Non-Fiction Sidebar: Possible Cures for the Royalty Cheque / Royalty Statement Blues

  One week (let's say early June in 2013) your friend receives a royalty cheque for sales of her university press hardcover, a study that in one sense represents the most tangible result of years pursuing a PhD from Oxford. 
   The amount? $2.30. (Yes, as in the price of a double espresso.) 
   That same week a university press accountant sends you a Statement of Royalties for $13 (plus change) along with the announcement that the press will not issue a cheque until the royalty total reaches $25.00. 


  Your friend emails to tell you her news and you reply, feeling both empathy and sympathy, and understanding that you're swapping a fishing tale of a grimly funny kind, the humour deriving from the switch of emphasis: not "the fish I caught was this big [your hands at least 15 inches apart]" but "the fish I caught was this small [your thumb and index finger almost touching]." 
   The self-deprecating laughing tone of the exchange brings to mind related ideas: gallow's humour, whistling in a graveyard, Cathy cartoons. Beneath that? A gray landscape of metaphoric figures—The Swamp of Sadness, The Road to Regret, The Bedrock of Bitterness, The Slough of Despond. Also, there's that galling, depressing sense of futility embodied by the daily routine of Sisyphus.


   Desperate to avoid that figurative terrain, you take heart in aphorisms and clichés—"It's the journey that counts, not the destination," "Money's besides the pint, I do it becaise I love it," and "It's an honour just to be nominated." 
   As always, you recall, ol' Oscar W. had something witty and pertinent to say: "Genius is born—not paid."
   Further apothegms related to money are especially reassuring—"A good name is better than riches" and "Money is the root of all evil." (You ignore the wisdom of Twain: "The lack of money is the root of all evil." His smart-ass tone is impossible to take seriously.)
   That biblical one provides lovely comfort too: "I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, 'Who then can be saved?' Jesus looked at them and said, 'With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.'" 
   So does Dorothy Parker—"If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to"—particularly because you do precisely as she asks, quickly surveying the field of obnoxious Americana: Kim K., Kanye W., Donald T., Paris H., that fatuous army of North American Real Housewives in Vancouver, Atlanta, New York, Orange County, Miami, Beverly Hills, and so on. 
   For a full five minutes you understand with wondrous clarity that a life of conspicuous consumption and crude staged arguments at nightclubs in front of a film crew doesn't appeal to you. Not in the least. 
  With those sayings digested, wealth begins to look unpleasant, no better than a burden or a curse.

   Persistent, you also take to heart the long-ago strategy of your parents (and to your knowledge, the strategy of all parents since history began): perspective. 
   In place of the dinner Mom served you / the lecture about people starving in Africa she delivered when you pushed aside that perfectly healthy serving of broccoli, you think about relative privilege and relative affluence, and that, for instance, there are "775 million people in the world who are illiterate, with another 152 million children set to follow in their footsteps because they aren't attending school." The numbers for poverty are more sobering yet. 
   You realize that you're lucky and entitled and supremely well-heeled, relatively speaking. 
   Less far-fetched, you think about the hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts publishers receive (which represent thousands and thousands of hours of labour on the part of unpaid authors) that are glanced over before being rejected and thrown into teeming recycling bins. "At least...," you begin, and trail off. There's so much for which to be thankful. After all, you're Published, you're Reviewed, you're an Author.
   A petty, never admired fold of dimwit neurons also notices that your paltry royalty-to-be is six times higher that of your friend. Guiltily, you file away that awesome fact. 
 

   Whew! You / your writing / your career as a writer has been granted an extension. You're ready to write again, free of worry about money—that vile and distracting insect.
   And you're full of insights, realizations. You think of lotteries and the feverish media reportage about winners that so mesmerizes society. Practically everyone pictures themselves winning the jackpot, all the while knowing that the usual winning of a dollar or two is just enough to buy another lottery ticket... 
   You see with sudden clarity that J.K. Rowling's billions and Yann Martel's $3 million advance are media-circulated stories of literary jackpot winners and that chances are remote (at best) that you will be a jackpot winner too. You vow to write for the sake of Art. You know too that you'll think "Africa, Africa, Africa" while steering clear of successful writer acquaintances, industry news, bookstores, review sections in papers, and literary culture in any form. 
   And you'll strive to forget the remaining $11 (and change) required to receive your precious royalty cheque. 
   That way, its eventual arrival will be a wonderful surprise.

 

Digression: Books I'm Reviewing—Lisa Moore's "Caught"

   In last year's notorious—harsh, mean-spirited, reductive, wrist-slapping—review of Alix Ohlin's story collection (Signs and Wonders) and novel (Open) in the weekend New York Times, William Giraldi dedicated some 1,387 words to condemnation of the sort that inspires visions of print runs being hurriedly gathered up and thrown into a gargantuan pile and then torched after being doused with gallons of gasoline. 
   From Ohlin's "cliché-­strangled" sentences and the "insufferable schmaltz" of her sentiments to "language [that] betrays an appalling lack of register," Giraldi could find nothing except serial flaws of conception and execution.
   (Asked by a Boston Globe reporter to defend his criticism, Giraldi framed the review as a mode of literary activism—and by extension as a valiant act in the service of civilization: "It was an attack on laziness, on the ubiquity of indolence that is currently polluting our literary culture.... Some people want to say the review was over the top. Let’s keep in mind, over the top is the only way to conquer a mountain, and I was confronted with an Everest of awfulness.") 

∞

   Giraldi also complained that Olin "has a baffling fondness for the most worthless word in English: 'weird.'" Regrettably, he set aside no paragraph to explain his empirical findings re: weird. 
   How he determined word value, for example, or what methodology of quantification he relied on to arrive at "the most worthless word in English" will remain undisclosed, perhaps a mystery for the ages.
   I bring this up because his ferocity for a short time made me wary of dropping "the most worthless word in English" into daily conversations or, even more egregiously, into my own writing. I'd long used and liked the word, and found places for its inclusion often, from "We had a really weird conversation on the bus" to "That scene in Blue Velvet where Dean Stockwell lip-synchs to 'Candy Colored Clown' is really weird." (Okay, the second example is total fabrication. I've never spoken those words in my life, even though I do believe them.) Yes, I could have used "awkward and uncomfortable" in the former instance and "surreal" in the latter, but weird suffices too, right?
   While reading Lisa Moore's Caught I thought, "What a weird scene" in several chapters. Writing the review I considered using "the most worthless word in English," but opted for "trippy," "oddball," "Twin Peaks," "touching-on-surreal," "stoner," and "Pineapple Express." Still, I could have easily inserted compound words: "funny-weird," "strange-weird," "eerie-weird," and, of course "delightfully weird." They're all apt.

The actual  review appears in The Vancouver Sun.

Digression: Books I'm Reviewing—D.W. Wilson's "Ballistics"

  The last time I was in Seattle, I passed by a gun buyback hosted by the police and sheltered under an I-5 overpass downtown. 
   For this unusual, but very American-seeming event the plan was for gun owners to retire their firearms in exchange for gift cards.  Even though the buyback was open to everyone, no women were visible.
   The police soon faced a problem, however: commercial buyers showed up too, pacing outside the territory the police had claimed and holding up signs proclaiming "Cash for Guns," and so on—a big obstacle, in other words, to permanently removing firearms from circulation.
   Besides the novelty of the event itself, the other noteworthy visual was the carnivalesque atmosphere. Outside the police zone, guys dressed specially for the occasion in camo, canvas vests, hunting colours, and sniper black (I'm talking about downtown Seattle here, where dyed hair, visible tattoos, and/or head to toe preppy are the usual indicators of belonging), and traded back slapping moments of camaraderie while handling one another's rifles. (Yes, the homosocial aspects caught my attention.)

   Watching them from within the car, I was reminded of the set up in Johan Renck's music video for The Knife's "Pass This On": a drag performer sings before an audience in what looks like a footballer clubhouse. The empty space between the watchful and potentially hostile audience and the delicate lone singer—the dance floor, technically, but also symbolic of the divide between two worldviews, two genders, and two sexualities—seems both menacing and vast. While Renck's video collapses that divide in a utopian fiction of scenes with euphoric dancing, in the reality of an overcast Seattle afternoon in January, I didn't feel so hopeful.


  Anyhow, this posting is all digression that began with me thinking about the gun-happy guys in Ballistics. Oops.

   My review appears in The National Post.

Digression: Books I'm Reviewing—Dede Crane's "Every Happy Family"

  Just as some professions seem to be overrepresented in literature (artists and writers and professors, for instance), others are underrepresented (garbage collectors, managers of fast food franchises, bus drivers). 
   Ditto for cities, with the Greater Toronto Area commanding a hefty proportion of the Canadian literary imaginary. Nice and pretty and reputedly boring Victoria, meanwhile, barely registers. 
   Set in Fairfield, one of the prettiest neighbourhoods anywhere, Dede Crane's Every Happy Family offers a glimpse of tumultuous middle-class life in BC's capital city.

My review appears in The Winnipeg Review.

Digression: Books I'm Reviewing—Spring Books (End o' the Season)

   Night class begins tomorrow, and that also brings to a close my book reading and reviewing for Spring 2013. 
   The last of the fiction I'll be writing about (listed accorded to personal enjoyment factors, high to low) includes Lisa Moore's Caught, Dede Crane's Every Happy Family, and D.W. Wilson's Ballistics; the reviews will appear in The Vancouver Sun, The Winnipeg Review and The National Post in the next few weeks (I imagine...I submit reviews, but have no control when they're actually published).

Digression: Books I'm Reviewing—Amber Dawn's "How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir"

   Known yet unknown, prostitution was a shimmeringly exotic occupation as well as a fatally poisonous one in my young mind.
   While girls at school were routinely called whores, sluts, and scrags (that last term a late 1970s' Fraser Valley regional idiom reserved for a trashy, disreputable young woman), and a few of them in high school were plagued by reputations as willing targets for entire sports teams on a Friday night, to my knowledge no actual prostitutes worked in the small BC towns where I grew up. If there were, they stayed in the shadows and out of harm's way.


   American TV, then, with its cop shows set in L.A. and New York and warehouse district strolls where tough, brazen streetwalkers with over-the-top fashion sense fought and joked and sauntered and bantered and eventually got into cars with single men with ready cash, provided my first impressions of a life that from many angles (and discounting the real dangers of pimps, psychos, and police brutality) looked way more fun than being a secretary or a nurse. 
   Still, an enthralled viewing of Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway, set in the same colourful Los Angeles (a fiction that basically collapsed the entirety of that enormous, complex city into the vibrant but tatty corner of Hollywood and Vine), led me to believe in the wisdom of conventional careers: waitresses and dental hygienists might suffer from boredom, I learned, but at least they won't get their faces cut up by a mean pimp who expects productivity in exchange for his investment.

  Books—in particular, The Happy Hustler: My Own Story—gave me other tantalizing glimpses. I can't remember how I obtained my copy, but I know I kept it hidden, stuck in a cubbyhole at bottom of my closet that led to rafters. I pored over it multiple times and savoured whole scenes. And while I no longer recall plot details, I remember feeling entranced by this fantasy of the life, and imagined how exciting it would be to live in an American metropolis and get paid (with money, drugs, cars, jewelry, vacations) to be admired—the centre of attention every time—and for a few weeks I vowed that one day a happy hustler I would be. (Such vows were always fleeting; before and after The Happy Hustler, I planned to be an assassin, a pimp, a fashion designer, a spy, and a cat burglar.)
   Elsewhere in the house, my father possessed a copy of The Happy Hooker, which I read and liked a lot less (for obvious reasons, in retrospect). 


   My father, eager to set his only son on a heterosexual trajectory, also educated me, offering (unsolicited) practical advice based on his own experiences in Calgary brothels back in the day. The advice was medical in nature and instructed me about how to respond if I suspected the "hooer" (his word) I'd just finished with was "dirty." (This patently idiotic advice relied on the antibiotic properties of my own urine, famous sworn enemy to syphilis and gonorrhea as any medical expect will confirm.)



  These early formulations of the figure of the prostitute and the landscape of prostitution rushed to my consciousness as I was reading How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir, not least because early in her book Amber Dawn, referring to prostitutes, asks, “Why do we so seldom hear the voices of those whose experience is so widespread?”
   From Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway and network television to kids at school and my father, I realized I'd been raised being told about prostitutes from ostensibly reliable sources who were for the most part not prostitutes. 
   And while these experiences occurred years ago, my guess is they're not all that out of date; I'd bet that circa now, the young routinely learn about societal outsiders and marginalized jobs from people who are invested in telling the stories in a particular way (with familiar, easily digested tropes such as the prostitute as dirty, sinful, fallen, contagious, Other, etc). 
   Dawn understands how damaging that kind of 'knowledge' can be, especially because it grants a kind of cultural permission, one that, for example, might tell a guy it's okay to beat up a prostitute because she doesn't matter, not really, or for others to view prostitutes as lesser beings whose 'immorality' and marginal status means their pain or suffering or even disappearance counts for little (cue "the wages of sin..." etc). 
   A report from the street and a "voice" worth hearing, How Poetry Saved My Life tells compelling stories while encouraging you to examine the truths of your own education.

(Oh, right, my review of Dawn's memoir appears in The Vancouver Sun.)

 

Non-Fiction Sidebar: What's in a Name? Book Titles, Product Names, and Predicting Consumer Behaviour.

   What's in a name? Would the makers of Ambien or Febreze sell fewer units if they'd named their products Aldazane or Bufian? Or, would the Insight and Leaf become household names if the North American marketing divisions of Honda and Nissan had opted for different naming strategies? And would you, shopping online or wandering through shelves of books, choose against considering a new Margaret Atwood novel simply because she'd titled it Journey Through Doom and Gloom instead of The Year of the Flood? (Okay, and probably in contradiction to any point I might be making here, I'll admit now that I was once offered a copy of a novel called The Shadow of the Wind and could not get past what I thought was the most idiotic of titles.)
   I'm wondering about that today because I read Deborah Copaken Kogen's "My So-Called 'Post-Feminist' Life in Arts and Letters" while negotiating with a publisher about the title of a book project.
   One of the intriguing elements of Kogan's article was the account of her largely unsuccessful struggle with publishers about the visual content of her books. While she shared her insights and preferences with her market-eying publishers about jacket design and the titles of her books, she appears to have repeatedly met a wall: the expertise of marketers trumped her own ideas every time, the supposition being that they (possessing the wisdom of marketing experience and the book smarts from degrees in Marketing) could better predict, or had special insight into, the mysterious processes of consumer behaviour. Kogan wanted Newswhore. Random House, she relates, told her Shutterbabe. She asked for Shuttergirl or Develop Stop Fix instead, but was told No and that, furthermore, she had no say in the matter. A few years later she ran into pink ghetto problems; she wanted the book to be blue and categorized as a memoir, while her publishers aimed to select pink and market it to women as a parenting book. Guess who won?


   I have had nothing close to that mixture of bad luck and closed-minded publishers. I submitted my first novel to my publisher as The J.H. Manuscript and was told the title was enigmatic without being interesting and that it seemed obscure. In retrospect, The Age of Cities really does look better. That said, it's anyone's guess if one title would have sold better. I'm doubtful.
   More recently I've been working with two other editors and four handfuls of contributors on After NAFTA, a scholarly book whose basic concept and title came to me in a dream. As did the subtitle: "Contemporary Canadian, American, and Mexican Dystopian Literature." 
   Maybe because the title appeared in a dream I took it as some kind of mystical sign and was emotionally invested in keeping it. Naturally, then, when the marketing people at the press told me that one result of a lengthy meeting was that the title had to go, I did a quick cycle through the Kübler-Ross model (dwelling a tad too long at Resentment, which while technically not a step in the model seems akin to Anger) before moving on. 
   Unlike Kogan, I initially received no pressure from an alternate title I actively disliked. Nor was a design foisted on me that made me feel powerless, manipulated, and miscategorized. The press merely asked for a new set of title options and I generated some. 
   For Round #2, though, all of my titles were rejected. The publisher's counter-proposal, in turn, made me dig in my heels. Despite highly dramatic imaginings—such as tearing up my contract and walking away with my dignity intact—my better, diplomatic self offered another set of titles. Ultimately, we agreed on Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature, and everyone's happy. 
   That said, if we'd run with After NAFTA or A Common Future (which was the publisher's suggested title), would the title make an iota of difference? Are consumers truly affected by the words that comprise a title and do supposed marketing experts truly possess the insight into consumer patterns that enable them to 'hook' gullible buyers with a special, nearly magical formulation of words? I'm guessing experts would like to think so. 
   Sitting here in my H&M sweat pants, Nike socks, Obey hooded pullover, and American Apparel T-shirt, I'll remain skeptical.