the intrigues about being an enthusiast about a subject or person is that once you start poking about, there seems to be a bottomless rabbit hole of information. And that hole can be well off the main road of what’s normally shared among the broad population. Now I’m not talking about true obsession, where perhaps you know more about the Morpho butterfly than its mother did, where you skip lunch then dinner sitting on the floor of a bookstore a continent away from your home because you’d heard they had a dusty tome by the premiere 18-century entomologist who also skipped most meals in favor of studying the Morphos. Not that kind of obsession, my pretties.

No, I’m referring to something more than the mere fan, but less than the stalker. As an aside, there are the rare polyglots who are able to tiptoe close to obsession’s stage while still staying out of its brightest footlights, and yet own another stage all their own. For example, going back to our fluttery friends, when Vladimir Nabokov wasn’t writing one of his remarkably layered, seriocomic novels, he spent serious time researching butterflies, publishing many monographs that professional lepidopterists recognized as authoritative. He once commented, “The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru. It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.”

Looking at Layers Leads to More Layers
This is a hide-and-seek way of getting to my main topic: how people and things are multilayered, and once you start pulling at the onionskin of a topic or character, there’s always another skin underneath. Case in point: one of the books I’m reading is titled, Twain’s Feast: Searching for America’s Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens. Now, were this work “… in the footsteps of Mamie Eisenhower,” I probably—and no insult to Mamie—would have picked it up with mild amusement and then let it flit from memory forever.

But because it’s Mark Twain, and I am more than a simple fan (though not obsessed, no, that’s not the beating of my hideous heart!), I’m reading it with great pleasure, for the author Andrew Beahrs combines his careful and light-hearted research into Twain’s writings on American food with Bearhs’ travels around the country trying to locate and eat that very food, which in the case of the prairie hens of Illinois proves ecologically difficult, and that of stomaching the ideal stewed raccoon a mite unpalatable.

From the Grubby to the Gracious
But it’s the flavor of Twain’s voice that comes through with spice, particularly when he lavishes angel-winged admiration on an American dish and contemptuous skewering on an insipid counterpart found elsewhere. His hilarious railings against spineless European coffee and expoundings on the glories of a stout cup of good American coffee do make one wonder what happened between Twain’s time and our parent’s days with the Folgers. Twain was uniquely suited to comment on the breadth of American food, for he palavered with the powerful in the boardrooms of the Eastern Seaboard, grubbed among the grubs in the grubbiest makeshift mining towns in dead-dry Nevada, and of course moved through the shoals and the high waters of foodstuffs up and down the mighty Mississippi, both in his boyhood and as a steamboat pilot.

I want to return to my original spiraling rabbit hole, for it’s in the reading of the table tastes of a famous person that you consider how layered a life is, how layered all our lives are. Twain could be, in turn, a kitten-loving sentimentalist, a flinger of flaming arrows against the establishment, a provocateur who spoke truth to power, and yet one who cultivated the company of barons of industry. A man of spectacular fame, yet of multiple spectacular failures and deeply public sorrows. His onion had many skins, and reading this off-center book tells me there are skins I’ll never know, on him and so many other subjects.

Yeah, Well, I Invented the Crossbow
Today I heard my girlfriend Alice tell one of my old friends on the phone that she had spent time a long while back to learn how to play the harmonica. Really! Who knew? Good instruction that, a reminder that thinking we know all that a person is about is a kind of blindness, because there are always layers unseen.

One thing though: Twain sang the praises of the 19-century oysters and mussels of the San Francisco Bay. That’s going much too far: I vigorously object. Oysters and mussels, gut-tugging expressions of some bronchial character, a kind of simpering slime. Though on the subject of maple syrup, I share his every sentiment.

One of my pals from Triiibes, Seth Godin’s fantastically fertile social network, is Bob Poole. Bob is a salesperson with a whole lotta soul, a fine and funny man, and the author of the recommended book, Listen First, Sell Later. His blog, called the Daily Doughnut, gives bite-sized advice and perspectives on selling, but selling from a framework of two-way communication, mutual gain, and being a human being. Imagine that.

Bob gives over the Sunday version of the Daily Doughnut to guests. I hacked into his blog and replaced today’s post from Richard Branson with my own. Check it out: “Galileo and Leonardo da Vinci Walk Into A Bar …”

Waiter, can you bring me more ice and a subordinate clause?

Because I am the founder of the Bentley Paranoiac Dystopian Technique (BPDT), I have managed, at the one-month mark, to have made my stay in the beguiling Bahamas a time of substantial anxiety, temper and intolerance. Not only that, there was some bad stuff happening too. It is once again a lesson in attitude IS everything (almost), and that my attitude makes your basic murderous dictator look like the designer of the Princess Phone.

BPDT aside, I have noted in the past the reputation of writers as the self-medicating types. I’m talking about the storied boozy histories of Faulkner and Hemingway and of Dorothy Parker, the quarry of this quote:”Writer, thinker, drinker.”

Thus, I’ve seen that when my interpretations of this beautiful island become baleful, I’ve started longing for my gin-and-tonic bath. That usually happens around 11am. (When Alice and I were shopping in one of the local liquor stores, one of the tourists there told us that the low-alcohol version of the good native beer, Kalik, was fine for morning drinking, and provided a stepping-stone (if you could still step solidly) to the higher-proof noon-time brew.)

Links with Drinks
Well, I haven’t actually succumbed to the morning bottle-feeding routine, preferring to continue my “I’m strong enough to wait until 5″ standard of excellence. Besides, I’ve got work to do, and I don’t have Hemingway’s constitution. But with all that in mind, I thought you’d enjoy my small collection of writerly links about drinks. They prove it is possible to hold a pen in one hand and a cocktail in another, however wobbly both may be.

Top Ten Drunk Writers

11 Drinks to Pair with Your Favorite Books

Greatest Books on Booze

How to Drink Like Your Favorite Authors

A Bar Pretending to be a Bookstore

Mind you, I’m not encouraging a headlong pursuit of boozy debauchery. Intemperate application of alcohol has created many a hell for many a soul. I just apply the stuff as an edge-smoother, and I’ve been edgy lately. I’m much more for the “moderation in all things” mantra rather than “why did I wake up wearing lipstick and heels?” Next time you’re in the islands, you can enroll in the BPDT program, buy me a drink, and I’ll tell you all about it.

Yeah, you're right—they were a vaudeville act in the 30s

I like to show off my smarty-pants friends now and then, and this occasion brings a half-dozen ways to do it: my estimable colleague, Joel D Canfield, is hosting a book-release party on the eleventh of November in Philadelphia. Joel (who besides making wicked pancakes) dabbles in necromancy and other dark arts, so he has scheduled his publishing party on 11-11-11, a day when normally steadfast digits and the earth itself both tilt on their axes. In order to cause numerologists to scramble to their interpretive books all the quicker, Joel has folded two other units into the numeral batter: 6/6.

Those dancing digits herald a titanic feat: he’s published six books in the last six months! And he rarely sweats! Though, as you might imagine from that kind of output, he does expound.

Four of the works are from the apocalyptic potato cellar of his own imagination, one is an immortal act of co-authorship with the stirring soul of Renaissance Man/poetic social theorist/quasi-historian/tooth-tugger Richard Wilson and one is co-authored with Change Catalyst Shanna Mann. Behold the list:

Through the Fog—An Irish Mystery

The Time is Now 11:59—Heretical Thinking for Tomorrow’s Business (with a foreword by Rick Wilson)

Getting Your Book Out of the “Someday” Box

Hits or Niches: Why Marketing is Boring, Obnoxious, & Annoying, & What You Can Do About It (with Rick Wilson)

Permission Granted: Create Something Remarkable. Start Now.

Why We Lead—Conversations on the Scarcity of Confidence and the Nature of Leadership (with Shanna Mann)

The works are available both in print form and from the aether, from the usual electronic suspects. The publishing party will be held at Cafe Nola, a New–Orleans style venue where the Bananas Foster is said to reign supreme. Along with flaming confectionary dishes, Joel will be attempting to eat full print versions of all the books. It’s unclear if famed hot-dog competitive eating champion Joey Chestnut will be vying for this literary-comestibles crown.

There’s a Facebook page trumpeting the occasion and Joel’s Someday Box page has links to buy these and his other books as well. On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia that day, but I won’t be able to make it. Save me a banana, boys. (On second thought, just save me the cognac.)

I still remember the clackety-clack of the high keys of my Mac Plus

This is a cobbling of a couple of things I wrote a while back, wrapped in the unfurled flag of Steve Jobs’ stepping down from Apple yesterday. As a writer with handwriting so tortured it screams in unintelligibility, any medium that offered the least friction between getting the words from brain to screen was a welcome one. For more than 25 years, my medium has been a Mac.

In 1986, I was hired by Borland, then a fairly big player in the software industry, to be a copyeditor. They plunked me down in front of what I was told was a smoking machine, a new, zippy IBM XT. Not having much computer experience, I plinked and poked my way around DOS, getting used to command-line instructions to open, save and find files. Some geekasauri from other departments came around, whinging because our department had given an upscale machine to the new doofus copyeditor, who didn’t know just how glorious 640k of internal memory was. I didn’t know memory from moonbeams, so I could only shrug.

Then my Mac Plus arrived. Lookee here—a mouse to move that cursor across the screen! A program you can draw with. A selection of typefaces. A graphical interface that quickly communicated the notion of file storage and retrieval. And something else: a sparkle, a design distinction, that holy integration of form and function. This was something else again, and I liked it, immediately.

The Contagion Spreads
A new copyeditor was hired. She was given a new Mac Plus. She’d only used PCs until then—revelation. A tribe of two. Our direct boss, who worked out of the office, got one too. Once a tribe, twice a tribe, thrice a tribe. Then, a goodly portion of the marketing department got them too. PageMaker 1.0 on the Mac—wow. People succumbed to the ease, the allure of the new, and again, that somewhat intangible design/desire glimmer.

But Borland’s bottom line was based on selling inexpensive (revolutionary, at the time) development tools for programmers. The geeks did not speak Mac, and in the office the machines were often derided as toys. But of course, that scorn only enhanced the “we’re unique, we use Macs” sense of narrow community within the tribe, which unfortunately could come off as “we’re better.” To my mind then, both machines got your letters written, your sheets spread, your data based, and your computations computed, but only one machine did all that with something extra—personality expressed through design. And a sense of play. (And anyway, whoever really thought a toy was a bad thing?)

Serious Play
I won’t cite boring statistical studies of the creative aspects of play, and the means by which this kind of play leads to discovery and tangible insight, but the studies are there. The Macintosh provided for millions of people the pleasurable pursuit of their own empowerment; and so many surfable waves followed, from the rising tide of desktop publishing to multimedia breakers to floods of creative connectivity today. Sure, Macs, PCs, Linux machines, just tools after all, but how Macs work has always made more sense to me. It’s personal—not like the zealot fanboy who flames any questioner of the Macintosh Creed—but personal in the sense that I do get where the fanatics are coming from.

Thus, I felt a pang yesterday after the Jobs announcement, because creative geniuses that make a real-world impact are few and far between. His and Apple’s work had a lasting impact on me and on my writing.

Godspeed, Mr. Jobs.

Image via Wikipedia

Famed adman Charles Dickens (Oglivy stole everything from Charlie) started out as a struggling copywriter in London, at one point so desperate for work he scribbled his business address—he was also the first graffiti artist—on the legs of local trollops working the district.

But then Dickens had a revelation: he did a little fiction writing on the side, and wondered whether his attempts to sell buyers on the chewy goodness of hardtack biscuits would work if he tossed in some storytelling. Stories might deliver the needed ROB (Return on Bamboozling).

Bingo!

So he formulated his Five Rules of Compelling Copywriting, which sleazy scribes have cribbed from for more than a century. To wit:

Hit ‘Em with Headlines
Charlie dug that the headline is the hook. He landed big ones with whoppers like these:
A Whale of a Deal!
Call me (but call me Ishmael)

Finagle Your First Lines
Dickens doctored all the first lines of his marketing pieces with winning words:
For fresh fruit: “These were the best of limes, these were the worst of limes.”
For sandwiches: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero sandwich of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

Never Short Your Sales Letters
You knew that Charlie pioneered the use of yellow highlighting in his sales letters, but you probably didn’t know that he perfected the use of the interminable sentence:

There once lived, in a sequestered part of the country of Devonshire, one Mr. Godfrey Nickleby: a worthy gentleman, who, taking it into his head rather late in life that he must get married, and not being young enough or rich enough to aspire to the hand of a lady of fortune, had wedded an old flame out of mere attachment, who in her turn had taken him for the same reason.

Charlie highlighted it all, of course.

Use Tongue-Torquing Character Names
For every vanilla “Bob” you’ve got selling your sparks, Dickens will give you a Wopsle, a Wackford Squeers or a Pumblechook.

Calls to Action that Crackle
Use tactics like pathetic, big-eyed urchins whimpering things like “Please sir, I want some more.” Dickens really knew how to yank hankies. (Hankies are always followed by wallets.)

Bonuses
And don’t forget his exemplary use of Random Capitalization and Emotional Outrage. They don’t call the guy “Mr. Gutbucket Sales” for nothing.

Next week, we’ll examine how Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People started out as a how-to book on trimming hedges.

Image via Wikipedia

The final notice that Borders has conclusively died, on its back with its eight legs faintly wiggling to the end, brought mixed feelings. As a lover of independent bookstores, which often have subtle and quirky relationships with a community rarely entertained by the big box stores, I felt a sense of satisfaction, tinged with the glancing guilt that occasionally pairs with Schadenfruede. But having found comfort in bookstores of every flavor for much of my life, that satisfaction was alloyed with the sinking feeling that bookstores as we know them are on their way out.

I’m not going to go into some quasi-nostalgic song of lament that touches on the uncanny combination of utility, reliability and romance that is the physical book—that blade has been sharpened by many word-whittlers with more gift than me. And if the physical book is wobbling downstairs on creaky knees, the jaunty trot of the ebook into the arena bespeaks a range of new possibilities of authors connecting with readers in ways unimaginable just five years ago.

The Electric Call of Books Unknown
What I will miss about bookstores is akin to the feeling you get when you are traveling, and you stop in an unfamiliar town and choose a cafe whose storefront beckoned to you in some elusive way. When you find out that they make a chile relleno with salsa that sings or a chocolate malt that is the milk of the heavens, that’s happy discovery. That kind of serendipity is similar to what can befall you when wandering bookstore aisles, having a title or cover magnetically draw your hands and then your head. There’s a gratifying sense of connection to author and idea that almost happens in a Malcolm Gladwell Blink, an electric recognition.

That tingle of connection from out of the blue can happen when browsing online, of course, but that’s a different experience, and doesn’t have the spark of sensuality I’m suggesting. Of course, bookstores won’t just disappear, at least not all at once. After all, we still can see a pay phone booth on city streets now and then, which can make a fine shelter for a sudden rain squall. Enterprising bookstores will continue to evolve, at least the ones that acknowledge and incorporate the ebook revolution, rather than denouncing it. And community bookstores will become more so, if they emphasize community.

Everything That Rises Must Converge
But for the more than 10,000 Borders employees laid off, that’s small consolation. Publishers will continue to tremble, with that vast arm of book purchasing quashed. And authors will quail too, particularly traditional print-arm authors, now bereft of acres and acres of shelf space across the nation. But enterprising people will still create, find, sell or enjoy their chile relleno and chocolate malt discoveries, no matter if the vendor is using street-corner sandwich-sign slingers or Net-enabled neon to attract the eye.

[Note: Author is not advocating ingestion of chile rellenos and chocolate malts at the same time. Though author suspects they might be pretty good together.]

Related articles

• Can bookstores survive after Borders? (teleread.com)

I’m old enough to have seen The Twilight Zone when it was in its regular run on 60s television. I watched it avidly, because it had the perfect composition of creepy/scary/otherworldly that fed and accelerated a kid’s imagination. It’s only now, having been treated courtesy of the Syfy Channel to a second round of the show, that I recognize what a perfect encapsulation of narrative intrigue the show was and is.

It’s a kick to see how many famous actors—Robert Duvall, William Shatner, Dennis Hopper, Robert Redford—added their early panache to the series, which was also notable for rarely straying into the truly cheesy for its special effects, though it was not a big-budget production. But it wasn’t the acting, cinematography or production values that made the show timeless. It was the writing.

Big-Issue Writing Without Schmaltz
The essence of The Twilight Zone is in the writing, the inviolate genesis of so mediums that provoke our thinking. And the reason the writing of The Twilight Zone was so compelling was that the 30-minute shows were a distillation of the biggest themes of existence: What is the nature of good? What is the nature of evil? How are morals compromised, and why? How can it be that the powerful can be so weak, and the unprepossessing so strong? What is the essence of fear, the power of the unknown? What is death?

Those issues, when spelled out above, can look so sententious, a formula for gloppy entertainment and tasteless treacle. But that’s not the case in The Twilight Zone, and not the case when those matters, which are serious, are taken seriously. Yet also presented as entertainment, a fine contradiction. And in matters of fine contradiction, the host, creator and prime writer of the series was a master.

Rod Serling, Writer as Philosopher-Magician
Somehow, often using the simplest of language, Serling was able to tap into the well of human nature, finding definitive examples of the pompous and the blustery, the ordinary, the humble, the unassailably good. And though the show could very well tip toward the preachy (against nuclear power, for example), its motions toward advocacy were mostly submerged in the drama. Space exploration could be both the source of enlightenment and destruction. Humans could be more soulless than robots. The spark of creativity, of love, could be found in the most arid of environments.

Rod Serling’s consistently good writing was matched by his compelling on-screen persona: the oracular host, biting off words with a steady, clipped, declarative voice that was that of an unequivocal judge, but one always in on the big joke. And the ever-lit cigarette, the smoke wafting into the air like the dashed dreams that so many of the shows depicted. Those cigarettes contributed to ending Serling’s life at a cruelly young age, but his legacy is clear: the small man with the big mind and the sonorous voice, still making viewers—and writers—reflect on what it is to be human.

You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead—your next stop, the Twilight Zone.

The deed to my deep holdings in the fabled Hollow

I’ve been copyediting the forthcoming Guide to Literary Agents 2012 book, and seeing all of the do’s and don’ts on sending your queries and proposals to agents reminded me that one of my big ideas for a book flamed out a little while back.

Since I was familiar with the fundamentals of writing a book proposal, I think I put together a reasonable effort, one that addressed the usual requisites of Synopsis, Chapter Outline, Sample Chapters, Market Overview, Platform, and Blithering On About My Background. If you Google “How to Write a Book Proposal” you’ll get results out of the yin-yang (wipe them carefully), but Michael Larsen’s How to Write a Book Proposal (updated to its 4th edition) is considered a classic.

If you can no longer bear the act of reading words on a page (the horror!), you can listen to Ted Weinstein’s Book Proposal Bootcamp audio recording, which is quite good. He has other proposal-writing tips on his site as well.

It All Starts with a Drink. No, I Mean an Idea!
Of course, you need an idea for the book. Mine started with a callow, whiskey-drinking youth who, upon seeing a prompt on a Jack Daniel’s bottle urging fans to write the distillery, wrote something like this: “Why, not only do I enjoy consuming Jack’s finest in a conventional way, but I also brush my teeth with it, and keep a glass on my bedside table, at the ready to ward off night sweats and other less congenial spirits.”

Little did I know that would prompt a tide of strange letters and documents, and even stranger objects (a rabbit’s foot, rubbing stone, chewing tobacco, sippin’ glasses and more) sent from the distillery to me. My first return letter from them came 35 years ago. I received another a month ago and I’ve faithfully returned the favor back to them, quirky letter for quirky letter. Even when months would go by without receiving a letter, that’s a lot of correspondence, marketing gimmick or not. (A lot of whiskey too.)

Thus, my thought that were I to package up the correspondence, and scans and photos of the mailed oddments between us (sent through their sister organization, the Tennessee Squires), and include a kind running chronology/commentary of what was happening personally and socially over the course of the correspondence, that would make for a weird, whiskey-soaked memoir. Egads, a book!

Putting the Kibosh on the Korrespondence
Anyway, if you scan the proposal, you can see that it’s a fair amount of work to put one together. It was composed a while ago, so some of the info is out of date. But one issue that Little Tommy forgot (and which was pointed out only toward the end of sending it out to a number of agents): I don’t own the copyright to letters sent to me. And when I politely inquired of the Tennessee Squires (of which I am a bonafide landed-gentry member) if I could assemble all our correspondence in a book, they politely turned me down. I asked twice, but no go. They just weren’t interested in publicity about the Tennessee Squire organization. Or they didn’t like the smell of my breath, who knows?

Anyway, I still might publish a shorter recounting of all this high-proof business, because it’s amusing. The next proposal I write, about Hugh Hefner’s pajama collection, will have all copyright issues solved in advance.

My girlfriend and I live on a small piece of property in Central California, a few miles from the sea. Though only minutes from the freeway, our neighborhood is semi-rural, with many neighbors owning several acres of land. Our little bit of sod is about 1/3 of an acre, essentially surrounded by open fields. Over the winter and into the spring, the field grasses grow high, drying to reedy, golden weeds, sometimes five feet tall.

And then, on an appointed day, a couple of the locals get on their riding mowers, and do an all-day mow, criss-crossing the territory in loud, patterned swaths of removal. That happened this weekend, and how we see is different: it’s like wearing welding glasses and having them fall off. Look, a cat, fixed but quivering, paws flexed in front of the gopher hole! A covey of quail, their topknots bobbing, busy harvesting seeds. And how did we not know that under the waving weeds, a clump of calla lilies stand shining?

Writer’s Slump
Writers are observers, but even observers fall into unseeing slumps. The buzzing of the hours, lunch followed by dinner, thoughts hovering on subjects well worn by prior thinking. You don’t actually see your work, your girlfriend, your very self. There’s a surface, and then there’s what’s underneath. What’s underneath is often new, bright and fresh—but that freshness is actually there all along. If you only tilt your head rather than hold it straight, not hold it expecting today’s fields to be the same as yesterday’s.

I’ve been feeling trapped in my mind of late, touchy, pessimistic, my thinking circular and petty. I’ve felt jealous of other people’s success, doubting my own path, my mind small and cramped. But the walkway to my Airstream office is lined with bright poppies, supple stems swaying in the wind. Gabbling goldfinches merrily dunk themselves in the deckside water garden. The flowers are impossibly bright.

Spring. Time again to see like a writer, see underneath the surface, to mow down the weeds of the small mind. Breathe.

PS When you’re all wrapped up in your small, sour self like I’ve been, it’s good to read something like Leo Babauta’s latest, 38 Lessons I Learned in 38 Years.